Just what, exactly, did turtles ever do to us? Writes Sarah Miller at Grist:
A student at Clemson University made a disturbing discovery when he placed a rubber turtle in the road and spent an hour watching what passing cars would do. Out of 257 cars that passed, seven of them tried to hit the turtle. Down the road at Western Carolina State University, a psychology professor asked a class of about 110 students whether they had intentionally ever run over a turtle. Thirty-five of them had.
Thirty-five had. It gets worse:
Running over turtles even has a spot in Southern lore. The reptiles used to be ubiquitous, especially in the spring as the males sought mates and the females looked for nice places to lay eggs. South Carolina author Pat Conroy, in his novel "The Great Santini" based on growing up with his Marine father, has the fighter pilot father run over turtles during a late night drive when he thought his kids and wife were asleep. But his wife confronts him, saying: "It takes a mighty brave man to run over turtles."
Why do I think that when we curb the urge to flatten turtles with our cars, we'll solve some of our other problems, too?
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The only turtle I would have the urge to run over represents the Commonwealth of Kentucky in the United States Senate.
How much would you like to bet that the idiots that are purposefully running over these defenseless turtles are repTards - tea bagged gop Scum ! Just take a LOOK at what they are doing to the disaster Victims {Humans/Americans} on OUR East coast ! They have No other thought processes other than for themselves , selfish self-centered Goof's !
Actually it's likely the culprits are self-centered adolescent types that get off on being angry. Kinda like yourself.
That said, considering the lack of coverage by the media around Sandy and it's victims, they must be doing just fine.
Listen to U , Do U own a mirror ? - Goof ! repTards just Amaze themselves - don't they ! Greedy self-centered Power-Mongers !
As someone who used to teach at Clemson, I can tell you that the story often involves more than turtles. Like when a member of the tennis team hit and killed with his car an African American student in front of a popular bar. No brake marks/skids. Beer cans falling out of the car when doors opened. As I remember it (early 2000s), no charges either.
An African American woman student walking down the street had eggs thrown at her. This sort of thing was odious, and altogether too common, but it made me feel better about leaving there, at least. Many good people in that town, and many awful things too.
Of course, it is also just down the road from Bob Jones University, which doesn't have any gay students, so there's no conflict in taking federal student loan funds, since there aren't any gay students there, how can they possibly be discriminated against?
@Eddie
Seriously, I hate to have to repeat my post from the other day but I will.
Using the term Tards is ignorant and insensitive. It is a derogatory term that individuals with intellectual disabilities shouldn't have to deal with in our society any longer.
You need to show some respect and drop this term from your vocabulary permanently.
@Lisa, I agree. To associate Tea Partiers and other right wi ng GOP politicans with the word retard is a grave insult to the learning disabled. They have a natural reason to be slow, not a choice to be backwards.
Yeah, Luckily there are no signs warning us of "T-party Express" crossing. I'd be hard put to hit the brakes.
Hi India, hope you had a great Christmas. Regarding crossings this por woman hit three deer but has found the way to fix the crossing problem. i assume she is a liberal lol.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/19/donna-radio-caller-deer-crossing-sign-complaint_n_1987405.html
Mitch McConnell just makes the blood curdle.
He makes taxing the rich such a hurdle.
He adopts Norquist's pledge,
Using it like a sledge.
You'd expect that from a man who's a turtle..
Thoughtful conservative, #1.9
Thank you for asking. Yes, we had a really nice Christmas. I hope it was for you, too. Good to see you. Happy New Year.
We live with the deer here in PA, too. Last night, two small doe were grazing near our house. I hate to see them get hit. Not to mention what it does to your car!
What is meta for?
The invincibility of reptilian ideas regarding women's reproductive rights, LGBT rights and racial intolerance.
Take Rache's segment on vaginal probes. They weren't noticed in Texas, but when they were in Virginia, people began swerving to hit them. It is brutal, certainly, but it is a sort of sociological culling of the meme pool.
you might include a car metaphor here as well. Who bicycles? Who drives a Prius? Who is loaded for bear with a Hummer, striving to flatten all they encounter?
just in case you think you may not have the appropriate gear check out this helpful tip
http://www.theonion.com/articles/ford-new-f150-pickup-truck-capable-of-crushing-a-b,30716/
In the Missouri countryside on a gravel road, I passed a turtle that looked prehistoric. It was extremely aggressive as it started hissing and snapping at me when I got out of my car to look at it. It had a tail like a dinosaur's, about 4 ft. long and moved a tad faster than any turtle I'd seen. It was a real 'trip' to see it. It was broad daylight and my vision was 20-20.
