Preparedness for when

DawnW

Blue_Doggy wrote: »

First catch your wild birds!

A common food for poor people in the south of England (probably elsewhere too) was sparrows, caught in a net while eating grain scattered as bait. When you think of the size of a plucked sparrow, you think how desperate the people were. I used to know an old man who had done this in the early years of the 20th century.

On the positive side, though, there's an end to type 2 diabetes and the obesity crisis!

Sparrows are much more scarce than they used to be. When I was a child there would be big flocks of them around houses, villages etc, but you only see a few now I am sure they weren't eaten when I was a kid (I am not THAT old :rotfl:) so not sure what has caused the drop in numbers.

GreyQueen

Bedsit_Bob wrote: »

There's always wild birds.

Yup - woodpidgeons. Four broods a year and a prolific pest of crops. Just asking to be eaten. And so very easy to dismantle bare-handed.

Mum remembers in her girlhood that chicken wasn't commonly eaten. The family kept 50 laying hens and sold the eggs and had a smaller amount of bantams for the household's own egg consumption. Chickens were only eaten if they were no longer laying or surplus cockerels.

People used to raise bunnies for food and for market. Grandad had New Zealand Whites for this purpose.

SpikyHedgehog

Bedsit_Bob wrote: »

I agree.

Although a vegetarian, in a survival situation, I would have no hesitation in eating animal flesh, if the alternative was to starve.

My mother became a vegan when all her children were at least teenagers and says she would rather starve than eat animal flesh, as we were all old enough to look after ourselves. I had a baby at the time I asked her this and though he's now 19, my younger son is pretty dependant on me (12 years old with Asperger's Syndrome), so my answer is that I do what I need to stay alive to look after my children.

I've brought my sons up as vegetarians but they've both chosen to eat meat as they've got older. DS1 has friends who can dress pigeons and rabbits (and presumably other animals, but that's what he's seen them do) but can't himself. Mother used to kill and pluck the chickens she and dad kept before they became vegetarians when I was 2, so I don't remember how to do it.

DawnW

GreyQueen wrote: »

Yup - woodpidgeons. Four broods a year and a prolific pest of crops. Just asking to be eaten. And so very easy to dismantle bare-handed.

Mum remembers in her girlhood that chicken wasn't commonly eaten. The family kept 50 laying hens and sold the eggs and had a smaller amount of bantams for the household's own egg consumption. Chickens were only eaten if they were no longer laying or surplus cockerels.

People used to raise bunnies for food and for market. Grandad had New Zealand Whites for this purpose.

I have woodpigeons in my freezer, and consequently on my meal plan for this week as *pigeon burgers* :rotfl:

Very nice, in a pitta bread with some salad

OH and I used to raise NZW x Californian rabbits for meat when the children were small and we were skint but had more outside space with our tied cottage.

[Deleted User]

GreyQueen wrote: »

Yup - woodpidgeons.

Not forgetting water fowl.

There's a pond close to where I work, and the ducks are so tame, they'd practically jump in the pot, if you threw a bit of bread in.

As for wabbits, they can be taken with an air rifle, or a snare.

And there's always the, very prolific grey squirrel.

[Deleted User]

COOLTRIKERCHICK wrote: »

And we can't be right all the time....

To quote Sheldon Lee Cooper:-

If I were wrong, don't you think I'd know it?

GreyQueen

I used to get the pheasants with the Fiesta. Only the on-road pheasants, it wasn't one of those four-wheel drives. The same Grandad with the rabbits used to be a horseman on a farm, one of the last to plough in England with horses. He could take a pheasant off a branch or a gate with a horsewhip.

As a teen, Mum can remember when the local paper sent a photographer and a scribbler to capture this vanishing sight of horses ploughing. The atmospheric pic was duly taken and then the scribbler tried to draw the dour old flat-capped Englishman out regarding the wonders of country life.

Grandad reportedly sucked on his roll-up and remarked, one the scribbler had stopped burbling about the wonders of the countryside and trees etc, that he'd been lookin' at blummun' trees orl his loife.

moneyistooshorttomention

The point where I've noticed people (always women as far as I could see...) "deferring" to other peoples decisions recently has been in medical contexts. I've been quite horrified to watch it and am still fuming at having watched my own mother having deferred to "the experts" recently (despite my having read enough about what they proposed to be telling her I really didn't think she should go along with them)....and finding that the highly unpleasant procedure they subjected her to was a total waste of time and just as unpleasant as I had told it would be:mad:

None of us can be expert in everything - chance would be a fine thing...

However - what we can learn about is how to do our own research/ask relevant questions and not to be so darn trusting of other people who set themselves up as "experts".

Errrm...and, in a very different context, I can recall that I took out my first mortgage in the era of "Endowment mortgages are IT and you will get a nice payout at the end of it". Scepticism and independent thinking served me very well there - as I sat there and thought "All that glistens is not gold and, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is" and took out a repayment mortgage instead. I've since watched friends in my agegroup going through various problems with the endowment mortgages they took out at that time....:cool:

One of my friends is marginally older than me and also has a public sector job pension - and is currently one angry lady that she is still having to work on past her retirement age because she believed the "endowment mortgage propaganda" and it all went wrong...

Hence - I think an independent/questioning mind is the single best asset one can have to survive - even if it doesn't make you the worlds most Popular Person sometimes:cool:

maryb

Interesting in the light of discussions on this thread today - Zerohedge has a piece entitled 'We're going medieval'

COOLTRIKERCHICK

Bedsit_Bob wrote: »

To quote Sheldon Lee Cooper:-

If I were wrong, don't you think I'd know it?

:T:T:rotfl::T:T

Good old Sheldon...