[adamh]

i hope this is the right forum for help:
I want to know how i can make a difference to a problem of cars speeding, i know its apparent everywhere in the u.k. to be specific i live in herstmonceux, a village in east sussex. I've not always been in the country, i was brought up in a north london suburb, village life is a little more better than living in the city, less noise, less anger, less people keeping you up until 6am!. i guess we all get older and less tolerable, lucky for some to get old?.

The small estate we now live on, in the tiniest of 2 bedroom flats , is probably about a quarter mile square, its an average type housing estate with a main road running right through it. The A271.

The reason for me writing today....

Today my young cat passed on. She was just gone a year and everything a normal person could want that makes life beautiful, i mean we were blessed to have her, really, we are as a race lucky that animals like cats and dogs do not run off from our sometimes thoughtless nature.

every single animal i come across in the house or at work i let it crawl on me, then i let it outside to be free and have a life, flys/bees/wasps/spiders/ants, cricket , roach anything. Directly I will help all I can, I have taken a pigeon to the vets before now which was sick, most would just walk on by. I have stopped many times before now to pick up dead animals off the road, last memorable experience was in the bucketing rain by the lamb Inn in wartling, some one had run over a badger, not much left of it, a bloody mess, and obviously just drove off, left it in the middle of the road dead. It was bucketing down, i mean visibility was almost zero. why did the person not have the guts to just stop, pick it up and at least put it to the side of the road to rest in peace, i mean.. just leave it there?.


Upon turning the car around I then stopped in the middle of the road, took out a blanket from the boot, put it over the dead badger, rolled it in the blanket, lifted it up. it weighed an absolute ton, then i climbed the steep embankment and put it to rest by a log on the verge on the other side of the very small embankments / road. and made sure it was covered with the white sheet, i envisaged while moving it, if it has a spirit it may be happy to have gotten to the log on the verge on the other side, some compensation hardly.. but a simple gesture what i could do with what i had to hand

The animal deserved the respect at the very very least i say, to be frank they deserve alot more than we give them.

Today someone else picked up my own beloved animal from the roadside and took it in to a lady close by to help, by that time she was allready passed on, apparently, the vauxhall zafira people carrier , 56 reg, didnt even stop, funny, he must have been a deaf driver to not hear a thud and look in the mirror to see a cat flying through the air. A guy from a local car dealership witnessed the accident while showing a car to a customer. He kindly went and picked up my cat, took it to a lovely local lady who called in a vet, this all happened at 10 a.m she was said to have been killed on impact. I found out after a 5 o clock finish at work.


The person that handed my cat in said the vehicle that she collided with was tearing down the small estate road (fiennes road) heading for the main road, breaking the speed limit or not, there was a distinct ring to the way the person said "the car was absolutely tearing down the road".

Do people forget that not only animals , but children and people live on these estates.. why do they seem to forget what danger they put everything else in, apart from one thing...... 'themselves'. mr/mrs zafira driver i am glad that the airbag didnt pop out and mark your face, or cost you some money to fix, please do send me the bill, I will pay.

i'm even more angry than I was before now, heartbroken and mortified of my bereavement of course, but I guess bieng a car driver myself i am half to blame for my poor animals trajic accident.

I do try to drive with my eyes on the verges to look our for rabbits/foxes, anything! having said that i dont feel any better!,
i am just looking for a way to get my local council to enforce speed on the housing estate, can anyone help me? do i constrcut some kind of petetion?

it just cannot go on like this!,
people tearing through estates in vehicles, where animals which look to us for protection have no chance at-all when a callous motorist decides he or she has the right to drive fast enough to endanger all but themselves. i mean, we do not get to teach animals the green cross code or warn them of the people that use the road, not the road or the cars, but the people that use them.

so how can i make a difference, how do i get sleeping policeman put it to the estate roads?, what do i ask for at the council? im not very political im afraid, i dont read the newspapers, dont vote, im not perfect by far'! but am keen now to try and help reduce road accidents, even if just on the land with which animals are enticed to share with us.

thanks for reading, and thanks for helping if you can.