The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 152: The Nipple And The Funnel

Episode Date: January 21, 2019

Steven Rinella talks with Jon Edwards of Schnees, along with Ryan Callaghan, Ben O'Brien, and Janis Putelis. Subjects Discussed: Steve and Cal’s wild meat shop; waterfowl gizzard pickling and the art of making confit from Canada geese; pro-foie gras people and the Anti-Funnel Fois Gras Society; Jon’s in over his waders; Cal’s pastrami recipe; the angel, the devil, and virtue signaling; hunt purity; more on Bigfoot people; the toughest animals to spot; super poachers; Hollywood's depiction of rural folks; synergy, show business, and muzzle control; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Cal, tell these guys about our little meat shop, our meat shop we had going last night.

I'm pretty excited about it. This is actually... Are you journaling right now? Yes, I am. Tell them about our meat shop. It's a new year, Steve. I've got some new resolutions I'm tackling. So very fortuitous that John Edwards is here

because we went down and shot a pile of honkers and some ducks. And Steve and I were cleaning our pile of birds and decided to do some batch cooking or some putting up of wild game. If we were nice, we would invite John since he took us hunting. I was waiting for the invite. Oh, last night.

We would have invited him over for our meat project. But we didn't do that. Now here he is and it's embarrassing. You guys suck. You know what I almost did too? What makes a good hunting partner? We made duck stock last...

Or I finally canned my duck stock last night and I almost brought you a jar. Almost. I thought about doing it and I haven't written it off yet. I just thought, you know, I should bring one of those to John. I was sitting there by myself,

by the fire, plucking birds. It would have been nice to see you. Just kind of lonely, a tear in my eye, man. The reality, we didn't come to the conclusion until well into the cleaning process. It was still like, I'm going to clean my birds, you clean your birds. And at one point we had three kids

crawling on the counter, plucking individual feathers out of birds, helping. Wanting to be the one that gets to cut something. Yes. Give me the knife. And, but yeah, so we decided that we're going to do a group kind of pickling of giblets, a confit of the thighs and legs, which I'm super excited about because I've never actually done that.

It's the best thing on the planet. Go on and I'll talk about that for a minute. Yeah, we needed to find that one because I was still, the definition for me still wasn't 100% until you walked me through it. And then we are making pastrami out of the breast, curing the breast. So it is a charcuterie. It wasn't a meat shop, it was a charcuterie. It wasn't a meat shop.

It was a charcuterie shop. Because confit falls under charcuterie. It does? It has to because it's a preservation. Let me walk you through this real quick. Which I wasn't aware of. I don't know if this is true, but I've heard this as being true.

Are you familiar with foie gras? It's a food that i'm kind of uncomfortable with because not because of the end product but because of how you the process of foie gras is produced foie gras is basically a really tasty diseased liver out into a duck's mouth and force feed it. Well, here's where it gets tricky. One might look and say that they force feed the duck all this grain, way more than it would ever eat naturally. And upon force feeding, it causes it to develop a very large fatty liver.

And that is foie gras. This practice is illegal in some places. Pro foie gras people will say, you know what, bro? Those ducks line up for it. Like when you pull that funnel out, it's like getting a dog. It's like filling a dog's bowl. They come a running or so I've heard. Like I'm not a subject matter expert on foie gras production, but that's what it is. Someone like, so if you get a wild duck, someone told me once, and again, I don't know that this is true,

but I like this because there's a tidiness to this, that if you, when you butcher a foie gras duck, that duck has so much body fat that you can harvest the liver and that one particular duck would have produced enough fat to confit its own thighs and legs. I can attest to that.

You've done, you've tortured? No. Okay. But I didn't even force feed them. We fed them a lot of shit because I know because they were eating all the chicken food and so eventually- These are the ducks that tried to also molest the chickens, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Isn't there a poor man's foie gras where you don't force feed them, but you just feed them a lot? Right. You know what? I didn't even think to look at the livers, but I can tell you that when I cooked them- Why not?

You're a thrifty dude. I don't know, but I might've not been the one that gutted them. My wife might've gutted them and I thought about it. Anyways, my point is, is that when I cooked them, we try to roast them. And I even read about this when I was going to roast these ducks. A lot of people said farm raised ducks, man, you gotta be careful because there's so much fat. You'll literally end up like, you won't be able to roast it because it'll just kind of baste itself and boil itself in its own fat. There's so much. I like that. Yeah, it sounds good.

It's kind of what happened. But after we ate the duck, I realized that between what I had in the pan and that was still like attached to the skin, there was so much fat. I was like, I got to do something with this. So then I took all that and rendered it. And I think out of two ducks,

I ended up with three pints. No. Yes. Really? Wow. And it's some good shit. Let me tell you. That's enough for confit, right? I know. Yeah. I got Really? Whoa. Wow. And it's some good shit, let me tell you. That's enough for comfy, right?

Oh, yeah. I got a little jar of- Plenty. I mean, a pint, that would be three cups of fat, I think, would be enough. And this involved no funneling at all. No funneling. I'm against the funnel. I feel like this-

Listen, man, the funnel is- The minute they start feeding something and involves a funnel it's wrong i found that anytime you're jamming a funnel in anything anything or anyone's orifice this is orifice you're you're on thin ice you're on thin ice funnel to change your oil maybe yeah yeah for sure because i i do have to get a whole lot of beer in your system very quickly. That's also- That's your own. Here again. That's the opposite of your liver.

That's the opposite of your liver. Okay, similarities between a funnel and a nipple. Can you hold that thought? Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. Okay. You're feeding calves. You're bottle feeding calves.

You're bottle feeding lambs. They'd line up for the nipple. And there's- How much of a difference is there between a funnel and a nipple? A funnel implies to me. A funnel implies to me that there's a forcing. A funnel is an involuntary action. I'm not talking about in your own experience, John.

I'm saying relate it to the farm animal. Yeah, I'm pro nipple, anti-funnel. I think we start the anti-funnel foie gras. Dude, here's the thing, man. You're going to get in over your waiters. This is a complicated world. There's a thing like Hudson Valley. There's a place.

You know what? This is not a well-managed conversation. I need to back it up. First off, Ben O'Brien from Hunting Collective is here. Yes. The beautiful and lovely Ryan Callahan is here. And John Edwards and, of course, the Latvian Eagle. Now, okay.

This is not a well-managed conversation. And there's a lot of parts floating around right now. So give me a second. Confi is, basically, it's like you're simmering meat in fat. It's an old timey thing because what it does is you simmer it for many, you take meat and simmer it for many, many hours in fat and rendered fat. So it's clean fat. There's not water in it and chunks of meat and whatnot in there and not blood, just pure fat. You render it in it. And then when you store it, you store it

where it's the meat, the cooked meat is submerged under fat and it's an anaerobic environment. People even to make it extra anaerobic environment will often store it and then pour in a quarter inch of oil on top of it so that it's encased in fat. It's cured, cooked meat encased in fat. In the old timey days, you would take your pork confit or duck or whatever and you go down and put it in the root cellar where it's kind of cool. And it was a non-refrigeration storage technique. And like many of these techniques

that came out of something practical, like smoking, right? Like smoking was invented because it would, you could put meat and put smoke on it and dry it out. The smoke keeps insects away while it's volatile, right? Salting meat was a preservation technique. Over time, we don't need to do it anymore because we have fridges now and freezers and shit like that. But it affected our tastes and we now like

smoke. So now you can even buy smoke in a bottle, which some guys think is a real sin, liquid smoke. But it's like smoking was a thing that came out of a practical consideration and became like a culinary tradition. Confit still tastes great. To make duck confit, what you do is you cure, you're basically curing the legs for a couple of days and just putting salt on them and good stuff to eat on there. You can do it with citrus peels, garlic, bay leaves. Some people put some pink salt on there to help the color,

to give it a nice color. You cure the meat for a couple of days, and then you simmer it. You're supposed to simmer it in duck fat. But duck fat, to a wild game man, duck fat is a pain in the ass. That's why, now that I'm trying to pick up the scraps here of our conversation, that's why we were bringing up the old thing,

like that if a big fatty domestic duck will make enough fat to do its legs. When we've collected fat out of mallards and collected fat out of Canada geese, I feel like it takes 10 or 20 of the things to get enough fat to do even a small batch of corn feet. So what we started doing earlier, I would collect my own duck or goose fat and render it and then go online and buy duck fat for like astronomical amounts of money for little teeny tubs of duck fat. Quit doing that. Would supplement with lard. And now I just do it with lard and any fat I happen to have laying around. How's that?

Well done. We caught up? Is that kind of pulling it together? Yes. Yeah, but why not just farm raise some ducks and make your own duck fat? I'm not a farmer. I'm a hunter.

Okay. Well, that's a valid response. You ever read the Old Testament? Jacob and Esau? I'm Esau. Okay. Yeah, I know that. Yanni's Jacob.

Raising them ducks. Who gets to be Jesus? I'm not touching that one. Easy there. So making the confit. And what we'll do is I will absolutely share that with you. You store it in the fat. And then what you do is you just absolutely share that with you. You store it in the fat. And then what you do is you just reach in there and dig out a little bit of that goodness.

It's all encased in fat and you can put it under a broiler and crisp it up. Or you can pick the meat because you cook it for so long in the fat at like 180 degrees. You put a candy thermometer there and cook it for five or six hours at 180 degrees. And it's nothing like if you were boiling it in water. I mean, you're boiling it in fat. You can pick it and it shreds. And then you put it under a broiler and it turns beautifully crispy. And then you make a salad and put that in the middle of the salad.

