Got this email from my dad this morning. Good read.


Why we shoot deer in the wild (A letter 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 my 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, 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 really want the deer 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 the animal to back in there and I started moving up so I could retrieve my rope.

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

I think that deer would taste better when shot in the wild having eaten its natural food plants, rather than after feeding it up on corn. What the animal eats affects the taste of the meat after all. For this reason, I think it was a bad idea, even if everything had gone smoothly.

The reason this was so unbearably hilarious is that I grew up on a farm myself and have had a number of varied experience with wild deer. For starters, my uncle found a very small fawn curled up by its dead mother along the road, and took it in to care for. They named it Ming Ming and raised him to adulthood. He could be somewhat skittish around people he didn't know, but was quite friendly if someone he trusted introduced them. They had him for two or three years and allowed him to wander around their property freely. He stayed voluntarily with no need for a pen once he reached adulthood (except as a safe place to sleep, protected from coyotes). Sadly, because he had no fear of humans, some hunter shot him one hunting season.

Those few years were not much for educating me about wild deer, though, since that one was domesticated at a very young age. However, I have observed wild deer fighting each other just a couple hundred feet away from me, in the corn field across the road from my house in my childhood home. They are quite vicious when they rear up and start boxing with their hooves. I have seen them tear bark and even sizable chips of wood from tree trunks when they fight next to a tree.

Thirdly, I've personally watched deer jump a good 10 feet vertically to clear a fence when good food was on the other side. I've also watched a running deer jump a good 25+ feet to clear a river with deep banks with a coyote hot on her tail (at least until she cleared the river and left the coyote on the other side). So given how high and far they can potentially jump (when properly motivated), it stands to reason that, despite their sometimes small size, they are extremely strong animals.

In regards to biting, one of my dad's acquaintances tried to help a deer that was caught in a tangle of scrap barbed wire. It bit the crap out of him! He ended up with stitches all over his arm and still has the scars to prove it. He did manage to free the deer, and it ran off, leaving him bleeding profusely.

Having grown up with these types of experiences, both personal and second hand, I learned that, although they may look cute and harmless, and are not really the brightest animals out there, they are far from harmless, and I should maintain a healthy respect for what they can do in close quarters.

When I reached high school and started hunting, I had a chance to talk with various other hunters with more experience than me who confirmed the legitimacy of that healthy respect for what they can do. Several years later, when I was in basic training for the Army, there was a guy in platoon who we nicknamed, "Cowboy" because he could take his boot lace, tie it into a lasso, and literally lasso your foot as you walked by him, yank on it to make you stumble, then quickly tie the lace around your foot with a few flicks of his wrist (I watched him do it with several others, then asked him to do it to me. He was scary with a boot lace!). He liked to tell stories about the rodeos he competed in (and often won, with pictures of the trophies for proof), but one time he was talking about roping things on his ranch. One day while he was watching his family's herd, he saw some deer grazing with the cattle and decided to try to rope one. Like the farmer in your story, he didn't think the deer would provide much of a challenge, so when he got the rope around its neck, he wasn't nearly as quick to tie it off on the saddle horn of his horse as he would have been if it was a 900 lb steer. Consequently, as soon as that rope snugged up around the deer's neck, it bolted and yanked "Cowboy" right off his horse, dragging him across the ground a good 30 feet or so before he wised up and let go. Apparently the deer eventually managed to figure out how to remove the rope, because it was found several miles away a few days later. Having learned all I had about deer while I was growing up, I laughed my ass off as he was telling his story.

But this one totally trumps Cowboy's story!

Back home my grandfather has attempted to raise a couple deer he has found that were injured or too young to take care of their self. He tended the injury of the first one and kept it fed. It died anyway. He took care of the young one like a father, but it did not last either. Now, he wasn't a vet but he did tend a large variety of animals on the property: Russian boar, 20+ head of cattle, chickens, exotic birds from Macaws to African greys, your typical ranch dogs, geese, peacocks, goats, and so on. His explanation was that they just don't do well in captivity. Maybe a fully grown deer that was already healthy (we see how well that worked out) would do well, but a young/sick/injured one probably isn't going to make it.