The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 123: The Sportsmen's Alliance

Episode Date: July 2, 2018

Columbus, OH- Steven Rinella talks with Evan Heusinkveld, Brian Lynn, and Sean Curran of the Sportsmen's Alliance, along with Ryan Callaghan, Kevin Murphy, and Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew. Subjects Discussed: core mission; moving the needle forward; the lynx of Arizona; backdoor attempts at banning methods and means of the hunt; taking care of the long-term problem; #metoo hits the animal rights world; the Great Lakes wolf situation as a case study in madness; are you for wildlife or not?; some good Kentucky elbow grease; 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, underwear-less. We put the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less. We've got the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Okay, we should probably start with a mega round of introductions.

The machine's on, right, Yanni? Yes. A mega round of introductions. My machine's on, right, Yanni? Yes. A mega round of introductions. My job is done. Yanni will now take a nap. Yeah. Can you guys do some introductions? Kind of like what you do?

We're at your world headquarters. National headquarters. Yep. Absolutely. Sportsman's Alliance. Who wants to go first? You guys are all gesturing to each other. Go ahead. I'm Brian Lynn, Vice President of Marketing and Communication. So website, social media, print, anything that goes out to the public comes through our department and edit it and put it out there for consumption.

So the United States Sportsman's Alliance and you guys are spread out a little bit because you're out west. I'm out west, yeah, Spokane, Washington. Okay. Yeah, so. And we're sitting right now in Columbus, Ohio, which is where it all began, which we'll get into in a minute. Okay, go ahead. Yep.

Sean Curran, Vice President, Membership and Development. So everything from individual members to business partners to our donors, fundraising events, anything that helps bring revenue to the organization to fund the mission. Okay. Yep. And finally? Evan Heusinkveld, president and CEO. I wear a couple of different hats right now, so I obviously have the leadership role, but I'm also still in charge of our day-to-day government affairs work. So all of our core mission stuff, our

legislative issues, our lobbying, our ballot initiative work, and our litigation team. Is government affairs mean dealing with government? At times, yeah, absolutely. So, you know, for us, we call it our core mission, right? And so, you know, when you're doing lobbying, when you're doing legislative work, either in the state capitals or in D.C., certainly it's dealing with the branches of government that deal with legislation. In other areas, it's dealing with maybe the judicial branch for our litigation work.

And then finally, you know, the ballot initiative work, the stuff that we've done in the different ballot issues across the country. Historically, we've done a lot of ballot issue work. It's dealing with the government. Really, it's more of a legislative issue that's just before the people. Then on our end, we have,

of course, Janos Patelis, Kevin Murphy, the world's greatest small game hunters here, and Ryan Callahan. Do you want to introduce yourself? Say anything about yourself? No, no, I don't.

Ryan Callahan from First Light World world headquarters in ketchum idaho uh all right so let's say let's do this um give like give me the the the the one liner what's the one liner of the sportsman alliance like when someone says hey man what's the sportsman alliance we're when someone says, hey, man, what's the Sportsman Alliance? We're in business to protect hunting, fishing, and trapping. That's it. That's a great one-liner.

That's it. That's why we exist. That's why we were founded 40 years ago right here in Ohio. Was it 40 years ago? Yep, 1977, 1978. Yep. There was a ballot issue in the state of Ohio to ban trapping. And that was the beginning of the great fur boom.

Yep. So it put people, like the great fur boom, meaning like fur prices kind of skyrocketed late 70s, early 80s. And what it put trapping, it made people aware of trapping somehow. It did, and it coincided with the rise of the animal rights movement and the radical animal rights movement and these folks who are obviously diametrically opposed to those kinds of activities. And so those two things kind of emerged about the same time, the late 70s and into the 80s. And that's kind of the genesis of where we came from was working on those types of issues. What was that ban? Was that a comprehensive ban or was it kind of like

a whittling away ban? No, it was a pretty comprehensive ban. What was that ban? Was that a comprehensive ban or was it kind of like a whittling away ban? No, it was a pretty comprehensive ban. It was a statewide ballot initiative here in Ohio that would have banned trapping. So, I mean, it would have been kind of the first entry into the all out ban world for the antis. Was that the first state they ever went after? You know, I don't know if it was the first one.

It was certainly the first major one. Following the victory, we weren't even an organization at the point, right? We're just the founders of what has become the Sportsman's Alliance. We're the folks who kind of organized sportsmen in the state of Ohio, ran the campaign, raised the money, did the work needed to beat that thing at the ballot. And then after winning, you know, they started getting phone calls from all over the country. I'm wondering how they did it. How'd you do it? Can you come out here and help us? We've got these guys trying to do this. These guys are trying to do that. And that wasn't, I mean,

the animal rights movement hasn't gone away and they're not going to go away. Just because they lost here doesn't mean they're not going to try it in California or Oregon or Missouri or where else. So why Ohio back then? I don't know. It's a good question. There's a lot of famous trappers that came out of Ohio. Yeah. Yeah. When I, when I started fur trapping and set my first muskrat trap in 1984.

And I remember like so many of the books I would have about trapping would be from guys down here. Sure. I mean, Ohio is an interesting state, right? We've got a lot of, we've got a lot of open spaces,

but there's still a lot of urban communities in the state. There's still a lot of major metropolitan areas that might not understand trapping, that might not understand the benefits to wildlife and the benefits to people even of those kinds of practices. And so it's a natural target. It has been a target a number of times for the Antis over the years. I heard it explained to me one time that Colorado lost so many of their trapping rights. And it happens sort of at the minute that Denver and Fort Collins comprise 51% of the population. Just speaking in rough terms, it was sort of like this tipping point where Denver and Fort Collins sort of like made up the majority of Colorado. And all of a sudden you started to see the tables turned against sportsmen.

Absolutely. Especially as you talk about ballot initiatives, right? I mean, you're talking about trying to convince 50.1% of the people to vote a certain way. And you're already starting behind the eight ball when it comes to trapping issues, when it comes to big predator issues, those kinds of things on the ballot. You know, a lot of times on the ballot, you know, a lot of times when you do the pre-issue polling, sportsmen are way down, you know, hunters are way down. You've got to claw your way back and you do it through advertising and television and word of mouth and all these different tactics that are used in a campaign. But oftentimes you're starting underwater. Yeah. It's funny that when you see, like, if you go to people, if you pull Americans or go to different States and pull people and say like, do you support regulated hunting? Overwhelming majorities of people will always say they'll say yes. 78, 79%. Yeah. Yeah.

But then when you start getting into, when you start pulling down, the more specific you get, the more people are like, wow. yeah, I don't know about that. Yeah. Right? They agree with the concept, but then you can, depending on how you articulate these particular activities, they start becoming like, they start doing sort of a moral triage on each issue and sort of like casting an opinion on it, even though it might not reflect like the main point they were trying to make that they support it. Was the Ohio, okay, so when the Ohio ban came out, here's what I want to get at. I want to get at that your organization primarily goes head-to-head with Humane Society of the United States. That's right.

I mean, is that generally like, that's the general adversary? Yeah, that's certainly the biggest. I mean, they're certainly the most well-funded animal rights and anti-hunting organization nationally and internationally. And was that the case even in the late 70s? No, they've grown. I mean, they've been around for a long time, but they've grown and they've swallowed up other organizations.

They've combined with Doris Day Animal League. They've combined with, I believe, the Fund for Animals and others over the years. But today, they certainly are the biggest and the most well-funded. I think there's a ton of confusion that people have. Like your average Joe Blow has a lot of confusion about what the Humane Society does. I think if you go to most people,

they think it's about like taking care of, of sheltering cats and dogs. Cats and dogs, yep. And I hate to give credit where credit's due, but they did a masterful job of mainstreaming their image, right? They've done a masterful job of co-opting that term. The local humane society is the guys who rescue cats and dogs. Like you said, it's where you go to get a shelter animal if you need a pet.

They've taken that and they've used that to wrap their radical agenda. And so they use that moniker, they use that name as a way to cover up really what the true agenda of the organization is. They don't run animal shelters. They don't run pet shelters. They hardly do any of that kind of work at all. They're a policy-driven organization that's based in Washington, D.C. But when people say the local, if someone says like the local humane society, is that fundamentally distinct from HSUS? Absolutely.

They're not associated at all. There's no association. No. A lot of the local humane societies actually are frustrated by HSUS, by the funding side of it, right? Because you get people who see their commercials on TV, right? You put a sad dog, a mangy dog with some sad music, and you run a commercial, and you get $19 a month out of it, and all this money flows up to Washington, D.C. It's not flowing into local shelters. It's not saving cats and dogs. You get $19 a month out of it, and all this money flows up to Washington, D.C. It's not flowing into local shelters.

It's not saving cats and dogs. It's pushing these policy agendas. See, here I am talking about how it's annoying that people are confused about it, but I'm confused about it because I thought there was some. There's none. It's little h and capital H. Your local shelters are dependent upon donations and local taxes. That's it.

And they're struggling. Humane Society of the United States, less than 1% of their budget goes to grants or any kind of support for local shelters. They're co-opting this message. Yes, less than 1% according to their 990 tax returns and they've co-opted it and they've they're using it to fund ballot initiatives or lobbying to stop hunting trapping and uh big ag cal how familiar with you how checked out are you on that enough to not object to anything that's being said i'm not asking you i'm just doing it i'm doing a man on the street right now. Yeah. I'm like stopping you on the street to say, hey, man. Well, I guess I do want to know like where the no-kill shelter comes in.

So, you know, local shelters, a place where you go get your, you know, discarded puppy. Some are kill shelters, some are no kill shelters. And I know that's always for funding a big, uh, big issue, you know? Um, and so is, is a no kill shelter associated with any organization specifically, or is that just something done on the local level? Those are local levels decisions. You know, there'll be parent groups that'll run shelters as no kill. But, you know, as far as a humane society, they have zero connection to any shelter.

The HSUS. HSUS. So let's say that when we're saying, this is our little rule here, we'll say HSUS. How's that? And by that, we mean uppercase humane society, like the legal lobbying group. And not where you go down down where you take your kids down to get your get your pup yeah that's their hsus has a zero connection to any shelters that's not to say that those folks aren't aren't necessarily uh philosophically aligned at times

oh i'm sure but they're but they're not necessarily related organizations either so i want to talk about how anti-hunting, fishing, trapping initiatives, how they usually work in a state, just in a general sense. Then we're going to talk about a whole bunch of different or a handful of different scenarios, ways in which they work. But, and I pulled this from some materials that that you guys provide with me that there's basically like three ways to work on the state level and so the introduction of legislation and maybe you can like give me a quick run through on these the introduction of legislation you know what let's do this is it appropriate to do this through what happened in maine a couple years ago around black bear hunting? Yeah, absolutely. Okay. And by this, I'm talking about that in your materials, you explain that there's like a

sequence where you introduce legislation that'd be weighed by the state legislature. You can conduct lawsuits where you sue state fish and game agencies, and you can do ballot initiatives. What happened around bear hunting in Maine, was there something from all three of those that you could point to or only two of those? Well, yes, there were all three, but not necessarily in that linear order, right? Okay, yeah, all right. Lay it out for me.

So typically what you see is HSUS looks to build a case, and other groups that push ballot initiatives look to build a case for public support, right? So oftentimes they'll throw a bill into the legislature, start to get media coverage about it, create an issue where there might not be one right now. You know, there's not, there's not a need to ban black bear hunting in Maine, obviously. Their population has tripled over the last 10 years. It was voted down in 2004, but they decided to bring the issue back. And so you see them introduce legislation first as a way to drum up some support, drum up some of their supporters, and then also drum up the media attention. So they lost an anti-bear hunting thing in 2004? Yeah. Probably just to test the

waters too, right? I mean, if it goes dead, they might, all right, it's not a time or place yet. Yeah. I mean, they can see how much interest there is. I mean, I think, you know, I can't attest to this, but I think in a lot of cases, these issues, these ballot initiatives they run are probably net fundraisers for them, even after all the money they spend. You know, they're advertising nationally, they're advertising and getting money sent from all over the country to work on these kinds of issues. And so the more that they can drum up, bang the drum on the need to ban these cruel and inhumane and barbaric practices, as they call them, the better job they're going to do on the need to ban these cruel and inhumane and barbaric practices, as they call them, the better job they're going to do on the fundraising side as well.

So yeah, there was a ballot initiative in 2004 that they lost. They went away for four different cycles. They didn't come back. And then they came back in 2013 looking to start the issue again. And so there was a lawsuit that was wrapped into that. I don't know if you want to get into the campaign itself, but there was a lawsuit that they brought during the campaign that they tried to sue us to get our TV ads taken off the air. Yeah, I wanted to ask about that, but let's get into the campaign itself. So they introduced some legislation, didn't go anywhere,

meaning that the state legislators that elected individuals would, outside of bringing it directly to voters, that they would have decided and passed some bill. Yeah. It doesn't go anywhere. That's typically the MO, right? They try to do it legislatively first. We've seen it in Maine.

