Deer Handling Facility design.

How is your facility setup to handle deer? By handle I mean give vaccinations, shots, A.I. does, load Shooter bucks into trailers with antlers in both velvet & hard antler, etc. My main concern is handling bucks with antlers and not having to tranquilize them all the time. I know that there are still farms that will tranquilize all their animals but I know there is a better way.

A better way???? I never broke a leg tranquing. All deer handling is risky. There are good reasons for both ways.

Scott Heinrich said:

A better way???? I never broke a leg tranquing. All deer handling is risky. There are good reasons for both ways.

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My main question is how is everyones facilites set up to handle deer without tranquilizing them. Anybody have drawings of there setup, pen design, alleys, etc?

if you click on search and put in handling facility you find some information. Also go to the old site off the main page and search there too.

I've searched, found a few things that are helpfull but not any sketches of actual farm lay outs, shoot design or barn layouts.

here is our farm, colors were order of the stages we built, black,blue,purple red,

Thanks curtis, I like this design, it appears the shape of the pens helps run them into the alleys, what is the area in brown on the lower right side?

thats just the area we keep mowed bare for driving, the fenced area keep accidental escapes from happening, the feed bins are against the fence so they can be filled from the outside we get our feed in bulk 40 ton loads at a time. the extra pen in the back(left) and the alley lets us seperate deer into smaller groups or certian individuals making less animals to handle in the corrals if we don't need to.



For example : if I had 18 does in a pen and only wanted 6 of them for our AI program, The first group of 12 moved out of the pasture had only two of them. I would run them into one of small pens to the left of the facility, them move the rest from the pasture directly into the corrals and try to sort some of the first group back into the alley and back to their pasture reducing the number of deer to handle in close quarters, this really taskes unnecessary stress off the deer, although you can sort in the corrals , as always the less you have to handle the better

I will try to get better pics as we get farther along.Still have not built our holding pens or drop chute..