Three men from east-central Alberta are being praised for jumping into action to help an injured deer Thursday morning.
Corey Dennett, 38, was checking oil wells when he found a deer tangled in a barbed wire fence in a back road ditch.
He was halfway between Lloydminster and his work in Vermilion, Alta., when he phoned his Husky Energy coworkers, Marshall Stasiuk, 36, and Dylan Pattisson, 34, for backup.
When he arrived, Stasiuk says the deer was kicking and thrashing. Blood painted the snow red until the cut in its ankle became clotted, he said.
“The deer seemed to calm right down when we shut our trucks off and walked up to it,” Stasiuk said. “It didn’t seem to be too scared. It wasn’t too violent at all.”
His first thought was how the deer wound up there — and how long it had been suffering. Stasiuk estimates about four hours.
“None of us had really come across that before,” he said. “We have emergency training and such for our jobs, but nothing that deals with wildlife stuck in a fence.”
‘You just do it quick’
Stasiuk is a hunter who grew up on a farm, so he was prepared to step in.
The leg was stuck worse than they imagined, he said. So, they cut the wire, then dealt with the barb snagged in the deer’s leg.
“It’s like pulling a sliver,” Stasiuk said. “You just do it quick.”
“You keep a calm demeanour and your calmness rubs off on the animal,” he said. “So the biggest goal was to stay calm, and luckily, it reacted well to it.
“The deer laid there and looked exhausted, then all of sudden his ears perked up, and we knew right then, ‘Okay, he’s coming back to life.”
When the deer ran off, the three of them looked at the leg and saw that it wasn’t broken, Stasiuk said.
“It was obviously sore and the muscles were probably insanely tight because he’d been thrashing there for so long, and scared.”
Stasiuk guesses that the deer was about a year old.
“He was young and resilient. He would bounce back no problem,” he said.
“I’m a hunter too so I respect the animals. If everyone just ignored it and abused them, we wouldn’t have them anymore. So stay within the laws and make it sustainable for the future. I like to treat an animal how I’d like to be treated. If I was stuck in a fence, I hope someone would stop.”
His lesson from all this? “Don’t ignore things that are obviously wrong,” he said.
“Everyone’s in such a hurry these days, you got to be able to stop and take the time and do the right thing.
“I don’t want to see any animal suffer… there’s no need for it. If it’s something that we can remedy with our own two hands, you should do it.”