The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 124: Live from Columbus

Episode Date: July 9, 2018

Columbus, OH- Steven Rinella talks with Mark Kenyon of Wired to Hunt, along with the world's greatest small game hunter Kevin Murphy, Ryan Callaghan, and Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew. Subjects Discussed: ringing in the summer solstice; Kevin blows the horn; Ohio and Michigan's pissing match; Ohio's Serpent Mound and the undying memories it conjures; the death of an Ohio hunting spot; the impacts and ethics of shed hunting; Kevin forecasts the future squirrel season; pondering turkey breasts; Jani Day; a native pull to being outside; the challenges of hunting with your kids; and more. Please excuse the sound quality in this episode. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meat. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We are the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We are the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Welcome to the summer solstice. Now, in a lot of indigenous cultures, tonight you would have a ceremony in order to get the sun headed back in a southerly direction.

And Kevin Murphy, since we're not going to all get up and dance in a counterclockwise direction around a large sundial, Kevin Murphy is going to rip on his horn that he uses to alert squirrels to his presence but this is going to send the sun back south and we will be honoring the summer solstice hold on Kevin can you give us just a little more background because Steve didn't do it justice did he that you just alert squirrels

use the mic use the mic Mike every hunt that I try to do even even fishing, we go out, we always sound the horn to tell all the critters that we're coming. And it's their chance to get away. If they don't and they get killed, it's their fault. So here we go. So you guys maybe could leave now if you wanted to.

Okay. So. Well done. Let's hunt. It just so happens that three of us are from one state to the north, you guys, in Michigan. And in Michigan, we always look down and laugh at you guys. But it's not for what you might think. Because you guys know the Toledo Strip, right? So years ago, we were trying to sort out what state got what chunk of ground,

and we weren't quite sure how the landscape was laid out and where the lakes were. What's that doing? One is sitting there. I don't know if I can brought up to you. I was holding it after playing. I think maybe the mic's on back there in the sound. Jake? Jake?

It's gone now. Oh, is it gone? So years ago, when they were trying to figure out, like, what state's got what chunk of ground, right? And we weren't clear on how the lakes were shaped out. Ohio and Michigan got in this big pissing match over this little teeny five-mile-wide strip of land that now includes Toledo and it got so bad that we each sent our you know militaries like state militias to go up and get ready to square off over what became the Toledo strip and um some people call the bloodless war but there was actually one guy whose first name was two who stabbed another man with a pen knife and drew

blood on him so it was not a bloodless war between my home state and the people of Ohio. And then they brought someone in to arbitrate the whole thing. And the person looked and says, okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to give Michigan the UP, its upper peninsula, and we'll give Ohio this little strip of land. And everyone in Michigan was pissed. They thought it was a raw deal. But then all of a sudden they discovered all the copper and iron ore that came out of the UP and we realized

that the last laugh was on you guys and then if you factor in how much fish and game I pulled out of the upper peninsula over the years and back that into all the iron ore that came out of that place you can see that we got a pretty sweet deal but I do now and then uh come up into Ohio or down into Ohio. And I was going to tell about one time I came here is how many of you guys have heard of the serpent mound? Okay. So it's in Peoples, Ohio. And it's like, you know, some of the, some of the Native American cultures around the turn of like the 80 years into the BC years, we're in this practice of building these large earth and effigy mounds in this practice of building these large earth and effigy mounds in the shapes of animals. So there's turtles and bears and all manner of creatures.

But the serpent mounds, one of the biggest ones where they built a coiled snake that's 450 yards long. It's anywhere from a few feet high to just one feet high. People didn't even realize it was there until one day some guy started putting it together that stretching out through the landscape is this giant snake in Peebles, Ohio. And it's got a coiled tail and its mouth is a gate. And in its mouth is the thing that everybody tries to debate. Like, what is it? What is the thing that its mouth is wrapped around? Like, what does it symbolize? And some people feel that maybe it's an egg, that the snake is swallowing an egg.

And some people feel that maybe the snake is swallowing an egg. And some people feel that maybe the snake is swallowing the sun and it has something to do with the solar phases. So I think that's like kind of appropriate for today being the solstice. But one time I was, I wanted to come up and see the serpent mountain and from the direction I was coming from, I was coming up from West Virginia. I remember driving through West Virginia and saw my first ever roadkill black bear. And I was with an old girlfriend of mine. We were driving in a van that I had traded my buddy Ronnie a Husqvarna chainsaw and 250 bucks for. And you'd expect a van like that just to hum, right? But me and my old girlfriend passed, come out of West Virginia and passed into Ohio. And a guy is coming up along me and he's like trying to like gesture that something's wrong with my vehicle.

And rolls the window down and yells to me that I have a taillight out. So, or a blinker out. No, it's a taillight out. And we get to the first exit. Right when you leave West Virginia and you enter Ohio, we get to the first exit and I pull off. And go in there and I go into a parts store and I buy a bulb and I need a Torx bit. And I try to go in and borrow a Torx bit. And he's reluctant to lend me one. Eventually lends me a Torx bit and I come outside and I'm working on the taillight and next to me is a car wash. And there's some

people vacuuming the car. There's some kids vacuuming their car and they have loud music that's profanity laced you know you're like a certain age and you use profanity laced but it's profanity laced music and there's another guy with a young kid and the guy that takes offense to the music and starts urging them to turn down the profanity laced music and he's using profanity to express how like displeased he is with the profanity-laced music and a kid from the car produces a pipe. So an Ohio kid produces a pipe as though he's going to confront the guy and the guy calls his bluff and races over toward him. The kid throws down the pipe and the guy disappears into the car from which emanates the loud profanity-laced music.

And I'm thinking that's never going to work, because it's always hard to figure out other people's stereo. So when you get to a hotel and you pick up the remote, and you're like, dude, I'm never going to figure this out. But he's just like, immediately back out of the car with the CD, and throws the CD on the ground, and stomps on the CD. And then the other side of me, they were having a cheerleader car wash fundraiser, and one of those guys must have called the police, because then all of a sudden sudden here comes a car, pulls in with a siren, lights a flashing. We pull out and start driving down the road.

And I'm headed to the serpent mount. And I make the mistake of saying to my girlfriend, you know, I kind of see where that guy was coming from. And it just so happens that she was thinking what an asshole that guy was. We got into such a fight that we fought all the way through our time at the Serpent Mound. And every time I'm in Ohio, I cannot come here without thinking of the Serpent Mound and that fight. Now, so from Michigan, and then we have Kevin Murphy from Kentucky. And I figured that we don't have anyone from Ohio, but if you average out Kevin and me, you have like an Ohioan.

You know, we are holding Ohio up. It would probably fall off somewhere if it wasn't for Kentucky. So don't, yeah, don't feel underrepresented here by this like symbolic Ohioan that we think. And then Mark Kenyon from Wired to Hunt podcast. Ryan Callahan from just generally being a well-known guy

and also from First Light apparel. And then, of course, what a rip. Giannis Patel. Giannis Patel, the Lavian Eagle. Thank you. Sorry? The Latvian Eagle Bear Beater. Mark Kenyon, you...

Mark Kenyon likes to come down and hunt in Ohio all the time, but you just lost your Ohio hunting spot. Yeah, it's a tender wound still, so I'm not sure I'm ready to talk about it. Please. Yeah, it just happened last week, I found out. You want to hear what happened? No, I want to hear how you used to be a dude who comes down and hunts Ohio, but now you're not anymore. Because I think that's relevant to people, right? Well, I always knew I wanted to come on down to Ohio because us in Michigan,

we often talk about how the grass is probably greener south of us. And I wanted to come down, but I had friends who had said that they had hunted down here with Michigan license plates and said that they would have their windows smashed in, their tires cut. So I had serious apprehension about it. But I don't like the michigan wolverines either i don't know what that is so i did start coming down hunting here probably six seven years ago it's been really good to me um we had one small property sort of near cincinnati and the landowners were in their early 90s when we started hunting there.

I can smell trouble already, man. Yeah. When people get that old, like, change is a ruin. Yeah, and it was one of those deals where right from the get-go, we knew, okay, the clock is ticking. This isn't a long-term thing, probably, but it was so good still. We're like, well, let's just enjoy it while we got it. And it kept every year.

We're like, ah, how is so-and-so so and so gonna be you know every year looking for it and i don't want to sound like all i cared about was the hunting property i love the hunting property but we got to know the landowners too really nice people really nice people enjoy getting down there and chatting with them and long story short this year finally uh last last fall i was down there and just noticed that things are going downhill the landowner i went we went down, and I was heading in for a muzzleloader hunt, and I got there late for the afternoon. I drove down from Michigan in a rush, wanted to try to get up for the last couple hours of daylight. And so already I'm looking at my clock.

