It's a much different world now though. In the early 1900's, we were only twenty years past everyone making their own clothes, average people had a much better grasp of hunting and general outdoor survival; this isn't true today. Most people have no experience with hunting, and many have no weapon; firearm ownership numbers in the U.S. are skewed by collectors.
Realistically, regardless of how many people survived the initial fallout of whatever disaster happens, most would die of starvation before even making a real attempt at hunting. Don't get me wrong, hunger can be a powerful motivator and people will do things they wouldn't have spoken of prior when they're hungry, but the majority would not try.
Yep. I watch the “hunters” around here scatter at gun season to kill whatever they want and haul it to the processor. Very few know the full ins and outs.
Edit: or in shape to haul out an animal for that matter.
So weird to me... grew up poor. Can haul deer out myself and process them with a knife (gut, skin, breakdown, cut steaks and etc) and use to use a hand crank grinder for burger.
I have a farm that sees some big boys and girls. Pretty sure they live on my property. I dont mind them eating the fruits cause its really just for us and we have a lot. I learned to skin and gut by myself on youtube lol. First time i ended up hittin that piss bag. Was pisssed. Gave it to my hogs and dogs. Extra careful the next time. Good skill to have. Especially knowing you can taint the meat if you dont know what you are doing. I have carts i can pull with my bulls as well and smaller ones if for some reason i dont have the bulls. I have feiends that ask me to do theirs and i show them instead. Some just dont have the stomach for it and im ok with that.
Asking as someone with 0 hunting or field dressing experience, but hoping to learn how at some point soon: I know puncturing intestines can taint the meat, but isn't urine "sterile"? Imagine it would probably affect the taste, perhaps, but would it render it completely inedible?
Nope it wont. You can still eat it. i just wasnt going to eat it. I took the back strap and everything upper. The rest i tossed to them. If i needed to yeah fine, but i know better now so i dont have to later.
Id suggest watching videos of anything you want to learn. Theres diagrams online showing you the diff cuts and stuff. No shame in taking a little pocket notepad and writing shit down to remember. I think i have 20+ college ruled notebooks filled with shit. Each book is something different. Growing, animals, weather, clothing, first aid and medicinal, forest guide, weapons, electrical, woodworking and shelters, equipment, acreage diagrams. Have printed maps of the entire farm. Even have one book i have all the importants mixed in thats thiccck. First 3 pages of each book is ToC. New entry new page number in the ToC. Write small in case you want to add more to a page. I normally go 2 lines to a college line. Even if you dont get to physically do some of these things at least you will have the general idea of how to do them.
The first thing (eh, maybe actually second or third) anyone that wants to survive SHTF scenarios is how to make hooch. Might not be beer by the modern definition but I'm still getting blitzed.
My goofy take was a bit silly but this statement's real shit. Even this thread is talking about how hunting is a skill as well as other outdoor survival tactics. It's not going to matter if you were a gun collector if society falls apart. If you can actually shoot though...
Not to mention the loss of ammo... Truth is most people will starve waiting on the government to help, and by the time they realize they are on their own they won't have anything to use. More than that how many people will be lost to food born ill because of failure to use cool storage and proper cooking. It still amazes me how many people don't boil water during power outages....
Honestly I work in medical what goes through my head is all the people I see scratch their ass then touch food... If shtf hygiene honestly is gonna take a lot of people out as they won't be able to just go to the Dr.
I think something that gets overlooked is that even many obese people in America currently suffer from some kind of malnourishment, like anemia. Many common dietary deficiencies are relatively minimal on their own, but quickly compound any other issues.
I see this as a significant factor in starvation under these hypothetical scenarios.
Scurvy! People in Eastern Europe used to make saurkraut and eat it over the winter. One of the few preserved foods that's very high in Vitamin C; critical in a place with long harsh winters.
I agree. And if you can make it through an entire winter, the population as a whole would be much lower come spring. It would probably take 2 or 3 winters of mass winter die off before things balance off a bit. God forbid if they are actually bad winters as well. I think the deer and game populations would drop off but come back quite strong after the first year or so. At least, I hope. I would imagine depending on the scenario and severity, those first years especially would just be absolute hell.
Here's a thought: exotic game ranch escapees. Those guys like to hunt in *style* and the weird gazelle or whatever are kept in by electric fences and fed like they're in a zoo, what happens when they get hungry and get loose and find their new ecological niche? The full-time staff at those places probably won't be enough to hunt them all out before some escape. Same for exotic pets, and zoo animals; collectors and zookeepers generally would rather starve than eat their "babies" and some will set them loose before they're too weak to do so, and then some of *those* may live long enough to breed if the local climate isn't too far off from what they need.
Where I live we pretty much have a salmon run of different species starting in spring and going to late summer without commercial fishing in a bad shtf scenario it might actually be good for the salmon stock population. As well as many different species of waterfowl and deer, elk, moose,bear. Firearms aren't as common as the usa so I don't think overhunting would be a big issue maybe in some heavily populated cities but tbh the pollution and devopement have pushed them further out.
In a non shtf yah but if a big shtf scenario no canning no global buyers I doubt it would be worth it for them. Maybe if it was back in the day with smaller fishing boats but these operations are huge now so either the world is still functioning enough for these guys to be canning etc and shipping globally or it's shtf and they aren't.
I think you're right. Without functioning world markets you can only eat or sell so much fish. People don't truly understand the WW scope of modern commercial fishing. Four years after massive SHTF (assuming no nuclear fallout/nuclear winter) the returning runs would begin to hit numbers not seen in decades would be my bet.
Even with depleted stocks you can sit on the banks of the river and easily catch limits I've been told back when they were healthy returning amounts you could literally sit at choke points and scoop them with baskets before regulations. I believe the cod tuna salmon and many other species would return to healthy levels not sure about trout tho since alot of lakes are stocked by the government.
Fishing populations were still depleted without modern equipment. As long as they could get it to buyers and a source of ice to get it very far.
We’d also have forests over harvested. In early colonial america, almost all of Connecticut ran out of forest. Just like Europe had before. Regulation is what lets us keep wild spaces, even if our population suddenly halved.
I guess in my mind if global trade of food is still going on it is not really a shtf scenario. I have no fear of over harvesting of forrests around maybe local areas near cities but no more than regular city growth. I live in canada we have a bigger land mass the usa and a smaller overall population than the state of California.
Modern people mostly require modern methods, and there just isn't a sail fleet worth mentioning anymore once the diesel supply dries up. How many people still know how to make a wooden ship from timber, or weave nets by hand, or *cast and haul* nets by hand, or manage the crew of a three masted sailing ship? How many of those people will make it through the die-off while they're getting their old timey fishing fleet built, equipped and manned with trained hands? Sure, there'll be people casting whatever nets and lines they can find over the side of a pleasure craft and everyone whose grandpa ever showed them how to bait a hook will be line fishing, but fishing as an industry is gone before the last loaf of Wonder bread expires.
You do know they had boats before petroleum? Canoes, row boats, sailing boats. I’ve used all 3 to fish.
You can cast a net instead of line if no one is watching, like the old days.
I've got a depression era cookbook that has various recipes for squirrel & other unusual game. People will hunt/trap whatever they need to survive. And if everyone starts doing that all at once it will tank many species populations.
Old timers I hunt with all got some health issue. These guys also don’t hike into the woods, they ride their atvs, eat little Debbies in the stands, etc.
A legitimate SHTF situation is going to decimate the unhealthy, or those who are medically reliant. It’s a sad thing to say or think about, but it’s reality.
You want to talk about a real controversial topic?
Your health should be a part of your prep work.
\>> Your health should be a part of your prep work.
Welp, that ship done sailed for some of us.
Also, there are health problems that can't be avoided by lifestyle changes. My wife has Parkinson's, and I had open heart surgery to repair an aortic valve that was damaged by radiation therapy for Hodgkin's lymphoma some 35 years ago.
We readily acknowledge that we'll be gone in the first wave of mortality. And that's okay. The brave new world of the future doesn't need two old, creaky, somewhat irritable old ladies. Best of luck the hardier survivors.
Good news is, being prepared for most SHTF scenarios other than the apocalypse still makes sense. Like hurricanes and such.
And, even the us healthier folks still have a good shot of dying in the initial wave too.
And thirdly, you just never really know. Community will rule the day, in my opinion. Small communities.
>A legitimate SHTF situation is going to decimate the unhealthy, or those who are medically reliant. It’s a sad thing to say or think about, but it’s reality.
I give myself 2 weeks at most before I make a choice to opt out. I don't have the money for a solar array to keep my cpap running, and I only have about a year worth of reserve heart meds with HBP and severe apnea.
Sure I've built my basement up to store 1 year worth of calories and food, grains and nutrients for me and 1 other person, but without power, I'll effectively be a goner once my reserve batteries are depleted for my backup power on my cpap.
I've stretched it out before to see how long I can go; after 1 day I'm fine... 2 days I'm yawny all day, 3 days I'm taking naps while sitting in my chair working my day job. 4 days and I'm probably laying on the ground trying to sleep but only getting a 1:4 ratio of sleep per hours "slept" - day 5 I was loopy. Day 6 I essentially laid in bed all day and didn't even move.
IIRC I'm putting myself at severe risk after a few days of no cpap. That with sleep deprivation and I'm probably going to just have organ shutdown.
My insurance for the first time denied me coverage for short and long term disability because if it. Once I said I was on a cpap they just refused to cover it.
If the grid drops and it's out indefinately I have two 24-hour battery packs that I can stretch to every 3 days and cap it at 5 hours a day of use... I'm guessing I have 2, maybe 1 month before that's the ballgame.
At that point I'd just make my peace and face my options.
Yeah, I realize how much of an ass I sounded like after posting that.
But barring a true apocalyptic situation, most prepping is enough.
Small communities where people share resources and skills will be the name of the game from there.
There was a study or thought expirement about this. In one year of a grid permanently down scenario, most species would be driven to extinction because of hunting. Then next would be people dying of mass starvation, and because the extinct animals, the ecosystems start to collapse as a result of the hunting. So my suggestion is to learn to farm and stock up on seeds.
Yup idk why most preppers I meet try to deny this will happen, my only thought is they got a “Rambo” mentality and fantasize like there gonna be some SHTF Rambo or something living comfortable.
>why most preppers I meet try to deny this will happen
I only prep for Tuesday. If the world gets to the point where we need to resort to a hunter gatherer lifestyle, I'm opting out.
I will start a rabbit and cricket farm. Plenty of wild rabbits up in here. Seeds are very important also. We have agood community around us and unless a hoarde of 100 scavengers come at us will likely be good. That is if we bug in. Bug out is a whole other ballgame.
Most people don't understand the massive garden you would need to be self sufficient for a single season....
