The Joe Rogan Experience - #1674 - Clay Newcomb

Episode Date: June 26, 2021

Clay Newcomb is a 7th-generation Arkansan that grew up in the Ouachita Mountains. He's a hunter, mule skinner, curious naturalist, and observer of rural culture. He's also a writer, filmmaker, owner/publisher of "Bear Hunting Magazine" and host of the hit MeatEater podcast "Bear Grease."

the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day what's happening brother how are you i'm doing very well i uh it's always interesting to meet someone in person when you've heard them on a podcast i've heard you i don't know a hundred times on the meat eater podcast. So to, to see you in person and then to, uh, start listening to your podcast, which is, uh, bear grease, which is a hilarious name for a podcast. And if people don't know, um, bear grease rendered bear fat is actually a very valuable thing and it's great to cook with. And it's like, I'll never forget when I found out about bear hunting, about bears being good to eat was actually from Steve Rinella when he was explaining to me about blueberry

bears. Yeah. And then I watched that video that he put out of him hunting this bear in Alaska that had been eating nothing but blueberries. Right. of him hunting this bear in Alaska that had been eating nothing but blueberries. And so when he's breaking down the bear and taking the fat off, the fat is actually purple because this bear has been eating so many blueberries that it's in its flesh.

And he said, it is the most delicious meat you'll ever eat. Yeah, well, I mean, bear grease, bear fat is essentially whatever that bear's been eating. It's flavored, whether it be by acorns or berries or whatever. Or fish. I've got some bear grease for you, Joe. Oh, exciting. I come bearing many gifts if you would like to see what I've got here.

Tell me what you got there. Talking about bear grease and trying to connect it to a podcast, at some point I'll have to explain the metaphor of bear grease. What's explaining now? Bear grease at one time was this highly valued commodity. Used as a unit of currency on the American frontier. Bear grease, bear oil would be the rendered fat of a bear that would turn into liquid, like this right here.

This is for you. Thank you. Have you ever had, I mean, I know you've bear hunted, but have you had bear grease before? No, I've only, I've eaten bear. I've never rendered bear fat or cooked anything in bear fat. I've only just taken the meat and cooked it. Usually slow cooking. So what you would do with that is you would cook with it.

You would fry with it. You can make pastries with it. You can use it to condition leather. It's supposed to be amazing for pastries, right? It is. For like pie crust. Yep. And so there was a time when bear grease, bear lard was super valuable on the frontier

before refrigeration because bear fat stayed, didn't go rancid as quickly as pork lard was super valuable on the frontier before refrigeration because bear fat stayed, didn't go rancid as quickly as pork lard. So like on it, you would have pork and bear would be essentially the places where you would get it. This lasted longer. That'll last on the shelf at your house, unrefrigerated for over a year. Why does it last so much longer? Just whatever the constituency of bear lard is, it just stays good for that long. So going back to this metaphor of the name of Bear Grease, in our podcast, we're exploring things. And even in the tagline of the podcast, we say that we're exploring things or things that are forgotten but relevant and we're searching for insight in unlikely places and so like this bear bear grease i brought you

some stuff that you can do with bear grease this is uh this is some bear fat lye soap if you've if you ever used animal tallow soap no like just for like bathing washing your hands man that's incredible stuff yeah it really is 100 all natural i mean it's it's it's a it's a ancient process of using lye and animal tallow what is lye exactly lye is uh doggone if you hadn't asked me it's i mean it's a it's a chemical it's a caustic chemical that you can buy just about anywhere. But shoot. How did they use it? It's like H2 something something.

They used to use ash. Oh. They got the lye from ash. There it is. And it's a metal hydroxide traditionally obtained by leaching wood ashes or a strong alkali, which is highly soluble and water-producing caustic basic solution. NaOH. Sodium hydroxide. That's what it is. So they would get it from, like, burning wood?

Yeah. So the real primitive method for making soap from animal tallow. And you could make animal tallow soap out of anything. But bare fat lye soap is our specialty. But it's supposed to be real good for your skin. Do you sell this? No. No. When you say our specialty, you never sell it.

Just give it away. No, no, no. This is not for sale. No, no, no, no. No, no, no. This is not for sale. No, no, no. Did you make this? Yeah. Yeah. And so what's the ingredients?

So just lye and- Four ingredients. Bare fat, sodium hydroxide, lye, water, and then just essential oils. For the smell? Yeah. Yeah, so it smells real good. Yeah. What are the essential oils?

It smells like one of them stores. We had a bunch of different kind of oils that we added in like peppermint whatever i don't know sometimes i'm amazed at how uh you know kind of like hygiene conscious us bear hunters are like making soap and stuff because the other thing i brought you joe and i know you don't you don't you don't run a beard but uh this is some bear grease beard oil that i made and so that is a combination of three things so it's it's cheating just a little bit but it's it's it's one part bear oil one part almond oil one part jojoba oil and then essential oils and i mean you can drip it out put it on your

hands and uh oh that smells good yeah it's interesting and then the last one here and then i'll start talking about my metaphor again if you're if you want but this is a bear grease hand salve and so bear oil has all kind of folklore around it and i'm in the process of like an anecdotal research, very serious project of exploring all these folk tales of bear grease and bear oil. So it's healing properties. Yeah, they say, I mean, back in the day, bear oil would have been used to relieve arthritis pain. they say and you can find this all over the internet that bear oil cures baldness which obviously is like a big piece of folklore right but it's still just fun but going back to the idea that bear grease has all these uses is that this is thing that at one time was a currency and if you polled the united states 330 million americans and you said what is bear

grease i mean like what percentage of people would even know what it was probably like one percent of one percent yeah so it's been forgotten and so there was a time when so there's an archaic unit of measure of a barrel they used to take the tanned neck hide of a deer which would have been a part of the the buckskin that wasn't usable the neck hide and they would have sewed it together and they would have used it to have stored bear oil and they called it an eel and so they would make a container out of it, like a wine flask almost. Make a container, an eel of barrel oil. Huh. And it's just a wonder.

Spell it like eel? Well, it's been probably 10 years since I've actually seen it written. I think it's E-L-L-E, like an eel of barrel oil. It would have been a unit of measurement. So you could have gone to the store and you're like, well, I got two eels, barrel oil. You know, I'd like some flour. I'd like some whatever. And, you know, it's a wonder that we don't call the U.S. dollar, you know, an eel.

Do you see what I'm saying? Because the buck is essentially connected to the value of a whitetail deerskin that was tanned out and ready for tanning. And that became equivalent to a buck. For $1. For $1. Wow. And so, again, this idea that there's some pretty amazing stuff that's forgotten.

And then as hunters, we're very interested in using as much as we can from these animals that we're taking. Very interested in that. taking. Very interested in that. And so a bear offers a whole nother market of commodity that really no other big game offers. And that, you know, of the big game that we hunt, like, let's say an elk. I mean, like, you know, you're going to keep the meat, obviously, that's number one thing. You're going to keep his horns. But very few people would even keep the hide of that animal. And certainly they're not rendering down elk tallow. White-tailed deer would have the same sequence of usable commodities. Man, a black bear.

We have incredible meat. I would venture to say that 90%, maybe 80% of black bears that are killed in North America, their hides are tanned. They have usually, especially in the fall, have an incredible amount of fat, which can be rendered down into all these incredible, healthy, usable products. products. And so, I mean, like we have, we use, my point is we use more of a bear than we do almost any other big game animal that we hunt. I'm getting off track here. No, you're not. No, my friend, John and, friends, John and Jen, they run a bear hunting. Yeah. In Alberta. Yeah. And they take the bear fat and they give it to the First Nation elders and they use it for some sort of medicinal properties. They have some way of utilizing it themselves.

Yeah. And they found that pretty fascinating. They personally use bear fat for cooking and things like that. Yeah. And they cook a lot of bear and they're interested in a lot of bear recipes. But they say that they make trades with the elders and they deliver them bear fat. They're really into bear fat. Yeah.

But they don't kill bear themselves. Right, right. Which is interesting. The natives. Yeah, the natives. Well, they call them First Nations up there, I guess. They have a different perspective on bears. It's weird up there because they have different laws for First Nation folks.

So if you're on public land or what do they call it, crown land? Crown land in Canada. When you're up there, First Nation people, they can hunt at night with spotlights. They can shoot a moose 365 days a year. They don't follow seasons. They can catch as many walleyes as they want. They have a lot of weird rules, but they don't hunt bear. Right. as many walleyes they want. They have a lot of weird rules, but they don't hunt bear. Right.

But there's a lot of them. You're right. There are First Nation tribes that do have inside of their history quite a bit of use for black bear in different places, but I've seen that too. A lot of the Canadian First Nation peoples aren't that interested in bear hunting.

Yeah, I wonder why. But historically, I i mean bears and you know first nation people especially in the south and everywhere in alaska i was just doing a reading a book on the koyukan people up in in alaska which is an indigenous tribe and in al. And I mean, they have an incredible amount of bear hunting history and bear hunting methods. And like they have what they call taboos. I've got a list on my phone of like 14 of their rules for bear hunting, which are like super interesting. Let me hear them.

All like very... Specific. Yeah. It might take me just a minute that's okay we should probably tell people because it's it's all this stuff sounds odd because uh when you're talking about hunting in north america to most people that don't hunt they think of deer hunting that's yeah that's common yeah but during the days where people were traveling across the country, settling and the pioneers, they mostly ate bear. And they were using deer for the skins, which is kind of crazy when you think about it today. Like that bear was like Steve Rinella has that great animated thing.

Have you ever seen it online where someone's animated this piece about. The story about Boone. Yeah, Daniel Boone and all of his bear hunting and canning bears and smoking bears and that bear meat was highly prized. Yeah. Yeah. It was, I mean, there's no reason why that really should have changed other than just kind of went out of popularity. Fucking Disney. Disney did it.

That's what happened. People started looking at animals in this really weird anthropomorphic way. Yeah. I mean, it's Yogi Bear. It's a teddy bear. It's your buddy. Yeah. Which is the weirdest thing to have an animal that will fucking kill you.

And that's the one that you've decided that you won't kill back. Yeah. And you won't eat them. Yeah. Okay. Well, I mean, bear meat, that's probably the number one question that I get asked by people is do you eat the bear? And I mean, like, absolutely. I mean, bear is, I mean, it's incredible meat when handled correctly, just like any other

kind of meat. The way I describe it, I'd say it tastes like a deer fucked a pig. It's like red pork. Yeah. red pork yeah it's like this really interesting meat yeah but it's very good it's very good yeah i mean really is you don't have to convince yourself yeah bear meat is good meat yeah and there was a time when it was like highly valued and that just seems to be forgotten yeah just forgotten Just forgotten. And what's wild, and I don't want to get too far ahead of myself, but black bears on the North American continent are thriving. Yeah. Thriving.

Especially in New Jersey. Anywhere. Yeah. Florida, Arkansas, Oklahoma, out west, Michigan, Wisconsin. Like, whatever's happening ecologically right now in North America. And I mean, you could make a list that would just be bizarre about urban sprawl and fragmentation of wilderness and all this stuff. Whatever is happening, you know, increase in temperature across the place, like bears are thriving. temperature across the place like bears are thriving and so why that makes sense that right now that people would begin to be re-interested in in hunting bears is that we've got more people

on this continent than we've ever had obviously we've got more overlap of bear country and humans. We've we literally are up against the wall in terms of managing these animals of I mean, they they will be managed. Like bears will be taken out of populations one way or another because bears only have so much of like, for instance, let's take Arkansas. Arkansas has 2.2 million acres of national forest, and that's essentially the core bear habitat in the state of Arkansas. That's great bear habitat. A natural bear density in the Ozarks or Ouachita Mountains would be, let's just say, one bear per square mile, and that would be a fairly high population of bears at a landscape level.

Well, if you have two bears per square mile, that might not seem much to you or me, because we're not bears. But long term, that is not sustainable. And bears replicate, basically, a healthy population of bears is going to increase by over 10% per year. So if you have 100 bears, and, you know, the next year you're going to have 110, and then, you know, you can do the math. And one time I did the math, and it was like in,

I want to say within 12 years, the population, even including mortality, natural mortality could double in like 15 years if it was just released. You know, when you start doing the math, 10% per year. Anyway, point being— And then you have to do the math with fawns and elk calves and all the different animals they're going to eat and what kind of impact that's going to have.

Yeah, yeah. Point being is that like it's a great time. I mean, it seems kind of counterintuitive with the the social structure of the planet but i mean like man this country was founded on really was bear hunting i mean the american frontier was fueled by bear meat and bear fat it sounds so crazy to say but it really is true and it took me a while to understand that yeah it took me a while of reading historical accounts of these travelers and these people that were making their way these pioneers making their way across the country and what they ate yeah a lot of what they ate was bear

this blows people's mind and it blew mine when i first learned it years ago but and and we could do trivia but i'm setting you up to know what the answer is black bear um what is the most widely distributed big game mammal in north america this is a little bit of a trick because it's not quite as straightforward most widely distributed white-tailed deer elk naturally pre-european civilization what to be black bear? Well, black bear's number two. Really? What's number one? Mountain lion. Really?

Mountain lions went from, they basically covered the entire North American continent except in the real far North Arctic. But since that time, habitat fragmentation and mountain lion populations are now, they're thriving in the places where they are in the West. And they're moving back into the East, which we did a podcast on. But black bears would be number two, the most widely distributed big game animals. So they were everywhere.

I mean, when people got off the, I mean, when they, in the Eastern United States, full of bear. the, I mean, when they, in the Eastern United States, full of bear. I mean, the Eastern Distiguous Forest, which would essentially be from Western Arkansas all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, all the way to Maine, all the way to Florida, all the way down to East Texas, like one third of the United States would be the Eastern Distiguous Forest. And how did they, like, was bear hunting a thing in Europe when the early settlers came here? Right. I don't think there was a lot of, like I don't see a lot of connection between our bear hunting culture and European bear hunting culture. Do you think we or the pioneers learned it from Native Americans?

