Bear Grease - Ep. 357: Render - All About The Florida Bear Hunt

Episode Date: August 20, 2025

On this episode of the Bear Grease Render, host Clay Newcomb is joined by Travis Thompson of All Florida to share about the history of bear hunting in the state, when and why the hunting season ended, and the work that had gone into bringing back the Florida bear hunt.  It’s a success story of how conservation minded groups and individuals came together to see science-based, sustainable wildlife management for the future of Florida. If you have comments on the show, send us a note to [e-mail] Connect with Clay and MeatEater Clay on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Youtube Clips MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube Shop Bear Grease MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. Worldware Gear at firstlight.com. My name is Clay Newcomb, and this is a production of the Bear Grease podcast called the Bear Grease Render, where we render down, dive deeper, and look behind the scenes of the actual Bear Grease podcast. Presented by FHF Gear, American Made, Purpose Built, Hunting and Fishing Gear that's designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. We've got an incredible podcast lined up.

Yeah. We're going to have a very interesting conversation. We're joined today by Travis Thompson from Florida. And we are going to talk about Florida Bears. I mean, one of our favorite topics bears. No willy-nilly and around here like, how was your week? What are you been doing? Josh, you've been fly fishing.

Nobody cares about your fly fishing. We are getting into. There are a loyal few that e-mobile. email me and say, Clay needs to lay off the fly fishing comments. That could be me. I could be me to email. I have alienated half of our listenership by my, by my, my, my, my, animacy that we don't talk about fly fishing.

I was happy to hear Mark Kenyon support fly fishing on the last period. Well, Baranukam told me we should have Dwayne Heda on this podcast. Dwayne Hada would be an excellent podcast. Well, I would like to extend a formal invitation to Dwayne Heda on the podcast. We could talk about fly fishing. Have you noticed there's a Venn diagram that is a complete? complete overlap of fly fishermen and then it just barely shifts in the turkey hunters. Is that right?

They're almost, yeah, they're the same people. I can see that. I can see that. I'm telling you in Florida they're the same people. That's interesting. Yeah, they're consumed with those two practices and those two practices only. That is very interesting. I can't, I can't, I don't describe it, but I understand it.

It's like CrossFit. Like you go somewhere and that's all they can talk about, is fly fishing or turkey hunting, depending on the time of year. Yeah. Interesting. So, Josh, save the fly fishing small talk. My moment is coming.

Travis is here. Man, there was, just to give a small introduction of what we're going to spend the next hour and a half talking about is that last week in Florida, the game commission approved a Florida bear hunt, which we're going to get into all the history, but that's what we're talking about. This is major. This is significant. and Travis was heavily involved in everything that went on around that. Now, Travis, tell me who you work for, what you do, kind of your history. Yeah, so I got kind of a three-prong, three-prong, who I work for. I run, ironically, for talking about bears, I run the largest waterfowl hunting operation in the state of Florida.

Oh. So I'm a big duck hunter. So you're an outfitter? Yeah, well, yeah, we'll call it that in Florida. I don't have a lodge or anything like that. but most of what we do is by the day stuff. Okay. I used to be a fishing guide before I got into hunting more.

Okay. So I do ducks, alligators, snipe, and some hogs. I don't love hog hunting, but that's a different story. Anyway, and then I grew up, I'm fifth generation Floridian, grew up there hunting, fishing my whole life. My dad worked for the Department of Environmental Protection. So I kind of grew up with a dad that was carrying a gun around and was a tree hugger. So, like, very heavy in the conservation space. I have a nonprofit in Florida.

It's called All Florida, where we work on issues like this. Anything that touches conservation. So ag, ranching, timber, prescribed fire stuff, water quality, and consumptive use. You know, I heard Rinella say years ago on, was it stars in the sky that a conservationist is an environmentalist with a gun. Yeah. I'm trying to reclaim that in Florida as a conservationist as environmentalist with a gun. I like that.

And then the other thing I do kind of my day job is I work for a group called the International Order of Theodore Roasteland. Roosevelt, and we do constitutional rights to fish and hunt in states. So I got hooked up with those guys a couple years back. And in the state of Florida, we did a constitutional right to fish and hunt, which, like the bear hunt, everybody said, well, you're never going to get a bear hunt again. Everybody said, you're never going to get that passed. We passed it with 67 percent with a huge grassroots movement in the state.

And so that was a big deal. But that's who I am. That's kind of how I entered the conversation is like, I'm passionate about keeping Florida wild. Yeah. And I believe hunting, fishing are two of the most important tools on that landscape to do it. So Florida, let's start off by describing Florida. I've not spent a lot of time there, but I'm aware of kind of culturally what's going on in that Florida is one of the fastest growing states in the country. I don't know the exact stats, but I've heard it said that, you know, there's a band around the coast.

of Florida. Of development. Of massive development. Massive cities, massive development. But the interior of Florida essentially, I mean, I'm putting, stop me and you take over this, but I mean like the interior of Florida is like the rural, rural America. Yeah. So the joke used to be the further south you go in Florida, the further north you get.

That used to be kind of the joke because it was so developed, like in Miami or Fort Myers or these places. But in reality, Florida is deep south. Like, I live in Polk County, which is the dead center of the state. I mean, it's a different terrain, but it's like driving out here, right? A lot of cattle. Florida was the first state with cattle. Right.

So cattle ranching in the United States originated cattle. And I think it's in the top 10 now still for producers. Yeah, huge cattle production. Cowboys. Real cowboys. We call them cow hunters because Florida didn't have fences until the 50s. So cattle, you branded them and just let them. them go and then you would go round them up and take them sell them so we didn't have fences

that said they called them cow hunters you went into this really rough stuff and and rooted out your cows Florida's only state you know there's a conservation easement program called NRCS they have they have easements Florida is the only state where you're allowed grazing on the easements because it's such an important tool for keeping our state wild and about man is probably 10 years ago a friend of mine a gentleman in Carlton Ward he's a national geographic guy real big in panther stuff. He did Path of the Panther. It's on National Geographic.

I don't know if y'all have ever seen that. And Carlton is a hunter, was a hunter, but he's very much into environmental stuff. He kind of helped originate or codify this idea of a Florida wildlife corridor, which was the idea that if you took a panther and you stuck him in Flamingo at the south end of the state, he could walk to the Oki-Finoki Swamp in Georgia and never cross a road, you know, have prey along the way and create this green infrastructure through our state.

Florida's got the most public lands, I think, east of the Mississippi River. We have 7 million acres, 6.8 million acres of public lands. So we've got a lot of public land out there, and a lot of that's available to hunt. So Carlton and a team, and there's an organization called the Florida Wildlife Corridor. They went and passed a legislation to codify the Florida Wildlife Corridor and create this green infrastructure, and the animal they used was not the Panther. The animal they used was a black bear. They wanted a black bear to show that this black bear could go from Big Cyprus National Preserve and wander to Ocala National Forest or Appalachicola National Forest or Osceola National Forest.

And they kind of created that animal as an avatar. And there's days where I'm like, man, that's a game species. So we want to make sure we talk about it as a game species. But they did a really good job of kind of going to ranchers, going to private landowners, and then interworking those properties with public lands. so that we had these corridors for animals to traverse. It's not just bears, it's deer and turkeys and quail and gopher tortoises and everything else. And so the black bear has kind of become this avatar for protecting what's wild in Florida, in the heartland of Florida, what we would call the heartland of Florida.

And you talk about the coast being all developed out, and we want to grow. Like there's places that need economic development in the state, good development. There's good development and bad development, right? there's some places that need some of that, but we want to grow in a way that allow species to thrive and work. A friend of mine, he's a new commissioner, but Josh Kellam said last week,

we want to make sure conservation and development are able to work together so that we have these wild places and wild things that are able to exist a long time. So that was a roundabout way of answering your question, but I think Florida is still real wild. Yes. We got the oak trees with the moss growing on them,

and for us, it's cabbage palms I don't know if y'all have seen cabbage palms, but cabbage palms, they're critically important to black bears as a forage source. They're eating the leaves of them? The berries. They get berries on them. They love them. And we just got forest of cabbage palms, you know, have thickets of cabbage palms. And I mean, it's just a unique landscape, even to just see, like, silhouetted, it's very different than an oak hammock or a pine thicket or something that you'd see someplace else.

You see these cabbage palms with their, like, poignant leaves and everything. It's a really unique landscape. It's special, man. special. Hmm. So this, this corridor, is it down to the granular understanding where they're actually mapping, like they could show on a map? Oh, yeah. Like, like this property connects to this property, which connects to this.

So it's not just kind of like an arbitrary, like there's like a bike, not a bike trail, but like a map. The idea. And so University of Florida, Dr. Tom Hocker, University of Florida got involved in it. and the corridor foundation itself. They've sat down and mapped it all out. And so if you were to protect it all, it would be 18 million acres protected lands.

That's not all public lands. That's private conservation easement sold or land put into less than fee acquisition or whatever. But today we have about 10 million protected in it. And the rest isn't developed yet. So we're trying to figure out ways that we can protect it. And Travis, a guy that contends, you know, I talk about Aldo Leopold,

the plow cow, axe-matched gun. those are the five tools that are going to save wildlife. We don't talk about that gun nearly enough. And when we talk about a species like Black Bear or, you know, North Florida, we got timber, heavy timber. Those guys run coil hunting operations or turkey hunting operations. And that's another revenue stream that's helping offset the pressure because the developer is going to come in there and offer you X,000 dollars a year to turn this into a subdivision or a solar farm or whatever. If you can stack some revenue streams on top of an easement and produce something like solar or cattle or a crop. man, we can keep Florida wild for a long time.

So I'm going to, I'm going to jump in and I'm going to say something that you said. But I've kind of said the same thing, but I don't hear it enough. And that is, and it's essentially capsulating what you just said, is that the cultural and economical value of hunting in North America will be the thing that a massive factor, on saving wild places. So in today's world where expansion of civilization, roads, concrete, urban sprawl, neighborhoods, you know, going out and being built, people wanting to have five acres in a house, like all that sprawl, a thing.

And, you know, how much of the percentage of America's private land, like 95% or something? It's big. at least 90% of America is private land. So if you think about wildlife conservation on this macro scale, it's actually the private land that's going to be the main thing. Like we think about public land and habitat conservation, but private land, 90% of the country, when people are incentivized to keep places unfragmented,

undeveloped because of the hunting value of that land, we win. And 50 years from now, should the earth persist, they'll be like, thank God that there was cultural value of hunting that kept some places wild. And I mean, it's an incredible point that I don't hear enough people saying. It resonates with people. When you say it, it's like, you know what? Hunting is incentivizing the keeping places wild.

Because just like if I had 40 acres right here at Arkansas, all and right up against town and I could sell it to a developer or I could keep it because my kids valued hunting, my family valued hunting or sell it to a hunter who's going to put little food plots on it and cameras all over it. And I mean like that is a win, massive win for there to be a blank spot on a map like Aldo Leopold would say. You know, it's funny. So I mentioned a minute ago I worked on the right to fish and hunt and what hooked me on

that was not that I wanted to protect the right of fish and hunt, although I do. Like I'm a hunter angler. Like, of course, I want to protect the right to fish and hunt. But in that, we looked at language in other states, and there's these magic words you use. And anyway, we looked at language in the state of North Carolina. And the Supreme Court in North Carolina determined that those rights can't exist in the abstract, which means you have to be able to exercise them. Which means in a state that's feeling development pressure like Florida, putting that in place. And I think this is important to put in place everywhere before because I, when I talk to guys in Montana, they're like, man, you never seen development.

like this. I'm like, dude, come to Florida. Let me show you all the big boys play. But the right can't exist in the abstract, which means the state can't say you got the right to hunt, but we're going to eradicate white-tailed deer. You have to be able to exercise the right. And I think that's an important thing. So it folds into the same thing. I think hunting is, I like to say hunting is the tool. Maybe not everywhere. I know there's pockets where it may be timber or it may be ranching or it may be agriculture. But those tools are working on stave off development in this country. Those are the tools that are going to, and we didn't event that.

