The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 132: Sheep on the Mountain

Episode Date: September 3, 2018

Bozeman, MT- Steven Rinella talks with Gray Thornton, Garrett Long, and Clay Brewer of the Wild Sheep Foundation, along with Scott Peckham of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, and Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew. Subjects Discussed: Wolves, lynx, eagles, and other things that can be hell on wild sheep; thick and thin (horns, that is); the historic decline of wild sheep everywhere, including Texas; auto-immune diseases in sheep and lessons learned; wild sheep vs. the wool industry; wildlife terrorism; governor's tags, auction tags, and regular tags; a tribal perspective on destroying wild game; are you an a-hole for owning llamas; and more.  Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I want to do all the introductions and explain where we're at. But first, I have a quick question just based off a painting that i just ran into in the entryway of the wild sheep foundation um do wolves get after bighorns they do i think i think um mountain lion and clay mountain lion probably a little bit more of uh a problem certainly in the lower 48 but yeah wolves definitely into thin horn habitat and and big time up in bc and in alberta but you bet it just seems like they i don't know man just feels like like a little bit out of their like that kind of country seems a little bit out of their area of expertise but they've hit him in the winter or what the big horn like down here in the lower 48 in the winter well they'll hit

them different times of the year but yeah absolutely uh further south desert bighorns you've as gray just referenced uh mountain lions are a little bit tougher tougher on sheep than wolves but uh yeah it's uh it's a tough place to make a living have there been cases where mexican gray wolves have killed desert bighorns do they know about that yet you know i don't i don't have any documentation of that. I have not heard that, but I'm sure they would. Yeah. Man, it seems like a formidable, like when you factor the topography

and then just like the horn structure and stuff, it just seems like a formidable foe. They really are. If you look at the the way the animal is built you know the way their eyes are positioned on their heads if you look at these mounts in this room just just look at you know how much they see uh yeah big eyes bugging outside their head you know their greatest defense they see a long ways a lot further than than we do uh if you look at the country in which they live it's the the

topography is tough there's always escape terrain and places for those animals to escape so you know they've survived uh they've adapted and and learned to to deal with predator issues through time but yeah it's it's tough there's a i don't know if you're there's a guy i can't remember his name a professor at university of alaska at fairbanks and he wrote a like a natural history book about alaska and in talks about an eyewitness account of a friend of his who watched a single lynx chase a doll ram down a gully jump on its back and kill it with a bike to the base of its neck yep a lynx who's like a snowshoe hare specialist well it's just not it's it's not just the four-legged predators either

you have eagles and and other things it in fact i've observed firsthand uh golden eagles i was hiking an area one time uh working with sheep and and overhead i saw a lamb go by. No, really? Oh, yeah. So it's not just the four-legged prey. Wow. That's pretty nuts. I heard that they kill them, but I didn't know they carried them off.

I thought they just ran them off, somehow scared them or spooked them or ran them off ledges and then killed them like that. I observed it firsthand. They pick them up. You know, they're small. Yeah. Tiny animals. Just a little lamb.

Yeah, exactly. We watched a golden eagle spend 20 minutes working over a bull elk. There's two golden eagles. Yeah, working over a bull. Jesus. Dive bomb in his head. And you could tell this bull elk did not like it. He was agitated, man.

I've flown surveys, and I almost had him land in the helicopter with you, and they are huge animals. All right, so we should probably, so like I said, we're at the, you guys call it the World Headquarters? World Headquarters is the Wild Sheep Foundation. World Headquarters, Wild Sheep Foundation, Bozeman, Montana. Still in Bozeman? Still in Bozeman.

It's Bozeman. Yeah, this is Bozeman. It's almost Belgrade and almost Four Corners, but it's a Bozeman montana still in bozeman still in bozeman it's both yeah this is bozeman it's it's almost almost belgrade and almost four corners but it's it's a bozeman bozeman address so if i write you a letter i put bozeman you put bozeman yeah um let's go around and do uh let's go around do introductions we'll do it like uh i like to do it as though i'm dealing cards and so you're up uh garrett long so i'm the marketing and communications director here uh exhibits and sponsors manager store manager um what else great you clean toilets yeah clean toilets um on a frequent basis uh and i came over here just recently about three months ago i

previously was the conservation leader over at sitka um Sitka Gear just down the road and came over here to just do real conservation work and it's been a blast man it's been pretty cool. So you guys probably have a you probably had a relationship with this organization when you were there because I know Sitka does a lot of stuff in support of. Yeah so so my job there was actually kind of inverse of what it is here I took in all the contracts, conservation contracts, and decided what we spent money on, prioritize conservation organizations. So it was great actually coming to the Wild Sheep Foundation because they were one of the groups that I use as an example, you know, going through like 990 forms and things like that with other organizations. Like, hey,

this is what we're looking for. These are the type of projects we want to fund, all that kind of stuff. So it was pretty cool getting a call from Gray. But, yeah, I had worked with them a lot. And then I still work with them over there a lot too because they support us very heavily. That's great. Go ahead, sir. Clay Brewer, I'm the Bighorn Program Lead Conservation Director for the Wild Sheep Foundation.

I worked for almost 30 years texas parks and wildlife department was the did a lot of things was the the big horn mule deer pronghorn guy for years uh served in various leadership roles uh actually served as the interim wildlife director for a year and a half and and uh so my experience i have uh primarily on the ground experience um i'm not necessarily enamored with these sorts of things that we're doing here today uh i've spent my life out in the middle of nowhere and i enjoy that that aspect of it so uh i spent the majority of my my career uh restoring sheep bighorn sheep in texas They were extirpated by about 1960.

And so through our efforts that we've done there. They hung out as late as 1960? Oh, yeah. And then got extirpated. The last documented sighting of a native Texas bighorn occurred October of 1958 in the Sierra Diablo Mountains, which is a little bit south of the Guadalupe Mountains. Usually when we're talking about something vanishing, it's 20 years earlier. Yeah, it was 1960 was what we guess, anyway. So after that, lots of work, lots of transplants,

lots of things going on, but bighorn sheep are at late 1800 population levels right now. Was anybody, okay, in 1960 inxas after the last one vanished was it what a day later they started recovery i mean were they were they already paying attention to it as they were on their way out well there was a guy hired in the 40s and uh this is a guy by the name of birch carson he was hired to document the decline of bighorn sheep in texas and so today well i'll give you my experience i i was a younger guy then and and was hiking through the mountains and it was actually uh we we did and still guide all of our own sheep hunts so i was preparing

a first first had a sheep hunter coming here you mean the the state guys? State of Texas, yes. And you guys give out how many tags every year? Well, it varies. Now 15, 16, 17 tags every year. So we've come a long ways. So if you draw a bighorn tag in Texas, you go out and hunt with a, you go out and are guided by a state biologist or? Well, if you buy a state tag,

they're also private landowner tags. That's a little bit different. Some hunters prefer to bring their own guide, which is fine. We like that, too. It makes us no difference. So anyway, you asked me about did they see it coming. And Texas was no different than the rest of the states where you hear about the domestic sheep issues. And we lost our sheep for the very same reasons.

And so a guy by the name of Birch Carson was hired in the 40s to document the disappearance of bighorn sheep in Texas. And so I was getting ready for a sheep hunt, and I was hiking along. It was in January, and it was pretty cool in the mountains. And so I was walking down the ridge, and I decided to get off the ridge, and I started hiking down a deer trail. And so I walked the deer trail for a ways, and I came into an opening, a small bowl in the bottom of these three, just three knobs around, and it got still. The wind knobs around, and it got still.

The wind stopped blowing, and it got still, and I thought, man, this would be a great place to eat my lunch. Took my pack frame off, sat down on the ground. I looked over on the ground. It said there was a carving in the rock, and it said W.B. Carson Sheep Inspector, 1943. And so it became a hobby of mine. I spent a lot of time by myself, and so I started looking for these things. And every time I thought I was the only human being to ever see this, I would look around on the ground, and I would find another carving,

and it would say, Sheep Inspector, W.B. Carson. And so I found caves the guy lived in. There's a cave in the Texas mountains where the guy's clothes are still hanging in the cave today. And so he documented the decline. Oh, that's nuts, man. That's like Boone. In Boone's day, they'd always write their names on it. Oh, it's interesting.

Carving the name into rocks, carving into trees. It's interesting history. There's a guy named Bob Anderson you guys are probably familiar with. Great Rams, one, two, three. He became interested in Bert Carson, and so he actually wrote a book. He's got one. I wrote the forward for his book, and he never has published it. He hasn't done anything with it, so he's trying to figure out who his audience was, but it's called something like the Desert Wanderer or something like that. So the guy was a taxidermist. Just an interesting history.

World War II veteran. Was injured in World War II and came back and hiked those mountains with a limp. And so, you know, pretty rough country. So a short time later, in the mid-'50s, there was a cooperative agreement developed between, at that time, the Texas Game, Fish, and Oyster Commission, Boone and Crockett Club, Arizona Game and Fish Department. I'm trying to remember who else. Wildlife Management Institute. We brought sheep in from Arizona, and in the early years, you know, in the early 1900s, like most jurisdictions, it was people focused on protections. There were, like in Texas, 1903, there was a hunting prohibition enacted,

and so then in the mid-50s, it was propagation. You know, there's always a joke running around in those days. Most states, the Desert Bighorn Council was formed in the 50s because every state was in the same boat. And some people would have, you know, they only had two sheep left and they knew them by name. You know, and Bob didn't feel so well. It was kind of the running joke. And so anyway, so them by name you know and bob didn't feel so well it was it was kind of the the joke the the running joke and so so anyway so propagation efforts were implemented in the mid-1950s and and since that time uh uh 207 wild sheep were translocated to texas uh coming out of arizona no different

places i'm sorry and i think I think I have those numbers wrong. It's more like it's, I think, a total of 107 came from Nevada, 31 from Arizona, six from Mexico, and two from Utah. So that's the lineage of today's desert bighorn populations in Texas. And so we worked together. We traded in the early years. We traded Arizona for pronghorn. They were short on pronghorn at that time. Texas had plenty of pronghorn, so we would swap animals. And more recently, I can tell you, I was at a, in those days, it was a FNAZ convention, and people were coming by my booth from the state of Nevada, and some of them were pretty upset with Texas.

And I couldn't figure out why, what the story was, and I thought, man, just having a bad day. And so later on, I was reading a newspaper, and the headlines with letters about three inches big said, State of Nevada Trades Turkeys for bighorn sheep. And so the Nevadans were not real happy about that trade. But if it were not for that, then none of us would have any wildlife. And so as time went on, in our case, what's interesting about that is the landowners, you know, we had problems with disease issues in the 30s and lost all of our sheep later on. It was a slow progression. We lost those sheep.

And so we worked. Texas is a private landowner state, 97% privately owned, but domestic domestic sheep landowners raise domestic sheep and then later on the land the very landowners that we worked with it where the problems occurred years ago are the very same landowners that helped us restore sheep today their descendants yeah and so we did that together and so like, like I said, today we're probably 1,800 animals. So we've surpassed the late 1,800 population levels, and numbers continue to expand. Populations continue to grow.

And so, so far, so good. But it only took, you know, 60 years or so or 70 years for that to happen. Start figuring it out. Yeah, we'll dig into that whole story a whole bunch, man. It's interesting. Then Giannis, of course. Go ahead. Scott Peckham.

I'm the big game ecologist for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in northeast Oregon and southeast Washington. So I work on anything per view of the big game headline and uh so wear a lot of hats i should tell you all about the elk tag i drew that would be good i've heard the rumors extremist extreme southeast corner of the state okay you know real well you got some waypoints i've seen some big animals in that part of the country but i know people that really know it really well i know the sheep country better than the elk country there but i do see big bulls in there when i'm doing sheep work so so you you focus on sheep in that area uh typically

yeah in in southeast washington i'm usually up there working on the sort of the hell's canyon initiative work that's going on gotcha um so So you back up, like you inform and back up the tribe's perspective on big game management. Exactly. And that's interesting because you're actually looking at two different states. Yes. Yeah.

