A recent AP article, “What’s For Dinner? How About Raccoon?”, highlights the fact that eating raccoons is a large part of the culture and tradition of many people in the southern U.S. And it isn’t just about habit, apparently. Those who eat it regularly say that ‘coon meat is ‘just plain good’!
There are a number of benefits to a culture that embraces eating natural, wild animals as a major part of its diet.
“Raccoon meat is some of the healthiest meat you can eat,” says Jeff Beringer, a furbearer resource biologist with the Missouri Department of Conservation.
“During grad school, my roommate and I ate 32 coons one winter. It was all free, and it was really good. If you think about being green and eating organically, raccoon meat is the ultimate organic food,” with no steroids, no antibiotics, no growth hormones.
In addition, the raccoon meat market helps trappers obtain an added value for the coons that they trap for fur, and raccoon populations remain healthy and relatively disease-free when kept in balance with their habitat via sustained harvest.
In the wild, raccoons typically live five or six years. Populations that grow too dense can be decimated by disease, especially when temperatures drop, Beringer says.
“The animals huddle together, passing on the infections. In the winter, we sometimes have massive die-offs. If we can control the fluctuations in the populations by hunting and trapping, we can have healthier animals.”
The demand for raccoon meat continues to be high in Missouri, and eating varmint meat is apparently on the rise across the pond in Britian as well. Perhaps a meat market for ‘coons can be developed in other parts of the country? I’d be willing to try it.
In some states the selling of raccoon meat is unlawful, however some trappers do it anyway. Catching a fully prime, good colored hill coon and getting a couple of dollars for the pelt is not worth the effort. Assuming a trapper could find a willing meat buyer and it was legal to sell might influence a one to re-start up a coon line. It takes petro to run traps in my area of the world and I am too old to ride a bike.
well I would eat a raccoon if it was killed on the road, (fresh kill observed by me) I live where there are bushy tailed tree squirrels, we don’t kill them but when i see a road kill it goes on the BBQ.
I have eaten deer, elk, squirrel,alligator,bear, rattle snake, buffalo,frog,most all seafood and one wood rat.
I would like to eat raccoon but they live here by me and I feed them and the PaPa coon brings his family to feed in my yard. The father eats out of my hand but the mother and babies keep a distance. Yeah I know don’t feed wild animals but I have left overs and they like my cooking, the wife doesn’t but at least the coons do.
So the first time I witness a coon hit by a car he is in the pot. Enjoy!
Jess