Telling you what, son. People that don't like geese, think geese don't taste good they haven't had this so did you guys uh pluck all your geese pluck some of them pluck some of them um you ate you had a roast goose for christmas right yeah but that was my brother shot that oh okay he brought that out he gave me that goose for christmas oh which is like weird it's like giving a guy that a coal miner coal for christmas he's like you know i got you for christmas this goose i was like you don't say i got a bunch of those i was just messing with my freezer you hit this on the highway on the drive over didn't you? No, but I saved that fat because that goose,

I roasted in a pellet grill. A Christmas goose. You know in a Christmas carol? Yeah. Charles Dickens. Biggest goose in all of London. Yeah, Bob Cratchit. He buys a Christmas goose.

We roasted that goose in a pellet grill, but I was worried about all that fat causing me all kinds of trouble. So I put it on a rack over a roasting pan. That thing had a ton of fat. And I poured that fat off and saved that fat in my fridge. And then we were also pellet grilled two whole mallards skin on,

which put off more fat than the goose even. Wow. And saved all that. And I got that in my fridge right now. So where we're at on the confit process, we're basically, we did the prep and step one. So I had never done this. I thought we were immediately going to start

simmering stuff and fat, but you do a salt cure, a dry brine. A couple of days. A couple of days. And then do you rinse that? Rinse all that off. And then it goes into the fat. Then rinse that all off, dry it, pat it dry, then put it in the the fat and then five or six hours at 180 degrees and then you uh pick the meat out because you'll have some settling in the bottom there'll be some

fungation in the bottom of the pot okay pick the meat out put it all nicey nice into your container in the olden times one would store it in a crock uh which have kind of fallen out of favor crocks you'd start a ceramic crock i put it in a crock, which I've kind of fallen out of favor, crocks. You'd store it in a ceramic crock. I put mine in a glass jar. With the fat or just the meat? No, pick it out because there's the fungation in the bottom that you don't want.

Yeah, but in old times, you kept it in the fat, right? Well, I'm guessing you strain it. No, I'm not done yet. Okay. Pick the meat out and lay the meat all nicey-nice in your receptacle. Then you take the still liquid fat and pour it over while keeping one eye. Do you strain it? Just put a strainer on there?

No. You could. No, because all the fungation goes to the bottom. The fungation is at the bottom. So you get your, again, get your meat all laid out all nicey-nice, and then you pour the nice, pure, clean fat on it, watching to not get,

when you get down to the water and whatnot that came out of the meat, is in the bottom. Make sure not to get that in your container. Gotcha. If you strain it, any liquid that's in there is going to go that way anyways. Does oil float or sink? Cal?

Oil must float. Oil does float because that's how they spray that crap that makes oil settle. When there's an oil spill. When there's an oil spill, yeah. So that's how you make it. Then you let it sit in your fridge for a couple weeks. I was reading your recipe card. And then you eat it. It said, your recipe card said a month.

Or three months in the freezer. I've kept it in. Yeah, in the freezer thing, three months in yeah and the freezer thing three months that's my buddy who's a chef so he's always careful about that kind of stuff when i put something in the freezer unless it's fish i think of it as being like good in perpetuity once in a breeze like i'll eat that sometime in the next two years but no he's real because he's he's got a he's a professional chef. Matt Weingarten. I just read on

Food Republic's website, six months fridge. Yeah, I've left it in there a long time. But again, you'll tend to have chef guys being, they're always throwing out their spices after three months because they don't have quite the nice smell they once did. It's just different being

a home cook and being a professional chef. Can you do goose confit? Yes. That's what we're making is goose confit. Which is better, duck or goose? Duck. I like the size of it better. Nothing wrong with the goose, but the size of it's nice

because then you can put it in a wide mouth mason jar. It's hard to fish a goose's leg out of a wide mouth mason jar, but we're doing with Canada's. What about the pastrami? Are we ready to tackle that one? Talk about that, Cal. How'd you wind up with your special pastrami cure? Oh, a buddy of mine that I met,

you know that conference that you and I went to down Jackson Hole? Oh, yeah. Hard to forget. Yep. Almost some fists, almost some punches thrown at shift. Um, well, a great, uh, connection, um, that I made down there was, um, there was a guy who had a bunch of, he, I think he had like Buffalo Reuben sandwiches or something at the, at something at the dinner night, the night that you

spoke. And his place is called Sweet Cheeks Meats. And it's a butcher shop down there in Jackson. And this guy's name is Nick and it's him and his wife. And they, you know, he's like, yeah, man, I got nothing wrong with hunting. He's like, but why would I ever hunt? Everybody just brings me meat. And so I swung into a shop. He's like, why would I ever get a job if it just brings me money?

Yeah. Yeah. Which I totally understand that. And so I went in there, picked his brain the next morning on my way out of town and we've just been kind of staying in touch. You guys became email buddies is what you're trying to say.

Yeah, pretty much. Yep. But it's great having a butcher as a resource and chatting about different cuts and things. And they're like a whole animal butcher shop. So they're putting up tons of bone stock and they're, they're using everything and whatever they're not selling, uh, to people they're selling to people as dog food. Gotcha. Yep. Um, and it's a cool operation, but anyway, um, he gave me some duck pastrami one day and I thought that that cure that he used was really good. And so last time I went through, he's like, hey, I got some of this.

So it's tailored to waterfowl. It is, but it's domestic waterfowl, right? I was aiming to use the goose pastrami recipe that can be found in the meat eater fishing game cookbook available now, everywhere books are sold. But we diverted from that plan to use your buddy's stuff yeah and uh we're probably short a couple of key items in there in the recipe book too judging from what we ran into last night too so in the old in the rinella family spice cabinet yes so we're making

it slap your mama no i know that's a hot. I mentioned that last night, though. Did you? It's a hot sauce. It is. It's good. First had it on steelhead, I think. It's a good spice for steelhead. Oh, it's a dry spice? Yeah.

Slap your mama. I think it started out as a hot sauce, right? I don't know about that. Oh. The way I've had it was a dry rub. And you liked it? Yeah, it was really good. Do you like us less because we had this meat party and you weren't there i'm a little disappointed yeah when we share some of it with

you you'll feel better you know when a guy stays up all night and drives all the way to dylan you know it's no love oh dude i feel really guilty about it watch this transition. You know that pastrami? What state was that made in again? That mix? Cal? Wyoming. Did you guys hear about the guy in Wyoming that in September hunting the Wind River Range?

Hunting elk. I feel like you guys already know about this. We talked about this. You might not know about this. He's hunting elk. I just read about this yesterday. And finds a bull pinned under two trees that fell over. No way. Live.

No way. Yeah. Pinned by his right beam is under two. He said roughly 10 inches in diameter, 25 feet long. Pinned down. Been kicking all night, it looks like. He's dug out a tr diameter, 25 feet long, pinned down, been kicking all night it looks like because he's dug out a trough where his feet lay. He said there's dirt scattered up to like 20 yards away.

And he's like at this point so tired that he's not really reacting to the dude standing there. He gets up to 20 yards, say, when he realizes. So was it two bulls fighting and got wedged or did it like he had he postulated a theory in there that perhaps they were mixing it up a couple bulls scrapping i mean what are the odds you're just cruising through the forest and yeah but people get killed by but think about people get killed by fallen limbs man dude i know you like we'll ride into clear trail in you know august or july and it's unreal how many trees are frigging on the trail.

I mean, they come down. Yeah, I can't even tell you how many times I've been out in the woods, right? And you hear, you know, were you by yourself? Did it really happen? Yes. If a tree falls in the forest. If you're by yourself and a tree falls, did it really happen? I think so.

I think it made a loud racket too. If there's an elk under the tree, do you? Yeah. It's one of those weird things that has to happen. But to be out elk hunting and the guy passed up a bull that day. Yeah, it's just bizarre, man. To go down and find a bull alive pinned under a tree crazy he says his initial feeling was to cut it loose but he ended up sticking an arrow into it but he wasn't

able to cut it loose he tried to move the tree it said he tried like didn't have a chainsaw of course yeah you know the problem is and the problem is you never right because because one might be i could picture a scenario in which one later and i'm not accusing anyone of this at all i could picture a scenario in which one might later um tailor the story i I don't know. I don't know. So you're saying you think... I don't know that it would be... Okay.

I don't know that it would be that I tried my damnedest and unable to find a way. I was at my wit's end. I was resorted... My only last resort would be to shoot it. The only humane thing to do. The only humane thing to do. The only humane thing to do.

I don't know. Don't know the feller. Don't know. I'm just picturing me. Let's say Ike was stumbling through the woods and there's a live bull laying under a couple of trees. I don't know. I feel like I would have tagged it.

Yeah. Yeah. Depends on a lot of things. Yeah. I would have tagged it. Yeah. Depends on a lot of things. Yeah, I would have tagged it. I would have taken some pictures. I probably would have gone live on Instagram. Hey, guys, look at this. Yeah, and I feel like people,

there's probably a lot of people, Brody sent this to me. He's like, I bet you people will be a little bit up in arms about this. I don't know that they will. I got a lot of, me and Yanni did a podcast where we talked about we would take a tree stand if it was left in the woods and people were like, I thought you had morals.

I'm like, if it was left in the woods in public ground where it wasn't supposed to be there, it's trash, picking up trash. This is kind of a similar thing. On its face, it seems like something you may not want to do. But when you look at it from a practical level, you should do it. Here's one for you.