I love turtles and hate to see them becoming extinct. Idiots have no idea how destructive smashing turtles is to nature.
Obviously, it's only a sin to kill a mockingbird.
What you saw was likely an alligator snapping turtle. I'm jealous -- I studied amphibians and reptiles in the southeast for years and never saw one.
Why am I unsurprised this is a Southern phenomenon???? And most likely whites?
Southerner whites wouldn't know what civilization was if it came up and bit them on their asses.
The barbarity of slavery is in their DNA.
I think the portrayal of Southerners in Mame was spot on. Treacly nice to your face, while they stick the shiv between your back ribs.
And They Claim to be biblical followers and the most righteous of the righteous , They R such a bunch of hypocritical Goofs , they Refuse to SEE that they are the least likely to follow religion as they twist and manipulate this little book of words of theirs that they supposedly follow !
"The barbarity of slavery is in their DNA."
A: General assumptions of someones nature based on where they were born is as bigoted as anyone who calls someone a pejorative term.
B: Those of us who grew up in the South and still live here and love her, know that the reason people in LA have such low opinons of our home is merely jealousy.
C: I have nearly been hit by cars numerous times while moving turtles from the road. I consider it a offense that you, who likely the closest you have ever been to wildlife is the hookers on Wilshire, would dare to lecture me on Civilization.
Um, no Tom Benson. Those of us who grew up in the south and still live here think the overall southern mentality of the majority of people here sucks ass.
I lived in California too, and let me tell you, no one I know from southern Cal is jealous of some pigsty in Alabama or Arkansas or where ever.
Why don't you save your lectures for your beloved southern compatriots, they're the ones who need help.
You know, I'll tell you something, Mr. Benson: all you "good people" in the South have been telling the rest of us for 300 years how nice the place is and how nice the people are and all the rest of that crap and why don't we stop lumping you in and all that, and in the meantime, in 300 years, you have accomplished JACK when it comes to changing all the rest of those inbred drooling barbarians. So tough luck, you don't want to get lumped in with the morons, stop defending them, idiot.
Um... Tom. I'm not sayin as a southerner you don't throw a mean bbq. Because I bet you do!! But maybe you could work on the design of your invitations a bit. Presentation is everything, I hear.
ps: I dont need no stinkin frilly invitation. Just give me first dibs on seconds.
I wonder if Tom will ever get just how nasty a first impression he made? Nah.
I wonder if you will ever know how little I think of your opinion? Yep.
I'm more amazed at the racist bull crap that TCinLA posted, having generally had the impression that s/he was a nice guy, MeddlingMonk. It's funny, 'cause that's probably the same reason Tom Benson feels the way he does about white southerners.
It's called empathy, some of those college kids are probably just one significant life experience away from reflecting in horror on what they've done in ignorance. It's the genuine sociopaths you need to worry about and generally there's no racial or regional bias for sociopaths.
Interstate 40 in Oklahoma in the spring was wall to wall with dead Snappers every time I drove it. When I was young, foolish, and a Republican I used to swerve to hit possums, until I realized that I only got the dumb ones. Cleaning their gene pool was not a good idea!
Once I stopped to try to move a HUGE snapper off the road. This thing was the size of a picnic basket and probably weighed thirty-five pounds. Someone had already clipped it but it was very much still alive. I had had surgery a few weeks previously and wasn't physically able to move it (not that I probably would have risked losing fingers if I had been). You don't shoo a snapper, either. I was at a loss as to what to do, but my hassling seemed to piss it off and it took a step towards me. So I harassed it some more. And it took another step. And that is the story of how I heckled a big ole snapping turtle off the road.
At the time I didn't understand how it could have been hit, b/c it was on a straight, flat section of road, so any driver could have spotted it easily. Now I realize someone probably tried to kill it. Sick and sadistic.
Sick and sadistic.
A perfect description of the White South.
