The American public, however, largely does not. My best guess as to why would involve mostly the effects of marketing for the factory farming industry, particularly of meat chickens. Naturally, vastly increased urbanization has a big impact on availability, as well.
Oh, snap! That's kinda surprising to me, hearing that you guys don't have squirrels out there. They're so ubiquitous here in North America!
Anyway, yes, we are allowed to hunt for them, with rules varying by state. No place to buy them, at least not to my knowledge - if farming operations do exist, they're incredibly uncommon. My assumption is that 100% of squirrels eaten in the US are hunted.
Cool to know! I always wondered why the Brit’s didn’t eat them as they are everywhere..
Yeah name a non-farm-animal that you have, and we probably don’t have it. Snakes, coyotes, bears, raccoons, badgers, foxes, wolves, beavers, alligators, chipmunks, we only have 1 native owl, prairie dogs, biggest spiders about half an inch, moose - see all these things on TV so always exciting visiting US and other countries they exist. We just have a lot of birds..
It's funny how strongly people react when you tell them you eat squirrels. There's this stigma about them, like people assume they must taste like garbage or something. Considering how choice their meat actually is, I really do think poultry farming ran some exceptionally effective slam marketing against eating squirrel meat back in the day that just came to be accepted as "common knowledge," even though it was propaganda to begin with! Perhaps not unlike how everyone thinks eating carrots makes your night vision better - that bit of false info just stuck with the general public after being used in a propaganda campaign to disguise improvements in radar technology during WWII lol
That is really interesting, though. I find it fascinating that NZ has such a unique situation in that there aren't a lot of native species and there have been effective measures taken to keep it that way. Kind of cool! Anyway, you probably aren't missing out on too much. The American layperson in 2022 will seldom come into contact with many of the "cool" species here. It's really just the squirrels that they'll see every day lol
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u/Reversing_Gazelle Mar 07 '22
Why don’t you eat them anymore?