Fair Game? A Realistic Look At Game Meat As A SHTF Prepper Food Option

I was seriously tempted to shoot a squirrel once.  In my laundry room.  As he sat on a pile of our stuff he’d tumbled onto the floor, after chewing our windowsills to splinters trying to escape.  The little blighter wasn’t smart enough to find the chimney clean-out access he’d shoved open to make into the house.  But he Was in the house, and sitting on our stuff, so no, we didn’t shoot him.  We opened the window and left him to see himself out.

Little blighters destroy things and steal ripening fruit; it’d serve them right if we ate them.

Shooting squirrels can be a tempting vengeance plan, but is it a prepping plan?  In this podcast, Salty and I consider the pros and cons of game meat.

The Good

On one hand, game meat can be very good food.  While many people who’ve always eaten commercially produced meat find it too strong in taste, those of us who ate it early in life relish it (and find commercial meat too bland).  Nutritionally, it does some things very well.  Wild game is even more protein rich than commercial meat, because it’s a lot more lean.  The fat it has is enriched in healthier varieties of fats than corn-fed makes up corn-fed beasts.  It’s a great source of iron, and pretty good for some other minerals too.  Also, it’s savory and flavorful — two qualities not abundant in many prepper stored foods.

The nutritional profile of squirrel meat is pretty good … unless you’re looking for energy (calories).

The Bad: The bad news is two-fold:  First, there’s not much meat on a squirrel.  An average tree rat will produce about 360 calories.  That means a mid-sized man moving around some to do the hunting and cleaning would need to eat about eight of them a day to keep weight.  Rabbits are somewhat better — about three times better, in fact — but that’s still a lot of hunting.

At least it’s a lot of hunting after the first few days of it.  That’s the other bad news:  even the famous reproduction rates of rabbits can’t keep their numbers up in the face of heavy hunting in a single area.  The stupid ones would die in the first few days; the wily ones not long thereafter, and the region would be left without a useful furry food source for quite some time thereafter.  Even deer have that problem:  One deer will provide quite a bit of meat (more than one family can eat unless there’s a preservation method on hand); but they reproduce slowly.  Even the lower population of 1800s Missouri hunted deer nearly to extinction before seasons and limits were enacted.

What works?

Since game meat is good food, but sustaining on it as most or all of one’s calories is pretty much not happening, the best solution seems to be to hunt in sustainable levels and use the meat, but get most of your calories elsewhere.  Those dehydrated veggies will be Way better if you put them in a squirrel stew instead of eating them all by their lonesome.  The meat will not only improve the taste, but provide valuable protein and minerals.  Plus, your fruit harvest will be much safer.  (No, I’m not bitter about all those stolen peaches.  Not at all! )

Pro tip:  Rabbits can carry tularemia, a bacterial disease that is transmissible through body fluids.  I’ll be doing a post on it in the near future; but a relevant take-away for the moment is to be very careful when cleaning rabbits.  Their bones splinter easily and are prone to stabbing people cleaning the rabbits, which is a great way to transmit this disease.