Sometimes you can assign a job to a dog by raising it among the livestock you want it to guard. Sometimes the dog picks its own job by figuring out what needs to be done. We have a crossbred Great Pyrenees x Bloodhound, whose leg was injured as a pup and she was not expected to live, so we let her take it easy as she healed. She limped over hill and dale, and found that she could sit atop ridges and keep a close eye on cattle in the valleys below. That became her lifetime job. She will sit out in the pastures, watching and guarding, for days at a stretch returning home only for a meal and encouragement – then back out she goes.
Another dog, a collie-shepherd cross, self-assigned “watching the house” as his job. He stayed between the house and barns, kept down the squirrel and armadillo population (and fed himself at the same time), and let us know if something unusual was going on.
A good dog can be trained to perform a task it might not otherwise choose to do – bring water to someone working the field, for example, or learning to search for someone who is lost. But, the dog won’t do it for love of helping out someone in need. The dog will do it because he gets something else that he wants as a reward afterwards – a treat, chasing a Frisbee, tugging on a rope, attention and loving. Remember that dogs are not volunteers or humanitarians; they are “paid” workers. You have to find out what “pay” the dog is willing to work for.
The dog is hardwired to protect his home and his people. He is alert, barks, and looks for backup from his people or other resident dogs when strangers arrive or predatory animals invade. A normal dog doesn’t carry out unprovoked vicious attacks – badly trained, psychotic, or mentally ill dogs might. An otherwise stable and balanced dog that attacks has been provoked.
Dogs that have the run of your property will learn your boundaries. They might not be precise to the fence line, but they are generally pretty close to it. They aren’t inclined to wander off and get lost. If they do, generally they don’t come back.
A good dog learns his limits. You and your people are the dominant species, and dogs actually need the boundaries and behavior control that your dominance provides. Young livestock guardian dogs might rough up their livestock charges when the dogs are pups – but stern discipline from you, the dog’s alpha owner, teaches that kind of behavior isn’t tolerated. The dog gets one chance to make a mistake. If you discipline the dog (seriously, because you mean it), and it does the same thing again, the dog is gone. No excuses.
You can trust a good dog to be a reliable dog. Never, never, ever put all your trust into a dog. Always, in the back of your mind, you must remember that all dogs are self-interested predators. They are programmed to chase and kill smaller animals and eat them – and they enjoy the chase and kill. They have sharp, biting, and flesh-tearing teeth, with strong molars to crunch through bone. They will eat herd animals’ manure like candy, and roll all over dead carcasses until they stink of dead-thing. A dog is not a person. Dogs have many qualities that endear them to us, but they are not us. We are the pack leaders, and the dog is the pack.
Dogs are not static defense in the way a fence is, but a dog that understands your property boundaries will alert if trespassers come onto your land – therefore, becoming part of your security infrastructure. With their keen hearing and sense of smell, they can perceive the presence of intruders before we do. The dog may stiffen up, sniff the air, the hair on its back may raise, and it may growl or whine to let you know something’s amiss. Pay attention to that, and remove yourself from harm’s way.
Whenever someone in your group goes out to check locations in the outer rings of your property, they should take a dog along. Many rural residents have stories about the dog that barked and distracted an attacking pig or bull long enough for the person to get away, or the dog that got between the person and a venomous snake. Children benefit by having a dog, and there are thousands of stories of children rescued or protected by their dogs. That’s how dogs protect their pack and their pack leaders.
In the coming Cold Times, don’t spay or neuter dogs. At some point, you’ll want to replace your old dogs with puppies. There may not be any decent ones left since hunger has taken many pets in past cold ages. Female dogs come “in season” and can be impregnated for about 2 weeks, once or twice a year. The signs are unmistakable.
If you don’t want pups, put the female into a tight pen during that time. When she is in season, your male dogs will fight among each other; when she’s done, they’ll be friends again. The rest of the time, she’s got her job. If she has puppies, she’ll have them under a car or in a hay-filled barn if it’s cold outside, and she’ll raise them without a speck of help from anyone else until they are 4-6 weeks old. Then, they’ll need some extra food. Some will probably die. Let that happen. Pups that live will be strong and hardy, what you need for the Cold Times ahead.
In hard times, dogs eat whatever they get – soup, oatmeal, moldy bread, leftovers, dead chickens, wild animals they have hunted, bad eggs, guts and leavings from livestock that was butchered. They’ll do better on this varied diet, loaded with natural nutrients and important vitamins, than they ever did on GMO-corn-based kibble. If you can, make sure each dog gets a rabies vaccination every two years. If there aren’t vaccinations available, be prepared to destroy any dog or cat with strange symptoms, such as staggering, unable to drink or eat, or personality changes, so you don’t risk your family’s health. That’s another reason you need more than one dog.
If you currently have a dog, keep it until extenuating circumstances force another decision on you. If you only have one, get another one – NOT neutered or spayed. Look for “free puppies” signs. These will be crossbred, which is exactly what you want. Buy some dewormer and a “puppy shot” at the nearby feed store, and treat the dog. Get or make an insulated outside house, bowl of water, and something to eat. Dog lives outside.
