Fuzzy Top – The Joe Btfsplk* of Deer

Fuzzy Top has to be the unluckiest deer on the mountain. Or at least he was. Maybe his luck has changed now.

We named him Fuzzy Top because the ‘velvet’ covering that is on deer antlers in the spring and summer never fell off. Although I have no real understanding about it, I speculate that it’s a dietary deficiency common to a lot of the deer around here. We’ve named a couple of the other bucks “Thick Horn” and “Snaggle Horn” due to the problem.

Since we’ve been giving them specifically formulated deer food (the ingredient list on the bag includes a long list of vitamins and minerals), all of the deer that come to our house look better and their antlers do too. In his case, one side looks pretty good but the other is a malformed spike. He’s been around for several years now so we know the bad antler is permanent. Last fall, the velvet on his spike antler didn’t shed off like the other one and he ran around with the tattered shred hanging down and a bleeding wound at the base. But he did eventually shed it and the wound around the base healed. The year before that, he went through the entire winter with the velvet still on his antlers.

As Fuzzy Top got used to us and stopped running away, he would be close enough to see that one front leg was actually crooked in the middle. I noticed a slight limp. After looking him over carefully, I decided that his front leg had been broken and had healed that way. It’s hard for me to imagine how painful that must have been. Deer don’t show emotion unless you count beautiful, graceful bounding over the black brush as emotion. But they experience pain just like you and me.

As the months passed and we watched him, the limp completely disappeared. Fuzzy Top, malformed spike antler, broken leg, and all, appeared to be the top deer in the herd. The other bucks would move aside and let him be first in line at the deer food pan. He became one of our favorite visitors.

Then, about four months ago, Fuzzy Top showed up after a fairly long absence. But he was moving slow. It was easy to see that something was wrong. As he moved carefully down the mountain, we could see that now, one of his back legs was broken. Every step included a painful hop with the other back leg. He was holding the broken leg well off the ground.

How could one deer be so unlucky?

Since then, Fuzzy Top has been back at our house maybe four or five times, which means that he would be gone for as long as a month. Every time, we worried that we would never see him again. This morning, he showed up for a handout (along with Snaggle Horn and Anxious) after a long absence. He’s looking a little gaunt and tired, but he’s putting just a little weight on the broken leg when he walks. I gave him his own deer food pan and kept Snaggle Horn and Anxious away so he could eat in peace. At one point, Anxious got a little too close and Fuzzy Top tapped antlers with him. Anxious moved away again. Even with a broken leg, Fuzzy Top retains some status! Fuzzy Top might be a lesson to us all.

I can almost hear some of you saying (if you read this far), “Another bleeding heart with screwed up priorities!”

I’ve thought about why I feel this way and I might have some reasons that you don’t expect.

One of them is my wife, Roxy. I can’t speak for her, but I can speak about her. She grew up on a farm where her father kept pigs and her mother made authentic old world blood sausage. Roxy’s job was to hold the pan to catch the blood while her father cut the pig’s throat. When we were both in college together, I used to really look forward to trips home where Roxy could stock up on more sausage. Skipping a lot of time in the middle, Roxy has become a different person now. I have been a vegetarian for over thirty years.

We’ve been married for well over fifty years and we’re going for the finish line. You don’t stay married … and in love … for that long without learning that some values must be shared, or you end up not sharing any values. I believe I know where that road ends. So, I have adopted much of Roxy’s values about animals – with a twist.

Contradictory though it might seem, I’m not an animal lover because I love animals. I’m an animal lover because I want to love myself better.

I’m an analyst. I spend a lot of my time just thinking about thinking. Where do values come from and why do we have them? If you really work at it, you can stand apart from yourself and ask that question with some honesty. It ain’t easy, but it can be done.

When I was a salary slave, I spent five years managing a software development project to a conclusion and it damaged my mental health. (See my essay, “RIP Fred Brooks” at this site.) I spent the next five years boiling in anger. I became an obsessive stock market ‘day trader’ because winning or losing more money than I could afford every day could actually occupy my mind instead of the anger. And between stock trades, I could think about thinking.

Any social scientist will confirm that one of the most reliable predictors of violent criminal behavior is the way you treat animals. Being cruel to them is a short step away from being cruel to everybody. Even yourself. A simple fact is that cruelty breeds more cruelty. And love breeds more love. I care about animals because I care about Roxy, other people, and myself. This formula may not work for everybody, but it works for me.

So, Roxy and I care about the deer and about Fuzzy Top. Want more? I’ll tell you about Lop Ear the rabbit.

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* From Al Capp’s “Lil Abner” comic strip

Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20596776