The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 079: From Taxes to Trout

Episode Date: August 28, 2017

Steven Rinella talks with fisheries program manager Mike Ruhl, the pizza magnate Jimmy Doran; and Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew.Subjects Discussed: therapeutic wheat cutting in Montana; the end of establishing new non-native populations of sport fish; funding wildlife management; a brief history of the Dingell-Johnson and Pittman-Robertson Acts; the user-pay system; Pennsylvania: the 'huntin'est state'; managing native trout; 'horn-nose chub mussels'; managing ecosystems as a whole; slow-burning emergencies; John Mcphee's Annals of the Former World; the New Jersey cat lady rears her head...for the last time?; 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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without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We put the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. All right, before we get too started, Jimmy Dorn, you're fresh from the wheat fields of Montana. Yes, I'm just back, just the other day.

You go out every year and cut wheat? Every year on my friend's wheat farm, yeah. Do a couple weeks of harvests and just had a little break. Came back to the bar for a couple days, take care of the business at the restaurant. End of the month stuff and then right back to school. We just switched over from cutting winter wheat. Now we're moving on to spring wheat, which is still a little bit high in moisture. So it's worked out perfect.

Why and how? How many years have you been cutting wheat for? This is my fourth or third year. Okay. And it was one of my best friends, his family. I met him actually. We worked at a restaurant together here in Seattle. And his family runs a big wheat operation north of Great Falls.

Dan or there's really fantastic people in the Gazvotas. And we just went through a deal. And his father actually unfortunately passed away at a pretty young age and kind of you know it was kind of a it's like just kind of all hands on deck kind of thing so i went back and helped out and uh just love it i mean just driving a big old combine they trust me to drive all kinds of raccoons and antelopes yeah yeah definitely a little bit of wheat the raccoons get in the way occasionally uh but uh yeah they trust me driving really huge cool super expensive pieces of equipment and i just love it so tell me

how like give me the what's the volume again like how much wheat you cut how quick i couldn't really break it down how much how quick i mean we fill a lot of semis it's we can fill up like a 750 bushel hopper in minutes. I mean, it's a 45-foot header moving at three and a half. You're cutting a 45-foot swath. 45-foot swath at a time, yeah. Did you mow a lawn so fast? Oh, boy, it'd be quick. We cut 600 acres in just under a couple hours. It was pretty amazing.

When it's humming, we have three machines going, three combines and a grain cart, and we can just flat out knock it out is it getting hauled to a silo or is it going right to semi truck we have two different things you'll haul to grain silos yeah commercial operations and or we'll bin it and uh they speculate on prices and stuff like that we can wheat stores for quite a while so and uh just depends on where it's going what it is and you said i think we talked about it before that you kind of do it for therapeutic reasons oh man it gets me out of the city and uh away from the pizza business away from the pizza business so instead of like yoga and surf camp some of these wheat farmers might want to look into selling like uh

oh yeah dude's going to yoga you go to yoga retreats yeah they should go cut wheat yeah it is very therapeutic i mean you spend it's it's i don't want to sell it short it's a grind i mean Do we go to yoga retreats? Yeah. They should go cut wheat. Yeah, they should. Go cut wheat for a week. It is very therapeutic. I mean, you spend, it's, I don't want to sell it short. It's a grind. I mean, we cut from, you know, you wake up at six and you're servicing machines by 730 and then you're generally cutting by around nine and you work all day. And they, the cool thing is dinner in the field. And also you get these, you know, the cooler shows up around you.

You're just getting shit-faced up in that thing. Shit-faced up, that wouldn't be. Oh, not that kind of cooler, lunch cooler. Lunch cooler. Yeah, getting shithouse might not go over too well. There's really expensive gear, but I don't know. Yeah, and, you know, comes around, and you cut until dark. And then generally the rule is once these machines all have fantastic light arrays,

you could work all night if you wanted to. And generally we just fill up all the machines. Once it gets dark, dark, that's when we're just like, all right, just fill up the semis. And then we tarp them off overnight. And that's generally the end of the day but you'll generally cut from 9 a.m to generally around 10 30 11 p.m so it's it gets things start moving kind of wavy after you know 12 hours or so but man you need to do like later on you have to do like a memoir about wheat cutting. Oh, I love it.

I really do. And then, you know, the scenery is pretty cool. And I mean, you know, it's a climate controlled, you know, environment. You're sitting in air conditioning with an air chair and you have XM radio. And I download, you know, I've listened to 40 podcasts. But it still doesn't, you know, we did did we cut for 130 plus hours in 10 days i mean it's it's definitely a grind you close your eyes when you hit the sheets and you open them and it's time to go again it's just like you don't even feel like you get a break for real so at the end

of the year they just cut you big badass check and you walk out well we'll see about the badass part but yeah i definitely get comp drive off in a brand new truck gold i wish i wish no it's good they're super nice people and they've been you know i was a total greenhorn and it's like i'm the city guy showing up playing farmer and so they're you know they're nice enough to a trust me and b i take instruction i can learn pretty much anything pretty quick and you know they're like hey do this do that And they literally just kind of throw you to the wolves, man. They're like, all right, here you go. Don't wreck it because it's really expensive.

And then I take it from there. It's great. It's been a really fantastic learning experience, and I've met a lot of fantastic people. And farmers, I think, are some of the best people we got. It's been fantastic. I really enjoy it. And then Tuesday you head back, cut more wheat?

Tuesday I go back, yeah. I got my trucks at the, like I said, my trucks at the Great Falls Airport right now. Just got to go and get right back after it. And I think it's probably another 10 days to two weeks. And then we'll probably drink some beer and eat some steaks when it's all said and done. So, yeah, it's been great. I just, like I said, I love it. Just the nicest people and amazingly resilient.

And just something breaks, you don't just, you're 60 miles from anything. So it's not like you can just, I mean, guys know how to weld. This guy that I work with, you know, Josh and his brother-in-law, Brandon, they can literally fix anything. Like on the fly, like this crazy bracket broke on the combine I was driving. And this guy, Brandon, had a new one fabbed up, installed in like an hour and a half. Like just, oh, yeah, I got that. They're that kind of people.

And when stuff goes south, we had a big fire on the farm adjacent to ours, which is like just a disaster, right? You know, you watch your whole year's work go up in smoke. Oh, wheat fire. Wheat fire. And it's 95 degrees, and there's a 15 mile an hour wind i mean it is astonishing how fast a fire will move and how dangerous it is but like our wheat is still standing still standing wheat and there's actually some cut there's this lay down it's like swath i'm not exactly sure the technique for harvesting but so basically it's just like it's laid down in these long rows

just tender dry and it's just massive amount of fuel for the fire and I mean everybody drops everything from like a three mile radius and everybody you have to have it You know We have these big we drag a disker behind a tractor and we have a fire rig set up with you know Massive container water with a pump like a legit fire setup. And everybody just drops what they're doing, and it's like all hands on deck. Everybody shows up and puts out their neighbor's fire. It's really astonishing to see how everybody comes together.

It's pretty cool. That is nice. Yeah. No, it's solid. Their people are just good. Salt of the earth, just awesome folks. Any other questions? No, no, no no no but here in seattle if a if a competitor down the road if

another pizza guy down the road's place was burning down you'd just be like i'd lend a hand i would we're all in it together i like to think so yeah all right our other guests mike rule mike tell tell everybody what what your story is what you do for a living so i'm the native fish program manager for the new mexico department of game and fish and people are thinking new mexico has fish they do when i uh when i when i moved into that job i thought man this is probably going to be easy i don't think there's really any water in new mexico but uh turns out that's not true there's there any water in New Mexico. But it turns out that's not true. There's water in quite a few places and a whole lot of native fish that are pretty unique to that part of the world. But if you were to weigh up tonnages, let's say you had a giant pile that had all of the non-native fish in New Mexico.

And then next to it was a giant pile with all the native fish of new mexico which pile is bigger wow that's a tough one that is i probably non-native fish the bigger pile yeah based based mostly on on the reservoirs that we have yeah yeah why why do reservoirs tend to suck so bad for native fish well i, it's certainly not always true that they're bad for native fish, but... But it's like, you know, it just seems like everywhere you go, when you go to a reservoir, oftentimes you're fishing fish that aren't from the area. Yeah, so, I mean, definitely a couple of things at play. One, it's not the historic habitat that's there. You know, those native fish evolved in rivers, mostly.

And then you put a dam on the river and you create a lake. And so that's just not what they're adapted to. Gotcha, yeah. And then, of course, the other thing is, you know, the introduction of non-native fish, both intentionally and accidentally over the years, including, you know, non-native fish that we like to fish for. Yeah, because it's probably a big thing with, you deal with the non-natives that you want,

and there's the non-natives you don't want. I think, like, where I grew up in the Great Lakes, the non-natives you don't want are getting almost as numerous as the non-natives people did want. Yeah, I mean, all the carp, gobies, right? Right. All these things that completely rewrite the landscape, the deleterious non-natives. At the same time, they're also trying to establish more and more of the ones they you know five species of four species of pacific salmon in the great lakes that's a tremendous amount of money that goes into

putting those fish in there yeah you know i'd i'd like to think anyway we're mostly done in most places trying to establish new populations of non-native fish um but of course you're right you know salmon and and other fish to support them that got established in the great lakes are a thing um you're saying that mostly like we as a culture are mostly done trying to establish non-native fisheries yeah i think i mean i think here in the united states for sure that's true i don't know about elsewhere in the world i think for the most part i mean that doesn't mean that we don't continue to support some non-native fisheries but but as far as uh

you know bringing in a lot of new non-native fish at least in the public waters um that's lower that's low priority yeah you know i'm not familiar certainly not in new mexico with you know with efforts to do that yeah to like get more walleye going or more whatever going right yeah you know a thing we want to talk about is um like i think i think a lot a lot of people that hunt fish don't realize is how wildlife management gets funded. And I'm going to set this up real quick. Then after I get done setting it up, you go with or don't go with. You can say where I was wrong or right.

Sure. was wrong or right sure but in so if you were to look at american history um in a wildlife perspective we came in you might say like euro-american culture european culture came to the u.s what's now the u.s and we spent a couple hundred years almost systematically, but not quite intentionally, depopulating wildlife in the country. To the point where we got to around the turn of the century, the early 1900s, and we'd kind of almost wiped out virtually everything. And then at that time, there was a big push to try to find a way to recover game animals and one of the biggest things that happened there's two stages in recovering wild wildlife in america there's like two stages that happened to it well let's for our purpose we'll say there's three stages one of the stages was setting aside land and habitat.

And Theodore Roosevelt kind of ran point on that idea, just like establishing landscapes where you're creating land that if there were animals, that's where the animals would be, setting aside habitat. Another stage in this was trying to stop the bleeding which was basically a war against market hunters so trying to de-incentivize or otherwise make illegal the raping and pillaging of the land and water by people who were collecting animals to sell, be it for the feather, trade, wild meat, wild fish. So that was another step that we had to take was to stop market hunters. And the third step was to build stuff back up again.

