Odd Lots - MeatEater's Steven Rinella on the Economic History of Hunting

Episode Date: December 15, 2025

When we think about America’s economic rise, we usually point to agriculture or the industrial revolution. But in the early days of colonization, one of the biggest economic drivers wasn’t crops or factories — it was animal products. Deerskins were a booming trade that pushed hunters into new frontiers. In the early 1800s, beaver pelts became a fashion craze. And of course, later that century, we nearly hunted buffalo to extinction in another frenzy of resource extraction. On this episode, we talk to Steven Rinella, author and founder of MeatEater, about this overlooked chapter in US economic history, plus how the hunting economy functions today. Read more:USDA Lowers Cattle Price Outlook After Tyson Beef Plant ClosureRFK Jr. Eyes Single National Standard on Food Labeling and Safety Only Bloomberg - Business News, Stock Markets, Finance, Breaking & World News subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at  bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots Join the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm June Grasso, inviting you to join me for the Bloomberg Law podcast. Every weekday, we help you make sense of the legal stories that shape the nation and the world. Listen for complete analysis of the biggest court cases, the latest actions from Congress and regulators, and the legal moves driving the markets, from corporate law to constitutional law, and from state courts to the Supreme Court. At Bloomberg Law, we go beyond the day's headlines. We speak with top attorneys, judges, scholars and policy experts to break down what the rulings really mean. We do this every weekday,

then bring you the best conversations in our daily podcast. Search for Bloomberg Law on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or anywhere else you listen. On the East Coast, listen as you start your day, and on the West Coast, catch up in the evening. That's the Bloomberg Law podcast with me, June Grosso. Subscribe today wherever you get your podcast. Hey there, Oddlots listeners. It is that time of the year. Again, we are going to be doing a call-in show on the podcast. You can ask us any of your burning questions.

That's right. You want to ask us about finance markets and economics? Go for it. You want to ask us about the year in podcasting. Go for it. You want to ask about where Tracy is with raising chickens. Growing chickens. Raising chickens on her.

on her versioning farm in Connecticut, go for it. This is your chance to ask us anything. Joe's favorite cut of steak, right? My favorite cut of state, my favorite Chinese restaurant in the East Village. It's all fair game. All right. All you have to do is send a voice memo with your question, your name, your age, and your location to oddlots at Bloomberg.net.

Deadline to submit is December 17th, so get them in as soon as you can. We're looking forward to hearing what you have to ask. And yeah. That's coming up. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts Radio News. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

And I'm Joe Wisenthall. Joe, I have a pop quiz on American history for you. Oh, God. Are you ready? Go on. Who was Daniel Boone? Did he have like a hat that was cool? He was like, I just think it was like someone.

A raccoon hat. A raccoon hat. And you is probably an outdoors guy who probably didn't hang out in the cities very much. So what I think of besides the hat and imagining him out in the wilderness somewhere, I have no, I don't know what year he lived in, anything beyond that, maybe 1800s. I don't know. So the one fact that you know about Daniel Boone is actually, I think, contested whether or not he actually wore the raccoon cap. But do you know what he was doing when he was outdoors? No, no, no.

He was hunting. Okay. I guess I could have guessed that. I would have guessed that. He was something called a long hunter. I don't know what that is. He went on really long expeditions to hunt. Do you know what he was hunting?

Nope, raccoons. No, apparently not. Deer. Okay. White-tailed deer. And this is something that I think, you know, everyone has heard the name Daniel Boone, but almost no one can actually remember what he was doing.

Yeah. And people also forget that, you know, a lot of American history is built not on manufacturing and farming, necessarily, but on hunting. Have we ever done a hunting episode? We have it. And I find this whole part of U.S. history so fascinating. And it actually really is intertwined with even how we think about money.

So do you know where the term a buck came from? Lend me a buck? Give me a buck. Well, now I imagine it's probably from a deer. Yeah. But had it not been for this intro in the context, I actually would have had no idea. Yeah. So hunting is actually embedded in the way.

in the way we talk about money. So that's what we're going to be talking about today. I can't wait. A whole new avenue for us. And I have to say, just on a personal note, something has happened to me recently, which is I have completely flipped on deer. I used to like them.

I used to look out the window and be like, oh, these graceful animals, aren't they beautiful? But as of a week ago, they ate my entire newly planted garden, and I hate them. Yeah, I get the impression that a lot of people, their view of deer flips pretty quickly when they're actually living in a location where they're prevalent. Like he's like, oh, they're cute. Maybe you saw a movie about them or something like that.

It's like, oh, who has to hunt the deer? And then you confront them and you're like, maybe we need a little bit of population management, so to speak, with the deer community. So my solution to this problem, I don't hunt personally. The only thing I hunt is like leftover Thanksgiving pumpkins on my property, which we target shoot. But we have a friend. who loves to hunt. Yeah. And so he's going to be on our property hunting deer. And if you want some fresh venison, then let me know.

Have you arranged a deal with him where he can keep as much as you want? Like, do you tithe you 20% or whatever it is? He pays us in meat. Yeah. Which is actually great at the moment because beef prices are so insane. You're so lucky. You're cold. You're meat.

