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24 Comments

    1. The Chinese, I have heard, have a saying. “If its back faces the sky, it is edible.”

      Dogs made a contract with humans thousands of years ago: “You feed me and I will provide companionship, security, and (to some extent) protection.” The majority of dog breeds cannot fend for themselves if humans do not provide daily sustenance. Dogs who have been bred with extreme features, e.g., “smushed” faces, overly large dogs, and overly small dogs, would likely be doomed without human help.

      In Fortschen’s novel, “One Second After,” town residents become desperate within weeks of an EMP attack. Pets become a luxury that few people can afford, given that people are themselves starving. They turn their dogs over to the town’s administration in order to avoid the need to slaughter them themselves, and in order to avoid eating their own pets. They are then provided with meat from other people’s pets.

      I have read that, without meat from the dogs obtained by trading with Indian tribes, those in the Lewis & Clark Expedition would have starved. Lewis refused to eat dog meat. Clark and the others were said to have preferred it to venison. Dog meat is a common entre in Korean and Chinese restaurants.

      I watched a fairly well-done Danish movie on Netflix in the past year. I do not remember much about it, but I seem to remember that some disease turned people into rabid creatures. One family is running out of food, but is shown enjoying “beef stew” one night. The son asks if anyone has seen the family dog. The others deny having seen it, and one of them suggests that he has run away. Knowing looks are exchanged.

      Cats would not likely be a burden after a societal collapse. A cat turned loose in the neighborhood would fend for itself by killing rodents and birds. In the History Channel series, “Life After People,” cats are shown doing just fine without human help. In large urban areas today, feral cats thrive. Of course, while they are wandering around neighborhoods, they would be subject to being killed as a useful protein source. 10 million coyotes can’t be wrong.

      I agree that having to eat cats or dogs would be “sad,” but, having starving family members would be sadder. In an extreme survival situation, regardless of how we might view matters now, I expect that most of us would ultimately do what we needed to do.

  2. Rice is a good storage for pets like cats & dogs too. It is a good extender with fish for cats, or dogs can do quite well on rice, meat, and cooked vegetables like green beans or carrots.
    Rice is very versatile for people. Can be an accompanying dish for meat or fish, a dessert such a rice pudding, or a main dish type casserole. Rice is fairly cheap to purchase in 10-20 pound bags that can be repackaged into LTS.

  3. Please note: The quick links in the article were added by the editor with no input from me. This is perfectly fine and I am glad he did so for examples of certain products. Just know that I am NOT promoting the examples he included (which are likely fine but I have never tried them).

  4. So many people do not know how to cook food anymore. They just heat up already prepared items and call it cooking. It is Not hard to cook your own food and it usually tastes much better than the store bought commercially made already prepared food. So go to the library or on line and learn basic cooking skills-now! It will make your life much easier later and you’ll enjoy healthier and better tasting food now as well as saving you money that can be shifted to other preparedness items.

  5. [Home] canning butter, though recommended by loads of preppers online, is not advised by food preservation specialists (https://nchfp.uga.edu/questions/FAQ_canning.html#33). Unaware of this advice, and just going by what was posted online, I canned dozens of pints about ten years ago. Some jars were good after a few months, or even a year, but many started to smell bad. It’s not worth the risk of botulism or other food poisoning.

    A very acceptable substitute to butter is coconut oil. It can be had for about the same price as butter and already comes packaged (better to buy in glass instead of plastic for long-term storage) so you don’t waste a canning jar. It works extremely well in baked goods like cakes, muffins, and chocolate chip cookies.

    Jennifer

    1. I concur that for butter, the risk of home canning outweighs the rewards. If anyone wants to store butter, then commercially-canned butter is a good option. Red Feather brand (sold by several SurvivalBlog advertisers including Ready Made Resources) has a great reputation. Other options include canned coconutmilk and canned ghee.

