Imprinting Fawns

In the letter from the editor in the last Heartbeat magazine Mr. John Yoder talks a bit about imprinting newborn fawns to make them tame without bottle feeding. Has anyone been doing this? If so how has it worked for you ? It sounds interesting.

I haven't seen the Heartbeat article but I can tell you what has worked for me. This is my 5th year raising deer and for the first 3 years I bottle fed half my fawns and by the time I weaned the bottle fed fawns, the mother raised fawns were eating apples out of my hand and most of them let me touch them. The mother raised fawns were also larger than the bottle fed fawns.

This is how I do it.....When the fawns are born I wait til they are cleaned off and nurse for a while and then I do vaccines and ear tag. Then I take the fawns into the fawn pen that is attached to the birthing pen but i have a piece of plywood 2 feet high that keeps the fawns from getting in the birthing pen but the mothers can go back and forth to feed fawns. I have a birthing pen and fawn pen. I raise the plywood as they get older. Everyday that I can, I touch the fawns and for the first few weeks I will stimulate them to go pee and pooh. I will also sit on a bucket in the fawn pen for at least ten minutes a day. As they get older I give them treats and by the fall they are perfect for handling. They are tame but not "stubborn" tame.

I don't think this would be called "imprinting". I would call it fathering the fawns because I'm not replacing the mother but I'm changing some of the diapers, giving some treats and spending quality time with them...lol

This is something that has evolved into what it is, I didn't plan for it to work like this but I am sure glad it did! I will never bottle feed again unless I have to. -Dan

That's brilliant Dan! I've never even thought about that

Dan,

Thanks do much for replying to my post that is just the imput I was looking for. It is so cool to hear from someone that is doing thier own thing with such great success. Great ideas, thanks for sharing !!

Dr. Kroll anong others have been doing this for years. You can spend time observing your fawns when they are young with their mothers and have very manageable deer.



I started using the 2 to 3 foot plywood trick on a door three years ago and it works well. I did it because I had three young first time mothers that I wanted to keep the stress down on. If you have the fawns in one pen and put the plywood onto a door that leads to a pen with 4 foot tall grass that the mother will lay in during the day to keep away from pests. As soon as that fawn makes a peep the ears on a doe would go up and she would get up and stop at the door to investigate. After a while they could recognize which fawn needed to be fed and they wouldn't come in unless necessary. They always seem to stop at that plywood door when entering and exiting. It keeps the stress down on the doe who has more freedom and they always know where that fawn is. When the fawns were a month old I would close off the tall grass pen and rotate the mothers to another pen that connected to the fawn pen without the plywood on that door so the fawns could go back and forth as they please.



When those fawns are born I vaccinate and tag them and spend time with them and it works best if the mother went through the same routine a couple of years ago and wasn't bottle-fed. I gave a buck fawn fawn a vaccination shot yesterday when he turned one month old. I could have walked up and given him a shot with stress in less than five minutes. Instead it took me over a half hour, but the syringe put the full dose into him while he had his head down chewing on clover. I can approach closely to him today without him being the wiser.

What would happen if you just put some smaller pens inside your regular birthing pen (I run three pregnant does in about a 1/2 acre pen times 5 pens so I have a very good idea of who the mother is of each fawn unless more than one goes in the same pen on the same day)...short enough for the doe to hop over, tall enough for the fawn to stay in? Maybe this is close to what you guys are doing...I thought about trying it a few years ago but like all other ideas, it's been on the back burner since.