Our driveway is long, dark and steep.

That means that when driving you need to accelerate in order not to stall the engine.

Coming home one night last week, from a lovely evening at a friend’s place, we did our usual run up the drive.

Part of the way up we hit something.

My reaction was, “we’ve hit an animal” while Danita’s was “we ran over a stick”.

Since there are large trees overhanging the drive, Danita’s response made sense and indeed, that’s how it felt.

Because it was cold and dark, and Danita did make good sense we didn’t bother to stop and check.

Next morning, on our daily constitutional walk, we were horrified to find the body of a pademelon (a small wallaby-like animal) in the driveway.

So, in this instance it gave me no pleasure to be right.

There are a number of animals on the property who we feel a bit connected to.

It’s nice to come home and have a family of birds run across the driveway, who we’ve know since they were a couple of parents and their chicks.

We have rabbits (OK I’m not thrilled about rabbits as they tend to be trouble for vege gardens but they are cute), pademelons, horses and, of course, Sancho our dog.

On our morning walks and in the evening we will often come across any or all of these animals and so we’ve developed something of an attachment to them and they’ve become a bit like family.

Thus, we were both very upset by this incident.

As if to rub it in, The Universe sent us a no-so-subtle reminder in the form of a TV show we watched the next evening.

It was an old episode of Vera in which a woman is killed in a hit-and-run incident.

in the show, the driver eventually commits suicide.

Thankfully, we weren’t that devastated but we did feel guilty (hey! we’re Jewish, guilt is in our DNA, OK!).

Sadly, road kill is very common in Tasmania.

I guess that’s a result of having a lot of wildlife in close proximity to high speed roads.

There’s even a special campaign to reduce the level of road kill amongst Tasmanian Devils.

Thankfully, we didn’t contribute to that.

In preparing this post I came across a Radio National article by Ann Jones entitled “Welcome to Tasmania, the roadkill capital of the world“.

(A couple of comments in response to the article argue that it’s actually South West Queensland but this isn’t a competition we want to be leaders in.)

We’ve loved living in Tassie since we first arrived, less than a year ago.

However, this is something we have noticed and it’s disturbing.

Thankfully, no-one seems to be disputing the size and nature of the problem.

Also, no-one is trying (YET) to mitigate it by giving it a less impactful, or more politically correct name like “automobile induced euthanasia” but that’s probably coming.

There are many, many things to love about Tasmania.

Sadly, this qualifies as one of the not so great bits.

As I see it, the big problem is, most of this happens in the evening and at night when it’s often difficult to see animals in time to react.

We could try to mitigate it by slowing down but then you’ll be driving others on the road crazy because you’re driving way below the speed limit.

While Tasmanians are generally very polite this could result in an upsurge of road-rage especially from tourists (who I have seen doing some totally insane things on the road).

At the moment it feels like a no-win situation but maybe an increase in general awareness of this will have an impact.

I hope so.

And we still feel a sense of loss over our pademelon friend.