Whither Goest Thou, America, in Thy Shiny Car in the Night?

7 Comments

Assume? ASSUME?

You bastard! You didn’t stop to check? You didn’t bother to find out if it was dead, or just dying in agony?

I hope you hit a fucking wombat, and it rips out your sump, and brake-lines and then pisses on your trapped and crippled body after the car crash.

Or hit a kangaroo, that kicks your kidneys out of your eyes after the impact has fractured your engine block and thrown you onto the road through the windscreen, and then pisses in your eye-sockets as you bleed out on the highway.

(No animals were harmed in this violent fantasy. Wombats and Kangaroos are things to avoid hitting in your car as they win, car loses. Although a kangaroo kick would probably push your kidneys out your anal sphincter rather than your eyeballs.)

If the only damage to the car was a dangling fender, then one of two things is likely true — they only clipped the deer (probably not dead) or the “deer” was actually a fawn (bye bye Bambi). I’ve never hit a deer, but my sister has, and both car and deer were totaled.

@CheapBoy: Having hit a deer I understand his seeming sang froid. One does assume the deer to be dead though what happens is that they will pull themselves away from the highway to die. And yes, when I hit one the car wasn’t totaled but the front end had to be rebuilt.

The white-tailed deer was hunted almost to extinction. It was reintroduced here in the Catskills (in Neversink Valley to be precise) in ’41 and now the buggers are everywhere eating everything in sight. Not that one advocates blasting them but locals regard them more as pest than ornament. They’ve eaten all the leaves of my elderberry, for example, and are working their way through the hydrangeas. As a species they’re blessed with terrible road sense. They’re given to panic and jumping right in front of you. The hubby hit one right outside the entrance to our dive. And if one runs across the road in front of you another is likely to follow. So it’s not unusual to see cars stopped on the road as a fawn darts across, waiting for the next one or two to follow. Apart from that, carry on.

Wombats are funny.

@Benedick: There are so many in Rock Creek Park that the National Park Service is bringing in “wildlife management” folks from USDA to thin the population, with the resultant meat going to local food banks. Animal rights groups are not amused, to say the least.

@mellbell: I don’t have the proper statistics handy, but have no doubt the deer population in Pennsyltucky has increased at the same rate of the general decline of the human population – at least in those parts outside of our mighty metropolises.

And I have zero problem with hunters going out and culling the ranks. Venison can be delightful; my dad had patients who would pay him in meat back during the Whip Inflation Now days of oil shocks and price increases.

@mellbell: Where are the coyotes (the four-legged kind)?

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