RED CARPET ROXY’S “RED ALERT” OF THE WEEK-JULY 5, 2010

2 fawns born prematurely after their mother was impaled on a fence which forced her to go into labor image: dewayne little/u.s. fish and game

Just this past weekend, a good friend of mine who lives in Pacific Palisades (an area populated by lots of wildlife including deers) was horrified to walk outside of her front door and see an injured deer with a mangled backside and bleeding, stumble across the street and fall on her neighbor’s yard. The deer was very weak and doing all it could to ward off the prowling coyotes. An animal control officer was called to the scene where he determined that the animal had been gravely injured when trying to hop over a wrought iron fence with spikes. Sadly, because the deer was an adult, it would have mostly likely have suffered from capture myopathy (basically the deer becomes overly stressed that it gives itself paralysis and cardiac arrest) if transported from the scene and because its injuries were so severe, the officer made the decision to destroy the animal on site.

And this isn’t an uncommon occurrence. As the officer put it, he sees these type of situations “all of the time.” Often these deers can’t even make the jump, causing them to impale themselves on a spiked fence until they bleed out and die. In fact, the city of Los Altos in Nor Cal, also an area populated by deer, banned these spikes on all newly constructed fences as of January. What do you think? Should we push to ban these types of fences in areas where deers freely roam?