Rehabilitation not possible, officials say, because of a condition caused by high stress in the deer.
By Lindsay Kuhn/Special to The Malibu Times
The euthanasia of a deer that ran into a local clothing store last week raised questions about why it couldn’t have been released back into the wild.
The morning of Nov. 8, a three-point buck (a male with three points on each antler) somehow made it through traffic and the parking lot at the Malibu Country Mart, and through the front door of the Malibu Beach Club, a women’s clothing store. The frightened deer, trapped in a dressing room for hours, rammed a mirror.
Natasha Pedersen, owner and manager of the Malibu Beach Club, was in the store at the time. When the deer ran into the store, Pedersen ran out. She called the local sheriff’s station and sought help from people in Marmalade’s Café.
“I screamed the top of my lungs,” Pedersen said. “We were only five feet apart.”
Pedersen said the deer made a lot of noise as he trampled around the store, but didn’t knock anything over.
“He was snorting and mad,” she added.
With their strong back legs and antlers, deer can pose a danger to humans if confined to a small space.
“There is a risk of being impaled with the antlers,” Dr. Lynn Whited, a veterinarian at the California Wildlife Center, said.
But the deer was at risk, too, and ended up injuring his leg.
“There are a lot of things in a store that could hurt an animal,” said Cindy Wood, a game warden for the California Dept. of Fish & Game, who responded to the call.
The deer was trapped in the dressing room for four hours, until the Department of Animal Care and Control, and the Department of Fish and Game arrived.
Both agencies tranquilized the buck and brought him to the animal shelter in Agoura, where he was eventually euthanized.
“When evaluated, rehab was not an option,” Wood said.
Wood cited capture myopathy as the reason for this.
Deer suffer from capture myopathy, a condition that leads to kidney failure, when they are frightened because they exert excess pressure on their back legs, which in turn, releases harmful chemicals. And according to Whited, deer scare easily.
“What most people don’t understand is that, yes, they’re beautiful to look at but they are a high flight species. They are very, very nervous,” Whited said.
Because deer stress easily, they’re difficult to rehabilitate.
“As a rule of thumb, broken-limb deer cannot be rehabilitated,” Whited said.
Bev Caskie, the executive director of the California Wildlife Center in Agoura, attributed the problem of rehabilitating deer to both the high stress level of deer, and a lack of resources.
“The difficulty with adult deer is that the stress is so intense for them that they die of stress,” said Caskie. “And we don’t have funds to build [a] facility [for rehabilitation].”
Whited mentioned that the California Wildlife Center in Agoura, the sole facility in the area with a license to rehabilitate deer, only rehabilitates fawns.