Barefoot Vegan Mag Jan_Feb 2017

To further understand why these animal victims are still
regarded with such little compassion, consider the
similarities between animals hung in butcheries and
those flattened on the road. Both require rationalisation
on the part of the would-be compassionate human.
Language is a big part of this mental-moral negotiation.
As labor scholar Dennis Soron explains, “As a human
creation, ‘road kill’ is just as de-animalized as ‘beef’ and
just as open to cultural meanings that are bracketed off
from the embodied experience of the suffering
animal.” (6) In other words,
simply calling these animals
“roadkill” is the first exclusionary
mind-trick.
For this reason, I use the term
“road-killed animals” to
emphasise that the way in which
these animals die does not
exclusively define their
relationship to the human
community. As individual beings,
road-killed animals have full and
varied lives independent of the
final violence inflicted upon them
by humans.
Other factors that limit the extension of compassion
to road-killed animals include both the practical and the
cultural. On a practical level, travel by car is inherently
inhospitable to demonstrating compassion for roadkilled
animals due to the speed at which we move. Not
only are we only granted just a few seconds to react to an
animal on the roadway (living or dead), but high-speed
traffic makes it dangerous to stop and engage with any
potential feelings of concern or grief upon seeing an
animal’s disfigured corpse.
Culturally, road-killed animals have largely been a
punchline. Twentieth century cartoons like Wile E.
Coyote and gag-gift variations on Playboy columnist
Buck Peterson’s The Roadkill Cookbook series are
expressions of a larger speciesist discourse that
maintains a hierarchical divide between human and
nonhuman animals. Narratives of human dominion and
progress, along with the desire to travel further, faster,
and more frequently in North American car culture work
together to create conditions inhospitable to compassion
for road-killed animals.
A final factor contributing to the lack of compassion
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