The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 158: Noxious Stimuli

Episode Date: March 4, 2019

Steven Rinella talks with Sam Lungren, Miles Nolte, Seth Morris, Ryan Callaghan, and Janis Putelis.Subjects Discussed: Where Jani’s marriage advice falls short; hanging trophies in the living room; forty dollar underwear vs. expensive beer; “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee”; trouble in North Dakota; the case for banning banana peels; the psychological burden and consequences of poaching a 400-pound tuna; Seth's ill-fated buffalo hunt of a lifetime; Narcissus’s death; Herrera v. Wyoming and getting in over one’s waders; the conservation necessity doctrine; noxious stimuli; do fish feel pain?; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less. Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Yanni, I got to hit you with a marriage advice question.

All right. I'm not looking for marriage advice. But a dude was asking, you know, you're like explain your your one to ten deal that i started that i that i appropriated oh i stole it i think from uh dr wayne dwyer dyer dwyer who's that he's like a self-help kind of author you're a self-help man my dad is and so he's he's passed along a lot of books to me. Okay. Dyer.

Why is it slipping my mind? Nobody can help me out here? Wayne Dyer. I know Dwayne Shue recently passed away. It's Wayne Dyer. That's Dwight Shue. Dwight. Yeah. No relation.

No. Anyways, I guess you could... Yeah, Wayne Dyer. I was right. It's like a life hack kind of a thing, almost. Can you start over and not say that word? But that's popular these days, and people know what I'm saying.

That's what I was hoping you could do it without it. But go ahead. I can do it without it. But anyways, I've been doing it for, I don't know, 10 years. But it's a way to get through small, petty arguments that maybe at the time don't seem small or petty with your spouse or loved one to get through them efficiently and move on, which you then realize that it was probably a petty argument and it was better just to have it behind you. But the way you do it is if you find yourself in the situation where you're arguing about how, let's, the example would be how to load the dishwasher and you're arguing about it and someone realizes, man, this would be a great time to execute the one to 10, what do you, what'd you call it? Like a device to get through this argument. The one to 10 relationship advice. So basically you just say,

all right, how important it is to you. And at that moment, both people throw out a number, one to 10, one being, I don't give a shit at all, but I load the dishwasher. Yeah. To be like, now that I think about it, I really don't care. Yeah. 10 being like, this is so important to me that if we don't load the dishwasher, right, I'm going to be up tonight and three o'clock in the morning thinking about it. And so everybody throws a number out and whoever has the higher number, you just go, okay, it's obviously more important to you than it is to me. Let's do it your way. And you move on. I found that it works because I've, once I asked myself the question, realized I was arguing about twos and threes. And I also had it work to my advantage where i was adamant about

something and my wife threw a two or three or whatever and i was like well you know what for me it's like a nine and i won and she backed out and she's never brought it up again but you have to be fair you can't always be throwing out eights and nines well this dude that wrote in yeah he shot the biggest mule deer of his life uh-huh with his little boy okay with his little boy and he's like yeah i'm putting it right in the living room with my other ones uh-huh and she's like uh-uh okay he already had some up and he was gonna add another there's a whole long story about what's there not there and all that but just the the gist of it is he wants it there yep she's like uh-uh um so they do the trick that they that you taught them and she throws an 11.

but then he's like well hey so if it go and so he threw an 11 back okay so at that point you're just in a regular fight yeah i just know yeah yeah that's gloves off it's obviously you just go back to like sleeping on the couch and you could combine this with your hand holding trick though yeah we haven't talked about that on the podcast i feel like i'm just getting a lot of marriage advice out of this whole deal this is miles nolte talking not this that no this is miles nolte talking you related to nick nolte not that i'm aware of but i have been called nick my entire life because of the slips yeah yeah i'm telling you what man prince of tides the book he's not in the book he's in the movie of course there's some good hunting and fishing stuff in prince of tides man yeah i mean the

nick nolte thing was fine in the 80s but then when you had the whole dui thing that was posted all over you know social media and the internet that that didn't go so well he associated with like a pull a cork i didn't know that yeah he got arrested and his uh it was it was a big story it was a while ago but nick nolte used to be cool he's not anymore my kids were watching a movie the air night on movie night uh and he was voicing a dog voicing a like old wise dog uh where were we oh there's an irregular big fight but the trick this is my dad's trick when when one is fighting with their spouse he likes to do it and he would do this yeah he likes to do it where you hold hands you have to hold hands and

fight which changes the fight oh it does i'm gonna try that reach across the table and hold hands and then be like i'm hanging up that son of a bitch and deer right or however you're gonna go about it oh another thing we were talking the other day cal and yanni you were in on this about whether it's okay or not okay to name your shooting irons. Yeah. Or your bow or whatever. Yeah. And I was saying I don't, but I had my halibut rod was called the Widowmaker. But I didn't name it that, but it just came with the name, which I use.

The man that named it dubbed it the Widowmaker. And this guy looked it up and he's saying you know there's various things there's there some people refer to a particular type of very intense bong hit as a Widowmaker he found there's a disturbing sexual practice called the Widowmaker which I'm not privy to but he says what he thinks you're getting at I was saying it means that you're going to catch i thought it meant you're going to catch male halibut thereby widowing yeah and i can see i can see the other interpretation his is larger like like females i know yeah that's the thing so you're uh yeah he gets into this deal.

You've got to introduce yourself. Sam Lundgren. We're going to get to you real big. Oh, God. He said what it means is you're going to like the rod so much that it will effectively widow your spouse because you'll be fishing so often. Got an email from a guy. This is interesting.

He was zapped on the ankle as a kid. He was in Custer State Park in South Dakota. Got zapped on the ankle by a prairie rattlesnake. Within seconds, he was temporarily paralyzed. And the weirdest thing, he says he was left with nothing but his sense of hearing. Whoa. Yeah. Almost lost his life and there's this whole other story about the the dude that helped him out and in the way that he felt that the state park sort of didn't didn't seem to want the news to get out i don't know

but uh but i thought it was an interesting story. We get hate mail. I don't talk a whole lot about hate mail. We got an interesting hate mail from a guy who is pissed by a handful of things. He's pissed that we wear $40 underwear, which I don't understand because I didn't know how much my underwear cost. My underwear costs $9. I'm going to have to look mine up. I have what's called a varicocele, which is a problem in your scrotum. It feels a lot better if I wear...

I don't wear tighty-whities. I wear black tighty-whities. Three for $27. I checked. He's referring to the first light boxers yeah but i don't want to work my varicoseal problem so he's pinning on me if i did i would just tell him yeah because i'm going to get some more of the things that he's mad about but that's one of the things he's mad about expensive underwear yeah uh i think you're unfortunately you're just looking at those as underwear they function just fine as

shorts on the occasion um i've hiked in them alone many times and uh you know for plane travel all the way up through riding a horse and mountain biking and all that stuff um you know you don't stink so bad so yeah and you can wear the same things for six seven days and i do regularly so but that's his gripe yeah here's the weird thing about this dude he he says he's he's drinking beer at sea tack and acknowledges that he's probably had too many how much is the airport beer ten dollars at least minimum so i don't get it like especially that's where this guy's letter becomes really funny because another main gripe of his is that he doesn't feel that non-residents should be able to apply for he's mad that we talk about and have

friends who and that we apply for non-resident big game tags, especially for like limited draw stuff. He thinks that this is bad because a lot of people can't afford that stuff. And you, apparently he feels that only a taxpayer, like you should have to pay taxes in a state to hunt in the state if it's for limited draw stuff. But again, he's talking about like the working man. But again, you're buying too many airport beers. I always feel that when people, it's like, if you honestly can't afford, if you're alive in America today and have a vehicle in the house, I could come in and analyze your budget and find the money for you to do an out of state tag. I have often said, i'm like myself personally

there's a lot of things that i write off as unaffordable but if i looked at my yearly beer budget the money is more than likely right there you know janice quit drinking for a year i was conversing with his wife about this well i haven't yet how do you i was actually this was you're in the midst yeah i'm in the midst but i haven't done it yet that's right uh next year in 2020 you can say that but it's your intention right now to take a year off of booze it is as i look to get back into it he's looking to get out of it and his wife was observing to me just the observation of not having to buy all that beer. And she said, this kid can do whatever. This guy. Think about how many states he'll be hunting.

It actually impacts the bottom line, apparently. Yeah, this is pure habits. Yeah, well, $40 boxers and IPAs are not cheap. And then he was also mad. Yeah, he talks about how I have ADHD and I'm a narcissist. Guy wrote in something funny. He was saying that we were talking about button bucks. Like, do button bucks ever shed their buttons?

And a lot of people wrote in, in in fact like sent pictures and stuff this guy tells this funny story where he him and his old man killed a button buck once and it shed its buttons in their vehicle whoa huh as they're handling it so he saves them he hears us talk on the podcast about whether button bucks ever shed the hardened piece goes to get his to take a photo of him can't find him ask his wife have you seen my two little things she says i didn't know what the hell those were and i threw them out so he's bummed about that um emails coming in lately about yannis not getting the respect he deserves and not being properly appreciated. And someone wrote in,

the best I can tell this is a poem about Giannis. Oh. Have you seen this? No. Does it say who he's not getting respect from? No. I feel like he's- I assume it's like, I don't know.

Yeah. He feels that Giannis doesn't get the appreciation he deserves. In fact, the guy that wrote the big hate mail about me having ADHD and suffering from narcissism, he also said something like, you got to have all those people around you to save you from bears. So he's not entirely wrong. Again, I think he's referring to Giannis. That's great uh now i hold the cremation of sam mcgee and the shooting of dan mcgrew as sort of like the pinnacle of american

poetry me too like there's no better poem ever been written so with that as the here's i'll read a little bit oh it's long more imperturbable than a stoic philosopher more patient than job as brave as a lion as sharp-eyed as a mountain eagle women adore him critters fear him in action how like an angel huh liking this in action action, howl? Howl. Howl. Oh. In appreciation. Oh, in apprehension.

Howl like a god. It goes on. Another guy wrote in talking about how bad. I feel lucky just to be sitting next to you. I know. But then another guy writes in about how bad Giannis is at math. Well, the poem didn't say anything about math skills. I mean, let's be fair in math how bad remember we're talking about in ohio if you shoot a buck and it's like how ohio rates

yeah the penalties for poaching and that if you shoot a trophy class animal they want to make it a lot worse for you than if you shot a forky. And they have this formula. Do you still have the formula on you? Might be able to find it quickly. You made a mistake in a term you used, and a teacher, a calculus teacher wrote in about it. Uh-oh. You said, okay, so you take the gross score.

