The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 103 Thirteen Bullets

Episode Date: February 12, 2018

Las Vegas, NV- Steven Rinella talks with Ryan Callaghan of First Lite, along with Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew.Subjects discussed: going pantsless at the table; Chef Kaido and salting fish for sushi, morel tips and other wild foods know-how; is the sun setting on Old Bay Seasoning?; the peritoneal and thoracic cavities; sewing yourself back up; the loose math of packing enough bullets; things gettin' "western"; the upshot of cannibalism; Cabeza de Vaca and making shakes outta folks; the reasons for game huddling up in no-mans lands; the categorical imperative and the morality of hunting; high fence vs. fair chase; artisanal small batch deer drives; love handles; 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.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Presented by First Light.

Go farther, stay longer. All right, start. Why are you guys uncomfortable with how I'm sitting at a desk like an evening newscaster? Well, you have your pants on, right? Yes. Okay. Because nowadays, there was a time when you could do that, but nowadays you need to have... I'm at a desk with a computer and papers in front of me and it's intimidating to uh ryan callahan and uh janice poodle is it is it seems like we're just

not all part of the conversation here i'm about to swivel well i'm leading from over here at this desk like the old time there was a time when america would tune in at night and a middle-aged white gentleman would explain to you what's going on in the world. And it was a shared experience. And oftentimes they were pantsless. And we're hearkening back to those days with me here at this desk with these pieces of paper. Callahan, do you remember the last time we spoke we talked about a fella by the name of kaido oh he was breaking down how he does sushi salmon yes that he buries it in kosher salt for eight minutes so he takes a fish fillet skin on

buries it in kosher salt for eight minutes or buries it in salt for eight minutes and then rinses the fillet and that's where you how you get buttery yeah that's how you get i feel like he must have broken some unspoken rule like some smoking mirrors of the sushi industry because by telling us that yeah because everybody's blown away by that he wrote back he wants you to know this yes that's what he does we did not have it wrong he says he does half lays Half-flays. Leaves the skin on it when he salts it. Okay. He thinks it controls a little bit of the moisture loss.

And then he says, because you've got to pull the pin bones, pull them after you salt the flay. So cover the whole flay in salt. Count to, what's eight times 60 60 that is a hard math problem 480 count to 480 and then count to 480 like one mississippi 480 times then rinse all the salt off then pull the the then pull the pin bones because he said absolutely no longer than 10 minutes, right? Yeah. And he says that when you pull those pin bones,

it doesn't do any damage to the meat. They just slip right out. I've seen that. Because if you freeze a filet and then pull the pin bones after you freeze it, it does a lot less damage. It loses its grip on the pin bones. When you de-pin bone a fresh fish, you're pulling up little popsicles. Yes. Bone with meat hanging off the end. Yeah, you deep pin bone a fresh fish, you're pulling up little popsicles. Yes.

Bone with meat hanging off the end. Yeah, you can make them look like junk fast. What he also says is this, and I learned this from my old man. Well, my old man learned it from Eugene Groters.

I don't know, Lord knows where Eugene Groters learned it from, but when he's handling salmon fillets, and this kind of goes for all fish fillets, he makes a hole at the tail through the skin to make a little finger

gripper hole and that's how he handles it he doesn't carry it around by holding the meat yeah and doesn't maneuver it that way he makes a at the tail cuts a little hole and that's how we isn't that isn't that right yeah it's back me up we make a little finger hole in fish fillets oftentimes to tote them around.

Yeah. And to skin them because it gives you something to grab onto. He says he does that. This is from a full-on sushi chef. That way you handle the fillet. All the stress is on the skin and not on the meat. The skin never breaks. He goes on to say this.

Callahan, he says. Spelled your name right. Wow. Loves to use caul fat. He soaks it in buttermilk to purge it and flavor it. He likes to add a tablespoon of Old Bay spice mix to the buttermilk and then soak his caul fat in there and also his liver. That's going to make young Ford Van Fossen at the first light office very happy.

He's a Marylander, and he thinks the sun rises and sets on Old Bay. That's good shit. I like it. I mean, for just like an all-purpose, it's right up there with Tony C's. No. Really? No. Oh, yeah.

I think it is very distinct. No, no, no. From my desk, from my desk in a position that would suggest authority over those around me. No. Tony C's. I don't know why. We always called Uncle Tom's seasoning. I have no idea where that came from.

Like something to do with Uncle Tom's cabin. But Tony, how does it? Chachere, something like that. Yeah, you know what? I had some Cajun boys. I said that one time. Some Cajun boys told me that I had it. I was so far off, I don't even say it anymore.

Oh, yeah. I get shell shocked by saying it. Chachere's, cherries. That's not it. Sashay. It's not sashay. No family is safe. Sashay. It's not sashay. No family is safe when I sashay. That's a rock song.

But that stuff, you like Old Bay as much as that? Yeah, in its place, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. That's because you hang out in North Carolina all the time. I eat a lot of seafood, too, from North Carolina. That's what I'm saying. They probably use a lot of Old Bay down there

Not a ton My father-in-law doesn't He likes it plain and simple Salt and pepper Kaido also says this On the subject of Morels He's talking to you in this He spells your name right and my name wrong

He spells me Steve S-T-E-A-V-E. He says, Morels, yeah, man. You gotta rinse them. Don't run water over them. He places them in water, lets

them soak for a while. The dirt falls away, and then he lifts them out of the water gently. The grit is denser than the mushroom stuff and will sink to the bottom. And he doesn't then use that water. If he does, I'd imagine he just uses the top and not get down and roll the silt. Well, I told you guys this year that the few that we found last spring turkey hunting,

I did the steam and freeze method method yeah and uh just had them frozen bait i froze them on cookie sheets and then once they were frozen and dried i just threw them into gallon ziploc bags and uh great product very happy with really when it came back i've messed around freeze mushrooms was never that happy about it steaming and freeze so uh another little thing i noticed is you really don't have to go to cheesecloth if you want to reserve that liquid because as you reduce that all those uh heavy parts once it gets down to like the bottom inch of liquid they just start plastering to the side of your saucepan. Oh, really? Yeah. That's interesting.

Yeah. I mean, it is clean as a whistle. Yeah. Can I tell you a little more about cow fat? Yes. An emergency room doctor wrote in from Jackson, Michigan. He's an emergency room doctor in Jackson, lives in Ann Arbor. He says there's something we need to know about, a couple things we should know about.

Speaking of call fat, he says, humans have something similar to call fat anatomically. It's called omentum. And it hangs off the greater curvature of the stomach. And in overweight people, this can contain considerable size due to fat deposition. When cleaning our deer, he gives a basic anatomy class to his hunting tribe and reminds them how similar human anatomy is to white tails and most mammals, for that matter. And he says there's some words we ought to know about

for the stuff we like to talk about. The peritoneal cavity is everything below the diaphragm. The peritoneal cavity. That contains. Below the diaphragm as in diaphragm to anus section. Yeah. Downstream. Downstream.

That's everything. Liver, large and small small intestine spleen stomach and everything so the peritoneal cavity when you're gutting a deer is below above upstream is the thoracic cavity this is where you got your esophagus heart lungs and your great vessels like the aorta and vena cava in scotland i hunted in scotland one time with a game keeper and they have a thing called like a they like they gut deer out in the field they gut deer only below the diaphragm

you know i'm saying yeah like it's like the word they use is like the glat. I don't know. Glat? I'm screwing it up. Just because the diaphragm's holding everything else. All the stuff that's going to sour fast is below. You get all that out. But then in the field, you don't gut diaphragm up.

Anything with the esophagus? They pull that, they cut the windpipe or anything like that and pull the windpipe out? Not that I remember. This stuff's not going to sit around though. No, but I just remember it was like that was, he's like, when you gut something, they gut it like that. And we got the peritoneal

and thoracic. We removed the contents of both the peritoneal and thoracic cavities and those guys just removed the contents of the peritoneal cavity. He goes on to have a whole lot to say about getting poisoned by mushrooms. Man, harrowing stuff, which I'll not get into right now. Quick other thing I want to touch on, just from feedback to feedback. I had two guys write in to say that in the old days, no one bled walleye, but now people bleed walleye. This guy says about 10 years ago, everyone in Lake Erie started bleeding walleye.

