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Never Eating Roadkill . . . Again

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There are plenty of jokes about eating roadkill, but it's a real thing, and it's regulated:  You have to apply for a roadkill salvage permit.

If an animal gets hit by a car, it will typically lie by the road decomposing until scavengers drag it off, the department of transportation removes it, or traffic compresses it into a smear of hairy tar.  If the animal was in good health, that's a potential waste of good food—provided the meat didn't get destroyed in the collision.

A few years ago a neighbor of mine saw a large deer that got hit by a car limp away then jump into an alfalfa field.  The deer soon after succombed to its injuries and died in the field.  It had been an otherwise healthy deer, so my neighbor obtained a roadkill salvage permit and permisson from the field owner to retrieve the deer.

Our neighbor was kind enough to give us a slab of raw meat from his roadkill, which my wife examined carefully for road damage, then she cooked it up.

It was our first time eating roadkill, and we made tortillas out of it.  Not once, but twice I bit down on gravel and felt it scraping on my teeth.  I had just recently damaged a tooth on a popcorn kernel, so I was extra unthrilled about the experience.

I will never eat roadkill again, simply because I don't want to risk ruining my teeth on gravel.