The Joe Rogan Experience - #576 - Jim Shockey

Episode Date: November 17, 2014

Jim Shockey is an outdoor writer, a professional big game outfitter and television producer for many hunting shows. Jim has hunted in more than forty countries and has taken nearly three-hundred known species. Check out the new season of "Uncharted" airing in 2015 on the Outdoor Channel.

and just like that we're online pretty easy huh nothing's changed for me how do i know for sure we are exactly that's the key i think that that's eventually going to be the whole world we We're just going to be online. I wouldn't doubt it. I mean, look at the size of these cameras. I'm shocked. I was expecting to see this big studio with like, do-do-do, this is Hollywood. Yeah, these are tiny little cameras. Normal, consumer grade, you know, and that's basically what it is. I mean, we have new ones that are high definition ones that we haven't worked the kinks out yet that will be up shortly. But other than that, just regular cameras. And this is actually, like, just like this, the background, everything's online.

This is online right now. Yeah, we can show it to you if you want. You want to see it? We'll show it to you on one of the screens. Yeah, that's really cool. I spend a little bit of time out in the mountains, so I don't get to. A little bit. Yeah, a little bit.

There you go. Hey, look at that. That's you. You're live online right now. Way cool. So I saw your show, the new show and the old show. I've seen them online from, I guess, the last couple of years. And for folks who don't know, Jim Shockey, you're a famous hunter, a famous outdoorsman,

conservationist, all of the above. But your new show is what really drew me in, what I really started tweeting about it, the show Uncharted. Where, I mean, there's shows that transcend the genre that they're in. You know, there's shows that, like, it might be a comedy show, but there's more to it. It might be a drama, but it's... This show is very difficult to define this uncharted show because it's almost like a documentary on these strange cultures that you're visiting yeah with hunting as as the as the underlying reason we're there yeah um and the

theme when we're in those places you know what what's going on with the hunting in those crazy wild lands um and you know I mean, before we even go one step further, I got to say, I'd like to take full credit for it, but it's, it's our son Branlon, you know, this is his brainchild. He, he, he actually, you know, I've, I've done television hunting shows and you've seen the hunting shows.

I mean, they started, my original ones a zillion years ago now were pretty bad. Like, hi, I'm Jim Shockey. This is my big buck. Right. But, you know, Bran wanted to do something that would change television. Like literally that was his goal was to change

television, the way you watch television. And, you know, I said, absolutely. If it's art, which I think, you know, we don't get enough credit as hunters. People think, well, we're just I think, you know, we don't get enough credit as hunters. People think, well, we're just louts, you know, swilling beer, shooting out the window of the truck and causing havoc. Well, that's not what hunters are.

You know, hunters have some of the highest sensibilities you can possibly have. They're tuned into nature like nobody else, maybe mountaineers. I mean, you read mountaineering books, those guys, they're also switched on for that but uh your brand wanted to try and capture that and and the cultures around that's that's uncharted yeah i think it's a very unfortunate aspect of our culture that we live in this weird insulated world where people are so detached from

the meat they eat and where it comes from that they view the people who go out and get it themselves, in the most difficult circumstances, they view those people to be less intelligent, of low moral standards. They view them to be drunks. And I don't know how it happened that hunters got lumped into this strange group, but I was having a conversation with a friend of mine online the other day, got lumped into this strange group, but I was having a conversation with a friend of mine

online the other day and he was having these, he was making these, you know, accusations about hunters. And I was like, do you actually even know any hunters? Like, are you just like basing this on like an episode of Bugs Bunny? Like, what is this?

You know what it is? It's, yeah, I mean, I'm old enough to remember Walt Disney when he did Bambi. That son of a gun did, I'm telling you, that was the day. Yeah. That was the day that the pendulum started swinging in the other direction.

And we, in the popular press, became that guy that killed Bambi's mother. I mean, oh God, you know, Walt, while I'm down here, I'm actually going to see if I can have a visit with him and go piss on his grave. Well, I know because he also, he also did Pollyanna and some great movies, but, but, uh, you know, he, that's where it started. And, and to be fair, to be fair, you know, go back 19, say fifties, you know, you've got

Howard Rourke and Hemingway foot on top of their lion, you know, with their gun up and, and these guys, you know, you know, there's no wonder there was a backlash, especially by females. I mean, Ruark, what did he brag about? And I apologize if I get the numbers wrong, but how many women he slept with in his life. I mean, and that's fine. That's fine.

But it went against everything that was family and what this country and Canadaada was built on you know the foundation so these these guys were they were chauvinist you know boors and no offense and i apologize hemingway if you're listening or ruark but they did us no service so when when disney came in and did bambi that was it you was it. And that was the same time roughly approximately when Kennedy was shot. So now you had this whole gun thing and the hippie movement and wham. We are, I guess, alienated or certainly marginalized as human beings since 1960. So this is what we've been fighting and now

finally you know we we did not have access to any press we had no way to tell our message where we you know we had american sportsman with kurt gowdy that was up until 1962 show canceled gone goodbye or whenever it was canceled uh we had no way i had no way to access uh the the airwaves you know the the three major networks, they wanted no part of hunters. They wanted to show Bambi or anything else that was similar. And we had no way to talk. We had no way to tell people our story other than magazines, which, of course, television superseded that very quickly.

So it's only been in the last 10, really 10 years, that we've started to, to reach into the households, you know, with, with outdoor channels like the outdoor channel, literally. And that's even though that's sort of almost preaching to the choir a bit. Yeah. Unfortunately that, and that there's, there's economics, right? Who's, who buys that network? Well, it's, it's a case of, you have to buy the households before you're going to get distribution into those households. So it costs money. money i mean i don't know what the numbers are it's like four dollars a household it ends up being it's expensive i feel like there's a swing

in the other direction now in a pretty big way and i think one of the reasons why is these um these shows like life below zero and these alaska Mountain Men shows where they're showing people living off the land, and it paints this attractive view of living this sustenance lifestyle. Yeah, simpler lifestyle. I mean, I still have issues with how they portray the characters. I mean, they still want, you know, they don't want to see somebody who's articulate can form a whole sense. Not saying those guys can't, but, you know, they't, but they still want to be able to justify watching it.

They want to see them being a little bit different. Yeah. I mean, look at Phil and Willie and the guys on Duck Dynasty. They're allowed because they've got the big beards and they talk funny. Right. So, okay, well, we can let them hunt. But they don't want to see somebody that looks like them hunting. It doesn't compute inside their brains because that's not what hunters are.

Well, I don't think it's necessarily that they don't want to see it. It's just that they're trying to sell. They're trying to sell television. The way to sell television is to show freaks, to show honey boo-boo and show weirdos and these duck guys living in the swamps with these crazy beards. That's what people will tune into. Hey, Willie, he didn't mean that about being freaks.

I did. I did. Just trying to stick up for Willie. He needs to stick up for himself. You know, Willie's been telling people to watch the new Nicolas Cage movie to prepare for the apocalypse. I haven't heard that.

I'll play it for you if you like, Willie. Oh, is that right? Yeah. It's The Reckoning or what have you. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, but yeah, that's, that's what people want to see. They want to see different.

They want to see freaks. Yeah. They don't want to see normal. They want to see the Kardashian dysfunctional family. And you know what? That has to change. That has to change because we can't keep feeding people that swill and expect you know what what's going to happen to the country in uh 10 years of that or you'll be so dumbed down you

won't even be able to remember how to breathe i think i think it is changing i think what we're dealing with is like the last throws like the last dying twitches of our culture making this weird shift into the age of information and along the way you're just going to give people just anything to keep them occupied and people they don't have communication with their neighbors they don't the gossip that they get is like gossip at work i come into work this motherfucker always wants to talk to me about kanye west is getting divorced and this guy's in trouble and jay-z got an argument with his girlfriend and like these people that live in this culture today a lot of and i'm not jamming he's a very intelligent guy but he loves pop culture we are we're constantly inundated with stuff that's that's flashy and distracting and

and nonsensical things that don't mean anything and i think a lot of it is just because of the way human beings live i think a lot of it is the way people live in these neighborhoods where they don't know anybody and we have a desire for gossip we have a desire to to talk shit about people and to to like hear what the secrets are and what the dirt is and i think these shows feed that they feed into that they give you this world that you can pay attention to that's way more screwed up than your world is and it's right in front of your face and you can tune in every night and you get engrossed and caught up in this character one guy owns a pawn shop and his dad's

always sleeping and you know and you watch this dumb show and you wasted a half an hour of your time and because of clever editing and because they put these weirdos in front of you and just interesting enough to keep you paying attention before you know what your hour's gone like what happened what you just stole something from my life you did a dance for me and you you waved a clock in front of my face you know tick- tick-tocked, and you hypnotized me. You know, speaking of that, actually, I've been caught on that because it's true. When you're saying it that way, I mean, I was caught up in the Arctic here this year. We were watching, I couldn't get out on the land for a hunt, so we were trapped in a little tiny hotel room, which, a hotel there is like a trailer divided up into, you know, compartments.

And on television, it was reruns of Storage Wars. And the one storage the guy had bought a vault. It was just a safe. And I watched the whole darn show. And Bran will attest to this. Bran is listening. I can't do it online. But there was nothing more important.

I watched every commercial so I wouldn't miss the opening of that stupid safe. And then they open it up and there's nothing in it. It's like, oh my goodness. They got you. Oh, of course they did. And you said it. I mean, they dumb us down. They don't want us, like they hook us on sugar.

And there's, at the end of it, you're still hungry, but you don't feel sated. You know you're 20 pounds heavier than you were when you started the show. So it's- Or 20 IQ points lighter. Less, yeah, less. And I don't know. I just have hope.

I mean, I don't always, there's times when I despair, when I look at this big picture. Because I look at it from an outside objective view. You talked about Jay-Z and, and, and Kay West or something like that. I have no idea who those guys are and they are assuming they're guys, you know, so I, you know, I spend a lot of time on a mountaintop looking at the world and, and, you know, there's times I just despair and, and, and then, then I'll tell you honestly, and this is a compliment to you. You know, I get a tweet like that where you saw what we're producing and someone in this place, and this isn't, you know, no offense, but you're not far from Hollywood, which has got to be around here somewhere. I had to have driven through it.

It was $100 for the cab ride from the airport to here. Wow. I must have come, unless the guy took me on a tour, I have no idea. No, it's probably just the airport to here. Wow. So I must have come, unless the guy took me on a tour, I have no idea. No, it's probably just the traffic. Yeah. It was, I mean, you're close to that, but again, back to the compliment, you know, I'm here for one reason, because you're standing up for good things, things that are important. You know, in my world, that's the hunting and to bring it to the forefront and you'll

take the heat. You know, I saw some of the comments about you and whatnot with your hunting and how you've had to, you know, define what you're doing as hunting, eating the meat. And I respect that. You are standing up and that's hence the reason there's, you know, a zillion people watch your podcast and listen to what you say.

I mean, we were listening to it in Tanzania this last month. Wow. One of my, one of my cameramen is a huge fan. He's probably listening right now. Hey, John. What's up, John? He's, he a huge fan. He's probably listening right now. Hey, John. What's up, John? He's, he's probably, like I say, listening right

now. He had your, your podcast with Steve Rinella. So, and it was fascinating. I mean, you're reaching out and educating people about what, what hunting is about and, you know, from the meat side and that perspective. And it's fantastic. I'll support that any day.

And that, that gives me hope. So when I stand up there and look at this picture of this world, it's just like you say, it's been honey boo-boo-ized. You know, there's really, it's just despair. I just see a big mass of despair until these tiny little voices come up, you know, and you're making an attempt and you're reaching people and you're fighting. And that, you know, that's why I'm here.

That's, that's hope. There is hope. People are just not that stupid. No, they're not. They're not that stupid. They're not. And just like you, you got roped into watching this stupid storage war show.

Well, that was, excuse me, that was a safe. Like that was, that was different. Excuse me. That was different. There was a safe and there had to be something that was different excuse me that was different there was a safe and there had to be something in there do you remember al capone's vault i do there was like a special live episode like what kind of a fool like opens this stupid vault live hoping there's something gonna be in there excuse me i i got caught on that one too i actually i actually did watch and then

what they find newspapers or something and then nothing nothing but you you're a guy who is constantly in the outdoors you're completely in tune to nature you're a conservationist you're very passionate about the outdoors and about hunting and about the traditions of it and and what a discipline it is but yet you got sucked into this. And I think that this is the same way. Like if people are starving and all that's on the shelf is some sugary cereal, you'll have a bowl of that stupid sugary cereal because that's what's there. But if something else is more interesting and it gets your attention and pulls you into it,

that'll be ultimately much more satisfying. It's just a matter of not having those options. And the people that are programming television, they're just trying to make money. They're not artists. Their goal is to not embarrass themselves. They don't want to put anything out that shames their family. They want to put something out that they can say, hey, Storage Wars is a good show. Hey, to 100 more episodes of Storage Wars.

And they'll clink champagne glasses and they'll drive off in their mercedes and they think they're doing a great job they're not bad people they're just selling something that sells they're they're promoting something that they think is going to earn them a living that 100 i agree i mean we've done the trips out to new york city and met with these people and and you know i'm probably burning all kinds of bridges on this but you know it's mediocrity at its best I mean that is what you see and for very good reason you know the tall popper is going to get cut off so if somebody has the the guts to to put a show that's actually good that people will watch they're going to be the first one to do it so they've got to fight against imagine that it's not just one box of cereal,

you know, Fruit Loops and Captain Crunch on this. You know, there is Choco Nuts and all kinds. I mean, it's an aisle full of that crap, that sugary crap. And everyone's trying to get the attention of. Now you put one good show in that same aisle, you've got everybody addicted to the sugar, right? And once you're eating sugar, you know,

it's hard to put down a package of Jubees and Twizzlers particularly. I will eat until the last Twizzler's gone. to the sugar, right? And once you're eating sugar, you know, it's hard to put down a package of jujubes and Twizzlers, Twizzlers particularly. I will eat until the last Twizzler is gone. And that's what people will do. I mean, it's a metaphor, but that's what they're doing. Yeah.

You know, they're going down that aisle. There's, there may be one good show on there, but you know, the odds of them, A, biting on it or trying it are really slim. These guys are making the choice to put that show on that, on that shelf. You know, that guy's sitting there with, with his entire career on the line because he tried

to do the right thing and to, to undummy down what's being fed to us on television. So his mortgage isn't on the line. His kid's got to go to school. He's got to have shoes on their feet. And now he's done something that's right. And it doesn't work because there's too much on that shelf of that garbage.

There's too many networks. Everybody's fighting for that, those eyeballs and how does his show stand out? So he loses his job. So what do they do? What do you do? You put another box of cereal on that shelf of crap and let people eat it.

And that's, you know, so like you say, it's not their fault. They're just, they're in between a rock and a hard place. They've got to save their jobs. It's their income. And, you know, well, you know, I mean, the good thing is we have the Outdoor Channel. The Outdoor Channel, the powers that be at the Outdoor Channel made the decision to put something other than crap on the shelves. And that's why you have Uncharted.

I mean mean they're our partner in that show they backed it they they uh they allowed us to do something that's that's you said was outside of the genre or beyond the genre that that's what they've done so kudos to them i wish that the you know powers that be in new york city on the big networks uh you know the 110 million universe networks had the same guts to do that you know it's just very difficult to get funding for those kind of shows it's very difficult to get the approval you're dealing with a giant conglomeration of human beings when you're on an nbc or cbs or even a cable network a history channel you're dealing with a large group of

people and there's a lot of money involved and risk taking is not on the top of their list of priorities what's on the top of their list of priorities is how cheap can we do this show how many people are going to be reached by the show when you have a show like duck dynasty as goofy as that show is one of the good things about it is that show reaches millions of people and millions of people get to see hunting and i think that alone even if it's not necessarily the most positive show because it is very low brow and it's very scripted it's very obvious it's almost insultingly scripted like when you watch it you could tell that it's not you're not really watching reality you know they're calling it a reality show but all these scenarios are set up in advance you know i know a lot of people work

in in the bit like storage wars those kind of shows they don't even that's not even real like they set those things up they put those things in no no no no no there's no way you can you can slag all the other shows but you start slagging storage wars no way finding bigfoot they've been looking for bigfoot for six fucking years now. Yeah. They don't find anything on that show. They don't even find skunks. They find nothing. It's the same as a ghost show.

I mean, it's a perfect show to produce because you know the result every single time. Yeah. Actually, they called me in, Animal Planet, I think it was, called me in to do a swizzle or something or something they call it, to do on. Swizzle reel? Yeah, exactly. To find, to find Bigfoot. And I didn't know. I went down and he was like, okay, they wanted a hunter.

Okay, I'll go down there and, you know, just see what this is all about. And yeah, I was supposed to be hunting Bigfoot. It's like, oh man, seriously? Les Droud, who's a, you know, survivor man. Yeah, sure, yeah. Who I love dearly. He's a good friend, a great guy.

Yeah. But you don't realize how ridiculous the search for Bigfoot is until you're watching one of those Bigfoot hunter shows with a real hunter. I was sitting next to Cameron Haynes. Do you know Cam Haynes? Sure, very well, yeah. And, you know, Cam Haynes is as legit as it gets. He's a good friend of mine.

And we're bear hunting up in Canada, in Alberta. And we're in between, you know, at night after the hunt's over we're sitting watching television and we're watching this bigfoot show and he's laughing he just thinks it's the dumbest thing he's ever seen he's just like what because the guy that less trout is with is like clearly some sort of a charlotte some sort of a hoaxer and you know this guy's got bigfoot masks on and everything pretending to be bigfoot. They have this crystal clear view of Sasquatch hiding in the bushes. I don't know if you've seen it, but it's so stupid. Les Stroud is hosting the show?

Les Stroud's a part of it. And I don't think he buys into this guy either. But Les, apparently, according to him, and I believe him, he's a very, very honest guy. Very good guy. But he had an experience when he was in Alaska. They flew him into this place by himself in a tent. And he had this experience of what he believes is a large bipedal animal was near his tent and made like an ape-like noise. And it freaked him out.

It was many, many years ago. He heard like, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, in the middle of the night. And I'm like, well, maybe it was a bear. I don't mean bears make weird bear. I don't mean, bears make weird noises. I don't know what it was, but he says it was distinctly primate and that when he went for his camera

and started moving and gathering his stuff, it took off. And he said when it ran off, it was like, boom, boom, boom, like a bipedal animal. Right, yeah.

