The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 209: The Deer Nut

Episode Date: February 24, 2020

Steven Rinella talks to Jim Heffelfinger, Ryan Callaghan, and Phil Taylor.Topics discussed: an epidemic of llama losses; Grandpa Half-a-Finger and other stories of loss; does killing big bucks screw up deer genetics?; the difference between blacktail deer and whitetail deer, and where they came from; a whitetail fossil from the Pleistocene; Cowz, Cooze, and Couse; telekinetic levitation; why do deer lose their antlers?; Steve's disappointment with having less-than-average Neanderthal genes; wolf recovery and the Endangered Species Act; trophic cascades and surplus killers; jaguars in America; hunting jackrabbits; and so much more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. All right, suckers. We've been talking all the time about our live tour. Me, Cal, Yanni, a lot of special guests. Live tour coming up. Everything's sold out.

We've got two dates left. Got to lock it home. April 15 and April 16. April 15, Mesa Arts Center, M's sold out. We've got two dates left. Got to lock it home. April 15 and April 16. April 15, Mesa Arts Center, Mesa, Arizona. So that's like your Phoenix market. April 16, City National Grove, Anaheim, California. Again, me, the Latvian Eagle, OCal, special guests, Me Eater Live, April 15, Mesa Arts Center, Mesa, Arizona.

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or Google Play store. Know where you stand with OnX. I think listeners ought to know that Phil the Engineer has, he's not good at starting that timer. He might have to go back behind the curtain. Might have to go back into the resumes. We're just talking about mountain lions and Cal's talking about what a mountain lion does when it drops down into like a pen full of llamas.

If I was a mountain lion, I would be a llama specialist. That big neck. Hard to miss. You could be drunk. A drunk cat. You could get drunk. No matter what, you're going to get it. With a neck like that, I would be a llama specialist mountain lion.

Yeah, they really like to keep their heads high, too. I would quickly depopulate the nation. It would be a llama epidemic of llama losses. A couple things. I don't know if you guys. There's a couple of news things I want to talk about before we get into it. I haven't dug into this yet, but Disney's redoing... They're doing a live-action Bambi remake.

I was told about this yesterday, I believe. Oh, man. Live-action. So it's going to be like that stupid thing they did with the lions talking. I believe. Oh, man. Live action. So it's going to be like, you know, that stupid thing they did with the lions talking. Like people. Yes. Their Lion King remake. Phil showed me the intro to the Lion King deal, and then he explained that it is, they didn't vary the story at all.

It's the exact same story from the animated, the full animated version. Yeah, but it's just like actual lions being like, what's up, man? Phil called it disturbing. So now it's going to be like a buck. They're going to be like, no, no. Well, it's tough, man, because you got these lions, you know, voiced by humans, but with absolutely no human facial expressions. Yeah, but I mean, a deer is decidedly less sort of facially active.

Uh-huh. So it's going to be even worse than the lions. I hope there's a part in that movie where, you ever see the trail cam footage of deer eating baby birds out of nests? I hope that's part of the movie. That'd be a good part of the movie. movie where um you ever see the trail cam footage of deer eating baby birds out of nests i hope that's part of the movie that'd be a good part of the movie um how do i i would kill to be i i've helped out in in the movie world on on one script as far as like hunting accuracies and it's something you did some consulting yeah tell me the movie years

deer hunter uh last of the mohicans no it was it was the revenant called walking out oh yeah which um i was all excited for a minute because i was if you did any of those movies i was gonna smack you because you did such a shit job speaking of resumes resumes. Yeah. But that was for my buddy Colin helping him. And it's just like the movie world. Oh, is this Colin dude like a horse dude? No, he's not a horse dude. Lives up in Whitefish? Yeah, he's a Whitefish guy.

He's not a horse dude? No. A little bit like a wrangler? He used to wrangle horses for movies? No, he just kind of looks like that type of person, though. You met him once. Anyway. Well, I met a dude once named that type of person, though. You met him once. Anyway. Well, I met a dude once named that who was a horse wrangler for movies.

Oh, no. Lived up in that neck of the woods. No. I always call this guy Young McConaughey just because of his hair more than anything. No, different guys. Yeah. But the movie world just, they fight so hard against reality. Oh, yeah. It's just they'd want no part of it you know did

you see that thing i did that gq breakdown that was fantastic so like gq like gq magazine they have this thing they do the breakdown so you can go watch like a navy seal breaking down navy seal scenes and movies there's a chef breaking down cooking scenes and movies there's i don't know there's many of them uh alex onald the climber breaks down climbing scenes in movies. There's, I don't know, there's many of them. Alex Arnold, the climber, breaks down climbing scenes in movies. I did one with breaking down tracking and hunting scenes in movies. And leading up to it, I was talking to someone, and I was like, man, why don't these movie people, like, why don't they hire a guy to come in and be like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

You know, you should make it like this. That'll seem more real and he said oh they do they just don't listen to them they like to have them around just you know just to be like oh man i wouldn't do it like that you know you don't got a tape here with a machete well and they're like in this movie we do plus like we said uh the general uh way of doing things has changed quite a bit because you look at the reality of uh the robert redford jeremiah johnson elk shot yeah like that elk died oh yeah you pointed out and they took some heat they took some heat for it and robert redford kind of like justified and explained it and then in McGuane's

movie Rancho Deluxe greatest film ever made um they you know they shoot a steer with a sharps rifle um and he expressed to me that he was glad they don't do it that way anymore oh they bought a steer shot it and when you watch the movie if you're familiar with any kind of hunting or farming or anything when you watch the movie there's no confusion you watch last of the mohicans it's like when they shoot a deer it's like that deer i don't know what happened to that deer it wasn't shot that was just i don't know what it went from a live deer to a stuffed thing no it goes somersault yeah so yeah like a stuffed like they threw a stuffed animal through the woods somersaulting yeah i i imagine how for the amount of folks uh that are on a film set how some could it could probably cast a shadow over production for a day uh if you're not

familiar with watching the light fade from something's eyes. Anyone with sensitivities might want to come to work late today. You know, I'm about ready to quit talking about, I don't know, Phil, let me ask you, just as an impartial observer. Sure. Do you think we should cease covering

severed finger stories or no? Well, what has the feedback been like? More, it's just we get flooded with severed finger stories or no? Well, what has the feedback been like? It's just we get flooded with severed finger stories and images. Have you gotten anybody that's saying you're making me gag while I listen to your podcast? No, they just send us more and more graphic.

I have pictures of severed fingers that would curl your hair. I sent one to my wife and she was genuinely mad at me for two days. I would be too. It was about midnight i was in a different time zone and i sent her an image yeah no no explanation this is an audio medium though so i think you know i think you're okay i want to post them to instagram but i feel

like i'd get banished oh yeah for sure you got sent sent the grinder one, right? Yeah. That is haunting. Yeah, that is. Especially if you grind your own meat because the hand, when it gets eventually cut out of the grinder, is very familiar. Very familiar. Yeah. Tendon-y chunks.

I might start a page, a separate page. On the dark web. Before I get into it, anyways, a couple more finger stories. First, Jim Heffelfinger. That's a hell of a name. Actually, speaking of severed fingers. My grandfather severed his finger at the railroad, rail house. We called him Grandpa Half a Finger for most of his life.

Oh, that's fantastic. Yeah, it's an unusual last name you have. Yep. Tell people your job real quick swiss german my name name is swiss german i'm a wildlife science coordinator for arizona game fish department but you got your like you're in there man you mix it up it's fun you write articles listen to stuff monitor stuff argue it's all interesting it's all interesting yeah um i started being interested in jim because he sends so many clarifications and corrections.

I don't want to be that guy. No, no, no, no, no. You do it very respectfully. We'll get a lot of guys that send in a correction or two, and you can just see over the months, you'll see them just become very agitated. But they're not getting the level of attention they want, and then they turn like they hate you but still listen. And you want to write them back and be like, no, you could not listen.

It doesn't occur to them. and then they turn like they hate you but still listen. And you want to write them back. Because you didn't call back. No, you could not listen. Yes. It doesn't occur to them. Okay. This guy is talking about another great story. So this guy got married and his best man's dad had retired. I don't understand this. He retired and moved to a golf course and he would kill time by mowing the lawn i feel like it must have been a spare job

not volunteer would you move to a golf course and volunteer to mow the golf course listen my grandpa would volunteer and mow lawns out at the golf course that he loved i i did not understand it but my buddies who were working out at that uh golf course as like caddies no they loved it they're like yeah i saw your grandpa really came by on the mower today i've been anti-golf my whole life but i'm huge i'm super pro golf now i don't want to tell people. I don't want to tell people why. I don't want to tell people about what happened with me and the Flip-Flop Flasher. But now, we're like major golf supporters. At least it's green space. I'm not a golfer, but a major golf supporter.

I support the golf industry. My dad always said. I'm friends with the golf industry. Hit the ball and chase it. Hit the ball and chase it. Look at those simps out there. Hit the ball and chase it. Oh, no, listen. I'm friends with the golf industry. Hit the ball and chase it. Hit the ball and chase it. Look at those simps out there. Hit the ball and chase it. Oh, no, listen.

I'm a golf supporter, and I love all golfers, and I support all golf courses, but it's a moronic sport. Anyways, this guy's out mowing the golf course. You can just picture this. So he's in a mower that's got a roll bar and he's coming in and there's a pole with a guy line, a guy cable coming off of it. So he realizes that the roll bar and the cable are going to make contact.

So he breaks as he realizes and he reaches up to put some up pressure on the guy line to clear it from the roll bar. But then his foot slips off of the brake. Phil, can you put in a good noise?

It sounds like this. But it's like a, right? I mean, is that the sound of flesh or the sound of like what's happening here with that noise? That's the cable cutting his finger off. Okay. A little crunch. So a combination. I think the most disturbing part of all of these is there's rarely a scenario where I don't see myself having narrowly avoided that happening to me.

Or I can't be like, oh oh i could see how i would do that there's a great detail he says that his the the tendon there's a tendons find their way into these stories the tendon is someone sent us a picture of it it's like a finger with like 16 inches of tendon like the tendon came off up at the elbow but the tendon he said is wrapped around the cable this is he's a good writer he says it's similar if you took a ribbon and run it along a pair of scissors to coil it up that's how he's describing the coil of the tendon and this man then getting up there and unwrapping his uh unwrapping his finger from the cable uh another good finger story this is the last one for today

there's two stories one has nothing to do with fingers guy was saying his uh his old man's welder and he had a big welding glove on and his super hot chunk of slag got down his welding glove and lodged against his wedding ring. His wedding ring got so hot that it burnt a scar circle around his finger. Now he doesn't wear a wedding ring because he's got a scar circle instead. He's got a scar as a wedding ring. And a

story. Oh, two more things, man. I just said one more, but two more. Nah. What do you think, Jim? You getting bored? No, I like finger stories. It's not even a finger story. No, I'm not bored.

All right. We were talking the other day. We had an episode where Tom and I were dropping stuff down ice holes. And this guy drops a.357 Smith & Wesson down the ice hole, which leads me to be like, why? Absolutely why? Like, that is not a common part of my ice you said it was stainless and so the real bummer was he couldn't get it with a magnet he sends in a video of him in his ice house he gets his ice house ripping hot with a heater and he's in his ice house with his swim trunks. He goes down the hole. Can't find it. Comes back up. He looks in like

rough shape, man. He gets worn back up. Again, his buddy's filming it. He looks in like totally rough shape. Then he gets psyched up enough and dives back down there again. Comes out pretty much. His buddy's like reeling back in with a rope tied around his ankle and he's got that pistol. He says they were toting it around because they kept seeing wolves out on the ice oh my gosh pretty funny uh that's good all right uh jim halflefinger let's

start out with this so you know i guess first off tell people like what your sort of scope is your your the scope of your life's work as a wildlife guy. So I spent 22 years as a regional biologist in Tucson for Arizona Game and Fish Department. And then the last four years, I moved to kind of a statewide position called wildlife science coordinator. And the gist of that job is to have someone kind of free-floating that can do some of the deep dives in the science and make sure that we've got good science supporting the policies and the decisions we make as an agency. So that's pretty unusual to have a state wildlife agency to be, I think, forward thinking enough to have someone like that to make sure that we're providing a good scientific foundation on the things we do.

And your work, I know that just from talking to you about various issues around the country, inherently your work spreads beyond Arizona because wildlife issues don't stop at state lines, right? Yeah, and one of the biggest reasons I'm involved in a lot of west-wide stuff is I'm also, there's an association of 24 western state wildlife agencies, state and provincial wildlife agencies, and it's called the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies. And they get together twice a year, and they have some subcommittees and some working groups. And I've chaired.

I've been on the mule deer working group for more than 20 years now. And I've chaired it for the last 13 or 14 years. And so as a chair that oversees a mule deer expert from each of those 24 western agencies, we as a group and me as the chair are real involved in all the western migration stuff. You had Matt Kaufman here and Kevin Monteith talking about some of the stuff they're doing. I've been working with Matt and Kevin actually an awful lot on a lot of these things in the West. But that position to the Western Association, chairing that group, really puts me involved and in the seat to do a lot of things throughout the West too.

