Wannabe Bushcrafter's video: Punji stick trap: primitive feces coated stakes of doom

Hi folks, today I'm going to build a famous trap. The punji stick trap has been used by the hill tribes of southeast Asia for thousands of years. This trap was originally designed to capture medium sized game. However for much of recorded history, Southeast asia, being a tropical region located far from the main trade routes, was a technological backwater. This geographical disadvantage caused the region to be repeatedly invaded by more advanced cultures from the Eurasian temperate zone. One such recorded conflict, in the 2nd century B.C, described an invading Chinese army equipped with steel weapons, body armor, mechanical crossbows, and seige engines. The defenders, the hill tribes of Northern Vietnam, were principally armed with stone clubs and bronze tipped spears. In such an environment, the natives of southeast asia quickly gave the punji stick trap a secondary occupation of disabling invading soldiers and their horses. To build this trap, I first collected a number of green hardwood sticks. These sticks are no thicker then a pencil. Then I removed the bark from each stick. If a stick is slightly crooked, I straighten it by light bending. Obvious knots were removed with the knife. The goal here is to get each stick to be smooth, straight, and flexible. This helps with penetration. Next I carved points on each stick. It is important that the point smoothly transitions into the body of the stick, as this will dramatically improve the effectiveness of this trap. A single punji stick trap requires 5 to 6 such sharpened sticks. It took me about 10 minutes to collect and fabricate 5 sharpened sticks. Next we take the hacket and we craft a digging stick. this is done by finding a stave of dense wood and shapping one end of it into an asymetric wedge. The digging stick is used to dig the punji trap pit. Now to maximize the chances of success, we need to place the pit along paths that game animals routinely walk over. So I placed it on a deer trail. It is important to get the size of the pit right. You want to optimize the pit for the game that you are trying to catch. The pit should be 3 times the length, and 2 times the width of the game animal's foot. And it should be be between 1 to 2 feet in depth. I sized my pit using the deer foot prints as a guide. Digging such a pit took me about 5 minutes. Next we use the digging stick to create 5 guide holes at the base of the pit. These guide holes help firmly seat each stick. Finally, the sharpened stakes are inserted into the guide holes, completing the trap. Now to camouflouge this trap, thin branches covered with leaves are usually placed on top of the pit. When an animal steps into the pit, the sharpened stake peirces the animal's foot or leg, effectively disabling it through agonizing pain. Two additional techniques were used to dramatically increase the effectiveness of this trap. For animals, the sticks were often tipped with a neurotoxin collected from the skin certain tree frogs. Once injected into the blood stream, this neurotoxin quickly paralyzes the animal. Now for injuring humans, a time tested technique was to smear each sharpened stick with human feces. In a tropical climate, this almost garunteed a slow agonizing death for the injured soldier due to infection. Now this Punji Stick trap took just 20 minutes to construct. In my opinion, this trap design is simple, fast, and highly effective. the knowledge to create such a trap is very useful. With that said however, the Punji stick trap is ridiculously dangerous to human life and should only be used in an absolute emergency. And because I built this trap just to learn how, I dis-assembled this trap immediately after I constructed it. Anyway, thanks so much for watching. If you like this and want to see more, please like, share, and subscribe to my channel. Thanks a bunch and see you later.