Here's the formula. Oh, you already have it. Yeah, I just realized I have it in front of me. You take the gross Boone and Crockett score of an animal. And just real quick, remind people how you determine the, like, what are the measurements to when we talk about this? There's a whole bunch of measurements, but it's basically the lengths of both main beams,

depending on how many places you can get it. There's mass measurements that go around both main beams depending on how many places you can get it there's uh mass measurements that go around the main beams and then the length of the tines as well as the inside spread there wouldn't be mass yeah yeah circumference measurements yes and then the length of all the tines you add this all up and there's a couple different systems for doing this right is there total overlap between boone and crockett and pope and young or is there a difference the scoring systems i'm pretty sure it's total i think it's the same yeah i think it is yeah as far as like methodology of yeah but then the sci is a different it is my brother's a proponent

of he wants to establish a system which might be in use somewhere he thinks that there's only one measurement it should only be water displacement i've heard that pretty amazing i've got a friend in idaho is a really serious uh shed hunter and he's found the sheds off the same crazy buck for like the last five years straight both sides it's awesome he's just got a stack of them but it wouldn't score anything on either sci or boone and crockett because it's awesome he's just got a stack of them but it wouldn't score anything on either sci or boone and crockett because it's just they look like moose antlers that stick forward it's just so massive and palmated but it's not long and it's not wide but he was telling me about the water displacement and how it would do very well yeah that's his view his perspective is if it's big

it's just big dip it in the water how much water does it displace and there you see whose is the biggest that way if he drew a giant club you could potentially anyhow uh so you score up the deer and then you take 100 off the score so let's say he's a real whopper and i think they only start at 125 okay so in that case you ax 100 yeah so you need 25 you square 25 yeah 25 times 25 then you times that by a buck 65 and you create the and that's what the fine is so we're talking about this guy killed this big whopper whitetail, and the fine was $26,000. He had $1,000 worth of add-ons. You incorrectly, I didn't even catch this, you described it as exponential, that it grows exponentially, apparently.

So I used the term exponential wrong. When something's being squared, it's not exponential. That function is quadratic. Quadratic. So he had his calculus kids make a calculator for us so we could type in any number and it would do it. And he said he also made a calculator that if you use Janus' method, you use yannis's method and got away from a quadratic system and went to an exponential system uh a 125 inch buck would okay he he made an exponential system and rated it so that the 125 inch buck scores the same on the quadratic and the exponential. And then he ran what would happen if you killed a real whopper, a 250-inch whitetail. If it was exponential, Yanni, you would have a $1.3 million fine. fine with the quadratic system your 250 inch whitetail would get you a 37 000 fine how much familiarity uh you guys have with north dakota got some kin from north dakota that's about it you don't hunt it nope i've hunted damn close i've hunted looking over into it i caught northern

pike on uh bluegill jigs over there one time that was pretty exciting just throwing out nothing but a jig head and popping it bad it was catching like hammer handle northern yeah uh there's a bill there right now in the North Dakota Senate, state Senate to make it that I'm approached this wrong way right now in North Dakota, you, a landowner needs to actually post his land, no trespassing. Like if you're in North Dakota and you see private land that isn't posted, you can go on it. And I guess oftentimes there'll be like large properties and someone might post along the roads or whatever, but you can oftentimes find landowners who don't bother to post it. And it's just understood that you can hunt it.

Or even people that try to post it don't do the thorough enough job, I guess. And people find, you And people find a place where it wasn't posted according to law and therefore you're allowed to access it. And there's a bill in the North Dakota Senate to change the law so that it becomes

an automatically posted state, meaning the landowner has no obligation to tell you you can't go on it. It's just understood if it's private, you can't go on it just understood if it's private you can't go on it without permission i can see both sides of that one yeah yeah um another interesting thing from a guy he was hunting in oregon and got a bad hit on a bull He said he took a longish, longish shot. At what point does a shot become longish? I suppose if you start

questioning. No, bow and arrow, archery hunt. Oh, that would be very long. If you start questioning. I don't know if he felt those longish in hindsight or if he felt those longish when he was going to pull where you're back. Either way, he takes a longish shot,

uses the wrong pin, hits high, square in the shoulder, gets a couple inches of penetration. On a whim, he goes on an Oregon Hunter Facebook page

and describes his insert broadhead combo. He says, hey, if anyone hunting this year were to encounter this, let me know. 10 days later, guy sends him a photo telling him he was six inches high of his broadhead. This bull, this guy shot this bull 12 miles due north of where he hit it. In a different unit.

Wow. It crossed, is it Grand Ronde? No, Rhone. It is Ronde. Ronde? Crossed the Grand Ronde River no Ronde? It is Ronde. It's Ronde. Dude. Ronde? Ronde. Crossed the Grand Ronde River 12 miles away 10 days later.

No kidding. Scared it pretty bad. Or he's just out doing elk type stuff. Yeah, exactly. They move around a lot. Or he's like, I am out of here, man. And the upper end of that's just that giant plateau. Yeah.

It'd be kind of easy walking, but 12 miles, that's pretty wild. Yeah, but in between the plateaus is pretty rugged. Yeah, up on top, top. Right. Yeah. The big gorge there is amazing. Amazing. Yeah, like down Joseph Canyon and all that stuff is unbelievable.

You good for a couple more? Yeah. Lots of people wrote in. We were talking about, can you really slip on banana peels? Lots of people wrote in about slipping on banana peels. Firsthand accounts of people slipping on banana peels. One guy feels it's such a problem that banana peels should be banned. He says, he's like,

I'll say this, if lawn darts are illegal, you should not be allowed to have banana peels. That's real interesting because if you get an upgrade in your flying service of choice, typically the snack basket includes bananas. Yes.

So, I mean. But lower class people are not permitted to have bananas. Yeah. They might be irresponsible with the peel. Bananas are the most eaten fruit in the world. Is that right? Real liability.

We were doing kid trivia last night. Back in 2017, a dude in Massachusetts, an angler, Massachusetts catches a 400-pound bluefin tuna 15 days after the season ends. It's like a $10,000 fish. Decides to keep the fish, but it's hard to hide a 400-pound tuna. Word spreads around the boat dock

that this fella is running around with a tuna. At some point, he gets scared, and he can't get it in his truck but he ties it to his truck and drags it out into the woods okay he gets a federal fine of $15,000 for killing this tuna. Then just now, putting salt in the wounds, his local municipality doubles around and hits him for another thousand in fines for littering and disposing of waste from a vehicle. They're like, and so you didn't learn your lesson,

we will now fine you an additional $1,000 for charges related to you dragging a bluefin tuna out into the woods. That is very interesting. I think that's totally fine for the record. That's expensive fish. Oh, I'm not criticizing. I think that fine should be higher considering the value of those fish and that fishery.

And the waste, that should be significantly higher. Yeah, 26k for a whitetail. And here you have like a threatened species. Yeah, like a fairly depleted species. Yeah, and it wasn't the...

I forwarded around that article about that bluefin, the first bluefin of the season. It went over a million bucks. It went over a million bucks. No. Yes, in Japan. In Japanese fish markets. Because it had the right fat content and everything?

No. And it was the first? Absolutely. No, this is legit. A dude got a million for a bluefin. Well over a million, if I remember correctly. Yeah. And this guy owns a chain of sushi restaurants over there

and is known to be a big guy with a fat wallet, I believe is the story. I'm pretty sure that wasn't the first one to go for over a million. No. No shit. I mean, I knew they were extremely valuable. But I want to know.

Bluefin tuna goes for 3 million at first 2019 sale at Tokyo Market. How many pounds was the fish? 612. 612 pounds. Because I know that they'll go, like I was talking to a guy that sold some bluefins over the years, and you take it down right away, and they pull a plug out of that thing. I don't know what they do, but they're very interested in fat,

and I'm sure a host of other color fat and all that. And you either got gold or you don't have gold yeah and he says it's hard to tell like he couldn't tell yeah but they damn sure no i was just watching that uh documentary jiro dreams of sushi that's a good ass that is a good one very good but oh man it was amazing to see them go to the fish market and the guy's like you know to an aside he's like i wish there was some actual tuna here and there's like a a warehouse full of these big giant beautiful looking tuna and there's just it was all garbage to him yeah and it's amazing like they cut them down to where they can like stack them like cordwood right um the cores me and i need to use that learn that yeah the cores yeah this guy was

uh this bluefin tuna they found out in the woods was missing they had its head cut where they leave the collar on but take the yeah the core i mean wouldn't you just i'm dying to know what was going through the the psychological burden on this man from where he's like nope screw it i'm hauling it to the woods i'm keeping it on the boat i'm not turning it back or was it like bleeding from the gills and he was just like man why would i throw this thing back to the shark well that's the difference between dumping it out that's like you calling fish and game yeah or you just caught the line once you realize what you got yeah but i just wonder if there's something that like made him be like okay screw it kick the doors open.

Haul this thing on. I'm keeping it. And it's not his boat, apparently, because I'm sure they could have taken his damn boat. I don't know if they did that. Those dudes that poached those bear cubs, man, they got their boat taken away. And I think the truck they used to pull the boat. Yes. Is that state by state, though, whether or not they can confiscate gear for poaching i don't know i don't i don't know

but yeah the guy had to have just been a mess then like all that compounds by the time you get back to the dock and you're like oh man wish i just let that damn fish go yeah and then to waste it yeah oh oh that's sacrilegious, man. That's kind of the weird part is, you almost have to hang out with the guy. Yeah. Because at some point, he even abandoned the idea that he's just going to stake it out and put it in a bunch of freezers. Yeah.

And that's why I'm like, jack that fine up even further. I mean, if you're wrestling, he's clearly wrestling with this idea and yet chooses to do a series of worse and worse actions. It's like you had a lot of opportunities to right this wrong. And you did all of it. I get it. But we used to break all kinds of rules when we were little. Yep. I don't know if he's little.

I was going to say, I doubt this is a kid we're talking about. I don't think this is like a 16-year-old. Yesterday fishing when the sheriff pulled up. Yeah. All right, we're fishing, and the county sheriff pulls up, and I'm able to now, now being where I'm at now in life, I'm able to walk up to the window and lean on the window and be like, howdy, boys.

In the old days, if we weren't doing something wrong at the moment, we were nervous about what we had just been doing wrong last week. Absolutely. Like pitchfork and salmon out from behind some beaver dam. Oh, a little part of me was still like, what am I? Where's my light? Do I have barbs on my hooks? Oh, that doesn't matter here.

Am I old enough to be drinking? Yeah. When you see a cop, you turn the radio down. I'm old enough now where I'm just like, what's up, guys? I haven't done anything wrong even lately. The thing that threw me off was we're going to get out and talk to you boys. That threw me off too.

I'm like, you know what? Get out and talk to me. I haven't done anything bad in a long time. I haven't found any salmon in a drainage ditch saying shot up with a shotgun hypothetically i grabbed my license yesterday morning in preparation for going out on the ice and actually opened it up double checked the expiration date yeah right yeah got it

yeah just saying we're coming up on the expiration here because the first year I lived in Montana, I had a game warden. I was fishing downtown Missoula at the Hollywood Hole right in front of the Double Tree. I saw a game warden watching me with binoculars. That's called the Hollywood Hole? Yeah, just because everybody's looking at you. Oh, that's a good point. Game warden watching me with binoculars peeking around the building. And I was like, what's he doing? And I was like,

oh, you know, I left my fishing bag in the truck. That's where my license is. I reeled up when I saw him do that, walked right up to him and said, hey, saw you looking at me, figured you want to check my license. It's in my bag in the car. I needed to grab that bag because I needed to change flies anyway. He's like, oh, great. No problem. I'll walk'll walk with you walks over there with me i grab my bag give him the license we're just shooting the shit being real friendly and everything and he hands me the license back and as i reach for it he pulls it back and goes oh wait this is this expired last week and writes me 130 ticket is that right yep my first year first year living in montana always and i was like i was like i was like there's a there's a there's a fly shop two blocks from here i will literally jog there and

renew my license he's like no sorry violated flexibility here yeah because he was giving you some flexibility for not having your license on you yeah he'd already like yeah but but but i approached him, too. So I felt like, I don't know. You acknowledged it. Yeah, absolutely. He was in the right there. Yeah, I could see it both ways, man.

