The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 150: Tough Assed Questions, Vol. 3

Episode Date: January 7, 2019

Steven Rinella talks with Sam Lungren, Morgan Mason, and Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew.Subjects Discussed: the bird as a "Michigan hello"; quick thought on Secretary Zinke’s departure; Jani’s heart health; throwing lead at Jani’s solstice party; making your own lures and catching big fish; what happens when you snag a seagull; taking drugs to fight buck fever; the hard knock life of blue-collar deer and the immunity of white-collar deer; disinfected deer; is tender food a fad?; the big seasonal differences in taste of black bear meat; glass or boots?; why are some squirrels tougher than others?; how much wild game does it take to feed your family?; what is road hunting and is it bad?; muskies are back in fashion; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Whatever state you guys are from, are you from the west or east side of the state? West.

West side? Where I'm from, like where I grew up. The state you were born in. I don't even care what it is. East. The east? Yep. West.

And you were born, no, kind of. You're right, dead nuts. No, we're not. Not even kind of. So kind of you're right dead nuts no we're not not even kind of so you think you're west michigan southwest michigan yeah that's what we call it i'm not talking about i'm not talking about i know i'm not talking about latitude sure but when someone says where is kalamazoo in west michigan i say southwest. Yeah, I don't know about that. Oh, my God. Get a map out. Oh, I know where it is. I just don't know if it has the West Michigan sensibility.

The reason I'm bringing this up is because, remember we talked about how you guys didn't grow up flipping off your buddies as a way to say hi. No. Okay, because hear me out. Have you ever met anybody else that said, oh, yeah, we said oh yeah check this out what brought up the conversation about the michigan hello which is the middle finger is we were talking about the some guy was saying man you should like it's bad to say mugs and this

guy had to be australian because we just use mugs like hey friend you know friendo um it's more like hey friendo where it's like friend with a little little jab in there um he was saying oh that's horrible thing to say and so we're looking up like what mugs means in different places i think it means something kind of awful in australia and in this discussion one guy wrote in to say like man i would never take any advice from people in Australia. In Australia, their Michigan hello or their mugs is to call everybody the queen mother of all swear words. The C word. That's right.

One day, my little boy made a list of all the naughty words he knew. He's a public school kid made a list on a board on a plank out in the garage with a sharpie a list of all the naughty words he knew and i said you know what you almost got them all but there's one i will never tell you he's dying to know what it is he even knows what letter it starts with but i will never divulge they use that word as a salutation so this other guy was saying plus you know he brought up like swearing allegiance to the crown he brought up all kinds of reasons why he wouldn't take advice from an australian about how to speak to people but in talking about the middle finger it turns out that

we get a letter from a guy who clear like just without any prompting clarified that he's from western wisconsin and then we got a guy who wrote in about the middle finger and he clarified these from western wyoming so i was wondering if in every state there's this weird phenomena where in every phenomenon where in every state people that live in the west half of that state flip people flip their friends off as a way to say hi this guy in western wisconsin said it was so prevalent he said that if his buddy didn't flip him off when he's driving by he thinks something was wrong it was pretty prevalent the guy must be mad at him yeah western washington i i mean maybe it was just my jackass friends but i feel like that was completely ubiquitous yeah another thing about the bird the guy from western

wyoming said we really differentiated between putting your thumb out or not and like you might put your thumb out and give the bird to your buddy and it was kind of like the exclamation point on it yeah it was like it meant something different and he said it's like the old man bird which had your thumb in. He was saying he got in the habit of doing it so much that one day he flipped his old man off and his ma whooped him. She was from the eastern part of her state.

Didn't realize. Guy rode in. It's kind of a moot point now. But a dude rode in being like, man, he's talking about Secretary Zinke leaving his position. And he's saying, oh, you know, you never got it right. And you handled Zinke with kids' gloves.

I don't want to dwell on this. I'm just going to say, dude, wait and see his replacement. And then come tell me that I handled Zinke with kid's gloves. You'll be looking back at the good old days real soon, perhaps. Guy wrote in to say that this year, no, that in Mississippi, remember we talked about, Yanni, we talked a lot about whether people can actually tell tell how old bucks are and letting bucks walk and all that kind of stuff yeah when we're talking with mark canyon yeah he wrote in that um we were talking about like like growing up in michigan like no one ever shot everybody always just shot spikes and forkies

every buck but he's saying like in mississippi it's he says it's a different he's been it's a different situation down there this is old data this is 20 2014 2015 in mississippi 74 of the bucks killed in mississippi were aged so like that's not you guessing they were aged at three and a half years and older. 74% of the bucks. For you numbskulls, almost three quarters of the bucks in Mississippi are borderline mature bucks. Three and a half and older. Dude, man, that's way different than a lot of places. Changing all the time.

Well, we think it's way different, but do we have that kind of data from other places? I would love to go find it. I would love to go find, like when I was a youngster, I would love to go find, when did I shoot my first buck? Like back in the mid 80s right i would love to know when i was just like a teen like a young teenager entering into my teens i would love to know and those in that collection of counties or statewide in general i i would say those 70 i was the opposite i would say it was 75 and this is just me pulling this out of the out of thin air but i bet it was 75 were one and a half or just spikes and you know fork spikes

little sixes we thought a big buck was just a year and a half old it had a bigger because they'll throw an eight point rack you know they'll throw a michigan eight so we got that was a big buck but maybe you were being fooled, too, that maybe there was basket racks, 6s and 8s, that were actually 3 1⁄2 years old. No. Just genetics weren't into playing those. Yeah.

No. I don't think so. But how can I really defend my position? Because I don't have any. The material is out there. I was just looking at a sweet collection of maps that a dude sent in that was um it was going back into the 1920s 1930s 1940s and showing what parts of the state of michigan were opened

and closed for deer hunting and there was big periods of time like you know when all the animals got wiped out there's big periods of time when there would only be like a little block of the state open. Like they'd have a deer season. The entire southern third of the state would be closed to deer hunting. And it would just, you know, every year they'd be like, just bounce around as they were trying to recover deer. You'd look at something very similar in your own lifetime if you went and looked at turkey. You know, how turkey seasons filled in as turkeys were recovered uh guy wrote about this you guys ever hear this that there's a

i don't know if this is true he says there's a cover scent that basically functions like vicks vapor rub when you're a little kid would you mod rub vicks vapor vapor rub on your chest yeah so you'd get like it like waft up yeah he says there's a cover scent that's like menthol and it's just meant to throw off a deer's ability to know what's going on man i've heard of stuff like that and i just don't really end up giving much credence to pretty much anything on the scent control so the deer rolls and he's like whoa bro I can't smell anything. It's just mixed vapor. It's just like swamping their senses. I mean, maybe there's something. You haven't heard of this?

I've heard of all sorts of stuff like that. And I don't think I really even register most of it. Is that the stuff that's supposed to smell like cookies or whatever? No, he said it smells like menthol. He's asking me or us what we think of it. I don't even know enough about it. I wish Mark Kenney was here. Yeah, I've never heard of that one.

You know, if you're listening right now, send your question to Wired to Hunt. Dude, you'll get 30 minutes on, like, you'll get 30 minutes because you'll know about it. I guarantee Kenyon will, like, know about it and have some kind of opinion on it. In the ongoing listing and collecting of shit that makes turkeys gobble guy wrote in he was out hunting one time got all sick started puking rolled into dry heaves and gobbled up a

bird dry heaving out in the woods his buddy called he says his buddy called it and killed it a train engineer says that he can get him to he can get him to shot gobble with his train whistle says but it's so damn loud you can't hear the birds but he'll see him out in the field blow the whistle and see him stick their neck out and gobble even though you can't hear it he's up in his train engine so dry heaves and train whistles uh yannis's heart here's a good yanni gets i only forward yannis like a very small percentage of people concerned about his heart. You get any good tips off that? Well, you know, there were so many after my recent clarification, which I felt like I did a good job of saying, I'm feeling good, folks.

But people care about you. I know they do. But we got quite a few emails being like, oh, man, I know exactly what's wrong with you. You better call me or this, that, and the other. So I felt like I might have somehow miscommunicated and not given off the appearance that I'm fine. I'm doing good, and I feel comfortable with the situation. And so, yeah, one of the guys that wrote in was like,

dude, you got to call me. So I did. So I chatted up i got like a you know like a a um what do you call when you go back like a like a checkup um follow-up from a guy a doctor out of great falls was it a doctor that called you that you want email yeah oh so a doctor said call me yeah that's yeah and so it's good to know doctors because i email doctors every week where i got a question no for sure and it was good because i basically ran through everything and he's like sounds like you're right on track you're you're uh you know you've done all the tests that i would have recommended and you you understand what's going on i'm glad that you're on the aspirin today

and the only thing i would say is that don't wait until you're 65 to go see your cardiologist again maybe check in just a little more often always nice to have a second opinion totally dude you need to have doctors in your pocket man i'd like to have a doctor in each back pocket at all times because i because the first day a guy wrote in and yeah i don't know about like i hope he's not listening. No, it's fine. He wrote in and he's like, his buddy has to go down some kind of emergency and get an MRI. And the MRI machine is backed up. Okay.

So he's got to wait. And some doctors like, hey, as long as you're waiting, let's do the x-ray first to see if there's any metals to verify there's no metals. Like they'll add, cause you know, the MRIs are magnets. It'll draw the metals out of you. So if you got implants and stuff, they have steel,

but, but, and he says that, thank goodness. Thank God he did the x-ray because his body had inadvertently swallowed a piece of shot that was residing in his stomach and that that mri would have drawn the shot right out through now yeah for sure that's i verified that with my doctor friend d no d the doctor I should call D right now. So I wrote back and said, well, because he said it was from eating turkeys. And I'm like, but you were using steel shot for turkeys?

You sure you weren't using like copper plated lead? Mm-hmm. Or brass plated lead? They have both, I think. Because the magnet wouldn't draw on lead. Then, and then I emailed my doctor buddy, Dr. D, to ask her, the MRI wouldn't pull, like it has to be something with iron in it for the magnets to pull it. And she's like, yeah, and that's why it's standard procedure to always check people with x-rays to make sure they don't have any metal. And then the dude wrote back and said, yeah, in fact steel they were hunting turks with steel shot so it'd be pretty interesting to have that bb drawn out of your body a little pinhole you would it would now the

thing that would worry me call that interesting huh i would like it just for the story if it got drawn straight out but let's say it got sucked by a magnet let's say they put the magnet in top of your head pulled through your body and drew it that way man that's not interesting no but just a straight shot just like bounce across every vertebrae as it runs up your spine and then right through your cranium your Through your cranium. I don't know how strong the magnets are, but I felt that it'd be. You were just hoping for like maybe through the liver. No. Man, you'd hope they'd shut it off when you started screaming.

