Absurdity
Ohio PD Now Has A Hammock Category In Its Deer Rescue Spreadsheet
By Jeff Garstein, . BSN Network. Satire.
TWINSBURG, OHIO. The Twinsburg Police Department has, over its operational history, developed what officers describe informally as a working competency in deer rescue. Fences. Nets. Drainage infrastructure. One incident in 2019 that a sergeant will only refer to as "the pool situation." The department has seen things.
It had not seen this.
Last Tuesday, responding to a call from a residential backyard, officers arrived to find a white-tailed deer fully entangled in a fabric hammock, suspended between two trees, in what one responding officer's written report described as "a reclining position." The deer was alive. It appeared, by photographic evidence later posted to the department's Facebook page and liked 4,200 times, to be neither panicking nor particularly embarrassed.
The Twinsburg PD has a protocol for deer rescues. They have, by the department's own account, executed that protocol many times. The protocol does not mention hammocks. It does not mention hammocks because, in the entire professional history of the department, no one thought to ask.
"We've handled a lot of deer calls," said Officer Dave Pfaff, who was on scene and who, it should be noted, is a grown man with a badge and a service weapon who spent part of his Tuesday afternoon untangling a deer from outdoor furniture. "This was a first."
He said it the way a doctor says "that's unusual" while looking at an X-ray of something that definitely should not be there.
The rescue took approximately twenty minutes. Officers used what the department's Facebook post called "careful maneuvering," which is the institutional language for four people in uniform standing around a hammock trying to figure out which end of the deer to grab first without getting kicked into next week. The deer was freed and released into nearby woods, where it presumably resumed its afternoon.
The hammock did not survive.
What the Twinsburg Police Department now has to reckon with, administratively, is the question of classification. Their deer rescue records, accumulated over years of what was previously a fence-and-ditch operation, do not have a hammock field. There is no dropdown. There is no box to check. Someone in that building has to create one, which means someone has to write a definition, which means at some point a supervisor approved a memo that uses the phrase "hammock entanglement" as an official category of police work.
Chief Christopher Kallay, who has presumably spent his career preparing for situations more serious than this, released a statement calling the rescue "a testament to the dedication of our officers." He said this with what one imagines was a completely straight face, because he is a professional and because the cameras were on.
The deer has not commented. Based on the photographs, it does not seem particularly grateful.
Twinsburg, Ohio has a population of roughly 19,000 people. It now also has a deer that has spent more time in a hammock than most of its residents did this summer.
The department is asking residents to secure their outdoor furniture.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2026/09/21/deer-hammock-rescue-North-Canton-Ohio/4011790011736/