On the sixth day, which was Saturday, the squirrels came again for the last time; they brought a fresh skull in a little rush basket as a last parting present for Zombie Owl.
But Nutkin ran in front laughing, and shouting—
"Walnut tasty, walnut sweet, Crack through the skull and suck out the meat!"
Now old Brown Zombie took an interest in brainzz; he opened one eye and shut it again. But still he did not speak.
Nutkin became more and more impertinent—
"Old Mr. Z! Old Mr. Z!
Wrinkly old king in his castle of bone, Looks out twin windows at the view from his throne."
Nutkin shambled up and down like a dead thing; but still Zombie Owl said nothing at all.
Prions cannot be destroyed by boiling, alcohol, acid, standard autoclaving methods, or radiation. In fact, infected brains that have been sitting in formaldehyde for decades can still transmit spongiform disease.
I’m from KY. My dad used to do the brains and eggs scramble for Sunday morning breakfast. I grew up in a household where you ate what was put on your plate with no complaint.
I think I just made myself a little sick to the stomach.
There’s nothing wrong with eating offal (including brains), but the problem is there are various diseases that can be passed along by consuming the brains. And if its a wild animal you can never be sure if its safe to eat or not, and if you see my previous post… even if you cook it well it will not get rid of prions (and possibly might be the same for other things)
I’m guessing that a lot of the squirrels are “caught” a bit by surprise by a rimfire round, so it may not be so much an issue of “was the squirrel dysfunctional because of clinical disease” as much of a “Holy poop! How many squirrels have non-clinical prion disease?”…
Nasty nasty disease group though. I’ve seen sheep with scrapie, and cows with BSE, and those are both pretty horrendous.
I grew up in rural Arkansas; we ate squirrel fairly often, but didn’t eat the brains.
When my dad was a kid, he often ate squirrel brains scrambled with eggs. He loved them.
As far as I know there were no rituals or traditions about handing out different bits of the animal to different families, or eating roadkill. Frankly that sounds like sensationalist bullshit, or a story some hillbilly thought would be funny to feed to city folk.
During the depression, my dad lived in both rural Texas and Kentucky. They occasionally ate rattlesnake or squirrel, but never brains as far as I know. Now with chicken, my dad’s always been a marrow-sucker. Ugh.
That passing of the squirrel head to the matron story sounds like unmitigated fake cutesy “the space shuttle dimensions were determined by the width of a horse’s ass” bullshit that your creepy uncle fwd fwd fwd’s to you.
"Seahorse and almond, two of each, an ambsace; Archway and hook, the temporal lobe. Chamber, bridge and pine-gland, and a sky-blue place; Black substance and peach-stone, all part of the globe."
Nutkin made a whirring noise to sound like a groan, and he took a running jump right onto the head of Zombie Owl!..
Then all at once there was a flutterment and a scufflement and a loud “BRAINZZZ”
The other squirrels scuttered away into the bushes.
The really weird thing? A lot of animals we consider to be harmless vegetarians do eat meat. Deer eat a fair bit of baby birds that fall from trees, it’s known that cows and other herding animals will do the same. Chickens will do better health-wise if they are occasionally fed meat to supplement their grain/plant based diet. Etc.
Coincidentally Scishow did this somewhat recently:
