The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 161: Only in Texas

Episode Date: March 25, 2019

Steven Rinella talks with chef Jesse Griffiths, Danielle Prewett, Dr. Karl Malcolm, and Janis Putelis.Subjects discussed: Texas high fence; drunk designated drivers and other wildlife news; nilgai meat and their defecation piles; coyote attacks; wild game dishes you never want to eat again; a shocking example of erectile dysfunction in the animal kingdom; why grizzlies don’t live in the eastern US; can you make soap out of another man's fat?; Daniel Boone vs. Davy Crockett; pressure cooking versus slow cooking; adult-onset hunting; misconceptions about wild hog meat; the ethics of serving wild game to the unwitting; would you eat a CWD-positive deer?; the cocaine bear; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. The meat eater podcast. You can't predict anything. How's everybody doing tonight? Good? All right.

Who's, um, I want to ask now, we're going to revisit this later, but does anybody have a birthday tonight? That many people? Some on top, too. Just like, if you have a birthday, just say, like, just do one noise. Really? We need five of you, but it sounds like there's tons more. Okay, let's do some introductions first, and then we're going to get started. We're going to talk about, I have a lot of anecdotes I want to share, and I talked about these last night,

but we didn't record it, so I get to talk about them again, is a lot of anecdotes about you people drinking too much. But first, introductions. Giannis Patelis from Meat Eater. My name is Jesse Griffiths. Talk up your deal. Talk up your restaurants, man. I have a couple of restaurants in Austin. Dai Due and Dai Due Taqueria. Cheering for Austin or me? Also run a business called New School of Traditional Cookery, where we incorporate kind of a culinary aspect into hunting and fishing. Offer three-day trips, custom trips, stuff like that.

Also wrote a cookbook called A Field, a wild game and fish cookbook. All right. Hi, guys. I am Danielle. I'm wild and whole, so I am the girl who cuts up hearts and tells you how to cook it. Hey everybody, my name is Carl Malcolm. I'm the regional wildlife ecologist for the Forest Service based out of Albuquerque, New Mexico. And my whole career is rooted in the fact that I love to hunt and fish. That's what motivated me to become a wildlife scientist. And this is Carl's eighth appearance on the show. Yeah, it's an honor, man. I appreciate it.

And Carl pointed out that not only has Johnny Cash been on this stage, but also Groucho Marx. We're walking in the footsteps of legends. In the footsteps of legends. So I was going to talk about it, but I decided not to because we already talked about it a bunch. How in Houston, a woman went into... This just happened.

A woman goes in to smoke a joint. You guys know this story? In an abandoned house. And there's a tiger hanging out in there in a cage. That's like, I would say that's like the most Texas thing I've ever heard. And then, but I got so, so like we're, this guy worked with Brody. We were rounding up things to like just some local flavor, and Brody stumbles into this. Oh, hold on. Oh, go ahead. It's a little late, but is that what they mean by high fence?

No. That's all that Texas high fence they're always talking about. So Brody, this guy worked with Brody rounds up this like it's like a roundup of game warden activities from around the state. And so a game warden in Van Zant County, two game wardens in Van Zant County. Are you from Van Zant County? If I hit on something, if you people are in these stories, please come to the stage. So like you get a picture of game wardens, right?

They're out trying to catch poachers and stuff. These game wardens of Van Zandt County are going down the road and they come across a vehicle stop in the middle of the road. So they question the people. And there's a person who's too drunk to explain where they live,

which is making it hard for their designated driver to get them home. The designated driver turns out has been drinking. So the game wardens arrest the designated driver and the dude who can't figure out where he lives somehow has it in him to call another buddy to come pick him up that buddy shows up and he too is arrested for drinking and driving and so moving down to i want i keep messing this up the z one how do you say it? Z County? Zapata. Zapata. Yeah, you guys from there? So here a game warden responds to a tip about an illegal gill net in the Rio Grande. Goes down there on the Texas side of the river and starts pulling out some monofilament gill net, which has been set illegally. And by the time he's done, he has hauled in 4,000 feet of gill net. Near Abilene, a game warden sees people shooting from a truck,

stops them to ask them what's going on, and they explain that they're multitasking. Because one of the things they're doing is they're drinking. One of the things they're doing is the woman, her and her boyfriend are drinking and they're teaching her son how to drive and they're hunting hogs. In Bexar County, which I made the mistake last that i called it bexar county bexar which didn't go over well bear county game wardens find a guy on social media bragging up about how he's been doing a lot of hunting and fishing in the san antonio power plant property

which is closed to said activities and they want want to find the guy. So they review his social media posts and eventually figure out who he is and learn that he's on felony probation. So they can't find him. So they just go down and wait for him when he needs to show up for his probation court hearing and then arrest him. Another Texas story uh that's interesting is red wolves so red world i'm trusting you to know a little bit about this carl red wolves have been declared extinct in the wild in the wild yeah and they've tried captive breeding they have on an island off of north carolina they have tried some yeah but there's no red wolves alive in the wild. Yeah, and they were just surprised to learn that on Galveston Island, the coyotes there carry red wolf genetics.

Yeah, and quite a bit of it. Quite a bit. Yes, like to the point where, based on the most recent genetic analyses, they have more similarity to the red wolves than they do to a pure-blooded coyote. So they're kind of a middle ground, which raises some interesting questions about what defines a species, really. Yes. What do you think? Now can Texans start worrying about how they have wolves or is that premature oh there's probably plenty of that chatter already yeah uh another thing i again at the second time i talked about this but you guys have this this is the one i it's hard for you to pronounce you know the animal i'm gonna say the nil guy. Okay. Right? Now, you also have a problem in Texas with the cattle fever tick.

Not the tick that makes you that you can't eat meat, but like a tick that spreads a disease, cattle fever. And they can eradicate it in cattle or can control it in cattle, but now the nil guy carry the tick. So they are installing motion-activated spray machines that are like trail cams, but they blast Nilgai with a solution containing nematodes that kill the ticks, which would be some unnerving shit to happen to you, right? To be like walking through the woods and all of a sudden,

you would, it would be, I would be distressed for a minute. Well, you know when they zap them. What's that? You know how they zap them and when they zap them. No, I have no idea. I haven't looked into it. So the trick is Nilgai are very wide-ranging species. Like compared to a whitetail deer, they cover a ton more ground. But they congregate at shared latrines.

So they're installing these things at the shared latrines where all the Nilgai will get together and do their business. So it's like even more unnerving. It's like a baby toilet. Yeah. So you show up to do your business, and then you end up getting sprayed. Is that really right? Yeah.

Now, we have two genuine Texans. Have you guys hunted and eaten? I've hunted no guy. We've actually done a lot of stuff. I was just down in the King a couple weeks ago. I was cooking for clients that were hunting no guy. And, yeah, it's true. You'll see an for clients that were hunting no guy. And yeah, it's true. You'll see an eight foot circle of no guy shit in a road. Do they like to mound it up?

It's mostly flat. I'd say it's like a hill or a dale of shit. Because, you know, llamas, like if you if my brother keeps his llamas out in a flat, like if you keep them in a flat pasture. Llamas like to any kind of little rise to get on, and they'll shit in the same spot and build a little pitcher's mound that becomes substantial, and then they'll perch up on there just to get a better look. But the Nilgai meat is good.

It's fantastic. Even the bigger bulls, I mean, they get huge. I mean, 600, 700 pounds plus, not unheard of. And in my experience, even the big bulls are really good to eat. Is that right? What would you compare it to? It's maybe axis deer, like very mild. Maybe less, has like less of an iron flavor than whitetail, a little,

little bit beefy. It's, it's really, I mean, very lean, but, but very, very good. It's good stuff. We wanted to touch real quick on the Frisco coyote epidemic. Everybody lives in Frisco. Yanni's a subject matter expert on the Frisco coyote epidemic. Break it down. Sounds like all of you must have been bit by a coyote in the last six months from what I read. What else I know about them? They're chewing on small dogs uh cats a lot there was i think even

one news uh source had come up with their own app to report coyote sightings and at the time there was over 300 coyote sightings right around frisco and people were genuinely uh worried yeah because like five people, right? Got nipped or bit? I think it was seven. Seven people got bit? Yeah. Do you guys live in Frisco?

Oh, have you guys been bit? No? So everybody's doing it? Are you cool on that subject? Like that's kind of the extent of it. Yeah, you know, it didn't surprise me really when i read it i was like yeah that makes sense um we have you have something to add no oh you're

not cooking coyotes yeah i'm good no but i mean i want to i want to give a quick shout out. Another podcast guest, Bracey V. Hill II, is here with his friend Wes Keyes. Wes runs Wild Game. Am I saying this right, Wes? Wild Game for West Dallas? They put together 2,000 pounds of venison for protein-poor neighbors. Processors. There's a group called Hunters for Hungry. So deer hunters are bringing deer down to processors.