I mean, I would never tell this to the public or anything, but I do have to say that I was in British Columbia, and this was early in my career hunting. I can't remember what I was hunting for, moose or something. And I heard a sound that absolutely had to be, to me, an ape. It was like, like that, and loud loud and close and i knew i was the only person in there scared the living heck out of me at that time until about 10 years later i always

hid that memory and said you know find a happy place and keep it compartmentalized i was in british columbia on a different hunt and I heard the exact same noise again. Only this time, you know, a little bit older, not, not quite so susceptible to suggestion. So I, I snuck up on it. It was an elk and the elk was doing exactly the same. Not, not, you know, like an elk would do the whistle. It was, it was like, like that, like, like a monkey. I've heard him a million times down in the jungles of west africa and this was an

elk totally outside of their normal sound range doing sounds that uh you know if i if i didn't know better after 10 years of walking around those mountains and knowing darn well there's nothing in there that that lives on two feet and and has hair all over it other than maybe some of my guides. But the animal itself was an elk making that noise. So there's, you know, I can't say, you know, in Les's case, elk in Alaska doesn't sound reasonable. So, you know, what that could have been, I have no idea.

But it could have been a bear making noise outside of its range. Yeah, 100%. He was in grizzly country. Yeah, also wolverines. I've been chased off a mountain one time by a wolverine and that was all night long, walked around the tent making crazy ass noises that scared the heck out of me then too.

Again, I'm a little older now. I don't scare as easy. In fact, I don't scare at all anymore. But, you know, I get concerned sometimes and very concerned, but not, not afraid or not frightened, but that was a get concerned sometimes. Right. Very concerned, but not afraid or not frightened. But that was a, Wolverine did that. So same thing, you know, not normal, outside of the normal sound range. And, you know, when you're on a mountain and, you know, the stars are going, the northern lights, and, you know, there's a, you know, the wind.

And it's a spiritual place, and spiritual places is where spirits live. So, you know, your imagination can run a little wild sometimes. Especially when you're by yourself in a tent. Yeah. By yourself. It's actually worse when you have a hunting partner that's really scared. By yourself, by yourself, you got to deal with things. When you've got a partner, you tend to lean on them, you know, for help help or support and if they're even more scared than you are then you both just spiral down into the world's ending skies falling in yeah there's the other thing that happens with people when it comes to their memories that memories change over time like i've had conversations with people that

about events that we both witnessed where they have one portrayal of it and i have another portrayal of it and it's they're so different that it's either one of us has lied to ourselves or over time the retelling of the story has led to the memory getting distorted and twisted and especially when it comes to the narrative of i was there i know bigfoot is real i know it's real i saw i was in the woods once and i saw what i thought was a wolf. It was a squirrel. For like two seconds, I thought it was a wolf. I was like, is that a wolf?

It's a squirrel. What the fuck is wrong with me? Like that's a little bit. That can happen easily. If you take away all your outside stimulus, like in the Arctic, absolutely 100%, I've been riding along on a Cometic and looked out the side, you know, and get all panicky.

There's grizzly bear, grizzly bear, you know, tundra grizzly. And all of a sudden I realized, no, it's a whiteout. There's a slope right beside me and it's just one of those sooks sooks, a little gopher. And it's 10 feet away.

And you don't know. I mean, and it's, thank goodness the Inuit, if they're up in the sled up front, they can't hear you when you're screaming grizzly, grizzly. A little bit embarrassing in that case. Making fun of the white man and his fantasies.

What do they call this? Kabloona, big nose. That's what they call white people? Yeah, we're called Kabloona. That means just big nose for whatever reason. It's interesting. We let them. They can say whatever they want.

You literally can't make a bad slang for a white person doesn't exist we don't we just we're like okay you want to call us honkies yeah because we're so egotistical we think well that's got to be a compliment well we're the greatest so yeah okay it's a compliment must be has to be a compliment well we're very happy with being white. So, like, whatever you call us, it just doesn't affect us. At the end of the day, we're still white. Yeah. So you call us a cracker, you can call us whatever you want, and we're like, all right. This doesn't, you know, like, an insult for an African American or for a Chinese person

or, you know, fill in the blank is, like, very devastating. It's a horrible racial slur. But an insult for a white person is like yeah i mean it doesn't work yeah i mean i can't speak for all white people but for me i'm willing to speak for all white people there's a white person out there that does get offended by any sort of a slur towards white people they don't deserve to be white how about that i'm saying it said by joe rogan i said I said it. I said it. You don't deserve it.

You got lucky. You're born white. It's like the most acceptable minority, or it's almost a minority now, right? It's getting to the point where in 2000, it's said that in America, within the next, I think it's two or three decades, being Caucasian will actually be a minority. Oh, I'm sure. I mean, you know, if you look at that historically, I mean, and again, this is, you know, so unscientific, but, you know, maybe our role was to explore and discover new places and colonize and then who comes after?

I mean, there's always an after. Who is it? You know, like you go to Africa right now and, you know, it's wonderful being a white person, but there's parts of Africa that it's not quite so great. But what you do find is tons and tons of Chinese people. In Africa? They're colonizing Africa. Oh, because of the resources.

Yeah, resources. Yeah, and it's, you know, we are, again, this is one of those times when I sit on my little mountaintop and look out with and feel despair. The entire continent of Africa is being colonized by the Chinese. And it'll be a different roadmap in 20 years, 30 years. Wow. It's amazing.

So we may well be knocked off our pedestals here in the next couple of generations even if we are we'll still be so super happy for any white slur that you throw our way we'll just still take it as a compliment yeah we're like fine whatever you want to call us we're still white yeah that's true we're the most egotistical race ever the white folks but it's interesting that you brought that up because um in in a related point when you're talking about you know what comes next and people exploring and i think that what i was saying earlier about the age of information and that um one of the things that's changing because that you've got these reality shows on and all these goofy programming this sugar

programming that you're getting on television. Because of the age of information that we live in, there's all these alternatives now on the Internet. I mean, you have like these things like Netflix, which has, I think, something like 60 million subscribers that pay $7 a month. They have so much money. They're producing their own original programming now. And they have this show called House of Cards, which is a fantastic show. They're doing talk shows. They've got a Chelsea Handler talk show that they're doing. They're doing stand-up comedy specials. They're doing all these different things because they have all this money now,

but they're taking all these wild chances and they're doing this really interesting, out-of-the-box stuff. And then you have things like podcasts, things like this, where we don't really have a boss. We don't have anybody to tell us what to do so we could have a guy like you want anybody i have on this show is only anybody i'm interested i'll take that i'll take that as a compliment you should i'm a huge fan of yours you should definitely take it as a compliment but this this this sugar diet is not necessary anymore now this is a part of what's happening this rapid change that's happening in our culture and when one of the things that i think a backlash against hunting is that people are hoping that we're going to separate from what we were what took what we we went through to get us here what we went through

to get us here is all the brutality that we know that happened with the native americans and all the you know the idea that we almost wiped off the buffalo wiped the buffalo off the face of the planet and that people had to hunt for a living to feed their families they had to go out and be barbaric and that this age of information and that this this change this evolutionary change is going on in our culture is eventually going to lead us away from a diet of eating meat and i think that's something that people that's one of the reasons why people have this sort of rejection of hunting that's this this idea that they have in their head is that this is the remnants or the echoes of a barbaric past and when you see these people they're standing with a you know a rifle on top of a lion like

ernest hemingway and instead of that it's that cute girl i don't know what her name is that was involved in that huge facebook controversy because she had kendall kendall jones or something yes yeah and it's along the same lines it's like we're trying to get away from that old way and embrace some sort of a new way yeah it's a new messiah and that that's that's what they're looking at as opposed to looking at the real picture, which is how many millions of years, depending on what you believe in, have we been doing the same thing? We're not going to change. You know, I use an analogy, you know, two dinosaurs standing there. You know, one has three toes and one has four toes. And the one with three toes, he's highly evolved because he's got three toes.

He's laughing at the other one. You know, you got four toes. I got three toes. I'm evolved. And when the comet strikes strikes it doesn't matter how many toes you have you're still a dinosaur you're a dinosaur and this is what people are trying to do they're trying to ignore what brought them to the to the dance you know like you said it you know the hunting brought us here we've been hunting cultures up until 10 000 years ago when we turned agrarian and even then some of us still stayed as a hunting, you know, there's a percentage

have that gene. We're the hunters. We're the better hunters in the tribe back then. We're still hunters. You can't get rid of that in 10,000 years. It doesn't happen. So they're trying to, trying to, like you say, ignore the fact that all of us are here because of hunting. And you want to change because you think, what, you eat soybeans? I mean, give me a break. Go look at that soybean field. How many acres of that soybean field is actual ecosystem where wildlife can live? You know, someone that says, I'm a vegan or vegan or whatever they call themselves,

and, you know, they can punch this pilot, I don't hurt animals. Look at the soybean field. You killed how many animals in that field because you had to survive with your soybeans. That's, that's, there's no way you can separate us, you know, or, you know, no matter how much information is out there and how sterilized you want to make this, say we don't eat meat. There's no way you can separate the fact that all of us were carnivores or omnivores at the very least. And all of us got here, we're around today because of hunting.

And it's not a tradition, it's not a skill, it's not a lifestyle that's going to go anywhere. In fact, I suspect when that comet does hit, that's who will still be around. Soybean fields, pretty tough. When that comet does hit, I hope it hits me right in the head. I don't want to live in some strange post-apocalypse mad max world you may not want to live like that but but guess who's going to survive in that situation of course the people who know how to

actually live of course the wild yeah and i'm not i'm not predicting that and you know i'm certainly not saying that this is what's going to happen but well it's fascinating to me that there's so much backlash against hunters and someone posing with an animal that they shot gets so much backlash. Yet, you can have an advertisement of a guy eating a Carl's Jr. cheeseburger with a big smile on his face.

And nobody thinks it's offensive. Nobody has any problem with it. I shot a bear, and there's a picture of me and Cameron Haynes. And I ate that bear, by the way. Me and Cameron Haynes standing over this bear and we're both smiling and people were angry they were saying you this should be a somber moment like you're smiling but this should be a somber moment says says who is if I was eating a cheeseburger and smiling would anybody really have a problem

with it you go down any road in Americaica and canada as well and pass by in any town where there's stoplights and stores you're going to find dead animals all over the place you're going to find dead animals that are on people's cars in their in their seats you're going to find it on their feet you're going to find it in all the restaurants you see 99 plus percent of all restaurants serve some form of animal protein everywhere you go you're seeing dead animals and we conveniently ignore that and focus on what we think is an archaic practice the practice of going into the wild and and killing the animal yourself you know you know to their to their in their defense you know when they see us smiling over a dead animal, and this is something that I have to reconcile inside myself.

What bothers them about it? Well, it looks like you took joy in the actual death of the animal. Yes. But that's not what you took joy in. That's not what you're smiling about. You're smiling about the accomplishment, the fact that you met the challenge, as great as it may be,

and they don't understand, the people looking at the picture, how great that challenge is to get that bear. You know, the skills that it took for you to get it, I think you used a bow and arrow. Yeah. I mean, just go try and learn a bow and arrow first. Then talk to me about, you know,

the challenge of getting that bear, a wild animal that's switched on, tuned in, it's his backyard and you're in there trying to hunt him. And he's, if he's true to what his nature is, his nature is to try and avoid being hunted, whether it's by another bear for intra-species predation, or whether it's a hunter, a human hunter, or maybe it's wolves coming in to kill him or a cougar. Who knows what's trying to kill them? His job is to survive. So you're going in there with a bow and arrow to hunt that animal,

and it worked. It's a huge challenge that you met. And the accomplishment is directly proportional to the challenge. You met it. Why wouldn't you smile? Why wouldn't you be paying homage to that hunt for that animal and be proud of it and be smiling? And I think this is where the disconnect is for people looking at it. You know, they see a picture of, like, my daughter with her bear smiling, and they go, how can you do that?

The picture is what offends these people because they equate the smiling with the joy of killing the animal. And that's not what hunting is about. That's a necessary part to have hunted in fact it was ortega de gas that the spanish philosopher said that you know i don't hunt to kill i kill to have hunted so you have to eventually kill something to actually be hunting if you're taking photographs you didn't hunt you were a voyeur you you weren't part of nature. You were just there. And no offense to all the photographers out there, because I'm sure in a lot of ways, it's like hunting. And for them, the capturing of the animal is like capturing of the animal.

But you know what? It doesn't taste good. I don't care how you prepare that picture. It's not going to taste like your bear roast or whatever you did. It made sausages with it and i think the the pictures you know the people the people that don't hunt and maybe sitting on the fence about hunting or or anti-hunters for sure they don't they equate the smile with the joy of killing and and that's that's not what it is that's not what it's about and i you know again that's that's us i guess educating we

haven't done a great job we haven't had the tools to do it until now until now but what it is is people just haven't had a guy like you explain it that way they just see that image and they draw their own conclusions based on our culture based on our culture of being able to go to the supermarket pick up a piece of meat pay for it with a credit card, and you're done. And this complete disconnect. And now you see a guy smiling, standing over a dead animal. Meanwhile, these people, I had a guy come up to me in the airport, and I've talked about this on the podcast before, but he was upset that I killed a bear. He's like, I can't believe you killed a bear.

I go, you're wearing leather shoes. Yeah. You're wearing leather. What the fuck are you talking about? I ate that bear. You're wearing leather shoes, man. You don't even know where that shoe came from. You don't know that cow.

You don't know anything about how it was acquired. You're eating meat probably on a daily basis. And if you're not eating meat and you're wearing leather shoes, either it's for health purposes or you're a silly person. Yeah. They don't want to know the truth. I mean, they don't want to know that that cow that they're eating, which is, you know, in hamburger form, wrapped in cellophane, they don't want to know about the life of that cow. They want to keep that, like, insulated. They want to, you know, cordon that off. And I,

you know, how I say this, it's like the truth sometimes is like laying on cold, hard ground. It's not fun. It's cold, it's hard, and you try and sleep on that ground. It's just, but it's the truth. It's the reality. It's the truth. Many, many people in our culture nowadays, they build a house of an ideology. They build a house.

It's like a castle. It protects them from the truth. Then they make a bed of hypocrisy. They wear leather. They eat meat, but they don't want to know the truth. Then they make a bed of hypocrisy. Wear leather. They eat meat, but they don't want to know the truth out there, that animal, how it lived. Then they cover themselves in a comforter of denial.

They want to deny that they had anything to do with that. Punch his pot, wash their hands. I don't want to see it. I don't want to hear it. The cold, hard truth means lying on the ground sometimes. And they live inside these castles, these ideological castles that it would destroy their world to realize that that person that took you to task for killing that bear and eating it actually is wearing a killed animal and eats animals. And they had a horrible life. Which is a better life that bear that

lived till whatever you know i know i saw the picture is probably a you know six seven eight year old boar you know probably past breeding age this animal lived its life wild and free and then one arrow came out of the blue because it made one mistake it walked in when it shouldn't have walked in its senses weren't switched on as much as they should have been to ensure that that animal passes its genes on for generations to come, and it's dead. The cow that that guy's eating, think about that life. In a feed pen, being shot full of every describable antibiotic and, you know, sprayed with any pesticides, living with no space. What kind of life is that?

And that person has the right to come to you and take you to task for killing a wild animal that lived wild and free and had every chance to walk away but didn't. And in fact, you know, if you believe in Darwin, it was probably a good thing you shot it. You know, no offense to you and Cam, but I mean, it had to be a pretty dumb bear to walk in. So so so is that a bear you want passing on his genes right well i think

that in in the defense of the people who get angry at hunting they're not they're just not getting the information they're just not there's the information is not being represented by our culture and that's why they have these ideas that's why they have these childish notions well you're talking about the cold, hard truth. You live in the cold, hard truth, but it's not ugly. It's not nasty. I've been living in the cold, hard truth for the past couple years since I started hunting. It's not bad.

I just shot a moose last weekend. It was great. I had a great time. Yeah, I mean, people don't want to hear that. You shot a moose. You had a great time. I had a great time. It was a hard hunt.

We hunted for four days, climbing up hills, sneaking up on moose that winded us and they took off and there was a lot going on it was day after day of struggling it's very difficult to shoot a moose it's difficult to acquire or you get lucky and one can just you know in the rut could walk right in front of you and you blast it i mean that's possible too but in in our situation it was a long and difficult hunt so when we finally did get this animal but in our situation it was a long and difficult hunt So when we finally did get this animal, it was very exciting. It was very exciting It was a very happy moment, but most people don't experience that and What we're talking about when you say the people don't live in the truth. They don't have the opportunity

They they don't you're in it all the time I've been in it over the last couple of years. But I don't believe it's their fault. I think our culture is filled with these infantile notions of what's acceptable, what's not acceptable. What should we allow? What should we not allow? I mean, we're constantly adding new words to the words that we're not allowed to say anymore. to the words that we're not allowed to say anymore. We're constantly changing our stances on all sorts of behavior that was normally accepted.

And we're becoming more and more hypersensitive. And I think one of the reasons why we're so hypersensitive is because we're fucking babies. We're a bunch of babies. We're babies that are coddled and we have this really soft, easy life where we hop in metal boxes with rubber tires. We ride over this hard surface everywhere. We sit into this cubicle and we live this life of zero threat, of zero challenge, of zero risk. The only risk is that they might take away your cubicle. Oh, no. How will I be able to stuff myself full of sugar cereal?

I can't sit at this stupid fucking cubicle anymore. That's our main risk in this life. Outside of car accidents and disease, which by the way, the car accidents are caused because you have to get to this stupid fucking cubicle. The diseases are caused by the diet that you're eating. This terrible diet is responsible for a large majority of the diseases that people have in this world. A large, I mean, outside of viral illnesses, of course, a lot of the diseases that people have in this world a large i mean outside of viral illnesses of course a lot of the the problems that we have in this country deal with obesity poor diet massive sugar intake cholesterol there's all sorts of shit that people put into their bodies today that's absolutely

terrible and it's all a part it's a symptom of the same thing of this this this infantile society that we live in you know there's no risks yeah we're trying we're trying to regulate out all objective dangers yes and as soon as you do that what what have what have you created a society of people that are unable to adapt unable to respond to a new novel situation and you know when you bring in the diet they're unable to fight off you know whatever diseases are out there i mean god forbid that there's you know we get hit by a real bad pandemic of whatever because we're not going to be able to fight it off if we don't have the drugs we don't have the

resistance now you want to see resistance just go over to these asian countries go over to africa and and south america and those people are tough you know and really i mean we shouldn't be the sugar get rid of the sugar diets and go eat a more panty worm you know like like expand your what you ingest because that's going to give you resistance to all of these various strains of whatever i mean it's uh i mean this what i was saying is it's not terrible our society is not 100 awful we still create great art we still have these incredible technological achievements that are fascinating and interesting our education system is better than it's ever been before as far as the acts i shouldn't say system but our access to information it's better than it's ever been before so far as the acts i shouldn't say system but our access to information it's

better than it's ever been before so there's all sorts of great things about living in a civilized society that i appreciate accept to take you know take part of i i think there's it's it's not universally bad but what is missing is a connection with all the other animals that are on this planet a connection with the cycle of life. And that's something that I think people are rejecting when they reject hunting. They're rejecting this idea that we are a part of that, that we are a part of the cycle of life, that we have moved past that. We've moved past that.

