> but if it's just a deer you'd likely rather hit it than drive off the road.
A deer will seriously screw up your car and might kill you. Deer do kill more people than sharks in the US. In a lot of areas the ditch is a much safer play.
Yeah that was perhaps a bit locally biased: Deer around where I live are of either the Bambi or Rudolf variety and pretty harmless to cars (No risk of being tall enough to enter through the windshield) while our elks are lethally tall and either end up in the lap of the driver or flatten the top of the car.
Obviously if a deer is of a kind that approaches elk/moose size then it's in that category wrt. ditch vs. hit too.
I've only seen one moose on the road. We passed by each other on an icy morning on Hwy 2 west of Lakota, ND. He was just standing on the road on a foggy morning. It did scare the crud out of me.
We've had buffalo. One killed a motorcycle rider and annoyed the buffalo. The other I personally witnessed on a very foggy morning. Seems a very young buffalo escaped the local wildlife reserve. I was standing on the porch of the building where I worked trying to clear my head with a cup of coffee. Out of the fog and down the street ran a small buffalo pursued by a military vehicle. I think they figured they could get it into the back without it hurting them or it[1]. I walked back into the building not having cleared my head.
1) I did learn two things: 1) buffalo do not turn very well going down a hill 2) the door to a Pontiac Firebird does not hold up very well when a small buffalo hits it square after running downhill.
A deer will seriously screw up your car and might kill you. Deer do kill more people than sharks in the US. In a lot of areas the ditch is a much safer play.