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Hunting solely for food

Horn said:
Would anyone start team/buddy hunting, say drives? Seems like most of are solo hunters
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I would avoid drives if I were hunting in the same area repeatedly, if we we going full on nomad style I'd partake in drives, but if we talking homesteading/stationary living I would avoid excess pressure and stress on the wildlife around me
 
Not a big fan of deer drives. Running deer are hard to hit and alot of time end up getting hit in the gut. Would I hunt with someone else, sure...each one of us face a different direction I guess and split the haul.
 
Outside of an apackalips scenario nothing much would change for me. We have not ever had to buy meat out of necessity in my life time that I can remember. We buy a little chicken but if I ever find a free range flock to hunt, I will stop buying it too.

If the whole world goes to hell in a hand basket, we would relocate to our friends farm most likely. It is isolated and big enough to sustain all of us for a long time. 2 of the neighboring farms are friends and family. The other option would be go to deer camp at the river. In either location would need to identify potential threats to food and security and get them eliminated pretty quickly. Dont need anyone around that isnt going to work for the common good.
 
woodsdog2 said:
See now we all immediately go to firearms and crossbows thinking the weapon is more efficient. Are we also thinking about the impact? Crossbow I get but honestly, unless its a vertical crossbow like the mini, I find the "typical" crossbows unwieldly in the woods and on the stand but I haven't hunted with the new super narrow offerings from Raven et al, as they're illegal in my state. But my point is hunting impact to keep your perceived pressure down. Wouldn't selective harvest with quiet equipment equate to more long term success over the season?
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I’d say 10 years ago the average crossbow was about as deadly as the average compound. You needed to be about 50 yards max to kill one reliably, and it was heavy and hard to manuever. Nowadays you can reliably plunk a deer from 60,70 yards no problem with a high end crossbow
 
I might try to live trap some rabbits in my own front yard and hopefully end up with a couple breeding pairs which over time would yield more breeding pairs. I’m in the suburbs, but rabbits are everywhere here.

Makes sense to me, but I’ve never hunted or trapped (I’m just here for the climbing gear and techniques).
 
Red Beard said:
This may be a fun one... How would your hunting practices or strategy change if your harvests were the only source of meat for your family?
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I would focus on doe havens first and try to quickly fill the freezer to take the pressure off so I could then hunt worry free and how I want to hunt for the rest of the season. Rather eat does, than rank ass bucks any day. The downside to that strategy is that once you fill the freezer it’s kind of hard to convince the wife that you’re going to starve if you don’t go hunting every day Lol.
 
Red Beard said:
I love where this thread has gone!

Guess I was thinking more along the lines of what @Exhumis came back with though. Lets do it this way... if the sole source of your family's proteins came from what you were able to harvest during a lawful game season (big or small), how would your hunting tactics for said game change? Would you change your scent reduction strategies? Maybe would you make it a priority to take off on Tuesdays to hit the woods because you know less hunters will be out? Would you still hang in trees waiting for game to walk by or would you be more aggressive on the ground?

Also, please don't stop the apocalyptic talk because it's fun to see that element of thought process in this as well! :D
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I assumed you were waiting to see how long until the thread descended into cannibalism. What's the easiest protein source to find? PEOPLE. :tearsofjoy: :tearsofjoy: :tearsofjoy:
 
I already eat everything racoon and beaver I trap and they are far tastier than venison, so I'd just trap more often and regularly than I do now.
There's also Deer that walk through the yard that wouldn't survive the night......
 
Red Beard said:
This may be a fun one... How would your hunting practices or strategy change if your harvests were the only source of meat for your family?
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That's easy.

For the first 3-4 years we were married, that's all the wife and I ate meat-wise. Then we kinda moved up in the world and started enjoying ribeyes and chicken wings. Then this summer I had a crisis of conscience and decided I didn't need/want commercial animal produce. So I've got a fair amount of experience sustenance hunting and will be doing more of it going forward.

If you go by the USDA's recommendations for daily meat servings, about 6 deer a year will provide the 2 of us with that amount. That's not a hard bar to clear. I've cleared it annually for probably the past 6-7 seasons, and almost doubled it half of those years. Alabama has a decent deer population and a liberal bag limit. I hunt a lot, and am not picky about the deer I shoot. No real need for poaching or special tactics.

That many deer deboned and all fill the chest freezer and the fridge freezer pretty nicely, so canning it to save room is nice. If you're eating it regularly you want a lot of it cubed for stews and stir fry, and a lot of it ground for burgers, spaghetti sauce, tacos, casseroles, etc.

I can run limb lines for catfish pretty efficiently, and the bay holds crabs and mussels. Ducks and squirrels and other game are really more for fun than efficiency. But I would say most hunters on this forum, if they really wanted to, could go "vegan" with the exception of locally-obtained wild game. It's weird to me that so many hunters (myself included) don't do that.

The SHTF/Apocalypse stuff is so far outside the realm of possible/rational it's not worth discussing. Batman vs Darth Vader kinda mental excercise. You can look all over the world across millennia to see what happens when a post-agriculture society reverts back to hunter/gatherer ways out of desperation. Mass starvation and total depletion of species. Shoot, a measly little depression in the 1930s almost wiped out our deer herd and it didn't last a decade. Practically nobody starved to death, plenty of the land was arable, it was much more rural...we still almost wiped out several game animals practically overnight just because we were slightly hungry.

I'm a well above average killer and I'd fully expect to starve if the supply chain broke down. I'd be desperately trying to build a community and reestablish trade with other nearby populations vs trying to lone survivor it on the compound. That's how people survive. Self reliance is a myth. Even ye olde rugged mountain man relied on commodities and artifacts that were the end result of a global supply chain held together by the largest and most technologically advanced navy known to man at the time.
 
Since nutter brought up ground meats, what would you guys cut that with, assuming lots of people add pork or beef to thier ground venison. No pigs to hunt here.
 
Horn said:
Since nutter brought up ground meats, what would you guys cut that with, assuming lots of people add pork or beef to thier ground venison. No pigs to hunt here.
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I don't think you'd be adding anything to it. Fat is hard to come by in wild game. I think your best bet would be to harvest animals in early winter that were loading up on calories and try to keep the caul/kidney/internal fat.

Native American populations are more likely to have heart disease and other diseases related to too much fat. Lots of theories on why, but a prevailing one is that genetically they're predisposed to be "thrifty" with any fat they come across since until practically yesterday from a genetic timeframe it was pretty scarce for most of them.
 
DB4x4 said:
I assumed you were waiting to see how long until the thread descended into cannibalism. What's the easiest protein source to find? PEOPLE. :tearsofjoy: :tearsofjoy: :tearsofjoy:
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It was said that the scariest thing you could see on the street in southern Russia during the famine of the 1920's was a well fed man.
 
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