By Lalinda De La Fuente

I do not like to just rant and rave in my blog. I usually plan things out and give things some thought. Sometimes I do some research, things like statistics, facts or anything to support what I am saying. Today’s topic is set to be road kill. Yes, road kill.

So it may not be surprising to find out that road kill bothers me. Today I jumped onto the internet to get some information. Who takes care of road kill? How many animals does the city, or whoever picks them up, acquire per day, week or year? What types of animals are mostly hit and where are they mostly hit? It was questions like these that I sought to answer.

But then I got to thinking who cares? I don’t care who is supposed to clean it up because somebody is. I don’t care about the statistics because one animal is too many. These are animal carcasses and they don’t belong sitting on the road for a week or under a car’s wheels for that matter.

One morning in Miami, on a major highway, I saw a large black dog dead on the side of the road. When I got back on the highway that evening it was still there. Every day for the next five days it was still laying there. This wasn’t a squirrel. This was a large dog!

Not long ago, also in Miami, I pulled into a parking lot and saw an odd site in the vacant space next to mine. From the terrible looks of it, it was some sort of bird (a chicken or rooster maybe) inside of a large paper bag. It appeared that someone had placed the bird in the bag and ran over it a hundred times. The site was gruesome. I wish I never saw it. I used to pass the same lot everyday and I never recall it getting cleaned up.

Just a week ago, and yes, here in Miami, I saw a duck that had been run over. It took them four days to remove it. Earlier today I saw what looked to be a dead cat, flattened to a pancake and from the looks of it, dead on the road for weeks. And just yesterday morning I saw a dead dog in the road. Last night, when I was forced to pass it again, someone had moved it to the side of the road but I guess decided that that was enough and didn’t take it away. As of this morning it was still laying there.

What about all those raccoons and possums and squirrels? If no one is going to pick up a dead dog a squirrel has little chance of being removed.

We claim to be an understanding and non-barbaric society yet we leave animal carcasses on the road to decay. And forget the fact that they lay in the road for days and weeks as if their life never counted. Who are these people who are running over these animals? I will chalk some up to night time mishaps but a bird in a bag is not an accident.

Some seem to have blatant disregard for anything that is in front of them on the road. Once, while sitting on his back porch one clear summer night in suburban Chicago, my boyfriend watched in terror as a man in a huge pickup truck barreled over a raccoon. There was no one else on the road, just him and the raccoon, and he made the executive decision to run over it.

Maybe in his next life he will be a raccoon and someone will run over him.