Do deer eat carrots? Ours do!

Hello! I'm a doe and I am enjoying my carrots!

In this educational / entertainment post:

our deer eating carrots (pictures, videos)
do deer eat carrot tops?
what fruit and veg can deer eat?

I hope this answers the question of 'do deer eat carrots' right there. They can and will eat these vegetables if they come across them.

Our deer welcome carrot showers (when a lot of chunks get thrown to them), and also make funny faces as the pieces fly and when chewing them.

Our animals get carrots as a supplement quite often, and every day during summer droughts, when there's less vegetation available.

Therefore, we gotta have some storage for those carrots to keep them fresh summer. So instead of a beer-fridge, we have deer-fridge, as in, it's for the deer (not with deer in it):

fridge full of carrots

Anticipation is showing. All eyes on that human preparing to make a throw of the delicious, crunchy, sweet vegetable...

deer awaiting carrots

More flying carrots and deer faces in anticipation:

funny deer and carrot picture

They don't mind being hit by their food, but also have learnt some defensive techniques.

INCOMING!

deer under carrot shower

Go get those carrots, quick!

Watching deer chew their food is entertaining. Capturing awkward-looking moments is even funnier.

That moment was so funny it deserved to be immortalized into a picture, an animated gif and a video.

Feeding deer carrots

In this video, a group of deer gets some carrots and some bread in the end. The vegetables get eaten whole, and carrot tops are just as desired, as well as the leaves and roots of the veg.

Deer Miss Red once got lucky passing by on all on her own and getting to eat a carrot uninterrupted by competing fellow deer. We didn't have it cut into smaller chunks at that moment, so she had to chew it whole. There was no complaints.

Pretty deer crunches on a carrot

Watch this pretty hind chew carrot in front of a camera.

Carrots are highly desirable, but when fed both those and bread at the same time, most deer will choose bread first. Bread is king! But please don't feed wild deer big quantities of bread, it's something their digestive system needs to get used to.

How a herd of deer eats carrots. Watch in the following video.

You can notice towards the end some bits being continuously ignored, deer get a sniff of them and walk past without eating. Why do you think that is?

Do deer eat carrot tops?

Easily. Both the tops and the roots will be enthusiastically consumed by deer. You don't have to cut carrots into smaller pieces, but that helps, of course. They will also eat carrot leaves and roots.

What fruit and veg can deer eat?

Deer will eat practically anything when food supplies are low, but otherwise they adore carrots, apples, bananas, pears, berries, especially blueberries and blackberries, beets, quite enjoy some leafy greens, spinach, turnip, cauliflower, peas, beans or broccoli, strawberries, plums, pumpkin, cabbage, sweet potatoes and sweetcorn. Nuts are also very appealing to deer. We find citruses are not on top of their list but deer will eat them if there's no better alternative, even lemons, whole.

Not fans of onion, garlic and fennel, although our ones didn't mind garlic bread.

deer taking carrot from hand So it all adds up to this: deer love eating carrots, and many other things. It call comes down to when and how to feed them, and whether to feed them.

Last modified 2022-06-26 at 21:39