Water Deer Interaction with Humans - Conservation Efforts
Water deer are held in a handful of captive collections in Europe (see: Water deer in captivity), but as far as I know none include active conservation projects for the species. This is despite recent genetic data suggesting that we may have lineages now extinct in China. Presumably, the lack of conservation interest in Europe is largely a reflection of them being an introduced species and that the feral population in England appears to be flourishing and expanding its range, even in the face of increasing urbanisation, pollution, and poaching. Indeed, it is something of a conservation paradox that a species which might otherwise be subject to eradication methods in the face of a growing population is in such steep decline in much of its native range.
Globally, the conservation status awarded to the water deer by the IUCN has fluctuated over time as the body of supporting data has increased. In 1990, for example, water deer were classed as "Rare", while they were "Vulnerable" in 1994, "Low Risk/Near Threatened" in 1996, and in 2008 they were considered Vulnerable again. In the most recent assessment, carried out in November 2014, Richard Harris and Will Duckworth retained the conservation status of Vulnerable, meaning there's the potential for the species to become extinct in the medium-term unless action is taken:
"Due to the lack of updated information it is not possible to assess the worldwide status of this species with complete certainty. However, a serious decline is nevertheless evident [due to poaching and habitat destruction]. … A decline rate of at least 30% over three generations (approximately 18 years) seems highly plausible."
In Britain
Owing to its introduced status in Britain, the water deer has not received a conservation assessment here, although in their Britain's Mammals 2018, the Mammal Society gave it a Prospect Index rating of "Good", meaning population and range trends were positive. Despite having no species-specific legislative protection in the UK, water deer are covered by both the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 and the Wild Mammals (Protection) Act 1996. Overall, these Acts mean that while it's not illegal to kill water deer one must do so in a specified manner. They cannot be caught in self-locking snares, poisoned, or electrocuted, for example. Similarly, no wild mammal, including all deer, may be kicked, beaten, nailed or otherwise impaled, stabbed, burnt, stoned, crushed, drowned, dragged or asphyxiated with intent to inflict unnecessary suffering. In other words, if you're going to kill a wild mammal you must do it "in a reasonably swift and humane manner". Additionally, the Deer Act (1991) states:
"if any person enters any land without the consent of the owner or occupier or other lawful authority in search or pursuit of any deer with the intention of taking, killing or injuring it, he shall be guilty of an offence [of poaching]".
Someone also commits an offence if they kill a deer without a viable reason (e.g., humane dispatch, significant crop damage, etc.) during the closed seasons set out in Schedule 1 of the Act. Since 2007, before which they could be shot at any time of year, the closed season for water deer in England has covered 1st April to 31st October, inclusive. In other words, water deer can only be hunted in England between November and the end of March.
In March 2010, Statutory Instrument 609 went through the English parliament and Welsh Assembly with the aim of including an additional 63 invasive non-native species to Schedule 9 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act. Two of these were mammals added to Part 1 of the schedule: wild boar (Sus scrofra) and water deer. Section 14 of the Act makes it illegal to deliberately release a Schedule 9 species into the countryside. The Instrument passed, despite protest from several researchers and the British Deer Society, meaning that it has been illegal to release water deer into the wild in England and Wales without a license from Natural England (or Natural Resources Wales) since 6th April 2010. (See the pop-out note below for clarification on the release of trapped water deer.)
Clarification on Schedule 14 - Emergency in situ assistance
Schedule 14 clarification
Contrary to some statements I have seen elsewhere online, the UK Government's Guidance on section 14 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, published in 2007, includes a provision for "Emergency in situ assistance". This provision states that it is not considered an offence under the Act to free an individual covered by Schedule 9 that has become accidentally and unintentionally entrapped—entangled in a fence, for example. If the animal is brought into captivity for rehabilitation or veterinary attention, however, it cannot be released back into the wild once deemed fit. Equally, a license is required to trap and release any species on the Schedule for the purpose of scientific study.
In China
Writing in the China Journal of Science and Arts during the mid-1920s, the late naturalist, explorer, artist, and editor Arthur de Carle Sowerby noted how water deer were less common along the Yangtze, in the Nanking and Chinkiang districts to beyond Wuhu, than historically. Later, in 1981, Linmu Xu of the Nanjing Xuanwu Lake Park Management Office in southern China wrote a short article to Acta Zoological Sinica describing how the water deer was "on the verge of extinction" owing to a recent increase in hunting and man-made habitat destruction. Despite at least one successful farming project in the late 1980s, however, water deer conservation didn't really take off until the start of the 21st century. Supported by a grant from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, East China Normal University zoologists Min Chen and Endi Zhang led a project to reintroduce the water deer to Shanghai, where the species had last been recorded in the wild in 1890.
