Right, but in a famine situation, everyone will be suffering, and if everyone is relying on wildlife, that source could soon be depleted, depending on how many neighbors you have (and how good they are at catching said wildlife).
First of all, pigs are mean MFers. I wouldn’t want to raise them - too dangerous.
Second, how many people know how to properly cure bacon or ham or hard sausage or other pork products so they don’t spoil. Chances are the average famine victim wouldn’t.
Pigs : they sound like a great idea, they are not. They dig and are very hard to keep in a pen unless you know how to build it. Think about trying to keep a dumb, strong, fingerless human in a pen because that’s what you’ll be dealing with. They can figure stuff out. If you hang with them long enough you’ll be loathe to murder them. Hunt them if they’re feral, but these things are not dogs.
Dogs for food would be a better idea because you can send them out to forage and they’ll always return home to you in the evening.
Chickens will definitely eat the bugs off your crops, along with the leaves, fruits, flowers, and tender stems. They will also dig them up by the roots to get at worms and bugs. They can turn an unbelievablely large patch of land into barren dirt in a matter of weeks. Keep chickens because they’re easy and eggy and delicious ; and keep them away from your vegetable garden. They also manufacture fertilizer for your garden. It is pretty much irresponsible to NOT have chickens when times are hard.
Rats are omnivores and not picky, and they breed readily and fast. Keep them contained and you’ll eat well.
OP is about animals, but in a famine you’re better off with a varied garden supplemented by occasional meat.
That’s true, but there will likely be a shortage of domestic animals as well since people will be eating them, and stealing them, and wildlife is going to better at successful reproduction. But this is very area-specific – we have lots and lots of wildlife and a smaller population, which is not the case in most of the US.
But pigs can be pasture- or forest-raised – in fact, acorn-finished ham brings premium prices – so a pen isn’t essential. And many breeds of pigs do very well living off the land, including raising young. Providing them with good treats is an easy way to train them to return in the evening . Of course, this requires you have the acreage they need.
There are breeds that aren’t mean, popular for this very reason.
And in a famine situation, is the salt/sugar that is essential for any food preservation going to be available? IIRC, no salt was a big problem in some areas during the Civil War.
I ain’t looking for a fight, but it can be argued that large swathes of the southern US have become hog pastures and the locals are generally not happy with the arrangement. 
I mean, some folks might be able to make it work but Joe Snuffy the Office worker probably won’t.
LOL! Agree! Watching the Y2K panic when people stored water in steel barrels, the people last summer filling plastic totes with gasoline, and a recent show about preppers who had stashed large quantities of cornmeal and flour, leads me to believe many, many people are not going to do well in serious hard times. So I really hope OPs question is just a fun exercise.
This is probably the most important point to learn. North American standards of “how much meat is enough” pretty much have to go right out the window. You might not want to live on only small amounts of meat every few days, but you certainly can survive on it. Even just a bit of meat mixed in with rice, beans, or any other sort of bulk source of calories can improve your overall chance of survival quite a bit.
If you have a growing season, and seeds, you should try growing the Three Sisters crop of corn, beans, and quash. The native peoples in the Americas had discovered this a long time ago. The corn shoots up fast and provides a plant structure that the beans can climb, and the squash, also a vine climber grows up both later.
Early season beans, middle season corn, late season squash. The most bang for your buck and for your time and gardening space.
How to Grow a Three Sisters Garden – Native-Seeds-Search (nativeseeds.org)
that was my assumption. animals that can feed off vegetation or insects that humans either can’t eat directly or can’t catch, then the animals convert that energy into energy a human can consume (meat, eggs, dairy etc).
like goats can eat poison ivy, cows can eat hay and grass, chickens can catch insects, etc humans can’t do that stuff but we can eat the animals afterwards.
for the op I was assuming arable land is being used for staple crops. the animals are being grown in areas where farming staple crops isn’t possible for one reason or another.
This was my first thought as well (I didn’t click the link, just agree with the insects part). Goats and chickens would work, but calorie for calorie I think insects would be the best source of protean for the effort and materials required. If it’s really a famine situation then that’s what I’d look to do.
To not raise a hog in a famine situation would be terrible. There is so much waste from food that humans can’t eat corn cobs, water melon rinds, spoiled milk the pig can turn all of that into more food. You wouldn’t want to rely just on the pig for sustenance but a male and a female breeding pair could easily be fed on a small group’s scraps and provide lots of additional food. The trick is not being so hungry you eat your garbage disposal.
Outside of the hogs I’d go with goats and geese. The goats can eat a lot of things that aren’t edible for humans on terrain that isn’t usable for crops. They can also provide milk while you’re waiting to eat the kids. The geese provide down as well as eggs and meat and seem to care for themselves fairly easily based on the ones at the local ponds.
Agreed. My first thought too.
The solution to the pig question is Mangalitsa pigs. They’re smaller, much more capable of surviving bad weather, good foragers and have mellow temperaments. They produce meat which is incomparably fatty, the “wagyu of pork,” especially if pastured with acorn and chestnut forage. No reason to think pigs pastured with hazel nut forage would be averse to scarfing them down–lots of hazel trees in the PNW.
Chickens yes, but also Indian runner ducks. Don’t need much in the way of swimming water and eat snails and slugs and bugs but are easier on the garden.
Goats for sure. Alpacas–meat and fiber and they can kick the shit out of a coyote or wild dog.
Rabbits have a big advantage in that they can be kept in a very compact area and don’t need much to flourish. They produce really good garden fertilizer too. They aren’t my favorite meat but they also yield very nice and useful pelts so that also gives them a bump.
A bigass garden is the most critical project though.
But farming crops isn’t nearly as easy as most people think, either. You have to worry about things like nitrogen fixation, soil erosion (and there are various types of that - 7 when I was in college), poor soil, missing elements in the soil, such as zinc, etc.
hidden as off topic
I had not even heard of A Modest Proposal. But it still resonates today.
Consider parallels with current thinking on the Right-wing of N. American politicians on how best to deal with the poor.
Any foraging scheme depends upon a small population doing the foraging so the animals are not rapidly depleted. But if you don’t consider that to be a concern: add free-range squirrels to the mix.
Read up on what the pioneers did. They used to call pigs the “mortgage lifter” - because pigs could be raised on scraps (or free range), then sold for cash. (The book Old Yeller refers to the practice of “marking” wild pigs to establish ownership.) But, the one thing pioneers did not have was the modern breeds of chickens that produce eggs daily.
Having raised many of the animals mentioned – or lived on farms which did – I would like to point out just a few things.
One, I think you’d have to distinguish between famine, real famine with people actually starving, eating grass, and a less dire situation where meat supplies are much scarcer than they are now.
In the former case, you probably wouldn’t be raising animals at all, except maybe a few free-range chickens which find all their own food. All the other animals mentioned require much more care and food than a starving person would ever come up with.
Animals, other than chickens, which are foraging for their own food because you would be eating anything you’d otherwise be fattening them on (grain, potatoes, even acorns), take a LOT of land. Sheep or cattle eating grass, goats eating brush, pigs rooting in a forest, those animals also require herders to watch them 100% of the time (especially if there are starving people wandering around looking to eat any source of protein they can grab), and the idea of eating them on any regular basis is not a sound one. True subsistence farmers ate domestic meat rarely – only the excess young or useless old. Typically just a few times a year. Hunting and fishing would be a large source of animal protein.
In a starving population all the wild animals, even the rats, will be caught and eaten. Joe Office Worker may not have any skills that would help him, but he’d either learn before he got too weak to use them, or die.
Grow beans, trap fish, and learn to eat insects, I think is the takeaway.