Is roadkill a viable meat source?
Presumably following the maxim of “waste not, want not”, utilising roadkill has become a trend. In the UK, top forager Fergus Drennan (www.wildmanwildfood.com) has taken to holding roadkill suppers. In Australia one Les Hall published a handy guidebook to spotting deceased species on the road. And in Canada designer Amy Nugent has taken things a step further, “harvesting” highway hits from bears and moose (what you might call megafauna) through to porcupines to fashion a celebrated jewellery range (www.roadquill.ca) that includes bracelets and tie slides. I’m not completely blind to the ethical reasoning here. The first rule of sustainability is that humanity should use abundance, and there is sadly an abundance of roadkill; at one famed US junction (Highway 27 at Lake Jackson near Tallahassee, Florida), a turtle has a 98.86% chance of being squished, while on our roads the People’s Trust for Endangered Species (PTES) estimates that 1-2% of the national population of hedgehogs, around
