Are DC Deer Cool?

Apparently this one is.

You see, Washington DC’s Rock Creek Park, on top of being a great place to drop the dead body of an intern, extends from the District’s wealthy, bucolic deer infested suburbs into the heart of the district, just blocks from the White House. In fact in April of 1997, several deer even made it onto the south lawn of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue –INSERT MONICA LEWINKSY JOKE HERE-, and these cervine bastards remain a national security threat to this day.

And it’s not like these deer are hapless creatures, no no, if anything the culture of the District has eaten these four legged mammals alive, both figuratively and literally. Not only are deer as ubiquitous to D.C suburbs as lobbyists are to the District’s steak and whore houses, but their flesh has received the ritzy Washingtonian style treatment as well. A year ago I was in the Dean and Deluca in Georgetown and saw that they were selling venison for $82 A POUND. If you do the math, you’ll realize that at 40 pounds of meat per deer, that would cost you $3280 for the whole animal, meaning it’d be genuinely less expensive to just go to Bethesda, run the fucking thing over, butcher it yourself and get your car fixed.

So should the nation have been shocked when on November 8th, 2009, a baby deer leapt into the lion enclosure at the National Zoo? I say no, and you want to know why? Because that deer, like every other Washington Whitetail, was BADASS. (NOTE-Apparently the video in the first link was shot by a man who was oddly named Ephraim Smethers, once again proving the Amish community’s scurrilous anti-deer bigotry)

Sure this once noble symbol of the outdoors has been corrupted by McMansions and greedy specialty food stores, but these local deer have that cut-throat spirit that makes D.C such a charming and pushy place to live. You don’t see any urban animals with this much chutzpah, do you? No instead of leaping head first into danger you only have spoiled, effeminate new money raccoons taking residence in over-priced SoHo boutiques and smarmy Los Angeles coyotes being paid off by TMZ to make Jessica Simpson’s life more miserable than it already is.

I say this deer exemplifies the American spirit in it's attempts to plunge headlong into unknown and dangerous territory for no other reason than that it wants to. Perhaps this fallen deer may even done this as an ironic protest against Obama further escalating the conflict in Afghanistan or maybe it was in celebration of the passage of Health Care reform (as it did receive mortal injuries and "being a deer" is often considered a pre-existing condition). We'll never know. And while it may have cost him his life, I think we can all agree at least one deer in Washington DC is very cool.