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In an opinion piece published by Pacific Standard, Assistant Professor of German Yuliya Komska discusses media treatment of a zoological puzzle: the behavior of red deer that live near the one-time border between Germany and the Czech Republic.

The puzzle, she writes, is years old: “How come the deer on either side of the former Iron Curtain roam along but not across the one-time border?”

Komska, a Dartmouth Public Voices fellow, writes that the “language of the story’s news coverage invites us to picture animals with strong traditions and beliefs—essentially, to imagine the deer as our anthropomorphic alter egos.”

Read the full opinion piece, published 3/11/14 by Pacific Standard.