Meet the man who has survived on a diet of ROADKILL for 30 years

Rat stir fries and owl curries hardly sound like the stuff you would serve your friends for dinner.
But surprisingly, Jonathan McGowan's exotic roadkill dishes are a big hit with his guests.
The 44-year-old bachelor has lived on a diet of roadkill for the past 30 years to avoid buying meat from the supermarket.
He has shunned pre-packaged meats and instead dined on mice, moles, hedgehogs, pigeons, crows and gulls.
The taxidermist from Bournemouth, Dorset, never kills the animals himself but eats only what he finds at the roadside or in woodland.
Mr McGowan first got a taste for roadkill at the age of 14 when he cooked a dead adder that he had found.
He said: 'The adder didn't actually taste very nice - a bit like bacon rind. But it had piqued my curiosity and I wondered what else I could eat and what it would taste like.'
After leaving sixth form college he lived alone and turned to roadkill to save some money on his weekly food bills.

He said: 'From a young age I was always interested in natural history and being brought up amongst the farming, hunting and shooting communities of the Dorset countryside meant I was right in the middle of everything.
'Everywhere I looked there were dead animals; fish that had been caught, pheasants that had been shot and animals that had been run over in the road so naturally I became drawn to nature and how it worked.
'I used to cut up dead animals to see their insides and when I did all I could see was fresh, organic meat, better than the kind I had seen in the supermarkets. So I never saw a problem with cooking and eating it.' 

Mr McGowan insisted it was better to eat roadkill than meat from shops because of the way it is produced.
He said: 'I guess at the age of 14 I just wanted to be different. But even then I understood that what I was doing was better than eating meat in the shops because of how it was produced.
'There was a broiler production unit close to where I was living where there was always three layers of chickens - a dead, rotting layer at the bottom, a squashed layer in the middle and a layer at the top where they could barely move.

'I saw how dirty farm animals were and how unhealthy they were. I was also used to going to the cattle market where the treatment of the animals by the farmers was grotesque. I wasn't happy about what I saw at all.'
Mr McGowan, who gives presentations in schools and colleges, has long extolled the virtues of his diet to friends who have been surprisingly open to the idea of roadkill  dinner parties.

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