Absolutely. Daniel Boone learned how to hunt bears from Cherokee Indians. Yeah. And they learned all the different properties, like the bear fat. Yes. Did they speak at all about trichinosis or about diseases that they would get from not cooking the bear meat enough? Man, it's really just a non-issue when you handle it right. I mean, trichinosis and trichinosis dies instantaneously. And because it's such a big platform, we can fact check this. Trichinosis dies instantaneously at like 144

degrees. Okay. Which is like medium. Yeah. It's not even well done. You know, the USDA is telling us to cook our meat to 160. Right. So, I the USDA is telling us to cook our meat to 160. Right. So, I mean, we are programmed to cook our meat to 160, to cook it done in most things. Trichinosis dies instantaneously at like 144 degrees. And fact check that before you eat a piece of bear meat. But it dies, you know, it's an incremental scale going down. Like it dies at 143 if it's at 143 for five seconds, it dies at one 42.

If it's at 142 degrees for a minute. So you could Sue V bear like one 35 and do it all day long. And you'd be good with a medium rare piece of beef. Absolutely. Like a, like a medium rare. Yes. Really?

Have you ever done that? No, I just, i'm not quite on the sous vide i mean i should be i've worked for steve ranella but i'm not on the sous vide train yet sous vide's awesome i i know it i prefer smoking i prefer like a you know pellet grill like a traeger that's my favorite way to cook but but sous vide the thing about it is you could go to work and just leave it sit out there on the, and it'll cook for eight hours for you. Yeah.

And then you come back and everything is just sort of all the tendons and all the rough stuff is dissolved. Yeah. It's nice. Yeah. It's good. I know Ryan Callahan's big on it. The sous vide? Yeah.

Yeah. It's good stuff. But I've never done it with bear all i've ever done with bear is cook it either slow cook it like a ham and you know and make sure it's thoroughly cooked put a meat thermometer in it or i've made ronella's bear candy recipe have you ever had that recipe i haven't oh my god it's so good it's like a um what's that there's like a like a general sal's chicken you know it's kind of like a sweet sort of chicken. You eat it over rice like an Asian dish.

You make that with bear. So it has sugar in it. My kids went fucking crazy for it. They loved it. Like bear candy was one of the favorite dishes that I've ever cooked for them. Really? Because it's very sweet. It's a lot of sugar in it.

It's really probably not very good for you. But man, is it delicious. And you cook it like an Asian dish with like some peppers and scallions and things on and you you know it's got kind of a brown sauce to it and you pour it over rice and it's really really good nice yeah nice another than that I've eaten bear sausage and you know standard things yeah bare backstrap well that's good so these are read us off these rules again okay so this is my these are not quotes from this book these are my interpretations that i wrote on the inside cover of the book okay okay and you took a photo but this this book was

called uh make prayers to ravens that's the name of the book. When was this book written? In the 1970s it was basically an anthropologist that went and lived with the Koyukan people in Alaska for an extended period of time. Nelson was his last name. I can't remember his first. Richard K. Nelson, I think. Incredible. Yeah, Make Prayers to the Raven, Richard Nelson. Incredible book. Okay, so when I got to the raven richard nelson ah incredible look okay so

when i got to the section on black bear they had a full chapter on black bear and they started they called them taboos but okay so so when a bear is found and these are like kind of spiritual rules that they use in bear hunting. But if you find a bear, you must speak very cryptically about your plans to go back or the spirit, because the spirit of the bear is aware and he'll hear you. So like if I went out hunting and I found a bear sign, but I didn't kill the bear and I came back to camp,

came back to my house that night and I wanted you to come with me, I would be like, Joe, tomorrow I would like for you to come with me around the mountain just to see what we can see. And you would know exactly what that meant. You would be like, winkity wink. So the idea is that your thoughts project and that the bears are so aware. They assign bears a very high level of spiritual ranking and power and only second to the wolverine.

They have like this hierarchy of animal powers. And so basically, you know, you can't talk about your plans you got to be cryptic and the way those plans will get out there because the bear will hear you and he will route your he'll do something different so that's that's rule number one you should never point at a bear because he will feel you so if you're hunting you know your first instinct is to, oh, there's a bear. Point at it. No pointing because he will see you. You know, I would be – I'm one of those people that loves calling bullshit. I'd love to call bullshit on this, but I don't know if I do.

You know what I'm saying? There's a thing about animals when you are staring at them. I feel like they get like a little, just some sort of a little frequency, like a little beep, beep, beep, a little message from the distance where they get uncomfortable. Well, I read these to Yann Spatelis, and he kind of functionalized every one of these. He was like, well, of course, you don't want to point. He's like, think about the movement that you're making when you're pointing. You're drawing attention to yourself.

Because he was trying to, like, say, you know, trying to find the functional value. And I'm not saying that I believe these, Joe. I'm saying I believe them. I'm saying I believe them. Bears are psychic. I'm going with that. So the third rule was that you talk to the bear as you shoot it. You tell him what to do.

So you, like, sweet talk the bear. talk to the bear as you shoot it you tell him what to do so you like sweet talk the bear and this whole chapter has has has examples like they did interviews with these people they had examples of them doing this but basically when a bear is in your sights and you need him to do something particularly because if you're hunting a bear might be behind a tree he might be facing you you don't have a good shot you're supposed to sweet talk him and they had it gave examples of it it'd be like dear friend i really would like for you to turn slightly to the right and wow there we'll do it i watched that episode of meat eater where you and ranella were hunting bear were you in montana montana and there was a bear that was how many hundreds of yards away? 800. 800 yards away and he winded you. Yeah. Well, I mean, winded us like that, but it was. What I mean by winded,

for people who don't know what we're talking about, the bear, the wind came from behind you and reached the bear. So you're sent, reached the bear from eight football fields away, which is fucking bananas. That's so far. Yeah. And that bear started running. Yeah fucking bananas that's so far yeah and that bear started running yeah and that's the only thing that you could attribute to his behavior oh there there was no question that the bear smelled us i mean that that's not in my mind or steve's mind really debatable but there is more to the story that would help make sense jo, because we were basically at the foot of a mountain and to our right was basically a very steep, straight up mountain. So we're sitting here, the wind is hitting us directly in the back of the neck and it's basically creating a wind channel that directed our scent

right to that bear, where if it had been open country, I feel like by the time our scent right to that bear where if it had been open country i feel like by the time our scent got there it would have dissipated so it was and there were six of us you just see me and steve on the screen but behind us was cameraman and all that jazz at least four other people may have been seven of us a lot of smelly motherfuckers it's true the other thing is the way it's been described to me is that kind of makes sense is skunks we can smell a skunk a mile away and it's weird like a skunk smells weird like you know you're driving down the road in your car and you like I smell skunk like somehow or another out there that minuscule amount of sunk skunk scent can get into your car and hit your nose.

Someone explained to me, now imagine that times 100, and that's how a bear can smell things. Right. And I'm like, what? You know, it boils down to when you look at the physical structure. I mean, you know, we have these olfactory receptors in our nose that help us smell, like just little receptors. we have these olfactory receptors in our nose that help us smell, like just little receptors. A bear would have, and I've forgotten the stats, thousands more times surface area of those receptors. So, I mean, they just have more mechanisms for receiving olfactory information. More than a bloodhound, even.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. A bear, as I understand understand it has the most powerful nose in the world of any animal that's what i understand um but this is the way i've heard it described to me that made a lot of sense like if you were to walk into your house and there was a pot there was a dish of lasagna cooking in the oven and you walked in and you're like i smell lasagna it's just what would register lasagna a bear would walk in and you're like, I smell lasagna. It's just what we would register lasagna. A bear would walk in and he, he would say, I smell cooking cheese. I smell warm tomato

paste. I smell a pastry or I smell, you know, the, the, the noodles. I smell sausage. I smell like he could smell the layers. I mean, essentially, it's a scent. That's one of our weakest things as humans is our scent. We don't use it in a defensive way at all, really. And so it's hard for us to understand. But, man, the animal kingdom runs off their noses. It's almost like a superpower.

To try to comprehend how a bear could smell you that far it's hard yeah our senses suck in comparison right yeah it's a wonder we ever survived so what were the other uh taboos okay yeah there's a few more that are pretty interesting uh always wear new boots when you're spring bear hunting. So don't wear a pair of boots that you've worn before. Always skin a bear where it is killed. Never haul or drag a bear. Why would you not wear old boots? Because of the scent? Man, when you read this book, you would get a sense for the worldview of these people and the way that they think.

And your question would be answered if you read the rest of the book that they think and if that would you your question would be answered if you read the rest of the book i mean they they just like stuff happens and it becomes law you know why don't you drag a bear who knows a lot of these were just stated right it's just like this is what you do i think it has to do with respect though this one was interesting when you kill a bear you slit his eyes before you skin him so that he does not see you and him become offended after his death wow so you walk up to the bear the first thing you do you slit his eyes because they perceive these as like spiritual animals that have power um they don't uh they very rarely keep the skins of bears they don't want a bear skin in their house because they think it holds like authority or power

hmm so the bear hide is not used as which you'd think in the Arctic that this would be like an essential for their clothing and whatnot but but they're killing caribou and other things. I think I stumbled across the eye-slitting video of Make the Prayers to the Raven. Oh, wow. I haven't even seen this. Well, they're not even slitting the eye. They're actually removing it. They're removing his eyes.

Wow. As I get down to these last two, I'll tell you kind of my conclusion of why this is intriguing to me and how I think it relates to me as someone who I don't well I'll tell you how it connects but the last thing well close to the last thing bear death ceremonies are second only to human funerals so So when you kill a bear, like they have an absolute like ceremony. People all over the village would cook food and this would be old, more ancient stuff. I don't know that I couldn't say how these people live today, but basically like extreme respect for that animal. basically like extreme respect for that animal.

Only second to a human funeral would be the death of a bear. And they would have these like ceremonies and cook and get together. And it was, you know, I feel that way when I kill a bear. I mean, like I don't take it for granted, man. And I've killed a fair number of bears. And like each one is like significant to me. Do you feel differently when you kill a bear than when you say you kill a duck or something like that? Nope. I'm not one of those guys, if I could say those guys.

And I don't, I'm not pointing any fingers. Right. A bear is an animal. I mean, I do not attribute him, I don't want to give him I don't want to anthropomorphize him too much. But they are special animals. And they are they are an incredible animal, especially when you understand where they fit inside of the ecosystem. bears you can be guaranteed that a whole bunch of stuff underneath that bear is in order in terms of the ecology of the land there's probably salamanders there there's you know the the squirrels are probably in good shape I mean the other they're indicator species and so to me they just they represent something really special so all animals that you kill have a deep significance to you.

Yeah. Bears are just another one of those animals. They are. But they are of particular interest to me. Right. And I feel like we have the right for no reason other than that we just want to, to make something special. You know? Yeah.

just want to to make something special you know yeah i mean just like i have chosen in my life that the newcomb family when we kill a bear it's a big deal for no no good reason why you do that clay why not when you kill a squirrel well we just like bears man we well they are special yeah yeah yeah yeah just by their abilities just by how difficult they are to come upon. I mean, there's a reason why they bait bears in a lot of parts of the country. It's because it's hard to get on one. Yeah. They're very aware and their senses are highly tuned. Yeah.

So it's a significant thing to kill a bear. Yeah, it is. thing to kill a bear. Yeah, it is. And it's also, as you were saying, if you are going to be a person who's involved in conservation, if you're really thinking about it correctly, they have to be managed in a certain way. And if you choose to look at it this way, like all animals, they're a valuable resource. Like deer are a valuable resource resource you eat one or you shoot one you your family can eat it for months That's a lot of food and the same with a bear and if you shoot a bear you're also stopping that bear from killing a whole lot of fawns a whole lot of elk calves a whole lot of Livestock there's a lot of thing. I mean that that thing has to eat a lot

Yes, and a good part of its diet is animals yeah we just published an article that recounted a the study was probably done 10 years ago in alaska and this was a brown bear study and they they they they collared 17 brown bears in Alaska, and they had a video – it was a video collar that took five-second videos every – no, 15-second videos every 10 minutes. And the batteries on those at the time, the technology, they would last for like 60 days. And then the collar would release, and they would go gather the collar up they were able to they were they put them on 17 bears seven bears lost the collar so they had data from 10 bears and i want to say with seven bears this is going to sound bizarre because even as i read it like i wanted to just be like man man, this is crazy.

But I mean, this came from the biologists in Alaska. They killed those seven bears, killed over 200 moose and caribou calves in a time of 45 days. I mean, they were just stomping around with the intent to kill moose and caribou calves and it was a it was a groundbreaking study because as far as i know it was the first time that it was video evidence so i mean they're they're watching these bears on video it was also really cool because they they they laid out in percentages of time of what that bear did like you know like 80 of the time he was asleep six percent of the time he just stood there he would stand up and just stand there like i want to say only six percent of his day he actually fed but in 45 days less than 10 bears killed over 200 moose and caribou calves have you seen the photographs uh from yellowstone of the recent uh there's a wildlife photographer that captured a famous grizzly bear I want to say it had a number like 399 or something like that

and this they caught this bear in the act of killing an elk calf and feeding it to the Cubs it's pretty wild it's pretty wild because you see the elk calf still has spots it's real young and the bear catches up to it and it's like a big dust up and the even the the cubs are duking it out over who gets to eat it's pretty wild Wow it's pretty wild because they you know they caught it with a really good wildlife photographer there's a whole series of photos see if you can find it it's it's very. That's a lot though. The impact on the species. But it's also for the health of species, you need a certain amount of them. So you were saying it's a

great indicator species, right? Yeah. Yeah. And if a bear needs- There it is. Oh, wow. Look at that. What number bear is that? The bear has a number. Yeah, it's 399. Famous grizzly, 399 kills elk calf on camera. But it's wild, man. Look at that seven-foot sow. And look at her chasing down that poor little guy. No chance.

Incredible beast, man. Yeah. And then the babies were behind her. And they were like, what's going on, Mom? What's happening? And they got the whole deal of it chasing it down and eventually getting it and then the pretty wild man yeah it is we just did a video on bear defense with through meat-eater we put out a video on bear

defense of whether you should use a pistol or bear spray. What was the conclusion? Both. I mean, just to cut to the chase. Yeah. We interviewed a guy named Todd Orr. Have you heard of Todd Orr? He's that guy that got his head cut open in Montana?

