Faced with climate change, COVID variants, and supply chain failures, we as a species must come to peace with the collapse of civilization. As flooding and wildfires encroach upon our cities, we have no choice but to move past mass consumerism and get used to the idea of living in small, feral packs.
Living in a feral pack is as much an art as it is a science. What follows is a field guide to finding and maintaining a feral pack and living your best of all possible post-apocalypses. Put this advice in action, and you’ll be scavenging carrion with the best of them in a matter of weeks – which may be all the time you have left.
Courting Your Feral Pack
You cannot wait for a feral pack to find you; to do so is to risk dismemberment. Instead, you have to seek out a feral pack, and then you have to court it. Wooing a feral pack involves a delicate dance, like dating in the pre-apocalypse. Squatting somewhere conspicuous and eating a dead pigeon or rat, as one would a cob of corn, is a fine way to demonstrate worth to potentials.
Image matters. The feral look hinges on a pronounced underbite, so set the trend by setting your jaw as such. Should achieving an underbite prove difficult, consider breaking your jaw to get that authentic prognathic look. A few weeks of severe pain is a small price to pay for the fellowship of your jut-jawed brethren.
Pulling your teeth out with pliers is a good idea, too. And if you’re really gunning for silverback status, extract a tooth right in front of the feral pack you’re courting. We recommend choosing a front tooth and never a molar or incisor, both of which you’ll need for chewing gristle and sun-dried viscera. Now your pack-mates will be reminded of your alpha-dog ferality every time you grin and/or snarl at them. Present convincingly and before long you’ll be knuckle-walking at the front of the pack – and even recruiting fresh talent yourself.
Recruiting for Your Feral Pack
The bare minimum for admission into a feral pack is competency with blunt-force weapons. More valuable still is the ability to fashion edged weapons from foraged tin cans. Especially desirable are any pyrotechnic skills – i.e., lighting old baseball bats on fire to use as torch-cum-club when raiding rival packs.
Individuals from rural areas have an advantage in this skillset, as many never fully participated in civilization to begin with. Thus, your feral pack stands to benefit from the inclusion of at least one Deliverance-grade Republican, preferably from a mountainous region, as you will find these types are hyper-adapted to niche environments (e.g. peat bogs and briar thickets) and can scale trees with simian swiftness.
As a recruiter, you would do well to develop an eye for powerful haunches. These promise greyhound speed and a tough-to-topple low center of gravity. Also, seek out persons capable of seamless transition from upright walking to a quadrupedal gallop, which will be indispensable when running down small game and abandoned house pets.
Maintaining Your Feral Pack
Grooming is the easiest way to consolidate bonds between pack-mates. You’ll find that picking lice and grubs out of one another’s back hair can be a relaxing (and nourishing) way to build attachments.
But the best way to bond is through violence. Dreaming up new weapon ideas is an excellent team-building exercise. You’ll need weapons, naturally, to defend yourselves against rival packs and also to brutalize human strays you chance upon. Scavenging sticks, stones, and even bones is a fun activity that really brings people together. The only greater feeling than capping someone’s knee with a gnarled femur is doing it as a communal activity – voila! Two more gnarled femurs for you and your feral pack-mates!
Just as crucial as inter-group violence is intra-group violence. It’s good to know who in your pack you can and can’t take. You may have to make an example of someone, so you should earmark a weak link you can beat to within an inch of their life at any time. And it never hurts to wear said person’s ears as jewelry, too.
Some might bristle at the idea of cannibalism, but you’ll have to get over this to get ahead in the post-climate nightmare world. It’s important to know how to assess edibility. Choose pack-mates whom you’d be comfortable dining with but also dining on, should push come to shove. Again, we can’t overemphasize the haunches – the thighs and buttocks contain the choicest meats.
Sorry, vegans, but you won’t last long in this hellacious dispensation. Most plants, after all, will be extinct. But don’t worry, you’ll still bring a lot to the table; you will be appreciated for your calories. Also, your connective tissue will make sturdy rope, binding the crude hammers and pick-axes that will help your carnivorous conspecifics survive – nay, thrive.
Some feral packs may flirt with minimalistic religion. Pieces of garbage typically make for great totemic objects. So choose detritus that can be easily weaponized – for instance, hubcaps, kerosene cans, or mannequin heads. And if your feral pack still retains the compulsion to celebrate Christmas or Passover, feral turducken – that’s pigeon in rat in human – is sure to be a holiday hit.
When a Feral Pack Decays
The healthiest feral pack has a half-life of just three or four lunar cycles, after which it will split violently into two asymmetrical factions, the larger of which will bludgeon-unto-death the smaller. An indispensable skill, then, is anticipating disintegration.
Warning signs of feral-pack decay include:
- Paranoid silence punctuated by overt displays of aggression
- Overt displays of aggression punctuated by paranoid silence
- Trichotillomania beyond acceptable levels
- Evidence of subgroup formation and the emergence of new and secretive grunt-ciphers
- Members generally growing apart with time
Notice any of the above, and you should consider razing the entire group preemptively. But if there’s no one you can take, there’s no shame in fleeing under the cover of night so you can find a feral pack better suited to your present feral needs.
Because if you’ve made it this far, you now possess the skillset needed to contribute to a world-class feral pack. You have the tools required to survive in the climate-apocalypse hellscape.
And if someone suggests otherwise? Well, you rip their face off and tell them, “Hey, get with the times, it’s 2025.”
