At least 10,000 whitetail deer will give their lives this year to auto-animal conflict, converting Minnesota’s roads into a 130,000-mile dinner table for a growing population of crows. Depending on when you count, Minnesota’s whitetail population rises to about 1.1 million (about 20 percent of the state’s human inhabitants) before the fall hunt. At a glance, roads are hardly a good deal for the whitetail, few of whom drive at all, but who suffer crash fatality rates at least 16 times that for Minnesota humans. So it makes sense that MnDOT is working to develop technology that might keep the critters off your hood in years to come. They’ve added an amber light to the top of existing “deer crossing” signs. Nearby motion sensors can activate the light via transmitters for about a minute at a time to warn drivers. If a two-year trial at three locations shows promise, the system could be deployed statewide.
In the meantime, the car-animal death match continues, and someone has to get rid of the leftovers. The Rake recently met with several Minnesotans who have stepped up to the job in the years since the DNR relinquished the responsibility in 1987.
Rick Johnson has contracted with counties (including Hennepin) and cities to dispose of whitetail road-kills for the past 12 years. “It’s really nothing special,” Johnson said modestly. “I have a winch and a truck and a board I put up to the back and throw the winch around the neck.” By lunchtime on the day we spoke, he had recovered six animals this way. Johnson strongly disapproves of local maintenance operations that simply stack the animals and mulch them with their woodchipping operations. It’s not unheard of for snowmobilers, for example, to collide with these above-ground graves, he said. “It’s disgusting.” MnDOT’s Kent Barnard states emphatically that MnDOT does not apply this disposal method to any road kill, but that it is approved by the Pollution Control Agency and may be practiced in some counties. MnDOT only uses landfills licensed to receive the animals, though in remote areas they can be dragged clear of the road and left for the benefit of scavengers. How does Rick Johnson honor the dead? He delivers about 1,000 deer each year to feed private collections of wolves, tigers, lions, and other predators, a route that puts 80,000 miles on his truck annually.
At the top of the food chain, humans rarely miss an opportunity for free meat. Out of 10,000 deer confirmed dead in traffic by the DNR, about 4,000 will be claimed with “possession permits,” available at no cost to folks who like to eat what they run over. At least one MnDOT employee admits having fed the family this way, and Kent Barnard promotes this use of unintended harvests. “What you call road kill, some folks call food,” he quipped, cautioning that penalties including vehicle forfeiture await those who bypass the permit process.
Closer to home, the victims are less likely to be supper than the family pussycat or pooch, which makes for a more delicate topic with Minneapolis Animal Control’s Bob Marotto. “We don’t refer to it as road kill,” Marotto recently said. “For us, we are dealing with ‘deceased animals.’ Obviously people have a close bond with their pets and we would absolutely never refer to them as road kill.” In Minneapolis, it’s Marotto’s sad task to impound 5,500 to 7,000 animals annually. In 2001, about 1,000 of them were pets killed in traffic. Marotto and his staff also undertake the job of owner notification, “One of the most difficult things we deal with.”
But for a chosen few creatures, the end of the road in Minnesota is also the launch of a more distinguished career—in modeling, naturally. The University of Minnesota’s Bell Museum holds one of the DNR’s handful of salvage permits, which allows Jennifer Menken and other museum staff to resurrect any dead animal for educational purposes. Current road kills on display are the raccoon in the museum’s touch-and-see room, and the popular “wing table,” which makes use of the flight anatomy when “the rest of the animal was too badly damaged,” said Menken. She noted that a wolf recently retired from the exhibit was also a rare road kill trophy. Eventually, said Menken, the wolf was “loved to pieces” by the 700 kids a day hosted by the museum in springtime—a kinder death, no doubt, than its first.
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