Oh, gosh, I'm already running late. I pull in, and I see the landowner there, and he's outside of his house, and I always want to stop and say hi to him. So I'm like, okay, I'll say hi and then let him know I'm'm sorry. I got to kind of run. Let's catch up tomorrow or something. So I do that. I go say hi to him and, you know, he starts chatting and I don't want to be rude. So I hear him out. And then finally the conversation ends. And okay, now I'll have like one hour of hunting. It'll be okay. And as I'm walking away, I start hearing him like cursing. And I'm like, oh no, what happened? I turn around to look and you can see him like cursing and i'm like oh no what happened i turn around to look and you can see

him like doing this thing and looking around and i'm thinking to myself and he's standing next to his car i think he locked his keys in his car well i thought he just realized you had michigan plates no so so he he had locked himself out of his vehicle and there was nobody else home there's no one around so i ended up you know losing that whole hung out with him for a couple hours while we waited for someone to call the tow truck and everything for him and it was that kind of thing though had a few instances like that where you just knew it was probably going to be changes coming and yeah a week ago got a phone call that said uh we're not gonna hunt anymore they're selling it and uh the the kids are taking it on and trying to get it sold.

So it was a great place. Had a lot of fun. Really enjoyed getting to know the folks. They're still alive, but they're going to be moving to nursing homes. And the death of an Ohio hunting spot. Hold on, are you telling me that since I locked my keys in my car last week that I'm on the downhill slide? That and several other factors, I think, would say that you're heading that direction, to be honest.

So what I wanted to ask you, Mark, is we had a guy write in proposing that you like to hunt for, like, you like to look around. I hesitate to call it hunting. You like to look around out in the woods for deer antlers. Shed hunting. Laying on the ground. Shed hunting. Love it. deer antlers shed hunting laying on the ground shed hunting love it a guy wrote in to ask this question to ask a question to say like he feels that there should be a bag limit on shed antlers

like that the re he's like he's like because we have this thing we have this thing in wildlife management we have a fair use thing right right like we spread out the resource you know you don't get the hog all the deer you don't get to hog all the deer you don't get to hog all the ducks there's things in place so you're allowed some number and allow other people to have more and he was proposing like what if we came up with this idea of having like a shed antler season not we already have seasons in some states what if we had a thing where you were limited to how many you could have how would you feel about it as a shed antler hunter short answer i don't like it.

Longer answer is bag limits and stuff. I get what you're saying from a fair use perspective, but really the reason why we have those is to maintain sustainable populations of animals. So if I go in there and pick up 100 sheds, that's not going to impact the long-term sustainability of a deer population. So I don't see that as a viable argument.

You spending that much time in the woods might be stressing out animals. I have a question here also, as far as impact. How many deer antlers have you come across that have nine chew marks on them? A lot in certain places, depending on the time of year,

but yeah, a lot. That's not just for taste. They're not just trying that stuff out. That's calcium dense bone. So you're trying to tell me that... I've been hearing this a lot lately. People talking about, what are we removing?

That raccoon populations and squirrel populations, their nutritional... The importance of shed antler stem is that significant. I just don't see it. But I would say that I can understand the argument that there is stress put on deer herds or elk herds or mule deer herds or whatever, people going in there too early, especially in the western states where snowpack and stuff like that does significantly impact deer and so i understand why states like utah and other western states are putting in seasons to make sure that we aren't overstressing the deer at that time of year when they are struggling the most or maybe even in the very

furthest northern states like northern minnesota northern michigan northern wisconsin parks where these deer have to find yarding areas you know where they can only survive in certain areas to get that kind of food and shelter yeah that's an argument um but down here in kentucky ohio well sorry yeah he's got me kentucky ohio this whole region anywhere around here i just don't think that the stress is that high that it is going to make a noticeable impact but but you could get me on the seasons but yeah we get a lot of emails people wonder about that and i wonder maybe a side i think there should be a bag limit the size limit size limit and it's a slot limit yeah no i'm joking i don't see it as a real honest to goodness problem i just wanted to put it to an actual hot shed hunter hobbyist i had my best shed hunting year ever this year defined by quantity and quality okay

and i found my largest shed antlers ever here in ohio that's cool on the on this property really yeah okay um kevin anybody who's got a spot that you don't want to hunt and you want a guy to come down to michigan to ask yeah he's like oh yeah you know in fact i do have a large property no one's using mark it's like no guy come talk to me afterwards the wrong crew yeah you need to go down to the rotary club or something and check the check down there kevin can you um would you mind uh making some predictions this year uh on how what the squirrel season is going to look like based on mass crop is it looking like a strong season? In Kentucky, we had a good carryover from this winter. The squirrels went into, we had a good squirrel crop coming into the season.

We had limited mass. The squirrels pretty much ate everything in the woods, everything they could get their hands on to fatten up. They were mud ball fat, and they had limited activity throughout the wintertime. Their activity pretty much from the 30 minutes at daylight, 30 minutes at dark. Into the season, very, very little movement towards the end of season when the alum buds start coming out water maples squirrels would feed prolific during the day and you could go in and get harvest a limit of squirrels we had a very unusual winter in Kentucky this year probably like the worst in 40 years a lot of 40 year old people had never seen a winter like we had.

The ice froze about nine inches. I had to chop ice for the horses. It kind of shut me down. I got acclimated to hunting in 20 and 30 degrees winter. When it got below zero and negative wind chill, we just shut down. But eventually we got tired of sitting in the house and we started getting out. And we started killing rabbits. We didn't even attempt to kill any squirrels.

But I got to thinking back in the 70s and 80s, we hunted like that when it was that cold. So we had a late spring. It was snowing during turkey season. Had some late freezes, but due to this unusual winter, we had the oak trees did not bud out. And when we did have those late freezes, they did not freeze the buds on them. And we came through the wintertime with a good, healthy oak population. I've looked at the fruit trees, the mulberries, pretty good crop. The cherry trees at my house, the blueberries, it did catch the plums.

But from what I'm seeing, got three pretty good-sized pecan trees in my yard. And the Caspians on them, they're full. They got a lot of small pecans on them. So I'm predicting a good, solid squirrel crop in the state of Kentucky in the western region where I live. If these guys are lucky, it'll drift into Ohio. Are you familiar with the phenomenon, phenomena? What do you say? Phenomena is plural, right? No phenomenon. Either way, a weird thing happening where have you ever heard of a great, the great people say the great squirrel migration.

It is not a migration. It's a dispersal. An emigration. But you've heard of this before. Yes. Because Ohio had one in 1811 where there gets to be this thing where you develop overwhelming numbers of gray squirrels. I don't know if it can happen anymore because we've carved up the woods so bad, but you develop overwhelming numbers of squirrels and then you have a mass crop failure and the squirrels disperse. I used to think that this was a lie when people talk about about the great the great squirrel migration but in 1968 they had a they had another the great

squirrel migration and there was one in my own lifetime that happened in 1998 have you ever experienced 1968 uh north carolina tennessee had a mass failure. The squirrels migrated north through Tennessee, through the south end of Land Between Lakes, 170,000 acres. They came across. I didn't hunt much then at all. My dad, avid squirrel hunter, he'd take our squirrel dog over there. Of course, I was in school a lot. And he said the dog might tree one squirrel

and then three or four come by on the ground you know shoot them i remember hundreds drowning in the lakes riverbanks full of dead squirrels yes the crappie fishermen would be out there uh fishing for crappie lake barkley over a mile wide squirrels be coming by they would just take a dip net dip them up up. And so I have witnessed that. I have witnessed some minor migrations, probably right around the late 90s. Drove from Paducah to Louisville. It's about a three-and-a-half-hour drive.

There was one stretch of about 100 miles between there that I counted over 100 dead squirrels on a four-lane highway. That's not normal, folks. I mean, you just don't see a squirrel ran over on a four-lane. And I made a trip. I was basically going to a ball game up in Cincinnati to take my kids and made a trip like a week later down to Nashville and there was a stretch of I-24 down through there that I counted 54 squirrels dead on the highway. You know, I get kind of bored

sometimes driving down the highway. So, you know, I'll start looking at animals and seeing what's going on and really not pay a lot of attention to what's in front of me or behind me. But yeah, when someone wrote in to ask if the great squirrel migrations are true, and I would always thought they were not true, I started reading about it and read about a man that this article described as a budding squirrel expert, which is not something you see thrown around very often. Like, he's not quite a squirrel expert, but he's emerging as a squirrel expert.

You know, I've done a little reading on this, and I forgot where the article was, but sometimes there was still food in the area, but they didn't know if it was because they had so many squirrels and they had infestation of fleas and vermin in their nest, and so they left that area to get away from those. That's just one thing that I read. Of course, you know, we can read anything anytime we want to right now, but that was from some text, and I don't remember exactly where that came from.