We've seen it in Montana. We saw it in Arizona this last cycle on Mountain Lion. So they typically try to do legislation first. It's much cheaper than running a ballot initiative. Okay. Typically ballot initiatives, especially on wildlife-related issues, are won and lost on dollars spent. Can you say specifically what the ban is? I mean,

the ban on bear hunting, yes, but... Well, it wasn't... Go ahead. In the state of Maine, the ballot initiative in 2014 was on running black bears with dogs, using traps, and bait. And in the state of Maine, I want to say it was 93% of the bears they take each year are taken with those three methods. Bait being the biggest of the three, but all three account for roughly 93% of the harvest. Flat. Very, very dense. Flat, thickly vegetated country. That's just how you do it. So you're pushing for sort of, basically you're effectively banning it. Yeah. And that's what we've seen on these things and we can

get into other tangential issues like right to hunt amendments and stuff like that. But the issue comes back to they don't typically try to ban bear hunting. Like you said, they don't try to ban deer hunting. They try to ban means and methods. So they're going to go after the most inhumane as they call it, means and methods.

And so in this case, they targeted trapping, they targeted baiting, and they targeted hounds. But it's funny when, funny's not the right word, that they'll use words like inhumane when it really doesn't conform to a definition of what's humane. But it's sort of like a way you can do it. It'd be almost like, it'd be almost like they're saying like,

we view it as unsportsmanlike. And then, because it, it's not, you know, if you're going to, if you're gonna say like, no,

and it's okay to shoot a bear, it's okay to shoot a bear with a bow or gun, but it's inhumane if it's over bait. But if you think of like the humane part, one would assume meant like the method of kill, right? Like, is it a clean method of kill? so there you have a lot of people say like well overbait really winds up being a cleaner method of kill because you're getting a short you're getting a shorter range shot you're better able to identify the target you have a longer window you know in

which to place your shot so one could feasibly argue to be like like this you know this practical argument that it's more humane to do it that way if you're really interested in parsing out what humane is they're not though but it's like a term that they grab on to because it means something and i think that what they're what like another way that they would put it would be like what's unsportsmanlike and then you put like so you're you're concerned with sportsmanlike practices like you're you're concerned with sportsmanlike practices like you're in you're concerned with enforcing a code of ethics well you turn it around on them like so you know at the end of the day they're not going to be okay with with black bear hunting at all yeah exactly but they're using that because

in a ballot initiative specifically you're not dealing with with the legislature you're not dealing with a finite body you're dealing with the public and so're not dealing with a finite body. You're dealing with the public. And so they're trying to convince the soccer mom in Portland or in Augusta or in Bangor that they need to care about this issue. And so they're going to pick out on those things, right? They're going to isolate those things. But if you got them into a one-on-one conversation, they're not going to be okay with black bear hunting at all. Exactly. Exactly. So they, in that state, in Maine, with the ballot initiative, what did they do? 51% of the vote? Yep. Yeah. 50.1. One more vote than 50%. Yeah. Okay. And how did it go? Well, we won. We won by a bigger margin. They won in 2004. No kidding, really? A little bit bigger margin. Yeah. They spent $3 million in the state. 2.7, 2.7 and change.

How much was spent on the other side? That's what they spent. HSU has spent, their group spent 2.7. Our campaign raised about 2.3 and about, yeah, about 2.3. Well, so that doesn't conform to your idea that it's dollars spent. You guys underspent. You have to be good too. I mean, you have to put the right stuff on TV.

You have to put the right campaign plan TV. You have to put the right campaign plan in place. Uh, and it's, it's not equitable either. Right. Because you know, if you look at the $2.7 million that the other side raised 2.6 and change came directly from DC, came directly from HSUS, but it was under the guise of Mainers for fair bear hunting. That's the name of the campaign. It's it you call it a front group right were there yeah but were there bear hunters in manors for fair bear hunting oh they found a few yeah i mean they found some guys that they could trot out there to say you know hey we're we don't we don't like these practices either i mean that's that's typical you know it's it's it's a misnomer to

think that we're going to carry hunters you know lock stock and barrel right you know you look at these things you and brian i were just talking about this the other day, though. The Montana trapping issue. Yeah, they found some bird doggers to come out. Well, we did polling on the thing before we ran the campaign. 23% of hunting licensed buyers, guys who had hunted in the last year,

would have voted for it. Yeah, because they're worried about the dogs. Yeah. So, it was a similar kind of polling in Maine as well. We were losing 20% to 25% of hunting license buyers who were going to vote for the Black Bear ban. So it's one of those things that you can't always assume that those folks are going to be with you. You've got to do the education.

You've got to put the right kind of TV commercials together. You've got to put the right kind of campaign plan together. And we talk about it in two senses, right? We talk about messenger and messages. You have to have impactful messengers. You have to have believable messengers. But if they're not saying an impactful message, if they don't have an emotional message to drive home, it people are going to vote in that 12 hour window on election day? Nothing else matters. It doesn't matter how they feel the day before. It doesn't matter how they feel the day after. It all comes down to how are they going to vote on that day? That's what your campaign has to be built around. What was the split on votes? It was pretty sound defeat,

wasn't it? I want to say it was 57, 43. Is that right? I can pull it up here. I can't remember. I can't remember off the top of my head. That's bad. I should know that. Yeah, it was like 16% or something. I can't believe that it did better than in 2004. Yeah, it was about a percentage point, point and a half better than it was in 2004. Okay. So you guys are talking about the messaging and the messenger. Can you explain a little bit like what exactly, what that means or like what sort of like the message or who the messenger was and use either example, whether it's Montana or Maine. Yeah. It's a, you know, you look at voting and what the other side's doing, what we're doing

as hunters, we love to say, we got the science, we got the facts, we can prove all this and we can, but the other side uses pure emotion. You know, the soccer moms in the cities, it's a battle for those urban areas and the people that don't understand it. And what moves the needle there and with those people is emotion. And it's the simple emotions, you know, you're killing these things unethically or inhumanely or whatever they want to say, trophy hunt, you know, they throw that term out there and that sways everybody. And so that message in Messenger, we have to counteract that. We can use facts. We can point out that there's going to be increased bear attacks or more depredation permits or more issues or whatever.

But we also have to tap into that emotion, you know. And in Montana and in Maine, that's what we did. You know, we had to slowly ramp up that emotional argument and make them realize that, hey, these are apex predators. You're going to have issues, you know, and here's the other side. And it had to flip that coin and use the same thing. We still have all the facts, but you have to make somebody who doesn't care about wildlife management care about this issue. You know, I can let Evan talk about how we slowly ramped up those emotional things, but, you know, using polling and data and being able to get into the populations that are going to move the needle. You know, the messaging can work for all these different groups

and age classes and, you know, demographics, but you got to find where it's not moving. And that's where Evan and his team do a fantastic job finding out what's going to move that needle and sway that vote. And how do you find that out? Polling. I mean, obviously we want to do a high level of public opinion polling to not only understand the messenger side of things, who is a credible messenger, but also what messages actually move the needle, right? We go into these campaigns and we've got a lot of history of doing them.

So we have a pretty good gut sense of message X is going to work well here and message Y might work well there based on demographics and past history and past campaigns. Like in the main campaign, we're 10 years later down the road, we're doing the second round of this thing. So we have a pretty good idea of where to go, but that's not always right. And so we want to poll test those messages. We want to poll test the arguments, not only that we believe will work, but we also want to poll test what the other side's going to use. What messages do we believe they're going to use against us and see what that does to the general public, right? Because ultimately at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what message I think is best or what

message Volunteer Y thinks is best. A message that works the best is the one that changes the way people are going to vote and when you're trying those out do you feel that you have to enter into like the dirty pool world like do you do you catch yourself because i think hunters do this all the time man hunters are are always always using rhetoric that they don't actually believe. I think you have to be willing to say impactful messages, right? And you have to be willing to tell an emotional story because you're going to be going up against emotional ads from the other side. Yeah, the minute you say the word heritage, you're talking about emotion. Right. And I think that's one of the things that we saw in Montana specifically is, you know,

the heritage message in Montana. We should clarify what happened, or just keep it focused to Maine for now, because we haven't talked about what actually happened in the Montana story. So we could either introduce Montana? Yeah, we can. Maine, though, has the same message. Yeah, it's the same thing in Maine. We can stick on Maine. You know, the bottom line, at the end of the day, talking about these are historical practices.

These are things we've always done. These are methods and means that we've always used. That doesn't mean a lot to, you know, a mom with three young kids in suburbia. At the end of the day, you've got to find a way to impact her. What matters to her? And so sometimes you have to look at messages that are a little bit stronger. You know, those folks are concerned about public safety. Those folks are concerned about what's going to happen to the bear population if it's left unchecked moving forward.

If you take away 93% of the way we're harvesting bears in the state of Maine, what's going to happen to a population that from 2004 to 2014 damn near doubled? Yeah. With the take. They were already talking in 2013 and 2014 about expanding main seasons and expanding the opportunity there and potentially going to two bears. To account for the rise in bear numbers. Yeah.

So now you take away 93% of the way you're taking bears. What's going to happen moving forward? We already had, one of our TV commercials was filmed in downtown Portland where they had a bear in the backyard. The wardens had to come down and remove the bear. Yeah, well that, yeah. I mean, I think that there's a fair way to, I think it would probably be statistically,

it'd probably be like a little bit unfair to say bears are going to come kill all your children because I don't know when Maine's last black bear fatality was, but they're not that often. No. But the thing about, but the thing about just conflict and the costs of taxpayers of doing all that conflict work is enormous, but that might not be something that registers as emotional. No, no, absolutely not. And so you look at like, you know, you look at, yeah, deaths are extremely rare nationally, but there are instances where there are bear attacks. You know, we had one in Florida that happened right before, um, right before the Maine campaign. There's, there's texts. There was one in Colorado here recently, a couple of years ago, I believe. Um, there,

there are some of these attacks that happen. And so you ask the question of, as bears start to move back down into the Portland suburbs and Portland's growing, I mean, Portland's becoming a suburb, you know, now almost of Boston, right? I mean, you got people that are moving up into Southern Maine. The demographics have changed dramatically over the last 10 years. There are going to be additional conflicts moving forward as the air population

increases unchecked. So it's about how do you keep those checks in place? How do you convince voters that they need to do this for their own good? A lot of people are going to vote their own perspective. And so what's in it for them? There's a public safety aspect to this. You know, the message isn't necessarily bears are going to come eat your children, but there is a public safety idea that you've got bears running through schools. You've got

bears in backyards. You've got bears wandering around suburban neighborhoods. There can be problems that arise from that. Yeah. But one of the things you guys did that wound up causing more trouble and causing another lawsuit wasn't really an emotional appeal is that you were using the state, you had state Fish and Game Agency people who were opposed to this ballot initiative speaking about from their perspective why they didn't support it. Can you tell that story a little? So that gets back to what we were talking about earlier with the third leg of this, which is the lawsuit side of it. So we, our campaign, when I say we, I mean our campaign paid for the TV advertising. We filmed the commercials. We wrote the scripts. We did all the polling. The state wasn't doing any of that. The state wasn't involved at all in that part of

the process. You know, the state was obviously concerned about the issue. They had concerns about the implications of what it would look like on the management side moving forward if it were to pass. But they weren't involved in the campaign. They weren't involved in any of that. Because they could not be or they just weren't? Both. Okay.

Yeah, both. But we did have them in the commercials, right? These were state employees on their own personal time. They had clearance from the administration to appear in the ads. They weren't instructing people how to vote. They were just telling people that they were concerned. They were opposed to the measure themselves. Because they felt as though they were being stripped of-

Their management authority. Yeah. Yeah. And so what would be like, can you give me an idea of what, just one example of what a state employee might've said about the ballot initiative? Yeah. So, uh, we've got right, actually right up there on the wall that you can see the, the, the picture from the, the, the TV shoot we did, but they main, basically the message was Maine's game wardens and bear biologists opposed, uh, measure one. The bear biologists? Yep. Yeah, they were both together. And that pissed off HSUS. Oh, I'm sure. Yeah. And so, you know, they obviously thought that there was misuse. That's hard to argue, man. Yeah. Well, yeah, exactly. And that's

a very effective tool for us to have to be able to play. But they felt like the state was spending money to produce these TV ads. And so they actually sued the state to basically take the ads off the air in our campaign, which is not an unusual tactic. You're talking about a campaign that is being voted on in the early part of November, right? So you back that up six, seven, eight weeks. That's really when your TV ads are running. So it's a very short period of time that you're actually on TV with your political ads. So if you can sue us and you can get our ads taken down for a week or two weeks or three weeks while we figure it out in court,

that's a pretty impactful way to take our messaging and undermine it. So obviously we went to court, we sued or we enjoined in the lawsuit ourselves because there are ads, there are campaigns, it's not the state's ads. And we ended up winning,

we ended up winning the lawsuit and all that kind of stuff. We kept our ads on the TV, but. So did state's ads. And we ended up winning. We ended up winning the lawsuit and all that kind of stuff. We kept our ads on the TV, but. So did you ever have to pull the ads? No. Did you feel that those ads were effective when you did polling? Yeah,

absolutely. You can see it in the numbers. That to me feels like, that to me feels such a solid thing, but then I have a lot of, you know, I have a lot of sort of like, like a,

like a native faith in state wildlife management. So that would speak to me, but I'm not the person you really need to change the mind of. Well, I mean, they're a highly credible messenger, right? And so they're a person that the general public's going to trust, that they're going to view as a voice of authority. You know, people look to the state fishing wildlife agencies as experts, and they should.

These are the guys who have the day-to-day management of these species and are doing a fantastic job. At the same time, though, they have to say the right thing. They have to say the right messages that are going to be impactful. They can't just say, oh, trust us, we've got this. That's not going to be enough to change that. Again, I go back to the soccer mom in Portland, right? It's not going to be enough to change her mind.

