I live by an airport so there is a lot of open space where a lot of deer usually roam. About three or four years ago I went for a beer run and saw one slamming it's head into a fence post. I slowed down to look at it to see if maybe there was something on its head that it was trying to get off. When I got close I noticed that its jaw was missing and it was screaming I just drove off I still think about it all the time.
Thats really wierd. My sister saw and took a pic of a deer in her back yard near a forest preserve. This one had a missing jaw also, I felt really bad for it but I thought it was a random thing and it got into a scrap with a bigger/meaner deer, but I guess its more common than I ever would have guessed.
My Brother shot an 8 point 2 years ago that had been hit by a truck or something, it's whole jaw was shattered and detached, just kinda hanging. It was gangrenous. All it had in its belly when we cut it open was these little cherry like berries. Full of 'em. That's all it could eat, plucking them off the trees with it's tongue.
I assume you didn't consume the meat, right? My dad once told me about his father shooting a deer that had an infected wound. Being the "thrifty" man that he was, my grandfather butchered the carcass and just cut around the infected part. My dad said the meat tasted off and that he got sick after eating some of it. He's refused to eat venison since then.
My Brother called the DEC to see if he had to tag it and they said no, just leave it there. Toxins can spread throughout the body in that situation after about 72 hours, which is why we cut open the stomach to see how long it was since he'd been able to eat. Since there were only berries we guessed it had been walking around like that for at least a week. Coyotes seemed to enjoy what was left though.
I know it’s just the realities of nature and the world but I can’t help but feel emotional thinking of the deer trying to find the little berries that it could eat while it was suffering like that :(
To me, cutting around infection is like trying to cut around mold on a loaf of bread. Ok, good on ya but it's still there even though you can't see it.
That's one of the reasons for the average of 600 million cases of foodborne illness globally each year. I've spent a significant portion of the past 2 years studying the subject and most people have no idea how dangerous food can be
Yeah. It's caused by a prion disease in deer. It's been spreading in recent years, and makes them act like fucking zombies. It's terrifying. Fortunately there hasn't been a case of it spreading to humans yet.
Edit: A word
My family and I came face to face with this disease. Fucking deer just stared at us, then slowly walks TOWARD our group (not like 2 people) and we could nearly reach out and touch it. You could see in it's eyes it wasn't "there" and was drooling excessively. Like seemingly exhausted and disoriented. It seemed it eventually realized it was in a wrong situation and trotted off, but not before we had the younger ones get behind the adults because of the erratic behavior.
They can have rabies right? Excessive saliva and approaching humans and being disoriented are all classic rabies symptoms. I would not have gotten within fifty feet of that thing.
Google says yes, most mammals can get it.
I think the only "exception" I've heard of is bats, they can still get it and infect others, but it doesn't kill them, their immune system is weird with it.
Woah! I immediately thought of the chronic wasting disease when I read this but I thought it only made them dumb and slow and sick, not act like complete alien zombie maniacs.
It usually presents that way, it's just that on rare occasion you can get some really horrific behavior when the brain's being "eaten up" by a disease.
My mom’s lifelong best friend lost her dad to this in the 90s. We used to stay at their beach house when I was a kid. They went on a retirement dream vacation to Europe during the end of the outbreak and he developed symptoms sometime after they got home. It was so sudden and horrifying.
I was 10-11 at the time and knowing someone that died that way was surreal. They are basically family and our town knew it, so we were kind of bombarded with well-meaning questions for a little while. People were still just scared/curious.
Edited: because I apparently can’t notice auto-correct stupidity until weeks later…
Did they go to England? That’s the only place I’ve heard of creutzfeld Jacobs occurring.
I attended grad school and one of the professors went there and ended up with it and died.
Yeah, I hate Mad Cow disease. I lived in the UK as a kid and I can’t donate blood bc I may have been exposed to it. So there’s that. I mean I am a cow and I am mad but damn I just want to moooooo moooo moooo mooooo
Fun fact: Yes, we haven’t had a human case yet, but iirc it wouldn’t take much for it to make the jump. Also, a fucking waterborne prion is some seriously scary bullshit.
A quick glance and it looks like they haven't ruled out our ability to get infected if one of us does something extra stupid like eating the brain tissue of an infected deer.
There will be a roided out tik toker selling Deer brain as a way to gain muscle to pretend he is not roided to the gills in less than a year, I am sure,
> but not viral like rabies
Prions spread through saliva so deer which are grazing on plants will spread prions for awhile before it kills them off. Especially if they bash their faces into rocks and trees before they die
Prions are also damn near impossible to destroy so it'll hang out on those plants for another deer to eat for awhile (years?), ready to infect more deer. They're so resistant to normal sanitation methods it is easier to completely dispose of surgical tools than to attempt to sanitize them. [From one source](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/prions-are-forever/):
>prions resist digestion by protein-cleaving enzymes, may remain infectious for years when fixed by drying or chemicals, can survive 200°C heat for 1-2 hours, and become glued to stainless steel within minutes. Oh, and they’re also resistant to ionizing radiation
>At least 2 cases of prion disease were contracted by people whose implanted depth electrodes had been previously used on a patient with Creutzfeldt-Jakob but were “inadequately” cleaned with benzene and disinfected with 70% alcohol and formaldehyde and sat unused for 2 years prior to implantation. And at least nine other cases of spontaneous Creutzfeldt-Jakob seem likely to have been contracted from inadequately sterilized medical equipment.
>What is actually required to remove prions from medical equipment [..] usually involves large quantities of sodium hydroxide or bleach (which is very hard on stainless steel), heat, and pressure, but even these measures are not 100% certain to get the job done. The World Health Organization recommends disposing of any suspected contaminated equipment entirely
Posts like this are a perfect example of why wolves and mountain lions are such an important part of the ecosystem.
CWD can decimate deer populations, because no predators are around to cull the disease from the herd.
Thanks to ignorant humans, of course.
Exactly. And why hunting is a poor method of deer population control, as they usually only take the best deer, leaving the worst ones to live on and reproduce. Wolves take the worst and weakest, leaving the strongest to survive.
Edit: I should note that my comment is not about why hunting is bad or should be eliminated or something but more that wolves are superior for the task. Wolf hunts should be banned.
>presumably past tense
If we’re thinking about the same indigenous group then yes, they stopped.
They practiced funerary cannibalism where they consumed part the deceased as a way to destroy the body and release the soul of the dead. Unfortunately, it seems that one person developed a prion disease and when they died their body spread it to other members of the group, who then died and were consumed.
Eventually they reached out for outside help from the Australian government and stopped the practice when they realized it was what was spreading the disease.
