Roadkill

It is, as you can imagine, an inevitable byproduct of wandering the endless maze of roads across the golden state of California. With all the start n’ stops, in pulling over to snap a few photos of a discovered descanso, yes, like all of you who utilize America’s highways and byways, I come upon countless deceased animals and critters, usually unceremoniously mashed into the pavement as car upon car continues to ride roughshod over their remains. If that sounds mournful or morose, it’s because the etiquette regarding animals who’ve met their bloody ends on our roads is indeed mournful and morose.

Anybody who’s read enough of the ranting and raving hereabouts, be it in this column or one of the others in the Dogs of Generation X, knows I’m pretty soft on the animal world at large. Full disclosure, no, I’m not vegetarian, though I aspire to be one. I gave up beef and pork some years ago. I tried pescatarianism, but my stupid psychosomatic metabolism has so acclimated the absorption of animal proteins as a primary source of energy, it gave me unpleasant side effects when I tried to quit it entirely. Veggie folk will tell me it’s a minimum three month process of reteaching the body to adapt. I’m sure they’re right, but so far, I’ve been unable to reach that goal. I still aspire. I do believe philosophically we humans don’t HAVE to eat meat…we just WANT to eat meat. I’m in the same boat. I get it. Knowing that doesn’t make me a smarty pants. It merely reveals my psychological yoke to my omnivorous caveman origins.

In any case, I still try to avoid using most animal-derived products these days. I eschew leather as much as I can, I avoid hygiene products derived from animals, I try to eat organically sustained and cruelty-free fowl and fish livestock whenever possible. The point is, my lack of absolutism notwithstanding, I still have a high sensitivity to the treatment of animals. I grew up on a ranch. I know the dealio with the food chain and peoples’ livelihoods. All the same, I have often found our cavalier mass perspective on ‘roadkill’ unsettling. We accept that side effect of our transportation system as a necessary reality, and it’s not like I’ve given up driving in protest. So I’m part of the problem, no question, same as we all are. My lament at our lack of expedient development of safer methods of transit or workarounds for better protecting our wildlife and our wandering domesticated creatures doesn’t prevent me from utilizing our highway grid.

Some states are engineering wildlife overpasses and crossings, and that will work for some animals, but not all. I’m really talking about teleportation here, obviously, and it seems to me inventing matter-to-energy-to-matter displacement and reintegration ought to have occurred by now. It probably has, in some underground government wetwork lab via reverse engineering from downed flying saucers and such. In the interim, we plebes at the civilian level have still not been given access to the Brundle-Fly stage yet, and while we’re grousing about that, where are those friggin’ flying cars or hoverboards? Flying cars would actually help this issue for the furry critters, yet exacerbate it for the feathered ones.

It’s difficult for standard Americans to have avoided hitting something alive with their vehicle if they’ve driven for a significant period of time, even beyond the constant barrage of windshield bug splats. Myself, I can count three events as qualifiers.

The first was when I’d only just gotten my driver’s license at 16. I was coming home one late night driving my parents’ maroon VW Cabriolet with a buncha buddies in the back seat. While I didn’t see the varmint scurry out into the roadway, I was doing an easy sixty-plus MPH. We heard the despairing bump beneath the car chassis loud and clear. It didn’t take long to determine what we’d hit, as the pungent aroma of skunk became all powerful within a few seconds. It was after midnight, we were minors, and I just kept going. I still think about that little guy. I owe him a karmic debt. Actually, it’s probably safe to say we all owe all the animals we’ve ever prematurely ended a karmic debt.

The second event occurred in later years, when a juvenile red-tailed hawk flew into my truck’s front grill. I was devastated. I pulled over, removed the bird’s broken body from the road, took it home, and buried it in my garden. More on that methodology later.

The third event happened when I was in the back seat of a ‘57 Chevy in high school. My driver was barreling along at high speed and hit a small dachshund hound. He just kept going over my protests, the rest of our clan in the car laughing it off, and I never knew whether that dog survived or not, only that it was a shit-for-brains maneuver on our part not to stop and determine its status for ourselves, much less track down its poor family, apologize, and offer to assist however we could.

Cal Trans here in California has a soft protocol regarding hitting animals with your car. You’re supposed to carefully pull over to the side of the road and stop, determine any potential injuries to yourself or passengers. Then you assess the animal, if you can, without endangering other passing drivers. If it’s injured and you think it’s salvageable, you can either try to safely remove it from the roadway yourself only if it’s safe to do so, or you can call wildlife rescue or the highway patrol to come help. If it’s dead, you can try to pick it up and haul it to the roadside shoulder only if it’s safe for you to do so, and only if you can physically manage it. You document any damage to your vehicle for insurance purposes, and so on.

