The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 220: An Elk-Hunting Nudist Checks the Breeze

Episode Date: May 11, 2020

Steven Rinella talks with Bart George, Phil Taylor, Ryan Callaghan, and Janis Putelis.Topics discussed: Starting life and ending life in PJs; how the lower-48’s caribou vanished; a deceased oscillated turkey; the last ever flip flop story; Jani being a chit-chatter with his seat mates on airplanes; cows not condos; kangaroo meat being favorite; your dead dog tied to a tree; when a 3-year-old lion kills 14 alpacas in a single night, is that surplus slaughter?; a bear rolls down a hill and onto the bike path; what’s it like to get dosed by ketamine?; the distance from the stimuli and the distance from the flight; a lion so close you had to pull your pistol; training big cats to avoid humans by blaring Ep. 197 of The MeatEater Podcast at them; how mountain lions hate it when you touch them; when a guy in Canada legally shoots your collared cat, then mails you back the collar; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

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

Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google Play Store. Know where you stand with Onyx. You know, we had a guy, we had a guy write in that he's a, he's a nudist, you know? Do I know what a nudist is? Yeah, my kids the other day were wondering what nudists were and I had to explain it to them. How much time do you have to spend in the nude to be a nudist? That's what I don't understand. What percentage of the day? That's what... When I was talking to my kids, I left it to be that a nudist...

I kind of left it to be that a nudist would be someone who would sort of go out of their way to do their chosen activities in a place that would allow them to do them nude. That was sort of where i drew it is nude when possible oh you just looked it up i had watched the intro of a nudist documentary that's as far as i got nude when possible that makes me and that makes me largely a nudist no no because you'd be nude right now no i'd get in all kinds of trouble like from a like an hr type thing phil doesn't need to phil phil would complain probably the oxford dictionary just defines it as a person who does not wear any clothes because they believe

this is more natural and healthy yeah you know i i know, I'm not a nudist, but what God is talking about with our kids is I always explain to them that there's a thing that happens, because they were kind of wondering, why do they wear pajamas? I'm going to get to this nudist that wrote in, but they're talking about, like, why do we wear pajamas? And I said that people tend to begin life in pajamas and they end life in pajamas but then

there's a long long window in the middle when you don't wear pajamas i find i think that's accurate like you spend decades not in pajamas i don't know like when it ends and begins but you you start and end in pjs yeah if i wear them now it's more like to uh have a sunday brunch or something you know at the house yeah i can't i don't even i haven't owned a pair of pajamas probably since i like got rid of my superman pajamas reason i'm right about this guy is he elk hunts in the nude he says he's he says i've hunted with trad bows compound bows rifles being nude is the most difficult obstacle i've thrown at myself i like this guy he checked into it says his nudity is completely legal where he hunts um he says you have to be very careful about where you pick. He leaves his shoes on.

He says he's been a nudist for many years. And he says one of the main things that you wouldn't think about is just your awareness of wind direction is enhanced. You've got a lot of receptors. Yeah. He says it's very freeing. And he says you pick your routes very carefully. Has he had any kills in the nude? I don't think so.

He's got a nudist friend who also hunts. Different state, also hunts naked. I wonder if they have to wear hunter orange during a modern firearm season. That's when you get that body paint, man. That's all they wear. Ladies and gentlemen that was bart george bart how's it going it's going well i'm gonna uh oh you know we got a couple things to cover before we start talking about your work your recent work but uh so all the caribou last time we had you on we talked about mountain caribou that are in the lower 48, which at the time had shrank, shrank, shrank, shrank until there was kind of a couple in Idaho. They're gone.

They are gone. Gone, gone. We're pretty sure they're gone, gone, gone. We did get a little surprise. I can't even remember when it was. It's been 18 months or so ago. A couple of caribou turned up in Northern Montana. Yep. Just a fleeting glimpse. They passed through, got photographs, they were able to document them, and then never saw them again.