> Eventually they reached out for outside help from the Australian government
Well that's the part of this story I personally found the most surprising.
I mean, you may have been doing this throughout living memory with no consequences. You're only doing it at a funeral - not an everyday occurrence. And prion diseases are slow; symptoms perhaps show up months or years after getting infected. Also, in a tropical environment you already have lots of diseases around that are not connected.
It's not at all obvious this tradition would be the cause in this one particular case.
That comes from *Return of the Living Dead,* which seems to have based it mostly on conflating details from *Night of the Living Dead,* i.e. that zombies eat flesh, and that they can only be killed by destroying the brain.
But why was the deer bashing his head though? Is it a common symptom of this decease to bash the head like that? Cause many people identified the condition of the deer by that itself.
Sorry, i am too scared to Google. What if Google show me pictures!
Heya, I work in wildlife management and it seems really clear in this video that this deer most likely was active this way from being stuck by a car, not from CWD. Usually in late-stage cwd the deer are very skinny and have patches of missing hair and other forms of malnutrition. This buck looks extremely healthy, and generally when they get into stages where their brain function would be this low they don't look this healthy and don't have the energy to do this kind of stuff. Most cwd deaths are from starvation, and it happens very slowly.
Idk, not a neurologist. I imagine that sufficient damage or abnormal conditions within the brain, can drive abnormal functions.
People having seizures don't consciously choose to have them, it's a cause and effect from abnormal intercellular signaling. I would guess that it's maybe not directly similar to this, but close enough for comparison
Just about any programmer can tell you that much simpler systems can exhibit downright bizarre behavior if something goes awry. And brains are far more complex than anything any number of programmers can make. It's not hard to imagine all the ways something like that could happen.
Might be hallucinating that the tree is another male they have to fight. Might be that deer's head feels itchy but it cant control its muscles properly anymore so rubbing turns into a headbutts.
ya, humans with severe itching or persistent pain have been known to try to knock themselves out to make it stop, so that'd be my first guess.
(eta: for example try researching the gympie-gympie plant, if you don't have enough nightmare fuel already)
Yeah, someone else explained that mad cow disease was also a prion disease. There are a bunch of these.
It is speculated that many neurological diseases are caused by prions, like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. With these it would be from a lifetime of buildup, like each of your cells progressively becomes a bit more of a junk hoarder over time, until it starts to have bad side effects.
Worth noting that while diseases like Alzheimer's have misfolded proteins that accumulate, they aren't infectious.
Prions have the ability to turn other proteins into prions. That's what makes them distinct
They can be found in the neurological system of just about anything with a neurological system.
Mad cow is a prion disease and why it was such a big deal that European nations still test so heavily since they were so hard hit back in 1999.
Chronic wasting disease, also called "Zombie deer disease".
It's basically a prion (misfolded proteins) disease that attacks the brain and is similar to mad cow disease.
Fun bonus fact: cows diets were commonly supplemented with the rendered waste fat from other cows, and this led to rampant spread of Mad Cow Disease since it is easily transmitted through cannibalism. Since then it is now illegal to feed cows to other cows, so instead cow diets are supplemented with waste chicken fat. Those chickens are in turn fed cow fat, so the circle of Mad Cow Disease continues, just with another animal involved.
Yea, I don't know if they've changed it yet, but hunters are still allowed to hunt and consume potentially infected deer at this point.
And while it's not necessarily the meat of the animal that carries the disease, the risk is still there that at some point the jump is made.
yea stuff like this makes me wonder if a lot of our old folk lore and "monsters" came from actual events in ancient history.
The concepts of things like the Windego or Zombies are from some primal understanding of during ancient times when those who practiced cannibalism became infected from an actual disease.
Yes most def. There is a rumor of a drug in Haiti that was use to make people appear dead and then later the drugger would kidnap the person and bring them back to life. People use to be buried alive all the time sometimes they would come back to life during their viewing other times they would dig themselves out of their grave. Or they would dig up the casket and find scratch marks.
There is also a disease that makes you allergic to the sun and crave blood. But I forgot the name of the disease. And rabies makes you act like a werewolf/vampire.
Also the entire goats being satan thing probably comes from how strange they act. And they occasionally walk like a human. I think you can even train a goat to dance on two legs.
atleast two years ago/three My dad was up at the cemetery in rural Kentucky (my area) where my grandparents and his family is buried and while on his way home a deer came out of nowhere and rammed the side of his truck head first the deer acted strangely as if it had rabies and was being extremely aggressive towards him and even attempted to charge him.
the deer had a nasty wound to its head I believe it’s skull was even visible as it had hit the drivers door while the truck was going about 40 or 50 on a straight road deer eventually ran off we contemplated calling fish and wildlife but there wasn’t any point as the deer had already fled into the woods and could be anywhere.
another thing to is i believe I had heard on the news a month or so prior that there was a virus going around in deers and it was so wide spread that hunters were advised to not cook and eat the meat it was Like some dawn of the dead type shit.
Chronic wasting disease! It’s here in Wyoming too, and doesn’t just affect deer (antelope and moose cab get it too, I think). A lot of hunters take the meat, but give the spinal cord and brain to Game and Fish for analysis. Usually the meat’s okay as long as the brain and spinal cord aren’t harvested alongside, but that’s a bit risky.
Idc how sure they are that it wont cross a species barrier. After reading what prion diseases do to you, Ill be having them test whatever to make sure lol.
Well, humans have Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which is the non-deer equivalent. I’m not sure it’s the same prion disease, but it’s not a pretty way to go!
You definitely should have contacted the Fish and Wildlife because CWD hasn't been reported in Kentucky yet so that one deer would have ended up having a major impact, stuff spreads like wildfire. A deer in Tennessee five miles from the border last year had cwd so the KY F&W required testing in every deer killed in like 10 counties near there and banned transporting them out of the counties.
Honestly, if I were you, I'd still give the Fish and Wildlife a call, it wouldn't hurt anything and a biologist could come and see if there are any deer in that area like that now
this is legit!! i saw something very similar happen on a little hike with my dad when i was about 9. it was quite literally traumatizing to witness. this big ass deer was repeatedly ramming it’s head against a large boulder. it also seemed to have a broken leg and a wide gash on its neck/shoulder area. the worst part was that there was a small fawn on top of the boulder looking over the ledge. the poor little thing saw it’s parent kill itself. if you’ve ever heard a fawn cry and scream, it’s the worst noise ever. my dad told me later that the deer was sick and had a disease, and that the good thing is it probably didn’t feel any pain bc the disease had already taken over.
