Do you brake for cats, dogs, squirrels, skunks and possums? How about horses, cows, elk, moose, or deer? Fight the urge to swerve as you brake if you don’t have time to check traffic first. Of course the size of the animal matters. If it’s shorter than your car’s hood and you don’t have time to check other lanes, go through it. If the animal is taller than the hood, avoid it if you can, knowing it still might be better to hit the animal. A spokesman for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says: “These crashes happen so fast, often times drivers don’t have the option of making a decision about what to do. But the best thing, unfortunately, in most cases is to hit the animal and try to avoid swerving or doing something that could cause you to lose control and hit somebody else or an object or go off the road and roll over.”  Most human injuries from animal collisions occur not when animals are hit but by the crash that follows.