Fear the Deer—Nature's Unstoppable Killing Machines

A girl about to get gored by her soul sister.

Bucks duel each other for territory and mating privileges. These fights can go to extraordinary lengths. White-tailed deer bucks have been found in dead pairs, their antlers tangled and locked so tightly they couldn't extricate themselves. They died of thirst or stress. The truculence of deer can go further than that. I know of one case in which a buck was found with the decapitated head of another locked in its antlers. Biologists posited that the living buck picked a fight with an already dead rival and tore his head off.

This truculence transfers easily to humans. In 2005, for example, a man was tending the tomatoes in his backyard near Rancho Santa Fe, California, when a deer appeared. It gored him in the face and head. Bending over to pick tomatoes probably looked to the deer like a fighting stance. In 2006, a seven-point white-tailed buck attacked an elderly man in Pennsylvania, butting and goring him in the head. When his wife came to his defense, she, too, was attacked. The violence stopped only when police shot the buck to death.

Deer kept on farms and in zoos and wildlife parks have also injured people and even fatally gored their keepers. In 1997, in Belle Fourche, South Dakota, a man who kept reindeer as part of his Santa Claus act was attacked by a 550 pound bull in heat. When the bull tried to gore him, the man latched on to its 31-point rack of antlers. The reindeer carried the man – who weight 370 pounds – in the air for forty-five minutes. Eventually it pinned him to the ground. Five other men tried to pull the buck off. When they finally succeeded, the buck fell dead from its exertions. The owner was not seriously hurt.

A personal anecdote:  when my mom was a kid, they had a pet deer.  It tended to bully family members, and it's hooves were sharp and dangerous, and it knew how to use them.  They eventually had to kill and eat it, it was simply too unpredictable.