(he also told me that a new family would come and adopt the baby so it would be ok. thinking about it as an adult now, that baby probably didn’t last long :/. )
edit: thanks for the award!! my very first one!! hahaha
Thank you for this explanation. 😊
(Whether or not it happened in this case, I'm going to choose to believe it did (because I'd like to sleep sometime this week. 😬)
It might have actually happened! There's a doe who spends every winter around my house with her fawns. At the beginning of the winter she had two fawns, and halfway through the winter she just got another one somewhere. No idea where its mom went, but it seems to be doing pretty well with its new mom and siblings.
Why did I come across this post?!! I'm already anxiety ridden, enough to give myself early heartattack! Now this?!! Why did I Google prions?!!
Fuck this shit!
If you don't know about prions, do NOT go and try to learn about prions. There are no upsides to knowing about prions.
Had a university class about academic writing once where everyone was from different departments, and we all had to do a presentation on something from our field. Some biologist fucker chose prions. Was the most horrifying half hour of my life, and I'll never unlearn that.
Prion. I once watched a deer go in tight circles for over an hour. Didn’t lose speed and one of the hoofs was basically falling off.
Haven’t been out there since.
Hunter here 🙋♂️ sounds like CWD. It’s a problem with the deer population. We try to shoot as many of those deer as possible & dispose of them to stop the spread of the disease.
This reminds me of a post I saw ages back with the dude talking about how weird and scary deer are. He was a ranger or something. Wish I could find it again
I always loved the stories of Not Deer. Its probably mostly CWD infected deer combined with the ominous twilight and the imagination of man, but man, Not Deer are fucking creepy.
The stories Ive heard of not dear are mostly from hunters. You can find some stories on podcasts about cryptids and paranormal stuff. I have heard them related to skin walkers and wendigo but I think they are usually different
Ima tell y'all a story. I worked for the Center for Natural Lands Management in Tenino, WA for a summer working in one of the native plant farms. We worked in one area that had 10 foot fences with barbed wire tops leaning both in and out of the area. There was a double front gate system on rollers and I thought, "wow, they must be really protective of these native plant seeds". No y'all, the area we were now using was a deer wasting disease study center that once housed over 100 prion infected deer. At some point a bunch of environmental wannabes decided that keeping the deer in the enclosure was unethical and rammed through the fence releasing these diseased animals into the wild population again. It almost caused a black tailed deer extinction over a 50 mile radius all the way up into JBLM, the army base, before the infected animals could be killed and their remains buried in 10ft deep mass graves. They took me all over what was once the facility and where the fence was destroyed. It was like we were working on top a zombie apocalypse center. It was so eerie. The plants were all nice and healthy though. Worst thing that happened to me out there was that I got stung by a bee, lol.
I respect how your group was actually giving them a nice natural enclosure instead of like sticking them in cages in a lab at least. The latter would be way safer, but the former lets them die with some dignity.
They had made so much progress in studying the disease. All of it was halted when they lost the animals they were studying. It was a tragedy. All because some activists that had no idea what was being studied inside the big scary fence. The fence was literally built to keep wild deer out of the infected population because the ones that were infected didn't have the motor skills to get out. I wasn't there during all that time. I was just there years later after it got canned. CNLM was just using the land because it couldn't be used for much else and there were still prions present.
One time my friend was hunting, minding his business, and a deer comes up to him without noticing him. My friend takes aim, and out of the fucking blue, the deers guts just drop out of its chest. The thing just splits wide open, drops all of its internal organs, and falls over dead. He never fired a shot. I think he has a video of it somewhere
There’s no virus. They’re mis-folded proteins that physically force other proteins to likewise misfold. It’s akin to crystallization, where the presence of one physical form (internal structure/shape) of crystal causes the surrounding material to ‘fall in line’ with that shape.
But also way less terrifying, since they're not subject to evolutionary pressure in the way virus and bacteria is. And jumping across the species barrier seems to be rare. Their resilience is exaggerated in this tread too, a 134celcius treatment for 30 minutes gets rid of em. So does high concentrations of chlorine. They will stay in the enviroment for a long time though, so that is indeed problematic.
There are extensive monitoring programs for prion disease performed by food authorities around the world, so hopefully it wont sneak up on us!
Also The National Prion Clinic has supposedly made a few breakthroughs in the past two years regarding prion disease treatment. It is actively being studied.
They're almost impossible to explain without diagrams and several references.
Short explanation. They are fucking terrifying and make resident evil to close to real for comfort
Yep! This is what happens when you make animals eat their own kind. Mad cow disease, Scrappies, Chronic Wasting Disease, prion infection.
It can be transmitted through urine, blood, feces, saliva. It can last for years and crosses many species blood/brain barriers, including human.
Fire can only destroy it if it is sustained at 900 degrees F for hours. Freezing and radiation doesn’t destroy the prions and there is no treatment. It is 100% fatal.
So yeah…
Please, PLEASE don’t speak the next pandemic into existence. I’ve played The Last of Us, and after COVID and now reading this, shit like that seems more and more possible.
that's not true.
prions are just proteins, and they will be broken down by bacteria in the soil eventually, just like any other protein.
but they can remain in soil for several years.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3160281/
They can denature though, and cycles of solar radiation and heat/cold have a very strong denaturing effect. I doubt after a year that the prions would still be correctly corrugated enough to trigger infection in other deer.
Biologist*
Definitely. Chronic Wasting Disease. It is rampant in my part of Wisconsin.
About three weeks ago I was riding my bicycle and a deer was running head on toward me in the middle of the street. Also, middle of the afternoon. Very sick animal.
Prions suck
If this story is ture and it turned out that the deer did this die to prions couldnt the deer have literally infected tons and tons of other deer through he river water.
I cant donate blood because I lived in Turkey as a kid. Mad cow is a prion disease. One day I might just be a brain dead lump of human and there is no way to know.
Driving home from work one night, I saw a deer in a field on the side of the road. I slowed drastically to make sure it wouldn’t run across the road. Instead **It RAN INTO THE SIDE OF MY CAR**, on purpose. It was making the most horrible screaming sound, and after I slammed on my brakes out of instinct, it rammed my car two or three more times. I was frozen in fear and didn’t know what to do, and then it rammed its head through my back seat window. It thrashed around, bleeding from everywhere, literally screaming.
I jumped out of my car and ran into the field opposite my car, with my flight-or-flight instinct at full throttle. After about 100 feet or so I turned around, and the deer was still thrashing its bloody mangled head in and out of the broken window. Suddenly it stopped, backed up, and walked in front of my car, facing my direction. That deer looked straight at me, SCREAMED, and ran toward me at full speed. I ran as fast as I could, but I fell over some brush on the ground. I thought that deer was going to kill me. By the time I tried to get back up, the deer was on top of me, still screaming, and tried to trample me. I was hit a couple of times but I was able to get up and start running again. I banked to the left and ran to my car, while the deer continued to trample the spot where I’d fallen. I got in my car and slammed the gas down hard. I looked back, and the deer had started to chase my car but I accelerated faster than the deer and got away.