I think we've all been doing a little reading on this because it's kind of bounced around some emails, and I started looking into it. And back in the 1800s, like you mentioned, there were a number of these supposed events, and John James Audubon, a famous naturalist, had observed this, what they thought were millions of squirrels over the course of weeks and i believe it was crossing either the ohio river the mississippi river and they saw this and the behavior was so bizarre and they saw for so long that they they proposed actually that this was a different species of squirrel entirely from the

yeah a migratory yeah so they started calling it the i mean it's like the securius Migratorius or something like that is what they thought this thing was. And it even happened at the beginning of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Meriwether Lewis saw this happening crossing the Ohio River when they were coming down heading towards St. Louis. Yeah, and I usually disregard old-timey accounts of freakish stuff because they just had a weird way of explaining things, you know? Or you can't tell where the mythology ends. You know that Simon Kenton figures he saw around, I think it was 10,000 buffalo around Nashville, right? You hear that and you're like, it's just impossible to picture, right? But the 68 one is like, the 68 Great Squirrel Migration

is really well documented. Just the image of drowned squirrels. We once rescued one out of the Yellowstone. He was such a sad-looking critter. While I have you, Kevin, another squirrel question I wanted to ask you about. Do you remember a few years ago? Oh, please. Yeah, go ahead.

I'd like to know just from a sound of whoops how many squirrel hunters we have have in the audience to see if this is really good relevant information then how many of you see how many of you witnessed the squirrel migration a great the great squirrel migration nobody how many of you have uh squirrel meat in your freezer right now all right real deal kevin can you break down for me um like do you remember a few years ago it kind of became like a thing people talk about like you remember when like noodling became like ricard bilger i think started people like the media celebrating noodling for catfish right it was something that had always been around but all of a sudden it entered the popular imagination and became like a thing right a thing beside no a thing that was known about outside of people who already naturally knew

about it do you remember a few years ago when it became this big conversation about eating squirrel brains very much lay that out for me hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy my goodness do we hear from the can the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in on x are

available for your hunts this season the hunt app is a fully functioning gps with hunting maps that include public and crown land hunting zones aerial imagery 24k topo maps waypoints and tracking that's right you were always talking about uh we're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team.

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do you eat squirrel brains no no i do not. I do not. My background is in water, wastewater. I ran wastewater plants for 20 years. Got interested in pathogens, HIV, hepatitis, hepatitis C. Had 30 guys working for me. I was working out in the sewer system also. I wanted to know what's going on. That was when the AIDS epidemic was going around, and I would read what I could, and I was in a bookstore one day, and there was a book called Deadly Feast, and it was by Richard Rhodes. And he's the man that wrote The Making of the Atomic Bomb. And of course the book was only $5. I skimmed through it real quick and said,

I'm going to buy this baby. So I took it home and started reading it. And it was about a scientist that found the Crutchfield-Jacobs disease or something like that in the humans. But he went down to New Guinea to study a tribe of people down there. And the children and the women were coming down with tremor disease, and they would shake and die. The men did not have this disease.

And he sat down, and he was studying that tribe, trying to figure out what was going on. And he read a lot of technical journals about human beings and people like sniffing gold dust, and it would go and deposit in certain locations in your brain. He read one article where a scientist trained these tapeworms, ramworms to run a maze. You know, we all think of something, a maze being complicated. And I just kind of said, well, it's probably just like a real simple maze, you know, from point A to point B to eat this food. Well, for some reason, I don't know what the scientist was doing,

he took those worms that he trained to run the maze, he killed them, ground them up, fed them to worms that never ran the maze. The worms could run the maze. Come on. Yes, read the book. and from that the scientists knew that the people from New Guinea, they had a practice where they practiced cannibalism, not for defensive measures or trying to kill their enemies or whatever, but to celebrate life. They thought if they ate one of the elders that had passed on

that they would live in their body and go on. The men got all the choice pieces of meat, and you women got the organs and the lesser desirable quantities of meat, such as the children there. So they were eating the brain and the heart and those. And so he figured out there that that was a transfer of the brain matter. After they would eat it, go in, and that's where the tremor disease, the mad cow, the human version, the Crutchfield-Jacobs disease, was coming into their society.

So he got them to stop doing that part of it. I don't know exactly how that went. It's been a pretty good while since I read that book. But there was a number of articles and it seemed like it was like a year or two ago I went back and looked at some of those things. And there was two or three families in Kentucky. And I have eaten squirrel brains, but it was just one of those things that after I read that, read that book, and looked at a little research, and there was nothing definite about that happening, but they did see that's the common thread that those two or three families had that they did consume some squirrel brains.

So I don't eat any type of brain matter whatsoever. I was at a convention down in Houston, I guess it was about 1999, 2000, and there was a young engineer from Britain there, and it was a water-wastewater thing. We went out to eat with a vendor, ordered me a big steak, and then he said, aren't you worried about BVI? And that is the human version of the mad cow disease. And I started talking to him about it. And in the book also, I don't know if it was that same book or another book,

it came into our system after World War II when we started doing factory farming. We started feeding tankage to cattle. Tankage is dead animals that they would go around from farms and pick up, nothing but pretty much pure protein. So they would feed it to the cattle over in England and France, and that's when they started coming down, got into their system over there, the cattle, and they would call it the tractor disease. They were supposed to report it to the authorities, but when their cattle come down with it,

they went and got a tractor, shot them in the head, drug them off and buried them where they wouldn't have to kill their whole herd over there. You see it in cattle. Sheep is called scrapies in there. Hogs, I know, I don't think it's got to have a gestation period of several years out there. It's caused from a prion. You can put something contaminated with prions in an autoclave, and the autoclave will not kill it.

So a prion is very, very hard to kill. But, you know, do not eat any brain matter of any kind. That's all it took to turn you off on it? I have a question in here, too. Before we get off the squirrel subject. No, I was ready to move on from squirrels, but go ahead. Oh, can I jump in here? Please, yeah.

You, Kevin Murphy, are not just a squirrel shooter you're not just trigger man right you're a squirrel hunter correct yes so you observe squirrels more more carefully than any man you've ever met yes and you just told us that you watch them throughout hunting season you watch them throughout the season, you watch them throughout the winter, you see what happens in the spring. Correct? Correct. Are you part lawyer or where is this lady? In your observations, does intense squirrel activity in the fall relate to a heavy winter?

Oh, you mean like in a predictive fashion? In a predictive fashion. Like a farmer's almanac, Kevin Murphy's farmer's almanac by a squirrel. Bearing in mind, Kevin, that I am looking to get off the squirrel subject. No. That's all I want to know. I can't get off the squirrel subject yet because I have one last thing. It's like Montana.

I'm sure that's an old codger thing all over the place. Yeah, they know it's coming. Right. They're building that. They're making cash. It's beautiful to imagine. It is. It's beautiful to imagine. Let me go back to that. It's maybe not squirrel activity, but like I said earlier,

I looked at the squirrels that we were killing in late November, early December, and they were mud ball fat. I mean, mud ball fat. I mean, mud ball fat. Can you explain mud ball fat? It's when you've got to wipe your hands on your pants to finish skinning the squirrel. Yes. But where does the saying come from? What saying?

Mud ball fat. Yeah, what does that mean? I mean, I knew what it meant, but I don't know why it means that. It sounds good. All right, they were lard fat. How's that sound? Butterball fat, mud ball fat. But I have noticed that when they come, you know, like I said, two things are going on.

There's not enough food to get them through the wintertime so they're out there eating everything. And another observation that I made one year is that we had the locusts come out, and we had somewhat of a mass failure that year because they come out late August, whatever. But I never saw a squirrel eat a locust, but I know that that's what they were eating because they were as fat as I'd ever seen any squirrel in my life. But they were consuming the locusts. You know, a squirrel supposedly practices cannibalism, go into a nest and eat bird eggs, eat young birds. They're a rodent, and we all know what rodents do. They eat.

So there's some observations I have made as far as squirrel activity, bearing nuts and things of that nature. You know, I'm out killing stuff. I'm not waiting two days watching a elk or whatever. So that type of observation to see what squirrels do over eight hours, that's not in my DNA. All right, now officially moving on. Someone wrote in and asked a question that I just don't understand.

I know that we struggle with it. And he was saying, Giannis and I just had a confusion around this the other day on the phone. He was saying, why do people say a half turkey breast? Meaning, right, if I told you that I was out in the woods and I found half of a man's breast, right, what is the image you get in your mind? Not this, right, but half. So why do people, like, when you you clean a turkey okay you you cut off he's saying

when you clean a turkey is it do both parts is that the breast are both parts so a half breast is half of all or is a half breast when you cut it in half and i honestly do not know the answer to this do you understand what i'm saying i understand it's half of the entire breast it wasn't it wasn't my buddy tommy edson he was saying he's having his daughter's graduation party at which he would like to cook turkey and i said so take half a breast he's like you mean cut the thing in half i'm like no you know half a breast like bisect the chest i don't know what i mean because then i realized i say it but i don't know i say both ways i don't know what i mean i mean he's like i think the turkey's breast is the whole damn deal cut directly down the sternum bisect the breast so to you a

half breast would be one of those correct cut in half and a breast would be like what i imagine on a human being not cut in half no cow's calling the whole thing one breast. Yeah. Like the breast region. Both sides. Yes. The breast in its entirety. You're wrong. And when you say a half breast. No one says that.