Yeah. Yeah. He had the viral video of him, like, walking out. Wild. So I interviewed Todd, and then I went and was trained by by a pistol a professional pistol shooter that you know talked to me about the sequence of drawing a pistol and shooting and and uh and then we went to the Montana Fish and Wildlife and I did a bear simulation bear charge simulation simulation with a uh with a remote control bear that will only go 23 miles per hour is there a video of that

oh it's on Meat Eater YouTube. Okay, I need to see that remote control bear. Yeah, well, Joe, what was wild about it was, I mean, to be responsible in grizz country and to be clear with people, like black bears, I'm not going to say black bears are not dangerous because black bears do kill people and do attack people. It is much less likely that a black bear

is going to attack you as a brown or grizzly bear, which in the United States, brown grizzly bears are only pretty much in one general area, which would be in Northern Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, which would be in northern Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, and they're filtering out into Colorado and parts of Washington. And that's where grizzly bears are, the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. And those bears are very dangerous. I mean, very dangerous. I think there's already been a couple people killed this summer up there.

So the wild part, so you need to be responsible. And to be responsible means you need to have options you need to be trained in those options bear spray is highly effective but there are times when you don't want to shoot a bear with bear spray there are times when it is life-threatening and a bear is trying to kill you and you need to take lethal action upon that bear. And so best case scenario. There it is. Oh my God. Yeah. It's crazy how fast it comes on. Well, okay. And that's slow. I, I sprayed the bear, but what happened to Todd Orr was he sprayed that bear right in the face, but that bear was running 35 miles an hour when it was eight feet away from him, and he hit it, and the bear still hit him and mauled the heck out of him.

And within five, six seconds, the bear took in the full potion and left. But Todd had already been banged up incredibly bad in a very short amount of time so basically my conclusion even though i did spray this bear was that i still would have got mauled and i knew it was coming i knew it happened so basically if you get surprised by a grizzly you you're you're in trouble man yeah and as far as caliber is there a a consensus? We discussed that in the video. And there's been a lot.

I mean, for sure, a bigger caliber is going to be more effective at stopping a bear. But that is usually not the limiting factor in a bear attack scenario. Because that bigger caliber gun, you may only be able to get one shot off accurately. Where with a smaller caliber gun, like, say, a 9mm, you might be able to get one shot off accurately, where with a smaller caliber gun, like say a nine millimeter, you might be able to get off four accurate shots. And so the idea, you know, that what we say is that choose the handgun that you shoot the best. Worry less about caliber. Because for a while, guys were carrying.454 Casals, and I'm not saying that's a bad weapon. You just need to be able to shoot

that thing. Right, the kick. I mean, yeah, they're tough. I shot a.44 Mag on this.44 Mag revolver and I mean that's a great bear gun to carry. It has tremendous kick. To get six shots off quickly

with that accurately for a clay nukem would be very difficult but with a nine millimeter nine millimeter pop pop pop pop pop pop pop right so and most likely if you shoot a bear you're not necessarily gonna kill the bear right that moment like you're just hoping to hit him stun him enough that you turn him. And you're going for center mass. Center mass. You're not trying to headshot a bear. I mean, if you did with a 9mm, it's a good chance it would bounce off the skull, right?

If it hit him in the right place, I would say yes. But you could punch one in the right place, depending on the size of the bear. What about a.45? Is that a good middle ground caliber? Depending on the size of the bear. What about a.45? Is that a good middle ground caliber? My firearms expert, Jake, on this video, and I haven't seen the ballistics,

and there's so many variables with ballistics and different things, but he said a 9mm actually penetrates better in some situations than a.40 caliber. Why? Let me think about that. Because smaller load? Smaller diameter bullet. So there's this physics involved between a smaller diameter bullet that has less mass, but it's just physics. Moving faster because it weighs less.

Yeah, so there are some loopholes there because you think a bigger caliber is always going to be better. And I'm not a caliber expert. No, nor am I. But my conclusion was if you're going to be in legit brown bear, black, you know, grizzly country, you need to be carrying both. Because in my mind, there are scenarios where a non-lethal option is very safe and doable. And for people who wouldn't know as well, grizzly bears in the lower 48 are very protected. And if you shoot a grizzly bear, you better have a very good convincing story or you're in big trouble.

What is this, Jamie? Oh, is this the guy in Colorado? Yellowstone. Yellowstone. This is, they used a non-lethal shotgun round, I believe, on this bear, right? Is this the one where it charges the warden? Correct, yeah. Is that what he used, Clay?

I don't know. I've only seen a clip of it, which is this right here. Oh, because his one leg is up? Yeah. I don't know, maybe. He shoots it with a non-lethal round. Oh, I hadn't even seen that part. Yeah.

Yeah, it charges him. This is real recent, like two weeks ago. Yep. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. He hit it there in the butt. Yeah. And look, he's got a pistol on his side, bear spray.

Oh, you hear the little kid crying? Yeah. They're right in the car right there. Kid should cry. Fucking 2,000 pound there. Kid should cry. Fucking 2,000 pound. Monster. Gigantic monster.

That's a big bear too. It was. Roll that back again so we can see how big that fucker is. I mean, look at that. Imagine that thing running. And it does seem like something's wrong with his left paw. Look, see? Yeah, he's got it up off the ground. And he gets still extremely fast.

Yeah, that's got to be a big male seems yeah that's a big bear yeah he's got a hurt front foot so yeah well that's the legend of Bigfoot right there bears walking on back feet you know yeah I've shown that to people that are like big-time big bigfoot believers I'm like listen man imagine you're in a densely just like a huge forest like Pacific Northwest like Mount Rainier or something like that incredibly dense forest you're only glimpsing things through trees and it's like a box of q-tips that's how dense the trees are now imagine you've got a hurt black bear that's walking on his back feet yeah he walks by any seven feet tall you think it's a giant gorilla yeah you would think for sure that's big for yeah and feet. Yeah. And he walks by and he's seven feet tall. You'd think it's a giant gorilla. Yeah.

You would think for sure that's Bigfoot. Yeah. And we've seen documented in recent times bears that are almost bipedal, you know? Yeah, there's a lot of them. There's one. They call them petals. Petals. He was missing like a front paw and he would walk around on all, everywhere he went on

his back feet. Yeah. Yeah. For people who haven't seen it, you should Google black bears walking on two feet because it's crazy how often they do it. It is. It almost, it looks fake unless you,

when I first watched it. Pull some up so we can tell. When I first watched that, I was like, that isn't real. I mean, years ago. And then quickly you see that it is. That's one of the beautiful things about things like YouTube

is that there's so many videos now. Whereas before, maybe it would be a legend. You would hear about it it I saw a bear walking on two legs like what for how long oh across the whole field but I don't know yeah you wanted to believe people be like this guy sounds like he's full of shit look at these bears look at these guys just hanging out man I mean these two standing up there but that is bananas. Click on the video. Click on any video where you're going to watch them do it because the way they do it is so strange. It literally seems fake.

I mean, if you were walking around in the woods and you saw that, you would for sure think that was a Sasquatch. Especially if you were scared and it was dusk, you know, and you hear weird noises yeah and they you know they make weird noises that's a impressive bear call pretty good right i'm not kidding not bad right it made me turn my head that's how they sound too they get that weird

oh dude you got a better bear wolf than me. Want to hear my roar? Here we go. Impressive. I'm impressed. I've got a lot of free time. Not really, but I'm an idiot. So what are the other taboos? Is that the end of the taboos? There was one more. There was one more, that a man should stay awake after killing a bear

so that the spirit of the bear doesn't catch him sleeping. Whoa. How long are you going to stay awake for? Well, it's like this kind of, they just say like basically 24 hours. They attributed a lot of like weird, do you think that the attribution was due to the fact that they had these complete superhuman abilities in terms of like their senses, their sense of smell. You know, again, the full context of the book,

you see that they do this kind of stuff with a lot of animals. Like they have moose hunting taboos. They have, like everything has a way that it's done. And that's really what I kind of appreciated about it is that they pay attention and that they had just a scripted way that they did things, which I value. That ultimately turned to respect towards that animal.

But it is a fascinating book, for sure. Koyukan people. Well, it's always interesting when you see people that have lived with animals for generation after generation after generation. So they're passing down either legends or traditions that are hundreds if not thousands of years old. And you get a sense of how important these animals were to these people like one of the one of the stories i really enjoyed on your podcast was the story from the 1800s about the two german bear hunters oh yeah yeah that's a great one and it's i really love how your podcast is produced too it's a whoever's editing it and putting music in it they're doing a great job because it's it

takes you to a different place with the music and the way everything is the sound is edited into it it's really clever and it's and it's something i would tell people like if you're going to start off with one start off with that one it's a good one because it's representative of it gives you an understanding of what this is all about without how you haven't having an interest in hunting with that one it's a good one because it's representative of it gives you an understanding of what this is all about without have you haven't having an interest in hunting like that that transcends like you don't have to be a bear hunter or any kind of hunter in that regard listen to that podcast that's really interesting and it transports you to think about what it was like for those people that relied on these animals for their food and how incredibly risky it was. Yeah. So that episode was called death of a bear hunter. Yeah. I think

it's episode four. And we learned a lot on that episode. A lot of this has just kind of been an experiment to see how these stories come together. And it's been an incredible journey for me. I mean, like, I've had the time of my life making these podcasts. And when I first, you know, I read a section of this book that was published in 1854, written by Friedrich Gerstacker. Some people, the Germans will say

that I'm pronouncing it wrong. And I'm sure I am. Gerstacker is what they say. And I read like a 10 minute section out of the book. And I remember when I first told, uh, the guy that was working with me on it, he was like, he was kind of like, okay, like, you know, you sure this is going to keep people's attention? And, and I was like, man, I think it's going to be really good. And, man, when I listen to it, you know, I record all this stuff and do all the interviews, but, you know, the guys, Phil Taylor at Meat Eater is the one that puts it together.

Like I do basically, you know, 99% of the content editing, so, you know, I'm picking out what's in there. But Phil turns it into what you heard and man when i that episode was the first one where we stitched together like a pretty robust story because it was it was it was centered around this guy getting killed by a bear out in the ozark mountains you know 20 miles from where i live but But the story involved my family. The story involved an old man named Ori Provence that I met that helped us locate potentially where the grave was. The story involved a quest into human nature of why do stories impact us? And the beauty of that particular podcast too, and really what I'm trying to do with Bear Grease is answer some real essential, genuine questions inside of me.

Because I remember where I was standing when I read that story in about 2008. I'm just reading this book. Somebody told me about the book. A college professor had said, hey, there's some old bear hunting, Arkansas bear hunting stories in this book. You ought to read it. I was like, OK. Bought the book the book five years later i start reading the book i'm going through the pages and the book is called wild sports in the far west just to get that out there the first one-third of the book he's just traveling through the united states which is fascinating

but because i'm because the center of my world is Arkansas, I was waiting- And this takes place in 1840? Is that what it was? He arrived in the United States in 1837 and left in 1843, Frederick Gerstacker did. And so the first third of the book, he's traveling through the Eastern United States and goes up into Canada and finally gets to Arkansas. And I start reading the story and i read the story of erskine's death and i mean i was i was offended that no one had ever told me this story before it was like something incredible happening in your backyard which i want to hear about your black panther um but i don't think it was a black panther i got to see that i got to see it well

I don't think it was a Black Panther. I got to see that. I got to see it. Okay. This incredible story. And I don't know why I was so impacted by it, but I was. And I went home and I told my family. And I would use that story and I would tell my little boys when I would put them to bed.

I would tell them that story. My daughter to this day wears a bear claw necklace around her neck. Like that story really shaped our family and for no really good reason. Like there's not some big moral of the story. So part of the quest inside of the podcast was to understand why stories impact us so much. Like, why does this story matter to me? And, you know, the conclusion that I came to wasn't that profound, except that human nature, we are drawn to stories. Netflix is stories. The Joe Rogan podcast is stories. Humans are magnetized and drawn to and find significance, find identity. They understand culture. They understand value systems. Like our way to understand the world is through stories. Well, without giving away too much of that story, that story has

so many dots connected. Like, first of all, there's a life or death struggle in that one man is seriously injured, the other man is killed. It's also a camaraderie between animals because they're hunting with their hounds and what initiates him to literally go hand to hand with a bowie knife with his bear was that the bear is killing his dogs. So he rushes on the bear and tries to stab it to death

and gets mauled and killed. And his friend jumps in and stab on the bear and tries to stab it to death and gets mauled and killed and his friend jumps in and Stabs the bear as well and gets his arm ripped out of socket Yeah It's it's wild shit because it's got so many things connected together And then you've got the dogs that are still remaining alive staying with him the dead bear is there Yeah, his dead friend is there and he's trying to start a fire with one arm Yeah, yeah, And then he uses up all of his powder, shooting

shots off into the sky to try to alert the rest of the hunting party as to where he is in the dark, why wolves are howling around him. It's an amazing story. I'll never forget even the first time I read that story when he so he's got a fire going

and Erskine's corpse is, you know, 10 feet from him. And he had to lay stones on his eyes so that his eyelids would stay shut. And he said, with much effort, I made his arms lay down flat. Wow. I mean, he called it – he made reference to it was the night in the tomb. Wow. Because within, I mean, you just described it, but within 10 feet of him was a dead bear, five dead dogs, a dead human. Wow.

And him who was knocked unconscious, shoulder knocked out of place, and he stayed the whole night there, the night in the tomb. Wow. Just imagine the courage it takes to rush up on a bear with a bowie knife. You know, that was very common during that time. And I'm not taking anything away from this particular instance, but just for reference. And it makes perfect sense why it was common. Because the way to hunt a bear was with a pack of hounds. And they were carrying one-shot muskets.

They didn't have repeating rifles. So what would happen is the dogs would bathe the bear. And some percentage of time inside of bear hunting with hounds, the bear does not run up a tree. Most of the time it runs up a tree. And you're able to take the bear out of a tree. Some percentage of time, the bear stays on the ground. The larger bears tend to stay on the ground? Yeah, usually.

Because they have a harder time climbing trees, too. I mean, a really big bear is harder to make climb, but you might have a young bear that won't climb either. So the correlation is, yeah, bigger bears typically won't climb, but sometimes younger bears are bad about it, too. So you run up on this scene of bears you know dogs being a bear you shoot one time it the bear's now been shot but still might have life in him and so the the situation escalates dramatically you don't have time to reload

so what you do you pull your bowie knife which is standard issue for a bear hunter during that time period. And you go in and you finish him. How big is the blade on a bowie knife? 12 inches? At least 12 inches. Yeah. Standard issue, man. Like every bear hunter would have had one.

