I'm not saying bigfoot does exist, but regarding your 'hit by a car' reference... Just how many of the various mammals in your part of the country have you seen hit on the road? There are certainly TONS of things that actually do exist that you never see hit on the road. In my area that includes things like: pocket gophers, gray fox, fisher, porcupine, just to name a few. There are a lot of reasons to doubt the existence of bigfoot but this one doesn't mean much.
As a side note, I was just up in Remer, MN, this past weekend for Bigfoot Days. Remer is 'Home to Bigfoot'. It's really just an excuse to get some tourist traffic into town, playing off of a purported sighting decades ago, but it's fun.
The trail cam aspect is one of the more convincing arguments against them.
Rob
I cannot think of many mammals around here that I have NOT seen dead on the road. Mink, weasel and otter are the only ones I can think of.
Raccoon
Possum
5 kinds of squirrels: red, black, grey, fox, and flying ( just saw a dead flying squirrel last week).
Skunks
Woodchucks/groundhogs/whistle pigs
We've seen two live beavers walking on the sidewalk in downtown South Bend. They weren't dead, but the city captured them and took them back to the river or they would have been.
Deer
Coyote
Muskrat
Mice
Shrews
Voles
Moles
Bats
Rabbits
Red and grey fox
Rats
Chipmunk (first thing I ever hit with my car).
Ground squirrels
And that's just my Indiana list.
I've seen porcupines, a badger, literally a hundred armadillos in just two trips to Oklahoma, mule deer, an antelope in Wyoming, an elk in Colorado.
I think I have seen about everything larger than a snack-sized candy bar dead on the road here over the years, with, like I said, the exception of a mink, otter or weasel.
I've never seen a dead bobcat, however, one of our kids participated in a study on bobcat populations in Indiana during her years at Purdue. Guess where they get their population numbers? Mostly by the amount of roadkill reported.
So yeah, I DO think that roadkill is a valid and exceptionally accurate method of tracking wildlife populations in areas.
If bigfoot existed in North America, it would have been shot or hit by a car by now. Pretty sure of that.
