North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["William C. Garthright" <billg@inebraska.com>]

> Bill,
>     The easy way to clean squirrel is to make a perpendicular cut half-way down the 
> back, just wide enough to get two fingers in.  Insert the fore-fingers from each hand 
> and pull.  It takes about 10 seconds to "undress" a squirrel.  The same 
> method doesn't work as well with rabbits because rabbit skin doesn't always tear where 
> you want it to.
>   


Well, my squirrel-hunting days are long past (about 40 years past, I 
guess). But as a kid, I hated to clean them (and that's pretty much the 
method we used). The skin was just very hard to pull off. Rabbits, on 
the other hand, were a piece of cake.

I like all that stuff, and I never wanted to shoot anything I wouldn't 
eat. But I haven't shot anything at all in decades, and I'm not much of 
a cook. And I'm way too tenderhearted to kill the neighborhood 
squirrels, as maddening as they can be (not to mention that my neighbors 
- and the police - would frown on it). Besides, in my neighborhood, that 
would just open up the territory for other squirrels. There's no 
shortage around here.

And you know, fruit-growing is just a hobby with me. Yes, I want to get 
fruit from all my hard labor. But if I can't live with the local 
wildlife in these circumstances, how can I expect people whose 
livelihoods depend on it to do so? We complain about other people 
killing off tigers and wolves, but we can't even live with squirrels in 
our backyards? Heh, heh. There's something wrong about that.

Not that I'll let them eat ALL of my fruit, of course. :-)

Bill
Lincoln, NE (zone 5)

--
Man is kind enough when he is not excited by religion. - Mark Twain