More Urban Survival

We had a discussion of a lady in Seattle who has learned to eat squirrel.  Here is an older story from Detroit.

To urban hunter, next meal is scampering by
Detroit retiree, 69, supplements his income by living off the land
Charlie LeDuff, The Detroit News, 2 April 2009 (Hat tip: NC).

Detroit - When selecting the best raccoon carcass for the special holiday roast, both the connoisseur and the curious should remember this simple guideline: Look for the paw.

"The paw is old school," says Glemie Dean Beasley, a Detroit raccoon hunter and meat salesman. "It lets the customers know it's not a cat or dog."

Beasley, a 69-year-old retired truck driver who modestly refers to himself as the Coon Man, supplements his Social Security check with the sale of raccoon carcasses that go for as much $12 and can serve up to four. The pelts, too, are good for coats and hats and fetch up to $10 a hide.

Note that Beasley is a licensed furrier.  But his situation is not analogous with the middle class squirrel catcher.  The situation in detroit is a more desperate than that of Seattle.

"Starvation is cheap," he says as he prepares an afternoon lunch of barbecue coon and red pop at his west side home.

His little Cape Cod is an urban Appalachia of coon dogs and funny smells. The interior paint has the faded sepia tones of an old man's teeth; the wallpaper is as flaky and dry as an old woman's hand.

Beasley peers out his living room window. A sushi cooking show plays on the television. The neighborhood outside is a wreck of ruined houses and weedy lots.

"Today people got no skill and things is getting worse," he laments. "What people gonna do? They gonna eat each other up is what they gonna do."

Oddly enough, in England, the gray squirrel is becoming something of a delicasy, and they are hard to find.

Anyone for grey squirrel pie? Victorian delicacy enjoys revival in bid to save red cousins from extinction
Ryan Kisial, Daily Mail (U.K.) 14 January 2012 (Hat tip: NC).

James Hughes Davies, 31, who runs Little Jack Horner’s pie company, sells 60 squirrel pies a week at farmer’s markets and says he could sell dozens more if he could get hold of the animals.

‘The main problem is that I can’t get enough of the squirrels as the demand is so high’, he said.

The Seattle Squirrel massacre!

Seattle resident Melany Vorass started with a garden.  But the squirrels were eating up.

So she uses some “Have-a-Heart” traps to do some trap and releasing.  But the neighbors complained that she was just dumping her problems elsewhere.

So another solution was needed.

Meet the middle-aged, middle class woman who traps, butchers and eats squirrels in her Seattle backyard

Michael Zennie, Daily Mail (U.K.), 27 January 2012 (Hat tip: NC)

About that time, Ms Vorass discovered a recipe for squirrel and instructions on how to skin the rodents in an old Joy of Cooking cookbook.

The classic American cooking was first published in the height of the Great Depression and for many years contained recipes for all manner of wild animals -- from rabbits to opossums.

Of course she is a middle class American so you also have:

As for the actual killing, Ms Vorass says she thought long and hard about quickest the most humane way to off her captured prey.

After a squirrel is caught in a live trap baited with peanut butter and crackers, she drowns it and then cuts its throat so it bleeds out to ensure its dead before she butchers it….Drowning is the fastest way Ms Vorass has found to off the squirrels yet, since firing a gun in Seattle is strictly forbidden.

Ms. Vorass has had a series of  blogs, I believe this is her most recent:  Essential Bread.

Canaries in the coal mine

The delayed reaction layoffs to the economic crises is starting to hammer many in government employment.  Since blacks are disproportionally employed within this sector, they are getting hammered particularly hard.

So if you are not African American, why would you worry?  Because the black middle class (not the gang bangers) are the canary in the coal mine.  Of the various large groupings of people that make up the American middle class they have the shallowists roots, and the shortest period of participation. 

As Public Sector Sheds Jobs, Blacks Are Hit Hardest
Timothy Williams, New York Times, 29 November 2011

The central role played by government employment in black communities is hard to overstate. African-Americans in the public sector earn 25 percent more than other black workers, and the jobs have long been regarded as respectable, stable work for college graduates, allowing many to buy homes, send children to private colleges and achieve other markers of middle-class life that were otherwise closed to them.

But during the past year, while the private sector has added 1.6 million jobs, state and local governments have shed at least 142,000 positions, according to the Labor Department. Those losses are in addition to 200,000 public-sector jobs lost in 2010 and more than 500,000 since the start of the recession.

I think the last sentence of the first paragraph is a bit of a mistatement of why black's tended to go into government employment.  I think much of the attraction is the same for the Indian engineers, and doctors I know who make their money by running stores, but for prestige reasons keep thier professional positions active.   In this case, the blacks are probably attracted to the perceived stability, and medical benefits these positions offer.  That seems to be the attraction to the white southerners from a low income background who work in these positions.

Within the story is imbedded the second story.  Blacks have had a very hard time building on their foothold into the middle class.  There is a certain truth that your typical middle-class american is to some degree building on the success of their parents.  There is a built up social capital that they are banking on.  African Americans have had a hard time as a group building up on that capital.

