Have you or haven't you hit a deer?

In My Humble Opinion
81

Hit one, in Western Wyoming in the mid-80s. Was on a straight stretch of icy road when three deer stepped out on the road a few hundred yards ahead. If I hit the brakes, probably would have slid into the ditch, so I steered straight ahead and hoped for the best. Tagged the third one on the left rear leg. leaving a tiny dent on the bumper. Deer spun around and fell down, then got up, gave me a “WTF” look and ran off.

Around the same time, was a passenger in a mid-sized tractor-trailer rig on a mountain road in Colorado. As we were rounding a curve, a herd of at least half a dozen deer came plunging down an embankment onto the roadway, right in our path. We hit…well, most of them, sending them tumbling off the road down into a creekbed. Only damage to the truck was a folded bumper.

Have had a few close calls since then, but none in Texas where I now live.

82

Reminds me of a youtube taken from a train engineer’s cab. They round a blind curve and there’s a couple dozen cattle on the tracks. The speed looks to be 50-ish mph. The engineer blasts his horns and a couple cows look up. Most don’t. They drive through the herd with no discernable effect on the train; no jolts or bumps seen in the camera.

No idea how much burger they made that day, but the train decisively won that encounter.

83

I hit one last December. It happened so fast, I didn’t even have time to react and it’s probably good that I didn’t. I’d have probably hit another car head on if I had.

He was large and came from the other side of the highway. It couldn’t have been timed better to miss those two cars and hit my front bumper. Luckily, he wasn’t any higher in his jump or it would have come through my windshield.

I see them almost every day and it scares me silly, so I try to go slow, but there’s always someone behind me who isn’t happy with my speed and I feel forced to go faster until I can pull over to let them pass.

It’s just one more reason I don’t like living in the area I’m in. Much too rural.

84

Technically, Your Honor, the deer hit me.

Dumbass deer charged the side of my van as I was driving maybe 50 mph on a dirt road with a clear view all around me. He did it on purpose and he got injured, but the van was undamaged. What a maroon.

85

So far, roughly 50% of Dopers have hit a deer based on the poll results. I’m pretty well doomed, aren’t I?

86

In the dark, a large one ran out of the woods, directly into the side of my moving at about 30 or 40 mph car.

high pitched whistles do seem to help.

87

I know for a fact that in 1970’s Minnesota, it was so illegal for a person to transport a deer they had accidentally struck and killed that the vehicle could be, and often was, confiscated. Friends, with fairly new pickup truck, struck and killed a deer near Duluth and, not wanting it to be wasted, loaded it in the back and took it to the county poor farm type operation. Cops saw them, pulled them over, called for someone to come get them, took the truck, delivered the carcass to the poor farm, and impounded the vehicle. Took paying a fine of several hundred dollars to get the truck released.

88

Can you eat a deer if it is killed by a car? I mean in terms of digestibility, not legally.

Regards,
Shodan

89

I’ve hit two.

First one was on a motorcycle. Me, not the deer. I was very lucky. Riding down an old country road right before dusk (shadows are lengthening, but the sun is still up). I see a group on the side of the road and one decides that the best thing it can do is try and run across the road in front of me. Well, I guess he wasn’t all that familiar with motorcycles and he didn’t make it in front of me. I remember seeing his head pass within an inch of my engine guard and felt a “thunk” at the rear of the bike. After that, I heard some skittering of hooves on the pavement. I didn’t stop. Allen, my riding buddy, was behind me and we came up to a stop sign about a half mile down the road. He asked me if I hit that deer. I said, “If anything, he hit me”. Allen said the deer fell down on the road, then got right back up and ran off into the bushes on the side of the road. I examined my bike and one of the two buckles holding my saddlebag shut had been ripped off. Those were brand new saddle bags, and good ones, so I just ride around with only one buckle on that side. If that deer had been a fraction of a second quicker, I would have gone down.

The second deer wasn’t nearly as exciting (yeah, a deer on a bike is hard to beat). In my car shortly after dusk and one runs in front of me. I hit him with my left front bumper. It doesn’t break anything, but does mess-up the paint and leaves hair and blood behind. Again, I didn’t stop, I didn’t see much point.

90

My brother hit one once. He said he hit the deer (a 6 or 8 point buck, IIRC) in the left shoulder and the meat on that shoulder was just mush. The other shoulder was find and both hindquarters were OK.

91

Wisconsin changed the law a few years ago so now aircraft pilots have the same rights to a deer carcass as drivers do after hitting them.

92

I haven’t hit one yet, but we’ve only lived in this house for a year. We’re on a country-ish road with a high deep population; there’s a doe and three or four fawns who graze my back yard and apple tree nightly. I’m driving on high alert every time dusk falls!

We did have a guy hit one two driveways down from mine last fall. He stopped in front of mine and I helped him rip the fender away from his tire so he could drive home.

93

My wife has when I was in the car. It was more of a situation where the deer jumped onto our car.

94

I hit a deer with my car when I was 17, so … late fall 1986.

