#and fuck knows kirkman didn't do any exploration on the issue

[sweaterkittensahoy]

Decided to visit my Walking Dead nostalgia and the first fic I opened talked about Daryl having no wild game to kill years after the apocalypse, and I’ve had this rant before but I’ll have it again goddamnit: 

If half the population (at minimum; the implication on the show has always skewed to 80-90%) has gone zombie, there is plenty of fucking game left to hunt. Given, especially, that walkers in Walking Dead are slow-moving and need to be in a herd to take down a deer (because they are slow-moving), you cannot fucking convince me that the humans left alive--traveling in small groups, re-creating small towns--are gonna take out the local wildlife population.

ESPECIALLY THE DEER AND TURKEYS. 

If you need a scarcity, you can have the turkeys. They’re dumb as dry dirt. I once called my parents to say I’d passed the train tracks in my hometown and would be there in five minutes only to have them call me back 8 minutes later to figure out why I was late, and the answer was I’d turned onto their road, and there was a fucking wild turkey, and wild turkeys don’t give a shit. I got stuck behind that fucker for ten minutes. 

So, fine, turkeys are thin on the ground because they’re fucking idiots. 

Deer?? Deer are not. At the first rustle from a horde, deer would be FUCKING GONE. Deer would ALSO be fucking gone if a group of humans tried to be subtle. You can only get deer if you are very quiet for a LONG TIME.

Related: I MIGHT grant you a pond could get too murky with fish shit that it wouldn’t be fishable, but no way a river won’t have SOME FISH. Okay, fine, maybe a couple of species got eaten into extinction by bigger fish. But SOME FISH would make it. I assure you.

But, like, if you learn nothing, understand that even with super robust hunting seasons AND getting hit by cars AND walking literally into people’s yards, deer are BARELY kept in control in the modern day. Even if you can cancel out the need for permission to hunt, deer are still gonna outrun WD zombies AND be hard to sneak up on by the humans. AND there’s still rabbit and squirrell and turkeys (dumb as they fucking are) to hunt.

There is literally a zero percent chance that anyone on Walking Dead is gonna be unable to hunt SOMETHING. If they miss after hunting Walkers for so long, that’s the worst version of dramatic effect.