Yeah, but I was just really annoyed by it. I wouldn't plead it in court. Did you win? They reduced it to the minimum fine, which was $60. Yeah, it was worth your time. Yeah, I thought so. But to circle back to the guy with the tuna,

I just have to say, I hope he at least took the belly meat out of that thing. Because that bluefin belly meat is like the most delicious fish in the planet. You could find out because there's a picture of them. They had to call in a wrecker. They called in a wrecker to lift it up by the tail. There's a picture of it sitting on a

they had to call it Bob's towing to come down and get that tuna carcass. What a shame, man. They brought it to a garden. They brought it to a local farm to fertilize it. Old school. Did it say if he knew that the quota was filled when he put it in the boat? I don't know.

I don't know. I don't remember reading that. Maybe you want to bring up something, man. What was I going to bring up? We were talking about how I don't feel nervous by law I think you lose a lot of argument. But it made me want to bring up something, man. Like, what was I going to bring up? We were talking about how I don't feel nervous by law enforcement people anymore, which is good. What's in the good column? Shotgunning salmon. Bad column.

Well, when they make a bunch of wrong turns, here's the thing is, if they make so many wrong turns that they're in some farmer's drainage ditch, we would take liberties with them. Because then you're like, well, you're not gonna like run into another salmon and spawn on the gravel at this point like you're up bob

weir's in this drainage ditch you know like you've you know i don't know if the other salmon want you in this in the throwing in with them yeah that's your comment did the man know that the quota was filled i feel like you lose any opportunity for argument when you're stashing shit in the woods no doubt by the time oh no i'm just wondering what you know again his oh yeah me too i i'm dying to know yeah federal did i say federal federal yeah yeah i mean for all we know we could be really churching this up and the guy's like listen boys i had a lot of budweiser's those those couple of days i wish i could think of what i was going to talk about because it was like a tied to this deal tied to this deal and i was going to talk about it

see that adhd deal that like narcissistic adhd deal planted the seed now if i forgot something that was going to talk about how great i was that would back that dude up right but it wasn't i wasn't gonna be like oh i don't know what i was gonna say is i've uh you know very strapping um uh one last thing i want to bring up then we're gonna talk about what we're here to talk about i've got a couple three things um this guy was talking about how he used to hunt squirrels at his grandpa. And his grandpa, they'd hunt squirrels with dogs. And his grandpa kept a kit with him, which was a fire-making kit and a coffee can.

A tin coffee can. So when the squirrel would hole up in a hollow tree, grandpa would get a fire burn in his coffee can and then set the coffee can in there to thereby smoke the squirrel out. If I remember right, I feel like when we were little kids, you know those smoke bombs you get at Fourth of July? I feel like we'd do something

similar. That sticks in my head. One time he's out there with Grandpa and Grandpa forgets his can, gets a fire ripping, no can, uh starts himself a forest fire yep jeez did he get the squirrel fire i've heard of it today i hunted the web today with uh old bench made and uh chose the wrong uh answer when i was gonna just kick out my coals or should i use the rest of my water to douse my fire? It's like a choice I had to make

in Benchmade's Hunt the Web, realistic game. And I decided just to shuffle the coals out because I was hunting in the Pacific Northwest. I was like, nothing can catch on fire here. And sure enough, I walk away. And next thing I know, game over, forest fire, giant plume of smoke. I got a good one.

I should clarify, he didn't, okay, he didn't start a forest fire. He burnt the whole damn tree got a good one clarify he didn't okay he didn't start forest fire he burnt the whole damn tree down but then the fire didn't spread oh that's bad so okay on the lines of pacific northwest and fires and bad decision making go on our good buddy jeff lander all uh primitive outfitting his buddies that are floating floating a moose river um for years and years and years one of them dies they bury his ashes underneath this prominent tree on the bank of the river um one of these years they invite jeff to come down with them um and they they this tree is prominent because they've called in a bunch of moose in this same spot and it's nice and it, you know, breaks all that BC drizzle. And, uh, they're kind of having a peaceful moment there and they're, they're calling moose and Jeff has everybody's sandwiches and tinfoil.

Okay. And he starts a little fire there at the base of the tree. To heat the sandwiches up. To heat the sandwiches up. To heat the sandwiches up. Making some paninis. They eat their lunch, move on down the river. Somebody makes the comment of like, oh, you sure that fire's out?

The next day, Jeff has burned down the sacred tree, so to speak. With the ashes under it. With the ashes under it. Because he decided to shuffle the coals instead of because he's he's in a really wet place and it's just nothing matters doesn't doesn't burn i'll buy that yeah that's pretty sad well it kind of gives that sacred spot even better story. It does. All right, one more. One more quickie. No. One more quickie?

No. Seth, have you said anything yet? Just about the cops getting out of the vehicle. Oh, yeah. Can you tell people about your ill-fated one-hunt of a lifetime? Oh. Drew a bison tag in montana this year for gardner and talk about that yeah how'd you feel about three areas and three areas uh west yellowstone there's gardner and then there's the absaroka backcountry unit it's like west

entrance north entrance yeah and then the backcountry unit yep It's like west entrance, north entrance, and then the backcountry unit. Were you excited to draw that tag? Super excited. I was excited. Everyone was excited. Gave them all kinds of 200 grain federal bullets. It was the first year I put in for it and drew it. Had big plans. Talk about what needs to happen so the bison spend most of their life

in yellowstone park and in the winter time when the weather gets real nasty they migrate out of of the park to find better grass. You know, they migrate out because some animals stay in the park. This is from what I gather from talking with game wardens and stuff. They stay in the park. Some animals stay in the park, but there's too much pressure for, you know, the park to handle that many bison over the winter. So they move out. And they're just like roamers.

Yeah. They're predisposed to roaming. Yep. And so they usually push out of the park, you know. The season closes February 15th. By that time, they're usually, you know, having all sorts of trouble with them in Gardner and getting into people's backyards and destroying stuff. Well, this year, the weather was pretty mild. Not much snow down there.

And they didn't decide to leave the park. Yeah, we were up in that neck of the woods yesterday and there was like no snow. Yeah. Or inches. Yeah, we were up in that neck of the woods yesterday, and there was like no snow. Yeah. Or inches. Yeah. So my bison tag that, I don't know if I say it's a once-in-a-lifetime tag, because you can definitely draw it again.

Yeah, but that means different things. There's like once-in-a-lifetime, like the expression. Yeah. And then there are once-in-a-lifetime tags. It's a name. So once-in-a-lif montana for this tag would be like an expression yeah right meaning like it's not like an idaho uh moose tag right that's once literally literally once in a lifetime if you are successful yes oh really yep i think you told me that before

that's right yeah draw the tag got tags your opportunity if you fill the tag that is your once what's the wait period apologies to the guy who thinks you should only be able to hunt in the state where you live like in his view you can't let go to your uncles and then go out do a little hunt with your uncle that's like no way um uh how many years if you don't i want to say it's seven okay Okay, so a long wait. So they never, yeah. When I talked to a game warden, no state, now he used the term state hunters because there are tribal hunters.

Like a lot of the tribes exercise treaty rights or exercise the right, and they'll come and shoot some. I went down there one time and watched the Nez Perce shoot five of them, I think. Yeah, our buddy Ed Garcia, I think it was just last fall last winter he was down there he's got a cabin somewhere down there was driving through and saw a bunch of hunters getting after it and uh there was so many and they were having like problems

like getting all the meat out and everything and there's gut piles everywhere and he went down there and he harvested ribs and uh hearts and livers all kinds of stuff so much that he's like oh you want a heart buffalo heart on the way home and he stopped by and dropped me i've heard of people doing that down there in the gut piles yeah well there's none of that this year yeah not one not one tag holder not one state tag i guess a handful of tribal hunters got some early yep not one state tag holder yeah it's just not the year but he said numbers were low in the park yeah because they'll fluctuate you know like three thousand to seven so i heard that too numbers were low in the, which means the pressure for grazing isn't there. So you got to wait seven years now to try again?

I don't know. I'm not sure. I used to put in for it, then I quit putting in for it. Why is that? Just because it's like a shit show? Just because it just gets a little crazy, but I think I'm going to start again.

I'm not going to let that scare me off. No. I'm going to put in for it again. You got to do a snow dance, man. just wasn't the year for it now if a non-resident were to snag that tag out from underneath you don't tell that guy and don't tell the guy who's all drunk at the c-tag bar on the wyoming he's like i blew all my money on nine dollar beers bro i can't do that hunt wyoming side that opportunity to pursue that buffalo for a bull, I think is like over three grand now. Hmm. Wow. Yeah. They jacked their prices up last year.

Oh, the tag. If you draw the tag, it's three grand. Yeah. As a non-resident. Now your resident price, uh, there's typically a pretty vast discrepancy between your resident and non-resident prices. Would anybody like to venture a guess as to why? Because they don't pay taxes in the state? Because states raise a hell of a lot of money and they fund a large portion of their fish and game operations through the sale of non-resident, grossly inflated priced tags for maybe and

all those uh resident folks of which all of us are a beneficiary of our tag prices seldom get raised yeah yeah so it's a subsidy yeah you hunt you hunt deer for $30 and another guy hunts deer for $600 and therein you can fund a lot of wildlife work. Yes. I do feel for this guy though in the fact that I have definitely been the guy doing a lot of bitching about all the non-resident

folks. The out-of-state license plates and stuff. Oh yeah. I feel it. You know what? Sure. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes.

And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints,

and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team.

Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit OnXMaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Montana FWP raised something on the order of $21 million last year on non-resident license fees. Yeah. Which is like the second highest in the country, I believe. You know what happens in the trapping world?

There's like a reciprocity thing in the trapping world where, for instance, if a lot of states, because fur bearers are managed more like a commodity, a lot of states will prohibit non-resident fur trappers from trapping in their state. And there's a reciprocity system where if you live in a no-go state, if you're like a trapper from a state where your state doesn't allow non-residents to trap beaver, other states will reciprocate and

not allow you oh so for instance in montana you cannot trap fur bearers no a non-resident cannot trap fur bears in montana so a montana person is not allowed to go over into wyoming idaho wherever and trap because someone from another state yeah your state won't let our people come we're not going to let your people come i didn't know that either you get into a little tit for tat a guy wrote in like how come how come people don't talk like why is washington not a popular hunting state for non-residents like where do we start yeah there's a bunch of reasons um they're extremely conservative with tag allocation uh it's It's expensive just to apply. I have a ton of points in Washington, and now it's $330 just for the application fee for each one.

So for my moose goat sheep, I just don't do it anymore because it'd be $1,000 just down the drain. Non-refundable. Non-refundable. No shit. $330 application fee. Some states will really stick it to you like to even get in is going to cost you alaska smart i don't should say they're smart their strategy is

to sucker you in the application's not bad you got to buy a base license and you got to pay these fees and then you draw and you get all excited and they zap you hard on the tag. On the tag. But then you get people who draw and can't afford the tag and it probably screws you up on allocations a little bit. Probably. So some states want to be like, is he good for it or not? Send in all your money,

demonstrate that you're good for it so that when we give you the thing, we get our money and it doesn't like, you can wait and then later decide to buy it or not buy it and then we have a better sense of who's like ready to roll. Yeah, Wyoming, you know, mountain goat is a species and the bison as well,

where you can't accrue points for those. But that's all the cash up front. Just like if you were to put in for any of the other species and go for like the thin chance that you might get drawn without the points, you'd throw all your cash up front. But yeah, that's $2,000 for a goat. If you're putting in for a bull bison too, you're at like $5,000. In Wyoming. Yeah.