I don't know how fast it draws that thing in. I need to call. Point being, it's nice to have doctors you can call up and ask good questions to. No, here's another example of that. Steve and I guided a orthopedic surgeon in colorado this accompanied accompanied right we're doing a fundraiser that's right so we weren't being paid for this but yeah we hunted with them and uh i was always wondering what the actual name for what I call, refer to the pelvic crest on a deer,

which is like when you kind of break open its back legs and you slice away the meat and you've got what looks to me very much like a crest like piece of bone. You cut both sides of it. Yeah. And you pull it out. And just because I was, I don't know,

I was writing something about that, doing that process. And I thought, well, I don't know, I was writing something about that, doing that process. I thought, well, I might not be calling it the right thing. So figured bone guy. Or a speedy surgeon. Yeah. He didn't know off the top of his head, but he did a little bit of digging and quickly found out that it is called the symphysial crest. Is that right? Yeah. So I was right with crest. It's just not-

Halfway there. Yeah. So it is in the pelvic area. You know what a butt crack is called? Oh, technically, no, I don't. The gluteal crease. Oh. I like that. That makes sense.

I like that a lot. It just sounds so less personal than your butt crack, right? You guys ought to introduce yourselves real quick, by the way. Yeah. And what you do here, Sam Lundgren, Associate Editor at Meat Eater. And Morgan Mason, same, Associate Editor over here. Good stuff, guys. Yanni, real quick while you're on it.

Mm-hmm. Are you at liberty to talk about what's happening over your place tonight? Or no? Sure. Oh, because it'll be long gone by then. Yeah. What, are you worried that a party's going to be crashed? No, you might not like to talk about stuff that's happening at your house.

Oh, yeah, I hear you. I've been thinking about that lately too, about how much, you know, being that we're out in the public eye more and more and more and how much of that stuff you keep private. But no, I'd love to talk about it. Would you like me to? Sure. I wouldn't have talk about it. Would you like me to? Sure. I wouldn't have brought it up.

We're doing a little winter solstice festivities, which is going to involve... Pagan rituals? Yeah. Yeah, Yanni's into it. They celebrate pagan stuff. I'd say the biggest reason we're actually doing this and that my wife's interested in doing it Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, Yanni's into it. They celebrate pagan stuff. Yeah, totally. I'd say the biggest reason we're actually doing this

and that my wife's interested in doing it is the tradition of it. Yeah. So we've done it three or four years now, and whoever's with us over the holidays, we sort of... It's not always on the winter solstice, but even if we're...

We might do this at New Year's sometimes because you're kind of celebrating new year's ish type stuff right the ending of one year beginning of another whether you want to do that on the winter solstice when the days start becoming longer it's more logical yeah for sure the gregorian how does that how you say that the gregorian calendar it's more logical i don't know because that's just some arbitrary like like new year's should be right now exactly yep yeah either last night or tonight yeah it's kind of nice to think about that isn't it when you realize that that like tomorrow the day is going to be a little bit longer i spent like 10 minutes i spent 10

minutes explaining this to my kids but third thinking is they're like they want it to be real dramatic yeah you gotta move i was like no it'll be like you know like every day it'll be like sub a minute right and they thought for a minute i had their hopes up where they thought all of a sudden tomorrow's gonna be like hotter and balls light out till 10 p.m oh yeah that's funny uh but and you guys days, the Latvians, correct me if I'm wrong here. In the old days, the Latvians would get a hunk of molten lead and fire it into a bucket of water. Yeah, and we were thinking about doing that, too. And I think we've just, we just sort of ran out of time.

I'm still contemplating going by and grabbing a bunch of fishing weights. We used to melt lead with blowtorches. Get in there and huff that. It's good for your brain. Yeah, totally. You guys tracking what we're saying about throwing lead into a bucket? I am not. You know in some cultures you take a chicken and kill the chicken

and lay its guts out and watch how the guts squirm and then you can tell the future? I've heard of it. Well, Latvians, they like to take a hunk of molten lead and throw it into a bucket. Then you pull it out of the bucket and you get a candle going. And you throw a shadow of your lead shape because it makes a wild shape. You throw a shadow of that off the wall, off a candle, take a gander up there, and then see what's going to happen.

Yeah. Everybody else. It's like, we're going to get eaten by a large monster. Yeah. For everybody that's like seven years and younger, it's usually that. And there's always a lot of boats. For some reason, like a chunk of melted lead

that's just recently been reformed into a solid, a shape that it, or the shadow that it often throws is some sort of boat-like thing. Because everybody's going on a cruise next year. Or it could just be like something. If you predicted for me, if I throw my lead, and I throw a shadow up on the wall, and I look yonder, and I see a boat, and someone said,

man, I think over the course of the next year, you'll be in a boat. I'd be like, I think you're probably right. I got a feeling you're right. I went to a summer solstice party at an environmental historian's home who's been a guest on this show dan flores and he had the big you don't really have a spot for this he had a sundial on a rock okay so he could you know track the shadows throughout the year it was pretty cool and then right at the appropriate time everyone would uh at the time that he would

call he would say that this party was a collection of elite he said it was an elite group of hard players meaning an elite group of hard partiers. And everybody would be pretty partied up. And at the appropriate time, you would all dance. Like the shadow of the sundial throws in a certain direction. So as the summer goes on, days get longer, longer, longer. And you would dance in a reverse direction of the course that the shadow was taking.

And everyone, you know, all liquored up and everything, and you're all dancing and whooping and hollering around the dial for quite a long time. And it was like you were collectively harnessing your energies in order to send the sun back in the direction. It's like reverse the time stream. Send it back. Yeah. That's an interesting state of mind.

Yep. Summer solstice party. I mean, you know, it wasn't like, I don't think people thought that they were like literally reversing the course of the sun, but it was a celebration of, it was like. What is actually going on, right? They're saying that like there's going to be less sun now

and we're sort of going to help that along. Yeah, like it's getting too. too much too much you need to throttle her back a little bit and so you'd send the sun back down and it was a way of anchoring i think it's just like a nice way of anchoring your calendar yeah i like it yeah we tonight oh you know there's something about your heart i was supposed to bring up. Go ahead, Bobby. I don't want to get so far away from your heart that I lose my point. Okay.

Go ahead. Throwing lead. We're not going to throw lead. Is that what they call it? How do you say it in Latvian? Throwing lead, or whatever the term would be. I think it is. I think it's mest... Whatever the term would be. I think it is. I think it's messed.

Messed. Good job. Does your pop have the deal where he's like doing the signs on the body like he did up with the caribou hunt? No.

Like blessing the rifle? No. That's just for kids, you know. Okay. But no, messed Svino I think is what it's called.

I think it's to throw lead. Mest svino? Svins is lead. I thought it would be more like la-da-da-da-da-da. Yeah. Like most other Latvian words, it kind of sounds like that. So what's the process with the lead? You boil it down in something and just like have a pot of water?

No, so you just like have like a pot that you got at Goodwill that you're not going to use for anything else besides this and throw in uh yeah where do you guys keep the crucibles and a bunsen burner um yeah you just melt it down and then when it's in a liquid form you just take it and hold it right over the bucket of cold water and one fell swoop yeah the key is to do it fast and all at once, because if you drip it in there,

you can imagine what you get. That makes sense. You're going to see boat shapes, like with all that weight coming down, like how the water reacts with it. But I think people see the water, and it puts them in a boating frame of mind, too, perhaps. See both of that.

My old man had all the paraphernalia for dealing with lead. He had those sweet little, what is that material? It's like cast, but it's not like picture like uh it looks god i can't think of the word but it's uh you know like the super heavy cast iron things with a little spout on them yeah and you get like the little tippers and everything yep and we go down we had that we had the we had the molds to make your own fishing sinkers but we'd go down and get all of our lead out of the at the rifle range down the road we had a rifle range about a mile and a half we could

ride our bikes down a road that we dubbed dead dog road because strangest thing for a long period of growing up you'd look in the ditch off that road and would often be able to find dead dogs. We could never solve the mystery. Or magazines of a certain genre would be like what you'd find in this ditch. So we'd call it like our road at the end and then dead dog road to begin and down dead dog road. You go left into the shooting range. And we would would without doing any kind of things like putting flags up and whatnot to notify people that we were down there

we would go down with the sand of the sifter and sift out bullet lead and use that to pour up our own sinkers in our sinker mold but bullet lead there's additives in there. So normally when you bite a fishing sinker, it's soft. But when you'd bite our sinkers, you would hear your teeth go. Every time, because there was all those hardeners in there, man. It was a nasty fishing. It was a bad fishing experiment, man. Yeah, it was horrible sinkers, horrible sinkers. But we never thought to go get tire weights,

which most people who want to melt some lead up. That's what we always used. My we never thought to go get tire weights. Yeah. Which most people who want to melt some lead up. That's what we always used. My dad and I used to make. Nice soft lead. Buzz bombs and stuff like that. Tire weights. Yeah.

What's a buzz bomb? It's a long kind of diamond shaped casting lure for salmon that you can just huck a country mile off the beach. Oh, yeah. Because you guys were like Pacific Coast. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. We did a lot of you were throwing them casting for salmon mostly pinks and silvers but you'd run into kings time to time yeah oh man long along the west coast of would be island where i grew up when the pink salmon run was on like you you could go out to certain places and see a thousand people stretching

for a couple miles down the beach just talking buzz bombs and when you threw a bird down the beach they knew you were just saying hi one time when i was doing that i drilled a seagull out of the air with a buzz bomb when there was you know 500 people with inside of me and they all thought i did it on purpose when the worst thing was like i was kind of like oh there's a seagull coming by i didn't think in a month and you know a million chances how would you do it on purpose there's seagull coming by i didn't think in a and you know a million chances how would you do it on purpose there's no way you do it on purpose you a thousand bucks right there's no way you're gonna knock a seagull out but speaking of flipping

the birds there are some people who thought that was pretty uh pretty bad idea of me to do and and thought you did it on purpose thought i did it on purpose but i had to fight that thing all the way in pin it down unhook it it was pretty unpleasant with that oh not only did you hit it but you hooked it yeah you got you tied into them yeah if you're pulling drag oh yeah yeah it was up in the air then down in the water and squawking it's not horrible without an audience but it probably becomes horrible with an audience yeah worse about it well i've found throughout the course of my life that catching shit on fishing gear that isn't fish is generally unpleasant. Yeah.

Turtles. Yeah, it's never any fun. Never. Yeah, we dealt with the pelican once. I still need to get back to why I brought up your heart. Yeah. We got off of what we're going to be doing tonight.

Oh, because... No, you're having a solstice party. I just explained the... Yeah, winter solstice. I'm coming up with my boys. My daughter can't come. Oh, you guys are coming. That's good to know. I don't think you invited me. I think you invited my wife. I invited your whole family. But you guys didn't RSVP.

Really? I'm glad we know now. I'm coming up with two boys. Alright. We're ready for you. But what we're going to do, just so everybody knows what Steve will be doing and what he was doing on the evening of the 21st, we're going to have a bonfire. Throwing chicken guts. Throwing lead. No chicken guts. Bonfire.

