Deer Hunter in Japan – I don’t really think it’s necessary?

One of the more bizarre news from Japan lately was that of the restaurant owner in Japan's ancient capital Nara, which is home to a bunch of Buddhist temples and free roaming tame deer. The restaurant owner shot one of the deer roaming the park with a crossbow. (Japan Times story here)

The roaming deer are tame to the degree that if you happen to have any of the fodder cookies sold there on you, you will quickly get surrounded by herds of them eager to get a piece of the cookie and not hesitating to nib at whatever part of you which happens to be close to it. It can easily turn into a situation where you find yourself hunted by a fray of hungry deer running out of fear of being mistaken for a fodder cookie and eaten alive.

Now, this restaurant owner apparently had a devious plan of shooting a deer with a crossbow and use the meat in his restaurant to save himself some money. He did succeed as far actually shooting a poor deer in the stomach with a crossbow bolt, but instead of dying the deer escaped and was found by the caretakers of the park. It received emergency treatment, but passed away at the operating table. To add to the sob story, the deer was apparently pregnant and is missed by her family of the other thousand free roaming deer in the park.

That someone would get the idea of killing a deer in the Nara Buddhist temple park is bizarre in itself since they are basically sacred animals and Buddhism usually kind of frowns upon killing animals for food in general...

But "hunting" a deer in the Nara park would literally be as easy as going up to one of them, feed them a cookie, hit them in the head with a stick, put them in a sack and carry it home and make a nice deer casserole. There is no need, whatsoever to "hunt" them from a distance with a crossbow, and then also failing at that.

I only hope that his true objective was to murder Sentokun...