Why we shoot deer in the wild

[Motasyco]

A friend emailed this to me and I thought it was hilarious. I did a search and couldn't find it posted yet. It's a little long but well worth it. Enjoy.

(A letter Why we shoot deer in the wild from someone who wants to remain anonymous, who farms, writes well and actually tried this)

I had this idea that I could rope a deer, put it in a stall, feed it up on corn for a couple of weeks, then kill it and eat it. The first step in this adventure was getting a deer. I figured that, since they congregate at my cattle feeder and do not seem to have much fear of me when we are there (a bold one will sometimes come right up and sniff at the bags of feed while I am in the back of the truck not 4 feet away), it should not be difficult to rope one, get up to it and toss a bag over its head (to calm it down) then hog tie it and transport it home.

I filled the cattle feeder then hid down at the end with my rope. The cattle, having seen the roping thing before, stayed well back. They were not having any of it. After about 20 minutes, my deer showed up - 3 of them. I picked out a likely looking one, stepped out from the end of the feeder, and threw my rope. The deer just stood there and stared at me. I wrapped the rope around my waist and twisted the end so I would have a good hold.

The deer still just stood and stared at me, but you could tell it was mildly concerned about the whole rope situation. I took a step towards it, it took a step away. I put a little tension on the rope .., and then received an education. The first thing that I learned is that, while a deer may just stand there looking at you funny while you rope it, they are spurred to action when you start pulling on that rope.

That deer EXPLODED. The second thing I learned is that pound for pound, a deer is a LOT stronger than a cow or a colt. A cow or a colt in that weight range I could fight down with a rope and with some dignity. A deer-- no Chance. That thing ran and bucked and twisted and pulled. There was no controlling it and certainly no getting close to it. As it jerked me off my feet and started dragging me across the ground, it occurred to me that having a deer on a rope was not nearly as good an idea as I had originally imagined. The only upside is that they do not have as much stamina as many other animals.

A brief 10 minutes later, it was tired and not nearly as quick to jerk me off my feet and drag me when I managed to get up. It took me a few minutes to realize this, since I was mostly blinded by the blood flowing out of the big gash in my head. At that point, I had lost my taste for corn-fed venison. I just wanted to get that devil creature off the end of that rope.

I figured if I just let it go with the rope hanging around its neck, it would likely die slow and painfully somewhere. At the time, there was no love at all between me and that deer. At that moment, I hated the thing, and I would venture a guess that the feeling was mutual. Despite the gash in my head and the several large knots where I had cleverly arrested the deer's momentum by bracing my head against various large rocks as it dragged me across the ground, I could still think clearly enough to recognize that there was a small chance that I shared some tiny amount of responsibility for the situation we were in. I didn't want the deer to have to suffer a slow death, so I managed to get it lined back up in between my truck and the feeder - a little trap I had set before hand...kind of like a squeeze chute. I got it to back in there and I started moving up so I could get my rope back.

Did you know that deer bite?

They do! I never in a million years would have thought that a deer would bite somebody, so I was very surprised when ..... I reached up there to grab that rope and the deer grabbed hold of my wrist. Now, when a deer bites you, it is not like being bit by a horse where they just bite you and slide off to then let go. A deer bites you and shakes its head--almost like a pit bull. They bite HARD and it hurts.

The proper thing to do when a deer bites you is probably to freeze and draw back slowly. I tried screaming and shaking instead. My method was ineffective.

It seems like the deer was biting and shaking for several minutes, but it was likely only several seconds. I, being smarter than a deer (though you may be questioning that claim by now), tricked it. While I kept it busy tearing the tendons out of my right arm, I reached up with my left hand and pulled that rope loose.

That was when I got my final lesson in deer behavior for the day.

Deer will strike at you with their front feet. They rear right up on their back feet and strike right about head and shoulder level, and their hooves are surprisingly sharp ... I learned a long time ago that, when an animal -like a horse - strikes at you with their hooves and you can't get away easily, the best thing to do is try to make a loud noise and make an aggressive move towards the animal. This will usually cause them to back down a bit so you can escape.

This was not a horse. This was a deer, so obviously, such trickery would not work. In the course of a millisecond, I devised a different strategy. I screamed like a woman and tried to turn and run. The reason I had always been told NOT to try to turn and run from a horse that paws at you is that there is a good chance that it will hit you in the back of the head. Deer may not be so different from horses after all, besides being twice as strong and 3 times as evil, because the second I turned to run, it hit me right in the back of the head and knocked me down.

