Rare Chinese Deer to Be Given to China, Where None Survive

The Marquess of Tavistock today agreed to give 22 rare Chinese deer from his English estate to China, where they have been extinct for 80 years.

The deer--which have a donkey’s tail, the antlers of a deer, the neck of a camel and the hoofs of an ox--were hunted to extinction in the wild 1,500 years ago but found refuge under emperors who treasured their strange appearance.

Under an agreement signed simultaneously in Peking and London, the marquess will send 20 Pere David deer from his herd of 600 at Woburn Abbey to the former imperial hunting park of Nanhaizi near Peking for a breeding herd, and two does to Shanghai Zoo.

The deer are named in the West after the 19th-Century French priest and naturalist Armand David, who first spotted them over the wall of the imperial park near Peking in 1865.