oops, double post-sort of .

 

Just in time for the 06

 

I got the car back a couple weeks ago... just over $6500 worth of damage.
The shop did a great job and everything seems to be back to normal.

I have seen at least 15 other deer killed on the road by me since I hit the deer.

 

Oh.. and the '06 has crossed my mind...

 

Wonder if that's the result of Honda's "pedestrian friendly" front end? I remember reading the Accord was designed to absorb the impact of a pedestrian so it wouldn't cause such severe bodily injury. Does the Civic have that also?

 

Wow, you killed at least 15 other deer since that first one? Just kidding.

Here in LA we have LOTS of deer that get hit but you never see them on the side of the road for long. Deer is to LA as Puppies are to Korea.

Actually I've heard many people say our deer down here are smarter than the northern deer. Lots of times they just stand on the side of the road and watch the cars go by. I once had a problem with a whole family that was on the road in the middle of the day. I was in high school and driving my fathers Corvette with him in it - it was a sunny day and we had the T-tops off cruising down a vacant road. Off in the distance we could see the deer just standing in the middle of the road, I was doing 85 mph and accelerating briskly. My father warned me about them and I said no problem, I'll honk the horn and they'll move. They never moved, I laid on the brakes and came to a stop about 10 feet from them all while on the horn. When I was about 60 feet away they started scrambling and slipped on the road and fell down.

Since then I don't play around them, they are just to unpredictable.

BTW, LA to me is Lower Alabama (aka, northern-northwest Florida) Glad the car is back to new-er condition.

 

Back in the late '80s I nearly hit a deer with my wife's Civic. Found out later that there are plenty of meat processors in Texas that will butcher your roadkill deer for you. So we learned that car vs. deer collisions happen a lot in Texas, and just missed out on several months' worth of venison.

Just last week I saw two small-to-medium deer off the side of the road during my late-night commute to work. Wouldn't have seen them at all if the high beams hadn't been on. Fortunately they stayed put. At 55 mph I could never have stopped in time.

On some of the rural highways here, there are signs warning of wandering bears. After 10 years, I still haven't seen one.

 

The primary instinct of deer is to freeze when they sense danger. They are forest animals. They try to "hide" from predators by staying still and thus blending into the background. Unfortuately they will do the same when they are in the middle of the road and a car approaches. At night you can almost knock them over, even if you're driving just 10 MPH, before they decide it's time to run.

Our house borders a large park. The deer think they own the place and we are the intruders.