Road Kill I – An Elementary Examination

Every morning, on our way to work, my community and I involuntarily participate in violence. We partake again in the evening, on our way home, and helplessly many times throughout the day as we crisscross the rural landscape in our vehicles. 

Roadkill is an inevitable repercussion of American car culture, so routine as to seem an inescapable fact of life. And yet I find it impossible not to notice the mangled, crumpled bodies – no matter how small – and I find it impossible not to feel a crushing sense of loss. But so many of the fellow dwellers and drivers of my community seem to continue on their path oblivious, blind, or unaffected by these car-caused animal deaths. 

Why is there no moral or political discourse around the subject? Without it human individuals are left to reckon with the emotional and psychological implications of road-killed animals and to mourn on their own. For many of us, the highly public and visual violence of wildlife-vehicle collisions precipitates an as yet unaddressed phenomenon – that of ‘ecological grief.’ Personally, it forces an awareness of the relation between place and planet: I spent the majority of my life in mega-metropolises and moved to this town at the foothills of the Catskills in order to live surrounded by wildlife in a (more) natural setting. 

Why is it acceptable to openly mourn the death of a companion animal but not that of a squirrel or a fisher or a deer? How has car culture contributed to the decontextualization of wild animal lives? How have we ritualized domination in the way we permit ourselves to pulverize their bodies over and over on the roadway? 

The relatively nascent field of road ecology reframes traditional ecological dynamics by defining the car as apex predator and roads as a source of population loss. It’s high time the humanities and social sciences weigh in on the discussion too and mediate a critical reexamination of our collective relationships with animals.