Where do you think they came from probably out of the purcells but nobody really knows um so that's the last caribou documented in lower 48 and they were actually in montana what year was that like i said it's about 18 months ago i think it's right when all the self right when the selker occurred was just yeah i remember seeing that they had turned up there and i didn't i never really heard what the story was nobody knows the story they there's no conclusion to that story they just disappeared what was the nail in the coffin for the selkirk we're not exactly sure there was death you know there's i think when we talked there was what a dozen caribou left in that herd and we were putting together a big project to do a maternal pen and put together a whole bunch of pretty heavy-handed management

actions and that march when we were about to really get going with captures and stuff like that we started our census and we only found three cows obviously none of them were pregnant so that everything got put on hold. We completed our census, only found the three. We found three over in the Purcells. I think two of them were bulls so we decided we better get those animals together and moved them all north up to Revelstoke and put them in the maternal pen that they have in place up there. Put collars on them, obviously, and then let, actually, it was a kind of a stroke of luck. One of the resident animals from the Revelstoke area dropped down close to the penning site about the time they were being placed, and they captured her and put her in the pen to kind of

help them acclimate or whatever hopefully the mother up to her and that did work they followed her back up to the top and as far as we know right now they're alive and doing well in that herd wow so the last of the selkirk mountains don't live or last the selkirk caribou don't really live in the selkirks anymore. They're up north. Man. I invite people. What was the name of that episode, Bart, when we covered this whole thing? Oh, I don't know.

It was a- We always give them cutesy, clever names that are hard to remember. Yeah. Just give me a second. I think it was number 43, but I'm not sure. A guy at, a guy that, a guy I know that works at Old Town Canoes sent me this article about a dude, a hunter who became the first World Slam recipient across four categories. So everyone knows that I happen to be a turkey Super Slam holder. Now, almost two times super slam holder.

What that is, is I have gotten, there's this notion that there are five subspecies of wild turkeys. And they live in different places, you know. And I've gotten them all. And once I get another Florida one, I'll be a two-time super slam holder. A world slam holder is a fella who gets all five of our wild turkeys and then goes down to get all five subspecies of our American wild turkey. And then you go down to Central America or know belize southern yucatan area and you get yourself what's called an oscillated turkey which is a whole different species of turkey at the point you

get an oscillated turkey you become a world slam holder and there's an article about this dude what's really funny is he's standing there doing a grip and grin with a turkey and it described the caption says that it's a deceased so he's holding his turkey it says he poses with a deceased oscillated turkey deceased but so the dude so this is what the dude did though this is kind of like i can't tell i can't tell if i think this is the greatest or what thing so he's done the world slam so all all five North American, you know, all five American wild turkey subspecies. And then the oscillated turkey. He's got four times. He's done it with a bow, a crossbow, a modern firearm, and a muzzleloader.

So he's like a four time for like, I don't know what point you're hunting turkeys. And at what point you're just sort of checking things off a list. I don't know. I think he's still hunting turkeys. I mean, he's out there having fun, still chasing gobblers every time,

just choosing a different, a different fire. I saw, it wasn't a grip and grin. It was a picture of a dead turkey today on Instagram, and it was with a pistol shotgun. And I was like, ah, that's cool. I could get into that.

You know, because it's obviously shorter range, you know, easy to pack around. Took the dude a decade to get it done. So that's what, I wish I was better at math. Six times four. 24 so he's getting 2.4 turkeys per year to work toward his deal that makes it seem very achievable oh yeah yeah i knocked a crazy heart on the pocketbook either if you think of it that way no mike petrasca congrats, Mike. That's good. When I retire, man, I'm going to be hot on that dude's heels. This is the last thing I'm going to bring up.

This is the last part, the last installment of our, I shouldn't say our, the ongoing story of our flip-flops appropriate footwear. This has been beaten to death. Do you got room for one last sure you never know he might learn something so dude he's out like supposedly scouting for turkeys and which he says comes down to sit in the back of a truck drinking beer listening for gobbles at night and his dog uh he doesn't put the he doesn't put an e-collar on his dog and his dog, he doesn't put an e-collar on his dog, and his dog just decides to get up and take off and heads off into a swamp. He's got his flip-flops on.

