Dennis Miller, director of Gila Wildlife Rescue, talks to KRWG's Susan Morée about why it's important to leave a fawn found alone in the wild alone. While the instinct to pick it up to help it might feel right, doing so can bring more harm than good.
Susan Morée:
A person is walking along in the forest and they see this beautiful baby fawn. I feel like it's a human instinct at some level to see some fawn who looks all alone in the woods to think, 'oh my goodness, this little thing has been abandoned. I must scoop it up and help it'. Yes? But you say that this is actually bad for the fawn. Can you talk about that?
Dennis Miller:
Yes, I think it is that human instinct to try to save animals, but they probably are anthropomorphizing quite a bit, giving them human characteristics and thinking that if it's sitting there alone, that it's a bad thing. And in reality, it's a very good thing. When deer give birth, the baby is born with a neutral smell, so predators can't find them. But the mother has a fairly strong smell. And when she just gave birth, she has a very strong smell of afterbirth and things like that. If she stays with the baby, predators will find that fawn very easily. So she purposely stays away. She may be somewhere nearby. She may go off where you can't see her at all, but she always returns and comes back and either feeds the baby or moves the baby. Many times it may be at least two or three days in one place, and then two or three days in another place, and it may be really a week or two before the deer, the fawn, is able to walk on its own and maybe run from predators a little bit better. The instinct of the baby is to stay curled up, still, don't move. If it does try to run, any predator that's going to try to get it could catch it very easily because it's not able to run that fast. So the instinct is to stay down on the ground and not move.
Susan Morée:
And then if someone does pick up a fawn, what happens? Does the human scent get on the fawn itself? Does the mother then reject the fawn?
Dennis Miller:
Not at all. The smelling of a human, just because a human has handled the fawn or touched it or picked it up or whatever, is not an issue at all. The mother could care less that it smells like a human. She might be concerned some, but that's not the issue. The problem is that that baby is going to be picked up by its enemy. Like it or not, humans are deer's enemy. And any animal, whether it would be a human or a coyote or somebody's pet dog or whatever, is going to be an enemy to them. So, when the human even touches it or pets it or something like that, they get very, very tense. They tighten up all their muscles. When they pick them up and carry them off, it's even worse. And what it causes is a process called capture myopathy. And it's where their muscles get so tense and they get so scared that they build up lactic acid in those muscles that eventually can kill them. And so the death is kind of a slow two or three days and you might think they're okay type of thing and then they die kind of a death with lots of spasms and it's not a pretty sight to see. Capture myopathy is almost a 100% death rate once it gets going pretty strong. So if the human picked it up, no matter what they do, no matter what they think they might be doing to help it, they are causing this problem with this animal.
Susan Morée:
And is that a certain death? I mean, if a person does pick up a fawn, is the fawn just going to die a few days later? Or is this something that might happen but might not?
Dennis Miller:
If the human picked it up quickly and, you know, got it back to, you realize it was doing something wrong and put it right back where they got it, it has a chance. We've had some people that have actually picked up deer fawn. They've told us where they picked it up. We have picked it up from them and, you know, taken it back to where they found it. And we have observed mother coming back and caring for it and walking off with it. Does the fawn survive? We don't know. It has a much better chance now that it's with the mother rather than still being with a human. Eventually, baby deer people can describe where they've raised them and they calm down and things like that. And it does happen, but it's, I would guess, 1% of the time.
Susan Morée:
And is it important to take the fawn back to where the mother can find it?
Dennis Miller:
Definitely, because if you picked up that deer, thinking that it's abandoned and thinking we need help, you basically stole it from the mother. That's a natural process. She left it there and was going to come back and get it later and feed it. And if you picked it up, then you stole it from the mother. So it needs to be returned exactly where you found it in the exact same spot if possible. Now, if it's in the middle of a road, then taking it off to the side of the road or something like that is necessary. And that moving of a baby like that is not going to be enough to cause capture myopathy, and it's not going to be enough to be a problem for the mother finding it again.
