We get this in my hometown - people see the place, decide they want to live in the forest. They clearcut a chunk of it and build their house. Then when a bear wanders into their new yard (following the same territory it always has) they call the cops.
To… jail the deer?
I don't even know. I guess folks from the suburbs would call the cops and get an animal control officer to come out if they saw a bear in their yard? But my town was way too small to have animal control - theres like 2 cops and the emergency system switches over to the state troopers at night.
And again, bears live in the woods, of you build your house in their woods they're gonna walk on your deck occasionally.
No, to jail the bear!
Overread the bear, thought it was deer.
Edit: not beer.
Too late, both the deer and the bear are now in jail while the cops drink the beer.
Let's settle on a dear.
This has similar energy to "you're not in traffic, you are traffic".
I really pissed off a coworker with this line. Complains about 1.5 hour commute because of "all the assholes in rush hour".
Technically they are jaywalking so this would be a fawnlonie
Why did I laugh at this?? I THOUGHT I HAD STANDARDS!
Don't stop yourself from experiencing joy, it's rare enough.
The best experiences i had with deer was when i was fishing. they just chilled around me and wondered what the fuck is this human doing in our home. It was nice to share the time with them as no one else was there and it was quiet
Now that's an answer to why did the chicken cross the road that I never considered
I wanna know how deer are taught to read the deer crossing signs so they know that's where they are supposed to cross.
Deers are the ones who put those signs down.
And they are shocked when you drive too fast, so they wait until you drive by and then they jump in front of your car in order to tell you to drive slower.
Depending on your frame of reference, the road is crossing the deer.
Same thing happened with the Mexicans. They didn't cross the border, the border crossed them.
I mean, kinda yeah, but also deer are royally fucking retarded and would totally stand in the middle of the ocean if it meant getting in the way
I think the reason that deer seem "retarded" in their response to cars is that for their entire evolutionary history there has never been an animal that would hurtle through both the day and night at improbable speeds almost completely silently. No land predator has previously evolved to blind its prey with large powerful sets of lights at night.
Counterintuitively, in my opinion deer seem to so often chaotically run out in front of cars (and growing up somewhere with lots of deer I know how incredibly infuriating and scary this can be) because it is actually the most sensible survival strategy for being ambushed by a fast moving predator with a lot of inertia that may or may not realize they have stumbled upon a meal.
Imagine you weren't a pathetic, slow human being and could outrun most predators, now imagine chilling inside a bush when you see a a grizzly bear sprinting at 40mph almmmossst but not quite straight at you.
Your impulse is to freeze and then wait for the right moment to bolt, especially because the predator hasn't seen you yet and likely just caught your scent or is running at something else. However, this predator is scentless, nearly silent and at night blinds you so that the distance they are away from you is very difficult to determine (the opposite of a grizzly bear really), so the right moment to bolt is hard to judge.
At the last second you realize the "grizzly bear" is almost upon you and you panic because it is happening so fast and fall back on your instincts. Your instincts, as a prey animal that can run faster and for longer than predators, are the same as any human who has ever played a sport where they need to rush past a defender.... and you erratically cut across the bear's path of motion after you think it has committed to rushing directly at you. The idea is to hopefully catch the bear with its weight shift committed in the wrong direction so you get just a tinnyyyy bit more of a head start in the chase. In otherwords the deer's instinct is to try to "juke" the fast moving predator with fancy footwork.
Please see the scientific illustration I have provided, notice that the bear's path (red) has to switch directions whereas if the deer had decided to just directly run away from their bear the bear wouldn't have needed to switch directions/accelerate twice, just make a slight turn to reorient itself into an opportunistic chase with the deer.
This doesn't work on cars, especially because if at first a deer doesn't succeed at getting the timing right they are dead.
I think your probably right on all counts (supported by the highly scientific diagram, 10/10), but also deer are just really stupid, which I can say from having lived in their habitat half my life lol. I think it's mostly likely that intelligence was just never evolutionarily very useful to deer, it almost never is as it takes a lot of energy and doesn't generally support reproduction. The strategy deer have adopted seems to involve shitting out a bunch of babies each year and hope for the best. Which works great when the best isn't 2-5 tons of metal with a bunch of kinetic energy.
You are making a basic framing error here which has been deeply ingrained into us as a narrative justification for hyper individualism and late stage capitalism, prey aren't at war with predators.
Ever watch a whitetail deer spook and dash away into the underbrush? They flip their tail up to expose a bright white target on their rump.
Why?
Because predators overwhelming target sick and vulnerable prey, predators stabilize prey population swings and keep them from catastrophically exploding. Prey in turn sustain predators.
Whitetail deer display the signal to demonstrate they are healthy. I wouldn't call it symbiosis, but I also think it is a serious categorical error to conceptualize it as an existential war or arms race. If whitetail deer suddenly evolved to become so fast predators could never catch them even if they counter-evolved to be a bit faster it would either lead to extinction of deer or the extinction of deer and the ecosystems around them, those are the only to possible end states neither of which is good for deer.
The reason I am saying this is that unlike predators, cars have no consistent genetic forcing on deer, car deerkills are essentially random and thus only function to lower the signal-to-noise ratio on other genetic forcings that continously shape deer into well adapted positive contributors to the ecosystems around them. How can you expect a species to adapt to a process of violence that is so chaotic and disconnected from the surrounding ecosystem that it is evolutionarily invisible except as a force of degradation?
What a double crossed world :)
I really like this one
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