In reply to Chester, on the subject of dead mice.

[mapsedge]

I started this as a reply, decided it would make a good post. So here we are. This was predicated on the post I wrote for The Road Less Ordinary, Of Mice and Traps.

To Chester:

Michelle has watched (correction, helped, she says) her grandfather, an avid racoon hunter, skin and field dress a racoon on several occasions (I'm pretty sure it was a different racoon each time). She has changed a variety of diapers. She held me once while I was being violently ill from a bad reaction to a prescribed pharmaceutical. She will insert her hand into the body cavity of a dressed chicken to remove the giblet package and scrape away any innards the butcher might have missed.

But she will not touch a dead mouse, or bait a fishhook.

I told her yesterday as we were making pizza that I'd like to try rabbit. She agreed, guardedly, like she knew there was more coming. There was: I told her why.

Our neighborhood is lousy with rabbits, making them a cheap source of edible and, with the right seasonings and cooking method, I would guess delicious protein. As my predation creates less competition for food, their population would grow, providing more food for us, and so on. It's a win-win. Outside the city limits this is "normal." Inside them, it's "weird." I don't get the distinction.

We try to eat naturally and seasonally. I can field dress a broccoli blindfolded, chop an onion with nary a tear, and I am ... curious ... to try my hand at our world's fauna, to pay, as Michael Pollan says, "the full karmic debt for my meal."

I'm a kid of the suburbs. I am not a hunter or trapper, but I am keen to try.

Comments

[motherpockets.livejournal.com]

I have actually skinned and dressed (same thing? Should be undressed?) a rabbit many a year ago. I even held it before the slaughter (tame rabbit, raised for food purposes, but I still wept, and my 7 year old nephew had to take me inside to wait til the skinning part). As I recall, it wasn't too difficult; you just cut off the head, slit the belly from throat to anus, grab the skin, and pull, gently but firmly, and it comes off. Take out the innards and you are pretty well done. Rinse, cut up like a chicken (leg and thigh piece, breast, forelegs where the wings might almost be, back part, and cook. We had it fried, as I recall. It does taste a bit like chicken, except the bones aren't like the chicken bones, nor quite in the same place, but the meat is fairly similar.

[billthetailor.livejournal.com]

I found a number of YouTube videos on the subject including one that showed how to disembowel the animal by squeezing the innards out through the bottom - like emptying a tube of toothpaste. Effective, in an ewww-ish kind of way.

[rowangolightly.livejournal.com]

Eww....