An Unusual Nightmare

I know I said I was finished blogging about Nationals and I was. Until I remembered something I learned last week. It’s funny, isn’t it? The more I rest, the more I remember from the conference. I suppose my brain is finally coming back on-line.

Anyway, I took a workshop last week called Crime Scene Imagination. It was held by a DNA Lab Tech and a Body Farmer. I’m not going to go into the body farming. It creeped me out a bit although I was highly intrigued.

No, today’s post is about something the body farmer, Michelle Labbe told us. Someone asked what kind of animals were usually first on scene when a body was left in the woods. Of course she explained about flies, beetles, and the like, but what shocked me was when she said, “Oh and deer.”

Now I live in Sportsman’s Paradise. I’ve had wild game more times than I can count, but I never once thought of that wild game snacking on me. If you want to dig deeper, think of it as Bambi using you like beef jerky. I was horrified. I had to know more! So I raised my hand and asked what exactly deer would eat on the human body. I was told they’d probably eat hair, maybe the dryer parts of the skin.

I dwelled on this information for days and it still bothers me. I tried to justify it. It has to be the salt content in the human body. I know hunters put out salt licks for deer, so for a deer to decide munching on a dead body is a good idea, has to be because of salt excreted through the pores. I should be fine with that, right?

Wrong. The writer in me had a lot to think about because I’m now wondering about the deer that used to live around the house I grew up in. Were any of them man-eaters? Has there ever been a case of a deer killing a human to eat their hair and lick their skin? What about rabbits? Should I worry about them too? Like I didn’t have enough to be scared of already. You know, black bears, cougars, coyotes, alligators and all the damn snakes in south Louisiana, now I have to worry about the bloody deer! And possibly rabbits and nutria-rats and opossums and squirrels. There’s a whole world of trouble out there ready to snack on my corpse!

Phew, glad I got that out of my system. I mean, logically (but we’re not dealing with logic, are we?) I know that the cycle of life is unending. You’re born, you die, your body becomes food for the next cycle forming. It’s natural, but damned if it still doesn’t freak me out.

How about y’all? Have you learned something recently that freaked you out? Have you ever heard of a man-eating deer and if so, where was it?