Welcome to the eleventh in a series of Animal Tales from the
Bermuda SPCA, which have kindly been sponsored by our good
friends at Noah’s Ark. To the annoyance of some people the print
media is already full of Christmas ads, while the odd Christmas
song can be heard on the radio. One of today’s plays was
‘Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer’. Where on earth you might
wonder, did the association between Christmas and reindeers
originate? The answer is three-fold. In the northern hemisphere
we always associate Christmas with snow — even if we live on an
island where it has never snowed on record. The natural
environment of the reindeer is the Arctic plain or tundra, which
is covered in a blanket snow throughout the harsh, freezing cold
winter. Surprisingly, of all the species of deer, the reindeer
is the only one that can be domesticated. As such man has used
them for a variety of purposes over thousands of years –
including pulling wooden sleighs across the snow. Imaginative
minds in decades past have sought to lin