What's it like to hit a Deer?

South of the border it's "avoid hitting a horse", which me and a friend learned after the fact. Never hit a horse.

doesn't this belong in face plant??

I have personally seen fewer moving deer in MO than any time I can remember. I know it’s just luck because they’re dead all along the road.

I just returned from a road trip to Cincinnati. Left Dallas in the early afternoon and as soon as It got dark I told myself i'd pull over if I saw a single deer. Took a while. Sumbitch was standing about where the crash barrier would be, just looking at me. If I didn't have my fog lights on (they do a great job of lighting up the sides near the front of the car I would have missed it completely and who knows.
Pulled over a couple of exits later and slept for a few hours in an deserted garage/ gas station.

Reading these posts, I am impressed by how much suffering and expense results from deer collisions. I'm sorry anyone had to go through this, I'm sorry I'm going through it now, but so grateful that I wasn't injured.

I'll just put this here....

“You’d think they’d put deer crossings in smaller towns like at a school crossing — that would be a safer place for them to cross,”

Not exactly true. The deer population has exploded in SW Missouri. My friend who owns a body shop says it used to only be in the fall, but now it is year round.

I'll buy his observation, in his locale, and you actually strengthened my point. I was responding to another, that made the comment that hunters are running deer out of the woods in the fall. Deer hunting season most every where is in November when they breed. Are we to blame for the rest of the year?

Hunting is the only effective management tool for the control of deer populations. To elude that hunting is somehow causing the deer-car/motorcycle collision problem is to demonstrate a lack of understanding of the true problem.

Most of us know that we start seeing deer carcasses in greater numbers in late fall and early winter. All you need to do is look along the roadways.

Two summers ago, in early August, I rented a cabin in the Poudre Canyon, west of Fort Collins, CO. In the evening, I'd ride 30 miles to the other end of the canyon to have dinner in a small town there. Coming back at dusk, I saw more deer than I have ever seen in one locale in my life. I'm a Minnesota native, and lived in Canada, I know from deer, and this was the highest concentration and it was scary. They were concentrated in the canyon, and probably hunted year round by several predator species in the area.

Rode my 3 month old R80G/S to Alaska and The Yukon in 1986. Nearly hit a young bull moose in Moose Junction AK. He was as surprised as I was.

I wasn't so lucky on my way home. Riding down through Idaho, about 3 in the afternoon I rounded a corner and a deer jumped out of the bushes. Couldn't have seen it and no way to avoid it. Hit the deer behind the shoulder and broke its neck. We both went for a long slide down the pavement. A local in a pickup truck stopped and helped me get the bike and the deer off the road then drove me the 4 miles to the orthopedic hospital in Ketchum.
Had a road rash to the bone on my forearm and lots of small scrapes and large bruises but nothing horrible. Spent the night in the hospital. When I arrived in the ER, they all though I was going into shock as I was smiling and in a good mood. I'd ridden about 8,000 miles in 5 weeks and just hit a deer and walked away. What's not to be happy about?

The strangest part was when I was in the ER, a nurse came in to scrub the gravel out of the wound. She morbidly asked me "So when you saw the deer, what did you think? This was IT, this was the end?" So I thought about it and then asked her "Do you really want to know?" She said "Yes". So I said "When I saw the deer I though OH, A DEER! And I realized that this was going to hurt."

The surgeon disliked motorcycles. It was the first time I'd ever heard the term "donorcycle".

The guys from the local small engine repair shop hauled my bike into town and even gave me a lift to Twin Falls where I picked up a U-Haul and finished my trip home.

The bike was a couple hundred $$ from being totaled. I had it fixed. I still have the bike.

My friend once learned the expensive lesson of avoid hitting a cow with a borrowed Mitsubishi Sapporo .

(the Sapporo did not survive)


As for deer, I often herd them off the road; they go, sometimes unwillingly.

Walk out in our yard but be be sure to avoid the copious amount of deer shit everywhere.

It's ridiculous, and there are no doe permits.

What kind of animal jumps out from the side of the road into the side of a moving vehicle? Happened to me 4 years ago. I bought a sticker that said "a deer hit my car" and put it on the huge dent.

After a 10 year riding hiatus I bought a wanna be chopper 650 1976 Yamaha. Having grown up in deer country the mantra in a car was to hit the deer and maybe even accelerate to throw them off/over. At dusk on a curvy mountain road 60 miles from nowhere with all of 3 hours on the bike....... I feinted to the right to avoid him/her ( I did not stop to ask) he/she countered with a move to my right. Either I hit its back foot or I was so frigging pumped that I imagined it. My adrenaline level came back down within weeks

I gave my dad my old Saab 9-2X - absolute winter beast with the Subaru all wheel drive. Only had 135k and he hit one, took out the facia and rad, which would normally be ok, but the damn thing rolled up on the roof and did enough damage to it to total the thing. Wish he had bought it back, as it wasn’t much worse than hail damage.

I am also a deer hunter, mainly to help curb the population. I don't think hunters make deer cause accidents. Most people do not realize that deer are trying to run in front of your vehicle when they hit our vehicles. I experimented with this one night. I saw a doe way out in the field about dark. I watched her, she raised her head up and looked at me and then proceeded to run towards me at an angle that she could run in front of me. She ran the 100 yards and just about the time she was going to collide with me, I hit the horn. She ran about a city block and then jumped across in front of me. They are a crazy animal, if they would hold still and just let the traffic go by, there would not be a problem.

For a guy from Minnesota, hitting a deer is one of the boxes that need to be checked to keep your man card. I already put a pickup though the ice on a frozen lake, so got that one out of the way.

My buddy Stuart's Chevelle.

@MeefZah and @Rick G each have interesting stories of being hit by deer...

Oh! Hello. I have been summoned.

Bike: I've hit two. Or three. Depends on how you count. I've got really lucky, obviously some people have gotten fucked up or killed in deer v cycle crashes.

Cars: a few.

Bikes: First one (or two) was after dark, US 250 in rural Elkins West Virginia, pregnant doe ran into the side of my Tenere full speed. I was at 55+ mph, never even saw her. She peeled back all the plastic on the right side, bent the right fork, bent the bars, mildly fucked up my right leg but was nothing I had to see a doctor for. She got briefly caught in the right hard bag and mounts before coming free of it. Incredibly I didn't go down. I kept it up and even turned around and went back to see the scene and try and mentally process what had happened. That was when one of the grossest things I ever have seen happened: the doe shit out a stillborn fawn still in its amniotic sac as it went through its death throes. And also its stomach. And its asshole. Yes, it shit out its own asshole.

Pics!










I kept riding that bike for the duration of the trip, held together by zip ties and with my bars canted about 30 degrees from where they should have been. There was about $5k in damage.

The other time was almost nothing, really. Same scenario, Strawberry Hill Rd in Ferndale Calif in the early morning hours, 30-ish mph on the way to work. Deer ran right into the side of my Strom, hit the fairing just ahead of my right knee, and then bounced off. I didn't go down. Plastic was slightly cracked but I never even fixed it. Deer presumably wandered off, lived to die another day.

Neither scenario did I ever even feel like I was about to crash, there was no real loss of control or lack of stability. Just rode through it before I even knew what happened. But those were deer hitting me. Hitting a deer square on with a bike is another story and one which I hope I don't have to gain firsthand experience with.

Cars... I got no pics of

Yep. Same thing for kangaroos. Emus, who knows. THey are alien creatures left here by a flying saucer many centuries ago and obey no natural or human law.