Albuquerque in 2006!!

I might add that I have never collided with a sheep or a cow. If I had, I would have made an effort to contact the rancher in question and work out payment of some sort. Sheep and cows tend to be slow moving and one encounters them more often on back country jeep trails where one is already only going 20mph if that, so there's plenty of time to stop for them.

The first time I hit an elk, I came to consciousness briefly in the ER and then my heart stopped, and by time I got out of intensive care, the Colorado Wildlife division didn't seem too interested in my "crime."

The second time I hit a deer, it put out one of my front head lamps and bounded off in the darkness. I have no idea what the deer's fate was. Mine was to pull off the road since I was on a stretch of highway where nothing was open until 8:00am the next morning for 70 miles or so. I slept in a farmer's hayfield, and limped my car into Nucla, Colorado to have my right headlamp repaired the next morning. The third time I hit a deer, I did a complete 360 on the pavement from the skid, narrowly evaded death from an on coming coal truck headed for the 4 corners power plant at 80 mph and the deer again bounded off into the hills to meet whatever fate may have awaited it.

The Western slope of Colorado seems to be suffering from a massive over population of deer, and it is pure terror to drive the stretch of road that leads from Telluride through Naturita and on to Grand Junction after 3:00pm in the afternoon. That road is full of sharp curves, and the deer seem to enjoy playing a game of chicken with anybody fool-hardy enough to dare to use the highway. You'll round a curve and there will be three or four of them by the side of the road. They'll wait until you are almost even with them and then one will bound out into the road and front of you and just stand there, apparantly hoping that you will go into a ditch to avoid it.

I don't know who gets to keep any dead cows in Colorado. Since the law is that you have to pay the rancher for his cow, it seems to me that you should be able to keep what you paid for, but I don't know.