Possum Crisp and Brown

 

Frequent commenter Coyote Ken passed this link to me before November 4, 2020. He added the note, "In case Biden wins. We might all need this."Before reading this essay, I would have to be on death's door due to starvation before I would consider eating a 'possum. Smitty, one of the guys I used to work with shared a story of when he and his brother were hunting rabbits and had come upon the corpse of a long-dead horse.

They heard noises within the tent-like corpse. Smitty kept his shotgun at-the-ready while his brother banged on the ribcage to see what came out.

They counted ten possum as they exited the dead horse's anus.

The trick

Possum, once treed, are easy to shake off the limb. After hitting the ground, they rarely attempt to flee. Rather, they "play possum" which makes it easy to put them in the game bag while still alive.

Typically, when chased by dogs, an opossum flees by climbing a tree. One of the hunters would then climb after the opossum and shake the limb until it fell out of the tree and was captured....

“Yielding to fate,” in this case, entails what is often called “playing possum,” but what is actually an involuntary reaction of the opossum to stress: the animal rolls over on its back and loses consciousness, very much like fainting. This allows the hunters to throw the comatose opossum in a sack or otherwise confine it, and keep hunting, so that in Audubon’s words, “half a dozen or more Opossums are sometimes captured before midnight.”

The method of catching opossums alive had two main advantages. For one, the live opossum can be saved for a Sunday or other special occasion, or until the proper side dishes can be gathered. More importantly, as Wiley Prewitt Jr. mentions in his article on Coons and Possums in The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, and Jimmy Carter (who ate a lot of opossum as a child) mentions in his memoir An Hour Before Daylight, opossums are scavengers, and therefore many people believe opossums are both more hygienic and tastier if you feed them on clean food for several days before killing and eating them.  (ERJ note: Emphasis mine. A good hosing down might be warranted as well)

I have driven in the city and possum are abundant. They are most commonly seen early in the morning on "trash day" but their tracks can be found in fresh snow almost every day of the week. 

Key points:

• Possum can be locally very abundant in the autumn due to their huge litter size.
• Possum eat almost anything and get fat where many other animals struggle to stay alive.
• Possum are easily captured alive.
• Possum are moderately calm in captivity and can be "cleaned out" by feeding them dried corn or corn that has been soaked overnight to soften it.
• Your dinner guests do not need to know the provenance of the meat you serve them .and. meatloaf tells no secrets.