You'd say take out. I'm not sure what I said. I said take out. No, I did say half a breast. Meaning. Yeah, you just got confused in the moment. Yeah, but no, because this guy's confused about it. So it's not like it's just me.

He's confused about it. I'm moving on to something else. Does anybody have anything to add about this? I don't. He's confusing me, and it made me more confused. But Kevin, I got another one for you. Get a whiteboard up here. Kevin, I'm going to hit you with another one, Kevin.

Have you, a guy wants to know and i don't have enough authority in this to ask do uh rattlesnakes kill dogs yeah right yes if they zap them on the throat or nose you know a big diamondback packs a punch in there so i would think a big diamondback could could kill a dog now copperhead is our main poison snake in kentucky third third most prevalent snake out there i've had numerous dogs bit by copperheads and just like Steve said if they get bit in the throat that area the snake bite is not what really kills them it's the swelling from the snake bite if they get bit anywhere else it swells up I never take them to the to the vet on that part we were hunting one year january lbl uh out on a point and it had been cold it warmed up got sunny and my one of my best squirrel dogs came in there

after treated squirrel and you got to looking at it and its front left shoulder swelled up like a country ham. And the best thing that I could do, if you like that, that's Steve's favorite meat, country ham. So if you guys want to send him a present, he really likes country ham. But it swelled up, I mean, like four times its size. But my experience with numerous dogs throughout my lifetime, the copperhead, like I said, unless it bites a dog in the throat or whatever and it has some swelling, you're going to be okay. I mean, you know, take your dog to the vet, let them look at it, whatever. But like I said, my hunting dogs, I pretty much just let them ride it out

just like a bee sting or whatever. But my experience with rattlesnakes, I can't really answer that. We've got some timber rattlers in our area, but I do know that they are pretty brutal. We've got cottonmouths also in there that have like a neurotoxin in there, so I think they have some flesh degradation when they get bit by the dog. But the copperhead being a poison snake, I'm not too concerned if I do have a dog bit by a copperhead. Okay, so I'm going to tell this dude just don't worry about it. Hope he's listening right now.

Mark, in our home state, right, it's illegal to shoot a piebald, or is it still illegal in Michigan to shoot a piebald or albino deer? I'm pretty sure not because... It was when I was a boy. Because I don't know this because I know the actual regulation, but I remember a few years ago, a kid in Michigan shot, I believe it was a piebald, and it went viral and there was all sorts of Facebook hate mail and stuff like that

and death threats. Really? I remember people writing, some blogger or writer, writing in defense of the kid and stuff. So I'm not 100%, but'm not 100 but i'm 99 well that's because what the question was that someone had is like why is it he's like why is it unethical to shoot an albino or piebald deer and it's like i didn't know that it was like why does that make because it's an oddity that you remove you you remove this freakish thing and now you're a bad person i don't know if that feedback's coming from hunters but i think that maybe non-hunters view it as something extra

special carry a character almost you know once you have this unique feature then you can personalize that animal probably oh this is that bob the white deer that we saw in the neighborhood or something like that and then all of a sudden becomes something that emotions can get wrapped around. Yeah, he becomes like Peddles the Bear. Exactly. From New Jersey. Exactly.

But, I mean, I don't know many hunters who have a vehement position on it. I personally wouldn't go out of my way to target a piebald or albino deer. Like, it wouldn't be a thing like, oh, wow, I really want to go after that deer. If you had a 10-point though then you would well i don't yeah i don't know i don't know what i would do for for whatever reason i don't really i don't know i feel like it would just i would be maybe maybe i even as i'm talking through this i might be struck with the rarity of it and just be like wow that is really cool i don't want to see that end that's yeah i think the more i say i don't think i would i don't think i would shoot it it was annoying to me when you couldn't because i remember thinking like because piebald means just patches of albinism right like

not patches but patches of whiteness yes so when it was illegal to shoot one because i think it came from a case where there was one that was well known only because he was identifiable so he didn't blend into the normal general dearness of deer. And he was distinguishable. And so then when someone killed him, people were pissed because they knew that one. But I remember thinking, what if its patch is only on the side that's facing away from you? You're inviting someone to all of a sudden accidentally be an internet pariah. If you were to have the audacity to put a picture up. But if I looking at one like two stand next to each other and one had that characteristic i would be like not drawn

to the to the one with the recognizable characteristic yeah i agree but i wouldn't like look down on someone who did want to take that deer that's their prerogative i want to because i feel like you guys weren't getting me i want to return to this turkey breast thing but now i'm looking at the actual thing. I agree. Okay. This guy is writing in because him and his father are in a fight. They're in a fight.

He says, we are in a disagreement on the subject. It is my belief that a turkey breast is comprised of two parts that you cut out, and these two parts are each classified as one turkey breast each once and you slice them in half you have half a turkey breast my dad on the other hand wholeheartedly disagrees with me he said the turkey breast is one whole thing so it is a real issue tearing a father and son apart here's how i think steve i think that you can right here how do you remove a turkey breast is it a one part procedure or do you take out two things? You can't take it out as one whole piece. Those are two separate breasts.

Okay, moving on. Big question from a dude named Matt. Now, Matt wants to know this. Is it okay, and this is more hot, this is an actual problem. This isn't like how many breasts are on a turkey. This is an actual problem. This isn't like how many breasts are on turkey. This is an actual problem. Why is it okay? Why does everyone say it's not okay, but actually seems to be okay,

that you could thaw meat out and refreeze it? That's a big no-no. But I don't understand the no-no-ness. Totally fine. Yes. This is a question that we get often. Do you follow what I'm saying? Who's saying no-no and why?

It's just a thing. If you go and ask an actual real chef who deals with actual real ingredients, he would tell you that it's a big no-no because when it freezes. You're going to tell me why? Yeah, I think there's a couple reasons. Oh. Why did you just ask me? Just because I want to get the context. Oh, why did you just ask me?

Well, just because I want to get the context. Oh, okay, please. What they're saying about it. But I would say it's probably not so much that the freezing and thawing that it's going through, although that might deteriorate the meat as well, but meat's probably spending more time in the food danger zone. And so you're just inviting, there's like more opportunity to have bacteria and stuff grow and probably get sick from it. So you probably just don't want to be letting that meat go back and forth through that, you know, space of, you know, temperatures. So I guess

if you did under controlled, real controlled circumstances and never let it get out of, you know, whatever, above 40 degrees, probably wouldn't be that big of a deal. I thought it had to do with water loss. Which kind of doesn't make sense. Well, I think what it has to do with is water. But it's the

water freezing, breaking down the cell tissue. That's what I was going to get into all that crap. Yeah, and then you could come up with some mushy meat. Right? You're doing it multiple times. Fracturing cell walls. Because you ever notice when you

freeze something and thaw it out, it's like, where'd all that water come from? Right? You get that watery, bloody thing. Because all that water comes out of there. Had you never frozen and hadn't done that. You know the thing I'm talking about, right? When you just pull out a roast and thaw it on a plate, the water comes. Yes.

But many, many times. And you're doing it multiple times. Like, I'm digging through the freezer, and my stomach gets bigger than my brain. And I pull out more than I can possibly feed anybody that week. And I got to take off again so I had like oh yeah check her back in the freezer whatever I don't get to you know yeah and I've never had any ill effects yeah that's why I feel like it's not a problem because what we'll do oftentimes is especially if you're traveling is we'll hunt bone something out put it in gallon size ziploc bags

freeze it then you come home you got a total mess on your hands you'll thaw the thing back out sort it out process the property grind it if it's burger trim it part it out refreeze it and then people act like you've just committed like the cardinal sin of meat handling would it be fair to say that's not the ideal scenario but it's not the end of the world? Probably. So I have an interesting scenario playing out in my refrigerator in the garage right now. Okay. Down in Texas a couple weeks ago. And, of course, I kill a deer this afternoon.

This is pretty neat. The last day that we were there, last morning that we were there, 105 degrees. So we get it into a walk-in refrigerator. I break it down into general big pieces for travel and to let it cool out as much as possible. We hang out there as long as possible, let things cool down, stuff everything in a big ass cooler, pile ice on top of it, drive four hours, pull things back out of the cooler, stuff it into smaller coolers. Things are pretty darn chilled down now. And then, you know, walk onto the plane and fly basically like an eight-hour day back to my house at that point,

pull the big pieces back out, put them on the racks in my refrigerator, and I've let them go a little over two weeks now. You're aging. Yes, because there was no opportunity for that meat to rest. Now, Sunday night, I took a loin, and I never let loins age like that because there's meat loss and it's not that big of a loin. But I had a really nice, sharp fillet knife. And basically cut prosciutto-sized cuts off the outside of that loin. And it was fantastic.

And I'm intending on processing all that meat when I get back. From this trip. Tomorrow. I'll be processing meat tomorrow night. You should just leave it in there and feed off it now. But, you know, now I have like big hams left. I'm not going to be able to eat through that.

Yeah, I was telling them about the odd-dad piece of meat we ate. Remember that? Yeah. Sorry, I was also thinking about it. Someone else, our buddy Mike Rule aged some, is it Oryx I was telling you about? Yeah.

