Bigfoot Roadkill

I read Benjamin Radford’s article “Bigfoot at 50” http://www.bigfootencounters.com/articles/bfat50.htm at a unique time in my life. Not long before I had seen a news report on the Internet about the discovery of the Skookum cast. I realized that learning about Bigfoot was much different in this new decade then when I was last interested in this esoteric subject, back in the 1970’s. I was becoming aware of the claims regarding Bigfoot’s alleged dermal ridges, claimed to be found in several footprint casts. Very little changes in the world of Bigfootery, but these two findings seemed very “scientific” to me.

I was more or less familiar with the particulars of the arguments that Radford covered in his Skeptical Inquirer article. But something fundamental and simple really caught my eye, his statement near the end: “At some point a Bigfoot's luck must run out: one out of the thousands must wander onto a freeway and get killed by a passing car, or get shot by a hunter, or die of natural causes and be discovered by a hiker.”

Believe it or not, I really hadn’t paid much attention to the roadkill angle of Bigfoot. Most people are attentive to roadkill in one of two ways; either they laugh about it, and mention “roadkill cookbooks”, or they find it a tragic loss of wildlife. Roadkill is so esoteric a subject in its own right that people usually ignore it.

Recently Dana, Harlo, and I took a long road trip in her new Ford F-150. We went all the way to Louisiana and back. I paid special attention to the roadkill I witnessed. I saw the following; raccoons, birds, deer, armadillos dogs, squirrels rabbits, coyote, and two dead alligators. In Yellowstone Park we were given a newspaper at the entrance that had a flyer insert that claimed that “100 animals were killed each year in collisions”. I didn’t save the flyer, as it was not really a good source of documentation, but it was an official publication of the parks service. At a rest stop in Wyoming, a flyer was posted the claimed that 15 people were killed in vehicular wildlife collisions. I assume this meant in the state of Wyoming, but again, it was not a good source of documentation.

Where I’m going with this is that every species of animal that can walk, crawl, or fly onto a road eventually becomes road kill. Except Bigfoot. So out come the “Bigfoot Band-Aids” as I call them; glib answers for the deep and profound problems that Bigfootery has faced since day one like “why can’t Bigfoot be tracked by dogs”? The Bigfoot Band-Aid for that one is “because dogs fear Bigfoot”. Easy, isn’t it? The Bigfoot Band-Aid for “why is there no body” is a multipart answer.

But let’s be specific; why is there no roadkill? The best Bigfoot Band-Aid I’ve seen for that one is “because Bigfoot is too smart to step out in front of a car”. Really! Have you even driven south on I5 near the Mexican border? There are road signs that warn drivers to avoid human beings running across the Interstate highway. Why are these people, illegal aliens, at risk of becoming roadkill? Because many of them are from areas without high speed vehicular traffic. They simply don’t grow up having to do the wordless time-and-motion calculations that populations with a fast and dense automotive infrastructure do.

By this logic, Bigfoot must be smarter than human beings. The arguments by the advocates as to why Bigfoot avoids becoming roadkill are some of the weakest I’ve ever seen. It’s not like the animal is a whale, and never appears on roads, Bigfoot is sighted all the time walking beside or across man’s roads. Yet he is never hit by a car. This just does not add up, and in fact, the proliferation of roads and rifles on the North American continent is the crux of my Sasquatch skepticism.

For those of you still not convinced at what a toll roadkill takes on wildlife, I encourage you to take a look at this rather sarcastic blog. Note that even megafauna gets hit, sometimes in deadly encounters for the driver or passengers. http://slowcrow.blogspot.com/