The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 071: The Buttery Tones of Karl Malcolm

Episode Date: July 6, 2017

Steven Rinella talks with Dr. Karl Malcolm and Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew.Subjects Discussed: Zoonotic disease and the guy with the dead lion; Hua Gua or Karl's take on Chinese hot pot; ideas on how to capture blood for blood sausage; Latvian meals using ice wands; the 45th Parallel; Asiatic black bear and the Sichuan takin; the Blue Ribbon Panel project; the North American, European, and African models of wildlife conservation; contract culling of wildlife; pit hunting; the Imperial Feast: bear paw, swallow saliva consume, and 124 more dishes; Theodore Roosevelt's kids were specimen hunters?; the enjoyment of hunting and fishing indigenous species; the future of hunters and conservation; venavores; 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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Ready to roll? Yeah. Let's roll. So just to recap real quick something we were just talking about a minute ago. A guy finds a dead mountain lion. But he's not just a guy. No, he's like a lion biologist. The reason he finds this lion is...

So he wasn't just a guy. No, he was... That's what I meant. Well, I know Yanni was saying he wasn't just a guy, but I didn't know to what extent he wasn't just a guy. No, he was the guy that got the message that the collar on the lion was showing... Oh, it was collared. Yeah. It was showing dead.

Yeah. See, that's why I'm glad I brought it back up. Yeah. Because I've been ruminating on it. Okay. Yeah. Okay. It was collared yeah it was showing dead yeah see i mean that's why i'm glad i brought it back up yeah because i've been ruminating on it okay yeah okay it was collared because i'm like you don't just find a dead lion which doesn't happen real that doesn't happen okay that's not going to just happen well it could but i mean yeah probably not probably unlikely. So he's a lying guy. Yeah. Yeah. His lying, he gets a death, a mortality signal. Yep. From an immobile caller.

Okay. Yeah. And we should preface what we're saying right now by stating explicitly that we have not revisited this story. We've just been kind of BSing about it for the last few minutes. So- No, we haven't. There's a peer-reviewed journal article, and we can post that

when we present this material. We'll make that link to that paper available. That's smart. So folks can then get the facts absolutely straight. But the general story here is there's a Lion Project. I'll interrupt real quick and say this.

You're listening to the buttery tones of Carl Malcolm. Dr. Carl. Thanks for the intro. Yeah, so the story goes that this researcher, and we should also say, we're not trying to make light of the situation. This is a tragic story. It's a tragic story, yes. We've been chatting over dinner. But it's also become a public tale.

Yeah. And we've been discussing over dinner the topic of zoonotic disease. We've been going through the laundry list of all the things. As long as we're laying it all out. Yeah. We also explain dinner. Well, I would like to hear you and Yanni explain dinner because I would like to get your perspectives on what we just experienced. Okay, so hold tight on the

guy with the deadline, which is a worthwhile tale. Carl, in his work, has had occasion to go to China and work on wildlife issues in China. In China, he eats

all manner of things. And one of the ones that he decided, a little bit of technology he decided to take home with him was a dish called huo guo. Huo guo. Which translates into English

hot pot. Pepper pot, that's a totally different South American dish. Pepper pot, hot pot, hu pot. Hot pot. Yeah, pepper pot, that's totally different. South American dish. Pepper pot. Hot pot. Huacua. So he makes, Carl makes, he's got a camp stove out on his brand new deck, which he did a wonderful job building. Thanks, man.

And on his camp stove, he's got a double burner camp stove. And on each burner, he's got a very peppery broth full of all kinds of peppers and aromatics, Chinese flavors. Totally. And then he cut, he had frozen and then right at the moment of thaw that it becomes conducive to nice, uniform, thin slices. Sliced a bunch of elk, mule deer, turkey heart, turkey gizzard, walleye.

Pronghorn heart. Pronghorn heart. Several fungi. Yep. Crazy mushrooms And then you get those Bok choy Flat out green leaf

Loose leaf lettuce And Then you get these little things ripping And everyone just sits around like at a fondue party Dipping hunks of meat And guts into Wait wait Do those organs constitute guts When I think of guts I don't think of heart fondue party, dipping hunks of meat and guts into that. Wait, wait. Do those organs constitute guts?

When I think of guts, I don't think of heart. I guess gizzard. Yeah, gizzard's gut. I'll give you that. No, I think of it as a gut. All right, all right. So dip it into that, and my God, is that shit good, man. The key is don't let it.

Don't let it linger. I only let one piece linger. Yeah. Then it just becomes boiled meat. Right. You're not making boiled meat. You're making like, you watch it. It's kind of like flash poach.

I don't know what the proper term would be. It would be, I mean, honestly, if that water, if that, not water, the broth, the hot pot is simmering. You could call it a blanch, I think. You blanch. Blanching. You blanch the think. Yeah. You blanch. Blanching. You blanch the meat. Yeah.

30 seconds isn't too long, but it's plenty. Yeah. Yeah, and as you're listing through those ingredients, the things we were cooking, one that was notably missing from that list that's really popular in China that would be a unique culinary experience that i'm sad i couldn't provide is uh coagulated duck blood that's one that like just pour the blood in there and let it yeah but you don't really pour it it's almost got the uh consistency of like a jello gelatin you can slice it and it retains its uh integrity as you pick it up with chopsticks you can dip it almost like a piece of liver then

yeah it is very livery yeah yeah and i didn't think back when we were in mid-december amid these massive southward traveling flocks of mallards at no point did it cross my mind that i would have an opportunity to serve mallard blood via hot pot to you boys because if it had I might have been out there trying to figure out a way to extract that blood in the field yeah I'm not sure how that would have worked out but I've looked into it for uh blood sausage and it's difficult oh to capture the blood I don't think it'd be that difficult no i got a friend a dog trainer and he this is jacob zeiski up in arena wisconsin and uh he's big into training versatile hunting dogs and these dogs are expected to point on dry land to retrieve in the water that's a ronnie bames big north american

versatile hunting dog association the dogs running around here are dogs that have been tested through navda trials oh yeah really yeah do you know ronnie i don't well i know ronnie you know through what are dogs that have been tested through NAVTA trials. Oh. Yeah. Really? Yeah. Do you know Ronnie? I don't. Well, I know Ronnie, you know, through what you do. I've not met him. Oh, my God. But I'd love to.

You guys. So this dude, Jacob. I'd have to leave the room, but man, you guys will talk about dogs. So this dude, Jacob, like, you know, there was a stint where we were hunting as college students, like, more than anyone has any reason, like, any right to be hunting. We were, we were hunting a lot and he had worked out a way to kind of capture blood from big game animals

that we'd shot and he'd get it into jugs, you know, see, you know, and you're like field dressing a deer. And in the Midwest, you typically have the opportunity to bring like the whole deer out. If you want to, you could field dress it. Yeah. Yeah, but if you hit it through the lungs, just tip it on its back, wait five minutes, and scoop it all out of there. Totally, yeah. So my point is it's not difficult to capture blood from a big game animal. I'm not sure how you do it from a duck. What was he doing with it?

He'd freeze it, and then he would use it for basically simulating blood tracking over time. Oh, I thought he was making blood sausage. No, no, no. Yeah, so not for human consumption. No, no, no. That's why I mentioned the whole dog thing. The purpose of capturing the blood was related to dog training. You only have a couple months out of the year when you can be shooting white-tailed deer.

You want to have a steady supply of deer blood over the course of the training season. So we had these chest freezers that had all assortment of fish and game products in them among which were these jugs of deer blood yeah have you seen the movie only lovers left alive i have not seen that movie lay it on me no no go ahead that's it okay all right all right watch it we'll discuss next time all right no when i looked into making blood sausage. Oh, is that the end of your thing? That's all I have to say. Just that he was capturing blood.

Yeah, that's all I have to say. I feel like that was the main missing ingredient because we had surf and turf. We had some Oregon meat. We had a good representative cross-section of the big game species of New Mexico. But in China, we would have been having a little blood, too. Yeah, in China, there definitely would have been the blood would have been a key ingredient that we were missing but i appreciate the feedback you know like when i'm not i'm not gonna pretend to be the culinary student that either of you guys are but when you're going to be hosting you know steve ranella and janice patelis for

dinner damn sure better have some hot pot you got well you got to figure out like all right i'm not i'm not gonna like i'm not gonna pull out a package of oscar meyer wieners and uh slap those in a white bread bun no if we'd have had something that you hadn't shot i'd have been surprised yeah well I think that's probably standard. Yeah. I'd be like, yeah, if I'm going to go to Carl's house, I'm going to eat some wild meat that Carl went out and secured for himself. Yeah.

But no, I don't have any. I'm not like, I used to be a good cook, but I'm not a good cook anymore. Because of kids? Yeah. Yeah. They change it. It's just like, I just don't have that kind of time. Like, now, it's just as they eat so damn early. It's like. Yeah. Like, yeah, I just don't have that kind of time. Like now it's just they eat so damn early.

It's like, yeah, I just don't get the everyday spend. I don't get to every day when I'm home spend hours messing around. I'm like cooking for a 2-year-old, a 4-year-old, and a 7-year-old who at 730, we're brushing their teeth. Giannis, you were saying something. Blood. You want to get your hands on some blood. No, I do. I would love to make blood sausage.

It's a very popular, what do I want to say, cultural Latvian dish right like i grew up eating blood sausage with cranberry uh not jam but like a like what do you call like a jam that still has like the like rough berries and stuff kind of in it i'd call that maybe like a chuck well i can tell you the difference between jelly and jam but it's such a dirty joke that i can't i don't want a joke but anyways i looked into like the whole like getting blood to make it right and and you can ask for it and buy it at a butcher shop but the the you want it in a liquid state right and doesn't take long for that to change yeah so the whole thing is like how you cool it down and you basically would have to have like a giant vat with an ice wand is what it would take to do it out in the field. Really?

Yes. Because you'd sit there and basically stir it with an ice wand to bring the temp down, maintaining the liquid state. If you get serious about this, I would just think, if you get serious and want to be the first guy, or not the first guy because everybody's at this point in our history, someone has done everything but if you want to be one of the guys or the first guy you know about to do it you i would think that you'd

go do it at a place like doug's place yeah exactly get all ready yeah right get all ready and then on opening day when you know the ample opportunities, and then you're all set and blouch, and then run over there and start processing your blood sausage. The question is, would you shoot it in the lungs and go what you were just explaining?

That's where I would capture the blood. Or would you shoot it somewhere else where you would not cause that internal hemorrhaging and cause all that blood to be in the cavity and then some sort of try to then cut its throat and drain it that way. I see where you're going with this,

but you're into an ethical minefield. If you're saying you're going to cripple it up. No, no, no. I'm not saying cripple it up. So that you can then run over. There's shot placement you can make and dispatch an animal. In the neck.

