Letter Re: How To Obtain Protein From Alternative Sources Without A Firearm

Just a note about small animals: Don’t count on them for the bulk of your diet.

Take for example crayfish: The calories for your effort may be very small. There are approximately 3.5 calories in a crayfish tail. (There’s more if you eat the head but not much more.) I’ve seen traps bring in around 50 crayfish on a good day. Therefore, for enough crayfish for a 350 calorie snack, you’ll need at least two traps, and that’s on a good day. Double that for average days.

If you want 1/4th of your calories of a family of four to be crawfish on a 3,000 calorie diet (I consider 3,000 a minimum, given the extra calories being expended during TEOTWAWKI), you need to catch 857 crayfish per day, using about 34 traps! When you also consider that you’ll also expend calories trapping and shelling almost 900 crawfish, it gets exhausting quick.

Also, pray your traps aren’t robbed.

Crawfish make a good food that can balance out the routine of your food rations. They also have a nice quantity of vitamins and minerals. Don’t count on them so much for your daily bread, but they do play a good role in your diet.

This just highlights the need to raise animals at home in addition to what you hunt in the wild.

C.D.V.