The same way that you did. I think you did eight weeks in a fridge. No fan. It keeps it at 39 degrees. But it can't be sitting on it. Everything's like up on the rack. We ate Audad meat that had hung for 18 months in the fridge. Whoa.

And it was like... Highly controlled. Yeah, very temperature and humidity controlled. And it was like eating blue cheese. It tasted like cheese. It was good though. It was good. Dude, the only negative about it, the only negative about it is, so you got this thing, it's like this thick, right? After 18 months, there's, there's, you know, it's like a tenderloin on the inside that you can eat. All the rest is just dried out. And all you have left is this little inside soft bit of like a block of blue cheese hiding inside that leg.

Was it ultra rich like blue cheese? Oh, my God. It was pungent, rich. It was like if you told me it was meat-flavored cheese. So were you like second-guessing your next bite to where you're like, boy, that was really good, but I don't know if I could handle the next one? I fully expected to get sick. Not from the flavor. Not from the flavor.

I was like, there's no way. That just seemed like one of those things that later you're like, holy shit, what was I thinking? It just seemed like you were entering. Did you get that feeling like you were entering the territory of irresponsibility? Well, yeah, the outside was kind of like rainbow colored wasn't it i mean it was mostly white but there's definitely patches of different colors of all these things yeah did you run out of house cough drops yeah oh

no we were in a we were well fed inside a restaurant yeah and uh but my old man would talk about when i was looking at my old man would talk about hanging deer white-tailed deer until they had you would say a quarter inch of green mold was the indicator they would use it was now time that green quarter inch of green mold the mold you don't want white black no black fuzzy mold is bad but he would say a quarter inch of green mold these had white mold yeah yeah i wish he had pictures of that we do i think do we have pictures of that yeah he snaps green no white yeah i'm just saying what my old man said and he's like you know gone now and was had some questionable bits of information. I mean, now and then, you know? But that's something that he would

talk about is doing that. Hanging it that long. I will say this. This deer was absolutely fantastic. It's one of the better deer running around out in the woods, for sure. Or in the desert. I feel like the resting

period was critical to get together like there was no cheese here that's nice what i might do now since it's going to break it down some more that old tough cow i've been chewing on for the last five six months i might just thaw her the whole thing out and freeze freeze it? No, and then just freeze it again. Oh, as a tenderizing strategy. Yeah, if that's what's happening. I'll report back. What I am into that I don't hear people talk about is just like

what you're saying, just like standard fridge aging of game meat. Meaning just like set it in your fridge. You have to trim the outside away. But I think that people worry too much

about aging stuff. Like what's the, I mean, the worst case scenario? You get a teeny bit sick. I was cooking this stuff over at my buddy's act house.

And I went, I got a brand new Ziploc bag and went out there to throw this loin in the Ziploc bag. And realized that it would just be, I'd just be getting the Ziploc bag totally dirty for no reason. It has such a rind of meat that I could have thrown it on the hood of my truck and driven it across town. Yeah, they become durable.

And it wouldn't be annoying to look back. Yeah. So that, I mean, think about it. Save you some cash. hood of my truck and driven it across town yeah they become durable you know a little fast yeah so that i mean think about it save you some cash uh i got another ethics one couple ethics points um a guy wrote in he has one time he has one complaint about listening to the show as he used to listen to it then he got his friends listening to the show and now he can't talk about what he heard on the show as though it was something that he just natively knew. Because they'll be like, dude, you didn't know that. I just heard that too.

So he's bummed that he told anyone because he just liked to act like he just knew stuff that he had to find out about somehow. But he's talking about, so he's hunting, right? And he's, I don't somehow but he's talking about so he's hunting right and he's he's i don't know what state he knows he's in texas lives in texas and he's hunting and a doe and a yearling came up and i think he's not talking about a yearling because they're together so people say yearling but it's not really a yearling if you're hunting in the fall it's uh why do people do people still still like always say that, right?

It's like it's eight months old. Yeah, born that year. Yeah, born that spring. A deer of the year. So a doe and a yearling buck come into his feeder. He passes on the thing. Passes on the doe because he would have felt guilty about orphaning a yearling. And he wants to know what are y'all's thought on this because his buddies ripped him a new one over it saying doesn't matter

i think from a management standpoint from like a well-being of the deer herd perspective, it doesn't matter. From the well-being of the deer herd. I agree. From everything I've read and heard and talked to biologists about it, those deer of the year, those fawns, at that, by the time hunting season rolls around, they are biologically capable of surviving. Typically, from what I understand, they get picked up by of surviving in the typically from what i understand they get picked up by the rest of the doe family group that they're hanging out with or the nearest adjacent doe family group and they continue on just fine so from a biological or management

perspective yeah i personally it's heartrending i've i've like flip-flopped on it a lot like i've had days where i've been out there sitting and i've wanted to kill a doe and I had a doe and fawns come out. And I would just sit there and do I want to? Do I not want to? No, I don't want to. And then I've had other days where I yeah, I've got to get that doe. But in my head, you would still have that sense of, yeah, it's you get into all the ethics and morals and the whys and hows of what we do stuff, and that's murky, sticky, swampy territory.

I think all of us have a different thought process there. You shoot the pond. The pond has the least likelihood of surviving to maturity and producing more deer. Well, let's think about our goals. In most of the Midwest, in Ohio and want to we actually want to lower deer populations so we have issues where actually the smarter decision from a management perspective is to take that mature doe that's more likely to have future fawns and you know because we've got too high of deer populations because you have states that are trying to bend over backwards to encourage people to take some step toward

lowering deer numbers like in wisconsin there's areas you can't shoot a buck until you shoot a doe you have to shoot a doe to get a buck tag that's how serious they are about shooting does but still for me like from the like so like the whole like just the bambi angle on it um yeah I would shoot the other one. Which is awful too. Yeah. I don't know why. I would feel worse about shooting the fawn than the doe.

There are management areas in British Columbia, where they actually have half loose seasons. So, it's not a answer list, it is a half season. Now, right, think this through, you have a calf that a mature animal is caring for, in addition to themselves, during the hardest time of year,

the mature animal can produce one or two more of those, ideally, than its breeding season. So, I mean, it's absolutely no different than our agricultural system, right? You've got a cow that produces calves, you sell the calves, you feed the cows. Yeah, I never thought about that. People look down on a hunter for doing that, but when you go to a restaurant and do that, that's all you're eating. That is all you're eating that is all you're eating babies it is it's one of those weird things it's one of those weird things where it's like on one hand you want to be all uh you want to sit back and look at it all with sort of this perspective of like you know herd management longevity goals, but you're always thrust in these

situations where you can't divorce yourself and just these kind of like just basic, you know, these kind of like basic native feelings of kind of like misplaced empathy, I guess. You know, I remember being stuck in that situation all the time, Bohan, and yeah, I would never want to do that. Be like, oh oh it's horrible to do that and then like shoot the little one which is distasteful as well but yeah and the industrial egg situation that's all it is i would just say that i don't think personally that there's a right or wrong answer to that i understand both sides of it and i myself like i, like I just said, sometimes have, no, I don't want to shoot that deer. And sometimes I have.

But I don't think it's misplaced empathy. In that I think it, having some kind of sense of empathy around what we do as hunters, not saying it doesn't mean we don't kill deer or elk or whatever, but at least having some sense of that I think is maybe a healthy thing to temper what we're doing and to be at least thoughtful about it. How that actually plays out in the field is going to be different for everyone, but I would just say, meh. I don't think

it's a bad thing that we think about this stuff. It's an acknowledgement that you're engaged in something seriously and it plays out like you're dealing with lives and death. Most serious thing. This guy also says Tony Sachery is way better than Old Bay, Giannis. I just, I hold to that they're different.

