The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 057: Seattle, Washington. Steven Rinella talks with houndsman and wildlife biologist Bart George along with Janis Putelis from the MeatEater crew.

Episode Date: March 9, 2017

Subjects discussed: getting bit by a mountain lion; Radar the dog; collared dogs; running cougars and playing golf; the comedian Jerry Clower; what it's like seeing a mountain lion for the first time; toning dogs; finding lion kills while chasing lions; the challenges in lion hunting; responses to lion grip-n'-grins on Instagram; Steve's lion hunt; reasons why people don't want to eat predators; lion meat; strychnine traplines; and The Goat Killer. 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. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. All right, Bart George, there you are. A month ago?

Yeah. Getting bit on the arm by a mountain lion. Lay that all out for me. Well, how that all happened, yeah, I wasn't thinking about it at the time, I guess what it led all up to it, but, um, we were starting a project. It was the first day of a project with a new crew, um, putting collars on cougars in Washington, uh, up in the Northeast corner, an area that I'm very familiar with and feel comfortable running the dogs around. Anyways, I was the hound handler that day and had my four dogs and found a nice tom track.

You can tell. In the snow. Yeah, we had about, it was, I don't know, just before Christmas, something like that. So we had about eight inches of snow on the ground. Found a good track, fresh last night, and figured we were going to pop it up pretty quick. So I put the Nosy, the little tiny dog that we hunted with, and then Radar, the big male. That's the greatest name for a dog in the history of dogs.

Radar's a good name. Radar? Yeah. Nosy Nussel. Nosy's a good name. If you get to know nosy a little better you'll agree no no it has nothing to do with the dog i'm saying like if i ever get a dog i was gonna name my next dog highball i'm gonna name a radar if you don't mind yeah i don't mind put a junior or something, maybe. A radar junior. So there you are, you and Nosey and Radar. Right.

So I put those two on the track, and they smoked it for like 400 or 500 yards, and then they had a loss, which I'm not able to keep up with them. They get out ahead of me. They were 400 yards in no time. And you got a GPS collar on the dogs. Yeah, I've got collars on everybody. So I'm watching the collar, and there's a handful of us now, the state biologist and a grad student.

And we're trying to figure out what's going on. Like I said, it's the first day of the project, so there's still some introductions and that kind of stuff happening. Like who's who. Right. Yeah. Can you explain a loss when you say? Well, you got to back up before that.

When he says watching the collar, you have a handheld GPS unit that shows you where you are and shows you where the dogs are based on the little GPS units that are on their collar. Right. So it's a, yeah, it's a transmitter then from the collar back to my handheld. So. You see yourself relative to your dogs. Right. You see everybody on there.

Right. Yeah. I know where all the dogs are. I know where I'm at. And then there also of course the map layer the road layer and stuff like that yeah um so i'm watching the dogs and they get out you know four or five hundred yards and they have a loss where and i can tell it's a loss because they're like they lost the track yeah they're moving the track well and you could hear them of course at that distance they got out of hearing and you're watching the gps unit and you'll see it where they kind of start circling and doing different things,

and you can tell they're looking for a track. And sometimes that's because the cat made a kill, and there's tracks everywhere. Sometimes the cat would walk out and turn back and walk on its own tracks, and that'll confuse them, and they have a hard time finding an out track there. So anyways, I had one of those going on, and it took quite a while. It was a fairly long loss, but they're far enough in where, you know, I could take off and walk to them. But generally, by the time I got there, they'd have sorted it out and taken off. So I'm trying to give them a chance to work. And I decided to kick Whisper loose, who's kind of the old dog, pretty good at lining out a tough track.

So I put her on the track thinking that she would get everybody together. But by the time I let her go and, you know, while she was in route, the dogs split. So I had Radar going one way and Nosy going another, which is a little bit unusual. And when Whisper got there, instead of pulling everybody back together or getting everybody on the right track, Whisper went with radar just automatically. He was probably making more noise or whatever. So those two ended up taking off on a back track and Nosy turned out to be on the right track. Gotcha.

Of course, at the time. By itself. Right. And at the time, I didn't know that obviously had no idea um so i'm fair still fairly close i'm within a half a mile of everybody and uh nosy's kind of working up away from me and radar and whisperer kind of paralleling the road that i'm on so i'm able to get closer to them and listen and see what they're up to. And while I'm doing that, Nosy starts showing treat. What's that look like? Well, like I said, I can't hear her.

She's now eight-tenths of a mile away. So I'm looking at the GPS unit, and when the dog sits still for, I think, 30 seconds or whatever setting you put it on, you'll get a little tree symbol that just shows your dog's not moving. Yeah. And it shows you how much it's barking. They can, yeah. But nosies, hers doesn't usually register.

She's a pretty. Oh, because you don't get the barks per minute. No. Readout on that dog. No, I don't know if she's just too quiet or what's going on there. She barks, but, um yeah i don't know i don't usually get it radar you know i get 80 bpms out of radar anytime he opens his mouth but yeah knows he not really so i'm not concerned that it doesn't show her barking at this point um so i

started up towards her hoping you know thinking maybe she's at another loss and she's just not moving or she's sometimes they get hung up. Why aren't you thinking that it caught the lion? Well, I was hoping that was the case. Okay. I was still, because Whisper and Radar were on this other track, I was still thinking that they were right and she was still searching, trying to figure stuff out.

I don't know. I just trusted the two dogs more than the one so when you know I got within maybe 400 yards of where she was and I had Tipsy with me the young dog who's she's I say she's a pup but she's you know three and been on a lot of cats and knows the routine pretty well I had her with me in the box so we got out I had her loose walking down to Nosy to see what was going on, and I couldn't hear her barking, which then I was pretty concerned because I knew she wasn't treated at that point. So we walked down into kind of a swampy area,

similar to where we found your cat. There's a lot of tracks around. He's been living in there. Pretty tough spot for a dog to work. And we got down. I'm watching the GPS unit, and I can see her collar showing like 80 yards. I'm still not hearing her, and then I'm showing 50 feet, and I can't hear her. And you're thinking he got killed by wolves.

I'm thinking at that point, but I didn't know. I didn't know maybe she was in a river down there. I didn't know. I've had a dog one time get hung up on a stob at a collar, get a stob through its collar, and it was just sitting there quietly just waiting for me to come get it. So I was hoping something like that. But I obviously was concerned. I hadn't seen any wolf tracks yet, so I didn't think wolves had killed her. And got down, you know, 20 feet or whatever,

and it's fairly open, and there's a, you know, the trees are pretty open, and they're heavy with snow. So imagine, like, a Christmas tree that's heavy with snow, and it builds this kind of cave underneath of it, right? Or pulls the branches down to the ground. So Tipsy walks over to one of those, and it was strange. She never smelled anything. So another one of the dogs came and found you.

Tipsy was with me. I had her with me. Okay. And Radar and Whisper are still working on a trail and knows he's missing. Gotcha, gotcha. You got four of them out. Mm-hmm. So Tipsy starts showing major concern around this tree. She walks over kind of to the entrance, I guess, to this

cave or whatever underneath this tree well. And she lowers her level and her hackles go up and she starts this growl. And at that point I knew what was going on. So I walked towards her to get a hold of her and I'm sure now I'm like okay the cat's got nosy he's got her dead underneath this tree he's probably eating on her. I want to get Tipsy out of there before I ever wreck with this cat and her. So I walk over and I lean down to grab Tipsy and I'm, you know, six or eight feet away from the entrance to this tree well. And that cat kind of steps towards me and that's the first time I saw him. So I. And how close is now?

Six or eight feet away. He's close. Yeah. He's real close. I still don't see Nosy, but I know she's there. So I grab Tipsy by the collar, and I start hollering at him, and I back off and kind of put a little angle so I'm not blocking his way out. And you're not toting a firearm or anything?

I didn't have a gun with me. I didn't have bear spray with me because it's not bear season. So yeah, no gun. So yeah, I back off maybe 15 or 18 feet, and I'm hollering the whole time screaming at him. And he kind of backs it back into that hole where I can't see him anymore. And so I put a little bit of angle on that cave entrance so it doesn't feel like I'm trapping him in there. And, uh, I start, you know, I'm still screaming and screaming.

He won't come out. So I grab a stick and I'm just going to toss this stick in and, you know, spook him out, right? Which always works. If you throw a snowball at a cat, it'll jump out of a tree or whatever. So I'm thinking, toss the stick at him, get him moving, get him out of there. So I break this stick off, and I've got Tipsy on a leash now hooked to my left arm. And I take this stick, and I've got Tipsy on a leash now hooked to my left arm

and I take this stick and I just kind of underarm toss it over to the tree and the minute that it hits the tree he just blows out and he's coming towards me and it's close like 15 or 18 feet like I said so it's happening quick and I'm thinking like in head, I've got this dog attached to me. At this point, the cat's underneath the tree, and I'm like 15 or 18 feet from it. And I just want to get my dog out of there. I want to get Nosy's body out of there. I want to get my collars off of her. I just want to be out of there. And you feel a little sad?

Are you feeling sad for the dog? He's like your buddies. Yeah, totally my buddy. Yeah, at the time. There's a for the dog? He's like your buddies. Yeah, totally my buddy. Yeah. At the time. There's a lot going on. There's a lot happening. Yeah. I wanted to get, I was, whatever.

I figured, I knew that Nosy was dead. I wasn't going to, you know, I had to get Tipsy out of there safely. I had to get myself out of there safely. And I wanted to make sure I got Nosy's body out of there. So I take this stick and I toss it at the tree and the cat just immediately blows out and he's coming straight at me. Like accidentally or on purpose?

Well, that's what I thought, right? Because it happens fast, but it's kind of in slow motion in your mind as it's happening. And this cat's coming towards me and I'm thinking, okay, there's snow coming out of the tree and everything else is confused,

doesn't really know where I'm at. And he just keeps coming. And I've got Tipsy on a leash losing her mind. And I'm thinking the cat's going to stop or turn or do whatever. And it just keeps coming and coming and coming until it makes its big jump towards me. And I had her on my left arm. So I kind of turned the right side of my body to him and he hit me on the right side of my body to him, and he hit me on the right side and knocked me down. Hit you with what? His front feet, yep.

I don't think he ever actually got teeth on me. So he cut me a little bit on the right arm, knocked me down, and I had my backpack on, luckily, so I kind of balled up underneath my backpack, and I think Tipsy was just as shocked as I was because she was still pretty quiet at this point or she was quiet again and the cat kind of went to work on my backpack and I could feel him up there and I could feel his weight on me and stuff like that and then Tipsy I heard the dog fight start you know and I don't know if he

attacked her or she attacked him or whatever but so while he's working on my backpack, I hear this big dog fight happening right on top of me. And they kind of move off to my right side. And so I roll to my back. And now they're all piled up kind of in my right hip pocket. And Tipsy's hooked to my left arm, so it's a weird position to be in. And they're fighting. And I roll to my back back and I start kicking him and you know you don't have much power anyway I'm wearing rubber boots and I'm kicking him the best

I can and he gets off a tipsy and he starts back towards me and he's kind of right between my legs now and I'm still on my back and I'm kicking him in the face and chest trying to get him away and he's he never like I said he never got his mouth on me, but he was hooking my gaiters and stuff like that. Oh, yeah. So when you say he has some puncture wounds, I thought, so you had just like little scratches. Claw marks, yeah.

Claw marks, yeah. Yeah, little hooks. So as I'm kicking him kind of off, more pushing him away. Like how many seconds have gone by? I don't know. Since he made contact with you. I don't know. You know, the whole. Closer to contact with you? I don't know.

Closer to one or ten? Probably ten. Yeah. Seemed like ten. I don't know. It was probably ten seconds. It lasted longer than I actually expected. I thought maybe he'd just give me a swat on the way by or something, but he was pretty interested in me.

