I was out checking the mail, so I missed the initial radio transmission, but Tim told me the woman was attacked by the deer outside her home and her husband had to literally pull the deer off of her and get her into the house. Now the deer is 'lurking' aggressively outside the door, and the people are trying to leave so the gentleman can drive his wife to the hospital.

I cannot imagine having this happen. I told Tim that I guess the deer are all upset about the start of the hunting season.....

I hope she's going to be OK. Her spouse described her injuries as 'pretty bad' but not life-threatening so he didn't want the county to send an ambulance (and I'm guessing the cost of ambulance service is partly the reason why).

Tim says "only in Love County....". The wildlife do seem to have turned against us all this year.

Dawn

George

PS. We're processing venison right now : )

I am sure it is the rut. We have a lot of trouble with bucks during the rutting season. I take a big dog out with me every afternoon when I put deer corn out for 'our' deer. During the rutting season, the buck that seems to more or less live here on/near our property year-round always stands on the edge of the woods and 'snorts'(well, it is like he is blowing air out his nostrils and I don't really know what to call it) at me. I don't know if it is the same buck, or a different one, but he or they always stand in the same exact spot year after year after year. I guess it must be their favorite spot.

On the above incident, when the first deputy arrived on-scene, he ended up sending for medics and an ambulance anyway, apparently feeling that both the husband and wife had sufficient injuries and bleeding that they didn't need to be driving themselves to the hospital. I know the woman had multiple lacerations to her head, back and legs but he didn't describe the man's injuries.

The deer was on the front porch when the deputy arrived and then ran off into the woods before he could get his rifle out. After speaking with the residents and requesting an ambulance, he went next door at the request of the residents to check on their elderly neighbor who also had been outside when the deer attacked. When he returned to the original location, the deer reappeared and moved aggressively to attack the deputy.

At this point, he was the only officer on the scene and was waiting for another deputy and the wildlife officer to arrive, but they were still a mile or two away, so he shot the deer. The medics, another deputy and wildlife officer are now on-scene.

The big question now is this: who's going to keep this deer and butcher it for the venison?

Hope your processing goes well. It is that time of year.

Dawn

Diane

Saturday night I had to spend all night laying 110' of drainage tile in front of the house to fix my septic system before the rain came. I had a big worklight on, and had a radio turned on really loud listening to post-game OSU sports talk. At 1:30 my dog chased a deer away that had come up in the front yard near me. Then about an hour later the dog stood up and stared so I looked over and saw a really nice buck looking at me from the same place again. He was lit up and close enough to hit with a rock. I got a nice look with my spotlight before he got tired of the dog running around him and he took off. He is one of 5 different bucks that I have multiple pictures of from the trail camera down in the woods. Every image of these bucks was during the night until the last week.

It's that time of year.

It wouldn't hurt for everyone to be wary of hunters when the gun season starts Saturday. I like to get out early and drive the perimeter of our land the first couple days of primitive and gun season just in case someone gets to thinking nodody is around.

I had trouble with an aggressive male charging at me last spring while I was out walking a dog. It was pretty scarey.

Hi Scott, I hate the entire hunting season because of the unscrupulous hunters who spotlight from the road and fire indiscriminately at anything that moves. I wear red or orange clothing virtually every day the first week of the season. I know most hunters are not like that, but it only takes one or two of them to cause problems.

Our brown dog who is the same size as a yearling can't leave the house at all this time of year unless I have her on a leash because she likes to take off and run wildly through the woods.

I have no idea if our deer population is higher than usual this year, but I believe it must be since the number of people here who've hit deer in the roadways, as well as the large number of near misses, have been much higher than usual the last month or two. I would think that deer hunters in Love County will have a great hunting season.

You'll laugh at this, but I know the 'sound' of the vehicles (big, loud, pickup trucks) of the usual suspects who spotlight from the road in our neighborhood, so when I hear them driving up and down our road in the evening, I drive down to the end of the road and sit in the driveway in the car. When they slowly drive past our house, I either flash my headlights or a flashlight at them just to let them know I'm watching. They tend to leave and not return that night at least.

If they park their vehicle and walk into our woods, we call 911.

I just wish everyone would obey the hunting regulations. I have nothing against hunting per se, but careless hunters can make it dangerous for everyone and their animals.

Last night a woman hit a deer with her vehicle at the western edge of the county and was briefly pinned in the vehicle. It is that time of year, but I'll be glad when that part of the year ends.

Dawn

You guys do seem to have more than your fair share of crazy animals down there!

The more I find out about those critters the more I do think they are best off in someone's freezer or on their table.

