The Joe Rogan Experience - #1204 - Steven Rinella

Episode Date: November 16, 2018

Steven Rinella is an outdoorsman, author, and television host. He currently hosts “MeatEater” available on Netflix, and a podcast also called “MeatEater" available on Spotify. His new cookbook "The MeatEater Fish and Game Cookbook" is available on November 20.

you know uh you know what's funny i'll tell you later tell me now three two one what's funny uh i was gonna tell you a funny story about your address but but it wouldn't be it wouldn't be funny for you we'll talk later about that you and i uh we share african ancestry yeah yeah i was shocked yeah i'm 1.6 percent all right yeah see i have more uh i have more credential than you in that department you're two percent right yeah i know and it's it's funny because uh you know you sort of have your the story in your family kind of like where you came from and everything made and i always knew I was 25% Italian, and I knew that my family came from Sicily. In fact, the Rinellas that came from Sicily all seem to become kind of established in the produce world.

My dad was brought up in the south side of Chicago. I'm 44 years old, okay, So think about that for a minute. My dad was brought up in the south side of Chicago and he was raised by his grandfather, who was Sicilian and had come from Sicily. His grandfather delivered produce with a horse and cart in Chicago. So to have lived through that,

like to be brought up in a house where a guy leaves in the morning in a horse and cart to deliver produce, and then to be alive, to fight in World War II, to be through the atomic era, the advent of the internet, right? But I always knew that we had Sicilians. When I did the genetic test, at some point in time, one of those Sicilians must have shot southward and crossed the Mediterranean and had a hookup down there or something. Well, that was the history of Sicily in the first place. Yeah.

Just being Sicilian in the first place, there were so many people that were impregnated by the moors and by various people of west africa and north africa yeah it's fair and yeah i should have probably like always assumed but it just i hadn't thought about it um another thing i was reading about this stuff you might know more about it than i do is that when you do those tests there's missing parts you know it does it like it captures what's there but there's could be a lot there that's not captured just in the way that chromosomes are you know inherited and passed down like it's not it's an incomplete picture right right there could be influences there could there could be in your in it doesn't create a full picture of your lineage there could be lineages that are there that aren't represented

in your particular makeup how so like what do you mean you know i hate to right off the bat get into something that i can't speak about any level of expertise i was just reading a piece and the piece i was reading had to do it was kind of a dissection of like what happened with elizabeth warren when she claimed. We've been going off about that on the podcast, and I'm like 100 times more African than she is Native American. Yeah, well, that's what I found. I'm 10 times more or whatever. But it was a piece in the Times explaining how to make sense of, now that everyone's doing these tests like how to think about and make sense of these tests but but my understanding of it is um that you could have a

lot of ancestry that just isn't captured in your genetic code in a way that would be detected through the testing meaning there could be ancestors that for what because you're inheriting half you know you're inheriting chromosomes from each parent. And somehow you could have, it could be an incomplete picture. You could have ancestors that had come from other, you know, whatever these tests break out the world into a hundred or some odd regions or zones. That there could be people from those zones who are in your lineage that are not captured in your personal, that are not captured in your genetic code that's so bizarre you think it'll all be in there is that just uh an incomplete measuring tool is that what it is or is it just actually not in there i don't know you're gonna have to have a dude on yeah i'll

listen you need to have a dude on that understands it and that's i say i feel like i'm off on a bad start here man how much uh neanderthal did it say yeah less than normal really less than average what was the uh the number like it said it gives you you did 23 and me right yeah i can't remember okay i can't remember i just remember it was less than average and you know and those things like are refined by how many people do them you know but it was less than average which bummed me out but i'm like as hairy as like a 13 year old like norwegian girl you know i mean so it's that didn't surprise shocking didn't surprise me too much uh i was wishing to have a little more of that floating around in me it's a bizarre heritage you know the idea that there was a

different type of human that bred with homo sapiens and that there's like little bits and pieces of it floating around in people. Yeah. And people discuss them. People discuss. I was having an argument the other day where they say Neanderthal or Neanderthal. And everyone grows up saying Neanderthal. It's one of those things you're supposed to switch once you realize how you're supposed to do it. Right. Neanderthal.

But I just can't get comfortable with it. I go back and forth. There's a lot of words like that where I know you're supposed to do it, but I can't get comfortable with it because I feel like it makes you sound pretentious. It does. It's like rolling your R's in lot of words that were, I know you're supposed to do it, but I can't get comfortable with it. Because I feel like it makes you sound pretentious. It does. It's like rolling your R's in certain Spanish words. But we have this idea that Neanderthals as unsuccessful. Right?

Right. That they were these brutish thugs that died out. But they had a 600,000 year run. Yeah. In Europe alone. 600,000 years. Longer run than 600,000 year run. Yeah. In Europe alone. 600,000 years. Longer run than Homo sapiens have actually existed. Yeah.

Yeah. So. Whatever's next. I don't know that we're going to hit. Like, I don't know that we're going to match up and have that run. Well, we'll probably have a 23andMe for whatever the fuck is after us. And look, somebody back then fucked a human. for whatever the fuck is after us.

And he goes, look, somebody back then fucked a human. Like, oh, one of those crazy warmonger fucking rapist thieving humans. That died out. Turns out they didn't totally die out. Overrun with emotions and lies. And someone of a superior race infiltrated the humans and banged one of them. Yeah, it's funny to look at that uh that understanding of of those that understanding of those people um and then to have this to picture in your minds i even though you can't picture it like what it was look like when they were hooking up someone

are you know like anatomically and kind of behaviorally modern humans were hooking up with neanderthals was it was how is it perceived by their peers i bet the people that we think of as people back then like you know george the animal steel is no george the animal steel is a very famous pro wrestler from back in the day and uh i thought you're to say it was a paleontologist or anthropologist. No. It was a wrestler. He's a wrestler, pro wrestler, very famous guy, who could be a fucking caveman, like legitimately could be a caveman.

Yeah. See if you got a good image of him. Now, this is what I think. When I think of people, now give me a full body one. There you go. Oh. When I think of people. He's hanging on to something.

The Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens from, you know, 200,000 years ago. I think of George the Animal Steel. I think they were something like that. So the idea of George fucking a Neanderthal chick, not that far off. I think our idea is like that Dan Rather would be out there banging some monkey lady. I just don't think that's the case. Look at George's body.

I mean, Jesus fucking Christ. He's got the hairiest shoulders I've ever seen in a man. Is he still alive? I do not know. I don't believe he is. I hope he's not listening right now. I don't believe he is. He's a legend.

Legend in the world of the pro wrestling. So it's going to take more than this to hurt his feelings.. I don't believe he is. He's a legend. Legend in the world of the pro wrestling. So it's going to take more than this to hurt his feelings. That guy don't give a fuck. Yeah. He's a legend. But when I was a kid in high school, oh, he's old as fuck. Yeah. He's a, well, those guys, they all, that's a hard way to make a living, man.

Oh, he died. Died at age 79. He had a good run. Yeah. That's a good run for those guys. That's a fucking hard way to make a living. Have we ever talked about the idea of Neanderthals as having a confrontational hunting style? No, I don't think we have.

Because when anthropologists look at the skeletal remains of Neanderthals, they see this sort of suite of this pattern of injuries on them. And a researcher was looking at the types of fractures that they have on their bones and where the fractures occurred and the breaks and cracks in their skulls. He was looking at all this and wound up working with a doctor who had a lot of exposure to rodeo riders, bull riders. And the doctor was observing the way in which that suite of injuries was very familiar to him from rodeo riders, the types of breaks and the location of breaks. the types of breaks and the location of breaks. And this guy has this idea that they had a, like a very confrontational hunting style, um, that they were like mixing it up with big animals.

And another thing they found is that when you're looking at skeletal remains from early people, you still see that separation in the sexes, right? That, that the males would suffer injuries at injuries with a greater prevalence than females. But with the Neanderthals, it seems like they didn't have the sort of like duplicity of roles. And the females have the same prevalence of these types of injuries.

Whoa. And so maybe they didn't share that division of labor. Were the females as large as the males? Yeah, I don't know the answer to that. So we know that they had stone tools, right? The crude stone tools. Yeah. But we don't know whether or not

they had anything that could launch them. Do we know if they had spears? I don't believe that they found they had atlatls. Right. And I don't know if they were hafting materials, but they were doing art. And I think there's a little bit of a debate about whether they're doing representational art, but they were doing art. They were probably making jewelry.

And these are all things that as we kind of like wake up to what these people really like, and it paints like a more complicated picture. There's even this theory, and I don't know if this held any water or how long it was fashionable for, but you had this really long history of, this extremely long history of hundreds of thousands of years of Neanderthal occupation in Europe. And then it seemed to be that I remember someone putting forth this idea that it seemed to be that there was this flourishing of advancement that was contemporaneous with the arrival of our own ancestors in Europe. As though they were being exposed to or seeing art and seeing jewelry and mimicking this from these new invaders that were coming in. But I don't know where that idea sits right now. I don't know if it's been dispelled because of other discoveries. But I remember thinking that was an interesting idea that they would,

and it kind of paints this really sad picture, right, that they would be sort of in the autumn of their existence, and here's these adorned people showing up with these amazing toolkits and all these abilities and kind of struggling to sort of catch up you know it'd be like the country bumpkin you know going to the big city and yeah well there was also this uh idea i think up until very recently that neanderthals were not as violent as humans uh as homo sapiens but now there was an article that was uh published just a couple of days ago that new evidence shows that neanderthals like inter-neanderthal violence between each other was just as bad as uh homo sapiens yeah and find that and evidence of cannibalism oh yeah there was a lot of that right scraping of inside the skulls indicative of tools oh ad blocker got busted they get us every time with the fucking ad blocker yeah um

what does it say humans are just as violent as neanderthals are you familiar with the writer john muallem no you'd like his stuff yeah he wrote a really beautiful piece about he wrote a really beautiful piece about neanderthals not long ago okay i fucked it up the what they're saying is that modern humans were just as prone to violence as neanderthals i don't have a problem i think i'm i'm conflating this with something else that i read about inter uh interspecies violence neanderthal on neanderthal violence the other thing that's weird about them is they had bigger brains than us. They had bigger brains and they would be like 5'7 and weigh 200 pounds. Just jacked. Just a little gorilla thing. It'd be great to see it. There was a really dumb theory that was being

bounced around a few years ago. It was really hilarious about how we assumed that Neanderthals, because we don't have any soft tissue samples, we assumed that Neanderthals, because we don't have any soft tissue samples, we assumed that Neanderthals looked similar to humans. But because of the very different shape of their skull, this guy had, instead of giving them European-looking white skin, turned them into a gorilla. Turned them into a giant muscle-bound gorilla that preyed on people. And this was like, I believe this guy was an actually, actually was a professor.

And it seemed almost like a goof at first. Do you remember this, Jamie? We pulled this up a few times. Like killer Neanderthal theory, I think you call it. But he had drawn this thing black like a gorilla with like giant muscles all over the place and these big crazy eyes. And that painting neanderthals as a predator of humans and that's why we wiped them out yeah yeah that my limitations as

uh see i was gonna say my limitations as an as an anthropologist but i'm certainly not an anthropologist at all just a dude who's interested in it but one of my limitations is i'll hear theories floated okay and i don't follow them long enough to see which ones have any traction right i'll just read about them and and i don't i don't take it as gospel but i'll read about it and i'll be like that's interesting and it'll sort of like shape my understanding of it but then i don't keep track of it like i try to really follow the story of like the peopling of the americas so when it comes to the human history of the western hemisphere i sort of follow and like ideas will get floated and i'll track the idea to see where it lands in

terms of scholarly consensus but another stuff like with with neanderthals i'm always a sucker for a neanderthal story but I don't track what ideas that float up are just very quickly denounced as being complete rubbish. Yeah, it's a weird one. You know, it takes time to follow this stuff. Go to that other picture. That's what it is. Them and Us.

Yeah. But look at some of his images. Look at that image that he has on the cover of the book. Like, those are the idea. Yeah. But there's some way better ones. There's some of his images. Look at that image that he has on the cover of the book. Like, that was the idea. But there's some way better ones. There's some way better images where they drew of full body ones. They had, is it in the article? This was a link to the actual website from a different article.

Just go to that and then go to images. Because there was some really bizarre fucking, yeah, there it is, upper left-hand corner. This is what this guy. Yeah, well, that thing, whatever he's got going on, that thing is not making art. You don't think so? No, he's making meat, man. Come on. Yeah.

Yeah, it's pretty preposterous. But Neanderthals didn't have fangs like that either, did they? No. What is that? Is he morphing a Neanderthal into a gorilla? Is that what he's trying to do? That's a monkey down here. Oh, that's a...

Okay, monkey, gorilla, Neanderthal. But yeah, but like how it's got its snarling with its fucking vegetable-eating teeth. Anyway. It's, and then there's the, do we even know what those Denovians, how do you say that word, the one from Russia? Yeah. They don't have any idea what they looked like, right? No, I don't think so.

They have like some pinky bones and shit. Yeah, that one's not, that one I don't know. Hey man, your cookbook is fucking fantastic. It's really good. Yeah. You put a lot of goddamn work into that thing, huh? We started collecting images for it years ago. You could tell.

It's really good. Because I didn't want it to look like, was it boring you talking about Neanderthals? No. I'm out of stuff to say about them anyway. No. I could go on for days. That's the problem. We could spend days talking about things we're not quite sure about.

Yeah, exactly. Well, I heard. That's what I do for a living. I want to get back to the cookbook real quick, but you know what's funny is how many – you probably don't know this, but how many people in the wildlife world listen to your show? And get angry? I hear about it because I'm like a conduit i'm like a tell joe that that's not how it works i'm like a conduit where um i'm oftentimes getting frantic text messages as though i would be able to um jump in and you know clarify

like how a porcupine quill works. Yeah, it's really funny how many people I hear from. I can tell when you're on. I know when you're on the subject of wildlife. Especially if we're baked. If there's marijuana in the room, we've got a real issue. That's not what antlers are for. He should really know.

Well, who knows what antlers are for? They're for two things. They're for fighting and sexual selection, right? Yeah, that's two things that definitely make sense. Yeah. Battling, like a sexual display. We got a bull in Utah this year, and when we were butchering it, one of the hindquarters had been punctured by an antler. Yeah. And it got infected.

And when we cut into the hindquarter, just this bucket of pus came out. I mean, it was fucking nasty. We thought it was piss at first, like someone had actually punctured the bladder. And then we realized when we got deep into it that there was this giant ass. He had been assed, like literally right in the flank. Yeah. And it was just so fucking nasty. You find really high-pressure pus pockets in animals.

Yeah, all over his body. He had holes. Holes in his ribs. He had a big one in his face. He had been jacked in the face. I got a Sika deer last year who had lost his eye. Completely gone. I mean, like, his eyeball had been punctured.

And people were asking me, well, no wonder you got him. got him but i was like no his good eye was facing me on his line of approach yeah but he didn't know where you were his left perception his left eye was facing me but yeah with the cookbook so we started gathering pictures up for it years ago um because I wanted to have this really complete idea of how to process everything. The book includes everything from how to process a bullfrog to a deer to a pig to

mahi-mahi. A problem I run into when I've done books is I never wind up needing to pad them in the end. I always wind up needing to pad them in the end. I always wind up having very painful cuts. When I did my book, American Buffalo, I remember I had to lose 100 pages, which was hard to do.

