Don’t worry about the urbanite being crushed by this virus, my ruralite friends. We can just hunt all the deer and turkey we want, while they fight over the last few Soylent lattes. Don’t worry about the other 46 million ruralites with the same mindset as you, there are plenty of deer to go around, right?
Since ancient times, kings and conquerors have partitioned off large swaths of land for their own personal use. Why would the king and his entourage need tracts for personal use when there’s so much game and land to go around? Because it’s not true. Man is one of the most populous creatures on Earth, with billions of us spread into every crack and crevice of its surface (probably more under the surface, but we’ll talk about the cursed mole people later).
Deer populations in the US of A are estimated to be somewhere around 30 million, with the capacity to double every two years, if left alone. With an estimated 331 million people in the U.S., we could easily overwhelm that population. With 46 million gun-toting ruralites owning the vast majority of deer containing property, as well as, 10 million wild-eyed hunters amongst their ranks, and spatterings from the other castes, you can quickly see how the numbers do not favor the backwoods supermarket idea many of us have joked about.
Kangz of the past were the first conservationists, in that they preserved huge populations for personal use and left the peasants to farm and eat their measly grains. Kings often shared their meat reserves with the aristocracy and warrior-class, which sustained larger physiques than the smaller peasants who couldn’t compete. Nutrient dense meat is and up until very recently has been preferred by the upper castes of our societies.
Unfortunately, our beta, pencil-neck scientists have been bullied by women into crafting abominations resembling meat to make sure no animals are killed, as not to hurt their fee fees. Real scientists should be working on interstellar drives or computers that don’t need to “restart” for updates every other day. Vegetarians, and vegans (spit) worst of all, have thrown their predatory ancestors into the meat grinder in order to get a good taste of the leaves their betters used as toilet paper. These veggie advocates have retroactively cucked themselves into the peasant mold without threats of death or torture, which is fine with me so long as they don’t eat my mullein before I am clean.
There simply isn’t enough meat to go around in a post-industrial society, assuming we (hopefully) regress back to such a stage. Much of the world today still consumes insignificant amounts of animal protein in comparison to their forebears. The average American eats around 220 lbs of meat per year – from fish, red meat, poultry, and game combined. A single deer can be harvested with an average weight of 120 lbs, but a realistic meat harvest from said deer will only amount to around 58 lbs. If each hunter was able to kill a single deer, they’d get a mere quarter of their yearly intake. At the same time, they’d deplete the deer population almost instantly.
Here we get to the meat of the issue. I like my family, my community, and my wildlife more than I like strangers. Vagrant urbanites, displaced from nearby cities or towns, will be seeking relief from our Malthusian system. In turn, they will seek shelter in the wilds, as the megacities will be exhausted of food, minus the rats and the flabby Soylent bodies of their pod mates. When times get hard, your circle of trust will most likely shrink more and more as people crunch the numbers themselves. Scarcity is mankind’s oldest and most powerful enemy, held back by the fragile globalized economic system that allows you to get Brazilian nuts shipped many thousands of miles to sit uneaten on your Italian marble kitchen counter. With millions of people suddenly displaced by hunger, tough choices will have to be made. While we’d all like to think we could be soft, kindly egalitarians and share all our deer, fish, and crops if the system failed, scarcity has a way of establishing brutal hierarchies.
People forget that borders matter when travel is easy and resources are plentiful, but this can change quickly. Establishing territorial boundaries to keep you and your family safe is going to be the difference between salvation and starvation and that doesn’t mean you’ll definitely be the one making the decisions. Robber barons have historically established territorial boundaries in which they can bully their own subjects, but at the same time protect them from outside threats. In exchange for his protection, you just might have to give up some meat.
Soyboys, you have been warned.
We are witnessing, not the natural end of a great human civilization, but the birth of an inhuman civilization that could never have come into being without a vast, an immense, a universal sterilization of life’s highest values
Pete, er,… Nero Augustus, I mean: The (im)personal rancor reflected in that remark I don’t intend to dignify with comment. But I would like to address your general attitude of hopeless negativism.
Consider the lilies of the godd*mn field. Or, take “Ivar” here as your paradigm of hope. …
https://youtu.be/0CZCVE5Sd2U
We’d like to think we will be egalitarian and share our stockpiles during times of scarcity?
LOL. Speak for yourself.
My thoughtfully curated Armageddon bunker is for my kids alone. I’ll eat and drink just enough to stay alive to help them stay alive. No one else gets a grain of rice. Mssrs Remington, Smith, Wesson, Beretta, Ruger, Browning and Glock agree.
I damn sure don’t need anymore venison. But I wonder how tender the backstrap off a soy-fattened SJW might be.