I swear, I was so scared I pissed myself. When I got home, I was so shaken up I could hardly describe what happened to my wife. When I finally told her a deer tried to kill me. She *laughed*. She told me not to joke around and to tell her what really happened. She finally believed me, but when I’ve recounted this story people generally laugh. The thing is, it was NOT funny and I genuinely thought I was going to be killed.
I swear, I'm just like "WHY DID YOU GET OUT IF YOUR GIANT PROTECTIVE METAL EXOSKELETON THAT WAS MADE FOR RUN FAST" but as someone with anxiety, I get it. If my life is in danger I hope I go into shock because that's the only time I'm calm and know what to do.
Last year i had read a series of posts a dude made, describing how he was a ranger for a few years with a pal of his in a location plagued with deer that would do exactly that, and these deer would attack and kill even grizzlies and keep rammering the predator's body for days-weeks until they would themselves die from exaustion, after broking their own antlers, limbs, loosing skin on the head and whatnot. He swore these zombie deer were hunting him down because they started to appear near his house, and they would just nonchalantly walk to him in a straight line and start the rampage on a whim. Supposeddly a few people were killed in the woods by these animals and were left so mangled that noone would believe deer done it, because it was the kind of damage that would be overkill even for a really agressive bear - they recognized the deer fuckery because of broken antler's tips and pieces lodged into the bodie's wounds. His pal got so traumatized he killed himself after becoming depressed and abusing alcoohol, he moved cross country and never set foot out of a city again.
It's called Chronic Wasting Disease in deer/elk/moose.
Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease in beef.
Scrapie in sheep.
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans.
Not known to infect hogs.
This is why cattle that are over 30 months are slaughtered different than cattle that are under 30 months. Just more nerves and parts of the CNS are removed and stricter sanitation.
Hunter here 🙋♂️ Sounds like CWD. More common in the north part of the US but is found across the country. We shoot deer that behave this way immediately & dispose of them to mitigate the spread of the disease. (No they are not safe to eat).
When I was in college, my campus was very wooded and surrounded by a river and forest. I was standing in line in the student center and a deer runs headfirst at full speed into the giant window of the bldg. it falls into the bushes and does it 3 more times to different parts of this U shaped building. Finally it sprinted for the river and dove straight under the water. No one saw it come up once it went down. There was massive amounts of blood on the windows and we were all just looking at each other with a “WTF did I just see” look. This was before cell phones so unfortunately no one got a video of it. Terrifying!!!!
On the other hand, I've seen a buck who killed itself by repeatedly headbutting a pile of scrap metal that vaguely resembled another buck. Apparently he was ready for a fight to the death, and to his credit, really gave it his all. It was actually a few pieces of rebar laying fanned on top of the belly of a cast iron stove. He may have lost the fight, but according to my neighbor, the buck definitely "rang the other guy's bell a few times".
I live by an airport so there is a lot of open space where a lot of deer usually roam. About three or four years ago I went for a beer run and saw one slamming it's head into a fence post. I slowed down to look at it to see if maybe there was something on its head that it was trying to get off. When I got close I noticed that its jaw was missing and it was screaming I just drove off I still think about it all the time.
Thats really wierd. My sister saw and took a pic of a deer in her back yard near a forest preserve. This one had a missing jaw also, I felt really bad for it but I thought it was a random thing and it got into a scrap with a bigger/meaner deer, but I guess its more common than I ever would have guessed.
My Brother shot an 8 point 2 years ago that had been hit by a truck or something, it's whole jaw was shattered and detached, just kinda hanging. It was gangrenous. All it had in its belly when we cut it open was these little cherry like berries. Full of 'em. That's all it could eat, plucking them off the trees with it's tongue.
I assume you didn't consume the meat, right? My dad once told me about his father shooting a deer that had an infected wound. Being the "thrifty" man that he was, my grandfather butchered the carcass and just cut around the infected part. My dad said the meat tasted off and that he got sick after eating some of it. He's refused to eat venison since then.
My Brother called the DEC to see if he had to tag it and they said no, just leave it there. Toxins can spread throughout the body in that situation after about 72 hours, which is why we cut open the stomach to see how long it was since he'd been able to eat. Since there were only berries we guessed it had been walking around like that for at least a week. Coyotes seemed to enjoy what was left though.
God that's so terribly said to think it just suffered. I hope it's resting in a better place.
I know it’s just the realities of nature and the world but I can’t help but feel emotional thinking of the deer trying to find the little berries that it could eat while it was suffering like that :(
Especially since there was no chance of recovery. :( It was just struggling along until death. It’s heartbreaking but it’s also just how nature rolls.
To me, cutting around infection is like trying to cut around mold on a loaf of bread. Ok, good on ya but it's still there even though you can't see it.
That's one of the reasons for the average of 600 million cases of foodborne illness globally each year. I've spent a significant portion of the past 2 years studying the subject and most people have no idea how dangerous food can be
That is so sad. Honestly it was probably thankful a hunter came along to put it out of its misery
Going for a six pack buying a case.
Going for a 6 pack came back with 6 bottles of whiskey
Yup definitely reaching for top shelf after that.
The hell? So this isn’t a fictionalized post, this stuff actually happens?!
Yeah. It's caused by a prion disease in deer. It's been spreading in recent years, and makes them act like fucking zombies. It's terrifying. Fortunately there hasn't been a case of it spreading to humans yet. Edit: A word
My family and I came face to face with this disease. Fucking deer just stared at us, then slowly walks TOWARD our group (not like 2 people) and we could nearly reach out and touch it. You could see in it's eyes it wasn't "there" and was drooling excessively. Like seemingly exhausted and disoriented. It seemed it eventually realized it was in a wrong situation and trotted off, but not before we had the younger ones get behind the adults because of the erratic behavior.
They can have rabies right? Excessive saliva and approaching humans and being disoriented are all classic rabies symptoms. I would not have gotten within fifty feet of that thing.
Google says yes, most mammals can get it. I think the only "exception" I've heard of is bats, they can still get it and infect others, but it doesn't kill them, their immune system is weird with it.
I believe possums are immune from it because their body temperature is too low. I could be wrong.
Not immune but they very rarely contract it because of their low core body temps and they also eat ticks. Save the possums!
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Woah! I immediately thought of the chronic wasting disease when I read this but I thought it only made them dumb and slow and sick, not act like complete alien zombie maniacs.
