It's so easy to get a little cut/wound infection

[Mortblanc]

I doubt they have our special acquired taste for possum CH, or the Road Kill Cookbook that is needed for proper preparation.

[bigpaul]

plenty of road kill around here but its mostly Badger or Pheasant, pheasant is okay, I've had that a few times but I've never eaten badger before.

[Pete Grey]

CH, MB not a lot of possum around here but i’ve been googling some squirrel recipes.

[Mortblanc]

According to Wiki squirrel is the number 1 road kill item in the U.S., but I must say that by the time I see them they are generally flat! Depending on the time of the year it may also be difficult to get the maggots out from between your teeth.

We do not have many badgers here but the possums are plentiful, as well as an occasional ground hog. Raccoon is more plentiful than most other stuff but also smarter so they stay out of the roads and stick to looting near houses.

My parents had grown up in our Great Depression, then WW2. Both were rural settings. No money for large stocks of ammo and during the War none at all, and what you had you kept for "just in case" defense.

You killed game with a stick, rocks from a catapult, or just thrown stones. The car was also a food making tool!

They would put the old Model T in idle and let it creep down the road with the headlights on. When a rabbit was blinded by the lights it would freeze and they would run out and kill it with a stick. Population was less dense then and they could get away with that back then.

Even I myself have been known to coast along the gravel surface roads of my youth in whatever "hot rod" I owned at the time, with a friend on the hood with a .22 rifle potting rabbits out in the country. My Mom never once asked where I got them, they just appeared on the table as a treat.

At any rate there have been many times when we were driving down the road and sitting in the back seat I would hear a "plunk", and the vehicle would stop. Dad would exclaim "Just got a rabbit for supper", and I would be sent to claim the kill.

[CharlesHarris]

In West Virginia it is legal to claim and keep road killed deer as long as you call any law enforcement officer to witness the kill and issue you a game tag which makes it legal to possess the game carcass, which then counts against your bag limit for the year.

True story, young lads were in the barber shop waiting their turn and discussing the merits of deer hunting with a muzzle-loading rifle versus a bow and arrow. An elderly gentleman sitting in the barber chair chuckled and said to the boys, "I kill my limit every year and fill all four tags before Thanksgiving day, and don't worry half as much as you boys do."

The boys then asked, "Well, Mister, what do you hunt with?"

The reply, "A 1987 Ford F150 pickup!"

[Mortblanc]

Here in KY no one has to witness our kill and it does not go against our bag limit.

A couple of years ago I was pulling out of my lane and the guy that lives in the corner house was standing on the roadside looking at a deer laying dead in his yard. I rolled the window down and shouted that the deer was not there when I came home at 10pm, and it had been below 40 degrees all night. No way the meat could have gone bad. I helped him drag the carcass to his garage for processing.

Often you lose one whole side of a road kill deer but can still recover the good side if for nothing but ground meat.

As a re-enactor I also use the hide and bones of deer, and road kills have been a good source for the materials needed for projects beyond my ability to supply during the hunting season.

Same for wild turkey. I used to keep my son supplied with wing bones for turkey calls and feathers for fletching with road killed turkey. The only bad part was when you stopped to pick up a fresh turkey and it turned out to be a vulture!

You do have to be careful though, last year a woman hit a big doe with her Yaris and the game warden wrote her a citation for killing deer with a sub caliber vehicle!

[CharlesHarris]

Not far from here an urban visitor driving one of those little "Smart Cars" about the size of a top-loading washing machine hit a bear at night. The car was totaled and she was killed. The bear wandered off and was never found, so it was presumed it wasn't severely injured.

Bears here are more dangerous than deer, because bears don't look at headlights. They have no predators which are a danger to them and they believe they have the right of way. At night when they step across the roadway, they are simply "a hole in the dark" and most car-bear collisions result in fatalities.