There are no turtles on the road ever where I live. Plenty of squirrels. I brake for them and swerve to avoid the dead ones. Once I hit one by accident. I didn't realize it was even there until I heard a thumping noise from one wheel well and looked in the rear-view mirror to see it's little red body spiraling through the air behind the car. The guilt was terrible and lasted for days.
Yep, typical bleeding-heart liberal. That's because I have the fleshy, blood-pumping variety rather than the cold, stone lump "conservatives" always seem to come with. Deliberately killing a thing with a big mass of metal and plastic moving at high speeds? What sportsmen these Southerners are!
If it's a choice between crashing the car and hitting the beastie, I'm not crashing the car, but yeah. I hear you. At least the small animals tend to die outright. I've hit two deer (both jumped out unexpectedly, as deer are wont to do). The first died cleanly, the second I had to call the game commission and get them to dispatch the poor thing. :(
This is a real, actual thing? People are sick.
Not only real and actual, but sick indeed, IMHO.
One added note (just to make it worse): roughly 1/3 of the students in that class were comfortable admitting to such behavior. I don't care if it was a raising of hands in class or an anonymous written survey, that part of it troubles me at least as much as the fact of it.
Never hit a turtle, clipped a doe at 20mph, and she ran off. Ran over a rabbit in 1976 and occasionally still have nightmares about it.
'Bout what you'd expect of a wussy librul.
That is disturbing, but it's almost more disturbing thinking that they wouldn't admit it and wondering who around you was a racist or misogynist, errr, I mean turtle killer. At least when they admit it, you know for sure.
I can't even remember how many times I pulled over in Alligator Alley and other back roads in FL and picked up a turtle and put it off the road. Six, seven at least.
Why someone would EVER hurt a defenceless animal is beyond me. I can't get my mind around it.
Here on some roads we have signs saying "turtle crossing" and others saying "duck crossing". Get caught or reported hitting either and it's worse than getting a DUI.
I'm thinking I am glad we have no signs warning us against T-Party caucus crossing! LOL
I might not be so quick to stop.
I'm sure I would have "brake failure".
If we cannot save the animals then we cannot save ourselves. We depend on the wildlife for ecological sustainability. If you put bad energy out into the world then don't complain when it comes back at you. Have compassion for all forms of life.
You all are lucky if you only see turtles and possems in the road. Around here the animal most encountered in the highway is the whitetail deer and nobody delibertately tries to hit one.
Ever have one jump off an embankment, throught the roof of a brand new convertable? Newly weds. The people weren't hurt but not much left of the interior of the car.
The current issue of Car and Driver (Feb. 2003, no link yet) has a short article on the statistical probability of deer collisions collected by State Farm Insurance. (map) In any given year:
This is only reported incidents, the uninsured and unreported are uncounted. I'm surprised California ranks so low, here in SF Bay Area suburbia we have deer come down from the hills to drink from the irrigation runoff on 4 lane street medians and nibble on the brush by the bike paths. You'll see them all year round after 10pm in groups up to four. It's really funny to see them try to pronk off in a panic on asphalt. Maybe mule deer are smarter. That would be a good thing since they are the second largest species in the lower 48 after elk weighing in at 200-300 lbs for a buck and 150-200lbs for a doe.
As kids, we used to hunt for turtles, and then have turtle races. I dont recall if I ever won, but it WAS fun!
And then... the urban expansion came. There was no body count. Out of sight, out of mind, I guess.
I'd llike to make a Correction:
One Perspective - Next Round and Congress - MSNBC Comments
The email from Warren Buffet was not true:
http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/government/a/Congressional-Reform-Act-Of-2011.htm
Internet chain letter purporting to have the support of billionaire Warren Buffett advocates passage of a so-called "Congressional Reform Act of 2011."
Asks someone who has never gone skinny dipping in a creek with box turtles.
Mark Rober has a YouTube Video showing this kind of experiment in July, 2012. It is very funny. Mark used a rubber snake, tarantula and turtle, with a leaf as a control. After about a thousand cars, he found that about six percent of drivers will hit a rubber animal. Of these, almost 90 percent of those who will run over an animal are SUV drivers. He also found that people will kill tarantulas more readily than turtles. The target models were placed on the hard shoulder of the road, so drivers had to deliberately swerve slightly off of their lane to hit the rubber animal.
