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Hey, it's just a personal choice. For the people who like to eat squirrel, All the power to ya. Lots of people got offended because my family ate lots of mullets. They are big suckers that run the rivers in the spring. We would catch 500 pounds or more of them and fillet the whole works. We froze then individually and ate them all year. You never had a better fish.
My cousins shot and ate pigeons all the time. I have many a pigeon pie at their house. Those birds ate nothing but the grain they stole from the farms they hung around. I don't think I would like to eat a city one though.
I knew a few families that trapped hundreds of muskrats every spring for the furs. They also ate all of those rats and they are very good. Same thing with the beaver trappers. It would be a crime to throw away and waste all that good meat.
See on LI I think we take fresh killed food for granted.Most of us being born and raised on LI probably have no clue about eating squirrel, muskrat, possum ect... because we did not grow up eating that type of food. Most LIer's just go to the local grocery store and buy packaged meats, eggs and milk. They don't own farms where the eggs and milk are fresh.Now I am just generalizing LI. I personally think LIer's are spoiled with all the fast food chains, convenience stores. I mean I literally live 10 min from like 5 grocery stores, and someone maybe from another state would have to drive 30 min to get milk. Life seems so much simpler outside of NY.We are so conditioned to eat packaged foods and I think that's why we Turn our noses up at the thought of eating squirrel.It's just not something you see on a typical LI families table at dinner.
Oh yeah... I have eaten, pickled hog jowls, gizzards smothered in gristle, possum shanks, southern-fried muskrat, goat tripe, pork brains, fried chicken feet/heads, squirrels, rabbits, dove, snakes, snails, frogs, crabs, crawdads, gator, conch and just about anything else that walks, crawls, slithers, swims or flys that I could catch.
All good for you. People used to make fun of me in the military cause of the things I had eaten as a kid growing up. When we would get deployed out and were a few days out of resupply I was eating good while they were stuck with C rations.
I grew up on squirrel and rabbit and quail...........When we had squirrel mom would always do a chicken as well.....and us kids would fight over the squirrel. With five kids in the family we would have to have at least 6 squirrels on the platter. That and a big platter of biscuits and chicken/squirrel gravy made from lard and cream..............
got a freezer full of the buggers right now! Love the big red ones the best!!! Those lil grey are small!!!!! Make sure you hunt them in late fall winter and have a sharp knife as the skin is tough! Granpa tought me how to make a "hanger" to assist in holding while skinning, pretty simple if you have a foot or so of #9 wire!
See on LI I think we take fresh killed food for granted.Most of us being born and raised on LI probably have no clue about eating squirrel, muskrat, possum ect... because we did not grow up eating that type of food. Most LIer's just go to the local grocery store and buy packaged meats, eggs and milk. They don't own farms where the eggs and milk are fresh.Now I am just generalizing LI. I personally think LIer's are spoiled with all the fast food chains, convenience stores. I mean I literally live 10 min from like 5 grocery stores, and someone maybe from another state would have to drive 30 min to get milk. Life seems so much simpler outside of NY.We are so conditioned to eat packaged foods and I think that's why we Turn our noses up at the thought of eating squirrel.It's just not something you see on a typical LI families table at dinner.
I think this applies to most of the rest of the country as well.
I have a dear, hard working customer, who was the youngest of 10 children. She is a black woman who works hard in a local hotel. At Christmas time she was going to have a reunion with her siblings, and the family had been saving up a bunch of foods like raccoon and squirrel, and Lord knows, whatever else they had hunted and saved for the occasion.
To them, I suspect it was a lot like the Norman Rockwell painting.
Squirrel in a gas oven is fairly tame. We once field-cooked a big kangaroo rat over dried cow chips just to see what the early pioneers to the southwestern U.S. faced. Yep, it tastes like poop-smoked rodent.
Had squirrels and have to admit that their meat is nutty and sweet, buttery and tender. Very tasty.
Squirrel Peking-duck style, slow cooked with vegetables, breaded and pan fried, or squirrel stew - delicious!!
And remember: squirrel is low-fat and free-range.
BTW: I heard that squirrel is, in fact, one of the most popular game animals in the eastern US. Aren't there about 1.8 million hunters of squirrels in our country?
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Not that's some fine eatin' ! 
