Another Reason Why This Is Not Just Like The Great Depression

As pundits and politicians continue to fire cannonballs of gloom and doom at our ever-sinking ship of consumer confidence, media outlets cannot seem to resist trying to convince us that our current situation is as bad as the Great Depression. They seem to forget that the rules of psychology also apply to the rules of economics in this regard, namely, that the more you talk about how Depressed you are, the more Depressed you get.

That being said, allow me to state emphatically that even though I've expanded my garden this year, and begun my foray into small animal husbandry, I in no way believe that it's As Bad Now As It Was Then. And to prove it, here's a story from West Virginia's News and Sentinel about how people actually lived during the Great Depression, when their greatest concern wasn't whether or not they'd be able to afford the cell phone bill:

When Amma resident Howard Carper Jr. was a boy in the late 1930s and early 1940s, he and his family survived on what the land would provide and little else.

Unlike many families in more urban settings, they had meat at most meals. In the fall, they butchered hogs. Otherwise, the woods around the farm yielded the family's meat.

Every day after school, Carper and his older brother, the late Roscoe Carper Sr., scoured the woods near the farm for whatever small game they could find. There were no deer in that area then, so they kept the family fed with small game.

It was a daily routine, the boys came home from school, their mother, Annie Carper, would perhaps thrust a biscuit in their pockets, Roscoe grabbed a .22 rifle and off the boys went in search of game. As night fell, they returned home and their mother cleaned the game, soaked the meat in saltwater and stored it in the cool spring house for consumption the following day.

Carper said the boys learned a great deal about animals. They learned how they behaved and knew where they lived.

"The groundhogs, muskrats, squirrels, rabbits, possums, skunks and raccoons sure had a hard time when me and Roscoe was boys," Carper said.

Their hunting style bears little resemblance to most hunting today. It was Depression-era hunting, hunting that the family not only relied on for sustenance, but with a maxim of shooting only when absolutely necessary.

Larger animals, such as raccoons, Roscoe dispatched with the .22 rifle. Squirrels, however, the younger Carper brother sometimes killed with his bare hands. Shells, after all, cost money. Minor injuries from bites did not.

"We hunted with dogs and when the dogs would tree a squirrel and he'd go in his hole. I had a pair of lineman's spikes and I climbed the tree, reach in the hole and pull him out by the tail," Carper recalled.

Squirrels have long, sharp teeth for breaking into hard nuts for the meat inside. Those teeth also are very efficient against the hands of young boys reaching into their dens.

"Squirrels have sure got some teeth. I've got scars on my hands today from those squirrels," he said.

One of the worst scars comes from a time when Carper was locked in a life-and-death struggle with a squirrel and the only weapons the boy had were his thumb and forefinger.

"I stuck my fingers in his hole to pull him out by the tail, but as I was reaching in, he was coming out headfirst and latched on to my little finger. He about bit it plum off. I was up in the tree trying to choke him with my fingers and Ross (Carper) yells up 'You can't fall down, it's about 100 feet straight down over the hill.' It took a good while, but I finally got that squirrel strangled with my fingers. I've still got a scar from that," he said.

Just as in Parkersburg, Carper said there was virtually no actual money circulating in the Roane County economy. Muskrat hides, however, were an unofficial legal tender in Roane County. He traded 13 muskrat hides for his first rifle, a .22 single-shot Winchester.

So next time you hear someone complain about how we're in another Great Depression, ask them if they've ever strangled a squirrel.