A couple years ago my friend Billy hit a deer driving back to Eugene on one of Oregon’s winding two-lane highways. Always an opportunist, Billy put the doe carcass in his pick-up and took it home, where he skinned and gutted the animal in the side yard between his house and the sorority next door. He made venison chili, but the head was left over, and for months he kept the last evidence of his crime wrapped in a plastic bag in the communal freezer.
This is everyone’s favorite story about Billy; it takes a truly audacious person to turn a tragedy into dinner. And roadkill reclamation has a way of satisfying our morbid curiosity with death and collision—without the ethical implications of rubbernecking at car wrecks or attending human funerals a la Harold and Maude.
The California Roadkill Observation System provides another ethical framework for gawking at roadkill. In the name of science, university researchers and volunteers out of my home town, Davis, California, have been fanatically photographing steamrolled animals in and around the Central Valley. The research will apparently be used to design better highways in the future that would decrease the real-life, recurring episodes of Car vs. Wild (as in the Discovery show, the man and his invention usually prevail over “the wild.” Though everyone loseWeight Exercises when a deer goes through a windshield.)
In its current manifestation, however, the Observation System is most useful as an access point to hundreds of categorized images of dead animals splayed heroically across the state highways. While there are certainly an abundance of gross-out roadkill photo albums online (enough to be spoofed in Nigel Grimmer‘s Roadkill Family Album), this one is uniquely thorough and unapologetic. Better roadside landscaping may be the reason behind the images, but the camera is clearly focused on the animal–the carnage often lining up with the rule of thirds. Which leads the online viewer to wonder: Why is it necessary for the data in this research project to be publicly accessible? When I compulsively visit the “Mammal (large)” section of the “Roadkill Photo Gallery,” will it actually influence whether or not I run over more of my large animal friends in the future?
The photos are stark obituaries for the deceased fauna. In human obituaries, one reads about the mundane hobbies of the dead and wonders in private how it all ended. In roadkill photos, the death scene is our only access to the animal’s life, while everything that came before remains a mystery.
“Both deer had been dead about one week, the first one probably an older kill and the 2nd within one week,” says one entry. “What was curious was that they went all the way down to the lake before dying near each other. Normally deer would avoid another dead deer.”
More photos after the jump; you can’t look but you can’t look away.
(more…)