Jesus. Yeah. Just a wild way to go at it. Yeah. There's a lot of American art that revolves around that idea. We have a painting in our home. I believe it's William Fitzpatrick. It's called The Life of a Hunter.

Could you look that up for us? Life of a Hunter. And there are multiple iterations of incredible art from the 1800s of men on the ground with bowie knives taking bears. Why was the bear thought of as – oh, there's the image. Okay, there's one of them. Now, that's not the one I have on my wall. I don't like that one as much. All right. Keep looking.

That is – that one. Go left this this image right here that actual image the real original painting is is in bentonville arkansas at the walton's crystal bridges museum the original of that and um they don't there's no dogs in this painting but you know this scene is just so common during that time yeah now that okay that's an illustration that was in the book wild sports in the far west so this was just an illustration man i did an illustration i like to draw and i've got a pencil drawing that hangs in my office framed of of the scene that i drew years ago of that scene yeah yeah do you have it online is it online type in uh yeah type in clay nukem erskine's death i think you'll find it how do you spell Erskine? E-R oh really?

really yeah it's I used it well it's on my Instagram too it's up on my Instagram yeah it's for sure on my Instagram if you can pull that up I don't know

but no there's a lot of incredible history inside of bear hunting and and what's so interesting is that just the the trend of the age is that this would be something that seems to be this is you drew that nope nope nope nope okay go one back keep going that one yes one. This one? Yes, sir. That one. Oh, wow, that's great. Yeah.

So, you know, that's Erskine. There's a dog that's been, yeah. Why do you think they preferred to eat bear over deer? Because deer had to be plentiful back then, right? It was just super lean was it wasn't as it was tougher bear meat would be much more like beef yeah it was just better more of it so there are more of it because it's a larger and larger animal yeah yeah it just seems that with the danger involved that they would probably prefer eating deer. I mean, we're showing and talking about these extreme scenarios. You know, Daniel Boone in early 1800s, maybe late 1700s, you know, was reported he and Rebecca and his son,

one of his sons on the big Sandy river in Kentucky killed 155 bears in one winter. And I don't even think they were using dogs. Like they were just still hunting these bears. There was that many bears. Oh yeah. So it wasn't like, it's not necessary. It's not always, you know, that's actually the trouble with some of hunting's PR is that if me and you go hunting, we're going to come back and talk about the most exciting thing that happened, the most dangerous thing that happened. Right. And that brands the whole thing, which 98% of the time that doesn't happen or 99% or 99.99%. But that's what we talk about right we don't talk about all the times

that the bear just ran up a tree and we killed the bear or or we just saw a bear feeding we're able to take it it never knew we were there it was a good clean kill i mean so i think we're seeing the extremes inside of stuff like this which is not something we necessarily focus on that's a that's a big issue with uh perceptions of people who don't hunt right non-hunters perceptions are a lot of times based on grip and grins they're a lot of times based on maybe you're flipping through the channels and you get on the outdoor channel and some guy shoots a big buck and they're hooting and hollering and high fiving each other and people find it distasteful. They see it and they don't understand why everyone's so excited and so happy

because they don't see how difficult it is to get to that position, how much anxiety is involved in shot placement and squeezing the trigger and making sure you don't flinch. It's hard. Any kind of hunting and taking an animal's life is very difficult so when you see that that success celebration people think it's like a celebration of of death of killing right but it's a celebration of success and of overcoming anxiety and nervousness and and the the fear of failure and this the moment itself which is enormous. The moment when you're squeezing a trigger or drawing back a bow on an animal, it's a heavy moment.

And there's so much going on in the mind, so much anxiety that you have to battle. Well, and I think, too, that it's a snippet of time that's taken completely out of context. Yeah. And you don't see the lifestyle potentially. And there's all gradients and scale inside of hunters. Some people, it truly is a lifestyle. They've dedicated their life to it. Others do it less time, whatever.

But when I see a grip and grin photo, I see a lifestyle. I see somebody that's probably dedicated a big part of their life that's not even connected directly to hunting that has informed their ability to be efficient hunters. That's kind of what the stories that I'm telling, and even in the future, some of the stuff I'm planning in the future, what I'm trying to tell the story of is people who live their lives close to the land and the other things that happen. So you always hear some flavor of hunting in most of my podcasts. Many of them are not about hunting at all, but you'll see a small window, but you'll see this life. For instance, there's a podcast that's coming out soon,

and I interview this old guy that really is a legendary hunter. I'm not going to tell you where he's from. I don't want to forecast what the podcast is about. But the whole podcast is about his life. Very little of it's about hunting. But it puts it in context, it goes no that's not just a old hillbilly out shooting stuff this guy has dedicated his life to this this is a very thoughtful process this this guy not not just his life his dad's life and his dad's life before him

was dedicated i mean these guys made a decision this is going to be a big part of our life, boys. We're going to be hunters. And it affected their careers. It affected their families. It affected how many kids they, I mean, you know, just like the implications of choosing a lifestyle is so big. And that's what I think is so profound about hunting. And that's what I'm interested in is because I love to hunt. Like I cannot erase that for me. Like I do love to hunt like I cannot erase that for me like I do love to hunt but I am very interested in where like how hunting has actually affected my life how it impacts the character of my children how it impacts the the the sanctity of my marriage yeah I mean I I'm kind of going out there but I'm being being serious. Like, I think that what we choose to dedicate our life to has the opportunity to make us better and impact our character. And

it's just a big story, man. It's a big story. And a grip and grin doesn't tell that story, but it's so hard because it's hard to tell me, Clay, don't post a picture of yourself with a dead deer and you smiling right it's like bro you want me to accommodate my entire life for you i will do that like i spend much of my life doing that trying to interpret for people hunting but we're kind of asking for some for some empathy, from the other side. And we've got to do a better job of telling our story. Yeah, I think there's that. And there's also that we're connected to what you would call, what the general population would call trophy hunters. And therein lies the rub with bears, is that many people don't understand that bears are food.

And that it's not just food it's actually a delicious food and from a conservation standpoint it's actually important to control the population but when you see someone posing with an animal unfortunately it will go to like elephants or giraffes or some some unpleasant animal a lion where you see someone posing with a lion, and then you think about some canned hunt in Africa where some obese man is standing there with a rifle over this majestic animal, and it's very distasteful, and it infuriates people. And rightly so, because the image they're getting out of that

is some cruel sociopath who's just trying to check off boxes. Right. Have you ever seen Louis Theroux's piece that he did on hunting camps in Africa? I have not. It's really good. It's really good. And he goes to South Africa, and one of the best parts about it is he bothers the shit out of the people that run this camp. He's there forever. Until they just start talking frankly in front of him. And he gets all these people there's the shit out of the people that run this camp he's there forever he's there and until they just start talking frankly in front of him and he gets all these people who come over there and

they're talking about how much money they're paying i want to pay this much to get a hippo and then i'll pay that much and you know and you see these folks and you see this sort of casual attitude they have about going over there it's almost almost like going to Disneyland saying, okay, I'm at Disneyland. I want to ride the Incredibles ride, and then I want to go over here, and I want to do this thing. It's the same sort of way of describing it, and missing is all of the stuff that I get out of your podcast. Yeah.

All the stuff of the long, deep history of this and the traditions. And then, you know, one of the best things about Meat Eater is not just that it's like Steve is an incredible narrator and the way he writes those pieces is amazing because it gives you this insight into his mind that is this deeply intelligent, very well-read man who also loves hunting but also the cooking he's always cooking wild game on the show and you get it you get it when you see them cooking over a campfire and eating this food and it's like fantastic they're on the mountain yeah camped out it's it's very attractive yeah it's so much better than a

grip and grin yeah you know like that is if there's if a grip and grin is the worst way to get people introduced into hunting meat eater the television shows the best way yeah yeah have you ever heard the uh has anybody ever walked you through like the philosophy of the term trophy hunting and how it kind of came in no no so here's the short version joe is that i'll start out with a controversial statement and i'll qualify it okay trophy hunting is what saved north american wildlife trophy hunting imagine a market hunting culture where there was no ethic of like it was literally the wild west let's explain that to people how that all took place too because most people don't market hunting like but essentially when

europeans arrived here they arrived into a wildlife bonanza like the earth has not seen since bonanza like the earth has not seen since of all the big game animals that we have now. And they began to hunt these animals for market, for profit. Okay. So, you know, the hides of animals were valued. The meat of animals were valued. A bear fat was a commodity that could be traded as money. And so there was much incentive, like Daniel Boone, a lot of these guys, I mean, they made a good living as market hunters. And when I say good living, I mean, they weren't getting rich, but fur traders could get rich.

And so market hunting was a career. I'm a market hunter. That happened from, in 150 years, essentially from 1750 to the turn of the century 1900 basically was the one of the greatest scale demolitions of wildlife that planet earth has ever seen and and how long is going for how many years well you know i mean Boone was born in 1734, and he died in 1820, and that was kind of the—so let's just say from the late 1700s till the late 1800s. So roughly 150 years. And during that time, there was also no refrigeration.

So if you did shoot an animal, it was really only good for a certain amount of time. That's right. And they had to sell it quickly. Yeah. it was really only good for a certain amount of time. That's right. And they had to sell it quickly. Yeah.

But it was common. Like if you ate meat in a town in St. Louis, Missouri in 1820, you were probably eating some kind of wild game. That was marketed. And so that was the mentality is if it's brown, it's down. Kill anything. There was no ethic involved in it in terms of conservation. That wasn't on people's minds. Like, it wasn't invented yet. And in the late 1800s, Teddy Roosevelt and a group of guys that would later form the Boone and Crockett Club, they foresaw the end of North American big game. North American big game. They said, the big game of North America will be extinct in the next decade, like gone forever, such that they went out to collect specimens to put in a museum in New York so that future Americans would know what a buffalo looked like,

because it was going to be gone. So Americans would know what a mule deer looked like. And so basically these great thinkers of which Teddy Roosevelt and a bunch of them, there were many other men, but Roosevelt was the big one. They were like, we got to change things or this thing's going to die. And they created the Boone and Crockett Club, which essentially gave credit, gave cultural value through a numerical number, a score of an animal. And so for people that don't hunt, today you might hear a hunter say, man, I killed 150 inch buck. And that means nothing to you. That's just a number. But to us, that means a lot because, oh, wow, 150 inch buck. Like we know the that they're measured, and we know that, man, that's a big buck. And you're measuring the antlers.

Measuring the antlers of a bear. You measure his skull. Or the length of the body. Well, for Boone and Crockett, it's just the skull. Oh, okay. Just for measurement. The Boone and Crockett guys essentially came up with an ingenious plan that we are going to give cultural value to older age males so that people will be incentivized to take older age males and let the juveniles and females go. And basically over the course of about 50 years, they changed the entire hunting culture of North America.

They picked us up from a market hunting. It's brown, it's down. There was not much value put on big animals. You can go back to some of the Native American cultures and see that they put some value on big horns, but very little. And I'm not an expert on that. But essentially, this idea that we're now obsessed with big antlers comes from the idea that we want to save North American wildlife. And in a conservation perspective, the best animal to take out of a herd is an older, mature male, because he has contributed to the gene pool, it is a it is not a loss to remove him and so basically they had this incredible idea that worked and so that's what hurts me a little bit

like when you say trophy hunting i'm like no i mean i'm against i mean what you're you are describing i am against the semantics of it though actually if you deep dive and that's where you cannot understand these things if you just gloss over the surface. And that's the problem with so many parts of our world is people look at a clip off YouTube and go, okay, I understand the whole thing. Man, you don't. That's a part of Louis Theroux's documentary as well. He explains that these animals, a lot of these animals in Africa were on the verge of extinction. And now they're in abundance,

but they live in these high-fence hunting ranches. Right. And it's sort of a weird, bittersweet victory because the numbers are huge. They're higher than they've ever been before because there's value associated with them because people are willing to pay to kill them. And I realize that's a tough pill for somebody to swallow or some people to swallow but like so to me like many many many many animals have not been

shot by me and my family because of the influence of us wanting to take a bigger male and there's no shame in that it's honorable yes it's it it's not honorable because, wow, look at the animal you killed. You must be a big stud man because you – that's not it. We're players in this big game that we understand. You could take any one of my kids and put them in this chair, and they could tell you the exact same thing that I just told you. I mean, they understand what we're doing. They understand that, yeah, when we pass up a young buck to shoot an old one,

we will celebrate the heck out of those horns. But we also know that we are celebrating the heck out of that we took an animal out that's the right one to take out, the hardest one to take out. And so to throw in trophy that word came from that time period. So anyway, to me, that's fascinating. It is fascinating. Trophy hunting is what saved North American wildlife. And now we have this incredible ethic inside of everywhere.

