How Bambi is costing drivers $8 billion per year

If you happen to meet Bambi one night while driving on a dark road, here's a suggestion: Hit him.

Animal lovers may take umbrage, and the advice does seem horrifying. Yet a wide body of evidence suggests that motorists should actually hit animals that jump in front of their cars instead of trying to avoid them, if the driver cannot brake safely.

Why? Because by some estimates, swerving to avoid the loss of animal life is a very costly problem. While being responsible for the death of an animal is tough to carry on your conscience, some auto safety experts say its better than the alternatives.

"When considering some of the options a driver could take when confronted by an animal in the road—swerve right into a tree or ditch, swerve left into oncoming traffic, or brake severely which would promote the animal possibly rolling up the hood and into and through the windshield— the best advice is simply, hit it," said Robert Sinclair of AAA.

"It's very counterintuitive, and many respond that they would not want to kill Bambi," he said. "But I'd rather kill Bambi than myself and my family."

Even though it might be the safest, it is merely the least of all evils. One estimate from a Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) report to Congress in 2008 said collisions with wildlife cost motorists and taxpayers more than $8 billion per year. Although people rarely die from hitting a big animal, it can do a lot of damage to a car—and sometimes it can land a driver in the hospital.

The flip side is that hitting an animal can be dangerous for a species' longevity. The same report identified 21 species considered threatened or endangered in the United States, for which road mortality is "one of the major threats to their survival."

Many other species are far more common—such as white-tailed deer—but the report noted that every deer hit by a car is one that does not bring revenue to state-run hunting programs. While the number of auto crashes has held steady, the number of animal-related collisions have risen. The FHWA report said there were about about 300,000 such collisions reported annually as of 2008, and researchers believe that number is still low—some local government agencies do not have the resources to collect statistics, and some drivers don't report collisions.

Some ecologists, such as the Wildlife Conservation Society's Amanda Hardy, observe that smaller species, including birds, squirrels, and even reptiles and amphibians, usually are not counted at all.

"There is a lot of question about the actual numbers," Hardy said. "Many of us who work in the field have been pushing for a national data reporting standard. That could go a long way to helping us understand what is going on."