We're going to drag a Yule log around the house. We're going to sing some songs. How do you guys feel about that? My wife thinks that Americans in general are very uncomfortable with singing songs in public. Oh, yeah. I hate it increasingly unless it's like it used to be way more common seems like yeah like i was just reading in the

paper some article the other day that like christmas caroling is like this thing that used to it's like we used to do it every year when we were kids yeah mrs babcock would organize it yeah and sure you kind of hated it but i think as you do it more, you kind of realize the benefits of it. I don't know. I feel like singing makes you feel good when you do it, and it's just interesting that Americans really don't like doing it. Well, no, because I always sing my song, Yanni, Yanni, Chimani.

I sing that all the time. Yep. We sing a lot, O-Hun. But no, when my kids have a birthday, and there's people over and it comes down to sing the birthday song, I'm never stoked to sing the birthday song. Yeah, that's not the kind of singing I'm talking about.

I know what you mean, though. It seems like it used to be a lot more common than it is now. So we're going to stand around the bonfire, sing a few songs, sing some songs while we're pulling the Yule log around. And then the real, well, that's part of the tradition

in the whole Winter Solstice thing. the tradition and the whole winter so how big is the yule log we gonna like need a team oxen or what no you know it'll be you just had your house redone you're gonna drag a log through it after no around it oh around around it you do it three times you know to basically bless the house and you know get rid of evil spirits and get it ready for the next year you're gonna lose a lot of people on that hill. I know. We have a corner, man, where there's not a lot of space. You just put up a rope. You put up a rope people can hold on to. Yeah.

Little carabiners they can clip into every time they come around the house. When it's done, you go to the bonfire, and then we have an axe. And you can either, you know, to everybody there, express in words what you're chopping into the log, or you can just keep it in your own head. But the gist of it is that you're chopping the shitty things from the prior year, the demons, the dragons, the battles, the hurdles, negative stuff, whatever, and you're chopping it into the log.

Out of your body into the log. That sounds cathartic. And then. I don't buy that. And then you pick up the log goes into the log. That sounds cathartic. And then, I don't buy that. And then you pick up, the log goes into the fire. I feel like every guy with a wood stove does that every time he chops. He's like, son of a bitch.

Exactly. But here, hold on a minute now. How is it that you're chopping it into it? I feel like what it should be, it's symbolic. I think it should be that you knock a chunk out of the log. The log is your everything. You come in at a 45, come in at a reverse 45, knock out a little chip. That's the, right?

Throw that in the fire. Toss that in. Well, those chips will be lying there. So if that's how you want to do it, you can throw a little chip in there for sure pretty subjective on the approach on this like you just have your angle know what you want to do yeah totally i'm sure there's some you know crazy real traditional pagan latvian that'll say no we're doing it all wrong but uh i need to get back to you why i brought up your heart but yeah real quick you guys would paint those buzz bombs huh yeah how would you paint them usually uh bubblegum pink what kind of paint i mean just like rust-oleum and i said

different stuff like i remember i was into powder coating stuff for a while but i can't remember if i was doing that for my steelhead jigs or buzz bombs i i don't i don't honestly remember but like hard enamel yeah stuff because you'd be banging it on rocks and all sorts of stuff i paint my own halibut jigs and that's always a letdown man yeah yeah it chips off so damn fast you gotta do it stays good yeah because then you're trying to put glow in the dark on there right right like powder a lot of times if you're just jigging halibut it's good but as soon as you start banging rocks for yeah halibut are typically over a sandy bottom yeah as soon as you're like banging rocks for ling cod or banging rocks for rockfish then you pull it up it's like all that hard work

he's got like a lead jig again yeah but i also kind of like ones that are a little battle scarred i've always uh always thought that it needs like a little bit of seasoning before something's fishing well especially with jigs like once it once there's a little bit of chip maybe it makes it give a little bit more of a realistic pattern or something i don't know i haven't noticed that i think that's in your head but what's in people's head is important man yeah i think so i used to hate talking with people about hunting gear and fishing gear and then they'd like something stupid and i'd be like man i think that's stupid and then they'd say well it works for I'd be like, man, I think that's stupid. And then they'd say, well, it works for me. And I used to not like it, but now I understand it and like it.

Yeah, I talk to people about that all the time, that what you're fishing is less about having it right from objective standards and more what you're confident in. That's what I say all the time with steelhead it's like pick a no don't pick like the fly that you know some professional things you should pick pick the one that you're confident in the one that you're going to feel like you're fishing well all day feel that like is working for you and and and have that sense of find that sense of confidence yeah and that's what's going to catch you fish,

not trying to rely on somebody else's expertise. Yeah, like this year, man, it's funny you bring that up because this year I tried a whole new kind of flutter jig for jigging halibut. And we traditionally always use just classic lead heads, but, I mean, they're 16-ounce lead heads, right? Like just a big lead head with a big j hook coming out of it and on that you put you know like your classic just like you're rigging up for smallmouth bass but

everything's like way bigger you got like a 10 inch grub body on it not 10 inch six eight inch grub body on it yeah and i switched to a flutter jig and at first you're fishing it and you're not fishing like you are when you're fishing something you love. But then, I want to, on day one, late on day one of halibut fishing, smack two very nice halibut. Then, you should see me fishing that jig. Yeah. Then, you're playing for keeps, man. I'm sitting up there just jigging, jigging.

Not like, you know, you're in it. Because you're like oh this thing works then you're fishing seriously so it's self-fulfilling right it definitely is it takes a while it takes a while to develop that with uh new patterns techniques all sorts of stuff and some there's a lot of things that i've just never gotten past it i was like i never figured out how to fish this never worked for me i've got probably boxes full of flies and and lures that i tried one time i was like i'm not really feeling it never really stuck it out long enough to make it work because

sometimes you just default to those things but then sometimes like that you're just like oh shit that's me that's me with any kind of um surface bait yeah i just like i just like, oh man, surface baits. Oh, I have a, this last spring I took my dad to Wisconsin on a muskie trip and a friend had told us to get this, this new fancy surface bait called the Whopper Plopper. I was like, well, that's the dumbest name I've ever heard of. And then I saw it and I was like, well, that's the dumbest looking lure I've ever seen. And it's, it's like, it's like a Zara spook, kind of like a, like a, just like a cigar bait, no lip, no nothing. But the back end has like a little fin and it goes blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, spinning around.

And you know how noisy muskrats are when you're swimming. Yeah, exactly. Real noisy. They're just like throwing water everywhere. But the wounded ones are. Yeah. And so I just, I just couldn i just i just couldn't i just couldn't handle it but he went and bought five of them of course and and then first day he landed

like a six pound small you gotta get a loan from the bank to buy five musky plugs yeah seriously he got a he got a huge smallie on it the first day and then a big musky on it the second day and then after he caught that his first musky on this bait that I didn't think was going to work, he busted out another lure that I had even less confidence in called the suicide duckling. Okay. Literally it looks like a rubber duck. These guys should get a job naming hot sauce.

Yeah, absolutely. This literally looks like a, a, a duckling. It's, it's, it's fairly fishy.

It's like head down. It looks like a duckling running away, which definitely does make a lot of commotion it's got propellers for the feet and it's got treble hooks sticking up all over the place and i was like you gotta be kidding me he's like i bought this i bought this lure i think it's awesome i want to fish it he and he just loves harebrained ideas for different stuff he fished that thing for 10 minutes and landed a 40 inch muskie right at the side of the boat really guy can pick lures yeah or he just fishes them with confidence yeah i know folks that swear by those two definitely the walk oh i both both of those things man i am completely i'm completely until last summer yanni and i didn't know. Maybe you did. I don't think you did. We didn't know that muskies

were all of a sudden in fashion again. Oh, yeah. That there's like fishing game agencies establishing them. Well, yeah, because my grandpa was a muskie fisher. That was my mom's father, maternal grandpa.

He liked to fish crappie. He liked to fish muskie. But he was fishing musky in native water right go up in north wisconsin and stuff and fish musky um and that was like his thing but i didn't know that they're making all these like super breeds of muskies and cutting muskies loose and all these lakes where they weren't traditionally been and all these like sterile hybridized muskies that just get bigger and bigger and bigger and never reproduce and it's like a big thing management practices when they're trying to get rid of a carp or suckers or put in hybridized yeah sterile musk exactly because they'll they'll

create a cool fishery they get really big but you know they're not going to breed they're not going to like you know eat themselves out of house and home like pike or actual muskies were. We've got tigers all over Montana. People get real fired up about catching them. Yeah, definitely. They're monstrous. When I was a little kid, we did. We fished this lake for bluegills called Wolverine Lake, pretty heavy.

They had tiger muskies in there, but they were all dinkers when I was a kid. The assumption was they were going to someday be hogs. You just catch dinker tigers. The reason I brought your heart up, a guy wrote in, which was a kid the assumption was they were going to sunday be hogs but you just catch dinker tigers uh reason i brought your heart up guy wrote in which is a doctor here he was talking about your in an email about your heart he pointed out that he had to take beta blockers yep he says that the medication has had an interesting and unintended side effect, which has made him immune to buck fever. Oh, that makes sense. He gets excited about seeing deer, but he never gets that feeling like his heart's about ready to jump out of his chest.

He's got that calm, steady hand. Because he's taking medication specifically meant to prevent tachycardia. That's right. Man, you're going to get a lot of listeners jumping on the beta blockers. says i'm no super hunter by any means but when this buck in the picture below came into view in october i was cool as could be yeah no i could see that but uh quite a few doctors have told me and all agreed that beta blockers also the young people don't like them because they slow you down so much. There's like a like for taking them you have a constant

lethargy. Oh, slow you down in that way. Yeah. I don't know if they take the peaks and valleys. They take the peaks out of life. No, no. Physically slow you down. Yeah. So if you're hiking a hill, you'd probably have to just because your heart's not responding

to what your body's asking of it, you'd have to stop more often. You're feeling what this guy's saying. This isn't psychosomatic. I've had the beta blocker chat with anybody I've talked to about taking it. If you're really symptomatic and it's bothering you, and a lot of

people like that like i had an anxiety from having those you know the symptoms but once i was told that there's nothing to worry about i was able to just put it out of my head and when it happens now i'm like okay it's fine and i go back to sleep or just go on with my thing a lot of people can't do that and the anxiety just builds and builds and builds, and so they're going to take beta blockers to deal with it. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes,

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

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

As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federaleral and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit OnXMaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. If it was happening to me twice a day, I'd probably be taking beta blockers. Because you just get sick of it.

