[MUSIC PLAYING]
ARTHUR BOYT: Well not all my neighbors know what I am.
Yes, I have a bad reputation for eating roadkill.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
ARTHUR BOYT: Here we are at the gateway to our property.
It is Butterwell farm.
We had a badger come across here.
Ran across here, and over there.
Every night he was coming down.
And one night, coming up, I very nearly ran him over.
Just caught sight of him about to go under the wheel.
Yes.
Yes, I've hit at least one pheasant and one rabbit.
But I would do my utmost to avoid killing anything.
This is a polecat ferret.
I found it not a mile away from here.
And it, as you see, has been thoroughly
rolled out on the road.
They stink.
The flesh smells.
But you can overcome that by putting the body into running
water for four days.
And that will remove that musky tang from the meat.
But yes, you could eat it.
You'd have to be pretty hard up to want to eat a polecat.
I live here on [INAUDIBLE]
with my wife.
And with a cat.
I'm often asked, how did this all begin?
After 1976, when I was living on my own, I didn't have to
bother and with anybody else's feelings in the matter.
The food was there to be brought home and eaten.
I would pick up roadkill in those days to
bring home and mount.
I am a taxidermist.
So I'd skin things, and then stuff.
And instead of throwing the body away, I decided to start
eating them.
I think that's how it came about on a regular basis.
I'm pretty sure I'd eaten badger
before that, and a swan.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
ARTHUR BOYT: Right here is the famous freezer.
A young hedgehog.
A barn owl that was nearby.
An antler there, and an antler there.
This is a lovely bird.
That's a snipe.
I picked that up in Devon.
I don't know what this fellow is.
He's a reptile.
Here's a sparrowhawk that flew into the window.
In fact, I've got three sparrowhawks here.
Badger, cat, 2008.
Hind legs of a cat.
Butchered, ready to eat.
And a buzzard.
I have occasionally hit an animal myself, by accident.
But I never aim to kill an animal.
I do my utmost to avoid it.
I come across it in my regular or irregular journeys in and
out of Cornwall.
Badger, Camel Valley, April, 2001.
Here's the heart, the kidneys, and, ah yes, the testes and
his willie.
Now the badger has a bone in its willie called the baculum.
And I've got quite a few of those.
You can eat the penis, yes.
It's not particularly tasty.
But I'd imagine a bit like in the Arab world the horse penis
is quite a delicacy.
But I wouldn't say it's anything to write home about.
This is it the badger's head.
This is my favorite, because you've got
the big muscles here.
And you've got the salivary glands.
You've got the tongue.
You've got the eyeballs, very essential for good sight.
And then you've got the brain.
So you've got one, two, three, four, five different tastes
and textures in one saucepan.
They all taste different, feel different.
Here we are.
Where do I find--
price range, $180 to $680.
[PHONE RINGING]
ARTHUR BOYT: Hello.
It's reasonably undamaged?
Yes, I know.
I've got it.
OK, we've got a badger.
We'll go along and see if I can find that.
Good.
I don't eat everything I find.
But there's nothing in this country that I wouldn't eat.
I've eaten a couple of bats.
Not a lot there, I must confess.
I've got the key.
-Would you ever eat your own cat?
ARTHUR BOYT: Where has she gone?
There she is.
We had a cat that died.
And he's buried up there.
I didn't eat it.
If my wife found out, what would I say?
[MUSIC PLAYING]
ARTHUR BOYT: 1982, I cycled across America, from New
Orleans to Winnipeg.
And I found a lot of roadkill, of course on the way.
On one occasion I stopped near Kansas City.
There was this brilliant scarlet bird
lying in the gutter.
And I stopped and picked it up.
And as I did so, a car drew up beside me.
And it was a police car.
And he wound down the window down.
And he said, do you mind stepping off the highway
before you get killed?
So that was rather nice.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
ARTHUR BOYT: This looks like fresh badger.
Let's have a look at it, and see what condition it's in.
It's not too bad.
It's not been squashed.
Yeah.
It may have been here a little while, but it doesn't look
rotten yet.
It's jaw is dislocated.
