Kickin' it Fudd skool.

As an Omnivore I can digest both meat and vegetable matter. As a human being animal protein(meat) is an important part of my diet, as has been the case for the last two million years of our species existence on this planet. No matter what folks might believe, we evolved as meat eaters and hunters. Our ancestors spent much of their lives following herds of herbivores and killing them with sharpened sticks, and considering how we've spread like a virus, our ancestors were pretty damn good at hunting. I guess that the suckers never heard of hot pockets being in their grocer's freezer.

Yes, the rednecks are right. Hunting and eating animals is a part of our genetic heritage. Though now it's done more for sport than subsistence needs. Some consider it to be a right of passage. Or an important connection to the natural world. Mostly it just seems to be a chance for them to exercise their natural instincts and go out and kill something. While drinking beer and hanging out in the woods.

It is highly conceivable that the drive through at McDonalds will be closed for the foreseeable future, and damn it, I really don't want to actually have to get out of my car and go inside to get a lousy hamburger. I'll just have to adapt. So, on to Plan B! Going out into the woods and killing and processing animals.

The clear upside of wild animals is that they don't need to be cared for by humans and are capable of surviving where our domesticated livestock would die in droves. Cows, pigs and the like tend to need medications and special kinds of feed, as we've bred their ability to adapt out of them over the last few centuries. So, you might be able to take a gun out to Farmer Bob's place and bang away at the ducks and sheep for a while, but soon enough they're probably going to die off, leaving the fittest to take over al la Darwin. But this might take a few years, or decades even, and that's assuming that they're not hunted to extinction by hungry and short-sighted humans. I make no assumptions when it comes to our species.

Which leaves us with wild game.

there are generally two ways to approach hunting.

The first, which is rather popular in many places as our population has gotten rather fat and lazy, is to sit hidden in a blind and wait for the animal to come to you. Then, you shoot it with a high powered rifle or shotgun and celebrate how you've successfully re-established your roots with nature.

Blind hunting involves a lot of sitting and waiting for the prey animal to come to you. Here in the USA, the preferred animal is the white-tail deer. Typically the hunter will either construct a blind(ranging from permanent structure in the woods, to a more flimsy and mobile tent) or they set up a tree stand. Either way, they're confined to that location as they sit quietly and wait for a deer to cross their field of vision. If you're truly hardcore and dedicated, you even use some sort of bait to lure the dumb animals in. That takes preparation and fore-thought though. As well as expandable food-stuffs. But it does increase your chances for a kill. Some might consider this unsportsmanlike. Blah blah blah. There's no such thing as fair when you're in danger of starving to death Take any advantage that you can.

The second method of active hunting is stalking. You take your weapon and walk through fields and woods looking for animals to kill. This was how our most ancient ancestors proceeded. We as a species have advantages and disadvantages. Most animals are faster than us, though we are excellent distance runners. In addition our senses of smell and hearing and sight are relatively weak when compared across the spectrum of our competitors. Most of us are loud and rather clumsy. Years of sitting in office chairs have made us soft and flabby. So, we'll be giving ourselves away the moment we step into the woods to look for prey.

Our advantages consist of the ability to think abstractly and logically – which allows us to puzzle out problems. Some animals like octopi are also capable of some problem solving. So we aren't alone, at least on a basic level. What we do have is opposable thumbs, which allows us to create and manipulate tools. You ever seen a bear with a machine gun? Didn't think so. These skills offset our relative lack of speed, strength, sense and natural weapons. With luck, persistence and the proper tools, one should expect to bag something. Though as Les Stroud says, hunting as a means of survival is a rather iffy proposition, especially when you're alone. He brings to the table his documentation of many weeks gone without a proper meal in the bush.

So you've deered to kill your first dare. Congratulations. Now what are you going to do with that still steaming lump of mutilated flesh that used to be one of God's creatures? Here's an instructional video on field-dressing a deer carcass. Mind, it is extremely graphic. I guess the fact that it was set to Country Music doesn't much help either.

There are other ways to harvest animals. Traps can be especially effective and they require little energy after the initial set-up. As animals generally aren't overly Snares are a fantastic way to take rabbits. What must be taken into account is the fact that you can scale traps up to work on a massive scale for larger animals – as did our ancient ancestors with Gazelle traps all over the mid-east. Assuming that there is a large herd of herbivores to cull, these traps can help feed a substantial number of people.

But, if there are a substantial number of people to feed, it would be best to harness their labor revert to the agrarian ways of our more recent past. You can feed more people on grains and potatoes than you can with hunting, which is how our species really managed to conquer the planet. Hunting will do as a stop-gap measure until more reliable means of food production is found. Relying on wild game too heavily will deplete said game, forcing you to either move on to new territory or to starve. A decision our ancestors faced constantly.