‘Zero survival instincts’: Dunderheaded deer successfully dodges cars when it runs straight into traffic, but it fails to miss a whole building

They don’t teach you this in school, but the food chain isn’t as universally cut-and-dry as you think. The logistics of predator and prey, and which organism fits into which category, shuffles significantly across regions and time, with some settings like Australia randomizing the predator-prey brackets every other day.

Take the biome of the university town as an example of food chain back-and-forth: the student may eat the campus pub spinach dip, but the spinach dip and the university both eat the student’s money, which deprives the student of the resources they need to survive in such a climate, causing them to migrate back to their quaint fishing village of origin. Elsewhere in this collegiate ecosystem, the deer faces threats not only in the form of oncoming traffic, but also, apparently, of buildings that are holding completely still, as evidenced by TikTok‘s @raecheljosephine’s candid nature video.

The 29-second video kicks off with a dreadful wave of anxiety as we watch this deer gallop its way across the university courtyard and directly into the street, where it narrowly avoids getting smacked into oblivion by a van belonging to the town’s sheriff. Raechel’s stressed “no no no”‘s are all of us here.

But then the deer throws us all for a loop by slamming loudly into a wall — a wall that, importantly, the deer never once broke eye contact with this whole time—seconds after it gracefully cleared the more motorized menaces in the vicinity. Suddenly, we all become stunlocked in the awkwardness of a video that had us fearing for our emotional safety just moments before.

Perhaps the greatest joy to be found in the whole ordeal is how the deer didn’t even seem to react to the impact in any particular way, immediately pulling a U-turn and heading back the way it came, straight back into traffic as though God can’t touch him. It gives massive “I meant to do that” vibes, and realistically speaking, God probably can’t touch him.

The big question then; why do deer run in front of oncoming traffic so frequently? It happens often enough that it’s a real-life trope at this point, so there must be a reason, right? According to World Deer, they mostly do this out of fear and confusion, wherein they may accidentally run towards the vehicle thinking that they’re running away from it. It bears remembering that deer have lived here way long than we have, and so the unnatural shock of our presence probably disrupts their decision-making abilities, to say nothing of the fact that, humans or no humans, the deer are going to try and get where they need to go. And sometimes, they need to go to the other side of the street, as their natural grazing instincts will inevitably bring them.

So perhaps we’re perpetually in the wrong for taking deer — or any animal — as fools. Indeed, perhaps that mindset is precisely how you wind up on the wrong end of the food chain.