Eventually the question comes up, right? How are we going to pay for wildlife recovery in this country? And one of the first things, kind of like one of the big things that happened in wildlife recovery in this country and one of the first things we're kind of like one of the big things that that happened in wildlife recovery happened in 1930s right and it was originally called the wildlife restoration act yeah i mean they the the two acts that you're going to talk about i think you know we commonly refer to as pitman roberobertson and Dingell-Johnson are actually, Pittman-Robertson is the Wildlife Restoration Act and Dingell-Johnson is the Sport Fish Restoration Act. We often put those two things together and call

them the Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration Acts. In fact, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has offices that we shorten even further and call them the WSFR offices, short for Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration. Those are the offices that administer those federal excise taxes. But the portion of that that became Pittman-Robertson happened much earlier. That's a good question. You're probably actually more familiar with the intimate history of the acts than I am. My knowledge kind of starts with

they came into existence in 1937 and then have been amended various times throughout history. Regardless of what is the gap, let me real quick lay out the background on it so franklin roosevelt he goes around like he had a big conservation bent like theodore did and franklin roosevelt goes around and he in the 30s he's going around and this is like the you know during the great depression he's going around explaining there's this rod and gun clubs around the country people who are interested in in hunting and fishing he's going around and explaining to them if so if this is going to happen if we're going to recover american wildlife

you guys are going to have to do it and they come up with this idea that we're going to put an excise tax on guns and ammunition and hunting equipment to the tune of like 10 or 11 percent and the sportsmen who are going to be paying the tax it's a very targeted tax just on people that hunt and they're overwhelmingly enthusiastic about it the The industry people, the people who are producing guns and ammunition, who are going to theoretically lose sales due to the fact that their goods are not going to be 10% or 11% more expensive, are enthusiastic supporters of this Wildlife Restoration Act idea. And the thing goes from introduction to the president's signature in 90 days.

Now, the Affordable Care Act took over a year to give you a sense of how quickly this thing went through with overwhelming support. And it wound up that they're just taking, when you buy guns and ammo, you get taxed on it. That tax, we're going to talk about how this works. That money is the money that went into recovering American wildlife. Yeah, right. It's what's called a user pay system. So, you know, it's in sportsmen's best interest to have healthy wildlife and fish populations in the landscape. And in order to foster that, the idea was that the users would help to pay for it. Meaning that it's going to favor...

Well, we'll get into that. The criticism that it just favors game animals. Yeah, and we can talk about that at any point you want to. The reality is the acts are a little bit different in how they're specifically focused. I mean, yeah. Let me clarify, though. The one I'm talking about became Pittman-Robertson. Following that or not, what did you find out?

Oh, sorry. You didn't clarify the question, so I didn't look anything up. What are you talking about? You're supposed to look up what year did Dingle Johnson happen? Okay. Now, Dingle Johnson's a real strange name. Pittman Robertson, you know, he kind of like... Right.

There's like an austerity to it, right? But Dingle Johnson is just like... I would have picked a different name. Well, I think it's... Personally. It's just like Pittman Robertson named after the two sponsors of the bill. Yeah, no, no, and God bless him. But I just would have said, like, you know, considering that it's Dingle and Johnson, we're going to go with different names. I don't expect you to have a stated opinion on that. But can you lay out what,

take it from the perspective of the dude who likes to hunt and fish, what stuff is he buying that is going into these funds? So specifically what kinds of products? Yeah, like when you buy sporting goods, what exact stuff are you buying that you're paying such a humongous tax that then goes into wildlife funding? what's on the list yeah so there's i mean there's a uh there's a huge list of things it it really largely comes down for for pitman robertson a lot of it is guns and ammunition um It's archery equipment, reloading supplies, I believe.

Archery equipment is in there? Yes. Yep. Some gunsmithing, I believe, if gunsmiths are actually building guns. Muzzle loaders. So it's really most of the common things that we think of. But not backpacks and stuff. No, that's correct.

It's super specific. Yeah, that's correct. It's super specific. Yeah, that's right. And then what is it in the fishing end of things? So fishing is pretty similar in that it's the things that you would think of. It's rods and reels and lures. So the very specific stuff. Right. The one that's pretty important to sport fish that most folks don't

know about is that that there's an excise tax on boat fuel so yeah but boat fuel is just i mean unleaded gas yeah that's correct but depends on where it's sold exactly and i'm not i'm not entirely sure how they calculate what counts as boat fuel you know if uh there's some small percentage of all the fuel that's sold that's considered to be boat fuel or if it's just what's sold on marina docks, for instance, or close to reservoirs. But there's a substantial portion of what comes through the Sport Fish Restoration Act. Coming from boat games. Yeah, I mean, it's an important component.

Yeah. So I know that the Pittman-Robertson funds that right now, so again, right now when you go out and buy guns, ammunition, all this kind of stuff, reloading stuff, archery equipment, muzzleloading stuff, you're paying a heavy-ass tax on those goods. And right now, I think on average now, it raises about a billion dollars a year go into that fund. Yeah, I think the, I'm going to go into government speak here,

the fiscal year 2017, I believe $780 million is the number that I got in front of me coming through, just through Pittman Robertson, just through the wildlife restoration. $780 million? Yes. From one fiscal year. Right. And does that stay pretty steady every year? You know, I don't have the history in front of me.

It went up. I think almost everybody knows the story of what happened during the Obama administration. Can I tell the story? Yeah, go ahead. All right. So there's different ways to spin this i'm gonna try to find a way that rolls into different spins on it so okay um now this is me talking not mike uh obama people know it's not like uh the the gun the the firearms industry did not find a kindred spirit in Obama. And there was a lot of fear throughout the eight years of his presidency

that we would be having some draconian anti-gun measures enacted. And it prompted a lot of people to go out and buy firearms and buy ammo for fear that their right to do so might be infringed upon in the very near future. And it caused a legit gun rush. I think that handgun sales went up 500% under his administration. And so all that gun buying, some people called him, jokingly called him America's best gun salesman, and other people talked about his conservation legacy because it blew up Pittman-Robertson funding. Because every time someone goes out and buys a handgun for home defense, by the way this law is written, 10% or 11% of that purchase price goes into funding wildlife. So it was like the good old days for eight years.

And then gun purchases, with the new administration coming in, gun purchases plummeted almost instantaneously. So I think now there's some austere times coming. Yeah, that's entirely possible i mean we haven't it'll be it'll be fiscal year 18 when when uh when we see those new numbers but whether yeah because the real big drive around that is guns and ammunition i mean as far as like the percentages go so yeah because because because obama fueled such a gun buying frenzy he He fueled like some major conservation spending. I even saw where one magazine, like a very pro Obama magazine, had it be like as sort of building in it as part of his, like I said, his conservation legacy. Even though it's completely like the Department of Unintended Consequences, right?

It was like not the goal. If that was the goal and you were that shrewd of a poker player i have to like hand it to you if you're like well how could i get more money to fund wildlife i don't know i'll do i'll act like i'm gonna get rid of guns but not really that's shrewd no one plays that kind of poker you got no yeah i got no i mean i got no i wouldn't think so i would just say that it's been a good thing for for conservation funding yeah so okay so there's 780 million now how much comes up from the taxes on fishing gear you got that yeah so it's it's about 350 million less yeah but there's twice as many fishermen yeah you. Because fishermen are like, I was having this conversation the other day.

Twice as many people buy fishing licenses, but they're not as obsessive. Right. There's more weekend folks that don't fish year-round like people who are real dedicated with hunting. Yeah. year-round like you know like people who are real dedicated with hunting yeah like when you talk when you talk about hunting and fish like hunter numbers in america and fisher numbers in america all they're looking at is uh they're just looking at who bought a license what happens after the guy buys the license you have no idea so you count up and be like i can't remember what it is there's 30 million like i don't know some years i think like around 30 million americans buy a fishing license

but they could be buying three-day licenses in order to go out one time. So twice as many fishermen are only paying half as much excise taxes on stuff. Fishing routes are like $100, $100 rifles are $1,000. So maybe it's just a question of ticket price. Could be. Maybe. question of ticket price could be maybe so there so that money um so we got like what you're buying it pays this stuff this is something everybody has to do where does that like what's the path that money takes in order to then go into like actual fish and wildlife spending. Yeah, so I guess one thing to note there is that the excise tax is in the price

that you see on the gun rack, right? Yeah, you don't get like an itemized bill that shows that part of it. Yeah, if you walk up to the counter and they charge a tax, that's not the tax that we're talking about. It's already built into the price of the item um so that money essentially goes into a pot of money that is administered by the u.s fish and wildlife service and then from there do the pots get blended or the pot stay separate they stay separate the hunting pot and the fishings pot go to u.s fish and wildlife service but they stay hunting and fishing that's correct

yeah yeah i mean there you know there are different there are different rules for both pots of money um in terms of how things get doled out to the states and and territories and the district of columbia um so they stay separate and then uh essentially what happens is the fish and wildlife service runs their formula for how much each state is going to get from each program every year what's that i want to talk about that but what I forget. What'd you find out? Did you find it out? 1950. Dingle Johnson. Yeah. Some odd year, 12 years, 13 years later.

Here's another thing to look up. Do you remember when a guy told us how much Federal and Savage when they have to cut their check, their Pittman-Robertson check? That's a ridiculous amount of money. Yeah, I don't know if I was there for that conversation, though. No, you were on the email.

I'll find it. Okay. I'll look. Yeah, some guy was telling us what a company like that, Federal Ammunition, how much ammo they sell. It's got to be a lot. At the end of the year, you write a check

for tens and tens of millions of dollars. Just think about how much Federal I shoot every year. It's nuts. All right. What is the goal? How do you calculate that out? What are they looking at to say, okay, here's what states get what? Is it how many dudes hunting fish there?

Yeah, that's part of it. Like I said, they're a little bit different at their heart. They are both about two things. One is land area, so how big the state is, and the other is how many licensed buyers there are. There's a little bit of complexity and nuance and we could we could spend a week talking about that but for wildlife restoration act um it's 50 percent land area and it's 50 percent number of paid licensed hunters now so who are the big winners there well i you know i got to imagine i could i could look at the list but

you know i have to imagine a state like texas which has a huge land area and a huge number of hunters would would really come out high but there is an additional rule in there which is that no state can receive more than five percent of the total or less than one oh i got you so it it keeps it from from you know having one state really dominate i grew up in pennsylvania that pennsylvania would probably be another one that if if you base anything off the number of of licensed hunters in a state you know would would really get a big share oh yeah because they are pennsylvania often buys for like the hunting estate yeah i per capita but just total numbers of licenses right so you always hear like pennsylvania

michigan texas yeah they they used to say when when i was a kid you know they said there there were a million people in the woods on the first day of rifle deer season every year so i i had i looked it up recently um i i believe in the last couple years they fell below a million licenses sold but but that million number is a threshold that that not many places i think texas i think for a couple years ago five to ten years ago maybe pennsylvania was was number one right there and now it's fallen behind to Texas a little bit. Fallen behind Texas. Yeah.