Damn. Wow. What did your tag cost you that you drew 125 bucks it's 1250 for non-res hmm you want to see a good pivot i do speaking of wyoming you like that i do that's what we learned to call it we just called a segue but someone was saying it's like a pivot larry keen larry keen pivots uh larry bird for that matter yeah oh yeah nice um real quick real quick issue two real quick issues no you guys are all familiar with our friend ben long very when we talked about what we're going to talk about, when I touched on, I one time touched on

what we're going to talk about, and he emailed me warning me not to talk about it. So I don't want to talk about it because it scared me off. So Sam Lundgren's going to talk about it because I was too intimidated. I was's going to talk about it. Because I was too intimidated. I was too intimidated to talk about it because this is like the forbidden subject. Well, that's not very narcissistic of you.

Oh, what would I do? What would be a better, more narcissistic? You know who Narcissus was? Narcissus, yeah. Narcissus? What's his name? Narcissus. Narcissus, yeah. You know what What's his name? Narcissus. You know what his

story was? He found that little looking pond, right? And what happened to him? He would just stare at his reflection in the pond, but something bad happened to him eventually, right? Didn't he drown in the pond or something like that? Yeah. He died by that. By being so obsessed with his own reflection

that that was his downfall. Can you type up how Narcissus died? What's his name? Narcissus. Narcissus. Can you type up how he died? How he passed away? Rest in R.I.P. Rip.

Yeah. He found a little pond with a clear surface and he liked to look at his reflection. And to be clear, this is Greek mythology, right? Yeah. Yeah. Because he was sitting there looking so much, and he didn't want to disturb that perfect surface. He got thirsty.

Oh. Didn't want to disturb that perfect reflection. Died of thirst. Died of thirst. Oh, that's a painful death. Yeah. Especially the painting. He looks like he's got his face about six inches away from the water.

That's a good story. And we were talking about not long ago about the Greeks? There's this principle. It's Xenia, Z-E-N-I-A, I think. It has to do with the guest host bond. It's somehow related to the relationship of a flower and its pollinator i've heard of this i was going to name one of my daughters i only had one named after my mother but if i had more i want to name one xenia um but yeah it has to do with the guest host bond

like meaning like if you host someone like let's say uh let's say my father hosted your father in his home you would owe me still like it's that strong the guest host bond is that strong wow what culture does that drive from i learned it when we were reading that ilia in the odyssey and that's right. Because it was Troy. You had to do with like, you remember how the dude that, you remember how Achilles kills Hector? Achilles kills Hector and drags his body all over the damn place. And Hector's dad, Priam, maybe?

I can't remember Hector's dad. Hector's dad comes to beg Achilles, let me have my boy's body back and stop disgracing his body. And there's all these other things that went on with how he guilted him into it. But part of it had to do with Achilles' father was once the guest of Priam's father. And so he was somehow through this, there's an explanation that because of that,

he's like, okay, I'll give you your boy's body back and I'll stop dragging it behind my chariot and making a total mess out of it. Xenia. Wyoming. And the thing that one dastard speak about. There's a Supreme Court case. I want to explain to people the damn Supreme Court case.

Well, now you got me all nervous about opening my mouth about it, which I've definitely felt throughout the reporting on this. Do you want to know the metaphor he used? I used it the other night. He said it's a deep, cold river, and you will get in over your waders. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it certainly felt that way, but it's also been a fascinating experience diving deep into this.

But what we're talking about is the Supreme Court case, Herrera v. Wyoming, which was heard by the United States Supreme Court on January 8th. And they haven't decided yet. No, they haven't decided yet. Most folks anticipate a ruling coming out this summer or this fall, but you don't really know with the Supreme Court. Isn't that funny how it takes so long? Yeah, it is. It kicks up a lot of research issues, I'm guessing. Yeah, and the alleged crime here happened five years ago. Lay it out. Lay it out lay it out all right what happened sam's now getting he's up to his knees he's in his knees well you hated some hate mail to me yesterday about this so now i'm all nervous yeah because sam right sam writes well let's clarify

sam writes an article about this which can be found at the media.com what's the article called it's called her era v wyoming inside the Elk Hunting Case Before the Supreme Court. And he's already gotten hate mail. Yep. Yep. But, you know, I mean, it's more people airing their biases towards us than hate per se.

Yeah, it's not. And this was like, to be fair to the one I'm talking about, it wasn't hate mail. It was like being like, hey man, here's some stuff that you might not know i learned i learned a couple things i don't i shouldn't tip that was a bad you know what me saying that was a shitty thing to say because it was not hate mail it was like being like hey i think you missed you're off the mark he was a total dick about it but he was he was he was uh he was correct on some nice he wasn't no he said

he started off by saying he was sorely disappointed which is uh i feel like i don't know i feel like that's my mom like well i'm not i'm not mad i'm just disappointed it's amazing that people some people are so uh are really disappointed really easily we got a piece of hate mail one time because because just out of habit we use the term like to instead of using something be like you're running it you're like running whatever tripod and a guy took the time to write about how bad that is so the people are like ready to be not happy yeah they're they're they're they're trying to find any small flaw within it and you know i worked on this for three weeks

and i'm sure there are elements missing, but I, you know, obviously my goal as a journalist here was to put forward the most complete and accurate version I could. And I tried to write something that would walk the line of like explaining this without, you know, pissing off people based on their preconceived notions of it. So I tried to play fair. It gets into race. It's highly racially charged. So let's back up a little bit and talk about what happened. So there's this guy, Clavin Herrera, who used to be a game warden for the Crow tribe of southeastern Montana. And with a couple friends, they followed a herd of elk off of the Crow Reservation across the state line into Wyoming

in the Bighorn National Forest, where they killed three elk that they packed out. The game warden who ultimately tracked down this case and brought them to justice, if you will, found a fourth bull that was untouched. But they all claim that that was, that must've been from something else or that he's lying or something like that. Okay. And how did the, is it worth getting into how the warden tracked down? I think it is worth getting into because I found that to be, I found that to be a fascinating element of this. So this, this, this ward who uh testified before uh the before the court in wyoming um and i read through all of that uh so he was finding a lot of poaching cases in this area

he referenced a friend of his who's a shed hunter spending a bunch of time up there and this guy alone who's not law enforcement reported 12 elk poaching cases in this area that year butchered or partly butchered yeah it's like like there's one where it's a big bull um with missing just its head and its uh back straps um and yeah i've got a i've got a quote. Sounds like good hunting zone. Yeah. Yeah, and he's like, yeah, and he's getting out the onyx. Yeah, this drops way too much. This warden said, I was getting pretty desperate. I mean, you know, the public entrusts a game warden to enforce the game laws.

The way the vehicles were coming and going, it was obvious to me there was a possibility it was members of the Crow tribe who were responsible for some of this. But the way he actually got to these particular guys, and it sounds like there's probably different groups of people, and the Crow tribe is large with a large reservation, but the way he got to these particular people and Herrera in particular was Herrera sent an email to Wyoming fishing game asking to discuss poaching incidents in this very area. And that was forwarded on to this game warden, Dustin Shorma, who then reached back out to Herrera and said, heck yeah, I'd love to talk about that. We're getting our asses kicked out there, basically. So they met up on a back road near the state line in this area and talked about

what their two departments could do to collaborate and to try to solve this problem. But he walked away with kind of a fishy feeling about that meeting. So that was the, he, Herrera, whose name carries the Supreme Court case. Yes. He reached out, I didn't realize this, even like, I realized, but I didn't realize the implication of it. Yeah. He initiated contact. He did. I could pull up that email.

No, no, no, go on. Yeah, if you want to see it. Even reading it and talking with you about it, I missed that fact. Yeah, he sent that email. I knew there was a conversation, but I didn't know that that's how it was initiated. Yeah, and he voluntarily went to meet up with Dustin Shorma at the state line. They went up and looked at the carcass of a spike bowl that had been poached in that area. But Shorma walked away feeling

uncomfortable with the meeting. Here's another quote from his testimony. He was interested in knowing who I suspected was responsible for these poaching incidents. He was curious as to the capabilities of our forensic laboratory in Laramie. On the way home, I was kind of, I don't know, maybe excited that I'd be able to solve some of these cases. But by the same token, it bothered me some of the conversations that we had. I started thinking like I was maybe being taken advantage of, I guess. So he got home and googled Clavin Herrera and found his Facebook, but also found his postings on a brag board website called monstermuleys.com.

Is it fair to call that a brag board? That's what a lot of other folks have called it. Brag board? Yeah, you know, I haven't really. I feel like it's just dude swapping info, man. Whatever. It's a forum. No, no, no.

That's part within those forums a lot of times. There'll be sections where you swap info, but then there's also like a thread or an air zone where all it is, it's like, here's the right kill. I wasn't trying to preference that. It's just kind of shorthand. Yeah, no, no, I got you. You know what I mean? I got you. But yeah, I just would hate to take like a thing like that, where people are, you know, sharing like legitimate info. Yeah, that's fair. Yeah. You like to look, it's like, you like to show pictures of, I don't don't know yeah we all like to do that i mean i guess instagram has become a brag board brag board that's fine brag board uh or a forum website but uh found a

post there that herrera had made called good year on the crow reservation okay and there was photos of uh these three elk in question uh also a pronghorn and a mule deer that other folks he knew had killed um but shawarma saw looked closely at the background of the photos and felt like they looked like they were in wyoming okay he felt like he recognized the topography the vegetation um obviously he knows this area very well and talked about that at length in his testimony about how familiar he is with the landscape he said just based on the limited topography and vegetation I could see from the photographs I kind of had a hunch where it was at but I wanted to confer with some people who knew the area a lot better than I did so we talked to some folks, he talked to that guy who'd reported all the, all the poaching incidents.

And then this is many months later after the snow had cleared because they weren't able to get up into that, into that area in May. So this, that shooting and the conversation between Shormarma and herrera happened in january in may uh shawarma went in there with a wildlife investigator and printouts of these photos and they basically walked to the kill sites and found all the carcasses uh he talked a lot about um finding like the the frozen ball of of like cud if you will um that apparently doesn't doesn't get taken by by uh predators when they're when they scavenge can i interrupt you real quick go ahead talk about that seth with your special buffalo tag that you didn't fill um no this is fascinating yeah and i never heard of this they they send you all this information when you draw this tag and one of the the rules that they want you to

follow is if you kill one you have to cut open the stomach on you cut open the stomach and spread the contents out what because think about it when mugs have been hunting an area later other people go you have this big bloated stomach i mean grizzlies and stuff eventually eat it but then you got like that you know it just winds up so they want you to cut it because then when you cut it and emptied out it's like a really small thing i feel like it's aesthetics there's no other explanation yeah it's gotta be aesthetics because everything else is gonna mop up all the soft tissue ravens whatever gets into it quick yeah i mean a predator or a scavenger rather is going to come tear that stomach open oh bearsley it just leaves it looking like

someone dumped out a bag of lawn clippings yeah exactly but i mean there's no other explanation besides like just the way it looks it's yeah because there is a lot of uh non-hunting recreator overlap yeah and that's like the size of a wheelbarrow. That stomach is like, you couldn't even fit it in most wheelbarrows. That's also a sensitive topic around there, shooting buffalo. There are a lot of folks who are up in arms about that.

