NORTHUMBERLAND AND DURHAM: Nearly every year, coincident with the time of the lambing, the deer-sheep hybrid appears. The deer-sheep hybrid is always the offspring of an aberrant roebuck and a ewe. The local papers all out for the sensational regularly print reports of this alleged hybrid. The deer-sheep cross has almost entirely ousted the old time fox-dog hybrid from its place in country lore. In the past I have followed up a number of cases where bitches have said to have succumbed to the favours of some wandering dog-fox and have subsequently produced litters of fox-dog cubs. All of the specimens I have examined have inevitably turned out to be foxy looking terriers. Vulpes, it is now surely known, does not mate with Canes. No more does Capreolus cross with Ovis. Yet the deer-sheep myth persists and only this spring the alleged birth of such a curiosity came to my notice on a farm close to Stamfordham. I saw the creature and photographed it. To my eye this was merely an odd-coloured lamb whose wool bore some little resemblance to the colour of a roe deer in full winter coat – that is donkey-grey with a decided white rump patch.
These alleged hybrids have only come to notice since roe deer have increased so markedly in these two Northern counties. Afforestation, on a large scale, commenced in 1919 and with it roe have been yearly more numerous for these deer are essentially a woodland species. Cases are not unknown where a roebuck has been seen to jump a ewe and recently I heard from an entirely reliable witness of an instance where a roebuck got a sheep cornered in some wire netting and nearly killed the sheep. A roebuck might even attempt to cover a roe but that union is highly improbable, if not physically impossible. Any such false mating could not result in a quite unnatural hybrid. No, the deer-sheep must be relegated with the fox-dog to the limbo of the quite impossibles.
