My dad lived in the country with his grandparents for a year when he was a kid during the depression and he hunted squirrels for food. Even today, in much of the south, squirrel is considered good eating.
There was an outbreak of Creutzfeld-Jakob disease (the human equivalent of Mad Cow) a few years back. As the patterns became clear, it emerged that, the squirrel-eaters in the hills fell into two camps -- the ones who ate the brains and the ones who didn't. The former suffered the brunt of the CJD.
When I moved out of the house after college, one of my first purchases was a copy of The Joy of Cooking. This was before the recent revision. It was designed to be, and was very good as, a basic one-volume resource on cooking; and it included instructions on how to dress squirrel and rabbit, among other critters.
Spent a lot of my youth on my Grandfather's farm (50’s) and learned how to shoot hunting squirrels and rabbits and if we were successful … the results of our hunting would be served for dinner.