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Drinking urine?
- Thread starter Codger_64
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Being a vampire sounds slightly advantages, but the whole thing about losing my soul makes it a no-go 
2L of water for a trip? You guys kidding me? I regularly have to take 6L if I can't reach water that day (ie. camping on a ridgetop). If you walk with a pack, you sweat and exhale a lot of moisture.
2L? Survive? Yes. Stay hydrated? No. Don't we all do hard walks here?
2L? Survive? Yes. Stay hydrated? No. Don't we all do hard walks here?
I'm honestly surprised if there is anyone with half a brain and with a tea spoon of survival/wilderness knowledge that did think that you can drink your own (or anyone else's) urine without doing more harm then good.
I actually have no tea spoons of survival knowledge and get the idea that drinking unfiltered human excrement is of no benefit.
The nauseating effect is something to consider, since blood is highly emetic to most folks.
But even not taking into consideration the pathogenic dangers of drinking raw animal blood, another point is that even if you don't throw up, blood is a highly osmotic fluid, because of it's composition (specially proteins and salts). It would be like drinking soup to quench your thirst, so it would work better as food then as liquid.
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Slightly off topic but I remember reading in an anthropology text about a nomadic people (can't remember specifics, sorry) that actually used the blood from animals in their herds as a dietary staple. I guess ingesting raw blood is something you can adapt to. They would bleed the animals in a rotation and then let them recover, never killing them. Kind of messed up, but apparently a decent food source. Anyway, my point is that you are dead on about blood being more akin to a food source than a water source.
i rarely bring water. If i do its about 2 cups worth.
here in BC all you have to do is walk 50 feet to the next creek, fill up the canteen and drop in a chem tab. Sure beats humping in a ton of water. By carrying less i get hike farther. Got my full kit down to about 3lbs. . YMMV of course
Hi Bushman, I envy your water availability! Here in Australia, it's easiest to walk along ridges, bushbashing down a spur to find a creek is a lot of work, sometimes meaning losing 300m elevation. I wish that it were different, but it's not.
But my original post was in reference to carrying 2L only in a desert environment. Which is crazy.
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Bushman, your a lucky man to live on that side of the ridge, on this side streams can be a bit more fickle. The Mongols are reputed to have drunk the blood of their horses during long marches, just enough to get by, especially when the horses had good grazing, so were well fed, but there was little to no game available to a large army. If you were adapted to it, it would be a pretty good staple I'd think, no problems with mineral deficiencies.
Even if you let it settle, the plasma is still pretty full of stuff. you could however use a still, blood does have a high water content, so distilling it would produce a good return
Even if you let it settle, the plasma is still pretty full of stuff. you could however use a still, blood does have a high water content, so distilling it would produce a good return
You beat me to it. The Masai use this mixture of blood + milk as a soup (food source, not water source). It has a high nutritional value.Maasai mix cattle blood and milk I think. According to a friend who was in the Peace Corps there, they also make a "beer" in 55 gallon drums and don't bother to dip out the drowned rats.
True, but there's a huge difference here: the blood is cooked. Nutritiously raw or cooked blood is basically the same, but once cooked blood looses it's "emetic properties", so to speak. And for those who cringe at the taught of eating blood even after it's cooked, you don't want to know what goes into hot dog sausages
.Not just the salt but basically everything else that goes into the mixture makes it an osmotic solution. That means it would have little value as a hydration source.
BUT, in an emergency situation, drinking animal blood would give you a few more days. Even with the threat of infection (I would even say it's a small risk), weighing the pros and cons I would undoubtedly drink blood if necessary - I think I could keep it down without throwing up in a life-or-death scenario. Totally different from urine, that will only cause harm and absolutely no benefit.
BTW, if you drink small amounts each time, it's easier to keep it down.
Dear God, from eating excrements we went to vampirism
