The Hidden Life of Deer by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

Author:Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

Drivers, Hunters, and Their Prey

Deer are most vulnerable as fawns, of course, but they face danger throughout their adult lives too. Most of the danger comes from us. And to a degree, vice versa. An important cause of whitetail death is vehicle accidents. These don’t compare to deaths by hunting, but the number is large just the same. Many people are also killed in these accidents. In fact, deer are rated as causing more human deaths than any other animal, with bees causing the next most. That doesn’t really make sense, as bees mean to sting you and a mountain lion means to kill you, but a deer doesn’t mean to get hit by your car. Still, it’s a statistic.

These accidents are unfailingly horrible, even if no human being is hurt. Too often the deer is not killed outright, but just seriously injured. Deer hit by cars are not given a chance to recover on their own as was my bear. They are invariably shot by the police or by some armed bystander, as were two deer whose accidents it was my misfortune to witness.

The first of these took place on the road I take to go to town, where a doe was hit by a car. This was the doe whom I thought might have been the mother of that mysterious third deer of the Betas, the little fawn who might have been adopted. When I arrived at the scene, she was awaiting her fate at the roadside, not struggling, looking at the small crowd of people who had gathered to observe her and were busily telling one another not to let the children who were present witness the sad scene. The children were drooling with fascination and had no intention of not watching.

The doe’s legs were broken. A doe cannot walk on broken legs, obviously, and I believed that her destruction was inevitable. But did we need to terrify her, as the onlookers were doing? I persuaded a few of them to give her some space. Then I learned that our neighbor Don had seen the doe on his way into town and had turned back to get his rifle. Soon he returned, and to my horror, he and another man grabbed the doe by her head and her broken front legs and started to drag her into the bushes. Why? Because they wanted to spare the curious children the sight of Don shooting her. To me, the sensibilities of the children were vastly less important than the terror and suffering of the doe—just because animals can endure pain does not mean we should inflict it on them—and I did my very best to persuade the parents to remove their children and begged the two men not to drag and thus torture the doe but to shoot her where she was. I was unsuccessful. The two men dragged the doe about fifty feet into the woods, bumping her over every obstacle, making no effort to ease her pain or to move her carefully.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.