I know some of the bigger things you get involved in, like, you know, all your big game and your charismatic megafauna. Um, how low down in the, what's the smallest thing you're involved in? Well,

my 22 years as a regional biologist, I was in charge of three species of quail, goose, turkey restoration, um, in Southeastern Arizona, uh, mountain lions,

bighorn sheep, pronghorn, all of, all of the hundred species is what I dealt with from big game to small game. So that was most of my career, and it's really the last four years or so that I've been doing primarily a lot of big game, a lot of big game western stuff, various miscellaneous science support for the agency, and then Mexican wolf recovery, which I've been involved in for the last 10 years. Oh, for a decade now?

Mm-hmm. All right, we'll get to that a little bit. I know that's a constant. It's a big part of what I do. Yeah, and it's a constantly changing landscape. It is. Minefield, you might say. Yeah.

All right, first question. Some quick hitter topics for you. And a lot of this is inspired by feedback you've given us when questions emerge on other shows. One of the things we've emailed about is this, and we've touched on this, like news reports about this or confusion about this, is

there's this, it seems to be this emerging idea that people are like, well, if hunters go out and they want to, like, hunters want to get big bucks, right? Hunters want to shoot big bucks. They want to shoot big bighorn sheep. They want to get big bucks, right? Hunters want to shoot big bucks. They want to shoot big horn sheep. They want to shoot big moose.

If you go out and selectively target big bucks, are you changing the evolutionary path of the species? Meaning you're putting a selective pressure against big antler deer. This is an argument against trophy hunting, right? And that by doing that, you're making them, you're driving them to become smaller. Right. You buying it, not buying it? No.

With servants with a deer family, there's no evidence of that at all. This all came to light. It's not even that new. It's just once in a while a reporter will learn about it and write an article about it and think they're the first one to write about it. But it really caught. That's a good way of expressing how things like this come up. And they stay alive like that. Someone thinks that, hey, I just found out this new thing, but everybody's been discussing it for 17 years, which has been about the case with this.

In 2003, David Coltman came out with a picture. When we talk about severed fingers, you don't feel that way, do you? No, we can keep doing that. Keep doing that. These guys think they discovered severed fingers. So there was a paper in 2003 that really lit the world on fire on this whole topic. You didn't hear about it much. In 2003? 2003. That's how long. And that's really the genesis of all this recent kind of interest in that topic. But there's a population on the East side of the Alberta Rockies and it's separated from the main part of the Rockies. Big horns. Big horns. Okay. It's called Ram Mountain and it's a, it's a really small little dot out away from the rest of the sheep populations.

I got to stop you. Okay. You mentioned with cervids, but now we're talking about. Yep. Sheep. Yeah. Right. Help people through that. And I've just, I just with cervids, but now we're talking about sheep. Yeah. Right. Help people through that. And I just mentioned cervids right off the bat to almost dismiss that because – and we can talk about some of the reasons. Tell me what cervids are too just because – The deer family. So moose and elk and deer and anything in the deer family with – basically with antlers with a few exceptions. Yeah.

So this whole idea of trophy hunters ruining the gene pool, degrading the gene pool, some of the popular media call it evolution in reverse. That has really been focused on bighorn sheep or wild sheep. And it all comes from this one isolated, unique population called Ram Mountain in Alberta. there and they they reported in 2003 in nature that hunters selecting the largest rams were actually causing a genetic change in the population so that there were smaller and smaller rams in that population and then that same author even came out in 2008 and said well my work in 2003 really probably over exaggerated the genetic component of that there's really more nutrition than i originally said in the paper but it was too late. The popular media took that and just ran with it. And you saw it everywhere. And part of it was for people who don't like hunting and people that don't like trophy hunting,

it was such an irresistible story. Trophy hunters, something negative about trophy hunters. And some people just love that. And so trophy hunters are ruining the gene pool and all the popular media picked up on that. And then there's even some scientists who don't like trophy hunting and don't like hunting. And so they started looking at other data sets and see if they could produce a paper that looked something similar. And all of the subsequent papers that came out, they would cite the Ram Mountain information, which later found out to be over-ex over exaggerated in the genetic component. And these other scientists would speculate, citing Ram Mountain, and then speculate that this may be happening in these other areas. And it may be happening with all big game, may be happening with all species worldwide that humans harvest.

And so these other papers were just full of speculation. But every time someone published a paper to speculate, someone else could cite the speculative paper and the Rand Mountain paper. And these started to build this body of speculation. And now we're starting to get back and apply some science to that and find out that it may happen in a few cases, but it's certainly not widespread. But it's too late. The public has seen the popular message and aren't reading scientific papers. But the bottom line is, if selection is intensive enough, it can affect the gene pool in the future.

What you need to think about is, in what cases is selection intensive enough to actually change the gene pool in sheep or deer or any other species that we hunt? And the answer is, it's a very rare case. And the case on Ram Mountain was unique because it was isolated. The population swelled and bottlenecked a few times, which can affect the genetics. And also they had a hunting regime there where it was an unlimited number of hunters could hunt that little isolated mountain range, little isolated mountain, but they had to be four-fifths curled before they were legal to harvest. And so that's a situation where the rams that have faster growing horns, better genetics, faster growing horns, are going to get truncated. They're going to get taken out of the field as soon as they hit four-

fifths. And so that's a case where the rams that have faster growing horns are going to be removed at a higher proportion than rams of slower growing horns. So that was a basis of this coldman. And so there's, it's so theoretically and in practice there, it's not flawed that in certain situations that can happen. We did some more recent research with, with Kevin Montice lab, Taylor LeChar is a graduate student where we took state Vighorn sheep records and state records were important because we had horn measurements and we also had ages on those rams, which is something the Boone

to Crockett Pope and Young record books don't have ages. They just have measurements. They don't, they don't record the number of annual eye on a horn. Not, not Boone and Crockett. No, it's measurements. You know, they got their measurement system and then on the data sheet there, they can put age on some of the species, but I'm not sure if they even do it with bighorn sheep on there. Yeah. And a problem, too, is you have to be, like, pretty well trained. Yeah, it's not that easy. There's some experience that goes into it. But state agencies do record age and record some measurements, sometimes full boon crocket, sometimes just bases plus the length of the horn.

And so we went to the state records and got all the state records we could assembled into a database where we had age and we had the antler or the horn measurements. And then we were able to analyze these sheep records, and we were able to accommodate or neutralize the effective age because obviously the older the ram, the bigger the horn. And so you've got to, in your analysis, you've got to be able to look at that and ferret that part of the analysis out. And then we were also able to look at some NDVI index, which is a greenness index of satellite imagery. And we were able to look at nutrition and environment and how that affected horn size in these states and in these populations. And in the end, we analyzed data from 35 years from 72 different hunt units around North America.

Um, and, and in the end we found that of those 72 units, um, 78% of them were either stable or the horn size was increasing. So only 22% even showed a decline. Now we don't even know yet what that decline is, but in those 22 that declined, only half of those had a hunt regime that even, even could possibly exert some kind of selective pressure. You know, sometimes you can just look at a hunt system and, and like a complete permit system that Arizona has where someone just takes one, just one ram tag. Yeah. One tag per mountain range. So you're not, you don't have that kind of selective pressure. Like you if you have unlimited number of hunters creaming that horn size at a certain level.

And so even in the 22 where they weren't stable or increasing in horn length, they were decreasing, still about half of those could even have possibly been due to some selective pressure. And so the bottom line is even in sheep, which is the only species that this has really been found in a controlled setting, it's very unusual to have that kind of hunting regime that would actually apply that selective pressure to cause kind of genetic changes. And all this is confounded terribly with nutrition. The more nutrition an animal gets, the bigger the horns and antlers. The older the animal gets, the bigger the horns and antlers. And there's all kinds of obstacles, which is the paper you saw that I wrote, all kinds of obstacles that get in the way of hunters actually affecting the gene pool. And when a hunter goes out and shoots, passes up a spike and shoots an eight point whitetail buck in Iowa, technically that's selection because they passed up one buck and

they selected a bigger buck. But you have to look at the intensity of selection. Is that anywhere near intensive enough to cause any genetic changes? And you think about all of the other things that are removing animals from the population that have nothing to do with horn or antler size. You have, for example, a fawn crop. You lose half of the fawns every year before their first birthday in general. And those losses of half of that annual cohort have nothing to do with horn or antler size. You've got mountain lions, you've got predators killing adults that have nothing to do with antler size. And the idea that hunters going out during daylight hours in the hunt unit they have have a permit for only able to take, uh, males. The fact that the idea that they're affecting that entire gene pool is just ludicrous that

you would apply that kind of pressure. It could happen in some cases in sheep, but it's pretty rare. Well, there's so much, so much conflicting data out there too, as to how much we're actually even, we, I guess, hunters in certain cases are actually even affecting behavior. Like you see all these whitetail papers that come out and it's like, well, the bucks have gone nocturnal. It's like, well, no, we tracked them and they do just as much walking around during the day as they do at night. Yeah. I mean, hunting affects behavior hugely. Oh.

Of game animals. But like you look at these club situations, right? Where it's like, you got five guys hunting, you know, a thousand acres. They're out there maybe 25 days total between the five guys. And they all have the same story as Joe dude going out on public land. It's like the deer are so educated.

Yeah. But it's generational too. I mean, they're raised by, I mean, these are animals that spend a year with their mother, who spent a year with her mother, who spent a year with her mother. There's a learned, you know, there's a learned response. I mean, you just go look at landscapes where you always had hunting and then took it away. Oh, that spot that we hunted, Eric Siegfried from onyx and i hunted this year yeah it's this funky access deal where you kind of have to get up on this rock rim and i swear to god 30 percent or more of the mule deer does just walked below staring at that rock rim like they just were

locked on it yeah and when you and your body sneak in and always hunt Yellowstone, I mean, you guys always act like you hunted somewhere else, but I mean, you guys do really well in there, right? You and your body. Well, better than anybody else. Do you get frustrated by the way stuff's covered in the media? It's got to make you mad.

It makes me mad, and I'm not even a scientist. It does, but when you know the science makes me mad, and I'm not even a scientist. It does. But when you know the science, and the public's not reading scientific papers, so when you know the science and you see something like that just catch fire and run away in the popular media, and it's not true and it's exaggerated and everything that you read is just full of errors, and that's what most of the general public's reading. And there's credible places that run with it, too.

Like National Geographic could cover the piss out of a story like that. They would never cover the root. Like when it wound up being that it wasn't accurate, they would have zero interest in it because they love anything that can be like a little bit, like put a little taint on hunting. They love it. Yep.

Like they go out of their way to find it. They would never be like, Oh, you know, it turns out that that wasn't actually true. I mean, like, like the bias is so within an organization like that, the bias is so severe oh that's even like you look

at this thing that's going on with uh donald trump jr right he's doing a fundraiser he's doing a fundraiser where they're gonna go hunt ducks and blacktail deer and the media is covering it like a trophy animal hunt i'm like that's a hunting ducks and blacktails is a trophy animal hunt now. Yeah. Well, it's like, that's how it's described. The, uh, did you guys saw the, um, so the, uh, IUCN, uh, is a body that I pay attention to for a lot of conservation, up-to-date conservation facts and knowledge and um a lot of stories came out earlier uh or late last year on how the iucn has determined that trophy hunting is this terrible thing and it's killing these animal populations and you start

reading into it and you're not see hunting not not bush hunting not bush meat hunting yeah right the paper is they're like well this is a something that was being researched and it's not even the conclusion somebody just took it and ran this out this is not our finding but nobody covered that story yeah it was always like oh here it is there's been some good pushback some letters. I think I sent you something recently with the Conservation Frontlines is an email service that you can subscribe to free. And they have some really good information about some scientists have gotten together and some people in Africa have gotten together. It's representing local African communities.

And the African communities are saying how dare Western um people take away our livelihood the you know this is sustainable conservation it's funding conservation is funding our villages and how how dare someone sit in their White House someplace in the U.S and say this isn't a good thing yeah it's like the it's like left-wing imperialism man oh the band's going on in the uk it's like it's like it's like a softer gentler imperialism do you think the uk bands are kind of a uh little long-term guilt-laden thing is from the days of uh british imperialism no where it's like yeah that's why i know they're like they're like tacking a little, like the old pendulum. Right.

Yeah. Shane Mahoney asked me to be on the IUCN Sustainable Use and Livelihoods Committee. So that's one of the committees that he chairs and real active with. And it's all about this. I like the IUCN ratings. Yeah, I do too. We should say. I tend to eat a lot of things that are of least concern.

Yeah, except I was recently looking at the Mountain Lion IUCN rating. They changed it. It says that it's decreasing. It says that the populations are decreasing. Yeah, I looked at that. I don't understand. For Mountain Lion. I don't understand that either.

In fact, one of the main paper they cite for that is someone I work with with Mexican Wolf Recovery. I sent him an email with a link to that. And since they were citing their work, I just asked him, what is that all about? And I haven't heard from him yet. I feel that the IUCN does a little bit play a predictive game. But even that with Mountain Lion, predicting a decline. Yeah, when something's on an increase, how do you predict? Yeah.

So that's just patently wrong. Yeah, when something's on an increase, how do you predict? Yeah. So that's just patently wrong. Yeah. We should say International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Yeah, if you go on, you know, the Wikipedia gives a lot of ink to the IUCN. So if you type in any species, like if you go in, the other day we were looking at the long-tailed weasel. So the IUCN long-tailed weasel, it would have it like population of least concern, which is like the best news a species can get.

The thing you want is to be in least concern. And it's graded out over, I don't know how many designations. It's five or six or whatever. There's a spectrum there. And there's like a most concern and then a critical concern. Yeah.

