The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 005

Episode Date: March 19, 2015

Seattle, Washington. Steven Rinella and MeatEater producer Janis Putelis sit down in Steve's office to answer frequently asked questions. Subjects discussed include: the best bang-for-your-buck western hunts; old rusty rifles; a crash course on bonus points for big game tags; all-purpose rifle calibers; dry-aging venison; the problem with high-wire hunting; the hypothetical cooking of a red fox; whether or not camouflage matters; getting fooled by randomness; hunting trends worth praising; hunting trends worth damning; being a candyass about recoil, and whether or not that's bad; and how to transport game meat on airplanes. // Mentioned links and notes // Sponsors: Squarespace.com - use the code MEATEATER at checkout to get 10% off and help support the MeatEater Podcast. Visit Wealthfront.com/Meat to get your first $10,000 managed for free. // MeatEater TV Show Book: The Complete Guide to Hunting, Butchering, And Cooking Wild Gam Gun Broker Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meat. Hey, what's up? This is the Meat Eater Podcast recording. This is the first Meat Eater Podcast we've ever recorded not on the road. We're in my office.

I'm on the road. Oh, that my office. I'm on the road. Oh, that's right. Yeah. I take that back. This is the first Meteor podcast ever recorded where

where I was not I Steve Rinella was not on the road. I'm joined here as is often the case by Giannis Petelos

who is on the road. We're joined here, as is often the case, by Giannis Petelos, who is on the road. We're in the Pacific Northwest, overlooking the beautiful Lake Washington, and in a little office, and fixing to do somewhat of a special episode of podcast here, because there's this thing that happens. We get, like, you know the meteor podcast right the name comes from the fact the word meteor comes the fact that that um there's a show i do a television show called meat eater um hopefully you've seen if you haven't seen it hopefully you'll go check it out but but i like to think if i didn't do a television show called meteor i'd maybe still have a podcast by the same title. So these things that exist, they circle around each other in some way.

I don't know why I'm explaining that to you. But anyhow, people watch this show, the show called Meat Eater, which is arguably the next to Apocalypse Now, Godfather 1, Godfather 2, and Strange Brew, perhaps the best thing to ever be filmed. And people watch this program, and they always write in with these hunting questions. And what you notice over time is that people ask the same questions.

So something about the show or something about the subject of hunting, I think probably the latter, like something about the subject of hunting, brings up these perpetual questions that people always ask. And a lot of times I have, what's cool about having Giannis here, and Giannis is a producer on the show, but also a lifelong hunter, former guide, all kinds of stuff like that. A lot of times I will defer some of these questions to Giannis because he can speak to them with some authority.

So for this episode, what I want to do is, in some way it's like answering questions that come in all the time, but it's more than just answering questions for some particular dude out there. It's not like, hey Bob, here's the answer to your arcane esoteric question, because these are things that are just on people's mind all

the time when it comes to particularly the big game hunting. In order to give a little context, I'm just going to start rolling into these and then we're going to do a bunch of them as much as we can in an hour. This is just like a big game hunting discussion. One of the first questions, and we get it all this time, is people always write in asking, what's the best bang for

your buck hunt and it's usually like a dude who lives somewhere east of the mississippi river grows up you know he's 100 white tails all of his life on small game all of his life he's been saving up he doesn't have a lot of dough he's been saving up and he wants to figure out like what is the big wild west hunting trip he's gonna saving up and he wants to figure out like what is the big wild west hunting trip he's gonna do what's he gonna hunt for and where is he gonna go and this is his big chance to you know experience the vast beautiful vistas of the american west and yanni can feel yanni's he's guys's not even paying attention. He's working on a side project on his computer,

which is the completion of, yeah, I want to throw it in real quick. The reason Giannis Patelis is in my office right now is we just pulled a five-day, I don't want to quite call it a bender because there was besides a bottle of beer here and there, it wasn't like the old stories, Jack Kerouac getting all hopped up on pills and writing for days on a big continuous piece of butcher's paper. five days, 14, 15 hours a day. Putting the finishing touches on volume two of the complete guide to hunting, butchering, and cooking wild game, which will be released in the fall

of 2015. This coming fall with Spiegel and Grau, a division of Random House and Imprint with Random House. Beautiful books. And we've been just busting our asses on getting this thing done. That's why Yanni's here. We finally turned it in last night.

So all that research and work makes us even better boned up. But we didn't quite finish it because Yanni's messing around with some thing over there. But, yeah, so this is a perennial question. If you're going to go out west and do something, you want to go do a wild west hunt, what are you going to do? I'm going to give a long answer, or I'm going to give an answer

for the long-thinking, detail-oriented dude, and I'm going to give an answer for the impulsive dude. The long-thinking, detail-oriented dude, and I'm going to give an answer for the impulsive dude. The long-thinking, detail-oriented dude will think of a couple species that interest him. And I would suggest if you really want to have a western experience

with good availability, good chance for success and action, I would think about mule deer and elk. Do you disagree with that, Giannis? No, not at all. I would think about mule deer and elk. I would think about the following states. From the south working north.

I would think about Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Idaho, Montana. It's good to mention that he's asking about affordability as well. Well, I'll give him the long, detail-oriented answer. Okay. So let me go on a little bit. So I'll just name some Western states.

Some states I would rule out, like if you're a dude from the Midwest, or the East or wherever, and you want to do a Western hunt, this will piss some people off. But I wouldn't spend a ton of time looking at Washington, Oregon, California. I just wouldn't spend a bunch of time on those states. That's a long ways to go. Add to the gas bill big time.

Yeah, it adds to the gas bill. And also,'s just like uh i just wouldn't spend a lot of time looking at those states for a bunch of reasons but the long detail oriented dude i would pick you're gonna you're gonna pick a couple species and i would start doing some research in publications such as eastman's what's the eastman's one called eastman's hunting yeah and bow hunting journal eastman's, what's the Eastman's one called? Eastman's Hunting? Yeah, and Bowhunting Journal. Eastman's Magazines and Hunting Fool

Magazine and start doing some research on what are the premier low pressure mule deer and elk units in a handful of states that seem attractive to you. Let's say you decided you got your heart set on the Northern Rockies.

