The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 184: Managing Bambi

Episode Date: September 2, 2019

Steven Rinella talks with Matt Ross, Ryan Furrer, Hank Forester, Mark Kenyon, and Janis Putelis.Subjects discussed: having kids by accident; Mark Kenyon’s “That Wild Country”; slunger and slow-walker as new synonyms for mondo; where quality deer management ends and trophy deer management begins; busting deer myths; Field to Fork; when teeth start floating; and more.Plus, stay tuned for Steve’s special feature on the joint onX and TRCP report about state landlocked public lands. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Presented by OnX Hunt, creators of the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters.

Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google Play Store. Know where you stand with OnX. Hey everyone, quick announcement before we get started. So this is a special edition, two-part podcast. Get your regular part, which happens next, and then we got an extra special part, which happens after that, so make sure you stay tuned. This extra special part has to do with the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership working in conjunction with OnX. And together, they just released a new report called Inaccessible State Lands in the West, the extent of the landlocked problem and the tools to fix it.

Now, if you remember, if you listen to this show, and you obviously do because here you are, we did a show with TRCP andyx a little over a year ago in which we outlined the findings of their federal land landlocked report meaning all kinds of land you and i could be hunting and fishing and cavorting around on but we can't because there's no legal access to it it's just like chunks of public land sitting there but you can't legally get on it because it's surrounded by private land. And so they looked at that and how to take care of that. And they followed that up now with this state land report, which has some pretty like staggering

findings in it with very real implications for anyone that likes to spend time outdoors. So stay tuned. And thanks to TRCP and OnX for pulling us together and stay tuned to hear all about it after this here show. Okay, a couple quick things here first. Mark Kenyon, here's one for you. Yeah.

Have you ever heard you know like words for big stuff? Like huge? Sure. Or toad. Jumbo. Mondo. Mega.

Have you ever heard a guy wrote in wondering about where he's from in southern Ohio, a big buck. I don't know. I think this might just be in his social circle. A big buck is a slunger. You know, it's interesting's the g being pronounced the same as in giant yeah i have heard of that slunger now how i heard of it is there was a video production team out of ohio so it's gotta be this all coming this substantiates it yeah and i'm pretty sure they were called slunger hollow and I just remember this because when I was in early college, they were the only-

How's the day when they specialized in- Big bucks from hollows in Ohio. I watched this. You could get the TV show online. I watched it in college. It was called what again? Slender Hollow. I think it was Slender Hollow if I remember right.

So is that why people started calling them Slenders? You don't know? I've never heard it used in that way, but that would make me think that could be where it came from, given they're both from Ohio. Yeah, you know about this? Never heard of a slinger. Have we talked about that? I don't know if people in Ohio should use the word hollow. I feel like it's cultural appropriation.

No, I think if they say hollow, it's fine. If you were up there and you said holler. I was going to say holler, yeah. A hollow, yeah, it's fine. If you were up there and you said holler. I was going to say holler, yeah. A hollow. Yeah. That's fine. I had a guy from Missouri once. I had dropped him off somewhere.

I was guiding him elk hunting, and I came back to him, and he was telling me about how the bull was hollering down there over in the holler. Have you guys heard this one? Dude wrote in that he's saying, he's saying if you want tender back straps, you hang the deer's carcass by the pelvic bone. You ever hear this? So there's no strain.

I have not heard that. I have a hard time buying. Hank, you're nodding your head. I've not heard that. I have a hard time buying. Hank, you're not in your head. I've heard this. But even a professional butcher will put a hook in the cavity and hang it like that because you don't want the hindquarters. Stay by that microphone. Sorry about that. You want the hindquarters 90 degrees angle from the hanging carcass upside down.

Yeah, when you hang them under tension, the rigor mortis does more damage to the meat. Is that right? I've heard it. I think he just made that up. You heard it, but haven't executed on it. No, no, I still hang my deer. And I don't age them hanging. I don't have a walk-in cooler or anything like that.

But you have heard this? Mm-hmm. And if you go to a processor, I've noticed they hang the deer and the cows that way do you um do any of you guys electrocute your deer right after you shoot them electrocute yeah not once never heard of it did you ever hear there's this company and i never got around to trying it man i wanted to tender it's called tenderbuck because you know you ever been you ever watch them slaughter cattle and slaughterhouse? Yes.

How they hit them with that captive bolt. Then they hang them up. I think they cut their jugular. Bleed them out. And then they zap them with electricity. And it does a number of things. But man, when they hit them with that,

they just relax. So this guy made this thing and he was marking it to hunters. You run it off a car battery. But apparently, you're supposed to run over there so damn quick. It's going to be pretty quick on a drill set. You're supposed to run over there so damn quick that you... Oh, there's a time limit. Well, yeah.

I mean, when they do with cattle, it's within seconds. I mean, and you have to have a car battery with you. You don't take one of those. I've heard that guys, like I've heard that like commercial shooters, like down in Texas that go out and, you know, shoot non-natives that go into the meat market that they use. I don't know if they use that product, but they are out there shocking them. So what's the advantage?

We're trying to get a meat scientist there's this meat scientist i want to get on who's uh at purdue university and because i could tell you why i think what it has to do with like how the animal goes through has to do with how the animal goes through rigor mortis um and there's some other complicating factors there but i don't want to do it because i want to have a guy come in who really, really knows. So for the hanging thing I did, it was a professional butcher who gave a presentation I was at.

A professional butcher, yeah. Another one, Mark, we'll introduce everybody in a second here. Mark, what's the name of your trailer, your camera trailer? I mean, I haven't named it. No, I don't mean that. If you did, I wouldn't even want to know. I wouldn't want to know. You mean, what's the model?

The model, yeah. What is it? It's a Fleetwood Pioneer, I think. Yeah. I've been paying. Or Frontiers. Pioneer or Frontier. One of the two.

Yeah, that's a reasonable name. Because me and my wife are shopping for a new camper trailer. Uh-huh. So I've been paying a lot of attention to camper trailers. Like we're kind of like kicking around, you know, looking at the R-Pod. Yeah. And other kinds. But now whenever I drive by a trailer, I check them out.

And there's been like a weird shift in trailer names where now they give them like really aggressive names and paint like aggressive like claw marks in them and stuff do you know what i'm talking about it's so weird yeah i uh it just means that generation x has come of trailer buying that's it it's like bone names in the 90s. There was a lot of names like that. Yeah. Executioner. Yeah. So I saw one the other day called The Vengeance. Wow. Like if someone's out to get vengeance upon you and they hook up their fifth wheel.

And then there's one called The Prowler, which is weird. I've seen that one. But that's weird because if you have a prowler, you call the cops. True. You wouldn't want to, you call the cops. True. You wouldn't want to haul it around behind you. Yeah. The spider. But yeah, I felt like they used to have names like yours, like the Pioneer.

Yeah. I saw one the other day called the Solstice, which I could see Yanni liking. There's a lot. After States, there's the Montana. I've seen the Wyoming. I've seen the Forre i've seen the forester yeah but now it's like they're trying to be like they're badass and they got like like claw marks or teeth you know but it just feels like a it just feels like a camper trailer

it's hard it's like you can't put lipstick on a pig yeah it seems like a hard sell but are you happy with yours i know you had to remodel it. Yeah. Mark remodeled his trailer. Now, why are you laughing at that, Steve? I just like the idea of remodeling a trailer, man. I think it's fun. Yeah.

I mean, it was old and decrepit when we bought it. We got a great deal on it. But ended up finding there was a lot more damage. So we had to replace the roof, put new floors in, put new hardware hardware in redid a lot of interior stuff completely renovated the interior so now it looks like a you know our own design all painted all new cabinets new stuff like that so it's cool it's nice i've been inside of it how many people sleep in there uh two my wife and i and our son but how many could sleep in there you could do do four, I guess, if you put two young kids on the pull-out table. Yeah.

See, we had a third kid by accident. Yeah. Which really like, and I knew that it was trouble when it happened, but I didn't even know about the implications for camper trailer shopping. Yeah. You could stick one on the floor. They're like- Could do five. Camper trailer companies are generally don't like families of five. Yeah. You could stick one on the floor. They're like, they, camper trailer companies are generally don't like families of five.

Yeah. I need to find one of those companies out of Utah where they make, you know what I mean? Cause a lot of them, I see where you're going there. A lot of them don't cater to people who had too many children. Yeah. That's no joke.

I spent two years in Utah and it's just one giant family after another. Oh, yeah. People there would be like, how come you guys didn't have more kids? When I walk around feeling like there's just too many of them. Restaurants don't even have two tops and four tops. It's just nothing but sixes and eights. Really? Huh.

Like I told you, you're welcome to give it a test run if you want to see how the family fits. Yeah. I think I might go out and take your camper trailer out. It's cool. It's cool now. Yeah. We got new solar set up in it now after everything got stole. We got new batteries. We got new propane.

Everything's fresh and ready to rock and roll. Yeah, did you hear this that Mark parked his camper trailer? Yeah, I was in the car listening to that conversation. Yeah, and then someone ripped all of his stuff off and the owner of the place he parked was like,

eh. Yeah. He parked it in a secure lot. Supposedly locked the monitor. Did he explain that it was like

park at your own risk? Like he assumes no responsibility for this. Yeah, I don't remember last summer when I put it in there if he gave me a rundown or maybe it was in the fine print. I don't remember, you know, last summer when I put it in there, if he gave me a rundown or maybe it was in the fine print. I don't remember.

But now we just dropped it off at a new storage facility because we're still, you know, we're still going to try our luck. But this place seems much more reputable. They've got surveillance cameras, barbed wire fence, great gate. There seems to be some human presence there more often. And they very clearly articulated, had a much more professional contract. The whole process seemed a lot more legit. Looking back, this guy,

you know, he was the only one available, so we just went with what we could get. Yeah, I'm going to a place with like a dude with an 870 over his shoulder, walking the perimeter, man. I feel better about this one. But she did, this time, made it clear, like, hey, we do everything we possibly can. We have monitoring.

We have the gate, et cetera, et cetera. But you do need to understand, there's 200 other people that have access to this facility. People can come in and out. Oh, yeah. You might have got ripped off by another camper trailer owner. Yes, possible. You should go look through all the windows. I could.

At this point, I'm kind of over it, but I could. Yeah, look in their camera window. There's my battery. What's weird, though, is whoever did it had a strange agenda because, for example, they took our forks and knives but left the spoons. Were they sterling and the spoons were? No, it was all just really cheap stuff. They took some paintings that my wife put, some cool artwork to kind of make it feel different. They took some, left my wife put, some cool artwork to kind of make it feel different. They took some,

left others. That makes sense. They left Yeti mugs, but took cheap plasticware. They took our batteries and our solar inverter, left the panels. They took some of my tools, didn't take some. What kind of tools did they have? What did they like? They took my ratchet set. They took cordless drill. Took, left

my hammer, left some screwdrivers uh did they go into your drill bit assortment and just pull out certain diameter drill bits because they might have been doing something really specific man no they might have been under the influence yeah no they took both i had like two nice boxes full of bits and stuff took it all gone so yeah on the Brits... How much money did you get wiped out of? I don't know. I probably put another, like,

five, six hundred bucks in to replace stuff just to get going again for the batteries, propane, inverter, some basic tools. Wouldn't you just like to kill that guy, man? It was shitty. Like, we just...

We were all excited to get to the camper because we'd been traveling for ten days and we're like, all right, we'll get to the camper. That's our home for the next six weeks we can get in a routine you know it's challenging with a one and a half year old in the tent and trying to do that whole thing leading up to it so yeah when something like that happens to me i spend months just thinking about how cool it would have been if i could have caught them and just defiled

them like like the things that i wouldn't even want anyone to know about. Last thought on campers, then we got to get to our business at hand, is a complicating factor with the camper trailer is, you know, I have an F-150. I want to pull it behind an F-150. I don't want to go buy a new. Yeah. I don't feel like going and buying a whole new truck. You shouldn't need to with the F-150. No, but, man, I'm not going to put, like, some five-mile-long fifth wheel on it. Oh, yeah.

Well, you don't want that anyways, do you? No, I want to be able to get into cool little spots. Yanni's incredulous. Of a camper in general? He thinks it's stupid. I mean, I didn't like the idea either, but when it came to, like, having kids and stuff and doing long trips, like we were doing several months at a time,

it was the option, best option for that yeah i want to be clear this is strictly a function of having children yeah we usually camp under a truck yeah like car camp it'd be like if it rains you slide under the truck or like have a tent but it's just now i want to be like all rigged up because by the time if all five of us are going camping by the time you get five sleeping bags five sleeping pads two i just want all that stuff to be in something yeah i get it and then you know load up the crayfish traps and hit the road get after i like the size of those rpods like that's the size if i was going to get a new one i would get something like that yeah but

someone's got to sleep out under the trailer which is fine i mean the youngest my four-year-old i was gonna say jim sorry buddy you gotta sleep under the trailer enjoy I just feel like it limits you a little bit as to where you're gonna go that's the only reason I'm a little it does I'm not but yeah but you understand what I'm saying with the whole packing up situation I totally understand and then we're like unpacking my truck with all that shit to set up a car camp it's a pain yeah and then like turkey camp this year starts raining and we're out in the gumbo and then just everything just goes downhill then my wife's like you know what might be time to head home once every you know it's just like

it's hard with yeah we just had this conversation last night about marking the new kids coming it's different oh that's right you're having a whole nother one yeah are you still being all secret about your uh you know which thing the other The other one? We can talk about that. Remember the advice I had for you that contradicted your publisher's advice? Yeah. Yeah, we can talk about it. Mark's got a book coming out. I've got a book coming out.

Tell everyone real quick. Now we've got to get on to what we're supposed to be doing. Yeah. I've got a book coming out December 1st. It's called That Wild Country, An Epic Journey Through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands. So taking a look at, you know, we all talk about this public land stuff, but I got into it from an outsider's perspective, right? I'm from Michigan.

The last decade, though, I've gotten to experience these places a whole lot, spend a few months every year. So I decided, like, I personally wanted to learn more about what led us to this point that we're in, where there's so much contention around the topic. So the book examines everything that got us to this point. And it's told through a series of my own hunting, fishing, backpacking, rafting trips across country. Yeah. Top to bottom. What's the furthest south you get? Arizona. What's the furthest east you get? Michigan. North is? Alaska.

Above the Arctic Circle. Yeah. Or close to the Arctic Circle. Yeah. West? Well, Nevada. Oh. Covered the whole damn country.

Pretty close. Yeah. It was good. Yeah. The next time someone asks you that, do you think of something better? Because Nevada and Arizona are close together. You want to make it seem more sprawling. It was northern Nevada, at least. Oh, yeah.

That makes me think like, wow. Northwestern Montana. Yeah. That's pretty far west. And it comes up, when can people go buy it? December 1st. Oh, it's still got a ways to go. You can pre-order it.

You can pre-order it. It's the best title. It's pretty good. Of any book in the world. Yeah. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah. Well, I also like Larry McMurtry's pretty good. Of any book in the world. Yeah. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. Well, I also like Larry McMurtry's All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers.

That is good. But that wild country is a close second. It stems from a quote from Wal Stegner talking about, you know, how we still need that wild country for no other reason than to, you know, sit there in the office and think about it or walk to its edge and look over it. It's part of the geography of hope, he said. And, uh, and I definitely resonated with me. Did you think about naming it the geography of hope? Uh, it seemed to, to, uh, I don't want to say cliche, but it's been used. Like people talk, there's article titles, the geography of hope and stuff like that. It's a great, it's a great title, but I thought that that wild country would be a little bit off of that, but still speak to it.

Okay. You can come back on in December when people can actually buy it. Yeah. People will preorder stuff, but they don't like to. Yeah. I get that. Okay. Everybody's got to introduce themselves now.

Hank, we already heard from you. You were talking about hanging deer up. Yep. Yep. Hank Forster, Quality Deer Management Association. I run the hunting heritage programs. So anything that educates or recruits a new hunter, that kind of stuff. One of the younger Hanks on the planet.

Possibly. Yeah. I haven't looked into that yet. Go ahead. Ryan Fior, Senior Regional Director, kind of in charge of grassroots operations, Quality Deer Management Association. The Latvian Eagle. Good morning.

Long-tongued Yanni. Go ahead, sir. Matt Ross with the Quality Deer Management Association. I'm the assistant director of conservation and appreciate you having us. Yeah, great. How do we – let's say someone, you know, you're at a party or whatever in an elevator and someone's like, Hey, what is, uh, what's QDMA? That's a good one. What do you guys do? What do you guys rip out? What do you say?

That elevator speech, right? Like, what do you say? Uh, you know, probably the first thing I would say is, uh, we're a deer hunting organization. Um, if the person deer hunts, they might get that, and they may not have heard of us. But we're a conservation organization for deer hunters. That's what we are. When you say they might not, yeah, I think everybody. You know what? Let's do this real quick. Explain where QDM and QDMA and where one ends and the other begins. So quality deer management is a concept that arrived around the mid seventies and it actually came. That early? Yeah, 74. There was a book

named Producing Quality Whitetails. That's the title of the book. Oh yeah, okay. And Al Brothers, Murphy Ray Jr. wrote the book. They're both biologists out of Texas. And that book was kind of the beginning of a paradigm shift in how people were thinking about deer. Starting at the turn of the century, really, we had started a program of protection and recovery, and we can talk about the histological part of that. But deer populations were starting to really skyrocket. And that book, the concept of quality deer management was more about managing for deer health, habitat health. So it's centered on three principles, quality deer management. And you could really manage any game species really in the same way. But QDM is based on trying to manage the

population of whatever animal you're talking about to not exceed what the habitat could support. So not to exceed carrying capacity. That's the first principle. Second is to have a balanced sex ratio. So to have as many males as females on the landscape. If you walk away from a deer population and there's no human influence, it eventually gets close to one-to-one, two-to-one. Yeah, because they're born. They're born at one-to-one. Straight up one-to-one. I mean, basically humans.

Yeah, slightly heavier to the males. No kidding, really? Yeah, slightly heavier. So that concept, like if you really walked away from a deer population, it would correct itself. And then the third principle of quality deer management is to make sure that there are deer or whatever animal in all age classes. So you have young, middle-aged, and older individuals represented, not in equal parts, but that they're existent on the landscape. Again, walking away, that's what would happen naturally. But not, it would be, there'd be a stark drop-off.

Yeah, I mean, it would be heavy. Honestly, if you looked at a naturally occurring population where humans aren't influenced, you would have like 40 to 50, at least, percent of the population be the first age class. Okay. Because it's correcting itself every time. Yeah. But go back to that thing a minute ago about that they're born at a one-to-one male-female ratio. Yeah. ago about that they're born at a one-to-one male female ratio yeah um but but the females like an unhaunted population don't the females live way longer in the males uh they can uh they do yes they do but when you account for all individuals that are born in a year, you're seeing a slightly higher male to female ratio,

but not by much. It's just a couple of percent, like one or two percent. But the reason I bring that up is if the females are longer living, if you went and looked at a total whole population, it's easier to be, they'd stick around longer. Like what's the oldest male you've ever heard about? Uh, well, I mean, the oldest buck you've ever heard about in the wild. Uh uh there's been bucks that have been killed in their teens no kidding really yeah uh you know we in the wild even in the wild i think the oldest teens yeah late teens geez yeah i on they look pretty haggard they gotta look pretty yeah yeah and in captivity they can live older. I mean, just where I hunt and I'm from New York

and the property that I hunt on before I started hunting there and kind of talking to the people about quality deer management and hunting that way, they basically abstained from shooting does. And we could talk more about that too, but I convinced them that we need to reduce the deer population. Let's start shooting some does. And they had abstained from shooting does for so long that within the first couple of seasons, we shot some really old deer. And I'm very interested to see those ages. So we age all the deer that we-

All does when you say this. Bucks, not so much. I mean, it was very skewed. Because they were shooting all the bucks. Yeah, they were shooting all the bucks. It was very, very skewed. Most of the bucks were young, one and two-year-olds, but certainly one-year-olds. But we had sent teeth away.

