But, Bill, it’s ranch-raised. That’s no substitute for powder smoke, hot lead, field dressing, and humping the carcass back to the truck. Personally slaughtered venison – I mean, Tres Bon!
You’ve marked it as NOT A CIDU, but actually I think you have misunderstood it. You can buy venison on Amazon. What you can’t buy is the thrill of the hunt.
I think Pete is correct. I’m not a hunter but the ones that I know do it mostly for the sporting aspect of it (and yes I know it’s a pretty one-sided “sport”).
. . . and a chance to go out and drink and do manthings, and kids like to be taken out of school for a day or two . . . more things you can’t buy on amazon.com
Is “you can’t buy that on Amazon” going to be this year’s answer to “priceless”?
He didn’t say you couldn’t buy venison He said you couldn’t buy a dead deer in a truck.
“the ones that I know do it mostly for the sporting aspect of it (and yes I know it’s a pretty one-sided “sport”).”
If the deer wanted it to be more fair, they should have brought guns instead of pointing sticks stuck to their heads.
Yeah, but…. If the hunter meant the thrill of the hunt, why didn’t he *just* say the thrill of the hunt? I’m not saying it doesn’t work as a joke but…. okay, I am saying it doesn’t work as a joke.
I mean, yeah, I get it, but it’s not particularly interesting or pointed. It’s about as blase an oblique comment as you can get without actually being straightforward.
Sorry, Terrence, but I’ve just never understood the thrill of killing.
It would be more sporting if the hunters weren’t allowed any sort of weapon. Hand to hand combat with deer.
This would make bear hunting interesting as well. :-)
Or even squirrel hunting. (My only extended one-on-one battle with a squirrel was trying to chase one out of the house some years ago, which ended up in my wrenching my back in the process and missing a couple days of work, while the squirrel — which finally left the house — got off scot free. So it pains me to admit that the squirrel won.)
As for BLOODLUST, there’s also a cheesy teen-oriented “Most Dangerous Game” rip-off movie of that name, which was sent up by MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 and which presumably one can also buy on Amazon (in either original or MSTed form).
Much easier to use a shock trap. Unfortunately, for every one you get rid of (to use a euphemism), three more move in and thumb their noses at you whilst eating the bird seed. (Yeah, I know they haven’t thumbs, but if they can hold seeds in their paws, they can thumb their noses. Or give a finger.)
@ Grawlix – The best thing about sending hunters unarmed against deer is that they might run into boar, which would attack rather than run away.
P.S. There is a lengthy description of a boar hunt in T.H. White’s “The Sword in the Stone“, including a comment that “it wasn’t considered ‘sporting’ to wear armor while hunting”. The hunters (who used spears and a pack of dogs) still had the clear advantage, but boar were (and are) quite dangerous.
That venison costs roughly $20/lb. Taking the first link for googling (ok, duck duck going) “how much meat on a deer” gets me a very detailed analysis, from which I’m going to summarize that you get about 35 pounds of meat from a deer. That’s $700.
Say I work for minimum wage, and say the minimum wage is $15/hour. One day of work gets me $120 before tax. So if I think I can see the attraction to hunting if you’re trying to feed your family. Yes, you need to invest in guns, ammo, licenses, etc., and you need to learn to field dress and later butcher (or pay someone to butcher for you), but nevertheless, as a use of your time, it’s more than 5 times as profitable as working minimum wage.
(On the other hand, DDG tells me chicken costs $.75 to $1.50 a pound, so for 35 pounds of meat, I need only pay about $35, which I can clear after 3 hours of minimum wage work after paying Unca Sam… Still, if I am unemployed with few prospects, hunting that deer can still be attractive.)
We have a friend who hunts… everything.
No joke, when they ask “What can we bring?” we always suggest a salad.
(That said, come the Apocalypse, we’re hanging out with him)
@ larK – “hunting [is] …. more than 5 times as profitable…”
Hunting is definitely not a cost- (nor time-) effective way to feed anyone. Your math would only work if the hunter could bag a deer every day, which just doesn’t happen. According to some German hunters to whom I’ve spoken, it might take anywhere from two to four weeks of daily (actually evening & night) excursions to get just one deer (or boar).