Amen on owning a gun or guns. Living rurally it is a must.

Be careful everyone during hunting season. But I have to say Good Luck to all the hunters. Those deer need to be seriously thinned out. They are just causing way too much danger to humans.

Our friend is still in sad shape! He is in a rehab unit now. Didn't recognize his own son last weekend. Still has a trach....and well....it doesn't sound like he will ever be the same. We keep wondering what kind of life he will have after this deer accident. So sad!

G.M.

Traipsing all over our land without permission, shooting willy-nilly in all directions without so much a thought as to what is in the background, hunting from the road everywhere, and so on...

I can't even tell you what words are bouncing around, trying to come out of my keyboard right now. It completely steams me.

Diane, the cusser

The paramedics treated them at the scene and didn't transport them to the hospital, so I guess their lacerations were not too deep, so that's a good thing.

I am sorry your friend is so slow to recover. I am hoping and praying for the best possible recovery. Sometimes a person who is initially recovering quite slowly will eventually make a fuller recovery than initially believed possible. Rehab units can work miracles sometimes, so I am hoping and praying he makes a miraculous full recovery. Those darn deer!

Diane, I think I know the words you mean. LOL Y'all be careful. The local guys who think they can illegally hunt from the road here are a little afraid of Tim, so they do not come onto our property as much as they used to, but they still drive up and down the road at night. If I was going to try to 'sneak around' that much, I wouldn't drive such a loud truck.

Dawn

The reporter didn't get the story exactly right....she makes it sound like the woman got up and ran into the house, but what was reported on the emergency radio was that the husband had to get the deer off of her. The reporter also missed that the gentleman had injuries (less serious ones) too. The rest of the story was right though.

I linked the story in case you want to see it. The deer was described as a 7-point buck weighing about 130 lbs.

I bet this makes people think twice before they try to carry a pan of water outside for a deer in the yard to drink from. (What was she thinking?)

Dawn

Yes, I'll be thinking more than twice before I go out this fall to leave anything for ANY of our critters.

Paula

I put out deer corn for 'our' deer, but I put it out in the middle of the day when they are not likely to be around. I feel like it is too dangerous to put it out in the early morning or early evening hours. I also always take a dog out with me because, except for one incident last year, the deer always turn and run when they see a dog.

During periods of drought when the ponds and creeks dry up, I make 'wildlife puddles' (the biggest one is about 6' long x 3' wide by about 1' deep) for the deer, rabbits, raccoons and other animals to drink from.....and very shallow mud puddles for the butterflies. However, I'd never give them a bucket or pan of water (especially while they are standing out there!) for fear of them becoming too used to being around us and depending on us. At least a puddle seems 'natural'.

Sometimes when I am outside in the garden, the deer come strolling up on the outside of the 7' tall fence...often within 15 or 20' of me and that makes me nervous even though there is a fence in between them and me. I just don't think it is a good idea for deer to hang around too close to humans precisely because of what happened to the lady and gentleman in Love County yesterday.

I have heard of people here having a buck sort of stalking them (one stalked me almost every evening for 4 years--every single time I left the house during rutting season) or watching them or maybe even lunging at them without actually coming too close, but this is the first actual attack I've heard of here. One thing the story didn't mention is that the deer 'circled' the home for almost 20 minutes between the time it attacked the woman and the time the couple called 911 for help. Every time they thought it had left and tried to leave their home to go to the hospital, the deer came charging back at them. The deer could have survived this incident if he'd just gone away instead of continually returning.

I know we all need to be careful around wild animals and remember they are exactly that---wild animals and not pets!

Dawn

I would not be too worried about anything happening during the late winter, spring, and summer.

We have a neighbor who has raised a couple orphan deer (last year?) and has orphaned bear cub this year. In her house. Loose. I won't even go into the details of it but you can guess how I feel about the situation.

Diane

Best I recall she was waiting in the car while a friend or her sister went to a house and the car was parked in the street. A deer came up and started attacking the car. She got out to frighten it away and it came for her! She ran back and got into the car but the deer kept attacking the car.

I say don't mess with those critters. They are not Bambi like someone else said ealier.

Thanks for news link. I missed that.
G.M.

Take that, evil Bambi! :-D

Diane

I feed the deer corn and sometimes other grains down on the edge of the woods several hundred feet from the house because if I don't they come into the yard and eat every single plant that I plant. Over the years, they have eaten over 100 hostas, about as many daylillies, every hollyhock I've ever planted, etc. So, I guess you could say they blackmail me. And, I can't bear to look at starving little fawns in the winter time. I'm just a big softy.