What do you do if you come across in bow season a dead bull that's recently expired? That just happened to my buddy Greg Blazkowicz. And let's say it's a really nice bull. That's happened to him. How nice. Just happened. blaskovich and let's say it's a really nice bull that's happened to him how nice just happened let's say we survey that bow hunting public what what do guys do in that situation because i got a story happened two years ago and a traditional archer came across oh yeah you told me this story the meat wasn't the meat was gone the meat was gone yeah but it's a really nice bull okay real quick i know a fella that just found a fresh dead bull

and he did his damn good yeah he had just been shot he did his damnedest to find the hunter first he sat there and waited and waited and waited expecting some guy to come down along the blood trail yeah No one shows up. He wound up going and asking all around. The people camped, skinned it, butchered it, still kept looking for the owner. Yeah. He wound up with the bull.

Which you would hope most everybody would do. Yeah. But how many guys would really do that? Don't know. Yeah, and it would definitely depend, unfortunately, on the size of the antlers. Well, that's what's so interesting about the story I told Steve is this turned out to be a 390 bull on public land.

Yeah, for you gentle listeners out there, that's a giant elk. Yeah. Bull of a lifetime. And so it was very cool what the guy did. He went online and made a post that didn't reveal where it was, just sort of in Montana. Hey, if you've shot a bull, failed to recover it in Montana, if you contact me and let me know where it was

and what the fletching on your arrow was, I might have found your bull. Might have. If I like you enough. If you seem like a nice enough fella, I'll tell you. There's a version of events in which I found your bull. There's a possibility. So sure enough, the archer contacted him

and he gave him a pin and he recovered his head and horns. Kind of a cool story. That's amazing. That is amazing. That's the right thing to do. But he did not pack the head and horns out, correct? He didn't. He didn't touch it.

He just pinned it. Wow. Told the guy where it was. And the guy came back from out of state, long way. And it had snowed two feet in the intervening weeks and hiked in there long ways and recovered it. Here's what I feel like I would have done. I feel like I would have found that

and probably would not have done all that. And the perfect me would have, but I don't even know that it would have really occurred have done all that. And the perfect me would have, but I don't even know that it would have really occurred to me like that. I would have been, huh? And cool find. Yeah. And I would have taken the head and hung it up in a tree somewhere. So something didn't, you know, drag it off and bust the skull all up,

trying to get the brain out of it. Hung it up in a tree somewhere with a, with a thinking that at some point in time, I'd go back in there once I had a little time to clean up from birds and whatnot. Then I'd go up there and bring it home and throw it out in the yard. What are the chances that you post online

wherever you post, and the person that actually shot this thing is going to see it? It was actually a buddy of his. It was serendipity that way. But yeah, it's like you got the angel and the devil, you know, and it's like, what do you do? And is it- But it wouldn't even have been that.

It would have been like an, it wouldn't have been an angel and devil. It would have been sort of like an, it was just like, I'm just talking about what would have gone in my head. It wouldn't have been the push and pull. It would have just been like, I would have just, I would have never even,

it would never even occur to me to try to find the person. You know what I'm saying? And it's obvious from the find that it was a fairly recent, it was that season. There's a carcass and the meat was gone, but it was obviously it wasn't last year's bull. No, I like it. It was noble of him to do it.

And here's another one for you. Is it or is it not significant that the guy who did it was a traditional archer versus a non-traditional archer? Oh, come on. You know what? No, no. You know what?

I'll give you that. I'll give you that. Okay. I'm going to give you that one. That's a bold statement. It's a question. It's not a statement. It struck me as a real arrogant.

Are you a traditional archer? I'm just learning, actually. Okay. You know what? Initially, yes. Okay. Yes. Okay. Can we? That's great. Okay. You know what? Initially, yes. Okay. Yes. Okay. Can we, yes. I think that this is a bold ass statement and I'm not a traditional archer by any stretch. I did win

a longbow contest when I was a kid, but it was only one of the kid in it. I'm into it now. My buddy Frank, I was a lot older than he was. Yeah. It's, it's cool. I picked one up at the, at an archery challenge up in big sky last year it felt great talked to guys about it and my buddy frank burkowski who introduced me a guy named dan tolke who's a fantastic bow bowyer i guess is what you would say up out of the flathead sure anybody know this guy dan tolke fantastic guy and so uh yeah i just i just got a longbow and it's it's fun do you feel more responsible with a lot of you feel he treats his wife so much better i'm more morally sound now i am so in over my waiters right now it's not funny if i pick up a quarter on the street i'll stand

there and he's like normally i wouldn't even call my wife i just go out drinking all night but you know now that i got that longbow get her some flowers um no it's a bold statement but yes do like if you took a hundred if you took a hundred traditional archers and a hundred compound archers and then did a sort of ethics and moral exactly survey i do feel just i just have a feeling that they would score higher. But you know, I was thinking the other day, I was thinking about what it is, why do I like and hang out with hunters? Okay. I was thinking about this the other day. Like, like if I go to a wedding reception and you're like, oh my God, I don't want to go to this thing. I'll typically at, by the end of the night, I'm talking to some dude that likes to

hunt and fish. I just sniff them out. You I was thinking, if you were in some situation where your house is on fire, okay, and you're somehow incapacitated and your children need to be rescued, and the fireman says, listen, because of circumstances I can't explain right now, only one person can go in and do the rescue. We have a guy that hunts all the time and a vegan. Who do you want to attempt the rescue? I mean, come on. Come on. So it's like.

There's a shit ton of blasphemy in this podcast. I love it. Anyone is going to be like, well, clearly. Get the hunting dude in there to go. You've never seen like the weightless and vegans, you know? I just think like that's going to be the guy that's going to go in there. He's going to go in there with a lot of grr and just get the kids and come out. Quick, let me get my longbow and I'll decide whether I want to go in. So yes, in that, in the same, I just want the record to be clear that it was a question.

And I'm not siding with the traditional archers over the compound archers or anything like that. One could also point out that a traditional archer might like to do, what's that word? Moral signaling? Virtue signaling? He might be a virtue signaler. And what greater way to virtue signal than to go on to a forum and be like boy did i find the bull of a lifetime

laying out in the woods but not gonna touch it exactly signed pope and young lifetime member yeah and he like dude i just saw a post of a traditional archer with a grip and grin photo. He shot a vole, like a mouse, with his traditional archery gear. So he would score low. He would lower the mean. He would lower the mean ethics score of his compatriots. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my my goodness do we hear from the canadians whenever we do a raffle or sweepstakes and our raffle and sweepstakes law

makes it that they can't join our northern brothers get irritated well if you're sick of you know sucking high and titty there on x is now in Canada. The great features that you love 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, um,

you guys in the great white North can, 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 to the OnX Club, y'all. It was a trophy vole for a traditional archer. He didn't eat the vole?

That's what I was going to say. You know what he might have been fixing to do? That's a good point. He might be so hardcore that he's going to do his shelf liner instead of doing it in felt or leather he's gonna do a vole hair because he's so good at stalking that when he gets up close he finds that the noise of his wooden shaft on felt is too loud

i'm a little uncomfortable because i feel like we're starting to rip off the traditional archer. Because Cal's a traditional archer and Yanni's a traditional archer. Yanni's a traditional archer? Not really. He's not a traditional bow hunter. He goes both ways. He's not a traditional hunter. He's a traditional archer. My brother,

Danny, is a traditional hunter. And Cal is a traditional hunter. So when Danny traditional so when danny goes out the only bow he hunts with how often does he hunt archery or with archery never oh but if he does what he does he likes to bring his longbow because he lives in the land of the long winter yeah in alaska but i don't understand so he likes to sit around drink a a beer, shoot and recurves. Stand around, drink a beer, shoot and recurves in the winter. So at times he has taken said recurve out

and shot it at things. Yeah. Yeah. That is one note for you there, John. If you're just getting into the traditional side of things, recurve is night and day difference easier than longbow. So I screwed up already

basically getting the longbow is what you're saying. It just is, man. Like the consistency out of my recurve, I need another year of like real shooting. In fact, when I moved up here to Bozeman, with only things that I could put in my truck,

I brought my longbow. So I could figure out how to start shooting the thing as fast as possible. Yeah. But the longbow just feels like more traditional. Yeah, well, the Adel Adel. Adel Adel, that's what that's about. But Adel Adel dudes,

the kind of dude that hunts with an Adel Adel is, the kind of dude that hunts with an Adel Adel is a different kind of dude than hunts with a recurve. Yeah, for sure. I hope so. For sure. But there was a guy, I met a guy and he was like trying to convince me to pick up a recurve.

And I said, I've tried before and it just never stuck with me. And he said, I said, where'd you learn it? He said, well, I learned it on YouTube. I said, don't you think that's a little bit oxymoronic? Don't you feel like that's a little bit ironic that you learned your traditional archery from fucking the internet?

That's pretty funny. That's pretty funny. I like that. Where do you go? Yeah, where do you go traditional archery hunting? Well, let me check my GPS. I'll tell you. Yeah.

You want people to be all internet. Well, here's the thing about my brother, like the ethics of my brother. You want to talk about having high ethical standards as a traditional archer. Check this out. Every traditional archer gets arrows that are painted to be fake.

That's not true. Yeah, well, I know because my brother's an exception. He was ethically uncomfortable having the carbon arrows that everyone gets that have a wood wrap. Yeah, that's what I got. It's kind of weird. He went out.

