The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 028

Episode Date: February 5, 2016

Subjects discussed: How to pronounce the word "Coues;" the five subspecies of the American wild turkey; what is a turkey Royal Slam?; the unwritten rules of hunting public lands; Kevin Murphy, the Neil deGrasse Tyson of squirrels; other hunters, a.k.a. the assholes; how to pick a conservation group; whether hunter recruitment is a scam; how Steve would cook goat testicles; bear hearts; elk hunting tips; the debate around suppressed firearms; coyote killing contests; point creep; poaching; the ins and outs of hunting technology; game eyes and the great challenge of spotting a Coues deer. 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. This is the Meat Eater Podcast. We're in Douglas, Arizona. Going to be crossing into Agua Prieta, Mexico tomorrow to hunt for coos deer or cows deer. What all pronunciations exist out there?

Coos. Coos. Cows. I don't like cows. Cows. Coos, cows, and cows. So don't now go and waste your time telling me that it's not actually coos deer. Chris Denham, and I've said this before, Chris Denham said he's, you know,

I think he's probably written more pages and published more pages of information about this animal than probably any man alive. And he said that he will call them coos deer until the day he dies. Fighting words. I agree, for sure. I'm here with Giannis Poutelis, maker of the famous Hunt to Eat t-shirts. How's that going, Gianni?

Great, Steve. Thanks. Giannis was just telling us before we started about how all the money he's made on Hunt to Eat t-shirts. Jay Scott, who's here with us, noticed that Giannis actually has money falling out of his pocket. There's a small pile of it here on the hotel. If you ever are fixing to get a Hunt to Eat t-shirt, do it now because he's almost made so much money

he's going to be getting out of the business. For our other two guests here, Giannis needs to make a shirt that says hunt to measure because J. Scott and Dara Colburn are here, and these guys are the guys that find the biggest critters running around in the mountains. They just go and look real quiet and patient and find them. We're crossing tomorrow to go hunt in Mexico,

but we're not actually hunting together. You guys have clients, multiple clients going down. And we're kind of riding on the Dar Colburn, Jay Scott coattails by getting some access onto a place to go hunt. But you guys got it. January's, right? You spend all January down here hunting coos deer? Yeah, typically January during the rut. What's your annual schedule like with guiding?

Starts in September usually for elk. September elk and then sheep. We start scouting in November and hunt sheep in December. And then pretty much January is coos deer down in Mexico. And you guys, like Jay, you're the only one you don't you don't do turkey anymore right dar uh well i'm back in this year so i don't know one year i couldn't take it i don't know if you follow turkeys at all there's something kind of interesting where there's in north like in the new world, you get two kinds of turkeys. You got just the regular American wild turkey.

And then you have a thing called the oscillated turkey, which lives in Central America, extreme Southern North America. But then you got like the regular old turkey we all know about. The regular old turkey we all know about is divided into five, what we've traditionally called subspecies, though a lot of geneticists argue that that's a bunch of malarkey and that they're not legitimate subspecies.

But you have the eastern wild turkey, which is native to the eastern U.S. Then you have the Osceola, which is in the southern half of the Florida panhandle. And that one is the one that geneticists say is the least legitimate subspecies because there's sort of this arbitrary line which happens to exist around Orlando where everything north of that line is the Eastern wild Turkey.

Everything South of that line is an Osceola and a Turkey could kind of walk back and forth from being an Eastern to an Osceola throughout the day. There are some morphological differences, like some coloration stuff, but basically it's kind of like, you know what it is based on where you shot it. Then you got, uh, what real grams miriams which are from the south southwestern u.s and texas and elsewhere um then the fifth is the kind of coolest one in my opinion the goulds

it's hard to find a goulds there There's some Goulds tags here in Arizona. I put in a form, never drawn them. Very limited. But most guys that want to get, what are you looking at me for? I was just wondering, is that the only U.S. state that has a couple? A few, not many. Now, if you pay attention to such things, there's a thing called the Grand Slam. I have a turkey Grand Slam in that I have killed all five kinds of turkeys.

Royal Slam. Royal Slam. And you have the World Slam. No, I don't have the World Slam because I never killed an oscillator. Oh, okay. I have the turkey. What kind of slam do I have? Royal.

Okay. A grand slam is a dude who kills four. The four main subspecies of turkeys. The four most readily available wild turkeys. I realize this is some major turkey geek stuff, but the royal slam is when you pick up the ghouls. People who are into turkeys usually... I'm pulling this out of my ass. people who are into turkeys usually... I'm pulling this out of my ass.

75% of the guys that need one more turkey to get a Royal Slam need a Goulds. 25% of the guys that need one more turkey to get a Royal Slam need an Osceola. I'm pulling it out of my ass. I agree. That's probably close. I agree. Probably close. Somewhere around there. Yeah. If you want to get a Goulds, you do a long shot draw,

and it's like a desert turkey. They live in the Sky Island areas down in New Mexico. If you want to get a Goulds, you do a long shot draw and draw a tag, or you call up J. Scott and Dar and dar colburn that's the only two ways right well my book that's it because these guys these guys spend a lot of time in mexico and they spend a lot of time scouting down there did you guys get into interested in mexico because of coos deer because the turkeys coos deer yeah and then you're like holy shit there's a lot of turkeys running around here i have a funny story just i know you go off on tangents but just a quick tangent i was down here why does why does the fact that i do how's that relevant who's the host of this show i'm going off on a tangent i appreciate the

morning i was down here i'm gonna sip you know i've always wanted to get straws so we could drink beer through straws and it didn't make a funny noise and so i'm gonna do that okay no one will notice because it doesn't make any noise quick tangent i was down here scouting ranches uh in a in the the late summer early fall and was looking at a ranch and they were making charcoal and we come up we come up to the pit where they're making it and out walks the freaking guy from the show we filmed down here three years ago. The guy that cooked with you on the charcoal guy. Same guy. Just doing a contract on another ranch.

Yeah, different ranch. I mean, 100 miles from there. I got a picture of it with him. Really? I was going to send it to you. Yeah, but it's the same guy that's on the show crazy process man and some thankless work is smoldering giant pits of charcoal he remembered dar oh yeah put his arm around yeah it was funny i was talking to these boys from national wild turkey federation and they were talking about when they were bringing

they were getting ghouls out ghouls turkeys out of me of Mexico in order to try to get them reestablished on native range in the United States. And they went down and struck a deal with a guy in Mexico that they wanted 20 turkeys. And he was supposed to establish these bait stations to catch turkeys. And they would go down and use cannon traps. It's like an explosive charge. It shoots a net out to catch birds. Because when they had, originally we were trying to do turkey reintroductions.

You know, like turkeys got their dicks knocked in the dirt. Like there used to be turkeys in, you know, at the time of European contact, there was turkeys in, I don't know, 39 states or something like that. By the 1930s, they were mostly gone. You couldn't legally hunt them barely anywhere. South Carolina had a few. They about got wiped off the planet.

And they came back through just careful work, primarily by National Wild Turkey Federation and a bunch of state agencies. But anyway, they would do hatch-raised birds. But the hatch-raised birds, they don't't live they just get decimated by predators and weather so they started realizing the only way to establish turkeys is to catch wild ones and move them you can't raise them in a pen and let them go so they started coming down to mexico to catch these birds and they paid they struck a deal with this guy in mexico to establish these base stations and when he made the deal he was excited to get the work, but he misunderstood the deal. He thought he was getting a set amount and was real happy to do it,

not knowing that he was getting that amount for each bird up to 20. So he's hauling 50-pound sacks of corn all over in the mountains. They come down and catch all these birds and he thinks i can't remember what it was but he thinks he's getting like a hundred bucks but this dude was telling me i turned around and handed him the money and he was off by you know a factor of 20 so he turns around hands the guy two thousand dollars the guy wept. That's awesome. He thought he was doing all that.

