The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 026

Episode Date: January 7, 2016

Scottsdale, Arizona. Steven Rinella talks with Janis Putelis and guests Floyd Green and Chris Denham about the least understood realm of hunting in America-- mountain lion hunting. Subjects discussed: eating mountain lions; Montana's Rock Creek Lodge Testicle Festival; how Floyd got into lion hunting; hunting lions in the snow; the varied names for mountain lions; following a false trail while lion hunting; the behaviors and diets of mountain lions; the greatest argument against the existence of Bigfoot (or why it is that no one ever hits a bigfoot with a car); what it means to "jump the lion"; hunting lions and coyotes; eating eagles; wild burros; and Steve's first mountain lion sighting. 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. Thank you for joining us, ladies and gentlemen. This is the Meat Eater Podcast. We're going to talk now about something that is perhaps the least understood, in my opinion, realm of hunting and fishing in America, which is hunting mountain lions.

Something that I've never done successfully. No thanks to the guy I'm sitting here with, Floyd Green. Before I get into that, I want to remind everyone, if you want to watch, watch the show Meat Eater, not listen to the Meat Eater podcast. Go to meateater.vhx.tv and you can download it and stream it to your heart's content. They sell them on there in these blocks of episodes. And if you go on there and use the offer code MEATEATERPODCAST, you get five bucks off any volume. How many volumes did you say around there yet?

Six. Six volumes? I think that's about 25% off. I think they're around $20. Way huge discount. So MEATEATER.VHX.TV, offer code MEATEATERPODCAST. And while you're at it, go on to Giannis. Giannis Patel is joining us here.

Go on to Giannis' thing. Website. Plug it. Go buy some of Giannis' Hunt to Eat t-shirts. Hunt to Eat. What's one of those good t-shirts cost, Giannis? $24.95. Usually you can get it shipped for just a couple dollars.

And if Giannis is out of stock like he always is, just keep checking back because he'll buy two or three more and get them in stock. That's right. Okay, on to the subject of hunting mountain lions. I have, I'm going to give my personal mountain lion resume. three mountain lions, which is the same number of mountain lions that I've seen in the wild, though I haven't eaten any of the ones I've seen in the wild. I ate all separate ones.

There's this place outside of Missoula, Montana called the Rock Creek Lodge, and every year they have something called the Testicle Festival, where they serve, there's this whole big, very hedonistic festival around serving deep fried nuts from castrated steers. They castrated steers in the spring, but it's in the fall.

They must be freezing them. Hope they keep well. I don't know. It seems like you do it around the time, right? But one time I was in there in the spring and there was a pot of uh pulled pork on the counter and they weren't selling it was free and i made myself a sandwich and the guy told me that it was mountain lion and um he said rock creek lodge balls in the fall pussy in the spring you know that was one of the three mountain lions I've eaten. Another mountain lion I ate,

my old girlfriend was in line in the hardware store in Wyoming and the guy in front of her was buying a mountain lion tag. She said, what are you going to do with the mountain lion? He said, I just want it to hide. She said, we'll take all the meat. Sure enough, this dude called about a week later and gave us the whole mountain lion. We ate that thing every which way it's not bad no it's pretty good the back straps on there where it's at yeah but it's all you know kind of a white meat that yeah surprising resembles pork without the greasiness you know pretty good stuff it'll it'll test the strength of your jaw often. So I'm joining this conversation by a real live, actual, very serious lion hunter, Floyd Green. Floyd owns some things that you might be familiar with that I like to use and that you see often around wilderness athlete, outdoorsman's.

But you've been a lion hunter longer than any of that stuff. Yeah, I started hunting lions the first time with some guys, and I was a teenager, late teens. And I didn't have my own hounds until I was around 20. And you were born here. We're in Arizona right now, in Scottsdale. And you were born here we're we're in arizona right now uh in scottsdale and you were born here in phoenix and what was the lion hunting culture then like how did you get into it well i got into it actually up in show Arizona up there building homes and and the guys were headed out one day and i just tagged along with them and always been always had a lot of dogs and been around dogs my whole life what was the reason you had them I didn't have any lion hunting dogs that they were had one coon hound and one mutt but after spending time with those guys and

watching them work with their dogs and you know the first time you see a lion climb a tree or you walk up to a tree and one is in it, it's just the buggy. It generally bites people that really enjoy that. And an amazing animal to be up close to like that. And it's a dog thing largely too. Absolutely. We can get into that.

Absolutely. If it wasn't for watching the young dogs transform and all the planning that goes behind putting your your pack of dogs together or breeding the next group of puppies you know just seeing lions get killed it's certainly not why people hunt lions so how how many years ago was that you started hunting lions it'd be early 80s like 81 you know somewhere right around and then got your own dogs right and that was i had a lot you know i had my own dogs within a year at that time, but they wasn't a very successful group of dogs at that point in my life.

Just had a lot more dogs when we had lion catching going on. Yeah. One thing that Floyd does, correct me if I'm wrong on this, but basically you would divide lion hunting into two categories. It's hunting them in the snow. Right. Is that fair? It is.

Or hunting them in where there's no snow. Well, hunting them in bare ground conditions is more challenging due to the fact that you rely on the dogs a lot more. So it takes a lot higher level of hound uh you know you're in the snow you're going to drive the roads look for where a lion's crossed in the snow you can determine generally determine to some degree how old that track is certainly can determine which way it's going with the hounds when you're riding along on your mule

or some guys do it off of a four-wheeler however you may be doing it and your dogs are free casting out in front of you there's literally dozens of animals that they they have the opportunity that they smell every step of the way they're smelling some different creature yeah and you're relying on them to let you know that they've they've crossed the lion's path and you may go you may go days before that happens in a lot of cases you know my brother my older half-brother, was an elk guide in Colorado for many years, and he did some lion, he had a guy, one of his guides was a lion hunter.

And they would just, you know, have clients who wanted to come out. And he would have a list of guys, and he wouldn't call the client until he found the track. And guys would, because he would have some guys, like, you got to be ready to go, drop the hat, and he'd call and the guy would get on a plane and come up from Dallas or whatever. And then they'd begin to hunt that lion. And then he'd go chase that lion.

And in some parts of the country, nobody even thinks about lion hunting until the snow falls. And part of that, now with the wolves like they you know they can really determine whether there's wolves in the area or not also before they turn their because the wolves will kill your dog right you know these canadian wolves are just a dangerous you know they're they're always a threat to the guys with hounds up there and i don't know much about hunting in in the northern part of our country but what i see of it it's uh you know snow hunting can be very very challenging it can be really really tough physically some of the toughest hunts i've ever been on have been in the snow just climbing around on snowy hillsides you know go 15 miles

and two foot of snow and in and out of the grand canyon a couple times and you know you have it's just a tough tough hunt on everybody but what what what the snow gives you though so when you when you go out and look for a line let's let's just set this up first so some people get what we're talking about when you go out look for a line how old does the track have to be like what's the oldest track you can run most you know that's a highly controversial subject uh i would say nobody's going to catch you're going to catch very few lions that are over six to eight hours you're six to eight hours behind them okay so step one of a lion hunt just for listeners like step one of a lion hunt would be you're going into likely lion country or a place a lion is likely to pass through and you're trying to find either through

the nose of your dog or from tracks in the snow or tracks on the ground you're trying to find a place where a mountain lion came through walked through within the last six to eight hours ideally i don't mean the harp on the snow thing too much but it's just like it's just an interesting way to start thinking about some of the complexities of hunt lions because if there's snow on the snow thing too much but it's just like it's just an interesting way to start thinking about some of the complexities of hunt lions because if there's snow on the ground you know how big the lion was right generally the speed or the the gender so you can tell that even right most of the time and the best is you know what way it went absolutely we experienced that at a time too it's you know knowing you're going the right way is 50% of the battle. Yeah, because the dog, like a famous thing people always say about a good beagle is a beagle can zing back and forth on a rabbit track a couple times,

and he can tell relative freshness just on a short stretch, and he'll know what way the rabbit went. But with a lion, that's not, it takes them a little while longer to figure it out well sometimes they they the tendencies of the dog well the rabbit's a hot a hot scent track type track whereas a lion i would consider a cold what do you mean hot like the rabbit just jumped up just was there so it's much more obvious to that that beagle which way that track's going because it's dissipating. And with a lion, that track may be laying there. You know, a lion, when it walks, it's offloading cells or spores, whatever you want to call them, that that's what the dog is detecting.

