I thought does were female deers? Man, English's so weird sometimes.

FRien said in comment #2628096:
I thought does were female deers? Man, English's so weird sometimes.

Apparently it traces back to old British classism.
"Oh there you go, bringing class into it again..."
"Well that's what it all about!"
Hunting deer was a special privilege reserved for the aristocracy, whereas the lower classes had to do with hunting wabbits. So I guess a female rabbit was the peasant version of a female deer, for a lot of practical purposes related to not draining the population too much, hence calling them does and the males bucks.
But English gets plenty weirder even just relating to the "terms of venery" (hunting), which is part of a whole larger vocabulary the British gentry invented just to better distinguish themselves from the common rabble, as hunting was an important ritual of that social strata. So for example they'd call a bunch of lions a "pride", crows a "murder", deer obviously a "herd" but rabbits a "down" (hence the title of the book "Watership Down") and hares a "husk" (and they'd even have synonyms for these terms!), all while the uneducated help could only stand there looking confused and potentially alarmed.
Good times, I'm sure.

FRien said in comment #2628096:

I thought does were female deers? Man, English's so weird sometimes.

Yes, female deer are indeed does. So are female rabbits. And as a native American English speaker with passing familiarity with Australian, British, and Canadian English, no arguments here regarding its weirdness.
I wonder how much of that weirdness can be blamed on uptight, prescriptivist 19th-century grammarians trying to impose the "rules" of Romance languages (defined here as "languages derived primarily from Latin," e.g. French and Italian) on a fundamentally Germanic one....

Alanis, killed by a rabbit girl named Marshmallow