Now, is this what most people do?

Obviously, it isn’t.

As we all know, the majority of us drive on. Part of the necessary evils of vehicular passage, we’ll rationalize. Only when we hit a larger animal like a deer, a mountain lion, a bear, or a more sentimental animal like a dog or a cat, might we be forced to pull over and act like adults, and maybe not even then for too many humans. No, if the poor critter in question is one of the usual suspects - birds, rats, possums, skunks, rabbits, squirrels, raccoons, coyotes, armadillos - we usually just keep on truckin’.

Gen X, you remember that guy. Sure ya do. Robert Crumb drew that venerable ‘toon. It’s almost as embedded in Gen X cultural collective sentiment as Kilroy Was Here graffiti and the 70s Hang Ten feety logo. Ocean Pacific, am I right Gen Xers?

Yet another inadvertent result of my empathy ramping up in my old age was the very real compulsion to properly honor animal casualties when I came upon them, particularly the larger, furry ones who hadn’t already been turned into a grisly pulp on the pavement. What I wanted to do, when I saw a dead coyote, or someone’s cat, or worst of all a doggo, is to pull over and bury the animal properly, a small token of respect and a small counterbalance to our collective dismissal of roadside casualties.

And guess what. For a brief period of time, perhaps several months, that’s exactly what I did, even going so far as to carry a tarp, work gloves, and a shovel in the bed of my pickup. I interred a handful of dead critters during that brief salvo of what I thought was serving a greater good. Lo and behold, as you likely have already determined, there were a number of problematic issues in asserting that well meaning if misguided intent.

First of all, in doing all that legwork of removing the animal and making a public scene by digging a hole aside the roadway, you’re endangering passing drivers by distracting them. How often do you see folks digging aside the highway that aren’t officially sanctioned highway workers wearing orange vests and hard hats? Exactly. I often thought about taking the animals further away from the roadway to avoid that attention, but more often than not, private property tends to lie beside most roadways, and trespassing seemed above and beyond the call of roadkill duty.

Then there’s the risk to one’s self in retrieving remains from the road, which most cops would tell you is better left to the professionals like the CHP or animal control or Cal Trans, since they’re paid to assume those risks.

Also, there’s the issue of the legality of carcass disposal and your intent therein. Many states, including this fair one of mine, have legalized taking home roadkill for food. Don’t get me started on RFK Junior. That dude’s a wackjob, plain and simple. Chainsaws and whale heads. Come on.

An additional consideration? Usually, the soil adjacent to most roadways is nearly as hard as the adjacent asphalt, and it’s not easy digging, particularly here in Southern California’s desert ground, which is uniformly dry and hard-baked, often coated in gravel ground cover for the shoulder, and near impossible to breach with a standard foot shovel.

But what finally convinced me to stop those altruistic endeavors? The very real possibility I might bring home some nasty disease to my own doggies, accidentally picked up from the splattered carcass of a road casualty. That revelation is what finally put an end to my noble if not terribly incisive campaign of honors to our furry and feathered road victims.

Nonetheless, I am despaired each time I see the body of an animal on the side of the road. Less so for the death of the animal itself, more so for the mass acceptance of all my fellow drivers rushing on by. It’s super weird, if you think about it, this casual observance of constant vehicular carnage, not too different from our carnivorous slaughterhouse food chain ways, I suppose, but the nature of roadkill’s violent ends and our emotional immunity to it…I find it despairing. It’s not that I’m outside of that sphere. I’m not. I keep going, same as you do. I would not do that if I’d been the driver who hit the animal, however, save for that one damned skunk in my youth, when I’d had my driver’s license barely a year.

A recent circumstance fired up this longstanding conundrum, when the wifey and I were en route to Vegas via Pearblossom Highway out past Lancaster (there’s a descanso segment on Pearblossom’s blood alley here). We were turning a curve not far after Charlie Brown Farms, and on the right shoulder of the highway was a young, in-his-prime rottweiler, laying dead, red collar about his neck. Definitely someone’s pet, definitely hit by a car. I am admittedly still inclined to stop and deal with dogs or coyotes if I can, to some degree. But we were running late on the six hour drive to Sin City, my wife protested, and I grit my teeth and drove on. Because what I’d come to realize about disposing of dogs in the private sector is, if you do indeed choose to bury them right there near the highway, you adopt the risk of their stewards (you’ll note I never use the word ‘owner,’ because you can’t ‘own’ living creatures) never discovering what in fact happened to their lost pet. I’m not certain if that’s a blessing or a damnation, a parent of a furry doggo never having to identify any bodies at their local animal shelter, as opposed to never knowing what happened to the dog.

