ANALYSIS: Its guts spilling out on the pavement, one of the latest of the victims of Alaska North Slope crude died a painful death along Goldenview Drive on Tuesday. There was nothing I could do to help. No amount of detergent was going to wash away what oil had done to this poor, hapless porcupine.

There was no saving it after an automobile tire -- a petroleum product, turned by a gasoline-fired internal combustion engine -- squashed its abdomen against the asphalt, yet another petroleum product, and ruptured his internal organs.

This is how Alaska oil usually kills.

Forget the Exxon Valdez oil spill and all the hype that surrounded it. The spill was nothing. It was insignificant. In the grand scheme of things, it's damn near meaningless.

About 50,000 animal carcasses were collected over the course of the spill. Nobody knows how many animals actually died. Some of the carcasses recovered were obviously those of animals dead of winter kill before being oiled. Some, possibly many, of the carcasses of oil-killed animals were never found; they sank forever out of sight before anyone had a chance to recover them.

Fifty thousand dead animals might seem like a lot, but even if you took that times 10 to account for all the sunken carcasses plus more, it would be a pittance. The damage done by spilled oil is nothing when compared to the havoc wreaked by refined oil.

My back-of-the-envelope calculations indicate North Slope crude has probably accounted for the death of something on the order of 14 billion animals, give or take a billion or two. That's right; 14 billion. With a "B."

Go ahead and scoff. Sit there in your smug little I've-never-run-over-a-squirrel world, slurping your double mocha coffee delivered by a truck that never ran over anything either, and shake your head and say, "Well, that just can't be.''

But before you dismiss all of this as impossible, let's do the numbers:

The trans-Alaska oil pipeline has now moved about 14 billion barrels of crude from the North Slope to the Port of Valdez to be loaded onto tankers for transport to refineries in the Lower 48. All but about 11 million barrels of that crude has made it safely to market. The 11 million that got spilled is such a small percentage of 1 billion, let alone 14 billion, that we can simply ignore it in the calculations that follow.

A 42-gallon barrel of Alaska crude produces about 20 gallons of gasoline, give or take a few gallons one way or another. Forget the slop in the math there, too. The numbers here are big enough that if we generalize and say Alaska oil has to date produced about 280 billion gallons of gas, we're in the right ballpark. And now if we assume the average American vehicle to be a 10 miles-per-gallon gas guzzler, those 280 billion gallons of gas account for 2.8 trillion miles of driving. Of course, that figure is probably much larger thanks to environmentally conscious (or cheap) Americans who drive high-mileage vehicles, which means they can cover more ground per gallon and increase their chances of making roadkill of the innocent animals,

And roadkill is us. Roadkill is, as that Goldenview porky indicated, common in Alaska, and it is everywhere Outside. Driving across Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois this summer I couldn't hardly go 400 yards without encountering the carcass of a road-killed raccoon, skunk or deer. In Michigan alone, 64,451 deer died as road kill in 1997. That's only the deer. The state doesn't seem to keep count for 'coons, skunk, robins, squirrels, ducks, etc. Suffice to say are a lot of animals dying out there. A study in Australia calculated the road kill for reptiles alone at 5.5 million critters a year.