Bear Grease - Ep. 58: Poaching - Our Relationship with the Law

Episode Date: June 15, 2022

This episode of the Bear Grease Podcast will be an exposé on two men in the outdoor industry that you may have heard of. We typically don’t like to air people’s dirty laundry, but we gained access to these hunters and you may know them, maybe even respect them, and their stories might shock you. The hunters we’re talking about are Clay Newcomb and Steven Rinella! They had a candid conversation about the way they were raised, their history with game laws, and a few of their regrets. The intent is to have some honest dialogue giving a data point to understand our cultural history as modern hunters that will allow us to dictate where we’re going. We’ll also talk Austin Booth, he’s a lawyer, a former marine, and now the director of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. We want to understand the philosophy of wildlife law enforcement in 2022 and the status of poaching. We’ll also pick up two foundational components of the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation that we all should know. If you want the dirt on Clay and Rinella, you’re for sure not going to want to miss this one. Connect with Clay and MeatEater Clay on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and 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. We would jack-layer Rabbits, which is illegal, but never a deer. There was a code. There were laws you would not break. This episode of the Bear Grease podcast will be an expose

on two men in the outdoor industry that you may have heard of. I don't like to air people's dirty laundry, but we gained access to these hunters and you may know them, maybe even respect them and their stories will shock you. Who I'm talking about is me and Steve Ronella. We had a candid conversation about the way we were raised, our history with game laws, and a few of our regrets. The intent is to have some honest dialogue,

giving us a data point to understand our cultural history as modern hunters that will allow us to dictate where we're going. We'll also talk to Austin Booth. He's a lawyer, a former Marine, and now the director of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. I want to understand the philosophy of wildlife law enforcement in 2022 and the status of poaching. We'll also pick up two foundational components

of the North American model of wildlife conservation that we all should know. And if you want the dirt on me and Ronella, I'm certain you're not going to want to miss this one. That tipping point where you go from consumption to conservation necessitates you looking at poaching as a horrible thing that detracts from the resource. My name is Clay Newcomb and this is the Bear Greece podcast where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant. Search for insight in unlikely places and where we'll tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land. presented by FHF gear,

American made, purpose-built, hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. I was raised around, let me put to you this way. Any of the hunters and angers, any of the outdoors when I was raised around, and I was raised around many of them, any of them would have, if an undercover agent had embedded with them for a week or two or a month,

any of them would have racked up a bunch of violations that would sound really bad. I didn't grow up around anyone that didn't break game laws. I'm not kidding you. Anyone that was serious about hunting and fishing that didn't break game laws

because there was the ones you paid attention to and there's the one that no one paid attention to and in fact, I now know there's a lot of them that we had no idea that was a law. That was Steve Ronella of Meat Eater. He and I are about to give an expose of our lives, because if you're new to hunting, it might be hard to understand where we as a culture have come from. Let me restate that all this talk of breaking game laws isn't a celebration, a justification, or a stunt, but rather a crisp look into reality for the purpose of getting it right in the future. In modern times for us to protect this immensely valuable wildlife resource we have on this,

continent. It helps if we're just honest with ourselves. This next clip is from the Bear Greece Render, and it's my father, Gary Newcomb, talking about his experience of stepping into the big game hunting world at the age of 26 in the mid-1970s. And so I was introduced to bow hunting, and I immediately fell in love with it, and I got to watching people. And I saw nobody. Now, take this literal. I'm telling you. you like I saw it. I knew nobody that wouldn't kill an illegal deer. And I'm like in a state of shock. I'm not going to do that. I didn't have uncles that taught me that. I didn't have a dad that taught me that. Now, if you run up against Josh, and he's a city boy out enjoying hunting,

you know, two or three times a year, now he's not going to kill anything illegal. He read the regulations and just did what it said. Yeah, yeah. But the diehard hunters, I'm telling you, From my perspective, you've got to keep that in mind, my perspective, they all killed illegal stuff. So where do you draw the line? I killed one person. I kill 50 people. I mean, you're killing stuff. It's illegal. And where is it bad? It's bad with one. It's bad with 10. It's bad with 30. The prevalence of wanton violation of the law in the past is remarkable, but I feel like we've turned a corner. Of all the laws, wildlife laws are tough to enforce because hunting is done in secluded places, often alone, and animals don't speak English. They can't tell on us. There are various gradients of poaching and all are bad. There are serial poachers that leave the house with the intent to break the law. There are those who are typically law-abiding, but they make the odd exception to egregiously break the law. There are opportunistic. lawbreakers who violate out of convenience or to take advantage of a unique situation.

