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Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

Why not decompose the carcass if you're doing this for ecological reasons? Encouraging consumption just makes it seem like a cruel not-solution for the poverty problems in this state.

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In areas where people are hungry, hitting a deer and being forced to leave it to rot on the side of the road is a real tragedy.

One deer is enough meat for a whole family for many months.

Why not raise pigs or chickens, for a simple and more reliable meat source than chasing deer with a car? If hitting a deer is needed to feed a family, then all the people who don't get lucky starve to death.

That is done. If you live in a rural area, hitting a deer is not uncommon. If you take it home to eat it though, you're poaching. A game ranger told us on a class trip one time after a student asked about hitting a deer if you could eat it. He said, "If you hit a deer, call us. We know lots of hungry families, but don't load it up and taking it home. That's illegal."

last time i did the math an average deer offsets something like $425 worth of beef, and that was a conservative estimate. i know road kill tends to have a bit of damage, depending on the impact area, in any case thats a lot of meat to waste. Elk, are even more meat too.

The hardest part is the timing, it really needs to be a collaborative effort between motorists, an agency (like) CHP, and a number of charities that are able to collect the animal quickly.

I remember hitting a deer as a kid. My parents called the cops because it was hurt but not dead, when the cops showed up they called a charity, killed the dear and fed some people in need. Kinda makes sense IMHO.

A lot of people like wild game. And why let it go to waste, especially when it would likely be displacing some other form of food consumption?

Unless you manage to luckily find a fresh kill, isn't it generally a bad idea to eat meat that was left out in the sun on the road for an indefinite amount of time? Even if you cook it?

Around here, some nights it seems that the deer are trying to get run over!

I have literally, no joke, come around a bend to find two deer fighting in the middle of the road at 10:30pm. I see fresh roadkill (as in: wasn't there yesterday) pretty often on my drive to work in the mornings.

Right, but the question is that roadkill fresh enough to be cooked for consumption? It's one thing if you killed it yourself and bagged it up to be cooked, it's another if that deer had been laying there all night.

Unless, it's somehow sanitary or safe to eat raw meat that was also left outside for the same amount of time, so long as you cook it thoroughly after.

How is giving free food to poor people cruel?

Food that was killed by accident, by non-domesticated animals that are probably gamey, and have been out on the street to spoil for who knows how many hours? As opposed to giving people food that other people eat.

Logistically, I don't get how roadkill could be fit for human consumption unless immediately bagged and stored.

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