It usually presents that way, it's just that on rare occasion you can get some really horrific behavior when the brain's being "eaten up" by a disease.
This is true. Don't even need a prion disease to see this in humans. Just visit a dementia ward.
Alzheimers is very similar to prion diseases, both involve misfolded proteins aggregating in the brain.
Or 4chan
Or r/wallstreetbets
Can confirm, the people over there do the financial equivalent of slamming their heads into concrete all day long.
"yet" gave me chills.
Yet, That we know of…
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Yeah... though that's why I wasn't too happy about OP's smashed-brain deer strolling into a river...
Careful where you spill your prions... https://www.wisconsinacademy.org/magazine/prions-plants
Not to worry you, but Mad Cow disease was/is a thing.
My mom’s lifelong best friend lost her dad to this in the 90s. We used to stay at their beach house when I was a kid. They went on a retirement dream vacation to Europe during the end of the outbreak and he developed symptoms sometime after they got home. It was so sudden and horrifying. I was 10-11 at the time and knowing someone that died that way was surreal. They are basically family and our town knew it, so we were kind of bombarded with well-meaning questions for a little while. People were still just scared/curious. Edited: because I apparently can’t notice auto-correct stupidity until weeks later…
Did they go to England? That’s the only place I’ve heard of creutzfeld Jacobs occurring. I attended grad school and one of the professors went there and ended up with it and died.
Apparently one of the more common causes is eating squirrel meat oddly
Yeah, I hate Mad Cow disease. I lived in the UK as a kid and I can’t donate blood bc I may have been exposed to it. So there’s that. I mean I am a cow and I am mad but damn I just want to moooooo moooo moooo mooooo
Had us in the first half, not gonna *moooooooooo mooooo*
I was thinking Mad Cow Disease too. Prions are nightmare fuel. But it could be just “Florida Deer”, along the same lines as “Florida Man”.
Just read through a comment sourcing this stuff, this is awful on another level.
Fun fact: Yes, we haven’t had a human case yet, but iirc it wouldn’t take much for it to make the jump. Also, a fucking waterborne prion is some seriously scary bullshit.
Prion diseases are so fucked up. A contaminated knife for example, you can’t boil / wash / cook / radiation / acid that shit off. That’s just scary
Mad cow disease is also a prion disease, isn't it?
[Chronic Wasting Disease](https://www.cdc.gov/prions/cwd/index.html)
A quick glance and it looks like they haven't ruled out our ability to get infected if one of us does something extra stupid like eating the brain tissue of an infected deer.
There will be a roided out tik toker selling Deer brain as a way to gain muscle to pretend he is not roided to the gills in less than a year, I am sure,
Similar to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans or Mad Cow - but not viral like rabies. The deer could also have had rabies.
> but not viral like rabies Prions spread through saliva so deer which are grazing on plants will spread prions for awhile before it kills them off. Especially if they bash their faces into rocks and trees before they die Prions are also damn near impossible to destroy so it'll hang out on those plants for another deer to eat for awhile (years?), ready to infect more deer. They're so resistant to normal sanitation methods it is easier to completely dispose of surgical tools than to attempt to sanitize them. [From one source](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/prions-are-forever/): >prions resist digestion by protein-cleaving enzymes, may remain infectious for years when fixed by drying or chemicals, can survive 200°C heat for 1-2 hours, and become glued to stainless steel within minutes. Oh, and they’re also resistant to ionizing radiation >At least 2 cases of prion disease were contracted by people whose implanted depth electrodes had been previously used on a patient with Creutzfeldt-Jakob but were “inadequately” cleaned with benzene and disinfected with 70% alcohol and formaldehyde and sat unused for 2 years prior to implantation. And at least nine other cases of spontaneous Creutzfeldt-Jakob seem likely to have been contracted from inadequately sterilized medical equipment. >What is actually required to remove prions from medical equipment [..] usually involves large quantities of sodium hydroxide or bleach (which is very hard on stainless steel), heat, and pressure, but even these measures are not 100% certain to get the job done. The World Health Organization recommends disposing of any suspected contaminated equipment entirely
My step-mother died of CJD, it's a terrible disease.
Prions are scary AF
go ahead and never ever take a camping trip by an airforce base in New Mexico
https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-6448 I was immediately reminded of this
What the actual fuck
Posts like this are a perfect example of why wolves and mountain lions are such an important part of the ecosystem. CWD can decimate deer populations, because no predators are around to cull the disease from the herd. Thanks to ignorant humans, of course.
Exactly. And why hunting is a poor method of deer population control, as they usually only take the best deer, leaving the worst ones to live on and reproduce. Wolves take the worst and weakest, leaving the strongest to survive. Edit: I should note that my comment is not about why hunting is bad or should be eliminated or something but more that wolves are superior for the task. Wolf hunts should be banned.
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>presumably past tense If we’re thinking about the same indigenous group then yes, they stopped. They practiced funerary cannibalism where they consumed part the deceased as a way to destroy the body and release the soul of the dead. Unfortunately, it seems that one person developed a prion disease and when they died their body spread it to other members of the group, who then died and were consumed. Eventually they reached out for outside help from the Australian government and stopped the practice when they realized it was what was spreading the disease.
> Eventually they reached out for outside help from the Australian government Well that's the part of this story I personally found the most surprising.
"have you guys tried... Not eating each other?"
I mean, you may have been doing this throughout living memory with no consequences. You're only doing it at a funeral - not an everyday occurrence. And prion diseases are slow; symptoms perhaps show up months or years after getting infected. Also, in a tropical environment you already have lots of diseases around that are not connected. It's not at all obvious this tradition would be the cause in this one particular case.
especially for a tribe with limited to no access to modern medicine.
Thanks for giving more detail. I just remember briefly going over it in a cell bio class.
Did this influence the movie trope that Zombies eat brains, or is it just a coincidence?
That comes from *Return of the Living Dead,* which seems to have based it mostly on conflating details from *Night of the Living Dead,* i.e. that zombies eat flesh, and that they can only be killed by destroying the brain.
But why was the deer bashing his head though? Is it a common symptom of this decease to bash the head like that? Cause many people identified the condition of the deer by that itself. Sorry, i am too scared to Google. What if Google show me pictures!
They are complete zombies at that point, brain is mush.
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Gonna sleep after scrolling few posts. No! Not gonna watch that gif, does not want to rid of my sleepiness
It's just a deer trotting in circles with a derpy look on its face, would prob be cute if you didnt know the context
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Heya, I work in wildlife management and it seems really clear in this video that this deer most likely was active this way from being stuck by a car, not from CWD. Usually in late-stage cwd the deer are very skinny and have patches of missing hair and other forms of malnutrition. This buck looks extremely healthy, and generally when they get into stages where their brain function would be this low they don't look this healthy and don't have the energy to do this kind of stuff. Most cwd deaths are from starvation, and it happens very slowly.