Yeah. Anyway. I'm blessed in natural resources just like America. That's right. All right. Well, I'm happy to say we have the perfect. guest to talk about all of this, someone who I'm very excited to be talking to, actually. We have Stephen Ronella. He is the author and founder of Meat Eater and knows all about hunting and all about

this particular aspect of U.S. economic history. So Steve, welcome to the show. Hey, thank you for having me on. I'm dying to jump in and offer a few clarifications and corrections on our friend Daniel Boone. When you're right, how do we just start? Tell us everything we got wrong in the intro. Just go for it. Yeah, Boone did not like coonskin caps. That was a thing that was added on later through Disney depictions. Boone wore a wide-brimmed hat made from beaver wool felt, which is still the material of choice for high-end cowboy hats. Raccoons, there was a commodity for a long time in different tallows and greases. They used to hunt raccoons and possums and actually render the oil from them.

Oh, wow. Just as an example, I'm holding in my hand right now, at one quart jar of rendered coon grease, which I made for a buddy mine just as a present. What do you actually do with that? Can you make candles? Well, I haven't done anything with it. Yeah, yeah, you definitely make soap, candles. You can cook with it. In fact, when the English were first strategizing around establishing their first colony in the

new world, and they had a sort of a list of ways that they might monetize this colony on that list was like animal oils, animal greases. So, yeah, Boone was in the deerskin trade, but he also was in the bare grease trade. and the animal oil trade, as was Davy Crockett, who wore the Coonskin cap, but was kind of mocked by his contemporaries, but he was a showboat,

and he wore it to create this atmosphere of this every man's backwoodsman, but it wasn't regarded as a practical hat. He just wore it to draw attention to himself. He was a showboat. Crocket was a showboat. Boone was a professional. I love the idea of all these manly pioneering hunters,

critiquing each other's outfits. I also like the idea. I also like the idea of like, oh, when hunters get together, they argue about, are you a Daniel Boone man or David Crockman? Oh, your guy was a total showboat. He was a fraud.

No one would have ever worn that hat. And the other people was like, oh, no, he did this. Yeah. All of these. My dear friend, who I'm giving that one of my jars of Coon grease to, he is a Crockett man. And I'm a Boon man. And we have had, we fight about this all the time.

I'm a boon man. The other thing is, one last comment just to get caught up. Were you to formalize the arrangement with your deer hunter? If you were to formalize that arrangement, where there was an expected quid pro quo around deer meat for access, you would be in violation of the law. You need to keep it non-formalized. Oh, okay.

That's good to know. You can gift him access. He can gift you meat. But the minute you formalize that transaction, you would be commodifying wild game meat, which is illegal in this country. Tracy just admitted to a crime. No, no, no.

I, she was, I've already reported her. I specifically said we don't have a formal agreement. We're trading informally. I've already learned so much on this. I've like, if we ended the episode right here, I would have learned so many more things that I didn't know when I woke up this one. And you'd be looking for a new co-host because yours would be locked up. Who'd be literally in prison for accepting venison.

Okay. Well, let's not stop here. Let's keep going. Steve, you know, you mentioned that when England was colonizing the U.S., one of the big draws was animal grease and animal products. Talk to us a little bit more because I think when people think about the colonization of the new world, a lot of people think about tobacco and farming and agriculture. But hunting and animal products were actually a really big part of it. Yeah. In the early colonial period, one of our biggest ports was, you know, coming out of Charles. out of South Carolina.

So at a time, in the late colonial period, so prior to the Revolutionary War, deer skins in value, an economic value, whitetail deerskins were the second largest commodity coming out of the colonies. The first one being rice. So the animal grease thing was a thing,

but it was dwarfed by the deerskin trade. If you look at these old paintings you see of like, the king of England, around the time of the colonial period, you'll sometimes notice that they're wearing a white breech or a white pant, a seeming white pant. That's buckskin. Buckskin was used as workwear, but it was also something that the affluent individuals wore those white breeches,

those white buckskin pants. It was a preferred material for clothing making. There's a historian, Mac Farragher, and he wrote a piece about the early colonial period, and he remarked that, like, among colonial Americans, so Euro-American, Colonial Americans, and Native Americans alike, black bear meat was the food of choice. Huh.

Deer skin was the material of choice. So they were hunting bears. That was the good stuff to eat. Deer were what you made your clothes from. I'm surprised about the bear meat. Does bear taste good? Yeah, it's very beef-like and texture. It's phenomenal.

It's one of those things that there's, in some levels, there's a cultural taboo. around it. As you'll see, like Florida right now is running a very controversial black bear hunt. People get worked up about it. But yeah, it's an excellent food. It was a very prized food at the time. Another business that Daniel Boone was into was producing a product called Bear Bacon, which was consumed domestically. Yes, smoked bacon. It would be plausible that Ben Franklin, he could have walked down to a market in Philadelphia, and he would have been able to purchase bear bacon or smoke. black bear hands. It was a very popular food item. Bear can carry trichnosis. Most cases of

trichnosis in the U.S. today do not come from hogs. Mostly comes from black bear. You have to cook it. So for that reason, a lot of people have an idea that it should be avoided. But my family, we prodigious amounts of it. Wow. I want to, can I come by some time and have some bear bacon or bear steak or whatever? Anytime, anytime. I would knock on the door. I will cook it for you and I can fry you some up in bear grease, if you'd like. I think, let's do a video series. Let's go on the road. I already have like a million questions.

Can we just back up a second? For the listeners, can you tell us your story a little bit? Why are we talking to you? What's your background? Oh, so yeah, I grew up in Michigan. I was born into a hunting family. That was kind of our identity. My father was a very avid hunter.

He came home from World War II and just hunted. And I was brought up around it. I pursued a career first in trapping throughout high school. I was convinced I was going to be a fur trapper. I became interested in writing, went to graduate school for writing. Starting in 2000, when I finished school, I became a professional long-form magazine writer. Started doing books. And all my stuff has always been in the outdoor space.