There's a whole organization built around it. A whole organization. I can kind of understand why they want to worry about the optics of that. Go on. They did some cut analysis. Yeah. But they were able to take photos that matched the photo printouts

they had brought with them by identifying specific, like, unique knots on trees and burn marks and branch configurations and and and took gps waypoints at the same time finding all these all these kill sites were um they said within the space of about a football field and they were all a mile away from the montana border okay um so he, and they, they, so they found those three butchered elk, um, which, uh, in Herrera's defense sounds like they were well, they were well taken care of. They'd taken all the meat, but they did find a fourth bull that had been untouched. And so it's May now. Yes, but it's unclear whether that was from Herrera or his group or somebody else or if it died of natural causes.

I got you. Somehow. So they couldn't tell what that bull died from? I don't remember exactly. There's a lot of chatter about this, I think, is something we should discuss. I've heard a lot of the chatter. That's why I i'm letting you say because you've looked into it more i've heard a lot of chatter and i heard some like surprising things that i don't know if they're true or not yeah and you know i i've had very little uh conversation with claven herrera but i have

tried to get in touch with him several times and i asked him specifically about that um that was the first thing i asked him in fact because it's a you know it's a big accusation to level at a hunter and um but i also figured that was something that would you know maybe get him to respond to me instead of a softball question uh and he told me he um he wouldn't even dignify it with a response. That's how he felt highly insulted by the accusation. But anyway, that's what the game warden from Wyoming said they found. So they put together this evidence, the GPS waypoints, the photographic matches, and he confronted Herrrera on the crow reservation um in uh september and cited him for uh two misdemeanors obviously the hunting out of

season without a license but also being accessory to other people doing so uh for the the two folks they um they possessed or they uh they seized the heads of the elk all three elk had already been eaten by that point okay um and uh those three folks uh went to court uh they uh were pressured very hard by the state of Wyoming to plead guilty, to plead out. The state of Wyoming was seeking some $30,000 in fines and was going to come after them really hard with removal of hunting privileges and certain things. The two other guys, whose names are escaping me right now, uh, did plead guilty, um, for a lighter fine. Yes. Uh, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 8,000. Okay. Um, and probation and not hunting in Wyoming for three years. Um, a lot of, a lot of this stuff is, uh, I, I feel like people who know this case are just taking notes about what I'm getting wrong here. And I'd like to kind of address that briefly by saying that a lot of these case files are sealed because it's an active litigation before the Supreme Court.

Nobody wants to talk about this. Like the guy who sent us that pissy note yesterday. He was privy to sealed information. He was privy to sealed information and ended his letter with a long disclaimer about how we could not reproduce this, we could not use his name, that it was not the official opinion of anybody or anything uh and that's that that's what i've run up against a lot in this court case um because well i've even had friends so many people are bound you know what happened yeah and then they'd tell me some other part of it and i would say well man how where can i go see that and they'd say you can't it's not part of

the public so it's hard to yeah and and yeah. And what I'm talking about here, this testimony, what I extracted by skimming through 270 pages of court transcription from the testimony. But anyway, the court in Wyoming issued a pre-trial decision saying that these men could not use a treaty right argument within this case. So they, in trial... You don't need to explain it to me, but I just don't understand the court system enough to understand that. I don't either, Steve. And so it seems odd. It seems odd to me. I wish I understood it better.

I do. I do too. And I imagine this podcast will get a lot of people reaching out and maybe somebody we can actually quote about it. And I'd love to talk to anybody about this and i i'm sorry if i pissed anybody off i think by reporting i want to point out i think you're doing a great job okay thanks i appreciate that you're trying really hard because here's the thing it's not like we're

airing someone's dirty laundry this is being heard by the supreme court yeah and as we'll get to this could is something that could have significant i don't want to say major could have significant tangible ramifications it could and it couldn't yep um it couldn't it couldn't so so if you hit some points here sam where you like during your uh investigation here tracking down um leads have you hit some points where you're like, I'm just, this is pointless to go forward? Yes. Yeah. Oh, I wanted to walk away from this so badly. I got to the point where I was like, man, I really wish I hadn't opened my mouth about this story. Because it got to the point where it was very difficult to proceed and to really know, to be able to parse it

because everybody's got a vested interest here and there's so many different strange competing sympathies. Most of the mainstream news coverage you see on here about this is, oh, nasty Wyoming is just being mean to those natives that they promised this to and now they're reneging on these treaty rights all these hundred this 150 years later um but then on the other side of it uh you know is some some pretty uh i feel like overblown um rhetoric about what would happen. I've seen both extremes.

Yeah, absolutely. And so that's what I was seeking to accomplish with this story is to, is to make something that people could read all the way through that, you know, was aware of those extremes, but didn't buy into them. And I think honestly, most of the feedback I've been getting about this was hunters saying hunters were angry at us for not condemning her era and i that's just not my role as a journalist like i kept myself out of this as much as i possibly could obviously you can't

completely eliminate bias but i wasn't willing I wasn't willing to say that. But you haven't even gotten to the part that the court cares about. Yeah, okay. So yeah, the part that the court cares about. You can all circumspect, but we're not doing it. Yeah, well, yeah. So that's how he got caught, went to trial.

He was found guilty. The jury agreed with the prosecution that, and so he argued argued because he couldn't make the treaty right argument in court he argued that he didn't know he was in Wyoming and that is the can I return to what sidetracked us yeah some legal professional needs to explain to me how in a court, it can be dictated to you what... I don't get it.

Let's say you kill someone and you're like, but it was self-defense, bro. Or I'm going to act like it was self-defense, whatever. And they say, you can't say that. I don't understand that, but I don't understand law enough. I think part of this, and gosh, I wish I understood this better but part of it is is an issue is a thing called issue preclusion so i think i think that's what perhaps where where this pre-trial decision derives from because wyoming is saying that because this issue has already been litigated in in high court decisions that i'm about to discuss because this issue has already been litigated in in high court decisions that i'm about to discuss because this

issue has already been litigated you can't re-litigate that issue yes so so what hold on one yeah go ahead he's saying he didn't know he was in the state of wyoming but he wasn't like the list of charges brought against him didn't include hunting without a license it yeah it did it did oh he would he would have been legal he would have been it wouldn't have been wyoming's issue yeah on the crow reservation i don't believe the crow tribe issues deer or elk hunting licenses because it's treated as a as an inalienable right. You're allowed to go shoot deer and elk as a Crow tribe member on the reservation kind of whenever you want. Okay.

Collateral estoppel is your issue preclusion. Yeah. Issue preclusion is by and large what's being argued by Wyoming in the Supreme Court. Correct me if I'm wrong, Sam, but isn't there also something that hinges upon the definition of occupied land? Yes.

Oh, yeah, but we haven't got to that yet. Oh, okay. Yeah, jumping the gun. But you know what? Now I'm feeling it on how you cannot... Like, let's say we live in some fictitious world in which some Supreme Court decides that self-defense is not a justifiable

self-defense isn't justifiable for murder so then later i'm like i get murdered and i'm like well i'm gonna say that it was self-defense and they say no you're not because it's been decided yes that that isn't a defense so i could see some version go on yeah i'm feeling better now yeah so uh wyoming is is pointing to uh two separate court cases um an 1896 supreme court ruling called ward v racehorse moment i'll back up because you're not you're not there yet i'm tracking you're right you're right you're right you're He appeals. He's convicted and appeals. Yes. And the appeal obviously has made it to the United States Supreme Court.

And what is his appeal? His appeal. The forbidden appeal. Correct. His appeal is that the 1868 Second Treaty of Fort Laramie included language that the Crow Tribe, when the Crow Tribe ceded some 30 million acres of Montana, Wyoming, North and South Dakota to the United States and were allotted their, I think, 8 million acre reservation, they retained the right to hunt on the unoccupied lands of the United States. So long as game may be found there on some wishy-washy words. Yeah.

Yeah. But no, not words, a wishy-washy word, right? What is it? Unclaimed or unoccupied? Unoccupied.

Okay. Yeah. Unoccupied lands of the United States. so long as game may be found thereon so the state of wyoming became a state shortly after that in 1890 and in 1896 the shoshone bannock tribe tribe tried to assert a similar hunting right with similar language. I think the same language, actually, unoccupied lands of the United States, asserting off-reservation tribal hunting rights in Wyoming. And the Supreme Court said that when the state of Wyoming entered the Union, they did so on the same footing as all other states, the equal footing doctrine.

That's pretty ubiquitous. And that equal footing includes sovereignty over the natural resources within that state. So Ward v. Ray source said that the Shoshone-Bannock's tribal hunting rights were extinguished by Wyoming's statehood. They became not unoccupied. Yes. That land became occupied when Wyoming became a state. It was unoccupied territory prior to that.

Then it became a state. So that's your definition right there of what is occupied. Yes. And that's being tested, right? Yes. And there's another layer to that. There was another decision from the 10th Circuit Court in 1995, so just shy of 100 years later,

in a case called Crow Tribe of Indians versus Repsis, which is a very similar case to this. It was a Crow tribal member who killed an elk out of season without a license in the Bighorn National Forest. Oh, wow. That did not go to the Supreme Court. That ended at the Tenth Circuit Court, but the Tenth Circuit asserted that the creation of the Bighorn National Forest

resulted in the occupation of the land. The Bighorn National Forest was designated in 1897. It's one of the oldest protected areas in the country. So there's those two cases, but shortly thereafter, after the Repsis decision in 1995, the Supreme Court heard a case called Minnesota v. Millox Band of Chippewa Indians, and the court maintained in that decision that the Mille Lacs tribe did maintain hunting and fishing rights on the lands they had ceded under a similar treaty agreement, but they did not reverse either the racehorse or the repsis decision.

So now there's these three conflicting precedents yeah that the supreme court is is is wrestling with yeah because i'd have to challenge like is the u.s territory of guam technically unoccupied because it's not incorporated as a state well and you could show up and hunt like a tribal member could go hunt guam the oral arguments in the supreme court uh yeah i don't know i don't think so no the the supreme court um wrestled with this in in the oral oral arguments and they're i mean they're throwing jokes back and forth about like how the hell do we decide what unoccupied land is. They asked, let's see, three lawyers. Attorneys spoke before the Supreme Court,

one representing Herrera, one representing the United States. Who is intervening on behalf of Herrera in this case? So they're siding with the Crow tribe and then the attorney for Wyoming. And they asked all of them, what's unoccupied land? How do we decide that?

I asked a wildlife professional about this. I don't want to tell who because I didn't talk to him about how I was going to use this perspective. But I was asking, when people were drawing up these treaties, I was expressing some surprise about using language that would be so confounding to later generations. And he said that... Confounding. Gets it. He said that that probably wasn't the word that mattered to them. Because at the time when they were doing this, I think the assumption was that the game would be exhausted.