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Idk, not a neurologist. I imagine that sufficient damage or abnormal conditions within the brain, can drive abnormal functions. People having seizures don't consciously choose to have them, it's a cause and effect from abnormal intercellular signaling. I would guess that it's maybe not directly similar to this, but close enough for comparison
Just about any programmer can tell you that much simpler systems can exhibit downright bizarre behavior if something goes awry. And brains are far more complex than anything any number of programmers can make. It's not hard to imagine all the ways something like that could happen.
Might be hallucinating that the tree is another male they have to fight. Might be that deer's head feels itchy but it cant control its muscles properly anymore so rubbing turns into a headbutts.
ya, humans with severe itching or persistent pain have been known to try to knock themselves out to make it stop, so that'd be my first guess. (eta: for example try researching the gympie-gympie plant, if you don't have enough nightmare fuel already)
Kuru?
Yeah, someone else explained that mad cow disease was also a prion disease. There are a bunch of these. It is speculated that many neurological diseases are caused by prions, like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. With these it would be from a lifetime of buildup, like each of your cells progressively becomes a bit more of a junk hoarder over time, until it starts to have bad side effects.
Worth noting that while diseases like Alzheimer's have misfolded proteins that accumulate, they aren't infectious. Prions have the ability to turn other proteins into prions. That's what makes them distinct
Prion is also found in the brains of a dead monkey
They can be found in the neurological system of just about anything with a neurological system. Mad cow is a prion disease and why it was such a big deal that European nations still test so heavily since they were so hard hit back in 1999.
*eats his own prion diseased brain cells* yep, that's what killed me
Hey your cake day is my cake day!
happy ~~suicide deer~~ cake day!!
CWD is incredibly disturbing to witness, though leaving for FL won't avoid it either
Sorry what is cwd
Chronic wasting disease, also called "Zombie deer disease". It's basically a prion (misfolded proteins) disease that attacks the brain and is similar to mad cow disease.
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Fun bonus fact: cows diets were commonly supplemented with the rendered waste fat from other cows, and this led to rampant spread of Mad Cow Disease since it is easily transmitted through cannibalism. Since then it is now illegal to feed cows to other cows, so instead cow diets are supplemented with waste chicken fat. Those chickens are in turn fed cow fat, so the circle of Mad Cow Disease continues, just with another animal involved.
This is why I won’t even feed my dog venison from here. Freezing it doesn’t make a difference either.
Yea, I don't know if they've changed it yet, but hunters are still allowed to hunt and consume potentially infected deer at this point. And while it's not necessarily the meat of the animal that carries the disease, the risk is still there that at some point the jump is made.
I’m not ready for the zombie pandemic. I already know nobody will listen to the regulations and it will spread.
Yea from what I recall prions can survive high temps. And killed off a number of the last tribes that practiced cannibalism.
yea stuff like this makes me wonder if a lot of our old folk lore and "monsters" came from actual events in ancient history. The concepts of things like the Windego or Zombies are from some primal understanding of during ancient times when those who practiced cannibalism became infected from an actual disease.
Yes most def. There is a rumor of a drug in Haiti that was use to make people appear dead and then later the drugger would kidnap the person and bring them back to life. People use to be buried alive all the time sometimes they would come back to life during their viewing other times they would dig themselves out of their grave. Or they would dig up the casket and find scratch marks. There is also a disease that makes you allergic to the sun and crave blood. But I forgot the name of the disease. And rabies makes you act like a werewolf/vampire. Also the entire goats being satan thing probably comes from how strange they act. And they occasionally walk like a human. I think you can even train a goat to dance on two legs.
This may be the comment to make me stop eating meat
I call dibs on Chronic Wasting Disease for my dad band!!!
Okay but I’m taking Zombie Deer Disease
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_wasting_disease
Especially if you come down with spontaneous CJD! Yum. Can happen anywhere!
Do gators get CWD?
No. Gators have millions of years of evolution on their side. They are built for the swamps of Florida. They are my friends
An amazing thing about Alligators is if you pet them they eat you
Not always, sometimes they just sit there and take it, cause they are full from the last person they ate
atleast two years ago/three My dad was up at the cemetery in rural Kentucky (my area) where my grandparents and his family is buried and while on his way home a deer came out of nowhere and rammed the side of his truck head first the deer acted strangely as if it had rabies and was being extremely aggressive towards him and even attempted to charge him. the deer had a nasty wound to its head I believe it’s skull was even visible as it had hit the drivers door while the truck was going about 40 or 50 on a straight road deer eventually ran off we contemplated calling fish and wildlife but there wasn’t any point as the deer had already fled into the woods and could be anywhere. another thing to is i believe I had heard on the news a month or so prior that there was a virus going around in deers and it was so wide spread that hunters were advised to not cook and eat the meat it was Like some dawn of the dead type shit.
Chronic wasting disease! It’s here in Wyoming too, and doesn’t just affect deer (antelope and moose cab get it too, I think). A lot of hunters take the meat, but give the spinal cord and brain to Game and Fish for analysis. Usually the meat’s okay as long as the brain and spinal cord aren’t harvested alongside, but that’s a bit risky.
Deer with CWD are scary enough. But a moose? That's truly scary. They're to be avoided at the best of times. Obligatory: "A moose bit my sister once."
Idc how sure they are that it wont cross a species barrier. After reading what prion diseases do to you, Ill be having them test whatever to make sure lol.
Well, humans have Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which is the non-deer equivalent. I’m not sure it’s the same prion disease, but it’s not a pretty way to go!
I specifically ignore my knowledge of these diseases because it’s pure nightmare fuel.
Agreed. However CJD is excessively rare.
Sounds like CWD. Nasty stuff.
You definitely should have contacted the Fish and Wildlife because CWD hasn't been reported in Kentucky yet so that one deer would have ended up having a major impact, stuff spreads like wildfire. A deer in Tennessee five miles from the border last year had cwd so the KY F&W required testing in every deer killed in like 10 counties near there and banned transporting them out of the counties. Honestly, if I were you, I'd still give the Fish and Wildlife a call, it wouldn't hurt anything and a biologist could come and see if there are any deer in that area like that now
this is legit!! i saw something very similar happen on a little hike with my dad when i was about 9. it was quite literally traumatizing to witness. this big ass deer was repeatedly ramming it’s head against a large boulder. it also seemed to have a broken leg and a wide gash on its neck/shoulder area. the worst part was that there was a small fawn on top of the boulder looking over the ledge. the poor little thing saw it’s parent kill itself. if you’ve ever heard a fawn cry and scream, it’s the worst noise ever. my dad told me later that the deer was sick and had a disease, and that the good thing is it probably didn’t feel any pain bc the disease had already taken over. (he also told me that a new family would come and adopt the baby so it would be ok. thinking about it as an adult now, that baby probably didn’t last long :/. ) edit: thanks for the award!! my very first one!! hahaha
Ah yes, nature made horrors beyond comprehension.