Aldo did 100 years ago. Yeah. And it's going unchanged in that time period. So I'm really passionate about somebody's got to speak up and make sure this stuff's protected because otherwise they think nothing about shaving off places where you had a hunting lease or places where you public land. There's not a hunter in this country, my age, I'm 45, that hasn't lost a property to development. That's exactly right.

There's not a single one of them that spent, you know, a good chunk of their life being a hunter that hasn't lost a property literally to development. I mean, I'm thinking of a probably right now that is literally a subdivision that I used to hunt. And so instead of demonizing the developers, what we try to do is go sit down with them and figure out like, how can we develop better? How can we do redevelopment? How can we grow up, not out? How can we protect wild lands or corridors through developments so that animals, then you've got homeowners that are able to see wildlanders. life. They're able to connect it and care about it. And then you're able to continue to, for me, touch it in a way, like, I don't want to touch it and eat it. But there's people that just want

to photograph it or whatever. So one thing about the philosophy that we're just talking about right here that I think we've got to bring up just because it's interesting is that inside the hunting circle, people, when they hear about cultural value and economic value of hunting, that does mean that my 40 acres that I sell is going to have a higher value than it did before because of its hunting. And somebody's going to buy that and somebody that can't afford to buy that is going to say, well, the rich guys got it and they are pricing me out of hunting. I mean, it's kind of a, because that's a narrative you hear inside the hunting circles. Oh, we're all being priced out of hunting because it's now becoming a rich man. sport. It's becoming like Europe. I think that those two worlds kind of, you can't have one

without the other. I mean, when I go down the Mississippi River, me and Brent Reeves took about 250 miles down the Mississippi River a couple of years ago, 99% of that land is owned and in hunting leases or specific properties made for hunting. They've kept the riparian zone of that river in pretty incredible shape, really. That land is so valuable, there's no way that a common man is going to own that land. Incredibly valuable, pretty much 100% because of hunting. And there's people that would say that was bad. I would say, well, thank God at least it's protected.

And maybe twice in my lifetime, I'll get to go over there and hunt on the Mississippi River. And it's still there. Do you understand what I'm saying? And I think there's another point off of that. And we hadn't even got the bears yet, but I think there's no point off that. And that is, you know, you can talk to the turkey doctors, Chamberlain or Lashley or Callier or any of those guys. They'll tell you 95% of turkeys are produced on private land. But then they spread out.

So it's like you and I were talking off air where your bears came, they were reestablished in Arkansas and then they spread it out. Right, right. I run a waterfow hunting operation on private land. We do a lot of work to that land. those ducks don't all stay on that private land. They end up on Lake Okeechobee. They end up on the coast on public land where a lot of people. And so by increasing the habitat and ensuring we want the maximum return on this land from a wildlife value standpoint,

whether it's white-tailed deer or turkeys or ducks or whatever, squirrels. Yeah. That's going to spill out from there and hopefully spill out into areas where the average guy is going to be able to. So I'm always a big proponent of, I've heard this around Ducks Unlimited before, right? oh, they're just locking up land and doing it for the... Yeah, but at the end of the day, they're producing more ducks and more habitat for wildlife, which is going to benefit everybody in the grand scheme. Like, this is not...

It's not just this local population. It's a global or an international or a flyway population or whatever the larger population zone is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All this is so interesting. So let's go ahead and get into... Give me the biography of Florida bear hunting.

just to the best of your knowledge. I mean, historically, they were hunting bears there like crazy. Yep. And then when did it end? It ended when I was in high school. So 94 is when they shut the hunt down. Completely shut it down. Completely shut it down.

And if you went back historically, and I'd encourage you if you really wanted a deep dive, FWC has on their website, you can do Google FWC Bear Report. There's a 200-page document that is really good. I mean, it's, if you want a history of bears in Florida, I mean, it goes into the way they used to do agriculture, because Florida was big in turpentine. Okay. And so they would burn forest, but they would burn them too aggressively sometimes.

And it basically wiped out the understory, which hurt bears on forge. Now we understand burning science a lot better. And that's an important tool. So the bear population dropped into the 50s, but it seemed like it kind of stabilized from the 50s to like the, the, 80s or so. Okay. And then it dropped again. And so in the early 1900s, they guessed, I'm sorry, the early 1990s, their speculation

population was as low as 500 bears. Okay. Wow. So now, in white history and settled history, prior to that, they guessed me there were 11,000 bears. Okay. In the state of Florida. In the state of Florida.

Like pre-European content. Pre-Hernando de Soto or whoever it was. Gotcha. That came there first. So it was about 11,000 bears in the state of Florida. So they- Casa de Vaca is who it was. I got his book up there. First guy, first European guy to come into Florida.

Incredible book. Few years before DeSoto. A few years? Yeah, a few years before DeSoto. So we closed it down. It stayed untouched until 2015 when a hunt was brought back. There were a couple of rules made to bear existence. Like you could shoot a bear to protect livestock, I think was a rule that was made.

around 2010 or 11. But largely, Bears went untouched for whatever that is, 21 years. That's only 21 years. Right. And what do we think the population had grown to about 2015? So the state had science in 2015, they believed the population was over 4,000. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls in building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts.

Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut.

I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out prime cuts at Felps. I think you'll be glad you did. And you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. So in bear management,

they typically say that an unhunted population will increase by 10% per year. And so I've done the math and extrapolated out like if you have 400 bears and this includes natural mortality and recruitment 10% per year. So if you have

400 bears, year one, year two, help me with my math. You're going to have 440. The next year you're going to have 484. 484. The next year you're going to have 532.

Oh, this guy's a math wizard. Impressive. by the time you get out into decades, like decades, you're talking about exponential growth. Exponential growth. And typically populations that are recovering where a bear has like unlimited or the habitat is not limiting. Like there's not stress on the habitat because of other bears where they'll increase by as much as 18% per year. and so basically an unhunted population in 20 years can triple in size. That's pretty much.

I mean, so we went from a guesstimate of 500 to 1,000 bears to 4,000. Right. So yeah, it went up. Tenfold. Yeah. I mean about tenfold. Yeah. 500 to 4,000.

Is that right? Yeah. About tenfold. Eightfold. Eightfold. Eightfold. So you got to this bear. We did a bear hunt in 2015.

depending on what side of the story you are about a bear hunt. It was either an unmitigated disaster or it was a wild success. I'm sure you know the story, but the background on that was they issued a number of tags based off success, what they believed a successful harvest would be. So I don't remember the right number of tags, but they had a quota of 320 bears, I think, that they wanted to take. So they issued, let's say, a thousand tags. 48 hours in, they'd kill 305 bears. Wow.

So I believe we could all sit here and say, well, that shows how many bears there were. Yes. How quickly they were harvested, like a hunt needed to occur. Yes. There was so much anti-hunting pressure. Florida, hunters in Florida and conservation in Florida does not look like it does in other places. And I know it's different in every place from the state. Everybody'd say that, but man, I'm telling you all, it's the Wild West.

So there was so much public pressure. You know the polling around acceptance of hunting, and you look at a bear versus a, you know, a white-tailed deer, like a bear's way lower on the list than a white-tail deer. Yes. It seemed like every one of those people had a vocal voice that they were going to share in that poll. Yeah. So they came and the hunt was intended to come back the next year and it did not. So let's stop right there a little bit because that 2015 hunt was historic in nature. It was just, well, it was different in that there was a lot of people. publicity about it before it happened and a lot of us were talking about it before and it um it was one

of these deals where a new bear hunt was coming on the scene in this population that was clearly doing really well right and just a couple little nerd out facts i mean if they if they were wanting to kill 320 bears and they felt like the population was 4,000 that's less than 10%. So typically in bear management if you want to stabilize a population, which, There's a many, many, many, many places would love to just stabilize their bear population. Yeah, zero growth. Just, let's just keep it where it's at because human conflict is, is tolerable, habitat for bears is tolerable. The bears are healthy.

Right. And that's what people, and it's so, it's so, it's such a human problem. But a population of bears that is not j-curving in population that's stable is really healthy. I mean, because if I'm a mama black bear and I go any direction, a half mile, and I'm in some other bears region, and there's conflict and there's big boards. It's like it's better when there's just the right amount. Point being, Florida was that 320 was probably a conservative management number. because it was less than 10%

that they were trying to take out, which probably they were like, we really ought to kill 500 bears, but let's kill 320. So, I mean, it was probably a wise move by them to just enter in. And then the quota fills in two days.

And the optics, I mean, so we had check stations where you had to take the bears to get checked. The anti-hunting community was out in mass with photographs. Yeah.

So there were photos of a bear under hunting. pounds that was killed. There were photos of lactating females that were killed. Like, the optics that they then used and the grassroots storm that they created on the backside of that made it to where politically no one wanted to touch bears. Yes. It became such a third rail to grab. No one wanted to touch bears. And in, and in hallways, everybody said, man, we need to have another bear hunt for years after that. And so it's a funny story. Clay and I, we reconnected their day in our previous

correspondence was in 2019 in our text messages. And he came on my podcast. I used to have a podcast in Florida, and we talked about the 2019 bear plan on that podcast. And we kind of candidly said, I don't know if we'll ever see a bear hunt again. Yeah, that was interesting. He told me that today. I wouldn't have remembered saying that. But that's what I said the other day in a little video I did.

I said, I didn't think that it would ever come. come back. But I said that in 2019. Yeah. Like it was, the public sentiment was so bad that I, look, man,

I mean, it really is truly, people love to talk conservation, but when you talk about dead animals, yeah, the charismatic megafauna thing triggers, and they do not want to talk about bears. Yeah.

And it becomes a major problem. And so that was a tactic now. We've got to spend the next decade getting through, right? Like, we've got to go from 2015 to 2025, and we didn't know when this would happen, but everything from gubernatorial offices to legislators to people that would fly out and hunt a bear somewhere else,

but they wouldn't talk about it in Florida. And I was like, we've got to do something different here. And I say, I want to be clear, the hunting community in Florida got this done. Like, this was a big push from a lot of different people and a lot of different groups. The dog hunting community showed up in. mass. Wow, that is incredible. Now, Florida, I grew up dog hunting for deer. Right. That was my

I've never hunted a bear in my life. But dog hunting for deer was like, that's how we spent our Saturdays and Sundays was deer camp and we were listening to dogs run. Yeah. There's a strong hog dog community in Florida. 100%. So dog hunting in Florida is a part

of the cultural like it's part of the culture of long time history of florida's hunting with dogs we call people there's not a connotation to it we call people from florida crackers yep um the the background on that was they would crack whips the cowboys when they were driving when they were driving cattles the cow hunters were i was actually going to say that the the original crackers right came from florida because they and the cow drives that was the term was a cracker florida crack because of the whip cracking in the palmetas and you couldn't see the cows and that's how you got them out and that's still something that's the cattleman, like, man, to this day, you go to an event.

They'll sell whips, they'll crack whips. Like, it's part of their culture. Similarly, dog hunting in Florida is part of the culture of, if you identify as a Floridian, that hunts. Like, you've got some kind of, I don't dog hunt anymore. But I've got a soft spot for dog hunting because it belongs here. It belongs on this landscape. And so, man, when you, when you get into places as thick as Florida, like literally vegetatively thick as Florida, people that don't have never been around dogs and be like, why would you need a dog to

shoot a deer? Why would you need a dog to shoot a bear? They've never been to Florida. They've never been to South Arkansas. That, you know, I mean, it's a highly functional way to hunt. Yeah. Because animals live in stuff that you literally can't see the length of your arm in some places. Oh, it's, am I right? It's nasty. And so you send some dogs in there and you, you get that game moving, and I mean, that's the way you hunt. Yeah. I mean, there's some stuff you don't want to go through. I mean, I'm in decent shape.

