It’s been many years since I was there, but I recall that Muir woods was lousy with mule deer. In fact, just about every park I’ve been to out West has had plenty of mule deer.
Actually, the Mormons get together and run canneries already. And they store enough food for years. And it’s not like “harvesting some crops” is such a difficult process; my tomato seedlings are just about ready to go into the ground and they’ll hopefully produce way more than I can eat fresh. I’m also growing beans, cucumbers, lots of herbs, beets, fennel, salad greens, radishes, maybe some peppers, watermelons, maybe some more stuff. I’ve got a raised vegetable bed that’s 12x4. There’s a blog somewhere in suburban California (maybe Pasadena?) where they’re trying to live independantly, and they pull, no joke, 3 tons of food out of the dirt on their normal suburban lot.
I’m pretty sure that’s true of Southern California too. When I was at UCSD in the late 1970s, there were guys in the dorm who routinely put on their SCUBA gear, walked into the ocean, and harvested abalone and lobster.
Um… are we assuming that all of the livestock has magically disappeared as well? My limited time in California taught me counter to my stereotypes of that there’s a lot of beef and dairy raised in the state, and not so incredibly far from the coast. This is in addition to the peas, strawberries, greens, almonds… not all oranges and shellfish. And, um, feral dog…
I should think that if the people disappeared tomorrow someone with enough skill to hunt dog and process acorns could eat a whole lot better than that just by going to local farms and ranches.
But at that point they are feral. By definition. (If you don’t accept that definition, we’re talking at cross-purposes.)
The scenario posits that the American west coast is devoid of human life, at least to a fairly thorough searching. Thus any pet dogs that can’t become feral would die off.
I know that. I meant food sitting around loose in grocery stores and refrigerators and so on.
Note that harvesting abalone with scuba gear is now illegal. (Not that this makes any difference in a survival scenerio, but just in case someone wanted to practice.) You can harvest abalone in some areas with a permit by freediving, which is what you’d have to do anyway in your post-apocalypse The Quiet Earth-ish scenerio.
Back to the OP, if you were going to find yourself bereft of the benefits of civilization, the Coast of California is a prime choice for survival (which is why it was such a popular destination for farming and agriculture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries). Tide pools provide easy pickings for protein, as already noted, wildlife is abundant, and nutritional flora is widely available in the year-round Mediterranean climate. A healthy, capable person should find it nearly trivial to support themselves in such an environment; it’s certainly far easier than surviving in the Scandinavian near-Arctic or the Australian Outback.
As for the consumption of carnivores argument, I’ll note that many cultures, including the Mongolians, the Koreans, and the Inuit kept dogs as food animals. There’s nothing particularly unnatural about it, any they’ll certainly provide more accessible nutrition than the disease-infested flying rats known as pigeons.
Stranger
OK, my poor terminology…consider me corrected.
I wouldn’t. Orange County is border to border houses and strip malls. Hardly an orange anywhere.
Otherwise, the California coast is rich with foods. As others have mentioned, there are plenty of animals, fish, shellfish and birds ripe for the harvesting. Fishing nets are simple to make from scratch, if you can’t be bothered to ite together a bunch of volleyball nets. Fishing spears are rather basic. There are rather large herds of cattle around, as well as chicken ranches. Fresh water is no problem at all outside of the major deserts. The only reason there is a water problem in California is that there are too many people in the wrong areas. Vegetable items are quite widespread, even on the coast.
No problem surviving here.
But I like L.A. 
Stranger
BTW, not all acorns are unpalatable raw. The tannin content varies quite a bit from species to species, and the species with less tannin are perfectly OK eaten like nuts. I’ve eaten them, and thought they were quite good.
The high tannin ones are so bitter as to be inedible, at least raw. The Golden field guide “Trees of North America” book divides the oaks into two groups, the red oaks and white oaks, commenting that the white oak acorns are not bitter. Species from both groups exist in CA, as do Chinkapins, which produce edible acorns, and Tanoaks, which produce incredibly tannin-loaded acorns. Those trees are not true oaks.
If I were in such a situation, I would certainly go looking for dogs, not to hunt them, but to hunt with them. A dog, once you befriended it, would serve you a lot better than just 50 pounds of meat or so. Of course, not all dogs would be friendly or befriendable, but given that they’re recently decended from domesticated dogs, and not directly from wild wolf stock, there’d surely be a few well-tempermented ones around to take up with.
But as long as the scenario started in the springtime, I’d think that a survivalist could make it pretty easily anywhere in the contiguous US. In California, with the nearly year-round growing seasons, it’d be a cakewalk.
Methinks Chronos has been reading up on his Harlan Ellison.
Stranger
While I have read some of Ellison’s stuff, I don’t recall anything in particular involving domestication of dogs… The closest I can come up with is a story starring a werewolf. Care to elucidate?
My comment there comes not from fictional inspiration, but just from being a dog person.
A Boy and His Dog, from a story by Harlan Ellison.
Ellison’s ending was better. 
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the film, but IIRC the ending to the movie and the story are more or less the same, to wit:[spoiler]Vic escapes from the underground vault with Quilla June, only to find Blood starving and near death…so he sacrifices Quilla June to feed Blood.
A boy loves his dog.[/spoiler]
Stranger
Nope. The movie ends the other way. 
I must have blocked it from my mind; the story was much better anyway.
Stranger
No it doesn’t.
The British intelligence agency MI5 reportedly said:[
We used a long panning shot of Oildale for a scene of nuclear destruction in a music video we shot in Bakersfield. (The Final Conflict, Burning Image)