I've had people tell me, why would you go hunting when you buy your meat in a store? You just go to a store. I've had people that I know that are smart but they just they haven't been exposed to it they haven't thought about it this is almost a new concept to them they have this peripheral thinking when it comes to where the meat comes from and if you show any interest whatsoever and being more involved in it and participating in it on a much deeper level especially actually going out into the woods and calling it an elk and trying to shoot an arrow through its lungs.

They're like, what the fuck is wrong with you? Like, why would you do that? Why do you want to do that? Yeah. And again, it's a denial, right? They're denying that we are part of nature. Yes. I mean, we are instruments of nature's change.

That's what we are, but we are still part of nature. Yes. And whatever, again, this is looking from the big picture. This biomass on this planet, it's changed from dinosaurs. are still part of nature yes whatever again this is looking from the big picture where this biomass on this planet it's changed from dinosaurs now it's a lot of it is us and whatever we create but it's it's still there in the same the same amount is still there so it's just changed form and if they think they're not part of that they're somehow above it aloof from it i mean and again you know i watch television and which isn't a lot but if I do see it and I see the nature shows, you're always, you're, it's the animal, you're a voyeur looking in at it.

So they perpetrate that or perpetuate that, that, that image that we're separated from wildlife. We're not. Look at that lion killing the whatever, Cape Buffalo. We would never do that because we just watch and we observe and look at the lower life forms. That's not what it's about. We are those life forms. We're part of nature. And you just have to get out of your, like you say, your cubicle, not, I won't describe

the same way you did, but the cubicle, you get out of it, go out into the world and you'll see, I mean, everywhere around this world, we are part of nature. And unfortunately, we're an ugly part of it right now if you're concerned about wildlife because we're pushing back these animals into these tiny little enclaves and they're fighting for their survival. Well, I've had this conversation recently with someone online who was telling me, you know, hey, man, your ideas about animals are ridiculous. You know, those bears, the reason why those bears are pushing into this New Jersey suburb is because people are pushing into the... No, that's not true.

There's an overpopulation of them. And it's not good for the bears. There's more bears per capita or per square mile in New Jersey than anywhere else in North America. That's crazy. The fact that you've got a place like New Jersey. You know, when you think about New Jersey, you think of Joe Piscopo from Saturday Night Live.

You think of, you know, you think of Frank Sinatra and Jon Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen. You don't think of fucking bears. But meanwhile, a kid from Rutgers last month got killed by a black bear. And the reason is there are too many of them. They're starving. And that's why you see that battle

where those two big black bears were duking it out in that new jersey suburb i mean that's rutherford new jersey that's like might as well be here in canoga park it's a normal american suburb and you got seven foot black bears duking it out on the streets big 300 pound bears going to war with each other that has to be taken care of if you want to pee if you want to have people if people want to live in those environments you have to regulate and control those populations and that's something that people don't want to see they don't want to think of it that way they want to think that somehow or another nature is just going to sort it all out nature just leave nature on its own guess what you're a part of nature that's what

people don't yeah it will sort it out but it might mean they eat us that is a possibility and that's what people don't want to consider when they think about nature sorting it up nature sorts it out meaning if you have too much of one thing in an area yeah it does it achieve some sort of a balance but along the way you might lose some kids. Yeah. Again, we're so removed. The problem with the whole thing from a hunter's perspective is the wildlife loses that battle 100% of the time. We pushed them back because there's too many people. So they have less areas to live, so they push back when we get more numbers. They come into our suburbs, and you saw the two bears battling.

But it's, you know, we can't, hunters want more animals, but we also want to be able to control the numbers. Like, you know, we're realists. Again, the cold, hard truth. They have to be killed. Now, you can do it two different ways. And this is, again, I've seen this before where people somehow don't have a problem with euthanization. They hire a mercenary shooter who has no feeling for those animals. It's just a target. And he'll go in there at night with a silencer and pop off the bears and kill a bunch of them.

there at night with a silencer and pop off the bears and kill a bunch of them. I guess what people don't want to see is that hunters go in there and in some way are enjoying themselves on this hunt. And again, this is that disconnect. They don't realize the challenge. It's not so simple to just go there. It's simple to go out there and pop them off at

night with a night vision scope and a silencer. You can do that easily and you do kill them and they're gone. and a silencer. You can do that easily, you know, and you do kill them and they're gone. But, you know, to me, that's treating them like with such disrespect. I mean, these are wild animals that their entire being is to survive and to live through hunters trying to kill them, not to pop them off with a sniper scope at night. So, again, this is a battle that us hunters have to fight and fight it well, because we

will lose that. They want to euthanize. It's okay to kill. How many dogs and cats get put down every single day, right? Right around us right now. How many dogs and cats get put down by PETA? That's what people don't want to listen to. PETA is responsible for the death of a large number of cats that they can't take care of but somehow in people's mind that's okay that's okay yeah and it's a it's a

weird thing and again it comes back to the picture of the smiling hunter over the animal or you enjoyed the death of that animal that's sick well it's also ignorant in the form of they don't understand that the money that goes to hunting tags and to when you pay to hunt, when you buy a hunting tag, that money directly goes into the fish and wildlife departments. And the fish and wildlife departments hire biologists. They're not like putting hunts out because people say, well, we want to hunt the animals. We don't care how many of them there are. No, the fish and wildlife department, they tell you how many animals can be taken they release a certain amount of tags and depending upon the area if you can have some areas where they have unlimited tags because there's too many animals

they're trying to thin the herd or you have animals like you know like uh bighorn sheep in in montana very difficult to get a tag for it's hard to draw because they're trying to build the numbers on nevada same situation they're trying to build the numbers up very difficult to get a tag for. It's hard to draw because they're trying to build the numbers up. Nevada, same situation. They're trying to build the numbers up. Very difficult to get a tag for. These are all done by biologists and the money that comes from hunting them goes directly into conservation. That money is exactly the opposite of what happens if you have to go in and hire someone to kill them with a sniper rifle. Because if you have to hire someone to thin the herds out, you have to pay that guy. So the money that would have come from the conservation from the hunting tags, it's not there anymore.

And now instead, you're in a deficit because you have to actually use public funds to go in there and eliminate those animals. So instead of those animals being a valuable resource, now those animals, it's an issue where you have to actually pay for it. The taxpayers put the bill yeah no here's here's another little side angle on that one when hunters pay for their licenses when they they bring an economic value to that community that area where those animals live the animals are suddenly empowered with money. They have value now. You can actually, those animals, in one way, I mean, it's, again, a strange, it's difficult for people to understand this.

But it's, you give the, you hunt the animals, they essentially have value. And they have, if they have a surplus of that value, they can start to buy back habitat, right? I mean, all the CPR, what do you guys call it, CWP lands or whatever they are, RWP lands where their farmers are allowed to put their land back into natural habitat. That's wildlife buying back that land. So not only are you, by sniping them off, what have you done? You've killed them for predation, youation, depredation on the crops. Okay, great, I get it.

What value did the animal have? No, you're just going to keep killing them. And if the crops keep pushing into where the animals live, you're going to kill them all. I mean, we did it with the bison. Virtually, we killed down to 500 of them. If you give those animals money, which hunters do, it's hard you know it's a it's a hard you know hard to grasp because it's you know it doesn't make sense but you give those animals money they buy back the habitat you you hunter kills one animal but the animals buy back 10 more acres which means two animals live you know and a bigger picture they buy back hundreds of thousands of acres like in

places in africa where it's only hunting that has kept those animals alive without hunting they are gone and they're the buffer zone between the parks and and the great mass of crush of humanity coming in towards the parks the hunting dollars protects those animals and the animals have bought back their land literally bought it back the hunters pay hundreds of thousands of dollars millions of dollars to go hunt there the communities get the money so they say okay we'll protect the animals we'll protect them because we're getting more money from that than killing these animals for five dollars in bushmeat and and over here yes it's you know we may be more sophisticated but the problem is still there you know the bears

in north carolina if the hunters they might be losing $60,000 in one, you know, three or four hundred acre crop field, you know, $60,000 in crop depredation from the bears. They get zero money for those bears. What do you think they're going to do? They're going to shoot, shovel, and shut up. The animals, the bears will be gone. Now, when the hunter comes in and pays X amount of dollars, suddenly the farmer, and they don't want to kill the bears. You know, they're sentient human beings. They know what they're doing. They don't want to kill them and bury them.

So now they have a reason. They're grasping for it. They're begging for it. Give us money for these animals, and we will then protect the animals. I'll let them eat my $60,000 in corn crop. So the hunters are not just working as a conservation tool to buffer these, protect these animals from coming into our communities. They're also empowering the animals to buy back their lives. They're giving them value and nothing is going to survive the next, I'd say 30 years, nothing, no wildlife, no tree, nothing in this planet will survive the next, I'd say, 30 years. Nothing, no wildlife, no tree,

nothing in this planet will survive the next 30 years unless it has value. They have to be able to pay their way in today's world. I don't care what it is. What about like the spotted owl when they shut down logging? Same thing. The spotted owl, when push comes to shove

and this world gets really cranked up, they're going to cut down those trees, down the marble murellette. It's going down because this tree's coming down. But if the marble murellette, for whatever reason, can pay for those trees to stand up, which, you know, they tried to do, you know, I mean, the big fight back in the, that was like an 80s or 90s fight, you know, they did protect some of the habitat back then. But when it gets really dire and we realize we're in a fight with the rest of the world, the competition around this world for resources is going to be so huge and so expensive. When your house costs you $20 million to build because there's no wood, you're going to cut down the trees that you have access to. And down the marble mule lead, it's going down on that tree.

So these animals, if there's a way for them to pay, then they have to pay. have access to and you know down the marble mule lead it's going down on that tree so so these animals if there's a way for them to pay then they have to pay now as hunters we can't fight the marble mule lead or the spotted owls fight we can't fight that but we can fight the battle for the bigger game like the the i mean all the way up from prairie dogs to to moose in in north america we can fight for them on their behalf. We can finance them to buy back their existence, to protect their existence. Isn't that such a bizarre contradiction?

I mean, this is one of the things that people have such a hard time grasping, the idea that somehow or another, you killing those animals is good for those animals. Yeah, it doesn't make sense. What's the word? I've been trying to think of it in my brain. I've gone brain dead. It's a...

Contradictory? Yeah, no, there's another word. Oxymoron? Oxymoron. Yeah, jumbo't make sense. What's the word? I've been trying to think of it in my brain. I've gone brain dead. It's a... Contradictory? Yeah, no, there's another word. Oxymoron? Oxymoron. Yeah, jumbo shrimp, military intelligence. Yeah, it doesn't make sense. Yeah, it's indicative of how bizarre life really truly is. And also how bizarre life truly really is when we're disconnected from the information

that we really should have access to when it comes to like where our food comes from that we are actually animals that we are actually a part of this cycle of life that we are actually in great we've done this strange thing by putting ourselves in these big cement boxes and buildings and paved the roads and locked ourselves out and put bolts on the doors we've separated ourselves from our environment in such a profound way that we don't think that we're a part of it anymore. Until you're forced to be out, naked and afraid. You know, those silly shows that make people go out into the wild.

And you realize, like, wow, we're so fucking vulnerable. We're unbelievably vulnerable if you take away our buildings, and you take away our cars, and especially if you take away our clothes. We truly are just a life form. We're just a weird, bizarre life form that's figured out how to make clothes and shoes and houses and all these different things. But we want to think of ourselves as being alien.

We want to think of ourselves as being separate from it. Yeah, but we're not. We're not. And to be fair fair not everybody lives like that you know not everybody does but there's a you know with urbanization over the last whatever starting in the 50s 40s 50s you know we have gone that route but not everybody it's a recent thing yeah and and it's not everybody like you can still go out into wyoming and find people alaska oh yeah i mean look at the everybody up there. And even Northern California.

You know, there's still people, lots of them. There's lots of us that are still out there that aren't buying in. You know, we're not drinking that Kool-Aid. You know, we'll take advantage of the modern technologies. I mean, you know, internet's great. We can tweet and Facebook and do all that kind of thing. But we can also be in touch with nature we can be true to who we are as human beings i thought it was really fascinating one

of your shows to get back to uncharted it was uh amazing you were in pakistan and you were putting something up on facebook yeah and the negative comments of people that had this very ignorant idea. And when I say ignorant, it's based not on any information they've gotten firsthand. It's based only on the propaganda of Pakistan as nuclear weapons. It's a Muslim country. They're going to go to war with India. They harbor terrorism. They have all the, we have all these ideas that we have been fed.

And meanwhile, you're over there with these people. You're breaking bread with these people. You're sitting around a fire with these people. And you're posting these updates of your hunting experience on Facebook. And these people are making these comments, these super negative comments. And because of that, you had to actually get out of town yeah the you know that's not everybody over there is a good guy you know that's that's just face it that's the reality but that's like not everybody here's exactly right not everybody on this planet

i don't care where you touch down on is a good guy and i use that figuratively there there's bad people over there and and when you when you um that particular situation i actually had to cut out a lot of a lot of what we videoed because people would get hurt if i aired that but i'll get i'll i'll tell you give you a quick sort of idea of what could happen in a place like that uh you know where there's people that are monitoring Facebook pages, there's political party that wants change and democracy and they're the good guys. Then there's military powers that want to take over as basically dictate to the people.

And in those countries, that's a volatile changing evolving dynamic situation now the military has access to the uh like you have the cia so they have their secret service or their intelligence agencies that are second only to israeli or israel because of their their uh the money that was pumped into there through the 1980s, the 1990s. The money came in by the billions of dollars. These guys are very capable. So the military runs the intelligence agencies. The intelligence agencies monitor everything.

The intelligence agencies monitor everything. What happens is, and this is where it gets a little complicated, if somebody was with somebody who's maybe associated political side of things, the good guys, to get an egg on their face. Like say somebody was kidnapped that was a known entity over here in North America. That person would be family. It's a terrible thing for that to happen. So if the intelligence agency knows what's going on and they happen to slip that word to the real bad guys, right, and those are just the thugs, the criminals, the gangsters. If they slip that information to them, they would love nothing more than to cause anarchy. They don't care who it is.

So that's what happened. We got a word that we had 15 minutes, get out of there now, right now, go. And, and, you know, do not take any of the roads you've traveled on. You, you, you know, it's, it's the word's been given out to the bad guy. So we actually had to go and that that's, you know, I didn't know what was going on at that point. I was going, what's awesome action, action. And, uh, and we're on the road, you know, sirens going, getting the heck out of Dodge. Well, that was what that was about. And I couldn't air that. I couldn't show that because it would cause people to be in trouble. Who phoned? Who warned? Who, you know, it brings up too many questions. Like I say, I'm hoping I'm not causing anybody any trouble right now. I don't think so.

Well, we're being pretty vague about it. So I think the visual depictions of, you know, you interacting with those guys would probably be much more problematic i would guess but so they would you you could be used as almost like a political tool that's all you are that's all you're and you're nothing in this world and those guys could care less right they're they're i mean they're guys right now uh it's just you're you know nothing personal but we're going to behead you because this is going to get us press and that's what we need. Right, like all these journalists that they keep killing over there and putting them on video. You're still putting yourself in those situations, though, and you're doing it to film this show. I mean, you could easily go to Nebraska and go big buck hunting in some cornfield and, you know, and you could probably have a really interesting show.

But instead, you're choosing to go halfway around the world to one of the most dangerous, volatile areas currently and hunt an animal. And do it as the hunting the animals like a task that you have to do on this show. The actual show itself is more about you interacting with the culture and you getting this very unique sense of who these people are and what their lives are like. Yeah. I don't know that there's any other way you could do it. I mean, in every society in this world, there's hunters. They are there, no denying it. There's 10% of the population are hunters. And that's probably historic. It goes back into prehistoric times actually you know a percentage of the population was that were the hunters and a percentage were the basket makers i mean that someone had to do both right so you know for for me i go to these countries to find those hunters and once you're embedded with them living like they do with them doing what they do

every day you are so far away from the tourist lanes, the photography, photo op places, busloads, or even individuals going, even our journalists. There's very few. They're being fed whatever they're being fed. When we're with the hunters in that community, we literally are being swallowed up and integrated into that community, and that's what we

try and do is live with the hunters learn from the hunters and that gives us an insight into their these societies all around the world that you can't get any other way i don't believe you can and and you know maybe jane goodall will argue with me when she goes in there that she's you know she's embedding herself and and and she's part of their cultures and she probably is she's embedding herself and and and she's part of their cultures and she probably is but hunting is is definitely a way to do it i mean marco polo was a hunter all the great explorers were hunters that's how they that's how they fed themselves on these trips everyone shackleton name name them name lewis and clark all of them they they hunted to survive while they explored and for me you know uncharted is is is, you said I was there to film the show.

That's not really what I'm doing. I'm there to just be who I am and to do what I do. The show is documenting what I do. If there was no camera with me, I would still be in there. For your own personal education. Of course. I want to know. I want to experience.

And I also said at the beginning, I don't feel fear. I detest when somebody tries to instill that feeling in me. They try to terrorize me. It just drives me wild to the point where, okay, now here we are. You know, now, Mano, Mano, you tell me, go ahead. You know, I'm facing you now. This is not an unknown lurking dark fear that whole side of the world is a scary place. No, I'm right here. I'm right here. You know, and what you find most times is that our press tends to, you know, they tend to feed us propaganda. And people in all of these places, the vast majority are good people. Now, they may believe in a totally different construct than we do, religiously, politically, you know, just civilly. They may be

like unfathomable to us. We look and go, you've got to be kidding me. You know, you say you own your wife, like you are one confused guy. But that's if we're judging them. If we're just there going, okay, you know, that's what they believe. But they're good people. They just have a, you know, different than us. So that, what I found traveling into these places, and again, it's just to affirm, I think, partially inside myself that the vast majority of this world is filled with good people. Good people that, you know, they have children, they laugh, they raise them with love. They may have the weirdest, you know, the two wives or 10 wives or whatever that,

that stuff I don't get. They, you know, they may eat stuff that I just look at and go, well, it's not really for me, but Hey, you know, that's good for them. And the hunting allows me to go inside those communities, see what they're really like, you know, without, without buying the bull crap that I'm reading the propaganda in our popular press and to say, no, these people, I don't hate everybody there. And therein lies the basis of hate is fear. When you fear something, you hate it. You have to hate it because it's a threat to you. So this is why, you know, I mean, tying it all back into the animal rights there, they're, you know, they hate us because they fear us. They fear you because you represent, you're not, you're not supposed to be talking positively about hunting.

