I think a lot of these folks underestimate what it takes to hunt an elk, field dress it, bring it back to their vehicle, and put away 300 lbs of meat. Even if you borrow a gun as one person interviewed here would, you need a truck, knives, a bone saw, camouflage, maybe a tree stand, and a large freezer, among other things. It is reasonable to hunt for food, but it's not reasonable for your typical "hospital manager" to go out in the woods and take his first shot at a large animal.
Lots of people from NYC suburbs and Long Island head up into the nearest forest every hunting season and accidentally shoot each other, maim animals and don't have the stamina to chase them to complete the kill, etc.
If you're concerned about food shortages, it would be much easier to raise a few backyard chickens or rabbits if you have the small amount of space required for it. Much less likelihood of a gun accident that way too.
If you're set on going out in the woods for a "mental cleanse" and to kill an animal, you could do worse than starting with a read of Jackson Landers' excellent Beginners Guide to Hunting Deer for Food (https://www.amazon.com/Beginners-Guide-Hunting-Deer-Storey/d...).
It's also a good excuse to learn to hunt. Every single experienced hunter had their first hunt at some time.
My family has hunted for generations and I have hunted for nearly a decade now. You are right, there is an elevated risk of accidents. But the experience of hunting is nothing like raising chickens. Staying out in the woods for days, becoming more and more tuned to the animals and environment around you. Feeling the adrenaline when you hear a huge animal tromping through the woods, just to look over and see a couple squirrels playing. There's nothing like it.
If this pandemic draws more people out to try hunting, and in so doing, they have similar experiences to those I've had, then I'm fine with it.
I agree! But these aren't people who are going to spend days in the woods. They are people who work in offices, who are nervous about toilet paper shortages and are unprepared for the possibility of food shortages. Good for them for trying to be prepared and I hope many more people do take some steps towards self-sufficiency. Safely. Maybe with an experienced hunter friend.
I know, I know, that seems like an oxymoron, like jumbo-shrimp or old-news. But in the US at least, a lot of national parks are funded via hunting permits [0]. The same is true in many parts of Africa. Those photos you see of some rich person with an elephant or a 5 point buck? The permit to kill that animal cost a lot of money and the parks are very grateful to have the cash [0].
In our state the conservation efforts, the DNR, everything comes from hunting and fishing licenses. So-called environmentalists who criticize hunting (at least here) are ironically doing little or nothing while the hunters are supporting the cause.
Public land in states with highly limited seasons, few legal hunting areas and high barriers to entry is always a shitshow because you have a bunch of people who haven't been in the woods since last year scrambling to shoot the five stupid bucks that are walking around on opening day in the tiny area you can legally hunt. If the state doesn't like the outcome they should change their laws to stop incentivizing it either by relaxing requirements on where you can hunt or adding more barriers to entry to get the number of people down (of course the latter approach doesn't help control the excessive deer populations that a lot of states have problems with).
I had the same thought. That guy sounds like it's as simple as walking into the woods and shooting an elk. I don't think he has any idea how difficult it can be.
That’s what’s always held me back from hunting; there is a huge amount that has to be learned in a really short period of time. It seems to me that you should probably know what to do before you shoot the animal, and not plan to figure it out later.
It seems that hunting is a skill best passed down directly from seasoned hunter to new hunter.
Doesn't your state require hunter safety courses? In Missouri, we've got to take one before legally being able to hunt unless we're being guided by an experienced hunter.
They taught gun safety, field dressing, and the different type of animals that could be hunted. They taught what clothes you can wear and when, and they taught different strategies to extricate animals if they were too large for you to carry or drag.
I was unaware that hunter safety courses taught more than hunting. Other things held me back well before that point.
More practically my apartment dwelling nature was more of an issue; the idea of storing a gun in my apartment isn’t something I find particularly thrilling. If I could afford a house with a safe, that might’ve been a different story.
Oh, and I’ve lived in 3 states in the past 6 years. That also would’ve been a problem.
Gun owners must have a way to lock it up, of course. That's usually just a locked case. Not cheap but much less than the firearm itself. And you'll want it to transport the firearm anyway.
This might be state/course dependent. In NY you have to take a class in order to get a license but the one I took well over 18 years ago only taught you the safety part, gun safety, don't shoot at things you cannot see, what to wear, basic navigation, etc., as well as when it is legal to hunt different game. If someone else didn't teach you the actual hunting part you'd be fairly ill equipped still after taking the course.