Yes. Yes. I've read that. They didn't view... It wasn't... No one was picturing that we'd still have the resources and it was like they were watching it vanish as long as it's there go ahead well hell no it ain't gonna be there long it was exhausted and that's and that's an interesting uh argument that hasn't been made but has been suggested to me that elk were extirpated

from the bighorn Mountains. Yeah. So the treaty language not only says the unoccupied lands part, but so long as game may be found thereon. So the state of Wyoming also could make the argument that because at one point, game could not be found thereon in the Bighorn National Forest, and the state of Wyoming brought them back, as well as bringing elk back to the Crow Reservation, that the treaty was extinguished because of that. That's not the argument they made, but it's one they perhaps could have.

That's amazing. Yeah. And I've heard that too, that the negotiators, if you will, for the United States at the time were thinking that, that, well, we're damn far down the road of getting rid of all the bison and elk and everything. And they're probably not going to last a whole lot longer. So what validity does this have? This right will go away just because they won't have anything left to

shoot not too long. It seems that the money is betting on Wyoming losing. We don't know how much they'll lose or how bad they'll lose, but the money seems to be betting on that Wyoming will lose. Yes. Yes. That's my, if I had to read the tea leaves. And there's two competing wisdoms here. One competing, one wisdom, one idea, is that this will mean that the whole system that we've built around assessing wildlife populations, making a determination about harvestable quotas and being able to enforce

that, all of that's gone now. I'm just saying the two look radical competing with each other. Yes, that is the radical. I'm giving the radicals here, the radical sides. And we'll get in on what might be the thing. But you don't need to look far to find someone who could say well what this could mean was is that tribal members can go out onto any national forest any blm land i've even heard national park oh yeah and shoot whatever you want whenever you

want whenever you want yeah it's unoccupied land and it'll make land and it'll make wildlife management very difficult because we won't have enforcement systems and quotas and bag limits and seasons and all that. That's one thing.

Another thing is that this is nothing new. Other states have been in this situation. There's states that work in cooperation with tribal hunters and it wasn't wildlife Armageddon, and there's no reason to think that it will be here. I haven't been able to confirm this, but I've heard a couple times that Wyoming is the only state that does not allow any form of off-reservation treaty hunting every other parent i i cannot confirm this but i i've heard

that every other state in the west there exists some form i mean we were just talking about it in the case of the gardener bison hunt that's off-reservation treaty hunting yeah and there i think and man i could be off but in there i feel like it just has to be that the tribe exit like the tribe doing the bison hunting but they're doing it in cooperation they're like there's like quarters they put in place so that's exactly what people have missed it's like historic use patterns yes so it can't be that like that i don't think that that someone from um like a seminal perhaps i don't know i could be wrong i don't think a seminal could come out and make a claim that they're gonna shoot buffalo on the border of yellowstone national park i think

it has to be a group that has some sort of historic use standing now the nez perce who i went there as we all know when the nez perce were during Nez Perce war, they traveled through Yellowstone. So it was like they had an awareness of the area. They were able to navigate through there. They had historically gone out and hunted on the plains. It was like our people, if they didn't know about it and didn't know how to travel through there, they wouldn't have gone through there in 1877. So we had a historic, there was a historic use. Yes.

And many tribes have petitioned based on historic use and and treaty language successfully and in very very recently too um to uh restore those those hunting rights based on historic use yeah hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. 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 a 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.

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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. So what didn't we hit? What didn't we hit? Well, yeah, okay. So we didn't quite wrap that up about what would happen.

So, yeah, there's people who are saying, well, the supreme court you know rules in favor of herrera then all of a sudden there will be tribal members in every national forest in the west shoot whatever they want whenever they want i'd be i'd be extreme i would be that that's just not going to happen well the matter is that's not going to happen you don't know because matter is that's not going to happen. Yeah, but you don't know because there could be some huge sweeping, like now and then the court will have like some huge sweeping thing that causes a lot of. Yes, but the doctrine of conservation necessity is in everyone's minds here.

And that is a well-established precedent that basically prevents courts from issuing decisions that would have drastic negative consequences for wildlife populations. Okay. This is something that dates back a long ways, and the Supreme Court is highly aware of. The Supreme Court is unlikely to completely solve this issue. They typically, I mean, the Supreme Court deals in high-minded ideals, if you will. So they, what I would guess they would do is issue a test for occupancy to, I imagine they will say that there are unoccupied lands in Wyoming still. But what that means that they may remand to a lower court or they may issue some form. Like what i think about here is another case i'm

familiar with is you know the current litigation surrounding the clean water act uh so that the the issue there is like what what what are connected waterways so like what are you allowed to pollute what are you not allowed to pollute and um what they're basing a lot of the revision of that Clean Water Act rulemaking is on significant nexus or is it navigable or how water flows from one place to the other. That's what the Supreme Court likes to do is like, here's a test. This is how you go down and you go figure it out. And so they'll probably remand to the Tenthth circuit or whomever it is um based on this and i've heard some i've heard some suggestions that it's 150 yards from a road and 200 yards from a campground in in a national forest in on on

public land or so so they they may issue some some like these are unoccupied lands, but the doctrine of conservation necessity will likely lead them or the lower court they were manned to, to effectively force Wyoming and the Crow tribe to come to the table and say, okay, you do have, the Crow tribal members do have this right to hunt these unoccupied lands, whatever they may be. And put it to Wyoming to accommodate them. Yeah, exactly. Wyoming will have to accommodate them. And in the story, I have an example of how that went down with a tribe in Colorado. Okay. how that um went down with a tribe in colorado okay um and so you know one guy i talked to uh for this for this story uh he get he gives the uh example of um so say there's 100 elk tags for that unit currently he if he's looking in the crystal ball or tea leaves or whatever he's saying

like you know currently and you know these these are numbers out of thin air but he's looking in the crystal ball or tea leaves or whatever he's saying, like, you know, currently, and you know, these, these are numbers out of thin air, but he's like, so if you currently have 80 licenses of those licenses going to residents and 20 going to non-residents after whatever may happen, if they rule in favor of Herrera, then you'd have 60 of those licenses going to residents,

10 going to non-residents and and like 30 going to Crow Tribe members. So in that case, it's a significant reduction of available tags. Yeah. You just brought up something that's interesting with the guy, this idea of should you be able to do non-resident hunting. Most states also put a cap. Most states limit an available resource where only 10% of the resource can go to non-resident hunting is um most states also put a cap yeah most states limit like an available resource where only 10 of the resource can go to non-residents yeah and wyoming does

all sorts of crazy stuff like that like you can't hunt in the wilderness areas and on resident without a guide which i believe is unconstitutional but i believe i agree i asked the governor there about that he didn't want to discuss it with me i would imagine like that's an unfair rule how do you justify that he goes i don't need to justify it to you i just point out it was it was a joking he didn't really i mean it was weird informally joking around uh my buddies over there on the idaho side that that's kind of what they always come back to is like, listen, you may have more pressure in your area, but the number of non-resident hunters doesn't change. It's like for the last X amount of years, it's been this much. It's capped. Yeah.

It's like, it's, it's never above 10%. And he's like, yeah, I don't doubt that you're seeing more pressure in your zone. Well, Colorado archery elk is not capped. There's over-the-counter tags all over the damn state. Oh, really? Yeah.

Oh, that's interesting. Brody feels like you will, Brody's predicting that you will see the end of that. Yeah. It'll become capped. I thought that they. I guess not, right? Something's happening to move it that direction.

Oh, they're doing some stuff this year, but they didn't cap like for the OTC tags, they didn't do any. Idaho, every non-resident purchase goes against that quota. So it doesn't matter if you're buying all the way up in the pan handle, uh, you know, unit one or all the way on the complete opposite side of hell's Canyon. Um, it all comes out of a non-resident pool. Can I, uh, I know I got us off on that, but can I get us back? are we missing sam i feel like we've covered it so we gotta wait now we got we gotta wait but yeah you know i mean to if you had to one to ten it one to ten it on this is like one to ten it um like this is like oh my god this is gonna change life as we know it being a ten one will One will be that there's not even a blip.

You could live your whole life and never knew this happened. Where are you putting it? This is a tough spot I'm putting you into. Yeah, it is. I wish you'd asked me that an hour ago and I could have thought about it a little bit. But I'd say a three or a four. You'd put a three or a four? Yeah.

I mean, and everybody with this piece, everybody wanted to put big implications in the headline and major changes coming. And I was uncomfortable with that because of the doctrine of conservation necessity. We don't have unregulated hunting in the United States, by and large, you know, this will, this will ultimately fit into some form of game management system. Will people in Wyoming lose opportunity? That's, that's possible. I don't think this is quite possible. Yeah, quite possible. Um, but, uh, you know, something, something that, um, Herrera's lawyer keeps harping on whenever I've talked to her is that elk are over objective in that unit. And that Wyoming apparently can't get rid of enough elk tags. What's interesting about this, and we talk about this and you talk about it too, is that none of this matters to the court.

No. The Supreme Court doesn't care about the elk objective. They don't care if you took all the meat, none of the meat. It doesn't matter if you shot 100 of them. Yeah. It doesn't matter if you tortured them. It doesn't matter if it was a ceremony. They're talking about three or four words.

They're talking about issue preclusion and unoccupied lands. They're not, that's all they're making. Like, was this ethical? And it's like, it's like, they're looking at something very clean.

All of the stuff we're getting into all the prelude is like germane. It's like, is someone who's living under this treaty that was made with the federal government. What is the definition of a term that was used in your treaty? Yeah. That's all. And so,

and so that whole story I took, I took people through is like, and that's what everybody points to is like it's like oh man he just he's felt so guilty he felt he really feels like poaching even someone on staff was like well he was poaching let's just say he was poaching um that's not that's not that's not that's not what's afoot here that's not what the supreme court does more than likely i would expect that whatever the supreme court decides there will be another ruling by a lower court case that will decide if he was poaching or not and he'll get

slapped with a fine for that no you don't think so no if he wins he's not going to get a if he wins the supreme court case he's not going to get fined by the state right well you know who knows let's let's revisit this after yeah let's bring a lawyer in here but yeah so i i really i really think that you know it it will affect hunters in wyoming um by some measure but i don't think it uh blows up the north american model of wildlife conservation like some people are asserting. That's your prediction? That's my prediction. We'll return to it. Okay. Yeah, I'm hooked now. I can't help but continue to follow this. So it's going to be quite a while until this is resolved. So we'll have plenty more opportunities. I don't have a good segue for what's coming next. Do you have a pivot? No. Well, yeah, I think a pivot, that's just like you just start talking

about something different, right? No, a pivot's, I think a pivot, that's just like you just start talking about something different, right? No, a pivot's kind of like a segue. You could just jump. I like how you're wearing your things. You have a jump. My dad calls it changing gears without stepping on the clutch. Yeah, I'm not clutching. And he loves to do that.

He just changes topics on the drop of a hat. Mid-sentence. Oh, I forgot to clutch there. Sorry. Because the theme here, one of the themes here is um uh we're talking about here i'm working this out one of the themes is we're talking about we're talking with writers and uh and writing we're talking about writing that can be found at the meat eaterEater.com. And I'm pivoting to Miles, Nick Nolte's kid. Miles Nolte.

He never sent me any good birthday gifts or anything. That's what I was always hoping for. That's disappointing. Yeah. I mean, he could have afforded some good shit. I never got anything. You got to do a paternity claim. Like, well, how else would I have the same name?