Almost three, but yeah, two, both Southeast Washington. So there's three tribes under one treaty, the Walla Walla, Cayuse, and Umatilla. And that traditional territory expanded the state boundaries there so most of the northern blue mountains uh were towards past la grande oregon down south towards john day so parts of various basins so what's your like what's your professional mandate then to basically protect conserve and restore big game populations and their habitat that's our program mission and that's that's a directive coming from those tribes

yes we have a first foods mission for our department of natural resources which is fairly well staffed we have about 100 employees and dnr itself our wildlife program is pretty small about nine employees um but yeah under the big game mantra we are that's our directive to protect restore and enhance habitat and populations and i'm guessing you must coordinate with states and fed all the time yep we work on because basically a lot of the the wildlife habitat where the treaty hunting occurs where the rights are or they're allowed to exercise their treaty hunting right is on federal public lands so we work with the land managers of blm and forest service and then we work with the states obviously because

they tend to do more of the population level management so we coordinate with them pretty closely yeah like the feds got the feds are administering a lot of the landscape but the states are administering a lot of the wildlife on landscape exactly yeah so decisions about land land use and land management planning we're very involved in that with the, with the forest service and BLM. And you get to spend a lot of time looking at sheep. I do. Yeah. Very fortunate. Is that a high priority? Um, I'd say yes, just conservation wise. Um, the, the tribe is, is very interested in expanding, um, populations of sheep. We have a lot of historically good sheep habitat in those parts of the country.

I think you've been to Hell's Canyon. Oh yeah, I've gone out looking at bighorns in Hell's Canyon. And those populations have struggled. So there's a lot of good work that could be done. And so I think that's where our interest is. Obviously, you've probably heard about the mule deer issues that are going on. We do have declines in mule deer populations. But elk are pretty stable, large populations of elk in the Blue Mountains, which you'll get to see.

But yeah, sheep is sort of our biggest conservation concern on the big game front. I don't want to get ahead of ourselves, but is that because things are getting worse or because they could be so much better um i think in our corner of the world there it's we're sort of a stagnant stagnant sort of population that has leveled off so i think we could there's a lot we can improve i think we can make some gains for sure yeah for sure but we're not we haven't had a disease a large die-off in several years but we're we're only a little ways away from one we're always on the cusp so i think there's a lot of work we can do. And this kind of forum is a good place to discuss that. Gotcha.

Go ahead. Steve Gray Thornton. I'm the president and CEO. We're here, obviously, at the world headquarters, but we also maintain offices in Cody. We have an education coordinator in Nevada. Clay is remote in Texas. We've got a lobbyist in Washington, D.C.

And then our Montana conservation director is also in Germany. So we base international operations out of Germany. We work in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan. Isn't it funny how everyone hates lobbyists but lobbyists can come from any like people just like are like oh a lobbyist that you registered that must be negative but to think there are like conservation lobbyists yeah you see you know i was envisioning lobbyists like some guy out to do something evil you know he does he does he does smoke cigars so he plays you know he plays that lobbyist role well you know we he's out there he's out there lobbying on behalf of wildlife he is and he's lobbying on behalf of uh you know wild sheep and wild sheep restoration but you know we called him our advocate and and our legislative

affairs director and finally just let's just call me lobbyist. That's what everyone knows that I am. So, you know, we just cut to the chase, and that's what he is. I was just back with him two weeks ago, spent three days advocating for Big Horn Sheep programs and Tin Horn Sheep programs. So when you guys are doing that, like when you're down in D.C., what are, are you meeting with, do you tend to be meeting with individual politicians or do you tend to be meeting like more on the agency level?

Both. So we meet with the federal agencies. All the land management agencies. U.S. Forest Service. Most bighorn sheep live on U.S. Forest Service land, about enclave, what, 80 some odd percent of bighorn sheep live on U.S. Forest Service land. About, in Clay, what, 80-some-odd percent of bighorn sheep live on the forest, 70-80%. BLM, interesting enough, has huge holdings in Alaska. Alaska's got 25% of all doll sheep and thinhorn sheep in North America.

So pretty huge population there, 40,000 to 50,000 doll sheep. So we meet with the BLM we meet with the forest service at times we'll meet with the u.s fish and wildlife service at times we'll meet with the national park service and then on the hill we'll we'll meet with uh representatives and senators and their staff. So pretty broad base. The issues that we're dealing with are primarily land use issues, some grazing issues, and separation issues between domestic sheep and bighorn sheep and now even thinhorn sheep. Yeah, that's what i'd like to get to and spend some time on because i think that's that's kind of seems like we're so much of the conversation is right now around sheep but i want to do a little bit of backing up and i'll let you

guys you guys just kind of decide by making quick glances among each other to see who should handle what but i want to like really quickly bring people up to speed on just like sheep taxonomy which i think can be a little bit confusing we don't need to go global we'll just keep it north america but is a fair is like when you say like big horn thin horn is that a fair just is that a fair if you're going to take all of our country's sheep or u.s and canada and make some sort of division it seems like people start with bighorn, thinhorn. You bet. So you have, you know, let's take North America as Mexico, U.S., and Canada.

Okay, perfect. So in Mexico, you have the desert bighorn sheep. In the lower 48, you have the Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep and the desert bighorn sheep. Then we've got, you know, there's kind of splitters and lumpers. Yes. There's some divisions that come off of it. There's the California bighorn sheep. Then we've got, you know, there's kind of splitters and lumpers. There's some divisions that come off of it. There's a California bighorn sheep that's really a Rocky Mountain, and it didn't come from California. It came from British Columbia, of all places. There's a Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep. There's a Peninsula desert bighorn sheep. So there's

a bunch of kind of subspecies, but the bottom line is there's desert bighorn sheep, Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, and then as we go north, you've got the stone sheep, which is primarily in northern British Columbia. And that's a thin horn sheep. That's a thin horn. And then the white sheep is the dolls. So the stone sheep range in B.C. depends on the research you're looking at but there's some new dna studies that are that are pushing to the point that that's really the only place they are uh and that the stone sheep and we still call them that but the stone sheep that are in in the yukon territory are actually fanon sheep

or just a a cross if you will uh and dark pellage of a cross between a white sheep a doll sheep and the stone sheep and the doll sheep are in alaska yukon and northwest or just the color phase of the dolls yeah pelage which really irritates people oh because if you you know you think you got your four north american wild sheep right like that's a big thing you want to get your desert your rocky mountain your stones and your dolls but you know they're starting to say and clay was explaining this to me earlier you know now they're going well maybe that dolls is just that or that stones what you think is the stones is actually just a color phase of an actual doll so it'd be like you going around and saying man yeah i've shot a black bear and a grizzly bear and then finding out actually your black bear was,

or what you think was your grizzly bear was just a brown-faced black bear. Yeah, yeah, I got you. But when you get up, I'm confusing myself now. I want to stay below the U.S.-Canada border for a minute. When you hear of the California, the California's Iraqi, and then you hear in the old days that people had this idea there's the autobahn was iraqi right in the missouri river breaks we actually have an autobahn in our conference room now extinct although there's some debate on that with with dna you know the dna studies that we can do now and the samples we can use, there's even some conflict of whether or not the Audubon was truly a separate subsystem.

That's what I was reading about recently. But the bottom line is we've repatriated bighorn sheep into the area that the Audubon was, the Missouri River Brakes, which is kind of the classic, beautiful, big Rocky Mountain sheep of Montana. And then, so now jump up into Canada and going up into Alaska. Like at the time of European contact, would it just look like one continuous string of sheep that just happened to get whiter the more farther north you went? Or were those populations like broken up? No, they were broken up. And there is certainly a difference between a bighorn sheep and a thin horn sheep. So the thin horn sheep,

and I don't know exactly what latitude they're above, but the stones and the dolls definitely look different than a Rocky Mountain bighorn. The Rocky Mountain bighorn are down in southern bc um you know the the the front of the rockies in alberta and then basically go down through the dakotas a little bit in nebraska clay was just in oklahoma we now have uh bighorn sheep in Oklahoma. And then desert in Texas. And then you kind of, as you go west and further south, you get into the deserts. But there's some states that have both. Nevada has the Nelson bighorn, Rocky Mountain bighorn, and Colorado, I'm sorry, California

bighorn. But we really treat those, we california and the rocky as the same if if you look at the work and how it was done you know everybody named something in in the 1800s they everybody threw a label on it and and then there was a guy named cowan about 1940 or so uh that that actually maybe the 60s uh i can't remember exactly. But anyway, he did a lot of the original work, and they were measuring skulls and horns and looking at different ways. Well, in the 90s, Rob Ramey and John Weyhausen did some of that same work. And when it all came out, I mean, I guess the short, and I tend to think simple, is sheep are sheep.

And they described stones and dolls to the north. So it's really two species, rocky mountain or big horn sheep to the south and thin horns to the north. And then the subspecies, they described three, rocky mountains. They said Californias are the same. And there's lots of discussion. A lot of states don't agree. A lot of folks go round and round over that. But then there was Sierra Nevada and deserts.

But they were measuring orbitals and taking various goal measurements. And this will be ironed out very soon. The genomics work that's occurring right now will answer every one of these questions. So just stand by. It's coming. Yeah, it's interesting to watch the answer every one of these questions. So just stand by. It's coming. Yeah, it's interesting to watch the way the genetics work has changed. Because when I was working on my book, American Buffalo, and you read back 100 years and people had,

there were seven different kinds. It was mostly just different people not orchestrating their activities, but we're seeing something somewhere and giving it a name and seeing something somewhere, giving it a name and seeing something somewhere giving it a name yep and always very eager to identify uh populations that weren't there anymore and have it be that it was something entirely different well in texas they texana uh they thought they had a different subspecies in texas it was most likely mexicana that subspecies so it wasn't unique but you'll still hear people talk about that. Are there any places in Canada where a bighorn and a thinhorn sheep would run into each other?

You know, I've thought about that. In fact, we were kicking around that very thing earlier. And it's honestly, no, but again, sheep are sheep. You know, for what we know, the chances of them crossing paths are probably slim to none, just the habitat that they use and those sorts of things. Like they're geographically separated. Yeah, exactly. By barriers that they're not likely to cross.

Right, exactly. Yeah. You guys have some cool graphics in here that show what the... Where the population distribution now relative to when things were really dire and bad relative to when things were like relatively unexploited to what year do you have to go back um before you hit like what would have been kind of like pre-contact baseline

meaning no extirpated like no extirpated regional no regional extirpations you know that's that's a very tough question there was a a seat in the 1929. Ernest Thompson. Yeah. Ernest Seaton. Yeah, you know, what were the numbers? 1.5 to 2 million, something like that. Yeah, but those guys paid fast and loose with numbers, too.

Oh, exactly. There's no doubt about it. And there are folks today that will argue with those numbers, or a lot more effective at arguing those numbers than I am. Or at least the confidence interval is really wide on that one. Well, exactly, exactly. And so, you know, that's a tough thing. But, you know, if you try to read, you know, some of the accounts, Lewis and Clarks,

and, you know, how much did they, you know, they talked about many, many animals. I don't know what that means. But if you, you know, all the way, you you can trace some of that particularly desert bighorns uh you know 1700s and things like that when the conquistadors were traveling you know the the the missions the priests describe what they observed and it's so it's pretty interesting but the numbers are always tough um you know if you look at in the 50s, what we do know is that numbers had probably declined to about 15,000, 17,000 animals, something like that. So they got pretty low. So unless Seton was wildly off, there was still a big reduction.

There was far more than there were today. You know, in terms of counting numbers, you guys familiar with how for a long time, the fashionable number for bison was 60 million. And like, you look into where that number came from. Well, Seton kind of like collated the whole thing, but it came from basically a big herd going by. It seemed to take days to go by later.

Colonel Dodge of Dodge city infamy has a conversation with another guy who saw the same thing and hell, he must have been three miles away and through this right comes this like wild estimation of how many there must be yep so it is frustrating i'm reading this book right now grizzlies in the southwest and the first part of the book is trying to collate all the cases where someone identified one but you get into just terminology yep and being like is this what is this guy talking about like what is you know whoever's keeping records during the coronado expedition what is he talking about when he says x

is that what he means yeah i don't know i'll send you a story of the only grizzly bear killed in texas i just read about that did you yeah in the davis mountains right yeah yeah i just read that it's in the smithsonian the skull is oh okay yeah so i could see that it'd be like exceedingly difficult to get a sense of what was where but you could picture that i mean like it's fair to say you take Nevada, you take Montana, more of it was sheep country than not.

