⊠I usually do not touch anything to do with PETA, but I feel compelled to inform everyone that there are, in fact, legal frameworks in some places for claiming dibs on roadkill, either as salvage or placed on a waiting list to receive it when it becomes available. Hereâs a map of US laws on the subject. The vast majority of states require a permit, or permission from the relevant police department.
In areas where thereâs state oversight, it helps ensure that people donât poach and lie about it. States and municipalities with roadkill regulations require people to take the whole carcass from the site of death or from state custody, usually after an audit or an on-site inspection of the carcass.
Some municipalities donate the carcass to food banks. Most people use it as a windfall that will be butchered and shared with others, or frozen and kept for months or even years. Moose sometimes get hit, and they are hecking big.
Do people eat the roadkill raw? Iâd guess probably not. However, the Alaska Department of Public Safety does have this to say on their website:
I love that Texas is the only place where you absolutely cannot take roadkill.
A lot of herbivores are opportunistic carnivores: theyâll eat carrion, bird eggs, or bones if they canât find anything else or need more of a particular nutrient than plants can provide. Deer will absolutely eat roadkill! And theyâre still herbivores!
I also donât daydream about eating grass fresh off the lawn, or raw eggs in their shells, or algae. Animals eat a lot of things that we humans find gross.
Texas roadkill will kill you back. Donât touch it.
Texas has some of the worst waste mismanagement around. Only G-d and maybe an angel know what that roadkill last ate, which could mean exposure to any number of carcinogens from pesticides, or machine, or animal, or chemical waste, and an additional unknown number of disease pathogens, which most of our medical facilities will misdiagnose or straight up refuse to treat.
So, no. You cannot, should not, please DO NOT eat Texas roadkill.
Note, please do Not call 911. Call the non-emergency line
So the actual reason itâs illegal to pick up roadkill in Texas has less to do with the potential toxicity of the animal, and more to do with preventing poaching and later, leprosy!
Back in 2007, Texas made it illegal to pick up roadkill after the Department of Wildlife reported on an illegal trade in endangered Texas reptiles and reptile parts, especially highly endangered Indigo Snakes. Prior to House Bill 12 being passed, it was illegal to collect roadkilled game species like deer, elk and Javelina (Because people would kill them without permits and then claim âit ran right out in front of me!â and itâs a pain to prosecute that and highly enviornmentally damaging). Now in 2007, the same thing was happening with Texasâ endangered bords and reptiles, with people illegally hunting and selling the parts of "roadkillâ snakes and birds. So while not the most elegant solution, the Texas state legislature made it illegal to collect ANY roadkilled wildlife for any purpose, so that people selling endangered animals and animal parts could be prosecuted more easily. This has had a positive impact on the populations of many small vertebrates, including the Texas Indigo Snake!
Now, this isnât a particularly nuanced law and people were considering repealing it until 2016, when there was an outbreak of Leprosy in Florida caused by people exposed to the bodily fluids of nine-banded armadillos after removing roadkill armadillos from their cars without proper protection. Approximately 1 in 6 Armadillos are naturally infected with the bacteria that causes Leprosy, and are also the most common roadkill vertebrate animal in Texas. Since touching a splattered Armadillo is apparently a great way to contract leprosy, Texas has decided to keep itâs No-Touching-The-Roadkill policy in place for the time being.
TL;DR: Youâre not allowed to eat the roadkill in Texas because some people were using it as a cover for poaching and also itâs a great way to get leprosy.
@no-visitors does bring up a good point about wildlife toxicity though- While the southeast US has some pretty bad places for pollution, even my environmentally-concious Colorado still has exposed-uranium mine shafts and places with enormous amounts of cyanide left over from the gold rush. Wild animals can carry any number of diseases, parasites and toxic chemicals within them, so you need to be extremely careful with meat youâre not 100% sure of the origins of.
@katy-l-wood you know more about game processing than I do, how would someone go about safely selecting and processing a roadkill animal for human consumption? I imagine youâd only want certain species and as fresh as possible, but are there places to get it tested for disease or chemical contamination?
