An Imaginary Divide?
There are numerous approaches to wilderness survival, and the development, refinement and maintenance of wilderness survival skills. As such, there are numerous arguments about which is right, and who is wrong.
Those who cannot do, particularly those who cannot innovate, debate. Everyone has an opinion on a given topic, and many folks are extremely willing to share their opinion, but mileage always varies. Much debate is driven by low-mileage individuals, who may “know” a lot but have proven very little of it to themselves. These folks are quick to point out flaws in others thinking, but they rarely if ever take their own knowledge outside in the dirt and try to break it. They fail to actually build strength, through finding and solving failure, and instead attempt to satisfy themselves with arguing as if it were a real form of doing the work.
I am sure that there are those who would bitterly argue that wilderness survival skill is far removed from bushcraft, just as there are those who would that no one can develop competent survival skill without being a bushcrafter. On one side, they might say that bushcraft practice is akin to studying musketry for contemporary gunfighting needs. Meanwhile, on the other side, they might say that studying survival skills without the depth of knowledge granted by bushcraft leaves one wholly incompetent to really get the thing done. This isn’t really about declaring one, or another, hardliner to be right or wrong. We have no real interest in participating in argument. If hard lines have been drawn, then those drawing them aren’t going to change their minds. They will simply continue to contribute noise. Our interest is in a little bit of signal, for those also interested. With that in mind, it is this issue of competency that grabs hold of us.

Bushcraft, as commonly seen, is more of a committed lifestyle, a dedicated approach to being in, enjoying and having success in the woods by primitive and minimalist means. It is not an approach strictly for extreme situations. Wilderness survival is an emergency, not a planned event or a chosen practice.
So, isn’t that a pretty big difference?
It certainly can appear so, especially to an individual regarding strictly his/her own survival needs. Often the most distinct examples of bushcrafters are serious traditionalists, who work hard to embody a classic style, i.e. North Woodsmen and others from bygone eras. To these practitioners who seek the depth of living a traditional bushcraft lifestyle, to do it fully means living in the wilderness, comfortably by ones own hand without modern conveniences. There are also those who do not make a full-time existence out of bushcraft, but still approach with great dedication and effort to traditional ways. You will see these folks eschewing contemporary tools such as chemical tinder, and often preferring traditional costume over modern garment technology.
This can be a very alienating style for “modern” individuals looking to better their survival skill. They do not go into the woods in heavy wool flannels and felt hats, with leather possibles bags filled with natural fiber cordage and char-cloth tinder. Rather, they go out in Polartec and Gore-Tex, with Cordura backpacks, carrying modern fire tools and 550 cord. Often enough, these items are issued by their employer, and the act of going into the woods is serious work for a particular goal, rather than recreation or any end unto itself. On these surface appearances alone, the bushcraft lifestyle can appear to be something far different and of little value.
To begin to see some of the common ground and value, it helps to get over limiting first impressions. One must take into account that bushcraft exists well outside the traditionalists. There are more modern minded bushcrafters, who seek a balance between long-term knowledge and modern technology, to achieve ideal results. They will make more, if not full, use of technologies ranging from modern garments to chemical tinders and storm-proof lighters. They do not appear as distinct as their traditionalist brethren, however, and it seems that many see them as being on the modern side of this (mostly imaginary) divide between bushcrafters and modern survival students. It looks familiar, so it must be like me, is the flip side of the same coin that says if it looks alien, it must be of no value. This is the sort of closed loop thinking that must end, for any successful student of survival.
The difference remains that a lifestyle is still not an emergency, and techniques ideal for a lifestyle may not serve those experiencing true emergency. Many bushcraft practices are more a form of camp craft, than in extremis emergency practices. This difference does not mean that one has no bearing on or relevance to the other. Survival skills are a distillation of woods knowledge and practice, with specific focus on getting through an emergency, rather than living, in the bush. Bushcraft practices do a great deal to inform wilderness survival practices, as is only reasonable given that such methods are long proven means of getting by in the wilderness.
The ideas of bushcraft and survival are far from antithetical. The experiences and lessons learned from bushcraft, and experienced bushcrafters, also contribute a great deal to strict survival skills. The range of trial and experimentation afforded by bushcraft has provided a great many lessons to be distilled down to simple, proven, methods of achieving desired results in the wilderness. Bushcraft practice provides many opportunities to try different methods, and evaluate tools, without the dire consequences that may threaten in a survival situation. The knowledge available from this field is invaluable to wilderness survival: Bushcraft essentially provides a laboratory in which to test and refine the essentials necessary for survival.
Even if viewed as similar, but disparate ideas, let us pose a pair of questions:
What is a survival kit, no matter how modern, but a set of minimal and fairly primitive tools?
What survival situation could not be bettered by deeper experience, and greater comfort, in the environment?
Any practice of working and living in the woods, in particular with minimal and primitive tools, should be of obvious benefit to wilderness survival needs.

We Are All Bushcrafters
A few truths as we see them:
Survival skills being highly perishable and always improvable, survival students need to be continually practicing, using, testing and refining their skills. Most wilderness survival students are those who spend time in the wilderness (the bush, the woods, the desert, BFE, the boondocks, et al, etc. and ad nauseum): They seek skill, because they exist in an environment that demands it. It follows then, that the smart ones will do two things: Use their time in that environment as an opportunity to further hone their skill in relative comfort and security, and; Conduct themselves in the environment in a way that supports their survival needs.
The best survival plan is the one that is wholly integral to ones experience in the wilderness. The tools and practices of survival are not just those which you default to when an emergency occurs, but those which you have been integrating into everything from your pack contents, to your clothing choices, to how you move through your environment. Survival begins not when emergency occurs, but at the very start, in your home or workplace from which you depart, when you make the right preparation. You do not break out the skills of survival when the emergency happens, you are either using them as an integral part of how you conduct yourself in the wilderness, or you aren’t. If your conduct is poor, your likelihood of being in a true survival situation is increased, while your odds of performing well in that situation are decreased. Conversely, if your conduct is good, your odds of being in a true survival situation are decreased, while your odds of good performance in that event go up.
Your practices in the woods are part of your survival skills. You are depending on yourself, and the items you are carrying, to create a micro-environment that supports your survival. Lifestyler or not, what you do in the woods, is bushcraft. If you’re on a SAR team, if you’re a rural police officer, if you’re a nature photographer, an occasional hiker or a serious mountaineer: Your practices in the woods are your bushcraft. You decide how serious you are about those skills, and how dependent you wish to be on modern conveniences and technologies, in those practices. You decide how to prepare and conduct yourself in the woods (and in the time leading up to being in the woods). You decide if your wilderness survival tools and skills are going to be kept in some protective bubble, or be taken out and used as integrated parts of your wilderness behavior.
The choice is yours whether your bushcraft supports, or hinders, your survival skills.

Bushcraft as a Practice
It is possible to hone your bushcraft, for your needs, without being a lifestyle bushcrafter doing it for the doing. None the less, it is not an occasional thing. Like shooting, like medical skills, wilderness survival skill must be refined, and repeated, regularly or it goes away. Choosing to make a dedicated effort at developing good bushcraft as a foundation for survival, means making it a routine practice. For those who choose to, the routine practice of serious bushcraft instills a competency that cannot be attained through occasional survival courses and training sessions. This competency instilled is greater than simple skill proficiency, or ability to use the tools of a survival kit, it is a competency for existing in, working with, and depending on the resources of austere environments.
Such competency contributes to improved decision making and a decrease in disorientation when emergency occurs. The mental shift from being sure you’re warm, well and will go home soon, to not being sure you’ll be warm, dry, sated, or going home ever again, is going to be jarring. Shaking things out into a functional process will go more smoothly if you have a developed level of familiarity and competency in the wilderness. Already having a comfortable familiarity with depending on your abilities, with your tools, to work in and with varied natural environments to continue existing, puts you ahead of the curve when an emergency occurs.
The approach we have been cultivating in our core group since the beginning is this one of woods competency. Across the BFE Labs team we have a varying interest in, and ability to practice, traditional bushcraft, but we all have a very strong interest in, and need for, developed and robust survival skills. To that end, we practice bushcraft, and use time in the woods as opportunity. The learning that occurs from even the briefest personal experience in the woods is remarkable. There is a lot that you can learn very quickly.
Quickly you learn that attending a couple courses, stocking a survival kit, and then never touching the skills or tools again is a zero-return endeavor. You expended furious energy, for a short period of time, and walk away with almost nothing except additional weight.
Almost as quickly you learn that the time you’re spending in the dirt and sticks, while initially shorter than a furious survival skills crash course, is staying with you. With each trip, each exercise, each ramble, you’re finding yourself doing more things from confident memory. You begin to stretch a bit, and innovate for yourself.
This is the point, in any endeavor, where you start to meet with failure. There are days in the woods when it sucks to be you. This is also the point at which many people quit. They return to the internet, and start posting about how much X, or Y, method sucks, and how much better Z method is. Why? Because they were doing X or Y, and it made them feel weak and silly at some point, so therefore Z method (that they’ve never tried, so it’s never damaged their ego) must be better. Stepping outside of this, and continuing to “embrace the suck” until it sucks less, is the road to success. The more opportunity you give yourself to find the weak points, break things and have problems, in a controllable environment, the stronger you, your practices and your selection of tools will be when a survival situation occurs.