So you're going to like, you think in Idaho, Montana, let's just say you love the looks of Idaho, Montana, never been out there. Want to go up there, get Eastman's and get hunting fool and start reading through those publications

and find low pressure, draw units in those States. And then start applying for those units. Because if you know you want to go sometime in the next five, six years, start applying for like the cream of the crop top pick units. And these are not secrets. You know, these are widely known things. Basically, it's the things with the minimum percent chance that you're going to draw the

tag and start applying for those tags for five or six years, because you might just get lucky and hit some sweet unit, hit a tag for a sweet unit. And when that happens, you'll know now is my time to go. Cause I'm going to have a fantastic hunt. And it also narrows down because any tag you draw like that's going to be for a very specific little chunk of ground. And you'll know to hammer down where you're going to go hunt you start studying maps and all that now if you're just a guy who's like i'm going this year man i don't care i would think that the first thing you want to do is pick your species and again one quick interjection on that note of those points and whatnot.

A lot of states, it doesn't really matter if you're actually already choosing the particular unit. You can just be collecting points. And that's probably the most important thing that you need to be doing to be thinking about this grand adventure in the future is just collecting some points. So when you do have your pennies saved up, you're ready to roll, you've got these great options. Yeah, I want to give a quick crash course on bonus points and big game tag draws. It's a really complicated subject. We have a ton of information about it in the complete guidebook that we're working on. But the way it'll work is, like, let's say you want to put in for a unit, like, let's just pull it out.

The premier mule deer unit in Montana is 270. Okay. It's in the upper bid route. If you could have any mule deer tag in Montana, you'd want unit 270. Now the odds of drawing unit 270 are single percentage points. Okay. Especially for a non-resident, you're just not going to do it. Montana has a bonus point system though. So every year that you put in for a tag and you don't draw, you get a point added to your name. And Montana squares, well, let me back up a minute. You get a point added to your name.

That means the second year you put in, your name goes into the hat two times. But what Montana does now is they square your bonus points. So let's say you've applied two years in a row unsuccessfully for unit 270. The next year you apply, you have two bonus points. Your name will be going into the hat four times for your bonus points and a fifth time because you're filling out a new application. So right now, for instance, I'm sitting on, I think, 12 bonus points for bighorn sheep in Montana. I apply for the same unit every year, 680, for bighorns.

My name will be going into the hat this year 144 times. I still will not draw that tag. Mule deer and elk are different, though, because there's a lot of opportunities. So the long thinking guy will start right now this moment accumulating bonus points in a handful of states.

I put in for every state but I am able, like I hunt a lot more for a variety of reasons. I hunt a lot more than most people. I put in for like pretty much every western state. But for you, pick a couple states that you've always wanted to visit,

or better yet, where you have some family or friends or some connection. Some connection to resources and logistical support. And start putting in for tags every year. There's no reason not to do it. It costs a little bit of money. But just do it. Now, let's say, but that's not the case and you want to go this year.

Or as soon as possible. Pick your species. I would suggest elk or mule deer. And then narrow down into what state you want to hunt. That's the first thing I would do. And I would think like for affordable states and availability of tags, and you want to go for mule deer elk, I'm going to try to narrow it down a little bit and say that,

and Giannis, correct me on this, I would say Montana, Idaho, Colorado, Wyoming. Mule deer elk, availability of tags, good hunting potential. Yeah, the only problem with Montana is they have increased their prices big time for the non-resident hunter. I want to say that you're upwards of $800, maybe even close to $900 if you want to do the combo tag. Yeah. You're going to wind up being shocked at what tags

are going to cost. In other states, like Colorado's a cheaper state to hunt. Yeah, right now I think you can hunt a bull elk in Colorado as a non-resident for about $575. That's definitely one of the cheaper states. Idaho might be a little bit less. They might be in the fours.

Yeah, Montana, you're up there, eight somewhere. It's a lot of money. What you got to look at is you got to look at how you're going to – and this gets into a whole other subject is when you go do this, how you're going to save money. You're going to drive, camp out of your truck, hunt public land, all that kind of stuff. But the tag is going to be expensive. And the other thing that guys run into on a problem with this is Colorado has some over-the-counter elk opportunities.

Idaho, Montana has some over-the-counter. Technically, they basically have some over-the-counter opportunities because of something I'll explain where you're supposed to put in for a draw every year. You have to apply around June 1 or late March, and then around June 1, you apply for a tag for the following fall. Oftentimes, there's not enough applicants to fill the allotted quantity of tags, so the leftover tags are sold basically in the over-the-counter way until the quota runs out, until the number of tags for sale are sold. That usually sold basically in the over-the-counter way until the quota runs out, until the number of tags for sale are sold. And that usually happens sometimes in the late summer.

Sometimes it doesn't even happen until season starts. So when I say over-the-counter, it's not technically over-the-counter, but it's basically over-the-counter availability. It takes a little bit of research. You can find yourself with some great tags if you do that. You find those undersubscribed units, and you can't buy them over the counter. So the guy that's not doing any research is not finding that tag, not getting into that unit. So with a little bit of research, you can really get yourself into some good stuff. Yeah, so I'm going to try to get even more detailed. Mule deer, I would say.

Idaho, but not the panhandle. For availability, inexpensive, all that kind of stuff. Mule deer in Idaho, not the panhandle. Colorado, you got to put in for mule deer tags. And some of the better units take a couple years to draw. But Idaho, you're just going to get the tag. Montana, a more expensive tag. Think about the eastern half of the state.

For elk, Idaho and Colorado. If you're not playing the long game. Colorado is hard to beat for the short game guy because there are lots of elk there. It's something like 250,000 elk in that state. There's two seasons that are wide open, over the counter. You just show up and buy a tag. So you can decide the week before that you want to go elk hunting.