It seems strange that there are people who invest that much effort (and cash) to produce something that just doesn’t taste that good (at least not to me), but tastes obviously differ (I have the same feelings about wild mushroom hunters).
“Hunting is definitely not a cost- (nor time-) effective way to feed anyone. ”
Ahem. How did people get fed before there were minimum-wage jobs? A modern society allows more human beings to survive than does a simple hunter-gatherer society, which is why you can’t have everybody going out to hunt as many prey animals as they can kill… you’ll run out of raw prey animals. The population of predators has to drop until the predation level is such that they can be harvested without depleting the supply. This likely means fewer humans. But, if you have only a few who take more than their share, then hunting is a perfectly good way to feed people.
P.S. Now that I think about it, even if the hunters are not armed with guns, the mushrooms still probably have a better chance of killing their hunters than the boar do.
“. . . if I am unemployed, . . . ”
And if you ARE employed – even at minimum wage minus taxes – if you take a day or days off to hunt, you would be in the red, so to speak. Especially if, as Kilby writes, you don’t KILL a deer every day you don’t work.
‘No joke, when they ask “What can we bring?” we always suggest a salad.’
We need a ‘DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU ARE DRINKING [INSERT NAME OF ANY LIQUID HERE]!’ tag.
Now I have to clean my keyboard . . . again . . .
Kilby: Is there a webcam in my back yard? I was just baiting the rat trap AND picking out mushrooms to throw away, JUST IN CASE one of the dogs should get back there and eat any.
@ Andréa – Mushroom edibility can be species-dependent: just because a squirrel or bird (or whatever) can eat a particular mushroom with no ill effects does not mean that it is safe for human (or canine) consumption (not to mention that the adverse effects sometimes do not appear until hours or even a day later).
P.S. I have no idea how common any deadly mushrooms are in North America, but there is one species here that used to be called “Saxon Killer”, which is responsible for a large percentage of the mushroom-related poisonings and fatalities in Germany (including one fatal case in the news just last week). I have no idea why anyone would ever risk collecting any mushroom with even a vaguely similar appearance.
“@ Andréa – Mushroom edibility can be species-dependent: just because a squirrel or bird (or whatever) can eat a particular mushroom with no ill effects does not mean that it is safe for human (or canine) consumption (not to mention that the adverse effects sometimes do not appear until hours or even a day later).”
Same with seeds . . . I have some wildflower vines (on the other side of our privacy fence) that I know are poisonous (google told me so), but I see cardinals and squirrels eating them, so I’ve not pulled them up.
Kilby: I would suggest you count your blessings. Growing up, I knew families where hunting and trapping were vital to supplementing their diets with high quality protein, and they were not of the stereotypical redneck types who would hunt regardless — he was a science teacher in our school (yes, teachers were badly paid!). One weekend to bag a deer (and they are not that scarce on the ground here — I could almost guarantee you seeing some if I took you to certain places — it might be because there is too little open space where I live now that they are so easy to see, coupled with maybe that there are not professional hunters and foresters here to take care of the populations*) and you have meat for the month — 35 pounds will last a while! He also used to snare rabbits in his yard.
Sadly, wages have mostly stagnated for the middle and lower classes, so if this was reality on the ground when I was growing up, I don’t see it having changed much since then, other than us having polarized more into urban and rural, red and blue, such that if you are in the urban camp, hunting is now seen as definitive of the rural camp and to be disdained; we weren’t so polarized when I was growing up.
