Can you Touch Fawns Without Gloves?

Anyone who has anything to do with fawns knows that you should not touch them with your bare hands. I wholeheartedly agree with this statement. However, I cannot agree with the common reasoning behind it, namely that otherwise they will no longer be accepted by the doe, because this statement is simply false and has even been scientifically proven since the 1970s. And yet this rumour is passed on year after year from older hunters to younger ones. I have been fighting for over 15 years to dispel this rumour, but it persists like a rock in the surf.

Why Should we Never say ‘The goat won’t Accept it Otherwise!’ Again?

I know of a case where a child found a fawn and played with it. Afterwards, they told their mother about it. The mother was very upset and said, ‘Oh no, now we have to take it home and raise it by hand because its mother won’t accept it anymore!’ The likelihood of such a fawn growing up healthy is relatively low.

The Fawn is Accepted, Despite the Stench

The doe will always accept her fawn, even if it smells strongly of humans or something else. I will provide the scientific evidence for this below. But even using common sense, the statement ‘the doe will no longer accept it’ should seem strange. It contradicts natural evolution. Giving birth and bearing young is an extremely energy-sapping affair for any mammal. Is all that supposed to be sacrificed just because the offspring smells a bit strange? And what about the days of pain in the breast because milk production cannot be stopped so quickly? It just doesn’t make any sense to me!

The Scientific Proof

Dr Ernst Moser from Upper Austria personally taught me how to rescue fawns between 2008 and 2010. He was and probably still is one of the most dedicated fawn rescuers ever. He has been rescuing fawns for well over 50 years and has conducted countless scientific studies on the subject.

Among other things, he also investigated whether the does would accept the fawns again if they had been touched with bare hands. Since he had always tagged all the fawns he had rescued over the years, he was able to prove years later, when he shot them, that they had been accepted again. However, he is not the only one who has been able to demonstrate this. Scientific standard works on wildlife biology (e.g. Fred Kurt: Das Reh in der Kulturlandschaft, Ökologie, Sozialverhalten, Jagd und Hege, Kosmos-Verlag, 2002, ISBN 3-440-09397-2), one can find scientific studies that come to exactly the same conclusion. Fred Kurt writes in Chapter 3, ‘Birthing, Afterbirth Phase and Critical Period’ on page 68: “Newborn fawns that are found by chance should not be touched, it is said. Otherwise, the doe would no longer recognise them as her own young because of the foreign smell clinging to them and would therefore no longer accept them. From an animal welfare point of view, this popular belief makes perfect sense, because fawns belong with their mothers and not in the care of inexperienced humans, under whom they usually die quickly or grow up physically and psychologically crippled. Nevertheless, it is wrong. Does even accept foreign fawns, at least within a certain period of time after giving birth. This was first proven by BUBENIK (1965).”

Don’t Touch it Anyway!

The smell is particularly helpful in the first few days of life, enabling the doe to easily locate her fawn. Although young fawns do not emit their own scent, they often have a typical smell of slightly sour milk and urine.

In order to avoid leaving any scent on the fawn, which could attract predators such as foxes, you should leave as little scent as possible on the fawn.

But the fawns and their mothers probably suffer the most damage from the stress caused by being chased and caught. So please, no selfies lasting several minutes and passing the fawn around so that everyone can pose with it for Instagram. That is what harms the fawns the most. And whether you are wearing gloves or not is probably of no concern to the fawn and its mother.