Eventually, got into television, started doing a show called Meat Eater, and we turned Meat Eater into a full-fledged. business. We have a media arm where I spend the bulk of my time, but we also work and we have a lot of consumer products. We have four outdoor gear companies, which live under the meat eater umbrella. And I've intended to make a living in the outdoors when I was a kid. And I mostly succeeded at that. I get to spend a lot of time outdoors, and I get to spend a lot of time thinking about issues of how hunting plays into contemporary American culture and how hunting shaped our country and shaped our national experience. Yeah, I got to plug Steve's. I think it's an Audible series on like the

history of hunting in the U.S. where there's a whole episode on Longhunter's that I've been listening to. Also one on like Buffalo in the 1800s. They're really good. Yeah, it's called Meat Eaters American History and it's an audio original through Random House Penguin. Yeah. And we've done three so far on different commodity trades in American history all around wildlife. So one thing that I did learn from the Audible series on Longhunter's is the American hunting system in the sort of 1600s, 1700s when colonial started coming over to what would become the United States was very different to how hunting was done in Europe, right? In Europe, hunting was like the purview of landowners and rich people, but in America, I guess there were no rules and everyone could hunt animals.

Yeah, you know a good way to think about it. I often remind. people to think back to certain details of the Robin Hood story where you have the King's deer, okay? And part of Robin Hood's gig, right, is he'll go hunt on the King's estate to get venison, which you would then distribute to the poor. It's part of the Robin Hood narrative. So, yeah, in England and in Western Europe, by that point, things were heavily developed. Most the woods, the wilderness was gone. Having access to wild landscapes was something that was relegated only to the most wealthy. You could be, have your eyes gouged out.

You could be executed for hunting animals that belong to the aristocracy. So when American colonists started showing up, like Boone's family came from England, they did not arrive here as hunters. They did not arrive with a hunting background. They adopted it. The colonists, like Boone's family, for instance, they were Quakers. His people were. But the American colonists were.

as impacted by Native Americans, as Native Americans were impacted by American colonists, you could see it in Boone's dress. He would plate his hair. He would braid his hair. He would grease his hair with bear grease. He would wear buckskin. He would hunt the animals that Native Americans taught him to hunt. He would cook them in that way.

He would make his clothes in that way. So they adopted hunting as a way to make a living on the American landscape. Some of them were farmers through and through. some became hunters through and through. And they were at odds. These hunting people, these kind of wild men like Boone in the colonial period, would always be hovering at the western edge of colonial expansion. England would try to rein in these American colonists.

They would feel that they were kind of drifting too far out of colonial influence. And these American colonists like Boone who were hunting for a living would cause a lot of tension with Native Americans. And so the colonial powers didn't like these guys living this frontier wild existence. Because, again, they were drifting away from the crown, and they were causing animosity with Native Americans who had then blamed the English for these incursions onto their landscape. So it was like a rich kind of area of adoption of a wilderness aesthetic while still trying to live, you know, under colonial rule in Boone's early days. The news doesn't stop on the weekends. Context changes constantly.

And now Bloomberg is the place to stay on top of it all. Hi, I'm David Gurra. Join us every Saturday and Sunday for the new Bloomberg this weekend. I'm Christina Rafini. We'll bring you the latest headlines, in-depth analysis, and big interviews. All the stories that hit home on your days off. And I'm Lisa Mateo. Watch and listen to Bloomberg this weekend for thoughtful, enlightening conversations about business, lifestyle, people, and culture.

On Saturday mornings, we put the... the past week's events into context, examining what happened in the markets and the world. That on Sundays, we speak with journalists, columnists, and key political figures to prepare you for the week ahead. Join us as soon as you wake up and bring us with you wherever your weekend plans take you. Watch us on Bloomberg Television. Listen on Bloomberg Radio, stream the show live on the Bloomberg business app, or listen to the podcast. That's Bloomberg this weekend. Saturdays and Sundays starting at 7 a.m. Eastern. Make us part of your weekend routine on Bloomberg. television, radio, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Are you watching the new Ken Burns documentary at all? No, but everyone else's, it seems like. I'm going to. I've watched the first episode so far. And it's just interesting because obviously, you know, the version of independence that we learned about in school was just incredibly simplified. And this idea that there really were all different kinds of tensions between the colonists and the sort of norms and the laws and the rules of the old country.

really striking. I hadn't really appreciated this dimension before about the hunting, but I think it really shows how, I guess, from day one, there was a certain, I don't know if a egalitarian was a democratic element of colonial society. That sounds very distinctly different from where they were coming from. Yeah, there's an interesting passage where Washington, George Washington, criticizes folks like Boone. He criticizes these frontier individuals. that are living off the land out on the frontier and market hunting, he criticizes them because he feels like a tip of the hat would push them over to the Spanish or whoever, like whatever other colonial entity was out there.

He did not feel that they were adequately American. And then as much as Boone has been adopted, there's one guy joked that Boone has become an honorary founding father. As much as Boone has been adopted as this American icon, Boone and his contemporary. So again, speaking of these long hunters, these colonial white-tailed deer-skinned hunters, they would not have identified as American, loosely. But they would identify in family clans,

and they were not what you would call, if you look at around the revolutionary period, you would not refer to these guys as patriots. They were opportunists, and they were mostly beholden to small villages made up of people they were related to, these networks. That was their allegiance.

Didn't Boone actually end up striking a deal with the Spanish for land? That's one thing I learned from the series. Yeah, again, like the same way. Like he's an honorary founding father. Boone in some ways is the father of Kentucky. He was not the first, but one of the first people to go through this thing called the Cumberland Gap and start hunting in what is now Kentucky. He got fed up with the government there.

