Here's a story about a deer that (supposedly) befriended a dying cat:

Margie Scott was devastated when her 9-year-old cat Sammy was diagnosed with kidney failure, but she never could have predicted what would give her comfort during her pet’s last days...

... A family of deer regularly visits the complex, and one day, Sammy was sitting outside in the grass when two young deer happened by...

... For several minutes, the young deer licked the small cat. Scott grabbed her camera and got a picture of the tender scene.

“It was amazing,” she said. “I truly believe the deer was able to sense that there was something wrong with Sammy and that was why he started licking him, like he was trying to nurture him.”

OK, dry your eyes.

Now for the science. I'll bet that the cat's kidney problems were causing it to excrete excess salt from its pores. It was a walking, dying salt lick.

That and the cat, close to death, probably didn't have the strength to claw the hell out of the deer for licking it.

The cat had been declawed...

There is only one sane* answer to what happened. Due to global warming deer have now resorted to carnivorous behavior but are not equiped with the teeth to do much about it. Licking was all he could manage.

*Kos/DU definition of sane.

I have to agree with the last commentor... In over 25 years of my life, I've never heard of a deer licking a cat. That's proof the Global Warming is occurring. Next thing you know, cats and dogs will be living together and then mass hysteria.

> Now for the science. I'll bet that the cat's kidney problems were causing it to excrete excess salt from its pores. It was a walking, dying salt lick.

Do cats sweat?

Finally! A legitimate use for cats, and all because of an Inconvenient Truth. Thanks uncle Albert.

This is probably too vague to be useful, but it runs in my mind that I read somewhere about some kind of deer known to eat the eggs of ground-nesting birds. It wasn't a case of Bambi mutating into a carnivore, but the deer being after the calcium in the shells (with, of course, unfortunate collateral damage for the developing baby birds inside).

Dwight - were they fluffy developing baby birds?

Oh, wait - that's ducks.... And bunnies. ;-p

I just did what I should have done to start with (do a search on "deer eating eggs"), and the results were...well, worse than I thought.

http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/resource/birds/deerpred/results.htm

White-tailed deer apparently not only eat ground-nesting birds' eggs but nestlings, too. Quick and easy meal, calcium in the bones...

How this applies to the original deer licking cat story? Just that deer may not be the exclusive herbivores we thought and are more opportunists. So when a sick and dying kitty comes along, just exuding salt...slurp. Maybe the cat was lucky the deer didn't try to eat it outright.

I once had that sort of relationship with a veal. My taste buds have never been quite the same.

Strange to find this message board. I caught my cat (an outdoor fixed male) lying on his back with a deer nuzzling his stomach. I thought it was so strange I did a search and found this. He is a really friendly cat, his best friend is our German Shepherd.

When I would visit my grandmother in Michigan during the summers when I was little, she lived on a large Saddlebred farm outside of Lansing. There was an apple orchard next to her home, and it attracted the deer every night and they would bed down there. ANYWAY... long story short, her cat Winnie, a large grey tabby, could be seen rubbing up against the legs of the deer all the time. They never had a problem with her or vice versa. It was unusual, but I suppose they were just very familiar with one another.