Yeah, then just get into some kind of hunting where you don't need to do a whole lot of walking. But you need to do a whole lot of keeping calm. Sounds like whitetail hunting. Yeah, totally. Start living in a tree stand. Guy wrote in, remember we were talking about shooting

squirrels shooting squirrel nests when you're a little kid to try to rustle them out or like to try to get them i like how when we were squirrel hunting the other day your boy was like he's like just want to make sure but uh we can't shoot the squirrel nest right yeah with no problem yeah he like anyone independently it's nice when someone like independently discovers something that definitely occurred to him why not just go ripping a couple rounds up in each and every one of these nests and then we'll climb up there and have a look we'll climb up there and see what we got uh this guy's saying in some there's states that have explicitly state i haven't looked this up but he says there's states that explicitly state you cannot shoot

into a squirrel nest. Makes sense. He's talking about, he did it once when he was a kid and I don't know how the squirrel flopped out or he climbed up and got it out, but he took it home to his grandma and his grandma was pissed.

And she was yelling at him. She cooked the squirrel still, but she was yelling at him she cooked the squirrel still but she was yelling at him and she said that's like someone shooting you in your home which i don't want someone to shoot me no matter where i'm at yeah so if they're out on the branch or is like somebody shooting in your yard and that's all right yeah it's like oh it's chill man i was outside when i got i was asking for it um one last thing before we get into some uh before we get into some uh things that are more questions in nature but a guy was saying he's got this idea he's come to think of uh you know with people right you have like you have like high class and you know you

have class there's a class structure in america right there's like blue everybody talks about blue collar and and affluent. He views deer. He thinks that the deer that live on public land are blue-collar deer because they've got to put up with all the bullshit, man. Like getting shot at. Chased around nonstop. Yeah, and then there's the high-class deer that live down in the private land.

Nothing bad ever happens to them. Slowly walking around, immune head up i don't know how i feel about that feeding all manner of times through the day so so is it white collar people who are hunting white collar deer and blue collar folks like us on public land he says he's worked his theory up he's running by a few people everyone doesn like it. His wife thinks it's stupid. He says he's still trying to work on it. But the basic outline of it is there's blue-collar deer, and they're stuck on public land. All right, Yanni, what do you got?

There's some merit. Some merit there. I think it warrants mention. Yeah. All right. Some merit there. I think it warrants mention. Yeah. All right. Here's one. It's not on the big list I let you guys all look at, so this is a surprise question to you,

but I think it would be pretty easy. A friend of mine, Patrick Rodin, he's already sent me an email telling me what happened here, and so we have the follow-up already. But at the time when he wrote this, his cousin ran into a situation that he had no real knowledge on. He was wondering if we could weigh in. His cousin killed a large doe. And they had cold temperatures, so he decided just to hang it with a hide on and leave it.

Out in the woods are in his garage. Probably at home. He didn't say where, but he says he hung it and then he got to his place to butcher. So after picking it up, he realized that the face of the deer had been slightly chewed on. And I saw the picture and it looked like pretty much half of the muzzle had been chewed off. So he's got it hanging by the hocks. Yeah. He's got it hanging by the gambrel. Okay, his cousin thought

it was a raccoon, maybe an opossum. Could have been a dog, coyote, could have been all kinds of critters, really. That's why I'd like to know where this is. Because if it's in his garage, and his dog's in the garage, I've got it narrowed down. Case solved.

It wasn't your ma. Sounds like it was out in the woods and then he brought it back. Now his cousin felt that he couldn't eat it because of this. What? Because he's... The dead deer had rabies. Because there was a risk, possible risk, feeding it to his family. And at the time, he was going to plan on just burying everything and returning it back to the earth.

Oh, my God. That's wanton waste. That's wanton waste. He's got a deer, a gutted out deer hanging. And something chews on its muzzle, and he's going to bury the deer? Even if the thing that chewed on its muzzle had rabies. It was a vampire. Yeah.

Yeah. The deer's blood isn't circulating. I mean, unless you're planning on doing like head cheese with that deer, which like most people don't do, like there's absolutely no reason. It got chewed on by a rabid animal. Or a hungry one. Rabies is mostly eradicated. This is a dude looking to get rid of a deer.

Certainly there is that possibility but i think you guys should to us it seems like so well of course but i think to a new hunter you could see that and definitely be turned off and wonder like okay no which yes it could happen yeah yeah because i had a coyote eat on a or probably could have been a pack coyotes eat on a cow or probably could have been a pack of coyotes, eat on a cow elk one time that was left in the woods a little bit too long. Okay. And I came up to it and was like, I wasn't worried about, like, I was going to contract something, but I was definitely like, what do I do here?

Like, what? How much do I cut away? I'm factoring in. I'm putting, like, heavy emphasis on the fact that it's it's muzzle yeah for sure now if he said it ate all like eight half of each back ham i would trim i would definitely trim around that yeah yeah that's a different situation yeah okay yeah so i'm not gonna i don't think it's a stupid question it's my point yeah so patrick patrick had a chat with him and they they uh who's patrick a buddy of mine oh yeah

he's giving us some so this is from within your social circle that's why you're being so that's why no no no he's uh he's like an acquaintance through Meat Eater. Okay. But they came up with the solution to can the whole thing. And then by pressure cooking it, everybody felt comfortable that there was nothing. So, yeah. So, you're saying every time you open a jar up, you're like, well, boys, this meat's rabid. But I canned it. Was it? rabid but but i canned it was it what's pressure cooking gonna do different than any other kind of cooking isn't listen it's all in the guy's head right but he didn't waste the animal it didn't have to go back to the earth oh no god bless him i think he's a real winner. Disinfected deer. I think he's a real...

I think... I'm happy with the outcome. Okay, I hope you guys don't feel like I wasted your time. No, not at all. That's a great question. That's a great question. And we get a lot of questions

with people in situations that I feel are less obvious, such as having... It's typically coyotes, having coyotes, coyotes, eating hunks of your stuff. And then people often wonder like,

well, what do you do? That tells a story about my brother that had a bear getting messed his situation all up. That buried all that meat? Buried a bunch of the parts. He walked around digging it all back up, took it down to a creek, gave it it a bath and went home and ate it yeah nothing wrong with it that dude eat anything and it wasn't a rabid grizzly bear i don't know if he had he never got it tested but yeah i mean i don't think it crossed his mind

this is a guy that takes little bits of trim and puts it in a tupperware container and puts it in his microwave for his dog but ends up putting salt on it and eating himself one for you one for me oh yeah i i told you right that he was when we were in the tent this fall together he was telling me that he felt feels like tender meat and tender food is a fad that is going to go away yeah well there are cultures that would agree with them are there yeah don't you remember the chupac the chupac eskimo they were saying that the parts they liked are the chewy parts they talked about meat being too tender of the caribou that's right yeah

they like the you know unlike uh every animal all the ungulates have it but it's real exaggerated on like moose and stuff that like there's if you picture something spine like let's picture something that's got a real obvious hump uh like take like a moose right and when you got the spine you got the blades that come up off the spine those are called the thoracic And when you got the spine and you got the blades that come up off the spine, those are called the thoracic processes. When you got an animal like that and you go to the highest thoracic process, like on a buffalo, those things be

20 inches long. Moose got a big thoracic process. And then off that, there's that cable. It looks like a yellow cable, giant tendon that runs from, that's fixed into those things, runs along the top of the neck, and basically holds that head up. They were talking about liking to eat that thing.

What? You don't remember this? Sometimes I feel like you're not paying attention to stuff. I vaguely remember having a conversation about enjoying the the tougher cuts with those boys yeah like callahan's throat roast and stuff yeah which is a tough cut chewy cuts um and there are a lot of people who like prefer those chewy who like that chewy cut so i think matt could be onto something or matt could have been born into the wrong culture matt's wife was explaining to me how matt is he's in his tent he's in his teepee tent with his stove going so he's got like a collapsible seek stove and he's in there cleaning up a skull

an elk skull just on during a snowstorm and all the little scrapings that he's cutting off, he just lays it flat onto the stove. Like no pan, no oil. And just lays the chunks of meat out onto the stove. That's a good idea. And then just as he works, that's what he has for a snack. You want to talk about some tough bits, man. Right, yeah. That's the muscle they use a lot.

He likes a chewy bit. i feel that yellow cable's got to be the chewiest thing ever yeah i wonder if that's something that they're just like kind of chewing on to pass the time they're chewing on the cud yep they talk about like and they cook some chewy meat if you remember because they kind of like boil they boil but not for long. Just boil meat. Yeah. Remember that? I do. I remember not being real impressed.

They like flash boil the meat. Well, because they like to chew. They like to chew. They like to cud. Here's a good one. Have you noticed a difference in the taste of a fall black bear and that of a spring bear? Yes. Yeah, a big difference man and again it depends on we're gonna rule because everything gets squirrely no let's keep it open to the let's keep it open to nuance here

if it has access to marine resources meaning if it's a bear that feeds on salmon and dead seals it finds washed up on the beach and whatnot, I feel that they're better in the spring, especially fall bears that are on salmon. There are many, many exceptions. People are going to write it and be like, it's not true, but they are perceived. Black bears feeding on salmon are perceived as being borderline inedible. And in those marine areas, when bears in the spring are feeding real heavily on vegetation, beach rye, various things they find, and even little crabs and stuff from under the rocks, they're regarded as being much more palatable and better than fall bears i think that that becomes reversed for other reasons when you're talking about bears that are not have access to marine resources such as salmon runs

because in the fall they're eating a lot of mast they're eating a lot of berries they're putting on a good layer of fat. They have very good fat for making lard, and I think they're better in the fall. But I would suggest that it doesn't vary as much with interior bears. Not as much variation. Because, I mean, I've eaten a number of different spring black bears from Montana that were just fabulous.

Couldn't ask for anything better. Yeah, there's no off-taste in meat, but you don't have they're not as robust and fatty. Right. And bear fat's good. Yeah, but they'll still carry a pretty healthy layer of fat sometimes in the spring. You've seen them good and fatty in the spring? Yeah.

I can't think of ever getting one you could actually render lard off in the spring. But the spring's a big window too, right? I remember I got one on April 17th, which is early. You can hunt them to mid-June in Montana. Yeah the spring's a big window too right i remember i got one on april 17th which is early you can hunt them to mid-june in montana yeah there's some units and the guys up in canada they're hunting them into june by that time he's at two months to eat yep so you can be packing out some weight another guy wrote and he says does bear lard go bad yeah lard goes bad now lard by definition you've rendered it right so you've gotten the impurities out and you got the water out but i wound up just as a test when i the the the the animal that i wrote american

but they're kind of like the animal i wrote american buffalo about my book i i rendered a bunch of um he had a real orangey fat on them because they like, you know, process the carotene and things and they get like a nice orangey yellowy fat in late summer. It's my understanding of how that works. And I rendered a bunch of it out and made a bunch of basically beef lard because that fat's good. Oh, yeah. That fat's like beef fat. It's not like tallow. It's not like tallow. It's not like venison. It's not like the waxy venison fat,

which varies in quality throughout the country and time of year, I believe. But their fat's good. You can leave the fat on and grill it, and it's good. Does it have kind of the same color as duck fat? Yep. Oh, cool. Yellowy-orangey.

