July
1996
Driving
Animals to Their Graves
By Mark Matthew Braunstein
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Everyday in the U.S., 190 million motor vehicles hit
the road, and one million animals get hit by motor vehicles. That’s
counting cars, buses, motorbikes, and trucks, but not ATVs, snowmobiles,
and other
off-road vehicles. The figure includes mammals, birds, reptiles, and
amphibians, but not insects and bugs, who somehow never count. Only
America’s meat-eaters take a larger toll than its motorists.
For every dead animal counted, three or four more die unnoticed. Even
at 55 m.p.h., we smell the remains of far more dead skunks than we see.
The walking wounded die far from the road, so only instantly killed
animals are seen and get counted.
But who’s counting? During the late 1950s, in a roadside version
of the Audubon’s Christmas bird counts, the Humane Society of
the United States conducted some Fourth of July body counts. During
the 1970s, again groping for numbers, the Humane Society compiled data
from isolated scientific studies of single roads or single species.
Its secondary sources yielded the same national death toll as its field
studies: one million animals a day. Two regional surveys during 1993
and 1994 offer updated species death counts. Reliable death data, however,
still remains elusive.
State wildlife agencies tally road fatalities only for large mammals
so rare that they are listed as endangered species or so common that
they are hunted as fair game.
Dead Silence
Roadkill. Truck drivers want to prevent it. Car drivers wail and lament
it. Still, hit-and-run drivers flee the scene of the crime. The very
word implies that the road is the lone assailant. We could never call
it carkill — because the cars are ours.
Meanwhile the only road with no roadkill is the information superhighway.
Database searches yield few citations and provide fewer clues. Humorous
cookbooks dish out roadkill recipes, but no food for thought. "Flattened
fauna," a satirical field guide, offers barely one page of straight
facts. Even some dictionaries fall silent.
Silence, dead silence. No mainstream environmental group includes roadkill
on its agenda, and few animal-protection groups address the issue. Friends
of Animals printed warnings on bumperstickers without saying much. As
though it had been counting sheep, even the Humane Society has fallen
asleep.
Street Violence
An orphaned issue, the car carnage continues. While there may have been
a rare ancient-chariot-kill on a road to Rome, or a random wagon-wheel-kill
on the Oregon Trail, roadkills did not become common until our modern
Age of the Automobile. Cars are the biggest source of smog. For every
American who dies from riding cars, another dies from breathing them.
Animals also breathe, and also die. As cars pollute air, roads erode
soil. Also, four million miles of roads have steamrolled across this
nation, fragmenting and destroying wildlife habitat. Habitat loss means
animals must run away from home. With no place to run, they get run
over.
Blacktop Ribbons of Death
Few roads or highways are designed with consideration for animal traffic.
Some, such as those with concrete "Jersey barriers" along
the medians, are so lethal they could not be any worse.
The widening of a state road into an interstate highway through Michigan’s
northern peninsula resulted in a fivefold increase in deerkill in the
first five years. Even death tolls on old roads can be alarming. Pennsylvania’s
roads in 1985 underwent no new major construction, yet over 26,000
deer
still were killed. In wintry northern states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania,
sick or starved animals travel on plowed roads through deep snow. Weakened
animals sometimes cannot jump or climb over icy snowbanks formed by
plowing. At critical meetings with automobiles, the animals slip on
ice and into oblivion.
In the West, roadsides are laced with barbed wire to prevent cattle
and sheep from prematurely becoming dead meat. But barbed-wire fencing
ranks second only to hunting as the leading cause of death to mule deer
and pronghorn antelope. Every sunrise illuminates impaled or ensnared
wildlife who reached neither the shorter road nor the greener grass
on the other side of the fence.
Still, many roadkills are not the result of attempted crossings. Many
animals are fatally penalized for moving violations along roads, not
across roads. While wider roads inflict more habitat loss, narrow or
no shoulders is worse. Both motorists and animals remain unseen by each
other.
Paving the Way to Extinction
Some species seldom become roadkill only because they instinctively
avoid roads. Effectively in quarantine, divided populations suffer
from
genetic split personality. Other species no longer get "roadkilled" only
because they become extirpated or extinct.
Of our nation’s large mammals, Florida panthers hover nearest
extinction. During the early 1980s, the panthers suffered nine roadkills
— half their entire population.
During the 1970s and 1980s, at least 357 of Florida’s threatened
black bears blackened the blacktop. That’s one-quarter of their
present population.
Fewer than 300 of Florida’s miniature Key deer survive. The Nature
Conservancy estimates one deerkill nearly every week. Despite a 15-m.p.h.
speed limit, driving vacationers remain the Key deer’s worst
enemy.
Deer Today, Gone Tomorrow
Not all deer species that confront cars also face extinction. Many regions
of the U.S. suffer from overpopulation of two species of large mammals:
deer and humans. No wonder our two paths cross so often, as each year
350,000 deer fatally collide with vehicles. An additional 50,000 collide
and survive.
Collisions with motorists are usually fatal for the deer. In 1992, New
York state motorists reported killing 11,822 deer. Cornell University
researchers found that, for every deerkill reported, four more died
and one more was injured.
Human casualties also occur. In 1994, Michigan reported 56,666 deer
collisions, of which five resulted in human fatalities. According to
the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, every year 120
people
are killed and 8000 are injured in deer collisions. For all animal
collisions, it’s 150 people dead and 10,000 injured.
Animals Need a Paving Moratorium
Road banning helps more than mere road planning, especially because
new roads initially generate more roadkills than old. The equation is
simple: fewer roads equal fewer motor vehicles and roadkill.
Replacing 20 cars with one bus, and 50 trucks with one train, would
reduce congestion on present highways and postpone or eliminate the "need" for
new ones. This could revive our ailing public transit and mass freight
systems.
Another simple equation is too controversial for most people to embrace
and most lawmakers to endorse: fewer affluent people, and fewer people
generally, equal fewer motor vehicles, fewer roads and fewer roadkills.
Legislators can reduce the speed and enhance the safety of our cars.
Enforced speed limits would afford greater protection for every animal
on the road, and for every motorist as well. But as long as automakers
manufacture cars capable of cruising at 110 m.p.h., twice as most legal
speed limits, whatever lawmakers dictate will be disobeyed by chronic
speedsters. Silent but deadly, next century’s electric cars pose
the greatest risk of all.
With dwindling and damaged habitat, animals are losing ground in humanity’s
broader war against wildlife. In time, the rate of roadkill will decline
— not from lack of cars or roads, but from lack of wildlife.
Mark Matthew Braunstein is the author of Radical
Vegetarianism and is a nature photographer. This article was excerpted
with permission from Auto-Free Times. For more information, contact,
P.O. Box 4347, Arcata, CA 95518. Tel.: 707-826-7775.
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