I'm glad I had Tipsy with me. So I'm laying on my back, and Tipsy's on my right side and got my left arm pretty well trapped. And he's working on my feet and trying to get up towards my body. And then he stops and he circles around to the left where I'm kind of vulnerable. And I turned just enough to give him both feet and just kind of push him away. And that's when I was able to get to my feet. And Tipsy's at this point, she's fighting mad. She's barking and she's, you know, at the end of her leash trying to get at him. So he's must be 10 feet away from me or something.

And we're just kind of in this standoff where we're sitting looking at each other. And he's in full position, you know, he's down like you would imagine him to be. Like in a crouch. In a crouch, you know, he's working his tail and he's looking at me. imagine him to be like in a crouch in a crouch is how you know he's working his tail and he's looking at me he's pretty focused on what's going on um and he sat there for a long time this thing weighs how much 148 pounds oh because you laid okay you know exactly how much he was okay wow so we're kind of having this stare down for a little bit and again that's probably another five or ten seconds and and then he walks kind of walks a semi-circle back towards

the tree where nosy's at and of course the whole time i'm screaming at him you know and carrying on make a lot of noise the dog's barking um where are the other biologists that you're with they're still they don't know anything this is happening they don't know any of this is happening okay because i went in to get nosy lined out and figure out what's going on i was going to call them if we were treed um and i had them listening to those other dogs to see what they were doing yeah um and they're the ones with the tranquilizer gun they've got the dart gun. So yeah, he finally kind of walks off and then he got maybe 20 yards away and jogged off.

So I was glad to have him gone. I didn't want him to come back. I wanted to get nosy gathered up and go take inventory on myself and on Tipsy to see how bad she was hurt. And I walked over to the tree to gather her up and that dog hopped to her feet. She was like buried underneath.

I don't know if she was unconscious and the cat buried her like a kill. Yeah. Or if she was just playing dead and the snow fell out of the tree and she didn't move. But throughout that whole, you know, screaming match, she never got to her feet until I walked over and was like underneath the tree looking for her. And she hopped up. She was in tough shape. She had holes to her feet until I walked over and was underneath the tree looking for her.

She hopped up. She was in tough shape. She had holes in her head and across her back and back of her neck. It's kind of a miracle she's alive, you guys saw. They stitched her up. Yeah, we stitched her up. How many stitches? Not very many because they're all puncture wounds.

We got you. There weren't any long cuts. Not like gashes, but more like tooth marks. Yeah, she's, yeah. Up on, you know, he had a hold of the side of her face, the right side of her face, and put several holes in the top of her head and underneath kind of on her jawline.

And then across her back, she had a bunch of holes, probably from claws. He probably gathered her up that way and then he bit her on the head um so she ended up with five drains you know the latex tubing drains in her and handful of stitches putting those back together now what percent recovered does the dog know uh she's treated several cats since then so So now, does she have a renewed vigor? Yeah, she did. Or is she like more cautious now?

I don't know. I haven't seen her. Well, no, she's right back where she was. I don't think she missed a beat, actually. She's had cats bail out of the tree, and she's right on their case. But she's not like more bloodthirsty? She's always been pretty bloodthirsty. I don't think she's, I mean, she's a good little hound.

I wonder if she wasn't unconscious because I would think that would be unnerving. Are they really bloodthirsty? No, she's not bloodthirsty, but they don't like cats, right? Someone told me, I think it was Floyd was telling me, one of his dogs got scratched up by a lion, and he thought that it came out extra excited about running lions. Oh yeah. Hounds aren't

real smart dogs. Otherwise they wouldn't chase lions. They'd be bird dogs or something. I totally disagree with that sentiment. I don't know. You guys went back out. There was a debate that you should maybe go kill the cat because he's now kind of mixed it up

with a person or was that not a serious debate at all? Not really a serious debate on something. You know, it's not like I was just out hiking and this cat pounced on me or something. You were asking for it. Yeah. I was knocking on his door. So no, we didn't really talk about like euthanizing that cat.

I, you know, knowsy was in tough shape i was unnerved for sure yeah rattled yeah right yeah it shook me up a little bit um and was that your first skirmish with the mountain lion yeah how many mountain lions have you um been either like that you treat or were present for the like how many mountain lions have you like encountered hunting and then in your professional life as a biologist? Oh, geez, I don't know. A lot. More than a hundred.

Yeah, more than a hundred for sure. And never had a skirmish with one. No, I've never had a cat even look at me. Like when this cat looked at me underneath the tree, I should have known that it wasn't impressed by what it saw. Like it wasn't intimidated. Not at all.

No. So I should have known right then. But again, there's a lot happening. I've got my dog under there. You get a little bit complacent after however many cats, right? You don't think it's ever going to happen. Had you ever heard of something like that in your line of work. Well, Floyd's buddy Joe got attacked by one.

I didn't hear that story. He got his ankle and foot all chewed up by one. Yeah, I don't know. But again, he's been run. I mean, he's treed, I'm sure, in the hundreds, Mark. I heard a story that I thought to be untrue about some guy in the whatever southwest states that treat a lion. There's two of them. And a lot of times cats will focus on a person down underneath the tree. You know, they'll pick one person out of a group or whatever, and they'll kind of focus on them.

And that's not unusual. But this story went that the guys were underneath the tree, and this cat was kind of watching this guy, and whatever. When he got the opportunity, the guy turned his back, and the cat jumped out of the tree over the dogs and landed on this guy and was, like, working on him. And I always thought that that was untrue, but maybe it wasn't. Now you're a believer. Yeah, I might be, but with all the dogs around,

that still sounds like a tall tale. This guy, Joe Mitchell, the guy that i'm talking about the guy chewed up by one on his boot i think it was a little bit bad like he had to have some work done on his foot um oddly he likes two things which i think are completely incongruous he likes running lions and he likes playing golf which is just like do you mean it seems like yeah and i was saying to him, but how could you golf? Because like lion hunting is so challenging and hard. And how could you do something so like kind of benign and, you know,

like unmasculine as golf, you know? And he said, man, you got to golf all the time just to be shitty at it. Yeah. He found the challenge there. I wonder how that attack went. I got bit by it. Yeah, he told me the story. I wonder how that attack went I got he told me the story I just don't remember the details but then so okay so

you guys still want you wanted to put a collar on this lion no the one that got you no we're over this lion no but you were chasing it in the first place to put a collar on it for a predation study so you'd watch where this lion goes,

and then he'd see that he kind of hung around the area, and you'd go in there and see what he killed. Right. Or you had deer and elk wearing collars. That's right. And when they got killed, you'd go see who killed them. Right. So the state has a study going.

They're going to collar, I think, 50 elk, 50 deer, and whatever, 15 cougars. And that's right. We'll get a point cluster from a cougar go in and investigate the kill that's what the grad student was there for i think and this is so this work when you got scratched by this cat that was what you were trying to do right but you guys went back and caught the line accidentally really yeah um how do you accidentally catch a line well so accidentally the same line accidentally the same lion.

Accidentally, the same lion. Oh, so you were like out with a vendetta. No, no, no. I wasn't after that lion. So, went home. Were you avoiding that lion? I was a little scared of that lion. Just because he was unpredictable.

Yeah. Like they usually go up a tree. He didn't want to go into a tree. Well, with one dog though, I wouldn't necessarily... I mean, for Nosy to get attacked like that, okay, that's not that unusual anymore. Like, people used to run with one dog. You don't do that anymore, ever. Because of force protection.

What's that? What do you mean? Like, you're protecting the dogs by having multiple dogs out. Right. Cats have, I don't know if cat behaviors change or whatever. That's sort of the conjecture at this point. Like, people, Bruce used to run one dog. He used to guide his hunts with one dog. I don't know if cat behavior has changed or whatever. That's sort of the conjecture at this point. Bruce used to run one dog.

He used to guide his hunts with one dog. And he did it for years until the dog got killed by a lion. But everybody's kind of upping the number of their packs right now. And I think maybe we've had three dogs ambushed this year by lions. Oh, really? Yeah, so this is kind ambushed this year by lions. Oh, really? Yeah, so this is kind of an emerging trend with lions. They're learning how they're like developing a different strategy on dealing with dogs. Right, so in all three cases,

it's been a single dog that got out in front of the pack. That they perceive a single dog differently than a group of dogs. Right, yep. And they outweigh them by, I mean, how much does the dog that got scratched up weigh? She's 32 pounds that day at the vet. And that thing's 148 pounds.

Yeah. There's no contest. That's why it's surprising to me that the lion would ever bother to run away from them. Well, you got to think about,

you know, lions live out there. It's silent. They're not vocal animals, really. They don't make a lot of noise, especially a big solitary tom. He's not making much noise.

The only noise he ever hears is like if he snatches a calf or a fawn or something you know briefly and also it sounds like holy hell coming through the roads those dogs it has to be an unnerving pretty stressful deal when you know a whole pack of dogs flies up on you like that and they just pop up a tree. Yeah. I think I was telling you this, like my buddy Remy this year, he was watching some lions on a kill and some wolves rolled in and the lions just popped up. The tree took a nap.

Right. You know, it's like they've done it a hundred times. Right. You know, that's, and that's, I mean,

maybe that's why dogs are fighting more now. Like I said, nobody knows all the hound hunters are talking about different theories. Some probably crazy, some probably reasonable. And this cat being as big as he is, if one wolf rolls in, he can kill that wolf too. That doesn't mean anything. I got you. So I think maybe he's just sick of getting run off of kills.

Every time he kills a deer or elk, if a wolf rolls in and takes it from him, he's over that. So after a while he's like this is not going to work out for me anymore right yeah um but anyways yeah we don't really know what the deal was with that cat he uh yeah the way we accidentally got on him we were hunting south of kind of a main road that day by a couple of miles and how many miles from where the the the scratching occurred yeah like i said a couple miles a couple miles from that spot yeah so the next day we went like four miles or the next day we went to a different drainage and caught a cat um i actually called a friend in to bring some

dogs because i was like stacy wasn't into the idea of me taking any more dogs out and i was what really yeah she was it it was like hold, your wife said you can't use these dogs or run lions anymore? It was a brief moratorium on cougar hunting for the dogs. Yeah, we had a moratorium on eating black bears in my house after trichinosis. I know what you're saying. You just kind of waited out.

Yeah, so it took a little while to kind of get ourselves back together. And whatever, yeah, it was unnerving. It was spooky for sure. Like, you just don't expect that. And I needed to get my, you know, feet back in the water right away. I didn't want to take a break, but yeah, I was not ready to put my dogs back on a cat just yet. So anyways, I called a buddy up who's got really good dogs and we caught a cat the next day. Everything went exactly the way it was supposed to. I did have one dog with me.

I had Tipsy that day. All the dogs were safe, of course. We got a dart in him safely, collared, released. Everything worked perfectly. So we're feeling pretty good. When you hit that line with the dart, how long does it take for the dart to take effect? About five or six minutes. Yeah.

Fairly quick, but if a cat jumps out of a tree and takes off with a dart in it, we have all the dogs tied back, obviously. So they can go quite a ways in five or six minutes. So you put the dogs back on them? No. Is that risky because the cat might fall asleep on the ground? Right, and the dogs chew it up. We can't have that happen. So the way we would do that is then just put a dog on a leash

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onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. So you catch another one. Catch another one, go smoothly smoothly everybody's feeling good projects back on track um got our first collar out feel good about that uh we go to another spot and cut a track looks like a tom track pretty good size and we're same day as the other collar no the day after

that so two days after the dog got attacked no no same day as he caught no the day after that. So two days after the dog got attacked. No, no, same day as he caught. No, the day after that one. Okay, the day after that one. So we caught one. Then the following day, we went back out. So it's like, whatever, Wednesday. And you're saying first collar of the whole study? Yeah.