I did not know that. Yellowy-orangeyy like kind of a not great looking like imagine orange that has like a not super just yellowy orange okay gotcha leave it at that i rendered a bunch of it out because yeah there's a lot of it on there um and then i kept one i liked having it so much that i didn't jar it and seal it pressure seal it or anything i just kept it in the jar and i must have kept that stuff for seven i kept one little pint-sized jar just for just because i'd like to have it in my fridge i like looking at it um over time it was like this beautiful color in the beginning and over time it just turned kind of gray and eventually i thought some out and it had gone rancid it had gone rancid and if you leave that's

like one of the things like you if you leave so he's talking about bear lard which has been rendered but if you leave fat on a bear in your freezer it will it will go south on you in your freezer you need to trim that stuff off when you freeze bear meat but i don't know what it is about that fat but salmon fat goes bad in the freezer. Oh, it sure does. There's a lot of stuff that goes wrong with salmon in the freezer. I think that fat in general,

most freezers aren't keeping it cold enough to preserve it. The only reason I know that kind of, and I feel like it would work with wild game fat and does work with wild game is because an uncle of mine owns a place where they sell Dippin' Dots ice cream, I believe is what it's called. I hear about that all the time, but I don't really understand what it is. Yeah, I've never tried it myself either.

But it's so high in fat, I guess, that they they had to put in when they became a purveyor of this product they put in a freezer that's the first time anyone's ever said purveyor on this show i guarantee it i like that that uh it's got to be kept at like minus 30 or something instead of just zero like a normal commercial freezer is or whatever and he killed an elk and he's like yeah man six years later still eating on that thing and i swear it was like every bit as good as it was you know six months after it because he had a high class freezer yeah because he felt like it was keeping it so cold and just preserving it that much better yeah those dip and dots are a weird consistency i could see how you'd maybe have to do something different

so you just take him like a one roast per christmas and that was it seriously i'm through an elk in six months go ahead yanni or anyone um yeah well we all decided that this um was a good question and this guy actually prefaced his question with i'm hoping that it's the question of the century. Yeah, I don't need to hear that. That's a high bar. I don't need to hear that. Keith, I can tell you that it's not. But we're getting a laugh out of the way you're presenting it. So he asks, let's say you're on a budget, and God comes down and holds a gun to your head. Okay.

And for tracking. And God comes down and holds a gun to your head. Okay. And forces you to choose between high-end boots or high-end glass, meaning optics. I'd turn around and grab that gun out of his hand so fast. Yeah. But let's just say. I don't think it's— Oh, you're saying it's not fair. It depends on what you're doing. You're saying God's not being fair with that question?

No, I don't want to do that. I don't want to's... You're saying it's not fair. You're saying God's not being fair with that question? No, I don't want to do that. I don't want to blaspheme. Yeah. But I'll say that I got to know more. I got to know what you're up to. If you're a chucker hunter, boots. Good point. Good point.

Let's say big game. Let's say Western big game. Optics for me, man. Optics. I feel like I like nice boots, but you can get a good pair of boots for less than you can get a really expensive pair of boots. That's a good point. Yeah, you just keep wearing out cheap boots. The disparity is not as much.

And if you had to, you could hunt in bare feet and make some moccasins. Yeah, and the thing is, too, if you buy right on Nox. Lost you. If you buy a pair of Vortex Nox, you get great Nox. They're not going to kill you on cost. And even if your house burns down, they they replace them as long as you got something to show for them yeah you still got the lanyard and even the most expensive boots i've ever had in my life they still last me like a season and a half but you can't wear out boots and send them in

you can wear out knocks and send them in you can with some companies i sent in a uh sent in a pair last year and they rebuilt them for me for like 30 bucks. Oh, rebuilt. Yeah, that's true. Just put new soles on them. They didn't put a new sole on them for me. That was like another like 125 or something. I was like, yeah, these will just be my shit kickers.

Schnee's Pack Boots you can send in to get redone. And like White's Pack Boots you can send in to get redone. These are Kenetrex. Yeah. Got you. Okay. so you can a little bit but not the same way you're not bringing them back to 100 i'm still not giving it on the fact that it just really depends but in general let's say okay so my life the way my life is like what i do all the things i do man it's really tough because it just really depends i said a thousand times i've yeah but god's got a gun to your head right now man well i know that's that's why it doesn't like equivocation let's go let's go to last weekend squirrel hunt pretty

mellow walk about nox right you're still gonna. I could have been out there in flip-flops. I wouldn't have liked it. A bit. Even kind of. Morgan, you're with Knox, too? Yep, I'm on the glass. Sorry, Keith, good question, but not the best of the century. To be the question of the century, you're only going to live, like all of us in this room, we'll touch into our early eighties and we'll die.

So that would have to be, you didn't even get a full century when it's all said and done. Generally, he's saying that he would have had the, so in all your entire life, that that would be the best question. Like you're on your dying bed. I need to know.

You're dying. And like someone says, you know, in all these years, man, like, you know, as you fade out of consciousness, what was the best question you've ever heard, right? It's a really obscure hypothetical I came up one time and emailed to a podcast. Yeah. It's kind of like the ever debatable question. People are expecting him to be like, what's the meaning of it all? Or like, is this really the end

or is it only the beginning? But he'd be like, God has your boots. You got to lean down into his ear to hear it or into his mouth to hear it. What are you saying? Okay, here's one. Why are some squirrels tougher than others?

I think it's age. Definitely. Why are you peeking over my area? I think it's age. Definitely. Why are you peeking over my area? Because I want to see what you're working off of over there. I'll show you. Why are some squirrels tougher than others? Are you getting frustrated with what's on my area? No.

Not at all. He was cooking up some buffalo hot legs. Kudos to him. He's cooking up some buffalo hot legs from the Meat, Eat, or Fish and game cookbook available now and uh and he's noticing how some are real a real bite and some are just phenomenal and he says it doesn't seem to be related to size i think i believe that it's a function of age well is he is he assumed he reassuming that he shot all those squirrels in one outing? Because if one was sitting in the fridge or freezer longer,

he could understand why the meat would have aged. Good idea. Yanni's going to start a thing. Can I talk about this? I think so. I don't know what you're talking about. For questions like this for questions like this where you go you get the question you're like yeah there's got to be more

to the story yeah yanni's gonna start a thing called ask the eagle where you get where when when you're like what really happened because it'll be like someone will be like, oh, you know, I was out, and a guy shot at me, and I shot at him. Who was right? It'll be like, I just got to have to get him on the phone to find out a little more. So this would be a good thing for Ask the Eagle, because then you can dig in and get him on the phone

and find out what exactly. Because he might not know to ask the right questions. Yeah, there's a lot of factors that go into that kind of stuff that can be pretty easily missed. I didn't start to pay attention to aging until a couple years ago. Oh, I'm not saying aging. Age. Yeah, yeah, no, I agree. Yeah, I'm addressing both, I suppose.

Because in Escoffier's cookbook, Le Guide Culinaire, he says that he only will cook a rabbit if you can tear the rabbit's ear like paper. You should just be able to grab it like you're ripping paper. It's true. Young rabbits,

like a young cottontail or a hare, when it's dead, you can grab its ear and you should be able to go like this and you can tear the ear. That's a young cottontail or a hare, when it's dead, you can grab its ear and you should be able to go like this and you can tear the ear. That's a young rabbit that is okay to cook. And he could afford to be picky. I mean, he's like a chef of kings, man. My brother's first rabbit would have been perfect for that.

He was chasing a rabbit around a brush pile for like 45 minutes and he probably had 10 holes in his ear. From the brush? Well, no, from him shooting a.22 at it and missing and just hitting his ears. So it was like perforated. brush pile for like 45 minutes and he probably had 10 holes in his ear from the brush well no from him shooting a 22 at it and missing and just hitting his ears so i was like perforated so then yeah he might have had a false positive yep uh does scoffier mention what he did with the rabbits that whose ears he couldn't rip he probably would have ground them up and used them for dog food no

he would have ground them up and used them in in p no he would have ground them up and used them in in pates and to make canals and stuff like that would be my guess but for these you know for his preparations of like whole muscle preparations he'd like to be able to tear the ear and then you knew you had a nice tender specimen i might start doing that and then i'm just gonna turn my other rabbits like kevin murphy did into uh brats it's not a bad idea because man those were good yeah rabbit brats yeah white brats dude you gotta ask i forgot about those rabbit brats yeah those were delicious son of a bitch we should put that in the cookbook what kind of spices you throw in there like what's the flavor profile oh man i don't know if i can remember off the top of my head oh like just for brats yeah well for those yeah like white pepper

coriander there's a bunch of things you put in brats yeah people put mace in their brats yeah that pretty classic beer bratty you know not italian not you know there's no spice, mild beer-brotty kind of flavor. What else you got? I got a list as long as you are. Speaking of eating wild game, he says it's a wild game logistical question. He hasn't found a definitive answer to after a decent amount of research which is so i'm just guessing that nobody's written a blog post about it i've searched high and low he's not the library looking up the car he opened up the card catalog how much wild game do you think it takes

to feed a family of four and then specifically he asked you guys keep track of how many animals you and your family eat in a given year it's hard to answer just depends on your habits right like uh well let me give you for instance i was having this conversation with brody here you got family of four very strict wild game diet Brody's got through a cow moose, a cow elk and a buck that's like eating at home and when you're eating at home

he throws down heavy on game a variety of small games thrown in I kind of look at it because I get to do a lot I get to do a fair bit like, you know, I get to do like a fair bit of, it's harder for me to answer because we fish a lot, small game a lot, but then the other thing is, is we, when we're out, like most of my hunting is when we're out filming the TV show.

And so then we have a crew and with our crew, we divide out. So like if we get an elk you're like oh there's an elk but then it's it's a sixth of an elk or a fourth of an elk when we divide out for because we split out for the crew yeah so i never get like an accurate count and then i also get a lot of stuff from buddies right where buddy mine will whatever buddy mine will get a wild pig and he'll be oh you know here here's a pig leg and and then later i'll catch some salmon and i'll be oh bro here's a couple salmon flays so it's like i never like look at it in terms of but brody has a good count but that's

that's not extreme but it's pretty that's a lot yeah but it seems like a lot, but I don't think it is. I know that before. Because he's devoted. Yeah. Before I had kids, because kids and meat eater kind of started at the same time for me. But prior to that, my wife and I would go through two elk, no problem, every year. And it wasn't like, you know, we ate elk, but it wasn't like we were trying to eat elk five times a week you know just like what we when we ate red meat that's what we ate but it was no problem to go through two two cow elk yeah it depends on how you're cooking too because if you get like if you're sitting high on the hog right and you got a full freezer which is how i look at it i just always watch in my freezer levels but

you know if you're sitting pretty you might be doing things you're doing like big roasts if you're sitting thin you might be making like fajitas or something right where it's you take like a you could have family of five so you get one pound of like a one pound roast out and make like a dish that that has like the nice flavor and it's fun and everything and it's like a wild game dish right but it's not like you're sitting down and laying out big rolls where people are eating wedges off that thing so it just depends so much yeah i feel like i've heard like one guy can take down an elk throughout the year. That's kind of the ratio. Sure.