There's a lot of opportunity there. Randy Newberg wrote a great article. I think it appeared in Bugle Magazine where he lined out how to basically go on this affordable Western elk hunt in Colorado for $1,000. And I think he did it leaving Wisconsin or Indiana, one of those Midwestern states, driving out, car camping. Obviously, you only drink water and you eat

ramen noodles, but even with a $600 elk tag for $1,000, he went elk hunting for a week. I used to do stuff. I've lost touch with it now and sometimes I feel like I need a reality check because the way I'm able to hunt, like doing a show and stuff, you know, you just, you stop thinking about money in quite the same way.

But to give you a sense, I mean, hit it in a duffel bag, drove two and a half days on a Greyhound bus because I couldn't afford a plane ticket to Alabama to hunt ducks on public land. And it took me two days to get back home on the bus. So, you know, I've done cheap hunts. And it's like, the way to cut down your costs to get back home on the bus.

I've done cheap hunts. The way to cut down your costs is just self-denial, privation, I think. There's some expenses you're not going to get around. You're not going to go hunting without the tag. You've got to have the tag. That's going to cost money. What is the negotiable stuff?

I also mentioned this. I've got the guidebookable stuff? And the thing I also mentioned is, I got the guidebook on my head. The thing I also mentioned in my guidebook is you got to look at, I'm getting into some life stuff here. You got to look at like, where are you spending your money in your life? I remember one time watching the guy pull up and pull up to a trailhead in Montana.

And he pulls up, you know, $40,000 brand spanking new pickup truck and he pulls out a $20 pair of binoculars and starts glassing for elk out of his truck window.

I remember thinking that dude's got his priorities all wrong. You know all wrong. He might have bought that big hunting truck

but then he burned up all of his money on something that was like in large measure a vanity project. So I don't mean to invade privacy here, but I think so often, where is your money going? What are you spending your money on? I understand the tags are expensive, but there's not a guy I know that I couldn't go into his personal financing and find the money necessary to buy a big game tag if he really cares about that. All right, we're going to take a quick break.

We'll be right back to talking about big game tags in a minute. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada.

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Yanni? I just reread the question. Yeah, but I'm not trying to pick that dude out. No, I know. I just want to specifically answer his question before we get away from it. Oh. But I agree with everything you're saying there. I'm cost prohibitive for a guy with a young family? Yeah, he's got a young family. we get away from it. Oh. But I agree with everything you're saying there. But...

Cost prohibitive for a guy with a young family? Yeah, he's got a young family. And just what came to mind, because I know a lot of guys that actually go hunting with young families on this particular big game hunt, is a Wyoming antelope hunt. As a non-resident, you can get doe tags, I think, for $40. I wasn't thinking about that. And the nice thing... Bring your family.

Yeah, you can bring... Camp out with your family in the late summer. Yeah, right. Antelope hunts, you do not have to get up early in the morning. You can get up, get the family going, roll out there at 10 o'clock, go hunting, leave the kids at the truck for a little bit, whatever has to happen. But for antelope does or even a buck in Wyoming, you can probably get it done in two days. Yeah.

Two days of hunting. And the tags are cheap. Right. Antelope tags in Montana are cheap. I wasn't even thinking about it. But, you know, I want to move on because we can't spend all of our time on that. Yeah. Here's the second most, like this is one of the second most common questions that ever come in.

It's like, what's a good all-purpose rifle? Both in terms of caliber and everything else. Reasonable price. Reasonable price. Reasonable price. This question comes in, I swear, every day a couple times in some different way. Let's start with the caliber part. What's a great all-purpose caliber? There's a movement right now in shooting, in hunting, to go with lighter calibers.

This has to do with recent or sort of ongoing technical improvements to ammunition. Ammunition is becoming more reliable. The materials work better. They're bonded in better ways. The bullets themselves, you're speaking of. Yeah, no, no, I'm sorry. Yeah, I mean, bullets are getting, well, they're getting pushed faster,

and they're performing better. They're able to withstand very high flight speeds or feet per second, high muzzle velocities. They hold together better. And this is leading to greater efficacy on part of the bullet. And so people are realizing they can get away from some of the high recoil shoulder busters

and shoot these faster, flatter shooting, smaller caliber rifles with high quality bullets in them. I don't really want to get into that, but like right now, sort of the hot new caliber among long distance shooters and stuff is everybody's talking about how great 6.5 millimeter rounds are. Everybody used to shoot.284, like 7mm stuff and.30 caliber stuff. It was sort of

always like the go-to calibers for all purpose, general purpose, big game rifles. People were getting away with that. In some way, I'm sort of a throwback or a traditionalist or something.

Or just a guy who likes to stick with things that I'm familiar with. But what I'm thinking about, I almost hate this conversation because it's so dependent on your personal experiences. I often tell people, if I had to have one gun for the rest of my life, and I had to pick it right now, like what's your caliber for the rest of your life, and you're interested in all forms of big game in North America, I would pick, I had to pick one rifle. I think that I would pick a 7mm Rem Mag.

If I was ruling out... If someone came down and said, you can't have that one. Then I would start wondering, do I want a 300 Win Mag or just a 270? And I would start vacillating between those two. Now there's a lot of ways to achieve the same thing. When you say

300 short mag or 300 wind mag or 300 Winchester short magnum, you can get those same muzzle velocities and trajectories and bullet weights with other guns. But those are just ones that come to my mind. That's what you'll find a lot of in my gun cabinet

is that kind of stuff. And I'm like an old-timey, Elmer Fuddy kind of guy for thinking that way, but that's what I like. I tend to also like a rifle. My goal isn't to try to get away with as much as I can get away with. I'm not the kind of guy who's going to go out

and hunt mule deer with a.243. It can be done. People do it. I remember meeting the kiddies like, this guy telling me, oh yeah, my kid just killed an elk with a.243. Later I was talking to the kiddies like, yeah, I shot it nine times.