You're 300 yards in. Your watch is like, are you working out? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and it's like, man, I thought, you just completed your exercise goal for the day. Yeah. And you've gone, you can still see the truck. It's like, what is happening here? Like, it's hard hunting.

It's hard hunting in period. It's just a harsh environment. So we come out of 2015, the bear hunt gets, or the bear, plan gets released in 2019. That's when you and I first talked. And constantly, and I'm going to give credit to an old gentleman, he runs an organization called United Waterfellers of Florida. There's this guy named Newton Earl Cook. And Newton is, I think he's in his 80s, but every commission meeting, we'd have a thing called items not on the agenda. And our commission moves around the state. So Florida, to drive from one end to the other is like 16 hours, from like

Pensacola to Key West. And our commission meeting moves to make it more convenient for, so it's not always where everybody has to drive, right? Newton would show up at every single commission meeting, and his items not on the agenda, he'd say, he's got this old Tennessee voice. He'd say, it's time for us to bring back a bear hunt. And he would do this to the point where you almost roll your eyes at some point. But he just stayed on it, and stayed on it, and stayed on it.

And we'd have conversations in the hallway. And there were a lot of folks in the hunting community having those conversations. But we'd have conversations in the hallway of like, look, what was the guy's, the old guy's name? Newton Earl Cook. Newton Earl Cook. That's a great name, right? Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. We're going to make a bronze statue of him and erect it in Florida. We just gave an award at the commission meeting, not the most reasonable one for that. But anyway, he'd bring it up in the public record over and over and over again. And I didn't want to go dial on that hill over and over again because you get death threats and everything else every time you bring it up. But we'd start having these conversations off to the side of like, what's it going to take to get the bear hunt back? What's it going to take to get the bear hunt back? And you talk in the hunting community, especially your guys that have feeders on their property.

man, it's a mess out there. Like the way that the ingenuity that's going on to protect your deer feeder from bears has gotten outlandish to where they're like they're put hard tops on their can ams and a ladder on top of that so that they can get to the winch so they can lower the feeder down to keep the bear out of it. And I mean, it's just this ongoing engineering battle between black bears and landowners. And corn feeders. I mean, it's bad. I'm sure you've seen it. But it's, yes, it's, they're destructive on corn feeders, and you almost can't beat them unless you've got it, you know, on a wire and a pulley system. But then they had to move the pulleys up because that's this one engine, he figured out how to break the pulley.

And it was just like, you'd walk out there and he's like, man, is that, you know, you got tree cover and you'd see these feet. And it's like, is that a radio tower? And then you walk out from under the trees and it's a feeder, it's 25 feet up in the air. Because they've, they've just re-engineered it. You know, I got to interrupt you. This is such, so interesting. In some of the research I'm doing for my book, Black bears have been academically documented

as the most curious animal in North America. Really? Mm-hmm. Like in controlled tests where they've been able to test animal curiosity, the American black bear is the most curious animal. And they tested weasels and raccoons. Like animals we call smart.

Yeah. Polar bears. I don't know that they tested any ungulates or something because they knew that they're not going to be curious like that. But the cats, more than bobcats. Right. Like in the way they tested them, it was really interesting. They were confined animals and they would put objects all in the space

and just turn an animal loose and observe them for hours and watch and document every single thing that they did with the little trinkets that were in the place. And the Black Bear like blew them all out of the water. Because he just examined everything? Yeah, Black Bear was like picking up chains and laying on its back and like playing the chains in the air. Point being,

a Black Bear will figure. out how to get anything it wants if it's physically possible. Yaz Putele has told me he described a scene of watching a bear get a beaver carcass that they had hung 15 feet in the air

and like 10 or 12 feet out from any tree. Like basically there's this hanging beaver carcass that's like let's say it's 12 feet in the air. I mean just out of back bear can't jump like a mountain line. and it's 10 feet at least from any tree.

And basically he said he watched this bear for an hour climb up every tree within, you know, within size. Just range of that deal. The bear did, you know, tried to climb out. And finally the bear realized that if it grabbed the pulley rope and walked back and dropped it, that it would cause that beaver to move. and before long, he had pulled it so many times and dropped it that the beaver carcass went to the ground.

Took him an hour. And basically, no other animal in the world would have got that beaver carcass. Well, I mean, think about how many times they just tear cameras off the trees. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, and it's, it's, and the point of all that, people might be like, well, yeah, bears are notoriously curious. And it just kind of like glaze over it. Like, they tear up your cameras.

They tear up your four-wheeler seats. They get into your feeders. That's why bears are successful. And they're intelligent. They're not just curious. Well, curiosity is, it correlates with intelligence. I mean, that's what we would say. But that's why they're so successful.

That's why they're thriving in Florida because they can eat anything. And they, they are, they are generalists. They're the world's greatest generalist omnivore. And they will do anything to get food. Yeah. It's pretty, it's brilliant. really. It's funny because bears

and maybe you may know more about this than I do but bears seem to exist in Florida in the wild bear population and the urbanized bear population that very much like are different. I think we spent at the time of that bear report I read we'd spent two and a half million dollars

on bearproofing trash cans and municipalities trying to keep bears out of garbage because they just my photographer lives my videographer photographer that we use a lot. He lives like I'll say six streets from the woods, like cross streets. Okay.

And it's in a neighborhood. And bears are in his yard. I mean, he can go get a bear photo for me anytime he wants with the right. Like, you can distort the background and take a picture of a bear because they're always in his front yard and eating his mom's plants. Wow. And they, yes, those are bears that go back into the Wakava forest, but they're not, I mean, they're not just coming into the yard on the edge. They're getting like six. Yeah.

They're actually taking an Uber. Yeah. Like, they're in the neighborhood. And they're not like just on, you know. It's not a common in the every legature on the edge of their swamp behind you and a panther walks through your backyard. But you don't see one five streets over unless you've got a cat that's outside. But the bears are just like, they're happily existing there.

Yeah. Like giant raccoons. They have an incredible awareness about them. A lot of wildlife does inside these urban settings. You know, like deer know that they can, they're okay in your yard. But typically the big predators don't. They get bashful. They get shot.

unusually aware of, I am perfectly safe right here. And then they turn to anthropogenic foods. Yep. Big term for human foods. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls in building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest.

It's just not going to happen. but when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut.

I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelpsgamecalls.com. I think you'll be glad you do. did and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy to use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. I guess in 2023 is when we started having some serious conversations about, okay, what would a hunt look like if it came back?

Like what, what do we need to change from the last time we did a hunt to get it right? and that was presented in May of this year. So in May, that was brought back to the commission. And my opinion, they got it right. Now, I want to say something. FWC is one of the leading agencies, Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission, one of the leading agencies in the country on social science.

And we as hunters, we love to say, man, I want biological science to drive everything, not social science. But the end of the day, what's a factor? Social science is playing, man. It's playing. And so to ignore it as a tool in the toolbox,

I'm telling you this is a guy that's going on there and say, man, I don't want to use social science. Like I've said that on the record at podiums and stuff before. I'm like, science should drive this, and I'm talking about biology. Social science is going to play. They did an incredible job of meeting with stakeholders and figuring out what the concerns were with the last hunt and addressing those with this hunt.

And so kind of one of the dominant things they heard was selectivity in sex in harvest. I think in the last hunt, 60% of the bears that were taken were sows. Okay. And as I mentioned earlier, that was a quota that was issued. And then you went out, if you didn't kill your bear, like you checked in. Like, if you didn't kill your bear and they called the hunt off, you didn't get to fill your tag. That stinks. Yes.

So what they've brought back is a hunt that is 187 hard tax. It's either 1807. It's either 186 or 87. Can I stop you because I think we're going to go over it and I'm going to forget to say it? Sure. These quota hunts where the hunt ends at a quota caught in and you insinuated it, but we didn't say it. It causes people to be highly unselective. It is selectivity.

Because if you kill the first bear. Yeah. 100%. Oklahoma, well, I don't know the details on it. Oklahoma had a similar thing where they had a quota. And the quota wasn't even being met, but the very nature of the quota caused people to be unselective. And I'm pretty sure they took the quota off and they never went over it.

And people were a lot more selective. Yeah, if you think the hunt's going to end tomorrow, you're going to shoot the first bearer that you see. And oftentimes that's a juvenile or female. Which could force, and it's on the hunter. right the hunter should be a better hunter but oftentimes you know we've all done it with a deer or something you're like man that deer was way bigger when i looked through the scope than he was when i got up to him right yeah the so things they addressed they address selectivity with that

that's good they also address selectivity by allowing bait stations and and dogs because you know as well as i do that both of those things are going to give you time yep to say hey is that a sow hey does she have cubs with her how big are the cubs like you can look and study this situation yes and you're going to have cameras set up on your bait station yes to where you're going to know the bears that are coming in and out be like oh that's a sow but i got a bore over here like that's that's what i'm going to and it allows people all of us as hunters we're in it for everything right the meat the hide the fat that like we want to but the end of the day we'd like to take the biggest thing we can or the best thing we can and and in this case we're moving

that urgency allows for us to have way more selectivity in this hunt and I to me the agency got that exactly right the anti-hunters

would tell you and I don't I live in a world where I have to deal with them I would tell you I don't necessarily care what they say I do I pay attention to it

the anti-hangers will tell you well these are barbaric methods this that and the other these methods are because you guys wanted better selectivity in the hunt

yes it was nothing wrong with the first hunt but we've changed it based off your feedback and these are the methods that we've allowed to come into it, right? Man, I can't believe you're saying this with such clarity because I think 10 years ago, the articulation of that idea just wasn't widely known.

Inside of bear hunting, these methods allow hunters to be selective. And you could say that that is just big talk and that actually doesn't happen in the field, but it does. I mean, hounders let way more bears go than they harvest, even in places where they could. I mean, they're being selective. Not everyone. I mean, sometimes you got a kid with you, and it's their first bear, and you let them shoot a dry sow. Sometimes, I mean, I'm not saying juveniles and sows don't get harvested sometimes.

But in general, hound hunters are trying to be selective for older-age-class males. Period. bears, the cameras, man, I am the most selective period when I'm baiting a bear. Yep. Because I know every bear that's coming in there, and it's very difficult to kill that older age male, and it becomes a challenge. It becomes, it's what makes it enjoyable and fun to try to kill a big bear over bait, which is actually quite difficult. And, uh, yeah, anybody who says that, that hunting bears over bait is unethical and easy has never baited

for bears. Talk to me about that for a minute. Sure. This is one of the things I want to explain fair chase and baiting. Yeah. Like, can you do that? Can you guys talk about that? Or jump in.

