Just Because it's a Cute Deer w/ a Fluffy White Tail Doesn't Make it Okay to Break the Law [View all]

[dballance]

I know I'm going to get flamed for this but here it is anyway.

The law that prohibits people from having that deer and other wild animals is there to protect the animals. It was the right, kind and humane thing for the couple to do to get the fawn out of immediate harm's way as the initially did. It was the wrong thing for them to do raise a wild animal in a pen on their property. They should have turned it over to the IN Dept. of Natural Resources.

Wild animals raised by humans become domesticated and dependent upon humans. They don't have a chance to learn the survival skills they need in the wild from their mothers. Humans can't teach them that. This couple apparently intended to turn the deer back out into the wild. They were spending less time with it to prepare it one article reported. When I was growing up on a farm my dad told us in these sorts of cases that if we took in an orphaned wild animal we were going to take care of it for it's life. Because animals raised temporarily by people like this couple rarely survive long when put back into the wild.

If they are predator animals they never learned to hunt because they were fed by humans. An animal like this deer never learned from its mother the smells of the predators and when to hide or how to forage for food.

People are all up in arms about euthanizing the deer. Well turning it back into the wild was likely a death sentence in its own right. It is just as likely that the deer has already been killed by a predator it never learned to avoid. Or that it's starving to death because it didn't learn to forage for food properly. It could not have possibly learned those skills living in a pen and being fed by humans.

It's a further insult that the Indiana Dept. of Natural Resources wants the charges dropped against this couple now. The only reason they're doing this is all the crap on the Internet. Well that's a fair and equal application of the law. How about all the other people who have been or will be charged under this law? I guess they still have to go to court and actually defend themselves if they can't muster an Internet outrage.