If your family doesn't hunt, states often have "learn to hunt" or mentored hunt programs that will help teach you. I did a learn to hunt deer program in Minnesota and it was extremely informative and extensive. Everything from learning about the habits of the whitetail deer, scouting sessions looking for deer sign, rules/regulations, processing a deer in class, then going on a mentored hunt during a special season.
Deer hunting is still very popular in the midwest, although it's fading fast with the younger generations.
Every year I can walk through my neighborhood and see deer hanging in the garages. A deer is much smaller than an elk, you can dress it and then take it to a processor or cut it up on your own.
Had this pandemic happened during hunting season, states would have probably banned hunting anyway.
The midwest has too many deer. Pretty much everyone acknowledges it, but what usually happens is that you get an argument about extra deer hunts vs birth control for the deer.
I'm not a hunter, but I think that most places in the midwest limit deer hunting to a bow season and a shotgun season, so at least you don't have the danger of people firing rifles all over the place.
You can take a kill to a butcher. You can drag an elk out with a ATV or other means than relying on your own strength, but some can do that as well. You don't need a truck necessarily, an elk can be quartered or de-boned in the field. A bone saw is helpful, but it isn't necessary.
Millions of Americans hunt for deer and elk without a lot of the gear you list.
Hunting isn't some sacred thing that can only be accessed through special means, even though plenty of hunters frame it as such. You can pass a hunter's safety course in less than a week, while learning the basics as you go.
However, I agree with the idea that using legal hunting as a means to survive during a national food shortage is grandiose.
I live in the mountains and learned from dad to park the truck downhill so you can drag the carcass fairly easily. No ATV needed, unless you just want to scare the game away.
As one who does hunt in the suburbs of NY:
Most hunting in the NYC area is done with bows, and some with shotguns. Almost all is done from elevated stands or occasionally cliffs.
The maximum effective range of a bow is 40 yards (above that, and the deer jumps away before the arrow gets there). Shotguns are a little bit higher, but even so, I have never heard of a bowhunter shooting another bowhunter in the area -- one time a novice bowhunter illegally hunting in a park shot a dog, but that's about it.
When you shoot a deer, you do not chase it. You wait for it to expire and then look for it. This is taught in the bowhunting safety course.
The real difficulty is that even in areas where they are overpopulated, there are at most one group of deer per 60 acres, and a bowhunter can barely cover 1/4th acre. Deer do not like to move around, don't follow the same routes every day, and are quite cautious and sensitive to odors and noise. They also spend most of their day in areas such as thickets where a bowhunter cannot get close to them without scaring them off.
So unless the deer happens to walk by the hunter, not smell him, not get startled by his movements drawing a bow, and is facing the proper direction to offer a shot, the hunter will go home empty handed.
Wrong time of the year to eat wild rabbits. Wait until a few weeks after the first hard frost, else you run a risk of contracting tularemia.
Unfortunately, I missed the small window to get a hunting license in my state this year, it closed in Feb, before CV-19 was much of a thing. Fortunately, no license is needed here to hunt rabbits. From what I hear, the same is true for feral hogs, which are becoming a bit of a problem in some parts. Next year, I am definitely putting in for an elk tag. I got a 4x4 largely so I can get into the areas where they hide.
Don't rabbits die if they are infected with tularemia? Is there actually a correlation between temperature and tularemia spreading in rabbits? It seems incredibly rare.
I can see there are more cases in humans during warmer months, but that is probably due to insects that are the most common disease vector, no?
Yup. This is a classic case of something making the news because it is atypical.
I found it funny that the article stops just short of implying that hunting is driving gun sales when despite the obvious 800lb gorilla (Covid driving the sales of any/all emergency preparedness products).
I didn't even know gun rentals outside a range (pay money to shoot stuff you can't afford to own) or B2B (e.g. security or armored car company leases handguns from a gun shop) context were a thing but it makes sense in states where the only thing you'd need a full sized rifle cartridge for is assigned tags via a lottery so every season you have plenty of hunters who suddenly have a tag that they might not be equipped to fill.
There is a tiny fraction of the available game to feed America. A single deer would feed a family of four for, what, a week? So, every family needs 52 deer per annum. Forget it.
This is sort of why civilization is based on agriculture. Not hunting-and-gathering.
