A Pa. woman domesticated a deer. MAGA and Musk are after the state officials who took the animal away

For nearly two years, Tammy Shiery’s rural Western Pennsylvania backyard was like a scene out of Disney’s Snow White.

Not long after a baby white-tailed deer sauntered onto the Fayette County property in 2023, the 64-year-old formed what she described as an impenetrable bond with the wild animal.

There were daily feedings, in which the male deer, dubbed Baby, scarfed down fresh strawberries, blueberries, and butternut squash by the gallon. There was also a plush bed for Baby to doze on Shiery’s back porch. Baby even delighted in playtime, nudging a big purple ball across Shiery’s yard alongside her two Chihuahuas.

Last month, Shiery and Baby’s fairy tale came to a shocking conclusion.

In the same yard where Shiery raised Baby with Candice Jenkins, her longtime friend and housemate, officers with the Pennsylvania Game Commission took the young animal from the women, citing state law that bars residents from keeping a wild animal in captivity.

A widely circulated video of the tense incident shows an officer pulling Baby across the property by rope toward a trailer.

When the deer resists, bucking and falling to the ground, a distressed Shiery can be heard repeatedly yelling: “You’re gonna hurt him!”

Officers have since rehomed Baby in a wildlife sanctuary. Shiery, who believed she had the proper permitting to keep the deer, will not face charges.

But Baby’s story is just getting started.

Across the internet, more than 100,000 people have viewed the video that Jenkins initially posted to Facebook. TikTokers are sharing the footage to outraged followers. Petitions are racking up hundreds of signatures.

Even Elon Musk chimed in.

“Authorities need to stop doing this,” Musk wrote on X this month in response to a story about Baby’s removal.

The post garnered 115,000 likes, while users drew comparisons to last year’s controversial confiscation of “P’Nut,” the social media star squirrel.

Downstream of Musk’s input, similarities between the cases of P’Nut and Baby — government employee seizes cute animal — are turning the deer’s story into something of an outrage du jour for the online MAGA crowd.

Firebrand U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.) posted support for Baby on X, while right-wing influencers issued rallying cries against the game officials, charging them with “tyrannical” bureaucratic overreach.

Sensing a potential tidal wave of public support, Shiery and her neighbors have launched an awareness campaign — and a court petition — seeking #JusticeForBaby and the return of the animal.

Their effort includes Baby-branded social media handles, a GoFundMe for legal fees, and a “Save Baby” website to urge local politicians and game officials to aid the deer’s release.

Deer experts, on the other hand, say that for safety reasons, wild animals should never be domesticated — no matter how cuddly.

Baby’s life on Shiery’s Connellsville property resembled that of a well-pampered pooch.

Along with berries and squash, Shiery and Jenkins kept Baby satiated with a daily supply of apples, zucchini, and dried fruit, as well as nutritious livestock pellets from a feeder built just for him.

“He never ran out of food,” Shiery said. “He had his banana moments — he would come in the morning, I’d open up the door and he’d have his banana, then he’d go out.”

The beginning of their relationship was a bit sloppy, but ultimately sweet.

“He ran right up to me, started licking my hand,” Shiery said of the September day in 2023 when the fawn wandered onto their lot from a neighbor’s property.

Local children began playing games alongside the deer, and Baby kept the women company as they fixed up the yard. Shiery says they always left the gate open, and Baby was free to go as he pleased.

“Where she would go, he would follow,” Shiery said of the relationship between Jenkins and Baby.

The two women forged their own close bond back in 2013, when Jenkins, 54, who is disabled and uses a wheelchair, moved in with Shiery, an old family friend who agreed to be her caregiver.

Shiery and Jenkins eventually applied for a permit with the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, one they believed would allow them to keep Baby legally. On the form, Shiery stated she would be keeping a deer for noncommercial, aesthetic purposes.

Weeks passed without a response. Meanwhile, Shiery claims, an agriculture department employee gave her verbal approval to keep Baby (when reached for comment, a spokesperson for the department said it had notified Shiery she could not do so).

Shiery then called on a local veterinarian to give the deer a handful of shots for rabies and other diseases. The same vet also had Baby dehorned and neutered in an effort to make the animal less attractive to hunters and less aggressive, according to Shiery.