There are those who are simply ignorant of the law, and then there are people that flat out make a mistake or misjudgment in the field. But if laws are broken, the intent or the context really doesn't matter. No one has an excuse. I'm still on the search for understanding our functional ideologies around game laws. In the last couple of episodes, we've talked with game wardens, undercover agents and hunters, trying to nail down our collective doctrine. And doctrine isn't what we say with our mouths, it's what we actually do. Most people would tell you that their law abiding, but when you really dig in, you might find places where they don't always hold to the letter of the law, or more commonly where

in the past they didn't. And sometimes people just mess up. And the more time you spend in the woods, the greater chance this would happen to you. We forget. get, we didn't know, we justify it this one time, or we just flat ignore a law because we think breaking it won't hurt anyone or the resource. I think we've got to be honest with our worst selves if we'll ever live consistently in our best selves. I hope these stories will fortify a culture of putting the resource first. Breaking the law is an easy thing, and here is an example. Once during muzzleloader season, I was walking to my dear stand in the pre-dawn darkness, and I planned to put on my hunter-orange vest in the tree. You see, I got

dressed at the tree trying to do all the sink control stuff. On the way in, I dropped my orange vest on the ground and didn't realize it until I was 25 feet high. The orange was like way back towards the truck. I was on private land with no other hunters, and I was bow hunting during musloader season. I continued to hunt with just my orange hat, which didn't meet the square inch orange minimum. And that morning, I proceeded to kill one of the largest bucks of my life with my boat. Technically, I was in violation of the law. Am I a poacher? By the law, yes, but by every rational thinking human on planet Earth, I don't think so. It would have been more dangerous to crawl out of the tree and walk to get the orange at daylight than it would have been to stay in the

tree and walk out midday. Have you ever left your tree stand up longer than you were supposed to on public land. Have you ever gone fishing for the first time of the spring only to realize you didn't auto renew your fishing license? Have you ever dipped your toe across a fence boundary that you didn't have written permission to access? Have you ever party hunted as a waterfowler? Which is basically a group working to get the collective limit of everyone on the hunt. Have you ever wasted meat? My intent in asking these questions isn't to soften our ideas about the law, but rather to strengthen them. And ultimately, I hope this conversation makes us be introspective about ourselves. That being said, and I'll stand by

this statement, I don't have a history of intentionally breaking game laws. I've dedicated an incredible amount of energy to the point of paranoia to not break them, even before I was in the outdoor industry. I've never had a wild streak, and I grew up in a very law-abiding family, which I'm proud of. But by sheer volume of exposure, running around with the odd ruffian, being a dumb kid and just being human, I've made some mistakes. Here's Steve Ronella describing the culture of how he grew up. I used to be reluctant to talk about some of the stuff because of fear of getting in trouble, like elements of hypocrisy, whatever.

Sure. We broke laws all the time. Okay. I could sit here and just give you dozens of occurrences. Let me give you a couple, for instances. In the spring, the rivers had come up, and sometimes the rivers had come up so high that it would flood out the muskrats out of their bank dens. It wasn't muskrat season. You were not allowed to shoot muskrats in Michigan.

You had to trap them, but we couldn't resist the temptation. We'd go out of the 22 and go out in the flooded swamps and get muskrats and just add them into the furs we sold the next year. Yeah. Okay? Because who's going to notice, like, some 22 holes and some of them? I remember in high school, my buddy Eric Kern, he's no longer with us. My buddy Eric Kern were dipping smelt. He caught a steelhead.

Not allowed to do that with a net, stuck it in his waiters and carried around in his waiters in the boot of his waiters for the night. I'm talking like a 10-pound fish. Never in a million years that we had let that fish go. But there was some stuff we would never do. Would no way, no how jacklight a deer? Spotlight a deer. We would jacklighting rabbits.

which is illegal, but never a deer wouldn't go over a bag limit. But you had to be 14 to hunt with a rifle. I started hunting with a rifle when I was 13. I shot a doe.

My mom came out and put her tag on it. I would have gone down and told, I would have gone down and told that story in school. It just, right.

