Everyone remembers the first time they hit an animal while driving. It’s a traumatizing, heartbreaking experience. And for one Wisconsin man, it’s an incident he’s not going to forget any time soon.
Last month, Mark Armour was driving to work early one morning when he thought he struck an animal. He could feel something hit his car, but he didn’t see an animal limp away or anything on the road in his rearview mirror. But when he arrived at the Waukegan train station in Illinois, where he works as a train conductor, he realized something was definitely not right.
A stunned fox-like animal was stuck in the grill of his vehicle.
“It was 6:30 in the morning when dispatch called me,” Amber Manley, an animal control officer for the Waukegan Police Department told the Lake Country News-Sun. “I asked if it was alive and they said, ‘yes.’ I told them I’m on my way.”
When Manley arrived, she quickly identified the animal as a coyote.
She noted that while it’s incredible the coyote fit perfectly inside the grill, it’s even more amazing that he survived the hit.
Manley used safety equipment to carefully remove the shocked coyote from the bumper and placed him inside a crate. She then brought him to the Flint Creek Wildlife Rehabilitation, about an hour away from the train station, for medical attention.
The coyote suffered from three fractures in his legs, which have been set by Dawn Keller, the rehabilitation centre’s executive director and founder. The coyote is reportedly now resting comfortably in his three casts and will likely be released back into the wild after the winter. Armour is currently raising money for the coyote’s recovery.
Armour’s also named the coyote Vern, after the car he was driving at the time of the hit: a Buick Verano.
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