There is something special about sharing your home with an animal. It doesn’t matter if it is a dog, cat or something unusual, they bring a lot of love to the family.
Of course, when you open your home to an animal, they’re going to require some care for you as well. It is something that runs in both directions. You provide them with a place to stay, food and medical care when necessary and they provide you with lots of love.
Pets have a unique ability to form bonds with humans but they can also form bonds with each other as well. At times, that bond may even extend outside of their own species, as you are about to see.
Through the following pictures, you will see how one family in Warwickshire was changed when a baby deer entered their life and never left.
Geoff Grewcock is accustomed to taking care of wild creatures.
He runs the Nuneaton & Warwickshire Wildlife Sanctuary in the United Kingdom, which is dedicated to treating and rehabilitating wild animals that are injured or sick.
The goal, as is the case with most wildlife sanctuaries, is to eventually release the animals back into the wild.
However, every now and then, special cases arise.
Some animals are too badly injured to be able to reasonably fend for themselves in the wild once they’re healed, while others might need protection from human hunters or loss of ecological environment.
And then, of course, there are the animals that find their human friends and domestic life to their liking, and simply refuse to go back!
That’s exactly the case with a young deer called Bramble, who lives at home with Geoff, his wife, and their four dogs.
Bramble, a stag, was first discovered as a 2-week old baby, comatose in an isolated field.
The sanctuary brought Bramble in, where they took very good care of him until he eventually emerged from his coma.
From that point onward, Geoff began to rear Bramble by hand.
Without a mama deer to raise Bramble, he grew up with Geoff and his four dog siblings, and eventually seemed to conclude that he was a dog, too.
Just like his canine family, Bramble likes to hang out by the window and watch people go by, and also can be relied on to go greet friends and neighbours at the door.
Geoff has tried to release Bramble back into the wild once or twice, but Bramble doesn’t seem interested.
He loves his family, and he’s also perfected the trick of opening the fridge to rifle through for interesting vegetables and other snacks.
Besides, Geoff is quite happy to have the deer by part of the household; the family loves Bramble, and they know his lifespan would be much shorter in a deer park than it is at home.
Since deer are somewhat overpopulated in the U.K., as they are in many parts of the U.S., there’s an annual cull of deer to protect the ecology from overgrazing.
Even though Geoff understands better than most why such action is necessary, he’s not about to let Bramble end up in a cull, potentially waylaid by his slightly more plush upbringing.
As Geoff put it to Caters, “I wasn’t going to hand-rear him and then let him be culled in a deer park when he’s 3. He’s one of the family.”
Besides, from what we can tell, it seems very unlikely that Bramble would enjoy living in the wild very much.
This highly domesticated deer is at his happiest when he’s curled up with the dogs while his people watch TV.
Barring that, he can occasionally be found curled up for a cozy nap on Geoff’s bed.
We wish this adorable sweetie pie many more years of cuddling up cozily with his “fellow” dogs.
Via: Little Things
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