I think there's extinct. I think some of them are just extinct. Yeah. Okay, next question. We have before, you've done some work with Val, we talk about Val Geist

all damn time. He's a good friend of mine. Is he? Uh-huh. Good friend. 20 years. Okay. In fact,

I brought Ben O'Brien Val Geist bone broth recipe. That's Val for it, and I got it. That's good. Val Geist, okay, we That's Val for it. Nice. That's good. Valgeist, okay, we covered this before. Valgeist had a, he took a stab at what, I don't know if I want to redo it. He took a stab on how the mule deer came to be.

I presented this to some mule deer researchers and they were not titillated by it. They didn't even want to take it on. I was like fanciful and not understandable. But it was this idea that for... I'm going to do a short version. Cal, hold your thumb out and as you get bored, start going down.

I was going to start in the plyo scene, so you're doing better. I'm not going down. If you know... Here's what we could do. Let me try to do a crash course in what I'd read. He floored this idea that 3 million years ago, like what is now the southeastern U.S. There's always been white-tailed deer. Cal's thumb is still up.

What'd you do? Bang your thumb on the hammer? Your kid asked me that, too, and I got to tell you the same thing. I don't know. That was an MD-750 right right there what was I saying oh yeah there's always been Whitetail deer was now the southeastern US we had this big wet you know period of lush growth and these deer colonized coast to coast colonize the the the mid continent from the east coast of the US.S. to the west coast.

Then it was a big dry period, and the middle emptied out. And these deer that remained on the west coast gradually evolved into blacktails. Then there was another period where it was moist and conditions were good, and this population of blacktails moved east. The whitetails, which had retreated to the southeastern U.S., had moved back west. They met along the Rocky Front, the

Rocky Mountain Front, had sex, and spawned mule deer. Hybridized. And then there was another great retraction. Blacktails went back to the coast, whitetails went back down to the southeast, and this lingering population of these hybridized

I think it was blacktail bucks making love to whitetail does that's your mule deer and they said I presented to some mule deer people and they had a response kind of like let's move on

well there was a And they had a response kind of like, let's move on. Well, there was a scientific basis for Val coming up with that theory, which has been superseded by other genetic work that came along. Tell us. It's not time for you to tell us. What's up with all the deer? So that was basically it. I think it was glaciers advancing and receding rather than wet and dry, I think, probably. Just changing environments, changing habitats. We're calling it a split.

But regardless, that's basically the story that Val came up with. And he did that for a reason because when they first started doing genetic work, they found out that black-tailed deer have completely different mitochondrial DNA than mule deer, yet they're subspecies. So there's two kinds of DNA. There's DNA in the nucleus, and you get this nuclear DNA DNA and you get half of that from your mother, half from your father. There's another kind of DNA floating around in the cells outside the nucleus called mitochondrial DNA. Mitochondrial DNA, you only get from your mother. So it's like a clone. It comes from your mother and your grandmother and her mother. Yeah. That's how they like contract

down sort of the, you know, like all of Western Europe. You theoretically track all of Western Europe to like a female. Yep, to an Eve. Mitochondrial Eve. So the mitochondria, so you can, you want to analyze both types of DNA and they yield different answers to different kinds of questions. But initial mitochondrial DNA analysis showed, you think about really the two black-tailed deer subspecies are just subspecies of mule deer. They're all Otocollis hemionus, some subspecies. And then you have white-tail, which are a different species, Virginianus. And yet when they looked at the mitochondrial DNA, they found out that mule deer and white-tailed deer have basically the same

mitochondrial DNA, which is bizarre because they're different species. And both of them, including mule deer, have different mitochondrial DNA from black tail so black tails have this unique mitochondrial dna so val took that just thinking about that val said well that could probably occur if female if if black-tailed deer bred with white-tailed deer and and the offspring brought in that white-tailed deer mitochondrial dna so if you had female white-tailed deer breeding with black-tailed males, and they spawned some kind of hybrid mule deer, then all those mule deer would have the same mitochondrial DNA as the white-tail. Ah.

Because it comes through the female line. So if it was female white-tail, then mule deer would have that same mitochondrial DNA. You following this, Phil? And black-tailed would be different. And so that, just going on that, that was a basis of his theory. So that's what inspired that. That's what inspired it. So it made sense at the time.

But later on, more work, especially with nuclear DNA that you get half from your mother, half from your father, you look at mule deer nuclear DNA, and it's closely aligned with black tails. Black tail and mule deer are all closely associated. And then white tail is completely different. So if they really were hybrids, then the mule deer, when you look at the nuclear DNA, they would have about half of the white tail genome and about half of the black tail genome. But they don't. Mule deer and black tail deer evolved as one group. And then black tail deer split off during one of the advances of the ice ages over in the pacific coast so theory okay so in this version of events mule deer um predated black tails yes yep in that version but here's the thing is like why does a sitka white tail looks or a sitka

black tail looks so damn much like a whiteitetail. I know. Antler growth, everything. Well, even like metatarsal glands, there's other things where the blacktail deer actually looks like a hybrid, which makes it as confusing as hell. Because a blacktail deer looks almost like it's got some whitetail-like characteristics. But when you look at genetics, the blacktail can't be a hybrid between those two. And so it's got to be convergent evolution where they kind of acquire traits that are similar even though they're not. Yeah, like dragonflies and hummingbirds. We talk about this the other day.

Dragonflies and hummingbirds both fly. That doesn't mean they're cousins. Yep. So we did genetic analysis. We did some genetic analysis all up and down the coast in blacktails from California up to Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and then mid-British Columbia you start start getting into Sitka blacktails, up into Alaska. And we had them all and analyzed all of those and found the highest concentration of genetic diversity

was the coast of Oregon and Washington in blacktail deer, both subspecies of blacktail deer. And geneticists, population geneticists will tell you that where you have a focal point with high genetic diversity right there and then lower genetic diversity radiating out from that that indicates that was the refugium that's the that's ground zero for that species or that animal and so likely the black-tailed deer were isolated for a long time during one of the many glacial advances and receding over on that coast and then gradually expanded out from there with the receding of the glaciers.

And so why does a Sitka then look different than the Colombian? And I don't know the answer to that. Like why he doesn't typically have a bifurcated antler, like a forked antler. A forked tine. Well, the mature Sitkas do. Well, I mean, they tend to throw a rack a hell of a lot like a whitetail. They're small. They're about the same size like that.

The mature ones will have the G2s. Yeah, I got you. But Sitkas have a double white a whitetail. They look, they're small. They're about the same size like that. The mature ones will have the G2s. Yeah, I got you. But Sitka's have a double white bib on their throat. They're kind of a different tail. They look real different. And that, nobody knows for sure what kind of separation there might have been in some glacial period between Colombian blacktail and Sitka blacktail. The Sitka could just be a phenotypic or a physical adaptation to that marine environment, swimming and living on islands and that kind of environment. It could be adaptation and they're

physically changing, not so much because of the separation. Nobody really knows that for sure. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking a high-end titty there, OnX is now in Canada.

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of the whitetail? Like, like how far back in time I'm trying to think how to express this question. If you had a time machine and it said that like a random it would just randomly throw you back to randomized dates and you wanted to set a location on your time machine

to maximize the chances that you would stumble into a whitetail, what would you set? Florida. Florida? Yeah, and there's a lot of whitetail fossils in Florida. In fact, I brought one. They've been hanging around there a long time. Yeah, they've been in the Pleistocene. There's just a ton of

Pleistocene whitetail fossils in Florida. And I actually brought you one. Oh, really? That's kind of a – Holy shit. That's an epicenter. So you can see that's fossilized material, and that's just the base of an antler. Jim just handed me a fossilized – the bone base from the skull, so the pedicle.

Got the pedicle. The antler, about an inch and a half of antler, about an inch of skull. And it feels like stone. And it is stone. Yep. You know the word pedicle comes from George Bubenik, famous antler researcher, George and his father, Anthony. And Anthony, they wrote a book in 1990 called Horns, Pronghorns, and Antlers, and it's like the Bible for ant antler kind of antler science geeking out but anthony bubonic coined didn't coin the phrase pedicle but he told us how to pronounce it pedicle he says it

rhymes with medical but anthony bubonic spoke about six languages and english was like his fifth language and so i always think it's kind of funny that we're all taking our pronunciation of medicals from this guy who nobody can understand when he spoke English. This is amazing, man. This is out of Florida? Yeah, Florida. So this deer was running around. He'd bump into mastodons now and then. And that's dated Pleistocene.

Mm-hmm. Yep. Jim also brought to show us a replica of a saber-tooth tooth. Smilodon fatalis. His canine. Mm-hmm. And Smilodon is a... And canine. And Smilodon is... And this thing is 11 inches long?

Yeah. Smilodon is not because they had a big smile with those big toothies. Smilodon comes from, I think it's Smili, I don't know how to pronounce it, but it's Latin for double-edged sword. Really?

I'd laugh if one of these just jumped out and just grabbed Phil. It would make a bike ride to work a little more exciting. Like, you know, just kill them. I'd be like, ah, look at that. I would too. Can you believe that, Cal? That's what I'd say. Move real slow.

Move real slow. So Florida had a lot of white tails. Go ahead, Cal. Florida also has the spring site where they got all the fossils out of, including the giant tortoise with... Not familiar with that.

Giant tortoises that once roamed what is now the United States, but they found a tortoise shell in this spring in Florida that had a spear point in it. No. I need to talk to our former podcast guest who does it so then you start digging into the actual paper and it's like it was laying nearby it was laying in the shell as they brought the thing out and they're like so you know it could be this but it very well could be this. But then every time you – Probably it's clear evidence of ceremonial turtle slaughtering practices.

Yes, exactly. It was a religious totem. It's a religious sign. There was a paleontologist in New Mexico that was knocking one of the – on arrow points, knocking one of the little shoulders off and saying that was indicative of Sandia Man. And he wrote papers and constructed this big story. Because he always knocked a shoulder off. But they found out later he was knocking the shoulders off and saying it was diagnostic of this. Wow.

There's some bad stuff. But he wasn't doing it as a greater social experiment. No. That's a bummer. Can I tell people what you were musing before we started recording? Your observation about archaeology? Or is that just too harsh? No, that's fine.

That's fine. You tell them yourself. Yeah, truth is hard. A friend of mine always called archaeology a soft science because so much of it is just made up. They'll find a toe bone and then they'll write a paper about what the home range was and what the color of the fur was. Unfortunately, there's just a lot of garbage.

I was looking into archaeological evidence of elk in Arizona when we were doing some Miriam's elk stuff, and there was a son who was a paleontologist and archeologist and his dad was too at the university. And he had 44,000 deer family bones out of the site in Arizona. And he had like 14 or so elk. And so I was really interested in those elk specimens and I couldn't get ahold of the son, but I talked to the dad and the dad says, oh, those were, those are big Otocolios those are big mule deer those weren't elk he didn't know what he was talking about talking about his own son yeah in his paper so there's a lot of that in there and you just got to really be skeptical and be cautious you can't read a paper and then just go um you know repeating

it without some skepticism but thinking thinking about it when i was When I was working on my Buffalo book, it came up where I was reading about where there were accounts of them occurring. And there's a lot of versions of why Buffalo, New York became Buffalo, New York. But you'll often read in old books that like Buffalo, New York was Buffalo, New York because someone had encountered Buffalo. I thought it was the wings.

Well, no. I think I I thought it was the wings. Well, no. There's a – I think I get into it in the book. I can't remember if I explained it or not. A bunch of different theories about how it got the name. But it wound up being that sometimes you'll see distribution maps for where Buffalo roamed, bison, bison, bison roamed, and people will have it going up into New York. The range map will go up in New York that the did the range map will go up into New York and it comes from people include it because two skulls

came out of some campsite some excavation of a campsite in New York just the skulls and both of them had cultural markings on them. And later people looked at it and thought, were they living here? Or did someone get some from someone and bring them home? The same way copper that comes out of Michigan's Upper Peninsula can be found anywhere in the Midwest. And traced back, like people took stuff, they thought stuff was cool and brought it home with them. Sure, Arizona had parrot feathers in Arizona and all kinds of things from Central America.

There was these big trade routes. Oh, is that right? And if you look in the, not the last Elk of North America book, I think it was the one before, or maybe it was the last. No, it was the one before the last one. And they show elk distribution all the way down to Mexico City. And it's only because Montezuma had some elk. He had a menagerie. He had a menagerie. And he had some elk in the menagerie. And the people do the distribution map to include Mexico City.

And in fact, the elk really weren't in Mexico. Cortez, his recorders describe the first bison ever witnessed by a European was probably in Montezuma's menagerie witnessed by Cortez expedition. And I think that somehow they describe it as having come from the north. Yeah, probably. Having come from the north. Yeah, probably. Having come from the north and not that it lived there. The mule deer was first described from the journals of LeRae. And he first described what a mule deer looked like in the west.

And it was found out later that there was no such person as Charles LeRae and that his journals were entirely fabricated by someone. They don't even know who. But entirely fabricated the journals, taking pieces, some from Lewis and Clark, some from different journals from explorers and put it together and made up this story about Charles LeRae, who was in the West. He was captured by Sioux Indians. He was held captive for several years by the tribe. And during that time, he kept a journal.