You told this company line down here in California and just, this is the way it should be in Hollywood. You can't do this. So, so this is the same thing for over there in these countries. They want us to hate all these people because we're supposed to fear them. And most people fear them because they don't, it's unknown. So I'd rather just go there, visit them and find out what's going on with hunting as the, as what I do, which I also want to see what's going on with the wildlife. How, how are the wildlife, these animals faring with, with all this going on? I mean, these people, and what you find out is the hunters are taking care of the wildlife there. They're taking care of them in Russia.

They're taking care of them in all these crazy places where you'd expect it's anarchy. No, it's not. They're still, the wildlife is still benefiting from the conservation efforts of hunting. And that's what I always hope to find out when I go to these places. Sometimes, you know, it's not the way it is, but that whole journey, that's all part of hunting. It's all part of hunting. It's a voyage of discovery. And that's why back to the picture, people see a smiling or, you know, with that animal, dead animal, you're smiling about the killer, the animal that's sick, wrong. That's

not what we're smiling about. We're smiling about the process that was involved to get to that animal. I mean, we had to think about where to go're smiling about the process that was involved to get to that animal. I mean, we had to think about where to go, learn about the animal, learn the skills to actually hunt it, learn the skills to shoot whatever we're shooting with, rifle, even that isn't easy. We have to then learn to track it, wait for it, have the patience. We have to know when to move the wind. We have to live this animal's life in sort of a counterbalance until we cross paths and we kill it. That's what the picture represents, that whole process. And when you add in a place like Pakistan, you know, I'll have, you know,

I mean, I've got a big smile if I'm whatever animal I've hunted. But there, that degree of difficulty is just so much higher because there's all these other elements. You shouldn't have to be looking over your shoulder and wearing a Shalwar Kameez and the Topi Sindhi hat to go hunting. But you have to. It becomes part of it. So for me, it's all exploration, discovery, and the hunt is the theme through it all.

The thing that ties us, it's a network around this entire planet of hunters that are looking after the wildlife and who, for the most part, are the good people of this world. And you're wearing the traditional garb of these people in a lot of the places where you go. It's not like you're wearing like Sitka digital camo and, you know, you're wearing like what they wear so that you fit in. Yeah, it depends. it depends on where I am. There, absolutely. It's not to blend in with the environment. It's to blend in with the culture. You walk around dressed in a cowboy hat like I would here in cowboy boots, you look a little weird when you're right on the, say, on the Swat Valley on the Karakoram Highway.

I mean, you just would stand out too much. say on the Swat Valley, you know, on the Karakoram Highway. I mean, you just would stand out too much. So I'd rather look like a Pashtun warrior than I would, you know, a cowboy from the West. So, and that, you know, again, it's not fear. It's just adapting. It's just, you want to walk in there dressed like that, go ahead. You know, all the more power to you.

But, you know, be prepared because you're just a target at that point. And it's almost disrespectful in some ways. When you go to these countries, do you bring a translator? Do you hire someone before you get there to translate? Do you hire someone who's integrated into the culture? How do you set these things up? Well, like I said, there's a network of hunters around this world that are conserving wildlife. They're looking after the wildlife of this world.

And make no mistake every wildlife population in this planet is managed to some degree or other nowadays that you know the world is just crushed with with humanity so every every single big game animal small game animal they're all managed so there is hunters around the entire world and and i'll work that network to find who's there you know that that you know they're the hunter they they know they they they know the places to go they you know they're proud to be hunters they're happy to help you out to take you to this place now on the translation basis we do our best but it's uh i mean i was i did a uh self-guided hunt into the jungles of

cameroon in west af, right on the Congo border. Whoa. And I was, we literally took a bus from, we landed in Douala airplane, took a bus, and we were the only white people on that bus and in that bus station to Yaoundé, and then hired a taxi cab to take us as far out into the bush on the bush trails as the taxi would go, another eight hours. Ended up in a little village filled with pygmies and there's another tribe that will come to me but they they uh we hired them to be our our uh our guides into the forest then we hiked into the forest for two weeks

and hunted my translator was the only translator i've ever hired that could only speak one language french so that was my that was my my attempt at that point to hire a translator. It works sometimes, sometimes it doesn't. But the language of hunting is like a universal language. I can talk with anybody, Swahili, it doesn't matter. We can converse because we know what we're talking about. That sounds like such a crazy plan. Hire a cab to drive you as far as he's willing to go on these roads into the Congo.

Then you get out and what, are you camping? Yeah, we actually had a little pup tense. It was just me and my cameraman. And yeah, we just hiked into the jungle and wandered around the jungle for two weeks. And it wasn't in the Congo, by the way, because that would be illegal. Oh, okay. But it was very, very close to the Congo. It's illegal to hunt in the Congo?

It's not illegal to hunt, but there's no, in the Congo itself, now Congo Brazzaville, I've hunted there, you can hunt. There's actually a mandate, it's proclamation with the there. You can hunt. There's actually a mandate. It's proclamation with the government that you can hunt. There's a way to do it. It's a very complicated way, but you can do it. But in the Congo Democratic Republic of, they're hunting, the animals are getting hammered in there because of the civil wars. There is no oversight in there. I mean, there's animals, the okapi is in there. They're being slaughtered and there is no oversight in there i mean there's animals the okapi is in there they're being slaughtered and and there's no there's no hunting without hunting there's no one overseeing it now there will be some biologists uh you know they're probably the bravest of the brave actually

when you when you break it right down they go into those places and and do their best to protect it but it's it's a losing battle right now in that country wow so you are with just you and a cameraman and you bring just one rifle yeah i had a muzzleloader actually jesus christ yeah it was uh why do you hunt with a muzzleloader is it extra challenge or something yeah you know you know what i started as a bull hunter and and i realized fairly quickly in in the beginning of my career that I wasn't patient enough to be a bowhunter. I mean, I trust my skills and I'll gamble on my skills every single time. And the problem with bowhunting, you can't do that. There's just rules.

You can't shoot an animal quartered towards you. You shouldn't shoot it. You know, if it's severely quartered away, if it's, you know, if it's ready to jump string, you can't, you shouldn't shoot if it's a greatered away if it's you know if it's ready to jump string you can't you shouldn't shoot if it's a greater distance than 40 yards now everybody's skill level is different so a guy like Cameron Haynes you know I'd say Cameron shoot if it's 80 yards shoot because he's going to be able to hit it in those days the equipment I was using finger tabs there was none of the modern it was compound bows but barely compound and and I actually wounded a deer one day and i and i it was horrible i had to i i couldn't get close enough for a second shot i had to watch it die

and that that uh that i i just said look jimmy face it you should never have taken that shot you did and now this animal's suffering it's wrong and and so i put my bow down and i picked up a muzzleloader because that still gave me the challenge of archery hunting where I had to do the same stalks, get just as close. But when I took that shot at 55 yards, which is how far that deer was, with a muzzleloader, I'm going to kill it. And it's going to be humane and done deal. And so that's why I switched to muzzleloader. But rifle for me, it just wasn't as challenging. Now now as I'm hunting in some of these places around the world nowadays I'm back to using a rifle occasionally because there's places you just can't get within three four hundred yards of these animals in the mountains what about a second shot like a follow-up shot like if an animal is wounded

and is trying to take off and you would normally be able to just with a bolt action rifle and have another shot in the chamber ready you it takes what 30 seconds yeah if if if i was with a speed loader waiting you know anticipating having to reload quickly i could do it in about 30 to 40 seconds uh but then you know then acquire the target and shoot. So you're about a minute. The, you know, the idea of using a muzzleloader is that, A, you have to get close because you don't have the range that you would with a high-power rifle, and that you have to make the first shot perfect. I mean, that's all. You don't really have an option.

So, you know, the more opportunity, we're humans, right? The more opportunity we give ourselves to do it the easy way, we'll do it the easy way. Second shot, okay, I'll reload and shoot again. So I actually almost never have a second load ready to go. I just, I make sure I don't take a shot unless it's perfect. Now that, you know, we're still humans, so you can mess up, but that's not an alternative.

And it gets a little hairy on dangerous stuff. Yeah, I would imagine. Yeah, it's, it's not that, that I, I, I can't say that I enjoyed, you know, sneaking in on Cape Buffalo and, you know, they're just, it's just a scary situation. And the thing is, it may not be me that gets hurt.

Maybe it's the native tracker that's helping us out. Right. You know, someone's going to get scratched or spit on or stompled and it's going to be because I was hunting with a muzzle. It's a bit of a stunt. I was just in Africa here. I just got back actually. I probably don't even know what time it is here. It's 1.20. It's probably midnight for me right now. I was over there and I was using a rifle.

I didn't take my muzzle. I took my bow and a high power rifle. And I got to say, it was kind of nice, you know, to, for once to go in on these Cape Buffalo and not have to worry. I've got a rifle that I'm entirely capable of taking care of the situation. In fact, we got, I was going to bring you the footage, but my computer died. It was, we were charged by hippo. We were hunting a hippo that had been terrorizing a village, and they wanted us to help. It was wrecking their crops. And it was one particular hippo.

So we were sneaking along a riverine, you know, sort of a creek, thick, thick, thick stuff, working our way along. We could hear the hippos. They come on, you hear them ahead of you. How's that going? I'm not a good hippo caller. working our way along. We could hear the hippos. They come on, you hear them ahead of you. And- How's that going again? Oh, I'm not a good hippo caller. I never win the national hippo calling contest. But as we went,

we were sneaking, we saw this hippo that we're after. One came from behind us, literally hunting us and came through the grass, hit full speed when it was going 30 miles an hour and hit the opening or the grass between me and it. It was 30 feet at that point.

30 feet? Yeah. And coming at 30 miles an hour, a hippo, 100% someone was going to get killed. If I had my muzzle over my hands at that instant, it would have been questionable if I could have stopped it. But with the big rifle, I did stop it. That's all in camera. It's incredible. You see how quick it's like, it's a tenth of a

second from when you have to acquire the target shoot. Ooh, wee. Yeah, scary stuff. Wow. So. Yeah, you don't want to be with a flintlock when you're doing that.

No, no, just the hang fire would be too, you know, that poof, you're already dead. Oh God. You'd be cut in half by that hippo. And there are be too, you know, that poof, you're already dead. Oh, God. You'd be cut in half by that hippo. And they're actually, people, you know, think hippo, it's a big, you know, chunky beast. What does it ever do? But they're behind crocs, mosquitoes, and puff adders. Hippos kill more people in Africa than any other animal.

They're a dangerous animal to hunt. Well, they're enormous too. And they don't have any fear of crocodiles. There's this crazy video of these crocs that are hanging around this waterhole. And the hippo walks through them like it's a bunch of children in a pool. Like, excuse me, pardon me. These murderous dinosaurs are floating around next to him. He doesn't care at all.

He just waddles through. Those crocs, by the way, I was in Mozambique, too. That was the last place I was. I was in Tanzania and Mozambique. But Mozambique, we were along the Zambezi River helping the villagers there. They were getting hammered by these crocs. Literally, while we were there, a woman got taken 800 yards down the beach from us, killed, dead, eaten. And we were there because another lady had been killed two days before.

We went into the village. There was a dozen people that were chewed up chomped on you know over the years that survived the majority never ever survived the croc just comes up takes them underwater and gone it was it was and they live with that every single day of their lives it's uh you know those animals crocs uh you know i i actually don't feel much compassion for crocs i i just think they're too primitive. You know, they haven't changed in 250 million years. They were here.

They are dinosaurs. They are dinosaurs. And you see a 15-foot croc come out of the water. It is a sight to behold, frightening. And you've seen them in real life? Yeah, I shot one here just two weeks ago. Whoa. And we autopsied it.

There was a shirt inside it. A shirt. Yeah, they found, now I don't know if it actually ate somebody because you don't know, but they found one croc had six flip-flops in it, but we never did get the one that got the young girl. Six flip-flops inside of it, so most likely it's been eating people. You don't know. You don't know, right?

You don't know. Either that or it's a really dumb croc that has a thing for flip-flops floating down the zambesi river more likely it's getting people i'd say so yeah yeah they're there 200 people in a 10 mile stretch were killed in the last year two years wow so that's almost a person a day yeah oh no it's it absolutely is that's incredible yeah it's uh, that's all part of Uncharted. That's why we were there was helping these villagers. And this is an episode, obviously, you just shot. Yeah, it's in the can now.

It'll come out in 2015. How many of them are you doing? We do 13 one-hour episodes a year. So we have to do 13 in the course of a year. And you're still doing your other hunting show as well? Yeah, Hunting Adventures. Yeah, we do 26 half-hour episodes of that. But that I have helped because Evie, our daughter,

she's helping me co-host it. And sometimes we'll do the outfitting side of things where we're guiding other hunters. So I don't necessarily have to be on camera for the entire show. Yeah, and it's just kind of synchronicity that your daughter's in the news today and she was on Fox & Friends this morning

defending this bear kill because this, she put a Facebook post up. And Steve Rinella has a very interesting take on all this stuff. There's the picture of her with an enormous bear from North Carolina. Yeah, a giant bear, 510 pounds. Yeah, we can't play that, but there's probably some better photos. There's a picture of her holding on to the bear's head. I think it's from Facebook. I think it's fine.

her holding on to the bear's head um i think it's from facebook they could find but um ranella has an interesting take on it that i think really holds a lot of weight and what he's saying is that a lot of what you're getting from these people that are getting upset at uh these women posing with these bears is sexism that if i was a man posing with that bear on facebook it wouldn't get nearly as much press or nearly as much interest. It was a fat, old, bald man that had this dead bear. They'd be like, oh, this asshole hunter. And that would be the end of it. But because of the fact that she's a young, pretty woman,

they're attacking her. I mean, look at the size of that bear. My God, that's like a grizzly. Yeah, it's bigger than most grizzlies. It's enormous. North Carolina has the biggest bears, biggest black bears in North America. Really? Yeah, they're huge.

How big is that about? Hers is 510 pounds. Yeah, giant, giant bears. Wow. You know, when I, I mean, Steve is right. Absolutely, it is sexist. But I think the reason that there's such the vitriol from these animal rights people is that they are scared to death about this as being the image of hunting, the new image. You know, it's easy to stereotype, you know, me, go ahead. You know, I am what I am. Right.

You know, and it's easy to stereotype, you know, that big slovenly hunter that, you know, swills beer and shoots out the truck window. It's very difficult. What do you do with that? Right. What do you do with a young, beautiful girl? What do you do with that? Smile on her face. They are scared to death.

They are scared to death of this, this impact. Because women prior to this generation, very, very few of them hunted. Now it's the fastest growing component of the hunting side of the world. I talked to the guys at Bass Pro Shops, Johnny Morris, and he said 10 years ago, 3% of their customers were female. Today it's 30%. So this is the fastest rising part of our industry, the, the hunting industry is the female component. The animal rights people look at this and go, how do you battle that? How do you battle that? She's a beautiful young lady, articulate. She, you know, she's not a redneck lout, which, you know,

I mean, you can cheap shot me for that, but you can't cheap shot her for that. She's got a degree from a university. She, and she hunts and she for that she's got a degree from a university she and she hunts and she's she's beautiful and pure and her reasons for hunting well the other thing that was really disgusting was on facebook people they were they were telling they were they were saying horrible things about her but they were also saying horrible things about killing her dog that's that's just like are you an animal lover or what are you just a hater you're just an evil person she did a fantastic job on that fox and friends by the way because if you didn't know that she was a hunter you would think she's some news correspondent or something she comes off

she's very articulate she's very well spoken she's not overly emotional she doesn't distort the reality of the situation she's just talking about in a very clear concise way which is pretty remarkable for a young girl yeah she uh she evie is a very special young lady you know uh her mother and i louise actually it's our be our 30th anniversary here in another few days very very proud of evie um you know that's a tough thing to sit you know she's I'm I've I'm prepared to fight that battle you know I mean I I'm a warrior for this stuff go ahead bring it on you want to argue debate what do you what basis religious cultural you know family how do you want to talk about this biologically I can fight I can I'll argue with you Evie is a young

lady who's just doing it because she loves to hunt and she knows it's good for conservation good for the animals in the long run and she loves to hunt you know pure and simple and it's a tough thing to be thrown in front of a national television camera and asked hard questions about it and so yeah we're very proud of her and i you know hard to say where this all ends up but but I know one thing that the animal rights people are and you know the majority of the people are the 80 percent in the middle 10 percent hunt 10 percent hate it 80 percent of the people are riding the fence swinging one way or another depending on what they hear or learn but for the most part if you educate them

there there is only one logical answer one logical way this whole thing can be played out. Hunting is good, period. You know, you may not want to do it yourself. That's fair enough. But slamming hunters? In fact, you know, Evie made a mention of it on her, on the Fox and Friends, or maybe it was on the Blaze, I think, on the internet.

If every dollar that people donate to organizations that try and stop hunting are actually aiding and abetting the poaching and the decimation of our wildlife around the world. Now, that's a weird thing for people to compute in their brains. How does that work? Well, if in a place like, let's pick the Serengeti Park, for instance. Serengeti is, and I'll go off continent because this is an easy one to use as an example. The Serengeti Park is this huge area that wildlife essentially is protected by dollars from tourism.

Tourism being photo safaris, photo safaris, photo safaris, essentially. But it's only that area. safaris essentially but it's only that area but the the wildlife of the serengeti isn't just isn't just in the serengeti it's it's across the borders it's outside of that there's you know less and less animals the further away you get because there's more and more people coming in this is in tanzania so what they've done is they've created border hunting areas and this this is with the government in full recognition of the value of hunting as a conservation tool. They have now a buffer, a huge buffer that's tens of thousands of miles where hunting dollars are the only thing that finance the protection of

those animals. Now, if the animal rights guys or if the animal rights people convince Joe Blow Public, somebody sitting in their apartment in New York City, that you'll donate your money, this will stop hunting. You'll stop those bad hunters from killing the animals. What they're doing, and then those guys, they have the money. They go in there and they rally the forces. They convince the government that, oh, you've got to stop hunting. They get the World Bank behind them or some very wealthy, prominent people to support it. Suddenly, they stop hunting. Now, what happens at that point?

