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

You just take away electricity and people will start dying within a month. How many people rely on modern medicine just to survive? If it's summer people will die of heat, winter people will die of cold. It will be orders of magnitude worse than the depression. People were tough back then and already had the basic systems in place to survive off grid. Now you take away a teenager's phone and they're suicidal within days.

Alaska is an interesting case. The weather and the terrain will keep the feral mobs from your door for sure, BUT ... most modern bush Alaskans are still tethered to the modern supply chain. It takes a very hardy individual to survive in the Alaska bush with out modern tech help of some kind. Transportation to and from game alone is a major obstacle there even if you live remote. How many people paddle to and from their moose hunt.

I agree. Scale is the question.

A little off topic but this is a good documentary ...

"Death and the Civil War"

People can look at the wide open west and think that they could go out there and survive. There's a problem - water. Much of the west has only a fraction of the number of deer as the east because there isn't enough water to support large numbers of deer. Rainfall is much lower than in the east so the forage plant growth is equally much lower. Deer have to eat, too.
That's why there's so much public land in the west compared to the east. It was never homesteaded because there isn't enough water to irrigate the crops.

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

Machine tools and hand skills will be highly sought after. Small scale food production is *essential*. The skills our grandparents and great grandparents had and most of society has lost.

Our society values "professional" skills. In the future not so much.

During the civil war, how many people had subsisted their entire lives on water from a municipal treatment facility, nearly 0%? In the USA right now, today, it's EASILY less than 5% of the population that's strictly on their own private well and has been their entire life. Our digestive and immuno-biology is fundamentally changed from 160 years ago. And again, in a total breakdown, water-treatment and sanitation, even indoor-plumbing becomes non-existent.

Think US tourists in Mexico sans bottled water, it'll be that way EVERYWHERE. You get a stomach bug, you get the runs, you get dehydrated, your kidneys shut down and you die in under 2wks. There's no anti-biotics to bring you through and your body isn't equipped to do it for itself.

If you can't hunt um from where you live you won't hunt. During SHIF if you can't walk there you ain't going.

Exactly! Elk were virtually wiped-out in Kolorado, by hunters feeding the mining industry! memtb

Market hunting pushed the passenger pigeon to extinction. It wasn't the shooting that did it, though. The numbers easily withstood the shooting. The problem was that the hunters learned to hang out at the nesting sites waiting for huge flocks to come in from feeding. The pigeons quickly abandoned the nests and wouldn't nest elsewhere so there was no next generation. Most of the population bust occurred within a couple of years from no replacements being hatched.
If the hunters had simply avoided the nesting sites, the population would have likely supported heavy hunting indefinitely.

Corn, beans, and squash fed a whole lot of folks in rural Native America. Not sure it would work again though, given the amount of folks around today.

Rodents, well sort of, in the form of rabbits and squirrels would be an added benefit.

The odd coyote, or a domestic dog or three, would sweeten the soup pot some.

I've got ipos growing right on my property, of course I have to make sure I don't mis-identify them as there are other roots around that will kill a fella.

A couple of folks mentioned "long pig" or the fat neighbors.

What would you say to the Cannibal Question?

One of Grace Slick's finest vocal performances addresses the question quite well:

I think the prairie chicken was close to extinction also.

On the Oregon trail, the biggest killer by far was disease, usually Cholera or typhoid. They're spread by polluted water. Everyone drank from and washed in the rivers. Sick people would wash off puke and diarrhea in the rivers and spread it to everyone drinking down stream. Drinking from a home well is fine as long as you have a working pump so when the grid goes down, you need a power source of some kind. A lot of people will end up drinking from streams.

As general interest, the 2d most common cause of deaths on the Trail was gun accidents. All of the immigrants had guns but a good share of them had no experience using them. They were farmers who had never hunted. They ended up shooting themselves and others accidentally.

I fed part of my emergency food supply this morning after I fed the hens in the Gulag.

Daily there are 20-40 quail, an equal number of pinyon and scrub jays, presently redwing and Brewer's blackbirds (gone in the winter) and especially those big invasive Eurasian doves.

Crane was out back this morning too.

Neighbor ladies multitudinous cats might start disappearing into a stew pot too.

"... indelible..."?

I would shoot a feral to keep from starving.
Killing deer would not be an everyday affair.
They are too labor and time intensive to be of great value unless you're stationary enough to preserve the excess.
In a survival situation, small game is much more available. Easier to acquire and a lot less labor intensive.
Squirrels, rabbits, possums, raccoons, birds, fish, snakes, etc, etc.... even rats and mice.
Learn edible flora to enhance your diet.

Oops. But spell check said it was ok so it must be.

One of the most valuable items to own will be a brick of 22LR HP's.

Interesting Thread, Most people today don't know how to do much more than run their phone or computer, ask them to gather up the wood and start a fire, you will get a blank i don't know how?

Forget cooking over a open fire, building a shelter and a bed, very few will kill to eat till they are starving, then they don't know how to preserve the meat, or in most cases cook it. the only people that will survive are the scavengers. Rio7

Absolutely not for me. There is not a huge amount of game in this general area, and most of it is confined to pretty small chunks of acreage.

Deer were extirpated here once, and if everyone started blasting them again it wouldn't take long to wipe them out again. There were zero deer locally for about a 50-60 year stretch, until they were reintroduced in the mid-1960s.

Or perhaps a small bore black powder rifle/smoothbore?

For when the .22 ammo runs out.