And it was only because Western literature was really popular this is some late 1800s I think Western literature is really popular and being held captive by Native American tribes was like a really hot story so this guy just fabricated this whole thing and so you'll read even some of my early writings where we talk about Charles Le Ray described the first mule deer oh is that right it turns out it's just crap it's permeated like permeated yeah everybody keeps repeating it uh over and over again when we were talking ahead uh ahead of this um i came here at some point in time you'd mentioned that you wanted to discuss uh elliot coos but let me tee that off with uh do you accept i'm a bit like who's you're kind of one of my favorite animals by far definitely my probably maybe first or second favorite thing to go hunting for maybe third turkeys mule deer and white tail

i'm sorry turkeys mule deer turkeys deer in my mind depends what time of year it is which one of those is my favorite thing to hunt but uh our coos deer like do you accept or what's the thinking they're like a subspecies of the white tails. They're just white tails and they happen to live somewhere else. Yeah. There's no doubt there are subspecies that really evolved differently because they were in the Sierra Madre of Mexico. And so they were really geographically fairly isolated from all of the white tails. So in the Sierra Madre, that's Coos deer. Okay.

Yeah. I mean, when you get down, you get about halfway down the Sierra Madre and they start getting all these other subspecies names. But nobody's really done science on that at all. We've got a small white tail throughout the highlands of Mexico and none of them are probably any different. They're probably basically cow's deer all the way down through the Sierra Madre. You're a cow's deer, man. Yeah. Didn't you hear Yanni a couple weeks ago?

I didn't know that you were a cow's deer, man. This is the first cow's deer, man man we've ever had in this room. I had my 15 minutes of fame a couple weeks ago, and Yanni said, there's like one guy that says cow. Screw him. And I said, that's my 15 minutes. They mentioned me. They mentioned me. Cow's deer man.

Well, here's the deal. Elliot Cowes. That's how you pronounce his name. No, that's not what I heard. You heard wrong. I heard he pronounced it cows. Yeah, that's, you know where that comes from? Chris Denham. Probably Chris Denham. Chris Denham read something Richard

Achenfels wrote and Richard Achenfels writes in his annotated bibliography of cows, white tail, he writes, it's, it rhymes with house. And I asked, I'm friends with Richard, I've known Richard for 20 years. I asked Richard, where'd that come from? He said, well, I talked to Neil Carmody and, and, um, and I visit Neil Carmody in the nursing home in Tucson every couple of months. I've been, I've known him for 25 years. I asked Neil, where does that come from? The cows. And he says, I don't, we knew somebody that, um, spoke some French and he says, that's

probably how it's pronounced. So that's where, that's where that cows thing came from. Completely bogus. There's no question how to pronounce his name. There's a huge question on how people want to refer the deer. That's where that cows thing came from. Completely bogus. There's no question how to pronounce his name. There's a huge question on how people want to refer to the deer. That's maybe different. Yeah, I think that those two subjects have their own evolutionary paths. They do.

Okay, but go on. You can call them whatever the hell you want. Ladies and gentlemen, if our guest here says cow was deer, he's referring, of course, to coos deer. It's really sad. Nowhere in, I would say, linguistical or idiomological history do I know of a word where after learning how to pronounce it correctly, 95% of the public not only refuses to, but militantly refuses. Oh, it gets people riled up. Till the day I die.

Yeah, they get angry. But you know what? You know who gets riled up. Till the day I die. Yeah, they get angry. You know what? You know who gets riled up the most? Cows to your people. I would call them cows. I call them, listen, I call them coosier for a simple reason. The people that introduced me to them and that I hung out with and hunted them with first, that's what they called them.

I actually had Jay Scott say cows on his podcast one time when I was on it. I was like, did you just say what I thought you said? So there's also like, you know, there's a spirited debate around Sitka. Right. Sitka. Which confuses people because I think Sitka blacktails. Anyhow. Yeah. Sitka. Elliot Cowes. Elliot Cowes. Now, to put the name pronunciation to bed, Elliot Cowes, when he wrote the checklist of birds in North America, he added a footnote. Oh, he was an ornithologist.

He was mostly an ornithologist. I forgot about that. He'd never killed a deer. Someone named the deer after him. So he really wasn't a deer guy. He was a really good ecologist. But he wrote the checklist of birds in North America, and he has a footnote where he explains how to pronounce his name. No.

He does. And he says C-O-W-Z. Cowes. That's a lie. Not a lie. It's in black and white.. Cows. That's a lie. Not a lie. It's in black and white. Really? Okay, here's a twist.

Who the hell makes a footnote in their book about how to pronounce their last name? It was a footnote on a bird species that was also cow's eye. Oh, excuse me. Some species. So he was explaining where that name came from. And he was writing the book, and he was explaining how his name was pronounced. Kind of pretentious. Okay, so you're right.

You're right. It's cows right from elliot cowles's mouth you're right but we're talking about the deer not the dude yeah we're talking about yeah yeah he's right but so yeah so say we were in that i know i know and so say that there was someone who is who just had made huge contributions to outdoor education, entertainment, had a podcast, had a TV show, and did so much for the industry that some deer biologist wanted to name a subspecies after him. The renella deer. Odeocolius hemiotus renella. And then so we go in the- Cal's deer. You and I go in the time machine, and we go 100 years in the future, and we get out and

we talk to some deer hunters, and they're talking about, yeah, we're all jacked because we got tags for these Renea deer. You'd be like, Renea deer. No, the guy's name- French. The guy's name was Rinella. The guy's name was Rinella. And they'd shrug and say, I'm going to call it Renea until the day I die.

You'd be like, hmm. Yeah, man. That's kind of weird. You're like, that's my deer. That's kind of weird. You're like, that's my deer. That's kind of weird. That was named to honor me, and the deer was named to honor Elliot Cowes. No, you know what I'd say? I'd be like, no, dude, I totally understand.

Would you? I don't think so. I don't think so. As a coos deer, man, I understand. But there's a twist to that story. So Elliot Cowes and Elliot Cowes' father, Samuel, and his grandfather, Peter, they pronounce it cows. He was an ornithologist, not a deer guy. But did he, like, muse on or, like, was he like, oh, and there's this little shit and deer running around?

I'm not sure if, well, he did. He wrote quadrupeds of kinds of deer in Arizona. I think he wrote that. That's a great title for a book. I like that word, kinds. We talk about subspecies and races, and he wrote a paper, Kinds of Deer. That's a great book, man. I like that.

I'm going to do that whole series. So he's written about all kinds of, you know, all the mammals and deer too, but not in detail. He wasn't really a deer person in detail. But there's a twist to the cow story so he elliot cows and and at least two generations back um pronounced it cows but he says that back in france i don't know how many generations that would be we're talking about 1700s he's a frenchman from yeah the name is french and so his family originally came from northern france moved to southern england and he says in that same footnote, when they moved to southern England, the name was changed or bastardized, and they started pronouncing it cows.

And in France, it was two syllables, couets. That's what I'm switching to for the deer. Couets. And so if people are going to argue that that's their basis for saying cous, then I want to hear them saying couets-ays, dear. That's what I'm switching to. I cannot wait to get around all them hard-hitting Arizona flat-brim dudes and be like, coo-ays. Yeah, I'd like to be interested in these coo-ays, dear.

I like how you held out until you found a reasonable out. I needed to find something contrarian. I needed to find a way to get out of this. There's some people in Elliot Cowes' family back before him that spelled their name C-O-W-E-S. Instead of U in the middle, they put C-O-W-E-S. Oh, wow. Because they were tired of people mispronouncing it. Coups, probably.

I have a newspaper article about an uncle of mine. No, my father's uncle hit a accidentally like crashed his car into a policeman's car. An Irishman named Philip Toomey.

And Philip Toomey went home and got his pistol and came back and shot and killed my dad's uncle. I have a newspaper article about it, but in that article, my family is R-I-N-E-L-L-I. So, sure. In the article?

Yeah, in the article. Okay, and that's the only place? Yeah, my dad said he grew up with his grandma pulling that. She kept the clothes in a box, and she'd pull them down and show everybody the bloody shirt with a bullet hole in it but the article about it describes him as with r-i-n-e-l-l-i so he perhaps right you know just like people how just i'm just coming on the way that names morph and change and yeah and like how like what like what pronunciation i mean how that dude pronounced his last name i don't know did he say ranella or did he have some whole other way of doing it? My family is originally from Deegton, Switzerland in the 1700s.

And two miles from Deegton, Switzerland is Heffelfingen. Heffelfingen, Switzerland. And there's Heffelfingers back there now, and they spell it the same way, which is kind of unique, because names do change when they switch continents and things, but still spell it that way. Last thing on

Elliot Cowes. Do you understand? I read, like, what was his thing about levitation? Have you read that? I read that he was into levitation. But have you read his paper? He was a believer in levitation? No, I just read that he was.

I was probably on something stupid like his Wikipedia page, but I just read that he's, like, into levitation. No, you can get the, I bought that publication for like 99 cents online on Kindle. I don't know if it's available other places, probably other places, but it's a short thing. It's more of a paper than a book, but they make it look like it's a book. And it's really entertaining because he, as a scientist, he's talking about, well, okay, people don't believe in levitation, but basically we should hold out the idea that there's a lot of things in the natural world we don't understand and we can't explain. And future research will probably explain it. And he kind of felt that way about levitation,

that we don't know what it is now. He'd been totally swindled by people who were levitating in front of him. But he said, you know, we don't understand it now, but future, in the future, science might unravel what that's all about. He says, people don't have any problem believing in centrifugal force or gravity. Like if you took the earth and you spun it, wouldn't people levitate because of centrifugal force? He was talking about these forces as being understood, and we just don't understand that

one. He said, everybody in the world uh doesn't believe in levitation except he says christians of course i mean they have no problem believing that christ ascended into heaven through levitation so so the christians believe in levitation so they're open to the idea that's right that was his his tongue in cheek but he talks in there about he he ends it kind of odd he talks about how his wife which he refers to as Mrs. C in there. And so those. Because he can't pronounce.

He doesn't know how to pronounce her name. Probably. He just gave up on that. So he talks about his wife and a friend and this big old table. And they put their hands on the table and they tried to move it. And the table started bumping and moving by itself. And he was totally convinced. There you go.

That they were doing this. And they pulled away from the table. And the table kept bumping and being agitated with nobody touching it. And then at the end of that kind of bizarre story, maybe he was getting senile at the end of his career. At the end of that story, he says, and therein lies my theory of telekinetic levitation. Yeah, I buy it. He just adds it. No, I'm totally convinced now, man.

It's an interesting read. It's pretty entertaining. It's pretty short. This is a question that cannot be answered to my satisfaction. I'm going to phrase it in an annoying way. Why do deer lose their antlers? Evolutionarily, or how does it happen when it happens? Why do they evolutionarily?

Why shed their antlers? Yeah, I say it's annoying because you can't go like, we don't know why. We could speculate about things that may have, right? There's some good reasons to lose antlers. You break a tine, you got a new set next year. Yeah, but you break your horn, you don't get a new set.

No, you don't, but they're not going to break as much as tines though. You know, you'll broom the tips off and get sinusitis and lose the horns. But would that really drive? No, I'm not alone, I don't think. I'm not alone. But, you know, you think if you're overwintering and you're trying to make it through winter on harsh winter range and through deep snow, it'd be nice not to have, especially a moose, those big bones on your head.

I mean, there'd be an advantage to losing those during the wintertime. Yeah, but you can't beat the hell out of stuff trying to kill you. No. Tell you what the answer is probably. Oh. Is. Let's go. Nutritional signaling.

And you've heard about that where it gives you and it gives the animal an annual expression of its physical condition and its fitness for females to select the animals that are able to acquire the most resources, grow the biggest antlers because they're luxury organs. They grow after the body has been satisfied, the nutrition. Yeah, so the difference between driving a car or having a picture of a sweet car you used to have.

It sounds like a personal story. Did you sell a car or you didn't? Okay. But here you've got an annual expression of how fit you are. It's up to the minute. And getting bigger every year. As a yearling moose, you don't want to grow this gigantic 50-inch set of antlers. But here annually, as your body grows and as you get more nutrition and and maybe become dominant you can you can express

that and say look ladies look at look at I got yeah but horned here's the problem with that horned animals have the same luxury they just keep growing right but there's some times where it's not like a two-year-old bighorn is going to wind up having the biggest horns ever it's like a big ass horned bighorn is big horn is old they you know cervids the deer family evolved in asia bovids evolved don't know where probably europe someplace and so these animals get on these different evolutionary tracks and you get that's good you get characteristics that just develop independently and and and now looking at them now they may not make sense when you compare them yeah i like what you're saying.

But they just had different pathways. There's a Procolius in Asia, some fossils. We're looking at a set of fossils. It looks like, at least that was the conclusion, some of them shed their antlers every year and some of them didn't in that form. And so that's thought of as maybe being the root of the cervid family, of the deer family. Gotcha. That's right at the point where animals have these things on their heads and then they're dropping off every year or not dropping off every year.

We had a really, really neat, uh, kind of expression of the, the, you know, health of the animal being represented in, in the antlers. Um, Sam Bates, uh, a producer here at MeatEater, she, uh, shot her first, first mule deer buck and it was a really neat buck and everything about it from my look at the deer was like, boy, this is a mature deer, the antlers aren't that big. And they're kind of an interesting formation and uh you could have laid a you know a two-year-old deer next to this probably three or four-year-old deer and the two-year-old deer would have bigger antlers um but then when he started dressing the deer, the deer had been shot the year before. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Oh. There's also leg injuries. Front leg injuries will produce a non-typical point on the same side as the front leg injury. Rear leg injuries. You say that like always. Produce the opposite. No, not always, but. Oh, you know, I knew, I thought it was always the opposite. I didn't know it was front leg.