They stop hunting. Kenya, here's an example. Kenya, they stopped hunting in 72. The animals are decimated outside of these parks. There's nothing left. In Tanzania, there's still animals outside of the parks because of hunting. You stop hunting. So those dollars go into an anti-hunting organization.

They go, they lobby over those in those foreign countries and you can buy just about anything over there. They buy support, not saying that's how they do it every single time, but it does happen. They stop hunting. No more hunting there. So all those animals outside of the park are protected now by who? Who's paying for the anti-poaching patrols to go around the border? Nobody. There's no money. There's no economics. So what happens, the poachers come in like a

tidal wave, wipe out all the animals, and the next boundary they're going to cross are the parks. So essentially, the money that these people are donating to the anti-hunting organizations are aiding and abetting the criminals, the poachers, to decimate the wildlife populations. It's a weird thing, but it's counterintuitive, but it is a fact. It is a reality. Hunting dollars are the only thing that are protecting those animals in those areas, like the Masswell areas. It works. It's a model that works and it can work all over the world. Isn't that just Africa though? I mean, how does that apply in America? I mean, the poaching

issue is not nearly as large in America. No, it's not a poaching, but it's habitat loss. You have to look at it as, you know, poaching is a guy with a snare or a set gun or a leghold trap. But habitat loss is by far and away the greatest danger the wildlife faces here in North America. So you've got to have that wildlife land set aside for them. Now, it's a luxury in our world to be able to say, here, we're going to have this as a park and no hunting in this area. These are corridors. It's a luxury in our world to be able to say, hey, we're going to have this as a park and no hunting in this area. These are corridors. It's a luxury. So right now, maybe it's not quite as important as it would be over in Africa.

There, it's a war. I mean, it is literally a war on wildlife over there. Over here, it's not as important, but we still can never, never let our guards down because there's always a push. Humanity is going to push those those animals out of that habitat you're talking about it in jersey why why are the bears there well because there's not enough space for the number of bears outside of the city so they're moving into the cities

well it doesn't work they're going to kill the bears so we have to okay then let's make buffer zones let's do what we can let's let's get more area for these bears you know let's make buffer zones. Let's do what we can. Let's get more area for these bears. Let's not put subdivision over there. Let's let the animals live there. But if we're not going to put a subdivision there, that's going to cost somebody some money. So, okay, how do we buy that land? Well, you can do it with taxpayer dollars and just print money, or you can actually do it on a revenue-based concept or model

where the animals get the money through the hunting and they can buy back that land. Or on behalf of them, we can buy back the land and habitat. Now, one of the big controversies when it comes to Africa is the high fence hunting operations. It's a very, very contentious issue. These areas where they fenced off these large tracts of land and the only reason why they've done it is so that these wild animals

can live inside and people show up and they pay pay a lot of money and they go in and hunt there's pros and cons the pros being of course the animals or they exist in much higher numbers than they ever have in the past animals that were on the verge of extinction are now flourishing they have massive populations the reason being is because they're a valuable resource now but people have an issue with that high fence thing. The fact that they're all trapped in this area and then they can't get out. Even if it's 10,000, 100,000 acres, it still kind of bugs people that you're hunting essentially in a fenced-in backyard or park. That's the idea behind it.

Yeah. That's a far more complicated issue. I heard you and Steveve ranella talking about it actually and it's you have to be there feet on the ground to to get a real grasp of what the situation is and and and even even on a philosophical basis it's it's far more complicated than than just animals are trapped inside a big area and the hunter's going to kill them. As a for instance, and I, you know, I was actually asked to do a, I used to write, that's how I started in the outdoor industry. I wrote magazine articles and I was asked to do the con side of high fence hunting,

which I was no problem doing because I didn't believe it and I thought it was a bad thing and I did it, but, you know, and I received death threats from the guys that do the game farms. They, you know, they, they were very unhappy with the version I took of it. Uh, but, but it was an assignment, but what I did on, on the assignment afterwards, I started looking and go, you know, maybe there is something, maybe there is another way to look at this. And, and I mean, I'll, I'll adjust this whole thing if you want, if you will start right off the bat. Okay. You've got say a patch of 10,000 acres, you know, that's a big area, you know, it's, it's more than 10 square miles. It's a big area. If the animal that you're hunting has a home range of say one square mile,

that means he never would have been outside that fence whether it was there or not and i'm not standing up for high fence hunting i'm just giving you i'm objective yeah i'm looking at it from the other side if if that animal has a home range of one square mile then you know is it really inside the fence if it never hits that boundary now my argument on the other side was okay well if i want that animal i'm going to bulldoze that entire 10,000 acres and I will get it. I can't get away. Okay. Got you on that one. What if you're only allowed to hunt in one square mile of that 10,000 square acres, right? Is that now, is that hunting? Because the animal is free to go outside of your little one mile, but you're only allowed to hunt in that one mile, right? So now,

yeah, it can't get out of the 10,000 acres, but it can sure as heck get away from you as a little one mile but you're only allowed to hunt in that one mile right so now yeah it can't get out of the 10,000 acres but it can sure as heck get away from you as a hunter so there's another way it's another gray area what if there's what if there's you know the you know they say high fence but high fences an eight foot high fence usually with electric wire around it and page wire or you know they call it jackal wire along the bottom. What if it's a low fence? Is that okay? You know, there's a hunter that hates high fence hunting. Would he say it's okay to hunt in a low fence that's four feet high? Most animals can jump over it, but what about the ones that can't?

You know, it's just as effective as a high fence, a bontobuck. You know, there's an animal in Africa that can't jump over a fence, or a spring buck. They don't jump over fences. They'll try and go through it, but if there's a jackal fence along the bottom of that four-foot fence, they won't go through it. So they're just as kept inside a certain range as those animals inside the high fence. But the guys that have this huge hate of the high fence, they have no problem hunting a low fence,

but the animals still just kept in there, can't get out. Now, animals like eland and kudu, they'll go over it. The other flip side to that is those fences that they built in Africa were not to keep the game animals in. They were to keep people out. And to say that it was only for hunting isn't true either, because a lot of them make their living with photo safaris. Now, as the animals multiply inside those high fences, what do you have? You have the same situation as the bears in New Jersey. You've got to go manage that herd. So now, after a couple of generations of this high fence ranching in southern Africa,

even the photo safari places that are adamant against hunting, they're realizing, well, we've got to go in there and cull these animals. Something has to be done. There's too many animals inside these fences. So what they've actually started doing over there, and again, this is fairly new developments in Africa, they're starting to build these conservancies where you had a 10,000-acre patch here that was high-fenced right against it, a 50,000, right against it,

another 10,000, another 20,000, and they were all high-fenced. Now, they shared fences. What they're doing now is they're removing all the fences. They have enough area in these conservancies, you know, 500,000 acres with no fence around the outside. So essentially, the good of the high fences, whether you agree with hunting inside the high fences or not, the good, the benefit is now years later,

the fences are all down and in those conservancies, there's no fences on the outside. So you're hunting wildlife that would not have been there except for the high fences. So again, I've taken the, not the pro side, because do I, you know, do I enjoy hunting inside a high fence? Well, you know, to me, you know, I get to hunt in the Himalayas. You know, I get to hunt in the Rocky Mountains.

And we're spoiled over here. You know, we have that, you know, would I go into, you know, a thousand acres and shoot a big deer? No. It would mean nothing to me. It would be like, i wouldn't go shoot a cow i wouldn't well in some places not even a thousand i mean yeah ted nugent has like a 200 acre ranch and his show a good percentage of his show is him sitting in a tree in his backyard shooting these animals that live in his yard yeah i don't know a pile of corn yeah i can, I don't know how big Ted's ranch is.

It's only a few hundred acres. But I do know one thing, that Ted is, as an outspoken proponent of hunting and the rights to bear arms, I don't know anybody that reaches more people. Now his message is, you know, it's Ted. It's all Ted. It's pure Ted.

Right. But if you read his books, a lot of it is just common sense on steroids you know and that that's that's ted so i you know i won't i i mean i appreciate that he'll stand up there and fight our battles well i don't think there's anything wrong with what he's doing let me clarify the fact that he's hunting these animals in his his own piece of property i think it's a great way to acquire meat if that's what he wants to do and if he needs to manage his herd and i know he donates a lot of the food to Hunters for the Hungry. I know that nothing goes to waste. Nothing, absolutely nothing wrong with it.

Yeah, never. Way better than farming or than having some animal in a corral that you're just fattening up and eventually going to shoot him in the head. I mean, it's way better. These animals are essentially living a wild life in a contained area, and then he shoots them. I don't even have a problem with him leaving out food for them and shooting them off of bait piles. I mean, it's an effective way to make sure that you have a clear shot. I think he's got really bad knees anyway. I don't think he can, like, go hiking up into the hills and go looking for them or anything.

I've seen him perform. If he's got bad knees, he hides the pain well. He's an amazing performer. Well, my friend Ben O'Brien was telling me about how I went to see Ted Nugent backstage. He's got ice on his knee. He just got done with knee surgery. He looks like he's a wreck. He goes on stage and just hammers.

He goes crazy. He's jumping around like a 20-year-old man. Yeah, he's a fucking pro, you know. And hard worker. And I mean, he's, you know, he's on our side. Yeah, he's crazy fucking pro you know and hard worker and i mean he's he's you know he's on our side yeah oh he's crazy as hell but a lot of what he says has merit you know a lot of what he says when it comes to hunting and conservation has met but a lot of times he's almost his own worst enemy with his all the yahoo gonzo stuff that he it's it it he takes it so far you know like threatening the president and all that shit when they had to visit him with the Secret Service and go, come on, man, you can't say stuff like that.

Like, what are you doing? Yeah, he runs at a high speed. Yeah. You know, he runs at a high speed. And, you know. Sometimes you trip. Yeah. So if you're going to run that speed, exactly right.

And that's, you know, we'll all sit there and countenance every word before I say it. You know, Ted, ted you know he's just at a speed that my brain doesn't work that fast and i don't care whose brain it is eventually like you say you're gonna trip well he also has some like pre-programmed sentences that are ready to go he could just press play you know and just a drop of a hat he can say you know spiritual backstraps and all this you know he has all these things that he'll say the drop of a hat he can say you know spiritual backstraps and all this you know he has all these things that he'll say at the drop of a hat well he's a professional he's been doing it for 40 years so exactly you know after 40 years if you if you don't have that and boy he's also been defending hunting in the public eye long before it was fashionable yeah yeah and and he's debated

like i've i've seen him debate uh i don't know, again, I don't know the TV guys, but one of those talky guys and masterful, masterful. I mean, he's just bang on on what he's saying. Now, sometimes the way he says it is a little harsh. I mean, it might be not family friendly, but it's, you know, it's Ted. It's just Ted. Well, did you see him debate Pierce Morgan? I never saw that one. About gun control?

Hilarious. I would love to see that. Because he knew all the actual facts about gun deaths. Well, did you see him debate Pierce Morgan? I never saw that one. About gun control? Hilarious. Because he knew all the actual facts about gun deaths. He's like, do you understand that the numbers that you're quoting also involve cops shooting bad guys? Like, you're adding that in. And Morgan didn't know. For Pierce Morgan, he doesn't know anything. He sees some numbers.

He's got them written down. He tries to throw them out there. He sees some numbers. He's got them written down. He tries to throw them out there. But Nugent has a deep understanding of what those numbers actually entail and where they come from and what's really at the root of it all. Sure. And you can't argue with that. And he's a brilliant guy.

He's brilliant. He's definitely not a dummy. No. No. He's crazy. But he's fucking Ted Nugent, man. What do you expect? Crazy like a fox.

Wango, tango, cat scratch fever. I mean, that's who he is. Cat scratch fever. I mean, I grew who he is. Cat Scratch Fever. I mean, I grew up with that. That's my... Stranglehold, one of my favorite workout music songs ever. But what I think is necessary today when it comes to a modern face of what hunting is, is guys like you.

Guys like you, guys like Cam H like you guys like cam haynes guys like steve ranella people who when when you sit down and have a conversation with them and you realize where they're coming from people can are going to be able to relate to the message in a way that i don't think they i think it's too easy to marginalize someone like Ted, unfortunately. Yeah, I don't disagree with that. But by the same token, he reaches more people than any of us do. I mean, we're reaching people today. It's thanks to you.

I mean, this is why I'm here. You're doing great work. I mean, you're putting yourself out there. This is definitely not an anti-hunting show. You're not following the masses on this. You are reaching out and saying, hey, this is something you want to think about so you know you're making a big difference ted makes a difference in his own way and no no question no question no i'm not putting him down um i'm not putting myself out there though i mean i kind of am but i'm not because all the other

things i mean i'm so easy to marginalize already. I'm a cage fighting commentator. By the way, I saw you in UFC 100. I was there. My son and I were. Oh, for the Brock Lesnar fight? Yeah, we were guests of Brock Lesnar. We really? I have his gloves. After the fight with Frank Muir's blood on them, he actually gave them to me after the fight.

Whoa. I have his mouthpiece. Yeah, he took it out and put it in my pocket while I was interviewing him. I still have it. Is that right? Yeah, that was amazing. So, I mean, I don't know about marginalized. I think this is two worlds colliding. In fact, someone Facebooked me today, I think, said that.

Oh, no, they texted me and said that they listen to you when they're going out hunting. Right? They're hunters. And UFC, I don't know what they know about that, but they know you. And they know that you represent UFC. And, of course, you did the Fear Factor and whatnot. And these guys now, they say in my world, which they also listen to, it's colliding. It's perfect for them.

It's building. And we're reaching more people. I definitely think that message is getting out there. We're reaching more people. I definitely think that message is getting out there. And I think today people are more concerned now than ever before about where their food comes from and about getting to this sort of back to basics idea. People are more concerned with eating grass fed beef. People are more concerned with eating organic vegetables. People are more concerned with taking in quality food and not eating as much gluten or processed sugar.

with taking in quality food and not eating as much gluten or processed sugar. There's much more concern now for eating what you would call a holistic diet than has ever been before. And then when people start thinking about where their food comes from, that's what opens the door for hunting. And then when a show like this comes on, the difference between this and any other show is that, first of all, it's completely uncensored. No one can tell us what to talk about or what not to talk about and we're going to talk

for as long as we want and so if you have a point you don't you don't get cut off by a commercial you don't get cut off because it's an uncomfortable subject you don't get cut off because hey let's not talk about bears people don't like to hear you hunt bears let's talk about only game animals let's talk about some ugly let's talk about pigs wild pigs pigs are good no nobody has a problem with pigs i haven't my agent who i love to death she's a sweetheart she's an she loves animals but she's like you can hunt pigs because they're ugly she actually said that to me but it's fair enough i mean the animal rights people who do they have as as their icons on their posters you know know, polar bear, tiger, lion.

The worst animals in the world to be stuck alone with. Yeah. Oh, there you go. And also the ones that need our protection most right now. Yeah, especially tigers, right? 100%.

There's as many tigers in Texas as there are in the wild. Oh, that's a sad commentary. In those wild animal parks and people have like those really crazy rich oil barons. They have these giant backyards like Mike Tyson style, like a thousand tigers running around. I mean, I think it's great that they're doing that because it does protect those animals somewhere else outside of their native habitat. But, you know, it's a sad commentary that there's so few tigers left in the real world out there.

And again, they are being killed and they're being poached constantly, constantly. Yeah, so much so that I was in, I think it was Philadelphia recently. There's a big poster at the airport with a tiger's face that it said, I am not a rug. And I put it on my Instagram. I was like, is this really that much of an issue

that you have to like, first of all, anybody who's going to poach a tiger doesn't give a shit if you put a poacher of it saying i'm not a rug they're still gonna fucking shoot it like i don't understand who that's for well it's to raise money it's to raise awareness it's to tug on the the sympathy strings of of that little old lady walking down there at the airport going those hunters are turning my tigers into rugs. I mean, that's terrible. Well, hunters aren't, they haven't hunted tigers since the colonial days.

I mean, since they left India, I don't think there's been a tiger killed legally by a hunter. So it's nothing to do with hunting. They're just, they're raising money on our backs as hunters and still using that stereotype that, yeah, we kill tigers to make them into rugs, which we don't. You know, poachers do.

Poachers turn them into aphrodisiacs. I don't know. Yeah. Something for Asians. That's some rhinos too, right? Rhino horn. Rhino horn is bad. The latest one is when I was over in Africa just now, the skeletons of lions.

For some reason, they're on that kick now, which is. Don't they know about Viagra? I mean, you can get a lot of Viagra. You really don't need to chop off any rhino horn. You just go to CVS. You need one tiny little pill and you're good. And this is probably off color, but it begs the question, why do they need so much Viagra over there? Like, what's their problem?

Well, I think it was before they knew about Viagra. I think that's where all this rhino horn it became a part of the tradition this is these animal products from these virile powerful animals were thought of as aphrodisiacs or at least some male enhancements in some sort of strange way yeah and it's you know they the way they do it i think it's a status symbol too for them if you have your little tiny sliver of rhino horn that you dip into your soup, I mean, literally that's what they do. They'll keep it for years.

Really? And just dip it in there, and that gives this power. Ridiculous. Yeah, it's ridiculous. But it's ridiculous, but it's happening. Right. So the result is you've got 1.3 billion Chinese. I'm not saying it's all China.

It could be Korea as well. Who knows where it's going over there. There's just not enough rhinos to sustain that kind of a pressure. And the prices are going through the roof on the horns. And you've got all the social problems in Africa. So someone's going to go over and try and kill that rhino, even if they're going to be put in jail or shot by anti-poaching teams. They're going to do it because they get 500 bucks which will this is where it brings up a really interesting contradictory issue that rhino that was put up for auction by the dallas safari club

right huge issue because someone spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on this rhino hunt to be able to go and hunt this rhino and everybody was so angry what they didn't understand was that that rhino was an old male who was not breeding who was killing young rhinos he was killing young breeding rhinos and the only way to prevent that was to kill him and the money that was raised by auctioning off a hunt for this rhino helps in the conservation of the rhinos. That's so difficult. Unless it's explained to you, unless you're deeply immersed in the world of conservation and of hunting as a form of conservation, it seems completely contradictory. Yeah, it's counterintuitive. Yes. How do you kill the animal to save the species? Well, it seems completely contradictory. Yeah, it's counterintuitive. Yes. How do you kill the animal to save the species?