That's all. Okay, here. Completely anecdotal, though. Yeah, go ahead. Speaking of the calf being picked up by the rest of the herd, I had a hunter once that on open morning, he killed the bigger of the two elk, and they were traveling together. The calf was left there alone and that

was like opening day so we got it for five days then I think I had two or three days to hunt because the season was like nine days long we got it for five I could hunt the last four days of the season I was hunting around hunting around couldn't find a cow and I thought oh I wonder about that calf sure enough I went right back to where the hunter had shot from i sat there and before the the the sound of the first note of my cow call faded i heard and here she comes just running over the hill and i was like oh man i kind of didn't hope for it to work so well and then so she hadn't joined the herd she was still like hanging out man i never heard that story so tasty though thank you for sharing i mean a cat like archery season so much easier to pack out

so tasty yes yeah one trip yeah here's another one a guy said we were having a conversation on on this year uh program we're having a conversation one day where i was talking about some things that didn't like some forms of hunting some hunting practices that didn't interest me okay and i cited some examples we were actually having a conversation about we're having a conversation about where i was kind of like putting it to mark kenyon a little bit like in like why what is the difference between having a food plot and having bait out in the woods right and some people say like it's the same exact thing or some people say it's different and it brought up this conversation where um i was saying that

we used to hunt over bait all the time then it just became where it's not interesting to me now and now i don't and he pointed out like that he's saying in this letter he's like you don't read it this way but what that reads as is it reads as you condemning and hunting practice that anyone looking in would say like that by saying you wouldn't do it you're condemning it hunting practice. That anyone looking in would say, like, that by saying you wouldn't do it, you're condemning it. And I think that that's, like, kind of an interesting thing that needs to be prodded at a little bit. Because I don't feel that I am, right? I'm feeling that everyone looks and there's things that you're drawn to and things that you're not. And how could it be held up that if you're not drawn to something and don't want to do something, it doesn't interest you, that there's sort of this like this like implicit condemnation of the activity which seems like a stretch like it

doesn't feel to me that's what i'm doing and i think it like just opens up some level of sensitivity on people's behalf where they feel like you're saying like they like to do something you don't like to do it therefore you must be saying that they're wrong yeah if i choose not to play soccer are you going to think that means I hate people that play soccer, that I'm condemning the sport? No. Well, in not playing golf, that's what I'm doing. But yeah, I agree with you. I think that there's nothing wrong with people having different takes on what appeals to us or what lines we draw or whatever it might be and that's okay i think it's a good thing that we all have our own different lines of what we feel is compelling

interesting or even ethical we all have a different take on some of those things and yeah because he's inviting to look at he's inviting one to look at it from the non-hunting perspective saying like from the non-hunting perspective people would look and be like see you see what i'm saying about those certain practices these people because you're signaling that that it's bad and maybe his argument is that because because you have platform so maybe as someone who's like a leadership position in some capacity within this community by saying that you don't that signals to other people as someone that you know has a platform but maybe that's the case i could better understand that argument but yeah i agree got one for you yannis bring it um dude's wanting to know is it okay to hunt deer of the 223

why is that for me because i think of you as like a um like a guy that knows about you're definitely kind of a bullet he likes to act like he's not definitely yeah did you guys see my tattoo is that what it makes of the bullets all of them i'm joking oh you know what i forgot to mention not only is it the solstice but it's yanni day in latvia, where I think people named... Like the singer? No, people named Janis celebrate today in Latvia. Everybody celebrates. It's weird. It's a summer solstice party, and it just happens to be called Jani,

which is like the Jani name day. Everybody, all Latvians have a name day as well. It was kind of nice growing up because it was almost treated as like a second birthday. So you'd get, you wouldn't get quite as many presents, but you'd get a few. You'd have like a little celebration. Would it no joke be equivalent to there being a Steve day?

Yeah, exactly. Dude's name's Steve, party that day. Yes, yeah. But for Yanni day, it's on the summer solstice. And yeah, you you bet you have all kinds of traditions that you do sing a lot big bonfires travel from house to house with your greet all the neighbors eat this is gonna get a good it's gonna get a good laugh but you eat a bunch of yanni cheese.

Which is like a, it's kind of bland, but it has caraway seeds in it. It's tasty. There's pea dog usually, which some of you have had, or maybe it's just Steve. I've had it. Yeah. What else do we do?

Yeah, you do just, you know, like you were saying about the Native Americans, you know, doing things to sort of, you of, what did you say, move the sun? Yeah, you're paying homage to the sun somehow. You're sending it back south. Good luck for the rest of the year. I think you had to get a partner and jump over the bonfire. That was the highlight.

When we were old enough, when your parents were like, ah, you get to do it this year. It was like, yes, we get to jump over the bonfire. Do you want to do it this year. It's like, yes, we get to jump over the bonfire. You want to know more? Yeah, no, I want you to jump real quick because I thought the solstice was the day you guys throw molten lead into a bucket of water and then read the future with it. Can you break that down? Winter solstice. Yeah, winter. Yeah, break that down. You don't want to wait until the winter solstice for that? I want to talk about it right now. Yeah, very safe practice. I can't believe our parents were like, hmm. But yeah, we would buy a bunch of fishing weights and probably everybody got a bag or so and you'd have an old pot that was used every year for this and you would melt the lead and you'd have a cold

bucket of five gallon bucket of cold water. And you would, I think some years, I guess we had a ladle, but I remember usually just having a small pot and you would dump the pot quickly into the cold bucket of water and it would just turn into a form everybody would go around doing that and he'd sit around and look at this thing and then you would um find a take off a painting off the wall or something just have a plain your hand is doing it right now on that wall behind there you There you go. And you set up a candle, and you just hold the lead figurine sculptor. I don't know what you call it. You didn't sculpt it really, but the form that you made. And with the light from the candle moving a little bit, and then that odd shape,

everybody else sits around that's in your group and looks at that shadow and sort of projects your next year like it'd be like yanni is gonna get a big old buck right if it throws a shadow yes yeah that's good stuff now back to this 223 thing oh yeah uh you know i've never i've never done it and i'm like i've never owned a 223 so i really can't um i've never killed a deer with a 243. I've seen it done, so I know, you know, and it was a nice, quick, clean kill. But 223, I'm sure with the right bullet and the right bullet placement, it could be done. Right bullet.

Yeah. But there's guys that have killed charging grizzly bears with 22s, but I don't think anyone proposes that that's, like, a thing that makes sense to you. So when people rely on the, like, when you hear that argument, well, my brother's cousin, that doesn't make sense. But you know what I mean? Like, it's thrown out there all the time. But this dude wants to know.

I'm not a gun guy, but the reading i've done on it in the past is that yes but it's you got to be mindful about your bullet choice and your distance like it should be a close range thing only because like i said i'm not a gun guy but i think the 223 it's a velocity thing right to make that work to kill a larger game species so you want to make sure you don't shoot so far that velocity drops off and we've talked extensively uh yannis and i both had poor guiding experiences when folks would show up with the 7mm mag and that was when that cartridge first came on the market and was very popular. And I'm trying to be a grown-up and objective in looking back. It's not that that rifle isn't worth anything, but likely there was not the appropriate ammunition on the market at the time to make that a good killing rifle. Yeah.

I'm going to leave it at that. I wish I knew if he was here, we'd know if he was happy with that or not. Yeah, I think you need to look at velocities. How much energy that projectile is taking to the animal at a given distance, so you know what math says is the correct amount of energy at what distance, and have an appropriate projectile for hunting, not a target projectile that, especially in a 223 case is the most prolific and the least expensive by far yeah i would recommend you go read what chuck hawks has to say about it that is kind of the authority but he's a reliable dude, Chuck Hawks. And Chuck Hawks is a gun writer who's kind of anti-gun writer,

which is helpful. This guy, this is a good one that I don't understand. He grew up in Montana, where everyone knows that you skin an animal, hanging it from its gambrels, meaning you hang it from its hocks upside down. In Wisconsin, everyone knows that you hang a deer by its neck. Why is this and who is right? The neck guy, I think. Because what we used to do is we would take them and do all the

skinning cuts, hang it up by the neck, and then take a golf and skin the neck down a little ways, put a golf ball in there, wrap a rope around it with a slip knot, hook it to a four-wheeler or a vehicle and just drive away and that whole hide squirts right off. Slick. One cannot do that the other way around. So I think that's God's way of saying hang it from the neck. But it's that regional bias. Dude's wondering how, why, the difference. Does anyone have anything to add about that? Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada.

The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints,

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out. If you visit on X maps dot com slash meet on X maps dot com slash meet. Welcome to the, to the on X club y'all i would guess that if you actually took a census and drove around those two states you'd probably see it's probably split down the middle in texas you could probably go from one ranch they're all hanging by the neck go to the next ranch or hanging by the hawks i don't know if that's necessarily true that it's one way in the north and a different way in the south. So he hung out with two people.

He hung out with one guy in Montana that did it that way, and one guy in Wisconsin did it the other way. And he's like, that's just how they do it in these states. Few enough that I think it's a coincidence. Make it clean, get the meat cooled down fast. I don't care how you do it. A guy wrote in from Ohio here, and he wanted to know, what is up? Why can we not

have elk in Ohio? Of the people who are from Ohio, how many of you guys would like to see elk in Ohio? How many of you would not? All Ohioans are in yeah it winds up being like kind of an interesting story because of course elk here like everywhere pretty much everywhere else um at the time of european contact you were in the heart of elk country right right? Elk occupied almost the entirety

of the lower 48. There's like some debate about where the line was drawn around Maine, where the line was drawn, like whether they were down in the Florida peninsula or not, but they were just everywhere. Everywhere, you know, early English colonists went, many places Spanish colonists went, there was elk. And the thing we always point out is we've only recovered elk on, you know, 90 or so, like, you know, we've only, I'm sorry, we haven't recovered elk on something like 90% of their historic range. Elk are absent from most places that elk belong. And someone was saying like, what's up? Like, why not Ohio? Ohio did a feasibility study. Oh, another interesting thing is, you guys remember the Muskegum River? How do you say it?

Oh, because I'm from Muskegon. We don't spell it nearly like that. How do you guys say it? Muskegum. You know what it means? Okay, one dude say it. Muskingum. Muskingum.

