By Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh ——Bio and Archives--April 21, 2023
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I am obsessed with the show ALONE for several reasons. Number one is the killing of animals which I could not do. I do eat meat and I know how and where my meat comes from.
I watched my Mom kill chickens and saw her holding its head while the body was dancing in the grass, dying. She then submerged the whole thing in boiling water to make it easier to pluck its feathers. I always left the tiny apartment because the smell made me sick to my stomach.
When I was growing up, I knew Grandpa slaughtered a pig every year for the extended family during the Christmas feast. The red blood splattered in the white snow remains in my memory to this day. In retrospect, it did not look like a humane killing and the pig knew what was happening to him.
I remember grandpa burying a pig one year, far in the woods, because the village vet tech told him that it had trichinosis worms, and it was not fit for human consumption.
A few childhood friends died of parasitic infestations, the result of living off the land, just like these contestants on ALONE. The children who died were not lucky to be live close to a medical clinic that could have treated them. There was no doctor assigned to the village even though it was only 10 km from a large city. The bus ran twice a day, but people had little money to travel.
I remember when Mom’s youngest sister used to take me and my best friend Steluta to the Prahova River. The water had the clarity of crystal and was so cold, coming down from the mountains. There were natural pockets between large boulders where the water was deeper, and large fish were trapped.
We played in the water with fishes swimming around us. We were hungry all the time, but it never occurred to us to try to catch any. We were afraid that someone would report us to the communist government, and we would go to jail. Technically everything belonged to the Party, including the river, and we did not have their permission to fish.
The ALONE survival show brings to life for me the reality that every day we live, some creatures die to keep us alive. We just do not realize how much killing we do indirectly because someone else does the killing for us.
The reality show’s participants have revealed survival skills, gathering, hunting, fire building, shelter building, bow hunting, primitive survival, endurance in the face of starvation, standing up to large predatory animals, basket weaving, tool-carving, and other skills. They all have shown respect and gratitude for what they fished, hunted, and killed to eat. It was not pretty, but it was life.
Survivalists knew what plants to collect to supplement their food and which have medicinal properties. In our modern world, we are entirely removed from such knowledge, and from our meat sources if we consume meat.
Urbanites, who often are vegetarians, do not have gardens and have no idea how to plant, grow, and harvest vegetables and legumes; they are just as far removed from their food sources as meat eaters are.
A lady survivalist snared a squirrel. Momma squirrel came immediately, trying to revive her baby, and she was making all these crying sounds and chittering loudly. It was heartbreaking!
A survivalist from West Virginia who hunted and killed with his bow and arrow a beaver in Labrador, Canada, contracted giardiasis, a parasitical infection from the beaver meat--he called it ‘beaver fever.’
He had to undress down to his underwear and swim in the freezing water to retrieve the dead beaver’s body which was floating in the middle of the river. Hunger was stronger than the potential for hypothermia.
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Within hours of consuming the undercooked beaver meat and fat, he got so sick that he had to tap out to seek medical attention. Was it the revenge of the beaver for killing him/her and leaving his/her mate alone for life? I have empathy for both the man and the poor beavers. But then larger animals maul humans all the time as well if they are in their habitat or vicinity, and they happen to be hungry.
Joe Keller wrote about his haunting hunting encounter. “I shot a deer once. Never again. There were two of them that jumped over a stone wall in the woods. The first was a doe and the second was a spike buck, three-four years old. I shot the buck, and it dropped on the spot. The doe was about 30 yards away and turned around. I called for my brothers-in-law, and they came running. We were all bent over the dead buck and the doe, its mother, stuck her head in-between us and tried to get the buck to stand up by nuzzling it a few times. She looked at us, as if we could help her. After a couple of minutes her eyes got watery, her head drooped, and she slowly plodded herself way away from us. I have not killed as much as an insect since that day. It still haunts me.”
The worst health scare in the Alaska wilderness of this reality show was the case of a young man who contracted trichinosis and it attacked major organs so severely that he was hours from death. His former 32-year-old heart resembled the heart of an 87-year-old. It took him months to recover from the damage to his organs and he suffered from debilitating congestive heart failure.
Watching these survivalists choke down roasted crickets, worms, and other bugs convinced me even more that the globalist plan to destroy our food sources and supply and replace them with farmed bugs in the name of saving the planet from an invented global warming is not for me.
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Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh, Ileana Writes is a freelance writer, author, radio commentator, and speaker. Her books, “Echoes of Communism”, “Liberty on Life Support” and “U.N. Agenda 21: Environmental Piracy,” “Communism 2.0: 25 Years Later” are available at Amazon in paperback and Kindle.