This is a sad story.  Yesterday we killed a deer.  A baby deer.  On Accident.

Our house backs up to the mountains and we have a LOT of wildlife … deer, bears, coyotes, mountain lions (we’ve only seen one), etc.  This time of year all the deer are out & it’s not unusual to have a whole pack of them in our front yard (do you call them a “pack”?).

Anyways… to the story:

We were driving home yesterday evening and I was checking out a video on my phone.  Chris looked over to check out what I was watching (he was driving) and SMACK we hit something.  It happened so fast.  Chris got out and it was a young deer that ran in front of the car, it died almost instantly.  We called the police department and animal control.  Then we had a very serious conversation with the boys on the importance of not running into the street as cars are dangerous (they kept asking “why daddy killed the deer”).

This is the first time either of us has ever hit an animal and we feel really terrible about it.  I almost wished we weren’t vegan so we could have at least eaten the meat instead of killing it for no reason.

It was a HUGE wakeup call as to how fast something can happen while driving and how stupid it is to take our eyes off the road for a second to check our phone, etc.  We’re lucky it was a small deer and not something bigger or human that ran out in front of the car.  Our resolution from this is that we will keep our phones in the glove compartment while driving, which is going to be REALLY hard!.  We’re one day into this resolution, I’ll keep you posted on how it goes… DRIVE CAREFULLY!

Here’s a photo of a bear in our yard from last spring…