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Fish and Game conservation officer frees tangled
buck;
video goes viral |
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November 16, 2015 |
By Roger Phillips
IDFG public information specialist
It wasn’t an average day at the office for Idaho
Fish and Game Conservation Officer John McLain
when he encountered a white-tailed buck tangled
in baling twine, but his average days don’t go
viral on the Internet, either.
In August, McLain received a call about an
entangled buck near Orofino, and he went to
investigate it. Finding the buck, he turned on
his body-mounted camera and thought, “this might
be a video of me getting my butt kicked, or it
might turn out alright.”
 Fortunately,
it was the latter, although not without some
drama that he captured on video. Upon seeing
McLain, the buck panicked, but the twine had
wrapped around its front leg and prevented it
from fleeing. The buck quickly exhausted itself,
and that’s when McLain went to work carefully
cutting the twine from its leg and antlers.
Once freed, the deer remained on the ground for
a few seconds, then bound away and appeared
uninjured by the experience.
It wasn’t the first time McLain dealt with
entangled deer during his nine years as a Fish
and Game conservation officer. Another time, he
untangled a deer from a soccer net, and in a
sports-related coincidence, another deer
wandered into a batting cage in Orofino. When
McLain tried to help it get out, “I kind of went
for a ride,” he said.
After posting his video to his Facebook page, he
watched in amazement as the world took notice.
“I knew it would get some shares, but when it
hit 100,000, I was like ‘Wow,’” he said.
So far, the video has been shared more than
147,000 times and liked more than 69,000 times.
He received hundreds of friend requests and
personal messages because of it.
Wildlife rescues are common for Fish and Game’s
Conservation officers, who may be called on to
deal with all types of situations. They can be
as routine as herding a wild animal out of town,
to as bizarre as tranquilizing a bull elk to
remove porcupine quills from its nose.
“It happens,” McLain said. “I just happened to
catch this one on video.”
Watch the video at
https://fishandgame.idaho.gov/content/officer-frees-buck. |
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