Harsh Definition of Needs
There is endless minutia that can be delved into and studied in the arena of primitive/minimalist wilderness skills. These are often drawn into the practice of strict survival skills and their training, to varying degrees of return. If your goal is survival above bushcraft for its own sake, harsh evaluations need to be made in where and how you invest your time.
There will be time for the tempting esoterica. You may not be a lifestyle bushcrafter, but you have a lifetime to invest in bettering your survival skills. Begin with the skills and methods that are of benefit to you the most directly, and build from there. The basics of water, shelter, fire etc. cannot be practiced enough, and you can find ample opportunity to practice them in controllable conditions. From there, work outward, and seek to define what your needs actually are. As you define them, refine them. You do not need great breadth of knowledge, but rather depth of knowledge. Edible plants are good to know, but given the time you can go without food vs. how quickly you can die of hypothermia, not nearly as good as being absolutely sure you can make a fire. Knowing forty different types of shelter construction technique may not serve you as well as being hypercompetent at two that work in every environment you’re in. Just as it is possible to carry too many extraneous tools, adding weight and slowing you down, it is possible to have too much in your mind, clouding your decision making and keeping you from fully developing skill at the things you’ll really need.
Your primary goals are going to shape your bushcraft, and your survival craft as it extends from that. If your primary goal is not camping, staying warm, drinking and eating, then these are things you must do in order to achieve whatever your goal is. Be it climbing that mountain, escaping an enemy in the area, penetrating the area and finding that enemy, placing and monitoring cameras to capture images of rare and elusive snow leopards, killing meat for the table, or what-have-you, your goals are something other than the simple practice of the necessities. This is what demands both gear minimalism and depth not breadth: The better developed your skill, the more you can do with less. The better proven your kit and skills, the less extraneous bullshit you will feel you need. The less extraneous bullshit you are carrying (in your pack and in your head), the more robust your decision making. Your bushcraft, and your survival craft that it provides foundation for, must be in synch with your overarching needs/goals. Your competency is not defined by being competent at skills you have no use for, or that are incompatible with your objectives. Your woods competency is being able to go into the woods, with the tools and skills you need and no more, and accomplish your goals without increasing your risk, and being able to come back even when the worst happens despite your best efforts.
This takes work. Practice and refinement are essential. Investment of time is required. You are no more prepared because you own a survival kit, than you are a musician because you own a guitar, to paraphrase.

This is not to say that the practice of woods or survival craft is a strictly DIY affair. There is no substitute for quality instruction. Good instruction can fill in for personal bad experience, as you benefit from the learning of others mistakes. Good instructors can help good students filter out a lot of bullshit, and achieve better depth faster. Note, we don’t say “professional instruction”, because by default not all professionals in this business provide quality instruction. Do your due diligence before plunking down your hard earned cash; There are many great, talented, and even truly gifted instructors out there, focusing on both strict survival skills as well as deeper bushcraft lifestyle, endeavor to spend your money with them. The best of these also make it quite clear what they teach: Beware those who pass off controllable-environment bushcraft methods as survival skill, and vice versa.
If you look, there are also many good instructors who are not professionals. Speaking personally, a healthy portion of my wilderness skill is rooted in spending much of my life among traditional cowboys in the southwestern US. Men and women who make their living out, particularly those who know more about a bedroll than a bedroom (and such folks do remain, though their numbers dwindle), have a great deal of knowledge about getting along in the outdoors. It behooves anyone who encounters such folks to close mouth, and open ears. (Of course, now it probably won’t be long until someone presents himself, bedecked in Stetson, boots, waxed mustachios and wildrag, as a cowboy survival expert, teaching “SagebrushCraft” or some such horseshit).

If your interest in bushcraft skills is primarily survival, seek whatever breadth you desire, once you have established a deep competency. Invest your time and energy appropriately, now, in learning and refining, regularly and mercilessly. Such an investment can be drawn on at any time, but you will only get out of a thing what you have put into it. The choices, as always, are yours

A Pair of Traditional, Thin, Folding Knives, inset Comparison to Modern Tactical Folder Thickness

I was at a branding recently, out here in cattle country, and took note of the knives being used. For those unfamiliar, when branding calves it is also common practice to ear-mark with a notch in an ear and castrate. These tasks require a deft hand with a sharp knife, particularly when the calf is not forced into an immobilizing squeeze chute, but is rather roped out and held down. I’ve taken part in and observed this process numerous times in my life, and there is a great commonality to the knives being used: They are thin, sharp, knives. The same knives most of the cowboys and ranch hands carry in their pockets daily, and use for everything.
The thin, sharp, knife is not unique to this environment, but rather common to every other. Moving out from the traditional slipjoint folder common to the ranching west, a survey of other traditional folding knife designs would turn up a variety of styles, locks, and construction methods, but one commonality: Thin, sharp, blades. Moving from folders, to fixed blade knives, we see the same variety in design and construction in traditional designs, but a great many have the same commonality of thin blades. The traditional Scandinavian knives, as typified by the Mora so common to woodscraft, are an easily accessible example of the type.
Thin blades are not limited to small knives, either. Many old-time woodsmen, frontiersmen, mountainmen, etc. who used big knives carried ones that, rather than resembling the Iron Mistress of Hollywood, more resembled a butcher knife, being thin although long. Now, some may use the argument that we know more than they did, and thus make more appropriate choices, but that is simply nonsense. Anyone who makes a living with a tool, or depends on it for his own life, on a day-to-day basis, knows far more about selecting the right type of that tool than anyone who does not do the same, no matter the other mans “knowledge”.
If so many who’s lives depended on their knives choosing thinner blades historically holds little sway, then the fact that the trend is a modern one too should tell us something. Today, if we take a survey of the knives being used routinely, we would find many of them to be far thinner than what we’ve come to expect (or been told to expect). And not just small knives: While so many Americans and others influenced by the major knife market are of the opinion that a heavy, thick-spined, knife is required for chopping or “serious” woods work, much of the rest of the world relies on something far different; The machete, or some variant thereof.

Many Working-Class Knives, World Wide, are Thin  and Simple (if not Crudely Constructed). This Example was Found in a 50lb Sack of Livestock Feed, and has Excellent Edge Geometry and is Well Tempered.

I have seen the argument made that we in the first world know more about metallurgy and geometry than uneducated third-world residents who regularly use machetes. The idea that, because of where you live or your heritage, you somehow are more in possession of advanced knowledge than someone from a different place or background, is racist garbage. Again, all the education in the world is no substitute for what someone knows from a lifetime of dependency on a tool. That thin sharp knives, even in larger blade lengths, dominate much of the working world, and the manufacture of such tools is a deep part of some cultures, holds far more sway with me (and should with you) than some xenophobic concept of “more knowledgeable”.
Different tools are appropriate for different tasks. There is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, a place for robust knives. One of the most valuable characteristics of contemporary knifemaking is the rise of robust locking systems for folding knives. The matching rise of the robust blade, however, may not be the best thing. But it is important to recognize that place, and use the right tool for the right job. For the majority of tasks for which a knife is used, a thick bladed knife is not the right tool. This includes many “hard” tasks, from woodscraft to cowboying to “tactical” environments (whatever those are). You aren’t necessarily wrong is you carry a robust knife for these, or even more mundane, daily uses, but you should ask yourself if that is truly what you need. Give some thought to whether cutting performance is a greater need than brute strength, and take a thinner knife better suited for cutting out for a spin sometime.

