The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 183: All For a Flashy Mule

Episode Date: August 26, 2019

Steven Rinella talks with Clay Newcomb, Kevin Harlander, and Janis Putelis.Subjects discussed: double-battered buttermilk squirrel; shit on a shingle; fell, or the skin under the skin; Kevin raising Steve's hog; MeatEater and First Lite as kissing cousins; anteater boots; say no to flip flops; when a boy horse and a girl donkey do it; doggin' on traditional bows; the time when Clay's arrow touched a bear's nose; what is meant by "fair chase"; Oklahoma bear oil; 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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Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google Play Store. Know where you stand with OnX. Alright, first thing I want to do, Clay, um, Clay Newcomb, right off the bat, just to get us started, like a cold open. Man. You familiar with cold open and show business? Yeah. Do, uh, talk about how you guys fix squirrels down there in the Ozarks.

Like the number one, if you had to eat them the rest, one way the rest of your life. Simple answer. There's only one answer. That's fried. Yeah, but there's more to it than that, right? Well, I mean. That's it? Well, I like to double batter them.

So you take your buttermilk. Yeah. And if you've got to take this in the field with you, you've got to have a little preparation, some Ziploc bags, whatnot. But buttermilk, flour, mix it. Hold on, on hold on back up just a little bit more yeah okay because we don't know if you're if the squirrel is already in the buttermilk okay dead or alive no so because so you got your squirrel you got your squirrel quartered okay he's also you've also got the rib cage in midsection so you got five pieces of squirrel. When you're cooking squirrel, do you discard, I mean, the actual rib slab?

I mean, you're not eating that, right? Well, kind of as a hat tip to the squirrels, I usually cook it. And just scrape it? Just nibble it on. Like you're eating artichoke meat. You've got some squirrel back straps on there, you know? Oh, yeah. But typically you would just eat the quarters, yeah. Well, the quarters and the whole –

I'm trying to think with the vocabulary of squirrel. Saddle, isn't it? Yeah, the saddle. The saddle. The saddle. The four legs and then from the right in front of the pelvic bone up until about the second, third rib. Yeah, that kind of like oyster-like with a spine in the middle. Yeah, saddle.

Yeah, the saddle. Saddle, that works for me. But you take and cook the rib cage too. Well, if we're cooking in the field, I would, but there's not much meat there. Yeah. There's not much meat there. Okay. I mean, really, we're talking about four quarters.

But you're not throwing the saddle out. Well, I mean, I guess it's a less process just to cook all of it. Just cook the saddle with the ribs. Oh, I'm with you. So you just got this big piece. It's like a saddle handle yeah five pieces so you got five pieces yeah five pieces so what i would do is i would i would take those pieces dip them in buttermilk have a ziploc bag with flour if you're

at your house it'd be a you know pan or whatever bat put the put the buttermilk squirrel into the flour in a perfect world do you soak them in the buttermilk you know the flour. In a perfect world, do you soak them in the buttermilk? You know, I'm going to be honest here. I never have. But I've never eaten squirrel with that much forethought. A lot of times it's just like, hey, we killed some squirrels. Let's eat them. That's typically the way that I do it.

So I have not done that. So buttermilk and then put them back in the flour for the double batter. So you're saying you're going buttermilk, flour, buttermilk, flour. Yep. You ever cook catfish by going,

you go flour and then egg because it gives the egg, the egg sticks to the flour and then the cornmeal sticks to the egg. I've never done the cornmeal first. I would have done the egg the egg sticks to the flour and then the cornmeal sticks to the egg i've never done the cornmeal first i would have done the egg first and flour cornmeal well no no no so you're actually saying like actual white flour yeah you take those you take the fish and put it in flour okay dust it in flour all i've used then it goes to the egg because then it get then the egg it's like you're sticking the flour to the squirrel, the egg to the flour, the cornmeal to the egg. Okay.

And you're doing like, you're sticking the flour to the squirrel. No, you're sticking the buttermilk to the squirrel, then flour, but then sticking more buttermilk onto the flour and then back into getting yet more flour. The second dip is where the magic happens because that's when you really get the thick batter. I like a good thick, you know, thick battery, you know, deep fried. Do you find that as it cooks that all that falls away because you got too much of it on there? Probably, you probably maintain 70% of the batter. You're running about a 70, 30. 70, 30.

Yeah, the rest of it's just like crumbled in the bottom of the pan. Burns, gets black in the bottom of the pan, then you eat that later. No, that makes the gravy. Yeah. The key, though, to the way that I have learned, and I won't lie and say

I've been doing this my whole life, but bear oil. And you're sitting there holding, ladies and gentlemen, Clay Newcomb was holding a jar or barrel. Half pint. Which is some pure white, I'd call that pearly.

I'd go so far as to call it pearly white. I've got a question for you about this later. But let me, should I, we've jumped into so many. So I would fry that squirrel, double-battered squirrel, in some type of pure animal lard. I mean, if you didn't have barrel oil, if you just had, like, pork lard, I would fry it in that. Shallow fry? You know, I'm a mid kind of guy. You're not deep frying it, so you don't need it, like, an inch deep. But you don't want to skimp on it too frying it so you don't need it like an inch deep. But you don't want to skimp

on it too much. Classic mid-fry. Mid-fry. Yeah. It's not pan-fried. It's not deep-fried. It's mid-fried. I think that counts as a shallow fry because anything shallower than a shallow fry counts as just sautéing it.

No, I like mid-fry. Or pan-searing. When I picture a mid-fry, I picture the oils coming halfway up it. Okay. It's probably not that deep. I never heard of mid-fry. Because bear oil is such a precious commodity,

you don't want to waste it all in one spin. You know what I mean? Dude, have you ever heard of the chef? He's a friend of the program. Jesse Griffiths in Texas. Okay. I knew it's like a thing people did but i just kind of forgot about it he fries his fish and uh beef fat beef fat

yeah he buy at his restaurant fries everything at his restaurant he buys beef fat renders his own beef fat fills his fryers full of beef fat and fries his fish in there wow yeah i don't like the smell of beef fat it's heavy duty it's heavy duty so then uh there you are you don't parboil it you don't double fry it so you like a good chewy hunk of squirrel you know i can't i can't say that i'm like the ultimate squirrel chef. That's just the way we do it. Yeah, that was my question. Yeah. How do you do it?

Yeah. That's the way we do it. I've had some squirrel and some like New Brunswick stew that we've made. Yeah. Which is kind of like where you would boil it and then add it to a stew with carrots and onions and all kind of stuff. But those are the main ways. I mean, there's really only one way to eat a squirrel in the south we had three four ways we cooked it as a kid and i don't think any of them like none of them are traditional you had gray squirrels in michigan fox and gray fox and gray you know and then both you know do you guys where you're at

you have black phase gray no No? Very, very little. I mean, a black squirrel is like, you kill a black squirrel, you're going to get it mounted. Oh, you know what's interesting? Like in my mom's yard, in my mom's yard, over the course of my lifetime, it's been funny. It went from very rare to see a black phase gray squirrel in her yard. Right.

To now, it's rare to see a gray face. Really? What happened? I face really what happened it's just out competed the ebbs and you know well i think a gray squirrel can have a litter that has gray phase and black phase in the same litter for some it's just trending towards black yeah no yeah until the predators pick up on it could be whatever's hiding the black ones yeah it could have something to do remember how we were were just talking about black and white squirrels or white and browns? It could be that there's some really proficient squirrel hunter

who doesn't like black-faced gray squirrels. You'd have to think that that would be a pretty significant change in terms of that's that animal's number one line of defense is its color. Yeah. It really would be. Yeah. I mean, I wish I could tell you some hard data on it, but that's that number animal's number one line of defense is its color yeah it really would be and yeah i mean i wish i could tell you some hard data on it but that's happened but what i was gonna say about traditional traditional cooking is there's not like where i'm from there's not a lot of tradition but people don't think of like traditional fried fish is traditional there but traditional in a lot of places but we had four like my mom would do four things with it and one was like something that everybody did back then with wild game which kind of fell out of

favor is you would take a crock pot and put all your squirrels in it and then you dump cream of mushroom soup yeah oh yeah i'm bringing that back and then turn the crock pot on minnesota same thing you did the same thing ladies and gentlemen that's's Kevin Harlander. Hello. Do you like more of a Harlander or Hard Harlander? You know, that depends, I guess. Harlander's great. Harlander? Yeah. Yeah, cook it in there, and then you would put it on egg noodles.

Okay. You'd put it on toast, oddly. Shit on a shingle with squirrel. Really? Is what you'd call call it no shingle being the total God fear and southerners ever done that that can't be true I don't know any put on noodles or put it on toast both really we put on a biscuit but if they cooked it down in this case different a can of soup that they've

done you know yeah I think so I think so but you would never put it on a can of soup? That they've done. You know, yeah, I think so. I think so. But you would never put it on a piece of toast. You'd put it on a biscuit because I know damn sure you'd do that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, try it on toast. It's called shit on a shingle. I'm sure it's great.

The shingle being, you know, the toast and you put the- Got it. Got it. We would do that. My mother would- My mom had a recipe card. I bet she still has it. We would do that. My mother would. My mom had a recipe card. I bet she still has it. She had a recipe card that she got from her mother and her mother got it from the package that some frozen rabbit came in from the store. Really?

1930s? It was like a Hassan Pfeffer. It was like rabbit. And on it was like, hey, and pepper it was like rabbit and on it was like hey here's what you can do with the rabbit it was like a recipe card my mom said was stuck onto a package and they liked it so much she cut it out and that's how she would cook cottontail rabbits if she was cooking them and she would cook squirrels and we'd eat hoss and pepper with them and then we would eat them in my dad's deep fryer

a lot and sometimes my mom would brown them like you're saying do exactly what you're talking about this is how my brother matt likes to cook them still do everything you're talking about not he doesn't know he doesn't do the double dip chrome double dip deal single dip single dip um in a pan then finish them in a 300 degree oven okay for a long time covered in foil hmm and it's it tenderizes them but that works okay moving on a little bit you good on that Yanni well I did have one follow-up on cooking squirrel go away you treat a young squirrel and an old squirrel the same you wouldn't if you wanted them to taste good oh i mean again i'm i'm my squirrel cooking has been

we kill the squirrel we're gonna eat it we're going to be that worried about, you know, the culinary aspect of it. The joy inside of this is just we kill the squirrel and we're going to eat it. It's just that simple. So sometimes if you cook it the way that I have described, as my buddy Michael Lanier says, big squirrel hunter, I hunt with some, as he said, when you get one like that, you just pitch it to the dogs. A tough one. Yeah. How does he know it's going to be a tough one like that you just pitch it to the dogs a tough one yeah how does he know it's gonna be a tough one well he bite it oh so he's oh i got you i got you yeah so he goes a no into one yeah and if it's just super tough and then they will be and sometimes

you can't completely tell but an older squirrel so i don't have any tricks for tenderizing older squirrels if that's where we were going you know are you familiar with go ahead oh no i was gonna say that i mean my only trick is that i look at them like that one is a giant it's gonna go into the slow cooker pile and that one is a young tender one and i'll fry it or grill it or whatever yeah you familiar with the term the fell the fell no uh we we used to have a really old neighbor in mile city montana this guy was so old um i'm trying to think there's a couple ways i can describe how old he was i'll tell you this way to tell you how old he was he was so old that he once they were sawing firewood with a sawmill blade they would pull the wheel off a truck and jack the back of the truck

up wow and run a sawmill blade by putting the accelerator on the truck to turn the saw blade that's impressive he was using this saw blade and cuts off his thumb like back where he took the base of the thumb with it and his brother flicked that thumb into the hog pen, and the hog ate it. No, just to get rid of it? Yep. That's how old he was. So, because that doesn't happen nowadays.

Nowadays, people know to run off to the hospital. I've always heard you put it in buttermilk. Yeah, or put it in buttermilk. No doubt. You cut off anything, you put it in buttermilk. That's what I've always heard. put it in buttermilk. Yeah, or put it in buttermilk. No doubt. You cut off anything, you put it in buttermilk. That's what I've always heard. And he was a butcher. He did custom slaughter work.

Here's another way of telling how old he was. I've talked about this guy a lot. He was so old that he used to shoot horses, shoot wild horses and fatten hogs on them. Wow. And was reluctant to send them off to market with a belly full of horse meat because of how it might look to the slaughterhouse people. So he'd give them barley for a while before

selling them so that no one knew he was fattening them on horse meat. And he said that their condition worsened while eating barley. He said their tail wouldn't have as tight of a corkscrew to it and their hide would lose a little bit of its sheen is that a correlation to how good the meat is how tight the he said that he was a big proponent of uh so he even back then he was a little bit he felt like this practice was a little bit shady

he he expressed being reluctant to send them off with a belly full of horse meat i don't i don't know i get it i don't know he that's how old he was i can just tell you how old he was he's about 93 but uh when i was at the time or when he passed away okay so he described he would talk about the fell on rabbits or the fell on squirrels and it'd be like the skin under the skin. You know what I'm saying? Like, what sits between the muscle and the hide when you pull it off.

And he would talk on rabbits that had a, the fell was too thick. And he felt that was a rabbit that wasn't very. Would the fell

actually be like the layer of like fat, sinew-ish membrane? Yeah, like the membranous. Yeah, kind of visqueen-y. Yeah, the connective tissue visqueen-y membranous thing. And he would point to a rabbit and talk about it had a thick fell and wasn't going to be a good rabbit.

Merriam-Webster defines it as a thin, tough membrane covering a carcass directly under the hide. Oh, so he was right? I had no idea he was right. He got it right. Oh, I just thought it was like his, oh, the fell. It can also be a synonym for skin hide or pelt. Really?

Mm-hmm. Or if you fell off your bike and scrape your fell. Or if the squirrel fell out of the tree. Okay, taking a break from that for a minute. Kevin. Yes, sir. Speaking of hogs, you see that transition? That was nice.

That's what they call a segue. Yeah. Some folks call it a pivot. We found that some folks call it a pivot. I like to think of it as a segue. You're fattening some hogs. Sure am. Have you been a lifelong hog fatter?

No. No. So I grew up in Minnesota. Both my grandparents are from dairy farms. So they're dairy people. So why weren't your parents from dairy farms? So my grandpa and my grandma grew up on different farms, right? Married.

And they moved off farms. Neighboring farms? Yeah. Opal and Holy Fork, Minnesota. Germans one town, Polish? Married. And they moved off farms. Neighboring farms? Yeah. Opal and Holy Fork, Minnesota. Germans one town, Polish in the other. There's probably a lot of animosity between those. I don't think so. I think they helped each other out a little bit. They got beyond that?

Yeah, I think so. It was later down the trail. You heard of World War II. Heard of it, yeah. Studied it. At that point, they were probably just new immigrants to the country. Yeah, I think they were like second or third generation. Needed to the country. Yeah. I think they're like second, second or third generation together. Yeah.

Yeah, certainly. Uh, and they grew up farming. Yep. Met each other, fell in love. Yep. Moved, uh, to St. Cloud, Minnesota. So I got away from farming. Yeah.

My grandparents got away from farming. Yeah. Yeah. Well, my grandparents got away from farming. They moved off. My, my granddad strung telephone wire from North Dakota down to Missouri. So they had to get away from farming. They did, yeah.

For like economic reasons. I think so. I think so. And my great uncle still runs the farm. He's like 92, I think. So he's still up there. He's got two thumbs? He has two thumbs.

