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mapsedgeI 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.
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.
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Date: 2010-02-15 14:24 (UTC)Dad kept the cages ans started growing them for food, as we was po. Not 'pooor', but PO. Usually had rabbit every Sunday dinner for many years until finances got better.
I remember on Tuesday or Wednesday, Dad would let me pick the rabbit (which I think was just to make me feel like I had a part in it) and we went into the basement. Holding the critter by the back legs, he'd whack it in the back of the neck, killing it instantly.
He'd immediately open the belly and clean the entrails into a bucket then rinse out the cavity at the utility sink. I was usually done at this point because the sight of skinning scared me. I was like 5, after all. Each cleaned beastie was put in a container of salted water to pull the 'gamy-ness' out of the meat, and left for a few days. Come Sunday, it was usually prepared like chicken, and was not greasey or awful-tasting in any way for said 5 year old.
It's not 'just like chicken' per se, and far less tough and greasy than squirrel. Since you are looking to catch ferrel rabbits, they may not be as plump as out hand-raised ones.
I vote 'GO for it'