When we did the complete guide to hunting, butchering, and cooking wild game, it came out at 700 pages. Do you ever think of going back and putting those 100 pages back in, or do you think it made sense to remove them? No, in hindsight, it had to happen. It had to happen. In terms of the narrative stuff I've written, the narrative nonfiction I've written, that's my favorite thing that I've done.

And it had to happen. It was painful. When I did the guidebook the guidebook series it came in 700 pages and my publisher was uh my publisher was like you know you just don't really make 700 page books and so that's why we want to do the volume one and volume two because i didn't want to get rid of any but then in doing this this cookbook the meat eater fishing game cookbook is what it's called and putting this together i think early on we started to get a little bit kind of running a little bit wild about what was going to fit but then caught it earlier but that

was the first thing we did was started collecting the pictures because i think a lot of times you look at a book an illustrated book and it kind of smells like a photo shoot you know what i'm saying yeah yeah where you can tell that they get they sort of how they got the images and i didn't want to feel like that i wanted to sort of feel like really representative of like so many different places and different experiences that are captured in here and so we just started filming these process shots of how to walk stuff through like everything you know how to like turn things how to take an animal and make it into a variety of usable ingredients and collecting all those took a long time and then and then actually like assembling it and putting putting it together was more systematic once we had that

underway but i think it's i think like it's cool looking though you know no it's great like the book in the end where it's kind of like half could almost pass as a coffee table book. I agree. Yeah. No, it really could. And I think it's a really valuable resource for people that hunt because it's just, I mean, there's only so many different ways you can cook backstraps, right? There's so many different ways you can put ground venison into spaghetti sauce. ways you can put ground venison into spaghetti sauce, you know?

Yeah. You're giving people such a wide variety of things to, and including your original books as well, a wide variety of things to, you know, to cook and ways to cook them. That's one of the things I really enjoyed about your show, you know, and still do, but now that it's on Netflix, actually, I enjoy it even more, but that you do a lot of cooking on your show. Yeah. That's very rare in the hunting world. You see these hunting shows, they're very one-dimensional. You see someone looking for the animal, and then they finally get it,

and yay, everybody's happy, the end. But you spend a great deal of time breaking down animals and cooking a bunch of different things, including marrow and shanks and unusual preparations. I think that's really important yeah that's that's something that was that was always there for me growing up and hunting fishing very complicated and you do them for a bunch of reasons i think that people in explaining hunting to audiences or explaining hunting to people who are uninitiated uninformedformed about it, maybe adversarial toward it this research piece of taking justifications for hunting and finding test subjects who are skeptical of hunting

and explaining various justifications to them and seeing which ones of those they find to be most impactful. So he's actually done research around when you take this great, like this broad spectrum of reasons people do this, you know, and everyone has many of them as part of their story, right? And you run them by people. He sees these ones that they really resonate and which ones kind of move the needle in their perception of it.

And it's a little bit surprising. There's some surprises in there of ones that you think would be, like, really resonate and which ones kind of move the needle in their perception of it. And it's a little bit surprising. There's some surprises in there of ones that you think would be like really impactful, but in fact are not impactful at all. People don't care about. Like what? Well, population control. People don't care.

People, I think that people don't, the kind of people you're talking about who are largely unfamiliar with it, but they're looking at it from the outside and they're skeptical of it. They have a hard, they don't't buy it i don't think that they're afraid of deer generally but people who live in high population areas like i did a gig once in western massachusetts well yeah it was in western massachusetts and i had a drive i was coming from new york and I had a drive through the most deer infested place I've ever been to in my life. It was completely insane. Like when you're driving on the highway, you have to go 25, 30 miles an hour and things are just jumping in front of your car every 15, 20 seconds. It was fucking nuts, man. And I took this side road down to get to

wherever the gig was, you know, and I'm just watching these animals jump in front of the car, like left and right. And I'm like, these people that live here, these things are a goddamn nuisance. Like if this was your everyday reality and you asked those people, you said, hey, what do you think about deer population control? We need to hunt to keep the population down. They'd be like, fuck yeah, you do. Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah, I'm sure that there are like quite a lot of people that live in some of these areas that have a great abundance of deer that feel that way but the general population yeah when he was looking at

it with just general population thing and it was full stop too he didn't get he didn't give a lot of he didn't go in and give case scenarios and examples right it's just a question that you ask and people it didn't like immediately click with people another thing that didn't immediately click with people but it's extremely important to me is issues around heritage and legacy okay so meaning that um my maternal grandfather my paternal grandfather were hunters my father was a hunter i was brought up hunting um to a non-hunter doesn't matter your grandparents and parents could have been involved in all kinds of bad shit i don't think that that

means you need to continue doing bad shit right um one that's very obvious is people understand people understand and respect the idea of food like your general population to look and respect the idea of food now to back up to look and respect the idea of food now to back up what i was getting at about you mentioned like that being a big element of the show uh it almost winds up being that it was like i was like fortunate or lucky or whatever that that early in my career i started focusing on talking about that aspect of it but it wasn't something i just made up out of nowhere because it was a huge part of growing up where, for whatever reason, I happened to be raised by a dad who was just really interested in cooking stuff and sharing it with people. driving down the road in June and you see a snapping turtle laying eggs on the side of the road that's come up out of a swamp and you need to find some sandy ground and he finds it on the

edge of a dirt road and there it is laying eggs on the side of the dirt road we were eating that turtle right and everything we ate you know all kinds of fish and we ate a lot of things that other people weren't interested in we could go out and bring back our dad bullfrogs. He would love it if we went out and got him frogs. We'd take our bows out at night using flashlights, which unbeknownst to me was illegal and remains illegal in the state where I was brought up. Even for frogs? To use artificial light for frogs, yeah. Wow. Dude, when I found that out later, no idea.

Wow. That you weren't supposed to do that. We would do it, and we'd come in and bring them and it was like a big thing right to bring our dad the frog legs and he would cook him he would cook and eat anything and then he would do stuff where we would catch salmon when the salmon were running the rivers in october and he would have people over and we would have a salmon boil you know so i was raised around that stuff of like of wild game, having to be very social, having to be a way to connect. Salmon boil?

Yeah, boiled fish. So you're literally cubing up salmon and pearl onions and little baby potatoes. Oh, so you make them like a stew. It's a fish boil. And then you drain it off and you have drawn butter. And you drown all that shit in drawn butter. It's good. Sounds good. Yeah. But it doesn't sound like people do fish boils people do fish boils but it's not normal to do a salmon boil it seems like it's such a flavorful fish you would

lose some of that in the broth yeah for sure but it's like when you it's like when you have the pearl onions and a little bay potatoes and cubed up and you drown all that shit and butter it's just like a thing people like the So the taste is really good, but it's not necessarily the taste of salmon. It isn't what, if you went to great, if you went to the Pacific Northwest and asked like a bunch of great chefs in the Pacific Northwest

to list their five favorite salmon preparations, boiling them in a pot of water isn't going to be on, isn't going to make their list. Yeah. But we would do that, you know, and it would be a thing, and you'd invite people over to do it. So I kind of early on, like early on with all the things I enjoyed about hunting, like the food aspect was big for me and really informed all of the sort of

conversations that I've had around it since. And so then in doing a show about hunting, it wasn't something that I was going to lean out. But in all fairness, when I was growing up, I did a lot of fur trapping too. And trapped muskrat, beaver, mink, all kinds of stuff. And I was doing that to sell the furs. And I would use some of the meat for bait. I'd sometimes sell meat to dog sled racers. When did you realize that beaver were delicious?

Not until after. I think I ate the first one when I was in community college. I'd still tell people about the beaver that you cook for us in Wisconsin and how good it is, and they'd look at you sideways and be like, I'm telling you, man, it was like the most delicious pot roast I've ever had. It was fantastic. Yeah. It was really good. There's even stories about early on when early explorers were in this country, they had a difficult time getting fish sometimes.

And beaver were approved for the Lenten meal because they were aquatic. Wow. So on Fridays when you're supposed to have your meat-free day, you were allowed to eat beaver meat because they were a water animal. It was a very popular food item. Do you follow what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I get it.

The first ones we ate, I had started reading about, I'd always read narratives, stories about the mountain men. Meaning like when I say mountain men, like a very specific thing, like a, you know, a Rocky Mountain beaver trapper who was sandwiched between, who was sandwiched in time between the end of the Lewis and Clark expedition and the collapse of the beaver market in the 1840s. So it's a very finite period of time is what a mountain man was. Explain to people how big the beaver market is because this is going to blow people's minds. Well, America's first, you know, Astor, John Jacob Astor, like the beaver market made America's first millionaires. His fortunes came from being a beaver trader.

The richest man in the country, their money came from beavers. Yeah, and he was in on the business end of it. He wasn't in on the trapping end of it. Right, he was in on the hats, right? The fur companies, yeah, the big fur companies. And when Lewis, when we bought, think about it like this, how big it was. For us to do the Louisiana purchase and to buy that chunk of land uh when lewis and clark came out part of their mandate was to suss out the potential for

the trade in beaver hides wow it'd be like buying something now you'd want to buy oil and gas right you don't know can we justify this through oil and gas they're looking to justify it through trade and beaver hides now also there was also language about that they might find out about whether woolly mammoths were existing out there as well so there was like some confusion about what was going on wow they really thought the woolly mammoths were still alive jefferson was interested in that stuff because he had he had been to some areas uh he had some familiarity and been to some areas with these large bones and he was puzzled about him he was wondering if this wasn't some if it maybe in fact was not a an extinct species but was somehow living in the american west still

how hard is it to people historians like people not historians popular historians really love to make a big deal out of that because it's so weird but it wasn't like hey let's buy the let's do the louisiana purchase transaction because of the possibility of locating mammoths i think it was like an idea that was floated around people see it and they people such as me see it and perhaps overemphasize what it meant but it was an idea that was out there the beaver trade stuff was certainly a big factor another thing i was reading about recently that just point out to your to your uh that you might think is interesting is that we people have this idea of lewis and clark going into this unspoiled uncontacted landscape i was recently reading a piece by a historian who's talking about at the time le and Clark headed out into the Great Plains,

there were Native Americans living on the Great Plains who had been to Europe and met the King of France and returned back to the Great Plains. Whoa. What year? They went out in the early 1800s. So they were out in 1804.

Wow. You gotta, if you imagine the time from the time in the 1500s when the Spanish were poking around and like Coronado

coming up from Mexico into the Great Plains Cabeza de Vaca being shipwrecked along the Gulf Coast and people pushing up into these areas. That was hundreds of years prior. Like the distance that separates, imagine the distance that separated Lewis and Clark from the first Europeans

who were doing activities in and around the Great Plains is like the distance in time that separates us from Lewis and Clark. More so, right? Yeah. It's the distance in time that separates us from the Declaration of Independence. It was like a long history of people messing around. However, so yeah, but think about it too.

Like Lewis and Clark were encountering people who had horses, right? Right. And those horses had been traded up. So that's just a side note this idea of eating beavers so i got from reading about the mountain men i got interested in this idea because you'd always see like anytime you're reading about mountain men you're always going to find the part where the author talks about how much mountain men liked beaver tail um and the first people that tried eating beaver tail was it was around when I was in community college at the time,

and my brothers, I remember, stuck a beaver tail in the oven for a while and cooked it, and they reported back to me that whatever it is they're talking about isn't that. There must be some other explanation. Didn't we eat beaver tail? Yeah. Yeah, we ate it in Wisconsin. Yeah.

There's pictures and an explanation of how to prepare, how to actually prepare beaver tail mountain man style in the meat eater fishing game cookbook. It wasn't bad. It was just bland. It's just fat. It's fat. So after that, we started thinking that when they say the mountain men like beaver tail,

we thought it must have meant they like rump basically like the hindquarters so we started when we when i would catch beavers um i'd be careful when skinning them to not get the caster the beavers have two large glands on the inside of their legs they're like tucked in there what looks like if you lay a beaver on its back tucked kind of on either side of its, like if it's a male, like tucked either side of its penis or either side of its cloaca, you'll see a, not cloaca, but like vent. You'll see these glands that are the size of, I don't know, if you make like a, if you take your index finger and your thumb and make a circle, there's like a gland on each side called a castor gland. There's an oil gland in there. They used to use it for perfume.

It still has value today. It's used for a wide variety of things. It smells beautiful. If you're ever walking on a stream bank and you smell like a strange perfume smell, it's usually beaver castor. Smells great, tastes like shit. Tastes like you're eating, like you rubbed roses or something all over your food. So start figuring out to skin them and be very careful not to get the castor on your knife or get the castor on your hands. So I started figuring out to skin them and be very careful not to get the caster on your knife or get the caster on your hands. And then we would just take the meat and put it in crockpots with potatoes and onions and stuff and just cook them down in a crockpot so you could pick them. And it was like roast beef. So then I started eating that, but then later I realized that

I read other accounts of how people prepared beaver tail. And if you take the tail, like the scaly-ass tail, and it really should be from a fall beaver because the tail would be twice as thick in the fall than it is in the spring. They're emaciated in the spring. Take the tail and just skewer it on a stick and put it next to a fire where the skin starts to bubble and boil away. And pretty soon you can just peel all that skin away. And what's hiding under there is the best equivalent, like the best equivalent or point of comparison that I can think of would be,

it's like if you had a really, like imagine you're eating a grass-fed steak, right, but still has that fatty gristle on it. It's just made up of that gristle. What a lot of people would trim away from a steak and not eat, that's what's inside that beaver tail. But these individuals that were doing this were fat-starved, eating such lean meat all the time. I think they loved it because here's a chunk of fat.

And they had ready access to because they were catching them to make a living and if you're just eating the meat there's no fat on the meat and so they would complement it with just eating the beaver tail fat and i'll often tell people about and i even gave some to there's like a culinary arts institute and i gave some chefs that stuff and everyone that eats it points out that it's not that it tastes so fantastic but it's just like really interesting to try and eat it the fat from the tail and it's like you got to put yourself in position you've probably been in this too where if you're you know especially if you're out hunting and eating you know like freeze-dried food or not eating great and you're just exerting yourself all day all the time how

you're what you want to eat changes a lot. Yeah. And the level of appetite you have is off the charts. Yeah, and so just to eat a big slab of fat was appealing to people. Yeah, your body starts craving things that it absolutely needs. Yeah, that makes sense. It makes sense, and particularly when you think about these people that are hiking across the West, traveling massive amounts of distance, probably very physically strenuous, dragging all their shit with them, and they get across some big-ass piece of fat from a tail, it's probably a huge treat.

Yeah. And then our understanding of people, we used to have this idea of early Native Americans, they're just eating nothing but mammoth meat all the time. As our understanding of people grows, you see how much they were utilizing plant resources and probably had pretty plant-rich diets. But with the equestrian bison hunters on the Great Plains guys were like they weren't cultivating like at that era like especially the era when lewis and clark came in these people were not cultivating crops a lot of the people who had been farming along the mississippi and missouri valleys once they got horses they just gave up on that shit and just started roaming the landscape eating meat and the mountain men certainly weren't doing that and they were just eating like you're eating meat and the mountain men certainly weren't doing that and they were just eating like you're eating meat 365 days out of the year and you see that they really probably to make up for

a lot of nutrient deficiencies ate shit loads of organs your guy putting gall putting gall on your food gallbladder squeezing taking the galladder, squeezing the bile from gallbladder on your food? You did that once. Yeah, it's horrific. It's like putting a 9-volt battery on your tongue. And you think they were doing it just because they were just nutrient-starved. Yeah, it seems like they put a high emphasis on eating just organ meats, blood, organ meats, milk from mammary glands. Really?

