Pardon me if this is a dumb question, but just what does one do with a dead squirrel?
Some people eat them, some people just get off from killing animals.
Gumbo, baby. Or mulligan or fried.
(They are all nasty to me, but I’ve been told I have a fair hand at cooking it 
)
Oh, and kids just like to kill things. I mean, what are people thinking giving a kid a gun? They’re just gonna admire it?
Only if it’s your tragedy to cope with. If it’s not, then you’re doing something other than coping, and it’s not very nice.
I had an air rifle as a kid, and I wouldn’t even have thought about shooting at or killing an animal. I shot on paper targets in bullet traps.
You were a good kid. So many aren’t.
It’s nearing deer season around here and the woods are full of ping ping sounds of hunters testing guns and sighting in scopes. You can bet there are plenty of kids out there.
Scary times. For me. I’m afraid to walk too far afield. Even driving on the county road is a little dangerous.
I have actual bullet holes in my log house from errant hunters taking pot shots from the road. They never intended to hit anything. Of course. 
It’s not only me, but my parents gave me the rifle only for practice shooting. If I had used it for shooting birds or squirrels and they had found out about it, they would have been shocked and taken the rifle away from me.
Exactly. They taught you right.
Yes, they did. They are good people.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with shooting squirrels. There are two perfectly good reasons to do so:
- you want to eat them
- they are eating your crops
Killing things just for the joy of killing things is nasty. When i was a kid, little boys sometimes killed ants by burning them with a magnifying glass. And that’s nasty, even if it’s only an ant. But there are legitimate reasons for killing squirrels.
I’m not sure why they are shooting squirrels with anything more powerful than a pellet gun, though.
I get that some people are willing to eat squirrels that they’ve hunted. But they’re tiny little creatures that I don’t imagine yield much meat, especially not compared to buying meat from the market. Plus there’s all that work of butchering them.
Edited to add, my parents’ house has squirrels in the backyard, along with chipmunks. Neither seems like they’re worth the trouble.
According to my old Joy of Cooking, there’s also a gland near the tail that you must remove properly. The butchery instructions in that book included skinning. I think each recipe used several squirrels.
You can actually get more meat from small game than large, just because there’s so many more small critters. Big game hunting has always been about male bonding and boasting rights (seriously, there’s been research). As for me I’ve always been kind of neutral on it; I eat meat so I’d feel hypocritical about condemning it, but it’s never appealed to me either.
As for humor and this incident, I wouldn’t make fun of the teen who was killed; he’s not the one who screwed up and killed somebody. He’s the victim. I’d make fun of the person who did it, if I could think of a good, appropriately insulting joke about them at the moment.
Yep. We did it all the time.
Ground squirrels sometimes need to be culled, due to disease.
In GB the North American Grey Squirrel is am invasive species , spreading disease to the native Red Squirrel and destroying trees crops, etc.
I buy all my meat from other people, who have done the dirty work of killing the animal and cleaning the carcass. But I’ve enjoyed quail and squab (pigeon) which are both smaller than a gray squirrel. Lots of edible fish are small, too. Heck, in Japan I’ve been served tiny just-hatched fish, both as a seasoning and pickled, as a side dish.
And Cheney famously has never apologized to his victim, according to the victim.
Kentucky-style burgoo, baby.
I can’t see hunting squirrels, though I did set a rat trap (unsuccessfully) for the little bastid that keeps chewing paint and occasionally wood from my porch.
A homebrew with million Scoville unit hot pepper extract consistently repels him now, plus I have the joy of thinking of him getting a taste, then running for the pond to wash out the tongue burn from all those Scovilles.
It can be a macho thing among teenage boys to scatter blood, guts, and gore.
Iowa is also Fox Squirrel country. This picture was taken in CA were they are introduced and they can be melanistic (all or partially black), but most are predominantly this reddish-brown:
I caught our dogs playing tug of war with one.