Heck, with the human population decimated, hunting deer in the Virginia woods should be a cinch.
Thanks; I totally missed that one somehow.
In the last 15 or so years? Gasoline of today is not what it used to be.
I think the story may have taken a turn towards magical realism or something. Consider the barn attack. It certainly was portrayed like a dream sequence. The horde descends on our protagonists’ shelter for no good reason, Daryl inexplicably doesn’t attempt to warn anybody, and just when they are about to die it ends abruptly with Maggie waking up.
Here’s the magical realism or something part: she goes outside and we see that her dream actually started to happen, but was averted by a bizarre cosmic coincidence.
On the other hand, if the barn attack was supposed to be a real thing that happened, then it’s just more sloppy, borderline nonsensical writing.
Remember that vehicles don’t have to run like swiss watches or meet pollution standards any more. Old gas will run fine in older vehicles or newer ones with some simple mods. They might run rough. Water in the fuel would be a continuing (but solvable) problem. But almost any reasonably-sealed source of gas would be good for the first five years of Z-time. And some cars, especially pre-smog ones, will run fairly well on things like paint thinner.
I’m willing to accept that walkers have done their part to hold down animal populations, especially larger ones easy to corner with a mob.
Squirrels? Fowl like wild turkeys (which roost in trees, not on the ground)? Rabbits, which multiply like rabbits? No chance. Even most deer should easily get away once they learn that zombies are predators. As the case in nature with prey and predators, usually just the weakest or oldest would be culled by the zombies. The zombies in this universe are so slow that I really don’t see how they’d catch wild game. Sure, they’d catch the domesticated animals on farms, but I think that’s about it.
It’s idiotic that their master hunter/tracker Darryl can’t find any game to kill. Particularly since the humans can apparently get away from zombies most of the time simply by walking very very slowly (as shown in the road during this episode), it doesn’t pass the smell test that game would be scarce. Game should be much more plentiful with so few humans, even when adding in (shambling style) zombies.
Sorry. Make that “I’m willing to cut the writers and production team some slack on the lack of wildlife because it would be expensive to film and would also screw up their attempt to portray the southern heartland as a desert hostile to life.”
Mostly for the first part. I can take some hand-waving about not showing animals running through every scene. That they are so scarce the gang has to eat old, tough feral dogs… sigh.
Well, zombies seem to be able to move as quickly as the story needs. At the high school, some of them were moving pretty fast after Shane and Otis. They were downright sprightly.
Zombies are essentially low-speed persistence hunters from hell. Pretty much nothing can escape a persistence hunter, with the exception of humans and possibly canines, who themselves employ the persistence hunting technique.
That seems pretty laughable to me. Animals that move in groups, like deer, can easily escape except for the slowest and weakest. Once one falls, all the predators, including zombies in this show, stop to eat. Additionally, just like humans, deer can easily get over obstacles that the zombies can’t get past. They can jump fences, jump ravines, go up and down ravines/hills (like the hill that Rick and company pushed the zombies down from the bridge).
Squirrels can easily escape, as can fowl, raccoons, and anything else that can climb trees. Particularly in areas where animals can go from place to place without touching the ground, zombies wouldn’t be able to hunt successfully. These zombies could pick off a few, but not nearly enough to make a dent in game populations compared to a world dominated by humans. That would leave plenty of food for human hunters like Darryl.
Look, I know I’m quibbling about something that’s relatively minor, but when they use these minor things to try and ramp up drama it pisses me off if they aren’t internally consistent about the rules of the universe they’re writing. If zombies were so interested in game, why the hell would they always follow and cluster around human locations? Why would they be such a danger in humans rather than just going out into the forest permanently if it’s so easy for them to catch animals? If they’re such good persistence hunters, why is a pack of feral dogs showing up to threaten the group?
It’s fine with me if they zombies are more attracted to humans for some reason (latent brain function, better smelling/tasting, larger prey, whatever), but then there has to be some other reasonable explanation for the group to be starving due to lack of game. That’s still ignoring all the complaints in this thread that there should be non-perishable food stashed all over the place by initial survivors of the apocalypse that then were killed or died!
I really need to read the comics to see if the universe is more consistent and thoughtful about what to use to create drama, stress, and conflict among the group.
I’m not saying that zombies do hunt animals. Just that if they did, the animals would quickly be gone.
