Honestly, I see no real difference between a rat and a squirrel..............
If squirrels suddenly lost the bushy tails people would go crazy with disgust, but I agree they are tree rats nothing more.
“Honestly, I see no real difference between a rat and a squirrel..............”
There’s not any.
Col. Hans Landa : The feature that makes me such an effective hunter of the Jews is, as opposed to most German soldiers, I can think like a Jew, where they can only think like a German... more precisely, German soldier. Now, if one were to determine what attribute the German people share with a beast, it would be the cunning and the predatory instinct of a hawk. But if one were to determine what attributes the Jews share with a beast, it would be that of the rat. The Führer and Goebbels’s propaganda have said pretty much the same thing, but where our conclusions differ is I don’t consider the comparison an insult. Consider, for a moment, the world a rat lives in. It’s a hostile world, indeed. If a rat were to scamper through your front door right now, would you greet it with hostility?
Perrier LaPadite : I suppose I would.
Col. Hans Landa : Has a rat ever done anything to you to create this animosity you feel towards them?
Perrier LaPadite : Rats spread diseases. They bite people.
Col. Hans Landa : Rats were the cause of the bubonic plague, but that’s some time ago. I propose to you, any disease a rat could spread, a squirrel could equally carry. Would you agree?
Perrier LaPadite : Oui.
Col. Hans Landa : Yet I assume you don’t share the same animosity with squirrels that you do with rats, do you?
Perrier LaPadite : No.
Col. Hans Landa : But they’re both rodents, are they not? And except for the tail, they even rather look alike, don’t they?
Perrier LaPadite : It’s an interesting thought, Herr Colonel.
Col. Hans Landa : Ha! However interesting as the thought may be, it makes not one bit of difference to how you feel. If a rat were to walk in here right now, as I’m talking, would you greet it with a saucer of your delicious milk?
Perrier LaPadite : Probably not.
Col. Hans Landa : I didn’t think so. You don’t like them. You don’t really know why you don’t like them; all you know is you find them repulsive. Consequently, a German soldier conducts a search of a house suspected of hiding Jews. Where does the hawk look? He looks in the barn, he looks in the attic, he looks in the cellar, he looks everywhere he would hide. But there’s so many places it would never occur to a hawk to hide. However, the reason the Führer has brought me off my Alps in Austria and placed me in French cow country today is because it does occur to me. Because I’m aware what tremendous feats human beings are capable of once they abandon dignity.
Squirrels won’t eat the same foods as rats.
I would certainly prefer eating squirrel over NYC rat.
The rats they eat are usually ricefield rats (yes, it’s a distinct species) which infest the rice paddies and eat their crops, wild rats they catch and fry up.
They also like the bamboo rats, which are bigger and fatter (and kinda cute) as seen in this story about a rat farmer:
https://www.rfa.org/english/news/cambodia/rats-09152023161108.html
These are not nasty like the urban rats we know (which they also have in abundance and are not at all cute). So, yeah, more like squirrels when it comes to eating them. But like all rats, they do carry leptospirosis. But you get it from their urine, not from eating them (kinda like hantavirus)
Export of rats for meat to Vietnam is big business in Cambodia. Heaven knows those people need a break, so glad to see them make money off those rats.
They supposedly taste like pork, but I can’t personally vouch for that. I drew the line at lizard (which tasted kinda swampy, but it was water monitor, so... of course it did). No, I did not try the fried spiders, scorpions, etc. And certainly not “Cambodian popcorn” (giant flying cockroaches, legs removed, fried up in a wok). I did eat some cricket legs used as a salad garnish at a wedding feast by mistake as it was getting dark and I could not see them. Had no idea they were there until I was asked how I liked this delicacy after I ate the salad. Oops.
We have our ideas about what can be eaten these days. My Dad and his brothers hunted squirrels as kids during the Depression for my grandmother to fry up and thought they were yummy. They eschewed possum meat even in those tough times, however. Some people did eat possums back then, though. People gotta eat!