And for whatever reason, a lion leaves a scent longer than most animals, and it's different in the sense that like with coon dogs you know coon dogs do the same thing as the beagles do on rabbits and they almost generally figure out which way that coon's going to go the right way gotcha lionhounds there's i if i can't help them then i let them make the decision i don't ever try to out guess them but I've sure gone the wrong way a lot of times how far away you go the wrong way till the dogs become exhausted or the track burns out there and I've gone in well Chris or the day we caught your line this is a line that's caught Floyd's talking it to Chris Denham here who hosts Western Hunter TV show and is a publisher?

Publisher. Yeah, it's a good – Publisher of Western Hunter, Elk Hunter magazines. And Chris has done a fair bit of lion hunting with Floyd. Yeah. We took a large male down in the Catalina Mountains. And after the lion was shot, Chris had shot the lion, one of our better dogs turned around and trailed that track,

the one that was now dead, backwards until 6 o'clock that evening and probably went 12 miles from where we started. Yeah. Back trailing the lion. Back trip. You know, I mean, there was no question about what went on. And we ended up catching up with her uh in canada del oro yeah almost to the bottom of it i shot him at it was april 15th i remember it was tax day we shot him it was it was it's a crazy crazy story but and it shot him with an hour of daylight and we were we got to the bottom of canyon deloro and finally found that that dog

at dark and came pretty much out in the dark and it was 14 hours probably that dog was trailed back on that on that line yeah because when we went out those couple times and looking even when the dogs start running something we were still spending a lot of time trying to find a track to verify what it was that they were after. Right. You know, a lot of these dogs, all of my dogs now, line numbers have dropped in the last five years, and all of my dogs have gotten to trailing bobcats, and they never used to do that. So now we have to determine, is it a bobcat or is it a lion?

And it's really hard to tell. Why did your dogs start running bobcats? Well, basically you would consider that a fault in a dog, in a true bare ground lionhound. But almost all of them will at one time or another trail bobcats and foxes. Because you don't come across enough lion tracks to keep them. They're going to trail something. And it's very hard to tell the difference between the two unless you've got the soil or you find some way to find a track, as foxes and bobcats are everywhere lions are here in Arizona.

Well, that's always been something of a problem. But the good news is typically fox and bobcat tracks, very similar to a coon or a rabbit, the track dissipates quickly. So typically the big... So your lead's going to run in the right direction. Right, and typically if they don't go anywhere, that's a good sign that it's probably not aligned. Oh, I got you.

If you start moving it out of there... I see what you're saying. It's not going to, like, he's not going to, they're not going to run an eight-hour-old track for very long. Right. Yeah. Well, they won't run an eight-hour-old bobcat track or fox track. They won't.

It's got to be fresh to get them interested within probably 30 minutes or an hour oh is that right okay what um between all the hunting you've done like just hunting lions of people and all the stuff you've done with biologists

training them for research purposes and tranquilizing them and what not how many lions have you run run? or how many lines have you run run or how many lines have you caught like like lion guys use the word caught for a lion whether you kill the lion or not right because the whole thing is catching it right after that it's you know shooting them kind of an anticlimactic end to the chase the uh as far as lions i've caught it's between three and five hundred you know it's's always hard to put a number on that.

For me, a lot of them were caught with other hunters there and different circumstances and things like that. Some of them were lions that were caught multiple times and turned loose. You know, it's always challenging to figure out how to keep score. But there's been times in my life where we've caught as many as 25 lions a year for several years in a row. And there's other years you catch, you know, my goal is always to catch 10 a year. But there's been a few years we haven't got that done.

Is that right? Yeah. So maybe when you think about doing it for 30 years, that adds up to a pretty substantial number. As far as lions that I've trailed, it'd be, you know, thousands. 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.

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As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onXMaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. How many dogs do you take out to hunt a lion? I take as many as 13 at one time. I would prefer to take a half a dozen. That's an optimum number, four to six. And I've caught a lot of lions with one dog.

You know, you just, it's, but typically for a good, good fun hunt, the number I would pick would be five or six. But a lot of times we'll take all 13 of them just to help keep them in shape. Oh, just to exercise them yeah so much about catching a lion has as much to do with the physical ability of the hound to persevere through a whole day of day of trailing and then jump the lion and actually put enough pressure on it to get it to climb a tree so if they're not in good physical shape and their feet aren't tough and they can't go and they got to be able to go 10 12 hours so lay out for me like how a lion hunt lay out for me like how a successful lion hunt goes you get up in the morning and like what i know each time is different but just like how might

a hunt go well chris's yours is a classic the the one we were just talking about we got up in the morning and uh saddled the mules and and rode out rode up the very first you prefer to hunt out on a mule yeah that'd be my preference by far. So you're mounted, dogs running all around. And I can stay with my dogs a lot better. As good a shape as you feel like you are, it's hard after a few days to physically stay with them on foot on a regular basis.

We covered an enormous amount of ground, I felt, when I was out with you. I never hunted with a group of guys that was physically in the shape that you guys were when we went. Joe and I were both absolutely amazed every night when we came in and all the guys running the cameras and running them backwards up the hills in super tough country. It was amazing and normally guys just don't show up in that kind of physical condition and we did go

a long ways i mean there was a couple times we trailed lions and i was sure we had the one caught and uh and we didn't but uh that would have been even that's a typical although joe started that one early for us it was uh the distance wasn't unusual you know to go to their collars like the gps their gps does it keep a track of the distance they run? Oh, yeah. These dogs look like satellites, man. They got like three collars on, wires and stuff coming off.

So what's an average day that a dog puts on? Well, the dog's minimum on an average day is 20 miles. So, you know, and I've seen 35-mile days. You know, that's not a crazy deal either. But mile days you know that's not not not a crazy deal either but what gets tough is that's not hard for a good conditioned hound to do on any given day it's hard for that dog to do day after day after day and that's where you see professional lion hunters guys that are guiding full-time or some of our government lion hunters that gets to be the difference between them and sport hunters is the

condition of their dogs quality of the dogs obviously but the condition is huge where they can pursue a lion they may trail a lion for three days before they overtake it and actually jump it and and i'm not saying they're stopping the track and picking it up each day but every day you learn more about that animal and you you're getting closer to it you're getting into a tighter area where it may be well in that third day if you've been running like you're saying three days in a row you might pick up where that lion was the night before absolutely as he's hunting the area well you won't pick up the exact spot but you know the lions travel into the south we've trailed him four miles in that direction down this drainage we'll try and loop ahead of him and pick him up again and typically with good broke dogs when you when you cross his track there

you know they'll let you know verify the direction and go again sooner or later that lion's going to kill something or he's going to lay up somewhere and that's when you'll overtake him once he gets a belly full or that he's was that because he's stopping to eat or because he's just hungry because he's full and doesn't run as good no well it's because he stopped traveling oh okay you know he just finally because you know then he's camped out on the carcass and he's there so i think this is an important point because i think i was like under the wrong impression too because i always everybody or in my head it's like you start out and it's like as soon as you're on a track you're like dogs are chasing this lion but it's not that way this lion is just out and about doing its thing for maybe three or four days and eventually your hounds just catch up to it

right and for those prior three days those dogs never got close and it seems so exciting because those hounds are so excited they're balling and carrying on that you feel like you're you're the Lions up and running from it but that cat might not even know about you and your dog absolutely that's a more more often than not when you're trailing a lion there was only one instance that I thought maybe we had a lion jumped and that was that large Tom in the galeros yeah that and I believe he outran us. I think that lion left the country. But almost every other lion, those lions probably never knew

we were even in the vicinity. I think my lion was a classic because we were riding, it was the third day and we had done the same loop the first two days. Probably a 15, 18 mile loop. Just through the country. yeah just in working the

same you know the same uh trails and just kind of working out old tracks and the third day we left camp and we weren't what a mile from camp and all of a sudden the dog struck i mean and you know and struck hard and we'd been through that exact canyon the two days previous we knew that lion track wasn't there two days before so we knew you know this is fresh so you knew the lion had walked you were sleeping and the lion passed through a mile from where you were sleeping yeah right so then what happened on that hunt oh it got it got pretty crazy after that but uh uh we were right in the bottom of a canyon and uh in the dogs kept trying they were going back and forth and we finally finally scratch and figured out the can the the scratch was saying the line was going up the can

back up and explain what you mean by that oh with the lions will scratch well you can explain a little more but it's what a scratch is but where they're where they they're marking their territory the toms and they use their front feet and they they pull it they pull the the soil up over top of where they've urinated and they create a pile of leaf litter or whatever. It's in the bottom of that little canyon. You can see it from a good distance. It's usually maybe six, ten inches long. In likely little places, you can anticipate.