We aged the jawbones by their wear, but I also sent an incisor in for any deer that looks really old, including the does. And one of the hunters on the property killed a doe second or third season. That was 20 and a half. Wow, man. Wow. You should look this up, Steve. I think you'd like it. But I saw photos of a buck that made it to 16,

and his antlers kind of almost reverted to roe deer shapes. And I don't know if it's common, but their antlers just kind of deform or like backtrack into a different animal. Huh. It was really weird. Yeah, some weird kids like, you know, you see, wow,

we had so many weird things we believed, but if you got any kind of misshapen antler, like palmatian, anything, we'd be like, that's a really old buck

who used to be big. Yeah. It was like always, always what we thought, you know. And usually, usually followed by the thought, we got to call that deer,

right? Because there's something wrong no there was you didn't no as a boy and I remember this like I remember

and this is kind of part of my interest in QDM is as a boy everybody shot if you shot like you just shot any buck you saw yeah it would be a laughable idea that you would like let a buck

walk past i remember the first guy and i'm still friends with him the first guy i ever heard of passing a deer up was a guy a gentleman by the name of tim zelden rust who grew up on a farm and everything in deer hunting changed all like two things happened at the same time three things happened uh you started to be able to hunt from an elevated platform with a rifle and that changed how it just changed how like people that had access to land how they started to perceive the land because it used to be that if someone had a farm everybody not everybody but like like everyone from church or whatever hunted that farm and you just sit in the field corners or whatever then when all of a sudden you can hunt from an elevated platform um people who own the farms or their immediate family right

would all of a sudden build these giant platforms and then you needed less people out because you could see so much more. And it was right around the time when people started like thinking about like bucks became like valuable, you know, it was used to be just like, Oh, everybody comes out.

We shoot deer and fill doe tags. And then all of a sudden it became that like, it just became much more restrictive because deer kind of commodified a little bit, you know? And then people, then people will be like, well, they didn't want other people hunting because they were trying to grow big bucks.

Well, and then the whole culture of deer hunting changed in my area of Michigan. It was kind of a wave across the country, really. I mean, that, that book was written. But this didn't happen until the, this didn't happen until the early to mid nineties. Nineties, right? So the way, the kind of the order of how things happened was that book was written, which is where quality, the word quality came from, quality deer

management concept. And our founder was a biologist for the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources. What was his name? Joe Hamilton. Okay. Yeah. And he's still with us today.

He's, he's been with us today. He's been with us 31st year. He was responsible in, I don't remember the exact year, but it was in the 80s of hosting a regional conference that happens in the South called the Southeast Year Study Group Meeting. Each state agency takes turns hosting it. and it's where all of the agency folks get together and a lot of academics and they talk about the latest concepts of deer research, monitoring, all types of deer management related things. And South Carolina hosted it that year. Joe was an employee and he invited the author of that book, Producing Quality Whitetails, to be the keynote speaker because it was this new concept. It was five years old or so at the time.

And he took that thought and hearing that person speak and went back to his job. Joe worked in a part of South Carolina. He didn't cover the whole state. And he worked with about 800 hunt clubs. And the book really was starting a change in how people were thinking about deer going from, you know, a time of trying to build deer. I mean, a lot of Southern states were actually bringing deer in and trying to build populations. Still trying to rebuild herds.

Restocking them. Yeah. And a lot of hunters had that thought process of, you don't shoot does. It's, you know, that would be almost a sin. We want to build deer populations. But at the same time, if you looked around, the habitat was really suffering. You could see browse lines everywhere. And the age structure was out of balance.

Most males in the state were young. I'm talking about they wouldn't see past their first birthday. So Joe said, you know what? I think I'm going to start this local group. It wasn't meant to be what is now an international organization to communicate good ways to manage those club properties. So we created a newsletter and named it something like the South Carolina Quality Deer Management Association. And these are 800 hunt clubs out of South Carolina. Yeah. In a region of South Carolina.

I think that it was generally the low country. And that, just fast forwarding through time, grew to a state-specific organization. Within a short period of time. It was, they covered all of South Carolina. And then eventually we were named the North American Quality Deer Measurement Association, and then just QDMA at some point, because around the time of the nineties, that concept almost burned like a fire going from South Carolina up through the Midwest and everywhere. I'm surprised that it didn't grab hold in Texas first. When did, like, Texas pick up on it?

It's the birthplace of quality deer management, the concept. Texas is where— That's the birthplace of it. Yeah, Al Brothers and Murphy Ray and a lot of their cohort of biologists, they gave birth to the idea, but the association was born in South Carolina. But, like, codifying it and organizing it into a group was a South Carolina idea. Yeah. And, you know, organizing deer hunters has historically been a pretty difficult thing.

I mean, trying to get deer hunters to agree on something. And Joe also had been- What? Like, explain that. Just getting- I mean, I know what you're talking about. Like herding cats. Yeah.

Help people understand what you're talking about. Like herding cats. Yeah. Help people understand what you're talking about. You know, there's a lot of dissension among deer hunters in terms of weapons used, strategies, whether they're doing, using dogs or drives or stand hunting. And it's hard to get deer hunters also to see that there's a need for conservation in terms of there's a need for an organization to tell them what to do. Because a lot of deer hunters feel like what grandfather or grandpappy told me is what we do. Right. So it's that, that was difficult, but Joe had been spending some time, uh, in Australia. Um, and also, uh, Tasmania.

And, uh, he had seen that they organized deer hunters through a group called the Australian Deer Association, I think is the ADA. And the way that they structured their grassroots activities and even what they named, like we name instead of chapters, we have branches. Yeah. And that's fashioned after the ADA, the Australian Deer Association. And he had spent some time, he had been brought over there to speak as a keynote speaker on some events and came back and that's how we started. What's their program? I mean,

in Australia and Tasmania. They have a quality deer management Tasmania wide for all, pretty much all the deer species down there. Hog deer. All the introduced deer. Yeah. They're all introduced, but they're again, just trying to say, all right, looking at the deer, is there too many for what the land can support? What's the buck to doe ratio and are deer represented in generally all age classes? That's the concept. Yeah. The other night I was out to eat with my wife and her buddy and a guy puts a piece of fish down in front of me and says, that's a Tasmanian, uh, ocean trout.

And I'm like, is that right? And so I look online and it's, uh, someone's like has an aquaculture facility and he's raising Pacific steelhead in Tasmania marketing it under Tasmanian ocean trout. Wow. I was like,

no wonder I haven't heard of this bitch before. Literally a bait and switch. So when you said Tasmania, I perked up because it reminded me of my meal the other night or a portion of my meal

the other night. Okay. So everybody gets all excited and it sweeps like wildfire. But I got another question about this. Cause I just, I'm like, I think of all this in context of where I grew up. Is it, do you think it's possibly true that there were no, like we didn't have trail cams. We didn't have trail cams when I was a kid.

So late eighties, early nineties. But my feeling looking back on it is that no deer, like that you could go out to a large property and say that there are no deer living here that are older than two. And if there's any of those, it'd be surprising. Is that ever true for real? That no deer where you would actually walk into a place? You mean bucks, right? No bucks. I'm sorry. Because in looking at the enormous pile of deer that our collective group of family and friends would kill every year.

And the fact that I can point to one buck, which is hanging on my mom's wall to this day, which was like a freaking giant because it was a 120 inch whitetail was like, people came from far and wide to look at that deer. At a property scale, absolutely. And talking about a statewide scale in those years, being Ryan's from Pennsylvania, 90% of the statewide harvest of bucks was one and a half years old before they started changing some of the things they did in Pennsylvania. And Pennsylvania kills 330,000 deer a year. Yeah.

Do they really? Yeah, Ben, 150,000 bucks a year and 90% of them are year and a half old. I wrote this into the show one time, I think you talked about it. We covered it in the Mexico episode. He was the guy that wrote in about Pennsylvania's age class. Oh yeah. Because Pennsylvania and Michigan were similar. I would imagine those statistics were pretty close. But to your point, our camp, same thing.

If it had a spike, man, there was nobody passing a spike in our camp. Everything was going down. I remember we had a late-season bow hunt once. Not once, but they'd run late archery. And I remember sitting there. It was in December. And I remember sitting in a field and counting 90 some does yeah and not a single buck and like man you shot every you shot every buck you saw we were just talking about the as far as habitat regeneration

and everything but i still hunt the same camp in gun season that I did as a kid. And, I mean, we shot the deer, but no, it was sacrilegious to shoot a doe. I mean, there was just no way you were doing that. And you would go to stand the first day of buck season. That's what it was, was the first day of buck season, Monday after Thanksgiving. And it was almost like a badge of honor who saw the most deer. You know, you come in for lunch. How many deer did you see this morning? 47.

Yeah, I saw 47. You know, it's just your spot's better than mine. I only saw 30, you know. Yeah. Yeah, that's just. But waiting for a buck. Wait, yeah. Yeah, we never had that.

Like, it was taboo in a lot of circles. Even among my father's friends, it was taboo to kill does. But he really encouraged doe shooting, but not from a management perspective. He just, it was just stacking up deer. That's his, and even in Pennsylvania then, we had two weeks of buck season. And then we couldn't hunt on Sunday. So Saturday, the buck season went out after the second Saturday. The following Monday was the opening day of doe season.

And it was almost like the guys that hunted for two weeks in camp and hadn't shot a deer are like, no, we get to unleash here. And just for three days it was let's shoot everything that walks in front of us type of deal. Because you finally get some shooting in. You kind of get some shooting in. We're going to warm this gun up here. Yeah. And then we were talking about, I was just thinking, I remember being a kid, like you and all of the hunters bringing deer back in camp.

And they were all looking back, knowing what I know now, I probably remember I can count on one hand how many of them were two and a half years old they were all year and a half olds but i remember like the common conversation was you know you don't have much for handlers man they got a big body you know every year and a half old 90 pound you know white tail buck oh he's a big body or a big forehead and one guy in our camp used to age them i swear swear to God, he would call them slow walkers. You know, I'm looking for one of them slow walkers.

I like that. And I still use that to this day. I might steal that. Slow walker. I might steal that. Slow walking slunger. What was it? Slunger. Slunger.

So QDMA grows out of South Carolina and starts spreading around the country. And what is people's primary, like, what is the primary motivation? Do you feel that most people who were getting into it, and when did it blow up? Like, when did it become a national thing? I think in the 90s. Yeah. I joined and heard about it in the late 90s.

And I lived in New Hampshire at the time, so I think it took a while to get up to New England. But it became pretty commonplace in like the outdoor literature, you know, all the hunting magazines out there. You'd see QDM thrown around in the 90s. And we have this discussion internally. I think organically the hunting community was going that direction. If you think about when outdoor television started and then people started shooting bigger bucks on outdoor television and, you know, that, and then that magazine articles, you know, I remember when 140 inch buck was huge and then

fast, you know, that was probably the mid nineties, the late nineties and fast forward 10 years and it had to be 180 inch buck, you know, so it just kind of all happened together. You know, we, you ask, we ask ourselves, you know, where will we be if it wasn't for television and vice versa? You know, where would quality deer management be if it wasn't for that? You mean to television popularize the idea of shooting a big buck? No, I don't want to say popularize it. You can look back at whitetail buck pools, you know, like in my community. We have the club.

Yeah, that's a good point, man. People have always wanted to kill big bucks. Yeah, it's always been there. The one hunt club I go to, they still have in the bar their first buck pulls in 1942. You know, the people signed up for it, and they kept, you know, over all those years. So the attraction of shooting big bucks has always been there. But I think, you know, through the outdoor channel or outdoor media, however you want to look at it, that just really boosted it for sure. That wasn't – I mean, we talk often about QDM and a byproduct of it is bigger deer because you're trying to push deer into older age classes.

But when Joe formed the organization, certainly that was probably the apple that he hung in front of some of those clubs. But he designed the logo with basically a two-year-old buck. He didn't want to make it a gargantuan buck. It's standard eight point, probably a hundred inch deer with a doe next to it because it's all about trying to balance bucks and does. That's what QDM is really about. All right. This gets to like a, I think, a pretty important question. As people adopt QDM or join QDMA, the primary motivation, regardless of what the mission is or the side benefits or whatever,

the primary motivation is that you could grow a trophy buck on your property. For the joiner? Yeah. I mean, just for the public. Like that's what they see, right? I think it depends. We have a pretty good mix.

Some people want to learn how to manage the habitat for a lot of different species. We have a lot of that information out there. But at the end of the day, and I tell people this all the time, I mean, especially, you know, predominantly males or hunters and just like buck pull started, you know, 60 years ago. So yeah, you know, the byproduct of bigger antlers is certainly an attraction for sure, especially if you're managing your own ground. You know, but I wouldn't say that that's the sole reason people seeked us out. I think it's important to mention that we really try to deliver the science. I mean, that's what we do is we keep abreast of all the research from the universities, and we try to communicate that to the deer hunter.

And, you know, you go out there and you talk to deer hunters, and there's so many urban legends or misconceptions of what deer do and how they work and and i think that's one of the strong suits of qdma and what they've done is we've really gotten people to understand you know how they view the world what they see what they smell you know all that kind of stuff so but but to what end you know i mean like what is the like if you had like let's say you had a vision statement what's the qdma vision statement well remember what were the statements we were talking about the other day yanni vision and mission yeah what's the like the vision like where would it lead like it would lead to what it you know the goals that matt was talking about but you know habitat herd and hunters you know we want to look out for the the deer their habitat

and the future of hunting. In your mind, what's the worst thing that could happen to deer hunting? I think hunter loss. I mean, that's what I'm paid to do, but I think hunter loss is the worst thing. That's one of our dark clouds, and CWD, of course. Yeah, well, that's what I think. If a hunter were to contract CWD from a deer, it would be the end of the game. Oh, that's catastrophic. Well, that's talking about trivializing the actual service that hunters provide.

We do it because it's self-serving. We want to go out. We want to experience the outdoors. We want to get meat for our families. Um, but we also provide a very big service to, to, to everybody, to all public by removing deer and keeping deer populations at bay. And if that was trivialized or even fractured to a point where people don't support hunting, because right now most hunter, most of the non-hunting public supports hunting when, when it's done for meat, it's 84% or 81%.

82% for deer and turkeys. Yeah. But if you lose that support, it's a privilege to go hunting. It's not a right. So if we're not even allowed to do that to sustain that, it would be catastrophic. Well, and a byproduct of all that is that we fund most of the conservation in this country today. I don't think you can say you hunt for conservation, but us hunting, a byproduct of that is funding our state agencies and most of the conservation in this country. product thing is interesting because um now that now that there's more public awareness among hunters or over around funding structures for wildlife management um like there's even this

this slogan uh like hunting is conservation right uh we could say like conservation is a like even at its most base level conservation is a byproduct of hunting but it doesn't necessarily mean that that's one's motivations and to get into that byproduct thing is i think that that's like a little bit of what i imagine happens around quality of your management is like people are motivated to do it because they want to grow a large whitetail on their property and a byproduct of that, like an unintentional byproduct of that is like perhaps healthier deer herds. I think it's kind of akin to, lots of times we'll talk about the natural progression that many hunters go through, right? It's like, you just want to figure out how to kill a deer and then you want to kill a lot of deer. And then maybe you want to

hold out for a bigger deer. Many people go through that kind of trajectory, not that you have to. Then eventually you're older and you just want your kids to kill a deer and then you just want to see it. So then I think there's something maybe a little bit similar to that as people get introduced to QDM. Many people, no doubt about to your point, Steve, are drawn to it because they want to see bigger deer. They've seen it on TV or they've read about it. Man, it'd be awesome to see deer like that or to experience two big bucks fighting in front of me. Like that looks great, but I've never seen it in my neck of the woods. And then you find out like, oh, there's things that I can do here on my back 40 that might lead to better experiences like that. That definitely lures people in. What I have found from my own experience and like

talking to a lot of people that have taken a step into that world and explored it is that many people go in with that initial idea, but then realize there's this whole breadth and depth to quality deer management. So you get these people that are interested in trophy bucks that five years from now, though, are all of a sudden thinking about quality of the habitat, making sure that the doe harvest is in line, making sure that age structure and sex ratio and all these different things fall in place too. So you're kind of getting them in with that candy, that apple, but then there's a lot of byproducts, benefits that people identify with and follow through in the long term.

Yeah, I can see that it awakens you to this whole world. Hey, what was the what was the you said 82 percent of americans yeah the the most current data says that 82 percent of the american public approve of hunting deer and turkey and when you go into other species like elk and stuff it it drops not not significantly you can't drop that much for elk does it uh i think it's in the low 70s or something but there is a significant you know i think it's just because you know deer and turkey are in our backyards and yeah you know i saw a headline this morning that um 75 of the people in britain oppose quote cruel trophy hunting

so like you call them up and say, do you support cruel trophy hunting? And if that's not a lead... I want to hear from the 25% that said, yeah. I would like to hear what the dude is like, oh yeah, why not? You sure it's cruel, right? You sure it's cruel? Because if it's cruel, I can get behind it.

Which I think a better headline would be like, 25% of the people in Britain are sadistic. We have the same data, though. Before this, 82%, it was always that 78% of Americans approved hunting for food. If you put trophy in that question, 35%. Yeah. What do you think that means to people? I mean, I got all kinds of ideas what it means.

I think that they think it means that you didn't eat it. Yeah. Yeah, I think there's all kinds of negative connotations. It's kind of a, I mean, we've talked about it a thousand times, so I don't want to get into it, but it's pretty, that word needs to hire a PR agency. Well, I think it's important to also point out is what you're seeing on a lot of the hunting shows is trophy deer management. And we, of course, kind of taught a lot of people the science of quality deer management and they took it a step further and so we are and ignored other parts exactly and so we are we're often viewed as like trophy deer preachers but it's not it's people have taken our stuff

further than we you know our guidelines and and if that's what they want to do, all power to them. But we're not solely about that. You know, there is a traditional deer management, a quality deer management, and a trophy deer management. So you feel like you've got the lessons from your organization where there's like a radical fringe who took the lessons from your organization and went off campus? And how would one do that? Trophy deer management? Yeah. A lot of it. Where, where is one end and the other one start?

So trophy management is where, um, there are some similarities in that you're trying to, um, do the same three principles, but where the, where you take it the next, the next step. What, what does it remind me of the three? Uh, balance a deer herd within the habitat. Okay. Uh, have a balanced sex ratio and have deer in all age classes for both males and females. Yeah.

It's hard to argue those three principles. Yeah, you can't. Trophy management is keep deer within where the habitat can support and, in fact, exceed nutrition so that each individual animal has excess nutrition, not just, we try to optimize it with QDM where there's maximum hunting recreational opportunities where hunters get to see deer, but they also get to shoot deer. With trophy management, you're pushing deer populations to a point where there's lots of deer out there, but they still have lots of food. You're also protecting bucks until they are at the maximum size of antler growth,

which research shows is anywhere between five and seven years of age. All we say is past yearlings. Two and older is up for game where necessary. There's a lot of places in this country now, in our latest White Toe report, we have statistics tracking the percent of yearling bucks in the national harvest. And in 88, when we were formed, it was close to 65% of all bucks in the United States were one and a half in the harvest. And fast forward today, it's about 30, 33%. Kind of surprising to me. And it dropped. That's just whitetails. That's just white tails.

That's just white tails. That's not mule deer. Not mule deer. And that's plateaued. So only 35% of the bucks that get killed in this country are one and a half years old. Yeah, and you kind of can put up the mission accomplished sign. And in a lot of areas where there are deer that are now in all age classes, you don't need to protect the youngest age class anymore because by volunteerism, people shoot what they want and they're represented. Some people will shoot small deer and young deer. Some people

will shoot older deer. You don't have to protect the youngest age class at all stages. It's only when it's imbalanced. So trophy management is pushing bucks until they're at least five or older. That's not quality deer management. That's pushing deer until they're at least five or older. That's not quality deer management. That's pushing deer until – That's where – okay. That's where they have their largest set of antlers is between five and seven. There's multiple research that shows those are the ages where they hit the largest size. And then for the sex ratio part, you would actually want to skew it a little bit and have it more males to females to make sure you meet that habitat requirement.

Let's say there's a, let's say there's a fellow hypothetically and he manages a large ranch and he builds a dossier on all the deer that live there as much as he can. Um, and has candidates that he's selected for eventual harvest. And in order to not stress those bucks, kills all the bucks he can that aren't in the candidates for future harvest. With the end goal of every year he makes two giants and then he's got two giants coming up and then little ones that he's eyeballing based on whatever to get them up through what's that trophy management that's not qdm No. What's he doing wrong?