  6. I have to admit, I’ve eaten dog. While in Korea, with the U.S. Army, there was a dish in the village called, Omarice (phonetic spelling). It was like an omelet. It had rice,eggs meat and vegetables in an omelet like covering. I had eaten this dish almost every time I went to the village. I kept forgetting to get the recipe. On one of my last visits to the village, before rotation, I had a half of a plate before me and remembered to ask for the recipe. Me with my ‘broke Korean’ and the waitress with her ‘broken English’ were having a little trouble communicating. I had understood most of the ingredients but she was saying something like “one pound of peppers”…I didn’t understand saying, “I don’t see any ‘peppers’ what type of ‘peppers’? She said, ” No,No (with her hands stretched about two feet apart) no dog, puppy”.
    I stopped dead in my tracks and thought, puppy? Then I said to myself, “This is ridiculous, the dish was so good a minute ago that I had to have the recipe, but now that I know what is in it, it’s no good anymore?” I finished the plate on principle, but I never ordered it again. You know we are all conditioned by our societies, it just depends where you are standing on the planet as to what you think about a lot of things. How about a hamburger in India or pork chops in Israel?

  7. All choices of food for long term storage and/or SHTF are compromises. The issues are cost, weight/space, cook/prep time, nutritive value, storage time, palatability, familiarity, and more. The advantages of wheat, beans and rice are very hard to disagree with. And it is fairly simple to learn how to use these (and a few other) prepping staples. If you really want to understand the value of dried beans, for example, calculate out the amount of dried beans to make a can of beans and put them side by side. Now imagine yourself loading up a months supply and humping it through the woods for a month.

  8. I just did a quick Google search and as far as I could find rancid butter won’t kill you. It might upset your stomach due to the off taste ans smell. I canned lots of butter and it was fine for 3 years. When we made a move I had to store my canned goods outside under a tarp in the hot son. Some of my butter then developed an off sort of rancid taste. I currently have a cool cellar where I can keep such things cold.

  9. I package rice and pinto beans in mylar bags with o2 absorbers.
    place about 30 ish pounds in a 5 gallon bag in a 5 gallon bucket. add o2 absorbers and immediately seal the mylar wait 24 hours if the bag looks vacuumed down put the lid on right the date in sharpie move it to storage. this is by far the cheapest way to have LONG term food storage that you can still move.
    you can do this with 55 gallon barrels but there almost impossible to move without some equipment or strong backs.

  10. I actually like the links and often just add to my wish list to look at later. I tried the chocolate version of the boxed milk and saw 18 was a better price and there is also a $5 coupon for the first order and, of course, free shipping with Prime!
    Thanks!

  11. Thinking you will be able to shoot your food with a slingshot (5% chance) or firearm (5-25% chance) is dangerous fantasy. As is the idea you can catch enough fish to feed yourself and loved ones. Big difference between fishing and catching.

    You do well to learn how to trap critters or buy a large fishnet to anchor securely in a nearby stream where the fish might, I say “might” swim in and stay until you show up. Passive means of bringing home meat is likely to be a way more efficient use of your time and resources than hunting or fishing.

    Of course, you can buy lots of canned protein. I have cases of canned mackerel I bought for less than $2.00 for a 16 oz. can. Dollar store.

    Carry on

  12. Dollar Tree stores have boxed shelf stable milk in quarts for $1.

    One storage food that is difficult to store is cooking oil. Most has a fairly short shelf life rating (1 year). Olive oil is best at a 3 year rating. Anyone with pigs or neighbors with pigs have a perpetual source for lard.
    As a last resort most areas of country have bears and one shot in late fall would normally have a lot of fat that could be rendered. I am not a fan of bear meat and I wonder about bear fat. We do have bears around here but no hog farmers so bear would end up being my only fat source. (once my storage oil was depleted)

    2. We’ve had no problem storing virgin olive oil in plastic bottles (such as those sold at COSTCO) in our freezer for up to six years with no noticeable change in consistency or flavor, upon thawing. And we’ve never had a bottle leak, even though some of them have been frozen 2 or 3 times.

  13. I agree with Once a Marine about slingshots and your chance at catching small songbirds. Probably would be better off with a trap or net. Fishing for survival is also better with a net, a trap or with multiple sets that can fish without you being there to watch the line. Overall, if an entire city is suddenly turned topsy turvey and everyone has to eat pets, zoo animals, and local flora and fauna, they won’t be around long (as we have seen in Venezuela). You’d be better off investing in some rat traps or not being in the city in the first place.