The project got underway in 2006, with 21 animals (seven bucks, 14 does) released into a 540-hectare (1,333 acre) area of Huaxia Park within the green belt of Pudong during March of the following year. The population grew rapidly, the survival rate about 80% per year, and was estimated at 96 individuals by December 2010. In October 2009, 20 deer from the stock were transferred to the Punan woodland in Yexie County, Songjiang District in the southeast of Shanghai for acclimation and to join a further 20 individuals introduced there from the Zhoushan Archipelago in 2008. At the same time, 14 were moved to from Huaxia to Shanghai Binjiang Forest Park during November and five to Shanghai Century Park in the same year. The animals were tagged, and several fitted with radio collars to monitor their movements as well as their influence on the local species. The Punan population also flourished and was estimated at 151 by December 2013, and, apart from some winter supplementation in the first two years, the deer found sufficient food in the native vegetation. The final stage of the project was to release 15 of the acclimated deer into Nanhui East Shoal, a reserve created in July 2007 in the Yangtze River estuary, during early 2010, and 20 in Xinbang woodland in 2012 -- these deer were fitted with GPS collars. By the end of 2013 there were some 300 deer living in the Shanghai region, two captive populations, two semi-captive and two wild/free range populations.
Public support for the reintroduction project was high, and in a 2012 paper to the Sichuan Journal of Zoology, Tie Su and colleagues presented the results of a survey looking at the perceived social value of water deer in Shanghai, completed by students and their families. The results showed just over 92% of the 1,496 questionnaires returned were supportive of a reintroduction project and indicated a social value of 49 million ¥/RMB [£5.4m / €6.2m / US$7.5m] -- i.e., based on the number of respondents who were happy to pay something towards the programme and for ecological protection. Unfortunately, however, Chen and Zhang found evidence of poaching at their project sites, and within the first six months, four deer (three bucks and a doe) had died either through poaching or "unexplained causes" at Nanhui Wildlife Sanctuary. Overall, however, the project was a success and an article in the Shanghai Daily newspaper on 15th January 2013 mentioned:
"Right now 227 Chinese water deer are living in the Binjiang Forest Park and Huaxia Park in Pudong, the Xinbang Forest in Songjiang, and two other parks."
Unfortunately, releases of 12 water deer at a site in Laogang during December 2020 and a further 20 animals in Nanhui in January 2021 suffered significant disturbance and losses through predation from feral domestic dogs on the site. In the space of two months post-release, all 12 animals liberated at Laogang had perished, while 40% died at Nanhui. Several recent authors have also mentioned a continued threat from poaching, although there are several active water deer farms in China that presumably serve to meet some of the demand for traditional medicine and meat products that would otherwise be levied against wild populations.
In January 2021, the List of National Key Protected Wild Animals was approved by the State Council, China's highest level of central government. Water deer appear on this list as Class II (also referred to variously as Level II or Grade II). In practical terms, this means that while the species is not considered critically at risk, hunting, capturing, or trading it without a licence from the relevant provincial-level authority is illegal – a less stringent requirement than for Class I species, for which any such licence must be granted by the State Council itself. The water deer is further listed as Vulnerable on both the 2016 China Mammal Red List and its latest revision, the Red List of China's Vertebrates (2020), the latter officially released as a policy document in May 2023 by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. That same year, Hydropotes inermis was flagged as a "species of concern" in the reedbeds and marshes of Jiangsu in the IUCN's 2023 Situation Analysis report on ecosystems of the Yellow Sea.
The Korean peninsula
Unfortunately, we know very little about the status of water deer in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) because there is no recent, comprehensive assessment of the species' conservation status there. In their 1999 paper to Mammal Review, Changman Won and Kimberley Smith noted that, in 1959, the North Korean government banned hunting for five years following the translocation of 16 deer from Moonchen of Kangwon Province to South Hamgyong Province the previous year. The authors suggest that, as a result of complete protection, the species had increased in number and range but don't provide any specifics. In their literature review of Hydropotes, published in Hystrix in 2017, Ann-Marie Schilling and Gertrud Rössner noted that North and South Korea ratified the Convention on Biological Diversity in 1994, which, among other things, led to regulation of water deer hunting. Yeong-Seok Jo, John Baccus and John Koprowski's summary in their 2018 Mammals of Korea was somewhat less optimistic, however:
"The North Korean government made a habitat for the species at Mt. Guwol, Hwanghaenam Province a Natural Monument. Despite several releases of Chinese water deer by North Korean government, populations remain small due to illegal snaring for bush meat."
Zongzhi Li and colleagues, in their 2023 paper in Scientific Reports, reported what appeared to be a range expansion from North Korea into Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning provinces in north-east China, based on camera traps and line transects – suggesting a growing population, at least in the north of the country, from where the species also appears to be spreading into southern Russia. A rather grimmer picture emerges, however, from Joshua Elves-Powell and co-workers at the Zoological Society of London, whose 2025 paper in Biological Conservation on the illegal wildlife trade in North Korea notes that deer are considered "high value harvest species", with their blood and bones still used in traditional medicine. In an email exchange in March 2026, Joshua told me that, despite being considered less valuable than the larger species, water deer were nonetheless opportunistically hunted by both local people and government-certified hunters for wild meat or as a tradeable good (both domestic trade and cross-border trade to China).