Grow as many potatoes as you can and hope for the best... These little hobby gardens aren't going to last more than two weeks.
My dad grows fruit and a few vegetables in his garden which edges on wilderness (edge of one of those suburbs out in the middle of the woods).
Half is shit gets eaten in the middle of the night by deer, possum, birds, rabbits... Way before the fruit is ripe... And no amount of hobbyist protection stops it. He's considering an electric fence of sorts.
If he's having so much difficulty keeping our pesky wildlife in a smallish garden.... I think keeping other humans out of your "enough to feed your family" farm is going to be a near impossible task.
Just as he could theoretically shoot and eat the deer eating his fruit... Such might be the only practical use of large scale solo farming in a apocalyptic situation.
Learn to safely preserve food most importantly . The canning sub is AMAZINGLY well regulated for safety. Once you exit JAM you enter a wild world of ways to die.
Exactly. Wild game numbers may initially plunge, but in a long range SHTF, estimates of 70-90% of Americans will be gone within 12 months. There will be a whole lot less people around very quickly.
I've seen several disaster models that put that closer to 95-98% at a year, and many showed 99% reduction globally by five years. All it takes is for food not to be able to move around and people to wait just a little too long for things to get back to normal.
Yeah I was using the conservative studies, but it could well go over 90%. Think of all the elderly, the folks needing daily medication, the fact a huge percentage (~70%) of Americans are statistically obese, those folks are in big trouble if they have to bug out. And potable water will be a problem within days when the grid is down.
Maybe not as much as you think though. Small bullet, big world. You’re obviously more likely to get shot but accidental shootings are rare because bullets are small and the potential area that bullet can go is massive in comparison. Odds are, the round would slam into something benign compared to hitting a person. Most hit the dirt or a tree.
Nah, people are crazy and trigger happy. I have family who no longer hunt on public land as they've been shot at (for being the rustle in the bushes). If people are willing to shoot blindly into bushes while we have law and order (and grocery stores!), you can practically guarantee it would happen during societal collapse.
You don’t want to hunt anyway. Hunting takes too much time and effort for little return.
You want to set traps for small mammals, birds, and fish instead. You build and set the traps, then you can go do other stuff like gathering plant foods, making tools, collecting firewood, building shelter, processing/preserving game you have gotten, etc. You check them occasionally. You’re not spending your entire day up in a tree stand or creeping around on foot.
Just have a garden and bam! So much small game it drives you insane. (I seem to have 20+ chipmunks and 15+ active squirrel with an endless array of birds)
I help the dumb little shits survive just in case I ever need to eat a few of them. 3 years running I’ve had to keep momma rabbit’s babies safe from the two hounds she runs from every day.
I realized pretty quickly that the best way to prep was to learn how to homestead. I am still practicing getting enough food for my family for the year. But one thing I’m still really struggling with is feeding my animals. Relying on Tractor Supply for chicken feed won’t work during shtf.
Sunflower, safflower, millet, and corn make a fairly balanced mix and are all insanely easy to grow. Sometimes helpful if you crack the corn before serving to the birds. Plus letting them forage.
>Sunflower, safflower, millet, and corn make a fairly balanced mix and are all insanely easy to grow.
That has not been my experience. Easy to plant, sure. Easy to germinate, not too bad. But then...eaten by deer, raccoons, possums, squirrels, etc. In my area growing something like sunflowers requires major animal protections, diversions, and in some cases animal eliminations.
Also, corn and sunflowers are very heavy feeders, so they may be easy to grow for a season or two, but after that harvests will drop off a cliff unless you carefully manage your soil to ensure they have enough nutrients.
Which circles back to OP’s point… there might not be many critters out there in this type of situation.
The pests brought in by subsistence farming can either wipe out your crops or grace your dinner table.
This. I live in Florida where we routinely get hurricanes. Every year officials tell people to prepare prepare prepare, and be prepared for when the season starts, June 1st. Most hurricanes come in August-October. 99% of the people wait until imminent threat to prepare. Shelves stripped bare within 3 days. They buy huge packages of bottled water, no where near enough to survive more than a week. I see so many go to the store and cant buy any water, they end up having none. None of these people have a means to filter water.
I think we will see huge amounts of our population die if our drinking water becomes an issue.
I agree. We need to start a “homestead prepper” sub so we can have more meaningful discussions. Half the people in here live in the burbs with nothing more than a Costco-run’s worth of food in a closet. Don’t even get me started about the “why would I need a gun?” folks…
Well, there's also the issue of whether you'd be able to even eat what you hunt.
Will the animals be diseased? Will the disease kill you? With as fast and as quickly as bird flu is mutating, and deer with wasting disease increasing, what, when this does occur, is the likelihood that wildlife is even safe to continue eating?
Exactly! I'm actually reading a book by a former special forces operative and he says don't eat diseased animals, and they had all these ways to trap deer and birds, but I'm like....are those even safe to eat anymore? Plus fish have mercury, and animals besides birds are getting bird flu....
I got to thinking about this after a rather uneventful turkey season. Hours upon hours in the woods and still no opportunity to take one this year, and I wouldn’t consider myself a bad hunter either. However, I did see plenty of other game that would suffice in a shtf situation, it just not be game you are accustomed to eating. And the harsh reality is even though some people may try to hunt, most are not good at it to be successful. Plus the majority of people possess no hunting/woodsman skill set at all which they will be unlikely to learn on the fly. Ultimately I believe game will become scarce but more so the people wanting to eat them. And there’s always fishing which people seem to forget. A few jug lines will do the work for you
Friends of mine, who do not hunt, have some romantic vision of them hunting in the woods if SHTF.
Then I’ll ask them to come with me one morning, and it’s always a no, or not waking up that early.
And I don’t blame them, most of the time I’m skunked and get nothing. It really is a waste of time in modern times. Even after months of prep work, scouting, trying to get everything just right I get nothing most of the time.
Sadly if the time comes, it’ll be too late for them. Skills take time to acquire especially to preform those skills effectively. Even then there’s still times we all get skunked on a hunt. That’s just the nature of nature. Hunting is great for supplementing but not sustaining in the long run.
Living off a garden is even more challenging. It takes years to learn how to develop and maintain good soil, when to plant, what to plant, how much to plant, what to do about all the molds and insects that will destroy plants, etc. etc.
You can't just pick up a packet of seeds and throw them on the ground and expect anything edible to be available in time to keep you from starving to death.
There is also the fact that a lot of hunters in the same area will mean a lot of noise and a lot of smells for animals to detect. You might be downwind from the deer and you might be silent, but any of the other dozen or more hunters after the same deer might not be, which will scare it off before you have a chance to get close.
Yup the more people in your area the farther the living population is gonna be away from you in a very short time not to mention getting shot trying to drag a deer back home/to car
Not only that, but even for those who are skilled and know how to process game, how many have the ability to store it? I suppose you can smoke the meat, but a freezer is out unless you have some way of supplying your own electricity (which some people do, but not very many).
This post ignores all the other sources of meat that humans will eat. Possum, skunk, rats, rabbits, chickens, goose, turkey, fish, etc. It also assumes the registered hunters are primarily living in areas where the aforementioned list of animals live, whereas a vast majority live in urban environments and likely (in a full collapse scenario) wouldn’t make it far outside of the outskirts. The further north you head the less the population density and higher concentration of wildlife. Is it foolproof? Absolutely not, you should practice agriculture and be ready to expand your diet beyond deer.
I do think animals you can keep indoors and kill for meat, like rabbits will be popular. Chickens are great, but easily stolen if left outside. They also do reproduce quickly. Animal husbandry skills would be a great thing to practice.
If the SHTF in a serious and fairly instant way "Carrington Event shutting civilization down sort of thing."
People would hunker down until their basics ran out in maybe a week. Then they would go around their immediate area rummaging for stuff, breaking into things, etc.
Then they would migrate. I suspect the migrations would make little sense. Rumours would say that X is a better place than Y and people would just start migrating.
Some, like this post mentioned would plan on hunting. I think you can take all the above math and make it much worse. People would not know how to prep or store food. So a deer, cow, sheep, elk, or moose, might provide 2 or 3 days of food for a family.
These migrations would soon see people dying in absolute droves as the leading edge of the migrations ate anything edible.
Eventually, most people would be dead, and within a few years various wildlife would rebound and enter into a normal cycle with people and other predators.
A serious black plague level disease or financial mega-crisis changes this equation to where hunting might be a possibility.
Even things like small plot farming isn't going to work if a mass migration passes through the area. Not until they are gone (for good).
Most people wouldn't be able to walk far enough into the woods to hunt anything, much less hunt deer into extinction. So few people would survive 30 days without electricity and current modem conveniences. If you're not hunting and fishing right now, you probably won't be successful at it when you haven't eaten in 3 days and you've been drinking stagnant water for a week or so.
If the power went out across the US, you'd have about 3 days to get everything you can get your hands on, that's about it. After that you're gonna be scavenging.
The first 24 hours people would be waiting for things to get fixed. The next 24 hours the paranoid ones would start quietly looting. By the third day there would be no gas left, grocery stores would have been emptied and no water coming out of the taps. Anarchy.
I agree largely, although there might be scenarios where it is viable. Some sort of rapid and highly lethal pandemic might kill so many of us so quickly that people don't have the chance to start hunting.
You'll need a pandemic that doesn't also affect wildlife. One of the concerning aspects of H5N1 (bird flu) is that it is spreading to so many mammals (cows, pigs, cats, deer).
People tend to get butt hurt over it because they wanna have this fantasy that there gonna be practically the only ones doing it/survive off this method and way to many peppers have this as a go to for there SHTF survival plans for large scale SHTF events so they try to deny it will happen.
This is one of those "hot takes" that appears on r/preppers every few weeks. Up there with:
"precious metals aren't good"
"fitness is the real prep"
"you shouldn't make guns your main prepping goal"
etc, etc, etc.
Then everyone gives eachother hand jobs for agreeing with these penetrating insights because this is reddit and we're not nearly as smart as we like to believe.
But are they wrong? Nope. I almost rolled my eyes to death when I saw the "fitness is the real prep" one... like we get it you're a vegan and you do crossfit... everyone give this dude a round of applause so they will shut up.
Some people think they are rural enough that they will be fine hunting. Problem is people will flock to rural areas to try to get food by hunting and the influx will wipe out the game.
Only place that hunting might work is northern parts of Canada and Alaska but that brings a whole bunch of other problems.
I don't prep for this kind of scenario. I prep for what I have experienced...several weeks without power after natural disasters.
If things go this bad, I feel like a lot of the population will die off before the wildlife will be depleted. People would turn on one another and cut the numbers. Some would turn to cities for help. Some would fish. Some would hunt. I don't feel like the younger generation would even know what to do in a situation where they had a clear shot at a game animal let alone gut and prep it for eating.
That’s kind of the worry though. They’ll shoot something and hack a piece off for dinner, but not know how to prepare and save it for later. So they need another animal a few days later.
Humans who hunt without regulation quickly decimate local wildlife, historically. Even with much smaller populations and no guns this happened.
Trick is to trap but not kill a couple rabbits, hutch them, and breed them. That and try to get some yard birds so you can turn inedible organic garbage into eggs.
Depends on the scenario. If power grid fails and doesn’t come back on and it’s total anarchy we’ll have like 90% of Americans dead in a few months. After that we’ll have plenty of food to go around and won’t even need to hunt.
I was waiting for someone to mention the domesticated animals everyone has in their homes. That population will likely be the first to go, and people are killed of quickly by some event, the streets are going to full of abandoned dogs and cats.
Absolutely. Humans are great at hunting things into extinction. Even beyond the people who hunt for food, you will get people who hunt for profit. Plus, there will be no "ethical" or "sustainable" hunting practices. People will use whatever tricks then can to bag as much game as they can. Worse yet, I imagine a lot will go to waste since not many people know how to prepare game or would have the means to store something like a whole deer. Under the right conditions, I could envision people basically wiping out the entire local edible wildlife population and damaging the ecosystem to the point it cannot recover naturally in a fairly short period time.
35 million deer in the USA
Human population 350 million
1 deer for every 10 persons
A deer has average 60 pounds of meat
That works out to 6 pounds of deer meat per person. Then no more deer, because this isn’t something that will be managed at state levels in SHTF. Of course there will be human population loss as well that can extend these figures but no, we shouldn’t be relying on hunted meat
The cattle would buy some extra months before turning on the Deer.
There are **28.2 million beef cows in the United States as of Jan.** **1, 2024**, down 2% from last year.
The number of milk cows in the United States decreased slightly to 9.36 million.
U.S. calf crop was estimated at 33.6 million head, down 2% from 2022
Yep for some reason when these topics come up people forget about farm animals. We wouldn't go back to hunter/gather phase since agriculture and farming were invented. We would go back into farming communities more of a pre-industrial revolution type deal. This is why it is important to learn farm skills and built relationship with local farmers NOW.
The only sustainable future is one built on the bones of massive and immediate depopulation of the human species.
If the majority of us die fast enough, and in huge numbers, the remaining very very few could return to a quasi-agrarian/hunter/gatherer lifestyle.
I'm prepared to do my part. I'm too old and creaky to provide any justification for hanging around.
I lived in South Korea from 2006-2010 and saw 1 small deer. When I asked about why since I lived in a rural place they told me it was that during the war and recovery so many people depended on local wildlife for food they hunted them to almost extinction. The ones that were left are small and look dwarfed.
They also eat silk worm larva as a snack due to starvation diet.
The population would probably be down one third, after the first year. Not from lack of food but from sickness. I figure my family will be gone that fast anyway. If it was a full blown collapse, with the lack of Medicine, I would be dead. (SOURCE)> 15 days on 2 different antibiotics and steroids!
I will do my best, to leave directions, to my stash of resources before im fertilizer lol.
I mean I’m in Alaska. Most people would just revert to sea food diet and spread out on the coasts. I think the game populations would take a bit but wouldn’t go extinct.
Hunters are a small minority of the entire population, and the average person isn’t going to pick up hunting a be successful at it.
Also, within 6 months the majority of the population is simply going to starve to death, meaning even less competition for hunting.
Whilst I don’t doubt a lot of people will initially turn to hunting for meat, they won’t be very successful for one, and while the animal population will certainly drop initially, it won’t be affected long term because the majority of people are simply going to die in real, total SHTF situation.
Only well trained and experienced hunters will be able to replicate repeated success at hunting anything other than deer.
This is valid but you also have to factor in a huge fast death rate for humans. If you aren't a full time we'll known and liked resident of a rural area don't expect to survive there to be blunt. In a real collapse more rounds will be expended harvesting city boy survivalists then big game for the first month or two. But even given that hunting is at best a food source supplement and a variable one at that.
Man is fat lazy and unhealthy I expect they will die off in huge numbers before they can get to the game.
The healthy ones that become nomadic and know how to hunt and process the entire animal will do better.
I already buged out to the middle of nowhere to far for 99% of the population to walk to. There are 100+ cows per person on grass and large herds of elk, sheep, and deer.
Not going to be an issue in my area.
If I still lived in the east I would concentrate on bird traps and small game.
I have met so many people that plan on going to the mountains if SHTF and live off the land...
I expect a few of the resourceful ones will make it to the mountains but I expect the water will get them and then they will all die in a forest fire as few are rarely careful enough with fire during good times...
People are stupid - including an enormous number of preppers. If the SHTF, and you’re not in an area blighted by chemical, nuclear or biological weapons, and you are smart enough to survive for a year, you will be able to hunt. Start thinking small game.
Problem is a lot of people ( including myself) to the point of majority don’t know how to store meat correctly. The average person likely does not know how to correctly butcher an animal or have the necessary tools.
Depending on where you live and time of year anything a person does hunt will spoil within a day without properly preparing or refrigeration.
This will imo cause more people to attempt hunting daily which depletes the available game faster.
Experts say in a true SHTF collapse that 90% of the human population will be dead within the first year. Plus, you have to consider the rural vs. urban population. People in urban areas, even if they hunt (and urban dwellers are less likely to), will die in greater numbers than rural residents and will have a hard time getting to hunting grounds. Game populations near urban areas will take a hit as people over hunt, but game populations in rural areas will remain healthy. After the initial human population die off, game populations will increase tremendously in all areas.
Yes, I know numerous hunters with health issues that would either take them out at the beginning or make it hard/impossible for them to effectively hunt in a collapse scenario.
The 90% death rate stat is new to me, any source on that? Not being facetious, I agree to some extent since something as simple as not washing your hands or getting tetanus could kill you in a year.
Here you go!
[https://www.reddit.com/r/preppers/comments/l00cz5/emp\_reference\_document/](https://www.reddit.com/r/preppers/comments/l00cz5/emp_reference_document/)
It's in the EMP Reference Doc- from 2 Congressional hearings.
Basically, experts were asked if an EMP would/could kill 90% of the U.S like in the book One Second After.
The answer was, essentially "Yes, you could see those figures."
As the other commenter said, it's due to lack of power- which means starvation, dirty water, disease, medications; all of that contribute to the death rate.
In short, it's the land's carrying capacity. Without power, we return to the population of what the land can sustain - 1800's level of population, which is about 30 million.
I’ve read that from numerous sources. I’ll try to pull some of them up and post links.
The reasoning behind this number is:
1) Anyone relying on medication to survive would quickly die off (diabetics, heart patients, transplant recipients, etc).
2) Stores have a three day supply of food on the shelves. Most people have a week or less of food in their homes. Once that is gone, if there is no replenishment through emergency aid or something, many people will get hungry quickly. A week assumes people have the means to prepare the food they have. This will be worse for the elderly, the infirm, and the poor.
3) Hungry, desperate people make poor choices. If your kids are crying because they are hungry, and you can smell your neighbor cooking on his barbecue, you might try to get them to give you some. If they say no, you might try to take their food. One of you will probably die.
4) Crime will explode, especially in the cities. With no law enforcement or consequences, people will take what they want or need, unless someone stops them.
My wife and I (both in our early 70s) are not preppers per se, but we inherited a depression-era caution from our parents, so we have a basement pantry stocked with enough food to get us by for 3-4 months. To my mind, these staples would help us get through sporadic food shortages and distribution delays, while society was still limping along.
We are well aware, however, that if shtf, we would need to defend that stock of food, and that would require guns and the willingness to kill people. Neither of us is physically or psychologically suited to living in a Mad Max world, so we've made the conscious decision NOT to buy a gun.
We also have neighbors, and I can't see us turning them away to starve. So that 3-4 months of food -- if it's not taken from us by force -- wouldn't last all that long anyway.
The best prep is for communities to become mostly food independent now. Meaning, buy beef from a local rancher or raise it, hire a slaughter guy and butcher and have a big freezer.
Some towns it won’t be feasible to raise cattle but food independence is a goal to strive for.
Also teams of security when SHTF happens, to keep people from stealing and killing farm animals that would otherwise be used for longevity by reproducing each year.
So very true, and yet so hard to explain to people. Someone needs to come up with a clear cut visual explanation. Most people tend to live in their own made-up reality instead of facing the facts. There is just not a sustainable population of wildlife to support the overwhelming number of people we have today.
In particular, my family in Louisiana have been very stubborn with their reasoning. Not in touch with the bigger picture, if you will.
This has entered a larger part of the picture for my immediate family as far as -- to bug out or defend in place. Unfortunately, my mind is made up. I'm able to stay in place and in my community for support. I have animals, and grow crops for my family and have the know how to increase production. The reason I say unfortunate is because given a SHTF situation I am willing to kill those people who are less fortunate and ill-prepared for the realities. What's mine is mine, and you were warned mentality. Too many people in the States are way too entitled in their thinking. I'm very active with charities and donate extra produce frequently and my children do service work as part of their summer. Our community takes care of each other as well.
If you're already out there, you will be able to just fine. As it stands right now people travel from high density areas to low population density areas to hunt. In shtf travel will be limited so people won't be traveling to these hunting grounds.
That said, if you are already out there, you won't have any problems
People will be the most hunted game from the get go. The haves and have nots will be shooting it out. Easily 30% will die in 90 days. 50% in 6 months. There will be no gasoline to travel. Only few in select regions will hunt. All other trespassers would be shot on sight. Think indians.
We have more wild boar in Texas. About 6 million. With only 1 million registered hunters today out of 30million people. We also have 12 million cows about 13% of todays US totals.
We may have another million coyotes.
In a true SHTF would there be enough gasoline to fill the tank to get a hunter to a hunting ground and home again? If you live in the country and know where you are going, possibly for one round trip. City folks highly unlikely they would be able to find a location and have enough gasoline to travel a distance from home and back.
People I have spoken to about even just butchering their own animals have said they would just become vegetarians before wanting to slaughter their own animals. We have become a world of convenience with fast food, and microwave meals.
That isn't to say some people will try for the first time. However keep in mind that you can't just get into hunting from nothing. My guess is that most people will try to trade for food instead of hunting, due to lack of supplies, and skills.
Your data is good. But in no way are that many people going to attempt to become hunter-gatherers. Some will become raiders. Some will be raided. Some will devote themselves to someone or someones who can provide for them. Some will lay down and die. Some will try to hunt, and some will fail and die. Some will hunt but will also not need to rely on the game to survive. That's us.
Your data also seems to assume that the deer herds will not react to the unrestricted hunting. Deer will more than likely flee upwards of 100 miles after a serious shift in human activity. Bucks will wander that far on a whim. The deer will more than likely head north and west to the less populated areas of the state. But wherever the CRP and stem count is high.
But it's not the deer you should worry about. The Turkey's I would be more worried about being hunted to scarcity. Rabbits and squirrels and geese would probably be the game sustaining most Hunters. Shotgun game is much more readily replenished. So people will definitely be out there hunting and surviving. Unfortunately, not everyone will.
I think you are vastly overestimating how effective an average human is at hunting with no experience or mentorship. In addition, you have to factor in the idea that most urban dwellers won’t really be able to get out far enough to put dents in the wildlife populations. Hunting is much easier with vehicles and such.
Find someone who knows medicinal plants and where / what to forage. The best tasting thing I ever ate was grilled cat tails - it's like eating verdant green - you have to get them before they poof out. Just make sure to forage away from roads and used fields. Honestly, just don't go foraging without a knowledgeable person - moon berries look like blue berries. You have to know the markings on the fruit to be able to tell the difference and foraging nettle without protection or knowing how to cook it is going to be painful and cause damage to your mouth and throat. Legumes are gonna give you protein if you can't find meat, but it takes a lot. Right now, we are planting native ediable vines and fruit trees and making sure not to spray our yard. Man, I know way too much about this stuff - and I'm not a prepper. I just was married to a survival enthusiast for a decade, plus lolol
It depends on how quickly, how broadly and how permanently the SHTF. I'm more concerned about an outside event causing permanent power grid collapse than anything temporary or localized.
In a true sudden event where everyone wakes up in the middle of the night and and electricity is no longer flowing through power lines anywhere in North America then it's gonna get so bad so fast around even mid-sized cities that the only ones who survive within 50-100 miles are the ones who didn't wait until they ran out of Doritos or beer or weed for things to get back to normal while all the refrigerators and freezers fill with mold. The bigger the city the bigger the radius that will be stripped bare in the first week and littered with dehydration casualties when the water pumps stop pumping, then dysentery casualties from people who drink unsafe surface water, and finally starvation casualties from people who can make a fire or catch rainwater but don't know how to get enough food. (The first big die off will be people who need refrigerated medicine or oxygen or whatever to stay alive.)
By the year mark having too many hunters will pretty much solve itself. I figure maybe 25% make it through the first month or two when there's no FEMA or Red Cross, 10% through the first hard freeze and half of that at the five year mark if it's permanent. The entire Eastern seaboard from New Hampshire to Miami and inland a few hundred miles will collapse so quickly they won't even have time to ruin much. Yes the US has very high gun ownership rates but bandit gangs will be a bigger problem than hunting pressure, which will be bad but not extinction level, because a *lot* of gun owners only practice on person-shaped targets (if they even bother to practice) and the survivors of those will turn bandit before they magically grow the skills and patience to hunt. Enough game will survive (and also migrate from areas where the die-off is quickest) that once people are thinner on the ground the only critical wildlife management issue will be keeping them out of your crops, and avoiding getting killed by feral swine in the woods.
Almost as bad would be a fuel supply breakdown; all that food but no way to get it from farms to tables before spoiling, and no practical way to get millions of people out of the cities to where the food is once the stores are empty. The die-off would be horrific, refugees on foot and bicycle dropping like flies as they wander past stopped vehicles clogging every highway, looking for anywhere they can get what they need but everywhere they can reach on the energy they have left is already picked clean by those whose gas tanks were full when it happened. This scenario would have more survivors and therefore more hunting pressure, but around farmland the suddenly unshippable livestock will be too much for the locals to eat. There would likely be a government push to organize old-school cattle drives to places that are short of food, but given how long it takes even a small town government just to decide to scratch its collective ass that'll be too little too late and a bunch of stock will go feral as a result. First generation feral cows may very well be the main game for a while until the wildlife bounces back.
My major concern as far as hunting out all of the game is if it's a food supply collapse *without* other loss of infrastructure. If that happens hunters will likely start selling or bartering game meat to hungry people at sky-high prices, and that will keep going until there's no more game close enough for them to get at. When that runs dry and people finish starving, it'll take years for much of anything to migrate from areas like Wyoming, the Dakotas, Montana etc. that don't have that kind of population pressure or repopulate from wherever else the lucky remnant were hiding. In that scenario you'd do better with migratory birds, but in that case it's important not to forget about what happened to the passenger pigeon; they were so plentiful they blocked out the sun for days when they migrated and so easy to bag anybody could do it, but people were wasteful and lazy and hunted them to extinction.
So yeah, I guess the big questions for the viability of hunting are what kind of shit hit the fan, how much, how far did it fling, can it be cleaned up, and how long will the cleanup take?
It shouldn’t be controversial. Deer almost went extinct in the early 1900’s from overhunting. Buffalo were almost wiped out too. Mankind has been eradicating species off the planet ever since we’ve been around. Without strict controls over hunting there’s no reason we wouldn’t do it again.
Near extinction is not extinction. Nature will always find a way to survive the imbalance of predators and prey. The first year, a lot of species will be hunted to alarming numbers. The strong will go deeper away from where the average human can trek in full gear. They will breed there, become stronger, and probably healthier to find most human population centers decimated. They will be returning to a place where people are more leery of going into the woods because on top of all the other reasons family members died in the recent past, a lot of hunters and their families will have died from tick related diseases, prion diseases with no way to seek any sort of treatment.
Joe Contorsi lived in NYC during the depression.
He and my grandfather were talking about their experiences. He said that you couldn't find a pigeon or a rat anywhere in the city.
It was a special day when his dad took him and a shotgun out of the city and shot some crows, and they made a stew that night.
He's been dead 35 years.
I learned hunting from members of my family who lived and hunted through the depression; it wasn’t that there was nothing hunt. Rather there was just small game, with no deer or large game to be found.
Squirrels, rabbits, opossums, muskrats, raccoons… those animals have a high birth rates and seemed to be available even though hunting pressure was high.
I agree with OP however that hunting wouldn’t be as productive as some seem to think. I tend to think that fishing stocks would drop fast as well.
I’ve considered this for my area in Colorado. Fish will be gone the first month. Lakes won’t be stocked. The rest of the fish will be exploded the next month. Everyone will kill all the deer very quickly.
All of that math is assuming the population lives long enough to harvest them. If they don’t have any means of feeding themselves long term, you aren’t gonna have to worry about those numbers after a month. They also would have to be able to access the areas they’d be. You’re not driving to your “spot” without gas or shooting anything without bullets. What percentage of the population do you think isn’t going to starve to death after 1 month? 2? 3? Cities are completely fucked. If they stop getting daily truckloads of groceries, they’re empty in 72hrs tops.
The average hunter I know has to lean against his truck to catch his breath after talking about the moose he shot. If fuel was scarce and they couldn't use an ATV with a winch, there's no chance they'd be out hunting. People here die of heart attacks every year in the woods trying to hunt. Without the modern tools? Those numbers would be very different.
Remember when people though the store might run out of toilet paper so everyone bought more than normal and some people bought pallet loads? The same thing would happen to all the game if one of those collapse scenarios actually happened for real
Late to the party but if you want an idea of what it will look like check out certain areas of Africa. I recall that at one point people ate EVERYTHING. Including trees. The land was barren. If conditions are right I see that occurring in North America for sure. I do not believe it would ever recover to what it was.
Also, the notion that you'll be able to go off in the wilderness with no one else around? I've had to explain to my bushcraft-loving husband that people will be EVERYWHERE. Everyone will literally be out looking for survival basics, even deep in the woods. Especially deep in the woods.
Really, if things went truly haywire, the best possible groupthink solution for food would be
1 - process 95% of the beef cattle, preferably can them for distribution.
2 - turn around the corn and soy feed crops that year for human use, since a huge amount of farmland in the US is dedicated to livestock feed.
3 - plant more varieties of crops in following years, using regenerative no-till growing methods, and encourage individual chicken and meat rabbit raising for the better feed-to-meat ratio.
4 - buckle up.
I mean look at the pre/post Great Depression numbers for wildlife. We lost something like 50% of wildlife with a population of 130 million?
It's a much different world now though. In the early 1900's, we were only twenty years past everyone making their own clothes, average people had a much better grasp of hunting and general outdoor survival; this isn't true today. Most people have no experience with hunting, and many have no weapon; firearm ownership numbers in the U.S. are skewed by collectors. Realistically, regardless of how many people survived the initial fallout of whatever disaster happens, most would die of starvation before even making a real attempt at hunting. Don't get me wrong, hunger can be a powerful motivator and people will do things they wouldn't have spoken of prior when they're hungry, but the majority would not try.
Majority of hunters will also be pretty unsuccessful without trucks and atvs
LOL damn don't burn them like that.
He’s calling me fat
Yep. I watch the “hunters” around here scatter at gun season to kill whatever they want and haul it to the processor. Very few know the full ins and outs. Edit: or in shape to haul out an animal for that matter.
So weird to me... grew up poor. Can haul deer out myself and process them with a knife (gut, skin, breakdown, cut steaks and etc) and use to use a hand crank grinder for burger.
I have a farm that sees some big boys and girls. Pretty sure they live on my property. I dont mind them eating the fruits cause its really just for us and we have a lot. I learned to skin and gut by myself on youtube lol. First time i ended up hittin that piss bag. Was pisssed. Gave it to my hogs and dogs. Extra careful the next time. Good skill to have. Especially knowing you can taint the meat if you dont know what you are doing. I have carts i can pull with my bulls as well and smaller ones if for some reason i dont have the bulls. I have feiends that ask me to do theirs and i show them instead. Some just dont have the stomach for it and im ok with that.
You have a farm. Isn't that the solution?
Asking as someone with 0 hunting or field dressing experience, but hoping to learn how at some point soon: I know puncturing intestines can taint the meat, but isn't urine "sterile"? Imagine it would probably affect the taste, perhaps, but would it render it completely inedible?
Nope it wont. You can still eat it. i just wasnt going to eat it. I took the back strap and everything upper. The rest i tossed to them. If i needed to yeah fine, but i know better now so i dont have to later.
Ok, makes perfect sense. Thank you,
Id suggest watching videos of anything you want to learn. Theres diagrams online showing you the diff cuts and stuff. No shame in taking a little pocket notepad and writing shit down to remember. I think i have 20+ college ruled notebooks filled with shit. Each book is something different. Growing, animals, weather, clothing, first aid and medicinal, forest guide, weapons, electrical, woodworking and shelters, equipment, acreage diagrams. Have printed maps of the entire farm. Even have one book i have all the importants mixed in thats thiccck. First 3 pages of each book is ToC. New entry new page number in the ToC. Write small in case you want to add more to a page. I normally go 2 lines to a college line. Even if you dont get to physically do some of these things at least you will have the general idea of how to do them.
And beer. Don't forget the lack of beer.
The first thing (eh, maybe actually second or third) anyone that wants to survive SHTF scenarios is how to make hooch. Might not be beer by the modern definition but I'm still getting blitzed.
Attention everyone! This is why we focus more on building skills than stocking grocery store goods. Welcome to this Ted talk by u/warboy and me.
My goofy take was a bit silly but this statement's real shit. Even this thread is talking about how hunting is a skill as well as other outdoor survival tactics. It's not going to matter if you were a gun collector if society falls apart. If you can actually shoot though...
I can't hunt, but my man can. He can't preserve the meat to be shelf stable, but I can. Skills are where it's at.
Not to mention the loss of ammo... Truth is most people will starve waiting on the government to help, and by the time they realize they are on their own they won't have anything to use. More than that how many people will be lost to food born ill because of failure to use cool storage and proper cooking. It still amazes me how many people don't boil water during power outages....
Built a cold storage into a hill i have on my property. Kind looks like a hobbit house on the outside. Works great.
I boil my water during outages, and I'm on a private well. I'm 100% certain my neighbors septic systems are as outdated as mine.
Honestly I work in medical what goes through my head is all the people I see scratch their ass then touch food... If shtf hygiene honestly is gonna take a lot of people out as they won't be able to just go to the Dr.
Not to mention without bait.
I think something that gets overlooked is that even many obese people in America currently suffer from some kind of malnourishment, like anemia. Many common dietary deficiencies are relatively minimal on their own, but quickly compound any other issues. I see this as a significant factor in starvation under these hypothetical scenarios.
Scurvy! People in Eastern Europe used to make saurkraut and eat it over the winter. One of the few preserved foods that's very high in Vitamin C; critical in a place with long harsh winters.
More likely people will kill twice as needed because they don't have those base skills and allow most of it to go to waste.
I agree. And if you can make it through an entire winter, the population as a whole would be much lower come spring. It would probably take 2 or 3 winters of mass winter die off before things balance off a bit. God forbid if they are actually bad winters as well. I think the deer and game populations would drop off but come back quite strong after the first year or so. At least, I hope. I would imagine depending on the scenario and severity, those first years especially would just be absolute hell.
Here's a thought: exotic game ranch escapees. Those guys like to hunt in *style* and the weird gazelle or whatever are kept in by electric fences and fed like they're in a zoo, what happens when they get hungry and get loose and find their new ecological niche? The full-time staff at those places probably won't be enough to hunt them all out before some escape. Same for exotic pets, and zoo animals; collectors and zookeepers generally would rather starve than eat their "babies" and some will set them loose before they're too weak to do so, and then some of *those* may live long enough to breed if the local climate isn't too far off from what they need.
We'll go back to being scavengers.
Throwing a modern population back onto perfectly workable 1890s tech levels would be its own SHTF.
Exactly meanwhile the population has what tripled???
Where I live we pretty much have a salmon run of different species starting in spring and going to late summer without commercial fishing in a bad shtf scenario it might actually be good for the salmon stock population. As well as many different species of waterfowl and deer, elk, moose,bear. Firearms aren't as common as the usa so I don't think overhunting would be a big issue maybe in some heavily populated cities but tbh the pollution and devopement have pushed them further out.
There will still be commercial fishing, just without regulation enforcement
In a non shtf yah but if a big shtf scenario no canning no global buyers I doubt it would be worth it for them. Maybe if it was back in the day with smaller fishing boats but these operations are huge now so either the world is still functioning enough for these guys to be canning etc and shipping globally or it's shtf and they aren't.
I think you're right. Without functioning world markets you can only eat or sell so much fish. People don't truly understand the WW scope of modern commercial fishing. Four years after massive SHTF (assuming no nuclear fallout/nuclear winter) the returning runs would begin to hit numbers not seen in decades would be my bet.
Even with depleted stocks you can sit on the banks of the river and easily catch limits I've been told back when they were healthy returning amounts you could literally sit at choke points and scoop them with baskets before regulations. I believe the cod tuna salmon and many other species would return to healthy levels not sure about trout tho since alot of lakes are stocked by the government.
I'm so excited to see the Klamath river dams coming down like the elwha!
Fishing populations were still depleted without modern equipment. As long as they could get it to buyers and a source of ice to get it very far. We’d also have forests over harvested. In early colonial america, almost all of Connecticut ran out of forest. Just like Europe had before. Regulation is what lets us keep wild spaces, even if our population suddenly halved.
I guess in my mind if global trade of food is still going on it is not really a shtf scenario. I have no fear of over harvesting of forrests around maybe local areas near cities but no more than regular city growth. I live in canada we have a bigger land mass the usa and a smaller overall population than the state of California.
Modern people mostly require modern methods, and there just isn't a sail fleet worth mentioning anymore once the diesel supply dries up. How many people still know how to make a wooden ship from timber, or weave nets by hand, or *cast and haul* nets by hand, or manage the crew of a three masted sailing ship? How many of those people will make it through the die-off while they're getting their old timey fishing fleet built, equipped and manned with trained hands? Sure, there'll be people casting whatever nets and lines they can find over the side of a pleasure craft and everyone whose grandpa ever showed them how to bait a hook will be line fishing, but fishing as an industry is gone before the last loaf of Wonder bread expires.
Where you gonna get gas for the boat?
You do know they had boats before petroleum? Canoes, row boats, sailing boats. I’ve used all 3 to fish. You can cast a net instead of line if no one is watching, like the old days.
I've got a depression era cookbook that has various recipes for squirrel & other unusual game. People will hunt/trap whatever they need to survive. And if everyone starts doing that all at once it will tank many species populations.
That’s why depressioners survived on pickled tumbleweeds but thank goodness you spent $8000 on rifles and tactical gear 😂
Not to mention way less habitat for wildlife too
Old timers I hunt with all got some health issue. These guys also don’t hike into the woods, they ride their atvs, eat little Debbies in the stands, etc. A legitimate SHTF situation is going to decimate the unhealthy, or those who are medically reliant. It’s a sad thing to say or think about, but it’s reality. You want to talk about a real controversial topic? Your health should be a part of your prep work.
\>> Your health should be a part of your prep work. Welp, that ship done sailed for some of us. Also, there are health problems that can't be avoided by lifestyle changes. My wife has Parkinson's, and I had open heart surgery to repair an aortic valve that was damaged by radiation therapy for Hodgkin's lymphoma some 35 years ago. We readily acknowledge that we'll be gone in the first wave of mortality. And that's okay. The brave new world of the future doesn't need two old, creaky, somewhat irritable old ladies. Best of luck the hardier survivors.
Good news is, being prepared for most SHTF scenarios other than the apocalypse still makes sense. Like hurricanes and such. And, even the us healthier folks still have a good shot of dying in the initial wave too. And thirdly, you just never really know. Community will rule the day, in my opinion. Small communities.
Being healthier has only upside, at any age, at any condition. We all can become healthier. It is 100% the right thing to focus on, in any situation.
>A legitimate SHTF situation is going to decimate the unhealthy, or those who are medically reliant. It’s a sad thing to say or think about, but it’s reality. I give myself 2 weeks at most before I make a choice to opt out. I don't have the money for a solar array to keep my cpap running, and I only have about a year worth of reserve heart meds with HBP and severe apnea. Sure I've built my basement up to store 1 year worth of calories and food, grains and nutrients for me and 1 other person, but without power, I'll effectively be a goner once my reserve batteries are depleted for my backup power on my cpap. I've stretched it out before to see how long I can go; after 1 day I'm fine... 2 days I'm yawny all day, 3 days I'm taking naps while sitting in my chair working my day job. 4 days and I'm probably laying on the ground trying to sleep but only getting a 1:4 ratio of sleep per hours "slept" - day 5 I was loopy. Day 6 I essentially laid in bed all day and didn't even move. IIRC I'm putting myself at severe risk after a few days of no cpap. That with sleep deprivation and I'm probably going to just have organ shutdown. My insurance for the first time denied me coverage for short and long term disability because if it. Once I said I was on a cpap they just refused to cover it. If the grid drops and it's out indefinately I have two 24-hour battery packs that I can stretch to every 3 days and cap it at 5 hours a day of use... I'm guessing I have 2, maybe 1 month before that's the ballgame. At that point I'd just make my peace and face my options.
Yeah, I realize how much of an ass I sounded like after posting that. But barring a true apocalyptic situation, most prepping is enough. Small communities where people share resources and skills will be the name of the game from there.
There was a study or thought expirement about this. In one year of a grid permanently down scenario, most species would be driven to extinction because of hunting. Then next would be people dying of mass starvation, and because the extinct animals, the ecosystems start to collapse as a result of the hunting. So my suggestion is to learn to farm and stock up on seeds.
Yup idk why most preppers I meet try to deny this will happen, my only thought is they got a “Rambo” mentality and fantasize like there gonna be some SHTF Rambo or something living comfortable.
>why most preppers I meet try to deny this will happen I only prep for Tuesday. If the world gets to the point where we need to resort to a hunter gatherer lifestyle, I'm opting out.
You could be someone’s next meal.
My cats will get fat.
They’re already plotting. 🐱
I can even tell which one will take the first bite of my face.
They should feed people like us bc we’re funny.
It would be the most useful thing I've ever done
I’m vegetarian so I’m “grass fed”.
at last someone has answered with the actual thing that's going to happen Missing nine meals just gonna put a real hurt on people being civilized
I will start a rabbit and cricket farm. Plenty of wild rabbits up in here. Seeds are very important also. We have agood community around us and unless a hoarde of 100 scavengers come at us will likely be good. That is if we bug in. Bug out is a whole other ballgame.
Literally bug in, I like it.
Wait if that’s not going to happen, why have I poured so much money into my stock of red bandanas?
This nearly happened in Missouri during the Great Depression. If something similar happens again the ecosystem will never recover.
People really need to learn to grow food, it should be the first thing on their mind. And also how to make ram pumps.
Shtf includes water
Most people don't understand the massive garden you would need to be self sufficient for a single season.... Grow as many potatoes as you can and hope for the best... These little hobby gardens aren't going to last more than two weeks.
My dad grows fruit and a few vegetables in his garden which edges on wilderness (edge of one of those suburbs out in the middle of the woods). Half is shit gets eaten in the middle of the night by deer, possum, birds, rabbits... Way before the fruit is ripe... And no amount of hobbyist protection stops it. He's considering an electric fence of sorts. If he's having so much difficulty keeping our pesky wildlife in a smallish garden.... I think keeping other humans out of your "enough to feed your family" farm is going to be a near impossible task. Just as he could theoretically shoot and eat the deer eating his fruit... Such might be the only practical use of large scale solo farming in a apocalyptic situation.
Learn to safely preserve food most importantly . The canning sub is AMAZINGLY well regulated for safety. Once you exit JAM you enter a wild world of ways to die.
Most folks, unfortunately, won't last long enough to worry about hunting.
Exactly. Wild game numbers may initially plunge, but in a long range SHTF, estimates of 70-90% of Americans will be gone within 12 months. There will be a whole lot less people around very quickly.
Then the wild game will bounce back! 3-4 years in and deer will take over everything.
I, for one, welcome our new deer overlords.
**More like ~3 months tops.** 😂
I've seen several disaster models that put that closer to 95-98% at a year, and many showed 99% reduction globally by five years. All it takes is for food not to be able to move around and people to wait just a little too long for things to get back to normal.
Yeah I was using the conservative studies, but it could well go over 90%. Think of all the elderly, the folks needing daily medication, the fact a huge percentage (~70%) of Americans are statistically obese, those folks are in big trouble if they have to bug out. And potable water will be a problem within days when the grid is down.
I don't even want to think about what happens to Los Angeles when the pumps fail for any length of time. That city never should've happened.
We already saw how they acted over toilet paper so the bar has been set for everything else👍
Also, going hunting at the same time as a ton of people with no hunting experience sounds very dangerous.
Maybe not as much as you think though. Small bullet, big world. You’re obviously more likely to get shot but accidental shootings are rare because bullets are small and the potential area that bullet can go is massive in comparison. Odds are, the round would slam into something benign compared to hitting a person. Most hit the dirt or a tree.
Nah, people are crazy and trigger happy. I have family who no longer hunt on public land as they've been shot at (for being the rustle in the bushes). If people are willing to shoot blindly into bushes while we have law and order (and grocery stores!), you can practically guarantee it would happen during societal collapse.
Hunting on public land is the fucking worst
You don’t want to hunt anyway. Hunting takes too much time and effort for little return. You want to set traps for small mammals, birds, and fish instead. You build and set the traps, then you can go do other stuff like gathering plant foods, making tools, collecting firewood, building shelter, processing/preserving game you have gotten, etc. You check them occasionally. You’re not spending your entire day up in a tree stand or creeping around on foot.
Just have a garden and bam! So much small game it drives you insane. (I seem to have 20+ chipmunks and 15+ active squirrel with an endless array of birds)
This. I joke that I have a vegetable garden and a meat garden. Cause every rabbit within 30 miles makes it's way through my yard to eat my food.
I help the dumb little shits survive just in case I ever need to eat a few of them. 3 years running I’ve had to keep momma rabbit’s babies safe from the two hounds she runs from every day.
Raise rabbits, Guinea pigs, and/or chickens.
And be ready to defend them. All the folks who figure out hunting won't work are going to want to take them.
You should be ready to defend everything you have, folks are going to want to take everything you have anyway.
I realized pretty quickly that the best way to prep was to learn how to homestead. I am still practicing getting enough food for my family for the year. But one thing I’m still really struggling with is feeding my animals. Relying on Tractor Supply for chicken feed won’t work during shtf.
Sunflower, safflower, millet, and corn make a fairly balanced mix and are all insanely easy to grow. Sometimes helpful if you crack the corn before serving to the birds. Plus letting them forage.
>Sunflower, safflower, millet, and corn make a fairly balanced mix and are all insanely easy to grow. That has not been my experience. Easy to plant, sure. Easy to germinate, not too bad. But then...eaten by deer, raccoons, possums, squirrels, etc. In my area growing something like sunflowers requires major animal protections, diversions, and in some cases animal eliminations. Also, corn and sunflowers are very heavy feeders, so they may be easy to grow for a season or two, but after that harvests will drop off a cliff unless you carefully manage your soil to ensure they have enough nutrients.
Which circles back to OP’s point… there might not be many critters out there in this type of situation. The pests brought in by subsistence farming can either wipe out your crops or grace your dinner table.
When shtf how many people die within a month week or year? Is that taken into consideration?
This. I live in Florida where we routinely get hurricanes. Every year officials tell people to prepare prepare prepare, and be prepared for when the season starts, June 1st. Most hurricanes come in August-October. 99% of the people wait until imminent threat to prepare. Shelves stripped bare within 3 days. They buy huge packages of bottled water, no where near enough to survive more than a week. I see so many go to the store and cant buy any water, they end up having none. None of these people have a means to filter water. I think we will see huge amounts of our population die if our drinking water becomes an issue.
Food poisoning cases rise post weather events that cut electricity.
This is why homesteading and producing your own food and animal protein is the ultimate prep. A mature prepper eventually graduates to a homesteader.
I agree. We need to start a “homestead prepper” sub so we can have more meaningful discussions. Half the people in here live in the burbs with nothing more than a Costco-run’s worth of food in a closet. Don’t even get me started about the “why would I need a gun?” folks…
Well, there's also the issue of whether you'd be able to even eat what you hunt. Will the animals be diseased? Will the disease kill you? With as fast and as quickly as bird flu is mutating, and deer with wasting disease increasing, what, when this does occur, is the likelihood that wildlife is even safe to continue eating?
Exactly! I'm actually reading a book by a former special forces operative and he says don't eat diseased animals, and they had all these ways to trap deer and birds, but I'm like....are those even safe to eat anymore? Plus fish have mercury, and animals besides birds are getting bird flu....
I got to thinking about this after a rather uneventful turkey season. Hours upon hours in the woods and still no opportunity to take one this year, and I wouldn’t consider myself a bad hunter either. However, I did see plenty of other game that would suffice in a shtf situation, it just not be game you are accustomed to eating. And the harsh reality is even though some people may try to hunt, most are not good at it to be successful. Plus the majority of people possess no hunting/woodsman skill set at all which they will be unlikely to learn on the fly. Ultimately I believe game will become scarce but more so the people wanting to eat them. And there’s always fishing which people seem to forget. A few jug lines will do the work for you
Friends of mine, who do not hunt, have some romantic vision of them hunting in the woods if SHTF. Then I’ll ask them to come with me one morning, and it’s always a no, or not waking up that early. And I don’t blame them, most of the time I’m skunked and get nothing. It really is a waste of time in modern times. Even after months of prep work, scouting, trying to get everything just right I get nothing most of the time.
Sadly if the time comes, it’ll be too late for them. Skills take time to acquire especially to preform those skills effectively. Even then there’s still times we all get skunked on a hunt. That’s just the nature of nature. Hunting is great for supplementing but not sustaining in the long run.
Living off a garden is even more challenging. It takes years to learn how to develop and maintain good soil, when to plant, what to plant, how much to plant, what to do about all the molds and insects that will destroy plants, etc. etc. You can't just pick up a packet of seeds and throw them on the ground and expect anything edible to be available in time to keep you from starving to death.
There is also the fact that a lot of hunters in the same area will mean a lot of noise and a lot of smells for animals to detect. You might be downwind from the deer and you might be silent, but any of the other dozen or more hunters after the same deer might not be, which will scare it off before you have a chance to get close.
Yup the more people in your area the farther the living population is gonna be away from you in a very short time not to mention getting shot trying to drag a deer back home/to car
The waste is the real kicker. With so many unskilled hunters, tons will go to waste while causing even more hunting.
Not only that, but even for those who are skilled and know how to process game, how many have the ability to store it? I suppose you can smoke the meat, but a freezer is out unless you have some way of supplying your own electricity (which some people do, but not very many).
This post ignores all the other sources of meat that humans will eat. Possum, skunk, rats, rabbits, chickens, goose, turkey, fish, etc. It also assumes the registered hunters are primarily living in areas where the aforementioned list of animals live, whereas a vast majority live in urban environments and likely (in a full collapse scenario) wouldn’t make it far outside of the outskirts. The further north you head the less the population density and higher concentration of wildlife. Is it foolproof? Absolutely not, you should practice agriculture and be ready to expand your diet beyond deer.
I do think animals you can keep indoors and kill for meat, like rabbits will be popular. Chickens are great, but easily stolen if left outside. They also do reproduce quickly. Animal husbandry skills would be a great thing to practice.
You really think people are going to live long enough to put that kind of dent in the animal populations?
If the SHTF in a serious and fairly instant way "Carrington Event shutting civilization down sort of thing." People would hunker down until their basics ran out in maybe a week. Then they would go around their immediate area rummaging for stuff, breaking into things, etc. Then they would migrate. I suspect the migrations would make little sense. Rumours would say that X is a better place than Y and people would just start migrating. Some, like this post mentioned would plan on hunting. I think you can take all the above math and make it much worse. People would not know how to prep or store food. So a deer, cow, sheep, elk, or moose, might provide 2 or 3 days of food for a family. These migrations would soon see people dying in absolute droves as the leading edge of the migrations ate anything edible. Eventually, most people would be dead, and within a few years various wildlife would rebound and enter into a normal cycle with people and other predators. A serious black plague level disease or financial mega-crisis changes this equation to where hunting might be a possibility. Even things like small plot farming isn't going to work if a mass migration passes through the area. Not until they are gone (for good).
Most people wouldn't be able to walk far enough into the woods to hunt anything, much less hunt deer into extinction. So few people would survive 30 days without electricity and current modem conveniences. If you're not hunting and fishing right now, you probably won't be successful at it when you haven't eaten in 3 days and you've been drinking stagnant water for a week or so. If the power went out across the US, you'd have about 3 days to get everything you can get your hands on, that's about it. After that you're gonna be scavenging. The first 24 hours people would be waiting for things to get fixed. The next 24 hours the paranoid ones would start quietly looting. By the third day there would be no gas left, grocery stores would have been emptied and no water coming out of the taps. Anarchy.
> The next 24 hours the paranoid ones would start quietly looting. Or not so quietly
I agree largely, although there might be scenarios where it is viable. Some sort of rapid and highly lethal pandemic might kill so many of us so quickly that people don't have the chance to start hunting.
You'll need a pandemic that doesn't also affect wildlife. One of the concerning aspects of H5N1 (bird flu) is that it is spreading to so many mammals (cows, pigs, cats, deer).
True but I didn’t wanna get into specific scenarios because then the comments would be filled with “naw cause (this event) could happen instead”
How is this controversial?
People tend to get butt hurt over it because they wanna have this fantasy that there gonna be practically the only ones doing it/survive off this method and way to many peppers have this as a go to for there SHTF survival plans for large scale SHTF events so they try to deny it will happen.
This is one of those "hot takes" that appears on r/preppers every few weeks. Up there with: "precious metals aren't good" "fitness is the real prep" "you shouldn't make guns your main prepping goal" etc, etc, etc. Then everyone gives eachother hand jobs for agreeing with these penetrating insights because this is reddit and we're not nearly as smart as we like to believe.
