Saw my first roadkill happen today.
apologies if im not marking this correctly, Voyager only lets me mark image posts NSFW so I'll put it into a spoiler instead.
::: spoiler Tap for spoiler Had my first good day at work in a couple weeks left going home feeling good about myself for the first time in a while. I only have a ~8 minute drive home at most, less if I'm driving on a nearly empty road at 10:30pm like I was tonight. For context I'm 19, been driving since 16 but don't drive that often other than for work or groceries.
On either side of the road is just forest and swampland, it is florida after all. It's not uncommon to see deer at night. Though it is a lot rarer than when I was a kid as our area has been more developed. You'll also see other animals like raccoons, opossums, armadillos, bunnies, etc. As you can imagine seeing roadkill isn't out of the ordinary here.
sidenote, whole we're on the topic of wildlife my grandma used to have one of those hunting camera in her backyard and would leave out scrap food for animals to eat and get photographed. She eventually got 4 or 5 turkeys to trust her enough to show up and walk around her house during the daytime. They were all named Tom since we couldn't tell them apart.
Anyways, on my drive home tonight there was another car coming the other direction, an opossum ran out from the grass in front of us both. No warning beforehand, just a little guy running as fast as it could. I hit my brakes to let it get through my lane, but the other car didn't seem to notice or have time to react. It looked like it was pretty close to getting out of the way in time but I didn't really get to know for sure as I was still rolling pretty fast.
I could've kept driving and just gone home but I've always been one of those people that just has to see what happened or else the mystery will eat away at me. what if it was ok? what if it's injured and needs help?
I took a u-turn at a roundabout and thought I saw where it happened and saw nothing and got my hopes up for a second, but then I saw the tiny body on the road curled up not breathing. It looked to be pretty young, not wise enough to know how to avoid cars.
It didn't have a fearless death, but it seems it had a fairly painless one.
I know I could have done more, but I don't blame myself for that. I don't blame the other car for hitting it, and I don't blame the animal for its mistake. Just a shitty situation all around.
That doesn't make me any less upset though. I know these things happen and it's just a part of life, but it just sucks to see man. Theres a lot of bigger issues in the world but I still feel so bad for that little guy :(
:::
3 replies
I remember watching a cat jump infront of the car ahead of my family. The way the car went forward really looked like they did it on purpose, but I know that was me just trying to rationalize what I saw. They couldn't see the cat.
We're a family of cat people too. So we were all quite stunned. There was an animal control officer right behind us (yeah, talk about coincidence) and she saw it too, hopped out. Saw us kind of stunned and she told us not to worry about the freaky spasming it did after it went under the wheel - that's how you know it was instant, the whole body just lost connection. She picked it up by the scruff and we heard her talking to it as she brought it to the truck. I won't ever forget that. "Poor old boy, guess it was your time. Its ok though, you get to chase all the mice forever now."
You find out that most drivers are inexcusably bad once you put an animal on the road. Once I saw someone plow through a whole flock of ducks that had been on the road for half a minute already. Zero reaction. No braking. Just mowed them down and kept going.
That's always hard to witness. Props to you for going back to check on the poor thing.