AirForceShooter
Member
They still would have hit them at 70.
AFS
AFS
Texas Highway with 85mph speed limit meets hog infestation
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Double Naught Spy
Sus Venator
Up where I am, they still hit them regularly at 50-55. The only difference is the potential amount of damage.
Of course, the slower you go, the more likely you are to be able to avoid such a collision, but in limited visibility (nighttime, limited headlight capabilities, etc.) and at such speeds, there is very little reaction time, assuming there is even enough to prevent the collision. Then there is the problem of whether attempting to abait the collision is safer than the collision itself. Not just with hogs, but lots of people end up in wrecks, even fatal wrecks, avoiding critters as small as rabbits and squirrels.
Of course, the slower you go, the more likely you are to be able to avoid such a collision, but in limited visibility (nighttime, limited headlight capabilities, etc.) and at such speeds, there is very little reaction time, assuming there is even enough to prevent the collision. Then there is the problem of whether attempting to abait the collision is safer than the collision itself. Not just with hogs, but lots of people end up in wrecks, even fatal wrecks, avoiding critters as small as rabbits and squirrels.
Art Eatman
Moderator In Memoriam
A "not-always" generality about critters, cars and night:
If you see a critter in the road, dim your lights and honk the horn while braking.
If it's a deer, steer toward the direction it was going. Deer tend to retreat back to where it was safe.
If it's a cow, steer toward the direction it came from. Cows tend to avoid being headed. I guess it's an inherent stubbornness feature.
If it's a horse, all bets are off. Horses are suicidal and will work to stay in the headlights.
If it's a large hog and you can't steer clear of it, try to center it while braking to avoid a rollover.
If you see a critter in the road, dim your lights and honk the horn while braking.
If it's a deer, steer toward the direction it was going. Deer tend to retreat back to where it was safe.
If it's a cow, steer toward the direction it came from. Cows tend to avoid being headed. I guess it's an inherent stubbornness feature.
If it's a horse, all bets are off. Horses are suicidal and will work to stay in the headlights.
If it's a large hog and you can't steer clear of it, try to center it while braking to avoid a rollover.
Hell, I don't know what it was. It was a pig, black as coal, covered with LONG coarse black hair, and sure didn't look like a normal farm-type pig. It also wasn't huge like wild boars get, so we just kinda assumed the name "javalina" fit. I certainly didn't look it up in a dictionary, and Google didn't exist back then, or PC's for that matter. Wasn't any fun, I can tell ya that.
dogrunner
Member
Yeah, our Florida Javelinas have real rough hides, lotsa teeth and slap your wheels with that long tail when you thump 'em!
MCgunner
Member
"If you wanna kill a deer, slow that bullet down to 55 mph, put some little headlights and a horn on it, and the deer will jump in front of it! WOO, that's an elusive creature....."
Ron White
Ain't hard to tell a Javelina up close, just look for the HUGE zit on his back, I mean, if you can't smell it.
Ron White
Ain't hard to tell a Javelina up close, just look for the HUGE zit on his back, I mean, if you can't smell it.
sixgunner455
Member
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Guy in my town hit a javelina on his motorcycle back in July. Just hit it solid with his foot and peg.
Turned his whole leg around backwards, laid him and the bike down. He's just now allowed to stand up for more than an hour or two, and doesn't have to wear his brace 24/7 anymore.
Speaking of hitting pig-like critters.
Turned his whole leg around backwards, laid him and the bike down. He's just now allowed to stand up for more than an hour or two, and doesn't have to wear his brace 24/7 anymore.
Speaking of hitting pig-like critters.
JohnB
Member
Don't forget chickens and sheep in the daytime. Either will stand on the side of the road until you are right on them, then jump in front of you.
When I was a kid my dad always said the two worst things to hit (in rural Alabama anyway) was a hog or a mule. The hog will flip you and the mule will come through the windshield and kill you. I understand in Maine it's a moose.
Jim Watson
Member
I had the same warning as JohnB from my Dad.
Alabama, too.
Many years later a co-worker hit a mule. Not well centered, he was ok and the car was even still drivable. He drove it as-is until the rain washed the mule blood and brains off.
Alabama, too.
Many years later a co-worker hit a mule. Not well centered, he was ok and the car was even still drivable. He drove it as-is until the rain washed the mule blood and brains off.