So did you say, again, just to back up, did you say it winds up being how many people buy a hunting license or how many people live in the state? No, it's how many people buy a license. It is number of paid licensed hunters. So it's land area, 50% land area, and 50% number of licensed hunters. So then they take the big giant pool of money the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service does, or the three-quarters of a billion dollars, 800 million, whatever it is. They take that, and then they run their calculation, and they wind up saying, let's use New Mexico. They wind up saying, okay, here's New Mexico's chunk.

And what is New Mexico's chunk? This is all public information. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you can, I mean, if you do a web search for sport fish and wildlife restoration acts, you'll end up at the Fish and Wildlife Service website. And all of this is readily available. Yeah, yeah. So New Mexico, make sure I'm on the right line in the table here,

looks like $15 million, $15.5 million in fiscal year 17 from the Wildlife Restoration restoration act so from pitman robertson and what from the fishing i think it's about it's six six point one so 21 and a half million combined and so the feds then they don't just like turn around and write you a check for 21 and a half million and say go for it yeah and so this this was really one of the things that i wanted to talk about you know we talked a little bit about the history of the act and and like i mentioned i'm you know i'm not the the greatest student of that history i'm i come at this more from a pragmatic standpoint of of how we do this

and how the money really works and how it flows and where it goes. And so what happens is the states write grants. I mean, we know how much money is going to be granted to us or how much money is available for those grants but we write grants to but you know like but you know you're going to get it we know we know we're going to get it i mean the the fish and wildlife service you know reviews the grants to ensure that the projects meet the rules that the acts put in place yeah you know so so there's a process step there that has to be done. But, you know, we still have to write the grants,

and then we report to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at the end on what we did with the money. But, you know, one of the real interesting nuances of how this works is that both programs, as well as some other federal grant programs are reimbursement programs so the state while while we do write a grant and the fish and wildlife service does come back hopefully and say yes you know go ahead you can spend money on that the state spends the money first and then once we've spent it we apply for reimbursement but where do you get in the first place so almost all of that money in especially in a state like new mexico comes from the sale of hunting and fishing licenses. So the licensed buyer pays for the projects up front

and then gets reimbursed for a portion of the money that has already been spent. Can you real quick give people a sense of what these projects are? Well, I mean, it's tough because they're really broad in scope and scale. We use the money to do all kinds of things. Habitat restoration is one thing, you know, both for fish and wildlife. You know, we do surveys. We monitor populations of fish and wildlife statewide um on the fishery side of

things we do things like operate our state fish hatcheries using this money uh specifically in the the program that i work in we do we we work with our native fish, particularly our native trout. Both Gila trout and Rio Grande cutthroat trout are considered sport fish. So even though Gila trout is listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, we're still able to use Dingle Johnson money to work on it. So it is... To do research and habitat improvement. Right. To try to recover the fish.

Yeah. Yeah. And so to a large degree, it covers most of the breadth of the biology stuff that the agency does. And so, you know, I do want to I don't want to move on before I mention one thing, which is that most states work like New Mexico, where almost all of our revenue comes through license sales. You're not getting money just from the general taxpayer in New Mexico. That's right. And most states work that way. There are exceptions.

I believe Missouri and Arkansas are two exceptions that, while, of course, they still get money through licensed sales, they also get other monies, sales tax revenue or general fund monies. But most states are like us, and we say that we're an enterprise agency, which essentially means that we generate our own revenue. Yeah, I had read somewhere that, so the country has 50 state fishing game agencies obviously i read somewhere that their budgets so all of the work that goes into wildlife at a state level which basically all states every state manages virtually all the wildlife in their state with some exceptions when you get into into things that are listed as endangered species,

but states manage their own wildlife. And across the board, all states' budgets, all the money they use for wildlife, game and non-game, so just like all wildlife in the state, is paid for 60 to 90%,

depending on which state, is paid for by people buying hunting and fishing licenses or by people paying taxes on hunting and fishing gear. Like the hunters and anglers foot the whole thing, virtually. The hunters and anglers, through buying licenses, certainly foot a big proportion of it. I don't have an agency-wide number like that. I mean, there are things that you can pay for using Sport Fish and Wildlife Restoration Act monies.

We call those reimbursable expenses and other things that you can't. So you can't reimburse for law enforcement expenses and obviously that's a substantial component of what a lot of you know agencies do so you're actually paying game wardens you can't use federal funds for that right that's correct that's got to come out of your license sales it does and so one of the other things that the acts prohibit are really anything that generates revenue so we can't use the money to sell licenses so the the staff and the infrastructure and everything else that's actually selling licenses is not reimbursable expenses hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy my, do we hear from the Canadians

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And I want to, I want to get back to the, to just to, to the, to the part you're talking about where you're doing paying out of pocket and then applying for grants. But just real quick, a thing,

a problem that used to happen that this corrected is it used to be that states would, some states, the state fish and game agency would make money. They would raise funds by selling hunting and fishing licenses. But then the states would pilfer those accounts. And if a state removes hunting and fishing license revenue from its state fishing game agency, doesn't the state then become ineligible for the federal money? Like there's rules that come with the federal money. There are. And, you know, we call it the anti-diversion portion of the bill. So the acts basically say what you just said, which is that if a state is to be eligible to receive the money,

they cannot transfer that license sale money outside of the agency to do other unrelated things. So they can't divert the money for other purposes. They can't take it and put it you know in their general fund to be spent on roads or something yeah it has to be your so your license money stays on mission right which is really i mean that was a absolutely brilliant thing to build into the axe that's what i was just thinking it's like man they really like nailed the like the game plan with this one yeah then greg blast but his favorite part of it is, is if the money doesn't get used in two years,

it just gets rolled into migratory birds, I think. Yeah. He likes that little final button on it. Yeah, I actually just listened to that episode again, and I was thinking about that one this morning, actually, that if folks wanted to, that would be a great one to listen to before this to kind of start thinking about why that revenue is important before you sort of get into the mechanics of how it all works. So how crippling is it that you guys got to pay up front and then get reimbursed later? Why can't they just give you the money up front?

Well, you know, I don't know. How do they expect you to have the money? I think that agencies, I mean, I think this has been going on, I don't know the early history with agencies, but I think this has been going on so long at this point that agencies are, you know, have just learned to plan for this as it currently stands. I think New Mexico Department of Game and Fish is doing just fine with that. But just moving the money around.

Yeah. Taking money that everything would go for, doing a project with it, you're going to get it back later. And when you get it back, you can use it for things that the federal funds aren't eligible for yeah you know i'm not i'm not a hundred percent sure that that but that that's exactly right that it's it's not necessarily that we wait to get it back and then use it for things that it's not eligible for i think it just all comes back into you know our our big fun when it comes back yeah so walk me through the process of like i did like how walk me through the like follow a dollar right so there's a dollar in this pool how does it come that that dollar winds up going to to to

fish and wildlife like in in a case scenario like something you've been involved in. So once it gets to the agency? Yeah, like I'm saying, like walk me through the process of a state identifying something they'd like to do. Right, so we say, hey, we have a Rio Grande Cutler Trout project that we want to work on. Here's what it is. We write up the grant grant we send the grant to fish and wildlife service they come back and say okay you're approved and um how long does that

take you know it depends um usually a couple months i mean there's there's kind of grant cycles that are that are tied with these things that most folks understand what they are and when things need to be turned in to fit in both the state and the federal fiscal year. So they usually turn them around pretty fast. And so then once we get approval, know there's the grant code set up and uh if you go work on that real gandhi cutler trout restoration project um you come back and you report that time that you worked or if you buy stuff for the project or whatever it is um you report it that way and then we have a federal aid office so new mexico department of game and fish employees who who work on this stuff full-time financial specialists um they gather all that information

up they send it to the fish and wildlife service you know to document that the agency spent the money and then the fish and wildlife service sends back the reimbursement portion, which for both sports fish and wildlife is 75%. So we get reimbursed. They don't pay back 100%? No. No, we get reimbursed for 75% of the cost. Is it competitive? Is there some bigger hand at the state level that says like, okay, we have $15 million to work with here.

Let's figure out how we're going to spread this around. Are you competing? Are your grants competing against other people within the state? In that sense, it's all within our agency. So, you know, you could view it as there is some competition in that way where, you know, upper level management like the chiefs from Fisheries and Wildlife and the other divisions, you know, would talk about the projects that are on the docket and how they're going to spend that money. Now, of course, because the acts are separate, because one's for sport fish and one's for wildlife, generally the wildlife division is going to decide how to spend their portion of it,

and they do that in consultation with, you know with our administration, our director. So by that I mean, let's say you know there's $15 million available. They're not sending over $25 million in grant requests. To the Fish and Wildlife Service? Yeah, they're sending over $15 million in grant requests. We work that out internally. Yeah, okay. All right.

So you're never fighting against the guy down the hall? No. All right. You got to go make your case right at the for the state level yes that's correct yeah so what was the next part of that now because i interrupted you about that i don't know where we were 75 percent reimbursement oh yeah yeah why like how's that come up that? That it won't do 100? Well, I mean, I think that the idea is that the state is vested in its own projects. Okay. I mean, we ultimately are still, I mean, we're accountable right up front in spending the money, but, you know, I think it's also a mechanism by It's also a mechanism, you know, by which we own a portion of, of what's been spent.

And, you know, I, we have a lot of pride in the projects that, that we do. So what is it with, I noticed when you're talking about this, you're saying wildlife, but then sport fish. So Pittman, again, like it just in lingo, just for the listener in lingo, we've come to talk about the wildlife restoration act is known Pittman-Robertson, again, just in lingo, just for the listener, in lingo we've come to talk about the Wildlife Restoration Act. It is known, Pittman-Robertson, because that's like two people whose name were applied to the bill, like two people pushed for the bill. That's game and non-game animals. Yeah, so wildlife is defined by the act as birds and mammals so why is the fishing one

sport fish that's a good question i mean um so if there's like a chub that people don't regard a native chub that people don't regard as a sport fish. You can't use that money on it. It has to be a sport fish. Yeah, that's right. That seems kind of like, it seems like, not quite cynical, but it seems like a little bit

where you're opening yourself up for some pretty heavy criticism. Well, you know, even there, there's a couple nuances. One is that the state has some role in defining a sport fish. Okay. So, you know, there are places where a round-tailed chub are considered sport fish. Not in New Mexico, but there are places.

