The does moved silently and quickly until they were a few miles from the bucks. As far as their sensitive ears could tell, the bucks were still bashing heads and yelling, seemingly having not even noticed that the does were gone.
Su Yin, a doe who was a history professor on the other side, began. "You know what the trouble with stags is?"
Lateisha giggled. "The unscheduled meeting of the Saltlick Symposium on male inadequacy will come to order."
Su Yin pressed on. "Antlers."
"Antlers?" Hannah queried.
"Think about it. They have these big, honking antlers, and we don't. You see how invested they get in their antlers. We don't have antlers, so they don't think of us as really human. Well, not human, but you know what I mean. I mean, look at the predators."
"What about the predators?" Lateisha asked.
"Don't the predators have better relationships than we do? You seen predator couples all the time." Su Yin replied.
"OK" said Hannah, thinking of Jackie and Keith.
"Predator women" Su Yin continued, unconsciously slipping into lecture mode "have claws and teeth just like the men. The men are a little bigger, but that's about it. A predator man who tried to bully a female into sex--like the stags try to bully us--would be risking a nasty claw swipe, if not more. So they have to treat females like equals."
"Hmmm. . ." Hannah replied. "But couldn't another reason be that predator couples hunt together, while we aren't really partners in grazing? There's not much that male and female deer could do together other than talk and have sex, and not many of these guys seem into talking."
"That's true." said a doe named Jenny, who was one of the few to have have had sex with a buck. "The times I've done it, they don't even stick around to ask how it was for you, just pull out and leap off."
"Ugh." said Leticia. "Still, I would like to try it before I go back to human. It seems a shame to have all of these fully functional parts and not giv them a workout."