Every wonder why deer freeze in headlights?

Friday, May 21, 2010
I grew up in the Midwest. Rural town Midwest. Where deer hits are one of the top 5 causes of automobile accidents per capita. I have totaled two cars hitting deers and both of them stopped dead in their tracks and just looked at me. Stupid deer. 
Of course each time I did it I bawled more for them and trying to will them to live then for the fact I was going to be without a car for awhile.

Now I have always been the kind of person that if anything remotely traumatic happens to be I have to wait a couple of days for the shock to wear off before I can really talk openly about it with anyone. Always been that way, probably always will. Okay this happened a couple of days ago so now I'm telling anyone who remotely cares.

Here is the scenario...

I go to work, park in the parking lot, decide to walk over to the whole sale food place to pick up a couple things before I start work.
Now you have to cross a very busy intersection known as State Rd 123 in order to get to this place. 4 lanes of cars in an extremely small town called Vienna.
Imagine Mayberry meets downtown Chicago traffic...you get the idea.
Not to worry though. There is a stop light in the middle of the nowhere for pedestrians to cross. The reason I say in the middle of nowhere is because it is halfway through the block. There used to be an old railway station that they ripped up and made a trail out of for bikers, walkers and all those other healthy peeps.
Anyhoo, I cross the street get my stuff and coming back. I press the button to cross the intersection and there is a bicyclist on the other side waiting.
We get the right away.

I start to walk in the street and turn to the left to see a woman in a Jeep Grand Cherokee on her cell phone yacking away, still coming....not stopping... no brakes... You see why I chose that picture up there? That is EXACTLY how I felt. KARMA! What a Bitch!!!!
As you can see I'm still here typing.. she missed by inches. Here is the weird thing though. I know why those stupid deer don't move! Strangely enough it is an almost calming feeling...you can't believe it is about to happen...it really isn't frozen by fear but more of acceptance.
"This is it...this is my time and how it is going to happen".  It is almost like your Divine self knows that this is it and you shouldn't be afraid...just accept it. Very weird.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great post. Very weird, and interesting. That's very insightful, "It is almost like your Divine self know that this is it and you shouldn't be afraid...just accept it." I mean it does make sense. Biologically speaking, priority #1 is to survive. Why, then, would we freeze like that in the face of death? It's not just humans and deer, either. I've seen this "freeze" response with other animals, too.

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