Frankly if they are allowing a speed limit of 85 mph at night that's foolhardy at the least.
Unless you were running 100 watt halogen lights or some other illegal lighting system on your vehicle you are way over driving your lights on a vehicle at night at 85mph.
Unless you were running 100 watt halogen lights or some other illegal lighting system on your vehicle you are way over driving your lights on a vehicle at night at 85mph.
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Lots of folks mistake the term javalina for a wild boar.
So just for the record .........
A javalina is a wild peccary that occurs in the Southwestern deserts of the USA, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. A wild boar is just an old farm hog gone wild some of which have Russian boar genes due to Russians (Europeans) being released on hunting farms and spreading out and breeding over the years.
Now if I can just get folks to stop calling a cape buffalo a "water buffalo" we will have gained some knowledge in the long run.
MCgunner
Member
Well, Javelina DO occur in south Texas, even around Corpus, up to and including the Aransas NWR, and across the brush country. Hitting one would not be the big deal that hitting a hog would be, well, depending on the vehicle. Might deploy the air bag on my Toyota Echo.
Double Naught Spy
Sus Venator
You bring up a good point about the airbags. They go off via X number of sensors being triggered at X levels, one or more of which are in the bumpers.
Hitting hogs can be bad and the Caldwell Sheriff spoke of cars rolling or flipping as a result. So I went on line and looked for stories of cars flipped or rolled by animal strikes. First, there is limited hog crash information in terms of news accounts, though there is a lot of deer accounts in the news. Few hog crash pics, but lots of deer crash pics. Cops, game wardens, wildlife experts, and others all talk about animals flipping or rolling cars, but I could not find a single example of a car being flipped or rolled by a deer strike. This is a subtle but significant point. In every case, the cars that ended up rolling (they all go over laterally, not truck over hood), they rolled after a loss of control of the vehicle AFTER hitting the animal and sometimes without ever actually contacting the animal. The cars appear to lose 4 wheel ground contact stability during the course of some sort of swerve, usually in conjunction with hitting something like a curb or leaving the hard top and transitioning to soft ground, sometimes where there is a dropoff. I found it interesting that there were cases of cars hitting deer and rolling over and the deer strike was to the windshield, a location that would not cause a rollover simply from an impact. The rollover was due to the subsequent loss of control of the vehicle...as sometimes happens with other rollovers not associated with animal dodging or impacts.
I also noticed that by and large, hitting hogs tends to produce damage mostly BELOW the hoods of even smaller cars and much lower on bigger vehicles. Bumpers suffer greatly as do radiators and even sometimes front wheels. Deep impacts tend to be above the bumper on lots of vehicles and often are from the higher grill/hood area and above. The salient points here are that deer, even small deer, have longer legs and tend to bound or leap when they run and this elevates them that much further. Hogs have shorter legs and tend to travel at speed at much lower altitudes than deer and so their locations of impact and damage tend to be lower.
People injured in collisions with hogs tend to have minor or no injuries if the car did not have a subsequent secondary wreck such as hitting another vehicle, fixed object, or rolling. I could not find anyone killed by striking a hog only. People hitting deer often don't have much in the way of injuries either, but because of the hits being higher up, deer come through windshields in quite horrific ways sometimes, resulting in serious injuries and even deaths of car occupants.
Of course there are exceptions, I am sure, but I didn't find any during the 3 or 4 hours I spent Monday reading over dozens of articles and watching online news accounts. I am not saying that hitting a hog (or anything else) can't roll a vehicle directly, only that I could only find accounts where vehicles rolled due to a loss of control either after hitting animals or as a result of swerving with ZERO animal contact. I would not want to hit a hog or deer, but between the two, hitting a hog actually seems safer than hitting a deer, if only because hogs don't tend to come through windshields, probably not even on Echos.
Hitting hogs can be bad and the Caldwell Sheriff spoke of cars rolling or flipping as a result. So I went on line and looked for stories of cars flipped or rolled by animal strikes. First, there is limited hog crash information in terms of news accounts, though there is a lot of deer accounts in the news. Few hog crash pics, but lots of deer crash pics. Cops, game wardens, wildlife experts, and others all talk about animals flipping or rolling cars, but I could not find a single example of a car being flipped or rolled by a deer strike. This is a subtle but significant point. In every case, the cars that ended up rolling (they all go over laterally, not truck over hood), they rolled after a loss of control of the vehicle AFTER hitting the animal and sometimes without ever actually contacting the animal. The cars appear to lose 4 wheel ground contact stability during the course of some sort of swerve, usually in conjunction with hitting something like a curb or leaving the hard top and transitioning to soft ground, sometimes where there is a dropoff. I found it interesting that there were cases of cars hitting deer and rolling over and the deer strike was to the windshield, a location that would not cause a rollover simply from an impact. The rollover was due to the subsequent loss of control of the vehicle...as sometimes happens with other rollovers not associated with animal dodging or impacts.