To me, when you describe fair chase, you know, you're capitalizing on that bear's natural tendency for hyperfagia in the fall. I mean, you're capitalizing on a biological process inside of that animal

to hyperfixate on a food source, just like they would, an acorn flat or a cabbage palm flat or berries in the summer or a salmon stream in the northwest so you're capitalizing on something this animal is doing naturally number one number two if if you have this north american idea of taking an older age class male that animal is incredibly intelligent acts completely different than juveniles and females and it's very difficult to kill over bait because when you're hunting over bait you have a stationary bait a human has got to be within a bow shot distance of that if you're hunting with a bow which most baiting for bears is is archery hunting

and that big bear knows he has made a living with his nose and he knows when you're there and he knows when you leave and you got to kill him while you're there you can't not be there and kill him and killing a large i'm talking like a 10 plus year old boar bear over bait anywhere in the country is just about as hard as hard as any big game hunt you would ever have. And so the hunter that's sitting there that kills a big bear, he has let go a bunch of animals that came in before it. And that's just what people wouldn't understand or see. No, that's why I wanted to ask you as a bear hunting expert. I can say this, but keep going. Well, so you've got to practice a high level of selection. And basically to me, when I think about

fair chase and ethics and just kind of this big north american model when you understand that that baiting or and we can talk about hounds too where where baiting is a tool for selection it's like that makes it ethical just in its own sense if we could even just go in and extract a mail easily that would make it worth it but we can't but we can't males are very hard to get to come into a bait like that and so to me it it completely fits it's the idea of fair chase. Three components. You're capitalizing on an animal's natural tendency,

just like it would in the wild. You've got to be in very close proximity, and you cannot hide from bear. Everybody in the planet, every white-tail hunting of the planet that thinks they can hide from a black bear over bait using all the different scent control products has never done it, because you cannot.

Period. A thousand years from now, they're going to replay this, and they're going to say, that old hillbilly was right, because technology has never become good enough for us to beat a black bear's nose. It is supernatural. When you see a bear's nose flexing like this in the wind, he literally is talking to God. Not literally. That's a metaphor. It is a super, it is so powerful.

It's almost supernatural. That's my point, John. And then the third prong of the fair chase. component to me is that it's a powerful management tool to be selective, period, done, over and out, bear hunting with bait. Well, and like what we experienced last year, you know, you can have great bears coming into your bait because that's what they want. And then you're playing this match with nature.

And just because you've got all this high fat, delicious bait, as soon as they're, you're those acorns start falling. They would, they would rather eat natural food than any antigenic food. They show us a selectivity back to 100%. I mean, they've been built for 1.5 million years off eating natural food. And here in the last, you know, 100 years, we would put out antiprogenic food for them. Yeah. That would, they would be attracted to.

They want to go back to natural food anywhere in the country. So it's interesting. You say that. So in Florida, we're not allowed, we're allowing basic. I don't know why we're calling them bait stations. They're feeders. We're not allowing donuts or like we're not allowing it's corn or sort like it can be like it's feed. Natural cultural product.

It's what we put in a deer feeder. Yeah. And so this conversation has gotten high. I think it's a bad marketing. I think the agency did a bad marketing job and the anti-hunting community grabbed onto it because we talked about bait and then they go get pictures of a grizzly bear eating donuts or something. And it's like, that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about trying to get a bear to come to a corn feeder. And especially in an okaymic that's got just a huge mast year.

Well, and the other thing, too, is that you can get a bear to come to corn and grain and all this stuff during the summer very easily in the fall, which I would assume the despair hunt's going to be taking place. What's in December? So the first year is a three week in December. Okay. After that, it'll extend out. But go ahead. Well, just like right now in Arkansas, you get every bear in the country to come to a pile of corn.

A month from now, when the acres start to trickle down, you will have a very difficult time getting a bear to come to a pile of corn. Point being, in December, the effectiveness of using this kind of natural, more natural food for a bear is probably not going to be great. And that's what, that's a harder nuanced conversation. That's why I wanted to have it with you. It's a nuanced conversation that gets missed by the general public. And I'm hoping a lot of them will watch this and say, oh, well, that makes way more sense. You're not putting a feeder out there and saying, I'm going to roll out there about 11 and shoot a bear by 1130 because he's going to be on that feeder. And that's not what's going to happen.

And that's probably what people hear as they hear. Well, they're tearing down corn feeders. You can't keep my bears off corn. You know, this is just going to be so easy. But in December, it's different. And now I've never been around bears in Florida. It's possible there's a slight different everywhere. There'll be a shift.

But in general, I guarantee you that getting them to come to that in December is going to be different than getting to come to that in August during a stress period in August, probably when they're mainly hurting people's feeders and whatnot. Yeah. Let me just throw this out there for color. It has nothing to do with bears, but it talks about Florida. our south zone archery opens in July does it really?

Because the rut is so early And then we have zones No, you can't hunt the key deer But this is like the Everglades Like Big Cyprus and South of 70 It opens in July Artery opens like this year I think it was July 28th

I had no idea So you want to talk about fun sitting in that In a tree Like you'll strip down to your underwear It's bad out here Biskitas just gnawn up But you just put And then we have zones

Paint all over your whole body And sit up there naked I am an hour and a half north of that road. And the WMA closest to me, their rut is in February. Wow. So just the way that landscape is, is so, and we have different zones around this. I think we have five different zones for deer because they run at different times and everything.

So I think we will begin to figure that out with bear as well over time of when they do feed heavier, when they don't. And I think that's, I think our agency has probably already looked at that, but they'll continue to look at that and study it as we see hunter's success. So hunter's success is a thing. When we're talking about the number of permits, they're issuing 187. Have you ever done a sidelis tag? Like an alligator hunt?

Like we have to put a tag, a hard tag in the gator. You get those two tags. If you don't harvest, you send them back at the end of the year. You got to return them. Oh, wow. The bear hunt's going to be the same. It's not sides tag, but it's going to be the same kind of way where you're issued a hard tag. And when you take that bear, you've got to report it immediately.

It's no longer check stations, so we're not going to give the antis, you know, this place where you just set up their cameras and harass hunters. And then you've got to put that tag into the Bayer or if you don't harvest, you're going to return it. So the agency set the threshold for harvest. If 100% of those tags are females and 100% of them are successful, the population will grow zero. It will not decline. It'll be at least a 0% growth. So it's zero or greater than. So it's not going to hurt the population.

There is no mortality that's going to cause it to go down from hunting. Yes. So it's really interesting in the court of public opinion. People are like, well, they're doing this because we've got too many bears. This isn't really going to change how many bears we have. It's going to be at least the same number of bears we have and probably a slow growth because you know as well as I do. What is the – I'm putting you all on the spot. What's the average success rate for a bear hunter?

60% 40% like I don't know way less than that that would be my guess too so 187 tags we could do some math real quick 50 of them get filled 100 of them get filled would be well if you're talking about in general like in north america I would say way less than that in a hunt like this it's new I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't fill 90% of it it may be the first year yeah the other side of that is we've put tools in place that are giving a selectivity so again that's based on no population growth if you harvest only 7% of it's thousand and 100% success. Yeah. We know we're not going to have 100% success, and we know given selectivity, you're going to choose the board. Worst possible scenario, it still doesn't hurt anything. Doesn't change anything. Yeah.

So I've heard so much pushback about it. And they're like, how can you support this? I'm like, well, this is conservation, man. Yeah, absolutely. I've got this sustainable resource that I can take. And I've said this for, I've said this for a long time. In 2016, there was some number of bears we could take that did not matter. Five, 30, 75.

I don't know the number. I'm not a scientist. But there were some number of bears that would have fallen under compensatory mortality in the state. Yes. That could have been taken continually. Yes. We fell into a social science trap a little bit of we should not hunt this charismatic megafauna. Now we are back to where we have turned on this hunt.

And this hunt should stay on for forever. As long as the population is not going to decline because of hunting. Yes. But if a disease came in or whatever and we could turn the hunt off. Yes. But the hunt is now on. We're not going to have to go through this iteration year after year after year. It'll be up to the agency to look at the population and say,

well, we had this much success rate last year. We had this much harvest rate on Bores versus South, and we're going to issue 300 tags this year instead of 187. Or we're going to issue 100 tags this year instead of 187. Like the agency is going to be able to follow adaptive management, is what we call it. And they're going to use that to set the threshold for how many bears can be taken. And then they're going to have a three-month span in the fall.

I think it's October, November, December that it'll be open for hunting. So this first year, no dogs in year one. I think actually dogs aren't until 27 because it's kind of a staggered approach. I think you told me this a long time ago. I vaguely remember somebody telling me this. Long term to hunt bears, you're going to have to use dogs to have any measure of success, right? Like dogs are... I'm not sure I said that, but...

I'm paraphrasing maybe. Okay. But like dogs are one of the most effective ways to hunt back. bears. Yeah. And, but initially with this bear population, they haven't been hunted. So we'll probably have a higher success rate initially for a couple of years. Right.

Then we're going to need some other tools to move these bears around and root them out and have success because you're not going to be able to just pop on at your deer feeder. Yes. They're going to get conditioned pretty quickly. Yes, they will. They will. They'll learn. They'll adapt.

And they will get harder to hunt over time. And dogs are going to be critical to be able to hunt them. Yes. that's yes so that's where we're at today it's going to be $5 for a tag to apply

and then if you get issued only residents no it's resident and non-resident are you serious it's $100 for resident $300 for a non-resident if you get drawn wow so I can apply for a tag

absolutely I hope you do don't tell them Josh edit this out I love it man and so the anti-hunting community their new movement is they're trying to get everyone

to apply for as many tags as they can afford and buy a hunting license. And I am thrilled with this. Just FYI. I'm over the moon. Wow. They're going to contribute to this thing. They're contributing to conservation?

I've had a thought. And I think I'm changing on this. And it's not a conscious change, but it's my attitude towards anti-hunters. And some of the expressed truly ignorance, I don't mean that word derogatory, but in the truest nature, sense of the nature, the ignorance. oftentimes of anti-hunting community, just in their lack of knowledge of conservation, while we do what we do,

hunting culture, historic use practices, you know, has caused my blood pressure to go up and I would probably have been a little more like, I don't care what you think, this is who we are, kind of make it like a tribal identity thing in a way. Like just personally, maybe me in the way, me in the in the private setting, I really feel like the win is for us as a community

to become a much, much more understanding of people's ignorance and be a little more merciful. Most people, there's probably 3% of the anti-hunting community that are just jack wagons. Oh yeah. That are like not interested in changing, not interested in the facts are just. just interested in causing trouble. And they're probably, and they're probably ugly, too. They're probably ugly, yes. And, but most of them probably just have never set with somebody that they could make eye

contact with and they could go, this is a real human. I want to hear their story. And they hear about my life and eating bear and my family and me taking my kids and us literally preserving land for bear hunting. And when they hear about some of the deep history of bear hunting, and when they hear what you and I were talking about earlier, but of the eighth bear species on planet Earth, there are twice as many American black bears

as all other species combined. This is a massive success story. I mean, if I sat with or you set with or anybody of us set with somebody, most of those anti-hunters would go, you know what? I didn't know that. I mean, most people would probably be a little bit reasonable. And I think that's the play is not, because right now in the country, the political, the political atmosphere is to just like be vehemently opposed to your enemies. Just smack them in the mouth with this is who we are.

I mean, it's just all over from both sides and every side. And that just doesn't, it just creates bigger enemies. And I just feel like we need to. And the practical solutions and way to do this, it's hard to say. But just like a grassroots tenor change of us being like, hey, we're all on the same team. We want bears on the landscape. And it's okay. I understand why you might be concerned.

You said it earlier in your statement. I think you said the word tribal. Yeah. It's demystifying the badge that you wear, right? Like, like, it's easy for me to go outside and say, man, meat eater, man. But then you sit down and talk to Clay or you talk to Reneller, you talk to, like, you get to know these people. And it's like, well, wait a second. They're all really good guy.

You know, like I'm using it as an avatar for this conversation. But we see that a lot. We hate the wildlife agency. But you sit down and talk to this scientist or that scientist or whatever. And it's like, man, they really are looking out for our best interest, the wildlife's best interest and making decisions that are looking at everybody broadly. Right. I have gotten personally doxed multiple times over this issue. Like address name, phone number put on the internet,

we pray nothing bad happens to this guy. And then my picture. That actually happened to you. Oh, it's happened multiple. Remember the, Would you rather encounter a man or a bear in the wild thing that was kind of going out on the internet? There was like this whole thing where women were like,

we'd rather encounter a bear in the wild than a man in the woods. Okay. They actually took my picture and put it next to a bear. and like plastered it everywhere and there were people coming and say, well, if we're going to open a season, we want to open it on this guy.