Not saying he couldn't have done it cleaner, but I like to have plenty of gun, plenty of bullet, plenty of speed, and plenty of weight. That seems to be a fading perspective. It seems to be now this competition to get away with as much as you can get away with. Shrink it down as much as you can shrink it down. Also, at the same time, think you're going to shoot things from farther and farther away.

I'm going to use a really teeny bullet that's borderline already, and I'm going to toy around with this idea that I'm going to be shooting stuff at 700 yards with it. I'm not that crazy about it. I'm done talking about it, but I'm going to have you on us talk about it now.

It's a very, very in-depth subject, that's for sure, and we certainly don't have enough time, or I don't have the experience and knowledge to really, really speak to it. But just speak from your own experiences. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like I said, it is a personal thing. You've watched 100 elk in your career. You've watched a hundred elk in your career. You've watched a hundred elk get shot.

Right. Right. And in our camp, you know, this is going to totally contradict what you just said, but in our camp. You guys shoot pellet rifles. No. The one rifle every guy in our camp used to always, like, drop his shoulders, drop his head. When it walked into camp, when it was time to go elk hunting with a new group of clients was a seven millimeter remington magnum why personal experience like not big enough uh yeah you know too fast too small and yeah it just

didn't whatever we just had bad experiences with that caliber and whatever you know that's just how it went it just happened to be that way. It could be a total, how does your brother say it? We're just getting fooled. Fooled by randomness. Fooled by randomness. My brother's an ecologist, but he's a statistician. Even more technically, he does a type of work or a discipline or something called Bayesian analysis.

I could be screwed. I hope he's not listening to this. But he's a statistician. He's really big into the science of science, or he's big into how scientists approach things, how scientists think, how they're influenced, what their biases are. And one of the things that he's interested in, too,

is his idea of being fooled by randomness. Like you're out fishing, and you guys are all fishing a pumpkin colored grub for small mouth and someone puts a black grub on and hooks a fish that he's like oh they're hitting black and everyone switches to black he thinks that those situations are ripe for being fooled by randomness um but anyhow so yeah back very quickly to cap calibers without going into the rifles themselves um i'm even older more fuddier uh traditionalist guy than you so i'm gonna go with 270 and the 30-06 uh multiple reasons but always find ammo for it and uh those calibers have been killing stuff for many many many years um but

my takeaway or what i'd like to listen to takeaway would be to is to to pick the caliber use a premium bullet whatever caliber you choose use the the the best bullet you can afford and shoot the caliber that you can shoot comfortably and confidently but i get so sick of these guys who make their whole decision based on recoil. Well, it's a big deal. It's like, fuck up. No, if you're – That's the best of both – Fuck up is such bullshit because guys say that, oh, yeah, man, I can handle that gun.

I'm bucking up. And you watch him shoot, and the guy pulls his head a foot away from the scope before he pulls the trigger because he's got to flinch him so bad. So you can't say that he is – Yeah, I mean, fuck up. He is not – I don't mean buck up physically i mean buck up psychologically okay well that you know that takes time and practice but what i'm saying whatever it is if you can some guys maybe just or or any person we shouldn't say guys some person might never ever

be able to to shoot a 30 caliber um you know magnum rifle It just might not be in their thing. Small framed. They don't have the... When my kid starts hunting, I'm going to have him hunt with a 7mm 08, I think. Right? Recoil issue. Yeah.

So I'm not saying... But listen, the 7mm... I was talking about the 7mm Remag. And again, there's so much personal bias, right? I just happen to own a very nice shooting seven millimeter ram mag uh shooting like a 160 grain bullet at about 3 000 feet per second muzzle velocity and it just shoots good for me, right? And I've had some good hunting experiences with it. So therefore, I'm extolling this caliber

based on just a very small thing. I happen to own one that I've had good experiences with and that I like. Could I have had that same rifle chambered in a different round and taken it on those hunts and had those experiences? Absolutely.

And if that was the case, I'd be talking up that one. Giannis is right there. The 7mm Rem Mag kicks like I have a 375 H&H. That kicks like a very slow kick. A 7mm Rem

Mag kicks you like getting kicked in the face by Joe Rogan. We were just watching him kick a kick. A 7mm mag kicks you like getting kicked in the face by Joe Rogan. We were just watching him kick a bag the other day. It's like, that's a 7mm mag, and it's so abrupt and fast that it gives you a headache.

All those things can be managed a little bit. There's also a big fad of very lightweight what they call mountain rifles. If you're packing around a rifle that only weighs 7 pounds, all loaded up with a scope on it and everything, it's going to kick and bark and want to jump. That same rifle, you know, with a heavier stock or heavier this, that, that comes in at 10 pounds is going to recoil a lot less.

Yeah, my 7mm Red Mag with a scope on it is 12 pounds 9 ounces. Right. Heavy. But like my brother Danny said, he's got an old Ruger Model 77. It's a 300. Thing weighs a ton. But he said, man, you lay that thing over your backpack and you know something's going to die. It's just like.

Right. A heavy rifle. The crosshairs. It just settles in. Steady. Yeah. He was just talking about that. He's like,

you lay that thing up in your pack and you get nestled in there and it's just like, that thing is just, there's no doubt where that bullet's going. And those light rifles, I had a rifle that was too light.

I couldn't shoot it. I never felt good in a real worldworld hunting scenario. That's a big thing not a lot of people talk about. There's this big push for light rifles. It seems like a recoil thing to me. This big push for light rifles is people talking about carrying them around. But the reason I'm carrying mine around is because I'm hoping to shoot it at some point.

And if I need a couple more pounds to make that thing feel good when I go to shoot it. The bulk of the shooting I do and I hunt western hunts a lot. The bulk of the shooting I do is prone with my pack. What was the word you used the other day for a certain kind of rest? Improvised. Is shooting

prone with an improvised rest. Backpack, wad of jackets, your buddy's shoulder, whatever. And doing that, I find that a little bit of weight on that rifle makes a huge difference. Okay, we've got to take a quick break. We'll be right back after this message. I don't mind toting around some extra pounds.