This guy says the same thing he fishes the western basin of lake erie and he says 20 years ago no one bled walleye nowadays everyone bleeds walleye they're using buckets of slosh ice and getting real particular about field care in lake erie. That is interesting. I like to hear that. That's cool. He says, better texture, better flavor. When he bleeds them, he says the meat's whiter and firmer. Fish last longer. I have not actually been able to detect a flavor in those ultra white fish.

Yeah, I know you complain about walleye about that. Well, here's how he does it. Here's how he handles his walleye. Standard practice is to unhook a legal fish. Clip the front of the gills with pruners. Picture what he's talking about, where they come up together. Okay. Right, below the chin.

And then drop the fish headfirst into a five-gallon bucket, half filled with water. The fish will bleed out and die very quickly. Then it's removed and iced. He's enjoying great success with that method. That's cool. That's really cool. Now, here's a guy saying that when you break something and got to fix it, he says, sew it not with thread, you dumbass,

but with braided fishing line. Here's a guy who wants to know your guys' opinion on this. That's smart. Yeah, but it's way stronger. Dental floss. He says this is better than dental floss.

Dental floss is strong stuff. Braided fishing line is strong. Yeah, but you don't use braided fishing line to floss your teeth. I know, but yeah, I carry dental floss andided fishing line to floss your teeth. I know. But yeah, I carry dental floss and do my field repairs with dental floss. I've got field repairs I made way ago.

Yes. I sold my sling up a long time ago with dental floss. I carry a little mini travel dental floss in my kit, and to the back of that, I stitch a needle meant for fixing sailboat sails. Okay. It's got a curve to it. Yeah. Little kids carry needles

because they think they watched Rambo and they think you're going to sew yourself up. I've heard from doctors that that's not the way to go about it. When you give yourself

stitches, the first thing they're going to do when you get to the doctor is undo those stitches because it's just not properly cleaned in there. Right. you're holding holding in nasty stuff my friend who is a doctor stitched their own dog up one time when we were hunting and they even undid those

stitches that were done by a doctor to get everything sterile in there yeah and then do a redo but we used to all dream because rambo a redo. But we used to all dream, because Rambo stitched his arm. And we used to all dream of stitching, if you would be so lucky as to get into a situation where you could sew yourself back up. And then you could point to it at some party later. Just be like, I know that looks a little rough, but understand that I did that.

I have a coincidental counter story. Because my cousin was somewhere deep in Colorado. Not real back country, but like, what do you call it? Like four-wheel drive back country, right? Cross some slick spots and whatnot. And they got to a spot. I think they got to a snow drift and there was like some trees down. And anyways, they're chopping their way through it.

And he put a hatchet right into his shin. Oh. Yeah. And they, I don't know the reason they didn't just leave, but they stitched him up, and they stayed. And he got to the hospital a couple days later, and they were like, good job. Excellent. Don't need to do anything here. Bullshit.

Really? Yep. Really? Mm-hmm. All right. job excellent don't need to do anything here bullshit really yep really all right here's one was it because they looked at him they were like well you're not gonna be able to pay for this anyway so maybe i feel like there was an argument to that there was going to be maybe more damage done by going in there and messing around anymore and trying to reopen the moon, especially after that, you know, the time of whatever, 48 hours or more had passed. There was some sort of thinking like that.

Yeah. Let's say you're out hunting. You're out hunting. Picture it. Yep. I'm setting the scene. You're out hunting. How many bullets do you got with you?

This is a great question what is the reasoning for this number and what arguments have guys had on the topic over the years oh i like it how many bullets are you toting around out in the woods can't believe we haven't covered this no i cannot believe we've never talked about this because i have very uh strong conflicted feelings on the subject. Do you remember the last, second to last time we hunted BC and we were up on the mountain and this question just kind of came up? No. Between Aaron, yourself, and myself,

all three of us had 13 rounds total for 10 days. Do you remember? No, I don't. I wish I remembered because that number feels good to me. The number feels good to me. It's an unlucky number, which I don't believe in. I don't care about that. Why do we all have 13 rounds?

Because everyone knows that 20 is too many and 10. Because here's the thing. I start to get on a couple issues well you go first why i'll get around to why i carry 13 around why i carry around 13 okay three rounds in the magazine oh that's why it's 13 uh three rounds in your pocket or someplace quick access. Two in my pad. Two in my hip pouch. Three in the mag, two in the hip pouch.

You got at least two tags on most long hunts. So that could be, you know, one, two, three rounds per animal if things get sideways. And then if you fall on your butt and you whack your scope, you want a couple of rounds to sight back in with, right? That's one of the things in my head. How that adds up to 13 in my brain when I'm packing my pack, I don't know. What I'll touch on too is that there's a societal collapse while I'm out.

And I got to reckon with that. So here I am. Society has collapsed. Ammunition value goes way up. I'm like, I'm going to be residing in the mountains now for the foreseeable future until I can sneak my way in and rescue my family. So then I got to factor that in and add another one, another bull or two for that. So that's your like little equation? Yes.

That's it. But that would mean that if you only had a tag, let's say you don't have a deer tag and an elk tag, you got a tag, you got a deer tag, do you then take some out?

It would be, yeah. By that, it would be reduced by three you would yeah i mean if so you do the you you calculate that carefully no i really don't it's just and that's the question it's like that's typically what i end up with in my between my person and my pack yeah how i get there, I do not know. These numbers are definitely more of like backpack, like I can't get back to the truck tonight. I'm in there for a week.

So if I happen to bump my scope, I got to deal with it out here. No, because I do the same thing even day hunting. Yeah. Even day hunting where it's like I leave my vehicle before daylight and I know I'll get back to my rig after dark, I will find myself still carrying around the same number. And I'm going to explain how I've come to it or sort of the loose math I'm running in my head.

But, Yanni, what's your number? I would say that, yeah, if I'm out there for like, if it's like a big hunt and we're backpacking, staying out there, I'm probably like full mag. So if that's three or four rounds and then I've probably just got a sleeve of 10, um, you know, lately we've been shooting federal ammo, which, but before shooting federal, I would just have reloaded stuff. So it would sort of depend on what sort of container I had. So if the container held eight, I probably would have just had eight. But just some way that I can organize it.

You know, I like to run those little stock pouches and sheetgrass suits. I do not understand those things. But, man, I mean, talk about having a place. You don't have one, Steve? No, do I have, like, bullets hanging off. You don't have one, Steve? No, do I have like bullets hanging off my stock? It's like a bullet losing

device. I think it's the other word for it. No, but see, mine are enclosed. Giannis' deal looks, you know,

Giannis' looks so. Oh, you don't care like the bandolier looking. No, no, no. It looks so put together

and. Benny O'Brien was running one of those bandoliers. Yeah, guess what? Because he was carrying a Giannis Patel's rigged rifle. Yeah, it's like a, I call it like an ammunition dispersal device. of those bandoliers yeah guess what because he was carrying a yannis patel's rigged rifle yeah

i caught like an ammunition dispersal device no that one does have it on the outside and i feel like that is a flaw um but the other one i have and i think i gave you one like that the one from pig tactical it's zipped in the pouch yeah when i use when i use that i keep the ones that i would normally keep in the hip belt of my pack in that thing. Because usually if you're in the situation where things got, I don't know who coined the term, but got a little Western. Squirrely. And when I think they say Western, they're talking about like maybe a Western movie shootout. No, I think they mean just anything gone haywire.

Because people that you people that that use uh they'll use it anything like like people will say um you know you might be running lions like oh things got a little western i when i hear that i'm like oh the dog's got into a fight with a cat if someone packs horses things got a little western like oh the horse is freaked out and ran down a hill and scattered. Gear everywhere. Gear everywhere. Got all tangled up.

Kicked someone in the face. Okay. Well, let's say you get into a shootout. Squirrely. That's what I'm saying. A synonym is squirrely. Yeah. Or a shootout.

No, because if someone told me they got into a shootout, I'd be like, holy shit. People are shooting back at you. The deer were. But I feel like you want to have those extra rounds close. shootout i'd be like i was like holy shit people are shooting back at you the deer were so but i feel like um you want to have those extra rounds close and like top of the top pack or top pouch on your pack it's probably kind of a close spot but man on the stock your gun is close close super close to where they need to go to get more rounds down range you know know? Um, but I'd say for day hunt, I'm probably like full mag

plus another pocket full of three or four, maybe two full mags. So probably day hunt. If I'm going dawn to dusk, I might be down to seven or eight, but if I'm going back country for a week or whatever, five days, then it's, uh, in that 13 range, full mag plus 10. Something to think about as far as your cartridge containers, sleeves, the ones that hook on your belt, stuff like that. I've found, one time I watched a kid

go after some antelope and he had a full box of ammunition in one hand, rifle in the other, stopped to make his first shot, put the box of ammo down and continued off into the prairie without his box of ammo. So I found that and I just put it on his truck hood. But then I found two other cartridge like in the back country like going up a trail and the same exact thing must have happened somebody stopped did some shooting

had to pull out their sleeve ammunition ran off and then took off yeah we one time climbed up out this is on the arctic slope like where no one's around. And there's a mound, like kind of like a little knob, like a little glass and tip with a smooth thing on there. And you're out in the Arctic, right? And climb up there. And sure enough, some guy lost a couple bullets up top there, lost a couple shells up there. But my thinking on it, like I've arrived at the same number and it plays out in my head like this. I don't want the, I don't need a whole box, right? I don't need a whole box. So what will happen is I'll put three in my magazine, not one in the chamber, but I'll put

three in my magazine. So there's three. But then I'm thinking in my head, a lot of things could happen. You could even lose the magazine. It's happened where you're out hunting. If you have a detachable magazine, all of a sudden I used to be so paranoid about it. I would put my magazine in and then I would put a piece of duct tape that wrapped up around each side to secure that. I was so paranoid about dropping that magazine. It's a major complaint.

I think, well, I had one of those goofy Remington Model 700s a long time ago, and it had exposed buttons that would drop the magazine. I mean, you'd look at that thing funny, and the magazine would come out. So I used to duct tape that thing on, and I'd put a whole stock on there, so the duct tape would grab that stock material, and I was so nervous about losing that thing all the time,

I'd click it in there and put a piece of tape on it. I could still get it off in a hurry. But in a situation like that, I'm not going to be reloading that anyways. Then you're just dropping single rounds. I don't need to be able to get the magazine off in a hurry. I'm not going to, in the heat of the moment, pull the magazine out, reload the magazine, stick the magazine back in. I'm just going to be dropping in singles the moment pull the magazine out reload the magazine stick the magazine back in I'm just going to be dropping in singles but what if you had a second magazine sure and that's how you carried your three extra rounds in your pocket I still wouldn't because

then I'd be like yeah I'm not gonna tote that magazine around then what I do so I got three nobody I ever knew until like this day and age ever thought the 70 bucks for another magazine was everybody was like yeah that'd be nice but nobody ever wanted to pay it yeah i just never had a detachable magazine gone but i kind of almost went that route one time just so i could because i saw it in action once where the dude i was like i had tagged out the client we was like the last, I was like, I had tagged out the client. We was like the last day. It was a great hunt. We, uh, in the morning, it's the fifth day of the hunt. And in the morning, we're all jacked up drinking coffee, getting ready to go out. And we got one tag left to go and out walks one of the clients. And he's got like dress shirt on press khakis, like ready to go to the airport.

We're like, what's up? He's like, I'm done. I'm done. It ain't happening for me. We're like, we got a whole day, bro. Let's go. No, no, no, no. So it like literally takes us to way after first light until we're like, get your gear on. All his buddies like rally and we get out there.

And it's just one of those weird mornings where like 10 a.m. There's a five point bull out feeding in the quake. He's like the first ridge you peek over, and we're like, see, told you. All you have to do is get out here. But Ethan, who you met this year in Colorado, was carrying the guy's extra magazine, and he shoots, shoots, shoots, shoots, and then literally it was like I just saw his hand come up, and Ethan goes, slap him.

You've got to be kidding me. And that extra mag gets put in there, and somewhere down the line of six or seven shot, finally he hit him, and bull went down. See, part of what I'm doing all this math in my head, I don't go out. I'm like, I need one of these bullets. To go out making a plan about how much shooting you're gonna do i feel like you've already and as a latvian you'll

appreciate this you've already set you've already sent a message out into the universe to be like that you've got it all planned out about how much, just how many bullets you're ready to shoot. Yeah, but you don't plan for the best of times. You have to plan for the worst of times. Hear me out. I am. But I'm not going into it fixated on how I'm going to get maximum rounds

out the end of the barrel, right? I put my three in my magazine. Then I, in my hip belt i used to put two in my hip pouch of my pack now i like to depending my bino harness has a little pocket right and i'll put often one there because that's's with me no matter what. I don't like to leave my pack. I don't like to get up and be like, okay, this next hill is the hill. Let's leave our packs.

I don't like to keep my pack with me, because you just never know where you're going to wind up when things go bad. But I tuck one there, and nowadays I tuck one there, and I tuck one in the hip pouch of my pack. So now I got three in the magazine, one right here, one right there. So I got them all over the damn place. And then I take a sleeve, half of a box, and that's in my pack. And what I'm prepared for is if I'm hunting with other people, I'm especially wanting them because I'm picturing that they're going to cripple up something and then we're going to be trying to chase it down.

Right. Yeah. So that's one of the reasons I have much. And I'm also mindful of societal collapses. Well, think about Rambo too, right? To go back there. Didn't he pour out gunpowder onto his wound? And cauterize his wound

i don't i'm gonna start carrying an extra one for that so i carry him for societal class i'm gonna carry him for that and then like you said knocking your rifle off and needing more yeah i think about that the backpack thing i say snarky comments when uh i'm hunting with somebody this is always almost always archery season and for some reason they drop their pack and then take off after the elk and what I would like to do is leave that pack there and then that they would be forced to go learn that hard lesson of trying to find their pack in the dark yeah but that would also make me stay on the mountain much longer when I'm trying to get out of there. So I pick it up and I say something like,

yeah, some small child forgot their knapsack over there. Mm-hmm. I was talking with someone not long ago who, I can't remember who, Yanni might remember, leaves Thai Surveyor's Tape onto their pack to help them find it when they lose it because they've left it somewhere. I've done that in the past.

I think they're missing the greater lesson there. Yeah, you think that like you get up and you think like it's all going to happen right at this little rise and then you wind up hours later in the pitch black miles away without

your pack. But it doesn't even take that, man. I mean, when it's pitch black miles away without your pack but it doesn't even take that man i mean when it's pitch black it can be 50 yards but you think it might have been 200 yards like i've been i know that i've been within like scene distance of my pack in the dark and with your headlamp and you're just sitting there going shit shit shit yes when i do leave my pack i drop a waypoint on my gps if some real like if you're like a very heavy pack right and it's just really and you need to have like mega optimum stealth all right day one of a 10-day hunt or something yeah and you're like dude this pack is too much like i can't put a creep on right now. I'm going to have to leave the pack. Then I'll put some essentials in my bino harness and the little pockets and whatnot on there.

Take a GPS thing and throw that unit in my pocket so I can go find the son of a bitch when I'm, you know, wind up way later. Cal. Yes, sir. This guy, we had talked about camo undies. Yeah. Remember that? Yeah. This guy wrote in, he's got a bone to pick with you.

Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join our northern brothers get irritated well if you're sick of you know sucking high and titty there on x is now in canada the great features that you love and on x are available for your hunts this season the hunt app is a fully functioning g GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery,

24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. You guys in the Great White North can be part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites

are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit OnXMaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet.

Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. He owns camouflage. He owns First Light first light camouflage boxers yes but he says both times when he's winning to make his order he tried to buy a solid but it was out and bought camo and everyone thinks he chose camo so he's like he thinks you have a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy going on there to say that people buy camo this guy's saying that it wasn't his intention but that's what he has but it's okay because his wife thinks it's hilarious goes on to say i'm not calling cal wire yeah um well yeah not not to say i'm right and he's wrong but i i feel like i did say when we first started out that's the way

it was like the camo went faster than the solids now I think it is the opposite way and and I could be totally wrong but yeah I'm I'm right there with you I do we have such a limited offering of colors like right now you know I'm on like into week two of living in hotels out of my same bag. So it's, I also have camouflage undies with me. Because you burn through the other ones. Yeah. And I can be like, oh. Literally burn through.

Dry earth is gone. Time to wear the fusion. Here's a good letter. This guy's an attorney. This is an attorney, a lawyer with an interesting practice. He has a practice focused on hunters, guides, and outfitters. And wanted to talk about our permissions episode. A law practice?