Don’t get a purebred anything. You will have no need for registration papers, and papers don’t make a good dog. Purebred dogs, like purebred chickens, come from limited gene pools, and you sure don’t want to end up with the products of intense inbreeding when you need smart, healthy animals. Look for dogs with herding or guardian ancestry.
“Drop offs” are dogs and other pets that someone has dumped out on a lonely country road. During downturns in the economy, backcountry farms are inundated with dogs of every breed, crossbreds, and everything else. The same will happen during the Zen-slap. I’ve had purebred Bassett Hounds, Rhodesian Ridgebacks, Australian Shepherds, and an assortment of mixes “show up” starving and desperate. One of the best dogs we’ve had – who saved elderly Granny’s life by finding her in the woods in the middle of the night – was a well-trained pit bull, not a breed we usually think of as a rescue dog! Hard to believe someone could just abandon such a nice dog out in the wilds to its fate.
Most drop off dogs die of hunger, being shot by farmers, or being killed by coyotes, by the way. So if you know someone who’s thinking of doing that with their dog, advise them to do the right thing and just take the dog to be euthanized at the vet. It would be kinder to the dog.
Finally, if things really go bad, be aware that someone may try to capture your free running dogs to turn them into meals. Or, worse yet, you may be at a point of desperation so great that the dog ends up on the menu. Do what you must with no regrets. If it helps, remember that the dog is a carnivorous predator, and it would eat us if it had to without a moment’s hesitation.
Controlling Entries and Boundaries
Each entryway has a single, visible sentry behind a locked gate on the perimeter of the property’s outer ring. The sentry’s job is to either allow entry or to prevent it. The sentry waits in a protected warmable structure, the “guard shack”, which might be a stalled vehicle or something similar. Somewhere nearby, that sentry is visible to one or two others who are hidden and ready to take defensive action at a distance. A method of discrete signals, perhaps raising a hand, or taking off a hat, indicates to the watchers that the sentry is under
threat, and immediate action is needed.
The sentry may be in radio contact with the command center, or may be empowered to make his own decisions on who gets in and who doesn’t. The group may be looking for people with specific skills (medical, construction, electrician, etc), or may simply have no additional food or space; the group may be willing to let in relatives of those inside (the sentry should have a list of ‘acceptable’ names). These are all factors in the sentry’s decisions.
Potential entries are told to remove jackets, lift shirts, turn around, demonstrating that they are not carrying concealed. Any visible armaments should be placed on the ground and retrieved by the sentry, for return later. All new entries should spend a couple weeks in quarantine before exposing the main group. Exceptions can be made for emergency messages or other situations, of course.
If the entryways have previously been “tried” by outsiders, barricades and funnels may be necessary. Old vehicles, downed trees, or other obstacles can be utilized.
Sentry posts need off-property monitors, as well, to let the sentry know when there is movement on the road. That means OPs need communications or visual signaling such as semaphore or blinks of a light, that can be received by the sentry day or night.
Boundaries and gates need to be watched even more carefully at night, since intruders often seek the cover of darkness. If you or your group are able, night vision (NV) and/or infrared (IR) goggles or monoculars will give you the ability to “see in the dark.”
Better yet, if you can outfit your OPs with NV or IR, their ability to give advance warning and manage potential intrusions at night increases dramatically. The high price of the equipment would be worthwhile, if it prevented potentially damaging intrusions.
These battery operated devices are expensive at a couple thousand dollars and up, but would be worth their weight in gold during any serious downturn situation. Store them with the batteries out, and use only for brief periods of time rather than continuously. Some of these have a small light or illumination that is visible at a distance; shield or otherwise cover this, turn it off if possible. That light gives away your position to distant viewers. There’s no indications if NV or IR equipment could survive an EMP; a Faraday cage wouldn’t hurt.
If you still have power and wifi, you can send a drone with camera aloft to monitor your boundaries from a distance. These are becoming increasingly inexpensive with good ones for $200 or so. If you have the funds, spend extra to get one with a longer flight time and NV or IR capabilities. It can help you find lost livestock and live game, as well, without having to hike through the woods.
Sentries and gate guards will have the responsibility to turn away travelers and beggars, for lack of a better word. In any kind of downturn, this is the hardest and most wrenching job particularly if the individuals in question are young, or children, or defenseless-appearing women. These pitiful cases, if allowed entry, can be your undoing. They may be “spies” sent by other groups to identify your assets and weaknesses, or they may merely be desperate folk who have lost everything. You can’t tell by looking, so you must assume the worst. If there is a refugee center in a nearby town, send them there. As hard as it may be, don’t offer food. That will signal that you have food, and make your group a target.
