Day: August 8, 2025
The Deer
I laughed the whole time I read this.
(A letter from someone who wants to remain anonymous, who farms, writes well and actually tried this.)
I had this idea that I could rope a deer, put it in a stall, feed it up on corn for a couple of weeks, then kill it and eat it. The first step in this adventure was getting a deer. I figured that, since they congregate at my cattle feeder and do not seem to have much fear of me when we are there (a bold one will sometimes come right up and sniff at the bags of feed while I am in the back of the truck not 4 feet away), it should not be difficult to rope one, get up to it and toss a bag over its head (to calm it down) then hog tie it and transport it home.
I filled the cattle feeder then hid down at the end with my rope. The cattle, having seen the roping thing before, stayed well back. They were not having any of it. After about 20 minutes, my deer showed up– 3 of them. I picked out a likely looking one, stepped out from the end of the feeder, and threw my rope. The deer just stood there and stared at me. I wrapped the rope around my waist and twisted the end so I would have a good hold.
The deer still just stood and stared at me, but you could tell it was mildly concerned about the whole rope situation. I took a step towards it, it took a step away. I put a little tension on the rope, and then received an education. The first thing that I learned is that, while a deer may just stand there looking at you funny while you rope it, they are spurred to action when you start pulling on that rope.
That deer EXPLODED. The second thing I learned is that pound for pound, a deer is a LOT stronger than a cow or a colt. A cow or a colt in that weight range I could fight down with a rope and with some dignity. A deer– no Chance. That thing ran and bucked and twisted and pulled. There was no controlling it and certainly no getting close to it. As it jerked me off my feet and started dragging me across the ground, it occurred to me that having a deer on a rope was not nearly as good an idea as I had originally imagined. The only upside is that they do not have as much stamina as many other animals.
A brief 10 minutes later, it was tired and not nearly as quick to jerk me off my feet and drag me when I managed to get up. It took me a few minutes to realize this, since I was mostly blinded by the blood flowing out of the big gash in my head. At that point, I had lost my taste for corn-fed venison. I just wanted to get that devil creature off the end of that rope.
I figured if I just let it go with the rope hanging around its neck, it would likely die slow and painfully somewhere. At the time, there was no love at all between me and that deer. At that moment, I hated the thing, and I would venture a guess that the feeling was mutual. Despite the gash in my head and the several large knots where I had cleverly arrested the deer’s momentum by bracing my head against various large rocks as it dragged me across the ground, I could still think clearly enough to recognize that there was a small chance that I shared some tiny amount of responsibility for the situation we were in. I didn’t want the deer to have to suffer a slow death, so I managed to get it lined back up in between my truck and the feeder – a little trap I had set before hand…kind of like a squeeze chute. I got it to back in there and I started moving up so I could get my rope back.
Did you know that deer bite? They do! I never in a million years would have thought that a deer would bite somebody, so I was very surprised when ….. I reached up there to grab that rope and the deer grabbed hold of my wrist. Now, when a deer bites you, it is not like being bit by a horse where they just bite you and slide off to then let go. A deer bites you and shakes its head–almost like a big dog. They bite HARD and it hurts.
The proper thing to do when a deer bites you is probably to freeze and draw back slowly. I tried screaming and shaking instead. My method was ineffective.
It seems like the deer was biting and shaking for several minutes, but it was likely only several seconds. I, being smarter than a deer (though you may be questioning that claim by now), tricked it. While I kept it busy tearing the tendons out of my right arm, I reached up with my left hand and pulled that rope loose.That was when I got my final lesson in deer behavior for the day.
Deer will strike at you with their front feet. They rear right up on their back feet and strike right about head and shoulder level, and their hooves are surprisingly sharp… I learned a long time ago that, when an animal -like a horse –strikes at you with their hooves and you can’t get away easily, the best thing to do is try to make a loud noise and make an aggressive move towards the animal. This will usually cause them to back down a bit so you can escape.
This was not a horse. This was a deer, so obviously, such trickery would not work. In the course of a millisecond, I devised a different strategy. I screamed like a woman and tried to turn and run. The reason I had always been told NOT to try to turn and run from a horse that paws at you is that there is a good chance that it will hit you in the back of the head. Deer may not be so different from horses after all, besides being twice as strong and 3 times as evil, because the second I turned to run, it hit me right in the back of the head and knocked me down.