Yeah. Really? Wow. I'm an attorney with a practice focused on helping hunters, guides, and outfitters in numerous ways. Nathaniel is his name. He's responding to the Permissions podcast. All 50 states have a version of the Recreational Use Act. This is helpful for people to know.

Listen to what I'm saying. If you're at work, stop working. Just listen. All 50 states have a version of a recreational use act. It confers liability protection onto landowners who allow free access to their property for recreational purposes. This means, he says, if I go knock on a door, which I frequently do in Colorado and Kansas, where I hunt and practice, and the landowner allows me to hunt, fish, hike, et cetera, without charging me for the privilege to do so, the landowner is protected from liability.

But recreational, what was the word I was using again? R-U-S's? Oh, recreational, yeah. Recreational, what was the word I was using again? RUSs? Oh, recreational, yeah. So anyhow, this liability, now I got myself totally confused, but he wants to caution this. It extinguishes the protections if there is compensation of any kind

given to the landowner. If this guy, we had a guy write in a letter that he offers landowners where he says, hey man, if you let me hunt, I'll provide a number of services to you. I will post your land if it's not already post. I will pick up garbage. He's going to do these favors to the landowner.

He's saying once you enter into an arrangement like that, you negate the liability protection provided to that landowner for giving free access to his land because you've now entered into a brokered arrangement. Wow. And that'd be so hard to disprove or prove one way or another. He says the compensation exemption would likely not apply if the work was done after the season as a thank you to the landowner. Oh.

But if you enter into it and say, you let me hunt and I'll do this, you might not be protected by his state's de facto liability waiver of a person who allows free access to their land. This guy says, if an individual is going to hunt on the land of another and pay or compensate, he absolutely advises having liability waivers. He goes on to say waivers are a whole can of worms, depending on your own state, but he still advises it. I know that a liability waiver is very powerful in Alaska. That's not him talking, that's me talking.

The National Agricultural Law Center has a great database on the RUS for every state. So he's just saying, you can go onto that, the National Agricultural Law Center, and look up what your state covers. If you're a landowner, what all your state covers for you with liability when you let people on your land for your charge. What do you think about that? Good to know.

It's good to know, but also nothing you would ever put into that landowner conversation, right? Yeah. Well, well, well. I wouldn't pay you. I would love to pay you, but I cannot because, yeah. But you could add it in. Say you got the permission and then it was going to be free. Hey, just so you know.

I told you I'd feed those cows for you. I'm going to do it in three months. You know what? I could picture throwing it out like this. You get a permission, right? There's a feeling of mutual goodwill. You get a permission. There's no strings attached to the permission. They're like like happy to allow you to hunt my place son i could picture saying um oh you know

what's cool is you know our state does have a protection to you you're giving me free access to your land um you're by state law protected from liability if i were to hire myself out here yeah he might be like really great and that could kind of pay it forward for somebody else thanks for he says thank then he might say something like thanks for sharing here's a guy that spells yannis y-a-n-n-i-s which is a good spelling not right but it's a good spelling phonetically says he's got squirrels coming out of his ears in Illinois. And he also says this. We often talk about doing autopsies on our kills to determine what organs you hit. That's not correct.

An autopsy is done on a human. A necropsy is done on an animal. This guy says, I performed all kinds of necropsies. Luckily, I have never had to perform an autopsy. So keep that in mind. That kind of falls into my cannibal thinking from a couple months back. You remember that? Yeah, you can preview it with me again,

but I'm still not totally sure how I feel about it. Yeah, because, I mean mean it's not bulletproof but you remember this yannis yeah the uh uh folks that say i shot a hole in it hunting is murder okay right and well you know we as humans say murderers are murderers but if you are a murderer who then eats the person that you murder you are called a cannibal which is i regard as being even worse i never looked at it being like um like oh at least he ate it like i don't feel like when i hear of a murderer right who then cannibalized the victim. I'm not like, well, you know, yeah, I do disagree. I do disagree with murdering people.

But, however, you know, at least he put it to good use. It's like that never enters my mind. I think those are just our societal standards here. Continue. If you go down to Papua New Guinea, where they had, you know had some structure for that. Yeah. It was an important thing for certain age classes. Yeah, it had religious or spiritual significance.

Right. So you're saying, though, you're saying if an animal rights person is going to say, like, oh, you murdered those deer, that the language in some way reflect the fact that you ate it. And not use that word. You want a word akin to cannibal, that you cannibalized it. Yeah. I mean, is murder, I mean, it is murder. I don't know.

I mean, that's why I float out these big ideas to you guys, so you can fine-tune them for me. To stretch them and poke them. Yeah. Cabeza de Vaca, who is perhaps the first European. Head cow? Yeah. Cabeza de Vaca.

Okay. He was a Spaniard who was shipwrecked on the Florida Peninsula. 1500, like way early. And everyone died off and was killed off. And eventually it was just Cabeza de Vaca. And he, to survive, he started to head west and walked all the way to the Spanish settlements in Mexico. Probably went insane along the way. Survived all number of harrowing things.

It was a long journey. Picture what I'm talking about. Yeah. From the Gulf Coast to the Spanish settlements in Mexico in the early 1500s, Cabeza de Vaca walked it. Around Houston, it seems around Houston perhaps, became the first European to ever lay eyes on bison, bison, bison, otherwise known as the buffler, Cabeza de Vaca. One of the groups Cabeza de Vaca One of the groups Cabeza de Vaca encountered

They would burn their dead And then make like a shake A milkshake Of the ash And drink the ash Like a clay shake But folks A folk shake

You want to read about some crazy shit man read about cabezade vaca i write about him in my buffalo book well just think of the thing like there would be some serious backtracking like just right now if you try to walk through the panhandle of florida all the swamps and lakes he crossed the mississippi we've drained so much of that. Louisiana? He describes a lot of wildlife. People put a lot of stock into historians when they're trying to get a general picture of what was where.

They put a lot of faith into what Cabeza de Vaca described along the way. But he encountered these big curvy horn, shaggy haired cattle around what seems to be around Houston. Wow. What was the timeline? How long did that take him?

It was a long-ass walk, but I can't remember exactly how many months. Jeez. It's like a three-page footnote in my Buffalo book, the saga of Cabeza de Vaca. And also how he wound up with that handle. He's referenced elsewhere though, right? All over. Yeah. It's famous because it's like the first glimpse.

What people are really interested in is the location and prevalence of Native American communities along the coast. Because what you realize is that, you know, smallpox traveled ahead of the settlements. So usually when you look at like when the Spanish are going into areas, when the English, later the English went into areas, you think of them like they're doing their explorations and they're seeing it for the first time. And you think like what they're seeing as being what was there but the way smallpox works like cabezade vaca probably

right introduced disease along the way so oftentimes you'd have be that you'd have a european stumble through some area but then it didn't really get like explored for 100 years later and now it seems like like when the English were going into areas, they were encountering probably about 10% of the humans that would have been there had they passed those areas 150 years earlier. Wow. Because how many people smallpox carried off. So if you look at what Cabeza de Vaca describes as he travels the coast,

for just how many people he's encountering, different groups, different languages, different cultural practices. And then you go and compare that to people traveling that same thing 100 years later, you'd think they were in a different country for what they're encountering. One, abundance of animals. There's a school of thought

that believes the abundance of animals is much higher later and the presence of humans is much higher later and the presence of humans is much much lower and there's an implied correlation sure between that deep peopling but not kind of historically how we've been thinking about it but that that's interesting that you carried off 90 of the human predators of course you're going to see us in 100 of course you're going to see us gain a spike in game yeah there's a guy. So when you look at where Lewis and Clark found the greatest abundances of wildlife, historians later went and looked and found sort of hostile environments seem to be the areas, this is just a theory someone has,

that where Lewis and Clark described the greatest abundance of game were the borderlands between warring tribes. So you'd get to where the, like you'd get to a buffer of the Crow and Blackfeet. Right. And that sort of no man's land between their two core territories you would find a lot of games it was very dangerous to hang out in that spot because

when you were in that area you were in the war zone yeah i'm shaking my head because this is like it makes total sense but it has never been explained that yeah like the headwaters region of the missouri and you've read that like just doing your montana history right it was like oh yeah and then blackfeet would carry off sue here and you know nez perce would come over but so that that headwaters region of the missouri was like a hotly contested ground where like you had the crow would come from the south and go up in there the blackfeet would come from the north and west and go in there the lakota would come from the eastern range go up in there. The Blackfeet would come from the north and west and go in there. The Lakota would come from the east and range in there.