I don't think anybody is proposing to replace the entire existing food supply chain with nothing but hunted deer.
There is no reason however, to think that hunting can't supplement a family's food stocks if other sources start to become thin. And there's a lot more to hunt than deer.
There's also more in play than hunting. A family might feed themselves through a combination of any or all of: hunting, trapping, fishing, foraging for wild edibles, home gardening, AND buying from whatever is available on the market.
One interesting thing about this is that those living close to the coasts may be in better shape in one or two regards. Most notably, seafood is one area where "direct to the consumer" sales is a real thing, and there isn't a lot of processing involved. At least where I grew up on the NC coast. It's common for seafood houses to sell oysters, clams, shrimp, etc. directly to consumers.
Again, there is every reason to believe (know) hinting/foraging is woefully inadequate. Simple numbers. Natural 'foods' are pitiful fractions of modern cultivars. It takes a quarter acre(?) of Jerusalem Artichoke to gather a few baskets of roots, which must be boiled and peeled down to a few score pounds of edible material. Even a bonanza 10-acre plot in a meadow would feed 40 people for a few days.
Early Americans spent the whole summer struggling/working like slaves to put up enough food for the 3 months of winter.
Seafood - that sounds like continuing to rely upon the food supply line (fishing boats and their supply chain). That used to be pretty good return. Not sure stocks today could feed a fraction of America for long. Most of us eat seafood a meal a week/month that way even in the best of times.
I don't really understand what point you're trying to make, w/r/t the post you're replying to.
Again:
A family might feed themselves through a combination of any or all of: hunting, trapping, fishing, foraging for wild edibles, home gardening, AND buying from whatever is available on the market.
I'm saying that hunting, etc. are individuals components of a broader strategy for providing food - not that any one of those things is sufficient in and of itself. As as of today, it doesn't appear to me that the commercial market for food is going to just disappear overnight. But if things devolve to the point that you can't buy everything you need, then some of these other approaches can come into play.
Seafood - that sounds like continuing to rely upon the food supply line (fishing boats and their supply chain).
There isn't just one "food supply line." The supply chain for the steak you buy at Food Lion involves a lot of intermediate steps and processing. And those are exactly the steps where we've heard news reports of the processing plants closing down, etc.
My point about seafood is that there are fewer such intermediate steps involved. A boat comes in, docks, and sells their shrimp to the seafood house, and the seafood house sells to the public. The main processing is weighing. And some boat captains even bypass the "sell to the seafood house" part and sell direct.
Responded to the comment directly above (?) As a supplement to a family's food supply, hunting and foraging are totally insufficient. Not if everybody was doing it. The numbers aren't there.
Fewer steps in the seafood supply chain, doesn't offset the fact that in America anyway, it currently provides a whopping total of 1 meal a week per. That's gotta be dropping too. So still the numbers don't support any idea of supplementing food supplies to any great degree.
The OP was just a puff piece about an uptick in hunting. That was fun and interesting. I just posted to provide the insight that, this isn't going to ever matter to our situation in any significant way. We have to support/restart our commercial food chain, or its going to get very bad. No alternatives are reasonable.
As a supplement to a family's food supply, hunting and foraging are totally insufficient.
You can't really make that claim without quantifying the degree of supplementation in question. And that's an unknown. So really this is all just speculation. But I can say that for myself, I'd rather have the ability/knowledge/skills to acquire food by hunting, trapping, foraging, fishing, etc. than not, all things being equal. If you want to take a defeatist attitude and not pursue those things, well... that just means you'll be one less person I'll be competing with for food eventually.
I just posted to provide the insight that, this isn't going to ever matter to our situation in any significant way. We have to support/restart our commercial food chain, or its going to get very bad.
I think we're ultimately talking about two different things here. Of course we have to restart the commercial food supply chain. That, to me, goes without saying. It's also somewhat irrelevant to that I'm talking about (which I think is different from what you're talking about). I'm talking about things to do in the interim for base survival... until the commercial food supply chain is working again. It sounds like you're assuming that we're talking about depending on hunting/foraging/fishing etc. as the default way of life for perpetuity. On that point, I agree with you... it's not reasonable to sustain a population of our current size for an indefinite period of time.
I have grown Jerusalem artichokes in my home garden a few times. Each plant easily produced two pounds of tubers before boiling and cleaning. Plant spacing of around 9 square feet per plant. That comes to over ten TONS per quarter acre. They are amazingly productive.