Yeah. But yeah, so we had started Rais raising hogs last year as a you know i'm 28 so we just started last year and uh is that your was that your that's your girlfriend that you partnered up with on hog raising yeah yeah we actually use her her folks live over in eastern oregon where we moved from um and they've got a little chunk of ground we've been raising some hogs on so it's been great and this is the second year second year yep it's going well so i hear i've been over too much very easy yanni did you know that i purchased one of these hogs and i'm gonna give you a bunch of it yeah no but what a great surprise i'm gonna share my oh that's

i'm gonna share my hog i'm gonna share my hog with the people that i work with nice it's generous and he's gonna he's gonna include all the fat yeah all the fat So when I grind up venison I'm going to cut in my My pig into it Right So these pigs are in eastern Oregon Yeah eastern Oregon right now But you live in Ketchum now

Well we just moved in May Hogs were purchased prior to the move So we didn't really know where we were going yet Got it Are you going to move your hog operation closer to home, or are you going to have to get out of it now? Oh, man, I think we're going to try to keep in it, but we'll see. We've got to move out of catching.

We've probably got to go down to Haley or Bellevue or something like that. Just get you one of those good privacy fences. Yeah. Do whatever you want back there. We should. Backyard. We should, yeah. So how many hogs are you fattening?

Three right now. And do you call it fattening them? I think we're just calling them raising them. Just raising them. It doesn't sound as cool as... I know. Okay, but three, is this a business or is this a hobby farm? It's a hobby.

So it's a hobby, however... But you bought one. Yeah. Well, yeah, but I don't think he's like... It's a business now. I don't think he's like... Oh, you just turned it into a business. We're just covering costs mostly because...

No, he's like... No, I bought it from him, but I'm saying I don't think that if you asked him what he did for a living, he'd probably say he works at First Light. I doubt he says he's a hog man. That's right. That's right. I've never uttered those words, actually. Just like I'm not a chicken man.

Yeah, you're not a chicken man, but you've been known to let eggs go to cover costs. Yep, and that's what we're all about, trying to cover the cost. And it's really awesome because we add it to all our grind. Oh, yeah, that's what I'm interested in. Yeah, so we took the bacon eggs, and I shouldn't say I do this. My friend Jake Hines, who owns a butcher shop in the Grand Oregon, who's a phenomenal cutter,

he added all the hog bacon eggs from one of our hogs to all of our bacon ends. Oh, I thought you said bacon eggs. I was like, tell me more. Bacon and eggs. Yeah, yeah. The bacon ends, right? These bacon eggs you speak of.

Yeah, just your cut ends. He added all those to our elk grind. It's delicious. Oh, so he smoked it. Yeah. And then you made your own bacon elk grind. Yeah. Have you noticed when I've done that in the past,

I've bought specifically bacon ends before. Have you noticed that I've done that in the past, I've bought specifically bacon in before. Have you noticed that almost a grind, you notice it mostly like when you do something like a burger, but that you almost get like, it almost like firms the burger up a little bit. Yeah, I would agree. With the sausage up, if you get enough of that actual pork meat in there.

Yeah. And we've been kind of messing around with different percentages, you know, different percentages of pork in the actual elk grind. But I think like- What are you going at? I think like 10 to 15% is pretty good. That's why I feel like that's industry standard.

Yeah. But that's not full fat. That's- Yeah, it's like bacon ends. So you're getting chunks of muscle in there as well. So yeah, it does add a little bit of firmness to that burger. We actually just did a little video clip at first light about making burgers over an open fire. So that was elk with the pork grind pork your own home-raised pork yep that's

right my brother got all uh he got all snooty for a while and didn't want to put any any domestic meat oh into his wild meat yeah which is like i get it but you know yeah i put eggs and shit in there but i mean but he had chickens too though yeah but he put eggs in there to try to bind it but just it helps uh it just helps to add that fat in there yeah and we always would do 10 you know i need to go to some guys they'd be like oh i do 15 or 20 but when you get too much of it i talked about this before it feels like it stops being wild game and becomes something else. Like a 50-50 blend is like, is that wild game? I don't know.

Yeah. We feed a lot of folks that come through and friends of ours that don't eat a lot of wild game. So I feel like a little bit of bacon in there is always a good entry level, especially with elk. You don't hardly need it, but good entry level piece of wild game to serve those kinds of people. How big is my pig going to be?

We'll probably kill him at like 250, somewhere around there. And then are you going to charge me on the hoof, guts in and everything, or how are we doing this? No, I think it's based off hanging weight. And what are you going to charge me? I don't know yet. We've got to look at the books. That's more silly as department.

So I need to start following the commodities market to find out what I'm going to order. You're setting it off global pork prices. That's more silly as department. So I need to start following the commodities market to find out what I'm going to order. You're setting it off global pork prices. That's right. Well, last year... You're in the driver's seat, though, Kevin. You've got to sell before you've even told him the cost. That's right. That's right. I roped him right in.

That's good hog farming right there. I'm a hog man now. You're on track, man. I worked at a brewery before First Light and was doing a handful of things. We'd get all that spent grains, man. Yeah, we used to, I worked at a brewery before First Light and was doing a handful of things and we'd get all that spent grain. So all that barley actually, with all the sugar out of it, I was like a filler. Oh, man, start over again now?

We used to work at a brewery, right? Yeah. Before First Light. There's this stuff called spent grain. Who's we? What's that? You said we used to work at a brewery. Well, I worked at a brewery.

Actually, Celia, my girlfriend, worked at the brewery as well. She's on the front end. Tell me her name again. Celia. Celia. Yeah. How'd she spell that? S-I-L- the brewery as well. She's on the front end. Tell me her name again. Celia. Celia. How does she spell that? S-I-L-J-E. She's from Norway.

Her family's from Norway. Oh, okay. Yeah, I met her. Yeah. I liked her. She's awesome. So you guys used to work at a brewery. Yep.

And so I worked on the business side, and I would take all the spent grain, which is brewery grain mash that's been brewed through, and bring that to the hogs, and they love that. And it has some nutritional value still. Just a little bit. All the sugar's out of it, but it's kind of just like a filler, a fattener, if you will. So it worked pretty good. What are you feeding mine?

They're getting a blend from this guy named Woody Wolf. He raises barley. Woody Wolf. Woody Wolf. That's a good name. Yeah, great guy. He's in the lower willowa valley um he actually raises all the the grain for the carmen cory carmen's hog operation which is in in willowa county as well is that something that i would know about probably

not she does a lot of like grass-fed beef and that sort of thing she's entered entered quite a few markets with that product so okay they have a hog side too. So you're not feeding any kind of restaurant slop right now? No, a little bit of compost here or there, ends of like salad greens and things like that. And then how are you going to kill it? There's a guy named Dale who's got a mobile slaughter operation. It's pretty awesome. He comes through, kills it, skins it, brings it to Jake,

and Jake takes care of the rest. How much space does my pig have to run around on oh quite a bit it's like an acre and a half there's three of them so it's pretty good they they tend to want to stick into the shade this time of year because it's pretty pretty hot so have you named my pig no no do you know the one that's mine uh yeah i think so it's that scraggly looking one i'm just kidding hey i going to advise that you feed it a little bit of Asian food right before you slaughter it. Okay. Why?

What happens? I just hear people talk. Well, you're a hog farmer too. A little Asian food just fattens them up, flavors them up. Is that right? I'm kind of joking. Oh. I like it though.

He said that he didn't feed him any like restaurant slop. Oh, I got it. I'm saying do what you're doing about But it soars some slop.

About three weeks before you slaughter it. Give it a little Asian food. Well, MSG. The point of the grandma story was they used to take the skim off of their milk like the thick cream you told

me about this and they they would throw that in as as their main food source without mixed with oats so that was probably pretty delicious pork i imagine i think way to bring it back yeah thanks dude that was he should host this thing no that. Appreciate it. But you know what was bad about it is you took so damn long that it wasn't fresh in people's minds that why you were talking about your grandma. That's right. So you went from there and then you've been with First Light? Yeah, since about May. I just started with those guys actually, just as we were kind of marrying up these two operations.

I know. I feel like we're cousins now. Yeah. I think we are. I think we are. I think we are. Kissing cousins. Oh, all right. And you liking it over there?

Loving it. It's the best job I've ever had, for sure. Really? Oh, yeah, hands down. I mean, I just got back from a week in Texas access deer hunting, so it's pretty damn good. And you were at work. Yeah, I was at work.

I can't talk about it, but we looked at a bunch of the new First Light stuff coming out. Yeah, I guess we could talk about just that it's there. It's in development, so we're working hard on that. We've got a whole new robust program for gear testing, and I'm really excited about that. We're going to get it to a lot of key guys. It sounds like you guys are going to wear it somewhere this week. You're heading somewhere. Yeah.

We're heading somewhere. Yeah. We're heading up, me and my wife and children, Brody Henderson and his wife and children, and then my wife's buddy and her husband and children. Sweet. Are going up to our fish shack. Cool. And I'm going to wear that new summertime-ish. Yeah.

That's a good way to put it. Some of that new summertime-ish stuff. I'm revealing too much. Brody and I are going to do it. You guys are leaning into the Texas market. Yeah, I've been spending quite a bit of time. I can tell you guys have been hanging out in Texas because you've got some clothes that are like.

Yeah, we're getting close. You're like, you know what would be sweet is a shirt that wasn't hot in Texas. Yeah, at the latest gear meeting, they're like, so what do you guys think about some elephant skin boots? Yeah, that's right. Rhino? Ostrich?

Ooh, yeah. That was, yeah, that was the, one of the more shocking things about Texas is all the things you can make boots out of. Man, it's wild, isn't it? I'm kind of thinking about going that direction. Yeah? I don't know, man.

I don't know if I could really pull it off. Like wearing boots of all different critter types? if i was sitting here and you said hey what are those boots made out of and i was like elephant yeah i feel like you'd be like that i was a little bit of a poser well being from michigan i wear cowboy boots once in a while but they're just leather you know just made out of cow's hide yeah i just gotta ease into it maybe yeah and i don't even know if i can't even pull that off yeah i think that would be the harder part more than worrying about what species it was it'd just be like are you comfortable in some high heels this is legit footwear choice though i mean it really is yeah but your neck of the woods yeah yeah they're

comfortable though but you have the right person you have the right personality and everything for it but i'm sitting And these are just leather. I mean, you get into the guys wearing the anteater boots and the gator boots. Oh, that's what they get? I know the gator boots. Growing up, my uncles had- You can get boots made out of anteaters? Oh, yeah.

My God, they need boots out of their lives. I remember as a kid sitting around, and the guys used to wear shorter pants than they do now. So my uncles would have their legs crossed so you could see like almost the entire boot

you know when they had their legs crossed like the upper leg over the knee the boot is then exposed I remember my dad

being like look at his anteater boots and they were anteater boots to me it was just like that is top level that's when you know

you made it you got a pair of anteater boots I've mean, to me, it was just like, that is top level. That's when you know you made it. You got a pair of ant-eater boots. I've never had anything other than leather, though. Have you been wearing it your whole life? Uh, nah. I mean, I've had boots, but I started wearing cowboy boots probably, I don't know, eight or nine years ago. I mean, like wearing them casually. And were they comfortable, like, right off the bat?

Like, you tried them on. It's an acquired taste. I mean, it's partially, I mean, I'm of the firm belief that a man ought to be wearing leather boots, leather shoes of some sort. At all times.

Almost all the time. But you're a mule packer. I'm uncomfortable. Like, I have sandals. I mean, I like sandals. Don't get me wrong. You'll see me in sandals. He gestured at my feet. He got an office full of flip flops. You'll see I have sandals. I mean, I like sandals. Don't get me wrong. He gestured at my feet.

You'll see me with sandals, but uncomfortable. I quit wearing flip-flops a few days ago. Why is that? For the same reasons that you're going to say you wear leather boots. Why do you wear leather boots? Man, I was going to wear...

In case you've got to defend your family. Man, I'm serious. When I wear these, I feel like I'm wearing armor. Yesterday, I was going to wear it. In case you've got to defend your family. Man, I'm serious. When I wear these, I feel like I'm wearing armor. Exactly. Yesterday, when I was flying up here, I was like, man, I ought to just wear my tennis shoes. I have some shoes for running and different things. And I was like, man, I can't do it. I'm going to wear the boots. I mean, if it goes fist to cuff somewhere, I need these.

Yeah. I mean, I'm being serious. I'm kind of being funny, but I'm kind of being serious. I wanted to talk about ronnie bame anyway so i'll start now um he like he always asks himself am i ready for a volcano to erupt and when he has uh i can't remember he has some crazy word for flip-flops but anyways he's like i just don't feel like i'm ready for that occurrence and the other day a longtime friend of mine who i've been hanging out with for forever i was sitting there we were having dinner and i had flip-flops and he said man i

just like really surprises me to see you in flip-flops and he's from montana that hurt you didn't it are you not gonna tell us who this friend is d is? Dave McKay. So Dave McKay is from Montana. And he was with his wife in New York once. And they went into a comedy store, comedy show, right, to watch stand-up. And the stand-up guy sees Dave, and Dave's got flip-flops on. And he yelled, where are you from? Because you're not from here. He said, I'm from Montana.

And he goes, you're going to defend your wife in those shoes. And it got to him, and him pointing it out to me got to me that, like, you're not ready for action. It's true. You're not ready for action. Now, in these strap-ons that I got on now, I'm ready for action. You can move in those. Yeah.

If something bad happens to Yanni, I'll spring over and defend him and he'll be falling over his flip-flops. Oh, I forgot this. The day we went to dinner,

I had tripped twice in my flip-flops. Fell off a curb and tripped coming through a doorway. Well, I heard about the... So it was top of mind. Yeah.

Well, I didn't know that other people shared my sentiments about shoes. I mean, really, I've never, I didn't know that other people shared my sentiments about shoes. I mean, really, I don't know that I've ever verbalized what I just said. Being ready for action. Yeah, but it's very real. The first guy that ever brought this to my attention was Donnie the Wild Man McConnell, who I've talked about before.

Is this the guy that would sew pistol pockets into his leather vest and whatnot? That's the guy. That's the guy. That's the guy. Yeah, he says that he wouldn't do anything. He wouldn't even get ready for bed. Yeah, he said he'd just lay down. Yeah, there wasn't even a sleeping bag on his bunk. And I would always try that when I was just starting there.

I would try to always steal that bunk. And they'd be like, no, that's Donnie's bunk. He'd just forget because there was like nothing there besides an ashtray and some empty coke cans and empty Budweiser and that was how his day went was he would finish the day with Budweiser's and some cigarettes

and he would take his boots off and lay down jacket with his .44 in his pistol pocket and all and then when your alarm would go off you'd get up and we'd spend 15 minutes getting our shit on and getting all geared up and brushing our teeth. And you'd be like, Donnie, breakfast. And he'd just sit up, put his boots on, light up a cigarette,

crack a Coke, and be gone. That man is ready for a volcano. That's like the Mitch Hedberg joke that he wanted to get clothes made out of blankets. So at night, he didn't need to do anything. Oh, my thing about Ronnie Bam. Did you guys notice that? You know what a trombo is?

No. A trombo? Trombo. You ever spent much time in Mexico or Greece? Nope. You know what Taco's El Pastor is? Not really. You, Kevin?

Come on, help me out here, man. Just go with the hero analogy. That's the easiest way. You know what I'm talking about? You have the meat on the spiraling. Okay, okay. I just didn't know what it was called. Phil the Engineer knows.

What are you wearing? Let me see your feet, Phil. Let me take a guess. Phil's ready for action. Oh, he's got a lace-up sign. He's ready for action. it was called. Phil the engineer knows. What are you wearing? Let me see your feet, Phil. Let me take a guess. Phil's ready for action. Oh, he's got lace-ups on. He's ready for action. Ready to go. Shit hits the fan.

