The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 036

Episode Date: May 27, 2016

Bozeman, Montana. Steven Rinella talks with Jeff Sposito, Pete Muennich, Chris Gill, and Janis Putelis. Subjects discussed include: organic masses; bringing meat and ammo through TSA checkpoints; the writing of Duncan Gilchrist; 2% for Conservation's mission; domain names; bobbers vs strike indicators; how to run a t-shirt business; Chris Gill-Ridge Pounder; getting older; why everyone should be more direct; the genesis of the Rocky Mountain Goat Alliance; how mountain goats differ from other big game; hunting a bear with Randall Williams; how to pay it forward; why we've got it good as sportsman today. 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 meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. There he is already. Did you just do it?

He's done. I'll explain what he just did in a minute. But you know what happened to me today that was kind of funny is I was flying with a muskox tongue. The tongue of a muskox in a Ziploc bag brined. And I'm going through TSA in the airport in Seattle. And it flags, right? And they got to check my bag and You were carrying it. Yeah, I had it in my carry-on.

A brined tongue. I mean, when you look at it, you're like that's a tongue in a bag. And she says, I need to inspect your bag. And we go over to inspect it. And she says, there's an organic

mass in this bag and I made a joke about organic masses but then I was worried that she'd think I was hitting on her and something weird like do you know what I mean like I'm like oh you know those organic but I left it

yeah but an organic mass she pulled it out and said and it's just a tongue in a bag and she said I'm like, oh, you know, those organic, but I left it. Yeah, but an organic mass. She pulled it out and said, and it's just a tongue in a bag. And she said, everybody loves their fish. Did you say yeah? I did. I didn't go like, well, actually. But yeah, meat sets it off.

It does. Because yeah, that turkey set it off. It got me in trouble. That was in a checked bag, right? Yeah. Is that when you want? Oh, tell that. Because that's interesting about TSA. We get a lot of people who write in and ask various questions about how you fly with meat.

I think I've told this story before. I'm trying to make it short. But yeah, I got called back to security after I'd already gone through. I'd come all the way back through. And they're like, yeah, they need to see you in the back room about your checked baggage. I go in there. On all the nice stainless steel tables, my big red duffel is

completely taken apart, all the pieces laid out. I happen to have a whole turkey chopped up in there cold, not frozen. There was a tail fan. I was bringing the wings home for the kids two breasts the legs it's all there spurs you know because the kids want to see all that

shit so i'm like what they're like well this set it off pointing at the turkey breasts because again large organic mass but the reason you get you're in here is because we were in there looking for that we found a loose shotgun shell loose turkey bullets yeah loose turkey bullets and so that's what got me in trouble but luckily in checked baggage they don't have to do the whole um check your background and and the cop uh report but the funny part of it was that it was one of those heavy shot and if you hunt turkeys and use heavy shot you know it's like you touch the trigger there goes four or five bucks yeah four or five bucks and i knew that in my nice case i had some like cheap remington stuff i was like hey if you don't mind instead of taking that one can i swap out you can take my cheap remington one and get a heavy shot back

he was cool yeah he's like no problem bro thanks you packed it all up and left now you just got uh the problem where you try to go yeah walk onto the plane with ammo yeah which is a different deal 20 rounds at 22 and you had to talk to the policeman yeah that's what i had to do before but it was in bozeman they were cool yeah it had to be an anchorage and they knew that i wasn't trying to pull a fast one yeah i had just hunted tarmigan that day you know they're like yeah yeah i get it buddy but here's the deal now we got to act like you're trying to sneak out of the plane with ammunition and go through all the steps though obviously you're just like you know every other idiot who comes through here with like bullets in his pockets at the anchorage airport but i had to

talk to policeman and take some information down i had a morning at the Anchorage airport where I was coming back to the States with a black tail on my backpack. And I remember going through security, and the deer's entire head was inside my backpack concealed. But when I went through the x-ray machine, they could obviously see inside the backpack. And the girl's face behind the machine. And she looked at her supervisor, and she looked at her cowork the machine and she like looked at her supervisor

and she looked at her co-worker and then she looks at me and i'm just like hey it's alaska and i'm taking a deer back to montana really cool about it super cool about it i had a friend that was carrying the antlers one time and they had a big debate about the antlers and in the end he was able to bring the antlers on cool another guy's debate that they could be a weapon whether yeah whether it was weaponized or not so we're just talking to had a bunch of weird stuff in his fishing vest who was that an old man was flying with a fishing vest i missed that one and he had all kinds of like semi-weapon like items in his vest and he was like really confused.

And they kind of said like, they made him, just tell me this. They made him get on the plane and they're like, okay, you put it in the overhead bin and don't mess with it until you get where you're going. That's going to stop the plane from getting hijacked.

But that's on one hand, you think it's entirely rigid right like there's a set of rules and there's no room for individual interpretation within that but when nick brigden had a set of deer antlers they debated it and apparently with this old man they debated what he had going on in his fishing vest and there was a level of, you know, weighing in on it. But, you know, their mandate is looking for hazardous materials that would be hazardous to the plane and air travel. Like, I've heard they, like, if you could have other illegal junk in there, and it's not their concern. Right.

Like, it's not what they're looking for. I had a man, I flew, recently I had a bag pulled out because I had a big hunk of iron ore in it. And the guy's like, I need to look in your bag. I said, yeah, I got a piece of iron ore in there. He goes, ingot or raw? I'm like, in fact, it's raw iron ore. And he let me go. And I had another time in the last few weeks where I had a mammoth tooth and pulled that out.

Never even asked what the hell it was. Gave it a good looking over. Sent me on my way. I feel like you could have like a dude's arm in there. And it'd be the day it's not their mandate to pull it out. I think it'd be depending on the state of decay.

They might take you aside. Or if you had a hundred dollar bill duct taped to the arm. And you're like, oh, I'll look the other way here. Or if you laid a bag up that had one of those handcuffs, and it was still handcuffed to the side of the arm, and you ran that through the thing. I need to check your bag, sir.

Joined by Chris Gill, Ridge Pounder, Jeff Sposito, right? You sound kind of Italian. It is an Italian name, yes. I wonder if you're more Italian than I am. How many grandparents do you have that are Italian? Just my grandfather on my dad's side. Yeah, that's the same thing as me. Yeah.

One grandparent. Yeah. So I try to relate to Italian culture culture but it's just really hard for me yeah I I'm American with Sposito is my last name yeah my old man was brought up speaking he was raised by his grandparents

so he was raised by full on balls out Italians immigrants was raised to speak Italian in the home later in life he moved up to Michigan it was like it never Italians, immigrants, was raised to speak Italian in the home. Later in life, he moved out to Michigan. It was like it never happened. He didn't care about the language.

South side of Chicago, right back, what was it, Comiskey Park. So my grandfather grew up in Pittsburgh, but came over, same Italian-speaking family. His parents never didn't speak any English. Similar story. Yeah, he was, my dad's like, didn't speak any english similar similar story yeah he was my dad's like didn't eat the food but now and then try to remember a word he used to one of his he had a handful of insults one of them was that you were a mingula morta now i've asked a lot of italian speakers like what would that mean like the best i can tell it's like, you're like a dead dick. And then he had another insult, which in my mind was, was Votana Bishaku.

And I've said that to many Italians and they're like, yeah. Don't know. That doesn't even sound, I don't know what that is. Just made that up. But that was the Italian words he had. Yeah. Couldn't have cared less. But anyways, good to meet you, fellow Italian. Well, interestingly enough, just tying off the Italian thing

I just learned my cousin apparently we have enough Italian in there that you can apply for dual Italian citizenship I don't know what the laws are but yeah it blew my mind too and then I started to ponder what would be the advantages of having this or the disadvantages

but my cousin was able to get an Italian dual Italian citizenship and Italian passport. Yeah, I don't know what the advantage is. I'm not sure either, but it sounds cool. So maybe something to look into. Well, if you wound up in some Mexican jail, you'd have two embassies. You could have two embassies simultaneously working on your behalf. I guess that's an advantage.

Yeah, I'm not sure there is an advantage, but there you go. And then Peter. Pete? Pete. Pete? advantage yeah i'm not sure there's an advantage but there you go and then peter pete pete pete who's holding a dog shocker oh yeah you got a dog out somewhere right now oh yeah he's tied up outside oh he's tied up he's in the truck yeah we can actually see him from right here so you're keeping an eye on him oh i can see him and he would rather be killing house cats well chasing house cats i don't mean to say killing house cats. It's chasing. It's family friendly. Let's just leave it to the wild ones. Yeah. Tell me your last name again. I forgot your last name. That's not occurring

to me right now. Munich. Pete Munich. Yep. So we got dual things going on here. Because Chris, you got nothing. No. Chris is just in town. And he just rather than being alone in his hotel, trying to figure out how to get cable to work or something.

Chris is a cameraman that works with us. And you just put in a long, hard day. Yeah, I wouldn't say a hard day. It was a fun day. Yeah. It was a day. We weren't climbing ridges or anything. Pete Munich, you do many things, but Rocky Mountain Goat Alliance.

Explain that real quick. So the Rocky Mountain Goat Alliance is a- That's your brainchild. I guess you could call it my brainchild, yeah. With the help of many talented people along the way, has become the leading conservation organization for Rocky Mountain goats across North America. All right.

Do you guys have members? We do. Oh, yeah. It's an animal that doesn't draw, you know, it doesn't have its focus group. Correct. It does now. It does now. It never did have its focus group.

Correct. You've read all the books by Duncan Gilchrist? Quite a few of them. And his videos. Now, there's not many mountain goat writers, but he is, if there are two, I'm guessing he's probably the best. Oh, he's a legend right there. But the guy that wrote The Beast, The Color of Winter?

Chadwick. Yeah. Not real hunting friendly. No, nor are his colleagues. But an informative book anyway. Yeah, The Beast of Color Winter is an incredible book. Certainly doesn't highlight hunting the way that we try to. Is he still alive?

Yep. Lives in Montana. Yeah. Yeah, he's a good guy. I don't you know, he, I don't know, it's weird because like when you get a researcher, you know, but they spend a lot of time in proximity to the animal. You can kind of go two directions and you kind of almost develop like this like anthropomorphic kind of relationship, you know? Sure. But it's an informative as hell. Yeah, it's incredible.

You know, there's not a lot of literature on mountain goats. Yeah. And certainly not a lot of literature for the general public so the beast the color of winter is a very valuable book to the mountain goat yeah um gilchrist has so many awesome observations i love that you know he's like an astute observer oh yeah accidentally he's an accidental very good writer when i said say that, I mean, I think that, I don't think he set out to try to emulate styles, but he accidentally writes like Hemingway. Interesting.

These very clear, declarative sentences. He says a very true thing, then says a very true thing, then says a very true thing, on down the line and winds up having these like kind of like accidentally beautiful passages. It's kind of hard to argue with a guy like that.

Yeah, there's like an authoritative sense. And then Jeff Sposito. Yeah, from Italy. From Italy. Dual citizen. Possibly soon. Oh, you even have a hat. Yeah.

The reason Jeff's here is I want to talk a little bit about, so we got two kind of like two organizations, two goody two-shoe do-gooder organizations represented here. I've never been called that before. You actually couldn't get that name. You tried to be the goody two-shoe Alliance, but had to go with the Rocky Mountain. Wasn't able to get it on paper, yeah. So break down what you got going on, the 2%. So similar to Pete, thanks to a lot of help, help them fund their mission work by bringing industry companies and giving a way to conservation deserve recognition for what they do and what they contribute and trying to find a medium or a platform to help them get recognition

from consumers for what they do for conservation groups. Yeah, so you go on there and you see that that's there and you know what you're doing. Now, I don't know if you can even talk about this. Can you talk about, like, because I see that name you can even talk about this. Can you talk about, like, because I see that name and something pops into my mind. Can you talk about that, or you're not allowed to talk about that? Yeah, I think we can talk about whatever, everything. It's kind of like, you know, there's, what is it, 1% for? Yeah, it was 1% for the planet, yeah.

So 1% for the planet is an organization that was started by Yvon Chouinard, who's the founder of Patagonia, and a fellow named Craig Matthews, who owns a fly shop here in West Yellowstone, just south of us. And don't quote me on this, but 12 or 15 years ago, they started 1% for the planet based off the principles of businesses

that make a living on the planet. Outdoor industry should be given back to environmental causes and protecting the planet, outdoor industry, should be given back to environmental causes and protecting the planet. And their model, it's been very successful. They have, I think, over 2,000 member businesses now. Do they really? Yeah.

All in the softer outdoor industries. Well, it's very broad. I mean, they have food, you know, food, organic companies. Cliff Bar is a pretty popular brand name. That's a 1% plant member. If you look on the back of every Cliff Bar you eat, there's a little logo. So it's pretty broad. How many companies?

Over 2,000, I believe, yeah. So, yeah, so they, we, I can't take credit for inventing that model, but really looking at what that model's done for environmental sustainability type nonprofits and what it's done for businesses like Patagonia who really have a strong reputation for corporate responsibility. How many organizations do they back? They have, I want to say, 3,500 different nonprofit environmental groups that they say are within their network. I mean, it's broad. Super broad. Yeah.

But yeah, so that's kind of what our model is built off of. We looked at the opportunity to kind of leverage that in hunting and fishing conservation, and it made a lot of sense. The more we learned about how 1% of the planet is structured and what they do um and that's kind of what started us down the path with two percent of conservation so what do you got to do now like it's pretty brand spickety new yeah we got we got everything to do yeah yeah we uh to this point so we've been working on on getting this going for about the last two years really doing all all the back-end stuff, getting the IRS determination for 501c3 status, getting some startup funding money, working with some conservation groups

and some businesses to really get feedback and evolve the model, make sure we're going on the right path. When you say startup money, what do you mean? You needed money just to get the legal stuff taken care of. Got to get the legal stuff taken care of, got to build a website, got to create a brand, got to go and and market the brand and build value so so who pays for that do do the did did the groups that you're going to

eventually support pay for it as an investment for the backing they might get down the road or did you have people who participate in the program help so that so so a little bit of both but yeah my first approach was to go to some conservation groups that i'm fortunate to have a relationship with uh the first one i went to was the wild sheep foundation and and yeah it was exactly that conversation and hey what do you think of this model it's pretty open casual conversation this is an idea we have when we think that if it's successful, it could help raise more money for groups like yourself. But I need some money to get it going. But to get it going, we need some money.

So they took a leap of faith. They believed in the model, and they said, yeah, I think that this just can impact us long-term, can impact conservation as a whole long-term, which is just as important. So they were willing to invest some money in the form of a grant to get it off the ground. Did that come with stipulation that you're going to have to pay them back?

No, no. No strings attached. They took faith. Yeah, no strings attached. How many, are you guys, is it launched? Like, could I expect to go somewhere and go and be like, oh, 2% for conservation? So we, yeah, you can.

So we turned the website on, for lack of a better term, about 10 days ago. Oh, is that right? No kidding. So the website's live. It's fishandwildlife.org or 2%forconservation.org. Get you there, too. So we have a website. People got to put in the little percentage symbol.

You can't buy domain names and symbols, so it's 2% all written out. TWO. TWO, yeah. But fishandwildlife.org is how we're putting it. little percentage you can't buy domain names so it's 2% all written out but T-W-O T-W-O yeah but fishandwildlife.org did you run into that problem

with hunt to eat no we ran into the problem that someone else had already taken the numeral who was that just some

jackass same way some jackass owns meateater.com did you try to buy it the guy that owns meateater.com now and then puts up a picture of some dinner he ate in a restaurant. And you reach out to him?

I don't know. We tried. What did he sell it to you? Was he open? Can't get old. We haven't tried yet. We don't have those kind of pockets yet. Have you approached the guy?

Is he a hunter? Oh, yeah, we did. No, yeah, we just sent just an email just saying, hey, we'd love to have that domain name. I don't think we ever got back to you. Well, trade you. Really? Never even got back to you? No.

You know what's funny? It's not a hunting thing. It's the same thing. He's like, supposedly. Oh, yeah, looking for restaurants. Yeah, he's hunting for restaurants. Yeah, be like, I'll go buy going out to eat or

I'll buy um trying to find a good restaurant dot com and then you give me the one you have

because you obviously have the wrong one because that's going out to dinner that's funny yeah out to dinner

would be a better one for him there's so many stories and this is the right uh group of guys to know them all but there's so many stories and this is the right group of guys to know them all

but there's so many stories about like people writing domain names you know the domain name buying game

dude but yeah people who like yeah you know he might want to be in a big name in politics someday I'm going to go buy his name

you know I should almost go get my kids names now in case everyone becomes a tree trimmer and wants to have his name anyhow so speaking of that we were pretty fortunate

to play the domain game a little bit no one owned 2% for conservation we got fishandwildlife.org nobody had that and I think somebody lapsed on it. And I was on GoDaddy late at night one time when trying to find domains. No one had fishandwildlife.org? No.

And I was putting in a whole bunch of random domain names in GoDaddy. And it was like, I don't even know how I came to fishandwildlife.org, but put it in. It was like available, $100. And I was like, damn, that's kind of expensive. And moved on to like search other domains. And the next morning I woke up and like texted one of my buddies

that's helped me with this. And I was like, fishandwildlife.org is available. He's like, you bought it, right? And I was like, no. He's like, dude, you're a moron. 100 bucks. Yeah, man.

So we bought that domain name and that's what we're using to promote the platform of 2% for conservation. I figured if it doesn't work out, maybe we could sell the domain name and something like that. Somebody needs it. Yeah, now the people know. All right, so you launched 10 days ago.

Yeah. Who are your benefactors? Is that the right word to mean who would you? Okay, you aggregate the 2%. No, you? Okay. You aggregate the 2%. No, no. You don't aggregate the 2%. Yeah. So I wouldn't say benefactor is the word I would use, but I think that's appropriate.

So we aren't taking the money from companies that they're giving back to conservation. Essentially, what our organization does is certify that a company does meet certain criteria. Oh, I got you. So that is a common misconception I've had with businesses, but this is really what the genius of the model. You're like, I got an idea. You send me. Send me 1% of sales.

But to your point, so this was an interesting learning that I had from 1% for the planet, right? That's what I thought when I started studying the model too. I was like, huh, so how the hell are you going to distribute those funds? How are you going to convince companies to write you a check for 1% for the planet, right? That's what I thought when I started studying the model too. I was like, huh, so how the hell are you going to distribute those funds? How are you going to convince companies to write you a check for 1% of sales? And I learned that,

no, that's not how it works. I mean, the companies, and this is a huge benefit of the model, are empowered to work with the conservation groups they want to. What are you passionate about as a company? Who do you want to support? Or you want to support the Rocky Mountain Goat Alliance, backcountry hunters and anglers. We don't care as long as they are pro hunting and fishing conservation groups. We just certify, okay, did you contribute 1% of sales to that? And then 1% of your time. So I guess we should clarify that first.

