Are there any exotic animals that people eat that taste exceptionally interesting?

They’re not exotic, per se, but I’ve tried both horse and venison. Smoked horse tastes a lot like prociutto crudo. Venison, on the other hand, is sweet.
Iguana, I am told, tastes like chicken.

Moa, Dodo. Both of these tasted so good that theres none left.

The taste of venison also has a lot to do with the diet of the deer, and the age. I just finished the last of the meat from two deer a friend and I had butchered. I much preferred the younger doe.

A former coworker told me that deer from the southern part of the state, or on the islands, taste different than those here in the north. Apparently eating fewer branches and more grass and herbaceous plants makes the meat taste better, according to him.

So various factors go into the taste of meat. Have you ever had 100% grass fed beef? Kicks the ass of any factory farmed beef out there, in addition to the health benefits. Same with wild vs. farmed salmon. I imagine a lion, for instance, would taste more or less like a domestic cat that also was entirely carnivorous (not that I have any idea what that is like). I can tell you that all the rodents I’ve eaten taste delicious, particularly braised first in lard and then in tomato sauce, but they’ve all been wild and not eating trash.

From a trip to South Africa I discovered that Crocodile tasted like fishy chicken, Wildebeest was very tough and gamey, Kudu sausages were divine.

The nearest thing to exotic that I’ve eaten is ostrich. It was dark, like beef or venison, and extremely lean and tender. I’ve also had water-buffalo, which was like lean, slightly gamey beef. Both of these animals were farmed in England.

It’s not terribly exotic, but I’ve had wild boar and moose.

The wild boar was one of the best things I’ve ever had. My husband’s cousin not only hunts, but is a chef. I don’t know how he cooked the boar, but it was so flavorful and tender. He also made a red wine sauce to go with it. Amazing.

The moose was also very good and reminded me of grass-fed beef. Great flavor. It was made with a seafood stuffing, cooked by the same hunter/chef. He also serves venison each year at Christmas dinner, and even though I normally don’t like it, whatever he does to it makes it super yummy.

Porcupine. If you ever wanted to know what it would be like to taste a pine tree, just have some porcupine. Yuck.

I happen to enjoy pine tree. Mostly the needles, sometimes the inner bark

@incendiary_dan Does gin count?

Crocodile apparently takes on the flavour of whatever it has mostly been eating.

Kangaroo is a gamey, but extremely low in fat and healthy meat to eat.

Emu is okay, had it an emu sausage once.

Witchety grub… couldn’t eat the actual grub but I have had witchety grub pate… it was not very flavoursome.