This Picture Of A Fawn And Its Rescuer Will Take Your Breath Away

MONTMORENCY COUNTY, MI — The fawn saved by a family saved at a Montmorency County lake in northern Michigan looks positively grateful in a picture with conservation officer Sidney Collins.

Collins was only part of the rescue operation that saved the fawn from drowning.

She got a call about the distressed fawn, which a family out on a fishing excursion reported was swimming in circles for several minutes.

They plucked the fawn out of the water when they saw no doe nearby to help the youngster, according to a post on the Michigan Department of Natural Resources Facebook page.

When Collins arrived, the doe — though surely nearby because the baby was in good shape and wasn’t dehydrated — still had not shown up to claim the baby.

So Collins called her.

She repeatedly played fawn bleats from her truck loudspeaker. It did the trick. Twenty minutes later, Collins heard a doe snorting in the woods, and the two were safely reunited.

Was the look on the fawn’s face in the photo with Collins one of gratitude?

Perhaps. Researchers are often cautious, lest their work be dismissed as unscientific anthropomorphism — that is, the attribution of human qualities or characteristics to animals.

But noted author and primatologist Frans de Waal says it's time to embrace the theory that all animals experience a range of emotions that historically have been considered uniquely human. It's a crutch, he says, that allows the human race to “sustain our customary ‘anthropodenial’: the denial that we are animals.”

“We like to see ourselves as special, but whatever the difference between humans and animals may be, it is unlikely to be found in the emotional domain,” he wrote in a 2019 piece in The New York Times.

His most recent book, “Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves,” is centered on chimpanzees, but his research also focused on Capuchin monkeys, elephants, dogs and rats.

“Uniquely human emotions don’t exist,” de Waal wrote in The Times. “More and more, I believe that we share all emotions with other species in the same way that we share virtually every organ in our bodies with them. No exceptions.”

Although no specific research exists on the degree to which deer feel those emotions, the World Deer Organization says wildlife observers have gathered anecdotal evidence of emotion within the family Cervidae.

“All in all, we can conclude that animals, including deer, do feel emotions. And among those emotions is grief for their dead,” the World Deer Organization wrote on its website.

“Deer exhibit behavior that indicates they do mourn the loss of members of their herd. Whether by changes in demeanor, animal funerals, or visiting the death site — each species has their own method of handling loss in their community.”