I would say it's been for probably at least a month.
But it's been very cold weather.
So it has kept.
Yeah, it's edible, I reckon.
I have never been ill from eating roadkill.
I've been ill from eating food supplied at
a buffet, for instance.
But I've never been ill, ever, eating roadkill.
If it's well cooked, I think there's very little chance of
any bugs, bacteria surviving.
Well, we'll take it back and see if it's OK.
And then skin it, cut it up, and eat it.
It's a lady badger.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
ARTHUR BOYT: I certainly think there is a lot to be said
against eating meat that involves animals being killed
on my behalf.
For animals to be killed so that I can eat them, and chuck
away what I don't fancy is a terrible thing.
You see people in a restaurant that leave
no end of meat uneaten.
Well that animal has died in vain, in a way, you can say.
Shall we put it like that?
Every joint of meat you eat has been hacked
from a body like this.
You never think of that when you tuck into a
beef burger, do you?
Got the knife in, but as you see, with an intact skull you
can get a bit of leverage on it.
Nice crunchy noises.
There's the heart.
OK, that's all we want from this.
I'm going to leave the neck.
This I shall put out for the crows and the ravens and the
buzzards and the foxes.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
ARTHUR BOYT: The reason I started eating roadkill
regularly was because I was on my own.
My wife had been made to leave me.
She'd be made to leave me by the religious
sect to which I belonged.
This is me in the days when I was young and handsome.
Do you want it under the light?
I'm sitting on my bed in my aunt's house.
And I'm reading my Bible.
I was a member of the Exclusive Brethren.
I used to preach in the street, three
times a week or more.
Until I was 36, when they kicked me out for questioning
the administration.
They wanted to stop us from interpreting prayers for the
deaf people in the community.
And I questioned it.
I have a twin brother.
When I got kicked out, he had no more to do with me.
And they made my wife leave me.
It's unthinkable.
So I got a divorce.
And have since happily remarried.
But I now do not believe in the existence of God.
I suppose that eating road kill is a new adventure.
And when you first go to eat something that isn't supplied
by the butcher, you've got to cross a threshold.
You are going into unknown territory.
All I'm doing here is just sealing the meat.
And that is well charged with onion and garlic.
I eat a badger once that someone else had picked up and
put on one side.
Because they wanted it's skull.
It was blown up like a horse on the Western Front.
And it smelled rather horrible.
When I cut into it, the flesh was green.
But nevertheless, I persevered.
And stewed it.
It made the house smell like the old fashioned mental
hospitals used to.
But boy, it tasted delicious.
Well that's the casserole in the oven.
And to be well cooked it wants to be in there for three and a
half hours.
Then we'll see how it goes.
Cannibalism, it's a tricky question.
I don't think it for me to make comments about other
people being cannibals.
But if I were in a situation where there was human flesh
available, and it might sustain me or others with me,
I would have no compunction about eating it.
All right?
Allow me to introduce you to Mister Jonathan King, and his
son, Peter King.
He happens to be the brother of my good wife.
I knew someone who worked in a hospital lab who could have
got a human leg for me.
But I decided that fun though it might be, it would be
irresistible to tell somebody I'd done it.
And once I told them, I would be branded
forever as a cannibal.
Who knows what that might result in.
-Badger.
ARTHUR BOYT: This way, this way, this way.
Here we are.
The skull, meat slipping off it.
Look at that, nicely cooked.
Here we have a casserole, badger's head.
Boyt specialty.
This is very tender.
Mm.
I should be in at the brains in a moment.
I think the brains have all bubbled out, actually.
The have a tendency to do that.
They're not where they originated.
-How about a tongue?
Can you pull the tongue out?
ARTHUR BOYT: Yeah, I can pull the tongue out.
Here is the tongue.
Do you see the tongue there?
There's the tongue.
See that?
Lovely, badger tongue.
Mm.
[LATIN TRUMPET MUSIC PLAYING]
ARTHUR BOYT: Peter, to the badger.
PETER KING: To the badger.
Thank you.
ARTHUR BOYT: A misses badger, it was, a badger sow.
PETER KING: It's not bad, actually.