Sure. Or the high shoulder shot is probably what I would... No. If I was in that situation where God comes down and puts a gun to your head and says, you've got to make deer blood sausage, I would shoot it through the lungs and then hustle over there

and get it on its back so the blood's not exiting the wound. Hustle over there, get it on its back, wait some number of minutes, and collect it out of there. Go in there with a small pitcher. Yeah, just like a cup. Maybe a ladle. Ladle it out and start making blood sausage. So you haven't watched Only Lovers Left Alive.

No, sir. Have you watched the film Southern Comfort? So you haven't watched Only Lovers Left Alive No sir Have you watched the film Southern Comfort? I can't say that I have Okay, in Southern Comfort, it's a great movie Kind of A ringing endorsement Well, it tries to take a little bit too much from Easy Rider toward the end But in it, some National Guard guys are on like doing a mock war game scenario

in the bayous of Louisiana. And they're out there with just blanks. And some of them get lost. And they steal a, you know, like the Cajun dugouts, the pirogues? Oh, yeah. They steal one because they're lost and they're sick, you know, those like the Cajun dugouts, the P-Rogues. Oh, yeah. They steal one because they're lost and they're sick of being lost and they steal one

and that leads them to getting crossways with some people that you shouldn't get crossways with. And then all kinds of, it has a lot of elements of deliverance. I was, dude, I was just debating whether to bring that one up. If deliverance had sex with the easy rider that would be the baby baby would be southern comfort and so that's a better endorsement in this in this they make blood sausage oh okay in this movie um and it's like a it's a it's a it's a pretty captivating scene. And another one, a documentary called Brother's Keeper.

It's a documentary about three brothers who murder their father in their trial for killing their father. They kill a pig and collect some blood out of it. And, Riani, before you embark on your little mission here, you should take in some cinema and get some pointers. I will. Carl. Yes, sir. Oh, real quick now, the lion. Yeah, let's get back to that lion.

But let's not dwell on it, but just kind of lay it out. Yeah, so again, the disclaimer, we've all heard this story, Steve, Giannis, and I, and we're kind of recounting facts that are maybe a little murky in hindsight. But the takeaway was this guy was a biologist working on the Lion Project. One of the collars goes into a mortality mode from basically being immobile for a certain amount of time.

So they know there's likely a dead cat out there. The guy goes out, finds this cat, and it looks flawless. Like there's no visible evidence that could lead to an obvious conclusion about the cause of death. So the biologist scoops up the mountain lion, takes it back to his garage, if I remember properly. And I want to say it was kind of like, in retrospect, looking at it, it's like the perfect storm because it's the weekend, right? So it's not like during the week where he would then have maybe taken to a lab and maybe had other biologists around. I remember you telling me this part of it.

Yeah, and that's a perfect example of a detail that I either didn't know or have forgotten already. So hopefully I've sufficiently. Hey, I just recently had a thing. Like, listen, trust your instinct. Trust your memory. Because I was recounting recently a plane crash that I witnessed the aftermath of.

Oh, wow. And this was when I was a child. Yeah. Okay. Not even 10 probably. And I was recounting details. And I'm like, I can't remember. I think this happened. I was a child. Yeah. Okay. Not even 10 probably. And I was recounting details. And I'm like, I can't remember. I think this happened.

I think that happened. And then someone found the article and sent it to me. And dude, you got to, when it comes to stuff like this, I feel like you can generally kind of trust the little feelings, the things you kind of felt like you remembered. Yeah. you kind of felt like you remembered. Yeah, and I would feel like that would be a more applicable mindset if this were something that I had experienced as opposed to articles that I'd read. No, you're right. But I dig where you're coming from.

So, yeah, the guy takes the cat back to his garage, and like a good biologist would want to do, he's hell-bent on determining the cause of death of this mountain lion and elects to perform a necropsy on the cat which is basically not a necropsy no necropsy necropsy i'm gonna i'm gonna give that a firm knee definitive no i'm thankful you did that because i was always confused about that word yeah and i'm sure there's some people who disagree but i'd be happy to hash it out with them at a later date so the process of a necropsy is essentially going through and eliminating possible causes of death so one of the first things you do is try to get the skin off the

cat and look to see if there's any evidence of trauma that's visible kind of superficially once you uh once you've skinned the animal out is there any you know any explanation um and essentially the guy made some mistakes in terms of the standard protocols around limiting your exposure to potential pathogens and again if memory serves me correctly he was using some standard like the kind of tools you would find in your average garage to conduct this necropsy reciprocating saw reciprocating saw yeah saws all and in the process of cutting this cat apart trying to figure out what killed the cat he ends up exposing himself to uh various bodily fluids from the cat and i don't recall what the exact uh mode of exposure was whether something got in his eyes or whether it got in his mouth or a cut in his hand or if they ever

even determined what the route of exposure was but the takeaway was that within a matter of a very short period of time like on the order of a day and a half or two days something to that effect the guy was dead from the plague which is what had killed the mountain lion. Yep. And we got on this subject because we were going down the impressive laundry list of zoonotic diseases that Steve and Orionis have wrestled with, which is a pretty impressive But not that one. No, and that's when you don't want to mess. I used to do tree work, tree surgeon work. And the guy I worked for hated squirrels. And we differed on that because I always loved squirrels.

But he hated squirrels because of the plague. Really? And I was like, come on, dude. The plague? But apparently, it's something to watch out for. And I don't want to make light of this man's death. No, I don't either. I was on that track.

But to go and find, if you go to themeateater.com slash podcasts, you will find podcast descriptions of all the episodes. And within that, when you're listening to this, go there and we will have that, we will find that peer-reviewed journal article and put it up yeah and i'm glad that you said that steve because i could i could see myself or any number of colleagues potentially making that kind of a mistake you know like the notion of being killed by the plague when you're trying to do a necropsy on a mountain lion it was not the first thing on that gentleman's mind and you know we're obviously not trying to make light of the situation in any way but it's a it's a powerful story because um zoonotic diseases are not something to mess around with and i feel like you know we have a tendency to kind of get cavalier with the way we handle dead animals.

Oh, yeah. There's no reason why I don't use latex gloves, but I don't use latex gloves. I even sometimes carry them with me and don't use them. Well, even when I use them, I feel like half the time I end up with as much blood inside the glove as more than I would have on my hair i have for garage chores i have some very heavy duty ones that i keep thinking about bringing with me but i don't do it because one i don't like

it when i don't like going down that path i don't like going down it with myself or with my kids of always thinking that everything's gonna hurt you yeah yeah and i don't like when i catch myself in a paranoid state and and i don't like to act like the world's so dangerous all the time and that everything's bad and gonna get you no well let's let's talk about this what is the threat of um like just let's just take the white tail deer and you're gutting it i don't know i don't know what blood-borne what blood-borne pathogens one is trying to avoid on a white tail deer yeah i would say i am not really well equipped to answer that but i'll give you a brief tale along these lines um some good friends of mine up in wisconsin we would have

these annual parties where we would all make a mountain of sausage right the annual sausage fest yep and uh so you'd be butchering deer and all the random cuts that you wouldn't be packaging as like a roast or steak or whatever you'd throw those in a big heap. And then at some point later on in the year after the hunting was over, thaw it out and have a big sausage party. So not naming names. You guys know who I'm talking about here. The guys listening will know. We had a sausage party where the rules of proper hygiene and handling the meat were not followed.

And by all accounts, the series of events was one of our sausage making team with meaty hands touched a doorknob with the meaty hands. Not doing enough hand washing between touching the meat touching the doorknob and ended up later like not not very long later but after the sausages were made grabbing the door handle which still probably had some of this meat juice on it okay and other members of this individual's family also did the same thing and ended up with a pretty wicked case of foodborne illness cranking through the family from well how do you know it came from the doorknob well like the series of events is what leads to the conclusion that it had to do with the meat handling so the the doorknob is the the point on the house that was identified as the likely thing a lot of people were handling and there was a point in time where the hands went from the sausage meat to the door and this person

was like ah it's no big deal yeah and the conclusion and it's not bulletproof but the conclusion is that it likely came from getting this meat juice so it's kind of a foodborne thing as opposed to a zoonotic disease yeah but i do think like in general we have a tendency to be kind of cavalier around this stuff that said your point about choosing what you want to be scared of you know when i think you know you don't have to be in an actuary scientist to recognize that the things we do that are the most dangerous do not involve handling dead animals right it's like getting behind the wheel so if you want to be scared about something i would suggest that's like at the top of your list yeah that would be like a high priority scary thing yeah so your point is well taken but i the reason i i'm going on about this is that i could see

a lot of really good people like sound biologists being a little bit cavalier in approaching a dead animal like that wanting to get to the bottom of what killed it and making the same mistakes so i have a lot of sympathy for what that man went through and also his family you know it's a horrible story yeah and it's like what what what not that you blame the dead but what sort of alleviates blame is that it was so unusual that we're now sitting around talking about it yeah this was a couple years ago too they wrote a someone wrote a paper about in a peer-reviewed journal so it's like if it was just a thing that like oh any idiot would know right right yep me and yanni got sick from eating undercooked bear meat while talking about how we're probably going to get sick from eating undercooked bear meat so that's like a level

of stupidity that this really isn't because something that just like so unexpected and without precedent struck this guy. It wasn't like, ha ha, this is really stupid. We could get sick from this undercooked bear meat. Let's have some more.

You know? Yeah. Like if we'd have died from that, I'd be like, yeah yeah that's worth a chuckle like he had a good run was the stupid ending yeah now uh just change subject real quick there's a thing i want you to tell people about okay um can i see another unrelated like uh not that any of this is related can you real quick get into that you used to be a contract deer shooter for an airport? So I'll get into that. That's not a very accurate explanation of how it went.

Everybody's like, man, that's a good job. No, well, it's not far enough off the mark. So here's the deal. I actually, as an undergraduate, incorporated my own business and then bid for a number of contracts to do wildlife management work. And I had a number of clientele that included proving grounds for automobiles and no airport work but in essence it was very similar to airport work where you were trying to alleviate human wildlife conflicts in essence by removing wildlife

from the scene and so i've shot a lot of deer a lot of turkeys in situations that were far from a hunting context. And for folks who haven't done that kind of work, you know, it might sound like, oh man, getting paid to shoot deer, that sounds awesome. You probably get over that real quick. You get over that real quick. Yeah. And it's, you know, it's really hard work. And also, you know, my mentality around hunting and around wildlife is such that I don't take killing lightly. meals like the one we just had and stocking up you know the translation of death to food

it feels good it feels like something to celebrate and feel happy about yeah but when you're thinking when the animal is in this context of being a problem and you're like i need to eliminate this problem by killing this animal, it is a very different set of emotions that I personally experienced in that sort of a setting. So we're talking, you know, like in a given year, I might, I might shoot, or I might've shot in some of those years in the neighborhood of like 50 or 60 deer in a year and it it doesn't take too many deer into that 50 deer let's say before you're kind of like man this is not pleasant at least again for me personally that linkage that was all if that was your only relationship it might have been different but you're juxtaposing it to the feeling, to the celebratory feeling of hunting for meat. So you had that confusion occurring in your head.