I believe Arizona defines round-tailed chzona defines as a sport fish um the other thing is when when we go out and do work for sport fish and some sport fish are native you know i mentioned i mentioned the two trout species and and actually you know down in in southeast new mexico there's there's a lot of native fish there's largemouth bass and other things down there. But when we go out and do surveys, even if they're sport fish surveys, we're almost always learning something about the fish community as a whole. So even though the work may be focused on sport fish, there are ancillary benefits to other native fish, non-game fish got you and then you know it's not totally discriminatory against non-game no not totally but well and i would think if you're studying habitat

then you know whatever you learn about habitat it's going to be beneficial to all exactly or or doing habitat improvement projects are often good for everything. And so a big chunk of what happens with my team and my program is done through other federal aid grant programs that have similar mechanics but different sources of of of funding give me for instance so there's really two programs that we use all the time um there is some funding that comes through the fish and wildlife service to work on endangered species called endangered species section six funding um and so you know one of the hot button issues that we're working on right now we also in my program work on aquatic invertebrates you know um we're working with a native muscle called the texas horn shell there's a a lot of uh things swirling around right now

with listing for that animal like that it'll get threatened or endangered. Yeah, it's actually, they're about to publish the final rule. And so we've been, we've been working on, on one getting the best understanding that we can of what's going on with it. We've also been trying out some, some new conservation approaches to try to repatriate it to some historic habitat places where it's not currently found. And then we've also been working with the Fish and Wildlife Service and private landowner and business folks to work on what's called a candidate conservation agreement with

assurances. It's essentially a conservation agreement that folks can enter into before an animal gets listed so that to try to head off getting listed well it's not it's not that particular agreement it's not necessarily so much about the animal not getting listed as it is about laying out what will happen if it does okay so that muscle lives in the permian basin and if you google search the permian basin the thing that you'll see pop up is probably about oil and gas development okay and so you know those businesses are interested in understanding what will happen and and and so through this process they get assurances about what's going to happen if the animal gets listed. And they probably get real interested in having it not get listed. Well, you know, I mean...

Like as far as like supporting the paying for biology or no? Yeah, well, they, I mean, through this program, they support conservation by paying into a fund to to ultimately help recover the animal if it gets listed or continue to to work on it as it goes through the process what what tell me about the animal the one you're talking about right now texas horn shell yeah um you know it's a muscle it's a it's i believe it's the only remaining freshwater muscle in new mexico it it lives uh in the black river which is a tributary to the Pecos River in southeastern New Mexico. It's got an interesting life history in that it lives up under these mud banks that overhang the river and under rock ledges and stuff.

So it's actually kind of fun to go sample for it. You jump in the river and swim around the banks and feel up under the banks trying to find a thing. How big are they? They get up to, I don't know, I'd say maybe five inches the long way across the shell. And it looks like a kind of mussel you'd get in a restaurant? It looks kind of like that. I mean, it's a bivalve mussel know similar to what folks would be familiar with there and why are they suffering are they intolerant of pollution um you know water quality is an issue and of course water quantity

is an issue as well or so drawing water off lowers water levels and that screws them yeah it if uh if water levels drop below where they uh where they live up under the banks they don't they don't fare so well gotcha so let's say you identify um i i mean you specifically but kind of like address this as you as in just people that work at state fishing game state fishing game agencies you identify a thing like let's say with with this muscle you're like man if i had you know a couple hundred thousand dollars i could there's this idea i'd really like to try what is it like when you go and present how competitive is it when you go within agency to present your plan? Like, do you have to have your shit dialed in when you go in to present your idea because it's a competitive environment?

It's more of a negotiation, I would say, than a competition. Okay. We talk about all the priorities that the agency may have for using that funding. And, you know, I mean, I would note we're really, we're talking about when we talk about Sport Fish Restoration Act money, you know, millions of dollars, it's bounced up and down a little bit, but the ESA Section 6 funding has been around $200,000 in federal money a year.

So much, much smaller pot of money. And the other program that I wanted to mention is the state wildlife grant program. If you look, most states have what's called a state wildlife action plan, which is a plan that they develop in concert with the Fish and Wildlife Service, and that's tied to another grant program. That is more, I believe it's currently in the $800,000 a year neighborhood. So for non-game fish and invertebrates, those are two pots of money that we draw on. What funds those? Where does that money come from?

They're money from Congress, tax revenue money. So that's the general pool money. Yeah. So when you have an idea, you're not in there fighting the guy down the aisle. No. I don't know why I'm obsessed with this idea. I just feel like there there's gotta be a

lot of people that want the money there i mean there there is there you know to some degree there's there's long-standing programs that money goes to yeah like some guys pissed because he's got some glamorous thing that draws in all the money that doesn't happen well i mean like all those sheep those desert bighorn sheep guys sure gobble up a lot of money but see those those folks can use pittman robertson money so they're not you know they're not a direct in these more limited all right so is it that those trout guys gobble up a lot of money well i mean again that would be that would be DJ money eligible. So it's really a smaller group of folks in the agency that work on things that are not reimbursable against PR and DJ money.

And I guess I've honestly never thought much about this. Maybe it's in part because my team gets a lot of that a lot of that funding you know on the wildlife side um the herpetology stuff reptiles and amphibians you know they they use that money as well and then you know with uh so particularly for that's particularly true for the esaSA funding. For the state wildlife grant funding, we have another division called Ecological and Environmental Planning. And that division also works with a lot of state wildlife grant money. But, you know, I feel like those lines are relatively clearly drawn. And, you know, there is conversation and negotiation every year

about how that money is going to be spent. But it's, you know, it's not gladiatorial. Yeah, I got you. So do you feel like you're well-funded all in all? I do. Really? Yeah. So here's a government guy and he's not going to complain to me

about he doesn't get enough money. No, you know, I... You're able to do what you need to do. I think that we currently absolutely have as many projects going, as many fully funded projects going as we could do. You know, if we had more folks in the program, we could take on more stuff. But right now, we're very busy doing a number of projects across the state jimmy dorn you got any questions up to this point none just everything's been just kind of sit what's the part you thought was the most interesting um basically the breakdown

between the amount of money that's gleaned off of sales of firearms. I mean, I just had kind of a not a really strong knowledge and background. I'm just amazed that there's that kind of revenue, $750 million. I was wondering if they put it – I was going to ask if money gets put away if it's not all spent, but you said it's rolled into migratory. It's got to be spent on mission. It's got to be spent instead of having a nice big war chest somewhere where we've got to spend it on mission. It's got to be spent instead of having a nice big war chest somewhere where we've got to spend it. Well, that's good.

It seems like it's going to good use. I like the idea of our funding our own deal. We can't say, how do I say it eloquently? We're paying for what we're getting. That strikes home. That's good. But that becomes controversial to some people. Why is that? Because here's a criticism that you hear floated around.

Mike, you might speak to this or not. The criticism being that they'll even use, like a fishing game agency, you'll hear their language of like, our customers. Okay? So someone who just, let's say you have a person that doesn't hunt and fish and they live in a state and they enjoy wildlife. There is some resentment with some people

that the agency that's responsible for managing and handling all wildlife in that state views it as though they're doing it to service a customer base who's actually paying for it now i would argue that makes sense to me these are the people who are funding it so they should have a bigger say or have their interests served as a higher priority than people who aren't funding it. But some people feel like a state shouldn't be in that situation.

They shouldn't be looking at, if your job is to manage wildlife, you shouldn't be doing it through the lens of servicing your customers, meaning of emphasizing or paying special attention to the things that they like to go out and shoot and catch. That they would point to there's inordinate spending on elk, turkeys, trout, walleyes, and a lack of attention and a lack of funding and a lack of management brought to horn-nosed chub muscles. Right? Because the customers don't care.

Right. Or don't care as much. I like that it's broad, that it's not just specific to stuff that we hunt, but it's also the money's just distributed all around. Sounds good to me. But it's also the money's just distributed all around. Sounds good to me. But it's not. A lot of attention is paid to the things that the customers are interested in. I'm a devil's advocate.

I'm just saying that that makes people uneasy when they view it being their customers. It would be like this. Imagine you're the governor of a state. You would never say, well, rich people pay a lot more taxes. I'm more interested in doing the kind of stuff that helps rich people out. Now, that would not fly well as a campaign rally. No, it would not.

But fishing game agencies, some people feel a fish and game agency is basically saying that by managing wildlife mike do you care to speak to this well i mean you know i i guess not your own opinion but just like would you care to add any flavor or texture well no i i mean you know i i think i think that to some degree that's a misinterpretation of what we do. Me being the guy complaining, you don't agree with that complaint? That's not a valid complaint? I think I understand where folks are coming from when they believe that what we do is manage sport fish and wildlife, and that we just do that for a customer,

and all that we're doing is trying to increase populations of things that you can hunt and fish for. I empathize with that. I think I can see why people might see that, but I think that the reality is a lot different and you know that i mean that's really why i wanted to come on today was you know to to talk about you know how it is that we pay for conservation and and why why we manage non-game fish and wildlife can you answer like can you just answer that in a sentence why yeah is it a mandate well i don't know that i can answer it in a sentence um i think there's you know there's okay big long set a big long bunch of sentences together well there's about a half a dozen reasons

why we do it i mean one new mexico like most states you know has in law in statute that their fish and game agencies are supposed to manage fish and wildlife and there may be nuances in how they define those things but they often include lots of stuff that's not you know game or sport fish animals so that's sort of you know first reason there reason there's this legal reason, right? Yep. The second reason we do it, and I believe... But let's stop, because I want to talk about the legal reasons. So you're saying a state has that, knowing that the money is going to come from,

knowing that the money is coming from hunters and fishermen, they still, like, with that bit of knowledge, they still have it written in that you have to manage all wildlife i mean i don't know what the consideration originally was when it went into statute and in terms of where the funding would come from but yes it is you know we have a statutory obligation to manage fish and wildlife it could be sued for not doing it i i suppose we could yeah okay so there's the legal reason right so you know there's there's the ethical reason and and i genuinely believe that this one is important to a lot of people in our

agency that you know managing ecosystems as a whole is the right thing to do trying to pass on our natural history as intact as possible is the right thing to do. So that's an ethical argument for why we do it. And you feel that that sentiment is held, that's like a widespread belief within agencies. I do, yeah. Because you guys didn't just all get into it because a huge paycheck we it's a great it's a great way to make a living it really is but it is it is uh not one that necessarily comes with lots of zeros yeah i got you so you know the third

reason is the ecological argument right so if we want healthy populations of the kind of things that we like to hunt and fish for out in the landscape they're part of an ecosystem you you never know what's going to happen when one thing or another disappears you you never know you know what might cause things to fall apart from an ecosystem level it's you know it's it's the aldo leopold intelligent tinkering quote right you know um so we want to preserve all the cogs and wheels from an ecological standpoint so that's you know reason number three that the ecological argument that it's it's good overall to have healthy functioning ecosystems and all the things that go with them because of the interconnectedness of it all right yeah that's

that's what i think about a lot i think a lot of people that hunt fish and look at wildlife through that lens of just like are there a lot of deer around right now or not like was it a good deer season or not because i sat in my deer blind two days and i want to know if i saw more deer last year than the year before like if you have like that limited of a view of wildlife i think that oftentimes you can kind of miss some bigger pictures about things and we're spending some time talking about this not long ago where like in the in the 90s in the 80s and 90s like we we were of changing in this country. In the middle of the country, we were changing some practices of how we were growing grain. And tilling up more land and growing more grain

and experimenting with new fertilizers that allow us to grow much more grain in places that we hadn't traditionally grown grain. And this went on in the 80s and 90s and kind of rewrote the map on grain production in the U.S. And that caused a massive explosion of snow geese to the point where snow geese populations quadrupled and then went beyond that. All of those snow geese spend their time, they summer and nest in the Arctic. And they started to decimate grasslands on the Arctic slope.