To set the scene: when I was about 12 my stepfather had hit a deer with his Honda Accord. He was alone in the car, but I got to see the car at the body shop and it was really messed up. I think everything in front of the firewall had to be replaced.

So when the deer jumped over the guardrails in my path, I immediately knew I was dead.
This was a really big deer, and his chest was just above dashboard height, and so it was going to hit my windshield. And based on what happened when a deer hit the bumper of my stepfather’s Accord, … I was dead.
The swerve I performed was some of the very best instinct-driven stunt driving I have ever performed, and that’s saying something. I got into a controlled fishtail and did other things that seemed to defy physics, all without being aware I was doing them.
I almost completely missed the deer. Almost.

Miracle #1) I was still alive.

A couple hundred feet down the road was an intersection with a streetlight, so I got out to survey the damage.

Miracle #2) My car was undamaged.

But, …
I’m going to get a bit vague here, because the details are definitely not PG-13. The deer wasn’t dead, but it was badly injured and couldn’t live. It was in the middle of the road and couldn’t walk.
I kind of went nuts. I knew I couldn’t handle this, so I went to get help.
I had been driving home from work at the time, so I drove home. There I told my father and older brother what had happened. I explained it over and over, but I wasn’t making myself clear.
Eventually I got it across, though, and my brother packed up the things he figured he’d need to go kill that deer and then get it out of the road. (And into a friend’s freezer, as it turned out.)

A few months later, I was a passenger in a car my brother was driving when he hit a deer. Just a crumpled fender, and the deer died. When they butchered it, … it had clearly been sick, and was probably trying to die. Nobody ate that one.
But it’s the only time I got to be the one to help my brother through a traumatic event, because I had been there and done that.
A few weeks later he described a problem he had while driving, and I said “You’ve gone deer-paranoid.” Deer-paranoid is when everything at the side of the road looks like a deer. DEER! No, mailbox. It lasts for a few weeks.

I’ve been startled by a deer a few times since then, but I haven’t collided with any.

The spoiler box below includes the description of how the deer I hit was injured, for those who simply must know. This is not for kids or the timid. Seriously, the folks in horror movies who get eaten by demons because they just had to read that book? Those are the people who read this spoiler.

[spoiler]
The deer had glanced off the side of my car, and would have been fine except … one of it’s legs got between my rear fender and rear bumper. And came off.
That was the part I apparently couldn’t say, and why my brother had trouble understanding what happened. I kept saying the deer was still in the road at (place a couple miles away), that my car was in the driveway right outside, and that the deer’s leg was stuck on my bumper.
Once he understood, he got some trashbags and a couple of stout knives and a sword he happened to own and went off in his own car to deal with this for me.
He said that, once he’d had looked at the leg on my car, he fully expected the deer to be dead when he got to it. It wasn’t.
He said that he parked where his headlights lit up the area, got out and approached the deer, and that after he’d taken a few steps towards it, it picked up its head to look at him and he nearly threw up.

And that is ALL he has ever told me about what happened that night.[/spoiler]

95

Missing a poll option: Never hit a deer, but been hit by a deer.

There was a deer casually crossing the street near my house. I slowed to about 5 mph and waited for it to get out of the way. Then a large herd stampeded across the street. One deer wrapped itself around my car. It managed to shatter my windshield and crush my back door without damaging my front door.

Also, when I was a kid my mom ran over an alligator.

96

Hit a turkey on the wing on my motorcycle and almost crashed it. Lost the windshield and bent the fender a little. Also solved any constipation problems I may have had. Got my revenge though; I ate the sonuvavitch. :slight_smile:

97

I have never hit a deer, and didn’t really think about it before driving my wife places. But now that she mentions it, they’re on the side of the road quite a bit once you head east (where she’s from). I knew a girl in high school who hit a deer in a 1/2 ton pickup. She drove on to her destination. The deer here aren’t that big.

I personally fear cows far more. 1500-2400lbs, and as the incident reported by LSLGuy will confirm, they don’t react for shit (although, longhorn might chase you). I had a cousin who died with their prom date after hitting a cow in a 1/2 ton pickup.

But myself? No, just a bunny once.

98

This was in the 50’s and police weren’t as strict about following the laws . My dad got pulled for driving drunk in late 60’s , mom and I were in the too car.
Dad paid the police off and I was bullshit ! I wanted to report the police &my dad when I got home , I had his badge # . Mom won’t let me , I didn’t give a shit if dad was mad as hell at me , at least it might had made him think about driving drunk with his family in the car.

99

In a mild derail, in the category of things you don’t want to hit/have hit you, we’ve already mentioned Moose. I’d like to add Buffalo/Bison, which I encountered sitting on a 2-lane road in Custer State Park, South Dakota about 25 years ago. I was driving a Chevy Cavalier wagon at the time, and for sure I was not going to try and nudge him out of the way, so I sat for about 15 minutes until he got up and moseyed on. Don’t even want to think about hitting one at speed…he might get…annoyed.

100

Just in case you encounter an airborne reindeer late in the evening on December 24th… :smiley: