The squirrels have figured out which of my bulbs were the most expensive, or hardest to find. This was not unexpected. It's just more annoying than usual today. This is war!
Barbecued Squirell Source: "L.L. Bean Game & Fish Cookbook", by Angus Cameron & Judith Jones
2 dressed squirrels, cut in serving pieces
3/4 cup red wine
1 cup water salt & pepper
2 bay leaves
1 large onion, chopped
2 carrots, sliced
1-1/2 to 2 cups BBQ sauce
In a kettle, boil, then simmer the squirrel pieces in the wine & water with the rest of the ingredients except BBQ sauce. Cook covered for about an hour. Remove pieces, place in a baking dish, and cover with the sauce. Bake in preheated 300 degree oven for another 45 minutes.
The same book also suggests: Brunswick Stew Squirrel Stroganoff with Mushrooms, Onions & Sour Cream Squirrel Stew with Black Olives Squirrel in a Clay Pot (Slow-cooked with ham & herbs) Squirrel Braised in Sauerkraut Squirrel Cobbler Squirrel Cacciatore
Anecdotal evidence suggests a causative link between eating squirrel brains and the development of a spongiform encephalopathy similar to "mad cow disease".
Many, many, many mammals have forms of spongiform encephalopathy restricted to their species. A study was undertaken in rural kentucky where a dish called Burgoo is eaten (scrambled squirrel brains & eggs) & where eleven cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease have been documented. The definitive link was not successfully made between squirrels & the five cases, nor has an agentative prion for squirrels been found in human brains. Because all the western Kentucky cases were country folk who indeed ate Burgoo from time to time, warnings against eating squirrel brains have been going 'round for about eight years now. Of course, they all also ate beef, and many other wild animals, so the link to squirrels is very tenuous.
ALL wild animal brains AND BLOOD as well as domestic animal brains AND BLOOD are equally suspect, and avoiding eating brains is not enough to avoid the disease. But cluster of cases in rural Kentucky certainly beat the statistical odds of so many cases in one area. Suspected cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in Alabama, Mississippi & West Virginia add another but still uncertain layer of evidence that the disease prions are passing to humans in areas wherever squirrel brains are eaten.
A more alarming finding of the west Kentucky study showed two groups of patients with Parkinson's disease, one group with 12 of 42 patients having eaten squireel brains, in another group 27 of 100 ate squirrel brains. A much higher percentage ate other kinds of meat, but the recurrence of this comparatively rare meat item for human diet rightly rings alarm bells. All this evidence out of context seems very convincing, but in context the greater commonality was all the patients ate venison, & just as many researchers believe increased incidences of parkinson's and CJD in rural communities is from eating venison, the blood of which carries the suspect prions. The other commonality is the Kentucky cases all ate pork, & pigs may also transmit the disease.
The problem with all these links is the prions found in people more closely match up with types of scrapies or mad-cow prions found in cows, deer, sheep, and goats -- but to date, no match with squirrel prions has been shown, which doesn't mean that link never will be shown as further studies progress.
Furthermore, the types of feeds that were long fed to cattle, which carried the prion infections from roadkill & sick sheep that were turned into protein meal by rendering plants, continued to be fed to chickens and pigs long after it was banned as a cattle feed. Chickens do not live long enough to show signs of the disease, but may well carry the prions to humans. Two studies have indicated (again without definitive proof) that eating pork increases the risk of this disease. Virtually all CJD patients have a lifelong history of feating beef and pork. THey also turn out to have had a higher-than-average consumption of lamb, and man meats prepared "rare." Roast pork, ham, hot dogs, pork chops, smoked pork, & scrapple (an appalling stew made from cooked pork bones & corn meal) are all more likely to be in the CJD diet than is the case with the uninfected.
It appears that who eats meat, period, is at risk; who eats wild meat is at increased risk; or who eats the brains of wild or domestic meats is at still greater risk. Becausae it is believed by some researchers that chickens may also harbor the prions, & in some places are still fed the rendered protein meal, some speculate that even vegetarians may have some risk from the use of chicken and steer manures on agricltural crops.
American cattle are not well tested, and the beef industry relies mostly on its own propoganda & on its ability to lobby & buy off congress to counter the bad press this disease generates. The immunohistochemistry test used on AMerican cattle is not a senstive test for this disease, and it is only used on cattle showing signs of illness, whereas most cattle go to the slaughterhouse too young to show signs of their infection. There are "sporadic" forms of the disease that the cow can carry to humans without ever having shown signs of the disease. Many American cases of the syndrome are diagnosed as Alzheimers or Parkinsons and if the patient is elderly no one will even question the diagnosis.
