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Road Kill in the Mountains

© Greg Cruey

(Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in "From the Creek Bed", a now defunct online column on Central Appalachia, in February of 1998, shortly after the bill was approved. It is used here with the authori's permission, which was easy to obtain since the author was me...)

With political tension building in the West Virginia legislature over the issue, I thought I should come clean.

I confess: I've eaten road kill.

Now, before you loose your lunch, let me clarify that. I do not mean that I once found a possum drying in the sun on the road and that I scraped it up with a snow shovel and took it home to eat.

What happened was this: a family friend works in close connection with state police and similar bodies in West Virginia. His job often requires him to be at the scene of car wrecks. He was offered a deer that had recently been hit by a car. The driver was okay. The car needed work. And the deer was dead.

As it turned out, this friend didn't have enough freezer space for the whole animal. So I got a leg. I grilled leg steaks on a little habachi on my back porch while it was snowing a couple of weeks ago. The steaks were good -- and we'll have more of that "road kill" again soon.

The Associated Press recently ran a story about a West Virgina state bill that has come to be known as The Road Kill Bill. The article was dated Tuesday, Feb. 3, and was entitled Senate Approves Road Kill Proposal.

Here's a small portion of the article:

Road kill -- it's what's for dinner. A state Senate committee approved a proposal Monday that would legalize immediately collecting and eating animals killed while running in front of vehicles. Proponents said that if drivers can be encouraged to eat their road kill, the state could save paying highway workers to remove the carcasses. .

The Associated Press's main concern seemed to be the potential entertainment value of the issue: everyone enjoys making fun of West Virginia, and this was a really good chance.

But the AP sacrificed at least a little accuracy for the sake of entertainment: the headline implied that the bill had cleared the State Senate; in truth, it had only been released from a committee when the AP broke the story.

But the bill, HB4062, was approved by the State Senate on Feb. 9 and sent back to the House, which will have to approve the bill in it's new, amended form.

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