It's 2% for conservation is 1% of sales, plus 1% of time equals 2% for conservation. But let's say they turn around. They're like, oh, yeah, we gave it all to the Humane Society or HSUS, right? Would you then say, well, that don't count? Yeah, of course. Yeah, I got it. So that's part of what we do from the certification is we look at the criteria of,

okay, who'd you contribute funds to? Who are those organizations? Make sure we have four kind of uh bullet points for lack of a better term that kind of define conservation groups in our mind those are uh the obvious one wildlife and habitat improvement right that's kind of the most common one access and opportunities one of them which is hugely important and wildlife and habitat would be research and everything that's research everything yep everything. What are the other two? Education and outreach. So this is

teaching kids about conservation, about hunting and fishing, about how it all works. And then what the hell is the fourth one? Did I say access and opportunity already? You already said that. I'm going to have to pull up the website to figure out what the fourth one is. Wildlife habitat, access, opportunity,

education, outreach. Come on, man. Good thing the website launched. What do you think about all that, education, outreach. Come on, man. Shit. Good thing the website launched. What do you think about all that, Chris? I'm into it, man. Like in what way? Well, I'd like the, like for the 1% for the planet model

that you're talking about, right? Like I will, as a consumer, and like a lot of people I know will consciously go out and buy products from brands that follow that model makes it feel a little bit better yeah it makes you feel good about it so like if you're into hunting and fishing and you don't really have like an outlet to donate your money like you're not gonna you know or if you're just some dude that works at a ski shop or something or a fly shop you're not gonna like write write a check to X conservation group for whatever. But if you go and buy a new jacket from whatever company and you're like,

oh, part of that went to, you know, funding conservation programs, you feel good about it. Chris, is it safe to say like you weren't like a big full balls hunting guy? No, man. No. Yeah, it's safe to say that. I never was opposed to it yeah no no no he liked to angle yeah i was an angler still am what's your what was your angling back i'm going

toward a question i have for you but what's your angling background well same as mine i grew up in michigan yeah a lot of like you know whatever's hitting a lot of pipe whatever's hitting that fisherman you know you guys go chase the wiley steelhead we chase the steelhead oh yeah no i'm saying fly rod though i learned that yeah it was always drifting spawn or wax worms yeah but do we fly fish for steel but we didn't really we use fly gear yeah that's fly gear and we just run running line. That's a brand like Amnesia. And run split shot. An 18-inch leader.

And yes, they'll fly on it. But a lot of the spinning tackle guys are running yarn balls. Same thing, yeah. You're hooking fish out from under your boots all the time. Yeah. Because you're just staying on the edge of those deep ass holes and runs and just running it through there to act like you're fly fishing. But it's like you could have put a spinning reel on it. Some guys get high and mighty about it. Oh, yeah. And they're like, oh, no, I'm a fly guy. I'm like, dude, you're fly fishing. But it's like, you could have put a spinning reel on it. And some guys get like

high and mighty about it. Oh yeah. And they're like, oh no, I'm a fly guy. I'm like, dude, we're essentially fishing the same gear. I just have a Shimano reel

and you have a Sims. Dude, today I saw sticking out of, here in Bozeman, I saw sticking out of the back of a truck a rod tip and a bobber. Yeah.

And I'm like, that's funny. Guys, what the hell is he bobber fishing for right now? Bluegills? I was like, there's no bluegills

on the beds around here or anything. There is. It's a fly rod. With a strike indicator. Yeah. Strike indicator. That's a bobber.

That's called a bobber. They've been selling those for a long time. It's a bobber. We had this conversation before. It was like, it's a strike indicator. And I said before, I'm like, yeah, well, okay. So my kid uses one of those to indicate strikes. What we call it is a bobber.

Yeah, that's what I call it, man. You know what used to really mess with my client's heads when those, what are they called? Thingamabobbers, right? You guys fly fishermen? A guy came out, there's a guy that makes a product called a thingamabobber, which is a bobber.

Yeah, it's a strike indicator. That looks like a bobber. It doesn't. It's like a plastic ball. It's half red, half white. What do you mean it doesn't look like a bobber. It doesn't. It's like a plastic ball. It's half red, half white. It doesn't have that. Is it a plastic sphere? No, it's not plastic. It's like a soft...

It is soft plastic. It has air in it, but it's completely sealed. It doesn't have the little... What do you call it? Spring and the spring hook. You got to basically double up your leader, stick it through the hole, flip the leader over it, pull it tight. That sounds like a breaking point to me.

No, because you're doing it way up the leader. You're at a 30-pound test or something. But people got used to it, and they come in all kinds of colors. But they're all like one solid color. And you can slide it up and down at whim. Yeah, you just move that loop out, move it up wherever you want, put the loop back over. Yeah. up and down at whim. Yeah, you just move that loop out, move it up wherever you want, put the loop back over. Yeah.

People got used to fishing those, and because they were just one solid color, they kind of looked different. You know, they're like, it's my strike indicator. So they came out with white ones. I took the white ones and some red marker. It made it look like a real. It made it look like a real bobber. And freaking it would mess with those fly fishing minds. They'd be like, really?

You don't have like a pink one or a green one yeah they didn't want to admit they're bobber fishing that's exactly what it is and by the way we had a san juan worm hanging underneath it you know yeah call an ace an ace yep yeah you were you were matching you were matching something those fish have never laid eyes on, which is a red worm. Oh, it just gave me a smile every time I'd look over off the oars and be like, yeah. I have done it. I've spent many hours fishing that way. And I, yeah, you don't like, you know what we would call it? I struck a happy, a lot of guys call it.

I was like, I can't call it a strike indicator because that's just, you know, that's like mental masturbation. But if someone wasn't like a bobber either, we would call it a float. Yeah. Because we use them for steelhead a lot. A float with a stick. Which is just like ice fishing, you'd call that a bobber. Same rig up. What do they call the bobber that you put the water into to fish off a spinning reel so you can actually throw a weightless fly?

You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, but I don't know. I know them and I've owned them, but I don't know what they're called. I have no idea. I've never used those. Anyhow, what I was driving at, you first came out and worked with us when? September. September last year, yeah.

Yeah. 2015. Do you feel like you've gotten like a kind of a crash course in a bunch of hunting-related business? Oh, yeah, man. I feel like I learned a lot. What's the business think about all that? She's into it, man. She's supportive of it.

She kind of hates my job because of the travel. Yo, I can imagine. You don't say being gone all the time causes marital stress? Who ever heard of such a thing? Yeah, she likes it. She likes it because I don't have to like go to super dangerous places now. You know?

She just got back from the Congo. Yeah, but that's not like that. No, that is like. Like, that is like. You worked in Afghanistan. Yeah. You worked in the Congo. Yeah.

You work in Iraq. Yeah. What's a dangerous place? I would say more I would say Afghanistan and Iraq Detroit? Yeah, definitely So she likes this better than Afghanistan

Grizzly bears to her are safer than We had bear spray That's good because most people think that bears most people think that bears are dangerous. Yeah. Which is silly. They are, but it's silly.

Yeah. They're not going to come at you with a knife. There's so much. This is the thing I wanted to say. Let's come back to the bear thing because I want to talk about the bear thing. 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. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love

in OnX 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, 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. onxmaps.com. meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the to the OnX Club, y'all. All right, so 2% for conservation.

They pick the group. You certify the group. Now, what's the thing you need most right now? Do you need businesses to go 2%? Or do you need customers to prioritize buying at 2%? So we need both. I think our strategy is we need customers to value what we're doing

because that's going to make businesses understand and realize the importance of becoming a member. But there are a lot of businesses that already meet the criteria that are already volunteering time that are already giving back one percent of sales yep so so our strategy is to go find those businesses uh and talk to them about what we're trying to do uh and see if they believe in the model of, hey, if you had this conversation internally about marketing what we do for conservation, right? What would be their argument against it? Well, there's no argument necessarily against it, but you're a business trying to sell products.

That's your first, that's where your focus in marketing is. But no, in your case, you're saying they're already, because there's a lot of companies, particularly smaller companies I know about, that are already doing that. That's right. So what would be their, what would be a reason they would have to not be like,

yes, unless they just want, they didn't want to be part of something that could. Hopefully they don't have very many reasons not to say yes. Unless they're just paranoid. Our model is unproven. So there's some risk in like tying your brand with our brand that's not, I mean, you don't know what I'm going to go do,

something stupid with how we market our brand or something. So there's some risk there. But you don't have any chance to really do anything bad because they're not sending you, like I thought earlier, they're not sending you the money and it turns out that you embezzled it. Sure. Yeah, so it's low risk, to answer your question, for companies that are already doing it.

This is just another way for them. It's a multiplier effect on their investment, right? So you're working with BHA or so company, working with BHA. Not only are they giving you exposure for your sponsorship and your dollars, this is another way for those same dollars, you don't have to invest any more to get more recognition for it. So hopefully, that's kind of our goal at the gate,

is to start talking to these conservation-minded companies at the gate. But the real goal and the real long-term win is if we could prove that value, right? As I want companies who aren't currently working with conservation groups, who aren't investing 1% to see that value and then come asking like, shoot, man, I want to do that too. How do I get involved? And we can say, well, what do you care about? Go, I mean, public land access. Yeah. Go talk to the guys at BHA and see what you can do. And that's when incremental dollars will come to conservation. And that's when the model is is effective at doing what it what we hope that it can do so when you go and pitch this to a company do you go and talk to the marketing guy at the company talk to whoever i can talk to first but but yeah the marketing guy's usually the

guy the guy that would do it because it's like a marketing thing there's something in it for you yeah it's a marketing investment the way most companies look yeah yanni's t-shirt company recently sold a bunch of t-shirts and gave the money all away. There you go. Which someone might look and be like, dude, that's a stupid way to run a t-shirt business. Probably not profitable. You might think like, man, you got it all wrong. What they really do in business is they keep all that money.

But you were thinking marketing. Sure. As much as you were thinking trying to do like, you know, win-win. Yeah, like I said. Yeah, so I think this model, hopefully for something like that, right? Like there's a marketing investment for how conservation groups have evolved, right? As they offer sponsorships to companies as a fundraising mechanism for them, and that really is a marketing investment for businesses. I don't understand what that means. So, I don't know, you can go become the corporate sponsor of BHA or RMEF, or you can work at whatever, you can buy advertising

in their magazine, you can, as a business, you're not just writing a check to these conservation groups without expecting anything in return, right? How that model's evolved, how they raise money is they offer you something in return for your return, right? How that model's evolved, how they raise money is they offer you something in return for your contribution, right? So it's a marketing investment, right?