He's like, I can't do that. I can't live a lie. And so he went out and had to struggle to find arrows for his recurve. No, that were carbon and looked carbon. Oh. Where they weren't masquerading as wood. What is with that with you guys? Well, I don't think the you people argument

is one that you really want to go down, but it's just the fact, it's better. You know, you're not breaking as many arrows. You don't have to deal with arrows. Why does it have to look like wood? No, my problem is not shooting carbon. My problem is why do you guys make it look- Who are you trying to trick? Oh, nobody.

I'm like, there is a inexpensive arrow. No, okay, you're not listening. No, I am. For me personally- Demonstrate to me that you're listening to me. There's no part of like, oh, here's this selection of arrows. I have to have the one that looks like wood

because now I'm shooting a traditional bow. It just so happens that arrow manufacturers such as like Easton and Beeman, they have pre-fletched with real turkey veins only the arrows with this fake wood sheath over the top of it. It's the exact same arrow as I think an axis arrow, which is a very common arrow,

but it's one grain per inch heavier because it has this additional faux wood laminate on top of it. Laminate's probably not even right. That was a good detail, Kyle. I don't even think it's the archers themselves that this problem spawns from. It's some marketing dudes. And they started it.

And so it's just like Ben, they like produced the first 10,000 arrows because they thought that, well, of course, these guys that are shooting these old timey wooden bows, they're going to want these old timey wooden looking arrows arrows and it was never like a group of traditional archers being like hey easton god we love shooting your aluminum or your carbon arrows but you know if you guys could paint them up to make it look like wood we'd be so much happier and what is really funny is I have gone, you know, some spots around Ketchum where I have like good north-facing slopes

that have like good loamy soil, soft soil, because it's real rocky country. Go out and zip out of town, go stump shoot, right? Shooting old rotten stumps with the recurve. And I have found other arrows out there where i'm like oh there's my arrow that i lost last time and it's not my arrow but it is like the wooden shaft arrow can i or the fake wood i get i'm running behind there's so many things i want to bring up right now i need to write them down i can't get what i can't get of like the the marketing of traditional archery equipment

like do they bring it in your house in a horse and buggy what the hell does it matter what according to the folks in the in the archery equipment industry it is such a ridiculously small group of people out there that whoever made the marketing decision, and Giannis, I think you are spot on, that was a long time ago and nobody's thought about it since. I don't buy it. I don't buy it for a second. Would you wear, let me ask you this. What kind of rat you smell in there right now? Would you wear, okay.

Yeah. Let's say First Light makes some bitch and synthetic clothes but like you know what we're gonna uh instead of having to be camo it's gonna look like it's buckskins and we're gonna put we're gonna paint fringe on it and have it so that way when you're out in the woods, it looks that at a passing glimpse, you'd be like, oh, that fella's wearing buckskins. But he's not. It's synthetic. Of course not. No. Is that a real coonskin hat?

Nope. No, it's not. It's polypro. I just painted it to look like I'm out in the woods. It's not important. It doesn't, it's not important enough to converse about. No, I mean, it is funny. It's a thing I have noticed.

I grew up hunting with guys that would go out in buckskins with patch and round ball, 50 Cal Hawk, and hunt that they had no optics, no nothing. Those guys are called buckskinners. Yeah. I was interested in the buckskin in the world as a young kid because I knew guys that were buckskinners. Yeah. You know, I the buck skin in the world as a young kid because I knew guys that were buck skinners. Yeah.

You know, I said I had so many things I wanted to bring up that I had to write them down. Write them down. Here's one of the things I just wrote. When I was a little kid. You know, are you talking about going stump shooting and finding other arrows? Yep. When I was a little kid, I remember vividly and I could tell you where I was standing when I heard in the parking lot of the Muskegon Bowman's Bowl Club, a guy telling me, if you really want to find Indian arrowheads, here's how you do it. imagine shooting lanes of yore. Okay. So like a opening through the trees where he could picture someone having taken a shot

a thousand years ago. And he would then go over there and look around to see if he could find the lost Indian arrowhead. Boy. We gotta have some time on our hands. The lost Indian arrowhead. Boy. We've got to have some time on our hands. This is the dumbest person. But in reviewing it in my mind now. You were like, you were an old growth forest the entire time?

I have the luxury of taking a pause to review this in my mind. I wonder if he wasn't just yanking a kid's chain. Well, now out here on the great plains right that does stand up as far as like okay a pishkin buffalo jump site yes um old water holes are places that you know cave sites things like that and that does take that theory, right? That imagination of days of yore being like, okay, this is a natural pass. Been here for thousands of years. Through this pass, there's a high point.

There's a water, there's an old dried up pond area underneath it. Boy, I bet that would have been a good place to camp and wait for animals to come into that pond. And work on my heads. Work on my heads. And then at that pond, you could probably spend some time and find bird points. Yes. Or small game points. I agree with that because I've successfully found arrowheads, old stuff, with anthropologists

whose approach was to go to likely observation points and likely campsites on the Arctic slope where there hasn't been anyone wandering around picking it all up. And you'd be like,

man, I could picture hanging out up there waiting for wild horses to roll through during the Pleistocene. But putting that in the upper peninsula with like giant old growth timber and that would be a pretty daunting task. It was outlandish. Real quick question before we move on. You good, Ben?

Yeah, I'm good. Okay. You remember the house on fire scenario? Yes. Okay. Picture that you're in that situation. And knowing that you have no children, imagine that it's your mother and grandmother, say. And imagine you're a vegan.

No. And it's that you're there incapacitated and they can let the one person run in and they have a compound shooter and a trad guy. That's all you know about the potential rescuers. What way are you leaning? I got my answer. I'll wait for Cal, but...

I'm going trad guy. Really? I'm going compound guy all day. There's a lot of passive compound shooters. The trad guy is old. A lot of passive. They said hardcore compound guy. The trad guy is old. He can't get up the ladder.

There's no way. Too methodical. He's going to be thinking about like, listen, all right, the compound guy is just going to run stupidly forward. Get in there and get it done. But then he's going to stop 100 yards away. That's true. So what's your answer?

Your mother and grandmother. For some reason, my first instinct was to say compound guy, so I'm just going to go with compound guy. Yeah, that's the obvious answer. I feel like you were patronizing Cal a little bit with your answer, Steve. No. Is that true or no?

No, I wasn't saying to. I know, I just, I think of guys that I know in a couple of fire houses, a couple of fire, city fire guys I know, they're all compound guys. Oh, so you're thinking you might actually wind up with a fireman by making that selection yeah okay i bet you anything we hear from a fireman who's a trad archer i will be watching for his email uh moving on real quick this is interesting

they found there's a species of snake a before okay chiapas mexico 42 years ago they don't explain how this happened 42 years ago some cane some palm harvesters working in the mexican state of chiapas am i saying that right chiapas yeah i'll go with that they find a snake they find a coral snake and in its gut um so whatever reason they decided to cut it open and if yeah if you're a palm cutter and you run into a coral snake i imagine you're killing that oh yeah because he'll get you while you're working so they killed a coral snake and they disemboweled it for whatever reason and find a snake in it that they did not recognize. Hadn't seen it before. Someone preserves the specimen. 42 years goes by. It's a 10 inch long male snake with two peckers, a double peckered snake.

42 years later, they do the genetics work on it. And not only is it a new species, it's its own genus. Completely undescribed. Watch this segue. Oh, go ahead. The defining attribute, I guess, would be the two pecker versus one pecker? No, I guess it's not that.

I just like that part of the story. But who wouldn't? They have, like, snakes will have, like, thorns, like little burrs on their... Like ducks. Tallywhacker, if you will. This one is a double... Double...

It'd be fun to just know how they got. Is that how, yeah. It's not a new species, right? Kingdom phylum class order genus species, right? You'd have to dig deeper into it. So, yeah. I'm sorry that I'm not able to answer that. All right.

Sorry. Go ahead. But yeah, it's like they think that perhaps it's a ground-dwelling, insect-eating snake. And you might be like, well, maybe it's now extinct because no one had ever found one. And then 42 years ago, a snake ate one, and no one's found one since then. But it's probably just, it kind of opens up, like there's just a lot of mystery out there. People are describing new species all the time, but oftentimes it winds up being that you're taking something you kind of opens up, like there's just a lot of mystery out there. People are describing new species all the time,

but oftentimes it winds up being that you're taking something you kind of already know. Like there's some stonefly, right? And the stonefly has six bands on its abdomen or whatever. And you realize the next drainage over it is a stonefly. It's got seven bands. Like, oh my God, it's a new species. But you look and he's like very closely related to a known one. It's interesting that we can still be out there

discovering something as significant as a 10-inch snake that isn't like super close. It's not just like a little slightly different than the one found in Guatemala, but it's like an entirely new genus of snake that we didn't know about. Yeah, you would think there'd be plenty of them given the two-pecker situation.

Twice as many. Twice as many. Twice as many. They'd propagate well. But maybe it doesn't work. Maybe every man's dream is actually a detriment. And I'll pivot off that point to talk about that perhaps, I think that this would enlighten and embolden all of those people who wrote in about our Bigfoot show. Because the Bigfoot responses were one, half the people that

wrote in about the Bigfoot show we did with a person who had explored the world of Bigfoot people. Half the people that wrote in were like, I can't believe you would even honor that subject with a conversation. The other half were like, bro, I didn't believe either. And then I met one or ran into one or had one throw a rock at me. And the thing that really surprised me out of this was the people, we joked at length about people who bigfoot people who say that like you have an obligation to

shoot one if you see it because that's a step toward that's a step toward saving them that if you kill a bigfoot then it'd be that you'd we'd have to recognize it as a species we'd almost certainly have to recognize it as an species. We'd almost certainly have to recognize it as an endangered species. And it can't get a Linnaean name. It'll always be a mythical creature until someone kills one. But that conversation brought the fact

that there are people out there shooting, like really in real life, shooting at stuff that they think is Bigfoots, which is a dangerous practice. I had a guy write- It's happened here in Montana. Yeah, just happened. That story's a little fishy.