Yeah, because you can't just eat that lean-ass game meat every day. Right. You were talking to a guy from Alaska. What's that guy's name? Buck? Buck Bowden. Buck Bowden, yeah, on your show. And he was talking about, you know, essentially he was subsistence hunting in certain stages.

Yeah. And, you know, he ate nothing but moose like he ate shot of moose and ate nothing but that moose for months and picking wolverine meat off the skulls and stuff like whoa yeah you know and you you know so fucking modern day human who's alive right now talking about only surviving on the leanest of lean meat you know that guy had to be skinny as fuck when that was all over. Yeah, and I wouldn't mess with that guy. He's tough as shit, too. He lived a life that seems like he had parts of his life that seemed like he was 100 years.

Yeah. Could have occurred 100 years earlier. The episode of the podcast is like, you're a good man, Buck. Is that what it's called? You're a cool dude, Buck. You're a cool dude, Buck. Which is what a buddy of mine says to him in the show you know he's a cool dude it's it's a treat to get a chance to talk to a guy that you think probably never even fucking heard

of a podcast uh and and certainly comes from a completely different era yeah the the reason he was living on had to live off the land is an interesting story where he was just getting into the guiding world, so guiding moose hunters. And they were wanting to find some ways to be able to hunt some very remote areas, and they hidden us the idea that they would just bring horses in. Because if you don't have landing strips and stuff, it's just really hard to operate out of these areas. So they thought, well, if we can get horses in there, we'll have them in there, We'll hunt for the season. Then we'll ride the horses out. But getting the horses in there was so difficult and took far longer. And the route they wanted to use was impassable. By the time they got the horses in there, they realized that they're never going to get these horses back out of here. And they realized that someone needs to stay over winter to take care of the horses and he just volunteered to do it so he started spending

they would go in and hunt in september and then he would just start hanging out and just stay there to agree to care for the horses until spring so that's how he found himself living out by himself and they would bring some food in but it would be never enough and he would be eating you know wolverine beaver moose whatever he could come up with but he was just um he was just open to it and didn't care you know and is really comfortable with solitude when i spend time with him he's very gracious but um when you spend time with him you see him just engage in conversation like you see a a sort of weariness kick in where you're talking to someone who's very comfortable going months without human interaction right so him talking to people is like okay that's enough yeah let me get the fuck out of here you realize all of a sudden he realized, like, when I've stayed at his place, his cabin, he's got a remote cabin still.

When I stayed out there, he kind of, like, will sort of drift off and vanish for good spells of time. Oh, sure. Even when he's, like, entertaining, you know. And he sells bowls, like wooden bowls for a living? It's one of the things that he does. Do you have one of those bowls? I have one in my home, yeah.

I need to get one of those bowls. It's a birch. Yeah, it's like a salad bowl. Sort of like a growth on the side of a birch tree that you cut off with a chainsaw and hollow out. Yeah, they call them birch bark or burl bowls. Yeah. Yeah. I have a beautiful one.

And he sells them. They go into tourist shops. I think it's a shame. That they go into tourist shops? Yeah. I think it should all be direct to consumer from him. Well, why don't you hook it up? Get some of those 0.0 people on the case.

Get some of your meat eater folks. Yeah. He had a great many that he lost in a fire, too. Yeah. That was a sad story. But besides, yeah, so he still guides and does that and takes those burls and makes bowls out of them. Just talking to a guy like that, listening to you talk to a guy like that is so fascinating because he lives a life that I can barely comprehend. Just everything about it.

And just to think that what he does is almost impossible to comprehend. Now think about Lewis and Clark making their way across the country and not really knowing what was out there. Yeah. Really not knowing. Like guessing, having some people gave some reports. This is what we saw here. This is what we saw there. They didn't even have a good account of all the different animals. No.

They had wanderlust. And that's the thing. We were talking about this point the other day. We were talking about like what people now you'll hear people say like oh he's a real mountain man you know and oftentimes when people hear that they imagine this like old hermit yeah you know who's like living in his cabin um him being a mountain man but if you think about what the mountain men were they were for the, the most well-traveled people. Right? And the least xenophobic people.

Right. Alive. The equivalent today, to be a mountain man today, the equivalent would be, I think you'd have to go to Brazil and ascend the Amazon and follow tributary after tributary and get into the borderlands around Venezuela and then go in and despite the language barrier, you'd have to go in and travel amongst and live amongst people who, tribes who had not had a lot of outside contact, but had a familiarity,

had a familiarity with outside peoples. And you'd live their foods, you'd eat their foods and live with them and take their ways that they dress themselves and adopt it as your own. The kind of guy that would do that is not the kind of guy we're talking about nowadays. And we talk about, he's a real mountain man,

right? We're talking about reality show people. That's what people talk about now. But these people were like insatiably curious explorers. They're the people now. Yeah. The people that do like go to really crazy war zones or like decide to go backpack up in the hindu kush in afghanistan you know just to see

what happens um yeah very different kinds of people your episodes that you did what where where was that in with the uh the most recent series series where you're bow fishing with these people? Yeah, in Guyana. In Guyana, yeah. That's got to be a trip. How long were you down there for? Oh, you know, long weeks. A couple weeks?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, but there's a lot of travel. There's a lot of stuff that needs to happen to get out on the river. When you're around these people and they're all walking around barefoot, and they're making cassava, which we talked about the other day, that could easily kill you if you do it wrong. The water has all this cyanide in it.

You're about as close as you can get to that kind of environment, right? Yeah. In a situation like that, you're with people who are very familiar with like Western culture, the modern world, like a great awareness of it. But like when, when the sort of rubber meets the road of daily existence, they're still really connected to life patterns and, and skill sets that were, that, that their grandparents used and still fishing like in very similar ways right so where you might have had when you were a boy even if someone now is in

their 30s when they're a boy they probably use a 12 pound handmade wooden paddle and maybe now they have a different paddle or maybe somehow they've come into, you know, a plastic paddle, say, and they use that for their boat. Or they have a, they still have a dugout canoe, but they also have an aluminum boat. So there's major differences. protein from the river and that you hunt and fish 250 300 days a year um in the places where your ancestors have always done it you're still you're still getting this like really beautiful glimpse at how people lived even though they've had enormous changes in their own lifetime and they're very much modern you know very modern but you can still like glimpse it more you don't i don't think you really get that as much you don't get that as much here you know hunting is is ancestral right there's like this kind of continuation that goes on

but when europeans came here when europeans came to the world, they weren't coming in as hunters, right? Even if you go look at like Daniel Boone's family, Daniel Boone's family came from England. They didn't come here as hunters because you couldn't, like the peasantry, you couldn't hunt there. They came here and learned hunting. So hunting in America for Euro-Americans, hunting in America is like an invention. It's a thing that people kind of got, learned, and took from the Indians. So it doesn't have that deep, deep thread that you'd find with indigenous communities where there's this continuation that's going on for forever unbroken, but on this continent unbroken for whatever, 15, 16, whatever the fashionable number is, thousands of years.

And so it's like our understanding is just different because my ancestors came here and got into it. It wasn't a cultural continuation for them. And you look at, like, for food and wild game, an interesting thing is my use and understanding of wild game is really influenced by, like, contemporary food, right? Like, restaurant food, things that chefs do. Like, how do you take wild game and do these, like, cool, exciting, modern, innovative kinds of things with wild game and cook it? You go talk to even a dude like Buck or particularly people in South America who have hunted for more of a subsistence, literally subsistence purposes. Their whole attitude is different about it. Attitude's different about it. People in South America will eat the chimane or the makushi.

It's like they'll eat the same thing every day for lunch. Every day. Boiled fish with a dried pepper on it and then a grain made from cassava. Boiled as well. I shouldn't say a grain, but like a dish made from cassava. Why are they boiling it? Why don't they just grill it? Well, they sometimes do, but for lunch, it's like you take leftover.

You'd probably smoke what they would call barbecue fish, where you make a big rack. You have a fire and make a big rack high above it. It kicks off a bunch of smoke. You split fish, salt them, and lay them on that rack and smoke them, dry them out. And then you take that fish and smoke them dry them out and you take that fish and break it apart and pour river water over cassava um and then put fish in there with river water and kind of stir it up or you just take fish and throw it in a pot and boil it and put that on there but to eat that same thing every day then you come and talk about uh there's no recipe right there's no like written preparation right and then you come and talk about

like wild game cookies i understand it where you make a book and it's got a hundred different recipes in it all these ways to approach stuff it's just like it's it's very particular to us like other people aren't really perceiving it that way. Like they don't use wild game and recipes. They have like a, there's like, here's how you cook this. And we don't really deviate from cooking it this way. Where it's like fish on a rack over the fire or fish in a pot of water. And very limited diet.

Does it weird you out when you're around people like that? Because you have options, right? You can eat any way you like. You can go to a restaurant. You get a burger from fast food. You choose to go hunting. With these people, it's literally how they survive. Yeah.

There's no option for them. There's no options, and they've been doing it that way forever. Do you feel like a weird recreational sort of person around them? Like, is it, does it feel strange? That's a great question, man. No, there's definitely, there's definitely like an envious part to how, like to live that deliberately. Like, I'm a little bit envious of it but really the thing that i feel most is i feel um more than separated i i tend to feel more the areas in which i'd be

like aligned you know right where i like appreciate the perspective and i appreciate the skill set, but never feeling, um, yeah, never feeling like, like, uh, bashful or ashamed or something that this would be something that I would like choose to engage in. And this is something that they were engaged in. And I think that one of the things that helps make it that way is how much they love to do it. Right. That when you go out, like the infectious excitement of heading out in the morning the fact that they still feel it like they're as giddy as anybody about going out and doing it like very excited to go out and do it it is not like going out to get your like to get you to

check your mailbox my uh my youngest daughter has become enamored with fishing, and I love it. Because I get to, whenever we go on trips, I take her fishing. She fucking loves it, man. And we were in Florida, and we were going to get to go bass fishing. I set it up. Had a guy who was going to take us out. I woke her up, 5 o'clock in the morning in the hotel. I'm carrying her. She's stiff as a board because she just woke up.

She's like, I'm so excited. She was so excited. She wasn't like, Daddy, I'm tired. Can we just go back to bed? No, I'm so excited. She was so excited. She wasn't like, Daddy, I'm tired. Can we just go back to bed? No, it was dark out, 5 in the morning. She's just going, I'm so excited. Did she wind up having fun? She caught a 6-pound bass.

Oh, really? Then she's hooked. She caught quite a few bass. It was a great lake in Florida. In Florida, obviously, a lot of great bass fishing there. But we caught a ton of largemouth bass. And she caught a fat boy. It was like a six pounder.

She was hooked. She was freaking it. It bit her finger. She was showing everybody, look, it bit my finger. She was so excited. She fucking loves fishing. But that feeling in the morning when I'm looking at her little face and like we're on the water. It's a genetic thing.

It seems like it's just in the DNA. Fishing, it's not like, hey, we're going to go play soccer, which she likes too, but there's not that kind of excitement. No, there's like, oh, this is going to be so fun. It's triggering something that is deep inside human beings. I see it, and I see it in i see it in varying degrees and in different people like some kids seem to come out of the box with more of it yeah you know yeah my i don't mean that as a euphemism no my my 10 my 10 year old daughter doesn't she's like yeah we can go fishing like

she's gone fishing and caught stuff it's okay it. It's okay. When we had a daughter, my wife was adamant early on, as soon as she found out that it was going to be a daughter, that you will not exclude our daughter in this world that you're in. I was like, of course not. And I don't, but having in my mind, I don't feel like I've messed this up. I feel like I've put the same emphasis, right, on my – I have three kids, but my older two – the little one's just a little bit too little yet to really know what's going on.

But the older two, I feel like I put the same emphasis on it. And my daughter just isn't demonstrating the same enthusiasm that her older brother does. And you try to suss out, like, the nature-nurture question. Because I feel like I'm doing the same inputs. Right. But I'm getting different results. And it leads you to wonder, you know, it's a very small sample size.

But when I talk to other parents, like, you know, parents who are parenting right now young kids, I just keep encountering other dads who are having the same experience and it really leaves you to wonder sort of what sort of cultural influences are going on there

where it's like the enthusiasms often times among young girls are not as high as the enthusiasm among boys and it's hard to unpack i don't know it's hard to unpack everything yeah that's that's my question is like i'll never i don't know age what's how old your kids well these two i'm talking about are eight and five yeah man i don't know how much culture plays a part i know i really think that it's and it's obviously in my small sample group an eight-year-old and a ten-year-old for the youngest kids the uh the eight-year-old fucking

loves it they're both girls the ten-year-old she's like whatever you know if i try to wake her up take her fish and she'd be like leave me alone you're going back to sleep i'm sure there are parents out there who you know i haven't met yet. Maybe they're out there where they have like a boy and a girl and the girl's super fired up and the boy's not. Maybe it happens. I guarantee it. Jamie and I were just talking about this yesterday because I was watching this video of these. There's, I want to try to put this in a respectful way.

I think there, and I'm sure you're aware of this there's people that are in the hunting world the outdoor industry that i think are in it because it's a good avenue to get attention if you're like a hot chick yeah if you're a hot chick and you know you wear pink and you go out and shoot things you take all these grip and grins with deer and like this you're gonna get a lot of likes yeah because it's like uh imagine the the male perspective on it yeah it's like here's the woman who has everything exactly and she likes to hunt yeah she's hot and she likes to hunt and uh there's quite a few of them and it's i was telling jamie it's a weird world because part of me i don't want to be a sexist. I don't want to look at these girls.

I don't look at a guy who hunts and who wants to be a part of the outdoor industry and go, oh, this guy is just doing this because he thinks this is his avenue for fame and success. I think, well, here's a guy who really likes to hunt, and he realizes there's people like Steve Rinella and John dudley out there and these famous hunters man i want to be a famous hunter how do i do it you know how do i go well i'm going to just start taking instagram pictures and say a lot of the same shit that they say and sort of you know put myself into the cultural norm i don't think like that with girls you're like you just want to have men like you not all of them a lot of them i think are

super legit a lot of them but there's unquestionably this added element in that world and with it let's be super generous and say it's only 10 of them but that 10 i'm like i smell a rat i'm not unaware of what you're talking about i'm sure you're not no i noticed it yeah it's weird yeah i even had like a yeah i remember it was yeah it's kind of like a yeah like a like a like a sex pot kind of yeah huntress scene oh yeah super made up full war paint fake eyelashes hot as fuck skin clothes, out there shooting shit, taking pictures. Yeah, it's weird. And then you go to their Instagram page and it's like there's pictures of that and then there's a lot of pictures with their butt up in the air where they're doing some strange

exercise. Getting ready for bowl season. Yeah, accentuating their butt. Like, that's weird. I don't do any of those exercises. I would really like to, I know, I would really like my, know i would really like my to because i'm going to continue leaning on my i'm going to continue leaning on my daughter uh because i would really like her i'm going to keep leaning on her until i feel like she's in the at an age where she can legitimately say she doesn't want to go right because right now if i asked her every day hey

you want to go to school she'd be having a real delinquency problem. So you're really like, you make kids do stuff. I took her duck hunting a couple weekends ago. It was a cold morning. And we get out there. And before it's even legal light, she felt terrible. She's laying there crying about how cold her feet are. If my boy was doing that that i would have a very different attitude about it right then when she's crying her crying because she's cold

like made me feel awful right with my boy i've been like suck it up but her i'm like oh man yeah she's all cold now yeah and then it may and so you really there really is a difference yeah there's that there's a there's a difference there and it's not you know the people that buy hunting license in this country 90 of the people buy hunting 90 are males right right so one in 10 license holders is a woman but then there's there's more women than men in the you know slightly more men women than men in the country and there's a ton of ways of explaining it we talked about earlier with neanderthals or maybe neanderthals didn't have these like divided roles but in all the hunter like and hunter gather cultures is very normal

to see a division of labor here and to have like that men were out hunting and women were not there's a bunch of explanations for that like people were tied to being home to care for small children and you know couldn't afford that risk do they vary there are there some women that go out with the hunting parties you know if it is you know the minute you say no someone's going to point out to some right variation but in your experience you've you've done several of these trips to these remote jungles oh yeah but that's just what that's just such a small thing i mean you get rather than looking at personal experience just like from kind of exploring the literature and reading about you know historic accounts and what people and what people do, it is very much the norm.