A study by the Brookings Institution in 2007 found that fewer than one-third of blacks born to middle-class parents went on to earn incomes greater than their parents, compared with more than two-thirds of whites from the same income bracket. The foreclosure crisis also wiped out a large part of a generation of black homeowners.

"There hasn't been one family member who hasn't been touched by a layoff," Ms. Kindle said. "We are losing the bulk of our middle class. I was much better off than my parents, and I'm feeling my children will not be as well off as I was. There's not as much government work and not as many manufacturing jobs. It's just going down so wrong for us. When I think about it I get frightened, so I try not to think about it."

The blacks I think have had the particularly bad luck to get their economic freedom at a time when the best part of the post-World War 2 American expansion was largely past.  They had the government expansion in the 1970s, and the economic expansion of the 1990s, but a lot of that last expansion was bought on credit that is coming due.  African Americans were particulalry hard hit by the bust in sub-prime home lending.

There is also the arguement by Thomas Sowell that blacks have emulated the worst portions of the dominant white culture (think white trash) that they were most familiar with.  Their lack of success has mirrored the lack of success within this portion of Anglo-Saxon culture.

None of which really explains why blacks children are half as likely to build on the success of their parents.

Where is the Black Death?

Where is the deadly Black Death?  Is it still around?

It certainly shows up in fiction.  While it seems that the flu is the most popular purveyors of pandemic in the current rash of realistic apocalypse-in-progress novels,  that old standby, the Black Death (Bubonic Plague) still makes its occasional appearance.  It was the causal agent in Terry Nation’s novelization of the hit British TV series Survivors, and also more recently (likely via the meme vector of Connie Willis’ Dooms Day Book) Katherine Amt Hanna’s Breakdown.   Rats are associated with the spread of the plague, yet neither novel uses this vector.  As it turns out, they are correct.  Your various rats (or rat fleas to be more exact) are not required vectors.

In addition, the plague is known to infect an amazing variety of both mammals and birds which makes it an outlier in that category, and opens up all sorts of possible alternative vectors.

Having read Ms. Hanna’s (book- it was good, review later), and working on Terry Nations (good so far –review later), I decided to look at more info on the modern versions of the black death.  One item to be wary of, is that (oddly) many researchers leave out many of the occurences.  You get constant references to Medieval Europe, but they ignore the much earlier Justinian Plague (which we touched on earlier), and the fact that the last wave of the black death was in Marseille in 1720- hardly the Middle Ages.

So I was happy to find a lengthy piece that went into a much broader cross comparison.  I have only quoted the very short concluding remarks.

Medieval and Modern Bubonic Plague: Some Clinical Continuities

Lars Walløe, CCBI.NIM.ORG, 2008; (27): 59–73

Most (or all) late medieval and early modern “plague” epidemics were caused by [the bacteria] Yersinia pestis (as were the Justinian plagues (ad 542–767) and possibly the plague epidemic in about 1100 bc described in 1 Samuel).

Most (or all) of the historical European plague epidemics did not involve rats as intermediate hosts. The mode of transmission was from human to human via an insect vector.

Pulex irritans [,the human flea,] may have been the most important arthropod vector in Europe prior to the late nineteenth century, but other ectoparasites (other fleas, lice, etc.) could also have been involved.

In China before 1894 and in Hong Kong, in many (but not all) areas of India, and in cities like Bombay, Colombo, Alexandria and Sydney, the most important arthropod vector was Xenopsylla cheopis, [, Oriental Rat Flea,] and the mode of transmission was from Rattus rattus [the Black Rat] (or Rattus norvegicus [Brown or Norwegian Rat]) to man.

Note that the evidence for the Black Death becoming less virulent over time is rather limited.  The primary difference may just be that there is effective treatment that limits both the fatalities, and that modern conditions will often limit the insect vectors.  As he notes, “the bubonic and septicaemic forms of plague need a vector organism (most likely an insect) to transmit the infection from one mammal to another.”  Modern hygiene is helpful.

Note that it can still be very deadly if contracted.  This piece takes the more traditional approach (rat fleas spread it) but gives a little more background information

Black Death (pdf)

Saylor.Org, June 2011

The modern bubonic plague has a mortality rate of thirty to seventy-five percent and symptoms including fever of 38–41 °C (101–105 °F), headaches, painful aching joints, nausea and vomiting, and a general feeling of malaise. If untreated, of those that contract the bubonic plague, 80% die within eight days.] Pneumonic plague has mortality rate of ninety to ninety-five percent. Symptoms include fever, cough, and blood-tinged sputum. As the disease progresses, sputum becomes free flowing and bright red. Septicemic plague is the least common of the three forms, with a mortality rate close to one hundred percent.

Ouch.  Obviously a disease that you don’t want to become resistant to treatment, or find a new nifty vector.  I don’t think Flu’s and Bacteria can easily combine their genetic coding, so fortunately (I hope) you wouldn’t expect a Black Death- Flu.