i nearly killed an animal on purpose today

i have been veggie for the best part of 14 years, and have been fairly hardcore for the last 5 or 6 years. if someone had asked me yesterday if i would kill an animal to survive, the answer would probably have been no, coz i believed animals had as much right to be alive as humans.

today i was pootling down the M4 surrounded by heavy fast moving traffic. in my lane up ahead i spotted a very large pheasant. in the time it took between seeing the bird and reaching it i decided that if it didnt move i would kill it. braking or swerving would have created far too much risk to human life, (especially my own).

as it happened, just as i was about to hit it, it decided it had had enough of playing on the motorway and took off.

it did call into question though my previous morals as regards to the value of an animals life. i had never realised quite how unhesitating i would be about killing an animal if i had to. it made me realise that i dont place anywhere near as much value on the life of an animal as i used to think i did.

so - to swerve or not to swerve - that is the question!

hardcore veggies.........discuss!

peace and love
stardust
xxx

 

ah fuck it, these things happen. life is going to end regaurdless of time or place.

to be honest im veggie, but if i killed an animal then sure i'd feel guilty, but at the end of the day accidents happen...they cant be helped

 

I think you made the right decision..!!

Dodging that on the motorway or any road for that matter would be a risk to you and all the people behind you!!

 

pursides it would have hardly been on purpose...

 

i just surprised myself that the consious(sp?) thought went through my mind "if it doesnt move i'll kill it". i would have expected my brain to at least put up a bit of a fight!

peace and love
stardust
xxx

 

You must die :X :X

 

I think what you did is fair enough, i mean.. you took into account what would happen should you swirve it wasn't like you didn't just like AH HA theres a pheasant lets run it over... i'd have done the same... i think anyone would have to be honest. it wasn't premeditated... it wasn't on purpose it was a choice on the spur of the moment ..

 

hehe on a driving lesson one time between bodelwyddan and home i was tootling along the road when a bird flew in front of my windscreen.....did i swerve???































no! i hid underneath the damn steering wheel lol, until my instructor promised me (and i made him promise) that there wasnt dead bird splatted across my windscreen. luckily it was a straight road and when apologising profusely for doing such a dumbass thing, he told me at least i didnt swerve!!

 

Simillar thing happened to me with a rabbit yesterday. Thankfully it was on a small country lane and breaking hard caused no danger to myself or anyone else. I suppose, even if you were to place animal life on the same level as human life (and objectively it is no more or less valuable - only human chavanism and self preservation says that we're more important) you could look at it in a purely utilitarian way. How many lives (human or animal) would have been damaged or lost if you had swerved? Probably more than one. I don't think you had a choice....

 

jonny2mad read this and brought up an interesting thought on msn..........

what if it had been a toddler?

 

I agree with Spyder, it can hardly be called 'on purpose'! I've run over animals twice; armadillo's on a long, dark stretch of highway in Wyoming. There'd be lots of them at night, but you couldn't see them coming, they'd not be sitting in the road where you could see them but run out into it from the unlit undergrowth along the side... and with several hundred miles to go it was hardly feasible to drive real slow either... I feel sad about it but neither did I wanna run myself off the road...

Oh, I even ran over a mouse once with my bicycle! That was weird.. daylight and all but it just shot out of the bushes and crossed the bicycle track at a run, no way to stop or swerve even though I wasn't going fast at all... a mouse at a run is *quick* & it also came from underneath the bushes on the side of the narrow track, same moment I saw it I'd already hit it.

 

A muslim toddler or a christian toddler?

 

I swerved out of the way of a fox on the motorway once. I didn't even think about other vehicles that were near me, it was sort of instinctive. I could have killed myself or others but luckily there was enough space ... just

 

I was driving down this lane once. There were two kids walking a dog on a lead on the right hand side of the road. A dog suddenly belted out of a driveway just ahead and to the left of me (basically, it had seen the other hound and wanted to play). I had to make a split-second decision. I was able to swerve just enough to avoid the dog without mounting the kerb and killing the kids, but initially I was convinced I hadn't been able to swerve widely enough. I was sure I must've hit it. It was only when I looked back in the mirror that I realised it had escaped. It must've lost a whisker or two though!

 

yeah driving scary. i havent done my test yet. been learning on and off for 3 yrs finance dependant tho not really that long as havent driven in over a year. but its scary. i know my mam has swerved on motorways to avoid things and probably has been an instant reaction to avoid the animal. knowing me my instant reaction would be the breaks and id cause a pile-up - eeeek!

if it were a toddler stardust youd blatently swerve to miss it at all costs. human instinct. we can try to place animals on same value as us in ever day life but when it comes to life and death think our natural human instinct takes over and chooses

 

That's nothing to do with natural instincts. That's learned social values.

 

to be honest i think i would have swerved.....it seems to just happen with me. obviousely if i had a whole bunch of people in the car with me then it might sway me the other way a bit, but if i was on my own i would have to swerve into he verge or otherwise.

living up in the country where i passed my test there were millions of phesants and it was a constant thing, i used to drive about 40 mph on the roads just so that if i saw one on the road i could have enough time to break or swerve......
N
x

 

I agree with Sal about having to take a utilitarian approach to it, and think about the number of lives you would be endangering to preserve one. My mum taught four girls who were killed in a car crash when they swerved to avoid hitting an animal, and that was on a very quiet road, doing it on a motorway could have been even worse.
As a vegan, I can completely understand how you must feel, I would find that decision very difficult aswell, and have no idea what decision I may have made when forced to think so quickly. I don't drive. I had one go at driving on a quiet country road, and I emergency breaked everytime I saw a leave on the floor that looked like a fieldmouse, and when a pheasant waddled in front of the car about 30 metres away, I nearly crashed into a bush! If I had been on a motorway, the consequences of that would have been awful.
Don't worry about it, as it all came through in the end. I hope you never find yourself in that position again

 

HURRAH! you just had your first taste of bloodlust. you'll think nothing of it until one day you find yourself strangely drawn to clay pigeon shooting, which will get very boring very quickly, so naturally you'll go to trafalgar square and BLAST THE AIRBORNE RATS OUTTA THE SKY!!

or not. just have a good long smell next time you go past a mcdonalds and see if it appeals...

 

having hit quite a few things myself (maybe once a month since i been driving) on the way to college thru winding back roads, i can say that i feel guilty most times (pheasants i hit too many now to be that bothered)... one that especially that sticks in my mind was last week i hit a duck, a pretty brown one and my thought pattern was as follows:

Is that a duck?
Is it alone?
Is there a trail of ducklings following behind it?

needless to say it was alone and that it was dead outright, but made me realise that had there of been some little duckings i would of braked or swerved, regardless of any cars about (there was one behind and one coming head on).
Maybe. but then the single duck, its led a good life i expect and probably didn't have any regrets but does that make it justifiable because it wasn't young?

I am a conservationist, so killing anything seems wrong anyway, but then some things in nature are more able to soak up deaths like pheasants with no effect to the population because of their population size, Pheasants are an introduced species none the less, bred anyway by humans to be shot and eaten.