My 12-pound 9-ounce rifle was ridiculous. Too heavy. Too heavy. These 6, 7-pound rifles, I don't know. They're light. Yeah, I think that 8 to 9 is really optimal. You know, I mean, everybody, and look, a lot of people that are packing around 6-pound rifles, they could shoot better with a seven or eight-pound

rifle, and they could just shave those two pounds off their gut, and you'd be all the same going up the hill. That's a good point, man. I had a rifle that not long ago I sent to a gunsmith to put a heavier barrel on it, not for anything to do with the barrel overheating or anything. I just wanted more weight.

The rifle never felt good to me shooting it loved carrying it you know it's like carrying around a chopstick yeah lastly for me on caliber i feel like you you need to be able to put that bullet confidently in the spot so again shoot what you're comfortable and confident with and i i would rather you put it in the spot that I tell you to put it as opposed to flinchums and who knows where the bullet goes. Then we're just hoping that big overrides

bad shot placement. That's a point that's brought up so much, man. You kill an elk with a penknife if you put it in the right place. That's right. Let's move on to best reasonably priced, affordable, good rifle. Let's move on to best reasonably priced affordable good rifle. No, I want to change. Let's get to that, but I want to interlude with one that comes up all the time.

Can you dry age venison and elk and stuff? Okay. Yeah. There's a couple things you don't want to age at all. Don't age bears and don't age pigs because the fat isn't tolerant. The fat sourours bad. And not only that, but the fat on wild pigs and the fat on bears, well, fat on everything, sours in your freezer. Takes a lot longer, but it'll happen. You can put a fatty old chunk of bear meat in your freezer and pull it out eight months later, and that stuff will have turned a bluish green color.

I'm not joking. If you trim the fat away right away, kill a bear, skin it, trim the fat away, get the thing into your freezer. Kill a bear or kill a wild pig, skin it, get the fat off it. There's a lot of uses for the fat. You can render it out and do great stuff with it because when it's rendered, it has a great shelf life. It doesn't on the animal. Other than that, on hooved animals, so birds,

we're not going to talk about birds. That's a whole other thing. On hooved animals, you can definitely age them. There's all kinds of thinking about how you age them. Hide on, hide off. Do you recommend it? Yeah, if you have the facility for it.

Yeah. Because what I was going to point out is in so much of my life, I'm always thinking of this situation where I'm going to have a walk-in cooler. It just never happens. All stainless steel, meat hooks on rollers. Yeah, it never happens. What does happen is you're in some hotel room in Phoenix, Arizona, trying to butcher a deer in a bathtub because you're flying out the next morning.

Or you and your buddy go up and you got to come back home and you know that at home it's 70 degrees out. You got to work the next morning. You got two dead deer. You know, it's just not, like, it just doesn't happen. Those are extremes. Let's talk about, let's just say you are living in, you know, a little bit of a northern latitude, and you do have a garage with a concrete floor that does stay cool what can we do in that

can i tell you an anecdote yeah my old roommate when i was in uh school my roommate killed a calf elk in the in a late season hunt it was a january hunt he killed a calf elk we hung that calf elk in my garage skin off and never froze any of that elk and ate the entire thing with it hanging in that garage with the temperature hovering a tad below, a tad above freezing in the wintertime. It hung in there. It must've been in there. It must've taken us probably about seven weeks to eat that thing. Sometimes you go out there and it feels kind of frozen-y. Sometimes it'd be fine. We just ate it.

My old man talks about, my dad was born in 1924. He had to use 50. He's dead now. But he's got some old timey experiences. He was talking about hanging deer, skin off, until there was a quarter inch of mold covering the deer, at which point they would butcher the deer. Wow.

This calf elk I'm talking about that we had hanging there, you could, I'm not joking you, you could stick your thumb through that meat. It was so beautifully dry aged by the end of it. But it was perfect conditions. This is a Montana, it's dry, cold, sheltered area. It's good. What I do now, and I want to talk about real-world stuff. I want to talk about my brother Danny's experience.

A strategy my brother Danny used. Oh, but I also want to say, we had that elk in Kentucky. And a guy, in that case, we were going somewhere else, couldn't bring the elk home. That was one of the only times in recent memory that I've ever had something butchered by a butcher. He hung that thing 10 days.

And? Dude, I couldn't tell. It wasn't like it was like tender regular old elk regular old elk my brother Danny

kills a moose every year it's kind of like his main thing it's his main part he kills a moose and that's what his family eats everything else is just

extra he don't think about having his freezer like I often think like okay, fall's coming. October's coming. I want to have my freezer emptied out. All of last year's game eaten up. Because I'm going to be filling it with new game this year.

He thinks about it the other way around. He doesn't want his freezer to be empty around September, which is his main hunting time. He doesn't want his freezer to be empty around September which is his main hunting time he doesn't want his freezer to be empty in September he wants to have like if he's going into a new year so let's say he's fall of 2015

he wants 2014's game to be petering out mid winter because that allows the animals that he's killed in the fall to age in his freezer. This is something people don't talk about

very often. They should talk about it more. Hooved game ages and tenderizes in your freezer. The same way if you leave something in your freezer too long, it can go south on you. It can go bad. Some of that decay is good,

and some of that decay is called aging. Aging is just breaking down. He kills a moose in September. He don't want to even look at that thing for a few months. He forgets about it. Butchers it right away. He's got that time of year, he got blow flies everywhere.