Hunters for Hungry are paying for all the processing fees. And then they also have a group, Brother Bill's Helping Hand, and they've been teaching. They've taken some young kids out and doing their first hunting trips, and he's here in the crowd tonight, so I wanted to mention that. He mentions that we need to have more Doug Dern, and I think that the world needs more Doug Dern. Quick question, yeah, we were with him the other night okay one more person i gotta bring up who there's some guy here

joel with the wife who has the coolest name in the world named timber you guys here okay wedding advice once wedding advice what he wants us to explain, Timber, I don't know if I'm doing this, Joel wants us to explain that, I'm just going to come at it, that you need to make sure that he's allowed to go hunting all the time. He wanted us...

I was supposed to frame that up as some kind of marriage, be sly and frame it up as some kind of marriage, be sly and frame it up as some kind of marriage advice, but that's just what he's getting at. So I'm just going to cut right. I'm not at an angle for it, because it sounds like maybe he's not getting to go enough, right? Or he feels that way, right? No, no.

No? Because now you're going to make it that he's not going to have a good night. He, no. no because now you're going to make it that he's not going to have a good night he no this dude says he says i go all the time i think that he wants to just make sure that that continues into the future precedent like precedent setting which is that's a big, that's my marriage advice. My marriage advice starts before you get married. I would, if I was timber, I would even push him. And cause there's this like yet to be the guy that actually hunts 365 days a year. So I would say when it's been about eight days or nine days in a row, if he actually hunts that much, then when he's like, so I'm going to sleep in tomorrow morning, I'd have that alarm going off at four and be like, dude, get out of bed and bring home the bacon, bro. Like, no rest for the

guy that wants to hunt all the time, right? Like, get it and just kind of see where that level's out. He's getting married in May, so good luck to him. Now, digging in. We're going to focus pretty heavy, not like totally heavy, but pretty heavy on wild game tonight because we've got so many good cooks up front here. We've got some other questions. We're going to stray a little bit.

We're going to touch on cannibalism. I want to talk. I got a question about whether deer ever lose their ability to get it up, which is for Carl. But first, no, not like that, man. I don't mean like, I don't mean you're going to know because, you know, subject matter. I mean, like, you know, because it's like an animal question that I was going to steer your direction. I knew it.

But first, I want to get into this this one this is a question that comes in that came in it's that this is a panel opportunity what have you eaten that you will never eat again and how was it that you cooked it i can start or i can go later. It doesn't matter to me. You got one? I got one. Staying on brand, I'm a big fan of hogs. I ate a hog once that had been snared.

And that thing had been in a snare for at least two hours by the time we got up to her. So, I mean, enough that when I walked up, she just lost all the, you know, ability to fight. She got really sad in here. She had just given up. But that meat was absolutely inedible. So I hung up the hog snares after that. Really? I have some of those and I look at them all the time. I've never messed with them. I mean, for eradication, it would be good, but for pork chops, not good. Really?

What do you got, Giannis? I don't know of anything that really fits that bill, because I want to try it again, and this might be a good segue for you. But merganser, a hooded one. The one time we tried it, we stunk out the apartment and just vowed to never do it again. With the skin on it.

I can't remember. I doubt it. I bet we just took the breasts out. But you don't mind gold, do I? No. This was a long time ago. This was probably close to two decades ago. And I remember it being pretty fishy.

Yeah. The thing I made, this is kind of like, what I made is intertwined with how you cooked it. And I wrote about this in my first book. And I always remember just how kind of off-putting it was, was kidney pudding with elk kidney, but it was from an old elk. And the fact that like when you're eating it, and it really, honestly, it's like eating like solidified piss. And man, that was just like such

a letdown, you know? Like a urinal cake. What's that? A urinal cakedown you know like a urinal cake what's that a urinal cake it was like a urinal cake you need one of those no there's like soapy things in a urinal yeah it'd be like if you cook that i've not eaten one but it was yeah it was like a you know and you cook it and it kind of rises it has like a souffle-ish kind of thing. But man, it was not a good dish. Kidney pudding. You ever got burned on a dish? Yeah. This is actually really embarrassing.

But in my early days of cooking wild game, actually probably my first experience ever processing, butchering a deer. It was a gift given to us by a friend who manages a ranch and he quartered a deer. And I was like, we're going to process this whole thing ourselves. And what should have taken hours was days because I thought all I knew was like get all the silver skin off so i'm like breaking down the shanks like i'm going crazy so like days this meat has been in the cooler and i don't know that you should drain the water out and keep fresh ice in so it's like nicely marinating in this cooler for way too long in its. Yeah. And so I have all the bones left,

and I'm like, you know, I'm going to make a stock. I'm just this, I was just like a hot shot in the kitchen at this point in time. So I start making the stock. I roast, I wake up early, roast the bones. It's just, I got this nice pot going, and I realize it smells really bad. I'm thinking to myself, well, it's just I got this nice pot going and I realize it smells really bad I'm thinking to myself well it's just gamey right that's just like venison I'd never really worked with venison

before I'm like it's just gamey it'll get better just keep cooking it and like it's on the stove for hours and then Travis that's my husband Travis comes, and he busts the door open, and he yells at me like, why are you making a European mountain house? Like, do that outside. Yeah, and I was like, okay, this is not right. So I threw it out. So I didn't try it. But the worst thing, so yeah, so I didn't even taste it tried it was like it was like death in the house it was so so bad um but the worst thing i actually ate was a tundra swan that had been in a ziploc bag or not even like a ziploc freezer just like a little baggie in the back of someone's freezer for a couple years i had like a nice freezer. Like it's a tundra swan wasn't you know bad enough. It was freezing burn. So they have so much tundra swan laying around that they lose track of it?

So we, Travis went on a hunt with a buddy in the pothole region. This was up in North Dakota, not Texas. Up in the pothole region, and they were, they were diver duck hunting, and they see some swans come by, and they start yelling, hoo-ha, hoo-ha, they turn around, so he gets his swan, and I actually wanted it mounted, and I didn't, but I wanted to eat it, so his friend's like, oh, I have some in the freezer, you can mount that, and I'll give you, give you this one. So I was like, oh, that's so sweet. Thank you. Thank you so much. Yeah. No good. It was, yeah, it was terrible. You got, Carl, something in China? I ate some bad stuff in China for sure. But yeah, the thousand-year egg, no bueno. Oh, have you eaten that deal, the embryonic?

You know what I'm talking about? You ever eat those where they let a duck egg? Balut. Yeah, I've eaten that. My God, man. Yeah. That fits into the category. But the thing that came to mind, first of all, is stuff that I now love eating, but

at the time had no idea how to handle it. And so I've been thinking lately, you know, like anybody out there grab a copy of the new Fish and Game cookbook? There it is. So the reason that that's cool is I think about being like a 13-year-old squirrel hunter who loved hunting squirrels and didn't know what the heck to do with them, really. And how it would just be a different ballgame today to have the videos, the cookbooks, and have all that at your disposal as a new hunter.

But to answer your question when I was learning how to hunt we'd do these like Daniel Boone Davy Crockett adventures where we'd go camping in the woods behind our house and we'd catch trout we'd pick mushrooms we'd hunt squirrels and grouse and pretty much whatever hunting success we had we'd build a fire, skin out whatever critter it was, and just like hold it in the fire. And so you'd get this like black, crisp exterior and bite in, and it would be like cool to the touch on your teeth. And you'd be like pulling meat off like i must really like hunting

so i'm done with that like i'm doing all kinds of you know like squirrel now is the bomb yeah but it's because i've learned how to do it and you know that's one of the things about having these resources at your fingertips now like we weren't we weren't jumping on youtube or jumping on your smartphone it's like like, here's a dead squirrel. I'm going to build a fire and hold it in there and it's going to be awful. That's like, a long time ago, that was wild game cooking was so weird

because I often think like, the impact of phones you don't even really think about is that you used to, if you're going to meet your friends, you guys all had to pick a bar and no one could leave the bar to go to a different bar because you wouldn't be able to find each other. Right.

You had to like pre phones. Everything was different, man. Yeah. It was hard to find people. You're starting to sound like an old man. Yeah. But you know what I'm saying? Like, if you remember, it was like you.