We’ve previously discussed the phenomena of inattentional blindness, and mentioned that expectation of the “unexpected” event, i.e. the gorilla walking through the scene we’ve been instructed to attend to, seemed to increase the viewers ability to notice the “unexpected” event. In short, if you’ve been told its coming, you’re looking out for it in addition to whatever primary task you’re completing.
What Dr. Simons work on satisfaction of search suggests is that once an “expected unexpected” is attended, we become more blind to the truly unexpected. Falling prey to satisfaction of search, could influence us to refrain from searching for additional threats once initial cues have been detected.
Under the wrong circumstance, this could put us as far behind the power curve as not having situational awareness in the first place. Predators use distraction to disarm their targets, and when working in multiples can use different tactics to draw focus to one member of a team while their partner(s) approach the victim from less obvious angles. If we’re sensitive to the cues of potential assault during the interview or set-up phase, and focus in on a single source of those cues, we may be entirely unaware of the encroaching secondary threats. We must shape our thinking and training to deal with this. Approach by a single threat is it’s own cue of approach by multiple threats; We mustn’t fall prey to “satisfaction” or tunnel-vision effects, and neglect to be aware of multiples. Our training should incorporate the use of multiple aggressors, using tactics of misdirection and malicious attentional capture, to develop our sensitivity to relevant cues, and our ability to manage those situations once recognized.

“[...]a man becomes his attentions. His observations and curiosity, they make and remake him.” William Least Heat Moon

Our last post was on April Fools Day. We posted an appropriate post, saying our philosophy had changed to a very left-of-center, naturalistic, and pacific position of harmony and… well, you get the idea. It was, of course, bullshit: A prank, a joke, a laugh. Still, we got some pretty negative feedback from a few of you who didn’t get the gag. To those who took us seriously, and were upset, hopefully there are no hard feelings; Please don’t think we’re laughing at you. Well, not anymore. We got all that out of our systems months ago, honest!
April 1st (April Fools or All Fools day) is traditionally a day of pranks. While the origins are murky, the spirit of the day is well known to many, if not most. From time to time we may forget what day it is, and begin to fall victim to an April 1st prank. Most times before we fully fall however, we realize the day and snap to facts pretty quickly. Sometimes though, we succumb to unawareness and are taken for the fool. With April Fools pranks and such nonsense this is harmless, but there are times and situations where any lapse of relevant awareness might prove very dangerous.
With this (particularly the examples of folks who took it seriously) and the recent Paying Attention post well in mind, it seemed to be a good time to go over some thoughts on awareness, and cultivating it. All of us could benefit from more practice at paying attention, and ideas on cultivating awareness also apply to maintaining awareness.
Much of this writing is framed around self defense and awareness of potential criminal assault, but should provide information valid across a broad area of interests that also benefit from improved awareness.

Awareness as a Tool
Awareness, as used here, is not the general awareness that yes the sky is blue and we are alive, but more specifically Situational Awareness. To borrow from the Wiki entry, Situational Awareness is “the perception of environmental elements with respect to time and/or space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their status after some variable changed, such as time.” Rather than general awareness, this is awareness of potential bad shit as it’s encroaching upon us. Ideally, an awareness that is in time for us to avoid, or at least dominate, the situation.
Situational awareness is a tool of constant importance, not just something to turn on and off when “things go down” (once things are going down, you’re way behind the curve). Nor is it a process of accessing a static moment after it has happened. It is a constant process of perceiving your environment, processing the nature of objects and events, and determining their meaning both immediate and in the future as the variables change. This is thus not mere recognition of existence, but a more active process at the front end of our decision making, feeding us relevant information.
Our situational awareness is the bubble with which we first “touch” the world around us. If you are paying attention, using your senses together and constantly taking in surroundings and events, your bubble is larger. If you are not, your bubble is smaller and everything is that much closer to you (in time and distance) before you are aware of it.
Good situational awareness is fundamental. It makes you better at almost everything, from driving to navigating office-politics minefields, to personal security. Without good situational awareness, you can have enormous amounts of technical skill, and never have the opportunity to make good use of it. Because we cannot get advance notice before bad things happen, the best we have is to be able to register their potential or development sooner. If you’re tuned out at that random moment when chaos occurs, your recognition of danger may come too late, and someone or -thing will take advantage of your inattention and eat you.
Our first layer of protection is our awareness of whats going on around and within us, and the speed with which we can process and respond to those inputs. Note how I slipped that word “within” in there: Our internal voice of alarm, and our own mental/emotional state, are critical. That little internal voice, or the odd feeling of discomfort, often comes from something we have seen or recognized that has not consciously registered. That little voice exists for a reason,and it saves lives. Also internal, our own mental or emotional state changes how we deal with things before us, and being aware and in control of our current state is essential to keeping a cool and unclouded head.
Good situational awareness is something that takes effort. Paying attention takes work, and habitually doing so takes long-term cultivation. Even once developed over time our alertness can slip, and simply become dulled, without effort at maintaining it. The way we are commonly raised and live never really instills good situational awareness, and then actively tries to beat it out of us with distractions, placations and illusions of happiness and safety. Coupling the above with natural phenomena which work against situational awareness, the result is that good situational awareness is neither wholly innate nor permanent, and must be given due attention. It is a tool which must be developed and routinely honed, and demands hard work to achieve the greatest results.
So, like all our skillsets, we are given a choice. Develop them, and maintain them, or let them languish and wither. If we’re making the right choice, practice with and improvement upon situational awareness (to include hard evaluation of our utilization or lack-there-of), should be part of our routine of self improvement and evaluation.

Know Thyself, and What Thyself Knows
Our situational awareness depends on being able to trust the information we receive from the environment and our interpretation of it. To know we are seeing what we need to be seeing, and that our take on it is valid (without any risk of second guessing ourselves, literally, to death), requires more than simply seeing, or assuming.
This begins with yourself. Most of what we know at any given moment goes unrecognized, it is noise we filter out to focus on the current object of our attention. For the uninitiated who don’t know what to pay attention to and not, as well as those beginning to dull at the edges due to the cognitive predations of time, this is a starting point. Learn what you know, and to be aware of your own knowing of things. Doing this both familiarizes you with being attuned to your environment and your internal voice, and can aid in providing you with background against which to screen new (potentially important) inputs.
An exercise I’ve been taught in several contexts, and found to be valuable in personal practice, is as follows:
One day (or for a series of days), stop once every hour for about five minutes to ask yourself the following questions: What am I feeling at this moment? What am I hearing? What do I taste? What am I smelling? What do I see? What do I know right now?
Use this tool to tune yourself in to what you are actually seeing and otherwise sensing, what you feel, and what you know. This tool should be revisited from time to time, as part of routine maintenance.
You always _____ (see, smell, taste, hear, feel) far more than you’re aware of. Spending time actually attending to things usually tuned out helps us, if nothing else, learn to trust that voice that speaks of things we didn’t consciously register: Call it intuition, gut feeling, whatever. That little voice has been much maligned, and often we’re encouraged to ignore it as being prejudices or unreliable emotions at work. This is fundamentally wrong, and both anecdotes and serious studies provide illustration of the value of intuition.
Working on knowing yourself, what and how you sense, provides the internal familiarity necessary to validate your intuition. This exercise, and similar questioning of oneself routinely, should also improve your broad situational awareness (such as it exists), by giving you cause to actually take in more of your environment regularly.

Inattentional Blindness – The Key?
This is probably the point at which to make clear that broad-spectrum situational awareness appears to be a fallacy, and not within our cognitive ability. Instead, our natural tendency is to focus on particulars, and fill-in everything else (whitewash with expected information, vs. perceive what is actually there), particularly the unexpected.
This is, at least in part, the work of phenomena known as Inattentional Blindness, and Change Blindness. In short, inattentional blindness is the phenomenon of not perceiving things plainly within our field of view, because of inattention to the unseen object or event. Change blindness is the related phenomenon of inability to perceive changes to scenes. We have to note that these are normal phenomena; These are not occurrences of a damaged brain, or some “other” brain, but rather the natural functioning of your brain and mine, and everyone else’s (Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events, Simons et al, Perception, v28, 1999, discusses inattentional blindness, and the relationship with change blindness in more detail. The following study information is also contained therein).
In the case of inattentional blindness, among the more well known (and oft repeated) studies of this phenomenon is to task study participants with watching a mock basketball game and counting the number of passes made by the players in a particular of two team colors. At some point during the game, a man in a gorilla suit (or in some variations, a woman with an umbrella) will walk through the middle of the scene. In all studies of this type, a significant portion of observers fail to notice the unexpected event; Their focus being on watching for and counting passes, they are blind to even a dramatic event due to inattention. In the case of change blindness, it appears that this blindness to unattended events carries over to noticing changes in scenes. For example, studies of change blindness where participants are tasked with observing an image of a scene which, as the viewer blinks, is changed to a similar image of the scene with changes made. Few people are able to identify the changes. In other studies, participants are engaged in conversation with another person when a temporary barrier comes between them, such as workmen carrying a door. Behind this block, the other party is replaced by a new person. Upon removal of the barrier a significant number of particiants fail to notice the change.
The cause of these phenomena, put simply, is that we fill in rather than perceive the environment around the object of our attention. We fail to perceive items and events to which we are not attending, causing us to be both immediately blind to them and blind to any change in the unattended elements of a scene as we have not perceived them to remember them. This does not occur solely within the visual realm either; A 2008 study (Auditory attention causes visual inattentional blindness, Pizzighello,S., Bressan, P., Perception, v37, 2008) noted that inattentional blindness occurred when the task being attended was auditory, and a 2007 study (Executive Working Memory Load Induces Inattentional Blindness, Fougnie, D., Marois, R., Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, v14, 2007 ) showed that tasks of working memory could also induce inattentional blindness. Further, these phenomena appear to increase as the difficulty of the task to which we are attending increases (The role of perceptual load in inattentional blindness, Cartwright-Finch, U. ,Lavie, N., Cognition, 2007).

