If you saw a car hit a bear cub and wanted to skin the bear and put the meat in your refrigerator, what kind of car would you use to pick it up? And if you then got waylaid, needed to head to the airport with the bear still in your vehicle and needed to dump the carcass somewhere, like New York City’s Central Park, for example, would your choice be different? Maybe you’ve had worms eating your brain for a while. How would that affect your choice of vehicle? These are all important questions that can really only be answered by Presidential Candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Unfortunately, RFK hasn’t said what make or model of vehicle he was driving when he dumped a bear in Central Park back in 2014, though he does specify that it was a van. That gives us somewhere to start. Is a van a good vehicle for hauling a dead bear? There are a few things to consider.
Payload:
You’re going to want a vehicle with enough payload. A full-grown black bear weighs as much as 700 pounds, though RFK did specify that the bear he’d picked up was a young one. You don’t really want to be limited to just baby bears, though, right? Should the moment arise that you’ve witnessed a vehicle hit and kill a full-sized bear, you wouldn’t want all of that good meat to go to waste, right? No, you’d better have at least a thousand pounds of payload available to haul it safely.
Smell:
To me, the worst part of hauling around a dead animal is that it isn’t going to smell fresh for very long. Wild animals already kind of smell bad anyway, and worse still when they’re in the throes of rigor mortis. A hit from a car going fast enough to kill a bear is probably going to leave the corpse bloodied and possibly emptied of excrement. There’s not much worse than the smell of old blood and shit in a hot car.
Load Liftover Height:
Bears are heavy fuckers, so you’ll want something with a low load floor and low liftover height, because the higher you have to lift, the more you’re going to strain at it. A big tall truck or SUV is going to be a non-starter here, I think.
Conclusion:
If it were me, I’d go with the Ford Maverick. With the tailgate down, the lift-in height is just 30 inches. The separate bed means you can haul a dead bear without smelling a dead bear. And it’s got 1,500 pounds of payload capacity, so if you saw two dead bears you could pick both of them up in one trip! Plus it’s available as a hybrid, so it can creep along quietly in the middle of the night when you’re dumping in Central Park on your way to the airport.
