Our cars are great for catching small to medium animals!
 

So first post on here and it's a fun one!

I have found a new use for our cars. They're great for catching small to medium sized animals.

I was on my way home from a 6.5 hour drive, it was around 12:30 am on back roads and a raccoon ran out in front of me.

I hit the brakes and tried to swerve to avoid it and came close, but still managed to hit it. I figured it had gone off to the side or under the car as I didn't see it in my mirrors so I kept driving. 15 minutes to home.

When I got home, I went to assess the damage. I looked at the front of the car and saw 2 feet sticking out from under the grill on the right side of the car. 'Great!' I thought sarcastically. I reached down and grabbed the feet to see how wedged in the dead raccoon was. Then, to my surprise, the feet began to wiggle and kick, slowly. IT wasn't dead!

It had hit the bottom of the grill, which cushioned its impact. The grill had pivoted open, the raccoon slid in and lightly hit the radiator, and the grill had pivoted back to about where it should be, thus acting like a trap.

'Oh man' I thought as I looked at my gf, 'It's slowly dying and stuck in my car'. NOPE!!! I went to get tools to take the front clip off and to call my insurance agent. I let them know that I'd be taking the front of the car off to get a live raccoon out. They told me to call the police to see if they could get a hold of the SPCA. I did so and the SPCA was dispatched.

SPCA arrived on scene and got out this big claw looking thing. I was so tired at this point that I really didn't feel like taking the whole front of the car apart so I just un-clipped the grill as much as I could by pushing it in a bit at the top and then pulled it forward, hinging on the bottom clips that were still attached. We tried to get the raccoon with the claw, but at this point it was fully back to consciousness and coming out of shock and was PISSED and snarling. It did NOT want to leave it's newly found, comfortable spot in the front of my car. They went and got one of those loop on the end of a pole things.

We got the raccoon out and it was safely caged in a proper cage, instead of the front of my car, and taken away by the SPCA.

Pics or it didn't happen :bonk: :

https://image.ibb.co/exjsUT/IMAG0681.jpg
https://image.ibb.co/iTQo3o/IMAG0682.jpg
https://image.ibb.co/dZRvio/IMAG0679.jpg

Post of the day for sure and probably best first post on the forum.

I concur!

Wow...this is one of those rare occurences you hear about once in a blue moon

It's a first post about "rocket" the racoon, not rocket bunny!!! Lol :bellyroll:

OP, sorry you hit that little guy.

Aww it's cute.

xArchangelx, welcome to ..The Forum - :clap:

Fantastic first post .. :thumbsup:

You are quite a good story teller .. I'm looking forward to your posts .. ;)

(after you tell 10 stories, a button will appear at the end of peoples posts where you can thank them ..or not)


humfrz

Thanks for the welcome everyone! Looking forward to being here and not catching any more animals!

You could go old school


lhttps://i.pinimg.com/originals/d0/e4...e7f746dbf7.jpg


Or, if you don't want to practice catch and release...

http://yourrailwaypictures.com/Maint..._Blower%20.jpg

lol nice..back when I had my first FRS, same thing happened to me during a long night drive between AZ & ID. I hit a jackrabbit while going 90 and when I pulled over at the nearest gas station I found everything except for his face inside my grill. Worst part was when I first attempted to pull him out of the grill he ripped in half :cry:

Not nearly as impressive as yours but I caught a frog in between the bottom of the bumper and my splitter. Unfortunately, the frog's fate was not the same as your raccoons. RIP

https://i.imgur.com/7G4KtdT.jpg

@Tcoat can verify this: I once hit/had small birds hit me three separate times in the span of about an hour, if that.

Yep ^


Never had a survivor like the OP did but I have killed so many small animals and birds with my car I should start marking it with victory stickers!


https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/i...yJCfYPmrpoG3CQ

The little guy was probably shitting bricks driving down the road faster than a little racoon has ever gone before.

But probably still complained it needed more power.

+10 RP

Racoon Power

One time I hit a giant pheasant. when I got to camp 20 minutes later I was pleasantly surprised he was sitting on the bumper. Man he was good wrapped in bacon on the BBQ.

OP, need to change your handle to "coon catcher" or something.

Haha CoonCatcher or RaccoonRocket (see what I did there?)

I pulled apart my bumper this week to try to fix the bumper gap, and I found a dead frog, dried out from the wind, clinging to the grill with a frozen look of terror on its face. Your experience was decidedly more whimsical.

Ewww!

Some good jerky right there.

Cute and furry and fun till ya get rabies

One of the reasons I changed to a mesh grille was so it would hopefully be more effective at blocking little birds from going through the grille (since there's a stretch of road on my commute where a bunch of dumbass birds just fly low across the road constantly). Don't think it would do much to stop a raccoon though.

Toyota Raccoon Destroyer.

While driving at the coast one day on a twisty two-lane I crested a hill with a blind turn and there was a seagull in my lane pecking at road kill. I couldn't swerve with oncoming traffic and it was too late to brake so began the de-feathering process.

The bird thumped against the floor all the way back. The mirrors showed a cloud of white feathers like someone opened a goose down pillow and shook it out. In the middle of all that there was a naked seagull stumbling around for a moment until the next car finished him off.

I felt bad until remembering the time a seagull dropped a big one on another of my cars. It was so nasty that it ate through the clearcoat so figured it was karma.

Updated my Avatar and Title to reflect.

Why Thank You!

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/ExemplaryA...restricted.gif

When I lived in Louisiana I frequently had to run up from New Orleans to Baton Rouge on I-10, which runs right through the Maurepas Swamp just a few feet above water level. During mating season, the bullfrogs would come up out of the swamp en masse looking to get lucky and would try to cross the road. They were impossible to avoid. I'd try to miss them with my wheels, but of course they would hop when the car was over them, and I'd hear them thump and tumble down the underside of the car. There would be bullfrog carnage all over the road.

Big bull gators also try to cross that highway during mating season. For a few weeks each year you can see gator carcasses on the shoulders, some of them pretty messy. Luckily I never hit one of those, although I've seen them sitting right on the shoulder as I passed, waiting to try to cross, and had to swerve around some whose luck had run out. I've also seen tourists stop to take pictures of them.

The sad thing is that hawks and eagles will swoop down to the road to eat roadkill and will get hit. It's a wildlife apocalypse zone.

The worst thing that happened to me along there was an insect holocaust. I drove my Jeep into a thick swarm of something and my windshield suddenly went opaque. There's only so much the built-in windshield washer can handle. I had to pull off and clean it.

That sounds insane haha! I'll stick to Raccoons and Porcupines!

It's great that everything worked out for you, but your car can get pretty messed up next time, and you'll have to shell out for the parts. I was talking about this with a friend last week. He told me that he had many coyotes around his farm, and he had to check out a guide to get rid of them. As I understood, he used wolf urine to keep them away, and it worked, but when he was returning to the barn in his tractor, he hit a coyote that stuck in his radiator just like your raccoon. He didn't call the SPCA and managed to get the animal out himself. It was alive, too.

Bots are afraid of wild animals?

We need more wild animals in this forum. Will scare off the bots.

I think they're afraid of viruses.....

This one's smart though, it somehow got a profile pic.

I think this forum has plenty of wild animals as it is...

Crazy. How do they get in there behind the grill? Is you underpanel stuff in place?
Its like one of those puzzles.

EDIT: OK, reread the description again. Sounds like your grill is loose enough to flex back on impact. Still crazy...
https://cdn.notonthehighstreet.com/f...al-puzzles.jpg