On Eating Roadkill Meat in UK

I remember the first time I plucked a rabbit off the road and brought it home to skin and gut in the bathtub.

I wanted it to be a surprise for the kids so before I got to the front door, I felt for its soft ears and pulled it out. It was different from when I'd grabbed it off the road and thrown it into the footwell of the passenger seat. Now, it felt like holding up a large water balloon - heavier than I expected and somehow volatile.

I knocked and waited.

Scrambling footsteps, voices, and the door opened.

They stared at me, then at the rabbit swaying by its ears with one eye unnaturally bulging.

That night we gathered around the bathtub with a kitchen knife and the rabbit and emptied its insides into our shiny white plastic bathtub. The smell was horrid: a weird merging of rabbit guts and bath salts. The conclusion was half a soup bowl of edible meat and a carrier bag of skin and entrails that I didn't know how to dispose of.

We fried up the little pieces of meat with chilli, salt and olive oil and it was okay. The satisfaction, however, of finding and eating wild meat that would otherwise have been pound into the tarmac by hundreds of cars, and wasted, was immense.

Getting worthwhile meat from roadkill in UK isn't impossible or even ridiculous, but you definitely need a good amount of enthusiasm. Like my friend's wife who once recounted a story to me of when she found a roadkill deer on a local road that many of her colleagues drove.

It was home-time and colleagues and parents of her children's friends would soon been trundling past. Still, she pulled over just in front of the deer and popped the boot. Hearing a vehicle turning the corner at the bottom of the hill she quickly went for the back legs and dragged it towards the car.

But, she explained, they are much heavier than you'd expect.

She hauled the back end onto the ledge of the boot whilst wrapping her other arm under the neck and flipping it in. She was still scrambling to squeeze in the last hoof when the car zoomed past.

"Victory!" She said.

As well as enthusiasm, you also need a good sharp knife (I'd recommend something like this) and a good guide (like this).

You will soon learn what is worth collecting and what you should leave. If you drive a route every day and a dead animal suddenly appears at the side of the road one morning, you know it is as least as fresh as when you last drove that road. If it's pummelled into the tarmac obviously don't bother. And if there's been a big hit to the internal organs and everything has ruptured inside, the meat (muscle) is likely to have spoilt. You'll soon know when you cut it open.

Anyway, after a few attempts with roadkill rabbits and pheasants, I found my own deer. Jackpot!

Since then I have found a decent enough roadkill deer to collect, prepare and eat roughly once each year. Each time, I have discarded about 50% of the meat because it was spoilt or because I didn't know what I was doing. Even so, I would go away with at least two large dinner's worth of wild venison for my family of ten. I think that's pretty cool.

Recently, however, we've had an upgrade. Our local landowner is culling the deer population, so we're getting freshly shot deer delivered straight to our garage!

Most recently, I had a couple days holiday and we decided to skip the butchering process and see if we could build an earth oven in the garden to cook the deer whole.

And here's what happened...