The deer herd on our land preceded us. When we bought this land, we had a herd of 5 that now has grown to 9. The two old mama does that were here originally in 1999 are gone now, but their descendents are still here. They have a couple of specific spots where they bed down at night and we stay away from those areas year-round so they'll feel safe there.

Love County seems to have a huge overpopulation of deer....many more deer than the area can support. It isn't such a problem in a year with a good mast crop, but in drought years, you see a lot of painfully thin deer. Practically everyone on the 2-3 mile stretch of our road closest to our house feeds the deer and none of us hunt them. We'd rather watch them frolic in the pastures than shoot them.

This year, our next-door-neighbor has a deer stand up on his land for the first time since we bought this land in 1997. I believe his son-in-law and daughter put it up, but no one has been using it.

Before we put up the 7' tall fence around the garden, they occsionally jumped into my garden and ate everything in sight. I think I grew okra for 4 years before I was able to pick any for us. I wish we had a 7' fence around the acre or two closest to the house so I could have gardens all over.

The deer here that live on our property trust us. The does always bring the fawns to the garden, just outside the fence, while I am in it, to show them off while the fawns are teeny, teeny tiny. The first time it happened, I thought it was an accident. But it happens so often now that I think they bring them on purpose to show them off.

Having grown up in the city with a non-hunting dad, I never ate venison growing up and really don't like to eat it now, except if I make it into jerky.

We made the decision long ago that if we were going to feed the deer, we wouldn't hunt them or let anyone else hunt them on our land....to me, training the deer to come to a feeder so you can shoot them is like shooting fish in a barrel. I have no quarrel with anyone who chooses to hunt, but we just choose not to. We do call 911 and report anyone spotlighting from the road or trespassing onto private, posted property. We've also gone outside with guns and chased poachers off our property. The general feeling here along our road is that there are too many houses here now and way too many domestic animals (raising cows, horses and goats has pretty much replaced farming here) for any of us to feel comfortable allowing hunting on our property. The one neighbor who allows hunting on his property only allows one specific young man to hunt and he hunts only with a bow. This neighbor is between us and the river and his deer herd is so large it is like having a herd of cattle and they destroy his garden every year. He lives in the D-FW metro area and comes up here to his place (where he grew up) on weekends only, so the deer are too comfortable on his place and his garden suffers terribly.

Our two old mama does that lived here when we moved here really seemed to like us. (Of course, the garden only had a 3' tall fence then, so they probably loved us because we were feeding them all sorts of wonderful plants during the gardening season.) One of those does used to come look into our breakfast room window occasionally. I could never figure out why she was looking inside, but she was the first one who started bring the fawns to the yard to show them off and she'd often go off and leave them in the yard for an hour or two and then she'd come back and get them.

I never lose sight of the fact that deer are wild animals and are dangerous. I feel the same about every other wild animal on our property...they are "wild". We have a neighbor up the road a couple of miles who takes in and raises orphaned baby raccoons....and I think she's playing with fire too (as is your neighbor) because raccoons are mean and dangerous. I think wild animals belong in the wild, not in the house. :)

G.M., I remember that. You have to ask yourself what she was thinking getting out of that car? I would have been on the cell phone hollering for someone to come shoot that deer, or if I didn't have a cell phone I either would have laid on the horn to scare it off or I would have started up the engine and driven off.

I never figured out how that deer made it into town without someone shooting it or running over it there near Central Park!

Like Jay and others said, these deer are not Bambi. I have read of cases in other states where deer have attacked people and killed them.

I can always tell whether a deer on our property is one of "our" regular residents just by looking at it. My sister's boyfriend tells me that lots of hunters who regularly hunt on the same place year after year are the same way....they know the regulars by sight.

I definitely have a love-hate relationship with the deer. In general I love seeing them around the woods and pastures, but I hate them when I catch them in the yard or garden eating my plants and have been known to let out a dog to chase them off. Once last fall, I left the garden gate open overnight and came outside to find 4 of 'our' deer in the garden. They about destroyed the fence, the gate and the garden trying to get out of there when they saw me because they were just in a blind panic. I've been very careful to check the gate every night since then!

I hate deer hunting season. The residents here not only have to worry about inexperienced or careless hunters endangering the residents and their animals, but the constant gunshots ruin the peace and quiet we otherwise enjoy year-round. There's always a fire or two or three started by a careless hunter's campfire or cigarette---one of our worst fires last year was believed to have been started on a high-fenced game ranch and probably by a cigarette---and it burned for over two weeks, day after day, back in rugged, rocky hills in northwestern Love County and kept volunteer fire departments terribly busy. Our emergency personnel also get paged out sometimes to conduct search-and-rescue missions for lost hunters. I'd be just as happy if everyone skipped deer hunting season, but that's not going to happen. I think we see more and more hunters every year....and we still have increasing numbers of deer.

