It seems Vancouver's famous downtown deer is dead after a car accident in Stanley Park over the weekend.
Vancouver police said a deer was struck and killed near the Lions Gate Bridge Sunday night, reported CBC News.
Officers didn't confirm whether or not it was same buck spotted roaming the city's downtown core in July, but the park board said that's "very likely" the case, as he was the only deer known to be living in Stanley Park, according to Global News.
The young buck caused quite a stir on social media when he wandered through Vancouver over the summer, and even had his own Twitter account.
After the deer settled in the park, wildlife experts asked the public to keep their distance from the animal because they didn't want him to become accustomed to humans.
Nick Page, a biologist with the city's park board, said videos of the deer licking people’s hands and taking food shows it was likely cared for by humans at some point.
“The deer didn’t develop those kind of behaviours of tolerance to people on its own,” he told The Canadian Press. “It’s had some care or influence of being with people in the past.”
Patricia Thomson, executive director of the Stanley Park Ecological Society, said wild animals should stay in the wild.
“People don’t understand, often, that their good intentions can put that animal in jeopardy,” she said.
The B.C. Ministry of Forests said it had been looking into relocating the deer, but no solution had been found before the deer's death.
“Because the deer was clearly habituated to humans, simply relocating it to the wild would not have been successful," the ministry said in a statement.
"The deer would have either become a problem somewhere else or died due to being unable to fend for itself."
Animal control is looking into the deer's death, said the CBC.
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