Maybe this has been discussed before, sorry if it has. Has anyone watched that show on Discovery called Survivorman with Les Stroud? http://www.survivorman.ca/ Does anyone else think this demonstrates exactly what NOT to do in a survival situation? I have seen that guy do some of the absolute dumbest things, get himself into ridiculous predicaments, and all sorts of other preventable disasters. There are a few things he does ok, but for the most part, he does some real boneheaded things.

For example, after using lint from his socks to start a fire, he started preaching the virtue of "always wearing cotton socks" in the outdoors. I mean, that is just flat out wrong as far as I have been taught. Anyone agree or disagree?

Yeah, I caught that "cotton socks" remark too. Totally wrong in my opinion.

Most of what he says is pretty good stuff. Yes, he gets himself into preventable situations, but I think that he has to do that in order to have a show. If he didn't deliberately put himself into a survival situation, he wouldn't have a show.

If you watch a couple of "Man vs. Wild" episodes, you'll see that Les Stroud is a lot more solid.

Nobody is perfect and everyone has his own preferences. It's easy to judge a person, while sitting in a comfortable chair, sipping coffee. But when your cold, hungry and miserable, you will make mistakes and things that might not have been the right choice. It's about doing enough things right, not about being perfect.

One thing you have to admire, is that he actually testing his skills and at the same time filming it. Very little of use can see they survived with that little.

The man spends a week at a time surviving in some of the worst places on earth, swims with sharks, built a house which can run on solar power and God knows what else. and you are going to call him wrong?





the fact that he has lived through a lot of REAL survival situations and not just sat at home reading books about it should suggest that he may be the one doing it right.



He did it though didn't he? cant really argue with a guy who spends his time outdoors doing this sort of thing for a living. who the heck are we to tell him it should be done a different way?



maybe what you were taught was wrong. Or maybe there is MORE THAN ONE way of looking at things. If he does it then it obviously works for him.



Whatever the man does or does not do, agree or disagree he makes it work. and has managed to survive some real world stuff. It is easy to give opinions from home sitting on the couch with a beer in hand and a bag of chips with feet up, warm and dry. but things are different when WE are the ones out there. unless you can HONESTLY say that you have done more, then it would be hard to say someone else has done dumb or boneheaded things.

I think that when I have my own hit TV show and I am internationally recognized as SURVIVORMAN I will have better judging ability on what is right and wrong in a survival situation.

I think the wrong or right can always be subjective. Les may wear cotton socks because he can use lint from them as tinder. And you may have been taught to wear wool or polypropylene, probably to avoid wet cotton and possible frost bite.

Maybe each could be correct depending on who is invovled. I don't think poly socks are useful for me at all. My feet sweat, they get wet, that is not going to change unless they get some air. A change of socks helps, and a fire might help one set and my boots both dry out.

I think some of the things Les does or does not do are batty, I really do not get some of them. However, I don't go out and spend my time crossing deserts or frozen tundra, so I really don't have room to criticize Les or Bear. As with any thing in this arena, you need to look at and evaluate what may work for you.

If you watch the Survivorman DVDs and look at the behind the scenes stuff, much of what he does it not pre-planned. He improvises and tries stuff just for the hell of it sometimes. He also openly admits that he's human, makes mistakes like anybody else, and I don't ever recall him refer to himself as an expert in anything.

He does however do a LOT of research on the area he is going to, the local wildlife, plant life, skills, etc. He also trains hard. He runs through the bush with a fully loaded pack and does it without much food just for the practice.

A few more things you just have to respect. He's alone (unlike Bear) and he has to carry all his own equipment. When you see a shot of him walking over the horizon...he has to walk all the way back to get that camera when the shot's done...sometimes that's in -40 weather or half way up a cliff. Plus when he married his wife, they spend the first year or two of their marriage living in a shack in the woods san civilization...if I recall their first kid was born there...or something like that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Stroud
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorman

I think part of what he’s (Les) trying to do and show is that survival situations can happen to people any time without much warning. The last time you were flying on a jet, did you have cotton socks on or not? Did you think about it before you walked onto the jet that it may crash and you would be in a survival situation? I see Les as trying to get people to understand that at any moment in out lives we could be thrust into a survival situation and have very little survival supplies with us. You use what you have with you to survive.

