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Do you guys see a lot of squirrels where you live, such as the Red Bellied Squirrel and the Plantain Squirrel? There was a concerted effort in the US to relocate squirrels into cities during the 19th century. I don't think this happened in most of Asia. I am also aware of a presence of ferrets in much of China who may be a predator of squirrels.
Last edited by fatsquirrel; 04-12-2019 at 03:27 PM..
It appears there are commercial squirrel breeding facilities in China for pet purposes. If you are interested in doing business, there is a business website and China Central TV interview video.
Funny anecdote: my wife is Chinese and up until we were together, she had a fear and dislike of most animals, like many people here from the rural interior. One animal that bucked that trend were squirrels. She always thought that they were very cute,and asked early on in our relationship if there were squirrels where I came from in the US.
When we were visiting for the first time, I was making breakfast and she took our then year old daughter out back. I heard a scream, followed by "honey! Come quick!" I bolted out, thinking something had happened to our daughter.
There was a fat, confused squirrel sat about twenty feet a away on the fence, eating an acorn. "Honey, is... Is that a squirrel??"
"... Yeah. That's a squirrel."
*Pause* *uproarious laughter* "IT'S SO CUTE!!"
The rest of our trip we went squirrel spotting at every park near where we stayed. The highlight was seeing a red squirrel and a black squirrel in the same tree on the Harvard campus.
It appears there are commercial squirrel breeding facilities in China for pet purposes. If you are interested in doing business, there is a business website and China Central TV interview video.
Yes, squirrels are a somewhat common, if not niche pet here. Shopping sites like taobao sell harnesses, bells, and trinkets for training them as well as the animals themselves which can go from 30 RMB (>5 USD) for a young basic one, to a few hundred for a mature, trained and pedigreed long-eared red squirrel.
To answer the original question, there are wild squirrels in China, but they tend to be in the northern and central regions, and are almost never seen in cities. Their populations were decimated during the famine and periods of social and economic turmoil last century; they were caught for food and also hunted as vermin (China's population of sparrows, personally hated by the Chairman himself who thought they were crop-destroying pests, has never rebounded). They've never been resettled or introduced into urban settings to my knowledge; if they were, a lot of the old people who survived that period would just view it as the government subsidizing free food and would catch and eat them (many parks that have placed turtles in their ponds deal with this; at the one in our complex in GZ, security was often chasing away old guys with long nets who would show up hoping to catch one).
Are Callosciurus squirrels and the local chipmunk tamer than the American ones? I’ve been bitten and scratched many times by American squirrels but have heard that the typical Chinese chipmunk is imported into Europe as a pet.
I’ve also seen footage of pet Indian squirrels (same genus as Chinese squirrels). I’m wondering if the wild yellow ferret like animals in many Chinese cities and possibly other areas, eat squirrels. These animals are everywhere.
Squirrels are common in China? Where? In the countryside? I have never seen a squirrel in all of my years living in China. That being said, I've only lived in big cities like BJ, SH and GZ. Even when I go to the countryside to my wife's family in Anhui and her old village, I never really see animals in the wild.
Matter of fact, there really aren't many animals at all in China, when you think about it. If you compare to say North American, where they have squirrels, racoons, possum, ducks, deer and so on in many parts, you don't have any of those animals in China unless they are caged in some man made farm.
I think a hundred or so years ago Chinese killed them all off for the meat, as well as the fact that they were valuable and the people were poor.
Reading the comment's here it looks like 黄鼠狼's (ferret) got all the squirrels, because they are a predator of rodents. Rural to urban migrants in America eat squirrels all the time. My neighbor used to eat squirrels, possums and raccoons. However there are still too many squirrels here especially in the city, like 500 per square mile. The natural occurrence of a squirrel is 1 per square mile otherwise it's fat and eating too much junk food.
Last edited by fatsquirrel; 04-15-2019 at 10:37 PM..
I live in Vietnam. I have never seen squirrel. I thinks because of my country don't have them a lot, not because of we eat them
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