I highly recommend "How to Grow More Vegetables: Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine" by John Jeavons.
Every year, my garden produces an ever increasing portion of the food for my household and this year it has expanded to provide a significant amount of food for a small flock of chickens. Important things that aid my productivity and reduce the time it takes are a heavy mulch to minimize weeds, improve soil fertility and reduce water consumption as wel as drip irrigation on timers.
There are plenty of people using sustainable techniques to produce more food than they can eat if you look around on the internet.
Not if other foods were unavailable (the assumption). You need 2000 calories a day. 70g of meat is ~600 calories. So triple that, divide by 4 and you've got the week I mentioned.
Other foods aren't unavailable though... They aren't hunting because they're starving, they're hunting because meat is harder to get, and it's a nice luxury that's also expensive. Couple that with reduced/no income and choosing to hunt isn't insane. I know a fair number of people in rural GA who will hunt one deer a year and freeze it, You get small servings of meat all season. It goes a long way...
No one would seriously recommend an all meat diet. It will kill you. Seriously - Go google protein poisoning. Unless you're eating incredibly fatty meat like seal, don't eat just meat.
> No one would seriously recommend an all meat diet. It will kill you.
The Carnivore Diet is a real thing that is gaining popularity, if choosing between two extremes with veganism on the other side, I would much prefer an all meat diet.
Maybe I misread. But the fact remains, hunting and foraging are fun for some (a vanishingly small fraction) Americans. But not gonna feed the teeming masses.
You can get 60 lbs of meat off a medium sized sized deer, and more if you go for bones, certain organs (e.g lungs, testicles) that are less commonly eaten.
It takes about 2-6 deer to provide meat for a family of four for a year. So, a single deer is about two months of meat. (a deer is 50-125lbs of meat... depending on species and size)
Not if that's all the calories you have - then it adds up to a week's nutrition. But sure, as a trivial additive for fun, deer can work for a tiny fraction of the population.
My state of 3M had 100,000 deer harvested last year. That's deer for 3% of the population. One deer each. Not gonna put a dent in our food supply. That was my only point.
They have an even more vanishingly small contribution, total poundage, to the food supply.
I don't mean to be a scrooge - go hunting if it pleases you! But its not gonna feed America, not even a percent or two of us. The numbers don't support it.
Personal experience from someone who enjoys hunting and eating game:
The bigger issue is getting one's family on board. A spouse or kids who have grown accustomed to CAFO beef and chicken and not much else will be difficult to transition to gamier meats, to say nothing of offal.
That's certainly an issue. We solved that, by taking the boys to a local Methodists' Mens' Wild Game Feed (rural church event). The good ol boys brought out everything from the freezer for the season, had a potluck, a fundraiser for the church. We feasted on every kind of fish, pheasant, boar, wild mushrooms, every part of deer imaginable. All grilled or stewed in a machine shed and enjoyed in the attached shop space with big tables set out and everybody seated together.
To this day my boys rave about the pepper deer tenderloin, roasted and sliced thin. Best meal of their lives. And they're all about 30 now.
This is where the meat grinder swoops in to save the day. Venison doesn't always make the best steak but there's very few meats that don't make a good burger or taco.
Meat is generally 1/4lbs - 1/3lbs serving per person, per meal. Venison is very comparable to chicken breast nutritionally. So lower in fat and lower calorie than beef.
You must be refering to those tiny deer back east. Here in the west we have mule deer, which dress out to over a hundred pounds. You're looking at over 70 pounds of meat. If your family of four eats two and a half pounds of meat a day, every day, they may not be actual humans. An elk will net around 250 pounds of boneless meat.
The article is more about legal hunting. Not uncommon for 'guides' to provide a full service experience, including the gun in your hand, the clothing on your back, coffee thermos at your side, and all the cleaning/butchering while you have a beer. Not an economical way to fill your freezer, but it is a bonus if you were looking to 'try' hunting. Hunting elk like that is closer to you going deep sea fishing on a charter.
I would have expected an article more along the (legal) varmint hunting for wild hogs down in the south or straight up increases in poaching. I know some farmer have discovered cows .. dead and missing only a few choice bits.