And this is just another way to leverage that investment. So that was an interesting point where you're saying, let's say you have a conservation organization that does a publication. What keeps that publication alive and drives membership for that conservation organization and allows them to- Advertise. Yeah yeah it's like the people advertise in that magazine yep so a company that is buying ads in a place in support of a conservation organization that's a conservation spend on

their part hell yeah it is that that that conservation group depends on those funds to execute their mission work it's a fundraising and that's a recruitment tool and a way to disseminate information. Totally, yeah. I mean, going to the Wild Sheep Foundation is a good example, right? Buying a booth at their show and exhibiting at their show. They'd have that show to raise money

and awareness for their brand. That's important for them executing their mission work and raising funds. So going to work with them, that's a contribution to conservation. That's important. So would you picture that a fella's going to go, like a fella's going to go make a purchase?

They would go check on your, they would go check on fishandwildlife.org and be like, oh, you know, if I'm going to do this, maybe I'll do it at a group that's pledged 2%. Sure. I hope that they can do that and check the website, but you know, the way the model gives companies flexibility to leverage it how they want, right? So I would hope that a guy's going to buy ammo, right? At Sportsman's Warehouse. And he's going looking at the giant wall of fricking boxes of ammo. And he's sitting there looking at the 270 and there's a box of federal with a little 2% of conservation logo on it.

And then there's a box of whatever, Remington that doesn't have the logo on it. Hopefully if we're doing our job right, getting our brand out there and recognition right with the consumer, he'll see that and know that, you know, a percentage of that purchase is going to go back to conservation.

He'll buy that federal ammo rather than whatever else. That's kind of the end goal in that consumer mindset. No, I'm with you. Yeah. Two more questions. Maybe more. What's in it for you?

Like, why are you doing this? Nothing. Yeah. I kind of thought that. Once I heard that you weren't getting the checks, I was like, huh? Yeah. once I heard that you weren't getting the check so I was like like huh yeah no uh you know so so my background I work in the hunting industry for for uh for SICA um who sells clothing hunting clothing and I do sales and marketing I've done I've been with them for a long time and and we've always internally talked about this this opportunity to talk about what we do for

conservation and struggle with what we do for conservation and struggle with how we do it and then so part of my job at sick is i work with all the conservation groups that that we have partnerships with and i've gotten to develop lots of relationships there and learn about how they function and the challenges they have and gotcha and the challenges they have from fundraising and and kind of those two perspectives this just kind of hit me one time and it's like, shit, man, that we could do something here to make this easier for both parties, right?

And so I just started working on nights and weekends and it's kind of come to this. So really, yeah, nothing's in it. I'm married. I got two kids. How old are the kids? Six and three. Well, three in two weeks.

And then 2%, it's not 2% of profits. No, it's actually, it's 1% of sales. 1% of sales. Yeah, and it's 1% of time, which we've based off of roughly 2,080 work hours in the year, right? So 21 hours. And that's not per individual at the company,

that's just company-wide. We want you to commit to 21 hours going back to volunteer work. And that could be selling raffle tickets at a banquet, sitting on a board, doing a river cleanup project. We just want you to do more than write a check, right? I shouldn't say it's easy to write checks, right? Because that's not easy,

but anybody, your company can essentially write a check, but can you show commitment beyond writing a check and go out and foster that volunteerism with conservation groups? Time is more expensive than money. Yeah, you know, and that was a learning that I had when pitching this model and getting feedback to conservation groups. They're like, yeah, money is really important. But to a lot of them, arguably, time is more important than the money. Like, we need volunteers. Volunteer time.

Yeah, we need volunteers to help us execute the actual conservation work that we're trying to do so so yeah so that's how you get to it's one percent of sales plus one percent of time and that's that's where our naming convention comes to two percent for conservation so like if if a listener like what's your call to action man if you had to give a call actually what do you need most right now to happen uh we need we need people to uh to communicate to the businesses, the brands that they love, the products they want to buy, that this is valuable to them. So I want a guy that loves to die hard. Matthew's guy loves to shoot Matthew's bows.

That's all he wants to say. Hey, man, why aren't you guys giving back 1% to conservation? Why aren't you volunteering your time? You should be a member of this yep and if some dude is out there you know stitching up uh backpacks out of his out of his garage and selling them like he could heck yeah man yeah so so there's a cool thing too where i think there's lots of opportunity for for non-endemic companies like it's not just hunting fishing companies right that's obviously where there's the most direct correlation, but a guy that owns a construction company that's just a passionate hunter, right?

Shit, that construction company could be a member too. They should be contributing to conservation or whatever it is. So there's a lot of, I think there's a lot of opportunity when you start looking at the world of businesses outside of just hunting and fishing companies too, which is exciting.

There you have it, fishingwildlife.org. Or if you know how to spell that good. Yeah, 2% for conservation. But yeah, fishandwildlife.org is- That's your favorite one. There you go. That's easier to remember. Easier to remember.

That's my domain name win for the year. Pete, was it you? Oh, yeah. Did you raise your hand? No. Okay, well, let's do this though. Let's do this. 2% for conservation.

Do you have concluding thoughts about 2% for conservation? I mean, I have something I can say about it. Well, don't waste our time. I'm just making up things to say about it. I'm just glad to hear that, yeah, you guys are like really trying to get out, you know, get out of just the hunting and fishing industry. Cause I think that'll help just raise awareness of what the hunting and fishing industry does already. And just get more people in on the conservation boat.

Yeah. You could make it, you could already be because you could take and look at all the money you gave away off the t-shirts you gave away. Yup. You're like 10%. Yeah. He's like,

yeah, he's 11%. The volunteer time. No, you know what? You've done, the money was enough. You got the volunteer time, man. You know, the volunteer time, it's going to be interesting

when we go talk to businesses that, you know, that might be hard. That might be the hardest thing that we find out that, that we do, which, which is good. I think it, we don't want it to be easy to be a member of this,

right? It's not, you want people. Yeah. You don't want people to be more valuable for a member of businesses, right? Cause it's a commitment. It's hard to do.

You'd be like, well, if I drank all night at a ducks, unlimited thing, does that count as volunteer time? You got any concluding thoughts about that? Chris, you already kind of told us about what you thought about it

yeah I'm gonna do it Chris's real name is Ridge Pounder it's on my birth certificate because this man is you know I talk about Duncan Gilchrist being an accidental good writer Chris is an accidental good hiker.

Unbelievable. Lucky dude. Attitude and stamina. I think it's just attitude, man. I think it's not even. So you're hurting deep down? No, I'm like, I'm not in pain, but like I get winded. You know, I'm not like just.

Yeah, but you're always just right there. He's always just right there. I talk about that so much is that that attitude can almost, in the end, trump the stamina because you can take two guys and look at them and look at their stats in the gym and be like, that dude's going to crush that dude. But the guy that looks like he's the gym rat might not have the good attitude. And those long days on the ridges and on trails,

attitude really just takes you home. Yeah. Long smiles make takes you home. Yeah. Long smiles makes for short miles. Yep. And yeah, big smile on Rich Pounder's face all the time like you're having fun. Dude, I am having fun. You kidding me?

Even when I'm like, dude, did you run ahead lately and get that coming on shot? I haven't seen you up ahead of us lately. And then I'll go ahead. I'm there. But you mean he's right. You mean he's ready to run up and do it? Yeah, totally.

So what I've been telling him, and this is the second time I brought this up today because we just worked today. You're not that old. 27. Yeah. You, here's what I'm afraid that you're doing. I'm afraid that you just think that you're just going to go on through life slicking up and down hills like a greased hog without putting any investment in. And I think you might be at the apex of if you go on just thinking that that's how you are.

Dude, I've been having that attitude, I think, for most of my life of like, oh, yeah, no, it's fine. But I think you're right. Just got to hit it. But what do I do? I live in flatland, man. I think he's got 10 more good years. Really?

I don't know. He might, but that's not that long once you're there. Listen, when you've been alive 10 more years you'll still be younger than me which is insane I don't even know what the hell point I was trying to make I was trying to make

the opposite point he'll be my age that's what I'm saying because I really everybody keeps telling you know has been telling me for 10 years

oh metabolism's going to slow down you're going to get beer gut yada yada yada well now just in the last year, I really am like, man, I have to watch what I eat. You're not getting a beer gut.

No, but. Plus, you quit drinking beer. He quit drinking beer. You haven't drank a beer in like five months. Yes. He's on a Latvian cleanse. But I still think that like, I just, my body feels different finally. I'm kind of accepting this.

I feel it. Dude, I live in absolute fear because I know now. The other day, for instance, I woke up and my neck hurt from sleeping funny. Normally, by 8 in the morning, it would not be that way. My neck hurt for five days. That's a bad crank. Normally, by 8 in the morning, it would not be that way. My neck hurt for five days. Oh. Oh. That's a bad crank.

Yeah. Well, it's just happening. I'm starting to live in fear. Need a new pillow. Yeah. Well, I was at my brother's house. He's got a food tie. And that did it to you? Well, no, because we were at the house.

And so my wife and I had we're like a bed but you know the kids we brought all the kids to my brother's place to fish and they were confused about what the hell's going on like we're like okay you guys all go in that room and sleep and we're in this little not a little bed but like a bed you know and then pretty soon they're in ours and I was just like never mind I'll go back and find another place to sleep and that's where I hurt my neck. But it took forever to get better and it's just because I'm getting old. My wife keeps telling me I'm getting old. She's like, you've really aged a lot lately.

It's brutal. Well, no, it's not. Cause it's like, I like to know what's going on. I don't want people to tell me a bunch of lies. Yes, you know, speaking of that, we should bring up our friend who we hung out with last week. Did we mention that on podcasts?