Now, when a deer paws at you and knocks you down, it does not immediately leave. I suspect it does not recognize that the danger has passed. What they do instead is paw your back and jump up and down on you while you are laying there crying like a little girl and covering your head.
I finally managed to crawl under the truck and the deer went away. So now I know why when people go deer hunting they bring a rifle with a scope……to sort of even the odds!!
An Educated Farmer. 
Credit: The original author
PATRIOT POST MEMES
He just wanted to be loved…
Being a complete and total sap when it comes to animals, I couldn’t help but want to share a story I came across on The Blaze featuring a four-legged furry lad. Homeless and showing signs that he had been abused in the past, and, apparently, shot in the face — who does something that awful? — he was not feeling the vibes coming from the Antrim County Animal Control shelter. It simply cramped his style.
Scout, a 65-pound mutt roughly a decade in age, made like Tim Robbins in “The Shawshank Redemption” and broke out of the shelter not once, not twice, but several times. Scout used jumping skills that would make even Michael Jordan jealous to get over the ten-foot-high chain link fence and an additional six-foot privacy fence, before making his way safely across the highway.
However, this isn’t the story of a dog who just liked to roam free and wild. As it turns out, there was a destination in mind for Scout: the Meadow Brook Medical Care Facility, a long-term, 82-bed nursing home that houses senior citizens.
Here’s more from The Blaze:
The first time he got out, Scout made his way inside the nursing home and slept in the lobby on a leather loveseat. A nurse found Scout the next morning then called animal control, who acknowledged he had gone missing the night before.
Scout made another great escape just a few nights later. Again, he found his groove on the leather loveseat, and again he slept until caught.
The Free Press indicated that, despite being carted back to the shelter a second time, Scout wasn’t ready to call it quits, making his way to his spot in the nursing home a third time just a few nights later.
“He was pretty relentless in his pursuit to be here,” Stephanie Elsey, who works as a clinical care coordinator at the nursing home, stated during an interview with The Washington Post. “He found his home.”
After the dog broke free from the shelter for a third time, one of the employees working for the nursing home decided to take Scout to their own home. Alas, things did not work out and the pairing was just not a good fit. However, many conversations were had by staff members about the possibility of the home itself adopting the lovable mutt.
“I’m a person who looks at outward signs, and if it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be,” Marna Robertson, the administrator for the nursing home, said during an interview with the Free Press. “He did that one time, two times, three times, and obviously that’s something you should pay attention to. And I asked the staff, ‘Well, he wants to be here. Would anybody like to have a dog?’”
The staff was on board with the idea, and so were residents.
One of the administrative assistants, Rhonda Tomzack, went on to say, “I think it reminds them of being home.… When you’re home you have your pets, and you don’t get to have that here. Having a dog around makes it feel like home.”
Scout has been calling Glacier Hill, one of the units at the facility, his home since 2017. That particular unit houses about 20 individuals.
And Scout is quite intelligent, as he often visits residents, even if their doors are closed, because he taught himself how to open them. Scout especially likes to pay a visit to residents he knows will give him a treat. Just like a man, right? Thinking with his stomach.
One of the residents, Shirley Sawyer, 82, remarked, “He’ll always let you pet him and lets you talk to him if you need someone to talk to.… It’s very nice.”
Sawyer’s brother, Bob Shumaker, also lives at the facility and thoroughly enjoys having Scout around. He often pretends to be snoozing while the dog nudges him until he finally gives in and provides the precious pup with a much-desired biscuit.
While it’s clear Scout has seen some seriously bad days in his past, the dog is extremely gentle with residents.
Robertson said, “He certainly has a penchant for the elders. He’s very in tune with what they need, especially our very vulnerable population. If they have dementia or if they’re dying, he knows that, and he will go and be with them and comfort them. He must’ve just felt like he needed to be here.”
At a time when most of the news we consume can be so depressing, it’s nice every once in a while to read a story that hits you smack in the heart. Scout’s tale is legitimately like a real-life Hallmark movie. You know, before they went woke.
Dogs are so awesome.
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