I can relate to this, to an extent. I never hunted in my youth, despite having grown up in redneckville. I was all about bass fishing in farm ponds, not hunting. I was enthusiastic about shooting though, and I'm a lifelong gun owner and have done a fair amount of sport shooting. So at least I already know how to use a gun and do so safely.
Anyway, even before this COVID thing started, I had gotten into the whole prepper mentality a bit and had started thinking "I should learn to hunt in case I need to bring home some food one day." I went and took the NC Hunter Safety Class back in January, just so I could get my hunting license. I had planned to team up with some family and friends who hunt this coming fall, to learn the ropes. Now I find myself wondering if I'll be forced to try and find a way to accelerate the learning curve.
At least I do know how to fish. I wouldn't necessarily want to be forced to support myself entirely on fishing, but I could make up at some some portion of my diet on fish if push came to shove.
I've had similar thoughts, the reality for me is that, should it come to needing to fish/hunt for food, old methods aren't going to work. People are going to fence in/trap big game, they are going to net/troll/spike water even in ponds. If the rules of subsistence change enough that hunting becomes required, accessing land in camo and a 4x4 will be outdated. My 2 cents.
It's strange that meat processing facilities in the US have been hard-hit by Covid-19.
These are places that have strict hygine standards during normal times, with employees wearing gloves and face masks as a matter of course. So you'd think they wouldn't be somewhere that diseases would spread easily.
This has also not been a significant issue in other countries hit by Covid-19, that I'm aware of. What is it about the USA's meat processors that have made them vunerable?
> This has also not been a significant issue in other countries hit by Covid-19, that I'm aware of. What is it about the USA's meat processors that have made them vunerable?
We still underestimate how amazingly contagious this disease is.
You would certainly expect that these places should have strict hygiene standards, but investigative journalists have found time and time again that slaughterhouses in the USA are filthy places where human and animal disease alike are concentrated by the time pressure to go faster, to make meat cheaper and cheaper.
It's not necessarily being spread within the plants themselves - I've seen claims that due to poor pay etc, a lot of the work is done by immigrants crammed multiple people to a room in shared housing, and we know from Singapore that's a really effective way of creating a major coronavirus outbreak.
This pandemic is really bringing out the folly of concentration at the expense of all other business considerations. Sure, it makes food cheaper but at what cost? We deserve systems that are more resistant to shocks. We've allowed oligopolies to form in many industries, perhaps especially agribusiness. This has brought prices to rock bottom and commoditized living beings, putting pressure to further reduce prices. "Ag-gag" laws and the might of huge consolidated meatpacking firms makes it difficult to do investigative journalism.
Maybe it's time for people to try going meatless instead? People are so disconnected from their meat supply and the horrific conditions (https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/25/meat-work...) imposed on the people who provide that meat to them. If we had a different political climate, we could think about sensible reform in meat.
Finally - if you, like me, grew up eating meat and never considered what a meatless diet would look like, now's a perfect time to try while you're stuck at home learning new things. There's a large community of former meat-eaters that would be happy to help you start.
> This pandemic is really bringing out the folly of concentration at the expense of all other business considerations.
I think that's just the hackers's infatuation with decentralization speaking here.
Using decentralization to prepare for a disaster that happens once every 100 years costs so much, you'll be uncompetitive 99% of the time, which means you'll likely be out of business by the time disaster strikes.
Furthermore, when it does strike, you'll probably have prepared in the wrong way because you didn't foresee everything, like the disaster affecting every decentralized place at once, as it would in a global pandemic.
Keep in mind that the meat supply hasn't been severely impacted yet, might never be, but even if it was, there would still be a grain supply that hasn't been impacted at all.
Lastly, the average American has enough fat on their body to sustain them for at least a month of eating nothing at all.
But meat is sooo good, and there's nothing else even close, that I'm willing to pay more for it. I'd rather see the supply chain issues worked on, even if it just means more expensive meat. Going meatless is like cutting of the nose to spite the face.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadLots of people from NYC suburbs and Long Island head up into the nearest forest every hunting season and accidentally shoot each other, maim animals and don't have the stamina to chase them to complete the kill, etc.
If you're concerned about food shortages, it would be much easier to raise a few backyard chickens or rabbits if you have the small amount of space required for it. Much less likelihood of a gun accident that way too.
If you're set on going out in the woods for a "mental cleanse" and to kill an animal, you could do worse than starting with a read of Jackson Landers' excellent Beginners Guide to Hunting Deer for Food (https://www.amazon.com/Beginners-Guide-Hunting-Deer-Storey/d...).
