Um, some confusion here. The flatness of roadkill is not caused by the car that killed it. The initial hit usually stuns or kills the animal, but the 20+ cars afterwards do the flattening.
My thoughts: let’s say we have a car that can travel X to Y speed. X = the minimum speed required to hit a cat. Any slower, and the cat would just wander out of the way. Y speed is so fast that the cat cannot get out of the way even if the cat moves as fast as possible. By pure logic, speeds closer to Y must do more damage because of the reaction time of the cat and the impact of the collision. At speeds closer to X, you need the cat’s cooperation to get it under the tire and impact damage will be minimal.
Therefore, the faster you go, the more likely death will occur. I’d guess that if you were going at around 200 mph, the cat would probably get sliced in half.
I’m going to posit that higher speeds = flatter cat, and here’s why:
What if we take it an extreme and say our car was going at light speed?
Wouldn’t it mean our tires are rotating near light speed, so the rotational energy grabbing the cat and shoving it from a standing position into a flattened position would be enormous? Result = flatter cat than if we are moving at a sub light speed? Therefore 80 mph = flatter cat than 5 mph?
Of course, when the cat gets shoved into the ground, the force gets returned in an equal and opposite direction, sending the car careening, but we only care about how flat the cat is.
Or is the flatness not considered a nearly linear function with speed? Could there be breakpoints or an optimal speed?
Clearly I’m not anything close to a physicist or engineer, so feel free to enlighten me on the errors of my limited logic and thought experiment.
I’m on walking and I hear a car slam on the brakes really hard. I look up just in time to see it make contact with the cat standing paralyzed in the road. The car couldn’t have been going more than 20 mph.
The car shot straight up into the air and back down several times, like something you would see in a cartoon. It was turning and twisting and making sounds from the depths of hell. Finally is came down and stopped.
Nope, because the cat is standing. If the car hits a standing cat, the cat will get thrown out of the way. The cat has to be lying down to get flattened.
My cat died that way. I was near the road and the cat liked to be near me. It was only out of my sight for a second, and then I see it flopping around on the road just like that. I caught it, and as it died, the body stiffened in my hands. My theory is that a car passed over it, the cat had a heart attack, and this was the result.
Whilst it has been a long time since this thread was responded too if any of you are interested
I was on my way to Eastbourne for a colleague’s retirement party on November 9 2007.
My BMW Z4’s satellite navigation system sent me the wrong way and soon I was on a country lane, having to brake hard to avoid two cats running in the road.
I had been traveling at around 70mph, and broke to 30mph, I didn’t feel like I had hit anything. I carried on to the party and spent the night at the Langham Hotel.
I returned to my BMW on Sunday morning and spotted two amber eyes staring at me.
My first reaction was has it come back to haunt me? I recognised it as one of the cats from the day before. I called the RSPCA when they arrived they had a mixed message a they thought the cat was in the grill in the hotel kitchen, I showed them the cat behind the grill of the BMW, we popped the grill out and rescued the uninjured grey tabby called Milly.
Thanks to a microchip in Milly, she was immediately returned to her owners who lives some 70 miles away. It seems that my braking had dipped the front of the car enough to scoop the cat in to the lower grille of the Z4 — I have found a small split — and once in the grille snapped back and trapped the cat. Any slower the cat may have just bounced off the grill any faster and Milly may have been toast.