The upshot to all this, is that paying attention is great but if you aren’t paying attention to the right thing, you might not notice it. This seems to be a key problem of situational awareness. As we cannot spend all our time watching for threats, we are disadvantaged by our own brain function when it comes to early spotting of trouble. The question becomes how do we overcome this?
Training seems to be the obvious answer. An in-press paper by a team of researchers from the University of London (Why are some People Inattentionally Blind and can Training reduce its frequency of occurrence, Richards, A., Hannon, E.M., Derakshan, N., School of Psychology, Birkbek College, University of London) reports findings that training, by viewing the scene prior to performing an inattentional blindness task, reduced the frequency of inattentional blindness. “The predicted increase in attentional resources from training appears to make the unexpected stimulus more likely to be seen rather than less,” say the authors. The authors also note, “These findings suggest that IB can be manipulated by training, which may have implications for training of, for example, drivers and pilots.”
If drivers and pilots can benefit from training, then we can believe that other fields can benefit as well. After all it is easier to attend to objects, events and changes for which we are somehow prepared. So, how do we prepare for an unknown and out of the ordinary event without knowing specifically what it is? We learn to focus on and respond to learned cues, to recognize things and changes in our environment that are relevant markers of conditions or actions.
Relevancy of things in our environment makes the difference between what we are aware of, and what goes unnoticed. We come to assign things relevancy through experience and very good teaching. Both experience and good training for high risk environments can teach us subtle cues of impending problems or danger. Experienced law enforcement, military and emergency personnel, as well as drivers, horsemen, climbers, and other dedicated professionals are sensitive to cues relevant to them, from years on the job. Often, in addition to experience, their recognition of cues also stems from (or, if they are fortunate, is rooted in) training and practice, particularly at the hands of good mentors who can translate their own experience into teachable elements that highlight relevant signatures.
In problems of violence, this presents some difficulty. Experienced bar bouncers, cops, and others who deal with problems of criminal assault on a frequent basis can often identify cues warning of impending assaults, but what about the average Joe worried about protecting his family? The average Joe probably lacks experience with human predators, much less at violence (this can also often be true of professionals who may face, or need to employ, violence), so how does the inexperienced but needful individual develop their sensitivity to these subtle cues? Training. Good self-protection training, that which is contextual to the “criminal assault paradigm”, can employ these cues in role-played scenarios, and give the student a better awareness of them. Repeated hard training, pressure testing, in a contextually underscored environment will only increase and reinforce lessons learned. The same if true for any other field and area of performance where situational awareness is crucial: Contextual training, at the hands of experienced teachers (those who are doing the work to bring together, prove and teach valuable lessons from their experience and own on-going training), a component of which is pressure testing the student under realistic conditions, is crucial.
Hard pressure testing forces students not to parrot what is being provided, but rather take ownership of it through hard work. Hard contextual training imparts experience of value all on its own. Contextual implies that such hard training is grounded in reality rather than fantasy. Such training is properly built on learning, and thus integrating into training, relevant signatures of criminal assault or whatever risky/threatening patterns are of concern.
Endeavors such as studying and observing body language (for self protection students), or spending time woodswalking (for the survival student) can provide a great deal of both information and experience for recognition of relevant patterns. Those who seek out such learning opportunities and related real world exposure will be much more sensitive to relevant things in their environment than those who don’t. However, it s not enough to watch the mountain, you must also climb it. Without hard challenge to our skills, we are denying ourselves fundamental elements of the experienced whole that contributes to improved awareness. Hard training, and hard experience where possible (hard experience at violence is something the self protection student will seek to avoid, however other arenas where situational awareness is important, such as extreme sports, provide hard experiences in and of themselves), is essential to developing our framework of recognizable patterns for focusing our attention and initiating our decision process.
This nuanced, sometimes hard to describe, sort of experience-derived knowing, when supporting the task of paying attention to the environment appears to offer mitigation of inattentional blindness effects on situational awareness (not by granting us any greater ability to recognize unattended events or objects, but by allowing us to capitalize on relevant cues to trigger our attention). Put another way, learning cues through good training and experience does not cease inattentional blindness, but provides us the information necessary to task ourselves with attending to the relevant stimuli.
Adding value, such training builds our decision making abilities for the fight (or whatever environment/situation is being trained for), and allows us to connect our awareness processes with our decision making, which is essential.

“One way of looking at this might be that for 42 years, I’ve been making small, regular deposits in this bank of experience, education, and training. On January 15 the balance was sufficient so that I could make a very large withdrawal.” Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger

Tasks, Routine, and Lifestyle
In the real world failures of attention occur for myriad reasons, and often our behavior encourages them. Very often we set ourselves up for ongoing series of attentional failure, with our actions and habits.
A 1996 paper on awareness failures in airplane crashes (Sources of Situation Awareness Errors in Aviation, Jones, D.G., Endsley, M.R., Aviation, Space and Environmental Medicine, v67, 1996) provides a list of situational awareness errors in the following categories: Failure to correctly perceive the situation; Failure to comprehend the situation; Failure to project the situation into the future.
On the first count, Jones and Endsley describe that failures to perceive the situation correctly may arise when information is not attended to despite its availability, and note that heavy task loads can induce such failures. The authors also note that information can be attended to, but incorrectly perceived due to prior expectations. In studying airplane crash reports from the NTSB, the study authors identified several causes for these first category of failures, including environmental interference preventing individuals from attending to information, distraction by other tasks or demanding task load in general, distraction by things not related to the primary-task, and individuals relying on expectation rather than verification by attending to the object/environment in question.
For the second category of error, information may be perceived without the meaning being comprehended. The paper posits that this may occur due to lacking a strong mental model for combining the available information into something meaningful, or the attempt to process the information with an inappropriate model. Also offered is that over reliance on “defaults” in a given model may cause failure to comprehend the situation when that expectation in absence of data fails. In the study of crashes, such failures included individual failures to attend to information given and resulting assumption or default to a standard behavior, as well as expectation of the behavior of others rather than offering explicit instruction or verification of information. Distraction and preoccupation were noted underlying factors for failures to apply a new or correct model to the situation.
In the third category, the individual is aware of their situation, what is happening immediately, but is unable to extrapolate that into future meaning. The given causes are, again, a failure of the model relied upon to provide framework for projection, and the general difficulty of mental projection tasks. Failures in this category included incorrect response to information due to poor understanding of systems, and incorrect predictions of the meaning of speed and location information.
Put into a context of situational awareness in a daily, two-feet on the ground, environment, you should probably be able to easily identify such failures or the potential there-of. Failures resulting from being unable to see or otherwise perceive important details of the environment due to position or interfering objects/people, failures because of distraction or preoccupation, and then further failures because of assumption in place of the missing information happen all the time: You ask your wife if she put the milk back in the fridge, she doesn’t hear you or you don’t hear her response, so with your focus still on listening to the TV you were just watching, you walk right past the milk on the counter and open up the fridge to look. Failures to accurately project the meaning of information should be equally easy to imagine, even if its something as simple as misjudging the speed and direction of the running dog and getting our feet knocked out from under us.
Countering many of these failures comes back to actively working to know ourselves and what we know and having the right training and experience, to give us strong models to handle the information we perceive, but there is more to it than that as well. We’ll get more into specific actions and behaviors that improve your ability to run situational awareness routines in an upcoming article; Here we’re talking about overall lifestyle. You must cultivate a lifestyle that facilitates situational awareness, and minimizing interference. While anyone is at risk for succumbing to task related failures at some point, we set ourselves up in other ways. Task induced failures occur alongside others rooted in boredom, distraction, depression or neuroticism and assumption. Often these occur not alongside, but together in a chain or related sequence of attentional failures. It seems that the common term in this industry, “Task Fixation”, is describing the daily effects of either/both inattentional blindness and attentional failures due to insufficient attentiveness caused by one or another different factors. It is important to note that the object of fixation may not be a “task” in the physical sense, but a purely mental task or emotional state which has captured our attention.