I don't know if it's confusion. I feel like even now in hindsight, I feel pretty... Maybe conflict or something. Yeah, I feel like it's just, it's so disparate. There's so, there's such different things.

You know, like, and again, in the hunting world, this word hunting, to folks who haven't, hunting to folks who haven't especially to folks who haven't experienced it a lot of different things kind of get put under that umbrella a lot of different activities and this this is very much we're talking about culling wildlife which is a very different thing from hunting both involve killing wildlife. One of them to me is something, you know, that I enjoy more than

almost any other activity. Like it's one of the most satisfying things I've experienced is being able to hunt and feed my family through that activity. The other thing, culling um i see the i see the merit i see the value in that management approach and there's there's a utility to being able to manage wildlife in that way but when you're the person pulling the trigger at least based on my experience being in that role, it is a night and day different experience from going out with the hope that you're going to fill your freezer. Yeah. How would you get paid for that kind of work? Well, I had a corporation I incorporated. It would have been about 2003. And I ran that business for 10 years. I had contracts in place where I would essentially charge by the hour. So I'd keep track of the amount of time I

was out doing the work. And then for virtually all the species, all this work was done in Michigan, by the way, and none of it involved migratory wildlife species so it was always the situation that the state of michigan would issue a special essentially permit to be able to kill those species in the interest of of managing and were they sanctioned to do that for geese or would that fall under migratory water yeah so geese are a good example and actually like resident in the proven ground it doesn't matter if they're resident or not because it's a migratory species. So in order to secure a similar permit to manage migratory waterfowl, as an example, you'd need to also have federal involvement, Fish and Wildlife Service involvement to get a permit for that.

So never crossed into that arena. Predominantly what we were dealing with were white-tailed deer and wild turkeys so i've shot like for a midwesterner i've shot more turkeys with a rifle than probably any guy you'll meet yeah um and again that also was very you know a lot of this was shooting from vehicles a lot of the culling work with white-tailed deer happens at night shooting them with spotlight oh okay so it's not at all about fair chase and you're not you don't charge by the deer you charge by the hour that's correct yep got you yeah that was gonna be my question is uh it's like so sure the the pulling the trigger is different you know that aspect of it is different but did you ever feel like you were hunting no during the thing it's like you're using totally different methods you're just max like

you know one of and i i love to i love to bow hunt um i love hunting and challenging situations we've been talking a little bit about this archery ibex hunt here in new mexico that i've enjoyed the last few years which has a very low success rate so i i like having the deck stacked against me i like the challenge and with the culling operations you are doing everything you can to be as efficient as you can be while accounting for human safety because that's another element here as we're talking about wildlife management, oftentimes in a landscape that is very much human dominated. So you have people all around, you know, you're dealing with trying to be absolutely safe with every shot you're taking, as is the case, obviously, when you're hunting as well. But it's so much easier to accomplish that when you're in a remote landscape when you're in like suburbia um so yeah like no holds barred you're talking about shooting at night shooting

from vehicles baiting um you name it and that also you know feeds into this easily discern discernible uh disparity that i've been talking about a little bit already. Yeah, I wouldn't do that. I mean, there's many times for the bulk of my life I would have. It's a luxury to be able to say that I wouldn't take

that work now because I don't need to. But I did do work like that trapping. Mm-hmm. Animal controls, animal damage control, trapping, but never shooting. Yeah. And no, now, man, I wouldn't be like, sweet.

It's like a type of hunting. Yeah. It wouldn't feel like that. Another thing that makes it feel way more like work is when you're talking about dealing with that number of animals because a lot of times what we'd end up doing is like donating the meat to a food bank you know like you could do that i was gonna guess you had that you had to discard it because of the permit process now we were able to we were able to donate donate the meat from the turkeys and the deer so you dress all those deer out yeah yeah and when you so imagine you're on

like a five-day deer hunt and you succeed in filling your tag and getting a deer and all that work of field dressing dragging the animal around or quartering it up packing it out that all feels kind of like a celebratory part of the process you know it's hard work but it's kind of the icing on the cake it's like the hard the hard work that you have earned the privilege of doing through your successful hunt. But when you start talking about like, okay, we know we want to try to remove 40 or 50 deer from this site, that, that becomes a huge amount of work. So I got like, I thought I knew how to field dress and handle a whitetail based on my hunting experience leading up to that point. But I got a lot of experience in a short period of time handling that many deer.

But it felt entirely like work. Yep. 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

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As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. I was... I hesitate. I don't want to call it hunting.

Because I can't think of a better word right now. I hunted in Scotland one time. And in Scotland one time. And in Scotland... So in Scotland, hunting typically refers to fox hunting. Yes, we stalk. They say stalking, right? That's if you're hunting. And what was funny about it was that there's this guy,

and there, we have the North American model of wildlife, and here wildlife is public property. So if wildlife's on private property, it's still owned by the public. It just happens to be residing on private. In Scotland, if you own the land, you own the animals on it. And they sell the meat in the marketplaces. So when you go into a butcher shop in Scotland, you'll find rabbits and ducks that have shotgun pellets in them.

And you'll find deer that have been shot by guns hanging in there. And so on one hand, they're running an operation where they're culling deer and selling them. But when there's a client, they put on an even different outfit of clothing. You get dressed up in the tw the tweeds which is ridiculous they get dressed up in a little suit and you go out and and stalk or hunt red deer so i went and did this with the gamekeeper um the jagermeister right the gamekeeper and i remember we did this and the next day he was going back out to cull different clothes different firearm but would go out

into the same area and set up on a knob and shoot 25 red deer and he somehow was able to maintain the dichotomy that there's no

there's culling and then there's stalking and I'm like but as best as I could tell it had to do with the tweeds right and when it gets when hunting gets that

like hunting that borders that close on something else, it's like you said, it's just not hunting. It's not hunting. It's like you're shooting a semi-wild form of, you're like dispatching a semi-wild form of livestock. You know? Yeah. Now here's another thing I wanted to ask you about oh what kind of

guns you're using you're doing that i shot a tika m595 in a 243 caliber so i've shot with like a suppressor i did not shoot a suppressor and the reason for that was the the licensing process in michigan was sufficiently difficult to navigate that i did not embark down that path that was the funny thing about skyland this is before suppressors started to be able to use here and um you know quite a few years ago and i was like man i can't believe you boys can use suppressors and they're like i can't believe you boys hunt without them you crazy yeah yeah they thought it was irresponsible to hunt without a suppressor my ears would agree with you yeah not just yours but the dude next to you yeah um let me now let me ask you this question this is something you told me about

uh you're in china and you're at the latitude, roughly the same latitude where you'd spent your entire life. Yeah. Yeah. And you're telling me how you're out in the woods and there's like equivalents for everything. Yeah. Tell that, explain that, and then tell the big exception. Yeah.

Do you know what I'm talking about, right? I do. I totally do. In Michigan, at least, one of the cool things is you travel from south to north. The state of Michigan along the side of the highway

has these signs that indicate when you've passed the 45th parallel. Oh, yeah. I don't know if other states do that or not. Have you seen those other places? No. But I know... I think of it as a distinctly Michigan thing

that tells you when you've passed the 45th parallel. That was where... The Mason- But I know. I think of it as a distinctly Michigan thing that tells you when you pass the 45th parallel. That was where. The Mason-Dixon line, I think, is. They mark it? Yeah. So if you look at a map of the U.S., that big arcing line that defines most of our northern borders, the 49th. Yeah. But when you cross the 45th, they put a line because you're halfway between the equator and the north pole and like each degree of latitude i think gives you about 70

miles as you march up sounds about right yeah so that was my you know like as a middle school student i remember passing those signs and that was finally what helped me like differentiate between longitude and latitude and i i have fond memories of traveling traveling up to the cabin and passing the 45th parallel sign on our way up there and so if you look i think it would say like halfway between the equator and north pole yeah or something it worded it beyond just the 45th parallel it explained what that meant i i would love to have that sign in front of me right now to refresh my memory but i do remember like the notion of equidistant between the equator and the north pole so if you were to hop on that 45th parallel and just start traipsing along that line

at the same latitude and then get over to china the same kind of distance between the equator and the North Pole. You cut through Wisconsin, Minnesota. Well, that's if you go north. Oh, you're going the other direction. You could go either way. Yeah. Right. It's damn near the same distance either way. So the study sites.

Can I interrupt you? Sure. Yeah. Just remind me of something. Bring it. You know, like when you're a kid and they say, oh, if you dug a hole straight down, you'd come out in China? Uh-huh. You wouldn't.

You would if you got your angle right. Most people in America. But you know what that's called? It's called the Antipodes. Wherever you are, if you burrowed a hole straight through, nuts down through the core of the earth and hit, you would arrive at your previous location's antipodes. Huh. And that's singular? Or those two points would be antipodes?

That I don't know. All right. But there you are. You're on the 45th parallel. Yeah. So follow that around the globe halfway. And somewhere in like West Central China, Sichuan province. So I was doing some research there in eight different nature reserves

in Sichuan, Shanxi, and Yunnan provinces, kind of the southwestern part of the country. And for folks to imagine kind of the geography of China, it's got some striking similarities to the layout of the United States, where along the eastern coast of China, you have these major concentrations of people, like huge cities, you know, like the termite mound housing, just like high rises with tons and tons of people.