Overall, the situation in North Korea remains unclear – not least because all contact with foreigners by DPRK scientists must go through state-approved channels, making free correspondence with outside colleagues effectively impossible. Writing in the regional newspaper Daegu Sinmun in July 2025, South Korean journalist Chae Young-taek noted that most of North Korea's forests have been destroyed, and that water deer habitats have been largely devastated by development -- the remodelling of rivers and the filling of wetlands to create farmland -- causing a sharp decline in numbers. A news report from May 2016 suggested that conservation efforts in the country had seen little success, even noting that the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport had identified the extinction of several rare plants and animals, including the water deer – presumably local extinctions. Several sources point to the water deer having been designated a status of Natural Monument No. 916 in the DPRK, but this is a misinterpretation. This Natural Monument number in fact refers to the habitat in which the animal can be found (i.e., Mt. Guwol) and not the animal itself.
In the Republic of Korea (South Korea), the species is frequently portrayed in the media as a pest, primarily due to its impact on agricultural crops and association with road traffic collisions. This portrayal is significant in light of a 2025 study published in Biology Education, which examined biology teachers' perceptions of urban wildlife in the country. The study found that even well-educated individuals may derive their views of wildlife more from media narratives than from scientific evidence, with potential implications for future conservation attitudes and policy. The research explored how teachers perceived urban wildlife -- specifically pigeons and water deer -- using metaphor analysis. Participants, consisting of early-career middle and high school biology teachers enrolled in certification training programmes, were asked to describe each species through self-generated metaphors. Analysis identified nine overarching metaphor categories, with negative perceptions predominating for both taxa. Water deer were frequently characterised as animals to be avoided, as "bizarre", or as "pitiful", perceptions largely shaped by concerns about traffic accidents. Overall, the findings indicated that teachers' attitudes were influenced more strongly by socio-cultural and media discourse than by ecological knowledge or direct field experience.
Several "unofficial" online references suggest that water deer enjoy legal protection in South Korea, appearing mostly on internet forums and news sites, but this appears to be a misunderstanding. One article cited the water deer as National Monument 217, though this designation actually belongs to the Korean Goral (Naemorhedus caudatus), not Hydropotes inermis. In fact, the species has no national legal protection in the Republic. Yeounsu Chu and colleagues -- in their 2019 paper to the Journal of Environmental Impact Assessment -- do imply some province-level protection in Daegu and Gwangju, but in reality this reflects provinces choosing the deer as their emblem/symbol and does not convey any legal safeguard. Indeed, the authors note that the species is broadly considered both a "harmful wild animal" and game species in the country.
One stalking forum poster suggested that water deer could only be hunted under government licence, during an open season running from November through March (as in the UK), but this too appears to be incorrect. In March 2026, Yeong-Seok Jo, professor of biology at Daegu University and former researcher and mammal collection manager at the National Institute of Biological Resources, confirmed to me that water deer have never been protected in South Korea and "are still heavily hunted throughout all seasons".
Numerous wildlife rehabilitation centres across South Korea routinely rescue, treat, and release injured individuals, and these efforts likely support the persistence of local populations. A 2025 case report published in Animals by Sohwon Bae and colleagues documented the GPS tracking of a juvenile male released after undergoing femoral head ostectomy surgery to treat a hip dislocation sustained in a road traffic accident in Gangwon-do. Post-release monitoring showed that the animal adapted rapidly to natural conditions despite having undergone major orthopaedic intervention – underscoring both the resilience of the species and the potential value of targeted rehabilitation efforts.
Recent genetic studies have also advanced understanding of population structure and connectivity in China and the Korean Peninsula, providing an important foundation for future conservation planning. In 2011, Jeong-Nam Yu and colleagues analysed genetic variation in Korean water deer using mitochondrial DNA and nuclear microsatellite markers. Their findings suggested restricted gene flow among Korean populations, potentially resulting from habitat fragmentation or a severe demographic bottleneck in recent decades. Similarly, in 2014, Baek-Jun Kim and co-authors reported in Genes Genetics and Systematics that the genetic diversity of South Korean populations was lower than that observed in Chinese populations, further supporting the conclusion of limited connectivity.
More recently, in 2020, Rory Putman and collaborators, writing in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, found that populations on Zhoushan Island were significantly differentiated from those on mainland China. They also observed that the Dafeng and Yancheng populations were significantly differentiated from most other populations (excluding each other), indicating marked regional structuring. These findings are consistent with earlier work by Jie Hu and colleagues (2006), published in Biochemical Genetics, which analysed a 403 bp fragment of the mitochondrial DNA control region (D-loop). That study identified significant molecular variance between Zhoushan and mainland populations and recommended avoiding translocations between them, while suggesting the establishment of a dedicated breeding centre for the mainland population. The authors further reported lower haplotype diversity in the Zhoushan population, consistent with inbreeding. Although only three haplotypes were shared with mainland populations, seven were unique to the archipelago, underscoring its distinctiveness and conservation significance.