So the attack happened on the very first track. Opening morning. Interesting way to kick off a study. Yeah, it was a lot of drama to start with. So on day three, we go out, we cut a track, and we're, you know, I looked at whatever measured on Google Earth or whatever else. We're six miles from where Nosy got gathered up. So pretty good distance, two days, cross a main road, you know, cross a big drainage.

We didn't expect it to be the same cat. Turned out that it was. Now, how do you know that though? Well, I hope it is. Because just the behavior of the cat, the size, the behavior, proximity. We ended up on a really long chase. We put,

Jared has good fast dogs. They ran the thing like over several drainages. We ended up on a super long chase. When you say ran, so actually in pursuit? No, no, no. Just tracking. He was a traveling cat.

He was a traveler. Yeah, you know what? This is an important thing. And I know we harp on this all the time when talking about lions. We might as well take a minute now to talk about this. Okay. Now, I'm going to lay this out. Then you run with it or correct me where I mess up when people

when you're running a lion track it's not like for the bulk of that time it's not like the lion is thinking holy shit these dogs are chasing me I'm going to go run all around and try to get away

they're way behind him in time and in distance possibly. And for the bulk of the chase, as it's called, the lion has no idea that this is going on probably until moments before it ends when all of a sudden he's like, what's that noise? And runs up a tree. Right. But he just out doing his business, hunting.

Yeah. Traveling. When I say we ran that cat for a long ways we didn't run the cat we tracked the cat for a long way tracked his past movement that's right so you know we're running yesterday's track and we're trying to freshen it up and figure out what that cat has done in the last 24 hours um so it might take us all day to do that. But by the time the dogs catch up to the cat, the actual chase is probably 400 or 500 yards. Like the cat hears the dogs coming, he might get out of his bed and start moving away from the noise. But a cat can't outrun those dogs for any length of time.

So when he gets jumped, that's what we call the jump, when the dogs get him up on his feet moving or whatever, it's a really fast thing. Seconds. Seconds. Yeah, if they run, you know, 500, 600 yards, that's going to be a pretty long one.

So once those dogs get a visual on that line, and the line gets a visual on the dogs, he's not going to think, I'll just run for miles and get away. No, he couldn't. And start jumping up giant cliff faces across canyons. It's real unusual in our country.

You know, you hear about that though. Sometimes they'll, if they climb up a cliff face or something like that, they can get some space on the dogs or if they go someplace they can't get, that's possible. But again, it's not like this foot race where the cat's just

doing all these tricks and whatever. Yeah, like it might be he's up on a cliff face because he happened to be up on a cliff face. Right. And the dogs happened to find him at a point when he was up on a cliff face. Or they tracked to the base of it and they can't get up it. And he's then jumped moving away from the dogs. I got you.

I imagine it's not too different than if you startle a house cat that you're not familiar with and it's not familiar with you, whether it was with a dog or kids or whatever. It's like outside. And you all of a sudden just see a cat that's chilling. And all of a sudden the cat is just, oh my God. And he runs up a tree. It's probably very similar to that, right?

He just goes from like this, whatever he was doing, loafing around to being sort of surprised. And he's like, what's the easiest way to get out of this situation? And that's that tree right there. Right. Lions especially are that way.

I think lions, once you get them jumped, you know, I think they lay and just listen to those dogs come quite close before they get concerned. Yeah. But once they realize that the dogs are coming for them, they take off and they probably climb pretty quick. Bobcats will outrun dogs. Is that right? Yes. I've had bobcats on chases walk past me at 10 yards,

and I've kicked fresh dogs on them, and the bobcats still outran us. They have more stamina for long run. They can absolutely outrun a dog, and they're a little bit lighter scented, so the dogs can't run the track quite as quickly. So they have a pretty major advantage there. And bears can outrun dogs, which surprises people. Bears can, they'll smoke a group of dogs. Yeah.

So you get the lion. So we get the track. Okay, we got this cat finally starting to, like we think we're on the fresh end of this track. And this is a huge, you know, it's a 45 minute drive to get back around the next drainage where we can get close enough to even get a signal back on the dogs and figure out what's happening. This is an all day deal. So we get this cat in this canyon. We think we're close. The dogs are really moving the track more quickly. And then we start getting a tree signal. So we start their way,

you know, walking down this steep, nasty canyon, the dogs are all showing treat and then they'll break tree. And you'll hear this, you know, once you're in hearing, you can kind of figure out what's going on. So you hear all the dogs barking treat, like they're looking at it. It's a different bark. And then all of a sudden gets super excited in their move, and they'll go back to tree again. Gotcha. So then you know the lion's jumping the tree. That's right.

So what you know now. The great humorist Jerry Clower calls it tapping the tree for some reason. It tapped the tree, which means it left its tree in reference to raccoons. Really? Yeah.

You know Jerry Clower? He used to get up between sets at the Grand Ole Opry and tell hunting stories. You should get yourself some Jerry Clower CDs. Yeah, I'm going to have to. Yeah.

Most about coon hunting. And a lot about dogs. His dog was Highball. Okay. If I was going to steal his name, now I'm stealing your name. Radar's a good dog name. So yeah, the cat's

moving and jumping and had Jared's dogs on their race again and I had Tipsy with me and then James brought a dog along. So we have these six dogs that are all fast. And you're letting all these dogs out because this thing won't get into

a tree and stay put. We're letting it out because we thought it was treed. So I dump, you know, we have all we dump uh tipsy who like i said i still call her a pup she's been on a lot of cats she's three and then james dog is actually a pup she's like a year old um so they race down the hill and we hear you know they hear him get to the tree now there's like i said there's all six dogs are there we think we have this cat caught. It ends up climbing a big cedar tree. We feel good about it. The state crew shows up, biologists and the grad student, and we're getting things set up to dart this cat,

and with whatever, all five or six of us standing around and the dogs, and we're trying to get the net set up to catch it if it goes under in the tree and falls. And the cat just finally said it had enough and climbed down out of this huge tree that it was 60 feet up, climbed down, jumped over all of us, and then refused to tree again. So now he's just walking and fighting dogs, which was a problem. And it's just blow down. It's steep. It's getting dark. I mean, this is like the worst place in the world to do this. So we're at this point like thinking we need to just get the dogs off of this cat

and get out of there before somebody gets hurt or one of the dogs gets killed. And so probably took, you know, 20 minutes of, you know, catching the cat on the ground and trying to get dogs gathered. And you're seeing the cat. Yeah, we're on the cat the whole time. Jared and I are right on him all the time. And you can't shoot it with the tranquilizer because you've got to catch the dogs

before you tranquilize it. Right. And we want it in a safe spot and whatever. Brian's running the trank gun, the dart gun, and we're just there to handle the dogs at this point yeah which means now we're just trying to get the dogs out of there um we're all pretty well fed up with this cat and we get finally get this cat caught in a blowdown and we think we can get all the dogs gathered and just pull them. So Jared slips in to start getting leashes on dogs.

And I'm about 15 yards downhill from them. And I'm still headed their way. And Jared starts pulling dogs out. And that cat comes out from underneath the blowdown. And I think it's the first time he'd actually really got a look at us and knew what was going on. And he looked at Jared and started at him through all those dogs. Oh, really?

Yeah, it was terrifying. So Jared saw the cable leashes that we use with a clip at each end, and it was still clasped. Jared's whipping this cat in the face, trying to get it to just stop. And the dogs are all over its case, and it's focused on him, which is a weird, unnerving kind of thing. So yeah, I have my gun with me this day. So I have my gun out, but there's dogs everywhere,

and the cat's very close to Jared, and you don't want to shoot a cat unless you absolutely have to. And at this point, I'm thinking, nah, there's a pretty good chance nobody's going to get hurt yet. The cat turns and takes off, and he finally climbs up on a leaning log about eight feet high, and he's wore out now. He's been in like a 20-minute scrap.

And he's on this log, and you can see he's breathing pretty heavily. And Brian was able to slip a dart into him. So we were able, you know, and then we darted him with the dogs loose still, but we were able to tone the dogs and pull them back off once we had a dart in them. Yeah. And he ended up going out on that log, basically. Toning the dogs is? A GPS collar has a shock feature and then also a tone feature,

so the dogs are trained to stop what they're doing if you tone them. So when you train them, they know that the shock follows the tone. Right. So once they figure that out, they just do what you want when they hear the tone. Yeah, once they're broke to that, they pretty much do whatever you want when you hit the tone. So we got a collar on that cat that day, which was nice. And that cat weighed 148? Yep, he was a big tom.

He's 148 pounds. Broken tooth. Had a busted off lower canine. We aged him at about 11 years old. So he's as old as he's going to get probably. Yeah. He's on his way out. Yeah.

He's probably been defending that territory for half a decade. You know, he's been up there for a long time, seen a lot of stuff. So, again. Would you guess that that cats been treed before maybe you know what maybe not legally they wouldn't there's no hound season there but I guess back in 2008 and 9 they were doing some hound hunting there maybe he got treed then but yeah I don't know why I don't know why he had the attitude other than just being old you

know kind of like the old man yeah just was kind of over all this nonsense and how when you guys go out i mean i saw how it happened when we were hunting but like when you're there how are you it sounds kind of like when you say like oh we caught a charak like it's not there's more to it than that like how are you guys cutting tracks because if you tasked a lot of people and you said hey go find me a mountain lion track this morning they're not gonna find a mountain lion track yeah most people wouldn't um well we have we have pretty good cougar densities up there and as winter gets on you know they get even more dense so finding a track if you know what you're looking for is not that hard a lot of times. But you're working off of deer herds.

Yeah, we're looking at winter range. So we're trying to hunt or, yeah, we're trying to, whatever, capture near deer and elk herds. Yeah. So to find, you know, like finding this track, we know that that area has quite a few deer and elk in it. We know there's going to be a cat anywhere there's deer and elk in that area. So we cut the track, and then the harder part isn't just finding a track.

The harder part is figuring out where it's at and finding the freshest track we can for the dog's sake. Yesterday we were hunting or trying to capture a cat, and we ended up getting on what wasn't the fresh end of the track. He'd crossed the road several times, and know misjudged which track was which and the dogs ended up spending all day working and they ended up right back at the road at a track that we already knew was there so we just messed up yeah so the hardest part is figuring out which track to turn loose on if even if it's the same cat to to get the freshest scent. Do you like running, let me put it this way,

in your life of chasing mountain lions, has more of it been functioning as a biologist or has more of it been functioning as a hunter? More of it has been as a hunter for sure. But not necessarily as like a consumer. Most of the cats we tree are for

pictures and dog training purposes. Yeah, like the thing that surprised me is houndsmen who've chased lions their whole life. How few lions they ever actually shoot. Yeah, well, that's just, yeah, how many lions do you really need to kill, right?

I don't want to kill a whole bunch of cats. I'd rather chase them and let the dogs get the work and show somebody else a cat. It's kind of fun. It's fun to take somebody new out and show them a cat and let them take pictures of it or whatever. It's exciting for people. And learn about them.

