Defenseless deer attacked by man too lazy/violent to walk around them.

The Nara Deer Preservation Foundation recently released the results of its annual survey of the deer population of Nara Park, where the animals are allowed to roam free in deference to their connection with local Shinto cultural customs. The foundation reports that the park’s number of deer is up this year, since the larger number of human tourists during the ongoing Japan travel boom means more people purchasing and handing out the cracker-like deer snacks that the animals love.

However, not all humans are playing nice with the deer. On Sunday, video began making its way around the Japanese Internet showing a young man, who appears to be in his teens or 20s, physically assaulting the deer with kicks and blows to the head.

In the video, a group of deer can be seen crowding a sidewalk at the edge of the park, which is by no means an unusual occurrence in Nara. Rather than taking a few steps to thread his way through the herd, though, a man in a white T-shirt decides to go with the shockingly cruel footwork option of forcibly kicking one of the deer, causing a loud slapping thump as his show rams into the backside of the unsuspecting creature, which wasn’t even looking in the man’s direction.

The deer, and a few of its brethren, dash forward a short distance to get out of range of the man’s feet. He then continues walking and, when the same deer is once again stopped in his path, he kicks it again, and when another deer looks towards him, with an expression that practically seems to say “Dude, what the hell?”, the man slaps the animal in the face.

It takes a special kind of coward to sucker-kick a deer, and it’s an especially heinous thing to do in Nara Park, where centuries of mingling harmoniously with humans on a daily basis had made these deer communities much less wary of being attacked. Aside from being a heartless breach of trust, it’s also a crime to assault Nara Park’s deer. Even beyond cruelty to animal ordinances, Nara Park’s deer are officially designated as natural monuments by the Japanese government because of their cultural significance, and injuring them can be punished by up to five years in prison (which is actually a step back from the samurai era, when harming the deer was punishable with death).

Some versions of the video claim that the man kicking and slapping the deer is Chinese, apparently based on the incident taking place with many non-Japanese tourists standing around. However, the above version of the video points out that the man has what appear to be house keys clipped to his waistband and is wearing a T-shirt from a relatively minor Tokyo-based apparel company, and some commenters have said thy can hear the man saying “Jama” and “Doke,” Japanese for “You’re in my way,” and “Move it” as he strikes the deer, suggesting that he may be a Japanese local, but his identity remains unconfirmed at this time.

Source: Shukan Josei Prime via Yahoo! Japan News via Jin
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