Oh yeah, if you look at the mountains of Nevada and look how it's laid out and compare that to, say, Texas, you can see just only the far west part of Texas. And if you look at where Scott works, just some of the heritage that Native Americans have passed down, the stories and pictographs, we have a pretty good idea of where they occurred. That's interesting, just representational art.

These people are drawing them, so they must be familiar with them. Same story in Texas. I can show you pictographs of bighorn sheep in Texas. But numbers, it's an educated guess, that's for sure. I think it's a fair assumption to say that we had a lot of sheep. And their distribution was wide. The use of them culturally and for materials and food was widespread. People were, the first explorers were encountering

bighorn bows out way into Nebraska and out into the plains. The plains Indians were using bows made out of bighorn sheep horns. Now, wasn't it most common though, like right out of the park? Yes. Because they used the hot water.

Yep, they were coming, basically being traded for and the pictograph record is very widespread. So I think it's it's fair assumption to say we had a lot of sheep they were widely distributed um a lot there was a lot of cultures that were built around sheep um and obviously i think you've probably read journal of a trapper yeah i mean some of his descriptions this is a guy that's seen yellowstone park area and it's sort of in prime form and using descriptions of immense numbers of mountain sheep in the wintertime so like i think someone that uses the word immense numbers he's not seen a

dozen you know this isn't a herd of 100 or 15 sheep on the side of a hill it's the winter range was numerous there was a lot of sheep there have you read francis parkman's oregon trail i have not so he he he was a historian and he wrote, at the time, the definitive history of the French and Indian War. But he had health problems and was told to come out and spend time out in the West. And he comes out and travels on the Oregon Trail. I think this is 1846.

He actually winds up traveling with the Oglala Sioux, probably was in the same camp with Crazy Horse when Crazy Horse was 13. They go up into the black hills to get lodgepole pine for tent lodge poles the guys he's traveling with get onto a big herd of bighorns and kill a bunch by throwing rocks down at them so you get like that's not two that's like a size there must be like sizable groups if that's your hunting strategies to hurl rocks down and successfully kill a bunch yep those those kind of accounts i think we're piecing all that that information together cultural accounts early explorer accounts we

know what their range is and modern day we know how many sheep of the habitat can support so we can kind of piece it together you know like what the numbers right so if you had to express like how have been like. So if you had to express how bad it got, what's the best way to express how bad it got? Because you don't know the beginning number, so it's hard to do it numerically. How do you guys think about it when you think about restoration? Is it filling in the map, or is it achieving numbers? It's a little bit of both.

You look and you're referencing this map that we've got in our conference room. And let's say if we're using Seton's numbers of one to two million sheep, let's use a lower number of one million. Throughout North America, we reduced those in the 1960s down to 25,000. 25,000 in what's now the U.S.? U.S., U.S., U.S., all of North America, U.S., Canada, Mexico. Bighorns, though. Okay, so not the thinhorns. The thinhorn range is actually still, distribution is still pretty much the same.

Yeah, because they haven't come up against the obstacles, right? No, they haven't. And that's what you're trying to prevent. But the bighorns did. So you're looking at if it's 500 or 1 million or 1.5 or 2 million dollars we or 2 million um sheep we reduced those numbers down to 25 000 by the late 1960s today we're at about 85 000 bighorn sheep in in canada u.s and mexico so i, it's been a good restoration. They got as low as 25,000. 25,000 in all of North America. And I want to talk about why it got that way.

But at the low point with sheep, were you then finding that you had states? I know we talked about Texas. Were there multiple states that had completely run out? You bet. You bet. You know, if you look at some of the data that we'll show you know we'll we'll reference remnant population some were just gone texas gone nevada was down to a remnant population they're a they're an absolute incredible success story you know they had they had 100 or 200 you

know what does remnant mean 200 sheep they're up to 11 000 desert bighorns right now they probably got about 12 000 to 13 000 bighorn sheep in nevada today and they were down to 11 000 desert bighorns right now they probably got about 12 000 to 13 000 bighorn sheep in nevada today and they were down to what's called a remnant remnant in the 1970s yeah which would be sub 100 you bet so it's pretty amazing um what states were like the big holdouts wyoming strong really like so the wyoming stayed strong we did pretty well. I think Montana did pretty well. Like hanging on to them. Colorado pretty well, but still. Who was housing, what states provided the last refugia for the deserts?

Desert bighorns. What states had wound up when all the smoke cleared? Clay, Arizona. Arizona. New Mexico. No, New Mexico was down so they were way down pretty much pretty much mexico and and and arizona california you know they i don't remember how low the numbers got in california uh nevada's got i mean most of them were remnant it was rough and mexico held on to some mexico did um in the sierra madre where

you know most of it was just well in the baja okay all right yeah i'm wrong part of the country yeah so yeah yeah because baja man like as far as like uh representational art yes baja north yeah you i've been spent time. Man, there's tons of pictographs. Pictographs of big horns and mule deer, you know. And they've held their own even today. I mean, they do pretty well. I mean, there are a lot of sheep. In Sonora alone, I can't remember the numbers exactly,

but there are probably, in Sonora, Mexico alone, probably 7,500 sheep just in that state. Sonora? Yeah. We hunt down there. I never run into one. Must be the wrong part of the... What was the...

I kind of already know this answer because I know it was like disease and pot hunting. But what made it so bad? How did it it so bad? Like, how did it get so bad? Well, there were lots of things, a combination of things. Civilization, railroads were moving through. In a blanket term, yeah. And all the wonders that it brings. Yeah, and Scott can speak to this stuff a little bit further north.

But as far as the stuff in the south, you know, if you read Texas history, the railroad came through, and you'd read accounts where, you know, they were feeding railroad workers, and a guy would hunt meat for the railroads, and he would hit where our prime habitat is, and he would say, I had them in a box canyon, and I got every one of them and and so he would take the meat back feed railroad workers but it was disease issues and competition for forage and limited water and forage with with domestic livestock that it that had come in later and and people were trying to feed their families it was tough places to to make a living so if you break out like let's

say you break out market hunting um and who's that famous uh photographer that used to work out of mile city uh huffman la huffman he was taking pictures in the early 1880s of market hunter camps where they had just all kinds of bighorns lined up they're killing along the yellowstone but if you're going to take out if you're going to divide it like half let's say you had habitat issues okay so grazing competition water whatever market hunting and disease are are they tiered out or are they all just equal players oh no it's if typically if you if you're trying to piece the story together that Scott described, you typically look at land use history, and you look at how things occurred or what might have occurred. And today, the greatest obstacle that we face is disease. And so chances are,

that was the greatest threat, the thing that caused the most problems in the 1800s, along with those other things. But in my view, it would be diseases and competition for forage and limited water in the desert environment anyway. Yeah, that's totally fair. Just to give you a perspective like if you think about it and in terms of grazing and um let's just use a northeast oregon oregon example in that that corner of of oregon and wallowa county where hell's canyon is located there was about the turn of century there was 300 000 sheep grazing in that county no yes 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

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y'all. Yep. So there was an immense number of sheep, domestic sheep in, sorry, 300 domestics grazing in Wallowa County. The county alone had 300,000 domestic sheep yeah so we were you know obviously it was great grazing land for domestic sheep and so people were grazing there was no taylor grazing act it was sort of a free

for all on the public land system which is you know probably not fully established at that time and we had a lot of a lot of domestics right in the bighorn habitat. So we should probably talk about disease. When we say disease carried them off, is it a host of diseases that hits bighorns, or is it a disease that hits bighorns? It is a disease complex. So Clay can fill in the gaps,

but based on our last decade of research, I mean, it's been an evolving story over time where people are constantly learning new information all the time as our techniques in science get better and our experimentation gets better and our insights get better. But what all the research points to now is it's one particular bacteria that our North American sheep did not evolve with. So they're hosted by the domestic species. When they come in contact with each other, the bighorn sheep contract that bacteria. They are no longer able to fight off other infections. So it compromises their cilia and their, and their trachea.

So they are unable to move other bacteria out and they succumb to basically pneumonia, but from other, other, it's a back, you know, a mic polymicrobial disease is the term. So they're very naive to this disease.

The, the MO it's called mycoplasma OV pneumonia. So we call it MOV for short. And just cause it's a mouth. What's the termae. So we call it MOV for short. What's the term for short? MOV. M-O-V. M period OV.

Okay. And this is a disease that seems to have originated in Europe? Old world sheep in Europe. And they perhaps were exposed to it for 10,000 years. They had evolved with it. Correct. So they carry it. They're not clinically affected by it. We don't see the same symptoms that we do in bighorns where they're coughing or having nasal sinus discharge. So it doesn't appear to have a strong population level

effect or no population level effect on domestic sheep. So some lambs will succumb to it once they're kind of getting close to weaning. But our bighorn sheep lambs will be infected early on, and it's very fatal. And there's many strains. They have different severity and the reactions within bighorn populations. So it's a complicated disease issue, and that's why it's taken us so long to sort this all out so was was this disease hitting bighorns before anybody knew that this disease was hitting bighorns for sure yeah it's just it was like i don't know what happened to them all yeah i mean if you think about the habitat

that these animals live in how freaking really do we how well studied our herds now with our with our level of technology and our dedication dedication back in the 1800s? I don't know how many people were looking at them. Yeah, Steve, you look, you know, a great analogy would be looking at what we did to Native American tribes with smallpox. It's, you know, so similar. And when we talk about mycoplasma ova pneumonia as a setup agent, you know, kind of in lay terms, even though they're not the same, you know, it's kind of HIV and sheep. You know, HIV is an immune deficiency. This is not. This is a bacterium.

It's a pathogen. But it's a setup agent. So, you know, Joe is 32 years old and you heard he died of pneumonia and you go, my God, you know, Joe was 32 years old. I was a 32 year old guy, died of pneumonia. Oh, well, you know, he had AIDS, HIV and compromised his immune system and he got pneumonia and died. Very similar to what's happening with sheep. As Scott had pointed out, the mycoplasma pneumonia or MOV lays down the cilia in the esophagus and allows other bugs, other pathogens, other bacteria to get down into the lungs.

They can't cough it out. The cilia is not moving it out. They get sick. And then what we used to say is, well, they died of pneumonia. Well, actually, they probably died of something else but mov is we're able to study it more and more and more mov was present there's there's a litany of other pathogens uh manheimia hemolytica there's there's new research that uh is looking at um nasal tumors is so it's you know these these sheep which a mountain sheep, when you look at where they live in some of the harshest climates in North America, some of the most unique climates in North America, the sad thing is, is from a respiratory standpoint, they're pretty darn weak.

Our vice president of conservation, Kevin Hurley, it, I think pretty, pretty succinctly says the damn things are born looking for a place to die. Um, so there, you know, it's, it's a, it's, it's challenging. Um, it is a disease complex and, and every time we, we, you know, Wild Sheep Foundation has spent millions and millions of dollars into disease research. We endow a chair of wild sheep disease at Washington State University. Every rock we overturn that we think we've got the solution, this is it. This is now, there's four other rocks underneath it that we unturn or overturn those, and there's four more

other questions that we don't know the answer to so i want to explore the timeline a little bit on on the numbers collapsing but no one really knew where we started no one had done like this exhaustive analysis of where sheep exist and how many there were but it's just like any anyone who's paying attention can't miss the fact that they're vanishing at what point do people like this organization or other individuals or state agencies at what point do people go like wow we need to like get on top of this and start taking some step and at that time did they were they then aware of what was causing the problem or were people doing restoration and then all the sheep die again without even knowing that the real issue was disease, thinking it might have been something else.

Does that question make sense? It absolutely makes sense. That's a good question. Clay and Scott can dream in, but we were probably putting sick sheep into clean sheep, so we were making some errors back then. We just didn't know. No one knew this stuff.

