Dual Survival

In which Joe Teti kills a boar.

The show on Discover Channel features Cody Lundin, a naturalist and primitive skills expert who wears his thinning hair long and braided into two pigtails tied with leather ribbons and feathers and what have you and who goes around everywhere barefoot be it swamp or desert or jungle or savannah, cold mountain top or boiling valley, so a holdover hippie type contrasted with Joe Teti this season, a military trained special operations type.

Obviously they have different approaches and differing areas of knowledge. Cody is surprisingly knowledgable in unusual ways. Teti's knowledge is more standard survival textbook. What's surprising are the very many areas where they agree.

In this episode Cody was chiding Joe for putting so much emphasis on making a spear then heading out into the Hawaiian jungle looking for trouble. Cody thought Joe's time could be better spent on something far less dangerous and equally productive. They found a boar's skull then they found fresh evidence of boar. Cody could get them fish and he's always busy showing viewers different ways of making a fire. They both show ways of building shelter and various ways of treating water. Earlier they found an abandoned car and Joe scavenged around it and came up with a roll of chicken wire. "You gotta use what you find, and this chicken wire is gold," and viewers are wondering why Joe would be so interested in having the fencing.

Using the boar skull for demonstration the two discussed how dangerous wild boars are. They'll gash right through your legs and gouge you. They can easily kill you.

Joe used the old rusted chicken wire to create a channel on a boar path that he found with fresh boar droppings. He would channel the boar into a kill zone. He set up a trap and waited. This could have been a setup for the show but sure enough a boar comes along. It didn't have the five inch tusks that made the boar skeleton so dangerous. This was a smaller size boar. Joe had smeared his body in mud and his boots in pig poop to conceal his own scent then hid and waited some distance from the snare.  The boar does allow itself to be channelled along the chicken wire fencing and it does enter the kill zone and it does get its leg hung up in a snare and its squeals in terror immediately.

Joe jumped into action, lunged at the boar, stabbed the boar from the length of his spear multiple times then mounted the boar from behind and sliced its neck in an instant. It blew my mind how quickly Joe turned from patient explainer into an utterly effective ruthless pitiless killer each step meaningful, each motion to an ineluctable singular end.

It takes him a moment to calm down and for the wildness to go from his eyes.

You would not want to get into a knife fight with Joe.

While Cody is traipsing around barefoot in pigtails.

Next scene Cody and Joe are eating boar shish-kabob. Joe says, "How's the boar?"  Cody answers, "This is among the best boar that I've ever eaten."