Well, I mean, but- Not wrong, but what would a QD, like what would be the difference there? He's just taking it to an extreme. I mean, he's- It's intensive management. That's, and biologically, the land is still healthy.

Yeah. So there's a lot of positives still happening with that. It's just- Is there a negative? It may be loss of opportunity for some folks. Yeah, but like an ecological negative. No.

Nope. Often they're actually over-harvesting does because, I mean, these old bucks, they don't want to be pestered by young deer. You know, if you create a void, that's where these old secluded bucks will pull up. And, you know, we're finding a lot from the research that, you know, the bucks that live longer don't travel as much. They might not be prolific breeders. You know, the deer get in trouble when they walk across roads or in front of our stands and stuff like that. So kind of these homebodies are the ones that are surviving, and especially to these super old age bucks. Oh, yeah. That's also been shown.

Sight fidelity or their likelihood to be in, uh, the same place and also have home ranges that shrink goes with age. So as a, as a buck ages, their home range doesn't expand. They actually shrink. Oh. It's like, when is he most likely to be most,

uh, when's the deer most likely to wander the most? In the fall. No, no, I mean in his age. Year and a half, two and a half. Oh yeah. Definitely in the younger age classes. They move around more.

Yeah. They, they're, they will every year, they will, their home range and core area shrinks a little bit. And there's research out there. I think it was done on the King's ranch, right? Um, two and a half year old age class did most of the breeding. Uh, even the year and a half old age class will still make up even in a trophy management situation where you're pushing deer into extreme you're still going to have yearling bucks out there and they still contribute about a third of the breeding to uh the general population

you can't stymie stymie that to the point where they're not part of it. So the doe, even when there's a big buck around, the doles let little bucks breed them. And sometimes it's multiple paternity. There's been cases where twins or triplets have different fathers. Sorry about different fathers. Yeah. How many bucks might a doe breed? Believe it or not, that's also been done in Texas. How many will he breed

no no how many box will one doe have sex with uh they will they will in a in a in a cycle and they will cycle they they will do it until she her estrus ends so it could potentially be multiple times no but how like has anyone ever paid attention to how many different bucks bred an individual doe? I don't know the record on that, but it's been at least three or four. At least three or four. Yeah, because there's those cases of triplets having three different fathers. I think it's 25% of all twins have different fathers. Yeah.

And I have twins, and that was one of the first things he told me. You know that 20% of twins are sired by different fathers. Yes, yes. And I have twins, and that was one of the first things he told me. You know that 20% of twins are sired by different fathers, right? Okay, so when you see a doe with two fawns, 25% of those pairs of fawns have different fathers. They're like half-brothers and sisters. Yes. Now, what about the opposite?

How many different does might a single buck breed in a given fall? Has that been looked at? Yeah. So that, again, not necessarily breeding occurrences, but in terms of contribution to the general population, out of Texas, Randy DeYoung out of Texas A&M Kingsville did some really interesting research that showed that at least on the scale that they were operating at, and it's a free range population, that the average buck sired no more than two or three fawns that made it to adulthood in their life. Oh, wow. In their life. In their life. Well, yeah, because that would be like replacement.

Yeah. That would be like enough to sustain a population. But again, you think about the misconceptions or myths that hunters were taught years ago was that bucks would have home ranges that would, you know, expand every year until they were the king of the forest. They would harem up their does much like elk and that they were contributing. The biggest antler bucks were just pumping out lots of offspring and that's how you get all these other older bucks.

Old slow walkers. Yeah. Slow, yeah. He's going to walk over there and get them all. Yeah. But that's not the case. But there has to be some advantage to being a big buck. Well, wasn't there some research that showed that large antlers were a sexual –

Chosen. They were chosen for a little bit. They were selected for a little bit more by does. And that was just a couple years ago. They were at our convention, actually. Does in a pen would actually – there were different bucks sectioned off in a pen with different size antlers, and the does would pick which one they had to mate with. Yeah, Mississippi State, Dan Marina, I think his last name was, did a study where they actually

were able to use captive deer. They cut their antlers off once hard and secured a attachment to the bottom of the antlers so that they could swap antlers out from individual bucks. No way. So they could make that buck who was big, small, and that buck who was small, big, antler-wise, and would pair them with receptive does. And the does generally chose bucks with larger antlers. Dude, it's shallow, man. Yeah.

Yeah. Size matters. Size matters. Shallow, really? Yeah. That's really fascinating. That's a good idea for a study. It was cool. That's really fascinating. That's a good idea for a study. It was cool.

It was really cool. Then the does were penned up, and they would literally back themselves in front of the buck of their choosing. It was really cool. I mean, from that perspective, I thought it was awesome. No, that's fascinating, man. That's a good idea. Hank mentioned it earlier. I mean, that's really what was—

Do you guys fund stuff like that? Yeah. We've been really concentrating, again, the big issues and what our vision is. What's the biggest, uh, you know, crises that are happening with deer and, and hunting and conservation is we're trying to shift a lot of that and we are towards chronic wasting disease, but we have funded a lot of research on habitat management, teaching people, um, things on fire, forest management. This latest magazine has a really cool study in there out of Tennessee looking about, you know, a lot of people think if you fertilize

oak trees, they're going to make more acorns. That's not true. So we've funded- Oh, is that right? Really? Yeah. We've funded a lot of research. Hank mentioned it earlier that, you know, think of us- Things with broader wildlife implications. All of that. And hunters working together, cooperatives. There's a really cool study that's going to be published soon about when you get neighbors working together and form cooperatives, which are huge in Michigan and Texas and many other places. The conservation of biodiversity that happens at the landscape scale is better and more intensive than places where people are not working together.

So that landscape level management. What's a cooperative look like? The average cooperative in the country is probably about 1,500 acres, anywhere between five and ten landowners working together. But it varies. There's ones out there that are 100,000 acres with hundreds of landowners. And it's a bunch of mugs who all agree to like a certain set of principles. Yeah, they meet preseason and say, you hunt your place, I'll hunt mine. But let's all agree to do this and we'll meet up next year and see how things are going.

In Michigan today. These are formal. They don't have to be. It could be as simple as that or we have some that are much more complicated. They meet quarterly even, but just some sort of agreement. The important part is that I guess the successful ones don't punish anybody. I mean, you're part of a really good co-op, so you can just speak to that, how yours works. Well, at a kind of a scale in Michigan, just to give you an idea of how popular they are. Michigan, there's an organization there that we partner with called Michigan United Conservation Clubs.

Oh, I know MUCC. Yeah, I used to be a member of that when I lived there because to sell fur at the Ravanna fur auction, you had to be a member of Michigan Trappers Association. And if you were a member of Michigan Trappers Association, by default, you were a member of Michigan Trappers Association, and if you were a member of Michigan Trappers Association, by default, you were a member of MUCC, and then you got the MUCC publication, Michigan Out of Doors,

right? Yeah, that's correct. Not Outdoors, but Out of Doors. Out of Doors. That's a good magazine, man. TV show like that, too. They're a great group. Was that Fred Trost's TV show? I believe that was Fred's, yeah. He was ahead of his time, man, because he'd have a wild game segment. It was cool. I remember as a kid.

He always liked everything people made. Yep. He was never like, ah, tastes like shit. He always was like, ah, that's great. He seemed nice. Yeah, and he would get deer racks, and to count the antlers, if he could hang his wedding ring on it, it counted. There you go.

Yeah. That's awesome. And he was running a metal ring. Nowadays, if he had a silicon ring, you'd have a lot more antlers, if he could hang his wedding ring on it, it counted. There you go. And if he was running a metal ring, nowadays, if he had a silicon ring, you'd have a lot more antlers on deer. Yeah, a lot more points. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

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But a metal ring was hard to hang on a little dinker. He'd have a lot of 30, 40 pointers coming off now. But, okay, MUCC. I took a little trip down memory lane there, man. That's okay. There's a person that works that's an MUCC employee, but QDMA, Pheasants Forever, we all fund part of that person's salary that works with cooperatives. And today there's over 325,000 acres in Michigan in private landowner cooperatives in that state, which now exceeds actually more than what the state game area acreage is. Yeah.

Now, what are some of the tenants? Let's just say you took some average cooperative. So, okay, just so people understand, we're talking about a bunch of different properties. They all border each other. Yep. It forms this contiguous block of land. It doesn't have to be contiguous. And it's like, it doesn't have to be contiguous.

No, it could be like a checkerboard effect. Checkerboard. Yeah. Now, a cooperative doesn't mean that you all get to go wherever you want. You hunt your own place, but you hunt under certain guidelines. Yeah. What would be an example of some of the guidelines they'd hunt under? Like, we're all going to agree to shoot a shitload of does.

That would be one. Yeah. Or we're all going to pass yearling bucks if they want to grow bucks into older age classes. And sometimes they advance that and individual properties go higher than others. Certainly habitat management, coordinating habitat management or even purchasing equipment together so they can get price deals on things because they're all in it together. Sharing stuff. Buying lime, fertilizer, you know. Really?

And then sharing information during the season and after. I found personally from being involved with some loose type cooperatives, just you kind of get the deer camp effect but expand it. So now you have multiple people that are sharing stories. I saw this buck. I saw that one too. And after the season, you kind of know what happened to different deer you might have seen or there's other folks to help you get in there and track a deer down. And then like, oh, I found this deer shed.

I mean, it just builds that community effect. So there's benefits both socially and ecologically. But everybody's still gaming for... Sure. Everyone's got their own self-serving sides too. Yeah, like you couldn't say to one dude, be like, we've decided that your place is the sanctuary. No one can hunt.

He's like, oh, man, again? That's pretty cool, though. And they don't formalize it, but people help them organize it. Yeah, we have employees in other states that do the same thing. In Alabama, we work with the Alabama Wildlife Federation, have an employee there. We got two guys in Missouri that are co-funded with the Missouri Department of Conservation. They pay part of the salary. We pay part of the salary.

But that's their jobs. And did you say you see increased biodiversity? By what measure? It's a thesis that hasn't been published yet. But looking at digitizing those properties and looking at the delineation, basically the straight line of where different habitat types meet or those vegetation types will meet and looking at nearby properties of similar scale and seeing if the diversity, at least from the sky, um, is the same. And then asking the hunters that hunt those co-ops questions about satisfaction. That's also been shown, um, in Michigan, there's a published study that shows, uh,

generally hunters that hunt in those situations have higher satisfaction up to like 70%. Really? Whereas hunters that are just hunting their own places, not working with their neighbors are generally 40% satisfied with the way that things are going in their state. So, and one of the strongest things that's kind of a unofficial by-product of them is state agencies being able to communicate something super effectively to a lot of landowners quickly and Michigan is a perfect example. When CWD hit in Michigan, the Michigan DNR was able to communicate with all of these

private landowners basically through this one employee and her contacts with all of those leaders of those co-ops where they needed sampling, where they needed to do town hall meetings. And they could have done that equally, but not as efficiently by just doing them in public places and announcing them. They were able to go and target certain places and collect more samples that way too. Yeah. The biodiversity thing on managed properties, I think is something people don't really

understand well, where people manage for what, like, I think, is something people don't really understand well. Where people manage for wild, like, you know, you can say, like, I manage for deer, but in some ways you're managing for wildlife. Earlier I mentioned a friend of mine from back home, Tim Zeldinrust. He's got a, he's got not a small property. I mean, like, by Western standards, it'd be small. But he's got a property that he manages for deer. You go out there in the wintertime, it's unbelievable. The amount of bird life oh yeah rabbits squirrels birds deer bobcats like it's unbelievable this is an area that's not

like that like a lot of this area is managed for maximum yield yeah maximum ag yield or it's just getting developed up we have that and it's all disturbed it's all disturbed like in that area it's all disturbed landscapes there's no like like it's it's a fiction to think that there's like a pristine right this is like west michigan man i mean people have been there and everything there's no old growth timber anywhere everything's been disturbed virtually everything's been tilled at some point absolutely everything's logged multiple times yeah there's no there's nothing like natural um isn't a thing there because you're not having like six you're not like forests aren't going through natural

succession you know what i'm saying he so he like he to go in and take a piece of ground and be like i'm gonna do wildlife on this piece of ground. Dude, like you could go in there with a blindfold on and just listen. You'd be like, there's something different about this place. Ryan just mentioned, we actually did some research. This was 10, at least years ago. But University of Georgia did a study that we funded where they went to properties that had been doing deer management and specifically had been putting in food plots because we wanted to see the impact of food plots in forested environments and did small mammal trapping and bird surveys and found that within a buffer zone around food plots where they were punching holes in the forest canopy and putting a food plot in where there hadn't been, that there

was higher species biodiversity in those areas compared to places that were just open or forested and not had been changed. Yeah. Because the amount of how varied the area is. Yeah. He's got like, he's got thickets, you know, hinge cut trees for bedding areas. He's got food plots around. He's done water stuff. And it's like this big mosaic of all these different kinds of, you know, hiding areas, feeding areas, trap. Like he pays attention to travel corridors,

allowing things to move around. And my God, does it make a difference? One of the biggest components that's missing is, is you either have straight disturbed land that's ag, or you have forests that are overmature, and they go through those stages of succession. And those earlier succession young forest stages, we call them a seer, seral stage one and two,

and a little bit of three, is what is declining throughout a lot of the country where we're not letting those things kind of revert. Because once they start happening, you get kind of the hair standing up in the back of your neck and people want to do it. They want to clean it up. They want to bush hog it. They want to make it look like something

that we visualize as nice and neat and clean. And there's a lot of generalist wildlife out there. Deer are one of them. They do well in cities. They do well in grasslands and forests. They live everywhere. But there's a lot of species of animals that are niche-specific that rely on very specific stages of succession. Like you wouldn't expect to find a gray squirrel, which relies on forests in the middle of a grassland Savannah because they

wouldn't be there. And you wouldn't find a Eastern meadowlark in the middle of a forest because they like grasses. So those younger forest succession stages where you have thickets and young trees coming in, um, hosts a very wide, uh, birth of animals. And a lot of deer hunters are getting involved in programs like CRP or they're hinge cutting or they're doing something because they want to hold deer on their properties. There's a lot of food benefits too, not just cover. And that's why you're seeing the response from animals like that. And that's a byproduct of hunting. The hunters are trying to do that for deer, but you're seeing the response in other ways.

Yeah. hunting the hunters are trying to do that for deer but you're seeing the response in other ways yeah it gets into the this thing we got earlier like the the intended and unintended consequences or it gets into this idea that that someone enters into that motivated by something that might be regarded as fairly superficial meaning man i wish i could have a big buck on my farm and then a decade down the road you have these other sets of realizations about what you've kind of accomplished from a wildlife perspective. And that you like create some kind of menagerie. Yeah, that's what Mark was saying earlier is that you get a lot of guys and gals that get involved in it for the first reason. But then they realize how much, you know, how much they enjoy the other part of it. Yeah.

That getting dirt on your fingernails and doing something and watching wildlife respond, it's an extremely satisfying thing to do. You guys have been involved in, maybe I'm wrong and I don't think I am. You've been involved in promoting states putting up antler restrictions. Talk about that a little bit. Like what kind of what the pros and cons are, what the public perception of that is. Why do some people, you know, why would one support it and why would one not like it? All right.

So we have a policy on antler restrictions where we want them to pass a three-part test in our eyes before we would support anything remotely close to that. The first would be, is it biologically needed? You know what, do you mind explaining antler restrictions for people real quick? No problem. Antler restrictions are a tool that state agencies or private land managers will use. Let's talk about just like government level, state agency level. To move deer into older age classes. They can be something that would be selective in harvest where you're saying only deer of a certain characteristic will be able to be shot.

Point restrictions. So if a deer has so many points, spread restrictions. If its antlers are so wide or wider, you can shoot them. Sometimes there's combination approaches. Sometimes it's if their antler beam lengths are long enough, and you can judge that by looking at the deer in a profile. Those are all antler restrictions where they would actually make selective harvest to the hunter who's choosing. There's other ways to actually move deer into older age classes too that are not part of that, which would be reducing total buck harvest by changing seasons, opening days, weapons, going from something that's easily, you know, like going from a modern firearm to a primitive weapon and all of those tools to say instead of $150,000 being killed in a state, let's kill $125,000 next year.

And we're automatically moving $25,000 more deer into the next age class. So that's another form of moving deer. It's more of a quota quota based thing than selective harvest. So there are antler restrictions in over 20 States today, either statewide, um, as the only buck you can shoot as a selection of, if you can kill a couple of bucks, maybe apply to one of those bucks that you can shoot or in smaller areas. Um, what's the most typical antler restriction? A point restriction because it's the most easily enforced. Yeah, like in Texas

there's some width ones. Yeah, Mississippi too. I've heard, I don't know if it's true or not, but we've had people write in and say that the width ones leave a lot of deer laying out in the woods. Because it's too hard for people to make a call. And they shoot them and find them.

You know, there's a valley we passed, we walked through a valley sheep hunting once hunting doll sheep you know in alaska there's a lot of areas where it's got to be a uh you know there's a width yeah requirement like a 50 inch requirement and we found two moose skulls in a valley and one was like a 47 and one was a 49 oh really, really? Yeah, we always thought like, man, that seems pretty weird. You know, I've heard that comment before, and I know that it's older data, but it's been proven to not be true. Not be true. Yeah, that people aren't just shooting deer and letting them lie.

Did they get up and put a tape measure on? They're like, ah. Yeah. Point restrictions are the most common, but they're not the best in terms of protecting deer because you can have deer – if the goal is to move deer from one to two, you can have bucks that are spikes to 10 points that are one years old. So a point restriction, there's a lot more slack in that, which is why some states are trying to push hunters either into- Is width more reliable? It's a more reliable predictor of age, but again, it's subjective because it's harder to judge the spread.

That's a good point about the point thing, man, because you could have anything from a spike to a little eight point. Absolutely. Be one and a half years old. And if it's a statewide restriction, there's a lot of variety there in terms of the productivity of a certain state. So you have parts of some states that are super productive. You know, the soils are there. There's a lot of ag and those deer are going to primarily produce larger sets of antlers

in their first age than ones that might be on lower productive areas. Yeah, I got you. So a lot of states will make sure, like in Pennsylvania, they have a split between the state and where part of the state, it's a four point on a side and part of it's three. But it just comes down to law enforcement. That's where the antler restrictions typically come to points. Point restrictions is because it's easier to judge. You should be able to count. And, uh,

you know, if a law enforcement officer catches up with you and checks your harvest and says, okay, that one doesn't have enough, um, or it does, it's easy for, you know, black and white in terms of what the law says. So the pros of antler point restrictions is B that it just allows more deer to pass and do, it allows more deer to pass through their year and a half old birthday. That is the goal. And move on. And the best case scenario, that first kind of rule of thumb that we use is, is it, is it biologically, is it created where it will protect the most yearling bucks, if that's the goal, but allow the maximum number of two and older to be able to be harvested. Some of them, there's enough slack there that it starts bleeding

into the two-year-old age class. We don't want that to happen. So you want to make sure that the antler restriction, if it's necessary, is protecting the most first age class, but no other ones. Have you guys ever supported or ever you heard anybody put an idea that if the goal is to have, if the goal is to have, um, deer, like you mentioned earlier, having deer of all ages. Yeah.

Why don't you do a deal where once they're two and a half, you can't shoot them anymore. Cause then you'd have a whole shitload of deer that were of all kinds of age classes. Like if you made it be that you can only shoot spikes and forks, that would achieve your goal there of all kinds of old bucks running around.

It would have the least palatability probably by hunters, but it's- Yeah, but I mean, if we're just talking about true core mission. Yeah. Like mission, like the mission isn't, the mission isn't that people shoot big giant bucks. The mission is that you have deer of all ages. Why do you want to kill them all once they're two and a half? Uh, just for maximum opportunity. Hunter satisfaction has to come into play somewhere. Yeah. So that's what that, that's, that just has to do with it. That would be untenable to people. Right. Well, yeah. I mean, a big part of managing wildlife is the hunter side of it. And that's

actually one of the other things that we look at with an antler restriction is, is it biologically protecting the right number of deer and allowing maximum harvest on the other one, do the majority of deer hunters support it? If deer hunters in that state or that region, or, you know, management unit don't support it, it's not worth doing. And I honestly, even before I go any further, we are fans of not mandating this stuff. Is that right? Oh yeah. In my home state, New York, we have a voluntary educational program that the state of New York launched three years ago. And it is showing a shift in deer harvest just by the state agency saying, if you'd like to see deer of older age classes, don't shoot young bucks. There's no law or restriction.