Just because someone lives in the country doesn’t ensure they possess the basic skills of hunting and harvesting game. We are in a hunting-heavy area and I would bet that at least half of my neighbors couldn’t shoot a deer if they had to and wouldn’t know what to do with it if they did. Add in rabbits and wild turkey, ducks and pheasants and we have quite a bit of wild game. Then you have farms full of beef on the hoof, chicken barns with tens of thousands of birds each, hog farms, farm ponds stocked with fish….heck, even horses if need be. We will be OK.
Now if the distant denizens of suburbia and the “diverse” areas come looking for food and shelter? Well let’s just say they won’t find anything they want in my home or that of my neighbors.
I have a younger brother who harvests (I was told years ago that “killing” and “slaughtering” and these sorts of terms were/are unacceptable in the modern world, and that I’d best better get with the program and start to use the correct terminology, so here ya go, Larry), year-in and year-out, way more than his family’s share of … basically every species of wild game Oklahoma has on offer imaginable. He always gives our family part of his excess. In exchange for those favors, I’m likewise always at his beckon call whenever he needs something that falls within my area of expertise/outside his. It’s a kind of “barter” system between us, if that is what you want to call it. But it’s just treating others the way you want to be treated, and returning the favor best you know how, so to speak.
I don’t especially care for trot lining or jug lining for catfish, for example, and I certainly have no interest in “noodling” for catfish, so doing so isn’t especially within my range of expertise, although I can certainly do all of it and then some, and do it well enough if I have to.
Hunting and killing (I mean of course “harvesting”) white-tail deer used to be one of my favorite pastimes, but I have slowly lost interest as I’ve gotten older. I still like to (rod and reel) fish, though, and almost always catch more than my fair share in a typical outing. My boys are young and love to hunt and fish. I ‘get it,’ so I accommodate them as much as I can. So there ya go. BTW, I’m a ‘scaly, flaky meat, sort of a fisherman,’ but I’ll eat catfish … if I must.
We don’t have any chickens (we have lots of goats, though,… errgh!), but know several people intimately who do, and who supply us with fresh eggs whenever we ask for them or when they are otherwise inundated with them and don’t want to see them go to waste. I could eat eggs (cooked in a variety of ways) for almost every meal. And that a lot of people around me haven’t as yet discovered that fresh eggs beat store bought eggs all to hell and back, is our gain and their loss, if you know what I mean. The learning curve on this is bound to straighten out a bit with this “Corona virus” scare, so, crap! Ha, ha.
There are an abundance of wild hogs on all sides surrounding me. But I’m kind of weird about killing (I mean, “harvesting”) and eating wild hogs. Again, I’m not especially prone to hunt them or kill (I mean “harvest”) wild hogs, but I can certainly do so if needs be.
I jokingly refer to my wife, Annette, at times as “Polk Salad Annie.” She ain’t too good to “harvest” and cook up a good mess of Polk Salad (nor a good mess of wild mushrooms, for that matter) now and again, and there ain’t a one of us in our little brood too good to eat it when she does. Add a little side of scrambled eggs (the fresh kind: See above) and, “Oh, Mama!”; if there was ever “heaven on earth,” that would be it. She also inherited the proverbial “green thumb” of her mother, and always (year-in, year-out) produces a pretty respectable (very respectable by most standards, but as long as we’re being humble and all that) garden. I could probably live on her garden tomatoes and sweet corn for a year if I needed to. That is to say if I didn’t like the okra and several varieties of squash (not to mention the “young potatoes” and whatnot) just as much.
I could go on and on, but I won’t. You get the picture, I hope. When I “consider the lilies of the field,” who of course ‘toil not,’ neither do they ‘spin,’ I figure ‘the Lord helps them that help themselves’ no matter what. I was fortunate enough to have been raised in rural America and taught most all of this growing up. That is true of virtually everyone who lives near and around me. I do have a kind of a soft spot for those who weren’t so fortunate as I, as I’ve pointed out many many times before. I’ll help them if I can in dire circumstances, but the bottom line is that my family comes first and foremost, and that is just the way it is. If you don’t believe it, dependent man, try me/us.
I’m a generation older than you and can remember chatting with the old timers talking about how they got through the great depression as young adults with families. Even in an extremely rural area, the elk were all killed off fairly quickly, then even the deer. However, the smaller critters were always easily available for those who knew how and wanted to prepare them- things like raccoon, opossum, squirrel, etc… The .22 turned out to be a more important hunting rifle than something larger. On a separate note, in some of my travels to less developed nations folks tend to rely on eggs for protein as meat is often too expensive for the average folk.