And if you went in there, you were going to be mixing it up with other folks. And it was just, and it was like a game rich environment. Here's something interesting. We're talking about morality on a podcast quite a while ago. You were there, the Bozeman event. Oh, the live event. We're talking about what makes a while ago. You were there. The Bozeman event. Oh, the live event. We're talking about what makes a good person. Which is way off topic for us,

but we're talking about what makes a good person. My brother brought up something called the Kant's Categorical Imperative. He didn't explore it, but he touched on it. And this guy writes in to kind of take that idea to task. He's saying that Kant's categorical imperative

is a way to determine the morality of an action by imagining the consequences of any individual action if it was a universal law. So he says, let's go out and set out to prove why littering is wrong. Okay? So to apply Kant's categorical imperative to it, you would say, well, what if everyone littered?

What would the world look like? Right? So he goes, therefore, you can arrive at the fact that littering is immoral. If everyone did it, it would be a total shit show. My kids have a book called What If Everyone Did That? And one of the things it explores is what if everyone littered? What if everyone talked out of turn? Which is another problem we have on this show.

So, so he goes on to say, so if you want to prove, he goes, he goes on to that. He brings us around to hunting. He says, most arguments against hunting tend to be based on irrational emotions or

preconceived assumptions. But when you apply the categorical imperative to it, it does make it seem, in his view, that hunting becomes immoral. Because he says, what if everyone hunted? But he hasn't thought about it good enough. Because just the fact, when you hunt, you're still subject to the laws.

So if everyone hunted, you're still subject to the laws. So if everyone hunted, we wouldn't have, it wouldn't mean that there's more death. It doesn't mean there's more death and less game. It would just mean you'd have greatly reduced opportunity. Because if everyone hunted, I was like, okay, so that means everyone now

has to apply for all the tags. Right, reduced opportunity. Yeah, we will all draw a lot less tags. Increased regulation. You can't use Kansas categorical imperative to say hunting's immoral because if everyone hunted, all the animals would be dead. Because in this country, it's all regulated. If everyone hunted, it would just mean that there's a lot less opportunity, and you're going to wait in the longer line to get your bit of access. A lot more cash for state agencies.

A lot more cash for state agencies, which makes it seem more moral. Yeah. I see what he's going for, but he just didn't think it through far enough. Guy's name's Brad. I've generally had good luck. I've generally had very good luck with Brads in my life. Interesting. I'm thinking particularly of Brad Cross and Brad Chester,

who were both big BMX guys growing up. Oh, like the movie Rad. And Rad rhymes with Brad. When I see the name Brad, I generally feel like I would like the guy. They're already starting up with a little bit of credit. You know, Brad. Brad trying to come in and hit his heart with Kansas Category Comparative. Do you have any thoughts on that, Giannis?

I don't. Yeah, because that, you know. Really? Just nothing. Everybody litters. Well, no. I mean, I think you. Makes sense.

Makes sense. But that crosses the boundary of, well, yeah, I'm sure there's going to be higher fines for littering, but if everybody just keeps littering, that doesn't quite hold water, right? Yeah. Yeah. I guess if everybody poached...

Yes. But we already consider... But we already know that poach is in Zamora. We've already arrived at that. Yeah, so Kansas category on parrot in my eye. Here's a good one. This guy is aware of the fact that there are turkey grand slams. I don't know if he's aware of the fact that I happen to be a turkey.

I can't remember what Turkey slam I have. I think you have this grand. No, the Royal. No, we're going to figure it out. Okay, so it slams a lot of people hate slams and for very good reason because it introduces

the element. Look, I got to back up. There's slams and for very good reason because it it introduces the element look i gotta back up there's slams are a thing that someone made up or another someone or another made up this idea that you'd go like okay there's different kinds of turkeys and if one were to get one of all those kind of turkeys that person would be a slam holder okay? So with turkeys, there's a thing called a turkey grand slam. And to get a turkey, so there are five. Five. Yanni's holding up four, but there's five. A grand, okay.

Is there just a North America grand slam? Hold tight. Hold tight. There are five subspecies, which some people say aren't actually subspecies. There are five types of wild turkeys. You have the eastern of the eastern U.S. You have the Osceola of the southern half of the Florida Peninsula. You have the Miriams

and Rio from the southwestern U.S. And then you have the Gould's turkey from northern Mexico and the Sky Island mountain ranges of southern Arizona, New Mexico. If you were to get, and the Gould's is kind of the hardest one to get because of availability. Like most people who get a Goulds is kind of the hardest one to get because of availability. Most people who get a Goulds turkey get it in Mexico. So a Grand Slam is that you get the four kinds of wild turkeys that are around and widely available in the U.S. A Royal Slam is if you get the Goulds too. A world slam is if you go down and get another whole other species of turkeys,

which is called the oscillated. Not to be confused with the Osceola. The oscillated turkey, which is down in the Yucatan Peninsula, Guatemala, the Mayan areas, there's the oscillated. So that's the world slain. That's a whole other bird. There used to be a, there's possibly was a sixth subspecies of turkey called the Mexican turkey. And that is the one that's probably been domesticated for thousands of years. And that's the one that when the Spanish conquistadors came to the new world, that is the domestic turkey that the Aztecs had.

Probably didn't even, maybe didn't even exist in the wild at the time, but that was where they derived the domestic turkey, which was then taken back to Europe and is the domestic turkeys we know today. So turkeys are a New World species. They were domesticated thousands of years ago by indigenous groups in Mexico and Central America. Europeans came, borrowed the birds, took the birds back to Europe, bred up all kinds of crazy variants on the wild turkey, and then brought those back to the New World, reintroduced them. And that's when you go and buy turkey in the grocery store. That's what you're buying.

And they think that that original domestication was perhaps a turkey subspecies that is no longer around. I think some people think it was the Goulds. Maybe it was the Goulds. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law

makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land,

hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services

hand-picked 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 the on X club. Y'all. The question being that this guy has is, um, why isn't there a deer elk Grand Slam?

Can I add one thing about the super slams or this or all the slams here with the turkey thing? Because I was just on the National Wild Turkey Federation website. And they have a Canadian slam. If you kill all available birds in one province of Canada, it's a Canadian slam. Which would be like two. Yeah. Or one. Two.

Oh, okay. And then the Mexican is Gold's Rio and- Oscillated. No, Merriam's all down in Mexico. Really? So there's- Okay. Yeah.

There's more turkeys around. But then there's a super slam, which is the all states besides Alaska. And the reason I'm mentioning this is because I was like, man, that's got to be freaking hard, right? Well, the last time, according to the books here on the NWTF website... Oh, back up, back up, back up. You didn't...

I got confused because I was looking at something else. But there's other slams too, though. For turkeys? You didn't get into like Grand, right? Oh, I thought you covered that. Oh, okay. okay oh so you're doing just ones in addition the one that you hadn't covered yeah okay so tell me again the name you had it right that you're saying a name for getting a turkey in all 50 states is a what u.s super slam u.s super slam i'm jealous of someone that's done that i can't explain why listen there are according to

these records there's eight people that have done it killed a turkey in 49 states i like my brothers when i explain this to them they just they can't even begin to understand they don't like anything that that they don't like anything where you introduce a sports type mentality. Right. Like a keeping track, sportsy, competitive stuff. As Thomas McIntyre said, it's pissing in the cathedral.

Yeah. In their opinion. But I like it. A little teeny bit. I like it a little teeny bit i like it a little i like it for the i feel like if that's the way you're gonna go and uh travel the united states and get to go to 49 different states and meet the people in 49 different states and see 49 different landscapes that turkeys live in like it's well worth it well worth thinking to get into you know yeah

yeah you know at the end of it if you were to kill a turkey in all 49 states you would have killed turkeys in 11 states that did not historically have turkeys right because they think at the time of european contact we had turkeys in maybe 39 states so yeah so in that way to go stress that you'd be like looking at like just how good turkeys are doing but the deer one i didn't know yanni's gonna break down what's up with deer well like i thought before i did my little 10 minutes of research here it's like there's this idea of a deer slam out there floating aroundating around. Floating around. But somebody involved with QDMA, they tried to go with a whitetail slam.