We did in Wyoming about his bluntness and about how I was mentioned that some dude, I told 10 people about that. Yeah. It was like, we, it was a little uncomfortable at first, but once you got used to the way that this dude operated,

you appreciated it. You appreciate it. Cause you're like, there's no gray area. Everybody knows exactly what's going on. And that's kind of how you like it. So, yeah, he's a very successful businessman, accomplished in that field, and has been in management roles for a long time. And we, at one point, found a couple of moose sheds, okay? Rather than have any awkwardness about who owns these moose sheds, those will be staying on the property. And at first, they're like, whoa.

They're like, hey, you know what? Better that, right? Than him being like, man, those guys found them and they took them home and now I'm mad and wish I had them. Just keeping it real. We got done eating dinner. He's like, let's clean up. Right? It's like, please, everyone should just be like that.

Just tell me what it is you want. I wish my wife would be like that more often. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, I say that, but I say that, but I don't really have that problem. But she obviously is being that way because she just told you. You're aging lately. Yeah. Well, you know, I say that, but I don't really have that problem. But she obviously is being that way because she just told you. You're aging lately. Yeah.

All right. So Rocky Mountain Goat Alliance or Mountain Goat Alliance? How's it go? It's the Rocky Mountain Goat Alliance. Rocky Mountain Goat Alliance. Now, what was the genesis? It was early 2013. I went to my first Wild Sheep Foundation convention.

For what reason? I was working at Schnee's at the time, and we had a booth. So I was on my first trade show circuit. I was like 22 years old or something. Even younger than Ridge Pounder. I'm 26 now, yeah. Still younger than Ridge Pounder.

Are you younger than Ridge Pounder? I'm 31. I'm getting old too. I saw the Montana Governor's Tag sell for $280,000. The Bighorn Sheep Permit sell for $2,480,000. Yeah, that was a quarter.

Wow, I'm really butchering this. Half a million dollar sheep was sold that year. Yep. 90% of those funds went to Montana bighorn sheep conservation and management. And I have a relationship with a regional biologist here, Julie Cunningham, a very good friend of mine. And I came home from that convention and literally Monday morning, I was knocking on her door.

And I had killed a mountain goat in 2011 and I'm obsessed with mountain goats and asked her how I could help out with mountain goat projects. If there was any volunteer opportunities or if anybody had orchestrated a conservation group specifically for this animal. And the answer was no, but her quick follow-up was, I've been waiting my entire career for somebody to walk in here and say that. Oh, is that right? So she and I sat down and over a cup of coffee, the Goat Alliance was kind of boring that morning. So we came up with the idea. We're going to start a grassroots conservation group to assist with mountain goat conservation

and mountain goat management. And that's all fine and dandy. But then the biggest question was, hey, what are we going to do? Yeah. What problems does a mountain goat have? Because they're generally above development. Sure. They're higher than development. what are we going to do? Yeah. What are the, like what problems does mountain goat have? So, cause they're like, they're generally above development.

Sure. They're higher than development, but they have very low fecundity. They don't have like a high reproductive rate. Correct. So what's their problem? Nanny harvest is probably the most detrimental thing to a mountain goat population. Is that right?

And what's unfortunate is across North America, the average mountain goat tag is an either sex permit. Yeah. And that's for- Can I break in for a minute just to clarify a couple points here? So what he's talking about there is when you get a permit, an either sex permit, you'll find the animals that are very hard to sex or that are hard to sex. They don't, they generally do either sex permit. So for instance, bears, it takes a trained eye to sex a bear. I don't know if I've ever seen in my life a bear tag good for a gender specific bear. It's asking a lot. Wild pigs, a trained eye.

You never see like it's good for a male or female. Things that are easy to distinguish. Sheep got a big damn set of antlers on its head or not. Stuff like that. You see it. Mountain goats. It takes a trained eye, an educated eye so rather than putting that on people where you're basically sending 50 of your people out to to probably end up breaking a law they do it just because it's

so hard to enforce i'm guessing and it's puts a certain level of um responsibility on their shoulders i'll point out and i'm sure you're aware of this. I drew a goat tag on the Kenai Peninsula, and they say it's either sex. If you kill a nanny, you can't even apply for this tag for seven years or something like that. So they penalize you that way. And that's not even the end of the repercussions of that harvest.

The Alaska model, if you harvest a nanny, the quota for the following year is directly resulted. They lower their tags. If you go in there and kill a nanny, you're taking a tag out of someone else's pocket the next year. All right, so go on about that nanny harvest being a big issue. Yep. We could have a hell of a lot more goats.

Sure, yeah. If people would draw a tag, and then when you draw a tag, you got months before you're going to hunt. Sure. So mountain goats are extremely robust. You know, they don't, they don't deal luckily with the extremely detrimental issues that bighorn sheep deal with as far as pneumonia outbreaks or anything of that. Like they're, they're a lot more durable of a mammal than a wild sheep, in my opinion. So they're survivors. They do very, very well when introduced to areas. And there's not a lot of literature explaining that, but mountain goat

introductions, if done with a large amount of mountain goats, are extremely successful. Other animals introduced are a lot more finicky. So mountain goats are total survivors. They flourish in a handful of different environments. What's an old mountain goat? 12, 13. Okay. Yeah.

A lot like a sheep. Like a 14-year-old ram would be a dead sheep walking, right? Yeah. He doesn't have any teeth left. It's just like a billy. But the nanny harvest is extremely dangerous because they do reproduce so slow. The average mountain goat doesn't reproduce until it's three, maybe four years old. Kid recruitment rate in the first year is sub 50%. And most of the populations in the lower 48 are pretty small. So if you have a couple of years of heavy female harvest, there are significant repercussions from those harvests. And you can't incriminate these people. You can't blame the 14-year-old kid that draws a mountain goat tag

and it's an either-sex tag and he doesn't know anything about mountain goats and he goes out goat hunting and he sees one and he shoots one and it happens to be a six-year-old female. Well, that's a really valuable animal to that population. She's important. They give off one

offspring? Correct. They have one. Tw, twins do occur. It's pretty rare. It's very rare for the twins to both survive, but nothing near what we think of like a whitetail pumping out twins every year. Right. Pretty much a whitetail will have fawns its second year, right? Yeah.

So it's very different and you can't expect the average sportsman to understand that when you hand them a mountain goat tag so a lot of the stuff that we're focusing on moving forward is public education and raising the public awareness and raising the responsibility of the mountain goat hunter. And do you talk about, are you talking about raising it in a legal sense or raising it in like a, hey buddy, you should know this? Or do you guys think it would be a good idea to maybe mandate a little more education,

a little more responsibility? Like what's your take on that? Because I can see that you get sideways with some people who want to just be like that. They're going and they're going and they don't want to have to do anything. Sure. Uh,

it's a little bit of all of that. Um, I think the more you raise the public education, the more you raise the, uh, you know, it's embarrassing for a guy if he goes out, you know,

and I'm, I got this once in a lifetime mountain goat tag. Well, I don't want to, I don't want to accidentally shoot a nanny for a bunch of different reasons so it's a little bit of that and it's uh it's definitely part of i i think that the judging the gender of them and being educated on it is up to the guy with the tag in his pocket. Yeah.

And the educational materials available to that guy at this time are poor. Duncan Gilchrist produced some phenomenal mountain goat educational materials. That happened in the 1980s. Nobody's done it since then. Yeah. So we orchestrate on the ground, boots on the ground, volunteer projects throughout North America to assist regionally with mountain goat surveys

and population analysis on a larger scale. I mean, you guys are out piling in the mountains. Oh yeah. Checking stuff out. Yep. Do you ever find out stuff that no one knew? I found a mountain goat. I found a nanny in South Dakota last year.

She looked like she had this horrible infection on her face. And she just had scabs all over her face. And it was gross. I mean, as gross as you think it is, that's what she looked like. And it turned out it was this contagious eczema of Capri species that South Dakota didn't know they were dealing with. Oh, is that right? Yeah. So that's probably the closest thing we've ever come to finding out

that nobody knew about before. So you never found one that jumped mountain ranges in a weird way? Oh, no, that happens quite a bit. We're sitting in Bozeman right now. Just north of town is the Bridger Mountain Range. Very well-known mountain goat population. Those goats came from the Tobacco Root Mountains just west of here in the 1990s. Did they really on their own?

Nope, they were introduced. Oh, okay. So they brought a trailer full of goats up to Ferry Lake. It's the trailhead for the Sacagawea hike, the highest peak in the bridge range. They turned loose, I don't know, 15 mountain goats. One of them was like an 11-year-old Billy. He hiked up to the saddle, down the west faced, and 40 miles across the Gallatin Valley, walked back to the tobacco roots. No kidding. Yeah.

There's pictures of that goat jumping fence in Belgrade, Montana. His buddy's like, man, where you been? He's like, don't even get me started. You don't even know about the walk I just had. Wow. There's a goat right now. There's a billy right now that just showed up in Dinosaur National Monument on the west side of Colorado. And this goat came out of Utah from a Wasatch population.

And he walked east. It's got to be 30, 40 miles. And all on his own is some five-year-old billy showed up in Dinosaur National Monument, which is controlled by the feds. And according to the National Park Service and the feds, that's an exotic animal. Yeah. So they are trying to figure out how to deal with him right now. And the proposed solution is to kill him, which breaks my heart. It sounds like a pretty badass Billy that went for a walk.

But he came from an introduced population, though. In Utah, he did. I can see how that would put him in a sticky situation. Yeah, I was going to say, because in Colorado, all the goats there are considered introduced. There's no natives there. Correct. And that must be, just in general,

like a sticky subject for you guys, right? But Montana has native populations, but Northwest. We do. Bob Marshall, the Bitterroot stuff. Everything West of the Bob. There's an argument that some of the mountain goats in Northern Utah are in fact native.

