Discuss: Seeing Deer

After reading Craig Childs’ sensitive article, I feel that magic and mystery surrounds us, around that dignified deer. We need to have reverence for life around. Thanks Craig!

One cold autumn morning, I came across a dying buck along my rural path to city work, and saw his chest heave once. I stopped, knowing what I must do, and cursed the errant driver whose speed in the dark and insouciance had left this creature thus. I drew my never used pistol from my fanny pack and finished him. No more suffering, but mine. Sad morning, crying my way to work. Go figure.

I spent the last six months in Pennsylvania. I traveled lonely roads at night knowing I would encounter these beautiful creatures, and took the time to slow down, to be careful not to hurt one and enjoy the scenery. 

One night I talked for 10 minutes to a group of deer who seemed to have no fear, just stood there listening to my babble and singing without making a comment of their own. 

Thank you for this lovely story that suggests these beautiful creatures are kindred spirit with us. Frankly, I think they rise above us.

I had two teenage friends die when they swerved off the road trying to avoid a collision with a deer.  I have hit deer when I was driving fast, and when I was driving carefully. 
More than once, I have shot a deer out of a group and watched as the other deer looked up at the sound, and then returned to feeding in the grass around the body of the deer I had just killed.
An average doe has two yearlings annually. Without hunters and automobiles, we would be neck-deep in starving deer and we would just give up on raising any crops -because the deer would eat everything.
Deer are pretty, and they have their place in the environment, but also on my dinner plate.

Thankyou for that beautiful story.  I too say a prayer/blessing when I get into my car, that I harm none, on my way to work in the hills of Southwestern Virginia where wildlife is abundant and many creatures are seen smashed on the road and ground into the pavement.

I once had a run-in with a group of deer who were crossing the highway.  I slowed down, they ran across in front of me, I thought they had all crossed, but another came out of nowhere and glanced off my car.  I called the state police to report the hit and they came to inspect my car, as insurance requires.  When I told the trooper about the experience and that I cried all the way home, he said “Lady, you are lucky to be alive.”  Since then, I have learned to drive slowly on warm rainy humid nights as that seems to bring them out of the woods up in New York’s Catskill Mountains, where I reside. Since studying PermaCulture, I have let my previously formal garden go back to nature, and enjoy watching the deer forage in my yard.  They don’t even run away when I am outside if I make a sucking sound like one does when calling a cat.
I guess that is a universal nurturing sound. I have observed that making that sound seems to calm a frightened animal.  Try it and see for yourself.

Mr. Childs writing touches on a point that we often overlook, that we humans are another animal in the grand scheme of life.  He has an obvious gift for putting this connection with other living things into words. 

Mark in LA has a point in that the only controls on deer populations at this time are humans.  However, we humans are the reason why there are so many deer.  Our irrational fear of other predators has eliminated the environmental checks (mainly wolves) on the populations of wild ungulates. 

Collisions with wildlife kill 200 humans and 1.5 million elk and deer each year costing us $10 billion per year.  On top of this one million other vertebrates die each year from auto collisions (see High Country News, Safe Crossing, Nov 12, 2007). 

So what we need is not more auto collisions and hunting, but more predator reintroduction programs and highway wildlife crossings to curtail these automobile deaths.

This is one fine piece, Craig. It moved me to tears. I so appreciate your sensitive telling of such a personal, tragic experience. Thank you for sharing it with the rest of us who love wildlife, love animals, and have hit one on the road. It’s truly a heartbreaking experience to which you brought grace. Thank you.