Well, it doesn't make sense. And by the way, that was Corey Knowlton, who, if you watched Uncharted, is my sort of teammate on several of the shows. And I think the price was $350,000 for that. They felt, Dallas Safari Club felt that they would get over a million dollars. They had people that would have essentially donated, very wealthy people that would have paid. Look at this. Jamie just put up an article.

Feds could force Dallas Hunting Club to scrap the rhino hunt auction to $350,000. Wow. I haven't seen that title. That's today? Yeah. Whoa. 17 hours ago, last night. Oh, wow.

How apropos. Yeah. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife, they're a pretty powerful organization. They can actually say, well, we're not going to let you import it. They can't stop. And I can't say that they can't even stop that auction from, you know, it's already happened, but they can't. They can't stop it from hunting it because it's in another country, but what they can stop is him bringing the animal over after he's killed it. That for sure they can stop, but they also might be able to, after the fact, say that was not a legal auction.

I don't know. I've never heard of this. This is the first I've seen of that title. But they do have, they're pretty powerful, and they, you know, they do some good things and they do some things that don't make sense from the hunting side. Well, they do some things based on political pressure.

And a lot of that political pressure is not based on wildlife management, biologists, recommendations. I think they stopped the importation of polar bears again recently after the 72 Marine Mammals Act. You know, then they open it again because there's so many polar bears up in northern canada and canada has biologists they're smart guys they're

doctors they know what they're doing the the communities up in the north are killing those bears anyway so why not have hunters come in and pay twenty thousand dollars so that a young one a young female breeding age doesn't get killed but just an old boar beyond breeding age so u.s fish and wildlife for whatever reason you know in their in their wisdom, and I don't know them. I don't know what pressures they're under to make these decisions, but they banned the importation again. So now, you know, everyone else in the world is still hunting the polar bears in Canada, just not Americans. Well, you can hunt polar bears in Canada, but what you can't do is bring back the body. Can't import any part of it.

I didn't even know that it was still legal to hunt them in Canada. I just didn't know until I was up there. Yeah, absolutely. And walrus, same thing. Atlantic walrus, you can hunt up there, but you can't, as an American, bring them into the States. Not even a whisker. Isn't that the same with African elephants?

Like there's some African elephants that you're allowed to hunt, but you can't bring the tusks back. They've just shut down the importation from Zimbabwe and Tanzania recently. Both countries were, until this year, allowed, you know, could hunt them and bring them back into the States. They still allow the importation from Namibia

and South Africa, as far as I know. But, you know, Cameroon, they don't allow it. Now, this is U.S. Fish and Wildlife. It's a national-centric decision. It's not a world decision. There's CITES, the Convention for the International Trade in Endangered Animals or Species. They control all of that export-import around the world. And the U.S. is a signatory to the CITES Convention.

So they should listen to what CITES does, but they don't. You know, they, above and beyond that, say, no, CITES says. So they should listen to what CITES does, but they don't, you know, they, they above and beyond that say, no, CITES says it's okay, but we say it's not. And again, I, I'm not saying that they're right or wrong on that. I'm just saying that they, they are very powerful. And sometimes the decisions they make as a hunter, and again, looking from my little mountaintop at this whole objective picture and, and, you know, having hunted in botswana you know for elephant cameroon and and uh tanzania all of these places you know it's it's was to the detriment of wildlife to the elephant as near as i can tell so it doesn't make sense how they what was their justification i know they shut down the importation of polar bears from Canada because they said the potential of, what was it, global warming, the impact of global warming over the next 50 years, the potential is there, so we're going to shut down importation.

It's just like this is reactive management. It makes no sense. Well, if you pay attention to the stories on global warming, most people believe that the polar bears are endangered right now. Most people believe their habitat is being lost at an alarming rate, that the ice caps are melting, the ice islands that they swim up to are going away. If you talk to the average person that is aware of all the news stories

on global warming and you ask them, do you think the polar bear is endangered? Oh, yes. Polar bear is endangered. That's drinking the Kool-Aid. What they're not telling you is that the polar bear population is directly proportional to the population of ring seals, bearded seals, and harp seals up there. These animals, if there's a heavy freeze, like say like say for instance we're going to hit another mini ice age which back i'm old enough to remember back in the 60s when all these same scientists were predicting ice age coming ice age it's going to be a mile i mean i worried about that as a kid

right i'm gonna you know i'm gonna get my toboggan and and you know sled all my my toys down to mexico because i'm going to be a mile under ice here right so these same guys now it's global warming global well sort of because they have a lot more information nowadays yeah they have more they have more to back it up but what they're not what they're abusing is the the reality up there which is you need new ice for seals to grow if they have old ice that's too deep the the seals, they die. And they die, the polar bears die. So a mini ice age kills polar bears. Global warming, this ice still freezes every winter. It freezes and the seals, they come up through it and the

bears can fight or fight through the ice, find their seals and survive. So there's more seals up now than there ever has been, which translates to more polar bears than there ever has been. And this is backed up by numerous studies up in Canada by Canadian scientists. And by anecdotal evidence, just go talk to the Inuit up there. You know, back 40, 50, 60 years ago, they had to work really hard to find a polar bear. And also remember that there was commercial harvesting of these polar bears up until 1970. You know, 10,000 a year they were killing up in the northern, in the north, whether, you know,

between Russia and Canada. Just for the fur? Just for the fur. Now, that's all gone. So what do you think those bears did? They had babies, the ones that survived, and those babies had babies. There's bears everywhere up there now.

So again, the Inuit know better than anybody. They live there. When you can't walk out of your house and not see polar bear tracks, there's a lot more polar bear than there were. So again, to say that global warming is potentially going to cause the demise of polar bears, so we're going to stop hunting, well, you devalued the polar bear for the Inuit up there. The Americans were the main market for those polar bears, for the hunters. So what do they do now? They still kill them, but now they don't care. The first one they see, baby, mother, doesn't matter, you know, because it's meat. It's just plain and simple meat. And is that a great way to manage the polar populations up there? So, you know, coming back to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, I'm not saying that they're,

I don't understand the logic behind their decision. Now, I would love for one of them to explain to me what the logic is, but I don't see it on the ground, feet on the ground in the Arctic. And I was there this spring for a month. You know, it's the same story, more bears than ever. It's so interesting how counterintuitive that is based on like what most people believe. Most people believe that this area is diminishing in habitat and that the polar bear is going to be forced into extinction. But meanwhile, there's more than ever. And it is really easy to take a picture of a mother polar bear with two cubs on a tiny little ice cube out on the water and say,

my world is melting around me. I'm dying. What would you do for a Klondike bar? Have a Coke and a smile. There you go. They're the most vicious predators we know, and they're used to sell ice cream and soda. They're marine mammals. They're marine mammals. They swim. That's what they do.

These animals are doing fine. No, no, no. Their habitat is lost. They're drowning. Don't you know? That's ridiculous but it's also it's also a way for scientists who and i use the term scientists lately the way for them to raise funds right because you got to remember they have to pay for their mortgages too so jump on the bandwagon let's get i'm going to study these polar bears now because look this is the danger the threat and if you get enough people believing it then then, you know, there's money available, right? Okay, let's give $25 million to studies.

That's fascinating. Yeah, I mean, I sound like a conspiracy theorist, but it's the reality. It's people are trying to make a living. They're just trying to make a living. They're just trying to sell storage wars. They're just trying to get you to look in Al Capone's vault. That's right. And they're trying to get you to send money in to their organization that's raising whatever billions of dollars a year or hundreds of millions to protect wildlife.

Have you eaten polar bear? Oh, absolutely. What does polar bear taste like? You know, when I've eaten it, it's up in the Arctic with the Inuit. And so they boil everything. It's boiled. And it's funny. You put salt, like the brisket, normally where we'd eat the backstraps, you know, that'd be the first choice or tenderloins.

The Inuit knot, it's, it's the brisket. Because when you boil it, that's where you've got this great textures, you know, the crunchy, uh, I mean, I don't even know what you'd call it, cartilage and, and connective tissue. That's not just meat and fat. So that's, you know, it was, it was a delicacy. I would rate it right up there with the best of the meat I've ever had. Really? Oh, absolutely. But boiled with salt and being very hungry out on the ice.

You know, you spend 20 days out on the ice with the Inuit on a dog sled, you're, you're hungry. You know, they kill a bear, you eat it and you're, it's like the best, finest Kobe beef in downtown New York City. Is it relative to where you're at and the struggle that you're, it's like the best, finest Kobe beef in downtown New York City. Is it relative to where you're at and the struggle that you're in? I mean, if you had it here in LA, if I took you to a restaurant down the street. Hard to say, because there is no restaurant that serves it.

So it's hard to take it out of that context and say, is it the best meat now here? I don't know. I mean, wild sheep, same thing. You're on a mountain and you've been backpacking for 10 days carrying 50 to 70're on a mountain and you've been backpacking for 10 days carrying 50 to 70 pounds on your back and you finally get your ram and run down to below alpine and find some little sticks and make a fire and roast the ribs on it i defy anybody to

tell me there's a better piece of meat in this world that tastes better than that wild sheep on a mountain after a sheep hunt. But would it be that good if I was downtown New York City or here in L.A.? You know, I don't know, because you just can't do it. It doesn't exist. One of the best meals I've ever had in my life, we shot a mule deer, that deer right there, in Montana. And we ate the liver and the heart that night.

It was insane how good it was. It was so delicious. On a campfire, just cooked it over oil with a little salt and pepper. And we were just moaning with delight like an orgy. Anyone that doesn't hunt, that isn't out there, can never know what you're describing. I know it. I know it. Right.

I've had the same thing. And I've had moose liver and name it, name it, you know, antelope. All around the world, we've had the same thing. It's the best of the best. It's the perfect. I think it's because that's who we are. That's who we are. We're not the fancy restaurant, you know, thousand-dollar bottles of wine and ho, ho, ho, you know, hoi cuisine.

It's not. What we are, we're just, we're just that. We eat wild game cooked on a fire. That's the truest we can ever be. That's the truest, most natural flavor and eating that we could ever do. But one of the number one posts when I Instagram pictures, like the ones that get the most likes are all me cooking wild game. It's crazy.

Yeah. Wild pig or wild venison or the moose recently. It's weird how people, it resonates with people. Yeah. And again, I think we are making inroads. The hipsters nowadays in the big cities are looking at this and saying, hey, yeah, it's organic meat. It truly is better than anything that's raised. So, I mean, why not?

It's organic. And if they look at it objectively and it's managed herds and it's, you know, there's wildlife populations that can sustain a harvest of a certain number of animals that's regulated. Okay, well, why not? Now, suddenly it makes all kinds of sense to not to eat that instead of a but but it's not that simple to go get that you know you've done it you've made the effort you've learned the skills you know you shoot a bow you shoot a rifle you do rifle i don't even know yeah yeah so but all those are skills that you've acquired you can't just walk out there and go

shoot something well i'm very lucky and first of all lucky that i got to meet steve renell and have my podcast and i got to take my introductory course in the hunting was with a master hunter i mean took me out the right way in the wild in the missouri breaks and place where there's no people the deer that i shot most likely never even seen a person i mean you're in a very inhospitable environment for most people it's very difficult to do and very difficult to find the time to go to the range to learn i mean to learn how to bow hunt with cameron haynes i mean just very fortunate in that sense i mean he taught me so much about archery and equipment and how to you know adjust your equipment and dial it all in and how to practice and what to do and you know how to stand and hold your breath and you know the proper way to release all that stuff takes

it takes a lot of you have to invest a lot of time and energy that people a lot of people don't have you know they have this this cubicle existence whether they like it or not they're tied into their student loans and tied into their bills so when i talk about like those existences like i've been trapped too man i've had plenty of jobs that sucked and i was stuck there forever but you what i what i'm saying is is not i'm not judging people for not being able to do it or not doing it themselves what i'm trying to do is just let them know the benefits if it's possible to figure out a way to get to that part to get to that point in your life the benefits of being able to do it the benefits being able to hunt your meat and actually kill that animal and cook that liver over the fire, you wouldn't believe how good it tastes.

You literally wouldn't believe. And it's a completely different thing. I've had many delicious meals where I went to the store, I bought a nice steak and I bought some vegetables and I came home and I cooked it up and, you know, just no connection whatsoever to how that kale was grown or how those mushrooms were picked or how that cow died but it's still fantastic delicious meal but there's another level yeah that comes from like this moose i cooked some moose last night this is a totally different level i know exactly where that animal came from i cut the back straps off its body i

put it in the plastic bag. We froze it. I took it home. I defrosted it. I, you know, I put the garlic salt on it. I started the fire, the whole deal. And when that, this is a complete different thing when you're eating that. And that's, that's the next level of connection. Yeah, I think no question. And that, I mean, I think we're seeing it in the popular press on television with, with the, the, you know, guys like Anthony Bourdain. And I mean, I don't know the other cook guys, but one of them, I think it might've been him, killed an eland in Africa. And, you know, that's hunting. Yeah.

You know, now what they're missing, they're doing it very surgically. They're not, they're missing the spirituality of the hunting side, the skill set. You know, I'm not sure which one, how it happened. I think it was shot right from the truck. You know, they missed the hunt part. So there, people are maybe coming in the back door on the, on this whole hunting issue. Like, okay, we get the meat part, right?

It's just the hunting part we don't get yet. Right. So, so, you know, but if we reach in them through the meat side and they recognize this is the best meat that you can possibly, the best sustenance you can have, the most natural, then that's fine. I'll take that any day.

Now, here, let me take you into the outdoors and show you the part that you don't get yet, which is the actual killing of this animal. And what that means to you as a person that's going to then supply your family with this meat and eat it yourself. with this meat and eat it yourself. You know, like that, you know, besides the fact what the meat tastes like, it's also that it's a spiritual connection with life. I mean, life. Where do you think that steak came from in your life? It was a life.

You know, life begets death begets life begets death. This is the part that we've almost got the people coming in from, like I say, the backside, the meat side, almost got them to where they understand now, or they're ready to understand that, okay, well, now here's the death part. This is the hunting part. They accept the wild game and no question, all our friends like wild game meat. We give it, it's gone the instant we offer it to anybody.

But the hunting part, they're still on the fence about. So, but slowly, slowly, and if it has to come through the meat side with the cooking shows, great. And, you know, we'll also push on the other side, the exploration, the discovery, the skills that it takes and the joy to be out in the wild lands. I mean, you know, I don't spend my day worrying about how to make enough money to drive a Rolls Royce like my neighbors or a second TV or, you know, whatever chattel that people chase in this world today. I don't do that. I use my time and my money to be out there. You say that people don't have

enough time. You do have enough time. You just have to change your priorities. You know, instead of sending your kids off to the nannies and whatnot, take them out there. Take them out into the wild lands, wherever that may be. It may be a 40-acre park, but at least you're out there. Show them a bug. Show them an insect. Show them a butterfly. Show them a bird. And maybe you'll be lucky and see a squirrel or a rabbit. And if you're really lucky, a deer. It's just priorities. There's time if people prioritize properly. Well, to me properly, maybe not to them yet.

Because maybe they want the Rolls Royce. It doesn't interest me. I think there's also an issue that's coming up now where the moral high ground that people take by endorsing vegetarianism or veganism, we're starting to understand that plants might be sentient, that plants actually can communicate with each other, that plants can transmit information, that plants can feel pain, that plants recognize when they're being consumed, and that plants have protective measures

in order to discourage predation because that protective measures that become enacted upon them being torn apart or being eaten we're starting to find out all sorts of strange things about plants that plants might not be this we like to look at plant as being like oh it's like fucking eating styrofoam it just grows you pull it out of the ground and it's fine. Well, it's a life form. It's a life form. And just because it can't scream when you eat it doesn't mean it's not a life form like any other life form.

Yeah, and it doesn't mean it's not screaming in a language we don't understand. Exactly. You see the kudu in Africa feeding into the wind. Is that to protect them from predators? No, it's because the plants that they feed on that they prefer can't send pheromones or whatever that signal is where they talk to each other. And I mean, it sounds like Dr. Doolittle here, you know, Mr. Plant Little, but the plants actually send a signal to the plants ahead if it's downwind, and they all send out a chemical in the leaves that make them inedible for the animals. So they're talking to each other, and there's no doubt. Now, would that

stop me from eating the leaves of that plant, or a lettuce, or a carrot? No, not a bit. But, you know, I mean, I guess if people want to sit there and say, I don't kill things, I would say more like, you drive a car, how many bugs do you think you killed in that car? How many birds have you hit? You know, of course you're killing animals. No one can wash their hands of that. Well, there was an experiment that was recently done where the students showed that plants won't grow near a Wi-Fi router. They showed the difference in plant growth near a Wi-Fi router and without. And they're starting to realize that there's something that these plants are, they're interacting with their environment in ways that we're not totally aware of.

The same way sort of how bees are affected by cell phone signals. This is a huge issue with bee populations. They think that bees on a regular basis are dealing with radio frequencies and cell phone frequencies, Wi-Fi signals. These actually affect their ability to communicate with each other, their ability to navigate, and that there's all sorts of things that the wildlife, whether it's wild plants, whether it's insects, animals, there's senses that they have, there's ways that they're interacting with their environment that we're not totally aware of. So when we look at a plant, it grows, and grows and we go oh we'll just eat this plant and it's so simple and

convenient because it doesn't scream because we don't recognize its life in the same level as our life we don't put it in the same hierarchy it doesn't mean it's not life like you life eats life that's exactly right and i say life begets death begets life. It's a continuum. It's a perfect balance. It's been going on forever on this planet. And it's not going to change just because someone calls themselves a vegetarian. I mean, it's animals die, plants die so that we can live.

Now, when you're traveling to all these different worlds, I mean, there really are almost like different worlds, these different parts of this planet, and you're interacting with all these indigenous people. What's their attitude when it comes to vegetarianism? Does that even exist in some of these places? No. I mean, protein's at a premium all around the world. It's a first world issue. Yeah. It's a luxury that we can call ourselves a vegetarian.

Now, that doesn't mean that some places, they're not vegetarian because they have to be. But if they get an opportunity to eat a fish, they're going to eat it. It doesn't matter where you are. You'll see the pygmies in the creeks catching the little freshwater shrimp. If they didn't catch an animal that day, they're eating the shrimp. Protein is a premium all around the world. There's no one, here's the third world. That's not really a great term.

Yeah, I don't like those terms, first world, third world. I used that term about Mexico, and I did it at a show once, talking about San Diego, how weird it is that San Diego is just a 20-minute drive to Tijuana. And this guy came up to me after the show, and he was from Tijuana. He came to the show, and he was like, yeah, I'm from a third-world country. Like, you could tell it bothered him that I said that.