Phil's going to spring out of that little booth there and come in. That curtain's going to fly back. Phil's going to be coming to the rescue. So it's like you slice a bunch of meat. Right. Thin, thin slice. Not cooked, but just raw. You slice raw meat, thin slice, and you marinate it.

And then you put it and you stack it on this skewer. And so it winds up being on the skewer in the shape of a giant pineapple. And I say that because they often put slices of pineapple in there. And then it turns vertically on a spit. And you got either a propane burner or charcoal that's oriented vertically. And this thing turns on a spit with a vertically oriented heater. And then when it's time to like, and then you're just ready, that thing's just running around the clock. Okay. So you, you put the, we used to, when we started first started traveling to Mexico,

we called it a pork rock. Cause it looks like a giant rock made out of pork. And that spit turns. And when you go to make a taco, you just hold the taco up against the rock of meat. And it's all stacked. Like if you put one hand on top of your hand and another hand on top of your hand. It looks like just a solid piece of meat. Yeah. You can't really tell.

But then you slice also vertical slices off. So you're just taking the ends of all this stuff that the part that's cooked yeah and you slice the cook part onto a taco or you slice it into a euro um and that device that cooking piece of equipment i recently learned is even though i owned one, is a Trombo. Okay. So Ronnie Bame, when I got married all those years ago, we had, you know, you'll have like a party. No, we had a party the day I got married before I got married. So we had a party before the party.

Okay. And at this party, my brother took a bunch of deer meat and Ronnie Bame welded us up a Trombo out of stainless steel. And it was a hand-turned kind. You had to hand crank it. So we cooked a bunch of venison tacos like this. And then I kind of forgot about it for 11 years.

But I was just home at my mom's and found the trombo in the pole barn. Brought it back here and had a fabricator here in Bozeman named Travis Barton, who's a fireman. Yanni introduced me to him. He did a lot of the metal work at Yanni's house when Yanni remodeled. He raised it on higher legs and put a rotisserie motor so you don't need to hand turn it anymore. Single speed?

Can you regulate the speed? No, just single speed. It's about this fast. That's what it sounds like. But smooth. Like a... No. And I'm going to make

a mountain lion. Ooh. I'm going to make a pork rock out of mountain lion. Nice. I like it. That's going to be good. I like it.

Yeah. What else, Johnny? Should we wrap it up? No, we haven't even started yet, ladies and gentlemen. Okay. How do you describe – do you say you're from the Ozarks? Yeah. Yeah.

I live in the Ozarks. Now, I hunt in the Ouachita's. Some. Oh, this is something I wanted to bring some but that's kevin you know how to pronounce that mountain range the washitas oh shit he knows he didn't he didn't see the spelling i call it the our cheetahs yeah yeah so if you saw the spelling it's spelled o u a c h i t a you mentioned how we mispronounced it was it me because i don't think i would venture to try to pronounce it.

Well, I don't want to name any names here, but it was a guy that was from the Ozarks. And he mispronounced it. Well, you mispronounced it, and he didn't correct you. And he was like, yeah, that's the way you say it. Who was it? Man, I honestly can't remember. It was on one of the Turkey County episodes y'all did with Brandon Butler.

But was he the one that did it? No, it wasn't Brandon. I'm not throwing Brandon under the bus. Was it a guy that – It was the other guy. Our friend Steve Jones, the wild game chef? I don't – Parker Hall?

No, it wasn't Parker. It was – we're narrowing it down. It was a guy that was a turkey hunter. He was describing how he called turkeys with his mouth. But it was kind of like i felt like it was kind of he didn't really know but it was kind of just like yeah that's the way you say it guys up what's that guys up may have been so you're so polite you don't want to say who did it well i mean i just hate to throw the guy under the bus but at the same time he's got

pretty thick skin i vowed to my people that if it ever came to it, I would bring back the honor of the Ouachita's. Okay, so O-U-A-C-H-I-T-A. Yeah, so it's O, but it starts with a W. Yeah. Yeah, well, the Ouachita's. Yeah, yeah. It looks like O-A-Cheetah's.

Oh, yeah. O-A-Cheetah. O-A-Cheetah. And you say- Ouachita, like with a hard W. Ouachita. Ouachita. Ouachita. And the C-H is a sh, with a hard W. Wachita. Wachita. And the C-H is a sh, not a ch.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Why don't you guys just spell it different? Man, we didn't. We're just some messengers, man. This is a chalk talk. Well, actually, there's three things that they say. First of all, it is a transliteration of a Caddo Indian word for Ouachita. Can you explain Caddo Indian?

It's just a type of Native American that lived in Southeast Arkansas. Caddo Indian. Yeah. I got you. It's a tribe like Choctaw, Cherokee. I thought it was like when they talk about language types like Proto-Indo-European. No. Okay.

I got you. I got you. So it's a French transliteration of the way the Caddos said Ouachita. And they said it with a W, but it's a bunch of French guys over here that said, oh, we're going to spell it O-U-A-C-H-I-T-A. And it actually means good hunting grounds. No shit. Yeah. There you go.

So there's three things. There's another guy that says that the O-U-A-C is the Choctaw word for buffalo, and it actually means buffalo hunting grounds. Given a throwback to the woodland buffalo, which totally was in Arkansas. That's interesting. Woodland buffalo. And then there's three possibilities, and there's no agreement on truly what it means. The third one is another Choctaw word that they think it means far away hunting ground. Got it.

That's what I got. I like that. Ozark. Man, the French named a bunch of stuff back in that country. So the word Ozark describes a bend in the Arkansas River. The Arkansas River flows. It doesn't really flow north, but there's a north-trending bend in the Arkansas River. The Arkansas River flows, it doesn't really flow north, but there's a north-trending bend in the Arkansas River,

and they called it Aux Arc. They called this region above the arc Aux Arc. Oh. A-U-X Arc, French. And so the trans, well, it grew into the Ozarks. So the Ozarks are north. They're above the Ark. Oh, shit. So those are the two mountains.

That's August. I like them all. Those are the two mountain ranges in Arkansas, and they're very different. I could totally nerd out about the differences. You're saying geologically or culturally? Geologically. Yeah. Oftentimes those are inseparable though, right?

Right. They're similar enough in size and animals. I mean, inseparable would mean like the geology will shape the culture inparable though, right? Right. They're similar enough in size and animals. I mean, inseparable would mean like the geology will shape the culture in some ways, right? Absolutely. Yeah. So the Ouachita's are in east-west running mountains formed from uplift when the South American continent bumped into the North American continent. Yeah. And it's the only mountain range between the Appalachians and the Rocky Mountains that runs east and west.

And so what happens when you're hunting in the Ouachita's is you have two very different types of terrain because you have these southern-facing slopes and then north-facing slopes because the mountains are running east and west. Yeah. You with me? Yeah. So the north is like really thick, moist, vegetative,

not as much direct sun. The south sides are arid, have a lot really thick, moist, vegetative, not as much direct sun. The south sides are arid, have a lot of pine, blueberry, a little bit more open. Gotcha. And so the critters use that different terrain in different ways. Pretty interesting. Do you go up and hunt along the rim where you're kind of tapping into both? Yeah. Well, that's the other feature of these mountains is that they're formed by uplift.

So they're these like hogback ridges. And so there's these real distinct tops, which are usually fairly flat, but small. So either walking straight up or you're walking straight down the other side. But there'll be, you know, these flat tops and critters travel on them. So you hunt the tops of these mountains quite a bit. You know, while you were talking about all that stuff, it reminded me of two good pieces of barroom banter. One being, you talk about the buffalo hunting. Right.

You know where that word comes from? One of the ways they think that buffalo came about? I read your book. I should know, but I forgot. Good for making buff leather. Hmm. But there's even occurrences where people called manatees buffs. Hmm.

Thick leather. Now, buffalo wasn't the Native American word for it. No. This was an English word. Yeah, they would call them buffs. Okay. And you spelled all kinds of different ways. And it eventually became buffalo.

Okay. But it was something good for making buff leather. Like thick leather, you know? Yeah. And the other thing you're talking about, like the geology. Have you ever read Annals of the Former World? No. By John McPhee.

It explains all the geography in the U.S. They won a Pulitzer Prize. All the different types. East to west. They won a Pulitzer. But there's an interesting thing in there where, you know, Alaska kind of accreted and docked up. It was a bunch of islands, just a big mishmash of shit that accreted and docked up. It was a bunch of islands, just a big mishmash of shit

that accreted and docked up against our continent and then rode north on a transform fault. And I can't remember, I think in 87 million years, Japan will have accreted

all of the Aleutians and slammed into Alaska. Wow. Yeah. Wow. All them bears and everything gonna be in japan which is in alaska how'd you get in hunting man i grew up it's just i grew up with it my dad i always say that my dad

was bow hunting before bow hunting was cool. He, so I mean, I grew up bow hunting for whitetail deer. My dad got into hunting. With a stick bow? No, no, that's new. My dad is like totally a compound like speed guy. Yeah. My movement into traditional archery probably is a little bit of a throwback from his kind of the intricacies. And he takes tune and bows and all this kind of to the extreme.

I never really liked that side of it. I wanted it to be simple. And so I still shoot compound and love it. Yeah. My dad shot a recurve before compounds came out, and then he rolled into compounds hard and never looked back. See, that's the way these guys think, though. Like, my dad is like, why the heck would you want to go backwards? Because that's where he started, too.

You know, shooting these traditional bows that they couldn't kill anything with. And then, so to go backwards just didn't make much sense. Yeah, setting out with those bat quivers full of 40 arrows. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But my grandfather— Kevin, you grew up hunting, too, right? Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we grew up deer hunting. We had a place in northern Minnesota. So we kind of grew up in that north belt country of just hunting small racked, big bodied whitetails. And then really got into waterfowl hunting in high school because it was accessible where I lived. You were hunting right from the get go. Yeah, yeah. Right away.

It's been a part of my family for a long time. Because you had access to those farms. Yeah, yeah. A lot of good phe a part of my family for a long time. Because you had access to those farms. Yeah, yeah. A lot of good pheasant hunting, a lot of good duck hunting. Pretty good deer hunting. Not as good as Iowa and out in the West, actually. But it's great. Good way to grow up.

You say not as good? Yeah, at least in northern Minnesota. Oh, yeah, I'm with you. Yeah. Still pretty good, though. Great from a camaraderie sense, from the deer camp sense. Not as big a deer for sure sense from the deer camp sense uh not as big a deer for sure but great great deer populations certainly are you guys in wolf area yeah yeah certainly has that changed a lot for real or can't even look at it for real because

you're so wrapped up in the oh man differences that's a loaded question i think um if you talk to people up there they'll say it has impacted it tremendously. But I think in my case, I haven't seen it to the point where it's made the deer hunting in my lifetime that, that different. Yeah. Feels different. Yeah,

certainly feels different. Yeah. Yeah. And I would say that my experience in the West, specifically in Oregon with, with wolf reintroduction has been my, my experience in the short time I've lived out there has changed traumatic, like

pretty dramatically, I'd say. Yeah. Where were we? Oh, go ahead. Well, I'd like him to just, I want to name an example. Like what's the, what's probably the most common thing you've seen change?

I think in Eastern Oregon specifically is just the, the bounce back between the ranching community and and and sort of the introduction of wolves it's a obviously a slippery slope conversation but they've been impacted in a different way than they haven't been in the last 50 years um from a hunting standpoint a lot of guys will say oh those elk are quieter in this area now which i i think I've had a few experiences with that. Although it's anecdotal, it's not based off science. So I think my experience in seeing wolves too, I've seen a couple in Eastern Oregon. That's different than when I started hunting there when I was 19. I didn't

see wolves until two years ago. There's quite a few now. You started hunting in Oregon when you're 19? Yeah. Yeah. I was out there to fight fire when I was in college. That was the first time I ever stepped foot in Oregon for real. I was spending mostly about May through end of September there and then going back to school. I heard my first wolf from my deck a couple nights ago. Really? Just two howls.

I was out there watching a small herd of elk, and every single one of those mature cows was looking down the hill and across the drainage. Really? Nobody was eating. Nobody had their heads down. Everybody was just staring. You're kidding me.

When that wolf was howling. But it only howled twice, now, isn't it? And they perked up. Huh. Yeah. Such a different sound, too. It's pretty remarkable. 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

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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 on x maps.com slash meet welcome to the to the on x club y'all uh clay you got like your grandpa was a big hunter my grandfather was a

quail hunter that's all he hunted really that's that's all he'd be shit out of luck now huh yeah yeah what happened there well so there was a time in the south when i mean the heyday of quail hunting would have been from the 40s to well 1980 as you regard yourself as being from the south yeah it's really i really, I mean, I do, being from Arkansas, but I mean, you know, I can drive 20 miles and technically, well, 40 miles and be in southern Missouri. Yeah. Yeah.

Arkansas is definitely not deep South where I live, but I live in northwest Arkansas in the mountains, and so the mountain culture truly is not deep South. You get into the Arkansas Delta, you absolutely would feel like you're in the deep south. Gotcha. This is very different. So my grandfather, he was a renowned bird dog trainer. And that's all he did.

I mean, they would go out. I mean, he talks about going out and finding nine coveys of quail in a day and several guys killing their limits of quail. And then about 1980, the quail world just started to dry up. And I had bird dogs when I got my first bird dog when I was in the sixth grade. Got it from my grandfather. And we actually had two or three coveys of quail back behind our house. And my dad wouldn't let me take the shotgun at that time.

There were some houses. It was kind of suburban, rural Arkansas. And so I would take that dog out, and we pointed quail during the winter. I mean, I probably didn't go out every day, but I feel like I did. Was snow on the ground? No, not in Arkansas. Really? No. I thought up in the hills you guys get a little snow we do get a little bit but not a lot i mean just a few days a year we'll get snow fast yeah i got you but he so he he is the one that really introduced my dad he my grandfather did some squirrel hunting but he was he was a bird dog

man i mean that's like in the south that was like a like a nobleman sport you know and then he was a trainer and then was he affluent tell me what you mean by that like was he when you say what was the word used i said it was a nobleman sport i mean like affluent was he wealthy no no no he was a he was a uh biology teacher for a public school and a pastor and a pastor of a church yeah when he said like noble i didn didn't know if you meant. Just noble in the sense of like this is a – Not like nobility. No, no, no, yeah.

Good clarification there. But he – and part of truly what influenced – still influences me today is that I watched my grandfather the last 25 years of his life lament the demise of the animal that he loved really i mean i didn't know that conservation was cool i didn't know that i mean it's just what happened before me but every time i'd talk to him it'd be like man back and he was it wasn't like he was embittered against it or he like he hunted just the same when there were no birds as he did when there were lots of birds i mean it wasn't like he was like i'm getting rid of the dogs there's no more quail he hunted till the he didn't hunt till the day he died when he's 94 but

but uh he was a he was a good man good good dog trainer what uh i don't want to ask what his idea was about what happened to the quail but like what's idea was about what happened to the quail. But what's your take on what happened to the quail? You hear so many different versions, you know what I mean? Do you remember you read something that I sent to you one time? And it's pretty straightforward. Did you send you to think about the fire ants? Nope. But about habitat?

