The name of Vasily Vasichkin is well-known to many in the Moscow region. If you need to save a wild animal or a bird, you need to go to the village of Likhachevo, where the Vasichkin family's deer farm has been standing for almost 30 years.
The owner of the farm is a professional reindeer herder, or as he says about himself, a man who loves deer very much and just lives next to them.
"Now I have 20 spotted deer on my farm, half of them are tame. It happened so that I had to feed them, someone's mother died, some abandoned their fawns, this happens in nature. And so I fed them from the nipple every two hours, so even though the deer have grown up, they follow me around. I am like a mother to them," says Vasily Vasichkin.
Vasily Vasichkin had a love for wild animals all his life. It all started with horses. Almost forty years ago I bought a horse for myself, then I bought a horse for my wife, then for my children. And the whole family went horseback riding in the Caucasus. We began to keep animals at our dacha near Ruza.
Vasily Vasichkin received his first spotted deer as a gift almost thirty years ago. And then suddenly a reindeer appeared in the family. During Perestroika, VDNKh began to get rid of its famous reindeer sleds. Vasily bought one of them, a very old one. As it turned out later, the very first reindeer of the Vasichkin family is a star of Soviet cinema, starred in the film "The Snow Queen".
It is noteworthy that almost all of Vasichkin's deer live much longer than their natural term. Some deer lived to be thirty or even forty years old. Although no more than fourteen live in the wild.
Vasichkin does not keep an account of the rescued animals. He recalls, perhaps, the most striking cases. For example, recently he had to nurse a stork that got hit by a combine harvester. Passers-by brought an owl that had been hit by a car. These and other stories have been shown on Channel One more than once.
A year ago, a llama was born in a private Nizhny Novgorod zoo, but the mother did not have milk, and the staff realized that they could not cope with the newborn. They gave it to Vasily Vasichkin, who fed the little lamont from a bottle every two hours. So lamas also appeared on the farm.
Currently, 25 northern and 20 spotted deer live on the deer farm. There are morals, fallow deer, even bison and Tibetan yaks. We had to make separate aviaries for birds. Polar owls, tawny owls, eagly owls, barn owls, barrow eagles and even peacocks are the real pride of the Vasichkins.
"Eight years ago, I started letting people in, first for free, then I got a license for the right to operate a zoo, and now I have a contact mini-zoo. We do not have sponsors, so we buy animal feed from visitors. We keep them," Vasily Vasichkin continues.
But children from orphanages are allowed here for free. Vasily Vasichkin says that he has been making friends with orphanages in his district for a long time and is happy to wait for children two or three times a year.
Photo from the personal archive of Vasily Vasichkin.