Young Deer With Scours

[catapault]

Mr Poe and Domino were staring out the door at a young deer on our front lawn.

No spots on deer so older than a fawn but not adult. It turned to walk away and I could see that its spine was very prominent and the flanks were sunken in. Then I saw it was black from under its tail down its hind legs. Has to be scours. It wasn't staggering, walked / semi-jumped down the wall, which is low at that point. Head up, ears erect, eyes looked good.

moxiewild is it likely to survive?

 

[Caspers Human]

Deer are amazingly resilient. Not to say that there isn’t anything wrong with your deer but it could be almost anything, not necessarily life threatening.

(Okay... So, it's not actually YOUR deer. Wildlife doesn't belong to anybody but it is "your" deer in the sense that it's the one that comes to visit your property. )

Deer can eat almost anything, compared to other animals. Did you know that they can even eat poison ivy without getting sick? I was surprised to learn that! But, that's not to say that, if a deer CAN eat something that it SHOULD eat something. There are plenty of things that a deer can eat that would give it digestive trouble. If a deer got into a big patch of wild blackberries and ate a whole lot of them, it could get the scours. Since it's a young deer, it might not have the experience to know what to eat or not eat, yet.

However, if you see that deer again and it doesn't look like its health is improving, there is probably something wrong.

You mentioned that you noticed that the deer looked like it had lost weight but also noted that it was walking all right. Are you thinking about whether the deer has scrapie? (chronic wasting disease) If it stumbles, drools or seems to lose its fear of humans, CWD is one possibility but scours isn't one of the usual symptoms.

If you are worried that the deer has a communicable disease... CWD/scrapie is communicable AND it is zoonotic (can be transmitted from animals to humans)... that deer needs to be culled. You should call a game warden and tell them that you have spotted a deer that you believe is infected with CWD. If you can get a good picture of the deer, I'm sure that the game warden could use that to help figure out what the problem is.

If the deer has a communicable disease, it needs to be taken out of the population or else other deer could also get infected. It could also infect livestock and domestic animals, too. It's a long shot but, once that happens, the next step is for a disease to be passed to humans. That's how we got this stupid coronavirus. People acted stupidly and brought sick, wild animals into contact with other humans and it spread from there.

Don't forget that hunting season is coming soon. Most hunters that see a deer with the scours would pass it up and call a game warden but there are some that get "buck fever" and would shoot it and take it home. If the deer is sick, bad things could happen.

So, yes, keep an eye out and watch to see if the deer gets better. If it doesn't seem to be getting better, call it in.

Nice catch!

 

[catapault]

Thank you for your comments, Caspers Human A few years ago I saw a different deer with scours, a couple of miles from my house. It did not look as gaunt as the one I saw yesterday. Just as we worry about our cats when they have diarrhea an aggressive case of scours / diarrhea could lead to dehydration and weight loss.

Have not heard of chronic wasting disease around here. Scours happens in young cattle and farmed deer. They are treated. No way to run down this particular wild deer, capture and treat it. If it dies the coyotes will be happy.

Different animal, different disease - did once see a raccoon staggering and falling over as it went up a slope behind my house in the rain. Doubt rabies, more likely distemper. By the time I might have reached someone to come and do something it would have been gone in the woods. And I was not about to go out and try to box it up myself.

Living the wild free life is not always lengthy and happy.

 

[Caspers Human]

Maybe I shouldn’t be so worried about chronic wasting disease but I have a friend from high school whose uncle died of Creutzfeld-Jacob disease, which is one of the human forms of CWD and it is transmissible from deer to humans. The guy was an avid deer hunter and he didn’t know about the disease until after he got sick.

CWD isn’t thought to be transmissible from deer to livestock to humans but there is a lot that isn’t known about prion diseases so an ounce of caution is warranted.

Chances are that it’s not CWD but, if the deer is seen again and it isn’t getting any better, the cautious choice is the better.