Why Cody Lundin Matters
You need survival skills to maintain life for a specific period when your current situation goes from normal to chaotic, but you also need life sustaining skills. Skills that can support you for an indefinite period when the SHTF. While charging through the brush to run down a wild boar with only a wooden spear or a knife makes for good, “TV” it is not the way to start out once you find yourself lost or stranded.
You may think you need food right away but you usually do not. Food procurement is emphasized in most reality survival shows, because the people watching make food a priority. People will panic over lack of food before they would panic over not having a shelter or clean drinking water.
This is not about who, what, when and why, as far as the reasons Cody left the show. It is safe to say that all participants on the show Dual Survival are all experts on survival by anyone’s reckoning.
This article is about the realities of survival, and not about creating drama in a survival situation for drama’s sake. Lives will be at stake when the SHTF so you had better learn how to approach the situation in a systematic and calm manner and know how to get from point “A” to point “B”.
Like building a house, you cannot get ahead of yourself. The frame has to be up before the roof goes on. The same philosophy applies to survival and the skills needed.
Being lost or marooned is bad enough, but compounding your problems by possibly injuring yourself, when there is no reason for the actions that would cause the injury, is even worse. If with a partner and one or the other, gets hurt this endangers both. Of course, anyone can become injured, but to charge off purposely before getting a shelter built and a fire started is foolhardy and goes against common sense.
Another safe assumption one can make is that Cody Lundin paints by the numbers if you will. There are priorities, and shuffling the deck is not a wise move when caught up in a survival situation, first things first in other words. If you do it the same way each time, and in the same order, then you will always know what to do in a survival situation.
Hunting dangerous game with a spear is not usually recommended unless you have sufficient experience and have a spear that can actually be thrown effectively. A spear made from forest debris is usually a self-defense weapon.
Imagine a mountain lion is circling you. Do you throw the spear at the lion or do you wait for the lion to charge and then let the lion’s own weight impale itself on your spear. Dangerous either way you look at it.
If you throw the spear in hopes of impaling the lion, you will probably be its next meal. You miss and so now, you have no weapon. The same goes for hunting wild boar. If you have boar pits, then yes you can dispatch the boar using a spear, but out throwing spears at them means you will be disarmed a number of times, and wild boars are not shy about attacking humans. A wild boar can kill you as quickly as any mountain lion in Montana or panther in the Amazon jungles.
This is why you should pay attention to Cody. Granted when there is more than one person the duties can be split up, but shelter, fire and water in most cases is always a priority, and two working together on the priorities only makes sense. Hunters are important and each group or team needs one but it is also the hunter’s responsibility to remain effective.
Charging off through the brush is not keeping safe for the sake of the group or team. You as a member of any team have a responsibility to stay healthy and to make choices that benefit the team as a whole. It is not just your life at stake when part of a team in a survival situation.
The positive aspects of the show Dual Survival are numerous. As with any reality show however, certain things are staged and would not typically be something you could or should do in a real world situation. Overall, though, teamwork is evident and even stressed on the show at times, and in a real situation, teamwork is critical.
Cody Lundin in many cases errs on the side of caution, and you should as well unless in an extreme situation, where you are in immediate danger. Getting impatient and wanting to dash here and there wastes energy, causes you to make mistakes and increases your chances for injury. Hunger pangs will not kill you. In fact, you can live weeks without food but only days without water and in some cases, only hours without shelter and fire in extreme weather.
Cody could start a fire in virtually any situation and so could the others. However, for drama’s sake peeing in a baggie and then magnifying the sun’s rays through the liquid is more interesting, and it beats urinating in a helmet to take a drink.
In both cases, if in a real world situation, this would show desperation and a lack of training. If you were dehydrated, enough to drink your own urine, then you would not likely be able to produce any urine to drink. It is not recommended that you drink your own or anyone else’s urine.
You should stop and think about your situation so you can come up with a plan, and without a plan, there is no productive action that you can take that will benefit you.
It is understood that the show is about audiences and keeping people interested. Long days lost waiting for rescue is boring once you have a shelter and a water source. The show of course, is all about finding a way back to civilization. If you were truly lost, in most cases, wandering around would make it more difficult for rescue personnel to find you.
Anyone can be lost or stranded regardless of skill level. Once lost however, you have to decide based on your skill level whether it makes more sense to stay put, and do what you can to signal rescue personnel or do you set off to find civilization.
Cody knows what can be eaten in the wild and what was not edible, so he would tap the easy resources first, but he has the experience to do this. Going off first thing to set elaborate traps and snares that could break your hand or arm or impale a leg if you make a mistake may not always be the best course of action. Traps of this sort are time consuming as well, because to be effective you would need multiple traps.
Simple snares are a passive means of gathering food and should be employed as you fish and look for other foods, but building deadfalls to trap/kill large game is complicated and can be dangerous.
Enjoy the show or others like it but remember, what you are seeing done is not always practical in some survival situations. Many years of training on the part of the participants may make many tasks look easier than they really are.