Not that the current mountain goats are native, but their ancestors did in fact live there. The mountain goats did inhabit the Northern Utah, the Willard Peak population. Got you. Matters to ask.

And they were potentially wiped out from human causes early on. Yeah, hard to kind of put your finger on what, there wasn't a whole lot of testing of animals until the last couple decades. What's an argument in favor of putting mountain goats in places where they haven't been before? It's a natural resource. You're increasing your natural resources.

And if you're supporting sportsmen who fork over their dollars, if you're the state manager of Mountain Goats, I believe it's your responsibility to have a lot of Mountain Goats and to provide this opportunity to the citizens of your state. Yeah. It's a renewable natural resource. I asked this question about turkeys one time. Uh-oh.

Because, you know, well, no, because, I mean, 49 states have turkey seasons now. Sure. They said it's been yet to be demonstrated that there's a deleterious effect. No one's pointed to a good negative. It's a lot like the pheasant. Pheasants are everywhere. People love pheasants. Yeah, they're from Asia.

Straight out of China. It's like no one has yet said, man, if it weren't for these pheasants. Yep. So the argument. It just winds up being, in many cases, like a win-win. Like you're not, you know, put them there. It's not that you can point to endemic species that have gone extinct because of mountain goat grazing or the other species have been displaced because of mountain goat activities. There's two main arguments against mountain goat introductions.

The one is the destruction of alpine plant life. Take that for what it's worth. The other is conflict of sheep habitat. And people that like sheep don't like seeing goats near them. Oh, so they find a conflict between goats and sheep? Certainly. Yeah, but they coexist all over the place. Sure, they do.

Are they worried about disease transmission? Correct, yeah. So there's a little bit of fear. There's a population of goats in Nevada, in the Ruby Mountains. Pneumonia has run rampant through them. It's the only population of mountain goats in North America that is very clearly suffering from a pneumonia outbreak.

Obviously, pneumonia has wreaked havoc on wild sheep across North America, not so much in the wild goats. Nevada has this problem. It's kind of ground zero for this disease outbreak. Certainly, they can transmit it to a wild sheep very easily. So a lot of people are living in fear of pneumonia transmission. It's called MOV, and it's the infection that can cause pneumonia. And living in fear that goats could potentially infect our wild sheep.

So a goat tested positive in Washington last year. It could be a false positive. They don't know. A goat tested positive in Jackson Hole a couple of years ago. Again, very realistically is likely a false positive in the testing. But those are huge red flags to wild sheep enthusiasts. And let me back up and say

one of our most cherished relationships is in fact with the Wild Sheep Foundation. We work really closely with them on a lot of stuff but um disease outbreak and wild animals is certainly something to be cautious of oh yeah man hugely are there any areas are there is there any native mountain goat range that where mountain goats were extirpated from the range they've never made it back like if you looked at a map at the time of european contact that showed where goats are right are they still everywhere they were no there was and you know before the europeans mountain goats were as far as mexico and it was a an ancestral goat um it's not an actual mountain

goat as we know it today but there was a subspecies of mountain goats that lived as far as mexico when the ice fields were that far south. Yeah, they were in a place that seemed epic. And then they started receding to the north and the goats kind of, that particular, I think it's called the Harrison mountain goat is the subspecies of goat that existed all the way into Mexico. They are completely extinct now. The mountain goat that we know today inhabited everything from Alaska into parts of Idaho

and arguably Utah. Yeah. You ever read the book, The Big Sky? I have not. A mountain goat saves his life. Say what? I mean, he shoots the mountain goat and eats it, but it saves his life. Oh, perfect.

In the end, The Big Sky. Yeah. We always talk about that. It's such a good book, man. Who wrote it? I need to read it. A.B. Guthrie. Sky. Yeah, we always talk about that. It's such a good book, man. Who wrote it? I need to read it. A.B. Guthrie. 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 a high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX 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. OnXMaps.com. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. That's why people call Montana Big Sky Country. Because of that book. Yeah, he coined the thing, The Big Sky. You ever read it?

I've learned something every day. Have not? Why not? I've never heard of it. Can't read. So where are you guys at with things? How long have you been around? So the idea came about in early 2013.

I believe about a year later, we were granted 501c3 status from the IRS. So we became a non-profit. And things have kind of exponentially escalated every year. So we started off just doing super grassroots projects

here in Montana, assisting with regional biologists. Mountain goats are a very hard animal to keep tabs on. And they are nowhere near the top of the list of priorities of the average state biologist. Public interest certainly hasn't been focused on mountain goats. And it has been on several other species. It's weird because it must be 95% of them live on public land.

Right. Probably more. Probably more, yeah. High country. They're on all the unwanted land. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, they say the goat hunt starts where the sheep hunt ends. Yeah.

But in Montana, the average mountain goat hunting district is surveyed every four years. The average sheep district or elk district is surveyed once or maybe twice a year. So very low on the totem pole of priorities comes the mountain goat. So when, why do you think that is? I love those things. Oh yeah. It's just kind of out of sight, out of mind.

You know know there's there's no public effort behind them until now yeah you know if you got

the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and all the weight and money they pull of course elk is going to be a big priority in your state and do you think part of it has to do

with how durable they are that we just have confidence that they're surviving? Just kind of let them do their thing? Yeah, I mean, I don't know. Yeah, but man, that's the kind of attitude that that's dangerous. It's bad. Yeah, because you get a few bad years and all of a sudden you're like, hey, what happened to all those things? I feel like for just general wildlife viewing

you just plucked a random citizen out from somewhere east of the Mississippi. They want to see a mountain goat. When I lived here, we would take people up with a spot scope. Just part of the whole tour is you take them up

and glass up some of the ones in the bridge range and people would be like, holy shit. Very cool. What's going on? You got to be somewhere? Just making sure the babysitter is doing all right. She doing good? She's doing good. She not drinking too much?

Hopefully not. You know what I got interested in them? After moving to Montana, I had a girlfriend, and I was always putting in my applications. And I'm like, man, you should put in too, you know? She'd never hunted. One year she drew a bighorn ewe tag, a goat tag, and we got her a black bear on one year. Oh, my gosh.

She had a big year, big game hunt. Cool. The goat tag, we drew it in an area called Blodgett Canyon, which you may be familiar with. I'm not. It's on the west side. Okay. But we didn't know it. That's how I discovered Duncanilchrist was just trying

to bone up i had no idea yeah i'd never been in a mountain goat hunt i didn't know anybody that been on a mountain goat hunt so we went up and was i was inexperienced at mountain hunting and just generally inexperienced at big like definitely inexperienced at mountain goat hunting and inexperienced at big game hunting outside ofienced mountain goat hunting and inexperienced that big game hunting outside of a handful of animals that had just moved from the midwest to the west and uh we were shocked to find one and killed the first one we saw young nanny next i went on a goat hunt was a couple years later and by that point we'd logged just some massive amount of time in the mountains. And we went up.

And our method then, our saxing method then, was to sit in this pass and look at a ton of goats. And we're like, that one out of the 11 that we're looking at is far and away the biggest one we're looking at and started at that point. Great white buffalo. Just being like, it's way bigger than everybody else. Let's go investigate its maleness. Let's learn from this guy.

What do you tell people when you get into the male-female thing? I've spent a lot of time looking at animals. I've on goal hunts i've skinned several of them i can't if i look at one from 300 yards away i i don't immediately be like oh yeah it's tough i mean i stare at you're lying to yourself you say it's easy um so what are like what are the things that in your conversations in your experience what is is the thing you're looking for? You got to watch them pee. Is that right?

Yeah. That's the nail in the coffin. The boys stretch out like a big Clydesdale and pee like a horse in the girl's squat. Do they pee every hour? They pee every time they get out of a bed. They do? I mean, I don't have the data to back this up, but probably 95% of the time a mountain goat gets out of its bed, it takes a piss. So that's like the thing you're looking for.

That's the dead giveaway. You can determine the gender of a mountain goat without watching it urinate. By the glands on its horns. Yep. You got to kind of take a look at the big picture. There are several key identifiers that will indicate the gender of a mountain goat. And it's important to look at all of them and not just one of them. Because if you make your mind up on just one attribute that you see in this goat, you could be wrong. So a nanny, a girl typically will have a skinny, tall horn with a kink in the top quarter.

A sharp kink. Yeah. Like almost a point where it looks like it was bent. Something bent it. Yeah. A boy is going to have a heavy horn and a gradual sweep. A big, gradual curvature. No kink, just a clean swoop.

But dude, that alone is confusing because I've looked at pictures. You better not make your decision on just that. Now and then you see one, a picture, you're like, oh yeah, dead on. Sometimes you look at it and you're like, oh, that's and they're like, no, that's not. So we host these Billy vs. Nanny quizzes

on our social media platforms and they're pretty popular and people eat it up. So we'll put up a picture of a mountain goat and say, what do you think? Is it Billy or a nanny? Is that right? And they're pretty popular, and people eat it up. So we'll put up a picture of a mountain goat and say, what do you think? Is it a billy or a nanny? Is that right? And they're increasingly popular, and it's a good educational tool throughout the work week. But we definitely, there's some very, very experienced,

legitimate people that participate in these quizzes that get stumped. I mean, I get stumped. It's tough because some of those old nannies have some big old long horns too, right? So it's not like you can judge them on just pure size or word length. You got to look at the whole picture. So the gland. So a common misconception is only the billy has a gland. That's not true.

Girls got glands too. They're just way smaller. So both the boys and the girls have glands behind the horn the billies have significantly larger glands they look like hockey pucks late in the season behind their horns they can always all rut it out and they rut late right yeah november yeah and um the billies are obviously going to be significantly larger. A 10-year-old billy looks like an albino silverback gorilla walking around the mountainside. They're big.

They're big. I've seen that. When you see the man, you kind of know he's the man. But when you're looking at a band of them, it's tough. I tell people that the mountain goat you want to shoot is the one that you look at and immediately make your mind up. There's no question about it. He's just a tank.

