If Town Clears Out, It Must Be Squirrel Season

[acmavm]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/sports/othersports/03squirrel.html?pagewanted=1&oref=login

By JERE LONGMAN
Published: October 3, 2004

<snip>

VILLE PLATTE, La., Oct. 2 - Before 7 a.m. Saturday, Jason Cary, 10, walked into an oak and palmetto forest with his father. Within 10 minutes, a fox squirrel began to bark and skitter from branch to branch.

"Dad, look, it's right there," Jason said, raising his 20-gauge shotgun and shooting an orange-hued fox squirrel with a tail a foot long.

Squirrel season opened at dawn Saturday, and within minutes the report of shotguns boomed through this part of Evangeline Parish. Elsewhere, squirrels might be viewed as rats with good public relations. Here squirrel season's opening celebrates and preserves a distinct local custom at a time when many of the estimated half-million Cajuns have been assimilated into the broader culture.

Ville Platte High School shut down at noon on Friday. Sacred Heart High School did not open at all. Friday night schoolboy football - a consuming passion in this Cajun prairie town of 9,000 - was pushed back to Thursday night this week.

<snip>

By 7:30 a.m. Saturday, Melvin Reed had bagged his limit for the day. Some hunters will kill 500 or more squirrels by the time the season ends on Feb. 28.

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Have no comment to make because I'm feeling rather confused and conflicted on this one.

Guess I posted it because it was so damn weird to me. And it was in the Sports Pages of the NYT.

[CarolynEC]

1. A shotgun? Why not just use a cannon? Or a bazooka?

:silly:

[rfranklin]

2. I heard people in West Virginia got mad cow disease from eating...

squirrel brains. Anyone else know more about that?