And like they were, it's easy for me to just get defensive over that. Right? It's easy for me to, there's a handful of people, five, seven, nine that are responsible for that. The vast majority of the people

even commenting on it don't understand, don't know the nuance. And if they walked in this room, first off, they wouldn't be that aggressive. Yeah. And second off, if they sat here and talked to me for a minute,

they'd realize I care just as the presupposition is that I don't want wild Florida to exist. Dude, I want wild Florida to exist way more than you do. Yes. I want black bears everywhere. I want ducks everywhere. I want turkeys where I trip over them. Like I want cabbage palms and oak trees and cows.

That's what I want. I don't want concrete jungles. And the way I'm going to do it, I've got a solution to do it that I'm working on right here. I don't know what your plan is other than demonizing me. Like I'm on your team. trying to fix this thing. And I don't say that in a defensive way. Like, I'm pretty cavalier about, I'll just sit down with anybody and have that conversation,

which is exactly what you're talking about. Like, let's get to it, man. Yeah. Get to us the way through it. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls in building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest.

It's just not going to happen. but when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut.

I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelpsgamecalls.com. I think you'll be glad you, you did and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. People are capitalizing on our desire to strike an enemy and we're letting the 5% get it so riled up that we become radicals. Oh yeah.

You know, I mean, and there's a game theory. If you ever get some free time, you can read about game theory stuff, and there's the thing called an Overton window in the middle of like a number line. And you're trying to shift that Overton window your way. And so if you looked at the, I'm backwards to the camera, but this is the far right, this is the far left. And you try to fire up your base and it pulls people this way because the people in the middle don't have a choice. They're like, well, I've got to vote this way or I got to vote that way.

I see. And so you don't go to the middle, you go to the edges. Okay. And you create this thing called an Overton window that you're trying to shift your way on this number line. That's what's happening. So it pushes people to be radical. It pushes people to be radical because that's where you're going to raise money. That's where you're going to raise support.

And that's where you're going to fire up your base. But what if radical was just reasonable? And I think that's the conversation that I try to change every day is like, what if radical didn't exist? What if we just took a common sense approach to conservation, to conservation. You know, what if we? I'll go back to development in Florida. People say all the time, I'm anti-development. You've got to stop.

Dude, do you know how many people in Florida make their living off building houses? And then you're a fishing guide or a hunting guide. Do you check W-2s for people when they get on your boat? Like, that they work for a fertilizer company or they work for, like, they're all connected to it somehow. Like economic growth is economic growth. I'm not anti-development. I'm pro-smart growth. Like, let's sit down and figure out ways forward that take care of my natural resources

and your financial needs or economic needs, your tax base is what's going to grow your economy. I just think we get into these binaries. You have to stop growing. Yeah. You have to grow at all costs. Dude, most of us sit right here. Zero sum game.

It's not binary, right? Most of us sit somewhere here in the middle. And I think there's a whole lot of good conservation that is missed because we spend time in this fight and in this fight. And that's not the fight. the conversations right here in the middle where we can move it forward. And I think this whole thing, I think Bayers, perfect example of that. Because I said earlier, the agency went and addressed these concerns over here were we never

want to hunt, but their reasons were because you killed too many sows. And you killed them. It was a bloodbath. It was too fast. And the hunters could have been over here saying, well, we did it right the first time. And I could make the argument that that quota hunt was handled right the first time. The hunters could get over here and entrenched say, well, we're going to do it this way, by golly. we're not changing.

Yeah. What the agency did a really good job, and the sportsman's community did a really good job was coming up with a solution that really did address their concerns. Yes. Now, they don't want any hunting to take place. We're not going to move there. But they did address their concerns with selectivity, with season, and everything else.

Man, that's what conservation's supposed to look like. I believe that in my heart. That's what conservation is supposed to look like. And now we have the sustainable, renewable resource that is a game species. By the way, you're the best bear guy that I know. Why are bears considered game species? Can you talk about that for me? Because that's a question I get all the time.

Let me put a pause right there on that question, because I want to say one thing, and then I want to go to that right there. If the reason bears are so important is if we can win on bears, we can win on anything. Guard the gate is what you've said. So to me, and we've said this for a decade, is that when you look at the whole of North American hunting, if we can protect the thing that's the gate for, you know, the lowest hanging fruit, which is always going to be predators, I mean, everything above it is safe, essentially, you know, deer. I mean, people aren't going to be as concerned about, if we're talking about actually legislatively, hunting opportunities being taken away.

I mean, when I think about bears in Florida, it's almost like the bear being the keystone species biologically. Like if you have bears, then you probably got good turkey habitat, good deer habitat, and good lion habitat and good, go for tortoise habitat. In a way, if you got a bear hunt in your state, you probably got a lot of things in order to even legislatively. And that's why I've always said that I feel like bear hunting is

probably as critical a topic of discussion and interest for us to understand and be able to articulate and talk through. Because if you can explain bear hunting to somebody that's starting from zero and get them to go, you know what? I kind of understand why you'd hunt a bear now. Man, you have one. You're the hero. Yeah.

And I just think bears are really important. It's critically important. I'm a guy that's never hunted a bear. spending a lot of time on bears because of because I think it is I think it's crucial to saving what matters in my state. Yes. And I think it's crucial to saving this tool that matters in my state. Yes.

Right? Like it's critical to keeping the wild places wild, but it's also critical to saving hunting, which is going to help keep the wild places wild. Man, I think it's so cool that you're such an advocate for it. And I love it that you say you've never hunted a bear. I mean, we don't need everybody to go hunt a bear. I mean, they can. There's plenty of opportunity to, but it's like people getting involved in something bigger than themselves is important right now in this time.

It matters. It matters a great deal. Your question about – Let me ask it again. Sure. And I'm asking you – I know how to answer this, but I'm asking you as the bear hunting expert in – Yeah, he's the guy. Mr. Bear Grease.

He's Mr. Beargreeze. In this room. In this – in this – I get asked. all the time, why do we consider bear a game species? Now, this is being asked by Florida environmentalist primary. And I was like, let me ask Clay. Like, I, so I think, I think there's two, might be two ways to view that, like in the past, a lot of game agencies managed bears as, as a, vermin, essentially managed them from a, as a nuisance species. As a nuisance species because

they wanted them off the landscape. I mean, that's, that's actually, I mean, just in the last 30 years, I think, have all the states now made black bears a game species, which game species, meaning that what that translates to, it's going to have a lot more protection. It's going to have science-based studies going into how many are there, how many are taken. Like when an animal comes a game species, all of a sudden, it's getting a lot more attention, a lot more regulation, and it's good. Now, I think what an anti-hunter in Florida might, the tunnel that their question is coming from is, why are we even hunting them? This shouldn't be an animal that we even hunt. So, like, they're not saying let's manage it as a vermin or a nuisance animal. Am I right?

No, you're exactly right. But I want you to talk about the bears are the species we do the most with, right? The historic practice on this continent is humans on this place have been hunting. bears since the time they set their feet on this continent. Long, deep, deep history of utilization of black bear in this continent. I mean, we talk about utilization of wild game, like we kill a deer and we want to eat all the meat and, you know, save the horns for a memory. Man, black bears, we use more of a black bear than any other big game species that we harvest.

Tell me about it. How many deer hides do you have hanging in your house? done. Okay. Bear hides, on a black bear, you eat the meat. I would say 80% of black bears, their hides are tanned when people harvest them. And we render the fat, which is something that's revival. There's a bear fat revival in this country, and guys are starting to harvest fat from their animals and rendered into bear grease.

So historic use, Native Americans, you use bear like crazy. their incredible table fare. I mean, in the frontier days, people killed deer for their skins and bear for the meat. I mean, it was crazy to think about eating deer. The long hunters were shooting deer and leaving the carcasses on the ground

and killing bears for food. So essentially, the answer to your question would be they're an incredible animal for eating and for utilizing for bear fat. I mean, you could go into all the things you do with bear fat. But, I mean, does that answer your question? I think that is the, that's what I have said to people, but I'm not a bear hunter. So it rings hollow when I say it.

I'm asking you, the bear expert, like, this is the animal, right? I mean, if a white-tailed deer is a game animal, manages a game animal because we eat it, a bear is managed as a game animal because it's better than a white-tailed deer. That's the answer. I mean, it's just true. That's the answer. And we've got the deep historical. data that that says that you know i love it well i'd eat a bear burger any day over just about any other

meat what did you say you've had two bear burgers in my house in the last month and they are the best burger that you can eat anybody that i i don't know three out of ten guys i talk to go man i don't like bear meat i had it once and it was a tasted bear br br brer man i have no idea what people are doing if they have any time i'm eating that tastes bad delicious yeah i mean I don't know. I don't know what to tell them. It's really great meat. I've never had a beer burger.

I've had a, I've had roast. I've had a bunch of roast. I've had a bunch of roast. I wish I would have cooked you one if you were here longer. Who knew? Well, we'll have to do Florida. Come to Florida, harvest a bear. If I draw one of those tags,

but we're not going to tell them that non-residents can't. Yeah. Yeah, there's no way that a non-resident could ever get a Florida bear tag. Really neat. That was a joke. Really neat thing they're doing, too, is they wanted to make sure private lands were corporate because obviously you can't have a feeder on public land. We can use dogs on a lot of public land. We have a lot of national forests.

They'll allow dogs. But not in this season. Not in this initial. Not this first year. Right. But in not the second one, it'd be 27 before dogs were used. Okay. Dogs would utilize.

But we'll see. Oh, so the private landowner will be able to apply for tags. and those tags would come out of the whole quota, which you could argue, well, that's less opportunities for me, but I think it's a really good management tool. Okay, so the private landowner isn't, it has a better chance to get in the tag? Is that what you're saying?

No, but if they apply, they could get those tags taken out of the 187. So if you have 3,000 acres in North Florida, and you got bears all over it, you can apply for the private landowner tags. Yeah, but they wouldn't go in the draw? they would have to Or is it their own draw?

No, I think they'd still have to go through the draw process But if they got drawn it would come out of the hundreds But I mean, I'm not understanding I feel like there's something else you're saying Because if me and a landowner with 10,000 acres put in I would have the same odds of drawing as him That's the way I understand it to work But I can get you a clarification on that

I mean, I thought maybe you were saying there Those guys were given a preference No, they're not given a preference Okay They're not given a preference but I think what will happen is we'll see that program grow out over time. Yeah. And so this first year, we may see some private landowners take some of those 187 tags.

Yes. Through an application process. I would think arguably they're going to have a higher success rate because they've got feeders and they've got private land that's managed different. You don't have the romp and stomp of people like driving their jeeps and riding horses. But then long term, I think we'll see a private land program created. Man, I'm all for it. Same. Anybody that is like, man, the private land guy's getting any kind of a preference over non-private land, I'm not for it.

And I don't own big properties. I don't. But if I own 4,000 acres in Florida and I got bear, it's just crawling with bears, give me an incentive. Exactly. To not gut shoot those bears with a 22 rifle, which that's very crass. And I don't even like to say that. No, but it's a shoe shovel shut up, right? Oh, it happens all the time.

in places where there's no season and there's no outlet for management of that species. That's right. And you've got an animal that's destructive. You said he's curious. He's destructive to, I don't know that they would take a calf, but I know they take goats and sheep and things like. They will opportunistically take livestock. They'll destroy fences and sheds and barns. And like they just, we had our first fatality from a bear.