Yanni, go ahead. Yanni's a subject matter expert on this story. Well, I tried to be. I tried to research it, but it seems that the story's fallen dead. I didn't have time to call the police department of, was it Helena or Missoula that it happened nearby? I'm going to talk about one from Texas. But you go ahead and talk about this one.

I think it's Helena. Helena. Helena, you're right. A fellow was shot at and then the dude that was doing the shooting claimed that he was shooting at him because he thought he was Bigfoot.

And last we knew, they had not apprehended the shooter. Nobody was hit. That's what the story seems weird. John, what's the bar on the west side of Rogers Pass? The little town there. It's starting to get kind of repopulated now because folks are spreading out from Helena. You're going to tie this into this Bigfoot deal?

Yeah, because the bar right there. If you're going to do that, go ahead. Has big like a Bigfoot. No, Cal just remembered the great drink he had there. Why would you assume I would know the name of this bar? They got a cocktail there called the Bigfoot. Well, because you've been in Montana a long time.

It's not Trixie's. No, no, no. This is right on the west side of Rogers Pass and there's a bar right there. And they have, I think it's a weekend long, like big foot hunt party that goes on on private property off side of the bar. And then they come back to the bar

and there's buses and all sorts of stuff. And they're hunting. So that could stand to reason why maybe this guy didn't pick up on the fact that it's a good excuse for a party maybe he was like okay this is an epicenter of bigfoot activity right we should have done a good job finding the the the would-be victim and talking to him. But my understanding of the story, he was sighting in. The would-be victim was sighting this rifle. Yeah.

And all of a sudden, boosh, boosh, boosh. And there's bullets hitting all around him. And he winds up having a conversation. According to his story, he has a conversation with the shooter. Shooter's like, bro, you should wear Hunter's orange. I thought you was a Bigfoot. And opened up on you. And he drives off in a...

Black Ford pickup. Yep. And then the guy, the would-be victim, isn't interested in pursuing this or pressing charges and doesn't even notify the police until a day later, apparently. He's got no beef with the guy. Took him a day to think he's got no truck. He's got no truck with the man who almost killed him. That's crazy. So I just like,

I don't know. A lot of times, you know, when someone tells you a story and you, at the end of the story, you're like, man, there's got to be more to that story. Mitch Hedberg used to talk about taking drugs for attention deficit disorder, even though he doesn't have attention deficit disorder. And anytime someone told him something, at the end of it, he'd be like, man, there's got to be more to that story. I hate to say it, but I think I side

with the half of the people who wrote in like, why are you talking about Bigfoot? I'm sorry. It doesn't surprise me that a guy gets shot at sighting in his rifle. That doesn't surprise me. I'm sad to say. Yeah. Shot at or accidentally shot at. But when the defense to the crime is, oh, I thought he was Bigfoot. Here's where it becomes, here's where the rubber meets the road, John, is a guy wrote in, and this is a guy I'd talked with before, emailed with before,

and he belongs to this North American wood ape conservancy. And they feel as though they have, wait a minute. Check, hear me out. He feels as though they have identified a valley in Texas, I think it's near the Texas-Oklahoma border. They have identified a valley that is inhabited by a small population of big feet that they feel is endangered by habitat loss. And they've had, I think, like 40 his group of guys that are researching

this imperiled population of wood apes. They feel like they've had 42 run-ins and they have a document they put out. And in this document, it details members of his group shooting at bipedal organisms with buckshot and winging them and blood trailing them

and sending the blood off to the lab and seeing stuff off in the dark and trying to get shots at it and saying that we need to move away from buckshot and switch to slugs. And they're out in the dark with flashlights. Here again, man, people shooting at bipedal organisms does not surprise me it's troubling it's troubling to me it is troubling to me as well and it makes me not want to hunt that makes me not want to that's all the headline not necessarily the place you

want to go you're out hunting there and you're out late and you're like oh my god i forgot my flashlight and you're cutting off through the bushes at night. And furthermore, it doesn't surprise me that there's a national bipedal wood ape conservation group out there. That doesn't surprise me either. This goes back to our model of conservation. I don't have any problem. I don't have any problem with going out in the woods looking for stuff.

It's like, great, go out in the woods, look for stuff. I have a real problem with going out in the woods looking for stuff, it's like, great, go out in the woods, look for stuff. I have a real problem with going out, firing away, firing away at things walking through the woods. Isn't there something we learn in hunter's education called know your target and beyond? Or are we just now wanging away at bipedal organisms? No, we are not.

Officially, we are not just wanging away at anything. Don't wang. Know your target and beyond. No wanging. Don't wang at anything. I think every 12-year-old would say that. But the whole Bigfoot thing to me, again, it's like this is postmodern America.

And if you don't know what postmodernism is. Pomo. Look it up. Because to me, Bigfoot is a post-modern phenomenon but there's guys like legitimate guys like less stroud i don't know if we all think less straddle legitimate the survivor i have no problem with him the survivor man went all in on bigfoot i think but a lot of people do this guy says the guy that wrote in this guy even says that they were they they believe they were able to self-tag a wood ape with a nano tag radio transponder transponder and tracked it for 10

months attempted to close in with the animal came very near at times um got a lot of geographical data on it and they feel as though they were able to calculate a potential home range for the species. Bullshit. Excuse me. No, it's... Just reply. I don't have a lot of time on this. Let me know when you get one.

Like, let me know when you can... You have nets? You have a net one. Well, it gets into... Dig a hole. Put some sticks over it. Yeah, we can dart a rhinoceros. Let's dart one.

Dart one. Here's why you can't trail cam them. I'm not going to say any more about this. Again, I am, like, I do not, for a second. Everyone knows my opinion on this. I'm just talking about, it's like an interesting, like, you dip your toe into the world. It was interesting to watch.

Like, I had, we had a guest on a couple episodes ago who did a podcast series where she explores the world of Bigfoot enthusiasts. And I thought, huh, that's interesting. And had a conversation with her. And it's just funny to look at. It was funny to see the feedback that came in. I remain, like, if you want to hear my opinions on it,

they're unchanged. Listen to the episode. But it was fascinating to see the mental gymnastics that people go through in order to keep this notion alive. For instance, that you can't get a trail cam image of them because they see somehow infrared. And they can tell when there's sounds like a trail cam emits feelings that they detect it emits electromagnetic radiation it's like hunting with hex yeah i was just gonna say wrap it in the hex suit and they even say a guy was even saying in fact a bigfoot's aversion

to trail cams is so strong that if you have a Bigfoot messing with your house all the time, just put trail cams up and he won't come around anymore. And he'll stop messing with your house, firing rocks at your house all the time. That's a helpful safety tip. That's all. Yeah. It's just like dudes that have ghost hunting TV shows on like some channel nobody watches. If that was happening, it would happen on like the news. 60 Minutes.

Yeah. If somebody found a Bigfoot, it'll happen. Like you'll see it on the news, minutes yeah if somebody found like if somebody find a bigfoot it'll happen on like you'll see it on the but here it is oh that's why you don't need to follow it yeah it's not even worth it yeah what do you got yanni i like i feel bad for having brought it up and at times i vowed to stop talking about stuff and then broke my vow yeah that's that old joke right it's it's uh there's no such thing as a shortcut if it was the shortest fastest route it would just be called the way all right man but you know i've broken my vow but i'm gonna make a vow i made a vow to stop dogging on people who like super crafty beers and Texicans.

What about your mug vow? Last time I was on your- Broke that vow. Yeah. I break vows all the time, but I'm vowing right now for real, for keeps. I'm vowing to stop talking about damn Bigfoots. Oh, thank God. But what about wood apes?

Them too. Them too. I'd lump those. Put them together. Bipedal. What do you got, Yanni? I'm sick of hearing myself come up with Bigfoot stuff. You ready to leave Bigfoot?

Yeah. Okay. 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. We're always talking about OnX here on the MeatEater 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 your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services hand-picked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more.

As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Speaking of tough animals to find and see in the woods, if you guys haven't caught on yet, we have a thing here on the Meteor Podcast

where we just try to out-se segue each other. You guys can all join in at any time and someone else should do the rating. Yeah, I need to pull off a double segue. I tried, but you guys, I don't know if you guys gave me the thumbs up for actually pulling it off. In this case, you could say, speaking of

segues. Very good. Mark asks, what is the toughest combination of animal and environment to spot while hunting so you mean i think he's asking like out of all the stuff that we hunt and all the different places that we hunt what's like what's the toughest animal to spot in its environment his example is a white-tailed deer standing white-tailed deer in a standing cornfield which i would say that it's impossible to spot that i see the tassels moving the top of the corn yeah i like the tassels it's hard to spot a deer behind a brick wall too yeah you can't see

them yeah that's okay because that that's are you talking about like it's it's in the wide open you could see it but it's camouflaged by its environment that's a good way of putting it like that's what nice yeah because if it's it was behind standing corn you probably can't see it anyway yeah i think we should narrow it down to uh like it would be possible to see it yeah it's land land mammals right yeah yeah it's hard to spot halibut. Well, yeah. In even like... 300 feet of water. I was going to take out waterfowl.