    Regarding the milk, I don’t consider anything with a one-year best-buy date and a two-year total shelf life to be “long term” storage — that just isn’t long enough. I don’t even like wet-pack canned goods and MREs because they deteriorate too quickly, although I have some of each. However, I have #10 cans of freeze dried meats made for Uncle Sam that have 30-year storage dates.

    White rice is a great food for long term storage, but store some beans as well. I have done the math and figure the best ratio for your nutritional needs is to store 7-parts rice to 3-parts beans. So if you have 200 pounds of rice, you need about 85 pounds of beans. If you can’t remember this, just store twice as much rice as beans and you’ll be pretty close. And keep in mind that lentils and split peas count as beans, and products like barley, oatmeal and cornmeal count towards the grain portion, so have some variety in your storage foods.

  14. I got a second used chest freezer cheap, and it is my deep cryo freezer now, with a variety mixture of meats, coffee, olive oil, cheese, butter, herbs, yeast, and miscellaneous other stuff.

    It stays totally frozen and extra insulated top and sides with quilts. I keep the motor area open, and the little indicator light visible on the front side showing it’s

    In our other regular use freezer, for freezing fish and cooked shrimp, I do like the hunters did with mastodons…. simulate the ice age… freeze them in water in a baggie and they never dry out.

    One bag of shrimp (I harvested them) is on it’s 3rd year and still good. We just ate the second to the last bag…garlic butter and yum! Same thing with vacuum packed salmon….it’s still bright orange, coated with a layer of ice inside the vacuum sealed bag.

    Ice glazing at home works for shorter term: fish or chicken (possibly rabbit too?) strips laid on baking tray, brush water heavy on both sides of meat and freeze, repeat 3 times, then put in freezer bags. Use within a few months. Vacuum packing frozen glazed food not recommended.

  15. If birds are around and you have some corn, they are very easily trapped. Back in the ‘50s-‘60s, when I was a kid in rural south Georgia, I often trapped birds with a simple trap that had no moving parts at all. I built a four-sided pyramid of sticks, arranged with roughly half-inch spaces between rows. The maximum length, width, and height were about 18”, 18”, and 10”, respectively. I dug a small trench (roughly 18 inches long, three inches wide, and three inches deep). When the trap was fully assembled, one end of the trench would be inside the pyramid and the other would be outside. On and around the “inside” end of the trench, I scattered some grains of corn. Then I made a thin trail of corn grains from that end of the trench to the other, and I scattered a few more grains of corn around the “outside” end of the trench. I covered most of the length of the trench with a thin board, leaving a relatively small opening that would be inside the pyramid and a larger opening that would be outside the pyramid. Then I placed the pyramid over the “inside” end of the trench. Birds would find the corn near the outside end of the trench, eat their way along the trail of corn, thus erasing the trail, and enter the pyramid. Once there, they could not find their way out of the pyramid. They just would not go back down the hole that no longer contained corn. The method worked very well with quail, doves, blue jays, etc. I often caught 3-4 birds at once, even mixtures of the above species.

    1. Eat all the Starlings and English Sparrows you like , they are invasive to the Americas , and any other invasive species you can find . Most other songbirds eat tons of insects , making outdoor activity safer for humans, preventing disease and helping our gardens. I would suggest restraint in all hunting and smaller portions of meat after SHTF . A lot of meat will be wasted by inexperienced hunters and roadside butchers . We the experienced may have to exercise restraint to prevent our extinction and that of all wild species . As much as I like myself I do not feel I could justify wiping out an entire species to save our butts . We have already done just that with fur-bearers and doves and other delicious birds. I hunt and have and will again raise my own food . Most of us realize proper management is the only way to maintain a healthy herd , wild or domestic . Please support survivalblog by taking the 10 cent challenge . Thank you and keep up the good work.

  16. Everyone talks dogs and cats when desperate, but don’t forget guinea pigs and rabbits as an alternate meat source as well. They are smaller, don’t make a much noise and fairly easy to feed with garden scraps.

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