Why Is This Deer Standing on Two Legs? The People Would Like to Know

When you picture a deer in the wild, it’s likely that you picture it standing on all four legs. Which is probably why a photo of a deer standing on only its hind legs caught many people’s attention when it was shared on Twitter on Monday.

Posted by Twitter user Solene Marion, a PhD student studying the interaction between red deer and hill walkers in the Scottish uplands, the image shows a buck with still-forming antlers standing up on two legs while his herd grazes in the background.

“How do [you] think I should classify this red deer behavior?” Marion wrote, noting that the photo was captured by a camera trap. “Only 15,000 photos left to analyze.”

Fellow Twitter users quickly began to chime in with comical responses that ranged from jokes like, “Just seeing what the neighbors are up to,” to riffs on animal-centric cartoons from Gary Larson’s The Far Side comic strip.

But, according to Marion, the correct answer was actually fighting with another deer.

We prefer the Far Side version.