The women say they even secured a license for Baby to be designated as an emotional support animal, complete with a red collar and identification tags.

Still, Baby’s official status as a state-approved animal remained unclear to them.

“He was social, he was domesticated,” Shiery said. “A wild animal would not have complied with the [game] commission taking him away.”

For days after the game commission removed Baby in February, Shiery and Jenkins had no idea whether their beloved deer was even alive.

According to a statement from the commission’s southwest regional office that month, the removal came following an “investigation involving the unlawful possession of a white-tailed deer taken from the wild.”

The game commission, an independent state agency responsible for Pennsylvania’s wildlife conservation, said it had relocated the deer to a licensed facility but did not say where.

The commission put out another notice in early March announcing that the agency had permanently rehomed Baby to a wildlife sanctuary, again without sharing the location.

To this date, Shiery and Jenkins do not know where Baby is, and the women say they are still unable to get information from the agency.

Meanwhile, Fayette County prosecutors dropped a handful of charges filed against Shiery for what the game commission described as interference into its investigation.

The commission says it will not refile charges against Shiery for unlawful wildlife possession. However, the agency made one thing clear: It will oppose any effort on Shiery’s part to seek Baby’s return.

“[A]ny future possession would constitute unlawful possession of the Commonwealth’s property,” the game commission said in a statement. A spokesperson offered no further comment.

Should Shiery have been allowed to keep Baby?

According to Don Wagner, a deer researcher in Pennsylvania State University’s animal science department with more than two decades of experience, the answer is a resounding “no.”

“The only situation that a deer should be taken in like that is if it is seriously injured and needs medical attention, and it goes to a licensed wildlife rehabilitator,” Wagner said. “That’s the absolute only way.”

Wagner sees a similar story across Pennsylvania each year: A well-intentioned neighbor takes in a doe-eyed fawn at its youngest and cutest. Soon, the animal is growing at a steady clip, reaching 120 pounds and sometimes climbing toward 200.

That’s when the animal’s natural tendencies kick in.

Wagner sees the worst of these scenarios among domesticated young males, who are flush with testosterone during mating season and can become both aggressive and oblivious of their surroundings, leading to attacks on nearby humans.

“A big buck with a set of antlers can do a lot of damage,” Wagner said.

Shiery and Jenkins strongly disagree with that assessment.

Baby was never violent, they say, and his antlers were removed. The women see the deer’s affectionate relationship with neighbors and dogs as evidence that Baby had properly integrated into the community.

Shiery now hopes the matter will be settled by a judge. This week, Uniontown attorney Vincent M. Tiberi filed a petition in Fayette County Court framing Shiery’s claim to Baby as a return of property.​

In a potential twist in the dispute, Shiery claims she has evidence that Baby wasn’t wild after all, but had been initially purchased by her neighbor — possibly helping Shiery’s case for a permit — though she did not provide that evidence, citing the ongoing legal matter.

For those wondering where Baby’s saga is headed, it’s helpful to look to the not-so-distant past.

When New York state environmental officials euthanized P’Nut the squirrel in November, the Instagram-famous animal’s death sparked online outrage over purported government overreach into the rights of animal owners.

Those cries were amplified by conservative politicians and activists, so much that even then-vice presidential candidate JD Vance echoed them in the final days of the 2024 campaign.

Now chatter surrounding the Save Baby campaign is taking a similar MAGA bent, brimming with patriotic bravado as Shiery and Jenkins’ story is branded as one of everyday Americans against a Goliath state bureaucracy.

Already there are AI-generated images circulating on social media of Musk cuddling with a fawn stand-in for Baby, while an X account with 1.2 million followers called “Donald Trump News” has further amplified the story.

And, in a callback to Musk’s much-memed Dogecoin, a “Baby” token hit the crypto market with $1.1 million in total value during a recent high.

Shiery, asked about Baby’s story becoming a conservative cause, said she was “ecstatic” about the attention from Musk and others.

“Enough is enough,” said a message from Baby’s X account last week, paired with an illustration of the deer standing at a podium alongside Musk, Trump, and the American flag. “WE WANT ANSWERS.”