When we were out, we kept looking at it. After a while, I'd be like, that's a place where he would do that. You're in a canyon and a tributary comes in It was like a leafy area or something, you know, they spying trees. Yeah So we do this we figure the lines we know that from the direction of scratch He's probably going up the canyon, but the dogs keep trying to they go up and then they turn around They want to come back. They want to keep wanting to come back. And finally, one dog went up and around us to get around us because we're trying to pull the dogs and push them the other direction. And then all of a sudden, he struck, and we figured out afterwards

that we probably literally jumped that lion out of that canyon. Oh. And he scratched and then went right up and over the top. And as soon as we got up over the top and uh do you want me to tell the whole story yeah okay it's it's a pretty good story no it is because this is explaining how a lion hunt goes yeah so keep in mind the miles keep in mind miles here so people can get a perspective of like the scale okay this one actually happened pretty you know pretty quick in a short amount of time but so. We know the lion went up and over top this ridge, maybe a 300-400 foot elevation, half mile over the top.

We got up to the top, and we can hear the dogs barking down the bottom, but it's kind of crazy barking. Floyd split off to get a little bit of a different angle, and I stayed with the mules. Floyd calls me. You can hear the dogs barking down there and floyd calls me on the radio he says chris this lion's coming right to you get off you know so i jump off my mule and i get my pistol out and i'm standing there like you know with my pistol out in front of me just waiting for a lion to come up uh anyways another dog came up there and and all of a sudden that lion took off and went back down and back into the other hounds. But you can see this happen.

No, Floyd can see this happen, and I can't see this. So he bails down to where the dogs are, and I'm just kind of standing up on top of the mules, just waiting for Floyd to tell me what the heck's going on. And all of a sudden I just hear this voice down in the bottom of the canyon, and it would go from R-rated to X-rated if I actually told you everything he was yelling at me. But it was like, Chris, get your ass down here. I can just hear him just yelling at me.

And I got a radio in my hand. And the part that, Chris, just for everybody listening, this lion's very unusual. It has gone by about 50 trees that it could have gone in, from oak trees to juniper trees, and it's fighting the dogs on the ground, which is really unusual for a mountain lion. And it's fighting them like a jaguar or a bear would fight them. And it's winning.

I mean, it's mucking them out. Oh, really? Oh, it was. I mean, we stapled and stitched dogs for hours after this this whole program but floyd's getting to see this i was i was wanting chris to hurry down there yeah so he's seeing he's seeing all this and i'm just i'm like trying to piece it all together in my head so i go bailing off the ridge you know down to where all the screaming's coming from and uh i've got chaps on that are too long for me.

I'm stumbling and falling. And I get there, and there's a big oak tree in the very bottom below me, and there's a bluff I'm standing on top of. And right underneath the oak tree, I can see just a muck of dogs and Floyd screaming and the lions screaming. On the ground. On the ground. With a perfectly good tree there. Yeah, perfectly, on the ground, on the ground. I mean, they're perfectly good tree there. Yeah.

Perfectly under a huge bit, perfect tree. So I literally, I kind of jump off that little bluff through the tree and Atlanta on the ground. And, uh, and I get there and there's a washout underneath the tree and that washouts filled up with Oak leaves. And all I can see is Floyd with a big stick in his hand in the bottom of this washed out oak leaf like pool. And the lion, Floyd's got this big huge stick in his hand and one end is the lion's hanging on to one end. And there's dogs just jumping in. This lion's just got paws going everywhere, claws going everywhere with a stick in his mouth. Floyd's yelling at me, him shoot him so i go sliding in the hole and i grab

i have my pistol on my hand and i'm i'm literally from meter foot like three feet from the lion and dogs are jumping in there and i'm trying to grab dogs to to get a clear shot and floyd meanwhile is covering his face because he knows the bullet's going to create some kind of splash we're all so close he's you know meanwhile the stick's broken off between his hands so now he's down to two hands hanging onto the stick like a fishing rod with a big you know the sailfish on the end and and i shoot the lion through the shoulder and from you know from three feet there's no way i missed and floyd picks a cover uncovers his eyes and he looks at the lion he looks at me and the lion's still doing the same thing he was doing before i shot him so he yells at me shoot

him again so i shoot him again. So I shoot him again, and then finally the lights go out, and on the lion, he's just dead. The dogs are piling in there, and it was just utter, complete chaos. But what had happened is with those oak leaves in that pool, nobody could get any traction to get out of there. You tell them what happened to your pistol. Well, I was, I mean, Chris wanted to shoot the lion.

I didn't want to shoot it and use my tag. But when I looked down in there, it was just all the dogs were, they were getting killed. I mean, they were, this lion was grabbing one. It wasn't, if there hadn't been a group of those dogs there, he would have surely killed numerous dogs yeah and he was big he was one of the few 160 pound lions that i've caught in my life with and i mean it was a big big male that just didn't have any fear of us or the hounds or anything else anyhow when i slid down in there i had my pistol in my hand and just you know you're sliding i i jammed it into the dirt and i just didn't want to you know i didn't know if it was full of dirt or not.

Yeah, you didn't want to shoot it. And I had that stick with me. Typically, when lions are wounded, they'll bite down on a stick like that. I never really had to deal with one that wasn't wounded before. But it did the same thing. And Chris got there about the same time it bit down on the stick. But that's what I was using to beat the dogs and it back, trying to get them separate. Oh, I got you.

And that's how the stick got in its mouth. So do you lose a lot of dogs to lions? No. If you, typically you lose them to the bluffs, you know, and falling off of things more than lions. This last year we had a dog, another lion similar to Chris's that busted the skull on one dog's head and had another one in his skull, the hound's head in its mouth and I shot it. It would have killed some dogs.

We lost maybe four or five over 30 years directly to a lion like that. Getting them. Right. I think this was you that I asked this one time. I was asking you if you ever have any problem, like when you're bringing in dogs that have been tore up by lions, if the vets ever frown on you. And I think you told me you went and found a vet who likes to hunt lions. Well, he's retired now, but we have a local vet here in town. And there's a couple of them that are lion hunters. So they understand.

They understand. They're good about it. And even the clinic we use now, they're certainly not what I would consider hunting-oriented or anything like that. And they're always there for us. But there are a lot of people that frown on it you know i remember one time i went into an emergency clinic with one

of my hounds and it would it had had a gastric torsion where its stomach had turned it was a great dog and i was really worried about losing it and this pudgy little veterinarian told me that the the dog uh she obviously didn't believe in hunting. And she told me she was going to turn me into the Humane Society or the Sheriff's Department for mistreatment of animals because my dog was in such poor shape physically. And she was probably 50 pounds overweight. And I pointed out to her that you didn't see any fat people winning the Olympics either. And, of course, that didn't help our relationship. They did save the dog but yeah every once in a while you get into those clinics and yeah run into that there's a lot of people that disapprove of lion you know hunting with hounds

and they think that it's unfair to hunt lions oh all the time it's like one of the lion hunts one of the things that when anti-hunting groups, anti-hunting money, humane society, a lot of the money comes from other organizations. When they look at what they can go after, that's one of the things they go after. I remember reading this thing where it was a series of polls on acceptance of hunting. And I remember reading one in Arizona where if you just asked people, do you support a person's right to hunt? And it was surprising to me. I can't remember exactly, but it was somewhere on the lines of like 74% or 75% of people supported it. But any time you ask them a specific thing, the acceptance rate would go down.