Mine had to do with invasive grasses, fence posts. So, I mean, basically, back in the day, there was no fescue in Bermuda grass. And because of the cow-calf operations that all these farms have turned to in the last 40 years, cow-calf operations in Arkansas need fescue in Bermuda grass. It's just the best. And those grasses are-

You mean so they can bale it? It's just hardy. Okay. It's nutritious. It grows like crazy. And that's what they seed in on pastures. It's just hardy. Okay. It's nutritious. It grows like crazy. And that's what they seed in on pastures. That's what everything is. I mean, right now you go and look at any grass, and it's going to be some type of fescue or bermuda,

which are both invasive grasses, and they're turf-type grasses, which means they grow by rhizomes. So what the quail would have been used to back in the day before these invasive grasses would have been clump grasses. And so clump grasses provided places for the birds to move through. When you say clump, like I'll hear you from people calling bunch grasses. Yeah. Probably the same thing. I mean, just the native grasses of Arkansas, like orchard grass and some of the sage, they would not have grown in like these continuous patches. Like even if it looked like a continuous patch, if you open it up, you'd see ground underneath

it. And so basically habitat was destroyed by those two invasive grasses. And then with the advent of basically modern brush hogging machines and just people kind of taking better care of their farms people have t-post fence rows now when back in the day they probably would have just strung barbed wire between trees and put up some wooden fence and not that wood or metal makes a difference but basically they had these robust edges that provided habitat for quail yeah windrows and and we don't now we have have T-posts.

And with a T-post fence, you can mow right up beside it. You can mow within six inches of one side and six inches of the other. You know what I mean? Like a two-sided fence. So that was big. I mean, those really are the – it's habitat degradation. But the other thing that's happened in Arkansas that's crazy that has to do with the ground nest and bird is our turkey populations are down like 60%.

So it's almost like there's this fuzz of nobody knows really what's going on with the ground nesting birds other than that they're doing really bad. You know, we had an article we ran on themeateater.com about declining turkey numbers in some states. And it's kind of funny, man. It pisses people off. Really? People, you come over to my house. We got plenty of turkeys. I'm like, I'm sure you do, man.

But I mean, there's certain things you can't ignore. There's a lot of states that have, for the first time in a decade or so, you're seeing declines in turkey numbers. Yeah. But people get – I don't know. It's like a weird thing to get irritated about. Yeah. No one said like turkey hunting is over, but you're seeing like a, like you're seeing a widespread decline in turkey numbers in certain parts of the country.

Yeah. Well, I think it's guys, like I can go back to some of my good spots that maybe there is a 60% decline in turkey numbers, and I can still hear a turkey gobble from there. But there's not eight of them there anymore. There's one. So, I mean, like, to the guy that's really not paying that much attention, he goes in there and he kills that bird.

And he's like, well, I killed a bird last year. Killed a bird the year before that. Don't you tell me about my turkeys. Yeah. We've had some good hunts down in Missouri. Yeah. Now, Missouri, oddly missouri is totally different oh is that right man you go and this is what's bizarre and you can't blame any of

the commissions i mean i don't think it's anything they're doing but any direction you go from arkansas the turkey hunting gets better quick huh no doubt i mean even where y'all are hunting with with brandon butler yeah i mean that's a couple hours from my house, like three hours. Yeah. And dramatically better turkey hunting up there. I've talked about this, I'm sure. We saw this interesting thing hunting in Kentucky, which is another area that used to have great quail hunting.

The quail are gone, kind of gone. And we were hunting with our friend Kevin Murphy, and he was explaining that when he hunts small game he likes to hunt on the Amish farms she said they don't clean farm they still dirty farm and you go out there it was so funny the whole time running around with him that was the place we saw quail was on an Amish farm I got described dirty farming I've heard you say it before but well leave like they'll pick corn, leave it for the winter. So they'll pick corn, leave the ground covered all winter.

They will have big rows, like big, huge wind rows. And they don't winter till. Okay. They leave crop coverage on the ground for the winter. And so he was just saying, the other part of it is, he said, they're hell on predators. Yeah. So they provide habitat, kill predators. And it's like small game gold.

So he goes way out of his way to hunt the Amish farms. He said, that's where all the game is good that's where all the game is man sounds good yeah did uh did your grandpa hunt quail on mules no no no he didn't but how'd you get into hunting on mules you know my my dad doesn't hunt on mules we actually did not grow up having equine animals. I mean, being in rural Arkansas, I grew up with horses and stuff. I mean, just people had them, you know, buddies had them, and we'd ride and stuff. But it wasn't until about four or five years ago that I just said, it's time to get a mule. And it was, you know, I'd give you the short version or long version of that. I think you ought to tell people what a mule is.

A mule. That's when a donkey and a horse do it. A mule is a hybrid cross between a male donkey called a jack and a female horse called a mare. And it produces a, what in the biology world they call a hybrid figure. So how does it work with the gender again? So a mule is a male donkey, a jack, and a female horse. The opposite is a- What's a genie mule? Okay, that is when it's a-

Man, I'm going to mix it up. I'm not an expert, but it's a different animal when you do the inverse, when it's a male horse and a female donkey. It produces a different animal. It's escaped me what that is. It's really rare. People don't do it. Well, that's what a genie mule is or whatever.

Look that up, Yanni. Yeah, there's a phrase for it, and I can't recall what it is. Genie. I think it's G. Hustle, Yanni So The cool thing about We'll come back to you The cool thing about

A mule Is that It's a classic example Of hybrid vigor You know the phrase Hybrid vigor Oh yeah, I know the phrase Hybrid vigor

Hybrid Hybrid Hybrid vigor Hybrid vigor I mean, I know it in terms of Ag Yeah So So basically You take the strengths Of these two animals Hybrid, hybrid, hybrid vigor. Hybrid vigor. I mean, I know it in terms of ag. Yeah. Yeah.

So basically you take the strengths of these two animals, which both have great strengths, like a donkey. Like a donkey's strength would be like hard feet, nimble, very strong for its size. And you would take a horse, which would be, its strengths would be its speed, its trainability. And basically, inside of a mule, you get the best characteristics of both animals in one animal. And this is fascinating to me. A mule will live longer than both a donkey and a horse. Live longer. I mean –

And they're not sexually viable. They're not. Do you still gel them? Yep. They have all the same desires, but no real ammo. Yeah, so you got to cut a male or he'll want to breed females and stuff. But it won't do him any good. It won't do him any good.

It'll do him good, but... He doesn't know that. Yeah. Yeah. What'd you find? Henny. Oh, Henny. That's it know that. What'd you find? Henny. Henny, that's it. That's when you want a

boy horse. A stallion. And a girl donkey. A genie. They do it, they get a henny, correct? Male horse, female donkey. Which is the the opposite what you're talking about that's

right and it's a different animal they have different they're usually not as big and for some reason people just don't do that very much it's not his store yeah so guys the more stature ears, stronger legs, and a thicker mane. So guys who produce mules for the mule trade, they have some donkeys, they have some horses. Well, you would have a set of, let's say there was a guy that was actually a mule breeder. He would have a set of mare horses that would be, I mean, if he was good, they would be selected horses based upon them being a good horse, being trainable, being not kicky, having good feet. I mean, have all these traits that you want in a good horse. And then he would have a jack that suited and produced what he wanted inside of a mule.

And so a lot of guys use mammoth jacks, which a mammoth jack is like a jack that's over 14 hands, but can be up to like 17 hands, which is huge. I mean, it looks like a dinosaur. You ought to look up a mammoth jack. It looks crazy. So you'd have one or two breeder jacks. And it's just like any type of animal breeding. You make a cross and maybe it produces a mule that's really good, that's tempered right, that's built right, that has good feet, that's strong, that's colored the way you want it to.

But there's a lot of quirks inside the mule world too. It's really hard to get a mule bred with color. Like actual, the fur color of a mule typically tends to be solid. Who cares about that? Oh, everybody, buddy. Something like that drives me crazy, man. It's just a,

it's just a, it's just a, like for instance, the mule that I, that I trained and own, like in the mule world, it's like, ah, that's a flashy mule.

I mean, it's just like your bow. It's just like your bow. I mean, like you want a bow that you like the looks of it. Yeah, my new bow. My new bow. All bows are this way now almost.

But I got a new Matthews, and it's flat black. Looks menacing, man. Oh, yeah. Verdicts. Everybody wants one of them flat black bows because it looks like a killer. Remember Fridge Perry? Fridge Perry? Oh, the football player.

Yeah. Yes. I remember in 1984, you know, they won the Super Bowl. That was kind of the last football game I watched. Did he score a touchdown? My mom was from Chicago. He wore black shoes back when everybody had white shoes. And he was saying he wore black shoes because people looked at him

and they think he was going to be slow. But then he'd just slam them. Now, why would black shoes make you think they're slow? Dude, this is 1984, man. It's 30-some years ago. I don't know if people had it. So who knows? That's what was his theory on it.

But that black bow, the point is my black bow looks fast. It does. Jet black bow looks menacing, man. I shoot the same color bow. It's a mean, mean bow. If I had a guy pop up to shoot me with an arrow and I could choose whether he had a camel bow or a black bow, I'd go with camel. If he's shooting at me. Because I'd be like, yeah, how bad could it be?

But he had a flat black bow. That's menacing. Yeah, he's probably wearing flip-flops. I do shoot my bow in flip-flops a little bit. How much is a mule? Man, that's just like every other thing on the planet when you're dealing with a commodity. There's all kind of variations. I mean, just this last week, somebody asked me how much I paid for the mule that I have,

which I trained my mule. So it was an untrained mule. I mean, basically, she was totally untrained. So no one knew what it had. No one knew what it was going to get. The only thing, the only reason I bought the mule that I did, traded and bought, and I'll tell you what I gave for it, was because it was a flashy mule that was the right size that I wanted.

So you wanted it. Oh, I have no apologies for wanting a flashy mule that was the right size that I wanted. So you wanted it. Oh, I have no apologies for wanting a flashy mule. Man, if I'm going to feed that thing and see it every day out from my house, I want it to look good. Let me tell you why you don't want a flashy mule. Let's say you get a flashy mule, okay, and it winds up being a shitty mule. People are going to be like, that guy bought that mule thinking it was all cool looking, and now he's got – but let's say you have a shitty looking mule people are gonna be like that guy he just went all that mule taking those all cool looking and now he's got but let's say you have a shitty looking mule and he's a shitty mule

people be like whatever yeah he's got some old mule i don't know it doesn't do what he says it's like a lot different maybe like if you bought a really fancy sports car and in the minute you take it out, you crash it. It's more funny to people. That's going to be more funny to people than if you bought an

old junkie car and crashed it. So you're like going to hedge your bets on the social aspect. Like Romella bought an ugly mule. It really doesn't

matter. And it turns out it's a stupid mule and it doesn't work good, but I mean, what do you expect? Low pressure. Well, you understand

what I'm saying, Yannis? don't understand yeah well see the thing about i'll i'll try to be brief here i mean i can leave at rest you bought a cool looking mule right you could you could you could pay ten thousand dollars for a mule easily. Based on what it looks like? Based upon a whole bunch of stuff. Okay. Man, the complexities inside of the animal world, especially the one that you're going to ride, are so great. You mean like at the point at which it's broke? Right, yeah.

And you know what its intelligence is? Yeah, you'd never buy like an untrained $10,000 mule. But I mean, what can you spend on a horse? I mean, you can spend like, oh, you can spend 20 times that on a horse. Yeah, sure. Millions. Sure, sure. Yeah, because of the racehorse industry and some of the stuff.

But no, the reason that I bought the mule that I did is because I liked the way it looked. It was the right size, and nobody had ever messed with it, which that's the one thing with a mule is that they're easy to mess up oh they're so the the strong they're easy to mess up they're very once you start messing with it very so you don't want to get a mule from a guy that's like i trained this mule a little bit and i gave up ah you know i'll sell it to you for this much you don't know what's happened with that mule and that's that's the one negative people talk about that mule. I got you. That's the one negative. People talk about how- Because that mule might have formed a really bad impression of people. They're highly unforgiving.

But in the same sense, that's what makes a mule great is that if he trusts you, if you train him right, if you do it right, he's going to be an incredible animal forever. That's an abbreviated, simple thing inside of a complex

situation but i wanted to i wanted a mule that nobody had messed with and you wanted your mistakes to be your own yeah no i did i wanted to know because i got a mule i had a mule before that that was green broke and green broke is basically just a way of saying this thing ain't trained and i had what does green mean it's broke but green broke means technically like you could put a saddle on it and get on its back like it's trained enough for that and could ride a little bit but it's a broad term but green broke in my book means highly dangerous really you don't know what this animal has so i had some bad experiences with a with a greenbrook mule so i wanted to train one on my own and i i i this guy's now become my friend but a guy

in southeast oklahoma had this mule craigslist mule dangerous he's going on there and typed in mules oh yeah i do it almost every mule almost every day starts ins in the morning. And he had this mule I wanted to buy. He wanted $1,500 for an untrained mule, which is, you could buy a broke mule

for $1,500. But the mule was special. Basically, I traded him a 1994 Honda Four Trax four-wheeler, an old Russian World War II rifle that was worth about $75. One of those, whoa, what?

Man, it was- A little set, what do they call them? It was given to me as a gift, and it fired. It's some odd caliber. But no, it's like, what? It's like 7.62, like whatever. Yeah, 7.62. Yeah.

Yeah, I grew up with that. I hunted deer with one of those. A four-wheeler, one of those rifles, and $500 cash. And he took me to the cleaners, really. I'm not a good negotiator when it comes to stuff like that. I'm a little too nice. So he got a gun, a quad runner, and 500 bucks. And I got a mule. And you got a flashy mule.

And, man, it was an incredible, incredible experience training that mule. And you wanted it just for hunting on. Yeah. There's six mules for sale on the Bozeman Craigslist right now. Any of them look flashy? Hey, if you – Why is there a dead deer on that same page? Well, because –

Mule deer. Mule deer. You get mule deer pop up on there. Oh, you want to know what people sell on mule deer mounts? And Kawasaki mule four-wheelers. So you got to do a lot of digging to buy a mule. There's a lot of nuances in the Craigslist mule world that a guy has to get tuned up on.

Huh. That's pretty interesting, man. I love it. The thing about hunting with mules down where you're at is it really like an access issue? What can you get to on a mule that you can't get to in your truck? Well, that's a good question. It's legitimate. I mean, we don't have the wilderness that you guys't get to in your truck? Well, that's a good question. It's legitimate.

I mean, we don't have the wilderness that you guys have in the West. I mean, we just don't. But we do have big – I think we have 2.2 million acres of national forest in Arkansas, and a lot of it's fairly remote, fairly – well, all of it's pretty rugged. We have 11 wilderness areas in Arkansas that are limited to foot travel, equine travel. Federally designated wilderness. Absolutely. Wilderness with a capital W. Wow, who knew? We have 11 wilderness areas in Arkansas that are limited to foot travel, equine travel. Federally designated wilderness. Absolutely. Wilderness with a capital W.

Wow, who knew? We have 11. Roughly how big are they? The biggest one is about 30,000 acres. Okay. Yeah. The smallest one is probably 6,000, 7,000 acres. Is that 30,000 acre one fairly contiguous or is it busted all up into 1,000 pieces?

Contiguous. Really? Oh, yeah. No kidding. Yeah. Yep. Is that 30,000 acre one fairly contiguous or is it busted all up into a thousand pieces? Contiguous. Really? Oh, yeah. No kidding. Yeah. Yep. Yeah.

Hey, man. Oh, that's interesting, man. For the South, if we're considering Arkansas the South, which it is, we have some incredible rugged, I mean, well, it is wilderness. It's federal wilderness. What do they call that? What's the name of that big wilderness area? It's the Buffalo Wilderness. That's the biggest one.

