The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 061: Seattle. Steven Rinella talks with David Allen of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, along with Navy Seal and author Rorke Denver, Ryan Callaghan of FirstLite, and Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew.

Episode Date: April 27, 2017

Subjects discussed: Deadwood, South Dakota; Dale Earnhardt, senior; not being afraid to say "I love you" before it's too late; Bugle magazine; the brucellosis vaccine; livestock detectives and bio-terrorism; chronic wasting disease; conservation easements; the Land and Water Conservation Fund, and how politicians screw with it; the Durfee Hills; Disney Syndrome; the relativity of cruelty; wildlife as a relic of the past; H.J.R. 69 and the unwarranted hysteria it inspires; and more. 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.

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Go farther, stay longer. David Allen. Deadwood, South Dakota. Yeah. You never meet anybody from Deadwood. Yeah, not many of us escape. Yeah. Yeah.

Nice little western town it was when I grew up there. And now, like nowadays, you are the president and CEO Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. Everybody's heard of Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, but just like give me the one-liner. RMEF, what's it like? Well, RMEF is a wildlife conservation slash land trust, I think is the simplest one-liner that there is. We're the largest big game organization, but that's not just our focus.

Our focus is really habitat, and that has been for a long time, as well as the animals, the critters, and the hunting culture that sustains it. When you say land organization, break down what that means. No, you know what? Hold that thought. So that's what RMEF does. But I want to back up. Deadwood, South Dakota.

And then you worked for a long time. Like you came out of both NASCAR and it's like and rodeo. Yeah. Yeah. I had a real strange trail to the Elk Foundation. I ended up working for Dale Earnhardt Sr. when I went to Wrangler Jeans. I went to Wrangler Jeans in 1980. Doing what?

Marketing their rodeo program at the time. That's what I was hired to do. And you probably grew up wearing Wrangler jeans. I grew up wearing Lee, but I was in Wrangler pretty quick. But Wrangler signed Dale. That was Dale's first major sponsor. And so that's how he and I. What year was that?

1980. Yeah, late 80. What year was that? No, 1980. Yeah, late 80. What year did he die? February 18, 2001. Got that memorized. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was a long day. So you started working for him in 1980?

Well, I was working with him and for him, but you did work for him him that's the way he was i mean he um he just had that kind of bigger than life personality and and uh he was awesome was he successful then that early no no no he had bounced around he had dropped out of school. He raced on the weekends to try and make it and you know he made it and and lost it several times. Then in 1980 he did have a land developer out of California named Rod Osterlund came out and bought and owned about four NASCAR teams. And in those days, you could own four for about a million dollars total. And... What's it now? I don't know enough to know that. Oh, it costs about 20 to 25 million a year to race now.

So I don't know what you could buy one for. So, you know, 100 million maybe, I don't know. But Dale ended up driving for Rod Osterlund in 1980 as one of the four drivers that he had. And Dale had great raw talent. And he was Rookie of the year for nascar and so things looked like they were finally going to start taking off for him and you know have a a great career and wrangler picked him up in 1981 and man he was miserable for about three years. He wrecked everything he drove.

But, you know, and he started getting the reputation of this guy can't drive. He's just a maniac and blah, blah, blah. Well, his whole philosophy was they call this a race for a reason. I'm here to race. And so if you can put equipment under me that'll go i can go i can i can race it and that was his whole lifestyle and his whole mentality so when he finally got with richard childress as his car owner and richard being a former driver had a better understanding of what what dale needed they clicked and i mean from there it was like he was the michael jordan of the deal for well 15 years or more oh yeah man yeah he was

he was the man and so it really worked for him and i was just fortunate didn't he do he hunted elk a lot he and richard uh he hunted with George Strait a lot. They hunted White Mountain in the 80s when it was just still undiscovered. And then they hunted in Mexico. A lot of people probably won't know what White Mountain is. Yeah, White Mountain is the Apache Res reservation in uh what it would be north eastern corner of arizona uh probably the most famous for giant elk and and i've been there uh i haven't been fortunate enough to hunt it but i've taken some people hunting there it is unbelievable

for a long time the world record elk came from there. Yeah, and you look in the record books, there's going to be several that are in the top. I mean, it's just, and the way they managed elk over the last 35 years, I mean, nothing but six by sixes lived. Everything else, boom, out of here. I mean, literally, get them out. And they just kept at it and kept at it and and it's quite a story

but yeah dale it's a high roller hunt though oh yeah it's 22 000 a man yeah whether you pull the trigger or not okay and what do you what do you think it was just for comparison sake in the 80s when yeah i don't uh i bet it was 13. well yeah it was it was a high dollar it always has been a high dollar thing so yeah yeah and incredible elk but yeah dale loved to hunt he hunted deer everywhere um what state was he out of north carolina okay yeah he was from charlotte area uh canapolis north carolina is his hometown so you you worked for wrangler and then kind of like managed that part of the relationship at that time i did and then when wrangler got sold to vanity fair in uh in whatever year it was, 88 or 89, I went with Dale and Richard, and we started one of the first in-house marketing groups

to market the race teams. Every team does it now, but none of them did it then. So we managed all of our own sponsorships and everything that was related to the sponsorship. Because sponsorship drives that sport. That's what it's all about. That's where the money comes from. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. So we started that marketing venture, and I did it until he died. And actually, I did it a few years after that and then sold it and got out. Had you guys become personal friends? Oh, yeah. Very much so. I've known Dale Jr. since he was five years old

and Kelly, his sister, and Carrie, his brother. Yeah, yeah. It was a personal thing. Very much so. Yeah. And then you went into rodeo well i was actually in the rodeo stuff with the prca the pro rodeo cowboys before that i went from

prca to wrangler so that was the chain of events of i quit college My mother still hasn't forgiven me and went to work for the PRCA and then went to Wrangler from there. You never went back and finished college? Never went back. No, I regret it. Now I got... Why do you regret it now?

Well, just you didn't finish. You just start something, finish it. Well, here I am. I got one in college and one going to be there next year. And I'm telling them now, you got to get through this. You got to do this. And it's like, well, Dad, you didn't.

It's like, well, yeah, I didn't. Yeah, but there's a generational thing, man. I got lucky, too. I wouldn't want to try it again. Yeah. You know, I just don't. And we've preached to our kids from day one, you start something, you finish it. You go out for basketball, you don't like it, well, you can quit at the end of the season,

but you're going to play through this year. Otherwise, don't raise your hand and don't go out. You know, my old man, he never finished high school just because he enlisted to fight in a war. And then just later, I think he went and got a GED later, but he recognized by then, by the time his kids were older, he recognized that college was something you need to get on board with.

But it wouldn't have been fair to be like, well, you didn't do it. It's a very different world, man. Oh, completely. Yeah, I mean, I grew up, I graduated high school in 1969. So my junior high and high school years were the Vietnam stuff. And so, yeah, it was a whole different world.

It was pretty goofy. So when Dale died, I call him Dale, when Dale Earnhardt died, you worked your way back into rodeo? No. When Dale died, I mean, it really hit me personally. And I think what hit me the most after the initial shock was here's a guy who had everything. And he had a lot of money, he had a lot of fame, he had everything, and it didn't buy him one extra hour. Yeah.

And I had a two-year-old and a four-year-old boy, and I told my wife, we need to go back home and raise these kids around their grandparents. And I don't know what that means. I don't know what it looks like. Yeah, like an awakening. Yeah, it was. And I really lost some passion for racing. I mean, it just took kind of the air out of my sail for sure.

I know it did Richard too, because there was a time when I thought Richard was going to hang it up, but he didn't. But anyway, so we moved back to Montana. I still had my racing ties and whatnot, but I was trying to evolve out of that. And the whole time, I was really trying to find something in the outdoors that I could do. And I talked to Cabela's, almost took a job at Cabela's I talked to you know guys at Realtree I've known Bill since he started the company and I talked to a lot of different companies and I was

like I was looking and I was on the board of the Elk Foundation when they had issues with their previous CEO. And so some of the board approached me and said, have you thought about applying for this position? And I hadn't. It didn't even dawn on me. And then my wife and I talked about it, I was like well why not you know something I like something I care about and so long story short I did and that's where I ended up and that was 10 years ago when you were a kid they have it wow were there what was the elk situation where you grew up there weren't any my My dad and I'll never forget,

because we hunted whitetail in the Black Hills. That's what you hunted at the time. And a lot of them. We hunted on an area that was up very close to the Wyoming-South Dakota border around Newcastle. And one morning, one real, I'll never forget this,

burned in my memory. We're walking in one of those stone quiet mornings, you know, or fresh snow and it was, the sun was coming up, it was just beautiful. And my dad stopped and he pointed, you know, and points at something ahead of us and I look up there. I thought it was a donkey or a horse, and it was a cow elk. I'd never seen an elk in my life.

That was your first elk? Yeah, it was the first elk I'd ever seen. We couldn't hunt them. They weren't. Yeah, yeah. But there was one there, but I didn't even hunt elk until, I don't know, I was probably in my late 30s because I just wasn't around them and hadn't, I'd hunted everything else, but I didn't know anything about them at the

time and it was pretty cool. So where, that one you saw, how did it, where was it coming from? You know, I don't know. It had to have come somewhere out of the Wyoming side of the Black Hills. But had wandered in there on its own. Well, that's the only one we saw. There probably were more, but there sure weren't very many. But that's the only one I'd ever seen, and I'll never forget it. It was so cool to see it you know my the way I

get like my little glimpses kind of like into your head and and what you do is always read your column okay it comes out in bugle yeah um what people call is it six times a year yeah yeah every other month yeah so the elder the Elk Foundation, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation publishes a magazine, Bugle, which really does a good job of breaking down in an epic scale, like a national scale, sort of like what's up with elk

and many other wildlife issues, predator management, in a pretty digestible format. This thing comes out every couple months. And you guys write a column. Right. I have help, but yeah. You do?

It's a good column. But yeah, I mean, I have guys help me sometimes with wordsmithing or something maybe, but I pick and choose the subjects, and I try to input as much of mine and then let them tweak on it and then I'll look at it again. It's an effort. Yeah, I can imagine. It's good. It's very well written. Well, and I'd have to be honest, Dan Crockett, who's our editor. I know Dan. Yeah. Dan is awesome at that. I mean, that's his wheelhouse. And he makes me look a lot better than I am, for sure, in that column. But, I mean, we go back and forth.

And I don't let anything go in there that I wouldn't stand up for or anything. Yeah. You kind of offer in it, what I like is you kind of, you probably don't think about it this way, but there's sort of like kind of prophecies I see in there now and then. I try. You are always looking a little bit ahead to where things are headed. Well, you know, yeah, I appreciate that you recognize that because I think that's probably more of what drives my passion for this job than anything.

Again, through the eyes of my two boys that have grown up outside and their buddies and all that, that's, I think, more my focus, long-term focus than anything is what are they going to have and what's this going to be 25 years 50 years from now i mean i'll finish out you know it won't be a whole lot of difference but what are they going to have and it shudders me to think sometimes what they might not have and i i hate to think about it but yeah but you guys worth fighting for no you do like i said you make you have some prophecies in there where you you anticipate and i know now from personal experience that you anticipate problems that are going to hit

the culture of hunting before they do try to push some buttons buttons once in a while. I don't even know if there's a thing that happened. Let me see your pen. And I'm going to write down something and you tell me if I can talk about it or not. Oh, okay. You one day, over a year ago, mentioned this to me before. Oh, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Can I talk about that oh i don't care okay so yeah i'm sitting in

david allen's office i believe i was in your office yeah i remember that now i know and you were kind of rattling off some potential trouble spots for hunting and you mentioned uh and you said and now you got people hunting with spears. Yeah, this was before that thing. Oh, yeah. And it was funny because the minute that happened and sort of the way that was framed and the way it was not just perceived, but portrayed, I immediately thought of you. That you'd pull that out of thin air as a thing that you're like it's just not gonna go well well and and yeah it obviously didn't um but i think here's here's where it really didn't go well

is somebody took the time to record that edit it and put it out in the public. And that made it, that magnified it, what, 100 times. So I don't know as I really have a personal issue with hunting with spears or not, although that's probably not what I would teach my kids. Yeah, well, I know that a lot of states legally do now. Yeah, yeah. If it's legal, then, you know, I'm not above the law and all that.

So, okay. But, you know, it's the old saying. We had a football coach that used to tell us when you act like a jackass and stuff, it's like, act like you've been here. Yeah. You know, and so that's, to me, where that whole issue really got in trouble was they took it out and said, look, everybody, look at this. And it's like, are you kidding me?

Yeah. You want us to watch that? Yeah, outside of like, kind of like meaningful context, meaningful dialogue. Yeah. And I don't want to point this out like you were in any way saying oh it should be illegal i just remember you throwing off off top of your head right a thing that and even it's funny about it is because even when you said it i remember thinking what the hell why like why that and it was then later when it became that it's

like when put in the public when put out to the public, the way people had such a visceral reaction to it, it made me, I remember thinking like, when David Allen talks, I'm going to listen. What was it that tipped you off, David, to that? Well, I mean, I think just common sense of... I mean, you just read somewhere that it was just now this thing or you had heard of someone doing it? As Steve said, it was starting to become legalized in some states.

And I'm like, really? There's a big demand for that? I mean, what is that? I didn't know that it was illegal. In some place, it depends how carefully a state spells out method of take. I think so yeah so if you like like alaska um not you know it's you're not looking for what it says you can do when it comes to method of take using looking at what it says you cannot do of course that's not the case like with waterfowl

um it's spelled out and yeah and like excruciating detail like what ammo and everything yeah the minimum uh bore diameter maximum bore diameters sure that what what your shots made of like all this stuff spelled out right but in some things um if you look it's not saying like spears are great but you look and say like legal method to take and it's like no artificial lights or whatever and you kind of read between the lines just the other day i was trying to figure out for where i grew up in michigan you cannot hunt bullfrogs with artificial light so i was checking in washington what the bullfrog rules were and there's no mention of artificial light so you're like okay you can use artificial light because it doesn't say not to so i think now what you're

going to find is you'll probably wind up seeing that if that's become a thing that has demand, you'll see state agencies spell out that you cannot do it. And I think that the argument against it is going to wind up being, from a manager's perspective, it's going to want to be an efficacy. Is there a reasonable amount of efficacy or is there like a higher than normal likelihood that you're gonna that you're gonna injure and lose animals well i can't imagine for example me out there calling in a bull and throwing a spear to see what happens yeah he even said he can't believe it oh yeah i'm so like why when you when i touch the trigger i don't go like i can't believe i got it when i touch the trigger, I don't go like, I can't believe I got it. When I touch the trigger, that's the expectation. Right, right. I'm pulling the trigger because I have a 99% certainty that this thing will die upon that action. So that's telling me that it's time now to touch it.

But if you're like throwing out a Hail Mary and then you're like so shocked that it worked as opposed to that you just hit it in the leg and gashed it and it ran off yeah and again I don't know that husband and wife those those people at all and and I don't have any animosity or issue with them but I if I were talking to him I'd say well what did you think was going to happen? When you filmed it, you must have edited it, and then you put it out. So you had plenty of time to think of, you know what, maybe the next one will show. Maybe not this one, or maybe I'll get better at it first or something. And I'm with you. And I don't even want to put you on the spot about that. No, but I think it gets to the bigger question of where's your respect level for the culture?

Yeah, there should be a beat and you think, is this our best foot forward collectively? Yeah, is this good? Yeah, right. So there's a lot of things. I won't include any of you here, but there's a lot of things that I do that are legal that I'm not filming and putting up on the internet for everyone to judge because I don't think it would be my best foot forward.

It was legal. Oh, yeah. In my, let's see. You mean in your personal life? Yes. Well, even in my hunting life, I've hunted 52 years now or 53. I can assure you not every one of my kills was perfect

the absolute perfect you know fell over dead and and uh i didn't feel good about a lot of them but i didn't have them on tv either so yeah you weren't holding it out as this is what it's all this is yeah i know and i learned from them rocky cool and everything right is what it's all about. Yeah, I know. And I learned from him. Rarky cool and everything right now? Yeah. It's quietly listening. Yeah. I like that. Interesting statement. I'll come in when it's appropriate. This is what it's all about. Comment. You know, the thing that Dave said

that did resonate was, you know, on Dale's passing is you know, serving. It's interesting to have this entire generation of people that have lost, you know, buddies and friends, close friends. You mean people in your own military world? Yeah, and some of us, a lot of friends, and how much it does retool your life and make you think about what's important

and what you want to be doing with your time and how you're going to pursue that stuff. I mean, it's very, very, very eye-opening. I don't wish it on people, but it's a powerful, powerful moment in your life when you say, you know what? None of this is promised, so you've got to make the most of it. Yeah, when I lost a close friend a couple years ago, the clarity it gives you, but it's hard to hang on to that clarity.

You go right back to being mad that your kids left their clothes laying all over and didn't put them in the clothing bin. Do you know what I mean? And you go like, well, wait a minute. I had such clarity a month ago about what the meaning of life is. And here I am yelling at a two-year-old

about why you're purposely dumping your milk out yeah yeah and then you just you like it's when you get those crystal moments they just they they fade man you know i'll tell you the one thing that and i purposely have done it since that day is i've never been afraid to tell somebody i love them because you do you know as you had yeah yeah and um and I do that I mean I obviously tell my wife and my kids that but I mean grown friends of mine you know double tough cowboys or whatever I am not one bit ashamed or afraid to say it I've done the same I think I freaked out somebody's seals do that with each other all the time afraid to say it. I've done the same. I think I freaked out somebody. Seals do that with each other all the time. They'll say it because it's like,

there's a real good chance this is the last time I'm talking. They're living on that line every day, yeah. And I'll say it to a buddy the other day. I could tell I took him sideways a little bit. He was good with it, but he was kind of like, what? He's like, do you know something I don't? Yeah, no. It gave a little pause.

I've seen your cat scans, buddy. I love you. So back to Bugle, because there's a couple things I wanted to ask you about. When I was reading the most recent Bugle, you guys were celebrating some milestones in there. One, in terms of land conservation. And two, you had a wrap up of what's going on with Eastern elk. Mm-hmm.

Kind of you guys work with Eastern elk and what the picture of Eastern elk is. A couple things struck me. Is this a fair statement? right now only occupy about was it 14 or like 14 or 20 percent of their range yeah at the time of european contact that's probably true um so they're 80 some 90 percent absent from where they were when columbus landed in the west indies, I don't know the exact percentage, but I don't think that's an exaggeration. I know it was something like that, but they're showing outside of a couple states in the Northeast.

Yeah, yeah. Across the whole damn country. The lower 48, including Florida, there's records of elk in Florida from time to time, except, yeah, one or two states in the New England area. Like Maine. Yeah, and you would think they'd be up there, but elk were a plains animal all that time.

They weren't in the mountains. And I've heard the number of, there was 10 million elk roaming, and I don't know how they knew that for sure, but there was an estimate that, you know, there's, I've heard the number of, there was 10 million elk roaming, and I don't know how they knew that for sure. But there was an estimate that, you know, there was large, large numbers of elk. And yeah, that's probably very accurate given the amount of space that they occupy today. Their once native range, as some groups like to talk about like vastly like because you you look at them and you think like oh i mean they are very like where they where we have them tend to be very

abundant but like yeah the east you should not if you live in the east you should not really think of like the west is elk hunt you should think of like you live in elk country oh yeah very much so and they're doing really well in areas that they've been uh either reintroduced or later have dispersed into kentucky is the most uh shining example that i can think of the elk were moved from utah to kentucky i think is about 15 or 17 years ago. And they got 10,000 now. Well, they're fudging on their numbers. They've got more than that. That's what I heard, but I don't want to say that.

Yeah. I would have had to written that down in your notebook. Yeah. I teased their director about it, and he laughs too. But yeah, they have somewhere probably between 12,000 and 15,000 head elk. They're the number nine elk state in the country now it's incredible yeah number nine in the country yeah and what's even uh i think more rewarding about it is that they were released and they still principally habitate on reclaimed coal

mine property yeah so here you have a win-win for conservation. You're bringing a species back, but you're reclaiming that ground, and it's an even better ground today than it was long ago. Yeah, when you talk about like, so that's when they take that mountaintop coal mining. Right. And they went in when they did the remediation.

Yeah. They put in, I mean, what looks like the grasslands. They did. They put in native grasses and whatnot. Yeah. And these elk are just thriving. There's some giant elk. Well, I think you hunted Kentucky, didn't you?

Yeah, I hunted Kentucky. And if you read about accounts from like Daniel Boone's day, Simon Kent, those guys hunted elk. Oh yeah. In Kentucky, they hunted elk in Tennessee. Yeah. Like their dads had hunted elk earlier in Pennsylvania, Virginia. Yeah.

They were always killing them. And I know that they would criticize them too because the hides were a little bit too heavy for work wear. So when they were hunting, they liked to kill white tails because they'd sell that sure because that leather was good for basically car hearts back in the day were made out of buckskin right and they wanted to kill white tails in the summer yeah and the elk's hide was a little too heavy and wasn't as valuable they'd use it for harness material and shit but it wasn't as valuable for apparel so they liked the white tails but they'd be wading through. There's an account of one of those guys rolls into what's now Nashville, Tennessee, and makes the estimate that there was 10,000 bison in the area.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the bison were all over the lower 48 as well. So, I mean, this place was a whole different world before man got here so it really like yeah it really kind of like fudges your understanding of it because like when i was growing up in michigan um yeah when you thought of elk you didn't think oh yeah right here yeah you always pictured like an elsewhere thing colorado and within that thing though you guys had this is something i hope you get some clarity on, because you guys were doing a state-by-state roundup of, I think there's now nine states east of the Mississippi.

There's actually 11. 11 states to have. If you got it right there, rattle them off. Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, Virginia, and the last one is West Virginia. Just came on. Just came out. Yeah. They're just starting to move elk now from Kentucky into West Virginia. And in this wrap up of these states, you guys had notes about when elk vanished how like how well is that known you know i that i don't know uh the accuracy of i think they're going by a lot of anecdotal and

you know um uh oh what do you want to call it? Journals that have been passed down and those kinds of things. Because, I mean, there were no game agencies. So, you know, who knew for sure? So I don't know how you would really verify it other than the anecdotal and stories that have been passed down and passed down. It's like the last some guy and then he never heard of another one yeah so he kind of goes as the guy that got the last one yeah yeah and um at the time of uh teddy roosevelt they were uh the estimates were the elk population in the whole continental U.S. was less than 100,000.

