Poison for hunting?

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HM

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The improvised weapon thread gave me the idea to discuss the possibility of using poisoned arrowheads/darts/spears to potentially overcome lack of good aiming skills and bring down bigger animals faster. Curare and the skin excrutum of little poisonous frogs are the examples I vaguely remember.
I am looking for the opinion of more experienced people. Jeff Randal certainly competent in it, and I would also love to hear Walks Slowly's and Walt Weltch's answer among others.

Thank you,

HM

 
I would say that poison would not make up for lack of aiming, but rather for lack of punch. I knew a guy, rather scared me actually, who told about the .22 derringer he carried. He bored out the tip, dropped a wee bit of mercury in the hole, and sealed it with wax. He didn't care about takedown power, but wanted to make darn sure anyone he shot would die. He still had to hit them.

With animals, you'll still need to hit them. With anything deer size and larger, you'd have to be a good tracker to take them, most of the time even with modern equipment, and poison wouldn't change that, just make your trail a bit shorter. Larger, and I wouldn't bother shooting them to start with, smaller, and I want to kill them where they are, before they run to ground. I guess, in general, I'd want to focus my time on snares and traps, rather than things to kill larger critters. I know I could preserve meat, but a steady, small, supply would be easier to manage than large supplies in infrequent chunks, and I wouldn't starve waiting to kill my first deer...


Stryver
 
I realize we are talking survival here so the following would not be a major concern . BUT, be very careful using poisons for hunting , they are illegal to use in most states I know of. THere was a time when they were leagal for use with the bow and wrrow but that day is long gone.

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Lee

LIfe is too important to be taken seriously. Oscar Wilde
 
There aren't a lot of poisons I can think of that I would tolerate in an animal I was going to eat. I also don't know of any good arrow poisons that I could find in the wilds of the USA. As I recall you get Curare from the woody plant strichnos toxifera (sp?) which is native to South America. You get brachiotoxin (sp?) from the arrow poison frogs of Central America and northern South America. You get bushman's arrow poisong from acocanthera venata (sp?) aka "bushman's arrow poison bush" from Africa. The only one I've seen in the US is the bushman's arrow poison plant which was imported a few years back as an ornamental shrub. I saw it on a college campus.

While cyanide might be fast enough to be useful I don't want to contaminate my game with it. I guess nicotine is about the only one I could find in the wild that might work. A common southwestern plant called nicotiana glaucos (sp?) aka "tree tobacco" has a deadly concentration of nicotine and could be boiled to produce a concentrate. I've got no experience trying to do this, but a professor once described using the plant this way to produce insecticide. Tree tobacco gets to be around 6 feet tall, with a thick fleshy stalk, slightly greyish green leaves, and tubular yellow flowers a little like honey suckle. (This is all from my old memory).
 
Like stated above I hope your talking about a desperate survival situation. Poison is not only illegal but very unethical. How about developing some hunting and woodsman skills instead of reading books on how to kill easier.
 
I don't see anything unethical about using poisoned darts--it's just illegal, dangerous, and typically impractical. If I had to kill an elk with a crude spear with a whittled point it would possibly be much more merciful to anaesthetize it with nicotine than to track it for days waiting for the spear to work. The trade-off to me is whether I should spend time making a better spear head or making poison. I would go for the better spear head.
 
it would possibly be much more merciful to anaesthetize it with nicotine QUOTE]
Nicotine sulfate is not merciful. It paralyzes them, but they can be conscious for quite some time befor the CNS stops or they die from a lot of stress. Dying from stress dumps a lot of unwanted hormones into the muscles this makes the meat less than enjoyable. Nicotine was the last legal drug sold for use with bow hunting. The above is why it was one of the reasons it was banned. And why nicotine is no longer used for chemical immobilization.


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Charlie D
Click to expand...
 
Thanks for the input on nicotine Charlie. I knew that it was used in the first generation of "tranquilizer" darts, but I didn't know how it really worked. My speculation that the drug would be more merciful assumed that you tracked your prey down and dispatched it asap. I wasn't assuming that the chemical itself did the job. The contrast for me was tracking a mortally wounded animal for days verses tracking one for half an hour or less.

I don't advocate using poison darts. I actually favor a spear thrower and javelins with wide cutting points.
 
I recall reading a about Alaskan woodsmen who carried a dried Monkshood root in their kits for extreme emergencies. The root was crumbled and thrown into a pool of water. The active poison would kill large numbers of fish, which would than be collected and consumed. The poison apparently killed by suffocation. I don't know if this would actually work or not, but always found the idea interesting as a extreme measure.

John
 
In order to use a fish poison you need a small body of still water like a pond. Your poison will likely kill all the fish in that pond and leave it dead. This is pretty extreme. I don't remember all the fish poisons in the states. The commonly mentioned one is walnut husks. I'd probably eat walnuts while I came up with a better mode of fishing.
 
Gentlemen,

Thanks for the replies.
I agree with Jeff Clark at several points and assumed the use of poison in a survival situation.
I wish I could tell you whether the natives who use dart poisons use it for food animal hunting or for warfare. If they use it for food gathering, I think that justifies the use of it potentially. We still do not know how they get rid of the poison from the meat.
Even then we are left with the problem of finding a good poison around. Tobacco tree was mentioned, how about regular tobacco (Nikotiana tabanicum?)?
About fish poison:
FM21-76 Army Manual:
Rotenone works on cold-blooded animals but not on human but looseseffectivity with lower temp (useless below 50F). Plants are: Anamirta in Southern Asia and South Pacific, Croton tiglium in South Pacific, Barringtonia in Malaya (?) and in Polynesia, Derris genus in the tropics, Duboisia in Australia, Tephrosia in .....(not mentioned, somebody should have really review it before printing), Lonchocarpus in TROPICAL AMERICA and WEST INDIES (getting closer!!!), and finally green husks from hickory nuts, butternuts and black walnuts (crush and throw husk into water).
Moreover, lime from burnt coral and seashells!
And if I am correct then burnt limestone (industrial method to get lime) should be fine to! In the area where I grew up limestone was everywhere and even used as brick. With little effort one could find ancient seashells in it (actually ancient seashell sediments formed geological limestone layers as far as I know).

Thanks for all the inputs. Please share with us any further thought on it.

HM


 
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