Huh. No kidding. I can't remember. Is there good squirrel hunting in there? I've never hunted the Buffalo Wilderness because the Buffalo Wilderness has become a hot spot for tourism because of the Buffalo River, which is the nation's first national river. So it's incredible. The Buffalo River area is probably the most rugged, true representation of the Ozarks that there is, but it's become a hub for tourism big time.

So it's a positive thing, but I don't really want to go there and hunt. Yeah, I got you. Yeah. It sees a lot of non-hunting tourism. Yeah, it does you. Yeah. It sees a lot of non-hunting tourism. Yeah, it does. It does. But so being an issue of access, like it's not like I'm going to ride my mule like 18 miles back into the wilderness to hunt. That's just not going to happen.

But definitely I go places that other people don't go and stay longer. I mean, that's the whole point of it is to go further and stay longer. And a lot of times, and I learned this technique from James Lawrence. That comes in first light. Man, you know what? It does. But it's – I like that a lot.

No, that was good. That was good. My – Farther. One of my – That's right. I call him a friend, but he's more than a friend, a guy named James Lawrence.

James, he grew up hunting in wilderness in Arkansas. And what he would do, and he taught me how to do this, and that's kind of a lot of what I do. I'm trying to do what James did. That's just the way I like to do it. But he would use a pannier and lead a horse in with all his gear on it for like nine days solo. He'd just haul his horse in with packs on. And then once he got to his camp, he'd unload all his stuff, and then he'd ride the horse. Got you.

And I liked to hunt that way. Yeah. That's probably my best. I saw on one of the one of your videos that you made you're a good writer man thank you

like you write like the the narration is well I like it it's well done um you can shoot off that mule

yeah he doesn't even give a shit yeah shooting right off over his head yeah dude I one time got on a horse

with a muzzleloader, and that muzzleloader swung across the corner of his eye. I was down on the ground so fast and so hard, man. I hate that. Just from, not even shooting it. It swung in his peripheral vision. That'll spook a man off a horse. He flipped out.

And I landed on a rock. Were you with an outfitter? Yeah, well, I was on a reservation, so I was with some tribal members messing around. See, a good animal's not going to do that, Steve. You're going to desensitize it. I mean, like I spend— Well, this dude, you know what's funny? The guy knew enough to know that it knew enough to know that um it might not like that see that you shouldn't

put you shouldn't put somebody you shouldn't put somebody on an animal yeah my sister-in-law takes my daughter out riding she picks a horse that she thinks is suitable for my daughter yeah she's like this would be a good horse for her yeah because of x y and z this guy's like this would be a bad horse for that. Let's go. He looks wiry. Put him on that horse. You guys hunt raccoons? Yes. You guys hunt raccoons on mules? Yes.

What kind of dogs do you chase them with? I've got plot hounds. So you don't use your squirrel dogs? No. No. What's a plot hound? Plot hound is a, it's a UKC registered breed of dogs. How do you spell it? P-L-O-T-T. A plot hound. Plot Hound is a UKC registered breed of dogs. How do you spell it?

P-L-O-T-T. Plot Hound. Plot. Is it like a walker? Is it like a red bone? I mean, it's a hound, and it's a fascinating story. Like a lanky, long-legged deal? No, it's pretty compact.

I mean, my dogs are like 50 to 60 pounds, females in the 45 to 50-pound range, males in the 60 to 65 pound range if it wasn't black it would look like a hound oh i'm looking at a picture that's what you run raccoons with you betcha looks like one of them catahou like what's the dog i'm looking thinking catahoulo yeah they're kind of a brindle dog my dog one of my dogs is black but the plot looks like a man eater the plot hound is the only breed of hound that didn't descend from European foxhounds. So, walker, blue tick, red tick, English, all these dogs descended from European foxhounds. They've all been tainted by Europe.

Well, the plot hounds were too. The plot hounds came from Germany, but they were big game dogs in Germany. And they were brought over in 1750 by a 16-year-old boy named Johannes Plott. Oh. by a 16-year-old boy named Johannes Plott. And Johannes Plott, his father bred these dogs for a nobleman in Germany. He sent his son to the New World, and what he sent him with was five hounds, which were the original plot hounds. They came, and Johannes Plott was 16 years old. His brother died on the journey over.

He and one other brother came. They ended up in North Carolina with these five dogs. I mean, they weren't plot hounds. That was just their last name. They were just hunting dogs. Yeah. He had a mix of males and females, presumably. Yeah. And so the story is, is that the plot hound breed descended directly from those five dogs. And the plot hound is- You think that's true? It's absolutely true to a degree. There's some like real hardcore plot men that are like, the plot breed has never been bred by anything outside of those five dogs. But clearly, when you look at the history and the culture, I mean, dogs on tethers out in people's yards and these mountain people, they were breeding other dogs in. But in general, they stayed true to that to that plot lineage and uh so the plot is the national dog or the state dog of north carolina and it's the only

hound is that true janice oh man i just read it janice married into north carolina okay he's essentially from north carolina okay okay that but the plot the plot hound is the only breed of hounds that is directly associated with bear dogs. So, I mean, it's like a plot bear dog. And so, for me, hunting coons with plots is actually primarily because we cannot run big game in Arkansas with hounds. And so, I wanted to have plot hounds. And what we can run is raccoons. And so a tree dog is a tree dog. They'll chase anything with fur and they've just got to have that tree and

instinct. So the difference between a bear dog and a raccoon dog is very different depending on how much you want to nerd out about it. But you could take a bear dog and train it to be a raccoon dog. Why do you guys call it, when a tree, squirrel, or raccoon taps a tree, jumps from one tree to the next, why do you call it that he timbered the tree? You know, I guess because that's just a— I say tap because that's what Jerry Clower says.

That's the best possible description of it, Steve. Timbered. It just makes sense. What else have we heard for that? Like in Mississippi, I think it's taps the tree. Taps the tree. Let's see, when I hear the word taps the tree, to me that means that the raccoon, squirrel, whatever, went halfway up the tree and then came back down and went to another tree. Oh, you know what?

That might be what Jerry Clower is talking about. Yeah, that's what he was. Yeah, I know what you're talking about. That's what he's saying. He tapped the tree. Yeah, so they timber because they're up in the timber timbered out oh yeah yeah he timbered like we didn't have we don't have a word where i'm from we didn't have a word for that you didn't say something like he jumped into another tree very little yeah you didn't settle with something like that so that's what like he tapped it but didn't climb it and that happens a lot a lot of people would think that they did that on purpose to throw off the dogs i don't think that happens i think the the critter's just moving around and

maybe went up that tree for a little while and goes to another one so what happens the dog sees oh he went up the tree and so the dog starts tree and on that tree you get there there's no animal in the tree and the guy goes i tapped this tree you know and the coon's get there, there's no animal in the tree, and the guy goes, I tapped this tree. And the coon's not there. That's good. Yeah. You guys eat the raccoons? No.

I mean, I can't. I've eaten them. I have eaten them, but it's not the norm. Are you selling hides right now? You know, an Arkansas raccoon hide, I think the average market value last year per the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission report that they give was like less than $2 a pel. They're that low? I mean, it's sad. Southern raccoons.

Yeah. We just don't have good fur density. It's just not that good of a hide. So, I mean, you know, we take so many people raccoon hunting. I have this like spiel down to like a science when I take people because we do skin the hides. I've got a bunch of hides right now at a tannery and I get the hides tanned. Do you flesh them yourself? Yeah. Yeah.

And give. I should have you send up a, we can do an exchange program. Done. I'll send you one. I'm not going to get them back to like december over my i keep a raccoon hide over my desk chair do you you know come out of one you're trapped come no come out of doug duran's barn oh really well come out of his his uh grain silo yeah he didn't obviously reasons that wanted in there yeah yeah well we you know so i i talk to people that i take hunting new hunters because we take a ton of new hunters raccoon hunt we really do and uh you know i talk about how this this hunt is is your there's two birds being killed with

one stone and that this is a conservation hunt a depredation hunt in terms of we're trying to remove an unnatural amount of raccoons that are here. There's an unnatural amount of coons right now. Because of agricultural practice. Because of agriculture, because of all the things that are going on ecologically. So we're trying to remove them because of their suppression of ground nesting birds. And, yeah, we just don't eat raccoon that much. It's laborious to cook it you do like anyone you talk to the it's raccoon they're usually doing two or three things to it like you cook it this way then you cook it that way we like slow cooked one you know

and then finish it on a grill it's not bad though yeah It's not bad though. Yeah, it's not bad meat. Beef like. I've cooked it over an open fire. Oh yeah? It's pretty good. Roasted it? Yeah, just open fire. You guys eat raccoons when you grew up in Minnesota?

No. You ever eat a raccoon, Yanni? I have not. You don't remember anybody eating them? Just the last guy that told me he was eating raccoons

and still making them and cooking them was bow well that's right yeah that was that was the name of that podcast yeah no that was the last the most recent and he still eats them hmm i'd like to cook another one up i mean there's a million of them around here east of here especially come to arkansas would you say it's pretty similar to beaver no greasy greasier yeah i think it's not a ton different than bear meat even though i think bear meat is better but it has that same you know kind of greasy feel diets fairly similar yeah but so i really don't think it's that it could be eaten but it's just not it's just not what you do you know what had to me that was funny is today i was thinking about

you know when you're looking at youtube videos i was wondering how fixed the ratio is of likes and dislikes on youtube videos this is like honestly going through my head today. And I was like, man, it'd be interesting to take an analysis of all YouTube videos and add up the likes and dislikes. Because it's like, I feel like it's like less, like generally runs less than 10%. 10% dislike? Yeah.

I feel like I was thinking like it's such it's so weird that there seems to be such a fixed ratio like when we put out videos you look at the

thumbs up and thumbs downs they're like always fixed right overwhelmingly positive but always trends stay true yeah and then I was reviewing

one of your videos that's got like 1.8 million views and it has more dislikes than likes. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Which shattered the theory that I had just been thinking about that day.

You know what's amazing? You know what video I'm talking about? Yeah, huh? Mm-hmm. You know what's a... Let me tell you something that's amazing about that. I've been tracking that video now for about two years. How old is that video?

I put it up, I think, in September of 2017. So almost two years. You seen this video, Kevin? I have not, no. You haven't seen this video? I put it up, I think, in September of 2017, so almost two years. You've seen this video, Kevin? I have not, no. You haven't seen this video? I don't think so. Huh.

The likes and dislikes were within a hundred of each other for years. There's 10,000 and 11,000 right now. Well, it started to kind of go over the top. No, but it's still very close. Yeah. Man, it was like I wanted to start calling my friends, like, hey, will you like this video? You know what's funny? I need to pull it back up and like it. It would help, man.

Might have tipped her over. Yeah, no kidding. I'm serious. There was a time when I want to say it was below 100 difference between. It was just like it's amazing that there's this tug of war, but it actually stayed above on the positive side. And just in the last couple months, it's kind of tipped over. Yeah.

Yeah, it's tough. Tough being a YouTuber. Do you think of yourself as a YouTuber? Nah. Man, I never wanted to be on youtube i intentionally stayed off youtube two years ago because we were creating we've been creating video content for five years and uh never wanted to be on youtube to me youtube was like for cell phone videos and stuff you didn't want to watch and bad stuff like if you didn't want to watch

that's where you put it. Yeah. And I had a buddy of mine. It was like the garbage can. I mean, that's the way, that was my perception. Do you know someone recently told me that every minute,

I don't know if this is true or not, judging by the source, I think it's probably true. Every minute, 400 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube. I believe that.

Yeah, it's crazy. 400 hours per minute. uploaded to YouTube. I believe that. Yeah, it's crazy. 400 hours per minute. Incredible. I had a buddy... You could tell us about the video. Yeah, I was just going to continue on how I got there. You asked me if I felt like I was a YouTuber.

I feel like at some point we need to get around to what's in it. But go ahead. You used the word YouTuber. I didn't. I'm always surprised when someone calls himself a YouTuber. Nah, I don't really consider myself a YouTuber, but I do have content on YouTube, you know. Yeah, that's what I was thinking because you wouldn't be like, it just seems weird to name it. Like if you're a musician, right, and you wind up that most of your money comes from Spotify, do you call yourself a Spotify-er? Right.

Just a platform for the art, really. Yeah, and so it always felt weird for me to be like, oh, when it used to be like iTunes Store. I'd like to interject, though, that I feel that YouTube made YouTubers and not that musicians made Spotify. Spotify wouldn't exist without musicians. That's what I'm, yeah. Oh, you're saying the platform created a the platform created a type of content producer yes and it wasn't like musicians like oh we used to make our business this way now we distribute that way that's in the way that youtube handles

creators kind of channels do they handle creators you bet yeah you get if you you guys are on you i mean like i get oh yeah but i don't think of them as like hand i wouldn't say they handle well they i feel like they're trying to help creators like with the best possible ways to do things and to upload and create content and so they kind of created this culture of hey you guys are youtubers i mean you know but i don't necessarily identify with that but but now so do you want to talk about the video when you're ready i'm ready so it actually surprises me that you brought this video up why you know to me well i brought it up because of the really supernatural thing i was not supernatural like like above natural right but like uh exceedingly natural yeah that i was thinking about the ratios yeah then i'm then i was like

before we came and talked i was like oh my god it's funny yeah yeah no no it it the year the people don't like it more than man that this video has taught me a lot and really has toughened up my skin big time oh i can imagine tell folks about damn video you don't know about the video kevin no i'm not seeing the video let me tell it? No, you tell them about it. I was bear hunting in Saskatchewan. Bear hunting in Saskatchewan, I believe. I like the way you pronounce Saskatchewan. Now you're going to have some dude like you calling in and talking about how you didn't say it right.

Saskatchewan. Nugent calls it Cat Scr wine. So hunting in Saskatchewan, it was a wilderness-based boat hunt. So we were boating back in on these Canadian rivers. Man, the Canadian wilderness is incredible. Oh, yeah, they don't play around up there, man. Like legit wilderness. It wouldn't even classify it as that. But I was 21 miles

from the nearest road and we were hunting bear over bait and that is camping yeah yeah yeah i mean we were camped closer to the road system but we were going we were traveling by boat 21 miles a day to get one way to get to this particular spot well how do you get in there before it gets dark before it gets late in the morning you don't okay you just typically are hunting in the evenings the days but then you're bowing out in the dark or you just yeah yourself enough time to mow it down in june and northern saskatchewan hardly gets dark yeah you know so you just you just kind of navigate out and you leave you got to give up on the idea of hunting from dawn till dark yep and that's the hard one because then there's no time for breakfast.

Yeah, yeah. Or sleep. So, and that's the key component of this video is it was true wilderness. To the other direction from me, according to my buddy who's the outfitter, the closest road was 56 miles away. So, we're 21 miles away from this road. And then the other direction, the closest road is 56 miles. I mean, this is like a 75-mile block of wilderness. Now, there probably would have been like snowmobile trails and stuff in there.

But like you couldn't have taken a motorized vehicle back in there. Yeah, yeah. No, I understand. There's like places in Alaska where if you headed west, you won't hit a road until you get into Siberia. Yeah, yeah. First day of the hunt hunt we come to this it's a bait site and nobody's hunted there that year and he he told me he's like man there's a big black bear coming in here that's you know that's what you're after and so i was looking for a big black bear he's baiting it with what oats these a lot of oats and grease up in northern Saskatchewan.

