For more than a week, drivers and dog-walkers near Westland's Hines Park kept spotting the same unsettling sight: a young deer stumbling through the woods with a plastic Halloween pumpkin wedged over its entire head, unable to see where it was going.
The Detroit Animal Welfare Group, known locally as DAWG, started tracking sightings almost as soon as they were reported, worried the pumpkin would eventually stop the animal from eating or drinking. What they first assumed was a doe turned out, once they finally got close enough, to be a young male — a button buck just growing in his first antlers.
Four river crossings and a tranquilizer dart
Catching up to the deer took the better part of a Sunday. Rescuers followed it deep into the woods around the park, crossing a 20-foot-wide river four separate times as the animal doubled back through the water to shake them. "Not once, not twice, but four times," the group wrote afterward, describing the chase.
Once volunteers finally got within range, they tranquilized the deer, worked the cracked plastic pumpkin free of its head and antlers, and gave it fluids before reversing the sedative and letting it walk off into the park under its own power. A yellow tag was clipped to one ear — standard practice after a tranquilizer dart, meant to warn hunters later in the season that the animal was recently sedated and should not be taken for food.
DAWG's own account of the day made no secret of how it felt on the other end of the leash: cold, soaked through from four river crossings, and smelling, in the group's words, like a swamp — but relieved enough to say they'd "finally get some sleep tonight." Wildlife officials in Michigan field a steady trickle of these jack-o'-lantern rescues every November, usually deer or raccoons that stick their heads into carved pumpkins for the seeds and get the rind stuck behind their ears; this one simply went further and longer than most before anyone could catch up.
