Brian, follower of Deornoth linked to this in the comments.
Highly recommended viewing.
If you scroll down a bit there's a great deer-vs-cyclist clip in the comments, although that looks accidental rather than malicious.
We haven't had one of these stories for ages, from thelocal.de:
The elk, which has been spotted several times in the Dresden area during the weekend, had been grazing nearby when he was startled by a group of onlookers and police and fled.
“This is a sign of panic,” said a press spokesman for forest management company Sachsenforst. “He doesn't know where to go any more.”
After five hours in the office block the animal was anesthetized, loaded into a container and taken away on Monday afternoon. He was released in eastern Saxony.
Which reminds of this story, from The Daily Mail:
Almost 25 years since the Iron Curtain came down, deer roaming the Czech-German border still balk at crossing areas where electric fences one lay.
A study of the animals in the Sumava national park, in the Czech Republic, has discovered that red deer are avoiding the once perilous areas where three parallel electrified fences were patrolled by armed guards - despite the creatures having no living memory of it.
Nearly 500 people died trying to cross the barrier, which isolated the communist world from the West. According to a seven-year study, the invisible border has become instilled in the [deer] population, and will be handed down generations.
From The Daily Mail:
A hotel in Colorado welcomed a rather unusual guest this week; a one-week-old moose.
The frightened calf was spotted by staff and residents at the Antlers hotel in luxury ski resort Vail on Monday.
A cell phone video sees the tiny animal stood in the lobby area at one point and later lay down in a corridor. It is also seen batting its hoof against a window in a bid to escape.
On a pedantic note, the English term for such an animal is not "moose", it is "elk", which is what Americans call red deer.
I'm not sure why the BBC thinks this story is newsworthy, but I do, so I shall link to it.
Headline from The Daily Mail: Oh deer! Incredible pictures after animal jumps THROUGH the windshield of a tractor trailer truck and lands in the cab.
"What's a 'windshield'?" thinks the poor ruminant, "Don't they mean 'windscreen'?
"A 'tractor trailer truck'? Is that alliteration or does it just mean 'big lorry'? 'Cab'? Is that like an official taxi, or am I thinking of a 'mini cab'?
"While I'm on the topic, does 'black cab' mean a London Taxi because they are traditionally painted black? Or does that mean a cab driver who doesn't pay tax?
"And is the driver completely drunk or something, he's on the wrong bloody side of the road! Fuck!"
Duly befuddled, at the last second, our English deer abroad decides to jump to safety on the passenger seat. Only problem is, not only do the Yanks drive on the wrong side of the road, they have the steering wheel on the wrong side of the vehicle as well, and he ends up being crushed by death behind the steering column.
Thanks to Graeme who linked to this from The Daily Telegraph:
Cambridge University academic 'fighting for life' after being gored by giant stag
Kate Stone, 44, suffers life-threatening injuries in 'the most unlucky freak accident ever', after the stag appeared to single out the 6ft academic who was the tallest of the group…
The Daily Mail is on top form today, so choose whatever you are most paranoid about and get clicking!
Sand attack
Flying car attack
Pink limousine attack
Deer attack
UFO/meteorite attack
Runaway train attack
No giant sinkholes or cows in today's edition, I'm afraid.
From The Evening Standard:
A woman has been treated in hospital after a deer ran loose in a city centre.
The wild animal was seen running down Chelmsford High Street on Sunday, knocking over pedestrians as it went. A woman in her 20s was taken to the Broomfield Hospital after suffering cuts and bruises when the deer attempted to jump over her.
A spokesman for the East of England Ambulance Service said: "We understand the deer, in its attempt to get away, barged into a number of people, sending some to the pavement. It also dazed itself when it hit a plate-glass window. The young woman was treated for minor facial injuries, then taken by us to Broomfield Hospital."
Essex Police said the deer was later spotted near the A12 dual carriageway. Roadblocks were set up to catch the animal but it was not seen again.
Spotted by JuliaM in The Guardian:
Police are searching for suspected rustlers who stole six fully grown elks from a farm in Somerset.
