Tinkerbell staring at me through the kitchen window
(Feb 2025)
'The dead by the road, or on
it, testify to the presence of man.' [1]
I.
One of my least favourite compound nouns in the English language is roadkill - an ugly word coined in the United States during the 1940s for an ugly phenomenon; namely, the unending slaughter of animals by cars and other motor vehicles and the negation also of any distinction between animals that meet their end in this sickening (and I would say sacrilegious) manner [2].
II.
Essentially a non-phenomenon before the advent of motorised transport speeding along modern tarmacked roads built in the UK at the beginning of the 20th century [3], roadkill is something that first attracted the concern of naturalists in the 1920s.
Since then, countless numbers of birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and invertebrates have died beneath the wheels (or been smashed on the windscreens) of road vehicles.
We might also mention the fact that our road networks have massively altered the natural environment, often isolating wildlife populations and thus further decreasing their numbers, but, even without considering this, mortality resulting from roadkill alone significantly contributes to the population decline of many threatened species.
Unfortunately, I suspect that the majority of drivers - insulated and indifferent inside their vehicles - simply don't give a shit; indeed, there is even evidence from studies that some drivers intentionally run over small animals, such as mice, frogs, or hedgehogs [4].
And who knows, maybe even cats ...
III.
Back in January 2023, Members of the House of Commons debated a petition signed by over 100,000 UK citizens calling upon Parliament to amend legislation so as to make it a legal requirement for a driver to stop and report an accident involving a cat (as they are already required to do in the case of a dog or a farm animal) [5].
As one Labour Member reminded the House, although dogs are the most popular pet in the UK, one in four households are home to at least one cat. Mine is one such household: home to a very handsome white and ginger male cat called Phoevos. And home also to a lively young female cat called Tinkerbell (or Tinks, for short) ...
IV.
Technically, Tinks lived a few doors down with one of the neighbours, even if she spent a great deal of her time here during the last six months, observing everything that was going on and endlessly seeking affection (or food). Indeed, I have never known a friendlier (or greedier) little cat. And despite being half his size, she was soon chasing Phoevos from his favourite spots in the garden, so she could claim them as her own.
And then, suddenly, she was no longer meowing at the door or sitting on the kitchen windowsill watching me do the washing up or prepare some lunch. And one instinctively knew that something must have happened to her ...
Sure enough, after a few days we learned from the neighbour that she'd been hit by a car and suffered severe injuries to her head and face, including a broken jaw, the loss of an eye, and possible brain damage. Luckily, someone - not the driver of the car who hit her - had stopped and taken her to the vet where she underwent emergency surgery.
The prognosis isn't good, but she's being given a month to recover. If, at the end of that time, however, she's still unable to eat and her injuries haven't fully healed, then she'll be put down.
V.
Sadly, of course, this is not an uncommon occurrence.
However, because there is still no legal requirement to report trafic collisions involving cats, nobody knows for sure know how
many moggies are killed by vehicles on UK roads each year, although it's (conservatively) estimated to be around 230,000, which equates to 630 cats killed each and every day.
So, what is to be done? Well,
either we must change feline behaviour, or we must change driver
behaviour.
I suppose both are possible.
But when I think of poor
Tinkerbell, I just want to scrap cars, rip up roads, and reduce the human
population by a significant figure.
To paraphrase D. H. Lawrence:
How easily we might eliminate a few million humans and never miss them. Yet what a gap in the world, the missing feline face of Tinks the tabby cat, and the ting-a-ling-a-ling sound of her little blue bell when she came running. [6]
Notes
[1] Timothy Findley, Journeyman: Travels of a Writer (Pebble Publications, 2003), p. 16. Findley goes on to suggest that when human beings stop killing animals without the slightest misgiving, they will then stop murdering one another. I serously doubt that, however.
I also suspect that we will never stop killing animals. For as the American anthropologist Jane Desmond concluded in a 2013 essay examining public indifference to animal suffering and their acceptance of roadkill, "animal lives have little value for most of the populations
in the United States", particularly wild creatures which, unlike household pets for example, are unowned and lacking in monetary
or emotional value.
See 'Requiem for Roadkill: Death and Denial on America's Roads', in Environmental Anthropology: Future Directions, ed. Helen Kopnina, and Eleanor Shoreman-Ouimet (Routledge, 2013), pp. 46-58. The line quoted from is on p. 55.
[2] I have written about this topic before on TTA: see the post dated 4 October 2019: click here.
[3] The first roads designed specifically for cars were built in Nottingham in 1902; the same year that Welsh inventor Edgar Hooley gave the world the gift of tarmac. The first UK motorway, the Preston Bypass, opened in 1958; followed by the first
city-to-city motorway, the M1, in 1959.
[4] See E. Paul Ashley, Amanda Kosloski, and Scott A. Petrie, 'Incidence of Intentional Vehicle–Reptile Collisions', in Human Dimensions
of Wildlife, Vol. 12, Issue 3 (2007), pp. 137-143.
The authors of this Canadian study found evidence that 2.7% of motorists would intentionally run over a lizard or snake, with some even speeding up to ensure they did so. The thing that surprises me is not that more male drivers were guilty of this than female, but that the figure is so low. Cruelty is one of the oldest pleasures of mankind, as Nietzsche liked to remind his readers; although today it is more often something practiced by the players of video games than celebrated at large public events.
[5]
See 'Road Traffic Collisions Involving Cats', in
Hansard, HC, Vol. 725 (debated on Monday 9 January 2023): click here.
Sadly, Rishi Sunak's government decided not to make a simple amendment to the legislation already in place under section 170 of the Road Traffic Act (1988) that covers
horses, cattle, asses, mules, sheep, pigs, goats and dogs. It did, however, push through legislation requiring all cats in England to be microchipped before reaching twenty weeks of age. This new law came into effect on 10 June 2024.
[6] I'm paraphrasing and extending the closing lines to Lawrence's poem 'Mountain Lion' in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (Martin Secker, 1923), pp. 187-189. The poem can be read in the Project Gutenberg edition of this work (2019) by clicking here.