I was going to bring that up. Do you think that was part of what helped push this? hunt over? You don't think it had anything to do with it? Tell me about that fatality. When was it? This was in May. So the commission meeting, I don't remember the dates. May was kind of a blur, but the commission meeting, it was like two weeks before the FWC commission meeting. We had a guy he lives in the Everglades and the bear, the details have not been released fully. So the report's not out there yet, but the agency calls it a predatory attack. Wow. So it's a really sad situation.

Was it, was it in his neighborhood or was it out in the wild? He kind of lived remotely. So he lived in like a, like a, for lack of a better term, I'll call it an inholding. Like he lived in the woods. In the, gotcha. It killed his dog and it killed him. And the agency ended up killing three bears in reaction to that, to that attack. And it was, it was, it was, I have heard it is some of the grisliest stuff that people have ever seen.

Wow. Like, really? Yeah. Unsettling the photos and the, I haven't seen them, but it. It was unsettling. So Black Bear attacks, it's pretty interesting. On average, like one American gets killed a year by Black Bear. Really?

On average. I want to say three or four, on average, get killed by Grizzlies, which is super interesting because the Grizzly home, the range of Grizzlies is 3% of what the range of Black Bear's is. On average reported Black Bear attacks over the last like 60 years. There's like 13 documented Black Bear, what they would consider an attack on humans. So this is general data. One death, 13 attacks.

Wow. A lot of stuff doesn't go reported. Like my friend Mo Shepherd who got charged by Sal Black Bear and punt. punched it in the face with his bow and kicked it in the teeth. And like, it didn't hurt him. Like that wasn't considered an attack. Yeah, it wasn't. It didn't get, it didn't get counted.

Like if it's, if, if there's contact, well, there was contact in that one. But point being, there's a lot more skirmishes that happen. But actual attacks where somebody gets mauled. Statistically, the people that get attacked are people that have dogs. Because they go for the dog? Well, the dog goes for the bear. If you've got a leash dog, it's actually better. But if you have an unleashed dog, like I don't want to say the percentage, but a vast

a lot of those 13 attacks that are going to happen by a dog is running loose. You're just walking down a trail. Your dog sees the bear before you, goes in, barks at the bear. The bear turns on the dog, and the dog goes, oh, crap. the dog runs back to you. The bear follows the dog right back to you and attacks you. Yeah. So the consistent theme inside of attacks is dogs,

which people actually usually would think a dog would be protecting them from a bear. Right. But that's why people are getting attacked. And then, but the most deaths are from predatory attacks, usually juvenile males. and they literally are when a bear is stalking people. You know, there's a way that they categorize a predatory attack. It's not like a surprise. It's not a sowd defending her cubs.

Right. The soud defending her cubs is not going to kill you. She's just going to eradicate the... She's trying to end the threat. In the threat. And as soon as she can get away from you, she's going to. So you're going to get whooped on a little bit. But very unlikely she's going to kill you.

The one that's going to kill you is the three-year-old male that you're walking down a trail and all of a sudden you look back 30 yards and he's following you, just like walking, looking at you, making eye contact lowered head, and you start walking faster and he starts walking faster. And I mean, that's a bear that'll kill you. And what happens, it's happened several times where basically a bear starts coming around somebody's house like an in-holding where they're, you know, just like this lone house out in the wood somewhere. And a bear just starts coming around, coming around, getting more, more familiar with who's there, what's going on.

And pretty soon that bear has killed somebody. There was a story, I believe in California a couple years ago. I mean, in modern times in the last decade where a bear was just coming around this lady's house. She called it the, she actually called it the big old B-A-S-T-E-E-S-T-E. A-R-D. That's what she called it. I don't want to say the word. Did I spell it right? Yeah.

Y'all are looking at me like, well, no, I was cutting up. We could have a caption on the bottom. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She called, that's what she called it. All her family knew, you know, he's here, the big B-word. That sucker broke in her window, ate that woman in her house. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, yeah.

And very rare. I mean, you've got to. of much, you shouldn't be afraid of black bears. You really shouldn't, but it does happen. Right. Anyway, I was going to ask you about that fatality. Unless you give them a name like that. If you give it a name like that, just expect to get attacked.

Yeah. Be more respectful of your names. That's right. That's right. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls in building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called Prime Cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. not going to go I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest it's just not going to happen but when I run

this call I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for I have a great turkey hunting track record if you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods they're not going to win calling contests right that's who I listen to I can make those sounds on my cut I also hunt with phelps's cut and I hunt with clay's cut because they're all three great cuts check out prime cuts at phelps game calls.com. I think you'll be glad you did. And you'll find out that the Steve Rinella cut is an easy-to-use cut

for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. Another dynamic of the black bear situation in America and it's happening in Florida is never before in history has there been so much overlap with black bears and humans.

Never in history. We've got more black bears today than we've had in the last two. 200 years. And what was the American population 200 years ago? I mean, probably like 10 million, 20 million, maybe. Today we've got 330 million and it's like J. Curving. So never before in history. So this idea that you'd think like the American bear story is kind of this old like Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett deal. You know, those are the guys that, you know, had these overlaps with bears. They didn't have nothing. and compared to what we got today. You know, it's funny you say that, too. I want to not to hijack where you're going there, but going back to like the conservation success.

Like you said when Vaca got there, DeSoto got there, there were probably 11,000 bears prior to that. Then we went into this massive slump. And now we have 22.5 million people in this state, and we got over 4,000 bears. And you got almost a third of them, if not half of them.

We're almost back to, where, like, and we've grown and developed, I mean, none of what's in Florida existed when they set foot there. Right. And we've, the species. And so we talk about what's wrong in conservation all the time. Leopold talked about the world of wounds that we live in. You see all the problems.

Right. In reality, that's pretty good, man. Like, the species has been restored to such a place that we could take some of them as a sustainable, renewable resource. And they likely are continuing to grow. We're continuing to study them. Like, that's fascinating. Yeah.

If a hundred years ago, you. You said, okay, one day there's going to be 22 million people in Florida. All these people are going to have a place to live. All these resources are going to be extracted. There's going to be roads. You don't know much about roads 200 years ago, but there's going to be pavement on them. What's pavement? Right.

And you would have said, what's going to happen to the bears? They're going to be gone. You would think they're going to be completely gone. And it is still a little bit of a mystery how bears have done so well. I mean, we do know that. They're magic. that populations, I mean, it's like white-tailed deer. Like disturbed landscapes produce more vegetation, more feed, potentially more cover even at times than undisturbed landscapes.

So just like white-tailed deer. There are twice as many white-tailed deer today in America as there was pre-European settlement. I mean, they say, and I don't know what the new numbers are. Because they drive with disturbance ecology. 100%. And they're animals of the edges. And so we've created exponential amounts of edges compared to what would have been here pre-European settlement. So white-tailed deer have gone. Bear kind of fit into that same category. They're not quite like deer. They don't hone in on the ecological niches. But disturbance to the landscape has produced success. And the thing that a bear can do that a deer can't is bears have learned how to use anthropogenic foods to their advantage. So in these earth. urban centers, and even in rural places like Arkansas, bears are capitalizing on some man-made food in agricultural areas. Their man-made food is skyrocketing. But it's still kind of a mystery. It's still like, wait a minute, why are bears doing so well? And this is a stat that's in the

academic literature and has been for a decade plus, is that every research population of bears in North America is increasing or stable, period. I mean, what other population of hunted animals, big game animals, could you say that about? I mean, there's plenty of things that are doing well. I'm not, but every population, and the reason they say studied population is because they haven't really studied every population to the extent of others because if you have a limited amount of resources in your game agency and there are bears everywhere

and you got you know the bobwhite quail that's about to struggle and kick the bucket like you're putting a lot of energy towards here they're kind of like this is particularly what there is a lot of bear research that goes on in Canada but it's almost like hey the bears are fine

let's study caribou do you kind of see what I'm saying yeah so like you got to put your money where you think it's going to and bears are one of the most researched big game animals in North America, if not the most researched animal in North America. I mean, like, incredible amount of research. But all that to say, they're thriving.

You said something else a minute ago, too, that as you're talking now, reminded me, you talked about them being a game species when I asked you that question, and that we fund research. I've run through this in Florida. A few years back, they wanted to close a fishing pier over pelicans on it. And I said, well, what's our mortality rate on pelicans? What's a competitive? like I'm a hunter.

Like we should know these. Well, we don't have the money to study them like that because they're not a game species. They're not regulated in that way. They're not managed that way. Versus game species, we know those details inside and out. Like I can go down the list of ducks and turkeys. I mean, we can get into it on what really is happening with those species. Bear fit into that.

And that's where hunters fit into this conversation, right? We've been paying for that for a long, long time. And we're going to continue to pay for it. Yeah. Yeah. So walk me right up to last week when this is hot off the press. Walk me right up to the commission meeting and tell me what happened. Yeah. So the commission meeting was in a little town called Havana, Florida. You ever heard of Havana? I've heard of Havana, Cuba. It's not near that. It's about 20 minutes outside of Tallahassee. It is where the one thing FWC does, I've alluded to this early, they move it around the state. so that it's not always in Orlando and you've got to go there

it's not always in Tallahassee and you got to go there. Havana, the facility didn't cost taxpayer much because it's the law enforcement training facility. So we had a kind of a cheap facility to use there. We coordinated in advance. A lot of the hunting groups coordinated in advance of, hey, we need to make sure we pack this room. I don't love that game because I don't think that should matter.

How many people are in attendance and they're in. It should not matter. Science should drive wildlife policy. Right, right. But there's a social science game afoot there. And so we showed up in mass. Like I mentioned earlier, the dog hunting community. That's obviously a dog hunting stronghold, the North Florida world.

But we had folks drive from South Florida. I mean, there were guys there from around the state. The dog hunters largely wore orange. So when you looked at the room, like I can see you some pictures, but when you look at the room, like, it's just a sea of orange in that room. Wow. Sierra Club bused people in. They had three bus locations around the state. One, I think, in Daytona, one in Tampa, and one somewhere south.

And they bused people to the event to speak in opposition to the hunt. And staff came up there, gave a presentation. It was the same presentation they had in May. And because they bring it to May for approval as a draft. And then they give some time for people to kind of – and we had one no vote in May who flipped and voted yes this time. One commissioner voted no in May. And he flipped and voted yes this time.

He didn't understand – I think it was dogs was one of his concerns. concerned dogs and bait. So we got to we got to you know the staff to the presentation then they allow public comment and by by rule they're they're going to allow two hours for public comments and you typically get three minutes per person well we had 170 people sign up so what are you going to do what they did is they gave every person a minute so I mean it's hard you got to consolidate your three minutes down to a minute but you get to go there say your piece and they made sure

every person got to speak in that room. Really? Oh, yeah. Is that recorded? It is. It is. That'd be an interesting thing to listen to there. It is because I learned some things here.

You had one minute to speak. Man, I learned some things there that you could kill bears just by staring at them. I did not know that. That was what one of the anti-hunters said. And I was like, dude, don't look at me. That's dangerous what you're doing right now. A lady walked up there and she was determined that you could kill bears. She could scare them to death just by staring at them.

We had another woman proposed that we... Worth a try. Then we hunt white-tailed deer instead of bear. Maybe if you could grin a coon out of a tree. Right? So who knows? I'm interested in digging into that. But another person say that we could, we should look into hunting white-tailed deer. We've checked that box already.

Wow. Another woman offered to give money to the Wildlife Commission directly if they would, instead of a bear hunt, fund a python hunt, which you can hunt pythons anytime in Florida. Oh, yeah. It's been massive, massive. So, like, there was just like this. People just didn't know. It was just a detachment from reality that was fostered in. And it's, it's the people we were talking about a minute ago. I don't think those people, like, I'm kind of poking fun down, but I don't think those people are probably bad people.