He said this guy is just happily packing around all this stuff. So that's how the Goulds that came up here came up here. What else about that? What I actually wanted to do is do some of our – a thing we do that's popular with listeners is we do fan questions. It's good to have Jay and Dar here because they can weigh in on a bunch of these issues. These are good talking points. This gives you a chance to kind of hit on a lot of things that are going around in the worlds of wildlife, hunting, fishing.

Jan, do you want to pick one out first? Yep. I like this one because you have a... Now, is it one that Jay and Dara is going to be interested in or not? No, definitely. I think so. I think they can definitely weigh in on it because from talking to them over the last couple of days,

they're kind of dealing with some of the stuff that I think we'll talk about from this question. The question is, it's under the heading of basic beginner advice. What hunting norms exist and how would a new hunter go about learning them? I'd like to hear your advice for the absolute beginner hunter, not equipment or scouting tips as much as the stuff most people learn while growing up hunting, like the unwritten rules of hunting public lands. example in my area central north carolina we have lots of small tracts of public land a squirrel season starts during deer season can i wander around looking for squirrels without ruining someone else's hunting do big game hunters take precedent and i like that question because we just

heard a story about this we just heard a story up in Michigan. We were down in Kentucky. Yeah, yeah. We were in Kentucky, heard a story about Michigan. We're down in Kentucky hunting with a small game. Giannis said that this guy we were with in Kentucky, his name's Kevin Weaver, that he is too. Kevin, sorry. Kevin Weaver's a gun maker.

Kevin Murphy. Kevin Murphy is to squirrels what Neil deGrasse Tyson is to the cosmos. He's a squirrel man. Through and through, raises squirrel dogs, hunts squirrels. He was telling me that he left his home state of Kentucky and went up to hunt squirrels in Manistee National Forest in Michigan. He's out running his dogs and gets a bow hunter so pissed at him that the guys following him around yelling obscenities at him.

I would have punched that guy in the face. That's my take on it. It's public land, dude. Why does a guy bowhunting deer have more say than someone else? I think there's things you can do. If you were to see a bowhunter in a tree say than someone else i think there's things you can do if you were to see a bowhunter in a tree absolutely you have an obligation not an out yeah you have an obligation a moral obligation to work around them but to say that you're not going to squirrel hunt because

it's bow season i think is ridiculous jay i had a situation i was guiding an elk hunter and um here in central arizona and there were bulls bugling all around and we were kind of it was an afternoon hunt we were kind of going after our first bull all of a sudden you hear lion guys bear dogs well you can bear. It's a very liberal season. It was right during the two-week archery elk season. So what I would say is if you have an animal that you can hunt all the time or a very liberal season, maybe you ought to maybe not go when the guys only have, say, a two-week season. That's my take. I think that's a lot of people's take because I just had this conversation with my friend Jared Fink in Wisconsin.

And we were kicking around the idea of having Kevin Murphy from Kentucky come up to Wisconsin on farmland, which he would think he died and gone to heaven because the squirrels are there to sit and bark at you. The ones in Kentucky are smart. Anyhow, I was saying, man, we ought to do it before gun season. He's like, are you crazy? That's bow season. People aren't going to let you on their land hunting squirrels during bow season. So it's a common, yeah, I think a lot of people think that.

Me, personally, what I don't think you should do is I don't think you should be able to hike or walk or ride a bike or anything like that. Ever. ever i personally would say you know it's up to the fish and game departments to maybe structure the hunts we were up on the strip this year there's uh 13b in arizona it's a 10 day season 14 day no 10 9 or 10 yeah 10 day season um it's the most coveted tag for mule deer in the world. I mean, one of the best mule deer tags. I thought it was the Henry Mountains in Utah. No, it's better than the Henry's. And there's 70 deer tags in a huge area.

But low deer density, you know, it's a... Yeah, you guys can go days without seeing a buck, right? Yes. So there's a 10-day window for this hunt. Well, it opens the same time as the chucker season, which is like a – I want to say it's almost three months. And we saw chukar hunters out there. And, I mean, there's people that have waited 20 years for this tag. And why not push the chukar season back 10 days?

And so there isn't even a conflict. I mean, that's my opinion. It might be this. 70 deer hunters, how many chukar hunters are there? How many field days? Maybe they're just trying to maximize people's opportunities to get out. I see where you're coming from. They definitely are.

I see both sides of it. But what's 10 days later going to matter when in 10 days no one's going to be hunting deer, the place will be a ghost town and they can run to from you know second week in november to february like they do you know the fishing writer john gierich i think that's how he says his last name he had a great line where he said there's two kinds of fishermen there's the guys in your party and then there's the assholes and it's like it's just kind of it's kind of like that. But you had the key that you said, though.

Dar, you said it's up to the fish and game. When people have questions like this about what's the right thing to do and the wrong thing to do, I think 90% of them can be answered by, well, let's take a look at what the hunting regulations say. Because a lot of this stuff shouldn't really be guesswork. You look, you're like, am I allowed to be out hunting squirrels right now? I am. You're talking legal versus ethics. So I'm saying like I don't think that it's some guy's job who wants to do a little squirrel hunt and whatever.

Let's say it's his kids got some time off school. He wants to do some squirrel hunting. I don't think it's his job to sit down and figure out, well, will my squirrel hunting negatively impact someone who supposedly is doing something more valuable by hunting deer? I think it's BS. I think if you've got a problem with it, like you said, maybe the State Fish and Game Agency might look and try to alleviate some of those conflicts. And I think in a lot of places they do do that.

Like Wisconsin used to have a lot of places they do do that. Wisconsin used to have a lot of regulations about being out small game hunting the day before deer season and all that kind of stuff. All right, I'm going to bite on this one. You have more to say about it? Yeah. Say your thing. I'm not even going to reply. You're saying if you can kill, what is a squirrel limit?

15, 20 squirrels? Anywhere from four to no limit. Okay, four to no limit. Throughout the great country. So you can just roll out and start blasting. And a bow hunter or a guy in a deer stand has got one deer tag to shoot one deer. Now, I'm talking about Arizona because Arizona. That you have to draw.

It's a draw. One deer. It's 20 years to get the tag and so the chucker can go out and shoot 15 chucker for the next 90 days my thing would be put yourself in the position of whatever hunt that you might go and interfere and if you feel like you would be interfering then not do it wait till that season's over and then go knock yourself off so you think that should be the i said i wasn't gonna reply off. So you think that should be the, I said I wasn't going to reply, but you think that should be the responsibility.

That's the responsibility of a guy who wants to do a little hunting with his kids. That's not his responsibility. No, I think it's the department, game and fish department's responsibility. He can't be the guy who has to figure that out. I want to move on. I think hunters should put themselves in the other person's situation and say, I'm not going to screw up their hunt. We can squirrel hunt or chucker hunt anytime or quail hunt.

Let's not go out then. Let's find something else to do. Or let's go in an area where there's not a lot of deer and let's stay away from them and let's be courteous to the fellow hunter. How often do you cancel your planned activities on account of not wanting to inconvenience other people do you ever go to put your boat in a river and be like you know probably not a good day a lot of shore fishermen today i will tell you when i'm rowing down the river and by that you mean no no when i see people

when i see people on the side of the river i go to the other side and go by them and don't even go through their water so i would say all right and i see a lot of other guides do it too so i mean i i think it's common to be you know courteous courteous to your fellow man fellow hunter all right so i think that's a good point put yourself in the other person's shoes and what would you do? You two are as tight as my friend Doug says. You guys are like nuts on a dog. Whenever I see one of you, I see both of you. And the fact that one of you is saying it's an ethical issue

and one of you is saying it's a legal issue shows that there is a place where J ends and Dar begins. We're not twins. Or vice versa. All right. I don't know if we settled that or not. I think i think we answered so there's the answer to your question specifically specifically for that person though i think that certainly uh they can go squirrel hunting during deer season especially in a place like north carolina where most likely the deer hunter has 10 deer tags they can fill.

