Roe Deer RTA

I am on a set of nights. Actually so far it has been pleasantly easy, unlike my last several sets of nights. However that can change with the weather.

Friday morning brought a new police call out a deer (size unknown) had been hit by a car, could we attend. I rang the driver. He arrived back about 6:30 with a roe deer in the travel cage in his estate car and parked inside the building. This was lucky as normally the van would park outside.

I helped him start to lift it out when it woke up fully. Although roe deer are not large when you factor in the fact it was scared silly and fight or flight was in full flow and it had a double branched antler so was fully adult and not a baby it was a handful.
While the driver was trying to stop it hurtling off and hitting a wall or us l tried to wrap the towel tight around it’s eyes while holding hard down on the antlers which were long and had a double spike, to try and stop them slashing upwards into the driver who was bent over, trying to control it and myself trying to keep a hold of the towel so l could wrap it. After a short hard struggle it gave up and stood still the towel nicely blocking sight.

“Iso” l said and he agreed. Isolation was in the same area as the car so easier than anywhere else. We dragged and pushed it to iso and had just got in when it went off again.
I had the horns but we also had a slippery floor that was wet to contend with. We all started to slide downwards. I jammed my foot into the drain hole as l did not want the deer to stick a leg into it. And that seemed to slow us down. I saw the drivers head snap back and thought l heard a hollow “pock” noise so l pushed harder down on the antlers. Again after a few minutes we got control shoved the deer into the walk in and l looked at the driver.

He was holding his nose and wiping blood off it. An antler had slammed into the bridge of his nose, another mm and it would have been in his eye. Thankfully he just had a nasty bruise on the way. It was also lucky the car was parked inside Had we been outside and the deer got away from us it would have been a danger to traffic as well as being confused and lost. Having said that trying to catch it in the building would not have been fun, assuming it had not slammed into a wall and killed itself.

The deer had a sore head from meeting the car but there was no obvious damage. Well apart from the cut on the drivers face and scrapes on the deer’s head and it was released later in the day where he was found.

A relaxed Roe Deer, defiantly not our one.