And another thing that happened from this explosion of snow geese decimating grasslands and leading to the incursion of salt water into because as they destroy the grass and the rhizomal systems salt water would come up and entirely change plant communities on the arctic slope and meanwhile polar bears were figuring out this new resource and in hudson's bay you had polar bears that are eating hundreds of pounds of snow geese eggs and not eating things that they used to eat before, changing their whole diet around to accommodate or to account for this new resource. So you realize that some dude tilling ground in North Dakota to grow barley has such wide-reaching effects on wildlife.

The Aldo Leopold idea that when you pull a lever, it's not happening in a vacuum. You're changing many things along with it. Right. I think a lot of people fail to realize that when they talk about species that are that we pay attention to or don't pay attention to. You can't just have this sort of willy-nilly idea that you're just going to

let things vanish or trash certain things and not have it be felt in strange, weird ways elsewhere. Yeah. Yeah, ecosystems are complex things. and not have it be felt in strange, weird ways elsewhere. You know? Yeah. Yeah, ecosystems are complex things. That are much bigger than you think they are.

Much, much bigger. And generally much more complex. Because you can't anticipate. Right. Yeah, like things that... And you have to get over the idea, too. I think people have to get over the idea that we're done making mistakes. There's sort of a cockiness that comes where we laugh about shit we used to do.

But right now, we just haven't found out yet. We're making big mistakes right now that we'll later realize we're laughably stupid. Well, as a fisheries manager, I, you know, I, I hope that we continue to get better. I mean, you know, we have a lot more science than we did when a lot of things were happening. And, and, you know, the introduction of non-native species has been such a big thing in the fisheries world for native fish. And, you know, we talked about it earlier that that those kind of things

really are not happening on on the scale if they're happening at all they're they're not happening on the scale that they were so it's it's true a hundred years ago fisheries management was largely about you know getting fish out in the landscape for people to catch and that meant you know anywhere that you could get a trout from and go stock it that that was a good thing particularly if you could establish new populations you know people people wanted to go to Yellowstone for instance and catch eastern brook trout and german brown trout you know along with the native fish but for quite a long time now, we've had a sense that that maybe wasn't the best idea. And we've been working for the last couple of decades on doing the small things we can to remedy that in limited places. places um so you know it's entirely possible that we'll look back in 100 years and and find things

that that we did wrong or that we wish we hadn't done yeah um you know but but i really i mean i really hope that we're you know that this idea that we want to manage native species and that we want to manage intact ecosystems i would be surprised if those concepts have changed dramatically in the future i think the landscape will change to some degree but i think that we'll still be trying to preserve native species and trying to do the best that we can to to manage ecosystems you know that the other thing i guess that i would say about that is is that you know teddy roosevelt there's a quote that i that i love um he said that in any moment of decision, the best thing that you can do is the right thing. The next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing is nothing at all.

Yeah, I don't know about that. No? He said that, but I don't know if I entirely agree with that. Well, but so, you know, I guess what I would say about that is he's talking about the decision-making process, right? Yeah, yeah. So what I am not saying, and I want to be clear, is that sometimes doing nothing is the right thing to do. And sometimes we make decisions to do nothing because we think that's the best thing for the resource.

My point is that we are really often faced with problems that are relatively clear, a species that is in decline, right? Yeah. Something that is going away. And we want to work to stop that. We want to keep that species on the landscape. So the solutions are not usually nearly as clear as the problem right yeah i got you it's

often very hard to understand what can i do to make this situation better but we we have to make a decision i mean we have you know if we want to stop the decline we have to try to do something. And so I think it's important to consider that the standard can't be that we always get it right 100% of the time. I understand. The standard has got to be that we do the best we can with the information that we have when we come to a point that we have to make a decision and that we're brave in making that decision and trying to do something, understanding that in 100 years, somebody might look back and go, man, those people were way off the mark. How much of the stuff you do, how much of it comes down to emergencies? Or is it more like these general kind of long-term trends?

It's more... Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting way to look at it. I would say that it's more slow-burning emergencies. Slow-burning emergencies. You know, it's... Slow-burning emergencies? Yeah, it's things that, you know, that you know are probably headed in a bad direction. And, you know, but it also takes a long time to implement solutions.

Yeah. Well, when I say, like, what I would classify as emergency, we recently had a conversation with someone working on Mexican gray wolves wolves okay and and they had you know there was a point when there was seven in existence okay i feel like at that point you're sort of in emergency land yeah i mean i think anytime that if your goal is to have them not go away that's an emergency right other things are I would say, like, salmon in the lower 48.

So Pacific North, like, it's emergency status right now, I would argue. Okay. Other things are like, man, you know, like, for instance, there's, we've seen some declines of turkeys in some states. And it's kind of mysterious, like, what's going on with turkeys in some states and it's kind of mysterious like what's going on with turkeys i'd be like not quite emergency yet but definitely something that warrants watching for well yeah and i mean ultimately our hope would be that that we don't get surprised by things like that nearly as often anymore right so you know i'm i don't know i i know i like to hunt turkeys i don't know you know a whole lot about turkey biology or or the turkey science world but you know i would suspect that we know in part that turkeys are in decline because there's monitoring data out there

about turkeys that state fish and wildlife agencies are collecting probably harvest data you know as as well as on the ground things like you know nest success and and hat success and those kind of metrics and you know all of that is aimed at understanding what's going on so that instead of something getting all the way to the emergency stage, you know, that, that we're able to try to start implementing solutions before, before we get to the last seven in captivity. Just yeah.

To prevent emergencies. Right. 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.

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Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet.

Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. What do you... When you take the long view on wildlife and wildlife funding, what are some of your feelings? Well, I mean... What are some of the things that you're optimistic about? What are some things you're like optimistic about what are some things you're pessimistic about you know that's i'm not sure that there's a whole lot that that i am

really personally pessimistic about on the funding side of things um you know you're familiar with the argument right that? That if there is a, that if Americans were to, you know, become increasingly urbanized and they dissociate from hunting and fishing, okay, and we have less people out doing these activities, less people buying firearms, you're going to see a diminishment in dollars that go to wildlife. That doesn't keep you up at night.

That's just too hard to think about or too much unknown. That would certainly be one of those things that for me right now in my role with the agency, you know, I've got plenty of on-the-ground, immediate kind of problems. non-consumptive users for for lack of a better term fit in the picture of wildlife management and you know how how do we how do we bring them in and and make room for for that viewpoint in the big picture um you know and and then i think that sort of gets to how can they contribute. I mean, you know, is there a similar model to what we currently do with the money that is all tied back to the sale of hunting and fishing licenses with other folks?

So, I mean, like, looking forward, is there a way that non-consumptive wildlife users, is there a way we would find that they would start funding some stuff with wildlife? Well, I know that's not your department but it's like a thing that you hear discussed well i mean just as a guy that likes to spend time outdoors you know yeah right and i mean i think you know i i guess i think to some degree it is the department that i work in and you know in the sense that that i work with lots of threatened and endangered and imperiled fish. And, you know, that, that would be the kind of funding that, you know, that could really boost budgets for those things. You know, we, we talk about this sometimes at work. You know, I mean, one thing, and it almost, it almost sounds funny,

but one thing that people can do to support fish and wildlife conservation in the states that they live in is to buy a hunting or fishing license whether they go out or not right and you know i mean again you know i i suppose some folks might chuckle at that but you know when you look at the fact that that we spend a lot of state money on non-game fish and wildlife, and that the formulas for money coming to the states through the excise programs through PR and DGA are based on how many licenses we sell. Yeah, it's like matching dollars. It's like when you listen to an NPR fundraiser and they talk about matching dollars.

Yeah, you're basically getting dollars. It's like when you listen to an NPR fundraiser and they talk about matching dollars. Yeah, you're basically getting three to one back. Yeah. Why don't the state just start selling I guess they do like Duck Stamp. No, that's federal. But why does the state just have a thing that they just put out there?

Being like a dude who likes to look at animals licensed. They have them. I know license plates. New mix. No, no, no. They have like, uh, they're like what? Like recreation cards. They call them or things like that.

I don't, I'm not. Habitat stamps. Yeah. So we, we have a habitat stamp program, which would be another thing. You know, somebody could just buy a habitat stamp. Um, I believe all of that money gets matched again and you can also make a donation on your license plate right yeah motor vehicle stuff to go to state yeah so so like most states ours is called share with wildlife um and a lot of that share

with wildlife funding actually gets matched against state wildlife grant money you know so that's that's almost exclusively spent on on non-game does that bring any money in uh you know i don't know the numbers for for what's there it's it's not you know it's not millions of dollars okay so so you know but i think the the path that you were going down earlier is is like the holy grail, right, for this kind of funding, which would be an excise tax on other outdoor equipment. Every damn backpack that gets sold in the country. Well, and right. I think we should.

I would happily pay that shit. I would draw, like, I would come in, and I'd go down to REI, and I'd be like, yep, all this shit. Right? And just do that across the board. Yeah, you know, I mean. If you're at skis, anything, if you're doing a thing, if you're doing a thing in the outdoors, if I was just, like, the emperor of the world, okay, just the emperor of the country, I would say that if you're doing an outdoor activity,

I'm going to tax your shit 10%. Yeah. Habitat and wildlife. Right. Unless you can convince me that when you see an elk, you don't look at it. Then I'd give you some kind of exemption. Because if I'm the emperor,

that's just how I'm going to run it. That's how I'm going to run the program. Yeah. Obviously. I'd be like, you're're really telling me honestly you don't look at wildlife like really don't look at it then if that's the case if you look out your window like holy shit elk you pay for all your shit that's what i would do yeah and i can't you know i i would never advocate a legislative position but but, you know, I mean. I know, but here's the thing. You could be buying, you could be buying a little, like, pocket pistol, okay, for home defense. You're paying for wildlife.

