Small Game Hunting: Feeding Your Family in a SHTF Scenario

Small Game Hunting Sustainability

I’ve previously explored the possibility of whether or not the US large game population would be a sustainable food source in a SHTF scenario. If you haven’t read it, click HERE to read. To paraphrase that post though, I do not believe that large game hunting alone would be a feasible option to feed our entire population. So I have to question whether small game, or even a combination of all game is sustainable.

I have to admit, trying to nail down exact numbers on small game populations has proven itself to be quite a challenge. In fact, I could not find a single government study that attempted to keep track of the population levels of their states small game animals. So that being said, I was left to make estimates of population based on the territory range of certain animals. Also, as with large game, so many smaller game animals are regional that I’ll try to keep to more common and universal critters.

It might be small, but it's food in the pot!

Squirrels are probably the first little guy that comes to mind. It seems like you can’t walk past a single tree without getting barked at by one of these little beasties sometimes. The reality is that squirrels are very territorial, and depending on the environment, each acre can only support around 2-6 squirrels. Urban areas tend to have a higher squirrel per acre population at 5-6 and more rural areas only contain around 2 per acre. And while the US has around 2.43 billion acres of land,it would be easy to say that we could support 5-14 billion squirrels. Unfortunately it isn’t that easy, we have to take into account how many acres just aren’t suitable environments for the critters. So to estimate this I’ll take into account how many acres of suitable hunting land each person would need to feed themselves. There’s also many breeds of squirrels around of varying size, in my area of the country fox squirrels are the most common and are a very large breed, but when I take a vacation to the mountains of Colorado, all you see are the tiny pine squirrels that aren’t much bigger than a large hamster. So with all the preamble aside, let’s dig into it.

Using fox squirrels as an example, I can get around 8 ounces of meat from each one harvested. And considering that the average american consumes 222 lbs of meat each year, that means you would have to bag about 8 squirrels per week per person you plan to feed. But if the goal is to harvest them sustainably, we have to take into account their breeding habits. Squirrels breed on average twice per year and give birth to an average of 5 kits per litter. They also don’t reach sexual maturity until they are 11 months old. So if your hunting grounds are in a rural area supporting 2 squirrels per acre ( I assume most people won’t be riding out the apocalypse and hunting their food from an urban setting) you could sustainably harvest about 10 squirrels per acre per year. That works out to 44 acres per person in your family to feed them entirely on squirrel meat. Now considering there aren’t 14.39 billion acres of squirrel friendly land in the United States we’ll have to look into other options. Luckily squirrels aren’t the only animals hanging around most hunting areas.

Bonus points if you can capture them in live traps to breed in captivity.

Rabbits to me are the quintessential small game animal. The US has 15 different species of rabbits and hares, each one specialized to live in its respective region. So in lieu of writing a post the size of an ecology textbook, I’ll focus on the eastern cottontail which inhabits about half of the country. Female cottontails are extremely territorial and have an individual range of 1-3 acres, but for the sake of keeping the numbers neat and tidy we’ll settle on 2 acres each. Now before we get into the numbers too much, I’ll tell you, after searching the inter-webs for a bit you’ll notice rabbits referred to constantly as “prolific breeders.” That holds up. In fact they look to be such an enticing protein source that I’ll plan on another post focusing on them in the future. But back to the task at hand, the eastern cottontail breeds on average 4 times per year but varies based on climate. The gestation time per liter is 28 days yielding between 1 and 12 kits per liter but averaging 5, the kits will be mature and ready to mate after 3 months. Even though the average weight is around 2.5 lbs per eastern cottontail, I’ve found that you get just over a pound of meat per carcass. So the maximum amount of game we could harvest per acre sustainably would be about 10 lbs per year. That means hunting only eastern cottontail in an area of 22 acres could potentially fill 1 person’s meat needs each year.

Raccoons are another animal that’s native to the entire continental US. While their territory range varies wildly based on availability of resources, THIS STUDY was able to capture 42 adult racoons (22 females and 20 males) within a 20 hectare area (just shy of 50 acres) on a wildlife preserve. Raccoons will only breed once per year and yield an average 5 kits per liter, females are ready to breed again during their first mating season. In the wild, they have been known to weigh up to 60 lbs but on average you can expect them to weigh around 8-15 lbs, yielding around 5 lbs of meat. Could you really expect to harvest 500 lbs of racoon meat each year from 50 acres of land? I’m not sure, this seems like a best case scenario, and that location was probably chosen because of an unusually high population. However other information points to males having a territory range of up to 250 acres in rural areas, and traveling up to 10 miles away from it’s home den in search of food. So it does seem likely that you could expect to see that many over the course of a year but not necessarily nesting in the area.

Where there's humans, there's trash. And where there's trash, there's raccoons.

These 3 small game species can often inhabit the same territories without competing for resources. So if you happen to be in an area where they are common enough you could potentially produce your meat needs in a 10 acre area per person that you’re feeding. Obviously this is only the potential maximum amount that you could harvest under optimum conditions. There are many factors that keep the rabbit population in check including habitat requirements, disease, predators and climate. Unfortunately eastern cottontails have about an 85% mortality rate in the wild, in part due to hunting, and there isn’t anything we can do to stop winter or disease. However improving your hunting area to provide improved habitats for cottontails is a simple matter, as outlined by Penn state HERE. And predator management is something you should consider if a long term survival situation anyways. Coyotes, foxes, weasels, hawks and owls are all predators to squirrels and rabbits that should be hunted without prejudice and would provide a nice bit of extra meat to add to the stew pot anyways.

It does seem that small game could be a viable protein source, especially coupled with a bit of large game hunting as well. And considering that this covers such a small portion of small game species, I did not cover prairie dogs, opossum, foxes, coyotes, or any type of game bird. Alot needs to be considered though, whatever caused the initial crisis may have affected or killed off wild life. It may have even killed off a bit of the human population. Currently the US population is around 327 million, and with 2.43 billion acres in the country, that only leaves around 7.5 hunting acres per person that you could even attempt to harvest animals from. So much of that may not be ideal for hunting due to climate or habitat needs in the case of areas that are used as farmland. This leads me to a few conclusions. The first is that the country is simply becoming overpopulated. Even if hunting could provide us with the natural resources that we need today, there is no telling what the case could be in a generation or more. The second conclusion that I’ve come to is, faced with a TEOTWAWKI situation, we may have to reevaluate how we meet our protein needs. While we may be accustomed to a certain amount of animal protein, that doesn’t mean that we require it. To me, hunting when the SHTF just poses a greater risk than reward.

If you haven't read it yet, this is a continuation of: Can Large Game Sustain Your Family in a SHTF Scenario?