I recently watched two episodes of season one of Naked and Afraid, one set on the Serengeti and another on a Panamanian island. Although I once ran a website with travel tips and have spent a lot of time in wild places, I am not a survival expert. I know that a fair number of Susan's members have had real survival training, so I hope that some will venture their own opinions about some aspects of what was shown, and on my hypothesis that the female mindset may be better suited to wilderness survival than the male.
As to the series itself, it has been accused of fakery and there were aspects of the Serengeti episode that gave me pause. For example, one brief clip shows springboks, one of which pronked and another showed springboks, a Southern giraffe and a greater kudu cow. Springboks are similar to but distinctively different from the Thompson's gazelles of the Serengeti, and the Serengeti has Masai giraffes. I think that greater kudus are not even found in that area of Tanzania. The animal combination in that clip, plus the whiteness of the stones and soil, lead me to conclude that the clip was filmed in the Etosha area of Namibia. However, they may be stock film clips just used for atmosphere, and irrelevant to the show.
A more significant poser was because the male contestant, EJ Snyder, apparently took three days to make fire by twirling one piece of wood on another, during which time the contestants could not boil the muddy water and could not drink. When I was much younger I suffered from mild confusion after just a few hours of exertion and dehydration in relatively mild temperatures. EJ and his partner Kellie were on sun drenched African plains close to the equator. Would they have been able to function after three days in such conditions?
At the end of the episode, EJ was given a Primitive Survival Rating (PSR) of 8.2, beating Kellie's 8.1. That really puzzles me. At the end of the Serengeti episode, he actually said that he had thought that women have their place and it definitely was not in the wilderness. I'm sure that the army would not tolerate a buffoon as a survival instructor, so he can't be one but that was the word that kept coming to mind while I was watching and listening to him throughout the episode. (Of course, I'm not a survival expert.) From the start of the episode, EJ, the army survival trainer, exerted his authority over Kellie, a survivalist, bow hunter and former game warden, by bellowing and bluster, so she called him Sergeant Major.
Their first and most important task was to get to water, I understand that. However, they knew where the water was. EJ's attitude was that he and Kellie should focus on that "mission".
I'll digress here. It was once explained to me that in assessing army recruits as individuals, they might be told that their unit desperately needed fire and would be told where to find it and being back embers. A recruit who repeatedly failed such tasks should probably not rise above the rank of private. A recruit who successfully completed the task should at least make corporal. A recruit who completed the task AND brought back the box of matches that had been deliberately left on the trail would probably make sergeant or higher. In other words, focus on the mission but be observant and focused on ANYTHING that could be relevant to the mission. Other relevant saws are "more haste, less speed" and "for want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe the horse was lost, for want of a horse the message was lost, for want of the message the battle was lost".
EJ manfully strode towards the water. He even had the nerve to mansplain to Kellie how to walk without getting thorns in her feet. He became frustrated when Kellie stopped occasionally to pick up edible plants. Kellie, you see, was looking where she was walking and knew that they would reach the water without rushing unnecessarily. When they reached undrinkable water along the way, EJ, who was suffering from the heat himself, was frustrated when Kellie "wallowed" in the mud. She was cooling her body and covering it with mud as a screen from the sun. When they reached the potentially drinkable water, it was clear that EJ's feet, especially one of them, were in a bad way because of the thorns. This in spite of his mansplaining to Kellie. EJ was soon limping and confined to base and about halfway through the 3 weeks that they had to survive independently, he had to be temporarily evacuated for medical treatment. MASSIVE FAIL from day one in my opinion. If he wasn't bellowing at Kellie from frustration, he was screaming like a child from pain. I wondered what the Tanzanian medic who treated him thought of the screams. Traditional African coming of age rites often include boys having to endure great pain without flinching, crying or yelling.
The contestants could choose one tool each. EJ chose a knife and Kellie chose a pan for drinking, boiling water and digging. The tools themselves were almost male and female. To his credit, EJ used his knife to make footwear for himself and Kellie. If only he had done it at the START of their walk to their base. He also made the firemaking kit. He did not use a bow and hurt his hands during the three days it took to make fire. He also carved a spear and a trident but they weren't shown being used with any success.
For some time, the only food that they ate was what Kellie could forage. They didn't seem to be interested in the lizards, scorpions, grasshoppers and termites that Ray Mears or Bear Grylls would have been munching. EJ and Kellie went out hunting and foraging together while he could still walk. EJ became bored while Kellie was watching antelopes from shelter. She explained that hunting is not moving but watching and listening but EJ still stood up, spoke loudly and ruined the hunt.
After that, Kellie had to go out alone as EJ's foot was too painful. At one stage, EJ had persuaded the crew to leave so that he could have a private conversation with Kellie. In spite of the fact that he was the crippled one, he basically accused her of laziness. At one stage, it is true, she was in very low spirits, worn out, I believe, less by hunger than by EJ's browbeating. It looked to me as though the reason EJ got the crew to leave was so that he could make Kellie cry and film her doing it. While the crew were still away, Kellie went out foraging and returned after nightfall, showing that she could navigate in the Serengeti darkness without undue fear. (I doubt that they were in the Serengeti National Park itself, as the danger from lions would have made such antics too dangerous by far. Even in Tanzania, with the widest ranging lion population in Africa, lions are no longer as ubiquitous as they once were. There were hyenas in the area but they clearly weren't in the large numbers that are sometimes found where game is numerous. Leopards and snakes must also have been a danger.)
While persuading the crew to leave, fishhooks were seen changing hands between a crew member and EJ and I think that he and Kellie were given a hint about where to find protein. The fishhooks were apparently not used but EJ was seen stabbing randomly into the water with his trident. Kellie, however, sat in the water with her legs spread and sifted through the mud with her hands until she caught the first catfish. Three were caught and if EJ caught any of them, it was not shown.
As the end of their ordeal approached, EJ did redeem himself somewhat. During the night, EJ threw through soil on Kellie's hair while her head was close to the fire. It must have been too quick for me or Kellie to see but apparently, Kellie's hair had caught fire. Obviously, she was very grateful. Such a faux pas must have cost Kellie a brownie point or too but her accident was near the end of the adventure. EJ's potentially fatal foot infection was caused by his haste on day one and led to his medical evacuation.
So what did EJ do to score higher than Kellie? As I said, I'm not a survival expert, so I would welcome the opinions of members who have had real survival training and/or experience.
The only other episode I have seen so far was the one set on a Panamanian island. In that, the woman was so obviously more experienced, more knowledgeable, more patient and more usefully courageous than her male partner that the powers that be had no choice other than to give her a higher PSR. I have in the past thought that women have a better survival mindset than men. I once took part in a team building exercise in which each team had to choose a small number of items to keep after a plane crash in the Amazon. Women tended to choose things like biscuits and blankets. Men tended to choose a knife, a map and a compass. Afterwards, I would joke that after a jungle plane crash, the women would be found miserable and hungry but otherwised unharmed, near the crashed plane. If anything of the men was found, it would just be their skeletons near a knife, a map and a compass.
So:
(1) Why did EJ get a higher PSR than Kellie after their Serengeti adventure?
(2) What do you think of the hypothesis that women are more likely to survive in the wilderness than men?