Myself, I always err on the side that I’d rather know what happened, even if it means death, because the alternative, it seems to me, in never knowing what happened to your loved one disappearing one day is exponentially more agonizing than knowing they’re dead. I extend the same perspective to humans. You may recall that old Kiefer Sutherland movie The Vanishing, where his girlfriend goes missing at a gas station truck stop. It’s a horrifying thought, the unknowing. Such scenarios provoke primal fears in all of us. Thousands of children every year vanish without a trace…permanently. The question always is, would a parent rather dwell in the remote possibility the child is still alive somewhere yet never seeing them again, or would they rather deal with accepting the death of their child yet at least knowing their fate for certain?

Most parents, agonizing as it would be, probably would choose the latter. Living a lifetime of not knowing what happened to our kids…that’s pure hell on earth. Nothing’s worse. Same goes, in my world anyway, for the loss of a beloved animal. Unfortunately, sudden disappearances happen far more often for cats and dogs, who wander off or escape from yards much too frequently. I have shared my life with near a dozen cats who never came home again one night. It’s annoying as hell, living with the mind’s proclivities of what if and I wonder and where are they. Multiply that compounded feeling by a decade or two, and you might grasp a fraction of the anguish parents of perpetually lost children experience.

In the mid-nineties or so, I came upon one of my cats of the time as I stopped by home on lunch break, and he’d literally just gotten run over by a vehicle outside my pad, twitching in the street. I frantically burst out of my vehicle and picked his broken body up, only for him to succumb to his injuries seconds later, and I cried and cried and didn’t go back to work and buried him in my yard. But at least I knew. I was there for his end. Not ever knowing what happened to your favorite furball sucks. I thank the never-gods every day I’ve never had to experience that with any of my mutts, but countless people do and I ache for all of them. That empathy thing. It really is wearing at times. But what can ya do. We have to master that bastard abstract, as trying as it is in these stardust-water frames of ours.

Anyway. If I’d actually bothered to pull over and bury that rottweiler aside Pearblossom highway, his or her parent would never have known what happened to him or her. While that was still a possibility regardless, there was a chance the dog’s body would be picked up and his or her parent might head over to their local shelter and check records for weekly casualties turned into them by Cal Trans, animal control, or the highway patrol.

By the by, I’ve had to do that before, experience an identification event. Not one of mine, but I accompanied a dear buddy to the shelter, who’d lost his precious boy and suspected the worst. It wasn’t a pleasant experience. I don’t know what the current protocol is concerning bodily roadkill disposal or storage amongst Cal Trans, animal control, and shelter networks, but back when my pal was faced with his worst fear in the mid nineties, we were presented with an iron barrel stuffed to the brim with bloodied carcasses, a catch-all for the day’s roadkill collection. It was on him to dig through the bodies and see if his doggie was among them. Really. His border collie-aussie mix was in there. If you ever want to see a dude really cry, witness something like that. We ended up burying his dog on a riverbed bank where he took that dog on walks. I still remember that internment moment clear as day. It was an exquisitely shared vulnerability. Not for the fainthearted.

(The header photo above was a descanso constructed for a pet of some kind, I figured, though there was no way to tell for certain. I presumed as such because they bothered to assemble a cairn in front of the cross, atop an slightly eroded, overgrown mound of dirt.)

I’ll go ahead and posit the obvious points concerning roadkill.

If you hit a larger animal, you should pull over. If the animal appears likely to survive, you should determine if you can safely get it to the side of the road without endangering yourself and call animal rescue or the highway patrol. If it’s dead, again, if you can safely drag it from the middle of the road without endangering yourself to try and avoid further traffic calamity, then do so, and then call animal control to notify them of the location of the body. As far as taking roadkill home to eat it, I’d eschew that option, seeing as how you simply don’t know if that animal has any sort of rabies, scabies, or a general zoonotic infection, and you might end up transferring some carrion-laced virus to your own pets at home.

Also, any backwoods redneck will tell you (I know a little something about those boys, seeing as how I’m one of them), if a deer, or any animal at all, jumps out into the road, don’t swerve away. Just hit it. It sucks, but it’s not worth losing lives over, especially yours, your family, or any folks in oncoming traffic. It’s a very difficult reaction to control. Our autonomic response is to try and miss it, but that frequently results in a lot more misery.

Yeah. Teleportation can’t come soon enough.

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