Recovering from Deer Damage

They won’t touch it more than once!

Yup. It also builds character.

Minor tangent within the topic: Most of my trees are still very young and juicy snacks for the varmints. But I have found that if I leave the crunched end of the twig, the tree does not recover nearly as quickly as if I go ahead and prune the branch tips. Most of the time, for me, this has been a simple 1/4" (~6mm). Some branches benefit from smart pruning back to a bud that can become the leader. I do not know if there is something in their saliva, if the ripped tissue cannot recover, or a combination, but the branches I do not prune sometimes take months to start growing, and more often (again, young trees) what growth I get comes from elsewhere. I’ve literally pruned off last year’s teeth marks on twigs and seen them start growing again.