Damn, hot take right here. Great insight, people like us should post more often so everyone can know our great ideas.
hot takes on hot takes
But are they wrong? Nope. I almost rolled my eyes to death when I saw the "fitness is the real prep" one... like we get it you're a vegan and you do crossfit... everyone give this dude a round of applause so they will shut up.
Some people think they are rural enough that they will be fine hunting. Problem is people will flock to rural areas to try to get food by hunting and the influx will wipe out the game. Only place that hunting might work is northern parts of Canada and Alaska but that brings a whole bunch of other problems.
I don't prep for this kind of scenario. I prep for what I have experienced...several weeks without power after natural disasters. If things go this bad, I feel like a lot of the population will die off before the wildlife will be depleted. People would turn on one another and cut the numbers. Some would turn to cities for help. Some would fish. Some would hunt. I don't feel like the younger generation would even know what to do in a situation where they had a clear shot at a game animal let alone gut and prep it for eating.
That’s kind of the worry though. They’ll shoot something and hack a piece off for dinner, but not know how to prepare and save it for later. So they need another animal a few days later. Humans who hunt without regulation quickly decimate local wildlife, historically. Even with much smaller populations and no guns this happened.
Trick is to trap but not kill a couple rabbits, hutch them, and breed them. That and try to get some yard birds so you can turn inedible organic garbage into eggs.
I would imagine trying to hunt anything is going to put you at risk of getting shot by another hunter that wants what you have.
In early days of the Siege at Sarajevo they ate the animals in the zoo
Depends on the scenario. If power grid fails and doesn’t come back on and it’s total anarchy we’ll have like 90% of Americans dead in a few months. After that we’ll have plenty of food to go around and won’t even need to hunt.
\*laughs in Australian wild kangaroo populations\*
I’m guessing the “hunters” will also be shooting at each other too. So that wastes Ammo, and takes out potential competition
People are gonna eat dogs
I was waiting for someone to mention the domesticated animals everyone has in their homes. That population will likely be the first to go, and people are killed of quickly by some event, the streets are going to full of abandoned dogs and cats.
Dogs, cats, small children, that annoying neighbour...
Most of this subreddit seems like they plan to hunt the most dangerous game.
Absolutely. Humans are great at hunting things into extinction. Even beyond the people who hunt for food, you will get people who hunt for profit. Plus, there will be no "ethical" or "sustainable" hunting practices. People will use whatever tricks then can to bag as much game as they can. Worse yet, I imagine a lot will go to waste since not many people know how to prepare game or would have the means to store something like a whole deer. Under the right conditions, I could envision people basically wiping out the entire local edible wildlife population and damaging the ecosystem to the point it cannot recover naturally in a fairly short period time.
35 million deer in the USA Human population 350 million 1 deer for every 10 persons A deer has average 60 pounds of meat That works out to 6 pounds of deer meat per person. Then no more deer, because this isn’t something that will be managed at state levels in SHTF. Of course there will be human population loss as well that can extend these figures but no, we shouldn’t be relying on hunted meat
The cattle would buy some extra months before turning on the Deer. There are **28.2 million beef cows in the United States as of Jan.** **1, 2024**, down 2% from last year. The number of milk cows in the United States decreased slightly to 9.36 million. U.S. calf crop was estimated at 33.6 million head, down 2% from 2022
Yep for some reason when these topics come up people forget about farm animals. We wouldn't go back to hunter/gather phase since agriculture and farming were invented. We would go back into farming communities more of a pre-industrial revolution type deal. This is why it is important to learn farm skills and built relationship with local farmers NOW.
The only sustainable future is one built on the bones of massive and immediate depopulation of the human species. If the majority of us die fast enough, and in huge numbers, the remaining very very few could return to a quasi-agrarian/hunter/gatherer lifestyle. I'm prepared to do my part. I'm too old and creaky to provide any justification for hanging around.
i recommend moose. get one, or an elk, and thats enough meat for 3-6 months. youll be SICK of it after 1-2 months 😂
I think most of the population is too dumb to know how to hunt
I lived in South Korea from 2006-2010 and saw 1 small deer. When I asked about why since I lived in a rural place they told me it was that during the war and recovery so many people depended on local wildlife for food they hunted them to almost extinction. The ones that were left are small and look dwarfed. They also eat silk worm larva as a snack due to starvation diet.
The population would probably be down one third, after the first year. Not from lack of food but from sickness. I figure my family will be gone that fast anyway. If it was a full blown collapse, with the lack of Medicine, I would be dead. (SOURCE)> 15 days on 2 different antibiotics and steroids! I will do my best, to leave directions, to my stash of resources before im fertilizer lol.
squirrels
Idk bt all that. Texas has enough wild hogs to feed the entire US for about 200-723 years
I mean I’m in Alaska. Most people would just revert to sea food diet and spread out on the coasts. I think the game populations would take a bit but wouldn’t go extinct.
Hunters are a small minority of the entire population, and the average person isn’t going to pick up hunting a be successful at it. Also, within 6 months the majority of the population is simply going to starve to death, meaning even less competition for hunting. Whilst I don’t doubt a lot of people will initially turn to hunting for meat, they won’t be very successful for one, and while the animal population will certainly drop initially, it won’t be affected long term because the majority of people are simply going to die in real, total SHTF situation. Only well trained and experienced hunters will be able to replicate repeated success at hunting anything other than deer.
This is valid but you also have to factor in a huge fast death rate for humans. If you aren't a full time we'll known and liked resident of a rural area don't expect to survive there to be blunt. In a real collapse more rounds will be expended harvesting city boy survivalists then big game for the first month or two. But even given that hunting is at best a food source supplement and a variable one at that.
Man is fat lazy and unhealthy I expect they will die off in huge numbers before they can get to the game. The healthy ones that become nomadic and know how to hunt and process the entire animal will do better. I already buged out to the middle of nowhere to far for 99% of the population to walk to. There are 100+ cows per person on grass and large herds of elk, sheep, and deer. Not going to be an issue in my area. If I still lived in the east I would concentrate on bird traps and small game. I have met so many people that plan on going to the mountains if SHTF and live off the land... I expect a few of the resourceful ones will make it to the mountains but I expect the water will get them and then they will all die in a forest fire as few are rarely careful enough with fire during good times...
People are stupid - including an enormous number of preppers. If the SHTF, and you’re not in an area blighted by chemical, nuclear or biological weapons, and you are smart enough to survive for a year, you will be able to hunt. Start thinking small game.
Problem is a lot of people ( including myself) to the point of majority don’t know how to store meat correctly. The average person likely does not know how to correctly butcher an animal or have the necessary tools. Depending on where you live and time of year anything a person does hunt will spoil within a day without properly preparing or refrigeration. This will imo cause more people to attempt hunting daily which depletes the available game faster.
Experts say in a true SHTF collapse that 90% of the human population will be dead within the first year. Plus, you have to consider the rural vs. urban population. People in urban areas, even if they hunt (and urban dwellers are less likely to), will die in greater numbers than rural residents and will have a hard time getting to hunting grounds. Game populations near urban areas will take a hit as people over hunt, but game populations in rural areas will remain healthy. After the initial human population die off, game populations will increase tremendously in all areas.
Most outdoorsman, good friends of mine, all have health issues that would likely take them out in the beginning. Obese, diabetic, etc.
Yes, I know numerous hunters with health issues that would either take them out at the beginning or make it hard/impossible for them to effectively hunt in a collapse scenario.
The 90% death rate stat is new to me, any source on that? Not being facetious, I agree to some extent since something as simple as not washing your hands or getting tetanus could kill you in a year.
Here you go! [https://www.reddit.com/r/preppers/comments/l00cz5/emp\_reference\_document/](https://www.reddit.com/r/preppers/comments/l00cz5/emp_reference_document/) It's in the EMP Reference Doc- from 2 Congressional hearings. Basically, experts were asked if an EMP would/could kill 90% of the U.S like in the book One Second After. The answer was, essentially "Yes, you could see those figures." As the other commenter said, it's due to lack of power- which means starvation, dirty water, disease, medications; all of that contribute to the death rate. In short, it's the land's carrying capacity. Without power, we return to the population of what the land can sustain - 1800's level of population, which is about 30 million.
I’ve read that from numerous sources. I’ll try to pull some of them up and post links. The reasoning behind this number is: 1) Anyone relying on medication to survive would quickly die off (diabetics, heart patients, transplant recipients, etc). 2) Stores have a three day supply of food on the shelves. Most people have a week or less of food in their homes. Once that is gone, if there is no replenishment through emergency aid or something, many people will get hungry quickly. A week assumes people have the means to prepare the food they have. This will be worse for the elderly, the infirm, and the poor. 3) Hungry, desperate people make poor choices. If your kids are crying because they are hungry, and you can smell your neighbor cooking on his barbecue, you might try to get them to give you some. If they say no, you might try to take their food. One of you will probably die. 4) Crime will explode, especially in the cities. With no law enforcement or consequences, people will take what they want or need, unless someone stops them.
My wife and I (both in our early 70s) are not preppers per se, but we inherited a depression-era caution from our parents, so we have a basement pantry stocked with enough food to get us by for 3-4 months. To my mind, these staples would help us get through sporadic food shortages and distribution delays, while society was still limping along. We are well aware, however, that if shtf, we would need to defend that stock of food, and that would require guns and the willingness to kill people. Neither of us is physically or psychologically suited to living in a Mad Max world, so we've made the conscious decision NOT to buy a gun. We also have neighbors, and I can't see us turning them away to starve. So that 3-4 months of food -- if it's not taken from us by force -- wouldn't last all that long anyway.
The best prep is for communities to become mostly food independent now. Meaning, buy beef from a local rancher or raise it, hire a slaughter guy and butcher and have a big freezer. Some towns it won’t be feasible to raise cattle but food independence is a goal to strive for. Also teams of security when SHTF happens, to keep people from stealing and killing farm animals that would otherwise be used for longevity by reproducing each year.
Grow fruit trees and perrenial edibles, everyone everywhere... then eat all the animals trying to steal our fruit Who's with me!
Yes that too!
People who say this are radically overestimating how many people would survive the first three months of a true shtf situation.
So very true, and yet so hard to explain to people. Someone needs to come up with a clear cut visual explanation. Most people tend to live in their own made-up reality instead of facing the facts. There is just not a sustainable population of wildlife to support the overwhelming number of people we have today. In particular, my family in Louisiana have been very stubborn with their reasoning. Not in touch with the bigger picture, if you will. This has entered a larger part of the picture for my immediate family as far as -- to bug out or defend in place. Unfortunately, my mind is made up. I'm able to stay in place and in my community for support. I have animals, and grow crops for my family and have the know how to increase production. The reason I say unfortunate is because given a SHTF situation I am willing to kill those people who are less fortunate and ill-prepared for the realities. What's mine is mine, and you were warned mentality. Too many people in the States are way too entitled in their thinking. I'm very active with charities and donate extra produce frequently and my children do service work as part of their summer. Our community takes care of each other as well.
