Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Could you live on deer in a major crisis?

In a dystopian America game enforcement laws would be out the window and food distribution would be broken.

All you have to do is look to China to see what would happen. The Chinese decimate wildlife populations.

The oceans would be hoovered clean just like the south china sea. The truth is that the slightest breakdown in wildlife protection enforcement any where in the world combined with a small food shortage and world wildlife populations would fall off a cliff. In the dystopian future of earth will have very little wildlife and mass extinct.

People have no idea in what a house of cards we live in.

A quick google will tell you how many licensed hunters are in each state. That would be a place to start in estimating how many would or could shoot a deer. You might say that 60% don't know how to dress a deer but you can bet they'll figure it out in a hurry if they're hungry.
Seasons would be ignored. Shooting a doe in the spring or summer insures that the fawn won't survive so that's a double hit.

I’ve gone on the record several times on this forum stating hogs will be our manna from Heaven.

Dystopia means no or limited laws. There are a lot easier ways to kill wildlife than shooting them. Hunger is the greatest motivator.

They would become rare also. I don't think you have come to grips with how many more people there.

Self production and small communities are the only real solution to dystopian survival.

You haven’t a clue what I’ve come to grips with.

Ammo is gonna become rare too. You can’t load mags fast enough.

Once you accept the fact you are already dead, everything else is a piece of cake!

In an all-out breakdown of society 50%-70% of the US population would be dead in ~90-120 days.

1. Lack of clean water would be the number one killer
2. Everyone on daily medication would be next

Lots of people would die just because of all the dead people. Who's going to police the bodies?

After that your locale and access to resources might start to play a factor in your survival.

https://www.northernexpress.com/news/feature/article-5543-the-indians-in-winter/
"A French observer named Nicolas Perrot reported that a band of Chippewa collected 2,400 moose on Manitoulin Island using only snares in the winter of 1670-71."

I believe we are on the same page, oldHat. The deerskin trade of the 18th century decimated the whitetail populations in the south. Creek hunters from the village of Pecana at the junction oc the Coosa and Tallapoosa rivers in modern Alabama were traveling as far west as the Sabine river basin to find deer by the 1750’s.

Clean water will be a big problem for sure, but I disagree with your time scale. Maybe in phoenix and Vegas but not in most cities. We can drink dirty water or rain water as long as Dysentery or Cholera does not take hold. It will inevitably but it will take some time.

Disease will take longer than 120 days. Civil war battle fields were highly polluted due to dead bodies, but disease was able to be managed. True smaller scale but dead bodies just by themselves are not a problem.

Agreed. Same problem happened in the Ohio river basin in the late 1700s. Stories are told of hunters having to travel very long distances to find any deer.

Kentucky was flush with game when Boone arrived and within a couple decades was decimated.

Given that Calif Dept of Wildlife has managed to completely decimate the herds of blacktail in a very short time...I'd say venison is not on the menu for long. I'm thinking corn, beans and taters with an occasional rodent. I have eaten a lot of crow in my lifetime...you get used to it.

No deer where I live, the squirrels and coons would thin out pretty quick. Fishing would work for awhile, but I'm 20 miles from the coast.

Why indelible?

Anyway the questions is could we? We could easily eat no beef rest of our lives.

Are there enough for the masses ? Nope. But then again our land here and up north is big enough to feed more than us so we just manage it as needed.

Hopefully if it ever got bad 2 things would happen. We could get up north where very few if any have the balls to go and survive there just fine. And lots of people would no longer exist. That would be the biggest plus for the country as its well overpopulated and worse every day.

LOL

Good water might be the, "thing".

Coast of TX unless you speak of way south, is running out of fish already. Limits have been going lower etc.. IF it was a survival thing the coast would hurt really bad also. But people would learn they could eat hardheads at least I suspect.