Of course, even if you blasted the creature off this mortal coil with your own Subaru, that doesn't automatically mean it's safe to eat—and Bauer says there's no way to be 100 percent sure the thing is disease-free. The good news is that cooking an animal well will kill most diseases. And there are ways to identify potential contamination. "When I'm gutting it, I'm looking at organs, specifically the liver," Bauer says. "If it has a spotted liver, if it's questionable at all, I probably won't eat the animal." A general rule of thumb is to avoid picking up roadkill in urban environments, where the animal is more likely to have consumed something poisonous or otherwise subsisted on garbage. According to Bauer, a 2006 study found 65 percent of city-dwelling raccoons in Portland carry Baylisascaris procyonis, or raccoon roundworm. "It's a parasite that has evolved to be inside of a raccoon, not a human," he says. "If it gets inside of a human, it doesn't know what to do. So it basically eats it's way through the body to the brain and then just eat holes in the brain." So, uh, y'know—as the law says, eat at your own risk.