And our buddy Mark King actually wrote a piece on it five years ago where they break down eight subspecies of whitetail across our continent. That's not – really? Yeah. So, again, that's why I'm saying it's like this idea that people are pushing for whatever reason, but it's never really. Because they want it to become a thing. They want it to become a thing. Same thing with the regular, not the whitetail slam, but the regular deer slam would be Columbia blacktail, Sitka blacktail, regular whitetail, Coos whitetail, mule deer, right? Five.

I've done that. Accidentally. Right. I'm an accidental deer slam holder. Now, I'm one away. Cal, what about you? Oh, I'm far off the mark. Far off the mark.

But the reason some people don't like this is the argument of, oh, you're just a collector. Yeah, that's maybe what I you're just a collector. Yeah. That's maybe what I was trying to say earlier. Yeah. Uh, I'm going to start saying not that I've, I'm going to make it into a food thing.

I'm going to say that I've eaten. I have the Royal slam. Be like, what's that? Be like, I've eaten all, um, I've self harvestedharvested and eaten

all five subspecies of turkey. Made turkey tetrazzini out of every one of them. Okay, ready for this one? There's nothing... I'm not asking you guys to add anything to this. It's just a thing this guy has. This guy hunts the Texas hill country. Cool country, I think.

You know, his family owns, you know, 50-some acres of prime hill country. Over his life, he says that it's become that, he's just seen a lot of change over his life as the whole place has become fenced. His subject line is, high fence is screwing my fair chase. He says, when you drive down a road,

you're driving down corridors between high fences and he says it just has had dramatic impacts on sort of the movements of deer and has really kind of like put the screws to someone who doesn't fence just the interruption of deer movements and he also gets into the interruption. And then the other things that have happened on the land, like introducing exotics onto your fence property, just has really changed the area in his opinion for the worst. He tried to bring all this up on a thing called the Texas bow hunter forum and

got thrown off. That's interesting. Interesting. I have been on those lanes, though. I'm sure you guys have, too. Driving down between the fences? Yeah. I haven't really spent that much time there.

Yeah. Buddy Yars has a place out there. I've gone hunting with him a couple of times. His place is not high fence, but in order to get to his place that that is the scene that pops in my head right you got 10 foot tall chain link fences on both sides of the road and so if an animal did want to move around they'd have to basically walk down a very very thin shoulder or right down the middle of the road to go from

there is no point a to point b right it's all yeah following some you know ranch map from 100 years ago or the flip side of it is is that there's probably if you went and tallied up the number of deer there's probably more deer than before they just live differently they don't move around as wild animals anymore but like it's not that there's it's not that you probably can't go and look and be like oh it's there's no deer there's tons of deer that it's all been turned into livestock yeah i'm thinking of the food change too yeah and so something like the numbers like the nut like you can't say the species is hurting because they're probably doing fantastic.

Like each one of these fenced places probably has more deer than it did in the past or else they wouldn't be fencing it. But they're just not, like some of their wildness is gone. Yeah. Because they can't roam. how much corn, like silage corn, goes to the state of Texas because it's such a heavy feeding, game feeding state. It'd be really, yeah. The number of, like the poundage of, or like the calorie count of how much food comes in.

And then again, man, it's like that in some ways, everybody's got its ups and downs. Yeah. Because in some ways, that shit makes the desert bloom too, right? Because like a lot of wildlife feeds off that. There's a lot of wildlife feeds off that cycle. It's just different, right? It's different.

Some people might go and look like, yeah, man, got a lot more quail now than we did. Probably way more water too. Well, yeah, because people do water. Yeah. You bring in a bunch of corn, you bring in a do water. Yeah, you bring in a bunch of corn, you bring in a bunch of food, and you bring in a bunch of water. So people might look and be like,

yeah, man, we now have a lot more quail than we did when I was a kid. We got a lot more javelina than we did when I was a kid. We got a lot more whitetail deer than we had when I was a kid. There's just like the landscape is supporting a larger biomass under the system of all of the feed

where you're turning like marginal habitat. You're taking like what's missing. Like what are the things that are missing that would make this just place explode with numbers? You'd be like, well, food and water. Okay, well, let's fix it. Let's bring in food and water. You wind up with something like very different,

but you can't really readily go in and just attack it from top to bottom because if you're going like, well, how are we going to quantify the health of the ecosystem? Let's do it by counting up how many pounds of animals are running around out here. You'd look at that and you'd be like, it's made a big improvement. There's a lot more poundage of wildlife. Yeah, you would. But other people might be like, yeah, but everything about it, like the way it uses the landscape, how it's moved, just all the dynamics, you've interrupted all that. And some people might be like, okay, you're right.

Well, there's the negative. And then they would be like, but a lot of animals. Yeah. Everything in life is so complicated. That's what I've found, Cal. This guy, we're talking about shooting fawns. Someone's like, what's the morality behind shooting fawns? I don't think there's any

moral, there's no moral decision to be made. This guy writes in to say that we shouldn't be harvesting animals that haven't achieved skeletal maturity because you're not getting maximum output out of the animal. He thinks it's premature to shoot a fawn.

We're talking about a fawn. You're talking about a deer drops around Memorial Day, and then you shoot it in the fall. You'll often hear people say they shot a buck. This is just real basic stuff for people who aren't tuned into this kind of junk you'll hear people say like if you talk about deer like they'll be like i killed a buck he was one and a half he was two and a half he was three and a half the reason they're always throwing in the half is because they're born in the spring and typically hunted in the fall so you always got like the half so people say he's shooting a farm the real time was just shooting a six-month-old thing.

And you're talking about a species with a life expectancy of two. It's not that little, but it's little. And you always hear like deer of the year or fawn of the year. Fawn of the year. Born that spring. Yeah. So when you shoot one and the thing weighs 60 pounds or whatever and you get a 40% yield, right,

he's saying that it's just like a premature harvest. Yeah, and I thought we kind of covered that that was kind of one of my gripes with even shooting calf elk everybody's like oh the veal the veal i'm like yeah but you get like 50 or 60 pounds man and if you shoot a two year old cow you're almost double than that usually yeah for sure yeah i like his term, skeletal maturity. Here's a hard one to answer. This guy wants to know, Adam. Mixed experiences with Adams throughout my life,

but I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt. He says, like, do you think each state has its own hunting subculture? Does a state have a hunting culture? I would say no for states, but regions do. You think so? Oh, yeah. Definitely.

Expand on that. Man. Expound. Would you say expound? I guess either works, right? You can, yeah. Go ahead. I've grappled with that in the past. You say expound? I guess either works, right? You can, yeah. Go ahead. I've grappled with that in the past.

You can expound or expand. I don't care, Yanni. Do what everyone seems right to you. Hunting culture by region or by state. I think that you could probably find little nuances about hunting culture in certain states and be like, oh, yeah, that's just like a total Idaho thing. But I think probably more likely you'd be able to break the country across the classic regions of Northwest, Southeast, Northeast, Midwest,

and sort of find things that are maybe tactics that are more accepted one place or another. Like you and I grew up. I don't know. Did you guys do money drives, deer drives growing up? Oh, it's so weird you brought that up because the guy wrote in and wanted to know the morality of deer drives. Right. Like, dude, I mean, that's like, that's, I mean, I was kind of.

I grew up in deer drive culture. Yeah. And we do. I mean, we do. It was funny because it's like you go right from the before, you'd still be in full archery mode, setting up stands and hunting deer on the ground, trying to get close. And then the next day, you would just flip the switch,

and it's like dudes just pushing through the woods, running deer, and you're taking running shots at deer. I mean, I killed my first deer. He was screaming by me at 10 or 20 yards. We didn't switch into drive mode. We had a 10 or two week rifle season whatever it was um we didn't switch into drive mode to the last couple days oh really and you were kind of an a-hole if you were out driving deer early in the season oh we do oh we do open them we would sit open in morning for two to three four four hours. Yeah.

Doug, they have, like in Wisconsin, on the Doug Dern property, Doug Dern family property, they have a light drive, a gentle drive that they call a mooch. And they'll start mooching the second day of the season, but it's a gentle drive. It's not like dudes lined up banging pots and pans and stuff, you know, which is how we kind of grew up driving deer. Not with pots and pans, but it was a lot of guys in the woods.