Like fry oil? Yep. Yep. That's primarily what they use. So he goes around to restaurants and saves all their grease and pours it on top of oats. Yep. Yep. I met a guy not long ago that was baiting with, I don't know if it's the same brand,

but you know Jolly Ranchers? Mm-hmm. He'd get barrels of that syrup that hardens into a jolly rancher bear popsicle oh yeah i do shots of that man put some everclear in there anyhow so so it's the first day of the hunt the i miss a bear so this video shows a ton of bear interaction i miss this bear at like probably 12 yards with a tradition i'm hunting with a traditional bow we're hunting off the ground the trees up there are too small to put tree stands in and so now why are you hunting with a traditional bow uh just same reason i ride a mule just i like it it's hard you can't fake it

i like doing stuff that you can't fake. I mean. Yeah, but you can say that about baiting bears. That's different. One might. Yeah, I'd love to talk directly about that. When I say fake it, that's probably a hard term, and that's not why I do it, but you can't fake being a traditional archer.

You can't just go pick it up. That's probably a harsh term. I don't want to. Well, we talked to a guy yesterday that they've been doing this they've been training new hunters up and shooting crossbows in three hours they can have you ready to kill a deer yeah well i would say that's all it takes in three hours they're ready to kill a deer i would say you could do that with a compound bow today oh i disagree man three days no i don't know it depends man but not today. Bullshit. I disagree. Man. Three days.

It depends, man. No, no, no. I'm with you. I can concede that. You can get them shooting accurate quick. And that's a good thing. That's a positive thing. I'm walking real careful here because no, I'm not like, yeah, and I'm walking real careful here because, no, I'm not.

I'm dogging on your bow and crossbows. Okay. Because everybody knows that their own bow is the way to go. Yeah, that's right. No, do it like me. Yeah, yeah. That's the right way. Yeah.

Okay, so anyways, there you are hunting with a traditional bow. On the ground. Recurve or longbow? This was a hybrid longbow, which is just kind of in between a recurve and a longbow. Yeah, I get confused with those bows. A longbow, the most simple way to think about it is a longbow has pretty much straight limbs and a recurve bow has the curved limb tips. And that's the simplest way to think about it.

And so this bow would have been kind of like in between. You could call it a crossbow, but then it'd be like, I mean cross, like a little bit of each. Yeah, it'd be a little confusing though. But it'd be confusing as hell.

Yeah. Yeah. So I miss this bear and then- A different bear. I miss a bear that I never killed. Yeah, okay.

Big, like big Boone and Crockcket potential type bear. And... Did it spook him off? Yeah, he ran off. He did. He never came back. He didn't like the noise.

He knew. All the bears know that you're there. That's what I kind of want to talk about. Yeah. Well, the story will reveal this. Yeah. So, what we didn't show in the video is that almost all those bears walked up to us not much different than the bear did so these

these bears they see you so far in the wilderness that they are they're not they're not that alarmed by human presence and i realize i'm digging myself a hole, but I would love to talk myself out of it after I tell the story. So the bear. You haven't seen this video, Kevin. A bright blonde sow bear comes in. A bright blonde sow bear, beautiful bear comes in. Another bear comes in and they begin to frolic on the ground. Oh, yeah.

I mean, it was incredible to watch them. I don't think you really ever bred them. So it was like early summer. Well, that was late June, which is prime time for a bear rut. So these bears are frolicking around and literally rolling on each other, and he'd kind of jump up on her and act like he was going to breed her, but he never really did. And then all of a sudden sudden off down beyond the bait i see i see a a big color

phase bear coming up the hill he's got his lip was drooping and had saliva dripping from his lips man he did not like the looks of that one bear getting on that female he saw i mean they were literally he the big the black bear was on top of the sow. And they were just like, oh, hey. It's like they got busted. And he charges them. And these three bears just run right past us. And when I saw the color-phased bear, I was like, that's the bear. That's the bear I want to shoot.

That's a shooter, older age class male. That's what I'm after. 43 seconds later, the bear comes back in, the colored bear. And they don't really look at you. I mean, it's kind of, I've probably heard people talk about this with like grizz attacks and stuff. He didn't just like look at me, but you could tell he totally knew we were there. And he basically just kind of like starts walking towards us, but kind of at an angle. And then he gets about eight yards away. And at that point he directly looked at me and then he

turned and started to, to, to walk in a place that was going to project him to be about five yards from me broadside. He's just walking this way and i'm thinking here's my chance you know what's better than a bear at 10 yards is a bear at five you know when you got a traditional bow and so i mean i got three fingers under the knock i mean this is about to happen you do three under you don't do one over and two under no three under is that for suckers to do one over and two no no it's no. It's, no. Meridian, one over, two under, is the traditional way to shoot a traditional bow. Okay.

A lot of guys. That's how I make my kids do it. Oh, really? One over, two under. Nah, let them shoot three under. Well, the reason we did it when we were kids is because our arrows didn't fit our strings, and you had to use some way to hold the damn arrow on it.

Yeah. You could chew on them all day long and bite the nocks down, but you still had to pinch it on there. Yeah, I understand. Why do all day long and bite the nocks down, but you still like had to pinch it on there. Yeah. Why do you like the three fingers under better? I just think you can shoot better.

It transformed my shooting when I just one day started shooting three under because you can draw that arrow right beneath your eye. Oh. And there's some shit where you stack your fingers too,

right? You count down for distance. Yeah. People do that, but that's not normal in hunting. That's more like Olympic style target shooting stuff. They typically yeah people do that but that's not normal in hunting that's more like olympic style target shooting stuff they typically don't do that with hunting so there you are so the

bear's coming at me and when he gets to like this place where he's just about to be broadside five yards away he just turns and just comes at me yeah comes at you like to the point where he comes up and touches your arrow yeah how do you uh how do you know he's not gonna um he's not gonna do anything he's not gonna try to get a bite of you or get pissed and scratch you when he's that close to get scared and take a chomp out of you this was the only situation thus far in my hunting career where a situation got out of control if i can say it that way. Up until he touched the end of my arrow, I thought I was in the driver's seat

because I thought he was going to turn. I thought he was just going to kind of wheel in to about two or three yards and just kind of spin and go on. Because he weighs quite a bit more than you. Yeah. Yeah, it was probably a 250-pound bear. I mean, you could tell somebody it was 400, and they'd probably believe you. Yeah, people throw out some wild ass numbers.

It was probably 250. And when he didn't stop coming, and I subconsciously used the tip of the arrow to like, I didn't poke him, but I positioned my arrow so that, I mean, imagine a dog like attacking you and you've got a bow and arrow in your hand you're not going to shoot him and i mean you'd like use what you had in your hand to keep the animal in between you know away from you and when my arrow touched his nose that's when i said oh crap literally that's what i said and uh and i backpedaled and it startled him and he raised up on his hind legs about three-quarters. It's not like he just stood straight up, but he kind of reared up, and he stuck his head in the blind and just kind of smelled us and then dropped down.

Do you feel that that was his first encounter with humans? Absolutely. And there's a couple of back things behind it, too. Colby Morrison had never seen that bear before. I mean, these are stations that they know what bears are coming in. Never seen that bear before. I am confident that bear had never encountered a human. And that's why he did what he did. He was just like, who are these guys? What is that? Who are these guys? And it's the only time in my life that I didn't think he was going to eat me. I was just like, who are these guys? Like, what is that? Who are these guys? And it's the only time in my life that I didn't think he was going to eat me. I was just reading him.

I mean, I just didn't think he was going to attack me and eat me. Yeah, but I, yeah, not that he's coming in with that intention, but when he's that close, there's no room, right? When he's that close, like the minute he gets scared, he's so on top of you that you can just see. And I know like a grizzly would be a very bad situation. You wouldn't have let that happen with a grizzly. Yeah, you couldn't, right? Because when they get scared, they lash out. And so you could be thinking, oh, yeah, when black bears get scared, they run.

But at that close, it's just hard to rule out that he's not going to get scared and neutralize what he's also not identified as a threat. And I thought that's what was going to happen. After I said, oh, crap, and I stepped back, I thought. It's like, you know, one time I almost drowned, and it was like slow motion. Like, oh, this is what it feels like to drown. Yeah. In that moment, I thought, oh, this is what it feels like right before you get roughed up by a bear.

I mean, I thought he might just kind of like whack me. Swipe you. I thought he might knock my bow out of my hand Or something And yeah It was scary But A lot of people were like

What were you thinking What were you thinking I was trying to kill that bear I did not have another thought In my mind Other than That's the bear I want to kill And I was in

I was in mode of That's what I'm going to do Yeah surprise me How much you kept your composure to then take the shot. Man, that's what I took a ton of heat for, even from bow hunters. What? The shot. Well, we can talk about that later. Why?

Because he's like two feet away? Man, you go read some of those comments. I made a conscious decision not to. Well, I understand that. Well, that's another whole other story. When I'm trying to take in well-formed, well-thought-out sentences, I don't typically go to the YouTube comments section. I hear you. I hear you.

A lot of people had a sentiment of that bear gave you spared my life and then i took his what a yeah terrible thing oh he spared your life oh steve it's incredible how many people i mean i bet since i've been in bozeman someone has made a comment that that bear spared my life and what a expletive expletive expletive i am for shooting him and how cowardly it was for me to shoot him once he turned his back on me no i'm not i mean hundreds hundreds of comments and that's a sentiment the hunters have no no okay oh what i took for on flag for the shot was and this goes just a shot placement stuff people said it was a terrible shot you shot him in the butt or something man that was a full What I took for on flag for the shot was, and this goes just to shot placement and stuff.

People said it was a terrible shot. You shot him in the butt or something. Man, that was a full-length shaft, 30-inch long shaft. I got 17 inches of penetration, steep quartering away angle, hit it in the last rib. It was totally a mortal shot. I won't give on that because people are like, ah, you shouldn't have killed it. Because I made a follow up shot that was better

than the first shot granted the first shot I couldn't tell what happened when you shot again man he just strolled out there no I saw him I couldn't tell what the arrow did

ah it just ten ringed him yeah out there but he felt either arrow would have killed him either arrow but you know I mean

he's he just he just kind of strutted out there like nothing happened like he didn't even so I was just, what do you do when he keeps walking? You shoot him again. How far was it the second time?

About 24 yards. Dude, watching it, it's unsettling, man. It's like you're like, wow, you know. But then the thing I think is it's unsettling because you're sort of watching it through other people's eyes. But then you think because you're sort of watching it through other people's eyes. Yeah. But anything like you're hunting. The objective is to get a bear. Yeah. You got a bear.

Yeah. What does it remove? The objective of the bear comes up and touches your arrow? Right. If someone was hunting deer and a buck came up and touched the arrow and the guy shot it that's not going to annoy people right it does yeah i mean i've made i mean it annoys some but it wouldn't annoy 11 000 of them i mean it would have made it would have made these people that had complaints happier if i'd have shot the bear at 10 yards which that doesn't make any difference but no there's there's

a lot to this and obviously people don't understand baiting and and steve honestly this is awesome that we're having this conversation because i have been torn at different times and i feel like i've created my my position uh which i i assume you would agree with hopefully maybe but just like when i first put that up i, is this good for hunting for this to be on YouTube? Because of how misunderstood it was. And from a guy that's running a small business and, you know, I mean, like this has been good for my business. You know, I'm like, well, am I going to? I mean, I've really wrestled with that because, man, the first few months that I had that up, I was like, this is bizarre.

I mean, people talking about my mama, people talking about my wife, people talking about my kids. Oh, just people saying, I hope your mom dies. I hope she dies of cancer. Your mom? Yeah. Oh, yeah, they talk about juju. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. That's what my kids call my mother. Oh, I thought you meant like, oh, I don't even know what it means, but like, yeah, karma. Like karma. Bad juju. That's some you meant like oh I don't even know what it means but like yeah karma bad juju that's some bad juju which I don't even know

my mother's name is Judy so my kids call her juju so we joke we joke with my mom we're like YouTube hates you yeah so they were like

I hope your mom because they're like you dying won't be bad enough I want your mother to die yes anyway it thickened up my skin for a while

I had the comments closed down because I was just like, this is crazy. That's a great feature, closing comments. Yeah. But then I decided to open them back up, and I've just left them up. And, you know, I guess it has to do with just how much time I have, but I've gotten to where I respond to some people if I can discern that they have a genuine question of why we do it. You could write a book off the comments that I've made to genuine people about the North American model for wildlife conservation, hunting older mature males, being selective. Bears are thriving all across North America.

Most of these people think that I killed the last black bear on the planet. Actually, they think I killed the last grizzly bear on the planet because of what color it was. Oh, they think it's a grizzly? Oh, absolutely. They're like, how dare you kill a grizzly? And I'm just like... Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my

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y'all. Kevin, have you killed a bear over bait? No, we were just talking about this. Have you bear hunted? I've never killed a bear. He's never killed enough, so we're going to swap. How'd you avoid bear hunting? I think the biggest part of it was in Minnesota,

I was always playing baseball in the spring, so I played college baseball. Did you really? Yeah. can i read you a quote sure let me pull it up go on finish talking yeah so i guess it just wasn't a thing we grew up doing and then when i came out west i've been on bear hunts i haven't killed one myself but want to hear a quote from jim harrison sure in the spring and summer the boys in the town carry either baseball mitts or fish poles on their bicycles. Two different types are being formed. And though they might merge or vary at times, most often they have set themselves up for life.

Nice. So you broke the trend. Yeah, we used to have these little- We could tell old Jim he was wrong, but he's dead. Yikes. Playing baseball. We used to have these racks on our bikes, and we biked to baseball practice. One hole would have a fishing rod.

One would have the bat. Oh, that's good. Yeah. I think he's being a little rigid there. The only reason I was thinking about that is because what happened was, I want to get back to this YouTube video, but the other day my boy, for the first time, he's's nine and we don't let him stray too far but his buddies the neighbor kid is 12 and they both like to fish

so they wanted to go fish where they had to ride off a mile away or whatever um and i said i said you can go but i took the 12 year old boy his name oddly is harrison took the 12 year old boy and i said you're in charge and and uh that's great if you guys go together but i want to make sure you come back together like don't you split and leave him and you know yeah and they rode off together with their backpacks and they rigged their rods up their backpacks and rolled off together. And, dude, it was heartbreaking. I bet. I can imagine. Because he didn't want me to go. Oh.

He didn't say it, but he was like, didn't want me to go. He wanted to have the tackle. He was also real concerned about if it was his tackle box or not, if it was his rod or not. It was not like, oh, come with. Right. Just you wait. He was just like, we're out of here. He kind of like, oh, come with. Right. Just you wait. He was just like, we're out of here.

He kind of like, I hope you don't want to go. And they took off. And on his way out, he goes to get a Ziploc bag for his fish. Yeah. And they took off down the road. And I put it on Instagram, the video of him taking off on Instagram. And I thought of that Jim Harrison quote, and I put that Jim Harrison quote in there.

Dude, it was heartbreaking. Just wait. Just wait. There's going to be shad wraps disappearing out of your tackle box. Oh, I grounded him last night because he lost a bow. I'm like, how do you lose a bow? I can see losing arrows, but you don't lose the bow. That's what my dad was talking about.

All his stuff would disappear. Now it's starting to come back around. Yeah yeah he found it and got ungrounded but uh good but i had to like try to find a way to express to him that it was not acceptable to lose the whole bow oh man anyhow uh playing baseball didn't bear hunt no yeah sell. Yeah, sell me on bear bait. Yeah. So anywhere that you can hunt bears over bait, it's a management tool for the powers that be that have the data that want to achieve a harvest objective of taking out a certain number of bears. That's the only way they can do it. I mean, you look at any place where it's legal to bait bears,

and it is a management tool spot-and-stalk hunting could not take out the number of bears that they need you know and so they use baiting as a management tool for bears I tell you story about the first bear ever saw in Michigan yeah grew up there there's bears there my brother drew a bear tag we put out a lived our whole lives never saw a damn bear he put us out of bait pile within a couple days i saw my first bear you know i'm saying it works yeah they just flat thick ground yeah yeah why do the uh game and fish agencies need to reduce the numbers of bears? That's just, I mean, just like every other thing, there's a suitable amount of habitat.