It wasn't like you were being secrety. It was just, it was like the attitude was, how many deer are we, allowed as a family. Tell us that. And then, and then just leave the rest to us. Yeah. Right. And that's functionally the way they, that it was enforced too. Am I right? It was like, I don't know. I don't like, we weren't checked by people. Just, I could go on and on. Like stuff that I'm,

like stuff that I'm ashamed about. And I'll point out, my dad was a, like I said, I mentioned, my dad was a veteran. His friends were veterans. These are people who fought in World War II. These people love their country, right? The most upstanding members of the community, okay? One of the guys down the road, a veteran, he was a car salesman, mentored me all through growing up.

He lived with his wife, and his wife died, and he fished all the time. Couldn't eat that many fish, but he fished. I remember some days he'd fish 270 days a year because he kept the track of it in a notepad. How many fish can you eat? He sold his fish. He would encourage me to go sell my fish

to the illegal outfit that he sold his fish to. Was it a restaurant? No, it was a fish dealer. A fish market. Okay. And he would even advise me on how to negotiate the deals. Do you understand? These are not people that would have

identified as poachers. Right. I don't know why. Oh, moving fish around, dumping them into all their lakes and stuff. Like, you name it, man. Like, it was just everywhere. But there were certain lines you, there was like lines you didn't cross. I remember I don't want to name the guy's name

because I'm still friendly with this kid. The guy shot way more wood ducks than he was allowed one time and did a very sloppy job of cleaning them and just breasted some wood ducks and dumped them out in the woods. And we found them and told our old man about these wood ducks that weren't cleaned. And my old man went over there and confronted the guy.

That was something you do not do. Waste again. Yeah. Don't do that. Yeah. But he would do all. my own man would do all manner stuff you weren't supposed to do. Yeah.

But it was like Spirit of the Law, a letter of the law. I really appreciate Steve opening up about his past. It takes some guts to do that, and his intent is just to be honest. He nor I have nothing to hide. I have no doubt that people who've been involved in hunting and fishing their entire lives,

and if they've seen a few winters, can relate. I know I can. And at the end of this podcast, I'm going to tell you my darkest secret. It's really not a secret. But here's Steve on ethics. It's a relationship with the game laws. It's hard to understand.

I'll point out to people now, we have all these conversations about hunting ethics. I'm like, man, here's a good way to get 95% of the way there. Follow the laws. We've codified our ethics in this country to a large measure. They change through time. at any given time, our ethics are mostly codified by law. If you want to be an ethical hunter, that typically means don't break the laws.

Yeah. But my God, were they loose with the laws growing up? And I was too because I was brought up that way. I had to later realize out of getting on board with the program, okay? Getting on board with the game management program that we're on in this country. Right. The journey we're on with conservation. the journey around with game management,

like getting on board with that. And also, quite simply, frankly, when I was in my 20s, out of fear of being in trouble. Yeah. Didn't want to be in trouble. Cleaned up our act. I got the,

scared out of me by a game word one time, who I knew was on to me about something. And that scared me pretty straight. You don't want to tell that story. I'll tell it. Well, I really don't tell it if you don't. Let me tell you what he asked me. You weren't allowed to use snares where I lived

for land animals. He asked me if I'd been setting snares. I told him no. He then went through over 100 traps in the back of my truck looking for one that didn't have a tag on it. He didn't like check one. He was like, I'm going to look through this bundle and I'm going to find a not tag trap. And I'm going to give you a citation. And you didn't find a not tag trap, to my surprise and his.

Because it just fall off sometimes. But I knew that guy knew something I'd done. So that kind of scared. straight. Oh, on that stuff, I had a fur buyer who would push snares on you. Catch more game. Licensed fur buyer. He's like, hey, why don't you take some of these?

Bringing stuff in, right? Just pervasive. And there's no way you wouldn't, there's no way you don't, like knowing where you grew up and how you grew up, there's no way you didn't have all those same experiences. Yeah, you know, I had an interesting, interesting experience in that my dad was Gary Newcomb, who he did, he always said. he didn't grow up in a hunting family and I don't like it when he says that because he did my grandfather was a big quail hunter and bird dog trainer what he means to say is he didn't grow up in a big game hunting family which he didn't and so he was kind of a first he learned how to bow hunt on his own and did all this stuff and man he was pretty straight laced and kind of came into the hunting space and realized that he was the only guy around that was actually trying to to obey game laws.

And he just had just kind of the right mix of following the rules. And he was a banker. He was in the community that he felt like he needed to be an upstanding citizen end, which was good. And man, we came out of the shoot with a very, I mean, I wasn't afraid of the game warden.