But then if you go out to the wild west of China, you start getting into some rugged country that is relatively remote. And in that chunk of the country, kind of west-central, southern China, is where you'll find Shanxi, Sichuan, Yunnan provinces. And I was doing some work with Asiatic black bears in eight different nature reserves in those three provinces. And one of the study sites where I worked is in northern Sichuan province, a nature reserve called Tanjaha. And this place, it reminds me kind of like the Chronicles of Narnia, where you'd see vegetation that makes sense because you're at this latitude where you know I grew up around oak trees and kind of maple beach forest and you know

I knew the pine trees and the spruce trees of my home forests in northern Michigan but if you caught a glimpse of a deer in Michigan you know know, you didn't have to double take, you knew it was a white-tailed deer. Whereas in Tonjaha, I believe there are seven different ungulate species in that reserve. So you might catch a little glimmer of... How big is this reserve? It's a good question. And I would have to do a little digging. I think I've actually got that figure. I printed off a couple of papers from from there so i'll try to get you a get your number on that while i'm chatting here but you would see species like musk deer um munt jack or barking deer as they're called

gorl siro there was this amazing you know one of the most epic animals I've ever seen in the wild is the Sichuan Golden Taken, which is this huge mountain. This description won't do it justice. Like people should just look this animal up and check out pictures of it, Sichuan Golden Taken, golden talking but it's like a stout really sort of front heavy goat of the mountains that's massive like on the order of i'm just winging a guess here they probably weigh 500 600 pounds the wild mountain goat yeah but i'm saying mountain goat and it like you're gonna see a picture of this thing but like that doesn't look like a mountain goat yeah this big golden uh like flowing fur they stick out on the side of a hill like you wouldn't need good glass to find these things they just stick out like a sore thumb and when i was when i was working in these nature reserves i was thinking you know what kind of animals do you

need to be worried about out here asiaticiatic black bears are notoriously more aggressive than American black bears. So I was always kind of like, ah, bears in the back of my mind. And then I'd heard stories about nature reserve staff having gnarly encounters with wild boars from time to time, especially if they had young with them. So I was, you know, kind of hip to the fact. And that's wild boars in their native range. Yep, yep. was you know kind of hip to the fact and that's wild boars in their native range yep yep and then what i didn't realize is that this animal the talking according to the folks who live in that

chunk of country and told me all their stories that was the animal to be the most worried about and the reason for that is that they they lived in such rugged stuff there were these these passes that uh villagers would use to traverse the reserve between communities so like footpaths and they'd be up in the rugged high country and on the same trail as a talking and people would fairly often apparently based on the stories i was told have situations where they would they would have an option of either getting run over by these things because they'll charge you if they feel like they're threatened or bailing off the side of some nasty cliff and breaking their legs or even dying and there was a researcher on a talking project working in that chunk of country

who um was trying to dart one of these things and i i didn't witness this happen but i heard the story and the guy was in kind of a tight spot when he took the shot and the talking after getting hit with the dart ended up chasing him off a ledge and he jumped off this ledge and and kind of jacked up one of his ankles like not a major fall but on the order like 15 20 feet so the talking it turns out was the animal to be most concerned about in that landscape so just the biodiversity was amazing but the story that i was telling you a while back steve was you know i'm in this forest for the first time i'm kind of trying to get my bearings from a botanical

perspective understand like okay so there's a that looks like a chestnut tree that looks like uh uh an oak tree that looks like a walnut tree and i'm kind of starting to feel like all right i get this forest and as i'm walking along this ridge up ahead i see tree limbs swinging i hear branches breaking and i'm thinking oh maybe that's maybe that's a bear up there or you know who the heck knows what it's going to be i kind of close the distance a little bit and there's this whole string of golden monkeys in the oak forest jumping around in the treetops and they see me and start vocalizing barking yelling and there are monkeys running along the forest floor there are monkeys crashing

through the treetops and i remember just standing there thinking to myself i'm not in michigan anymore this is a different ball game here so yeah really fantastic as as a wildlife biologist just getting a chance to experience a different a different piece of ground um with that kind of biodiversity and it was really humbling too because i thought you know i had these preconceived notions of what china was like that were really, really ignorant, frankly. I was just imagining like a massive sea of humanity and people, you know, packed in on top of each other. And some of the cities, you know, I've felt that way in the cities, but there are places in these reserves that are every bit as breathtaking as anything I've seen anywhere else in the world and the biodiversity is unbelievable places where you can you know drink the water that's bubbling

out of streams and high elevation rivers where you can you know stand on a cliff and look down and see every pebble on the bottom of the stream just beautiful landscapes but another important distinction that i love to point out to folks who enjoy recreating in our public lands here in the u.s is that some of these reserves are in essence very difficult for the average chinese citizen to access and the recreational opportunities are very limited because it's cost prohibitive to get there no because they're not they're not the lands are not set aside to provide necessarily uh for recreational opportunity these are these reserves were in large part established to protect the remnant habitat of pandas okay so they they exist primarily as a conservation tool for a species of you know kind of globally

recognized significance it's like the poster child of chinese conservation and they're not operating under a multiple use multiple use mandate no it's a conservation mandate now that being said it was also really interesting to note how much agriculture was happening inside the boundaries of some of these reserves and that was one of the things that the research i was doing focused on was um the degree to which agricultural activity inside of the nature reserve boundaries related to the stress responses of bears in that landscape. So I was looking at the relationship between the production of hormones indicative of sort of a stress response to a variety of factors including human activity including natural food abundance including whether the bears were within the boundaries

of a nature reserve or outside the boundaries of the nature reserve the overall kind of quality of the habitat and so you hear the word nature reserve and it might elicit a picture in your mind of kind of an undisturbed landscape. But within the boundaries of some of these reserves, you have people living, raising livestock, growing crops, in some cases poaching. So it's not as simple as it might seem at first blush. What is the, you can approach this however you want, but I know that one of the things you did there is you delivered a lecture on the North American model. So you delivered a lecture on the idea of publicly owned wildlife and public harvest of sustainable resources, which is like a foreign concept there explain that but also explain what what is like in what what forms does hunting take in china

so i'll start off by saying i've presented that kind of a presentation in a variety of formats in China. And that included speaking to university classes at Peking University about the various models of resource use around the country, including the North American model. You mean around the world? Yeah, thank you, around the world. So talking about subsistence hunting talking about the european model the african model the north american model and what's the african model real quick so the african model would be basically wealthy international tourists paying high dollar to come in, typically in a guided format, and hunt and pay in a way that the finances directly benefit the community and the conservation of the place where the hunting is occurring.

And China actually had a very similar model to that up until 2006 so this kind of gets into your the second part of your question one of the forms of hunting that has historically occurred in china is this same model where you know wealthy international adventure seekers would pay big money you know tens of thousands of dollars for a tag and pursue any number of species, including, by the way, the Sichuan golden talking that I talked about. That was one of the species that people would pay to be able to hunt. And that would incentivize local people to not kill and eat the animals. It's more alive. It's worth far more to some out-of of town dude than it is in your cooking pot.

Yep. Yeah. So a really good example of that. And one of the places where I presented on this subject, in 2010, there was a workshop that was hosted by a variety of partners, including the Chinese government, to essentially explore the idea of reopening this sport hunting program that had been closed in 2006. And this was hosted up in the northwest part of China in a province called Xinjiang in a city called Rimuchi. And that's close to the border with Mongolia. By close, I mean it's like a, I don't know, 15-hour horrendous bus ride.

If you go north in Xinjiang towards Mongolia, there's this huge wildlife park where historically prior to the 2006 ban, there was international sport hunting, as they term it, for Marco Polo Argali sheep. So one of the reasons that the Marco Polo Argali rams are so appealing as a trophy species for these international adventure seekers is that they carry around a set of horns that would make the North American wild sheep kind of pale in comparison if you'll forgive such a comparison i'm comfortable with that all right because we're talking about an animal with horns potentially up to six feet on each side of its head if you were to uncurl them

yeah so it's like it it grows like so so americans like you know artists our audience you look at a bighorn or a doll sheep now they're getting big when they achieve what we call full curl yeah okay a lot of big doll sheep are well past full curl but meaning when you look at it from the side that horn describes a 360 degree circle. If you were to like uncurl that circle and measure the length on a big doll sheep, like 40 inches is the threshold where a doll sheep becomes like, holy shit, did you hear about Dave? He shot a 40 plus inch doll sheep.

So that's a big one. But these sons of bitches are six feet long horns and they get like double curlers. We used to joke about doll sheep like because you're trying to find a full curl because it's legal. And then we joke like he's like a double curler. But they really are double curlers. Well, they're darn near. I mean, I'm swiping insane looking pictures right now on the on the phone here and it's just i mean yeah so go look at a picture of a marco polo and you can see why now i shouldn't say this if you understand people's devotion to sheep

you could see why you might spend say 60 70 000 to go on, $70,000 to go hunt a marbled pole. You look at what a wild sheep tag goes for here in North America, and sometimes those get up into six figures if they're being auctioned off at a Wild Sheep Foundation event or something like that. Yeah, well, if you're going to go doll sheep hunting in Alaska, there's no tag limitation, right? Generally no tag limitation. So if you want to go this year, if you can find an outfitter, he's going to get tagged for you. If you're a non-resident and you don't have a direct relative in Alaska, you can only hunt doll sheep with a guide that hunt

is going to cost you to do like a high quality doll hunt it's going to cost you north of 20 grand you can spend more you can get it for less but expensive the most expensive tag that sells in the country every year is what's called a governor's tag in montana um for bighorns which lets you hunt it gives you the whole year and you pick your unit anywhere in the state that's open to sheep hunting and that tag will sell um for as high as more than four400,000. And it's pushed up close to a half million dollars to hunt a bighorn. But guys that do that then go hunt along the Missouri breaks

where the biggest bighorns in the country are killed. So you could hunt a hell of a lot of marco polos for what it would cost you to buy a governor's tag and shoot it all western states governor's tags usually go for it i shouldn't say all most western states bighorn governor's tags go for more than $100,000. Yeah, and with the Marco Polo hunts... Sheep of fools, man. There may be cases of them getting into the six figures, but the numbers I've heard thrown around

are in the $25,000 range for a Marco Polo hunt. Is that right? Yeah. God, that was a lot more expensive than that. Once you're all in, maybe it is. Well, yeah, that's the thing more expensive than that. Once you're all in, maybe it is. Well, yeah, that's the thing, like the logistics of getting there and the logistics of traveling with a firearm. I have no idea what it would even entail to bring a rifle into China if that's an option.

China is much more restrictive in terms of the management of the public's possession of firearms. It's virtually prohibited for the common citizen of China to be's possession of firearms it's it's virtually prohibited for the common citizen of china to be in possession of a firearm yeah it's draconian man yeah you're controlling a pop well we'll save that so there you are yeah so i went presented at this conference um in in xinjiang province and then had a chance to go up and visit this park where historically the ability to offer a limited number of marco polo argali sheep ram hunts was a an important element of conservation on the landscape and some of the primary it was funding it was it was funding a couple of things you know first and foremost it put a large finance it attached a large financial value

to an animal that otherwise might be poached and reduced to the value of you know a plate of food yeah and this this conversation actually it's kind of it's uncomfortable for me to be thinking in these terms right like the notion that this animal has this high dollar value on the landscape to the point where somebody wouldn't want to eat it because it's only worth as much of its food as i'm saying that it kind of makes me yeah but when you're having that conversation and it's a it's a valid conversation around rhinos, elephants, okay? Yeah. Where you're generally talking about depleted resources.

