Squirrels are referenced in Aajonus Vonderplanitz's teachings not as a food for humans, but as the exemplary model of an animal physiologically designed to eat nuts and seeds, a category of food that humans are explicitly stated to be incapable of properly digesting. The squirrel appears in Aajonus's framework primarily as a comparative biological reference point: its digestive system, enzymes, and anatomy are built for nut and seed consumption in a way that the human system fundamentally is not. Every mention of squirrel in the source passages exists to illuminate, by contrast, what humans cannot do, and therefore what raw meat and raw animal foods must do instead.

There is no protocol in the sources in which Aajonus prescribes squirrel as a food for human consumption on the Primal Diet. The squirrel is a teaching tool, a biological counterexample, used to demonstrate the mismatch between what humans are often told to eat (nuts, seeds, grains) and what their digestive systems can actually process and assimilate. In the rare instance where actual squirrel flesh or small wild animals are discussed in adjacent contexts, it is in the context of Aajonus's personal survival stories eating whatever raw animal was available, but the squirrel itself is never highlighted as a recommended food source, the comparative point is always made to drive people toward raw meat, raw dairy, and raw eggs as the appropriate human foods.

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The core teaching Aajonus delivers through the squirrel reference is one of species-specific digestive design. He states explicitly and repeatedly that squirrels are built to digest nuts, their digestive systems contain the correct enzymes, the correct length and structure of digestive tract, and the correct biological machinery to extract the full nutritional value from nuts and seeds, including the proteins and oils locked within those hard shells.

Humans, by contrast, lack this machinery. Aajonus's teaching is that humans possess some capacity to digest the starch fraction of nuts, but are largely incapable of meaningfully digesting the fat and protein fractions, the very components that would make nuts a valuable food. This is the critical distinction. The squirrel can crack open a walnut, eat it, and fully utilize the fat and protein within. When a human eats that same walnut, according to Aajonus, the fat and protein pass largely undigested, unavailable for tissue building, cellular repair, or energy production.

He states directly: "We are not designed to digest nuts. Squirrels are. Birds are. They are designed to eat seeds and nuts. But we aren't."

And again: "We squirrels and chimpanzees and herbivores and nuggies to digest and we've been built for that. We are not."

And further: "Squirrels can do it with nuts. We don't do well on nuts. Again, it's the same process. We handle the starch in the nuts very well, but not the oils in the proteins."

The reason Aajonus identifies squirrels as the correct nut-eaters comes down to enzymatic capacity and digestive architecture. A squirrel, like herbivores, possesses the enzyme systems necessary to break down the complex oils and proteins inside nut and seed shells. Aajonus draws a parallel with B-pollen, noting that pollen grains, when viewed under a microscope, look just like tiny walnuts, with a hard shell just as impenetrable as a walnut shell, and that it would take "a digestive tract as long as a cow or a buffalo to digest it. And the same enzymes that a cow or a buffalo has or a squirrel."

He notes that even the squirrel does not eat the shell itself, it chews through it to access the interior, but that the squirrel's digestive chemistry is suited to what lies inside. The human digestive system, lacking the enzymatic profile of a squirrel, a bird, or an herbivore, cannot replicate this process.

Aajonus uses his own personal experimentation to quantify how poorly humans digest nuts, and in doing so references his own reduced hydrochloric acid production as a limiting factor. He consumed seven pounds of nuts per day, predominantly walnuts and pecans, which he identifies as "softer nuts that we should be able to digest the easiest", and still lost weight, waking up "a fraction of an ounce lighter" or at most "a whole ounce" lighter the next day, demonstrating that essentially no caloric or tissue-building value was being extracted from that enormous quantity of nuts.

His acknowledgment is: "Of course, I don't have the hydrochloric acid that most people do. Most people might do twice the digestion of it. But still, having to eat three and a half pounds of nuts a day? Not logical."

This is a significant concession. He allows that a person with normal hydrochloric acid production might digest twice as much of the nut's content as he did, but even doubled, the efficiency is so low that consuming three and a half pounds of nuts to get meaningful nutrition is described as illogical and not a viable dietary foundation for human beings.

Aajonus extends the squirrel principle to grains as well, noting that "squirrels and birds can eat grains and nuts. We can't." The structural argument is the same: birds possess a gizzard specifically designed to handle the mechanical breakdown of grains and seeds, and their biochemistry is suited to handle oils like flaxseed oil and sunflower oil, which Aajonus calls "highly acidic", in ways that human systems cannot. A squirrel is built to extract nutrition from the very foods that pass largely unused through a human body.

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Because squirrel is discussed exclusively as a comparative biological model in these sources, the typical "form and state" analysis (raw vs. cooked, fresh vs. aged, etc.) does not apply in the conventional sense for this entry. However, the principle Aajonus establishes, that the squirrel can do something with nuts that the human cannot, is itself a statement about the inherent form of nuts as a food. Nuts, in their raw state, are still incompatible with human digestion of the fat and protein fractions, even though squirrels can handle them perfectly in that same raw state.

This is an important distinction from Aajonus's broader framework, in which raw is almost always superior to cooked. For nuts consumed by humans, even the raw form is insufficient, the problem is not preparation but species-biological incompatibility. The squirrel eating a raw walnut is engaging in a biochemically appropriate act. A human eating the same raw walnut is engaging in a biochemically mismatched act, regardless of preparation state.

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While squirrel meat specifically is not discussed as a dietary protocol, Aajonus's extensive personal narratives about eating wild rabbit raw, the first raw meat he ever consumed, provides the relevant adjacent framework for understanding how he approached wild small animals as survival and medicinal food. The rabbit experience is repeated across multiple seminar transcripts in remarkable detail and is the foundational story of how Aajonus came to adopt raw meat as the cornerstone of his dietary approach.

In one account, he describes the rabbit as "a year-old jackrabbit," "good, strong meat," warm from the coyotes having just killed it, and he ate approximately three and a half pounds of a seven-pound jackrabbit in a single sitting, taking roughly 45 minutes to an hour and a half to consume that quantity. He gave the remainder to the coyotes.

He notes that the first several bites "came right back up" purely from psychological resistance, not from any actual digestive rejection. After approximately ten to fifteen bites, held down through conscious effort drawing on childhood memories of being forced to eat cooked vegetables at the dinner table, the meat "started tasting delicious" and he began "ravenously consuming it."

The wild rabbit functions in Aajonus's teaching as both a survival food and as the transitional experience that proved to him, by personal experiment, that raw meat was not only safe but healing. He had been warned by his uncle, by common cultural belief, and by his own medical conditioning that wild rabbits contained "a microbe that will take over your digestive tract and kill you within 48 hours very painfully." This fear was so ingrained that he initially ate the rabbit believing it would kill him, expecting the death as a relief from chronic suffering.

Instead, "it did just the opposite. It made me feel good in my intestines and everywhere else." After eating three and a half pounds of wild raw rabbit, he experienced no cramping, no diarrhea, no vomiting (beyond the initial psychological resistance), no illness of any kind. He noted:

• "Not one cramp, not one diarrhea, no worm came out my ear or my nose or my eye or anywhere."
• The next morning, he was able to get out of his sleeping bag in 45 minutes instead of the usual two hours.
• He felt "less pain all day long."
• This improvement sustained for three full days on nothing else but those three and a half pounds of rabbit.

He describes it as "better than I'd felt the rest of my whole life."

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While specific squirrel-meat pairing protocols are not given in the sources, Aajonus's universal principle that raw fat must accompany raw meat applies to any raw animal flesh, including wild small game. He states that eating raw meat alone directs it toward energy production, while eating it with butter directs it toward cellular rebuilding. The presence of raw fat (particularly raw butter) is protective and nutritionally synergistic with all raw meat consumption.

In the context of his personal survival eating wild rabbit and rattlesnake raw, the two wild animal experiences he documents in detail, he was eating without any fat accompaniment (no butter, no cream, no avocado available in the desert context), which represents an emergency rather than an optimal protocol.

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Aajonus frames the cultural promotion of nuts as a human protein source as a fundamental misunderstanding of human digestive biology, one that he argues has been compounded by the promotion of vegetarian and fruitarian diets that treat humans as if they were squirrels or herbivores. He makes this argument consistently across multiple seminar transcripts:

"We are not squirrels. We don't digest nuts well enough."

"In grains, we're lucky if we digest five to 10% of it unless it's cooked. Then we can digest a lot of it, but not well without toxicity. So again, we go to dairy and meats and eggs as our main food source for protein."

"raw foods isn't the answer. It's what raw foods you can digest. Nuts aren't it. We can digest some starches of the nuts, very little of the protein and very little of the fat."

The squirrel, in Aajonus's framework, is the living disproof of the idea that all animals thrive equally on the same raw plant foods. Species-specific design determines what each animal can and cannot use. The squirrel thrives on nuts because it was designed to eat nuts. The human thrives on raw meat, raw dairy, and raw eggs because the human body is designed to utilize those foods. To eat like a squirrel when you are a human is, in Aajonus's view, a fundamental biological error, one that results in malnutrition, tissue wasting, and chronic illness regardless of the quantity consumed.

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