The “whys” for salvaging are many, ranging from ethical concerns to saving money on food. The “hows” are not for the squeamish.
Anne Christmas, a retired teacher from California, moved to a 5-acre farm behind the Sisters Rodeo grounds in 2017 seeking a different life.
“I grew up in Palos Verdes, California, and it was beautiful and wonderful,” Christmas says. “And I felt like we had fresh air and land there. But nothing like Central Oregon fresh air.”
On a recent visit to Christmas’ homestead, over a dozen chickens from her 40-plus flock are roosting around the large, wraparound patio, sending up a cacophony of crows and squawks. Inside, Christmas is busy roasting, chopping, searing and prepping ingredients for venison stew. It’s a take on her grandmother’s recipe, one that replaces beef with deer. In this case, a doe Christmas recovered last year off Highway 20.
“A friend knew of a deer that had just been hit, and he called me and said, ‘Come on over,'” Christmas says as she adds onions to a pan. “And I said, ‘Well, I can’t, because my husband’s not home and I won’t be able to do it on my own.’ And he said, ‘No problem. I’ll help you.’ He loaded the deer into my truck, and I had to gut it and skin it, and then a couple of days later, after hanging it, I had to butcher it.”
To hang and butcher it, Christmas enlisted the help of a nearby friend — another woman who had also never carved up an entire deer. While her friend held up a cell phone playing a YouTube deer-butchering tutorial, Christmas diligently cut into the animal. It took hours — much longer, she guesses, than experienced butcherers. But she was pleased with the results. The doe had been hit by a car, Christmas says, but had very little bruising — ideal for harvesting “beautiful meat.”
“I really didn’t know what I was doing, and I wanted to do an excellent job of it,” she says. “The YouTube video I was watching was fantastic. It talked about tying off the esophagus so that you could get the whole part of the guts out.”
Christmas and her husband are part of a small but growing movement in Oregon to salvage fresh roadkill from the state’s ribbons of roads for food at home. It’s a movement that gained visibility with the passage of Senate Bill 372 in 2017, which legalized the process for deer and elk. Among the rules for the salvage program that went into effect on Jan. 1, 2019, are that you must apply for a permit within 24 hours of salvaging an animal, you must remove the entire carcass, including gut piles from the side of the road, and you must surrender the antlers and head of the animal to an Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) office within five business days for testing.
Since its implementation five years ago, ODFW has issued over 8,000 salvage permits. Bend ranks fifth among the cities with the highest overall salvage permits. Most of the permits are issued from cities along I-5, just over the Cascades, where more cars on the road mean more animals hit.
A Facebook group named Oregon Roadkill Recovery boasts almost 11,000 people with regular posts notifying would-be salvagers of recent roadkill sightings. There’s also an offshoot of the group, Central Oregon Roadkill Recovery, with a few hundred members. On most posts in the groups, users note where and when they saw the dead animal, the state of the body, some details of decomposition, like how bloated it appeared, and often a picture. Where some see simply roadkill, others see opportunity.
“Saw about 9:50am. Elk down in Beaverton on 185th Ave south of Germantown Rd. That’s all the information relayed to me. Good luck!” a user posted on Feb. 23. Within an hour, the post had two dozen comments — including a picture of the body — with posters working out who was nearby and best able to recover the animal.
Shelby Boal, who lives in La Pine, is a member of the Facebook group, and together with her family, she’s salvaged numerous deer. Boal says salvaging roadkill is an easy decision.
“For my family, it’s a useful way to put meat in the freezer instead of it rotting away on the side of the road,” Boal says. “Venison has a high protein content and is a great alternative to other red meats since it’s also lower in fat content.”
Boal says a background in hunting and knowing what red flags to look for as a sign that the meat has turned helps, too.
“Not every deer is salvageable. If it has obvious trauma to organs, they may be ruptured, which would render the meat no good. You also want to check for tissue damage and the overall smell of the animal.”
While Christmas was preparing ingredients for venison stew in her kitchen, she shared similar sentiments, talking at length about how lean and nutritious deer meat is and all for the right price.
“It is so nice having almost free meat. I did pay a little bit for the bag to hang it in this last time, but I don’t think I paid for anything else,” she says.