My family has hunted for generations and I have hunted for nearly a decade now. You are right, there is an elevated risk of accidents. But the experience of hunting is nothing like raising chickens. Staying out in the woods for days, becoming more and more tuned to the animals and environment around you. Feeling the adrenaline when you hear a huge animal tromping through the woods, just to look over and see a couple squirrels playing. There's nothing like it.
If this pandemic draws more people out to try hunting, and in so doing, they have similar experiences to those I've had, then I'm fine with it.
I know, I know, that seems like an oxymoron, like jumbo-shrimp or old-news. But in the US at least, a lot of national parks are funded via hunting permits [0]. The same is true in many parts of Africa. Those photos you see of some rich person with an elephant or a 5 point buck? The permit to kill that animal cost a lot of money and the parks are very grateful to have the cash [0].
NPR had a good story on how conservation in part depends on hunters: https://www.npr.org/2018/03/20/593001800/decline-in-hunters-...
Yes, the issue of hunters/poachers is a very complicated one. But what the sportsmen take, generally, is less than what they give back.
[0] The funding of parks is very complex, but permits do play a large part, generally. Each park is unique though.
It seems that hunting is a skill best passed down directly from seasoned hunter to new hunter.
They taught gun safety, field dressing, and the different type of animals that could be hunted. They taught what clothes you can wear and when, and they taught different strategies to extricate animals if they were too large for you to carry or drag.
More practically my apartment dwelling nature was more of an issue; the idea of storing a gun in my apartment isn’t something I find particularly thrilling. If I could afford a house with a safe, that might’ve been a different story.
Oh, and I’ve lived in 3 states in the past 6 years. That also would’ve been a problem.
Every year I can walk through my neighborhood and see deer hanging in the garages. A deer is much smaller than an elk, you can dress it and then take it to a processor or cut it up on your own.
Had this pandemic happened during hunting season, states would have probably banned hunting anyway.
I'm not a hunter, but I think that most places in the midwest limit deer hunting to a bow season and a shotgun season, so at least you don't have the danger of people firing rifles all over the place.
Millions of Americans hunt for deer and elk without a lot of the gear you list.
Hunting isn't some sacred thing that can only be accessed through special means, even though plenty of hunters frame it as such. You can pass a hunter's safety course in less than a week, while learning the basics as you go.
However, I agree with the idea that using legal hunting as a means to survive during a national food shortage is grandiose.
The maximum effective range of a bow is 40 yards (above that, and the deer jumps away before the arrow gets there). Shotguns are a little bit higher, but even so, I have never heard of a bowhunter shooting another bowhunter in the area -- one time a novice bowhunter illegally hunting in a park shot a dog, but that's about it.
When you shoot a deer, you do not chase it. You wait for it to expire and then look for it. This is taught in the bowhunting safety course.
The real difficulty is that even in areas where they are overpopulated, there are at most one group of deer per 60 acres, and a bowhunter can barely cover 1/4th acre. Deer do not like to move around, don't follow the same routes every day, and are quite cautious and sensitive to odors and noise. They also spend most of their day in areas such as thickets where a bowhunter cannot get close to them without scaring them off.
So unless the deer happens to walk by the hunter, not smell him, not get startled by his movements drawing a bow, and is facing the proper direction to offer a shot, the hunter will go home empty handed.
Unfortunately, I missed the small window to get a hunting license in my state this year, it closed in Feb, before CV-19 was much of a thing. Fortunately, no license is needed here to hunt rabbits. From what I hear, the same is true for feral hogs, which are becoming a bit of a problem in some parts. Next year, I am definitely putting in for an elk tag. I got a 4x4 largely so I can get into the areas where they hide.
I can see there are more cases in humans during warmer months, but that is probably due to insects that are the most common disease vector, no?
This is as close to the proverbial foot gun you can get.
I found it funny that the article stops just short of implying that hunting is driving gun sales when despite the obvious 800lb gorilla (Covid driving the sales of any/all emergency preparedness products).
I didn't even know gun rentals outside a range (pay money to shoot stuff you can't afford to own) or B2B (e.g. security or armored car company leases handguns from a gun shop) context were a thing but it makes sense in states where the only thing you'd need a full sized rifle cartridge for is assigned tags via a lottery so every season you have plenty of hunters who suddenly have a tag that they might not be equipped to fill.
