I think the reason that deer seem “retarded” in their response to cars is that for their entire evolutionary history there has never been an animal that would hurtle through both the day and night at improbable speeds almost completely silently. No land predator has previously evolved to blind its prey with large powerful sets of lights at night.
Counterintuitively, in my opinion deer seem to so often chaotically run out in front of cars (and growing up somewhere with lots of deer I know how incredibly infuriating and scary this can be) because it is actually the most sensible survival strategy for being ambushed by a fast moving predator with a lot of inertia that may or may not realize they have stumbled upon a meal.
Imagine you weren’t a pathetic, slow human being and could outrun most predators, now imagine chilling inside a bush when you see a a grizzly bear sprinting at 40mph almmmossst but not quite straight at you.
Your impulse is to freeze and then wait for the right moment to bolt, especially because the predator hasn’t seen you yet and likely just caught your scent or is running at something else. However, this predator is scentless, nearly silent and at night blinds you so that the distance they are away from you is very difficult to determine (the opposite of a grizzly bear really), so the right moment to bolt is hard to judge.
At the last second you realize the “grizzly bear” is almost upon you and you panic because it is happening so fast and fall back on your instincts. Your instincts, as a prey animal that can run faster and for longer than predators, are the same as any human who has ever played a sport where they need to rush past a defender… and you erratically cut across the bear’s path of motion after you think it has committed to rushing directly at you. The idea is to hopefully catch the bear with its weight shift committed in the wrong direction so you get just a tinnyyyy bit more of a head start in the chase. In otherwords the deer’s instinct is to try to “juke” the fast moving predator with fancy footwork.
Please see the scientific illustration I have provided, notice that the bear’s path (red) has to switch directions whereas if the deer had decided to just directly run away from their bear the bear wouldn’t have needed to switch directions/accelerate twice, just make a slight turn to reorient itself into an opportunistic chase with the deer.
This doesn’t work on cars, especially because if at first a deer doesn’t succeed at getting the timing right they are dead.
I think your probably right on all counts (supported by the highly scientific diagram, 10/10), but also deer are just really stupid, which I can say from having lived in their habitat half my life lol. I think it’s mostly likely that intelligence was just never evolutionarily very useful to deer, it almost never is as it takes a lot of energy and doesn’t generally support reproduction. The strategy deer have adopted seems to involve shitting out a bunch of babies each year and hope for the best. Which works great when the best isn’t 2-5 tons of metal with a bunch of kinetic energy.
You are making a basic framing error here which has been deeply ingrained into us as a narrative justification for hyper individualism and late stage capitalism, prey aren’t at war with predators.
Ever watch a whitetail deer spook and dash away into the underbrush? They flip their tail up to expose a bright white target on their rump.
Why?
Because predators overwhelming target sick and vulnerable prey, predators stabilize prey population swings and keep them from catastrophically exploding. Prey in turn sustain predators.
Whitetail deer display the signal to demonstrate they are healthy. I wouldn’t call it symbiosis, but I also think it is a serious categorical error to conceptualize it as an existential war or arms race. If whitetail deer suddenly evolved to become so fast predators could never catch them even if they counter-evolved to be a bit faster it would either lead to extinction of deer or the extinction of deer and the ecosystems around them, those are the only to possible end states neither of which is good for deer.
The reason I am saying this is that unlike predators, cars have no consistent genetic forcing on deer, car deerkills are essentially random and thus only function to lower the signal-to-noise ratio on other genetic forcings that continously shape deer into well adapted positive contributors to the ecosystems around them. How can you expect a species to adapt to a process of violence that is so chaotic and disconnected from the surrounding ecosystem that it is evolutionarily invisible except as a force of degradation?
