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Topic: Anybody ever have a run in with a deer?

Mike Blakesley
Film God

Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99

posted 09-15-2005 02:17 PM

Our local UPS driver once hit a black cow, at night, going 55MPH.

Due to the tank-like construction of UPS trucks, the only one who got injured was the cow.

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001

posted 09-15-2005 08:59 PM

Yeah, John, hitting a Moose would be bad. You would surely damage your vehicle badly. And then there would be a decent chance the moose would still be alive and in well enough shape to get really mad and total the vehicle the rest of the way trying to get to you.

I saw a funny clip from a documentary about grizzly bears. This bear goes barreling down a hill toward a parked jeep and rams his head right into the passenger side door.

Elk are another bad road hazard -even if they're already dead. My first drive up to Colorado was a very close call. It was late at night. I was heading north out of Raton after just getting on I-25. Normally I like to drive in the left lane when passing by exits. For some odd reason I kept my Camaro in the right lane. Good thing I did. Before I could even see it, I blew past a huge dead elk laying across the left lane. My car would have been toast (and me possibly in the hospital) if I had hit its carcass.

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Sam Graham
AKA: "The Evil Sam Graham". Wackiness ensues.

Posts: 1431
From: Waukee, IA
Registered: Dec 2004

posted 09-15-2005 09:16 PM

I nicked a deer one night on I-84 in Utah. Foggy night and suddenly there it was right in front of me. I barely had time to hit the horn before it jumped to the right and I heard it clip the bumper. No damage. Deer probably had a sore leg. I've had dozens of near misses over the years, but that's the one I can still see clearly.

A cow once damaged that same car. It was parked at the time. The cow, escaped from my uncle's pasture, head-butted the thing. Left a nice round egg-shaped dent in the fender and pushed the whole thing towards the hood. We managed to realign the fender. The egg dent remained for the rest of the car's life.

But my favorite encounter was with a bear and her cubs in my Alaska days. I chased them up the road toward the house at a pretty decent rate of speed. Next morning, there was a bunch of white foam down the fender...where Mama Bear had pissed on it.

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Randy Stankey
Film God

Posts: 6539
From: Erie, Pennsylvania
Registered: Jun 99

posted 09-15-2005 09:57 PM

quote: Brad Miller
Randy, does your brother just not learn???

Well, that's ONE way to put it! [Wink]

I've never seen a moose or an elk on the road where I live. We're just a bit too far south and/or east. However, I have read stories about people getting KILLED when they hit one with their cars.

The way I understand, the front of the car goes under the animals belly. The impact sweeps it off its feet and it rolls up the hood of the vehicle. Shortly after that, a 1,000 pound animal crashes through the windshield and is deposited directly into the driver's lap... at high speed! So, basically the occupants of the car get crushed by a flying pile of mangled moose meat. [puke]

So, this is totally conjecture on my part, based solely on what I read... But, the way I hear it, when a collision is imminent, if the driver has the time and the forethought, he should try to aim for the animal's ass end. That way, instead of it rolling up the hood and landing on you, there's a better chance of spinning the thing around sideways. Your car will still be fucked up but, at least, you will survive.

Moose/Car collision physics... What a weird branch of science THAT is! It's almost as funny as launching chickens out of an air cannon to test jet engines! [Big Grin]

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Mark Gulbrandsen
Resident Trollmaster

Posts: 16657
From: Music City
Registered: Jun 99

posted 09-15-2005 11:05 PM

Only once so far. I was hit by a deer bounding over the highway(thats right, the deer hit me ... I didn't hit it) on I-94 heading south near Baraboo, WI. I was at 65 mph and the deer literally ran up into the left front fender of my 95 Dodge pickup..... we both had about a half second of eye to eye contact as its head made it up to windshield level.... before it slid down the entire left side of the truck. The deer lay in the middle of the road and in my rear view mirror I observed the guy behind me driving an old Chevy Nova go right over the top of its remains... he couldn't stop. The deer was a mess and the entire left side of my truck was torn up... I didn't stop to see what happened to the other guy because traffic was very heavy but I phoned it in to State Police and got off at the next exit and waited. No one was injured except the deer. The trooper informed me that the Nova was a total loss!

Mark

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Carl Martin
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1424
From: Oakland, CA, USA
Registered: Feb 2002

posted 09-16-2005 03:19 AM

i often come across deer on my bike ride home on city streets. they're pretty skittish, though. never had an incident with one. raccoons are worse. i braked suddenly to avoid one, hit it anyways, and flew over the handlebars. messed my knee up good. the coon got away.

carl

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Aaron Mehocic
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 804
From: New Castle, PA, USA
Registered: Jun 99

posted 09-16-2005 01:19 PM

I've hit three deer but none of them ever damaged my car. Here in Pennsylvania a lot of people get into one vehicle accidents for what ever reasons, but blame deer on the reports or insurance claims. Thats one reason a few years back the Game Commission issued bonus tags to hunters so they may harvest more than one animal. Its not out of the ordinary for deer to live in cities since they are one of the most adaptive animals in natural history. We even hunt them in downtown Philadelphia. On average hunters there take about 25 buck and twice as many doe during the respective archery, rifle, and muzzle loader seasons.

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001

posted 09-16-2005 07:05 PM

quote: Carl Martin
raccoons are worse. i braked suddenly to avoid one, hit it anyways, and flew over the handlebars. messed my knee up good. the coon got away.

