Deer spotted wearing high-visibility safety jacket in Northern B.C.

Andrea Arnold is used to having to slow down to let deer cross the road in her Northern B.C. community. But this weekend she saw something that made her pull over and snap a photo.

A deer was wearing a high-visibility safety jacket. Not a vest, a "full-on jacket" that has been zipped up, says Arnold, who lives in McBride and is a reporter for the local paper the Rocky Mountain Goat.(opens in a new tab)

"They're everywhere around town, but this one was wearing high-vis. I did a double, triple take like, 'Wait, what am I actually seeing here?'" Arnold told CTV News.

Since posting photos of the deer in a Facebook group, Arnold says she's received a lot of entertaining comments in response – but no information about how the deer ended up in the jacket or who may be responsible.

"People do feed the deer in town, which is a public nuisance and safety concern. So far, nobody's been able to truly stop that, but the idea that somebody has tamed one enough in order to (do this). I mean, I put clothes on my dog. She fights me, and she trusts me," Arnold says.

Photo submitted by Andrea Arnold, a reporter with the Rocky Mountain Goat newspaper.

Sgt. Eamonn McArthur with the B.C. Conservation Officer Service says he's hoping to get more information from people in McBride about the deer so he can figure out the best way to proceed.

"I don't even want to speculate on how that might have happened. They're not predisposed to wearing clothes" he says.

"Even if you can get close enough to the wildlife to put it in a sweater or a jacket or boots or what have you, we recommend highly against that."

The jacket – a piece of safety gear for humans – is, McArthur notes, potentially dangerous to the deer. The biggest risk is that the jacket will get caught on something and the deer will panic when trying to get free, potentially injuring itself.

The best-case scenario, McArthur says, is that the jacket will rip and fall off. If conservation officers get enough tips from the public to locate the deer and confirm it is wearing a jacket, the approach would be to try to get close enough to tranquilize it so the jacket can be safely removed.

Harassing wildlife, an offence under BC.'s Wildlife Act, means to "worry, exhaust, fatigue, annoy, plague, pester, tease or torment" an animal.

This part of the legislation, McArthur notes, does not explicitly mention putting clothing or accessories on wild animals – but he says doing that would qualify.

"In general, animals get stressed out when you get that close to them. And we want to try and limit stresses on nature as much as possible."

Anyone who sees the deer is urged to steer clear and call the BCCOS hotline at 1-877-952-7277.

Whoever it was probably didn’t rope the deer to get the vest on. From the internet:

Roping A Deer ( Names have been removed to protect the Stupid! )

Actual letter from someone who farms and writes well!

I had this idea that I was going to rope a deer, put it in a stall, feed it up on corn for a couple of weeks, then kill it and eat it.

The first step in this adventure was getting a deer. I figured that, since they congregate at my cattle feeder and do not seem to have much fear of me when we are there (a bold one will sometimes come right up and sniff at the bags of feed while I am in the back of the truck not 4 feet away), it should not be difficult to rope one, get up to it and toss a bag over its head (to calm it down) then hog tie it and transport it home.

I filled the cattle feeder then hid down at the end with my rope.

The cattle, having seen the roping thing before, stayed well back. They were not having any of it.

After about 20 minutes, my deer showed up — 3 of them. I picked out.. ..a likely looking one, stepped out from the end of the feeder, and threw.. My rope. The deer just stood there and stared at me.

I wrapped the rope around my waist and twisted the end so I would have a good hold. The deer still just stood and stared at me, but you could tell it was mildly concerned about the whole rope situation.

I took a step towards it...it took a step away. I put a little tension on the rope and then received an education.

The first thing that I learned is that, while a deer may just stand there looking at you funny while you rope it, they are spurred to action when you start pulling on that rope.

That deer EXPLODED.

The second thing I learned is that pound for pound, a deer is a LOT stronger than a cow or a colt. A cow or a colt in that weight range I could fight down with a rope and with some dignity.

A deer— no chance.

That thing ran and bucked and twisted and pulled. There was no controlling it and certainly no getting close to it. As it jerked me off my feet and started dragging me across the ground, it occurred to me that having a deer on a rope was not nearly as good an idea as I had originally imagined.

The only upside is that they do not have as much stamina as many other animals.

A brief 10 minutes later, it was tired and not nearly as quick to jerk me off my feet and drag me when I managed to get up. It took me a few minutes to realize this, since I was mostly blinded by the blood flowing out of the big gash in my head. At that point, I had lost my taste for corn-fed venison. I just wanted to get that devil creature off the end of that rope.

I figured if I just let it go with the rope hanging around its neck, it would likely die slow and painfully somewhere. At the time, there was no love at all between me and that deer. At that moment, I hated the thing, and I would venture a guess that the feeling was mutual.

Despite the gash in my head and the several large knots where I had cleverly arrested the deer’s momentum by bracing my head against various large rocks as it dragged me across the ground, I could still think clearly enough to recognize that there was a small chance that I shared some tiny amount of responsibility for the situation we were in, so I didn’t want the deer to have to suffer a slow death, so I managed to get it lined back up in between my truck and the feeder - a little trap I had set before hand...kind of like a squeeze chute.

I got it to back in there and I started moving up so I could get my rope back.

Did you know that deer bite? They do! I never in a million years would have thought that a deer would bite somebody, so I was very surprised when I reached up there to grab that rope and the deer grabbed hold of my wrist.

Now, when a deer bites you, it is not like being bit by a horse where they just bite you and then let go. A deer bites you and shakes its head —almost like a pit bull. They bite HARD and it hurts.

The proper thing to do when a deer bites you is probably to freeze and draw back slowly. I tried screaming and shaking instead. My method was ineffective. It seems like the deer was biting and shaking for several minutes, but it was likely only several seconds.

I, being smarter than a deer (though you may be questioning that claim by now), tricked it.

While I kept it busy tearing the tendons out of my right arm, I reached up with my left hand and pulled that rope loose. That was when I got my final lesson in deer behavior for the day.

Deer will strike at you with their front feet. They rear right up on their back feet and strike right about head and shoulder level, and their hooves are surprisingly sharp. I learned a long time ago that, when an animal — like a horse —strikes at you with their hooves and you can’t get away easily, the best thing to do is try to make a loud noise and make an aggressive move towards the animal. This will usually cause them to back down a bit so you can escape.

This was not a horse. This was a deer, so obviously, such trickery would not work. In the course of a millisecond, I devised a different strategy. I screamed like a woman and tried to turn and run.

The reason I had always been told NOT to try to turn and run from a horse that paws at you is that there is a good chance that it will hit you in the back of the head. Deer may not be so different from horses after all, besides being twice as strong and 3 times as evil, because the second I turned to run, it hit me right in the back of the head and knocked me down.

Now, when a deer paws at you and knocks you down, it does not immediately leave. I suspect it does not recognize that the danger has passed. What they do instead is paw your back and jump up and down on you while you are laying there crying like a little girl and covering your head.

I finally managed to crawl under the truck and the deer went away.

So now I know why when people go deer hunting they bring a rifle with a scope to sort of even the odds.

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