One guy stole the rubber snake.
I am disappointed that Rober's video is not mentioned or linked in news articles and blog posts describing the Clemson study.
Rober does not say where he performed his study, but I am somehow not surprised that drivers in South Carolina will go out of their way to run over a turtle in the middle of a driving lane. I am a bit curious to know if there are regional differences in roadkill rates.
Of these, almost 90 percent of those who will run over an animal are SUV drivers.
Given one has to be a drooling moron to drive an SUV, this doesn't surprise me. Most SUV drivers are Republicans, proving their lack of both taste and intelligence.
So, how many drivers stopped, took the tortoise* to a place of safety, and set it on its back to bake to death in the sun?
* turtles are the ones who live in water
Squirrels and woodchucks I always try to hit. Being safe at all times of course.
Don't get the turtle thing at all though.
What's a turtle? What's a porcupine, a beaver, a magpie?? What's a frog? I haven't seen any of these for 20 years. When I was a kid you couldn't take a step outside without making 10 grasshoppers jump, the night was deafening with cricket noise,,, even miller moths and house flys are gone. I live at the confluence of two largish rivers which I would guess support about 1% of the diversity they use to.
Suspiro
Metaphor, Metafifth, Metasixth and as many as you need for understanding:
LaPierre, vowing to spill more blood than all of America's war combined. So many Americans in agreement with a new madness and then another and another.
The automobile is a metaphor for a shell or carcass of steel protecting fragile humans inside, yet those automobiles are ever thirsting for the last drop of fossil carbon oil energy. Even the steel is refined by coal sequestered from a planet thriving with life, as was the fossil carbon oil energy used to propel those automobiles, and everything else that humans pretend to need to extend themselves beyond their means.
Life was always doing a battle against a trying death using the power of carbon; life has held these secrets dear and far away from men. It was then men to be sure who pried loose from Earth those hidden carbon energies. That man and his created beasts do roar as angry lions down the lanes that bar all crossing other life. Taking aim for his arrogant certainty and perceived elevation over all lowly life, man takes as his target a Kafkaesque metaphor, a mere bump in the road, a hull to be crushed, entrails to be splattered, not once thinking that man is in that very hull, and it is himself that he kills with no mercy, no trace of humanity and with as much killing armament and his brain can invent.
The metaphor you seek and will always seek is you.
That the ancient creature in its DNA knows of this long path, and knows that that the long dead and buried fossil carbon energy when released by mankind will create the steel carcass, will then propel that carcass and will use all the long sequestered carbon energy to meet his imagined needs. One of those needs is in the lusts that lead to all things, having many names all spelled the same as excess. So it is that the carbon of the ancient depths is brought forth as the antidote to the great and mistaken creature, that superior being. That ancient creature in its DNA has the cure to man's many diseases, but it slowly crawls across the road to its own certain and deliberate death, knowing that if is DNA is extinguished in this murderous sport, of mindless vengeance of accidental callous waste, that it is man who does himself in.
The guts of the carbon energy spewed across the air, into the oceans in acid flumes, will be reclaimed, slowly in ages to come and in eons unnamed with life we known only today as DNA buried in the gene pool of all life.
As we learned from the Tortoise and the Hare: slow and steady wins the race. However, In our fast pace world where a 90 second reboot of our computer seems like an eternity, the slow-but-steady feel the brunt of our anxiousness.
Seems like too many people are just in a hurry to die. Live their lives out; get it all in; for tomorrow may never come for some. Don't want to miss out by being a "turtle". Fast pace is okay, and much of the time necessary in our hurried world, but the slow pace is just needed for ant semblance of longevity.
Come on; there's nothing wrong with this.
When I lived in Myrtle Beach, I not only stopped for turtles, but I'd get out and pick them up to speed up their journey. There was one turtle I came across that was right on the yellow lines in the middle of the road. I thought it was alive, but when I reach it the top of the shell had a big hole cracked in and it's innards were exposed. The way it was posed, it appeared it had kept struggling to cross before it died.