Les’s show is interesting and seems more about real survival. Bear’s show is more entertainment and I would say it shows what not to do as he takes a lot of unnecessary risks to show how much of a man he is. Do this stuff in real life and you come out in a body bag.

But with saying that, I still watch both shows.

Les Stroud isn't perfect, and that's just one of the many reasons I love the show "Survivorman"

My thoughts are that I'm glad Les Stroud shows his screw-ups as well as the things that go right. In a survival situation it is very likely that I'm going to screw something up, and more than one thing at that. When Les does something wrong and then recovers it shows that you can go on if something fails.

Here are a few of Les's more memorable screw-ups, off the top of my head:
Caught his shelter on fire
Got sick eating water lily roots
Cut himself trying to get water from a vine
Built the worst igloo ever, in the wrong season
Played a harmonica when polar bears were about
Built a shelter too close to a river, when it had been raining
Built a trap in a way that he almost crushed fingers in the attempt to set it
Failed to properly bait a trap, the bait was stolen and he caught nothing

I could go on and on listing various screw-ups. In any case, as far as I can remember Les has never given out advice that I would consider contrary to what one should do in a survival situation where he didn't mention the "proper", or perhaps I should say "commonly accepted", way to do things.

Regarding the cotton socks, Les was in a Georgia Swamp and probably could have gone without socks if he needed to, at least long enough to fire dry them. And even though the temperature dropped significantly several nights while he was out there, he survived the ordeal, so cotton socks probably worked well for him in those surroundings. We often hear the maxim "Cotton Kills" here on the forum. When you're in the wrong place at the wrong time, then yes cotton can fail to keep your body heat close to you, but cotton isn't the Boogieman if a person is careful and knows how to get around the materials negative aspects.

If he did say that a person should always wear cotton socks, then I'd agree that he shouldn't have, or at least that I wouldn't follow that particular bit of advice. I'll try and catch that episode when it's on again and listen closely.

As always, I could be wrong.

maybe i came off a bit harsh in my first post. i do respect the guy for doing what he does, but i think he does make some pretty obvious mistakes that he should know how to avoid. for instance, he was in the jungle, and mentioned how he had been paying for not purifying his drinking water (i assume the latrine was getting heavy use.) days later he finally realized he had an empty tin can to boil water in. i mean, come on, he should have been using that from day 1. in that same episode, he put his shirt on after getting out of the river only to be bitten by an unknown bug (what if it was a fatal spider bite!) he should have shaken out his shirt first, thats just a common sense thing. but by far the worst was when i watched him wade into the ocean barefoot at night time. survival situation or not, that is a very foolish thing to do. the odds of spearing a fish at night while carrying a torch are pretty much nil, while the odds of slipping on coral or stepping on a stinging creature are pretty good.

i know its easy to be an armchair critic, but any boy scout could pick out the poor decisions. but i do like his show because he is an everyman who ends up in a situation that we could all be in one day. it is entertaining, and maybe it is a bit of showmanship, but i just think he should make sure he's sending the right message to people.

bear on the other hand, to me, is total showman. way too many unnecessary risks. i think he does his show for the "im a badass" effect.

He could have easily edited out any mistakes that he made while in the bush and re-shot, but Les keeps them in to show that mistakes can be made no matter what the situation. For instance the laying his shirt on the bank mistake, being a Northern woods guy it would probably be just a natural thing for him to leave his shirt out like that with no problem, but he made the point by leaving it in the program so someone watching it hopefully won't make the same mistake. I have a lot more respect for Les being a "real life" survival person instead of scaling waterfalls and climbing into the rain forest canopy, things that would probably get you and I killed, like another survival show host does.