It is very much the norm that hunting was, you know, patrilineal descent activity and all these cultures you go to, like the cult of the hunter is like a male sort of cult. But the factors that made it that way, okay, sort of the, you have to assume it comes from some kind of practical factor. The factors that made it that way aren't there anymore. And like I said, it's a difficult thing to unpack. both boys become avid hunters and fishermen, and somehow my daughter does not, I'll probably view it as some bit of a personal failure, though I'll never know what really was going on.

Like I said, it's hard to unload it. I wish I could have 100 children, like 50 girls and 50 boys, and have a bigger sample size. But I do wonder about it. And what's funny, funny too is there's no like at our home you know our kids like our kids eat tons of wild game at our home to the point where they don't have any you could give them anything to eat they would eat it and it would not register to them as unusual they They've eaten everything, right? They've even eaten like breakfast sausage made out of fox and beaver meat.

Fox? Yeah, they've eaten everything. Wait a minute. Yeah. You eat fox? I have. I made a batch of breakfast sausage because I had an arctic fox one time and I made breakfast sausage out of it. What was that like?

I just cut it in with beaver meat and a little bit of deer meat and a little bit of pork fat. My kids ate it and then everyone winked. Did you try any of the fox on its own? Nope, didn't try the fox on its own. I've eaten a ton of things, but I didn't eat just the straight old. What possessed you to stuff that fox into that sausage? I heard that they were good. And I had an arctic fox and I wanted to get a thing made for my wife from it.

So I had a hat, an arctic fox hat made for her, and I retained the meat. And then we just ate the meat and breakfast sausage. And if I told them, if they were to ask what meat it is, and I would say, oh, it's this, this, and this, it wouldn't – Freak them out. It wouldn't even – no, it wouldn't even register as like a thing that might seem unusual to some people right so the squirrel rabbit all manner stuff right the just anything and so i know there's no element of there's no influence like that with them there's no influence of oh that's gross or you that's weird you know the other day we were hunting the other day we

went out and we were hunting street pigeons. They'll eat pigeon meat. Where were you doing this? In Montana. Oh, okay. There's a guy at a grain silo that was in a festival of pigeons. Folks don't know, many people listening to this, that pigeons were actually brought over here as food. When you get fancy squab on the menu that's what

a pigeon is yeah flightless pigeon pigeon hasn't flown yet that's what a squab is so smaller and younger you know that's the idea yeah the meat's pinkish on the meat's pinkish on squab if you want to get squab we used to go out and catch squabs where we had a lot we had like a little almost like the equivalent of a little trap line where they would nest in various places around town. And we would just know all the places to go check to get squabs. And, yeah, it's one that hasn't flown yet. But people that commercially produce squab, you can just keep them from flying. But if you want squab from the wild, you'd need to go out and just go and collect them.

And what's the difference between pigeon and squab in terms of the way it tastes? Pigeon meat is tougher, grayer, has a more livery quality, and squab is very tender, pinkish. It's not like quail, but it's leaning way more in the direction of quail. Like if a pigeon and a quail had a baby, squab's more like that. One of the biggest surprises I had, that was one of the biggest surprises that I've ever had in game, if we can count that as wild game,

would be what a squab tasted like. Because I had been eating, I had for a long time eaten street pigeons. Because, you know, street pigeons, you know, they're around. Even up in the Missouri breaks, you get street pigeons that nest up in the cliffs. And, you know, there's many places you can hunt street pigeons, and they become an agricultural pest. And they're not regulated. So there's no closed season no bag limit right they're treated like they have no more they're regulated like rats if if you could talk to wildlife managers and ask them if they could wave a magic wand and make street pigeons go away most everybody would wave it because they're so

costly they're costly to cities they're costly to cities. They're costly to agriculture. So I'd always eaten pigeons. But the minute of discovering what a squab was like, which is well known to people in the fine dining, but I had never had it. It was shocking how good it is. That's interesting. I've never picked it off the menu, but now I'm tempted. Yeah, you should do it. But street pigeon, should I avoid that? No, I would eat some first. Just to test it? Yeah,, but now I'm tempted. Yeah, you should do it. But street pigeon, should I avoid that? No, I would eat some first. Just to test it?

Yeah, make pâtés from it. Okay, but it's not something that you would go, this is one of my favorite things to eat. No, definitely not. Is there a way to do it where you could really, like, is there a preparation maybe that you've missed? It's not bad to put it in a marinade and you can grill it. You want to take the little breasts and you poke it a whole bunch, like poke it with a fork and tenderize it a little bit and also make some avenues of approach for the marinade and grill them over a very hot flame.

But what's good is to use it similar to stuff with ptarmigan or whatever, to make pates and terrines. Ptarmigan is something that you would cook that way as well? Yeah. I've only seen people do ptarmigan on that, what's that show called? Life Below Zero. Uh-huh. It's a lady who lives, she's been on the show before.

She lives like fucking, what does she live? Like 200 miles above the Arctic Circle, something crazy like that, and she hunts ptarmigan yeah up there the best ptarmigan i've ever eaten and this is we we this is in uh in our new cookbook too but i mentioned using ptarmigan for it but it's just a dish that's great for regular like any any kind of meat particularly game birds is like you have you've got a hot pot yeah where you like where you have a hot pot where you have the simmering broth and you have all these raw sliced meats that you dip in there. The best timing I've ever had is just like that.

It's otherworldly. It's just kind of like when you slice it thin and cook it that way, it just kind of vanishes on your tongue.'s a very very tender meat you can almost kind of mash it up people like a thing you hear with a lot of game birds people describe ptarmigan street pigeon a lot of game birds people describe as livery diving ducks being livery because there's like a texture thing to it and then the strength of flavor and a darkness of color um and those and you know people make a lot of pâtés with liver right so those birds that have that quality oftentimes they just they can find their way into pâtés so we also have recipes for that like how to do

pâtés from using all all manner of meat do you have any recipes in that book for brown bear no but we have bear recipes is there a difference you know brown bear black bears are among people who know black bears are widely accepted as being good to eat if you go into if you go to earlier i mentioned daniel boone so if you go into that like the the the frontier era of american history right which preceded just these little lingo terms the frontier era of american history preceded the mountain man era of american history with like the the eastern settlements right um if you read it like about daniel boone's area you know early 1700s up into the Revolutionary War, bear meat was the most popular meat on the frontier. Black bears.

The most popular as in preferred? Yeah. Preferred over venison. Really? Yeah. People hunted deer to sell deer hides, and they would eat the deer meat. People hunted bears because that's what they liked to eat. It's just more beef-like, you know? Right. And, you know, when cooked, right?

People love bear meat. Brown bears, grizzly bears just don't enjoy the same reputation. Different diets. The thing you run in with brown, like when we use it, when we use the term brown, like brown bear is kind of almost like a, a it's used amongst hunters a lot but it there's all it's all one species so whether you got a grizzly bear in wyoming or a brown bear on kodiak it's taxonomically it's regarded as as a single species people call brown a brown bear is a grizzly you'll get all kinds of people writing you to say various points of this, but like debating various aspects of this.

A brown bear is a grizzly with access to marine resources where marine resources make up a major component of its diet. And then the question you bring up is then like if you go to the North Slope, so if you go to the Arctic coast and you saw a grizzly there, you'd be like, well, he has access to marine resources. He can eat a beached whale, whatever, but he's a grizzly. So like brown bears kind of extend, right, from, you know, northern BC up around and hook around into the Bering Sea. But at some point, they're just not brown bears anymore. They tend to be big and oftentimes because of the name the name, they tend to have a darker coloration. They have a horrible reputation as food. You'll always find people who will point it out, right?

Or nowadays, because people are so aware, like in the social media world, nowadays, you'll have people who will kill a brown bear. And here you are, you've got 400 or 500 pounds of meat meat and they'll talk about how they're gonna eat it but like dude you're in for a pound a day this year really yeah is that really what happened for real is that really what happened that's true right and then there's no salvage requirement on it oh there's no salvage requirement on it don't you have to in alaska don't you have to pack it out? Depends. There's some areas that have zero, some areas, you know, typically, typically no, but there are areas that do have salvage requirements.

Where I have a cabin, there's a salvage requirement on bear meat in the spring. Because in areas where bears, that's a black bear area. Yeah, your cabin is, there's no brown bears. Nope. There, it's island by island. So some islands have brown bears. So you go to ABC Islands. You go to Admiralty Island, and Admiralty Island is all brown bears.

So it winds up being that if the island is good brown bear habitat, it will only have brown bears. Because on the islands where it's smaller they just would they kill all the black bears they're there and black bears aren't there if the island is not brown bear habitat and can't support brown bears it'll become a black bear island prince wills is a black bear island admiralty is a brown bear island and you know it kind of depends on how much seems to maybe depend on how much like open country or alpine or, you know, if it's like densely, densely forested, it's less suitable and becomes a black bear territory. But black bears in the spring have a salvage requirement.

Because if you're talking about coastal bears, coastal bears are better to eat in the spring when they're not eating tons of rotten salmon in the fall there wouldn't be a salvage requirement because when they're eating dead salmon their flesh can become not good i remember you telling me a story about using a guy's smoker and he told the guy man you need to clean that smoker out it smells like fish he's like i've never cooked a fish in there it's because you you were smoking a bear in it. Yep. And that was an early June black bear who was not getting salmon, but it stores up. That flavor stores up in their fat. I've watched even wolves eating salmon that were so rotten that they're, like, lapping it up where it just turns into a gray mush. And the bears. And people's idea of a bear is, is like eating a brand new fresh fish,

which they love to do, and they seem to prefer it. Like when there's tons of fresh fish, and they're just getting fresh fish, they'll just eat eggs, right? But as the fish run dies down, they just start eating rotten fish. I can't remember how we got talking about quality of food. Oh, were you asking?

Brown bears. So even like Buck Bowden, Buck Bowden, who, like I said, he's picked the head meat off a wolverine skull to eat it. Buck Bowden has said he's struggled his entire life and just hasn't found a way to make brown bears that good. There are exceptions. People run into good tasting ones.

I was talking about like grizzlies up on the North Slope have a very good reputation. Any black bear in the Rockies, any black bear is good. I mean, I've heard stories. I had a buddy that killed one over a dead cow one time. He killed one that was scavenging a rotten cow, and he had a hard time with the meat. But generally, bears that aren't eating marine resources are phenomenally good. I talked to my friend Eric Weinstein yesterday. He's a mathematician, one of the smartest guys I know.

And he has been fascinated by my obsession with hunting. And so he started watching a bunch of hunting things online. And he said he was very put off. I people uh killing bears with spears yeah and celebrating and the way they were celebrating about stuff he's like he found the thing the whole thing i you know and i saw his point and we had this discussion about it where um you know acknowledging the need to control the population and that this is all, that they're allocated a certain amount of tags by wildlife biologists,

and this keeps the moose population healthy and the deer population, all these different things, and even that people eat them. All those things made sense to him. But the celebration and all the hooting and hollering and stuff, it's like there was just not enough of a reverence for the dead,

and it really disturbed him. Yeah. That's – it's a great subject, and it's hard to – it's hard to approach because you find so many contradictions and weird parts of it, and by that I mean this. I was having a conversation the other tonight with a gentleman over dinner and we were talking about, he was explaining to me, like, what is the role of a rancher and what is the role of a farmer? Here's a person who's bringing animals into life. He's propagating breeding animals with

sole intention that they will all die and he will make his living off of their death but that person remains a sort of cultural icon they enjoy like a celebration you know when you're trying to sell sell a pickup truck right if you can tie it to a rancher it makes that pickup truck seem more legitimate that's a celebrated character people like oh he's an old cowboy yeah and we like that it's like what is and not that i'm definitely not knocking them like let me get where i'm going with this but what is that like that person is based off of like rearing animals in order that they may die, and he profits from their death and remains celebrated.

And then you get into the idea of what, when it comes to American wildlife, where we have a population of wildlife, in many respects, we have it and enjoy the management that we do and the abundance that we do in many ways that abundance is supported bolstered financed by hunters but hunters tend to not enjoy that same cultural support because of the death right well it's also because of media depictions sure i think that's the big part of it more than even so than the death if our if all of our depictions about hunting were tied into this sort of rational discourse and they showed all the images from your show of animals being shot and and carefully butchered in the field and then prepared and cooked and enjoyed,

I think people would have a way different perception. But, you know, we have Elmer Fudd. We have the evil hunters in the movies that are always, you know, trying to torture the animals. I mean, it's Disney and anthropomorphization of these animals and all these different films and media depictions and books. That shit and then teddy bears all these things are like stained into people's brains of what's good and what's bad

you know very few kids have stuffed cows that they're pets yeah or that they're uh toys they have teddy bears and maybe rudolph the red-nosed reindeer you don't want to shoot rudolph no it seems that it seems that it gets much worse and more contentious the less the pop if the american population is looking at something they recognize as game they feel different right things that they don't recognize as game that they don't readily recognize as game um to see that death is more abhorrent to them, even if it is being treated as game. But you don't see social media explosions come up around someone with a turkey. You don't see a lot of social media explosions come up with someone around a whitetail deer.

People look at that. They see this animal that they perceive to be very abundant. In the case of whitetails and turkeys, they're correct. Very abundant. They're familiar with them. They're familiar with the idea of these things being hunted, and it feels different. Now, if there's things where there's a perceived scarcity, okay, and they don't immediately recognize it as a food item, it's hard for them.

Extremely, and this is way outside of my personal area of expertise but like what goes on in africa but for people to see animals in africa that have been hunted and they recognize them only from like film depictions cartoon depictions mobiles over their child's crib like like a hippopotamus is very like very, like, you can't look at that, and it's hard to see that as, like, the harvest of game. It becomes something very different. And it's, we've watched it happen with bears, you know. Also, a thing that will happen is if you initiate the hunting of something that wasn't hunted before, that's very difficult for people

so you take a state where like new jersey or florida where they for a long time you know historically they would have a bear season they would lose the bear the bear season would go away because of a resource scarcity then later they would recover the resource and want to reinitiate the hunt. People have a very difficult time with that. Being like, if it wasn't hunted before, how can it be hunted now? Right. And that trips people up really bad.

