While driving back to Grahamstown on Saturday for the second term, I murdered a kudu. My father and I had left from Pretoria at 5am that morning, so by the time we left Cradock for the last two hour stretch into town, we were not prepared for an encounter with this majestic animal.
While driving back to Grahamstown on Saturday for the second term, I murdered a kudu. My father and I had left from Pretoria at 5am that morning, so by the time we left Cradock for the last two hour stretch into town, we were not prepared for an encounter with this majestic animal.
We drove along the deserted R350, waiting for the first glimpse of Grahamstown lights, thinking of nothing else but sleep.
Two male kudu then ran out of the thick bush and into the road. The image was surreal. We weren’t expecting to see them just a few metres away from my little grey Hyundai.
I braked hard. The first kudu barely escaped the speeding mass of metal, but it was too late for the second.
His leg snapped against the right-hand headlight, his head banged against the bonnet, and his entire mass flipped over the car, knocking into the metal and then hitting the tar road behind us.
My father’s first reaction was to pull over and assess the damage to the car. My first reaction was to assess the condition of the animal we had just catapulted into the air at great speed.
But in the middle of a deserted highway at dusk, getting out of the car to do either was not optimal. We continued into town.
A spokesperson for the Cacadu district traffic department estimated that between four and five kudu are killed every month by vehicles, especially during the hunting and mating seasons.
Grahamstown panel beaters Albany Auto Services have received up to four vehicles at a time which have been damaged by colliding into these large buck.
They assured me however that if the kudu jumped over the car, there would not be much damage. Ian Stewart, general manager of Bucklands Private Game Reserve, says that they have about one kudu death per month.
He also advises motorists to attend to their own safety first, and then inform the farmer whose land they are on in the event of collision.
The statistics are out there for the purpose of traffic statistics and motoring safety. We have forgotten about the living creatures who stands very little chance of surviving the brutal impact of a man-made machine moving at 120 kilometres per hour.
If it doesn’t die immediately, it will most likely experience the kind of death we all fear ourselves: slow, painful, and lonely.
Its legs will most likely be paralysed, meaning it will lie on the tar road where you left it, air moving rapidly in and out of its lungs, its heart pumping blood through its damaged body for a few last moments, blinking a few more times until its eyes are exposed inevitably to the dusty wind.
It has been four days, and I can still see the animal’s frightened eyes staring at its mechanical predator. My car needed repairs, and the game reserve will salvage the meat, but nothing can be done to bring back the stolen life of that kudu.
