**Survival Skills:**
– Wilderness first aid includes treating common injuries like snake bites, fractures, burns, and infections.
– Shelter building involves creating effective shelters for protection against elements and animals.
– Fire-making methods like solar spark lighters and flint strikers are essential for warmth and cooking.
– Water sourcing and purification are crucial for hydration and preventing dehydration-related health risks.
– Food procurement techniques include foraging for edible plants, hunting, and fishing for sustenance.
**Additional Survival Skills:**
– Navigation techniques such as celestial, map, compass, and natural navigation aid in finding safety and suitable locations.
– Mental preparedness involves maintaining clarity, focusing on tasks, and recognizing denial in survival situations.
– Urban survival skills like ‘Drop, Cover, and Hold’ during earthquakes are important for safety in urban disasters.
– Importance of hydration for maintaining bodily functions and cognitive performance in extreme conditions.
– Psychological aspects of survival, including staying calm, building resilience, and fostering teamwork for enhanced survival chances.
**First Aid and Shelter Building:**
– First aid skills include immobilizing limbs, wound care, and knowledge of medicinal plants for treating injuries.
– Shelter properties like insulation, location, and heat sources are crucial in preventing hypothermia and hyperthermia.
– Understanding how to build various shelters like debris huts and snow caves is essential in survival situations.
– Fire provides a sense of safety and home in wilderness survival, emphasizing the importance of fire-making skills.
– Survival kits with items like first aid supplies and fire-starting tools are essential for potential survival scenarios.
**Water Sourcing and Food Procurement:**
– Water sourcing techniques like boiling, purification tablets, and filtration ensure safe drinking water in emergencies.
– Sources of water in the wild include rivers, lakes, and rainwater, with hydration packs and portable filters as useful tools.
– Food procurement methods involve hunting, fishing, and foraging for edible plants, insects, and small animals.
– The Universal Edibility Test helps determine safe plants for consumption, while caution is needed for toxic plants and contaminated water.
– Proper food storage and preparation are necessary to prevent food poisoning in survival scenarios.
**Shelter Building and Psychological Aspects of Survival:**
– Shelter construction using natural materials like branches and snow helps maintain body temperature in various environments.
– Psychological aspects of survival, such as staying calm, developing resilience, and prioritizing tasks, are crucial for survival.
– Fear, stress, and panic can hinder decision-making in survival situations, emphasizing the importance of mental preparedness.
– Building a sense of community and teamwork enhances survival chances by promoting adaptability and problem-solving skills.
– Psychological strategies like setting goals and staying focused aid in coping with survival challenges.
This article's tone or style may not reflect the encyclopedic tone used on Wikipedia. (November 2019) |
Survival skills are techniques used to sustain life in any type of natural environment or built environment. These techniques are meant to provide basic necessities for human life, including water, food, and shelter. Survival skills also support proper knowledge and interactions with animals and plants to promote the sustaining of life over time.
Survival skills are basic ideas and abilities that ancient people invented and passed down for thousands of years. Today, survival skills are often associated with surviving in a disaster situation.
Outdoor activities such as hiking, backpacking, horseback riding, fishing, and hunting all require basic wilderness survival skills, especially to handle emergencies. Individuals who practice survival skills as a type of outdoor recreation or hobby may describe themselves as survivalists. Survival skills are often used by people living off-grid lifestyles such as homesteaders. Bushcraft and primitive living are most often self-implemented but require many of the same skills. There are also many instances of survival skills being used to avoid attention from legitimate authorities or self-serving busybodies such as fugitives (from oppression or justice), irregular migrants, draft dodgers and draft evaders, poachers, escaped prisoners, serial killers, organized criminals and terrorists, by hiding in wilderness areas. Additionally, both park rangers and conservation officers are taught survival skills to help them find missing persons, and in case they become stranded while investigating wilderness crimes. The United States Armed Forces has a training program called SERE, in which military personnel, Department of Defense civilians, intelligence personnel, and private military contractors are taught survival skills and techniques for evading capture and escaping from captivity if they need to survive and hideout in wilderness areas while avoiding capture by enemy combatants.