In any case, if you're still eating hamburgers from Macdonalds, I sure wouldn't worry about the squirrels.
Hell no. A burger without fries simply isn't complete. And, I just read about what farmers spray on potatoes destined for McDonalds, in order to assure blemish-free fries. In the book I read, one farmer's wife wasn't even comfortable serving the potatoes to dinner guests. :-)
About ten years ago, in Mexico, I was served spinal cord once. Now, in Mexico, you just don't refuse someone's food, so I dug in - and it was DELICIOUS. I've never had it since, but always thought about it, at least until the K-J/mad cow thing came up.
Well when I was a kid in New York, we ate a lot of squirrel. My favorite was squirrel stew. Quartered and cooked a long time with the normal stew vegetables. Allow between one and two squirrels per person. Yum, and it does not taste like chicken.
When I lived in rural Kentucky many of my uncles and their friends went squirrel hunting several times every year. They and their families relished the meat. I never developed a liking for it. Don't remember if the brains of the squirrels were eaten, but considering the size of the animals I imagine they were.
Most of those that ate the squirrels lived long, healthy and happy lives well into their eighties and some even into their nineties.
Update: I just went outside and found one of the little bastards sitting on the hard tonneau cover on my pickup truck. They plotting to take the vehicle.
When I was growing up in northern Indiana, my grandfather hunted squirrel all of the time. My grandmother would cook it and serve it for dinner.
During the time that I was in eastern Carolina I would look at the Gray squirrels and wander how they would make a meal. Now after moving back to Indiana and seeing the red squirrels, it is obvious.
Eeech. As I pointed out before, the Suquamish have asked many times, humbly & politely, that this fabrication not be fobbed off on Chief Sealth. Why persist in the insult? It's fine if this piece of white christian fabrication speaks to you personally, but for god sake at least credit it to the Jesus freak scriptwriter who wrote it. The correct attribution would be "Ted Perry, 1972."
I can see you don't want to credit it honestly, because much as people pretend it's great writing, only the name of Sealth is great, & in admitting it's from a christian telefilm script for the Southern Baptist Convention's Radio & Television Commission, well, being HONEST would require this honkified fabrication to stand on its own merits, which are equal to the merits of Ashleigh Brilliant, not Chief Sealth. But gosh darn it, do TRY to have some respect for Sealth and stop crediting him for this Southern Baptist invention.
Perry has generally avoided public statements because he is justifiably humiliated to have been responsible for this great insult to Chief Sealth. Linda Marsa reached him in 1992, & obtained the closest thing we will ever have from him of an apology, though it is not apology enough to forgive him. It was the film producer who fobbed off the quote as Sealth's & Perry claims to have protested at the time. To quote Marsa's article: "I'm embarrassed now when I'm seen as someone who put words in Chief Seattle's mouth," says Ted Perry, a tweedy professorial type who teaches film at Vermont's Middlebury College. "That was never my intention."
Marsa continued: Of course, most people are puzzled by the raging controversy. After all, Chief Seattle is a revered icon. So no harm, no foul. Right? Wrong, say scholars. "Native American culture is constantly being exploited and appropriated as illustrations of whatever European theory is in fashion," says Jack D. Forbes, a professor of Native American studies at the University of California at Davis. These range from the extreme individualism of the 1983 novel Hanta Yo to the New Age spiritualism of Lynn Andrews. "When," asks Forbes, echoing the frustrations of other Native Americans, "will the thefts of our spiritual traditions end?"
For whoever actually respects Sealth I'll repost the correction previously provided:
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Si'alh (Chief Sealth) never spoke those words, which are a romantic invention concocted by screenwriter Ted Perry, who had looked up Chief Sealth's speech & assessed it as "simply not very inspiring or significant" which reveals the depth of disprespect Perry had) so made up a speech he liked better, for the 1972 telefilm "Home," which was somewhat hippy oriented, & aimed at ecology-minded christian whites & completely unconcerned with Native Americans.
The fake speech includes such moronic impositions as "I have seen a thousand rotting buffaloes on the prairie, left by the white man who shot them from a passing train" when Chief Sealth's stomping grounds were the east & west side of Puget Sound, & he neither saw prairies of dead buffalos nor pretended he had, nor in 1854 could he have seen a train; nor did Sealth know the "web of life" myth which is Greek, though had that been the only absurdity it could've been chalked up to a translator's imposition, though in fact it is just Ted Perry writing from a white cultural basis. Even the fake speech's reference to "the lovely cry of a whippoorwill" is a bird Sealth never could have heard.
