Jumping Doe Attacks Dog
If you take a stroll down a particular golf cart path in southeast Peachtree City, you're likely to see deer that won't run away from you.
Carolyn Taylor shot cell phone video of a deer that seemed unafraid of her while she walked the path with her dog. Her mother Susie Lucsko describes what happened moments after she stopped recording.
'All of the sudden, the deer started chasing them, and my daughter took off, running really fast, and the deer just trampled on her little basset hound,' said Lucsko.
It was a close call for Carolyn Taylor's dog, but things turned out much worse for a beagle named Scratch, whose owner, Hunter Wood, says his dog was in the confines of her backyard when a doe jumped the fence, and attacked.
'She was immediately onto the dog. She stomped it and cut it's head open.'
The dog was injured so badly, she had to be euthanized shortly afterward.
Several videos have been posted to YouTube from other parts of the country in years past showing times when mother deer have gone after dogs in similar ways.
Christy Daniels has done a survey of local vets, and discovered there have been at least a dozen similar attacks this summer alone.
'I have quit letting my kids take my dogs for walks on the cart path for sure,' said Daniels.
Meanwhile, Hunter Wood thinks humans are to blame, for creating an unnatural situation.
'We've got such a heavy deer population in this area, which is partly contributed to the fact that the neighbors feed them.'
Wood believes the deer is mistaking dogs for coyotes, their natural predator, and the only reason we don't see more dogs attacked like this is because deer usually don't want to be very close to a dog's human owners. In this specific neighborhood, the deer have trained out of their fear.
But Wood isn't ruling out that maybe his dog was killed as revenge for the well over one hundred deer he's taken throughout his hunting career.
Story re-posted from CBS46.com.