Yeah. All right, let's jump along to the – man, there's a lot I want to talk about. Oh, you know what? Here's another interesting one, man there's a lot i want to talk about oh you know what here's another interesting one man another main one i want to bring up because even though we're talking about stuff that already happened i think it's really informative for people to understand it's almost like more informative to understand how it plays out right because because that how how it's it's informative to understand how these things played out from start to finish in order to begin understanding what will happen in the future, right? So it might seem like we're talking about, like, oh, it already happened. Who cares? But it's illustrative of something.

And another main issue I thought was really interesting was the issue with lynx in Maine. So here you have an ESA protected species in Maine. And someone comes up with the idea to say, hey, you know what? No one should be able to trap in an area that could potentially have links because you might accidentally

catch a links. That's right. And if you accidentally catch a links, it'd be an ESA violation or we'd like to make it an ESA violation. So therefore, let's stop trapping anywhere with lynx. And you brought up an interesting point in some of your materials that you put out to the public.

With that line of thinking, you could close fishing in a river where an ESA-listed fish happened to be present. That's right. So it becomes a really important fight. Like someone might look at it and be like, oh, it's like this really detailed policy thing, but it's not. It's just kind of a way to put like a special little twist on something. A little backdoor attempt to get at something a little bit broader, right?

Yeah. You know, we're not going to sit here and argue that, yeah, we want to see a whole bunch of federally protected lynx species killed by trappers. No, that's not the argument. The argument is that at the end of the day, most of the lynx that were caught were being released unharmed, right? And so if you have a few lynx that are caught incidentally to other trapping seasons that are going on, that doesn't have a population level impact, even if the species is

federally threatened or federally endangered, that's not having a population level impact on the lynx species as a whole. But if you use that line of thinking, like you said, you can expand that pretty quickly to other things where you can say, okay, well, there are endangered wolves in the area and they are about the same size and look like coyotes. And it gets back to the wolf discussion too with this idea that there are two wolf species

in the eastern part of the u.s there's the um one that is very very this isn't the antis theory right but there's one that is is very rare looks identical to the western great lakes gray wolf the only way you can tell them apart is genetically well if you have a wolf subspecies or endangered species of wolf that's separate from the Great Lakes gray wolf in the same area as the gray wolf, how could you ever possibly allow a hunting season? So you can see how they can take these arguments and if they can get that established in case law in the Lynx lawsuit, then you can apply it to other areas, whether it's fishing or whether it's hunting for

other species. So what happened with the Lynx situation that they put out? So we've had numerous lawsuits on this. There's been at least two rounds of lynx lawsuits in Maine. There was a lynx lawsuit in Minnesota. This really dates back to started probably 2006, 2007 timeframe and has been litigated over the years since then. We've had some favorable outcomes that the trappers have had to put some stuff in place that would help to ensure that they don't unnecessarily catch additional links. But the bottom line is, I think the population is at a level now

where you'll see the Fish and Wildlife Service start to move forward with a delisting effort and getting them back off the ESA. The adjustments that the trappers had to make, is that just like how the, what kind of trap and how those traps are placed right yeah yeah there's that's an interesting thing with i want to spend some time on this later but it's but since it came up it's an interesting thing with how we sort of

um the ways in which sportsmen can kind of cooperate to alleviate issues like this. Like, for instance, when you get into that you'd be able to release, if you had a bycatch incident trapping, like you caught a lynx in the area where you're not allowed to retain a lynx, that you would take steps to modify your equipment to enable you to release things unharmed and it comes down like really like technical stuff like jaw thickness right right like like a lot of trappers you know will laminate the jaws on their trap to increase this like to increase the surface area okay

adding inline adding inline swivels so you have like a trap is staked out and you have a chain that connects to the trap and you have a swivel at the trap base. You have a swivel at the stake and guys will add inline swivels into the chain. So there's all these little steps that a person can take, right, to do it. And now and then someone would come in and say, you know what, we're going to mandate that trappers take certain steps that doesn't decrease the efficacy of the equipment. Some would argue actually increases the efficacy of the equipment. And then you have to weigh out like, okay, is this like big brother stepping in to tell me how to conduct my business? Or is this something that's actually going to enable me to conduct

my business long-term? And that's the thing that I think a lot of sportsmen have to look at when these kind of issues come up, man. Yeah, and for a lot of it, in this case specifically, it comes down to another, it seems like all this stuff comes back to Endangered Species Act policy. But there's a method in the Endangered Species Act where you can allow for the incidental take of protected species. It's called an ITP, incidental take permit. And so what we saw in the Maine Lynx case specifically was the state of Maine applied to the federal government said, look, we've got this issue. We know that we're having, there's the potential and trappers are

incidentally catching lynx. If the feds will issue that permit, it basically precludes them then from prosecuting those folks under Endangered Species Act violations. And as part of that application process and part of the awarding of that permit from the Fish and Wildlife Service, there are typically steps or concessions that are made to assuage those concerns. Got you. So there's a bit of a back and forth on what it's going to take to allow it to go through. An interesting point that came up when I was looking at the lynx issue in Maine was here, was that an HSUS issue primarily, or was that coming from another source? No, I don't believe HSUS was the main litigant in that case. I want to say that was Animal

Welfare Institute or Animal Protection Institute. I can't remember which was which, but they're, they've been involved in those cases over the years. In a case like that, you have someone presumably like feigning a great interest in the wellbeing of the links with a concealed goal or camouflage goal, just like hindering trapping activities. But it brings up an interesting thing where there was a loss. This is the cormorant issue in Oregon where there's perilously low stocks of salmon returning from rivers into the ocean. And there was a situation

where they were trying to control cormorant numbers. They were killing cormorants in an area to enable greater returns of salmon. So a cormorant is a fish eating bird. They're pounding salmon, returning out of the ocean from rivers. So to alleviate the pressure from the cormorants, there was a project where they were culling cormorants to increase salmon returns. And there you have lawsuits to prevent them from doing it. So here you're trying to you're trying to use a management tool to help an imperiled species yeah but that action gets flagged and gets sued against and so you have to ask like it kind of reveals that sort of bias or reveals the thing that you're not really we're not really talking about wildlife well-being here in a long-term sense we're talking about some

it's a proxy argument what we're talking about is like you're just opposed to certain kinds of animal deaths caused by certain kinds of people particularly people who are paying money to go do it right licensed people who might be deemed like recreational sure that's the greatest you know irony is that they want to stop hunters from paying into a system that supports conservation that ensures the long-term viability of these species but at the end of the day when they actually accomplish that now we're paying the state to take that place and they take on that burden. And they don't seem to have a problem with it. The animal's still dying.

You're still having conflict, but now you're doing it with a debt. But the other thing is who's paying, right? In that synthetic situation that hopefully we never get to is like, there's going to have to be something put in place to fund the state agencies. They don't do that. I mean, you take the California mountain lion stuff as a perfect example. You know, mountain lion hunting is banned there.

Now they issue four times as many depredation permits and they're killing more animals, more mountain lions than they did before, but there's no hunter paying for a tag. Now the state has to go out there, pay for people to do it or issue the depredation permits and then they have to have necropsies on top of that so now you got now they're operating operating at a loss at a deficit yes and there was no funding mechanism in in the

ballot initiative to fund the necropsies yeah yes yeah your salmon scenario is like, you're talking about state of Washington, right? No, this was happening in Oregon, but it was a suit against the, it was a suit, I believe, against the Coast Guard for killing cormorants. You know, they would use a euphemism, culling cormorants

from, that were preying on salmon smolt returning. Not returning, going out into the ocean for their feeding cycle i think it's the wildlife services of uh not coast guard right was it wildlife i think it's there yeah but that i mean that's such a messed up situation over there too because what we don't have diminishing salmon returns because of the cormorants. The cormorants are taking advantage of a giant system that we've put in place

through many man-made... Sure. There's many factors. It's a way deep conversation. Yeah. We've created a human-caused... There's a human-caused problem that we've created with damming and

habitat destruction and other things to create a situation where now we just have to stop the bleeding. Right. So, yeah. And we got sea lions taking advantage of it. But to have your perspective, but your perspective winds up being like a little bit cynical because here we have a thing like, yeah, we created a huge problem with salmon. Okay. being like a little bit cynical because here we have a thing like yeah we created a huge problem with salmon okay it's going to take a lot of public and political will to fix the underlying problem in the meantime you just have to try to keep the thing breathing yeah salmon being the

thing breathing so when people then go like oh uh you know the problem is dams and so now you're trying to like do these little micro adjustments. Yeah. You need to do anything you can to just have something be there while we take the decades necessary to take care of the long-term main problem. I don't think that our inability to fix the main long-term problem means that we shouldn't look at little micro adjustments we could make to kind of immediately aid the situation. I think that stock should be taken, though. Be like, yeah, do you know why we are killing cormorants? Do you know why all these sea lions are gathered at the base of this dam?

Do you know why we have so many? Okay, so you feel, this is a side argument. Excuse me, guys. At some point, we can't take down all the dams. I mean, we depend upon them for hydroelectricity and everything else. So at some point, it is a weighing. Yeah, and if you want to weigh it even more, you'd be looking at that. It's infinitely deep.

That's why I feel like you should. And I know that this country a long time ago decided against, rightfully so, decided against putting unnecessary restrictions on voters. But in a draconian sense, I feel like we need to go back to voters need to be able to pass. I just think it should only be on wildlife issues. Voters need to go pass a very stringent test about what's your understanding of wildlife history. And you know it well. I'm not saying you don't know it well. But if if you want to spend time getting into the cormorant

i just think stock should be taken like people when they say okay we're going to kill these cormorants and just so you know the reason they're piled up right here is because xyz please keep that in mind yes i agree it would be nice if everyone was infinitely aware of all the factors at play. But it's the thing that people do, and you're doing it right now, is acting like that because there's a bigger underlying problem, it makes it that we can't morally address micro issues. Yeah, I guess I'm not worried about the mic. Yeah, I don't know.

You're saying we made these dams, and we did the habitat destruction and the industrial pollution and so therefore we should be made to suffer and we should let salmon go extinct just to remind us of how awful we are.

That's taking a little far, I do think, because I'm not anti-bonking some cormorants in this issue, right? Like, I want the salmon to exist, but I think that should just be included in the campaign right there should be a sign we are killing these cormorants because we have destroyed these rivers yep our decision 60 years ago 100 years ago it highlights the challenge

of wildlife management right and this idea that things just don't happen in a vacuum yeah yeah we wanted to still stuff down to you you know, good versus bad, black versus white. You know, these issues are highly complicated. And you look at, you know, another example, you raised the question of whether or not, to me, this is the question I've been struggling to write a story about, but the animal rights and anti-hunting community in certain instances,

elevate one species over another, right? And so in this case, cormorants versus salmon. I'll give you another one. What about wolves versus moose in Northern Minnesota? So at the same time that they're pushing lawsuits to keep wolves federally protected that have recovered and have blown past recovery goals, the moose population in Northern Minnesota is crashing.

Now, is that all because of wolves? No, absolutely not. There are other environmental factors that play into that, but there's certainly an impact from wolves. And so how in their minds do they square the idea that we're going to keep wolves federally protected and continue to sue for that, even though they've blown past recovery goals, at the same time, we're seeing it have a direct impact on other species in the area yeah we're yeah we're willing to let moose walk that's a great that's a great segue cal and i will pick this up later in private we'll pick this up later in public 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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onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Can you give like a mile high walk through on Great Lakes, the Great Lakes Wolf situation? It's difficult for people to follow because there's a lot of twists and turns

and I don't want to get too, I don't want to get so deep that we lose people, but just a general sense of how the conversation has gone and where it is right now. So you're talking about a multi-year series of lawsuits, right? This goes back to mid-2000s.

It's been through the Bush administration, the Obama administration, and now the Trump administration. Multiple different times over that 10, 12, 14 years, presidential administrations have moved to delist recovered species of gray wolves that 10, 12, 14 years, presidential administrations have moved to delist recovered species of gray wolves in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Each time the antis have sued, each time the antis have taken into court

and each time they've gotten a federal judge to overturn the delisting for various reasons. So where we're at right now is that we just wrapped up a lawsuit last year, the final round of this lawsuit, I'm hopeful, that basically issued a ruling that was both good and bad for our side, right? The ruling said, yes, you can do the delisting of wolves. We're talking about distinct population segment policy of the Endangered Species Act is really what we're dealing with here. The broader question was, is can you use the Endangered Species Act to delist a distinct population segment of a broader national listing?

Wolves were listed nationally as a matter of convenience under the ESA back in the late 70s. Yeah. They were listed nationally because there was just a matter of convenience back then. There wasn't a DPS policy in those days. Since then, we figured out that, look, we're not going to have wolves recovered in their entire historic range. Nobody's calling for that. We're not going to have them in Seattle. We're not going to have them in Chicago. That's not a reasonable expectation for delisting. We appealed the latest round of rulings because the federal judge in Washington said, unless and until wolves are recovered in their entire historic range, they can't be considered recovered

in the upper Great Lakes states. So it doesn't matter how many wolves you have in the UP. If they're not back in their entire historic range, they can't be considered recovered, which is ludicrous. Yeah, when we've talked about this in other contexts, and when I'm talking about this, I always like to point out that elk are only recovered in about 10 to 14% of their range.

Absolutely, yeah. So it would be like saying, we're not going to hunt elk in Colorado, which has what, 250,000 elk. We're not going to hunt elk in Colorado because we haven't recovered elk in Ohio. That's right. That's right. And that's ultimately what you're getting down to. There's a question of law is that when you use the Endangered Species Act, when you use the distinct population segment policy of the Endangered Species Act, are you talking about historic range? Are you talking about current intended range, right? Are you talking about recovering wolves in these states? Are you talking about recovering

grizzly bears in these areas? Or are you talking about the entire historic range? Because under that status, then you're right, elk aren't recovered yet. And so how could you possibly have a hunting season on elk if they're not recovered everywhere? And that's the argument they're wanting to use on wolves is that, oh, they're not recovered across the entire historic range. So how can you possibly have a hunting season in Michigan? Well, they're recovered in Michigan. They are. I mean, nobody's arguing about the population science. Nobody's arguing about the data. They're arguing about arcane policies, the Endangered Species Act, and trying to apply that to the situation. Because at the end of the day, if they were very truthful about what they're going after, they don't want

a wolf hunt. That's it. It's as simple're going after, they don't want a wolf hunt. That's it. It's as simple as that. They want to preclude a wolf hunt. So how do you do that? You use these federal tools to tie you up in court for a decade, decade and a half and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars

to fight the litigation. So what do you think is going to happen? I mean, the delisting went through. I mean, I don't know how many times. How many times has the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, how many times has the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recommended delisting where the delisting happened for a moment and then management policy was stripped away?

Like just in the last few recent years. It's been like a cease. Three or four or five times. It's happened across, it was in the Bush administration and the Obama administration and now in the last few recent years? It's been like a season. Three or four or five times. It's happened across, it was in the Bush administration and the Obama administration and now in the Trump administration. And in each of these cases, the federal management agency,

so the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is the one that oversees ESA protected species. That's right. In each of these cases, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is saying it's time to delist. Right.

Where do the states fall on it? Well, the states agree a lot. A couple of the states have moved to open their own hunting seasons, but they don't have a lot of power. They're in the lawsuits as well, but they don't have a lot of power to allow for seasons or allow for incident or for take while they're federally protected. So they're involved in the lawsuits. They want to see them delisted. The states want to have them returned to state management like they should be. That's the way the ESA was intended to be

applied, right? It wasn't intended to be this Hotel California policy where you can check in an animal onto the list and it never can check out. That's not the way it was intended to be. It was intended to be used as a tool to recover imperiled species, get them back to health, and then return them to state management. But the antis don't see it that way. In the animal rights community, they don't see it that way. You know, you talk about charismatic megafauna, right? These are the species they want to protect in perpetuity. And that's one way to do it. If you can keep them listed as a federally protected species, then you can't have hunts on them. Yeah, but they only resist the delisting of species that might potentially that might potentially become a game animal that's right like no one you know when we

went to delist the bald eagle it was a great celebration because there's no historic use pattern of like you know using bald eagles as a renewable resource yeah i mean outside of outside of certain native american groups sure they would use them for ceremonial purposes so i was like there was no risk i think that from their perspective it winds up being they want to block any animal moving off the esa list that might potentially that might potentially it's a tool to preclude hunting yeah and so ultimately i mean you look at the esa and we we can debate ESA policy for weeks, right? And we have.

Yeah. Ultimately, you talk about an endangered animal is one that is in danger of going extinct in all or a significant portion of its range. A threatened species is one that will meet that standard in the foreseeable future. Those don't apply to wolves. That doesn't apply to grizzly bears

in the greater Yellowstone area. These species have recovered. And if the population starts to slide, there are tools in the ESA that allow for emergency protections to be put into place. So at the very core level of this, these animals no longer meet the definition

of what is a protected species. And what's interesting about some of the ESA species too is we mapped out what recovery would look like before we achieved it. Yeah. Like where everyone said, like even in the absence, in some places,

even in the absence of certain species, we said, okay, like what would success look like? We paint out this roadmap of what success would look like down to kind of like excruciating detail. And then we blow past those benchmarks and people are like, yeah yeah but i didn't really mean it this is moving that bull post yeah i didn't really in that go post i didn't really mean it you also hear a lot well you just want to see that so you can hunt them and my response is always that is the best case scenario yeah if

you love this animal yep yeah that would mean if you have like a huntable population, that means you're doing pretty good. It means they're recovered. It should be celebrated. It means there's focus on them. There's dollars going to them. Right. And it's sustainable.

This is where we get into our idea of huntervationist, right? Like, okay, we get to this point. Now there's dollars going in. We're hunting them. It's conservation. It's taking place. And that's kind of our little term we've coined is huntervationist. And that's what's happening when you get to that level.

It would happen with grizzly bears, with wolves, whatever. Just stepping back, yeah, they don't oppose the red-bellied creek chub getting delisted. It's these megafauna. As he said, I like to use the idea uh the bigger the eye and the longer the eyelash the greater the outrage yeah and then they can fundraise on that they can piggyback and fundraise on that and use that to fund all these lawsuits that they stretch this stuff out meanwhile the sportsmen were cobbling stuff together does the cormorant have an eyelash the salmon salmon damn sure don't salmon don't have one that's why they're being sacrificed to the cormorants.

So bringing this back to the original question, because that was kind of a long answer to where the wolf situation stands today. So we fought these lawsuits time and time again. The latest round, like I said, was a good news, bad news story, right? For the immediate future, wolves remain listed as a protected species

in those states. But the court did come back with a very clear pathway for the Fish and Wildlife Service to delist wolves appropriately in their view, right? If you follow these steps, then we would find that you have basically done this correctly. What is the scope of those steps? Oh boy, I'd have to go back and pull it up. I don't have it off the top of my head, unfortunately. But there is a pathway there that basically says you need to do it appropriately. If you consider these factors, right? We talked about range earlier. You don't have to necessarily show that they have recovered in their entire historic range, but you have to consider that impact on its current range. And so some things like that where you have to go back and the Corps basically went back and gave them this clear pathway that says, go do the delisting effort again and do it via these methods and I think you'll be okay. Am I correct right now

Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, none of those states has had any kind of wolf season for a couple years now, right? Right. And the most that any of them had one for was a year or two yeah yeah okay yeah i think it was just one season actually i'm not sure 2014 maybe yeah how long do you think like when they laid out that path to that path to state management is that a decades long path or could it be much shorter than that ultimately it'll depend on the litigation, right? So the Fish and Wildlife Service at this point is moving forward with that process.

I think you'll see a delisting effort out of the service maybe yet this year. It'll depend on what kind of delisting they issue, what kind of order it is, do they check the boxes correctly, and how creative can the other side get in suing to stop it? If the Fish and Wildlife Service meets all the criteria that's set out in the court's ruling, then they probably have a pretty good chance of having it upheld. But I would be very, very surprised if we don't see those same groups line up to sue regardless of what they put out there. So you're back into court for at least a year probably.

Can there ever be an end? Yeah, there can be. Ultimately, we'll get to a point where this thing comes to a head, but we're, I mean, it's- Does it come to the head, does it have to come to a head at the Supreme Court? No, I don't think it'll get to that level. I think we're probably,

I think we're in the home stretch here. I think we're rounding third and headed for home. Is that right? It's, you know, this latest round of, it'll depend on what the service puts out. You know, we don't know what they're going to do. If they come back and check the boxes correctly, then I'm sure there'll be a lawsuit.

Will it last six, eight, 10 months? I don't know. You know, these things tend to be typically a year long to multiple years long, depending on how many appeals there are. If they do things correctly, I would think it'd be a pretty short, short window of the, of the lawsuit, right?

There's not gonna be a lot of appeals. There's not a lot of stuff to appeal then. So you're talking about a delisting order by the end of the year, a public comment period, and then off to court. So you're probably looking most of 2019 is going to be eaten up with this. And maybe by 2020, we'll have wolves back off the list. I don't know. That's just a guess.

Yeah. You know, there is some validity to the question about what are the implications for delisting a little segment of wolves or grizzly bears or lynx or what have you. Like, what does that mean for everywhere else? Like, I think it's a legitimate question because if you look at an area that I'm infinitely more familiar with, it would be the grizzly bear delisting in portions of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming. has expressed the idea that we should maintain the idea of genetic exchange between these different isolated populations of grizzly bears, right? It's a goal to have connectivity between what's called the Northern Continental Divide ecosystem and the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem. So that's a goal that you would have a place for bears to freely move back and forth.

And it is an interesting question. If you get to where you have absolute saturation of grizzly bears in these certain areas, and you're going to have increased likelihood of human-bear conflicts, and you have a variety of reasons to want to go to state management and some limited amount of hunting, you do really have a responsibility to look at like, okay, what does this mean to our other, our other objectives? Because the people need to understand the state agencies that are wanting to have state management of these recovered resources are certainly not anti-grizzly.

They're not anti-wolf, right? They're trying to like do something that's very nuanced, you know, control in certain areas, open up public involvement in it, but also allow for some managed expansion of the resource. It winds up being like, it's like, it's not easy. No, it's, it's the great balance question, right? Where do you, where do you draw the line to balance this situation out? If you try to connect the Northern Continental Divide population with the greater Yellowstone population, you're running right up through Palinah, Missoula, you're running right up through the population centers of Montana. You know, what does that look like in conflict terms? I mean, you're inviting additional conflict at that point, but there can be arguments made on the other side that there are needs for genetic

diversity and other things that must be balanced as well. This is ultimately the great challenge for wildlife managers for any species is how do you find the appropriate balance between the resource, the user base and the general public. And for those people who are just like really deep into this, it has to be so frustrating when these issues come up and it winds up being like waged out through these kinds of emotion based campaigns. Yeah, exactly.

You just imagine when you've devoted your life to balancing out these complex things, then your life's work just vanishes in a second. It's all reduced down to a meme on Facebook. Well, it's reduced. You look at BC, right? I mean, BC is a great example of that. It's reduced down to the ability to get rid of a hunt because they use the word trophy in a poll, right?

You poll a question of, you know, how do you guys feel about a trophy hunt for grizzly bears? Well, of course people are going to have a negative reaction to that term. You know, people support hunting by wide margins in those countries, as you said earlier. That's regulated hunting. That's the idea that there is a state management system. People view that, the public views that differently than when you say, how do you feel about trophy hunting? It doesn't matter if you define them exactly the same. They're not asking that question. They're just asking, what's your visceral reaction to those two separate questions?

The poll results are going to be very different. Yeah. Okay. You guys cool to move on to another thing? Are you still seething? Are you seething? I'm not seething. I just got a little.

He's all damned up. No, I'm not. Well, Cal loves fish. Cal loves fish. But you ready to move on? Yeah, let's move on. I just see a lot of these arguments are always made in this blue sky world

where the human population does not exist that's right go ahead please and it's like well if we just let it happen it'll all be fine and i just think people need to be reminded that we have screwed up this fishery for existence or for example from where these fish spawn 470 miles away all the way to where they're coming back into the ocean so please keep that in mind when we're bonking these corn you're back on that this is just an example right that's an example and these guys were nodding in agreement it's like the arguments get made as if the human population is not here and expanding. Well, and the other side does that, though. We just leave it alone and let nature take its course.

Well, we can't. We manage everything from the ground up. Yes. And, you know, you got your habitat, your prey species, and your predator species. We can't just let a grizzly bear or a wolf run free and not manage it. I mean, it's like Bart Simpson at all. You can eat seafood buffet. It's going to go crazy and eat and keep reproducing.

And now our prey species are out of whack, and the only result that they can do is reduce tags to hunters, and there goes the funding for conservation. So it's like the other side uses that argument of, hey, we've, you know, just let it go. We've impacted the land. Let them do their thing. It's like, no side uses that argument of, hey, we've just let it go. We've impacted the land. Let them do their thing. It's like, no, we manage everything.

I mean, we kind of passed that moment like several hundred years ago in some areas. Unless we're all going back to following the herds and tearing down the cities, at some point, reality has to set in here. No, you good? All set. Okay. in here. No, you're good? All set. Callan, if you'd like, and you can allow you to, you can do, I'll allow you a guest

hosting position if you would like to arrange a discussion on, we've discussed salmon in Alaska at length, we haven't discussed Oregon, Washington, California, you can arrange the whole show all right I got some good folks okay bonking cormorant show it's gonna be called it's gonna be called bonking cormorants the cow uh and moving into more in more recent time oh the cat

the cormorant thing if you really want to get into something there's an interesting story because cormorants were uh ESA species for a while and then recovered beyond anyone's wildest dreams and i think that some people still like aren't hip to what happened there no i think you need a real tasty cormorant recipe in order to change that thing around yeah when when um let me chime in here from Kevin Murphy. Please. Yeah.

Water turkeys is what we call them back home. And they are a nuisance species. They have recovered in giant flocks. They destroy

the remaining islands that we have out in the middle of Lake Barkley, which was formed by Cumber River, Kentucky Lake, Tennessee River. They have become nothing but a nuisance.