But it's subjective, like how you're eating. Absolutely. Yeah, but I think that one person who's a dedicated wild game eater puts the elk in the freezer, and you got like a... With that, you could probably even be having a little breakfast sausage now and then. And when someone says an elk, that could be as little as 65 or 75 pounds of meat. If you shoot a calf. 250, 300. Yeah, exactly. So big variance there.

Yeah, I'm going to get better at that. You know who I'm going to ask and we'll bring this up again. You can't get better at it. There's no answer. We gave the answer. No, because listen, what you could do is by weight. Oh, I would love to know that. You could very easily just have a scale in the kitchen,

and every time you go to cook, you just weigh it, make a little note somewhere, and at the end of the year, you tally it up and say, you know what? We ate 300 pounds of elk, 30 pounds of turkey. That'd be a great idea. Perch fillets, be like, oh, there's two pounds of perch fillets. 2019, starting soon. Write it down.

There you go. Let's do it. Yeah, that'd be cool, man. Have a little list. You take it out, weigh it, write it down, and then you'd be like, oh, so we ate 70-some pounds of venison, 13 pounds of perch fillets, six pounds of catfish fillets. And then if you wanted to, you could take average. 0.25 pounds of sea cucumbers.

Averages of all those animals. And then you could say, I ate roughly. X pounds of wild game. Two elk and roughly four turkeys. Yeah, man, because I feel like I could, not a stuff I kill, I mean, I'm mostly cooking for one. I could eat wild game breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day of the year and still have game left over. Yeah.

Then you got like social media personalities who, there's no, you can't account, there's no possible way to account for all of the stuff they kill. And they're like, wild game, bro, wild game, bro. And you realize, dude, you shot thousands and thousands of pounds of meat. Where'd that all go? Donated. Yeah, you wind up like,

it's just like, I know enough to know when, like I know enough to know when I see something a little fishy and then you kind of know enough to know when you... Yeah, I don't know. Nothing but tenderloins all year. I've had people level that at me.

Last year, I killed a bull elk, a cow elk, and two mature mule deer bucks, and that's way more than one man can eat in a year. But I went home a couple times and filled my Yeti 105 to the brim and gave it to my parents gave it my cousins gave my uncle and you party with it yeah exactly smoke some and party with some it's a fun thing to do and then like do some charcuterie just like kind of like play around with some experiments of what you want to do absolutely and none of it's going away when i live in seattle i practice a lot of wild game diplomacy with the people around but that with that kind of thing i would uh because i i lived around a bunch of people

that had no connection to like it's kind of a little connection to fishing like absolutely no connection or idea about hunting and um and i'm thinking primarily of my three most immediate neighbors, and I would bring them a lot, but I would bring them not so much, sometimes frozen, but I would bring them recipe-ready stuff. Not like you're trying to dump some frozen game bag full of hairy trim off on someone's doorstep, but I would bring them like here's the thing right it's trimmed here's what i would suggest you do with it i'll text people

a recipe you know here's a fish fillet i pulled the pin bones and and it was it was cool man so yeah yeah i do do a lot of i do give and receive a lot of uh wild game gifts but here's another way to approach answering it let's say you take a turkey so you got you you're you and your husband you and your husband you shoot a turkey and you're going to cook for you and your husband i think that you have each lobe of the breast is a meal or two for you and your husband the two drumsticks depending if you're like if you're made let's say you make soup with the two drumsticks there's a couple of meals a few meals for you and your husband and you smoke up the wing pieces and add them to a gumbo or whatever and there's like an additional part for the meal or you take all of that you got a big old tom that

tom weighs 20 pounds you take all that you want to make breakfast sausage out of it you wind up with like eight pounds of turkey meat you cut in a substantial amount of pork trim so you put in four pounds of pork trim you make a 12 pound batch of apple turkey breakfast sausage out of the meat eater fishing game cookbook say um and then you fry up little patties for your breakfast and stuff you could eat it 25 times there's lots of great ways to stretch it out like that. What's next? You got one? You said you had a list a mile long. Yeah, but why don't you hit

me one of yours? I can keep going. I'll do one. Lots of questions about this. What are those little things that are on the end of y'all's shooting irons? That's what he says. Is it tape? Do you just shoot through it? Does it affect the bullet? Why is it even there?

Yes. All of the above. And no. So it's yes and no. I'll start with the yeses. Yes, it's tape. But it could be any number of things. It's common practice if you're around mud, if you're around a lot of rain,

especially rain that could become freezing rain. Snow. If you're around snow, you could get things that obstruct your barrel by getting into your muzzle. It's a good idea to keep that stuff out. You can keep it out. There's thousands of ways of doing this.

Some guys will use finger cots, which is a little condom-looking, prophylactic-looking little dealie. You know what prophylactic means? It just means disease prevention device, something that prevents disease. It doesn't necessarily mean a prophylactic, how you'd use it.

Put a finger cot over your barrel. I don't like those because they break, and they seem to get brittle when it's super cold out, and they just don't last that long. Or you can take a little piece of Ziploc baggie or anything and place it over the muzzle and wrap a piece of medical tape, which is what i do quite often over it electrical tape you put a piece over it and then put a wrap around it to keep it from

peeling off i mean there's a thousand things and it's just to keep junk out of there yeah the thing i think people are really afraid of that can cause real trouble and injury i've never had a barrel blow up from numbers from an obstruction but the stories you hear would be that you got a bunch of wet snow in there or you got a bunch of water in there and then it got cold and it froze and like formed a block of ice that was like adhered to the walls of the inside of your barrel, or the inside of the bore, and you could potentially blow your gun up. Yeah, because of the amount of pressure that can build up in there.

Either that or like a wet mud, like a clay mud or something like that. Yeah, the stories you hear most are something got in there and froze solid. But I've never had that happen. But I just it because why it's so easy to do it and there's no negative like why not do it if you're in a place that's real wet and nasty yeah and i've had i've i've been asked this question a number of times because i've always my whole life i've put electrical tape around the barrel of a gun i mean my dad taught me that when we first went deer hunting so it's always seemed like normalest thing in the world but a lot of friends have asked me about that and people are always well does that mess with your bullet flight does that slow it down like

man i really don't think so like you know rifle blast the muzzle blast that tape's probably gone before the bullet even gets there yeah this last trip home i went down and talked to a buddy he's like friend of mine from high school, and he turned into a Kansas Highway Patrol state SWAT sniper. And I asked him specifically on that, and he said that the gas is pushing forward, knocks that out way in advance to affect that bullet. There's nothing wrong with that.

Yeah, I've talked to all manner of high-end shooters who would know enough to know and the consensus for sure is that it it doesn't do it and it went early on when i really first got on to doing that if i had something heavy like like electrical tape i would oftentimes if i was in the moment of truth i'd oftentimes catch myself reaching up there to peel it off just out a little bit of nervousness but uh yeah i've shot through it many many times um i haven't done a lot of i haven't done like a rigid round of range testing on it it'd be interesting to do it be interesting but i just there's so many people whose opinion i trust who i've talked to about it that it's yanni's got

opinions why are you sitting there though so quiet um no mean, I can just say that I've tried it at the range, and I've shot the same size groups shooting through tape as I have, you know, just without tape on my VR. Be a fun little video to shoot. Yeah, for sure. There's people that have done it on the old YouTube. Oh, I'm sure, man. But, yeah, it's the way to be, man.

Keep it protected. Okay, your turn. You guys got a burning one here? Yeah, I got one I'd love to talk about. Go for it, Sam. Yeah, I was looking at this one. This guy says, I joined Instagram recently and have already seen a few instances

of anti-Road Hunter sentiment. Of course, it shouldn't matter to an ethical law by any hunter what others think but I was curious what exactly counts as road hunting on the extreme one could strictly define it as someone who drives around all day glassing from the truck or ATV really rarely leaving the car until an animal is found is this actually illegal in some states is a parenthetical clause but there's a spectrum here i wonder what the where the line is typically drawn hmm you want to start i'll start i don't give a shit go ahead

this is coming from a guy that does a fair bit of road hunting meaning like like he's right it's hard to define if the other day we were day, me and Yanni were out messing around and we stopped a vehicle, rolled the window down, and we're glassing some sandstone outcrops for cottontails. I mean, let's be straight. If we'd have found one, we'd have gone

after it. Yeah, for sure. So it's like right there. There's a spot I want to go check for cottontails not long from now, and what I'm going to do before I get rolling is I'm going to go and check a bunch of little willow bottoms that I could pretty much look out the window to see if they're tracked up.

I keep a window mount and my spotting scope in my truck so i can just roll down the window mount up the scope and look out that's yeah but is that scouting or is that hunting well i was damn sure hunting the other day when i was looking for cottontails on those these outcrops because if i would have found one i would have got out i would have got we'd have got the kids out and gone and went after it. And we'd have glassed it up from the rig. I think when people use road hunter in a negative way, it would be like... Slinging the rifle out the window. Rifle barrels out the window.

I've seen that. Like shooting out of the... Which is illegal. So it's illegal to shoot out of your truck, depending. It's illegal to shoot out of your truck if you're on a maintained road. So you can't shoot from across from the right from the legal right away of roads so i think when people talk about a road like when you if someone uses road hunter

negatively i think it's like someone whose hunt plan okay their hunt plan is to drive around heater blasting um yeah eating chester fried chicken they bought the gas station pepper bit schnapps knocking that back with the plan being that they're gonna find something and shoot it from out the truck window uh laws be damned i don't know like that's what comes to my mind well and there's a lot of western hunters who who don't want to shoot a deer or an elk more than quarter mile from the road because how the hell else are you going to get back to the house and everyone looks like you could be driving along um headed to a place that you intend to begin walking i've had this turkey hunt drive into to my turkey hunt spot. I remember one time I was with my late buddy, Eric Kern,

and we're driving to our turkey hunt spot. We cross over a drainage, and we look and see some turkeys. Err! Right? We were actually, and truth be told, we were actually heading to a place. We hunt turkeys in a place where you had to hunt it realistically. You had to hike in and sleep out. But it wasn't like we like we see these

turkeys and we just pulled over and went and started to try to work the birds so someone'd be like oh there's a bunch of road hunters but you know it's funny you mentioned at the moment at the moment you caught me sure friend of my dad's when i was growing up i remember we were turkey hunting in eastern washington and i remember him saying oh even if i saw a 30 pound tom from the truck i'd never shoot it never i'd never shoot an animal i spotted from the truck and he spotted from the truck yeah that's because you're not hunting you're not out on foot and that was just like that was his own like ethos around i would never say yeah i would never block a fella from having his own everybody sets up their own guardrails. Right. Absolutely. But I mean,

I've done that. I've done that too. My deer camp this year, the first day we drove out there, we, we saw enough bucks between our campground and the trailhead that we all could have tagged out in the first hour of the first day. And none of us took a shot because we were just getting out there and we're just like, ah, this isn't how we pictured it. This isn't the experience we were looking for. So I think that's what it comes down to for some people. So I wouldn't begrudge folks who don't feel comfortable walking around a lot to back roads of Montana, driving around, trying to figure out where the deer are

and then get out and do it right. But personally, I like to be a couple miles back with a backpack on, glass in, and feel like I'm, you know, engaging with the environment. The other day, I had all three of my kids, and we were going out to sit for whitetail does. And we had a pop-up blind set up 150 yards from where we could park and right away we pulled up lo and behold out pops from windrow out pops bunch of does in range and we still got the back of the you know back of the truck open my boy was like

very interested in us getting this taken care of right here and now and i didn't because it wasn't what i was trying to demonstrate to them yeah we had gone and put up a pop-up blind we're talking about the need to be sitting and quietly waiting and how all this worked and that, that they would come out to feed at night. And right. And then all of a sudden he was pissed, but it was like, no,

cause this isn't like, I'm showing you a thing and this isn't what I'm showing you. I'm not showing you this. Right. Right. Um, if it had been like the last day of the season and we'd put in our time and we're going back after our last morning hunt and out pops them out of the windmill right down the road, it's just a different situation. It's not like something that you can explain or prescribe to another individual and be like, oh, no, here's what you should and shouldn't do.

