why-animals-do-the-thing:

speciesofleastconcern:

eruditionanimaladoration:

buzzfeed:

Kelvin Peña Is Best Friends With A Powdered-Doughnut-Loving Deer Named Money

However, after some backlash, Kelvin decided to start feeding Money and the rest of the deer fam some healthier snacks. “It means a lot that he feels he and his fam can come through, so I respect them and I want them to be healthy, so I’ve been buying fruit for them,” he told BuzzFeed.

@speciesofleastconcern they were doughnuts

that is SO marginally better than marshmallows

EDITED TO ADD: feeding the deer fruit isn’t such a hot idea either. If ruminants get too much sugar it can cause bloat. Which can be fatal.

How about: feeding deer in general is a Horrible, Very Bad Not Good Idea. This is not cute in so many ways.

First off, let’s have our usual refrain: don’t feed the wildlife. It’s not helpful and can lead to all sorts of bad things can like bloat and population imbalances that will cause them to become pests.
Deer habituate to people easily – it sounds like ‘Money’ already was, considering Kevin “walked up to him, and noticed he didn’t run away.” And this isn’t just one deer – it’s multiple deer, repeatedly.

Habituated deer are more likely to hang out around houses and eat gardens, get hit by cars… and hurt people.

Let’s examine those. It’s utterly stupid to approach deer, especially in mating season. They will fuck you up – just google for clips of ‘man attacked by deer’ to watch people literally get kick-boxed by deer standing on their hind legs. Loose dogs are often a huge threat to deer, but a good kick can also easily kill your pet. By the way, hitting a deer with your car can really hurt you and destroy the car – be ready to consider it totaled if it’s anything but a glancing blow.

Hopefully your neighbors like deer more than their gardens. See, according to a Maine government website on deer, “even when provided with optimal supplemental foods, deer will continue to browse on shrubbery, tree buds, garden plantings, and seedlings in the adjacent forest. At many feeding sites, deer may occur at densities that are 3 to 5 times higher than “normal” wintering density. When highly concentrated, deer can literally kill all vegetation within their reach in the vicinity (one to several hundred acres) of deer feeding sites.“ So say goodbye to your mom’s petunias or your neighbor’s heirloom blueberry bushes if you’re feeding deer.

When you feed deer, you screw up literally the entire ecosystem around them. They frequently stop migrating because they don’t need to, which means that certain areas don’t get grazed and have overgrowth problems and your area has too many deer because they don’t die off in the winter (nature’s built-in population control). This leads to a spike in predators in the area – big, toothy predators people don’t like in suburbia – and overgrazing, which in turn effects the survival of lots of other local species. Not to mention you’re screwing with natural selection by removing competition for the best food, so over time the lower quality makes whose genetics actually are detrimental to survival will not be weeded out. But hey, you’re getting warm fuzzy feelings, right?

Except… you can kill deer easily by feeding them. If you start feeding deer at the wrong time in the winter you can actually help them starve faster because you screw up the microorganisms in their stomach that need to be optimized for low quality browse, not human food. If you feed them sugar and they bloat, they die. If you feed them too much at once, they can die. If you feed them spoiled grain or moldy things, they can die. You can cause malnutrition in an entire population by drawing deer to a feeding site but not feeding them enough – they’ll stop grazing normally. High concentrations of deer also makes them a super effective disease vector.

The tl;dr is that feeding deer even healthy food leads to death, injury, probable death, ecosystem imbalances, disease, vegetation destruction, and more death. Not cute. Not good. Ever. Stop fucking with the wildlife because it seems cute, guys. (And massive shame on Buzzfeed for not thinking for a sec about maybe this being dangerous and a bad idea to promote).