So there still were some, but, I mean, not a lot. And, of course, today there's somewhere around about a million and a half probably. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And, boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season.

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you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. What's the primary, what's the impediment to having elk everywhere they used to be?

Oh, man. I mean, in short. Like, is it available habitat more or is it public will? No, I would say it would be available habitat. I mean, I get in, you might find this hard to believe, but I get in debates with the pro-wolf people every once in a while and you know they'll say well wolves are not in their they're only in two percent of their once native range and whatnot and whatever the percentage is and i'll i'll agree

with that that's probably true but same for elk and i always jokingly say to them there's no elk in iowa yeah so but take iowa for example there's not a lot Iowa. Yeah. So, but take Iowa, for example. There's not a lot of national forest or wilderness area or just public ground. It's either populated or it's farm ground. So where are you going to put them? Where are they going to live? And not get into trouble. And not get into trouble.

And not get into trouble. And elk are kind of a pain in the rear for landowners. I mean, they are. I just wanted to ask on West Virginia, or any of the states on that list really, I mean, it's been a long time since they've seen elk, right? Over 100 years, some of them 150 years and so was there some real pushback out of the gate sure because there's a lot of small farmers a lot of small

small ranches that's that's the biggest hurdle and when you say real pushback i wouldn't say it's it's certainly not uh like the pushback on grizzlies or wolves or something like that where it's a huge debate. But it's not 100% support. And we don't do it unless the state agency and the state itself have taken X number of steps and the first step is they have to develop a bona fide biological elk management plan and then that plan has to be accepted by the agency and by their legislature I mean it has to be approved and everybody

signed off we don't have the authority sure in first place and we don't have the desire or will to come shove it down their throat if there isn't that will to accept it we're not going to do it will help gladly if there's a lot of support for it. But in those processes and in those public comment periods and whatnot, it'll be the farm community that has, and a lot of times it isn't like, oh, hell no, we don't want that. But they have issues and they're like,

well, now what's going to happen if and what about this and you know some of it can be mitigated by where these elk are located because they're not great big herds in a lot of cases Missouri was just like that the Missouri Farm Bureau really didn't want them and uh once it was identified the area where these elk were going to be released and it was going to be like 50 or 60 head, I mean, it wasn't a large, then that kind of diminished some of the resistance and it ended up happening. And it takes a long time for 50 head to explode. And we have game management knowledge and wisdom. We can manage those numbers and keep it at whatever kind of population you want to some degree.

That's one of the things that was explained to me about why it works so well in kentucky it's because you had it's that southeast portion of kentucky that was coming out of a long history of coal mining was kind of being like underutilized by wildlife and you didn't have a big agricultural presence there right that's right and then in a very short number of years, it turned into a great contributor to their economy. I mean, not just the hunting, but people coming from neighboring states would come up there during the elk rut, and they want to observe and hear them and see them and you know it was economy it was tourism and and uh now i don't know how many thousands of people put in for those i think maybe what do they have 500 tags or it's a limited number of tags whatever it is and they have like a lottery system and whatnot but it's generally their lottery system is like winning the lottery.

Oh, yeah. And it generates a lot of money for the state. In an area that's economically depressed. Yes, yes. But they make it available to everybody. You know, some of the Western states where you have to buy a $150 license and then you can, you know, apply for, you know, to win a tag. There, I think it's just straight $15.

The last time I applied, it was $ bucks yeah i think and it's like you said anybody you and i any of us can just go uh and i don't know if you can buy i think it is like a just a real lottery can you buy more than one entry i don't think so no just one yeah i haven't done it. Because if I won, it would look rigged. So I can't. There's no way. You're probably really limited in your hunting. Oh, yeah. Because you got people looking at you all the time.

Yeah, I get offers to hunt all kinds of stuff. And I'm just like, man, I'd love to. But I wouldn't even pull the trigger, and the rumor mill would be, so I just can't do it. Yeah. Well, Steve has a helicopter that we just fly. I was just told that I fly on it. I had a guy point out to me how I fly in a helicopter for all my hunts, which I thought was odd since I've never been in a helicopter.

Well, you've got to be a pretty good shooter to do that. Yeah, exactly. I couldn't pull that kind of thing off. I recently started describing you and folks i ask as i'm like you know steve has likes to do things the hard way and now i feel like he's just getting worse and worse in preparation for any sort of criticism future argument be like oh yeah well let me tell you how we do things yeah go on low success hunts um did i make this up do auto insurers do auto insurance companies resist elk reintroduction yes

yes that always cracks me up yeah they do um that was another issue i remember specifically in missouri is you know they would talk about wow how many of them are going to be hit on the highway and you know they just come out with whatever they throw it at the wall and see and yeah i wouldn't want to hit an elk with a car i no question but when you're only putting out less than 100 head, the chances are so small. Yeah, but there's inherent risk with being alive. Oh, yeah, right. Exactly. I just feel that when it comes to wildlife issues,

if we weren't willing to make some sacrifices, we would be where we were in 1900 we don't have any well and most of these people are coming out of the metro area of some city and they probably have more risk in their daily lives of something happening to them than you know out in the country driving along and hit the nail but people get hysterical when it comes to animals. Oh, boy. Tell me. But it's like, I just feel like, yes, some things are inconvenient.

It happens. Elk. Well, kids, I can tell you that, are real inconvenient. But people sure have those, man, you know? Oh, yeah. But, yeah, I heard that about the auto. But, I mean, but you're never going to. How many deer does Kentucky have? Oh, yeah. white tails oh lord who knows look at uh look at

connecticut and the white tail issues they have well i mean their auto insurance rates are through the roof because of deer car because of deer in greenwich and areas like that that are north of the city yeah i mean, it's crazy. I think they're going to fix that because they're going to tranquilize them all and then sterilize them. That's right. Yeah, that'll work. That's right.

Yeah, yeah, until the next generation. Yeah, right. What are some of the other common fears, I guess, from like a farm bureau of why they would not want to have it? Well, there's crop damage. I mean, I've seen what elk can do to a haystack. They tear it apart in the winter. You know, if a big enough group of elk come in and camp on your haystack.

They can rip fences out, no problem. Oh, they tear down fences. If they get run through a fence, it will get knocked down for sure. I've seen what elk will do in cornfields. They love to live in a cornfield. They'll move in? I know a ranch in eastern Montana right on the Yellowstone River. And when this guy's corn, he's got about 800, maybe 1,000 acres of corn.

And when his corn gets about shoulder high, those elk move in and they stay there till he cuts it. And I mean, they literally move over to the next row as he's cutting it. And they wait till the very last row. And I mean, giant bulls. There's some 380 kind of. They're just bedding in there?

They can never see anything? No, they can't. I've walked in there a couple times see anything no they can't you i've walked in there a couple times and and then you'll walk in on their trails which are completely trampled down probably two rows of corn just all mashed down and you'll find an area in the middle of it where it'll be a circle that might be 50 yards in diameter. And that's where they've been living and laying. And they've pooped in there everywhere. And they're rutting in there.

Oh, yeah. They live in there from end of June till middle of September. And you drive by and never know. Oh, you would never know they're in there. I mean, you could, yeah, never know. And they are giant because they're eating corn all summer long. Feedlot elk.

Yeah, literally. Industrial farm elk. Literally. And they go over to the Yellowstone, which is about 100 yards away, and water and go right back in there. And I would say this group of elk is probably 50 or 60. What's his relationship to them? Do you like them or not like them?

Well, it's frustrating for him, but he has leased his whole ranch out to an outfitter for hunting. So he's making it. Got you. He's recovered some loss. Yeah, yeah. And so in that case, I get it. And I think he ends up killing a good elk every year himself,

probably right off the corn harvester. I don't know, but I'm not accusing him of that. I don't know. I haven't been there. So to get back to the eastern states, if a state jumps through the hurdles that you want them to, where the Elk Foundation is saying, you got to be serious about this.

Yep. This needs to be very transparent, right? Yeah. Public process. The management plan's got to be in place, yep. So what do you got like what do you guys have to do with it well then they'll funding is the biggest issue that's their hurdle that's usually the big hurdle is funding of course if you had to rate the hurdles

uh being like public meaning business pushback business of ag business of auto insurance like that hurdle or just the money funding is not that hard okay it really isn't because uh our volunteers who were in those areas you know uh well kentucky our volunteers there went nuts it's like wow we're gonna bring elk out here and all this is going to, I mean, you want to talk about some motivated volunteers and they're getting out beaten on doors going, hey, we need some money. We need you to donate when this is for our backyard. And these are guys, because I met a lot of these, the big volunteers on there.

These are guys who will never hunt one of those elk. May not. May very well not, yeah. The odds are against them. Yeah, very much against them, right. But it's something, it's like not really altruistic. Because it's always the thing you hear like, oh, you guys, conservation groups,

you just want more ducks so you can kill more ducks. And be like, tell that to a Kentucky elk volunteer. Some bitch ain't going to kill elk. No, no, no. The odds of him getting him or her getting drawn. So the money is usually not that big a challenge for us. And we're fortunate enough now where we have an endowment that we can help match those funds.

And so we have a lot of ways to skin that cat. What's it cost though, like to put an elk on the ground? Oh, well, you have to be uh there has to be a faci a holding facility at both ends um because they have to be quarantined you got cwd and all this other stuff so chronic wasting disease yeah and so the elk wherever they're coming from have to be in a facility for you know probably 120 days or better and they're tested and you know drawn blood and everything else and and these are wild captured oh yeah yeah what what they do is they have this facility

that's a great big type of enclosure where you might open up gates and you'll put out feed or whatever and elk will start coming in there to feed and whatnot and at some point in time you'll shut the gate that's how they catch them yeah yeah and then you've got them in the big area and now you got to get them into the smaller area and so they and that's a gradual process to keep from getting stressed. And then what is the optimal minimal number to start the herd? Usually they will move at one time 25 to 30 of them or so at a time. Like the Kentucky thing, the elk came from Utah. That was two or three shipments of elk okay and it's a whole interesting process because when those elk and they load them on like

cattle carriers type things but when and a lot of times they're padded and whatnot so they don't really and you do it in the spring so they're bulls have horns, but cows are pregnant. So there's a real fine line of when you want to do it. You don't want to do it too late to stress the cows, but you can't do it too early because the bulls still got their horns on. You got to have X amount of each. Gotcha. But then the real interesting part is when they're loaded and leave, they got to go all the way to where they're going.

I mean, you can't stop like you're taking horses to a rodeo. You don't stop in Oklahoma City and let them out at the stockyard and water them and wait overnight. It's like you can't let them out. You got to go. These guys that are doing it are switching off and on and they're driving straight through long trips you get them there and then there's generally a facility almost identical to the one they left to where they're let out and you let them out

right away in this holding facility and get the hell away from them. Leave them alone because they are stressed. They're traumatized a little bit and you just got to let them acclimate. Do you guys lose a lot of elk moving them? No, you don't. Surprisingly not. Man, in the old days, when I was working on my book about Buffalo and I was talking about some of the processes of trying to restock the staffs from here and there and shipping them by rail car. Yeah. Middle of summer.

Yep. Man. Yeah. They had a lot of false starts. They didn't know what they were doing so much. Yeah. They had no idea. I mean, it was like, it was a novel concept at the time.

