British Deer and their Horns 
2 4 
for fattening and horn-growing. Half the park is reserved for hay, so the red deer, which 
number about ioo, have no great extent of ground to range over, and very little winter 
feeding. Nevertheless they thrive and have continued to improve steadily since 1884, when 
the dressing was first tried, and at the present time a four-year-old Warnham stag is better 
than an adult animal in most other English parks. 
I have endeavoured to illustrate the proportions of the two great Warnham stags 
which were killed respectively in 1889 and 1894. The stag with the long bifurcation of the 
left horn was killed as a nine-year-old. He weighed 31 stone clean ; 30 stone clean is a 
WASH AND BRUSH-UP, NO CHARGE 
big weight, and is doubtless occasionally reached, whilst 25 stone and upwards may be 
regarded as exceptional. 
This 31-stone Warnham stag is not the heaviest beast ever in this park, for an¬ 
other animal killed a few years previously must, from his “ dressed ” weights, have scaled 
at least a stone more, but his precise weight I am unable to give. The fourteenth Earl of 
Derby, writing in the Field, 27th February 1869, says, “The heaviest stag I ever killed at 
Knowsley weighed 30 stone 4 lbs., or 424 lbs. clean after gralloching. The gralloch would 
probably weigh 6 stone more. He was an outlying deer, and very fat.” 
Reverting for a moment to the little peculiarities of animal life that have so often come 