It's just like you, it's just, you're always just running in your head, man. You're always running in your head. Yeah. I always, I always encourage people to just, you know, try wandering around. Cause I know. Learn a little woodsmanship. Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's, to me, that's what's fun about hunting is the exploration aspect of it. And, and so many, so many people just don't feel

like they can you know know how to break down an animal that they can't drag to the truck or or know their way to you know how to figure out how to get back to the truck and yeah i mean i understand that but encourage people to learn and say that it might deepen the experience the other thing about that makes me uncomfortable is that different people have different abilities yeah and people have some a lot of people have pretty serious disabilities man so you're like oh yeah road hunters road hunters they're no good it's like you know what there's a lot of people i mean they don't have the luxury man yeah because of any number of things age physical, physical condition, disabilities.

So it's like I hate to like, you know, to act like all, like the, I hate to act like there's these like broad condemnations of behavior that exist out there when it just is like, you know, it's almost like you got to know what's in their heart. Yeah. I'm supportive of people getting out hunting. Yeah. It's hard to know what's in someone's and and honestly like if if there's guys doing that i mean it's that's not really affecting what you're doing if you're hiking you know deep into a wilderness area i mean if anything they're proving your point that you know getting far back getting away from the road is beneficial because a lot of a lot of

people do hunt from the truck a lot of people hunt for the truck who wouldn't even admit that they hunt from the truck yes so it's a i think doesn't doesn't affect me as long as they let me get by them when they're creeping up a forest service road at five miles an hour thinking they're sneaking up on shit they are you've been off quiet i've seen thinking they're sneaking up on shit they are i've seen it they are sneaking up on stuff man it can it can be a uh a tactic that works you know do they take out like a prius or something that's that's that's silent under a certain rpm i don't know it's like the old rancher man that drives like animals never scared of the ranch truck, right? Because the ranch truck just drives all over the ranch every day.

But yeah, as long as it's legal. I mean, I've done, I've done, I want to say my fair share, but I dabbled in shooting some deer literally out of a truck where it was legal to do that. Where? Once you're on private property? No. In, like you said, unmaintained roads you know in nebraska and um it was novel at the moment but by the time like my third doe was dead this is back when they had a booming deer population we had lots of doe tags to fill um it's like okay that was enough of that you know i'm gonna go take my rifle for a walk just out stacking them up like cordwood in the back of your truck yeah yeah exactly and like

the first two evenings it was like wow never thought you know just because i didn't grow up you know you couldn't do that in michigan right some guys use some guys love to see road hunters because they're like oh man you know that area you're going to go there and you're going to think it's super crowded but it's all road hunters just cruising the roads so don't worry about it meaning that there's still you're gonna it has the appearance of being overplayed yeah just like over the ridge but it's not overplayed because the minute you like hike down in some little spot that's that you can't see from the road that's a big thing that's a big thing with antelope oh absolutely they're like a big thing with antelope hunting there's i think there's a lot of people who have the mistaken notion because it seems like you're in flat open country that feel

as though when you take gander out across the landscape i can see all of it they feel like they're seeing it and you're just not there are so many dips in pockets and it's just like you get out and walk that stuff like i don't care if you look and you see like i can see clear to you know yonder mesa you don't head toward that mesa same direction you're finding all kinds of animal that you do not see and so it's um yeah i'll oftentimes get out like think you've seen it off in the truck we would get out and hunt the same country and have a very different experience bumping animals along the way having very different experience than you what you thought you were seeing when you're looking out unless you're looking out in a salt pan you don't know what's going on

hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in on x are available for your hunts this season the hunt app is a fully functioning gps with hunting maps that include public and crown land hunting zones aerial imagery 24k topo maps waypoints and tracking that's right you were always talking about uh we're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast.

Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more.

As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Ready for another one? Yep. What's this fellow's name? Who cares?

Before I get to that one, Chuck's wondering what your uh thoughts on the flick jeremiah johnson are i mean i've talked about that it's great one of the greatest movies ever made damn straight greatest movies ever made the ending of that movie is one of the saddest things um One of the saddest, most contemplative exchanges ever captured in American cinema. Loaded with symbolism.

Wonderful movie. There's a little, little, a corny moment, a corny moment or two that I wish they would have chopped out. Splashing around the creek trying to catch a trout and that and i'm particularly thinking like the great character

bear claw chris clap one great character played by grandpa walton um uh little little corn pone you know but my god does that movie wind up just being like being a pretty profound movie about loneliness i need to re-watch it can you show it to your kids yet wow no i'm glad you just brought it up if i'm gonna holiday movie holiday movie well you know it might like it might there's parts of it that would confuse them a little bit there's there's some there's death you know there's like death and insanity and stuff in there that might be confusing to kids, but they can hack it pretty good.

In terms of kids, I'm usually in favor of... I'm usually a little ahead of the... I get them rolling on stuff earlier than you're supposed to in terms of what you expose them to. Kind of going explanations with them. Opens up good conversations, man. Opens up good conversations. Yeah up good conversations yeah i'm not like one of those i mean they've got you know there's i'm sure there's like a lot of great parents who are very you know want to have like the world's all innocent and all

that and i don't know i don't know what you get from painting a picture of the world being all innocent children what's that naive children's what you get personally that's my feeling on it but i have but but again you know if i could have had parallel lives and raise some one way and raise some the other day and then compared them at the end i don't have that luxury so it's just gut instinct and i don't want to dog on any parent who who who i don't want to dog on parents who are real protective but no we kind of roll out the ugly realities and the beautiful realities um with that said, I would show them, but I have not yet.

It's a profound movie. I think it's a profound movie if you look at it in the right way and pay attention to the things that are said. Especially the end. When he's cooking that rabbit. That's going to be a tough-ass rabbit. The way he's cooking it.

I'm not picturing that scene. Just a skinned-out rabbit stuck on a skewerwer it's probably been 10 years since I've seen that you're gonna be chewing and the thing is he's cooking a rabbit on a spit and I'm telling you he goes and tears off a piece of that rabbit he like tears off his shoulder

off that cottontail and I'm like bullshit you braised that rabbit yeah yeah maybe he was lathering it up with something he had a raft and foil and then he's just putting a final little singe on it but he's yeah he's cooking he's cooking up a rabbit me my buddy ben freed and we were little kids would cook cottontails that way and i'm telling you man but he's cooking he's got a high above the buddy Ben Friedman, we were little kids, would cook cottontails that way. I'm telling you, man. But he's cooking. He's got it high above the flame.

He's got the right idea. But he tears off a hunk and throws it to Bearclaw Chris Clapp. And Bearclaw Chris Clapp observes how he's learned to cook rabbit very well. But still, I wasn't buying it. Lance wrote in, and he says, Hold on, what are you going to say about Jeremiah Johnson? Why did you ask the question? I gave the answer. Why don't you have an answer?

I got nothing to say about it. Why'd you pick it? Because I thought it'd be interesting to hear your answer. Doesn't it specifically ask Steve's opinion? It does, actually. Oh. I mean, I think it's a good movie. I couldn't articulate it like that

and I haven't digested it quite to the point that you have. He's coming up from the Mexican War. He's damaged goods. He's got PTSD, what they'd call it now. You gather

he's been damaged from the war. Comes up the trap. But he's too late. The beaver market already collapsed. It's a sad movie. If you're listening properly, it's a sad movie. Anyone would know it's a sad movie. But there's some good stuff.

So we got one from Kevin, and it's one you guys have already touched on but it's about bird hunting and like how to pull shot and like being scared about giving people who are just getting introduced to the uh to wild meat um so it's firstly after cleaning 10 or 15 birds of my own prior or with no experience i got a lot better at the process. However, no matter how to go about it, he's still finding shot in the birds. And he's wondering, is there a reliable way to like give this bird meat to people without having shot in it? So the first thing I would say, like I've been like a lifelong bird hunter out in Kansas. And one technique that I just found was like taking the birds whole, putting them in water and like sprinkling in like a couple teaspoons of salt. And like when that shot comes in and hits the bird and hits the feathers, it will like bring the feathers along with it in most cases. And what I found is if you put it in overnight in the fridge, like that salt water will actually pull the shot and the feathers out of there.

I don't understand how that happens. I don't know either, but like it brings it to the surface in most cases. And so I just pluck it right off the edge of the bird, toss it away. It's not foolproof. It doesn't pull all of them, but it brings a lot of them up there. Otherwise, you just got to breast the bird out, massage it down, find the BBs in there, maybe slice it up and then take the carcass and use it for stock. Some birds you can hold a breast chunk up to a bright light

and you can see the shot. Yeah, if you breast it out, for sure. It's a working man's x-ray. Get yourself an MRI machine. Yeah, run through the MRI. Yeah, no serious bird hunter does that. I was on MRI. You know, we talked about getting the feathers out,

but a great trick is to take a toothpick. Mm-hmm. And sometimes you can pull a shot, too, if it dragged a lot of feathers or hair into a cottontail. You put a toothpick in there and twirl it, and you'll pull the hair, squirrels, anything like that. You'll pull the hair out, and oftentimes you'll pull it out, and you'll have a little bit of shot.

It's like locked up in there. Yeah, because picture like a comet. You know, haley's come twain was born the year the haley you know the haley's comet comes every 75 years he was born was born the year it came and predicted that he would come in with the comet and go out with the comet and went out with haley's comet really yeah anyways picture a comet when you see a picture of a comet and it shows like the rock and it's got the flames that kind of wrap around the front and trail out in the back yeah like a shot goes in there like that

dragon hair like flames yep and you put it in pull it out that's the noise it makes but the brine one man i don't it worked for me i don't know i don't know if it's like something with the osmosis or like i don't know like when like brine or salt like it does draw things out of the meat but i i don't understand i don't understand how that would actually expunge the shot like i was just brining it loose well no i'm thinking that it's bringing in the salt water right like it has to equal and it's bringing in the salt water, right? Like it has to equal, and it's in that brine. That's what's going on, right?

