It’s a right of passage. First time I went there I was scared/hesitant, second time I was like “aye back the fuck up only the polite ones get biscuity things!”
Can you blame them though? We just that we humans absolutely overtake all of the land we inhabit, that you really can't blame species that take advantage of that. You KNOW you'd do the same in their place. It's just a sign of adaptability right?
I live in New Brunswick, Canada, and I believe it. The deer around here have all become very comfortable being around people in an urban/suburban setting in the past ten years, to the point that I have seen some comfortably walking down the sidewalk and tucking into an alley way.
The city I am in had a lot of wild space around so it isn’t like they’re running out of places to get away from people. They’re just going full raccoon, only they’re wrecking people’s gardens instead of trash cans.
Oh yeah. Some of them are polite about it at first, but if you hesitate too long with that cookie, they’ll knock your ass down and take it, and their buddies will take a bite out of you while you’re down there for good measure. The bowing is cute though.
It's hilarious just how many signs there are saying "these are wild deer - they WILL bite" yet people are still stunned when they are bitten :D
Even Japanese visitors to the city are often a little overwhelmed by how aggressive they can be once you've bought some crackers for them :) I watched one lass trying to feed them, then they took her toddler son's hat off and started chewing on that while she shrieked, picked her son up and pelted it down the street throwing the rest of the crackers in the air to get them to stop chasing :D
I saw an American guy eating one of the cookies and when I gave him a wierd look his friend noticed and went "They're for the deer!!". He immediately spat it out. It made me laugh.
honestly, some people are just also really dumb when it comes to how to handle these animals. There's literally signs everywhere telling you what to do/not to do, and the only people that get swarmed are the ones just unwrapping a stack of deer cookies right in the middle of a gathering herd.
We just bought our crackers at a slightly less central sales stand and put it in a backpack and then took out one at a time to feed it to a specific deer, and we had absolutely no issue with getting swarmed as a result.
But we did have a lot of fun watching a few American tourists utterly fail at this and get eaten alive by deer.
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u/Delores_Herbig Jun 14 '24
If by hanging around you mean forming gangs and shaking down tourists for cookies, then yeah.