Again I just like to play devils advocate but why does this quote translate into an animal having great intelligence? Are you somehow offended that you have a hard time killing a "stupid" animal? Because it seems to me some REFUSE to admit fact.

I mean seriously, I give you hard evidence as to thier lack of intelligence and the only repsonse I keep getting is how hard they are to hunt. I'm not saying they're not hard to hunt, I'm sure they are. The places I got my info from never said they were easy to kill, they are indeed elusive no doubt about it. But they're hard to hunt because the have keen senses. You put them in dark timber and you'll never see them because they hear and smell extremely well. It doesn't take intelligence for an animal to sense danger and run. The fact that the big bucks get really wary is called classic conditioning. A buck gets shot at so many times and pressured there is a switch in his brain that automatically associates human odor and sound with danger. Thats an instinctive thing, not a well thought out plan by a deer. He goes out in a meadow and gets shot at, classic conditioning will tell him to stop going out in the meadow during daylight. Again thats an instinct not a thought process. Classic conditoning is a survival mechanism given to every animal in the world regardless of intelligence.

If you put a rat in a cage and you shock him everytime a human gets within a certain distance of his cage I guarantee you after a dozen or so times everytime a human walks within that distance of his cage he will run like the wind and hide. Is the rat intelligent? Is classic conditioning a sign of intelligence, I guess it is on some level it is but its more of an instinctive mechanism than an intelligence indicator. Take a new born baby and if everytime he touches a red bottle he gets burned, I guarantee you after 3 or 4 times he will cry whenever that bottle gets near him. Thats instinct. Deer are hard to hunt because of classic conditioning, an instinct.

You put a human in that same dark timber and I'll bet without technology and training, a human would be easier to hunt than a whitetail deer because his senses are much weaker. Does that mean a whitetail deer is in fact smarter than a human?