The poor deer

Sometimes you can be sitting around after a meal and not be thinking about things that bring you down, which in my case include an amputated leg, a shattered shoulder and a likely terminal form of cancer, and then something intrudes on you that depresses you. 

A sadly too thin deer eats Pennsylvania foliage.

That happened to me this morning when this emaciated young buck walked in front of a window in my kitchen after I'd eaten breakfast. He was eating foliage, as you can see in this photo and this video. 
The comedian Louis C.K. has a routine in which he talks at some length about his hatred of deer. It's funny, but to me only funny because of the intensity of his feelings. I have nothing against deer. They were in this region long before any of my ancestors were, and this is true even if I'm found to have any American Indian blood, which I'm pretty sure I don't. Yes, they cause many car accidents and more than a few fatalities annually, but that's hardly their fault. You can't expect an animal to evolve an awareness of a machine that's only existed for a little over a century. Also, it is mice that are the primary vector for deer ticks and the Lyme disease they often carry, not deer. 
I'm guilty of anthropomorphizing animals. Many are. They don't know evil or good. They act to survive and to procreate. If they eat your prize foliage, that's your fault for leaving it accessible to them. 

Too close

Two deer in the Loser's back yard.

Last night, during a short highway drive, the Complete and Total Loser came just feet from hitting a deer as it ran across the road from the Loser's left to right. The Loser had a hard time believing he didn't hit it, it was so close, and drove for several minutes afterward with a stupid, slack-jawed look on his unattractive face. 
Today, the Loser saw a dead cat on another road, the victim of a car. It made him think about how and why it tugged at his heartstrings—it was probably someone's pet—yet it had no more or less personality than a deer. The Loser can see personality differences in the deer that enter his back yard. Some are bolder than others, some of the young ones are more playful than their peers.

The old friend

The majority of conversations the Complete and Total Loser has these days are with animals in his back yard.

The Complete and Total Loser got an email today from a friend he's fallen a little out of touch with. She suggested that the Loser go into the city and have dinner with her husband and her, or that they travel to the suburbs to visit the Loser. At this time, however, the Loser can't imagine why anyone would want to see him, or why he'd want to see anyone else.
 

An animal answer

The Complete and Total Loser's neighborhood has changed since he grew up in it in the sixties. 
It's still made up of mostly well-to-do whites, though now they're whites who grew up in the suburbs, not ones who emigrated from the city, like the Loser's parents and neighbors. The population has burgeoned, but the proportion of whites to other races is probably about the same as it was.
The change the Loser's talking about is in animals.
When growing up, you'd hear about people seeing an opossum, raccoon, or skunk, but about the only time you'd see one yourself was when it was dead on the road, killed by a night time driver, a college kid, probably. When the Loser was sixteen, a deer vaulted across the road he and a friend were driving on. They were so excited by the rare vision they went to the area the next day to look for its tracks, as if to prove to themselves it had been real. 
It's different now. 
Since summer, the Loser has caught four raccoons (the most recent just yesterday), two skunks, an opossum and the same feral cat twice. Deer often hang out in his back yard for hours at a time. Last night, the Loser shone a flashlight out back and two pairs of deer eyes glowed back. Both had laid down, ready for a cold November night.
One word explains the change. Dogs.
When the Loser was a kid, dogs were never leashed in the suburbs. They ran free, got in fights, killed animals or, if they found an already dead animal, rolled around on its corpse. Seldom neutered, the males would disappear for days at a time, traveling for miles to mate with a bitch in heat. The Loser's dog did this into his sixteenth year, returning hungry and grinning. His DNA is in a lot of dogs by now. 
Now, of course, everyone's so timid and litigious that the idea of a child being nipped by a dog and the packs of personal injury lawyers has made that impossible. Any dog just roaming a neighborhood is assumed to be feral, maybe even rabid. 
So the animals run free, with no natural predators except maybe a fox or two and, of course, cars, their primary foe.

If the Loser knew how to hunt and butcher deer, he'd have to buy a meat locker.

Vigilance

#1: What happened?
#2: The human came out in the yard.
#1: Oh. Is he carrying anything?
#2: Yes. The black thing that clicks when he puts it on his face.
#3: Is that dangerous to us?
#2: I'm not sure. Nothing's happened yet, but I've heard about what happens when other humans put things on their face. Especially the long sticks.
#1: We'd better stand up and look in all directions anyway.
#2: Just in case.
#4: Well, I'm not going to worry about it.
#3: You! You don't worry about anything! 
#1: You seem kind of tired today. Are you all right?
#4: Actually, I'm kind of achy and tired. I feel like I have Lyme disease!
#2: Funny.
#1: Good one.
#3: Yeah. Almost as funny as it was yesterday.

Wild Animals

The Complete and Total Loser has thrown up his limp-handshake hands and called professionals to deal with the raccoons in his attic crawlspace. He's trapped and released three but is sure of a fourth. He imagines that as small as the area is it's like a rabbit warren and that dozens of them live there, defecating, clawing, chewing through cables. 
Yesterday six deer hung out in the Loser's back yard for much of the day. They lay, resting, occasionally getting up to munch on vegetation they found in the weedy yard. The Lose went out. They looked at him. He realized that he was outnumbered and that if they wanted to, they could have killed him with their sharp, quick hooves.
This morning he saw this fox in the backyard. If only it ate raccoons.

The Country Squire

A deer, seen through a window.

The Complete and Total Loser works on Sundays, doing the bidding of those who he feels are dumber than he but somehow have skills that produce enough money for them to frequent the retail establishment he works in.
With his parents gone for the month as of yesterday, he heads after work for the train station, where a train will bear him to a suburban town fifteen miles from the city.
The train, packed, arrives to its destination on time. The Loser disembarks. The first thing he notices while walking the half mile to the house is the drop in temperature. It's at least five degrees colder, and he considers putting on his gloves. Second, he looks at the sky and sees a field of stars. Light pollution has made American cities frosted-glass terrariums, where inhabitants are unaware of any space beyond that defined by its tallest buildings with occasional interruptions from helicopters and jets.
He enters the house, silencing the burglar alarm's warning beep. There are notes from his parents; nothing he doesn't know. He downs a beer quickly, makes a sandwich, and drinks another while eating it. Tipsy, sated, he turns to something he doesn't have in the city, the great teat of the American public: Cable TV.

Pets

A dog.

Why would anyone get a dog? When the Complete and Total Loser was a kid everyone had dogs. He lived in the suburbs. You'd let your dog out in the morning, if the weather were nice enough, and he'd roam all day and return when you got back from school. Sometimes they got in fights with other dogs, which would add drama to a young life. Sometimes the Loser's dog, an un-neutered male, would smell a bitch in head from miles away and be off for two or three days. He'd return famished but smiling. This now would rightly be considered irresponsible pet ownership. The Loser sees dogs in the city and they're miserable. Sure, they jump up and down when their masters come home, but they're filled with nervous energy, unable to run free, penned or leashed for all but as little as half an hour a day in most cases. Bad pet owners let them bark, disturbing their neighbors by shattering the peace.
Even though he lives in a big city the Loser can see enough animals living free to satisfy his link to nature. He sees squirrels, Canada geese and any number of other birds. When he goes to the suburbs just 15 miles away he sees deer, groundhogs, rabbits and foxes.