In the UK, there are over 38 million vehicles, mostly cars, driving along an extensive road network that stretches for about 246,700 miles (i.e., all the way to the moon and a bit beyond).
It's unsurprising, therefore, that each year an estimated one million wild mammals, including badgers, deer, foxes, hedgehogs, rabbits, and squirrels, are slaughtered on UK roads, with many millions more suffering fatal injuries, but managing to leave the scene of the accident and thus evade capture within the official statistics.
As well as the above, as many as ten million birds are also annually sacrificed on the roads; mostly pheasants, but also increasingly rare and endangered species, such as barn owls. Even domestic animals, including beloved pets, aren't safe; around 230,000 cats, for example are killed by cars each year. Sadly, I doubt that anyone even bothers to keep numbers for reptiles and amphibians, as if frogs, newts, and slow worms aren't even worth counting.
As for human beings - and we too, of course, are not immune to becoming roadkill - there were 1,782 fatalities on UK roads last year and 25,484 serious injuries; numbers that admittedly pale into insignificance when compared to the previous figures given and it's hard to feel much sympathy for car owners who are complicit with the destruction not only of wildlife and the rural landscape, but who have also turned many urban areas into virtual no go zones for pedestrians and severely restricted the outdoor play of children.
Hopefully, we'll one day reach the conclusion two legs good, four wheels bad and learn how to journey naked and light along the open road, exposed to full contact on two slow feet, as D. H. Lawrence would say.*
Notes
* I'm aware Lawrence is speaking figuratively here - about the condition of souls, etc. - but he was obviously no fan of the car, writing elsewhere of the mocking triumph of the motor engine and of traffic flowing through rigid grey city streets in terms of a sinister underworld.
Despite the name being in extremely poor taste, readers might be interested in Project Splatter, coordinated by researchers at Cardiff University, that attempts to quantify and map wildlife roadkill across the UK: click here for details.
Lawrence may have accepted the occasional lift in a car, but he despised them, and their foul exhaust fumes, ending his marvellously misanthropic, pro-animal Pansy, 'Paltry Looking People' by saying 'how paltry, mingy and dingy and squalid people look. . .sitting stuck, like automata, in automobiles'.
ReplyDeleteFabulous quote - thanks for reminding me of this.
ReplyDeleteTo claim these animals are 'sacrificed' ('made sacred') seems etymologically off - the point is, surely (and sadly), that no one gives most of these accidental deaths a second thought.
ReplyDeleteDHL probably needed to get out more - in a car or not. The quote, with its reference to automobiles/automata, seems to me to highlight how his attitude was catalysed by his aversion to the prefix in the compound ('auto') and its perceived insult to the author's biologism/vitalism.
Like it or not, though, cars are inseparable from human culture, and the best of them are beautiful feats of engineering (if not now necessarily ecologically desirable in their petrochemical form), as well as being well-recognised Jungian symbols of the body in the unconscious. Last but hardly least, they're also of great utility - if you're about to give birth or dying of appendicitis, good luck with a walk to your nearest hospital 'naked and light along the open road', but you may not survive the journey!