Happiness Is....

My Dad would say "a large gut pile". I guess I prefer the part we take home. One of the benefits of recovering roadkill is that you get to keep whatever no one else will eat... I love heart... and liver... and tongue...

This is a fairly rare situation. A roadkill in the middle of summer, in the middle of the day, on a sunny day, and the bugs weren't even too bad.

The critter was a moose calf. We removed the tailgate of the "Bird Dog" (big green Ford who earned the name) and slid the whole thing up into the bed. Then we decided to gut it there so we didn't have to take the guts home.

While we were working some tourons, or are they tourorists? (you know the people that take pictures of everything and pay to wild life) came by and wanted to watch. I'm all for educating the public so they leaned over this near side of the pickup bed to watch. We had the guts out and I wanted to get the heart out. So I was working up inside the rib cage (note the blood up to my armpits). When I pulled it out it did not look like what our tourist friends thought it should (it sits inside a sack). So I slit slit the sack and flipped it over exposing the heart... and splattering blood... on the tourists. Oops!

After they ran off, some one snapped this photo, as much as we like moose heart I think the grins are because of the tourists.

We have a history

This is my grandfather (maternal). He is in the basement of our farm house in what we called "the cold room." This was a room specifically designed for cutting meat. It was below ground and stayed about 40 degrees year round.

Some things to note in the picture: Meat cuber on the table behind, Hobart meat grinder, and solid maple cutting block. Not visible in the picture but in the cold room anyway: built in smoke room, meat cutting bandsaw, second maple cutting block, second long prep table, overhead trolley system, and there was always a huge tin can of white pepper.

Grandpa was a Dentist, but his father was a meat cutter. Growing up in rural Arkansas my grandfather learned the trade from his father. He also worked his way through college and dental school cutting meat.

Now grandpa was not keen on hunting, he thought that you should work, so raising beef cow or some hogs he respected but thought that hunters were leaving too much to chance. However, he also thought that wasting meat was about the worst sin a person could commit, he grew up during the Depression. So one day on the way to work in his Cadillac limousine, surplus from a funeral home in KC, he hit a moose. It tore off the hood ornament and broke both windshields but the center column kept it from coming in the front seat with him.

Grandpa had his knives with him, this was not first roadkill he had encountered, and he got to work bleeding and gutting and dressing the critter. Now up here in Alaska if you hit it , you don't get to keep it. So someone else was going to get the meat so as he was telling the story I asked why did he do all that work? He said that quality of t he meat would have been affected if he had let it lay there. He wanted the stranger was getting that meat to have the highest quality meat he could get.

That, in a nutshell, is why we recover roadkill. Not everybody knows how to do it, not everybody has the equipment to do it, and not everybody is willing to go out at 2am when its -40 but we do because we hate to see the meat go to waste when there are people who need it.

He got me started...

About two weeks ago my Dad died from pancreatic cancer. He taught me how to dress, butcher, and cut meat. We started small with spruce hen, hares, and ducks that we got hunting on our farm. I also remember raising chickens and slaughtering them.

We raised several pigs over the years, usually two at a time. We would name things like: Porky and Petunia, Laverne and Shirley, or Heckler and Koch. I was handy to put their names on the packages of meat so we could know who we were eating.

This is a picture of my Dad splitting down a pig. We did it by hand, I've seen the fancy power saws and heard of people using chain saws but this got the job done and didn't waste meat. We did get one road kill pig, although this is probably not it.

My sister was walking home from a neighbors house, a mile away. and found a pig that had gotten loose, gotten hit and broke a leg, and then got stuck in our fence. It then wallowed a shallow still entangled in the fence. Dad called all the other farms around close and nobody claimed it, so he called the Troopers just to be safe. Then he put it out of it's misery and brought it home.

Back in the 80s Dad got us on the Roadkill list and the Troopers would call us to come get Moose that had been hit. Back then they let anybody sign up, but after a while they discovered that they had a huge list to deal with, a lot of inexperienced people wasting a lot of meat, and a whole moose would go to one family. So they have since changed the rules. Now a nonprofit charitable organization can be put on the list and they are expected to distribute the meat to the needy.

Once they required nonprofit status we signed up through our church.

Besides the moose we got hunting, we usually did one or two roadkill a year. From 2001 through 2006 I was averaging 6 a year. Over the years my Dad and I have probably recovered close to 100 moose, I have records on about 40.

Dad was real serious about not wasting meat and the idea of big animal like going to waste really galled him.

What's a sporran anyway?

A sporran is a man purse worn by Scots (notice the furry sack in front of this piper's kilt). A sporran is typically fur or leather and since there are no real rules about them they tend to reflect the personality of their owner. This particular sporran is more a reflection of the family this poor piper married into... You see, he's my brother in law, and that sporran is... you guessed it... roadkill!

Shortly after I had knee surgery I had to drive a motor home on a long road trip. I was driving left footed, as I still was not allowed to bend my right knee, when I noticed a dead muskrat in the road. Being the conscience redneck that I am, I pulled over and hobbled out into busy traffic to recover the somewhat tenderized rodent. The critter appeared to be in good shape, so I skinned it (I always have a knife).

As I was working, this silly little bird (Arctic Tern) was squawking and dive bombing me. I ignored it for a while, but when it started hitting me I looked around to see why. I had backed the monstrosity of a motor home over her nest... The chicks were OK, so I moved the motor home. then she left me alone.

After I had the muskrat skinned I needed to preserve it. The motor home had a pretty sparse pantry, no salt. We happened to have an ice cream maker kit, so I used rock salt. I then called my sister to brag about my score. Her husband suggested a sporran, so I tanned it and my wife sewed it into a sporran, which we gave to him as a Christmas gift.