Fawn put down after dramatic Cole Harbour lake rescue
COLE HARBOUR, N.S. — A happy ending would have been welcome.
But we didn’t get one.
“Unfortunately we did have to put the deer down,” Butch Galvez, a wildlife technician with the Department of Natural Resources, said Monday afternoon.
“It’s not uncommon — it could have been struggling all night.”
On Monday morning, someone saw a fawn on Bissett Lake in Cole Harbour.
They cared enough about the small creature, cold and alone that they made a phone call.
A team of firefighters cared enough that they donned survival suits, walked out on the thin ice and brought it to shore.
“We just went out took the deer off the ice so nobody else went out and tried to do it their self,” said district chief Geoff Garber.
Dramatic pictures of the rescue caught by the Chronicle Herald’s Tim Krochak and posted online warmed hearts.
But the wild is a hard place in January.
And our attempts to put mercy in it can’t change that.
The wildlife technicians found the fawn, which would have come into this world early last summer when it was bright and green and alive, was injured from its night of slipping and falling on hooves evolved for softer ground.
The only act of mercy at their disposal was to kill it, clean and quick.
“I’ve been to dozens of these rescues and sometimes the animal is OK, but sometimes this is the result,” said Galvez.
If we’re looking for a silver lining, Galvez offers this: there’s been little snow cover and temperatures have been reasonably warm.
So it’s been a gentle winter thus far for the creatures of fur and feather who live all around us but in a world so different from our own.
