The roads can be a treacherous place. As well as having to avoid other road users, we have to contend with animals venturing out on to the tarmac.
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Last year more than 75,000 motorists lodged a claim with the RACV over car damage, and about one in 14 of those involved an animal.
Some involved pets — cats, dogs, rabbits and even birds. Others were farm animals such as cows, sheep and pigs. Native animals such as koalas, wombats, kangaroos, echidnas, emus and dingos also ended up in the path of motorists.
These creatures didn't necessarily end up as roadkill — you can still claim if you swerve to avoid a possum and hit a tree — but if they did, they got some revenge on their killers by causing a panicked phone call to the RACV.
So which animal is involved in the most crashes?
The answer is the kangaroo. Our national icon was implicated in eight out of 10 such collisions with an animal on the state's roads last year.
In second place were wombats, who have overtaken dogs in recent years when it comes to crash numbers.
And then there were 217 dogs, 87 deer, 83 cats and 67 cows that prompted motorists to lodge insurance claims in 2015.
Rounding out the list were nine possums, three pigs, three echidnas and one dingo, the only one of its species to be involved in such a crash in the past four years.
Damages from animal collision claims average around $5000, RACV insurance general manager Paul Northey says, and these incidents happen throughout the year.
Where do the crashes happen?
Every time a motorist is injured in a crash with a motorist, police take a note of where it happened. This map shows every single crash with an animal they have recorded in the past five years.
Straight away, you can see how much kangaroos (the green dots) dominate, with most of the collisions happening around Bendigo or Melbourne's northern fringe.
That's because urban expansion in the city's north is putting more kangaroos in the path of motorists and is one of the reasons why kangaroo crash numbers have surged in recent years.
These 407 crashes left two motorists dead, including a 40-year-old man on the road to Bendigo who swerved to avoid a kangaroo in 2014, slammed into a tree and died at the scene.
A further 148 people were injured enough to be taken to hospital for treatment after their collisions with the marsupials. More recently, nine cyclists were injured when they ploughed into a kangaroo carcass on the side of a Shepparton road and spun into the path of an oncoming four-wheel-drive.
Crashes with cattle have also led to two deaths in the past five years. In a case from 2011, two motorcyclists were riding their modified Harley-Davidsons at night through an unlit road in eastern Victoria when they struck some dairy cows that had wandered onto the bitumen. Justin Smith, 35, then spun out and crashed into a power pole. A coroner's inquest into his death found a broken electric fence had allowed the animals to get on the road, but that the modified headlights on his bike did not illuminate the road enough to see the cows.
Keep in mind that in both the RACV and VicRoads data, the actual number of animals getting run over is certainly much higher, because these figures only record crashes where someone was injured or if the vehicle was damaged. If you reversed over your neighbour's pet poodle one morning, it wouldn't be showing up here.
Likewise, the data does not record the fate of the animals, but chances are they would have perished. Even though kangaroos often hop away seemingly unharmed after getting hit by a car, they have actually sustained horrible damage to their leg muscles and soon suffer an agonising death.
When it comes to avoiding animals, Driver Dynamics master instructor Kevin Flynn says your best bet is to go it slow, keep a safe distance from other cars and be extra wary around dawn and dusk, when local fauna is most active.
"You're not likely to hit a kangaroo while you're driving down Elizabeth Street, but in the country the most likely time you will encounter a kangaroo is when the sun is going down or coming up," he says. "If it hasn't rained for a while the little buggers will drink from the puddles in the roadways."
But Mr Flynn says you can still get caught out by wildlife jumping in front of your car, and when that happens it is time to hit the brakes.
"In most cases you are better off running over the animal than you are trying to avoid it," he says. "A lot of people have wrapped themselves around a tree trying to avoid a kangaroo."
To report injured wildlife contact Wildlife Victoria on 1300 094 535 or Wildlife Rescuers on 0417 506 941.