Yeah. If you could sit down and have a conversation and be like, the eye lady, I'm not sure how to even start that one. But like the other ones, I'm like, man, we hunt white-tail deer. Like, that's a game species that we've hunted for. Yeah, where we've found the state, we've been hunting it. Yeah. It's just like a detachment. And so they're picking up on a narrative.

I sat next to a girl that was from Sierra Club, and she said, can I ask you some questions? I said, sure. And she said, this is a trophy hunt, right? And I'm like, well, no, it's not a trophy hunt. I said, trophy hunting is like a misnomer. Secondly, no one trophy hunts anything in Florida. Like, we have wanting waste laws and everything else. Like, you're not coming here to trophy hunt a deer.

You're not like, you're coming here because you want to hunt and you take the meat and everything else. So I was like, this is not a trophy hunt. You could just tell she'd kind of been misled. Yeah. She had to tend her heart for bears. She probably is never going to go hunt. But, you know, I don't know if I changed her mind or anything else. But it was the conversation you're talking about, right?

And I looked around the room and you see people around the room having those conversations with people who are sitting next to it. Do you feel like the guys in Orange did a good job of interacting with the Sierra? And I realize that there were people that didn't, didn't probably. I'm going to say this as a Polk County Redneck. There is the Polk County Redneck and then the probably the conservationist hunter that's a little more. some of the Polk County redneck types maybe not so much but I was really proud of how the hunting community showed up and conducted themselves when you got one minute on a subject that's been this teased out for this long like those commissioners are briefed like they are in Florida the commissioners are appointed by the governor they oversee the they vote on the rules the scientists present the rules so the science are saying here here's what we think the hunt can be the mission ask questions and dig into it a little bit, but they vote on whether or not we approve this recommendation.

So there's seven of them. Man, to stay engaged that long for three hours listening to person after person is tough. Yeah. What we did as a hunting community is we went to, and everybody did this, we went to our people and said, look, if you're here and you're representing meat eater, you're here and you're here and you represent BHA or whatever, sure, go up there and fly the flag. But if you've got 15 people here, have the other 14 of them just stand up and say, I wave in support. There's no reason to belabor this. Right. Yes, yes. So the 170 comments probably became

120 people going to a microphone. Okay. Which also, it did force that number, that time limit down. That wasn't intentional, but it did force that time limit down because those people all waived in support of this hunt. Really proud of how that was handled. And it was handled in a very organic, I don't know everybody in the hunting community. You know, you go to, to the girls were there from American Daughters of Conservation This group we have down there of women hunters, fishermen. They showed up in mass.

They made sure that everybody they talked to, they went and said, hey, make sure you wave and support if you don't want to go to the microphone. And so you just stand up where you were. You didn't even go to the mic and record. Like, your name's already up there. Literally raise your hand and support. Hey, I wave and support and sit back down.

And that was really well received, I think, by the commission because it was respectful of their time. We had a long day. We had a lot of stuff to work on. I mean, there were other conservation issues we had to tackle besides bears. And that, the next day you and I played phone tag because I was I was in and out working on oysters and shrimp and

bonefish and stuff that day the hunting community that was a high point I mean it was a really proud moment for me yeah and it was a really proud moment for me because I look at I look at the broader hunting conservation world and in the last year we beat back Prop 127 in Colorado we beat back this Mike Lee publicly in sale we passed the right to fish and hunt in Florida which no one thought we would do. We just reestablished a bear hunting Florida. What was it two years ago? They reestablished a bear hunting Louisiana. Like it's easy for us to sit back and say, man,

we are getting our butts whooped. But in fact, we are drawing some pretty strong lines in the sand and say, we are reclaiming some of this ground for conservation. Not just hunting. I don't talk about hunting as much as I talk about conservation. That's the verb that I use

or the noun that I use to describe. Because that's the activity that I care the most about is conserving wildlife and conserving these things, I just happen to want to do it with shotgun. So really a high water moment. The commissioners, I think they asked good questions about, they'll call staff back up at the end and they'll dig in, you know,

clarify what dogs mean, clarify. And sometimes it's something that maybe even something they've heard from an anti-hunter and they're like, she doesn't understand her, he doesn't understand it. I'm going to ask a question to clarify it so that it's on the record as, we heard people say these dogs are going to, going to go in there and attack the bears and kill them. That's not how this works. That's not the intention of dog hunting.

No. We have people say, because if you get a permit and you want a dog hunt, you're allowed to bring nine people with you. They believe that all nine people are going to, or all 10 people are going to shoot at the same time. That's not how it's going to work. Like, you heard that over and over again in comments. It's like, this is going to be a firing squad on this bear.

No. You guys know this, but like that's, and so the commissioners would tease out those questions and ask, like, so what does this mean? What does that mean? And some of it they really were asking and some of it they were asking to clarify for the other side. Get done and

Commissioner Gary Lester called for a vote. I think Commissioner Josh Kellam, who's our new commissioner, he seconded it. And they said, let's vote. And it passed unanimously. All five of them went for it.

That's awesome. And, man, I commend the courage of all five of those commissioners in Florida for doing that. You know, it's sad to me that we've gotten to a societal place where these groups,

these anti-hunting groups, have targeted their businesses. Because this is not their job. They're bi-vocational, right? They don't get paid at all. They get reimbursed for travel. It's a huge job to be a commissioner. 10 days a year, 8 days a year, they have to sit there and listen to, again, not just bears, not the sexy stuff.

We spent two hours on oysters the next day and how many we could harvest in a bucket or something. Like, it's not all the fun, sexy stuff. I love to eat oysters, but they sit there and they participate and they engage well on it, and then we go and demonize them. There's two sides to that too, right? Like that's another thing coming out of this is we left that meeting,

and I heard people in the hunting community say, well, it was only 187, and it was only these zones, and we need more, and there's 10,000 bears and say, guys, there's a way that this works, and we're working really hard to get as many bear permits as we can in a sustainable way. Like, just check yourself where you wreck yourself a little bit here, because we really are trying to navigate these things that are hard to get them done.

Yeah. So that we can go out there and enjoy the resources that we love and experience. For me, it's never about killing an animal. It's about sitting in a stand and watching a world wake up or being with my daughter, my son, or whoever. You know, it's about the camaraderie. Yeah, I love to hang stuff on the wall and I love to eat the meat, but it's really about the time that I get to spend outdoors. And that's how I enter and exit it. It's carrying a rifle or carrying a shotgun or carrying a fishing pole.

That's how I get in and out of it. So it was a watermark moment. I was really proud of those guys for standing strong. But there's people that have targeted their businesses. They are protesting. There's one that owns a car lot in Tampa. So if you need a car, go to buy one from him because he owns a car lot in Tampa. And there's people protesting in front of his business, targeting him specifically.

And this is a guy that cares deeply about wildlife, man. Did they, are any other species that people are doing that in Florida? I mean, like protesting in the street. They're not worried about oysters. They're not worried about white-tailed deer. Just bear. Bears, we get a lot of protests about developments. People don't have a real good understanding of private property rights and how that works in Florida.

So we get a lot of protests about developments. And then we see a lot of protests around manatees. But I mean, nobody's... You can't hunt manatees. It's not a thing. But it's a water quality thing. Manatees, that's a whole other thing. But manatees are a large grazing animal.

like there's probably a carrying capacity for how many of them can exist in this state and then we create warm water discharges and we feed them lettuce and we kind of artificially inflate it and you could get into some ecology of that but there's a lot of protests about manatees when they die off and stuff like that but bears are pretty much it and the same anti-hunting community what we've seen them move on now is archery they've determined that archery is inhumane and so we should not be allowed to archery hunt anymore that's their next kind of hill to die on there's no traction there we're talking about a very small but very noisy, but very small group of people.

And then they've also started dabbling into coyote hunting. They don't want coyote hunting. I don't know why. Coyote is a pretty sustainable resource. We've got plenty of them. I'm not a huge coyote hunting, but I've killed plenty of them. From a predator management standpoint for turkeys or whatever. It was a win.

Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls in building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragm. called prime cuts. Now I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that goblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record.

If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut. they're all three great cuts. Check out prime cuts at Phelps game calls.com. I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut

is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. Should we expect more turbulence? Was there anything legally about this hunt that sets it in perpetuity for a period of time? Nope. So it does not need to come back to the commission.

But I mean, are they going to, last time in 15 when we had a hunt, it was shut down the next year because of public opinion and all the stuff that happened after the hunt. Do you expect that to happen again or we kind of over it? You're asking Travis's opinion? I'd say I think we're going to be fine moving forward. Okay. I do think, okay, so they do, and you know more about this than I do, but they do bare den studies on a generational cycle. Right. Something to this effect.

So every 10 years, they'll have new updated data. So 2029 is when they'll have the latest real population estimate for the state. We know that there's at least 4,000 bears in Florida. And we also know that no matter what, this hunt's not going to change that population. 197 coming out. Like this goes back to what I said real early. It could be five. It could be 25.

Remember when they reestablished elk in Tennessee or they allowed seven to be taken? Yeah. It could be like that. 187 is such a It's a Rounding error. Like it is nothing. Right.

Yeah. So we're going to see bear populations continue to thrive. Yeah. And over time, we're going to get better and better data to go with that. Because we don't not have data. We've got hero corral data and things like that. So we know in different,

they call them BMUs, bear management units. In different BMUs, we know like some level of how many bears are using a particular fence line or whatever. Yeah. So we know that that population is going to continue to grow. We know that the hunt is going to be very different from how it was last time, just from the removal of checkstations, doing digital check-in, doing the hard tag, allowing for selectivity,

not forcing everybody to hunt all at once. We know that those factors, there's so many have changed, it's going to look very different coming out of it. Yeah. And then we do know, too, that a lawsuit has already been filed by the anti-hunting world, but it got dismissed outright. in 2015. Like, they were sued in 2015 for the hunt, and the case was dismissed.

So I don't want to be flipping about anything because you never know what's going to happen on any given day. But I just don't see any merit to that suit. Like, FWC is a, not to get too far in the policy weeds, but in most states, you have a legislatively created body, a statutorily created body where I think Arkansas is actually constitutionally as well. In Florida, FWC was created by the Constitution. So they're almost like a de facto fourth.

You got the executive legislative judicial and the conservation branch. I got it. Now, is there crossover with the governor appointees and stuff? Sure, there is. And the legislature controls their budget so they can force them budgetarily to do certain things. But the end of the day, FWC is an isolated body that's able to kind of make their own determinations on this stuff. I don't see how you want a lawsuit because they're constitutionally empowered to manage fish and wildlife. Yeah.

So, like, if you sue and say they breach their duty, well, their constitutional duties to manage fish and wildlife, and it's a pretty broad purview that's given to them. I just don't, I don't see that holding merit. Maybe you get the right judge and the right jurisdiction, but I just don't see that in Florida. You know, when we talk about, I think the narrative, the way that we speak about hunting is important. And oftentimes you hear, like, there's a bear population in Florida. There's a new bear hunt. there's an expanding population. We're hunting them to control the population.

Like that's what people would say. But that's actually not true because the amount of barriers that we're taking out of Florida is basically going to be ecologically inconsequential. It's significant. So what it comes down to really the, what people like us that love wildlife and love wild places and love to eat, Wild Game, what we believe is that, I mean, the philosophy is that a hunter should be able to take from the surplus of a healthy population of animals and use that resource from traditional use practice.

I'm an American, I'm a eighth, ninth generation American. My family has been hunting for a long time. I mean, you know, there's all these reasons why it's like, you ought to be able to hunt if it's not hurting anything. Right. I mean, that's kind of the philosophy. And that is absolutely the doctrine is like, hey, if I can go out in my backyard and kill a couple of deer and feed my family, and it's actually not hurting the population, I have the right to do that. And that's what we're saying, even with bears.

