We have a bumper crop of fawns this year. There are about six running wild around our house and through our flower beds. The mother dropped one of them right in our front yard and within minutes it was up and on its own. They are cute but a total nuisance and this only promises to get much worse.

I have never cared about deer hunting. I was greatly influence by the movie Bambi. It really bothered me for the hunter to kill Bambi’s mother. It didn’t occur to me at the time what a jerk Bambi’s father was. He really didn’t do anything to help Bambi and the poor fawn was left to fend for himself. That’s the way it is in the real deer world. The bucks don’t do anything but strut around and impregnate the doe. The doe really don’t do much either to help the fawns. I have observed these creatures pretty closely from the porch and the fawns are own their own very early and helping themselves to my plants while the mother is off wandering around doing her own thing, which is also eating my plants or the feed distributed by our thoughtless neighbor.

The greatest fawn story of all time is “The Yearling” by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1939 and was made into a movie starring Gregory Peck. In this story the father is bitten by a snake and kills a deer to use its liver to suck out the poison. It turns out that the deer is a mother and who has left a newborn fawn. The man’s son, Jody, persuades his father to let him take the fawn home since the mother has saved the dad’s life with her liver. Jody raises the fawn and names him Flag. They become inseparable. Flag grows up to be like the deer in my back yard. He eats everything in site including the crops of Jody’s parents. These folks are poor farmers in the backwoods of Florida and are facing starvation unless they do something about the deer. Flag eats a big portion of the new corn crop and most everything in the garden. The father wants the deer killed but is confined to bed and can’t so anything about the situation. Jody refuses to shoot his deer so the mother blast away with the shotgun. She seriously wounds Flag and Jody has to put him out of his misery with a final shot. Jody then runs away from home after he tells his folks he hates them and wishes them dead. Jody isn’t gone long before he is starving and finally comes dragging back home realizing he was wrong. He has become a man and the childhood of Jody ends with the death of the Yearling.

These two great stories tell us that the deer are irresponsible creatures and a nuisance. Yes, they are cute for about 10 minutes then become pest. The meat really doesn’t taste all that good compared to a nice beef steak. Some of my best friends are hunters. They spend thousands of dollars in pursuit of these pest who overrun my neighborhood. I have to drive down the street slowly to avoid hitting them. The hunters have expensive leases and have elaborate feeders to attract the stupid creatures for the slaughter. It’s all beyond my understanding.

With the hard economic times I have decided another way to supplement my income. I’m going to lease out my back yard to the hunters. I’m already feeding the deer with my plants so I am confident the hunters can get their limit each year. The only problem is that my deer are fairly scrawny, probably because of the inbreeding. I think some of them may also be homosexuals but as far as I know they don’t have AIDS, so should be pretty safe eating.

The main thing for me is that I get to watch all this activity from the porch and my garden will be safe from the Bambis and Flags of the world.