Google Street View Car Kills Bambi, Removes Pictures Afterward

We’ve seen Google’s Street View cars capture a variety of interesting scenes, such as a house on fire or car accidents, but this is a new one. Apparently, one hit a deer and then captured a photo of the poor thing lying dead or dying afterward.

The Daily What has the before screenshots, reprinted above with permission. Want to see them now? Sorry, if you try, you’ll see a message saying that Street View is unavailable “due to high demand” or that “This image is no longer available.”

Postscript: Reader Tim Cohn sends news of funnier capture out of Street View, two guys apparently caught having an archaic battle with shields and sticks.

Postscript 2: Google’s working up an official blog post on what happened but tells me that the image was removed because of several requests from users using the Street View image removal option.

Postscript 3: Google’s blog post is now live:

The driver was understandably upset, and promptly stopped to alert the local police and the Street View team at Google. The deer was able to move and had left the area by the time the police arrived. The police explained to our driver that, sadly, this was not an uncommon occurrence in the region — the New York State Department of Transportation estimates that 60,000-70,000 deer collisions happen per year in New York alone — and no police report needed to be filed.

See also discussion on Techmeme.