This video by Amy Carrickhoff, from November 2010, shows the special bond she had with a deer named “Little Girl”. In the video she feeds the deer powdered goat’s milk in her kitchen, a routine she performed every morning.
The excerpt below the video explains the rest of the story.
The video is heartwarming with a dash of absurd. Carrickhoff stands outside her house in Oakridge, North Carolina, calling for a deer she has christened “Little Girl.” The deer comes out of the woods and jumps on Carrickhoff like a dog wanting to be petted. She scampers up the driveway and follows Carrickhoff into the house, where she then sucks down a baby bottle of goat’s milk. When the milk is gone, Carrickhoff dabs the deer’s mouth with a tissue.
One of our producers initially spotted the video on YouTube in 2010 and encouraged Carrickhoff to upload to our site. The video was popular with readers from the start, but more than two years later, the iReport resurfaced on several hunting sites and took off anew this past January.
While some animal lovers were touched by the obvious bond Carrickhoff had with the deer, hunters and wildlife rehabilitators felt she wasn’t doing the doe any favors. They said she was allowing the deer to get too comfortable around humans and could have been hit by a car, been shot by a hunter, or hurt someone.
“You just gave this animal a DEATH SENTENCE – you also have put all your neighbors and their children at risk of being attacked where this deer matures and when she doesn’t get fed, she attacks someone,” one reader wrote, one of about 250 comments on the iReport.
We recently caught up with Carrickhoff (username deermommy2), a ticket agent for United Airlines, and asked her a few questions about her viral iReport.
Carrickhoff’s first comment was that if she had known the video would get so many views she would have changed out of her gym clothes. As for the deer, sadly, the update isn’t a happy one.
Little Girl continued coming back for bottles until around January 2011, when she moved onto regular deer food, Carrickhoff said. The size she is in the video is as large as she ever got. Carrickhoff last saw Little Girl in October of that year. Something just seemed wrong, she remembered. Carrickhoff watched as the deer appeared to have a seizure.
“She walked off into the woods and we never saw her again,” she said. “We combed those woods … we never found anything.”
Looking back, Carrickhoff said getting to know the deer was a special experience that she doesn’t regret.
Friends had brought Little Girl — apparently orphaned as a baby — to Carrickhoff’s home because the woods in their backyard were protected, and the deer would be safe from hunters. School children loved visiting the gentle creature who would lick them with her soft tongue and didn’t mind being petted.
Carrickhoff is confident that she didn’t overly domesticate the animal. Even when Little Girl was bottle-fed, she lived in the woods and did “deer things,” Carrickhoff’s daughter said. The deer gave birth to a baby of her own the following June, and toward the end, she wouldn’t come when she was called. She was becoming wild again.
She and her husband got so attached to Little Girl that they don’t ever want to take care of another animal.
“I just watch the videos and she kind of lives on,” she said.