That's how the elk ended up in Texas, I found out. As they were shipped, a very rich man rancher in texas wanted elk and he got them from the black hills and had them shipped to texas on a train and that's how they ended up there but the facility on the other end is very much like what they had and they're held in a very small facility for a while to keep an eye on them and And again, you got to test them and just get them to come. Then they're let out into a bigger area and they'll stay there for X amount of time. And then they'll have a release,

which is kind of a ceremony for the people that have donated and the volunteers and all that. And they'll open the gates and away they'll go and a lot of times which is weird they'll leave the gates of these open they'll come back and go and come back and go and you know they don't know what's going but that keeps them going crazy yes yes yeah because there's two things that come i just mentioned uh when i was doing research on on buffalo or bison, there's two stories that what you're telling me reminds me of.

One, when they moved the animals, the buffalo that wound up being in Alaska around the Copper River, Delta Junction, they caught them in Montana, put them on a train out to Seattle, then put them on a boat up to Whittier, put them on a train in Whittier up to somewhere in the Fairbanks thing, loaded them on a truck, and eventually dumped some on a road leading to a salon of mine.

How on earth did they even survive? I don't know, it's crazy. They wound up cutting 13 loose out of a truck. This is after they had been well established in delta they took something to a road leading to a mine and just pulled the truck up and opened the gate and for a decade they thought they all died because no one ever saw him again but it was a hot release and they eventually turned up about 130 miles away having greatly expanded their numbers yeah out in the middle of nowhere and then that's when people started putting together you do like a cold

release yeah where you let them get a little used to the areas that is kicking them out the back of a truck and having them sorted out right right well and now with the issues of CWD and other stuff, it's highly regulated. And, you know, the feds aren't going to let you move across state lines without all of this. Because they don't want you rolling in with brucellosis. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And we're getting concerned because of CWD that this whole thing could get shut down for a while anyway. And just by federal regulation. that this whole thing could get shut down for a while anyway,

just by federal regulation. But is the quarantine process not? Well, it works. I mean, we know, like, for instance, the elk that just went to Virginia and West Virginia and North Carolina came from Kentucky. Oh, so they're a source herd now. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's kind of rubbing them raw too because everybody's going back to them.

Because that's the most tested herd of elk, certainly in the lower 40s. For disease. Yeah. And so we know. People want clean elk. Yeah. Yeah. And originally when elk were being moved, you know, 25 years ago or so, they were coming out of Elk Island in Canada.

And that herd has been tested and had a very pure-blooded strain. But now with CWD and that, APHIS and whatnot, they won't let you cross the international border. So Kentucky's getting picked on a lot more. They provided the elk to Missouri too. Did they really? Yeah. So they're moving them back westward. Here's a good one.

The elk that went from Utah to Kentucky, one of them that was a calf that went to Kentucky is now a cow who's had calves in Missouri. Really? Wow. It's kind of cool because they're tagged. They know where they came from and whatnot. That thing's perception of reality has to be a lot different than most elk.

Yeah. What are we seeing CWD-wise? I don't know. That's a great question. We get lots of emails and lots of, what are we going to do? And nobody has an answer.

I mean, literally, that's the honest answer. But I truly don't know at all. Do we have documented cases of CWD in elk herds in certain states or oh yeah man do we um oh no deer sorry in deer yeah not not an elk yet and uh we haven't even really had in like in montana it hasn't hit yet but it's just across the border so it's a matter of time but they have had but but so do you know how many

states have had uh mule deer and white-tailed deer get cwd oh boy i don't know how many but it's a lot it's several yeah oh l cavum in colorado or l cav cwd in colorado and i believe that's correct yeah but the whole the bigger picture issue, what are we going to do? And we don't know. Yeah, it's so early to tell. It's one of those things that we don't know what causes it, and we sure don't know how to treat it or what to do about it. And it's very frustrating. If I can, I like doing bone-in neck roast

because I love the neck meat. And I take a sawzall and cut it, and it makes this gorgeous butterfly. You know, it's beautiful. You might start enjoying that dish less, man. And so I had a talk at the BHA rendezvous last weekend, and that's what everybody who wasn't really from Montana was, well, what about CWD?

Like, we can't touch the spine. We can't do this. I really had a big, I don't know what to tell you, but this is the way I like to do it. In some states, you can't bring it in. You can only move boned-out meat now. Correct. correct no heads at all or the head has to be clean clean the head has to be clean right like if i uh shoot a bull in new mexico to take it back to montana well i gotta go through two other states but um i gotta have it boned out and whatnot yeah zero bones

yeah wow yeah to not be moving it around wow um it's i know it's 100 fatal takes a long time but it's 100 fatal like when an animal gets it yeah it will die yeah for a while if you look at states that have really dealt with it aggressively and and ultimately unsuccessfully so far like wisconsin they kicked around this idea of doing this like eradication um yeah but they find that's hard to do it's really hard to do i've had a number of of uh all the older biologists that have been around a while and whatnot, and they're kind of like, well, one way or another, we got to get to where we have a strain that's immune to it. And to get there, we got to start eradicating and culling and everything else but man i mean that's a i know they did it's a huge undertaking yeah it's expensive and hard yeah they tried one in

right on the alberta saskatchewan border and shot a lot of deer and the basically the test results from the cold deer were completely inconclusive right and then they were sitting on a pile of dead deer too and so and then hunters go ballistic yes problem they had in Wisconsin where people are like, because right now there's no known case. You know, there's no known animal to human transmission of CWD. Right. So a lot of people are like, you know, you tell me you're going to like wipe this county. You're theoretically going to eliminate every deer in this county

in hopes that like some of, in hopes that the disease goes away. We don't understand how long it stays in the soil anyways. And then we don't even know that there's a real problem. And meanwhile, for the next 10 years, I won't hunt deer to see what might happen. Pretty hard sell. Yeah. You're not chasing like oh no it worked here we're just gonna try here it's just all experimental so i think that that's one of the one of the hang-ups i'll tell you if i was eating this last thing and i said it's a bunch of times now if i was eating a deer that i knew was positive it would be hard for me to enjoy the deer very hard and especially feed it to my kids that's the thing oh. Oh, yeah. My wife would kill me.

Oh. The thought is it's completely within that spinal column, right? No. No. Brain. Yeah, nervous system. Yeah, I think the brain is a big area. Well, they always want to cut out that tissue and test it and stuff. Brain, nervous system.

But I think there's so many unknowns. And you see people calling it a conspiracy theory too have you seen that yeah yeah like field and stream blog and stuff i can tell you always been there and it's right it's not it's not i mean it is there it's uh it's genesis seems to be not well understood but yeah there's a conspiracy theory about it yeah yeah i don't know we get a lot of questions about it and a lot of emails and everything else. And, you know, it leads to the debate

over feed grounds and other stuff. And it's like... Close proximity to animals. Yeah. Animals rubbing nose with other animals. And well, and here in Washington, we got the hoof rot issue going on. It's mysterious as shit too.

And there's no cure for that that we know of. And it's just- Where their toes grow off early. Oh, it's disgusting to watch. I mean, when you look at them, they can't hardly walk. They look like a horse or a mule. You haven't worked on their feet in years. Yeah, it looks like an old feedlot sheep.

Yeah, it's really hard to watch and so i i truly haven't looked into that at all either but is that a fungus i think so but i don't i don't know i mean i've heard theories that it's coming from being too close to dairy cattle operations um i don't know if that's accurate. And then there's other theories of where it comes from and whatnot. And again, we don't know what to do about it. Now, brucellosis is one that there is a fix that could probably uh work but we can't get the brucella uh agent whatever that technical term is off of uh the terrorist watch list um to develop a vaccine yeah um we have agencies that are have a very high rate of uh they think they can uh make the vaccine and they feel very confident that it could be developed and we

could literally if if that's true we could literally be vaccinating the cattle that are in that area. Yeah, we wouldn't be vaccinating elk. You'd be vaccinating cattle. But they'd be the ones that are in that area of the park, which is where brucellosis is a real issue. And that could probably be dealt with or minimized. But so far, we haven't had luck in getting that removed from the terror agent list or whatever. One of the things that I saw some is I went to a livestock investigators conference one time.

It was like for stock detectives. But they had people speaking on all these different issues surrounding livestock. And there was a guy from Department of Homeland Security there. And he shared with the audience uh stuff that was seized in afghanistan yeah and in the early invasion of afghanistan we wanted to root out al-qaeda and there was a lot of communications about um disease agents in life sure and even like and they ran models They ran models where if some guy went out and nose swabbed,

like if some guy went to a certain holding facility, I can't remember what state it was, but it was like South Dakota or a big cattle state, and went to a holding facility and swabbed three or four cows in the nose with hoof and mouth, whatever, some livestock disease, and they modeled

it out how quickly it would spread around the country and just paralyze livestock oh yeah think about what it would do to our food supply yeah oh so they had serious yeah so yeah that was a little incredulous but then this guy gave a whole extra on it and they had seriously looked into yeah yeah it's so i i'm not saying that i hope that it you know not trying to thwart the research, but yeah, it was a thing. They definitely put time into livestock disease. I don't know if they put time into probably a thousand ideas and maybe they never went anywhere with it.

Well, and obviously human safety is going to overrule animal safety every day, as it should, but yeah. So how much money have you guys, you guys being Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, how much money have you guys, you might not even know this, how much money have you guys spent on Eastern Elk? Oh, boy.

Millions. Oh, yeah, easily millions. I was trying to think how many millions that might be but i i don't know 10 million is probably not a uh it's probably low but i don't know i i really don't know i mean from time to time when you consider all of the things that are involved and what it takes. Wow. Yeah, hard to tell. And there's even been some false starts.

Like they tried, like someone did a half-assed effort in Wisconsin once and then came back and got it right the second time. Right, right. And well, something interesting in Wisconsin right now is because of a combination of a wolf population and black bears, some of the elk that they had in one area, they actually are now taking and relocating them 300 or 400 miles south of that. The state's trying to move them. Yeah, to get them away from that predator base. Because they can't.

They're just not building. They're not. Well, no, they're losing ground. They're not growing. The herd is shrinking. And yeah. Most people don't count Texas as the east, particularly not Texans.

But I don't want't talk about Texas. They kind of count that as one state only. I think. Yeah. This lone thing. Yeah. So Texas historically had elk. Yep.

Yeah. And there was a period of absence and Texas has elk now. They do. That didn't come through a formal did not come through a formal reintroduction process correct correct it was more like bucket biology on the land yep yep yeah and uh somewhere in the mid 90s it changed from being a game animal to an exotic. That's what I want to ask about because I don't really understand that. Well, I don't know exactly what happened,

but I can guess because in Texas... They didn't want the protections. Yeah, well, and it's a different culture down there, hunting, as you know, completely. So it's pretty much the landowners run the day in in uh in texas as far as wildlife's concerned and uh landowners wanted that changed and so they were they were redesignated as an exotic where they can be hunted in high fence and they can be hunted at will um for whatever price you want to charge and everything else so without without any regulation no tag required that i know of

so that was like that i know you don't know officially but that would be a motivator when i heard that that uh that they had sort of they're kind of like trying to his like this this is harsh i know you wouldn't put it this way but they're kind of trying to like to deny the legitimacy of elk in texas that this is me talking not not david allen not right this is me they certainly don't have the same view of them that we do i would assume yeah yeah yeah but i when i heard that i figured it was to try to keep that it was land managers agriculture whatever that could have been not wanting to deal with regulations yeah but i never thought of the other added thing that this way if you do have elk you don't have to deal with state management right right yeah and i the way to like treat

them like vermin or whatever you want to treat them yeah well i think there's a lot of that goes on in texas just because like i said the landowners pretty much uh control the process down there i'm not saying that's good or bad that's their culture and that's just the way it is yeah and uh they have they have you know like like wildlife management in north america was in some very literal ways meant to be in a repudiation of the european system where the wealthy landowners own the land they own the animals on it yeah and common little dirty people uh working stiffs did not have access to that kind of stuff and our system is in large measure like a reaction to that where we have publicly owned wildlife but

texas follows a year a year a more european model yeah yeah i say it a lot when I speak at different events, is we have the most successful wildlife system in the world. And I believe that. And in fact, I think we might have the most successful wildlife system in the history of the world, which is kind of a bizarre statement. But there isn't another one like ours. Ours is state-based. It's that North American model. And it's very regulated and very well managed.