I was afraid of my dad. So it's kind of a different story. So I never wantonly broke game laws, even though I did, just because I was a done. I'm a kid, you know, a couple of times in coon hunting while we were coon hunting. Twice, deer were killed on coon hunts. Hmm. Steve said, well, here's the full story. I've never in my life set out to kill a deer

illegally, ever. But one night, deep in the winter, when I was 17, we were on a coon hunt. I saw the glowing eyes of an erect-eared critter that hovered about 20 inches off the ground. I immediately whispered to my buddy with the 22 rifle, Coyote, shoot that thing. Within seconds, a shot was fired, and the glowing eyes went out. Upon retrieval, it wasn't a coyote at all. Turns out it was a bedded doe deer. And it wasn't even legal to shoot a coyote at night, but I didn't know that.

Rather than calling the game warden, which would have been the right thing to do, calling old Jimmy Martin, we stuffed the deer in our dog box and went home and skinned it. A second time, I was hunting with someone older than me on his land. And again, I think I was 17. We saw a pair of eyes on the hill, and I said, there's one of your cows. He said, that's not a cow, that's a deer. I said, no, you're wrong, that's one of your cows. He proceeded to pull out his 22 pistol, take aim, and drive.

dropped the animal from over 75 yards away. We walked up there and he was right. It was a deer. He loaded the deer in the truck, drove to some dude's house that needed some meat, and no questions were ever asked. He dropped the deer off. Since that time,

I've become more adept at identifying animals by glowing eyes. I'm ashamed of these things and learned a lot from them. Here's Steve. Man, it's hard to explain. Yeah. Yeah, but there was a code. There were laws you would not break. I don't know any of all the violating that I just talked about.

I don't know anyone in my family's social circle that ever shot a deer of the spotlight or that ever shot a deer out of season. Right. That would have been bad. That was when you didn't break. You would not do that. I don't know why. I want to introduce you to the director of the Arkansas. saw a game and fish commission. He's been on the bear grease podcast before. His name is Austin Booth.

He's a former Marine, a lawyer, a pilot, and at the ripe age of 35, he's one of the youngest directors in the agency's history. And he's making some good waves in our state. Austin is also a lifelong hunter. Over the next 20 minutes, I'm going to ask him about the agency's philosophy of law enforcement, the status of poaching in the state, and the foundational identity. ideology that regulates wildlife law. Here's Austin Booth. So what is the philosophy of law enforcement these days and how are we going after people that are breaking the law? So there's a whole lot of people out there that wrongly believe that the Arkansas Game Fish Commission is just out there to write tickets. That's not true. It is written into Arkansas law that all the revenue that we

generate from tickets goes into the county schools in which we write that ticket in. So we never see a single penny of that money. So there's no quota on a warden to write a ticket. Would you say that's common for state agencies outside of Arkansas? I know of a handful of other states. There's probably more, but it's intuitive to see that a government agency having a monetary incentive to write tickets is probably a bad thing. So we don't see any of that money. All right. Well, Austin, if y'all aren't there to self-fund yourself through regulations enforcement,

how do y'all approach this? We enforce regulations for compliance at the cadet graduation for the cadet of wildlife officers we graduated last year. Our Colonel Brad Young, outstanding American, said, y'all are not here to write granny a ticket for being one day expired on her fishing license. Make sure she gets a new license. We're not focused on minor violations. We want to educate people and we want to enforce for compliance. Where we do get aggressive is on serious game violations. We issue more than 3,500 citations per year on average. We issue well over 5,000. One,000. We issue well over 5,000.

warnings per year on average. So we really try to focus the lion's share of our enforcement work on major violators because they do materially take away from the resource. We had a case this year where a gentleman had what he called a deer garden in his yard where he had harvested over 40 bucks and had the heads out there in the sun cleaning them. We had a case this year, young man in his early 20s, who acquired over 1,300 points. Now, to provide some context for that, you only have to have 18 points to have your hunting license revoked. And so he accumulated an unimaginable amount of violations. And you can't tell me that that's not a taking from the public resource.