Front leg is the same side. It's called a contralateral effect. And, and so the rear leg or left rear leg will produce a, um, a messed up antler on the, on the right side the same side. It's called a contralateral effect. And so the rear leg or left rear leg will produce a messed up antler on the right side the next year. So a lot of theories are like some kind of counterbalancing, which doesn't make a lot of sense. Some say, well, the deer's probably back there licking his injury and he's damaging that opposite side antler. But I think it's more neurological. I think it's the way the right brain manages the left side of the body and vice versa I think it's something with that damage to the left side of your leg is neurologically

affecting the other side um okay so tell me why they how they lose their antlers what's going on one minute you're kicking ass you got some antlers you're fighting yes I mean you can pick it all, you can pick up the animal. Then all of a sudden they fall off. You can pick up the animal by the antlers. You can drag them around by it. And then after the breeding season, testosterone levels, mostly testosterone, a lot of other hormones. There's this big orchestra of hormones rising and falling throughout the year in a deer. But really testosterone is a driver.

And after the breeding season, testosterone levels plummet. And it's that plummeting of testosterone there's this this certain layer of bone cells between the the temporary antler material and the top of the pedicle that's called osteoclasts and they're real sensitive to hormonal changes and that drop in testosterone erodes those osteoclasts and antlers just fall off they must be some strong sons of bitches, though. Yeah, right. Think about what that's... Because you can hit, like, you've seen deer, like, you could hit a deer on the antler sometimes. And break the skull.

And it busts the skull in half. Mm-hmm. Yep. But then a drop in testosterone, a hormonal shift will cause whatever that glue is... It just falls off. And it doesn't take that long. I mean, he's kicking ass in November, then a couple months later, his antler falls off. And it doesn't take that long. I mean, he's kicking ass in November, then a couple months later, his antler falls off.

Yep. And growing new ones. And a couple months prior to November, you could squeeze the tip of those antlers off with your bare hands. Get blood on your hands. I've talked to a number of guys who've gone up I don't remember the circumstances, but gone up i remember the circumstances but going up and like

grabbed a deer to drag it and had the antler come off in their hand like it was happening they'll shed antlers quicker if they're uh nutritionally depraved or if they get sick or something no really cause that it messes it just kind of messes with their hormone system and they may lose their testosterone may go down quicker just because they're kind of sick. What do you think it takes? You know, people talk about areas of big bucks. And, you know, when I was like coming up as a young man, everybody was excited about the genetics. That place got great genetics, right?

Right. You still hear that all the time. Yeah. And then we talked to some guys you've done some work with matt coffin and and um his colleague kevin kevin monte kevin monte looks at nutrition and they've done studies of taking deer from supposedly shitty genetic areas or supposedly stupendous genetic areas yeah changing their diet to match diet of deer from areas that are contradictory to that. Meaning like you take a deer from an area that supposedly has shitty genetics and put it on the same diet as a deer from an area that supposedly has great genetics. And lo and behold, they went out looking exactly the same.

Yep. And he got into, and we discussed like, not only is it that animal's nutrition, but it's the nutrition of its mother when she becomes pregnant. Right. Like, whether he's going to be a stomp or buck could be decided by the condition of his mother when she becomes pregnant. Yeah, it can be decided by the condition of his mother right before she becomes pregnant, the condition she's in when she becomes pregnant. Epigenetics, probably epigenetics, it's a maternal effect is what Kevin researched and talked about. Probably there's a thing called epigenetics that is kind of a new field we're finding, not we, but there's some amazing things where an animal has genetics and passes on that genetic code. And we always thought of it like Gregor

Mendel, Mendelian genetics was just like whatever genes you had that's what got expressed in the young we're finding out that environmental influences like nutrition can actually switch genes on and off so so the genetic code doesn't change because it can't change which genes get expressed and turned on and off can change depending on if if you've got good nutrition or poor nutrition and some really amazing things where it looks like it's actually genetic effects, but the genes are the same. They're just more different ones are active. Really amazing, amazing stuff. Certainly not my expertise, but cool stuff.

And that's probably what's behind this maternal effect where the condition of the female can actually affect the antlers of her male offspring when they're mature. Because it's certain things are, yeah, it's got enough gas for certain things to kick in. It turns on, it's a methylation process. And I only sound that to sound smart because I don't know anything about the methylation process, but that's the vehicle in the DNA transcription that turned genes on and off. And that's what's at the heart of that. If you took, what's your theory on this, and why hasn't someone done it yet? Get yourself a couple of coos, dear.

Bring them up to Iowa. What happens to them? Do they just die because they don't like it because it's too damn cold? No, they'd get bigger. They would get bigger. Nobody's done it. Why not? That I know of. Because CWD, you don't want to be moving animals around. No, they'd get bigger. They would get bigger. Nobody's done it. Why not? That I know of.

Because CWD, you don't want to be moving animals around. Yeah, you can't. You know, we had a conversation with someone who does some work with Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. It was talking about with CWD, just like the whole thing of moving elk. It's just done, man. Yeah, but do we need to move elk much? I mean, we're still doing some restoration. I think we need to move them all over the damn place.

Rolling, it's unfinished work, man. Yeah, but that's a concern. Well, state Idaho had to move the habituated elk out of the state. That lucky elk that somebody chose to feed is now at the veterinary research station in Texas. Oh, that one, yeah. Living his full life. So you think they'd get bigger? They would get bigger, yeah.

I don't, you know, they're evolution. Would they stop being the gray ghost? I don't, good question what their pelage would do, whether you get like a rusty red coat in the summer, which we normally don't get. But I don't, they've been so separated, and they're good, legitimate subspecies. They're smaller. We did some genetic work. Boone and Crockett and Pope and Young paid for some genetic work that I orchestrated with some real geneticists, where we found a genetic marker that will identify a cow's

white-tailed deer from other white-tailed deer. So you could bring me a rack of skull plate, and we could test that and tell whether it's a cow's white-tailed or not. And Boone and Crockett and Pope and we could test that and tell whether it's a cow's whitetail or not. And Boondecrot and Pope and Young are using that to keep their record books clean now. If someone enters the new world record cow's whitetail, and it's a skull plate that Grandpa had in the attic, and Grandpa said he shot it south of Tucson. You'd be able to back. And this has happened, and we do the genetic tests.

Grandpas don't lie. Yeah. Family stories sometimes get twisted and changed. And so we've done that. And we've found some of these animals are not cow's whitetail. And so they're not. They can't be included. Oh, that's a bummer, man.

Someone gets confused about the buck grandpa shot in Alberta and the buck he shot in Arizona. I know. That's what it is. We had a thing where you wanted to bring up something about Neanderthals. Why? Yeah, I did. I've sent you a bunch of Neanderthal papers just because I think it's just you and I are in the same boat. We're interested spectators in,

in what the scientists are doing. The reason I'd be, the reason I'm a Neanderthal man is, uh, into them is because in my life they have gone from these crude, right? And these crude, like, you know, like beating their lady over the rock and dragging her home kind of thing to being just increasingly complex and sophisticated.

And it's, oh, they were free divers. Yeah, they built a raft. Now it's like, yeah, they were they were free divers. Yeah, they built a raft. Now it's like, yeah, they were avid free divers. They had art. They liked to carve things. I was trying to get Cal to put a thing in Cal's Weekend Review where I had a whole joke crafted up for Cal, but he wouldn't use it. I was waiting for the story.

I'm waiting for the story to come out where it was revealed that Neanderthals had laptops. It'll happen. Because every story about Neanderthals now is like, oh, they were just great. Nice people. Nice, smart people, the Neanderthals. You can start testing this out. By every time you see somebody eating oysters, you stare at them and you go, you Neanderthal. They're 2% of our genome.

Well, I'm a little bit, well, have you done 23andMe? No, I did the other one. I'm a little less than average on the Neanderthal. Rogan, I had a good laugh. Joe Rogan, he's like running heavy. He's running heavy. How did that not surprise me? It's the sagittal crest and the eyebrows, I think.

The brow ridges. Yeah, he's running real heavy, he was saying. But you know that miniature hominid that they found in Flores Island? Yeah. It was only three feet tall. Yeah, Floresis. I think I'm missing a syllable. But three feet tall at maturity.

They're running on almost all Neanderthal and Denisovan genes or genetics. I mean, they come from that Neanderthal stock, not from modern human stock. Yeah. At one spot in time, you could have wandered around southern Europe, Mediterranean area, and just like you could wander around here and be like, oh, there's a black-tailed deer. Oh, there's a mule deer. There's a white-tailed. There's a coos deer.

How do these all fit together? You could have roamed the land and run into like different folks. Yeah. Different kind of folks. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Who did some amount of lovemaking. Mm-hmm.

Multiple times, a paper just came out with the Neanderthal showing that it wasn't just one kind of unique population where they interbred and it spread out from there, but it was a real complex, over a long period of time, thousands and thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, well, at least tens of thousands of years, a whole bunch of different interbreeding events between modern humans and Neanderthals.

And that idea is really messing with people. Yeah. I don't know if I would have been into it or not into it. People like people coming from one spot. Would you like try to pick up other species? You're saying could as if it's past tense. I feel like you're trying to call me out here. Probably.

Like back in the day, you would have been like, I'm going to go check out that other camp. Sure. What are those anyway? Yeah. I think so. I'm going to bring check out that other camp. Sure. What are those anyway? Yeah. I think so. I'm going to bring some cookies over there. Uh-huh. And we're speaking past tense, hypothetically, back then.

Yeah, the people with all the oysters and mussels and doing the free diving. Yeah. They seem like a pretty good crew. Kind of small. Was it the unattractive modern humans, though, that were more likely to breed with the nander? I would love to know, man. I'd like to know when they sat around talking or they're talking about how great, you know. Like, was it like if you were Cro-Magnon or, you know, and you hooked up with a Neanderthal, was it like did you try to like keep quiet about it?

Right? Were you like, wow, you know, or did you brag it up? I would love to know. Time machine. I got a long list of time machine activities that I'll be engaging in someday. Yeah. Did you have any burning observation about them? No, I just.

You just like them. I like that the H is back in the name. You know, it was Neanderthal. And then for a period of time, someone said Neanderthal. Because it's the cow's coos deal. I know, exactly. It's because of the damn valley in Germany. Yep, yep.

So I don't give a shit what they call their valley. It's a Neanderthal, man. But now all the papers have the H back in, so that was good, because it was kind of awkward to say Neanderthal. I never know what to do in those circumstances, man. Like, when to switch. I've switched to pronghorn. Trying to switch. I even label my meat pronghorn now.

It confuses people. Yeah, you don't believe me? No way, really? You go look. Hell yeah. And I've given it to people and they've registered confusion. Really? That is so funny.

You don't label your packages pronghorn? I do not. They don't. Anti-locapra americana. I go through a lot of sharpies. You know, there was 18 different types of primitive antilocapra pronghorn family

in North America. 18 million years ago, for 18 million years, we had 18 different types of pronghorn. Some had corkscrew horn cores. Some had three horn cores on both sides, six total horn cores. A lot of them had two on each side. I wrote a field guide. It's called a bestiary of ancestral antelope caprids. And it's illustration- You wrote that?

Yeah, with some other people. You're writing machine, man. Well, that's interesting stuff. 18 different kinds of pronghorn and they all went extinct, except for the American pronghorn that we have. And so we had illustrations that Randy Babb did illustrations of each one of those skulls. And then I wrote a paragraph, which was anything we knew about it. And we had a map of where the fossils have been found. So it was like a little field guide. How far east are they running?

Florida. Yeah, Florida. Oh, there's different kinds all the way over there. Yep. If you would have named it kinds of antelope caverns. I should have. Kinds of antelope. You would have been on the same shelf.

You know, whenever I start getting depressed about all the animals that aren't around anymore, to help not be depressed, I remind myself that the largest animal to ever exist, larger than the biggest of Brontosaurus or Argentosaurus, the biggest animal to ever have ever existed on Earth is alive right now. It's still here, right. The blue whale. We're in the good old days. The biggest animal ever is here right now. The good old days of megafauna. We've got them now. Because you get to looking at at my kids like dinosaur books.

And I get to look at them. I'm like, man, kind of a little jealous about that. Oh, so jealous. I just lay eyes and get your brain wrapped around the scale. I want it. We talk a lot about whether they've been good eating or not. One of my kids thinks they would have been. And one of them thinks they wouldn't have been very good eating.

Yeah. I don't know. Rep like uh okay moving on this is a little bit i want to talk about like you're really mixed up in the wolf world i am yeah i was put on the mexican wolf recovery team in december of 2010 and was on it for two years, resigned in December of 2012. And with my resignation letter, added about a 14-page report citing all of the scientific process flaws that I saw in the writing of what was supposed to be the draft recovery plan at that time. That's what we were put together for. A couple months later, the remainder of the team went ahead and submitted a report. It had so many flaws, as I pointed out. Fish and Wildlife Service couldn't do anything with it.

They couldn't make that their draft plan. They just, stakeholders weren't involved. State agencies were just seen as maybe stakeholders we'll talk to later. And it went nowhere. So back way up, though, like what's the problem? Like what happened? We used to have, I mean, wolves were like, they had them in Alaska. There was no like place without them.

