I do love ordering a tasty rabbit entree when I see it on a menu because I never get to eat it at home.  My wife and kids think eating a rabbit is evil.  I have seen a few dead rabbits on the side of the road and as much as I love eating them, I’ve never thought about stopping the car to pick one up, take it home, and eat it.

Someone has thought about it and actually done just that.  Here’s and excerpt from a Slate article titled “Does this Rabbit Taste Like Tires?” by Catherine Price:

It really was a good-looking rabbit. Shiny coat, sleek body, glassy eyes—only its mangled back leg hinted at its violent cause of death. My husband Peter and I had come across this rabbit on a trip to a bird sanctuary in Gridley, Calif. It was lying in the middle of a narrow country road, stretched stiffly across the pavement; Peter swerved slightly to avoid its body.

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Peter made a U-turn. When we reached the rabbit, still lying sprawled across the pavement, I refused to get out of the car. Instead, I watched as Peter crouched down to examine the bunny and, with me telling him to only pick it up if it “seemed fresh,” returned holding its stiff body in his hands.

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When it comes to road-kill-eating individuals, however, my favorite example is an Englishman named Arthur Boyt, who lives in West Cornwall with his wife, a vegetarian. The 70-year-old retired entomologist and competitive orienteer ate his first piece of road kill—a pheasant—when he was 15 years old, and hasn’t looked back.

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At first, Boyt only ate animals you’d find on a restaurant menu—pheasants, rabbits, hares. But eventually he moved on to more adventurous game. Today, he has a stand-alone freezer packed with pieces of animals he’s collected over the years: badger, otter, roe deer, pheasant, partridge, pigeon, rabbit, and even a little bit of cat. “I’ve eaten three dogs,” he told me matter-of-factly, emphasizing that he never kills animals himself. “Two greyhound mixes, and one Labrador retriever. Dog is one of the nicest-tasting meats I’ve ever had.”

[Butchering] It was gruesome. The crunching of bone, the ripping of fur—these are not sounds that I like to associate with dinner. The irony, of course, was that this rabbit likely had a happier life—and a less painful death—than many of the animals whose meat I think nothing of buying from the grocery store. The key difference was that I was involved in the process.

Then they cooked it, “wrapped in prosciutto, sautéed in white wine and butter, and garnished with a sprig of rosemary,” and ate it, and it tasted good, even without one of the best parts, the discarded legs that had been squished by car tires.

For all the gory details of butchering a rabbit and photos that go along with the story, go here.