It's just like, you know, it's wet, rainy. The thing's already coming back a mess. You know, he hunts out of canoes and stuff. They come back, they got a moose all chopped up in game bags. You get home, there's, you know, meat bees, blow flies, Lord knows what. It gets in the freezer and forgets about it because it ages. Then what you do, and this is what I do all the time. If I'm home for a week and I know, okay, I'm home, I'm working from home,

I'm going to be cooking every night. I don't just do all my thawing the morning I'm going to cook something. If I know on Friday, I'm like, Friday I'm going to make a big elk roast. I will thaw that thing out. Maybe on Saturday. I don't know if I'm saying all kinds of stuff that violates USDA protocol. I don't really care.

I'll pull that thing out on Saturday. I don't even know if this is the right word. Basically, I dry age that thing for five, six days in my fridge. I don't care. It makes it more tender. And it makes the texture nicer to dry it. Because you notice wild game more than like, when you thaw wild game out,

you notice like when you freeze it fresh and stuff, you notice that it bleeds a lot. I've also heard that that's a big part of off flavors, and that's why you should do what you're talking about is because when you're letting it sit like that, you'll see that it does release some more of that blood. You get rid of that blood. Sometimes that blood is where that awful flavor is.

The texture gets so nice. Yeah, it's nice. I'll let it sit. Ideally, I like to let it sit until a little rind forms on the outside of that block of meat. Then I trim that rind off. That stuff sometimes looks so beautiful under there. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And, boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians

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onxmaps dot com slash meet. Welcome to the to the on X club, y'all. But yeah, let's say I just live and I and I have this. I have this just to answer the question. I live in some place. I hunt near there. I got a boatload of money. I go out and build myself

a factory spec meat aging walk-in cooler. Yeah. There's not a thing that I kill outside of wild pigs and bears that I wouldn't go hang in

there for a couple of weeks or for as long as I could. I'd monitor it closely, but absolutely I'd hang everything just to answer the question. Yeah. My quick answer is at least 24 hours because, and again, I'm no expert on this because, but from what I've read, that's how long it takes for a gamortis to set and then leave those muscles. And so, and I've had that. I've eaten meat that was, you know, too fresh. We talk about that a lot on the show because we're eating meat right there in the field. And sometimes that too fresh meat needs to be pounded with a rock to make it tender. And so, I try to give it at least 24 hours from when it hit the dirt, which isn't too hard.

Usually by the time you get home, it's been that long. I want to hit it super quick, and then we're going to go back up to the one you also wanted to get. What's your opinion on hunting wolves? I think wolves should be managed like big game. Managed like all big game. Don't push them to the point where their viability is threatened. Same way I wouldn't want to hunt elk until their viability is threatened. It's a renewable resource.

There's hunter interest in it. If you can allow some extraction of the renewable resource without damaging the viability of the resource, I think you should do it. Yanni? I don't even want to talk about wolves, but you were hot for one of these questions. Oh, we just were going to finish up on the caliber rifle thing. If you want to talk about a model, a maker, and a model of a good, affordable rifle.

I should be able to answer that in a couple sentences. But what is affordable? Less than $1,000? Less than $1,000? I guess there's a couple tiers. Let's do one 500 or less and one under 1000 how about that

I don't know I just buy so few I just don't buy rifles I have rifles that I've always had I have rifles that I've gotten from friends and I've had rifles that I've gotten through work I would be really bad at hunting equipment prices right.

Because the peculiarity of my occupation and life. I don't know what stuff costs. It's embarrassing. I know what stuff costs. I just don't know what that kind of stuff costs that much. You tell me. What's a good $500 rifle? Is there a $500 rifle? Yeah, I believe that it's...

I think you can get a Remington 700 in the bottom tier that's right at that price mark. There's also a Ruger American, which I think comes in right at that price mark. And then, Winchester Model 70, they probably have one that has

a, more of a plastic-y composite stock on it instead of a nice synthetic or a nice wood stock. But all three of those makers, too, you can get into that $700, $800 range and get yourself a really nice rifle that will last many, many years, probably many generations as long as you take care of it.

I want to tell a Remington Model 700 story. My old man, he died in december 2002 in 2000 he bought a brand spickety spankety new remington model 700 i remember at the time i remember i feel like it cost him you know four or five hundred bucks at the time he dies i don even know if he ever shot anything with this thing. He dies and we have this little drawing. Where we put. Me and all my brothers. And all my half siblings and stuff.

We wrote down the name of all his guns. Got little pieces of paper. On each little piece of paper. We wrote down the name of one of our old man's guns. And put them in a hat. And started drawing. The pieces of paper out of a hat to see who got what. He didn't specify any of this in his will.

I drew this new Remington Model 700. Left it at my mom's for years. At some point, I got it and brought it up to my cabin in Alaska. Never really shot it carefully. We sighted it in by shooting it at an old oil drum just to make sure it was kind of right on. Took it up a mountain, shot a black-tailed deer, took it out in the boat on salt water.

My brother shot a black-tailed deer with it. This is a.30-06, model 700. Then I hung it on the wall in my cabin, which is the wettest, rustiest, nastiest place on the planet. And I just sprayed it down with WD-40, but didn't do anything to the bore, the inside of the barrel. And left it up there for a decade,

or almost a decade, to the point where you look down this barrel, and you can barely see down it, the bore. So rusty. Took that thing home, cleaned it up, and for the first time in my life, probably the first time in the gun's life, took it down to a rifle range to shoot box ammo.

To actually, like, on a bench, shoot this rifle. Oh, this is the one that I cleaned out. Dude. Oh, this is the one that I cleaned out. Dude. Oh, Giannis cleaned it out. Right. Let me tell you. I'm telling you.

The first 20 patches that came out of the bore, I don't know if I can say it, but it looked like diarrhea. I mean, it was just brown, goopy, soupy, and I was almost scared to fire the thing. Yeah, Giannis even expressed fear about firing it. He was like, I don't know what's going to happen. That rifle, of all the rifles I own, and I own some

expensive-ass custom rifles. If I had to go out right now to shoot, and someone said, you got to shoot me the tightest group you can shoot, I would take that rifle. I took that rifle to the range and shot three-shot group after three-shot group after three-shot group

that were two touching, like two touching and one just off of touching. They were probably about half-inch to three-quarter inch groups, which is just incredible. That's an abused Model 700 shooting box ammo.

So, I don't know. And I'm a guy that owns some expensive-ass custom rifles. I don't get that kind of group out of it. So, you know. I know a lot of guys like T3 Lights, but those are more expensive. That seems like a very popular out-of-the-box gun. You just got to shop around, man.

If I was really going to buy a new rifle, I don't think I would buy a new. I would spend a bunch of time on gunbroker.com and stuff like that. That and a great tip. And find a dude who's got a custom rifle or some kind of souped-up rifle that his old lady's mad about him having and he's got to sell it.

Yeah, and the used gun racks at all the sportsmen's and the cabela's are great places to be looking you kind of need to know what you're looking for um but they you they have quality stuff in there they're not gonna they're not gonna just have junk in there but what a guy told me once when i was in there perusing the guy that worked in the gun library or whatever i forget what i was looking for i was looking for a deer caliber and it just happened to be november so he's like man it's just a it's just you're looking for that 270 or whatever it's the wrong time of year you should come back about january because what happens after big game season now everybody wants to go hunt coyotes and varmints and stuff so everybody comes in switching out their 06s or 270s or 300 Winchester short magnums,

and they want the hopped-up 243 or the hopped-up, you know, the little bitty guns to shoot coyotes with. And then the same thing happens again. They do all that into the summer, and then they drop off all those varmint guns. So it's kind of a never-ending cycle. I want to read a question that cracks me up. This is a good guy. I don't know him. Chris Rau.

Okay, this kind of – in some way to me really expresses everything we're talking about here. He says, I noticed you switched to the 270 WSM, Winchester short mag. So it's like a 270 but but a short version of 270. Short action version. In lieu of the long action 7mm mag, I have a 270 WSM, and I absolutely love it. I was wondering what ammo you are shooting or hand loads for elk. I've taken 8 bucks and probably a dozen hogs here in Northern California where I live.

Four mule deer out of state and two elk. But I'm always looking for new information about hunting or components to my hunting gear. I hand load and have taken all these animals to date with one bullet. 140 grain Nosler Acubond, all with one shot from 30 to 648 yards. For my hand loads, they are fairly fast at 3,150 feet per second on the chronograph and very accurate. But everyone is telling me to switch to Berger or Barnes. I'm the kind of guy, if it ain't broke, don't fix it,

but I'm always willing to experiment with new things. Thanks for your feedback dude i would like don't do i wouldn't change anything that's a great bullet the acubon only problem you're getting with the acubon is it's got lead in it so if you're hunting you know in more and more areas are going to eventually be going lead free you might run into trouble there but for a guy like that with that track record to be sweating this stuff kind of shows you the poor state of affairs we're in when it comes to people acting like these little things are going to fix problems. The dude could obviously shoot.

He's ambitious. Don't change anything. Yeah, it doesn't sound like he's got any problems with his rig. No. I don't care what everybody's talking about. No way to hack on Barnes & Burger. I have Barnes & Burger bullets.

Here's another one that comes in all the time. What's your opinion on camouflage? I don't see you wear a ton of it. I'll tell you what. Here's a couple things about camouflage. Absolutely for turkeys. Absolutely for waterfowl.

Always. Mostly head to toe. On that note, a lot of times it's not just the camo is as important as just covering up Your white Flashy hands Or even if you have darker skin

Just the oils in our skins It tends to shine So that needs to be covered up and muted It's almost like camouflage It's funny because I think when people I'm guessing when this guy says it What he means is like garments with camouflage, garments with camouflage patterns on them.

My wife's taking off. Not that she was here. She was ducked in to say howdy. He's talking about garments with like printed camouflage patterns. I'm guessing. Camouflage, yeah. I mean, you can go out and hunt ducks with just earth tones on, of course. But you've got to be careful about blinds and camouflage yourself

with vegetation, with material. But to get to his question, if I'm going hunting for waterfowl or turkeys, I am very serious about wearing camouflage clothing. This could be a fool by randomness, but I don't think it is. I remember one time when I first became a believer in camouflage, me and my brother Danny were hunting ducks in Michigan, kept flaring ducks out of our decoys on this little pond,

and I had a gray hoodie on, a light gray, whitish gray hoodie on. My hood, and I had a duck jacket on light gray, whitish gray hoodie on my hood. And I had a duck jacket on like a duck Brown Cokes. We were hunting dead grass, dead, uh, dead grass and cat tails. Bit of my hoodie was sticking out. We kept flaring ducks.

Danny's like, tuck that hood in. I tucked that hood in, stop flaring ducks. It could be fooled by randomness, but I've seen a lot of stuff like that happen over the years. Particularly face shine. You're blowing birds and then someone puts a face mask on and you quit blowing birds because your face is just like oily and shiny. So cover it up.

I wear camo and I don't know. I can't tell you this empirically. I wear camo bow hunting. Because why not? It's just not that hard to get camo. You're never going to regret having it. I can't imagine a situation where I would regret having camo on. I would have got that thing had I been wearing solid colors.

It just isn't going to happen. Sometimes I do think that with some of the camo patterns that are very, very dark, that at a distance greater of even 10, 15 feet, you start to look like a black bear. And so in that case, I'd rather just be wearing like a nice light gray or that first light dry earth because even at 100 yards, I might look more like that light rock on the hillside than that black bear. Yeah. I don't care. I don't worry about it hunting. I don't worry about it rifle hunting for big game.

I never wore it. All growing up, bow hunting, whitetails, we didn't wear a camel. Our mom would stitch us clothes out of wool. We'd wear that. We'd wear army surplus wool. Earth tones. My dad always hunted muted earth tones. He blended good.

