Road kill...

[BSLMichael]

Okay So today I found this HUGE male common snapper dead in the middle of the road today. (Not sure how the driver didnt see him if the driver had his/her eyes on the road) Anyway I was sad like I usually am when I see road kill but something about this particular one made me angry, while I was moving it into the grass.

WHY would you not stop?! Is it too much to ask that you take responsiblity for the animal you just MURDERED!? At the very least move it so that when other animals come to feed off it they don't get killed as well.

As a person that has never killed an animal while driving... am I just being unreasonable?

 

[AliCat37]

Depending on where/what was hit I think people absolutely should stop to move the animals. Now if you're on a mountain pass with sharp curves, that is one thing. But a country road, stop.

I will admit I hit a snake once. I obviously didn't mean it, I thought it was a stick until it was far too late. I didn't stop. Mostly because I didn't want to pull two halves of a snake off the road. It was awful.

 

[Chip]

I've hit animals driving, you feel horrible at the time but it happens and it's usually not murder. A big snapper would seem to be an easy one to see in time to stop or swerve, but some people are asses (and would "murder"), some aren't paying enough attention, and once in a while a car was coming in the other lane and they couldn't stop. But almost no one will move their roadkill off the road. Not passing judgment one way or the other, but it's usually traumatic enough to hit something, for the average person.

 

[BSLMichael]

Murder is too strong of a word. I don't actually believe this person did it meaningfully (atleast I hope not). That was just me being dramatic. This was a low traffic two lane road with a speed limit of 35. The snapper was nearly the size of your average 4 door sedan spare tire. So this person probably wasn't paying attention.

Shame a snapper that old died that way.

Maybe I've just seen too many other animals getting hit attempting to feed of the remains of the 1st animal that got hit or I'm just more caring, But I think about that stuff and I do stop to remove OTHER people's road kills when traffic allows. espically of larger animals that cannot be easily removed by say, a fox, coon, or possum.

I have never ran over a animal before and I hope I never do. But if I do and traffic allows i will stop.

 

[Rich Z]

Yahoos purposely running over animals is not unusual at all. I remember a long while back driving down route 65 below Sumatra, FL, which basically has swamp on both sides of the two lane highway, seeing a fair sized gator crossing the road going from left to right. Which meant it was coming into our lane. It was right at a blind curve in the road, and there was another car coming from the opposite direction, and the driver was PURPOSELY swerving into our lane to try to run over that gator. Obviously we could BOTH see the gator but our vehicles were not visible to each other He only pulled back into his lane when he saw our vehicle approaching, so the gator made it across the road safely.

Another time I saw a rather large gray rat snake that had gotten run over on the sandy county road that runs through our property. It was very obvious that whoever ran it over backed up several times to run over it a few more times.

So no, I believe there is a real good chance that that snapper you saw had been purposely run over. Anyone paying even the slightest attention to the road would HAVE to see a large obstruction in the road like that.

Unless, of course, the driver was texting on the cell phone, then all bets are off.