Beware the Many Signs of Deer

In many places in the United States, there are huge populations of deer, elk, and other creatures, big and small. The larger animals, primarily deer, elk, moose and bighorn sheep, have daily movements to water, sleeping grounds, and feeding areas. It isn’t uncommon for roads and highways to cut across the paths that these animals take to get to and from water, food, and so forth.

This can lead to numerous car accidents involving these large animals. For instance, here in Montana where most highways have a speed limit of 70 mph, collisions are common. A car that is moving at 70 miles per hour, hitting a 200-pound deer most often kills the deer, totals the car and sometimes kills the driver and passengers or at least puts them in the hospital.

For this reason, and knowing that deer and elk tend to follow major trails, highway departments often erect signs in the places the animals usually cross the road. This is to alert the drivers to be on the lookout for deer.

A woman called in to a radio talk show to complain about the signs. Her complaint was, shall we say, a bit unusual and funny in retrospect, though she was quite serious.

She really went off on the highway department for their lack of judgment, intelligence, and compassion. It took time before the host could find out what her complaint really was.

It seems that she’d been in three car accidents in the past couple of years, involving deer. She’d collided with the deer, causing great damage to all three vehicles she’d been driving. (She didn’t mention the condition of the deer, though that part can be imagined pretty easily.)

In all three cases, she’d hit a deer shortly after going by a deer crossing sign. Her contention was that it was the Highway Department’s fault that she’d been in the three accidents.

The host asked the obvious question; why?

Paraphrased, the woman said, “The highway department knows full well that those sections of highway are heavily traveled. Yet, they put the deer crossing signs there on purpose!”

The host, not quite sure what she was getting at, asked her what was wrong with putting the signs there. That set her off.

“Are you crazy? If they’d put the signs up in low traffic areas, I wouldn’t have been in the accidents. By putting the signs there so the deer know that those places are where they are supposed to cross, the highway department is causing accidents!”

The host and co-host, trying valiantly to keep from laughing, tried to explain that the signs were for the drivers, not for the deer, and that deer don’t read. The woman was having none of that, maintaining that if they moved the signs, the deer would cross in a different location.

Since the woman totally refused to listen to sense, the call ended with the host promising to send a transcript of the conversation to the Highway Department.

I don’t know if they kept their promise, but if they did, I imagine that the Highway Department and the Department of Transportation probably got a huge laugh over it.

This is a true story and amazingly, it has happened a number of times, in different locations, by different people who all apparently think that the reason the deer cross the road in those places is because of the deer crossing signs. It simply doesn’t seem to occur to them that their reasoning is exactly backward; the deer crossing signs are there because that is where the deer cross the road.

There are a lot of jokes about, “Why did the chicken cross the road”, but there is more humor in why some people think the deer cross the road, at least in specific places.