March 11, 2022

My dearest,

You ask me what’s the difference between deer and antelopes. What a great question. Why have I not thought of this before?

So I try my best to answer.

I agree they look alike, certainly, and both are ruminants – which just means that they are grazing herbivores, that they pre-digest their food by fermenting it in a special stomach, that they regurgitate that fermented food to chew it further.

That’s where the phrase “chewing the cud” comes from, which I learned as a kid without really learning how it came to be. (We absorb so much information without understanding, you see, without it becoming true knowledge. Yet I do know some true things, I assure you.)

I guessed that antelopes were found only in Africa, and deer pretty much elsewhere. I was correct, but not quite, in this.

Apparently deer are found in Africa too, indeed everywhere in the world but Antarctica. But yes, antelopes are pretty much an African animal with some grazing as far as the Eurasian region.

Both are even-toed ungulates, however; their odd-toed cousins we are thinking of are horses and zebras, rhinoceroses and tapirs.

It’s on their beautiful heads that the most striking difference can be found. Antelopes have horns, you see, permanent ones. Deer – male deer – have antlers that are shed every year and grown anew.

You remark that hunters need not kill deer for their antlers then, that they could just forage for the old ones abandoned in the woods. (Were it only so, my dearest. If it were only so.)

Deer antlers are branched. Antelope horns are not. Make of that what you will.

So I was right in some parts, wrong in others. It doesn’t matter. We shall learn as a pair, as with everything we do.

My dearest, I had mentioned that I do know some true things. I wasn’t lying. And the truest thing I know is that I love when we talk about random topics like this, when we discover new things together, when we learn more about deer and antelopes and, best of all, each other.

Yours, ever and always.