And like you said, Europe doesn't have that. Australia, well, none of the other countries have that. No one's come close to it. You could have places that don't have a big human population and haven't been really impacted by the industrialization of the world yet and that have maintained through isolation have maintained strong wildlife populations but to have a place that had like you know this eden right and then to have pretty much wiped it clean yeah and then rebuilt it back up yeah

without losing a single large mammal right and to keep it going today amongst 350 million yeah people walking around with one yeah one of the biggest like uh gdps and GNPs in the world. No one's even come close. No. And that's part of the case that I like to make for, we have a slogan that we use, hunting is conservation. And it is a very significant part of that. And of course, for some people, that's a hard dots to connect, but it isn't the act of going out and shooting something

and saying that's conservation. It's the process. And our process doesn't work without dollars and cents, without boots on the ground, and without passion for the wildlife. And a lot of political will. Yeah. And hunters bring that

and represent that and um i talked to an animal i talked to an animal rights uh activist and professor and um we were having that conversation and i was pointing out to i was actually citing him some of the work that Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation does with how much, I mean, we'll touch on this, but one of the things RMEF does is very simply take money that's raised from donors and buy big ass chunks of critical wildlife habitat and turn it over to public management. Correct. You're like creating, you're saving habitat that otherwise would not be saved. Right.

So he was telling me all about all the terrible things, how terrible hunters are. And I was saying to him, well, let's look at this aspect. Because if you ask any expert, any wildlife expert in this country, they're going to tell you that it comes down to habitat. Yep. For us, because we're not right now faced

with an extinction crisis, right? We're faced with just like providing habitat for existing populations of animals to carry on to live. And I was like, who's doing that? Like, no one is doing this except hunters. Right. And I'm like, if it winds up being that the motivating factor is that someone goes on a hunt.

So someone goes on a hunt and kills an elk. And then, sure, they're removing an animal from the population, but they then turn around and devote their life and thousands of their dollars to perpetuating that thing. It winds up being like a net benefit. And his response was, well, it's just too bad that it takes that to motivate people. And I'm like, hey, I'm just glad there's something that motivates people because otherwise it wouldn't happen. Well, yeah, I ask him, how many acres have you conserved? Yeah. And how many dollars have you donated to these groups?

Yeah, they put a couple of horses out of business in Central Park. Yeah, right. I think over the last 10 years, that's their biggest accomplishment. In an area that has a lot of excess horses and a lot of horse abandonment and a lot of horse feeding issues, they found couple more horses that to give them no purpose well and

that's again part of the argument i like to make with people of without hunting our wildlife system completely goes away yeah it's financial yeah it financial, and it's the passion and the political will and everything. I mean, it completely goes away. And they just can't imagine, well, you mean less killing of the wildlife is going to destroy the wildlife? And it's like, you're looking at it all wrong. You know, the killing of the wildlife is farming as part of what it is i mean it not all that wildlife can sustain with all these bodies running around here anymore we put we put it out of balance man does we have an obligation to to bring some balance that's our role and you know it's i'm sorry but nature does not balance itself anymore because we have tipped

the scale disrupted the system yeah but we do a i mean like we do a very good job of like creating and managing a system try to yeah but another thing that that hunters do and that you guys did is and i know that you didn't do like you guys didn't it's not fair to say that rocky mountain elk foundation like did kentucky you were a key player you guys absolutely you guys point that out all the time yeah it was like it was an effort that had many people including kentucky fishing game yeah heavily involved in it other outdoor organizations but there like it's easy for people to sit back and you know you could have like a yellow or a New Jersey cat lady, right? And she's like, well, what's a good landscape that I want to invest my energy?

And people pick like Yellowstone, Yosemite, right? And they pick these like gems that are recognizable from a great distance. But to imagine someone looking at a degraded coal mine site in Kentucky and be like, we're going to correct a mistake that was made 100 years ago with the extirpation of the elk, 100 plus years ago with the extirpation of the elk. And we're going to take this, which the rest of the country is not looking at

and thinking about and caring about. They're just like disregarding it. It just it's just shitty little spot in kentucky right old coal mine ground who cares and like make that bloom yeah and put like a keystone like missing species back on the ground there and make that work other people aren't doing that if that that's not conservation, I don't know what is. No, because no one else has the motivation to do it. Right, right, exactly. And, you know, that goes on day after day after day in this country, not just with us. There's a lot of groups that are doing great jobs and just good sportsman groups and guys that like to do it. But a rancher or a farmer would do the same thing on his ranch or farm. Every year he's culling his herd and he's doing this,

and there's reasons that he does that. It's for the health of his herd, and it's, you know, that's how it works. It doesn't sustain itself otherwise. No, but those guys never have to do it. A rancher never has to have someone come and say, don't tell me you like these cows because you sent some off to slaughter. Right, right.

Let me tell you, I damn sure do like these cows. Yeah, yeah. I like them all the way to the bank. I send some to slaughter. Yeah, right. Another state I wanted to ask you about, and I read about this stuff all the time. I don't understand it.

Like, what is the elk situation in California? You got like a native tule elk. Right. Okay. And that was the elk that was there. But then you got other pockets of like not tule elk. There's three species of elk in California right now. You got the Rocky Mountain, the Roosevelt, and the Thule.

Okay. And that's three of, there were four species at one time, as I know it. The other one was the Miriam, which I think came from the same guy that named the turkey. Yeah. In the old days, you could just name stuff after yourself. Yeah. Like the guy that did Stellar, Stellar's Jay, Stellar's Sea Lion, he named like 10 things after himself.

It's bad form to do that now, I understand. Yeah, right. You don't do it. No one does anymore. We have a Miriam. He's like, I know what I'm going to call that turkey. But just the name. So California has those three species.

Where was the Miriam? The Miriam's is gone? Yeah. From what I know, the Miriam's were in the southwest. Okay. I think mostly- Just like the Miriam's turkey. Yeah, Arizona and New Mexico.

And they feel that when those animals were shot out, that was the end of that- That's what I'm told. The end of that strain or whatever. One of the best elk biologists in the country, I think, is John Cade. He ran White Mountain for 32 years, and he was on our board. And so he was telling me the story of the Miriams from back in the day around the Grand Canyon area and that, which I wasn't aware of. I didn't know there was a fourth species.

Yeah, it's like with bighorns, now they call it into question. But taxonomically, they used to think there was the Audubon bighorn, eastern Montana, Dakotas. Okay. And now it seems like the trend in taxonomy is to get rid of those divisions

that we used to think were significant. So not like, you know, it was a big Rocky Mountain bighorn. I've seen some big ones turkey hunting over there in eastern Montana. You can't hunt them there either, but I've seen them. So the Miriams was in the southwest, and that strain or subspecies or whatever you want to call it is gone. Whatever is gone, long gone, I guess. And the Roosevelt is coastal California.

Yeah, and Oregon. They're in Oregon. Yeah, in Washington. There are probably more of them in Oregon than any other city. Yeah, they're in Washington too. I think at one time they went up into BC, but I don't know if there's much up there or not.

They're a much bigger bodied, smaller horned. They live in the dark timber stuff. But the Thule is a whole other interesting species. They're smaller all the way around. And I think the only place they're at is California. Yeah. So the Thule, do you have any idea, like, how is that? Like, are you guys as an organization, are you involved?

Because that stuff's all private land, right? Well, we're involved because it's elk, but because it's private land, that limits what we can do. And if we're asked to do things, and we wouldn't even do anything on private land if it didn't somehow have some kind of very obvious benefit to the species. But we would also prefer it had some kind of benefit to the public at large and certainly the hunting public so that's something you guys consider well we sure you know put in a bunch of water tanks on a private land not unless we're asked to and probably wouldn't do that unless

it was really benefiting the elk population in the greater area and it was like hey this is the best place for these guzzlers so this is what we're going to do i mean we get questions a lot of times about why do you do those easements on those private ranches they don't even let us hunt it's like no but those elk are living there over 50 of the year they spend their entire winter there. That habitat is critical. Winter habitat is really critical. And so if we have a willing landowner that'll work with us and work with us to keep that habitat ideal and will agree that that habitat is going to be protected in perpetuity.

We're trying to keep those corridors open for elk because elk move a lot. They move everywhere. And so, yeah, we have to look at the bigger picture when it comes to them. And we're not trying to just take, you know, I get letters of, oh, yeah, I suppose you're hunting over there. And that guy gave you a lot of money. And, you know, he letters of oh yeah i suppose you're hunting over there and that guy gave you a lot of money and you know he didn't give us anything and i'm not hunting there so it's for the elk well not you guys do a lot of matching also really matching funds for different programs also and i think that's something a lot of folks don't understand. Because I do hear that often as well.

Well, and one thing, and I don't know if people really confuse it or they're just looking for something to confuse it with, but they think we own this land. I mean, I still read on the internet over and over about how many ranches we own and, oh, yeah, all their VIPs are hunting them. We don't how many ranches we own and oh yeah all their vips are hunting them and so we don't own any ranches we don't own we own less than 10 000 acres of ground right now and that's only because we haven't gotten rid of the 10 000 but so how do you get like if you let's say you you you identify a piece of ground right okay here Okay, here's what- And you guys work on a willing seller,

willing seller, ruler, buyer. So there's a ranch. You identified it as key elk habitat. It goes up for sale. Those, we do less of those. We have done some of those. I'll give you a different example that's probably more common yeah please uh uh

in in montana about two three years ago we completed a project that was called the tenderfoot project and it was up in the smith river drainage um and what it was was a combination of checkerboarded public and private, public and private, all this land. And it was the private was owned by a foundation of when a family died and they left this money to a foundation. And it was checkerboarded with Forest Service ground. And they came to us. It was called the Bear Foundation out of Billings. They came to us and said, the heirs of this family would like to sell this property,

but we don't really want to sell it and just see it developed and ruined and blah, blah, blah. What can we do? Can you guys work with us? And this is very common for us to be drug into a project with the BLM or the Forest Service because we can go out and pull these deals together so much easier and faster than a government can and get it all

permitted and everything ready to go and then you do a simultaneous closing or it'll close from private to us and from us to public that day and this involved eight million dollars worth of lwcf money as well a dirty old oil company yeah that's land and water conservation right can i break that down real quick yeah yeah so land and water conservation fund you probably hearing a lot about that lately because now and then land and water conservation fund will expire and then it'll get caught up in like a custody sort of battle and people will use it as a pawn it'll get delayed and then it'll get caught up in like a custody sort of battle. People will use it as a pawn, and it'll get delayed and then refunded. But what it is, it takes money that the federal government raises with offshore oil leasing.

