Do those little plastic "deer whistles" do anything to keep deer from running in front of a car?

Comments

• Rocketpoweredgorilla@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  A company I worked for put them on all their vehicles one year to try and cut down on deer damage to our trucks. (About 45 vehicles or so)

  Deer collisions went up immediately. At best they didn’t work, at worst it was actively spooking them… either way they were removed shortly thereafter and the incident rates started dropping shortly thereafter.

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  • Cinner@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I wonder if this isn’t a different cause and effect scenario. If everyone in the company knew about the deer horns and believed them to work, they likely wouldn’t be taking the precautions they normally did.

    Of course they don’t work, but I’m wondering if the placebo effect is what caused the accident rate to go up. Or an increase in deer populations that year, or land development, or etc.

    But yes, they don’t work.

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    • Rocketpoweredgorilla@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I think it was more a matter of timing. It was in the fall around hunting season when more people are out running around in the bush and deer are on the move.

      The whistles were our safety officers idea. The rest of us pretty much knew they were crap. (Or at least some of us did) The safety guy wasn’t too sure either but figured they were cheap enough to at least give them a shot.

      It didn’t help matters that we were operating in an area with a very dense population of deer either. I’ve personally counted over 80 standing in a field by a road.

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• DerisionConsulting@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  They don’t really work.

  Is the whistle louder than the sound of your vehicle and the road?
  Is that sound going to reach the deer before it’s too late? What about when the wind is blowing in the other direction?

  researchgate.net/…/228505867_Analysis_and_effecti…

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• ikidd@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I know one neighbor that has these festooned all over his minivan and has hit at least half a dozen deer in the last couple years, that I know about. Nobody else that I’m familiar with has this terrible of a track record . But then again, I’ve driven with him and he doesn’t look farther down the road than the end of his hood.

  The trick to avoiding deer is to never look at the deer you can see; it’s the ones on the other side of the road that are trying to get over to the visible ones that you have to worry about.

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• philo@lemmy.zip ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Let me put it this way, those itty bitty deer whistles have about as much of a chance of working as Elon Musk’s Hyperloop.

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