My grandfather grew up in East Texas during the depression and went to work picking cotton when he was about 7 years old. Like a lot of people in those days they didn’t have enough to eat and often lived on small game, especially squirrels, and he developed a real taste for it.
When he came back from WWII he met my grandmother in Dallas where she had grown up, and when they got married she put a stop to the whole squirrel business because she found it repulsive, not to mention trashy.
I think I’ve mentioned here before that he was a crack shot, even into old age. She died in January of 2000, and when I went to visit him a couple months later, he had squirrels in the freezer. Starting about a week after she passed and until a few weeks before he died 22 years later at 100, he would walk around his neighborhood in Oak Cliff early in the morning, shooting squirrels out of pecan trees with the single shot, smoothbore Diana 25 he “liberated” from a house during the Battle of the Bulge.
I’ve got it in my safe today, in good working order.
This machine kills squirrels.