This is sort of why civilization is based on agriculture. Not hunting-and-gathering.
Depends on the size but you can get 40-60lbs of venison from a whitetail deer.
There is no reason however, to think that hunting can't supplement a family's food stocks if other sources start to become thin. And there's a lot more to hunt than deer.
There's also more in play than hunting. A family might feed themselves through a combination of any or all of: hunting, trapping, fishing, foraging for wild edibles, home gardening, AND buying from whatever is available on the market.
One interesting thing about this is that those living close to the coasts may be in better shape in one or two regards. Most notably, seafood is one area where "direct to the consumer" sales is a real thing, and there isn't a lot of processing involved. At least where I grew up on the NC coast. It's common for seafood houses to sell oysters, clams, shrimp, etc. directly to consumers.
Early Americans spent the whole summer struggling/working like slaves to put up enough food for the 3 months of winter.
Seafood - that sounds like continuing to rely upon the food supply line (fishing boats and their supply chain). That used to be pretty good return. Not sure stocks today could feed a fraction of America for long. Most of us eat seafood a meal a week/month that way even in the best of times.
Again:
A family might feed themselves through a combination of any or all of: hunting, trapping, fishing, foraging for wild edibles, home gardening, AND buying from whatever is available on the market.
I'm saying that hunting, etc. are individuals components of a broader strategy for providing food - not that any one of those things is sufficient in and of itself. As as of today, it doesn't appear to me that the commercial market for food is going to just disappear overnight. But if things devolve to the point that you can't buy everything you need, then some of these other approaches can come into play.
Seafood - that sounds like continuing to rely upon the food supply line (fishing boats and their supply chain).
There isn't just one "food supply line." The supply chain for the steak you buy at Food Lion involves a lot of intermediate steps and processing. And those are exactly the steps where we've heard news reports of the processing plants closing down, etc.
My point about seafood is that there are fewer such intermediate steps involved. A boat comes in, docks, and sells their shrimp to the seafood house, and the seafood house sells to the public. The main processing is weighing. And some boat captains even bypass the "sell to the seafood house" part and sell direct.
Fewer steps in the seafood supply chain, doesn't offset the fact that in America anyway, it currently provides a whopping total of 1 meal a week per. That's gotta be dropping too. So still the numbers don't support any idea of supplementing food supplies to any great degree.
The OP was just a puff piece about an uptick in hunting. That was fun and interesting. I just posted to provide the insight that, this isn't going to ever matter to our situation in any significant way. We have to support/restart our commercial food chain, or its going to get very bad. No alternatives are reasonable.
You can't really make that claim without quantifying the degree of supplementation in question. And that's an unknown. So really this is all just speculation. But I can say that for myself, I'd rather have the ability/knowledge/skills to acquire food by hunting, trapping, foraging, fishing, etc. than not, all things being equal. If you want to take a defeatist attitude and not pursue those things, well... that just means you'll be one less person I'll be competing with for food eventually.
I just posted to provide the insight that, this isn't going to ever matter to our situation in any significant way. We have to support/restart our commercial food chain, or its going to get very bad.
I think we're ultimately talking about two different things here. Of course we have to restart the commercial food supply chain. That, to me, goes without saying. It's also somewhat irrelevant to that I'm talking about (which I think is different from what you're talking about). I'm talking about things to do in the interim for base survival... until the commercial food supply chain is working again. It sounds like you're assuming that we're talking about depending on hunting/foraging/fishing etc. as the default way of life for perpetuity. On that point, I agree with you... it's not reasonable to sustain a population of our current size for an indefinite period of time.
If it comes to it, good luck out there hunting with all the amateurs who are hungry, unskilled and outnumber trained hunters 100:1.
I highly recommend "How to Grow More Vegetables: Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine" by John Jeavons.
Every year, my garden produces an ever increasing portion of the food for my household and this year it has expanded to provide a significant amount of food for a small flock of chickens. Important things that aid my productivity and reduce the time it takes are a heavy mulch to minimize weeds, improve soil fertility and reduce water consumption as wel as drip irrigation on timers.
There are plenty of people using sustainable techniques to produce more food than they can eat if you look around on the internet.
No one would seriously recommend an all meat diet. It will kill you. Seriously - Go google protein poisoning. Unless you're eating incredibly fatty meat like seal, don't eat just meat.
