Basically, the Driver must notify the Gendarmes … and follow their instructions.
Also notify Insurers if the vehicle is damaged…
Apart from the Gendarmes etc… Only the Driver may be allowed to remove the animal.
It must not be butchered in situ… but taken away, whole.
The meat/whatever must not be sold or given as gifts.
Very Important:
There are healthrisks when handling and/or eating animals which have not been checked by a vet for the “all clear”.
Finding such a dead animal is different… contact the local Mairie or the Gendarmes
Taking the dead animal is stealing and liable to a fine…
and, of course, the health risks are very real… even handling the skin etc can allow transmission of diseases.
On my then regular trips from London to Somerset to visist my parents I always came off the M4 at the Newbury juction and continued on the A4 because there was always roadkill - many pheasant shoots along the way - and nobody was better with pheasant than my mother. First, roasted - 8/10. Then casseroled - 9/10 and finally soup, with sherry, 10/10.
On one occasion I found a freshly killed cock pheasant with a distraught hen pheasant running up and down past the body. I didn’t have the means to turn the hen into a brace, so made do with the cock. “Sorry, darling. That’s life on the A4. 'Bye.”
On another occasion the car in front of me hit the pheasant, it sailed over my car and landed on the road between me and the car following, We all stopped.
I picked up the bird, which appeared to be brown bread. I was v. pleased. Roast/casserole/soup …
The woman who had hit the bird was going on a bit in a townee sort of way - this bird was bred to be shot. It wasn’t her fave garden robin.
All of a sudden the pheasant came to and looked round at the three of us in startled surprise. “Oh look! It’s alive! Let’s take it to the vet!” cried the GBH crim. I passed it to her, resolved to make sure that any others picked up off the road had had a tweak of the neck to avoid such nonsense in future.
I had two big buck rabbits in the boot. Arrived at the g/f in Bath. Next day, went to Sains. G/f, a veggie, opens the boot to see these two bodies lying there. The screams had the Sains carpark agog.
Back in London, under instruction ove the phone from the mama, rabbit casserole in a prune sauce.
This is interesting. On the way south at the beginning of the month, I had a hen pheasant dash from the side on the autoroute and heard the thud at the front of the car, yet there was no cloud of feathers and bouncing body visible in the mirror. An hour or so later we pulled in to a services and there was the head, just sticking out of the grill through which it had punched at 130kph. Normally it would have come home with us, but things are still a little too primitive for me to bother with pheasant a la RTA, and it quietly went into the receptacle for poubelles.
We see very little roadkill around Morvan, presumably because there are so few cars & they are mostly travelling slowly.
