Roe deer

Roe deer recur in the testimonies as living beings caught in the Chernobyl disaster, not merely as scenery around human catastrophe. Seen running through abandoned land, feeding near the reactor, and facing hunters’ guns, they expose the limits of evacuation and the moral distance between human decisions and the lives those decisions leave behind.

Presence in the Abandoned Landscape

One witness describes looking into a garden and seeing wild boars digging, while Roe deer ran nearby. The animals’ future is left open: whether they will reproduce, the speaker says, is unknowable. People can be resettled, but the animals cannot simply be moved in the same way. Water, too, crosses boundaries, passing over and beneath the earth without regard for human borders. The observation places Roe deer in an environment that cannot be neatly divided into human settlements and a separate natural world. Their presence persists within a landscape altered by evacuation, while their survival remains uncertain.

A view from a helicopter near the reactor gives the deer a different, more unsettling appearance. They are described alongside wild boars as thin and sleepy, moving as if in slow motion and eating the grass that had grown there. The witness emphasizes that they did not understand that they should leave with the people. That contrast is central to the account: people received instructions and were transported away, but the animals remained among the contaminated surroundings, continuing to feed without knowing the danger. The testimony does not claim to know what happened to those particular deer; it preserves the sight of them and the gap between human knowledge and animal exposure.

Hunting, Injury, and Recognition

The book also places Roe deer in accounts of hunting. One hunter recalls killing a fox as a child and later killing a doe, after which he swore not to kill another. What stayed with him was the doe’s expressive eyes. The recollection makes the act of killing a personal turning point: the animal’s look interrupts the hunter’s earlier acceptance of the hunt and remains present in his memory.

Another hunting account lingers on a wounded doe. The speaker says that any living creature, even an insect, has a soul. As the doe lies wounded, she seems to want compassion; instead, the hunter finishes her off. At that moment, her look appears almost human. The witness cannot settle whether it expresses hatred or a plea to live, but gives the plea words: she, too, wants to go on living. The scene does not erase the violence of the final act. Rather, it makes the animal’s apparent appeal impossible to separate from the decision to kill her.

The same testimony places hunting within a contested moral vocabulary. One speaker calls hunting a sport and complains that hunters are criticized while fishermen are not; another claims that hunting and war are the principal activities of a real man. Against those assertions, the doe’s look supplies a counter-image. The animal is not simply quarry or a test of masculine skill: the hunter’s account recognizes a life that resists being reduced to sport, even as he describes its destruction.

Scientific Use and Contaminated Food

Roe deer also belong to the practical aftermath of the disaster, when animals were shot for study and food. One account describes shooting two rabbits, two foxes, and two wild goats for scientific purposes; all were sick, yet the hunters tenderized and ate them. At first they were afraid to eat the animals, but they became accustomed to it. The speaker explains the decision through necessity: people have to eat, and cannot all move to the moon or another planet. The account does not specify the test results or the cause of each animal’s illness. Its force lies in the sequence it does record—sick animals killed for science, then prepared as food, with initial fear giving way to habituation.

This practice places animals at the intersection of observation and consumption. They are killed as specimens, but their bodies do not remain only scientific material; they are also eaten. The changing response of the hunters records a change in daily life, not proof that the danger has passed. In the wider testimonies, Roe deer seen feeding on grass near the reactor make that exposure visible, while the hunters’ account shows how contact with sick animals could become routine.

Evacuation and the Limits of Human Attention

The film-maker’s reflections broaden these individual encounters into a question of responsibility. An old woman refuses to leave her cat behind, calling it family; an apple tree without its usual smell also marks the film-maker’s awareness of what has changed. He later shows his Chernobyl films to children, who ask why nobody could help the animals. He cannot answer. The question exposes a gap in a culture whose art, as he describes it, attends to human suffering and love but does not descend to the level of animals, plants, and the rest of the living world.

He has heard that someone proposed evacuating animals along with people during the first months after the accident. The proposal immediately encounters practical and conceptual limits: animals above ground might perhaps be moved, but what of insects and worms in the earth, or pigeons and sparrows in the sky? How could they be given the information needed to leave? These questions do not resolve into a workable rescue plan. Instead, the Roe deer and other animals remain a measure of how incomplete evacuation was: the human response could move people, but it could neither explain the danger to other species nor encompass every form of life left in the affected environment. The film-maker calls the resulting challenge a transformation in feeling, a demand to reconsider whose suffering merits attention.