roadkill venison

[g4ghb]

On the weekend, chatting to my brother in law (a chef) I discovered he had recently hit and killed a dear. Now he has boasted for ages he would dress and serve one if he ever did it but apparently has been advised not to by a stalker as the meat is tainted by the trauma??

Is this right or is my gut feeling that he is all talk and no action as I have suspected for a long time?

 

[robin wood]

I used to work at Hatfield Forest in Essex and we were regularly called out to scrape up road kill fallow. Sometimes it was indeed traumatised and inedible, sometimes it was perfectly good. It will not do you any harm, just the meat has a strong taste almost like liver caused I understand by the release of lots of adrenalin etc into the muscle.

Dear that suffered a quick death without too much bruising tended to be better but the quick easy way to tell was to cut a quick steak out of a hunch or saddle and fry it up before you waste too much time on butchering.

 

[pothunter]

Hi g4ghb

Official advise is not to eat road kill as the meat could be contaminated with burst intestine or splintered bone. However as is often the case a bit of common sense will soon indicate what is and what is not salvageable.

Its pretty much as Robin says take a few choice cuts and disregard the rest. Don't bother with bucks or stags during the rut the meat can be pretty nasty.

Not definitive but the subject has been covered before.

Pothunter.

 

[C_Claycomb]

I have heard that deer belong to the crown and that it is questionable whether you are ever legally permitted to pick them up, but it is not something I am sure about and my personal feeling is that police have better things to do than chase down people picking up road kill. However, I am certain that if you are the driver responsible for having hit an animal, you are not meant to pick it up yourself. This is to prevent people using it as an excuse for mowing down wildlife for fun and profit.

From all other aspects, the deer that you have hit yourself is going to be the least likely to cause you problems. A colleague of mine hit a fallow a few years ago and mentioned it to me the following day. He did not think the deer was badly hurt since he thought it ran off. I went to investigate just to practice tracking. In fact, the deer was about 2 metres from the road in a clump of trees and had clearly died very shortly after impact. Since I knew when it was hit, that the driver hadn’t called any vets and that the carcass was invisible until you were next to it, I did not have to worry about a vet having shot it full of barbiturates. The intestines had got punctured, which wouldn’t have mattered much if I had found it the night before, but a day of lying on its side had tainted all the haunch on the downhill side. The other haunch, the shoulders and the backstrap were all fine. I didn’t even try to gut the animal, just took what I could without puncturing anything unfortunate. The meat didn’t taste particularly strong.

 

[Buckshot]

As Chris said you need to be carefull with deer roadkill
If a vet is called they will kill it with an injection.
There seems to be some argument as to whether the drug is still toxic after cooking, however I'd rather not be the person to find out!

I think the best advice is only pick it up if you know when, how, where etc it was hit. You know that vets haven't been called and the carcass isn't in a bad condition.
If in doubt - avoid
Anything else is risking it IMO

Cheers

Mark