But they're asking the question, should I do it? Is it okay? So they're actually thinking about it where a lot of people don't even think about other people. They just go do what they want to do. So I think they're on the right track. Across the board, whether it's hunting or not. Definitely. I want to do two total quickies, and I don't even want you guys to even open your mouths. Then we'll get the one that you guys will have something good to say about.

I feel like we even did this one before. Environmental stance, what's your take on environmental issues? Me, I'm a single issue kind of guy. I look at, yeah, clean air, clean water, what's good for wildlife. That's how I make up my mind about stuff. Opinion on BHA, I love. BHA, he's referring to backcountry hunters and anglers. There's a handful of conservation groups that I belong to.

This actually segues into another question I saw about how do you decide which groups to join. I support a handful of conservation organizations. There are many great ones. I tend to pick the ones I like because they speak to things that I like a lot. They speak to animals that I like a lot. They have proven track records. One of the groups that I support and advocate on behalf of is a group called Backcountry Hunters and Anglers. Basically, they work on a lot of things, but one of the things they work on is access issues.

They try to preserve the integrity of wilderness areas and backcountry areas, and they try to open up access to lands for hunters and anglers. They fight for stream access laws so that people can't lock you out of streams so people can't lock you out of public ground that's surrounded by buffers um they're a great organization that's my opinion on before we start a new subject let's take a quick break here's one that like that i spent a lot of time thinking about and arguing with people about and i don't really know man i'm kind of starting to let me tell you what it is first is hunter recruitment a scam

i think the discussion on hunter recruitment why it's a scam should be touched on in more depth i've seen it destroy fishing off my coast and Now it's working its way into hunting. I assume he means he's seen fishery recruitment destroy fishing. Your brother, meaning my brother, is spot on. Hunter recruitment is in essence hanging your own noose.

Yeah. Yeah, no. It's so complicated, dude. It would take forever to explain this, but here's the thing. California, let's talk about California for a minute. California has less than 1% of Californians hunt. The national average is 5% or 6% of Americans hunt. Some states it gets up pretty high into 10% and more. Some states it's much lower.

California is less than 1%. I recently had a very high-ranking person within California's fishing game department express to me off the record, i can't tell you who he is he feels in 25 years it's going to be all gone in california it'll be done what happens is people who are opposed to hunting whittle away around the edges of hunting. If you call up and ask Americans, do you support legal hunting, an overwhelming majority say they support legal hunting. The minute you start asking them specifics, like, what about hunting bears with dogs?

Well, I don't know about that. What about hunting bears with dogs? Yeah, you know, they're kind of cute. The way people who are opposed to hunting work is they take specific things and bring them to ballot initiatives and other things and and then bring them to votes or bring them in front of assemblies and and and shoot you down bit by bit by bit incrementalism it's never going to be that someone says, let's have a big referendum and vote yes or no on hunting.

It'll never happen like that. It just happens piecemeal. Because on a national average, only 5% of Americans hunt. Our futures are being decided by 95% of the voters going down there don't even hunt. They're just going down there and weighing in on what's their opinion about an activity they don't participate in. That's why I think that putting forth a strong message about hunting

and advocating on behalf of hunting and explaining hunting and being honest about hunting is productive because it's necessary for the general public to see that hunting is a worthwhile, helpful activity. But that alone doesn't solve everything. There has to be some hunters out there who are out there doing it, demonstrating it, making it viable. Another thing to think about is this. Your state fishing game agencies, many of them are funded with no hard funding from the state. They're funded through licensed sales and permitting. The reason they get worried about hunter recruitment is they see They see their budgets for things like research, enforcement of existing laws, habitat improvement, shrinking when less licenses get sold.

One of the main guys I argue about hunting recruitment about, with, okay, who's adamantly opposed to hunter recruitment. I realized that one of the main guys I argue with hunter recruitment about, and he's adamantly opposed to hunter recruitment, all he cares about, he says, is how many trucks are at the trailhead. That's the only thing he cares about. I realized that last year he went on a trip that was a combo walleye deer, or I'm sorry, he went on a trip that was a combo walleye turkey trip. He's fishing walleye in a river

that doesn't have a historic population of walleye, and walleye were brought in through a state fishery plant, state hatchery. And he's hunting turkeys that aren't native to that area and were brought in by the state game agency along with National Wild Turkey Federation. So two hunter-based initiatives put the turkeys on the ground, the walleyes in the river that he's fishing for,

and then he draws a mountain goat tag in a mountain range that mountain goats weren't in until the state put them in that mountain range. So you have to think long and hard about what you really care about. And we're talking about minuscule amounts. But if you think that you're going to be the last guy hunting, and it's going to be a Shangri-La, no one in the trailhead, and you're not just going to get fucked by voters and lack of funding for conservation efforts

in wildlife research and enforcement to put game wardens on the ground to stop poaching requires money that money comes from like pitman roberts and stuff it comes from duck stamps it comes from buying hunting licenses it comes from buying guns and ammo, excise taxes. Dudes out walking their dog aren't paying for the land. So, you know, there's a lot of like cutting off your dick to spite your balls, man. Anybody else have anything to add to that? No. I'll add something really quick my oldest son is

8th grade and it's scary though when I because he hunts a lot and I asked him and he knows most of the people in his school 6th through 8th grade and he could name and I think there's probably 100 to 200 per grade level,

he could name two kids that had ever hunted before. Yeah. It's scary. I mean, it's scary. If I had a crystal ball, and I could look into the crystal ball, and I could see that access would stay the same, and I don't think that it would. But forget it.

I'm not going to do any qualifiers. If I could look at my crystal ball and see that wildlife management would be as viable and as productive in the future with no hunters and that access would be as good, that enforcement of wildlife regulations

would be as good with no hunters and restocking depleted wildlife that happened through market hunting and stuff in the late 1800s and early 1900s, which is an ongoing process, would still be as vibrant. And I could be the only guy that hunts. I'd be a little bit tempted. But that's not how it's going to go. It's just not what happens.

When they put elk back into Michigan and Pennsylvania and Kentucky, who do you think did that? When they put bighorns, and they're still working on putting bighorns back everywhere they belong, who do you think is doing that? PETA? No. Well, one thing I might add too, and it's controversial, is the big auction tags and the big, as you call them, fat cats. I call them that? Well, I've heard you say fat cats before.

Not specifically those people. I was talking about Yanni because of his t-shirt company. Yeah, money falling out. That's a whole other controversial controversial subject but the reality we've talked about this though without that big money it goes right into the wildlife it goes right into the wildlife yeah and it's actually set in a lot of states it's set by law that i don't like 95 of it goes right into habitat improvement we've talked about that before jay and i didn't and i might have said fat cats but I use that term endearingly. And it's very relative.

And in fact, a lot of that money for sheep, when those tags are sold, like a sheep tag, it goes directly to sheep habitat specifically. Not just wildlife. I mean, specifically sheep. So that's... It's a complicated world, boys and girls.

Is hunter recruitment a scam? I don't think so. Absolutely not. Here's the thing. I understand the frustration of competition. So I get that sentiment. But I have had, through my professional life, the occasion to sit down and speak with some of the most productive conservationists that are alive today all of them and people that are well-meaning and have devoted their lives to wildlife all of

them have warned me about the possible threats of low hunter numbers. And they've all expressed to me that hunters need to continue to be as generous with the next generation is the previous generation was with us. It's not about us. It's about the future generation. One of these same guys. And if we're saying hunting is a wildlife management tool, I mean, if it's, if it, if we go away and it's not, then, I mean, it doesn't make sense. No, it's not.

