Someday, you may find yourself stranded in the middle of nowhere with nothing to eat. What would you do? You don’t just hug yourself and bawl your eyes out. Think about the people you’ll be leaving behind if you just give up. Imagine the pain you would cause them. Get yourself together and do everything you can to survive. One way for you to survive such a predicament is to know how to hunt and forage for food.
Maybe you just need to be reminded that our early ancestors didn’t have the luxury of fancy restaurants, fast food joints, grocery stores, and online deliveries. What they did back then was hunt and forage for food. Later on, people learned to grow and raise their own food.
Hunting
If you can’t let a day pass by without eating meat, you’ll probably be in for the shock of your life. You have a lot of getting used to when you’re all alone in the wild with the nearest Mickey D’s perhaps a hundred miles away.
Your best bet to have some meat in your “Into-the-Wild” diet is if you hunt or catch game. This is tricky if you don’t have anything you can use for hunting. You’re lucky if you have a gun on you but even if you had one, you should only use it to hunt big game such as wild boars and deer. Still, you should consider conserving your ammo in case the island you’re trapped in is home to cannibals.
If you have a knife, you can fashion spears or longbows and arrows out of tree branches, which you can then use to hunt animals. You can also attach your knife to the end of a branch to make a spear. You shouldn’t throw this one at an animal or cannibal as you risk losing your knife.
Fishing
Some people consider fishing as a sport or hobby. For some, it’s the reason they’re alive. For the person who will be lost in the forest, you better hope you stumble on a body of water. Not only will you be able to find food in the form of fish and other water creatures and plants, but you’ll also have something to drink. Of course, you need to turn any water you find into its potable version for it to be safe for drinking.
When it comes to fishing, there are a number of ways you can catch your food. One is by using a spear and standing in the river without moving until you’re able to stab a fish. Another is to make a fish net out of paracord or other materials you have. If you have fishing gear with you, you’re lucky. Otherwise, you can fashion a fishing rod from a branch and paracord. You’ll also need a fish hook and bait. You may need to sacrifice some of those enticing earthworms you found and use them to catch a fish.
Survival Traps
You can basically eat anything that walks, crawls, swims, or flies. For smaller animals, you can make do by just catching them with traps. One of the most common ways to trap potential food sources is to simply place a stick under a large rock. Place bait under the rock and when the critter gets too close and topples the stick, it will likely get trapped under the rock.
Another way is to dig a hole huge enough to catch boars and plant stakes in it. Cover the opening so anything not looking where they’re walking will fall into the trap and become skewered by the stakes.
Insects
Remember Fear Factor, the reality show where contestants were made to eat insects and other weird stuff? The reason why the brains behind the show let people eat insects is that they are actually edible. They wouldn’t let you eat something that can harm you, would they?
If you’re trapped on an island or lost in a forest, one way you can survive is to eat anything edible that you can find. Surely, there’ll be tons of insects and bugs wherever you are. Normally, it’s safe to eat insects. However, there are some that you’re better off not touching at all. Stay away from spiders, millipedes, and bees. Hairy bugs are a no-no while anything with a crunchy exoskeleton like grasshoppers, ants, and crickets are edible. Other creepy crawlers that can fill your tummy include earthworms, slugs, snails, and termites. Yum.
You should know which creatures are venomous and which are not. Scorpions have venomous tails but you can still eat them as long as you take the tail off and roast the body well. Steer clear of bright-colored bugs, too. There’s a high chance these creatures, like the dart frog, are poisonous.
Foraging
Aside from munching on insects the easiest way to find food in the wild is to forage. The Earth is filled with things that are surprisingly edible. All you need to do is learn which ones can be eaten and which ones can leave you with an upset stomach or worse, dead.
Mushrooms, for example, are abundant in the forest. Some can keep you alive until you are rescued or you find help yourself. Others will leave you with a damaged liver, kidney failure, or brain damage. Do your research now and you won’t regret anything if ever the world ends and we’re forced to look for food in places we never thought we’d be looking.
Cook Your Food
When you hunt and forage for food, you should also consider which ones have to be cooked before consuming. Ideally, you should clean and cook everything you find just to make sure you kill the parasites and do not end up with a painful tummy later or worse dead.
You should know how to build a fire in natural ways if you don’t have matches, a lighter, or any other fire starter. Ne you got your fire going, simply skewer your prized find and let it roast over the fire. If you have a cook set and water, you can make soup out of the things you foraged.
Why Learn to Hunt and Forage for Food
The ability to hunt and forage for food is not a skill reserved for when you’re in an emergency situation. Some people who prefer living off the grid depend on these skills to survive every day. If you know how to hunt and forage for food, you’ll also have a better chance of surviving end-of-the-world scenarios such as the ones you see on TV and in films. Mind you, these shows may be fictional but the disastrous events are entirely possible. So if you want to still be eating after a devastating earthquake, a nuclear attack, a zombie apocalypse, or an alien invasion, then you better know how to hunt and forage for food. You may also want to learn more about how to clean and cook game. Kill It, Clean It, Cook It, Eat It – Wild Game Hunting And Cooking is a hunting guide that doesn’t need to be explained thoroughly since it’s all there in the title. Give it a try, though, as these skills are pretty useful.
The Gentleman Pirate offers tons of tips and other bits of information on how to survive getting lost in the wild and other tragic situations. Feel free to visit the site to know more. Who knows? You may someday have some use for what you read there.
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