Lastly, "dodgyknees", PAH, not seen them, don't believe you ! I want to see pictures to prove your name is justified !!!!!
SHOW E THE KNEES............................................
I shall endeavour to find a photo of me in shorts and knee braces just for you
@Lateral. It’s my summer hunting look, one that is undeniably attractive so I am told.
Anyway back to the original post. Now that we have confirmed that reports of 400kg gutted boar are the stuff of interweb fantasy, we can consider what is it that actually causes the damage in these road traffic accidents?
Over the years I’ve done several defensive driving courses for various tickets to enable me to work in remote areas of Australia. This has always been my most favourite kind of training as there’s always something to learn and some interesting stories to hear.
Driving remote outback tracks for hundreds of kms in a heavily laden LandCruiser can be very unforgiving. Once you’ve gotten used to the appalling road conditions and various hazards presented by washouts, creek crossings, dongas, corrugations, etc, you are faced with the very real hazard of running into a four-legged creature roughly the same size as your vehicle. Camels, cattle (including the worst case imaginable - the 10yr old feral bull), donkeys, pigs, brumbies and emus. But by far the most numerous problem is of course kangaroos. A large red or grey kangaroo can all too easily end up in your lap if you strike them mid bound, when they are at an elevation roughly level with your bonnet.
This is why we drive vehicles with very heavy duty front end protection in the form of bullbars, and mesh windscreen protection in very high risk areas (mostly on light trucks like the Hino 300s etc).
However, as has been hammered home to me numerous times, the injuries caused by animal related accidents are almost always caused by the driver trying to avoid the animal and losing control of the vehicle, hitting trees, rolling in drains, etc. There is a specific training regime that you go through to teach you to control the instinct to swerve and to maintain your trajectory, including striking the animal if necessary.
The Hilux I drive now has the subtle imprint of a wallaby’s tail vertebrae all the way along the bottom of the front door panel. I hit it on the driver-side corner of the bullbar, swinging it round violently so the tail strike on the door was really hard. That was in the north end of the Flinders ranges, on bitumen at some speed, and if I had swerved and fallen off the road I would’ve been in all sorts of trouble, with the wife and kids and 700kg of gear.