So the dog goes off in the swamp, and it's like knee-deep muck, and because he has his flip-flops on, he can't go in there after it, but his buddy who's got sneakers on goes in there after it. The guy with the flip-flops takes takes his flip flops off so he can run and runs around on the road and in so doing encounters the neighbor and scores the hunting permission on the neighbor's place so it's sort of like an inadvertent uh effect you wearing flip-flops, Cal? Oh, yeah. Cal's got mine right now. It's flip-flop season.

An inadvertent upside to running around in flip-flops. Oh, a couple things I want to talk about, too, real quick. Back when people used to just freely fly around the country on airplanes. Back in the long, long ago. Yeah. When I was a boy, you just would get on an airplane

and just go where the hell you felt like. No mask, nothing. I travel a lot with Yanni and I keep wanting to bring this up with Yanni. I realize Yanni is a, Yanni's a, he's like a chatter. Like you like to chit chat

with your seat mates. Hmm. More so than I'm comfortable doing. Oh mates more so than than i'm comfortable doing oh more so than you that's for sure and uh i i heard i keep i never like brought this up with you but like yeah just talking to someone they're talking behind me i can hear him talking and yeah he's telling them all about just different stuff and what he's coming from doing and janice gets to talking about uh game meat wild game meat and i i laughed about this because the woman he's sitting to sitting next to tries to up him and i even wrote it down in my nose where she told him my favorite me of all time is kangaroo yep i remember that too because i didn't realize you were sitting in front of me until much later in the flight but i remember when she said that i said is that right and then i opened my book and

she's like don't you be telling me about this wild game you know i also heard this dude like this interesting story on an airplane not long ago one of my final flights. The guy was like, we were on a plane. There was a bunch of dudes going down to – we were coming home from Bemidji, Minnesota, and there was a bunch of Minnesota dudes going down to watch their team do spring training in Florida.

That is a trip I cannot imagine. Did you know that people did this prior to that? No. No. They're real excited. They're traveling down to watch people practice playing baseball in Florida. But he was observing to someone how the area where their Minnesota team carries on this activity. He was talking about how it got built up over the years.

And he was saying how it used to be when you went down there. It was all cows. And now it's all buildings. And I started thinking about that. Remember the old cows, not condos? The Bulberstegger? Yeah, you still see a few around this town. I never think of that like applied to Florida.

But like that the cattle operations replaced by just buildings. I look at like every day I look friendly. When I look at cows, I feel like more affection toward them than normal over time. So Bart, what's going on, man? What else is happening? We got a bunch of stuff to talk to you about, about your mountain lion, your crazy mountain lion projects. Yeah, that's been the highlight of my spring. The COVID stuff is everything kind of weird right now at work.

Are you able to get out and do your work still? Kind of. Not as much as I'd like. I'm really working like two or three days a week. We don't have childcare available, so my wife and I are kind of fighting over who gets to go to work and who stays home with the kids. Got it. Both of us are supposed to be doing our jobs. But we do have callers out working but we're still

generating quite a bit of data like you have uh you have collars on how many mountain lions uh we have five collars out right now but so these these collars are on a like a five week rotation so i i really don't want more than about four or five because we have to see every one of these cats every week and that's quite a bit of work you know capturing five cats a week hold on you got to go you got to go catch the cat and mess with it every week to put a new collar on it we don't have to put a new collar on it the once it's collared though we revisit that cat once a week tree it basically approach it and tree it to do what just to grab that data point so we're measuring the distance i can get into the details now if you if you want on that you're getting a little far ahead of yourself am i okay but but here's

no i'm not getting into the details of what you're doing yet i'm just trying to understand uh in today's day in this day and age what like i thought you just put them on it and then you just sit back and reap the information the collar and faller research no we're not doing that uh this is pretty hands-on as far as big cat research goes so we're looking at these cats every week and we are then measuring their response to that okay so let's let's back up let's yeah yeah we we can't we can there. Okay, you tell me where to start. Well, I can tell you about the project. Yeah, tell me about the project. So the reason the project is occurring, because we're seeing lots of depredations.

We're seeing lots of cats hanging around ex-urban interface areas. Depredations on what? Typically small livestock and pets. Typically the way those work, a cat kills whatever X number of sheep or a couple of llamas or whatever, eats its fill, caches the carcass near the pasture usually, and then just lays around, comes back and feeds that night. By the time we get the call, usually it's a day or two. And we started noticing that the cats are right there. Like we would turn the dogs loose from the carcass and they'd have the cat caught in like 30 seconds sometimes.

Cat would be laying 200 yards away, bedded someplace near the carcass, totally not concerned about us pulling in with the pickups and our voices and the dogs making a racket on the box and barking and everything else that's going on. So it kind of got me wondering, like, what's it take? Why are these cats not concerned about all of this goings on that's happening so close to them? Why aren't they running away from all that noise? And then, you know, the next question was, how close can we get to these cats? If we don't know it, how close are we walking up to these cats and maybe never knowing it? Hold there because I got a couple of questions. All right. couple questions all right uh do when they kill someone's dog like is a dog small enough where

they don't kind of like eat some and stash it and then come back and feed on it some more do you see them doing that with house dogs uh well it depends on the size of the dog a small dog they'll just pick up and walk off with oftentimes we don't find you, a carcass cached away if it's a dachshund or something. We have found big dogs. We had a, like a pit bull that was killed and mostly eaten. And that cat hung around on that carcass for a couple of days eating it before we caught him. And that was some dude's dog. Yeah, it was actually a service dog. Really? Like a full on service dog? Yeah. They let it out to pee in the middle of the night, and the cat was just laying there waiting, and grabbed it, and packed it up the hill a few hundred yards, and ate him. Obviously, a cat like that, I wouldn't want in my study. I get a little

alley about running dog killers, because we're running them with dogs. I don't want one of my hounds to get out in front and encounter a bad cat like that. And then tell me where this is kind of happening, where you're doing your work, just so people understand where we are on the map. We're up in northeast Washington. So Spokane, Washington is where I live, north all the way to Canada,

and then out towards Lake Roosevelt, Lincoln County. So we have a five- five county area that we're kind of working in okay pretty rural part yeah uh pretty rural we have cats close to town um had a cat caller like 10 minutes away from my house and like i said i'm right on the north side of spokane um you know you could see the city from where that cat lived we have another one right now that's working over by like mount spokane ski area between there and the city so rural but not remote definitely that kind of wildland urban interface you know ex-urban however you want to describe it a lot of white tails too right lots of white tails lots of edge habitat turkeys in north spokane too yeah a lot of turkeys there um but yeah just broken landscape a lot of small landowners 10

and 20 acre partials are very common when you say uh uh dog killers have you found like habitual dog eating cats like cats that have kind of started to specialize on pooches? I don't think that they have started to specialize on hunting and, you know, preying on dogs, but I think cats do start to figure things out once they work, and it might have been with a coyote or something, but sometimes I think those cats do figure out that they can turn and fight a single dog and pretty easily take care of that problem. Gotcha. Do you see where they kill many lions or llamas? Because that's the thing.

If I was a mountain lion, man, I wouldn't eat anything but llamas. Big neck. A lot of neck to work with. Yeah, when they get them, do they get them or they just twist that neck? Oh, yeah. They grab that big, long neck anywhere. I think it probably works for them uh we see a lot of llamas yeah a lot of alpacas too which i guess are slightly smaller than a full-size llama

um we had one cat it was a big young tom um 160 pound tomcat and he's only like three years old right outside of spokane that killed 14 alpacas geez over over the course of sweaters the sweaters you could make with that and they were it was a strange one because a cat must have spent quite a bit of time there he had moved between three different pastures to kill all these alpacas over what period of time did it take him to kill all those alpacas i think just overnight but it was like a battle scene there's just carcasses everywhere it was awful do you notice how uh surplus like there's people that um there's depending on how you feel about predators right depends on whether you're that you rather you embrace or try to deny the thing of surplus

killing yeah there's it's well documented um with livestock we see i'll i i would venture guess more than half of our depredations right now are multiple animals what does it like what do you think i know you don't know what he's thinking but what is he thinking when he wants to kill when he goes and kills 14 alpacasacas is just that he's wired to, you know, like it's opportunity and he can't really picture his future food needs. Or is he like, this is a hoot.

This is great fun. Yeah. I mean, it doesn't make sense for him, right? Like all the risk. I knew that if I, yeah,

I would look at that as a savings account. If I was a lion and just come back when I was hungry, but rather than kill them that if I, yeah, I would look at that as a savings account if I was a lion and just come back when I was hungry, but rather than kill them all at once. Yeah, I don't know what he's thinking. I think it's just irresistible. I think all those animals running around in a frenzy and they're sort of in a, you know, a frenzy themselves. And I don't think they can help themselves at that point. How does he, how is he killing the alpacas typically bites to the neck and head i'm not typically almost every single time bites to the neck and head was the owner of the alpacas pretty distraught yeah they were distraught um my brother he would my brother would

i can't imagine he'd be catatonic man if he came out and all of his llamas are dead yeah well they're i mean there's a financial right? But the bigger thing is a lot of these animals, they have a lot more value than just the finances there. A lot of these people count on their goats and their sheep for meat or for 4-H show animals for their kids and other things. Most of our depredations aren't on big, like, whatever, corporate ranches or something. These are like 10-acre places with a couple of animals that they use to feed their family or do whatever with. So, yeah, typically the landowner is pretty upset about it. How do people, the people that lose their dog, do they tend to be, this is like, i'm just asking for gross generalization here do people

that lose their dog tend to be circumspect and and sort of be like well he's just that lion's just trying to make a living and you know i can't really blame them are they like do they want blood they want its head on a on a spike like what's their general demeanor? Most of the time, if it's a dog, like, you know, particularly a pet dog, not a working dog, people are pretty fired up. They want that cat dead. That's been our experience. We have, you know, that's the other issue. When they kill dogs, it's hard for us because, you know, if they kill a goat, most people, you know, they understand what we're doing and, you know, that we're going to catch this cat and probably kill it. So they'll let us leave that goat tied out.

You know, we'll tie it to a tree, put a, you know, trail camera on it. We'll come back the next morning, and if that cat's hit it, we'll go catch it and kill it. It's hard to talk somebody into letting us do that with their dog. Tying the dog to a tree. Yeah, they don't want their dog to be used as bait. And I understand that. I would be that way too so yeah dogs are a little different than small livestock typically you gotta wonder if a cat starts out with a llama or an alpaca as prey species if that cat tries to move on to something else it uh has a very steep learning curve ahead of it due to the margin of error

for the length and size of the neck. Oh, yeah, like an alpaca in a little teeny enclosure? Yeah. I could kill it with my teeth, you know? Just got to get it in the neck. Now move over to a badger that has no neck. I don't know. I don't think that there are very many lions that get that opportunity enough.

You know, if they kill an alpaca, typically we have to respond pretty quickly. I say we, it's really the WDFW enforcement that responds. And then you guys met Bruce. Oh, yeah. Bruce does a lot of those i help with as many as i can and we go out and help enforcement take care of that cat and can you guys do anything with with the carcass at that point do you guys not really um unfortunately most of those animals sometimes if the landowner has a tag um or wants a cat sometimes they can get it um if they request that animal but typically no we've had a handful of

them donated to the tribes um you know the tribes will make use of that cat and the meat and the hide and the bones and different things what do you do with them just burn them up yeah they just go in the dump with the roadkill deer and everything else and people don't fish them out of the dump well maybe they do i don't i wouldn't know if they did i don't know man i don't want to say who this was but a good friend of mine he um when he was in college he was working on these uh net surveys these fish surveys where they'd go out and set nets in lakes. And what they were supposed to do is they're not supposed to use the fish.

They had to just dump the fish because they'd put out gill nets for surveys. And they'd go out in the work truck and dump the fish. He'd come home, get his regular vehicle, wait an hour, and go back and get the fish, and then take the fish back home and flame and freeze them. Sure. Couldn't bring himself to dump those fish.

What kind of fish are we talking about? He was kind of a whitefish specialist. He liked to go get the whitefish out of there, but other stuff too. Yeah. No. His initials were MD. And he had a 30-30, so we called him MD 30-30. Yanni, you had a 30 30 so we called him md 30 30 uh yeah you had a point i did yeah you were

gonna say something yeah he's taken to stroking his beard yeah because again it's not something i'm used to it's like you found a new thing out of space um no i don't think i did i just happened to glance over at you and you happened to be glancing this direction. Oh, no. I thought you had a thing you started to say. Maybe you didn't. I spoke to, on the disposal side of things, I spoke to a Montana game warden, long-time game warden,

and somebody in his area hit an abnormally large black bear and killed it. And he went to his normal disposal site, which was a sharp turn on the highway, where he'd give critters the heave-ho because he couldn't stomach taking them to a dump. He thought it was too disrespectful to take animals to a dump. Just throw them in with all the plastics and shit like that. Yeah. Yeah, I got you. But he said his physics were a little off on just how big this bear was.

And so he slid it out of the back of the truck, down the mountain it went, and he drove off. And the next day he got, from the town police department, he got a phone call saying, hey, we have a very large black bear that must have rolled off the mountain above town that is now on the bike path.

It did the whole hill? It did the whole hill. It did the whole hill. Remember that chainsaw commercials like that? Like some dude coming down the switchbacks and his chainsaw rolls out the back of his truck and eventually he like finagles his way down all the switchbacks and there's his saw laying in a mud puddle still running. Yes.

Is it running? No, it was not running. He picks it up and starts it with one crank. Oh. No. No. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians

whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada.

The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the MeatEater podcast.

Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit OnXMaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet.

Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Okay, so here you are. You got a dead alpaca tied to a tree. Bart. Yeah. That's about it. So when we show up the next morning, typically the cat comes back and feeds overnight.

We check trail camera if we have one out. If we don't, we just walk dogs over to the alpaca and turn loose from that spot. And it's kind of, you know, without snow, it's typically just up to the dogs to figure out the in track and the out track, which way the cat came from and went. But what we're seeing is these cats are just laying around pretty close to us, the whole just listening. And we're not sneaking around out there. We're at a house. We're at a farm with a dog box in the back of the truck and yapping dogs and people talking at normal voices.

And it was shocking how close the cats would be to us sometimes. We would hear, there were times where we heard the jump race where the dogs ran into the cat while he was just laying around in a bed listening to this whole racket that we were making and but and is that would that not be like when you could you like to run lions that was a hell of a start to a sentence listen you like to run lions out in the very remote wilderness areas too down then right is that not the same though there like when you find if you find where he just killed an elk um is he more inclined to as you approach scoot out like is this something that's peculiar is this a behavior that you were curious about because you felt that it was counter to what you'd see in other areas or aren't you factoring in the proximity to a suburb or people?

Does that make any sense? Well, we don't know. That was a bad sentence. I think I can clarify. I think what you're saying is that you were oblivious to it, right? And you were only realizing this because some of those cats were collared. We were only, well, no. We realized it when the dogs would jump that cat so close to us.

