More on Deer Intelligence

Posted By: Youper on the 24hourcampfire:

“Now, after five deer, daughters have seen mothers die. Mothers have seen sons die. They know.”

A little too much anthropomorphism for me. Your deer are smarter than ours shaman. Now mind you this didn’t happen to me, but to my dad. At a bait pile he shot a doe that had come in as part of a group of does and fawns. The doe was a bang flop, and every one else scattered. Since it was near dark he just sat tight to see what else might come in. Sure enough they all came back and stepped over the dead doe to eat.

On the other hand, you’ve got Madge. Madge showed up the year after this event:
First Blood with the Muzzleloader

She just could not figure out what had happened and why her buddy was taking such a long nap, and repeatedly came back to the body and tried to wake her up.

I don’t mean to anthropomorphize deer, but I do believe that deer can have some pretty tight bonds. Okay, so I name some of my deer. I name some of my turkeys too. It’s just easier to reference them that way. I also talk to them every chance I get. That does not mean I anthropomorphize.

I can remember one exchange a few years ago. I had another doe at another stand that would frequently drop by in the mornings during bow season. If I had been inclined, I could have shot her on several occasions. As it was, she was entertainment. First, since she bedded near the stand, she was forever busting me on the way in. I would climb into my stand with her just across the corner of the field snorting away.

Second, she would come by well before sunrise and meticulously go about picking up my scent trail and follow it over to the stand, and then stand back and gawk at me, before taking a quick turn at the salt lick and walking away.

After three mornings like this, she became really frustrated and stood about 7 yards out from my stand and looked straight at me She pawed the ground and exhaled menacingly through her nostrils. For a while, I tried to just hold still as I had before, but finally I got tired of it and decided to take things in a different direction.

“You’ve got me fair and square.” I said, dropping my face mask. She froze. “What else can I say. You’ve won. So what do we do now?”

(no reply)

“Do you want to trade places for a while? I’ll come down there and you come up here? It’s really quite nice up here. I’m sure you’d like it.”

I guess the thought of trading roles as carnivore and prey did not sit well with her. She ran back to about twenty yards and turned, giving me a perfect broadside shot.

“I’ll give you a hint,” I continued. “If you keep that up, you’ll wind up on a somebody’s dinner plate. Now go be a good girl and go find me a nice buck.”

She dropped her head and wandered off back towards the cedar thicket she used for a bed.

Now I’m not going to ascribe any human intelligence to that animal. I am not going to say that that doe (she remained nameless by the way. Don’t ask me why) understood a whit of what I said. It would be foolish of me to do so. It was just a way of entertaining myself on an otherwise uneventful October morning.

However, I must say that she showed a great deal of insight in this exchange, some true innate deer intelligence. For what she did was seize upon the crux of the matter. To be a prey species is to be forever under control of the predator. Yet here she had one moment to take control of the situation, to literally rule from below, by offering me that free shot. It was the only thing that deer could possibly have done to goad me. She dared me.

Having seen me impotent, she walked off. Was it deer disgust? Was it deer triumph? Am I anthropomorphizing? Look, all I can do is report what was going on in my head. For all I know that doe just got up on the wrong side of the cedar tree. It could have been flatulence influencing her actions.

All I can say is that doe did give me a fleeting moment of shame, followed by the sly self satisfaction that every apex predator feels when he chooses not to commit himself.

“Hah!” I mused to myself. “I guess the thought of climbing the ladder was too much for her. ”

I chuckled out loud to release the tension of having been under her scrutiny for well over fifteen minutes. It had me sweating and shaky from the adrenaline. I stood up and stretched before settling back down. In the few hours that followed I thought about the incident over and over. Maybe I had gotten her thinking about trading places, maybe not. It had definitely gotten me thinking about it.

“Oh well.” I thought. “She couldn’t have worked the bow.”

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