A Port Allegany couple has turned a herd of five critically
endangered Pere David deer into a herd numbering 26, and is
transferring two of them May 5 to the Erie Zoo.

Cyrus and Rose Denmark, who founded and maintain Whispering
Springs Rescue and Research Inc., made the announcement on
Monday.

“We have quite a few (animals) now and only so much grass,” said
Cyrus Denmark with a laugh. He explained how they came about
building their rare group of nearly extinct deer.

“There was a park down in Georgia years ago that had three,” he
said. “They had a couple thousand animals (in total).”

The owners were aging and decided to get out of the business,
selling their animals at auction.

The Denmarks bought all three. They later bought two more from
Idaho.

“The rest were born here,” he said. The Pere David deer –
Elaphurus davidianus – are native to China. The deer are much
larger than white-tailed deer, with adults weighing between 330 and
440 pounds. The antlers can be many times larger than those of the
whitetail.

“They’ve been extinct in the wild for 800 years,” Cyrus Denmark
explained. Hunted for its meat almost to the point of extinction
since the time of the Boxer Rebellion in China, a few animals were
removed to Europe where they were bred successfully. At the same
time, the species disappeared in China. Attempts to save the
species have succeeded to the point that in the late 1980s, they
were reintroduced to China. Today, about 2,500 animals live in
three national nature reserves there.

“The Chinese are trying to raise enough deer to reintroduce them
into the wild,” Denmark said. “They have some deer but haven’t
found out how to reintroduce them successfully.”

He said the intent of Whispering Springs is also to reintroduce
the animals to the wild, but they have not been able to raise the
funds necessary to accomplish that. The money from larger
foundations seems to go to more showy animals, such as tigers or
pandas, he said.

“A lowly deer that’s extinct … there’s nothing fancy about
that,” he said with a laugh. “We fund our own foundation. We don’t
get any financial help.”

The Denmarks also open their rescue mission to school children
for tours.

“We’ll get 2-to-3-thousand kids here in the next two months,”
Denmark explained.

Whispering Springs is a not-for-profit rescue and research
organization for the benefit of exotic animals either abused or
abandoned by their owners. It is currently home to many Pere David
deer, as well as camels, emus, rheas, Watusi cattle, buffalo and
other animals, domestic and exotic.

Denmark said, “We’ve got a lot of weird stuff here.”