And it's kind of sad to see an island that was out there with vegetation on it, and now it's got these black dots out there with this whitewash all over it. It's like a rookery. Rookery, yes. So we are fighting that issue back home to try to get, because the fish habitat is destroyed now. And the island is washing away down to the delta. One of my brother's first jobs when he was becoming a fisheries professional

was yellow perch were vanishing from the Les Cheneaux Islands area in the northern Great Lakes and they went through this big project where they were netting yellow perch putting these little markers in the yellow perch and you wait a period of time and then you go dig through cormorant scat trying to find your little markers to ascertain the cormorant impact on yellow perch. In that case, they learned that it wasn't the problem. Same thing in Kentucky. Through the League of Kentucky Sportsmen,

a resolution was made to go in and do a sampling of the cormorants out there. A lot of the sports fishermen were thinking that they were impacting the sport fish. They found out they were eating the gizzard shad, the non-game fish. Majority of them on there, but you don't have to

do a study to see what they've done to the islands out there. That species needs to be seasoned on them. Whatever we can do then we'll come up with some recipes after we get them in the in the in the hand but like i said we saw that same thing in in kentucky just recently where they get a lot of fishermen like uh i think a lot of fishermen look at cormorants and river otters all the time as being like if they're not having a good day fishing damn damn cormorants!

Or as they used to say in the UP, it was coomorants. Okay. The lion bobcat jaguar issue in Ocelot. Yeah, tell this story because this is a new one. Arizona.

The story is going to be very familiar to the Maine Black Bear story, right? I mean, it's a ballot initiative being pushed by the Maine State of the United States. It was supposed to be in the midterm elections or coming up in the- It's supposed to be on this fall's ballot. This November ballot. That was the intention. They didn't qualify the issue. There was some stuff done in Arizona to help them not qualify the issue, but it followed the same script, followed the same pathway,

right? They tried legislation. They weren't able to do it. They started creating a PR campaign to kind of push a ban on these protected cat species, of which really the mountain lions were the target. Obviously the rest were either already protected or didn't exist in Arizona, those kinds of things. Yeah, that's funny. So it was about mountain,

like if you look at the early rhetoric, it was about mountain lions. Right. They had a thing like the five most dangerous states to be a mountain lion yeah arizona was one of them colorado was one correct montana idaho i think utah and yeah so that came on the heels of the cease of the lion stuff in africa right right on the right after that kind of fervor died down hsUS released the report called The Five Deadliest States for Mountain Lions, and they had some junk science in there and some stuff that just doesn't make sense. And they started pushing this PR campaign that we need to protect America's lion.

They called it America's lion. And pardon my interruption, but Brian, you pointed out that those are like the five states where mountain lions are doing the best. Yeah. It's got the best habitat and the best harvest. So yeah, that's a good thing. But they, again, view it as it's the deadliest thing.

And so they flip it. And if you looked at their report, I'm using air quotes, it compared a 10-year harvest statistic to a one-year population statistic. So if you're the media looking, you're like, oh my God, they're killing all of the lions out there. Oh, I guess. And then they, you know, America, the top five deadliest states

as journalists and somebody who's worked in that world, lists are great things. People love it, especially for online consumption. So that got picked up by everybody and spread all around. They didn't include that, like, for instance, that Colorado has vastly more lions than ever before right now?

No, no, no, no. They're not going to include that stuff. It's just has vastly more lions than ever before right now no no no they're not going to include that stuff it's just that emotional reason to take it away but what was fun about it they were talking about it was like a mountain lion issue but they made it like an all cat issue and I think to extra confuse the situation is they included that it would be a

ban on hunting or trapping for things that aren't in Arizona. The Canadian lynx. The Canadian lynx, which has never been documented in Arizona. And they threw in like jaguars, which are federally protected. Yeah, and ocelots. Yeah, same thing.

That are already federally protected. There's maybe, it would, I think that most people would be shocked if they were to learn that at this second right now, there's more than, I mean, 10 is probably a big number for how many jaguars would be in Arizona. It might be closer to one or two. Yeah. But it's just like a fun little twist to put that in there. Well, yeah.

They can manipulate the media then. Then they can go after that emotional argument and say, they're killing endangered cats. We want to stop this. Make sure to protect these endangered cats. And so, well, yeah, okay. Well, they're already protected, but this is taking the next step. Or not even there at all. Or not even present. Well, the unique unifying factor of all five of those states that are the five deadliest, they're all five ballot issue states. They're all states where they get the ability to bring a ballot initiative if they want. Yeah. So it's all five of those states are states that gives them the pathway forward to

bring a ballot initiative, just like they did in Maine. I mean, the way the state constitution set up. Yep. Okay. It gives them the ability to put an issue before voters, where some states don't allow that. Some states don't have direct access to the ballot. So you feel that the cat hunting ban in Arizona was an HSUS-led situation, though they didn't do it under their own name in Arizona. But it definitely was. I mean, we have the application that has their name on it with the HSUS email address when they registered it for

the ballot. But what was the group they created to spearhead it? Arizona's for those wildcats, something wildcats. Arizona's for wildlife, maybe. No, it was wildcats. But that's what they do. They create a front group and they have their state leader, their state HSUS leader becomes the chairperson. And then they gather around that and they make it feel local and make it feel local. It's not, I mean, they, it was 98% of their funding was something like 98% of their funding was directly from Washington, DC HSUS headquarters. They just strike that pen. And to get it on the ballot, to bring it in front of the voters, you bring it in front of the voters, you have to cross a

threshold. Signature gathering threshold, yeah. Signature gathering. What's that look like? So in most states, there's two ways you can qualify an issue, right? You can convince the legislature to pass a bill by a wide enough margin that that'll directly put it on the ballot. Or you can go out and collect signatures and meet a certain threshold of valid signatures, meaning the signature comes from a person who lives in that county or lives in that legislative district. Typically, those vary wildly, right? You know, in Maine, it was much smaller.

It's a much smaller state. In Arizona, it was 150,000 valid signatures in that ballpark. So what you're typically looking at is you'll see the other side try to get above and beyond that because they know some of those signatures are going to be invalidated. They won't be from actual voters that have the wrong address, those kinds of things. Only 150,000. Yeah. Yeah, it's shockingly low in a lot of these states what the threshold is to place a ballot measure before the voters.

Because, I mean, there's, what, three million some people in Phoenix, right? Phoenix, yeah. Huh. Yeah. So what happened when, so they start gathering the signatures, but they didn't hit the threshold. They pulled right? Yeah. Huh. Yeah. So what happened when, so they start gathering the signatures, but they didn't hit the threshold. They pulled out?

They didn't. They had some issues. I'll give a lot of credit to the sportsmen down there. They organized together pretty well. They came up with a game plan to defeat this thing. And they ran their game plan. They were successful. We went down and met with those guys early on before the ballot initiative was even launched.

Tell them, look, we're seeing the tea leaves here. We can see the smoke. There's a fire coming, right? You know, they've released this report. They've highlighted these states. If you look at the five states, we feel like Arizona and Colorado are probably the two most likely targets. Because of Phoenix and Denver. Because of Phoenix and Denver, because we'd just gotten off the heels of winning the trapping issue in Montana, the ballot issue in Montana in 2014.

So just a year after that. So we've already got a kind of a campaign infrastructure left up there. Utah has some constitutional protections against wildlife related ballot measures. We just looked at those kinds of two states with the demographic shift that they've seen over the last 10 and 15 years, where the populations are located. You look at Arizona, that's a tough place to do a ballot measure. 78% of the households in Arizona, the TV households, the viewing public are in the Phoenix media market. So you're playing for one media market. That drives costs way up. So we look at these states, you can kind of predict where you think the other side's going to go. And they're looking at their own data and they're

looking at their own plans and campaign ideas and trying to figure the other side is going to go, and they're looking at their own data, and they're looking at their own plans and campaign ideas and trying to figure out where they're going to go. But, yeah, the guys down there did a great job. They put together a campaign plan that was designed to try to put up roadblocks to keep them off the ballot. Ultimately, the other side didn't hire a signature-gathering firm. They were unable to do so, and that drastically hurt their effort. Unable to do so for what reason?

So there's only a limited number of signature gathering firms in Arizona and the sportsmen were working with one of them already. And so that precluded them from working for the other side. And so what you're dealing with then is you have to bring in a signature gathering firm from another state. And that's not unusual, right? When they qualified the bear issue in Maine in 2014, HSUS used a group out of California to come up and do it. But in Arizona, there's a little bit higher threshold. Okay, you're getting into stuff now that raises all kinds of questions. No, in the best possible way.

Signature gathering firms, meaning there are companies that specialize in getting legitimate signatures to move ballot initiatives. There's companies that make a ton of money doing that. Just tons of money doing that. They just run the logistics. Do they run the media? No, no, typically not. Typically you see that done by other consultants, but typically these guys are in the business for qualifying issues and every state's got them. Guns for hire. Yep. They go out there and hire and some states you pay by the signature. And that's the interesting

thing in Arizona, right? So Arizona passed a law that said you no longer can pay by the signature. So instead of saying, you know, for every signature that you get, we'll give you a dollar and you don't, you're not paying a salary. You're not paying an hourly wage. You're just saying for every valid signature you get, we're going to give you a dollar or $2 or whatever the case might be. In Arizona, you have to be an hourly employee. So that creates a level of infrastructure that an organization has to have to be able to have those people be employees. You know, you got to do tax forms, you got to do this stuff an organization has to have to be able to have those people be employees. You know, you've got to do tax forms. You've got to do this stuff.

And you've got to have HR and payroll and health care and all kinds of stuff, right? It's a little bit different standard than a lot of states. A lot of states don't require you to be an hourly employee. So that created a little bit more of a barrier and reduced the number of potential firms down to just a handful. Okay. And so, you know, my opinion is that the other side got a late start on actually talking to these firms, right? They thought it was going to be an easier time to qualify than it was.

They felt like they could do a better job with volunteers, and they did. And one thing leads to another, and you ran out of time. And so they wound up having volunteers go out and set up out in front of a Whole Foods. Yep. What have you. Yep. I mean, to pick them out, but I just know that that was a place they were doing signature gathering. And a zoo and wherever else, yeah.

Sure, festivals, whatever. And a volunteer goes out there and starts gathering signatures. Yeah. Do you want to protect these endangered cats from being slaughtered by cruel hunters? And how many signatures did they hit? We don't know. Don't know, because they never submitted them, right? So they could have had 5,000. They could have had 120,000. The fact that they, they, they suspended their campaign, we just believe they didn't have

very many because they didn't even, they didn't even submit the signatures to the state. They didn't, they never crossed the threshold. They didn't come back and say, we've got, you know, 10% more than we need. And we didn't get enough valid. It was an issue where they didn't have enough to even submit the minimum threshold. So if every single signature that they had was a valid signature and they gave them to the state, you'd have to hit on 100% to get the issue qualified. It wasn't even that. They didn't have enough to even submit

the base level signatures. How could, in the case of Arizona, how were sportsmen, how do you battle that? Because there's nothing to battle yet it's just like all they're doing is they just have people out getting signatures are you playing like a like a like a pr game if you play to game these 150 000 people that they need to sure there's different methods there's different um tactics you can use right obviously there's the main method which was um Maine as the state,

which is a campaign you're planning where you're basically raising a bunch of money to fund a TV advertising campaign because you know the issue is going to qualify. Saying don't sign. Well, no, in Maine it was don't vote for it. In Arizona, what they went for was a decline to sign campaign, right? So they did a bunch of PR around the idea of don't sign this thing it's not what it is uh pretended or portrayed to be it's an outside group from dc it's not a local arizona group so they did a bunch of pr stuff like that do you think that was effective it can be it can be it's certainly um because it seems the threshold's so low yeah the 150,000 vote threshold is so low that you wouldn't, that you would get it from just, that you'd find like, you'd have enough like radical fringe people to account for the. Sure.

Yeah. You know, I think it was successful this time. You know, there's some other stuff in there, like I said, with the paid security gathering issues and some of the other things the campaign tried to do. And the HSUS had a sex game. That's what I was going to say. Let's not forget the internal turmoil they had right at this time. Right around

Christmas, first of the year, they had Wayne Pacelli get caught up in the Me Too movement and the sexual harassment. And that's the last thing you want on a PR campaign is you're trying to go out there and do this when the other side can start pointing back and diverting. But something to think about is

right about that time, they stroked a $500,000 check for the campaign. So they've suspended this campaign, but it's still structurally there with almost a half a million dollars in it that they can reignite at any time. So it's plausible. I mean, we'll never know what really happened.

It's plausible that they hit up against a sexual scandal, just had to pull, rein everybody back in, regroup, try again later. Yeah. Well, you come back with a longer timeline to get the signature gathering done. You get a firm lined up. You do the stuff up front.

It's a short-term victory. It's a good victory. We shouldn't belittle the idea that they were able to keep them off the ballot this year. But the question now turns to what does the future look like? What does it look like in 2020 or 2022 if they come back? What are we going to do to stop them a second time if they have a longer timeline? If they decide to throw instead of $500,000 at it, or if they throw $2 million at the qualification effort? You know, what are we going to do in the meantime to protect ourselves against that future attack? And that's what hurts us as hunters a lot is, I mean, they're a $150 million organization.

They can stroke that check, no problem. It's not a big deal. And our boots on the ground in individual states, we're all kind of fragmented. And for, you know, one state group of hunters to come up with one or $2 million within a short period of time is a tough deal. And that's where they're taking this is the ballot and the money fight. And they've got it because they've got grannies throwing $10 checks at them for saving puppies that they're not saving. You know, to use Maine as the example, right? I mean, we just talked about it. It came up once, then incubated a little bit longer, came up again.

