When the jackbooted figures of authority kick in someone’s door and seize their property, you sort of kinda expect or at least hope that, on some level, they had it coming. Maybe they were smuggling dangerous contraband. Maybe they kept slaves. Maybe they had a stash of…

Deer?

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…

Six hundred and fifty irate citizens flooded the agency’s phone lines over the next several days, demanding clemency for Snowball and her offspring…”I can legally blow the head off a deer during hunting season,” wrote Hillsboro’s Greg Ebert, in a letter to The Oregonian newspaper in Portland. “But God help me if I commit a humane act on its behalf.” At the outcry, state officials froze like, well, a doe in headlights.

Deer, deer, what are things coming to?