Like when you go elk hunting, you want to kill a big one. When I go bear hunting, I want to kill an older age male. And that's a good thing. It's a very good thing. It's hard to understand. It's a very good thing. It's hard to understand. It's not understood in a headline. Right. It's a complex issue. And it's an issue, if you do go back to the whole market hunting thing, and people get an understanding of what was happening in North America in the 19th century, they'll get a better appreciation of what was done because

with market hunting having animals in the verge of extinction and then reintroducing them in places like Kentucky where they now have seasons again or places like Pennsylvania like there's a lot of parts of this country where while there's some like elk we're just they're gone still from most of their range right where an animal has cultural value, it will be protected and preserved. Yeah. Where that animal has no cultural value, no incentive for the common man to preserve that animal, he will not be protected. I think it's hard for people to swallow the fact that it takes a lot of money to protect these animals as well.

it takes a lot of money to protect these animals as well. And one of the best ways to get that money is through the taxes that are taken from hunting tags and ammunition and gear. And the Pittman-Robertson Act that has been set up to set aside, is it 10%? It varies, yeah, 10 to 11%, something like that. So through that, they've generated literally billions of dollars in conservation. And as far as I know, I don't think there's anything even close in terms of the amount of resources that have been gathered for conservation. Hunting has gathered up more money for conservation than anything else. Absolutely. Which is crazy. else. Absolutely. I mean, when you see a big bear, when you see a hunter with a bear, with a deer,

I mean, really, what you should see through that lens is see protected habitat. I mean, because essentially, to have healthy populations of animals, we've got to have habitat. And that is the biggest threat to North American wildlife right now. It's just fragmentation of wilderness, to North American wildlife right now. It's just fragmentation of wilderness, urban sprawl, decimation of habitat. I mean, you know, there's the stats are easily accessible of, you know, how much of the planet is becoming concrete every single second. And man, when you lock in these hunting grounds, I think it's awesome that we still, like wars for the last 10,000 years have been fought over hunting grounds. And today we still kind of do the same thing. I mean, not wars, but like we set aside areas that this is a place to hunt. And those areas, public land anyway, are accessible

to other people other than hunters, but hunters are the ones that are primarily funding most of the public land. And it's ingenious. Ingenious to the point it's almost hard to believe. Yeah. It's got to be a giant shocker, too, when you run those numbers by non-hunters or people that are opposed to hunting and that people who are who are believers in wildlife conservation but they don't really understand the amount of resources that are involved in maintaining that stuff protecting wetlands protecting you know making sure that public lands don't get bought up that's an issue too right yeah some states they're trying to sell off public lands

and people have to act and it gets it gets heated yes it's really crazy because yes it's a slippery slope we have a really unique situation here too right yeah i mean north america has has a hunting culture that's different than anywhere in the world and And what's so cool about it, too, and Joe, you may know this kind of stuff, but the European model of hunting essentially boiled down to that people with money, wealthy people, elites, kings, aristocrats were the ones that hunted and controlled land and controlled wildlife. Gerstacker, the reason Gerstacker left Germany in 1837 was to come to this wild, wild place and hunt. And those guys got here and they were like, you mean we can just go hunt? I've got

a friend that, I tell the story sometimes, I've got a friend that lives in Wales and she watches our bear hunting stuff sometimes. And she says every time and she she likes it presumably she says every time she's has seen me shoot a bear she gasps because she says he just shot the king's bear like wow that's the question like it's it's not it's just the impulse of her is like oh my gosh clay's gonna be in big trouble so it's like a cultural thing it's just the impulse of her is like oh my gosh clay's gonna be in big trouble so it's like a cultural thing it's embedded yeah the wildlife is not for the people roosevelt man that's why this is so ingenious roosevelt came over here and said tell you what we're gonna make wildlife accessible to all the people we're gonna make public land accessible to everyone and and

everybody would have been like, wait a minute, you sure this is going to work very good? Like, if we want to have more wildlife, don't we need to protect wildlife? And they were like, no, we need to incentivize the average guy that he has a right and a place and an ability to go out on land and kill game for his family. And then you give incentive to everybody to protect, to value, to conserve, to contribute. And it's worked better than anything on the planet ever. What people don't know, perhaps, is that most in European countries, most of the land where people are hunting is privately owned.

And it used to be owned by the royals, which is why she's thinking, oh my God, he shot the king's bear. And that's what Robin Hood was all about. The original Robin Hood, the reason why Robin Hood was an archer, Robin Hood was a hunter. And he was hunting for animals on the royal land and giving the meat to the villagers who were starving to death and he was taking from the rich and giving to the poor later on it became money you know as the oh i didn't know that so originally it was meat yeah originally robin hood

was about hollywood stole another bow hunting story from us. Well, it's like what they've done with hunting is really kind of crazy. What Hollywood has done with Bambi and with movies where there's always these drunken assholes that are out there killing animals. And so like a horror movie, when they get there, it's always great. You ever see the movie Wolverine? Probably. get there so it's always great like you ever see the movie wolverine probably one of the movies one of the wolverine movies i think it's wolverine is uh hugh jackman oh this is one of the new bear hunters yeah superhero no i have not seen that well they're asshole bear hunters and he has to fuck these guys up because he's mad that they shot a bear like he he defends the bear

yeah it's but it's that thing where the bear hunters, the hunters in films are rarely represented as like noble people with a deep appreciation for wildlife and sustainability and the fact that this is going to feed and provide nourishment to their family and to friends. And it's not, it's never thought about that way. It's thought about like Bambi. You killed Bambi you killed bambi it's an easy story it's a very it's a one-step story to tell someone that does not

know or has any context into the rural world yes that these hillbillies killing stuff are bad right it's a multi-step story to understand it right you know i mean so it's it's just like it's if you want to go from zero to an understanding you've got to walk through all the things we've just described and you can't put that on a billboard yeah you can put on a billboard this is bad don't kill bambi right it's just it's so it's so classic clickbait human nature to be like, yeah, that is bad. And I mean, in modern culture, people are looking for, everyone has this agenda of something bandwagon they want to get on. And it hurts me, man. I mean, like for real, like Joe, I stay up at night thinking about this stuff. I mean, and to me, it's an issue of representation of my people. I mean, I take it really personally.

I really do. I mean, just like we are not the bad guys. We are the good guys. Why can't we tell that story? And part of the problem is the people who think of hunters as the bad guys are involved in factory farming in the extent that they buy factory farmed meat. So they're involved in this weird imprisonment thing where everything is done in the shadows behind closed doors

and through the protection of ag-gag law. So these agricultural gag laws won't allow people that work in these factory farm situations to take photographs and videos because it would unfavorably hurt the business. So they've made it so that it's illegal to film atrocities where people would be disgusted. They're like, this is what it takes to get my bacon? Well, I don't want bacon anymore, man. So they're worried that that would hurt the business, so they've made it illegal.

So people have been locked up and gone to jail for taking video of things that most of us would think are crimes against nature. Those people who buy that stuff will hate hunters, which is really kind of crazy. We have the card stacked against us, too, for two things. Number one, a smaller number of people are hunters. Number two, finances. a smaller number of people are hunters. Number two, finances.

Like we don't have – what we do as hunters is done in private, and it is not a massive financial contribution to society. I'm not discounting the $100 that we talked about, but just think about the agricultural industry, the meat industry, massive amount of money coming into that. I mean, they control the levers on the marketing of that thing we're just these guys that are doing what humans were designed to do from the beginning of time and we are easily marketed against because i mean we don't have the i mean you know there's not some organization that manages all of hunting's PR.

It has a bankroll. I mean, the point is that we, by the very nature of what we do, are a smaller group of people that are not a super financially empowered group of people. There's no incentive for some big meat company to make hunters look good. Also, it has the opposite effect that virtue signaling does. You have to defend yourself. So as opposed to like, there's a lot of people that love to talk about how they're vegan. And one of the things about saying that you're vegan, you're letting people know that you're a very moral and ethical person who cares about life,

and you don't want anything to be harmed. So you do no harm and you just eat vegetables. And so by saying that you get a free ride with a lot of people. Like there's very few people that are going to question, okay, do you understand monocrop agriculture? Do you understand what's involved? If you're going to plant corn, how many gophers you have to kill? Do you have any idea how much pesticide you have to use to kill off the bugs? Do you have any idea what a damaging effect monocrop agriculture, when you see hundreds of acres of soybeans, you know how fucking bad that is? It's so bad for the environment.

There's no question whatsoever. You've displaced a shitload of wildlife. If you're using combines to gather up that stuff you're gonna grind up a lot of rodents and rabbits and maybe deer fawns like there's a lot all the wildlife habitat like pretty much anywhere in the eastern deciduous forest that is row crop agriculture was at one time a climax forest of some type yeah life eats. And as weird as that sounds, there's not really a lot of moral high ground to eating vegetables as opposed to eating a large game animal. Shane Mahoney is a very well known conservationist and author and speaker. He's up in Newfoundland. And he,

I heard him say a statistic one time, and I don't have the actual numbers, but essentially, if the United States, if everyone in the United States decided that they were going to be vegan, we would have to turn the entire United States and Canada into, we'd have to clear the land and have it be row crop agriculture and able to fuel a 350 million person vegan operation i mean his point in the in the numbers there you know i don't i don't have it's been so long but his point was there's a massive imprint on this place even from something as you know that sounds so non-massive about being vegan. Yeah, and what are you going to do with all the cows? What are you going to do with all the chickens?

Are you going to give them birth control? Are you going to sterilize them? How are you going to keep healthy populations alive? Do you have that worked out? Are you going to decide some bulls can breed with cows and then some can't? Are you going to play God? Are you going to hunt them if there's too many of them and if you do what are you gonna do you're gonna feed them to mountain lions like how are you gonna what are you gonna do with all the food yeah you're in a weird

situation yeah have you ever read um dan flores's uh book bison diplomacy bison ecology bison Bison Ecology, Bison Diplomacy. American Serengeti. Yeah. Didn't he write that? He also wrote Coyote, Coyote America, which is amazing. He's written quite a few great things, but one of the things that he pointed to, and it's really an interesting theory, that when you go back to the original North American settlers, they did not talk about massive herds of buffalo. And he thinks that the Native Americans, with their hunting strategies that they had already had in play, once they got ahold of the horse, and once they were riding horses, which really

didn't happen until the European settlers... It's a crazy sort of convoluted thing because horses originated in North America, but then they went extinct, but they had already traveled to other parts of the world. So like they had Asian horses and all the horses the Mongols used originated in North America. Right. So they're in our fossil record. Yeah. So Europeans reintroduced the horses.

Native Americans start... In the 1500s or so. Yeah. But what he said is the reintroduction of horses came with Europeans introducing diseases. The diseases killed 90% of the Native American tribes, which is so fucking

crazy. When we think about genocide and surely genocide was committed on many North American tribes in the form of murder, but the diseases killed most. So in killing 90% of these Native American tribes, what it did was completely alleviate all the hunting pressure. So all these buffalo, the populations went crazy. So when you see these millions of buffalo on these fields, that was wholly unnatural. And his position was that was a direct indication that the hunters had died off. So I mean, it's hard for us to imagine that 90%, a disease that wiped out 90% of all the people here.

It's bizarre. But that is what happened. And so when a lot of what Lewis and Clark would have seen in the early exploration of the West was not natural for the last 10,000 years. Right. That's what you're saying. Yeah. Well, that's what Dan Flores is saying. Have you heard of Cabeza de Vaca?

Yeah. I just read a stretch. Did you read it? What is it? i just read uh what is it a place so strange is that a land so strange a land so strange my friend hank uh turned me on to it okay amazing bizarre book i it's been a while since i've read it but i think that was the first documented european travel into the interior the united states The guy landed in Florida, I want to say, and traveled up to the southern U.S. into parts of Texas.

400 guys. They got down to two. Bizarre. Wild. Bizarre. You know? I mean, I think maybe two or four. How many people survived the end?

Maybe it's four. But either way, from 400 guys. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a bizarre history that we have. Yeah, super bizarre. When you think about how long people have been around, and one of the ways that I always describe it,

and you have a similar way of talking about it in that bear hunting episode, is that, or was it the deer episode? I listened to a couple of them. But anyway, the point is that if the United States was founded in 1776 and people lived to be 100, that's three people ago. Yeah. That's not that long. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's so, if you go back three people, you're looking at a completely different place, which is nowhere on earth like that. Yeah. Other than, obviously, the introduction of machines and engines and the industrial age, which changed the whole world, just the sheer fact that this was populated by nomadic tribes who are subsistence hunting, and then all of a sudden, within three generations, it's completely unrecognizable. And then all of a sudden, within three generations, it's completely unrecognizable. The population of the animals has completely changed. Some of them have been extirpated out of their land forever.

And then there's just this new group of humans from another continent that overwhelm the place. Yeah. It's nuts. It's nuts. Now, it is interesting, the human perspective of time. And what you're referring to is when I was talking to my buddy, my hero, James Lawrence. He's 72 or something, and he was heavily influenced by his grandmother, who I want to say we calculated that she would have been born in the 1800s and she would have had grandparents just

like james that would have been primitive humans and we feel like that was so long ago but you know and i'm using james as an example from that one but i mean it's in all of us but like james is like he he much of the way that he views the world would would would be from the direct influence of these people it's just it's just an interesting thought especially people who live close to the land who live in the same places that they always have is they're like an artifact and i'm fascinated fascinated by them yeah they carry with them the echoes of people who literally came on boats without a photograph to look at yeah they had no idea what they were getting into they someone could have drawn this is what this is what i saw in america you draw it down like okay let me take the baby we're gonna get in a boat and take a

couple months and get across the country or get across the ocean i mean how long did it take to get across the ocean back then uh it had to be a long fucking time at least a month maybe three and they just took these chances i mean what kind of wild ass people were the kind of people that were willing to take their family and jump on a boat and hope to live because you knew not everybody on that boat was going to make it. Yeah. I mean, that was the reality of the age. It's just, it's incredible.

It's incredible how far we've come in terms of air quotes progress because it is progress, but it's really what it is, is like technological innovation and the invasiveness of this technology and how it's permeated all aspects of life and all aspects of civilization. And how radical that change is over the way people lived for hundreds and hundreds of years with small evolutions, small deviations in practice and new inventions and you know different ways to do things and I've heard you talk about this kind of stuff and so it's a common thought process for people to have in this time but like the way that we have lived even just for the last 50 years is a bizarre human experience that has never ever ever ever ever been seen before information and technology uh just i mean us sitting here us knowing each other i mean like in the 1800s we

would have known each other because you would have lived in austin i would have lived in northwest arkansas and that would have been a 18 day wagon ride i mean or longer than that. I mean, this is a bizarre human experience that we're having right now. And that's why, like, if we talk about people changing the rules and we have this bizarre understanding of time, like we're just, we just show up on this planet and then we feel like we, we have answers. And that's why I'm so concerned with people specifically with hunting, hunting bears. It's like we have this one little sliver of time and we decide that we want to change the rules that have governed us for the last 10,000 years. And it's like, wait a minute, you just came on the scene like 50 years ago. How old are you? And it's not really fair. I mean, it's like,

and the disconnection of humans from natural places and just a general understanding of the biology of a human and what we have to eat and how we have to live and the natural landscape is so disconnected. We're kind of in like a dangerous place for people that want to see wild places continue. And I was talking to Keith, Keith Urbane, the guy that's with me here. He said something last night that put a bunch of pieces together for me, just in probably a three-minute conversation. But he talked about he had been reading a book about how the american identity for 200 years essentially was interfaced with wilderness and there's and

clearly there's a lot of very negative things genocide conquest of the west like we're looking back on that now and trying to understand it and the impacts of it. But the American identity for so long was our engagement with wild places. And then all of a sudden we're done. And how that like we're now we seem to be in this time of trying to understand what is our identity. And for so long, we had this identity that was deeply connected. I mean, you look across the nations of the earth, and the American identity is pretty tied into, or has been, has tied into wild places and hunting and frontiersmen. Some of our most famous people were Daniel Boone and some of these guys.