I also noticed that by and large, hitting hogs tends to produce damage mostly BELOW the hoods of even smaller cars and much lower on bigger vehicles. Bumpers suffer greatly as do radiators and even sometimes front wheels. Deep impacts tend to be above the bumper on lots of vehicles and often are from the higher grill/hood area and above. The salient points here are that deer, even small deer, have longer legs and tend to bound or leap when they run and this elevates them that much further. Hogs have shorter legs and tend to travel at speed at much lower altitudes than deer and so their locations of impact and damage tend to be lower.
People injured in collisions with hogs tend to have minor or no injuries if the car did not have a subsequent secondary wreck such as hitting another vehicle, fixed object, or rolling. I could not find anyone killed by striking a hog only. People hitting deer often don't have much in the way of injuries either, but because of the hits being higher up, deer come through windshields in quite horrific ways sometimes, resulting in serious injuries and even deaths of car occupants.
Of course there are exceptions, I am sure, but I didn't find any during the 3 or 4 hours I spent Monday reading over dozens of articles and watching online news accounts. I am not saying that hitting a hog (or anything else) can't roll a vehicle directly, only that I could only find accounts where vehicles rolled due to a loss of control either after hitting animals or as a result of swerving with ZERO animal contact. I would not want to hit a hog or deer, but between the two, hitting a hog actually seems safer than hitting a deer, if only because hogs don't tend to come through windshields, probably not even on Echos.
bob barker
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No offense, but good halogen headlights are perfectly fine at those speeds. I travel that area quite often and have never felt unsafe. Try traveling the Houston beltway. Driving 85 will get you run over.
I travel flyway 8 each and every day and it's a fast road for sure.
However a highway in the middle of the dark country side going 85 mph at night is sheer folly.
Is the tollway completely lit by street lighting if so this situation I speak off is moot.
60 watt halogens(high beams) are not enough for the feet per second you are traveling in the dead of dark at 85mph.
And few places can you run endlessly with your high beams on.
Dont forget 55 watts is the light output on most low beams.
However a highway in the middle of the dark country side going 85 mph at night is sheer folly.
Is the tollway completely lit by street lighting if so this situation I speak off is moot.
60 watt halogens(high beams) are not enough for the feet per second you are traveling in the dead of dark at 85mph.
And few places can you run endlessly with your high beams on.
Dont forget 55 watts is the light output on most low beams.
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aussiepedro
Member
Here in Aust we've long had a problem with hitting Kangaroos so we came up with a frontal protection system called either a Roo bar or a bull bar, these are made out of alluminium or mild steel and are designed to protect the vehicals radiator(so you can keep driving, its no fun being stranded miles from help) and hopefully prevent the beast from coming thru the windscreen. If I had the I.T skills Id do a linky thing to some local manufacturers, as an aside I spent some of last May/June in Nth Western New Jersy and saw scores of Deer on, beside, and near the roads so much so that I wondered why the locals didn't use Roo bars as well?.
Double Naught Spy
Sus Venator
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullbar
http://www.southerntowbars.com.au/bars.shtml
We have these as well, but they are usually called names such as brush guards. Some are very heavy duty. Some, not so much. I don't know that we have too many designed for sedans, however. Mostly, you just see them on pickup trucks and the like.
http://www.southerntowbars.com.au/bars.shtml
We have these as well, but they are usually called names such as brush guards. Some are very heavy duty. Some, not so much. I don't know that we have too many designed for sedans, however. Mostly, you just see them on pickup trucks and the like.
Sheepdog1968
Member
I have in laws who live in an agricultural part of Ca. They were paid small amounts to shoot crows, etc. it gave them enough pocket change to be happy for a day or two (soda, comic book, ability to buy a few more reloads). I could see some young teens who like to hunt enjoying the small bounty, especially if dad reloads or foots the ammo bill.
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