In some English-speaking countries St Stephen’s Day, or Boxing Day, is a time for sports, We have the Irish hunting the wren or riding to hounds in pursuit of the fox, and Australians racing yachts and playing cricket. In the New Forest area of England, it was customary to hunt the red squirrel, an outing known as “Squoyling”.
A diary entry from 1928 expresses disgust at the practice:
A hateful thing is done here, done every Boxing Day, but I never happened to hear of it until this year. On Boxing Day the boys of the village go out in company to the woods to hunt the squirrel. Their game is to stone them to death. Squirrels are wary and shy and the hunters none too skilful, but they do take toll of them. I do not know the origin of this ugly sport. A forester who has known of it the last five-and-twenty years knew of a tradition that the squirrels eat the tops of the yews, and that this practice is a yearly punitive expedition, but I expect it has a more primitive source than that. Is there not some tradition that connects the red squirrel with Judas Iscariot? – something older still. The primitive hunting of the wren’, which Frazier includes among primitive agricultural or even pre-agricultural rites, used also to be practised here, but happily now has been discontinued. It was not confined in this place to any one day in the year. When will the squirrel hunt die out? While deer and fox and hare are hunted the village boys may say with reason ‘Why not the squirrel too?’
The squirrels were regarded as suitable for eating for those who could afford no more expensive meat and were also seen as a threat to healthy trees as this forester relates:
We looked forward to Boxing Days to go squirreling. Not after the grey tree rats we see in the New Forest today, but that gorgeous creature that we see here no more, the red squirrel. The red squirrel could never be described as vermin but their numbers had to be controlled otherwise the young bucks in June would tear about the trees, particularly the larch, and rind the top with the result that the tree died. We went after the red squirrels armed with snogs – lethal weapons made from pieces of wood with a lead weight wired on the end. These would be used to knock the red squirrels from the trees and when we had about a dozen we would take them home to be skinned and cooked in the turf oven. They made a very tasty meal.