Minnesota drivers crashed into 33,000 deer last year

Can't we work something out?

​If you're looking to crash into a deer, Minnesota's not a bad place to start.

If you don't want to kill Bambi, destroy your car, and possibly hurt yourself and your passengers in the process... well, now you finally have that one missing reason to avoid the state of West Virginia.

Minnesota is the eighth most likely state to have a deer-vehicle collision, according to a new study from State Farm Insurance.

Going against the grain, Minnesota actually saw an increase of 4 percent over last year's collisions. Nationwide, the total number of deer crashes is down 7 percent. Even with that decrease, there were a whole lot of deer accidents from July 1, 2010 to June 30, 2011.

Unless you're an expert on this kind of stuff, you might be shocked to find out how many.

Would you believe... 1.09 million? Well, believe it, because State Farm is an insurance company, and would never lie to us.

Minnesota more than did its part, smacking into a respectable 33,218 deer during the 12-month period. That's far from the highest total number of deer collisions, a title that belongs to Pennsylvania, which had 101,299 -- about 23,000 more than Michigan, which came in second.

The Midwest dominates on the "most likely" map. (Click to enlarge.)

​State Farm's study then ranked states by "most likely" to hit a deer, which found that West Virginia is clearly the worst place for animal loving commuters: West Virginia drivers had a 1 in 53 chance of crashing into a deer during the study. Minnesota's 1 in 98 odds leave us in eighth place, virtually even with neighboring Wisconsin (where the likelihood was 1 in 97), slightly behind Iowa (1 in 77, good enough for second most likely), and just ahead of the 1 in 107 odds in North Dakota.

It should be pointed out that the state of North Dakota only has 107 drivers, total, which probably means that Ray did it again this year. 

On the other end of the spectrum, hitting a deer in Hawaii is nearly impossible. Last year, your odds were 1 in 6,267, by far the longest odds in America.

A similar study was once attempted in Canada. It turned up zero reports of deer collisions, but survey takers did offer hundreds of pounds of frozen venison steaks with only trace amounts of Buick.