Eating dead stuff from the garden

[Jonny69]

This thread is not for the cringeworthy. I've mentioned in the past that I've wanted to try road-kill. Where I used to work I'd often seen road-kill during the winter and figure that, apart from the damaged side of the animal, there was nothing wrong with the rest of it, having sat out in the cold all night. I have no problem what animals I eat and, to me, wild food is basically about as ethical as meat gets. So, recently I've seen the odd dead fox and badger but either not had the balls to pick it up or I've been in her car without any plastic bags and I know she'd kill me if she found out I'd had a bleeding/oozing 'kill in the back. Also, I'm not so keen on town foxes because they've probably been eating the contents of peoples bins which will affect the taste of the meat.

Anyway, that aside, when we came home this afternoon there was a dead wood pigeon in the front garden. Slight injury underneath. It wasn't there when we left and on closer inspection its eyes were still quite bright (yes, I was scared it might start flapping about when I poked it ) so I figured it was reasonably fresh. Perfect opportunity for a bit of investigation and if it turned out to be bad I didn't actually have to eat it.

I've saved you from seeing pics of the corpse with feathers head and feet and skipped straight to jointing it up. See where I nicked the gut at the bottom of the carcass, but it basically looks ok to me:





The only visual damage to the birds was some grazing underneath behind the legs. It didn't seem to be infected at all and was dry with no smell:



Cleaned up and got rid of any remnants of feathers:



I had planned chicken pie tonight, so this is tomorrow night's dinner. I won't be eating it pink in the middle just in case but it looks fine to eat