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ANSWERS TO FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS, PAGE 2
What's happening is that we have matched humanity's ability to think against the deer's ability to jump. Deer are remarkable jumpers. A determined white-tail can't be stopped by anything short of a solid ten-foot barrier. And since few people consider the quest to prevent deer damage worth that, inventors have generally striven to deceive deer rather than to physically best them. This means that nearly all the good deer prevention methods available today rely on fooling deer or changing their habits. As a result, anyone who wishes to successfully exclude deer with any of these methods needs to know something about deer psychology.
What Motivates Deer?
Deer are motivated largely by hunger, scent, and habit; and much of their behavior is common sense. When I was a child my parents told me to stay out of the family flower beds. Since the beds covered only a small part of our yard and contained no toys, I found this easy. But it would have been a problem if I had been told to stay out of the whole yard, including my favorite play areas, and I would have been less apt to do it.
So it is with deer. If you have a 20-foot x 30-foot vegetable garden near lots of alternative spring and summer forage, the deer can be trained away early in the season with relatively mild measures, such as a low-key electric fence, and continuation of those mild measures is likely to keep them out. But if you decide to exclude the deer from a larger area, say an acre, even in summertime, then you are taking more away, and you may well need stronger measures.
In winter things get tricky. Evergreen trees and shrubs are fair game. And the deer, rather than just being hungry, may be starving. So they may come armed with a powerful incentive to pass any established barrier and eat. Thus, anyone who seeks electric fence protection for clumps of winter evergreens—much less winter protection for a whole yard, estate, farm, or arboretum—faces an altogether different set of conditions from the summer gardener, and must accordingly adopt more robust measures.
What the experts call "deer pressure" also matters. Do you seek to fence out occasional browsers or good-sized herds? Must the deer wander off their main paths to get to your place, or does a principal deer thoroughfare run through your yard? And what about plant desirability? Do deer relish the plants under your protection the way kids like ice cream, or do they view them more as a last-resort food the way children eye boiled spinach?
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