Do female deer have horns?
Yes some of them do. Female caribou and reindeer commonly grow antlers along with their male counterparts. In addition, some female white tail deer (and I suspect mule deer, although I don’t know for sure) will grow antlers. This phenomenon is well known to most deer hunters, who are not supposed to be shooting does but can get away with it if the doe has antlers. Now, to address this question (leaving out the exceptions noted above) we first need to ask – why should any deer grown antlers? Growing anything (an arm, a tail, or an antler) is associated with a metabolic cost – it takes food energy to grow that structure and gathering food exposes an animal to predation risk. Employing the adaptationist paradigm, we can assume that antlers serve a function that is important to males, but that function is not as important to females. In the case of deer, that function is the inter-male competition for mates. Deer really only use their antlers to fight with other deer. They are not usually