Totally, yeah. poaching because people recognize if i leave that thing out there the the financial gains for my community will far exceed the caloric gains i will have from consuming that animal then the other thing is uh that's a limiting factor is poor range condition so we're talking about a landscape where where pastoralists have been grazing livestock, predominantly yaks, for thousands of years. And I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on the range conditions up there, but the general kind of lay of the land was a very mowed-appearing kind of rolling hills, not as rugged as I would have expected,

but just not like a preponderance of forage for domestic or wild species to consume. So part of the goal, my understanding is, was to work towards reductions of the amount of livestock grazing in occupied sheep habitat in that landscape. It's kind of a twofold conservation approach. of livestock grazing in occupied sheep habitat in that landscape. It's kind of a two-fold conservation approach. If you're going to do that, you had to bring in some sort of cash economy. Yeah. Yeah. So in 2006, apparently, as the stories go,

that I've heard from my friends who are natural resource managers in China, the Chinese government wanted to revisit their policies around managing this trophy hunting program. And as part of that process, at some point, we're seeking some public engagement in the conversation. And it was a surprise to the public this hunting program existed. And there was sort of a public outcry against having this sport hunting taking place where foreigners were coming into china paying big money to hunt these big game species so there was a moratorium placed on the sport hunting program in 2006 and my understanding is that that has persisted through now, that there's still no sport hunting program.

So putting that part of hunting in China aside, there is a lot of people going out into the woods and killing animals for their consumption. Pot hunters. Pot hunters. There's definitely a lot of that. And one of the... But I guess pot hunters kind of implies illegal take. Yeah. And so it's interesting to be in a country where you're trying to get your bearings in a lot of ways, right? So I was very much on a steep learning curve about the ecology of the system, the social dynamics, the political dynamics.

And I think there's a lot of gray area around the amount of risk someone is taking in pot hunting, if you want to use that term, you know, going out and killing, let's say a wild boar that they're going to bring home and eat. I think a fair bit of that in these really remote rural communities is essentially condoned and not likely to result in anybody being prosecuted. Yeah. But I also think it's not really legal. And I know that there's a fair bit of essentially corruption around the subject. So one of the nature reserves where I worked, as an example, I would routinely spend the morning doing some field work, come in for lunch, and then go back out in the afternoon for more field work and at the reserve headquarters as part of a ecotourism

model they had a hotel with a restaurant and i would stay at this hotel and the mountains were like right out the back it was a beautiful place to work and one day i came back from my field work and there were a load of police cars like like dozens of police cars that were there. And they were having a meeting of police officers from all around the surrounding communities. They'd all come to this place as a gathering point. And I went in for lunch, sat down, and the waitress came out to take my order. And she asked me if i would be interested in trying any muntjac i was like muntjac we're in a nature reserve and it turned out based on what

she had told me that these police who were there for the convention in the nature reserve had gone out killed some muntjac for their lunch inside the reserve and she was offering to share some of this meat with me yeah so you have the law enforcement officers there participating in what based on my my understanding of the situation would be a clearly illegal activity if anybody else was to engage in it but essentially doing so with impunity yeah so that's an example there was also a case that i heard about another police officer accidentally shooting a villager by mistaking the villager for a wild boar that was his defense that he had missed mistaken this human being in the thick brush for a boar that he was out trying to hunt and that guy was prosecuted for shooting the dude he didn't kill him but he shot the guy and the whole

conversation about well what about the fact he was out there hunting isn't that yeah illegal and the reason i was digging into this stuff and asking these questions i was i was kind of curious like i wonder what it'd take if you take if somebody wanted to go hunting here. So I was always kind of trying to feel out the situation and get a handle on what people were doing. But in terms of the Asiatic black bears, a lot of the poaching that happens there is a result of direct conflict between humans and the bears.

So are they as bad as, or as prone to getting into tangles with people as grizzlies or just worse than black bears but not as bad as grizzlies it's a it's a it's a good question i think you know obviously if a person gets into a tangle with the grizzly i think the outcome is probably more likely to be fatal but but there were instances. In fact, during the research I was conducting, um, down in Yunnan province in one of my study sites, there was a guy who tried to run a bear out of one of his cornfields and the bear turned around and killed the guy while we were working working there and you know the people it was

actually kind of an upsetting deal because i i was traveling from reserve to reserve and i'd kind of gotten to know folks in the on the staff of these different nature reserves and they knew i was like the the foreigner bear researcher and so i got to this i got to this dinner one night after a long day of traveling and this guy who worked on the reserve came running up to me and my chinese has never been great and oftentimes like virtually all the time i'd be communicating through a translator this guy came running straight up to me with his camera he's like he really wanted to show me something and i had no idea like you know what he wanted to show me so i start flipping through these pictures and there were pictures that were taken of this this guy's corpse after the after the bear mauling and they

were pretty grotesque photos it was pretty upsetting stuff so the conflicts between black bears and farmers in these communities are very real i mean get raided, livestock are depredated, and people are not armed. So there's a lot of poisoning, a lot of snaring. And then there are these incentives. So not only does the black bear represent this difficulty for your livelihood, this animal that comes in, poses a threat to you physically has the potential to decimate your crops has the potential to destroy your apiaries because a lot of people were keeping bees in that country um has the potential to kill your goats but that's a quick just physical description of the that bear compared to our really similar to american black bears in

terms of size and kind of physical structure um they have a more a longer kind of more pronounced mane around their neck and then the classic distinguishing characteristic is the crescent moon on their chest so one of the common names given to the asiatic black bear is the moon bear they have this beautiful white same animal okay yeah moon bear so aside from you know all of the perceived and real difficulties of coexisting with that species for these folks who live who overlap habitats with the bear these animals have a huge price tag attached to them. And there are two reasons for that. One is the value of their gallbladder,

which is a key ingredient in traditional Chinese medicines. And the other one is that their paws are a key ingredient in one of the most epic feasts that exists anywhere in the world and have you ever eaten bear paw no yanni you ever eaten a bear paw no never cooked it so there's this feast called the the manchu han imperial feast and depending on who you ask it has somewhere between 184 and 320 different dishes spans over the course of three days three days and this feast first took place during the Qing dynasty and Qing dynasty was like mid 1600s until the early 1900s and it was exclusively um the elites right like emperors would be the people consuming this and very elaborate um you know basically you'd go from meal to snacking to another meal

to more snacking and everything was all these exotic difficult to obtain ingredients. So it includes things like eating the bird's nests that are made out of bird's saliva. They make that into soup. I've messed around trying to make that with swallows nests here. The mud swallows? That sounds like it would be muddy. I could never

extract the stuff I was after out of it. Yeah. I didn't have any luck with it. I think they thicken of it. Yeah. Yeah, it doesn't. I didn't have any luck with it. I think they thicken it from swiftlets, right? Yeah, they thicken consummates with it because the bird picks up sticks or mud and coats it with his saliva, and his saliva's like sticky. Yeah. boil it down and it extract and it liquefies it and then you reduce it down and you're left with like a sticky substance that you use to thicken soup and broth yeah it's thought to have all kinds of medicinal benefits too i think one of the things it's believed to do is really improve

the health of your skin and a lot of these different ingredients do you know according to traditional chinese medicine and some of it's been validated by Western medicinal tests as well. Some of these ingredients are certainly bioactive. And bear bile is one of those things that is a bioactive ingredient. It has medicinal properties. But that same chemical can be manufactured in a laboratory setting. But can we hold up on this for a minute? Because for most of my life, when you killed a black bear in the US, you were not allowed

to even have in your possession the bear's gallbladder. And then, do you know about this? What I know about this is that they've busted some major poaching operations including you know in the great lake states there's one in minnesota shooting four paws and golf for paul's pausing but i think now you're allowed to have you're allowed to have it but not sell it like you can retain your own bears so so rather than screwing with you on what you use you can retain your own thing but it cannot be sold yeah it's interesting to you know to forbid someone from fully utilizing and you know parts of an animal that they would want to potentially yeah when it's been legal

it's like legally taken yeah you can understand where it's coming from because we know that these parts are being circulated around the globe like there's almost certainly right now somebody somewhere in asia consuming an american black bear gallbladder in some product as you and i are speaking my buddy um found some bears that had just had the paws removed. Where? In Virginia. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And, boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle

or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX

are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service.

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y'all. Yeah, so everybody knows, I mean, most people are aware of the fact that there's this market for ingredients involved with traditional chinese medicine that's kind of a wildlife conservation challenge that a lot of folks are aware of but this thing about the bear paws is something fewer folks realize so this imperial feast the bear paw is served sometimes along with sturgeon as one of the key dishes in this emperor's feast. So it's kind of a prestigious dish to be serving. A lot of folks are aware of the emperor's feast. Other things on that menu include like bean curd simmered in various bird brains, like cuckoo brain and chicken brain.

So it's a wild list of dishes. And the longer list, the one that totals 320, includes 196 main dishes and 124 snack dishes spread over the course of three days. The first place this particular meal was ever served was in the Forbidden City in Beijing. So there's a history of bear paw being consumed by the elites, and it persists to this point in time so from a conservation standpoint you have this animal asiatic black bear that presents all of these difficulties in your life and then in the meantime has this huge you know dollar sign or yuan sign in china over its head and to give you an idea and that together can inspire some illegal take yes yeah so bare bile i was looking up some facts on this front and bare bile the going rate is as high as like close to 700 an ounce and to put that in perspective the current price of gold

when i checked a couple days ago was 1268 an ounce so it's about half the price of gold, when I checked a couple days ago, was $1,268 an ounce. So it's about half the price of gold by weight, this bile. And so from an outside perspective, initially you can be like, man, these villagers, there's such a problem killing these bears that there's this conservation concern over. But then you spend some time in these villages and you see how hard people are working to scrape by. And it doesn't take long,

at least it didn't take long for me to come to the conclusion if I was living in this setting and I was trying to support my family here, it would be not much of a stretch for me to see myself trying to poach one of these bears and market it. Because there's just so many incentives stacked up on top of each other. Oh, yeah. So it's pretty easy to empathize with those folks.