How does that have more to do with wildlife than a pair of hiking boots? It's an imperfect system right now. I'm not saying we should excuse those people. I just think that, yeah, and again, you're out of, like, you know, I know you don't want to give an opinion about this because of the capacity in which you're here. But I just feel like if that person's paying, a dude with hiking boots should damn sure be paying.

At least with DJ, they sort of did that with the boat fuel i didn't know that because it's not like only fishermen or yeah yesterday i saw a lot of people out there that obviously are chipping in and they weren't doing any fishing yeah so that's you're right some dude pulling wakeboards is like a is like a urban person who has a concealed carry and every time they buy ammo or whatever they're kicking it yeah the dude pulling wakeboards is paying for fish yeah we've heard reasons why this act or these things haven't gone through what's interesting to me is that we often ask like a lot of people we work with aren't necessarily hunters and fishermen but they are rock climbers and skiers and whatever and everybody we ask are like yeah sure i'd pay 10 on my skis what i've heard and i've only been like i've had some conversations around this and i heard an argument they make is

that so many people who make like for instance apparel okay sewn goods right sewn goods it's imported and they're already under such a tax burden from importing their materials or importing manufactured goods that they're saying we're taxed too much already. We can't afford to add yet another tax. And I don't know if you went and asked the gun industry, like, can you afford more taxes? They're not going to be like, oh, yeah, no problem. Anybody's going to say that. But that's the argument you hear and they resist it because people go to like outdoor retailers and push them on this idea and they don't want it they don't want it but meanwhile the hunting

the hunting and fishing industries were like please do it let's do it but roosevelt put roosevelt put it to him franklin roosevelt put it to him he's like no one will pay for this except you if you want this to happen, you will have to pay for it because no one else is going to do it. And they did it. Advocating for any new taxes on a political level too is like political suicide. It's a different world now

than it was. But I think it's like, it would solve so many of our problems. Maybe it doesn't need to be 10% to 11%. We'll give them a break. How about two? We'll give them a light, yeah, because they're like, we'll give them like a lightweight user break.

I mean, ultimately, the revenue needs to be generated somehow, so it's got to come from somewhere. Didn't the state, did the state somewhere just add a little bit on a sales tax for wildlife? Yeah, I believe it may have been Missouri, but you should confirm that one. Type that up, Yanni. I will. You have something to do down there. I would mention

that if in the mythical world that were ever to happen My emperor idea? Right. If they were going to be similar programs to PR and DJ, they would have to come

with matching state funds. There would have to be a matching source of state revenue if it was exactly the same model you don't want to all go into the federal kitty well you know i mean just just to say that right now we have we have licensed sale dollars that we match against you know to do the whole reimbursement thing all right talked about earlier so i'll think of a remedy to that too then i Then I would say that all states are going to have to add a 1% sales tax to fund Fish and Wildlife to give matching dollars to draw off my backpacker tax. That's fine.

How do you start a movement? Like a movement. I don't know. You're going to be hard-pressed to get people to pay more man no that's what i'm saying though every time we ask the people we've yet to have everyone i know that every backpacker i know is like dude i would totally pay it yeah if i knew that that's how it worked if i knew that that's how it worked and that's where i went i would happily pay it i think there's a gray area when it's voluntary or mandated when she you start getting told what to do.

Do some people just like the relief of being told what to do? Yeah. I don't know. I'll go along. All right, Mike, what else, man? What else do you got? Yeah, so we covered a couple of those why do we manage non-game fish and wildlife species arguments. Yeah, ethics.

Yeah, and so systems right legal ethical ecological right yeah so those those are the three that we talked about but you know there are three really pragmatic reasons why if you say you know i i'm not personally concerned about non-game animals you know that there are still some reasons why it's in your best interest that your state is managing those things yeah so the first one and you know you guys have talked a lot about it in the past is um it we think as a state agency that it's a good thing for us to maintain as much management control over species as as we can okay it's generally in the state's interest to manage its own fish and wildlife so we want to as opposed to what as opposed to federal management okay so

we want to do what we can in part because it's the right thing to do in part because it's our interest from a management perspective to keep animals from getting listed under the endangered species you want to maintain your jurisdiction right yeah so we want to know what's going on with those animals out in the landscape you know and we want to work towards conserving those animals in the cases when we can, particularly if we think that they're in decline. That helps keep them off the list. And then animals, once they do get on the list or if they do get on the list, we want to work towards recovery to bring more management authority back to the state. And, you know, I want to be clear.

We work with lots of federal partners very closely in very productive ways. You know, it is not that, you know, we're not interested in working with our federal partners. It's just that, you know, from the state's perspective, keeping things off the list and recovering animals once they're on helps us maintain more management authority. Yeah, it's like you're doing your job. Right. So that's one pragmatic reason is to head off listing and work towards recovery in the cases where things are listed. Because if it gets listed and the feds assume control of it, there might be things that

would happen that would have negative implications for people in your state well yeah and so that that really ties to to the second part of that which is that because the fish and wildlife service administers these federal aid programs that's what we you know call them federal aid programs um we to get that money we have to ensure that we are complying with all the federal laws so getting the money creates this nexus to the federal government which means that you know we have to consult on almost everything we do or every project that we use money on we have to consult with the fish and wildlife Service to make sure that everybody understands what the potential impacts to animals that are listed under ESA will be. And there's other federal laws like the National Environmental Policy Act, NEPA, and other things that we have to comply with.

And so a really good... I need you to back up on that one. So you're saying, like, let's say you wanted to do a project. You're going to do a thing to help out trout. Okay. Trout habitat. You're saying that you also need to make sure that that work isn't going to impact

an endangered or threatened species. Yeah, that's exactly right. Okay. And so, you you know a really good example that that kind of ties these two things together is that uh there's currently action to list a petition to list rio grande chub uh rio grande chub exists in a lot of places in new mexico some of those places are recreational rainbow trout fisheries that we stock with rainbow trout ah right so we use tingle johnson money at our hatcheries you know to raise the fish and to drive them out there to stock them and there's you know there's a there's a fair number of high use fisheries in new mexico that you know wouldn't sustain wild trout populations at the kind of harvest and those rainbow trout aren't good for the chubs

well you know i don't i don't know that i would say that out of hand um i don't know that we have great data on on good or not there are a lot of places that we there are places that we stock rio grande chub or i'm sorry that we stock rainbow trout that also have Rio Grande chub. So it's not a completely exclusive thing. Rio Grande chub were to be listed, there would be a consultation that would have to happen about the potential impacts of rainbow trout on chub and that

would have an effect to the average trout fisherman out there who utilizes those. I'm getting what you're saying. Yeah. That it could spell bad shit for rainbow trout in some places not that i'm a fan of rainbow trout but it could spell bad shit for rainbow trout if that if the chub got listed as an endangered species yeah i mean it it had the

it would have the potential to to change that landscape and have you ever read the book arguing that it lays out a really lucid argument of describing the rainbow trout as a synthetic fish? An entirely synthetic fish? Yeah. Anders Halverson, I think. It's a man-made fish. Yeah. When you start reading the history of that fish and how it's been spread around

and how it all came to be, yeah, it's like a make-believe fish. Yeah, and again, I mean. Very popular make-believe fish. But the fact again, I mean... Very popular make-believe fish. But the fact that people look at it and associate it somehow with wildness or pristineness is laughable. Except for in very few watersheds. I don't want to make a value judgment about rainbow trout. I'm not inviting you to. We certainly have a lot of folks.

People love them. People love them. But it's like... Jimmy Dorn, you're raising your hand. But you live in actual rainbow trout country, so you don't count. Okay. No, if you're on the Pacific Rim, you could, yeah, it's okay to like rainbow trout on the Pacific Rim. It's all the other people if you if you when you flush your toilet right if that water flows

into the pacific you can like rainbow trout okay if you flush your toilet and it doesn't you should not like okay that's coming from me all right not our guest mike rule gotcha and you know i would provide one perspective on that i mean i you know i grew up in pennsylvania right and that they stock a lot of trout in pennsylvania and i grew up fishing rainbows all we did was fish non-natives in michigan i'm not saying like i'm not holier than thou i'm just saying it's like we've created a weird situation all over the country when i was growing up we we did fish some. We fished native fish, but we spent a ton of time fishing a lot of things that had been introduced into our ecosystem

to the detriment of native species. Right? And I think that we're going to have, if we're looking long ways, I think that we're going to continue to, there's going to be a forced reckoning with that going forward. And you've kind of alluded it to yourself a little bit. I mean, I think to a degree we're in the reckoning.

We're at least constantly water for recreational opportunities. And, you know, we recently published a statewide fisheries management plan. If, you know, if anybody's interested in a particular water in New Mexico, you can go in there and it will outline you know what our our main management objective is and and that is not to say you know that just because it says the water is going to be managed for native fish that there absolutely won't be any sport fish there but you know it it does provide some insight into what the state's thinking yeah because a lot but because a lot of the relationships are totally harmonious like it's really hard people try but people don't have a lot of luck and there are exceptions to this but like generally people look and be like it's hard to find

rock solid evidence that turkeys are deleterious in all the places they've been introduced right it's like there's some suspicions here and there, but it's just generally like when you put turkeys on the ground, we haven't yet identified a way in which that's a major screw-up, quite like we had when you put common carp into a waterway. There's a tremendous amount of evidence to suggest we shouldn't have dumped carp everywhere. Right.

Yeah. evidence to suggest we shouldn't have dumped carp everywhere right you know you know and i mean to my point even i worked in the allison national park before i worked for new mexico um and even there in their current native fish conservation plan you know they identify a portion of the park. It's the Firehole River, the Gibbon River below the falls, and the Madison, where they are essentially saying this is an area that is a high-value recreational trout fishery, and we, at least in the, I believe, the 20-year time frame of that plan, don't intend to do native fish work in that reach. That's part of the balance. So they're saying, like, we're going to have room for non-native trout, brown trout, rainbow trout. We're making room for those fisheries because people value it.

Well, they're not necessarily saying, they're not making room in the sense that they're expanding them in any way. They're just not actively working to control non-native trout in those places. I got you. Yeah. So go back to talking about the thing you guys published, where you can look up your waterway. Yeah, it's the statewide fisheries management plan. It's available through the New Mexico Department of Fisheries.