And there's no two ways about it. He's definitely a billy, and he's definitely big. That's what they tell you about grizzlies. Yeah. Right? You can look at the sub-adults all day long. They go, I don't know. I think it's this.

I think it's that. But you know what? As soon as you see him. When he steps out. They're like, I don't know. I think it's this. I think it's that. But you know what? As soon as you see him. When he steps out, you're like, oh, big bore. That's him. And all that sussing out, those minor little things. How long have we been talking for, Yanni? Hour and a half, 15.

All right, so what do you need from people? You know what I think there should be a rule? If you draw a goat tag. You have to join our organization. Yes. I like that rule. How many states have goat seasons? Okay, not counting Alaska, because Alaska you can buy the registration hunts and all kinds of stuff. Well, let's count Alaska.

Well, they don't draw, though. You can just get them. States that you can hunt mountain goats in, though? 13. I think it's, I could count them off here. It's Alaska, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, South Dakota. South Dakota has a tag? They're crawling all over to Crazy Horse Memorial. I'm headed to South Dakota in the morning for a mountain goat project.

But they give a tag out. They gave two tags out in 2015. It was the first permits they've issued in over a decade. Did the guys get billies or female? They got two billies. Nice. Yeah. They're in the Black Hills?

They're in the Black Hills. It's a really incredible story. Back in the 1920s, half a dozen goats broke out of a petting zoo in Custer state park. I heard this before. No joke. Flash forward 50 years later, they had like a hundred of them and they hunted them and they were there. And they're obviously an exotic animal to the black Hills of Dakota and they

hunted them. And then their numbers started to dwindle uh for a handful of reasons they augmented the population with an introduction from Colorado did they really they were like at that point they wanted them they want them yeah they owned up to them they were like we like them they're they're doing well let's make it happen Hunting had been closed for 10 years. This is our, tomorrow morning starts our third annual volunteer project in the Black Hills of South Dakota. And 2015 was the first time in a decade that they decided to give permits out. So I like to give the Goat Alliance a little bit of credit there

that we got boots on the ground and eyes on the hills and helped out a regional biologist. Doing some counting? Doing some counting and doing some gender analysis. Oh, okay. Yeah, tell us about that. You guys organized, I think last year,

I tried to make it, but my wife actually shared it with me. She found it on like the Bozeman, the Bozeman listserv or something like that. Like the, I don't know if I've heard about it. Like the networking internet thing that goes out

to everybody. No, you're not familiar with that. It's like Twitter. Like Bozone or something along those lines. Anyways, my wife gets,

my wife gets emails from it and it's usually good, a lot of good, interesting stuff going on around town. And I want to say you guys were organizing like a big two day goat count in the craz Crazies, big camping trip. Yes, we orchestrate

backcountry volunteer projects in several different states. The one that you're referring to was in the Crazy Mountains last summer. The Crazies, I could talk to you for an hour about the story of the goats and the Craz. But essentially that is what we do. We started a nonprofit with no money. And as Jeff with 2% can relate, it's a lot of headaches and a lot of late nights. But the thing that we did have was enthusiasm and momentum and passion and time.

And we turned that into volunteer work. So this summer alone, we're working in several different mountain ranges in Montana, the Black Hills of South Dakota, the Frank Church Wilderness of Idaho, the Goat Rocks Wilderness of Washington, the Ruby Mountains of Nevada, the Willard Peak population of Utah.

So it's bloomed into a lot of different of Nevada, the Willard Peak population of Utah. So it's bloomed into a lot of different real interactive volunteer opportunities. But if I was going to show up at that one that was up here in the crazies, what would that have been like? You would have put a backpack on. I would have gave you a folder and told you good luck. And I would have found you at the end of the weekend and asked what you found. So we divide and conquer.

We separate our volunteers out across the mountain range, and we document every mountain goat set in, and we try to document the gender of the animal, general observations, social interactions. Do you guys photograph them? We do. Yeah, we film them and photograph them. So we also have the responsibility of kind of,

is the goat healthy? Is the goat, does it have a kid? Even if you're not a hunter, it'd be like a fun little thing to go do. Yeah, you know, people do that like geocaching stuff. I'd much rather go out and look for a damn goat. Now, what do you think about all that, Pounder? I think it's cool, man.

I got one question. If somebody does want to do that, say they live in Miami, and they're like, I really love mountain goats, and they want to go on one of these things. Miami, Florida? Yeah. Are you worried about them being a detriment? No, but say they want to go on one of these volunteer things, right,

where they go and identify. Do you guys, I guess it's hard, but do you ever do travel stipends for anybody? If you come and volunteer time, we'll help you out with a ticket or put you up or something like that. We're too poor for that, but no. To answer your question, no. Do you guys provide Mountain House?

We do not provide Mountain House. I will provide you with a folder and a pen. You're like, and I need that pen back. I'll give you a hug and I'll ask you with a folder and a pen. He's like, and I need that pen back. I'll give you a hug and I'll ask you for the pen back. Yeah. One day though, he should offer that. It's pretty cool for our Idaho project this summer.

We're working out of Yellow Pine, Idaho with the regional biologists out of McCall, Idaho. We have two pilots volunteering their time, airplane fuel, and aircrafts to the project. Nice, I do some serious counting. This is the first time in the GoToLines history that we will have two fully donated airplanes surveying from above with boots on the ground,

volunteers on the mountain below. So how do you guys get money? Do you have like state? Do you get government grants or does it just come from donors? So we have a membership base. Annual dues take care of a lot of our operational expenses.

What's it cost to join for a year? $35. We got a three-year membership for $100. We got a lifetime membership for $5. We have an annual business sponsorship available for $250. So companies like Sitka Gear are behind us and are also going above and beyond sponsoring our educational projects and donating to our conservation fund.

Besides that, we do a trade show circuit every winter, and that's kind of our bread and butter. We got a pretty badass logo, and so people like our shirts and hoodies and T-shirts, and to be honest with you, that's where a lot of our revenue comes from. That's right, selling shirts. Yeah.

What's your guys' website? We have a handful of domains. I did the same shopping. Hunty with a numeral two? Right. It's a handful of domains. I did the same job. Hunty with a numeral two. Right. It's a backwards question mark. And then, no,

it's gotoalliance.org, rmga.org. Did you have any problem finding that? No. gotoalliance.org. gotoalliance.org. What's really funny though, is we were talking about someone else has meat eater.com or something.

There's like a junior high school girls cheerleader squad that uses the same acronym RMGA. So if you look at Instagram, hashtag RMGA, it's tons of mountain goats and then like 12 year old girls doing backflips. Yeah. It's pretty weird. But they didn't lock up your website though.

No. Tell me again what it is. your website, though. No. Tell me again what it is. Goatalliance.org. All right. So if you've drawn a goat tag, and see, I have to stick by this, because I did limit to draw a goat tag in Alaska once. If you draw a goat tag, you have to go down there and kick in, man. Oh, yeah.

Come volunteer with us. Lace your lace your boots up yeah go look at some mountain goats oh yeah i love looking at mountain goats me too i like how you sometimes stumble into them in weird places too like when the snow gets deep they come down the timber a little bit more so just last week north of bozeman a giant billy showed up just off a county road in the bridger mountains and a buddy of mine was out looking for bears he says you're not going to believe what i'm looking at right now it's like i gotta go 200 yards off the county road oh yeah start sending me pictures of it what was he doing looking for bears no no what was the goat doing eating just out in the no kidding yeah he was just eating down in a super green gut right off a county road

just fed all the way down to the flat yep so i got i was i was at work and i got on the horn and called a handful of photographers i know in town and one of them was free and he bombed up there and photographed this thing and it's like easily a 12 year old billy all by himself 200 yards off a county road in like borderline antelope country that's a rare sight yeah pretty wild hey was it you was it you that got our friend randall williams into a bear i i did go hunting with randall williams this past weekend yes and you got a bear we got a bear yeah he's pretty excited? Oh, yeah. Randall's a good friend of mine. Randall and I went to high school together. And I've taken Randall bear hunt.

Randall's a very accomplished hunter. But I have. So I shouldn't have said you got him into a bear. Well, I heard a rumor that you had found the bear. Yeah, I've been watching the bear for about two weeks. Yeah. I'd go see him every night. Is that right?

He's holding tight. Yeah. So Randall's a very good friend of mine. And I had taken Randall hunting here for bears in southwest Montana. This was our third year doing it. In 2014 and 2015, it got real Western. We just had these really God-awful backpacking trips where we got way in over our head,

a combination of weather and trying to figure out new hunting spots. And it was just a total goat rope and never got Randall a bear. And it was kind of on me because I was showing him around my hunting spots, you know, and we got ourselves into some pretty God awful situations on a handful of different occasions. This year I was like, I knew when he was coming, I was going to drop everything to make it happen. And so we did, we invested a lot of time scouting before Randall got here. Yeah. We found a bunch of them, but this one was extremely consistent.

It took us five and a half hours to get to him. Randall shot him at 431 yards. Took you five and a half hours to get over to him or to hike up into where he was? Took us five and a half hours when I left the truck to when we put a rifle on the ground to shoot. Got you. It was far. It's easy to put a spotting scope on something. It's a little tougher to walk over to them. Yeah, we used to wind up,

when I used to do a lot of spring bear hunting here, we'd wind up in some miserable situations, man, because the weather was very erratic. Oh my gosh, yeah. We were hiking in anywhere from two inches to two feet of snow. We got some snow late last week and it stuck. So our whole hike was in the snow.

And it was pretty shallow, but then you get on a north face and you'd be up to your hip and some of this stuff. And it's just miserable. I remember that just on and getting off again with snowshoes. Yeah. I'm not smart enough to carry those, so I just post-hauled my whole way up there. Oh, yeah, man. It's nice.