*In fact, now that I think about it, things are really badly organized here with regards to the deer population: there are too many, and they are hunted haphazardly and pointlessly, mostly — where I grew up, a large portion of the open space was made into a preserve; walking through that preserve, I found a field where the preserve rangers would gather all the hunted deer cascaras, leaving them to rot in the field. These were mostly bow and arrow hunted, because hunting them with guns is too unsportly and thus not allowed most of the time; hunting with bow and arrow means a lot of the time you mortally wound the deer, but don’t immediately kill it — it runs off, you try and track it, but a lot of them get away, and die days later for the rangers to find and put in the field of dead deer. Despite this, there are still too many deer in that area (my father had a narrow escape from death when a deer jumped out from the side of the road onto his windshield as he drove by on the road on which we lived — fortunately it was a winding narrow road, so he wasn’t going too fast, but the windshield was totaled; the deer sprang up and ran away, no doubt to die later of its injuries and end up in the field of dead deer). I would rather the deer were hunted efficiently, with guns, and butchered for meat, rather than the half solution we have now. (I supposed I wouldn’t get much support for reintroducing wolves to the north east coast… People already go crazy enough about the few scraggly coyotes who have managed to make a comeback, to say nothing about the bears…)
@ larK – My comment was meant in terms of current economics, in which hunting has become more of a high priced hobby(*). I’m fully aware that subsistence hunting used to be much more widespread than it is today: I’m only one generation removed from it. My father grew up in the “rural suburbs”, they raised chickens and rabbits, and he and his brothers all went hunting, although only for small game (as far as I know). My dad once quipped that these days he sees more squirrels in one afternoon in his backyard than he ever glimpsed in his entire teenage hunting career.
P.S. (*) – Germans hunters pay a hefty fee for each animal they shoot. Everything is heavily regulated; the forestry department sets quotas for each region, making sure that the numbers of animals taken is sustainable.
I commented recently about how the squirrel population has exploded in my lifetime (and about how I think I have witnessed Darwinian selection in that time, as the squirrels have gotten smarter about crossing the road). I never considered that my observations could be due to cessation of human hunting of them. Food for thought… Similarly, whereas growing up the only large bird of prey (if indeed it was one) I ever saw was a turkey buzzard, nowadays large birds of prey have made quite a comeback. I’ve had redwing hawks on my balcony, there are nests of bald eagles to be seen by the Turnpike (though I have yet to actually see one), and osprey can be seen too — might their comeback be tied to the explosion of squirrels which might be due to cessation of human hunting of same (sounding like Meryl…)?
Apparently in our building squirrels used to be a nuisance climbing up the walls to the patios, until the local redwing hawks learned to hunt them from same, and discourage them from making their breeding nests on some of the older tenets seldom used porches; someone posted a picture on facebook of a hawk eating a squirrel taken on one from their apartment. I’ve never seen a squirrel climb the building in the five years I’ve lived here…
Osprey take fish. In WI it was a THRILL to see one; now I live on the shores of Lake Tarpon and it’s like seeing robins was in WI. Which, BTW, I never see.
I wonder, too, how many people now think squirrels are “so cute” and actually FEED the little rodents? I know that my vet and her mother RESCUE them . . . NOT a good idea (I’m looking at two eating bird seed right in front of me as I type) . . . and my rat trap has done a good job of exterminating them – no, you cannot eat them, I don’t think – but you know that as soon as one is gone, two others take its place. Where are the hawks, etc., when you need ’em?
With all the diseases wild animals can get (CWD in deer; bubonic plague in squirrels and rabbits – well, at least in China), why would anyone eat anything from the wild anymore? Oh wait – with all the recalls and issues discovered with processed food, why would anyone EAT anymore?
When I used to cook for our reenactment unit at events (demonstration for public, eating for members) I did not have a set budget – when the treasurer is cooking, there will be no overspending. One event this fellow stood and watched me cook most of the day (I actually thought it a little creepy). He joined the unit. After a couple of months he offered to cook. Robert and I looked at it each other, hmmm, new member, going out spending unit’s money… So we told him there was a budget per event and told him a little bit more than I normally would spend for the cooking (and bread, cheese, and pepperoni – aka French sausage – for snack during the day – Gatorade not included). Second time he was cooking, he had been hunting shortly before and brought venison to cook as same would leave more in the budget for other things – while it was good (I did not eat, did not even normally at events when I cooked) the board decided to raise his food budget. He is now on the board and very good addition to the unit.