He got fed up with America. When Spain had the Louisiana territory, Spain was trying to fill the place up. He struck a deal with Boone and his people where they would become subjects of the Spanish crown in exchange for money. And so Boone moved out and he moved west of the Missouri River and became a Spanish subject. He swore that he would never step foot back in Kentucky again. When Boone died, so Boone lived through the Louisiana purchase and became again an American just through the fact that America bought the Louisiana purchase. He died and was buried in Missouri and was later exhumed and brought back to Kentucky,

even though in his lifetime, he said, I'll never step foot back there. So people like to say Missouri has his heart, meaning his soft tissues. Kentucky has his bones. And there's like this little ongoing dispute about whether or not they really dug up the right guy and reburied him. But yeah, Boone willfully left American rule to go live under a different crown. He was married to the hunt, and he was married to his family clan. That was how he identified. That's super interesting.

Tell me about a long hunt. What are the logistics? Sounds difficult. What are the logistics of a long hunt? Yeah, the logistics of a long hunt, it was very decentralized, unlike if we have time that we get into the beaver skin trade of these American icons, like Jim Bridger, Jet Smith, John Colter, these guys that were engaged in the Rocky Mountain Beaver trade, which was very formalized, very top.

down. The long hunter area, so this colonial deerskin hunting area was very decentralized. A group of long hunters were probably mostly family networks. So it would be maybe a patriarch, his kids, his sons-in-law, okay, his cousins. And they would embark on these very long trips. They would leave these frontier colonial establishments, let's say the Yadkin Valley in North Carolina, I know a ton of long hunters came out of the Adkin Valley in North Carolina. They would travel over the Appalachian Range, and they would drop down into Kentucky, portions of Tennessee, and they would hunt deer skins. They might be gone six months.

I think Boone's longest long hunt was two years. It was all based off pack trains, so everything was based off of using horses to carry stuff, and they would build up a year's worth of deer skins. In the winter, the deer skins weren't as valuable, so they'd switch their efforts to beaver and otter trapping. They would transport all those deer skins back across the Appalachian divide and sell them. A good price, a way to think about it again,

is they were worth about a dollar, which was a lot of money back then. And some would go to tanneries in Philadelphia, Boston and New York, but the bulk would be shipped to tanneries, in England to be turned into leather for making breaches and gloves and other high-end items. And that was the economy. And they had, these were farming people, but this was their only access to cash.

Much of what they did was black market, to be honest with you. In two ways. When they would cross the Appalachians to go hunt, they were doing it against the wishes of the crown, which again did not want to antagonize Native Americans because it caused warfare in trouble. They were also doing it in violation of Native American claims to the land. So when they would go into Kentucky, they were hunting on, say, Shawnee land. So they were sort of doubly trespassing. But that's how they made their living. And it allowed them to live very isolated existences. And it gave them a cash economy so they could buy guns and other things that they couldn't trade corn for.

Wait, I'm going to take the bait on the beaver trade that you just mentioned. So talk to us. How is that formalized and how does it contrast with the long hunters? Yeah, the beaver skin trade had been going for a long, long time. So, you know, when the Dutch first came to Manhattan, one of the primary things they were after is beaver skins. Bevers, it's surprisingly easy to wipe them out. So if you look at American history from the colonial period on, we kind of have a, we had a way because of unregulated trapping.

We had a way that we would, that a head of civilization would mark a depopulation of beavers. So if we fast forward up to the Lewis and Clark expedition, here we do the Louisiana purchase. Thomas Jefferson dispatches the Lewis and Clark expedition to go find a mostly water route to the Pacific and also to look at natural resource abundance, right? Lewis and Clark come back and they report mind-boggling numbers of beavers in the inner mountain west, all right? Right away, right on their heels goes a bunch of American trappers out to, explore this land and trading beavers a beaver pelt was you know going for maybe three bucks that's more than you'd make in a day as a labor it was real money but guys got onto it and they formalized it and people would go out and get investors okay a group would go out and get investors well for instance

astor if you go to astor place in new york astor was america's first homemade millionaire astor's first business was the beaver trade so guys would get investors they would run advertisements to hire trappers. If you look at these really famous mountain men, like, for instance, Jim Bridger, these guys answered an ad in a newspaper. They ran an ad that was says, looking for 100 enterprising young men. And these young guys, some of them escaped indentured servants, people running away from apprenticeships, would go higher on as a fur brigade. And they would hire on as a day rate. And they would be backed by financial backers. And they would send these these young men out to the Intermountain West to trap Beaver as a day laborer.

In time, some of these guys would spin off and do their own thing and go independent, but it was a very formalized structure that was sending these young men out to catch Beaver in order to bring them back and they would be exported and turned into wool felt. If you look back to like Abe Lincoln's hat, okay, Abe Lincoln didn't wear a Beaver wool felt hat. He wore a silk hat, which will get to, but that style of hat, was the rage in Europe. All sophisticated men, many poor people who aspired to look more affluent,

would wear one of these top hats. They were made from beaver wool felt. So that was a huge export industry coming out of it. And again, it became formalized. And what killed it is they were too effective. Two things killed the trade. One, they were running out of beaver anyway. And then a fashion change crashed

the industry. And it was probably a good thing that it did because they may have pretty much exterminated the animals from the landscape. I probably got a little ahead of you there, but that's no, that's great. That's great. And actually, the thing about the fashion change reminds me of one of my all-time favorite bubbles, market bubbles, which was the ostrich feather bubble in the 1800s, where women would want ostrich feathers for their hats. And they became really, really expensive. And then the bubble burst and all these ostrich farmers, mostly in Africa. I think went bust. Yeah, that was, yeah, they called the plenary trade and all kinds of shorebirds.

