Running errands this morning, I encountered a fawn, smeared across the pavement of a local highway. Carcasses of raccoon and opossum also littered that stretch of road but the death of a young deer was especially sad.
No doubt, many Americans would not mourn the death of a white-tailed deer, regardless of its age. Relegated to narrow greenbelts by the development of human neighborhoods, the deer often help themselves to the plants that adorn our properties. After all, they lived here first.
Of course, in nature, the young and the old are often the victims of predation, a gruesome fact that is well-known but rarely observed (except when glimpsed in a nature documentary). But to die young in the "circle of life" is one thing; to succumb to a speeding vehicle, often at the hands of a careless driver, is quite another.
