What would you do?

[urbpan]

Imagine you are driving along a pretty busy highway and you see a badly injured animal in the road. Its innards are out a little, but it's alive and conscious. For the sake of the example, the animal is one that is common, but not invasive, like a possum in the eastern US or a red fox in the British Isles or Europe (can't think of an example for Australia, but you get the idea, right?)

What do you do? Do you move the animal off the road (with a shovel or something so you don't get bit)? Do you try to run the animal over and kill it more quickly? Do you try to kill it with something in your car (a shovel, some other tool)? Suppose it's a weekend or at night, and you can't get a hold of a rehabber, vet, or animal rescue org, what then?

Many of us have experienced something close to this, and I'd guess that most of us didn't feel any better after the experience.

Your thoughts?

Comments

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

Not to mention that a domesticated animal probably doesn't, I presume, have the same survival/coping skills a wild thing has by nature. We've bred it out of them? Or does it kick in in extremis?

I don't know the answer to any of these questions. I believe that the main difference between wild animals and domestics is that domestics have been bred to be less fearful of humans. The mechanics of this seems to be in amount of adrenaline produced in response to stimulus. What this means in the case of grave injury I don't know.

Even some domestic animals can be hard to diagnose because they still have the instinct to not appear vulnerable. I'm remembering here the rabbit that died at Drumlin Farm while I was there. He stopped eating one day and was dead the next. He was probably ill for some time, but it went undetected until it was too late.

But perhaps since rabbits are prey animals they are more likely to conceal symptoms. I know my dog Charlie does not conceal symptoms, but instead plays them up trying to convince me that he's dying and that I have to take care of him, even if it's just an acorn shell stuck on his toe pad. Dogs are sort of special, since they have become infantilized, and look to their human "parents" for the kind of resources that puppies look to their parents. (Licking your face in appeasement and to induce you to regurgitate food, for example.)