The dignity of a free deer – kudupinter World News Network

In addition to managing a bar La Vecilla de CurueñoJavier takes care of four sheep that he raises on a nearby farm. Every day, he takes care of them and feeds them because the guy loves animals and that’s all, you don’t have to think about it any further: some make models, … others play paddle tennis and Javier spends his free time taking care of ruminants in the mountains of Leónnear Asturias, between indescribable beauty and cold at 1,036 meters above sea level. One morning last winter, he noticed that there was no longer four sheep but five, and that the fifth did not have white wool but had brown hair and a strange muzzle. In reality, it was a deer that she had arrived freely at the farm from a nearby mountain, surely lost in her herd. Said Xavier that the deer lived perfectly with the sheep and that she came in and out of the farm as if she were one of them. With one nuance: unlike the sheep, one day the deer started following him everywhere and when he went to work at the bar, she stayed waiting for him at the door. Lucía Gutiérrez has already told all this better than me in ‘Northern Castile’, but I don’t think of anything else, so I tell it too, as if it were a version of the same song for the tribute album. The whole town got used to seeing the deer, which They started calling Pepaaccompanying Javier everywhere. Lucía Gutiérrez says that “those who observed them spoke of a special bond, difficult to explain.” And no one tried to keep her: Pepa is just a free animal who, freely, decided to live with the sheep in this meadow and to accompany Javier, guided, I suppose, by a herd instinct and a great desire for survival.

In March, the Civil Guard denounced Javier under a law that prohibits the possession of wild animals as pets. The complaint arrived in September and, therefore, he had to close the doors from the farm to Pepa. But it happens that the lost deer does not know the law and she decides to stay outside, waiting to be let into what she considers her home. I am fully aware that what I am telling is halfway between a Disney absurdity and a Samaniego fable. With one nuance: I do not personify an animal nor distort the reality of nature to attribute to it something that is not specific to it, whatever, crying bulls, praying rabbits, post-Lacanian elephants. On the contrary, it is about nature in its purest form, about a lost deer who finds refuge in a green farm and no longer understands why he is expelled from his home, “from the place where he learned to live”, as Lucía says.

But the deer is still outside, waitingand Javier has to drive to the bar to avoid Pepa following him. But she doesn’t care and keeps doing it. Javier is afraid that a car will end crush it. Meanwhile, she accompanies him to the bar and waits patiently at the door, without understanding anything. And Javier, in love with an animal that he considers part of the family after a year of living together, only thinks of the day when something will happen to not let her freely enter the place where the deer has decided to live, that is to say on a farm, by a river, in the middle of the mountains where she was born. Lucía says that “it wasn’t Javier who chose Pepa; “It was Pepa who chose Javier.” But at some point, the Civil Guard He will take her, we don’t know where. In reality, no one wins in this story: Javier loves the deer as one loves a dog and Pepa, who only understands her freedom around Javier, lives her exile with the incomprehension of the wild animal that the law which claims to protect does not allow her to live where she was born. And incidentally, to an animal society capable of tolerating the infinite shame of a canary in a cage, but not immense dignity of a free deer.

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