And anyway, we're in a weird place. And then what we're trying to say is, hey, just because we don't – there's a revitalization of American identity that should be modernized to fit our world now. And not to say that everybody should be hunters because they shouldn't. And not to say that being a hunter is some magical thing that's going to make you a better person. That's not what I'm saying. But there should be a space for us. I agree. And I think it's a lack of understanding. And that lack of understanding is, there's a lot of factors. There's what we talked about before with the media perceptions or depictions of hunters have been very distorted. It's very, very rare that you see a noble hunter who really truly respects the animal that they shot and killed

and takes time with the preparation and really values each piece of that meat. You don't see that in films and in television shows. You see the negative because they're just trying. They have 90 minutes to get a story out there, right? And the stories, you know, they're trying to have good guys and bad guys and the bad guys wear black and it's real simple You know, it's it's easy to and hunters are a great rude person If you got a guy who's like really in tune with animals, what do you do? You have a drunk

Asshole hunter and you insert him into your story it's a tired trope right yeah yeah but there hasn't been a lot of defense of that on the side of of hunters hunters defending themselves or depicting themselves in a positive light because i think up until now there really haven't been the resources available the wildlife shows or the outdoor shows, the hunting shows that are on television are really just preaching the converted. A lot of them have like kill shots over and over and over again and people hooting and hollering. It's for the converted.

And oftentimes, and there's some of them, we don't have to name names, some of them are hugely distasteful, even to actual hunters. You bring up some people that are professional hunters on television, amongst actual conservationists and actual hunters, they get angry. They'll get angry about that person. Like, that motherfucker's setting us back so hard with all the hooting and hollering and all the stupid way of talking about these animals and but with podcasts and

With shows like meat-eater. I think things are changing in a lot of people's perceptions Yeah, because they get us I've have conversations I've had multiple conversations with people where they said I have never even thought about hunting until I listened to a hunter on your podcast, describe what it means to them. And then I started watching some videos, then I watched meat eater, or then I read a book or then I, and I go, okay, it's like one of those things where when you're looking at it from the outside, you have a view of it that is not really accurate. And the only way to really understand what it is, is I think we have to lay layers upon layers upon layers of these kinds of conversations and discussions and stories and put them out there very carefully. So, and, and be honest about the good and the bad, the disturbing,

the part of the weird feeling of loss. Like you shoot an animal. There's a, there's a feeling, man. When I, when I shoot an animal like an elk and I walk on that up to an animal, there's a feeling, man. When I shoot an animal like an elk and I walk up to that animal, there's a real feeling of loss. There's a feeling of I'm very appreciative that that animal is going to feed me and my family and a lot of my friends for like a year. I'm going to be giving out meat. I'm going to give people sausage. They're going to send me pictures of it.

Like, look what I got. Look at what he cooked tonight for dinner. It's exciting. It's all great. But there's a real feeling of loss, and you've got to be honest about that, all the aspects of it. Yeah. And then people need to be educated about where their meat is actually coming from. And there's really good regenerative farming options.

You can buy, particularly, there's a lot of good places in Texas, where you can know your rancher. You can go and see the cows that that guy's raising. You see the bison they have that they're raising. And you can buy meat from these ethical people who humanely curate this meat, and you can have a relationship with them and buy all your food from them. And that's great. It's a great option.

But if you're a person who eats meat and you don't know where your meat comes from and you are casting aspersions at hunters you're doing it wrong and it might not even be your fault i'm not even blaming you for your perceptions because your perceptions again a lot of them are shaped by popular culture and popular culture over the last you know whatever, whatever it is, 100 years, has not done a good job of accurately portraying what's the best aspects of it. It only concentrates on the worst. Yeah.

You know, Steve Rinella, man, he, you know, I've just got to know Steve like the last year, really. And, I mean mean before that i would just been a consumer of his content and i mean he really changed the game he did i mean like he changed the game with a thoughtful intelligent way and i mean i mean i don't know any way to say it i'm not trying to blow smoke up anywhere. No, you're just telling the truth. It's just the truth. Articulate, well-read, thoughtful approach, and with a deep respect for those animals.

Yeah. And there's other people doing it too, but... But he's got a great way of describing things, and that motherfucker loves to talk. So it's like, you know uh when he had done my podcast the first time he didn't even know what a podcast was yeah and then he got me to go hunting with him that was back in 2012 so i was nine years ago it was the first time i ever hunted so it's kind of so really you had it with steve nine years ago for it was that long ago yeah i

mean i still i watched one of those episodes. 2012. Yeah, there's an episode of me and Brian Cowan hunting mule deer in the Missouri breaks. Did he get you started in hunting? Yes. Okay. On that show.

How did you know Rinella to begin with? I watched his show, The Wild Within. Okay. He had a show before Meat Eater called The Wild Within, and The Wild Within was, it was one of those sort of like life below zero type reality shows where it was like

he told me they were trying to do shit like they were trying to release a moose and then he shoots it like to ensure that they had an animal for him to shoot and he's like get the fuck out of here we're not doing that but there was a lot of what that show was that was interesting to me was his

explanation of what these people back then like he had made a raft out of hide and used it to float down the river and you know he'd shot this moose and took care of it and did all the field dressing and living like that to me has always been fascinating. And I had in my head, I had this understanding that there was a disconnect between me and food. That I would go to a store and I'd buy a steak. I'd come home and cook it or I'd order a steak at a restaurant. There's so many steps that were missing that my feelings of what a piece of meat were, were wholly inaccurate. And I knew that. And then I had seen a bunch of PETA videos. So I was like, oh Jesus. So I was thinking before Steve took me that I'm going to have one of two options. Either I'm going to become

a vegetarian or I'm going to become a hunter because I don't want to participate in this world where these animals are stockpiled into a warehouse and they're shitting into holes in the ground. It runs into this giant toxic pond. Have you seen the drone footage of pig farming? It's fucking crazy. And so I went with Steve. And my very first hunting experience ever was on video. And you can watch it online.

I shot a mule deer. Okay, I remember. I have seen that. Yeah, can watch it online. I shot a mule deer. Okay. I remember that. I have seen that. Yeah. That was the first animal I shot. I'd forgotten that that was your first hunt ever. Not only was it the first animal I shot, I'd only shot a rifle against paper like two days before that, like four or five times. We set up targets out there and he was basically just telling me, just don't flinch, just squeeze the trigger slowly and let it go off by surprise and I just sort of he was good at explaining it I got it in my head but I mean I wasn't even sure of how where to look at the scope that's it right there that's it so that was the first

animal I had ever shot ever and then you know we ate the liver um that night over fire you know we cooked it on a campfire and I was hooked Steve looks pretty pumped man oh he was so excited he gave you the he gave you the arm slap yeah well he was just excited that it dropped with one shot and it was still alive I had to put another round into it so not knowing steve real well until the last year and a half or so you know you have questions of like what's this guy gonna be like when you're with him or when the cameras aren't on because you know there's a perception of someone that's in media as much as him yeah and man i i mean i i would i would hope that people would describe me as a hunter i mean like the core motivation of me like i i i just i've been exposed to it long enough that like i can see through the fluff and man i mean and this didn't surprise me i knew steve was the real deal

but i mean i've hunted a lot with him now and i mean he the guy just loves he loves to hunt he's a real deal he's tough as nails he's he's what surprised me is like he came and hunted with us in arkansas and uh before the before we even, he wanted to go out coyote hunting. And it kind of surprised me just like his drive to hunt. Like he's not – he's legit. Oh, yeah. No, there's no question about that. There's no way he could describe it the way he describes things without having a deep love for it.

Yeah. He's very valuable very valuable he's a rare human that comes along that bridges a gap and he does it with his deep knowledge of literature and education he's he's a different kind of person that's what he did is he tied in anthropology and human history into hunting and uh and and yeah it's it's cool yeah it's it's cool what the company's doing too what meat eater is doing and now how meat eater is connected to all these other really legit companies too like first light or first light is now part of meat eater and they make you know these amazing hunting clothing and amazing hunting gear and it's just nice it's nice to see that this and that everyone in that

community shares this ethic and shares this deep understanding they're all very intelligent people whether it's remy warren who does his podcast through it or ryan callahan or all you guys it's it's really nice i'm more impressed from the inside than i am the outside for me as a company that's pretty cool and i and And I say that in all honesty. Are you living in Montana? Nope. I live in northwest Arkansas. That's the first thing Steve told me when he called me is he said, I mean, like within like 10 seconds of saying, hey, what do you think about coming to work for Meteor?

He said, you don't have to move. Because, I mean, man, my shtick is in Arkansas. Why Arkansas? I'm a seventh generation arkansan we've been there since the late 1820s i didn't know that was a term arkansan arkansan yeah we've been there and that's your spot yeah man clay gary lewin oscar robert you guys thomas thomas embarrassed at all about bill clinton my Clinton? My father and aunt went to high school with Bill Clinton at Hot Springs High School. No shit. I mean, yeah.

I mean, I'm not going to talk bad about Bill Clinton. But, I mean, sure we are. I'm just guessing. I'm just throwing a probe out there. Yeah, yeah. No, it's a great place to live. And no one should come there, ever. Really?

Yeah. You don't want anybody going there? Well, I mean, the same thing's happening there that's happening all across the country. People are moving out of urban areas. You can sell your house somewhere. Well, I better be quiet. Yeah. Well, that's happening right here, for sure.

Oh, it's happening everywhere. Yeah. No, yeah, I was born in Arkansas and, and not, I love it. I have a deep sense of, I've decided this about myself. Maybe I, yeah, I think I came to this conclusion on my own. I have an unusually deep sense of place. Interesting. I really do. And it's connected to Arkansas. Yeah. Do you know the story of Barry Seal? Yes. Mena, Arkansas, the drug drops. Man, you just made my day. Yeah. Do you know where I'm from? You're from Mena? Mena, Arkansas. No shit. Wow. That's crazy. You just made about

5,000 people very happy. Wow. By saying that name. Now, what it's connected to, maybe not so much. I grew up in Mena, Arkansas. Yeah. The Tom Cruise movie doesn't really do it justice. What is it, American Made? Is that what it is? It's a good movie, but it's fictitious.

Yeah. Tom Cruise is quite a bit more handsome than Barry Seals. Tom Cruise is quite a bit more handsome than Barry Seals. But the story behind it is that this guy was running drugs for rogue members of government agencies, whether it's the CIA or whoever. And he was flying into these countries, buying cocaine, and then dropping it off in Mena, Arkansas. And there's a long story that goes with it where there's two children were murdered, two kids that saw the drop, and then there was a lie that was told that they were high and that they fell asleep on train tracks, and then the family wound up paying for autopsies, and the autopsies concluded that they were murdered and stabbed.

And then, you know stabbed and then you know and then yeah so so we moved to mina in 1984 when i was five years old just from we just hopped a little town so it was right before it all went down well yeah and so my dad was uh i guess there's no harm in telling these details my dad was in banking so he became a banker in Mena, Arkansas. And so he was, you know, he knew a lot of people in the community. And he, so it was right after all that stuff, because all that stuff was happening in the late 70s. Is that right? I'm not sure. Exactly. Late 70s, early 80s. But it was over by the time we got there. But dad has lots of stories,

just over the years of people that worked at the airport, which I know, I mean, I could list names of people that I know today that worked at that airport. And there were stories of big jets coming in with no lights on in the middle of the night. And how much of it is true, it's hard to say. What is this, Jamie? Scroll all the way up so we can read the whole title. This is it.

Activities at airport in MENA detailed. FBI document recently released. Oh, shit, this is last year. Oh, that's pretty recent. Interesting. So it's a cargo plane. So this is one of the ways, I mean, there was more than one way, but one of the ways where they got cocaine into the United States.

They smuggled narcotics into MENA, Arkansas. There it is, Barry Seale. Extensive joint investigation by the FBI. Arkansas State Police and IRS revealed that Barry Seale used the MENA airport for smuggling activity from the late 1980 until March of 1984. I was there, man. Right when you were there. Crazy, the heart of it. I was there, man. Right when you were there. Crazy, the heart of it.

I was thinking it was the late. For some reason I had it was right before we got there. Wild timing. According to an internal FBI document released last week, Seal, a pilot, moved much of his smuggling operation from Baton Rouge to Rich Mountain Aviation at the MENA Intermountain Airport, according to the May 1986 FBI memo. It's a wild movie.

It's a wild movie. And it's not totally accurate. There's better accounts of exactly what went down that you could find. But that's that spot. Yep. Yep. A lot of people made a lot of money out of that area. I guess so.

Who knows? It wasn't anybody local there. No. No, I'm sure. It was somebody else. Yeah, somebody else in control. Now, as far as the area of Arkansas, we're looking at, I've never been. What is it like topographically?

So Arkansas, if Arkansas were, let's just say it was this square right here, If Arkansas were, let's just say it was this square right here, there would be a line drawn across from the northwest corner, northeast corner to the southwest corner. The southeastern triangle of Arkansas would be Mississippi River Delta country, like swamp country, producing some of the most, an incredible amount of rice, soybeans, and wheat, like farm country. From, you go to the northwestern corner of Arkansas, and it is mountains. It's southern highlands. And those two places are like two different countries. I mean, and it's that abrupt at different places. So I was raised raised in the washington mountains i now live in the ozark mountains and essentially it would be very equivalent to appalachia beautiful man ozarks are beautiful well we all get a sense of it from

the tv show ozark yeah which is a wild fucking tv never never watched it never no it's good is it oh yeah does it make us does it make ozarkians look bad no you don't think so no but it's not talking about real ozark culture no not really it's just a place it's just a place that's used for drama and drug dealing and it's it really is it's more about a guy who it's a brilliantly written show and brilliantly acted jason bateman is a wizard he put together an incredible show it's so addictive and it's it's more about drug dealing and how these people have doesn't sound too good joe for ozarkers man it's not about the Ozark. It's really about Mexican cartels and these guys from Chicago that wind up in the Ozarks. And he's just

trying to run this... I don't want to give away too much of it, but it's a brilliant show. I know what you're looking at it from a state pride perspective or a local pride perspective. I mean, maybe you won't like it because of that, but it doesn't make people look bad. I understand. It basically is about human nature more than anything. Yeah. And about people trying to, like, deal with situations

that have no pleasant answers. No, there's no pleasant solutions that are, like, real clear. Yeah. It's a wild show. No, I hadn't seen it. It's good. I hadn't seen it. But it's beautiful when they're in the Ozarks.

