Oh, Deer!
Public Safety encourages students to refrain from feeding the young deer spotted roaming around campus
By Natalie Nemes
Trudging to class or gazing out the window from a favorite study spot in the CdC, students might have noticed St. Kate’s has had a friendly four-legged visitor temporarily residing on campus the past couple of weeks. Community members have spied a young deer grazing out on the quad, trotting down the lawn outside the dining hall and hanging out in several other campus locations recently, predictably sparking widespread adoration in a student body obsessed with cute animals.
Despite a general sense of excitement surrounding the deer’s presence, however, there are several safety risks involved with the animal making campus its home. Given these risks, Public Safety sent out an email on Friday, Mar. 3, recommending steps community members can take to ensure the health of the deer and the well-being of themselves and others.
“In recent months, Public Safety has become increasingly aware of the young deer that has been seen wandering around campus,” the email said. “However, with recent reports of individuals feeding the deer, and of the deer attempting to follow community members into buildings, our awareness changed to concern.”
Exemplifying that a deer making St. Kate’s its home could lead to potentially dangerous situations, the campus-wide Public Safety notification mentioned that there was a safety incident involving a deer in the early 2010s, when an off-leash dog chased one through the glass door of a building on campus.
The email from Public Safety further explained that regularly feeding the deer will cause it to lose its natural fear of predators and people. “You obviously don’t want a deer to lose its prey instinct, right,” said Victor Juran, director of Public Safety. “You don’t want it to be so comfortable that it’s not scared of the things that it needs to be scared of, and then it gets hurt, right? What we’re seeing too is the deer has become a little too friendly with some people here on campus, and part of that is people are feeding it right now.”
One of the dangers of feeding the deer is that the food offered might not be healthy for it, Juran added. Furthermore, the deer may stay on campus and regularly approach people for food if it expects meals instead of moving on and finding a natural food source.
When the department first heard about the deer through word-of-mouth and general community discourse, Public Safety reached out to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, Juran explained. “The DNR basically came back with those two things that we put in the email, right,” he said. “It was: Stop feeding the deer. And then do things to make it feel unwelcome. Which I know kind of sounds a little harsh, but that was obviously the advice because we want the deer to kind of move on back into its more natural surroundings and not become essentially like a pet on campus, if you will.”
The deer sniffs at some tracks in the snow in front of Stanton. Credit: Anna Fields
“Feeding deer makes them less wild, more vulnerable to disease and subject to population increases above what the available natural habitat can support,” the DNR website explains. Although offering food may seem helpful to local deer populations, it can attract large numbers of them to a single area, leading to the spread of illnesses such as chronic wasting disease, a fatal neurological disease without a cure that affects deer and their close evolutionary relatives. While the DNR website does state that the disease is “relatively rare in Minnesota,” the department has enacted deer feeding and attractants bans across several counties as a precautionary measure to protect the deers of Minnesota and prevent them from congregating in large numbers near human food sources.
Food handouts can result in several other unintended consequences, such as enterotoxemia, a disease that often kills deer when they ingest too much grain. Drawing too many deer to one area may also damage the ecosystem of that land, causing mass animal consumption of plants and crops or the destruction of private gardens. Attracting deer to urban areas may cause increased traffic accidents involving the animals, and enticing deer to remain in one location may disrupt their winter migration patterns.
To protect the deer and the campus community, the Public Safety email recommended refraining from approaching and feeding the deer. While the email also stated that Public Safety would take further steps such as harassing the deer with noise, Juran clarified that the department is continuously assessing the situation and will only enact this plan if a lack of handouts from the campus community does not cause the deer to travel elsewhere on its own.
Juran went on to emphasize that all steps the department takes to discourage the deer from interacting with community members are in the animal’s best interests. “We really felt that the communication was key,” Juran said, so that anyone who saw a Public Safety officer approaching the deer and shaking a can of change would understand what was happening.
Based on advice from the DNR and Public Safety, it seems like protecting the deer and campus wildlife is a community effort, enacted so that everyone may safely enjoy the natural beauty of St. Kate’s for years to come.
