Q & A with Cody: Poop-eating coyotes & heel cracks | Cody Lundin’s Keep Your Ass Alive Ep 6

Cody answers viewer questions about rabbit sticks, healing heel cracks, heavy metal rat-eaters, poop-eating coyotes, traveling barefoot, boiling water in a tortoise shell, wandering students, pee drinking, and more! Miss this episode and never forgive yourself for the lost opportunity to gain timeless wisdom.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:15

Cody Lundines. Keep your ass alive where Cody teaches real people, real skills, giving hard survival advice with another broadcasting from somewhere in a high desert wilderness. Cody.

SPEAKER_02 0:34

Hey, my name is Cody Lundine, and welcome to another episode of Keep Your Ass Alive. And we're going to do another down the barrel. And down the barrel means I'm talking to you. It's just me and you around the crackling campfire. And in this case, I'm going to be answering some questions that were emailed to me. And we'll see what they are and we'll go from there. So, first question is from Todd Lau. Todd says, Can a tortoise shell handle flame to boil water? Okay, so can I boil water in a tortoise shell? The answer is yes, you can do that. I mean, uh, try not, I mean, you're gonna have to kill the tortoise, right? That would be very cruel to boil water in the shell when the tortoise is alive. And don't do that unless you need to do that. There's lots of other containers you can use to boil water. An interesting tangent is we deal with gourds a lot in my courses through my Aboriginal Living Skills School. And you can stone boil too. And what that means is taking a rock and heating it up, and you got to be careful when you do that. I'll maybe get into a more in-depth thing later on. And you put that hot stone in a vessel that wouldn't normally be able to be put over a fire. So, what that means is you can stone boil in a gourd. You can stone boil in like the stomach of an animal, et cetera, where or you could have a depression in a rock in a big boulder, and you could drop hot rocks in that and stone boil. So there's lots of ways to boil water, and boiling is pretty important because it cooks food, it can disinfect water, et cetera, et cetera. It's been around for a long time, and it's been around for a long time for a reason. Next question is from Penny Strope. Penny says, I can think of no greater gift than the knowledge to live, quote, off the grid and become more aware of what my actions now take from the world. I want to preserve for future generations. And how can I help be a part of the cure and not part of the problem? Double question mark. Where do I sign up, Cody? Well, Penny and everyone else, um, you don't need to be off the grid to, you know, be a part of the solution, not the problem. I'm a big fan of simplicity and doing more with less. That's a motto for my school. So, what I would do regarding self-reliance, and this is a podcast about self-reliance and all its many forms, is try to think about how you can simplify your life where you can be in control of more stuff than you are now. And what I mean by in control is you have, you know, where the water's coming from, so to speak. You know where the food's coming from. And maybe I'm talking in metaphors. For some people, I'm talking very literally. But I find that if I simplify my life and the less moving parts, the better, because moving parts fail. Uh, you might uh get a lot lower blood pressure, et cetera. And as far as consuming resources, I'm sure Penny's kind of getting into that as well. You know, we're consumers, humans consume. That's what we do, but there's ways to do that that can be lighter on the land if that's your thing. So we turn the page. Next question is from Tony Ross. Tony asks, how do you make a rabbit stick? For those that don't know, a rabbit stick is like a throwing stick. Um, it's kind of the ancestor to the boomerang, the Australian Aborigines, where it would, you'd throw it at something, you hope you hit it and kill it and eat it. And if not, it would come back to you. A throwing stick or a rabbit stick doesn't come back. So, how we make those in my courses, a throwing stick, again, looks like a boomerang. It's uh universally used, a lot of cultures used them, not just in North America. And it was primarily for ground-dwelling stuff. It's a hunting tool. So here in Arizona, it'd be gamble's quail, it'd be black-tailed jackrabbit, it'd be desert cottontail. I've heard in parts of Africa they use them to break the legs of lions to then disable that beast, to then kill it with spears or whatever. Don't try that one at home, but that's what I've heard. So we like hardwood for making throwing sticks. So around here, we have several species of oak. The reason I want uh a hardwood for a throwing stick is I'm gonna throw it and I'm gonna hit an animal. And again, it's gonna take out that animal one way or another. So we're not gonna be using balsa wood. That doesn't quite get the job done. In Arizona, also, a throwing stick is gonna hit rocks at some point in time because we're in Arizona and there's lots of rocks. Maybe that rabbit is in dense brush, and so I need a heavier wood to throw that stick to go through that brush, through the grass, to then penetrate that uh dense foliage to then get the animal. So, how we make it is we find an appropriate piece of wood. We've talked about the hardwoods. If I can't find oak, I'll use juniper. And in my courses, because our time is limited, we use a bola, which is essentially a machete on steroids and a saw to cut the, you know, just a metal, a regular saw to cut the branch off the tree. I like to work the wood green because it's easier to work with students on a two to five to nine-day course, although you got to watch out for checking, which is another name for cracking. We work it down. Uh, we're actually picking the shape to be kind of boomerang shaped to begin with. We work it down from both sides. I like to, where it's flat on the top, flat on the bottom. And then I'll have a student throw it in however they're most comfortable throwing it. There's usually four ways to throw that rabbit stick. The top will be rounded. So a rabbit stick's like an airplane wing. The bottom is flat, the top is round. So literally it's like a plane wing. So, what that gives that rabbit stick is something called lift. And lift means you can throw the stick longer, further, with less energy. And when you're trying to live off the land, anything that involves less energy is a big deal. So, Native peoples, indigenous peoples learned how to take a piece of wood, shape it with the same aerodynamics of an airplane wing, tens of thousands of years ago, and use it to save energy on the throw and be more accurate to try to take that critter down to keep the tribe alive. That's down and dirty, Tony, on rabbit sticks. It's a little bit more complex than that, but again, it's a podcast. Next question is from Tiana Hodge. Cody, being in the wilderness, do you coat your gourd canteen with anything for the inside? We talked about gourd canteens actually and how to make them. It was another question. So, yeah, I used to. So a gourd canteen, I take the gourd, you know, we make it, another project, another thing to talk about. We fill it with water on courses and I have more advanced primitive skills courses. The water bottle's out. You're not allowed to take your modern water bottle on the courses. So we're dealing with a gourd canteen, and they're volatile. They're a freaking vegetable, right? So if you drop them, they can crack and you have to pay attention. A long time ago, as in maybe 30 years ago, I used to coat the inside of my gourd canteen with beeswax, and it was a hell of a hoot and a holler around an open campfire with a bunch of students half delirious, melting beeswax. You can imagine where that can go if you're not careful. And we coat the inside of it needs to be a dry gourd canteen with that beeswax to kind of hermetically seal that. I don't do that anymore. The reason I don't do that is because I'm still choking on pieces of beeswax from my canteen. They tend to flake out. It is a skill that's learned and it has value. But what happens to that gourd canteen? It doesn't breathe. And what I mean by that, the old desert bags, the canvas bags that used to carry water, evaporated the water on the outside. And there was a slight water loss when that happened. But what that happened in the inside of the water bag is the water was cool. It wasn't hot like the outdoor air temperature. So if I take a gourd canteen and I coat it with beeswax, it no longer breathes. So I the water, you know, might get a little bit warmer than it would be if I didn't coat it. And obviously, when you're off a course and you go back to the coffee store, you're not going to be putting your coffee in a gourd canteen coated with wax because you're going to be shitting out beeswax. So used to do beeswax, now I do nothing. Now, one last comment on that. Gourds are bitter, very bitter. So you need to leach that gourd out with several changes of water. Doesn't need to be warm. It could be cold from a spring or whatever, because we do it that way in the wilderness. But leach it out so that you can drink it without throwing up. You'll know when it's time and when that gourd is ready to drink from. Next question from Darren Tomola. I think. Sorry if I'm butchering your name. Hey, Cody, I have a question. I'm sure you get asked this all the time. I live a life of the earth, but I'm having problems with the coyotes digging up my dookie hole. I've covered with rocks, branches, put our old charcoal in there, nothing works. What would you do? Okay, so this coyotes are eating this guy's shit. And uh, that's what that means. I'm translating this cryptic message to you. He's taking a dump in the wilderness, and the coyotes are digging it up and eating it, because that's what coyotes like to do have a free hot meal. I used to live in the woods in a trailer. Um at that time, I was, you know, doing lots of speed, smoking lots of dope and whatever. So I was kind of living high on life, but not in the way I like to live it now. And I was pooping outside, using toilet paper because I was on some private land. You know, we don't use toilet paper in my courses, so be mentally prepared for that if you sign up. And every morning after I was taking a dump, this neighborhood dog named Bear, because it was a huge dog, would come to my trailer wagging his tail with a piece of my toilet paper like coming out of his mouth. And I'm like, oh, that's don't let bear lick your face. Dogs eat poop, coyotes eat poop. And I actually talk about this in my second book, When All Hell Breaks Loose, stuff you need to survive when disaster strikes, about being an issue. You know, because if you're in the fence backyard and you're having to poop in a hole because the toilet doesn't work anymore, because we're in a grid-down situation, and uh Freddie the golden retriever goes over and has what you had for breakfast and then licks Junior's face, you got a problem. And that problem could kill Junior, especially when medical facilities are down. So lack of sanitation, and we'll we'll cover this in other podcasts as well. Number one cause of death on this planet is lack of sanitation. Hundreds of thousands of people die each year, usually infants and toddlers and the elderly through uh diarrhea and dysentery over all the worst combined. It's sad, you'd think we know better, but we still don't know whether, you know, what to do with our poop. So, Darren, the coyotes on your poop, uh, if you've put rocks, branches, and whatever, my say is let them have a free meal. You know, be a giver, not a taker. You give, they take. And I don't think the coyote's gonna be licking your face. So, you know, I wouldn't worry about it. You know, I'm assuming this is out in the woods and not like in, you know, Uncle Pete's backyard where this is going on. I just let them eat your poop. Okay, but that's just me. And I'm probably a poor one to ask. Next question is from Michael J.C. Salisbury. I like that JC in there. Did Randy participate in one of your classes? Or did he just acquire an ABBO Living Skills t-shirt some other way? Michael, I'm assuming you're talking uh about Randy Blythe, the lead singer from Lamb of God. And yes, Randy is way into outdoor survival skills. And yes, Randy's a friend of mine, and yes, Randy took the Ultimate ABBO course, which is nine days. And Randy, I've seen Randy eat rat. And Randy likes eating rat. That would be a good heavy metal title for a song. So, no, he earned that shirt. I'm wearing one right now, and you can buy one online, but Randy earned it the good old-fashioned way, and he has dirt and charcoal under his fingernails to prove it. Next question is from Lorraine Keith. Cody, how do you deal with heel cracks? And the uh the word heel is spelled H-E-L-A-L. So I'm assuming you mean H-E-E-L. How do I deal with heel cracks? Okay. You see these heel cracks here? I'm sure you can. Now, some of those you can see the crazy glue still in the cracks. That's that glistening stuff. It right now is wintertime here in Yavapai County. So what happens to bare feet or feet in flip-flops or just feet in general is you've got the really cold, dry air and it dries up skin. And so what I try to do, um, and this is an intense question, there's a lot to this, but I'll try to abbreviate it. Try to take care of your feet before they crack. And you can see I don't do a very good job of that. When my feet crack, it hurts like hell. I got another crack I need to deal with. I was spacing out, I should have dealt with it before this episode, but I need to glue it later on because it hurts when I walk. You limp. People stare more than they normally do, and they stare a lot anyway. When the foot cracks, I use crazy glue. I read some medical manuals that it's a little bit less toxic than super glue. Cryoacne, I have it in the survival show the name. It's like this long name. I don't remember it, but who knows if that's true. But I literally get the crazy glue. I like the stuff from the USA. I've bought crazy glue by brand in different countries, and it sucks. It's not the same as what I can get here in the USA because I've tried it. I get the stuff that's not gel, I get the liquid, okay, because you want that liquid to penetrate into the crack. The gel might just float on top of the crack. I take the cut, disinfect it however you want, glue it in the crack and about maybe a quarter inch around the crack. And