And see, I don't know where they filmed that, but I think it was in Missouri, in the Missouri Ozarks. The topographic core in terms of ruggedness of terrain would definitely be in northern arkansas so the the ozark mountains would cover northern arkansas and a big part of southern missouri so geographically it would appear that much of the ozarks is actually in missouri which it is and it's beautiful i'm not taking anything away from missouri but the most rugged part of the Ozarks is in the, is in central Arkansas. And by rugged, I just mean big mountains, lots of relief, big, beautiful rivers, bluffy limestone country, a lot of caves, it's karst topography, um, beautiful. And, you know, anywhere that you plopped yourself down on this planet like there's incredible history there and there's incredible beauty there in its own way and so i i recognize that where i live is like

i mean it's special because i i i've added value to it by being there you know and i've heard it said by kind of an Arkansas philosopher who was describing the Ozark Mountains, okay? And he said, the Rocky Mountains are grand and majestic, but the Ozark Mountains are intimate. And if you see a knob, there's probably a pretty good chance

that you could walk to the top of it within a half a day. And that was kind of his he was like so you know they're much bigger more majestic views but there's beauty to be found everywhere ozarks are cool it's a cool place yeah something doesn't have to be enormous just to be beautiful in terms of like natural topography yeah there's definitely beautiful mountains that are less daunting than say like, you know, the continental divide or something. Yeah.

You know, but all of it's fucking amazing. But the thing about Arkansas is it's relatively lightly populated, right? Less than three million people. For the whole state. State of, you know, five, 50,000 square miles essentially. So it's just a million people more than the greater Austin area. So Austin's a million, and then

outside of Austin apparently is another million that are closely connected, which is, compared to where I'm from, California, this ain't shit. It's hilarious. But that, you're talking about the whole state. So the whole state is basically the population of austin

plus a third yeah which is nuts yeah and see i don't really have a context for that joe like i really don't like i i understand what you're saying to me like the the population density of the planet is gauged against just what i know. And it just seems real normal that there's 3 million people in our state. And I mean, I think it's overcrowded. And where you live, how many people are in your town? So I live in a suburb of Fayetteville, Arkansas, which is a town of about 2,000. So Fayetteville is 2,000 or your suburb your suburb my little town i'm trying not to say the

name right i understand uh so northwest arkansas is kind of the the the hub the population hub of arkansas the state capital is little rock which has 250 000 something like that northwest arkansas has fayetteville multiple cities strung together, and it's about an area of about 300,000 people. And that's where the Walmart home office is, the Tyson home office, some big, big international companies. And the University of Arkansas is there. And it's a neat town. And outside of that, how much of that is public land? How rural does it get? How quickly? Quickly, you get into rural areas. I mean, like I said, I think there's 2.2 million acres of national forest in Arkansas and a lot more just standard like state public land. And I mean,

like from Fayetteville, you could pretty quickly be in National Forest. I mean, like within 30 minutes drive being National Forest. But to be in really rural Arkansas, within 30 minutes, you could be there. So 30 minutes. And when you're looking at wild game in that area, is it mostly deer and bear, like turkey? Like what, what kind of? Deer, bear, turkey would be kind of the big three in the, in the highlands of Arkansas. And whitetail hunting would be the primary thing that people are hunting. Turkey numbers are way down. Now I like small game. So I've got squirrel dogs, I've got coon dogs, and I've got mules. Do you eat coons?

We do, but that is not the primary reason that we harvest them. What do they taste like? They taste like a bear. Really? I mean, they're red meat, fatty red meat. Wow. So raccoon's good. Yeah, it's not bad.

And it's, man, I... Depending on how you prepare it. Yeah, yeah. But we're, you know, there's one of the pillars of the North American model of wildlife. I've got to say this now that I've said that I don't eat raccoons because we kill a lot of raccoons. One of the pillars of the North American model of wildlife conservation is non-frivolous use of wildlife. That's one of the seven pillars. So it means we don't just kill stuff for no reason. Most of the North American,

most of that pillar is fulfilled in that we kill animals we eat them right but there are other reasons that we would kill animals that would fulfill the non-frivolous use but wouldn't mean that we would necessarily kill them to eat okay and this is this is nuanced water i'm even nervous sharing it but like so a coon raccoons have an unnatural population. I mean, there are more raccoons on the landscape than there has ever been in the history of the world. Really? Oh, yeah.

Absolutely. Is that because of garbage? Just ecological, not garbage, just fragmentation. All the things that are happening are fantastic for raccoons. fragmentation all the things that are happening are fantastic for raccoons and so essentially we we hunt raccoons for their hides so they're fur burying animals so that part of the non-frivolously use with fur burying animals you harvest the hides and occasionally you eat them occasionally like one out of ten every now and then you just decide? Yeah. Yeah. But mostly you're doing it because you need to control the populations and for the hides. Two reasons.

For the hides and because, yeah, population control. And, I mean, that's a justification for me. I love to hunt raccoons with my dogs. What is this here? raccoons with my dogs. What is this here? Farmland as a human population in the United States has grown from under 3 million to over 300 million, providing millions of raccoons with garden vegetables, fruits, nuts, grain, household garbage on which to feed. In the 1800s, many areas in the United States supported approximately one raccoon per square kilometer, about three raccoons per square mile. In 2002, a study of raccoons in Indiana found 222 raccoons per square kilometer.

Holy shit. About 700 raccoons per square mile. That's a lot of fucking raccoons. Yeah. The largest raccoon was 58 pounds. Oh my God. Found in Texas. Wow.

By the way, those motherfuckers might be in my backyard. They in Texas? Wow. By the way, those motherfuckers might be in my backyard. They open up lids. Pull garbage bags out, these fucks. They got hands. They're an incredible beast.

So let me tell you about what I saw. What we think we saw. I have video footage of it, but it's night vision and it's a cat that seems like it's about in the neighborhood of knee high,

maybe slightly below knee high. And, you know, I'm estimating its weight. It could be, you know, 40 to 60 pounds, something like that. Who knows? But it's a dark cat. And I think it's probably a Jaguarundi because Jaguarundis did exist in Texas and people have seen them that's what it looks like now okay did you we have video footage of it can you show it to me yes yeah i'll have uh

if uh my security guys are listening i hope they've uh someone must have recorded it but you can see my neighbor who's got a headlamp on, who's walking his dog, the cat hears him and run towards him. Runs towards him, sees him, and then darts off into the woods. So the first episode of the Bear Grylls podcast is the myth of the southern mountain lion. I don't know if we talk about black panthers extensively. Oh. And this was little in terms of like, i've seen mountain lions before um i've seen two mountain lions one pretty clearly that looked like it was dog-sized you know like a 70 pound

ish thing yeah that ran and i didn't realize it looked like a coyote almost yeah and i realized it was a mountain lion when i saw its tail was running across the road and had like one of these tails i was like oh that's a mountain lion if If I was a betting man, and this is not against you. But this was in Santa Barbara. Okay, right, right. This was in a place that has mountain lions. Where I'm talking about this thing. Was here in Austin.

This was here in Austin, and it had a long tail, and it was a dark cat. Well, in my interview in Biologist, what they said is that the number one culprit for misidentified mountain lions is house cats. Yeah, this was big. It was big. It was big enough where my security guards had to tell me, make sure the dog's inside the house. Wow.

They said, we've got this large predator on video. I'm anxious to see it, man. In front of the house. Yeah. Whatever it is, it's bigger than a cat. It's bigger than a serval. You know those little pet cats? It's bigger.

It's a fucking real thing. Oh, is this it? There it is. That's it. So this is the video footage. I mean, it's hard when you see the guy walk by. I don't necessarily think we should put my neighbor on video. But when you see the guy walk by, you get a sense.

Okay, I just saw his tail. Yeah. I want to watch it walk again. Joe, has anybody, has a professional, seen this? No. Okay. So show this again. Well, some wildlife person should.

What are you doing there, buddy? Man, hey, you don't know the firestorm that I started about black panthers and mountain lions. Well, there are definitely mountain lions here. Right, right. In Texas. But this scenario. Look at this thing. Look at this thing. That's a cat. Right, right. In Texas. But this scenario. Look at this thing. Look at this thing.

That's a cat. And look how big it is. Right? Is there any magnification of this where it's less grainy? No. This is it. This is night vision. So you can see up close on the ground, right?

Right in front where it's more illuminated. You kind of get a sense of what it looks like at high resolution. But this thing is like knee high this is a fucking cat and it's a dark cat you see it run off that is not a house cat it's way bigger i don't want to show my neighbor but i'll show it to you but when my neighbor walks by afterwards you can get some scale it's up to his knee yeah whatever the fuck that thing is it's not small i mean think of that as a cat that's a cat that's that high yeah that's a big cat yeah so whatever that thing is i think it's a jaguarundi because they were native to texas

and the last time they photographed one here was the 1980s but you know know how dense Texas is. You go outside, fucking woods everywhere. If it's nighttime, you don't know what the fuck's out there. The idea that some wildlife biologist has combed every inch of this insanely massive state, and they existed here in the hill country. They're native to this area. But there's been people reporting pictures of them and or reporting meetings of them and citing them but there's no real photographic or video evidence yeah

whatever that is that's not a house cat yeah that's a big fucking cat i'd like to i'd like to see the the scale of it yeah i'll show you i'll show you well i'll get those guys to get uh the further video i hope they save that as well of my neighbor walking by or i could stand in that spot and you kind of see and you can get a sense of what it looked like but i'm telling you the thing is probably what what i would be interested in would be and it's it's not a high quality video so it's hard but like the gait of that animal like and i'm this this is why it's so wonderful about these kind of things and i don't know you well enough to uh like i don't know if you really want my opinion or if you don't i always definitely want your opinion um because this is the beauty of these animals out in wild places where there's like controversy over what it is.

I am by nature a skeptic, okay, of anything that's abnormal. Because usually people make errors in judgment. Right. I mean like 97 97 of the time i would have to it's it's i would like to see the scale of it that would give all the details that's what changed it for me we'll show you that afterwards okay what changed it for me is when i see my neighbor walk by yeah and then i realized well this thing's about that big yeah it's not a house cat it's like i'm it's wider than me it's it's not a house cat. It's like, it's wider than me.

It's, it's whatever the fuck it is, it's big. Yeah. It's not big like a mountain lion though. Hadn't seen it again. No, no,

I haven't seen it since then. But, I know that people have seen similar things like this and these are all anecdotal stories, but you got to think that if that Jaguarundi was here in the 80s, like it's...

It could still be here. Fuck yeah. Yeah. There's so, I mean, how many different times have they thought that an animal was extinct and then they find viable breeding populations of them? Right. It does happen. What's wild about the myth of the Black Panther in much of the South is that there are Black,

I mean, it is amazing how many stories there are of black panthers. Any community, anywhere, I mean, really in the eastern United States, you go in and say, are there black panthers here? And some percentage of people will say yes. And basically, science has never documented a melanistic mountain lion. But they have with jaguars. Yes. So for down here, that could count. Like if you, like you could be like, well, yeah, we're deep enough into Texas.

Jaguars are coming up from Mexico. There are some jaguars that their home ranges span into, you know, the United States. Arizona for sure. Yeah. Yeah. So, and there are documented melanistic states arizona for sure yeah yeah so and and there are documented melanistic jaguars and leopards but science has never documented a melanistic mountain lion and so like the whole idea of a black mountain lion in the in like arkansas tennessee kentucky north carolina anywhere is just straight up it's not true well isn't it also that people see things in the dark and they can't get a good view of what it looks like oh man we we interviewed a psychologist on our podcast about cognitive bias and naive realism about how and it's so funny because my dad my dad who is a he's hilarious but he he talked about that he it was like news to me i'd never heard

him say it before but he was like yeah i believe in black panthers and i caught this on audio kind of almost by accident and anyway it goes so deep people are just and it's touchy yeah i mean it like divides families oh for sure like if they're black panthers or not and i love it man i love it and i'm pro i'm pro black panther i mean like i i want the myth to continue i love a good myth man yeah i i do too but this thing whatever that thing is i mean you get a chance to see if that's a house cat that's a fucking whopper of a house cat yeah and i don't think it is i i think it's one of those Jaguar undies. If you can pull that photo of that Jaguar undie up again. Jaguar undie.

Because it looks like that. And that thing used to live here. And when they say that the last sightings were in the 1980s, man, that to me, like that thing. Yeah. That's exactly what it fucking looked like. Yeah. Big cat.

And, you know, those things still exist. They're not extinct like look at that thing that motherfucker right there that's exactly what it looked like hey okay what's wild right now on the joe rogan podcast there is a there's a social science experiment happening because like i want to believe you so bad we don't have to believe me you're playing into my what we discovered and even the conclusion that we came to on our podcast because part of the question remember we're answering these bigger questions about human nature and it's like how could the myth of a and i'm not talking about texas okay because there could

legitimately be a black jaguar down here but how could the myth of a black panther exist in kentucky when that animal has never existed and like i deeply want to just tell you that i believe you like i want to like it's hard for me not to just go joe i'm with you bro and like fist bump you and go man that's a stinking jagger rundy in your backyard like i feel this social pressure to do that well don't don't give into that and that is the beauty of human nature and community like and so like and that's essentially what has human nature and community. And that's essentially what has propagated in some ways false things,

but it's also what propagates a bunch of good stuff. Like I want to believe you. And you are dead set on what your perception of this is. No, I'm definitely not. Here's why I'm not. I don't have enough data. Okay. I don't have much data either other than that video. Yeah.

