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Has anyone here ever eaten roadkill they've found? Most of us come across it quite often.
I know a few people that have done it but I'm not one of them. I suppose as a means of self-sufficiency and preparedness it'd be another arrow in your survival quiver.
I don't imagine there's not too many dead animals you couldn't eat. An endless supply of protein.
Think of the money this English guy has saved over 30 years of not buying groceries and canned foods for preps!
Rabbits, badgers and pheasants are my most common finds. Rabbit is actually quite bland. Fox is far tastier; there's never any fat on it, and it's subtle, with a lovely texture, firm but soft. It's much more versatile than beef, and has a salty, mineral taste rather like gammon. Frogs and toads taste like chicken and are great in stir-fries. Rat, which is nice and salty like pork, is good in a stir-fry, too – I'll throw in celery, onion, peppers and, in autumn, wild mushrooms I've collected. Badger is not nice and hedgehog is hideous.
To answer the question(s): YES, I've eaten fresh roadkill, and winter roadkill that I knew froze before anything horrible starting manifesting. Moose (in AK) and deer (L48) being the most common; but also quail, pheasant, and grouse that get clipped. Most smaller critters get smooshed, which can corrupt the meat, so they aren't usually safe to eat unless you barely winged them and had to get out of the truck/car to finish them off.
For fresh roadkill, no special circumstances are necessary... fresh meat is fresh meat and it's smart not waste it (not to mention illegal not to harvest some animals in some states!)
I might eat questionable roadkill if I were hungry enough, and/or if the carcass didn't smell really disgusting... but I'd be sure to freeze it AND cook the living heck out of it first. In any case, if it were a decent pelt animal and the skin was in mostly good condition, I'd probably skin it and keep the carcass for dogs or the traps, at the very least get the carcass off the roadway so there weren't more incidents with scavengers.
When I lived in Carmel you could not walk a mile without seeing raccoon road kill. One trip to Trader Joe's and you could count a dozen. Carmel raccoon are 90% infected with raccoon ringworm that has no cure.
I nearly hit a deer 30 years ago, hit my bumper. I stopped and looked for it, if I had I would have gutted it and thrown it in the truck.
Most of the road kill I see anymore is a squirrel or rabbit, a few skunk.
Several years back, I hit a deer while traveling through Connecticut (right next to Rhode Island). My truck was dented, so I waited for the police. I was told that I had one of two choices: I could keep the deer, OR the state would repair my truck. I chose to keep the deer...fixing the truck was easier than hunting down some more venison!
I don't know if they still have that policy in CT. They sure don't here, in RI. But that was some mighty good venison, without having to fire a shot! The truck was older and the bent fender just needed pulling out some for it to run fine. So that's the way it went! YUMM!
So fess up: Do you eat roadkill? Would you? Under what circumstances (beyond SHTF)?
I'll confess.
I did about 30 years ago. I'd gone small game hunting and came upon a prairie chicken laying on the side of the road. It was still warm and limp. No obvious damage, so I thought it must have flown into the side of a car that had just passed by.
Took it home, put it the crock pot with some onions, carrots, and taters.
When I was a teenager I used to skin and tan raccoon, fox and badger pelts that I'd find as roadkill, provided they were reasonably fresh and not mutilated. I wouldn't eat game that I didn't kill or see be killed though. I'll only stoop so low...
I have taken home and eaten a few road kills. I prefer to do it my self or see the animal killed - not that I would ever hit any animal on purpose. The reason that I want to see it killed is that I prefer “head” shots with the vehicles. When a car or truck runs over and punctures the guts you have a stinky mess.
That smell permeates the meat. I have seen dogs that would not eat some of these road kills.
One funny story about road kill was one of my father’s in the early 1950’s. He used to own housekeeping cottages and would pickup his tourist from the local train station. On one occasion he had a young honeymoon couple from NYC. On the way back to the cottages a large doe ran in front of his old car with and extended front bumper. It got trapped under the bumper. My father jumped out and grabbed the large stillson wrench from the trunk and finished the deer off. He then roped the carcass to the front bumper. He never heard a peep out of the honeymooners for the whole week. He tried to offer them some fresh deer meat - but they declined. They left the cottage spotless. I guess some city slickers just have a hard time adapting!
A guy I know is married to a person we called mountain girl after Garcia's ex wife, and she spends all day every day in the most rural county in Ohio collecting fur bearing road kill and skins and sews things out of the beautiful furs. Raccoon blankets and capes, beaver, rabbit, etc. Really beautiful stuff. She gets hundred of animals a week, most of which end up as pig feed.
A purposely killed carcass is much nicer than a road killed one. There is a lot of bruising of the meat and the bones are crunched not to mention (as someone did previously) what spilled entrails does to the flavor. We have gotten a few road kills, but they were generally still warm and feral pigs are fairly large, too, so there are usually areas on the carcass which are salvageable. The dogs do end up with a lot of the roadkill, though. Which at least saves on dog food costs. I kinda like the idea of Wilson513's friend, gather the roadkill and use it for pig feed and then eat the pig.
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Roadkill! Do You, Would You?