Can you guys hear what someone's saying i got i got this yeah just get let him rip let it rip musking gum that's what it is okay you know what that means yeah what elk's eye he's right so many because you know like in the old days a very popular oh yeah you get something for that So many. Because, you know, like in the old days, a very popular. Oh, yeah, you get something for that. Like if you read accounts of if you read accounts of how hunters would hunt in Boone's time, like a very common way to hunt like the early hide hunters with how they would hunt was they would. Burn pine knots in the bowels of boats and they would just hunt at night like, you boon to like boon hunting a lot with dogs ran stuff with dogs they hunted a lot at night and they would go out at night and they would rig up a platform in front of a canoe and you'd burn

pine knots on the platform and they would just drift rivers that night shooting deer coming down and drink in the summertime and they say that that river draws its name from elk's eye. Presumably, you would, when you're drifting down, instead of seeing the eye shine on white tails that had its own particular dimensions and color, you would tend to see there the eye shine of elk. Your guys, when I say your guys, those of you who are from Ohio, you guys conducted not long ago, you conducted a feasibility study, and it was determined that habitat was pretty scarce in Ohio to have elk, but that there was a possibility that you guys could support a population of around 400 or less elk. The last elk here, the last place elk were commonly seen, I don't know how to pronounce this

either, Ashtabula, that ain't right. What is it? They used to be pretty common in that county. As of 1832, they were commonly seen around there. The last ohio's last elk died in that county in 1835 and they did a multi-agency thing to take a look what if we bring them back to ohio what's that going to look like kind of scoured the state for feasible locations to pull this off. They looked in southeastern, east central Ohio, and they figured that it wound up being that you could support maybe about 400 elk, which is a lot better than zero. But when they looked at it, there were too many, they felt that there were too many social obstacles to elk reintroduction in Ohio,

meaning that you just weren't going to get people on board who were going to deal with agricultural loss and cars running the elk. The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation took a look at it, too. But I feel that the way that the El elk foundation is looked at is like they feel that it has to be 100 commitment because the elk foundation has been burned in places where they did a bunch of work to come in they spent a bunch of time in new york working with the dec to come in and plan a full-scale elk restoration project and in the end the state's like you know what never mind and went another direction. They had the same thing in Virginia. For a while, Virginia fiercely opposed the idea of restoring

elk. And for over a decade, they thwarted elk volunteers' efforts to bring elk back into the state. Then all of a sudden, New Jersey gets a new governor. The new governor appoints a new director, and within two years, Virginia had elk back on the ground. So even though it was thwarted here as being there's too many social obstacles to it, I do think that it's something that you guys should continue to, an idea that you guys should continue to dabble in because you look at that map of missing a species like a valuable species with a lot of you know a lot of social support and everywhere it's found and you look and think that you guys could aim towards someday bringing that back here and fill in that map and eliminate some of that 90 of the ground that's absent this big, beautiful, gorgeous animal. I think that as a state, you guys should continue to kick that one around and keep pushing for it and try to overcome the social obstacles

that would be in place to put elk on the ground in Ohio. So keep that in the back of your mind as you're drinking cold beers tonight. One final thing I wanted to bring up here another letter from a person where a hunter's wife wrote in and she's trying to understand why does my old man like to hunt so much. And she's saying that he one time was watching a buck and he like had to get it. And so he ignored all of his family issues to get this buck. And he finally gets the buck and she celebrates with him. She's all happy. It's like, finally, we can put this behind us. And they had a wedding reception they had to go to. And she's like, I guess now you're cleared up to go to this wedding reception. Well, my buddy hasn't tagged out yet. So she says, please correct me if I'm

wrong, but is there ever a point where you have to just put hunting aside? He's married to the wrong woman. Someone says he's married to the wrong woman. Do you feel like, do you feel that, Giannis, that push and pull a little bit? Like, you know, if you were on the bars that night, you'd feel guilty. But do you feel guilty for being out in the woods? No.

I don't. But yeah, I don't get that from my old lady at all. But again, I could probably push it more though. But I feel like I'm conscious of how much time I spend in the woods and how much time I spend at home, making dinner, playing with the kids. The kids are now with me a lot in the woods. I don't think I get that many i mean out of 18 turkey hunting days this spring i might have had two mornings that were by myself so i had kids and friends and you know family my wife with me um so yeah i might only get 10 days that are like that really to myself i get to hunt kind of hunt for work a lot too so that makes it easier yeah i toy with the guilt all the time but that's why i keep feeling like the real solution to my problem will be when my kids are like you know i have a three-year-old

right they're hard to deal with at home but when my kids are all of age i feel like i look forward to the day of enjoying it without even the guilt. Because once they're all with me, there's like nothing holding me back. It'd just be like guilt-free, just utter bliss to be in, it's like everything I want all in one spot. My kids and the woods, you know? And I'm not that far away from that. Maybe you'll invite your wife along. Oh, she's welcome anytime.

But that doesn't, like, bring, like... I think that she would be just, like, there or not, she would be just as fine with it. Because, like, as a parent, you carry, like, one... Like, if you're... You know, as a parent, you're like,

you need to be with your kids all the time. But then you feel this, like, sort of, like, native pull to being being outside and i think that part of the guilt that comes from not being with your kids all the time is that someone's with them so you also feel like you're kind of like dumping someone with responsibility so you can go enjoy this thing that means a great deal to you so i think to alleviate the whole thing just makes sense like have your kids out in the woods when i was growing up it would be a it was a laughable idea that my old man would be out hunting or fishing and you weren't welcome to go along laughable it was just taken as a matter of course that if he was going

you were welcome but i don't think that everyone runs their program that way you know i think there is this sense of people that like you like do you want to leave that behind and go out and be out in the woods without your kids because they're hard to be around sometimes it's like it's a struggle with little kids so that's just like my answer is to have them be in that little period when they're big enough where you can move them around but they're not so big that they that they hate you you know yeah like the whole peace and quiet and meditating in the woods that that's gone for a while now right yeah my brother took his daughter out caribou hunting and when he came home i was like how'd that go is that what surprised me is that that knowing to whisper when animals are real close apparently is not just like a thing that people naturally understand.

We said these caribou come up and they're walking by real close and like in everything he feels like it's just like you don't move, you don't make a sound, like everyone just knows this. And his daughter just turns to him and flat out in a really conversational voice, wow, look at that, you know. And he's like, how could that, I just assumed that was like native knowledge you know store it into you yeah cal uh i'm gonna just pass you by on this one mark yeah every day is pure pulling off one of the kids for some higher learning you you fish You fish with... I'd appreciate that. But you've spent time... You've fished with my kids.

Oh, yeah. It's hard. It is very constant. I don't even know how to explain it. It's... Yeah, it's just very constant. There is no, like, drifting off. It's a lot of questions, which is great because, you know,

like they're paying attention and learning. But, yeah, it's very full on. Real quick, talk about your experience when we're diving for sea cucumbers with my kid. Because this is a good way of explaining what is the juggling you do with the kid. Meaning that there's a problem, but you can't admit to the problem. Yeah. So, all right. So, a skiff, 13-foot skiff.

It's a 16-foot skiff. Blue boat or red boat? Red, 16, blue is 18. Okay, so 16-foot skiff. Steve's child is in the front of the skiff. I am in the rear of the skiff. We start off just fine. Steve and his brother Matt are diving for sea cucumbers.

I feel very comfortable around the water and safety and all those things, but I have the variable of young James up there in the front of the boat. And when we start off, he's got his fishing pole, and he's casting around, and he actually catches rockfish. And the seas are pretty high, so I'm constantly trying to keep an eye on my guys in the water. So I'm kind of being safety for those guys. And keeping this relatively small boat oriented into the waves so we don't take water into the very small boat. And it is slightly more than I bargained for, because watching the guys keeping the boat oriented,

I'm not paying attention to James. All of a sudden, James is like, and I'm like, oh, fish fish oh no it's the propeller and then that breaks off which was a bummer but not that big of a deal but the problem was is that I couldn't get his rod, tie on another lure, and keep the boat oriented and be safe where we were. And then James was like, is this safe? Is this OK? I'm like, yeah, everything's totally fine.

And he's like, OK, great. Tie the lure on. And I'm like, well, just hang on a second, because I can't. And I'm like, grrrr. And he's like, well, if you can't tie the lure on, can I get a snack? And I'm like, yeah, get a snack. He's like, great. Hand me the bag and the bag.

He's in the bow of the boat. I'm in the back of the boat and bag is in the middle of the boat. And I'm like, well, man, I can't get you a snack right now. He's like, well, is this safe? Can we be out here? I'm like, well, yeah, it's safe. We're fine. He's like, well, great. Hand me a snack.

I'm like, well, ah, ah, and that's kind of how the day went, and it was a very, and then we did take a wave over the side of the boat, and Jimmy got drenched, and stuff's floating around, and it was just constant, like, is this safe? Is this okay? And it was a big day. Big day for me. Yeah.