And it lays out what long-term goals are. It lays out what our management objectives are in the waters of the state. Is there anything in there that's real controversial? I suppose that would depend who you ask. It has largely been supported by by the public and and of course it was approved by by our commission so um you know there may be folks that are uh unhappy with with the direction some specific waters are going but of course it's a quite hard thing to do to make everybody happy all the time yeah yeah so does that exhaust your list of why your list of things

about why we should no i want to hear the long list no i want more if you got you know i the last one is is that um when we work on on projects that benefit non-game animals, they almost always have ancillary benefits for things that we more generally associate with hunting or angling. I've been working on a project for Chihuahua Chub in the Membris River, which is in southwestern New Mexico,

kind of south of the Gila. How big is this chub? Up to 10 or 12 inches it's uh it is an esa listed species um so we've been working to do habitat improvement which includes work in the riparian corridor for uh the chub and for chiricahua leopard frog also a listed species of frog. But overall, we're doing habitat improvement work both in the river and in the riparian corridor. And that riparian corridor has javelina, it has mule deer, quail.

The last time I was down there, I saw bear tracks along the river. It's not the kind of place that a guy from Pennsylvania would expect to encounter bear tracks, but they're there. You know, as well as bats and Rio Grande sucker and other non-game fish and wildlife. So, you know, that project will have a benefit for that system on the whole. So even though somebody could look at it and say you're spending money on chub while that's true there's also ancillary benefits for other fish and wildlife yeah um have you does anybody fish for those chubs uh not that i know of i've i've seen them rise to uh to you know mayflies on the surface of the river so you could in in theory you could

yeah do you feel that are there cases where where you get you ever feel blowback from people saying like why are we spending money like do you hear it where people within government like even elected people um will kind of lampoon the or you know mock the idea of spending money on things that no one like care like quote cares about i mean like you know probably like you i hear about it it it's not been a personal experience that i've that i've had where where i had a project that got lampooned in that way and shut down. Yeah. I mean, there was a fellow running for president last fall that was mocking a smelt in the, he was mocking,

like actually mocking the fish, mocking a smelt in California as being too small to care about. So, I mean, it does happen. Yeah, I mean, there is politics and involved in everything and and uh you know some consideration of politics is is uh probably always prudent like why would anyone care about that yeah and that's you know let me count the ways right and that's in part what i hope to provide people is you know if you get into those conversations about why should i care about that you know there's a couple of reasons i mean you know some some pragmatic reasons about you

know why particularly as hunters and anglers we should care about working with non-game fish and wildlife the thing that i return to again and again thinking about this and talking about it with other hunters and fishermen is um it's just kind of like a sickening kind of audacity that we would somehow come to the idea that that certain species don't warrant existing existing. Like, you want to talk about sort of human hubris and arrogance would be that, and I don't care what your understanding of the world is, if you have just a completely secular view, if you have a religious view of the world, like there's no worldview that I think could really support the idea that we could sit back and let species that exist on this earth vanish because we in this particular moment in time don't really care about it it's just like

it just strikes me as being like absolutely immoral yeah and i don't throw that stuff around like i don't weigh in on a lot of social morality issues. I'm kind of like a, you know, when it comes to general terms of morality, I'm kind of like a privacy of your own home kind of guy, right? Like, I don't really believe in getting in there and legislating activities between consenting adults and stuff uh but when it comes like moral issues i feel that wiping things off of the face of the earth gone forever you are playing with some shit that you should not be playing with yeah i think that's the you know that's the ethical argument right is that it's the right thing to do to to preserve our natural history as intact as we can yeah the idea that some people find it acceptable that we would have less species on earth you know right but then some people get swept up in the some people get swept up in the idea that like things go extinct all

the time so it's okay. Right? We used to have these big-ass, huge dinosaurs, and they're gone now, so I guess it doesn't matter. It's kind of like, people argue that, but I find it's such a flawed way of thinking. That because extinctions do happen,

that we would just open it up and allow them to happen. Especially from human-caused activity. Yeah, I mean, you know. Yeah, because you can't argue that it's not natural. Even the geneticist that we spoke with, right? She's like, extinction is natural. Yeah, far more things have gone extinct than are in existence right now. Right.

But that's not, but when our activities. Exactly. So I think on our watch, we can't let it happen. Yeah. On our watch. And there's a matter of time scale at play there, too. Right. I mean, you know.

You get into geological time. Right. You know, and John McPhee has a, have you ever read Annals of the Former World? I haven't. So John McPhee wrote three books about geology and when they were they were eventually published together as annals of the former world and in this book there's a couple things one he says that if he was gonna if he had to sum up his his trilogy in one sentence it would be that the peak of mount everest is marineestone. So the top of Mount Everest is rock that was laid out on the bottom of an ocean.

But another point he makes is that if you imagine life on earth, so not just earth like the form, but life on earth, if you imagine being a man's outstretched arms as life on earth, from one fingertip to the other fingertip as a timeline, you could remove human history with one stroke of a nail file. Right?

It's a powerful image. Yeah. And when you imagine the amount of extinctions that have occurred under our watch and the amount of extinctions that we have conducted in that one stroke of a nail file, we're not living at a sustainable rate

as far as letting shit slide. And a lot of that shit would have been good hunting and fishing. The passenger pigeon, right? So it does impact hunters and fishermen, man. There's a lot of shit that would have been good good to hunt you can't hunt anymore what else mike you know other things you want to talk about no i mean that you know i think i think we we we covered most of it there i think there are a couple interesting points when, you know, when we sort of come at things from the perspective of, you know, what are agencies doing with the money and what does, what do those things mean? Not just to hunters and anglers, but to other folks, right?

So, you know, we mentioned that law enforcement is not reimbursable under wildlife sport fish restoration acts that's a little surprising because they're doing enforcement on to for the betterment of wildlife but okay i'll take like at face value i like i accept what you're saying but it is a little bit surprising to me right and i mean i think it is a little bit surprising because you know i mean we essentially police our own ranks in that way right i mean we're completely paying for uh you know a law enforcement system to protect the resource that's ultimately what it's about right is is to protect those resources yeah and poachers a lot of them probably aren't buying licenses so they're not even paying into the

they're not even paying for the guy that's going to arrest them. That's right. I mean, you know, they're doing it for us so that, you know, the license buyers have a resource to recreate through. But, you know, obviously game wardens do lots of things that aren't just checking fishing licenses um you know for instance when when there's a call about a black bear in somebody's garage it's often you know that that call ends up with a with the game warden and they show up to try to resolve the situation and generally you know their approach is obviously to keep people safe first but hopefully have the most positive outcome for the bear, for whatever wildlife it is when they show up. They're also not asking the homeowner to see their hunting license when they show up. It's a service that's provided to the public by the hunting and anglingling community by the license buyers in those states dude it should say that right on their truck brought to you by a dude that likes to hunt and

fish you know and and i'm i mean obviously for me i'm i'm i couldn't be more happy that we do that because you know the goal is to to have positive outcomes yeah for those animals but you know it is it is something that that is being provided. And then the other thing is, in a state like New Mexico, most of the western states, and really all across the country, there's game wardens whose districts are in remote and rural places, and they just overall help to provide law enforcement presence in those places. You know, we, I mean, we hear all the time about game wardens, you know, being involved in things that aren't wildlife related. They're just, you know, they're there to help.

They show up at the scene of an accident to help folks. I was out in California doing a story about livestock, guys that investigate livestock theft, and they have a rural crime task force. And I was, I met with game wardens who'd gone in on drug rates at the time i think it might have changed after that but they were called into all kinds of shit sure and you know i mean they they contact all kinds of folks and you know when they make those contacts they do the normal checks that you know law enforcement officers do. And, you know, so they, they just help keep things safer in general. Yeah. Um, you know, another one is, uh, so we talked a little bit about habitat. You know, I, I, uh, I got an estimate in New Mexico over a 10 year span, it'll be about $25 million

that's either already been spent or, or we have earmarked to spend on habitat protection. And that is all just PR connected, not the fish stuff that we're doing. Pippin Roberts is not PR public relations, but Pippin Roberts is connected, yeah. Wildlife Restoration Act. restoration act yeah um you know those projects do lots of things that like are for forest health and watershed health you know thinning controlled burning things that help to prevent catastrophic wildfires that would have serious impacts on things like people's water supplies right you don't when when you get catastrophic wildfire, if the town that you live in has a water supply reservoir

that's downstream of that, and you get some post-fire flooding, you can get a lot of, you know, negative consequences from that. And, you know, there's at least one example of I can think of where, you know, a water supply reservoir, you know reservoir more or less filled up with sediment and have to drain it and dredge it to get it back so that it can come back online. From a wildfire?

Oh, really? Yeah. So, again, the money is coming through and being matched by license dollars and ultimately being paid for in part, you know, by those license dollars. And it's good for wildlife, and that's the focus of it, but everybody reaps a benefit, you know, from doing things that benefit ecosystem health, forest health, watershed health. Yeah.

You know, so I think that's a great thing that, you know, that we help to do out there in the landscape. The last really interesting example I'll give you is, you know, aquatic invasive species, of course, are always a big thing. And we do a lot of work with aquatic invasive species. New Mexico, you know, we are fortunate that, you know, that through the work that we've done you know we don't have either of the two really common asian mussels so we don't have zebra or quagga mussels yeah and you know we we work hard to do um inspections on watercraft coming into the state you know and educate people about those species and yes yes, those species getting in the systems would have ecological impacts,

you know, both to sport fish and to non-game fish and probably other wildlife as well. But they would also have substantial impacts to water infrastructure. So if you have water infrastructure for irrigation that's drawing out of a reservoir and you get zebra mussels in the reservoir, you're going to have to spend some money, you know, basically keeping those pipes open, keeping zebra mussels from actually growing to a point where it plugs up that water. It costs in the Great Lakes. They cost hundreds of millions of dollars of infrastructure problems. Right. And now you mentioned like the implications for fisheries right and so i you know that's that's also i mean we as you know hunters and anglers are making an investment to keep those things out

and you know there there is a benefit to the general public to do that too people should be kissing our asses more than they do, man. You should walk down the road and people should be yelling out their car windows, like, thank you, hunter and fisherman. Well, and I mean, you know. Thank you. All you do for us. Really why, you know, I wanted to come on is not, you know, not the.

Not to have a lot more. You're not getting the credit you deserve no not that but but so that when we have conversations with people who don't do this who aren't involved in the recreational side of wildlife you know i think and i think you've talked about it like we're a pretty small percentage right like something like in in 2006 five percent of men over 16 years old bought or hunted for deer nationally yeah right and and women you know about one percent of of women so we're not like a huge majority population. Yeah, and it varies greatly by state to state. Right.

