Got Roadkill? Now There’s an App for That

Thanks to record meat prices, a growing number of reports suggest Americans may have to eat less animal protein. Imagine, though, if an app existed that could help you locate free, fresh, tasty, and sustainable meat near you.

That’s now the case in Wyoming, where a new mobile phone app feature “is helping get the meat from animals killed in fender benders from road to table and in the process making roads safer for critters,” the Associated Press reported last week. “State wildlife and highway officials rolled out the app—possibly the first of its kind in the U.S.—this winter when Wyoming joined the 30 or so states that allow people to collect roadkill for food.”

In my 2016 book Biting the Hands that Feed Us: How Fewer, Smarter Laws Would Make Our Food System More Sustainable, I note that a growing number of states had embraced the benefits of harvesting roadkill. Seventeen states then allowed the harvesting of roadkill. In a subsequent column on roadkill laws in 2017, I noted that that number had grown to include more than half of U.S. states. As last week’s AP report notes, that number has continued to grow, with at least 30 states now allowing the harvesting of roadkill—with Wyoming one of the latest to do so.

The state’s app facilitates legally harvesting animals—from bison to turkey and deer—that were accidentally killed on roadways. “For safety reasons, roadkill in Wyoming may not be collected after dark, along interstate highways[,] or in construction zones,” the AP explains.

The new tool isn’t a standalone roadkill app. Rather, the roadkill feature is housed within the state’s 511 app, which provides residents with information on road conditions and traffic. The app works similarly to how apps like Google Maps or Waze do when it comes to reporting speed traps; it lets drivers who’ve hit an animal or noticed roadkill to geolocate and report the roadkill—even if they don’t plan to harvest the animal. Other app users who may want to harvest roadkill can then use that data to locate and harvest the carcass.- READ MORE