But that, okay, a couple of- Well, your guys' camp stuff too. Yeah. The camp that you went to. Yeah. I was going to bring up just a couple of differences that I've seen between just the two regions that I've hunted a lot in, which would be the Midwest and then the Intermountain Rockies. But like deer poles or meat hanging poles, right? Like we have a picture of every single year that I've been at that Wisconsin deer camp

of most of the deer, unless someone left early and took theirs, but hung up on a pole and all of us standing in front of it. it's like a picture that's taken not really to like be like oh look at everything we killed but it's sort of just it commemorates in um archives the hunt right and like who was there how many deer were killed so that you know it was a good year bad year um yeah it tracks time yeah but a lot like so and then if you compare that to out west like deer drives and i think meat poles are by a lot of like western hunters are kind of considered like not not cool you know not part of the culture yeah not part of the culture well the deer drive thing, we did some drives here and there. For the large part, I would say completely unsuccessful.

But you're dealing with bigger chunks of ground, right? Typically, right? Yeah. It's just not as manageable. Because you're generally driving. When you're doing deer drives, you're driving places that have way more deer per unit of space than you're going to have in the west and we always had way fewer people too i feel like if you really want to find success on a drive the number of hunters you have to have has to be way higher and we just never had you know that's why the whole deer camp thing is so, it was always so weird to me in the West because it was like, get everybody together.

We would do artisan small batch drives too. Like the first deer I killed when I was 13 was on an artisan small batch drive. It was a four man drive. And that's when you know how the deer, you know what they do. You know how they respond. Yeah. So, like, there's this creek, Mosquito Creek, and there's this big sort of bend in the creek. And when deer get bumped out of that bend, they go up, you know, the second ridge down every year.

And every year, someone's going to kill a deer coming out of that bend in the creek going up that second ridge and so then it just is a matter of you say hey at 10 i'll post up on the ridge and you go down in the big bend and you know it's going to work you can't do it the next day it definitely won't work but every year it'll work yeah so that's like kind of a different sort of drive and the big pop banging drives we'd also do uh um a subculture that i used to struggle with but now i understand it is when you see hunting pictures from arizona and utah why how there's so many people in the picture like a grip and grin grin. An Arizona grip and grin will have a dozen guys. Utah is the same way.

And I used to be like, why is that? Then I realized it's because you don't have huge populations of wildlife there, and it's hard to draw tags. So to draw like an elk tag in Arizona, if you live in Arizona and you draw an elk tag, it's a big deal. And a lot of your buddies didn't draw an elk tag in Arizona's you know if you live in Arizona and you draw an elk tag it's a big deal and a lot of your buddies didn't draw an elk tag yeah so if you want to hunt every year so helping somebody out yeah so we now that we like have friends in Arizona who have sort of

a tribe you know like a group of guys they hang out with that they hunt with when one of them draws it's just a it's a thing that yeah we're all going to do it. So if someone draws some sweet elk tag, everybody wants to get involved, and everybody wants to go hunt. So all of a sudden, he's got eight buddies that all want to go too because someone's got a tag. Now, if you get up in a state like Colorado with vastly more elk than any other state, everybody's got an elk tag. You're just out hunting in onesies, twosies, threesies.

You don't need to have eight guys because those eight guys all got their own tags. You're like, you do your thing, I'll do mine. It's more individualistic, but it's like a communal form of hunting down there. And that's why you see these big packs of dudes standing behind some animal. I couldn't do it.

Drive me insane. Well, they also radio. Yeah, they radio hunt down there. Yeah. So generally what you're doing is everybody's out glassing. They're out glassing, and then when they find something, they just, through text messages or radios, convey its location. Yeah, I could just see.

It's like a hunting culture. Yeah, and I imagine it would be very successful. For me, it would just lead to paralytic indecision. Information overload. Yes. And then you got, again, that South Texas hunting culture where there's no public land or virtually no public land. It's general practice to use corn to bring deer out of an area that's otherwise very difficult to find them in, to concentrate them. It's general practice to hunt on elevated tripod stands or whatever, elevated platforms.

And it creates like a sort of culture around that that's like how deer hunting works i uh we were down at the dallas safari club show a couple weeks ago and an unbelievable amount of texas residents saying we're going out and we're going to hunt public land this year and they're all going out of state lots of new mexico colorado idaho uh wyoming some montana but all like got to go try out this public land hunting stuff because we just can't do anything around here oh really yeah pretty cool to see here's's another one. A guy named Patrick. I've always had great luck with Patrick's.

Plan to hunt in the future and I have a question that's yet to be... Oh, this guy's never even been hunting. It's not been addressed anywhere, he's sure, after looking everywhere. Why does no one mention harvesting the diaphragm from a deer or elk? It's not even kind of true but no one's mentioned it

yeah skirt steak yeah so when you got it's just small on a deer like when you open up a deer where the diaphragm fastens to the rib cage there's sort of like a little like it the diaphragm kind of t-bones this making sense it kind of t-bones into the rib cage yep and there's a big piece of of of uh striated or like stringy kind of meat that's long and thin it's like a like a hershey's bar it'd be like four hershey's bars or two three hershey's bars set end to end right diameter and length two Hershey's bars set end to end. Right? Diameter and length? Two Hershey's bars laid end to end, let's say. And that's where the, that's how the diaphragm joins to the

cavity. Now what? That's skirt steak. Is it a continuation of the diaphragm or the skirt steak? Yeah, it's like the diaphragm. From the ribs back? No, it's like the diaphragm from the ribs back the no it's like the diaphragm sort of goes out and that's how it's sort of welded which is an anatomical term but the diaphragm kind of is welded to the the the body of the animal and when you go and get uh

carne asada that's in a mexican restaurant that's what you're getting and on deer it's just really small on elk and moose it's like legit like you can make like full-on balls out fajitas with the skirt yeah i don't know of anyone who takes like the the who who does anything besides maybe grind up the actual diaphragm but but that skirt steak portion is usable. Yes. Which is the one that you're talking about that basically flaps below the ribs going back. It's very close to below the ribs, but it's, yeah, it's kind of like where our ribs really start to V and angle back.

That's where the diaphragm, right? Yeah. At the xiphoid process where the ribs come together. Yeah, so I think on deer, you just don't really notice it because it's really small. On a moose, when you open that thing up, you're like, holy shit. That's a big chunk of meat. Yeah. Yeah, but you guys aren't answering my questions still.

Maybe you're not asking it well. That could be. It doesn't taper back. of meat yeah yeah but you guys aren't answering my question still maybe you don't know how like you're not asking that could be it doesn't taper back it like it's not but you know like when you when you got an animal okay so yeah you're calling that then just the flank steak yes and then the skirt being the diaphragm yes oh the flank yeah is the well and i always grew up calling it the paunch. Yeah. Which would be your sides below your ribs. But above your hip bone, below your ribs, there's this thin thing, the paunch. We call that the paunch.

That you can just grind up. It's low-quality meat. And it has a very strong bit of fascia in there. Or like a thick... It's where love handles form yes there you go no yeah i'm pinching mine i believe that's where it would be i've been putting a lot of work into mine love handles is that like really a thing like yes that you're like i need something to grab on to i'm gonna grab on to love handles. Oh, no, no, no. I think that's a marketing spin on getting fat.

Oh, okay. It's a marketing spin. It's like an ironic. Yeah, because it just seems like, I don't know. I just have a hard time with it. But that's the hand. I doubt that's a preferred leverage point. When one needs purchase, that's where they find it.

Oh, man. Quickie. There's a quickie, then a quickie, then a longie. First, the quickie's a question. Second, quickie's an observation. The third, longie, is just a whole different thing. This guy has to say, how do you sharpen your knife out in the field? He talks about he's got a Benchmade saddle mount and skinning knife,

which is a damn fine knife. Agreed. He goes on to say how Benchmade has a deal where you can send your knife in and get it sharpened, which he likes. But let's say you're out hunting and you've got to, you're going to be skinning a couple of different animals. How do you, what do you,

how do you sharpen out in the field? Well, benchmate also makes you use their, uh, sharpeners. Yeah. I have the little one of the big one. Honestly,

I think the big one is well worth packing if you're going to really stick with a true fixed blade knife. And I can't remember what it's called, but it's got a ceramic part to it. It's got kind of a coarse and a fine diamond sharpener on there. Yeah. Man, a little minimal bit of practice, and you can sharp mean sharp sharpen those things yeah it's a little it's a little heavy and a little clunky but it depends what you're up to yeah like if you're out hunting where you know let's say you and your buddies are out hunting antelope you're

cutting up one or two a day um then i'll be like okay this warrants bringing like more sharpening if just going out on for one thing i don't worry about it. I used to just carry like a little, just like basically like a little teeny, teeny diamond honer. But it's like the, you get so much more to have an actual, Yes. an actual face to sharpen on.

