Can you eat a dead animal you find in the road? In California, not yet, but maybe soon

If you see a dead animal in the road, don’t pick it up. You can’t eat it — at least not yet.

State wildlife officials issued a public warning Monday that it remains illegal in California to pluck dead animals off the road, even if they are fresh roadkill and look tasty.

Apparently, there’s been some confusion about that lately. A new state law, called the “Wildlife Traffic Safety Act,” is in fact expected to make it legal to gather, cook and eat roadkill meat of deer, elk, pronghorn antelope or wild pig.

But, though that law goes into effect on Jan. 1, 2020, it will be awhile before the state will be able to create what it calls a “salvageable wild game meat” program to allow people with special permits to gather and eat animals killed on California roads in collisions with vehicles.

California Fish and Game Commission officials will join with Caltrans, the California Highway Patrol and the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment to design the program, which will include a test period at three as-yet unchosen areas of the state. It will include a reporting process and permit issuances.

David Bess, Fish and Game law enforcement division chief, issued the warning Monday on the department’s website after reviewing “misinformed” comments on social and news media.

“Many Californians think it will be legal to possess and utilize roadkill on Jan. 1, which is the technical effective date of the Wildlife Traffic Safety Act, but that’s not the case,” he wrote. “There is no collection or utilization program in place. We are trying to avoid any confusion by misinformed citizens who think it is lawful to collect roadkill animals.”

Roadkill incidents occur frequently in California, often in mountain areas, but also in many areas of the state where suburban and rural areas abut wilderness, including El Dorado, Placer and Sacramento counties. State officials say the number of incidents presents a safety hazard to drivers, not to mention the critters.

Under the new law, it will be illegal for citizens to kill an animal that has been injured in a crash. Only an authorized state employee will be allowed to do that.

“A person who unintentionally strikes and kills a specified animal on a roadway or who encounters an unintentionally killed animal of eligible species may recover, possess, use or transport the whole animal and salvage the edible portions pursuant to a permit,” the law states.

The program will have to deal with a variety of safety questions involving taking a carcass from an actively traveled roadway. An Assembly analysis also points out that “meat on recently killed game can start to spoil in under two hours in the summer heat, and a carcass has to be properly field dressed to avoid further risks of contamination.”

The new law authorizes the state to create a roadkill reporting database to help determine where collisions between wildlife and motor vehicles are most common. Data would be used support wildlife conservation efforts, such as animal crossing tunnels under freeway on main animal migration routes, including one with videos called the critter crossing on U.S. Highway 50 in El Dorado County.

The University of California, Davis already has a public reporting system in place that anyone can contribute to. It is called the California Roadkill Observation System.

Davis researchers estimate 20,000 California vehicles collide with deer annually. Deer account for about 90 percent of roadkill. In many instances, drivers are injured as well, and in some instances are killed.