Squirrels are definitely edible. Whether you’d want to eat the squirrels in your backyard depends on what they’re likely to have been eating and how much in the way of petrochemicals and other “fun” stuff they’re likely to have ingested. My guess would be that in most non-rural areas it would not be a great idea.
“. . . depends on what they’re likely to have been eating . . .”
My very $$$$ bird seed, THAT’s what they’ve been eating!
I’ve never seen a squirrel near our house (even though there’s an oak tree with a ton of acorns just behind our back fence). This is because there are ferrets (actually “martens”) nearby, and they don’t coexist. Their range must be very limited, because I have seen squirrels just a few hundred yards down the street.
P.S. @ Andréa – The composition in that strip is so unbelievably awkward that it’s almost amusing (I didn’t know that stuffed animals could “hop”). If that’s the same “Mason” that took over B.C., I would have thought that he could do better than that.
Not only do they hop, they fall. Out of the tree. Seriously, and seriously unexpected . . . by the squirrel; by the people who witnessed it; and by the dogs who were so surprised by this event, the squirrel recovered and scampered back up the tree before any of them could grab it.
The one squirrel caught by Daisy2Legs was attempting ‘suicide by terrier’ and succeeded. Hubby put it in garbage can. The d*mned thing came back and tried again (we knew it was the same one – 1/2 a tail and there’d never be TWO squirrels tempting five terriers like this). The second attempt was successful, and s/he became a legend in our family: A two-legged dog catching a squirrel.
(Here in FL, we HEAR them fall out of the palms, but don’t bother looking anymore; been there, seen that. And dogs aren’t in yard, so they don’t care, either.)
And of course, there is another lettuce recall. So much for ‘eat healthy’.
Comics I Don't Understand 
But, Bill, it’s ranch-raised. That’s no substitute for powder smoke, hot lead, field dressing, and humping the carcass back to the truck. Personally slaughtered venison – I mean, Tres Bon!
You’ve marked it as NOT A CIDU, but actually I think you have misunderstood it. You can buy venison on Amazon. What you can’t buy is the thrill of the hunt.
I think Pete is correct. I’m not a hunter but the ones that I know do it mostly for the sporting aspect of it (and yes I know it’s a pretty one-sided “sport”).
. . . and a chance to go out and drink and do manthings, and kids like to be taken out of school for a day or two . . . more things you can’t buy on amazon.com
Is “you can’t buy that on Amazon” going to be this year’s answer to “priceless”?
Here’s something else not available from amazon . . .
https://safr.kingfeatures.com/api/img.php?e=gif&s=c&file=TXV0dHMvMjAxOS8xMS9NdXR0cy4yMDE5MTExNl8xNTM2LmdpZg==
He didn’t say you couldn’t buy venison He said you couldn’t buy a dead deer in a truck.
“the ones that I know do it mostly for the sporting aspect of it (and yes I know it’s a pretty one-sided “sport”).”
If the deer wanted it to be more fair, they should have brought guns instead of pointing sticks stuck to their heads.
Yeah, but…. If the hunter meant the thrill of the hunt, why didn’t he *just* say the thrill of the hunt? I’m not saying it doesn’t work as a joke but…. okay, I am saying it doesn’t work as a joke.
I mean, yeah, I get it, but it’s not particularly interesting or pointed. It’s about as blase an oblique comment as you can get without actually being straightforward.
What you can’t buy on Amazon? Bloodlust.
Daniel, https://www.amazon.com/BLOODLUST-Explicit-nowhere-Travis-nothing/dp/B07VWZ4CJ1
Sorry, Terrence, but I’ve just never understood the thrill of killing.
It would be more sporting if the hunters weren’t allowed any sort of weapon. Hand to hand combat with deer.
This would make bear hunting interesting as well. :-)
Or even squirrel hunting. (My only extended one-on-one battle with a squirrel was trying to chase one out of the house some years ago, which ended up in my wrenching my back in the process and missing a couple days of work, while the squirrel — which finally left the house — got off scot free. So it pains me to admit that the squirrel won.)
