Bambi vs. the Bureaucrats

Had he been a hunter, and had the mottled white doe that tumbled down a hill into his rural Oregon driveway six years ago been an adult, Jim Filipetti could have ponied up $19, applied for a deer tag and gunned the animal down. He could have butchered the deer the state now knows as "Snowball," mounted her head on the wall and moved on with his life.

But Filipetti chose to raise the injured fawn as a pet, spending thousands of dollars on veterinarian bills to treat her deformed hooves, installing strips of carpet throughout his house so she wouldn't slip on the hardwood floors, and feeding her a steady diet of sweetpeas, tomatoes and green beans—"the best that Safeway had to offer," he says. After 12 months, the house painter moved her to a pen outside his home in Molalla, Ore., but she was still a member of the family. "It was like having a dog around the house," Filipetti says.

Filipetti uses the past tense because his beloved Snowball has been seized by the state, which was considering euthanizing her. The story has outraged local residents and animal-rights advocates.

What's telling is that the neighbors didn't complain. To the contrary, they took to Snowball, stopping by to feed the tame creature on a regular basis. "Everybody's got a set of animals somewhere," says Geordie Duckler, an attorney with the Animal Law Practice, a Portland specialty law firm that handles livestock disputes, biting incidents and claims against veterinarians. "It's rural Oregon."

One neighbor even brought for a visit his own rescued buck: Mr. Magoo, so named because he was blind. Filipetti agreed to let Mr. Magoo live with Snowball, until he died of what Filipetti suspects was a heart attack. Bad eyesight didn't stop a love connection between Mr. Magoo and Snowball, and little Bucky was conceived.

The family was happy enough until Filipetti had a flap with an estranged relative who called in an "anonymous" tip to state authorities that Filipetti was raising deer without any kind of permit, which is illegal under state law. In April, Oregon State Police troopers showed up, took samples of Bucky's and Snowball's blood to determine the species, retreated for a few months to figure out how to proceed and then returned last week. The deer might be permitted to stay with Filipetti if he'd unlock his gate, state officials said, so they could be free to roam. But Filipetti refused that option, worried that the tame deer would be easy bait for vicious neighborhood dogs.