If you bring a multi-tool of some sort, you can use the hard edges on that to, you know, straighten out the edge of your of your blade which is typically more than enough to keep you keep you running i feel if you want to be minimalist you know and you're bringing that what i like about that bench made deals it's got the angle so it's like molded into it there's there's like a big diamond honer not big there's a diamond honer face on it but molded into the molded into the sharpen There's like a big diamond honer, not big, there's a diamond honer face on it,

but molded into the sharpener is a set bevel. So each swipe you take, you can lay it up on that beveled piece and it sets your angle. It doesn't hold your angle. You got to maintain the angle as you swipe, but it establishes your angle to go in there and sharpen her up. And it's got like a little leather stroppy thing on it and a ceramic rod on it. I don't know what it's called. Guided field sharpener. And it's got a hook sharpener on it. Guided field sharpener? Yeah. Yeah, you can sharpen serrated knives, scissors, fish hooks.

We all know there's a lot of ways to skin a cat. There's more ways to sharpen a knife. This is one of them, and it's like, I like it. But if you take a brand new blade out of the box and you're careful with it, it does not take much at all to get that thing sharp, sharp. If you don't mess it up. Yeah. I think that's the key is uh staying on top of your

maintenance yes don't let it get dull yes yeah and what dulls knives more than anything in the whole wide world is bone and dirt hair yeah. Bone is bad. Hair dulls. Bone messes up. Get some mud in that hair when you watch your buddy come in to cut a shank or something off, and you're like, oh, boy, that's not. I think the knife ruin in this activity I know about is when you're skinning out a head for whatever reason, you're doing a cape and something or skinning it out for a year amount, and you get your knife in there

and you're working off the hide around the pedicles, that's a knife-ruining activity. That's almost like throwing knives at rocks. Hearing the knife, the blade hit the teeth too, that just sends shivers up my spine just thinking about it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I usually carry the little, they call it the tactical sharpener.

They have a mini version too, but it's only a couple, three inches long. It's got the ceramic V notch and the stone. So I just use that little V notch and just you know through an elk maybe hit it two three four times and uh just to keep an eye on her yeah just keep her straight keep her what's that thing called i have one of those two i carry it if i'm like if i can't justify my big thing it's called the tactical if i can't justify my big full-on sharpener, then I'll grab that little V-notch dealie. But I kind of became suspicious of those V-notch dealies.

I think you can, unless you take the time to really line that thing up perfectly vertical in the V-notch, you can kind of mess your beveled edge up a little bit. Here's the observation. That was little bit. Here's the observation. That was the question. Here's the observation. This guy says, you guys were struggling with a term. I think you were trying to refer to the LE effect.

Now, the LE effect is when you're talking about a population not being able to recover from low numbers, meaning there are like critical population levels but a population not being able to recover from low numbers. Meaning there are like critical population levels at which certain social aspects important for reproduction begin to break down. So meaning like, let's say you have a large, there's a reproductive strategy called predator swamping, for instance.

Let's say you have a, like picture a large collection of say geese. And these geese all lay their eggs at the same time. And hundreds of geese, and they're all in an area. They all build a nest at the same time. They all lay their eggs at the same time. All those eggs hatch at the same time. There will be a lot of predators lurking around. But since all of those hatchlings all emerge together at the same time, it's called predator swamping, where the predators can gorge themselves and gorge themselves and gorge themselves, but they can't get them all because they're all hitting the ground at the same time. Whereas let's say you took the same set of circumstances, but let it play out over a month. Where every day just some percentage of these eggs hatched.

And the predators could every day gobble up the small available thing. You would end up where they could feasibly get them all. But with predator swamping, you're creating such a deluge of offspring getting put out there that the predators can't, they just don't have a chance of getting them all during that, that window of vulnerability. So likewise, if you'll see that like,

like elk, for instance, will sometimes gather up in very large groups. Like you might see 200, 300 cows in their calving grounds. And those calves are all hitting the ground over the course of a couple of days, preferably.

Right. And you've got some predators hanging around, but they can't get them all. And then the calves are very vulnerable for a couple days, but then they're up on their feet and everybody's fine and they can run and the vulnerability goes down and you have some survival. So the Allie effect, their Allie effect, is when you reduce a population down and then you wind up being that it's hit like catastrophically low levels like that you can't just have some you either have to have a whole bunch or you're going to have none because they need lots in order for them to be able to survive i can't remember what we were talking about when this came up. Was it the condor? Or maybe caribou?

I don't think it was the condor. It's applicable to a ton of things. Passenger pigeon. We definitely talked about it long ago by name with the passenger pigeon. That maybe that species, if you don't have a billion, you don't have any. You can't maintain a population of 10,000 passenger pigeons because passenger pigeons need to have hordes of them in order for them to be socially effective or to be reproductively effective. Final one is this.

Final thought for the day. A guy wrote in, he's curious about, is it worthwhile putting in for the buffalo hunts in Montana? Which are a mess. A mess, mess yeah but i think it's worthwhile so there's a couple buffalo hunts you're looking there's a gardener hunt and a west yellowstone hunt it comes up every year where you have uh buffalo or bison are summering in yellowstone. And in the winter, late winter, as the snow accumulates, they need to migrate out. And when they migrate out, they cross the park boundaries and enter private land and national forest land. And there's a debate, there's this argument,

this perennial argument that goes on around this, where legally the animals aren't regarded as wildlife in Montana. They're regarded, once they go from being their wildlife in the park, even though they're native fauna that have been present on the ground, always, it's like a native land mammal, native game animal, I would like to say.

But when they leave the park, they lose their status as wildlife and they fall under, right now, to varying degrees, they fall under the jurisdiction of the Department of Livestock. They fall under the jurisdiction of the Department of Livestock because they carry brucellosis, which is a livestock disease that cattle pass to buffalo, and now buffalo carry brucellosis,

and they don't want the buffalo passing the brucellosis back to cattle. And so a state, you know, they enjoy brucellosis-free status, and if the disease were to cross the species barrier back in the other direction once again, you'd have brucellosis in Montana livestock, and you'd have to start doing all this testing and quarantining, and it's very expensive. So they don't want Bruce Lowe's getting back in livestock. Forget about all that for a second. One of the things that they do, one of the things that the state has been experimenting with and trying to do for a long time is treating them like wildlife. So they migrate out of the park.

They cross into national forest land. Here you have a resource that has value to people as food. It's a renewable, sustainable resource. And so the state will issue through a lottery permit, draw some limited number of hunting permits. And it's controversial, can be a controversial hunt. There can be situations where there's not a lot of privacy while you're hunting. There can be a fair bit of handholding going on and like letting you know when they've left and where they are. It's not perfect, but I think people should participate

in it and engage in it and get the most out of it they can, including a whole shitload of great buffalo meat, for the reason that it is a step in the right direction. And by that I mean it's a step in the direction of managing this herd as native wildlife that can support some amount of consumptive use. You have people that want the meat. The population can support limited harvest. It might not be perfect, but hunters should get in there and be engaging in it and putting in their two cents and doing the hunt and helping hunt, letting hunt managers know like what they liked about it, how it could be different in the future

and not just turn your back on it because this is a step in the right direction. It's good that they're conducting these hunts. He wants to know if I would suggest the hunt 38520 or 39520, you know, look into it. I put in for him. I put in for him. And I've been down there observing the hunt

before. It's something we just need. I think it's something we need to be doing. There's no negative to it at all. And the more we can do to encourage states to recognize and manage these

animals as a big game species, the better. So take one for the team and go big game species, the better. So take one for the team and go down there and do the hunt. What's the worst that comes out of it? You walk home with 300 pounds, 400 pounds of boneless meat. And if you draw the tag, you can give it up. Like if all of a sudden you're like, boy, I'm in over my head. Yeah. You can give it up.

But yeah, throw your hat in the ring. But the hunts occur at a time of year when no one's hunting anyway so you've got to round up all your buddies yeah dude we're gonna go out we're gonna you know it's kind of it's a hunt it's a management thing um we're gonna get the most out of them we're all gonna walk home we're all gonna walk with 100 pounds of boneless heck yeah so larry get down there, bro. Thanks for joining us. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this.

OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land,

hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service as a special tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX

if you visit onxmaps.com meet.