guest article

GUEST ARTICLE
PROTEIN FORAGING

The primary focus of much of today’s preparedness movement is on the acquisition of items, gear to enable one to survive in the coming dark times. Little time is spent, it appears, on the acquisition of skills to supplement the stockpile of supplies we are all putting away. Having spent the past twenty years as a professional educator/administrator in “fly in” Canadian aboriginal communities including seven “winters” spent north of 60, I have learned from the locals the value of supplementing store bought goods with foraged protein. I do not intend to give instructions on how to actually make sets or set snares as the techniques vary greatly from one area to the next, however, I hope I can convenience you of the value of foraging.

Food supplies, in the communities I have been part of, are available through local co op stores or Northern Stores (the direct descendant of the old Hudson Bay Company). These food stocks, canned good, fresh produce, meats and clothing are brought into these communities either on a winter road/summer barge shipment or weekly on freighter aircraft. Fourteen years ago, in our Inuit community, a bag of milk cost $14.00. The costs today have skyrocketed since then with the increasing costs of petroleum products. When the upcoming dark times arrive the scarcity of fresh food products will drive their costs beyond most people’s ability to purchase. This is when the ability to forage for protein will prove invaluable for family survival.

When I lived in the Canadian Arctic my wife and I maintained a two month reserve of food and paper supplies, in the event the planes stopped flying. We used and rotated these freeze dried fruits and vegetables whenever the locally available produce arrived rotten or simply didn’t arrive. A daily diet of beans and/or lentils made into a soup or stew with freeze dried vegetables is a very bland diet without some form of meat protein to add for flavour. In many of these communities, families ran snare lines for rabbits, gill nets for fish and hunted for fowl and venison. A modern 12 gauge shotgun with a second rifled barrel can harvest both birds up to maybe 40 meters and venison up to a good 150 meters. A hunting shotgun is a lot less threatening to the government than a modern assault rifle and as a result you become less of a threat to them as well. Bows and arrows are effective meat getters and can be used in the “burbs” effectively and silently and, for the most part, do not set off government warning lights. Inuit hunters effectively use 30-30’s against polar bears simply because that’s what they have available. Learn to reload your ammunition and cast bullets as a means of expanding your existing ammunition supply.

Contact your local or state trapping association and ask a trapper to show you how to effectively set snares and Conibears in your area. Learn to use a gill net. In the dark times, do what is necessary to survive regardless of fish and game laws in your state. In the First Depression, many game wardens looked the other way if a man poached a deer or used a gill net to feed his family. Learn how to cold smoke your surplus fish and venison or how to make sausages as an effective means of preserving your surplus meat protein. Foraging for meat protein requires many learned skills and the time to learn those skills is not in the middle of a crisis.

Google the following as a short list of suppliers and information sources I have come to rely upon: Fur Fish and Game Magazine; Backwoodsman Magazine; Bemidji Woolen Mills; Duluth Pack and Buckshot’s Camp. Remember skills, attitudes and global mind sets weigh very little to carry about with you and will count as much towards your long term success as your stockpiles will when the dark times come to you and your family.

With respect
MUKWAH