But I do know that there's a lot of exotic animals that people keep here as pets. Yep. And it easily can be something along those lines. Did you know that every part of the country has that story? What story? The story of the circus train wreck in the 1940s. Oh, when an animal gets out. No, for real.

It's all over, man. Oh, for sure. And everybody has the same story. It's so funny. Yeah, but you know Texas has more tigers in captivity than all the wild of the world yeah if that could happen anywhere it would be texas it's a wild place so whatever that thing is i mean i obviously we have grainy footage but we do have when we'll show you off air my neighbor and you'll get a chance to see because when you see that that's

when i went oh huh that's a big fucking cat and they're like yeah this is not a small animal this is somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 or 50 pounds maybe bigger yeah i mean the up upside it's just here's what you could do if you really wanted to test out your theory this is what you would do and the biologist told me they do this with mountain lion sightings, is take a cutout, like a piece of poster board, and draw a big cat on it, like a big-sized house cat. And put it in that spot. Put it in that spot.

Oh, that's smart. And then, you know. Film it. Yeah. Oh, okay. Just stake it out there and then walk back in your house. Yeah. Or just cut a square or a rectangle so you get a sense, well, this is the body size of it.

If I put that rectangle there, or maybe this is too big or this one's too small. Yeah, that's smart. Because if I put it in the exact same area, then I can get a real perfect readout of exactly how high it is. It would help you if you drew out like a- Like a cat. Like the silhouette of, and make it like a big house cat. I'll have a little, we'll have a project with my kids. Yeah.

My youngest daughter's very artistic. I'll explain to her what's going on. That's good. I want to hear the results of that. We have a lot of cool animals in the area, though. My God, there's a lot of fucking owls. A lot of owls and a lot of deer. Deer everywhere.

And we have one fat fucking coyote that we got on security camera that looks like a dog i mean he's big big big ass coyote and uh you never hear him i don't hear any coyote you don't hear him yipping no you hear weird fox noises like foxes make those crazy noises at night you've you ever heard fox screams? Yeah, they kind of growl. Yeah, weird. But no coyote howls. But they're definitely there. We have photos of them and video of them.

But that thing was weird. It was. Maybe wildlife biologists are going to contact me now. Imagine. Imagine we find out. It'll be solved to me. The next step of data I would need would be a two-scale model of a house cat right there in that spot. Yeah. Yeah, okay.

Well, one thing I do have that's a good scale is I have one of those foam pigs, those wild boar targets, a 3D target. Okay. I can go and plant that sucker out there, and we'll get a real good idea. Because the wild pig target's about this big. Yeah. Well, let me know how that goes. Those Reinhardt targets. Yeah.

Yeah. What did you think by looking at it, though? It's obviously a cat, right? Man, I don't want to – I just need more data. Right. But you think it's a cat, right? I'm not convinced. Really?

What do you think it might be? It just didn't have the gait and the grainy photo. It's tough. Let's see it again. A cat has a very distinct gait and walk, and I didn't initially just... There it goes again. It's kind of bouncy. That's kind of bouncy.

That's kind of... that's kind of bouncy that's kind of yeah and like a dog it that was my and i'm not saying that i believe that's a canine but the gait of that animal i'm that is not my conclusion that it is a that is a canine that's not what i'm saying but i would i feel like i just feel like it moves weird. Yeah, the tail though when it runs off it does appear like a cat. But that looks like a cat.

Yeah. When it runs off that looks like a cat. That part where it runs off because it hears my neighbor, let it go right there. Yeah, that looks like a fucking cat. It does.

It does. Big ass. More data. Creepy cat. Need more data. Yeah. My wife saw a zebra. Ohepy cat. Need more data. Yeah. My wife saw a zebra. Oh, from your house?

Driving, no. Like a wild zebra? Driving on the way to Houston. Saw a zebra. There was a guy that, there was a guy that. But there's a lot of fucking zebras out here. People, like, super common, believe it or not, in ranches in Texas for someone that was a zebra.

Oh, no. believe it or not in the ranches in texas for someone that was zebra i know there's a guy in arkansas this farm that we drove past every day to get to our house this guy in arkansas had two zebras out in his pasture and i was it was when my kids were young and we had like wildlife games that we played when we drove down the road you know every time we got in the car it was a wildlife game and we assigned points to different types of wildlife from crows to geese to deer and the highest level was a bear if you ever saw a bear like we would we were going to have some massive celebration and take everybody out to eat and the winner got to choose where they went like so we we had this elaborate mechanism of this game we played and this you know when my kids were like

four to eight you know whatever and this guy man this this guy had zebras and i used to rant every time we drove past his place because i had to lecture my kids about how yes we did just see a zebra but those don't live here. Those are African animals. And it was super confusing. So to this day, now my kids are grown, much older. Every time we drive past that place, my son goes, dad, gum, zebra farmer. I mean, like there's, it's like, don't have zebras in Arkansas, man. They're cool when they're in Africa.

Yeah. Well, it's weird how many animals are like that here. Like oryx, which are really very uncommon in the wild. when they're in Africa. Yeah. Well, it's weird how many animals are like that here. Like oryx, which are really very uncommon in the wild. They're endangered. In Texas, you can go hunt them. Yeah. They're all over the place. Yeah.

Texas is a different planet when it comes to a different country. Neal guy? Yeah. Yeah. What is this? Yeah. Wow. Arkansas judge mauled by family's pet zebra.

Wow. They're a cool fucking animal, aren't they? I've heard that they're – my cousin actually has a – God, look how wild they look. Half zebra, half donkey. I don't remember what he did with it, but they're wild critters, man. Oh, they can make a hybrid that's non-viable? I think you're getting off on it.

So it's like a mule? Well, this is in your wheelhouse because you're really into mules, right? Yeah, yeah. I don't know much about zebra breeding. But they can be bred with a horse? I think so. Wow. Man, you caught me on something I really don't know.

Look at that. There it is. A zonkey. That's what it is. A zebra-donkey hybrid. Yeah, my cousin. Wow. Man, you caught me on something I really don't know. Look at that. There it is. A zonkey. That's what it is. A zebra donkey hybrid. Yeah, my cousin had one of these. I think he still does. They have a big racehorse stable.

A zonkey. No, man, mules are fascinating critters. They really are. Well, that's another common misconception about the best animal to ride across the country during the pioneer days was not a horse it was a mule yeah well man if you if you want a spiel like if you want a little spiel and i could i mean i could talk for hours about it but you know what's the difference between a mule and a horse and why would you pick a mule over a horse okay because that's the biggest question and right for for just to inform people a mule over a horse? Okay, because that's the biggest question. And for just to inform people,

a mule is a hybrid cross between a female horse and a male donkey, okay? And it produces non-viable offspring. And there's a term in animal breeding called hybrid vigor, which means you cross two distinctly different animals. And it could even, hybrid vigor could be used in a lot of different ways.

But essentially, hybrid vigor means that the offspring of these animals is greater than the sum of the individual animal. Like a liger. Yeah. And so a mule has all these incredible properties that made it super valuable. And that's part of the reason in the Ozarks, like the Ozarks and the Southern Highlands of the United States are known as in many ways, as it could be argued, but as like the mule epicenter of the world, like a lot of mule

trainers, a lot of mule work. And it came from many, many things, but mules handled the heat better than a horse. Mules have more stamina than a horse when worked. And so that's why you hear people talking about plowing with mules. I mean, you can plow with a horse too, but a mule would have more stamina. A mule's feet don't have to be worked on because a donkey is essentially not that much different than a wild animal. worked on because a donkey is essentially not that much different than a wild animal. Like donkeys would have come from somewhere in the Mediterranean, like they would have been wild burrows and different things. A donkey is pretty close to what it was. A horse has been highly, highly influenced by human selection over, you know, thousands of years. And so you get this animal that has been very much so built for our purposes.

But in general, if a horse is not shooed, it will go lame and not be able to work much. So that's why there's this whole farrier industry, which is where people put shoes on horses. What about wild horses? What happens with them? Well, that's a good question. Because if they're acclimated in a certain way, they can become, you know, they don't have to have shoes in the wild, obviously, but they're not doing work either. They're not having a bunch of people on them.

They're not working. Okay. And it's kind of one of these deals. Once you start, you can't stop. So if you start shooing an animal, just like us wearing shoes, if we walked around from the time we were born barefoot. Right, right. The biggest point and the main thing I'm talking about is that a mule has extremely sturdy, hard feet. And so you don't have to shoo a mule.

Some people do, but typically you don't have to shoe a mule. Some people do, but typically you don't have to. So less maintenance. And that's a major thing. If you have a horse, man, you got to shoe that thing every six weeks. A lot of investment. A mule won't founder. And that may not seem like that big of a deal, but if you're an equine owner, if your mule gets in your barn and has access to 50 pounds of grain. What does founder mean? It means that if your animal has access to grain and it eats, eats, eats, eats, eats, it's an intestinal condition where basically the animal eats too much of the super rich food and just dies. Oh, wow. It's an intestinal thing. So horses founder all the time. A mule won't founder. So with a horse, you have to

be very strict. Very careful. What food you leave around. Yes. A mule won't founder. So with a horse, you have to be very strict. Very careful. What food you leave around. Yes. Yeah, your horse will founder like that. Wow. But the main reason that a mule would be the chosen animal for mountain riding is they're known to be safer than a horse a wonderful thing is that they're very trainable easy to train such that they say that you could train a horse to run off a cliff okay you could you could make because you're in when

you're on that animal you're in charge of it and you could give it the cues to make it do something that would endanger its life and in most circumstances that's a great thing because i mean like you're in charge and this animal's doing what you want it to do. You can lead the horse in a war. Yeah. A mule has a very strong self-protective mechanism in it that most people would perceive as stubbornness. So you hear people talk about stubborn as a mule. Well, what that is, is a self-protective mechanism on that animal. That animal, you ride a mule up to a raging river out in montana buddy you want to be on a mule because he ain't going to cross that creek if he's going to die so if you're on his back you are you you know you're going to be safe if he if you cue him to

go up the side of this bluffy mountain, if he'll go, just trust him. A horse might get up there and roll off. And I'm not talking bad about horses. I mean, like horses are dominant, the most for sure, most popular equine animal. Mules are about 10% of the equine world. But what I love about mules, what I love about mules what I love about them is that they're very difficult to train and that's why people don't go to them as quickly as they do a horse they're very difficult to train but a well-trained mule is an incredible animal and it's an incredibly safe animal and i want to be on the back of a mule when i'm in rough country but the thing that works against the mule i should be like the mule marketing guy like for the planet because we need some better pr because what happens is people

get a mule don't understand how to how a mule works because he thinks way different than a horse much more difficult to train and a mule never forgets i had a yeah well i'll tell you something somebody else said a mule never forgets and you can you can mess up a mule very quickly and so what happens is i get a mule and start to train it Start having some problems with him. And problems could be, I mean, just a variety of different ways. And then I sell that mule because I can't do anything with it. And and the next guy gets it and he starts adding problems because he's getting a mule with a problem. And then basically a mule has five different owners and every one of them's put their own problem on that mule. And that mule basically becomes like a wild beast.

And so people know, like, stubborn as a mule, man, you don't, I mean, you'll hear a lot of legit cowboys and guys say, man, you don't want anything to do with a mule. What I learned that I had to do was get mules from the time they were young. Like, I didn't want a mule that had been messed with by anybody else. Like, I want to know every interaction that that animal has had with a human. And I've had a lot of luck with that in training these mules. But I love it.

They're safe in the mountains. And the reason I want to ride mules is to get deeper into wild places and stay longer. And there's some romance involved in it, which I have zero shame over. Sometimes when I ride mules with Rinella, he's like, we could just walk. He accused me of kind of liking the romance of it. And I'm like, yeah, of course I do. Of course I want to ride a mule. But there is some real function. And he likes riding mules too.

He's pretty good. And that was the thing that across the country, the early settlers, they rode mules very often, right? Yeah. Because they knew about this a long time ago. Yeah. So Wild West movies. There would have been a lot of mules involved. And articulation of the feet, this will close my spiel.

Okay. Mules of the feet. This will close my spiel. Okay. Mules have the ability. They say that a horse is able to understand where his front feet go, but his back feet just kind of go wherever. This is anecdotal. A mule has, like, great articulation in his feet, both front and back. So he's able to very much so pick where he puts his feet. I mean, I see that.

That's the reason. They're like a four-wheel drive horse. And when you raise mules, you raise mules specifically for use in hunting adventures? Yeah. How many mules do you keep? I've got four right now. But they're, I mean, I'm not in the commercial mule business. I'm not like selling mules for anything. Is that a big business in the commercial mule business. I'm not selling mules for anything.

Is that a big business, the commercial mule business? Man, COVID, just like everything, has sent the price of mules through the roof. Really? I mean, I don't know if it's COVID, but my mules are probably triple the value of what they were a year ago. Because people want mules now? Yeah. Maybe it's just because they're cool now. They kind of go in and out of vogue.

Oh. There's cycles in the mule world. But hunting accelerated during COVID. Yeah, but that's not – the primary use of mules is not hunting, I would say. It's farm work? Recreational riding. Recreational riding. Just in general.

Interesting. Yeah, yeah. Most of the equine world is recreational riding. But then outfitters out west sometimes have big herds big stocks of animals and what so the mule trade world is there's a lot of there's trainers all over the country and there's great western mule trainers but there are a lot of trainers in the east that train mules year-round and then they take them to these big mule sales in the western united states and sell them for big money so this is a secret i will let you

in on you could go you come to arkansas and buy a mule for a thousand dollars that you'd pay probably four thousand to five thousand dollars just for hauling him and selling him somewhere in idaho really yeah don't tell anybody too late i i couldn't end this podcast without complimenting you on your mustache that's a fucking strong move Thank you I like how you got the beard Integrated The mustache

It's sort of a part of the beard But it's not It's a great look Much appreciated It's very old westy Like it's for a guy Who's so into bear hunting And the outdoors and hunting

You got a perfect mustache That's all I have to say Thank you And I appreciate talking to you man It was really really enjoyable I really talking to you man it was really really enjoyable I really do thank you so much

and I'm enjoying your podcast very much it's called Bear Grease it's available on everything right Spotify iTunes

all that thank you Joe thanks Clay I really really enjoyed it yeah alright bye everybody Thank you.