Posted on 03/03/2018 9:37:24 PM PST by nickcarraway
Some people in Britain hate grey squirrels enough to devour them. With the UK’s biggest purveyor of fried chicken in crisis, perhaps we should be cooking up our furry feral friends
ne cold Sunday morning last month, I visited Pow Hill, a glorious moorland thick with pine trees that overlooks the Derwent reservoir, north-west of Durham. In a clearing, three amateur wildlife photographers, in full camouflage gear, sat on plastic bags and watched a red squirrel race across the bracken.
As I watched the little fella leap from log to tree, the sunlight dancing across its tail, naturally my thoughts turned to its grey cousin and what he would taste like, deep-fried, seasoned, with a little mayonnaise.
I didn’t realise how much people hate grey squirrels until I came to Pow Hill. They hate them because they blame them for the demise of the red squirrel. They hate them so much that they eat them. Still, squirrel is low in fat and low in air miles and the internet is full of recipes. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has been doing it in plain sight for years, and squirrel has long appeared on seasonal menus at the super-influential St John restaurant in London.
The whole red-versus-grey saga is rather sad. Greys were brought over here from the US by Cheshire banker Thomas Brocklehurst (who released a pair into the wild in 1876) and, for a while, they were all the rage in high society. But they eat bark voraciously and harbour squirrel parapoxvirus (harmless to humans) that doesn’t harm greys but kills reds
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
Chick-fil-A and even Popeye’s chicken beats the Colonel hands down.
Do they eat fried chicken in the UK?
I’d go with Nutria!
The tasty tree rat
On a bed of rice...
Yummy!
How about they just sell NON-Halal Chicken....
We’ll tell them how to deal with the gray squirrel if they will tell us how to deal with those $#&*@#& starlings.
How about a bucket of Kentucki Fried Lizard Partes.
Dunno, but they are both rodents, so once in the stew...............
Every year I have to spend a few weekends with my pellet rifle plinking the new herd of squirrels seeking new turf / trees. They eat all my fruit, berries, tomatoes, and figs. Not to mention attic damage.
I am amazed that KFC is that popular in the UK!
Popeye’s? No, no, and NO! I only ate their once to learn never to do it again. That is not fried chicken, it is fried plaster served over chicken. Tasteless and reminiscent of eating fried cardboard, surely you are mistaken. Don’t take this too hard.
Nothing the matter with good squirrel if cooked right.
The next is what I think is a red squirrel, not sure, a little less pure. I had one with a more golden tail and named it Goldie. Our red squirrels have disappeared now the last few years haven't seen any at all. Taken September 2006.
And the last one for tonight is an example of be careful what you wish for. I made friends with many of them, some get more trusting than others. I had wished I could teach this little black one to knock on the door. This is as close as I got but it sure got my attention. I named it Flag because it had a white tip on it's tail. I either eventually lose them in the street or they disappear. Taken May 2003.
I would never purposely hurt or knowingly eat one.
Grey squirrel legs would be bigger than KFC chicken legs, that’s for sure.
I used to have a great big tomcat that was an ace squirrel hunter. He ignored birds and so on but loved killing, skinning and eating those things. He’d start eating them at the head and just roll that skin back as he went. I’d find the inside-out squirrel hides all over the yard when he found the pickings easy- but when the population was down he’d eat the skin, too.
My first thought is that it is better than Jonathan Swift's Modest Proposal.
Would you eat a rabbit?
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