It's education. Oklahoma is probably the place that is the poster child for successful voluntary programs through education. They started a slogan in the early 2000s, hunters in the know let young bucks grow. You could buy bumper stickers or they gave them away. And that state routinely is in the top five in the country in terms of older bucks in their harvest, just by telling their hunters through education. And no legal point restriction. No.

Tell me if this is correct or add to this however you might want to, Matt, but would you say that it is true that QDMA is a strong advocate of educating on the benefits of having bucks across all age classes, but is certainly still in support of and encourage you know hunters to make whatever decision they might want if you want to shoot a year and a half old buck if whether you're 40 or four and if that makes you happy go for it yeah like you i don't think i've ever seen you guys say you can't shoot year and a half old bucks i think sometimes you get these people there are individuals who do that And I think kind of bastardize your message many times, but that's not what you guys ever mandate, right? Exactly right. There's been plenty of cases where we've opposed the antler restrictions

because they just, they either didn't make biological sense or the hunters didn't support it. So we just, no, we just won't do it there. Okay. I've actually spoken in front of commissions in places and said, we do not support this. Really? Yeah. You guys are much more, you'd much rather go with like education and voluntary. Absolutely. In layman's terms, I mean, who are we to tell anybody what to do with their hunting license? Especially in Pennsylvania. I mean, we have antler restrictions, but we could almost see ourselves getting behind with the hunter recruitment decline and such.

You know, lack of time is a big issue. We're not allowed to hunt on Sundays there. You have, you know, as you put it, mugs working six days a week. They can't buy a hunting license if you can't hunt Sunday. I mean, or if you get one day a week, it's pretty tough to tell somebody, hey, don't shoot that deer when you go out. You know, can you imagine when you were a kid saying that to your camp, you know, in Michigan, that definitely wouldn't have flown.

Do you guys push against blue laws? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Who don't? flown. Do you guys push against blue laws? Oh, yeah. Who don't? There's somebody out there. It blows my mind, man. I recently heard a rumor that when you ask yourself, who in the world would support a Sunday hunting band? I heard a rumor that a lot of outfitters support Sunday hunting band. I heard a rumor that like a lot of outfitters don't, a lot of outfitters support

Sunday hunting bands. And someone was like, because I don't know, the reason I think it's not true is because they're like, oh, we'd have to work on Sundays. One decides this or not. It's been an ongoing battle in Pennsylvania. And I just did a newspaper article a couple of weeks ago or an interview. I've debated the head of, you know, some of the people from the Farm Bureau

in Harrisburg, they have a big stronghold on that. And I mean, I've heard every reason under the sun. That they don't want to have people bother them on Sunday? I've heard everything from the deer need a break, you know, the deer need a break. They're like, man, am I getting tired of getting shot? You know, that I want to be able to enjoy my property. I mean, just, and some of the arguments I get that some of them, I'm just like, come on. I mean, and my argument is, especially they like to, one of the biggest arguments is the safety factor. And you're literally, it comes in Pennsylvania with the two week gun season, it comes down to one Sunday. You know, like you're literally only talking about one day here.

I mean, let's face it. Bow season, how many bow hunters are going to stumble across the hiker, you know what I mean, on Sunday on the state game lands or what have you? How many grouse hunters? How many squirrel hunters? I mean, from the safety standpoint, I don't think that makes a pretty good argument. Oh, yeah, the argument that Sundays are for hiking. Yeah, Sundays are for hiking yeah sundays are for hiking sunday for shooting yeah um yeah i've never participated in civil

disobedience well no i kind of did because i used to pick up roadkill uh here before it was legal and i did that with and i did it in a very brazen fashion hoping to go in front of a judge and be like, yes, yes, I found a deer dead on the side of the road and ate it. Like, yep, you got me. Lock me up. You got me. I could have left it there to rot. I could have left it there to rot, but I ate it. But I would imagine the Sunday hunting thing,

if I lived in a state where you couldn't Sunday hunt, I would try to organize. Civil disobedience. And just to have a big Sunday hunt. You know what's interesting? A big Sunday squirrel drive. Me growing up, not hunting on Sunday, I mean, growing up in Penn, it's just how it is.

I've never had the urge to hunt on Sunday. Like, I've hunted in other states. Well, I mean, I go to other states, but I guess in my mind, in Pennsylvania, I'm just like, oh, yeah, I can't do it here, so I have to go to Ohio or West Virginia or, you know, whatever. So you go hunt other people's stuff on sunday yeah i go to ohio yeah sure dude that's hilarious if you lived on the border and you just like get like a hunt licensing hunt sunday in the neighboring state that has to happen yeah where i grew up so i grew up six miles from the maryland border and three miles from the west virginia border

in pennsylvania and i just grew up hunting all three states. And I can hunt Sundays and the other two on private land in West Virginia. So, yeah, I mean, I just, yeah, I'll just hunt West Virginia now. That's just how it was. Yeah. And then do you think it's going to go away? I don't want to, we don't need to spend too much time on this. Yeah, I think eventually. Because they don't have any wins.

There's no state that used to be able to hunt on Sundays and now you can't. Well, it's further right now. Like they don't win anything. It's further no state that used to be able to hunt on Sundays, and now you can't. Well, it's further right now. They don't win anything. It's further right now than it's ever been to passing. So eventually it'll definitely go away, but just time will tell, I guess. We've only had Sunday hunting. Like in North Carolina, probably 10 years ago, you couldn't hunt on Sundays, and then they allowed archery hunting on private land. And now it's to some point I think you're not allowed to rifle hunt on public land on Sundays. And you can't hunt within 250 yards of a church or between 930 and 11 or something.

I mean, it's just absurd. Because they don't want the fears that people coming out of church. I guess it'll interrupt worship. Or people going into church will see something, a buck. And they'll be like, oh, never oh never mind i was gonna worship this morning well it's they grab their gun and run off into the woods well it's no different than you can't buy a drink between before noon or one i mean we have all those kind of blue laws in the south and do you think it sends people to church because you can't buy booze but there's this historic perception of

alcohol being like not a great thing. Right. Yeah. For a lot of people. But those same people I would think would view hunting as like a pretty wholesome activity. Here's an interesting fact you'll like. In Pennsylvania, you can't hunt deer on Sundays, but you can hunt crows and coyotes. Wow.

You're only allowed to hunt crows. Because there's a limit. Yeah. You're allowed to hunt crows on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday only. So you can't hunt crows Monday through Thursday. Coyotes are open game, man. Seven days a week, daylight or dark, it's free rain on them babies. But deer, no, we can't do it. It's just- Because they need a break. They need a break. They got to take Sunday off. You said there was a couple of arguments, though, that you could sort of relate to. What are the couple of ones where you go, yeah, I can kind of get that?

So, you know, somebody that opens their ground up to the public, you know, hey, Sunday, a farmer maybe, just give me a day to feed the cows and get the horses moved around, et cetera, et cetera. I can almost see that. My argument against that is it's your property. Just say no, cetera, et cetera. I can almost see that. My argument against that is, it's your property. Just say no, honey, on Sunday. That's where I don't understand it because the argument that guides don't want to, it's like you still have some level of autonomy in life. I mean, you make decisions. Right. to i used to trap fox on a mennonite property and he wouldn't let you check on saturday

because they kept the historic sabbath of sundown i think sundown friday to sundown saturday could be getting something's wrong but it was it was not sunday it wasn't sunday it was like they it was i can't remember what which i feel like they were Mennonite. But anyhow, sundown Friday, sundown Saturday was their Sabbath. He was like, I don't want you checking traps on my property during the Sabbath, which meant on Friday you'd have to go pull because you didn't want to leave them out. You'd have to go pull and then reset on Sunday. And there was no law saying this.

It was just the guy was pretty clear about what he wanted going down on his property. Right. And it wasn't like I didn't try to debate him on it. Right. Totally. Yeah. Well, if you look at it my way, you're just like, cool, man. Got it. I won't be out here on Saturday.

Back to point restrictions. What are the cons? Like, okay, you've solved the question that you guys like categorically think that every state should adopt a mandatory plant restriction. That's not true. No, and in fact, if you look at the data that we talked about in the 80s, there was a lot of states that had an imbalance in buck age structure. But that doesn't exist today. A lot of states have deer that represent two and three and older in their naturally occurring deer populations. They're in the harvest. So that's – there are definitely small sections of states and probably even in some cases whole states where a significant part of the harvest is still young bucks, but that's not the case as it was, you know, 25 years ago. So we don't need to. Hunters have adopted this philosophy.

One of the things that also shows where people are really thinking about quality deer management differently is the general acceptance of shooting does. It took until 1999 was the first year nationally that hunters in the United States killed more does than bucks. So that was the first time in history that that happened. But talk about what that's a vast, because that's a defendable, we laugh about it now, but talk about what drove that reluctance to kill does. Was the concept that you don't shoot does because that's what we were taught growing up. Because there weren't any damn deer. Because there weren't any deer. But at the point of the mid-70s and going into the 80s, deer were almost at the highest point they'd ever been.

And definitely by later in that decade, it was happening. Yeah, but I guess the point being, once upon a time, that mentality was necessary. Oh, it was, yeah. Like when you had, I was looking at this chart that showed like what counties in, again, Michigan. I just know it because it's my home state. But showing like every, it was sort of like by five-year increments or something, what counties you were allowed to hunt deer in. Yeah. Going back into the early 1900s.

Yeah. I mean, there were times when you i mean there were times when you there were times when you were hunting just one little dinky corner michigan yeah and the rest of it wasn't even open to deer hunting and so that drove this thing like if we're gonna if we want to hunt deer at all um we need to grow deer population so you can imagine you'd sort of engender this great reluctance on the part of hunters to want to grow the herd. To that end. And now we act like it's like, oh, they're so, not that you act this way,

but people perceive it like that it was just this macho, that everyone was too macho to kill does, but it was a really important thing at a time to not kill does. Yeah. Because there was no deer. So to that end, quality deer management and really any game management should be site-specific. It should be at the property or management unit scale where you're looking at the population and temporally, what does it look like right now and where do we need to go?

That's what a management plan is. When some state writes a statewide management plan or a individual property owner gets somebody to come and either through federal assistance or has a private consultant write them a management plan, they should say, okay, here's the current inventory. This is what it looks like, the habitat, the deer, whatever, what other animal it is. And our goal is to get to B, point B on the path within three to five years. But then you have to reevaluate not only annually, but at the end of that time period and say, okay, what direction do we go now? It's like accepting, you know, you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater in terms of just because it was good once, it's always going to be good. And QDM has been definitely thrown into that bathwater of we're always going to tell people to shoot older bucks and not shoot younger bucks. That's not the

case. Or that you always have to shoot does. That's not the case. It's really site-specific and time-specific. So you could picture coming into a place and seeing a situation where you're like, man, don't shoot any does. Oh yeah. So where I live in New York, I'm on kind of the foothills of the Adirondacks. Okay. And there are definitely places north of me that have low deer density. There are parts across many places in the country where the productivity of the land is not quite that good. And you would not need to shoot any does because it just doesn't sustain it. Yeah, I got you. that good and you would not need to shoot any does because it just doesn't sustain it. Yeah.

We got you. Broad, broad pieces of, uh, Northern New England, the White Mountain National Forest, Green Mountains, Adirondacks, those places, there's in some places, no doe season. Just cause there's. It's not necessary. Yeah. And people would like to see, uh, hunters would

like to see more of them on the ground. Yeah. I mean, so in those cases, where would we go and talk to a hunter about adopting QDM? In those cases, they might want to improve the habitat and say, okay, maybe you can build the deer population up a little bit. That would be a way to abstain from shooting does

because that's what's needed. What's QDMA's relationship with the agricultural community and um i hear about this but i don't know i was gonna say the automobile insurance industry but i've had other people in your world like in your community say that the automobile insurance industry isn't really a main driver in trying to lower deer numbers. Like that it's kind of a fiction, which I've always been told was true. They don't want to pay out so many claims on people crashing into deer. And so they're one of the voices that we need to kill deer, kill deer, kill deer.

And in the agricultural communities, it's indisputable. I don't mean to lump them all together, but there are components of the ag community that generally advocate on we would like to see lower deer numbers and have and lessen crop damage because we lose so much food to yeah uh well in terms of the the uh insurance companies that's generally that is a falsehood like you don't get calls from them every day being like by god no yeah yeah i mean i grew up oh you hear that i grew up hearing that but it's i've had a lot of people say like they're just not big players in deer management yeah like i always say like i just want to be part of that meeting where somebody's writing the check and handing it over like hey shoot more deer this year yeah here's a hundred thousand dollars you

really never heard of it never i mean i've heard those stories no i'm saying but you never heard any like substantiation that, like, Allstate is calling up the Fish and Game Agency being like, you boys better kill all the deer. I mean, put it this way. I've heard it for probably 25-plus years. I've heard that story, and I've never heard of a case where, like, it's never been substantiated.

Like, nobody's ever. I would feel like by this point, 30 years down the road, somebody would be like, you know what, I'm going to blow the whistle on this. This is what I did. You know who called me was. And Matt, you have insight in other people than the org, like KIPP have worked for state game agencies, right? So you've seen the inside the belly of the beast, and that's just not happening, right? No, yeah, that's true. Are you guys being paid off and you're trying to cover it up?

Well, you know, it's funny, the parallel there is the, I'm sure we'll get into chronic wasting disease a little bit, but the thought that states are making money off of chronic wasting disease, it's a money- How do you make money off it? You can't, but that is a misconception- Conspiracy theory out there. That people say that they can't, they're spending money on it, but the same thing with the insurance companies is how are you making money off of that? I mean, it just. Making money on CWD? So the theory there, what some of these.

I like it. I just can't. I'm not tracking. They're saying that this, like they're getting all this funding appropriated to CWD management that's lining the pockets or keeping these guys in business. Oh, is that right? Yeah. CWD turns into new pool. Yeah.

I noticed all them fishing game boys got them new trucks. Nice trucks. New campers. Putting in new landscapes. They got a bunch of R-Pod campers. There's been recent... New R-Pods. There's been a couple of recent bills trying to get new funding appropriated to research and stuff, which seems like a universal, yeah, absolutely.

Like, let's support that. Even if you don't think CWD is a big deal, even for those people, you should want that funding because it's going to help answer the questions. Regardless, though, those guys, I'm seeing people post about it online. Like, yeah, of course, they're trying to get more money. That's how all these guys are getting rich. Just more and more money put into it. And it's crazy. It's just the general population of hunters themselves and i feel like they seek us

out when we're somewhere but my two favorite conspiracy type theories are rattlesnakes being dropped out of helicopters to eat the turkey eggs i hear that one yeah what is that what i don't what's that one i don't know and they don't because they don't like turkeys they don't like turkeys i guess yeah and then turkeys, I guess. Yeah. And then, so you get a bunch of rattlers and load them into a chopper and throw them out. No one will eat the eggs. Yeah.

That. Have you heard that one? No, no, I haven't. I'm sorry. I have heard it, but I love like how roundabout,

like if you task someone and you're like, dude, um, I need you to lower for whatever the hell reason I need you to lower turkey numbers and this guy goes and he's like okay let me formulate a plan. And this is what he comes up with. And the dude's like

okay here's how I'm spending the money. You know what a rattlesnake is right? It's so funny with these things like how bad if you really did come to a snake is right yeah so like it's so funny like with these things like how bad yeah you know i mean if you really did come to it if you really did come to a group of wildlife professionals and said i want to lower turkey numbers i just don't think that they would that that would be

the proposal right i feel like it'd be like a different plan yeah and then the next one is the introduction of coyotes. And I just, I get that one a ton. And I just got, my favorite was this past fall. A guy cornered me in a gas station, like 4.30 in the morning. I was going. How does he know? Because he had a QDMA shirt?

No, he just knew me from around town. I was going bow hunting and he was going bow hunting. And he actually worked in the coal mine in southwestern pennsylvania and in their break room one of his buddies knew a guy this is how it went his buddy knew a guy who was at the same gas station we were getting coffee you know three weeks prior and there was a guy coming from missouri with a trailer load of coyotes said he was working for the game commission and and i'm like come on. You know, that type of deal.

He's like, he has never lied to me before. Why would he start now? You know, that type of deal. And I'm like, you don't even argue. I'm just like, I can't even argue that, okay? Like, what am I going to do? I mean, their mind's made up, but I have heard this. And he thought that they were, just real quick, bringing in coyotes to kill all the deer, presumably.

Yes. With what goal? I don't know. That's another thing. I mean, if you know anything about business and the amount of money that, I'm talking Pennsylvania, that the whitetail deer bring to the bottom line, the last thing you do is want less of them from a state agency standpoint. But even when you you make that logic it's like nope nope nope they want the deer well no the state agencies are

just a bunch of greenies and they don't want anybody hunting anymore they're gonna bring in a bunch of predators that must be so that i could see that no i could see that like line of thinking it was like our famous one that we talked about too much. Remember the one that the Clintons. The Clintons, yeah. The Clintons. That's my favorite. We covered this so often, but I'll say it again. The Clintons wanted wolves back because they'd kill all the animals

and no one would have any occasion to hunt anymore. Therefore, it would destroy the firearm industry, which is another roundabout play. But yeah, conspiracy theories are fun, man. They are fun. We should get on to something that's more serviceable. Okay, I got one question. I do want to talk about CWD for a while. But here's my question.

And you kind of already answered it because you do feel an obligation to, like as an organization, you feel an obligation to help people achieve what they want. Right. Because you want hunters to be engaged, involved, happy. But let's say you knew some thing. Okay. say you knew some truth that uh that you knew some truth where the best thing for deer like that the really the best thing for deer was in opposition to what hunters wanted and it was turned out that some unforeseen thing like big bucks were detrimental to wildlife in America for whatever reason. I don't know what it is. How would you weigh that out? That would be a difficult

conversation because we need hunters. Yeah. I mean, we will always stand behind the science and ultimately we would end up trying to educate hunters about what's right. But I don't, okay. That brings over to, what is that? I say that all the time too, but like, what does that mean to you to stand behind the science? Oh, look at the preponderance of evidence that's out there. Evidence-based science that says what is beneficial to the environment? What is good for deer? Yeah.

That's what I'm getting at. So let's say they're what, that's what informs my hypothetical. Okay. And it's a goofy hypothetical. I have an example though of this. Okay. And it's a goofy hypothetical. I have an example, though, of this. Okay. And it's CWD related. Yeah.

But one of the questions. I'm doing shrewd hosting. Because I'm getting into CWD. Am I jumping the gun or are we okay? No, no, go ahead. Do it for me. So some people are saying that you should not allow younger age class bucks to advance to older age classes in CWD management zones. Theory being that that would be detrimental and lead to the spread further, et cetera, et cetera.

So how do you, as QDMA, tackle that? Yeah, great job. But earlier, what was interesting is how they decreased their home range. Yes, which is, yeah, great point. Because my buddy, this is his burning question. Yes. His burning issue is he feels, and he used to practice QDM. I know your buddy.

You personally? I think so. Oh, yeah. He used to practice QDM, but now he's concerned about where they have 25% prevalence. Yeah. I think in summary it's 50% prevalence in box spots, which is disturbing to him. Oh, yeah.

And so now, his whole focus has shifted. The way he sort of views everything, and he was an early adopter and really big into QDM. Yeah.

I don't know if he used it. I don't know if he used that term. No, he's got QDM posters hanging all over his house and shit but anyhow his whole focus is shift now where he thinks the primary concern right now is stopping cwd spread so and he feels that that a lot of the qdm practices are anathema to slowing the spread of cwd because bucks have higher prevalence and travel more. Good word, by the way.

Which one? Anathema. You like that one? Yeah, that was good. I did too. That was powerful. Okay. That means against.