Yeah. 3,500 citations and 5,000 warnings a year. Those are big numbers. It's interesting to me that wardens aren't incentivized to write tickets. I think that most of us wouldn't have guessed that. It kind of goes back to some of our past discussion about a fundamental mistrust of power. This helps us view law enforcement differently and realize that this misperception is probably coming from our side. I want to get Austin's opinion on the threat of poaching.

in the big picture, in the big scheme of threats to North American wildlife, are poachers at the top of that list. And it's not really apples to apples to compare like habitat loss. So it's not entirely apples to apples, but I guess I'm trying to understand how big a threat it is. Because I think sometimes we can live in a bubble, some of us especially inside, the guys that are real enthusiast inside the outdoor space. Sure. Like I said it before, the cool kids obey the laws. Like that's what, that's the culture we're building, is that we want to obey laws.

We want, we're all on the same team. We want to see more wildlife. I don't want to kill 30 turkeys. But because sometimes in this space, we're surrounded by the, by the good guys in a sense, you don't see what's, I don't, I don't always see what's happening on the outside and is poaching a major threat to wildlife? It is. And to bring us back to the last time we were on a podcast together,

we were talking about ducks and GTRs. And you said in closing one of the podcasts, you said that when an animal is treasured by people, it thrives. And so if you take that, that sentiment, the appreciation of wildlife, and their role that they play in the ecosystem and in people's lives, that appreciation is front and center

with the loss of habitat. And it's front and center with poaching too. Because the question as hunters shouldn't be, do we appreciate this resource enough to hunt it? It should be, do we appreciate, do we treasure, do we adore this resource enough to conserve it? And that tipping point where you, go from consumption to conservation necessitates you looking at poaching as a horrible thing that detracts

from the resource. So are we losing more ducks, more turkey to loss of habitat? Absolutely. Then we are compared to, say, poachers. But it's a common foundation of lack of appreciation for the resource. Right. How do you think we remedy that inside the culture? Because it's a clear worldview to me in a compelling lifestyle to live a life that is in accordance with the game laws. It's easy for me to say that too because I have a pretty privileged life when it comes to hunting. But there's also, you know, I spoke about how there was a risk inside of me telling the stories that I've told the last couple podcasts, the risk of it glamorizing, essentially rebellion against authority.

Right. So there is some of that. How do we, like, projecting forward 25 years? Because you go back 25 years from 2022, and it was a pretty different world in this state. For sure, you go back another 25, and it was like a different planet. And today, it's just different than that. I think we've improved. But there's still some of this culture that values that.

I don't know. What do we do? How do we build the culture to continue to progress? Well, I think there's lots of complex contributions to that that are... This isn't a complex conversation, Austin. That are well outside what you and I can control. We need more stable households that have a deep commitment to not only making sure that young boys and girls make good grades, but that they're men and women of character.

I think kids and even adults need to... to have a better understanding of ecology and the importance of conserving not just individual species, but also conserving the ecosystem as a whole. But I think the number one thing that we can do in addition to exposing more young people to the outdoors is doing exactly what you're doing on this podcast

and that's talk about the nexus of wild things, wild places, and people, and how these resources don't just exist. to exist, but they exist for us to steward them and to enjoy them. And the only way to do that in perpetuity is to take care of them the best we can. 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 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 want to get to the foundation of why we have game laws. This is language that we should all be familiar with and be able to wield in intelligent ways as we continue to carve out a stable position in modern society. Remember this, the public trust doctrine.

So the public trust doctrine is one of the foundational pillars of the North American model of wildlife conservation. And it is a repudiation of the European model, which is essentially that if you owned a tract of land, that you also owned the wildlife that were on it. So you can go back hundreds of years ago. if there was a peasant that lived adjacent to royalty or some other aristocrat. And there was some way to prove that the peasant killed a deer that came from the rich person's land, then they could be convicted for it. So private ownership. Private ownership of wildlife.

Yes. Yeah. The public trust doctrine repudiates that and says that there is such a universal interest in wildlife and seeing them flourish and the opportunity to enjoy wildlife, that wildlife are universally owned by the public in the present and in the future. Now, that would have been radical doctrine that was unique to North America. Is that right? From a global perspective?

Yes, that's correct. So, I mean, this was something that was part of what Shane Mahoney called American genius inside of a North American model of wildlife. conservation that we it's so counterintuitive too because you would think if you wanted to protect something that you would cinch it down to centralized control and not let everybody else in on it but we're saying everybody owns wildlife so deer on my property even though they're on my property are not mine that's great they're owned by my neighbor and by you and by people in Nebraska that's correct yeah and the context for the public trust doctrine I think very important because a lot of it, the broad public support for it, was born out of the early

1900s when we had exhausted wildlife to extrapation throughout the country. And so from a conservation sportsman perspective as a country, we were picking up the pieces and saying, how do we make this better? How do we not only increase wildlife on the landscape, but also ensure that this doesn't happen to the next generation. So there was a big appeal. At that time, it made a ton of sense that that's what we needed to do. Are you saying that now there's voices that are saying that is not as relevant? Yeah, it has some challenges.

