Roadkill Economics: How Predator Decline Affects Your Car Insurance Rates

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I almost died

It was not the first time in my life and not the last. On this particular day, I was driving back from my childhood home in Maryland to Columbus, OH, after winter break. The weather was terrible, and I was driving a rear-wheel-drive sports car, a Nissan 305Z, which I bought from my college roommate before he moved outside of the country.

I was living the dream as a mid-twenty-year-old. Life was good, I was cool, and things were going my way—until they went sideways. As the backend of my car lost its grip on the slushy road, I thought, “I hope this doesn’t hurt.”

I struggled for control and avoided crashing into the cement partition, but I overcorrected and started careening sideways into an oncoming plow truck. The truck didn’t stop, but thankfully, my car did, and all I could do was laugh hysterically in the middle of the highway, thankful that I was still alive.

Potentially, the wildest thing about my time owning that car was how much more my car insurance went up after I sold the vehicle, turned 30, bought a house, became a professional academic, and got engaged.

Statistically, I was much cheaper to insure, but I needed to pay nearly five times more for my premiums! Huh?

The Big Bad Wolf!

My first favorite piece of classical music was Peter and the Wolf by Sergei Prokofiev. From the opening stanza, my imagination came alive, and I could see the entire story play out in my mind with each note. I love that piece.

Have you ever wondered why wolves have such a strong negative persona in USian culture? We love our dogs (some a little too much), but wolves give us the heebee-jeebies and have us reaching for our guns.

This isn’t the same for the original peoples of these lands, so why such a contrast?

The answer, I think, is livestock.

One general difference between cultures from the “Old World” and the “New World” is that many cultures in the former domesticated livestock as part of subsistence practices. Societies in the latter part of the world domesticated plants on a large scale and acquired animal protein from wild populations.

So, in places where animal relatives were left mainly to their own devices and where human populations were less concerned about large-scale environmental transformation, predators like wolves were not a constant threat to human livelihood and well-being.

But, if you’re going to breed large, docile animals for food, you have to invest a lot in keeping them safe from other predators that, like humans, would gladly feed on prey that was less equipped to escape. So, things might have been more convenient for cultures practicing animal husbandry, but they also made it much more likely to encounter would-be competitors.

Thus, the stories about wolves differ depending on the cultures from which they come. If you’re constantly fending off wolves from eating your livestock and impacting your livelihood, you get stories like Peter and the Wolf, Little Red Riding Hood, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, and The Grey (dope-ass move). But if wolves are just another species in your environment trying to get food like you, you don’t view them as enemies or adversaries; they’re neighbors, relatives, even teachers.

More wolves = lower car insurance

Wolves are essential to healthy ecosystems because they prevent prey populations from being overrepresented in environments and disrupting ecosystem function. But because settlers needed to clear landscapes and eliminate large species that prevented them from livelihoods they wished to impose on this landscape (i.e., buffalo), wolves had to go too.

Fast forward a century or two, and now you have a landscape dominated by livestock that still has room for smaller ungulate populations like white-tailed deer but with a declining population of predators interested in eating wild red meat.

Deer populations have exploded in the last half century as hunting in the US steadily declines. Bringing other predators, like wolves and lions, back to the landscape is a non-starter for most USians, especially the cattle industry.

So where do all these deer go if not into the freezers of citizens and the bellies of other predators? They end up in the increasing profit margins of insurance companies, which have to pay more claims for deer strikes on roads.

Even though I had just checked a bunch of “stability” and “responsibility” boxes for insurance evaluators, I was moving to the country's number one deer strike state, which also has one of the highest road accident rates. West Virginia is a unique landscape vehicle because it is a dangerous driving place. Poor infrastructure, mountainous roads, and many deer are an insurance company’s holy grail, and we paid through the nose.

I take from this, and I impress upon my students in ecology and the environment classes the lesson that everything humans do has wide-ranging consequences. Many of those consequences are only legible through the lens of critical ecology, which I wasn’t taught in school. I had to understand the geographies of power and landscape transformation before I began to grasp what I’ve outlined in this week’s newsletter.

The other lesson from this example is that convenience is tricky and often a bad idea in the long run. So much of the convenience so-called modern human societies seek and develop is rooted in exploitation rather than efficiency, and much of that exploitation is what we do to ourselves, thinking we are being more efficient.

Tending livestock is intense work from which you can never really take a break. Your animals need constant attention, protection, medical care, food, and general care. Sure, you always know where a large part of your diet will be, but you work for them 24/7, 365 days a year.

The average USian consumes 100 lbs of red meat a year. The amount of time a given person would have to spend to acquire that much red meat from deer is significantly less. Two adult deer and, at most, a month’s worth of work, and you’re set for the year.

“But Jonathan, all I have to do to get red meat is go to the grocery store, and it’s right there, packaged and ready to go!”

Right, but that’s only if you have a job that pays you enough to buy that meat. You don’t control any aspect of how that meat was raised and processed, and while you might make enough to choose where your meat comes from, that choice still depends on your constant labor.

And that’s not even accounting for the conditions to which those whose job it is to produce said food are subject.

Convenience, but with a ton of exploitation.

Where do we go from here?

I don’t know. I just thought this was a neat story and a way to think about the interconnectedness of things in modern society.

My advice is to eat more deer, I guess. That’s what I plan to do.

CONSIDER THIS

Flat Top Cooking Indoors!

I bought a new kitchen item that I’m pleased with. This griddle pan by Made-In, one of my go-to brands for kitchen supplies, is simply excellent. Pancakes, grilled cheese, bacon, omelets, burgers, and so much more are a joy to cook again now that I have the space to prepare these foods properly.

It’s too cold to cook outside regularly, but I can take this griddle outside when the weather warms up to keep the party going. It’s rated up to 1200F, perfect for charcoal grilling where the cooking temps are north of 600F sometimes. Get you one today! It’s worth it!

NEW ON YOUTUBE!

Eat Your Heart Out

Organ meats are incredibly nutrient-dense, more so than skeletal muscle meat. But I get it: liver and onions may not be your favorite. Consider eating deer hearts to use more of your harvest and honor the life taken.

Cardiac muscle is very similar to skeletal muscle, and I’ve never eaten a deer heart that was particularly gamey or “organy” tasting. In this video, I show you how to prepare a deer heart so you can hardly recognize it as organ meat.

There’s an anatomy lesson in there, too. I couldn’t resist!

Thanks for reading!

-Jonathan