Deer aren' t smart at all. Their brains are very tiny. They probably have less " IQ" than dogs (just mho), and dogs aren' t smart at all. Anyway, dogs, deer and other animals act not by thought or intelligence, but by instinctual hard wiring and/or conditioned response. Let' s say wariness: Deer are naturally wary because they evolved among preditors. they are hard wired to be generally wary of certain inputs in their natural environment (sight, sound smell, etc) because those that weren' t didn' t propigate as much as those that were. They also can learn to be wary of specific inputs that aren' t part of their evolutional past because they encountered these things at some point and became conditioned to avoid them.

Why do some seem " smart" or wise and grow to be older and bigger? The old big ones either were born with more natural wariness or were lucky and became conditioned to avoid human sign (sight, smell, sound) because of non-fatal experiences with human sign that caused them to avoid it. It is all pure chance. If you take 100 deer, there are certainly going to be a certain percentage who are lucky enough to get this conditioning without being killed and thus turn in to the " Old, wise" 8 year olds. Again, this isn' t smarts or IQ, it is just conditioned response and they were the ones lucky enough not to be killed by the first few encounters that would result in conditioning.

It is easy to understand and predict what deer do as habits or in response to stimuli such as human sight, sound or smell. The hard part is to put yourself in the right place (including wind direction) at the right time and be still, quiet and scent free. All of that stuff has to do with your own intelligence and skill, not the deer' s -zeke