Pics of Cozy Fawn, Beagle on Sofa Go Viral

Credit: Snopes.com.


Photos of a fawn and a beagle apparently resting cozily on a sofa together, reportedly somewhere in Garrett County, went viral in summer 2008 after being published online in the Deep Creek Times of McHenry.

Snopes.com published one of the anonymous emails that accompanied the viral photo:

A fawn followed this beagle home — right through the doggie door — in the Bittinger, MD area. The owner came home to find the visitor had made himself right at home. This hit the 6 o’clock news big time.

Sure beats out the political news for a change.

Viral emails often position themselves as a refreshing or welcome antidote to whatever the press is focusing on; that’s part of the reason people forward them. The “political news” of summer 2008 included the nominating conventions that chose John McCain and Barack Obama as presidential contenders; the Bush administration’s protest of the Soviet invasion of Georgia; the John Edwards sex scandal; and a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that declared a District of Columbia handgun ban unconstitutional.

Any randomly selected season of U.S. political history, of course, would be at least as contentious, bruising and eventful, and feel-good email forwards are popular always, no matter what else is going on. (For the record, also making U.S. headlines in summer 2008 were the movies The Dark Knight and WALL-E, Lady Gaga’s debut album, and swimmer Michael Phelps, who won a record eight gold medals at the Beijing Olympics.)

The Deep Creek Times online archive doesn’t extend that far, but the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine shows that the original July 2008 photos had the headline “Guess who’s coming to dinner?” and this caption:

A fawn followed this beagle home – right through the doggie door – in the Bittinger area. The owner came home to find the visitor had made himself right at home.

(Editor’s Note: Never attempt to rescue a fawn from the wild! Read more here.)

The last three words contained a now-broken link to a Maryland Department of Natural Resources page like this one: https://dnr.maryland.gov/wildlife/Pages/plants_wildlife/Deer_Fawn_FAQ.aspx

Clearly the email quoted by Snopes.com lifted part of its language from the Deep Creek Times caption. According to Snopes.com, the Deep Creek Times later updated its info:

The end of the story: The local Department of Natural Resources told the beagle owner to put the fawn outside and block the doggie door so he couldn’t return. He took the fawn to the edge of the woods where he believes he might have met the dog. Upon return a little later, the fawn was gone. We can only hope he was reunited with his mother!

One would be more confident that the photos were, in fact, taken in summer 2008 and in Garrett County if the homeowner, the photographer and, for that matter, the beagle had been identified. Stripped of those details, the photos could have been taken anywhere at anytime.

Snopes.com pointed out, further, that the photos could depict “a staged scene with a tame deer.”

Still, the photos reinforced the popular belief that Garrett County residents are closer to nature than anyone else in Maryland, a belief especially popular among Garrett Countians. I wonder whether the photo is still making the rounds, and whether it’s still claimed for Bittinger, or for Garrett County, or for Maryland.

Sources:

“2008 in the United States.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_in_the_United_States. Accessed 15 Nov. 2021.

Deep Creek Times. https://deepcreektimes.com/. Accessed 15 Nov. 2021.

“Deer Fawn Facts.” Maryland Department of Natural Resources. https://dnr.maryland.gov/wildlife/Pages/plants_wildlife/Deer_Fawn_FAQ.aspx. Accessed 15 Nov. 2021.

Mikkelson, David. “A Beagle and A Fawn.” Snopes.com. Last updated 29 Jan. 2014. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/beagle-and-fawn/. Accessed 15 Nov. 2021.

Wayback Machine. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/web/. Accessed 15 Nov. 2021.

Credit: Snopes.com.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Rail Victims Moved 10 Miles in 100 Years

Image
Looking toward Frostburg from the Brush Tunnel near Corriganville. A popular spot with 21 st -century ghost hunters is the Brush Tunnel, on the Western Maryland Scenic Railroad near Corriganville, just west of the Great Allegheny Passage parking lot on Cash Valley Road. Built in 1912 to accommodate parallel tracks as part of the Western Maryland’s Cumberland-to-Pittsburgh extension, the Brush Tunnel likely had its share of the miseries and fatalities common to all old-time tunnel projects. But oral tradition sometimes associates the Brush Tunnel haunting with a pedestrian disaster after construction was over, when tourists stepped out of the path of one train only to be hit by another train going in the opposite direction. While she neither names the tunnel nor mentions a haunting, Betty Van Newkirk briefly summarizes the fatality in a 1995 article:   When trains began to travel through the tunnels, around the huge horseshoe curve below Frostburg, and down the long grade toward
Read more

A Dedication to Dave Knotts (1989-2020)

Image
Photo courtesy Dana M.Bridges. In my first post, a few days ago , I shared the official, university-approved, one-page summary of my Weird Western Maryland sabbatical project. I will spare you the entirety of the complete five-page, 2,400-word proposal that wound its way through the coils and recesses of Frostburg State University , but I do want to share its final paragraph: When this project is published, I hope to dedicate it to the memory of one of my former Frostburg State students, Dave Knotts, who was 30 when he died in a hunting accident in January 2020. He loved talking to me about this sort of thing, and I vividly remember his telling me, with great animation, about a supposedly ever-fresh bloodstain on the centuries-old floor of the Tomlinson Inn in Garrett County, which he was shown as a teenager. Dave himself thought it was probably groundwater seepage, but as he warmed to his story, he almost convinced himself otherwise. I hope these topics energize my future students
Read more

Yule-Tree Vendors Played Rubes in Big City

Henry Beitzel of Accident in Garrett County was, by all accounts, a savvy entrepreneur with multiple income streams (farming, mining, maple-sugar making), a hardworking craftsman who laid brick for the new English Lutheran Church building, an avid newspaper reader who sent six children to school. He was, in short, no dummy. Yet, when he and two friends traveled by train to Pittsburgh to sell a crop of home-grown Christmas trees in December 1892, they amused themselves -- and, doubtless, attracted business -- by playing wide-eyed, ignorant hillbillies, predecessors of the later stereotyped characters in Li'l Abner, No Time for Sergeants and The Beverly Hillbillies. Their rube act made good copy for the big afternoon daily, The Pittsburg Press , which for years had Pennsylvania's second-largest circulation, behind only the Inquirer of Philadelphia (and which would not add the "h" to its name until 30 years later). The Press headline told the story:     Visitors From M
Read more