And I want to get, I think, Mark and Kevin's perspective on this. One, kids or not. Two, is there ever some reason you should put hunting aside? Because, Mark, you're just entering into it. And, Kevin, you've come out of it. So from the entering into it perspective, obligations, balancing it all, racked with guilt. Yeah.

But you want to be out in the woods. Maybe you'll bring them. Am I going to get in trouble because it's real dangerous? Yeah, so all sorts of these types of things have been running through my mind for sure. And I think that even just before we had kids, even with my wife, at times i would struggle with some sense of am i am i neglecting you know my husbandly duties at home helping out with things being around doing things and i'm gone a lot hunting and traveling and stuff so so i think every person every family has a different like tolerance level my wife's very very understanding but even her at some point in the year she always kinds of reach she reaches some kind of like stress point usually it's like november 16th or 17th i've been gone three weeks straight hunting every day 24 or 14 hours a day

or whatever it is and finally she's like okay i need to know i have a husband again so so there's always some point like that so it's always in the back of my mind like what am i doing okay balancing that am i not but i definitely am not out there not thinking about it it's it is something that's in the back of my mind and trying to find a way to, you know, fulfill all those obligations. With a kid, I do think that's going to be even more. And I can already feel it. Like in the past, you know, when I'm going out for a hunting trip, I'm usually just amped. And, of course, I'm going to miss my wife.

But it's not like something that's like on the top of my mind when I'm heading out the door. I'm just excited for the trip and where we're headed but now with like my little baby he's five months old i'm heading out the door i'm like oh man i'm gonna miss him and i can imagine that come hunting season when i'm gone for weeks on end and things like that that that will be something that's going to be i'm sure a new challenge and as he's growing up i imagine too like when he gets to the age he can talk like i've heard heard friends say like, oh man, when they start like saying how much they miss you or when are you coming home or why are you leaving again, daddy? I imagine that's going to be kind of like a dagger to the heart. And I'm going to have, you know, some real figuring out to do like, how do I balance this?

How do I do it in the right way? But that story that you just shared, Ryan, like I cannot wait for that with my son. Like that sounds amazing. To put him at tremendous risk. With great risk comes great reward sometimes, Steve. The problem is they don't recognize all the other cool, amazing stuff where I'm like, wow, look at the waves crashing on those rocks. Look at the amazing stuff. And they're like, I need a snack. And I want a new jig tied on. Yeah, and i want a new jig tied yeah i need a new jig tied on like pronto man yeah i could totally see i can also imagine though like going out into the

woods with a child's eyes again like in the things they might be interested in like i head into the woods and all i'm thinking about is i need to get to the stand without getting winded by these deer and i need to be super quiet and blah blah blah and i could just imagine taking my four-year-old out or my three-year-old or whatever he is. And he's going to see a butterfly flying or he's going to see a track or bunny. And like, he's going to stop and say, dad, look at that rabbit. In the past, I never would have paid attention or whatever it might be. And I am already looking forward to how cool those moments can be too. So those will be far and few between. Maybe your kid will be a prodigy and you'll have a few of those every time you go out but most of the time it's like mud rocks mud rocks mud rocks rocks rocks mud mud i might

be blindly optimistic right now that's true uh we when we last summer took our all we last summer took all three of our kids up to our shack in alaska and we're having this conversation like i'm always like very leery about overpacking. I don't like when people overpack. My wife said, well, they're going to be all wet. They're going to get all wet. And I'm like, yeah, well, this is Alaska, man. We just wear our clothes dry.

She said, what does that mean? I'm like, you get them wet, you don't change all the time. You just wear it until it gets dry. The minute we get there, the two-year-old wades out into the water. And it's cold you know and he wades out in the water up to about his navel and comes out and she's like looking at me like the whole wear it dry thing you know but then we look and he'd also shat himself out there it was like dude that trip just went downhill from there man it's just like the things you hadn't accounted for yet but i've

had a lot of ways to know yet. But I've had a lot of ways to know that I like, I've had a lot of ways to know that I've married right. And over 10 years, I know I've like married writer and writer and writer all the time. I remember the first time I was leaving on a long hunting trip when our kid was an infant. And I remember being, I was sitting in the bathtub, taking a bath with the kids. So I'm sitting there in the bathtub with my boy James on my lap and I'm sobbing because i'm so sad about leaving him like you're talking about and my wife comes in and says you better pull it together and i was like that that's the response i want to hear man she's like you're gonna give the kid a complex you know just go so okay this father this father thing's gonna like

least be livable yeah you know i mean kevin you got any final thoughts on the whole thing like you got kids grown up gone things you should have done different yes because uh you know i was married for 30 years and it come to an end uh wife said she never wanted to see another piece of camouflage clothing uh if i died i was going to sell all my guns and buy guitars for my boy. And, you know, it ended there. You know, a lot of it can be not the quantity of time, but the quality of time spent with your children. That's what they remember. You know, you don't have to be around 100% of the time or 90% of the time,

but when you are there due to the job that you may have or whatever, those moments that you are with your children, make sure it is a quality experience. And they grow up in the blink of an eye and they're gone. So are your kids hardcore squirrel hunters? We used to have a family tradition of the Murphys going, hunting every Thanksgiving. My son, he would go with us on that day and that's pretty much it that was all he cared anything about going is like one day a year

uh it it kind of hurt me uh for a long time but i finally realized and i looked at some of my other other friends and they would have two boys one of them them was an adamant hunter. The other one was not. We had a professional coon hunt in West Kentucky back in the spring. I went over with a friend of mine. I said, let's go over. I said, they want me to guide. And I took a professional photographer over with me and asked him to take some pictures.

I said, I think I want to write a story about this coon hunt. And so when I went through the door, immediately I saw some of my friends, and they came over and started talking to me, just chit-chat. And he was able to go around the room, and he took four or five pictures of people that were there. Of course, it was a brand-new experience to him. He had never seen anything like that in his life. And he come back to me and said, hey, I got some great pictures. I want you to come over here and interview these people.

So the first two that I interviewed, there was two guys there. One was 83. The other one was 75, still out coon hunting. And I sat down and talked to them and asked them about their first hunting trip, if they could remember how they were. One of them was 8 and 12. One of them was 8, the other one was 12. I asked them about, well, who took you hunting there?

Neither one of their fathers hunted. They had an uncle that took them hunting. I said, well, you got any siblings that hunt whatever? He said, well, I've got four brothers. He said, I'm the only one that hunts out of those four. And the other one had like three brothers, and he was the only one that hunted out of that. And then he said, I've got children.

I've got one that's a hunter. The others are not. So, you know, we don't all have that DNA makeup to go out and go hunting there. So, you know, don't feel depressed or whatever. But give them that opportunity to go hunt, fish, whatever son he's an avid fisherman he does like to fish so he will go fish and he loves the meat um i had the opportunity to go catfishing in sandusky bay on uh monday did you guys know that your sandusky bay is super good for catfish yeah i can tell everybody kevin threw back 98 pounds of catfish no we we threw back 93 channel cats and i would estimate that

was probably over 600 pounds of rough fish uh i told my son about it i told my son about it and he cried i said son he lives in lexington he Lexington. I said, I've got some home in the freezer. He says, it's not fresh. He said, I wanted some fresh fish. I said, I'll pick you up. I'll fix you up. But it was outstanding catfishing up there. The best rod and reel catfish trip I've ever been on in my entire life. So if you haven't had the opportunity to go up there and fish, go up there. We used shrimp and it was non-stop for six hours. Largest catfish was 14 and a half pounds. I won the big mug, coffee mug for the trip. And the smallest one, we had like maybe four or five that you could have, what we call fiddlers back home. Some people call them whole fries. I would say they probably averaged eight pounds a piece but it was just

an outstanding catfishing trip all right let's hear it for ohio let's hear it for kevin murphy mark canyon ryan callahan yannis patellis oh. Oh, Janice, thank you everyone so much for coming out. We're going to go up front and we'll sign stuff and do a bunch of pictures and have a good old time. And remember,

I gave you like a little job you were going to do. Which is? You really like talk about the, I think they're all gone already. The commemorative turkey poker. Really? Uh-oh. Oh, really? How's that? Now you're rocking. The commemorative

turkey poster? They're gone. They all sold out. Thank you for buying those. And then you can also get yourself a genuine Meteor Podcast t-shirt. Now we have our genuine Bouch shirts. Everyone that looks at those shirts is like, it can't be spelled that way.

It has to be B-L-O-U-C-H. But in fact, in real life Latvian, it's blouch. Blouch. Blouch. Not blouch. Yes. Blouch. B-L-A-U-K-S with the upside down tent.

No, the right side up tent. A little mini V. A little right side up tent on there. So check those out. We're going to make our way out to the front. Again, man, thank you very much. Dedicating so much of your time. We've done this show for a long time.

I love it. It would not be possible without you guys i love every one of you thank you thank you thank you 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 on axe hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX

are available for your hunts this season. Now, the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet.