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my pet squirrel was perhaps hhmm...eight inches long minus tail, with tail perhaps double around 16 inches, but it's also a thing that he was a fortunate pet with ample food and water at home, so grew pretty large and heavy, and as per internet indian striped squirrels have average lifespan of just a year or two - this photo was taken at very end days of his life, so he was already a 'senior citizen' in human terms - regular feral squirrels here would be about an inch shorter and quite thinner in frame i thinkSqurrels here are bigger than rats - they look like your squirrel though i dont get size of your squirrel due to lack of frame of reference but squirrels here are mostly 15-24 inches long from nose to tail. ( small adults/females are just over a foot long, larger males can be up to 2 feet long and they seem to be more equal in body-to-tail ratio than your squirrel who seems longer in tail than body).
but its not like squirrels here are braver or anything- they all run the heck away from humans and me the same way whether its india or canada or murrica.
We just think that its the dumpsters being so close to the main gate ( university's idea back then = closest to main gate is most convinient for dirty teens to take their garbage out, plus easy for garbage truck to come and empty bin) meant the squirrels got used to loud drunk obnoxious humans 5 at a time 18hrs a day till they went full gangsta on us.
I was in an all-boys dorm in college ( and its better that way than co-ed dorms for many reasons that i dont want to get into here) and was engineering student with half my floor being engineers, so we actually made a Indian clothing line-pulley system from my next door dude's window from 3rd floor to pully-system our garbage bags into the dumpster, so that we didnt have to face kamikazi squirrels. Worked like a hot-damn for 3 weeks and the guy who came up with plan felt like Rancho from 3 idiots but 3 weeks later, we saw the squirrels climb up the pulley rope and sit by the dudes window and stare into his room. So squirrel 1, engineers : 0.
Since that day, for rest of our school-year, we just went to the room of the guy who was situationed right on top of the dumpster and gravity-dropped our garbage from 3rd floor. Coz squirrels look like crazy rats on crack and methamphetamine when they attack us. They definitely look and have facial expression of alpha guard dog, not scared cat or a bored bird attacking us. Its literally like tasmanian devil with a tail from bugs bunny took a swipe and then fucked off and came back from the skies to do it again a minute later.
diet consisted mainly
- choli / cowpea beans and pods, was like his staple, would consume at least 5 choli bean pods through a day everyday, we used to keep a stock of choli beans-pods at home just for him
- that hardened stem and base around gobi / cabbage, that chewy part that is usually discarded while cooking
- almonds lol, mother specifically kept a jar full of some local variety of almonds for him, would easily consume 5-some a day, surprisingly he disliked most packaged almonds being sold in online grocery stores like flipkart-blinkit...would just throw it away over some reasons...only some local variety wala badam chahiye thaa lol

- chironji seeds, loved it as much as almonds if not more
- peanuts
- steamed potato, just a small bite
- boiled rice, about a spoon worth
- a piece of dough from roti
- a piece of seasonal fruits
- dudh ki fresh malai, would often eat about a teaspoon worth of malai
- pieces of human food offered by us, like typical dhokla-khaman etc lol
he also loved to chew on tulsi ke manjari (basil seeds) a lot, so much that at season he'd spend time sitting in tulsi pots attempting to chew all manjari out
one time he ended up consuming sitafal ka beej and vomited lots of foamy saliva, we were frightened of some sort of poisoning but after taking it all out he just continued like nothing happened, but yeah, sitafal is not something that indian squirrels should consume
if anyone ever needs some tips about raising squirrel cubs, ping me, i've got a lot of experience now