All of your “the animals could escape” ideas seem pretty wide of the mark, either missing the concept of what persistence hunting is, or not grasping that zombies are not like regular hunters. You could run up a tree to get away from regular hunters. But what if you ran up a tree to get away from a dozen zombies, and now those dozen zombies stand at the base of the tree for the rest of eternity waiting for you to come down?
Someone upthread likened zombies to the terminator, which is apt. They never stop.
The difference is that it’s infinitely easier to run away from the terminator by virtue of it being THE terminator. Zombies, by contrast, are everywhere, numbering in the hundreds of millions.
So if they did eat deer, let’s say, and your hypothetical scenario where the pack of deer run away from a group of zombies with the weakest deer falling behind and getting eaten. Absolutely agreed there. But what this doesn’t take into account is that the group of deer can essentially never stop running because every zombie they get far enough away from so the deer can stop to rest, there’s a whole new group of zombies right there posing a new threat.
Deer can defend themselves, though. Then can get pretty nasty about it, too. Considering the established rotten-grapefruit tensile strength of zombie skulls, a wildly swinging hoof should prove quite convincing.
Yes. My eccentric aunt had stored a bunch of gas for the Y2K apocalypse. I inherited her stuff 5 years later, and used the gas without incident.
They go to another tree, or onto a roof, or across a power line, or wherever. I already mentioned this, in fact, by writing, “Particularly in areas where animals can go from place to place without touching the ground, zombies wouldn’t be able to hunt successfully.” Animals are evolved to evade predators. Squirrels go to the ground to collect food, but know enough to run up a tree and go somewhere else if a predator is chasing them. Some will fuck up and get caught, but nowhere close to enough to be below their reproduction rate. Rabbits will just run through obstacles that zombies can’t easily pass through, like fallen trees, into holes, through dense brush or bushes, etc, just like they do when chased by coyotes, dogs, wolves, foxes, or whatever other real-world predators they have learned to evade. Again, they’ll be successful enough that there would be plenty left for humans to hunt.
If that was the case, then how come humans on the show can stop moving long enough to do things like cook feral dogs?
This is my whole point. The writers should not be so lazy that they break the rules of their own universe to cause drama. At least they should make an effort to be consistent.
I also think they haven’t shown zombies to be nearly as prevalent as you’re stating.
Finally, my understanding of persistence hunting is that it is uniquely human and requires running, so zombies don’t qualify.
The whole point is that humans can maintain a jogging pace for much longer than animals for a number of reasons, including sweating allowing heat dispersal much better than most animals. Zombies don’t appear to jog on this show.
Persistence hunting also involves tracking since the animal will out-sprint humans for a short distance but then stop to recover while the humans can just keep jogging and jogging until the animal is finally exhausted. Humans can also carry water as they hunt, further increasing their range without needing to stop and rehydrate, unlike animals.
If a deer sprints out of sight or even out of smelling distance, how is a zombie going to find it? How will it ever catch up even if the deer has to slow to a walk or trot?
Thanks for the responses. I’m finding this discussion interesting even if we are beating a dead horse (or deer).
Of course, now that it’s established that carnivorous animals survived, it raises the question of why they aren’t eating the zombies, but that leads back to the magical nature of the zombie premise - even though the zombies are walking corpses, their decay (especially in tropical weather) is vastly slowed and for some reason, scavengers avoid them. Insects alone would quickly reduce a corpse (it being ambulatory would prove at most a minor nuisance) unless the zombie virus comes with a magical scavenger-repelling forcefield.
Gas from 1999 being good 5 years later is possible, especially if stored in a cool place. Sometime 2008 or so shelf life got significantly shorter. Gas with ethanol (E10) also seems to go bad faster.
Jay Leno has a large collection of vintage cars and has talked about the issues he’s having on his youtube show. Having to replace gas tanks, clean carburetors etc.
I had a tank of gas go bad myself in my classic car while I was doing body work for a repaint. The gas was a couple years old at that point and looked and smelled like kerosene. I added a bunch of fresh gas to the stale gas and it was enough to get it running.
I sense a Walking Dead ™ product endorsement in the offing.
*Off! Deep Woods for Zombies
Avon Rotten Skin So-Soft
Cutter - Now scented with Lilac to avoid that oh-so-rotten meat smell *
Another nitpick – sometimes they can’t have a fire because it will attract zombies, and sometimes they can. Has anyone seen an explanation?