Raccoons are just stupid when it comes to the road. I see so many of those things turned into road pizza around here they could be used to stripe the outside lanes if they didn't decompose. One example of the stupidity, I'm driving at night from Altus back to Lawton. A lady is driving a Honda a few car lengths ahead. I see this fairly large raccoon at the side of the road and he waits until the Honda's headlights are almost right on top of him. Then he bolts right out in front of the car! He got hit of course -spun like a top.

A decade ago, it was rare to see an armadillo around here. Now they're all over the place and often popped by vehicles.

Like others have mentioned, I too am seeing more and more deer dead by the side of the road. Saw several on US-287 between here and Amarillo recently.

Most odd road kill I've seen: dead mountain lion just south of the Walters toll gate on I-44 here in Oklahoma. Yes, the Red River system and Wichita Mountains both have mountain lions. They're rare, but they are there. I didn't know that until I saw that road kill.

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Michael Gonzalez
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 790
From: Grand Island , NE USA
Registered: Sep 2000

posted 09-17-2005 12:19 AM

I almost hit a deer on my motorcycle last year. Scared the shit out of me. I was going fast enought that I would probably have been seriously injured. Fortunately I missed.

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Robert E. Allen
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1078
From: Checotah, Oklahoma
Registered: Jul 2002

posted 09-17-2005 02:05 AM

In my 16 years on the south Oregon coast I hit three deer at different times on Highway 101. $2,000 to $3,000 damage each time to two different vans (twice to the same van). Now that I'm in the greater Seattle area I find other cars are the danger. But there's no warning signs posted.

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Carl Martin
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1424
From: Oakland, CA, USA
Registered: Feb 2002

posted 09-17-2005 03:29 AM

quote: Bobby Henderson
Raccoons are just stupid when it comes to the road. I see so many of those things turned into road pizza around here they could be used to stripe the outside lanes if they didn't decompose. One example of the stupidity, I'm driving at night from Altus back to Lawton. A lady is driving a Honda a few car lengths ahead. I see this fairly large raccoon at the side of the road and he waits until the Honda's headlights are almost right on top of him. Then he bolts right out in front of the car! He got hit of course -spun like a top.

squirrels and cats do that shit too. i think it's a survival strategy of quick small critters gone awry. the assumption is that the large fast moving object wants to eat them, so they provide a stationary target to aim at, and then at the last instant dart away in the direction that the large object should no longer be heading in. the problem is, the large object is trying not to hit the critter. natural selection is way too slow to deal with the unintended consequences of technology.

carl

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Leo Enticknap
Film God

Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000

posted 09-19-2005 03:43 AM

Thankfully I haven't hit one, but a friend of mine nearly did, on a rural single carriageway between Helperby and Flawith (in the middle of nowhere in Yorkshire). He had to swerve and brake hard to avoid an impact, with the result that he went into the ditch and the car was buggered. Thankfully, he wasn't hurt. When I was living in Devon I also heard of an accident in which several passengers in a tourist minibus were killed after it hit a sheep driving in foggy weather on Dartmoor. It was doing 50mph at the point of impact, which made me wonder what sort of moron would drive like that in those conditions.

Around this time last year I had a phenomenally lucky escape while following a very big lorry (about the biggest you can get without it being articulated) on a single carriageway stretch of the A19. I noticed that one of the rear nearside wheels started wobbling, and a few seconds later it suddenly flew off the axle and into a field by the side of the road. The driver didn't realise that he'd lost a wheel, and just kept on going. I slowed down to increase my distance to him as much as possible, whereupon several morons behind me started overtaking. A few seconds later a second wheel flew off the same axle, and rolled along the road behind it for 100 yards or so before going off the side of the road. At this point the lorry driver did realise that something was wrong and pulled over, but it was a very lucky escape for all involved. If either of those two wheels had hit another car, or if they'd flown off in a built up area, there could easily have been fatalities.

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David Buckley
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 525
From: Oxford, N. Canterbury, New Zealand
Registered: Aug 2004

posted 09-19-2005 05:58 AM

In my UK days I had the pleasure of being a passenger in a mini which had the misfortune to hit a sheep at a fair old pace.

This was not good for the mini, which was severely dented, leading to its scrapping, or the sheep, which exploded.

I did once see a horse take a fit on a car,m and that looked like a scrapper after the event too.

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William Leland III
Master Film Handler

Posts: 336
From: Charleston, SC,
Registered: Aug 2002

posted 09-20-2005 10:21 AM

i've never hit a deer, come close many times. i caught a deer one time. i was cutting grass and saw my dog running around. thought nothing of it, i looked closer and saw she was chasing a baby deer.

i got off the lawn mover and ran after her, she had just pinned it under a gate. i pulled her off and picked up the deer and put it in our garage. i let it got a few hour later. it ran away fine.

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Andy Summers
Master Film Handler

Posts: 397
From: Bournemouth Dorset United kingdom
Registered: Jun 2005

posted 09-20-2005 12:51 PM

Well since where the most dangerous, and the fact that the deer was around before we where the deer as first refusal to cross the road, when you see the deer with her new born you break and wait, don’t be an ass, thinking you have the right to kill the deer, if god gave the deer hands I think deer deserves some payback……

Where the most destructive species to walk this planet, and so it’s time we leave the deer and her newborns alone…..

And with that in mind drive carefully and take care…. [beer]

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