Food Gathering II

While trapping is not a politically correct thing to do nowadays, it is one of the best ways to procure meat in a survival situation. While hunting may produce larger animals, it is noisy to use a gun and time consuming with either a gun or bow. While you may bring down a deer or other large animal with a gun, can you really use that much meat all at once? In a survival situation, you may not have the ability to preserve and store a large animal. Catching a rabbit, muskrat, beaver, possum or coon may be a much better option. With traps, you can put out several and only take the time to check them a couple of times a day. These traps are on the job 24 hrs a day seven days a week. By checking them morning and evening, you can probably keep a goodly supply of meat on hand. One thing about trapping is that you need to know animal habits. This is a good hobby now while you are not in a survival situation. You do not need to do any actual trapping, in fact much of it may be illegal. Just get out in the woods and study all of the small animals and birds in the area where you intend to ride out a survival situation. That is right, I said birds too. While fur trappers try not to catch non-target animals, survivalists need to catch anything that will fill the pot. Once you have done your homework on animal behavior, you will need to decide what type of trapping you want to do. There are foothold traps, connibear body hold traps, snares and live traps. Live traps are great for experimenting with your knowledge of trapping. While living in a suburb of Chicago, I had a couple of box traps which I used to trap pests for the neighbors. Coon, possum and squirrel and even one skunk got taken to the forest preserve and released. Live traps are a little bulky for a survival situation. My own survival trapping gear consists of a half dozen foothold traps and a spool of snare wire. If you have no traps there is always the possibility of building a deadfall trap or a pit trap, or even a spring trap using a tree. These are methods you may want to study and know how to build them. However, I feel it is better not to rely on them and to have traps on hand as they are much more time consuming and not as reliable. All in all, trapping is a great way to procure food and the study of animals and their habits is a great hobby now when there is no survival situation. Even if a survival situation never occurs, you will have had the enjoyment of being out in the woods and learning about nature.