Walking the dog yesterday, we came upon a deer, a totally normal occurrence, but instead of leaping gracefully away, this deer walked towards us.  Henry, not on his lead, went bonkers, barking, lunging, and as the deer continued to not run away, he quickly worked up to grabbing on with his giant doggy teeth.

I was screaming at him by that point. I did not want him to attack this deer who was clearly old, or sick, though not apparently wounded anywhere that I could see.  Henry could not hear me, he had disappeared into doggy-gets-deer frenzy.  The deer would leap—so graceful!—a few feet away, at first staying just ahead of him, while I tried calling him (hopeless), but quickly she couldn’t continue this, even as Henry grew more bold, until he knocked her down, and lunged for her throat.

This is what dogs and wolves are made to do.  Hunt, kill, and eat deer.  But I couldn’t stand it, the suffering of the deer that I felt responsible for because Henry is my dog and I had the power to stop him.  In theory.  In actuality, every time I tried to get close enough to grab him,  my closeness would make the deer try to get away from me, which would make Henry go after the deer, which kept him out of my grasp.  Until I was standing right over the deer, shouting at my dog, and he knocked her over.

I picked up a stick and hit him.

Not hard, he didn’t even yelp.  But I hit him, I hit my dog to get him off that deer. Which makes no sense, because here I am, hurting one animal (or at least startling the heck out of him) to keep him from hurting another animal—an animal he is designed, by the food chain, to eat.  Brilliant.

Well, he was going to kill her, not just poke her with a stick, but still.  This is made more weird by the fact that she’s probably near death anyway. Apparently, I’m okay with him eating the dead deer, just not killing her.  I guess, if it were me, I would want to die peacefully, not ripped apart by a dog.  But maybe deer don’t feel the same way, I have no way of knowing.  I know Henry would have been in ecstasy to take down a deer, even an old, sick deer.  I know he didn’t want to get hit by a human welding a stick.  I know I felt all messed up by the whole situation.

Anyway, Henry jumped away, surprised, and I dropped the stick, surprised, too. I called him, hand out, and he came to me with his head down, slinking, watching my hands, afraid I’d hit him again, I guess, which made me feel like a total shit.  I took his collar and walked us both back to the yurt, leaving the deer behind, her eyes wild, her legs placed far apart, new scratches on her face just starting to bleed.

I’m completely aware that deer are eating the forests around here, destructively stripping them of undergrowth, and that deer over-population is a real problem.  I also have been known to eat venison—my uncle hunts.  I remember last year, my cousin saw a deer get hit by the car in front of his, saw that it was still alive but too injured to stand, and he just calmly got out of the car, got his gun out of the trunk, and shot the deer to end her suffering.  Then he took the dead deer home to butcher and eat.  This cousin is a sensitive person who helps with major Greenpeace actions.  It’s possible that I ate some of that deer, going over to my Aunt’s house for dinner and having some of her amazing venison stew.

I’m not as clear headed as my cousin.

This morning, I went out searching, but the deer was gone.  I was glad for her to go somewhere else to die, because I was keeping Henry on the lead after the whole attack thing, not wanting him to go out and get her—which he profoundly wanted to do, his ears staying in intense alert most of the evening, pointed to where I knew the deer to be, hearing what I couldn’t.

But this evening, she is back, right outside the yurt, beside the path we use to go for walks.

As I took this, a rifle shot fired off nearby, someone hunting.

Food can be so confusing.  I get hit with this frequently as a micro-farmer, because there are harsh practicalities to animal husbandry that can not be avoided if you want to keep goats.  I feel better about drinking milk from my happy goats than from factory farmed cows, but that means I have to personally do things such as burn off the kid horns, sterilize the boys, give shots, help birth babies, kill too-sick goats (this has not happened yet, part of me wants to sell the goats before it does), etc. Buying meat on little sanitized trays and feeding my dog kibble disguises the harsh realities of our  body’s animal need to eat, but it’s still there.  I’m aware that lots of people have no trouble with this.  They kill, eat, and enjoy.  And some tender-hearted people swear off animal products so as not to be the cause of animal suffering.  Ahimsa—non-harming, one of the first principals of Patanjali’s yoga.  I’m caught in the middle.  It feels like a stupid place to be, a creature not at peace with her own nature, but unwilling to fully embrace the other side.

So the deer is curled in a small ball right beside the yurt—how do those incredibly long legs fold up so small?  She is waiting to die by a coyote, maybe, or some other dog, or whatever disease is keeping her from running away when I go up to her, only a few feet away, to sit with her while the sun goes down.