Most folks have a routine. They do roughly the same things, most days, in the same order. Go to work, go home, go to work, go home, go to work, go to the store, go home. Perhaps not the ideal life, but such routine is often the reality of life. Even in different circumstances, routine can be hard to escape. There are things in our lives that need done regularly, and doing them in a particular order usually works best. That routine, however, may not be best for us as individuals.
We are lulled by routine, particularly a routine we find uninteresting or even depressing, into a state of lower awareness. We require novel stimulation to maintain interest in scenes, and sometimes our daily life doesn’t provide that unless we seek it out. Work is boring, there is nothing particularly great going on at the house, you’re bored, and after awhile of that, possibly depressed too. Such factors quickly add up to not paying attention, often relying on assumption rather than awareness (“No one followed me to my car the last 597 days I left work, so no one followed me today”). Rather than a large bubble of awareness, your inattention to the external confines you into a very small sphere, mostly reactionary rather than observant and predictive. Rather than your bubble of awareness reaching out around you, you are drawn in to a very narrowed focus, mostly on the immediate tasks to get through the day. Things in your environment have to actually penetrate this focus, to get your attention, and to do that, they have to get very close. Close is the last thing you want in a threat, be it from predators, impending accidents, or anything else that can do you harm. The closer threats and potential threats are before recognizing them, the less time you have to respond.
The same thing happens when we are tired, or when we allow ourselves to become focused on a particular task to the exclusion of all else. Tiredness slows us down, our thinking gets foggy and we focus intently on tasks just to get through them, only solidifying the tightened confines of our bubble. We must break out of these things.
Keeping an active, alert, mind despite dull routine can be as easy as finding simple things to entertain us, or keep our interest. Instead of listening to the radio play the same twenty songs every day, listen to different things, CD’s, your whole library of Mp3s on Shuffle, audiobooks, etc. that keep you aware (but avoid using an iPod, sticking earbuds in only removes us further from the rest of the world). Play games that challenge and stimulate you. Engage in creative activities, be they writing, drawing, crafts, or whatever. Use dull times to go over these things in your mind. Relate things you read or hear to things in your environment, actively look for inspiration and solutions to problems in your work, art or life in the environment and activities around you. Engage your mind, and make your mind engage in the world around you. Giving yourself stimulation to look and think farther than your own shadow does wonders for improving situational awareness.

If you are living the hurried and harried, but overly routine, life so common for many, your situational awareness is being impaired somewhere, somehow (probably in multiple ways). It is time to slow down, and expand: Break the routine, look up and around rather than down and only at work or other tasks. Rather than adding pressure, you need to find ways to cut stress, and work in the time to eat well, sleep well and play well. Like the very act of paying attention, this takes work, but is worth it on so many levels, not the least of which will be enabling cultivation or improvement of situational awareness.

Games
Some tools often talked about for helping new students of self-defense, and kids, develop their situational awareness are of value to improving situational awareness as well. These tools take the form of games played with yourself, while going about your daily routine.
The first is to spend a period of time, say a trip to the store, trying to spot a particular thing. Orange shirts, for example, can be your focus; Try to spot everyone with an orange shirt before they get within thirty feet. You can incentivize this by allowing yourself a reward for success, and denying it for failure. If no one in an orange shirt gets within thirty feet of you before you see them, in a day, you can have that chocolate bar, buy that new tool or toy, or whatever. This game starts fairly simple, with a single thing, but has a great deal of room for expansion. You can add new elements to what you’re trying to be aware of, so that rather than playing the game with just one thing, you are trying to be aware of and track multiple things. This allows you less time for each task, and forces you to engage in the process much more actively.
Another game is to, again as you go about your daily routine, try to actively think like a “bad guy”. If you were a predator of other human beings, what would you do with the information presented you at any given moment? What advantages could you take, what weaknesses do you see in others, in environments? This is an illuminating and interesting game for several reasons, and one of my favorites to play. Many report having a lot of fun with this game, and I suspect it stimulates the brain in some way that pleasingly tickles our inner atavistic predator. There is nothing wrong with that, as there are many lessons that can be learned from this game. Trying to think like a predator, gives you an idea (albeit, probably mild) of how those people watch you. You should be able to take away lessons about what your behavior could signal or give the opportunity for, or validation of what you aren’t giving opportunity for. As well as that increase of your awareness of your self, within your environs, this can begin helping you to be aware of others watching you; Few people watch others actively, it is a behavior of the dialed in of both good and bad intents. Being watched is not a sure sign of anything, but it always bears watching. Our think-like-a-badguy game is another that cultivates an active and aware mind, engaging with the environment rather than ignoring all but the parts of it immediately ahead. If this is a new way of thinking and perceiving for you, then this will be very good for you. When you think like a predator, and watch like a predator, you’re more actively observing than most people do. Taking note of movements, weaknesses, opportunities is an aware behavior, and essentially the same routine an aware protection minded individual runs. Feeling like you need to really hone your observational habits, for situational awareness? Play this game. Just want to stay sharp? Play this game.
You can get fairly creative from here, and start developing and playing your own awareness developing or enhancing games.
As you move into developing your own practice of playing awareness games, you should endeavor to connect the pieces of what we learn from other games, and from awareness enhancing training, and make our games contextual. Awareness games need to be designed in a way that matches signatures relevant to our needs. This gives us the opportunity to recognize pertinent patterns, as well as develop a picture of the background against which to screen.
As a contextual game, “what if” thinking may be of some value. The practice of entertaining “what if” type thinking during casual moments or downtime is often discussed among self defense students and professionals in violent environments. An example of this would be mentally gaming the possible responses to a carjacking attempt while forced to stop, say at a drive up teller or red-light (of course, not so intensely that you lose situational awareness). This is not the Rambo-esque fantasy time for imagining taking forty PVS14 begoggled ninjas wielding SCAR-CQB Heavy’s in the teller lane, but rather for taking accurate assessments of the environment, potential risks and your true resources and abilities. This type of contextual and reasonable “what if” game encourages information gathering and planning, which has been suggested to improve situational awareness and response to critical events (Training for Situation Awareness, Endsley, M.R., Garland, D.J, Situation Awareness Analysis and Measurement, 2000).
As part of routine mental practice for being a better human being, never mind a still breathing one, games are good. Using your mind in this way is part of what we were talking about before, in breaking the monotony of life and avoiding the uncreative and inobservant fugues that so many succumb to. Games give us reason to work on paying attention, and stay interested in doing so; Done right they provide us valuable “training” and feedback, enhancing our situational awareness overall.

Situational awareness is crucial to our daily lives, from driving to not stepping on that sharp rock; The higher the risks of our pursuits and professions, the more our success and sustained corporeal integrity depends on good situational awareness.
This is not the end-all, be-all, writing on situational awareness, or even on maintaining or cultivating it, but rather my observations of some issues and methods of value. You should look for your own ways to increase and maintain your awareness, your own games to play and practices to instill; And as with all things, everything, everything, should be pressure tested savagely, with as much realism and ego-less evaluation as possible.

In the coming weeks, there will be at least two more articles on situational awareness posted, to expand a little more on some of the things quickly moved through in this initial piece.

(Credit where Credit is Due: I have tried hard not to redundantly go over ground covered by others in other articles on situational awareness, and to make this an original article that adds value to the community, rather than mimicking. To that end, I’ve use many original ideas, but few of them are really mine. Much of what I know, believe, and practice about awareness and thus have shared here, owes to the richly intellectual community that is Total Protection Interactive. My thanks to you all.
Any abuse, misconstruction, or poor expression of concepts and ideas is wholly my own, however.)

In the future, BFE Labs will move entirely away from “Hostility”. The only reason hostility exists in the world is because we continue to propagate it; Preparing for it, acting in supposed defense or preemption, and even thinking about hostility creates an incredible amount of negative energy. That energy looks for a home, in the anger and hate of other hearts, and causes the very hostile actions others hoped to avoid. Those supposedly preventative , securing, measures therefore become hostile acts themselves;Hostile to the whole world. Spending time in nature, exploring and adventuring, has taught us this.
So, we’re going to be moving in new directions, healthier and more positive approaches to living and coexistence with nature, including other humans. By refusing to engage in hostility, we are left to focus on austerity in new, and breathtaking, ways.
The world, particularly the natural world, offers us so many lessons and benefits. We have been approaching austerity as something to be solved, and we have been wrong. Austerity offers its own solutions, if we are in touch with the Earth and can hear her voice within our hearts. From here forward, we are dedicating ourselves to spreading the words and wisdom of our mother Earth, because she has the answers for every problem, every negative experience or situation, if only we listen. It is our mission, now that we’re finally listening, to share what we learn in nature, and help each of you discover the beauty and capability in your natural soul, when freed from negativity by nature. Our new focus is thus Solutions within Austerity; Answers for the important questions, of the world, heart and mind, as provided by deep and spiritual wilderness experience.

