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Man delivers fawn using box cutters after seeing mother deer get killed by car

A Minnesota man delivered a baby fawn after he saw the mother deer get hit by a car and die. He walked over to inspect the carcass and saw that the deer was pregnant and that the fawn was still alive inside of her, according to WNEM on May 22.

A man used box cutters to deliver a baby fawn from its dead mother that had been hit by a car.
YouTube screen shot/ WCCO

Once Bill Schulte saw that the baby inside the deer was still moving and kicking, he went to his truck and grabbed the retractable box cutter that he uses for his job as a landscaper. He cut the mother's carcass open and delivered the baby. This was something he didn't even need to ponder, he just jumped into action to get that fawn out of its mother.

Once the baby was safely delivered, he drove 30 miles with the fawn to a place he knew could help the baby deer. He took the fawn to the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center of Minnesota in Roseville, where he's being cared for by a licensed wildlife rehabilitator, Polly Rixe.

The fawn is doing well, reports Rixe, it would normally take all summer to get the baby ready for the outside world, but Rixe moved the fawn outside this week and the baby creature of the wild did fine with this next step. Rixe is rehabilitating the fawn to go out into the wild one day.

When Schulte first brought the fawn to Rixe, it wasn't even walking yet, after all it was no more than an hour old when it first arrived. What does the wild life rehabilitator think about Shulte's impromptu C-section along the side of the road?

Rixe said it was, "Kind of crazy. I wouldn't necessarily promote people doing that, but I guess for this particular fawn, it's a happy ending." You probably have to be a special kind of person to actually cut a baby out of a mother deer's stomach. It most likely isn't something that the average person could do, but you never know what you are capable of doing when faced with an emergency situation.

Schulte was on the side of the road and he could see the baby deer kicking inside the mother. If he had walked away the fawn would have surely died. It is not like it hurt the mother deer, she was already dead. Some might say things move in a mysterious ways, was it fate that Schulte was at the right place at the right time?