Roadkill on the menu? Not without a few caveats

Jeremy Vander Meer had his first experience with salvaging a roadkill moose soon after he moved to Alaska nearly five years ago.

“It was pretty easy, actually,” he said in an interview with

The Canadian Press. “It was kind of perfect.”

The 31-year-old, who grew up in Oshawa, Ont., said it happened in the winter, it wasn’t too cold or too dark and there was some snow on the ground.

A pregnant cow moose had been hit by a car and had to be shot by state troopers, who called the next person on a roadkill applicants list. In this case, it was a friend of Vander Meer so he and his partner, Joanna Young, headed to the scene to help clean up the moose.

“We helped finish cutting it up and took it to the car and drove home,” said Vander Meer. “After that, it’s a couple evenings of butchering it and severing it into steaks and cubes and hamburger, and packaging it up and freezing it.

“Everybody takes their cut, depending on how many hours you worked.”

Eating roadkill is quite common in the northern state where wildlife troopers maintain the list of people who are interested in salvaging one of the hundreds of moose and other game hit by vehicles every year.

In Oregon, a law went into effect Jan. 1 that allows people to harvest and eat roadkill. About 20 other states allow people to take meat from the animals.

The laws on collecting roadkill vary across Canada. The one constant is that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency doesn’t allow the meat to be sold.

Ontario has some legislation on roadkill.

“In most cases, you may keep these carcasses without approval,” Jolanta Kowalski, a spokeswoman for the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, said in an email. “But certain species must be registered online … before you can keep them for personal use.

“This includes all large mammals, birds of prey and fur-bearing mammals.”

She said no one is allowed to buy or sell roadkill, although there are exceptions for pelts sold by licensed trappers.

“Anyone who is attempting to retrieve road-killed wildlife is reminded to do it only in a safe and responsible manner,” she said.