It was very difficult to locate your buddies. You could lose track of your buddies without phones. But also you couldn't look up how to cook stuff. So we would just know that people ate something like we knew. I remember the first time we tried to cook a deer tongue was in 1994 and uh we just knew that it was a thing one could do but we didn't have access to even the idea that the skin's supposed to come off yeah so we'd boil those sons of bitches and try to chew on them and boil them and try to chew on them and now you just would very quickly just realize you know yeah but we would just in like trying to figure out how to cook beaver tails when you have it's just a thing

you know it happens but you don't know how to do it and there's no you can't convey the information yeah unless you stumbled across some weird old cookbook somewhere you just had no way of knowing now everybody knows everything now when people don't know how to do something, I kind of look down on them a little bit. It's like, just look it up, man. A dish guy asked about, oh, no, first I'm going to get to this, Carl. I've got two more because we're going to use you up right now. Okay. Two questions. Okay.

Which one do you want first? The grizzly bear one or the penile erectile dysfunction in deer one? Penile one. Okay. a guy wants to know because here here's where this is coming from here's where this is coming from there's a guy i can't remember what state he's in there's a guy and he hunts a property and there's a really old deer and the landowner's like don't mess with that deer ever but he's wondering is it ever that because he thinks he wants this old deer that's got big antlers to breed and make more deer. And he's wondering,

do deer hit the autumn of their life? Right? Like dudes, there's a long period of a dude's life when he's not breeding anything, even if he wanted to. So does that known, like does a deer age out or do they stay viable till the bitter end? They do not age out.

They don't age out. And nor do the females for that matter. And if you think about, so there's this myth, right, of like the old dry doe. And there have been numerous research papers um a deer biologist by the name of glenn delgades did a great study up in minnesota where he was looking at fecundity the ability and and uh basically rates of pregnancy and number of offspring across different age classes of females and it just keeps ticking up like older does tend to be more fertile

than younger does but fertility rates are very high in females and given the complexity of what the female reproductive system has to do compared to the male reproductive system there's a lot more that you know can go wrong essentially in terms of having those years of fertility. That's why a woman has a relatively narrow period of fertility compared to a man. But in deer, if you think about the fact that they have this narrow breeding season, and you think about the fact that most of these bucks are dying from sources of mortality other than aging out. The likelihood of any individual deer getting to the point where they're not performing

reproductively, it's just not gonna happen. The exception would be if a deer experiences some kind of an injury, like people have probably heard of the term cactus bucks. Bucks that'll get some damage they'll injure their testicles those sorts of things you better explain the cactus buck so a cactus buck would be a deer that essentially keeps growing layers of velvet that are never shed and the growth like the antler cycle is controlled by sex hormones, testosterone. The seasonality of breeding is what is linked to antler growth.

So post-breeding season, when the testosterone levels start to drop, that's when the antlers would fall off. But in a deer that has experienced an injury to its testicles, or perhaps has undistended testicles, they'll just keep growing layers of velvet potentially on their antlers and get these really funky antler configurations and sometimes just carry velvet antlers for a long time. But there is an example. I have to know what she just said. That makes

sense. There is an example. Thanks, man. There is an example of erectile dysfunction in the wildlife kingdom, though, that I think would be of interest to people. So polychlorinated biphenyls, PCBs, are precipitating out of the atmosphere near the poles. And this is having a disproportionate effect on animals that are at the top of the food chain. And as you go north, we're talking polar bears here. And there was a research paper published recently about the fact that these PCBs have the potential. Is that what they're always telling you is not in your water bottle? Yes. Oh, really?

Well, there's a few things they're telling you are not in the bottle. But yeah, there are estrogenic substances in some plastics that they're really worried about when it comes to drinking water. But PCBs are a byproduct of manufacturing processes. So the problem is they can weaken skeletal tissue, bones, including in polar bears. Like they're detecting weakening of polar bear bones. And polar bears are one of the species that have a very unique bone. Baculum. The baculum. Pecker bone.

So there is concern that PCBs have the potential to weaken the penis bones of polar bears to the point that polar bear males could be predisposed to breaking their penile bones, thereby experiencing high rates of what would effectively be erectile dysfunction and further compromising their state, which is, you know, being driven by climate change and a host of other factors. But in the world of ED in the animal kingdom, that's the best I can do for you man that's good though that's good i want to give a excellent answer i can't decide if i'm if we should give no i'm gonna ask you the other one i got my other wildlife question one i can't i have a good sense of what it is but i can't figure

out so we all know like when you look at european contact we had you had mountain lions coast to coast, top to bottom. We had wolves coast to coast, top to bottom. Why was it that the grizzly bear never colonized the eastern U.S.? What kept the grizzly bear stuck at around the Big Bend of the Missouri River you want a real short answer yeah tight no short answer the short the short answer is habitat open country open country is the Grizzlies preferred habitat and if you'll allow just a couple additional details. If you go back in the evolutionary tree, you have a common ancestor about a million years ago that was shared by black bears and brown bears. And at that point in time, you had the differentiation where due in part to the habitat provided by the glaciers receding,

you had all this open country. And you had some of the bears specialize in hunting and living in that open country, and some of the bears specialize in occupying the forested habitats. And that difference in their habitat preference has driven so much about the morphology, the behavior, the level of aggression, the reproduction. Everything about the life histories of brown bears versus black bears is driven by black bears being specialized to occupy densely forested habitats. Yeah, like a quick example would be the short hooked claws that allow a black bear to climb a tree. Yeah.

And the grizzly's long claws, which are great for digging, but make him incapable of climbing a tree. But there's so many more cool details than that, the more you start to think about it. And furthermore, that specialization for open country and just being able to hunt the wide open and be very protective and territorial over your offspring and being just like a bad mofo kind of bear extended even further when the grizzly differentiated into the polar bear later on in its evolution. So if you think about the extreme example of that open country, untreated environment,

the polar bear is like the extreme version of that. And that's a relatively recent split in the phylogenetic tree. But everything about reproduction, like American black bears, their offspring stay with them for the first year and a half. Why is that? Well, a year and a half old American black bear can flee up a tree if it encounters danger. In contrast to a grizzly bear, where the offspring stay with the mother for two and a half years, and that's thought to be, in large part, because they remain so dependent on their mother for protection

that if they were to split at a year and a half, they'd end up getting smoked by another bear. They can't get away. They can't get away. So yeah, there are places, obviously, we could come up with a list of all the places where brown bears and black bears coexist, where they overlap, where you've got some forested habitat, but that's always going to be a place where you've got forested conditions for the black bear and proximity to open country for the brown bear so the brown bear is an open open country species compared to the black bear tracking good 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

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Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. I want to move on to, we touched on this now, and I want to move on to cannibalism real quick. A guy wrote in, and he was talking about that his buddy, he's talking about a guy. So there's a guy saying that another guy is going to get liposuction.

And he's wondering, can you use the fat for anything? And you remember that in Fight Club, part of the plot is that they're using human fat to make soap. And a dude once sent me, I don't know if you guys have done this, a dude sent me fat that he's been making with black bear soap, you mean. Sorry. Sent me soap made out of black bear fat. It's not really about cannibalism, but have you guys

messed with this at all? Like making your own, any kind of soaps out of fat? Bear fat? Deer fat? I've never made it, but we, actually at the restaurant, we sell soap made out of wild boar fat. You do? Really? And it works pretty good?

I mean, it makes you clean feeling? Come over here. Come over and check it out? Yeah, have we talked about this? You're the only guy I know that has, you've kind of cannibalized. Kind of, yeah. Because you've eaten human placenta.

I don't have a tattoo yet that says cannibal. Yeah, you've eaten human placenta, and you've drank. Oh, yes, I've done it twice. You've drank mother's milk. Drank human milk. A lot of us have drank human milk. You're drinking human milk? No, no, yeah, you're right. You're drinking human milk? No, no,

yeah, you're right. You know what? That's a good point, man. But I mean, like, that's a really good point. But he drank it as a grown-up. And I haven't done it. You start to think about, yeah, but most of us who have consumed milk, it's from our own mother. But then there are all these examples in a lot of cultures, you know in some communities in america where it's commonplace for babies to be passed around to various lactating moms and whose milk it is isn't that big of a deal and then you start thinking about the milk banks where you have mom a giving mom b's kid milk and milk's just like flowing all over the place yeah my wife would give out frozen sacks of milk to friends of hers.

