One cold Sunday morning last month, I visited Pow Hill, a glorious moorland thick with pine trees that overlooks the Derwent reservoir, north-west of Durham. In a clearing, three amateur wildlife photographers, in full camouflage gear, sat on plastic bags and watched a red squirrel race across the bracken.

As I watched the little fella leap from log to tree, the sunlight dancing across its tail, naturally my thoughts turned to its grey cousin and what he would taste like, deep-fried, seasoned, with a little mayonnaise.

I didn’t realise how much people hate grey squirrels until I came to Pow Hill. They hate them because they blame them for the demise of the red squirrel. They hate them so much that they eat them. Still, squirrel is low in fat and low in air miles and the internet is full of recipes. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has been doing it in plain sight for years, and squirrel has long appeared on seasonal menus at the super-influential St John restaurant in London.

Squirrel is low in fat and low in air miles and the internet is full of recipes

The whole red-versus-grey saga is rather sad. Greys were brought over here from the US by Cheshire banker Thomas Brocklehurst (who released a pair into the wild in 1876) and, for a while, they were all the rage in high society. But they eat bark voraciously and harbour squirrel parapoxvirus (harmless to humans) that doesn’t harm greys but kills reds. One gets the sense the grey squirrel didn’t want this to happen, that the whole thing has been stoked furiously by the media, like Liam and Noel moaning about each other. But such is the circle of life. If I like rabbit, I’ll like squirrel, the photographer says. I do like rabbits, I say. “OK,” he says. “I have a friend who kills greys and puts them in pies, but I can’t tell you who,” like it’s the Pentagon Papers. Eventually he does. (They always do.)

Sadly, the squirrel pie is sold out, but I track down a frozen multipack of five squirrels in Suffolk at The Wild Meat Company. I need only one, but I’ve long crossed the bridge of inhumanity, so I buy the lot and let it defrost in the car on the way home. I find a recipe on a chatroom for amateur hunters for southern-fried squirrel, which involves cutting it into chunks, rolling it in eggs, then flour and breadcrumbs, and shallow frying in some oil.

I don’t particularly enjoy the experience. I miss the supermarket coddling that allows me to ignore the horror of my dinner’s provenance. It’s hard, also, to feel nothing as you cut through the squirrel’s little arm like a twig with a pair of kitchen scissors – and hard to watch said arm sizzle gently in the oil. Taste-wise, it’s tricky to peg, sitting somewhere between pigeon and rabbit, dry and oddly meatless. All in all, the whole experience feels extravagant and pointless.

Chris Packham once called the grey-killing red squirrel fans “a small band of lunatics who are insidiously bogged down and blinded by sentimental racism” and, in truth, I get it. But having grown up surrounded by sheep, which occasionally we would deliver to their death, I have learned that everything dies – and not always in its own time. Happy eating!