But it's not just the south. Where I grew up in NH, I watched some teenagers in a jeep intentionally run over a cat. I was probably 13 or 14. The cat was hit so hard it's eye popped out, but it kept struggling to get across the road. As I was trying to help move it across the road, the kids circled back around. I could hear them laughing and yelling "It's still alive!" It's one of the most disgusting things I've ever seen.
I truly do not understand why people intentionally hit small animals with cars. They're just trying to get from point A to point B and go about their business. Come to think of it, lots of drivers are rather territorial about the road.
Wow. This makes me sad. I always stop and carry them to whichever side of the road they were headed, then a little farther.
Interestingly, on a number of occasions I've run across cars stopped on the road, drivers out of the car and trying to encourage the turtle to move. These people are actually afraid of the turtle, can't actually go near them, but they're trying their best. It doesn't work of course, because turtles are incapable of "running away". Not in the DNA.
I've actually had people clap when I grab them by the tail and move them to the side of the road. The turtles I mean.
Dear Lord (that doesn't actually exist)! When I was a kid, if we saw a turtle crossing the road, we'd pick it up, and we would have a pet turtle for a couple weeks. Then we'd release the turtle some place safe. We would name them. Amy Turtle. Donna Turtle. Sammy Turtle. I had a ton of turtles growing up. Just long enough to get to know them before they'd go back to nature.
One evening we were letting the turtle just roam around the living room. I was laying on the floor, idly playing with some toys. That's when I felt something bite the tip of my finger. I screamed and jerked my arm, only to have our pet turtle go flying across the living room. We decided we probably shouldn't keep turtles anymore after that.
Years later when I was all grown up, I was renting the basement out of this house that was fairly close to a bay. We'd get all kinds of wild life at that house. Every morning there was a turtle who would climb up out of the woods and just hang out in my yard. I love turtles. But mother nature takes better care of them than I can.
I can't believe anyone would run over a turtle on purpose. Not unless you were a Republican and couldn't care less about nature.
why would you run over a good source for soup? Cook them in the shell first.
Way back in the '80s, I had a cat I was very close to, named Snowball... She was a pretty thing, a long-haired albino... Her expectant mother, Furball, had prepared a nest in one of my closets, in anticipation of her litter... One day, after I got home from work, I noticed a thin, little cry coming from my patio door... I moved the curtain aside, and there she was, the size of my finger, placenta still attached... I picked her up and carried her back to the closet, where Furball was taking care of the rest of her litter...
A few months later, after I found out she'd contracted FIV, the feline version of HIV, she had to spend a month or two in isolation at the vet's... Two or three times a week, I'd go to visit her, and she would climb out of my hands, up my sweater to my shoulder and rub against my ear, purring like mad...
About a year later, coming home, I found her body in the road near my house... Half her skull had been crushed in... She was pure white, in the middle of the day, on a road posted 25 MPH, so it had to be deliberate...
What kind of sadistic sociopath would deliberately kill a beautiful, delicate thing like her?...
David, #21
That is too horrible. I am so sorry. There has to be a place in hell for someone who'd do that.
What a terrible thing.
Here in Maryland, I'm known (by friends & family) for carrying a 'turtle stick' in my minivan; a 4 ft long, sturdy wooden stick that I use several times a year to move snapping turtles from the middle of the country roads I drive on. The tough part is figuring out which direction the turtles are going; I've always been told they are heading from one body of water to another, and they need to be pointed in the 'right' direction to continue their journey. Other than having to learn the skill of how to encourage a huge, agitated snapping turtle to move, I've never had any problems. Usually other drivers stop to help out. Of course I've had plenty that just want me and the turtle out of the middle of the road.
Before all white southerns are maligned as callous turtle killers, I bring you the Tallahassee Turtle Tunnel. http://www.lakejacksonturtles.org/ When the construction of a road cut a lake in half causing much confusion and death to local turtles, a group was founded to support the building a passageway so that turtles could cross the road safely from one side of the lake to the other. The turtle tunnel was eventually built using stimulus funds, much to the consternation of of the right, but I think it is the best use of stimulous funds ever.
gee, more evidence that links stupid cruel behavior with abusive @!$%#s.
I'd love to have those 35 students in front of me and ask them point blank "Why did you do it? Whas it the need to kill something? To show your "power"?
Such pathetic people need to be embarassed in public.
I thought this article was going to be about Mitch McConnell. ;)