Like, well, this designation of first, second, third world. I was just in Mexico City. Some of the nicest people I've ever met in my life. They're so friendly. Like, Mexico City, it's overly crowded. It's unbelievably polluted, but the people are fantastic. And I think first, second, third world, all these distinctions, it's unbelievably polluted but the people are fantastic yeah and i think first second third world all these distinctions this it's kind of weird no it's just you know again

it's it's egocentric yes it's like the world revolves around us right it's just earth it's just exactly and there it's just it's different situation over there but they don't have protein you know they're getting it from their bean plants or whatever they happen to be growing if they're agrarian but but you know that that whole vegetarian thing i've never met anybody in any place that says you know i'm a vegetarian they're proud of it they're vegetarian because they have to be there's no other food around and given a choice they will absolutely eat that you know clam you know fish crab whatever if they're if they're along the ocean or rivers. A lot of people in India, aren't they vegetarian by choice? Isn't that a...

You know, Hinduism, I don't know. Once you start injecting the religious side of it, that's a different deal. Yeah, it truly is, right. You're doing 13 of these a year where you're traveling to all these ridiculously remote places. Like that one where you went to Russia and you took that crazy four-wheel drive truck near the side of this cliff. I mean, I was clenching my fist and tightening my legs watching that.

I was like, Jesus, what are they doing? You took like the most precarious path to go, was it Iran? You went to go shoot Iran? Yeah, the Tien Shan Argyle and the Tien Shan Mountains. That was in Kyrgyzstan, right? An ex-Soviet protectorate. So it's the only way to get there. How long did it take to get to that spot?

You know, that time we were pretty lucky. I think we did it from where we left pavement, I'm going to say 14, 16 hours. Maybe it was 18 hours, somewhere in that range. It's not bad. Sometimes in these places like Tajikistan, going along the Joachim Corridor there, it can take 36 hours in one of those little Russian Jeeps. Brutal, brutal. I swear they just run their exhaust pipe inside the truck for their heater.

Really? Yeah, I swear. It's just, it's disgusting. I have a headache pounding, and you're up at 14,000 feet, so you have a headache anyway. And you're breathing exhaust fumes. Yeah, smelling exhaust fumes the whole way, 36 hours. Oh, my God. Sitting in a, you know, they're not made for comfort.

The Soviet era, anything had nothing to do with comfort. So, yeah, but so the Kyrgyzstan one in that big russian unimog deal was uh you know relatively speaking it was fairly fairly quick still still you know and i've just become a bit of a fatalist on that if i'm if it's my time and this thing's gonna go over the edge it's my time you know and you're not going to stop you can you know stress out the entire time and get shots of adrenaline every time that truck leans and lurches it's just not worth it you know i i just go in the zone and wow what a beautiful view straight how do you get people willing to take you

to these places they live there that that's where they live they're they're hunters that's that's where they have to meet you where they don't live and then take you to where they live. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's the, that's why you have those wonderful road systems the Soviets built. Yeah. Wonderful. Yeah. No, I swear. It's like you built them along the way.

Yeah. They're, uh, there's the, there, but they're nowhere near as scary as down in South America and Peru. Go in the Andes and go into some of those communities where you're doing 20 switchbacks, switchbacks up a mountain, frightening. What is a switchback?

What does that mean? Well, you can't. They come one way up, 45-degree angle, then cut 45-degree angle, cut 45, cut 45. Oh, I see. And you can climb almost any mountain if you build a road wide enough for a track or wheels to go on. And scariest thing I've ever, scariest place I've ever driven. You know, Kyrgyzstan was bad, but, but, uh, the Andes in South America and Peru were by far worse. We were hunting a, a little whitetail that lives only at the Andes, Andean whitetail deer. It lives

up in the high Andes at 14, 15,000 feet. The only one animal lives higher is the Turuca, 15,000 feet. The only one animal that lives higher is the Turuca, which is another deer species that's higher. Wow. Yeah, fascinating place. Have you hunted everything that's on this planet?

No, but I'm sure. Do you have a list? Yeah. Do you have a bucket list? Yeah, I mean. Like a literal bucket list for them too. Yeah, I mean, the thing is, because no one's going to discover a new big game animal on this

planet anymore. What about that fanged sheep or the fanged deer that they just found in Afghanistan for the first time in 60 years? Yeah, I heard about that. Did they start salivating? Yeah, if they ever allow hunting. The thing is, probably they could raise a million dollars if they auction off a tag to one hunter. Who knows, a Russian oligarch guy. He'd pay the money.

He probably doesn't.'d go on it anyway but but if they raised a million dollars for conservation of that animal they'd lose one but they'd save the whole species you know and they protect it give the animals money they'd buy back some space for themselves so in fact you know i would actually like to see one of them hunted you know maybe not of them hunted. Well, there's so few of them, they didn't even know it existed until recently. Like the numbers can't be healthy enough to kill one, can they? Probably not, not at this point. But look at it this way. What if there's one, like the rhino, the black rhino, what if there's one that's over breeding age, past breeding age, right?

So he's not contributing to the preservation of that species anymore or the perpetuation of that species. He's just living. So if you lost that one raised a million dollars for the study of those animals and the protection of those animals, can you justify it? You know, again, it's a life, you know, to protect more lives. Or don't take the million dollars. That one dies because he's going to die he's going to die for whatever cause you know whether he gets pneumonia or whatever those fanged deer whatever they die from so it just dies and there was no million dollars you know so now they're still struggling to get financing to to protect these animals they could have done

it with one auction with one tag wouldn't the argument against, obviously I'm playing devil's advocate here, is like, wouldn't it be better if people were just, we just wanted to keep these animals alive for a charitable reason? I mean, people would say, like, why do we have to hunt these things? Why can't you just keep these things alive because you care, because you want to see them flourish? Yeah, that's uh what was that somewhere over the rainbow disneyland i mean those those places exist but not in the real world not right

now no nobody has nobody's gonna give a million dollars to protect the fang deer in afghanistan right it's not gonna happen you know and they can go try and raise money but you know what if you're gonna raise money would you use a picture of a fang deer from afghanistan or or you know a pretty uh an owl yeah an eagle or you know something else anything else a fang deer that people just look and go yeah that's kind of like a pig you know it's weird it's got fangs what do you how do you feel about hunting animals that you don't eat it depends what you mean by that because there's there's almost no animals that are ever hunted that aren't utilized as food.

So, you know. Hyenas? Hyenas would be, they call them cousin over there. So, hyenas, they don't eat. You know, that's a tougher one. That is a tougher question, right? And it's not one that, not one that I have a ready answer for because, you know, a wolf, for instance.

I understand that wolves kill my caribou in the Yukon in my outfitting territory up there. They kill the heck out of caribou. They kill the heck out of moose. Whatever they can kill, they're going to kill. The sheep that we're struggling to raise the populations on. So, you know, a wolf, to say don't kill a wolf makes no sense. They have huge litters. They, you know, they work on a boom and bust with a natural cycle. They kill everything, so then they all die off, and then everything starts again. And that's all fine and dandy if you don't want

X amount of ungulates around. You know, they're going through it in Yellowstone right now. So, you know, should you kill it, you don't eat it, you know, it doesn't mean you can't eat it. I mean, that's nothing wrong with wolf meat, I imagine. I've never tried one, but, but I, you know, on the conservation side, you, you know, they're competitors for a resource.

So, you know, you know, it's a tough one. Wolves are a very tough one. Yeah. I mean, I want the fur, you know, I want to get a fur collar. It doesn't, I want the fur. You know, I want to get a fur collar. It doesn't, doesn't frost up, you know, that and wolverine, you know, we don't need wolverine either.

So would you kill that? Uh, yeah, it's a, it's a tougher one. You know, it's a tougher one, but they're carnivores and you're, you're, you know, as a hunter, you've got a, not an animosity towards them, but certainly there's a competitive, a competition between them and us for the same resource. So there'sosity towards them, but certainly there's a competitive, a competition between them and us for the same resource. So there's, you know, it's almost like a justification

in that way, but because you can't have them and have wildlife, you know, like, like the ungulates living in the same place, you just can't have, you know, cause wolves will kill them all. They will, you know, anyone that says wolves only kill the, the, the old and the infirm, bull crap. They will kill an entire herd of caribou if they can, just for fun, just for fun, and eat what they can and then on they go. Wasted meat? Yeah, wasted meat. Wolves will kill them all. They're killing machines.

So it's a much tougher one. Hyenas over in Africa, they are predators. They try and paint them as non-predators. You know, they're scavengers and take away from the lions, bull crap. They're killers. Them and the wild dogs over there, kill, kill, kill. They're very efficient predators. You know, so do you kill that hyena to save 50, you know, pick an impala?

You know, can you justify that? If your job as a conservationist is to increase numbers of ungulates, but still maintain a balance on the predators, you know, there's the key, right? Maintain the balance. So, you know, how do you justify it? You kill them, you don't eat them, but you're increasing the numbers of ungulates. You know, and again're we're kind of playing god on some of this stuff where i was in bc uh there's no bag limit on wolves you can shoot

as many wolves as you want there were the guys who uh are there the hunting guy that i was with um big country outfitters and uh some of the people that i met in the town they were describing like the wolf situations out of control they have that took down a cow, my friend's neighbor. Yeah. Just a 2,000-pound cow. These wolves descended upon it and just started ripping it apart. They looked out the window. They heard howling and the craziness, and these wolves were ripping apart a cow.

Yeah, there's a lot of wolves up there. A lot. And they breed quickly. You know, they'll have litter of five, six babies, and they have five or six babies within two years. I mean, it's a number that increases very quickly, as we're seeing in Yellowstone Park. I ran into a guy at the airport, a really interesting guy, because he saw that I was checking in a rifle when I was coming back, and he was a hunter. But just a very, very intelligent, articulate guy, but he was talking to me about how much he enjoys hunting wolves.

And, like, that's a crazy subject to just strike up with somebody because if you just randomly struck up, you know, he's a moose hunter, but he enjoys hunting the wolves because they're a huge, they just decimate the moose populations and decimate the elk and the deer populations. And he was just talking about how this tract of land, he owns a large piece of land up there, about how he's driven the wolves off of his land because he's killed so many of them there. But there's no way you even put a dent in the population. He's like, it's a joke.

People, they have this idea of what it is in the city. And what he was telling me about, the people that I hunted with were telling me about that they had a situation where these wolves they were taking the wolves and they would take the alpha male and they would spay them they would neuter them take his balls and release them back into the wild they thought that was going to control the population so then they came back after a couple years and there was a huge increase in the amount of wolves because the pack that existed that had this one alpha male was overrun by another pack that realized that they were weak. These other wolves came in and go, look at these motherfuckers. This guy doesn't even have any balls.

So they kill him. They kill him, probably ate him. And then just swarmed. And there was just a hundred more wolves than there were before. And they were like, well, this is fucking crazy. This didn't work at all. Like the best laid plans of mice and men you know just off getting off to stray yeah that's uh i mean you know it's good intentions yeah i mean if you're trying to

avoid killing a wolf that's one way to do it i guess but it if you're trying to manage the population of wolves it's ludicrous it sense. Well, they were describing that the people in Vancouver are, it's also the same province. It's the same area. And the people in Vancouver, they're all urban. They're living in cities. They think wolves are cute. And they're voting on how all this goes down. And then the people who are up there in the bush, you know, they're hearing the howls

every night. And they're like, these guys like come hang out with me come come come be up here and come take a look at history come take a look at the fact that wolves killed 40 people in paris one year in the 1400s or during world war one when they actually had to call a ceasefire between the russians and the germans because they were getting so many of them were getting killed by wolves they said listen they were in russia and they go let's just stop killing each other for a little bit. Fuck these wolves up, drop the populations down and then go back to business.

Like that's a very rare or rarely discussed piece of history. An actual ceasefire between Russians and Germans just to deal with wolves killing soldiers. I've heard right now they have issues up there again. There are packs of 60, 70 wolves running around. Taking down horses. Yeah, I've heard right now they have issues up there again. Yeah. There are packs of 60, 70 wolves running around. Taking down horses. Yeah, taking, they'll kill everything. Yeah. And that's, I mean, to say that wolves won't

attack humans, they say that, that's absolute bunk. You know, in Saskatchewan a couple years ago, a guy was killed. You know, the scientists try to say, oh, it's maybe a bear. I mean, it's a wolf. It's a wolf killed him.

There was an attack in British Columbia recently too on one of the islands. Again, wolf, you know, so they will, they will attack. And the biggest problem is we've made it easy for the wolves to kill animals. You know, we build roads. As soon as you build a road, whether it's a logging road, a trail, skidder trail, doesn't matter. The wolves can run that trail much easier than they can over rough terrain. So they run that trail until they hit a track of a, you know, a moose. And then they, off they go, kill the moose, back

on the trail, run it until they hit a track of a deer, kill it, you know, elk, kill it. We've made it too easy for them to survive. So we've actually, you know, people say, let nature take care of it, boom and bust. That's not what's happening. It's not natural. We have built roads. So we've made their advantage too great over the ungulates we've added an unnatural element

exactly so you can say natural because it's humans yes we've got a beaver makes a dam right but then it's natural then it's also natural for us to manage that population of wolves to kill them so back to your question you know how do you how do you justify a wolf? I don't have a problem justifying killing a wolf. The hyena over in Africa, that money for the trophy fees goes to the village. So the hyena died, but in general, it helped the wildlife population as a whole. If you get into the deep philosophical question of it, biologically, it makes no difference. That animal got killed. It was going to die anyway.

You know, everybody dies, everything dies, and how it dies is irrelevant. You know, as long as the population is stable or even growing, then it doesn't matter why you killed it. And ultimately, as hunters, you don't really need to justify to anybody why you hunt. It's I hunt because I hunt. I hunt, you know, and killing is part of hunt. You know, that's, it's, it's what I do. So, so I, you know, but, but to, to couch it in terms that a non-hunter would understand why you killed that hyena, you know, it's very difficult. Very, it's very difficult.

And I, you know. Elephants. Elephants are a big one. That's a, that's a hot point. You said earlier that you've hunted elephants. When you say, I want to kill an elephant to someone, the almost universal reaction in a city is like, you're an asshole. I want to kill an elephant.

Answer, you're an asshole. Yeah. You know, the elephant situation over there is so tragic. I was in CIR a couple of years ago, and we were between the elephant herd and the Sudanese rebels. They were on horseback and chasing after the elephants and popping them with AK-47s. Just pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. And we were between them. They went right by us.

They shoot them, kill them, the entire herd, babies. Doesn't matter. If it's got a pound of ivory, it's going to get killed. Then following them are the pack trains of camels and more donkeys with the people that then butcher up the elephants that the horseback riders have killed. They were literally extirpating the elephant from CAR. At this point right now, I tried to get back into Bangui last year, but the Civil War was going on and Air France wasn't even flying in there.

I just have a feeling that CAR elephants are gone. They're gone. We're having the same thing now in Cameroon, the northern savannah regions of Cameroon, where five years ago there was elephants everywhere gone. I was in Tanzania in the Salou. The Salou is the largest game reserve in the world. It was, how big is it?

It'll come to me, it's six million acres, something just absolutely enormous. And when I was there five years ago, I probably saw, I don't know, a thousand elephants. There were 90,000, 98,000 elephants in the Saloo 10 years ago. Today, they feel there may be 8,000 altogether. And I was just there. We did an uncharted segment on the Saloo and on the elephants. I found skull after skull after skull, faces, chainsawed off, ivory gone. And these are young elephants. They're young ones. They're actually, they shoot them because it's easy to carry the ivory.

They're going to shoot everything. And two pounds of ivory, they're going to kill it. So it's just the unbelievably difficult circumstances that they find themselves in as human beings. They're almost forced into this horrible situation because they're incredibly impoverished and there's nothing else for them there. There's no other resources. Is that what the case is?

Yeah, there's big money too. And, you know, not only at their level, it's big money. Maybe they get what they're saying. They get $300 for an elephant, you know, just 10 pounds of ivory. The money, that ivory then goes to the middleman, who then goes to another middleman, who then another middleman, and finally, you know, to the big guys that get shipped out.

There's huge money at high levels in those African countries. I mean, I think we'd be surprised at who's behind a lot of the, who's making money off the poaching of the ivory. And the only thing in the saloo that was stopping the poaching were the hunters. The hunters were there, but it was too little. It was just not enough. We needed a thousand times more hunters in there. Then we'd had a thousand times more dollars.

You could have kept the poachers out. Yeah, you're losing some of the older bulls, they're you know very carefully controlled very carefully harvested out of this herd not when it happens to be poaching everything gets wiped out babies mothers doesn't matter and you know there's a case of where the hunting dollars just weren't enough but the hunters were the only ones between the poachers and the elephants. And you just can't hold back that tide. There's too many poachers, too much demand from Asia, and not enough money on the hunting side to finance the anti-poaching patrols that you needed. You know, and now after they're pretty well decimated, the government's come back in and they're starting to impose heavy fines for

poaching now in Tanzania. You know, in 20 years, if you're caught with poached meat, and if you're an elephant, you're going to jail for life if you don't get shot on the way to jail. They're serious about it now, but it begs the question, why did they wait till now? Why did they wait till 90,000 elephants were killed in the last 10 years in one area, one easily to protect area? It takes money, but why were they killed the last 10 years in one area, one easily to protect area with,

you know, it takes money, but why were they killed? Who was making the money? Follow the money. And that's when you'll find out the reason why that happened. You know, and I think we'd be surprised, like I say, who's behind it. When they stop hunting, you open the doors for the poachers and it's, it's a tough one. I mean, it's really, really sad. Then Botswana shuts down hunting altogether. You know, very wealthy country, lots of tourism, and too many elephants. The elephants are actually ruining the ecosystems near the riverine habitat. You've got to walk 10 miles to find a tree that's not been torn down in some places. places, you know, everything that relied on those trees, that ecosystem is dead and gone. All the antelope that required the trees and there's too many elephants for the habitat. Now in South Africa, they used to go in and right up until I'd say the 70s, they were culling them. They would walk in and kill the entire herd off, you know, because they knew there's too

many elephants. They actually reproduce too quickly when they're protected. So you end up with this two-sided problem, too many elephants in Botswana, elephants being wiped out by Sudanese poachers in places like CER, Cameroon, even Congo. They're everywhere now, Tanzania. Somali poachers are coming down into Tanzania.