For babies, though. What do you guys get for a bar of hog soap? It's like $7, $9, I think. Yeah, and it's pretty nice stuff? Yeah, it's got juniper berries in it. It's really nice. Good cover set, too, if you're hunting pigs. Do you have any experience with this making this making no i i thought about doing something with the deer fat because it's so waxy i was like that could seal a lot of things up yeah we used to seal

boots with deer fat we would take deer fat and man it makes your boots stink man but we would yeah we would just melt deer fat down and rub it into the rub it into the leather and i used to have a buddy who uh this guy named layton with glenda and he would um he would take bear fat and pine pitch and beeswax and make his own triple blend boot stuff the hard thing to get was the bees. He would track the bees to their hive and then take a chainsaw and root out the beeswax and make the boot stuff. That was kind of his scene.

Now, we want to touch on, because we're going to talk about Davy Crockett for a minute. Can you explain, Danielle, what you were telling me about what he might be credited with? No, no. I was trying to tell you that it was a lie. Oh, the hush puppies was a lie? Yeah. Oh, what?

Yeah. She fooled you. You did fool me. Because we're going to play a game. I win. We're going to play a lie. So that was trying out a lie? Yeah. Oh. Was it a good one but was it true about the bear killing the daniel that's true well i

mean allegedly he wrote that he killed 105 bears in tennessee bars 105 in seven months and i think either 42 or 47 i think 47 was in one month in one month yeah because boone claimed daniel boone and like people lump in davy crockett daniel boone but different dudes different times like not the same guy daniel boone's thousand times cooler than davy crockett which is offensive to texas but you guys listen are you guys aware are you are you guys aware that it is rumored right are you guys aware that it's rumored that crockett i hope his family's not here that crockett did not go down in a blaze of glory. Oh, no. I said it's rumored. You're familiar with this?

I mean, we've seen the footage. He tossed that torch into the gunpowder room and he took out like hundred Mexican soldiers. And he shot Santa Ana's hat off of his head at a thousand yards. You've seen the photos. But are you aware of the myth, like the competing legends about Crockett? No. A journal, a disputed, a hotly contested. You're going to have a meeting here soon.

You're not careful. I was telling Giannis this story and I got the story all wrong. But then we looked up the true version. It was a hotly contested journal. You look like you're agitated. I'm just trying to speak for everybody here. Carry on. A hotly contested journal.

Like the veracity of the journal has been called into question. But there's a journal that exists. I think it sits here in Texas. I think it sits in the state capital or something. You guys already know all this? And it was that. At the end, the smoke clears. The smoke clears at the Alamo.

And Crockett had surrendered and was executed. And he didn't go, he didn't, you know. I don't have a dog in the fight here. I'm just saying this is a contested thing. And Danielle got to tell me how Davy Crockett invented the hush puppy. But it was, which I thought was true. I can't believe you.

I can't believe you thought that was true. I don't know why I thought it was true. I thought that, but like, so we have like Boone and Crockett, they've been stuck in our heads together, Boone and Crockett. Boone claims to have, I wrote it down here,

because I've quoted this a thousand times, but I don't want to mess it up. Boone claimed, he killed, when he was hunting bears, for the bacon't want to mess it up. Boone claimed, he killed, when he was hunting bears for the bacon market and the lard market, he killed 155 in a single fall and once killed 11 before breakfast. Hunting with hounds. They would get, I think, like a buck a gallon for bear fat. And they would cure the hams. They would make, they would tap maples for sugar. They would go to Salt Licks and boil down the water to make salt,

and they would make their own salt-sugar brine. They would brine the bear meat in barrels, make their own smokehouse, smoke it, and then haul it on keelboats to be sold. And it's plausible that like like and this is contemporaneous with benjamin franklin so it's like plausible that ben franklin ate some you know bear meat from some long-haired wild man out running around brining bear meat but you imagine 155 in a single season and we were talking about all these animals

that used to exist across the continent, and we kind of whittled them down to next to nothing. That's the kind of feller that did some whittling. Yeah. And you think about how cool they are, but you also think, what is their sense of, give me the numbers on Crockett. 47 one month.

47. What is their sense of enough? That's like Timbers, dude. He hunts that much. He could probably kill 47 in one month. Yeah, parasitism. Okay, I want to move on. There's a guy, I think he's here tonight, he is here tonight, his name's Steven, P.H. Steven, he has a great sentence in his letter,

my name is Steven, I'm a big fan and a lazy Texas hunter, he goes on to talk about, I don't know the answer to this, but I'm curious. Everybody's all hot on hot pots. What do you call them? Instapots. Instapots. But he's like, why is it when you make something, if you cook game in an instapot, it just is never as good as if you slow cook it straight up? I want to think about that while I make sure that this is what he's saying.

Does that sound right? Are you here? You're buying. Like, I'm doing a good is what he's saying. Does that sound right? Are you here? You're buying. Like, I'm doing a good job with your question. Is that yes or no? Good. Okay. Yeah, so he's saying, what's up with Instapots?

I've never messed with Instapot. I do have an electric pressure cooker, but it's not called that. I would just get, get I mean there's really no substitution for time especially when you're breaking down silver you know getting marrow out of bones you need that collagen to gelatin conversion need that just that texture that flavor that's gonna develop over time and it's you know microwaves not gonna not going to do it and some fancy instapot contraption's probably not going to do it either i think one of the biggest issue so i started

looking into the differences between electric versus manual and the biggest thing with instapot is like obviously convenience so you kind of like i've never actually used one, but I've read through recipes and instructions from Instapot. And you put the meat in there and it's supposed to brown and sear the meat. And then you add your liquids and everything. And there's just, it's just steaming. You don't get that like mired reaction of like a true browning your meat. You're just steaming it. And so you really lose a lot of

rich flavors by doing that and plus like you were saying like you don't have time on your side either well i was thinking too it's like the there's no escape of water right right so there's no uh reduction happening well because it's pressurized the theory or i guess science behind it is that it has nowhere to go so it goes back inside the meat with all that pressure in there so i mean i use a manual pressure cooker quite a bit and i i like it a lot but it's it's it is not the same as, braising in the oven. It's not the same result. But you're using it for convenience factors. So when you're working and you have a busy schedule and you want some thigh meats to

be really tender in a really fast time, it's convenient, but you just aren't going to get the same depth of flavor if you were to slowly do it in the oven. Or a crock pot, for that matter. I mean, I'm a big fan of browning something in a pan, transfer that to the crock pot, let it go for six, eight hours, however long it needs. But you get the same kind of thing. But I think you just have to have that time in there.

And like you're saying, the browning process. Yeah. So important. Go ahead, Yance. Available everywhere. Everywhere books are sold. you're saying the browning process yeah so important go ahead yas available everywhere everywhere books are sold i feel like i even get two separate um results between crock pot and say dutch oven inside the oven would you agree with that as well and and have a thought on why that is you're gonna have more radiant heat from the metal versus just kind of that light ambient heat from the crock pot, I think. You know, metal is just going to conduct a lot more.

I mean, Dutch ovens are amazing, too. I'm a big fan. Right. Yeah, I think. And plus, it's just cast iron. It's just more authentic. And sometimes your brain just wants that. Yeah, right.

So it might be a little bit of placebo. I think that cook yeah in a dutch oven in the oven is the best well what else gives you that like car that like caramel coating that's a real bitch to clean off yeah when you see that man you know you've made something you know yeah but my suggestion on the instapots would be like cooking it like cooking stock in there like a really good stock that you pour in there because then you're sort of given, you're taking time earned from somewhere else

and applying it. Yeah, I would say if you're going to use an Instant Pot or even a pressure cooker or a Crock-Pot, brown it separately on the pan first always and then combine everything. You saute in an Instant Pot. everything yeah but that's what i'm saying is like that's not like a real like saute pan it's like this guy's a representative from instapot you close the lid on that and you're steaming it you're not letting any of that

moisture evaporate so you lose oh you can leave the lid off. Leave the lid... But here's the thing. Well, I don't want to get in a big fight. We already got in a fight about Davy Crockett. But I have one that's not that brand, and it's a deep-ass thing, and it's like searing in there is not the same.

Still not the same. Still not... See? Still not the same. Okay. I want to move on to one thing real quick here no this is not quick this is a long one um i'm going out of my own order you are jesse you've been described as a did you did you describe yourself as an adult onset, late onset hunter? Yes. What happened? Well, I'd fished all my life. I mean, I grew up in Denton, which is just north of here.

Hey, girl. And yeah, I'd fished Lake Ray Roberts. And growing up, I was actually, I remember when they filled that reservoir and just came to hunting later on in life. And I worked in restaurants since I was legally old enough to work. And then I learned to butcher first and then went into hunting

after I learned how to butcher animals. So you, hold on, back up. So you started working in restaurants real young? Mm-hmm, 16. Doing what, washing dishes and whatnot? Everything. I've washed dishes, bartended, waited tables, worked in the kitchen. And what got you, so what was the move into butchering?

