A friend of mine is starting to get into bowhunting and was asking me a few questions about the intelligence of deer. I have been learning about deer and hunting them since 2008 and I know for a fact that deer are smart. But just how smart are they?
Deer are extremely smart when it comes to their ability to survive and detect danger. Their heightened sense of smell and their ability to detect sudden movements have made them incredibly difficult for predators to kill, including humans. Deer can survive by eating just about anything in the wild. They have a skillset to seek out foods with specific nutrients to help them achieve optimal health. For example, deer need a lot of energy during the cold winter months to stay warm. They will eat foods that are high in carbohydrates during that time of year as long as those foods are available for them to eat.
Albert Einstein once said “Everyone is a genius. But, if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing it is stupid.” I think this quote applies to our topic because intelligence is relative to whatever we are comparing to. With that being said, let’s compare the intelligence of deer against humans and dogs. This will help us further understand how clever deer are.
Are deer smarter than humans?
No, deer are not smarter than humans. When it comes to survival, humans have been able to double our average life-expectancy over the last 200 years. When it comes to prey and their predators, predators are the more intelligent species. However, deer have survival skills that humans don’t possess, giving them an advantage over us in some areas of survival while we have an advantage over them in others. For example, if a deer is downwind from a human, they have the ability to smell the human over several hundred yards away. This allows them to avoid death from hunters quite regularly.
Hunters are much smarter than deer, but we still have a difficult time killing them whenever we want to. We have to be able to beat a deer’s nose, eyes, and ears which is no easy feat. Mature bucks are even more difficult to kill due to their more cautious nature, which makes it feel like they are smarter than us sometimes. If you’re a hunter trying to outsmart a mature buck then read this article: Do deer know when they are being hunted. Deer can learn to avoid treestand locations and any other area where they have been educated to human pressure.
Another topic that tends to get brought up about the intelligence of deer is why they run in front of cars if they are so smart at detecting danger. That gets me laughing a little bit because humans get hit by cars too, and it’s not always the driver’s fault. Anyways, humans have learned that if we build habitat bridges over our interstates, deer will learn to cross those bridges instead of crossing in front of our cars. This is just another example of how humans are smarter than deer when it comes to survival. By helping deer cross roads safely, humans are helping deer survive while also decreasing the number of human deaths that are caused by deer crossing traffic.
The last point I want to bring up in regards to human intelligence versus a deer, is how we communicate. Humans and deer both have our own forms of communication. However, humans are highly intellectual cognitive thinkers. That ability has enabled us to innovate, which makes it easier for us to survive longer and obtain a better quality of life. Deer can’t express thoughts into words like we can, but they still communicate in ways that meet their basic social and survival skills. I like to compare deer to dogs a lot when it comes to how they socialized together. But let’s dive more into that and compare the intelligence of a dog to a deer.
Are deer smarter than dogs?
Comparing the intelligence of a deer against a dog is really beneficial for learning how smart a deer is. Humans interact with dogs all the time so this comparison gives us a good gauge for understanding deer better. I’m going to give you the same kind of answer that I gave you when we asked if deer are smarter than humans.
No, deer are not smarter than dogs. When it comes to survival, dogs are a predator and deer are prey. Dogs have the ability to learn tricks, learn to hunt better through training, and they can problem solve. However, deer have survival skills that dogs don’t possess which allows them to sometimes outwit a dog. For example, a deer has the ability to detect movements if a dog is stalking up on a deer.
Dogs and deer both possess survival skills and communicate in many of the same ways. For example, dogs and deer both have a keen sense of smell even though a deer’s is slightly better. On the flip side, dogs and deer hear well but a dogs hearing is slightly better. Dogs and deer both communicate in many of the same ways. They both show aggression, affection, pain, mark their territory, sniff each other, and so on.
Even though dogs and deer are on an even playing field in regards to their senses and how they socialize, a dog is still a predator. Dogs are a superior species when it comes to intelligence.
Conclusion
The intelligence of a deer is relative to what we are comparing to. Deer are very smart when it comes to their own ability to survive. However, when you compare deer intelligence to one of its predators like humans or dogs, they are not more intelligent. Predators outsmarting deer is a game of cat and mouse. If you have watched the cartoon of Tom and Jerry you know that predators don’t always win. The key to successfully outsmarting deer comes down to how well a predator, such as a hunter, can stay undetected so that deer cannot hear, see, or smell him.