So people like the idea. But you say, okay, how about bow hunting? Much less. No matter what specific inquiry you put to them it was always like less people approved of the specific than it did the concept and when you want to go after something you you can make the case pretty easy they've done it effectively in several states now you can make the case pretty easily that it's real bad to hunt lions with dogs absolutely we've lost it in washington california oregon i don't understand why like i i i guess i kind of get what they're thinking but i think that they're

thinking that the dogs are doing all the work or i don't like what is the have you ever gotten a sense in your well it's you know i always kind of it, it's always tough for me to approach those people. Whenever people have a strong opinion about something that they have no knowledge about, you've got to almost assume that you're dealing with an idiot. Yeah. So at that point, the discussion for me becomes hard to engage. And I'll sit down with some people and talk to them about it. But the one thing I always tell people is, you know, in my life that, you know, I learned to fly a

helicopter in 30 days, can run multiple businesses. Everything is relatively easy compared to getting up in the morning and saying, oh, I'm going to go catch a mountain lion today. So it's really insulting when somebody says it's not sportsmanlike or it's unfair. Because they have no, it's just they haven't got a clue. You know, when you look at that and you think about that being put to a ballot or an initiative,

I can make the case, you know, lions are probably the most noble creature in the woods, probably certainly one of the most beautiful. And when people look at that they say how could you go kill that animal and you know in in wildlife management all animals have to be managed there's not you don't get to pick and choose which ones you do or don't manage so i i get really you know i i understand how they make the case i could probably

do a lot better job than they do but it's mostly they don't understand how sporting it is yeah that's you know it used to be the sport of kings chasing hounds and it was chasing foxes in england yeah a thing that i find works for people it's like it's helpful when you're like sort of conceptualizing what kind of hunting is is acceptable or not acceptable or likely to be shot down in a public ballot or not. I'm stumbling around this, but there's sort of a thing like traditional use. So in areas where people have traditionally hunted lions with dogs, I would tend to think, and I think most people would agree, that you would continue doing what was traditional.

So if you had an area, like there's states where you've never been able to bait, to set out bait for black bears. You can't bait black bears in Montana, for instance. It's been like that for a long time now. I'm not like uh pressing you know i'm not encouraging someone to legalize baiting bears in montana because the way it was set it was set from a wildlife management issue it was set from a traditional use issue and they have a system that

works you know but it's like when you start taking away traditional use practices, that's more upsetting to me and that makes me more suspicious than preventing new practices from entering the realm. That makes sense. I think it's something that comes up all the time. When guys down south, for me, I grew up in the upper Midwest. No one hunts deer with dogs. If you went and said, we're going to start a new rule, you can hunt deer with dogs. People, particularly deer hunters, would be up in arms, okay? They'd be like burning buildings down over this. Meanwhile, you can hunt deer with dogs in the southeast, many states. It's just what they've done. And you have to kind of respect traditional use practices, I think.

And the thing with lions is because the way lions behave, when they're active, how they travel, you just, you can kill them with predator calls, kind of. Now and then a guy will run into one and shoot it. But it's like you hunt lions with dogs. To stop dog hunting for lions, you're basically saying you can't hunt lions. Correct. Basically.

And I know like in South Dakota, they guys call them in a little bit, you know. Well, we just got the data back for our 2014 harvest here. I believe there was 200, and these are round numbers, but 270 lions harvested, and at least 230 of those were with the aid of hounds. Is that right? You know, and I say 230, maybe it's just over 220, 230, somewhere in there. But basically, when you remove hound hunting from the scope of wildlife management lion hunting lions with hounds from the scope of wildlife management you've effectively removed your ability to manage lions whether it's to benefit a sheep or deer or any other prey species

so now that california is a great example go to california and try and find a deer yeah they thought they had a lion hunting problem now they got a lion problem Now, California is a great example. Go to California and try and find a deer. Yeah. They thought they had a lion hunting problem. Now they got a lion problem. And right now we're seeing a decline in the lion numbers in the western states, at least in the states I'm familiar with, which are Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, and Arizona. Lion numbers are far lower now than they were five years ago. And we've got, you know, I'd hate to guess,

I'd say that there's a third to half the lions that we had five to ten years ago. But it really doesn't have anything to do with hunting pressure. It has more to do with the cyclic following prey bases. And everything cycles, and all wildlife species do. But they're definitely down now. It's one of the things we've encountered, like when we were on the... That's weird because they're having like an like outside of this area they're having they're experiencing an expansion of range right right like expanding yeah expanding into more urban

areas expanding in the states that you have traditionally not had them and i would question too whether those states have or haven't had them. I mean, everywhere has had them. Well, but the advent of trail cameras has given us a lot more documentation. You know, there's always been claims of lions in Maine. Yeah. And everybody thought, you know, somebody was just seeing things.

But now with trail cameras, you know, it's obviously a much more documented situation. And they are, and I do believe they are expanding the range. They're a very dynamic, very healthy population of lions in the United States. Yeah, and that expansion's a lot less if you take out young males. Like, if you were to draw a map of where females were showing up, that map's not nearly as big as where males are showing up. So a lot of times when you find these, when these lions are coming out of the eastern u.s and people used to say like oh it's

a runaway pet you'd be like there's a hell of a lot of people with mountain lion pets at this point but now they're finding you know these are like these male mountain lions they're traveling several states over coming out of the, you know, turning up in crazy places. Researchers term those as transient lions, and they're almost always males. And males tend to be the ones that get in the most trouble. A friend of mine that works for the government is, I think it was 500 lions were removed in a, I forget how many year period of time, but the vast majority of them were males. Yeah. And that's typically what you see.

They're the ones that get the most drugs. Do you tree more males than females? They're easier to tree. And I would say, yes, we do. Why are they easier to tree? You know, they leave more scent. They travel the country. The example I always use

is a guy going into a store and buying something. He goes in and he gets what he wants and he comes back, he's gone. He's straight line in, straight line out. You send your girlfriend or your wife in there, she might be there an hour to get the same thing and wander all over the damn store. That's how female lines are. So it makes them much more challenging to trail and they leave less scent. Gotcha.

The males are generally much like in the case of chris's lion that day that son of a gun came right straight down that canyon for two or three miles yeah you know and and uh when we were going backwards trying to find the dog we saw every place that he scratched and every mark that he made along there but and by the way i'd say they use their hind feet most of the time it is hind feet yeah is what i mean there's that's always been but there's an awful lot of pictures on trail cameras now i'm using the hind feet but uh and they use both but sometimes they use their front feet too you know there's a story i know i told you this in the past play where in the 1930s, in Florida, it was generally accepted that the Florida Panther was gone. You know, there was rumors of sightings in the same way that now they can take some state like Missouri or something where like now another guy will see one.

Everybody tells me he's crazy, right? That was the situation in Florida. But there was some guys who just knew they were there and there's a story where a guy in some somewhere in the early 30s i think it was he got in touch with some houndsmen in arizona and they came out and within a couple weeks had killed seven lions in florida at which point people said, okay. We get the point. And the guy was just basically saying, stop telling me there's no

lions in Florida. And I don't remember who the lion hunter was, but that could have been one of the Lee brothers or any number of, you know, there was a lot of famous lion hunters. I went and re-read it because you had mentioned there were some famous lion guys. I went and re-read it. He doesn't name the guy that came.