I mean, I feel like the work that you guys are doing, I mean, it's not like it's been done a million times before, right? Right, yeah. You guys are going to possibly gain new data that's going to, you know. Yeah, the study that the state's doing is going to be, it's pretty robust. It's going to generate a ton of cool data for sure. But, yeah, I think, you know,

what you said about hound hunters, like not killing that many cats, most, most hound hunters aren't in it to kill the cat necessarily. We just want to chase it and get the dogs in the woods and stuff like that. Yeah. So when I was, when we went out, so I hunted with Bart this December and we went out like looking to get a lion and kill a lion. Did that feel... Are you like,

oh, this is going to be more fun than normal? Or is it just all the same to you? Yeah, somebody shooting a cat, that's pretty sort of anticlimactic. Yeah, yeah. I don't care. So you're not excited to go't i don't know like excited to go get a lion i'm excited to tree a lion but if somebody wants to kill one it's just it's

one more step you know it's then you got to deal with the hide and the meat and everything else so um it's different than i guess i get asked a lot like well even stacy asked me like why why do you have to go kill all these deer why don't you just take their picture wouldn't that be the same it's like well deer not really it's not the same but for picture? Wouldn't that be the same? It's like, well, not really. It's not the same. But for cougars, it is the same. It's almost more rewarding for me to just get a picture of a cat and let it go. But it's not that way for any other species, which is kind of strange for me.

I don't know. But, nah, somebody's shooting a cat. I don't get that excited about it. Kind of whatever. I know that, you know, a lot, most hunters feel like they want to get a cat at some point in their life. And I get that. I understand that.

I've got a big one that I killed for whatever, sport. How many years ago? It was a long time ago. It was actually Whisper's first kind of solo cat and it turned out to be a big you know

Boone and Crockett Tom so it's kind of a special cat Whisper struck it and ran it and treat it do you regret killing that lion? no no I don't

yeah I think the build up of wanting to hunt one is real gradual for me yeah you know like even when I first saw you know I saw a handful of lions in the wild. When that first happened, I was like, man, I'm dying to go hunt a mountain lion.

It was after a long time, you know, like almost a couple of decades of looking at their tracks, seeing a handful of them, that eventually I had this like, I really wanted to go on a lion hunt. And a lot of it was just to really get a look at one. Because they're so, you just glimpse them. It was like, yeah, the moment I walked up on one in a tree, I was like, holy shit.

I mean, that's exactly what I said. To be like, there's one just standing there and it seems like bigger than life. Was that the first one you seen in a tree was I was like, holy shit. I mean, that's exactly what I said. To be like, there's one just standing there and it seems like bigger than life, you know? Was that the first one you seen in a tree? Was the one when we were with Bart? Yeah. The one that jumped. The one I'm seeing him in.

Yeah, you got a lot of. Getting to see him in three trees. Yeah, you got a lot of good lion looking there. Saw him in three trees. Yeah, I'd never seen one in a tree before. Yeah. We should talk through that haunt. Because it was.

No, I want to. It was interesting. But yeah, seeing that lion for the first time, it's surreal. So we went out and Bart found the track. We were hunting in the Idaho Panhandle. And the first morning we went out, hunting area had a ton of whitetails. Yeah, a lot of whitetails. Shitload of shit loads of whitetails yep and they were

they're not always there obviously it was deep snow up above and they'd moved into that winter range yeah like the snow up high because we later went up high the snow up high is ball deep yeah and there's deer that spend time up in that zone and as the snow was coming deer were moving down we were just finding concentrations of deer. And you found a track cutting the road. You found a track crossing the road. Of a traveling cat. Yep, coming out of that high country.

And we were on snow machines. And one thing you guys did that I thought was interesting was rather than just being like, holy shit, let's let everybody, let the dogs go. You went as best you could, checked a couple other areas

where you could get on roads with snow machines to see if there was an obvious place where that cat crossed another road. Right, that's... And to look for wolf tracks. That's right. There's two parts to that. So we always want to

find the freshest track and you know sometimes you can kind of guess bruce is very good at he's been hunting up there forever so he can kind of tell you what the cat is going to do especially if it's on a you know big travel um but the second part of that is finding looking for wolf tracks and sign and if we have any idea that there's wolves around, that changes how we hunt that or whether or not we hunt it. Yeah, because the wolves will hear all that ruckus and they'll come kill the dog. That's right.

Yeah, they get territorial and they hear the dogs coming. That can be trouble. Yeah. And to go check for tracks, some of the roads we looked at were distances of a couple miles from there. And you're just trying to rule out like, okay, he crossed this road too. So there's no sense in turning them loose where he crossed the last road because you're just going to wind up getting to this point anyways.

Right. Yeah, the idea is, I mean, ideally we would be able to- You guys call it boxing them in. Yeah, hamming them in. Hamming them in, that's right. Yeah, figure out one piece of ground where that cat has to be, which we don't usually get that lucky. And it can still be a huge patch of ground.

It might be huge, but if you can knock out two or the three sides, you have a pretty good idea either that cat went that way or he's still in this basin or canyon or whatever. So it really saves on dogs also. We have whatever, a really saves on dogs also. You know, we have whatever, certain number of dogs,

whatever, I think we had six on that hunt. If you turn all your dogs loose on the wrong end of a track and they wipe their feet out, like, it takes

three or four or five days for them to heal up so you can hunt again. Yeah. So, we got to take care of them. What was interesting about this track

that Bart found was he had a bloody foot so it was interesting because you could always tell because we ran into a number of lion tracks in the area but you could always tell this one dukes he had a bloody foot yeah it was like his right rear or something oh yeah it was a little bit of blood and it was kind of a mess like it was a weird foot of blood. It wound up being, it was kind of a mess. Like it was a weird foot. Yeah. And usually when something like that happens, you expect it to get better. But a couple of times it like bled worse.

Yeah, well, it's not icy snow. You know, it's probably just kept it open too. So we turned out on that thing and nothing happened that day. I mean, they ran a lion.

Yeah, a lot happened. They trailed the lion and found a lion bed. Remember, we were like, right away, we found a different lion bed and a different lion track. That's right. That caused some confusion for us. A lot of times, those cats will get in the spot, and they'll start circling and hunting.

And we couldn't be 100% sure that it wasn't the cat the dogs were on, and they just hadn't gotten to that bed yet. Let's say that cat ran out and did a big loop, and, you know, we don't know that they're not going to end up back at that bed a few hours from now after a mile or two of tracking. Yeah, I got you. Like he did a circle. Yeah, exactly.

And so we didn't really know. So at that point, you're sort of like just trusting the dogs and letting them work it out. And he's a circle. Yeah, exactly. So we didn't really know. So at that point, you're sort of like just trusting the dogs and letting them work it out. And he's crossing rivers. That was the dangerous part of that. Which is a pain in the ass because it's... It's like zero degrees. Yeah, the dogs don't...

They're not going to smell it where it crossed the water, but it winds up being that they cross on a log. But it's difficult for the dogs. The dogs aren't agile enough to cross the same little brush jam that a lion's going to cross. If the dogs go in there, they're going to be in rough shape. Right. Yeah, we don't want the dogs falling in the water when it's that cold.

The other thing, I'm sure you remember, is a pain. The dogs hang up at that crossing, and then we start getting a tree sign, and the dogs are far enough away we can't hear them, and it's easy to get excited and take off running down there to see what's going on. Plus, they're near. And it turns out they're just staying on the bank. That's right. The river can't get across the river.

But you have to do that because if one of the dogs is actually in the water and you're getting a tree sign, you better get there quickly to get them gathered up. So that first day, we spent a little bit of time just walking and crossing that river several times and having a pretty tough time of it, getting everything lined out. And then that cat split out of that river valley on a pretty much a straight line. And found another bed. Yep.

And the bed just is like, he lays on the ground and just kind of melts a little spot into the snow. Yeah, it looks like a deer bed. Yeah, like at the base of a tree. Yep. I had in my head base of a tree. Yep. I had in my head, I don't know why, I had in my head that he would be like, it would just be more of a dramatic sight, but it looks exactly like a deer bed.

Right. It just seems peculiar to have like a line curled up sleeping on the ground out in the open. That they'd somehow be more like a cave or like a big crotch in a tree, but in fact, he's just like, oh, let's go lay down right here. I walked up on one sleeping one time

in the middle of a logging road. I thought it was a dead deer. I was walking. It was like 4.30 in the morning in the summer. So it was pretty dark, but not pitch black. And I saw this thing laying in the road and I was scouting for an elk hunting spot and I'm walking up on it

and I'm just getting closer and closer, and finally I'm like 10 yards away before it dawns on me that this thing, it's a cougar, and it's sound asleep. Yeah. And finally it rolls to its belly. It must have heard me or whatever. It rolls to its belly, and it just gives me a look for a couple seconds and bounds off the road. But what a weird thing.

It's just sleeping in a logging road. Oh, yeah, they just lay down and sleep wherever, I guess, like a deer would. One of the ones I ran into spring bear hunting, ran into it on a trail. It was coming down the trail, we were going up the trail. And he sees us in books and runs on over to steep ledge. And I ran over to the ledge to see, like to watch him then run off through the woods. And I'm watching, watching, I'm thinking, how could that son of a bitch be so fast that he's already clear of all this area I can see. And eventually I looked down and he just like

feet away. Yeah. He just went and tucked in under that little ledge. And I'm just standing there looking out over him with no idea that he's just standing down there looking at me. Then when I made eye contact, it was me booked. Right. You know. But he just, he was just like,

he's just like, I'll just wait until this thing passes by. Right. Which again is like surprise, just like when you visualize these things, it's just not what you, how you imagine them operating, you know.

But, as we're chasing the line that day, what else happened that day in your mind that you remember? Because I remember it got to be toward dark and you guys really wanted to get the dogs rounded up because it was so cold. Yeah, it was too cold to leave dogs out overnight for sure, which you hate to leave dogs out overnight.

So you don't like to do that even when it's warm. Even if it's warm out with wolves and everything else, it's just not a good idea at all. So it would have to be a really unusual circumstance to leave dogs out overnight. So we ended up, you remember we ended up in that nasty swamp. Yep. And just had terrible losses in there.

The cat had circled and there was another cat in there, we think, and there's old tracks and fresh tracks, and the dogs just really had a hard time moving through that. Once we finally got them lined out, they got to that roaring river. Remember, the water was really high, and it was going to be a very dangerous crossing, and we were afraid the dogs were going to get down in that, so we pulled them at, like, last light.

Yeah. And then, of course, it's a, whatever, 30-mile snowmobile ride in dogs were going to get down in that. So we pulled them at like last light. And then of course it's a whatever, 30 mile snowmobile ride in the freezing cold to get back. So we don't want to be doing that too late at night either. So yeah, the first day we spent, I don't know how many miles we covered or how many of the dogs covered. I should have checked.

But it was quite a, I mean, it was like I said, a traveling cat coming out of that high country. Yeah. I feel like they, they moved the track three miles. Yeah, probably three. Three, about like that.

Yeah. The next day, we go back up there. And you guys didn't want to go in and just go let the dogs go where we quit the night before. Because of that river. You wanted to do more, kind of like trying to find out if the cat moved more, if he crossed another road. Right. And there was so damn many deer in there those hard to like because there's so many deer like beaten trails everywhere it was hard you realize you could miss

lion tracks well we did that cost yes yeah we spent all day back in that swamp you and I walked through there and found you know cat tracks go in every direction. Every which way. Everywhere. And dog tracks. Elk tracks were in there. Some moose tracks were in there. And dog tracks were everywhere with them. They just didn't have a good track to follow. There was no obvious direction for them to go. And then when we found that out track,

that, I mean, that was the savior. Once we had that, we could, you know, think we were moving in the right direction finally. And that was interesting because Bruce, another houndsman, Bruce, he checked some of the same areas a bunch of times and eventually knew there must be an out track and eventually found an out track. And I'm telling you what, 99.9% of American hunters

would not have found that track. No, it was just- I wouldn't have found that track. It was on top of all those deer walking on, I mean, that deer, the deer in there, it looked like a feedlot.

There were so many tracks. Yeah, it did. It really did. It looked like a stockyard. So it looked- The fact that he like picked that track up on that ship kind of blew my mind.

