This post is continued from yesterday’s Nara Park Deer know Postive Reinforcement too!
The deer at Nara Park have learnt from years of experience that if they bow to you, you will give them deer biscuits.
The practice of feeding the deer by tourists made the deer less shy to approach human visitors. The deer are not unlike dogs. If they smell the deer biscuit on you, they will start to trail after you in the hopes of being treated.
In fact, the deer keep their eyes peeled on the visitors in the area and will go to great lengths to follow them.
This deer struggled with crossing over the fence to get to the other side in pursuit of the lady running away.
The deer also mill around the street of shops facing the wooded areas. Deer biscuits can be bought along this street.
And when they’ve locked on their target, they can be persistent.
Besides the polite bowing, the deer have also learnt from past experience that the humans give up the biscuits when they are pursued. So these deer can be stubborn about following you about, going as far as to bite the human teasing them with the food.
It can get a little overwhelming for visitors because if there were a lot of deer around, they could swarm the visitor handing out the biscuits. And then the human surrenders the biscuit in order to distract them while they make their escape, not unlike this person in the picture.
So while the deer are positively reinforced to bow to the visitors for their biscuit, they have not been trained in any other way and are still wild animals that may hurt you.
But I suspect this happens more to people who deliberately tease them and get them riled up about the food. Mr P and I didn’t have much problems evading the more persistent ones, so it was a pretty interesting day for us, getting up close to the deer of Nara Park. :)
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