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The deer that bow, and why they are there at all
Nara's deer are wild animals with a legal status: around 1,200 of them live in and around the park, protected since 1957 as a national natural monument, and before that as messengers of the god of 春日大社, the shrine the park grew up around. Killing one was a capital offense into the Edo period. The bowing is not reverence and not training — they have learned that lowering the head produces a cracker, and they do it harder and faster the longer you hold out, which is where visitors get bitten. The crackers sold at the stalls, 鹿せんべい, are made of rice bran and flour with nothing else in them, and the vendors are licensed, because the one thing the deer must not learn is that human food is food.