Yeah. Animals. Land mammals. I say the gray ghost. Yeah, I mean that's definitely the first one that comes to mind. Or the coos deer. I've never hunted coos deer. That's the gray ghost.

Oh, that's the gray ghost. I mean, how many damn things is a mule deer? Yeah. Gray ghost is the coos. They're famous for being hard to spot. I think that a mule deer, because when the snow, when you get snow and the snow starts to melt off and it's splotchy patchy that makes spot mule deer very difficult because is it easier to do but to eliminate the things that are easy to

spot always like a moose a moose in the snow it's pretty easy to spot but they can still vanish in a willow thick that's true but yeah i think when, because when you're looking for mule deer, you're looking for the bodies of the butts. The bodies on the snow are real easy and the butts out in the sagebrush are easy, but when you get splotchy snow, your eye doesn't trigger on the butts or the bodies. Yeah. So you've got natural camo and, and it would make sense that coos deer is a smaller bodied creature, so it's going to be more difficult to spot. I think you could make an argument for a black-tailed deer. Yeah.

Coastal black-tailed deer can be very difficult to spot. In all the dark shadows. Yeah. That's hard to spot. I think easy to spot. One of the easiest things to spot that I've found is when you have black bears in the alpine. Holy smokes. Like iridescent black blobs you can spot from a couple miles away with the naked eye.

Yeah. Like green background and then this iridescent blob. Well, and spring black bear in general, just even locally around here, that's a good job finding them. You know, you look at a lot of stumps before you see one stand up and walk around, you know? Yeah.

Here's one kind of off the continent. Himalayan tar and the tussock flats of New Zealand when they get up like below the alpine and they're hanging out. That's tough? It's tough. Like a tussock.ck like the tussock it's just the grass looks exactly like the hair off a tar hunting whitetails in Michigan this year was pretty fun where being out one day and there's no snow and being out the next day and there's snow

and man you just, cause a lot of tall brush and a lot of thorn, you know, like multiflora rose thickets, but that snow hits. And all of a sudden you're like deer, deer, deer, deer, deer, that you would not have caught without. Oh yeah. I mean, man, it makes me vulnerable. White tail in the rut, depending on the, you know, what's on the ground and what conditions, I mean, it can be really hard to find.

You can know there's a buck right 100 yards in front of you. And you might see an ear. You might see an antler. But they can freaking get on their hands and knees and crawl with the best of them. A guy wrote in, and he swears this is true. He says he was sitting on a power line in Texas. I think he was in Texas. He says he saw a buck coming along.

He says, I would never believe if someone told me this, but I saw it with my own two eyes. He said he saw a buck coming along, got to a power line cut, and got down on its knees. I don't know. Got down on its knees and crossed the power line cut on its knees. I don't know. Got down on its knees and crossed the power line cut on its knees and then stood back up and walked off into the woods.

I have a difficult time with that. But I don't know. You have a difficult time with that, but not with the bipedal mountain ape scenario? No. Very different. I have. That's the.

I mean, you'd see. We're back. scenario no very different i have that's the i mean you've seen you've seen i wanted to see if you would break your back on your sworn i'm i'm oh i forgot about that yeah i don't know that's an inner have you ever heard anything like that about getting down on his knees i've never heard around you've seen you've seen a white tail get on his knees i've seen deer hunger i've seen deer slunch slump down and try to keep a low pro you've seen a whitetail get on his knees i've seen deer i've seen deer slunch slump down and try to keep a low pro i've seen a whitetail buck on his knee front knees getting through underbrush and stuff really yeah not but he was saying here he was like keeping a low pro to go across a cut line that's a different thing now we did we talked about this 10 times on this uh program we one time come around the corner in a canyon and walked in on a wild turkey and this wild turkey laid down

and laid his head and neck out flat ass on the ground he jumped for cover laid laid down. Yep. I've seen axis deer do that. I mean, well, from here to that wall, know they're there with a bow and be trying to get a shot at them and they're just up under a bush,

put their head up under the bush and like their neck where you can't. You can just see their rump. He's hiding from you. He's hiding from you and then when you get in whatever zone,

he knows he can bolt. He bolts. And it's so fast that you're, nothing you can do. What's your take, Ani? You can't throw it out

and then not have any feedback. I gave my answer to the hardest animal to find, but now you guys are talking about deer on their knees. I didn't throw that out. But I do have... That was a tangent.

I do have an anecdote. Okay. I wasn't there. I was there in camp when this happened, but two fellows, two brothers came back into camp. And one brother was on stand watching where we hunt in Wisconsin. It's like these big oak woods and there's a lot of ridges and bowls. And pretty much you kind of, when you pull stuff to sit for a day, you're going to watch a whole bowl and maybe a ridge or two, the ridge behind you. He watched a buck come into this bowl, snow on the ground,

watched the buck come into the bowl and go into the thicket down at the bottom. Real whitetail buck. Yeah, and disappear, bedded down. So he, and he could see all the ridges of this bowl. If the buck left, he would see it. Well, his brother shows up midday and he's like, hey, walk the bowl for me. There's a buck down there, kick him up. So he goes down there, walks the whole bowl, no buck comes out. So they go back

in there and he's like, I know where that thing went in. So they go in there and find the tracks. Then they follow the tracks from the bed and they find a log that is laid down from the thicket up towards the ridge and they can see tracks and then a belly scraping alongside the backside of this log as it goes to the top of the ridge and then the tracks pick up and he left. I like it. Walk the log. Walk the log. No, no. I like it. Walk the log.

Walk the log. No, no, no. No. Behind the log. No, there's a belly. There's a cover behind the log. Belly scraping on the ground behind the log. So he belly crawled behind the log.

So out of sight of the hunter. So the buck left the bowl and that's how he got out of there with the hunter not being able to see him. I like it. Interesting. See, that makes me like that story about that one knee crawling. There's got to be i haven't explored youtube but if it's something that happens it's probably there bucks walking

on their knees to avoid detection yeah that's a good one um speaking of bucks like that nice segue a there's a news story that a couple people sent to me of an Amish feller who shot a poached a 26 point buck. Like he'd shot one buck and then like tag the buck and then shot another buck and move the tag from one buck to the next buck. And that'd be potion. Yep. Yep.

28th. We were talking about like fines, like whether or not you get a good fine or a bad fine. This guy picked up a $28,000 fine. Whoa. Where was this? In Ohio, Millersburg, Ohio. They make a big point in the article of pointing out that he's an Amish man.

He put like a, he put a game check number on the, he used the game check number that had originally been used by another hunter. He'd also then also took more than one antler deer in a license year, which led it to be that he had a possession of, like all these things add up, right? You wind up with all these counts, right?

Like some guy will commit a crime and wind up with 13 counts or whatever, but he wound up. Then he's also got possession of deer parts that are improperly tagged, which is another thing. It also adds a lot of scrutiny into past seasons, typically. So maybe they picked up. Yeah, maybe he's doing that every year.

He had like, and it turns out like the game check number he used was originally used on a doe. But anyways, it all adds up. Dude winds up with $28 28 700 and some dollars in fines that hurts and then he can't hunt for two years that's it good how do you how do you get to go hunting again in two years those things don't equate 28 000 in fines and a two-year penalty well this guy doesn't sound like he may follow that rule either yeah maybe not my favorite part of it is it says,

and I had to think about this for a minute, it says that they tried to reach him for comment, but he was unavailable for comment. He's not hunting. No, because he doesn't have a phone. He's Amish. What are you going to do? Send someone over there?

Knock on the door? What do you think about those poachings? I would put that in the pretty stiff fine category me too well yeah there's a clear trail of total disregard for the rules right like you know as a hunter would you rather see the penalty be longer in time out of the woods or money because i would much rather be, you give him 10 years and five bucks. When I look at that, my thinking is, wow, that's a lot of money for a buck. Like, because I think sometimes you see someone

poach as a buck and they get a light, you wind up seeing these fines of a thousand bucks. But I think it also kind of like plays into, you know, you might be treated differently. You know, you're down on your luck and you shoot a forky buck for some meat. Like a judge would consider that. And a game warden, we were talking about sentences the other day, and we were expressing some frustration with why do some guys get such big fines? Like the guy, what was the guy that killed the three moose in Alaska? He had a hundred100,000 fine. And a game warden, our friend Eric from Idaho wrote, and he goes, you know, you got to understand,

a game warden doesn't, you don't get to dole out the punishment, right? Like typically it goes in front of a judge and you got judges that take, you know, you have certain judges that are known as real hanging judges on wildlife crimes. And you got some judges who wildlife crimes don't really register with them. And they can't picture, oh, it's just a deer, right? Their attitude would be like, oh, you know, who cares? They don't understand, like they don't understand the value.

They maybe don't understand and prioritize the value of the resource. They might've had a, who knows what cases they heard that day of what kind of horrible crimes they've been dealing with that day. And then you come in and it's like, oh, okay, some guy shot a deer. I don't care and not treat them. But then some judges are like really hardcore. And so it kind of depends on who winds up doing the punishments. And he says, you can try to influence them by telling them like the severity of the crime, but it's not,

you know, it's often not up to you. But you would, you would think that you'd have more, you stand a better chance of running into a judge that would be more strict

in Alaska than you would in Ohio. Yeah, where it's recognized as a very valuable resource. It's a valuable resource. That your citizens and your economy

rely on that resource. And it's more prevalent. You're going to see more wildlife-related crimes in a place where people are interacting with wildlife more often. And it might, yeah. And it could be that you get one. But it's a hefty crime. But in looking at it, I'm like, God, that's a lot of money.

