Pennsylvania Game Commission confiscates castrated buck with antlers removed that was kept as pet

Pittsburgh — A Fayette County, Pa., woman has been charged in connection with keeping a wild deer as a pet and resisting its removal from her property.

Tammy Shiery, 64, was arrested Feb. 25 when she tried to prevent state game wardens from seizing a two-year-old buck the Pennsylvania Game Commission alleges she illegally adopted and kept at her Bullskin Township home.

The deer, which she named Baby, had been castrated and surgically altered to prevent antler growth, according to commission southwest region information and education supervisor Andy Harvey.

It was wearing a dog collar when wardens, armed with a search warrant, went to investigate, he said.

“They saw the deer with a dog collar running on a publicly traveled road,” Harvey said. “(Shiery) was in a car driving alongside the deer and trying to corral it back to her property.”

Although Shiery has a fenced-in yard, the deer was known to occasionally roam the neighborhood, he said.

Shiery refused to give officers access to her property and was arrested by state police for interfering with a search warrant, Harvey said.

She was taken in handcuffs to the Fayette County booking center where she was charged with three misdemeanor counts of disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, and obstructing law enforcement, and one summary offense for unlawful possession of wildlife.

Dramatic video (see below) shows game wardens putting a rope around the deer and trying to lead it to a cattle trailer as it balked and struggled with the effort. A small crowd had gathered and Shiery can be heard screaming  “Do not hurt Baby.”

Harvey said the deer was not injured, and, as of March 1, it was being kept at a licensed wildlife facility.

Until the case is adjudicated the deer is considered evidence. Beyond that, its fate is undetermined, with options ranging from euthanasia to finding it a permanent home in a sanctuary, Harvey noted.

“We’re trying to exhaust all avenues before rushing into a decision,” he said. “We’re working through the process to determine where we might take the deer. We couldn’t release it to the wild because it would not be able to fend for itself; it has no antlers to defend against another male. This is not the easiest solution to navigate.”

A preliminary hearing for Shiery was slated for March 6.

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Shiery reportedly picked up Baby as a fawn. “We don’t know the circumstances regarding the mother,” Harvey said, “but (Shiery) should have contacted us and we could have taken it to a wildlife rehabilitator who specializes in deer.”

Prospects for reintroducing wildlife to their natural environment diminish the more animals are handled, Harvey said.

Although Shiery claimed that she had “papers” proving legitimate ownership, it is against the law to possess and domesticate any wildlife in Pennsylvania, “as it belongs to everyone in the commonwealth,” Harvey said.

Deer can be adopted as pets only if they are born in captivity and licensed as domestic, which is under the jurisdiction of the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture.

Shiery told KDKA that she had Baby neutered by a vet to “calm him” and made sure he received “proper vaccines just like they do at deer farms.”

A petition on Change.org demanding that Baby be returned to Shiery had garnered more than 850 signatures by March 1. The case received national attention.

Harvey said the Game Commission has fielded dozens of calls, the majority of them defending Shiery, with some asserting that Baby is her support animal.

“Most of the callers become more understanding once you provide them with the facts,” he said. “Besides the illegality of keeping a wild animal there are issues of safety.”

Harvey cited an incident in Indiana County where a couple took in a buck only to be gored by its antlers. “Wildlife may appear to be friendly but you never know what a wild animal will do,” he said.

Similar case

In a famous case similar to Shiery’s, the Game Commission confiscated a Lancaster County woman’s pet house finch nearly 20 years ago.

Pati Mattrick, of Elizabethtown, rescued the baby finch during a storm, named it Stormygirl and kept it as a pet, claiming to be unaware that game laws made possession illegal.

After the Lancaster Intelligencer/Lancaster New Era published a story about how the bird was helping Mattrick through personal and physical difficulties, Game Commission officers and Elizabethtown police seized the bird sparking nationwide anger.

Sympathizers circulated a petition demanding that Mattrick and Stormygirl be reunited and staged a protest at the state Capitol building in Harrisburg.

Mattrick had lived with the bird for four years and was photographed having Stormygirl pluck a doughnut morsel from her lips.

Then-District Attorney Craig Stedman called the confiscation a “grossly misguided abuse of law-enforcement discretion,” as reported in LNP/Lancaster Online. He vowed to change county court rules so that the Game Commission could not obtain search warrants without first seeking approval of the DA’s office.

Stormygirl reportedly was taken to a licensed wildlife rehabilitator at an undisclosed location, and Mattrick eventually met with then-Game Commission executive director Carl Roe.

She told LNP/Lancaster Online that although Roe made no apologies for the incident, the meeting went well “because I got to tell my side of the story.”

“I didn’t expect anything,” she said. “My whole point was the senselessness of it and how I was treated.”