Officers believe the thieves may have used dogs to round the large beasts up and must have had a sizeable lorry. They are particularly keen to speak to anyone who has been offered cuts of elk meat – or even an actual elk.
Fortunately, farmer Paul Richards managed to stop a herd of bison, which roam in the same fields as the elk, from escaping after a fence was cut.
"If they had got out it could have been a catastrophe," said Paul Richards, who raises elk, bison and wild boar for their meat at Woodentop farm, near West Coker.
It appears that unlike cattle, deer play the ball and not the man:
From the Evening Standard:
A dog owner told today how his beloved pet was trampled and kicked by a deer in Richmond Park...
"The matriarch of the group came charging towards me within seconds so I ran sideways behind a tree and she diverted her attentions to the dog, who fortunately for me was off the lead. Sadly, he didn’t run fast enough so she kicked him and then proceeded to trample him. I could hear him yelping but wasn’t going to go near him because I knew she’d just do the same with me.
"After a 30-second, 45-second onslaught where she used him as a football I was able to call him over to me and we legged it with her in pursuit."
Richmond deer: a much classier animal that yer average cattle, who would have gone after the slower moving human while the canine disappears into the distance.
Says the headline in The Daily Mail. The story does not disappoint!
Remember that the Americans use the terms "elk", "moose" and "deer" differently to us, so apologies for any confusion.
From yesterday's Daily Mail:
The first pictures have emerged of James Argent's wrecked and blood-splattered car after it ploughed into a deer on a Scottish road...
The 23-year-old says he was left badly shaken but uninjured. Arg was traveling in a black Kia with his manager Neil Dobias and their female driver after the star sang at Dundee University on Friday night. They were on their way to the airport to fly back to London when their car collided with the deer on the A90 about 5.30am.
The animal was knocked into the air before being hit by another car travelling in the opposite direction. Arg said he and the others looked for the deer afterwards and could not see it anywhere but he believes it would have died from its injuries.
Pictures show the left side of the vehicle's bumper - close to where Arg was sitting in the passenger seat - smashed, exposing the car's battery. The left headlight is missing and tufts of the deer's fur is stuck to the blood.
Ironically enough, my wife skidded off the road yesterday and demolished somebody's front wall, the front of her car looks a bit like that as well. Even more ironically, when my wife knocked on the door to explain, provide insurance details etc, the lady who lived there said that this was the second time in a week that a car had demolished her front wall and the third time in as many years. Her house is at the bottom of a hill on the wrong side of an adverse camber, you see.
By the same token, my wife interprets a 30 mph speed limit to mean that you should drive at 30 mph if at all possible and regardless of conditions or iciness, and that at this speed, nothing bad will ever happen and if it does. it's not your fault, it's the fault of the council for not imposing a lower limit.
VFTS directs our attention towards an article in today's Sunday Times, which includes the following statements:
1. The Highways Agency estimated that there were at least 42,000 collisions between deer and vehicles each year.
2. The UK deer population has more than doubled in the past decade to two million.
3. The muntjac has earned itself the name 'Asbo bambi' and its numbers are increasing more rapidly than for other types of deer. [This claim appears to be wholly insubstantiated and I shall not dwell on it further].
4. The cost of damage and injury caused by collisions between cars and deer (it's unclear whether they mean 'all deer' or 'muntjac deer') is £10 million a year.
I'm sure Dearieme will have some valuable anecdotal on what the best speed is to hit a deer (depending on its size), i.e. fast enough to ensure a clean kill on the one hand but not so fast as to render it to an inedible pulp on the other, but those statistics don't make sense as they have been culled (pun intended) from at least two quite separate sources (two of which are referred to in the article):
The Highways Agency says
- Estimated total deer population in England is 700,000 deer (I suppose it's possible that there are twice as many in S, W and NI, thus reconciling with the two million figure)
- there are an estimated 34,000 to 60,000 deer-vehicle-collisions ('DVCs') every year.
- the percentage of DVCs by type of deer involved are fallow (40%), roe (32%), and muntjac (25%), with red, sika, and Chinese water deer contributing less than 3%. In Scotland, where fallow are far less widespread, roe (69%) and red (25%) are most commonly recorded in DVCs.