What did that look like? I just, you know, eventually became a butcher at a restaurant and we were getting whole animals in. This is almost about 18 years ago. And back when people were just starting to get back into whole animal butchery and this restaurant I was working in started bringing in hogs and lamb and we just learned to cut them. And then after that, I was able to kind of make a pretty you know easy segue into hunting because the back end of it was super familiar to me

yeah uh you know there's a lot obviously a lot to learn on the front end of it but what was your what was your awareness you grew up in texas so there's like there's a huge hunting culture in texas what was your awareness of hunting and what were your perceptions did you have an opinion about it you didn't have an opinion about it I was always curious about it but my family you know I'm only child my dad didn't hunt but like I said we fished constantly and so I just had to get out there and learn myself and uh you know finally did and then it just it took and then there was something to do in the winter you know besides fishing in the warmer months and so now i find myself constantly occupied so yeah and then uh you so you eventually got to where you cook a lot of game in restaurants right and in your in

your own places talk about like the pet because i think a lot of people around the country people here are familiar with it but a lot of people around the country, people here are familiar with it, but a lot of people around the country are really surprised to hear that, like, actual wild pigs make their way into the restaurant world. Yeah, it's a complicated process. I mean, all the time people, somebody will roll up to the restaurant

and knock on the back door and be like, hey, I got a pig out here. And I'm like, no. Or you can't, so you don't touch that. Yes. No, totally illegal. I mean, it has to be inspected. So all the hogs that we get in are trapped.

They're trapped mostly out in the hill country. And then they're brought into a license processor in a trailer. And then he kills them. They're inspected before they're brought into a license processor in a trailer, and then he kills them. They're inspected before they're killed. They're inspected after they're killed. They're blue stamped. They've got a nice little Texas symbol on them, stamped, and then brought to us from there. But that pig could have trichinosis.

No one tested for that, right? Sure. But so could a domestic pig. I mean, it's highly unlikely. Highly unlikely. Yeah. But it is, I mean, there's swine brucellosis, pseudorabies, tularemia. There's a host of things that they are hosts of. So we keep our eye on it. Texas Animal Health Commission, kind of updates everyone on cases and then it's it's pretty rare uh to see anything come from the feral hogs although they can be vectors for a lot of different diseases yeah over 90 of the trichinosis cases in this country come from

black bear meat yeah yeah i remember in alaska they had a guy that got it from walrus which really surprised me then you guys also so you do venison too we do but like that's the weird that's the weird one i wanted to ask you about i told you i was going to ask you about it would be if if you say if you have a restaurant that sells wild game right people have an idea what that is and when you sell wild pigs that conforms to wild game or here's this animal that no one has any control over it's it leads its own destiny right just kind of does its own thing cruises around out in the woods but with when you sell the venison that's not like that's like a farm animal no it's not necessarily a lot of them will come off really large ranches have a ton of acreage and they trap them

bulk of what we sell is ngai. And so those are actually completely wild animals coming from the coast. And so they go in there and they catch them with net guns, like shooting nets over them, big traps, stuff like that. No shit, really? So a lot of what we serve So that can wind up in the restaurant trade? Yeah. Well, there's some inspection processes since they're not swine. They fall under a different status. And so they aren't as highly regulated.

And so there's even a wild game company here that sends an inspector out in the field and they shoot deer. But they, I mean, non-native. So axis, syca, fallow deer, things like that. When you say syca, you mean like, you're talking like the syca deer, the little elk-like deer. Yeah. So a true whitetail is never on your menu? No, we never serve whitetail. Oh.

So these are typically going to be deer that are, you know, proliferated on a ranch. So granted, it's a high fence. Yep. But typically very large, and they are trapped. But for the most part, my big thing is diet. So they are living wild. They're not in a pen. They're living wild, and they're eating mostly a wild diet.

Now, they're probably hitting a corn feeder here and there, but versus any wild deer in the state, it's probably about the same. So I also think that they are invasives in a way, and it's the best thing that we can do while falling under the parameters of the law. And you guys don't, so you guys don't sell deer coming out of New Zealand? Never. We don't sell, I mean, for that matter, we don't sell any product, any fresh product that doesn't, I mean, it has to come from Texas. That's interesting, man. I had no, I had no idea that I was playing on the boss of

your balls. No, sorry. But I didn't even get a chance. Really? So that's what it is. So people, you're getting like a pretty legit wild game experience. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like the taqueria, we were using all Nilgai there. So that's a wild animal. All the sausage we do at the brick and mortar is Nilgai. And then when we get in a whole carcass, you know, we never know what we're going to get. My guy calls me and he's like, hey, we got a couple red deer in the trap. Great, Bring them. That's, that's,

that's a, this might be proprietary info, but can you tell me what your cut of fat to how much fat you cut into making a, like a, your average sausage? I mean, it probably varies here and there. 20 to 25,

2025. Okay. What? Give me money this i i want to provide i want to provide good uh information for tonight's audience so what are okay so you've got hunting background you've got chef background and and and remember earlier we're talking about like pre um like back when it was harder to get information than it is now i feel like there used to be like growing up hunting we just had like certain ways we cooked everything and then you later learned that you had like people in the culinary world and chefs and things and they had

their way of doing stuff. But the communication didn't, there wasn't like an exchange of communication. Like if you were a rural person eating wild game, you probably cooked it like how your grandma cooked it, and they probably cooked it how their grandma cooked it. And you didn't have this big exchange between the culinary world, you know, the professional culinary world and rural wild game people. And now there's more freedom, right? I think you'd agree with that.

There's a lot more just exchange of ideas. Like, for instance, last time I had dinner at Carl's. Well, talk about what we had last time I had dinner at your house. The last time you were there, we capitalized on some technology that I had imported from my time in China, where one of my favorite dishes was what the Chinese call huo guo, which translates basically into hot pot. And you'll sit around a table with a big hole in the middle, and it'll hold a cauldron of boiling broth with all kinds of spices. And it's a really social thing because everybody's gathered around with chopsticks

and dipping in all manner of fish and meat and eggs and coagulated blood and all manner of mushrooms and aromatics. Yeah, it's like a fondue kind of deal. And so I was going to have steve and janice paying me a visit and when you're hosting these jokers at your house for dinner you don't want to be pulling out like a package of ballpark franks and slapping them on the grill not that you guys wouldn't like ballpark but i was like what could i do that would be creative so we did this menagerie of wild fish and game from all over New Mexico. We had walleye.

Yep, we had walleye. We had pronghorn, heart, turkey, wild turkey, giblets. There was some elk. We had just like whatever was in the freezer. And it was a fun way to spend an evening. Yeah, like with seasoning packets from China. Yeah. Put into the thing.

So the point being that there's this exchange now. So if you imagine your position where you've got a foot in the hunting world and you've got a foot in the technical culinary world, what are the misconceptions about wild pigs that you find like when you talk like the hunters have their own ideas about like what's edible not edible what's good not good where does that contradict what you found from the professional kitchen wild pig specifically sure man or whatever you want to get into i think in general i mean just the collective consciousness has shifted so much, and you can speak to this a lot.

I mean, that's what you do, is communicate food to people that are increasingly way more interested in that part of it. I mean, they're starting to recognize that you're a dead animal on the ground. You're halfway done with this job. And there's more enjoyment to it. You don't just slap some Italian dressing on

it anymore and wrap it bacon although you can't when I when I was a kid it was cream of mushroom soup in a crock pot right but I mean I think people are just I mean you just see so much more excitement about it now and more curiosity people are willing to try different things and they're they're just they're being more adventurous and they're they're wanting to get more out of of that that part of all that work they're going out there to do i think with with hogs we we experience a lot of myth and uh people a lot of misconceptions you know like i've been told that you know 120 pounds is the biggest hog that you can eat. So, like, 119 is just... But 121 is just gut pile material. And that doesn't make any sense to me.

I mean, I've had a 300-pound boar that was amazing. And you're not going to believe that. But, I mean, trust me on this. And I think that... mean my my my mission is to just get people to eat more pigs i mean they're invasive they're tearing up land they you know we you know there's i mean there's people that don't have enough food out there like this gentleman that's working so hard to feed them and it's just like we're shooting piles of pigs and leaving them to lie in a field and And I think if we can get out there and educate and show people that these pigs can be delicious.

