Fascinating Facts from the Road Kill Cafe.

When you travel in some parts of Australia, there are lots of kangaroos.

They mostly get mobile at evenings and at night.

So the road kill count climbs at night, there are the bodies on the sides of the roads the next day, then there are the kills, where the kangaroo bounces off the vehicle and it's momentum  or residual life carries it into the the grass and trees, a little way off the roads....

After a short while they begin to stink as the bodies decompose.

So if you can't see them, you can smell them... for sure.

It's one of the luxuries of travelling by motorcycle.

I call them hoppies and stinkies. And the stinkies do fucking stink.


But after coming across a fresh dead one, in the middle of the road, killed only minutes before hand, mashed up to the fuck, and seeing all the blood and guts splattered around, and the penny dropped, in that there are a lot more blood spatters and patches on the highway, than there are hoppies and stinkies.....

So someone - be it enterprising individuals gathering meat for personal consumption, for feeding the dogs, or highway crews, are cleaning the bodies up...

I have no doubt that dogs and foxes and cats and all, play their part, it's just I have never seen them either singly or in groups - scoffing down 50 - 80 Kg of meat in a night, in fact I have never seen them at all.

I kind of estimate that for every hoppy or stinky, or the visible dead, there are some 6 or 8 death patches - of dried out blood, in the form of mostly pale red ochre smears and splatters along the roads, with no body in sight or smell, of the death site.

So in thinking, "Ooo there were 3 dead roos  on the sides of the roads over the last 100K" - well that kind of misses the point.

Because smeared and splattered in patches along the same stretch of road, were the death sites of another 10 or 12 roos, minus the bodies.

i.e. There are a lot more kills, injuries and impacts happening, than merely going by the body count.

In an exponential kind of way.

The deaths sometimes are fucking horrendous, the mutilations,  the smashed bones - the guts and brains smashed out - and the way their peculiar autopilot minds irritatingly "don't get it" - to run obliviously, into the path of traffic.
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And they end up smashed, dead, dying and fucked up..

This body (kangaroo) ended up on the magical strip of road, that lay between the wheel tracks, of the traffic travelling in opposing directions - which is why it lasted so long.

It's pretty fucking awful - and they look more tragic, when the death is fresh, and the blood is bright red.


Day Time:

Notice the ears - that is the remains of the head,

 Night Time:

Same carcass - about 7 hours later.

This is what remains of it's head.

See the lumps of meat in this photo, they burst off the carcass towards me, when a car, ran directly over the middle of it, on the way past.

And here is one of some pics I took of one a long time back.

Dead kangaroos end up just like people, crossing the street, riding push bikes and motorbikes, and in bad car crashes, explosions, industrial accidents etc....

But while some people in some cultures eat each other, dead or alive, and others don't, and we eat other things, and they eat us, I think kangaroos - when one gets killed in a group, they perhaps register, "Oh there is so and so - their dead, fucked, out of the game", pausing for some kind of sentient reflection, and they just move on..

But dead, mangled and some times, horribly mutilated - and ready for eating, the good, clean, reasonably fresh, road kill, laying on the road side slab of the universal morgue - as a good opportunity for free, fresh meat.

Like on this carcass, I can't quite gauge just how much meat there is in the back legs, there might be 20Kg in both of them, maybe 30Kg. Maybe another 10Kg in the front legs.

This kangaroo is about 3m from head to tail.

Although this one wasn't real fresh, the meat would have been recoverable, especially if I had the butchering gear, and it was 2 days earlier when it was fresh dead from the night before.

I have decided to become more opportunist - as it's wrong to let so much good fresh meat to go to waste - especially on kangaroos.

If it's reasonably fresh dead, the average decently sized young roo has about 10 - 15Kg of good meat in the hind quarters...


 I am going to score the Gerber Bear Grylls Scout Folding Knife - a good non slip grip with a positive non slide - fingers down the blade type stop...

Big enough to handle and small enough to make it unobtrusively portable, and being a folding knife, it's inherently safer than a fixed blade in transit.

 This is a good folding knife - and carrying a pillow slip, to hold the meat, a garbage bag to contain the blood, the knife wrapped up - and it's all packed away - ready for immediate self service, when the opportunity presents it's self.

And it's sharp enough and tough enough, with a positive blade lock, so that the back legs can be cut from the carcass, bagged and stashed for the trip home to the deep freeze.

People pay $25 a kilo for steak - and if I can get 10 20Kg of good roo meat for 2 minutes of fast carving and 5 minutes of boning and slicing when I get home.

It's not a bad deal when you think about it.

But you gotta get the younger, fresh dead kangeroos, that at least are complete enough to butcher, for recoverable meat.


Now to score this decent knife, for a good price,

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