It's met some resistance in other states, fortunately not Arkansas, but people are often tempted to think more about wildlife as an agricultural resource. There are some states where all animals in high. high-fence farms, including native wildlife, are completely under private management and ownership. This is a new idea. Basically, high fences and privately owned native wildlife can threaten the public trust doctrine on which we've had so much success. Here's Austin on the impact of poaching on the system and a personal story. So when you think about the public trust doctrine and the success of the North American model of wildlife conservation, writing on the back of this idea of

public trust, giving incentive for the common man to want wildlife to thrive on a macro scale. That's really what's happened. But someone that would infringe on those game laws would essentially be violating the public trust doctrine or stealing from it and just saying, I can take as much wildlife as I want, I can take more than I want. They're violating not just the wildlife, but everyone else. And so, I mean, that's the whole story of poaching that's hurting the whole system. And when someone violates a game law in the form of poaching, essentially what they're saying is that they believe they have a higher claim to that, to that critter than anyone else does.

If we had that on a broad scale, our wildlife, as we know it, would weather and die. Yeah. Just to illustrate that, I'll tell you a personal story. I hunt a lease in Arkansas and put some work in. to it in the off-season last year. And it was a thing for my eight-year-old daughter and I to go out there and work. And then when deer season got closer, you know, morning time before school or church, she would crawl up in my lap and I'd be drinking a cup of coffee and she wanted to look at trail camp pictures.

So we had a good number of bucks out there. A lot of them were young. We were super excited, getting ready for a season. And then the rut comes around. There's no deer. And I just kind of chalked it up to, you know, Mother Nature, the rut being off, it being warm. Right. And then the farmer that was there cut his beans.

He was late getting them in, so he was late getting him out. And when he cut his beans, we found 11 dead bucks. There were no tire tracks leading up to them. All the horns were still on them. And so someone is shooting these deer just to shoot them. And my dog... Close to a highway. Yes.

close to the highway. Yeah. And my eight-year-old daughter asked me, where did all the deer go, dad? I said, well, somebody killed him. What, did you kill him? No, honey? Who killed him? I don't know. Well, why don't you know? Well, they did this thing called poaching. And I explained to her what poaching was, and she said, are they going to get caught? And I said, I hope so, but probably not. and she kind of thought about it for a little bit and she thought, well, if they're not going to get caught, can we or anybody else do the same thing? And to me, that's one sad.

Two, not only shows the amount of investment that people put into wildlife and when somebody poaches, they're taking not necessarily the wildlife from them, but that investment from them. And then thirdly, just the secondary effects of poaching on how people, even my eight-year-old daughter, views institutions and how they should behave

if they don't think that they're going to get caught. In my opinion, this is the most egregious form of poaching, killing for killing's sake. It's not hunters that do this. These people would fit into another category and don't deserve the label of hunter. I want to ask Austin about the other types of poaching that are going on today.

Food scarcity is a real thing in Arkansas. But the poachers that we catch, the narrative of I'm poaching because I have to, that is nonexistent. The people that the Arkansas Game of Fish apprehends for poaching, they oftentimes have night vision technology, thermal scopes, infrared spotlights,

and there is a high level of investment and work in time that often goes into their hardened decision to violate the law. A hardened decision to violate the law. That's a place you don't want to find yourself. Austin is now going to explain the open fields doctrine, which governs wildlife law enforcement. This is another thing that would be good to keep in your repertoire. I bet y'all didn't know that I could speak French.

So the open fields doctrine is the notion that if you have, a wildlife officer out there trying to enforce game laws, then they can freely cross from public land on private land. This is not just something that the Arkansas game fish came up with. This actually comes from the United States Supreme Court. It was a case in 1924. Hester versus the United States that said special protection accorded by the Fourth Amendment in their persons, houses, and effects, which is in the Constitution, does not extend to open fields. And the reasoning there being from the Supreme Court, which was later... Open fields. Describe that terminology to me. I don't understand that.

