Years ago, I worked for a homeless shelter. We would get poached animals, roadkill deer etc. We just had to pay for the butcher.
FYI, for you city folk out there, we aren’t talking maggot infested. These are fresh, identifiable sources. And as far as the animal being at “ambient temperature” that tells me you never dressed or butchered your own meats. We used to do all of that with venison, and our beef. It was hung in the shed and we worked on it til it was gone. Most of the time it was out there around 3 days. It was fine, never had any spoilage issues with it.
You’re a good person for helping feed and working for a homeless shelter. That’s very commendable.
I’ll add maggots can infest a dead animal amazingly fast in the heat we have. During winter not as bad.
Ticks are bad on deer this time of year. You don’t wanna mess with deer covered in ticks.
I’m failing to see the difference between this and what you get in the grocery store. It’s all the same basic process; commercial slaughterhouses just do it on an industrial scale.
Yeah, look, maybe you are a man named Jed-A poor mountaineer, who Barely kept his family fed. And that bear means a family that isnt hungry for days and days. I can accept that.
But not if you are a filthy rich kennedy. Then you are just a raving nutjob.
Oregon has roadkill laws. If you or someone else, doesn’t have to be you, hits a deer or elk, you can keep the animal and then you go online later and fill out a form. If it has antlers you can’t keep them and must turn them in to ODFW.
Washington’s appear to be more strict than most states - only elk and deer can be salvaged, and in certain counties deer are off-limits due to federal law, and they must be tested for chronic wasting disease. I don’t see anything in our state about unwanted meat going to food banks.
There’s a country town an hour or so from here that does an annual bear stew festival, but this year they had to use beef because they couldn’t acquire any bear. I assume they get it from hunters in the years when they do have it.
https://dnr.wisconsin.gov/topic/hunt/donation.html
I’m sure some (a lot? most?) of the money comes from the State, but the rest appears to come from donations of money from the public and donations of their time by butchers.
Someone upthread mentioned that butchers had to donate at least half of the meat. I could see that being part of the deal. If you butcher a donated deer, you can keep some amount for yourself to sell and recover some of the expenses of butchering it, ISTM that would be a good incentive to keep the program moving.
I don’t know all of the details, but Pennsylvania definitely does allow the motorist to keep the meat from a struck deer. Probably if your acquaintance had called the state police and filled out the paperwork, he’d have been fine.
Maybe, but IME the time delay would have been outrageous. I’ve mentioned the time I had a paralyzed deer that had been hit by a car in my parking lot at work.
Game Commission could have someone stop in a couple days. State Police responded, but he apologetically explained he could not shoot it.
My understanding (gleaned from a former employee was in the roadkill-collecting business for years) is that a lot of roadkill goes to rendering plants, and is used for soap, cosmetics and such stuff.
Met a Wildlife officer who’s job was to collect ripe roadkill and use it to bait mountain lion traps so they could be tagged and evaluated. He said he was asking for a transfer to the raptor program. Taking the temperature (anally) of a sedated but very pissed off cat? Yeah, no.
As a hunter, I’ve had a couple of occurences where I couldn’t find a deer I’d shot until the next day. Granted that’s typically at cooler times of the year, but I’ve found animals 8 or so hours later in mid-to-high 40s overnight temperature. If the gut hasn’t been punctured, it’s no big deal. If the gut has been punctured you take more time thouroghly cleaning the cavity, and cut away any meat that might have been compromised.
That being said, I wouldn’t stop to pick up any animal where I didn’t have a reasonable idea of time frame - if I run down the road to the little store, and find a new kill on my way back home, it’ll be safe. If I hit it myself (one-time occurrence, more to that, see below), I definitely know it’s fresh.
Oregon just passed the roadkill laws a few years ago, I hit a deer about 15 years ago, called the State Police (their senior troopers are game enforcement). They told me I couldn’t take it, and, because it was a deer, they wouldn’t take it to a food bank. If it had been an elk, they would have come and gotten it. Probably 75 pounds of clean meat went to waste then, and the county had to spend money to come collect it. Today it would have gone to a good cause, and wouldn’t have cost the county a cent.
ETA: If you’re in the backcountry hunting the deer or elk season, which are roughly a week long, with your buddies, no one is leaving until everyone’s had their chance to make a kill, or the season ends. If one is taken early, bring it back to camp, skin it, put it in a big game bag, and it hangs from a tree until time to come home. Could be a week. A couple of days with an animal in the fall or winter is no big deal. A little more important to do it quickly in the summer.
As a city mouse who did live a few years at the very edge of suburbia I’ll offer a thought about another other side to the equation that I don’t believe has been mentioned upthread.
The places where fresh roadkill are common are exurban to rural places. The kind of places where the folks who live there, be they indigent, comfy, or just gittin’ by, will be used to recreationally hunting and fishing. And also used to eating (most of) whatever they bring home.
The charity food pantry in my current highly urban locale would find very few takers for roadkill venison. A charity food pantry out in ruralia 75 miles from here would probably find every single patron has eaten venison regularly and happily. And would welcome some more for free.
Bottom line:
Supply and demand are geographically correlated. Which makes for a good and efficient market.
When hunting deer, normally ('round these parts anyhow), you kill the animal, then dress it, then don’t normally get around to the butchering for more than “several hours”. My dad would usually hang the deer in the garage for a day (or more) before butchering.
I have eaten a lot of roadkill in my time, I personally would actually expect very few issues (with a modicum of common sense applied, anyway).
This is normal around here also. Would only be a problem if the weather’s really hot; in any sort of cool weather, it improves the quality of the meat. I don’t know where the temperature cutoff is.
I may be an outlier here, but every hunter I’ve encountered (quite a few) never take their kill to a professional butcher/processor. They do it themselves.
I have cut and wrapped 1000s of packages of wild meat.
I think there might be one place/guy that does professionally butchered deer, around here.
If he hasn’t died or something.
It just isn’t done.
*
BTW, You don’t have to be poor, indigent, a hick, live rurally, MAGA, or uneducated to enjoy venison.
In fact, I hear it’s highly prized and upscale restaurant eats.
Don’t you go there and order it tho’. It might be roadkill(it’s really farmed🤭)
Come to my house you can eat venison, as much as you like. For free.
Interesting. I’m not disputing your lived experience.
When I first moved to the edge of the exurbs of St. Louis MO I was mystified at all the little concrete block shops labeled “Deer Processing”. Seemed like every 3-street small town had one. If the town was big enough to have a church, it was big enough to have a “deer processor”. Whatever the hell that was. This was pre-internet, so learning this sort of local trivia wasn’t so easy back then. This is also prime white-tail country.
I eventually asked somebody in one of those towns who looked at me like I was the dumbest rock he’d met in years. “They butcher hunted deer into steaks and chops and sausage and stuff.” D’oh! Color me edumacated.
I’m sure there are businesses that do it, but there are also plenty of hunters who do it themselves, too. In my grandparents’ home town, a hand-cranked meat grinder was a standard kitchen tool.