Interspecies love: deer and cat

November 12, 2013 • 2:58 pm

Look, I can’t vouch that this is true love, but it’s cute anyway. And if an owl and a pussycat can become amorous, why not a deer and a pussycat?

This was posted on Viralnova, which shows six photos of cervid-felid congress (I reproduce four below). The short tale:

Every morning, one pet owner in Pennsylvania noticed that his cat was going missing. Curious as to what his little kitty was up to, he began following him. What he found was the sweetest thing. His cat befriended a wild animal and they met every morning… for snuggles.

deer5

deer2

deer

deer4

Okay you haters, start suggesting that it’s Photoshopped, the deer is covered with tuna juice or other stuff like that!

h/t: Steve

48 thoughts on “Interspecies love: deer and cat”

  1. I think in that last shot, the cat is trying to figure out how he’s going to drag the carcass home. 😉

  3. My cat gets along with deer well (and he doesn’t get along with anyone, including me). I think that’s where he gets his ticks. The deer sit on the lawn and he cuddles them. I had another cat that would sleep in the raccoon den with the raccoon family on our property on cold nights. When the raccoons would come and eat her cat food, she’d groom them while they ate. When I’d tell her to chase them off, she’d reply, “Hey, I need them for body heat”.

  4. Okay you haters, start suggesting that it’s Photoshopped, the deer is covered with tuna juice or other stuff like that!

    😀 This made me LOL!

    The pictures are cute. I wonder if many of our pets have secret extra specie friends.

  5. The deer seems calm. The ones around my Massachusetts home are skittish. As soon as they see a human they start to walk away.

      1. I don’t know. The deer on the college campus where I am are very calm. They loiter around very close to people, only bothering to take notice or move if you actually try to touch one.

        Still, I don’t know that I fully buy the story. It’d seem more plausible if the owner had a relationship with both the deer and the cat and this was in their yard.

  8. I know this might sound stupid, but I’ll ask anyway — about the friendship between the owl and the pussycat: if the owl becomes sufficiently hungry will he start thinking of his cat friend as food? Does he have any kind of what we might call a “moral sense” where he won’t eat the friend?

    1. Well in tune with the fictional owl/pussycat theme…

      We could consider John Dominic Crossan’s excellent study of the fictional Jesus ~ he postulates that the Creator-of-all-things’ only begotten son’s corpse was eaten by dogs

      Presumably if a dead creator can be dog food, then St. Francis could easily be on the menu among all those carnivores who supposedly loved the Saint

      Also, dogs have been known to gnaw off the numbed diabetic toes of their loving, living owners

      On that basis I reckon any owl foolish enough to get involved in a deep relationship with a pussycat should sleep with one eye open…

    2. I think it was Woody Allen who noted that, while as Isaiah prophesied, the lion might lie down with the lamb … the lamb’s not gonna get a lot of sleep.

  11. Tuna, meat or juice, is not good enough for our cats, not anymore. I made the mistake of giving them the sockeye salmon tin to lick out and that was it.

    Also the deer around here are so blasé about people that they won’t abandon their hosta salad until you are nearly within arms reach. Even then, they just go a short distance and wait to see if you are going to give up and let them get back at it.

      2. It’s complicated. Something to do with kids that complain very bitterly about the smell of fish being cooked and a wife that buys things whenever the price is low.

        Occasionally I get to clean and cook a fresh caught Coho, but the peanut gallery will inevitably be heard from when I do.

    1. “This is the weirdest looking crow I’ve ever seen; I’d better nurse it to health” – Moe the Crow.

      1. You know, baby birds puff up their feathers and make themselves fluffier in order to look cute (sorry for the science jargon) to the parent, so maybe this fluffy kitten triggers that response in the crow. It apparently works even when the offspring get as large or larger than the parents. I see this all the time at outdoor restaurants, big birds teasing a handout with the cute fluffy pose from birds their same size or even smaller.