People are hard to get on board with it. I don't know if you watch what's going on with grizzly bears around what has been unfortunately named the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, where you sort of have this cultural custody battle around who owns this indiana-sized hunk of land surrounding yellowstone where because of naming people sort of think of it as as yellowstone when it certainly is not it's a you know large area surrounding it but there we had a period where we weren't you know we stopped grizzly hunting because the animals are being over harvested habitat destruction and then you go through an enormous amount of work to recover the species and people are extremely resistant to the idea that you would start hunting now that you would now start hunting something you weren't hunting a few days ago right that's like but it's also what you were saying earlier that's not recognized as a game species because it's not

thought of something you eat yeah like mountain lions like even if mountain lions are a nuisance like there was a woman that had um she had a depredation permit because uh mountain lions had killed like 10 alpacas and a goat in her farm in malibu and um she decided not to act on the permit because there were so many different people that were threatening her. There were so many wildlife activists that were threatening her and just general people online, death threats. Because she was going to hire someone to shoot this mountain lion that had been, I mean, it just went on a thrill kill. And got into one of her pens and just went ham. Yeah.

But people, they think of that thing as somehow or another better than her alpacas, which is very weird. No, people just recently protested the killing of a tiger in India that had killed 13 people. I saw that. I put that online and people in the comments were like, fuck those people. Okay. You're out of your mind. What if that was your sister? What if it was your daughter? What if it was your sister? What if it was your daughter?

What if it was your mom? What if it was your brother? Watch your brother getting dragged away by a giant monster. Yeah. You know, and just because it's called a tiger, you're cool with that? Like, fuck your brother? Is that what you're saying? This was an interesting year.

I don't mean that. Well, let me finish my thought. I don't mean that – well, let me finish my thought. I don't want to sound callous when I call it interesting, but Washington State had its first mountain lion mortality. Like where a mountain lion killed a human for the first time in, I think, it was 94 years. And Oregon as well. And then Oregon had its first in state history. Yeah. And with the one in Washington, it killed a person.

And they tracked a lion down and killed the lion. And the state Fish and Game Department got, you know, predictably like a bunch of blowback for having killed it. And I was talking to someone who was involved with that. And I was saying, you know, I think that the blowback would have been a lot worse had you not done it. You know, but you just don't hear from those people. I don't think there would be blowback honestly if they didn't kill the lion if the lion is just out there roaming around i think people would just ignore it because the news cycle's so fucking quick yeah i think

they would lose it would get lost and trump would say something stupid about north korea or whatever and people would forget yeah uh i can you know i continue to uh you know i continue to hunt black bears. I eat black bears. It's like in the case of mountain lions, you have rapidly expanding mountain lion populations. There's a lot of mountain lions. Mountain lions are recolonizing new territories all the time. They're managed. Most states manage them very tightly with mortality quotas, female mortality quotas, open season, closed season, permit draws, right? They're managed as a game animal. They're hunted and there's some allowable use of the renewable resource. And at the same time that that's going on, we're enjoying expanding populations of

mountain lions. I personally welcome the return of mountain lions to any suitable habitat where there's enough space for them to live without causing undue friction by them butting up against human interests. And I encourage people who are in areas that are being re-colonized by mountain lions to you know practice some level of tolerance and use best best use practices or best case practices around to like avoid conflict right same thing with bears like i welcome the return of bears i think there's a lot of areas in this country not a lot but there's a handful of areas in this country that could have sustainable populations of grizzly bears. That's like suitable habitat that is not being used by grizzly bears and could and should be used by grizzly bears.

At the same time, I like to see, when it's appropriate, I like to see state-managed wildlife practices and then allowable harvests of animals. There's a lot of people listening to this that don't even understand that mountain lions are edible and in fact you say delicious i like them i was eating mountain lions long before i ever hunted mountain i've hunted one mountain lion in my life um and i've eaten a bunch more than that so i had never had the question about it you know i'd never had the question about whether it was good or not the vast majority of the people listening to this right now are probably like what yeah among among houndsmen like among people who deal lines is widely known that it's a very good meat but i was introduced to it that way i went there's there's a place when i was living in

missoula montana there's a place 20 miles east there called rock creek lodge and they're famous for having this big thing called the testicle festival in the fall where you know after you castrate steers you know people will fry up the nuts right and so the testicle festival is this big it's kind of like turning like this big or had turned into this kind of like biker festival but it was this this big party and it was centered around eating deep fried cow balls and we used to go down there all the time and go drinking and one time i was at that same place in the spring and this guy had a pot of uh pot like what looked like pulled pork you know but with barbecue sauce and he had a bunch of buns out and he's just giving it away and i was eating it and he was telling me how it was mountain lion meat and he was saying you know is he's saying like balls in the fall and pussy in the spring you know to know mountain lion there and that was the first time i had mountain lion and then later i

had a girlfriend who's from wyoming and she one day is standing behind a guy in a she's standing behind a guy in a hardware store who's buying a mountain lion tag and she asked him what do you do with all that meat and he didn't want it so she gave him her phone number and when he got his line he gave us the whole damn thing and so we ate that whole mountain lion then i had then i came into other mountain lion meat in other ways and always enjoyed it to the point where i wasn't eating it because i had a moral obligation to eat what i killed i was going out of my way to get it because i'd rather eat someone else's mountain line than buy pork it's like pork it's that similar it's white meat man wow you can take

the back straps with fat on it you can leave the fat on it and take that back strap and see you got to cook it good because they'll have you know it's probably going to have trichinosis so you got to cook it to 160 just like just how used to be. Cook it, sear it. The fat's good. The meat's good. We cook it down and make all kinds of preparations with it cooked down. My kids, they eat a bunch of mountain lion meat, you know, well cooked. Yeah, but that's one of those things that we're not accustomed to.

But we're fine with things we are accustomed to. If you showed a mountain lion dead on social media and you're like, can't wait to eat this, people would go fucking crazy. You saw that recent controversy with that woman who shot a goat. An invasive species on an island off of Scotland. It's an animal they have to hunt. They literally have to hunt them.

If you've never seen what a goat can do to an environment they just destroy everything they eat everything they can they they they cause erosion they they they decimate all the local foliage but they weren't seeing that and i think that they were like the people that were upset about that were really like struggling to describe why it upset them even a politician had pointed out that the person was wearing camouflage because traditionally in scotland you hunt with different clothes and like there was no secret that there's hunting going on out there right no secret at all it was that it's an american that she's wearing camouflage uh she's adorned you know like like makeup and it's kind of like a like this beautiful image

set up she had a high-powered rifle which they're already using out there anyways and it was just a confusing idea and a confusing image for people had it been some old scottish dude with his with his you know deerstalker outfit on but there's something where people are like uh why her and why here yeah and it also her description of it as a fun hunt i mean people had a lot of problems with it but it's also i think because it's there wasn't anything else going on she caught a cycle you know she she just got you know she was headed down the river and a tributary opened up and she went right into Controversy Bank. That's what I think happened. And the people that were tweeting about it, I saw Glenn Greenwald tweet about it.

I'm like, you're a journalist. You're an actual journalist, a respected journalist. You should really do some research on this because the way you're calling it, I don't know. I mean, Glenn Greenwald is, I believe he's some sort of an animal rights activist. I don't know if he's a vegan. I don't know if he's a vegetarian. But I know Ricky Gervais isn't. He's not a vegetarian.

He eats meat. No. Really? Yes. That's the weird part, right? Yeah. That's funny, man. I didn't know that.

I didn't know that he did. I had a conversation with him on a radio show about it. He eats meat. Yes. We were talking about hunting. And I brought it up because we were on the radio show together, on the Opie and Anthony show. And I said, I shot bears and I eat them. I eat everything I kill and I hunt for food.

And I prefer to get meat that way. And we discussed the fact that he eats meat. Huh. That's really surprising. It's a weird one right because it's a there's a virtue signaling aspect of shitting on hunters where you're always going to get some positive remarks about it it's it's difficult for me it's not difficult for me for from someone who doesn't someone who doesn't eat meat. Right. I don't have a problem with it.

I'm like, you know, my brother said it best. Like, I don't know. He said, maybe they have a point. But when it's coming from someone who does eat meat, it winds up demonstrating. They're trying to put them, to condemn hunters who are hunting like a a regulated resource yeah to condemn them you're sort of acting like when you condemn you're sort of acting like oh i care about these issues and i want to be out here and i want to be like articulating a perspective and and i know what's going on but then so you're like putting yourself out as a person who has

opinions of value right just just like let your opinion be known yeah so if you're going to have that like where's the self-examination exactly where you are if you're eating meat like you're contributing all kinds of animal death like what is your understanding of what is your understanding of those lives and those deaths how is that not part of your reckoning if i do let's say i am happy that i got a bear that i will eat with my family let's say i am happy about it um is it better for you that you're kind of is it better to be sad about it somehow is it better to be regretful or just ignore the fact altogether or why is it not okay that I'm happy about what I eat? I know the story of it really well.

Like, I understand the history of wildlife in this country. I don't want to say better than anybody, but damn sure better than most. I know where we've been. I have a good sense of where we're going in terms of American wildlife, what the challenges are for American wildlife, right? I'm involved in this stuff on a daily basis. I can know all that, and I can see my place in it, right? I can see what my actions are and whether my actions are helpful or hurtful for something that I care a great deal about.

And if I can know that well and get a deer, a bear, whatever, and have it be food and find that I'm really happy to be involved in that, that somehow is off-putting to people. But it's okay to be that I'm blind to it. I have this nagging sense of guilt about it that I haven't reckoned with. I don't really know about it. And that's an acceptable position for some people to have it's really hard for me with people that are that that are contributing to animal death who who want to condemn those who are more willing to or for whatever reason willing to excited about taking part in the process themselves i gotta find a way to i gotta find a way to to to

engage with it though and i need to get a better to engage with it, though, and I need to get a better understanding of it because the debate isn't going away. I can't keep brushing it off as so ridiculous that it doesn't warrant my time because clearly it does warrant my time to understand that perspective. I just haven't had anybody really give it to me in a good way. I have people say, like,

oh, but they were raised to be eaten. That's a foolish perspective. That, to me, is way worse. It's a foolish perspective. That to me is way, way worse. It's a life condemned. I'd probably rather talk to Ricky. Google if Glenn Greenwald is a vegan. I'd probably rather talk to someone like Ricky Gervais about it because I assume that he's articulate about it. He's articulate.

I don't think his position is nuanced. I think there's some willful ignorance that's a part of people that eat meat but condemn hunting. Willful in the fact that, like I said, they know that they're going to get a certain reaction out of people when they tweet about it on social media. One thing, if you're talking about someone who's out there shooting things and not eating it, okay, I get it. I'm with you. If some guy's just shooting an elephant because he wants his tusks, I'm on your side. I get it. But if someone chooses to hunt, you know, an animal, fill in the blank, that might be a goat, might be weird to you that they're eating this thing. But they're shooting this.

It's an invasive species. It's actually very delicious. It's very edible. It's prized for its meat by some communities. You don't make any sense. You're doing this because you know that other people are ignorant about it as well and either you're ignorant because you've never bothered to look into it or you've bothered to look into it and you're ignoring the nuance yeah in the case of the goat thing there's this added thing there's

an added element that our government on the federal level is involved. There's a lot of state wildlife management agencies that are involved in trying to do wild goat eradication projects on islands. This is something that's ongoing all the time in Hawaii and many other places where we're like out helicopter gunning. Yeah. Helicopter gunning for invasive species. Explain to people how those goats got there in the first place because this is also very weird

a variety of ways but a lot of things were a lot of island species this is one way it happens invasive on islands would be introduced by seafarers whalers

who would want to establish food resources along trans-oceanic routes so that you could put something there and come back and get it later early way like like whalers used to come out of the the the american northeast like all those famous whaling villages in new england you know, they would go down and stop in and like, you know, stop in the Galapagos, whatever, and gather up tortoises that they could flip over in the hold of a boat and the tortoises stay alive for months on its back. You'd have like a fresh meat resource. And as people came to understand scurvy and realizing that fresh meat gives you enough vitamin C to avoid scurvy that you can get from dried meat because the way that vitamin C behaves through the cooking and drying process,

but fresh meat you can keep from having scurvy. Meat became even more important then. But people would come in and you'd cut some sheep loose, cut some goats loose on an island and know that they're going to breed and build up a big population, and that can be like a place you stop in and get food. And other things get introduced in other ways. And of course, animals move, you know, so if you have one island that has close proximity to another island, they can-

Swim across. Yeah, bump over. And then it destroys native vegetation. They trample birds' nests. And so you have many cases where introductions of non-natives particularly non-native grazing animals non-native predators will wind up causing like a lot of extinctions of endemic species on islands and creates all kinds of problems and that's exactly what we're talking about with this goat in that picture so this is an animal that must be killed. If you want healthy wildlife on that island,

the native wildlife, and the native fauna, the flora, all this stuff that lives there, all the stuff that's supposed to be there, you've got to kill the goats. Otherwise, they'll eat everything. But I think people look. People look and they're like, I don't buy that that was

the motivation of that person. What I care about is motivations of individuals. I think you're right. Because when California got rid of mountain lion hunting, they're still killing several hundred mountain lions here a year. People are comfortable with, like, the total lion kill didn't change much. People are comfortable with a state agent or someone being paid to go out and kill lions. They're not comfortable with someone paying who wants to go do it. I don't think they realize, I don't think they realize that state agencies are killing as many mountain lions in California as they are. I don't think

people understand that. I think people do understand if something gets put on the ballot, you know, would you like to reintroduce mountain lion hunting? People would go crazy. Like, why would you do that? Mountain lions are beautiful. They're exciting. I want to see them. But these are people in Santa Monica. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah. They're not people that are living, you know, an hour outside of Bakersfield. They've got 16 mountain lions in their backyard in a year. This is a different kind of world. You know, if they're in the Tachapi Mountains out there, and you see mountain lions all the time. They have a lot of mountain lions. It's a real issue. And there's a problem, too, that I view, and this is coming from,

there's a problem where I think a lot of people have a very hard time empathizing with people who might be negatively impacted by wildlife as well in the question of the lion issue. Right. Where it's kind of like this idea like, well, you better suck it up. Yeah. So if you're a rancher and you're running cattle in an area

where you're losing a lot of cattle, the wolves and grizzlies, people will look and be like, you better suck it up, buddy. Like, I can't really picture your problem but your complaints are not legitimate well they can't if someone were to cut a if someone were to cut a grizzly loose in golden gate state park right i don't know um i think that people would have would come to have a different perspective on that to put it mildly yeah but it winds up being that you look and people are they don't really want to hear about other people's problems if it doesn't if it doesn't jive with their understanding of what problems are yeah and that's the area

where the issue around grizzly bears and in the delisting so you know they were delisted they were removed from endangered species act protection protection temporarily because they had met all recovery goals. So what's the recovered population look like? They mapped out what it would look like, and we've exceeded that for many years now. And they were delisted. But then Wyoming and Idaho moved to have a very limited hunt on them. And then a federal judge blocked the delisting and they went back in the listing what's the federal judge's motivation well you want to hope that uh

that they didn't have one you wanted you want to think that they were just looking at you know the details of it but i think there's a suspicion that that person went into that no one damn sure what they were gonna do you know uh but but you don't really know i mean a lot of these arguments around they come down to like technicalities right no one's arguing that the population's recovered well there's also the argument that the judge is probably trying to protect his own reputation because the amount of blowback that a judge would receive for allowing a hunt to go through is vastly different than blocking a hunt. Yeah. Blocking a hunt, you're not going to get that much blowback.

