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Whoever's in charge of designing the book cover.

http://archive.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/news/lejeune_0400.h...

Edie Freedman came up with the concept and chose the early animal prints.

See: http://animals.oreilly.com/origin-of-species/

A lot of those are some sort of pun or reference on the topic at hand: The crab as as a reference to Ferris/Rustaceans on the Rust book, spiders on books for "webmasters", the snake on Python Programming, etc. Others were just assigned at random (and proceeded to become indelibly associated with the language, like the perl camel).

A list of the animals, and some history:

http://www.oreilly.com/animals.csp https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/a-short-history-of-the-oreilly...

At least the one for Rust makes sense, given that the community calls themselves Rustaceans.

And has Ferris the crab as a mascot.

Ferris eh? Apt name.

Thanks for the info, I actually didn't know that despite playing with Rust on and off for a year or two.

For more: http://rustacean.net/

That's adorbs but doesn't explain who was editing an elixir book and thought "yeah, musk deer that's what this reminds me of"

Sure. Was just trying to provide some context for the Rust book.