HOW RAISING AN INFANT DEER BROUGHT PEACE WHERE THERE WAS WAR
Last summer, I stumbled upon a huge revelation about how the world might solve the racism, intense hatred & violent wars that threaten to take us all down. I know, this sounds kind of crazy, but the idea came to me one summer after having lost still another precious veggie garden to our local deer family.
I'd been warring with the deer population for years; fences, more fences, electric fences, noisy radio shows on motion detecting switches, repellents, shotgun blasts (OMG), bow & arrows, nasty dogs. I swear, after 20 years, I actually craved the act of killing one of them. I felt very, very victimized by their destructive actions against my innocent family and our food supply.
It was early June on Vancouver Island, B.C. Late one evening after dark, my middle child Mac & buddy Andrew arrived home with a newborn baby deer in their arms. They had found it abandoned right out on the road and so brought it home to rescue. The boys named the tiny baby deer LUCKY.
And that was how the end of my deer war was started.
Lucky immediately bonded with us as if we were his mom & dad, brothers and sisters of the deer world. I guess he never saw his real mom for some reason, so he thought WE HUMANS were his family. He followed us right in the house and did not leave our side for months. We struggled to feed lamb & deer milk formula to him from a bowl; you can't begin to imagine what a huge mess this was. He never did figure out the baby bottle routine, so we had to hold the bowl of warm milk for him while he butted it, drank it, spluttered it all over, choked on it, spluttered & sneezed all over the place and pushed us back to the kitchen if there was not enough.
Lucky was unbelievably adorable; SO TINY! All beautiful soft baby brown, lovely fawn spots, big brown eyes, with one inch long eyelashes, tiny soft, perfect baby deer feet, dainty at the end of those long and unlikely crazy legs, that sent him catapulting across our slippery tile & wood floors.
He made our whole family laugh every day, following us everywhere, chasing the kids like a puppy and jumping up on my lap if he was scared or wanted some affection. He seemed to need to make contact with us, even insisting on licking our hands and face. A very strange sensation!
Soon, he grew to enjoy plant leaves and berries and flowers and, of course, the previously mentioned sainted veggie garden. Problem was, we had fenced the garden right up to our house to keep those D#*% deer out of our garden, but now the baby deer lived in the house and went into the fenced garden with the kids, out the kitchen door. Lucky loved those tender organic veggies like every other deer, but he lived INSIDE the garden.
That's when I just gave up on the veggies, realizing that for some strange reason, I could no longer do battle with my old enemies, the deer.
I couldn't fight them because I had completely lost the ability to hate them or even feel anger towards them. Lucky, and the months of love & care that we had given him, had transformed our well entrenched hatred to love.
It occurred to me then that, perhaps, if people with hatred & racism mind sets were allowed to nurture babies from the race or human type that they could not get over hating, the same or a similar result might happen. I know this is just not going to be able to happen in reality, but wouldn't it be nice?
Of course, we can't just hand babies over to haters, to help them get over their dangerous views! But what if instead of real babies, we tried it out with fake newborn babies? Is it possible for a realistic life like reborn doll to soften the steel cold heart of racism in this world?
So, how about buying a newborn baby doll for your child that doesn't look like your race, but like another. Perhaps it will make you or your child into an ambassador of world peace.
Reborn Baby Dolls as Ambassadors of Acceptance & Love! I can almost believe it!