Why No Road Kill?

 

The answer to that question is that we do get reports of road-kill in the UK. Since 1980 I have had reports of road kill jungle cats, wolverine (and the story behind that disgraces a certain national museum), wallabies, wolves and at least three people whose word I will accept (one completely) have seen large "exotic" cats dead by the roadside but not the roadside where you can pull in, take photographs or even put the animal into the boot of a car.  These have all been on busy motorways.

The only big cat I have seen in the wild was a road-kill panther on the Netherlands-German motorway. In fact, if you do travel along a motorway you will see badgers, foxes, sheep -basically all types of dead animal including birds. I would have loved to have taken a photo of the panther we passed but that was risking a collision of some kind. You cannot simply pull over on a British motorway to check out a dead animal unless you are suicidal (it is why you are told that if you break down on the motorway to pull in and leave the car to go to a safer position).

I have had a report of a quite large cat -possibly a juvenile puma- as well as an adult on another occasion. I do know one person who did pull in to get photos of a dead cat but then thought better of it as a juggernaut shot past within at least two inches of his car and a car beeped its horn as it had to swerve past him (on the hard shoulder). The whole experience left him shaken.

With wildlife rescues you find that if a deer or other animal they have responded to a call about is dead when they get there then it is moved to the side of the road onto a verge, into a ditch or hedgerows. The reason is that they can do nothing for a dead animal so better to leave it for "nature to take its course" -a free meal for other wildlife. Funnily enough one such deer I was told about popped up on a big cat site where it was explained that a big cat must have killed it and dragged it into the hedgerow -they had not examined the carcasse and all they went by was a photo someone had sent in.

On the other side of that I know one driver reported a large brown cat (puma) had killed a sheep and was eating it. I knew the farm where this had happened so contacted the farmer who knew of the cat in his area. He explained that the sheep had been killed by a car after pushing its way through a fence. It had been dead over a day when the puma 'killed' it.

As a rule there is no regular motorway clean up of dead animals because they are on the side of the road where no one is bothered by them so "let nature take its course".  With a lot of motorists and truckers having cameras fitted these days in case of accidents I do wonder how much footage exists of road kill and how much of that footage shows large cats or other "exotics" and it all gets deleted?

Road kill can tell us a lot about what wildlife is in an area and it certainly would be nice to get some verifiable clips for study.