Thanks for that. So Mark's asking about that specific thing. We, QDMA, does not employ anybody that's a CWD expert, but we are. Why not? God, it seems like it'd be like the high priority. I mean, I went to school for wildlife. I'm not a disease expert. You guys don't have like a epidemiologist, like a deer epidemiologist? Not on staff.

We align with the people that are the experts. We try to bring that. Oh, yeah. Whether they work for you or not, you're in dialogue. Absolutely. And in fact, the person you're talking about, we're in dialogue with him. We're on an advisory committee with about 30 other people and trying to push the CWD message across many different platforms. You know, he's staying at my house right now.

Oh, is he? Yeah. He should have been here. Yeah. He's fishing. He's on a fishing vacation. We should be fishing. Yeah.

Geez. He would have been good to include. Absolutely. Anyways. Anyway. He's actually sussing out my garden project when I left him, but, uh, go on. Okay. So Mark, Mark's question about that point of CWD, there is AFWA, the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, put out in late 18 best management practices that covers everything from surveillance to monitoring to management, all of these different strategies.

We are in agreement with all of those things and even to the point of pushing deer into older age classes to a point. Some of the science is a little quirky behind that. I kind of got lost for a minute. Okay. Back up. Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies put out a best management practices for all states. And that's like all the 50 state game management agencies. Yes.

They generate best practices for themselves. Yeah, for the agencies on how to communicate to the public, how to best serve. And it's a living document. It's changing all the time. It's a really good document. And it covers the whole gamut of game management. Of CWD. Oh, I see. I see. Okay. So I thought you meant that CWD is a part of this broader package. No, it's a CWD specific document.

I understand now. And looking at what are the biggest risks, where is CWD spreading the fastest? We're all in general agreement that is moving live deer and moving deer parts. Like if you're a hunter and you shoot a deer that is in a CWD area and moving the entire carcass either home or you're crossing boundaries where it doesn't exist. Has that's happened for sure? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And they've traced the movement to carcasses. I know they've traced movement to moving captive cervids.

They have done that. I thought you meant have they actually ever found somebody moving a dead deer? No, I mean has there ever been a CWD outbreak that was somehow traceable to the movement of a deer's carcass? There's an assumption in one place. I don't know if it's been proven, but you're nodding your head, Hank. Do you know? No, I don't know if it's proven, but it's definitely assumed that some taxidermist had thrown out some deer parts that had been brought to them that they think created-

That created an outbreak. Yeah. Okay. So those are the biggest factors that we see. More so than just deer moving. Yeah, definitely. More so because deer don't, they do disperse. We didn't talk about dispersal, but at younger ages, deer will leave where they're born and set up a new home range. That has been a concern with CWD from a lot of folks are thinking about when

deer disperse, they're carrying that with them. You can't stop dispersal. It's natural. And one of the thoughts on antler restrictions and that thought process of removing antler restrictions in cases where deer dispersal might be moving the disease faster, that can be argued. It's confusing for hunters because some states remove them and some states don't. Pennsylvania is a good example where they didn't remove antler restrictions. They got CWD and said that's not going to solve the problem because the majority, in fact, almost all of deer dispersal occurs before the deer is old enough to actually carry the disease. So deer are moving from when they're between 18 months or so of age and 20 months of age, they're moving to a new place. Anyway, dispersal is one of those factors that is looked at, but also deer movement outside of their home range.

Yes, we talked about their home range shrinking as they get older. Yeah. But deer also do something called excursions. That's probably the bigger culprit where deer will leave where they are in the fall and go out on these one to three mile excursions looking for breeding opportunities and then they return. That may also be moving the disease. Our thought process originally is some of the original research that came out was formed by models. One of the papers, Popov et al., looked at disease transmission of chronic wasting disease through bucks and had some pretty quirky assumptions in there. They assumed that 80% of all bucks would be harvested annually to be able to

limit that. That was one of those things that we didn't think was quite realistic. So some of the assumptions were a little bit quirky, but originally we set a rule and kind of our policy on managing hunters and managing CWD in those areas where CWD exists is that don't push deer to advance age structures of like four or older, which would be trophy management, but continue harvesting deer at least at two or three and excel that harvest at that point. I have heard some cases though in the West and Colorado where they're showing evidence of some of the management units, where some of that has been shown to be the case where in places where they're managing for mature bucks, they are seeing a higher prevalence rate existing. Oh, really?

Yeah. So that is starting to show up. And we at QDMA, we do base it on science and we continually review our policies and we're going through a pretty thorough review right now. It wouldn't shock me if at some point we have to revamp that. And in places where CWD exists, we say, you know what? Start shooting bucks at any age instead of waiting until they're two or older. Our contention there has always been you need hunters to be able to manage deer. And in places where we don't have good science on it, a lot of this was based on modeling,

not on real world scenarios before the Colorado examples popped up. We were talking a bit to hunters and saying, if we don't have hunters out there regulating the deer populations, we're kind of at a loss. You can look at Wisconsin as a perfect example of that where they lost a lot of hunter support. And with CWD management and a lot of people backed off and now the prevalence rate in that state has hit in some places 50%. Yeah. The disease actually makes it – it's interesting. Somewhere around 1% prevalence, the disease goes from a density-dependent disease to a frequency-dependent, which in essence means it doesn't matter how many animals are on the landscape. It's the prevalence rate that really is impactful of how quickly it spreads. Explain that. diseases, instead of trying to regulate deer population numbers, you need to start monitoring

how much interaction those deer have with each other through movements, through congregations, and other things. So in those places where they're outlawing things like mineral blocks, feed, those all make a lot of sense. They do. They do, yes. Because in those places, that's where they're concentrating deer, and they're going to be dispersing the misfolded proteins, they're called prions, into the environment, and other deer are going to contract that. So we're fully supportive of that. You know, Ted Nugent makes the point that you can't stop deer from – all they do is walk around and smell each other, rub noses, rub up against each other, that they're gregarious. And that you can't, you're not going to prevent deer on deer contact. He like describes them as the lickingest, rubbingest things on the planet.

Wouldn't you say though that mineral licks or baiting stations, that is just a disproportionately high concentration of that kind of stuff. It is. So yes, there's going to be interaction, there's going to be contact, but if we can at least minimize those super high concentration zones, we're not going to get rid of it all. But maybe, maybe it's a 3% better situation and we should take a 3% better situation. Yeah. And that's probably going back to the discussion about telling hunters to shoot young bucks or not in those cases. A lot of hunters have adopted the QDM concept, and really what folks are saying is if we can educate the masses like we did 25 years ago, maybe we can push people to shooting young bucks again to reduce that disease. But we've looked at it pretty objectively and felt like if you don't have hunters managing the population, and luckily, the disease is a very serious thing. But luckily, it's still in a small, relatively amount of the country. Yeah. What percentage of the country in a landmass sense has CWD? I think the last statistic, it's a little old, but it was about 8% of counties have it in the country.

And then how bad – could it get to 100%? It could, yes. How long do you think it would take? Well, if you look at – I know we're way into speculation now. you look at a snapshot of 10 years ago of the USGS puts out a map of it, it has probably expanded three times the size since 2010 and where it was in the US and Canada. The only thing I care about, I only care about one aspect of CWD is the risk of human transmission. That is the biggest risk.

That's really all I care about. If not, it's just like another thing that kills deer and there's tons of stuff that kills deer. Yeah. Except for probably a secondary thing to really worry about is in those places where it gets, once it gets to about 5% prevalent, it's basically hard to stop. You can control it when it's before that. That's what a lot of states have been shown. Comparing Wisconsin to Illinois is a standard thing a lot of states have been shown. Comparing Wisconsin to Illinois is a standard thing a lot of experts look at. They've managed the same way. They've had it about the same amount of time, but their management strategies changed at one point. And Illinois today continues to have about a 1% prevalence, whereas Wisconsin in some places,

it's 40% and 50% within the herd. And what did they maybe do differently? In Illinois, the state has always maintained a, when it's found in a new place, go in with a targeted removal. A lot of hunters hear that and they think deer eradication, which is not the case. It is you go in and you remove a certain percentage of the deer to test and sample to see how prevalent it is. Not eliminating all deer, but removing a percentage of it to be able to not only surveil and see how prevalent it is, but also to knock the deer density back so that the population is huntable in the future, but also keeping prevalence at bay. And since, you know, the 2000s, Illinois has kept it around 1%.

By going into outbreak areas and shooting a lot of deer. In the beginning. Not every year. They do it at the very beginning. They shoot a lot of deer, they reduce the deer density, and they're trying to maintain that deer density. So, there's always deer in those places. And then they manage it from further on by hunters. By hunters, yeah. Hunting license cells. So they come in and they say, okay, you know, whatever, we want to take 200 deer out of here.

And they do that. And then the years after that, they adjust hunter numbers, hunting license cells, doe allocations, and manage that with tags. Yeah. But it's managed by hunters after that. And they start at an 07, I believe, and it's been at a one percent since then yeah i'm not sure the exact year but in wisconsin uh they've had it a long time and in the the areas that have it had have had it the longest um they lost a lot of hunter and landowner support based on going in and trying to remove a lot of deer with the help of hunters, asking hunters to do certain things.

But they basically lost trust in a lot of those landowners. And a lot of landowners just held their hands up and said, you know, we're not going to allow access anymore. We're not going to shoot these deer anymore. And it started to climb. And then there were a lot of political influences in terms of how the state started managing it. And in some cases, it's been kind of a, let's watch it and monitor it and see how it reacts. And that is now really exacerbated and there's a lot of issues. So the other thing I would worry about besides jumping the species, is in those places where it starts reaching above 5% prevalence, it's an always fatal disease.

Yeah. In those cases, we will lose deer. Deer populations will decline. It's been shown in Wyoming, Colorado, and Wisconsin that once the eagle is above 20%, it's a trend going downwards and it's going to be hard to bring that population back up at any point. Got you. And it's always going to be in the environment. So whenever a new deer immigrates into that area, it will likely contract it. And born and all those things. Yeah.

I know this isn't your area of expertise, but do you feel like in 10 years, in the people you speak to, is there any path toward us knowing for certain what the disease's capabilities are in terms of that it would jump to cattle, that it would jump to sheep, that it would jump to sheep, that it would jump to humans? Will someone ever say like, you know what, turns out it can't? I don't think anybody will say that because it's part of the family of TSEs and other TSEs that's transmissible spondyform encephalopathies, um, have, have done that. And the more interactions it has with those other animals and humans, every case is a possibility where it could, uh, they, they are, um, changing over time.

Yeah. Diseases change. So as it grows, it, it is possible. But right now, there's research out of Colorado that says it won't jump to cows, to livestock. And the best science out there that we – there's conflicting evidence, but the best science is also saying that the species barriers to humans is pretty strong, that it likely won't jump. Yeah, and you remember they came out with that – some guy comes out, some people out of Canada like oh we gave it to a monkey yeah the macaw thing and it turned out not being true

dude stories like that pick up a lot more traction than the retraction oh fake news very true that's faster than real news

not even fake news just like a rattlesnake that's a study that was done but it wasn't even peer reviewed and there's some

question in terms of how it was performed. Yeah. And the sample size is pretty small. But there's another study that's out of the National Health Institute out of Colorado that used the same kind of monkey and used a lot more of them. It was about a 15-year study, and they showed that the species barriers are pretty strong. So right now the evidence is leading towards it being a strong species barrier. But I don't know if anybody would say it's never going to. There's another cool opportunity.

You might know it. I think it's like New York or PA, but somebody at like a wild game dinner later realized that they served a CWD-positive deer to like a group of a couple hundred people. It was New York. They got like over 100 people they're tracking. Yeah. They've been tracking them group of a couple hundred people. It was New York. They got like over 100 people they're tracking. Yeah. They've been tracking them for a decade now. Yeah. It was New York and there was, it was like 200 people.

And 100 and some submitted, right? Yeah. They submitted and they've been looking at it for a long time and haven't seen it. Yeah. You know, do you find that the, I find that most, like, this gets a little complicated. The other day I was asking Mark, what is a CWD denier nowadays? Because a CWD denier a couple years ago was someone who's like, it's make-believe. Yeah.

But now a CWD denier doesn't deny CWD. They're just like, it's not a big deal. Like, you're running out of people who, you're running out of CWD deniers who think it's make-believe. Now they're like, oh no, it's for real, but don't worry about it. I have found, and this, I hope they're right. I really root.

I root every day for CWD deniers to be right. I can't wait for them to be right and that I was wrong and I'll be the first guy to go out and buy them a beer. and that I was wrong. And I'll be like, I'll be the first guy to go out and, you know, buy them a beer. Like, I hope they're right. I just don't know that they are. And I kind of think they're not.

But I have found that most of your big, like, don't worry about CWD people tend to be from the deer industry. Yeah. Captive deer industry. Is that what you mean? Yeah. Yeah. Or no.

No, not just that. Like, baiting. Yeah. No, not just that, like baiting. Yeah. Supplements. Like they, they tend to have a connection. A vested interest. Yes.

Yeah. They tend to have a connection to, um, selling shit that you feed a deer or move buying and selling deer and trading deer and breeding deer. And is that, do you find that that's true? We do find that that's true. And we held a special press conference at ATA this year about CWD

and tried to get as many of the people in the industry there to that press conference to talk about that. And our CEO went on record of saying almost that exact thing at that press conference. Yeah. Um, you know, I, I don't, I understand the, the thought process there because what, what is hunting? I mean, it is so tied to nostalgia and tradition and all of these good thoughts and good things that have happened to a lot of us.

And you, you, the whole, you said the word hope. I hope it's not going to be the case too, but the majority, a vast majority of people know that it's a serious disease. And we as hunters, talking to the general listener here, we have to align with that. We have to realize that it is serious and we need to do our part. Yeah. And the other thing about the, like, again, I don't even know what a CW denier is anymore. But I would think that anyone would be real happy about funding. Because if you're convinced that it's not a big deal, I would think that you'd be very eager to see this borne out by the academic community. Exactly.

That they would look and, but they would say that they want it to, I think they would tell you that they wanted to be a big deal. My new thing with CWD deniers is I want to get a bunch of positive deer and make, and get a dozen or so of them and make a batch of burger. And I'm even going to grind some spinal cord into that blend. See if I'll eat it. And then I'll make them a patty. And I'm going to fry that patty. And I'm going to say, once you eat that burger,

we'll talk. But if you won't eat that burger, I don't want to talk. That'd be good. That's a good litmus test. Because if I see the slightest, Yanni brought up, no, he's got to bring in his kid.

Yeah. No, it was you. I said that. Mark's like, no, he's got to bring in his kid. The minute your, it may be you. I said that. Mark's like, no, he's got to bring in his kid. The minute your kid eats that burger, we'll talk about CWD. And if you tell your kid to eat it and he eats it, I'll be like, okay, this dude's a true believer. Now I want to hear what he has to say.

Yeah. I don't know. It'd be a tough burger to eat, man. I don't know if there's anybody out there willing to do that. It'd be a tough burger. Yeah, and we agree that there are less of those people, thankfully. Unfortunately, they have a pretty big platform, the detractors of how serious it is. And we just need more folks out there talking about the seriousness of it. And luckily, there's been some pretty good press about CWD to the general public through some of the larger publications like the Post.

Yeah, but there's been some hysterical. There has been some hysterical. As much as you want people to know and take it seriously, the minutes, this whole zombie deer, it winds up being counterproductive, man. It's that old adage, like, the only thing worse than not being written about is being written about. Do you guys have a blanket policy on bait and deer? Uh, we do. Um, and that's also being looked at right now, but the, the policy on. I'm, I'm, I'm beyond CWD now. Yeah. On baiting deer is in places where it's legal and it's already there. Um, we are supportive of it, but we are definitely,

we are not supportive of introducing it into new places. No kidding. Yeah, we are. What's the thinking there? Because the general public does not like baiting deer. Huh. Yeah, and we want support for hunting. And, you know, if it's been there traditionally

and a lot of hunters, that's part of the way they hunt instead of removing opportunity. Now, again, we also have thought processes with diseases, you know, so if something like chronic wasting disease pops up in there, we would support the state agency in removing that. Yeah. That's a part of game management that I like. And I learned the principle from my brother who lives in Alaska where they look look at there's a prevalent they put a lot of weight on traditional use practices which i like yeah um that's what the hunters know right yeah it's like it's kind of like uh if you have like what's regarded as a successful system and you're not you know you're not imperiling species yeah and there's a thing

that has worked and it's how people have behaved and it's kind of like woven into the culture that you when it comes to management decisions you prioritize traditional use practices um like generally i think it's like a pretty it's an interesting way of looking at it and i generally find that yeah like i support that because for instance like you can't you've never been able to bait bears in montana yeah um i i probably like i wouldn't support a motion to begin it but in places where you can bait i actively resist efforts to remove the right yeah but that doesn't mean i want to like introduce it in places where you cannot you know just like like honoring traditional use practices and what sort of things have worked for hunters yeah um what are the biggest uh yanni what do you got right now

i'd like to touch on uh what they're doing to get some for the recruitment i watched some videos of the qdma put out and uh getting some new hunters on board if we have time for that oh yeah go ahead do it uh well hey i think that's hanks forte right yep that would be me i don't know where to start man um crossbows seems like you guys are putting new crossbows in all the new hunters' hands. You guys like crossbows a lot? You guys love crossbows? I love crossbows. That's all you think people should be able to hunt with?

No, no, no. Here we go. All right. So, I mean, our goal is to create hunters. It's not, you know, there have been recruitment programs in this country for decades and decades and decades, and really none of them have been working well. We've focused on the kids of traditional hunters, you know, on down the gamut. It's really hard to kind of get into these new audiences. And that's what we've been doing, what you saw. We're about to release a video.

It's kind of a summary of our field of fork in Athens last year. But we set out, you know, with this R3 movement, recruit, retain, reactivate. We're trying to stem the tide of declining hunting. And the cool thing about R3, what I love, it's to increase hunting participation, but also to increase societal acceptance of hunting. I think that's really big. And you all touch on that a lot. That's my brother's view, that he wishes he was the only guy that hunted, but he had 100% public support. Yeah. And, you know, like you've touched, I always credit you on venison diplomacy.

I don't know if that's correct, but, you know, I mean, like, that's really what we're doing. But we realized that the most efficient audience to create a hunter is an adult. And the highest societal approval of hunting is food. So a buddy of mine, a colleague, Charles Evans, he's a Georgia R3 coordinator, and I sat on his steering committee one day. We were having lunch, and we're like, I had this idea to do like a game breakdown at our local farmer's market because they were doing chef demonstrations. And I just couldn't get my schedule to work, and I didn't feel like I was the expert to break down a deer in front of a group of people at that point in my life.

But, you know, fast forward a year, I was like, hey, man, let's just go set up a booth at the farmer's market and offer samples of venison and see what happens. See if people would, you know, we lead off with, hey, would you like to try some venison? And people are very receptive. It's amazing. You know, a lot of the vegetables that come to the farmer's market are, you know, they're hunting deer over, even in the months that we can't hunt deer with depredation permits. So, you know, if you're supporting, you know, veganism or plant-based, I mean, there's still, if you don't have an eight-foot fence or better, you're still,

you know, there's deer being harvested. So really when you, when you present hunting for food and you, and you tell the actual story behind it, it's really hard to attack. And so that's what we've done is we've just gone to a, to a new audience. You know, I know that people that go to the farmer's market care about where their food comes from, local, sustainable, whatever. And we've got the best bang for your buck. I mean, there's nothing more local and sustainable than the deer that are in our backyards. And that's kind of what we're teaching these people. And we do like crawl spos because we recruit current hunters to mentor these non-traditional or new hunters.

