The Walking Dead

A- here.

After many, many nights of sitting around a campfire drinking and BSing me and my friends actually came up with a post-apocalypse battle plan. It's sheer elegance in its simplicity. We actually create our own small kingdom complete with raiding parties.

Our plans are remarkably alike. One of my friends owns several hundred acres even further out in the boonies than me. He has a gas well on his property and one of the stipulations in his contract is that he gets free gas for as long as the well is producing. Every appliance in his house is gas. Even his refrigerator.

Here's a tough question -

In a zombie apocalypse, how many of you would abandon your pets? I don't know if zombies would respond to a dog's barking, a cat meowing, etc., but a poorly trained pet could certainly give you away if their vocalizations attract zombies.

I have two cats - one is normally quite as a mouse, but the other one "talks" incessently. And whenever I put either of them in the carrier to take them to the vet, they cry pretty much non-stop. I still don't think I could abandon them, and I hope I'm never in a position to have to make that decision.

End of the world? Sorry kitty your zombie food.

End of the world? Sorry kitty, you're MY food. Nom, nom, nom.

Kittens are bait to attract larger animals. Did you know that kittens are the favorite food of otaku and that a single otaku is fat enough to feed you for 3 weeks? During the convention season they can actually grow to be a whopping 350 lbs.

It depends on the type of zombies we're dealing with.

For instance, the World War Z zombies went after dogs, but dogs were great at detecting them.

The remake of that zombie movie in the mall the zombies didn't care about the dog at all, so they'd be great for scouting missions if you could train them well enough, or for transporting goods to/from nearby buildings, as they did in that movie.

However, pets use up an enormous amount of resources (mostly food/water) that could be spent on humans. So mine would probably be a goner, despite how cute she is.



We can always domesticate some other species after the apocalypse.

Dogs and cats can fend for themselves for the most part, unless it's the cutesy, useless type of animal. With refuse piling up after the fall of civilization mice/rat populations would sky rocket and provide dogs/cats plenty of food. My leopard gecko requires a ridiculously small amount of food/water, but the outdoor temperatures would do him in in no time. The idea of zombies actually catching dogs/cats with any efficiency or regularity strikes me as ludicrous, even at fast-zombie speeds.

Ok, I have a question, going back to the walker's live flesh preference... I didn't see this addressed already, so appologies if I missed it:

The walker hanging in the tree had had his legs eaten by the other zombies. This would imply that they are willing to eat dead flesh, including their own kind, unless perhaps he didn't manage to kill himself and was hanging there, slowly suffocating and they came upon him at that exact moment. So, if there is a lack of living food and the walkers begin to "starve", would they start eating each other? Can they starve to death?

Also, given how mindless they are, I would have expected them to stay theyre, trying to pull his body down forever (unless, as mentioned above, he was still alive when they found him and they wandered off when he died).

Most movies/novels that I've seen pretty much ignore the "starving to death" zombie issue. Pretty much all of them make the zombies out to be pretty immortal until being shot in the head or otherwise destroying the brain. This is mostly done to ensure that the story continues for the prescribed length of time.

Unless zombie-ism is a magical curse, most of the times it's some sort of virus or bacteria that is causing the state, and viruses need the same types of energy-providing materials as other cells do, and without them, they would die. So in a true zombie apocalypse, you'd have zombies starving to death quiet quickly once the initial plague outbreak passed. Basically, you could survive the zombie apocalypse as long as you had enough food, water and shelter to outlast the zombies' need to feed the virus.


I think it was in World War Z where the zombies that were created were still fairly vulnerable to heat and decay, and so started to become less of a problem over time. Some exploded due to gasses building up inside of them from decay, and such.


But "immortal" zombies make for a better story.

Here's hoping they finally move on from the farm/traffic pileup tonight...

Okay.

I'm predicting Shane is a goner within the next couple of episodes.