This is an interesting little tid-bit of news: According to The Highway Loss Data Institute animal collisions with cars has risen 50% since the year 2000.
The first question is why. Why the sudden jump?
My first thought, supported by the studies, is that urban sprawl is cutting into animal habitats. I grew up in a fairly rural area of the country, where the town stopped, hundreds of square miles of forest began, so anybody with a brain knew to keep an eye out for deer and possums and whatnot. That doesn’t mean that accidents didn’t happen. One time my dad’s kid brother was driving to work at the factory, working graveyard shift. Drove into a fog bank. Turns out some cows had knocked down a fence and wandered onto the highway. He didn’t realize they were there until a cow went by his left-hand window almost immediately followed by a HUGE bang when he outright nailed another cow, sending the poor beast up and over the hood and nearly through the windshield and into the passenger seat until it bounced out again. He was driving a Kaiser Manhattan, a car roughly the size and weight of the destroyer he served on, so the car, and my uncle, made it through with surprisingly little damage.
You can see where this scenario could turn out a lot different if a person was driving, say, a totally tricked out hot hatch of some sort.
Here’s another little bit from the recent car-to-animal collision study: “Animal versus motorcycle incidents rise in the summer months, mainly because riding two-wheelers is more common.”
Ouch! Like the possibility of bodily harm isn’t high enough on bikes already, imagine pranging a deer while riding a motorcycle doing 50. I’m sure the services would be very moving and respectful.
One thing that I do mention to people from more city-like environments is that most people in my home town used these things generically referred to as “deer whistlers”. They’re little chrome deals that look like miniature jet engines. You mount them in your grill or on the front bumper. The air flowing into them as you drive makes a high pitched whistling noise, like a dog whistle, too high for us to hear. Deer and other woodland creatures can hear it though, and for them, it isn’t a pleasant sound, so they run the other way until the sound, and you, are gone.
Be careful out there … it’s getting darker and slicker, so take care of yourself.
Source: AutoBlog
There’s the full press release on page 2.
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