You'll get a few people that are upset, but it hadn't been an established resource. It's not like you're taking something away from people. But if he allowed it, boy, the wildlife people would go fucking bananas on this guy. Yeah. They tend to, like, and I don't even call them, like, I don't call them environmentalists. Like, people who sue to block the delisting of recovered species, they'll masquerade as, you know, ecologically conscious environmentalists. But they're just people who it's untenable to them. You know, they can't, they're never going to accept the idea that you're going to have human exploitation of this resource.

They masquerade as they have an environmental motivation, but it's not. It's an animal rights motivation. They have a sensitive ear in a certain federal court in Missoula, and so you'll see a lot of these cases around wolves and grizzlies. They'll get that. They'll want it done through that court. They know that they're probably going to have a friendly take on it. I think it was a real, it was watching that happen.

And that's been happening recently. I think it was a real, a real travesty because, um, there's a couple of things that happen like culturally in areas where you'll you create a lot of tension with people where there's people that are living amongst these things and they're looking for some level of some level of relief and they want to see it go to state management and they might want to see the state exercise some control over where certain populations of large predators are spreading into. And when it winds up being that their voices are not heard, you know,

and they feel that people from far away are really heavily influencing decisions that affect them on a daily basis, it winds up creating like a lot of animosity toward the species too. Where, like think about what happened with the spotted owl, right? The spotted owl, no one can see, no one perceives the spotted owl as owl anymore. The spotted owl has become like a symbol of federal overreach. And you'll find that wolves for a while, they become like a symbol of a dispute. And people stop liking the animals much, and it becomes like this like contentious creature and i think that we're going to head that way if we keep if if we keep stepping in on wildlife issues with the mentality that we've been approaching the wolf and grizzly issue in the northern great lakes the northern

rockies soon to be in the greater yeltsin ecosystem now i think you're dealing with local and then you're dealing with national right so the local people are going to have an issue with it because they're going to be impacted by it. It's going to be directly impacting their life. Dogs are going to be killed. They're going to take domestic cattle and all sorts of different things. You're going to have real issues with the people that like to go elk hunting. The populations have diminished rapidly.

But the rest of the country doesn't give a shit. People in San Franciscoisco they don't give a fuck about it people in chicago aren't impacted by it if especially if they don't have anyone in their family that hunts or anyone that has a background in hunting and they don't have a background in it themselves they don't care no people really don't and it's i i point it out all the time, but that I care about the availability and abundance of deer, elk, moose, caribou, right? Like I care about the resource. There's a lot of people who rely on the resource, use the resource. They're major economic drivers.

I'm definitely, I'm anything but. I'm like, I regard myself as a pro-wolf person like i regard myself as a pro wolf person i regard myself as a pro grizzly person i cherish every interaction i have with those animals do you think i love to be around them a resource i don't have a problem calling resource but people do have a problem with calling a resource and um and and yeah i'm like pro i like the insuitable habitat i like to see them present i also like to see see that I also like to see them managed in a way that allows for abundant wild game resources. What's going on? House passed a bill to drop legal protections for gray wolves.

It's passed today. Whoa. Or, yeah, well, this part was two hours ago. Well, roll down a little bit. Well, this is part of what was two hours ago. Well, roll down a little bit. Republican-controlled House passed a bill on Friday to drop legal protections to gray wolves across the lower 48 states, reopening a lengthy battle over the predator species.

Long despised by farmers and ranchers, wolves were shot, trapped, poisoned out of existence in most of the U.S. in the mid-20th century. By the mid-20th century, since securing protection in the 1970s, wolves have bounced back. Well, that's not really exactly what happened. Great Lakes of Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin as well, and the northern Rockies in Pacific Northwest. That's sort of, but they're not talking about the reintroduction. The reintroduction is the big issue, right?

And that's what people have a great issue with. Well, yeah, but the reintroduction is only in one area. The Great Lake, northern great lakes uh that was not a reintroduction there was you know a sizable population well movements of wolves coming down from canada and coming back in the northern the northern continental divide ecosystem not a reintroduction you had a place where they have famous yeah well you had the famous case of the famous reintroduction in yeltsin national park so it's widely viewed now it's widely viewed now that if you wouldn't have done that, you would have had, had you not done that reintroduction, you would have had a natural flow anyway. A natural flow from Canada. You would have gotten it.

You would have eventually have gotten there anyway. Interesting. But would they have gotten to the exact same levels? No. No. At this particular point right now, I think that would be laughable to act as though they'd be there now. But people, there's now a realization that you would have, without the reintroduction, you would have through natural movement have eventually gotten. Do you think that that supports the idea of the reintroduction?

Do you think the reintroduction was well thought out i don't want you know i'm not going to debate the merits of the reintroduction like i said um my perspective on it it should be in a place where it supports them yeah my perspective on it is i i don't uh the idea of extinction and regional extirpation sickens me. I do not believe in, I do not believe that as a people, as a culture, we can justify or afford to remove species of wildlife from the landscape, native species of wildlife from the landscape. Like I said, the idea sickens me.

native species of wildlife from the landscape. Like I said, the idea sickens me. I like to have all native wildlife present on the landscape. So I don't oppose it. What I oppose is a thing that's happened now is getting where we have populations that we agree like what will recovery look like and at what point and what how will we manage all the different viewpoints that are coming in all the different like interests of all these varied stakeholders and at what point where we get in there and manipulate the situation that we're creating um i just would move that in a different direction where i think that when that recovered species,

right? In this case, we're talking about wolves and grizzlies. I think that you should have that. If you can do it in a sustainable way that doesn't have long-term deleterious impacts on the population, that they should be managed as a renewable resource. See,

this is where people are going to have issues. Sure, man. Don't have anything. Just even the term you manage them as a renewable resource you mean shoot them and kill them and use their fur sure i think that i think that recovered species that i think that if you put something on the endangered species act and it goes under federal protection um and then when it reaches recovery

and the u.s fish and wildlife service says it recovered, it's time to hand it back to state management. If a state then decides that they're going to do some limited harvest, particularly, let's say even if they're focusing on areas where there's very high prevalence of human-animal conflict, and the state decides to do that in some minor way as a way to service the needs of certain segments of their population that wants something to happen. I don't think that then some, like an activist judge or, or environmental groups or animal rights groups should come in and be like,

well, nevermind. We're going to pretend that they're not recovered now because we want to prevent the state from doing something that we think is unsavory. Well, the thought process behind the people that support blocking the hunt is that if you leave these animals alone naturally they're going to find balance and that the wolves will kill the elk until there's not enough elk for them to sustain their populations and the

numbers of their offspring will dwindle and they'll get to some sort of a sustainable level yeah but we already i mean we live in a but we live in a heavily manipulated kind of man-made environment now. The idea that we would just let things run their course and watch what happens isn't going to happen. You're still going to have a lot of grizzlies every year are still going to get in trouble. They're still going to get killed. You're still going to have mortality. You're going to have tons of grizzlies every year are still going to get in trouble. They're still going to get killed. You're still going to have mortality. You're going to have tons of grizzly mortality in tough areas. But the grizzlies aren't acting in packs.

No, but they kill cattle and they butt up against humans. It's just like it's inevitable you're going to have some of that. You're not going to let it run. As a person, as a hunter, I also don't have a problem with and actually support as a hunter that we would, you know, while allowing wolves to be present on the landscape, that we would mitigate their impact on big game. I don't mind saying, I don't mind just coming out and saying that I like to have high populations of big game animals that are available to hunters. high populations of big game animals that are available to hunters. And also at the same time, sharing some of that resource there,

having wolves on the ground doing it. Don't want to see them gone. Not anti-wolf, not anti-grizzly. It's just one of those, it's because a wolf is so much like a dog and because there's not a great history of people eating. I remember you telling me about one mountain man where his favorite food was wolf. Bill Jalmer Steffensen. Yeah. He was an Arctic explorer.

What a crazy fucker that guy must have been, huh? Favorite. Loved wolf meat. You ever tried it? No. No. No. But you've eaten coyote.

You've eaten coyote. So you've eaten a species of wolf. No, I've never killed a wolf, never killed a grizzly bear. Just haven't. Haven't eaten either of them. I ate one coyote. Yeah. I ate it, didn't like it.

Haven't messed with one since. Yeah, you said that was similar to diver duck too, right? That was Remy. Remy felt it tasted like bad diver duck. I eat diver ducks and still eat diver ducks. But no, I haven't no i haven't uh haven't done that anymore and then um haven't included any coyote recipes and uh there's no coyote recipes in the wild game cookbook either wolf might be the ultimate one that people are

going to have a problem with at the very that might be where the the rubber hits the road well you know in some places it's become a moot point because Idaho, Wyoming, Montana all have state management of wolves. Yeah. All of the things that were all these horrible things that were going to happen when the states resumed management of wolves didn't materialize. Right. But those places also have a rich history of hunting. Yeah. But it was going to be the end of wolves, right?

It hasn't been in the first few years in the first few years of the wool seasons you actually had you actually saw the populations go up well it's so hard to hunt them right well they it winds up being that uh putting that with that little bit of hunting pressure on them really changed their really changed their movements and changed the way they perceive human threats, and they adjust to it pretty quickly. But it hasn't led to, you know, I think a lot of people look in those cases where it was pretty effective.

You know, it was very effective to bring in limited regulated hunting, had the desired effect on how wolves were using the landscape and ways in which they were interacting and avoiding humans. I have no doubt, too. I have no doubt, too. Like, the situation will probably, in the northern Great Lakes, they had state management, lost state management. Like, it bounces back and forth.

You're going to eventually, I mean, it kind of depends on how the political winds blow, but you're eventually going to wind up with it there, and you're not going to see wolves vanish from the landscape. You know, you're just not. If grizzly bears wind up doing it, you're still going to see gradually expanding populations of grizzly bears, despite the fact that they're using limited harvest to achieve certain management objectives. It's not going to be the end of the world. It's just not.

Yeah, I agree with you, and I think the grizzly bear thing thing you probably have the same sort of situation where the grizzlies will eventually think of people as a threat and it'll probably be safer for everybody that's one thing that people that's one thing that people hope and again people aren't really um a lot of people looking from the outside in aren't very sensitive to it yeah to the idea of the way that which that's you know that this has impacted professional hunting guides hunters but these are my people these are people that i care about and i care about their needs yeah right and it's and it's an issue so um time will tell where that where that winds up well we see it in bc where they've just taken it away and they take it they've taken it away in a very irrational way because they they have a large population of grizzlies in bc it's very large and for people

that live up there that that hunt them this is kind of scaring the shit out of them that all of a sudden you've taken this away first of all it was a source of income for a lot of these people that would guide them but it was also a smart thing to control the population and keep them away from humans. Well, I watch that closely, though I don't feel it being another country. You know, you don't have that sense of it being that other country. You don't have that sense that you could influence, you know? So it's kind of like watching something happen in a distant way, and you don't feel it as closely,

and I don't know all the factors that play as well as I do here. Well, I have some friends that live up there. My friend Mike Hawkridge, who's a guide up there, he's told me horror stories about grizzlies. I'd shoot one trying to get into his cabin from like six feet away. Yeah. And, you know, they're big fuckers. They are. I love them to death.

They're great. I mean, it's cool that they're real. I mean, it really is. It's a wild thing that we have this huge monster that lives in the woods. Yeah, having been charged by them, I wouldn't change a thing, man. Yeah, and you were charged by them. I like every encounter and every mix-up. And it's really, it's like deeply complicated stuff and and when

talking about these things it's also they become like everything they become a proxy where we're engaged in a debate about um what is you know we're engaged in debate about like conflicting views on wildlife and these animals step in to this debate and the debate centers around them. And it winds up being bigger than a debate about grizzlies, bigger than a debate about bison or buffalo, right? Bigger than a debate about wolves. It's just that these animals step into this ongoing dialogue about what is our relationship with the natural world? What is our relationship with renewable resources? what is our relationship with the natural world? What is our relationship with renewable resources? What is our relationship with rural versus urban perspectives on how people should be

around wildlife and be impacted by wildlife? And so it's just this through line of us trying to sort out how to be like good, responsible stewards of the landscape. And that debate always centers around these things like you could have a huge argument like you'd be like in a lot of tension with your spouse right and it springs up in a debate about how best to load the dishwasher or who was supposed to pick up the kid from school right there's always like it always finds a place to live um and right now we're like this argument about american wildlife and what is our relationship

to it has has found its place to live right now around large predators yeah and in scotland it's found its way to live around a feral goat on an island wow in that one case yeah um all the traveling that you do and all the the hunting trips you go on this has it gotten to a point ever that it seems like a job yeah as now that i have kids i've it's changed a little bit i view it a little bit differently um but no i still i still really love it and i'm able it. And I'm able to know that I'm missing my family while I'm out. I'm able to know that and feel that pain and still know that I love what I do. And I love talking about the things that I talk about. And I view it as I'm sure you do. It's like this tremendous privilege that you're able to kind of grow up to have this intense interest in a subject and this intense interest in a lifestyle.

And have the ability to introduce people to all these different ideas. So, yeah, I can have those two things simultaneous um the kind of longing to be home more but enjoying being out i think if it would if the longing to be home more would override that someday it might change it but right now i'm you know i just have seen so many things that i'm happy to have seen. And to think about a future of not accumulating those experiences at the rapid rate that I've accumulated them in kind of bums me out a little bit. Yeah, you've lived a hundred lives. You know, the trip that you were talking about when you were in South America in the jungle and you came across those pictographs.

What do you say? How do you call those things? Petroglyphs. Petroglyphs. Petroglyphs petroglyphs petroglyphs on the rocks that no one had any idea who made yeah no one know why they were just there yeah no it's not like a spot on a map that tourists go to visit oh here's the petroglyphs no they're just there they're just there and the the hunter's like yeah there they are the ancient ones made these hey let's get the Yeah. They really don't give a shit.

But it's like you're seeing who knows how old that is. 1,000 years old? 2,000 years old? Yeah. Could be more. Impossible to say. But to have to run into stuff like that. Yeah.

Beautiful experiences, man. And then to eat the way I eat and live the way i eat it's it's yeah i feel fortunate all the time well i think you're very important because there's a there's a real lack of well-read articulate people that support your position um that are in the media i mean you got a lot of these shows that are on these uh the hunting networks that they appeal to a very narrow bandwidth and this narrow bandwidth is you know just uh it's it's like your stereotypical idea of what hunting is to a lot of people so they'll flip through the channels they'll watch that for a few minutes you see someone hooting and hollering after they shoot something and they

get this bad taste in their mouth about it whereas uh i tell people all the time if you really want to get an understanding about what hunting is about i always recommend your show because your your narration and your reverence for what you're doing and the animals and just your your appreciation for how cool the experience is and how wild it is to you know for lack of a better term to just to be out there in nature and to be in the pursuit of these things and then to take these things, these wild creatures, and feed your family and have it become a part of your life. And to sustain yourself with it primarily. You're giving a perspective that I don't think is available that I think is really important. Because it's just, there's so many people that are out there that are hunters, that are smart, well-read people that feel frustrated.

Like, God, I wish everybody could see it the way I see it. Yeah, I think it's important to point out that my love of hunting and of fishing and of living like a hands-on relationship with the natural world, living in close proximity to wildlife. Like my interest in that and desire to do that predated by a long ways my ability to talk about why I think that those things are important. It was there. It wasn't like I didn't grow up around that and then later started understanding the stuff and thinking about it and then decided like, well, the path for me then, considering what I know now, the path for me then would be to figure out hunting. It was like hunting was there. I loved it.

