By any measure, animals and roadways have never had a particularly good relationship. Aside from breaking up their natural habitats and delivering hordes of gun-toting hunters directly to their doorstep, the highway has become an outright death-trap to many a critter, both literally and figuratively.
While good records do not seem to exist, some studies have been completed in the past to try and gauge the extent of road kill carnage or “flat meat” as some people have dubbed it. For example, according to Wikipedia (for whatever that’s worth) an evaluation was completed in New England in 1993 that surveyed the remains of some 1,900 or so “incidents.”
Based solely on those results, data for the rest of the country was extrapolated (we can only hope that they took into account variables such as the fact that the Arizona desert does not in any way, shape, or form resemble the jagged granite mountains around parts of New Hampshire and that the population of different concrete-prone fauna may differ commensurately.)
In any case, the annual “breakdown” was as follows:
41 million squirrels
26 million cats
22 million rats
19 million opossums
15 million raccoons
6 million dogs
350,000 deer
All joking aside, these are horrific numbers and represent a very tragic flaw in our society’s freedom of mobility. Add to this the loss of human life and the economic impact and it is very apparent that we have not done a good job at all of managing the proverbial intersection of nature and vehicular activity.
Several incidents over the past week or so made this problem painfully apparent including the Turkish Grand Prix where a stray dog very unfortunately wandered out onto the circuit at the absolute worst of times. This is regrettably not an isolated scene as it has happened upon occasion throughout, not just F1, but all racing history.
With the exception of the couple few race weekends a year, Le Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve in Montreal is open to the public to use as they wish for picnicking, swimming, gambling and hiking/biking. Ask any of the people who frequent île Notre-Dame and they will tell you that the island has a large population of groundhogs and that the grounds crew must go through the herculean task of somehow isolating them from the track surface for the obvious safety of everyone involved come green flag.
2007 was a particularly difficult year as groundhogs made their presence known on more than one occasion, interrupting a Ralph Schumacher practice round as well as outright sabotaging Anthony Davidson’s race, who was running in third at the time, mind you. (This incident was particularly egregious as it sparked a bit of a controversy after Davidson’s team charged that the vermin in question had specifically targeted Anthony’s car and had the gall to masquerade as a beaver during the whole event.)
Another season that also happens to be currently underway is that of Thoroughbred Racing, which recently suffered a heartbreaking loss in the death of Kentucky Derby runner-up, Eight Belles. The horrific scene that unfolded with the collapsed Eight Belles being euthanized mere feet away from the celebration of winner Big Brown is a bad as the sport has ever seen and has put the whole sport under the microscope. This on the obviously fragile heels of 2006 derby winner, Barbaro.
One thing that at least the press seems to agree on is that pure greed powers the sport at this point and that horses have been super bred into a fragile state and pumped with all types of drugs, which is a practice that is illegal in all other countries.
To be fair, to read the headlines today, one would find stories about how UPS is throwing gobs of money at the Big Brown’s owners in an effort to be associated with him and that these same owners have turned away multiple offers of $60 million for the horse saying they are holding out for $100 mil.
Greed, drugs and abuse in horse racing aside, I couldn't help but think that I had heard the terms "horsepower," "high-strung," and "catastrophic failure" all in the same sentence at once.
Then it came to me.
The E46 BMW M3's engine was clearly a race-bred power plant repurposed for the street and even when combined with the newly introduced SMG-II transmission, was just begging for over-revving. Yes, BMW sorted out the issues by mid 2003 (post May '03 builds) if memory serves me right, but the parallels in philosophy driving a mechanical component and a racing-bred animal are palpable.
Comparisons must stop there, as we are talking about a hunk of metal and a living, breathing, feeling being, but we can take at least take solace in the fact that Eight Belles was doing what it liked to do best when all things went wrong.
The constant push for bragging rights, even in the face of historically high fuel prices, road congestion, and broken roadways has clouded many a vision in automotive design. Unfortunately this same attitude extends well beyond cars and into things that actually matter including people and, yes, animals. When is enough, enough?
Who knows, but if horses are collapsing M3's are exploding and olympic hopefuls are ending up in asylums, is it possible we have passed that point?
M3 E46 engine is one of the best engines ever made
Posted by: Goody | June 20, 2009 at 08:17 PM