Do you scavenge?

Hello,

I have thought recently about scavenging as a source of food. At times I have seen carcasses left by owls or dead squirrels, deer, woodchucks, etc. along the roadside and thought about taking some back, but was too squeamish and maybe it wasn’t the right time. Today I went on a walk intentionally looking for the first time for a scene of carnage that I might be able to benefit from…but didn’t find much. I had hoped to follow coyotes or hawks, and see if they left anything, but the coyotes were mostly listening for voles to pounce on judging from the tracks, and the hawk went straight over an impassible brushy area. In the end I contented myself with some cattail rhizomes.

Maybe it was a silly way to go about it..that is why I am asking. Have you scavenged before? Do you have any ways of finding carnage in the depths of winter?

Up here there is a road kill list people can sign up for. When a moose is struck on the highway someone is called on the list to go to the scene and salvage the meat.

You need to be travelling really early unless it's freezing cold- animals damaged in a collision usually have leaks and bruising which will adversely affect meat really quickly. You need something to put a carcass in to protect your vehicle from blood and other liquids, and you need water and a towel for your hands. I occasionally stop for unusual claws or skulls, hides or sinew, but not for food. I'd eat roadkill if I needed to but thus far it hasn't come to that. A couple of weeks ago I got a phone call from a woman in the city asking for a donation to a charity. I told her that my wife and I already give what we can and live almost entirely on road kill and lawn clippings. She got a chuckle out of that- but no money  

I have not, but I have family and friends who do under certain circumstances.

Generally, if something is stuck on the road and they know how long it has been down they may scavenge what is good out of the carcass. I'm talking bigger game animals such as bear and deer. Sometimes the harvest is quarters of meat that haven't been torn up or sometimes it is just backstraps.

I lived in deer country for quite a while and I think the general understanding was if you saw it happen, you could conceivably use it, otherwise it's better for the animals to eat (in one town there was a wolf sanctuary that would pick up roadkill to feed their animals if you called it in).

Even if you do get to it immediately, an animal that died in a collision may not be "prime eating". It happened to me one summer in college when I worked at a FFA camp in upstate NY and hit a deer-- we dressed and ate it, but my hunter friends explained that it had to be jerked (or similarly spiced up) or it wouldn't be worth eating.

I've picked up several roadkill deer for dinner. A few tips.....
1. Make sure it's fresh, and only pick them up in the cold, unless you actually know for a fact when it got hit (such as a friend calling you to tell you about the deer that just ruined their car). I drive 40 miles of highway 4 days a week for work, so I get a good idea of when they're fresh. Less than 12 hours is ideal, 24 hours max and only when it's below freezing.
2. Take your time to look them over. It's free meat, you don't have to take it.
3. Leaking from the mouth=probably okay. Leaking from the booty=stay away.
4. Wiggle the legs to see what's broken. It'll give you a good idea of the internal damage. Broken front legs=popped lungs/heart/stomach-okay. Broken back legs=poop all over the inside, it's ruined. Leave it. Sometimes, if you're lucky, you'll find one that just got hit in the head and the whole thing is good.
5. Use the gutless method when butchering. Videos are available on youtube. Regardless of external damage, it's not gonna be pretty on the inside.
6. Be selective of the meat you take. Again, it's free. You're not losing anything if you decide against eating it. Anything that's bruised or stinky gets tossed.
7. Find out the laws on this beforehand. Around here, you have to call the sherriff or game warden and get a salvage permit. Technically, you're supposed to do it before collecting the carcass, but I've never had an issue. They're just glad it's gone.
8. Don't be afraid of a farting dead deer. They're full of fermenting plant matter, and they're constantly producing gas even when they're dead.

I've made many a meal from roadkill..mostly deer and also wild pigs when I lived in California, plus other occasional odd bits like a wild turkey once.  Also, when I lived in Georgia, local hunters would often take only the prime bits of a deer, like the back straps and the hind legs, and throw the rest of the animal out along our dirt road...this happened so frequently that I would listen for the sound of shots in the morning on the timber company land across the way, and then take a ride out up and down the road a few hours later...this yielded fresh meat more than once.  

I just harvested a roadkill deer for the first time. The meat seems very fresh, i’ll probably cook some tonight.

One arguably safer alternative is to give the (non-bird) carcasses to your chickens.  Increased protein means increased egg production.

I looked up the guy in this short post and read through his website a while back. Interesting stuff. He lives off of scavenging and I think he lived off of scavenging as his only source of food for a year, including road killed animals.

https://www.thelunaticfarmer.com/blog/12/4/2019/ultra-minimalist

This thread is awesome and inspiring for someone like me who has went thru some years of vegan, vegetarian, back to eating meat, "sometimes" eating meat, only eating it if it's offered, and overall just a concious conscience mess inside about the whole thing.

Once I swore that if I ever ate meat again, it would have to be me as the killer and the prep. So then, I learned that speaking and judging too much can easily make oneself a hypocrite.

Would be good practice, and good service at the very least to fetch a roadkill and learn something with good intentions, and I guess while the blood will literally be on my hands, metaphorically it won't be.

Cole Tyler wrote:This thread is awesome and inspiring for someone like me who has went thru some years of vegan, vegetarian, back to eating meat, "sometimes" eating meat, only eating it if it's offered, and overall just a concious conscience mess inside about the whole thing.

Once I swore that if I ever ate meat again, it would have to be me as the killer and the prep. So then, I learned that speaking and judging too much can easily make oneself a hypocrite.

Would be good practice, and good service at the very least to fetch a roadkill and learn something with good intentions, and I guess while the blood will literally be on my hands, metaphorically it won't be.

Thank you for mentioning! This is my interest in scavenging. Right now I am vegetarian but find that for some reason I have digestive problems if I don’t eat some milk or eggs. These are not anything practical for me to get from the wild, and I don’t feel like making an enemy of the coyotes. So finding some animal food that is both wild and non-violent would be quite helpful.

I wonder on the other hand if I could replace all my animal foods with fungal ones. It would require more experimentation in cultivation as our fungal (and generally forest) ecology here has been declining for decades. I haven’t paid attention about digestion yet. But maybe it is a case of digestive adaptation and if I were to try more consistently I could go without animal foods.

Maieshe Ljin wrote:I wonder on the other hand if I could replace all my animal foods with fungal ones.

Probably not, unless you take some kind of industrial dietary supplements. As far as I know, fungi don't contain any vitamin B12, for instance.

We have chickens and use the eggs when they are laying in season.  Occasionally we will take a rooster for food, by in an odd twist, we 'scavenge' them more often then having to kill them ourselves.  Our meat consumption is pretty low and is mostly satisfied by vegan meat alternatives, but if we find a recent dead rooster from a fight between two of them or if a new dog addition still has not learned to leave them alone and kills one, we will eat those if in good shape.  There are some good articles out there in recent years on just how much meat consumption in humans may have relied more on scavenging than on hunting, which is interesting.

B12:   Worth noting is the potential for microbial fermentation to produce vitamin B12 as a naturally-sourced supplement for vegan diets.

Open access article on B12 production -->  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5282855/