That's where I was going with it, is that the Fourth Amendment protections generally revolve around things that you have an expectation of privacy in. That comes from the Katz case. The reasoning behind open fields is if you have a broad, expanse of land, your expectation of privacy does not go to every single corner of the land, that it's insulated around your dwelling and what the court calls curtilage. So like tents, trailers, cars that you have, that kind of stuff. And so Arkansas and nearly every other state, if a game warden is trying to get after a poacher and they believe that there's a poacher on private land, then under the open field doctrine, they can go apprehend that poacher without a

search warrant. They couldn't search the house without a warrant. They couldn't search a mobile home next to the house. They couldn't search a car next to the house unless they witnessed a crime happened and the individual ran into the house. That's completely different. But for, for warrant purposes, if they have evidence or reason to believe that there's poaching going on on private lands, again, outside the home or the curtilage of a dwelling place, then they can go hop a fence and try to apprehend that poacher. Without a search warrant. That's right.

And the reason that's important is because the deer can cross the fence too. If our natural resources, especially wildlife, can traverse private property and public property freely, then it's important for wildlife officers to be able to do the same to enforce the game laws. That's even more important going forward because if you look at the landscape, we're suffering for loss of habitat, right? And so as public land and private land become increasingly intermingled, it's a big deal to Americans that game laws be enforced equally, that public land hunters are not more, susceptible to game laws than say private land hunters are simply because of where they choose to hunt. And is that in jeopardy?

Not in Arkansas. But just in the... It's been undermined in other jurisdictions. How has that happened? They believe that the rights of privacy in private property are more compelling than equal protection of the laws for private lane hunters and public land hunters. That's a tricky one, isn't it? Because we all respect the rights of private landowners, and we want that right.

100%. But in the macro picture of protecting wildlife, that's a right that we kind of choose to give away in a sense. We didn't choose it, but we're okay with it. I mean, I want a game warden to be able to go on this guy's land and enforce game loss. Right. And in the same way, you could do it on my land. I hope this conversation has given us a more robust understanding of wildlife law enforcement, and I hope it's making us evaluate our own relationship with the law.

This next story is extremely personal and meaningful to me. At the time, it shaped my life, and it continues to do so. Here's me telling old Steve Rinella about it. How humiliating. I was bow hunting, public land, and had been walking for miles. and miles and miles with a bow in hand scouting and I see a squirrel and I mean I'm I'm not joking when I say this is maybe I maybe shot a squirrel with a bow two other times in my life and I mean and you know kept the squirrel is not something I make a practice of but just on that day

at the right time the squirrel sat there for long enough I said man I'm going to shoot that squirrel and I shoot that squirrel just at long shot like I didn't think I'd hit him you know 25 30 yards, just nail him. And the air goes through his hips. And I go up and I actually sat there looking at that squirrel just thinking, Doc, why did I do this? And this ended up being a pretty formative moment in my young adult life, for real. Because I made a conscious decision that was like, man, the meats run, you know,

broadhead through the hams of this squirrel. And I just decided that I wasn't going to take it. Which, I mean, only I know if this is true when I say it, but it's like highly out of character for me. You ever do something like that? And I walk out and I'm on a lonely stretch of public land. I mean, you still don't see cars out here very much, much less a game warden. And I'm walking to the road and I can see the road. And I see a car coming.

The car can't see me. and it's a dead end road Steve so this truck is going towards the dead end my truck's at the end of the dead end and I see that it's a game board truck and when I saw that truck I knew that I was going to be held accountable

for what I did and to be honest with you I knew that God was going to hold me to account of it because I could have just sat there I could have just like hid in the woods until he turned around because there's only one way for him to come out And I knew that if I did that, that I would be in big trouble with somebody that I was more worried about. And I walked right out to the road.

And I didn't know how it was going to come up. Like I wasn't going to bring it up that I'd shot a squirrel and left it in the woods. But I walked, start walking down the road. And sure enough, the guy is coming back. And he sees me. I could have stepped off the road and he'd have passed right by me. And there was nothing. I didn't have anything on me that would have given away.

and there's no, really no noticeable blood on the arrow. And he gets out, and he's like, hey, what you doing? And we talk, he's a real nice guy. Since this time, me and this guy have become friends. I communicate with him. Every couple of years, I'll call him. And man, that sucker spotted a speck of blood on my shoe about as big as a tick-tac, you know.

