The following photo essay contains images some may find disturbing.
TW: Dead animals, some gore.

Colliding Worlds: A requiem to those who didn’t make it to the other side, a photo essay

They were here first. Using branches and streams, they mapped out the terrain that provided them with shelter, food and comfort. Generation after generation of padded feet and feathered wings traveled back and forth through fields undisturbed, wearing down pathways of their own into the earth. The air was clear and quiet. The only traffic that would be experienced would be the unfortunate collision of predator and prey on the same path. The sun and moon would be the only things that shone. Then man came and brought their wheels, and with them, things that were once green turned to grey.

We became the intruders of their territory, flattening and destroying and changing until little is recognizable. It wasn’t our intention, but quickly we became dictators, not allowing the original residents a say in what we were doing to their world. Their dirt paths were intersected with crisscrossing barriers of cement and metal. We put up fences and walls larger than they could overcome. Familiar habitats were replaced with harsh lights and hard structures that left them lost. The highways stretched wider than any stream, with far more unpredictable currents bringing tons of metal hurling in their direction. We placed confusing elements and new dangers on top of them without much thought. Two worlds became one in a one-sided flash of machinery and electricity. And we expected them to adapt.

It is a difficult thing to coexist when everything created by one population seems designed to harm the other. We have forced animals to play the part of a homosapien, pushing on them the unrealistic expectation to work around what we have done. We don’t provide help, giving very little to compensate for what was taken. They search for the landmarks that guide them to their homes, but we have overturned their roads for our own and offered no detour. No bridges. Somehow, we are still disgusted and shocked when we find a corpse laying flattened and greased by our tire tracks.

To us, they are an eyesore. We look out the windows of our cars when traveling and expect to see the wonder of the world presented in sceneries that seem hand-painted by mother nature. Instead, we are greeted by what is left of a creature simply trying to exist in a landscape we forced onto them. Our minds don’t want to process the grotesqueness of the consequences. We look away. We don’t think about it. We hope they will either be taken care of by a scavenger or dumped in a trash bag so we don’t have to consider their death.

We do not think about what they were before the moment we found them with their dismantled bodies splayed out in what was likely to be their final resting place. They did not intend to end up there. They could have been a mother, traversing the rough terrain to seek out food for a family that was then left without its guardian; they could have been a victim escaping its predator by weaving through new dangers; they could have been a scared and disoriented creature, lost in a world it doesn’t understand and confused by the sounds and sights of humanity. We are responsible for their pain. Yet there are no flowers given for the loss of a possum, no funeral for the deer that couldn’t beat the headlights to the grass on the other side. We barely think twice. Is it not murder if it has four legs instead of two?