In coming weeks, we will be removing all references to hostility, violence, or use of force from this website. All of our tools and equipment related to violence and causing harm will be remanufactured into a variety of implements for bettering our lives in concert with the Earth. Knives, firearms and other steel tools will be reforged (in coal & petroleum free sustainable, recycled fuel “green forges”) into hand tools for a local “UnSchool” program teaching permaculture and sustainable food practices to elementary age children. Tools and parts made from other materials will be used in the creation of housewares to be donated to low-income undocumented immigrant families. All remaining items and materials of former negativity will be made available to local artists, and art-in-schools programs working with recycled media.
As we move forward, all our work in the wilderness will be re-focused to leaving no footprints, and living in concert with nature without doing harm, even in what many so-negatively refer to as “survival situations”. We have learned that survival is not a hardship, but an easy, and comfortable, process of existing within nature. Only those out of tune with our Earth mother struggle to eat, stay warm or be healthy in a natural environment. The “survival as hardship” thought process (thought poison) is something we will be entirely removing from our past work, and future outputs. This is a negative, masculine-centric approach to nature as something to be conquered, to be beaten and penetrated by men with tools and in anger. This is an incredibly damaging perspective, an active rape of mother Earth, that creates great negativity against all women. Our work to counter this perspective is essential to our new mission; We owe everyone so many apologies for this negativity we previously promoted, and the damage done to the rich femininity of nature.
The road is long, and is beset on all sides by forces of negativity and violence, but we are confident that we will endure. The Earth speaks within us, and through us, and alongside her we can create a new psycho-emotional climate of earth coexistence, learning from austerity, and achieving a state of whole-living as post-gender natural beings.

Thank you for sticking with us, and our most profound apologies for past negativity we may have brought to your life. We hope you will continue to join us, and allow us to remove that negativity and heal the harm done by it.
Namaste!

(Pssst! April Fools!)

Not to sound too stuck on myself (there is plenty I am bad at), I’ve known for a long time that many people were unaware of their surroundings, simply by contrasting them with myself. Growing up in the backcountry, on a working ranch, I came to have good observational skill at an early age. It was nothing specifically taught, but rather just part of the routine practices of living and working in the backcountry. You watch everything, as a matter of course. You watch the sky for signs of impending bad weather; You watch the ground for signs of your livestock and their movement patterns, as well as for dangers and predator sign; You even watch the grass grow, so you know the condition of the resources upon which your stock depend. These are the routine practices of the day, and the habits of everyone, as natural as breathing most times, and as forced as tying a shoe thats come unlaced at the rest.
Because of that environment, I have always been the guy among others who regularly saw things first in all manner of circumstances; The finder of arrowheads and lost keys, and the one who often took note of the little details no one else did. When I was younger, my first real clues that other people did not place as much importance on observing their environment, was that my mention of things like “smells like rain” or “I don’t think that real fresh looking bear shit was here when we walked up this way” were met with dismissal, arched eyebrows and “ohgod, there he goes again talking about more little random broken twigs and shit” attitudes. Folks from my part of the world, or who had lived and worked out a lot responded more positively, often being on the exact same page. After enough of this, plus experience teaching others observational skills for self protection, survival, and general better living through not getting eaten by that thing you otherwise wouldn’t have seen, I began to get the idea. Most folks don’t pay attention.
Sometimes though, even the most cynical among us can be surprised unpleasantly. A recent conversation with a neighbor, who we’ll call Jane, produced this. She had been talking to another neighbor (“neighbor” in this country being one of the five or six folk who live within ten or fifteen miles), who is a more recent resident out here, about the upgrades he was making on his property. He is a “prepper” type, is setting his property up as a survival retreat, and was talking about his solar and wind system and all his other neat tools and toys for surviving the apocalypse. Jane asked this fella’ about his plans to drill a well, and he told her wasn’t going to. Goggling at him she asked if he expected to be able to haul water the thirty-five miles of dirt road from town during the end of the world. Laughing, he said no, of course not, but he had other plans. He was going to collect dew, running off his roof.
Now, this may be a mighty fine idea in other places, I really can’t say. Here, however, it is not. This is a desert. A high desert, with plants and some water sources, and all of that, but a desert all the same. The amount of dew that runs off a roof in the average year is almost immeasurably small.
Here at the ranch, we trap all the water that runs off the roof. I have no honest idea about dew volume, but the amount we get from rain is not enough to sustain a family, much-less a family with crops, and animals (either pets or stock). This is dry country, with an overall dry climate. There are very few above ground water features, and the majority of those are seasonal arroyos and catchments pushed up by ranchers with bulldozers, which are typically dry. Annual precipitation for this area is nine (9) inches a year, and on top of that, we’re having a drought. None of this is exactly a big secret; The ground is dry, the grass is dead, and it never rains. Anyone with half a mind, and a pair of eyes, should be able to figure this out just by looking around, and if not that, by sitting in their kitchen in the early morning and listening to the sound of absolutely no dew running off the roof. In short, observing their environment. And yet, here was our “prepper” fellow, expecting to survive by collecting dew.

The Desert Has Many Riches, but Any Fool Can See, Water Ain’t One of ‘Em

This goes beyond backcountry, wilderness, or zombie apocalypse survival; From personal defense to your daily commute, if you aren’t observing your environment constantly, you’re going to miss something or wrongly assume that because something was so elsewhere it will be so here too. The further out on the edge you are, be it in a wilderness-, medical-, combative- or long term- survival situation, the more important that thing (or those things) you miss will be. Eventually that thing you miss will kill you. Maybe after its killed your children and your spouse.

The biggest problems I have encountered with butane lighters are getting them to work in the cold, and finding them depleted when I go to use one. The cold issue can be helped somewhat by moving them closer to your body when out in really cold conditions. Finding them depleted though is another story. The gas-feed buttons on the average lighter are pretty easily depressed, and can be held down by other gear or even resting wrong inside a pants pocket.
Awhile back, in an effort to counter this and prevent unwanted depression of the button, I made a couple kydex lighter covers for the units in my fire kits. These worked, but there was an unavoidable amount of bulk added by the kydex. I knew there had to be a better solution, and of course I found one that made me feel like an idiot for not thinking of.
Cruising the internet, I came across a photo of a fire kit and there was a Bic lighter, with an O-ring under the button to keep it from being depressed. Simple, easy, cheap and very low-bulk; The epitome, especially in contrast to my efforts, of the KISS principle.

On some lighters, the o-ring has to be pulled hard underneath the button to prevent its function. On some others, as shown, two o-rings had to be utilized. It’s also worth noting that this will not work with every lighter tried: On some, the o-ring could simply be depressed along with the button, allowing gas to escape.
Happy firebuilding!

Growing up and continuing to live, work and play in the hinterlands of New Mexico, I’ve had more than a few run ins with snakes. As a kid I encouraged “run ins” with non-venomous snakes such as bullsnakes and various racers, catching them and keeping them in a terrarium for a week or two before returning them to the wilds. However, there have also been the run ins I did nothing but discourage, those with venomous snakes, particularly rattlesnakes.
Over the years I have stepped on, kicked, almost sat or put my hand down on, been crawled over and been struck (in the boots thankfully, both times) by both Western Diamondback and Prairie Rattlers. I’ve had close calls of a less dramatic nature with most other species of rattler in the Southwest, to include Mojave and Rock rattlers. It would be easy to say that so many encounters are the product of foolish and uncautious behavior, but in this part of the world, in an outdoors/rural lifestyle, thats simply the luck that many folks have. Those who are foolish about snakes, have less fortune. For all my close encounters, I have avoided serious injury by being cautious and not acting the fool. You can do exactly the same, even in a snake rich environment.

