(submitted photo/Glen Fredin)

By Ronald Quaroni

Viral Buck

WATCH: Melfort area man’s video of close brush with deer goes viral

Nov 29, 2019 | 11:28 AM

It’s not every day you experience a close encounter with a deer. It’s even more rare to have one close enough to reach out and grab it by the horns.

But that’s exactly how close Glen Fredin got as he was field dressing a deer he had just shot and he has the video to prove it.

Bizarre encounter

“He could hear some crunching around him and when he looked up, there was another small buck walking around the truck,” Glen Fredin’s son Warren told paNOW. “Then it kept circling and laid its ears back and walked right in and tried to fight the other buck while it was lying there.”

Warren received a call from his Dad this past Sunday asking for help to load up a deer he had tagged. After a quick five-minute drive, he came upon the unusual sight.

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“I could see the deer circling his truck while he was outside,” Fredin told paNOW.

Not only did the raging buck attack the downed deer, it also left some damage on Dad’s truck.

“You can see in the video, when the buck hit the door, its antlers scratched the door on the vehicle,” Warren Fredin said.

Warren, 47, has hunted all his life and explained, he has never heard of an encounter quite like this before.

“They’re in the rut right now, they do a lot of crazy things they don’t normally do,” he said.

In the rut

Sgt. Daryl Minter, with the Ministry of Environment’s Conservation Service had one possible explanation for the odd occurence.

“They appear to be white-tail deer. This time of year white-tail deer are in the rut, which is their mating season. Bucks spar with each other for right to do the breeding. Probably what happened is these bucks were sparring prior to the hunter arriving and shooting one of them,” Minter said.

“I believe the one probably thought the fight wasn’t done. You can kind of see how he was scenting the buck and once he realized that ‘Yes this is the one I was sparring with,’ he gives it a few more pokes to make sure he has won the battle,” he said.

Minter concluded by explaining it’s not uncommon for the events like this to happen in the distance, but very rare for it to take place so close to a vehicle and a human.

Online Sensation

Warren Fredin shared the video online Sunday evening and it quickly went viral.

“I didn’t realize what it was going to do. My dad shared it on his [Facebook] page. I put it on my page as well and a few friends asked if I could set the privacy settings so they could show some other friends and it completely took off,” Fredin said.

As of Friday morning, the video has garnered more than 1.4 million views on Facebook.

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Ron.quaroni@jpbg.ca

Twitter: @Ronald Quaroni