A while back I shot a ground squirrel and cooked it up and it was great ,kind of a nutty flavor to it. It occurred to me that if I could domesticate them to some degree and raise them like chicken they'd be a good food source . Controlled food source and health monitoring decease is not as much problem then .
You will run into legal issues. It is not legal to keep wild animals. Game animals must be killed on site and reduces to "possession " or released immediately(meat, hide, horns)
I do lot of thing to encourage wild animals to come to our property. We created rabbit habitat and at the same time those brush piles act as funnels to move people and deer into areas where we want them to be. Our food plots are also killing zones of interlocking cross fire from our defensive pits or hunting blinds. The food plots bring in Deer and Wild turkey. We dont need to do anything with the lake as it brings in thousands of geese, ducks and many other water birds like swans and cranes. The federal lands around us are loaded with squirrels however the DEER population is pretty low per acre as the public lands get pounded by hunters and poachers. I have a nice size doe who comes in every year and eats off the food plots up front. She has been coming in for two years now and she brings her young who are also beginning to come in on their own now. I saw a small buck last year tending the does. I am trying to grow a small herd that stay close and feel safe. I dont hunt them today so I will have them tomorrow.