I'm not saying they're all stunning. There's some of them that are stinky. And I've experienced that. So there are stinky pigs. I mean, I've shot pigs that I thought were way better than other pigs I've shot. What do you think is going on? What's a bad pig? Well, I mean, go back anecdotally to my my snare story um you know stress is a big one it's

like the bigger the pig the harder it is to bring down the longer it runs the more it adrenalizes less lactic acids build up the muscles the tougher it can be the gamier it can be um diet is a huge one we kill pigs in south texas uh which aren't nearly as good as the pigs that we kill out in lockhart or maybe in the you know east texas where you have four kinds of oaks or you know places where there's lots of pecans and oaks diet diet forms a big part of that equation but i think that just convincing people to give them more of a chance, try some different cuts, try the ribs, try more slow cooking on them, you know, like really break them down. Get adventurous. I mean, or just, or maybe not adventurous is the right word.

I think a lot of times, you know, when you see a recipe that's like this, you know, nine-hour sous vide project and it's got a lingonberry glaze on it and you need a chiffonade of fresh mint and you need to find galangal to finely mince and put on top you're going to be like there's no way but if i was like why don't you make a sloppy joe out of it you're going to do that and it's going to be amazing and i think that's i mean i think that's the way that you communicate to people is you you you put it in a context that, you know, they first off can recognize how to make it and second recognize how it should taste. Is it true? I've heard it so many times. I don't know if it's true.

Like that people say that a wet, a wet sow is like the best wild pig to eat because it's you don't know what i'm talking about i mean pregnant sow hasn't had them yet but that's the one you want to eat or is that just like another myth or is that true no i was in a blind i was guiding a guy the other day in a blind and we were at one of our hunting schools and two sows walked out one was pregnant one was nursing and i was like shoot the pregnant one because you think it's better meat yeah the fat's staying in instead of going out so you just and fat is what you want in in hogs it's just it's all about fat can you um what's up with age and hog meat is it not not worth it we're in a warm climate so i mean if you have the you know the walk-in cooler that's got a lot of moving air in it then by all means you can try it i i think that it's risky um uh it can be done but i

think that in a really cold and dry environment you're looking at up to about 10 days with a hog but like if you're talking about like aging like people are doing with beef, you know pushing 60 days stuff like that and people are doing with pork domestic pork as well right now I'm I think that you're you'd be better choosing a different battle Yeah, I think let them get through rigor mortis and then cut them at your earliest convenience So you're like the hog proselytizer. But let me ask you this, though. This is a question I always ask people. So you guys enjoy this great, not great, you enjoy this resource, and you have as much of it as you want, and the animal becomes really interwoven into the culture. So the pig has almost like synonymous with Texas hunting

culture but the reason it's like gloves off on pigs is because they're non-native and problematic I always ask pig hunters this if I gave you a magic wand right and I said if you shake this wand

it'll be done the pigs will be gone so so not And I said, if you shake this wand, it'll be done. The pigs will be gone. So not that. You're not that far. You wouldn't shake the wand? No. I wouldn't. I'd get in trouble with my friends at Parks and Wildlife too, but I'm sorry.

I can't shake that one um i mean the control yes i mean we have them in east austin now like in the city limits um there's i mean they're a rampant problem and i have friends that are farmers and they want to shake that one too and i think that we need to find so you do feel there are people in texas who would shake the magic oh for sure yeah you a shaker or not shaker carl you because you have an obligation to american wildlife you'd have to shake it yeah i would really yep you got to find another door out of here to but you know i can understand the sentiment behind not wanting to shake it. I mean, I can understand how a species that you

have interacted with and that's fed your family and you've spent all this time learning about and, you know, breaking them down and cooking them. Like over time, I can completely understand and appreciate the kind of relationship that people would feel towards that animal and So I'm not I'm not dismissing that but from an ecological perspective. I Would absolutely shake that one really Would you shake it? I'm staying out of it. Would you shake the one? I? Feel like I'm supposed to say yes, but I probably wouldn't you probably wouldn't shake the one no you know we were in in in Chesapeake Bay on the East Shore,

and there's a fish there, a snakehead. Do you guys have snakeheads here, like a non-native fish? And at first the snakeheads hit the water, and everyone's like, oh my God, snakeheads are going to kill us all. It's the end of the world, snakeheads. Now you see dudes with snakehead decals.

And it wasn't even that many years. Snakehead decals in their truck window. I think that humans are so pragmatic. Where we have this thing, it's like, here it is. It's good to eat. When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. And we kind of are really quick to adopt stuff. The non-native stuff.

There are, like most of the places we hunt turkeys, turkeys aren't native there. That's right. And we probably wouldn't shake the stick on them, would we? No, I wouldn't shake the stick on those poor birds. Yeah, but there's a very, there's an important differentiation. They're not deleterious. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes.

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slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. I want to touch real quick. We were talking about chap ass like an episode or two ago. You guys are familiar with chapass. What's another word for it?

Chafing. Monkey butt. Swamp ass. We got, man, it was the number one, probably the number, no, of the things we get written about, Giannis' heart is probably number one. People who are- Still number one. Long term. Long term. People diagn, Giannis' heart is probably number one. People who are... Still number one.

Long term. Long term. People diagnosing Giannis' heart. We had a question not long ago where someone was, it was in Sacramento,

a guy was asking, he was like, man, I want to ask this but I don't want my wife to know. And he wrote in and he was saying that if you gut, say you gut a rabbit, that after gutting the rabbit, why does one's flatulence smell exactly like the gutted rabbit? That got an enormous amount of thing.

And one guy wrote in and he described a phenomenon called deja poo which is which is like this guy worked in like a for a corner or something and he was saying that he thinks there are little that there's like volatile fatty acids when you smell something foul there's volatile fatty acids and that somehow they get in your nose hairs. And he was saying that you get, when you smell an offensive smell later, it can carry a trace of that, giving one the sense of deja vu, which I don't suffer from. But on the chap ass thing, two really interesting pieces of feedback. One is all these products that people have that solve chaff ass. But one guy was saying he was with a guy one time that got chaff ass so bad

that he couldn't walk. It was that bad. And he took his sandwich apart and took a piece of bologna out of it and laid that piece of bologna between the cheeks in order to hike out. Another guy has, another guy writes in that the way to cure it, this is the most interesting concoction. He's taken, he's like, oh, bro, I know all about this. He likes to mix Neosporin with Origel. Like the tooth, the tooth numbing agent. And he's like, that's how you take care of that problem.

Which I love. But I want to move on. I just wanted to touch on that. I want to move on to another subject that this came in. And I already know my answer because I've done this before. But he, it's a guy, I can't, it goes something like, I didn't write down as many details as I should have, but there's a guy and he's got a girlfriend and they live with a roommate. His girlfriend eats wild game. The roommate won't eat wild game just like for eats meat won't eat wild game what are the ethics of just lying and giving them the wild game and he's ethical what do you guys think about it go for it

yeah they're totally fine totally fine yeah yeah i got nothing against i don't feel like i'm doing them a disservice or lying to them they're gonna come out of it you know something bad's gonna happen they're gonna have a negative effect you know from eating a wild game i tricked them to eat yeah like the guy that did the yeah we talked about the guy that was serving kangaroo meat school kids without telling them but he but that guy lost his job yeah that's a little different than just tricking your roommate a little bit would you pull a fast one carl i would say it depends honestly so i mean on the one hand i, we've all had roommates, right? And if your roommate is like eating some food that you've provided, to some extent, it's like you're lucky that you're getting some food from me. there's potential for the food to have like a negative outcome. So I'm sitting here thinking about like the example of all these people that have been exposed to CWD positive deer meat,

for example. So I would say if you're talking about like sharing a roast from a deer that you know is healthy, that's one thing. If you're sharing some kind of funky brain dish, you're like, hey, try this out. And then after the fact, you're telling them what it is. Or if you're sharing meat from an animal that you're not sure, like CWD status, I'd say there's kind of some gray area there. But if it comes to just like,

you're making some food and they want to eat it, but it's contingent upon whether or not it's wild game, I'd be like, have it, tell me if you like it and i and i and i wouldn't i wouldn't lose sleep yeah i think i would um you give them house cat meat uh do you know what i'm saying that's why it becomes really tricky because how do you draw the line well the reason we're all doing this i believe is because we're hoping that it results in the lights getting turned off and they're like, oh my God, that was dear. That was awesome. Please. I'd like to eat some more now. Right. Like that. That's why you're going through that process. So I kind of did this

the other day. Not because you're like, not the cat. Not the cat. Where Not the cat thing. Like, where is that cat anyway? So I've been accumulating ungulate tongues for the last few years in my freezer. And I got to the point where I had a moose tongue, a deer tongue, a pronghorn tongue, all in a bag. I thaw these things out. I cook them for eight hours in the slow cooker. And my mom is living with us right now. My mom comes out in the kitchen. I've got these things on the cutting board. She's like, what do you have there? I'm like, don't worry about it. I'm making a dish here.

