Have you ever seen anything like this before?

Mark Stetzer sent us this Moultrie trail camera video of a doe killing a fawn. Previous pictures on the camera farther down the trail show them all walking together like normal.

Mark said, “I saw this three days after it happened. We found the fawn’s corpse. We have them on camera together several different times walking this trail to a clover field. They were one of two sets of twins we have here. Nobody touched the fawn because nobody had been in the woods since first season turkey, except to mow the trails.”

Why This Happens

We can only speculate on why this doe killed the fawn. In the wild, a doe will typically only allow her own fawns to nurse. So, it’s possible this wasn’t her fawn. 

The behavior is more likely linked to food availability — in this case, the doe’s own milk production, or lack thereof.

A healthy adult doe will typically produce between 1.5 and 2 quarts of milk per day, and a fawn needs 2 to 4 ounces every 4 hours. If a doe cannot keep up with the fawn’s needs, it’s possible she could abandon (or kill) one of her offspring. Similar food-scarcity behavior is seen in wild birds, where fledglings are thrown from nests in order for others to have a better survival rate.