The People's Trust for Endangered Species (2011 report) says:
- Invasive deer species are generally on the increase, as are native deer. Muntjac are expanding their range the most rapidly of all UK deer, and account for 22% of road traffic accidents involving deer in England alone, with an economic impact estimated at more than £10 million per year.
The Telegraph said (two years ago)
The deer population in Britain has risen sharply in recent years and is now between 1.5 and 2 million. The boom in numbers has lead to an increasing number of motorists being injured in collisions with the animals on the road.
Even assuming that they aren't all just quoting each other's figures, the 40,000 DVCs seems rather on the high side, that would mean that about one in five hundred motorists has a DVC every year, i.e. by the end of your motoring life, one in ten motorists will have hit a deer, but just about plausible. I've no idea where the £10 million for cost of accidents is from, that would average out at £250 per accident, which appears to be on the low side. Or maybe the £10 million just relates to the one quarter of DVCs involving muntjac, which works out at £1,000 cost per accident (much more plausible).
But now we know, or at least we know that we don't know.
An article in the Evening Standard illustrates just how low our permissive society has sunk:
The Royal Parks today denied it had a "rogue stag" on the loose after another walker was charged by a rutting deer. A man in his fifties was knocked to the ground by a red deer that ran towards him from 200 yards with its 16-point antlers lowered.
It was the latest scare in Bushy Park after a woman watching three stags rut was attacked and forced to hide behind a tree, a young girl was taken to hospital after being gored and a swan barely escaped after coming between two stags.
The unidentified man was saved by passers-by, who scared away the animal. He had been sitting watching a rutting contest as two stags competed for supremacy. The man was said to be shocked but not seriously injured by the attack on Sunday evening.
A Royal Parks spokeswoman said: "There isn't a rogue stag, they're rutting. They're not intrinsically aggressive towards humans, they're aggressive towards each other."
From The Evening Standard:
This swan had a narrow escape after being attacked by two rutting stags in Bushy Park. It was caught up in the confrontation between competing males during the breeding season, which has seen several attacks on people in the south-west London park.
For once, humans were not on the receiving end.
Continuing my occasional series on horny herbivores molesting humans:
A warning about the dangers of rutting stags was issued by the Royal Parks today after three separate attacks in London.
In one case a young girl was taken to hospital with head, wrist and chest injuries after being gored by a stag in Bushy Park, Richmond. A man in his fifties was also taken to hospital after being attacked in the same park. In a third attack a woman, pictured here, was left "badly shaken" after being knocked to the ground as she walked through the park on Friday morning...
From The Daily Mail:
The Colonial Baptist Church in Cary, North Carolina, may want to look into updating its security system after a deer broke through a glass door and tore through the house of worship. Security cameras caught the deer pushing his way though an unguarded entrance, before taking the grand tour...
The deer proceeded to charge though the halls of the crowded church, leaving children - who were forced to dodge the sprinting animal - terrified and scrambling for the exits. A trio of brave men followed behind the unwanted guest as he nosed through a few rooms in what resembled a classic skit on the Benny Hill show."
Previous episodes here and here.
* OK, glass door, window, what's the big difference?
I love the attention to detail in this write-up:
ANCHORAGE, Alaska — A woman was severely injured when she was attacked by a mother moose near Palmer mid-day Monday.
A cow moose with two newborn calves attacked the woman in a neighborhood off Clark-Wolverine Road, near the Knik River. The woman was able to call for help on her cell phone. Officials said the woman's injuries to her chest could have been life-threatening, but that she is in stable condition and was transported to Mat-Su Regional Hospital. Troopers shot and killed the cow moose when it again charged the victim and troopers as they arrived.
Fish and Game has the two calves, which will be taken to a wildlife center where they will hopefully be rehabilitated, raised and released into the wild next fall. A charity salvaged the meat.
This is the second cow moose with calves shot and killed for aggressive behavior in the last week. Wednesday in East Anchorage, a cow moose with newborn calves was put down after exhibiting aggressive behavior by attacking a girl on her bike and chasing a jogger.