And it's hard to picture now that you could just, without regulation and coastal areas of the country, go hunt herons, eagrits to sell the feathers to adorn hats. You know, it's funny when you think about like conservation efforts or you think about endangered species, all these ideas feel very modern to me. Like, you know, maybe they started thinking about this stuff in the 1970s. or whatever. But obviously, that's not the case. How early on in the process of the hunting or hunting history did people start becoming aware of the fact that without some sort of regulation or laws or curves that this natural resources could be irreversibly depleted?

Surprisingly early. And I'll get to some of the earliest examples. But I want to clarify what I think motivations might have been. Some of the earliest examples we see of a conservation effort would even be in the colonial period. And I was trying to put some parameters around deer hunting. Because again, these were valuable animals for people to use for material. So when we see people trying to get to put in hunting seasons, like not to kill them when they're fawning, when they're dropping their fawns, or put in restrictions about outsiders coming into hunt, they probably weren't motivated by some sort of environmental ethic.

They were motivated by guarding and protecting a restaurant. resource. When you start to see an emergence of a real more emotional, spiritual, environmental movement is in the late 1800s. And its birth is this. Its birth is gentlemen hunters, such as Theodore Roosevelt, okay? You have these gentlemen hunters that want to connect to this piece of American history or American culture, but they're recognizing that unregulated hunting, this unregulated market hunting that we've been discussing, is going to make hunting impossible because these unregulated commodity hunters

are gonna drive everything to extinction. So in order to save wildlife and save hunting, which they recognize as a very important piece of American culture, they needed to sort of bifurcate American hunting efforts into sport hunting, which was regulated and had an environmental ethic or a conservation ethic, and unregulated market hunting,

which is what we've been discussing. One of the great ironies is this. One of the earliest conservation organizations that Theodore Roosevelt was involved in, involved in founding, involved in running is called the Boone and Crockett Club. And they're still a major player in American Conservation today. What's ironic is the names Boone and Crockett, which Americans today hear and they think of hunting. But these were just the kind of individuals that the Boone and Crockett Club needed to stop in order to save American hunting. was these market hunters who were out there doing nothing to compensate the American people for the

wildlife they were taking. And they would kill it all. And once they killed it all, they'd move a little bit west and kill all of that. And they about undid American wildlife. Yeah. So there's a tragedy of the common's dynamic going on here where you have this public resource, which is animals. And if too many people tap into it, the public resource ceases to exist. Can you talk a little bit about the Buffalo trade because I think this is probably the biggest example of that dynamic actually happening. Yeah, it's the biggest most regrettable example. And when I say it's regrettable is because by this point, we knew, we meaning news reading, engaged, educated Americans knew where this was headed.

Okay. And I'll back a little bit. So if we get to the time of European contact in the new world, there were maybe the fashionable number today is somewhere around 30 to 40 million American bison or Buffalo, those words are the same thing. 40 million to 30 million Buffalo on the American landscape. By the end of the Civil War, they've been removed from the eastern part of the country. So, you know, at a time, there would have been Buffalo in New Orleans. There would have been Buffalo in present-day Washington, D.C. There would have been Buffalo and present-day Nashville. All those had been wiped out by hunters. At the end of the Civil

war, there's probably about 15 million of them on the Great Plains, which has always been the nexus of the population. That was always the, that's where the bulk of the animals were. The country really turned westward after the Civil War. Once the South, you know, the union was saved, we sent our army out to pacify hostile tribes in the West and to protect economic interests in the West. And with that shift westward, we started looking for leather resources out West. And they identified. this 15 million buffalo. There was nothing special about buffalo leather. We had an insatiable appetite for leather.

What became is we needed it to produce industrial belting. Leather prices shot up. We were producing industrial belting to drive the industrial revolution. And the animals were just yet another source of leather. But they could be gotten for no investment, okay? A buffalo hide, let's say it's worth $3.50, $4, where the foreman at a tannery would make $3.50 a day. But a buffalo hide hunter could kill 20 or 30 buffalo a day and sell the hides at $3.50 a piece. And he didn't have to put any money into it.

You're not raising them. You're not feeding them. It's totally different than cattle. They're just out there. Oh, yeah. Is it true that like the buffalo just stood there while the hunters shot at them? Like they didn't really understand? No.

Okay. It's not true. They were just so good at what they did. They knew how to make that happen. Okay. This is a complicated thing you get into where you want to look at what they did and you want to look at the atrocity of what they did. And what it causes people to miss is this is going to sound weird.

It causes people to miss the professionalism and skill set that goes into this. Like a big part of my career is reconciling the skill set, the dedication, the bravery against the atrocity. right but no they wouldn't just stand there these guys were masters they were experts at what they did and they knew how to get that outcome you would not go out and get that same outcome you would go out and not get any i don't mean the hack on you no i have no doubt i would be unable to shoot a buffalo that's fine not even i don't even mean you wouldn't be able to get one because of emotional or constraints it's just like they were so good they were trained their whole life to do this they were too good and this is one of the most astounding things

When they start really getting after them, around 1872, the market really opens up. In American tanneries, the appetite for these Buffalo hides really opens up to where they're like, we'll take as many as we can get. That hits in 1872, and it coincides, not coincides, it's subject to the fact that the railroad hits Dodge City, Kansas. Okay. So now you can load these things on a train incentive of tanneries. By 1883, 11 years later, that 50, million animals is gone. It compressed everything. It took forever to almost wipe out beaver.

