A video is leaving viewers shocked after capturing what happened when a woman yelled out the words “little girl” into the woods. People couldn’t believe their eyes when they saw what emerged and came running towards her just moments later.
Amy Carrickhoff stood outside her Oakridge, North Carolina, home in the footage, and what happened next made the long-haired woman seem like something out of a Disney fairytale. “Little girl!” she yelled out into the trees, and while this might look familiar to many dog owners, what came bounding towards her wasn’t your typical four-legged friend.
“Here she comes,” someone recording the footage says as the video pans towards the sound of something quickly approaching. Then, viewers get a good look at “Little Girl” and quickly realize she’s not a human or a dog or anything else you might expect. In fact, she’s something else that’s so entirely unexpected, it’s no wonder the viral clip is leaving viewers jaw-dropped.
Just like a real-life Disney Princess, Amy has befriended the forest animals. Standing outside her door every morning, she called out, “Little girl!” That “girl” is a deer, which we see run towards the woman to greet her in the video before jumping up to try to give her a kiss. “Good morning! How’s my baby?” asked Amy, who at that point puts viewers in mind of Snow White.
The bizarre clip doesn’t end there. In fact, Amy then has the animal follow her through the garage and into her home to have breakfast in her kitchen. Preparing a bottle for the deer, Amy is seen shaking up some goat’s milk that the animal seems eager to eat, according to CNN. In the footage, the deer, which was brought to Amy as a baby by a friend when it was abandoned, gobbles up the milk before Amy wipes its snout with a napkin.
While some viewers find the clip to be the cutest, others raise concern. As animal-lovers cheered the fairytale-like experience and some even said they wanted a deer of their own now, hunters and wildlife rehabilitators felt Amy wasn’t doing the doe any favors. They claimed she was allowing the deer to get too comfortable around humans, where it could end up hit by a car, shot by a hunter, or hurting someone.
“After reading some of the comments, I feel compelled to add my own,” one hunter wrote, before sharing the concern the footage caused for him. “While it is true that her feeding this fawn will indeed make it somewhat dependent on her, the chance of that harming the deer would be slight. The bigger danger for it, and one that bothers me much more, is conditioning it to not be afraid of humans,” he warned. “There are some (not all, don’t flame me) deer hunters that would love to fill a doe tag by having one walk up to him so he could cut its throat.”
Others were more forceful and blunt with their opinions. “You just gave this animal a DEATH SENTENCE – you also have put all your neighbors and their children at risk of being attacked where this deer matures and when she doesn’t get fed, she attacks someone,” one reader wrote, according to CNN.
The deer, which was said to show up for lunch and dinner too, was brought to Amy’s home when the animal was abandoned since the woods behind Amy’s house are protected from hunting and offered a suitable location for the fawn to be rehabilitated. She continued to come around for bottles before moving on to regular deer food, which Amy gladly provided for her when the time came.
Although the clip created great debate as to the pros and cons of human interaction and interference with wild animals, “Little Girl” reportedly assimilated back into the wild and had a fawn of her own. Shortly after giving birth, “Little Girl” wouldn’t come when she was called. Instead, she became wild again, leaving Amy confident that she didn’t overly domesticate the animal.
“She walked off into the woods and we never saw her again,” Amy said. “We combed those woods … we never found anything.” Amy and her husband got so attached to “Little Girl” that they don’t ever want to take care of another animal. “I just watch the videos, and she kind of lives on,” Amy said, adding that getting to know the deer was a special experience that she doesn’t regret.