It's going to be managed with a completely different set of criteria. Now, one of these guys said to me, the writer, I was speaking around the edges of this conversation with the conservationist Jim Poswitz, and he was relating to me. He was at a meeting, and it had to do with an access issue, opening roads into a roadless area. And Jim Poswitz is, you know, he's an older guy now. He's in his 80s. Still very active, still hunts, but, you know, by his own admission, he's not the guy. He's not the hunter he was 40 years ago when it comes to knocking around in the mountains um he was saying

he's at this thing it was a comment period and the guy got up and it was the old another older guy he's like i've been hunting in there my whole life and now i can't get in there and i have a right to get in there should be a road in there and jim poswitz asked me says why would you want to deny the experience to upcoming generations that you're sitting here telling me meant so much to you it's like you had your fun you know you had your fun it's time for new people to have some fun. I get it. I get where they're all coming from. And I just feel that it's in our best interest to stay, to remain politically viable and to fund conservation groups and fund agencies. I recently had a conversation with an animal ethicist who, he's a vegan,

he's an animal activist, an animal ethicist, he's a professor, teaches animal ethics. We were talking about this and he was telling me how he thinks it's malarkey that hunters are conservationists. And I was telling him about, for instance, like Ducks Unlimited. How much

money Ducks Unlimited members and the organization put that just all they're doing is buying imperiled wetlands and transferring them into the public trust. Can't argue with it. Guys go to banquets, they have a couple drinks,

they start bidding on crazy stuff at auctions. It generates a bunch of money. And in other ways, outright donations. They love to hunt ducks. They belong to DU. They spend tons of money buying wetlands that benefits ducks, aquatic invertebrates, fish, aquatic plants, the entire ecosystem.

And he said, well, it's just too bad that their motivation has to be shooting ducks i'm like you know what it's just that's how it is dude i don't really care what their motivation is it inspires them let's say this hunting ducks inspires them to take money out of their pockets and preserve wetlands i'm sorry again pita isn't buying wetlands they're they're worried about like horses in central park that that's bad like it's really mean to horses that's their understanding of wildlife politics anyone with half a brain knows that right now when they're talking about wildlife politics they should be talking about wetlands, riparian areas. It's just like you got to have people who are on the ground, invested in wildlife, spending money, giving money, buying licenses, supporting state game agencies.

Let's move on. Well, that money from Pittman-Robertson and all the sports and money doesn't just help game animals. I mean, like you said, it benefits so many other animals. When Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation goes and puts together and they go and preserve a piece of elk habitat, the songbird, he doesn't know and care that it was meant for elk. He's like sweet you know and they're and they're looking at stuff that is a limiting factor issue too like a lot of focus on wintering habitat everything benefits 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

our northern brothers get irritated well if you're sick of you know sucking high and titty there on x is now in canada the great features that you love in on x are available for your hunts this season the hunt app is a a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about

OnX here on the MeatEater podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. 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. You pick one. Yanni. I like this one. How would you, how would you cook goat testicles?

I cook them in butter and put red hot on them. I call it buck nuts. Now you pick one. Yanni. Do you eat the heart for the bear you killed? is it good when i keep bear hearts i grind them up and put them in with bear sausage there's something about psychologically because i have a you know i'm like a conflicted bear guy uh i like to hunt bears i've hunted bears a lot i'll continue to bears. But I really find that often when I'm looking at a bear and I'm fixing to go after it, I have this thing where I'm kind of torn between watching the bear and going after it.

That's why I found for me that I like to hunt. Instead of hunting bears, I like to go out with guys who've never hunted bears and be with them when they get their first bear because there's nothing greater than your first bear. A lot of animals just keeps getting better and better. I just had my best mule deer hunt ever i've been hunting mule deer a long time i just had my best mule deer hunt ever every time i hunt mule deer it's better and better and better i love it more with bears my first bear will always be my most exciting bear um so yeah like a bear heart. I don't know, man.

I got like a little bit of a, I feel a little bit, this is hard to explain. It verges on a spiritual thing because I associate heart with, you know, like the spirit of something. I know I'm getting into some mystical business here, but no,

I grind it up. I don't think I've ever sliced... The other night, I made Kevin Murphy's Cat Head Biscuits and fried deer heart. The baby ate it. My wife ate it. We all loved it. But I've never just sliced up a bear's heart and ate it.

Cat Head? It's just biscuits. I don't know why they call them Cat Head why do they call them cat because that's like the size oh just the size of a cat's head i didn't know that i told my kids that those cat biscuits they took but my kids leave anything man they don't care they don't even know like they don't even know about a lot of stuff people eat, man. They just eat. Like I said, they're just eating deer. They don't even know about that it's abnormal.

Did you pick one? Yeah, I got another one here. This guy recently moved to Colorado, has a cabin near Bracken Ridge. It's an area of some good elk hunting. He's getting all geared up to go hunt elk in September with his bow during the rut, but he spent as much time preparing for the butchering as he is for the hunt. I think that's very smart of him, and he's asking if we have any tips. Because you don't want

to mess it up yeah so he just wants to have like his he don't want to be like that dude that uh in john krakauer's book right into the wild yeah chris mccandless yeah shoots that moose and that's the whole thing right what's your guys best you know i gotta put this one to jane darks you guys hunting the hot state yeah so what's your what's your just prep look like at home i mean he's probably done and set after years and years of doing it oh is he talking about at his house around the woods oh well he's saying butchering so i i prepping to an ounce. I think he means in the field. Oh, that's what I think he means. Let's take it both ways.

All right, in the field. Let's say he means in the field. My biggest tip is don't underestimate how big that thing is. Be realistic about how far you're willing to go from your truck because for one person to move a bull elk three miles is a major undertaking and you need to have a solid plan put together

about how many people you can get to help you are they on standby if they're not what's the weather? If it's warm, how quickly are you going to move four or 500 pounds of boneless meat? In a head. So four or 500 pounds all combined.

Because 100 pounds at first, you're like, oh, it's nothing. Three or four trips later, you are dying. So think about that. Yeah, it's huge, man, that list of people to call. Also, get the guts out of it quick and open up the ball joints and the back legs because that's where stuff will sour fastest. But I think mainly make a plan. Because when you walk up on it,

you're not going to be prepared for what's laying there. You get a feeling, and I get it when I walk up on a moose, you get a feeling like, what have I done? Because you can't even roll it over. I would say first and foremost, depending on his experience level,

get the hide off of it. Get the hide off of it get the hide off of it very first and foremost yeah and the more i would think the more you can break it down the quicker it's gonna cool off yeah so but that's the thing is like in arizona because tags are so tight you guys always had the luxury of having a lot of buddies hunting with you well in our country too isn't extremely rough like colorado most of the stuff you know we can get to fairly quickly um there's a lot of roads in arizona so i mean it's you guys have a downed game retrieval yeah you can fall with a lot of places you can drive a one trip deal they say you can go in and

get it and come out but we don't we're not hunting a lot of wilderness areas too you know especially on the early hunts when it's so hot. So usually within a mile. Yeah, usually, I would say. I think that when I hear about guys having meat spoil, and I'll remind you, it's illegal to let your meat spoil. You can't do something dumb and get five miles from your truck down in some hell hole and kill a bull. And then it gets up at 75 degrees and you don't get out of there and it rots. That's against the law, man. So it's not just about having like yummy steaks.

It's like you have an obligation to get that animal out of the woods in edible form. You can get fined and have your hunting privileges revoked. You cannot waste meat. So it's good that you're thinking about it. I think just the fact that the dude's thinking about it means he's not going to have a problem. So I think it's the guys who never give it any thought and they go way

too far. They don't have a plan. Their legs whatever got problem. They haven't notified anybody about the situation. They're the ones that probably wind up. Somebody who sits around and thinks about it for five minutes is probably in good shape. Suppressed firearms. Ethics of

using suppressed firearms. I've started using a 300 BLK rifle with a suppressor for wild hog control on my deer lease. Hogs are destroying habitat and the only cure is to reduce their numbers as much as possible. They eat all the meat.