From less than one to upwards of 15% higher. Right. But yeah, nationally about 5%. So this thought that it's going to be like some logical argument that we will win or lose, I don't think is really probably how it's going to work but i think if we can take the information about all the things you know that we do that are benefit not just to fish and wildlife that we can harvest you know but also to non-game fish and wildlife and also just to the public at large you know if we can internalize that and again not approach it like you know i'm going to hammer somebody with this argument but when we engage

people and when we talk to folks and when we hear things you know that we only care about elk you know that we have a a standpoint an informed standpoint to come at that from and say well you know you know there there are some other things that your state fish and wildlife agency is doing and you know they're doing them with revenue that's generated through the sale of hunting and fishing licenses and you know it does benefit chihuahua chub yeah you know, it does benefit Chihuahua Chub. Yeah. You know, and by the way, it does help protect that watershed above your city's, you know, drinking water supply. I think that that could be meaningful. Yeah, and as we learned from Greg Blazkowicz,

you need to throw out the argument of, oh, I'm controlling the deer populations for you. That's why you should like me. People don't care. People don't give a shit and as we know they don't recognize you know you kind of sort of are and you kind of sort of are yeah people don't recognize like your average joe blow doesn't recognize the problem no that's what you're saying i'm saying that the average i don't even know how true this is but i feel like a lot of

hunters like that that is like their like go-to is like oh no this is why you should like us hunter and fisherman because we're controlling the wildlife population for you keep the deer numbers down because otherwise they're all going to die of disease and as we learned from greg that argument doesn't work people don't care and i think you in the last 10 minutes have given given people a lot of like great arguments and points to make you know yeah yeah but the great conservationist jim poswitz when questioned about why uh why doesn't the american public like know the story and he's like hunters don't even know the story right because you gotta go teach it to them their own story they don't even know their own story you gotta teach their

own story to them before you have any chance of the broader public understanding it the guy engaged in it doesn't even know he just pissed because license fees went up what last year was three dollars um do you want to hear about a couple state funding successes that are outside of the stuff that we've talked about? Yeah, man. We were talking about some states that added sales taxes, so it was Missouri and Arkansas, conservation sales taxes. Virginia and Texas have dedicating tax revenues from outdoor gear.

So there are two states that are actually taxing tents and backpacks. Dedicated lottery revenues for Colorado, Arizona, and Maine. And then Florida and South Carolina have real estate transfer taxes that go directly to gammon fish agencies. More taxes. That's what I'm going to run on. No, I'm not. I'm joking.

But what I do, I don't like to run on more taxes, but I am going to, the idea of identifying other user groups who benefit from wildlife and who tend to want to have a say in wildlife, that you need to earn your seat at the table. Right? Yeah, I mean, you know, I certainly think that when, you know, folks look at that and wanting a seat at the table, you know, I think it's fair to ask, you know, how they're going to contribute.

I mean, we have for, as hunters and anglers, we have for a long time now contributed a lot of resources to conserving fish and wildlife. Here's a devil advocate argument that I can already hear brewing somewhere off. You just hear it out there. Yeah. Is that, do we want that? Do we want these people to have a say at the table? No.

I just want them to pay. Yeah, I want them to pay but have no input. I don't care what they think. All right, thanks. No, I don't want to hear about it. You don't want to hear about it? No, because I know where you're going with this. Right, yeah.

Because they're going to say, well, yeah, it's going to be the New Jersey cat ladies all of a sudden are going to actually start paying. And they're going to say, well, now I don't think you should be hunting those animals anymore. I had someone recently bring up that I had talked about New Jersey cat ladies. Quite a bit. But here's the thing. New Jersey just gets a bad rap. You know I live there.

No, no, no. I want to clarify. I want to clarify. I don't know any New Jersey cat ladies. But here's the thing. New Jersey just gets a bad rap. You know I live there. No, no, no. I want to clarify. I want to clarify. I don't know any New Jersey cat ladies. But when I close my eyes and imagine the exact, when I imagine my perspective on wildlife in America, and my upbringing, the things that shape my perspective on wildlife in America, and I try to visualize the opposite of my perspective on wildlife,

I feel that it's embodied by what I imagine a old lady in New Jersey who owns a shitload of cats might think I just picture like that would be the antithesis of my own perspective would be like a cat lady yes because she's rescued all those cats just somehow I don't really I need to spend more time picturing her because I might come up with a different thing or picture in new jersey in a different light yeah i just picture like a new jersey cat lady you know being like my arch rival when it comes to my perspectives on wildlife management so you know i'm gonna stop saying it actually i would lay out there that you know we we live in a representative democracy. So the concept that we can keep folks from having a seat at the table maybe isn't the most sustainable approach to this in the long term anyway.

No, it's not. I mean, we have to learn to engage other folks and come at some of these questions from a point of empathy. Yeah, because I think you're the one that brought up the idea that you have 5% of the population. We live in a democracy. So we live as hunters and fishermen. And there's a lot of hunters and fishermen that really want to act like this isn't true. But as hunters and fishermen, we live at the pleasure of the voting public who you're like your ability to live the lifestyle you live is because people who do not engage in the activities you engage in

have a generally favorable impression of those activities. If they did not, you would be done. You're not going to win a popular vote by just having the guys at Hunt and Fish going out and casting their ballots. It doesn't work that way. You're going to get smoked. You would lose all elections 95% to 5%. And things in this country generally fall around a 49-51 split is a landslide.

Shit is tight now. So you need to have... A lot of what I said was joking because it's true. You need to have very strong allies that lie outside of the activities you engage in. Yeah.

You need to live an exemplary lifestyle. Yeah. And, and, you know, we need to engage those people in, in ways that are meaningful to them. And, you know, I, that's why I really liked the episode with Greg. I mean, it, it's really what inspired me to reach out to you guys you know about this topic because it sort of seemed like a natural segue from yeah you know how how do we how do we talk to people you know what are those quote-unquote arguments or conversations that we can have with

people that do influence the way they view hunting you know and and then the next step is you know how do we be more informed about some of these things particularly, you know, and, and then the next step is, you know, how, how do we be more informed about some of these things, particularly that, you know, he laid out five or six arguments, right. And funding was one of them, or the revenue side of things was, was one of those arguments. And, you know, how do we, how do we take that the next step? How do we be informed when some, when we say, yeah yeah the revenue and somebody comes back and says yeah but the revenue all gets spent on things that you can catch and shoot yeah you know what Mike's referring to is I don't remember what number it is but if you go back we had a podcast episode some time ago where we interviewed a guy Greg Blazkowicz who's a social sciences researcher at Stanford and what he was doing is he was testing um he was he was working with people

who had a general like anti like an identifiable anti-hunting bent and he would test ideas um would test justifications of hunting with these individuals? 53. Episode 53, where they would go to people and here's a person who identifies as an anti-hunter. And then they would test ideas and say like, okay, well, what about if you knew this? How does this change your perception of hunting? And to look at what are the realities and rhetorics that hunters use and which of those are effective, which of those move the needle. So we've been referring to that a lot. You can go back and check that out.

Jimmy Dorn, you got anything you want to wrap up with, man? What kind of sports team is on your hat there? It's the Mariners. Seattle Mariners Baseball Club. Okay. Yeah. Got any concluding thoughts? Well, it's been good to learn to sum out how

our tax dollars are utilized and i appreciate the knowledge and guys like mike that are making it happen on the ground it's it's interesting it's good to hear and and uh i walk away feeling good about it as opposed to generally with my tax money i feel like most of the time it's being flushed down the shitter and I don't get that impression. Put a fine point on it. I don't get that feeling. And I appreciate that. I really do. And I appreciate the hard work that people put in to make sure that we do have these opportunities

in our future and hopefully down the road, kids' futures and maybe try and leave the place better than we found it. And guys like you, I think, are making that happen. And I'm grateful. Other than that, I'm going to try and get you to stop harping on New Jersey. Dude, I'm quitting now. I'm going to come up with a new arch nemesis.

Right on. I don't know what it's going to be. Again, I'm glad to be here. So good to listen. I generally learn something when I sit around this table. Good stuff. Thanks for joining us, man. Thanks for having me.

I appreciate it. Yanni? Did you finish with all the reasons you had to manage for non-game species? Do you feel like you wrapped up that point? Yeah, I think about six reasons there. Yeah, no, he got them. Yeah, he did. Got to all of them.

That was good. That was all. A couple interruptions in there, but we got there got to all of them i thought it was good because all those interruptions in there but we got there that's par for the course and wait any last oh sorry you got no that was it um any last final thing you forgot to mention well yeah you know i just in in this line of of uh of thinking about engaging people who aren't hunters and anglers. I came across a Wallace Stegner quote, and I love Stegner, just as far as being somebody who talked a lot about arid land and managing arid land.

Stegner said, and this is a little bit of a paraphrase, that wild places, and I think I would add to that wild things, are part of the geography of hope. And, you know, when I think about that, I think Stegner really had something there, you know, that we really, as people, draw hope from wild things and wild places. And, you know, my personal history is that my experience with wild things and wild places come from a perspective you know of hunting and fishing that's how I

grew up that's how I got engaged but you know there are other people out there that came to wild things and wild places in different ways but that i believe probably experience a really similar emotional connection to okay and i think it's good to think about you know how people perceive us and we perceive them you know i generally tend to have an emotional response when i hear anything that i believe to sound threatening to hunting. But I bet you there are people who don't hunt, you know, who when they hear about hunting, they perceive that as taking something out of the wild and that that is a threat to how, you know, they have come to the experience. And, you know, coming back to that, you know, that there's hope in, you know, that we place hope in wild things and wild places.

And so anything that we feel like diminishes that for us really draws an emotional response. And so, you know, I think that really trying to work to be more inclusive about how we talk about this stuff, having engaging conversations, sometimes that are uncomfortable with people that don't agree with us, is really an important thing. Again, that Stegner quote, wild places are part of the geography of hope. A lesser known author added to that, and what inspires hope from person to person is as similar as views from neighboring ridges,

but also is different. And I think that really speaks to thinking about how we experience wild places and how others experience it and trying to find common ground. Yeah. I'll work on that. No, I'm joking.

That means our buddy there at the top of the hill, the horse, the horse, what'd you call him? The timber buck hunter. Yeah. He shouldn't get so mad at the hippies When they're out there hiking No he hates the hippies Yeah

We're not all eating hippies Backpack hunters No they weren't This is a horseman Yeah Weather was nice So there was a lot of people in the woods During his hunt

This is a horseman Who did not have pleasant feelings For the other people on the mountain No But yeah Alright who did not have pleasant feelings for the other people on the mountain. But, yeah. All right. They are our allies, right?

I'm open to it. I'm open to it. Mike, thanks for coming on, man. Thanks for having me. You come back sometime? I hope so. All right. Let's talk about bighorn sheep down in New Mexico next time you come back. Yeah, my wife's a bighorn sheep biologist for the state.

I understand that to be true. And also an avid hunter. Is that right? Yeah, you guys should talk to her. About bighorns? She's got all the information about bighorn sheep. I was down in your state. I was down in New Mexico where they're doing the governor's tag auctions

and a guy from the desert sheep that was desert sheep foundation or some kind or someone having to do a sheep a ngo that does sheep work he was saying that uh in new mexico wildlife work comes down to water and money. But with desert bighorns, you don't need the water. So that was an interesting take on that. All right. Thanks for tuning in. Hey, folks.

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