Have you killed any wild animals by running over them at night in your car? You can't drive very far in some areas without coming on the squashed corpse of a hedgehog, badger or fox. On Sunday, on a quiet road in Meath a handsome big badger seemed to gaze challengingly at oncoming traffic. Dead.
He was intact, as far as could be seen. Good intention was to stop and remove him to the grass at the side, but it was decided that it could be done on the way back. On the way back, someone - a house was only a few yards away - had already done the good deed. Foxes, badgers, the odd hedgehog are common enough, but seldom rabbits and in years no hare is remembered in this area of Meath - where intensive hunting of them with dogs has had a catastrophic effect on their numbers. Birds by the score in autumn, when grain spills out of lorries, and rooks especially dare to wait for the last grain, and their raggedy corpses are strewn over our roads. Oddly enough, last Sunday there were for miles of not-so-busy roads, rooks, jackdaws and even magpies active along the green edges pecking away. Was it that the rain of the earlier hours had brought up worms? This was an afternoon, warming-up. But mile after mile, there they were, safe from the wheels, pecking away.
Badgers, it is said, are often killed because they keep to immemorial, tribal paths, and will not be deflected even when man covers a stretch of them with his roads. Over in England a Mammal Society study has just started, according to The Sunday Telegraph, and it asks for volunteers to report on the remains found on the roads in their search for methods of cutting down on the animal death toll. Efforts described are sometimes ingenious. For example, hedgehog lovers are encouraged to carry in the front of their cars a device which emits a high-pitched warning noise. In some areas, which have a high density of otters, red reflectors are installed in the undergrowth and they reflect car headlights as a warning to the animals. (Originally thought up in Australia for the benefit of kangaroos.) Most of the animals, but not all, are killed at night, for badgers and foxes are largely nocturnal; the rooks, etc are, of course diurnal. Lincoln Garland of Bristol University who is in charge of the scheme, says that while hunting accounts for about 10,000 fox kills a year in Britain, "we think about 100,000 foxes are killed on the roads every year."