Correct. And they take that money. So you're talking about out in the ocean, land that is not owned by an individual but is considered U.S. property, and they pull oil up out of the ground under the ocean, land that is not owned by an individual, but is considered U.S. property. And they pull oil up out of the ground under the ocean. And there's a fee that the extractor pays to the government. And some of that money goes to fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund. And the Land and Water Conservation Fund is used on public access wildlife issues habitat enhancement

boat launches yep yep yeah something exactly yeah stuff that goes direct to um direct to all americans and sportsmen and right now we're in what seems like been dragging on forever some you know people a little bit worried about the future of the land and water conservation well and like you said it's used as a political football and it's it's so intellectually dishonest i believe by politicians to do that because these are not government funds these are royalty funds that were paid to this fund yeah and they're supposed to be our dollars for conservation and we're not getting 100 of them anymore we're getting less than 50 of them so they're robbing that piggy bank as well but you know that's a whole nother story yeah the first time it was the first time it was put it was put in place for for like what felt like forever yeah and then now they're always like dragging an

hour they'll fund it for a year yeah you know just it's so it's always like kept up in the air but if you like to hunt and fish or wander around outside you should be you should be involved in making sure the land water conservation fund is sound you should be calling your senators and beating on them every day until they permanently reauthorize yeah stop and not use it as, not putting crazy riders on it and shit all the time. Including the senators from Utah, but I won't point anybody out.

I don't think their phones work. I said I don't think their phones work. They unplugged those phones a few months ago. So that's kind of a typical project for us. $8 million. $8 million of those funds.

And then our cell, we were like the lead group, if you will, lead public group in this. There were other local sportsman groups and whatnot. They didn't have a lot of money, but they wanted to be a part of it. And we welcome that. we want them to be i think we probably had two million in it the whole thing ended up to be about 11 or 12 million but today eight of that being eight or nine yeah yeah and you guys had a couple million into it. Yeah. And what was the end result? The end result is over 8,000 acres now

that is one contiguous block of public land. This is your own private hunting ground, right? David Allen's private. Yeah, right. Me and the chief of the Forest Service get to hunt it all by ourselves. By Steve's helicopter. But I mean, it's spectacular country it's just it's like a new it's like new public land yeah yeah forever open to hunt

yeah right now yep oh well the fishing is spectacular the smith river valley i don't know if you've ever been on the smith. It's one of the most pristine rivers. Yeah, you got to apply for a permit to float the damn thing. Yeah, yeah. But it is spectacular. But the whole area is. And my kids both caught their first trout on the Tenderfoot Creek, which runs right through this property.

And yeah, so that's a typical project of how we would work. The Forest Service or BLM primarily will look to us to be the lead partner. That's just because you guys are more nimble and don't have as much regulation. There's no red tape. Right. No red tapes and all that other. We can just go do. They don't need to go get a congressional approval.

Correct. can just go do they don't need to go get a congressional approval correct correct and uh then all of us will go lobby our senators now that tenderfoot one specifically um i would be the first one to give senator tester most of the credit because he got that on the priority list for LWCF money that year. Gotcha. And, you know, the Democrats were in power at that time, and he was in a position to provide that, and he did. And that's how it works all around the country. They trusted their own kind on it.

Yeah, yeah. But we'll do a lot of projects like that but we'll also have mom and dad rancher probably in their 70s or 80s and the kids don't want that ranch and uh mom and dad don't really want to let go of it or see it busted up or see it sold to a californian or whatever you know and sons of bitches yeah um hey the joke the joke is that's where rory kale's from so it's pretty common or fairly common for these older generation ranchers to start looking for avenues or what are they going to do with these ranches?

Because there's a lot of them now in the West that are in the third or fourth generation, and the kids don't necessarily want to stay on the ranch or they don't want the ranch or whatever, and they might want to cash in on it or something but the folks who have lived there most likely born and raised there want to see that ranch stay whole if they can and we do too for a number of reasons. The most important one is, again, to keep that migration corridors healthy and to keep the habitat available for the elk and other deer. And so they'll come to us in one or two or three different types of scenarios.

One is it might be a paid easement. They want to do an easement where they'll sell you the easement so they can get some money and do whatever. We're not doing many of those anymore. We're trying not to but what we'll try to do is either find a public way to keep that land whole or we'll try to go out and find what we call a conservation buyer and somebody who might be interested in a ranch like that, but we'll agree to keeping it in a conservation easement

and keeping it whole. And this would be, in these cases you're talking about, the landowner. Yes. Knows they're not going to make as much money on this as they could. Correct.

Oh, yeah. They're trying to get. Oh, yeah. I see. The land means more to them than the money. Yeah. In most cases. But they want out or need to get out.

Yeah. And if they can get something and know that it's protected. Yeah. Yeah. Gotcha. And frankly, the buyer knows that he or she may actually be buying something that is going to be very limited for them on the other end to get rid of someday.

Yeah. But if they have a conservation passion or ethic, I actually think that sometimes that enhances the value of the property. But everything's in the eye of the beholder, I guess. Yeah, because this person's saying that they're writing a check for land that they're not going to be able to change their mind and develop.

Well, they can't develop it. They can't break it up into 20-acre ranchettes. And in most easements, there's covenants in those easements. But most of them are not so restrictive that you can't do anything with the land, but breaking them up and into parcels is one that we'd hardly ever, if ever, agree to. Yeah, and there's some, on their part, there are some tax incentives that ease that burden for people in some sense. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. ease that burden for people in some oh yeah oh yeah they get uh the the the person putting it

into the easement gets a significant tax credit based on a couple of things and one is how much is that their principal place to live are they they making a living off of that land? What's the place of praise for? I mean, we're into the beginnings of a project now that will be really significant if we can succeed at it. Again, LWCF would play a role in it. It's not a huge piece of property, but it's in the Paradise Valley north of Yellowstone. Really critical calving area and winter area for elk. Tons of elk there. But there's a lot of bears and a lot of wolves there too.

But the owner is wanting to sell. He was at $25 million. he's now dropped to 22 million but that's a lot of money yeah and um you know the state of montana is interested in the property if we can put the thing together and make it work it, again, public ground forever and would be open to the public. So, you know, we're trying to work on that one now and fundraise. And there's actually some pretty significant people in that Paradise Valley that own property that probably would donate. The founder of Home Depot has a ranch over there,

and Richard Childress from NASCAR has a ranch real near this property, and there's some others. So we think that if we can get some LWCF, we can get it high enough up on the list of get some LWCF, we can get it high enough up on the list of priority for LWCF, we think we can maybe make this thing happen. You know, an interesting land deal that I know you guys are involved in.

Hopefully you remember some details, more details than I remember. But the story goes, this is again another story from montana but uh a guy was driving somewhere to get some 22 shells in north central montana and on the way his wife picks up one of those little flyers with like sells used cars and stuff right and on the drive she like finds this little weird patch of ground that's for sale and they check it out and it winds up being that it's sort of a bridge that connects the road system with a large chunk of landlocked blm huh i don't know that i think i

read about this in bugle yeah we probably we probably did. Then you guys came in and facilitated it. That couple did the purchase, and I believe the Elk Foundation was involved in it and wanted to become a public access to give people access to a big chunk of landlocked ground. And we're developing some software right now that will identify where properties lie with corners lining up or not lining up, et cetera, in all the Western states.

But a good example, much like that one. You mean in order to enhance access? Yes. Well, and to find these opportunities, little pieces, there was a 40 acre piece. But yeah, but just to be clear, that's not, that doesn't really do anything for the elk. I mean, obviously if you buy that land. It is good for the public. Right.

Yeah. This particular one that happened is you had the county road and you had this great big ranch over here, and they owned some property over here. But their property corners, for some reason, I don't know exactly how to draw it, didn't line up square. It was 100 feet where they were off. And there was a 40-acre piece of private where the corner was off by 100 feet, you know, where they didn't line up exact. And we heard about it through a volunteer of ours that it was going up for sale.

It hadn't been offered yet. And the guy that owned it. How big of a chunk of land? This was 40 acres, but what it did is it opened up 20,000 acres. 20,000 acres. Yeah. This was 40 acres, but what it did is it opened up 20,000 acres. 20,000 acres. Yeah. We bought it sight unseen for $190,000 because this rancher, very large rancher, wanted it to keep things locked up.

Yeah. And we turned it over to the Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, and they made a parking lot and a trailhead out of this piece right here. And now today, you can go in and access that whole 20,000 acres. That must be what I'm talking about. It could be. Yeah, it could be. Because it was a volunteer, and it was just a funny story how his wife was like, oh, what's this little piece for sale?

Yeah. Yeah. was like oh what's this little piece yeah for sale yeah yeah yeah and but there are a lot of those out there that just we don't know about and people don't know about and those are so ripe for the picking to open up so you guys so the elk foundation like you guys are looking at um You guys have a mandate, apparently, to enhance public access. Access is huge for us. Our members, it'll come back as, when we poll our members, it'll come back just about every time as one of the two top priorities that they expect from us nowadays.

What would be another one? Well, another one is advocacy, advocate for, you know, hunting and whatnot. And obviously habitat. Those are the three big across the board every time. And you guys try to stay responsive to what people. Yeah, we try to put a lot of effort into all three and i i would say we're we're more actively looking for the access opportunities today than anything else because they just aren't around that much and somebody private's gonna buy up it's a time sensitive

issue well i'd have to be honest with you if i knew what i knew in a different time and place i'd have paid 190 000 acres for that piece of ground it's a beautiful little piece of ground a little tiny stream goes through it and i would have had my own private you know i couldn't do it in this job but yeah, I mean, it would have sold easily. People would have bought, and that's why that rancher wanted it. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

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It's two brothers. It's the Wilkes brothers that are kind of infamous in Montana. They own, well, they own, I think they might be the largest private landowner in Montana now. They're the two gentlemen that perfected the fracking technique, and they sold that company for a couple billion dollars. Bought some land. And they're buying more and more of it all the time in different states, in Idaho and in idaho and in in oregon and

whatever um but uh you know we don't have like a warm and fuzzy with them as far as relationship but uh i try not to get real crossways with uh landowners either because you know you gotta they gotta be a part of the equation yeah but i mean in that case it seems to me you're performing a you're performing a public service oh we were no question that's that yeah usually when you try to perform a good public service probably someone's gonna be pissed yeah yeah it's just a general thing that's true yeah yeah you know i mean they're not uh hurting for land or elk let me tell you they probably control access to four or five thousand head elk in central montana alone and in that area so they're okay yeah and they'll get a bull yeah and yeah yeah and we would still work with them on anything that made sense

for our mission so i mean i'm not trying to pick a fight with them but no we'll compete with them if it's opportunities there but that's that same uh durfee hills oh well that's where the durfee hills are at okay the durfee hills are as the crow flies probably oh six seven miles from that little piece that we bought gotcha on yeah gotcha same thing yeah so what are the like what's the um what's the future the elk foundation look like you guys are You guys are in a good financial position. We're in a great financial position. Yeah, we really are. We've eliminated all of our debt that there was. And the ranch that was gifted to us in 2000 in New Mexico,

and then the family later let us sell that ranch with the agreement that we'd put 100% of it into an endowment fund. It was a concept that I took to them because we're not ranchers, and we shouldn't be in the ranching business. So we went back to them and asked them if they would be willing to amend the deed

restrictions and whatnot. And it took about 18 months when they agreed to it. And so we ended up turning a hundred thousand acre, unbelievable elk property in New Mexico into a $30 million endowment fund. And of course, now that $30 million in the stock market, the way it's been the last few years, has grown substantially. So that's given you guys a lot of muscle for some of these projects. And we agreed that we would not spend anything from that endowment on general funding, the light bill, salaries, anything, would all be spent on mission. And we only take a percentage of the earnings every year. The corpus is never touched.

