I agree that most SHTF scenarios are just idle daydreaming, however, I think you overestimate the impact on wildlife. In a real situation that required large parts of the population to rely on hunting a large portion of the human population would perish and the calorie intake of the remaining people would nose-dive (solution to the obesity epidemic).Zoogster said:I must chuckle a little when so many SHTF fantasy scenarios people come up with involve hunting for food for some long period of time.
If say 10% of the population hunted for most of their food, even to the extent of compensating for a lack of calories from other food sources like carbohydrates, the animal population would be nearly gone in a year. For example a deer a week, multipled by 30 million people (10%), would be 1,560,000,000 deer a year. Or 1.5 billion deer. But there is only about 20-25 million deer. Not even enough for 10% of the population to kill 1 all year long, and still result in extinction. In fact much less has to be taken just to result in something sustainable.
And deer are the most numerous large game animal.
Feral pig numbers are much smaller.
Even if you start adding in all the typical game animals, the forests would be quite barren within a year, and many of the species unlikely to ever recover, and others requiring decades to recover if even 1% of the population survived on hunted game as the primary source of their calories for a year.
Perhaps someone with a better knowledge of the great depression could comment on what happened to wildlife in the 1930s.