Weapons
Every person over the age of 10 in your group should be skilled enough to shoot accurately and on target at a distance of 50 feet, load and unload, and handle a firearm safely, at the very minimum. It wasn’t that many years ago that rural kids carried their trusty .22 to school for lunchtime target practice, and in the hopes of bagging a rabbit or squirrel on the way home to help with supper. In a very worst case situation, your group’s ability to muster overwhelming firepower may make the difference between having a future and not having one. Start training this week, and continue once a week until you have the skills down – then train continuously once a month after that. People quickly unlearn this skill, so it has to be practiced to maintain it.
We can thank “the Father of Prepping”, Ragnar Benson, for publicizing the idea that there are three types of firearms that a prepper needs: a shotgun, a handgun, and a rifle. Each of these weapons has uses for which it is ideal; there is no firearm that meets all the uses by itself.
Shotguns are for “home defense” and for hunting large animals if you use slug shot. They are good defensive weapons, because under duress your aim can waver – but a shotgun’s blast widens out as it leaves the barrel and puts pellets into a relatively large area. Shotguns using slug ammunition put a single powerful slug in nearby targets with ease.
Handguns are for close-by defense, and have the ability to be concealed easily. In a desperate situation, the handgun in your coat pocket can be fired right through the fabric, negating the need to pull the weapon out before shooting. The old saw about a handgun is only good for fighting your way back to your rifle is true enough in battlefield conditions, but we certainly hope we never have to get there.
Rifles are “to reach out and touch someone” at a distance. Ideally, if your group utilizes rifles efficiently, you won’t need to worry about using handguns or shotguns. Rifles are also the go-to tool for hunting large and small animals.
Caliber represents the relative “size” of a round of ammunition. The size is a designation generally based on millimeters. Therefore, a .22 round is smaller than a .38 round, which in turn is smaller than a .44 round.
What I’m not going to tell you here is what type of shotgun, handgun or rifle to get, simply because there is so much variance between users. A small woman with tiny hands won’t be able to control a big Smith and Wesson .357 revolver very well, for example, although these rounds pack a wallop and can stop threats quickly. She’d be better off with a smaller caliber, such as Walther .22 or lighter Sig Sauer semi-auto 9 mm – because a small well-controlled round does more damage than a large heavy round that misses the target. The 9 mm is a common mid-range caliber that lends itself to many applications and many skill levels.
Semi-automatic handguns generally called “pistols”, and manual handguns called “revolvers”, may shoot the same caliber of ammo but some shot is made for semi-auto specifically. You must read the ammo box to be sure. Pistols have the advantage of being able to shoot more rounds than a revolver – over a dozen or more in some cases. Most revolvers must be reloaded after 5 or 6 rounds. Revolvers, however, have the advantage of being simple and mostly trouble-free, whereas pistols may jam at inopportune moments.
Common shotgun choices are .410, 12-gauge and 20-gauge, with the 12-gauge being a more powerful shot than the other two. Four-ten ammo is fairly lightweight and is generally used for bird hunting with “bird shot” (basically, bb’s), but “slug-shot” (a single bullet) can be efficient against larger animals as well. Shotguns come with either a single barrel or double barrels, and manual reload or semi-auto. There are few things more chilling to intruders than the chuk-chuk sound of a pump shotgun being readied to fire.
Rifle type and caliber are among the most contentious areas of discussion among preppers – AK? AR? Moisin? .22? 30.06? Suffice it to say that each type of rifle has positives and negatives. Moisin-Nagant, for example, has a strong positive of putting 7.64 x.54 bullets on target hundreds of yards away using simple peep-sights, with practice – but equally strong negative of being heavy and unwieldy to carry. Being older, it has a plus of being a relatively inexpensive firearm to buy, but a negative that the ammo is harder to find than more common rifles.
In the same way, AR-15’s have the advantage of good accuracy and high capacity magazines – but have the drawback of being finicky and sensitive to environmental changes or grittiness. AK-47’s, on the other hand, can tolerate poor care and harsh environments and just keep going, but their accuracy leaves a lot to be desired.
Selecting Firearms
Your best bet in weaponry is to explore different types – that is, actually go out and shoot them, at shooting ranges that will lend to you, for examp
le, or with friends who have what you think you might like. You won’t know what fits you and works best for you, until you try it out. If you buy a firearm that you decide you don’t really like, sell it and buy another – you do not want to stake your life on equipment that doesn’t work for you.
Firearms that are all tricked out with the latest hot gadgetry typically indicate an owner with more money than skill. Serious shooters need a sighted-in accurate weapon with a good peep-sight or scope….everything else is nice but unnecessary.
If you have no experience with firearms, go to a shooting range and ask for guidance. The range may offer classes, live individual instruction, or have contacts with people who do. Don’t be shy – you won’t be the first newbie they’ve seen, and gun-folk love talking about their firearms.
Each firearm you own needs a minimum of 1000 rounds of ammo. Three thousand rounds each would be better, and allows you some for routine practice. Remember, there may come a time when finding new ammo may be very hard. Explore ammo reloading to reduce costs a little.
Cold Times — How to Prepare for the Mini Ice Age Page 35