We didn't know that that source herd had mycoplasma ova pneumonia. And so we plopped in, no doubt, in transplants, we plopped in sick sheep on top of clean sheep. So that became the primary restoration tool was transplanting sheep. Absolutely. Absolutely. The early years was protection. Every state, 1905, 1910, 1903, every state implemented something.

The first translocation occurred in 1922. Since then, there have been probably close to 1,500 separate operations removing somewhere in the neighborhood of 22,000 animals that have been moved. From one place to another. One place to another. So in 1903 in Texas, they're like, it's bad enough you can't kill one. And it wasn't just sheep. Keep that in mind. It was mule deer and pronghorn and

and all wildlife in those days i mean everything was suffering yeah but uh but it was there's no doubt about it the the tool translocations was that was the tool uh you know we would go we worked with uh nevada department of wildlife and we would we would trap sheep. On the landscape, I would be on the side of a mountain. We would trap sheep. We had a trailer, a double-decker trailer. Fill that trailer full as many sheep as they would give us, and then as fast as we could get back to Texas. You'd give them a turkey?

Give them a handful of turkeys. And no, no. Give them whatever it was they wanted because we were beggars. That was the bottom line. We were beggars at that time. So anyway, go back to Texas and 24 hours later, dump them on the landscape. Well, we were drawing blood samples, but we would never wait for the results of those samples. So if something would have happened, the cat would have been out of the bag by then.

So now we sample source and recipient populations in advance, and we look at those kind of things. So we're a lot smarter in the way we do business. That's a horrible thought to think of just out of a very excusable form of ignorance to spend that time and energy. Oh, there's no doubt. And go and infect a clean herd. Yeah, there's no doubt about it. Because if you look at the disease itself, it can only come from a live animal. There's no doubt about it.

Now, that can be domestic sheep domestic goats but it can also be bighorn sheep and it can also be uh wild goats so that that bacteria doesn't do well laying on the dirt no it does not it does it has to come it comes from a live source so but we've again you how close like let's talk close? Let's talk about the transmission for a minute. I don't know. I'm going to let Scott. It's a little bit of a rabbit hole, but we can. Yeah.

Because it's not well understood. I'm just talking about like, okay, you got a sick. Let's not even bring in domestic sheep. They don't have to touch noses. Let's just put. Exactly. Let's not even bring domestic sheep, but two big horns. If the pens are too close together, you know, WSU has a captive herd,

and they got them, I think one of the early trials they got a little too close to their clean sheep from the sick sheep. We're talking inches or feet or yards? Feet. Yards. You're talking about, in some cases, maybe kilometers. Well, if that's the case, then what do you mean then? What do you mean it has to go from sheep to sheep because it's just aerosol yeah well if it is this that's let's go back to the

if if you look at the if the issues associated with this disease i mean when it when when it comes down to it all all wildlife they adapt to the various pathogens that they're introduced to in some form or fashion. And so how it affects bighorn sheep is you either have a complete die-off. I mean, they just do terrible. Or you see it where, you know, a mother will pass down antibodies to lambs. And at first, you know, when you see them, the first few weeks of life, they seem to do pretty well, but about eight weeks, eight to 12 weeks, something like that, then you start seeing issues, and then you have complete lamb die-offs. So in other words,

you have complete die-offs, then you have no recruitment for decades and then the other part of that is that you have some sheep that for whatever reason they don't die and they go from herd to herd from this one to that typhoid mary typhoid mary that so they become a carrier who's not affected as a carrier that sheds that disease to other populations so bighorn sheep move they move and the other thing is there they are long-lived species generally in absence of disease you know ewes can live close to 20 years and rams are you know kind of the 10 to 12 is a long long-lived ram so some of these particular carriers can be alive for a long time moving around and keeping that disease in the herd and it's not able to

fade out how much do you guys see uh how much have you seen bighorns move a long ways not like yeah don't give me the no i'm always interested in the crazy number but give me the normal number the normal number and then i want to then hit me with a crazy number okay so the the the number that we're using based on sort of this estimation from telemetry data that was sort of a published model that we use for sort of risk of contact modeling. So how likely are bighorn sheep going to go out in the landscape and contact a particular distance from their home range, right? So all animals set up a home range. Generally, bighorn sheep do exploratory movements where they leave their home range and then may return. So whether it's to see what's going on on the next ridge or to look for receptive ewes.

But generally, the number there is 35 kilometers. So basically, 95% of ram movements over a 14-year data set showed that almost 95% of those movements were within 35 kilometers from their home range. How big is his core zone? That varies. It could be large or it could be tight. Just depends on the habitat. The habitat and the particular individual. So some individuals may have small home ranges.

Some might have larger. So the crazy number is a little ram that came out of the Losteen herd just this past couple of years. Where is that? Near Joseph, Oregon, between Enterprise and Joseph, up in the Wallowa Range. I know that area. So he took a little walk, and he went on a loop.

So they collared him. He showed up, I think, on somebody's deck. And he took a good photo, and they sent him to the Hell's Canyon Initiative folks, and they recognized him as 12LO27. We ear-tagged him as a lamb. So they knew he had a definitive age on him, and he went across the Snake River, the Salmon River, and then over into the Clearwater drainage in Idaho.

And they put a collar on him at some point. They actually put three collars on him because they kept failing. So he got caught two or three times with a helicopter, and I think he got darted once so and he made a 378 mile loop through seven different home ranges of big horns and he was out in some wheat fields and crossed a bunch of highways and so he went 125 miles from his home range and covered in that year and a half time or so with the collar he covered 378 miles and then died on a remote point in hell's canyon natural causes presumably yeah that was during i think it was during the winter so they couldn't get in there with any other waves at the jet boat so i don't i remember

how long it was when the collar went on mortality until they went and recovered it so he just went on a cruise just like yeah yeah so i mean it kind of just demonstrates the behavior potential of these animals that some of them are going to move. And they show up in town. You know, when you have a civilization at the bottom of a nice canyon that joins up to another big canyon, they're going to come through. And it happens pretty regularly. Especially in that landscape of Hell's Canyon, lower Hell's Canyon. Yeah, so this brings up, like, that brings up a big question.

So how, we haven't really set up what needs to happen here, if we know what needs to happen. But if they're going to go do that, how do you ever protect them from picking up transmittable diseases and spreading them to everybody else. Right. That's the million-dollar question.

Well, and Steve, the protocol of many Western states is when a bighorn sheep comes in contact with domestic sheep, that bighorn sheep is shot. So that's a standing, acting protocol. Because the fear is that that bighorn could then be the you know the vector and and as as you know this this damn ram did i mean goes on a walkabout and and could have gone through a whole bunch of herds so you know kind of now the standard protocol would be the administrative removal yeah you would kill like a state agency would kill that would kill that ramp and they're trying they're trying to get away from that where possible so

that just just the setup i was talking about where some animals will show up and say it you know a town along the snake river where there's bighorn habitat on all sides and they show up in town and you know generally the the old method was old method was let's remove this animal so it can't go back. And they're removing it for the express purpose of the rest of the sheep. It could have picked up pneumonia from a domestic. It could have made contact, especially if it was seen. Obviously the ones that are documented in a pasture with domestic sheep or domestic goats, you know, most of the time. But what they're trying to do now is, based on their proximity to WSU, is try to put, you know, dart the animal, live capture it,

then hold and test, or else take it to the WSU facility. So it becomes a research animal, basically. I'd like to, this was like my big aha moment when I came here, right? I was sitting with our biologist across the hall and and he just kind of said it like it was just something that oh it just happens and I'm like so you're telling me I could go get a grazing permit for my domestic sheep go into public land and then that wild sheep comes down and boom, they shoot it. Can that go on? Yeah.

And it does. You know, so we see in the breaks a couple years ago, there was two young rams. They went within three quarters of a mile of a domestic sheep herd. Boom. They were shot. By a state? Yep. Yep.

Because of them being a vector. Yep. So what's, like, what's your, do you guys have an official stance on the practice? Like is there an alternative to that? I mean, just to that part of it right there. No, we, you know, our objective is to keep the two species separate. Okay. So if there's known contact, you know, if you can send them off to wsu or send them

off to sabine in in wyoming great um but you know you think about that that's also a death sentence you know they're going to now be a guinea pig for disease testing um so the you know that there's really not much we can do other than keep the two separated. So we could circle back to Washington, D.C. That's what we're advocating for back in Washington, D.C., is federal land managers and agencies to work for spatial and temporal separation of wild sheep and domestic sheep. What's that need to look like? I can imagine where it becomes contentious oh you bet could you mind like sketching out the obvious and how does that become a contentious conversation

well you you know you got i was i was just back there with a with a producer who's who's uh this is domestic sheep producer he's the largest uh public land domestic sheep producer in uh in montana he's a good guy uh and he gets it and he uh he does his best to keep his domestic sheep away from wild sheep um and he wants more wild sheep on on montana's mountains but you know the the issue is um litigation uh wild sheep foundation is really not a a litigant type organization. We feel we'd rather sit around a table and work out solutions. So our objective there, Steve, would be to sit down with that producer and go, all right. The Western way of doing things is having a whiskey, chatting, acknowledging that there's an issue first and foremost,

and then looking for solutions. Is it times of year when a producer's trailing through an area? Is it how he uses or she uses the upper allotments or these high mountain allotments? So we've done various programs in various states. There's a few states that have very good collaboratives where you have a wild sheep and domestic sheep interaction working group. We don't always agree, but we sit around a table once or twice a year and say, let's come up with solutions that we can work this out.

It doesn't work everywhere. Wild Sheep Foundation's official position is we want healthy and expanding wild sheep herds, but we also support a vibrant domestic sheep industry. The key is there's often places that are just absolutely incompatible in the same landscape. We have worked with permittees to convert. If it's a high conflict area, you've got a large population of bighorn sheep, large population of domestic sheep, and we know there's going to be contact. We've worked with some producers to convert them to cattle where appropriate. There have been situations where we've worked with producers to pay them, almost like a CRP program in the Midwest, but pay them to retire their allotment or vacate their allotment.

Just to look at, like, what would you make in profits running sheep? Can we take conservation dollars? And we'll pay you to not do it. And we take private conservation dollars to pay you to not do it. So in those cases, you have a willing seller, willing buyer scenario. Absolutely.

And we paid a, just because these deals are typically confidential, so I won't even mention the state, but we paid a producer $ producer 427 000 to vacate their allotment they were also in getting into trouble with grizzly bears and wolves constant constant problem so the expansion of grizzly bears and expansion of of of wolves has in some ways benefited bighorn sheep in some states because the permittees want to get get the hell out of there and they come to ngos like wild sheep foundation and say can you

give us a hand yeah we do and we do and we've spent hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars doing that and you nailed it on a willing seller willing buyer deal but what does it look like you're talking about big organized producers okay who presumably have kind of like a business sensibility they have a sense of profit loss but what about all the people that just have two or three sheep excellent question how do you even know who they are? Excellent question. Because I mean, I could go, like my brother, he doesn't live in,

he lives in formerly Bighorn country. He's got some sheep. He's got 10 acres of irrigated pasture. He's got sheep out there. There's nothing to prevent him from having a buddy come over and say, hey man, I'd love to have a lamb for my place. Nothing, there's no paperwork.

So how do you even know? The key there is education. So, I mean, on this podcast, we're going to be educating people that there's an issue. You know, I came from Texas, and I go down to Houston, and I give a presentation. I talk about the disease issue and to a hunting community that you would presume would would know something about it and it's kind

of blank stares and never heard of it truth be told I came to Wild Sheep Foundation for Dallas Safari Club I wasn't aware of it I've been in the the hunting and conservation industry for 18 years I hadn't heard about it so it's's education. Walsh Foundation obviously respects private landowners, respects private land rights and your ability to do what you want on your land. But our effort there would be to educate those private landowners or those recreational producers or hobby flocks or whatever you want. 4-H, FFA, a lot of 4-H animals out there that could get in trouble. Educate them. I just spent two days on the Missouri River with a private producer in southern BC who gets it. And interesting enough, he's got a small flock of domestic sheep.