It's a really, really sad thing. And that's one where I don't see the, I don't see a solution for it. I honestly don't. I just think that the world, it's like Lord of the Rings where the elves realize this world isn't for us anymore. And the elephants, I'm i'm really really really afraid that there's just no hope for them in spite of the dollars that hunters put in to these areas to stop poaching i it's a it's a real sad one for me have you ever seen do you know who louis thoreau is thoreau yeah thoreau how do you say it well i said you say it i probably said it wrong i think

i think he says it through right anyway um Anyway, he's the documentary guy from England. Great guy. Had him on the podcast before. Very interesting guy. And he had a great piece about Africa and about the hunting camps in Africa. And one of the most profound moments in it was when he's kind of talking to this guy who runs this wild game farm and he's annoying the guy and you know the guy he's been there for like three weeks talking to him videotaping him the guy shows him all the lions that they they're feeding lions they're throwing a calf over the

like it's just like jurassic park they throw this calf over the fence the lions tear it apart in front of him it's like wild shit um but he's talking this guy and finally the guy just sort of breaks down he's like you don't get it like africa is fucked yeah like this is the only thing that keeps these animals alive is the fact they're worth something like this is this is what keeps them alive if it wasn't for that there'd be nothing they would just destroy everything yeah no africa is in in dire straits. And as I say, Africa is being colonized right now. You know, to me, you can colonize two different ways, militarily or economically. And Africa is being colonized economically. And if you look at the track record of who's colonizing Africa, you know, the wildlife track record.

And, you know, and again, this is big world politics talking, this is big world politics that, who am I? I'm a little guy that sits on a mountain and just looks at stuff and sees it hopefully objectively. And if this Africa 20 years from now, you know, the only place you're going to probably find wildlife is going to be in the parks. Wow. And that's, you know, hunting is, is helping,

you know, the parks will be bigger because of hunting. We can, you know, hold them back on the boundaries of the park, a buffer zone. But it's actually really, it's really sad. Is that a feet on the ground thing, as you said? Like unless you're there, you don't truly

understand the situation. Yeah. I mean, we get fed, you know, the propaganda from our press, right? And a lot of it's sensationalism. What sells? Go talk to somebody in Africa that's living the life there and see what they say about it.

Ivan Carter. Pull that back down, Jamie. Don't scroll it. China is Africa's new colonial overlord, says famed primate researcher Jane Goodall. You know what else Jane Goodall says? Bigfoot's real. Does she? Yeah, so take it with a grain of salt. Yeah, I've actually heard, I know quite a few people that know her. Yeah. And they say she's, you know, she'll drink beer and she'll. She likes to party? Yeah, she's not afraid of cuss words and she'll. Yeah. Yeah, that's what I've heard. Now, I don't

know, Jane, I'm sorry if you're listening, but she's probably a huge fan of yours and she's listening right now over in... Oh, I have no idea. She probably thinks I'm an idiot, more likely. But she does believe in Bigfoot. Is that right? Interesting. There's a...

Well, we don't have to play the clip. We've played it before, but she is convinced that there's some unknown primate i i think there's some unknown primate i don't think there's a question about that but it'll be in the democratic republic of congo somewhere it was bonobonos or whatever they call them yeah well do you know about that the beely ape or the the uh uh this this is a giant uh chimpanzee that they've found in the Congo. I may have heard about it. Yeah, there's this version of a chimpanzee that they've found in the Congo that's much larger. It's about six feet tall.

Sometimes there's one of them. They can get up to like 400 pounds. An enormous chimpanzee. Is that the ones that are quite friendly or they don't fight or something? No, that's the bonobos. Those are smaller, actually. Those are like the least violent. These ones, the locals call them lion killers.

What was the other term for them? The bono, no, it's not, the bondo, the bondo ape. The bondo ape. And they thought it was a myth until like the 1990s. Carl Armand is a Swiss wildlife photographer, became infatuated with them and started using camera traps and got a photo of one walking upright. It's very strange. When you see this thing, this very odd chimpanzee, this six-foot-tall chimpanzee walking upright. Fascinating. Yeah.

They nest on the ground like gorillas. Yep. Because they really don't give a shit who's looking at them. I mean, they'll kill anything. Toughest guys on the planet. Yeah. They're just, I mean.

They're, you know, when a chimpanzee walks up to a wild one, they're a frightening animal. Oh, yeah. Scary looking, scary acting. Have you seen them in the wild? Oh, yeah. A lot, yeah. Gorillas as well.

And the chimps that come up to you in the wild oh yeah a lot yeah grillers as well and the chimps that come up to you in the wild like what is that experience like well they're coming normally if they come up to us it's because we're calling for duikers duikers are little forest antelope you know there's all there's 20 or 30 different species that live in the jungles very fur to very difficult to hunt and so what we do is we sneak around and then set up sit down call you know we're trying for whatever reason the dikers come to this distress call and they'll come running in but they're not the only things that come into the distress calls the the chimpanzees they're carnivorous they'll come in absolutely 100 to come and kill whatever is making that noise and eat it so when they come in they're

they're nasty nasty and big they're big you know you see the muscles how they're nasty, nasty, and big. They're big. You see the muscles, how they're ripped. It's a frightening thing. Gorillas not. Gorillas are big as well. Purely vegetarian. Yeah, but scary. They will turn you inside out.

When one comes out of the bush at you, just shaking all the trees right in front of you, and then they're gone. They get killed by the pygmies. They get eaten. They're a food source. So they hate people. Hate people. Isn't that crazy? People eat gorillas.

Gorillas, yeah. They're an amazing animal. Last year I spent, I was in a machan again on the border with the Congo and had a troop of nine or 11 gorillas come in with one big silverback. And for 40 minutes in front of us, like 20 hours, no idea we were there. It was fantastic.

Wow. And these aren't the habituated ones from Rwanda, you know, that everybody goes and pays their $20 and sits there and don't look in their eyes. These are ones that'll kill you if you look in your eyes, not look in your eyes. If they see you, they'll kill you.

Wow. Yeah, scary animals. And they had no idea we were there they were videoed on the whole time. It was fantastic. Wow, that's amazing. Now, do you have a rifle ready to go if they make a run for you? Yeah, you would never kill one. I mean, you would—

Scare them? I don't—you know, there's a body language. I think they would bluff charge. Every time I've ever seen them, it's always been a bluff charge charge i've never seen one press a charge right to the very end well i wouldn't see if i did i wouldn't be here i saw a bluff charge online once oh this guy standing there in this silverback comes charging out of the woods right up to the guy and then just turns away but the guy just stands there and stands his ground but this enormous beast i mean i don't know how many hundred of pounds he weighed i mean probably five six hundred pounds

just running full charge just full of sinew and giant fangs you're like oh god how do you stand still monsters and they also roar like a visceral scary feeling inside anybody that's got ears. You can't, it just turns you into jelly. They're scary. They'll charge your truck. I've had them, you know, on those little overgrown logging roads come out just right in front of you, wow, right in front of you, and then into the bushes and shake the bushes. Scares the heck out of you.

It's a neat thing. And you know they're not habituated animals. These are, these are animals that live wild and free, hate humans, you know, for a good reason. They get hunted down. Is there anything that you haven't hunted that you want to hunt that like is on your list of things to go after that you have had difficulty finding maybe?

Yeah. I mean, I'd love to go into Balochistan on the border with. I didn't even know that was a real place. It's like where John Belushi came from. No, no, it's a province in Pakistan. You're going to go back to Pakistan? Well, I might not be able to after what I've said here today, but Pakistan, it's a fascinating place.

Yeah, it seems like it. There's an animal called a Suleiman Markhor, which, you know, Jason and the Fleece, that was probably what he was after was a Suleiman Markhor. What is Jason and the Fleece? It's a Greek tale, or I assume it is Jason. Jason and the Argonauts? No, the Golden Fleece. Who is it? Wasn't it Jason?

I don't know. I don't know. Maybe it was Hercules. Maybe I got my mythical heroes. But it was probably after this animal. What's it called again? The Suleiman Markhor. Suleiman Markhor.

Yeah. It's got straight horns with kind of a corkscrew on them. And the only place you can hunt them is there. And it's kind of a real iffy place right now. But they have allowed, I think, five to ten of these to be hunted a year. It's all controlled by the warlords over there. But they've got scientists in there. These warlords are educated in the States or England.

They're not dumb guys. They speak English very well, and they understand conservation. They just pick one side this week, one side that week. It depends on what's going on. But they are for conservation of these animals, And they get a lot of money for them. They're extremely expensive. What do they call themselves? We call them warlords.

That's a strange, almost archaic designation. Is this the animal? That's actually a cashmere mark. It also could be a- Wow, look at the horns on that thing. Yeah, there's about three or four different species. There's, what's the other one? The, oh, I was just there.

There's a Siloam mark where the middle, middle top. Wow. Look at that thing. Yeah. It's, wow. That's, that's like a drill, like an oil drill growing out of its head.

Yeah. Like two opposing oil drills. Yeah. Wow. What a strange looking animal. That's one, obviously that somebody hunted. Yeah. Like two opposing oil drills. Yeah. Wow. What a strange looking animal. That's one obviously that somebody hunted. Yeah. That's dead.

Yeah. And they're the Suleiman Marko I'd love to go. You can also hunt the Afghan Uriel there and I've not hunted that either. So those two animals I'd love to get into that problem. Nature is so bizarre. I mean, even an elk or a moose, this idea they

grow these antlers on their head, these enormous racks of like trees growing on their heads. Every year. Yeah. That's the hard thing to believe. They drop them every spring and then grow, what, 50 pounds of horn, like an antler on a moose? That's the after on your own. Yeah, they keep it.

Rams keep it all their life. Yeah, that's horns. Yeah. Yeah. The only one that drops its horns is the antelope, the pronghorn antelope. Well, the sheath on the outside will drop off every year.

Otherwise, horned animals grow every year. Antlered animals drop theirs and regrow them every year. Fastest growing bone in the world. Antlered animals that drop them, like how long do they have no antlers? Like an elk, like say when an elk sheds. You know, a lot depends on the season, what the year is going to be like.

If it's a rough winter coming up, seems to be, they drop earlier. They don't want to carry those, you know, as soon as the rut's over, off they go. And then they're, you know, not carrying it. They lose all their, basically, testosterone, I guess. So that's what causes them to drop. And the only animal that's a female that carries them is caribou, right? And is that to defend against wolves and bears? Who knows what the reason they're on their head.

But they're so tiny, I would never protect them from a wolf. Oh, are they really small? Yeah, compared to the males. Males are huge. Right. You know, largest antlered animal compared to body size. Largest antlers compared to body size of any animal. Yeah, they don't even look real. Like you look at caribou, the shovels and to body size of any, any animal. Yeah.

They don't even look real. Like you look at caribou, the shovels and all the crazy stuff they got growing off their head. Like that's, that's like a Whoville thing. Yeah. It's just, it's like something from Dr. Seuss. Yeah, exactly. No, it's fascinating.

They're, they're, caribou are an underrated big game animal. Love, love hunting them. Mountain caribou particularly. That's, that's of all the caribou species, that's my favorite to hunt. And do you prefer, like when you're going into these places, do you prefer to do it with a camera crew or do you get a chance to hunt where you just hunt sometimes? No, you know, I would have difficulty hunting without a camera crew.

And the reason is because it's become part of the challenge. It's far more difficult to hunt when you've got to drag along at least one guy, sometimes two. And you can only, you know, can't shoot into the sun. You can't, you know, if there's any flakes on the lens, you've got to call it off. If they can't get it in focus, if I could shoot, but they can't see it. If it's too dark for them to see, but it's legal light and I can see it, I can't shoot. And it has to be broadside, head up. You know, you start throwing in all of these extra

degrees of difficulty. It, to me, it's become part of the challenge of the hunt nowadays. And I want to share it with everybody. I mean, I, I'm in a, I'm in a position in my life and in my career where I can, you know, I'm able to, so why wouldn't I share it with the guys that can't go along that are hunters that maybe, you know, they would love to, maybe they don't have the money. Maybe they don't have the time. Maybe they, you know, for whatever reason can't do it. My goal when I started doing the television, hunting television was to bring all of these fellow hunters with me.

You know, they're there with me as much as they can be. They're not pulling the trigger, but they're experiencing exactly what I'm experiencing. So to me, it's a responsibility now. And it's also a challenge, and I love it. I mean, I'm proud of being a hunter. And I want to share it with other hunters that want to watch or with people that want to learn about conservation and why hunting is good. So to me, to not hunt with a camera would be, why would I kill it then? You know, it's other than to eat it, you know, so it's, uh, I don't know, maybe it's part

of the reason I, you know, justification for hunting. Do you eat any store-bought meat? Well, you know, if, if I'm at, you know, our convention season's coming up, so there'll be, I'll be wine and dine and take into the fanciest steakhouses around and. That's in Vegas at the SHOT Show? Yeah, SHOT Show. That'll be one of the shows with SCI. And we've got ATA, the Archery Trade Show, the Dallas Safari Club.

So yeah, I will eat store-bought meat, but it's always in those kind of situations. I can't recall last time in Louisiana brought, you know, brought store-bought meat into our house. I mean, it's just not. I mean, we live on moose and caribou and deer. You know, bear, if we have it, it's what we eat. Now, bear, not so much. I've eaten lots of bears in my life, so I prefer to share the bears with other people. It's not my favorite.

It's still good, but it's not my favorite. But to buy meat, it makes no sense. Why would we? Do you eat grizzly? Oh, yeah, absolutely. What is that like? I've heard it's disgusting. No.

No? That's such bunk on the people that say that wild game is gamey. It's all in the preparation. So if a grizzly's been eating salmon, for instance, and you cut a big chunk of steak off and a big swath of fat on it and fry it up, well, guess what it smells like?

It smells like rotten fish because that's what he's been eating. Right. But get rid of the fat and just take off the myelin sheathing and just have the meat. It's excellent. It's excellent. Same as polar bear. It's good. Black bears are excellent.

I mean, most of the time they just eat berries and grass, clover, whatever. I was amazed at how good black bear tasted. No, it's really good. It's really good. Because one of the things that I got criticized for, people were telling me that black bears tasted terrible. Like, why do you want to shoot something that you're not going to eat? And I was really concerned. I was like, man, who's telling the truth here?

Until I actually tried it. I tried it before I actually shot one. And I was like, oh, who's telling the truth here? Until I actually tried it. I tried it before I actually shot one. And I was like, oh, they're just lying or they don't know. You can't. I defy anybody to tell that they're eating a black bear as opposed to. I mean, honestly, I suspect I could, you know, sausage for sure. No one's ever going to know. You'd never tell.

And even from other wild game, I don't think you could tell. But I suspect you wouldn't be able to tell it from even beef if it was prepared properly. If it's in a stew, there's no way. It's good. It's good. It's not my favorite. I have to, you know, I'm allowed to have favorites, and I like moose. If I'm going to live on something for the winter, it's moose.

Moose is amazing. Yeah, ribs and moose are the best. What I prefer about game animals like moose or elk or venison is that you can eat it rare. You eat it like medium rare. That's the only way to eat it. You don't want to overcook it. And you have to sear the outside, seal in the juices so it looks, when you cut it, you sort of,

oh, that's way too rare. But you let that sit then for another half an hour off the heat and it'll go all brown. Like it's cooked. It's just, they're so juicy and so, I mean, flavorful. They're there. You got to eat them like that.

You have to be careful of overcooking that kind of game, especially moose, right? Yeah. Sear, sear the outside. Don't, don't overcook the inside. You can't, you have to leave it juicy because there's no fat. These animals have very little fat on them.

And if it is on a deer, it's tallow-y. It's not, not the same kind of fat as on a, on a cow. So you normally you trim the fat off on any wild game, if it is on a deer, it's tallow-y. It's not, not the same kind of fat as on a, on a cow. So you normally, you trim the fat off on any wild game, if it's, if they have any, but in the actual muscles themselves, there's, there's no fat. It's, it's, uh, you know, it's a fairly dry

meat. So you have to, you have to prepare it properly. Ronello recently got trichinosis. Yeah. You know what? I heard your podcast with him talking about the trichinosis. I was kind of giggling about that.

Well, it's hilarious because he was always talking about trichinosis, the dangers of trichinosis. And if you watch his show, he was with this guy, Rourke Denver, who's a Navy SEAL, took him out for his first hunt ever. They shot a bear and you're watching them cook the bear and you're like, that is not cooked.

Are you really going to eat that? It's just red. And he wound up getting trichinosis from it. Yeah. I mean, that's, uh, I heard the podcast. I was kind of giggling. I was, well, I was in Africa. I mean, there I'm worrying about three foot

long Guinea worms and microfloria and Belhazi. I mean, real serious stuff. Trichinosis is, you know, I mean, that's, uh, I'm sure a lot of us are carrying that around. We just don't know it. Really? You think you have it?

I don't think I do, of course. I know one thing. When I come back from these trips, my wife will occasionally say, oh, I've made a doctor's appointment for you. So I'm fine. I'm healthy. I'm good. It's just, you're going into the doctor and you're getting dewormed. I know I don't have trichinosis or any of these crazy parasites, but

just for insurance, my wife does send me to the doctor to take a course of whatever horse pills whatever they do so it's uh there's some weird stuff out there in africa especially i'm sure that's as about as wild as it gets for now right for now yeah yeah i mean you know in actual people places the the yukon is is more remote than anywhere in africa anywhere in asia that's Russia, there's some pretty remote places, but usually there's people there somewhere. But Yukon, North America, we still have some of the most remote lands left in this planet. We're very fortunate.

Jim Shockey, you're an awesome dude. This is a really, really enjoyable podcast. I was looking forward to it for a long time, and I really appreciate you taking your time to come down here. And I really want people to watch your television program. Uncharted is an amazing program, whether you like hunting or not. It's more of a documentary on the culture than it is just a hunting show. It really does transcend the genre and a real honor and a pleasure having you on here. Thank you very much. It's my honor. You're doing great work, and I'll support that any day. All right. Find Jim on Facebook. What is your Facebook page?

Jim Shockey. And Twitter, same thing, Jim Shockey, and then underscore after Shockey, right? Thank you very much, sir. Really appreciate it. You betcha, Joel. Thanks for having me. Let's do this again sometime.

Anytime you want me to. Let's go hunting. Do that, too. That would be really fun. Come on. Let's do it. I'll do it for you, Sean. Come to my house next time. I would love it. Let's do hunting. Do that too. That would be really fun. Come on. Let's do it. I'll do it for you, Charles. Come to my house next time.

I would love it. Let's do it. Yukon, here we come. All right. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you soon. Bye. Bye.

Bye. Bye.