I love it today. And I just had the luxury through what I do for a living to spend a lot of time thinking about, well, why is that the case? If this feels like harmonious to you and you can kind of like live in this and understand it and see how you fit into some greater, you know, ecological picture, right? If it does feel that way and that seems to be true, how is it that like, why is that right? And it was pushing at those edges that I eventually developed a way in which I talk about it. Now, I meet all kinds of people who live that same lifestyle that I lived growing up. And when I talk to them, a thing that they appreciate is just that someone is articulating to them something that they felt to be true and knew to be true, but

just hadn't had the time or, you know, didn't have the time or ability to really go out and express it. So I just, I would never want to act like I've invented, like I certainly have not invented some way of thinking about it. Like Aldo Leopold and, you know, Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, throughout history, like Jim Harris and Tom McGuane for contemporary writers. There's been a lot of people who have been saying and talking about and experiencing the outdoors in a way. I haven't invented some new thing. I'm working toward articulating and expressing something that has been in existence for a long time.

If people see negative stereotypes when they're on YouTube or see negative stereotypes on certain television shows. A lot of that stuff is self-feeding. I think a lot of that stuff gets created because it does have a shock value to it. And I would think that minus the camera, a lot of activities that people might feel are abhorrent might not even be taking place, where there is a hamming it up for the camera that goes on. That's interesting. Do you think that there's like a sort of a stereotypical pattern that they feel like they have to fall into? So they fall into it when the camera's on, almost like a DJ strip club voice? Yeah, I think that there's some of that, man. You know what I mean?

I think there's some of that. And there's also a thing that happens with people who feel under attack. And in many ways, you know, hunters are under attack in a lot of ways in a lot of places. And I think that there's a way when you feel like you're being attacked, you feel like you're being pigeonholed, stereotyped, a response is to cram it right back down someone else's throat right right you're like i'll show you and and there's definitely that stuff or like you fall into this us against them you know fuck them like i'm gonna you know i'll show them how we really are right and you you get into this like kind of dialogue thing it's a lot more pain it's like more painful i think um maybe not more painful it's definitely more hard to be like okay

let's let's talk about this for real this is really something we need to discuss let's like dig in and discuss it and i think that a lot of people feel like um that hunting feels like something that's natural to them they like to do it And they don't feel the need to take the time to explain it. And when pressed to explain it, they maybe kind of lash out. Yeah. And maybe lack the ability to look at it from an outside perspective because it's been a part of their life, their whole life, and they don't want to justify it.

Yeah. justify it um yeah it's i it's all there's also the weird thing that as much as you uh can appreciate hunting and think of it as a an ethical way to acquire meat everybody can't do it we've got too many people it's untenable and that that's that's a i mean there's no responsibility for you to acknowledge that but it's uh it's's something that gets brought up when people talk about how ethical acquisition of meat is really like either hunting or you'd have to raise something yourself and be absolutely aware or get something from a farmer who who's you know completely ethical from from birth to death and and you have to be comfortable with that but the most ethical in my opinion is a hunting but then people always say yeah but everybody can't hunt okay but i can you know if i can what do i do about the fact that everybody can't hunt well everyone could come in it's moot points it's just it doesn't matter i guess they're not going to but no certainly everyone could enter into the hunting

game you know you could come in and hunt it would just mean that you had a much larger pool of people after a limited resource and that limited resource would be allocated in a different way yeah you could have total participation and it would just be that um every person's slice of the pie would be much smaller but it's not like you know when we look at when a state met like looks at like what's a what what what's a turkey harvest that our state could support They break the state up into a bunch of different units. They look at population trends, and they determine, like, how many turkeys can we afford to harvest without impacting the turkey population, right? If everyone in the state wanted a chance, you'd still wind up with the same number.

You'd wind up with the same number of turkeys being killed. It would just be that you would have less opportunity. You'd have to wait longer to get your turn. So it's not that everybody can't. I don't think that, but it's not even really a point because everybody will not. When I do the stuff that I do, like in writing a wild game cookbook, I'm doing two things. In writing a wild game cookbook, I'm doing the main thing that I feel is the most important part of my job or the most important part of what I am is I'm like having a conversation with people who live this lifestyle right like those are people that I relate to I uh want to represent

the world in a way that like enhances their lives provide education right and share my experiences with an audience of people that I recommend is a tribe that I'm part of which would be like American hunters and anglers and I'm presenting them like I'm is a tribe that I'm part of, which would be like American hunters and anglers. And I'm presenting them, like I'm doing a cookbook, I'm presenting them like best practices, how to sort of like live the best version of a wild game lifestyle that they can. Here's a way to think about and approach wild game. But also the secondary part of what I'm doing is presenting a world to people who might be unfamiliar with it.

Right. world to people who might be unfamiliar with it right and yes do i have the hope that people will like say read this book and then be like man i want to participate in this lifestyle um that could mean as much as them walking down to the local river in their city and flipping over rocks and picking up crayfish but it is introducing, bringing them into the natural world and bringing them into engagement with nature. And I do view and hope that that will happen. Will it happen in some grand scale where we'll have hundreds of millions of hunters in this country? No, that's not going to happen. But I do think that it is important that we do have more people involved. We, in large measure, we fund much of our wildlife work and management from law enforcement disease

research on and on we fund that stuff through hunting and fishing licenses and through excise taxes on sporting goods equipment if the the more people that are engaged with this activity i think the the better it winds up being for american wildlife i agree but the idea is that everyone can't do it so the idea that you're saying that this is how you ethically acquire meat this is not a it's not a solution for everyone no but i don't think i don't i don't i don't say that this is the only way i'm not saying you do okay i'm saying this is one of the arguments that people make if you say that you know hey i hunt for my meat this is the only way. I'm not saying you don't. Oh, okay. I'm saying this is one of the arguments that people make if you say that, you know, hey, I hunt for my meat. This is how I ethically acquire meat.

Yeah. Well, everybody can't do that because there's not enough animals. That's true. That's true. Everybody can't do that. If even more people got involved, I mean, this is not a solution for the entire population. You can say, well, that's good. The entire population is not going to do it anyway.

But it's a stranger. There's just the giant number of human beings that need to be fed. Yeah. There's almost no other solution than the solution that we're doing right now unless they come up with some sort of a lab-created meat or whatever the fuck they're going to come up with next, of a you know i mean their lab created meat or whatever the fuck they're gonna come up with next which they are doing your lips are curling as the it was involuntary i said yeah i'm pretty happy with uh i'm pretty happy with my diet right now yeah and i'm uh but i yeah i watch that kind of stuff and i'm curious about it but i don't i don't take it

as a personal insult by any stretch, man. If everybody switched to lab-created meat and I still had the ability to continue eating how I eat and living how I live, I don't view that as being a future problem. Rocky Mountain Elk Federation has reintroduced – Foundation, yeah. What did I say, federation? Yeah. Foundation. They've introduced

uh elk to a lot of different places and made sustainable populations that are now hunted um and this is i mean this is a beautiful thing and i'd hope that they they continue to spread and continue to do that do you think it's possible that other game animals could be reintroduced to places where they would develop such a large population that we could sustain maybe even double the amount of hunters that we have now is that possible well put it this way um yes okay for starters yes you know that you just pull up an article about wolves you know i sell like like every article from mainstream news sources to get that involves wolves you'll you'll kind of detect the bias of the individual

writing it and they're saying how wolves have only been recovered across 10 percent of their historic range elk that's about the same for elk yeah right elk are missing from 80 plus percent of their historic range in the lower 48 right but we have, you know, at various times, we have a quarter million of them living in Colorado or, you know, some states got 100,000, whatever. You got now perhaps 20,000 living in Kentucky. Those were all gone. New Mexico at a point had zero, right? Michigan, zero. Kentucky, zero. Pennsylvania, zero. Elk were gone from the unregulated slaughter of the market hunting era when people could shoot meat and sell it into urban like meat markets right they eliminated American wild game before we figured out how to do what the word I keep using all the

time now which is like regulated harvest regulated management um so all that stuff was gone like there were states where there was no uh states where there was no deer hunting. At the time of European contact, we had turkeys in 39 states. It got whittled down to turkeys in 19 states. You now have turkey hunting seasons in 49 states. We've done a tremendous job of recovering wildlife, particularly a tremendous job of, because to demonstrate like what happens to an animal that hunters value

and love and are able to use as a renewable resource is those species tend to really enjoy a lot of protections and they thrive because people are vested in their best interests. So yeah, we've created turkey hunting seasons in 30 states. So yes, you can recover what, you can, like, do things with wildlife and, like, create resources. The fact that we now, we used to argue about what's going to happen with deer. Are we going to, like, drive deer to extinction in certain states or extirpation in certain states? Now our big argument is what do we do with having so many deer?

Here it winds up being that you come up against social tolerances. It's hard to, like, you know, when we fill in the map on elk, when the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation looks at filling in the map on elk, you got to sell people on the idea that you're going to recover elk. And there's a lot of resistance to recovering wildlife because a lot of stuff's inconvenient to have around. They do a great job of brokering deals with states and finding places where, you know, a state maybe has a patch of habitat they think could support the animals and providing the expertise and financial support and all that stuff to, like, bring in those things. But generally you wind up where, because of settlement, cities and suburban areas,

we wind up with fewer and fewer places where we can go and do it. So to really fill in the map on recovering elk across all that range where they're supposed to be, I don't know that we'll get there, but we've gotten there in a lot of other stuff. And there's like the Wild Sheep Foundation, right? They're trying to do the same thing with bighorn sheep. There, it's not even social attitudes. There it winds up being disease. Like they spent-

From domestic sheep yeah their their main like the main problem preventing us from recovering bighorn sheep is disease types of pneumonia that come from domestic sheep wow and people you know to go in and say to someone who's running sheep on a mountain domestic sheep on a mountain say, hey, no insult to you and no insult to your forebears who've been sheep ranchers here for 120 years or whatever, but we would like to try to recover American wildlife and bring bighorns back to this mountain range, and that's going to require you moving these sheep out of the way.

It's an insulting idea to people. So there's a blocker there. And every animal has its own type of problem turkeys it worked because people don't get pissed about turk you know no they like having them around yeah and look at what's going on with just allowing you know allowing bison to walk out of yellowstone national park it's that's been an issue for a quarter century now. People are like, I'm not comfortable with you letting these big-ass things walk out of the park and roam around because of disease, grazing.

People don't want to be inconvenienced by wildlife. These are places where, in that area, I would really like to see. When a bison leaves the park, he stops being a wild animal and becomes livestock. What's going on with that American savanna thing? What is that program? The APR?

Yeah, what are they calling that again? The American Prairie Reserve. Yeah. What is going on with that? Explain what the fuck that is because this is crazy. I mean mean I know It's just a long story Too long?

Yeah we're gonna have We're working with having the It's too long We're working with having the founder on our show Yeah To have a conversation American Prairie Reserve What they're essentially trying to do

Is reintroduce a bunch of animals Into a gigantic chunk of land And they continue to buy up more of this land and uh aren't they running block management on this as well yes and there's a lot of there's there's a lot yeah there's a lot of uh suspicions and controversy and it's like a it's a it's an idea that a lot of people are uneasy with but the problem not the not the problem, the thing is, it's like people who are, you know, they have funding and have a thing where when land comes for sale, they buy it. And the goal of buying up the land is to turn it back into, you know, turn it back into wildlife habitat for native wildlife. for native wildlife and it why it's contra it's the controversy around it stems from the fact that some people don't like to see areas that were that supported like traditional economies

in rural areas like cattle ranching and and to see these to see these areas returning to a wild landscape um is threatening to people From the hunter perspective is they're allowing, there's a lot of places that people used to be able to hunt. And the American Prairie Reserve is allowing hunting to go on. And people are coming in and saying, well, they need to make sure, they need to assure us that hunting will be allowed here in perpetuity. And because we're suspicious about what's going on. So there's a lot of like, you hear about it in so many ways,

but the core mission is something that most people, when you look at it, the core mission is something that most people are going to look at and be pretty comfortable with, be like, okay, you're a guy or an organization, you have money, and when a ranch comes up for sale, you buy it on the open market. The seller names his price. You pay the price. It's now your land. If you choose to not run cattle but want to have bison roam around on it, why should I

care? Right? But people do care because they look at it as being like a value judgment. They look at it as being like a value judgment about rural economies and about agriculture. Oh. Huh. I didn't think about it that way. at it as being like a value judgment about rural economies and about agriculture oh huh i didn't think about it that way and there's a thousand more aspects of this there's a thousand more aspects of this where like it's a rich subject dude i'd love to get into it more about next time i come on okay next time it would take like an hour to explain the situation

what is their long-term plan? Like how long is this going on for? It's been going on for quite a while, right? The long-term play is that over time you would assemble a chunk of the Great Plains that is far bigger than Yellowstone National Park, that supports a thriving population of bison, grizzly bears um you know in a in a park-like setting wow but it doesn't come without uh you know it doesn't come without its own bits of controversy and yeah again it's like it's the thing that everyone has opinion about. There was a version they don't like to talk about. There was a version of this called the Buffalo Commons that happened long ago

where there was a social scientist named, I think it was Frank Popper, by the last name of Popper, and he was looking at demographic patterns on the Great Plains. And he was observing the ways in which the areas on the Great Plains where the population was shrinking. So there's a lot of counties on the Great Plains where through various long-term agricultural trends and other issues where the human population is rapidly shrinking,

rapidly declining. And this sociologist brought up this idea that if these trends continue, you're going to have this rare case in which a landscape sort of accidentally rewilded, okay, where everyone left, which is not a story we're familiar with. When we look at what happens to wildlands across the world. The general story is people move in and wildlife moves out. So this idea became known like the Buffalo Commons. And it just so happens that that idea kind of centered around this area around Jordan, Montana.

Because you have large tracts of federally managed public land up there. You had a lot of ranch land that wasn't that expensive and people could buy it. And that was like the seed of the idea. I think that now there was such an unpopular notion because it had to do with like economic decay, right? And shrinking towns and reduced resources for public education and all the kind of stuff that comes from having an economy that's not thriving. But over time, that Buffalo Commons idea kind of segued into this American Prairie Reserve idea and happened to be sort of centered around the same chunk of land. Bill Kittredge, a Western writer who deals with a lot of landscape and environmental issues,

was talking about uh in the wake of the buffalo commons idea and popper's work was talking about going to jordan montana and talking about the buffalo commons is a great way to get your ass kicked because it's this idea like if if culturally like the agricultural producers and ranchers were celebrated and they made a civilization out of the wilderness and they brought in animals and created economies and created communities. And for someone to now say, you know, thanks, but no thanks, bro. We'd rather go back and eliminate your presence on this landscape. And we don't, in fact, value what you did.

And we're going to try as hard as we can to undo what you did. Because we now view it as that you did, your people did the wrong thing. We're going to try as hard as we can to undo what you did because we now view it as that you did your people did the wrong thing we're going to correct that wrong and some like it's some people it's like this insulting idea to a lot of other people they celebrate it because they're like hey if it's for sale and i buy it it's mine i could see it from both perspectives sure man it's it's it's very much like the hunting thing if you're a part of it you have a deep history in it you you understand that you know your perspective of ranching is from a rancher whereas people in

the outside conveniently can be ignorant about it and go oh fuck those ranchers i want to see the buffalo yeah and my perspective yeah my perspective on wildlife has been it's a thing that you care about. You work to conserve. You want to have it on the landscape. And you also eat a lot of it. And that's a foreign idea for people. Yeah, it is. I'm glad that you can't sell wild game.