They're a game animal. They're an animal that we eat, an animal that we utilize heavily, an animal that we have all this historic documentation on this continent since we got. here we've been hunting bears they're still here they're they're they're able to withstand human hunting when it's done in the right way which clearly this is a way that that is being done so so could could the volume be turned up could the throttle be turned up to where the hunt actually did manage population numbers it could and in many states it does yep i mean there's there's lots of states where thousands of bears are being killed. And they're taking them out of the population

because the populations are that big. Right. You can't take a token 187 bears out of Wisconsin and expect the population to remain stable. I mean, they're killing, I want to say, in some of those states, they're killing 4,000 bears a year. In Arkansas, we're taking about 500 bears, which is not very many, really.

a lot of the Appalachian states, they harvest a lot of bears. But point being, I think it's important that we be honest. I hear Ronella say this, and it's, I like it. He's like,

we shouldn't say things that aren't true that make us, that create a false narrative. I mean, could we make the Florida bear hunt actually affect the population? You absolutely could, you know?

But this is not that. This is not even that. And it's not to say that they never, because if you look at the BMU distribution, there are BMUs that have way more bears and BMUs that have way less bears. You want those BMUs way less bears to continue to grow their population, why you want to manage it in some of these others. But I also think over time, we will begin to apply more data to this and say, hey, we've got more human bear conflicts in this BMU or we're seeing more interactions negatively in that BMU. like we'll begin to distribute the hunt differently to maybe address this. Maybe we do want this BMU to always be at a thousand bears or whatever the thing is. And the other thing that I heard you say that kind of stuck would be is something I say all the time.

This is truly, and I can't stress this enough. I've said it a couple of times, but this is truly conservation. Like I say conservation is seeking the proper use of a resource. It's utilizing a resource correctly. We are about to utilize a resource correctly that we haven't tapped into for a long time for various reasons. And now I like to say preservation is for delicious jams and jellies. That's nothing to do with conservation.

It could be a tool that we use in certain situations, but by and large, conservation is seeking how to use it correctly. That's everything we've talked about here today, and that's everything we're talking about in general. That's everything you talk about on every episode you do, right? Ultimately, like you can get into the weeds, the nuts and bolts of turkey hunting or duck hunter or whatever. But the end of the day, I want to make sure that this resource is long-term sustainably

able to be used. And that's, that's, I'm really proud to where Florida landed on this and I'm really proud of everybody that worked on it because it's a,

is a, I don't think people outside the bear world understand how big of a movement this was to get this done again. Yeah. Yeah. Man, that's so cool.

You said something there we hadn't talked about and I've got a data point on bear human conflict. I remember in the last year reading that, that there was and I'm going to say a number

and for about six months I could quote the exact number. I've forgotten the exact number but I'm going to quote a number. 5,96 bear calls the state of Florida received in in a

new sense complaints in a single year. Wow. Like in 23 or 22. Years back. But it was somewhere in the 5,900 range. Wow. And I did the math on it, and that's one bear call for every 15 minutes of a working day. Wow.

And basically, the state of Florida, and I don't know that all those calls go into the same place, but theoretically, they would, they could hire one person that as a full-time response person? All they did every day for a full-time response person. All they did every day for a 40-hour work week from the time they got there to the time they left was field calls of people saying, a bear's in my trash can, a bear's eating my flowers, a bear chased my dog, a bear did this or that. I mean, in Arkansas, I want to say we're getting like under 200 nuisance bear calls a year. Wow. Florida, pushing 6,000. Yeah.

And it has to do with the population. There's 22 million people there. Yeah. There's so many people. And there's that many roads, that many people, a burgeoning bear population. I bet there's, I bet they're right on there's more than 4,000 bears. If you were wagering, I would, too. I bet it's more.

I read in the 2019 report, we euthanize 40 a year. Okay. So 1% of the population, if we kill a year, just. just as nuisance bears. And that's on average. I bet there's a lot more than that. And what I learned, I've just seen this with bear,

bear numbers is that the agencies are usually pretty conservative on bear numbers. Very conservative. So they're, if they say there's 4,000, there's probably more than that. But if they don't have the actual data, like,

so the way that they're doing bear population studies today is, yeah, they're using bear bear hair snares josh to put up a bait station put barbed wire up about 20 inches or however long put it around so a bear has to either step over it or crawl under it and there there's barbed wire and it catches hair right and basically they do they'll take like a grid of habitat let's say 10 square miles and they'll put five bear hair snare traps in that 10 square miles. They will take all the hair samples, genetically analyze it to understand exactly how many individual bears came to those traps in that 10 square miles. Then they will analyze the habitat

in that 10 square miles. This is a generalization of how they do this. And they'll say, well, we have a thousand other 10 square mile blocks that the habitat is similar. And we know that there's bears there. Right. We're going to extrapolate. And they do this like checkerboarded across the bear habitat. Right. And they go, well, in this 10 square block, or 10 square miles, we've got 17 bears and

we got this many sows and this many cubs. And then the block 27 miles away has the same numbers. And they go, every block in between there probably has the same. So basically, they get a really good look at how, you know, you know, you know, population dynamics of bears. Yes. That's how they do it now. Used to, they were doing like,

they were using hunter harvest, not necessarily in Florida, but another place they were using hunter harvest numbers. I told the story, well, they covered it on the Meteor podcast, but in California for years, they used hunter harvest numbers

to decide the population. Basically, they were like, whatever the hunters kill, we've probably got X number more bears than that. And so as long as we're killing 2,000 bears a year, we probably got 20,000 bears and we're okay. Well, then they gutted the management practices of California.

Stop dogs and bait. Yeah. And so all you could do was spot and stock bears, which is very difficult. And so they started killing like 1,000 bears a year in California. And then the anti-hunting community, God bless them. They were like, the bears are in crisis

because we tell our numbers of bears by how many bears are killing they're not killing very many oh we got to shut the whole hunt down this is not a joke this happened and then the gaming fish is like oh my gosh this is not true

this is crazy we got to do a real study they do a modern hair sample study and they find out that there's between 60 and 80,000 bears in California I mean it's a wild story but yeah just it'll be interesting to see the numbers in Florida it'll be really interesting to see the numbers of Florida and I'm gonna I'm a Florida boy through and through so I think man I think our wildlife agency is top notch and I really trust them implicitly like bears weren't under we have we have a HGM hunting and game management division and then we have habitat and species conservation which is not hunting that's all non game and lands Bears were under HSC and now it's becoming a it's going back under hunting so but that

HSC division like that team has just they're incredible like I trust them implicitly with the science that they produced and the science they'll continue to produce um they're going to get it right and I there's nobody in Florida that's affiliated with this that that wants to see bear numbers decline at this point like like we want to see them survive and thrive this is a win dude this is where we want to be yeah so i'm i'm i'm over the moon with where we're at i think this is the longest beggary surrender we've ever had i think so we've been talking for two hours i'm i blame for that's no it's been i've i've loved this everything about this is momentous yeah no this this is really really great well man um is there anything we've not covered

do you want to cover no i think i think we how can we help you guys like who should we what is there a call to action for us outside of Florida? Not right now. There's not. Should we send anybody a thank you card? The hunting community writ large. Like whoever it is you love in the hunting community that I don't care what group it is, they all like showed up and showed out on this in the right way.

I would like to, when I think about a hunt and these hunters who I consider my brothers going out and going to harvest 187 bears this fall. man I just want I just hope everybody's just like the culture is just on their best behavior do your best yeah yeah you know your best and and I think I think that as as a hunting culture and as a as a as kind of a tribe that we can we can ask that of people and and and you know specifics would be like you know be tasteful and respectful on social media when you're posting these pictures. 100% and in in somebody to listen to this podcast maybe maybe they learned something I learned something but man for for for us to be able to

for a hunter to kill a bear and him to actually understand bear management understand a little bit about bears understand some of the things we've talked about today goes a long ways like even in the social media post to be like man I got this bear and and and I I love posting pictures on social media I do there's been times when we'd be like, don't put any grip and grins on. Man, I still do. No, we own what we do. But to be able to have the words, to be able to articulate the philosophy of why we do what we do with a tenor of respect to that animal, to wild places, to conservation, and even in a set in a tone that would be sympathetic to someone who wouldn't understand. And I'm not saying,

you know, change who you are. It's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying, we can't be mad at somebody for not knowing. We can't be mad at somebody. And I'm speaking to myself. Yeah.

I can't be upset with that person because they just don't know. It is critical how we handle this. Florida hunters, how they handle this, or out-of-state hunters if they come. How we present this will determine what future rhetoric looks like.

That's right. and hunting is not the mainstream thing it once was. You guys at Meadier have talked about this for a long time, but it's not the mainstream. I mean, again, I'll refer back to stars in the sky. I think Rinella said in the 50s, like 4% of America hunted or it was a high number. In Florida, we got 22 and a half million people and 250,000 hunting license. I mean, that's a fingernail on that state. Wow.

Which is why the right to fish and hunt was so important to us to protect that, but that's just a backstop. Right. Like how we conduct ourselves, how we behave in this world. And again, I'm not saying the same thing you are. I'm not saying you don't post a dead animal. I'm not saying you don't, but the way you talk about it and the way you post it, the way you present it, I'll say selfishly makes my job way harder. Yeah.

To go into rooms and try to move needles on getting things like this reopened. Yeah. Man, it could be a tremendous help. And again, the honey community has handled themselves beautifully through this entire process. Like, they've done it. if I had asked for him to do it, if I could have just gone to everyone and said,

hit this out what you do it, this is how they would have done it. So I'm really proud of where we are. We continue that going. There's no telling what else we can get done. And not just in Florida, but nationally. I think there's a whole lot of stuff

we can get done that is pro-hunting, but pro-conservation that's going to help keep this stuff that we care about wild. Yeah. Well, Travis, thank you so much for coming.

Travis had like three, When do we talk Friday? Yeah. Thursday, Friday. It was Thursday afternoon. So yeah, Travis came here and just like super short notice. So thanks a ton, man. Thanks for all your work, for real.

I know you guys probably don't get a lot of paths on the back, but you should. I mean, often the thank you's goes to people that didn't have anything to do with it, like people that, you know, are, I just think about, I had nothing to do with this. Well, this has something to do with it. and we appreciate it. But like I said, there was nobody that didn't. It's like you look at a football team. I watch sports.

You look at a football team and you praise the wide receiver, the quarterback, the running back, whatever. That guy's not snapping the ball in the middle or that right guard's not holding the blindman off. Like, nothing's happening. Yeah. The defense doesn't come out there and play special team. Like, it takes a complete team to get this stuff done.

Everything that we get done, it takes a complete team. So everybody gets to play a part, and it's just an honor to be on that team. What's the name of your organization? Florida so it's a LLFLA.orgie. And that's your that's your organization. That's us. Yeah. Yeah. And but then you work for international order of Theodore Roosevelt. Okay. So that's uh t-rosevelt.org. I believe is their URL. Okay. So those are great organizations that that I'm really proud of. And in, in Florida, there's not a room that we're not in when it comes to hunting, fishing, conservation stuff. Like, like we are we have somebody in just about every room. That's,

that's incredible. So we're, we're really proud of that. And we love, we love that place. So Hopefully you guys will come down there. Man, I love for a bear, hunt a turkey. Really dear to my heart come hunt a duck. But we can figure it out. Yeah. Appreciate it, man. Josh come down there fly fishing.

Oh, brother. Can we not? Well, I'm in. Thank you all for having me. Keep the wild place as wild because that's where the bears live. And we need a big corridor right through Florida. That's right. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls

and building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to.

I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelps Game Calls.com. I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. This is an I-Heart podcast, Guaranteed Human.