They're actually mouflon sheep. And he's in proximity to bighorn habitat. And he's a part of an interaction working group in southern BC. And he was the guy that asked the question of them. He goes, well, why don't I, as a producer, test my sheep for Imovee? He did. And he's got an Imovee-free flock,

and he's now one of our biggest advocates as a domestic sheep producer for Imovee-free flocks. So that would be potentially one of the solutions in the small area. That's pretty interesting to think about because, I mean, a lot of states have managed to get brucellosis out of livestock herds. You bet. Is that an area of interest to think that you could expand? Absolutely.

Pneumonia-free sheep? Well, they would, you know, they'd be MOV-free sheep. There's a Dr. Tom Besser, who's our Rocky Crate Endowed Chair. He's at Washington State University, probably one of the world's foremost experts on this issue. And he's advised us that if you have an Imovee-free domestic flock, that's about a 97% solution to this issue. So that is exciting. But there's a fly in the ointment.

You don't say scott scott just talked about that ram that did a 300 some odd mile walkabout yeah if he's well so we've got you know we we know that um imovi is not endemic to bighorn sheep, but MOV is now resident in bighorn sheep. So we have herds, you know, we're in Montana. So we have herds in Montana that they test positive for MOV. As Scott pointed out, there's a variety of strains. It's kind of like the, you know, not necessarily, but again, layman's terms, kind of like the flu or the cold. You know, sometimes you get one hell of a common cold.

Sometimes you get a little light one. Sometimes you get a flu. There's a flu virus that just wipes you out. Other times it's not so bad. Same thing with strains of MOV. This bighorn may be able to live with it. Well, now here's the fly in the ointment. What if we have a private land domestic sheep producer doing the right thing?

Spending tons of money to do it. Tons of money testing his or her sheep. They're MOVI-free. They make sure they only bring in stock from MOVI-free. And we get a wandering bighorn that's MOVI-positive. Now we've switched the the dynamic there and you know that we've the fact is we've got to be intellectually honest and go we're still back into a separation scenario now we're trying to separate you know these imovi free clean domestic sheep from a potentially

infected wild sheep the truth of the matter if, we're going to have to think different. We can't continue to do the way we've done in the past. And I think there are opportunities that we miss. And I want to emphasize the work that was done. Gray mentioned private landowners earlier. We restored bighornep in Texas with private landowners. Because you didn't have a choice there. Absolutely. Absolutely. So we figured out a way to do this together. And these are people who care. And our goal is certainly not to put people out of business. To me, the way we do this is we figure out new solutions, better way of doing business. We sit down at the same table. We don't play the politics.

We stop denying that the disease exists. It's real. You asked me a question or asked us all a question earlier. Didn't you have any ideas? You watched those numbers decline. Everybody thought they had a pretty good idea why it just never was demonstrated or proven. And later on, that information came in a controlled experiment where we knew that it did occur. And then the

question became, well, that didn't really occur in the wild. You guys did that in a controlled setting. It really doesn't occur in the wild. It does. So the first thing we have to do is acknowledge that we've got a problem. And then we start working together. And Grace says it best. He talks about, you know, it's okay to have both on the landscape. They just can't be there at the same time at the same place. And so we have to figure out what that does look like. But we are going to have to think outside the box. How do we do things? I know and probably will suck the air out of this room, but we allow private landowners in Texas to benefit from sheep tags. There's an incentive there for landowners to work with us, and it's worked extremely well landowners are willing to

do whatever it takes we conduct we landowners allow public hunters on their property to hunt we hunt each other's property we we do research we capture sheep on private land so there are lots of other examples that's just one like in model, you're going for a thing where you're trying to change the landowner perception of what it means to have sheep. Well, exactly. That it's not just like, you're screwed now, buddy. There's a sheep on your property. Exactly. And you'll never, as a private landowner or a producer, why would I care if there were sheep, bighorn sheep around here, if I saw no benefit from that?

And so I think there are opportunities that we haven't explored that we need to. We need to sit down at the same table, work through some of these issues. But we can't do that if we don't acknowledge that the disease exists. And if every time something major happens or an obstacle comes up, a stumbling block, we run straight to D.C. Are there pneumonia deniers? Oh, absolutely. That seems to be a common theme across a handful of wildlife diseases. The CWD deniers have come on.

Absolutely. Well, there's deniers and then there's users. We've seen it used as a leveraging tool we they know that we'll pay to play gotcha hey you know hey we're gonna bring in some domestics in here what do y'all think of that right or you know there's a guy in in garden or somewhere um he got pissed he lost his grazing allotments and said all right and brought in domestic sheep more we lost 43 sheep that winter? Just because he was like, well, I'll show you.

We had a guy down in Wyoming that he was basically a cattle producer. But he had cattle allotments up to 11,000 feet in the mountains in prime, prime bighorn habitat. And he was not the best grazer in the world and he'd gotten in trouble with the blm constantly and he lost his blm cattle allotments he goes fine i'm going to put domestic sheep on my deeded land up at 11 000 feet right in bighorn habitat now what are you going to do so you know we so then he's just doing like right it's just retribution that's wildlife terrorism yeah that's wildlife terrorism because he you know he knows you know so as as garrett said you know you've got you've got people you got deniers and then you got those that'll use manipulators as a weapon well and then that

also occurs on just the different public lands issues uh there there are some who would use the grazing part of it or the anti-grazing part of it, bring bighorns into that just to lay that on the table. In other words, it's all about where it might be about public land grazing. That's not what we're about either. It has nothing to do with that. I don't follow what you're saying. Well, one of the public land guys can say it better. There are some groups who would use bighorn sheep to say that we don't want any grazing on public land, so let's use bighorn sheep to accomplish that.

So someone who had an agenda where they felt like they weren't so much pro-bighorn as they were anti-grazing on public lands. And they'd be like, this would be a great place for some bighorns. Exactly. Because I know that I'll be able to manipulate that into achieving my other goal. And that's not our mission. Our mission is simple. We put and keep sheep on the mountain. And if we're going to do this, we're going to have to do it together with livestock producers.

And I think there's some really good examples out there where people working together uh well i think that the the key like you know i've met with and have spoken with a lot of very effective players in the conservation space people like the people in this room in this organization who have a long track record and the thing that i find that these groups are in is you're in the middle and you got some crazies off to each side and you're trying to guide, right? You're trying to keep this thing moving along with some pretty radical fringe elements

probably barking at you from both sides. Absolutely. You know, and then I think, you know, going back to, he just keeps preaching education and it's huge. You know, and then I think, you know, going back to, he just keeps preaching education, and it's huge. You know, I've worked with, spoke with your buddy Ryan Callahan a lot. Like, he talked to these companies who one of their biggest things is wool, you know, and they're always preaching that they're selling great wool products. Well, where do you get it?

Yeah. You know, you have some people that are. They get it from New Zealand, I think. They do, and so they're safe, right? Same with Sitka. They're safe. You know, so talking with Sitka in first light, I mean, light i mean like hey guys you guys want to talk about where you get your wool from or maybe where you shouldn't you have some groups that say we're environmentally friendly and you know because we source our wool here locally and there's not these shipping things and all that and then you go where do you

get in they go oh colorado you go oh so you're just killing you know i sat next to avon chenard up on stage talking about how yay if you're sourcing your wool west of the mississippi you're probably contributing to the die off of bighorn cheap and that got an interesting i mean yeah that's the yeah that's a bold statement man yeah well i mean you know and it's like i should say a bold statement but a statement that people could read into pretty heavily. Yeah, it will. And I probably should have followed it up more, but people just don't understand. And a lot of times these people building the garments don't understand. Ryan Callahan is a very educated dude when it comes to conservation. And a lot of these things he had no idea about.

So if we talk about, if we at this like the separation thing the separation idea um well first i'm gonna address something you just brought up is there do you guys have a is there like a is there a the equivalent of like labeling something organic or labeling an organization to be of a certain pedigree of 401k non-profit like is there do you guys have a way where you like are certifying or giving a stamp of approval to certain producers for practicing no we we looked into it yeah you know we we had a we had a um you know kind of a wild sheep safe campaign. And the challenge with that, Steve, is it did get into a certification process. And we didn't have the staff.

And then we talked to our attorneys and they went oh man you certify one and not a you know so yeah we kind of backed away from that on the wild sheep safe and and it's it's almost like scott had said on you know what is effective separation what is the distance that's yeah i do want to talk about that separation yeah it's a real it's a real challenge there but like in puget sound there's a thing there's like a type of building that's like what they call it salmon safe or salmon country or something and a building can in a building can comply in a certain way and has to do with the quality of their runoff well right that has to do with that you've achieved some threshold some measurable threshold of acknowledgement that this water is going to be used by sand and this is this is what

garrett touched on and so we're we're kind of you know we're kind of looking at a concept of conflict free lamb and wool um and we're still fleshing that out i mean there's responsible wool standards uh that the wool industry uses interesting enough i've read through most of the organizations that have responsible wool standards it It's more animal husbandry. It's, you know, it's transportation. It's predator control. Whether or not there's some predator control going on in your area, they may think that's non-friendly. But they're not concerned about wildlife. Nothing in there talks about bighorn sheep.

So it's more like animal rights issues you bet you bet so we're you know we're reaching out to some of those more environmental groups to say hey if you're if you're gonna if you're gonna run down this path you better put bighorns in the picture uh but as we as we mature you know this conflict free space um it it too is more of an education program. I mean, we will probably never be able to have completely conflict-free scenarios in the western United States unless you put the wool industry and the lamb industry out of business. And that's not our objective. I mean, that's just not our objective. Let me ask this about that question. Let me ask this about that question. Let me ask this.

Does the wool and lamb industry in the West absolutely rely on public land grazing? No. So there's a version of it. 60 to 70 families. But bighorns probably rely on private land. No.

More bighorns are on public land even in the wintertime uh yeah still yeah still um so yeah it's it's a it's 70 to 80 percent of the time they're spending on public land so so there is a you know there is a public land grazing scenario and it just it just varies on states montana it's not the it's not really the issue public land grazing is not the issue it's more education of private recreational herds or you know or producers um colorado is probably the ground zero for the public land grazing issue with a lot of conflict zones the blm and the Forest Service have risk of contact maps. You can look at a map and it'll show active domestic sheep grazing allotments,

occupied bighorn range, and active BLM allotments, and then red conflict zones. So they're mapped out. I mean, there's risk of contact analysis that's that's going on the bottom line is we pretty much know where the the touch points and the hot points are um you know one of the solutions that we're looking at is what if we what if we took the top 10 hot points and pick a state colorado what if we took the top 10 hot points that man we've got you know real critical core bighorn herds in there in that area and we've got some pretty significant conflict zones what if we address those first you know it's it's eating the elephant one bite at a time it's it's a huge issue it's a huge problem um you know the disease issue is complex we

you know we don't have all the answers but what if we could you know the disease issue is complex we we you know we don't have all the answers but what if we could you know incrementally um you know 10 at a time start addressing those issues with a variety of tools some of them are going to be bottom line moving a producer out of that area and but the key there is can we find that producer other grass to graze um you know are there private land areas are there are there you know are there tools that we haven't used yet you know can can the the wild sheep advocacy community um you know if we're not going to buy you out can we incentivize you to go on to some lower elevation pivot point you know some alfalfa field or some other grass field that you can utilize instead of high mountain summertime allotments where bighorn sheep are grazing.

So, you know, we just got to get clever. And Clay said it. And we've got a program that we call our new narrative. But, you know, the premise is we've been doing the same thing over and over and over and expecting a different result. It's time to change that. You know, we all know that and over and over and expecting a different result. It's time to change that. You know, we all know that's called insanity if you expect a different result. So we're, you know, we want to sit down with willing producers who are progressive and

get it and don't deny that there's an issue and sit down and say, hey, you know, you want to keep your family in business and it's a part of the Western landscape. We respect that. You know, as a multiple-use advocacy organization, which is what Wild Sheep Foundation is, we respect that. But let's not do the same thing over and over and expect a different result. Let's do different things and get different results. And something Gray says a lot, too, that, you know, there's those that sue and those that do um and we're kind of like that first group that knocks on the door and when we get denied then we go all right well when they

knock on the door it's probably not going to be as pretty yeah you know so we're kind of like that just right at the beginning saying hey let's let's work things out and then when we leave if we get denied you know and there's there's unfortunate reality that other groups just come in and they're going to sue them. Yeah. 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.

