Abraham wrote:Seagulls: "they are meat eaters, and may have trichinella, a parasitic roundworm, as well of other poisons accumulating in the bird." (I saw this info tidbit doing a little internet looking.)
Plus, can you be certain they aren't garbage eating seagulls? They are to be avoided.
Too, they are a Federally protected species. Right, in a life of death situation whose going to care? Well, if the world righted itself relatively soon, lawbreakers just might be in trouble, ...or not, but I'd avoid eating seagulls anyway. They are beautiful creatures, but then to me, so are vultures and Id rather starve than eat one...
I get a kick out people imagining they can live off the land because they see rabbits and squirrels in their yard.
Even if you live waaaaaaaaay out in the country, with a wood full of game, everyone will be hunting and game will quickly play out.
To play the game: I'd want a suppressed .22 LR rifle.
Abraham is absolutely right about game playing out. Consider that the existing huntable wildlife populations are hunted by a relatively small portion of the country's population. Hunters are only a fraction of gun owners. Careful management is what keeps the wildlife populations healthy. In any complete social collapse, you can expect game populations to dwindle to next to nothing in the first months. Then what?
I read an interesting blog post the other day. I wish I could find it to post a link here. The individual who wrote it lives in NoCal in the SF Bay Area (I don't remember the exact town), and he admits that he's probably more politically liberal (as opposed to libertarian) than your average prepper. He's an avid hiker and outdoorsman, but not a hunter. He said he got interested in prepping a few years ago, and he eventually began accumulating a stockpile of about 90 days of stored food for himself and his family (wife, and a couple of young kids). As I was when
I lived in California, he was motivated more by earthquake preparedness — a very real thing, in California — than by some kind of total-grid-down thing like an EMP or socio/political collapse. You don't really need a 90 day food supply for earthquake survival. There have been several very large earthquakes in California in my lifetime, while I was still living there, with extensive damage to infrastructure and casualties, including people killed. But the truth is that, even in a
monster earthquake, with massive devastation, you're not going to be without food and shelter for more than a few days. There's just too much support available in terms of the Red Cross, FEMA, whatever. And since the event is fairly localized, it doesn't take down the rest of the country......just the areas of the state that are actually hit by the shockwaves. I didn't even feel the
Loma Prieta earthquake that hit the Bay Area so hard in 1989. I was 350 miles away in SoCal.
But once this blogger got into prepping for the reason of earthquake preparedness, he realized that it would be prudent to extend his ability to feed his family for longer than a few days, and so 90 days of food is what he decided on. He said a bunch of other things - some of which I agree with, and some I do not - but he made some points I had never thought of..... For instance, did you know that the NY Stock Exchange continued to operate throughout the Civil War - arguably the single biggest catastrophe to ever hit this country.......and they didn't have electricity either? I had never considered that. In
some places, people actually prospered because of the war. Yes there was massive devastation - particularly after Sherman's march to the sea. But Sherman excluded, and except for certain cities that were invested by attacking armies (Vicksburg comes to mind), starvation was probably a bigger problem for the actual combatants due to logistical problems than it was for their families back home - regardless of whether one was a Confederate or a Yankee. The more common hardship than starvation for many of those families so affected was to have their men of working age sent off to war while their farms and small businesses still needed to be worked.
In the end, this blogger organized his 90 day food and water supply, and he bought ONE firearm - a double barreled "coach gun" type shotgun. He had decided a long time before that he was not a hunter, AND he made the same point about game animal populations being hunted down fairly quickly. He bought the shotgun to defend his family and their food stores. He decided he would bug in, and try to ride out whatever happened.......and that is where I disagree with him, because that was his END game.
That's not MY end game. For any city dweller, bugging in should be a temporary situation until the emergency is either over, or you have developed a plan and a place to bug out to. MY endgame is to bug in until I have a place to bug out to, and then take everything but the kitchen sink with me when I leave. That includes about 15 or 20 different firearms and thousands of rounds of ammo.....not to mention food stores, medical supplies, etc. Additionally, my plan is to eventually have most of my prepping stuff pre-positioned after I'm able to guy some land, where I can
grow my own food. Because that's what hunters are going to be reduced to as the game disappears - growing their own food or starving. If you're a hunter, and you live in the city, and you don't have a retreat of your own land to bug out to, then basically the only difference between you and the other hordes of people fleeing the cities as food runs out will be that your loadout will be heavier than everyone else's, with your guns and ammo, and you'll move more slowing and be less agile.....and more vulnerable (you have to sleep
sometime).
THEN what kind of person are you going to become? The kind who steals from others? Who will kill to take what he needs? The kind who gets shot at (and maybe killed) by people who are just trying to protect what they had the foresight to put together for
their families before everything went to crap?
That's why I won't buy into the "one gun" scenario. I will use ALL of my guns, if necessary, to fight a gov't that says I can only have one (or none). So that's a non issue for me. I have been blessed, and I am not in the position of having to decide for financial reasons that I can have only one gun, and then try to choose what it would be. And if I
were in that situation, I would make it a very high priority to get to where I could afford more as soon as possible. Whenever you play the "one gun" game, you're agreeing to submit yourself to the
"Kobayashi Maru" scenario, because NO gun is perfect in all roles. Sooner or later, you'll run into the one situation in which your choice of gun is the
worst possible choice. Then what?
I'll tell you what. Just like James Tiberius Kirk, you cheat the game, and you refuse to have just one gun.
