Man Vs Wild

[Lauwit 9]

I was watching a program on the Discovery Channel the other night where a guy is dropped into the middle of the wilderness and has 5 days to find his way out. The host was in the British Special Forces, climbed Mt. Everest, etc. Along the way he builds shelters and fires and finds food & water. He also does some amazingly stupid stuff (IMO) like white water rafting with no raft, jumping off of cliffs with no idea how deep the water may be, etc. I have to admit that I really like watching some of the stuff and have often thought "Hey I learned that in Scouts" (not the stupid stuff).

 

My question is for those of you who have seen the show... What do you think of the show? Is the show really giving the general public or Scouts who watch the show a good plan to survive if lost in the wilderness?

 

I ask because I thought I was taught to stay in one spot, find shelter & water, and wait to be found.

 

Lauwit

 

[Gunny2862 11]

I love the show although I concur that not leaving the area likely to be searched is the best method.

 

His premise is that you are truly out of luck, over due and no one is looking for you - how can you survive, travel, and get back to any link to civilization. He takes his camera crew along with him. Even with the support team I don't know if I would be willing to try some of the more extreme things he does, e.g. floating along a river UNDER an ice shelf for an unknown distance.

 

I also like Survivorman with ?Les Stroud? he doesn't do nearly as much of the extreme things to try to get out. If you get hurt while you are alone you're likely to be out of luck on getting out. Something he attempted to show on one episode until he was doing so poorly he had to go back to using his "broken" arm in order to have any real chance at getting out. Les does it w/o camera crew and occasionally loses his helicopter "real emergency support/search" team.(This message has been edited by Gunny2862)

[CrewMomma 10]

I haven't had a chance to watch Man VS Wild yet but I am looking forward to seeing what it is about.

 

I have seen Survivor Man several times and enjoy it. He is a little bit melodramatic but he gives me a laugh. One of the things I remember SM doing is creating drinking water from salt water. We are headed off to sea base next summer and thought it would be a great thing to try out with the Crew!

[Its Me 10]

 

I really dislike the show. Too often I am sitting there with my tenderfoot scout and venture crew scout pointing out dumb things this guy does. He traveles at high noon in the desert. He climbed up walls that would have been way too technical and too risky to do unless you were an escaping prisnor. Too much shomanship for this family.

 

 

[SR540Beaver 116]

Survivorman is a far superior show. Les Stroud is actually out on his own and carries his own video equipment to film himself. Bear in Man vs Wild has a whole crew traveling with him. That is what allows him to do truely stupid stuff without much danger. He sensationalizes survival and in the process teaches some pretty foolish stuff to do. If he were alone like Les, he would be doing a totally different show while trying to really save his patootie.

[SSScout 1616]

 

And shall we mention the movie "Castaway" with Tom Hanks?

[resqman 108]

My son and I watch Surviorman with Les and enjoy him truely working to stay alive on his own. I prefer not to watch Man vs. Wild because of all the stupid things he does.

 

In a recent episode, he jumped 20 feet into unknown water. The water was literally freezeing cold, with a brisk wind, and his claim was that he could see steam rising off the ground a mere 20 minute hike from the freezing water. His plan was to jump into freezing water, swin across the creek, jog to the steam 20 minutes away and warm up in the volcano heated mud baths before hypothermina set in.

 

It seems in almost every episode he jumps from more than 6 feet into unknown water, during cold temps, spends an extended period in the water, and then climbs out in the hopes of finding a heat source. In one episode I though I detected a PFD under his sweat shirt as he washed up to the feet of the cameraman.

 

Man vs. Wild is a show about what NOT to do. Surviorman actually survives alone while taking mininal risk.

[Eagle69 46]

The Discovery Channel has a whole forum related to this show. I've looked at it a few times and a lot of the comments you all have made have appeared on the forum, including the question about the PFD.

 

http://community.discovery.com/eve/forums/a/cfrm/f/5651971848

[packsaddle 753]

Welcome to the forums! I have watched this show on many occasions and even though I know there's a film crew and that some of the stuff is contrived, I enjoy it. When he crashes through a hole in the ice it is real and you can really see how difficult it is to do some of the things he does.

 

I was recently impressed when he picked up a big double handful of fresh elephant dung and squeezed the fluid out of it into his mouth and swallowed it in order to demonstrate an extreme source of water for survival purposes. It is hard to fake something like that and I suspect he didn't.

If you take apart the shows and focus on the individual skills, you can high-grade them for the ones that are worth remembering. And if you 'read between the lines' during multiple episodes, you can glean broader messages that reveal a more general strategy for survival in a broad range of situations.

[GernBlansten 10]

Well, It seems my perception of the staged events in Man V Wild were true.

 

http://tinyurl.com/2la3yk

 

The king of survival and being miserable for my entertainment is still SurvivorMan!

[Gold Winger 9]

In Man V Wild he advocates drinking your own urine which is frowned upon by every source that I can find, including the various military survival manuals. Someone is going to try to survive by drinking pee and wind up dying.

[GernBlansten 10]

Well, if the army says so, it must be correct.

 

[ozemu 10]

I was an Australian Army survival instructor. Your shows will end up on our tv in 2008 very probably. It's a bit like that.

 

Our training was for when people were not coming to look for you. The expectation was that everybody else would be too busy for search and rescue.

 

So it was very low tech. The final ex was with knife, trousers, shirt and hat with boots. No socks etc. They pillaged our survival kits before we left and there was very little of any great use left. One bloke lost his boot laces because they were made of parachute cord - way too useful.

 

Eight days later we had great muscle definition! Spent four days around mangroves turning salt water in drinkable water while listening to crocodiles.

 

Heck - it all sounds impressive now.

 

But what was upper most in my mind (besides passing the course) was that it was all really just good bush craft and followed on from what I learned in Scouts. And I figured that I would be an SM one day and the skills would be useful for Scout camps.

 

Of course there were extra snippets like "if the bad guys are chasing you and you knock over a cow for food - take a rear leg and role the cow over so the missing leg is downmost. That way it will look like any other dead cow from a helicopter. And the rear leg is a lot of meat with a convenient carrying handle".

 

Navigating without instuments or map was particularly useful. Not what we teach generally because we are supposed to 'stay where you are'. But it is a useful skill for when I've broken and fogotten my compass.

 

This is reading a bit boastful - here's a levener. I was tossed out of Special Forces selection after just nine days. I might have been acceptable as a digger but as an officer I wasn't what they wanted.