Let me make the dish. She's like, are those mushrooms of some kind? I'm like, no. Let me do this. She's like, what is it? I say, it's food I'm cooking. Hold like, let me do this. She's like, what is it? Is that? I say, it's, you know, it's food I'm cooking. Hold back. Let me do this. And I end up making tacos de lengua with these tongues. And they turned out fantastic. And I serve them to my mom. I serve them to my wife, serve them to my daughter.

My mom is like, these are the best tacos I've had in years. These are the best. And then a couple hours later, my wife and my mom are standing in the kitchen. My mom's like, what, what the hell were those things you were cutting up the other day in the kitchen? You know, yesterday in the kitchen. And, you know, I was acting kind of shifty. And my wife's like, what's she talking about? And I said, well, that was what we had for tacos. And then my wife gets real nervous, right? She's like, what are you feeding us? So I say, those were tongues. And my mom's like, oh no. And I'm like, but you said those were the best tacos you've had in years. So that's an example where it's like, I know that meat is totally safe. I know there's no good reason. And my mom is very pragmatic. And she's the one who's always told me, if're going to kill it eat it that was like the golden

rule so i'm asking my mom then would you rather that i left this tongue in the woods with the gut pile when i brought out all that meat or would you rather put it to use to make the best tacos you've had in a couple years yeah you're helping me clarify my perspective on it. My perspective on it is this, because I've done exactly that. I gave my mother-in-law tongue, like cold, chilled, cubed, cured tongue in a salad, and she later said, that ham was so good. Yeah. But here's the deal. It wasn't like, I would totally, I don't feel the need to tell people what it is they're eating. But if I know that someone is like, I don't feel the need to tell people what it is they're eating but if i know that someone is like i don't eat x yeah i don't think it's ethical to trick them into eating what they

say they don't want to eat and i don't know that it's your business to tell them that their reason is right and wrong i agree with that that's where i draw the line a little bit yeah because if someone had like a religious dietary prohibition i wouldn't then feed them yes and be like nah yeah no that's messed up for you know for sure do you got any perspective to offer i've done it before you've done diver ducks diver ducks i didn't know what it was yeah that if it was like a person who eats meat and all but they're like oh i don't eat diver duck i would totally screw with that person Diver ducks. Diver ducks? I didn't know what it was. Yeah, if it was like a person who eats meat, and they're like, oh, I don't eat diver duck,

I would totally screw with that person. I ate gumbo, and I don't even think they knew it was duck. They knew it was something wild, but they were like, oh, well, it's a wild game, but it's good. I think they thought it was venison. And they eat it, and it's fine. Everybody's fine. Everybody's fine.

I don't remember if I told them or not. I mean, we carried on with the night. Nobody was like, what was that meat? Yeah, everybody's fine. This is somewhat related, and I'll explain where it gets related in a minute here. But there's another thing. I've been saving up emails from people that are all kind of the same thing

where this is going to not seem related, but trust me, I'm going to make it related. They all seem like not the same thing. Or I'm sorry, saving up emails of people asking the same thing would be like, if you kill an animal and it's been injured or oftentimes it'll be like, I found an animal with an infection,

or it had a broadhead in it and had an injury. Is it safe to eat? Enough work. We even had a guy write in, and he later, we talked about this, and then he wrote back in to clarify his point, but he one time hung a deer up, some kind of, I can't remember what the hell it was, a raccoon or something, gnawed on the muzzle of the deer. And then he was like, is it safe to eat? So where do you personally draw the line at which something that's messed up is not safe to eat? I mean, we've pulled bullets, shotgun pellets, stuff out of hogs.

I've seen rice breasts in ducks. The rice breast, that's trash. It's too much. It's a pretty general infection. And that's just all kinds of cysts, like the meat's packed with cysts. I think that if it's a pretty generalized acute injury and you can cut it out, then it's fine. I mean, considering that you also just shot 150 grains of lead through it,

it's got another injury now. And there's dirt and blood and bone and everything, and you're going to just happily kind of cut around all that and all that hydrostatic trauma and and kind of make that a palatable palatable looking piece of meat i think that a small injury that doesn't indicate like anything worse if the animal wasn't acting uh you know like super sick then i think it's okay. But you might know better though. I have discarded entire legs because of injuries and infections. I one time had a turkey that must have,

its whole breast was shot because it had must have pitched into a tree but impaled itself with a stick. And it was just horrible. And ditched that. So I'm not just eating sacks of pus out of stuff. But it is a thing that comes into people's minds. But I've never thought of a thing where an injury would somehow make something inedible and get you sick. When we had the bear that gave me and Yana's trichinosis, I had to send some to the CDC for testing, but I still had most of the bear meat, and I smoked one of the bear hams. So we sick off it and we knew that this thing had 868 larva per gram and my brother i had signed up to bring a dish to pass to my brother's rehearsal dinner for his wedding and i was like i'm gonna

bring this smoked bear ham and then i'm like man you know the smoked bear ham i was gonna bring turns out and i told him about what was wrong with it. And he said, well, don't tell anybody. And I thought I was like, I can't not tell him. I have to tell him. He said, then if you're going to tell him, don't bring it. Because the minute you tell him that this has all this larva living in it, you're going to make all the other food suspect.

Like, no one's going to trust anything you say at that point. So in that case, I again was incapable of doing, like, the lie, even though I cooked it to 160 degrees. You did the right thing. You think so? I do. I feel in some way like I chickened out. That's a zombie.

Give me a, oh, what's going on? That's a zombie deer. Oh, the zombie deer. Do you want to get into the zombie deer? Okay, quick poll, quick poll zombie deer? Okay, quick poll. Quick poll. Let's do a quick poll. Now that we know, okay, for a while it came out.

For a while everyone was all hot and bothered about this piece of research that some researchers in Canada had taken macaw monkeys. That's how you say that word? Macaque? Macaque monkeys. So some researchers in Canada said, oh, we gave some macaque monkeys CWD-infected meat, and the monkeys contracted CWD. Turns out that's not true. They didn't publish it. It wasn't peer-review reviewed. When the National Institute for Health looked into it, that didn't happen. How you mess that up, I'll never understand, but wasn't true. But it really got people excited. Another case where someone was doing a fundraiser, I think it

was at a fire barn, like a fire department fundraiser. They accidentally CW, accidentally serve CWD infected meat to 200 people. This is seven years ago, I believe, roughly seven years ago. 87 of those people have agreed to be monitored. They've been monitoring them since. Nothing yet. There's no known case, there's no known case of a human contracting CWD. So the question, two things, two points. But there are, man, this is such a sticky subject. There are people who remain, like I imagine most of you, people who remain like, I definitely want to know more. I'm not going to get hysterical, but I want to, I think that we, the scientific community,

I think we should be investing money to learn more about possible transmission. Then there are people who have already made up their mind there's no risk whatsoever. If I want to go to my buddy Doug's place, he lives in the CWD area, and I want to get meat from like 10 CWD positive deer, and I want to gouge out some of their spinal cord, and I want to take some of their glands, and I want to make burger out of it. And then I'm going to make patties, and when I meet a total CWD denier, I will cook that burger and I'll lay it on his plate. And if that son of a bitch eats that burger, I'll be like, now let's talk. I like that. If they hesitate, then I'm like, we're in the same boat, brother.

Like that burger makes me nervous. So nevermind the burger the never mind a blend of 20 whatever if you had it you get a deer it comes back cwd positive yannis would you eat the deer not not eating it not eating it no no not gonna eat it i don't know it's in my freezer for a long time. Yeah. That's a good point. No, it's not. No.

Don't eat it. You're not eating it. No. That's the answer. The answer is no. Don't eat it. It sucks. It sucks.

But you have to toss that deer. I feel that, like, I'm going middle ground. No. No. There's no way I would give it. I would not give it to my kids. But I would have a very, very difficult time discarding it. Maybe I would just keep it in my freezer and look at it. Just serve your mother-in-law.

