Skills like hunting, fishing, gathering and surviving in the elements are invaluable, particularly in a long-term survival situation or SHTF moment.

The more you can learn, the better off you will be; here are some skills you should try and master.

Hunting and gathering

Sure it helps if you pack a gun with ammo and your fishing pole with string and hooks with all the smelly stuff etc but do you know how to use all that stuff? Tracking animals takes some skill. Trapping them can take even more.

And if you got yourself a deer in the woods, do you know how to field dress it, skin it, butcher it and store the meat, and all that jazz? There are things to learn about what to do once you actually manage to grab or kill something you’re gonna eat. There are also a lot of uses for animals outside of just eating them. Would you know how to tan animal hides if you had to?

Homesteading

Let’s say you got yourself a dandy cabin in the woods and have a month’s worth of food stocked up there. What’re you gonna do the next month? Tracking, trapping and fishing take time and energy. One thing that can provide even more food per ounce of effort is gardening/farming/homesteading. You may not be able to carry or store 1,000 pounds of potatoes but you can sure grow them.

People who lived throughout the U.S. a hundred years ago and longer knew how to do this stuff because they grew up doing this stuff. A lot of us have lost this knowledge but it’s still available to be learned. Homesteading is the essence of self-sufficiency. In fact, there are so many useful things you can learn if you get into homesteading knowledge that it could easily deserve its own post on the benefits. Divining the knowledge within will bestow upon you the ability to do such things as: make soap, raise and butcher farm animals, grow crops, store food, make food such as butter and cheese out of basic components, make clothing, get energy off the land, and a LOT more.

Self defense

If you find yourself in a disaster or SHTF scenario, it won’t be enough just to know how to get stuff, fix stuff or store stuff. There are always gonna be people out there who’ve learned the TOPS method of survival – Taking Other People’s Shit.

Even having a gun is pretty useless if you don’t know how to use it. Take some time to learn how to defend yourself. Learn how to fight, how to shoot, how to take care of your weapons, how to make ammo, all that stuff. Figure out what you’d need to know that you can learn now. You may not be able to learn it in time then.

Also take some time learning how to defend your home and family. There are things you can do to set up your homestead and family to be protected, even if you’re not there to protect them. There are also things that you can learn that’ll make you be able to fight like a larger group (called a combat multiplier). The Army doesn’t just teach us to shoot, they teach us what to shoot, how to move, and how to communicate. You should learn that stuff too. You can’t always rely on calling 911.

Mechanical stuff

It’s awesome that you brought a $100,000 tricked-out, lifted, blown and badass F350 turbo diesel all EMP-proofed and stuff but if you went out one morning and it wouldn’t start, would you know how to get it running or does it instantly become a really expensive radio and extra storage for stuff you don’t wanna keep in the cabin?

You may have a garage full of all sorts of tools but do you actually know how to use them? There are a lot of basic things you can learn about how to troubleshoot and fix a car to get it running even if you don’t have replacement parts.

In my lifetime so far, I’ve used kite string and vice grips to get home at least 5 times in two different cars and a Harley. You may not have the luxury of having a mechanic around, or even parts. Plus, learning the basics of how to fix a car can help you if other mechanical things break like your swamp cooler or portable power system. Learn this now or be prepared to junk your stuff later.

The big thing about mechanical ability that you also need to keep in mind is that you need to learn how to fabricate things and use things in ways they weren’t designed for. If you were in the woods, would you be able to have hot water for showers? Could you make an evaporative cooler running off solar or water power? The more you learn about how things work, the easier it’ll be to make it work yourself, or even make one from scrap.

Basic survival

This is one that preppers usually do spend some time on. There are literally thousands of websites out there that can teach you call manner of bushcraft, as well as schools. I’d suggest that you get off your computer and get out actually into the woods and try it.

There are many ways to start a fire with wood and friction, and you may know ten methods off the top of your head but have you ever tried to do it? It’s not nearly as easy as it sounds. It’s a little like learning how to play pool. You can read all the books on the subject you want, and sit in lecture halls taught by the leading experts but that’s all crap until you get yourself to a table and hit some balls. If you’re gonna get a book on survival – just get this one – and then take it out camping with you.

You may not think so, but learning how to tie knots can be an important survival skill too. When I was going through the Warrant Officer Candidate School we had a leadership obstacle course that made us have to figure out how to do all kinds of stuff with random crap that was laying at the station. I’m decent with several knots but this was a bit more than I was used to. Luckily, one of the guys on my team was an 18C dude with a LOT of knot-tying experience. It made a few things work that wouldn’t have normally.

In basic survival, you also need to learn things like how to build a shelter, how to find and filter water, how to signal for help and how to protect yourself from the elements. There are many ways to do these things but if you know enough of them, you can just look at what you have available to you and adapt it to your needs without having to only be able to do it like they taught you on TV.

Make no mistake, it is incredibly important that survivalists stockpile what they think they might need to survive a survival situation or SHTF moment. The price of not being prepared is just simply too risky.

You also, however, have to have a working knowledge of basic skills pertaining to surviving or improvising what you have into what you need.

To learn more about this, check out Gray Wolf Survival.