As for BLOODLUST, there’s also a cheesy teen-oriented “Most Dangerous Game” rip-off movie of that name, which was sent up by MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 and which presumably one can also buy on Amazon (in either original or MSTed form).
Much easier to use a shock trap. Unfortunately, for every one you get rid of (to use a euphemism), three more move in and thumb their noses at you whilst eating the bird seed. (Yeah, I know they haven’t thumbs, but if they can hold seeds in their paws, they can thumb their noses. Or give a finger.)
@ Grawlix – The best thing about sending hunters unarmed against deer is that they might run into boar, which would attack rather than run away.
P.S. There is a lengthy description of a boar hunt in T.H. White’s “The Sword in the Stone“, including a comment that “it wasn’t considered ‘sporting’ to wear armor while hunting”. The hunters (who used spears and a pack of dogs) still had the clear advantage, but boar were (and are) quite dangerous.
That venison costs roughly $20/lb. Taking the first link for googling (ok, duck duck going) “how much meat on a deer” gets me a very detailed analysis, from which I’m going to summarize that you get about 35 pounds of meat from a deer. That’s $700.
Say I work for minimum wage, and say the minimum wage is $15/hour. One day of work gets me $120 before tax. So if I think I can see the attraction to hunting if you’re trying to feed your family. Yes, you need to invest in guns, ammo, licenses, etc., and you need to learn to field dress and later butcher (or pay someone to butcher for you), but nevertheless, as a use of your time, it’s more than 5 times as profitable as working minimum wage.
(On the other hand, DDG tells me chicken costs $.75 to $1.50 a pound, so for 35 pounds of meat, I need only pay about $35, which I can clear after 3 hours of minimum wage work after paying Unca Sam… Still, if I am unemployed with few prospects, hunting that deer can still be attractive.)
We have a friend who hunts… everything.
No joke, when they ask “What can we bring?” we always suggest a salad.
(That said, come the Apocalypse, we’re hanging out with him)
@ larK – “hunting [is] …. more than 5 times as profitable…”
Hunting is definitely not a cost- (nor time-) effective way to feed anyone. Your math would only work if the hunter could bag a deer every day, which just doesn’t happen. According to some German hunters to whom I’ve spoken, it might take anywhere from two to four weeks of daily (actually evening & night) excursions to get just one deer (or boar).
It seems strange that there are people who invest that much effort (and cash) to produce something that just doesn’t taste that good (at least not to me), but tastes obviously differ (I have the same feelings about wild mushroom hunters).
“Hunting is definitely not a cost- (nor time-) effective way to feed anyone. ”
Ahem. How did people get fed before there were minimum-wage jobs? A modern society allows more human beings to survive than does a simple hunter-gatherer society, which is why you can’t have everybody going out to hunt as many prey animals as they can kill… you’ll run out of raw prey animals. The population of predators has to drop until the predation level is such that they can be harvested without depleting the supply. This likely means fewer humans. But, if you have only a few who take more than their share, then hunting is a perfectly good way to feed people.
P.S. Now that I think about it, even if the hunters are not armed with guns, the mushrooms still probably have a better chance of killing their hunters than the boar do.
“. . . if I am unemployed, . . . ”
And if you ARE employed – even at minimum wage minus taxes – if you take a day or days off to hunt, you would be in the red, so to speak. Especially if, as Kilby writes, you don’t KILL a deer every day you don’t work.
‘No joke, when they ask “What can we bring?” we always suggest a salad.’
We need a ‘DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU ARE DRINKING [INSERT NAME OF ANY LIQUID HERE]!’ tag.
Now I have to clean my keyboard . . . again . . .
Kilby: Is there a webcam in my back yard? I was just baiting the rat trap AND picking out mushrooms to throw away, JUST IN CASE one of the dogs should get back there and eat any.
@ Andréa – Mushroom edibility can be species-dependent: just because a squirrel or bird (or whatever) can eat a particular mushroom with no ill effects does not mean that it is safe for human (or canine) consumption (not to mention that the adverse effects sometimes do not appear until hours or even a day later).
