CANADA'S FIRST VELVET EXPORT

This article was originally printed in the December 2001 / January 2002 issue of Deer Tracking
This article is copyrighted and may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

You must be joking. No way it's been done before. It will no doubt come as a surprise to many, as it did to me, to learn that the first exports of velvet antler from Canada to the orient had nothing to do with elk, or Western Canada for that matter. It was in 1928 that Horace Freeman, who was the research director of the Consolidated Paper Corporation at Trois Rivieres, Quebec, had the idea of selling white-tailed deer velvet as "an aphrodisiac to elderly gentlemen in China".

Apparently Freeman, who had been a friend and fellow bank clerk of Robert Service in Yukon, developed the notion after a delegation of Russian scientists visited his laboratory. The antlers were said by the Russians to contain pantocrin, which had been used to heal wounds during the First World War. Freeman did some research of his own and found that one ounce of sliced antler could be sold for $5.

Not one to hold back, Freeman invited U.V. Dmitrenko to visit him on Anticosti, the almost three hundred kilometer long island which lies north-east of Quebec's Gaspe peninsular. On a map it looks like a large throat lozenge in the maw of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Dmitrenko, a Russian refugee from the communists, who had gone to live in Los Angeles, was said to be the foremost export alive on "panti". Freeman learned how to process the velvet antler according to Russian standards and then an astonishing two hundred deer were killed on the island. The antlers were processed, and half of them were shipped to Manchuria, where, according to Dmitrenko, they should fetch better than $600 a pair.

Nothing was heard for several weeks, and then the British Consul in China found the shipment, somewhat high by now, lying unclaimed on the docks. He contacted the corporation back in Canada and told them something that we all now know well, that it was difficult to break into the Chinese market without an agent. The agent he recommended acted commendably quickly, considering the state of the cargo, and suggested that although the quality of the panti had somewhat declined he thought he could still sell it for $100 per pair of antlers.

Sadly, he neglected to mention what sort of dollars were involved. The corporation had expected about $10,000, but the sale generated only a fraction of that target. Worse yet, it came in Mexican dollars, the currency in use in China at the time. As the exchange rate was only about 30 cents, the venture was a financial flop. The other hundred pairs of antlers, rotting in the Trois Rivieres warehouse, were dumped into the sea.

So there you have it. White-tailed deer antler has been used in oriental medicine, but the next time that any enterprising deer farmer in Canada tries to market it overseas it might be a good plan to set up a broker ahead of time, and the of course there is the little matter of killing of wild deer to make a profit. Departments of Natural Resources might not approve. Nor would the various deer farming associations.

Author: Jerry Haigh FRCVS

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