They just ran all the way down into Mexico. People mistakenly just think about the Mexican wolf as just the southern part of a blending of different wolf sizes and wolf subspecies throughout the continent. We used to have 24 wolf subspecies in North America. And Ron Nowak boiled that down to five that seemed ecologically different in different areas. What were those? Arctic. Well, there was a Occidentalis, which is a big Canadian wolf in Alaska. And then Nublus, which is mid-continent, most of the United States. And then Balei, which is a big Canadian wolf and Alaska and then new bliss, which is mid continent, most of the United States.

And then, um, Bailey eye, which is the Mexican wolf. And then there was the, um, Arctic wolf. And I can't remember what the other one was. And the Arctic wolves, they run white a fair bit. Yep. Yep. And so the Canadian high Arctic, the Canadian high Arctic, Ellesmere Island and that sort of thing.

And so, so these are kind of groups of wolves that kind of make sense. The Mexican wolf is not just the, the Southern tip of a big wolf distribution that blended, um, freely with Nubilus, the other wolf to the North. The Mexican wolf evolved in the Sierra Madre, like we were talking about the white tails. And that's another reason Mexican wolves are physically different. They're genetically different. They're the most genetically different wolf subspecies when they look at genetics. But they weren't just in Mexico.

They were only in Mexico and the Sky Islands and Southern Arizona and Southwestern New Mexico. That was the historical range of the Mexican wolf. Some of those Mexican wolves. So kind of like almost overlaps with coos deer, cows deer. Right. And goose turkey. And goose turkey. And ghouls turkey.

And ghouls turkey. And so evolutionary ecologists will talk about subspecies just have more support when there's a whole bunch of other unrelated animals that have that same distribution. It just makes sense that there are some ecological forces that allowed those animals of different types to

evolve a little bit differently as a subspecies. Yeah, no, it's interesting. In that same range, you have this very different type of turkey. Merton's quail. Very different type of deer. Very different type of quail. And if you look at ecological zones, plants and the plant community, that whole Madre and Oak Woodland, they call it, that the Sierra Madre is typical of,

is different than the Mogollon Rim in northern Arizona, northern New Mexico. So it all makes sense that, and all of the, about 20 different mammologists and ecologists subscribe the Mexican wolf historical range like that. Southern Arizona, southern New Mexico, and all the Sierra Madre. Now some of the Mexican wolves, skull measurements have shown that some of the Mexican wolves would disperse up into the Moggy on rim like you'd expect to the muggy on rim central arizona in the gila national forest in in central new mexico so some of the mexican wolves dispersed up there those wolves in northern arizona northern new mexico were measurably larger the skull measurements

everything were larger and they some of those would disperse down the muggy on rim if you look at the um like google Earth, and you just zoom out, you see the Sierra Madre, this big green patch where the Mexican wolf was. And then the Southern Rockies is another huge green patch. And in between there, there's this Gila National Forest Mogollon Rim with non-wolf habitat to the north of it and non-wolf habitat to the south of it. So Mexican wolves dispersed up, bigger wolves, nubilus dispersed south, and those wolves from skull measurements, those wolves in the central Arizona, New Mexico, are intermediate in size. Actually, the males group better with Mexican wolves down there and the females group with the northern

wolves. An indication that they were intermediate between those two forms. So we did have some geographic separation, which accounts for the genetic differences, the physical differences in Mexican wolves. They're not um some subspecies that's blending in with all the other subsidies there's some reasons why they're geographically and all those other reasons why they're different hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy my goodness do we hear from the canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated.

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visit onxmaps.com meet. onxmaps.com meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Give me the pros and cons as much as you're comfortable. What are the pros and cons with trying to bring them back?

I think they, I mean, Mexican wolves were a native wildlife species in the southwest. And I think if we as hunters are going to thump our chest and talk about out bringing elk back and bringing turkeys back and all these species that we call unendangered we can't stop at the the predators i mean i just think it makes sense we just need to they have a place in the in the southwest and and we need to be working to bring them back most of the public thinks wolves are pretty cool they want to see wolves back and so as hunters do we really want to position ourselves on the other side of the table from them and say, no, we don't want to bring wolves back because they eat elk and we want to hunt elk. It might impact our elk hunting. So there's some real challenges with bringing wolves back, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't

do it. We need to have programs that work with the livestock industry to make sure those operators, and it's usually only a few operators that are impacted heavily, but those that are impacted heavily, we should have programs to help them out. We can't just say, well, you're grazing on public land and we're going to bring wolves back and we don't care about what happens to you. We need to work with them or it's not going to work at all. And as far as big game populations, where we have wolves, we have some hotsp spots where wolves have impact elk populations.

And we need to have management flexibility to do something about that when that happens. Predators have to be managed just like we manage prey. But in a lot of areas, wolves are back on the landscape and they're not heavily impacting elk populations. So I just think we need to make room for wolves on the landscape. They belong here. You know, you've been involved in state wildlife for your career. There's a lot of tension between, it seems there's a lot of, not seems, I mean, there is, there's a lot of tension between

federal wildlife management decisions and state wildlife management decisions. Do you think it's fair to say, just looking back at American history, it's fair to say that if there was no federal oversight of endangered species, and there was no federal wildlife involvement, it would be fair

to say that it wouldn't have happened. We wouldn't have done any active reintroduction efforts that would have been at, to this point in time that would have been spawned by the States. You're talking about wolves specifically. Yeah. Yeah.

I think, I think it's something that's been like for better or worse, the state, it's kind of top down. And when I talk poorly about the, when I was on the Mexican wolf recovery team and that effort, we reinitiated that in 2015 and in December of 2015, the Fish and Wildlife Service did it completely different.

Fish and Wildlife Service invited state agency people to the table in a series of workshops to develop a recovery plan that they would then write. And that was a whole different process because we had a neutral facilitator who was in charge of a population viability analysis instead of, in past efforts, it's been some academics that are very advocacy oriented, very protectionist oriented, and they were in charge of writing the recovery plan, which didn't work repeatedly. The recovery team that I was on was the fourth recovery team to try to write a revision the mexican wolf recovery plan there was one written in 82 it wasn't adequate it didn't

have recovery criteria and everybody agreed it needed to be rewritten they kept failing because you can't get a handful of academics with a real protectionist kind of uh attitude together and have them write a mexican wolf recovery plan Explain a protectionist attitude. Not ever wanting a wolf to die at the hands of man, no matter what. I mean, just like we want to craft some recovery criteria that will make it nearly impossible for them to ever be delisted and leave the protection of the federal government, which is not what the Endangered Species Act is. Endangered Species Act is that we're supposed to, it's like an emergency room. Someone just ready to, or almost close to dying, you bring in the emergency room and you just get

them well enough so that they're not going to die. And then you hand them over to, you put them in the hospital bed and you put them in the hospital and then you monitor them and then you improve their health. Endangered Species Act is supposed to be like that with species where we're just ready to lose them. We do everything we can to save them. We get them up to a certain level where we're comfortable that they're not no longer in danger of extinction. And then we pass them off to the state agencies and they manage them like all the other carnivores they manage. Yeah, I've often joked that in some with some species, it's become the my favorite animal protection act. It is. It absolutely is. And that's does such a disservice to the 2000 other species that are listed on the Endangered Species Act.

We've got species that legitimately are going to blink out and we're going to lose. And we've got 4,000 wolves in the Western Great Lakes. And we've got people writing scientific papers and filing lawsuits saying they're still in danger of extinction. And we've got 1,500 in the Northern Rockies that are delisted. We've got 65,000 in Alaska and Canada, 110,000 wolves worldwide. And we can't delist the wolves, the 4,000 wolves in the Great Lakes region when the recovery criteria was about 1,500 wolves. We've got 4,000. Oh, was it really 1,500?

1,500 wolves. And we've got 4,000 and people are still suing saying they're still in danger of extinction. And we can't do that. We need to work together on the other 2 000 species that need our help or they're legitimately going to disappear from the earth jim what what do you say to and i'm sure you've heard this argument because i have many times is well there's a value in having this animal on the endangered species list because it brings attention to the endangered species tell you it's gonna is that provision written into the endangered species act oh no the last part of it says oh and but you've heard of this right i'm not familiar with this argument

but i mean at some point doesn't it kind of matter what the act says? Oh, God. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. But it's like, well, you know, nobody's going to care about the whatever snail or butterfly if we don't have the grizzly bear. Yeah. It's going to. I haven't heard.

That doesn't even kind of surprise me, but I haven't heard that. This is the kind of thing that's going to ruin the Endangered Species Act. It's going to destroy the Endangered Species Act. Some of these people pushing and pushing and pushing at these ridiculous notions that we need to still have federal protection on a species like wolf is just going to fuel the fire and we'll have the Endangered Species Act completely renovated. Oh, it's already happening. People get like some state agencies get so frustrated and certain, you know, livestock groups, whatever, get so frustrated with the conversations around grizzly bears and wolves that when they hear it's like what happened. Like it's like kind of like the level of damage that happened to the ESA around the spotted owl. It's like you turn these animals into something where the animal becomes symbolic of a kind of foot dragging. And then the act becomes that it's just like a thing used to wield power about grizzly bear management. And people just get pissed.

Yep. That's not going to end well. Not going to end well. We need to get these species up so they're no longer in danger of extinction, which is what the act is. And then pass them off to the state agencies and, and Ed bangs led the Wolf recovery in the Northern Rockies. He's fishing wildlife service of quote unquote fed. He told everybody the entire time, he says, our goal is to get these up above

the recovery criteria that everybody agreed on and pass it off to the states. They do a great job managing wildlife. And that's what my goal is to recover in the Rockies. That's the thing, too, that happens that is troublesome is this thing that it's the feds. Listen, it's the feds that keep proposing that wolves get delisted in the Great Lakes. It's the feds that propose the grizzly bears. But people were like, oh, the feds.

I'm like, the feds are the ones saying they want to delist. They're the ones that put them up for delisting. And they get sued and they're not allowed to because of lawsuits.

Yeah, it's like a handful of anti-hunting groups that kind of masquerade as environmental groups or that do both, that serve both functions. What is the most hurtful when you go to some

of these fish and wildlife meetings and you have, you see this argument being played out before you is, is they're trying to kill them all. Yeah. Right. State agencies will just kill them all and they'll be on the endangered species.

Yes. And, and it's, you know, they don't believe in like, well, listen, we have this mandate that says this is what we are supposed to do. And we just spent a shitload of money to get them off the list. And I just, I want to say, how familiar are you with how we got rid of wolves in the first place and that timeframe? Right. I'm like, if people were trying to kill wolves now, they would be gone.

They would be gone, gone. Because we did it very, very well in a time without satellites, without GPS, without two-way communication. Like we just use a little bit of poison. Yeah. And what, what a lot of, uh, pro-wolf groups, and it sounds funny cause I'm pro-wolf too, but,

but a lot, a lot of the protections groups won't acknowledge is that the, the contributions of sportsmen through the decades have brought back the prey base in huge numbers that allows us to recover wolves. It's not just a better kind of conservation ethic that the population has, which is true. It's the prey base. We couldn't do it if we didn't have all this prey. Jim, talk a little bit about your article where you, the article you wrote where you talk about the public's enthusiasm for like trophic cascades. Trophic cascades also becomes like everybody's favorite word. Yeah.

Favorite phrase. It's another thing like trophy hunting that far outpaced the science behind it. So you want me to explain trophic cascades? We need to. Yes. Yeah. Do that. And then talk about the, you know, when everybody's like all hopped up on the idea that all it takes is a couple of wolves and their, their rivers run clear again.

Yep. So trophic cascades, just, just basically a trophic level in ecology is like the vegetation is one trophic level. And then you may have elk representing the second trophic level above that elk eating the vegetation. And then you have a third trophic level, which might be wolves, which eat the elk. And so you have these three trophic levels.

And the idea of trophic cascades is that if you've got a situation where you've got elk really impacting, overpopulated elk impacting the vegetation, and you've got too many elk, you bring in wolves on that third trophic level. Wolves impact the elk in such a way that it relaxes the grazing pressure on the vegetation and you have more vegetation and you have this recovery of vegetation. So the idea is adding wolves to that system cascades this effect through the trophic levels and where we have actually the addition of wolves affecting how much vegetation there is. So that's basically trophic cascades. So in Yellowstone, they put wolves in in 95. They put 14 wolves one year and 17 the next. And that wolf population grew, but that was 1995.

Can I interrupt you to use a quote from that era? Yeah. It was in your article. Where is that quote? Oh, around someone described Yellowstone as 3,400 square miles of paradise surrounded by reality. That was Ed. That was Ed. That was Ed Bang. So I just mentioned. So he's, he's the leader of the wolf recovery in the Rocky Mountain. Very pragmatic, um, awesome guy. And, and so everybody's talking about what's happening in Yellowstone and getting all excited about whatever's happening in Yellowstone.

That's what's going to happen everywhere when we put wolves everywhere. But Yellowstone's a whole different deal. And so that's where he said that paradise, pause, surrounded by reality. And that's so true because what happened in Yellowstone, no matter what happened in Yellowstone, it can't be replicated on a working landscape with people trying to make a living and working on that landscape. That's not Yellowstone everywhere. So, so the trophic escades in, in Yellowstone released the wolves in 95. Already five years later, some scientists went in there and they measured aspen growth in the Northern range. And they, they concluded that aspen growth was responding. And since wolves really hadn't impacted the number of elk yet, that they surmised or they theorized that wolves were just chasing elk out of areas where wolves were chasing elk, where the elk would camp out and feed in riparian areas and places.

