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.