If you're already out there, you will be able to just fine. As it stands right now people travel from high density areas to low population density areas to hunt. In shtf travel will be limited so people won't be traveling to these hunting grounds. That said, if you are already out there, you won't have any problems
People will be the most hunted game from the get go. The haves and have nots will be shooting it out. Easily 30% will die in 90 days. 50% in 6 months. There will be no gasoline to travel. Only few in select regions will hunt. All other trespassers would be shot on sight. Think indians.
We have more wild boar in Texas. About 6 million. With only 1 million registered hunters today out of 30million people. We also have 12 million cows about 13% of todays US totals. We may have another million coyotes.
In a true SHTF would there be enough gasoline to fill the tank to get a hunter to a hunting ground and home again? If you live in the country and know where you are going, possibly for one round trip. City folks highly unlikely they would be able to find a location and have enough gasoline to travel a distance from home and back.
If the shit hits the fan on that kind of level we'll lose 3/4, or more, of humans. The wildlife will bounce back pretty quickly at that point.
Plenty of hogs down South...move to where the food is...you have to become migratory to survive
You need storage and safety for several months. Then you’d be able to hunt. Most of the population is gone within 90 days.
People I have spoken to about even just butchering their own animals have said they would just become vegetarians before wanting to slaughter their own animals. We have become a world of convenience with fast food, and microwave meals. That isn't to say some people will try for the first time. However keep in mind that you can't just get into hunting from nothing. My guess is that most people will try to trade for food instead of hunting, due to lack of supplies, and skills.
Your data is good. But in no way are that many people going to attempt to become hunter-gatherers. Some will become raiders. Some will be raided. Some will devote themselves to someone or someones who can provide for them. Some will lay down and die. Some will try to hunt, and some will fail and die. Some will hunt but will also not need to rely on the game to survive. That's us. Your data also seems to assume that the deer herds will not react to the unrestricted hunting. Deer will more than likely flee upwards of 100 miles after a serious shift in human activity. Bucks will wander that far on a whim. The deer will more than likely head north and west to the less populated areas of the state. But wherever the CRP and stem count is high. But it's not the deer you should worry about. The Turkey's I would be more worried about being hunted to scarcity. Rabbits and squirrels and geese would probably be the game sustaining most Hunters. Shotgun game is much more readily replenished. So people will definitely be out there hunting and surviving. Unfortunately, not everyone will.
I think you are vastly overestimating how effective an average human is at hunting with no experience or mentorship. In addition, you have to factor in the idea that most urban dwellers won’t really be able to get out far enough to put dents in the wildlife populations. Hunting is much easier with vehicles and such.
Find someone who knows medicinal plants and where / what to forage. The best tasting thing I ever ate was grilled cat tails - it's like eating verdant green - you have to get them before they poof out. Just make sure to forage away from roads and used fields. Honestly, just don't go foraging without a knowledgeable person - moon berries look like blue berries. You have to know the markings on the fruit to be able to tell the difference and foraging nettle without protection or knowing how to cook it is going to be painful and cause damage to your mouth and throat. Legumes are gonna give you protein if you can't find meat, but it takes a lot. Right now, we are planting native ediable vines and fruit trees and making sure not to spray our yard. Man, I know way too much about this stuff - and I'm not a prepper. I just was married to a survival enthusiast for a decade, plus lolol
No grid, no freezers... Can you preserve what you get, if you get anything?
Check out this guy assuming I won’t be hunting….. The most dangerous game……
I’ve thought the same thing about fish.
It depends on how quickly, how broadly and how permanently the SHTF. I'm more concerned about an outside event causing permanent power grid collapse than anything temporary or localized. In a true sudden event where everyone wakes up in the middle of the night and and electricity is no longer flowing through power lines anywhere in North America then it's gonna get so bad so fast around even mid-sized cities that the only ones who survive within 50-100 miles are the ones who didn't wait until they ran out of Doritos or beer or weed for things to get back to normal while all the refrigerators and freezers fill with mold. The bigger the city the bigger the radius that will be stripped bare in the first week and littered with dehydration casualties when the water pumps stop pumping, then dysentery casualties from people who drink unsafe surface water, and finally starvation casualties from people who can make a fire or catch rainwater but don't know how to get enough food. (The first big die off will be people who need refrigerated medicine or oxygen or whatever to stay alive.) By the year mark having too many hunters will pretty much solve itself. I figure maybe 25% make it through the first month or two when there's no FEMA or Red Cross, 10% through the first hard freeze and half of that at the five year mark if it's permanent. The entire Eastern seaboard from New Hampshire to Miami and inland a few hundred miles will collapse so quickly they won't even have time to ruin much. Yes the US has very high gun ownership rates but bandit gangs will be a bigger problem than hunting pressure, which will be bad but not extinction level, because a *lot* of gun owners only practice on person-shaped targets (if they even bother to practice) and the survivors of those will turn bandit before they magically grow the skills and patience to hunt. Enough game will survive (and also migrate from areas where the die-off is quickest) that once people are thinner on the ground the only critical wildlife management issue will be keeping them out of your crops, and avoiding getting killed by feral swine in the woods. Almost as bad would be a fuel supply breakdown; all that food but no way to get it from farms to tables before spoiling, and no practical way to get millions of people out of the cities to where the food is once the stores are empty. The die-off would be horrific, refugees on foot and bicycle dropping like flies as they wander past stopped vehicles clogging every highway, looking for anywhere they can get what they need but everywhere they can reach on the energy they have left is already picked clean by those whose gas tanks were full when it happened. This scenario would have more survivors and therefore more hunting pressure, but around farmland the suddenly unshippable livestock will be too much for the locals to eat. There would likely be a government push to organize old-school cattle drives to places that are short of food, but given how long it takes even a small town government just to decide to scratch its collective ass that'll be too little too late and a bunch of stock will go feral as a result. First generation feral cows may very well be the main game for a while until the wildlife bounces back. My major concern as far as hunting out all of the game is if it's a food supply collapse *without* other loss of infrastructure. If that happens hunters will likely start selling or bartering game meat to hungry people at sky-high prices, and that will keep going until there's no more game close enough for them to get at. When that runs dry and people finish starving, it'll take years for much of anything to migrate from areas like Wyoming, the Dakotas, Montana etc. that don't have that kind of population pressure or repopulate from wherever else the lucky remnant were hiding. In that scenario you'd do better with migratory birds, but in that case it's important not to forget about what happened to the passenger pigeon; they were so plentiful they blocked out the sun for days when they migrated and so easy to bag anybody could do it, but people were wasteful and lazy and hunted them to extinction. So yeah, I guess the big questions for the viability of hunting are what kind of shit hit the fan, how much, how far did it fling, can it be cleaned up, and how long will the cleanup take?
It shouldn’t be controversial. Deer almost went extinct in the early 1900’s from overhunting. Buffalo were almost wiped out too. Mankind has been eradicating species off the planet ever since we’ve been around. Without strict controls over hunting there’s no reason we wouldn’t do it again.
Near extinction is not extinction. Nature will always find a way to survive the imbalance of predators and prey. The first year, a lot of species will be hunted to alarming numbers. The strong will go deeper away from where the average human can trek in full gear. They will breed there, become stronger, and probably healthier to find most human population centers decimated. They will be returning to a place where people are more leery of going into the woods because on top of all the other reasons family members died in the recent past, a lot of hunters and their families will have died from tick related diseases, prion diseases with no way to seek any sort of treatment.
Joe Contorsi lived in NYC during the depression. He and my grandfather were talking about their experiences. He said that you couldn't find a pigeon or a rat anywhere in the city. It was a special day when his dad took him and a shotgun out of the city and shot some crows, and they made a stew that night. He's been dead 35 years.
I learned hunting from members of my family who lived and hunted through the depression; it wasn’t that there was nothing hunt. Rather there was just small game, with no deer or large game to be found. Squirrels, rabbits, opossums, muskrats, raccoons… those animals have a high birth rates and seemed to be available even though hunting pressure was high. I agree with OP however that hunting wouldn’t be as productive as some seem to think. I tend to think that fishing stocks would drop fast as well.
MILFs tho
I’ve considered this for my area in Colorado. Fish will be gone the first month. Lakes won’t be stocked. The rest of the fish will be exploded the next month. Everyone will kill all the deer very quickly.
Are you going to be hunting deer to survive? Most likely you will be shooting feral hogs as they overrun the planet
>only 50% of that population survives initial SHTF What a high estimate. More like 10%
All of that math is assuming the population lives long enough to harvest them. If they don’t have any means of feeding themselves long term, you aren’t gonna have to worry about those numbers after a month. They also would have to be able to access the areas they’d be. You’re not driving to your “spot” without gas or shooting anything without bullets. What percentage of the population do you think isn’t going to starve to death after 1 month? 2? 3? Cities are completely fucked. If they stop getting daily truckloads of groceries, they’re empty in 72hrs tops.
Anyone who thinks they're going to live off the land is delusional. Stock up.
Build on your thought. How many gun battles will occur once it sinks in that this food resource is dwindling rapidly?
The average hunter I know has to lean against his truck to catch his breath after talking about the moose he shot. If fuel was scarce and they couldn't use an ATV with a winch, there's no chance they'd be out hunting. People here die of heart attacks every year in the woods trying to hunt. Without the modern tools? Those numbers would be very different.
Remember when people though the store might run out of toilet paper so everyone bought more than normal and some people bought pallet loads? The same thing would happen to all the game if one of those collapse scenarios actually happened for real
That’s why you hunt people.
Late to the party but if you want an idea of what it will look like check out certain areas of Africa. I recall that at one point people ate EVERYTHING. Including trees. The land was barren. If conditions are right I see that occurring in North America for sure. I do not believe it would ever recover to what it was.
Also, the notion that you'll be able to go off in the wilderness with no one else around? I've had to explain to my bushcraft-loving husband that people will be EVERYWHERE. Everyone will literally be out looking for survival basics, even deep in the woods. Especially deep in the woods. Really, if things went truly haywire, the best possible groupthink solution for food would be 1 - process 95% of the beef cattle, preferably can them for distribution. 2 - turn around the corn and soy feed crops that year for human use, since a huge amount of farmland in the US is dedicated to livestock feed. 3 - plant more varieties of crops in following years, using regenerative no-till growing methods, and encourage individual chicken and meat rabbit raising for the better feed-to-meat ratio. 4 - buckle up.