'Expert' Claims Bigfoot Killed This Deer. Untrue, Because Bigfoot Doesn't Exist.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the Michigan woods...

Recently, a dead deer was found on a trail in the Great Lakes State. The deer had been killed and eaten, which is certainly not unusual. But, of course, in these kinds of things, an "expert" always surfaces; this one claims that the deer could have been killed by - you guessed it - Bigfoot.

Bigfoot experts have weighed in on whether a "mangled up" deer corpse discarded with a twisted neck and its bones removed could have been the work of the elusive beast.

Images of the gruesome scene were shared on Facebook earlier this week by Dean Poeppe, who explained he stumbled across it in some woods in the northern part of Michigan's Lower Peninsula.

He said it was the same place where he had a "sighting" of Bigfoot in July 2022. "Today (Monday, January 8) I went out before we are supposed to have a big snowfall tomorrow. There on a two track trail I found this deer body," he explained.
"It was mangled up pretty bad. No bones except part of the skull. Further looking I found some of the bones a little ways into the woods in two spots.

"The one eye was sunk way into the eye socket. The head was twisted around a couple of time by the neck. All that was there was the hide and head [sic]."

Some years back, I was mooching around on Hardscrabble Mountain (never was a terrain feature more aptly named) south of Eagle, Colorado, when I came across some bunches of elk hair and splashes of dried blood at the top of a talus slope. Down-slope were more splashes of blood, more hair, and rocks disturbed. Curious, I followed the trail down the slope and, at the bottom, found a young cow elk that had been killed by a mountain lion, partly eaten, and then covered with pine needles. The carcass was very fresh, and I kept my hand on my revolver's grip the whole time, but I didn't see the lion.

Not wanting to disturb the cat's feeding, I left the area, but not before examining the carcass; the exposed rib cage didn't look much different than the photos in this story.

Having spent a lot of time in the outdoors and having stumbled across a fair number of predator kills, there's nothing about these images that looks unusual. This young deer could easily have been killed by a black bear. It looks to have been scavenged extensively, probably by everything from jays to coyotes. I've found other stripped rib cages like this before, from animals ranging from deer to cattle. Scavengers do tend to drag carcasses around, and until the ligaments start to decay, rib cages tend to stick together during scavenging by smaller critters who can't pull the bones apart. This amount of scavenging could have been done literally overnight. What's more, the trail where the carcass was found looks like a perfect spot for an ambush predator like a black bear; the trail has what looks to be pretty thick brush close by on both sides. From what I can see in these photos, there is nothing about this carcass that is out of the ordinary.

In short, this deer wasn't killed by a Bigfoot. How can I say that with confidence? Because Bigfoot doesn't exist. Dean Poeppe, whatever he may have seen in July 2022, didn't see a Bigfoot. How can I say that with confidence? Because Bigfoot doesn't exist. Like alien spacecraft visiting Earth, they are flights of fancy.

This deer may have been killed by a black bear. There are also reports of mountain lions in Michigan, which is more credible than Bigfoot because mountain lions actually exist.

Which raises the question, how does one become an "expert" on an imaginary beast?

Cryptozoologist Andy McGrath, author of Beasts of the World: Hairy Humanoids, says his research into "Bigfoot forms and types around the world" suggests the beast would likely be "omnivorous and subsist on a diet very similar to that of bears", including ungulate species such as deer.

Or we could apply Occam's Razor and presume that this deer was killed, not by a Bigfoot, but by a bear.

Because Bigfoot doesn't exist.