And one of the villages where I was doing this work, there's a nature reserve called Yela that's down in southern Sichuan province. And, you know, a cool thing about traveling in these remote hinterlands of China, everywhere you go, people are just wanting to meet you because they don't see a lot of Westerners. So I got to this village after a very long car ride. The called shihui yao and we were having dinner with a bunch of the local folks there and i met a gentleman who was going to be helping us with field work and the guy was you know he was pretty relatively old to be out working in the mountains all day like he was probably somewhere in his early 60s or so i would say and through the translator he made this comment saying you know we don't we don't see

a lot of white people here and in fact you guys are some of the first white people who have visited this village since the president's kids were here i was like the president's kids what year was this what year was it that i was there yeah would have been 2010 probably okay i'm like the president's kids i'm like what are you talking about and so the guy goes on to say you know the president who's famous for conservation and this is all through a translator right i'm like the president who's famous for conservation he's like yeah when when i was a small boy my dad this is this is the 60 year old guy talking my dad was a guide for the president's sons when when they came here to hunt for a panda no yes and i was like wait a minute roosevelt roosevelt's sons kermit and ted so we're panda hunters yes they were so man that's something that would not go over well these days man

so i start john that people get pissed when you shoot yeah so what have you i should give so we'll talk a little bit more about why they were there hunting pandas but initially i was totally skeptical about this i'm like you got to be kidding me but the guy like the fact that after driving for days bouncing around on these dirt roads and arriving at this village the fact that this guy knows that there's a president who has a conservation legacy i thought that gave it some credibility it's amazing because you know if you were to go to you know a remote rural corner of the usa and ask them about the chinese leader 100 years ago they're not going to know much

oh dude people watch us so much more closely than we watch them yeah fair point i still felt like it led some credibility so i i'm thinking myself if this is true this is just too epic of a story i've got to capture like as many details as I can capture. So I started jotting down notes. And then when I got back to the USA, I started doing some digging. And the guy who was with me, his name was Sujiu Muji and his dad's name was Sujiu Shila. And I caught that, those details from the stories. And this is all through a translator as we're out doing the fieldwork for my project. And when I came back to the USA, I learned about the Kelly Roosevelt's Asiatic Expedition,

which included a detailed account of them traveling to this exact place on the map. And like a blow-by-blow story of them finding and returning to western science the first specimen of a panda bear so they were like their old man in that they were specimen hunters they were that's exactly right so on that expedition and and this wasn't the first but on that particular expedition in addition to bringing back the panda they brought back more than 5,000 bird skins from that trip. So they're just, they're shooting everything. And this was in the era of.

But their old man was very heavily involved in that as well. Yes. For a long time, that was biology. Yes, absolutely. We were still in a, like, you got to realize realize in his era yeah okay so late 1800s we were still in a descriptive phase yes cataloging what was here yeah and a big like in a thing that roosevelt like when he wanted to be a biologist that's what he thought that that was yeah i'm not taking anything away from this oh no no i know you're not and i'm not i'm not like

yelling at you about it but i'm just saying like it's just like autobot you mentioned like autobot yeah autobot shoot it stuff specimen hunter draw it um darwin was a specimen hunter that was biology comparative analysis of dead shit laying on a table yeah there's a string of these so the cool thing about that experience

I'd learned a little bit about TR at that point but it opened up all these stories about the next generation of the Roosevelt's. And that's some of the most interesting, you know, some of the most interesting stories there are out there are around Kermit

and Ted and some of their adventures. Kermit, Ted. Yeah. Yeah. So Roosevelt had a daughter, um, with his first wife and she died during delivery of that daughter.

Then he went on to remarry a childhood friend of his, and they proceeded to have, I believe, five more children that included, I think, four boys and a girl. And the first two sons, Ted was the oldest and Kermit was the second oldest and they went gallivanting on these adventures with their dad so i know you're into suggested readings there was a there was a trip that kermit and teddy senior the president took um exploring the river of doubt yeah that was 1913 1914 that expedition and it damn near killed teddy roosevelt he was he was threatening to overdose on morphine so as to not be a hindrance to the rest of the party and the drama of that trip they had they had one guy one of the most skilled canoe handlers on that

trip drown you had another guy get murdered you had teddy roosevelt so sick with malaria that he was threatening basically to overdose and commit suicide so as to not slow the party down you had kermit saying to his dad if you kill yourself you're going to be more of a burden because i am guaranteeing you we're going to bring your body out of here and it's going to be harder to lug your corpse than to have you helping us move your sick self out of here. They were down to so little, what's the malaria drug? Quinine? Is that right?

Am I saying that right? One of them. Larium? Quinine. Quinine. That's like what they used to, tonic water was something that, in the British Empire, it was like a a malarial preventative drink like tonic water was quiet it was like soda water with quinine and the sweetener in it yeah so they're

down that they have this they have like a ration of quinine for the trip and uh kermit had malaria as well and he he was basically foregoing treatment and giving it to his dad and the doctors finally forced him to take an injection of it because he was all messed up but didn't want to admit it so they got back and later in life you know teddy either here as doctor at one point claimed that like years of his life had been shaved off it might have been a doctor who after teddy's death said yeah if he wouldn't have had that malaria case he would have lived another 10 years yeah so it was a rugged gnarly trip and kermit and and ted they did another they had done a previous uh asiatic expedition in the 1920s and they published a book from that

expedition as well and the title of that book is east of the sun and west of the moon so the expedition that involved the hunting of the panda they published a book trailing the giant panda i got a copy of this book after hound like scrounging libraries all over the country to try to find a copy of this book and everything in the in the account lined up perfectly with what this dude told me was it a hard hunt it actually was surprisingly hard and what what made the big difference was the fact that they had a snow come in and they were able to pick up a set of tracks in a bamboo thicket and trail the bear after i mean they they had walked and ridden on horseback countless miles in search of a bear.

And then finally, in this, what is now the Yele Nature Reserve in southern Sichuan, they finally bumped into a man who knew the mountain well enough to get him to the right place. And they cut the track of a panda. And the story goes that... Just in there nibbling on some bamboo. Yeah, so the bear ended up... And here they come. Yeah, if I remember right, the bear was in the process of disappearing

into the thicket as both sons fired simultaneously, taking this panda bear. And they came back to the u.s and in addition to all the all the other skins they had they had the first panda delivered to western science and if anybody's interested in seeing this panda it is on display in chicago at the field museum right now as we speak really and has been ever since carl's panda no no kermit kermit and ted and the amount of adventures that guy got mixed up in who are we talking tr yeah oh yeah like cuba for example

how he became president so yeah mckinley is president gets killed by an anarchist yeah he becomes president he gets shot yeah the his glasses in his pocket deflect the and his speech he had like such a lengthy speech and it was folded up enough times in his pocket that in conjunction with his glasses case it slowed down the slug enough that it lodged inside his ribcage. And he knew enough about anatomy. He knew he'd been shot in the chest. But the fact that he was not coughing up blood led him to the conclusion that his lungs had not been perforated. And gave his speech. And you know how he started off his speech.

I'm tougher than a bull moose. Ladies and gentlemen, this is roughly what he said. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm not sure if you're aware of this or not, but I've just been shot. But it will take more than one bullet to stop this old bull moose. And then he went on to orate for a couple of hours. This was in Milwaukee. See, that's the difference.

Lincoln, his speeches were so tidy and short that they wouldn't, like a Lincoln speech isn't going to stop a bullet. That's true. Because he wrote his best one on an envelope. Yeah. That was back in the old days. Short and sweet. Yeah.

My old man always, my father was fond of that quote. Some people attribute to Mark Twain, but it's forgive the long letter. I didn't have time to write a short one. I don't know if that's actually... Everybody attributes everything to Twain. Yeah, but I've heard that one attributed to Twain by a fair number of folks, too. So, I think that

might be valid. I had a little chill go down my spine when this guy in rural southern China was like, oh yeah, the president's sons are here. We haven't seen a lot of white people around here since then. It was pretty cool. So do they have wildlife populations that are even capable of sustainable harvest?

Yeah, absolutely. Sure. populations that like are even capable of sustainable harvest yeah absolutely sure so they could have sustainable regulated hunting yeah not enough you know not enough the ratio of people to hunting opportunity would be so high so much higher than in the usa but yeah i mean a lot you know one of the interesting species i encountered during my field work was bumping into pheasants in their native habitat you know i'd be poking around looking for bear scats as part of my research i mean man this looks like some pretty good bird cover i was like rooster go cackling off native pheasasants. Yeah. Yeah, and then, you know, driving around on mountain roads, you come around the bend,

and in the middle of the two-track, there would be a golden pheasant standing there, a wild golden pheasant. And they look, they're so just incredibly bright gold in their coloration. They look like they have to be fake yeah but yeah

people have tried to get golden pheasants established here in the u.s yeah why i don't know why regular pheasants that's a good question i don't know i don't know i mean they're you know i love hunting i love hunting pheasants but i do feel like and i mentioned earlier that i've had a great time hunting these ibex down in the Florida mountains of southern New Mexico. And that is, I think, one of the toughest archery hunts probably anywhere in the world. It's a gnarly hunt. But there is something, in my opinion, detracted from the experience when you know the animal that you're hunting is not indigenous to the landscape where you're hunting oh yeah man that's why i couldn't really i couldn't i couldn't really deeply enjoy hunting in new zealand yeah exactly all of the wildlife not all the wildlife

all of the huntable wildlife is non-native and doesn't have like a historic context on the ground. Now, I'm full of hypocrisies because I'll hunt turkeys in states that aren't native turkey range. I like to hunt wild pigs, but I don't like hunting them as much as I like hunting the native stuff. At the same time, I also like hunting in areas that have a deep history of human interaction with the animals. That's why I'm interested in the Arctic, but I'm not interested in the Antarctic. because it's absent of of of human history and absent of of a legacy of human interaction

human relationship with the wildlife so it does detract from it for me now a friend remy who likes to hunt in new zealand a lot you know he points out that there is like a they've established a culture of hunting a cultural relationship with hunting. But it's just a big difference there where in New Zealand, you might have a conversation like, oh, we wildlife populations because they're causing irreparable environmental damage, according to some people. And you're also out trying to do a recreational sport hunting, a meat-based sport hunting. It just gets too damn confusing you know i i just had a very difficult time enjoying it yeah yeah and the same thing goes for the fisheries too you know like i would you have any fish there i would rather and i do often hike into remote stream sections where I can catch the indigenous trout that

exist there, but which have been supplanted by non-native trout farther downstream in the watersheds. You know, and I would say the most beautiful pheasant i have seen was that one that came cackling out of the thicket in china i was like oh a native pheasant yeah i've never seen that before that was that was awesome so yeah your question that led to the story about the pheasant is whether or not there's opportunities to hunt these species sustainably and absolutely there would be um are the mechanisms in place to really manage it effectively at this point in time? Not that I'm aware of.

