I gun for rabbits and coyotes (all horrid pests), but will avoid the quail and snakes and horses. The latter for self-preservation.
Its almost impossible to hit a rabbit on purpose.
Same with squirrels. They are wired to dart in an unpredictable direction at the last minute, since that’s a good strategy against hawks, their primary predator. If it darts under your tires, oh well. But there’s basically no way to hit one on purpose with a car.
I was walking home one night when unintentionally I flushed a cat which ran WHAP into a car, and then dragged itself into my neighbour’s open garage before it expired.
It was a difficult to break the news to my neighbour.
I hit a fox once (unexpected for both the fox and me), which is not THAT much bigger than a cat, and wow, it really damaged the car, and I feel very lucky that I was able to keep control of the car after the impact. The thought of doing that on purpose seems both lunatic and cruel. (I was in a car, not a truck, so it’s possible the effect on a truck wouldn’t be that dramatic, but still.)
Yeah, the racoon did a lot of damage to my car. It would seem really dumb to hit anything larger than a squirrel on purpose. At least if you are driving an ordinary sort of car.
Wait, there are people who actually try to purposely hit deer? Despite the danger involved?
So that people won’t get the idea that 6% of drivers do their best to run over fluffy kittens, half of them were trying to kill a fake tarentula, and 2/3 of the rest a fake snake.
Neither seems very surprising to me.
Also, this experiment seems pretty dangerous to me.
Finally : you’ve been reinstated?
I’ve hit two deer, a squirrel and two birds in my car. I’ve also nearly taken out an owl with my head while on a motorcycle (hooray for fast ducking reflexes). I nearly hit an opossum who tried to flee by running directly away from me down the road, but I came to a stop in time. One of the deer I hit ran away from me down the road, then at the last minute decided the best course of action was to run across the road directly in front of me. :smack:
One of my deer was struck on a freeway at 65mph. $1,800 in damage and I had to get towed as it destroyed the electrical system when the battery shorted out.
Still, there are benefits to hitting the critter. I see more serious/fatal collisions resulting from people losing control and crashing while trying to avoid an animal than I do from people actually hitting them. I’ll brake to slow down, but smaller than deer size I likely won’t swerve. Bigger than that there’s a risk of it coming through the windshield and swerving is worth the risk of losing control.
A wildlife species which has a bad time on the roadkill scene in the UK and continental Europe, is hedgehogs (which I gather you don’t have in North America). The hedgehog’s instinctive strategy when in danger from a predator, is to roll itself up into a ball and lie still (spines all round, no vulnerable point). The creatures don’t “get” that this doesn’t work with motor vehicles. It’s extra hard to avoid a (suddenly) stationary rolled-up hedgehog, and many drivers don’t try to, if indeed they see the animal at all. A sadly large number of hedgehogs thus become roadkill.
I had the same experience. And then the thing ran away from me as fast as its little legs could waddle, completely blockng the narrow coutry road. I had to completely stop the car and turn out the lights before it relaxed enough to stop running from me and wander into the bushes.
Dumb dumb animals.
You sat on a dark country road all blacked out for some time? You’re fortunate another car didn’t come along and rear-end you at speed.
I’m not certain the only dumb, dumb thing that night was an opposum.
This. “Swerving” is fatally stupid. If you have time and space to make a well-considered gentle maneuver within your lane, by all means do it. Never swerve.
Likewise mild braking is fine. Panic braking for something smaller than a moose is putting yourself, your passengers, and nearby cars at considerable risk for no good reason.
The decision to do the right thing, not the silly thing, needs to be made now while you’re not moving. Failing to plan is planning to fail.
I’ve hit deer twice. Once was a very slow speed, causing about $800 in plastic damage. Once I hit the brake when I saw the stupid thing make its move, and my little Scion sustained over $3000 in damage, but nowhere near totalled.
I ran over a squirrel once - I saw it and I slowed way down, hoping it would run out of the way. Then I heard the sickening thump-thump and saw it flopping around on the road in my rearview mirror. I figure it was Darwinism at its finest.
I even swerve to avoid already dead critters in the road - I don’t want blood and guts on my car.
The speed limit there is 15mph, and people rarely take that stretch much faster. If another car had come by, I would have heard it.
I still didn’t want to wait for the possum to run at 3mph down the road.
No driver in the U.S. is immune to hitting a deer. They can and will literally jump straight in front of you with no time or a good way to react. I passed two separate destroyed deer carcasses on I-95 this weekend not that far from NYC. That is an incredibly busy interstate and anyone that had the misfortune of being in the wrong place the same time they decided to jump in front of fast moving traffic had a really bad Thanksgiving weekend.
It doesn’t help that they also freeze in place especially at night like…well…I am failing to come up with a good analogy. I have nearly hit a few myself including one that I just barely missed on a rural road with my then infant daughter in my SUV. It was just hiding in the obscured bushes waiting for the chance to commit suicide apparently and almost succeeded when she decided to bolt across the road but we missed by inches.
The only larger animal that I ever hit was a raccoon and it didn’t die right away so I had the gruesome job of driving over it again to put it out of its misery. I have hit two squirrels as well. Those cases were unintentional and unavoidable.
However, I am convinced that some people do hit animals on purpose. I grew up with a huge group of free-range, large dogs and many of them got hit by cars on the nearest road. It wasn’t a busy road at all and I even witnessed one of them get hit and killed once. Two of them were crossing when a woman in a small car just kept up her 50 mph speed despite no traffic, unlimited visibility and the fact that two large dogs were crossing. One was able to get out the way and she hit and killed the other. There is no way she didn’t intend on doing it and I hope it destroyed her car.
My dad ran down a turkey in the road. Then he tossed it in the trunk, took it home, plucked and roasted it.
I don’t think anyone would say otherwise. It’s just the idea that someone would be so fucking stupid as to hit it on purpose. If that’s the case, you deserve exactly what you get.
Those of us who live in deerless places are. Never seen one around here.
Out of curiosity, in what general area do you live in? White-tailed deer have infested the Northeast to the point where it is common for them to be a nuisance even in suburban and urban areas. They are also everywhere in the South and especially the upper Mid-West. The Western states like Colorado and California have a serious Mule deer problem. We have to fight them off with a slingshot at my aunt’s home right in the middle of Colorado Springs because they march right in like they own the place. I don’t know of any area of the Continental U.S. where a driver is relatively safe from a deer collision (or even worse, a moose or elk).
The only part of the U.S. that doesn’t have a significant deer threat is Hawaii. Deer cause $4 billion dollars worth of damage a year from vehicle collisions alone along with about 200 deaths as a direct result of those collisions. They also carry Lyme disease which is not a trivial threat in the Northeast. My ex-MIL, daughter, dog and a cousin have all contracted it in the last ten years and my cousin is permanently disabled because of it.
Deer are evil and Bambi was propaganda. Many more people need to take up the nice sport of deer hunting to mitigate the risks. It won’t be me because I hate getting up really early, sitting still and being cold but other people should.