As my one year driver’s license anniversary approaches, I was thinking about all the things I know now, as compared to little freshie me that was type-stressing about driving.

Many of you are not yet driving or new to driving, so I’ve got a list of things I wish they taught me in Drivers Ed. First on my list? Roadkill.

So the other day I was driving home from work, its roughly 9 pm, and i notice these small leaves blowing across the road, which, is a little weird. It’s mid-January; why are there leaves? Well upon closer inspection, these leaves, were literally just frogs. So there i was,  just casually running over families of frogs. Great. Jenna the murderer.

This had me thinking. Is that just like fine? Like to what extent is it just okay to run over animals? Don’t get me wrong: the lives of animals are very important, but is an animals life worth your own? Like a squirrel? Is a squirrels life more important than your own? If a squirrel ran in front of my car. Boom. Flattened. Pancake.

I would probably have seen it it coming too.

Have you ever seen squirrels just sit there and wait for a car to come? Like, they just sit there and wait! And then, “Oops. A car is comin’. Better go now. ”Why?! It had open road for the past 15 seconds. It had so much time to go.

Ok, so maybe I’m not losing sleep if I hit a squirrel. But what if we’re talking about a dog?

No way. I couldn’t just see a dog in the road and think to myself, “Alright, everyone hold on. It’s about to get bumpy” I would 74689% swerve for a dog, which, I know, thinking from a logical point, is completely stupid, because a dog’s life shouldn’t be worth my own, but, come on, cut me some slack.  No way am I letting letting Max, the family Golden Retriever, be sacrificed to my 1996 Jeep Cherokee.

Now let’s say there’s already a dead animal in the road. Am I cruel if I run it over again? If there’s oncoming traffic and I have no choice, is it disrespectful? Is Bambi sittin’ in the woods writing down license plates, watching his mom just get smeared across the road? I mean i’m not hurting it right? Sis already kicked the bucket. Maybe I should pull over and pull it off the road? Isn’t that really dirty and unsafe like with all the diseases? Let‘s not do that. But if not me then who? Is there a roadkill service? Or is that just those taxidermy people who just casually kidnap dead animals off the road? So many questions.

I Googled it; apparently there iss a “maintenance protocol” for dealing with that kinda stuff, where they send services over to handle it (which means that if you need a job you can totally shovel opossum off the roads.)

And yes. Its spelled opossum not “possum”. Google it.

Anyways, I think I’ve found a decent solution: let’s trick out the driving simulator.

We could incorporate animals into the program as to further educate. You know, we could have it so if you hit anything the chair would bounce up and give you advice to help you learn

“- 10 pts, swerving into oncoming traffic to avoid hitting a small animal could cause an accident that will hold you liable.”

To summarize: the life of an animal is not worth your own, the way roadkill is handled is low-key interesting, what to do and the consequences of hitting animals should be taught to a better extent, and we should totally have a driving simulator that has animals incorporated

Well folks, that about wraps up my first point.

Be careful on the roads! And don’t be dumb!