Decade-Long Friendship Between Neighborhood Deer and House Cat Is a Wonder to Behold

The Fox and the Hound is a classic animated film from Disney which imagines a friendship between a hunting dog and its traditional quarry. And though your average house cat is far too small to bother a deer, that doesn’t mean that the deer doesn’t recognize the creature as a predator, no matter how tiny. (And if your cat is of the one-braincell variety, it doesn’t mean they won’t try it, anyway.)

But not this cat and this deer. From the minute Buttons showed up at these people’s house, an orphaned fawn, she began to bond with their house cat. Now, thirteen years later, they are still inseparable.

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Buttons the deer came to live with the family as a homeless fawn and now, over a decade later, she still spends plenty of time with the family, even if she occasionally goes off to mate with deer. She’s had several babies of her own, who all grow up to be wild deer and some of them have even had fawns too. Buttons is a grandmother! But she still relies on the family that gave her a home so long ago, a process known as habituation. They’ve even given her a collar with a GPS tracker on it to monitor where she goes. (And hopefully tip off potential hunters as to her status among people.)

Related: Deer Brings Her Family to Meet Golden Retriever and We Can't Take It

And ever since she was a fawn, she has loved their house cat Rabbitcat, an Easter present for the family’s kids that loves this very special deer right back.

The Difference Between Taming and Domestication

Though they are often used interchangeably, there is a decided difference between an animal who is tame and one who is domesticated. (There’s even a difference between an animal who is captive and one who is tame, and that one approaches even blurrier lines!) Tame animals are members of wild species which—for whatever reason—live among humans. They are not part of selective breeding programs stretching back hundreds or thousands of years, and they could have parents, siblings, or even children that are completely wild.

Domesticated species, on the other hand, are ones who have been artificially selected and bred for traits that are most useful or appealing to the species doing the domestication. Think dogs, horses, pigs, sheep, chickens and even pigeons. Humans are not the only species that domesticate, but he way—even leaf-cutter ants are thought to have “domesticated” certain types of fungi for their own use.

Habituated Wild Animals

Even though Buttons is a tame deer, and one that is habituated to living among people, that does not make her a domesticated species. You can tell this by the fact hat she has family that live in the wild.

With cats, it is more complicated. Though humans did not purposefully breed cats the way they did with dogs and livestock until relatively recently, cats are a far cry from their wild counterparts in the distant past. In fact, they have been living alongside humans for so long that many scholars refer to the species as having self-domesticated to exhibit traits of gentleness and human-friendly characteristics so as to make them appealing to us.

As for Buttons and her half-wild life, it’s the rare story of a wild animal that seems to be going okay.

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