As we drove to dinner today, we passed through a nearby farm field. Berta remarked that within the past week she’s seen that field filled with many grazing deer. It got me thinking about how strangely we treat this wild animal.
Deer are fairly large beasts around here. They’re not quite as large, but are almost as tall as a cow. In any case, they’re no joke. If you run into one with a car, the car can easily be damaged beyond repair. This is in comparison to many other creatures that we have not hunted into extinction or herded for food that still wander wild in the open.
There really isn’t a range of animal between, say, stray dog and deer. There aren’t a whole lot of stray dogs around either, but if there were, the deer are on average at least twice as large. There are many, many smaller creatures than dogs out in the “wild”, as evidenced by the all-too-plentiful roadkill, but nothing between dog and deer size. What puzzles me is that we just take this deer thing for granted.
Yes, there are deer out there. They wander in our back yards, they run across roads in the dead of night, they chew up the nice shrubbery around the buildings. We really don’t do a lot about it. They’re just… there.
On the one hand, this is possibly how should treat most wild animals - just leave them to roam freely. But it just struck me as strange that there are these large animals outside just roaming around. I mean, I don’t feel oddly about bears. Bears live in the woods. That is their home, and rare is the occasion that one stumbles into the local Circuit City. So I’m not really concerned about that. But these deer are everywhere!
There is a ton of wacky crap out there that people are apparently using to torture persuade deer into staying clear of their yards. Deer really just need someplace to hang out, and Pennsylvania seems to be the spot.
Pennsylvania is the state with the largest number of deer-related car accidents in the US. No wonder everyone here has some story about how deer jumped out of the bushes and into the front of some car.
There really isn’t much of a point to this post, other than my occasional imaginings about how strange it is that we’d kind of “dominated” this planet. I’m just waiting for the deer to overthrow us. “Bring me my salt lick!” “Yes, master.”
