XX

Even if this were a fairytale, it’s hard to believe it all began when Abe Miller, an Amish man in Ohio, was looking for pet deer to wander his property in 1974. In his efforts, he bought two white-tailed deer, a buck and a doe, who eventually had multiple fawns. In 1983, one particular offspring, a single buck fawn who Abe named Patrick, would transform Abe’s hobby into a full-blown and controversial industry. For Patrick’s antlers grew at an alarming rate. As a yearling he sprouted 12 full points when most bucks’ antlers that age are barely taller than their ears. A few years later, Patrick’s rack sprouted additional nontypical points, which are rare and highly prized by hunters. With a rack that had an unusually large spread from tip to tip, and an equally large number of points, Patrick was a marvelous buck.

Word spread. Everyone wanted in. In 1987, curious entrepreneurs seeking new avenues of money-making ventures approached Abe to purchase Patrick. He sold for $7,500.00, and thus began a huge industry in the hunting world – deer breeding.

In 2015, the owner of a deer farm in Indiana invited me to look inside and around the property. That day, I drove through an imposing black metal gate crowned with an arch made out of iron that said: X-FACTOR. A 20-foot high wire fence surrounded the property. Curious deer frozen in place eyed me as I passed. The mission of the farm is to force female deer into heat and mate them with bucks to produce offspring with the atypical enormous antlers – so large the deer can barely hold their heads up and protect themselves and compete. The deer are bred to be hunted in a penned-in area, the desired trophy being the rack of unnaturally large antlers, to be mounted on a wall.

When I went inside the building, I was struck by the antiseptic smell, bright fluorescent spotlights, a heavy thudding noise. Hospital instruments and farm implements were scattered on a counter. Tangled groups of bleached white-deer antlers lay on tables, chairs and the floor. Down a dark hallway was a bank of heavy plastic sliding doors splattered with mud, feces and blood.

I was bewildered by what I saw. The process was intense, loud and chaotic. Outside, twenty to twenty-five deer were forced into a wooden maze with multiple sections and doors. When the last door of the maze lifted, the deer bounded toward a false freedom and instead found themselves in a small metal box. The last exit door shut around their neck, keeping their head on the outside as if looking out a window of a house. The sides of the box grabbed and squeezed the deer into submission, the floor dropped out below them, a farmhand lifted the tail and shoved a hormone-filled device into the vagina. This hormone-packed controlled internal drug release, called CIDR and pronounced cedar, brings the deer into heat. Finally, the deer is let loose to join other deer waiting outside. The experience left me stunned and mortified.

But I returned to X-Factor for the harvesting of the fertilized eggs. The atmosphere was dark, dystopic, surreal. A man stood with blue rubber-gloved hands poised in mid-air above a doe’s belly shaved for surgery. A small trickle of blood leaked from a tiny cut. She was laid out on a canvas stretched between metal poles. Her legs were strapped to each pole by repurposed automobile seatbelts. Rather than being perpendicular to the ground like a typical operating table, the canvas was tipped back and the deer’s head was lowered so much that her tongue, which was pulled out and clinched between her gums, nearly touched the concrete floor. Her hind legs reached toward the fluorescent light that dangled from the ceiling. In the adjacent room, more deer were also strapped in, belly up, legs reaching.

I couldn’t help but see the process as a violation. We think of deer as innocent creatures gamboling in the woods—unbound, wild and beautiful. But here the man inserted a tiny camera through the slit in the doe’s stomach to aid him in locating eggs he hoped had been fertilized. He found eight eggs imbedded in the lining of this particular doe’s uterus. Each would be harvested—removed and either frozen to be shipped to a buyer or placed in deer designated as “carrier” doe.

The business of high-fence hunting and breeding farms has spawned debate over what constitutes the fair chase (is it really a hunt to corner a compromised deer in a fenced-in area?), concern with fatal Chronic Wasting Disease, as well as lobbyists for unregulated control and privatization of wildlife. It brings up the issue of man’s relentless exploitation and manipulation of nature, the need to control and conquer. It was not lost on me that the deer resembled women.

I felt compelled to take photographs. My photo project combines photographs from the deer farm with others I have taken – portraits and objects, street scenes and landscapes that support one another in mood and tone. The work is entitled XX, referencing both the female chromosomes as well as X-Factor, the prize buck of this particular deer farm. The project explores ideas of vulnerability, dominance, complicity, menace and, by extension, the continuing gendered power imbalance in our society, how everyone, women and men, are ensnared within the system. Most critically, it also speaks to the current alarming mood of the country and the accelerating war on women’s reproductive rights.

The hunter continues to be framed within American culture as a steward of conservation and a worthy opponent to wildlife. In the case of deer farms, the hunter’s advantage is most definitely assured. Man’s intrusion on the land and the commodification of wildlife ultimately expose the dangerous “achievements” happening daily in the name of “civilization.”