Is This a Bear Market in...Oxytocin?

I have an obsession, I'll admit.  I have an obsession with learning and information acquisition.  Everything is fair game to me (intellectually), and I often like to learn about seemingly unrelated things - only to later marvel at the relationships that exist between them...or so I think.

It was about two months ago that I noticed a startling trend:  baby deer being abandoned by their mothers. Why is this startling, you ask?  Maternal instinct is one of the strongest primal forces, period.  That's why.  Widespread instance of maternal instinct breakdown among a very sensitive animal - the deer - is worth noticing.  Within one week's time, I heard of three different instances of fawn abandonment from people that I knew (they all found an abandoned fawn).  All three of these people did not live near one another, so it wasn't an isolated case that was experienced by three people.  I decided to do a little digging, and found many recent articles about the widespread abandonment of newborn animals by their mothers.

Fawn abandonment article. 

Many of these articles blamed the historic drought that is currently entrenched in the southern U.S. as the causal factor.  This all sounded like a "good enough" explanation at the time, and I was partially satisfied with this explanation.  I still couldn't totally understand the logic of the abandonment, as children are almost never economically-rational decisions.  Having children is an almost guarantee that there will be instant competition for the resources that you own.  If mothers are rational economic actors, then all mothers should abandon all children, unless the happiness/utility that the child brings outweighs the sadness/dis-utility that the child's competition for the mother's resources brings.  I guess these new mother deer didn't see much utility in their fawns - and with the coldness/detachment of a rational-economic-algorithmic-logic machine - they left their cute, new competitors to die.  I'm convinced there is a lurking variable...

The Payoff:
This morning, I was reading a piece about a neuroeconomist (yes, I know what you're thinking) who is an expert on the hormone oxytocin.  Oxytocin is a hormone that - among other things - is a driver of levels of trust and love.  The higher a person's oxytocin levels, the more they're likely to be a trusting, loving person.  I've heard all of this before, and have found it fascinating.  What I found most interesting - and keeping things in the context of the tome I just wrote up to this point - were the comments about how low levels of oxytocin can lead to 1) difficulty with a mother's milk production, and 2) maternal neglect.      

Excerpts from oxytocin article:
"...Dale later discovered that oxytocin stimulated the release, or let-down, of mother's milk by contracting the smooth-muscle cells around the mammary glands..."

"...In addition, oxytocin has been shown to facilitate nurturing behaviour in mice and rats: when oxytocin was blocked, the rodents stopped caring for their young and displayed signs of 'social amnesia'..." 

Recalling an excerpt from the fawn abandonment article:   
"...Other does are abandoning their newborns because drought-induced malnutrition has robbed them of their ability to produce milk..."

I don't have the resources to spot-check the basal oxytocin levels of Whitetail deer - but if I did - I might find unusually low levels of the hormone.  The lingering questions I have are:  1) is this (presumed) bear market in deer oxytocin also being experienced by man(?), and 2) what is causing this bear market in the trust/love hormone?