That spring snow, you can just grease across.. Oh yeah man it's nice that spring snow you can just grease across. Oh yeah. It's nice. Alright so anyhow Chris Gil you got concluding thoughts? You're thinking

about dinner. Yeah I'm kind of thinking about dinner. Enjoy the conversation. Learned a whole bunch. I like learning. I want to hear more about Iraq and

Afghanistan. Oh yeah I do. You don't have to have one. No, no, I do. It's kind of off topic, but it kind of goes back to the suffering. On that first shoot that I was on in BC, we're talking about like observing animals. And I'd like never seen a wild, I'd seen like a black bear

on a ski lift in the summertime he was riding the ski lift no yeah yeah he was sitting there waving yeah um but i had not ever seen like a wild grizzly bear and like we saw one one of those early days but then it was like uh we saw that pack that dude came in on top of us too yeah and that one was really that was cool man yeah and then it was just like saw that pack. That dude came in on top of us too. Yeah. And that one was really, that was cool, man. Yeah, yeah. And then it was just like after that week of fog and rain and snow and hail and like the whole thing. And then just seeing those ones like feeding and flipping boulders over

and just moving was like so worth all that gnarly suffering. Just like watching it. You know? And I don't know if that's just because I don't get to do that often but no dude it's magical to watch yeah well magical is a good word it's cool it's magical to watch them one of the things i wanted to talk about tonight we're gonna have to save it as i was gonna talk about some uh current political issues surrounding that around a night animal. Yeah, man. It's cool. You feel privileged. Yeah, that's the word.

Especially outside of the park. You know, we used to always have a thing like when people would be like, oh, I saw a blank. We didn't count it if you saw it in a park. So you'd be like, you ever seen a wolf? They'd be like, oh yeah, in the park.

You'd be like, eh, that's not what I'm talking about. That's not what I'm talking about. You do that for your car window. I'm talking about the real ones, man. Yeah. Yeah, honey? That's it? That's all I got.

You don't want to plug your new Fish to Eat t-shirt? Is that for sale? It is. I like it. It's not selling. People don't want a Fish to new fish to eat t-shirt? Is that for sale? It is. I like it. It's not selling. People don't want a fish to eat shirt. Yeah, and we forgot to get that picture today. I clobbered a whitey today on the head, man.

I had my t-shirt on and everything. We totally forgot. He's talking about a mountain whitefish. Mountain whitefish, yeah. People don't like a fish to eat shirt. Well, you know what it is? We're probably just not marketing it properly. They might like it better if you gave all the proceeds

back. That's right. You should start giving them away. Yeah, that'll be my concluding thought, is today fishing, as much as I'm always talking about how like, yeah, fuck that fly fishing. I'm not that into fly fishing anymore. I was enjoying it. I was telling Chris, I was like, you fishing. I'm not that into fly fishing anymore. I was enjoying it. I was telling Chris, I was like, you know, I'm not really into like,

I don't need to catch a bunch of fish right now. But standing here, water's rushing around me. I got a nice view. There's something nice about this. I'm having fun. And then I caught a fish. And then all of a sudden, man, I was just, I like changed. You know, all of a sudden.

Yeah, man, my focus got into like, all right, I'm going to really pick apart this riffle now and just started like, you know, getting all technical and I could feel this like energy. And I was like, man, I really didn't like this. But you caught the fish though. Yeah. Because I've noticed that fishing with people,

how when someone catches a fish, all the lazy asses all of a sudden start fishing hard for 20 minutes. That would just drive me nuts. They get asses all of a sudden start fishing hard for 20 minutes. That would just drive me nuts. They get all interested all of a sudden. Then you watch them kind of fade away. Concluding thoughts, Pete?

Well, it's John Muir's birthday. No way. He was born on the day Prince died. That's a weird way to look at it but it's extremely factual that would mean nothing to him no he wouldn't be too concerned about that say what prince what purple right so tell me about that what's that mean to you well john muir's uh uh an extremely uh inspirational conservationist that I look up to.

Yeah. And founder of the Sierra Club and everything that he's done. And yeah, just my social media got blown up with John Muir quotes today. It was awesome. Is that right? So you got some good ones? Oh, I got like six in my head right now. Can you give me one or two?

I think my favorite one I read today, I hadn't heard it yet. Everybody knows the mountains are calling and and i gotta go and whatever and the one i heard today i'd never heard before it was between every two pines is a doorway to a new world and that kind of struck home for me i like yeah i like walking through the woods you You got any more? I said I had six, right? Well, I'm not going to hold you to it. No, I think that's it. I guess my only ending note would be. You know, there was a miracle I liked when he was going up.

I can't remember it. But he went up near where I have a cabin in Alaska. And he had talked about, I'm going to mutilate it, but he had talked about that the islands, you know, there's so many of them, they look scattered like someone who had been sowing seed. Oh. But I don't remember the quote, but it was a doozy though.

Talk about a visual. Yeah. Wow. It's good stuff. You got any concluding thoughts? Yeah, you know, I- Going out for some pasta tonight. Super.

Still thinking about getting my dual citizenship over here. Figuring out what the value is going to be. You know, my mind is running and thinking about how the heck we can- Plug your organization, man. Yeah, well, I think two concluding thoughts. I'm really interested in how we can educate people to not shoot nannies. Like, that's a tough one. Like,

what do you, what do you do to teach people? Here's all it takes in my mind. Like I generally feel that people with notable exceptions, I generally feel that people want to do the right thing. Okay. People are generally very receptive to information that will help them do a better job in life, in the out of doors, especially if you can say, and here's why that matters. Yeah. I don't disagree. I think, yeah. I mean, that's the ticket. I think that's what you've discussed is how do we deliver? What is that better information?

How do you deliver it to people and get them to actually read it? People don't read stuff. Yeah. That type of stuff. I remember like with the grizzly brown bear thing, I just remember watching the thing put out by the wildlife management agency in Yukon saying that if we restricted the harvest to males only, we'd have three times as many bear tags.

I think Alaska, I think, you know, I could be wrong. I could screw this up, but they have Alaska Department of Fish and Game put out this, it's like an hour long video all about identifying boars for brown bear hunts but i think that was made by yukon though right maybe it was and i believe they require you to have it to watch it i mean yep loosely require you but i'll tell you you watch that son of a bitch a thousand times and still look at a bear and be like man i cannot tell every bear looks big when it's alive but the p thing is good stuff. Oh, yeah.

I've heard, yeah, a lot of people say about observing bears. Like, if you really want to know, wait for it to pee. But the problem on bears, like a goat, you might have a long time to watch the goat

and you might be able to go find him again tomorrow. Bears, man, a lot of times, they disappear. Yeah, but it's just like, there he is then and it's like,

then you look for him for a week and you never find him again. Right. You got a second concluding thought? Yeah, so my last concluding thought for the shameless plug is to your question, Chris, about a guy in Florida that wants to volunteer.

You can call him Rich. Got it. That guy in Florida that wants to volunteer and here you are struggling to get volunteers and part of the organization 2% that we're trying to do is foster all this volunteerism. I'm just excited to hear about those questions. And hopefully what we can accomplish is connecting that guy up with this organization and getting people out there to get involved.

Yeah, you get some contractor that gives a shit to fly Chris out from Chicago out here to help. Did you have someone of mine in Miami? No, it was far away. It just felt like a far away place. I mean, how sweet would it be if that guy works for a business in Miami and that business is telling all their employees

like, go volunteer. We're going to pay you today. Go to Montana and count goats. I like it it's yeah doing stuff i uh let me start that thought over i reaped the benefits quite literally reaped the benefits of the out of doors for decades before I ever thought about settling up the debt that I had accrued during a lifetime of amazing adventures and seeing things that no one's ever seen and doing stuff that I will think about for the rest of my life. It's just like, I think people get to a point when they go like,

holy shit, have I had it good. You know? Maybe it's about time I don't just think about everything that the outdoors is going to give to me. Pay it forward. Yeah. It hits people. I mean, some people it doesn to me. Pay it forward. Yeah. It hits people. I mean, some people it doesn't. Some people it hits them young.

But I think that in some way, you know, organizations like what you guys are trying to do is just sort of say to people, listen, man, and I say this all the time, we live in the good old days. By many standards, by many measurements, right now is the good old days by many standards by many measurements right now oh yeah is the good old days there's a tremendous amount of opportunity out there there's a lot of elk in north america right now it's just but it's not by accident it was by accident 150 years not by accident it was there 150 years ago we messed it up.

It was built back. I'm speaking very specifically to the U.S. It was built back from the ground up. The resources, hunting and fishing resources we have, in large measure by hunters and fishermen. That needs to be continued. Because it can very easily go in the other direction. Yep.

Yep. You, yep. You got it. And so I remember my fourth bullet point, right? Which I think ties right into that. Oh, yeah, yeah. Because I was thinking a lot less of you through this whole circle here. I don't even know what's on the website

that I wrote all the content for. This dude can't even remember four things. But it's recruitment and retention. It's about getting youth, minorities, middle-aged people who have never hunted or had the opportunity to hunt and fish. How do we get people involved and educate them on what conservation is and the way our model of conservation funding for state and wildlife agencies works? We need people to buy fishing licenses, hunting tags, right? So what are we doing to foster that? We need to support agencies that get very little hard funding from the state that's right if people are all their people aren't fishing

and people aren't hunting then then they're struggling at funding so so recruitment and and getting new people involved in hunting and taking somebody out to fish for their first time so important so organizations that that are have programs that focus on that type of activity are crucial. All right. Got any last? Because there's a lot built up after your concluding thought. I don't have a concluding thought tonight. I kind of gave my concluding thought.

Oh, I thought yours was great about, you know. Yeah, that was a doozy. But it wasn't my concluding thought. You realized you got to give back. It was a good concluding thought, though. All right. Thank you guys for coming down. Thank you for having us. Yeah, thank you very much

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