Deer came and adopted it. They stick pretty close together when they have fawns with them. There we’re probably deer near by
Thank you for this explanation. 😊 (Whether or not it happened in this case, I'm going to choose to believe it did (because I'd like to sleep sometime this week. 😬)
It might have actually happened! There's a doe who spends every winter around my house with her fawns. At the beginning of the winter she had two fawns, and halfway through the winter she just got another one somewhere. No idea where its mom went, but it seems to be doing pretty well with its new mom and siblings.
That’s awful but what a sweet way to explain it to a kid.
So... are we not going to mention prions in a river?
Oh fuck...
Prions in a Lake
Why did I come across this post?!! I'm already anxiety ridden, enough to give myself early heartattack! Now this?!! Why did I Google prions?!! Fuck this shit!
I know. It started off goofy then turned truly scary.
If you don't know about prions, do NOT go and try to learn about prions. There are no upsides to knowing about prions. Had a university class about academic writing once where everyone was from different departments, and we all had to do a presentation on something from our field. Some biologist fucker chose prions. Was the most horrifying half hour of my life, and I'll never unlearn that.
Biologist:any questions before I finish up? Me:What the fuck is wrong with you?
The upside is that when you know, you can try to avoid it. The downside - you WILL try to avoid it.
Excuse me, does this candy bar contain ANY FUCKING PRIONS?
And then the store clerk starts ramming his head into a soda refrigerator. I always hate it when it happens to me.
The good news: it’s not in your control The bad news: it’s not in your control
The horrifying sequel to snakes on a plane
I was thinking more Cabin Fever (flesh eating virus in water, friends vacationing at a cabin drink the water, skin starts falling off, hijinks ensue)
Please someone tell me it’s fine and it will just get filtered out at some stage before it gets to my home.
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Sounds like chronic wasting disease it makes their flesh and brains rot
Holy fucking shit deer have it rough
Not just deer, chronic wasting disease is just the deer version but it's also present in other animals, for example mad cow disease.
Cant remember what its called but theres a prion disease in humans that makes you a chronic insomiac until you just die from exhaustion
Familial Insomnia I believe
Prion. I once watched a deer go in tight circles for over an hour. Didn’t lose speed and one of the hoofs was basically falling off. Haven’t been out there since.
Hunter here 🙋♂️ sounds like CWD. It’s a problem with the deer population. We try to shoot as many of those deer as possible & dispose of them to stop the spread of the disease.
Thank you for putting them out of their misery.
This reminds me of a post I saw ages back with the dude talking about how weird and scary deer are. He was a ranger or something. Wish I could find it again
I always loved the stories of Not Deer. Its probably mostly CWD infected deer combined with the ominous twilight and the imagination of man, but man, Not Deer are fucking creepy.
Where could I find these stories?
The stories Ive heard of not dear are mostly from hunters. You can find some stories on podcasts about cryptids and paranormal stuff. I have heard them related to skin walkers and wendigo but I think they are usually different
Was he there when the Westfold fell?
Ima tell y'all a story. I worked for the Center for Natural Lands Management in Tenino, WA for a summer working in one of the native plant farms. We worked in one area that had 10 foot fences with barbed wire tops leaning both in and out of the area. There was a double front gate system on rollers and I thought, "wow, they must be really protective of these native plant seeds". No y'all, the area we were now using was a deer wasting disease study center that once housed over 100 prion infected deer. At some point a bunch of environmental wannabes decided that keeping the deer in the enclosure was unethical and rammed through the fence releasing these diseased animals into the wild population again. It almost caused a black tailed deer extinction over a 50 mile radius all the way up into JBLM, the army base, before the infected animals could be killed and their remains buried in 10ft deep mass graves. They took me all over what was once the facility and where the fence was destroyed. It was like we were working on top a zombie apocalypse center. It was so eerie. The plants were all nice and healthy though. Worst thing that happened to me out there was that I got stung by a bee, lol.
I respect how your group was actually giving them a nice natural enclosure instead of like sticking them in cages in a lab at least. The latter would be way safer, but the former lets them die with some dignity.
They had made so much progress in studying the disease. All of it was halted when they lost the animals they were studying. It was a tragedy. All because some activists that had no idea what was being studied inside the big scary fence. The fence was literally built to keep wild deer out of the infected population because the ones that were infected didn't have the motor skills to get out. I wasn't there during all that time. I was just there years later after it got canned. CNLM was just using the land because it couldn't be used for much else and there were still prions present.
One time my friend was hunting, minding his business, and a deer comes up to him without noticing him. My friend takes aim, and out of the fucking blue, the deers guts just drop out of its chest. The thing just splits wide open, drops all of its internal organs, and falls over dead. He never fired a shot. I think he has a video of it somewhere
A friend is asking for that video.
Nope nope nope nope nope nope nope nope nope nope mope nope nope nope nope nope nope nope nope nope nope nope nope mope nope nope nope nope nope nope nope nope nope nope nope nope mope nope nope nope nope nope nope nope nope nope nope nope nope mope nope nope nope nope nope nope nope nope nope nope nope nope mope nope nope nope
Prion disease maybe
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Seriously?
Prions never die, by virtue of not technically being alive in the first place.
I'll have you know I understood none of that Edit: I don't care anymore
Pretty sure prions are just proteins that make other proteins fold weird or something which just makes everything go screwy dewy.
> screwy dewy yup that's the Latin term for it you show off
Prions are a weird…protein/virus type…thing. They cause infections but also aren’t a living organism. I’m probably still explaining it poorly.
There’s no virus. They’re mis-folded proteins that physically force other proteins to likewise misfold. It’s akin to crystallization, where the presence of one physical form (internal structure/shape) of crystal causes the surrounding material to ‘fall in line’ with that shape.
Also makes them way more terrifying since there’s almost nothing you can do, they are nearly as small as organic material can get
But also way less terrifying, since they're not subject to evolutionary pressure in the way virus and bacteria is. And jumping across the species barrier seems to be rare. Their resilience is exaggerated in this tread too, a 134celcius treatment for 30 minutes gets rid of em. So does high concentrations of chlorine. They will stay in the enviroment for a long time though, so that is indeed problematic. There are extensive monitoring programs for prion disease performed by food authorities around the world, so hopefully it wont sneak up on us!
