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On the other hand, recovering an animal with a light is a good thing, because otherwise you might lose an injured animal that will slowly die over hours, days, or weeks

The impact of spotlights on nocturnal life are also significant.

If everybody is following the rules in good faith, it should be pretty rare, right? You only have to track down an injured animal in the dark if you shot it in the light and then it became dark before you got to it. Hunting ends almost everywhere around or a little after sun down.

Hunters don't follow the rules in good faith in my experience. If they would, they would combine drinking and hunting less often. Which would lead to less shot dogs or even (!) injured people.

No, too many of them break the rules the moment it is hard to prove it.

What exactly is 'your experience' exactly? There are many many many hunters every year who obey the law and hunt ethically and responsibly. In my state many youth take hunters education courses when young to learn how to responsibly handle firearms, ethically take game, and obey the rules of hunting.

Perhaps, but I suspect this is part of the rationale behind the law.

TBF, if it's injured, it will probably either die in a matter of hours from its injuries or be taken down as easy prey by a predator. If it survives a day, it's probably going to live.

But yes, I get your point.

You're quite wrong here, theres plenty of places an animal can be shot where blood loss is survivable but infection is not

Back in the day, in my rural county, people would drive with a spotlight, find a large deer, and run it over.

Result? Food for months and months for the family, and the insurance company produced a replacement car. And yes, people would do this when their car was in poor shape, eg transmission going or some such. Car rusting out, etc.

They eventually changed the laws so that deer were no longer given to people in car accidents, for obvious reasons. I imagine the light law mentioned here, is due to this too.

Not really. PA will still allow you to keep roadkill if you report it.

Even in states where you can't legally keep roadkill its often with a wink and a nudge that the officer/trooper on scene will say "I've taken my report and I'm going home. If that deer vanishes before fish and game gets here to collect it in an hour or so, well, I guess the coyotes were hungry tonight."

In most states it is up to the police (game warden is police and should be consulted) discretion. They will almost always give you a permit for the roadkill. The animal is dead and despite OP, most people are not killing deer with their car, so may as well not let it go to waste. Of course there are exceptions and so if the police suspect something they will not give the permit.

One interesting thing that I learned when I visited the Minnesota Wolf Center (20 years ago, but still...) was that their wolves were fed only from roadkill collected in a 100 mile radius.

Here in Norway they usually give it to a nearby nursing home, assuming it's in good shape for human consumption.

Nice dinner for the elders.

Oh wow. I assumed that would make your insurance more expensive because you got into an accident, but looking online it turns out it generally doesn't because it's not considered to be something that you're at fault for.

But still, yikes. There are just so many bad things about that.

"between killing vs recovering"

There's a third reason - scouting. PA allows night time spotlighting during specific hours and times of year for deer. You can't shine it on farm animals, houses etc. You also have spotlights for other species. So many of those points don't really apply (3, 4, and 5 specifically).

> zombies-vs-humans I didnt have this game when I was in college, but sounds cool

> Actually kids on college campuses do this for zombies-vs-humans, smart zombies will blind humans at night with spotlights to make it hard for them to fire their nerf guns back at the zombies.

Also the mechanic behind all the strobing lights during police traffic stops. You can't see through them enough to know where to shoot at the officer.