One serious problem that all the developed nations are facing today is death and injuries due to road accidents. The collision of an animal with the vehicle on the highway is one such big issue, which leads to such road accidents. In this paper, a simple and a low-cost approach for automatic animal detection on highways for preventing animal-vehicle collision using computer vision techniques are proposed. A method for finding the distance of the animal in real-world units from the camera mounted vehicle is also proposed. The proposed system is trained on more than 2200 images consisting of positive and negatives images and tested on various video clips of animals on highways with varying vehicle speed. As per the two-second rule, our proposed method can alert the driver when the vehicle speed is up to 35 km/h. Beyond this speed, though the animal gets detected correctly, the driver does not get enough time to prevent a collision. An overall accuracy of almost 82.5% is achieved regarding detection using our proposed method.