What are your thoughts on suppressed firearms? You know, I hunted in Scotland, which I hated, but I hunted in Scotland one time. And in Scotland, they couldn't believe that we hunt without suppressors because it's dangerous. They're like, I can't believe you're allowed to guide people without a suppressor and have them blowing their eardrums out. That was his take on it. But I was recently talking to

Game Warden and we were talking about technologies in general, drones, other technological issues we got on the subject of suppressors he said to me he said one of my most effective tools is the gunshot he's a big bow hunter and when a game ward warden, like no matter what, a game warden's at work generally,

but he tries to squeeze in a little bow hunt. He said there's been several times he could recount in just recent years when he's sitting in his stand and hears a gunshot. He's like, that don't sound right. And heads over there, and sure enough,

he said getting calls from people, I heard a gunshot at night out in my field. He says it's a very effective tool. He also said the internet's a very effective tool as a game warden. But he said he didn't want to get into the politics of it. But he said, from the perspective of doing my job, I feel that I would be seriously handicapped by suppressors. But I also understand that blowing your eardrums out all the time isn't great. And I understand, too, that if you're trying to, like this guy's saying, control hogs, you can shoot a hell of a lot more hogs without them knowing what's happening.

Do you think the suppressor gives you an unfair advantage on game on shooting game i don't think so i don't think it does i mean how many animals you shoot yeah and i mean you're you shoot at something with a bow and it usually you shoot once and it runs off yeah i mean no i don't think it means that you're just gonna be able to sit there and just set up camp and start shooting bullets off at something. I don't think that's really what's at issue. The only thing I see, and like I said, man, I'm very much...

My tendency is to think that... My tendency is to think that suppressors are not a negative. My one reservation is the issue about law, is the issue about poaching and enforcement.

Like this guy said, he said, I don't want to get into the politics of it. It's a valuable tool for me. I would almost think the other way on the safety issue too, that if you don't know someone shooting, that could be dangerous too. I mean, I don't know.

I really want, here's my thing i want to i would love to have a um i really want to suppress 22 just for small game I mean come on squirrel ninja because every time I'm out hunting big game I'm like ah god it's killing me rabbits everywhere squirrels everywhere

I just be like dude there'd be no stopping yeah that's a good one Yanni Leigh went honest oh here's a good one Yanni Leigh went on us oh here's another good one what's your take on coyote killing contests one of the first magazine stories

I ever did was it was in 2000 yeah it was in 2000 I remember it was the first time I ever went to the state of New York and I remember getting a car, taking a car service stupidly because of how expensive it was. I took a car service from JFK or LaGuardia or something all the way out to Montauk,

which is just insane, but I was in a hurry. And I remember seeing the Twin Towers. And I remember very soon after seeing them, they fell. Doing that, I went out there to cover a shark tournament where guys bet a ton of money. I was doing a story in 2000 for Outside

on a Mako shark tournament called Mako Madness. It was guys bet a bunch of money who killed the biggest mako and makos are valuable fish they taste good there's a market for them right it's a coveted fish good fish but the the thing had a thing where there's like the main money went to biggest shark and makos are greatly depleted from due to not not rod and reel fishing not recreational fishing but they're depleted from pelagic long lining um you know mako shark reserves are maybe down 70 percent from the 1970s so a lot of years now, the biggest shark winner isn't from what we generally think of as

big sharks. It's not from like a tiger. It's not from a muskie. But a lot of years, a guy will catch a big blue shark. Blue sharks are much more abundant. On average, not as big, but as the big coveted sharks go down, there's a good chance you might win the whole derby on a big blue. Blue sharks are not very popular table fare at all. I think they have about zero commercial value. And every boat,

you know, they'd all want to bring in, you're allowed to bring in like two sharks per boat. Everyone would always want to bring in a blue shark because why not? Because a blue shark might win. And they filled a dumpster full of blue sharks. No one wanted them. I mean, a dumpster full of blue sharks. As part of my story, I went and interviewed a writer who wrote

a pretty profound book called Song for the Blue Ocean. A fisherman who wrote a book about the depletion of the oceans. And he said something to me that he kind of articulated something that I had felt and thought about a lot out at

this tournament. He was like he's, and this is a fisherman, you know. I actually went shark fishing with him. But he had a hard time with anything that puts a carnival atmosphere around the killing of animals. He had a difficult time with it but just the idea of of of making uh like a contest out of the the death of animals or having that be the motive the motivation the issue with coyotes is much different with sharks because they're kind of the opposite as sharks are depleted from not

being able to regulate international waters and unregulated pelagic longlining and all kinds of other stuff. Coyotes are exploding everywhere. So this is different, but that's just something to think about. Anyone? You know, on this ranch that you guys are going to go hunt tomorrow, tying it back into coyote contests, there was a buck on the last day that we were trying to get and i hiked up this ridge and dar was over on another ridge and i found this buck and he was rutting he was just kind of walking and he went and he came off

this kind of shady basin and he peeled off down there and then he was looking for a place to lay down he laid down and i'm looking at him thinking you shouldn't have done that you know you're 500 yards from us it's the last day you're the buck we're looking for and he's right there and dar is already coming to me hunter and i see a coyote coming perpendicular sniffs the trail where the deer had just walked i'm watching this whole thing came across this flat he turns turned the right way sniffing sniffs that big buck up sniffs them right up comes kind of peeling over a rock and then oop that's not the way to go snuck around jumped that buck up and i watched that coyote chase that buck for over a mile as far as i could see out of my sight and the buck was running full tilt legs straight out i

would have thought he'd kind of turned and fought him yeah yeah and what's funny on that same ridge two days before we had seen a group of javelina with a pack of coyotes lined up and actually the javelina had babies too and the coyotes were just gang tackling those javelina and the javelina would be you know chomping their teeth and chasing the chasing the coyotes off but here's this big buck you'd think he'd turn and fight a coyote and he takes off running if if people don't think that coyotes have a huge impact on our deer they're sorely mistaken i invite you and i'm not i'm not saying this because from a pro cows i don't think coyotes have any problems.

I think you can go do all the coyote killing contests you want and you're still going to have coyotes around. You're not going to hurt the population. But I would invite you to go talk to people who are doing research right now about the issue of do coyotes actually kill a lot of deer. I think you'd be astounded how few they kill. And talk to Pat Durkin, the writer Pat Durkin. He's written about this widely. People can write about this widely. They can write about all they want. I saw it. I agree and believe you saw it, but I think –

And they were going to eat those javelinas. Yep, but here's what I'm saying, and I'm not vested in this either way. I'm saying there's a lot of emerging evidence that coyote predation on deer is not what we thought it was 10 years ago. I'd like to see it. Because on fawns, they're horrible. Black bears kill a hell of a lot more deer than was previously suspected. I'll tell you, in Arizona, we have a horrible problem with coyotes and antelope fawns. There was areas where there's no fa have a horrible problem with coyotes and antelope fawns.

There was areas where there's no fawn recruitment because of the coyotes. So a lot of the coyote contests I've seen in Arizona are up by like Seligman, Unit 10, where there's big antelope, and they're trying to really help the antelope come back. But you see the distinction I'm making. There's like what I'm talking about with this shark situation and what the shark situation was. Definitely. I think it's different. Coyotes are turning up in places they've never been. They're rapidly adapting to urban landscapes and suburban landscapes.

And it's funny because I watched this anti-coyote hunting documentary one time. And the big thrust of the documentary was he was arguing the more coyotes you shoot the more coyotes there will be so well i was like okay so if you love coyotes so much i think you'd want everybody to be out shooting them because there's gonna be even more of them so i think you'd be making a pro coyote hunting video so there's more coyotes i don't i'm not losing any sleep over coyotes but but would you say it's a management tool? I mean, could you say a coyote hunting contest could be used as a management tool? Totally, man.