I mean, you know, we have a whole infrastructure of game and fish agencies operating essentially at our equivalent of the province level, which they do not have, at least in a way that specializes around hunting and angling the way ours do. Yeah, we've been toying with this for a hundred years here. Yeah, and I don't think we've got it all perfected or figured out either, frankly. We've got it pretty good. Better than anywhere in the world. Yeah.

We've got room to improve. We have a more sustainable system. Yes, I agree. And we have room to improve. We have a more sustainable system. Yes, I agree. And we have room to improve. Yeah. Okay, what do you feel we're not doing right? I feel like the most pressing needs, which are directly related, is a broader base of funding for conservation work and linked directly to that is the notion of a consistently available form of funding for non-game conservation work so i think are you

familiar with the blue ribbon panel project yeah i am i've been paying close attention to that and i got to say some of the people who have been involved with that work, the soon-to-retire director of Arizona Game and Fish, a guy named Larry Voiles, has been right in the middle of that work. And there's nobody I admire more than Larry as a conservationist right now. And so there's some brilliant minds who are putting a lot of thought into how to address that need. But that is, I would say,

the overarching example of what I'm talking about when I'm saying we don't have it all figured out yet. Yeah, we don't have the money figured out for one thing. You know, you were at a dinner that I was at in New Mexico and someone got up and was talking about desert bighorns, doing desert bighorn conservation work. And he said, we joke in New Mexico that wildlife conservation comes down to water and money.

But with desert bighorns, you don't even need the water. Just the money. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, desert bighorns are, I would say, one of the species that are probably easiest to raise funds for. You have a lot of individuals and organizations with relatively deep pockets who are looking to pony up money to support that work. And that's fantastic. And I applaud that.

I'm glad that's going on, but I'm also that association with them being a game animal. Yes. But I'm also a huge fan of an intact biota that includes all of the obscure species that we can't shoot and eat. And I see those as being key elements to a fully rounded outdoor experience. You know, like going out, and this is an extreme example,

but to go out on an elk hunt and have elk be the only thing you encounter would be a very hollow experience in my opinion. No gray jays opinion no gray jays no stellar jays the pine squirrels yeah and so weasels i'll throw another j the pinion j because we're not worried about stellar jays too much around here but pinion jays we are and it's hard to get money for um funding the research or doing the conservation work to support that species because the way we fund conservation through hunting and fishing so it'd be nice like most like state level conservation work is funded by hunters and fishermen and hunters and fishermen are interested

in fish and game and so a lot of that money goes to support fish and game. But there's the thinking that you're well aware of. There's the thinking that by taking care of these apex animals, you're taking care of, that has a cascading effect. You're taking care of all these other things. Like, it's a piece of rhetoric thrown out there, right? Yep. The elk work often comes down to securing wintering range.

Waterfowl work comes down to securing wetlands. That's probably the best example. When you secure wetlands, all things benefit. When you secure big riparian zones, all things benefit. So that's like a justification or a rationale that's put forward by groups who are investing very heavily in game animals when people bring up to them, but what about everything else? Yeah. And there's validity to that argument and i do think hunters and anglers you know we have a lot to feel really good about that we have

collectively accomplished and contributed to over the last century plus that being said um i think there are conservation opportunities missed as a result of inadequate funding for some of these others. So where could the money come from? Do you feel the other user group should be ponying up the way hunters and fishermen have ponied up? Or how do you think it should go? Or just hard funding from the federal government? Well, there's a few ways to skin that cat. I think we've got some examples of success.

The ability of the state of Minnesota, as an example, to pass an increase in their state sales tax to support this interesting combination of conservation and the arts. Two things I'm interested in. Yeah, likewise. I mean, so there's an example um i do think you know that people rightly point to pitman robertson and dingle johnson as phenomenal advancements in our conservation model and there's obviously applicability of that kind of an approach to all kinds of other gear that people buy and it's fascinating to look back at the

history of those pieces of legislation being debated and discussed and how well supported they were by the industry and it's a little puzzling to me that there's not similar support and leadership coming from private industry now to push for similar excise taxes on all the other stuff that outdoor enthusiasts buy and i personally i i don't have any qualms about more people paying into the system and being vested as self-identifying supporters of conservation. from a thoughtful place, which many of us can do well, those discussions, I believe, will open up the minds of other interested conservationists, as opposed to digging our heels in and saying, no, we're the ones who are paying for for conservation and you're not welcome here in our kind of decision space. That exclusive approach, it feels kind of like trench digging to me. Yeah, but oftentimes when other people come in and want to have opinions they go against our interest and hunters have developed over the last 100 years

a sort of uh they kind of have staked a claim on how wildlife decisions are made and this this conversation um is one i've had a lot of times with a lot of people whom I really respect and admire, and I can understand that mindset. But I also have to kind of reject it a little bit, and here's why. I don't think, in the long run, if we want to retain our hunting and fishing rights as our culture changes around us. We have to be able to communicate about that with the broader community of non-hunters, whether or not they're paying into the system. Because the fact of the matter is people can mount challenges to hunting and angling and trapping

whether they're buying into the system or not and they have done that successfully they're examples you know the the chip legal challenges yeah legal challenge yeah every election cycle so the notion that we're gonna you know we're gonna win in the long run by digging trenches and not effectively with an openness to dialogue with people who have different viewpoints. Talk about this stuff and explain. And I think, you know, you and others do a good job of representing the mindset and the heart of many of us, where we're coming from. We need more of that. What we don't need is like entrenchment and an unwillingness to engage in thoughtful dialogue about this stuff. Oh, yeah. And I admire all that, but so much of what you hear is so ridiculous.

Yeah. When people who aren't immersed in this decide to dip a toe into wildlife management. Yeah. Oftentimes, it's absurd. Yeah. So that's where sound science being like the guiding light. The things that happened around Florida's bear hunt. Yeah.

Where they have a recovered above objective population of black bears. Open a season and put a quota system in place. We will not pass this threshold of bear mortality. Get close to the threshold much quicker than they thought they would have.

Demonstrate that they might have more bears than they thought they did end the hunt early before they hit the quota anyone looking at this would be like that's a successful that's a successful hunt allowing people to exercise their right of extracting a renewable resource in a way that is raising money for wildlife work. How is it treated in the press? Florida massacres.

Yeah. 300 bears. Yeah. Let's shut it down. So no shit that you generate a lot of antipathy from people who who are just not really welcoming to the new voices who are coming around who haven't aren't vested in this aren't invested in it aren't really aware of the underlying like core principles of the system

but they are just like going based off some shit i heard this morning on the news it drives you nuts it does drive me nuts i agree and i think so it's like i wish like that you sometimes wish that like new Jersey cat ladies would stick to their cat. Yes. So what's the solution to that? What's the solution to addressing this valid concern that you're raising? I don't know. I don't know.

I don't believe that entrenchment over time will be a winning strategy. I agree with you, Carl. So I think, here's what I believe. That's Yanni coming in forcefully. Thanks, guys. Here's what I believe the solution to be, okay? I believe if you can talk about this stuff eloquently, we. And listen, I agree with you, too. i'm just bringing up a way of looking at it

yes and and it's a valid it's a valid way of looking at it but i it's like it's like that saying like okay i'm wrong but am i right right i don't bring up a way of looking at it i don't think we can collectively stick our heads in the sand and ignore the cultural changes around us the the biggest one of which is the increasing urbanization of our citizenry which comes hand in hand with a disconnection from the natural world so i think the solution to that is that rather than sticking our heads in the sand and just digging trenches where we're in our own little echo chamber about how what we're doing is totally right and defensible and those people out there who see things from a different vantage point have it all wrong i believe the solution is that we capitalize on what eo wilson termed biophilia the fact that there's this innate

desire in human beings to interact with nature. And I don't think that's going to go away over a generation. I don't think that's going to go away over two or three or four generations. I think it is innate to our species that we have this desire to be somehow interactive with nature. And I believe if we have the right ambassadors for these activities we can welcome in folks from that urban majority to be mindful participants who engage in the outdoors and join us as ambassadors for these these thoughtful beneficial constructive activities and that over time our ranks and our impact rather than being diminished swell and our relevance swells and our base of funding swells and i think the path to that approach involves thoughtful discussion, thoughtful discourse, respect for other viewpoints, and a willingness

to speak authentically about where we're coming from with people who maybe have a different set of life experiences. Have you ever done a hunt where you had to go and pass a test before you could apply for the hunt? The only thing that pops into my mind is that classic fence crossing in hunter education. No, no, no. I'm talking, for instance, now. You've got to hit a plate. If you're going to hunt moose on the Kenai Peninsula,

as of this year, you need to go in and pass an online course about antler configuration on moose. In Montana, when you go to get a black bear permit, you need to pass an ID course. Can you differentiate from a grizzly? New Mexico has a lion identification. Colorado has a lion identification.

Yeah, yeah. So, yes. Utah, I just did mine the other day i did a 15 question exam before you can apply for a tundra swan permit because they want you to damn sure know the difference between a tundra swan and a whistler okay all right yep tracking now i just and this And this isn't just This isn't just like I'm not just applying this to hunting But I feel like

There should be a thing In a utopia There would be a thing where In order for you to have an opinion Yeah, I love where you're going About wildlife wildlife politics and wildlife conservation yep you need to go in and pass a course yeah and the course would be drawn up by people to be where it didn't reflect a particular viewpoint it just measured your

understanding of where we've been where we are are now, what the picture is, and what vision people are trying to pursue. At which point, when you pass said test, you can then say, man, I feel real bad about Pedals the Bear. Yeah. Or whatever. That's utopia. Yeah. the bear yeah or whatever that's utopia yeah yeah and you know the fact of the matter is the sad fact of the matter is that well beyond the discussions around hunting a lot of people have a lot of opinions about a lot of stuff where they really don't have sound justification

so hard unless i'm like arguing with my wife about something i try so hard to not articulate opinions about shit that i have no business talking about yeah yeah and i think the world would be a better place if more folks took that approach and if more folks you know had a real appetite for learning new things and having broadened horizons unfortunately that's not the world that we live in but i i sincerely believe and a lot of this is based on my experience with learn to hunt programs and with interacting with a lot of new hunters who have come into the activity as adults particularly particularly from urban backgrounds that this desire to experience the kinds of you know perspective altering outdoor moments that the three of us and you know a lot of folks listen to this have a healthy dose of every year the desire for those experiences exists in a lot of people who

are just trying to figure out how to get there furthermore there are a lot of people who if given the right catalyst the light bulb can come on and i believe in the grand scheme of conservation in this country, one of the most impactful things that we can do is help open up the door to those folks. And that is a different mindset than... I've taken 30 of them on their first hunting trip. Yes.

