Because he doesn’t like the way farm animals are being treated, Jonathan McGowan, an English taxidermist from Bournemouth, Dorset has been eating roadkill instead of supermarket meat for the last 30 years.
44-year-old Jonathan McGowan first tasted roadkill at the age of 14, when he cooked a dead adder. It didn’t taste very good, but it did make him curious about how other dead animals might taste like. ‘From a young age I was always interested in natural history and being brought up amongst the farming, hunting and shooting communities of the Dorset countryside meant I was right in the middle of everything. Everywhere I looked there were dead animals; fish that had been caught, pheasants that had been shot and animals that had been run over in the road so naturally I became drawn to nature and how it worked.” He remembers he used to cut up dead animals to see their insides and all he could see was fresh organic meat better than what he saw in any meat shops. That’s why he didn’t see any problem with cooking and eating it. His parents knew he was bringing animals home to stuff, but he didn’t tell them he sometimes ate them too, because he knew they wouldn’t approve.