Not that I feel bad for the dude, for the fine. Because it is like he really was going out of his way to pull off some, right? He was going way out of his way to pull. It wasn't like he made a mistake and then tried to cover it up. He was like actively being deceptive. I look, I'm like, that's a lot of cash. But then I look, I'm like, that seems like a pretty weak

on the revocation of hunting privileges. I think that to your question, Ben, too, like I think the money, it is a lot of money, but I think it's a greater deterrent to the behavior because you can say five years or two. Behavior of others. And the culprit in this particular case because it's difficult to enforce,

is he out there hunting two or three years? It's easy to enforce pay the fine. Yeah, have you paid or have you not paid? And that financial burden is a deterrent to others and to prevent recidivism. Well, yeah, and it affects your family. It affects others around you. That's right.

Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I can see it that way. You're giving the guy a chance to be good where if you take away his hunting rights the next 20 years, well, you've just created a dude that's going to poach for the next 20 years.

Exactly. It turned me. That's a good perspective on it this guy took like so the first bucky shot was the eight point and then he wanted to swap heads out on it like playing legos you want to swap heads out on it and they they later recovered the eight point head in the ditch oh why is it always a ditch because you don't have to walk very people like to throw stuff in a ditch ditches yeah and it's interesting too because you know amish uh communities are they're a communal resource right they just share their farm equipment they share uh oh right the the responsibility uh financial responsibility so yeah this guy did make a twenty eight thousand dollar ding on the community yeah but that being said like you know uh there are payment programs um that you can get into to pay these fines over the course of years

because they don't take somebody who makes $100 a day or $25 a day and say, hey, you know, it's $28,000. Where is it typically? Yeah, I mean, if you don't have it, they'll finance it, but you've got to pay it one way or another. Yeah. I mean, there's no way around that. Yeah, so I was talking with an officer out of Lewistown, Montana,

and he said that he much prefers a seizure of your hunting tools of the trade. In this case, your poaching tools of the trade over anything because he feels like that, in his experience, was always the greatest deterrent to future crime. It was like, we're going to take your vehicle that you use to poach this, if that is a comparable amount of fine money, or we're going to take your super fancy rifle.

Because he feels like that has a longer lasting sting to it than a fine that they can be like, Oh, well, yeah, it just turned into 75 bucks a month for the next 35 years or however it works. Yanis,

have we talked about, have we talked about the guy that I, the warden I met who had the theory about super poachers yes we talked about it death from down in kentucky nope oh maybe not oh i know what you're talking about this is something different oh yeah boy i can't remember if we brought it up you can bring it up again yeah i'm gonna bring it up again. He has this idea that in enforcing poaching, he feels that you have 10% of your poachers are doing 90% of your poaching.

And he thinks that that's where you need to really put your resources. And he thinks that they're the same way. He thinks there's a form of sociopath. And sociopathic behavior can take a lot of forms. And there's a type of sociopath and like the like sociopathic behavior can take a lot of forms and there's a type of sociopath and he has a personality type that he's built who these people are what their motivations are how they operate where they live what they do for a living all this he understands them and studies them and it's a type of sociopathic behaviors to become a

serial poacher that's their outlet yep and there's certain attributes of having like a trailer or a shed or a garage where you have all the heads and you are you have sociopathic, anti-authoritarian tendencies. You have a feeling that you've never really gotten what you deserve in life, that you seem to be somehow compelled along by this idea that you're going to deprive others of something. You've got it all figured out. They're idiots. You know how to find these big bucks.

With the spotlight on somebody else's place. And he has all these case examples of these guys who are like serial poachers, where when you find their cash, it's 50 or 100 elk, just squirreled away in a basement. Oh, that'd be fascinating. Yeah, they think they're, you know, they look at that big pile of poached heads, they're like satisfied. Yeah, he had said that there's a lot of similarities with, there's a lot of similarities with serial killers,

like the really like strange methodical behavior. And it's a sociopathy. Wow. So if you meet a guy that doesn't like the government, thinks the man's getting him down, and has a big pole barn in the back of his house. We'll let you look at his pole barn. Call the police.

Call the police. Yanni? Yeah. This might be the last one. We have to wrap it up. We've got a busy day. I don't know. I can't remember who wrote in.

I don't have the email anymore. It's not, the dude's name is not in front of me. But he wrote in asking why in the show we're always, and we take, we always see this show, I think it's the editors, must like to show us loading the cartridge into the chamber. Yeah, they like that nice metallic clanky sound. So this guy was Hollywood.

Editors like crick crossings, gate openings, burners getting turned on, ignited. I just watched the- And chamber shell, shelling chamberings. The Untouchables with Kevin Costner, you know, and Sean Conner on, ignited. I just watched the- And Chamber, Schellen Chamberns. The Untouchables with Kevin Costner, you know, and Sean Connery, great flick. And they must rack those pump shotguns about 10 times. And it's like-

And the Simpsons. How many times has Moe racked? How many times has the bartender Moe racked his pump shotguns? That's funny. I just watched that Netflix Bird Box. Dude, did you? And Sandra Bullock's in there. watched uh that netflix uh bird box and uh sandra bullock's in there and when yeah to prove her character she's in there going she's like i grew up she said something like i grew up on a farm what does that have to do every time i go to a farm i look around where i look at some guy we're acting a 12 gauge you know i grew up in a rural environment

you're like what oh well clearly you have somebody in hollywood wrote that shit my dad has a horse oh watching hollywood writers be like oh no i know all about these rural folks what they like to do yep i eat a lot of canned vegetables you're like go on go on yannis. So he's wondering why we do that, why we show that, why we're out hunting without a round in the chamber. He is in the woods always. Once he starts hunting, he's got a round chambered with the safety on. That's how he goes about it.

So I'll answer it with a song. There's no business. Larger what you're seeing is a function to show business because we have oftentimes a chaotic situation with camera guys circling around, popping up in unexpected places on you now and then. And it's different than just being out by yourself or being out with your buddy when you have a good synergy and you kind of understand where everyone is. And it's really, it's easy to have good muzzle control.

And just like, if you're out home with your buddy, it's just once you know what you're doing and you guys kind of like know how to move, you just do not whine in situations where someone's sweeping their muzzle across your chest. It just doesn't happen. It's easy to stay aware of who's around and what's going on. When you throw in a filming environment, there's just too much that feels at times like a little bit out of control or surprising. And there's like extra people around who need to get good angles and they're out in front of you and they're behind you. And it just winds, it's a good added safety.

It's a good added safety protocol to just not do it unless you get in the heat of the moment and you feel like you're in a situation where there could be a shot coming up, like in tight quarters. And when we're filming in that situation, I would even say, hey, heads up, I'm chambering around. And then this moment passes

and I would be like, heads clearing the round and it's just it's something we just developed over time that was a good thing with that said um if i'm bombing up some trail in the dark i don't like i don't like pull my gun out of a case and automatically chamber around just kind of depends what's going on yeah i think in most instances it rarely helps it's like it's not really that much of an added benefit to have one around chambered yeah john was saying earlier if you're still if you know you're still hunting right it starts to rain you're like i'm just gonna get them walking around see if i run into something then maybe if you're by yourself then maybe but otherwise i mean i'm curious to see if anybody

at the table here had hasn't been involved in any accidental discharges i have yeah i can think of three or four right off hand absolutely yeah and you know it's a i think it's a really good topic that hunters should talk more about i kind of preach it to my kids in in the nature of hunter education i mean we're it's a zero zero tolerance game. You know, you get, you get no chance to make a mistake. Yeah. Accidental discharges and all the rest, but I'm a strong advocate of not chambering around when you're rifle hunting in most situations. And I certainly have friends who have a different opinion of it and they think, you know, they're, they want to be ready in case they need to make a quick shot or something.

To me, it's not worth it. And it's almost never a situation where you're even going to miss a hunting opportunity if you have to take a minute and rack a rifle around with a bolt-action rifle or whatever. So my opinion on it is it's better typically not to have a round chamber. Yeah, it's an easy one. We're always spot and saw coming out west. You see a lot of that on the show. And John, obviously, that's mostly what you do.

But back east when I grew up hunting deer and I was going to sit in a stand, I'm definitely going to have a round chamber. Once I get set in that stand, and even if I was hunting with somebody, I'd probably still get in a stand. And once you're ready, you're going to chamber one. Because a white-tailed deer in those kind of woods, your shot's going to be less than 100 yards. And a lot of times they pop up and they're just right there in front of you. And you could screw up the hunting opportunity if you had to chamber around. Totally. I get that. And it's reasonably safe. You're sitting there by yourself. You've got good muzzle control, all the rest of it. And you're right,

Giannis. Out here in the West, larger country, spot and stalk hunting for the most part. That's kind of what I was talking about. And you're climbing over stuff and under stuff. And it's like, you know, recently I was hunting with my little boy and we set up to rattle, you know, to call hunting whitetails and set up.

I'm like, okay, we're going to chamber around and talked about how we're going to do that and then talked about how we're going to undo it, you know, to be ready. What I used to do, I now use a neoprene sock, you know, neoprene cover for my scope, which I love. I can't picture ever using anything else.

I used to use the kind that had like the elastic, you know, the shock cord. We used to make our own, just go down to a hardware store, make these like indestructible shock cord scope covers with PVC. What I would do is if I had a round in my chamber, I would always have that scope cover as a reminder. I would put that scope cover on like a bracelet. And that was my like, you have a round in your chamber, don't forget.

