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Man who eats roadkill dogs

October 2nd, 2013 1 min read

Davidstowe, Tuesday

Take one dead badger, head and all, dust with flour and herbs, season and braise for five hours — that’s the recipe for a perfect stew, according to British roadkill eater Arthur Boyt.

From dogs and cats to polecats and mice, Boyt insists there is nothing tastier than scooping up a carrion from the roadside and taking it to his remote home in Cornwall, southwest England, to skin, gut and cook.

Boyt, 74, a nature obsessive whose house is dotted with animal skulls and taxidermy, has been eating roadkill from the 1960s and thinks more people should do the same.

“People say ‘oooh, do you really?’ when I say I’m having roadkill. I say ‘well, if you tried it, you would probably enjoy it’,” Boyt says as a batch of badger stew bubbles in his kitchen.

“It’s not in the taste, it’s in the head. It’s a threshold you have to step over if you’re going to eat this kind of stuff. You say ‘OK, this is just meat.’”

The retired researcher’s favourite dish is dog — he has eaten two lurchers and a labrador which were hit by cars. He claims he tried to find the owners before eating them.

Boyt compares the “smooth, round, sweet” flavour of dog meat to lamb, adding: “I’d drink red wine with it — possibly a Chianti.”

Dog may be his special treat but the freezer in his outhouse filled with everything from buzzards to slowworms shows his eclectic tastes.

He also has no qualms about eating rotting meat, claiming to have cooked badgers which had been dead for two weeks and picking off maggots and ticks while preparing meat for the pot. | AFP