They shouldn’t exist.
But they do. Eight thousand two hundred of them, to be exact, roaming the coastal marshlands of eastern China in herds of hundreds. This is the story of the world’s strangest deer and the miracle that saved them from extinction.
The Four Dislikes
Ancient Chinese texts described it as a creature assembled from spare parts. The antlers of a deer. Hooves of an ox. The face of a horse. A donkey’s tail. The Chinese called it “the four dislikes” because it resembled four animals but matched none of them perfectly.
Père David’s deer once roamed freely across China. Then hunters came. By 1900, not a single one remained in the wild. Gone. Extinct in their homeland after thousands of years.
The species clung to life in the most unlikely place imaginable – a British nobleman’s estate, thousands of miles from home.
A Duke’s Gamble
The early 20th century brought Herbrand Russell, 11th Duke of Bedford, into the story. He did something remarkable. He acquired a few Père David’s deer from the Berlin Zoo and began breeding them at his Woburn Abbey estate. While China’s last wild deer vanished, the Duke’s herd grew.
His great-grandson would finish what he started.
In 1985, Robin Russell, the 14th Duke of Bedford, made a decision that changed everything. He donated 39 deer to the Chinese government for reintroduction. The destination? A former imperial hunting ground in Beijing where emperors once slaughtered wildlife for sport. The killing field would become a sanctuary.
One year later, 36 more deer arrived from five UK zoological gardens. From these 75 animals – just 75 – the impossible happened.
Against All Odds
The math shouldn’t work. Seventy-five animals don’t carry enough genetic diversity to rebuild a species. Inbreeding should have crippled them. Disease should have swept through. The population should have collapsed under the weight of its own tiny gene pool.
But something extraordinary happened instead.
Today, 8,200 Père David’s deer live in China. They’re thriving with a 17% annual growth rate. Every single one traces its lineage back to Russell’s herd at Woburn Abbey, and somehow, miraculously, they show no signs of genetic problems that typically doom such small founding populations.
Scientists are still studying how this happened. The deer aren’t just surviving. They’re flourishing.
The Legend Lives
The Chinese legend of “the four dislikes” tells of four animals who meditated in a cave more than 3,000 years ago. A horse, donkey, ox, and deer. When the tyrant King Zhou of Shang executed his minister Bigan, the animals awoke transformed into humans.
They learned of the King’s cruelty and wanted revenge. But he was too powerful.
So they became one creature. The speed of the horse. The strength of the ox. The donkey’s sense of direction. The deer’s agility. This hybrid beast galloped to the Kunlun Mountains seeking the counsel of the Primeval Lord of Heaven.
The Lord was astonished. “It’s unlike any of four creatures!” he exclaimed.
He blessed the animal and sent it to help the sage Jiang Ziya battle the tyrant King. Jiang Ziya rode the strange deer to victory, toppling the dynasty and founding the Zhou in its place.
Myth became reality when these deer returned home after 125 years of exile.
A New Chapter
Across China’s elk sanctuaries – Tianezhou, Dafeng, and others – dozens of square miles of pristine wetland habitat now belong to these remarkable animals. The marshlands are theirs again. A wiser China welcomed them back.
But the story isn’t finished.
Plans are underway to reintroduce Père David’s deer into truly wild areas where they’ll face real dangers for the first time in over a century. They’ll need to avoid predators. Battle the elements. Survive without human protection. It’s the final test of their recovery – learning to be wild again after generations of captivity.
The strangest deer on Earth once numbered in the millions. Then 39. Now 8,200 and climbing.
Sometimes extinction isn’t forever. Sometimes a duke in England keeps a few animals alive just long enough. Sometimes a species gets a second chance. Sometimes the impossible happens in the quiet marshlands where legends once walked.
The four dislikes came home.