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I kind of got a little bit lost in there but it's i'll just chime in with the tribe's perspective on some of this and it's really tied to public land grazing and so the the tribes i work for have a treaty reserve right to harvest bighorn sheep and that that's a deal with the federal government it's the trust responsibility but the federal government and they are at this time permitting through a federal action um grazing of domestic sheep that adds knowingly adds risk to our populations of sheep bighorns so they we just basically can't accept that because we really can't quantify the risk so we can quantify a minimum risk i want you to say a little more clearly you're saying the tribe has a deal with the federal government that they can hunt bighorns but it's reserved in their treaty of 1855 and they're a and they're able to argue that

the federal government by giving the grazing allotments to domestic sheep is hindering their treaty right? If we are knowingly adding risk to population viability. And I think we can demonstrate that with the science. It's like coming through a back door to... Grazing domestic sheep on suitable and prime bighorn habitat is very problematic for us. And that's just the nature of it. And I mean, yes, we are not against public land grazing,

but we just need to take a hard look at where it's suitable to graze domestic sheep and where it's not. And we need to protect the sheep we have, but we have to look at how are're going to expand our sheep populations. If we have allotments that are stocked with domestic sheep in historic and prime bighorn habitat that would be suitable otherwise, we've got to think about that. When you're working for the tribe as a biologist, do you wind up interfacing with these guys at wild sheep foundation? Are you in communication? Yeah. Yeah. What are the conversations that you guys have? Private. No, it's, it's always a good, it's always a great discussion.

Cause this is a, it's a tough, it's a tough, tough question. You know, you guys are coming at it from the same side of the thing where you want what's best for bighorns. We do. And that's the, we just have it, the tribe has a very different worldview of that, right? Yeah, no, I understand. That was something that was taken away, and it's still a cultural memory.

It's there. They want to be fully, fully be able to fully exercise that. And a couple of tags is is not sufficient we do coordinate with the states for for uh on issuing bighorn sheep tags and so that's a little bit of a sore point so we really need to figure out how we can move the needle and and get sheep back where they belong yeah so how does that work when they're on indian reservation land than they're technically owned by? Well, we don't have bighorn sheep on the reservation. We have a relatively small reservation. But you have hunting rights offside the reservation.

We do. On about four different herds of sheep. And so we work with the states and figure out a tag allocation allotment. And we issue, we hold a drawing just kind of similar to the state drawing. And they'd like to see more bighorn tags. Oh, yeah. Which means they need to see more bighorns.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Are you guys, I know you can't really answer this, but I'm just going to throw it out there anyway. Optimistic or pessimistic about bighorns? I mean, a lot of good work's been done right man i mean we were down to 25 000 we're up to what 85 85 000 what's a livable number for you you know that's that is the tough one is is where do we want to go um and i guess the best way for us to express that is we would like to see bighorn sheep

everywhere they are now suitable the problem is steve um you know suitable what does that mean where they're safe um it's tough to find places to translocate bighorn sheep that they're not going to get into trouble trouble being just this trouble trouble trouble running into a domestic domestic hurt so that is that really that is the obstacle number one inhibiting factor on restoration of bighorn sheep is is contact with domestic sheep and goats so is it fair to say like if it wasn't for the disease not blame blame whoever but if the disease for whatever reason didn't exist is it fair to say that we might have a million bighorns or 500,000 bighorns in the country well we certainly have more than 85,000 and you'd probably easily say probably double that and maybe triple that i mean

we've we've caught you know we've we've had a three-fold increase since the late 60s, 70s, and I think we could have another three-fold increase. But right now, it's tough to find. As Scott's saying, 35 kilometers. I mean, we're sitting in my office, and there's a Montana Unlimited bighorn ram that I saw on winter range, and I took him 30 miles away. So that's not 30 kilometers. That's miles away you got unlimited sheep i did really that's an unlimited sheep it's a big

unlimited sheep it's a 13 and a half year old unlimited sheep like to kill me hold a minute you found you you found that same ram 30 miles and we got him we found that same ram you know a blind hog can find an acorn every once in a while that's a big unlimited unit ram unbelievable yeah that that's the exact on my on the front of my door i have the live picture of that ram i had i had a photograph in in winter range of that ram on my desktop on my macbook for nine months and we found three rams in a different unit and one of them was that guy one of them was bigger that's the nice thing about sheep is you can really because they don't lose right they got a horn they don't lose yeah you got you can he's got three chunks of character now you know i need to i need to

preface in in case you know your audience thinks I'm a great sheep hunter. I had a great sheep hunter with me. I actually had Kevin Hurley, our conservation director, now our vice president of conservation. He was kind of our camp jack. And I had the ace in the hole. Jack Ashton, Jr., who I think has sheep blood running through his veins, was with me. So he and I backpacked up in and we found the rim in montana you got to get out of there in 48 hours you've got to present a a full head and cape

uh within 48 hours to game and fish or fish well off in parks and we got we got to the biologists in 48 after a bivouac and a lot of hoofing yeah just just all the things you love huh yeah it's pretty cool but the the point i realized the point you were making is just the distance is covered yeah that ram that ram covered 30 miles and that was just standard for that ram and he didn't do it by going in a straight line no no now the good news is in in that unlimited area there's there's no more domestic sheep is that right yeah so i mean you know that that and and the the that was in the still waters unit 500 and and those sheep are relatively clean um and and relatively hardy but they still have some

resident pathogens in them but they're they're living with it the problem is you then bring domestic sheep back in there and they bring in another strain of evovi and that's that's the that's the ticker that's the uh the straw that broke the camel's back and then you then you get a die off again so let me hit with this question now that we've kind of like prodded around what the future might look like and what's acceptable, do we right now know that at least it won't get worse? I don't, you know, there are some, and I didn't answer your first question.

I told you you wouldn't be able to. I am going to answer that though. Oh, you are going to do it. I gave you out by saying you can't answer it. Because no, there's those within our community that think that status quo is success. Okay. Wild Sheep Foundation, at least from my perspective, is not going to accept status quo as success. We want to come up with some more unique solutions to this problem and they're they're out there um while i was in

washington dc i had had a beer with that domestic sheep producer and in nevada they took a little different tact they were a bit basically willing to accept more risk some states would be willing to do that others Others would not. Scott, I don't think that... I don't follow what you mean. So here's a scenario. Are we willing, if we can work more on the MOVI-free, if we can work with producers on better practices, is our community willing to, let's say in Montana,

put wild, you know, translocate wild sheep into areas that typically we would not because we're fearful of that, the disease transmission. And that's a big question we're facing right now. Are you willing to spend the money on it? Are we willing to spend the money on it? Are we willing to spend the money? Are we willing to not litigate with a producer because that producer didn't object to us moving wild sheep within, for argument's sake,

20 miles of his operation? So you're making a sort of truce. We're just, yeah. It's an organization-wide question, it's a community-wide question, and there's those that agree with it, those that disagree with it. But would we then set up

protocols that we know that if that bighorn goes on a walkabout, that bighorn's not going to make it? Or do we use unlimited areas as a way to separate bighorns from domestic sheep are there are there areas and you know this is again a kind of a montana unique scenario can we use almost no-go zones for for bighorn sheep if a bighorn sheep is in that

zone it's unlimited you can take it you know we're just trying to think out of the box try to try to think out of the box again let's get let's get get past this doing the same thing and just fighting over this the good news and i guess why i'm i'm optimistic and realistic but optimistic is we are learning more and more and more on the disease issue. If we can get the domestic sheep industry to spend as much money as we do on disease research, that will help their industry because there's some data that show that, you know, Imove is not good for domestic sheep either. It's endemic to them and it's resident to them.

But it's not. Besser did one study. I think he was looking at the live weight, and it was like a 7% increase. And then it changed. So I probably shouldn't use those numbers. But there was kind of a significant weight gain change between an Imove-free domestic sheep and Imovi-positive domestic sheep. The Imovi-free gained weight quicker. Well, then there's a market incentive.

So maybe there's something that we can learn there. We're not there yet. It's unproven. It's not published. It's not peer-reviewed. But maybe there's something there. But wouldn't that be cool if we can use market incentives uh to encourage domestic sheep producers to uh you know if they can um have

emovie free sheep you know like like pretty much eliminating small smallpox maybe there is some sort of silver bullet where we can vaccinate domestic sheep and they're all MOV-free. You know, we've got two bright guys in the room, Scott and Clay. You know, I'm just a I'm just a managing guy and a marketing guy. But, you know, there's some very bright people out there that are working on this issue. We've got the wildlife vet community working on it. There's not consensus on on what the solution is. But you know what? we haven't cured the common

cold yet either but at some point we might but you have an interesting point there about producers being incentivized to get ahead of the problem and yannis and i had an interesting conversation one time with wyoming's current governor matt mead where he's just talking about we're talking about sage grouse in the extraction industry. And he was saying many players in the extraction industry have a very long view and they're very sophisticated.

And they know that like for them to be on the ground doing good business, they need to head off problems. And a problem that they have a vested interest in heading off is not letting wildlife get into dire situations where you're going to then invite high-level scrutiny into practices and that what's good for them to operate in their area would be good sage-grouse numbers. And that they can at times be very effective players

when they have that long view and not heading into conflict, heading into disaster, courting litigation great pero but you just had but again you have to be in it for the you have to be looking to the future to 10 years profit right not tomorrow's profit right right yeah it's a really good point i'm i'm optimistic we've made a lot of progress in in wildlife disease and you know disease in our domestic livestock if you think some of the things we know, disease in our domestic livestock. If you think some of the things we've gotten out of our domestic animals over the, you know, centuries that we've been doing it, I'm optimistic that we can, if we put the shoulder to this one,

I think we can overcome it. I hope. I'm really hopeful. I think the fact that you're, you know, honestly, Steve, you're here. Like, that's a reason to be optimistic because this was something that wasn't really talked about a whole lot you know and you get these these guys that have an incredible influence on the community you know and understanding really what we're up against you know imagine this issue flipped onto the elk population oh you know it'd be a totally different story and why because you know North American model is a huge success largely because of opportunity to hunt.

Relatively low opportunity to hunt wild sheep, relatively low funding for conservation. That's where we come in. If it was elk on the same landscape, man, this wouldn't even be a discussion. Could you imagine if 20 bull elk came down into a domestic sheep herd and they mowed down those 20 bull elk came down into a domestic sheep herd and they mowed down those 20 bull elk just because they came in contact with them yeah no way there'd be different no way and so the almost what makes them so aspirational like you know you know it's so difficult to get a tag it's so difficult to get to their habitat the things that make them so

aspirational can also impede them on making them relatable to our everyday lives and understanding what's going on. If we see a die-off of 14,000 feet, we don't really take heed to it. And it's not something that impacts our freezer. We don't think it does. But we talk about wild sheep being 1.5 million, you know, almost double what elk are today. Imagine if they were. Imagine if it was something that you just you know you went down to bob wards and bought yourself a tag and went went sheep hunting yeah

like you have a lot more advocates that's an interesting point that callahan brought up after being at the sheep show was he was like he's kind of marveling at the amount of people that are spending so much time so much money so much energy getting behind sheep conservation. And he's like, the thing of it is, most of those guys are never going to draw a sheep tag. They're just doing it for the idea. You know, something they do. For the idea of it.

A lot of the chapters that they do, it's pretty fun. You sit down at the banquet and they say, all right, stand up if you've taken a sheep. And it's like maybe a fifth of the room yeah but people are going to spend thousands of dollars every night because they just believe in it it's just out of their grasp but they believe in it enough you know it's just this aspirational thing that we almost can't can't imagine going after i would say that we have the most altruistic membership in our community. I mean, we've got 7,200 members. Steve, last year we put $4.6 million into wild sheep conservation.

Is that right? $4.6 million. $18.1 million in the last four years. With a little small 68 to 7,200 member organization. Clay worked on a project a couple years ago, and we were looking at it. And it's kind of switching gears a little bit, but it looks at the auction tags. And those are a little controversial. Oh, we spend tons of time giving both sides of that argument.