It took for hundreds of years to almost wipe out white tail deer. With the buffalo, they were so good at it. And the country was so primed industrially. We were so primed with railroads, with big tanneries, the tannery buildings that were, you know, a thousand yards long, that we could just, bam, burn through a resource with astonishing quickness. And the crazy part about it is once they shot them out, it didn't even affect leather prices.

Like a buffalo hide at the peak could be worth five bucks. So you would think once they killed them all, the market should spike. Right. Like their scarcity. The last ones were selling at the same price as the first ones. Because in the end, it didn't matter. They could buy cattle in South America. They could get leather from anywhere.

So we killed them all, and it wasn't like we needed them. It was a drop in the bucket for leather production. So there was no market mechanism, because it was just so much abundant leather from multiple sources, there was no market mechanism curbing the hunters. No, it was just. They were worth what they were worth. They were worth what a cowhide was worth. It was just that they could get them for free. And when they got them, it didn't affect anything.

The industrial revolution and leather belting was still produced and still produced and still produced. It almost makes it seem more shameful in the end. It would be like the country would have accomplished what we accomplished with the Industrial Revolution had we never even exploited that resource. Also, I never really thought about, I never thought about any of this. I certainly never thought about the connection between the Industrial Revolution. I just imagine these ancient factories with a bunch of wheels and these belts that are pulling the wheels and how that is connected to, I guess something had to be turned.

the wheels. I just never really thought about, I never really thought about what it was. Yeah. There's a great photo. It was later. It was later, but it was a great photo. And it's in a Ford manufacturing plant. And it's these lathing machines. And the photo explains that overhead of the workers are 50 miles of leather belting. And these are 16 inch belts. You can get the news whenever you want it with Bloomberg News Now. I'm Amy Morris. And I'm Karen Moscow here to tell you about our new on-demand news report delivered right to your podcast feed. Bloomberg News Now is a short five-minute audio report on the day's top stories. Episodes are published throughout the day with the latest information and data to keep you informed.

Yes, there are other products like this from a variety of news organizations. But they usually rerun their radio newscasts throughout the day. That's not what we do. We create customized episodes that can only be. be heard on Bloomberg News Now. And we don't wait an hour to publish breaking news. When news breaks, we'll have an episode up in your podcast feed within minutes. So you're always getting the latest stories and developments.

Get the reporting and the context from Bloomberg's 3,000 journalists and analysts we're all over the world. Listen to the latest from Bloomberg News Now on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you listen. What happens such that ultimately we still have bison? because the population eventually, right, they didn't quite kill them all, and now we've rebuilt the bison stock in the country. What happened such that we didn't quite go all the way and completely make this animal extinct?

I'm a little bit hesitant to say this because when he comes to the conservation history of America, it's a little bit of an anomaly. But what happened to save him is private ownership. We shot them all down to the point where there was just a couple scattered animals here and there. even at one time a guy named William T. Hornaday, who was a taxidermist and mammal expert. He wrote letters around the country trying to see who had a few. And there was a handful of eccentrics around the country that had managed to go out and rope some and save them, maybe even feed them off domestic cows when they were calves.

And these kind of slowly got brought in the little herds. Interestingly, some got brought to the Bronx Zoo. When they started trying to repopulate little protected populations in the West, another great irony is they were moving animals from the Bronx Zoo out to Oklahoma to turn them loose. Like, that's how bad it got. And even today, like, we really haven't recovered the end. We've saved them from genetic extinction. So there's about a half million in existence.

94% of them are privately owned. What we haven't saved them from is ecological extinction. Of all American wildlife, of all Native American wildlife, grizzly bears, black bears, elk, big horn sheep, on and on, and on. The buffalo, the bison, is the only animal that does not have the rights of a wild animal. If a buffalo walks off of National Park and comes into Montana, he becomes livestock. He becomes under the authority of the Department of Livestock. We do not accept them as wild animals anymore, which, in my view, is a great sin.

We could go for like three or four hours of this conversation. Easy, but we can't. So I'm going to take us up to, I guess, modern times. So when we were talking earlier about the long hunters, we discussed there's clearly this element of democracy and independence embedded in that particular system. And if you look at the way the modern hunting world, I guess, or system is structured, it feels like we're trying to, we're trying to solve that tension between. people's rights to hunt animals and the conservation public resource aspect. Is that right? Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. We live under now, when I say we in this case, I mean, American hunters, American fishermen, we live under a very complex regulatory structure, which is self-made. Our community, modern American sportsmen, have built the system that we live a very, very tightly regulated pursuit. We've come up with this system.

Early we talked about how things were in Europe in colonial period. We now refer to that with some disdain as the European model where a landowner owns the wildlife on their land. They control the wildlife on their land. We came up with a system where American wildlife is owned by the American people, administered on your behalf by fishing game agencies and by governmental entities. But American wildlife is American property. It doesn't matter whose land it's on. That has allowed us the ability to have a governing structure to control harvest for

sustainability because the state, and in some case the federal government, has authority over the animals, meaning you could have a big property and it has deer on it. But those deer are not yours to decide what you want to do with. The deer belong to the people. You own the land. You have to get permits. Yeah. Talk to us a little bit about the contemporary market.

