If you and your children were dropped in the middle of a remote area with just a knife would you be able to survive?

[LizaRadleywasonthespectrum]

Following on from an early morning conversation with DP. Obviously this is an unlikely scenario but not beyond the realms of possibility. Can you build a shelter, make a fire, find food and water? Can your (say 8yrs and older) children make a fire or set a snare and skin a rabbit.

If you can take your socks off you can skin a rabbit. It’s really easy.

Dropped to live outside where we live with just a knife possibly. The main problem would be water.

Edible plants are ok, I'm fine with that and some mushrooms.
There's lots of slow tame creatures to try to catch (pheasants and muntjac).
There's also plenty of wood to build a shelter.
A fire would be hard, but should be possible, even if it took ages.
It's been dry since March, so lack of water would be a huge issue.

We would be extremely tired, hungry - perhaps starving and thirsty. Every waking moment would be given to basic survival, which would be exhausting.

DH is a useful sort (understatement). One teen is a cadet and one teen is crafty so theoretically we should survive, but oh the arguments that would happen!

Not sure that, even in prehistoric times, one woman and a couple of children would have done an amazing job of survival. There’s a reason humans live in communities - if you have gone through the difficult process of starting a fire with sticks or flint, having someone mind/feed it whilst someone else goes out to check the snares is pretty key, i would think.

Interesting people think you'd die in the rain. I'd be sitting under a tree and I think I could find enough dry leaves/wood. You wouldn't die in 24h of rain.
If I could find a flint to make a spark, the fire would be ok. Not sure what I'd boil water in to make it safe to drink though. Might have to collect rain water.
Catching food - that might be my sticking point. I think I could kill it (though when I lived in East Africa we always got the men to kill the chickens) and could definitely gut it, but catching it, I'm a bit of a heffalump and it would run away.

@ShiftySquirrel I would trust DD to feed the fire but DS is even louder than me in the woods. Pheasants are pretty slow though, you are right.

I remember going to summer camp at about 11 years old. I chose the unit that focused on art. We had cabins and ate in the dining hall. We toasted marshmallows in a campfire we made in an established fire ring.

There were other girls in the survival unit. They got a small tarp and a knife and went into the woods. They built their own shelters. They cooked their food over fires they built. The final task of the summer was to catch a rabbit and turn it into dinner. I thought they were crazy.

I wouldn’t just die in the wilderness due to inexperience. A few days without my essential medication and that would probably be it for me. At most I have 6 weeks, but I would be very sick, very quickly.

Proper hunting knife you say?
so I could strip bark and make shavings for fire starting, and split thicker branches for logs, strip nettles to use the fibrous stems for string to make a rope for a snare, would need to be careful making some kind of receptacle for water, but could probably put together a shelter (may not be waterproof but would keep worst of rain off and the prevailing wind)…
yeah, I’d like to think I could but I’d probably end up in a sobbing heap (and hope my former Cub Scouts don’t find me to realise I don’t know how to manage without a few key tools…)

I mentioned the rabbit skinning to ds2 this afternoon and was somewhat taken aback to hear him nonchalantly say "I could skin a rabbit, no problem."

This from the boy who struck a match towards him, in windy conditions, and wondered why he couldn't light the fire laid on the ground...

I wouldn’t immediately know what to do, and it depends on such as factors as the weather, what resources are around etc. But yes I reckon I could figure it out. Killing animals would be tough but if forced to I would give it a try. I’d probably end up eating a berry I shouldn’t or something because I’m not great on that type of thing.

Most probably not, my kids are used to mammy running after them. Mind the youngest is 10 and could probably murder the rest of us so maybe we could survive a day until she decides the rest of us are dead weights.

If our 12 year old could have his gun then he would be fine.

We’d learn if we had to. Probably. 🤣

I reckon we'd be ok for a little while - no problem building a shelter but I think we might get hungry quite quickly!

Yes, I'd be well looked after by my dc, all of whom have done all sorts of survival training on various Scout camps.

Could I be dropped off WITHOUT the children?

nah, I don’t stand a chance

One of my children (dc2) was born to do this kinda stuff 😂often disappears with my husband for wild weekends camping…so yeah we’d be fine, the dc1 would just whinge all the time…

I can catch/skin/cook a rabbit, no issues with killing and plucking a chicken, I used to be able to shoot reasonably well and as long as dc2 child made me a bow & arrow pretty sure I could shoot us a deer or something similar.

Fire no problem at all, I could build us a shelter

Add DH & the dogs we would survive quite well I reckon.

Yep, both DP and I went to scouts. Dd is fairly good at following instructions so I’m hopeful she’d muddle along. DS is the only one I’d worry about. My scout group was top of everything in the district, we had hardcore leaders so you had to be good or they’d push you out basically.

I’d give it a go if I had to

though if you just live off rabbit you starve to death quicker so be wary of that one!

Oh....still yes, i'm the crucial one as he cant hunt/kill 🤣

Ah, see, if I had to bring my only DC, I am in far better shape…if we don’t kill each other. She was also in Scouts, and driven in getting things done once you point her in the right direction. But she’s fussy about food so we’d need to find a wild turkey and a pepper plant and a tomato plant and some sweet potato plants for her to not turn on me…

Off to buy every published copy of the SAS Survival Handbook. I'll keep one, keep myself alive while everyone around me dies, then turn cannibal and use the rest of the copies to make a fire to cook their bodies on.

Oops. Just reread the title of the thread! I was thinking of an apocalypse - not a desert island!