Yeah, those are a little controversial. I see both sides of that argument with crystal a little i see both sides of that argument you bet with crystal clarity but you look let me let me let me give you let me give you some facts when it comes to wild sheep conservation please please 74 can i first explain what you're talking about yeah please do all right we've talked about this a thousand times people always ask us about this but um when you have i'm speaking for the listeners right but when you have, I'm speaking for the listeners right now, when you have a resource that isn't large enough to meet the demand on the resource, you have to find a way, and I'm talking about a wild game resource, you have to find a way to allocate opportunity, right? And so if you live in the great state of Michigan or Wisconsin, and you want to go deer hunting, there's enough deer

to go around, everybody goes down, you buy a deer tag, everybody gets to go. With a lot of wildlife species, there's just, the numbers aren't there. And so everyone throws their name in the hat and it's meant, I shouldn't say meant to be, but traditionally those opportunities are allocated democratically. An exception to that case would be what you're going to now explain, which would be when they take tags, usually for very coveted species or coveted hunting areas, and they take tags and sell them to a highest bidder. And here's the rub. Here's the thing you got to pay attention to. And it's usually structured and settled such a way that like 90% of the money goes into the ground for restoration work.

So it's not lying in someone's pocket and this is tightly, this is carefully watched. This is a carefully watched flow of money. So with that little bit of bad, it's because a lot of people don't know what I'm talking about. It's a great setup. And if I could expand on it, you know, Shane Mahoney is a great friend, and he and I give talks around, you know, the world. And he was listening to some of my talks on this tag thing that we're going to talk about,

the special permits and tags, you know, exactly what you said, where, you know, one or two or five special licenses are taken from the pool of available tags and sold to the high bidder. And I used to call that a bastardization of the North American conservation model. You used to. I support it. I never even went that far. But I called it a bastardization. And I had Shane Mahoney down in my drift boat.

We're floating down the Yellowstone River, and we're probably enjoying a beer, in Shane's case, a Guinness. And he was just having a good time. He goes, Gray, I want a toast. Can you say it the way – can you use his accent? No. I'm trying to get the voice of God, shane mahoney there you go great guy absolute fabulous conservation but you know he says you know gray you know i've listened to you say this a number of times in a number of places that you know this this this special permit and tag and it

could also be a raffle tag and we'll get into that but this special permit and tag is a bastardization of the north american model he's saying to you i've heard you i've heard me say this and i and i talk i you you know i even use capitalism socialism kind of our our our standard system is an egalitarian program is and you know steve as you put it i mean anyone can go down and get a tag um when it comes to some of the coveted ones where it's a whether it's a bighorn sheep or a stone sheep or a desert sheep or a Rocky Mountain elk in a particular unit in Utah, you can auction off those tags too. So now that's not egalitarian.

I want to interrupt and throw a piece of color in. I apply for a bighorn sheep tag every year in six or seven states. Good for you. And in this state in particular for 13, 13 no 15 or 16 years in a row and i haven't gotten one just to give a sense of like what we're talking about we talk about the slim pickings you got you slim pickings on tags you got guys in montana that have been applied for 35 years and have not drawn a tag so you know you're either lucky um or you go into a jurisdiction like montana that has the unlimited units. But, you know, we had a 3% to 4% success.

So we're on the river, and Shane goes, you know, Gray, and he and Valor's guys are probably the foremost authority on the North American model. He says, you're actually wrong. It's not a bastardization of the North American model. The North American model also is one of its seven pillars, gives the state the opportunity to decide how it funds wildlife conservation in that state. And so a state that decides, like Montana, that we will take out of the pool of bighorn sheep permits

one auction tag and one raffle tag, and the key there is one goes to the the you know the the high bidder and the the very affluent one out of a couple hundred but uh yeah yeah i think we have 150 tags or so so you know one goes as a as an auction tag and one also is a raffle tag that you know so us regular folks can you know buy a raffle ticket and potentially have a little better odds than you've been in for 13, 14, and some people 35 years. So here's the interesting thing. When it comes to wild sheep, and Clay led this study with an intern,

74%, and I'll say that again, 74% of WAFWA, Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, the Western agencies in the United States and Canada, 74% of their wild sheep conservation agency dollars comes from either an auction or a raffle tag. Is that right? 74%. Now, you're peeling, let's say, two tags out of 100 plus tags,

and those two provide 74%. In a state like Arizona, it's about 95%. Is that right? And the other thing that was interesting in this research, and we used WAFWA data, 40% of all WAFWA, Wild Sheep Conservation Agency dollars comes from one organization, and that's the Wild Sheep Foundation. Really? Yeah.

So, you know, we have a relatively small footprint when it comes to membership at 7,200. We cast a very, very long shadow when it comes to conservation and putting money on the ground. But, you know, there's sensibilities. Wyoming gives five tags away on auction. If Wild Sheep Foundation went to Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks and the commission and advocated for another auction tag our building would be burned down so you know it is controversial it's but you know

but check this out man i i put it to my brother or another guy put it to my brother in a conversation and my brother like there's nothing he likes more than just like wrestling with ethical questions so they put the governor thing to him and he was saying that he feels on auction tags, he feels that in balancing the morality of it or in balancing the ethics of it, you need to look at what are the impacts of the auction tag because the auction tag is going to remove an animal from the landscape. But the money, if well spent, is probably going to add a higher number of tags to the general pool by the habitat work and relocation work and putting more sheep on the ground. So that money might be pulling a sheep out of the pool and returning four or returning five or returning 10. So there are actually possibly more tags made available

thanks to the auction tag than in spite of the auction tag. He nailed it. We were talking about that unlimited RAM. I can assure you, and we were looking at some data back in 2014, we've changed the dynamic in Montana now. Now there's an application fee of $50. But the amount of sheep revenue coming into Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks on the unlimited tags and the limited tags was less than $200,000. Okay.

And the auction tag goes for? It was actually a lot closer to $100,000, around $120,000, $140,000. You can't pay a biologist in a truck and uniforms and the like on $140,000. That same year, we sold the Montana tag for $315,000. We've sold that tag as high as $480,000. And you pointed it out earlier, 90% of that money goes right back into fish, wildlife, and parks in a dedicated sheep account. So we retain 10%. Well, we spend a hell of a lot more than 10% back in Montana. So 100% of those dollars go right back onto the ground into wild sheep conservation.

In Arizona, it's 100%. Wild Sheep Foundation sells that tag. We spend a million dollars to put on a show to get somebody crazy enough to spend $300,000 on a desert bighorn sheep tag. And 100% of that dollars goes back to Arizona Game and Fish into a dedicated account to restore bighorn sheep and conserve bighorn sheep. And that probably includes some disease spending. Absolutely. Same thing in the back. I'm like tipping more and more every year yeah so i tip more and more in the direction of like it's just like one of those it's one of those things you want to be like yeah man i see where you're coming from i'm not digging and you might i'm not even asking you to aesthetically like the auction tags like i'm not asking you to like the aesthetics of it but you

it's almost like you cannot argue with the efficacy you know and i i getting back to that unlimited i know that i had as a regular guy you know a non-profit employee as a regular guy i had the opportunity to buy in effect a bighorn sheep i was living in or in wyoming at the time i was able to buy a bighorn sheep tag in montana for 750 bucks back then in 2014 as a wyoming resident and hunt um bighorn sheep in montana and I was able to do that only because some other crazy guy gal whatever had the wherewithal to spend $350,000 on one tag and that money went to ensure that I had an opportunity to hunt in in Montana so I I look at it you know it's it it can be unseemly I look at a little different I look at as i am grateful that there are people

out there that could give money to their alma mater uh they could give money to cancer research and they do uh but there are those that have the wherewithal and they give it to wild sheep restoration and conservation so um instead of vilifying those folks i sell yeah but we can't measure their motivation oh you you know i mean you can't eat horns i don't you know i think steve the way that i've i've said you know a lot of us like to say hunting is conservation is a term we use a lot yeah and i don't think that there's any better depiction of that honestly than those auction tags when you take one tag out of the whole pool that funds 70 whatever percent of that conservation of that species you know hunting right there is conservation yeah the

numbers are yeah the numbers are you're struggling with this no i'm not because yeah because here's the thing here's what i like to do i like to take to i like in in wrestling with an idea i like to take it to the extreme because one might come in and say well wow man that's a lot of money let's take all the tags and auction them all off because that'd be a hell of a lot of money at which point i would say well now I feel as though you have, right? So we all agree that there's like, that's not a tenable solution. So we all agree that somewhere in here, there's a line, right? And we're like trying to like identify the line.

Now to have a state do one, that's pretty damn conservative. Yep. Do you guys have numbers on how much the raffle tag brings in um i don't know if garrett you have that you know montana it's it's typically a little shy of two hundred thousand dollars oh yeah but it's significant i mean it's significant you know that's five bucks a pop right you know that the you know the auction tag is the is the the main player but you know i i probably, probably a hip pocket would be a, I wouldn't want to say a two-thirds, one-third. But, you know, maybe 60% of the money comes from the auction tag, 40% from a raffle.

Have you guys ever calculated this out? That's pretty good. I thought it was going to be less. My brother ran the numbers out. I can't remember if he was confident in it. If the raffle tickets are five bucks, how much do you need to spend on raffles before you're doing better than just applying for the tag?

Yeah. I think it was a surprisingly low number where your odds of getting the tag increased like 25 bucks or something like that no the raffles you know you know bunch our our our community of chapters and affiliates i mean that's you know a raffle is so much better odds than any of any of the state or provincial if there's an lah in a province but you know any of the lah drawings a raffle is a much better odds they're just throwing into the state into the draw you're better off getting it you know, any of the LAH drawings, a raffle's a much better option. They're just thrown into the state, into the draw.

You're better off getting it, you know, if you're an aspirational sheep hunter. And we all are. And, you know, get into these raffles. Or, you know, we've got, you know, the gratuitous plug, but we've got the Less Than One Club, which is an organization or club, if you will, within Wild Sheep Foundation, where for $25, if you have not taken a wild sheep ram, for 25 bucks, you're entered into a drawing for three doll sheep hunts that we give away at our convention. And we've got 900 or so, 1200 or so in that club within Wild Sheep

Foundation. You got three chances we we spice it a little bit steve because the first drawn you don't have to be present uh the second drawn you got to be present and the third you got to be present to win gotcha um at this last less than one club reception and a reception is maybe a um one of our colleagues drew one of those yes yeah he did and and but that reception's maybe not the it's it's basically a beer fest we went through 25 kegs of beer in an hour and a half for three sheep tags eight three sheep tags per tag you bet so you know we maybe maybe our community is kind of a a drinking club with a sheep hunting problem. But it's really cool. I mean, the energy in that room is absolutely electric. And, you know, when someone that has aspired to be kicked out of the club,

and that's what we say, hey, you join the Lesson 1 Club hoping to be kicked out, and you're kicked out when you take a ram, you know, we're giving away opportunities for relatively low dollars and trying to augment the state and provincial drawings that are pretty low odds. My buddies, I've been saying how after many years, I'm saying how I'm like taking a break from SHOT Show. And I say to my buddies, and I'm going to start,

I'm going to like spend a couple of years at a couple of other shows. And I've brought it up with multiple of my friends in the in the hunting industry and they universally are like dude cheap show that's fun it's a family you know it's a it's a um you know we talked about the altruism but what what's cool and i think there's a little bit of a misnomer about who who we are because you know the the talk comes about and i threw the numbers out, $4.6 million last year with a relatively small club. So the erroneous assumption is that it's just a bunch of rich folks.

It really isn't. The demographic of our show is the age is going down and down and down because there's something badass about hunting sheep. There's something badass about wanting to hunt sheep. There's something badass about training to hunt sheep. So we're seeing our attendance age go down and down and down. We have backpack races indoor, backpack races outdoor. You know, it's just a fun time.