My guess is it's booming. I don't mean literally the volume of hunting that's going on. Although I bet that's. But like in your industry, in your world, outdoorsman media, people buying gear for all this stuff. My gut says that this is a hot area of the economy. Oh, yeah. I mean, we have a huge economic impact. I mean, you know, you have, you know, in any given year,

13 or 14 million Americans will buy a hunting license to go hunt. Over twice as many people will buy a fishing license to go fish. It generates billions of dollars in economic activity. But most of that economic activity is around gear and experiences, right? It's not economic activity about trading in deer in deer. And it's also growing really fast, I take it, or like, what kind of growth of you? It really spiked. No, it's remarkably stable.

Okay. It really spiked during the pandemic. You know, obviously as people turned to, you know, making sourdough bread and cooking venison. Back to the land. There were spikes. It's remarkably stable over the years. There are two types of Americans. There are sourdome Americans and they live in cities and then venison Americans.

That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So actually, that reminds me. So one of the things that I took from the Long Hunter series is that gear is, really important because you guys talk so much about the gear that the colonists and pioneers actually had. So I feel like there's an element of consumerism in the hunting community where people just collect guns and knives and things. Oh, for sure. Yeah. Like me and my buddies,

I mean, to be honest with you, when we're sitting around, you know, and I hang out a lot of people involved in the conservation movement. Me and my buddies, when we're sitting around, we mostly argue about gear. I came up in media, but our company, we have a hunting apparel brand. We have a game call brand. We have a hunting decoy brand. We have a hunting accessory brand. So yeah, I mean, like gear is, it can't be separated out. The same way Boone was adamant about what kind of hat he wore, I'm pretty adamant about what hat I wear. And that is like the economic activity today, you know, is in large measure equipment and gear. And what's beautiful about it, and I want to throw this in, What's beautiful about it is that's how we fund conservation.

So our industry in the 30s, we put ourselves under a 13% excise tax. So when you buy guns or ammunition, any gun purchase, guns, ammunition, sporting equipment, there's anywhere from 11 to 13% excise tax, which goes right into conservation spending. You go find me another industry that has anything comparable to that. It does not exist. And then our agencies that manage wildlife in America, all 50 states have a fish and wildlife agency, their funding comes from licenses, permits, and stamps paid by hunters and anglers. We're a self-funded group of Americans. Yeah, it's a rare situation.

It makes sense, right? Most industries don't voluntarily want to be taxed on everything. But when you think about the fact that there needs to be some resources to sustain the possibility of hunting, for generations to come, it is sort of makes sense that this would be an industry in which you want there to be some sort of price of entry. If I became a hunter this winter, would you make fun of me? Like, would I be one of those guys who it's like, okay, it's my first season hunting, I'm going to buy the most expensive rifle, I'm going to buy the most expensive hat, I'm going to buy the most expensive shoes. You must have a name like those types and they like show up on the

hunt with you and it's clear they like went through all the lists and just like, bought the top one. Davey Crockett. Yeah, like this sort of like wannabes. It's like their first thing and they just go down the line and buy them, decked themselves out in the top of the line gear. The name I have for those people is my buddies. Not, I'm telling you, not a year goes by, man.

Not a year goes by that I don't take out friends, family, whoever, people that are interested in hunting, curious about hunting, even sometimes uneasy with hunting, that I don't take them out and kind of explain the world. I have three young kids. I've been lucky to turn them all into, you know, avid hunters, and we share that. So, no, I like sharing this world. It's a world I care a lot about. I care about how it's perceived.

Most Americans don't hunt in some states, like California, New Jersey. 1% of the population hunts. So in some ways, we live and exist with the blessing of the American public in general. So it's important to me for people to understand what we're up to, how we think. think and that we're willing to recognize the sins of our forefathers and have gone out of our way to correct those sins. This is a slight tangent, but since we're on the subject of conservation, I'd be curious to get your thoughts.

But what do you think about commercial hunting of endangered animals? So things like lions or, I don't know, buffalo of some sort in Africa? Because one argument I've heard is that these animals at the moment basically have negative value, right? Because they're living on land that you can't use for anything else because you have to conserve it because you need to protect the animals. But if you allow commercial hunting in a controlled way, you basically put an economic value on that animal such that, you know, it becomes something that people want to maintain and preserve and stick around. Yeah, I would first want to just clarify, I don't mean to be a difficult guess, but be careful using the word endangered

because it can be when I say that like in the U.S. we have the Endangered Species Act we have a way that we formally declare things to be endangered. I think in the American imagination, Africa's far away. We hear the word endangered and it's not really open to certain levels of nuance about where and what. For instance, elk, right? Here in the United States, we have robust populations of elk across the American West. We have hunting seasons for elk. We have open hunting seasons for elk. But elk have only been restored across about 20% of their native range.

Michigan was elk country. Wisconsin was elk country. Virginia was elk country. Elk had been wiped out of those places and not restored. So you might say, well, elk are endangered because they're not in Michigan and Wisconsin in appreciable numbers. Yet, in the American West, in some places we have a problem with too many elk. So you got to be careful with words like that.

But to get to the core of your question, Yes, it is possible. There are places in Africa, and I'm not a subject matter expert on Africa. Like I am, I'm a subject matter expert on these issues in the United States, but in Africa, there are situations where money, like value to hunters is able to put so much value on wildlife that the wildlife becomes worth protecting, meaning people that are on the landscape will recognize the presence of wildlife generate so much economic activity that it's best not to kill it all off for use as bushmeat or other applications or because it's a crop pest or because it's dangerous to livestock.

They'll recognize that, hey, that lion, that thing's worth 60,000 bucks. Half that money's coming to our village. Don't mess with that lion. I mean, that just happens. whether you, however you feel emotionally about the killing of lions, that's an economic reality in some places. I feel like don't mess with lions is just good advice, right? Yeah.

