Posted on 09/21/2007 8:31:50 AM PDT by DogByte6RER
Bambi vs. the Bureaucrats
Six years ago, an Oregon man rescued a fawn and raised her as a family pet. So when the state seized the deer, with a threat of euthanasia, all hell broke loose.
By Winston Ross
Sept. 19, 2007 - Had he been a hunter, and had the mottled white doe that tumbled down a hill into his rural Oregon driveway six years ago been an adult, Jim Filipetti could have ponied up $19, applied for a deer tag and gunned the animal down. He could have butchered the deer the state now knows as "Snowball," mounted her head on the wall and moved on with his life.
But Filipetti chose to raise the injured fawn as a pet, spending thousands of dollars on veterinarian bills to treat her deformed hooves, installing strips of carpet throughout his house so she wouldn't slip on the hardwood floors, and feeding her a steady diet of sweetpeas, tomatoes and green beans—"the best that Safeway had to offer," he says. After 12 months, the house painter moved her to a pen outside his home in Molalla, Ore., but she was still a member of the family. "It was like having a dog around the house," Filipetti says.
Filipetti uses the past tense because his beloved Snowball has been seized by the state, which was considering euthanizing her. The story has outraged local residents and animal-rights advocates.
What’s telling is that the neighbors didn't complain. To the contrary, they took to Snowball, stopping by to feed the tame creature on a regular basis. "Everybody's got a set of animals somewhere," says Geordie Duckler, an attorney with the Animal Law Practice, a Portland specialty law firm that handles livestock disputes, biting incidents and claims against veterinarians. "It's rural Oregon."
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
Given the situation, the actual choice is between euthanasia and the petting zoo.
Other than that, I look to the fact that laws against keeping wild animals are not new, were passed for legitimate reasons -- and they make sense from several different standpoints. No sense in rejecting laws that have real and practical merit.
It's amazing how so many folks on this thread want to reject good sense when it comes to "their rights" with respect to something that doesn't belong to them in the first place.
Seems to me like a lot of folks are having a "bambi moment" that feeds on emotion rather than common sense.
Oh yeah...
That movie and “Old Yeller” were tear jerkers...
Carolyn
Carolyn (I hope I did this right.)
BTW, your tagline would be my second choice among many.
Carolyn, Thanks. Still no definite resolution on this yet, and the Portland media seems to have lost interest, maybe getting pressured by ODFW.
Lol, I thought it was a terrible title too...
Too often laws get misapplied. Disease is a worry in some cases, but clearly not in this case - the vet is the first place this deer went. Some people see baby animals alone and wrongly imagine that they’re abandoned or sick. Well, in this case the fawn was clearly sick - legs that needed casts to straighten them.
Wisely, the possibility of euthanasia was dropped the day after it was impounded.
As for the general issue of raising wild animals... as long as the animals are properly taken care of and kept on the owner’s property and are not endangered species taken from the wild - where’s the problem? (Or maybe that’s part of it - expense of checking to see if they’re properly taken care of?) It may be dangerous to the owner, but that should be the owner’s choice.
That or do something compassionate and feed the homeless & hungry some venison.
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