A while back, a close friend confided in me that, while driving home, he’d accidentally struck and killed a cat with his car. We both love animals, and he felt awful about what happened. I also know that he’s a cautious driver, and am certain the accident didn’t happen due to any recklessness on his part. Still, he was upset about it.

I did my best to console him based on what I’ve learned from Strong Towns: how much of what we, as a society, blame on “irresponsible” driving is actually the fault of poor road design. We talk frequently here about how many pedestrian deaths are preventable, and I feel that to a large extent, the same goes for animals that, like humans, get killed while trying to cross the street.

That discussion with my friend took me back to one that the Strong Towns team had a while back on Slack, prompted by my colleague Lauren Fisher. She made the astute observation that we have turned dogs into (beloved) prisoners, rather than willing companions: They are not given the option to choose to remain at our sides when we’re with them, because we have to keep them penned up or on leashes for their own safety. Otherwise, they could—and often do—lose their lives running into the street.

For my own part, I brought up how in many traditional societies, it was typical for animals of all kinds to wander freely among humans. For instance, my father always used to tell me stories about how whenever he, as a child, visited his family’s farm in Gugad, Iran, he’d watch massive herds of sheep, goats, and donkeys passing through town on their way to pasture. The animals knew where to go with minimal guidance (often only a single shepherd guided the flock from the rear), so it wasn't an issue. No fences necessary to keep them safe.

I was brought up on a lot of stories about Gugad when I was growing up. It felt like a fairy tale land to me, in part because my father is a marvelous storyteller, but also because it was a world so far removed from the auto-centric one I’d always known.

When I finally got to visit Gugad later in life, the town had completely changed from the one spoken of in my childhood. The family farm was gone, sold off in parcels and torn down to make room for new streets. The only part of our family’s property that remained were the ruins of a small mosque, its domed roof caved in and crumbling. No shepherds, no flocks of animals. The fairy tale had been destroyed.

*The only places in Iran where I saw the free-roaming herds my father described were in remote areas like the one above, in the mountains outside of Shiraz. (Source: Author.)*

This is a story repeated everywhere in the world where cars have been introduced. It’s easy to write off the idea of a town where sheep roam freely as being quaint, backwards, or extremely rural—but in truth, this is what many human communities looked like, for most of history, and in most places. The presence of animals (not just pets) in the same spaces as humans was a norm, not an exception.

So, I ask you to consider: Is there a place for animals in a Strong Town? I think that the answer is “yes.”

I’m not saying that we should go back to having livestock living in our cities and towns, per se. My area of focus in grad school was the history of medicine, and I know as well as anyone that there are important health benefits to living separately from herds of animals: better public sanitation; less potential for the spread of zoonotic diseases; fewer bites, gorings, and maulings; etcetera.

Still, I can’t help but feel that we’ve lost something precious by denying other species the right to exist freely and safely in the same spaces as us. People in non-auto-centric developments knew a type of relationship with other living creatures that the majority of us will never experience.

Allow me to cite a modern example: When I was sixteen, my family took a trip to visit some of my mother’s relatives in Japan, and tour the country. My favorite place that we visited was an island known as Miyajima (officially, Itsukushima). A mountainous place, the small island is not nearly as densely settled as other parts of Japan, though it does have some small towns and several schools. It is also a popular tourist destination, in part for its historic shrines, temples, and souvenirs—and also because on Miyajima, deer roam freely in human settlements.

I want to proceed with caution at this point. There are many religious and cultural factors tied into the presence of the deer on Miyajima, and my goal is not to fetishize the island or argue that it’s a situation that should be imitated everywhere else. Not every town in the world needs wild deer roaming the streets.

My intention in citing Miyajima as a case study is just to point out one thing: It is not an auto-centric place. Although cars are permitted on Miyajima, I don’t remember seeing many when I was there, and there are purportedly no traffic signals anywhere on the island. The streets are narrow, and parking is expensive and difficult to find. It’s overall very walkable, though, and you’ll have an easier time accessing parts of the island via rickshaw than by car.

It’s true that deer exist in such large numbers there because they’re protected…but it would be much harder to protect them if there were also a lot of fast-moving vehicles present.

People and animals alike can feel safe when walking in Miyajima. It goes to show that roadkill isn’t an inevitability everywhere, just like how pedestrian deaths aren’t “meant to be.”

And if you’re the type of person who’s more persuaded by numbers than by anecdotes, consider this: “[M]ore than one million animals die each day on roads in the United States. Road mortality is the leading cause of vertebrate deaths in the U.S., surpassing hunting within the last thirty years.” Moreover, a study done by Dutch biologists found that an average of two insects are killed for every 6.2 miles traveled by car, and similar results were found in the UK—suggesting that this average could be applied elsewhere, as well. Given the number of drivers and how many miles they travel in the U.S., that would amount to trillions of insects being killed by cars every year. Even allowing for some deviation in that number, it’s still astronomical. As Marc Bekoff (professor emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado) puts it in an article about the impact of roadkill, “Current rates of wildlife road mortality are neither sustainable for biodiversity nor a healthy reflection of our interactions with the environment and the animals who try to coexist with us.”

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To be sure, a large portion of these deaths happen on true “roads”—connections between productive, habited places—and maybe we can’t prevent all of them without totally dismantling our entire road system. That’s an unrealistic proposal, and I’m certainly not going to sit here and say that all roads must be eradicated. That would be ludicrous. We could mitigate some of the carnage with things like wildlife crossings, though, and certainly we can cut down on roadkill in areas populated by people (see above: “Miyajima”), where cars shouldn’t be moving that quickly, to begin with.

Because I can’t help myself (data-driven people, please bear with me), I’d like to end on one last story: one that was shared with me years ago by a colleague in school, and which has haunted me, as a dog owner and lover, ever since. Two of my colleague’s neighbors, a blind couple, were walking in their neighborhood one day when a driver accidentally veered off the street and came at them on the sidewalk. Without missing a beat, the couple’s guide dog jumped in between to protect them from the oncoming vehicle—using its own body as a shield.

Maybe that was entirely instinct on the dog’s part. Maybe it wasn’t. Either way, it should never have happened, because people shouldn’t die in traffic accidents, and animals shouldn’t, either.

Thankfully, both the couple and the dog survived that incident, but to take us back to the observation made at the top of this article: We’ve turned dogs into our beloved prisoners. Let’s emphasize “beloved,” rather than “prisoner,” from now on. If we love them the way they love us, then let’s show it by prioritizing their lives over the movement of vehicles. We owe it to ourselves to change our development pattern, and we owe it to the other creatures we share this world with, as well. After all, a Strong Town shouldn’t only be a home for humans.

Is There a Place for Animals in a Strong Town?

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