A local deer has some kindhearted human neighbours to thank for still being alive today after a harrowing fall into a 30-foot-deep wastewater tank near Toronto that surely would have otherwise been his end.
The nail-biting incident was all caught on camera by staff at Toronto Wildlife Centre (TWC), who were called in to perform the emergency rescue last week.
The buck had somehow lept into a concrete settling tank at a Pickering wastewater treatment facility and had been struggling in frigid sewage overnight.
Exhausted, wet, covered in sludge and exposed to hypothermic conditions for an unknown number of hours, the poor animal had clearly been unable to get out on his own, though he had managed to swim over to an overflow area of the vat where he could safely stand up.
“This is a pretty intense situation. He’s actually in a pool of wastewater being treated, so… yikes,” TWC team members dispatched to the site said. “There are a lot of things that could go wrong with this situation, including the deer ending up back in a 30-foot-deep pool of wastewater.”
The logistics of retrieving the adult white-tailed deer — estimated to weigh about 200 lbs. — from the enormous tank were indeed far from simple.
The strategy was to first sedate the deer via dart from afar, and hope that he collapsed in a way that did not pose further risk to himself or rescuers — which, thankfully, he did.
Workers from the facility then stepped in with equipment they already had on-site, including ladders to get down into the pit and a crane to lift the wild critter out of the outdoor basin.
He was then carried into a TWC vehicle to be assessed and treated by veterinary staff. The buck, his luck turned, was washed, dried, warmed and treated for lacerations he sustained during the fall.
“After what he’d gone through, I’m sure that was the little bit of rest that he needed to gather his strength back up,” staff said in the video of the ordeal.
And the story only got more heartwarming from there.
“While he was waking up, we saw two other deer that happened to hop by as well. It’s kind of one of those Disney endings, which we don’t often get,” they recounted. “This poor deer that was close to losing its life was now waking up back with its herd. We couldn’t be happier with how it went.”