I'm glad that market hunting is not a thing. However, I would really love it if there was a restaurant where you could go, where you could buy really well-prepared wild game dishes, like a really well-prepared bear, really well-prepared mountain lion, well-prepared fill-in-the-blank with the animal. I just think that would be a fascinating place to eat. And maybe if they could do something like that It wouldn't be that you could actually sell the meat

I mean there would have to be some weird work around You know it would have to be like Someone would have to give it to you You have to come to one of my dinner parties Well that's fine but I mean I would like it if there was a place where The general public could participate in it I think they'd get a better understanding.

I put up these posts all the time of elk that I cook, and people are like, God damn, I want to eat some of that. How do I eat that? How do you eat that? You've got to go get one of them. It's the only way you can eat that. Or come to my house. Yeah, you can go and buy the farm-raised version.

But then it's... Good luck getting a farm raised blueberry black bear yeah well no not that case but like you know you can buy but then it's that's a whole other conversation around the captive servant industry but yeah you can buy you can buy elk that are raised in a ranch environment right yeah i mean as long as you're getting it from new zealand you're not dealing with cwd and a lot of the other issues that they're dealing with in america right well yeah but they're not Zealand, you're not dealing with CWD and a lot of the other issues that they're dealing with in America, right? Well, yeah, but they're not.

I mean, those places are tested and herds that have CWD in them are destroyed. Right. Yeah. Yeah, but the whole New Zealand thing, that was an interesting thing that you brought up on your podcast recently, how New Zealand, there have been talks about actual eradication and one of the arguments that hunters always use is hey we're controlling the population this is a good service that we're providing yeah and then the government comes along and says well how about we take care of that and everybody's like hey hey not so fast yeah it's uh that that takes place in australia and new zealand where they have these thriving, very robust populations

of non-native wildlife. And the government has always and does now do a lot of culling of these animals. They don't have predators, right? They're very fecund, have extremely high reproductive rates. And the government is actively engaged around the clock gunning wildlife from helicopters. Just letting it rot.

You just shoot and leave it a lot of you know native uh plant species from going to extinct and fragile environments and all kinds of reasons like there's no death right there's no there's no predator there's no predator control on which is huge and then and in a lot of places just completely inadequate amount of hunting and the thing that hunters have always been able to say in australia new zealand is they've been enabled to um within in a culture where, particularly in Australia, like a culture that seems to be not as friendly toward hunters as they are in America,

you're able to say, well, you know, we're participating in wildlife control. And then later when people come up and they talk about, well, you know what, we're going to get serious about this and we're going to really actively with the goal of like totally eliminating these species um people are justifiably made uneasy about it because it's a it's a thing that they've come to appreciate and rely on and a resource that they want to use and now they're like whoa wait a minute i don't kill them all i do like them being here and it winds up putting you in this weird like you know winds up putting up putting you in a weird rhetorical position.

But I understand where they're coming from. Because if you could live there and you could agree that we're going to have some small number of them on the landscape and we're going to use those and we're going to hunt those and eat those. I also, if someone said, hey, they're gone now, I would be bummed. Yeah. I hunt turkeys. I was saying earlier, we had turkeys in 39 states at the time of european contact we have turkeys in 49 states now i hunt turkeys in a lot of those 10 states that didn't historically have turkeys and that do now and i generally have a perspective of trying to preserve native wildlife and trying to control non-natives

because i don't want to wind up with sort of a this like monolithic wildlife pattern or these same super resilient adaptive species such as canada geese and rats and white-tailed deer take over the entire country and pigs yeah so you like like yes i want like the variety so i'm generally like antagonistic toward non-natives but if someone came and said um okay you know what we're gonna actually go in and kill off all the turkeys in those 10 states that historically didn't have turkeys. I would say like, oh, you know, really? Because I've kind of grown to really like those turkeys and they're not really causing

a problem. And I think that some people, you know, if you're a New Zealand hunter, an Australian hunter, I don't think anyone's arguing there should be no control, but I think that they're like, let's find a balance. I think we can find a balance where there's some availability of animals on the landscape since they've been here since the beginning of our experience on this continent. If there's some availability of animals, let's find a reasonable compromise here. Well, that was one of the discussions as well about Hawaii, right?

Like on some of the Hawaiian islands eradicating the pigs. And then the Hawaiians were saying, well, they've been here as long as us yeah we've both been here yeah our ancestors have been here 1100 years they brought the pig with them how am i a native hawaiian and the pig has to go right there's like maybe you people ought to go i always like again man i always instinctively um when i hear stuff i instinctively lean in on i instinctively lean in from the perspective of you know i instinctively lean in from the perspective of the the hunter and angler you know and like and and and i love all these little debates and i think that they're all really helpful and interesting. But, no, I feel like I can recognize their pain.

And I can also look far away and laugh at the absurdity of it. Like, I even had a guy write me from Australia and say, this is a real bummer, because it exposes us to the thing where we got to say, like, yeah, you know what? I wasn't really just doing it because I'm trying to help the ecosystem by eliminating non-natives. I actually like having some of them around. And now I just got to come out and say that and that's a bummer. I really do wish there was some sort of a restaurant. I think that would be a great place for people to get a perspective. There's no way to do that, though, huh?

No, but I've, no, there's not. Well, I mean, not for all the things that you're talking about, no. And I don't look to, there is talk of a lot of people are looking to, are pushing for this idea that in areas that have too many whitetail deer, idea that in areas that have too many whitetail deer um there's people who are really pushing to reopen up the sale of of wild harvested deer as a solution to deer overpopulation but i'm but for me from the perspective from from my perspective and from the damage that was caused by unregulated wildlife slaughter um i just i'm very very uneasy with it and i do not picture myself ever coming around in support of the idea that we would start marketing uh that we would start

marketing wild cervids no i agree and i i think that just the sheer possibility of fuckery and people shooting them and poaching them and selling them and it's just and just it's it would increase the commodification of wildlife yeah um and and that's something that and that's something that um um also just uncomfortable with in general the commodification of wildlife and i think about uh resource availability for hunters and i think that a lot of people who enjoy access to certain areas now to go hunting to like hunt for themselves and their family um that the minute you made it be that those deer had a dollar value attached to them that there would be a lot less opportunity for people who choose to hunt to feed themselves because it would all of a sudden be like, why

would I let you come in or allow you to come in and use a resource when I'm just going to do my best now to collect it up and sell it? And so again, for aesthetic reasons, for what it would mean for hunters, for our perception of know relationship with our resources i i'm extremely uncomfortable with it though i see keep it's an idea that keeps popping up because we have in some areas um and i and i usually i hate to say that i hate to talk about there's too many deer there's too much this too much that because like by whose measurement but in some areas we really do especially when you start getting into the to issues like Lyme disease prevalence and ticks and starvation and just the possibility of other disease

outbreaks and the spread of certain wildlife diseases. There's some areas that by any reasonable measurement we have too many deer. Well, look it's already 1 o'clock. Oh, how crazy is that? Time flies in this room.

Your podcast is awesome. It really is. I'm glad i talked to you into doing it yeah i owe it all to you and every chance i get i point to it i appreciate it i really do appreciate that you do it because i think it's it's my favorite podcast to recommend to people that want if i want them to get an understanding of hunting um without you know even watching it just listening to you talk about because you have so of hunting without, you know, even watching it, just listening to you talk about, because you have so many guests on where, you know, you might not even be talking about hunting. You might be talking about biology. You might be talking about history.

You know, it's just a great podcast and you're a great guy for the job. You play a very important part out there. I really, really believe that. Thank you. I appreciate it. And I am glad that you talked me into doing it. It's been, in terms of all the things I do, like TV, writing, it's the thing that I enjoy doing it the most. There's a lot of things I enjoy having done it more.

Right. But the thing that I enjoy actually doing it, I just have like a smile on my face doing it. Well, you're such a great talker. I mean, remember the first time you did my podcast, even before Meat Eater, when you were just coming off of the wild within. What is it? Was that what it's called? Yeah. Yeah.

And I remember thinking, why doesn't this guy have a fucking podcast? And this was like, how many years ago? Seven years ago? Something like that? Do you know the first time I ever heard the word podcast? This is embarrassing. years ago, something like that? Did you know the first time I ever heard the word podcast, this is embarrassing.

The first time I ever heard the word podcast was Helen Cho telling me that I should go on Joe Rogan's podcast and I didn't know what it meant. That's how early you were into this shit. Wow. You were into this shit before I ever heard the word. Wow. That's crazy. Can I double back around and plug my book again? Yeah, please do.

Okay. So it's called The Meat Eater Fishing Game Cookbook, Recipes and Techniques for Every Hunter and Angler. Got a picture of that, Jamie? Bam, there it is. Can I say one last quick thing about it? It releases right now. It releases this week on November 20, but it's available for pre-order everywhere.

And it's broken into a bunch of chapters where it has big game, small furred game like rabbits, hares, squirrels, upland birds, waterfowl, freshwater fish, saltwater fish, shellfish and crustaceans, reptiles and amphibians. So all your bullfrog stuff is in there. And you want to talk about a species that's spreading all across the country. Bullfrogs? Yeah. Really? Yeah, I've hunted a lot of bullfrogs in places where they're very unwelcome what do you hunt them with a variety of ways most of your frog gig i don't care where you live like there's a lot of people that live in a city like

dude i'd love to go out and get some wild game i can't go get an elk like how do i do that you could be out gigging frogs at night no one would even know frog gig and crayfish grab and we talk about all this kind of stuff in the book so all and it explains everything from how to like break down and process and freeze stuff and then for everything there are many recipes and the recipes walk you through how to use the entire thing so you from for your white-tailed deer everything from the tongue to the rear shank, how, like, specific recipes on how to do it, and also just general best practices and guidelines around how to handle the ingredients. And then all the stuff around all the substitutions. So there's no such thing as, like, an elk heart recipe, right?

It's, like, how to, like, handle game hearts, whether it's mule deer, white tail, whatever, like how to approach a heart and an attitude toward wild game that is not, that's cut specific, not species specific. And with fish too, like I don't, I'm not comfortable with the idea of like, this is a walleye recipe

or this is a bluegill recipe, but how to handle like varieties of freshwater fish and like what kind of recipes you can use that are interchangeable depending on where you live and what you use. It includes all that. And they're real pretty pictures. Beautiful. You can see Giannis Boutelis, how to do the tail skinning method on a squirrel. And I don't care where you live, you damn sure live near squirrels.

People are very uncomfortable with squirrel eating. Not me. Oh, and you know, in the end, the guy that got the disease from eating squirrel brains, nothing to do with squirrel brains. Oh, the article I sent you? Yeah. What did he? Everybody sent me that article.

Yeah. There's no demonstrable correlation. It's like 30 Americans a know wind up with that form of kreutzfeld 30 americans wind up with it it just happens to be that this dude sometime in his past it's in some sort it's a prion or prion prion disease and it's the thing that yeah it's the thing that happens to people but but it was the the the correlation between his diet and what happened to him was implied. Implied. Possible?

If you go read up on it, it now seems like people are really saying, like, there's no obvious relationship here. No obvious relationship between eating squirrel brains and getting a prion disease. Yeah. There's plenty of people that get the same thing that haven't been eating squirrel brains right so just they were just looking at the unusual aspects of his diet and pointing to that and it's not that scientific yeah and the article got a lot more love when it was that some squirrel hunter died from eating squirrel brains right then it did when the later subsequent pieces came out where everybody's like whoa whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Yeah.

We don't really, like, you know. Squirrels are cute. Yeah. I ate some squirrel with you. Another thing you've served me. Very good. There's not a person in the world. You know what we have in the cookbook

is we have how to do buffalo wings, hot wings, how to do hot legs. With squirrels? Yeah, we were eating at the other night. Really? Yeah, so it's just like you're making. What are the rules on shooting squirrels?

Do they vary state by state? Yeah, so if you're in New York, you know, you have a season, you know, squirrel season in most states. So it's either one or the other way. Either there's a season and a bag limit, or they're treated as a non-game species. So here in California, there's a squirrel season. There's a bag limit.

I think it's four a day, four squirrels a day. And when's the season? You know, seasons usually run from sometime in August and September into winter, into January, February. So where I grew up, September 15th. September 8th to January 27th, archery falconry only jesus christ yeah so archery and falconry so august 4 for archery and falconry falconry falcon then you got to go to the tree squirrel zone map right but in your state jackrabbits are open for instance

your state jackrabbits are managed as non-game meaning there's no bag limit and open year-round snows like uh cottontails snowshoes have different management in a lot of states pine squirrels or red squirrels which aren't commonly hunted but they're more regarded as like things that get into people's houses but they're not hunted for meat they'd be listed as a non-game species but fox squirrels and gray squirrels would be as a game species so in new york i think the bag limit when I was living there was six per day, a possession limit of two bag limits. Did you shoot any squirrels in Brooklyn and eat them? No, no.

I caught some there. I caught some there and ate them. Did you? But I would hunt out of the city at my buddy's farm and some other places. So where I was born in Michigan, the squirrel season was september 15th and it ran into uh the end of january five squirrels a day possession limit of two bag limits the state i live in now um treats squirrels as non-game species so there's no closed season no bag limit because there's not really uh there's not a they're not widely distributed and they're not commonly hunted.

All right. But, yeah, most places they have them and they're managed. And you go out and buy a small game license for $12 or whatever. Get your hunter safety. Get yourself a.22 or a shotgun. And you can become a squirrel man or a squirrel lady. Like your buddy Kevin Murphy? He's a squirrel.

That's one of my favorite guys on your podcast. He's a squirrel man or a squirrel lady. Like your buddy Kevin Murphy? He's a squirrel. That's one of my favorite guys on your podcast. He's a squirrel man. This guy blows a horn in the woods before every hunt to alert the animals that he's coming. Yeah. Yeah, he carries a cow horn around and blows it. I think it's a shofar, right? Is that right? When you blow the shofar and like a jewish in a synagogue is that what it is i think it's called a shofar like you blow the rams they

blow a ram's horn it's not it's not a cow yeah it's not a cow horn but it's a ran horn you know in the end of um you know in the end of no country for old men yeah uh have we talked about this before i don't know he talks about his father riding out ahead of him with a horn of fire in the end when he relates the dream it's in the book and it's in the movie where the tommy lee jones character is describing a dream in which they're riding through a snowstorm and his father rides ahead with a horn of fire and i was wondering how many people heard that and had no idea what he was talking about. But what a common practice used to be is you take a horn, buffalo horn, cow horn, and it's hollow because it grows off a protrusion of the skull called the horn core. And you pop the horn off and it's hollow. And what people would do is when you

left your campfire in the morning, you would fill that horn with embers and cap it, but there'd be a little pinhole in it just to let a little bit of air in there so it could continue to smolder. And you'd carry that horn all day full of embers. And at night to start a new fire, you would dump the horn out and rekindle your fire. So when he talks about his father riding out ahead of them with a horn of fire, what that's meant to say is that he knew his father would be waiting out ahead of him with a fire burning. Whoa. Yeah.

But Kevin Murphy just blows it to let squirrels know he's coming. Thanks for coming, man. Always good to talk to you. We keep saying we got to organize another hunt. We have to do something got to organize another hunt. I would love to. We have to do something. Call Brian Callen. I talked to him recently.

We'll make it happen. He's one of the funnier guys on Instagram, man. He's one of the funnier guys alive. Bye, everybody. Thank you.