Deer in the Yard

It is only 8:30 in the AM and we have had some action already. Carisa and I were both up already at 7:45 with Jack in the bed getting hungry when, as there often is, a dog was barking continuously. Carisa got up to see what neighbor's dog it was when she said, "there's a deer in the yard." Not completely believing it, I got up and looked out the window and said, "there's two deer in the yard." There were two does just standing there plain as day and that is when Carisa noticed one was stuck on the fence. She took a picture from our bedroom window. There is a tree in the way of the deers body but you can see to the left of the tree where its left hind leg is caught on the top of the chain link fence. You can also see the blood all over the fence...it must have been there for hours.



I went out to see if I could get the deer unstuck. At this point, the other deer who was still hanging out waiting for its friend started stomping around the yard, I guess to try to scare me away. Eventually she just went and waited on the other side of the yard. The deer that was stuck was also scared and trying to get away from me but it couldn't. Instead she just kept pulling on that painful looking leg. By the amount of dried and frozen blood all over the place she must have been there since early morning. It looked like when she tried to jump the fence, her left hoof, instead of going over the fence, went through the second hole from the top of the fence while the rest of the deer's body went over the fence, causing the leg to be bent over and pinned on top of the fence. All of the skin was scraped off on the underside of the leg exposing bone and tendon and it looked to me like it must have been broken. Realizing there was no way I was going to be able to get the leg out of the fence I went back to the house and got some wire cutters. I cut the wire on the left side of the leg and she was still stuck...I think the wire was somehow in her leg at this point. So, I cut the other side and the deer fell free. It tried to run away but couldn't put any weight on that bad leg. She was in a fenced in yard and was unable to use that bad, back leg to jump out of the yard. At this point its friend was on the other side of the fence so the one with the bad leg laid down while they just stared at each other through the fence before the bigger, healty one eventually left.

I called animal control and two guys came out. We went in the back yard to see if the leg was broken and whether they would have to call "back-up". I guess the incentive of three guys walking toward it gave the deer the motivation to get out. It was putting a little more weight on the leg and succeeded in jumping out of the yard and running down the hill through more yards, jumping over two more fences and was gone. The animal control guys said that they would go down the hill to make sure she didn't get stuck in any more yards, particularly in one with dogs which wouldn't be hard to do in this town. That deer is lucky that she got stuck in one of the only yards in town without a pair of dogs!