We used to just wear, mostly because I do a lot of mountain hunting. For years and years, we did all of our mountain hunting and mountaineering clothes. My specialty was going into Goodwills and stuff like that, Salvation Armies, in high-end mountain towns. If you can go to a Goodwill in Bozeman, Montana or Jackson, Wyoming, Aspen, Colorado,

you're going to get all kinds of great mountaineering type clothes. I would hunt in that stuff. High quality stuff that I'd get for cheap. Had I found awesome camo jackets there, I would have bought them too. But, you know,

but if you have it, you're not going to regret it. Just if you have a good camo, wear it. If you don't have a good camo and you can't afford good camo, I wouldn't stay home about it. For big game for me, I feel that with the camo, I wouldn't stay home about it. For big game for me, I feel that with the camo and clothing

and gear, the quiet trumps the camouflage. We used to have guiding, we used to have a lot of guys that would show up with all sorts of camo, this, that, and the other, and it was covered in Velcro. Nothing worse than trying to sneak through the woods, still hunting, hoping to catch an elk just over the next rise at 100 yards and then behind you

you hear and that velcro this that of the other rips open and the guys you know squeezing and just playing with all the gadgets and whatever and being noisy you know stuff scratching against his legs because his pants were too noisy because he was to bring out, you know, a brand-new pair of Carhartts elk hunting versus, like, a nice, you know, chamois cloth pair of pants or, you know, some quiet wool or something. So I would certainly go find something quiet to go hunt big game in versus something camo. You want another hypothetical? Or, like, not hypothetical.

I don't even know what... I'm so fried out from guidebook writing. Yanni's holding up a paper that says 55 minutes. Here's the interesting question. What's your opinion on how hunting is going?

What trends should we support decry and hunting today? If you want to continue to see a tendency towards smarter and more realistic world, we're real world hunting for future generations of hunters, anglers, trappers. This dude's name actually is Hunter.

Um, I don't like high wire stuff, man. I don't like it being confused with hunting, and I don't like it taking on tendencies of hunting. My brother raises these lambs. He gave one to me and my buddy. But he said, you got to go out and shoot the lamb.

So we went out and shot our lambs with a.22 out in the pasture there. Did I then go and post a bunch of pictures of me sitting with that lamb acting like I was out hunting lambs? No. We were harvesting livestock. The other problem I have with high wire stuff besides all the bad ethical stuff

paints a bad picture also just too risky with disease issues disease vectors packing these animals into these you know situations and then having disease transmission escape the wild herds it's not worth the risk

you can give me all the economic numbers you want about this and that and this and that. I don't like it. I don't like it. Wild animals. I don't like it. Seeing these animals with those ear tags and stuff, on a personal level,

it disgusts me. I don't like it. I hate seeing it. What I do like is people taking great care to utilize to the maximum potential

the resources provided by the animals that they kill. Catch and release angling. There's no real damage there, but it's just playing with your food. I used to be a catch and release angler. I still am today, but we did a whole podcast on catch and release.

I'm not going to talk about it now. Grab another question, Yanni. How do you cook red fox yeah i we cooked coyote not long ago a couple years ago i just burned i did it like how i've had i saw how they cooked dogs in vietnam i just cooked the coyote like that burned the hair off and then roast it wasn't that good if i had to eat a red fox, if I was doing it for fun and people were coming over, we were going to eat a red fox, I would just burn the hair off and roast it just like a roast pig. If I just had to eat it like if someone came down and said, you can only eat red fox for the rest of your life and that's what you have to feed your family,

I would bone all of my red fox out, grind them up, and make stuff like chorizo and stuff like that. Strong flavored sausages with it. Yeah, you can pretty much take any meat like that and braise it, which is basically like slow simmer cooking for a long period of time. And whether it's two hours or six hours, when it's done, you let it cool. You pick it off the bone and then season it. Barbecue sauce, too. Put in a bunch of barbecue sauce, and, man, you could probably serve that fox and no one would know.

That's even better. I take back what I said. I wouldn't make treasel. I would take my red fox, yank the hide off it, trim whatever fat on there is away, quarter it out, rub just a lot of salt and pepper on all those quarters. Brown them up in half butter and half oil. This is just me, what I would do. Get a big pan, brown all those quarters, pack them into a big roasting dish, cover it two-thirds of the way with water, put a lid on it,

put it in my oven at between 275 and 300 degrees, start poking it with a fork about three hours later, when that thing was such that I could grab one of the bones and flick it and all the meat would fly off the bone, I would shred that stuff up and I would use it on barbecue sandwiches. I'd put it on burritos. I'd put it on tacos.

I got some moose meat. Not that moose is like Red Fox. I got some moose meat in my fridge right now like that. Big roast I did. It's all set up in the aspic. I just keep warming that thing up, grabbing a handful out and doing stuff with it. I gave some of the onion to you the other night.

We had it on burritos. It was great. I do that with my fox. And if someone did come down from wherever, heaven, outer space, and said you have to eat Red Fox the rest of your life, I would be a little bummed, but I would figure it out. I'm not afraid about it.

We will make it a point here soon to try to harvest one during a meat eater shoot and cook one up, see what it tastes like. I want to do one last quickie because this comes up all the time. One last quickie because otherwise I'm going to miss my flight. How do you get meat home on trips? When I'm on a trip, flying or driving or whatever, I kill something. I take it apart in big pieces so I bone out muscle groups. Put those muscle groups, wrap them up in saran wrap or better yet,

put them into resealable bags, Ziploc bags, gallon-sized Ziploc bags, big muscle group stuff. Get it into a freezer. Even if you got to go bang on the door at some restaurant and beg some dude who's like washing dishes on a late-night shift to put it in the freezer for a night, get a good freeze on it, pack those bags in the coolers, duct tape the coolers shut. It'll stay frozen for days in there. Then when I get home, I let it thaw a little bit so it's kind of soft. Then I do my final detail work and repackage it for my home freezer. Thanks for listening.

Meat Eater Podcast. Make sure to tune in. Sportsman Channel. Watch the show, Meat Eater. Take care. you you you