I just have one last question. You mentioned bear meat. I haven't had that much wild game in my life. I've had, you know, sausage with venison and pork. And like when I was out in Jackson Hole, I went to some restaurant and, you know, tried a few different, like, mini steaks of the game. Yeah, but that wasn't even wild game. Yeah.

That's just farm-raised animals. What should I try that I've probably never tried before? I like meat a lot. So what would I like out there? Some of my favorites, really, you know, mall or duck. So if you're in a park, you see that duck where the male has the iridescent green head. When you get those that have been in one place a while and have it migrated lately and they're getting on crops, they're getting in grain fields. One of my all-time favorite things, this is going to sound weird, but true.

Squirrel, properly done. would kind of blow your mind and it's partly the fun of it, like, because you have a preconceived notion of what it would be like. And then when you taste it, you'd think, I cannot believe that's that. That would kind of blow you away.

And I think that you would be very, very surprised if you had a bare pot roast in a classic fashion with root vegetables, you know, and a good broth. I think you would also say, like, I refuse to accept that that's what it is. and I wouldn't accept it had I not seen it happen. I'd love it.

I want a bare pot roast right now. I'll bring you some venison ragu. That's what I've been making so far. Although, one thing I learned is that the fat content of venison is actually really low. So it's not very good for making things like burgers and stuff like that. Yeah, it's very waxy. Yeah. It melts differently than beef fat, so it sets up in the inside of your mouth.

And it doesn't freeze well. So if you want to freeze, when you get your venison from your hunter, and you want to enjoy it for the next year, trim the fat away, trim the tallow away. And if you do that, it's basically archival once you put it in your freezer. If you leave that tallow on it, it's not. That tallow will turn even in your freezer.

Interesting. Okay, my last question is, what would you recommend I make with venison? I would start out by making the things that you like the most that are easiest to make. Like you mentioned ragu, a ragu, making hamburgers, making things that you're,

comfortable making that aren't overly complex, don't have too many steps, just so you can go and find these kind of like points of comparison. If you and your family, if in the summer you like to grill burgers, like you like to grill up beef burgers, grill up a venison burger, follow the same basic steps and just kind of get comfortable with the way it's a little different. And when you do that enough, you'll come to prefer it. My wife, like my wife doesn't hunt, man. My wife doesn't like domestic meat.

She doesn't like the taste of domestic meat because for the last, last 20 years, she's eating nothing but game meat. She's gotten where she don't like it. She doesn't want to eat it. We're going to have to wrap this conversation up, even though, as we mentioned before, we could go on for hours. I have to say, I hope my husband isn't listening to this, because I am planning on getting one of Steve's cookbooks for Venice and for Christmas. Oh, I would love to sign it for him. If you want to reach out, I will send you. Oh, that'd be amazing. I'll send him a whole box of stuff if you reach out.

Oh, okay. I might, well, of nominal value. Of nominal value. You guys are actual journalists. A book would be nice, for sure. I know a lot of journalists, but not the kind like that. Steve Ronella, thank you so much for coming on Oblots. That was a blast. That was really fun.

A blast. Hey, thank you for having that. A blast. Appreciate it. Thank you. Joe, that was so fun. That was so fun. I don't know anything about that, but like we could have talked for three hours.

There's so many things I'm curious about now. It is underappreciated. I think the role of hunting in America's economic development. And it's intertwining. I didn't even know this with the Industrial Revolution. I didn't know about that either. It's exactly what I was going to say. I would have had no idea.

And it's always sort of fascinating to think, like, you can't run a big factory if you don't have belts. Now, granted, according to Stephen, there were other sources of leather. But it's so interesting to think about, like, here is this thing that if you don't have an access to like one commodity or whatever. You know, there's a new book, by the way, out about rope that I want to have. And it's like a similar story about how crucial rope was. Anyway, it was so fascinating. You know, he mentioned squirrel meat at the end. So again, I'm just throwing out tidbits that I learned from his series.

But, you know, you can't really shoot a squirrel if you're going to eat it because they're so small, the bullet like rips off all the meat. So the way the pioneers used to do it, apparently, is they would shoot at the tree that the squirrel was on and sort of like, shock the squirrel to death and it would fall out of the tree and then you can eat it. Wait, Tracy, can I ask you a question? It's sort of non-politically correct. Is it true that Germans can't pronounce the word squirrel? Yes, yes. Okay. I've heard this before. My personal experience, when I was a kid, I used to ask my uncle to say squirrel all the time just for laughs.

And the way he says it is squirrel. And yeah, he struggles with it. I just want an excuse to see if this was confirmed or denied. Okay. Now that we're talking about squirrel. girls. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. All right. This has been another episode of the OddLots podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. You can follow me at Tracy Allaway. And I'm Jill Wisenthall. You can follow me at the stalwart.

Follow our guest, Stephen Ronella. He's at Stephen Ronella. Follow our producers. Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen, Dachal Bennett, at Dashpot, and Kill Brooks. For more OddLots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash OddLots. We have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all of these topics 24-7 in our Discord. Discord. g-g slash hotlots. And if you enjoyed this conversation, if you like it when we look into the economic history of the U.S., then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes,

absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening. I'm Francine Lacqua, an award-winning journalist, and I've got a new podcast, leaders with Francine Lacroix from Bloomberg Podcasts. I've interviewed everyone from heads of state to fashion icons about the news of the moment. But I've always been curious who are these people as leaders. I don't think there's one right way to be a leader. Make decisions. A poor decision is always better than no

decision. Listen to new episodes every other Monday. Follow leaders with Francine Lacois, wherever you get your podcasts.