I mean, just a tiny speck of blood on my shoe that I hadn't even seen. And he was all fun and games. And then he was like, what's that? And I looked down and I see that blood, and he just turned stone cold. And I said, I shot a squirrel, and I left it in the woods. I just straight up, just told him what had happened. And he said, why did you do that? And I just, I mean, I told the story I just told you.

And he thought I was lying. He thought I'd killed something bigger and was hiding it or something. And he said, well, put your bow in the truck. We're going to go find that squirrel. And I just went, man, I don't know if I can find that squirrel. That country down there is thick pine plantations. I mean, like thickets. And it was way back.

I'd been walking for hours. And so I start saying, man, I don't know if I can find it. And he thinks I'm lying. Sure. And I'm just telling him the truth. I was so naive that I actually said, well, you stay here and I'll go get the squirrel. You don't have to come with me. I'll bring it back to you.

And he was like, no, sir. You know, he thought I was going to. And I didn't, I was like, why would you want to follow me? This is going to be torture. And then I realized, you know, later that he thought I was going to go hide something, you know, which was dumb for me. I wouldn't a very good criminal. And anyway, luckily, I was able to go back to the squirrel and found it just like he said. And he goes back to the truck and we have a long talk.

And while I skin that squirrel on his tailgate, I didn't know the tail method or anything back then. I was just like pecking on it with a pocket knife, you know. It was at this point that the Game Warden issued me a citation for wanton waste. I was devastated and I deserved it. But if there's one thing I believe is this. Everything happens for a purpose. And if you yoke yourself to that purpose, as painful as it can be sometimes, 10 years later, you'll be glad that you did.

at that time I had I had just started diving into doing some stuff in outdoor media and man I told him that I said man I write articles about hunting

and I was just I wasn't trying to defend myself the ticket was already written but I was just like this you busted me at something that is not typical for me and he said you need to write about it he immediately said just come out with it, Clay. I mean, we became buddies in that moment. And I talked to him for probably 45 minutes

after that. And he said, what you should do is just come out with it. And so I went home and wrote an article that was published in a regional magazine. The article was centered around what I learned through the event. It revolved around a very unique section of the book of Proverbs about hunting and diligence. So there's a verse and Proverbs in the Bible. It's It's Proverbs 1227 says, lazy people don't even cook the game that they catch, but the diligent make use of everything they find. And man, really, it was a major turning point when I realized that I had lost some diligence. And since that time, I've been diligent with everything that I've done, to the best of my ability, inside of following game laws and doing everything right. And yeah, I was ashamed of that for years.

I mean, that's still I'm ashamed of it. But it was, you know. I'm sparing my own kids what I went through. I'm just from the get-go being that we just follow the rules. You might make a mistake, right? You might misunderstand something, make a mistake, forget something, I don't know. But we follow the rules. We talk about what they are, celebrate it.

That's like a new generation. Yeah, I don't like to tell. I don't like to tell the old I don't like to tell the stories of growing up in a way that that's made to like celebrate it. Yeah. Do you know? I'm just like I'm saying like that happened

nothing good comes from that. It's arrogant. It's arrogant, you know. I'm glad there was a, I'm glad there was a sort of governor on it meaning that there was a real limit to what people would do.

But it's a, it's just baffling. and like a little embarrassing, the degree to which just like you know better. In 2022, as wildlife and wild places continue to be jeopardized by shifting cultural value systems

and the encroachment of civilization, our widespread adherence to getting with the program, as Steve said, will be key to the continued success of the North American model of wildlife conservation. We got to turn in poachers. We got to watch our own selves. We got to love.

the resource enough to sacrifice for it. Listening to the stories of my dad and hearing about Steve's upbringing, I truly think that we've come a long way in the last 30 years. It's my hope that the stuff I've done in media has carried with it a strong values, integrity, and character-based message. But I never wanted to paint the picture that I'm an ivory tower. A good dose of transparency is healthy, and I hope it tightens us down into positions of respect for the law.

And one of my most valued practices is becoming deeply introspective in learning from mistakes. I can't thank you folks enough for listening to Bear Grease. Be sure to check out the Bear Grease merchandise on The Meat Eater.com. And please share our podcast with a friend

and leave us a review on iTunes. That wasn't as good as Russ Arthur's. Right on, bros. Right on. On Blood Trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bag.

And there was a pool of blood. Oh, my God, he doesn't have a hit. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors. Where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper. From cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwoods.

Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th.

Follow now on Apple, IHeart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.