Yeah, that's a nice thing to do. A little tool or a device to remind you that you have a round chamber. Because stuff happens out there. It's chaos theory. Just when you think, oh, I've got a round chamber, but I'm good. This is an easy hike and my safety's on.

That's when you cross over a log and you trip and fall. I mean, just stuff happens. Yeah, I would never. My oldest kid is eight it will be that many more years into the future probably more before i would ever entertain the idea of him having a chambered round unless he was preparing to shoot right and it as a parent it really hits home with you you know when when you're when your kids are are now hunting on their own with their buddies and it's like okay you know go get them guys uh i personally still to this day say i don't want you chambering around and i don't really

want you hunting with someone who's got a round chamber you know assess the the hunting competency of your buddies yeah because that's the one that's the bullet it's gonna get you you know and and i have had good friends i've had experiences hunting with very good friends who did not maintain control of their muzzle and you see a muzzle pass in front of your body and and i hate to be kind of a jerk about it but it's almost like a zero tolerance deal it's like i'm probably not gonna hunt with you again yeah drew the story this year i can't remember what state it was in the midwest uh guy was hunting with his dad and he went to pick up his dad and his dad was getting down off his tree stand or somehow somehow decided to hand by the barrel, hand his rifle to his son.

His son reaches up to grab the rifle. Boom. Dead dad. Brutal. Yeah. Because it's a game of worst case scenario. What's the worst case scenario if you don't have a round shaper? A deer gets away?

That's the thing. I can't, and sitting here talking about it, I really can't think of, I can't think of, and sitting here talking about it, I really can't think of a, I can't think of a case, a situation where you could really honestly say I would have had, I would have had that, whatever, had I had it round chambered. I really can't think of a case that, that I could legitimately say that's thing. And people talk about the noise, but what I do is I keep, I'll keep like when I'm doing that,

I'll often keep one in my pocket or I'll keep around in my bino harness. And you don't need to go like, it's not like you're like demonstrating your rural street creds, but you can just kind of open it up, place it in there, not work one out of the,

not working one out of the magazine, which is noisy, but open, place one in, put your finger on not working one out of the magazine which is noisy but open place one in put your finger on the round that's in the magazine press it down close the bolt it's not that loud well you could if you're sitting as the audience saying you're sitting in the ground behind or just sit up against a tree you leave the bolt open yeah in that same way you know i grew i grew up my dad if he said, watch your muzzle once every 10 minutes, it wasn't a surprise. Even if, you know, even if I had shoulder sling my rifle and there's no way I was going to muzzle anybody, he would still say, watch your muzzle.

Absolutely. And kids should start learning that with BB guns. And it's a lifelong thing. And now, you know, you get through teenage years. My kid, my oldest son now is 22. And, you know, we just hunted with him a few days ago and it's like you know when you're hunting with your friends don't be afraid to say my guns clear I'm empty my gun safe you know all the little hunter ed things just keep doing it yeah my

buddy guys up man he uh when we're with him he'll he'll say he's doing it like he'll acknowledge it but he doesn't take your word for it you'd be like oh it's clear well i'm gonna check yeah i think go ahead bro like don't don't apologize to me man totally don't like don't apologize to me about it check all you want don't be insecure about that stuff i mean it's no skin off anybody's nose it makes your gun safe and it's just habits and to hit the thing with the kids i'll tell you like this year i was hunting cottontails with my eight-year-old and he'd shot a cottontail and then we're sitting there and he wanted to get his he wanted to keep the 22 casing as a like just to put in his little bag his little medicine box you know so he goes to get it out and like it doesn't occur to him that when he goes, so he opens it up to retrieve one

and closes it. And I'm like, now, buddy, what just happened? And like, it didn't occur to him like, oh, and getting the one that I wanted, I chambered one. I mean, he doesn't do anything without me being right on top of him and handling, you know? But had I not been there, it wouldn't have occurred. He wouldn't have put that together.

Well, I mean, we're talking about bolt action rifles really in this situation or spotting stocking a deer or something. Think about in the upland field, you can't. If you're running an over-under, you can't walk around. I mean, you could walk around sometimes with it broke open. But most times you can't. It's hard. It's hard it's hard like

jump shooting yeah it's like you're that's a real that's a real deficit well and how many people you sitting in a pit blind with a bunch of dudes where that you got the rack in front of you where you lean up your shotgun and it's loaded and it's wet or icy or something the shotgun just goes falls over and if it's loaded you never know what's going to happen yeah and so those are to me like some of the more dangerous situations there are. For sure. Yeah, there's definitely cases where it really has implications for efficacy, right? Like it's not, if you're sitting there in a duck blind, in order to be in the game and to be an active participant there, you have to be ready to shoot.

You got to be ready to shoot. You got to be ready to shoot. So that, that comes down to where you increasingly, like you're really a lot relying on judgment and attentiveness. I think there are other cases where if you really look at it, like case by case going throughout your day, there's a lot of situations where you're really not at a deficit to have that extra, but it's a thing enough where like so many people have written and asking that question. Yeah, yeah. Now I had an interesting thing go down when I was in North Carolina over the holidays.

Through Kevin Murphy, I met another squirrel hunter that had a dog. And when he picked me up, he said, oh, we're going to go pick up this friend of mine. He's 77. He's training dogs, but he doesn't walk the woods anymore. But he's just going to come along and, you know, hang out at the truck. I'm like, great.

You know, so we go and pick this guy up. He gets in the truck. He doesn't even introduce himself. He's just like, hey, man, are you cool on gun safety? Because we only hunt with dudes that have gun safety as a high priority. And I was kind of like, whoa, you know, like, but but you know, and he went on to tell me he had two, uh, family members, some of them kind of distant, you know, a couple of cousins removed or whatever, but two family members that had been in gun accidents, you know, one had died, but, uh, yeah, that just struck me. And of course I was

like, yeah, bro, I don't hunt with dudes that, you know, don't exhibit, you know, superior gun safety either. And, you know, I won't even load my gun until there's a squirrel that up in a tree that I'm looking at. Right. On top of that, how's your personal hygiene? But only after that, did he say, so you're from Montana. What's your name? I said, Giannis. He goes, ah, it's an interesting name janice janice poodle us uh quick update it's hard because like there's like a delay and because of the holidays we haven't been able to like monitor where things are at on ticket sales for the upcoming live tour but we have upcoming events i believe uh it'll be way old news by the time it gets there our portland events totally sold out that real quick we have upcoming events uh houston

dallas sacramento seattle kalamazoo michigan kalamazoo michigan i'm not sure what's there cleveland not sure what's there i think that most every venue, our VIP tickets are gone. There's still VIP tickets. And I don't know. I don't think there are. There's still tickets for Reno. Absolutely. Dude, go to our Reno show.

Is that Sheep Show? Yeah. You can go to Sheep Show at the same time. Sweet, yeah. And enter the Less Than One Club because most of you mugs listening probably have not killed a sheep

and there's no better way to get an opportunity to go hunt a sheep than hanging out there. There's somebody in this Wait, wait. Kill the sheep. There's somebody in this room

who went to the Less Than One Club last year Oh, that's right. and happened to win. Did you go do that? No, I have not. When is that happening? Are you fixing to? Well, yes. I And happened to win. Did you go do that? No, I have not. When does that happen? You fixing to?

Well, yes. I do want to go. It's like the only thing I've ever won. So yeah, that'd be great. You're not a big winner. No, I'm not a big winner. I am not a big winner. No, I'm just one of those guys

that greases the skids for everybody else. You're one hell of a goose caller, dude. I'll give you that. I had no idea. Holy cow. Cal of a goose caller, dude. I'll give you that. I had no idea. Holy cow. Cal is a very talented sportsman. I knew that, but I had no idea that he was such an emphatic and effective caller. Duck hunting's wild. We hadn't been hunting together, so I was feeling everybody out and Cal's hammering the mallard call. I was this close to going, dude, come on, ease up on the mount. But then I was like, damn, this guy can call

some birds. He's turning birds. Talking to animals, man. I've always loved talking to animals. Cal, there was a bunch of geese flying in a V, high. Like, I would have bet the ranch they're packing the mail, you know. I wouldn't even have called

at them. Heading out of country. And dang if Cal didn't turn them, broke them up, and they came in and we got them like who's that sweet throated it was cool round chambered it was good that you guys saw that day because there's a lot of days when those geese just keep on and going so that was fun that was super fun. All right, as I was mentioning, live tour, go to themeateater.com, fish around there, and sign up for our newsletter while you're there, and fish around there for live events, and then go dig around and check out

which venue you would like to go to. We'll add more venues, but right now, we're focusing on these ones we got there. So go check around. You folks look forward to meeting you and you'll have a chance to buy our live tour exclusive steam breathing wild Turkey t-shirt and other cool stuff. Speaking of sheep show. Oh, good. Okay. I was going to end the show, but I like that segue so much. Sorry.

And all the way back to what's the hardest game to find, you got to kind of throw a nod in for sheep. Oh, I tried to find a real quick story. Doll sheep in the snow. Not easy. Not easy. One time I was following a set of tracks in my spotting scope and then couldn't figure out what happened to the tracks.

And it seems like I'd be able to continue seeing them until I realized that I was staring at a sheep at the terminus of the tracks, which it didn't even register me that that's why the tracks seemed to mysteriously end. You guys going to be set up at Sheep Show? Yeah, man. Schnee's booth?

Yeah, man. You going to be there in person? I will be. You come give John a hug and a kiss? That's right. Free kisses. Buy some boots? Free kisses. You can rub it in how he didn't get to go to me and Cal's meat party. Thank you for listening. 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.