well I’m pretty sure it was a cat… and I’m definitely sure it wont be going home tonight :furious:
well they say if you see an animal and you can’t avoid it the safest thing to do is carry on instead of putting yourself in trouble… at 50 its difficult to do anything when you see it scampering across the road…
bump…thud…thud…
damaged the front bumper and shall see if it did anything else tomorrow as i’m sure it went round one of the arches…
:whiteflag:
i need a drink…
Very hard to avoid sometimes, and equally very hard to break human instinct to avoid.
The near car-car misses I’ve seen because of a small animal shooting out and a person slamming the brakes on or swerving sharply.
Been their a couple of time never nice 
and once you have stopped its normally dragged itself somewhere to curl up and hide and feel sorry for itself where you can’t find it.
I’ve always been a cat lover, and lost a few over the years to that sort of incident
I will never understand why cats, which are IMO intelligent, fast, agile, and (usually) expert hunters, think they can go up against a bright eyed 1/4 tonne monster growling down at them doing 50 mph :sigh:
I often wonder if somewhere back in time they gained some Lemming DNA :shrug:
i like cats to, the stretch of road it was on i wasn’t even contemplating looking for the cat after i hit it. i just stopped to see the damage/if it was safe to continue and got on my way as soon as i could. from the bits of plastic bumper it has cracked and the thud thud… i think it went under one if not both tyres and possibly up into the arch as both thuds sounded like the front of the car. i dont think it would have gone anywhere
Bully
Ran a fox over a while back… and I mean ran it over, wasn’t nice
sliced up a pheasant on my bike once… lord knows what the front discs did to it, but my wheel was coated in feathers - just glad it was nothing bigger 
Had a near miss with a deer in one of my previous quality sheds in the wee small hours.
Travelling at the sort of speeds you can only do at that time of the morning it ran into the road and just stood there as I nailed the brakes and slid towards it with no noticable decrease in speed.
Then just as I was about to help it swiftly into the afterlife it made an almighty single leap into the shrubbery almost as if it was just playing chicken.
Funny thing is, all I could think about whilst skinning my tyres was, How can I explain to my daughter that I killed Bambi ?
Never hit a cat luckily… But have had:-
A rather large deer run out into the road in fornt of me which hit the side of me car as I went past it… luckily no damage.
A young deer jumped out of some bushes right in front of me… couldn’t avoid it, hit it with the nearside front corner of me XR2i demolishing the front bumper and bending the wing and bonnet. :furious:
Went over the top of 5 chickens whilst driving a coach… unfortunately for the chickens there is a mudflap behind the front wheels that goes full width of the coach, not just the wheels… there was a few thuds as the chickens got wiped out and a lots of feathers were observed in my mirrors. Unfortunately at the time the coach was full of primary school kids, some of whom had spotted the chickens in the road and saw it all happen… :sigh: Chickens must rate as the most stupid animals to be loose on public roads!
Because animals don’t recognize a car for what it is. Especially at night when all you can see is several bright lights. Trying to judge distance on bright points of light is very difficult so they don’t realize how fast you are approaching (even in daylight judging speed can be a trick).
It’s unfortunate, but it takes real intelligence to live safely in the human world. I am reminded of the classic goldfish living in a blender; totally unaware of their surroundings and of the immediate danger. I think that’s how most animals go though life in areas that people have developed.