Years ago in my “working life”, I would drive to work along wooded and swampy areas. In late October and early November I was informed by my deer hunting friends that the male deer herd went into the “rut”. My dictionary defines rut as a periodic sexual excitement of certain male mammals. In other words they get stupid.
Recently there was one male deer in Ohio that apparently was in the rut. He went into a Walmart parking lot and randomly butted cars and trucks for no apparent reason. Then this same deer headed for a nearby motel. He crashed through a window of a ground level room and that is where authorities found him. The deer should have known there were no female deer in the motel. The story ends happily. The buck was captured and released back into the wild where he could head-butt more cars, trucks and motels. I wonder if deer get headaches.
It is hard to believe a male animal can get that stupid.
During my daily compute to work there was always the danger of encountering stupid deer. I would see herds of deer from time to time but they seemed to graze like cows and were quite docile. Docile until this time of the year.
Our company dealt with an insurance company that handed out high pitched whistles. The whistles were mounted on the front bumper of a car. The wind passing through the whistle produced a pitch was so high, human beings could not hear the noise but deer could. If a deer was near the road side, the theory was that the high pitch sound would “freeze” the deer in his tracks and drivers would be safer because they could avoid the deer. I drove with whistle for several years and was never sure whether it worked or not. I never encountered a dangerous deer situation so maybe it worked.
Nope. It was proven that the high pitch whistle did not reduce deer accidents. If a stationary truck, car and motel room can’t stop a deer, why would a whistle? You can’t fix stupid!
So as Halloween approaches, you need to deal with witches, goblings, zombies and all kinds of strange creatures. Add crazed male deer to your list.
Love,
Dad