Survival Traps to Catch Small Game – Deadfalls and Snares
A sustainable food source is arguably one of the most important aspects of a successful survival plan. Building survival traps are an excellent way to diversify your current food procurement plans without spending a lot of money.
The Benefits of Survival Traps
Food stores deplete over time and you can only carry so many bullets for your hunting rifle. Trapping provides sustainable nourishment for your family and can be accomplished with just a few simple tools.
Other key benefits of trapping include:
Trapping requires less energy expenditure than hunting. Although the thought of dragging a large deer home after spending the afternoon hunting sounds appealing, the energy consumed during this process does not usually justify the end result (especially if you are not successful).
A few well-placed traps often produce more food than a hunting trip and your time can be spent doing other survival-related tasks while the food comes to you.
In some survival situations, keeping your location a secret may be one of your best defense mechanisms. Discharging your firearm while hunting can quickly lead people with undesirable intentions into your vicinity.
Trapping is not an “all or nothing” option. Feel free to hunt, fish, and forage as you please. Your traps are going to be effective either way and the extra food and animal hides you harvest give you a serious survival advantage.
You don’t need expensive tools or equipment to trap successfully. As you will see below, a couple dollars’ worth of supplies in your bug out bag is all you need to become a successful trapper.
Types of Survival Traps
Although we could spend hours discussing the types of traps that are effective in various situations, there are two basic designs that have been used for centuries effectively.
Known as the dead fall and the simple snare, either of these options (or a combination of the two) is all you really need to harvest meat from the wilderness.
Deadfalls
Dead falls are great because they can be constructed entirely from materials you find outside. Rocks, logs, felled trees, and branches can all be used to construct the dead-fall in a pinch.
In its simplest form, a dead fall is nothing more than a heavy object propped up by sticks with a trigger system. The idea is that an animal will activate the trigger mechanism; causing the heavy object to fall.
There are many ways to create an effective dead-fall in a survival situation. One of the best designs is known as the Paiute Dead-fall. This design has been used effectively by Native Americans for centuries and can be constructed without any special tools.
The design does rely on a piece of cord to hold tension on the system until the trigger is activated. If you do not have any cord or string in your bug out bag, you can usually fabricate some using vines, long grasses, etc.
Paiute Dead fall
To construct a Paiute deadfall, take two sticks of similar length to support the weight of the rock or other heavy object (logs also work well). A small twig is used as the trigger mechanism and a long thin branch is used as a bait stick. Your rope or cord is attached to the trigger twig and to the upper support stick.
The trigger is wrapped around the lower support stick and held in place by the bait stick. When an animal attempts to remove the bait, the movement releases the trigger and activates the dead-fall.
This design is ideal because it is extremely sensitive (higher success rate than other survival traps) and it is safer to construct because your fingers are not positioned under the weight of the dead-fall at any time during assembly.
Simple Snare
A snare is a wire noose designed to tighten around an animal; holding it until it can be harvested.
Although there are hundreds of variations of the snare trap, a simple snare is the easiest to create and can easily be adapted to more complex implementations depending on your situation.
A simple snare can be made for materials you probably already have lying around your home. When trapping animals up to approximately 10 pounds, all you need is some copper wire to fabricate snares for practically no cost.
An old lamp or other small appliance works well. The wire connecting it to the outlet (usually 18-2 gauge) provides enough material to construct quite a few traps.
You can also purchase a small roll of wire from the hardware store and stash it in your bug out bag to build survival traps.
Using Appliance Wire for Snares
If you choose to use appliance wire, notice that it is actually two strands of wire held together by insulation.
Start by cutting the wire into a 2 foot section. Separate the two pieces of wire so that you have (2) 2 foot sections of wire with insulation still attached.
Using a sharp knife, carefully peel back the layer of insulation from each strand of wire. Notice that the copper wire is actually composed of multiple thin strands bunched together. Be careful not to damage these fine copper strands while removing the insulation.
Separate the strands into halves again. You should now have four strands of copper wire in front of you.
Take each strand and twist it together. This compresses the individual copper fibers into a single piece. Trim the ends of each strand and twist again to prevent the wire from unraveling later.
Whether you purchased wire at the store or you created your own from an old appliance, these next steps are how you actually create the snare.
Constructing a Simple Snare
Make a loop the size of a dime in each end of the wire strand. One of these loops will attach to the anchor and the other will form the lasso or noose of the snare.
Put one loop through the other to form the noose. Tighten the loop that forms the lasso so that there is just enough room for the wire to pass through when under tension.
The small loop that attaches to the anchor can be hooked onto a tree, a rock, or some other heavy object that will hold the animal until you can retrieve it.
Correct Placement for Snares
For a simple snare like this to be effective, you need to think about proper placement. Look for areas where animals typically pass through and place snares in these areas. As animals move along their normal travel routes, with any luck you will trap some of them using this method alone.
Other Adaptations of Simple Snares for Survival Traps
There are also many adaptations that rely on simple snares. Spring pole snares and squirrel poles are two of the most popular.
For a spring poll snare, instead of anchoring your snare to an immovable object, attach it to a young sapling that is healthy enough to spring back to its original position after being bent over.
Using a trigger system similar to the one discussed for dead-falls, you can greatly increase your chances of success. When the trigger is activated, the sapling will spring back to its original position and tighten the snare around the animal.
A squirrel pole is simply a felled tree or large branch with multiple simple snares attached across its length. Once you’ve attached all the snares, lean the pole against a tree that shows signs of squirrel activity. The natural curiosity of squirrels often means that many of them will get captured in this simple design.
Although there are many other ways to trap animals, dead-falls and simple snares are the most reliable and easiest to create quickly. In situations where hunting is not practical, trapping is an excellent solution that can greatly increase your daily food harvest with very little energy expenditure.
Paracord, String, and Wire for Survival Traps
If you’ve been keeping track, the only materials your bug out bag needs for trapping are a length of string or lightweight paracord and a small roll of copper wire. As long as you have these two items, you can create traps and snares in any environment.
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