Snakebite Prevention
The first step in surviving a snake bite is to avoid it. Don’t get bitten, and you have nothing to worry about. Avoiding snakes, and avoiding behaviors when encountering snakes that increase the likelyhood of a bite, are absolutely key.
These steps are redundant; If you are dumb and let one slip, or are forced to let one go, but you are still doing the others, you retain a better chance of not getting fucked up. A momentary lapse almost earned me an envenomation from a Diamondback that had moved onto my front porch in the night, but the leather of a high-topped boot prevented his success (Incidentally, 12 gauge #6 birdshot makes a hell of a gouge in flagstone floor).
Wearing high-top boots, ideally of thick leather, or snake-bite resistant gaiters is an excellent step in preventing envenomation, but only become truly necessary when first line precautions haven’t been taken or are impossible due to environment or situational needs. Similarly, wearing long pants, denim or similar materials, may help reduce the amount of venom delivered during a successful strike (“Denim clothing reduces venom expenditure by rattlesnakes striking defensively at model human limbs”, Herbert and Hayes, Annals of Emergency Medicine, 2009 December; 54(6): 830-6).
Of primary importance is that you use care and caution about where you are moving, where your feet are going and where your stride takes you. Particularly when moving across areas that would be likely to harbor and conceal snakes. Brush, tall grass, loose rocks, boulders, deadfall, and human debris/garbage are all prime spots for snakes. Watch for snakes across varying elevations, as they can be above, beside, or below, and don’t forget to check in water for them as well. Look ahead of yourself, and over logs, bushes and ledges before you step over them. Sometimes you won’t see a snake until you are very near, or right above, it. Use a stick to probe, or light to look into, places you cannot see before reaching within.

Do You See the Diamondback?

Be aware of potential snake-rich areas, and approach them with caution. In many areas it is simply impossible to see under or into every possible snake hide. Use tools to locate snakes, so that you can avoid them. Use a trekking pole, or long stick, to probe materials you need to walk or reach through or under. Throw rocks into brush, or rock slides or under ledges. And always, always, look and be prepared to get out of the snakes way.
When dealing with rattlesnakes you have a distinct advantage in usually receiving a warning buzz from them, often before they are seen. However, some do not buzz or will not, and some are simply difficult to hear, so it’s never safe to assume there is no snake because there is no buzz. With rattlers, it is merely an added advantage to knowing where they are and avoiding them. This can also be a problem coming from an environment where 99% of the concern is toward rattlers – It’s easy to be spoiled by having an auditory warning, and forget that many venomous snakes have no such capability. Similarly, people inexperienced with rattlers are often confused by the noise, failing to recognize it as a danger sign, or making stupid moves attempting to identify or locate the source. It is important when going into unfamiliar environments to take note of the snakes of the area and their habits as part of your environmental safety evaluations.

Can You See the Snake Now?
This rattler never buzzed or moved; Had he been disturbed by an errant foot, however, he would’ve reacted far differently.

Most people who get bitten by snakes are bitten because they did something stupid. They were unaware, failed to recognize warnings, or failed to act in an appropriate manner. It’s not hard to not be stupid with snakes. If you encounter a snake, don’t fuck with it. Leave it be, give it a wide berth, and keep on trucking. Most snakes are not aggressive, and simply want to be left alone. A snake that’s been interfered with and frightened or pissed off, however, will act aggressively. Similarly snakes in other forms of distress will behave aggressively. Do your part to not contribute to their foul mood, and you won’t have much to worry about.
Some snakes, water moccasins in particular, are aggressive and territorial. I’ve personally encountered that behavior with Mojave rattlers as well, but that’s not conclusive. Use caution, stay out of their way, and avoid contact with potentially aggressive snakes as much as possible (just like any other snake). If you, for some reason, cannot get away from an aggressive snake, kill it. Most snakes will leave you alone, but when necessary, don’t hesitate to kill one quickly (The head is your target; Shotguns work especially well. A .22 through the top of the head will work just fine, but .22 “snake shot” is snake oil, use a bullet. Cutting the head off works well too, but I prefer a long handled tool like a shovel. Use caution with dead snakes and severed heads as they can still envenomate).

Snakebite First Aid
Snakebite as used here refers to a bite and envenomation from a venomous snake. Plain, simple, non-venomous snake bite should be treated like any other simple puncture wound from a nasty, germ/bacteria riddled, object.
Treatment of vemomous snakebite in the field, absent a well supplied doctor hidden in your backpack, is largely a fallacy. Most of what can be done in the field is support and transport. In the absence of certainty, the bite should be treated as venomous and the bitten transported to the nearest medical facility, or intercept with emergency medical services.
There are various tools on the market, sold as “Snakebite Kits”, which are of no actual value. Most feature a mechanical negative-pressure device designed to “suck” the venom out of the wound. Many also feature a tourniquet, and a scalpel blade, supposedly to constrain the venom to the injured limb, and to open up the bite site for easier suction of the venom. These ideas have been widely discredited in the medical community as wastes of time at best, if not outright dangerous.
I pretty commonly hear the tourniquet and cutting methods discredited by laypeople, but there are a great many people still carrying various types of suction devices. Primary among these is the Sawyer Extractor, but others exist and are still commonly carried and, worse yet, recommended by the people carrying them. There is strong evidence that these types of tools both fail to extract a significant amount of venom (if any at all), and that they may in fact cause further damage to the tissue and vessels surrounding the bite leading to increased necrosis.
In a study reported in the February 2004 edition of Annals of Emergency Medicine (Suction for venomous snakebite: A study of “mock venom” extraction in a human model, by Alberts, et al), 8 patients were injected with simulated fangs and a mock venom marked with radioactive particles. At 3-minutes a Sawyer Extractor was then applied to the “envenomation” sites, and after fifteen minutes of suction the blood collected and analyzed for venom content. The removed fluid was found to contain less than 1% of the injected venom. The study’s authors concluded that this “suggests that suction is unlikely to be an effective treatment for reducing the total body venom burden after a venomous snakebite.”
In the same, February 2004, edition of Annals of Emergency Medicine, an editorial by Dr. Sean Bush, MD, FACEP, titled “Snakebite Suction Devices Don’t Remove Venom: They Just Suck”, compared the study and its findings to previous dismissals of tourniquets and incisions across the bites. In the editorial Bush notes that, in a study he authored, increased tissue damage was associated with use of the Sawyer extractor, “The conclusion of the study was that the Extractor did not reduce swelling, but resulted in further injury in some subjects. Specifically, circular lesions identical in size and shape to the Extractor suction cups developed where the devices had been applied. These lesions subsequently necrosed, sloughed, and resulted in tissue loss that prolonged healing by weeks. Similar injuries after Extractor use have been noted in human patients.”
In short, these types of gadgets are, at best, a piss in the wind rather than panacea.

Snakebite Suction Devices and Tourniquets/Constrictor Bands are Dangerous Antiques Just as Much as Hand Forged Blood-Letting Scalpels; Most laypeople are too reliant on hearsay, word-of-mouth and memory to know this, however.

In absence of effective gadgetry, the best medicine for snake bites remains rapid patient support, and transportation to definitive care. Aside from fundamental Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS) type support for the patient, and transport, there is very little that can be done in the field for snakebites. Very little, however, does not mean nothing at all.

Pressure Immobilization Technique:
There is a management method, initially thought only applicable to Elapidae family of snakes common in Australia/Asia (vs. Crotalids, pit vipers, the predominant type of poisonous snake in North America), but now considered applicable for all snake bite. Pressure Immobilization Technique (PIT), also known as the Australian Method, is the standard for field care of snakebites in Australia and Asia. The method involves wrapping the bitten extremity in compressing bandages from the bite site, to the trunk, and back again, then splinting to ensure immobility (Australian Wilderness Medical Institute guidelines for Elapid Envenomation). This prevents or at least reduces systemic spread of the venom until the bands are removed (in a clinical setting with immediately available antivenin). For elapidae, this method works exceedingly well, but has only recently seen acceptance for crotalid envenomations.
Elapidae are primarily neurotoxic in their venoms, where-as crotalids are hemotoxic. PIT, when applied to crotalid envenomations, traps the tissue damaging venom and greatly increases intracompartmental pressures, greatly increasing the tissue damage done by crotalid venom. A 2004 study by Dr. Sean Bush et al (Pressure Immobilization Delays Mortality and Increases Intracompartmental Pressure After Artificial Intramuscular Rattlesnake Envenomation in a Porcine Model, Annals of Emergency Medicine, 2004 December; 44(6): 599-604) showed that when used on Western Diamondback envenomation, PIT delayed mortality by 23%, but increased intracompartmental pressure by 179%. In discussion, the authors reference other studies showing improved mortality rates when PIT is used, but increased possibility for tissue damage. Based on their results the authors concluded, “On the basis of our findings, we cannot recommend pressure immobilization widely for viper envenomation, although specific scenarios may warrant its use. Individuals who chose to consider pressure immobilization will still have to assess risks versus benefits versus alternatives on a case-by-case basis. An informed decision should take into consideration factors such as the size and species of snake, the patient’s size, duration and location of fang contact, previous exposures to snake venom, and time and accessibility to medical care and antivenom.”
Despite this expressed reticence, use of pressure immobilization is seeing acceptance in the United States as a taught method and protocol for many emergency medical systems. The 2010 American Heart Association First Aid Guidelines state “Applying a pressure immobilization bandage with a pressure between 40 and 70mmHgi n the upper extremity and between 55 and 70mmHg in the lower extremity around the entire length of the bitten extremity is an effective and safe way to slow the dissemination of venom by slowing lymph flow […] For practical purposes pressure is sufficient if the bandage is comfortably tight and snug but allows a finger to be slipped under it. Initially it was theorized that slowing lymphatic flow by external pressure would only benefit victims bitten by snakes producing neurotoxic venom, but the effectiveness of pressure immobilization has also been demonstrated for bites by non-neurotoxic American snakes.”
The use of PIT for Crotalid envenomations is further supported by “Pilot studies of pressure-immobilization bandages for rattlesnake envenomations” by Meggs et al, Clinical Toxicology, 2010 January; 48(1): 61-3, wherein the authors state “Pigs with pressure-immobilization bandages survived for 24 h, whereas untreated pigs died at 13.68 +/- 3.42 h (p = 0.014). Surviving pigs walked on the extremity at 7 days. Potassium rose from 4.033 +/- 0.252 at baseline to 17.767 +/- 5.218 mEq/L (p < 0.0001) at time of death in untreated pigs but was normal at 24 h in treated subjects. Widespread tissue necrosis was seen in the untreated group but only local necrosis in the treatment group.”