Now, when a deer paws at you and knocks you down, it does not immediately leave. I suspect it does not recognize that the danger has passed. What they do instead is paw your back and jump up and down on you while you are laying there crying like a little girl and covering your head.

I finally managed to crawl under the truck and the deer went away. So now I know why when people go deer hunting they bring a rifle with a scope......to sort of even the odds!!

All these events are true so help me God... An Educated Farmer

[vontar]

Don't molest the deer or any other wildlife.

[Guest m&pc9]

Why we shoot deer in the wild

Because the deer farm has a gun busters sign on the door!

[Mdunntn]

Oh wow this made my day haha

[Guest ADAM]

some people learn the hard way. this is funny

[1gewehr]

Deer kill more people in the US each year than any other wild animal.

[Guest KCSTEVE]

A friend and I were fishing in a boat on the lake. A small deer came swimming by and he said "I'm gonna take that little deer home and show the kids" so he loops a rope around the deers neck and ties the rope around his waist. ( Have you ever seen a bad idea taking shape and you don't know what to say? )

When the little deer's feet touched bottom in the shallow water, my friend was launched out of the boat and was dragged, at a high rate of speed, through the mud and was headed into the woods when he hit a tree.

We finally managed to get the rope off of the deer and "deer roping" was dropped from future fishing trips.

[Will Carry]

Hey Ya'll...watch this! My mother used to work at the emergency room in Bay Minette AL. One night they brought in a guy who had been run over by a VW Beetle.

They were riding through a pasture with the guy standing on the running board. They were trying to get close enough to a deer so that he could jump on it and kill it with his knife. Alcohol was involved.

[Caster]

While I am not the biggest lover of all things hunting, I will say that a shoulder in the crock pot with taters carrots onions and seasoning comes in a very close second to "Why we shoot deer in the wild"

[Caster]

..........or tenderloin on a biscuit.

[JAB]

When I was a little kid, about four or five years old, someone had given my grandfather and stepgrandmother a fawn whose mother had been killed. My grandparents kept it, bottle fed it and raised it as a pet (not that unusual living on Lookout Mountain in the 1970s.) It was funny how attached my grandfather seemed to be to it because he hunted deer - and my stepgrandmother used to cook venison tenderloin (backstrap) for breakfast pretty often when we would visit. Anyhow, that darned deer would follow them around, wanted to be petted, etc. They'd even let it come in the house, sometimes. To them, it was as much a pet as a dog. A really vicious dog that apparently didn't like little boys. Fortunately, unlike a dog, it didn't have a mouthful of teeth intended for rending flesh. Unfortunately, unlike a dog, it did have sharp hooves. Any chance it got, it would sneak up behind me, rear up on its hind legs and 'paw' me in the back of the head/neck/shoulders. I hated that damned deer and was scared to visit them because of it. I was not disappointed when it disappeared (probably ended up in some hunter's/poacher's freezer.) It is also why I have no problem with the idea of shooting and eating deer.

When I was older, about fourteen or fifteen, someone gave them another fawn. This one had been found caught up in a barbed wire fence. Again, they took care of it, bottle fed it and raised it. It also fell into the same pattern of wanting to sneak attack me. My grandfather thought this was funny (he has always been a cruel sort) and jokingly told me to knock it down the next time it tried pawing me. I took his words to heart. The next time it came behind me and reared up, I had my eye on it. Now, I have always been a pretty good sized fellah and by the time I was fourteen I weighed in at right around two hundred pounds (and some of it was even muscle.) So, when that deer was fully standing on it's hind legs, at the apex of its intended strike, I came around with a roundhouse right, with everything I had behind it, and caught it under the jaw with my fist. Now that was funny. The deer's back feet left the ground and it went over backward, went down hard, wallowed on the ground for a bit, struggled to its feet and ran off. My dad had seen it rearing up, too, and had been headed over to help me - and the best part might have been the grin on his face and the look of pride from knowing that I had stopped being scared of it and had taken up for myself.

As for the deer, it never tried to paw me, again. In fact, it wouldn't even come near me and gave me a wide berth when we would visit until it, too, disappeared (this time, they even had a florescent orange dog collar on it with its name and their address on the tag - and one day they found that someone had brought the collar back and left it.)

Edited March 3, 2011 by JAB

[railfancwb]

And I thought the answer was "Because we are not allowed to hunt in the zoo."

[Guest ForPointSix]

That is great!! I laughed so hard, the wife just walked in asking what is so funny!!!

[Murgatroy]

I chuckled quite a bit reading this.

[Guest mosinon]

That is a really nice story JAB!