Well, a man out of Texas, his name and there's a whole family of them, because you had mentioned there were some famous lion guys. I went and re-read. He doesn't name the name of the guy that came. He doesn't name the name. Well, a man out of Texas, his name, and there's a whole family of them, the McBrides, and Roy McBride is the one that I believe they, I don't remember where, maybe out of Texas, that they took lions back to Florida and infused them into that population to help bring it back around and some fresh genetics in there yeah but

yeah that's been a dynamic population down there now and it seems like they've got a very healthy population yeah it's doing better now and it was a funny thing because when we talk about mountain lions we're talking about there's so many names so mountain lion cougar puma or puma, catamount. Catamount. That's one you don't hear very often. I mean, that was like an older term in the East primarily was catamount. It's all the same thing. And so, like, again, like, go back to the time of European contact. These things were everywhere. Right.

You know. Coast to coast. Yeah. There was no real division. So there was probably no genetic barrier, really, when you factor how much they could travel, how many places they were. There was probably no genetic barrier between the ones in Florida and the ones in Washington State.

They're just lions. When the lion population in Florida got so low, people made an argument that they were talking like a subspecies and it's this constant like in biology you have this constant like lumping and splitting but people were arguing that you had this like subspecies in Florida

and that it would damage it somehow to bring you know blood in from somewhere else but they did and you know literally every mountain range It would damage it somehow to bring blood in from somewhere else. But they did. Yeah, and literally every mountain range can have its own subspecies if you get carried away, just because the animals may or may not ever travel out of that. They have the same kind of thing.

They call it the Yuma Puma here in Arizona. And all it was was a lion that was geographically isolated, just like the Florida panther. And at that point, they will take on their own genetic characteristics but they're still all mountain lions yeah and those things in florida were having they needed genetic diversity brought in so bad they were like their tails were shaped wrong and just all kinds of problems too much inbreeding and it was a funny thing because like you look at people who argue in favor of the existence of bigfoot okay that you've had you know like people say there's all those bigfoots in the up you have bigfoots of california bigfoots in washington bigfoots in oregon so you got a sizable population you must right and they've been here continuously now since people would argue pre before the arrival of native Americans across the Bering

Land Bridge, no one's hit one with a car yet. No one has a trail cam. But in Florida, take just the dead on the street thing. In Florida, at a point, they were down to

a known 47 or 50 mountain lions in Florida. And every year, they're losing multiple cats to getting hit by cars. And this is in the Everglades, where there's not a huge abundance of roads. And you've got 50 of a species, and you're hitting several a year with cars. That, to me me is the greatest argument against the existence of bigfoot if you could be hitting like a significant percentage of mountain lions with cars every year but no one's run into one of these things a real one it's always

like it's like a real dead one that we can just show around i run into people occasionally that actually believe that there is you know i mean i've got two of my life that i think of that were dead serious about it and i and it generally goes back to an experience they had out in the woods where they saw something that they thought was bigfoot but i spent 30 years of my life riding through the state of arizona staring at the ground i've never seen anything that even came close to looking like Bigfoot. Well, this isn't Bigfoot country. Yeah, well, I mean, that's probably true.

We don't have a lot of sightings here. Yeah, yeah. What is some of the work you've done with going out with government people or biologists or whatever to, like, get lions? Well, the bulk of it is probably the late 80s. I haven't done much in the last 10 or 15 years, but it would be the studies over by Wickenburg and over in that area in the desert country

and from Wickiup and all through the western portion of our state over there. What did they do? They hire you just to put lions in the trees? Yeah, it was hired in one case and then in the others generally volunteering my time because it was all the typically the biologists were friends of mine people like that that yes that knew us but uh you and you in those in those places you almost always put them up in a rock you know on a bluff and they darted put a collar on them and then a lot of times we'd have to go back out and change collars you know and the back in those days the telemetric systems weren't what they are today and we

certainly didn't have any satellite stuff so it was all they would change them which you know those lions get to be pretty savvy after you have to do that with them a couple times because like if a lion trees once and gets caught he's less likely to tree again the second time right he's darn sure not going to tree as easily, typically. Particularly, I say that the females seem to be worse than the males, but Julie and I this year had a male lion that, well, we started the track in the morning at six or seven in the morning and went from Arizona to New Mexico, eight miles as the crow flies, air miles, eight miles as the crow flies, air miles, eight miles. And at three o'clock in the afternoon,

the lion was across the canyon from us, the actual Mule Creek Canyon drainage. And we could see the lion. It was laying on the side of the rim, looking back, watching the dogs come. And that turned into a second pack of dogs in that process. So that lion wasn't going to be caught.

And then we watched, I mean, we saw it twice that day you never caught it never caught it in fact the second time we saw it i called a friend of mine that owned the ranch and he came and got on the track with the lions and the dogs and you know we ended up getting caught up with him and getting the hound stopped but that lion i doubt that lion will ever be caught by hounds and it's obviously learned that that's a learn because he's just not going to go into a tree right and and what they do is they get out in front of the dog in that case he would get about i'd say it was a half mile he started moving again and they start trotting and for whatever reason typically it's there's a lot of different theories behind it but a lion that is trotting. And for whatever reason, typically there's a lot of different theories behind it, but a lion that is trotting or running is much harder for a dog to trail

if the scent has landed on the ground. If the scent's still floating in the air and the hound can take it out of the air, it can really put some pressure on an animal. But as soon as that scent that's in the air dissipates, the dog has to go back to smelling it on the ground and now the scent and the spores that were very evenly laid because the lion was casually walking are now in bounded piles where it's landing if it's jumping or even when it's trotting it's just dispersing those those cells elsewhere for it so it makes it harder for him to

trail it yeah and there again that's when it comes into the case that the dogs are in good enough shape. I thought mine were in really good shape at that time, but there are guys that hunt that do it professionally that their dogs might have been in better shape and put more pressure on that cat and made it climb the tree. But it was a long day. So when you saw that land across the canyon, what do you mean? You just looked over and there he was?

Julie saw it. And she wanted me to shoot it. And, of course, I had a pistol. And I told her, I said, I wasn't going to be able to shoot it. And she filmed it. She filmed it over there laying under the tree. And it's mouth's hanging wide open. How many yards away?

150, 175. It's one of those, it's just, you know, real abrupt, bluffing canyon. And then you saw it get back up and start going? Right. As the dogs closed in? And it laid down under a big pine tree. It was interesting to watch this. The dogs, there was three dogs coming.

And we knew, you know, they're all, we knew which dogs they were. And they were coming fast. When they got to the tree, they thought the lion had gone up the tree. Because the scent was so strong. Oh, yeah. So they fooled around there for another five minutes or so while the lion's just getting farther ahead and going and going. Yeah. And I'm sure it got ahead.

And now the hounds never quit going. So, you know, the lion's doing this where it's running for a while and then it'll go through a really rough spot and then take a break and it just it was a lot smarter than people think they are that's uh you know there's a lot of people that'll make the case that a cat's iq is greater than that of a dog and i never really thought that most of my life but you know some of these experiences like that really make you think about it yeah 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.

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Let me go back to the biology thing. So you guys would go out and catch them with the collar on. Does that make it super easy to catch a lion when you got a telemetry deal yes typically when you do that you know where he is and when he's there right right uh it's you know half of the hunt is trying to locate a track a lot of times i got you and you know once you locate the track then you start trailing the lion and we're you know really when you have the collar on a lion like that, you're going to a spot to catch the lion. I'm with you. With fresh dogs.

It's a lot different. What happens between when you run the lion and the lion doesn't know you're after him? He's just going about his business. When you say jump a lion, what happens when they jump the lion? That just means the lion is now aware of dogs. That means we've come to the place, the lions, they travel a great deal early afternoon, late evening,

and then again they travel some in the morning, but most of their traveling starts about three or four in the afternoon and then probably eight, 9 o'clock. They're either laying up somewhere. I've learned a lot from people's trail cam photos. They just don't travel as much as I thought they traveled all night. And they don't.

It seems like the sweet spot for them is that early evening stuff. So if you started to track them. Daylight hours. Right. Most of their traveling is daylight hours. That gray light type stuff. Yeah. And you're liable to see them at any time.