Susan Morée:
And what about things like deer ticks? Is that something to worry about if you do touch a fawn?
Dennis Miller:
Not really. They're fairly large ticks that normally don't transfer to humans unless you're going to hold it in your lap for a while. Then you might, but again, that's not anything you should ever do. The other problem we have is people trying to feed them. And when we raised deer from in the past, we would start them off with electrolytes. Because of this capture myopathy, they're so scared that it causes a diarrhea called scours, and that is a very difficult infection to try to deal with. I would guess they have less than a 50/50 chance, no matter what care we give them, in keeping the scours from killing them. They almost always develop at some, and we have medications that can help, the local veterinarians help us out, but we are at a loss of a way to make it more successful. I would like to mention that the New Mexico Game and Fish Department does have a ban on caring for any hoofed mammals. That would be deer and elk and pronghorn and things like that. The main reason, especially for deer, is that there are some diseases that could be spread. We have a number of them, the game department can give us more details, but whirling disease, wasting disease and things like that, that could be spread. And so if we rehabilitated a deer and then released it somewhere, we could be spreading some not only diseases but some genetics that may be kind of mixing up the gene pool. We at Gila Wildlife Rescue totally agree with and approves of this ban at this time. We have an overpopulation of deer in our area and if we do rehabilitate lots of them, it just contributes to that overpopulation.
Susan Morée:
Would it spread to humans?
Dennis Miller:
No, but it would spread to other deer. So when you release the deer, then you could be spreading that disease. If you release the deer in a different place, which if it was a deer that came from downtown Silver City, which has happened, then we would not release it right there. We would try to release it in a wilder area somewhere away from there. But some genetics, some of these deer may have a genetic propensity that they are resisting this disease. And by putting a deer with a different genetics into a different area, that mixing up of that gene pool could cause offspring of this deer to not be protected from this disease. So there's a lot of complicated reasons why, but a lot of it has to do with just not spreading disease.
Susan Morée:
And are we in fawn season right now?
Dennis Miller:
Yes, we are. Fawns drop almost all the time between the 1st of July to the end of August. You know, there's some before and after that, but 99% of them drop their fawns right then. And this year, I started getting calls about this a little later than normal, towards the end of July is when I started getting fawn calls. And now I'm getting two or three a day. And we explain the situation exactly what I was describing about the mother with a strong smell, baby with a neutral smell and it needs to stay there. And then they understand and either leave it alone or even take it right back to where they found it. Most of the time, lately, we've done a lot of public relations work to get the message out, kind of a PR story explaining exactly what we've just discussed in our local papers and on Facebook and other kinds of posts. So many people in our area are well educated about not picking them up. The numbers of calls we get now compared to 10 years ago is like a tenth of what we used to get.
Susan Morée:
Okay, is there anything I haven't asked you that you think I should have, Dennis?
Dennis Miller:
Oh gosh, you know, I'm not sure you may or may want to use this. I think we have a problem with people not only wanting to save a deer when they see a baby deer like this, but they also want to be the person to be the savior. And we see this a lot with animals. A good example is that people will pick up a baby deer, they'll call us and we'll tell them, you know, please don't feed it, we're going to come get it and take right back to where it was found. And we explained to them the reason why you wouldn't want to feed it anything. And in the 15 minutes between the call and when we get there, they've tried to force human milk down. And that automatically causes some diarrhea, some problems. And so people have this almost uncontrollable desire to be the savior. And I wish they'd realize and stop and think, wait a second, this is not a human baby. This is a wild animal. There may be a reason why we need to leave it alone and let nature take its course.
Susan Morée:
All right. Well, thank you so much, Dennis. I really appreciate your taking the time to talk to me.
Dennis Miller:
No problem. It helps to get some information out and get more of the public aware of why they shouldn't be doing this.
Susan Morée:
All right, thank you.
Dennis Miller:
Thank you.
