I remember someone’s offhand comment on seeing a squirrel get splattered across the road.
“That took a lot of guts.”
Personally, we refer to such critters as making a PSD. Poor Squirrel Decision, even it if is a bird/dog/cat/possum.
I do my best to aviod hitting anything…but sometimes it can’t be helped.
The worst was a Canadian Goose on an extremely rainy day.
Ever seen that picture of the squirrel with an enormous set of cajones that’s just standing in the middle of the road? Even if I was in a pick-up, I’d swerve to miss that thing.
Yeah, I would too.
It’s my nature to avoid the critters. If the only choice was to wreck my car and perhaps get hurt OR run him down. I’d run him down. I wouldn’t like it and I’d feel really bad.
Here’s a good one though. I was on my motorcycle driving on the inside lane of a 4 lane street. From the oncoming lanes I see a squirrel dart across the road. Me makes it across two lanes of traffic with cars running over top him. The little guy is fearless.
He gets into my lane. Figuring my distance from him and how he’s moving by the time I got to him he should be on the right side of the lane. I move over to the left side. At the last moment he must have forgot a nut or something on the far side of the street and did a 180 and started back the way he came. I didn’t have time to dodge him and nailed him from nose to tail.
I thought “what are the chances of that?”
At least he died quick, considering the only thing that wasn’t flat on him where his little legs (spread eagle).
Poor little guy. 
I witnessed an accident once that was caused by someone swerving to avoid a squirrel. It was on a curvy street while it was raining, and she lost control of her car and slammed into a light pole. The pole fell over into the street and she completely totalled her car, and was emotionally distraught to boot. However, I think she was physically unharmed. It looked pretty awful, though. The squirrel definitely wasn’t worth it.
I hit a squirrel once. I felt awful, even cried, but I never tried to dodge it.
True story. Husband and I were going to Big Bend National Park. We started in the afternoon and drove late into the night. Somewhere around south Texas, the ranches take over and the road is very dead. Thirty miles with hardly a car in sight. Because it’s so otherwise peaceful, the animals come out and don’t have any reason to stay out of the road. We hit a handful of jackrabbits and frogs that night. It was horrible, constantly hearing that thump of yet another animal playing Russian Roullette with our car tires.
Now we feel we have a moral obligation to avoid driving that route at night.
Other than that, the only other animals I can recall hitting is a big black and white bird that smacked into our windshield so hard once while we were in Colorado that we were sure it cracked it and deer. You have to try to avoid hitting deer though.
I do tend to slow for squirrels if I’m on a suburb road, where the speed limit is slow enough to allow it, but I’m afraid the little buggers are on their own otherwise. Only animals I would try to avoid are large ones like deer and large dogs.
Are you really going to swerve off the road for a elephant?
A squirrel? No! Not for a squirrel, not for a rabbit, or a ‘coon, or a cat or a dog. A pig, maybe. A 200 lb. plus pig will put you it the ditch before you know it. A deer or a horse will come in the windshield and kill you. For them you do what ever you have to do to avoid a collision.
The squirrel may be just as much God’s creature as I am, but as between the possible abrupt termination of my life or the squirrel’s life I am afraid that if I get to make the choice, the squirrel loses. In one of Bill Maulden’s Stars and Stripes cartoons Willy and Joe are in a trench with all sorts of ordinance passing overhead: one says to the other, “The hell this ain’t the most important hole in the world. I’m in it.” My thoughts precisely.