The Carnivore Diet is a real thing that is gaining popularity, if choosing between two extremes with veganism on the other side, I would much prefer an all meat diet.
The carnivore diet fits pretty well into the "high fat" category.
I just went and checked, and the following seems to be a fairly consistent outline of the diet
---
Red meat (beef, pork, lamb), with an emphasis on fattier cuts of meat to take in enough calories.
Other options include:
Organ meats Eggs Lard Bone marrow Butter Salt and pepper
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Basically - A mix of protein and fat with fat constituting much of the calorie intake.
So yes, my comment should really read
>No one would seriously recommend an all LEAN meat diet. It will kill you.
but the poster was doing calorie calculations for pure lean venison. That's insanity.
Why is that your assumption?
My state of 3M had 100,000 deer harvested last year. That's deer for 3% of the population. One deer each. Not gonna put a dent in our food supply. That was my only point.
And what about rabbits, squirrels, turkeys, ducks, quail, bison, elk, feral hogs, etc., etc? There's more game out there than just deer.
I don't mean to be a scrooge - go hunting if it pleases you! But its not gonna feed America, not even a percent or two of us. The numbers don't support it.
Nobody is claiming that it will.
The bigger issue is getting one's family on board. A spouse or kids who have grown accustomed to CAFO beef and chicken and not much else will be difficult to transition to gamier meats, to say nothing of offal.
To this day my boys rave about the pepper deer tenderloin, roasted and sliced thin. Best meal of their lives. And they're all about 30 now.
I would have expected an article more along the (legal) varmint hunting for wild hogs down in the south or straight up increases in poaching. I know some farmer have discovered cows .. dead and missing only a few choice bits.
Anyway, even before this COVID thing started, I had gotten into the whole prepper mentality a bit and had started thinking "I should learn to hunt in case I need to bring home some food one day." I went and took the NC Hunter Safety Class back in January, just so I could get my hunting license. I had planned to team up with some family and friends who hunt this coming fall, to learn the ropes. Now I find myself wondering if I'll be forced to try and find a way to accelerate the learning curve.
At least I do know how to fish. I wouldn't necessarily want to be forced to support myself entirely on fishing, but I could make up at some some portion of my diet on fish if push came to shove.
So the solution is to go kill more wild animals. Awesome.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-28/closed-jb...
These are places that have strict hygine standards during normal times, with employees wearing gloves and face masks as a matter of course. So you'd think they wouldn't be somewhere that diseases would spread easily.
This has also not been a significant issue in other countries hit by Covid-19, that I'm aware of. What is it about the USA's meat processors that have made them vunerable?
We still underestimate how amazingly contagious this disease is.
Fast Food Nation (https://www.litcharts.com/lit/fast-food-nation/chapter-9-wha...) profiled this in the early aughts.
Countless other investigative journalists have tried, even against the "ag-gag" laws we have in farming states, to uncover even more in recent times:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/02/meat-plant-wor...
https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2010/05/14/probing_the_...
The consolidation of the meat industry has given them extraordinary lobbying power. They now have broad authority to regulate themselves:
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-administrations-new-hog-slaug...
Maybe it's time for people to try going meatless instead? People are so disconnected from their meat supply and the horrific conditions (https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/25/meat-work...) imposed on the people who provide that meat to them. If we had a different political climate, we could think about sensible reform in meat.
Meat should cost 3-5x as much as it currently does (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/21/the-true...) to allow for a safe and healthy habitat for the animals, and a living wage to the farmers and packers.
Finally - if you, like me, grew up eating meat and never considered what a meatless diet would look like, now's a perfect time to try while you're stuck at home learning new things. There's a large community of former meat-eaters that would be happy to help you start.
I think that's just the hackers's infatuation with decentralization speaking here.
Using decentralization to prepare for a disaster that happens once every 100 years costs so much, you'll be uncompetitive 99% of the time, which means you'll likely be out of business by the time disaster strikes.
Furthermore, when it does strike, you'll probably have prepared in the wrong way because you didn't foresee everything, like the disaster affecting every decentralized place at once, as it would in a global pandemic.
Keep in mind that the meat supply hasn't been severely impacted yet, might never be, but even if it was, there would still be a grain supply that hasn't been impacted at all.
Lastly, the average American has enough fat on their body to sustain them for at least a month of eating nothing at all.
We've gone back to the late '40s!