And so we leave them opening day. We're very fortunate down in Georgia. I mean, we have deer season from September 12th this year to January 13th or 15th. I mean, so it's not- It's like normally deer season. Yeah. I mean, we're very fortunate. Our limits are two bucks and 10 does. I mean, we,

we have this opportunity here and, and I'm a firm believer of the response and all this is there are so many people out there that want to learn to hunt. Um, but they just, they're daunted by it. They don't know where to start. Um, you know, my whole point is access is an invite. I don't care how much public access, private access you have. No one goes hunting without a mentor or somebody to really get them through the steps. There's your outliers. There's a few of them. But we set up, we use Crossbows because we hunt the second weekend of bow season, and that gives them the longest opportunity to continue their trial phase. Some take it up immediately and they hunt with us

or tell us stories of hunting 10, 15, 20 times that year. Some people, it's about the 80-20 rule in life. We're seeing 80% of our participants continue hunting. Can I interrupt? I'm sorry. But can we rewind just a little bit to get people from the farmer's market to the crossbow because there's a bunch in the middle, right? So you set up the farmer's market, you give out venison samples,

and then what are you doing from there? They take a bite. They're like, man, that's good. Well, and that's the thing. We're getting people who don't eat meat. They're willing to eat the venison. Oh, I've found that all the time. And so lead off with, hey, would you like to try some venison?

Nothing at the booth. I mean, we have a flyer, but it's not like there's not a lot of antlers or firearms or anything, but it's, hey, would you like to try some venison? And then I'll fill them out and say, do you eat a lot of venison? And oddly enough, I don't know if it's like they want to seem like they're a part of the fold or whatever, but a lot of people say that they eat a lot of venison. So they're getting it somewhere, whether they have a family member or a friend or something. A lot of them say they're eating venison. And then I just continue the conversation like, hey, we're actually here to recruit 15 hunters to go through this program locally. And, you know, it's two afternoon trainings in my office for three hours and we take

them on an organized deer hunt. It's a Saturday afternoon, Sunday morning deer hunt. But we're pairing them with local mentors. And we try to get them to form that bond or that relationship to continue. There's multiple levels of mentorship. I think becoming a hunter is two confidence levels. We know that if you don't teach somebody how to take care of an animal, they'll never go out again. Because that fear of waste, just not being, so you have to have the confidence. Yeah, we hear that a lot. I don't know what I'm going

to do once it's dead if you're not there with me. And so if you aren't confident in that, you're not going to go, the responsible person and the majority. And then I think self-identifying a hunter is the ultimate goal of our three, but that's confidence. You know, to go knock on somebody's door or even just self-identify as a hunter, like, if you don't know what you're doing, to go knock on somebody's door and be like, hey, can I hunt your back 15 or whatever, it just doesn't work. Well, I think it's important, too, especially the age demographics that you're seeing. You can touch on that. I think the first one was from, like, 18 to 64. It was mid-60s. We've evolved over the years.

The first year, we recruited a fairly young group. We had a couple of undergraduates. We're Athens, Georgia, college towns where we piloted it. But moving forward, we've had people of all different walks of life from engineers to roofers to organic farmers to the farmer's market manager this year, you know, both male and female, just all walks of life. But it's a common desire to learn to hunt for food. We really do pre-select. We do a very diligent, we use surveys. And before we select them, I want to make sure that they didn't grow up hunting, that they don't have immediate resources like their father didn't hunt and they just didn't take them up on the opportunity as a kid. We really want to get those that wouldn't otherwise have the opportunity.

But, I mean, now it's 18 to 70. It's really just fun to do um it's inspiring but it just shows that how many people out there are interested and and you train them up you train them up and shooting crossbows oh yeah like half of our training is shooting crossbows and the reason behind that is it's it's to become a new hunter and think about this two points if you're mid 35 40 years old hadn't hunted yet it's pretty intimidating thing to go up your buddy and go hey man will you take me hunting this weekend with you I mean if you haven't done it at that point in your life you know 40s you're probably not going to go seek somebody out to do that I mean statistics are low so now the roles

are reversed you know Hank and the R3 program or the field to fork program are asking hey do you want to hunt with us? Right. And then where the crossbow comes in play is it's, it's a less of an intimidating weapon. You know, when you start, you know, you put a 30 out six in someone's hand, they're a first time hunter, especially for a female. Whoa, wait a minute here. This is, you know, this is quite the undertaking. I don't know if I feel comfortable with that. Crossbow is a little bit different, you know, they're less recoil less recoil you know they don't shoot that far you know etc etc so that's probably it it opens up more opportunity yeah yeah right two nights ago i had some uh i have some out of town visitors that i alluded to earlier

and we actually we cooked a whole deer leg on a pellet grill, ate dinner. And then one of my buddies was talking to another buddy of mine. And he was talking about that he never bow hunted and he got a crossbow. And I overheard him say, man, it's like shooting him with a rifle. I've heard another guy bring up to me once. He's like, because, you know, like the crossbow community will often talk about oh efficacy rates aren't that much higher with crossbows but we had a listener right in he had an interesting point he's like yeah because you don't have lifelong hunters shooting them

if you had all these stone cold killers who've been shooting compound bows their whole life and they really know how to hunt if you gave them a crossbow they're gonna mop up but like crossbow hunters are typically people who don't know a lot about deer don't know a lot about deer hunting they don't know about all the tricks of the trade and so they tend to be less effective and less efficient but if you gave like, you know, the real pros that piece of equipment, it'd be, you know, it'd be bow season, it'd be gun season. Another interesting angle too is there's a difference, I think, in taking somebody hunting and teaching them to be a hunter and doing the field to fork in Athens per se and other places we've done it. Most of these people live in and around suburban communities where a crossbow allows them to hunt. They can hunt in their back half acre if they want to, rather than taking a rifle or et cetera, et cetera. So the idea is we're going to teach you how to shoot a crossbow. You're going to become a hunter and

hopefully you're going to replicate this and do it yourself on your own time, maybe even on your own property or an uncle's property or cousin's property. You know, Ryan's absolutely right. You know, we wanted to use crossbows to take advantage of the early archery seasons. You know, it's not cold, long. You have daylight hours after work. I mean, somebody can show up at a hunting property at 530 and hunt for a couple hours. You know, once daylight savings time switches, you lose that. There is a stigma against guns in this country, especially in these, you know, what we

call, you know, a non-traditional audience or something. We found that, you know, a lot of people at the booth will say, yeah, I don't know if I could really do that. And then you can say, well, we're actually using archery equipment and they just perk up. I mean, it's there, it's, it probably has a little bit more to that like native american you know you just feel like you're a little more um um you know it's intimate yeah people well i think people there's this misconception too that people feel that it's ethical yeah yeah like that it's more it's it's like such a weird piece of logic but it's pervasive that it's like more ethical to shoot an animal with a bow than it is to shoot an animal with a gun, which is like, I could see all kinds of reasons why bow hunting, like I love to bow hunt, bow hunting my entire life.

And it has a lot to do with how the hunter's perception, meaning it's more challenging. It takes a greater, it takes more skill to master it. It's like, you know, there's a thousand things. But to say ethical, like the most ethical way to kill a deer would probably be a captive bolt gun. Oh, sure. To the head. Or a— We'd probably like—I mean, that's like—and with cattle, they've kicked around a thousand ways to kill cows,

and they eventually settled on the idea that a big pneumatic, you know, one one inch diameter pneumatic thing driving down into their brain pan is a very ethical way to kill cows so there's this there's a that misperce that that mis it's like a misarticulation or like a kind of a confusion about what your personal journey is and you're confusing that with sort of like how best to like put an animal down and kill it and i don't make all my decisions based on what's the best way to put an animal down and kill it and i don't make all my decisions based on what's the best way to put an animal down and kill it because if i did it would it would change aspects there's a huge personal element to it right there's a huge personal element to it i don't think anyone really is trying to strive toward like what is the absolute fastest easiest way to kill things. No.

No, and we've actually seen, you know, it takes, in three hours, we can make somebody proficient with a crossbow, and we limit their shots. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's. As opposed to three years. Oh, yeah. No, that's the difference is we couldn't do it with vertical bows. So you can get someone ready to kill a deer in three hours.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, really? Oh, yeah. 25 yards and in. Well, how come crossbow. Why don't they just make crossbows, why not just make it that you can use a crossbow during gun season? You can. Why not just have it be that? Have bow season be bow season

and then crossbows as part of gun season. That way if they're afraid of guns and they think guns are bad, they can just go hunt during gun season with a crossbow. That's a good idea, right? You can use a crossbow anytime. In some states, like Kentucky has a crossbow season. They don't allow them in their regular archery season.

Yeah, if that's the argument, like, oh, you think guns are naughty, I would just be, okay, then the hum of the crossbow during gun season. No, I mean, I've had people tell me that fill the fork is BS because we use crossbows. You know, I mean, you know the groups out there. That's a stretch. Yeah, but... But they're not saying it's naughty.

They're just more comfortable with it. Yes, and I don't know. I mean, I just like, I haven't formed, I don't have a big crossbow opinion yet. I can tell you this though. Like I can tell you this part of it. I would be bummed. I'm generally bummed when I see them

without even knowing why i feel this way i'm bummed when i see states open up for crossbows okay yeah i'm always like ah really well i mean not like i'm gonna go like protest and like pick at the state capitol or even like write a letter but i'm always like that's my feeling and it's like a lot of old man kind of stuff well i can't my old man hated crossbow yeah probably where it comes from well i can't support it because i'm looking for opportunity i want to increase hunting participation but at what cost i guess but the kicker is of our participants it's probably even out now but in our first couple years they went out and purchased rifles after learning to hunt with a crossbow, they went and purchased guns.

They wanted to get even better. They wanted more food. They wanted to get more ethical. I mentored a lady from Philadelphia last year, and she actually seeked us out. She was a vegan at one point, and her doctor told her she needed protein. So she wanted the most organic form of protein and thought, I want to become a hunter. And just did that. She shot a deer video. It was awesome. Really cool. organic form of protein and thought i want to become a hunter and um just did that she shot

shot a deer a video it was awesome really cool she broke down and cried and you know but it was really neat moment but literally two weeks two weeks later she sends me a picture of a deer rifle like i'm going on i'm gonna get serious like her it was funny because you know she was very skeptical at first and then when she got it behind her it was a matter of two weeks and it was almost like now they're all done now like i got a gun and it's just how many am i allowed to stack up here i've never i've never i've taken a lot of first-time hunters out over a long long period of time i have never ever had someone regret that they did it i've had people not pick it up i've had people be like oh was great. And then they think they're gone and then they don't.

I've never had someone be like, man, I really wish. Like when I went to Disneyland or Disney World, what one's in California? Land. I went to Disneyland and I wish I hadn't. Right? I was like, I regretted going. But I've never taken someone hunting and been like, man, I really wish I had made a different decision and hadn't gone and done it.

Everybody is like, it changes people's worldview. And they might not start, but they liked having done it. And it totally rewrites their understanding of what it's like. And it changes you as a mentor, I've found. Oh, yeah. I'd much rather watch someone else get something than me get it, as long as I get half of it. Yeah. No, I'm serious man if you ask me like to go turkey and i'd much rather watch someone get it like calling a turkey and watch someone get a

turkey than than me get a turkey unless it's yannis or someone who's gotten a whole bunch of them 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 orstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts. This season, the hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land hunting zones,

aerial imagery, 24 K topo maps, way points, and tracking. That's right. You were always talking about, uh, we're always talking about on X here on the meat eater podcast.

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the on X hunt team. Some of our favorites are first light, Schnee's vortex federalortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com. onxmaps.com. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Now, Hank, tell me this. There's a big leap from going out hunting once to then

converting that into a future hunter. And I think you guys have kind of dialed in a scalable way to do that. And correct me if I get these details wrong, but you kind of have a system where you, there's a couple days of education, and then there's a mentored hunt but then the key thing is there's follow-up so it's not like we take you hunting once and you go and then that's it you have a follow-up meeting with

everyone again and then you also have mentors that stay in touch afterwards right can you kind of explain that yeah that's good because i think that it's uh i remember a buddy of mine participate in a program like this. And he's like, oh, you can get people to come out and hunt all day. If you're like, oh, I'll take you to this participating farm. And then they have a great time. And then they go home and it's like, what the hell is he going to do? Yeah, no, the one and done events don't work. And we know that.

A big part of the R3 movement stuff is just let's actually evaluate and track the data. Like, let's see if we're being successful. And that's how I can say that 80 actually this year 86 of our hunters continued hunting after the program yeah but you know and what's your guys like what's the secret to success there well the secret is is they're self-selecting we're not it's not it's not billy's dad that signed them up for this hunt they see me at the farmer's market and they're like this is something i want to do and actually it's usually that's's usually, I've been wanting to do this for 10 years or five years. I mean, and you meet them, you meet them where you go to them. That's what no one's

doing. You know, we're not advertising hunting. Um, you know, the field of fork made the wall street journal. It got all these views, but that's the first time we got it in front of a new audience. You know, having filled in stream right about field of fork is only going to a hunting base mostly they're like yeah yeah whatever yeah and so we've been hunting my whole life yeah we've got to get hunting in front of new audiences and by going to the farmer's market that happens but to your point that's a good point man the self-selection rather than being that that you know someone's like damn it son you're going to yeah no they're they're self-selecting. And you went to a place where it's like,

here's people that are interested in food. They're interested in food. You're meeting them in common ground where they are already focused on that type of environment. Right. And an important factor that I don't think Hank mentioned, the field of forks in Georgia, and then I did one in Pennsylvania,

but there's always a wild game component at every meeting. So whenever they're there for the training, we're cooking wild game. And then the postmortem, if you will, cooking wild game. And then we did one in Pennsylvania. My brother-in-law is an executive chef, and we had a whole butchering segment and a cooking. Every meal we ate was a wild game. He taught us how to make sausage, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So it gave them ownership of – they left there very confident in I can actually kill this animal.

I can take care of this animal, and then I can cook and eat this animal. It's delicious. So it was – now, that is some work on the mentor's part to pull that off. But when you do it, I think that's what has, why you get that 80% success rate. That's what I, that's, that's the thing I like. Cause I think you're creating like a good, I don't mean to say like good hunters and bad hunters, but you're creating good hunters. Because I think everyone now, like in the last few years, everyone likes to pay lip service to whatever, field the table, field the fork. Cause it's, cause it's like people like it and they're interested in it but then you'll have guys they'll be like oh i killed 35 big game

animals this year it's like is that right yeah and you're a big field the fort guy huh pretty hearty couple meals you've been eating right and it's like it's just gotten to the point where people just use it now as like a tool as a marketing tool and it's so it's so full of shit with some people who like are talking about something they really don't care about it's like they're harping on some things they know it sells and that and i just know they don't care like they they talk about it because people like it and then they they live a hypocrisy but i think that like in this idea of like finding people through interest in food is it's, it's, it feels like honest to me because people are coming into it with that interest

and going into food. I think it's also important to talk about wild game consumption among hunters and educate hunters about it better. Oh yeah. No. I mean, I could go back to Mark's point of our, our, you know, our schedule or how we do it, but he's absolutely right. We do two afternoons of training.

We do an organized time. Really, the value of that is to get it on the calendar. It's like it's a date that they have to do it, that they start. But the success of the program is in the follow-up opportunities. I've got a local landowner now who's thinking about, you know, giving a lease per se, not a monetary exchange, but, you know, create a hunting camp for these new hunters. Is that right? Yeah. You know, they're seeing the success. They're a part of it. But we do serve wild game at every, you know, at the farmer's market at both trainings, I'll cook,

you know, venison tacos or burgers or whatever I have at the time. And then we have a culinary social. We usually back it up a couple weeks from the organized hunt so more people will get out hunting because I really want them to share their story as the group. We're finding that it's social support that creates that hunter. And it's the same thing I talked about earlier, like different levels of mentorship. We're creating a group, and it's all local. It's not like, hey, let's go, you know, five hours away and let's go hunt. It just wouldn't be as sustainable. We've got this community now. We've got like 50 people in Athens and we've expanded to, we'll have 25 field to fork events

this fall. Do people have to pay to go? We charge $50 and some have gone away from that. I mean, as it's replicated, it's different. I don't believe- $50? We do it just as like a little bit of buy-in. Like hopefully they'll show up for $50. And I mean, everybody on the back end is like, man, this is like the best investment I've ever made in my life. Give an example of how those follow-up opportunities might work where a mentor might send like a group email out out to everybody. Yeah. We've, we've done, you know, group texts, which can get a little text. And we have a hidden Facebook group for the Athens one. I see email chains and it'll just

be like, Hey, I've got, you know, it'll be a first time hunter or whatever. And it's like, I've got Thursday and Friday afternoons free. You know, anybody want to take me hunting or a land owner, you know, be like, Hey guys, I'm, I'm available this weekend. If you want to take me hunting or a landowner, you know, be like, hey, guys, I'm available this weekend. If you want to come hunt, come on. So it's not like they always pair up with the same one. And sometimes I'll take four of them hunting with just me, you know, because I can take care of them if we get lucky and stuff. And you go out somewhere where someone's trying to get some doles removed off their place. Oh, yeah.

And, yeah, we're not selective. I mean, if it makes them happy and they want to put it in their freezer, let's go for it. You married? No. That's interesting.

Have you like found people to date through this? You probably can't talk about it because you're like at work. Yeah, no. That'd be great. We have a field

to fork matchmaking service. No, no legitimate.'d be great. We have a field-to-fork matchmaking service. No, legitimate. Oh, there is a field-to-fork matchmaking service. It's not a true matchmaking service, but it has happened. Not personally. I'm not going to say I'm... But you don't stand in the way of it happening. No.

Because you could... That'd be... Yeah. See, I'm always gaming. I'm so far away from being single, but I'm always imagining being single. Oh, I mean, the farmer's market is great. If I was single, what I would do. That's what I'm always thinking about.

Yeah. And I try a lot of my theories out on my wife. I'm like, you know what I'd do if I was single? And then she'd be like, nah, that'd be stupid. No, but I mean, it's just created this community. It's people of all different walks of life that share this common bond of wanting to have a better connection with their food. I mean, what we hear is they want, it's for the meat. It's a connection with nature.

It's the meditative aspect of sitting in the woods. You know what it really is? They don't know what it really is. Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm telling you, what it really is is that you'll never put your finger on it. It's more than just the meat

because if you said to them, if you said, hey man, you found them at a farmer's market and you get to talk about it, you're like, okay, there's one or two things

we could do here. I'll just dump a deer off at your place or you can come do this thing. If it was just the meat, they'd be like, we'll just drop it off in my house it's that it's because it's that immersion whole package of things the whole romance the meat does the people have it like it's a huge part and it's important but people

have a thing where they need to like make this balanced image in their head of wildlife management sustainability self-sufficiency andufficiency, and the people that are suspicious of hunting or didn't grow up around it are checking boxes in their head. Yeah. Right. And it's like, yeah, not, I don't even, like justify makes it sound negative, but it's like, they're like, they weigh this thing out and they're like, I need to know it's good for me because I want to eat the stuff.

But I also need to understand some basic things about how wildlife works. What is the story of wildlife in America? And you need to answer that in a satisfactory way. Because people aren't going to go like, you might give them all the meat in the world. They might kill all the meat in the world and eat everything. But if they feel that they're doing something that's detrimental to the environment, yeah, that's not it it's like it's like self-sufficiency being like a constructive participant in um like a like sustainability or betterment for wildlife betterment for the

environment like people got to know all this stuff so education is a huge like i'm talking about when dealing with people who are like completely outside of hunting yeah it's like the meat yeah but it's like that's very important, but there's a bunch of other things that need to be satisfied in their mind. Absolutely. And that was one of the shocking things for me, you know, kind of starting this program is they're so interested in the ecology of hunting. Yeah, man.

And I think, you know, part of where I see the success of the program is they're going back to their prospective peer groups and they they're sharing their venison, and they're sharing their story. And it's venison diplomacy to entirely new groups. And they also want that ecology and an understanding of the value of hunting because they've got to go back to their peer group and explain what they're doing. Yeah, man. It's daunting. I imagine you probably don't create closeted hunters no no these people are out there they're my best advocates um you know we have a waiting list

for the athens program we wouldn't we probably would never have to go to the farmer's market again but really but i can't call these How many of these are you doing every year? Just one in Athens. No, how many is QDMA putting on? We'll do about 25 this year in about 12 states. And here's what I think is really powerful about what you guys have done here is you have developed, you've systematized this thing. So for a long time, people have said, you got to mentor hunters.'ve got to take them out there and connect them with food. But you guys have put in place a structure and a curriculum, a toolkit that can scale. So you guys have, correct me if I'm wrong here, but you guys have a toolkit that if someone listening says, hey, I've always wanted to do this. This sounds like such a great program.

