prevent roadkill

A couple of weeks ago, I was driving on a freeway and saw the corpse of a big, beautiful raccoon, lying in the fast lane. Frankly, as long as there are cars and US speed limits continue to be set so high on freeways, preventing this overwhelmingly sad type of ‘accident’ doesn’t seem possible to me. But we live in the country and do most of our driving on country roads, and I’m reporting on this situation because I can’t stand the fact that we can’t leave our house without seeing dead animals littered across almost every road near home.

I know some of my neighbors and visitors to our region simply don’t care about danger to themselves or others – they tear down the roads like they’re on a race track. But I also know that many people are as hurt as I am by the sight of valuable, natural beings lying maimed and destroyed on America’s roadways. We never fail to say a prayer for blessing and release of the soul of the dead animal back to the Creator, but this isn’t all that we can do. We can go further than mourning by making a few behavioral alterations in the way we drive in semi-rural and country areas. While I can’t guarantee total success with this, I can share that we’ve avoided hitting literally hundreds of deer, coyotes, bobcats, foxes, possums, raccoons, skunks, rabbits, mice and domestic animals by driving the way that we do. We can make some reduction in the well over 100 Million estimated annual roadkill deaths in our lands, and I hope you’ll agree that anything we can do will be worth it.

Work To Prevent Roadkill With These 5 Practices

1. Respect The Dusk
If you drive country roads from dusk onwards, be aware that this is the time of day when the majority of wild animals come out of their resting places in search of food and water. Areas near water are especially likely to be thoroughfares for wildlife. Dusk is also one of the most challenging times for the human eye to see clearly. The mellowing of the light makes it difficult to distinguish objects ahead of you. When driving at dusk, commit to really focusing your attention on your eyesight. Sweep the road back and forth with your eye. It’s optimum to have a companion in the passenger seat to do the same thing so that you’ve got two sets of eyes watching the margins of the road as well as down the road. Don’t drive at dusk if you’re sleepy. This period of the day requires your keenest attentiveness and alertness. If you are a spiritual person, evening driving is a good time to ask for the gift of heightened sensory awareness to the presence of animals around you.

2. Let Them Pass
This isn’t about letting animals pass, of course. It’s about pulling over in designated turnout areas if you’ve got other drivers on your tail. This is especially important if those drivers are bent on driving fast on country roads. I never fail to be baffled by the fact that daytrippers in coastal and forest areas end their visits by speeding away from whatever site they’ve been enjoying that afternoon. It’s as if they can’t escape from nature soon enough and they drive like they are on a freeway. If you are unfortunate enough to be in front of such drivers and an animal should leap into the road, your are not only like to hit the animal, but also to be rear-ended by these unsafe country drivers. Turnouts were made for such situations. And once you’ve pulled over, you’re ready for the most important step towards more animal-friendly driving.

3. Slow Down
Unless you’re actually having an emergency, there is simply no reason to drive fast on an empty country road in the evening. Where rear visibility is good and you’ve rid yourself of impatient drivers behind you, take pleasure in exhaling and slowing down. Chances are, you’re in the country because you live there or you’re visiting to get away from the craziness of urban life. In the country, we have the chance to take things at our ease. It can be very pleasant driving at a leisurely pace in the country in the evening and the slower you’re going, the greater your chances of being able to brake when animals step in front of your car. Imagine that you are on a safari in a wild land and that hidden animals are all around you. By driving safely and slowly, you may not only have the pleasure of seeing these amazing creatures but also the invaluable decreased risk of harming them.

4. Use Your Brights At Night
On the roads we most frequently drive at night, the terrain is such that we can see the light of cars approaching in the far distance long before the actual vehicles come into full view on the road ahead of us. This enables us to use our brights for night driving and turn them off in time for those moments when oncoming drivers would be blinded by them. The brights allow us to see into the distance and to the sides of us with much greater clarity in the dark and they illuminate the eyes of animals almost as well as if the animals were wearing reflective clothing. If you are going slowly and using your brights, your chances of having time to brake are greatly increased.

5. When You See One, Look For More
In the springtime when animals are likely to have their young with them, or when encountering animals that frequently travel in groups such as deer, turkeys and rabbits, be extra aware that any animal attempting to cross a road may have companions just behind him. Just because a mother deer has made it safely across doesn’t mean you should step on the gas. Her family members may be just a few steps behind and walk right into the road as soon as she has gotten across. When you see one animal, always look for more of them on both sides of the road.

With these five tips for preventing the roadkill of valued animals, I hope you will be saved from the terrible guilt and heartache of accidentally killing innocent beings. The pain of this guilt can be very serious, with no obvious way to apologize or make amends. If you’ve mistakenly run into animals in the past, you know the pain I’m talking about and I think it’s all the more important for such drivers to do everything they can to prevent future accidents.

prevent roadkill
Further Steps You Can Take To Prevent Roadkill

If you live in an area where you have identified a particular wildlife path, consider posting a sign there. Your community may have official signs (such as the deer crossing sign accompanying this article) but I have also seen handmade signs reading ‘baby deer crossing’ in sensitive areas. These signs can alert visitors to your area that slowing down may prevent accidental deaths of both humans and animals.

Additionally, compassionate communities have invested in the construction of wildlife crossings like the one pictured here. Elevating a portion of the road so that animals can safely pass beneath it is a powerful way to give wildlife an alternative to risking their lives on major roads, but these types of projects are most likely to be funded in busy areas rather than on back country roads. Just as communities are unlikely to have crosswalks for human pedestrians in rural areas, they are even less likely to create safety zones for animals, and this is something that I would truly love to see change.

It’s only in the past century that animals have had to contend with man-made objects that move fast enough to kill. The cultures and lifeways of America’s wild animals are incredibly old and these brief decades since the invention of automobiles may simply not have been enough for animals to incorporate cultural warnings about vehicles into their societies. Doubtless, every baby deer is taught to fear and avoid mountain lions, but we simply don’t know if animal parents have developed a way to communicate to their children that the asphalt strands cutting through their homes are deadly. I have observed that many kinds of animals actually seem drawn to roads where a clear view is afforded to the animal, or he may find foraging for seed or carrion especially easy because of the absence of bushes and weeds. Very often, these roadways cut animals off from historic feeding and watering grounds or inhibit their vital migration patterns and they have no choice but to risk death.

The animals suffer from our choice to drive cars. I’m not such an idealist that I find it reasonable to suggest we stop driving – I doubt that will happen. But we could reduce our speed limits drastically if, as an enlightened society, we agreed that getting places a little bit more slowly wouldn’t be the end of our lives and would actually prevent millions of deaths of humans and animals each year. It’s going fast in cars that makes them so deadly. If we were able to give up our fascination with rushing and realize that, even in the days of the horse-drawn wagon, people did manage to get to their destinations, a great American slow down could actually revolutionize many areas of our lives while improving our expectations of what our planet can tolerate. I’m afraid our cars have cut us off from natural law in so many ways, and the animals, and our consciences, are paying the price for this.

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This article on VeganReader.com is dedicated to the baby deer who lived under our plum tree for the first few months of his life. His mother chose our garden as his nursery while she was busy during the day. He was a wonderful, quiet little being and we greatly valued his companionship. Three days ago, he was hit by a driver going fast on our country road – someone who felt their own rush was more important than the worth of this innocent baby animal. With very heavy hearts, we had to call the county road service to have the corpse of our friend removed from the ditch he was knocked into when he was killed and we have prayed for his spirit to be swiftly returned to his Creator. In the spirit of this fawn, we ask drivers to consider implementing our 5 tips for roadkill prevention.