Hoimo
The more obvious choice would be to make everyone go dark, instead of setting up nationwide voice mail to pretend everyone is alive. But maybe this way they can keep everyone's communications open while also fooling most of these intelligence gathering methods (someone answered, in the right language, mark it as active).
Not really early Germanic though, because every other Germanic language kept the meaning of "animal". It's only modern English (since the 1500s) that narrowed it all the way to one specific species (or family of Cervidae).
My guess would be that the language gained the word "animal" from French and "deer" was pushed from its niche and forced to specialize?
The reverse image search spotted it well, but it isn't the same image. It's very likely the source where the image generator got its ideas from though: https://lemmy.world/post/31578519/17746077
So can I subscribe to !nyaa@pt.nyaa.social from here? Because I know mastodon-lemmy is mostly one way, can't really subscribe to a masto tag or user from here, but if Piefed is structured similarly...
Edit: Jerboa opens the community for me at least, now I only need that subscription to process. Looks like it's working though.