But the evening, early evening, and in that, you know, 8, 9 o'clock seems to be the time that they do most of their hunting. So if you're picking up on one of those tracks, you're now, say you hit it at 7 or 8 o'clock in the morning, you're 12 hours behind this thing. So it's going to be a grind. And if it's a male and the conditions are right, like this time of year, those males put off a lot more scent and the trailing conditions are a lot better than, say, if it was in September or in October. Gotcha. But when you, you know, the dogs are barking and trailing, doing 100 miles of what we did together. When they get to where that lion's laid up, that lion jumps and runs, now that track's very fresh. And a lot of times they're taking it out of the air. They'll be chasing that lion and it just, you can tell the dogs have jumped it.

It's just the intensity and their excitement. And some dogs that may not have barked all day will all of a sudden be joining in. And that's when you know they've jumped the line. And that's when the race is on. And sometimes it'll just last to the bottom of the canyon. And then sometimes it may be a mile. But it generally is, typically, a normal lion, it would be over. You would expect to get it caught at that point. And when he's getting caught, what's he usually going into trees or rock piles in arizona we probably catch them 50 of them in the rocks do they go into holes oh yeah mine shafts all kinds of and it's i think the cats just wonder through their domain throughout time because they seem to find the craziest places to go get in and they also seem to know how to get

out of them and we dave martin's lion the fellow that puts the rim to rim on this year lion joe mitchell called and said you know we're coming your way and anyhow when they he actually saw the lion get up and go in the rock pile he was above us and we hiked up to where the rock pile was and dave and joe were standing on one side of the rock pile and i was above us. And we hiked up to where the rock pile was, and Dave and Joe were standing on one side of the rock pile, and I watched the lion come out the other side. And I say a rock pile, it's probably a 75 yard long pile of boulders.

And that lion traveled through that maze of boulders and come out somehow on our side. And fortunately for all of us that were hunting the lion, I had dogs with me and saw it and then we got joe's dogs over there and managed to get it in a tree but you know that that lion that's how smart they are the underground passageway yeah he had an underground passageway

the lion had gotten away the week before doing something similar to that oh okay you know but they're cats you know they probably spend their lifetime prowling around in that mountain investigating all those nooks and crannies and that kind of thing i was hunting how often kind of quick question how often can you jump on like that and be on like a hot track where they're where you're like the chase is on but then you don't get them treed you know it's happened once this year you know out of a dozen lions yeah so it's uh it typically when they jump a lion you should catch it but you just never know it's you know that's kind of what makes it exciting now the lions have definitely this you know as the numbers of lions decrease the lions that are in existence are just smarter genetically that you know whether it's a

genetic thing or a learned trait from having been hunted or whatever it may be they they certainly seem to be jumping and running and they're evolving more in that sense you know i recently i have a dog out in the backyard you haven't seen steve that's a friend of mine out of wisconsin helped me acquire they call them lurchers but it's half border collie and half staghound. His only job is to handle those kinds of things. He's just a physical specimen as far as an animal with super high intelligence and unbelievable physical ability.

He just meant to handle a jumped lion. Right. Jumped lions, lions that do things that the hounds... The hounds typically, if one jumps and they're looking at it, they handle that very well. But this dog would be more along the lines of, with his intelligence and the fact that he isn't a trail hound, when he thinks we might be getting close to a place

where we're going to jump a lion, he gets out and he spends a lot of time doing things that the hounds aren't doing, trying to get the jump on that lion. Is that right? Oh. He just kind of like kicks up the intensity just a little bit. Right. He doesn't even normally leave us until he thinks they might be getting close to catching it.

And then all of a sudden he'll just disappear. And I don't know. I mean, I never am there right when it happens, but I feel like he has definitely helped. I know that he helps when they jump in the tree jump type stuff. he doesn't really do a lot of things like a hound does but he never quits looking at him and you know when like that lion hits and he's only seen maybe 10 or 15 lions now when that lion heads out to a tree limb he looks like he's trying to catch a pop fly you know i mean he's right there trying he knows what he's gonna do yeah and he's you know he's anticipating it the whole way yeah and your dogs might be oblivious to the fact that the lions

leave in the tree no they some are but most of them kind of get that but they tend to be more reactive and the border collie in him is you can see the intelligence factor there you know you know you're talking about that lion going underground and coming out on our spot. We were hunting pigs, wild pigs in New Zealand with dogs. And the guy had the GPS collars on the dogs. And all of a sudden, his dogs just vanish off of his... He's not getting on his unit. He's not getting their signal anymore.

And we start going in the direction we'd last heard him and then now and then it'd be like it'd pop the dog would pop up one of the dogs would be like oh there it is but then it'd go away and it was because this pig had gone down into a tunnel the dogs went in and yeah it wasn't getting satellite reception anymore on his collar but then the pig wound up getting stuck in the way i wasn't getting satellite reception anymore on his collar but then the pig wound up getting stuck in the tunnel so the dogs just down there holding on the pig's tail and no one's coming out of that hole wow so we wound up digging a shaft down to the pig and pulled up with dogs still hanging off it

on the other end. Like the dogs were just never going to give up. Yeah, no, they, you know. That's generally your best dogs. You know, the ones that quit early and all that, those are the ones that you probably wonder if you shouldn't find them a good home. And unfortunately, those a lot of times are the dogs that get killed because they jump off bluffs after their quarry or whatever it may be but those are the good ones yeah it's kind of funny you talk about um

it's like we have such a weird relationship with dogs in this country where on some on some level we want to bestow on them like human characteristics you know and that they have almost like human rights but then how can you then tell the dog that he shouldn't want to hunt lions? Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's like an honest question I always think about is if you really are, like, let's say you're like adamant, you know, you're a vegan, right? Do you think that wolves should stop killing?

No one's ever actually answered this question for me. But do you know what I mean? It's like, who are we to tell a dog that he don't want to hunt that lion? Well, think about 90% of your animal rights people are cat and dog lovers that have some form of an animal in their home. And if they let that animal be wild for one

second, it would go back to killing its own, particularly cats. You don't need to talk the dog into wanting to hunt lions. Right. They get up in the river. Some just do it. And that's what really probably the breeding of those dogs is the single most important part, is to breed that drive and desire and those those

characteristics into them i'm fortunate enough a man here in arizona that's hunted lions his entire life named steve smith and and a man that's mentored me is jim bueller out of nevada those guys have the breeding that they've created i've been the beneficiary of and it's a game changer for you as a lion hunter to have those genetics that where that dog get you know when it's the day it's born it's it's almost as though they want to hunt lions so you've got dogs that come from generations of dogs that have been selected like selectively bred for lion hunting decades 30 40 years yeah did you were you hunting lions at all during the bounty days when you could get a bounty on lions?

No. That was in the 1960s. I think the late 60s, that went away here. So if you refer to that, they're talking about way ago. When you would just turn in the scalp on that lion. Right. And there was guys that, and we still to this day have government guys that are on payroll to do that to protect the livestock industry. You know, some of these lions just, they can wreck havoc.

In Nevada, I know Jim Buehler's dealt with as many as 20 and 30 sheep killed in one evening. And there's numbers where they're much higher than that, but that's not a crazy thing to see. Julie and I showed up one time, and the lion had killed 12 sheep that day. Is that right? Yeah, and it just looks like a massacre. And I'm not sure why they do it. I think they just get to be like a largemouth bass eating shad.

I mean, they just get to kill them. Did you guys catch the lion that killed all those sheep we did I remember when I was a kid I used to read trapper and predator caller magazine I remember an article in there it was called like the hundred thousand dollar line and it was because they had done a bighorn sheep transplant and in a lion killed all the sheep they transported and you know that they brought into this area i feel like it was in arizona well there's been of course the the brilliance of our game and fish department here to transplant sheep on a mountain called lion mountain this is back in the days when

they didn't acknowledge that lions had an effect on sheep which in the last decade they have certainly come light years around on that. But even today, we have the Derringers, or just world-class lion hunters here in Arizona, are working on the Aerovipa sheep herd to preserve it. Another man, Jim Bedland, has done a lot of work. Steve Smith has done a lot of work in Unit 22 here to bring back those sheep to Jason. Just trying to take pressure off them. Remove as much pressure as they could.

