What do steenbok have to do with Christmas?
I don’t know, but have a look this from Tetrapod Zoology.
Now, I can see where someone could get confused. How many people have seen the stop motion special Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer?
Here’s a clip in case you haven’t seen it:
The species that this cartoon was based upon was not the reindeer/caribou of northern Eurasia and North America. Because this special was made in the US, the species it was based upon was the white-tailed deer. In fact, if you watch the whole thing, the does don’t have antlers. In real caribou/reindeer, the does do have antlers, an adaptation that helps them compete for scarce food resource during the worst part of the winter.
This makes some sense, though, if the average person in the US saw what reindeer/caribou actually look like, I seriously doubt that the film would have had any credibility. I mean they just aren’t that cute:
Now, the young male reindeer in this special have little antlers, which look a lot like the steenbok’s horns. Unlike the reindeer/caribou, steenbok have actual horns, and only the males have them.
The word steenbok in Dutch refers to the Alpine Ibex, which is known as “Steinbock” in German. When the Dutch and German-speaking settlers came to Southern Africa, they called the little antelope they saw “steenbok,” and the name has lived on in the Afrikaans language and in English. (Similarly, the large antelope these settlers found was called an “Eland,” which is Dutch for elk/moose.” In North America, we called the close relative of the red deer an elk. Yes, I know we got also got that one wrong, but at least what we call an elk is a deer!)
Steenbok live in Southern and Eastern Africa. It is not exactly a species of the barren grounds of the High Arctic.
But maybe I have it wrong.
Maybe Santa Claus’s flying reindeer are actually flying steenbok, and they use their large ears as wings and soar just like the flying nun.