The Arizona example. So, I mean, what is, I mean, is there an educational campaign going on in the interim or to, you know, both on the public and on the hunting side of things, or how does that play out? Because if this 500K is sitting in the bank waiting to drop in, what is the proactive side of this from the sportsman's angle? So there's a lot of stuff you can do. Obviously, the PR side of it's important. You know, having that messaging out there, talking to the general public about, you know, why these species need to be managed,

why the appropriate management is done by the state wildlife agency. A lot of it is a reactionary game, though. That's the great challenge of an organization like ours. We don't know what the issue is going to be next year that we're going to work on. I can give you a pretty good idea of what I think the fights are coming, but the other side really controls the agenda in a lot of regards. They get to decide where and when they launch these attacks. So it might not be Arizona next time.

It might be Colorado. It might be Denver. You know, they might decide to go up and launch our campaign there. They might do both states at once. You know, we don't really know that. So from our side, it's really tough to kind of project and predict, you know, well, if you just do X, Y, and Z for the next year, you'll be fine in Arizona. Well, they might not come back to Arizona. It might be 10 years before they come back to Arizona. But what the next attack might be in Colorado.

And by and large, sportsmen don't like to think about these issues, right? Absolutely. No. We just want to be out there hunting, fishing, doing our thing. But this stuff pops up. We get motivated when the boogeyman's there. Immediate threat. But if they're gone, all right, good. When's deer season coming up?

Oh, we got 100 days? Cool. You've been shooting? How's it going? We forget about these things and move on. And it's a bigger issue in the industry.

We're talking about it right after Cecil. There was a lot of different people brought together to talk about how to be proactive and keep the next Cecil's line from happening. And this goes back to our messaging is how do you run an education

campaign someplace? I mean, the messaging we get into in a ballot initiative is very specific, trapping on public lands in Montana and what's going to move the needle there. How do you apply that to hunting in general across the nation? I mean, and you don't know which attack it's going to be. Is it predators? Is it prey animals? What's it going to be? So that's a great. It's a great point, right?

Because you can public opinion poll people and ask them, who do you believe should be the primary managers of wildlife? And overwhelmingly, people will tell you the state wildlife agency. They should make the decisions on seasons and bag limits and this kind of thing, right? You can also ask them, do you want to ban black bear hunting over bait? And they'll tell you overwhelmingly yes. In their mind, they separate the two issues, right?

You can ask them those questions back to back and you'll see a disparity between the two answers. And so general education, general campaigns that just espouse the benefits of hunting and talk about the benefits to wildlife and to populations and all this kind of thing, certainly there's a help there. How do you quantify what that help is when it comes down to a specific ballot initiative? It's much more difficult to do that. And then hunters have a tendency to be really provincial. Yep. Where you tend to view, when I say you, hunters tend to view what they do and their, like

how they hunt, where they hunt as the acceptable norm. Yep. And they don't really view themselves as being players in a large national picture. That's right. Hunting is very regional. It's very cultural. It's very different, right? You used the example a few episodes ago of the deer dog hunters in the South.

A guy runs through the woods up here with a pack of dogs after some deer, it's going to get some strange looks. You're going to get shot by a deer hunter. You'll be shot by a deer hunter. Yeah. But that's the cultural norm down there. That's the practice. That's the way they've always done it and so those i mean just a few states over those those those cultures can shift greatly and so you're trying you know we talk about 14 million hunters or 12 million hunters as a collective group but it's a collective group of of of

individual practices and individual cultures and individual you know morals and ethics and and and and heritages that That's what I think. Well, I was going to make a point, but I'm going to also then talk about why my point doesn't really matter. What I was going to say is if you look at a Wisconsin deer hunter, okay? So he's in part of a traditional use practice, hunting Wisconsin, where he's sitting in the ground blind in the corner of a field on the back 40. And he hears about, oh, they're going to ban the use of dogs for hunting deer down in South Carolina. It's hard to get that guy in Wisconsin to be like, man, I should probably

pay attention to this. That's right. Because this is a broader thing that will, in my lifetime, come around to involve me. That's right. It's hard to get him to feel it, but it's also hard to get him to be effective if he does feel it, because these things are playing out on the state level. But then you have a group like the HSUS, which is this national organization based in D.C., but they are going out and fighting these little fights, these little localized particular fights. So it's almost like hunters, fishermen, trappers need to become more interested

in gaming on the national scale and being more proactive and take the same approach, right? That we're going to wage small isolated, small isolated fights in support of this bigger thing that we're involved in, in our own local way. So I view it like this, right? You have to find, and this is, this is the struggle for us as an organization to grow and to find those members who care enough, because you're talking about somebody you have to, you have to have them believe in the greater good because they're not going to have an issue in their

backyard every single year yeah you know if you if you have a hunter in california versus a hunter in texas you think one's going to be more concerned about the anti-hunting community than the other absolutely yeah so how do you convince that deer hunter from texas to care about a black bear issue in maine you know these these issues these transcend state lines you know that you got to go fight the battles where the battles are. Otherwise, their battles are going to show up in your backyard pretty soon. Yeah, like a guy in Texas sends money to the Sportsman's Alliance. He looks at where that money gets spent.

It's probably not getting spent in Texas. Not that often, you know, but that's the issue, right? I mean, you either have to fight the battles where they are today or they're going to show up here eventually. You see these things spread, right? You've seen trapping issues spread. You've seen trapping issues spread. You've seen the bear issues spread. You've seen the application of these ESA policies spread. If you don't take them on when they come up,

you're just opening the door for issues 10, 15, 20 years down the road. You guys bring this up a lot in your publications is that once they win, one win win it just sets the precedent it's a springboard and so they just go in everywhere and go and look we won here on this by you know these reasons in maine so why would you decide any differently and yeah it's a springboard it's opportunity to point so you guys aren't doing as well as they are yeah you need to raise your standards you have to do better and you play one side off against the other and we know that wildlife management is vastly different from Montana to Florida.

There's vastly different issues, vastly different challenges. But for them, they're going to point to them and say they're not comparable. Yeah. The heritage argument for me, I always cringe when it comes up because, man, there's nobody in this room that couldn't shoot a lot of holes through a heritage argument um i see all the holes in it but i also it also means something to me it does because you are a hunter yeah exactly right that's the emotional if we're talking to hunters like yeah we can get hunters when that threat is immediate to jump on and get active a lot of the times. But, you know, it's to me the management side of things, you know, pumping up our biologists and look at the science is the win.

But, you know, how do you make that sexy enough for people to come out and say, yeah, this is what makes more sense than... Yeah, I think unfortunately it's not always possible. It's not always possible to sexify. Is that a word? It's not always possible to sexify wildlife, the complexities of wildlife management. Okay, I got two more questions for you guys. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

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As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. One. How do you weigh out? Okay. You're defending hunting,pping fishing practices but how do you weigh out what might seem to be a restriction um how do you weigh out like where it's coming from

and for instance in in your newsletter there's a sum up of legal activities going on and you had a sum up of what state um um you had a sum up in in minnesota for instance where there's a a bill that would expand the definition of a muzzleloader to include a scope okay and someone might look and be like okay great, great, because that's like, I don't know. It's like increasing efficacy of muzzleloaders, which one might proceed to be good for hunters because it increases efficacy and lets you do a better job. But we know in the case of when states started to adopt muzzleloader seasons, it was an add-on season. So it was a way to increase opportunity for hunters to be out in the field. What was interesting about muzzleloaders is they have low efficacy. So you could have your general firearm season where you're going to kill

the vast majority of the deer that you're going to kill, but then you could have these add-on 10-day, two-week, three-week muzzleloader seasons. And because of the weather, because of the difficulty of using muzzleloaders, you knew that it wasn't going to be a great additive sense in deer mortality. So you could increase opportunity for people who wanted to go hunt. They can spend more time in the woods. Everyone's a winner. It's not going to have a dramatic effect on your deer herd. Right?

So that's what gave us muzzleloader seasons so when we look when a group comes in and says when a state agency comes in and defines a muzzleloader in a particular way to have low efficacy and then someone wants to move to be like well i want to put a scope on top of mine how how do you weigh it out because you might view it as being well that's an unnecessary regulation that's like big brother telling you how to hunt but it might be like well the reason we can have a muzzleloader season is because they have low efficacy and if you increase the efficacy through technology you're negating the whole reason of having the muzzleloader season but it seems to be in your newsletter you feel that this is a good

thing to be able to add a scope to a muzzleloader so how do you weigh that out because this is not coming from the animal right this isn't like an animal rights community issue this is a good thing to be able to add a scope to a muzzleloader. So how do you weigh that out? Because this is not coming from the animal right. This isn't like an animal rights community issue. This is a game management issue. Well, it's certainly much more clear cut when it is an animal rights issue, right? So when it is a state issue like this, you typically look to the sportsmen in the state to educate them and let them advocate for themselves. But you've hit on the important kind of distinction here is that, yeah, there's the balance on the biological side, which the state is going to look at anyways when it manages deer herds and tries to project what that will do to increase the take during the muzzleloader season. But what also does it do on the opportunity side? You know, we've got a declining hunting population in this country. It's an endemic problem that we've been dealing with for multiple

decades now. You know, and so you have to kind of balance the idea of opportunity and access with the idea of, you know, are we using a season that was originally intended for maybe something a little bit different than it is used for now? Are we going to change that by putting a scope on a muzzleloader? I don't know that there's a clear answer to it, right? I mean, I don't know that there's, you know, you can draw a clear line in the sand. You know, for us as an organization, we tend not to delve too deeply into those issues, right? Yeah, I don't mean to, yeah, I should be fair there that this is not a marquee issue for you. Right. Right. Well, it's like, I mean, you know, it's like the debate over bows and crossbows and whether crossbows should be in the traditional

archery season, you know, bow seasons, or whether they should have their own season or whether they should be with firearms. For us as an organization- But that debate, I feel, is a hunter debate. It is. Like that debate is being carried out by hunters. It's not being carried out by hunters versus anti-hunters. Often not, right. Absolutely right. So do you weigh in on those issues where it's hunters debating something?

No, not typically, right? Because we're a small organization. We're a lean organization. We don't have a huge staff, right? We're one of the smaller organizations in the conservation space. You know, you look at some of these groups, RMEF and Turkey Federation, all these guys we partner with do great work, but they're massive organizations compared to ours.

So for us, you know, we have to fight the fights that are core to our mission. And our mission is to protect, you know, hunters from the anti-hunting and animal rights movement. You know, so certainly where you have hunters united in unison on an issue, muzzleloaders or crossbows or whatever the case might be in a state, we might be able to provide some support to that issue. We're typically not getting into the sportsman versus sportsman debate on these things because we just don't have the bandwidth. We have our hands full with these lawsuits,

with these ballot measures, and these legislative issues in the states. And if we could get to the point where we got done dealing with all the animal rights and anti-hunting crap, then yeah, we might be able to work on some other stuff like that. Because I also, I view too, like issues around technology. Okay, so issues around trail cam use. Like, is it to the point where we need to where hunters would decide among themselves that we need to get a grip on trail cam use or hunters would decide among themselves that we need to get out ahead of drone use right i feel that those debates should enjoy some kind of sanctity or they should be allowed to play out in some sort of natural way rather than teeing them up or framing them up in sort of this anti-hunting conversation. Because I think that there are times we're going to come up with where we're going to be self-limiting technologies

in advancement of like the betterment of wildlife in general. Sure. Right? And we might make those decisions. And someone on the outside may be like, oh, that's an infringement on a hunter's ability to conduct his business. Or that's you dictating how a hunter should go. But we're already doing that anyways.

We decided a long time ago not to fish with dynamite. So at the time we decided that we're not going to fish with dynamite anymore. Can you bonk cormorant with dynamite? I don't know if that, I doubt they're using it. Cal wouldn't like that. Hunt guns. Well, at the end of the day,

it comes down to management, right? So when we're kind of in these things, our position as an organization is leave it in the hands of the day it comes down to management right so when we're kind of in these things our position as an organization is leave it in the hands of the biologist yeah give him his tool chest let him have it don't take trapping away don't take baiting away don't take dogs away don't do this let him have it if the biologists say hey we can't sustain this with you know the dog harvest we're going to limit this or bait is being being too effective, or having scopes on this. Leave it up to those individual biologists in those regions to do it. Give them their full

tools though. We're trying to keep the animal rights movement from taking those tools away. Yeah, you did a much better job of expressing what I'm trying to say than I did. But yeah, it's sort of like looking at what are the motivations of who's providing this idea? Like, for instance, Montana has never had bear hunting for hounds. They've never had bear hunting with bait. That didn't come from the animal rights movement. That came from just traditional use practices and a deep legacy in that state. I would imagine that you don't look there and think that they're making a mistake, right?

It's just like a thing that's always been. That's right. They have a successful bear program, and it's just how it is in that state, right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's where the managers come in and make those decisions. And that gets back to the idea that wildlife management citizens are wildly local too, right? You know, it can vary wildly from, you know, from the Helena Valley of Montana down to the Bitterroot, right? You know, you get over into Idaho, you get over into Washington State, there are different cultures, there's different practices, there's different heritages.

And then you think about going from Alaska to Florida or from Maine to California. I mean, you're talking about vastly different habitats, vastly different cultures. Yeah, there can definitely be differences there. And you just use that toolkit idea, the management tools. And that's another thing with this very hotly debated federal preserve thing in Alaska, where Alaska has state authority to use certain management practices where they see fit. And then the federal government comes in and says, we're going to remove certain tools that you have access to

on specific pieces of land. And in the public telling of this, they would act as though these practices are rampant, when in fact the state usually decides not even to use the tool anyway. Yeah, the thing, the whole Alaska preserves and refuge stuff, if you watch HSUS,

Center for Biological Diversity, and all these guys blow it up, it makes it sound like everybody's hired a plane, we're shooting grizzlies from planes, we're going into dens and gas. All of these things were extreme management techniques for the state biologists to use in case they needed it. And often indigenous groups.

