A sign of the times, maybe, in struggling Detroit: Charlie LeDuff checks in with a 69-year-old retiree who supplements his income by hunting raccoons and selling the carcasses for $12—a typical raccoon serves four—and the pelts for $10. “Coon or rabbit,” Glemie Dean Beasley, a native of the South, tells the Detroit News columnist. “God put them there to eat.”
And it’s not so strange, he says, considering the state of industrial meat in this country. “Fill ’em so full of chemicals and steroids it ruins the people. It makes them sick. Like the pigs on the farm. They’s 3 months old and weighing 400 pounds. They’s all blowed up. And the chil’ren who eat it, they’s all blowed up. Don’t make no sense.” (More raccoons stories.)