P.S. I have no idea how common any deadly mushrooms are in North America, but there is one species here that used to be called “Saxon Killer”, which is responsible for a large percentage of the mushroom-related poisonings and fatalities in Germany (including one fatal case in the news just last week). I have no idea why anyone would ever risk collecting any mushroom with even a vaguely similar appearance.
“@ Andréa – Mushroom edibility can be species-dependent: just because a squirrel or bird (or whatever) can eat a particular mushroom with no ill effects does not mean that it is safe for human (or canine) consumption (not to mention that the adverse effects sometimes do not appear until hours or even a day later).”
Same with seeds . . . I have some wildflower vines (on the other side of our privacy fence) that I know are poisonous (google told me so), but I see cardinals and squirrels eating them, so I’ve not pulled them up.
Kilby: I would suggest you count your blessings. Growing up, I knew families where hunting and trapping were vital to supplementing their diets with high quality protein, and they were not of the stereotypical redneck types who would hunt regardless — he was a science teacher in our school (yes, teachers were badly paid!). One weekend to bag a deer (and they are not that scarce on the ground here — I could almost guarantee you seeing some if I took you to certain places — it might be because there is too little open space where I live now that they are so easy to see, coupled with maybe that there are not professional hunters and foresters here to take care of the populations*) and you have meat for the month — 35 pounds will last a while! He also used to snare rabbits in his yard.
Sadly, wages have mostly stagnated for the middle and lower classes, so if this was reality on the ground when I was growing up, I don’t see it having changed much since then, other than us having polarized more into urban and rural, red and blue, such that if you are in the urban camp, hunting is now seen as definitive of the rural camp and to be disdained; we weren’t so polarized when I was growing up.
*In fact, now that I think about it, things are really badly organized here with regards to the deer population: there are too many, and they are hunted haphazardly and pointlessly, mostly — where I grew up, a large portion of the open space was made into a preserve; walking through that preserve, I found a field where the preserve rangers would gather all the hunted deer cascaras, leaving them to rot in the field. These were mostly bow and arrow hunted, because hunting them with guns is too unsportly and thus not allowed most of the time; hunting with bow and arrow means a lot of the time you mortally wound the deer, but don’t immediately kill it — it runs off, you try and track it, but a lot of them get away, and die days later for the rangers to find and put in the field of dead deer. Despite this, there are still too many deer in that area (my father had a narrow escape from death when a deer jumped out from the side of the road onto his windshield as he drove by on the road on which we lived — fortunately it was a winding narrow road, so he wasn’t going too fast, but the windshield was totaled; the deer sprang up and ran away, no doubt to die later of its injuries and end up in the field of dead deer). I would rather the deer were hunted efficiently, with guns, and butchered for meat, rather than the half solution we have now. (I supposed I wouldn’t get much support for reintroducing wolves to the north east coast… People already go crazy enough about the few scraggly coyotes who have managed to make a comeback, to say nothing about the bears…)
@ larK – My comment was meant in terms of current economics, in which hunting has become more of a high priced hobby(*). I’m fully aware that subsistence hunting used to be much more widespread than it is today: I’m only one generation removed from it. My father grew up in the “rural suburbs”, they raised chickens and rabbits, and he and his brothers all went hunting, although only for small game (as far as I know). My dad once quipped that these days he sees more squirrels in one afternoon in his backyard than he ever glimpsed in his entire teenage hunting career.
P.S. (*) – Germans hunters pay a hefty fee for each animal they shoot. Everything is heavily regulated; the forestry department sets quotas for each region, making sure that the numbers of animals taken is sustainable.
I commented recently about how the squirrel population has exploded in my lifetime (and about how I think I have witnessed Darwinian selection in that time, as the squirrels have gotten smarter about crossing the road). I never considered that my observations could be due to cessation of human hunting of them. Food for thought… Similarly, whereas growing up the only large bird of prey (if indeed it was one) I ever saw was a turkey buzzard, nowadays large birds of prey have made quite a comeback. I’ve had redwing hawks on my balcony, there are nests of bald eagles to be seen by the Turnpike (though I have yet to actually see one), and osprey can be seen too — might their comeback be tied to the explosion of squirrels which might be due to cessation of human hunting of same (sounding like Meryl…)?
