On all those roadside “Deer Xing” signs. Why are the antlers on backwards? Are there special, mutant deer I should be watching for? Are these actually does playing dress-up? What’s the Straight Dope?
Why are the antlers on the deer in the deer crossing sign backward?
Dear Straight Dope:
Is there a specific reason that every deer crossing sign posted by this nation’s roadways depicts a deer with his antlers distinctly on backwards? I’m sure you can shed some light on the subject. --DKCartrite
SDSTAFF Melis replies:
You know … you go through life, kinda living in your own little world … when someone points something out to you that you realize you never really thought about. Your mention of the deer crossing sign did that for me.
At first, I was skeptical, so I checked out the Manual of Traffic Signs ( http://members.aol.com/rmoeuradot/200x200/warn/W11-3.gif) and looked at the sign. And my gawd! The antlers appeared backwards! The next step was to see where the drawing originated. I wrote to several traffic sign companies to see if they would 'fess up … and they must have believed either that I was personally complaining about their signs or that I was off my rocker, because I received no response.
Then I started to think. The deer on the sign is depicted in silhouette–a two-dimensional drawing. It wouldn’t show anything like curving antlers. So if the deer had antlers that maybe curved around the head … wouldn’t they show up as backwards on a sign? On this hunch, I checked an encyclopedia that had pictures of deer … and bingo! The deer you see on the traffic sign is one of the most common deer in North America–the white-tailed deer. This picture from the Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia isn’t the one I was looking at, but it does show that the antlers thrust forward. There’s a better illustration in the online Encyclopedia Britannica (www.eb.com), but that’s a subscription service so I can’t give you a direct link. Trust me, though–it’s a photo of a white-tailed that closely resembles the deer on the sign, antlers and all.
–SDSTAFFMelis
Straight Dope Science Advisory Board
http://www.nfwf.org/programs/walmart/images/projects/ME/me_white_tailed_deer.jpg
https://www.denix.osd.mil/denix/Public/News/OSD/SecDef00/NR/Camplejeune/whitetaildeer.jpg
http://www.wildlifewebsite.com/deer-pictures/white-tailed-deer-running-06.jpg
Do a Google image search of “white tail deer” without the ". You will see a number of real deer that have antlers similiar to the sign.
Thanks, all. Believe it or not I did a Dope search on “backwards antlers” before I posted. I guess Google has me spoiled for other search engines because nothing showed up.
I still like the idea of mutant deer. After all, they’d be the only ones who could read the sign and know where to cross.
I had to Google the Dope Archive to find it. I knew it was there; but, I couldn’t find it with the site’s search engine either.
The sign shown in the rmoueradot site is NOT the sign that is depicted in the current Federal Highway Administration’s *Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Signs * (MUTCD) or in the *Standard Highway Signs * (SHS) Manual.
Those manuals are the ones that are supposed to be followed by all states.
The sign with the apparently backwards rack MAY have been shown in an earlier version of the official federal manuals but I cannot verify that from this computer at this sitting. As it is shown in the rmoeur cite, I suspect that that may be the case, although it may have have been corrupted by a private sign fabricator and that design got copied a lot.
The current official MUTCD sign, number W11-3, can be seen in Figure 2C-10 on page 2C-22 of the 26 pages of the Warning Signs section of the MUTCD at
The specific design details of the W11-3 sign can be seen on page 2-93 of 177 pages of the Warning Signs section of the *Standard Highway Signs * Manual at
Both of these official sources depict a slimmer, trimmer, deer with a forward-facing rack.
Drive defensively.
A hunter friend of mine says the laid-back antlers are more like those on a Red Deer. Here’s a link to a hunting guide site with pix of several red deer (most of them freshly killed.)
http://www.insightbb.com/external/infospace_search.asp?qcat=web&qkw=red+deer&url=http%3A%2F%2Fmsxml.infospace.com%2Fisight.main%2Fsearch%2Fredir.htm&btnG.x=17&btnG.y=10
Let’s try that again, with a different link for the red deer.
http://www.deer-uk.com/red_deer.htm