I'd be like, and here's your deer meat no that's horrible yeah we wouldn't do that cindy we love you no i wouldn't do it it is scary there's a couple uh newsy things i wanted to get into but like a couple hot button issues but this is going to be the one. It terrifies me. I don't worry about the resource impact. Meaning, I don't worry about, I'm not like keeping up at night about reduced deer numbers from CWD. I'm not worried about, it's terrible that it happens. Like, here's what I'm saying. if somehow some omniscient all knowing being could come and say cwd cannot and will not be transmitted to humans i i really i would never give it another thought i would kind of lose interest in it like there are people who

are like well what's it going to mean for deer numbers like i don't i just feel like it'll it'll just join the list of all the other damn diseases that sweep through deer herds now and then wipe them out. And then they come back. But the food, the idea of hunters getting sick from venison is just an upsetting, gut-wrenching thought. The coolest thing in the world becoming somehow not cool is a heartbreaker.

And at this point, I don't know that anyone can really say anything more than that. I would add that it's happened. It's happened. We haven't had the confirmed case of a person contracting CWD from eating an infected deer.

No, and thousands of people have eaten it. But we have had already the culture around deer being compromised by the existence of that disease. And I'm speaking about this from the standpoint of a guy who was in grad school in Madison, Wisconsin, shortly after it was discovered in southwest Wisconsin, and watching the way just my own circle of friends over the course of the last 10 years, the way that our conversations have evolved around deer hunting in that part of the state, those impacts are already occurring. It's changed. If you're thinking about where do I want to spend my precious time away from work when I've got a couple weeks of leave time to spend over the

course of the year and I want to fill my freezer. Do I want to travel and hunt in an area that I know and love and have hunted a lot but has CW deer, do I want to maybe try to find another spot to hunt? And it makes it real hard to want to go back and hunt in an area where you might, you know, you've got a coin toss as to whether or not the deer you kill is going to be able to be something you can feed to your family. So if you look at all the culture around the activity, the land ownership, it's just a very real um very sad state of affairs and even if we don't have that example of a person getting sick from it just the risk of that i think is already

compromising the hunting culture and it frustrates it's entered your head oh it's entered my head and to see the inaction that has persisted frustrates the hell out of me, man. I think now exactly half the states, 26 states. Texas not, right? You know how many states we have, right? Well, you do have it now. It's pretty, it's in smaller areas. 26 is a little more than it. Oh, okay.

But I mean, it's like, I feel like it was like 24 and then two more this year, somewhere around there. Yeah. And Texas has something. There's a small quarantine area in Bandera, south of San Antonio. And then in West Texas. 66 confirmed in Texas. Yes.

You know, everyone in here who would eat a CWD positive deer. Oh, that's a good one. Say, yep. Yep. good one. Say, yep. Yep. Hell no. There's five in here that would eat your burger. No, not my crazy spinal cord burger, but just like my lymph node burger. Just, okay, like, I'm like, I'm honestly curious.

So if you would, just a nice, calm, yum. Like, if you would eat a CWD positive deer. Okay, if you would not. Well, you're not, you're not doing the nice, clean yum. Oh, I hate it. I don't want to, like, I don't, man. Parliamentary procedure. What's man. Parliamentary procedure. What's that?

Parliamentary procedure. What's that mean? I'm not familiar with the parliamentary procedure. Oh, parliamentary procedure. Oh, you know, real quick, did you know that I was reading a guy, a guy wrote in saying that eradicating pigs is part of the EU's New World Order domination plan? No, I did not hear that.

Dude, he laid out a very fascinating case. We're going to move real quick. So now, how are we going to pick our person? Right here! Oh, we didn't pre-plan that. We've messed it up we're gonna play we're gonna play seeing through the bullshit yeah where someone has to come up and they're gonna be presented with two lies and a single truth ryan can you help us right you gotta pick

us one just Just grab someone? So we normally select something early. So we're going to play. But first I have a correction to make. We played this not long ago. We played this not long ago, and we accidentally did three lies because we're talking about we're talking about a famous like the deadliest tiger the deadliest animal ever was the champawat tigress and it was a tiger who had had messed up teeth. Some people believe that she had been shot by a poacher,

busted her teeth. The tiger then dedicated itself to killing humans and eating humans. And this is no joke. It's probably more, but attributed that this single tigress killed 356 people. And it was killed by a...

I screwed up. And we got a lot of heat for this. I screwed up and said that the guy that killed it, Jim Corbett, I said that he was American, but the dude was British, and people were pissed. It was like when I said Sam Houston died at the Alamo. People were worked up. So that's my correction.

Corbett was British. Now, if you win, no, you just get it. Not if you win. What's that? Go ahead. Our contestant is here. What's your name? What's your name? Jay.

Jay, nice to meet you, man. Nice to meet you. Grab a seat. Hey, I'll spin you so you can look right in the eye of the storytellers. Okay, we're going to tell you things that are, there's one true thing hiding within this. All right. You want, what you want first? Truth.

Okay. Are you familiar with youth hunting seasons? Oh, yeah. Okay. And you are aware of the fact that now and then a doe, a female whitetail, will grow antlers. Okay. Tennessee's youth hunting season, a new youth hunting season record was set in Tennessee by an antlered doe. The individual who was holding the record prior to this kill has actually contested

the new entry because it's not a buck. Carl. Okay, so I have a story that weaves together bears and national forests, and it goes like this. In the 1980s, a narcotics officer turned drug runner by the name of Andrew Thornton was traveling over the Chattahoochee National Forest in a small airplane containing 40 plastic containers of blow. Coke, he threw cocaine he threw he threw the containers out of the plane donned his parachute leaving the plane unattended and en route to the ground unfortunately became tangled in his own parachute, plummeting to his death. Agents, when they went in to recover the drugs in his body, expecting to find $15 million worth of cocaine,

some 40 kilos, instead came upon a very dead black bear. The black bear had died of the single most impressive drug overdose in the history of wildlife ecology. Stuffed to the brim with the white stuff. A necropsy revealed the bear had died from a combination of cerebral hemorrhaging, respiratory failure, hyperthermia, renal failure, heart failure, and a stroke. That bear is now stuffed and on display at the Kentucky Fun Mall in North Lexington, where he dons the moniker Pablo Escobar. Okay, well told, well told. Okay. Well told.

Well told. Danielle? All right. So are you familiar with the Lone Star Tick? Not really. Okay. You don't know about the Lone Star Tick and the Lone Star State? No, I'm not.

So we have... Now we've got to find somebody else. Sorry, man. Just kidding. It's real, bro. So we have a tick that carries, I think it's called an alpha-gal carbohydrate. And so

when it bites and infects a human, goes into the bloodstream, we produce a whole bunch of antibodies and basically have an allergic reaction so severe that we can no longer eat red meat. So beef, lamb. So I'm just explaining what the tick is. We're just laying, we're just getting him off the groundwork.

Yes, we've got this tick. And recently down in South Texas, they stumbled upon a ton of, there were several coyotes that were really scrawny, and they started trying to figure out what was wrong with these coyotes, and they tested them, and they contracted this disease from Lone Star Tick, because they can't eat meat. Now, if you need help from the crowd, I can go to each one of the storytellers and stand behind them, and the crowd can yell the loudest for who they think is the truth, if you need that help. Will you do a quick review? Yeah.

A little review. Okay, you have the story of the new youth season Whitetail Deer record. You have the story of Pablo Escobar. And you have the story of the allergen, the meat allergen, that humans can contract from the Lone Star tick has been proven to be able to afflict coyotes and make them intolerant of meat, which leads to their emaciation and eventual death. And they all live in Frisco.

We are two Japanese. This is hard. This is hard. You want help from the crowd? Let me real quick. Let me do it real quick. So what we have is some Furyd 5000 binoculars from our friends at vortex who we needed we needed a present so it's seeing through the bullshit

we needed a present yeah and you get laser range finding binoculars all right real expensive real nice no pressure lifetime warrant lifetime thing you could If they burn up in a house fire, they'll give you new ones. As long as you got some chunk of plastic to send in. Okay, is it Danielle's? Let's ask the crowd. Danielle's story about the veggie coyotes? By bullshit, do you mean true or not true? Not true. That's a lie.

Okay. Carl's story about Pablo Escobar. Steve's story about the female Buck, which is now the state youth record in Tennessee. That's hard. I really was leaning towards that one. I really was. You were leaning toward the youth season? Oh, no? That's hard. I really was leaning towards that one. I really was. You were leaning toward the youth season?

Oh, I was. Well, that's if you want to win. But it's my fellow Texans, and I'm going to go the Texan way, and I'm going to go with Pablo Escobar. You got it! You got it! Thanks for playing. Thank you.

Thanks, man. Have a good night. And thank you all very much. We love every one of you. You guys are the best. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians.

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