But it got me wondering, like, what would it take for this cat to be afraid of people? Like, you don't, obviously, we don't want cats hanging out 200 feet from people's houses, laying around in the brush, listening to people, listening to engines and dogs bark and whatever else that goes on at a house or a farm. So is that normal cat behavior or is that some level of habituation? I got you. I got you. All right. That kind of answers my stupid, my not well articulated question of meaning. Are you curious about,

is that just like ambivalence to human presence, a factor of just exposure to humans, or do you think it might be innate in cats, but you're going to find, you're going to probably explain how you're going to find that out. Well, we hope so. Whether or not we find out if it's just normal cat behavior, that's innate to cats or, um, or if it's a learned behavior, I don't know if we'll pin that down necessarily, but we are going to know whether or not we can change that behavior and modify the way they respond after being chased around by dogs and, and yelled at by people and different things.

Okay. You guys are in Montana, you know, where they've chased cats around. I'm sure any cat that gets within Bozeman city limits probably has some eyes on it pretty fast. If there's snow, especially there's a lot of, there's an active community of hound hunters there that are going to go chase that cat and get a look at it. They probably won't kill it, particularly if it's a female, but those cats, they get looked at a lot. They get chased around, harassed by hound hunters. Washington doesn't have that. We're chasing cats that have very, very likely never been pursued by a dog.

We're chasing cats that have probably never had a negative interaction with a person at all. So that's another one of the questions. It's been how many years since they banned lion hunting with dogs in Washington? Over 20 now. Okay. I think 24. I think they banned it in 96, if I remember right. So long enough ago, there's no cat living today that remembers those times. Yeah.

Yeah. Any cat that was legally pursued, and I say're, I don't know if people are out bootlegging around or chasing cats. That used to be a problem right after the, right after they made it illegal, there was still a lot of hound hunters around and they were pretty upset about it. And I think that probably happened more then. The hound hunting ranks in Washington now are pretty slim. There's not a lot of people that still keep dogs

because the opportunities are really tough. Okay. So you get curious about this. Like, why do these cats just not care? What's your next step? Well, we started to kind of think about ways to protect, you know, the farms and pets and small livestock that we kind of suspected are going to get picked off by cats. And a lot of times, a real common narrative when we showed up at the site of a depredation would be this landowner that would say, you know, oh yeah, such and such saw this cat a couple days ago and my kid saw it when he was walking to the bus yesterday and, you know, it's been around. But nobody,

there's no method to track those cats down and do anything about them. They're just sightings, right? And it's kind of a meaningless metric. So the state wasn't really responding to a sighting because that's just a cat being a cat. Until it actually does something, there's no real reason for them to send somebody out to chase it and get a look at it. So I kind of got to thinking like, all right, well, if that cat's hanging around this farm for a couple of days and, you know, showing up on whatever porch or something like that, that's probably going to cause a problem sooner or later. It's obviously showing that it's not that concerned about people and noise and all the things that we have going on on a farm. So the project then kind of got started like, all right,

so when these cats show up and they're being sighted, I want to know about it and I want to come out and chase them and see if they come back to that spot. So initially it was a little bit of a geographic thing, but really it's a stretch to think that that cat's going to make a connection between it hanging around a farm and then all of a sudden, you know, 12 hours later, here comes these dogs and pop it up a a tree and then here comes these people yelling at it and stressing it out. It's a stretch for the cat to make that connection back to that original sighting that might have been the previous day. So it really became more of a behavior study. How does this cat

respond over time if we do this? You know, How does it respond to this stimuli, which in this case is your voice, Steve, over time if we pursue it and give it this negative interaction every time it hears that human voice? Yeah, I love that you're using this podcast. Who cares enough about this research, Bart, to pay for it?

It's a good question. It's a shoestring operation right now. We're looking for funding if you guys know any place to scrounge money. Imagine the Los Angeles Pet Owners Association. You're saying this is on your own diamond that the Washington Game and Fish

isn't helping you out. Yeah, but Bart works for the tribe. I know, but he also does work for Game and Fish, correct? With these problem animals? So a lot of the, Fish and Game is the manager of the wildlife in the state. Kalispell Tribe has a pretty keen interest in cougar stuff right now because we have a reservation that's smack dab in the middle of prime winter habitat. And we have had years where we've had terrible problems with cougars on the reservation in yards at bus stops and all the things that you hear about. So my initial kind of seed money came from the

