No good deed goes unpunished—particularly when baby animals
and bureaucracy are involved. A 67-year-old Canadian man is under investigation
for saving a baby deer’s life, something that conservation officers believe
should have been left to them.
Hank Van-Til was driving home one day when he saw a truck
hit a deer, sending it into a ditch. Van-Til pulled over and discovered that
the doe was pregnant. An animal lover who has worked with cows all his life,
Van-Til used a knife to perform a Caesarean section on the dying deer. Once the
baby had been safely delivered, Van-Til milked the mother and fed the baby deer
with his hands. Then he brought the deer home, named him Dickie, and nursed him
out of a bottle filled with maple syrup, Carnation milk, and hot water.
A few days later, Department of Natural Resources officers
seized the deer and told Van-Til that he could face criminal charges for
bringing home an orphaned animal without a permit. While this is a sensible
law, designed to prevent harmful human meddling in the animal world, it seems
wrong to apply it to Van-Til, whose particular meddling resulted in nothing but
good. Perhaps the best solution would have been to grant Van-Til a permit to care for the four-day-old deer, who can not be safely returned to the wild.
Van-Til has taken the loss of Dickie hard. “I don’t know
what happened to that deer, or what’s going to happen to it and I don’t trust
the [conservation] rangers,” he said, adding, “I did my part and I’m really sad
about it. It hurts.”
Photo: naturalhorsetrim.com