essentially what the wound does is it heals from the inside out. So, and I've been doing that for years, and it's extremely effective. Yes, I carry crazy glue in my survival kit, and uh it just for a million different things. It's a pretty awesome substance to have. So that's what I do to uh uh deal with the cracks on my feet. Here's another trick that I that I can tell you. I don't do it as often as I should, or I wouldn't have cracks. I like emu oil. It is uh essentially dead bird oil from an emu. You know, the giant things that look like ostriches that can kill you. You know, the big birds, not big bird on Sesame Street, but the big birds. There's companies around that sell emu oil, and that stuff is the bomb, uh, probably even more than uh lanolin for really having a long-lasting effect on dealing with skin. So when my feet are super dry, I will put emu oil on them to kind of make them supple. Not so much that my feet get soft, but in the wintertime it's a problem. And ironically, in the summertime my feet crack less. So remember the crazy glue? That's how I apply it. The wound will essentially heal from the inside out. If you're a total animal walking through rivers and barefoot and whatever, you'll need to reapply that and you'll know. You'll know when you'll need to reapply it. Just glue it until it heals up. The next question is from Heath Hillman. How can you stand the Arizona hot blacktop? Would think that would burn through any amount of calluses. Yeah, so in Phoenix, Arizona hot blacktop, here's me. I'm running on Arizona hot blacktop. Now, a little trick is you walk on the white lines and parking lots or the yellow lines and parking lots. It can get so damn hot here in Arizona on the pavement that the pavement actually will leave an impression of my barefoot. It gets literally soft. So there's no match for that. I've actually uh worn flip-flops on a day hike into a desert area where I do courses. I was reconning. It was super, super hot. And that's why I was wearing the flip-flops. And before I made it about a quarter of a mile in, I delaminated the bottom. I melted the bottom of the sole of the flip-flop off of the flip-flop itself. So there's a reason that Native Peoples invented footwear. I am a fan of footwear, believe it or not, but when it needs to be used, not to use it just for whatever hell reason. So now, blacktop and me, that's when you'll see me running and not stopping to answer your question because of pain. Next question: Marcelo Borges. Here's another barefoot. How long have you been barefooting? I have an article of an interview that the Prescott Daily Courier did of me. That's our local newspaper in the Prescott area, and it's dated uh 1990. And in that picture, um I'm walking barefoot, but I'm holding my sandals in my hand. So I started late 80s, 1990, trying to go barefoot. Um, I'll go into this more deeper, probably another, because sure shit, someone's gonna ask me more questions about that. But the obvious is why. And I was inspired by Native people, and I'm inspired by prisoner of war stories, where the first thing they do is take their shoes so they don't run away. And I'm really into self-reliance, and that's why you are too, because that's probably why you're watching this podcast. And I was fascinated with how one piece of gear can screw someone. If something happened to the footwear, they got lost in a fast-moving creek or whatever happens, because Murphy's law rules in the wilderness and in town. I didn't want to be a slave to that one piece of gear. And I was really inspired by Native people all over the world who did go barefoot when they could go barefoot. And they're finding these fossilized barefoot prints, you know, all over the place is proof of that. They weren't wearing their Chuck Taylors, you know, they were largely going barefoot. Because when you have to make your own shoes, when you have to make your own sandals, that's a lot of work. And more importantly, that's a lot of resources and resources that are premium. Again, on this survival show, it's a lack of resources that kill people. So when a native person could toughen up a part of their body to not have to do something to save time, to do use that time for something else and not use resources, then that's what they would do. So I was really inspired by that. Next question This is from Heather Gardner Bach. Okay, here's another, God help me, another barefoot question. Do you wear shoes at concerts? The floors can be so nasty. Uh no, I don't. I don't mosh pit. I stay away from the mosh pit barefoot, obviously. I'm not, you know, a total psycho regarding that. And yeah, the floors can be nasty. Um, Heather, I've walked through a lot of stuff, as you can imagine, and have a pretty good immune system. Maybe because of that, maybe not. But my main concern at a concert is drunk asshole, you