Taking Control of Your Food Source
Securing your meat sources through hunting
We live in 2022, arguably the most prosperous period in human history. We are blessed to be able to visit a grocery store for our food, rather than need to grow or hunt it ourselves. If you walk down the grocery aisle, you can count on almost every type of food item imaginable to be there. If you look back at the totality of human history, to have what we have available today would be hard to comprehend for just about every person to walk this earth before us.
Westerners have never had to worry about a lack of available food, so why should we now? As the ancient Chinese Proverb goes, “It is better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war”. That is to say, it is better to be prepared for a catastrophe, should it ever come, than be caught woefully unprepared which could very well lead to starvation and death.
One only needs to look at New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina or more recently, Texas during the Snowmageddon in 2021 where millions of people faced historically cold weather, a failed electrical grid, and empty grocery shelves for days, to realize that our society is only one catastrophic event away from collapse.
As a kid, I always wanted to have my own ranch, with my own animals that I raised for food and to hunt game animals. The ultimate way to be self-sufficient. When living in New York City during the 2020 pandemic, this flame in me was reunited when I realized how fast everything I rely on could come to a sudden halt. That event was all I needed to finally leave the city and revisit my childhood dreams of catching and hunting my own food.
In this article, I want to cover how you can be more self-reliant with the most time-tested method of sourcing your own meat.
We live in a time where we are actually seeing governments around the world trying to impose limits on the most nutrient-dense food in existence - red meat and animal products. The topic of the plant-based agenda is a deep one and can be discussed in another article, but for the sake of this one, let’s just say you should either have the skills to raise your own animals or hunt your own. And in terms of the lowest barrier to entry, hunting is where most people can start.
Hunting
If you ask most people who know me closely, I love to hunt. I love the idea of it, I love being out in the woods or in the desert, and I love the romanticism of matching your wits against animals who every day are fighting for survival against predators. Even better, that it is the ONE sure way, beyond raising your own livestock, to be a part of every step of sourcing your own protein and knowing exactly what went into putting it on your dinner plate.
Just yesterday, I completed my first successful public land hunt, chasing Coues deer (a subspecies of the iconic American Whitetail deer), through the southern Arizona mountains. I was able to see and walk among desert plant life that that deer had fed on for its entire life. I was able to climb the mountain that the deer had probably walked up and down hundreds of times in its life. And of course, I was able to be the one to deliver the single, life-ending bullet through its vital organs, killing it where it stood.
Forget the delivery truck, or a trip to a processing plant too - My cousin and I carried the deer out of the mountains on our backs, quartered the animal at his house, and butchered it at mine.
It’s a heavy burden, to end an animal’s life. But life sustains life, and no matter what diet you choose to follow, you are complicit in death whether you like it or not. For me, I would rather be the one to do it, if it is going to happen at all. This also gives me the power to not rely on anybody but myself for my protein source. This Coues deer will supply my family and I with anywhere from 30-45 lbs of the best quality meat you can find.
Do you have an interest in hunting? Would you like to see an article about how to get started?
-Sebastian