Buck stops here for ‘drunk’ French deer

A HUNTER is on a shoot-to-kill mission to bring down an “intoxicated” deer that has attacked locals in the Dordogne region of south-west France.

René Mandon, head of the hunting association in Augignac, an area popular with British holidaymakers, said he had been granted a special licence to kill the aggressive deer.

“To charge people like that is extremely rare for a deer,” he said, adding that it may have eaten a plant known as fleur de Bourdaine which for animals can have the same effect as alcohol or recreational drugs have on humans.

In one of the assaults, the animal charged a woman, knocked her to the ground and then gored her with its antlers. “When her husband tried to intervene, it knocked him to the ground too, where he grappled with it before grabbing a stick and bashing it on the head,” Mr Mandon told The Daily Telegraph.

Two days earlier a deer, believed to be the same male, charged a farmer in his field near Augignac.