know, in cowboy boots coming my way. So I have to be very, very, very careful with that. But yeah, I go barefoot in concerts and they will let you in. Is it recommended? No. You know, if it's a heavy metal concert, wear your lug work boots with a steel toe with the studs on the bottom, for God's sake. Okay, this is another barefoot question. This is getting old, but I'm just reading them in the order they came in. This is from Marcelo. Faith Donahue. Hey Cody, I just started reading a second book of yours. Am I too old to go on one of your survival courses? I'm 57 and in fairly good condition, no health issues. Double question mark. Does that mean you don't have health issues? Or are you asking me if you have health issues, if you can't go? I've had people in pretty advanced courses that were in their 70s, and they need to be reasonably physically fit to be on longer, more challenging courses. And I do have medical waivers and whatever, because that's part of my job as being a professional, is to try to vet people as much as I can. With that, That said, along with reasonable physical fitness, I've seen people who quote unquote aren't physically fit shred in the field. Shred is a word, if you don't know it, that means you're kicking ass. And what I've noticed in hundreds of students, and I'll say this over and over again in various editions of this, is where there's a will, there's a way. And you don't want to be stupid about that. But I've seen people that were so motivated and so positive and so willing to do this with an open heart and just threw themselves into the project that being overweight or whatever, it wasn't an issue because that mental personality drove them to the finish line. If you read survival stories like I do of real people and real life-threatening situations, uh you'll see that's a main factor. That's what I call party on, right? The will to live, other people call it, where you have that part of you that just doesn't give up. Extremely important. Because like we've talked about before, survival situations are 90% psychology. So it's more who of who you are as a person, mentally and emotionally. I'm not poo-pooing physical fitness. It's massive. It's a massive thing. Ideally, be in physical fit shape before doing something like this. But also, if you're in physical fit shape and don't have that will to live, uh, you're dead man walking. Next question from Evan Cressy. Hey Cody, do you have any openings for an apprenticeship? Silly question, I know, but it doesn't hurt to ask. It's not a silly question, Evan, but you better be good at what you do if you want to be an apprentice. What I mean by that is you'd have to have a natural aptitude or training uh uh already to come in and be an apprentice. I've had one co-instructor uh for many years, and we've interviewed him already on this podcast, and he's been with me for uh a few decades. It is a lot of work to apprenticeship, and I encourage you to do that, but be willing to put in the years to apprenticeship. Notice I didn't say days, I didn't say weeks, I didn't say months, I said years. Do I have any openings for that? No, but other people may. If you do that, make sure that person, your mentor, your instructor, is qualified. Now we've already had a down the barrel about what I look for or what I look for in a good survival instructor. So either watch that episode again or catch it on my website so that you can vet the instructor that you might be training from. Because that's first your responsibility to do that, not theirs. Next question from Alec Alex Perez. I know that many cultures have used and still use pee for healing purposes, but I wonder where along the line did the idea of drinking pea become an option to preventing dehydration. Jackass corporate TV survival shows. Okay, next question. This is from Michael F. Safford. Have any of your students ever wandered off? I believe you mean wandered, but a lot of them have wandered off on a challenging course. Why the f here? And I'm paying for this. They've wandered off. They've spaced out. Let me address that first. If you wander off W-O-N-D-E-R in the woods, that's very dangerous because it means you're spacing out and not paying attention. So, regarding wandering off, I had a student, those shall remain nameless forever and ever and ever, who wandered off to go to the bathroom. We'll talk about going to the bathroom sometime on this podcast because everyone does it, but no one likes to talk about it. So we need to talk about it at some point. They wandered off to have privacy and got lost. I was busy teaching, didn't quite notice, and they eventually wandered back after about 20 or 30 minutes. But it's possible. So, what we do now for Peen, since we're on that subject of the wandering, let people know, okay, this is group, backcountry wilderness. If you're going to go to