There has been concern expressed regarding the ability of both medical professionals and laypersons to successfully apply Pressure Immobilization, even after training (Physicians and lay people are unable to apply pressure immobilization properly in a simulated snakebite scenario, Norris et al, Wilderness and Environmental Medicine 2005 Spring;16(1): 16-21). Long term retention of ability to perform PIT within the narrow range of ideal pressures was found by researchers to be low.
A 2009 Australian study on pressure immobilization training and materials (“Investigating pressure bandaging for snakebite in a simulated setting: Bandage type, training and the effect of transport” by Canale et al, Emergency Medicine Australasia, 2009; 21: 184-190), noted that performance, while still not perfect, increased when participants were given proper training, “Following training, the median pressure for the 36 participants was 65mHg (IQR 56–71 mmHg), closer to the optimal range than initial attempts. On initial bandaging, 5/36 (14%) participants achieved optimal pressure range with elasticized bandages, compared with 18/36 (50%) after training (p~0.OO2).” The study also noted that “crepe”/gauze bandages did not maintain adequate pressures over the duration of an ambulance ride, “Bandage pressures were measured during a 30 min ambulance trip and demonstrated that all crepe bandages (with or without splinting) did not maintain pressure after an initial bandage was applied at the correct tension.”
Part of such critical work invariably focuses on the performance of untrained persons applying pressure immobilization, and the lackluster performance of these untrained persons is cited as stacking up against PIT. However, many other skills suffer from extremely poor performance when undertaken by the untrained (no one would say that poor performance of CPR by someone who just read an instruction sheet was reason to disregard CPR entirely). The takeaway from these studies should be the need for training, frequent practice and re-training at regular intervals, and ensuring use of the right equipment, rather than a complete disregard for PIT.

Whether pressure immobilization is used or not, patients need to be supported in accordance with standard ACLS guidelines for Airway, Breathing and Circulation. If available, Oxygen and fluids via large bore IV’s are commonly recommended (Snake Envenomation; Mohave Rattle, Bush SP, Medscape eMedicine 2008. Snakebite, Daley and Alexander, Medscape eMedicine 2010). In absence of IV availability, the patient can be allowed to drink clear fluids, in small amounts, so long as they are not experiencing nausea or vomiting (Venomous Snakebite in Mountainous Terrain: Prevention and Management, Boyd et al, Wilderness and Environmental Medicine 2007; 18: 190-202).
Minimizing activity, and removal of jewelry and clothing potentially involved in the expected swelling of the bitten extremity is recommended when applicable. If it’s necessary to walk the victim out of a remote area, these measures may need to be delayed until a vehicle, or EMS intercept point, is reached. Whenever possible litter carry of the patient should be considered, but may not always be possible such as in self rescue.
When possible the bitten limb should be immobilized to prevent movement, and reduce pain and swelling (regardless of use of pressure immobilization technique).
The patient should be encouraged to remain calm and aided in relaxation (your behavior, as rescuer is thus extremely important), to keep their heart rate low and decrease spread of venom.
Patient and injury history will be very important to record, so that it may be provided once the patient has been delivered to medical care. Note the type and size of the snake, the time of the bite, and the patients condition as it evolves between bite and delivery to care. Continue monitoring patient vitals and mark the increase in affected tissue every fifteen minutes or so. Take note of time from bite to onset of symptoms, and of pain level at time of bite and as symptoms progress. Make note of any medications (prescription as well as over-the-counter) the patient is on or substances they may have ingested, while they remain conscious and lucid enough to recount these details. When delivering the patient to EMS or the hospital, these details will be important.

Going step by step, from the information and sources previously referenced, we can establish a suggested protocol for management of envenomation in the field as follows:

• Contact Emergency Medical Services.
• Identify (if possible) the snake but otherwise leave it alone.
• Encourage calm and minimize physical movement/exertion of victim.
• Expose the bite, removing potentially constricting clothing from the area (cut away, rather than forcing the patient to make the excess movement required to disrobe).
• Use Pressure Immobilization when appropriate.
• Splint the bitten extremity (even without PI).
• Give oxygen and intravenous fluids if available.
• Mark the extent of envenomation (visible via swelling), and continue to re-mark every 15 minutes to track progress.
• Continue to monitor patient condition and vitals. Intubate if available and necessary to combat airway occlusion from swelling.
• Avoid administering any therapies that lack value, or may increase risks, such as administration of aspirin or anti-inflammatory pain medications that may worsen bleeding, use of ice or electrical shock, tourniquet application, ingestion of alcohol, and home remedies. Use energy and time for medically sound patient support, and rapid transport to advanced care.

This is not comprehensive, and is not intended to replace professional medical guidance for management of snakebites, but is rather an aggregation of some of the current findings and practices on snakebite care in the field. There is a lot more reading that can, and should, be done (certainly if you are a provider), but this should give you a start and a working beginning for your needs in the field.
Be safe, and tread easy!

Because of their ubiquity in the professional environment, I have at least a handful of times in the past directed people to BoundTree Medical for their medical/first aid supplies needs. Despite having some of their house-brand gear and seeing large orders made with them, I’d never placed a personal credit/debit card order with them until recently. It was a goat-rope.
I needed a small number of supplies to round out a custom first aid kit for a friend, roughly $25 worth. My order, invoiced for that $25 was broken up into chunks and charged to my account in chunks. This is, probably, where the problem began. As the order arrived, bit by bit over about a week, I saw the invoices were different amounts than those actually being charged. Then the charges kept coming, and totaled far more than my order. The first charge was $18, then $6, and then a series of charges between $1 and $13, totaling up to over $50 charged to my account. When I notified Boundtree of this issue it took their billing department 3 days to get back to me, at which point they said that the additional charges were, in fact, credits. I politely told them that they were not credits, rather they were debits (a hick from the sticks I may be, but I know which way my money goes and what those little + and – signs mean). At that time, a Thursday, I told them to make it right by Friday, or I’d go through the bank with a fraudulent charges dispute. After that the nice girl in customer service wrote back within minutes to tell me she would have someone call me from billing. I told her what hours I was available that day and the following and that if they didn’t get me, to leave voicemail and I would call back. No one called, no one left voicemail. I let it sit over the weekend as more pressing things came up, and on Monday morning logged into my bank account to begin the fraud dispute process. Upon logging in, I found that Boundtree had returned my money.
While I am pleased that they straightened out my order, the process took almost two weeks from the first confusing charges, until my money was returned. The Boundtree billing department either does not know the difference between taking money and sending out money or they knowingly lied to me when initially saying they had credited my account. Neither one is particularly tolerable, and, even with an eventually favorable resolution, it is no tolerable that it happened at all. I have no further desire to do business with a company that feels it can charge its customers above and beyond an order, and make no effort to get it right until seriously rousted by that customer. Taking peoples money for no exchange of goods or services and without an agreement to take that money is theft; Accidental, on purpose, it is still theft. BoundTree Medical ( Boundtree.com ) is a no go as far as I am concerned. To those I’ve suggested source materials there in the past, I apologize and hope you had less problems.
Boundtree is part of the Sarnova family of companies which includes Blue Ridge Medical, Emergency Medical Products and Tri-anim, all of which will be avoided in the future, with the recommendation to others to do the same. Will it hurt them? No, it won’t, but it will save me (and hopefully some others) from having to deal with their clownshoes billing department.

Shop where you will; This is posted for informative purposes only, to enable our friends, readers, and clients to make informed decisions about where to spend their money.