Lay out your deal. So the story that we're talking about comes from, I mean, this kind of kicked around in my head when I was ice fishing not too long ago. And we were having a good day. And we were pulling a whole lot of perch through the ice. And just kind of taking them off the hook. And we had probably three inches of standing water on the ice in the hut at that time and i could just hear these dozens of perch splashing around beneath us not not really dying just kind of gasping and half freezing and and it got me

thinking about how particularly as hunters we talk a lot about ethical killing yeah like you'd never have a half a live deer in the back of your truck. No, no. Well, that happened to my old man once, but it was accidental. And it was a roadkill. He didn't do it. Someone else did it. You never drag a half-alive deer and have it kicking behind you.

That's fine. Yeah. I'm not worried about that. That sounds pretty dangerous, too. I mean, there is that aspect. No, it's beyond. But that's not the point here. It's beyond danger.

Yes. So it got me thinking about how we talk a lot about ethical killing, and we judge people who kill how we determine to be unethically as hunters. But no one seems to give a shit about fish. My sister-in-law. Okay, your sister-in-law being the exception. And we tease her for it. We tease her for it.

She makes it her job to dispatch fish, and we ridicule her for it but we don't have live squirrels bouncing around in our game bags no that would be barbaric and and if you wound a bird bird hunting and it's still flopping what do you do kill it immediately immediately immediately and if you don't you're a bad person right i mean by all of like the collective consciousness assessment but with fish you're like tough shit we just let them go why is it and this is my question this is what i started thinking about is why why do we not care about fish it's i think it's like well i don't know i think it's just like a person what the amount of credit you give them yeah it's that hierarchy you've talked about before.

But so after you and I talked about this, Steve, I went and did a deep dive into some of the literature, like the actual research literature on this. On the dark web? Yes. The dark web, is that what we're calling academia right now? Yeah, Google Scholar. Type in the truth about.

The truth about whatever you'll get the real answer and and believe it or not like in certain biology circles or certain certain uh corners of academia right now there's a lively debate about how much pain fish feel and whether or not they do feel pain. And they're like these sort of these two camps that are lobbying articles back and forth in different journals. They keep referencing each other and going back and forth, convinced fish do feel pain, or convinced, the argument for why, fish can't feel pain. And it seems to me that all this, like, I learned a lot of vocabulary while I was doing this.

I figured you guys would appreciate vocabulary. So one being the things that cause pain to critters are referred to as noxious stimuli. I love that. Got it. Yep. I'm liking that one. Yep. That'd be a good name for a band yeah it would like it's real hard metal yeah yeah very like death metal yeah a lot a lot

of like feedback and they sing like death metal well that's a great segue into your lead it is but i've got more like i've got i've got these the the it goes on right like you got not just stimuli i'm just saying nirvana oh i know i do cover that in the article we do get into you know i do believe there's there's possibly like the reason at least our generation doesn't think that that's cool to torture fish is because of kurt cobain we can completely blame him for his lyric that you know it's okay to eat fish because they don't have any feelings. But I don't buy that. Cobain said that.

He did. Underneath the bridge. Yeah. Never did like that band. Oh, I did. I mean, nothing to do with that. Just never liked them. Well, you're from that area.

I know. Couldn't help it. I still don't consider him like a solid source on fish perception. You don't go there for your ichthyology. I don't go there for your ichthyology. I don't. There were people in my class bawling the day Cobain killed himself or the day the news came out that he had killed himself.

I'm not going to talk about being, I'm not going to act like I'm sad when someone passes away. I'm not going to say that. I'm sorry. I'm not going to act like, I'm not going to say like, I said the opposite of what,

I'm saying like, me digging, I just don't like the music. It has no bearing on my feelings about one's passage, especially someone who has a child. Yes. I'm going to pivot this back to where the noxious stimuli are things that could hurt something the the behavior of responding to noxious stimuli without being conscious of it are is known as nociception or nociception i'm not totally sure and and where this really hinges is the difference between having the subjective experience of pain which is known or subjective experiences are known as qualia. Okay. Just more thrown out there.

But there's a subjective experience of pain versus sort of the unconscious response to a noxious stimulus. Got it. And the best analogy that I was able to find was that like when you put your hand down on a hot burner, your body jerks your hand away before you experience pain. Yep. And so those two neurological experiences are different. Like the processes in the brain are very different between having what they would call a nocifensive behavior, pulling your hand away, and then having the subjective experience of having

pain. you're pulling your hand away and then having the subjective experience of having pain and so where these two camps of researchers seem to differ is do fish have the physiological capability of getting to that pain experience and some say they do and some say they don't so there's still debate between these two camps of biologists as to whether or not fish are just reacting to noxious stimuli or they're actually have or they have the capacity to both react to it and feel it as a pain experience yeah if the qualia or the subjective experience is similar to ourselves and higher primates and so there's the you know if you look at it in terms of the evolutionary tree of vertebrates fish are about as far from primates

as you can get and there are a lot of differences in the way that we're put together and these two camps of researchers are essentially arguing over something that right now is unknowable what is the internal experience of fish it's a good point unknowable it is and and they both seem to me and i'm sure we're going to get mail from folks who are researchers to know more than i do it seems to me that they're working from predetermined notions. One camp being like, since we can't know, the possibility of subjecting these critters to pain that's unnecessary is atrocious, and we should therefore make sure we're not doing it. And the other camp saying, the value to of our the way that we're doing things

like the way that we fish the way that we farm the way that we do testing on fish is so high that we can't assume that they're having the pain experience and so they both are working from their their sort of preconceived notions of value yeah and trying to prove something that at this point is unknowable so where are you at on it i mean i i'm stuck on the unknowable part and i have i love fishing and i'm not going to stop fishing and i think that fish experience stress there's no question they experience stress you can you there is is there no question that fish experience stress that part is no question they experience stress they have stress hormones they they there are a lot of studies that demonstrate that they avoid noxious stimuli right and that they they different fish more than others by the

way trout do not avoid noxious stimuli because they're not as smart as say goldfish different story though other thing i found but that's what cal can catch him so good i i still think i still from when going back to the initial, I don't think there's any reason to unnecessarily subject fish to stress if you're just going to kill them anyway. So you're now stopping. You're stopping. Okay, let me put it this way. Let's say you're fishing bluegills. And it's hot.

And you're throwing them in a bucket. Because they stay alive in the bucket. They do. And you keep adding water. Yep. Because you're alive well. We're alive well stay alive in the bucket. They do. And you keep adding water because you're a live well. We're a live well, yeah. Because it's hot out. Yeah.

You don't happen to have a whole bunch of ice and packing them in ice and whatnot. Do you think that's bad? He damn sure is not wanting to be in that bucket. Yeah, I mean, I think that... I'm not condemning live wells. I'm not going to go that far. How about buckets?

I mean, you make an argument. A bucket and a live well are pretty damn similar. A properly managed bucket. Yeah, I think those are pretty damn similar. And I think that in that case, if you're planning to harvest that fish and it's a question of spoiling the meat and wasting the critter, I'm going to say keep it in the bucket and keep it alive. But then dispatch it

quickly when you remove it from there here's the thing that makes this interesting too and you talk about this you talk about killing fish when you were a commercial fisherman i was i was a guide i was a recreational guide but we were harvesting a lot of i was a guiding up in alaska i got it up in alaska for years and we harvested a lot of salmon for our clients and we essentially became fish processors. Best practices. Yeah. Was to get them in as quickly as possible, whack them right at the base of the skull till you get the twitch and then bleed them out and get that meat off the bone. Well, and that's a lot more humane than what I did. I commercial fished in Alaska for a long time and we would haul in tens of thousands of salmon at the same time into our hold of refrigerated seawater. That's exactly 34 degrees.

And they would freeze to death over the span of about an hour. They'd be swimming around in there. So that seems much less humane than what you were doing. Yeah. And to that point, that's one of the the issues going on with the the researchers are talking about right the way that we harvest fish commercially if they experience pain like we have all these things in place for livestock and the way that you can kill livestock so that it is as humane as possible oh yeah even like blind yeah like

blind alleys you can't they can't see the one in front of it yeah and they don't see like with in a normal situation i guess they're not even watching the one in front of it yeah and they don't see like with in a normal situation i guess they're not even watching the one in front of it get hit right and that's a meat quality issue as much as a humanity that's what that's what i was getting at the commercial practices is it winds up being that um people who are like just concerned with i shouldn't say just concerned with like it's like a reductive thing people who are concerned with quality of flesh, I didn't know about your case. I think people who are concerned with quality of flesh process real quick. Yeah.

But Sam's case is slightly different too because we're talking about, he's talking about humane ethical kill. And this is a question of do fish feel pain? Well, this is both. And that's the difficulty of this debate is because we're trying to apply science to a philosophical issue the reason that we know this is possible though or it's a relatable thing is congenital insensitivity to pain or sip genital genital insensitivity congenital um which is the human version of you have never felt pain nor are you capable of feeling physical pain so by knowing about that we do know that it is at least possible to say well

these fish or what whatever you want to discuss this on, it is possible that they could very well not feel pain because we do have an established case. Yeah. I know that these critters damn sure don't want to die. No. That's why, yeah. I don't really have anything to add.

My sister-in-law changed my, my sister-in-law made me feel slightly sensitive to it because she doesn't like it and that that was the base of your we're out fishing catfish she don't like them laying on the bottom of the boat wriggling all around

she won't even fish she'll just take a fillet knife and kill all the catfish wow I would say this I think that the point for me in all this is that we we talk about trying to be at least conscious of the way that we kill things we're going to harvest we're going to eat them and i think that we should apply that to fish as much as we do anything else and and because because it's unknowable take steps to

you know i'm not saying don't go out and kill fish because i'm not going to stop doing that but yeah to to do it in a way that like if to not unnecessarily draw out that process because it's not hard to just whack them over the back of the head and they're done yeah same way like if you kill your ducks to someone say like i don't i think you should when you run up to a duck you should make sure it's dead that's not by extension saying you shouldn't hunt ducks. No. Yeah. We've just accepted that that's like a normal practice.

Have you guys seen the videos of the Maasai when they decide to kill their nomadic herders and when they decide to kill one of their beeves? It's quite the slaughter process because everybody's around petting this, I would assume a steer. And I'm not sure what age class they select, but. That would suggest that they castrate. That would suggest that they castrate if it's a steer, but, and I'm putting a lot of Western. So the critter. Yeah. So, but they're around like petting this, uh,

beef and, uh, I, and from outside looking in, making it seem very special. And then somebody just pops a real quick hole and it's jugular vein. And, uh, they continue to sit there and and pet it and eventually it just like weakens and goes to sleep is that right the long sleep here's the apocalypse now oh yeah it's not how they do it no no but um that seems like a killing them softly approach. I think the quick kill and quickly dispatching our game is something that's very caught up in the fair chase ethic that's developed around sport hunting in the united states over the last hundred years because i imagine the market hunters of old didn't care

so much about it i'm guessing not guys who were out killing you know dozens and dozens of deer bison every day probably weren't overly bothered by how long it took for them to die. They were, but for other reasons. Sure, sure, sure. Someone who ran 400 bison off a cliff probably wasn't top of mind to go and make sure. That was like a maiming exercise. It was probably not top of mind to make sure everyone was humanely dispatched real quick no but i mean this is

this is something that has grown as you know i feel like concurrently with the fair chase ethic and i think it's a positive notion i think it's tied to a lot of other western ideals and even anthropomorphism the growth of that in our our culture. So it's fascinating to me. And just dealing with working on this piece with Miles, it's really made me introspective about it. Now I sort of feel bad for letting tens of thousands of pink salmon die over the span of a couple hours. And it's really made me think about this.