Apparently in our building squirrels used to be a nuisance climbing up the walls to the patios, until the local redwing hawks learned to hunt them from same, and discourage them from making their breeding nests on some of the older tenets seldom used porches; someone posted a picture on facebook of a hawk eating a squirrel taken on one from their apartment. I’ve never seen a squirrel climb the building in the five years I’ve lived here…
Osprey take fish. In WI it was a THRILL to see one; now I live on the shores of Lake Tarpon and it’s like seeing robins was in WI. Which, BTW, I never see.
I wonder, too, how many people now think squirrels are “so cute” and actually FEED the little rodents? I know that my vet and her mother RESCUE them . . . NOT a good idea (I’m looking at two eating bird seed right in front of me as I type) . . . and my rat trap has done a good job of exterminating them – no, you cannot eat them, I don’t think – but you know that as soon as one is gone, two others take its place. Where are the hawks, etc., when you need ’em?
With all the diseases wild animals can get (CWD in deer; bubonic plague in squirrels and rabbits – well, at least in China), why would anyone eat anything from the wild anymore? Oh wait – with all the recalls and issues discovered with processed food, why would anyone EAT anymore?
https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/18/health/china-bubonic-plague-intl-hnk-scn-scli/index.html
When I used to cook for our reenactment unit at events (demonstration for public, eating for members) I did not have a set budget – when the treasurer is cooking, there will be no overspending. One event this fellow stood and watched me cook most of the day (I actually thought it a little creepy). He joined the unit. After a couple of months he offered to cook. Robert and I looked at it each other, hmmm, new member, going out spending unit’s money… So we told him there was a budget per event and told him a little bit more than I normally would spend for the cooking (and bread, cheese, and pepperoni – aka French sausage – for snack during the day – Gatorade not included). Second time he was cooking, he had been hunting shortly before and brought venison to cook as same would leave more in the budget for other things – while it was good (I did not eat, did not even normally at events when I cooked) the board decided to raise his food budget. He is now on the board and very good addition to the unit.
Squirrels are definitely edible. Whether you’d want to eat the squirrels in your backyard depends on what they’re likely to have been eating and how much in the way of petrochemicals and other “fun” stuff they’re likely to have ingested. My guess would be that in most non-rural areas it would not be a great idea.
“. . . depends on what they’re likely to have been eating . . .”
My very $$$$ bird seed, THAT’s what they’ve been eating!
I’ve never seen a squirrel near our house (even though there’s an oak tree with a ton of acorns just behind our back fence). This is because there are ferrets (actually “martens”) nearby, and they don’t coexist. Their range must be very limited, because I have seen squirrels just a few hundred yards down the street.
P.S. @ Andréa – The composition in that strip is so unbelievably awkward that it’s almost amusing (I didn’t know that stuffed animals could “hop”). If that’s the same “Mason” that took over B.C., I would have thought that he could do better than that.
Not only do they hop, they fall. Out of the tree. Seriously, and seriously unexpected . . . by the squirrel; by the people who witnessed it; and by the dogs who were so surprised by this event, the squirrel recovered and scampered back up the tree before any of them could grab it.
The one squirrel caught by Daisy2Legs was attempting ‘suicide by terrier’ and succeeded. Hubby put it in garbage can. The d*mned thing came back and tried again (we knew it was the same one – 1/2 a tail and there’d never be TWO squirrels tempting five terriers like this). The second attempt was successful, and s/he became a legend in our family: A two-legged dog catching a squirrel.
(Here in FL, we HEAR them fall out of the palms, but don’t bother looking anymore; been there, seen that. And dogs aren’t in yard, so they don’t care, either.)
And of course, there is another lettuce recall. So much for ‘eat healthy’.