So this scaring elk around by the wolves was distributing the grazing pressure and causing a response in the Aspen. And that just kind of speculative paper was just like the trophy hunting thing. It lit a fuse on the popular media. And everybody started talking about how the wolf was the savior of the environment. All we did was add wolves, and now we have vegetation responding. We have butterflies coming back. We have bees coming back. We have songbirds. We have beavers coming back to Yellowstone. We have vegetation responding and created this narrative based on just a little bit of measurement of aspen in some riparian areas. And the popular media went crazy.

They captured the imagination. They love that story. Can you imagine now, not only do we just want to put wolves back on the landscape, but now we have to put wolves on the landscape to renovate all of this degraded ecosystems. And it's all we need is to add wolves. So can you imagine if they had opened up hunting in Yellowstone? It would have done the same thing. And they saw a corresponding growth in aspens, what would the news cycle have been? Yeah. Do you think the news would be championing how hunters have saved the environment? The trophic cascade. Right. Anything can precipitate a trophic cascade like that. And so this firestorm of popular media and then a YouTube video that just about everybody has seen. It's got 40 million views that some British producer with kind of a David Attenborough kind of narrator.

That's all it takes, man. You put an old Brit, like, you know, a dude from a country where they kind of like got rid of nature. You put one of those guys at the helm of a nature video and people are like, I buy it. I buy it. And that's what happened. He starts out the video saying, and the deer, and they show these elk running. He says, and the deer get scared out of, and so it's full of errors, but it's got 40 million views. And you talk to anyone on the street.

A thousand people sent me that video. Oh, I bet. I bet. And anybody on the street will, when you ask them about Yellowstone and wolves, say, oh, that. And the title of the video was When Wolves Change Rivers. And it was about them having such a strong ecological effect in the Yellowstone ecosystem that river courses were changing and vegetation was coming back. The problem with that whole story is that it's not just wolves. They released the wolves in 95.

Shortly after that, they had a hundred year drought, the worst drought in a hundred years. They had a couple of years in that next decade with, with heavy snows, uh, at that time that, that knocked elk recruitment back. Grizzly bear populations increased so much that they documented three times the elk, the calf elk predation by grizzly bears than, than before we had wolves. There was hydrological changes in, in Yellowstone. We had the fires in 1988. Huge changes there. Moose populations were dropping. Cougar populations were coming up. All this stuff was- Beaver reintroductions. Right. See, you hear-

Very nearby. Yes. In the Gallatin. Yeah. So you hear that the beavers came back. They made that whole Upper Madison and Gallatin beaver recovery areas. So the wolves didn't bring the beavers back. Biologists did in crates and released them. And the beavers coming upstream and damming is part of the hydrological changes in that ecosystem that was really caused by the beavers. But the beavers don't have a paparazzi following them and championing everything that they do. And so the beavers didn't get any credit for their contribution. That's right. That's right. With conibears.

It's so funny, though, because you're like, well, yeah, just add wolves, just add wolves. And really what we're talking about, whether it's a beaver or a wolf, is heavy, heavy-handed management. And also, we were killing cow elk off of the park in the wintertime in hunts as a way to try to trim the herds. That's what we do. We kill the females. And those cow tags were probably held a little longer than we thought as the elk population was going down. So there's a storm of things that caused the elk population to go from 19,000 down to less than 4,000. And some people want to pin all that on the wolf and the wolf did all that.

And it's just such a simplistic thing that happened. But, but a lot of research has come on now. Matt Kaufman, who you had on the show, published a paper in 2010 where he did a more robust, more widespread, more scientific analysis of aspen in that same area in the northern range and showed that aspen wasn't recovering actually. Oh, really? Even despite a 60% decline in the elk population. So at that point, it wasn't just a behavioral thing. We've got 60% decline in the elk population. So at that point, it wasn't just a behavioral thing.

We've got 60% decline in the elk and it still can't document an aspen recovery. And so it's a really complicated thing with a whole bunch of factors feeding into it. And to sit back and say wolves changed Yellowstone and renovated the whole ecosystem is a fallacy. But unfortunately, that's what everybody knows. But when someone wants to come in and they want to come in and be like, let's have a normal, reasonable conversation about this, you get accused of being like anti-wolf. You have a quote in one of your things you wrote.

I can't remember if it was you or someone else who said, we don't have to make the wolf out to be a hero to justify recovery. That was David Mead. Why can't we just talk about it in a way that's i'm asking you why can't it just be talked about in a matter-of-fact way like is this the right thing to do how do we do it correctly but not have it be that we need to like spin these wild yarns it's too polarized we've got everybody at the polls and nobody in the middle when it comes to wolves and and I think that evolved because of wolf recovery in the Northern Rockies and wolves were getting, and they crossed 2002, I think they exceeded recovery criteria and weren't delisted by Congress, unfortunately, until they were five times the original recovery criteria. And do you have these, these, these groups suing to keep wolves protected under the Endangered Species Act, even as that population grows and grows and grows, I think that creates

so much pull to one pole that you had an equal and opposite reaction, the opposite way with people pulling equally hard and equally unrealistic things that they were saying on the other side. And, and it just got so violent. Everybody's still in their corners instead of meeting in the middle and just talking neutrally about it. The opposite of your trophic cascade person, the equally ridiculous opposite is your person who is just in love with the idea of surplus killing. Yeah, I guess so. They love it.

They love it. They love it. Right? It's like the other extreme. Extreme. It's the MSNBC Fox News split is trophic cascade surplus killing. What is the middle? I know it's not your business, but what is the middle ground? Lay out for me.

It doesn't need to be your opinion. Articulate an opinion that, based on all of your exposure to people, different opinions about wolves, imagine, if you will, the most sort of, like, moderate, kind of level-headed, consensus-

minded sentence about, collection of sentences about wolves. There's not many people there but i i feel like i'm close i feel like i'm close to that because the wolves to me are not on a pedestal as some religious deity that's going to save the world and and i certainly don't hate wolves wolves are just the largest member of the carnivore family and and agencies manage foxes we manage coyotes We can manage wolves the same way. They're just another native species.

And if we just look at them that way and say, well, let's bring them back onto the landscape. And when they're causing some unacceptable losses to livestock or unacceptable losses to native, other native species like elk or deer, then we go in and manage them. We bring that population down in that focal area, solve that problem. And other areas where they're not causing any problems and they're just restored to the landscape, they're good. Um, I don't know why more people can't look at it that way, but they don't. It's very appealing. It is. I know.

I mean, they're just, they're just big dogs. They're just another canid out there. I don't know why they have to be so special. If you imagine looking into a crystal ball, take the Northern Great Lakes. Will we get, will they be delisted to stay eventually? Yes, I think pretty soon. I mean, I don't know how you can justify

leaving them on the list. So I do think maybe this year they'll be delisted. Does it, I know you don't do politics, but I don't know if you can even answer this. You probably can't answer this. Does – will that happen independent of whatever happens with the next administration? Like does that have its own life course or does there need to be some like very top-down pressure on that? There isn't a lot of top-down pressure because I think there's safeguards

against, you know, like directives like that there's, there's influence there. There's no way you can take politics out of endangered species management and certainly not wolf management. So there always gonna be some political pressures and political, um, considerations that's just part of wildlife management. It's not, it's not pure science for sure. It's, it's an application of science and, and, considerations. That's just part of wildlife management. It's not, it's not pure science for sure. It's, it's an application of science and, and social science, uh, to manage wildlife. So I think in the future they'll be delisted. They certainly will be what, what we

can't do. And I've heard people say this is okay. I agree with delisting the Northern Rockies. I agree with delisting the great lakes, but we need wolves in more places. And so we need to keep them listed in all of the other places until they're recovered. That's not what the ESA does. If they're not in danger of extinction anymore in two big populations, then we don't just move those polygons around the country until we get wolves everywhere we want. Yeah, no, I a little bit disagree with you because those ideas weren't around at the time they were delisted, but it makes it better and easier to work. If you look at grizzly bears, it makes sense to me

that we would gradually, as it's acceptable, delist some idea of population groups. Rather than saying that, you know, rather than like undoing the whole protection across the entirety of the lower 48, we would be like, okay, this region's cool. That region's cool. That region's cool. That region's not cool. What you're talking about is those are subpopulations that were all part of the recovery.

And so one subpopulation is doing really good, then definitely we want to take that one off the table. We want to delist that. And we do want to keep those other ones because they're right from the start part of the whole recovery plan. Whereas in gray wolves, the whole recovery plan was three populations of 100, and then it was increased to three populations of 150 in the northern Great Lakes area there. And we reached that and exceeded that by five times. And then the western Great Lakes, it was like 1,400 in Minnesota, where they're just threatened. And then it was 100 more in Wisconsin and the UP. And they exceeded that a long time ago. And so those are two independent recovery processes, and they've both been satisfied. Whereas a grizzly bear example, that one that they're delisting is just part of the overall recovery plan.

I'm going to do another crystal ball one for you. What, let's say, pick a comfortable number, 20 years, 25 years. What are some states that might have population of wolves that don't now? If you just kind of look at the biological aspects and the political aspects. If you'd asked this question 20 years ago, there'd have been some real surprises. Yeah, right, right. Some of the Washington. Right. You'd have 20 years ago, there'd have been some real surprises. Yeah. Right. Right.

Some of the Washington. Right. You'd have been like, California, people have been like, bullshit. Right. But here we are. So, you know, is Nebraska, right? Like, is Nebraska going to be like, wow, who'd have thought? Now Nebraska has a wolf pack.

I mean, you'd have to say Utah and Colorado because we've got wolves going into those, naturally going into those areas as it is. And I think, and Mexican wolf recovery, we've since 2009, the Mexican wolf population has been increasing average of 12% per year. So that, the Mexican wolf population is going up and up and increasing towards a recovery goal. And yet I still get emails that say the Mexican wolf is spiraling towards extinction. Press the, click the button here to donate to help us save the wolves against the, the evil state and federal agencies.

And I think maybe they have my graph pinned sideways in their office or something and they, they think it's going. They hung it up wrong. I think they hung it up wrong because the graph is going up and up. So I, I, I do feel that Mexican wolves are going to be, I don't know when recovery will happen because we're still in the early stages of recovery, but that situation is going to

look a lot better. We're going to have more wolves in, in Mexico and we've got two recovery areas in the U.S. and Mexico because it's been a true binational, um, process. And then we're going to have some of the Rocky Mountain states where they're going to expand into those Rocky Mountain states. And really, I think a lot of this angst and polarity is going to relax once people have wolves around and realize they're not that bad. And if we have management ability to take care of problems where they happen. I think in cases where wolves have been here a while, like, for example, Alaska and Canada, they're not that big a deal because they've had them for a while.

And I think all this stuff will, will settle down 20 years or so. That's a really funny thing about friends of mine that just really don't like wolves. Right. I got, I got friends that hate wolves and, um, cause what they, what they, what their belief of what they'll do to the game populations, But the sons of bitches all want to hunt in Alaska. Right, right. I'm like, yeah, you would like it. Yeah.

Full damn wolves. I mentioned David Meech. David Meech has been working on wolves for 60 years, which sounds bizarre, but he has. He's been working Ellesmere Island every year on Arctic wolves for 60 years. And he's very pragmatic about wolves. You would think someone would have devoted

their entire life to wolves and wolf biology. But he's very pragmatic about wolves. You would think some of the devoted your entire, their entire life to, to wolves and wolf biology, but he's very pragmatic. He's, he's the one that says, um, wolves are neither saint nor sinners, except by those who try to make them. So, so they're not, they're just, they're just, um, canids there. And the, the public perception I find is so skewed as to what a healthy population is. And people like to have this very unrealistic idea of how animals spread out on a landscape. So if there's a healthy population, it means I see them where I go. And like, we're looking at this big picture of Hell's Canyon that is chock full elk, but there's

no elk in the picture. And people are like, something is wrong. And I've been at these public meetings. I had so many really cool wolf encounters in the, uh, Ketchum area, Ketchum Ranger District. And, uh, go to public meetings and it's like doom and gloom and the wolf population is going down and the hunters are killing them all and the damn cattle owners

association is killing them shovel shut up right and it's because people aren't seeing wolves when they're i mean some of these people are obviously not walking on trails but they said they were right um but they're not seeing them when they're walking their dogs, and they're not seeing them when they're driving their cars. And you're seeing long-tail weasels either. That's not charismatic enough. I apologize. I think they're very charismatic.

I was with a lot of non-game biologists last night, and they're big fans of the weasel family. That's good. Are we going to be arguing about jaguars in 10 years? No, I don't think so. Why not? Jaguars are never. I'm ready to argue about jaguars.

I know. I know. Ocelots. You want to restore jaguars. I was involved in one workshop recently. That's true. Talking about jaguars. And jaguars.

I don't want to restore them. I just want them to wander back in and be cool. I do. I think everybody, most everybody does. I don't know that I'm arguing yet that we put them in crates and turn them out. No, but the one workshop

I was at where there's three advocacy groups that got together and wrote a big manuscript advocating translocating from Mexico into the Mogollon Rim and the Gila National Park.