Is that the brine is penetrating the meat because it has to become equal between the two states of liquid in the meat and then just the liquid that's in there, right? Yeah. So maybe it's pressure. Maybe if it's just pulling in, then it might be, and it's going in through those pores or whatever, it just might be sort of plumping up and then pushing out. Kind of like popping a pimple.

That's another way to get shot out is just pimple popping. That's how you guys, I might talk about this before. We one time got a moose we were 20 miles, we flew in on a raft trip so we flew in off a highway up

20 miles up a river in order to then float back to the highway this is up in alaska and right where we landed the furthest point we got from any i mean you're nowhere near any kind of permanent structures we killed a moose that someone had shot in the butt with a shotgun long ago is all healed up in there but all these shotgun pellets i picture him him you know they move quite a distance throughout their life i picture him getting into someone's garden or something what size shot was it very small it looked like seven and a half or eight shot all over under his skin man oh that's gross was it all no it was like yeah yeah it was totally healed up that's

interesting totally healed up and it was just like you could just see it you know that meniscus like not a meniscus but like that what do you call it man like the like right under the hide it's kind of sticky dermis whatever that like the when you pull the hide away it's sticky right yeah like the fascia it was just like the the bb's were just in there and they were kind of like healed up in there a little bit huh and the hide didn't have any kind of there's like a discoloration on the hide but the the holes and the hide were gone wonderful it was like a guide giving it like the uh get out of here get out of camp the old ryan callahan smell me now you know he's like smell me now mister now it seems like a real alaskan move to shoot a moose in the ass with birdshot to get it out of your garden. Yeah, for sure. Should we hit another one, Yanni?

Yeah, I think we got one more. Time for one more. This found one I kind of liked. We could answer. If you had to choose one antlered game recipe to help introduce kids to a wild game, what would it be and why? Oh, I know exactly. See, it it's tricky i was just thinking about it's tricky because my first thought was well it'd just be freaking taco night

man because you can serve regular old american tacos with ground up cat meat in it and everybody's like sweet tacos but that's not necessarily helping introduce your kids to wild game maybe the idea of it yeah because you could feed them a beef taco and say yeah man you're eating elk and the kids are like great i'm eating elk so they're okay with the idea but i think you're disguising the flavor if you're actually yeah exactly so if you're actually sort of like trying to be like hey this is what wild game tastes like i think you're gonna have to be a little more nuanced and sort of pick something that is wild gamey, tastes like wild game.

You could pick it out as wild game, yet the kids are going to like it. The other evening, I served, just happened to have a very small, like bottom round roast off of an antelope. Wasn't going to be enough meat, so we also had two whitetail dough tenderloins. And I can tell you that it was all sliced up. It had been done like we do the perfect roast, which you

can find in the Meteor Wild Game cookbook, the recipe there, how to make the perfect roast. I cooked all three of those pieces the same way. Seared them up, olive oil, salt and pepper, finished them in the oven, sliced them up. To what town? seared them up olive oil salt and pepper finished them in the oven sliced them up i yanked them at like 125 ish that's what i usually go chili no no man once i let them rest they rise at five to eight degrees and it's their money anyways that i put a little bit of each on everybody's plates and it didn't take them long to be like to know that the one's a little bit of each on everybody's plates, and it didn't take them long to know that the one's a little bit smaller and rounder.

That was the good-eating one. Really? Oh, yeah. They're all over that tenderloin. The bottom round off the antelope was awesome too, but it just didn't have that melt-in-your-mouth-ness of that tenderloin. I don't know. I'd go with that, that man because you definitely know you

can taste that you're eating wild game it's got salt and pepper on it that's it but it's good it's really good so go the prime cut i guess is my simple prime cut i put up a thing on instagram about this but not long ago i had some uh mountain lion tenderloins and i did like how we i did like like doing the perfect roast as described in the meteor fishing game cookbook which is available now um seared them seasoned them salt and pepper seared them fired into my oven but i was kind of running a little bit behind schedule and like with little kids you gotta get the show on the road right because people gotta yeah they want to time the mess around you gotta get them to bed so i pulled them out i was kind of trying to rush things pulled them out and you can't eat

mountain lion rare you got to cook it you got it you know you got to cook it to 160 pull it out and i was like damn it was it i pulled it too quick still a little you know you don't want to explain that to your wife that everybody the kids all got trichinosis so uh i had a bottle i was like how am i gonna get this done like instantaneously because once i made i i was trying to roll it and i'm like man you shouldn't roll that you know and we had mild we had mild barbecue sauce um in the fridge a bottle of mild barbecue sauce in the fridge and i just put like a few glugs of that where I had a quarter inch of barbecue sauce in the bottom of the same skillet that I'd seared it in. And I put those slices and just simmered them in barbecue sauce. Because I'm just trying to get it done and get everybody fed.

Man, they loved it. Loved it. But my kids have eaten so much stuff, they don't even, it doesn't register. You could tell them. They don't have the apprehension because they never had the luxury of, or I shouldn't say the luxury. They've always had the luxury of just eating everything. So they're not suspicious of anything.

They wouldn't know. You could tell them the craziest thing in the world, and they wouldn't know to think it was weird. So it's not like you're overcoming prejudice but they that was a dish they loved and it makes me think of remember that blackberry dish i cooked a little bit which had that sauce that was made out of basically melted brown sugar yes and you serve it over rice yeah i believe we call it meat meat candy dude kids love that dish man we put that on the website at some point in time i don't think it's still there we need to revamp that recipe yeah it's basically like making mongolian beef um you know that's my brother was trying to make my brother who came up with the recipe was like

messing around trying to make like some dish from pf chang's or something you know his kids got hot on the mcdonald's and uh he started cooking halibut just like how they make chicken mcnuggets and they thought they were eating chicken mcnuggets wow dude speaking of some good fried fish um i had somehow ended up with i don't know if it was from a shoe that we did or if you gave it to me but the tony c's standard fish breading dude i ran out of just my whatever you know seasoned flour that i normally have i didn't have any corn i saw the box sitting there and so i went with that and man just seasoned just enough but not too much i was really impressed that's why it pisses me off when you talk up old Bay. Dude, I'm a big fan of Old Bay myself.

You're from the West. I know. They're two separate seasonings. I'm not saying one is better than the other. I view it like when it comes to seasonings that you can buy at any grocery store in America, there's two kinds of people. There's kinds of

people who think you can lump everyone into two categories. Yeah. There's two kinds of people. There's kinds of people who think you can lump everyone into two categories. Yeah. No. There's two kinds of people, man. What if you're feeling like you want to be authentico Spanish or Mexican?

What if you want that flavor? You can't, you're not getting that out of Tony Caesar all day. Then if I'm doing that, then you know what? No, it's not the only thing I eat.

I'm just saying like we, it was framed up as an either or. I think it was a listener question. That might have been, but I'm not falling into that trap. Okay. Well, when we got in that argument about Tony C's, someone from the Tony C's family, Sacheray,

everybody writes in, oh, you're going to say it this way. I just say Tony C's. And I've talked about it before. For a reason I don't understand when I was in college or called Uncle Tom's. I have no idea why. They sent me a care package.

And in it, in it was like a marinade. And I cooked some golden-eyed ducks out of that marinade. Oh, right. You said those came out really good. So, but yeah, it's a good breading

yeah it's a lot more fun to me you know you really ought to learn how to make your own and i know you do but it's it's like for there's a lot of good breadings out there yeah well i don't know a lot of times a lot of times those store-bought ones have that real like i'm gonna call it msg flavor but i don't know if that's what i'm saying maybe they're just over salty is what i'm trying to get at, but I just feel like I can taste something that I don't like. It's just too much usually. Where I felt like this one, I was like, wow.

I was pleasantly surprised that they had an over seasoned, an over salted. Got you. You know what my old man bought by the case? I didn't have fried fish that wasn't made in this seasoning. He bought frying magic. I remember that stuff. Blue box. He bought frying magic by the case.

And he had a cupboard in the garage where he kept peanut oil and frying magic and paper towels. Nice. It was like his stash. When your mom did those, you were describing how she used to do uh chicken thighs and like she'd do them in the pan and then finish them in the oven yeah very good you do and squirrels good that way yeah and i was thinking that uh my uh that was frying magic great okay it was okay because i want to say wasn't there a product called like shake and bake oh yeah people did the same exact recipe with yeah she would work it up and i should call her to double check but i feel like she would work it up with frying magic and she'd do squirrel

same way same breading start in the pan then she'd take a big sheet pan and line it with foil and put all those squirrel eggs on there and and throw it in the oven and you can cover it too that's kevin murphy he covers it and then cooks it in 300 to help tenderize it. A little moist heat. You guys got anything to add to the introductory log game? I'm on your line

of thought. Primal cuts, nice and tender. Just keep them as plain as possible but season them up just a touch. Don't let them dip the shit in ketchup, man. My old man had a ketchup. We were allowed to dip deer heart in ketchup. We couldn't dip normal deer meat in ketchup when I was a kid. Yeah.

We definitely have like a, this is an okay ketchup and mayo meal. For some reason, my kids freaking, they're just as happy dipping in mayo as they are ketchup. But we definitely run rules. We're like nope this one nope you just you're just gonna eat and when i was a kid i just put ketchup on everything doesn't matter you've grown out of that you do that yep but you've grown out of it oh yeah i still like i still like ketchup quite a bit but i definitely don't don't put it on my deer steaks. Yeah. I have another buddy who I guided with for quite a few years, and I was just the guy that would often cook in camp when there was no cook and clients were out or whatever, and we'd just be hanging out. And oftentimes I would spend a bit of time cooking up something,

and then he'd sit down and bust out the giant ketchup bottle and just over the whole plate, man. It kind of would hurt my heart a little bit, you know? I'm like, I guess if that's how it is, that's how it is. Need to take your beta blocker. Oh, last thing real quick. Last thing real quick. The Meteor live tour, man.

Live tour. Go to themeateater.com. You'll find tickets. You'll find all the links to get all your tickets we got shows coming up various things coming up you have to go look i'm not gonna bore you with all the details right now but stuff coming up most of it's already been announced tickets are available uh reno salt lake city sacramento cleveland kalamazoo schaumburg which janice pointed out is basically chicago houston dallas port, Seattle, Lander, Wyoming, Austin, Texas, Boise, Idaho. Meet Eater Live Tour.

Get your tickets. That's my concluder. That was a good concluder. I don't have one today. You boys got a concluder? I'm all good. Anything you were hoping to wedge in there? Any little snubs?

Anything bad you wanted to say about Yanni? I'm interested in what's going to happen tonight over at the house. Oh, throwing lead and guts? Yeah. Dragging the Yule log. Next time. you along next time Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this.

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hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints We'll see you next time.