Yeah, I would. I don't have any problem with them. I was just bringing up, I just think the world's different than just a bunch of black and white issues. I was just bringing up a perspective, which I attributed to a man that I admire, a good writer. That's just his take on it. My take on coyote hunting contests, if you're operating within the limits of the law and following legal methods, I don't think that there's any risk right now anywhere that I know of

of having a dangerous depletion of coyotes. I think there's other large predators that's the case. And you're gonna see some excellent podcast hosting because there was another guy asking through this transition i'm about ready to do because another guy was asking how come so many hunters are unwilling to accept that we have large other large predators on the landscape which is baffling to me too because i don't like to see any species driven to extinction or extirpation, which is like regional extinction.

I think it is just, it's morally wrong. It's ecologically wrong. We have no business driving species to extirpation or extinction. I support the management and where necessary, the reintroduction of large predators on the landscape. And I think they should be managed on a state level and whether it's traditional use patterns, I think they should be managed as game. Meaning we have plenty of wolves in the Great Lakes, Upper Great Lakes. We have plenty of wolves in portions of the Rocky Mountains. If we can have stable populations of wolves and there's hunter interest,

I feel that they should be hunted and managed the same way we manage elk. We don't want too many. We're not going to drive them to extinction. There's no risk of doing that with coyotes at all. In fact, I think we have the opposite risk where we're really coyotes are coming in because of man-made reasons and at the same time they're coming in they're really causing and not to make it an academic issue about whitetail deer like how many white tail do they actually kill they have a profound impact on on a host of different species it's just kind of a

level the argument i'm talking about with whitetail is a host of different species. It's just kind of a level. The argument I'm talking about with whitetail is a lot of guys are now questioning like in areas where we've seen deer crash, is it really solely attributable to new populations of coyotes or other factors at play? We should have Pat Durkin on here to talk about it uh a funny thing about wolves i always say about wolves with guys who are adamantly opposed to any wolves being around why do they go hunt alaska if you can't have big game and wolves why in the hell is everybody

wanting to go to alaska and why is everybody like reading books about lewis and clark and how awesome it was all the animals Lewis and Clark ran into? Because one thing they damn sure ran into a lot of is wolves. So don't tell me that wolves and big game are mutually exclusive when everybody's lining up to go hunt the most wolf-infested state there ever was. Or they all want to go to Canada where wolves occupy, I don't know, 90-some percent of their native range. Or Alaska where they occupy 95%-some percent of their native range, or Alaska where they occupy 95 or 99 percent of their native range, if you can't have wolves

in big game. It's just a lie. It's stupid. Pick one out, Yanni. You guys want to pick? You don't have a paper, so you can't pick one out. Here, I'll pass this one off. I would ask you, are wolves, have they been hunted in Alaska?

I mean, they've been there for a long time, but have they always been able to be hunted? Oh, yeah. They're hunted. They're trapped as fur bears. And then they're managed through culling, often aerial shooting. They manage wolves aggressively in Alaska. And how much they hammer them depends on what kind of impact they're having on caribou and moose. Because caribou and moose practically have voter registration cards in Alaska.

You can win and lose elections. Well, I mean, there's a lot of Western states. You can win and lose elections based on big game hunting. Yeah, they hammer them hard where need be. But again, they're on the landscape and i don't think anybody up there is saying how they ought to add like i'm sure there's some radicals some anti-wildlife people who are out there talking about how they ought to categorically remove them from the landscape but i honestly of all the guys i hang out with and hunt with

and i hunt with a lot i don't actually hunt with any guys or socialize with any guys who are really saying that we should go and poison off all large predators so that there's none left that's a radical radical perspective that exists i don't run into it very often and the guys that i do run into it where i do hear it from people. It's usually people who are just, I mean, just not that bright. They're not real smart at figuring out how stuff works. 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 our northern brothers get irritated well if you're sick of you know sucking high and titty there on x is now in

canada the great features that you love and on x are available for your hunts this season 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. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of

your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. 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. I got a good one. Trophyaching point creep this is under hunting tactics i don't even understand that question do they explain it do you feel the focus on trophy hunting slash inches within the hunting community of big game is leading to more poaching. Also, what ways could states like Utah, which manage heavily for trophy units, do away with current dilemmas facing a point system like Point Creep? I want you to answer, but I want to do a little translation. of translation um what what point creep means is when you have a resource that is not big enough to

support the demand on it and i'm talking about big game resource of big game animals it's not big enough to support unlimited hunting you have to find some way to control access to the resource so you have to look and you say we got let's say you got a thousand elk you're comfortable removing 10 of that population let's say because they'll reproduction will more than make up for that um you get how many elk that allows you to kill you You got 5,000 dudes that all want to go elk hunting. You do a lottery system and dish out tags, pull names out of a hat and give people tags. Because everybody can't go, so we got to find a democratic way of selecting who can go. A guy keeps doing this for five years.

He never draws a tag. He's like, man, I keep putting in. I never draw a tag. It's not fair because my buddy, he just put in for the first time and he drew a tag. So they come up with a system called bonus points where it's basically like you're awarding people for their allegiance. And every year they're spending some amount of money to draw a coveted tag. And you're giving them preference points or bonus points, basically awarding return customers. And the more years you put in, the higher your odds of drawing the tag go. Either every year you put in, your name goes in the tag,

the hat one more time, or a certain number of the tags go to the people who've been trying to get the tag longest. Very fair system in my mind. But point creep comes from the fact that it used to, let's say it used to take on average five or six years to draw an elk tag in some unit it might now be that guaranteed allotment of tags is going to guys who have 25 bonus points meaning they've been putting in for a tag 25 years so point creep is every year it seems to take more years to draw some of these coveted units trophy management and so if you're behind you're you're always staying behind yeah you'll never catch up like if you're 50 and you decide to start putting in for a unit that the max point

holders are have 25 bonus points you're kind of like a little bit late but that that would be true on a preference point right if you're behind on a bonus point like arizona it's not necessarily true right because it increases your odds but you still could in theory draw like montana does no allocation to max point holders what they do is they used to do each point you had through your name in the hat that many times. So if I put in for three years and I filed a fourth year application, my name's in the hat four times. Then what they did is they now square that number. So now my name's in the hat 16 times. So different ways of doing that. And in some states take 50% of the tags, be it moose, goat, sheep, whatever. 50% of the tags will go to those individuals who've been applying the longest.

50% of the tags will be allocated in the general draw. So newbies have a chance. The old timers have an enhanced chance. And everyone does this a little bit different. And there's variations within states based on species and based on units. This guy's saying if Utah is sort of trying to maintain animal quality, like maintain that you have a good chance of killing a big bull because they're not shooting all the bulls and you could open the doors up and let more guys shoot bulls

and drive big size down so you don't have as many animals reaching maturity but you got more guys having a chance to hunt it just kind of depends on how productive the landscape is and a gross general and I'm going to stop talking after this and let Jay and Dar talk a gross generalization would be this arid places that have low population

densities and not a lot of agriculture which tends to drive up animal numbers and they have a lot of ar, which tends to drive up animal numbers, and they have a lot of aridity, which tend to drive down animal numbers. Those places tend to be much more conservative with tag allocation, and they tend to have places that are more conservative with tag allocation tend to have more intact age structures, meaning you have animals living long enough to die of old age.

There's a lot to be said for a system that allows animals to die of old age because you're replicating more of a natural ecosystem. But it does piss guys off because guys want to shoot stuff yeah for sure and i think you know throughout the west there are certain states that guys that want to go hunt over the counter and more liberal tag systems can go and hunt colorado montana idaho and then there's states like new mexico arizona utah where you know you have older animals more mature animals you know you have point creep i don't know if you heard about arizona's new change no so and dar you can weigh in on this if i get because sometimes i get sidetracked on this but so 10 of the tags can go non-residents and before uh when you have four specific elk hunts deer hunts etc the max point

holders for that hunt like dar's son's 13b hunt okay up to 10 could go to non-residents 20 of those tags could go to max point holders. Arizona switched it so that 5% of the non-resident tags go in the max point pool, and the other 5% go into the random draw. The max point pool for non-residents? No. That's the thing. Really?