And some of the indigenous stuff. But from the state side, one wolf and the pups were killed in like 2009. Used it once. They killed the adult wolves, found the den that had pups in it, and because they were in a high, I can't remember which disease it was, area, they had to kill the pups. They couldn't take the pups and relocate them or put them in a zoo or anything. It was distemper, I think it was.

And so they had to kill them. That's the one time these tactics had been used and HSUS and CBD and everybody else blew it up like sportsmen go up there and are drinking beer and shooting out of a plane and crawling in dens with them and strangling pups and stuff. I know I have hunted extensively in Alaska. I have never heard of

someone using the contested practice. In fact, when it came like that you can kill a swimming caribou. Most places you cannot. I think there's two portions of two game management units north of the Brooks Range where it's a traditional practice

with indigenous Alaskans to head off caribou at pinch points where they're crossing rivers. They've hunted them that way for probably thousands of years. But they sell it like, oh, now that's going to be going on here when it's a toolkit. Like the state of Alaska has the ability to open up that method of take which they have chosen not to do across about 99 of the state and there's a couple places where they allow it because of traditional use practices and most of the way it's sold in the mean in the media

is that there's this last little bastion where you cannot shoot swimming caribou from a boat so it goes back to our message in Messenger that we were talking about. That's exactly what they're doing. They're spinning it and spinning the PR and they get a lot because emotional arguments and emotional things work great in the press. They get a lot of press. But this is a good example of the way this information came out. Could have been

delivered in a hell of a lot better way with much better context. We could have been delivered in a way to where the other side wouldn't be able to take that information and run with it the way they have. Because I'm getting this question all the time too. And yeah.

Well, they're good at what they do. Yeah, they are. And they have a ton of money and they have a ton of media connections. And so they can put this out there. And once it's out, it takes off. I mean, you watch it go viral and it's hard for us to turn around and flip that, you know, like, what do we say? Well, you know, NBC ran probably the worst article about the story and then corrected.

I think it was because of this digital radio program went out and, which is i'm joking uh and then did and did a some weeks later did a very sophisticated look at yeah a very sophisticated follow-up at it and i was like i was impressed with that article that was a good article and that's about as balanced as we're gonna be able to get as a hunting community the first one i did was they even threw in like bacon and donut it cracked me up like it was just like they tried to act like and they tried to tie it into wild stuff so yeah just act like it was it was a war on predators right and then they followed up and did a thing where they went and actually like looked at where the practices are used how they're used an explanation of the management tools well it's a very complex issue more complex than management the lower 48 even because you're

dealing with like you said indigenous and subsistence use, which is spelled out in state law. There's different parts of Alaska's entry to the union that it's spelled out some of these things that Congress has ratified, right? The Statehood Act provides for a sustained use, a sustained yield policy. You have a NILCA out there that also has these inroads that allow for certain practices to take place. And the state is supposed to manage wildlife to allow for those subsistence hunters. And so you complicate the issue of just trying to understand what are the practices we're talking about, and then what did the Obama administration do to change the long running practice? This is a great idea of the toolbox, right? The state of Alaska had these tools in their toolbox up until 2015

when the Obama administration changed and stripped it away. And they were mostly never happening. That's right. Never. That's right. And so it was a vast federal overreach in terms of the federal government for the first time in this instance saying, we're going to sever the tie between the state management of these species on federal lands. And we're going to take that back and say, you know, we just don't like those practices. Those practices are distasteful and you're not allowed to do them anymore.

These are practices that have been reserved. But even though they're still able to do it on 84% of the state. That's right. And they're able to, but are generally not doing the practices in 84% of the state. That's right. And so the biggest issue for us, the reason why we sued over that whole issue, the reason why we petitioned the Department of Interior to undo the rule and they've started that process, was in doing so, they vastly changed the definition of predator management, right? A lot of this comes down to the predator management side of things, whether or not you can hunt wolves in the summer, whether or not you can hunt bears over bait, or like you said, the caribou issue where they're swimming, that kind of thing. But the predator side is the big one

because they changed the definition of predator management in their rule in 2015, and they changed the way it was applied, right? Before, the state talked about these intensive predator management issues, right? Those things that a lot of folks are going to find troubling in the media. But it's not just the idea that you're going to go out there

and take a bear or take a wolf, but they expanded that to mean that anytime you change the rules, that could be viewed as a expansion of predator management. That's in violation of federal rule now, and you can't do it. So what, in essence, and this is a silly example, but if the board of game in Alaska said all of a sudden, you know what, we're going to extend the summer wolf hunting season by one minute, one minute, now you're in violation of federal rule. That's how hamstrung they would be. You couldn't change anything that would have an impact on expanding predator management. And so you've seen these things, you know, it's also important to understand that, you know,

yeah, 83% of the state, if that's the number, you can already do these practices on. But you're talking about, this was fish and wildlife service land, and this was Park Service Preserve land. It's 97 million acres. If that were a state, it'd be the fourth largest state in the country. It'd be bigger than Montana. Yeah, that's a good way to express it. I mean, it's a huge, huge, vast area of land that we're talking about here. And you're really talking about the idea that, and why the lower 48 guys should care? Because you have the federal government stepping in and saying, you know what state, we got this no longer. You're new. You're no longer in charge of management. We're going to take it over. We're going to, we're going to do what we think is right. But in the case of Alaska,

it's, we're going to take it over without being able to demonstrate you that you're doing something wrong. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you can't, you can't point to, they weren't able to point to a mismanagement. They weren't able to point to a collapsing population. There was like nothing to back it up. I could see if a state had some policy that was running some species into the ground or driving them toward an ESA listing. But here you have a state where they have uh wolves and grizzlies on whatever 99 of historic range so it's like in absence of a problem you're creating an oversight issue be like coming into a solution without a problem yeah it'd be like coming like i've

expressed this before it'd be like coming into a city where there's not like a high incident of traffic accidents they have a like pretty safe traffic record it's in line with everything else but you come and say like you know what if If your road passes a federal building, I want you to change all of the traffic laws there kind of arbitrarily, but just because that's how I would like to see it happen. And it's your responsibility to manage that and go and make that clear. Not that there's a problem. Right. The funny part about all this, and that's a fantastic point. The funny part about this is in the environmental assessment that the federal government did, they actually, and I'll read this to you, they actually admit that this policy could cause extirpation of certain species. Under some conditions and in some locations, this may include either predator, prey, or both populations declining to a point that they are below the threshold for detection through current monitoring techniques, or they may actually become locally extirpated.

They're actually admitting that that policy of changing the predator management stuff could cause some prey species to become extirpated. Yeah. Like you would probably see with trying to recover desert, reopening an old one, trying to recover desert bighorns in Arizona. If you lost the lion hunting management tool you're probably going to be kissing goodbye yeah or if you lost water gosselers yeah absolutely you're like you're kissing goodbye little isolated desert bighorn

populations so are you for wildlife or not exactly because all right my last question, I already know the answer, so I want to put it out there. Is there a potential truce? Let's say we get rid of bear hunting. Let's say hunters come to the table. We're like, okay, we'll make a deal. We'll quit hunting bears, quit trapping beavers. We're cool, right? Everything but cormorants.

That's the end of this whole thing, right? Let's shake on it. Is there a truce to be made? No, we lose. We're the only side giving anything up. It can't be a truce when you're going to say, well, let's have a compromise, right? Instead of the 10 things I want to do,

we're just going to do five of them. We're going to plan five methods. Well, we've lost that now. You can't get that back. The truth to them is that there's no more hunting. Like that's where this is headed. Yeah. What do we get out of that?

I mean, you know, we're basically negotiating against ourselves. And that's the great challenge here. We have to win every time. They only have to win once. If they win one out of every 10 issues they put out there, they're still moving the ball down the field. You know, it's this death by a thousand cuts approach. They're going to try stuff all over the place and they're going to see what sticks and they're going to take their victories where

they can get them. And they're going to put them on the shelf and we're not going to get that back. Just like we didn't get mountain lion back in California. Like, just like we're not going to get bear hunting back in California, likely. Once you lose these opportunities, they're gone. So for the other side, I don't believe there's anything to be had there for them. Why come? I mean, I don't, I don't see it. Well, they came into Washington state and they banned the use of hounds and hounds and bait. Yeah. Then they came back 10 years later and banned trapping. Yeah. So they're not happy. They just want to take it away and they want the world to run according to their belief system. I think it gets back to the idea you hit on upon earlier, right? It's that they want to point to these inhum their belief system. I think it gets back to the idea you hit upon earlier, right?

It's that they want to point to these inhumane and barbaric and cruel, whatever terms they use to define the method of take as the reason why they're doing this, right? We're only doing it because it's the most inhumane forms of hunting or it's the most inhumane take. But the truth of the matter is they're not okay with it at all. They're not okay with the idea of you hear about shooting a bear out of a tree or shooting a lion out of a tree. But if you shot that bear at 800 yards across a canyon, they'd have a reason why they're opposed to that. They have circular arguments.

It's all circular arguments. It's either if you're using a primitive weapon, then it's a primitive weapon, and you're going to have a higher chance of injuring that animal and getting away, and it's suffering. If you use high tech where you've got a scope and you're dialed in and you can shoot it at a hundred yards or a thousand yards, now you're not ethical and you're not fair. So it doesn't matter what you do or say, they have an argument

against it. It's got to work kind of good. Yeah, exactly. You know, and the average deer hunter needs to care about these fringe benefit

or these fringe sports just as much because one, those animals eat the deer and the elk and everything else but when they finish with that, they're coming after the bow hunters.

They had a big thing in the 80s and early 90s where they went after bow hunting. And they've been pushing, looking at that again. So they'll go after the bow hunting and say it's not ethical. And then the muzzleloader and they'll just keep chipping away. They don't care. It's like negotiating with terrorists. Cal, go ahead uh concluders i'm guessing you want to get back in the cormorants negative no no that was just an example now we've now stoned that bird um yeah i mean i think the we just need to get to a spot where it's like we have kids that are growing up in non-hunting families wanting to be the next Kevin Murphy, you know, wanting to be the next Steven Rinella and saying like, hey, these people are making a difference and they're contributing.

So you see a bright spot yeah i think there's there's a hell of an opportunity there you know and uh we have a lot of media out there you know and you said like oh it's a war on predators right man i can sit down with final cut pro and youtube and make a hell of a video that shows a war on predators right i'll take that i'll take you up on that cow right um so yeah man i mean it's it's advancing the advancing the sport for the next generation i'm not saying at all losing anything but for example like the montana trapping issue right you guys have a picture of it up here on your wall I was like that made my skin crawl I hated it that I couldn't believe that my home state that would ever even come up but when I

started wading in on that issue and um you know trying to do my own advocacy on it there's a lot of folks out there that I didn't want to associate with that were some of the loudest voices and how do we get everybody on the same page and say hey if you want this to exist maybe you guys should not be talking the way you're talking or addressing the general public the way you're talking you know it's kind of both sides right like we can do better pr we can be our own worst enemies at times at the other end of the spectrum we have to get off our high horse sometimes and meet in the middle like right so we got to protect these guys but we also can't condemn them so it's it's that meeting in the middle we both have to do a little both sides yeah the own worst enemy argument is one that it's a huge, and it's one that warrants getting into it,

and it's a difficult one. It's a difficult one. I think that there's a lot of people who, there are a lot of well-meaning people who seem to provide a never-ending stream of awful PR. And oftentimes it's coming from a really cynical perspective where it's like, well, I'm going to shove it in their face. Yeah.

And they think they're doing well. They think they're doing good. But a lot of times it hurts. Or a lot of times it's selfish. We've seen people construct drama in order to get the hunting community to rally around them. And now they're getting financial benefit out of it and they call us and like hey we're getting harassed by anti-hunters

how do we do this well it's pretty easy make your page private quit quit jumping around quick courting inviting disaster i've been doing this for 20 years i used to troll peter's message boards and i still haven't got a death threat. Message boards. You just showed your age there. Kevin Murphy, got any final thoughts? Yeah, I know you haven't had an opportunity to say a whole lot, Kevin. I know you're just absorbing, absorbing, but do you have any? And I've been doing some technical issues too. That's my man here. A lot of these topics that we've talked about do affect the small game hunters

in the central southern states a lot head to the north in the summer in the early fall hunting season opens up early we have those hunting opportunities 2013 I was in Maine grouse hunting with some friends of mine from West Virginia and Virginia. We saw the bear issue firsthand up there. I was concerned. I called back home through the League of Kentucky Sportsmen, asked them to show some support up there, try to send some funding to help fight this issue. There's a case example of what I was talking about earlier.

Yes. And we have bear hunting in the city Kentucky for a long time we we didn't have it just when the last like 10 years I personally penned wrote the resolution so through our sportsman club the LBL sportsman club so that you could hunt bears in Kentucky with dogs they were starting to become become a nuisance in there. They had a gun hunt, slight gun hunt in there, but finally we wrote that resolution. We took it through the League of Kentucky Sportsmen.

They presented it to the wildlife biologists. They reviewed it, says there's no problem hunting bears in Kentucky with dogs. No kidding. That's something that happened? Yes, yes. I wrote, like I said, the resolution. We have a sportsman club.