Typically, they remove the females or what you need to get out of there to get a sheep population to come back. There's no girls. The boys don't show up for the party. And the females, when they set up and teach those kittens to kill those sheep, they're just devastating.

I know the guys in Nevada, Jim Buehler and Casey Shields, they both were just working on the Salmon River on the Rockies, removing lions up there this last week. So that's been very... For what kind of stuff there? Ag purposes or for wildlife purposes? No, wildlife purposes.

That's all wildlife stuff. That's one thing you really lose is... Well, it's very expensive to keep professional lion hunters in business, and we'll always have them as long as we have lions. I mean, in California, they banned sport hunting of lions, and I think they were killing 300 or 400 lions a year. Yeah, no, they killed 300 or 400 and did the same thing. Except we pay to do it.

Is that right? Yeah. Yeah, the harvest of lions has never gone down in California. It's just illegal to do it from a sports standpoint now. But from the agriculture standpoint you know you just if you're going to have going to feed this nation you have to keep predators from eating the sheep and the cattle that's just that's just how it is any idea what it costs you think to keep to kill three or four hundred lions in california no i mean i don't know off the top of my head but

it's you know it's it's a government agency that's functioning. You can imagine the expense of that. But we'd have them anyway. They deal with a lot of other things. They deal with everything from controlling the waterfowl around airports so we can take off and land our airplane. Deer on the runways at the military bases. you know but something must have shifted in california though because you hear about that that like that the number of cats that lions are removing through predator control but then on the other hand you hear so many stories about just like the shifting nature of the lion population in california and lions popping up in places they hadn't popped up in before guys losing more

livestock to lions than they used to so something must be it must not be they were going to kill x number now they're killing the same number anyways or else you probably wouldn't have these issues no and it's always hard to track lion actual lion harvest numbers but one thing that you when you are hunting a lion population you know it, especially even if guys are catching them and turning them loose, those lions have a tendency to avoid people. And these big males, Chris's, I think back to yours, was probably one of the worst I can remember. But we caught one in New Mexico last year that absolutely,

and I can tell when I come up to them whether they're going to be a problem or not, but some of those lions, they're king of the woods. Those big males, they don't wonder if they can kill you and and when you get a lion like that wandering around in some place with children or people that are jogging and not paying attention if it decides to kill i think the only reason they don't kill more people is that a they're upright and they don't correlate that with their normal method of taking prey yeah and we probably taste bad you know i mean in comparison to say a deer or something they're accustomed to eating.

But we've certainly lost people. I mean, and every year, Colorado seems to be having more interaction than anybody these days. Petite female joggers. Oh. And then young kids. It seems like they're the- Those are the-

So it's like, it is like there's some kind of visual thing and often the thing with people running. Well, I think the reaction of those two types of people are where a man may stand his ground or at least not at least think not to just turn and run uh children it's hard to convey that to them you know they're just probably they're scared and they're going to run and even if the cat wasn't cats are very instinctive they're just like house cats lions are overgrown great big version of a house cat and if something runs very instinctive they're just like house cats lions are overgrown great big version of a house cat and if something runs from it they they just go into that predatory mode

but when you factor like how many lions there are it's kind of shocking and like how many there are and that they have the capability to kill people it's shocking it just doesn't happen doesn't happen more and i always tell people you know here in arizona it used to be typical for people to hunt a lifetime and see a lion now with everybody doing so much more optics hunting they tend to see a lot more with the optics than they used to but i always told people i said well don't ever wonder if one has seen you you know i don't know how many times we've ridden by where a lion was laid up and come back the next day and trailed it. You know, and realized that son of a gun was right there.

Oh, is that right? You know, let us ride by. Maybe it was asleep. Maybe it was watching us. Who knows? But it was 500 yards up on the side of the mountain in the bluffs watching us probably. Not to digress a little bit, but just a point you were talking about with lion harvest and lion predation. And Floyd pointed this out to me. And I think it's genius in the process,

the thought process, is that we're controlling, we're hunting lions, but we don't control coyotes as well as we used to with the banning of trapping in most states and the banning of poison in all states. So a lion goes out and a lion kills a deer, it needs an average of one deer a week. Well, a lion goes out and kills a deer, well, now our coyote population is out of control. The coyotes come along, find the kill, eat it before the lion can even get a belly full practically. Now, all of a sudden, that lion is back hunting again.

So instead of killing one deer a week, he's maybe killing two or three just to meet his needs. So a state like California, you used to kill 300 with sport hunting. Now we're killing 300 with government hunters. But I got to believe if we were controlling coyote populations, that 300 was a lot more significant number

back then than it is now. Yeah, I see what you're saying. Yeah, because the coyotes are just basically forcing the deer to hunt, I mean, the lion to hunt. Interesting. Since we've had that conversation, I saw a study the other day where they've documented that with the wolves. The same scenario.

The grizzlies steal their... The wolves steal, the lion kills. Oh, wolves steal, lion kills. And they pirate them. Which, you know, there's a lot of things going on that are always hard it's a very dynamic process when you try and figure out how lions engage the prey species but there's always a lot of moving parts to it too the coyote deal is a real significant problem here uh they've taken some steps here to try and manage them in

certain places but it's it's definitely where our fawn crop is really really getting hammered here losing them to that there was a video clip that came out of washington where a deer had a was wearing a collar camera and um you're they have the footage from this where because he's like it's just like sort of it's sort of like the camera's hanging down where the tags on a dog would hang down. And you can see the deer, he's just browsing. And when a lion comes and kills it,

the lion comes directly on that thing. Doesn't come from behind, doesn't jump from a tree. It's just all of a sudden there's a lion running directly at this deer. And that deer's just all of a sudden there's a lion running directly at this deer wow and that deer's just dead in seconds yeah oh they're they're extremely effective killers but he just came like just at it you know and typically i i would say that they they kind of ride up on him from behind

and try and oh you think wouldn't you think that'd be how you do it this guy this is like all of a sudden there he is head on head on you know and you got the feeling he'd done it before you know and you know some of those big males and and any lion their strength pound for pound is just unbelievable to me i mean i've seen them flip dogs distances with I'm not even sure I saw quite how the dog got slung so far. And their strength is amazing. And to watch them leap up onto some bluff since they just explode and fly through the air. I refer back to the house cat. You know, you watch a house cat, it's nothing for them to leap up on the side of any piece of furniture or anything they decide to. That's how those lions are, just, you know, tenfold that.

Yeah. You ever been scratched by a lion? The, no, I haven't. The, although Joe got bit two years ago, and that was a complete fiasco. Our girls had shot the lion with a.38 Special, and it came out of the tree, and the dogs were all it was a you know kind of the normal problem the lion when joe stepped in there to try and grab one of his dogs the lion got a hold of his jeans and just i mean one just jerked on him a little bit and jerked his

leg out from under him and then just bit him in the, right here in the calf and then proceeded to just claw its way up him. And that was, uh, and, and I had a pretty big old Oakland, but I, I always get a stick when, when we're about to shoot one.

Anyhow, I went to hitting that thing and I couldn't get it off of him, but when I hit it, it would quit going up him other than it was, it bit him. It only bit him really hard the one time. And, uh,

I remember the last time I swung at that thing, I remember thinking, if I miss this line, I'll break his femur in half. And I hit the line in the head, and it turned around and came after me. And I had a pistol too, so it was kind of the end of the story there. But it was a painful experience for him. And we had punched some holes in him. Did he have to do a bunch of staples shots, like any kind of shots for that? You've met Joe, so you can imagine.

