Hypothetically, and assuming that you don’t have to worry about other people killing and stealing your animals in this situation, what are the best animals to grow for food?
I assume it is chickens and rabbits, but I don’t know.
By best I mean provide the most meat/eggs/dairy the fastest with the lowest upkeep/effort on your part and lowest risk of them taking off. Also in these situations you may not be able to go to rural king and buy a 50 pound bag of feed whenever you need it. So animals that can forage for food are best.
I recently read about North Korea using rabbits and swans as food sources during famine and it made me wonder what is the best in this situation.
How about dairy goats? I think they’re pretty efficient and can apparently live on brush & scrub. With them you would have milk, cheese and meat. (You eat the excess males and aged our females.) They forage very well.
Rabbits are a good choice from what I understand. Pretty easy to raise and prolific, I mean they do indeed breed like rabbits.
Pigs can be really dangerous. If you let them forage they’ll probably be hard to control. If you keep them corralled, you need to provide food for them. Admittingly, they’ll eat almost any food scraps but I think in the scenario described they’re not a great choice.
If you had the grassland cows and relatives are actually a fairly good choice but I was assuming open prairie wasn’t part of the scenario.
Pigs will eat stuff even starving humans will not and will grow to harvestable size in no time.
Chickens will keep insects off your crops (you are growing crops) and provide eggs until you kill them.
That was my thought. Pigs can turn just about anything even remotely like food into bacon and ham.
As a practical matter, I’d go with chickens as my primary source. Short term, you get some eggs pretty regularly. Medium term, you get chicken. for the long term, have a few pigs growing in the meantime, and feed them on whatever slop you have left over.
Another plus of a chicken is no need for long-term storage. Kill a chicken once a week, say, and you have at least some meat for a day or two, depending on the size of your household. Larger animals require a lot more in the way of butchering and preservation to maximize their yield, which requires a lot more in the way of actual skills. You’ll likely lose a lot of good food to mistakes in the learning process, which would be less of a concern with smaller animals like chickens and rabbits.
You may be better off looking to crops. Raising animals involves using the land to produce fodder which you then feed to livestock that you later slaughter and eat. This isn’t a very efficient process, and for a given area of land you might get more nutrition by using it to raise crops to eat yourself than to raise crops for fodder for livestock that you will eat.
But in a famine situation other factors might also be relevant. Your needs are generally immediate, and both sowing crops and raising animals to eat may not deliver food quickly enough to avert your death. So egg-laying fowl or dairy animals might be your best bet - particularly those which will live off land not capable of producing food that you can eat, or other food resources not suitable for human consumption. I’m going with chickens and/or goats.
We have some pet Guinea pigs. How wild versions of these things ever survived extinction is beyond me. Walking meatballs whose one defense mechanism seems to be to freeze in place.
That’s why you want animals capable of foraging/grazing on the native flora. I can only farm much land by myself and, meanwhile, my animals are converting other land into extra nutrition for me via eggs and meat. Animals that require extensive care or feeding are a no-go.
It couldn’t be too hard to set up something like this in your basement or attached garage - with enough supplemental heat to keep them happy.
With efficient waste collection, you’d have plenty to fertilize the guinea pig veggie crops.
I would already have established a chicken-raising operation on our present acreage, though we’d have to find chicken-sitters for vacations, and it’s hard to go out to the coop and pick up a ready-processed rotisserie chicken.
Yeah, I went to Peru in the Before Times and we visited a small-town market area, and off to the side was a small, rustic “cafe” that had Peru’s version of the lobster tank, where live guinea pigs (AKA cavy) were inhabiting a grand-looking habit-trail right next to the tables. I would think they would be a decent choice in a famine situation.
I was going to mention about “rabbit starvation” or protein poisoning @MrDibble .
Wouldn’t this be very dependent on where you live? What kind of weather and forage are available in your area? Chickens, for example, can’t forage in winter, so wouldn’t be practical unless you had a supplemental feed source.
In my very rural area, wildlife has always been the goto in hard times – lots of squirrels, deer, groundhogs, etc.