I mean, you know, like we've got X number of available quality habitat for bears. Those bear, that bear population will remain healthy if it stays at these numbers. Bear populations increase by 10% per year. If you don't harvest these bears, then overpopulation isn't like the end of the world. But if a block of habitat can feasibly hold 10 bears and it's got 15 in it, all 15 are compromised in some way. So why not take out those five, balance it, and have a population that's stable? I mean, it's just like any other species. But you're talking about a little bit different situation when you're talking about a big predator.

There's a low cultural tolerance for a bear being on your back porch eating your bird seed as opposed to deer so i mean i think that yeah we just had a running we just had a bear in our neighborhood and that bear is not alive anymore yeah he wasn't killed by a hunter see i mean that's that's the thing bears are going to be taken out of the population so you know so why wouldn't we use hunting in arkansas like so arkansas reinstated its bear season in 1980. So from 1980 to 2001, all you could do in Arkansas would be equivalent to a western spot and stalk hunt. I mean, you just had to go out and just hunt them. But you did that successfully.

Oh, I do that now by choice. Yeah. I do that now by choice. But I'm giving you an example. So for 21 years, you could only hunt in that way in Arkansas and they killed, I don't have the exact data, but I'm going to guess less than 20 bears a year. I mean, because it's just such a tough hunt. It's just such a low odds hunt. I mean, bears were being killed just by happenstance, by walking past a deer hunter stand or something. What's the word they use for? Opportunistic. Yeah.

Yeah. Opportunistic deer hunters killing bears. And so basically the bear population got to a point where they said, man, we've got to take out 300 bears a year. How are we going to do that? Well, in Arkansas, the furthest you can see in any direction is about 50 yards in most places. So it's not by spot and stalk hunting.

And they said, we're going to use bow hunters over bait on private land to manage the bears in Arkansas. Do the same thing in Southeast Oklahoma. And so where people have a problem with it is this emotional sense that some way it's not fair to put out bait and draw a bear in. Well, my position on it is that if the goal of conservation is to strategically take out animals, bear baiting has the opportunity to be highly selective. You can be highly selective. Not everybody is, but you have the opportunity to be highly selective,

watch an animal for a long period of time before you can you can sex it you can tell its age you know get a general estimate you can make a wise decision about where you're going to shoot that bear i would argue that that spot and stalk hunting is the least selective type of hunting oh i'd agree with that it really is opportunity like if you say that does it in what chance does the hunter have the, whether he acts on it or not, in what chance does the hunter have the maximum capability of knowing what was going on? I'd be like, a tree, hound hunting. Yeah.

And bait probably be one of the same, because oftentimes they might treat you high up to get a good look at them. Yeah. And the third being spot and start. Yeah. And so, if you're talking about, well, who's the conservation hero? Because I'm on both sides of it when i kill the i don't want to get too far away from what i'm talking about but like that's the number one foundational thing that i think gives us is that this is a management tool but what nobody people can buy that what they can't buy or what people

have a hard time understanding and it's because of a skewed foundational understanding of is, you know, like you shouldn't kill a bear, charismatic megafauna. You know, you shouldn't kill a bear. It's okay to kill a deer, but you shouldn't kill a bear. Like totally emotional propaganda. This is an animal that just we have this emotional connection to and i kind of feel like that hunters play into that a little bit like we're like yeah i don't know you mean that they the hunters are like oh okay i'll give you i'll give up on that one yeah and and here's i'm not jumping too far ahead steve no you're not jumping too far ahead i feel like that we've started to use a hashtag called guard the gate okay guard the gate in that right now the biggest threat to hunting i mean there's lots of threats you know

access to land and habitat and these things but one of the most direct threats is anti-hunting community massively coming in on us and bear hunting is the gate for the anti-hunting community to get into our space would you agree with trapping and bears yeah for trapping yeah yeah and so our stance is why wouldn't we want to like create and form and i'm open to for input but like why wouldn't we want to create and form this powerful narrative for why that we do what we do. Why do we use hounds? Why do we use bait? Because a lot of hunters don't understand it. A lot of hunters would be like, ah, we could give that to them. Honestly, I think a lot of hunters would just be like, hey, why don't we just give them, just give them the hounds and the bait. Just let them have that. But we all know

that that will not solve the problem because they're not just after hounds and bait. Just let them have that. But we all know that that will not solve the problem because they're not just after hounds and bait. It's just the lowest rung on the ladder. It's just the easiest thing that's easy enough to sell. And so if we could sit down in a perfect world with the powers that be in the anti-hunting community and could truly say, hey, will you stop harassing our way of life if we will give this to you? Oh, I wouldn't do it, though. I wouldn't even make the deal. Even if I knew it was like, even if somehow it was like an enforceable deal,

I wouldn't want to do the deal. Well, but the thing is is that they wouldn't. I mean, like if we give them housing. No, I'm saying let's just say it somehow was possible. Right, right. Like through whatever. It was like possible that you would make a truce and be like, okay, I'll forfeit these two things.

And then you'll never mess with us again. Yeah. I would be like, I wouldn't make the deal. Yeah. I wouldn't make that deal. And that's why I think sometimes we're missing it when it's not. I mean, we have been, really, my personal, I mean, I would rather kill a bear in the national forest in Arkansas with my trad bow just out in the mountains. So it's not like I just have this love affair with baiting bears.

But I feel like that it's a critical component of this whole mechanism of hunting that we have to guard this thing. And so guard the gate. You know, the, well, that's my main thoughts. What annoys me a little bit, and you run into this in a handful of things, is people will take – it's almost like I don't even want to bring it up. No, I'll bring it up. Let's say a hunter says, I don't have any desire to shoot a bear over bait. People take that to be a condemnation. and i would have yeah no people do like i'll be like i don't uh hunt with an ar so people will be like oh he must condemn ar so like i don't hold the longbow do you also

think that i condemn longbows it's just like i just feel like there's a little bit of a part of that sensitivity is people want to, if there's a practice that the broader public might view as being controversial, that somehow you not participating in it is supporting that. When you could have very much like, I think there typically would be, I haven't hunted that way. I haven't gone out and booked a trip to go do that. Do I have a problem with it?

Absolutely not. But there are a thousand things to do in this world. There's a thousand hunts to do. Yeah. Kinds of hunts. In a lifetime, you only get to do a hundred. Yeah. And so does that mean I hate 900 of them?

I think that's probably a symptom of being the bottom rung on the ladder. Maybe you're a little insecure about it. People get sensitive. Yeah, they do. I get it. I get it. But then if you take someone like another beleaguered group would be trappers. Trappers don't get pissed at people for not trapping.

Yeah. Well, I don't think bear hunters are upset for people for not hunting bear over bait. I think it's just a general stigma, not everywhere, but in some places that just it's like taboo to do this. Yeah. You know, one of the things is people mix up a whole bunch of things. People mix up. They're like, man, we talked about this all damn time. We talked about it all damn time we

talked about yesterday ethics right but like ethics in what end do you need like ethics meaning the challenge for the hunter or somehow something to do with ethics meaning the experience of the animal the experience of the animal you're not doing the animal service or disservice to kill it one way or another, except for what's most effective. Right. You'd be, if you were going to look and say like,

what is most ethical? And I would say, okay, in terms of the likelihood of success or in terms of like, sort of like what's the most ethical way to dispatch an animal. I think that if you were saying the most ethical way to dispatch an animal would be bait because you have the greatest chance for a really good shot opportunity. Yep.

So people would be like, hunting over bait is not ethical. I'm like, what part of this are you talking about? Right. Because getting a 20-yard shot at a stationary animal that's broadside to you that you can make a good judgment on what's going on and place your arrow carefully, that's pretty damn ethical. Yeah. If the goal is to kill it quick. Yeah. But that's not what people are worried about. No, that's pretty damn ethical. Yeah. If the goal is to kill it quick. Yeah. But that's not what people are worried about. That's the thing. That's why I hate when people

use the word. I almost hate the word ethics. Yeah. I don't hate the word ethics, but I mean, I hate when it's described in that way. I've had so many people come to me and say, oh, I hunt with a bow because it's more ethical. To play devil's advocate, we are, I think the thing we've brought up before with bait that can trip people up is that you're changing the animal's natural behavior or natural patterns.

But then some people would argue this. When a whale washes up on the beach and there's 20 bears feeding off it, is the whale guilty of changing their natural patterns? No. What's natural? Is a big cache of food out in the woods as an elk carcass if you like if you butcher an elk and leave the gut pile and a bear eats it have you changed the bear's natural habits he's out in the woods he finds a big thing to eat and he hangs out and eats it you're capitalizing upon a natural thing that a bear does i mean a bear interacts with a

bait site the same way that he interacts with a white oak acorn covered ridge. I mean, he pounds it until the food source is gone. I mean, like you're. And defends it. Yeah. I mean, you're. I mean, I'm just doing the whole devil's advocate. Yeah.

We're two devils advocating. Hey, can I paint a story that could, I'm not going to step on anybody's toes, but it could, I think it's, I think it's legit. Yeah. You're telling me you're a ripper. I'm not going to step on anybody's toes, but I think it's legit. I think the issue, especially with hunters, is an issue that I think can be characterized by fair chase. People would say it's not fair chase to hunt bear. Yeah, yeah. Okay. I'm going to start this story by saying that I love western spot and stalk hunting. I hunted Montana, killed a bear in Montana, hauled my mules up here this year and hunted.

I don't do it yourself deal. I love it. Oh, you hunt in spring? Yeah. I killed a bear, man. Brought my mules up here this year and hunted a do-it-yourself deal i love it oh but let me bring yeah i killed a bear man brought my mules up from arkansas where'd you go oh western montana i'll tell you right where after we're off they're here huh um i didn't know you're out here hunting this spring yeah how many did you see a lot we we saw bears almost every day oh good deal killed day killed a nice boar you have to show me where I don't even know exactly I'm just curious I'll show you

so what's more fair chase to hunt with a high powered rifle with a custom turret on it have technological mapping capabilities that absolutely are supernatural compared to the human navigation abilities we have. I'm talking about having like an app on your phone,

having a four-wheeler, and having optics, which greatly, radically increase your natural ability to see. So what's more fair chase? Are we talking about, if we're talking about success rates? No, we're talking about fair chase, like fair. Well, we have to have a way, we have to have a way we're finally checking it. If it's success rates, it's still better to hunt with bait. Okay.

You cut me right to the chase. I should have known you would have done it, man. You're good. No. So, yeah. So you give me those four things, which optics, and we're going to give a plug for Onyx Hunt maps because they're awesome. I wouldn't have killed the bear I did without Onyx.

That's the truth. Good job. And, you know, a four-wheeler, a map. Yeah. Or you got a bucket of bait and a mule and a bow. Which one is, which guy is more fair chase i again it's a difficult word to work with because we don't know what it means if we mean that it makes it really if we mean what way makes it harder to kill a bear which i think is what some people are kind of talking about yeah like it evens the playing field.

Yeah. And you said to me, which of those people, a guy with a quad and on X and a high-powered rifle and optics in a non-bait state compared to a guy with bait and a bow in a bait state, the guy with bait and a bow will have a higher success rate than the guy in a non-bait state. Okay. But I don't know that that's what people mean when they talk about this. Yeah. Kind of.

Aldo Leopold. Hey, can I slip this in real quick? That Boone and Crockett basically says that fair chase is just in a manner that does not give the hunter an improper or unfair advantage over the game animal. Again, it's slippery language. Very, very. Boone and Crockett is all...

You can't define it, basically. Well, they're totally cool with baiting hounds. Boone and Crockett is. I am too. Yeah. I'm glad to hear that, man. I am too. I'm glad to hear that, man. I am too. What have I ever said or done

to make you feel otherwise besides saying what's interesting to me? I get it. I don't like starfruit. I'm with you. I'm with you, brother. I think sometimes we're probably a little insecure for real.

Yeah, you got what Randall Weaver calls the persecution complex. Yeah, we do. Well, it's true because you are persecuted. I mean, we really are. So, nah, yeah. You know, I got half my Brody, our buddy Brody. He did a hound hunt this year. Man, I'd love to see that.

Well, I hunted mountain lions with hounds. I would wake up tomorrow and go hunt bears with hounds. That's what I like, hunting with hounds. You don't like? Do. You do. Very interested in that. You need to come with me to New Mexico on a mule-based hound hunt for a bear.

You do that? I'm going to you get around a little bit huh? yeah you bounce around? yeah yeah I would do that it's it's gonna be

I'm really interested in hounds man I like hounds man me too I like all the stuff I mean I like how much stuff those people know yeah

so yeah it's powerful for us to get a get even just a small hat tip from a guy like you Steve for real yeah I mean like the first bear ever ate was my brother the first piece of bear meat I ever ate we we that bear down to the nubbins was a bear my brother Danny killed over a pile and he drew a bear

today Michigan it's all second bear every was the one my other brother killed over a bait pile in Michigan this this is what we say and you may say it too maybe I've never you may say it too, maybe I've never heard you say it, but we have absolutely got to defend every legal method of hunting. And in my assessment, every legal method of hunting that's legal today in 2019 has been run through the ringer of all the things. Is it it science-based is it this is it that and we've got nothing left to give the anti-hunting community well my my perspective on this i mean my perspective is like i said you know i support people's right to have a legally ordained and legally managed way of extracting natural resources of sustainable populations of wildlife. I've used population, like healthy populations of wildlife where there's public demand and use for it.

I view that we have a right set up, a system set up by which we determine the resource is viable and it can withstand X amount of pressure. And we allocate that through a democratic process and give people the right to go out and utilize resources. And bears are part of that. There's certainly desire. Always has been. If you went to the frontier settlements, they shot deer for hides and they ate bear meat. Now, in a lot of places, that's just the only way to go about it. Like traditionally, that's how people have done it i would i have no desire to see that be taken away from them especially in places where you're

effectively killing bear hunting and they know they're effectively killing bear hunting yeah um yeah yeah and i you know i love i want to say that i'm not like, I mean, I enjoy baiting bears. I do, but I, you know, I enjoy spot and stalk bear hunting just the same. I mean, I see what a lot of people don't understand that have never baited bears is how difficult that it is. Truly. And that may sound crazy, but if you've never done it, and difficult in terms of not just killing a bear, but killing a bear that you're after. It's just like hunting a big whitetail.

It's difficult. People don't understand that um ton of work same way they don't understand that hunting a cat behind hounds is difficult it takes it takes a dedication of a lifetime to be able to do that to have your own pack of dogs to know the cats to know where they cross to know what you need in a hound i mean mean, it takes a dedication of a lifetime. It's laughable when someone, you know, sitting on the edge of an apple orchard with a crossbow and a tree shoots a deer, which I'm all for. God bless you.

But when they're like, oh, I don't think it's okay to spend your whole life training up a hound dog and learn how to find a damn mountain lion. It's like, oh, that doesn't take any know-how? Man. to spend your whole life training up a hound dog and learn how to find a damn mountain lion. Yeah. It's like, oh, that doesn't take any know-how? Man. We've said it before, man. You're hung out of a glass house. The houndsmen that we've gotten to spend some time with have always been the best, you know, overall outdoorsmen.

