~Aiure - Do you not consider road kill as also "simply the way of the world."

@ Winged Centaur: Not really, no, because the animals are not killed for consumption. Scavengers may visit its carcass before it's picked up by a different human and discarded at a different location, but really, its death was essentially pointless. Kind of like an animal that's been killed solely for its fur or horns. The only things that benefit from the animal's death are the insects that aid in decomposition, and that seems like a waste of life to me.

The way to stop roadkill, which is indeed caused by humanity (namely humans having cars and driving them) would be to stop people driving. You'd have to make massive changes to civilisation. We'd have to walk everywhere - and even then, we do sometimes step on ants and spiders and snails without realising. Nothing like the deadly crunch of a snail under your shoe as you're walking in the dark and the rain, and the sombre knowledge that you've inevitably either killed the poor snail, or rendered him disabled and homeless.

@ Alpha Bitch: I know roadkill and other accidental animal deaths are inevitable, but that doesn't mean I can't grieve for a wasted life.

I wasn't suggesting you shouldn't grieve. Just curious because of the clear distinction you make between human intellect and animal instinct - you accept animals killing each other because it's instinct, but with roadkill, it's due to human intervention and therefore upsets you way more. So I was curious what choice you felt humans should make to stop roadkill happening - whether you would want to ban driving, for instance, or whether you're happy for driving to continue.

@ Alpha Bitch: As much as I dislike humans, I dislike suppressing technological advancement even more. So while we're on the subject of morbidity, I accept happenings like roadkill as a side effect of the spread of humanity (which is, yes, meant to be synonymous with the spread of disease), because I can't do anything to facilitate large-scale change. All I can do is wait for humanity to reach its peak, fall, and the world to reset itself.

Why do you dislike humans? Our behavior is very similar to a beaver. Their dams affect the ecosystem of rivers and streams, often in a very negative manner, yet they aren't considered a virus or disease to the earth!

i agree with ~Aiure in way here, i don't feel anything for animals killed by animals in the circle of life way - not for animals for meat, not even horse meat which isnt the norm here. I would be more likely to feel sad for roadkill in the circumstances of death.

@ November.Butterfly - Horse meat is mostly exported now, not sold for consumption in the US. But there is a great outcry against the recent lifting of the ban to slaughter horses in America, because evidently slaughtering horses is somehow intrinsically more wrong than slaughtering cows. I think that exporting horses to Mexico to be slaughtered inhumanely is intrinsically wrong, but that was the consequence of the ban.

It seriously depends on the situation that has caused the death I suppose for me... with the recent "save the polar bear" commercials we have been having here (its every where from the Coke ads on TV to the Khols store talking about it with fluffy stuffed bears that come with a story book about it) I found myself remarking to my mom that it almost makes me want to go either shove em all in the zoo or knock em all off myself just so I don't have to hear about it it anymore - yet if I hear in the news about dog fighting rings and how they found injured dogs or the bodies of dogs at the rings I will feel slightly sad (maybe wistful is a better word) for the dogs. The ASPCA commercials drive me nuts/annoy me but not as much as the polar bear ads - hard to explain why. - but recently a state-wide plea went out to anyone who had the means to take in horses/ponies/mules etc because so many had been abandoned/turned into the state due to the economy and people who honestly loved them could just no longer afford to take care of/feed them and really neither could the state - and after 14 days these animals were going to be shipped across the boarder for dog food. I felt bad for some of the through-bred that I saw in the news footage that I wished we could afford to put out on our land. so it really depends on the reasons I guess.

I don't particularly like beavers either, and for that very reason. Or mountain pine beetles, locusts, or any other destructive species. Humans are merely the most noticable incarnation of destruction.