this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2025
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that's a reindeer. completely different animal, despite the name.
also, the problem with reindeer isn't really that you risk hitting one, but that you get swarmed by hundreds of them taking up the entire road. they're not afraid of vehicles since they are often around people, so their reaction to oncoming traffic is... nothing. they don't even freeze, they just continue what they were doing.
FYI
Reindeer - Wikipedia
sure, taxonomically, but it looks and behaves very differently. just like i wouldn't like to call a moose a deer, despite them being related.
Absolutely; where I'm from nobody would understand you if you referred a moose/caribou as a deer. Hence your helpful clarification.
In in the UP, first time hunters often don’t know the difference between caribou and deer.
The supply shops find out when the hunters come back asking for help because the buck they bagged is too heavy to move. (They’re 500 lbs or more instead of the 100-200 lbs of a white tail)
okay then they are definitely not the same species because reindeer max out at like 150kg.
edit: north american caribou. right.
The size difference is wild. Then moose are absolutely huge.
Yup moved to moose country later on and are super tall. I skidded to a stop in front of one on a dark night and it was facing away and just looked like a tall person standing in the road.
It looked back at us, then climbed straight up a quite steep embankment into the woods.
The dangers in hitting them is that you knock the legs out from under them and they land on your roof and crush you.
huh your meese must be larger than swedish ones, what we're taught will happen is that they go through the windscreen
Well we were in a 1990 Accord Coupe at the time, so it would have definitely crushed us.
Probably would be a windshield collision in modern SUVs though.
Note that the hight given is "at the shoulder" (does not include head and also massive antlers).
I found some images, not sure about their accuracy but they seem to be about right AFAIK. They chose a conservative hight a male moose:
Oh, and I learned this fun fact reading the wikipedia page on moose:
Reindeer and caribou are different species. Why is it lumping them together?
Reindeer and caribou are the same species, Rangifer tarandus.
There are actually different ways of classifying them. Some including them all under R. tarandus, others have as many as 6 species with a cumulative 19 extant subspecies. It seems to be an evolving area of study.
edit: I swear that pun was unintended
Are they domesticated, or is there some other reason they're not afraid of humans ? Because we have tons of actual deers here (France) that you can easily see hanging out near roads at dawn or at dusk, but they're definitely afraid of humans and cars
reindeer herding is one of the main occupations of the sami of northern scandinavia. almost all of them are domesticated.
As seen in the documentary, 'Frozen'.
Oh yeah that makes sense then. The semi-wild cows of Corsica (they are domesticated and actively exploited for milk/meat but don't have dedicated pastures, they are left to roam and graze wherever they want) are also an absolute menace on the roads
that seems to be pretty much the same situation then, except while there seems to be around 30k corsican cows there are around 250k reindeer in sweden alone.