But what was interesting, and I had a guy come up to me, and he was actually at the Less Than One Club this year, and he said, you know, I'm sitting here, there's 1,500 people in this. Because now we let anyone go into the Less Than One Club. You don't have to be in the reception. You don't have to be a member. And people, I mean, guys that have taken 27 sheep come into the Less Than One Club just to see how cool it is for some new aspirational woman or man win their first sheep hunt. The first drawn is a female mountain climber that's dating a sheep and moose guide in alaska outfitter in alaska

and i mean it was just fabulous when she won she you know she won a incredible northwest territories doll sheep hunt she looks down at her boyfriend and you know she told me later she goes you know i couldn't sleep that night so i'm sitting there poking him you know in bed going do you see what i want did you see what i want so you know i mean, I mean, it's just, it's cool. And it's the family. But this guy came up to me and he says, hey, look, he goes, I go to all the shows and I do too. I mean, I'm a member of every, all of the organizations are all great and we support them. But he goes, you know, I walk around this room and I have the feeling that there are some real big players in here. He goes, I feel I can talk to anyone in this room and anyone in this room will

talk to me. So, you know, it's a great family and there's something about wild sheep. You know, we talk about sheep fever, you know, we talk about it as being a sickness, but there's something about the places they live. There's something about how challenging it is to get up to where they live. It's something about the training that you have to do the mental preparation you know and and it's probably in you know steve you hunt in places that's just fabulous uh and do it and do it the right way do it the hard way and do it the way that we all aspire to hunt um but that's kind of the essence of sheep hunting you know you got to earn it you know it doesn't come easy. There's no easy rim. Yeah.

It's for the hard players. It is. Steve, I spent my life on bighorn sheep and I am a less than one member. Oh, is that right? Yeah. Really? Yep. I'm not. Yeah, I already made a decision. We're going to the

wild sheep show. I want to go this year i'm going and it's not on shot show it's february 7th through 9th so we're we're off shot so i could feasibly yeah i need i want to spread my wings man i got to check some new stuff out yeah you'd love i got to check some new stuff out um any uh final thoughts around the table? We're doing the whole thing? If you feel that it's all been said, you can just say it's all been said. I don't have any concluding thoughts. Oh, man. As the preacher said, once I get started, generally I'm too lazy to stop.

So I don't know if you want me to do that. But I do think it's worth just mentioning, Steve and Giannis, it means a lot having you guys here, you know, and helping us talk about, you know, what we do as an organization. We, reality is, is we can serve a species that lives at 14,000 feet and that lives below sea level. And that includes a lot of animals along the way. So that's a good way of putting it, man never thought about like that yeah i mean when we do guzzler projects a a frequent animal that visits is a desert tortoise right you know we just did a rehabilitation um deal with uh encroaching conifers and uh you know the guy when we kind of got done goes well actually this is more mule deer habitat than anything else but um you know so we conserve that species and we have to watch that chain of events happen all the way

through those different different elevations as they migrate we have to watch you know just food predator management obviously domestic sheep conflict and a lot of people don't know that that happened has to happen That chain has to happen the whole way for this to work. And the fact that you guys are here and helping us tell that story, that just does good things for us. Like helping sheep, you're touching a lot of wildlife. Yeah. I mean, you're taking an animal that lives in the wildest places on both ends of the spectrum and probably one of the more wild animals in nature and behavior, and therefore you encapsulate a lot of critters right in the middle.

And so what we do, you know, it has legs. Forty percent of wild sheep conservation comes from us, and we conserve a lot of critters along the way. Well put. For me, you ask us if we were optimistic, and I am. I think a lot of times we focus on just the disease, just the negative side of the story. And if you look at the numbers,

today you have a better opportunity to see sheep, to hunt sheep. My kids have, my grandkids have a better opportunity to draw a tag than I did when I started my career. That's important to me. And I do, I am confident that, and I don't know, I've been accused of being Pollyanna. I've heard someone say that to me once. But I'm confident that we can come to the table and try to think outside of the box, think a little bit different.

Scott touched on it earlier. The science is improving. We're learning more and more all the time. But I'm confident that we will come together to find solutions, and I'm talking about both Walsh Youth Advocates and the livestock industry, to work together to achieve things that all of us benefit from. I'm confident that that can occur. I just think, you know, the younger generation, I think they're smarter.

I think they... Yeah, I don't know about that. Well, I just think that the future is promising. And I don't want to go back. I don't want to go back to where we came from. We've invested too much blood sweat and tears uh to to be where we are today and and i'm i'm proud of the wild sheep foundation i'm proud of what we do every day and i'm proud to work for the organization um

i wouldn't be here if i didn't believe in the mission and and so i'm i'm i'm optimistic about where we're headed. And never got a sheep. Not on purpose. I'll say it that way. I understand what you're saying. Never got a sheep. Do you put in for sheep tax? I do. I do.

Huh. A lot? Like Steve, 13 Western states? No, probably not that much. I don't know if it's that many, but it's a handful. Yanni, you good? Can you guys answer this quickly? Because I heard a rumor.

Are llamas bad? Oh, that's the main thing I wanted to ask. Does my brother need to kill all his llamas? Camelids. Yeah, you know, we're not as worried. No, just give it to me straight, man. Yeah, we're not as worried about them. There's some new papers coming out.

Clay, maybe you talk about it., maybe you'd talk about it. Scott, you can talk about it. I know Helen Schwansky up in British Columbia is a little bit more concerned about them than we are. It's kind of like pack goats. We're pretty concerned about pack goats. And as we learn more and more, pack goats seem to be more likely MOV-free than just a boar goat running around. But llamas can carry it. No, they can't carry mycoplasma.

Well, they shouldn't be able to carry mycoplasma over pneumonia. Why do people keep texting me to bust my brother's balls about hunting with llamas? There's some potential disease risk there. It's kind of like another rock that we've got to turn. I see. Gosh, now we've got to get involved with the llamas. Even the pack goat industry thing. Pack goats are a big thing.

We're working with the pack goat industry right now to develop some best management practices that we believe would work, that would involve some testing and other things. Kevin Hurley's actually meeting with those folks here. Are you distributing goat recipes? No. No.

A good goat will do that. So anyway, the short version is, for us, at this stage of the game, it's not worth gambling with. We don't believe that it's worth gambling with. I see. Have your brother test it. I will. Yeah.

He can have us test it? Absolutely. He probably – he's not a negligent dude. I just haven't talked about it with him lately. I'm sure that he's doing whatever he should be doing, and he's the kind of guy, too, that I think if someone laid out for him a really compelling case, I feel like he'd just be like, okay, I'm going to buy a horse.

Which is smarter anyway. Well, he just doesn't have that background, man. People that grow up around horses, you can't catch them. Yeah, his wife, who is is a horse i don't know i don't want to say whisper that's weird but like she's like a horse master almost every day her dad grew up around horses her great-grandfather recommends that he does not get involved with horses is this the brother that lives in mile city yeah and his wife comes from a long, long line of horsemen, breeders, and ranchers. She says it's too dangerous.

She's recommended that he temperamentally needs to steer clear of horses. Got something? Was that your concluder? Yeah. That was all? Thank you. That's a good one because I forgot about that, and that was top of mind. Did we properly dodge it? No, but enough i i said i got some code language yeah

we don't want to poke that one in the eye right now we got a bigger fish to fry right i'll just rewind just a little bit please if there's you know there might be some listeners that are maybe a little confused about the setup just some about the sheep ecology in the situation that we're in so okay historically sheep evolved in you know in large metapopulations of well-connected subpopulations so individual two to a hundred size groups right so all these oh you're on domestics or bighorns bighorn sheep okay so they were you know moving through the landscape you know maybe ram groups going to breed different groups of ewes. And so we had this sort of network of connection depending on the habitat.

Like think about the basin and range in Nevada, those mountain ranges that jut up out of the desert. Sheep would go across those, right? So that's where in modern times we've got humans in the bottom. Sheep, full year-round sheep habitat on top, they cross. That's where we're running our problems the river systems they're traveling up and down so their ecology and their their evolution is to move in between groups and so functionally we want to manage for large groups of sheep rather than small isolated groups because there's all kinds of negative impacts of

that so we're kind of stuck in that that problem where we like okay here's a good piece of habitat but we've got surrounded by domestics and we can't have sheep shooting out of it and going to talk to their their friends up river so we've kind of gotten ourselves into a little bit of a pickle and so that's a little bit of a pickle by thinking in pocket mentality exactly oh we could have a few here we could have a few there yes but they can, but if they come out, we can't let them come out in the valley or we're going to remove them.

So we've kind of got ourselves into a bind that way. But look at all this great sheep habitat we have and we want to have sheep there. But at the same time, it's hard to let them be sheep because their natural tendency is to move around between groups and eventually spread out.

That's an excellent point. point in in in texas you know we built those populations metapopulations there's constant interchange between populations and we've encouraged that because we haven't had the domestic sheep issues to deal with so that's an excellent point yeah trying to that and trying to restore that connectivity of herds really like it's it's it's the pie in the sky, and it's right in Wafla's main goal as far as connectivity and metapopulation management. That's the goal we're shooting for, not just to have one big population or one robust one here. We need a bunch of them that are all functioning together, exchanging genetic material. That are talking to each other. They're more resilient to disease outbreaks when you have a whole bunch of different scattered groups of sheep and they're they're

moving their genes in between and and it's just it's that's the setup we need to go for and it seems to give you a situation to have localized disasters horrible winters and then and then hopefully get them back without needing to then have it be by a helicopter. Exactly. Yeah. So that was just one thing I think people might have missed out on if they're, you know, not familiar with sheep and how they've evolved. No, that's a good point. Yeah. It spans habitat types too, generally.

And then I guess my little concluder is, I mean, we've had a great discussion today and thank you for having me. And a lot of the sheep habitats on public land so folks listening if you if this hit strikes a chord get involved i mean it's a public lands public wildlife you know you need to be if you want to be heard you got to be there you know and a lot of these decisions are being made you know policy level stuff that's disconnected from the science and if you don't like it, you need to be there. And so that's my main point is get involved. It's your sheep.

These are everybody's sheep. And we need to be there to make good decisions. And I hope that everybody listening will be able to someday draw a sheep tag. Me too, man. You know, you've hunted all over the West. How many bighorn mountains have you passed? Sheep mountain, sheep ridge, big sheep ridge. someday draw a sheep tag i want to put you know you've hunted all over the west how many big horn mountains have you passed sheep mountain sheep ridge big sheep ridge most of them don't have sheep yeah that's a good point i think we need to get we need to get there where big horns

and sheep mountains are are restored with sheep big horn sheep yeah if every sheep mountain had a sheep on it we'd be in good shape yeah yeah so one last concluder one last concluder um steve yannis first first and foremost um i want to thank you for the opportunity i i talked about while she foundation casting a broad conservation shadow um you cast a huge communications shadow and a lot about what we were talking about today was education and you've provided us an opportunity to educate a hell of a lot of people and we're grateful the final thought that i'd like to to say is that you know we we you touched on it on this the extremes you know there's an extreme on the right there's an extreme on the left and i've said this a few times to a few different groups,

and I think it resonates. If we could concentrate, whether it's the non-consumptive community, the hunting community, the conservation community, the environmental community, the domestic sheep industry, the cattle industry, the, you know, whatever, and the wild sheep community if we could aspire work and focus on the 80 to 90 percent that we agree on and not spend all our time on the 10 to 20 percent that we disagree on yeah we can move mountains so that's kind of our new narrative let's let's start looking at the areas where we agree and work on those and not bitch and moan and focus on the areas we disagree. It's an interesting idea that you imagine a big room and everyone's in it and you make an announcement. If you think wild sheep are cool, come over in this room and most people are going to wander in the room and then start there.

Yep. Yeah. Yep yeah put our differences aside look for areas that we can work together not areas that we spend all our time fighting yeah you get a lot of work done in that space we'll put and keep sheep on the mountain wild sheep yeah well it's an admirable goal man i think that anyone who you know is up in some high crazy mountain peak where you're just kind of like happy with yourself or just haven't gotten up there and to see one of those things crest out and turn his head and there's those curls it's just magical makes it makes the hair stand up on the back your neck yeah it's like you are seeing, touching, feeling wilderness. All right, well, thank you very much for coming on, everyone.

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