And so it's been generating roughly a million and a half to two million dollars a year of gravy for us to spend on on core mission on mission but even out of all your money like you gotta don't you got you're obligated to spend oh yeah we have a lot more i mean we're spending a lot more than that saying like what percentage of what percentage of your total money goes to mission? Oh, you're talking about how charity navigators. And it's right. It fluctuates depending on the year between 89% to 91%.

Okay. And some of that then remainers administrative. Yeah. Or promotional. Yeah, and that's all in your administrative and or promotional yeah and that's all in your administrative and cost of fundraising and that kind of thing which is uh very good i mean we we uh nearly every year have a four star rating every once in a while it might drop to a three actually the sale of that ranch caused us to drop a star in the rating one year because the way charity navigators

rates organizations non-profits it's based on a formula they have but it's basically how much of the money that comes in is actually going out towards mission okay well we bring in a 30 million dollar sale of a ranch and a million and a half goes out is like makes you look like yeah made it look bad on paper but so you look at the bigger picture yeah yeah so but that all works out and then we're back to a four and you know that's okay do you feel uh generally optimistic for elk when you look ahead i don't know 10 years 20 years yeah i do for that short term um i think like we talked earlier i uh i have more concern maybe for the little bit longer vision down the road of will this culture sustain? And I don't know. how much chipping away there is at it from so many angles, from gun rights to predator issues to the social issues.

I live in Montana. There should not be a public school in Montana that you can't talk about hunting and fishing in. And I can assure you in most of the billings high schools it isn't very high on i mean it's probably frowned upon as much as it is embraced and that's kind of scary um it just i mean it's such a part of our culture and the legacy of that state that it's like what is wrong with it yeah I mean well I live where I live I've you know I dealt with it well I lived in New York for a while and dealt with that with my kids there I've dealt with it here

I looked that shit in the face and stare it down yeah I know I win every time no I win every time when I'm dealing with those people you know why you win is because you're just speaking the facts you know and and what i but you know what i like about the way you do it is you do it very methodically very matter-of-factly and honestly you don't get all hyped up and you're not making up a bunch of gibberish. And it's like, yeah, we eat meat. This is how you get meat. I mean, most of the people that are criticizing hunting are eating steak and lamb and chicken and whatever else at home. If they had any idea how that actually got to their yeah to their plate and and not only are they eating meat but they're not putting a dime or a thought a dime or a thought into long-term like the the long-term

well-being of wildlife in america not a bit i think it just all happens with having nice thoughts yeah yeah yeah they live in a in a mythical yeah oh really I just think enough about how much I like animals everything will be taken care of so no that's not how I told us so when we grew up it's you know we all grew up with that or least I did it's the Disney syndrome of bambi and all of that and folks even the the people that talk about man needs to get out of the way and let nature take care of itself if they had any idea how cruel nature really is at times and it is that's part of nature uh look at the winner we just had oh yeah yeah and then you look at you know and i get it a

lot over the predator debates well and and i don't uh fault the predators for it that's what they are but it's a grisly process for uh no no pun intended for a wolf or a bear to bring down an adult elk and kill it and eat it. And sometimes they eat it before it dies, before they kill it. Yeah, and cruel is relative. That's how we look at it. Exactly. That deer that's being eaten half alive might not look at it as cruel. We do not know that.

Right. Yeah. Right? Yeah. I mean, I don't know what they think. It do not know that. Right. Yeah. Right? Yeah. I mean, I don't know what they think. It's just their day to day. Yeah. Yeah.

I agree with you. They're surviving every day. That's all they're worried about, staying alive. So that stuff worries me because there's so much political that can be injected into this. I mean, look at the state of California. We kind of laughingly joke about it once in a while, but it's getting harder and harder for real wildlife management to take place there. It's getting so restrictive and so controlled by, well, HSUS and some of those folks. The influence is so heavy.

So you feel that you might see a gradual erosion of people who are incentivized to perform duties of wildlife conservation financial work donors just because of a degradation of like the culture around hunting yeah and we become more and more urbanized all the time and we're more and more removed from the wildlife and from rural and um i i want us the elk foundation to start an effort in promoting rural values because that's where really all of this hits the road is the wildlife's in the rural areas and yeah and it's uh uh it's so key to the future of wildlife, the rural. Besides, I just like rural better. Yeah. I do.

I think they're more aligned with my values. I'm not saying that your values should be that. You're not saying I'm an evil person. Yeah. Yeah, right. No, I hear you. I think that one of the best ways I've ever heard it put was that there's a, you know, I've lived much of my life in urban areas,

but I was born in a rural area, live in an urban area. But there's a perception. I think it's kind of a toxic perception in urban America of wildlife as a relic of the past. Yeah. Where it's like you're looking at this thing that doesn't really relate to us and it kind of exists as this reminder

of the way things once were. Yeah. And it's best just kind of like looked at, you know, and that fosters kind of a naive perspective on what it takes to maintain and manage these things that are not going to, just because the nature of civilization and being in the industrialized world that aren't going to remain static with no one minding them right it's like every ounce of ground we have at this point up up until eight i don't know what the hell it was up until 1890 when the frontier officially closed up until 1890 we had accidentally wild areas they were wild because they hadn't, you know, no one had gotten there yet.

They hadn't gotten there, right. Everything we have now, all the wildlife we have now, and all the wild places we have now, are because someone took active steps to make sure that that was the case. Right. It's not just there because like, oh, it's just there because God put it there.

It's like, now it's like there because someone or some body of people made some sacrifices and did some stuff and spent some money or whatever to make it be there yep it's a very different kind of like we live in a very different kind of world and to act like we're going to somehow step away from wildlife management and wild wild lands management and have this eden you know where no one even looks at it or touches it it's just like it's false and you can't you're not going to go anywhere around the world and point out a place that works like that no you're absolutely right and that's why the whole public lands debate and all that other stuff becomes even more germane today is we have to have it. Without it, this whole thing crumbles and it goes away. And the fact that we're back to having like that conversation, and that's like one of the things that I'm very happy with,

with some of the people we have in power right now is it seems like there's some good resistance i mean you have people in power who are pushing against federal land management on behalf of the american people but also some powerful people right now who are upholding our very old and very successful idea yeah land management on behalf of the american people yeah and it yeah and not to get into that whole debate because you know it's been hashed over so many times but it's just physically and fiscally impossible it's just it's just a lunatic idea to think that states are going to take over these places and all of a sudden it's just going to be so much better. Like, for what? What are you basing that on?

Yeah, there's no good example to go look at. Well, but where that's coming from, to me, is where the debate needs to go, is what's driving that guy or gal to want to change ownership or direction of that public land. Most of it's coming from there's some deficiencies on that public land now, and it's making people crazy. And that's where the debate needs to go, and we've got to fix our public land management strategy.

Part of the problem is we don't really have a strategy in so many areas now it's just been so much lawsuits and fighting and political posturing and all that you mean it's time to like treat some of the symptoms yeah yeah forget instead of euthanizing the patient yeah right yeah exactly yeah because you will absolutely kill the patient, you know, and then we'll have nothing. So let's fix, let's get some real debate going and let's make some adults get in a room and sit at the table and say, okay, when I say logging, you say clear cut. That's not, you know, we got to stop this stuff. They haven't clear cut in over 30 years in this country. But the minute we say, well, we want to do a timber harvest or a thinning project.

Oh, they're going to clear cut. Oh my God, let's get to the courthouse. We got to sue them. It's like, no. And you feel that that kind of stuff creates that animosity. It's driving a lot of it. Yeah. It's driving a lot of it. It's driving a lot of it. And it's not helpful at all.

And it's not helping the wildlife. It's not helping the land. And it's ruining the whole debate. And, you know, we got to start managing these lands. We can't make everything wilderness. I'm sorry. I love going into wilderness. I've had some start managing these lands. We can't make everything wilderness. I'm sorry. I love going into wilderness. I've had some great experiences in wilderness,

but it's not the best habitat in the world. The best habitats where these animals are hanging out most of the time is private land. That's because it's managed for another reason. But we've got to get some adults at the table and it needs to start with our political leaders they got to quit trying to take advantage of the squeaky wheels and try to you know make uh political hay out of it which is all they're doing. They're just trying to leverage somebody's passion or somebody's heartburn.

Yeah. And they're not providing any solutions or any answers or any fixes. They're not trying to. No, it seems a lot like burning the house down.

Oh, it's crazy. Yeah. It's insane. So, yeah. Yanni? Concluding thoughts? crazy it's it's insane so yeah yanni concluding thoughts what's uh what would be like a surprise state that's like that you know of that people are thinking about trying to do some elk work that it's not on anyone's radar like maybe back east it might be coming up soon? Well, I'll tell you where we get right now the most calls from through our volunteers and whatnot

consistently is New York, upstate New York. Oh, shit, really? Yeah, and we're not opposed to it, but they got to get the state on board and they got to get their wildlife agency on board. And some wildlife agencies, just for whatever reason, or probably a number of reasons, they just don't want to bite it off. They don't feel like dealing with the hassle. Yeah, yeah. They know that it's going to be a hassle.

And I'm not saying that's new york i don't know right but do you it comes up a lot do you guys help um if you have private citizens saying hey let's make this happen in new york and you say well you got a lot of you got a lot of groundwork to take care of before we can get involved do you kind of help them understand what that might look like oh yeah, yeah. We will tell them. And the very first thing is their wildlife agency, whether it's Fish and Game or whatever they call it, that agency has to sit down and start developing a long-term management plan.

But do you guys help with that? Oh, sure. No, absolutely. You're there along the way to provide assistance, but you can't make them want it we can't make them that's correct right they have to want to do it first and like in the case of west virginia this was a governor uh the governor who was just terming out there who he's from the area where they're releasing them and reintroducing them. And he is like, we're going to make this happen. Got you. And then all of a sudden, everybody got religion.

But until that happened, it was like, eh, you know, we don't know. We got other things to do. You didn't have a good partner on the ground. Yeah. And it has to come from the state agency first. And then and then yeah then a lot of wheels can start churning upstate new york from what little i know about it would probably be a pretty good area in some places the adirondacks that's what they're talking yeah yeah oh our our members out there would be like all over it and you can imagine the people out there that would be all over it.

So, yeah. I'll be watching for it. Yeah, I would love to see it. Let's go catch one right now and turn them loose. Yeah. Between the four of us, we could drive straight. I was kind of the second one. All you want.

You have a high level position. We touched on a little bit where you were saying how in California, it's getting really hard to make any sort of real wildlife management decisions. And it seems like a lot of places, and I believe Michigan sort of, they're trying to address it, but we're not letting science make those decisions anymore. And I kind of feel like science is stuck in the middle because you have people like Humane Society, they get people emotionally riled up.

They can let them get decisions made pulling that direction. And then on the other side of the spectrum, you have if it's like a predator issue or whatever, that again isn't, you know, science-based. Right. And it goes, you know, and it's just like science is stuck in the middle. Yeah. It seems like a big problem, but I don't know how to address it.

Yeah, science is being manipulated and used and, you know, put it in the jargon of nowadays is there's probably some fake science and some real science and whose science are you going to believe? And, um, it's sad because when we lose real science, we're really going to lose. So, um, there's a lot of that. Playing on emotions, you mentioned, is a huge one. You know, there's things that... Oh, look at this. This is the thing I kept wanting to talk about is the House Joint Resolution 69.

Right, right, exactly. That's a... Let me lay it down. Can I... Yeah. I want you to comment on this, but... So a state, like generally generally states manage wildlife in their state, regardless of who owns the land.

Supposed to. Yeah. So if you have a state, let's say Wisconsin, right? You got some state land, some federal land, some privately held land, some county land. And let's just say we're talking about turkeys turkeys live on all this stuff but those turkeys are managed by the state regardless of what bit of land they have where they live that's right now a lot of people will say like well how come you're saying that federal land management is good and state land management is good.

Like how could that be? Like why wouldn't it be that one's better for everything? Well, the same reason that like the federal government is real good at maintaining the military. The state government is real good at licensing vehicles. And a lot of it has to do with inertia. States have managed wildlife very successfully for over a century.

And the federal government has done relatively a pretty good job with large tracts of undeveloped land over a century plus. And interrupting that static system that's proved pretty successful is going to lead to problems or could potentially lead to problems or lead us to unknown areas. And state management works well, but in Alaska, you have 20% of the state is refuge land, national refuge. Under the Obama administration, some management, some wildlife management aspects were stripped away from the state on national wildlife refuge lands. so they had always managed it then

there was a period that came up during the the eight years the obama administration where they lost some of that management capability now we're correcting the situation and we're in the process of handing alaska man its own management of the wildlife everywhere in the state back to them. So we have this 20% thing. Now, all the management practices that Alaska does with predator control or whatever is happening on 80% of the state already.

It's happening everywhere. Always was happening there. Okay? So all of this killing wolf babies and digging grizzlies out of holes in the ground and torturing them and killing them and slaughtering cubs is all shit that has not been happening categorically across 80 percent of the state and they were doing the same management practices on the chunk of land up until recently anyways. And in their toolkit that they have at their disposal to do management is a

thing called predator control, where now and then, depending on the situation, you will have a rise, a thing where you have a population of animals that becomes somewhat endangered through predation. And in a way to alleviate pressure on that population of animal, be it a herd of moose, herd of caribou, could be a non-game species. You might get aggressive about curbing predator numbers on that spot. That's something that Alaska, like I said, they do it in 80% of their state. They used to do it in 100%. They're going to now be doing it 100% again. The fact that

people have turned this into that they're now being allowed to like torture baby bears. Right. Is what they're getting at is this. It'd be like, there are bear seasons, okay? So if you move a bear season early enough, people be like, oh, bears are still in their den at that time, but the season's now open early enough where they're in the den. Therefore, now there's going to be den digging. I'll point out that the Koyukuk,

the native Alaskans, the Koyukuk, who live on the Koyukon River, they know they dig bears out of dens because they think that any chicken shit could shoot a bear out of the ground. It takes a special man to go down to the den and drag them out of there and kill them. So there are some den diggers and that's one group, a native Alaskan group. But all of this talk you're hearing when you go on Facebook, all this bullshit about like

all this awful stuff that's going to happen to all these animals. It's just like, you're looking at what they're doing is taking management policies, looking at some kind of absurd worst case scenario that might arise out of a management policy. Should they deem it necessary at some undetermined time in the future to do some level of predator control on 20 of alaskan ground that's what this is all about it's absurd welcome to the playbook of the uh you know extreme environmentalist animal rights whatever that that's right out of their playbook it's like i said a minute ago if i say logging they say clear cut if i say uh wolf management in alaska or bear management in alaska they'll say what you just described that's wholesale slaughter oh yeah they're gonna go out and kill every wolf

yeah let's take it to the absolute extreme because they know there is a percentage of the population that A, doesn't know better, and B, isn't going to research anything, and they'll buy it. And the Obama administration, primarily Dan Ash, who was head of Fish and Wildlife Service at the time, caved to that kind of social pressure. Yeah. And basically, because Dan knew he was leaving that job, and he caved to it on his way out the door and said, here, Trump administration, Merry Christmas. Here's a little present for you. Yeah.

That's about what happened. No, it was like someone, the way animal rights works is you're always sort of looking for like a, they're pragmatic in a way. They always look for like a little thing you could win. Sure. Right?

Yep. Don't have to win the whole thing. Win a little. Yeah, just like, oh, I got an idea. Let's say hunting mountain lions with dogs. We could probably win the whole thing. Win a little. Yeah, just like, oh, I got an idea. Let's say hunting mountain lions with dogs. We could probably win that. Yeah. Right?

Because if you poll Americans, hunting has a higher approval rating now than it did in the 1980s. Yeah. Yeah, it does. Higher than now in the 70s. 70-some percent of Americans support regulated hunting. Right. But when you parse it out and start asking about individual aspects of hunting,

you'll find areas that enjoy less support. Yep. So you manipulate those areas. When people are looking at that sometimes Alaska, and I'll point out that oftentimes when Alaska is doing heavy-duty predator control, they're doing heavy-duty predator control to aid subsistence cultures. Yes, that's exactly right. Rural, native Alaskan subsistence communities

who rely on a resource of moose or caribou as their primary protein resource, Alaska will oftentimes come in and do heavy-duty predator control. That's exactly right. To enhance their... And they have a right for that subsistence. Yeah.

In fact, when Alaska parses out fish and game, that's the top, that's number one category. Yep, yep. Subsistence use. And it probably should be. No, for sure. Then it goes like, then you got like commercial interest. Sure.

And then down, down, you have like non-resident sport hunting. Yep. So it's a thing they do. And at times, yeah, at times they have like generally you can't kill a sow with cubs but if you deem that you have a major issue and you're trying to reduce predation you might ease restrictions and say that a sow or or a cub could be killed or you're going to move the season early enough where some bears would still be in hibernation because you're trying to do like a very you know you're trying to do a a fairly isolated case of reducing predator numbers yeah so in this in this blowback about 69 they're acting

like sort of like someone has said you know what i wish i wish that we would go into refuges and torture all the bears and wolves and kill them right and no it's like the last thing they would want to do is actually explain the whole picture right right that these management practices are already being implemented on the vast majority of alaska which unlike our own portion of the country happens to have bears and wolves on 95 or 96% of their native range. Yeah, and they have a lot of them. So you're kind of like taking the people who, and granted, historically, it was kind of handed to them.

You're sort of taking people who are doing a phenomenal job with wildlife management. Yeah, that's the ironic part. And trying to hamstring them because you have no sort of memory of how things went down in our own area. See, and those folks will be the first ones to scream science. Oh, we got to follow the science, blah, blah, blah. And here you have these state agencies that are living and driving the science every day, but they don't want to buy into their science.

Like I said, it depends on whose science you want to... Well, what they attack, though, they generally attack... You'll have... Let's just take grizzly bear delisting. The people... All the people who are working with the agencies on the grizzly bear problem

will come and say, you have a sustainable population of grizzly bears, right? You've got enough of them in a big enough area where in a hundred years, we can still have this many bears in this area. If you're asking me, have we achieved recovery in this patch of ground? The answer is yes.

When people go to shut that process down and close delisting, they're not attacking that. They sort of pick around the edges to find legal loopholes or problems or like in the review process, did you look at X? Yes.

Did you look at Y? Not to not satisfaction. Okay, we're going to sue you on that. They never, they're not like suing the big picture idea they're just finding little things where some federal judge is going to come in and go like okay yes yep you're right they got to go back and they didn't dot that i quite effectively the conversation is never is this all true or not true it's not the conversation it's how can we hold this process up through the manipulation of minor details? Right. And that's the process that they played out with the wolves in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. And then they got so mad when the legislation

came down and put an end to it. And you know they attached that to a continuing resolution in 2010 or 11 which went back and reinstated the 2009 delisting rule and it said and it is no longer subject to judicial review which means they can't go back to court anymore unless Montana or Idaho would to wander off of their management plan. But now Montana and Idaho have lived out the five-year probationary period. And so wolves are just wolves now. And they're subject to Montana's management or Idaho's management. But it makes them so mad when they say, well, yeah, but politics jumped in and delisted the wolf. Well, you kept overplaying your hand.

You wouldn't leave it alone. And that's why finally the politicians got tired of hearing it on both sides of the aisle. And they're like, hey, this is enough of this. It's been in court, sued over silly things, and it's ridiculous. And it's, you know, they're tired of getting phone calls about it and everything else. So they just said, all right, we're going to do this. We're going to go back to the rule that was issued in 2009, and it now becomes law, period.

Yeah. Debate's over. There's plenty of wolves, and they're not threatened. But like you said, there's always a fallback plan. If they veer off that management and the numbers get too low. They get relisted again. Yeah. That's the science.

That's the beauty of our process. But that's the science that's the beauty of our process but that's the funniest thing about the the delisting issues too that even things that you have like you know in the upper gray lakes minnesota wisconsin michigan do you think that those people are going to go through so much trouble to recover the species and go through the delisting process and turn back to state management just to shoot them all dead again and have them relisted? It's not going to happen. That's what they just dedicated decades to solving that problem. Well, then what that-

Like what guy in the world would think that that would be a good idea? Well, and what that really tells me, because you're absolutely right, Steve, what that tells me is the end game of the animal rights movement in that case is not their concern about the wolf it's the end game of they want to keep at uh hunting and keeping it uh i think they want to continue to chip away at it. The more they can, the happier they are. And it's just what they, the ironic part, like for the wolf reintroduction in the Yellowstone area, if elk hadn't been brought back in such a successful way,

there would have been no way to bring the wolf back. Yeah. Because there would have been nothing to eat. So they don't understand how they really have to have the sportsman and the hunting side of the aisle for this whole system to sustain and that's what they don't get or they don't want to i don't i don't know which it is some of each probably damn it rich field of inquiry um Some of each, probably. Damn it.

Rich field of inquiry. Yeah. David Allen, what final thoughts? I want one of these jobs like this. This is fun. Your elbows get sore. You've been my hero, but now you're really my hero. You're getting paid to do this.

This is fun. Thanks for coming on, man. Well, my final thought is I want to compliment you on how you represent our culture. And you're representing it in venues where I wouldn't do so well, but where it needs to be represented well. And that's for the sake of my kids, your kids, their kids, those futures.

I appreciate what you bring to the table. I do. It's needed. We need that kind of leadership 25 years from now you'll be here i probably won't but well i appreciate you saying that but um no matter how much i do it's not going to be uh it won't be as much as putting a bunch of public land on the ground which is what you guys are doing well yeah and that sure that isn't me i didn't invent that. No, no, I wouldn't want to suggest you did, but you happen to be closely involved with an organization

that has a strong track record. Yeah, and I'm so humbled by our volunteers and our field staff and whatnot for the things they do and how they do it. It's just really cool to be a part of this whole thing and i uh it's like a second career for me and i'm just really enjoying it i am i'm i have the greatest job in america and uh i wouldn't even give it up to do this so good i don't think you should. I hope you don't. I don't want any competition. I have a face for radio, but that's about it.

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