Dawn

I'm just glad we don't have many deer that come around on our place -- at least here by the house where my main gardens are. I know they drink from our pond and have a trail down there. As long as they stay far away from my gardens, they'll likely live as we're usually too busy to even think about hunting. LOL (Someone always gives us excess deer each year, usually one or two whole, so we've never even had to go deer hunting.) We also make it a point to have an outside dog around to guard the gardens and whatever critters we have at the time. We just got a
Great Pyr pup early this year and he's turning out to be a dream of a working dog!

Boy, I sure did ramble around up there. But, yeah, I get why you feed the deer now. Thanks!

Diane

I'd love to have a guardian dog, and I am sure we will one of these days, but only after a handful of our old dogs have gone to doggie heaven. Eight dogs is enough.

Jay,

That is so true. There was an older gentleman who leased land near us and he used to stop and talk to me on his way to that leased place. I usually knew where he was headed and what he was going to do. One day, while I was walking the dogs, an ambulance came racing past us, headed west down the road to the place he was leasing and I remember calling Tim and saying....I bet his horse threw him or a cow or bull got him. Sure enough, his horse had thrown him. Although he broke a hip, he healed pretty well which isn't always the case with someone in their 70s or 80s.

When one of our neighbor's has a cow, bull, horse, goats or donkey out, we always call them first and then wait for them to arrive. We never try to put up an 'escaped' domestic animal alone (well, we'll do goats without help) because they are so dangerously unpredictable. Some cows will follow you right back into their pasture, but others want to romp around a bit and it scares me when a big old cow or bull starts running towards me a little too enthusiastically. (I'm a big, big chicken.) If we can't get hold of the owner, we'll call around and find the nearest neighbor who is home and available to help because they all have more experience with large farm animals that we do.

I always expect the worst behavior from the wild animals. I don't even like seeing a ringtailed cat or possum or fox too close up in the yard. It isn't the size that makes them dangerous...it's that if they bite you, you'll likely have to go through a series of rabies shots. Sometimes even the mockingbirds or blue jays swoop at us and peck at our heads, and that's while they're hanging out in the yard to eat from the bird feeders--ungrateful birds!

Dawn

I didn't mention skunks, but they are probably the most serious disease threat here too.

One day, Tim and I were standing down at the road talking with the neighbor who lives across the road. It was the middle of the afternoon. Out of nowhere a crazed skunk came flying across the neighbor's pasture toward us at a high rate of speed. Tim, who almost always carries a gun because he's a police officer, pulled his gun, shot the darned thing from about 100' away, and calmly kept on talking and continuing the conversation. We did briefly mention that a skunk out in broad daylight running straight towards 3 people was probably rabid, but other than that no one batted an eye. As the conversation ended, our neighbor headed off on his ATV to pick up and haul away the animal carcass.

Our dogs have been skunked only once and it was our first summer here. Our then-pre-teen niece and nephew were staying with us that week and they, DS and I had walked the 3 dogs. We got back to the driveway and, as we walked up it....and with the worst possible timing in the world, we unclipped the leashes from their collars. As the dogs walked up the driveway ahead of us, five skunks (one mama, four babies) walked out of the neighbor's pasture and across the driveway, undoubtedly headed for our creek for water.

In the chaos that ensued, 2 of the 3 dogs got skunked, and the two boys volunteered to chase down the dogs, catch them, drag them back and bathe them.....so by the end of it all, we had two skunky-smelling dogs and two skunky-smelling boys. It was horrible. The boys cleaned up pretty well, although we gave up on getting that skunky smell out of the clothing and threw those clothes away. The dogs were banned from the house for a couple of weeks until they smelled only like dogs again. The mother skunk and her 4 babies never walked across our yard again as far as I know.

We were lucky. The next summer, one of our neighbors woke up during the night to the sound of a 'dog' scratching at the door to go outside. He stumbled sleepily towards the door to let the 'dog' go outside, and discovered it was a skunk that somehow had come into their house during the night. After his experience, I felt fairly lucky we'd only had our skunk encounter outdoors.

I keep a skunk kit (Lemon Joy, baking soda, and hydrogen peroxide) handy in the garage at all times. Around here, if you go into the store and buy only those three items, the conversation with the cashier (and everyone else in the store) goes something like this: "Skunks?" "Yep". LOL

Dawn