And if you're a member of that, you can look at the game laws. If you want to try to help adjust those where you're a hunter, you think that they may need to be tweaked a little bit. So, you know, he's got to go through a chain. You just don't write something and send it in. You get the support from the League of Kentucky Sportsmen. They take it and hand it over to the state fish and game department. They review that resolution and say yay or nay, whatever,

and then they'll have a vote on it. That's some good Kentucky elbow grease right there, man. Getting in there, learning what the law is, learning how to work within the system, engaging with sportsmen, engaging with biologists, learning all about stuff. Our state motto

and what we've talked about here on our flag is united we stand, divided we fall. As sportsmen, outdoorsmen, fishermen, we need to stay together. We do not need to let the antis fragment our hunting and fishing and outdoor activities. Join a sportsman club locally. Pay attention to what's going on, just like you guys have discussed, but be involved because

there's going to be residual effects from these negative laws that impact hunting and fishing that can trickle down to you personally put in some elgo grease not just sit back and bitch yes kentucky that's right i like it i love that thing that you were up doing a little diplomacy you were in maine made some connections came home and said hey fellas i i didn I didn't. I did it from there. I saw some of the newspaper articles, the television ads. I had been up there a time or two, so I had a friendship, a bond with the people that I was hunting with up there. We stay in typically a bear hunting lodge that just rents that out to us during some of his off season. When you're hunting birds.

When we're hunting birds. I've been with some of the bear hunters up there just as a sidekick to blow the horn. And, you know, there's a great bunch of people up in Maine there. And just like I said, you know, we just cannot let them fragment our hunting and fishing opportunities out there. Because if they do, it's just going to all crumble one of these days. That's right. Janice? Speaking about how we can be proactive, you mentioned that there's a couple states,

and I don't know if I caught it right, but there's a couple states that have it in their state constitution where you can't have ballot initiatives mess with wildlife management. So can we get that in more states? Yeah, they're not that clean. It's not just a flat-out prohibition, but there's things you can do. Like you look at Utah that has a supermajority requirement vote on those type of issues. So instead of the 50% plus one voter, you have to get to 60% or 63% or 65% or a higher percentage, which makes it all that more difficult. There's other things you can do in law and in the constitutional law that would provide barriers, but they're very tough to get done. They're tough to get done in a manner that

actually provides some teeth that provides protections, right? Because getting back to Cal's question earlier, they don't go after banning bear hunting. They're going after a specific mean and method. So you have to be very careful in how you write those protections. And when you look at like these right to hunt amendments, when you look at constitutional protections, does it actually provide the necessary level of protection?

Or are we just making ourselves feel like, well, they can't harm us. And so it's a challenge. There's some stuff we can do. We've looked at some stuff in Maine. We looked at some stuff in Montana after both of those campaigns to try to suggest changes to either law or constitutional law that would provide some of those protections. But oftentimes, you're talking about changing the constitution. You're talking about running another ballot issue campaign yourselves. So you're still talking about

raising a whole bunch of money, spending a couple of years, putting a campaign together and then going head to head with HSUS or whoever else on the animal rights side would, would want to come to the table. And so if you, if you really write one of these things and push one of these campaigns that would put some teeth in and put some real protection in,

you're going to see the other side spend money. Cause they know that's going to be a, it's going to be a barrier to them coming back in the future. Right. It could be a win, like you said, you could put it on your shelf and be like, all right, we got that one. You know, you look at, we'll use Maine as an example, and we beat this to death today, but

like Kevin said, their group sent money up from Kentucky. That $2.3 million we raised was done at the grassroots level. There wasn't a $500,000 check coming from Washington, D $2.3 million we raised was done at the grassroots level. There wasn't a $500,000 check coming from Washington, D.C. like HSUS had. It was done $25 here and $1,000 there and $500 here from houndsmen out West and guys in Kentucky and people in Minnesota and all over the place. We raised that money grassroots style. It took a year and a half to raise the $2.3 million.

We beat the bushes. We beat the snot out of the folks in Maine trying to raise that money. Those guys gave everything they had. You have guys up there who aren't making a ton of money giving you what they can give you. And so to turn around on the heels of winning after that and come back to them and say, yeah, now we got to do it again a second time to go put the constitutional protection in there. That's tough, man. I'll tell you what, it's really, really tough to get those people to be fired up and engaged a second time when they've just given you the shirt off their back

to try to protect their way of life. Yeah, yeah. They want to get back to deer hunting. They want to get back to deer hunting. That's right. Was that your concluding, Yanni? Yeah. Go ahead.

All right, well, for me, I guess I'll expand on what Kevin was saying. And I really truly believe like we're an inflection point in the hunting community that we're going to see go ahead all right well for me i guess i'll expand on what kevin was saying and and and i really truly believe like we're an inflection point in the hunting community that we're going to see over the next 10 to 15 years you know we got this whole generation of people that are growing up today who are living in a world and they're becoming voting age and they're all voting age right now who are living in a world where their entire lives they've never known wildlife to be in peril right we didn't have to restore turkeys we We didn't have to restore deer. They were on the landscape. They can't see

back to the reasons why we started some of these programs, the reasons why groups like RMEF or NWTF or any of these other great conservation organizations, why they were founded in the first place. And so in their mind's eye, we've got wildlife everywhere. We don't need to worry about management. We don't need to worry about hunter. Well, you know, you talk about the distinction between how do hunters play into the management side of this thing? Those folks have no idea. They just know wildlife exists.

At the same time, you're marrying that against the idea of the folks that have created these concrete jungles where wildlife no longer lives are the ones who are now having the power to dictate wildlife management laws and rules and regulations. And a lot of times the voting comes down to those individuals. So I really feel like we're at that inflection point where over the next 10 to 15 years, we've got to stick together. There's going to be more attacks. There's going to be more issues. There's going to be a need to be involved in these issues and keep the wolves at bay. Otherwise we're going to, we're going to face a drastic future and it's going to be a need to be involved in these issues and keep the wolves at bay. Otherwise, we're going to face

a drastic future. And it's going to be a drastically different landscape where I struggle to think what the future looks like in that scenario. So I do think we're at that inflection point. It's a theme we've talked about a lot today, but how do we protect that future? How do we ensure that this great experiment we've been going through for the last 100 and 120 years lives on. And if not, what's that future going to look like? What's the future of conservation look like? If you sever that bond, if you break that tie between the goose that lays the golden egg, right? You get rid of hunters and the conservation dollars that are pouring into these states, into the federal government government what are we going to do i like it that you mentioned national wild turkey federation in that conversation because here

you know on top of the billion dollars annually that goes into conservation from guns ammunition sporting goods equipment fishing equipment and then the other you know i don't know billion some dollars from tags licenses and stamps that goes into funding wildlife at the state level in every state at the state level a group like the nwtf i think in the history of that organization they've put just slightly south of $500 million in the wildlife habitat. Yeah. Yeah, we've done a lot of great work with those guys over the years. It's an amazing organization.

Yeah, and then you look at that, the impact of the habitat work that has gone to wildlife, and then you compare that to what an animal rights group is actually, find an animal rights group that is actually working to do the work on habitat. The thing that's going to measure the success of wildlife in this country, the future success of wildlife in this country is going to come down to habitat. That's what it is. It's not the one-by-one mechanical removal of animals is not the issue. That issue is, is there a place for them to exist?

And hunters through mandatory spending and a self-imposed taxation system and then voluntary spending are driving the habitat programs in this country. Oh, absolutely. And that's where wildlife will live. And we'd be remiss to not mention target shooters in that as well. You know, you look at some of our business partners are spending, I was at Vista spends $87 million last year in PR money. Yeah.

I mean, not PR like public relations, PR like Pittman Roberts. That's right. Excise tax dollars are coming back into conservation. Recreational shooters versus your hunter, they pitch into that fund a heck of a lot more. Yeah, it's funny that some old granny living in the city somewhere

and she's got a pistol in her nightstand and is paying for conservation. Unbeknownst to her, she's paying for wildlife conservation. New Jersey cat lady who's against bear hunting wants to pay for conservation too. So yeah, we'll take the money though.

I'll tell you what. Go ahead. We covered a lot of ground. Dude, lots of ground. Florida to Alaska. Yep. California to Maine. Maine to California.

And we just scratched the surface on so many different things. And that's what's fun about these conversations because they're always eye openers for folks. These heavy subjects, it sucks to think about, you know, because it's what we all love. Everybody here loves getting outdoors and just loves enjoying that time outside. But there's so many things. Everything is so complex. The basic premise behind, you know, what we need from people is involvement. You know, we need every deer hunter out there involved. We need every duck hunter out there involved. They've got to understand the bigger picture of these issues. They've got to look beyond their back 40, beyond their immediate hunting season and see what else is out there. See those threats,

understand them. And they've got to get engaged. You know, like Kevin said, hey, start your sportsman's club, join there, get involved at the local level, know what's going on in your own state, know what's going on in your neighboring states and within your regions and pay attention to those things. Obviously, we want them to become members of the Sportsman's Alliance. We talk about, you know, if we just had 1% of every licensed buying hunter out there to be a member of this organization, that's an absolute game changer. Our mission, protecting and advancing hunting, fishing, trapping, right? We spend most of our time on that protecting side.

What can we do on the advancing side? How many more states can we get involved in with families of field legislation? How many more youth programs can we put together? Can we get people out there, not only youth, but young adults who want to learn how to hunt, who want to understand, hey, I kind of want to know a little bit more about where my food comes from. And hunting seems like a pretty organic process for me to get involved in and do those types of things. So how many more advancing side of things can we get involved in if hunters start getting more engaged? And we, you know, we're the key to all of this. If we want wildlife to continue, it's going to come down to habitat and it's going to come down to our involvement.

So we've got to get, I guess, a little more outside of just being a selfish hunter. And we've done that throughout our history. You know, I mean, to Evan's point, where we've got people who've grown up in a generation where they haven't seen wildlife in peril. Cherkeys are pretty prominent. Deer are everywhere. We need that more involvement, that more engagement, so that we can continue those things. We can have them in perpetuity for future generations

to get out there and enjoy. Amen. Yeah. I don't say that very often, but there you go. First of all, I'd just like to thank you all for coming out and having us on the show. It's huge for us. We're a small organization. I mean, there's 15, 20 of us, and that's it.

We get overshadowed by a lot of guys, bigger groups. But I've been involved with Sportsman's Alliance. I've been here for four years almost, but going back 10, 15 years when I was at ESPNoutdoors.com and editor at Outdoor Life, and this is a solid organization. I mean, doing the work that needs done without getting the headlines, don't have a huge PR department to push it out and do it. And like Sean said, if we had more help and had 1% of hunters, we could do so much more. When you're talking lobbying, lawsuits, and ballot initiatives,

it all comes down to money. That's what it is. And it sucks that it's that, but that's what it takes to win these things. And that's where the fight is. And the other side, HSUS, CBD, Sierra, all these guys have tons and tons of money that they can just drive us all out of business piece by piece. So we all need to stick together, look ahead and take the fight to where they're at. And you guys have a regular annual membership program?

Yeah, if you go to sportsmansalliance.org, it's right there at the top under Alliance Membership. Just click on there and join. The basic membership level, it's $35 a year. You know, it's right there. So it goes up from there. That's helpful. Yeah.

And then there's clubs. You know, if you're sportsman's clubs, you want to be part of it, you can do that. But with business partners, there's anybody that wants you're a sportsman's club, you want to be part of it, you can do that. We're business partners. Anybody that wants to be a part of the alliance, we're allies. Sorry, what's the publication you guys put out and how often? That's our newsletter that goes out to the members. It's every two months, and so we call it just Sportsman's Monthly.

Every two months. So kind of big picture stuff in the feature well down to the legislation and members and the businesses that support us. It's worth 35 bucks a year just to have someone keep your prize to what's going on, man. We'll take more than 35 too.

No, I understand, but it's a way for people to dip in the toe, man. Yeah, think about that. It's a pack of broadheads, right? That's right. It's a way for people to dip in the toe, man. When you think about that, it's a pack of broadheads, right? That's right. It's $35. It's good insurance on the future of our way of life, right? You're talking about trying to quantify what our group does

and the protection aspect of who we are. We're not like RMEF or NWTF in that they've got a critter. They've got a tangible item you can wrap your arms around. You're doing habitat work. You're restoring a population of a species. We can wrap your arms around. You're doing habitat work. You're restoring a population of a species. We're kind of selling insurance. You know, we're kind of selling protection way of life. We're like the fire department, right? Nobody wants to pay taxes until your house is on fire. You want to pick up the phone and call somebody who's going to come

help you. And so we don't have those tangible items. We're not doing the conservation work and the habitat work that these groups are doing. They're doing a fantastic job at that. That's not us. What we're doing is protecting the way of life that that supports. And so for us, it's a little bit different argument. We're in the same space. Yeah, but we're coming in to put fires out, man. That's right.

So we're coming at it from the other side. Yeah. We spent a lot of time pushing, and I will continue to do so, pushing those, you know, advancing the agenda of wildlife groups, advancing the agenda of wildlife groups advancing the agenda habitat groups and that stuff is extremely important but i think it's also important to stay to stay in the game and stay in the fight on on protection of rights that's right protection

of hunter rights yeah we can't advocate that space yeah it's a two it's a two-pronged battle that everyone that hunts and fishes needs to pay attention to. Guys, I appreciate you giving us so much of your time. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. Thank you. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this.

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