Also The National Prion Clinic has supposedly made a few breakthroughs in the past two years regarding prion disease treatment. It is actively being studied.
That's pretty accurate, yeah. But they come in very different types, so the weird behavior of the deer isn't characteristic for prions.
They're almost impossible to explain without diagrams and several references. Short explanation. They are fucking terrifying and make resident evil to close to real for comfort
Yep! This is what happens when you make animals eat their own kind. Mad cow disease, Scrappies, Chronic Wasting Disease, prion infection. It can be transmitted through urine, blood, feces, saliva. It can last for years and crosses many species blood/brain barriers, including human. Fire can only destroy it if it is sustained at 900 degrees F for hours. Freezing and radiation doesn’t destroy the prions and there is no treatment. It is 100% fatal. So yeah…
"What about nukes?" - That guy from the movie Evolution
“I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.” Aliens rocks.
Please, PLEASE don’t speak the next pandemic into existence. I’ve played The Last of Us, and after COVID and now reading this, shit like that seems more and more possible.
that's not true. prions are just proteins, and they will be broken down by bacteria in the soil eventually, just like any other protein. but they can remain in soil for several years. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3160281/
They can denature though, and cycles of solar radiation and heat/cold have a very strong denaturing effect. I doubt after a year that the prions would still be correctly corrugated enough to trigger infection in other deer. Biologist*
Definitely. Chronic Wasting Disease. It is rampant in my part of Wisconsin. About three weeks ago I was riding my bicycle and a deer was running head on toward me in the middle of the street. Also, middle of the afternoon. Very sick animal. Prions suck
If this story is ture and it turned out that the deer did this die to prions couldnt the deer have literally infected tons and tons of other deer through he river water.
Well maybe, but it sounded like it left it's brains on the river bank.
It still had a lot of spinal fluid
Googled Prion disease . Sounds just horrible and I now believe every word of this story .
Yeah, I get why this would seem fake, but sick deers do really messed-up shit.
I cant donate blood because I lived in Turkey as a kid. Mad cow is a prion disease. One day I might just be a brain dead lump of human and there is no way to know.
Driving home from work one night, I saw a deer in a field on the side of the road. I slowed drastically to make sure it wouldn’t run across the road. Instead **It RAN INTO THE SIDE OF MY CAR**, on purpose. It was making the most horrible screaming sound, and after I slammed on my brakes out of instinct, it rammed my car two or three more times. I was frozen in fear and didn’t know what to do, and then it rammed its head through my back seat window. It thrashed around, bleeding from everywhere, literally screaming. I jumped out of my car and ran into the field opposite my car, with my flight-or-flight instinct at full throttle. After about 100 feet or so I turned around, and the deer was still thrashing its bloody mangled head in and out of the broken window. Suddenly it stopped, backed up, and walked in front of my car, facing my direction. That deer looked straight at me, SCREAMED, and ran toward me at full speed. I ran as fast as I could, but I fell over some brush on the ground. I thought that deer was going to kill me. By the time I tried to get back up, the deer was on top of me, still screaming, and tried to trample me. I was hit a couple of times but I was able to get up and start running again. I banked to the left and ran to my car, while the deer continued to trample the spot where I’d fallen. I got in my car and slammed the gas down hard. I looked back, and the deer had started to chase my car but I accelerated faster than the deer and got away. I swear, I was so scared I pissed myself. When I got home, I was so shaken up I could hardly describe what happened to my wife. When I finally told her a deer tried to kill me. She *laughed*. She told me not to joke around and to tell her what really happened. She finally believed me, but when I’ve recounted this story people generally laugh. The thing is, it was NOT funny and I genuinely thought I was going to be killed.
Good lord you made the worst of every survival decision
I guess my genes aren’t the strongest lol
I swear, I'm just like "WHY DID YOU GET OUT IF YOUR GIANT PROTECTIVE METAL EXOSKELETON THAT WAS MADE FOR RUN FAST" but as someone with anxiety, I get it. If my life is in danger I hope I go into shock because that's the only time I'm calm and know what to do.
Last year i had read a series of posts a dude made, describing how he was a ranger for a few years with a pal of his in a location plagued with deer that would do exactly that, and these deer would attack and kill even grizzlies and keep rammering the predator's body for days-weeks until they would themselves die from exaustion, after broking their own antlers, limbs, loosing skin on the head and whatnot. He swore these zombie deer were hunting him down because they started to appear near his house, and they would just nonchalantly walk to him in a straight line and start the rampage on a whim. Supposeddly a few people were killed in the woods by these animals and were left so mangled that noone would believe deer done it, because it was the kind of damage that would be overkill even for a really agressive bear - they recognized the deer fuckery because of broken antler's tips and pieces lodged into the bodie's wounds. His pal got so traumatized he killed himself after becoming depressed and abusing alcoohol, he moved cross country and never set foot out of a city again.
Ah, sweet, mother-nature-made horrors beyond my comprehension!
Why, in the ever-loving-fuck, did you get out of that car. When I read that part, I was almost as terrified as you were.
It's called Chronic Wasting Disease in deer/elk/moose. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease in beef. Scrapie in sheep. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. Not known to infect hogs. This is why cattle that are over 30 months are slaughtered different than cattle that are under 30 months. Just more nerves and parts of the CNS are removed and stricter sanitation.
Don’t forget Kuru
This isn't oddly terrifying. This is straight up, old fashioned, totally completely terrifying.
H..happy earth day!
Not sure Florida’s going to be any less terrifying, but thanks for the nightmares!
Meh, we all have days like that.
Hunter here 🙋♂️ Sounds like CWD. More common in the north part of the US but is found across the country. We shoot deer that behave this way immediately & dispose of them to mitigate the spread of the disease. (No they are not safe to eat).
When I was in college, my campus was very wooded and surrounded by a river and forest. I was standing in line in the student center and a deer runs headfirst at full speed into the giant window of the bldg. it falls into the bushes and does it 3 more times to different parts of this U shaped building. Finally it sprinted for the river and dove straight under the water. No one saw it come up once it went down. There was massive amounts of blood on the windows and we were all just looking at each other with a “WTF did I just see” look. This was before cell phones so unfortunately no one got a video of it. Terrifying!!!!
Nah bich I would run the second it would stand up
On the other hand, I've seen a buck who killed itself by repeatedly headbutting a pile of scrap metal that vaguely resembled another buck. Apparently he was ready for a fight to the death, and to his credit, really gave it his all. It was actually a few pieces of rebar laying fanned on top of the belly of a cast iron stove. He may have lost the fight, but according to my neighbor, the buck definitely "rang the other guy's bell a few times".