Chinese Deer Industry Development Strategy Research

Deer are a type of economic and high value ruminants, and utilisation of deerproducts by our country can be traced back to thousands of years. Velvet antlers andother deer co-products (hard antlers, pizzles, tails, venison, and blood) have beentreated as tonic and health promoting traditional medicine. Deer hide is of highquality leather that is soft and used as the materials for making expensive jackets andlens cleaning cloth. Velvet antlers are very beneficial to human’s health, and can beused to treat headache, deaf and retardation of children’s development. Venison hashigh nutritional value: high in protein and low in cholesterol and fat. Besidesmedicinal use, deer are also attractive animals for sightseeing. In Chinese culture,deer are the symbol of health and longevity. Deer are very adaptive, therefore it isvery simple to source deer feed and to farm them. Consequently, deer farming canbe developed globally as an outstanding industry. In addition, farming deer canincrease one’s income and improve the local economic structure. Overall, deerfarming is a very positive bright industry.From the worldwide point of view, deer farming is a type of new industry.China has the longest deer farming history (based on the record, a few hundred years),and the industry is mainly based on harvesting velvet antlers. Our deer farmingindustry really took off in1950’s; whereas, in Western countries was much later andcommenced in70’s to80’s. The main purpose of deer farming in the Westerncountries is to produce venison. Since1980’s of the last century, velvet consumingmarket was established in South Korea and surrounding Asian countries. At thattime, the market was dominated by our velvet antlers, the situation stimulated thedirection change from mainly producing venison to velvet antlers in the Western deerfarming industry.Deer domestication started in our country. Development of the standards and regulations of velvet antlers for world velvet market in1987were all based on ourexisting knowledge and documents. In the subsequent10years, our deer farmingindustry remain in the forefront in the world. In1990, Western deer industrygradually caught up and even overtook ours due to the influence of Asian financialcrisis.The present review systematically analysed the current status of Chinese deerindustry including research, education, policy, market demands and problemsoccurred in the current practice; pointed out the bottle neck for the furtherdevelopment of our deer industry; and formulated the overall plan for the futuredevelopment of our deer industry. At the same time, the review provided theguidance for the implementation of this overall plan. Therefore, the present reviewis a hard-to-obtained valuable document for the healthy development and regainingthe momentum for our Chinese deer farming industry.