You guys, I hung with Bruce a lot that day because I think that's when you guys were kind of walking that one, that final kind of side of the box to make sure he hadn't gone. I don't know what direction that was South maybe anyways, but I was with Bruce and I can tell you,

he ran that one section of the road half dozen, maybe even 10 times until finally he just kind of was sensing something. And he told Gary and I, he's like, you guys just stay right here. Don't drive that stone wheel around anymore, because he's starting to think, like, we're going to cover up this out track. And then, you know, I think it was 1 in the afternoon when he finally cut that track. Yeah, it was getting on in the day when we finally figured that out.

And the problem is it was a small area, and, you know, you try to hem them in, and you think it's hemmed into this small area and then all of a sudden you have dogs running all over the place in there and you're thinking, are these dogs just absolutely worthless as they got in there and they can't get it caught?

Yeah, but he left and then came back in again and stuff like that. So it's confusing as shit. But then when he found that out track, he caught loose. Then right away your dogs got confused up the hill and you go up there and there's a giant freaking dead whitetail.

That's right. Yeah, so they ran up a few hundred yards and find that kill. And again, there's cat tracks all over it because he's been feeding on it. Yeah, frozen, pretty much stripped clean, 140 inch whitetail buck, still some meat on the neck,

neck twisted around a bunch oh yeah totally busted and buried probably like turned his neck and killed him or in the process of dragging him all over holy hell he was probably going back because that wasn't brand new he was probably going back into some other line killed him and he was checking on it

he just went back to check on his frozen kill. Right. Yeah. How often do you find kills chasing a lion? All the time. I mean, if you follow

lion tracks very long, you're going to find a kill. They're efficient. They're either eating on a kill or they're about to go make a kill. If you follow around

very long, you're going to find some. Yeah. My friend Floyd, where he talks a lot about the reason he's always hoping to find a kill like if you follow around very long you're gonna find some yeah my friend floyd where he talks a lot about the reason he's always hoping to find a kill is because the cat might just lay up yeah we had that last week um we were hunting up there and uh had a track that was just going all over the place circle and circling and we had it hemmed in and there's like a little narrow band of like 200 yards that we hadn't checked.

It's like, well, that cat, there's either an out track there or the cat's somewhere in there. So Rick took off, put the snowshoes on and took off walking the last little bit of this place out. And he gets on the radio

and he's like, turn the dogs loose. I just jumped the cat off a kill. So he walked up on this cat and it was just laying on top of an elk. An elk? Yeah. And we were only 300 yards from him, so we opened all the dog boxes, and they're all just standing around like, what do you want us to do?

And Rick's hollering, and finally they got the idea to go to him. And the minute they got to him, of course, they just blew up and ran the cat and had it treed within 400 yards. So, yeah, you walk their tracks very far you're gonna find a kill somewhere it's amazing that those things 140 pounds or whatever can kill those elk that are four or five hundred pounds this is like a 95 pound female we just took pictures and let her go a big a nice mature female you didn't put a collar on her? No. That was up at Rick's. Oh, okay. I got you.

What kind of elk? Calf, cow. A cow elk. Mature. Yeah. 95 pound female killed that thing. Yep. So, back to the one we got. You go up there and it was kind of a mess of tracks.

Yeah, there was a lot of tracks when you mess around there a long time looking for the out tracks that's like an interesting thing about running lines is the the dogs are doing so much of this but there's certain things the dogs are never going to figure out like if if you got a lion and he and he kills a deer and he like leaves and goes on some big walkabout then comes comes back, eats some more of the deer. Goes on a big walkabout, comes back, sleeps, eats the deer. Goes back to some place he'd been the day before. Comes back to the carcass. And you pick him up on one of those forays, right?

And you trail him back into where all of a sudden he's coming back into the center of the spokes on a wheel. I mean, the dog has got to be bewildered by it. And that's where like being an expert tracker, a human being expert tracker, needs to come in and do some like deductive reasoning about what in the world is going on here. And then find that track that seems the most fresh. Because the dogs like are good at knowing a fresh track,

but they're already feeling like they're running it. You know? And they could be going backwards. I mean, they could be doing any number of things wrong. Yeah, because the dog don't look at the track and tell what way it's going, which is one of the things that makes, the other two times I'd gone down to hunt lions unsuccessfully in the desert in Arizona

is there's not a lot of sand for them to leave tracks. There's a lot of rock and there's no snow. And the dogs can't tell what way the line's going. So right off the bat, even if the dog strikes and starts baying, there's a 50% chance they're going the wrong direction. Yeah. Until you can find a track.

And again, that's where it winds up being. That's why the handful of houndsmen that I've encountered have been the best sign readers I've ever been around because they find tracks no one's going to find. Yeah, if you can't. Floyd does it from the top of a damn mule. He finds tracks you'd never see if you were crawling on your hands and knees. It's just like there's like a, you look at it so much. You're going to treat very few cats if you can't find tracks. Like if you can't identify tracks and figure out what's going on and when to pull the dogs and when to help the dogs,

you're just not going to have any success. No, and a lot of these tracks aren't like, oh, yeah, big claws and shit. No, you're looking at a toe or something. No, it's just like nothing. Like you might see the heel or just one part of a track or whatever. And the area's creamed with dog tracks. Oh, that's the hard part too. At a passing glance, there's a lot of similarity.

At a passing glance, there's a lot of similarity between dog tracks and lion tracks, even in size. Right. I mean, like a passing similarity. On dry ground, for sure. Cat track, cat feet aren't that big. In the snow, they leave a bigger track because they've got a lot of fur and they snowshoe out sometimes. Yeah. Things like that.

But when you just see a cat step in fairly hard sand, their actual pads and toes aren't that big. Average width being, you know, three inches or something. They're not. Would be a tom. Yeah, they're just not huge feet like people think. Yeah. So you went up into that kill area and got that sorted out. Once we had that.

Did you at that point be like, like oh we'll catch this lion today well i'm like that all the time but um i i thought i knew that our chances just went way up but it was late in the day yeah that was the problem and the cat was going you know we're we still hadn't gotten him jumped but we were tracking him straight up that mountain up that deep canyon. Which is good because he was finally leaving this. That's what we wanted. Possibly leaving this clusterfuck of deer tracks and lion tracks and dead deer and lion beds.

Yeah, we wanted an actual out track. And the way the dogs move that, I don't know if you remember the noise and how fast they were going. But when they're doing that, you have a pretty good idea that they're on like today's track. Yeah. That's the thing is that what these guys do, we would periodically see a line track and you'd kind of check it out, walk it a little bit, you know,

try to make some ideas about how big it might be and what the snow, like whether it had time for, even if there's no new snowfall, snow is always blowing down out of the trees. Right. So you're looking at like, has snow had time to blow in there? Has the track kind of eroded from wind?

And the thing I would watch you guys do is you just take a dog and put his nose in there. Yep. And you could tell a lot about how old that track is by his enthusiasm. Right. Yeah. And they seem to kind of know like, oh, he's showing me a track.

Oh, yeah. No, they know exactly what we're doing. And you can start to learn your dogs too, especially like Whisper, my old dog. I've been doing that with her for seven or eight years now. So I know what I'm going to get on a fresh track. And if she just loses her mind, it's like, all right, we're going to get this cat right away. It's super fresh. If she's sort of tepid about it but wants to take it, it's like, all right, we're going to get this cat right away. It's super fresh. If she's sort of tepid about it but wants to take it,

it's probably that day's track. But if she starts moving it silently, then it's like, all right, we're going to have some work cut out for us now. I'll humor you and check this track out. You can start to figure out pretty quick how the dog reacts. And not all dogs are created equal. Some of them just freak when they get one particle the cougar sent.

I got you. But they learn to be more skeptical when they get older, or at least that one did. Well, no, not necessarily. You just learn, you learn how they respond. Like their personality. Yeah. Yeah.

So when you got that sorted out by that buck, they took off though. Oh yeah. And Whisper, Tipsy and Gus were on that chase and they're fast dogs, especially Gus and Tipsy. And when they start on a fresh track, they're going to get that cat moving, and they're going to catch him pretty quick. They're super athletic, fast dogs.

So that was the right group to have with that cat, especially the way he acted once he was treed. Yeah, when they lined out from the kill, though, I had a pretty good feeling that we were going to get him up I just was hoping it was still because it was shooting light you know what we like right at the summer or right at the winter solstice so you had like

you know very short days and that's the thing you know everybody you know who hunts waterfowl is always very aware of like legal shooting light but you know it's spelled out Alaska doesn't do it because the days are so weird and the light periods or photo periods are so strange but yeah I mean you got to find that thing you know, it's spelled out. Alaska doesn't do it because the days are so weird and the light periods are so photo periods are so strange, but yeah,

I mean, you got to find that thing. You can find it in perfect daylight, but you can't shoot. Right. I should say perfect daylight, but you could find it in light that you could shoot in, but it'll be illegal for you to do so.

Yeah, for sure. It's different than like a deer that's 150 yards away or something that at the same time, you wouldn't be able to make the shot of cats in a tree. I mean, yeah, you're going to find a way if you need to. Yeah, you can shoot it if you wanted to.

But you can't put artificial light on it either. Mm-mm. Yeah. Not that it would matter because you can't legally do it at dark anyways. Right. But it's not like predator hunting, like coyote hunting there where you can use artificial light. You can't use artificial light.

Nope, nope. Yeah, so once they lined out like that, we had a, it was a little bit of a race against time too, to get that cat in a tree and make sure we can get to him, which, you know, we had to drop back down off that mountain and snow machine all the way back up to the top and then come down the mountain to him. And we got, we got to that thing. Now it had snowed a lot and it was like a powder, like a fine, fine powder. It was not a breath of wind.

So all that snow is, is hanging in the trees and it had just been like consistently very cold, consistently not windy. So like the entire snow load, when you're under like a canopy of big trees, it'd be almost like bare ground. Yep. You know,

just like a dusting of snow that all that snow is still up in the trees. And when that line, we show up there and he's up in the tree. I don't lion, we show up there, and he's up in the tree. I don't know how high he was. He's pretty high up in the tree. Yeah. But he was on that steep hill where you're almost looking straight at him. Yeah. I was eyeball to eyeball with him coming down the mountain toward him.

Yep. And he was fine with the dogs blowing. We showed up, and he pitched out of that tree. And it's stuck in my mind as one of the most surreal things I've seen. Next to a time I had a mountain goat fall 1,200 feet off a cliff and standing above it watching it go is

locked in my mind. But the way that thing just bailed out of that tree and sent down a shower of that powdered snow and hit the ground at a full tilt run. Oh yeah, didn't mean anything to him.

Didn't, like, it was just like, like he does it every day if he needs to. He sort of like rode the bows and then this sort of like

cascade of powder, you know, almost like. Just snow everywhere, man. He couldn't have planned it better though to get away from those dogs. Like imagine being a dog underneath there and just getting all that powder in your face.

Oh yeah, but he bailed out over the dogs. Oh yeah, now he ran right. And then he hit a downward slope and just hit it like at a full tilt run. He was going as fast as he could and the bigger problem was he was running his tracks from about five minutes earlier. Yep.

I thought we'd lose a line because then he was headed right back down into the, that's right. Into where he came out of. And it was getting, yeah. Followed his own, followed his own set of tracks down.

We have never lost a lion that way. And I was thinking that that might be the first time. And it was going to be, yeah. Cause you guys all the time were telling me, Oh yeah, he might jump the tree, but he'll,

he'll only go three, 400 yards. It was going to be, we started chasing that thing and like a mile later, I'm like, some bitch is still running. Yeah, I even looked over and I was like, oh, don't worry about it. We'll have him treating 400 yards. Then 800 yards later.

Running our asses off. Oh yeah. And he gets in another tree. We show up there and you can't shoot the lion in the tree with the dogs on the loose because you don't want the lion in the tree with the dogs on the loose because you don't want the lion to come down out of the tree and fight the dogs.

Right, yeah, you don't want to blow him out of the tree to the dogs. Plus, you know, 99% of the time you have time for people to get pictures and you get the dogs leashed and tied back where you want them and you plan this thing. So it's a very controlled situation most of the time.

With your cat, it wasn't. He didn't want to stay up at all. No, he bailed out of that tree in an amazing shower of snow. And then that time he did like you were saying, went 300, 400 yards and climbed up another tree. We got in there right at dark. And he did not seem like he was going to stay putting that tree. And when I was thinking about all this,

like when I was thinking about lion hunting, going into a lion hunt, there's always this idea that people say it all the time. People who, who think that, you know, whatever, have like a misguided opinion that there's like no challenge to lion hunting.

Cause they, they think of like in their mind, the hunting is the shot, right? Yeah. The challenge and hunting hunting is the shot. Right? Yeah, the challenge is the shot. Like the challenge in hunting is making the shot. Right. But the challenge in lion hunting is finding the lion in the first damn place,

which is like, again, people are like, oh, we caught a track. And it sort of seems like, oh, yeah, you caught a track. Easy peasy. It's not. No, it's not. It's not like finding a deer track. You know there's a lion at the other end of the track once you find it. But finding the track can be tough and we've had we've had weeks where we didn't find a lion track

yeah when it's cold and they're locked down on winter range and they're just not moving very much we've like literally gone an entire week without cutting a track that we could run yeah so it's not you know it's not necessarily easy to find a track, although we were finding quite a few while you were there. The cat population is pretty good up there, so finding a track isn't necessarily the hardest part up there. It was the densest lion sign

I've ever seen in that area. We caught them on that move too. We caught them really a good time. You were saying it was perfect conditions, just snow coming in, a lot of deer. But in anticipating going on a lion hunt, a successful lion hunt, I'd always been like,

I really was interested in participating in and watching, right? Experiencing how houndsmen work, which I've developed a lot of respect for. The sign reading capability of a good houndsman, the athleticism of the dogs, just to see all this play out. I always had a little bit of trepidation or a little bit uneasy about that you'd get here and here's this amazing animal in a tree that you don't get to really see, you don't get to really ever look at them.

And then you'd find a tree and time would go by and you almost became like familiar with the lion in some way and then i was afraid that um not afraid now that i was like not that i'm afraid of myself arriving at any kind of conclusion but i was open to the idea that i would find the lion we would catch the lion and then i would be like man i don't want to like i don't this is i'm good now that was my lion hunt no need to get a gun involved in this right but I think that after like after jumping it out of the two trees and then find the third tree right at dark and he was not going to stay in that tree it wound up being like a snapshot yep let's get there was no sort of like thinking about it you don't want to be like there he is bam you know right and it wasn't i had in my head there's gonna be this sort of big

like uh like emotional wrestling match about like like everybody says like shooting the line out of a tree there's a story i told a hundred times i'm gonna tell one more time um i got a friend who built this deer blind that he calls the condo. And he bought a bunch of old pulp land. And he built a blind you can pull in and park inside a garage. And then you go upstairs and it's the blind. And it's wraparound benches, lead sleds, okay? Rolling off his chairs, electricity, and radiating out from the condo are,

like laid out like Washington, D.C., are spokes of shooting lanes planted as food plots. So you're in the center of the wheel, and there are spokes going out that have yardage markers on them. Okay? Okay. And he's like made the desert bloom out here where he's got like deer in a place that traditionally wouldn't have shit for deer like pulp land um in the southeast but he like all these food plots just deer just come in okay and we're sitting up in the condo seeing if some buck you know they know about by name right would show up I'm telling them about how I'm going to go out to hunt lions in Arizona I think at that

time was the second time I was going to go and I'm telling them man you know it's just like really frustrating because you know there's no snow so you got to like just take out and just kind of free cast with the dogs in hopes that the dogs are going to smell a track and make the right noise that the dog's owner is like, that's not a bobcat, that's a lion. They're going to take off. You're going to do some deduction about how you know how lions move through the landscape to try to figure out what way the lion's going. Then you're going to follow those dogs, studying the ground for a freaking track to figure out if you went the wrong way or not. Then you got to size the thing because you don't want to run a female.

You're trying to run a male and it could be a bobcat and all this shit going on, right? And you don't know when the thing came through anyways. And then I'm telling him all this and in the end, he's standing there like in his swiveled office chair

saying, I just don't see the challenge in shooting some lion out of a tree. It's so much like a perspective issue. I'm like, well, a lot of guys might look at what we're doing right now and just really fail to see the challenge of shooting whitetails out of a house.

Interesting. But it's like a perspective issue. But it was messing with my mind, this idea that you're going to shoot it out of a tree, which is sort of like a very loaded... It's like there's fish in the barrel and there's shit in the tree. You know what I mean? Again, it's not about the shot.

No, you even told me that. You said something interesting to me too, where you were... I called you up and I was just trying to figure it out. I'm like, this is a goofy question, but, uh, what do you imagine toting for a firearm? You know,

cause I'm thinking I'm just going to bring like a light caliber scoped rifle. And you had said something to me like about, you've, you've seen it happen, but you had like a, a, an opinion about bowl, bow hunting lions.

Yeah. That's a weird thing. And I don't know. I mean, whatever people are good with their bows and bows. like an opinion about bow hunting lions. Yeah, that's a weird thing. And I don't know. I mean, whatever. People are good with their bows and bows are super effective. When people shoot a lion with a bow, it dies in the tree and it comes out and it works.

But it's weird to me when somebody goes on a hound hunt and enters their cat in the Pope and Young record book because they got it with a bow. Yeah, that's what you said to me record book because they got it with a bow. Yeah, that's what you said to me. You didn't get it with a bow. You got it with dogs.

Dogs, yeah. It's not like you snuck up on it in its bed and shot it or something. The shot isn't what should matter at all. The getting has already happened. Yeah, it's got. You got it. Yeah, it's caught.

Pulling the trigger on the cat is sort of the whatever the anticlimactic part of that yeah i thought it'd be but it won't be on this particular situation it wasn't feeling very different than what i imagined it yeah you know and then i was like it was i was like so happy um yeah i was like. I was really happy to get the line. It was funny because I now say to people, people will be like, I said, that's probably the first line I ever got. I would guess, I'm imagining it would be my last line. People are like, oh, you didn't like it?

Or something bad happened? I'm like, no. It was a thing I really wanted to do. I did it. It's just different than hunting deer and elk. I think, yeah. I think if you went, you know, you're always welcome to come out and chase cats with us. I think the next cat you tree, you're going to look at very differently.

Yeah. And that's probably, you know, I have a hard time explaining that. Like people always like assume that hound hunters are just killing every cat they tree and now you know the shot is like you said this is like yeah whatever i don't care if that cat dies or not i don't want it to die really because i'd rather chase that thing again next year and yeah yeah get pictures of it and get a look at it and just let it go yeah i was I was surprised talking to your friend, Bruce, I was surprised about that. The quota systems,

like the idea of managing lions as a big game animal and not managing them as a like varmint. Right. Because some states still do have like 365 day a year season and they manage them. They don't manage them. They're like, get them off the landscape to avoid livestock depredation.

And that's kind of their approach. Some states, Idaho, Montana, some other ones, manage them as a big game animal. Where they're making like population estimates. Those lions are famously hard to count. They make population estimates on lions. And they try to figure out how we can maintain those populations. Or in some cases, probably you can grow those populations.

And they do it with having female quotas. Right. Or permit draws. There's a lot of areas in Montana, you got to draw a damn lion tag. Oh, yeah. It takes time, too. And it's like, they're competitive. Yeah.

Like, there's areas, I put in for, before this hunt, I put in for an area a couple times and didn't draw the tag. Right. Matter of fact, I put in for lions three times in certain areas and never draw a tag. There's also some over-the-counter ones, but some of those over-the-counter areas have a female quota and a total cat quota. Right.

That's a good way to manage them. You know, hound hunters have pushed all those quotas. Yeah, that's what I was trying to get at. Bruce was telling me like the history of that, that that came from hounds. Yeah, that wasn't anti-hunters that wanted a female quota or a hound quota or a cat quota. It was hound hunters. And the reason was the people were killing too many cats.

And we wanted to have something to chase. So we kind of led the way on that protection. And it's worked like there are places that have huge deer elk herds and really healthy lion populations where you can expect to cut a track every day yeah now i put a picture of the lion i killed it was like it was like a good representative example of a male lion it was like a like a yeah not a nice cat yeah so i put a picture of the one up there and uh on on instagram and it got you know like over like well over 9 000 likes on instagram so it's like a lot of people looked at it and they're like oh that's cool you only got a line um there's a lot of like not i don't want to say blowback but a lot of people

being like really like wanting to know more are you gonna eat to eat that? Big one. Why are you holding it up like that? Oh. Okay. So a guy was like, you're not a guy, and this is funny. My wife even pointed something out because she was kind of looking through them

because she was conflicted about this whole thing too. Where people were like, why would you hold it up like that? Like, you don't strike me as a big like trophy shot grip and grin guy. And I'm like, well, that's not true because i put up shit all the time with people with animals all the time

you're just viewing this differently because what it is you know and people like being like why do you why do people pick the line up and hold like that it seems like disrespectful like how else do you i understand i mean i guess i was like where does that come from why do people hold lions up by the armpits because because just when they're laying on the ground you can't tell what's going on that's right it's the more it is a definitely like the traditional whatever you want to call it hero shot or whatever you call it you know it's like grabbing a deer by the antlers and standing back and taking your picture or whatever i think people like people a lot of people wanted it to be

that I was super sad that I got a lion. I'm like, if I was super sad that I got anything, I wouldn't go do it. Right. It's like I set myself out to do something. I'm going to do it. Looking forward to having the lion's rug. I'm looking forward.

I'd eaten three damn lions without ever killing one. They're good. Yeah.. Guys would give me lions or got lion meat. One time I got a whole lion from a guy. So I'd eaten a bunch of lion meat. It wasn't like I was entering unfamiliar territory there. So I'm looking forward to having the lion meat. Again, it's not like hundreds of pounds of lion meat, but it's like a novelty.

It's a really nice break from red meat that you get off deer and elk. So I'm looking forward to that. Looking forward to the experience. I'm in an area where lions are well-managed through a season structure. There's a lot of lions. But people are like, wanted it to be that you were real bummed out that you got a lion. And there is a thing in hunting where there's a remorse factor now and then. Or there's a kind of a solemn thing with doing it. But I think this idea that you would,

anyways, why would you want to go do something that made you so depressed? I was happy to get the lion, so I'm happily holding up the lion. I'm not going to pretend to be all caught in prayer over this dead lion as though I did some horrendous thing, like ran someone's dog over with my car. It just wasn't like that. It was like, I intentionally set out to get this lion. I'm happy about getting the lion. I want people to see the lion. I'm going to hold it up and be

like, check out this lion. The same way when I got married, I was real happy to have gotten married to my wife. And we had a dude there taking pictures of us being married. Because it was like a good thing that we planned out and it happened and we were happy it happened. But it just killed some people to be that there's a dude happy with a lion. People are strange about- Lions. Lions, predators in general.

I mean, imagine if you were doing it with a wolf, right? They'd be the same. Oh, you would have heard the same thing. It would have been the same thing. Just predators or I don't know. I hate to even call it like a non-traditional game animal, but whatever. People have been eating lions

since people and lions coexisted. There's a couple things people trip up about. They're like, I can't imagine eating another predator. And I think that they're saying something different because they're like, you know, we're omnivores. Yeah, they're a predator, but i don't think you really don't want to hunt them because it consumes meat like i don't think that's really what you're talking about other people say like

oh they're so old but a old like a bull elk a big giant bull elk is potentially going to be older than like a cat that one would hunt for and get. Oh, for sure. Because you guys estimated based on tooth wearing and other things that the lion I got was six years old. Yeah. A giant bull could be seven or eight years old. So it's not the age thing. I had another guy point out that a friend of ours pointed out once, I think we actually discussed this, that he was like, we were trying to be like, why would, he was really upset about the idea that someone would shoot a wolverine. Not that I've ever shot a wolverine. We were having a discussion. He's like, oh, they travel so far.

I'm like, yeah, but caribou travel a lot farther. There's caribou that migrate a thousand miles. So it's not traveling. Because we just shot a caribou and that didn't bother you at all. It's something different. And I think people are really struggling. Why is it different there's 30 000 lions in the american west yeah if you go look the eye like if you go look

it's international conservation status is as is as low as you can get it's a species of least concern 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 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 know, sucking a high-end 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 MeatEater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing

on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com. onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Yeah, I think there's a misconception. People think that lions are really rare.

I hear that a lot. Oh, yeah. People think we're almost out of them. And a lot of that, if you hop on any number of activist websites, they'll tell you that they're rare. They're extirpated from 70% of their historic range. Yeah, but elk are gone from 90% of their range. That's right.

There are no lions in Illinois than they used to be. I understand that. But in the Rocky Mountain States, we have a lot of lions. They're not going anywhere. It's a well-managed population. No, in the IUCN status, like the International Conservation Status,

I always feel that when I look at stuff, I sometimes feel that they're a little bit jumpy. Like they give things status, like conservation statuses that are unwarranted. And I even was talking to Giannis on the phone. I'm like, I guarantee lions have like a critical or whatever status. But you go on least concern. There's the species of least concern about vulnerability.

It's good. Lions, people come up with weird stuff. People just get really upset about that shit. There's a bill right now in what Arizona. Arizona. Yeah. They want to eliminate the lion hunting season to let because they're killing deer and that's a public safety issue having too many deer or some

ridiculous yeah it was a guy and of course it's it's like of course he's a he's a democrat i knew the minute i saw that bill i was like that's got to be coming from a democrat um not to bash on, but just it's like you don't see a lot of anti-lion hunting legislation coming out of Republicans. They tend to be more like biology-friendly folk when it comes to big game management. But this guy, we're having too many deer and elk on the roads. We need to stop hunting lions in order to reduce deer and elk because it's a public safety hazard. Now, that man is not motivated by road safety. That man is motivated by some people, constituents or donors, who got a real bone to pick with lion hunting and rather saying,

can't hunt lions because people really like the idea of lions and feel and relate to them in the same way they relate to house cats or whatever. So we don't want anybody killing lions.

You can't say that. You got to like try to sell it to people on some bogus shit. Like public safety things. Because right away Bart pointed out to me there's a time proven way of getting rid of

excess deer and elk in a very targeted fashion called hunting seasons. Right. And anyone who's hunted in arizona knows that tags in arizona are not a gimme yeah if there's an overpopulation of deer i mean the first thing that comes to my mind isn't to like protect all the predators it's like all right let's address this overpopulation of deer like through whatever a hunting season no something else. It's like code language bullshit. Yeah, it's totally... People are weird. Like I said, people are strange about predators,

predator management, especially big ones. They don't worry about coyotes too much or even like bobcats, they don't get too excited, but wolves, cougars, and now grizzly bears, this whole conversation has gotten big. And a lot of the most vocal advocacy tends to come from the people

who are least likely to run into one. Oh, yeah. Of course you want a cougar hiding in every tree if you live in West Seattle. Yeah. Right? Because you're never going to see one anyway. Yeah, I always talk about New Jersey cat ladies,

you know, are getting fired up on behalf. But I think it is. I think it's like a, you know, there's fired up on behalf but i think it is i think it's like a you know there's a different like a different physiological difference between predators and prey is uh you know your eyes are centered on your face and you know line what it does is when your eyes are centered on your face um you know you can focus on stuff like you're focusing on something you're gonna pounce on like a deer he's got, think of an antelope or a deer.

Their eyes are way out to the side of their face. What they're doing is just scanning all the time, and they can see almost behind them. And when you have eyes that are focused, like when you have eyes in the center of your face, you're really good at staring at something. And when you see a cat, like if you ever watch a house cat kind of dodging its head up and down and side to side,

he's doing like a depth to side. He's doing like a depth perception thing. He's calculating a distance for a leap. You know? And a prey animal just is incapable of that kind of shit.

They're really good at detecting movement all over, but they don't focus on any particular thing at all. I think that people maybe see those front-facing eyes

and empathize with it more. We don't have a lot of... Because we have it. We have a predator eye. We have predator eyes. How many prey animals do you see getting walked around the neighborhood on a leash? Yeah. People We don't have a lot of... Because we have it. We have a predator eye. We have predator eyes. How many prey animals do you see getting walked around the neighborhood

on a leash? Yeah. People just don't relate to it. That could be it too. Like people don't divorce wolves from dogs, which taxonomically speaking isn't unreasonable.

And people don't divorce lions from house cats maybe? Maybe, yeah. Or it's a thing that they don't see. Like I said though, they've sort of divorced coyotes from it yeah yeah i think it's the perceived rareness maybe i think a lot of it is that i think people

yeah when they think that like we're out there killing the last cougar in north idaho it's easy to get behind you know sort of that anti-hunting action yeah whether it's easy to get behind, you know, sort of that anti-hunting action. Yeah. Whether it's just hitting a donate button or whatever else. But in the case of cats, we're seeing like an unprecedented explosion of lion range. Yeah. Lions are moving eastward. It's almost like it just took them a while to figure out how to cope with people.

Now they're like, they're re-colonizing old places. Well, and I think there's also a lot lot people are more tolerant of predators than ever before i mean you're probably talking about the black hills yeah like yeah so south dakota had kind of like been out of them and now they got you know they're running a hunting season down there but and a lot of that has to do with exactly what you just said the hunting season it's not a a varmint anymore where and you know the rural communities are there's not as many ranchers there's not as many people out farming and out in the woods as there used to be um so there's you know maybe less opportunities for them to get shot at yeah and then you can't and then

the other thing is we're not poisoning anymore like that and in the old days you would take a animal like did you take like an old mule out or whatever and shoot it and then inject it with strychnine before it died? So, the strychnine would pass

through the circulatory system and the whole animal would be tainted with a shitload of strychnine and then that would be sort of like,

whatever eats that is dead. And we did a lot of damage on predators. Yeah. I mean, that's kind of like,

largely, we lost a lot of grizzlies that way, a lot of wolves that way in the old days, damage on predators. Yeah. I mean, that's kind of like, largely we lost a lot of grizzlies that way, a lot of wolves that way in the old days, just poisoning programs. Right, yeah. I think a lot of people have the idea that wolves were hunted to whatever extirpation in the 48, and it was a lot more than that. You know, obviously bigger picture stuff

with habitat loss and prey loss. But wolfers, like the old wolfers, commercial wolf harvesters were poisoners. Yeah, you hear about that? Like the little wolf bombs or whatever with a little feather on them and the strychnine that would poof out and kill wolves almost immediately. Yeah, they were like ran, like they ran basically a strychnine trap line in the old days.

Kind of like after the Buffalo time, a lot of guys went to wolfing. And then we ran bounties on them. So up until the 1960s, I think Montana had a bounty on lions. Yeah. And there was this kind of this epiphany where, again, coming from Houndsman and others, where they just made a radical switch. Instead of paying people to kill mountain lions,

we're going to have people pay us to do a limited amount of hunting for mountain lions and we're going to find like a place in our heart to have the animals on the landscape. The houndsmen are the last guys that want to see lions get down. Oh, for sure. Actually, it was funny.

Yeah. Talking about like letting cats go. I've told you about like seeing cats and talking people out of shooting them. I've taken moose hunters a couple of different times and had cats. We watched a cat come down to a stream and taking a drink. And this moose hunter was like, oh my gosh, there's a cougar. I want to, you know, I'm going to shoot him. And I'm like, nah, let's see if it's a Tom, you know. Because you haven't caught it.

Yeah. I don't want him to shoot that cat. What for? So I kind of talked him out of it. The cat got away, of course. And the other day, Bruce is riding the snowmobile, and he comes around the corner, and there's a bobcat sitting in the road. And he has a gun on him, you know. So here's this bobcat, and he's like five yards away from it. It moves aside, and he rides past it.

And then he stops, and he sees a pair. There's a second bobcat on a deer kill right below the road like 10 like 10 yards away so here here's this you know hound hunter hunting guide all this stuff and he's sitting there looking at these two bobcats he's armed and you know obviously he doesn't want to shoot him like he hasn't he didn't catch it yeah what's he going to do with that bobcat right yeah so he comes back he's like oh there's a couple bobcats up there. We could go turn loose on those and take a chance at them.

But it's just an interesting way to look at it. Like, yeah, I don't want to. Why would I want to shoot a lion without catching it? Do you think you'll ever shoot another lion? Yeah, I mean, I'm sure I will for, you know, control stuff or whatever. I mean, just like a hunt, you know, like a big a hunt. No, no, no. I'm not going to do that.

Really? You just know you won't? No, I've got... No. I'm happy with the lion I've got. Would you do... Are you itching to do a lion hunt, Yanni? Itching?

No, but I'd like to. But it's not an itch. No. What's your feeling about it? Where are you at on it? You know, if I had an itch. No. What's your feeling about it? Like, where are you at on it? You know, I kind of, if I had an itch, I could definitely kind of scratch it by going on that hunt, you know, and definitely seeing that cat.

I'd like to go on more. I mean, I've got a couple of friends in Bozeman that are running cats and are, you know, sometimes killing them, sometimes not. And I've been invited to go out and I'm going to try to make that happen just to go see another lion because, again, just seeing a lion at 30 yards is special. It's crazy.

But yeah, I don't know. I mean, yeah, the meat's like you said, the meat's kind of like a novelty. It's actually great, great meat. I mean, we served it Christmas Day at my house. In-laws there. Oh, yeah? Did you have in-laws with it? Dude, they loved it. I was like really serving it

like, you know, with trepidation. Like, I don't know man. And I mean, that stuff hadn't even been like chopped up. We just took the lid off the Dutch oven and there's my mother-in-law sticking her fingers in and it's like, mmm, it's like the best pork, you know, roast you've ever had. Yeah, it was awesome. Like it got gobbled up. Like it's like, it's like the best pork roast you've ever had. Yeah, it was awesome.

Like it got gobbled up. Like it's really, really good eating, you know? But I wonder if that's not part of the reason that like people have that big problem with the wolf and the mountain lion because it's just not known as like a common food source. But it's not,

it's just the food thing is kind of novelty like i i like i think of myself as like i kind of in large measure like live off deer meat yeah for sure moose elk like i got like it's we are always eating deer meat yeah so someone say like you know here's this predator what this predator focuses on is he eats a lot of deer and elk and moose meat like he eats a lot of ungulate meat it would be weird and now and then i'll have like these little bonus things but when i sort of like map out my future meals you know i just imagine that i'm like a being that consumes venison i think it would be even as a hound hunter i think it would be strange if somebody was like did you get your cougar this year?

The way they do your deer or your elk or whatever. If you were living off cougar meat. That would be really weird. Yeah, definitely. I can't imagine I'm going to start living off cougar meat. Even if you could, I'm just like, I'm a specialist, I guess, on prey.

I've been saying I'll never go again. But see, now I have a few bonus points in Montana. You need to go. I'm real curious about that Sealy Swan area because that's where I saw my first lion. Yeah. And I love that area. So I can see maybe I'll do me a little lion hunt

over there someday. I don't know. You've got tight. And the nice thing about lion hunting is you don't have to shoot the cat either. You can run cats and tree cats all week, and it's a potentially non-consumptive hunt. Yeah, but I'm a pragmatic fellow, man.

Like mountain climbing, I have a lot of respect for alpinists, but if I'm going to go up there, I better be going up there. Just to go up there and say I did it, it's like I'll do that kind of stuff, but it's like a big motivation for me. I'm like a practical guy, man.

Just set your goal at getting pictures. Yeah, I could. Yeah, it's different than deer and elk, though. Pictures of them are no fun. When you got your first lionhound, was it because what? Because you wanted to have a lionhound or you wanted to get a lion?

Both. Before I had hounds, I would have like shot a lion if it had walked in front of me while I was deer hunting. That has changed. I wouldn't do that now. But I grew up around hounds and I knew I wanted hounds. So when I got my first dogs, you know, I moved from the Midwest where you're hunting raccoons out here and the obvious choice here is lions. So once I got dogs, I still hadn't killed a lion. Once I got dogs, then it was like,

had to train the dogs, had to do all these other things. And I knew eventually I was going to catch a lion, but it took a little time. How many years? I trained lions the first year. Oh, you did? Oh, yeah. Not easily.

It was pretty hard. It was hard training. Because the dogs weren't up to it yet or you weren't doing your job? I didn't know anything. I didn't know what I was doing. You know, I had a couple of friends that had been around it and they helped me some. But I didn't have a finished dog to train Whisper.

So I'm, you know, out trying to figure out these tracks. The first year I didn't even have a snow machine. So I was like park and walk in with snowshoes until I cut a track and start walking with this dog on a leash and try to like pet her when she did things right. And I had a border collie trotting along next to me. Oh really? Yeah, it was a show. Did you have GPS?

The first year I did not. The second year I did. And we actually treat a few cats that way. And I had, like I said, I had a friend. Just heading out and striking out on snowshoes and getting the dog going. But that's a really, really hard way Like I said, I had a friend. Just heading out and striking out on snowshoes and finding a track. But that's a really, really hard way to do it. And low success rates. I think I treated

one or two that way. Toms or females? Females. Which makes sense. They're just more dense, densely populated. And then once I picked up a couple more dogs and Whisper was coming on and got the GPS

and I was starting to feel more like a legit hound hunter after a couple of years. But I think I was in it, I don't know, two years or something, three years before I caught that big tom and it was kind of a special deal the way it all worked out. So that was your first line?

That was the first one I killed, yeah. I had treed and released several cats before that. What kind of hounds did you grow up with? English red ticks and blue ticks. That chased? Coons, yep. When you were running coons, were fur

prices good? No. We made up for that with quantity. Nobody was running dogs. Nobody was really trapping much i think a lot of raccoons yeah so you're you know you're getting 10 15 bucks a piece or something but if you had a good night you had a pile of raccoons yeah we got 400 one year yeah that's pretty good that was a big year but then you said your dad has now switched dogs yeah he's running beagles now for rabbits yep no your dad don't hunt stepdad oh okay okay Yeah, he's running beagles now. Rabbits.

Yep. No, your dad don't hunt. Stepdad. Oh, okay. Okay, so stepdad's running beagles. He, yeah, he's like a non-consumptive hunter now. Just runs rabbits all day. Oh, and he runs rabbits with beagles and doesn't shoot the rabbits?

Nope. Doesn't even take a gun. Which brings us all the way back around to the whole like Ronnie Bain thing. Yeah, but why don't the dogs just after a while be like, I'm not hunting this guy anymore. Because they're good dogs. They don't need to catch the rabbit. Just like, you don't need to chew on it to, you know, whatever.

Well, they like to chew on it. Or they like to see it. They get to see it. I'm not blaming the dogs. I don't care. I'm just saying I'm surprised that the dogs after a while aren't like, man, you know, we're going to get our asses off here and no one's doing anything about it. I don't know.

I guess they just don't need to. They just like to chase them. Yep. All day. You got anything you want to add? You honest? I added that. Bart and I talked about that earlier.

I thought that that was interesting, you know. The non-consumptive rabbit houndsman. Yeah. This is like just a guy that loves his dogs, loves his hounds, loves the chase and the pursuit. And then at the end of the day, it's like, sweet, load up. No cleaning. Let's go home.

Yeah. I guess he eats chicken breasts. Yeah. It's easy to get permission on private property too if you don't have a gun and you got a dog that's like big enough you put it in your purse. You're not that threatening. No. You're not dipping into the game population at all.

You're just out there like standing around in the field and letting the dogs work. Cottontail permissions, we've had, you know, back home in Michigan, we had like really good luck getting cottontail permissions. Yeah. You never like really like wanting for cottontail spots

because you're hunting in the winter. No one's out after deer. More and more people don't really care about small game. Right. Yeah,

if you can do it during the off season for the big game stuff, nobody's going to get too excited. People always let us hunt rabbits, man. Not always, but we had a lot of places to hunt rabbits.

You got any final concluding thoughts you want to add, Bart? I can just add a little bit to mine. Please, I don't care. I feel like now that we did that hunt, I'm actually more interested in doing one because I sort of had my, you know, not only questions, but just I had these, like, even just explaining that chase part, you know, that, like, the dogs aren't actually chasing the lion for most of the chase. Yeah, that was a real sticking point for you.

Yeah, you were hung up on that for a long time. Yeah, well, I feel like because when you talk to people, people just don't understand that. Yeah, they think the lion's out doing all this evasive activity or he's doing all this evasive activity and trying to shake the dogs. Well, you hear that too. You hear that from the groups about, chases the cat to exhaustion until it can't go any further

and then it climbs a tree. And that's not really accurate. We rarely have cats panting even. They're just standing there. Yeah, our cameramen. We're like, we kind of brought that up for the first time. They're like, yeah,

that's what happens. I'm like, no. Oh, see, he's got all these tricks and he's crossing and recrossing creeks to lose the dogs. Where the red fern grows and kind of stuff like.

Yeah. But now that that's been cleared up and I'm not really gray about how it all goes down. And the fact that we ended up having such a, you know real pursuit like hunt in the end where it was me cory you and bruce and i mean we're falling down the hill i mean i watched cory roll 10 yards down the hill and somehow protect his camera but you know fully lathered up in sweat you know and we're like halfway through, and Bruce looks at all of us.

He's like, everybody here? All right, we got to really turn it up. We're like, man, this is happening. We're like, man. And we had this real pursuit where at the end, you're just like. Oh, it was a chase. Yeah. I mean, it was wild.

Just because, again, I think everybody in their mind has this idea that some old boy just gets out of the pickup truck and walks 10 feet into the woods he's like oh there's a lion and just wasn't like that you know so um yeah i do see myself at some point killing a lion you know yeah but i'm not like i should just go ahead and do it right now because I have the opportunity, you know? Yeah, at this point, I think I've spent, not anywhere close to Bart, obviously, like a percent of Bart's time,

but I've spent 14 or 15 days following lion hounds and caught a lion, was there for a lion to be caught. And I, through all that, if you were to put my appreciation for what goes into a lion hunt on a sort of graph, it would be this lion that goes up at a 45-degree angle, like higher and higher and higher for my appreciation for lion hunters and lion hunting um just like a steady increase i never saw any aspect of it that may be like suspicious of it or be like you know it really

is just not fair i mean it's like it's it is a if you're looking at like a challenge thing, a skill set. It'd be different too if you weren't able to hire a guide to do it. I mean, think about if it had to be that way. If like when you got a tag or you wanted to go kill a lion, you weren't allowed to do it with a guide. You had to like do it on your own. There'd be no freaking lions getting killed. Like you said, it took you, sure you treat a couple that first year, but think about

the effort. Yeah, well, in a state like Washington- You had to go grab a couple of dogs. Yeah. In a state like Washington where you don't have hound hunting for lions, they basically give away lion tags to everyone that buys a deer. Was it five bucks? Yeah, five bucks.

Yeah. Because in states where they in states where you have houndsmen and hound hunting they're you're not like like encouraged to go get your lion thing in colorado you gotta pass the test to get a lion tag i can get behind that i think you should be able to sex a lion before you are able to go out and hunt them yeah i mean that's the that's the beauty of the quota system right right? You can say this many females, this many males. If you wanted to, you could even assign age classes per unit. I mean, you can really manage that with a lot of precision.

Yeah, that's a point we could bring up real quickly is that Washington went from a hound season, outlawing hunting with dogs. So now they just give away, what, like five bucks for a tag or whatever. And a lot of lions are getting killed. All, like, the wrong lions are getting killed. And didn't you say that there's, like, a group of houndsmen now that are starting to organize to? We've tried that a few times without a lot of success.

But, you know, there are people behind it politically. Democrats behind it politically. Steve. Getting the lion hunts back? Oh yeah, totally. Really? Yeah. It's got some bipartisan... Makes you feel all warm to our those fellas. Yeah. We've tried that some. Washington's a weird

spot because they've, like I said, they've made hound hunting illegal. As a result, they've really increased the number of hound or of cougar permits. And there's actually more cougars being killed now than before, but the age class and sex has changed. So it used to be like from 91 to 95, I think it was, you know, 40% female were killed. And now it's up like 65 or 70% of the cats killed are females, which really impacts the population more. You know, they're the breeding portion of the population.

They're important. You call those guys boot hunters. The boot hunters. Not dog hunters. Right. Right. Yeah. the boot hunters not dog hunters right yeah you know you i've read a lot about it you know this all the aspects of lions and stuff and talked a lot about it but it's like uh um it's not something that you're gonna like really quickly get a grasp

on ideas of mountain lion hunting mountain lion management the differences how different states view lions just from my perspective right now i think that like i really like the systems of managing them for longevity as a big game animal yep i think if you can remove yourself from sort of this emotional idea about what hounds and lions do and just manage them like a big game animal, like Montana does a great job of that. We need this number of cougars killed and remove yourself again from that sort of individual idea of the cat and think about the population. We don't care how it happens, but we need 10 males and 10 females killed from this unit to go take care of it.

That would be a more wise way to manage them. Yeah, and they're still running targeted predator control. If you've got a lion that's killing livestock, there's a lot of ways in which they go after and remove that specific animal outside of any kind of season structure. You bet. That big cat that attacked me got killed last week for attacking goats.

No shit. Yeah. With the collar on him. With the collar on him. I didn't know that. So he's dead now. Yeah. He got tangled up with some goats.

He killed five goats in like two or three days, and they called another houndsman to come in and take care of it, and he went in to kill this cat. It turned out to be the big mean cat, and it wouldn't tree, and it started after him, and he ended up shooting it right in the point of the nose, basically at point-blank range as it was like coming at him. Did you get your collar back? The state got the collar back. How far was it from where you guys put the collar on it?

Pretty close within, you know, four or five miles. No shit. Yeah. He's dead. Yeah. Did you get the skull? Yep. I'm going to.

You're going to wind up with it? I've got it. You want to be in a with it? I've got it. You want to be the goat killer? Yep. Yeah, just short time after the collaring. Five goats in a couple days. So he's killed them at a faster rate than he was able to eat them. Yeah, he's probably squirreling them away somewhere.

Yeah, sticking them under logs and shit. All right, man. Bart, once again, thanks for joining us. Yeah, anytime. I don't know. I remember the last time you were on, I was like, you have to come back and talk about lions. I don't know what we're going to have to have. I'm out of things.

I don't know what we're going to talk about next. I don't know either. It'll be something. Thank you. Yeah, of course. 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.

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