The numbers bear it out. You have the resources people need so that Joe Blow can go get this information, get the curriculum, get the whole plan, print out the stuff, and show up at their farmer's market next week and start executing on this with your guys' support, right? Yeah, no, and that's what I'm doing is I'm helping to facilitate the expansion of this program and working with people of all walks of life, all different conservation organizations, NWTF, BHA, you know, all the different state agencies from each state. We're partnering with them. I want to try to bring in, you know, a collective, make these more sustainable, but we have a standardized education. We wrote an e-book,

QDMA's Guide to Successful Deer Hunting. It's probably been four years ago, but it's a great resource. We just got back from Mossy Oak and filmed about a 15-part video series on how to deer hunt, which will be a great resource for curriculum for Field to Fork. But I am of the mindset that we need to do the education necessary in person, but I want to give these people the resources where they can go home and learn video. You know, we give them resources like your website. You know, we actually sit down with them at the second afternoon and say, what are we missing? What do you need from us? And we do the same thing at the Culinary Social. It's what do you need now?

What did we not touch on? You know, a lot of it's always like, hey, places to hunt. You know, what about local public lands? We send a lot of information forward on that. But we are trying to create this. And, you know, I'm not trying to keep it all under the QDMA banner. I'll run four Field to Forks this year with BHA. Oh, okay.

So I'm participating in mentoring a QDMA slash BHA joint Field to Fork event this year in Michigan. And I think that's such a cool opportunity. And it's important to note, too, that it doesn't have to be, let's say, limited to a group thing. I mean, any one of your listeners can do this on their own, basically. That's what we want. For the program to be successful, that's what has to happen. People need to introduce new people hunting outside of their proverbial box. Yeah.

At the end of the day, I mean, organized programs aren't going to move the needle. I mean, we want to scale it. We want to get it. But it's going to be individual hunters that either increase hunting participation or not. We need individual hunters to mentor. And that's kind of what we're doing. But we've taken fill the fork. And as we've replicated around the country, I've tried to prove a few different models.

I've gone to Texas and done destination fill the forks on large ranches where people travel in, and it works. But I will only take people from Texas because to take somebody from New York and take them to Texas, teach them to deer hunt, it doesn't work. But we're going to host a field Fork for Traeger employees this year. Last year, I hosted a Field to Fork for 24 employees of Ruger and Sig Sauer, American firearm manufacturers. And that was because an engineer, a young lady, when we held our first Field to Fork and posted about it on Facebook, reached out. Her name was Emily Monroe. And I clicked on her Facebook profile, and she was an engineer at Ruger.

Seriously, she was a MIT small-bore national champion. I mean, she didn't get a scholarship to MIT. I have misquoted that many a times, but she was, you know, competition, small-bore rifle shooting, and always wanted to learn how to hunt. That is how bad we've done as an industry and as a group. We're not even recruiting our own. We've hosted Field of Forks for QMA employees, where I just host it for my 20 office employees who want to learn to hunt.

But, yeah, we had to cap it at 24 in American firearm manufacturers who wanted to learn how to hunt. It's just we're doing a terrible job. And I think a lot of hunters have kind of been isolationist if it's a terrible job it's just the job that's never really been needed to be done when i when you look in the grand scheme of things 25 years ago most people hunt it that's just what you did especially in the northeast right everybody was a hunter i mean i say everybody very relative it's still like 10 or less right yeah but it felt like it felt like that's just what you did where i grew up like i mean you when you

were 12 years old you got a deer license and you went hunting this is how this is how it was but now again in the grand scheme of things 25 years isn't that long of a time it's a different game out there you know so it's not that we've done a bad job but just didn't recognize that the job needed done i think yeah and now it's very apparent that, you know, we're trying to play catch up, I think, to almost a certain extent. Yeah, I mean, four and a half percent of the American population hunts. We have to understand that becoming a vast minority of the population is going to have negative consequences. And I don't know how many of the percentage of the American population we could actually support as hunters, but we need to do what we can to try to increase hunting participation.

All right, man. Yanni, that was your question. Thank you. Good job. Got any more? We got to wrap it up. Yeah, we got to wrap it up. I think everybody's teeth are floating at this point.

You mean people, that's like a euphemism. Yeah. For their bladder is full. People gotta pee. Their back teeth are floating. I don't want to get, not only their teeth, just the back teeth.

I think I've always heard Okay, teeth afloat. Is there any like humongous things that are like major misses that we missed? Not like little trifling things, but like real,

you're like, damn it. Damn it. Damn it. Oh, I got a major thing. Oh, really? A major thing. Yeah. I'm holding Mark accountable for mentoring a new hunter this year. You are? He asked me to, and he's also going to be a part of our Field to Fork program, but I think he's going to mentor

another hunter outside of that. Yep. Yeah. And really, I mean, that's what we want to try to get every hunter to do. So we have a staff challenge amongst QDMA field staff members to mentor a new hunter every year. We've been doing it for two or three years now. Dude, me and Yanni crank them out

like Henry Ford, man. We took two people hunting this spring. Oh, yeah. And weirdly, one of them, this is kind of weird, one of them has property.

So now I'm like, you know, maybe we can hunt your place she's like that's great everybody thinks that like this new hunter is like you know totally outside the fold but you know we're meeting these people that own 50 acres and we'll go walk it and show them where to hang deer stands you know it's not it's not just this total outlier you know any other humongous misses? Alright, guys. People find you. Imagine if you type into your computer, QDMA.

Yeah, they'll find us. Don't type in QDM. They'll probably find you anyway. They might. They might. Alright. I encourage people to go have a look. And if you gripe about QDMA, I'd be curious to have you go look and be like,

okay, what exactly don't you agree with like yeah what exactly is the problem people write in and tell us but the interest like when you like actually look at like what the organization says and does where's the like show me the part you don't like yeah that's the big misconception that's been out there for years. It's, yeah, it's not that. Other people doing certain things get the QDMA label applied to them, and it's like it's misappropriated. And then people think, oh, that's what QDMA is, and it's not really. Like you said, when you actually go and see what these three folks here and their organization really are, speaking about doing in the field what they have on their

website those those missions it's hard to argue with that yeah yeah and i think an important note from our ceo down you know kip matt hank myself honestly we're just passionate deer hunters i mean we work in the industry yes but we all got there because we were deer hunters first and so it's not like there's any hidden agendas. We're trying to do this. We're trying to do that. I mean, you know, our CEO hunts 100 days a year probably. You know, he's a deer hunter, man. He ain't PETA. He's not PETA.

I mean, Kip, I mean, Kip's, you know, our head wildlife biologist, Mac works for. He is a passionate deer hunter. It's just all there is to it. We're just hunters. Yep. All right, guys. Thanks for coming down, man.

We appreciate it. We're just hunters. Yep. All right, guys. Thanks for coming down, man. We appreciate it. Thanks for having us. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, as promised, we're now going to get into our special report. And again, this covers a collaborative partnership between Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership and OnX, who just released a new report. It's called Inaccessible State Lands in the West, the extent of the landlocked problem and the tools to fix it. And out of the kindness of their own hearts, these two organizations, TRS-CP and Onyx, pulled together to try to get an assessment, to try to put their arms around the extent of the landlocked public lands problem

in the American West and to help maybe present some solutions to figure it out. Again, if you remember, we recently had TRCP and OnX on about a year ago or so to discuss the report which looked at landlocked federal lands, and they had identified 9.52 million acres of land that you and I as American taxpayers own but can't get to because they're surrounded by private land. And the only way to get in there is to have permission from private landowners. Well, they followed that up with this new state report. So we're talking about inaccessible public lands. We're talking about plots of ground that are theoretically open to the public and they're owned equally by all of us as Americans.

But being that they're entirely enclosed by private land, the land is unreachable unless you have permission from a private landowner. So there they are. We own them. We just can't get on them. Well, TRCP and OnX wanted to investigate exactly how great the Western States landlocked problem really is and how to identify some collaborative solutions that could help open up morester, Director of Western Lands at TRCP, Randa Williams, TRCP's Western Communications and Engagement Manager, Lisa Nichols, who's the GIS Supervisor at OnX, and Eric Siegfried, who's the founder of OnX. Now, before we get into the main thing, I had sort of given a little homework to Joel Webster, where I had a question that's related to land access but not related to the report and i wanted to include it here because i thought it was interesting is uh

it had come up a lot recently in talking to friends of mine like let's say you're sitting there looking at a piece of private or public land on a map and there's no way to get to it but an interstate cuts through it uh and we were talking about this, like whether or not you can pull over on a limited access highway. So say like I-90, I-15, whatever, pull over on a limited access highway and jump out of your car and go access some little chunk of public land that you've identified on OnX. It's funny because I was talking to Joel about this. And then a couple of days later, I had a buddy of mine visit from out of town.

He went out antelope hunting and texted me a waypoint and asked, can I legally get into this? Because he was curious, can I pull over on the side of an interstate and head off to hunt? So here's Joel on whether or not that's okay. Do you know how there's certain things, if you're like law-abiding hunter-angler, like there's certain things that you do thinking they're perfectly legal and then you realize later that, well, actually maybe that isn't allowed. For sure. And then the opposite as well. And then you like to change your behavior and it kind of ruins it for you after that because you thought, you know, you're perfectly fine. And this is one of those issues for me.

And so I did a little digging into this. I didn't look at a lot of states. So this is how I understand. So in Wyoming, there's state law. This is a state law stuff. Okay. There's state law specifically prohibits. Well, let me ask, why is it not?

Oh, cause there's no federal oversight of the highway system. Like there's no federal enforcement on a highway system, right? Yeah. State police generally. Like the FBI don't pull you over for speeding on an interstate. Like there's no federal enforcement on a highway system, right? Yeah, state police generally. Like the FBI don't pull you over for speeding on an interstate. Not usually, no. State and local. Depends on what you did.

Yeah, that is true. So the state of Wyoming, their state laws specifically prohibit stopping along a controlled access highway. If you're like a Montana, there's actually no laws saying you can't stop. So actually stopping there is perfectly legal as I read it. What's illegal is it says you cannot go outside of the lines.

Got you. And that you must enter and exit the interstate at designated spots. And so when you see somebody in front of you. And they're not talking about hunting. They're just talking about whatever. Just whatever. And so, you know, when you're driving along the road and you accidentally sort of swerve over and hit the rumble strip,

like you are breaking the law the same way somebody is when they pull over and park to go hunting. As I read the law. Yeah. You can get special permits for on and off, like you've got to get permission to do that. But here's the thing is, I actually, if you look at the Montana access guide, you look at the Montana fish, wildlife and Parks regulations, it says nothing about this. There's nowhere stated anywhere that I can find. Because it would be redundant because it's already covered in just the general highway law. No, you've got to go in and read statute to find it. And it took me 40 minutes to find it.

And I don't, I mean, from what I understand, like, I think it's, I think it's a traffic law, first off, not a game violation. And so it's like getting a speeding ticket versus being a poacher, right? But as I understand it, like, it's not really all that, you know, unless it's like actual sort of no parking signs along the interstate, it's really not advertised anywhere that you can't do this. And so I've always assumed it's legal because people do it all the time and I've never heard of anybody getting caught. And in fact, I actually know of a block management area where a portion of it, the only way I know how to get to it is by parking along the interstate

in Montana. So, which is kind of bizarre now that I know this, but that's my understanding of controlled access highways. And I would assume that there are some requirements placed upon the state in order to get federal money that they have to, you know, have these types of rules, but they're different for each state. Okay, now we're going to move on to the OnX TRC report and ask the question, why was it important to investigate the issue of landlocked state lands in the first place? Here's Eric. Our whole team is passionate about helping people get outside. So it's just like in our DNA. So we look at these landlocked lands and we want to at least make the public aware of what's out there. And we do see them as opportunities to help the public get outdoors more.

So that's really in our DNA. And that's why we're interested. Okay, from here, I think it's important to move on to the next thing. Let's get clear on what is meant by landlocked land. Like what does that look like? What does that mean? How does someone go and determine that yes, in fact, a piece of public land is inaccessible or, as we keep saying, landlocked. Here's Lisa explaining that and also talking a little bit about how Onyx obtained and analyzed the necessary data. So there's a lot of different ways to define landlocked. What we went with for this report was public land that cannot be accessed from a public road or cannot be accessed from an adjoining piece of public land. Meaning even if you are willing to walk in.

Yep. Yeah. You walk forever. just a little corner of it, we considered that entire 10,000 acre parcel as being accessible, even if you have to cross topography and rivers. This was just talking about legal access as opposed to logistical. Within the GIS department, GIS is Geographic Information Systems or Geographic Information Science. And basically, it's a compilation of data sets that all have a location component to them. And they're all stored into a big database so that you can make maps or you can run different analyses and understand how maybe one feature on

the landscape interacts or impacts another type of feature on the landscape. So not only do we take the government lands data sets and the private land data sets and reconcile them with each other, we also are classifying all of the government lands data. So that was really key in this analysis as well. So we were able to zero in on all of the lands that had the state land ownership type attached to them. And then basically we were able to compare those against our extensive road database and figure out which parcels of state land did not have road access. And each parcel that did not have road access got flagged in a big database. And then we basically ran through and calculated all those acreages together to get the numbers. The big challenge here is that there is no public versus private road data set available in the United States.

And so we did have to kind of come up with our own definition of what a public road is based upon the data that is available. So we said anything at the county level or higher, plus certain classifications of Forest Service roads and certain classifications of BLM roads. So there's a lot of areas where there's these two tracks that we're like, we don't know. We can't tell if they're open or closed to the public. And so after we went through and had results from the federal analysis last year, some folks with TRCP actually went out to some areas where we're like, we don't know. Like we can't really tell in these specific places. like there's two tracks going out to these large areas, but we can't tell if there's a way to get to them. And I would say, what was it in like 80 or 90% of those, those are the largest

ones. So those are like edge cases. Yeah. I was going to say we had, I mean, we were going out to some of the bigger parcels and even flying around on like Google Earth. If you go to Street View, you can sort of look at what the road looks like and see if there's a private road sign. So Onyx is doing some of that. But we literally had people driving up to gates and seeing how it was marked. Most of them didn't have, were not public. Yeah. And we also worked with BLM and Forest Service at the lands and realty level, where they actually looked up the records for us.

Oh, to find pieces that were gated and shouldn't have been, perhaps. No, looking up just to see if there were recorded easements across private land. Because that's one of the funny things is driving around, especially in the eastern half of this state and other areas in the west, too, is like'll have public roads but ranches will kind of grow up around them so that when you start feeling like there's no way i can be on this road yeah where you're sort of like five yards off a guy's front step his barn's on one side of the road his dogs are running around in the road you can almost look in and they're eating dinner it's like you're on a two-track but on the map it's like that's a road i know some spots and the fact that no one comes out and shoots at you you realize like wow this is like a road this two-track is a public easement well part of the

problem is that most easement files most easement documents are still on paper file they haven't been digitized yet because that's actually something that we're working on is to try and get the federal agencies the resources they need to turn easement, recorded easements that are still in file cabinets at local ranger districts actually into a computer system. And so you can just click on them and it says this is a public road or it's not. And there's obviously the county side, which is a whole nother nut to crack, but, um, the forest service nationally estimates it as 37,000 easements. Um, some of them are road easements, some are not, and only 5,000 of them have been digitized. So the rest of them are sitting in file cabinets and local offices and hoping that the office doesn't burn down, um, which would be terrible if something like that to occur.

But that's a real challenge with this type of work. And so we've had to do a lot of the work ourselves by actually trying to run down whether or not some of these places are open or closed. And again, here's Eric. We're unique in that fact that we brought the public land data together and the private land data, and we've made this more accurate mesh. You can imagine a fabric of these parcels in the U.S. We're the only one who has that complete meshed network, which is key to doing that analysis when you're having an algorithm look at the corners and everything when you cross over. So we've done that for public lands, and we've done that for roads. So the fact that we've brought all the roads data together and the land ownership data together uniquely positions us to be able to do this. And this is Randall Williams chiming in.

I think there's some people who probably have exclusive access to these lands. It's probably a bunch of people because they- Yeah, who don't like this, but there's also some people that are great and they allow the public in. And so it all depends on the individual. Let mephrase it i would be if i lived on the edge of that place i would be like um i'd be sweating it i would kind of want i'd be like man i hope people don't get all worked up about how i got all this land it's not mine personally i think you'd be arranging for when you died that your your land would go to the public estate absolutely once i'm dead i't care. I wouldn't care anymore. As it turns out, the volume of landlocked state public lands is pretty shocking. Joel and Lisa

described the scope and distribution of that Western land as in exactly where is it and how much is it? I actually am a bit shocked about the fact that there's only 49. We looked at the 11 Western states this time, so just the public land states. Why are they called the public land states? Because they're the states in the West that have the most public land. And so Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, California, Oregon, and Washington. And what state am I missing? Utah.

And so those lands generally have just sort of a higher proportion of federal public lands than anywhere else in the country outside of Alaska, which is its own beast. That's interesting. So even the Dakotas don't come anywhere close to, to be grouped in with those. The Dakotas have quite a bit of public land on that Western edge where they're touching the public land States, but the Eastern side of the Dakotas are more sort of that, those great plains type States where it's, you know, corn, soybeans, most things are privatized. Um, which a lot of it has to do with just how good a farmland it is. And so it went into private lands and stayed there, private hands and stayed there.

But yeah, I mean, so there's only 49 million acres of state land and there's, here's the number 6.35 million acres of landlocked state lands across these 11 Western states. How many total acres of state land are there? In these 11 Western states, there's 49 million. And so 6.35 million of those. So it's like 13%, wasn't it? Yeah, 14 or 13%. So 6.39 million acres we can't get to. 6.35.

3.5 million acres we can't get to. That's right. And we found four of those states have over a million acres. And those are Montana, again, which has... One and a half million. Really? 1.5 million acres of inaccessible state lands. That's right.

Lisa, do you want to run through this? Oh, sure. So Arizona has 1.3. Montana has 1.5. New Mexico, 1.3 again. has 1.5, New Mexico 1.3 again, and Wyoming 1.1 million acres. Those are all the plus million states. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so we know where these landlocked state lands are and we know how much of it there is.

But you might be asking these questions next. Like, how did this come to be? What are state lands? How did states get land? What do they have the land for? And in some cases, what the hell happened to all that land? It all started back in 1785 with the general land ordinance,

which was a law passed that established the grid system. And so township- Six by six square miles. That is right. Sorry, 36 square miles. Yeah, um, six by six square miles. That is right. 36 square miles. Yeah. But six by six miles by six miles, um, individual sections, 36 of them within each township.

So that basically the whole Western side of the country, um, was divided up into these, this grid system. Um, and. Well, a lot of other states as well. Yeah, but it's, I i mean so it started michigan has a township like a township system that was the west back in the day yeah they have a township system and they have a and they have like school trust lands that sit on that township system that's right it's even like a specified number yeah it's the old northwest territory so it's

you know how do you bring order impose order on a territory landscape that you really don't have any understanding of, familiarity with. So, yeah, it kind of rolls westward as the country does. And it's what makes corner crossing so fun to talk about. Yeah. But so it started in 1803 was the first state, Ohio, to get a land grant. And so what the federal government did is they passed these enabling acts where they actually gave individual states starting with just one section per township. So one out of every 36 acres in that state would get a section starting with Ohio in 1803. So the feds say like, you guys are going to become a state. You're like a little state.

You're Ohio now. You're going to become a state, and we are going to gift to you the state, one out of every 36 square miles that you own. That's right. That's how it started. Okay. And for the purpose of supporting public institutions, generally schools. And so this started with Ohio and there's, I think, 29 states got their lands this way.

And early on, there were very few restrictions on how that money would be used. And so most of the states just sort of sold off the lands, really states before 1850. But was that the intent when they gave them the land? Was the intent like, here, go sell it? Well, I think the intent evolved, but there's some states like Mississippi that held on to their state lands. I guess sort of it was early on, like, we're going to hold on to these and we're going to generate revenue over the long term. And they actually had a commitment to that. They played the smart thing.