It was all we could do to get him to take some antibiotics. He thought it was kind of a cool deal. He was bleeding all over the place. That's really the only one where I've been involved in somebody getting hurt. You know, the first line I ever saw, I was coming back from trout fishing on this lake, and I'm driving, it's just after dark,

and I'm driving like on where a where roads cut into a steep hillside and all of a sudden all these white tails are like coming down the grade in just like a cloud of dust and kind of like plopping down into the road in front of me but like they're spooked rather than being spooked from me they're spooking from something almost like running into my into my van and the headlights and all and then but then the road was so sheer on the side that they sort of shuffle trying to stay on the road without going over the ledge they sort of shuffle along, like right alongside the door of the vehicle. And I roll my window down and put it in reverse to turn the rear lights on because I'm trying to see what they're doing. And I roll the window down, put the backup lights on, and standing, just feet off my bumper is a lion standing there.

Oh, wow. Like, I have no idea what I drove into or what the situation was as I came around the corner. And I, like, tried, like, to piece it together in my head. But there's no way to explain, like, how everyone got in the position they were in when I hit them with those lights. You probably did a double take. Yeah, I was like, he's like, hold on a minute. Now what? Like, there's a van here yeah probably thinking thank god for that truck it was just the weird yeah it was the weirdest

thing man he's just like standing there in the back of lights like yeah like he's trying to kill one around me so now if you've been on you you hunt lions in Arizona and New Mexico. Now, what prevents you from just taking your lion hunting operation and going to the next frontier of lion hunting? Well, I think we're probably in it here. I think there's probably more opportunity. Nothing prevents you from doing that. You can travel and go.

But you feel like this is still a good, for now, even, a good place to be a lion hunter. Yes. It's not nearly as good as it was five years ago or even ten years ago.

Somewhere in there we peaked out and it's been declining ever since. But it's one of the greatest places there is because here we, you know, it snows in the high country every year consistently, but there's always lots of wilderness areas and pockets that these lions can move out of so you have a constant uh regeneration of most areas and with that said this year is the first time we've seen places where there's no lions in certain spots and that's you know concerning to everybody that likes to hunt lions here in arizona right now what do you attribute that to i mean in the last five years

it's not like there's been a great influx of lion hunters. Well, there's been more. Is that right? There's a lot more people who've gotten, you know, every day I hear somebody that's a lion hunter that I've never met and never heard of. Whereas 10, 15, 20 years ago, I kind of knew everybody that did it very much. And the biggest thing that I think is a factor now is the mechanization. When people used to have to ride mules and that was the primary way to do it, it was limiting in itself just to have the livestock, so not everybody did it.

But now with the four-wheelers, I see a lot of guys that wouldn't be effective normally that are very, very effective because they'll drive on their four-wheelers until they find a track, just like they were hunting in the snow. And then they'll... Find a track in the dust. Right, in the dust. And that seems to have really

increased the harvest of lions. And with that said, our lion harvest has not changed significantly. Arizona's harvested between 200 and 300 lions for well over a decade oh i got you so something else is going on it's yeah and i'm not like like you're weird talking about her like something with like like the like a cycle with the with the prey base you know and our deer herd's been in a decline for a decade anyway yeah maybe two decades yeah

and possibly everything's just reaching that point where the predators are following it um it's just really hard to say i and this is you know the first time i've ever felt like our lion numbers were low and and it's and it's not i don't think that much there's much that could be done to change it one way or the other. If you wanted to increase it or decrease it more, it's just a natural thing. It's natural peaks and valleys of wildlife. What's the next favorite food after deer for a mountain lion, not counting domestic? Javelina here. It's number two.

It'd probably go deer, calves, javelina. The spring around here, they can just be deadly on these calves. When we were out, we found we wanted to kill a fox. Well, a fox and a deer. We found a dead deer, yeah. Didn't we find a calf kill at one of the old calf kills? I don't remember that. I remember if I wanted to just rip the fox up.

And that's kind of where we were. You saw where they've eaten tortoises or turtles. Right. Turtles or tortoises? Desert tortoises. Desert tortoises, yeah. I happened to be riding tortoises? Desert tortoises. Desert tortoises. I happened to be riding along with Matt Pierce, who was conducting this study in the Harkabars at the time. We were actually in the Wallapai Mountains and rode up where a lion had killed a desert tortoise and actually left a scratch right there by it.

Really? Broke the shell off of it, bit down on it, busted and busted the shell and probably jerked the turtle out through the hole. And then actually scratched just like he killed a deer and left that. And what was crazy was. He ate the meat off the turtle. Yeah. He pulled the meat free. It was just a shell there.

And Matt actually still, I'm sure he still has the shell. What was interesting was we were riding that day discussing the fact that a biologist, a lady by the name of Jenny Cashman, she was with the U of A at the time, and she had just finished doing the fecal exam, or they collected a bunch of scats up, and they were finding tortoise feet in there. Okay. And Matt had asked me, he said, do you think they eat tortoise? I said, no, they eat everything else. Like, what all have you seen when you're tracking them? What all have you seen that they've killed?

I can't think of anything that lives in Arizona that I haven't seen that they've killed. Badgers, skunks. Bear? Bears. Black bear? Eagles.

They were cubs, you know, young bears. Elk. Lots of sheep. Mostly deer. Everything. I just cannot think of a species antelope we had one it was last year the year before killed an antelope right up here my sunset point and uh they just they i think they can kill anything they want to it just didn't matter whether they

decide to do it or not you said you you've seen where they've killed eagles. Yeah. And that was on one of their kills. Oh, he came down. I was wondering how he caught what the eagle was doing. The eagle was just eating something. It was somehow the lion. Of course, cats catch birds all the time. I guess

the lion was probably laying right there when that eagle was eating on it and just took him out too. Did it eat the eagle? Yeah, it ate the breast out of it. Really? I remember looking at that when we rode up thinking, oh, I didn't want to get any credit for that at all. Burrows?

Burrows, they eat the wild burrows. They do? Yeah, you don't see that very often, but they'll kill these wild burrows once in the wild burrows they do yeah you don't see that very often but they'll kill these wild burrows once in a while yeah not enough of them but not enough of them that's we train lions to kill burrows we could solve a lot of problems yeah turn those lions loose yeah man that's the whole issue for a future conversation yeah that would be good i would love to have that conversation uh on the burrow? Just about, yeah. What to do about it.

We need to not have it when Julie's around if we're going to transfer it to the wild horse population. I just refuse to, I don't like the argument of people who say they should be treated like a native animal. They're not. Because somehow during the Eocene, they were here and then millions of years ago, or because the Spanish brought them here, they should be treated as a native species?

Because the Spanish brought pigs? They're feral livestock. Yeah. At the end of the day, they're feral livestock. And these horse lovers can make all the arguments they want to about that. But they're a non-native species and feral livestock. And how we have the wild horse burrow act boggles my mind. And it's a devastating habitat.

That's what I would think. I would think any time you have a conflict between feral livestock and native wildlife, that it just, I can't believe there's even a debate about which is going to, who's going to take precedence. And even if you took the wildlife out of the scope of it, the damage that can be done through the overgrazing, the same people that want to run every cow off the land think it's okay to let the burrows and the horses destroy it. Graze it.

Next time ladies and gentlemen on the Meteor Podcast we're going to take on the issue of wild burrows. You guys call them burrows? Burrows. That's what I call them. It's a wild horse. No, we have burrows. Burrows here too. Donkeys. Like full on wild donkeys. Oh yeah. And they're probably worse than the horses.

Oh, I didn't know about that how many of them roam arizona cool okay in the thousands really yeah they're really bad in desert sheep country because they'll just get into a waterhole and just own it they won't let anything come and drink they'll just hang out there for days anything that comes into it when you said that i just automatically thought you meant like mustangs no we and we we have more horses here now than we ever did due to the big fires that we had a lot of domestic horses got loose and a lot and then we had the economic downturn a lot of people turned horses loose here you know but uh and also the shut when they shut down the horse slaughter facilities yeah right you know cause that i remember I was talking to a stock detective. I wrote a story about livestock theft some years ago.

And one of the stock detectives was saying that there used to be a horse theft problem. And now we have the opposite problem. Where people are always waking up to find horses they do not want inside their fence. Or instead of trying to go get a horse, you're always trying to go get rid of a horse. Find a place to put them. All right, thank you for tuning in. We will solve the wild horse, wild burrow dilemma next time on the Meat Eater Podcast. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

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