I've never eaten muskrat, but I have a friend whose trapped nutria on Back Bay in Virginia and cooked those. They are actually very good, indeed. He soaks the meat in buttermilk to tenderize it.

We have a lot of muskrats here. I suppose most places with water do. We have a local business park that had a WWII era drainage canal in it that had muskrats and the last population of cottonmouth snakes in that part of the city. Once the business park was established and picknick table put out for the workers, people started to complain about the snakes. Heck, I had one crawl into an inspection garage at the insruance building I worked at. The landowners started killing any snake they found. It wasn't to long after the cottonmouths were eradicated that it became unwise to walk anywhere near that canal. The muskrats had burrowed into the banks and walking close to the canal you stood a good chance of the ground collapsing into a maze of burrows and being in mud up to your hips. That canal is a total cluster now. It was once a pretty park-like area. Now it's eroded and broken and none of the landscaping is safe from muskrats.

[Linked Image from i.imgur.com]
https://vcdl.org/