Small Game Traps
In a bug out situation lasting more than a few weeks, you’re going to have to come up with a source of food quickly. Unless you know what fruits and berries are safe to eat around your area, getting your nutrition from meat is probably your safest bet.
However, not everyone has the patience or skill to sit around waiting for an animal to come into sight and hunt them with a gun or bow. Sometimes, trapping is the safest bet for catching food.
Trapping has been used to great extent for centuries all across the world, because it has a few advantages over hunting – primarily that you can set up multiple traps and have them all set at once, while you can only hunt one animal at a time.
The first kind of trap is very simple and easy to use, though it’s not always guaranteed results.
The Trap Top – Quality Squirrels Live Humane Cage Trap works well for catching small game such as squirrels, rats, and chipmunks. They’re very simple: it’s a cage with one side open, and when a pressure plate on the inside gets triggered, the door closes and the animal is trapped. You can place bait on the other side of the pressure plate to entice animals to enter, and when they try to walk over to the food, they’ll trigger the trap. You can also place sticks and leaves around the outside of the trap so that it doesn’t stand out as much.
The second kind of trap is harder to use, but works on a much wider range of animals and is more compact.
DakotaLine Snare Traps can trap anything as small as squirrels, up to something as big as a hog. The snare design of traps is one of the oldest, and can be made from rope or wire. These premade snares will snatch any prey that wanders through them. They’re almost undetectable to the animals until they’ve set off the trap.
Finally, it might be easier for you to trap fish than land creatures.
Eagle Claw Minnow Traps can catch most small fish, crawfish, crabs, and even water snakes. Once fish enter, they can’t find their way out. Attach the trap to a rope, and attach the rope to a tree or something solid so that the trap doesn’t float away. After a few days, the trap should have at least something in it. You can catch crawfish by placing smaller, dead fish in the traps, which will attract scavengers like crabs and crawfish.