Cheated Continued

Just so you know, I just recently learned that Kentucky is legendary for hunting and eating squirrel. Granted, I was aware that our famous Burgoo was originally made with squirrel (or possum) but I thought that ended at the latest, in the early 1900’s. I looked it up online and now it’s usually made with mutton (for you Southerners, that’s lamb). Burkhard Bilger writes in his Mad Squirrels and Kentuckians essay that twenty-five million squirrels “are killed every year in Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee alone.” That’s a lot of squirrels.

According to Bilger, in 1997 two neurologists published a letter in a British medical journal indicating that five patients all from Western Kentucky with CJD, a variant of mad cow disease, shared one thing “in common: They ate squirrel brains.” Let’s just say that Leno and Letterman had a field day with this once it hit the media. I’m not surprised that I never heard about this. The Kentucky Post responded to this uproar with what every Kentuckian knows deep down: That our fine state is not just full of “shoeless, toothless, inbred, mouth-breathing, road-kill-eating hijacks.” It’s just a known fact that they’re the only ones who ever make it on the news.

but wait, there's more