They played the smart thing. And like Ohio has, from what I can tell, nothing left. At least there's not enough acres there that I can find any record of there being anything left. And a lot of states just went and sold it along the way. However, and as a result of that, they were sort of misusing the money. So here's an example, Alabama, you know, near Mississippi, Mississippi held onto their lands, Alabama sold off, you know, it's near Mississippi, Mississippi held onto their lands, Alabama sold off their lands and like they invested in stuff. Really? Like you find that there's sort of a theme in a state.

That's right. Even like these neighboring states had two sort of different approaches. Well, we find that in the West today and we'll get into that. Um, but so the state of Alabama, like invest, they sold off a bunch of their lands. They invested the money and stuff that failed. And so they had basically nothing to show for it. But also what they would do in Alabama is, so if you lived within the township where that section was, you were the ones that decided whether or not it'd be sold. And so. Oh, really?

Which is totally corrupt, right? You have like, does my neighbor sell their property or not? Yes, so I can buy it. Yeah. But then they also would give out. That's like where local control kind of goes a little off now and then. That's right. And they'd also give out personal loans.

They had a school fund that they created, but it was kind of like an endowment with the idea that the interest would go towards those schools. And they'd give out personal loans to people in Alabama and never actually make them pay them back. And then they also did like 99-year leases. And so if you had a grazing lease or whatever, you could do it for 99 years. And probably, I don't know if the terms were fixed, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were. And so like in the 1840s, they were making 99-year leases that didn't expire until the 1940s, which is a long time, right? And so that's sort of an example of how states sort of got rid of their lands. And then in the West, so where this report is, the 11 Western states,

starting, well, California is the first Western state to become a state, and they actually got section 16 again. But after that, they started getting section 16 and 36. And so they got two square miles per township. And so like Oregon, Montana, Idaho, a number of states got two sections per township. And then at the very end, they got even more generous and they gave Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, four sections. So how does this system work out if there's already someone occupying the designated land that's supposed to go to the state? What does the state do then? They had this thing called in lieu selections. And so if it was down in New Mexico, right,

which is a very late state to become a part of the union, if it was, you know, let's say a Mexican land grant, for example, or an Indian reservation, or it was already private, they were not able to select those lands. They were not given those. In that case, it was 6, 16, 32, and 36, those later ones. They got four, those four sections. Oh, really? The deal kept getting better. It kept getting better, but they were still like spaced apart.

And so they're all separated, which is what. It still creates the same arbitrary scattered pattern. It does. But then they were able to correct, select these in lieu of areas. Yeah. And that's where we get some of these big chunks of landlocked land.

And so they'd be like, well, we can't have any, there's like this big, you know, 80,000 acre land grant or whatever. We can't have any, there's like this big, you know, 80,000 acre land grant or whatever. We can't have any of those lands inside of there. And so they go select some really big areas somewhere else. And then they might be like, I'm going to take all four of my, my sections, my square miles. I want them all together. That's right. So I got a sweet little chunk of ground. Or 30 sections together or whatever. And so you get some really, some significant holdings, maybe not. And so that's, that's kind of how that worked, which has left this legacy of all these isolated parcels.

And then states took to either hung on to them or sold them off. That's right. Now we'll get into something you might have heard about, which is the political and social push to transfer federally managed lands over to the states. Why is that idea so distasteful to so many hunters, anglers, and conservationists? Like, what are they so afraid of? Basically, there's a whole idea that this federal government should transfer their lands to the states, right? A couple of years ago, there was a big push for it coming out of Utah. It comes up now and then. Yeah.

It's sort of a theme that recycles. It's a recurring theme. And, and, and a lot of us pointed to the history of state lands for why that's a terrible idea, because some states have been really bad about selling their lands. And it was such a bad, there was such a bad history with it that the federal government actually started to impose restrictions on land sales towards the end of westward expansion because the system was being so abused by the western states. Is that right, really?

Yeah. That's part of the terms of the land grant. That's right. Yeah, I could see it would be like if you left your, like you have like a wayward kid and you leave him. That's why we have trust, trust fund kids. Yeah, I mean this is like. Because they couldn't trust the kid just to give them all the money. Well, this is like.

Because he'll just blow it. So they had to like give him a little. Your kid's graduating from high school, right? And you, you like give them a used car or something to get started. And that's sort of how, I mean, the intention of it is to bring these other states up. What's your. Equal footing. Equal footing.

Bring them up on equal footing with the current existing states. So they had to treat them like children. But some of those kids, yeah. And so like here's, you know, so you're not, it's sort of to break that dependency on the federal government for public services. And also not to put them at a disadvantage with the 13 colonies plus the three states that had already become states. Like they already had institutions in place. And so, you know, New York or Massachusetts, for example, they've been around a while, they had institutions,

and so they're creating these new states. They didn't want them to be at such a disadvantage that they created this thing called the Equal Footing Doctrine. This was part of it where they gave them these state lands, these trust lands. At the time, they were just called school lands with the thinking that they could raise money off of those to establish these institutions that would put them on equal footing with the early states when we were young

we would use we would go down I didn't have a plat book but you could go down to the township office and photocopy the plat books at the township office to find out who owned what then you'd go talk to them, call them or whatever. And ours would even, ours were labeled on these maps, just school trust land in Michigan. Yeah. And it had like a different color. And Michigan has some.

Yeah. It is interesting to see how states actually learn from other states over time, their mistakes. And you can tell that Congress obviously learned and they started making these rules as it went on. So that has happened. Like I'll give it to you, but you can't just Congress obviously learned and they started making these rules as it went on. Like, I'll give it to you, but you can't just run out and sell it. Yeah, it's like after the first three kids sell those used cars and just blow it on booze and whatever else. They could sell it, but they put conditions around the sale.

And so that they had to have a permanent fund. And then only the interest from that permanent fund could be used to support the schools. And they also set minimum sale prices. God, it's so much like trust fund kids. So these states were like selling these things to their buddies, you know, for nothing. And so then they set minimum prices to make it so they wouldn't have the incentive to do that.

Okay, so here's what's next. The crew at Onyx and TRCP, they're not really comfortable and it's not really their job to sort of like talk about who should be ashamed of themselves and who historically did a good job and who did a bad job. They're here to help. But you might ask, who are the good apples? I mean, which states do a good job of retaining their lands in a way that serves the public or that do a good job of managing access on their lands? State trust lands were given to these states to generate revenue for beneficiaries, okay? And so they're not multiple use lands. They're not like national forest lands or BLM lands where wildlife and recreation are supposed to have equal consideration with development.

And so you could actually say we're not going to develop a lot of these lands because of these other values. That's not how trust lands are managed. They do need to generate profit. Yeah. But most states in the West, actually, almost all states in the West, have decided that recreation can be a part of that management approach for generating profit, or it's compatible with the idea that these lands will be managed to generate profit, right? And so the idea that the public be a part of it, that they serve some sort of larger public good, is compatible with the idea that these lands generate profit. There's another side to it, which is a much more sort of dollars and cents. And the state is considered more of something they have to deal with. And I think when you look at if a state is doing a really good job from the perspective of hunters and anglers in terms of how they manage their state trust lands,

the ones that do a really good job have more of a welcome mat versus you can't find anything about it or it's a no trespassing sign. And a couple of states that have done a really good job are Montana, for example, where in the state nearly all the lands are open and available for the public. They have some basic rules about you can't shoot within a quarter mile of an occupied structure. You know, you can only drive on routes that are open and things like that. And Montana Fish, Life and Parks, when you buy your conservation license for hunting and fishing, you spend $2 in the state of Montana,

and that money goes to support the schools in the state. They generate about a million dollars a year through that. And as a result, it's actually benefiting those schools in a way that also supports public recreation. And also the state of Montana has been great in the fact that we talk about landlocked lands, you know, there being about a million and a half federal landlocked lands and a million and a half state landlocked lands in the state of Montana. The state has actually created programs. There's one called the MT plan, which actually

is a grants program where they can give out grants to create easements across private land that would open up these public lands. Montana Fish, Life, and Parks has a couple of programs. One, again, is a brand new one they just passed that, again, would enable the state

to spend money on establishing easements. Another one would provide tax incentives for landowners who allow the public across their private land to access these state lands. Oh, really, yeah, it's really cool stuff. And this is something that's bipartisan. It's coming out of the legislature. Montana is just sort of a shining example. You know, Washington's another state that's doing a really good job. They, you, you buy an access pass, costs $30 a year, which supports part of that goes to supporting that state trust revenue.

But those lands are open and accessible. And, you know, they've got good signage. Like you go to their website, it's very welcoming. And so that's something that they've done. You know, New Mexico and Arizona are two other states that actually charge a fee for the public to use these trust lands. Which, because they're multiple use lands, I think is just fine. That's a way to support the trust responsibilities that also support the public.

And now we'll get into what I'll call the bad apples, at least bad from my perspective as, you know, like a general outdoorsman who likes to roam around outside a whole bunch. The sort of flip side to that are states that would manage state trust lands for exclusive use. And so you'd lease them to an individual who basically would control access to those lands. And Colorado is the only state in the Mountain West, one of the 11 western states that we looked at, that actually does not allow public access to the vast majority of its trust holdings it's so uncolorado like you know what john denver bliss nanny it just doesn't doesn't it feel on you you used to live in colorado yeah doesn't it feel uncolorado like i agree i wasn't really aware of it when i lived there and just never came across yeah but yeah

you remember like the outdoor retailers they got all mad at the state of Utah. They're like, by God, we're going down to Colorado because they do it right. Mm-hmm. Yeah, no, it doesn't seem to fall in line with the way they act normally. And so Colorado has almost 2.8 million acres of state trust lands.

How many landlocked? 435,000 acres are landlocked, but 1.78 million acres of accessible land are closed to the public by state policy. God, that just seems... And also, if you think... I said you're doing a great job of laying out how it came to be, And you pointed out the intent was not that people could go run around messing around. I understand it. It just feels as though what a missed opportunity. Well, so I want to point out that Colorado, so they do have a program where the state land board and Colorado Parks and Wildlife are partnering to make lands accessible.

And up until this hunting season, there were, they have a hunter program, like a sportsman's program. Plus there's also, there's some lands that they lease for state parks and wildlife management areas that are open to the public. It's about 558,000 acres total there.

And this year, they're actually going to open up another 100,000 acres through that program. Okay. With the intent that they open up another 400,000 acres in the next two years, which would bring the state total to right around a million acres of land accessible to sportsmen. And so I think that they deserve a pat on the back for that. You take a step back and you compare them to all the other states in the West, they're still the only state that will have less than half of their land accessible to the public. And one of the things, too—

Even if it's sitting there, not actively being used. Yeah, even if it doesn't have a lease on it for recreation, you can't use it. Unless it's a lease to CPW, Colorado Parks and Wildlife. In that state, real quick. Yeah. In that state, let's say there's a Colorado. You guys do your report and you find a landlocked state section in Colorado surrounded by a cattle ranch. Okay. Is that operator of that cattle ranch prohibited?

Like, he doesn't necessarily have rights to go mess around there just like anybody else does, right? It's theoretically he could have this chunk of land in his thing that he's not supposed to walk across. Yeah, they would have to lease that for recreation if they wanted to. Okay. So it's not de facto his land. Yep. He might, he was, if he's like super law abiding,

there could feasibly be a situation in which he's like, I can't even go on it. And I own the periphery of it. And here's something that, you know, we uncovered sort of doing some research that makes this all a little bit more bothersome is that in 1996, the people of Colorado changed the Colorado Constitution to require that state trust lands, in addition to being managed for sort of sustainable

profit, not maximum profit, that they also be managed for wildlife and aesthetic values for the long term, sort of for future generations of Coloradans. And I'm sort of paraphrasing there, but that actually is stated in their constitution. And that was a change that was made by the people of Colorado. And that's something that I'm not aware of any other state in the West having. And so you could theoretically say that their constitution is the most public access friendly of any state with state trust lands, but yet their sort of management of recreation is the least friendly. And so I want to give them an A for this recent sort of project to help expand access. But they'd have to do it three more times to be sort of in parity with like Montana.

Yeah, I got you. It's like a super bad kid who all of a sudden like isn't quite so bad. Well, it's good. They did the right thing. You know, he's doing great. Yeah. But if he's like sort of. kid who all of a sudden like isn't quite so bad well it's good they did a good they did the right thing you know he's doing great yeah but if he's like sort of not as much trouble yeah but if you compare it to other states based on what lands are open what lands are not it is the one outlier and there's a couple other states outside of the sort of mountain west that lease their state trust lands, um, just for sort of private use. And those are Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Nebraska. Those are the ones I'm aware of,

but, um, state trust lanes in Alabama are open. They don't have a lot left, like 28,000 or something like that. Um, Minnesota, those lands are open. How about Texas? Texas didn't get land grants the same way. Neither did Alaska. Because they came in too early? Well, it's just a different state. I don't know the history of Texas. I do know that they did not get their grants the same way. Yeah. They're probably like, I don't want no handouts. I don't think. There was no federal land in Texas for the way. Oh. There was no federal land. So that was one reason the feds were doing that was like,

instead of being taxed on this federal land, we're going to give you the state lands to help you. Gotcha. But your school trust. But I think Texas did get some sort of land grants, but it was just a whole different deal. Hawaii, Texas, Alaska, they all, they're kind of unique. Then there's a different category of bad apples, states that sold off their public state lands and don't have it anymore.

I think we need to talk about the oldest kids. Those are the ones that might be even worse than some of the ones we just talked about. They were granted over a million, maybe sometimes 2 million acres of state trust lands, and they don't really have any right now. So it could be a total, these are mainly in the Midwest. As you go east to west, you're basically going

from oldest kids to youngest. So, I mean, those are probably the worst. It could be a completely different game in Iowa or Kansas. Iowa doesn't have any. They sold them off. I mean, they were granted 2 million, 1 million acres. So if you're in Iowa, you just cannot find a place to go hunting.

Yeah, and Kansas, man, like they had 2.9 million acres. Could you imagine? Kansas has got good hunting. Like if they had retained those, if they were open to the public. My question is now out of those states, they're the worst of the kids because we feel like they sold off all the lands but do any of them then sort of shine because they have something to show for it although they don't have these lands they didn't sell them off to their buddies and and then squander the money on wine and song as steve said but they do have the best institutions across the

country how do people spend money on song? Like in the saying, wine, women, and song? Like again, you mean like they bought alcohol, like they took, they engaged in prostitution or took women out to eat, but what's the song part?

Live, like concert tickets? Yeah. Must've been the opera. Karaoke machine. You know what I'm getting at? Karaoke machine. I blew up my money on karaoke. You guys might have not looked into

that, right? I do not know the size of every state's permanent fund, their endowment for their schools. I do know that states like Arizona and New Mexico have done quite well, and they've retained the vast majority of their state. They've monetized their lands without selling them. That's right. And one thing, Arizona

has been very selective about what they sell. And so they have lands like Maricopa County down where Phoenix is. And so they've been able to sell that land for an absolute ton of money. But as a general policy, they've really refrained from selling lands. And so they've been able to generate a lot of revenue. New Mexico, I mean, the Permian Basin is down there. Oil and gas is a big issue. And so they've leased a lot of their. New Mexico, I mean, the Permian Basin's down there. Oil and gas is a big issue. And so they've leased a lot of their lands for oil and gas. And that's really more of a

factor of just having a resource that's very valuable. And so they've been able to, I mean, just sort of annual profits. I know New Mexico makes a lot of money off of their state trust. And so you might have certain states that squander, right? And that's not the right way to go about it where the money is not going to the institution. But then you have the other side where they're so focused on the business that they're not thinking about the resource or the public in other ways. So to what degree are people aware, as in is it like common knowledge, that there are landlocked public lands all around us in the American West? I found like last year when we were trying to verify some of the larger federal parcels, it was most useful to talk to like a game warden in the area. Because they knew exactly where they were busting people for being on inaccessible land. And so I feel like a lot of this knowledge is at the local level. And that's a lot of what this project is, is trying to compile it all to actually wrap your head around the issue.

Have you thought about taking the analysis and then looking at the pieces of land that are sort of, I don't want to, I'll use the word offending though. I shouldn't, that's not the right word. Like where you look at these like big chunks of land people can't want, I'll use the word offending though. I shouldn't, that's not the right word. Like where you look at these like big chunks of land, people can't get to. And then you look at the easiest way to solve that puzzle. And then you look into what is going on with that chunk of land. Does that chunk of land for sale with the person wished to sell it?

Uh, like what is the status of that thing? That's generally what land trusts do, where you have groups like the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, where they've got folks actually out there drinking coffee with landowners and talking about how to transfer or sell a piece of land to open it up, you know, for the public. And so there's actually groups out there, a lot of them, that that is their purpose, is to work cooperatively with landowners, identify these opportunities. But they don't have always the best information about where those inaccessible lands are. And that's really where this project comes in. Well, it actually does two things.

It helps inform where those inaccessible lands are to help people sort of be like, hey, there's an opportunity here. And then you start, and then those folks can look at around that landlocked parcel where there might be, you know, five different private holdings and a couple of them are close to a road and they can be like, you know, is Bill a good, you know, what's that person like? Are they, you know, pretty public friendly and public access friendly and sort of have a conversation. And sometimes it takes, you know, several years to sort of work something out with a landowner. But also the other side of this is state policies and federal policies and actually having programs in place that help provide the money. And at the federal level, they've got like the Land and Water Conservation Fund and 3% of that fund is dedicated for access between 15 and $27 million a year must be used for access.

At the state level, they can actually use stateside funding. 40% of LWCF dollars must go to states, and they have the ability, if they wanted to, to use some of those dollars for access, but they may not realize that, and this report helps them see that. Also, there's certain states that just really, recreation just isn't a thing for them. And they're not thinking about it. And so that's, we're hopeful that this information

will also be used that way where people will be like, hey, look at what Montana's doing or New Mexico. They've got this new council where they've actually pulled together this group and they're trying to figure out like how to open some of these lands up. And also what are some of the restrictions on these state lands that maybe we could change a little bit to make it more sort of recreation friendly. And so maybe we can help bring attention to that through this work. And so states like Wyoming, who has a lot of landlocked lands, might be like, hey, you know what? We could create an access program that will help create easements to these state parcels.

And you know what? It's not only going to increase recreation to these lands, but it's also going to make it easier for us to manage them to generate revenue for our beneficiaries because we'll have access for these other reasons too. So now that the report is out, what's next? We're going to be looking at nationwide. We'd love to, like I said, our main goal would be to get to this landlocked data set that's nationwide. Keep working with local land trust, BLM, everybody to make sure we have a solid data set that has all those easements in there. And we know for sure, yes, this one's accessible. This one isn't.

So we'd love to get to that point. Because there are some real contested easements out there. Those are prescriptive easements, Steve, which are different than recorded easements. Gotcha. And that's a state law issue. And so it's different from state, but you think of like the crazy mountains, for example. Yeah, I mean, just here are various ones. Well, I mean, I've heard of some down in Colorado too, like contested easements.

So if there's- Contested road, I shouldn't say easements. Contested access points. Yeah. Ro's- Contested road, I shouldn't say easements. Contested access points. Yeah. Roads and things. That's right. Things that were historically regarded as a county road, but someone wants to argue that they're not in fact a county road.

That's right. But with easements, if it's written in paper that there's an easement there, it's not contested. But there's some places, because of continuous use, that you can get a prescriptive easement by going in front of a judge. It's a very contentious way to go about it and doesn't make a lot of friends. But there are places where that's happening. And that's why we want to get in front of that and try and get cooperative work done that brings landowners and hunters and anglers and other folks together

to actually open lands up in a way that works for everybody. And that's the preferred way to go about this. Okay, guys, you heard all that. If you care about getting state public lands that we all own opened up for us, there is definitely something we as American citizens can do. Right now, you can go send a message to your lawmakers. There's a website that TRCP has helped facilitate that for you. Now, you can just go to www.trcp.org and scrounge

all around and find it or you can go to this not entirely handy website address which i'm going to lay out for you www.trcp.org slash unlocking dash public. That's right, ladies and gentlemen. trcp.org slash unlocking, and you do a little dash mark, public, another little dash mark, lands. It's a hell of a website. Scroll down to where it says the key to unlocking public lands. Read all about the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which is a fund that helps unlock inaccessible lands, and send your message to your elected official right there. LWCF money is there to help on facilitating access to our public land. Make your voice heard, take action, and help unlock public

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