You can't fake it. In the woods, you know, the best woodsmen that we've ever met. Yep. Trackers and my God, man my god yeah that's right i mean they dedicate their their lives to it i mean you can't but people distill it down to one thing that you shoot something in a tree right they boil the whole thing down to the part that they care least about yeah it's such a traditional method too i mean like the the hunting culture of north america was built not totally on the backs of hounds but i mean they've been doing it since the beginning at least european european hunting on this continent highly traditional you know what proves houndsmen like don't view the

kill as the thing because they don't care who does the shooting no and they know you have some guy that like pat you have some guy that patterns some big white tail and finally cracks the coat on some big white tail does he turn around and go you know i tell you what bob why don't you get up there and get the shot yeah tell no but a houndsman's like dude all the work is getting it catching it yeah like i really don't care like they don't care and a lot of them get to where they don't shoot they like don't shoot oh they they release way more way more animals than they take almost all of them almost every hound's when i know i got one last quick question for you uh how do you how do you how do you spot stock bears in arkansas

what are they doing so we hunt in the fall and uh man i'm looking for white oak acorns and bear sign bear scat and white oak acorns and you do what well you don't ambush hunt so i do a lot of what i call slip hunting which is just slowly moving through places covering a lot of ground with the wind in your face moving into just covering a ton of ground, just trying to find bear. And you might kill a bear while you're doing that. You might see a bear before he sees you, and then you're able to put a stalk on him. Or in your rambling, you find a ridgetop or a finger or a flat or a saddle that's covered in bear scat and bear trails and white oak acorns.

And maybe there's not a bear there right then, but you come back in the next day and hunt him like a deer. That's the essence of it. I'd say it's one of the toughest big game hunts in North America. Have you been successful doing that? Yeah. Yeah, to me, it's the sheep hunt of the South. That's awesome.

Yeah. sheep hunt of the south that's awesome yeah now one of my one of my greatest most personal you know achievements inside of hunting was uh i killed a bear in arkansas with my bow spot and stalk i actually killed it over water and uh in the next day i went into oklahoma and did the same thing kill the bear of the trad bow just stalking so two days oh really yeah and it was because i i just i wouldn't even plan it on hunting it's a whole nother story but i'd gone in to scout made a big spin found a ton of bear sign luckily i had my bow i mean i wouldn't even going to bring my bow and uh it's all on video it's a youtube video that youtube shut down and probably have it's all on video it's a youtube video that youtube shut down and probably have it's got like 600 000 views right now but they shut it down

because of graphic content oh sad story the but so i found all the acorns that year was high so in in our mountains like mass crop varies based upon things that happened in the spring, like freezes, different things. So that year, all the acorns were up high. I didn't know that. I just was going in to scout this area, found a ton of bears, and killed a bear, packed it out. I had an Oklahoma bear tag. So the next day, I went into Oklahoma, which was just the exact same terrain. The Ouachita's run into Oklahoma and the Ozarks.

And I was like, well, if they're high in Arkansas, they'll be high in Oklahoma. And man, I went up there and killed another bear spotting stock on the ground the next morning by 10 o'clock. Was that a place you had been in before? Not in Oklahoma. The Arkansas place was. The Oklahoma place was. I got on. What's more graphic about, what's

more graphic about that video? Nothing. The human that decided it was graphic from YouTube that flagged it. You know, it could be just a volume of a volume of complaints. Yeah. 400 hours a minute, man. There's a ton of artificial intelligence

used on that stuff. Yeah, yeah. You're right. They shut it down though how long ago it was getting 50,000 views a day jeez and they shut it down and since that time

it's gotten like maybe 50,000 views in two years oh yeah I've found they for whatever reason

they cherry pick they shut down one of them if you want I don't know if you want to give it if you want to we'll put it on our website if you want,

if people want to come check it out. Yeah. I mean, you're saying like my YouTube video? Or like give you the raw content? No, we could just like put the video. Just put a link up. We could put a, I mean, it doesn't go to YouTube if they shut it down.

Right. Oh, I see. Just like put it on your website. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. That'd be awesome. If you I see. Just like put it on your website. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. That'd be awesome. If you'd like to have a place for it to live. Man, see, that video to me is the epitome of hunting.

I mean, the bears were not, and this again goes back to, it's not selective to be spot and stalk hunting. I mean, both of these bears, they were not large bears. They were just average bears. But man, you'd hear me say it if you watch the video. I shoot this bear out of the water. Bear's standing in the water eight yards on the ground. Just ten ring this bear.

And I say, I would rather kill that bear than a Kodiak brown bear. That bear, I did it on my turf. And the thing is, is that just nobody's doing that. Yeah. How many likes and dislikes does that have? I don't even know. No, seriously, if you want to put it up just so listeners can go see the video, we could like host it on a-

You're saying it's back on YouTube now. It is on YouTube. Oh. Now. It's on YouTube, but you have to be 18 years old or older to watch it. And what happens when YouTube flags one of your videos is they quit promoting it. So there's all these algorithms. It was getting like 50,000 views a day.

So now they don't prompt anyone. If you like this, you'll, oh, okay. Yeah, we'll just have the link up there. But if someone under 18 or someone tried to watch the video and they weren't logged in the YouTube, they couldn't watch it. Got it. Because YouTube has to know, oh, this person's over 18, so you actually have to have an account. Like if you logged on and tried to watch it right now, they couldn't watch it. Got it. Because YouTube has to know, oh, this person's over 18,

so you actually have to have an account. Yeah. Like if you logged on and tried to watch it right now, you couldn't. Are things heating up at first light? Heating up. Is it time of year when people start buying a bunch of stuff? Yeah, it's crazy.

It just like turned on. When? Fourth of July, I think. People are like, they shoot their fireworks off. Yep. Then like, what's next? Then like, oh,k season's almost here It's the same thing

With archery shops I talked to my friend John Who runs an archery shop In Eastern Oregon He's like man It is nutso in here right now Really? All the way to like

August 24th He said people will come in As we speak Yeah Our guy Joe Ferrigno Is a Farinato Joe Farinato's Cutting my arrows down

Right now man Just got a couple Built myself I'm excited but yeah things are heating up like people are coming coming sniffing around looking at gear yeah yeah we have more people swinging by the office is this a showroom no sir oh really yeah oh yeah oh yeah they want to come in and buy stuff yeah we send them to the interwebs though do you guys sell um you guys sell a lot more like uh mountain stuff before you start selling the whitetail stuff

like do whitetail dudes wait a little bit longer i don't know you know i think the most guys that are getting geared up right now are kind of getting geared up for november already they're starting to starting to get ready but um i think the majority of the purchases right now are from our 2019 line that just kind of came out so most of that stuff has hit the website as of yeah as of about a week and a half ago what's the hottest selling item man that's a good question probably the brooks down sweater that's a great one this year um the sawbuck i like that thing a lot yeah you've tried those sawbucks i'm sure yeah but tell you what i was wearing them hunting down in old mexico yeah and i was greasing through that desert like a grease hog man everybody else

is behind me oh my god yeah it cuts through cat claw mesquite all that stuff it was i got a feeling there's gonna be i got a feeling like after we went down we like to go down there we've been there quite a few times go down there in january to hunt coos deer in the desert and um i got a feeling that there's gonna be a lot more of those pants on the ground come this january than there were last Dude, my legs are the only ones not ripped up. Yeah, they're that's an incredible pair of pants The best part is it's not like a thick canvas pant where you can actually they're breathable for the hot. Well, I lived it every morning I just pull for all the southern listeners guys. They're talking about briar britches. Yeah, we're telling this today. That's awesome Should have called them that briar britches

Briar pants brush pants, but no things are things are getting pretty heated up at first sight people are getting excited yeah yeah we're coming up on it antelope season starts in august 15th i think you guys all hunt antelope with archery equipment yeah yeah you guys yeah us guys over here that's right should be fun i've actually never killed an antelope with a bow so so who's by our the sawbuck pants is it like um a lot of bird hunters or big game i mean they're built for for for the bird hunter chucker hunters and and folks like that but um actually a lot of folks in texas are buying them i was wearing them squirrel hunting in missouri sweet so i get sick of getting scratched up by the brush yeah yeah 100 eliminates

the need for a gator on the bottom when it's hot. I was crawling out of the river the other day with, and I didn't want my little boy to climb through the rose bushes and thistles. So I picked him up over my shoulder and climbed up through there, gashed my legs all up, had my shorty pants on. Ooh. Because we're coming out of cray fishing. Oh, nice. Yeah.

Yeah. Need to make those in shorts. Yeah. Because your feet's purposeful. Just have a big gap in the thigh right there. That's awesome. All right, man. Yanni, what do you got?

Anything? Final thoughts? I do, man. We need to finish up on the bear oil. Why does it say okay bear oil? It's only so good. It's okay. Well, that is an acronym for Oklahoma.

Yeah, so I brought you guys some barrel oil, Yanni and Steve. Thank you. This is Oklahoma barrel oil. Why does it say slow? Well, okay, so I did a test on how to render fat, whether there was any difference in rendering it slow or rendering it slow and low or hot and fast. This is not viscous for the air temperature. That was going to be my question to you after I tell you a few things about this.

So I brought you this bear oil to use at your pleasure. But this is a testament to black bear conservation because black bears were brought into Arkansas. It's considered the most successful reintroduction of large carnivores in the world. It's a reintroduction of bears into Arkansas. Is that right? And these Oklahoma bears are bears that have infiltrated into Oklahoma from Arkansas and now have a huntable population and are thriving.

That was a 550-pound Oklahoma black bear. No. Yes, sir. Wow. Yes, sir. Oklahoma black bear. Big head on him, too? i bet i'm one of the few people on the planet besides yanni of course holding a bottle of oklahoma bear oil right now

well hey not only do you get that but i'm gonna give you this uh bear grease weather chart that you can use i would suggest you cut it out. It's in a magazine. What magazine is that? Okay. Yeah, this is Bear Hunt Magazine. And we wrote an article, or we published an article, we didn't write it, about an old guy in New Mexico

named Gordon Wimsatt. He died in like 1980. Gordon Wimsatt was nationally known for 60 years of watching and forecasting weather based upon bare oil. Forecasting. Absolutely. He could forecast weather with a high degree of success, says this article. And this is his personal chart.

And so this chart shows, I mean, you know, one, if the barrel oil looks like that, then you go heavy and bottom, no changes for several hours, clear. Number two, there's a slight bulge. So barrel oil, for people that wouldn't know, would have- He's watching that barometric pressure. Yeah. Well, you've got to read this article. No, no, I'm intrigued.

He accurately predicted earthquakes with this i mean does it bother you i mean i like it i believe that he believed it right right but it doesn't bother you that i'm not buying it i'm a hundred percent with you oh okay yeah but i'm just i'm thrilled i'm thrilled that he thought so yeah it's just eccentric it's just cool i love stuff with bear grease and stuff it's a cool it's a cool article about that old guy gordon wimps that so here's my question my fridge this is gonna set up like a rock yeah yeah well my question is how do you render fat that's clear because i have rendered bear fat steve that was totally clear well once it gets warm it's clear well i mean looks like piss colored yeah but somebody told me it has to do with what the bear ate and actually like the chemical makeup.

Well, yeah. You know, like when you get like, you know, sometimes just like, you know, I've seen it on when I killed a buffalo that was in a certain area. There's a lot of carotene. Yeah. And he had orange, like orange, like a damn orange. Yeah. Orange. Yeah. Fat. where there's a lot of carotene. And he had orange, like orange like a damn orange. Orange fat. But that doesn't surprise me.

I know because people contest this, but it's true. When they're feeding on blueberries, the fat takes on a tint from that coloration. Right. Well, just my question is, and what I was trying to decide by doing different temperatures is, I have rendered it before when it was almost clear all the time. Like if you'd have put it in the refrigerator, it would have solidified up, but it looked like olive oil.

No. Yeah. Even look at Gordon's charts. When you put it in your fridge, it was clear? Yeah, even after that. Oh, I didn't know that was possible. Yes. You know what I ate not long ago? It was whale fat.

Hmm. Muktuk. The skin and the fat. I don't know if that's muktuk or not. I think part of the skin, I don't know. Either way, we were eating some whale fat. Moktuk. The skin and the fat. I don't know if that's moktuk or not. I think part of the skin, I don't know. Either way, we're eating some whale fat.

That was interesting. Pretty good. It's a good looking magazine. So you're good? Bear, tell us again. Bear hunting? Yeah,

bear hunting magazine. Yeah. We've been in print for 20 years. I've had the business the last six years, but we're making a – yep, that's us. Print Magazine six times a year. Read all about bear grease. Yeah. Yep, the editor's note in this one is titled Guard the Gate.

That'd be a good one to read. Nice. You got any concluding thoughts, Kevin? Before antelope season comes, get those guide light pants. They're sweet. That was a good one. There you go. Nice. You got any concluding thoughts, Kevin? Before antelope season comes, get those GuideLite pants. They're sweet. That was a good one. Coming out.

They're out right now on the website. It's going to be hot. And, man, when you get those, get yourself a Merino t-shirt. What's the light one called? The Wix. The new Wix. Yeah. Keep me in the deal.

I'm going to do it next time I climb up Baldy. We've been going up Baldy every Thursday, and I wear my Wix T-shirt. Nice. And everybody else is wearing, like, a T-shirt plus another layer. And I started off just a hair chilly, which is always how you should start a mountain adventure. Be bold, start cold, man. But that T-shirt makes it through the whole experience, starting at 50 degrees or so.

And by the time we get down, it's probably well into 70, and we're running, and it's hot. And that T-shirt just expands that whole variance in temperatures. And you get up top on Baldy, and the wind's howling, even sweating, and it's trying to blow through you, but it dries out, and it still keeps you warm. I feel like everybody should have that as their first piece on their skin. Greed.

Greed. That was your concluder? Yeah, thank you. My concluder is I think now that these guys pointed out a little problem, I think you ought to work up a price on that hog. I'll see what I can do. Probably like 18, 19, 20 bucks a pound, you think? That's old.

So I'm going to roll back over there and I'll drop it off. I'm just going to get it cut and wrapped. Cut and wrapped like a pro. I'm going to be generous with it. Yeah, you should. I'm keeping all the fat for myself. Yeah. Yeah.

That's a good plan. Well, I'll give Yanni a little fat. Yeah. Well, no, he's got a whole jar right now. If I just buy my half, can we just split it and not share it? You want to go halfsies? I'll go halvesies straight up right now. I'll shake on it. Okay, me and Yanni are going halvesies. I get buy my half, can we just split it and not share it? You want to go halfsies? I'll go halfsies straight up right now. I'll shake on it.

Okay, me and Yanni are going halfsies. I get the left half. We'll bulk up that left side for you. All right, Clay, you got any final thoughts? Man, I've said enough. I appreciate you having me on. I truly do. You did a good job.

Thank you. Thanks for having me. Eye-opening. It's been great this is really sweet go give his video a thumbs up yeah help me out man maybe we maybe if everybody works really hard we could tip it back over the other direction it would help that'd be great what's it called i think the title i mean they need to check out the type in like clay new comb bear hunt well i think it's called bear bumps into traditional archer's arrow.

Like we tried to like describe in the title. But if you just go to the Bear Hunting Magazine YouTube channel and hit popular, like there's a tab up there that says the most popular videos, you'll see three or four come up and it'll be there. Yeah, but I'm more proud of the squirrel hunting on mule videos and stuff like that than that that's a good one everybody should watch that one too steve and i both enjoyed that one all right man thanks for coming on hey my pleasure thank you appreciate it Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this.

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