I have been a volunteer wildlife rehabilitator, working for licensed rehabbers. My job was to raise squirrels, opossum and ravens in the desert. One of my fondest memories were taking two very young whitetail fawns whom I named Wind and Sky, siblings, and teach them to drink from a bottle. They were with me for two or three weeks.
When I took them to my rehabber, Betsy Knight, who runs the Big Bend Wildlife Sanctuary in Altha, FL, she was very careful not to "befriend" them. They would be weaned there with a minimum of human contact and later transferred to Tyndall Air Force Base to live in the forest and become game in deer season; sent off with prayers for their safety. That's all you can do.
When I see this, although I know it is not good for the deer to associate so closely with humans, it is a beautiful sight to me, and I wish I could do the same thing, while providing safe haven to them in hunting season.
But that would be in a perfect world.
It's like the fish I feed across the street. I can't fish for "my" fish. I don't do any fishing anyway. But if I did, I couldn't do it there. A few summers back, I watched one large bream who had lost an eye. I watched that fish for a year before it disappeared.
When I visited Montana this year, I wanted to visit a feed store and drop off salt licks on the prairie. But I know what would happen. It's like feeding game at a station to bring the subject in close so that they can be killed.
Two sides of a coin.
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