        1. They also do the “look at my sore wing. You need to help me because of my poor wing”. Then they make with the broken wing look.

          1. I’ve seen vids of birds leading predators away from ground nests with the lame bird act. Are you saying they do it at other times too?

    2. That video was the first thing I thought of when I saw Jerry’s pictures! I love the part where the kitten ambushes the crow toward the end!

          1. The ambush I remember was where the kitten was behind a picket fence and jumped out and startled the crow. Am I making this up?

      2. There’s a great video of an owl and a cat out on the interwebs. The music is a Spanish language rock song. I’ve also seen a video of a canid and a cervid romping around someone’s back yard.

      1. Presumably not much more than other crows’ eyes, but crows probably think other crows are cute enough to not be worth it, not that the crows themselves know it’s only supposed to apply to other crows. They just know they think certain things are cute.

  13. I hope this serves as a wake up call, secularists. The photographer proudly displays foreplay between two of his partners, but at least spares us the 3-way pics of him joining his menagerie in sweaty sexual congress. NOW do you at long last understand the inevitable outcome of same sex marriages you been warned about all these years? Morans!

    2. We can never say that the opponents of SSM didn’t give us fair warning of the advent of this interspecies sexual apocalypse.

    1. And Ghostbusters fans (especially those of the Venkmanite school) are sure to twist it into “real Old-Testament … wrath-of-God type stuff … Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! … Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes! … The dead rising from the grave! … Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together!”

  17. It occurs to me that if a carnivorous animal is well-fed, friendships like this can develop. Carnivores’ brains are hard-wired to recognize prey, I’m sure, but having that gnawing feeling in your gut sure helps!

    1. This probably applies to humans as well. We’d all get along a lot better if all our basic needs were met.

  18. This doesn’t strike me as unexpected at all, if, naturally, somewhat improbable (otherwise it wouldn’t be worth remarking on).

    But c’mon, our emotions are OLD. Same with our skeletons, and both are ultimately parts of our body. If we share a warped version of the latter with these relatively close common ancestors, why not the former as well? We certainly see behaviors indicative of similar emotional lives to ours in other animals, and it seems to us instinctually that that’s what they are, which should tell us something, because that’s the same way the other members of their species themselves would have to interpret those actions – Namely, that it would just “feel” like that’s what’s happening. They need that because they don’t have language to analyze it logically, and we retain it as an evolutionary legacy.

    The consensus on animal (well, OK, mammal, but that’s usually what we fellow mammals mean by ‘animal’) psychology seems to be drifting towards humans’ exceptional mental capacity being a matter of degree rather than kind. I agree to an extent, though I think we do have faculties that allow what David Deutsch calls a “jump to universality,” but again, that just requires a little tweaking of the already existent structure.
    The more I think about it, the more animals strike me as real individuals with real interiority like ours, just with aphasia and a bunch of learning disabilities, and various idiosyncrasies endemic to their species, but with a core of the same emotional palate, for which I think the relative proportions of our essentially identical skeletons are a good metaphor.

  20. My neighbors nursed an abandoned deer along till it was old enough to let loose in the wild. Imagine our surprise when a young spike buck, well more a nubs buck than spikes… Anyway it just walked up to the kids one day. We got a couple of pics. We didn’t know till later thee neighbors had recently returned it to the wild.

    This deer appears to me to be very comfortable near this home/photographer/cat. I suspect it may be rather familiar with humans.

    I did get to witness an interaction with a deer and our old tom cat out by the pond once. It was fun to watch. The cat just sat there warily as the deer approached and they nudged noses before the deer sauntered off. The cat has been retired and no longer stalks the watering hole.

    1. That must have been so cool to see, the interaction between your cat and the deer.

      When we used to back on to a forest, we often saw deer gamboling back and forth on the hiking paths. One morning, we saw a small fox hanging out with them. There was no threatening behaviour on the fox’s part, and the deer seemed tolerant or curious about the extra company.

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