Every line of the fake speech is either historically ridiculously, or portrays Chief Sealth as some kind of Saint Frances idiot savant, if not merely a third-rate poet suited to one more bad song from Paint Your Wagon, "I talk to the trees." This fake speech insults Northwest native peoples, who've tried to no avail to squelch this fake, but most whites want no part of the real deal, because history is painful & seriously indicts white culture as harmful to the degree of psychosis -- the fake version is Popular Romance for a feel-good Par-Tay.
What is preserved of his actual speech can be read here:
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was imperfectly recorded, & he gave his speech in Salish, so the speech as we have it is a witness's after-the-fact reconstruction from notes taken through a translator. Some historians have complained that even this "authentic" speech is poorly attested, but it has enough actual touchstones to the 1850s that it can probably be accepted as being as close as we'll ever have to hearing Sealth's considerable oratorial powers.
It is horrifying that whites hugely prefer their own modern version which has been turned into t-shirts, environmentalist posters, greeting cards, persistantly misattributed for the three decades since it was written, while Sealth's actual words of peace & sorrow receed from public knowledge. Why is that awful Ashleigh Brilliant-style fake speech so well known, loved, & persistantly quoted, but the disturbingly beautiful original is not:
"At night, when the streets of your cities & villages shall be silent & you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled & still love this beautiful land. The white man will never be alone. Let him be just & deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not altogether powerless."
Even this moving statement is altered by white interpolations, an anonymous christian editor adding to a later, revised version the ridiculous afterthought "Dead did I say? There is no death, only a change of worlds," completely reversing Sealth's persistant "comparisons" of conqureror vs native beliefs; one of Sealth's beliefs was that the spirits of the dead linger in THIS world, not some distant paradise, & this difference of belief was signal to his 1854 explanation of why these two cultures had such turmoil between them.
The actual speech speaks to real injustices & inevitabilities & is very moving in its historical context, permitting a glimpse of a good man who lived through a challenging time of sorry changes for his people, & still hoped room might be preserved for his people, & for peace between native and immigrant races.
The fake speech plays into a broad liberal white guilt & is the exact same kind of (ultimately racist) Romanticism of the Noble Savage that caused photographer Edward Curtis to make up his own Indian costumes & require Indians to wear them before he would photograph them, having absolutely no interest in their actual lives. The fake speech is a nice paean for the Sierra Club; the real speech is an unembittered plea for peaceful co-exsistance with conquerors who had been killing off Sealth's relatives for several years, for he knew his people could not survive through rebellion.
When he graciously accepts the offer of reservation life because his people "are no longer in need of a great country" there is a bit of a backhanded compliment imbedded in there; when he accepts the alleged "friendship" of the Great White Father back east (who he thought was still Geotge Washington), he says how generous this offer of friendship must be since the Great White Father has so "little need of our friendship." These are such obviously veiled criticisms of further injustice he is about to cave in to in order that some of his people might survive, even if only as "broken bands" grieving over their peoples' burial places. Understanding Sealth's position gives beauty & weight to his words -- though the author of the fake speech found it "uninspiring or insignificant" making it all the more horrifying that Rev. Parry's white christian version would be so much better liked by white christians. The fake speech is suited primarily to quotation in Hallmark Cards or as captions in National Park picture books & tourist pamphlets, but being written by & for white christians it evidently sounds more important to same.
As a great man of peace, Sealth deserves far better than forever to be quoted for things he never said, that had nothing to do with his life & the storm he had to bring his people through. His words were prophetic, & concern the ecology insofar as he saw that not only his people, but also the very land, were decaying beneath the tread of white conquest, a madness he blamed on whites' belief that the dead go away to a far paradise, whereas his own ancestors dwelt in the wild places that were already in Sealth's day being decimated, the whites permitting nowhere on earth "dedicated to solitude."
Sealth was liked by whites because he was always placating whites & joined no rebellions. He was nevertheless brave to stand up for peace in an age where even peace negotiators were killed by whites. It was bold to give the actual speech he gave, considering how Quiemuth was stabbed to death in Governor Stevens' office for attempting peacefully to turn himself over to conquerors, &when Chief Leschi sued for peaceful negotiations, he was summarily hung for an invented crime, in a public display of white barbarity the purpose of which would today be called pure terrorism in both its intent & its effect. The only good that can be said of white response at that time is that the white soldiers at Ft Steilacom so respected Leschi as a just warrior, & knowing that he was not guilty of the crime alleged, would not permit the territorial governor to have Leschi hanged in the fort, blocking the gallows to being placed there. It was otherwise an unitertupted legacy of conquerors' merciless cruelty that Sealth stood before, accepting humiliation while begging for co-existence, NOT for an Arbor Day celebration or donations to the Audobon Society.
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