Building fencing to discourage deer from feeding in the garden has been a frequent topic at Rural Ways. (See this post, for example.) We have often maintained that our efforts serve merely as a mild deterrance since we lack the resources to build a sufficiently tall barrier. This inability to foil the jumping capacity of the average deer has recently gained scientific credibility. Deer jumping has, in short, been peer reviewed.
In the latest issue of the Journal of Wildlife Management, Kurt Vercauteren and several co-authors have published a piece on white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) jumping in Wisconsin. While the deer problem at Rural Ways involves mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus), we are willing to extrapolate from the data. What Vercauteren found was that ALL deer will jump a five foot fence; that 86% of deer will jump a six foot fence; that 15% of deer will jump a seven foot fence; and that NO deer will jump an eight foot fence.
At Rural Ways, our fence currently stands at five and a half feet, including 18 inches of baling wire at the top. According to the data, we are probably impeding somewhere between zero and ten percent of the local deer. (My, admittedly unscientific, observations tend to place the actual impedance rate closer to the former number than the latter.) While deer proofing is not really the goal at Rural Ways, it looks like we are going to have to shoot for at least seven feet of fencing in order to have even a chance of success against deer jumping.
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