I thought at first it would be another pool of, okay, everybody else non-residents. So they're further limiting non-resident tags. So what it's going to do is actually make more point creep because let's say you had 18 points for that hunt that his son just drew and you're a non-resident. You have max points. Well, now they're taking half that amount of max point holders that are non-residents. But for the first time in a long time since the draw system, you have four points, three points, or have no points.

As a non-resident, it's the first time that you actually have a chance mathematical chance to draw that tag yep you still are thrown into the general draw okay that's outside of the 20 max point holders the random the random draws and but you actually have a chance but you're but if you got a lot of points you're still in a stronger position in the you're still in a stronger position but you're if you're a non-resident instead of taking 10 they only take five so your point creep you know it may take you another double the amount of years that it would normally take because they're taking half half the tags which creates what this guy's talking about that's point creep for nonresidents, it's going to creep.

For residents, it's actually probably going to go down. Yeah, because now they're taking 15% instead of 10. Instead of 10 out of that max point pool. But it gives you a shot to draw where a lot of these hunts, if you did not have max points, there's no way you could draw. Yeah, I get emails from people all the time, and they're like, I'd like to draw a unit 9 archery elk tag. And I say, how many points do you have? And they three i say how old are you they say you know 58 i said mathematically there's no way that you will catch up well now i can tell them put in for unit nine

because you could be one of the five percent that just thrown out in the random draw that could actually draw so i think arizona is going to see application numbers go up. Definitely. Yeah. Because now people that are behind actually have a chance. So I kind of like it. Which might have been their end goal. I kind of like it.

Yeah, because states make a lot of money. State game – I'm not talking bad money. State agencies make a lot of money for that stuff we're talking about. Research, habitat improvement, enforcement. They make a lot of money by having drawings because they make money off unsuccessful applicants who are obligated to buy a license or pay a draw fee so i don't think it's necessarily bad now from this whole this whole issue from the perspective of a guy like me i have the luxury of i get to travel freely willy-nilly all around the whole country hunting all the time so when i look at it i'm like yeah it's cool you got like some states or high opportunity states any year you want you

can go elk hunt boer rifle in montana you can go elk hunt boer rifle in colorado you can go elk hunt boer rifle in idaho so there's that do that all the time and then there's these dream states where i can apply but i realize that I'm not the typical guy. Like my situation, not that I'm not a typical guy, but my, my situation isn't typical. My hunting situation. If you were living in a state, like let's say you live in a state like Utah and you're like, man, I want to shoot spike bulls and fill my freezer. I think that's more important than a guy fulfilling his dream to kill a giant bull.

And I think there's a lot of validity to that perspective. I could see that it would be frustrating, but I think it's not just a matter of that you would open up the valve and let everybody start shooting all kinds of elk and expect that the picture is going to stay the same way. The integrity in these areas that have lower densities, kind of more complex elk management issues going on, it's not as simple as you're just going to start killing more elk and everybody's going to be happier and everybody's going to kill more elk. You're going to pay for it somewhere. Aldo Leopold in Sand County Almanac talked about when wildlife managers improve the pump,

but they don't improve the well. Meaning, you know, the cistern holds 100 gallons. Just because you put in a bigger pump doesn't mean you got more water in the cistern. It's a limited resource. Yeah. So it's like a lot of times this stuff is the result of trying to manage a limited resource rather than them saying like, yeah, let's make a system where no one can hunt but if you do get lucky to hunt you'll get a giant it's more complicated than that i have an

interesting utah application uh to this a friend of mine drew a few years ago a one of the best limited entry utah archery elk permits in utah i thought, I'll go with you. I'll go see how Utah elk hunting is. So there's 16 permits in the whole unit. And it's a huge unit, 16 permits. We're thinking, we got the whole place to ourselves. We show up there and there is literally a quad on every road, every ridge. There's people everywhere. We we're like what the heck's going on they have a spike and cow over the counter archery hunt at the same time in all those limited archery elk units yeah so in utah just to answer this guy's question in utah specifically you can go hunt cow or spike at the same time that the same guy that waited 25 years to draw you just can't shoot a big bull yep i remember

my brother when my brother lived in washington state he had the same issue like he could go out hunt spikes and units that were like the most coveted big bull units anywhere he says all day long he's seeing giant bulls, can't find a spike. Then you hear the same story from somebody else. To further complicate the picture, some states, like Colorado, like Colorado is the default go-to state for elk hunting. Colorado has twice as many elk, three times as many elk as the next largest elk holding state.

I'm screwing that up, but they have tons of elk. It's no wonder they got a lot of tags. But they're tight asses with their mule deer well and i think it's a trophy mule deer state and an opportunity elk state well in colorado in the past few years has gone to a lot more limited entry units and they've seen the quality rise as far as size of bulls and and you know yanni can attest to you know there's a handful of of Colorado units that have some pretty darn good size quality elk hunting. And then, of course, it's known for the over-the-counter elk hunt. I mean, it's the king. And the thing, too, when people hear, I find that a lot of guys,

when they're thinking about management, get tripped up by that they think that if you're growing big bucks or big bulls, that it's somehow only benefits like trophy guys. But what about having just healthy hurts? I got buddies that hunt in Wisconsin when they were growing up, like, like Doug Dern has been on the meat eater show. And I spent a lot of time with, talking to about wildlife issues.

He was growing up. If you saw a deer track, you ran home and told your dad. Okay? There was nothing around. Deer finally started coming back, and as deer came back, there was a thing. You never shot a doe because it was true. Deer were in recovery.

You wouldn't shoot a doe because you shoot a buck, you're killing one animal. You shoot a doe because it was true deer were in recovery like you wouldn't shoot a doe because you shoot a buck you're killing one animal you shoot a doe you're shooting her you're killing her and every offspring she's ever going to have it's more complicated than that but that's kind of true eventually they got where deer were just absolutely everywhere better deer herds they'd ever had amazing deer and a lot of guys still couldn't get used to the fact of shooting does i still run into old timers all the time particularly in the midwest they won't shoot a doe because those are the guys that grew up when they weren't deer they love deer and deer hunting so much like man you don't

shoot does shoot bucks and that's when you get in these situations that i grew up around where you'd sit there and you'd count 30 40 does in a night and not see a single buck because everybody shot the first buck they saw. And if someone shot a two-and-a-half-year-old buck, you all thought you were seeing a giant. Okay? So is that really the kind of deer herd we want where you have, like, deer are born one-to-one, just like people.

People are slightly more females than males, but deers are basically born like buck, doe, buck, doe, buck, doe. When you're sitting in the woods, that's not more females than males. But deers are basically born like buck, but dough, buck, dough, buck, dough. When you're sitting in the woods, that's not what you're seeing. I would argue that hunter recruitment, very first question that if new hunters can go out and see a big rack, cause there's just, I don't care who you are.

There's something about a big rack, whether it's an elk, a sheep, a deer. Yeah. Cause you're seeing the animal that lived to be old. If you could see a big rack, I think it would hook more people, more youngsters, more new hunters than if they went out and saw 40 does that all, quote, unquote, look the same. Yeah.

And they never saw a big mature buck. There's something magical about it. You grew up dreaming about it i just don't i think that like if you go somewhere if you got a place that is doing things well enough that you have animals dying of old age and you have breeding class animals actually breeding like animals like with with deer that are getting out to be four or five years of age and reproducing bull elk i mean it's like twice that right to be like in a healthy herd it has its whole age demographic i mean what's a what's a bull like a real herd bull i mean eight years old eight yeah doll six seven eight doll sheet nine ten it just takes a lot of to get stuff that old it takes a lot of not pulling the trigger

and it's like it's just healthy herds man um so i don't think that you know if you live in a state it's like a dry state or whatever and it's like low densities i don't think it's a sign that people are being tight with the purse strings because you've got big animals running around. You should view it as a good thing, but I do acknowledge and I do think there is an issue of managing for opportunity. Now, my state, Washington, no one understands why. I think there's theories that it stems from an anti-hunting sentiment in parts of the game and fish agency. I don't know that that's true at all. But they're real tight.

Their biologists are tighter with mountain goat tag allocation than anybody else. They have a higher threshold of what the population needs to be in order to award a tag. They award a lower percentage of tags. You might wind up thinking like, listen, man, there's a lot of other states successfully managing mountain goats that are allocating a lot more mountain goat tags. What's going on?

Are we utilizing the resource to full potential or is this something different happening here? Yeah, I think you can ask some questions but in general um i think that that some programs that are managing for quality animals or let's say you're managing for healthy demographics in your herd i don't think it's automatically a negative and i don't think that the default management system should be to kill as many critters as you can possibly get away with killing without driving the population into the dirt johnny what about the first part of that question the inches causing the trophy hunters are leading to more poaching yeah one is there more poaching now i don't know there was but i think that if you talk to wardens and stuff, I think there's more.

People used to poach for the pot. I think a lot of guys poached for the bragging rights. More so than was going on when I was a little kid. I don't think there's as much poaching big bucks or bulls as there used to be. Is that right? Yeah, I'm talking totally out of my ass i have no idea i don't think there is but i think there's a lot more people out there watching i think when you have a lot more hunters with quality optics and you have more of our own

police out there watching the fellow hunters and such i just i don't hear about a lot of poaching yeah well with trail cameras and people taking pictures and video, I mean, a big buck gets shot. I mean, other people know about it. Did you hear about that, dude? There's a dude that shot. Tennessee has much more liberal deer seasons than Kentucky. There's a guy that killed this giant.

He says he killed it in Tennessee. He brings it down to some big buck contest or something like the Outdoor Expo. And a guy from Kentucky happens to be at that Outdoor Expo, sees that buck. He's like, that buck didn't die in Tennessee. I got trail cam pictures of that buck. And the buck was so unique, and the trail cam pictures were so conclusive, that guy wound up having his buck confiscated and got prosecuted off a dude's trail cam picture.

He's like that book never stepped foot near where you're saying you shot it. Yeah. Which is interesting, man. It's like, you know, technology kind of like you always want to, there's always all these negatives to technology and hunting,

but in some ways you find these little, uh, like helpful stories, hopeful stories. We got to chat with those warrants in uh kentucky a little bit there and they talked about very sophisticated trophy poaching rings right but what was interesting to me is that i felt like if someone's going to go out of their way to go shoot a giant buck at night or however they do on someone else's property and all that stuff, there's got to be a monetary drive.

Because he's like, yeah, we broke up this giant poaching ring. And I'm like, well, what are they doing it for? Are they selling them for? He said, no, they're just basically a bunch of yahoos that just want to have the bragging rights. That's all it is. This dude also told me about a case they worked where a guy had put out a feeder, had a suppressor, had a red dot scope, and was just shooting deer.

And as best as they could tell, he was just shooting them to shoot them. Like not for trophy, not for me. He said it's just a mentally ill, sick dude. What are your concluding thoughts, Jay? Not this subject. The whole damn deal. You got to buy them. I got like two or three for free.

Right now, I'm sporting my Alaska one. It's got a doll sheep on it. Is there a hunt to eat Arizona? I might just have a hunt to eat shirt for you boys in that duffel over there. The hunt to eat Arizona should have a million dudes all hunting on one tag. A million dudes up glassing for one dude. Glassing, guy on every point. I want to say while I'm sitting here.

Oh, that wasn't your complete thought? No, I got one more. I want to say while I'm sitting here, I get a lot of people that really admire your show and the job you do producing the show and the benefit that people get from your show in that. Every show you can take something away. And to me, it's refreshing to hear people say that about your show.

And I wanted to give kudos to you guys for you know doing what you do and how you do it um i think your show is spectacular i think it stands out above all other shows and i just wanted to say that thanks man we'll give you a shirt for that okay yeah you better give him a shirt now give him a like shine it up before you give it to him fold it yeah and you're you're the same off camera as you are on camera, which is cool, too. I mean, you don't see that all the time in a lot of the shows, I would say. What are your concluding thoughts? I appreciate that. That was kind of.

I'm ready to go to Mexico. That's it? I am, too. I can't wait. Concluding thoughts? He stole my concluding thought. I'm ready to go do some hunting. My concluding thought is, and I'm not just doing this because they had such nice compliments. go and hunt coos deer, you might have to wait in line,

but you will not have a more quality experience than if you go with Jandar. Jay, the problem with these guys is they're a little annoying. Here we go. About, they don't like to leave anything to chance. Is he going to bring up the light story again? I'm not going to tell the light story.

Jay earlier was talking about something happening very early, and I remember thinking he must be talking about 2 a.m. A lot of guys say very early, and it's like 5 a.m. or 6 a.m. If you can handle the abuse of being around perfectionists. You will have, you might come home with complaints, but it won't be about your guides. Not hunting enough.

And it won't be about not hunting enough and it won't be about not being in a good spot. It might be that, I don't know, you were cold or your feet got blisters or you were bored or whatever kind of little problems you have. It won't be because you went to a bad spot and had a bad guy who didn't want to hunt. They like to watch animals.

And they observe animals. They're students of animals. And you can learn a lot from these guys for sure. And, um, hunting ghouls, turkeys, it's like to see, um, birds out in the desert, like in these little washes and stream valleys where everything's just like desert.

And it looks like a episode of Wile E. Coyote. And then there's these little like oases, you know, from springs and streams and just to watch turkeys kind of doing their thing down those little bottoms i mean it's just mesmerizing man it's just a turkey has great colors and if you want to see what like that in the most beautiful of settings it's like in a desert environment um it's amazing and coos deer is this your third trip down to mexico for coos

deer right yeah yeah what brings you back what brings you back what what about them do you like i like looking through binoculars yeah i just like watching big expanses and looking through binoculars and just observing same thing you guys like i. I just like observing. You know what I mean? I love walking around the woods too, you know. I just had a great time down in Kentucky following a squirrel dog through the woods, which is the noisiest thing you've ever been involved in. But no, just the quiet, quiet observation

and just watching and watching and watching. And then the thrill of realizing that there's a deer right where you've been staring all day long. I have a decent game eye. Yanni has a better game eye than I have. And Yanni talks about how frustrating it is to watch for Kuzdi or Jandar. I feel like I see one, Yanni sees two,

and he says, you guys see 25. Your eye definitely gets trained to pick it up. For sure. And it's a lot of it's proportion, I would say. Just what size to look for. Yeah.

Yeah. I learned, I never did the whole binoculars on a tripod thing. The first time I ever did that was hunting coos deer. And you realize that when you start seeing 200 yards away a bird, when you realize that you just saw like a bird wing 200 yards away, you're like, dude, there's no way i would have ever seen freehand and i would never have caught that movement and then you realize the

tip of that deer's ear is like about that size and a lot of times you're like i just saw a ear or hey wait a minute that piece of grass isn't grass it just turned it's like a tine it's just its own thing man if you like puzzles and like visual stuff you should try coos deer hunting um but anyone's going to appreciate a ghoul's hunt i think you need to hunt quite a bit before you're really gonna appreciate a coos deer hunt i think i think it's a connoisseur's thing. I think doll sheep is a connoisseur's game. I think coos deer is a connoisseur's thing. You have to love hunting and love all things about hunting

and love being in the woods in order to love coos deer. Maybe I'm wrong. I wouldn't suggest it as a first hunt. It's definitely not like as much action as you're getting out of a turkey hunt. I would suggest a ghoul. If you'd been hunting one time before, I'd be like, dude, go on a ghoul hunt, man. You'd have a blast.

All right. That was a long concluding thought. Thanks for tuning in. More next time. 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.

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