Anyone for dog sandwiches? Britain’s notorious roadkill eater dies
ARTHUR BOYT: 1939- 2023
Arthur Boyt, the roadkill enthusiast became an accidental fixture in British newspapers, with journalists ringing him up each year to quiz him on his eccentric Christmas lunch.
Sometimes it was badger ham, or a polecat (which he claimed could serve four); more sensationally, there was beached sperm whale casserole with brussel sprouts, and his Christmas 2015 dish of dolphin, which he sautéed live on air on Jeremy Vine’s Radio 2 show. The dolphin caused a minor scandal as it was technically property of the British Crown; Boyt retorted that he was simply disposing of the dead body, which was within the law, and nobody had stipulated that the disposal should not be via his mouth.
Arthur Boyt, famous for eating roadkill.Credit: BBC UK
But if he was mischievous and unrepentant about his eating habits, it was because he believed passionately that they were ethical. He would never kill an animal, and was revolted by factory farming.
For Boyt roads were a deli counter, and of all the meats he scraped off the tarmac, his favourite was dog. “DELICIOUS… tender as veal with the consistency of lamb,” he recorded, having first tried it in January 1978. Dog was only ever an occasional treat, however, because if the collar had a name on it, Boyt would do his utmost to reunite the deceased with its owner.
Unclaimed, a large dog could furnish 15 meals and plenty of sandwiches. “I once had four sandwiches for lunch, three of which were dog and one was hare,” Boyt wrote in his memoir. “I ate the hare first to give it time to get away before I sent the dog down after it.”
‘What a race of spoiled fusspots we have become!’
Arthur Boyt, a British man who spent his life promoting the virtues of eating roadkill
Cat he found bland, but much improved by redcurrant jelly. Once, he served cat fat from his dripping bowl to his unsuspecting sister, a fact he revealed to her only much later, in a speech at her son’s wedding; in front of all the guests, the infuriated sister tried to beat him up.
Swan was muddy, bat was odd, and fox repeated on him. “It tastes like it smells: a mixture of diesel and onions”, he said. But most other species, from otters to squirrels to stoats, he eloquently praised. He even published his own recipes, for dishes such as hedgehog carbonara.
“What a race of spoilt fusspots we have become!” Boyt said, demanding to know why Britons were so revolted by a rabbit, garnered from a roadside, that had “grown up eating grass and wildflowers, the epitome of an organic existence” and yet were perfectly happy to consume beef that had been “standing all winter in its own excrement, fed on heavily fertilised fodder, supplemented with growth hormones and injected with antibiotics”.
His motto was “just because it doesn’t have a label doesn’t mean it’s not edible.”
Putrefaction was no barrier to enjoyment, either. “I’ve eaten stuff that is dark green and stinks,” he said, claiming that roadkill, because he cooked it for long enough, never made him ill, whereas “buffet food like sandwiches and scotch eggs” had given him stomach bugs.
The only bit of the animal he was too squeamish to eat was the eye’s gelatinous lens, which turned into a hard white ball when cooked.
Obsessively cheap, Boyt did not just dine from the roads, he dressed from them, too, washing encrusted vomit off discarded fleeces he found. A pioneer “freegan”, he was so notorious for supplementing his lunch from the skip outside his workplace that he nearly ate a bread roll filled with spit and sand, left for him by some builders as a prank.
Arthur Boyt’s book Roadkill.
As a romantic gesture, he gave up eating dog in 1996, when he married his second wife, Sue, a vegetarian, but their marriage was still tested by the prank callers who rang up at 2am, pretending to be the ghosts of animals Boyt had eaten, and by the badger heads he always had bubbling on the stove.
To reduce the smell, he started to casserole them instead of pressure-cooking them, but his preference for a “greenish” carcass drove Sue to have dinner in her bedroom, to avoid a row. “I have to be discreet because I don’t want her to rush off and leave me,” Boyt told a journalist. “I’d sooner have her than the badgers.”
Arthur Boyt and his twin brother Dennis were born at Watford on September 3, 1939, the day that Britain declared war on Germany, to William Boyt, a solicitor, and Bessie, née Legg. There were two older siblings, John and Naomi.
The family were Exclusive Brethren, a sect of the evangelical Plymouth Brethren; there was no television, no Christmas festivities and no black pudding (the consumption of blood is forbidden). Their mother, a keen botanist, encouraged the twins’ fascination with foraging outdoors.
He got his taste for roadkill aged 13, when the twins, on one of their 100-mile cycle trips, came across a dead pheasant in Windsor Great Park. They liked the idea of dining at the monarch’s expense, so asked their mother to roast it.
In 1957 she died of a stroke. The now-orphaned Arthur read biology at university, then worked for seven years as an entomologist.
He married another of the Exclusive Brethren, Patricia, but in 1977 he was excommunicated for dissent; his wife left him and his twin brother cut him off.
He cycled across the United States, across Canada, and from Cairo to Khartoum, and twice ran the London Marathon in under three hours. But his passion was orienteering, for which he represented England well into old age, freely sharing his badger sandwiches with those he met on the way; for although he was pathologically averse to spending money, he had a Christian generosity to waifs and strays.
Nature absorbed him. He took up bird-song recording, then ringing birds’ legs. Snares drove him wild – he once found an emaciated badger that had been left, illegally, ensnared for two weeks – and he campaigned to have them consigned to the dustbin of history.
His run-ins with “legal” hunts trying to hide fox carcasses were legion (and often came to blows); and he harangued the RSPB, for which he worked as a surveyor, for tolerating the shooting of snipe, woodcock and golden plover.
He achieved his mild celebrity only in retirement, entertaining film crews from around the world. In 2022 he published his memoir-cum-cookbook Roadkill, which offered such startling tips as not to be alarmed if you hear a whistling sound when you defrost weasels in the microwave, this is just the steam escaping from their mouths.
His wife Sue survives him.
The Telegraph, London.