And every fish I've caught since then, I've just, it's not too hard to take a fillet knife and stab it right behind the eye and make them dead quickly. Man, those boys in Ghana are good at it. They kill them. They do. Because all their fish bite.

Yeah. They don't want to flop around the bottom of the boat because they'll take a chunk out of your leg. And man, they got it down pat. My dad almost lost it. It's like of the boat with you because they'll take a chunk out of your leg and man they got it down pat my dad almost hit it like it's like they take that knife and they'll stand the fish up belly down fin up and they hit the sweet spot with that tip of that knife and that fishes it's a good practice sometimes my dad almost lost a toe to a dungeon s crab that was wandering around the bottom of the boat. But some folks, again, for the meat, the consistency of meat that they're looking for, it's like you want to leave that heart pumping, pop a gill.

So it's bleeding out. That doesn't sound very good. And then there's that Ikejime practice. I was telling Miles about that. That can't be a good way to go if you feel pain. And then there's that Ikejime practice. I was telling Miles about that. Yep. That can't be a good way to go if you feel pain. Well, dude. That's where their cutthroat is still alive.

Once you Ikejime something, it's dead. Dead, dead. Dead, dead, dead. Yeah. Dead, dead, dead. Explain what that is. Ikejime, basically, you start at the tail um and there's a lot to do with like getting the fish cold um but it's still alive um you cut the tail open it hasn't been

bonked on the head or nothing it hasn't been bonked on the head yet i think i saw a video this one you peel the tail back you take a rod, and you run it up the spinal column to the base of the brain. And what that does is it prevents the fish for going through rigor mortis. Changes the way it goes through rigor mortis. Changes the way. Yeah. We had a guy write in all about this. Changes the way.

When you slaughter cattle, have you ever watched them slaughter cattle in a slaughter facility not personally so i think this is the right sequence they hit with a captive bolt gun hoist it up cut it electrocute it electrify it and that has to do with yeah it has to do with like meat quality issues but it just melts there's no like it like changes the way it's like seized up or not and we're the first time we went to Guyana they killed turtles that way cut the head off the turtle and take a long skewer did they go out cut in the jungle take a long skewer and run it down the turtle spine down the center of the spine. Because normally if you kill a snapping turtle, you can't clean it for an hour or two.

You clean that turtle the second you cut its head off. Because once you EKG made it, I'm using verb form, once you did that to it, you could lift this leg up and drop it, and the leg just falls flat dead. Wow. There's no nerve. There's no nerve contraction. It just melts.

That's fascinating. Telling you what, man. And it has to do with sushi. The applications, I'm not even totally checked out on. You can tell Janice is over there reading about it right now. Oh, yeah. But it is interesting on the fish thing, because at any point in time

a thousand years ago um somebody truly thought fish had pain experience that i think it'd take a real tough son of a bitch to be like listen man i know this is really gonna hurt but i'm going to run this metal rod up your spine. If you're quick about it. Yeah. You know, it's dead. It's going to be dead. Real dead. Yes.

If I did that to you. Just like jelly. No bringing you back. But I think, I think that a point here that's important is, is that like, is it possible that, that we are anthropomorphizing all the game as hunters and anglers?

Oh, sure. It's very possible. But I also think that there's a validity to that, to take best practices that we can to minimize the potential of suffering. Because we do not know. At least from the research that I was reading, we do not know. Yeah. You're not ruining the meat. No. You're not like ruining the meat. No.

You're not. It's like it's not costing you anything. And if it's only a 10% chance that it's diminishing suffering, why not? Yeah. Exactly. And from a moral standpoint, it's just better ground to stand on. Yeah. I feel like we can feel better about ourselves as hunters and anglers if we have a higher degree of respect for the animal and its life and i feel like you know in the day and age we live in having you know a positive

public perception of our practices is as is very important that we consider these things the fact just the very fact that we consider them i think is beneficial what's the name of your article miles the it's it's it's currently being decided because it hasn't come out yet oh it'll be coming out next week so we we the the draft copy is finished but you're gonna go with a clever one or just one that lays it right out i'm not sure yet like i've got two different options right now so i'm i'm i mean the the obvious one is do fish feel pain i've seen that or that exact type and i don't think i'm gonna do that that undersells it man i know i know i think you

should call it um it's working on ethical right now it's ethical fish killing it's sort of the working title but i think that's lame and i want to get more interesting i don't have a good title i'm working on it i was trying to get to a one fish two fish red fish oh yeah that have a good title. I'm working on it. I was trying to get to a one fish, two fish, red fish. Oh, yeah, that's a good idea. Type of situation. I was trying to go with. Red fish, dead fish? Yeah.

I was trying to go with a play on Nirvana or Kurt Cobain. I wonder if there's another lyric we could extract there. There was one of those in the list of titles. Smells like teen spirit, maybe? Yeah, smells like dead fish. Yeah. Real quick, what's wrong, Giannis? Well, I just want to say some things.

I've been listening to you guys talk for like 10 minutes about this. I was going to ask you if you had anything to add. And I just feel like it's funny because last night, my wife and I were talking about just like how much does an animal suffer? We're like the kid,

we somehow the HSUS came into it and we're trying to explain to kids like species versus individual animals. And we got to talk about suffering, whatever. Until we actually are able to say, yes, this is the experience the animal has. We can't really even use a term and apply the term suffering to them because you just don't know. And I mean, look at how individuals are different. You might

suffer when we're out there in Alaska in the rain and it's shitty and you have a suffering sensation. I might not. I might relish that and do well in it, right? And so we bring up these things where we're like, oh, well, we feel better about it. And sure we do, but it's like this made up fantasy really that it's in our own heads that we now feel better about this and sure we do but it's like this made-up fantasy really that like it's in our own heads that we now feel better about this thing that we're doing where we really don't have like there's just no basis to it because we don't know you could say the experience you could say the same thing though about all fair chase philosophy but totally no and i agree like it's something that we've made up and we've decided that those are

the rules that we're going to play by yeah well that's what ethics is an animal rights ethicist that i spoke with the guy that's interviewed in the stars in the sky documentary he one of the things he tries not try it out on me one of the things he explained to me is he's like look at the way look at the way the country handles human rights. We recognize that all people have rights. We don't base out your rights like an American's rights recognized by the government. We don't go like, oh yeah, but you're not that smart, so you don't have them. Or you're handicapped in some way, so you don't have them.

It's just that we extend them. We agree on these ideas that all people are created equal, have these things. And so that's what makes him uncomfortable with this idea. Well, I wouldn't do it to a deer, but I would do it to a fish. He does a far better job of articulating this than I do, but I'm kind of doing such a bad job, I almost regret bringing it up. But you get the point. No, no, absolutely.

And I'm glad you mentioned him because his segment in that film absolutely informed my thinking on this. I thought that was a super interesting inclusion to your discussion of hunting. Yeah, he's a good dude. Yeah. Like an interesting, well-spoken guy. He really looks the part of a philosopher too. He's an interesting guy.

Oh, the human hierarchy of animals is something that I find really terrible. It's like... You'd get a lot of advantage out of that, you know. Do I get a personal... He's saying you do. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. I know what you've been eating. Um, all right, Seth, you got any final, sorry. Um, just so we don't have to deal with it next time we podcast EKG may, I just did a quick search, read three quick different articles and they do because the main purpose is to do it quickly to end up with a better quality flesh and so there's a spike

driven usually right behind the eye to kill it and then the process of bleeding and severing the spinal helen cho helen show and her boyfriend do it and they have a special spike that's right i forgot all about it he's got a special spike and a special wire and he takes the special spike and puts it in a special place in the fish's head and then runs the wire up that's exactly right i would think he's got like a little special driver for his spike this is very particular about the placement of said spike now that i think about it i'm glad you brought that up the picture here looks very much like weren't you fishing with were you fishing with us out there when they were ekg man those fish we ate the fish raw yeah was it especially

good it's good man we had a lot of it it's a bummer when you get back to the dock and most your fish is eating up yeah living in the moment um anything else yeah no seth bad you'd be a bison hunter i know and you could have gone down and tried to implore them to extend the season yeah i tried i died yeah i tried that but uh no word of a season extension not not that i've heard of yet i feel like if it was going to happen it would have happened right yeah yeah i think so sam final thoughts concluders no i'm talked out really got water coming in over your waders bro no i think it's good i'll stay i'll keep my feet on the bottom you did a great job man i didn't want to do it.

Someone had to do it. Yeah, I felt like it was something in the space we exist in as the company that we are. I felt like somebody had to talk about it, and I didn't want to put that on anyone else. So I decided to do it myself, and it's been a fascinating process, and I hope people understand that I'm trying my best to give you the most accurate version of the truth, and I'm not trying to preference it in either way. It will continue to be fascinating. It will continue to be fascinating.

Miles Nolte? I'm going to echo the praise that you've given Sam. I think you did a really good job with that piece. I think that's a really hard one to do, uh i'm glad it didn't fall to me you'd rather fight about flop and perch yeah hey man i i that that one i feel like i can get my head around and i will piss off a lot fewer people yeah you never know though never know you'll always find someone to get mad oh i mean i'm gonna i'm good at pissing people off. I've done that my whole career. Okay, Al.

Do you want me to clarify my hierarchy of animals statement? I was excluding. If you feel it's necessary. Oh, I was just excluding the human animal from that equation. Oh, I thought you were talking about your position at the top of the hierarchy. No, no. It just really bothers me where it's like well yeah but that one's special you know because in the charismatic megafauna argument that we always

talk about it just drives me crazy that people are so disconnected from what food is so disconnected from the animals yet they feel like yeah glue trapping mice and shit like that yeah yeah slapping mosquitoes exactly slapping skeeters glue trapping mice and getting worked up because some guy's eating deer somewhere yeah yeah but i mean that rat doesn't want to we play we play into that too so on some level i mean most hunters get weird about you know when to eat a monkey oh yeah or a dog yeah dude i'm telling you what i everyone believes in a hierarchy yeah i put monkeys absolutely high on the thing well i remember when we were at the fish shack years ago and uh your oldest boy was uh challenging the hierarchy he was scooping up all these uh little eels and hermit crabs and. And he'd get them all situated in a bucket

and he'd have like little caves and stuff for them. And then every morning, everything would just be belly up in that bucket. And that kind of, everybody kind of got together and I was like, all right, wouldn't it be good? At the end of the day, at the end of the day, but he flipped about sea cucumbers sea cucumbers so his hierarchy is that like fish eels crabs or gunnels gunnel fish which look like an

eel that somehow the the lowly sea cucumber like doesn't be touched but he will suffocate innumerable other creatures in artificial in like aquarium settings perhaps the least cute and at least like least human being there is a sea cucumber just doesn't look like anything it looks like something dr seuss in his mind it was like how could you hurt such a thing? I need to go and dump out all the dead stuff from my bucket. I'll tell you, he's not interested in putting a perch back. No. No. No, he was upset with me yesterday for throwing back that two-inch perch.

He doesn't like that kind of stuff at all. No. I got no concluders. Did everybody get a concluder in? You good? Except for you. Yeah. You good?

Almost hit. No, I'm spent. All right, guys. Thanks. 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.

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