the bathroom and I'm talking taking a dump, if you're just pissing over by the tree, we can see you. Turn around, but we can see you, so it's no big deal. When someone's going to take a dump, poo-poo, kaka, whatever you want to call it, they want to be private. They want to be out of sight. So, what I have in my courses is they need to tell someone they're going to the bathroom. I don't have some weird fetish, don't worry. But it's like, hey, folks, I'm taking a dump and I'm going that way so that no one else goes that way. So they don't need to go as far so they can be private, yet proximal to the group, and not wander off. Next question. This is from David Pyrus. Any problems? Oh God, here's another barefoot question. Any problems traveling barefooted internationally? I imagine there might be some no-shoot, no shoes, no shirt, no service issues in some places. I think there was another question that said international barefoot travel. The more into developing nations you are, the less they give a damn about you wearing shoes, because your flight attendant might be barefoot as well. But in the United States of America, yeah, it's a safety issue. You need to keep your shoes on at all times during a flight because they could save your life when that plane crashes. Sarcasm intended. So the more remote the flight is, the more power you have. If it's a private airline or whatever, you can go barefoot and do what you want. But yeah, definitely at least take your flip-flops, because in the US, they will not let you board. That's their law or whatever it is. So don't show up barefoot to an airport and expect to get on that plane. This next question is from Raymond Daly. Recently, I was writing a parentheses, fictional account of surviving on a desert island. And I suggested a way to keep collected parentheses in bottles, rainwater cool by digging a small pit, lining it with stones, and then putting the bottles inside and covering the pit with a board and then sand. Would this actually work? Okay, Raymond. Jesus. So you got water on Desert Island, keeping it cool, digging a small pit, lining it with stones, putting the wells covering it with sand. Yeah, or you could just put it in the shade, you know. But I guess, yeah, if you dig in the sand, it's called conduction. And that sand is going to be cooler to the chuch, and usually the outdoor ambient air temperature. Yes, you could do my grandma when I talked to her, depression era grandma, about keeping the butter cold on the homestead. They had a hole in the ground with a box, with a piece of burlap, with water in the top, with tiny pinholes around. And that water would drip and keep the burlap sack wet. It's an evaporative cooler, right? But it pioneer days evaporative cooler. You get kind of that same effect with that damp sand. So, yes, you can keep it cool. So I hope that your fictional book, make sure to quote me in the credits about that little gem. And for God's sake, check if shit's going to be accurate before you write it in a book that's supposed to potentially train others as well. Next question from Diana Thibiduo. Sounds French. Cody, is there any place you haven't been to that you'd like to visit? I love our planet. I think we live on a beautiful planet. I love jungles, I love mountains, I love deserts, and I love uh unspoiled places, and I adore native peoples and a big admirer on what they are doing now in the deepest jungles and what they've done in the past, and hopefully what they'll do in the future. So it would have to be our beautiful natural places. I'm a big fan of nature. I hope you are too. Um, that's it for this episode of Keep Your Ass Alive. But before I go, I want to see if I have any fan mail and the old voice box mail here. So, and I'll share it with you. I don't often do this, but let me cue it up and let's play this message.

SPEAKER_00 30:48

Yes, if I sign up for your course, are you going to be the whiny ass little bitch like you were on Dual Survivor?

SPEAKER_02 30:57

If you want to hear me be a whiny ass little bitch again, stay tuned for the next episode of Keep Your Ass Alive. Stay safe, and always remember to party on. Hey campers, so that's it for this episode of Keep Your Ass Alive. Tune in next time and we'll talk to people just like you about survival advice or whatever floats your boat. Wanna watch the only survival show on Earth created, hosted, and produced by a real survival instructor? Check out the survival show with Cody Lundine at the Survivalshow.com. Want to take your learning to the next level? Please visit my Aboriginal Living Skills School at www.codylundine.com. We offer field courses in modern outdoor survival, primitive living skills, or urban preparedness to enhance your self reliance, confidence, and safety in the city or the wilderness.

SPEAKER_01 31:52

Visit www.codylundine.com today.