So don't be telling me about this. Dude, I'm preaching less to you and more just kind of i'm getting all defensive my feelings are getting hurt oh no dude so what i'm what i'm saying and you should be taking it this way what we need is more people willing to engage in these thoughtful conversations and willing to take people under their wings and the folks that you've taken out you know i think a lot of those individuals embody exactly what i'm talking about you have a lot of a lot of adult first-time hunters a lot of women a lot of people motivated by food um these are these are like universal the ability to to have kind of a communal experience outdoors that results in being able to eat something healthy

and share that with your family the ability to go out and actively procure the calories that you're going to use to sustain yourself and sustain those whom you love these are like fundamental hardwired desires in human beings interact Interact with nature. Eat something good. Biophilia and meatphilia. Yeah, dude, meat. Yeah, I see. So they're one in the same. It's one in the same.

Interacting with nature. I had a guy email the other day and said his girlfriend doesn't like to hunt. Sounds like my wife. They don't like to hunt, but they just like to eat wild meat and he said is there a word for someone who just eats wild meat yeah i just thought it was wilditarian i got it up with i got it is it wilditarian no it's not um so dude that's a tight word a lot i like wilditarian i've got one i've got one that's even tighter for you, though. Lay it on me. So if you look at the Latin root for venison, venado in Spanish, venison, veni, that means to pursue.

It means to hunt. So technically speaking, when somebody says venison, what do you think of? You think of deer meat, right? If you were to take a literal translation of venison, it would be meat that has been hunted. Venison, like you could pull out a quail and say, here's some venison. So I think these individuals you just described, they would be venivores. Oh, man. I like that but the problem is

the problem is not enough people know that's what that means well and we just invented it okay let me lay it look yeah but yeah but you gotta factor in you with that yanni you look skeptical no i like it but you need to you need to fact you can't factor in knowing you can't have it be just because you know that you're right you gotta to fact you can't factor in knowing you can't have it be just because you know that you're right you gotta look at people like venison means deer meat but they're saying but that's not because i eat snapper turkey shit too right yeah so i like it pursued but let me tell you a tale okay okay this is the last thing we're talking about yeah in the meantime have you come any closer and you're thinking about how you're

going to capture blood for blood sausage? No, I haven't been sitting here Googling. No, I have not. What about like a siphon? You know, like if you're trying to drain an aquarium and you got the hose, you kind of get like the downhill gravity thing going. Yeah, that's all fine. Like I said, you just got to be there with the implements to cool it down.

What if you shoot one on a late season hunt when it's negative 10 degrees out? You're fine. Wouldn't that be part of the solution? I would think you want to put it into a capped container and limit its exposure to air. Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. That's what I would be thinking about. Oh. But here's what I want to tell you.

Yeah, okay. This isn't even relevant. Can this be our bedtime story? Because I think I have to go to bed and then get up and get a flight all within like four hours. Isn't it beautiful out here though? Oh, it's wonderful. Got the stars. I'm not going to tell you the thing I was going to tell you.

You can't do that. You got to do it like a Cliff Notes. Okay. You got to do it like a Cliff Notes. Okay, so I have a shirt. I had a shirt that just takes a damn long to... All right. I had a Savage Rifles shirt. Yeah. Okay.

And the company is Savage. Yeah. Right? And their logo for a long time was a Plains Indian with a headdress. Yeah, the headdress. I remember. So my shirt had a Plains Indian with his headdress i remember so my shirt had a nose on the right with his headdress yep and it says savage so i i go to someone and i say hey what do you uh

what do you see what's this shirt right what does this shirt say to you and she says well it says to me that you got an indian on your shirt and you're saying that that Indian is a savage or Indians are savages. The truth of the matter is that Savage, the firearm company, was founded, started by a man who, due to no action of his own, happened to have the last name of Savage. Arthur Savage was the guy's name. When he was starting his company out, making lever action rifles,

an early client of his was Chief Lame Deer. He gave Lame Deer a good deal on a bunch of rifles. They became friendly. Lame Deer said, you know what? You could put my likeness i like you so much you could put my likeness on your rifles arthur savage says that sounds great okay so there's what someone hears and thinks they're seeing and what they're really seeing and to say a venusitarian or whatever not venivore a venivore a venivore that's such a good term you can't go around explain like

like it's like wearing my shirt where you gotta go around the people being like no no no check it out right really it just takes so much energy yeah so i would have to say people would be like oh no because i eat snap turtles and quails and shit too and i'd have to be like oh no no no because really the root word it just i just get so tired halfway through i wouldn't have any time yeah you got any concluding thoughts yeah you you'd have to be like me nice you'd have to be you'd have to be like me where instead of even giving people your full name, you've been relegated to saying JP. Yeah. So that you don't have to be like, yeah, it's Latvian, spelled with a J.

Yeah. Da-da-da-da-da. Every day, this man, every day, this man has to explain his name. Yeah. Now I saw he's got, Yanni has an email signature. For those of you who have not emailed with Yanni, where it's got the spelling J-A-N-I-S and then in parentheses, Y-A-N-I-S,

close parentheses. Like so people can help people understand how to pronounce his name. I read that and I thought, oh, his name's janice janice janice princes janice princes uh now even my car i got the kind of car you can talk to you when you want to call someone i have to say uh call janice poodle and it'll then and then my kids like that's not his name i'm like well the car takes

his name so that's what we're gonna call him right now until we get him on the horn then we're gonna call him yanni and then your phone your car says yanka oh yeah once the computers figure out that you can just say call yanni and it dials me up we We know we're in trouble. Then you'll know you've achieved artificial intelligence. That's when you know the beginning of the end has come, and soon the technology will be taken over. Okay, I don't have any concluding thoughts, because mine was the story about the t-shirts. My concluding thought is that I'm on board.

Yours is about your name. Your name sucks thanks mom dad no i'm on board with uh carl's thinking on how we should uh be moving forward with uh you know taking the time to accept those other viewpoints and it's i think it'll feel like it's our responsibility to educate these people. I hate that word. Educate? Because people don't usually mean, when people say

they need to be educated, I find what they're really saying is they're saying, I need to convince them to agree with me. It's like a weird code language. Where you're like, oh, the public needs to be educated. What you're saying really is like

the public needs to see... needs to think that I'm right. A friend, Greg Blazkowicz, showed us through his research that so many people out there think that hunting is completely unregulated. Yes. All you need to there think that hunting is completely unregulated yes that you all you

need to do to go hunting is get a some sort of weapon and walk out into the woods and if it's brown it's down okay so when there is that level of ignorance then i don't feel bad saying yes i should be going out and educating okay people no i I agree. I like it. I like it. I understand what you're saying, but I've just, over the years, I've found that when people say they want to educate people, what they're saying is they want to get people to agree with them. And funny you bring up Greg's study because Greg was testing ways in which he could get people to agree with him.

So yeah, let's go educate them, meaning let's get him to agree with us. But I also think there's a little bit of cynicism where when people say like, oh, I want to be opened up to other people's viewpoints, you're sort of saying I want to pretend to be open to your viewpoints so that I can educate you about my viewpoints and have it be that you come out agreeing with me you're not saying you're not saying that i am this mushy undecisive thing open to you telling me shit that's going to make me re-question my core fundamental beliefs so the dialogue you're supposedly fixing to have you might not even have a core fundamental beliefs. So the dialogue you're supposedly fixing to have with people.

You might not even have a core fundamental belief about what we're talking about. I have core fundamental beliefs about what I'm talking about right now. But wildlife management in America. Okay? So I'm not going to go around acting to people like, I'm open to your viewpoints. Because I'm not really. I'm curious to hear like I'm open to your viewpoints Because I'm not really I'm curious to hear what you think So that I can hear what you think

And then tell you some shit to make you think otherwise Kinda Kinda I'm nodding my head In agreement Or you want to go to bed No I'm done i have i swear

to god i'm not saying another thing just turn that machine off and you're ready honest it's been a good discussion it's been a live lively chat so this notion about uh now hold on a minute that was a joke because i'm not saying anything. All right. This notion about educating folks, I think there's utility in sharing information that is pertinent to the topic we're discussing. And I think there's a lot of folks out there who have no clue of the basics. And in those instances, if they have the desire to actually be informed, a degree of education is warranted. Absolutely. has less to do with like convincing people of hard facts with data and speaking about this in more personal ways that i believe are broadly relevant to our fellow human beings on like a species level so reverence for nature desire to eat eat well, desire to be active, desire to have healthy functioning ecosystems in which we can be participants. Those are those I believe for most people who have their their basics met, you know, folks who are otherwise they're covered and they have they have the

ability to think beyond just survival mode and it's important to acknowledge that for some people their reality is survival mode of people who have have survival mode box checked what we're talking about here around healthy land eating well active, getting a good dose of nature. I think those are like universally appealing. And I believe that based in part on my experience interacting with people from other countries that are far more ecologically degraded than ours is. Talking to people who have spent their whole lives living in urban centers in China about the recreational opportunities that we have here in North America

and having them say, I want to come do that with you sometime. And then having them come and experience that and having those experiences literally bring tears to people's eyes, like the story I was telling you earlier today about the deer hunt. So these are things that I believe are hardwired into us, and I think it's more about communicating on a personal emotional level

than it is presenting facts. But I agree the facts are relevant, Yanni. Yeah. I could rephrase it to, I guess appease you. So that it's more of just like exposing you. You're going to appease me? Yeah, so that you're like, yeah, Yanni, I like what you're saying.

So just like expose people to whatever we do. Don't try to educate them, but just expose them to what it is. And then let them make their own decision. I'm not going to be mad if they don't jump on my side and all of a sudden become the biggest conservationists and hunters in the, in, you know,

history of the United States. You remember how Michael Jordan quit basketball then like came back. Yeah. I'm back into this recording. I'm coming out of retirement hard. I quit earlier, right? But I'm back now.

And that's why we need caffeinated beverages around this table. I've gone to clarify that I am real comfortable with people who don't agree with me, especially if they have a good reason for it. A reason that I accept is valid. So it's complicated. Carl, thank you very much for joining us. Batman. Always glad to be here.

You always say things that make, despite all the shit I've been saying, you always say things that make me think a little bit different. Huh. Like I come out of the experience of talking to you every time a changed person. So thanks for that. Appreciate it, man. That's a great compliment and you're honest thank you hey pleasure to be here yeah and what a nice night oh my god dude glad you guys like the deck man that that means a lot too well the light pollution's low here so you can see the night sky beautiful if you've made it through this marathon podcast please go to itunes or wherever

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