We’ve seen several instances of bucks getting their antlers locked with another buck.
It happens all the time during the rut, when bucks begin to fight other bucks for alpha dog rights to mate with the various does in the area. All that testosterone is flowing, and these bucks are looking to lock horns with anybody that even looks at them the wrong way.
It’s the wild’s version of a 4am college bar… just a wild herd of drunk, horny college dudes looking to score, and taking their frustrations out on each other when they can’t.
And sometimes, the fights are so aggressive that the bucks’ antlers end up locking with each other, to the point that they can’t become untangled.
At least one, or sometimes both of the bucks end up dying due to their inability to survive with their head stuck to another buck.
With that being said, here’s yet another example…
But this may be the wildest I’ve seen yet.
Here you see another buck that had gotten locked up with another, and one of the bucks is dead.
However, the dead locked up buck is completely decapitated, as you can see the lone head and its antlers locked with the living one.
It’s uncertain how this was even possible, but usually one was somehow able to survive while the other decomposed, and lived long enough for the head to pull clean off the decomposed body.
However, this particular buck might’ve had a little help.
The caption to the video reads:
“It is not uncommon for the antlers of battling ungulates to become so entangled that they become inseparable. We’ve shown a few examples in the past of this very thing occurring.
Tensions are high, neither animal is willing to back down, one combatant expires before the other (unless both die) and the living one drags the dead ones body around until the majority of its body rots away.
This can happen naturally, as we’ve shown a few times on this account. On this particular one, the cuts look a little too clean, which makes me think that someone found this animal and freed the living one from the dead weight he was hauling around.”
An incredibly wild scene, nonetheless.