Testing Heads
At the ODFW office in Bend, on the border between industrial and residential neighborhoods in the Old Farm District, biologist Kristin Fratella pulls on blue latex gloves and strides across the office’s shop to a refrigerator. She pulls out a worn, blood-stained WinCo bag and peeks inside.
“This is usually how we get them,” she says with a laugh, “in various states. This one’s missing an eyeball.”
Fratella takes the bagged spike mule deer head to a tall metal table and pulls it out, causing the deer’s bloated, blackened tongue to flop out. “We’re just going to grab some lymph nodes and a tooth off of it,” she says as she picks up a small hand saw. “What I’m looking for on this is the retropharyngeal lymph nodes.” She quickly saws through the back of the skull and digs around in the head, easily finding the lymph nodes — and a maggot.
“Sometimes you get a surprise maggot,” she says with a laugh. Blood splatter happens too, she adds, as she looks down at her stained shirt. “I usually have a change of clothes here for that reason.”
Fratella takes the lymph nodes for testing because that’s the part of the deer most likely to contain evidence of chronic wasting disease (CWD). As one of six CWD surveillance biologists for ODFW, Fratella tests every head brought into the Bend office for the deadly disease and helps monitor the health of the state’s deer population. CWD is a serious concern, not just for deer but potentially for humans. Fratella likens it to bovine spongiform encephalopathy, otherwise known as mad cow disease, which also involves a prion protein that causes normal brain proteins to fold abnormally.
“It’s a degenerative disease,” Fratella says, “The deer start to lose their mental faculties. They’re not able to eat, and they’re also more likely to be struck by vehicles, which is why we’re really interested in getting those samples from roadkill salvage.”
Though there isn’t any proof, yet, that people can get sick from eating or handling an infected animal, Fratella says that the official recommendation is to wait for the testing results from ODFW before eating roadkill since similar diseases, like mad cow, have been shown to transmit to humans. So far, CWD hasn’t been detected in Oregon, but it has been found in all bordering states and could infect an animal for up to two years before symptoms show.
“It’s not something that you can simply cook out of the meat or just rinse off,” she says. “It’s something that is very persistent.”
Still, assuming an animal is harvested fresh and passes the “smell test” when picking it up, in addition to the CWD test later, she sees no harm in eating roadkill.
“Before I had this job, I did eat a roadkill deer,” she tells me in the breakroom at ODFW. “There’s a professor at OSU that made deer ribs for a barbecue.”
The Boneyard
As Christmas browns the venison from the doe she found and butchered a year ago, she talks about how she prefers roadkill to farmed animals. Other than the eggs from her chickens, it’s the only type of meat she’ll eat.
“When people tell me that they have venison, I often tell them, you know, just tell me it’s roadkill, and I’m good with it,” she says, letting out a small chuckle. “I do believe in hunting. I believe that it needs to be done to keep the populations where they should be, especially since we’ve messed up their environment, their living space and all of that. But I’d rather eat roadkill.”
She recognizes that it’s an unusual practice but considers it an ethical way to eat animals.
“Growing animals to eat? Just doesn’t seem right to me,” she says.
And, if an animal like the doe she took, or the other handful of deer she and her husband have salvaged over the last five years, isn’t removed from roadways for food, it’ll just end up in a dumping site like the one down the road from her house.
The dumping ground that Christmas and her husband affectionately nicknamed “The Boneyard” is about a football field’s distance off Highway 20 along a dirt road. At first blush, and with a few inches of snow on the ground, the barren landscape looks like any other stretch of undeveloped woods. Christmas and I walk a few yards into the area, our feet crunching in the snow as she points out carcasses. Ribcages and limbs scatter the landscape, picked clean by scavengers. This is where she dumped the remains of the doe she harvested.
“If you get here on a day when people have been dumping, before the coyotes get here, sometimes there are a couple different animals,” she says. “But, right now, probably just deer and maybe elk.”
Tomorrow night she’ll serve her stew at a family dinner, a welcome home for her husband and in-laws. Not everyone in the family is a fan of roadkill, though — at least they weren’t initially.
“My father is the worst about it,” she says. “He just thinks it’s so horrible that I eat roadkill, but when I feed it to him, he’s really happy. He thinks it’s delicious.”
This article appears in The Source Weekly March 6, 2025.
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