Wow. Hauling in on trucks. This is Ponderosa Pine Forest and was never, never habitat where they stayed the southwest arizona new mexico has always been places where transient animals came up we haven't documented a um a female with young jaguar in the u.s in arizona or new mexico anyway for 120 years yeah there hasn't been a female since 1963. And a bunch have been killed and

photographed since then, and no females. Yeah, but what about if you went back into you know, like, Coronado's time, man? Right, yeah, we don't know that. And there were jaguars, and there were some females and some reproduction, but this was a marginal area. If you look at the Native American tribes, they have, like, no jaguar

motif. Jaguar is not part of any of their stories. That tells you something about how common it was in the Southwest. It's interesting. And so we definitely want to make sure they can come back up and go back to Mexico. They want, there was Alan Rabinowitz is probably the most famous Jaguar person. He started Panthera, which is a wild cat group worldwide. He's established Jaguar conservation areas and refuges in South America and Central America, devoted his whole life to Jaguars. And when he talked about, well, the Fish and Wildlife Service was being pressured by some

environmental groups to designate critical habitat in Arizona and New Mexico. And when he heard that, he wrote an op-ed in New York Times and said, this is ridiculous. It's a ridiculous waste of money that we've got 170, 173,000 jaguars estimated from Sonora down to Southern South America. And, and some groups are saying this little dry, arid land on the Northern end of their distribution, where they really just kind of moved in and moved out historically, that should be designated critical habitat and critical habitat is part of the esa endangered species act and and habitat to be designated as critical habitat has to be critical to the conservation of the species and the fish and wildlife service did population

viability analyses where they included arizona new me, and then they excluded them. And as you would expect with 173,000 jaguars elsewhere, that didn't change the probability of extinction at all. And Mexico itself has 4,800 jaguars estimated, and that increased in the last decade. And so there's Arizona and New Mexico- Yeah, but I'm a patriot, man. I want American jaguars. Well, the groups that are asking for translocation up into central Arizona and New Mexico, at that meeting were some people that were involved in the conservation of jaguars in central Mexico where they are. Okay. And those people said, you want to translocate how many?

That's more than we estimate are in this northernmost population of jaguars. You can't be taking our jaguars. I mean, we're trying to conserve that population there so wow yeah so and then that got a lot of people looking at the carpet and scratching their heads like oh we didn't think of that we're just going to go get some jaguars and bring them up here i didn't you know i never knew something i should research more or read up on more is like how often how many right okay how many were really I'd like to know I'll send you a book like what is this sort of you know I've seen it I read a book not too long ago and it was it was just a exhaustive catalog of everything that could have possibly have been a reference of

grizzly bears in the southwest so it was mexico it got up into color yeah it covered basically colorado south yeah it was sort of like it was just thing after thing like it from back the spanish you know early you know frontier day ranchers archaeological record like everything that pointed to where were they what was it like i'd like to see that on jaguars if it was if it wasn't fact that this is always fringe and they'd straight up and this is just like the the natural edge of their habitat and just like you might you know the old mountain lion might kind of like flirt with the alaska border now and then but you'd hardly call alaska like mountain lion country but now and then, but you'd hardly call Alaska like mountain lion country.

But now and then one might turn up, and they do. If that was the case, then I guess my ask would be that we take the necessary steps to let that continue happening. Definitely. Yeah, I agree with that 100%. Just not jaguars in crates up into the Ponderosa Pine. That seems really weird. From a armchair expert, not even that, an armchair curious person, that

strikes me as being a little bit much. Alan Rabinowitz, I mentioned, when Fish and Wildlife Service was trying to designate, which they did, designate critical habitat in Arizona and New Mexico for the jaguar, like the third attempt. Alan Rabinowitz did his New York Times article or op-ed

saying that was the most ridiculous thing in the world, that you're wasting money talking about critical habitat and all the effects of critical habitat in Arizona. So here's a guy that devoted his whole life, and he's like at bangs with wolves. He's just pragmatic. He says that's not critical to the conservation of the species. But there's no doubt everybody wants to make sure

that they're able to still come up and use that habitat and come back. Because I've been in mountain ranges where I know there's a jaguar in that mountain range, a mountain island. And it's pretty cool just to know that my son and I one time carried a javelina that he shot off a tall mountain in the Coyote Mountains

and in the dark through the thick brush and we had a bloody javelina on our shoulders and and i knew that the jaguar the jaguar that we knew about was in that part of the mountain range at that time oh is that right so that adds a little element of interest when when you're out there ocelots the same way when right when we left sonora this year you know that article came out on uh the camera traps catching a down there group of o. Yeah, well, they got them in that King Ranch area down there in South Texas. Oh, do they? Yeah, and what's funny there is they're spending all this,

a version of things. What's funny there is they're doing a lot of ocelot recovery work, and then it turns out that sort of the strongest um you know the strongest populations are coming off these large cattle ranches yeah there's two populations one's on a national wildlife refuge and another one is on the uturi ranch and i think some neighboring ranches and that's that's private lands and you've got that the old man uturi who i think passed away recently i've been on that committed have you just committed to ocelot conservation. Gorgeous cat. Very much. Yeah. It's very much private lands. You've got to be managing on private lands. It's Mike Tuas,

and there's a graduate student that I know from Arizona that's down there working on ocelots right now. But I know Mike Tuas who's run that program since I did my master's degree down there. But obviously that species has a little bit northerly range than than the jaguar it's kind of well it's kind of the same in arizona it's kind of the same there's historical records that come up through central arizona or so but not not a breeding population in arizona like there is in texas south texas are breeding they have 60 some australians that they know about they're there but arizona it's the same thing it's one here and one there and we have so many cameras in in those mountain ranges now

that we're capturing what's sneaking around in there. Are there any in Arizona right now? Any Jaguars? I don't know. Oh, Jaguars. Yes. Right now? Well, as of September.

I know there was one around, and it turned up. It's hide turned up on social media. It got shot. It seems like it got shot in Mexico. It went back to Mexico and got shot. Yeah. There's a different one that when I was down by Douglas in September, someone told me about one that was down there.

I don't know if I can say where. I probably won't say where, but in the U.S. And it got picked up by a trail cam or a houndsman found it? No, a lot of trail cams. I had checking out a lion that a hunter killed because all the mountain lions get checked out at the Game and Fish office. And he got it out of the Santa Ritas. And he said, I had a bunch of cameras in the Santa Rita mountains.

This was several years ago. And I said, oh, you got a bunch of cameras set out. You ever get one of them spotted cats? He goes, yeah, all the time. That's cool. I was like, wow. I mean, hunters have trail cams out and they're getting jaguars on their trail cam. We've talked about this before.

There's a book called Candid Creatures and it's like a trail cam images. And there's a Jaguar standing in the snow. Oh, right. I've seen it. It's like the only image. It's like the only image, I think. Maybe like the only image in existence or something of a Jaguar in the snow. There's, you were talking about the historical record of Jaguars.

We have that list that the Game and Fish Department maintains. You did. Of Jaguar records going all the way back but a lot of those even in more recent times are like like some of the jaguar records that some of these groups were using for their modeling was some high school teacher saw a black jaguar across the road yeah and black jaguar is the color phase it's the jungle phase it's an amazon thing you never have black jaguars in mexico and to the north never so someone says they see a black jaguars in Mexico and to the north. Never.

So if someone says they see a black jaguar, we know right away, well, it wasn't a jaguar. I'm not sure what it was. Yeah, it's hard to sort. I mean, there's a thing of like measuring the validity, right? Right. And so we've got like three classes, class one, class two, class three. I forgot what the criteria are, but it's to rank them for veracity veracity for, um, how reliable they are. But some of those, some of those are, are just

sightings and some groups will want to include those as reliable and not. So you have to be careful. And that's why a table like that's a important, but there's a book called borderland Jaguars. You have not seen that one. No. Okay.

I'll send it to you, uh, Carlos Lopez Gonzalez and Dave Brown. And in there, they, they have probably not as complete as our list, but they have an account of the historical records of Jaguars. Oh, I'd like to see it. Yeah. I need to get my opinion straight. I know I like them. Right?

Everybody does. I'd like to get pounced and scratched, kind of scratched by one. Kind of. Just to leave a scar. Yeah. You'd have to have a scar. Yeah, it's cool to know that there are Jaguars out there. Very.

Right across the packs, man. One nice scratch. Rub some dirt in there to get it infected so it's scarred up real nice. Yeah, scar up nice, yeah. Cal, you got any final thoughts, questions? Yeah, I do. I got a question for you. I was talking with a buddy of mine this morning.

I drive back over here, and I always check in with him cause he's old forest service dude and he's good at getting grant money. And, uh, he's getting a lot of in kind cash for habitat work on his place. And this is kind of his, uh, retirement job as he calls it, learning to be a farmer and he's, uh, planting a bunch of plant species and setting his place up for mule deer wintering habitat and upland game. He loves the pheasants and quail. And he is kind of running me through his list of what he's got coming up and some of his successes and failures and uh i said well yeah a lot of work right now but hopefully you'll figure out how to strike a balance he's like yeah i don't think so he's like to be honest with you i'm not sure any of this shit's supposed to be here. And he, I mean, he is working with ecologists and he's got a litany of really good contacts from his past life.

But that did just make me think of this question. Like, do you find yourself ever get kind of bogged down in the management of things? Like we've been manipulating landscapes and species for so long do you ever kind of get to these points where you're like sure I guess screw it because it's not we're so far away from what it was or what we think it was I don't think so I mean I don't I don't think I get get that discouraged there, there's things like in the wolf recovery world where I just wish it wasn't a constant stream of litigation and litigation and litigation. Wish we could just get on with the business of conserving carnivores and managing them as, as species. But, but I don't, I think I'm optimistic.

I think there's just a lot of really good work going on right now throughout the West, habitat-wise and movement-wise and everything. That's great. Phil? Someone needs to address the elephant in the room. Basically, Giannis has nothing to do with this show anymore. He's moved on to bigger and better things. Giannis, once again again is out on assignments making his own content I was assuming you heard I was coming

no he's all busy we got a lot of irons in the fire and Giannis is tending to a couple of them he's in Fond du Lac he's out ice fishing you don't have your thing that makes the Giannis sounds anymore do you I was thinking about bringing it to Nashville next week so we can pretend Gianannis there oh you won't be there either no instead

you got me i'm changing his damn thing he's not even like a co-host anymore no so funny he's abandoned he's moved on he's he's left the nest he's busy Yeah, if you weren't cracking the whip, making all this other work. He's not a true outdoorsman. No. Yeah. Too much skiing. He's missing some good skiing, though, isn't he? Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. I should send him a note about that. Yeah. He's puking the gnar, man. He's in final, like, I went to high school about 40 minutes south of there, and college about an hour northwest of there. So I'm familiar with that country. The only, everything skiers say is annoying, but I did hear one good one the other day. Someone was talking about the powder, and he said, that gnar isn't going to shred itself.

Love it. Love it. Blower pal. All right, Jim Hellenfinger, what's your favorite favorite of all the pamphlets and books you read i think you you say that your masterpiece is the jack book jack rabbit hunting tips and recipes yep yep and that's even available as a pdf my on my website deer nut.com um just d double e r nut.com um i've got a whole bunch of pdfs that are magazine articles that i've written and you can i've got deer of the Southwest.

I brought you a copy, um, which is cow's white tail and desert mule deer in the Southwest, Northern Mexico. Um, that's available on the website and, um, my Instagram, Jim deer and deer has an E after the N like John deer. Oh, in fact, it's a little John deer logo that I photoshopped. It looked like a mule deer. Dude, I'm going to come down and do a jackrabbit hunt with you, man. Yeah, definitely.

Definitely. I'd like to. You guarantee me that we'll get tons of them, right, without trying very hard? Well, no. If you want tons, you drive around and shoot them out of the window, and we don't do that. We walk. You guys don't walk the land. And so we don't walk back with tons, but it's a fun hunt.

10-pound jacks. You get bit up by mites quite a bit with those? No. They're not all mighty no they've got they've got a couple internal parasites like the uh the bot fly larva which is a big thumb sized cute when they get under the skin just subcutaneous it doesn't affect the meat yeah but we in our junior jack camp that i developed for kids 10 years ago we bring kids together and we show them how to jackrabbit hunt show them how to um clean and cook the jackrabbits we find some of those big ugly botfly larvae under the skin and and we turned a liability into a a positive when we we started we brought a little frame scale no we started weighing them and we gave out an award for the largest botfly larvae

that's nice and pretty soon the kids are going do i have one do i have one does mine have one can you find one on mine so when you grab them see i thought because you guys are down where it doesn't get cold in the winter enough when you grab them your arms don't just get mauled by mites no and we hunt them they're open year round but we hunt them um october to march just the cooler season so we can keep the meat and there is less ectoparasites on them yeah as opposed to the endo inside or outsidecto or outside. I like that. Like the insects on the outside.

Yeah. But it's not bad at all. I mean, you just don't, when you grab them, they're nice and clean and you skin them and you've got some

really nice clean meat that cooks up like beef. Great. Wow. How much did you learn, Phil? Like on a one to 10? Were you paying attention? I was a solid eight.

You guys ran the gamut. So many things were talked about. Yeah. You soaking it up? Soaking it up. Mostly I was fantasizing about my Neanderthal mingling in this hypothetical situation. Yeah, Phil had to go back. He went back behind that curtain for a while.

That's right. Came back out again. I was imagining like a Romeo and Juliet situation. Forbidden love. Phil's search and Juliet situation. Forbidden love. Phil's search history is dark. Forbidden love. That sounds like a movie. I know.

Tonight I'm going to want it. Tomorrow I'm going to try to tap into Phil's incognito search. I've got to figure out how to do that. You don't want to. All right. Jim Hufflefinger. Outdoorsman. Biologist, man in the arena. A man in the arena when it comes to wildlife and wildlife management

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