Well squirrrel dodging behavior makes a lot of sense. To a squirrel, anything large and fast bearing down on them WANTS TO EAT THEM. That is a reasonable assumption. So they run one way and then swap ends and take off in the opposite direction. It works great if something is TRYING to catch you.

As we all know, that dodging behavior makes avoiding squirrels with our bikes .... challenging.

I was in a paceline a while back. One of our riders, dodged a squirrel. Edwina (an extremely proficient rider) chided him for doing so. She said that you should just run down the squirrel rather than dodging and putting another cyclist at risk. Besides, Edwina claimed that you could run over squirrels with impunity. Although, it must be hard on the squirrels.

I was out riding side by side with a friend of mine. A squirrel dodged her and went right under my front wheel. It got sucked up by the wheel and literally chopped in half by the spokes and fork. Gosh it was nasty and gross. I stopped and sprayed off the resulting squirrel debris from my tubes, legs, feet, and wheel with my water bottle. Edwina was right, you can run them over. But I would prefer not to.

By the way, I think that squirrels are cute. However, they are rodents with a high reproductive rate.