Bears and Seals and Deer, Oh My

I need a cleansing post after my last one on Keystone. As you know I'm an animal lover and I love heartwarming animal stories. So many of the stories we normally hear in the news are bad for animals but these last couple weeks have been fantastic. There have been a ton of sweet wildlife stories in the news recently. From the bear that took a ride on the garbage truck in Vancouver. To the bear found in a New Jersey basement. Both were captured and released without any harm.

There was the recent story of a New Zealand woman who came home to find a baby fur seal napping in her living room. The seal had apparently crawled out of the sea, crossed a busy highway, into the yard, through a cat door, and up some stairs to find the living room. There it had made itself comfortable on one of the sofas for a little nap. The woman was obviously shocked but quickly fell in love with the seal. The NZ Department of Conservation was called and the seal was captured and released into the sea without harm.

But my favorite story from the week was the Alaska Quest Charters captain who found himself in an interested position when four deer swam to his boat in the middle of Taku Inlet and wanted to board. He was in the middle of a chartered cruise but still pulled each of the deer onto the vessel. He turned the boat back to the shore and when he landed the deer got up and wandered off the dock and into the woods. The youngest deer had some issues getting back up after the exhausting swim and was helped off the boat in a wheelbarrow. After a period of time it too ran off into the woods. The event actually happened in October of last year but it has just started making the internet rounds. My sister posted it to Facebook yesterday and I immediately had to steal it. I love those kind of stories. Like the story last year of a firefighter giving a koala water after an Australian blaze, these stories reaffirm my faith in humanity. I hope 2012 is filled with them.