UCUT group, which is the Upper Columbia United Tribes. It's a consortium of five tribes in North Idaho and Northeast Washington. So that was the initial seed money for the research. I've got a couple of grants outstanding right now, but it doesn't cost that much what we're doing. Like I said, we only had to, we bought six callers. I've got that W, Buddy Woodbury's company doing the Garmin stuff for me. He's been super helpful with all the tech questions that I've got with Garmin and we're using their equipment. I think it's on loan, but they're not going to get a lot of it back because it just gets trashed out there in the woods for a month on a cat. Yeah, we're just kind of piecing it together

as we go. Okay, so keep going on. Keep going on the story here. So, explain how you work and how you use this podcast to help. Okay. So, as we're designing this project, one question tends to lead to another, and that's where we ended up. So, we have all these questions starting to pile up, and the protocol that we ended up settling on to try to answer as many questions as possible. I'll try to describe succinctly. But we capture a cat that's been sighted. So Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, the enforcement group is cooperating with us pretty well. So they are the ones fielding the calls for sightings or depredations or whatever. So when there's a cat hanging around a farm or a home that's spotted under a porch or wherever that it probably shouldn't be, they call me. And then we get our stuff together and go

get a look at this cat and we go capture the cat. It's, you know, Bruce is volunteering for the project and put a ton of hours into it. And I will go out and capture this cat and get it in a tree. And then we make a decision if it's a cat that we want to add to the project. We're really looking for adult cats. We don't want sub-adults that are still with their mom. And we don't want lactating females. I don't want to disrupt a cat that's actively nursing or feeding young. So we take this cat and we end up, we dart it, put a collar on it. And if we put a- Explain that darting process real quick. So we're just use a, you know, it's an air gun and we're, we're working on a drug formulation.

I think I'm actually really excited about it because a lot of people use ketamine, xylosine on cats. We're trying to save some money. We're trying to do some things different and test some different stuff and use a safer drug safer drug ketamine's a little bit dangerous and it's also a evidently a street drug that we have to be really careful about so we're using a drug called bam that we've used on sheep successfully so we're testing that on the cats and um it seems to be working real well so we're darting this cat cat. When someone uses ketamine, what are they after? I have no idea. I know for cats, it looks like it would suck when you see a cat under ketamine

because they're rigid and uncomfortable. And then when they recover, they're drooling and their head's bobbing around and they're just staggering it looks awful um i can't so you know you never like you never like put a little give a little squirt in your mouth because you don't want to replicate that experience of the cats it doesn't no it does not look like they're having a good time at all i was really hoping you guys were gonna uh go into like the side of things, like super shot of CBD. Just get them high, yeah. Yeah, we could try.

People use ether and knock cats out. I've heard of the old-timers doing that. Starting fluid, basically, they'll knock a cat out to get it out of a trap or something. Got you. And then did you hear the story we had on this show one time about a guy that got accidentally shot by the tranquilizer gun? No. Yeah, it was quite an ordeal for him. Yeah, it can be very dangerous. They had to pack him down on a mule.

Really? They had to load the guy up on a mule and pack him out of the mountains. Thought he was going to die. Got shot by a dart that's another reason i want to use the drug you're trying to experiment with is bam yeah um i would get that wrong if i told you it's a three drug formulation it's butorphanol i think adipamazole and metatomidine um so it's a three drugs mixed to one it's made by a wildlife vet in Colorado. Okay.

It's a great product. Uh, super safe. They're using it on moose and sheep and deer and other things. Uh, the one thing it does have, it's reversible. So if I was to dart myself, I could also reverse myself. Oh, no kidding. So you can carry like a, you could carry like a vial of antidote. Right.

So I have a reversal agent. Um, I'll get back to darting the cat and we'll talk about reversing it and everything else. But so to dart the cat, we get it in the right tree. So if it's in a super high tree, someplace where it's going to get injured, if it comes out of the tree, we'll jump it out of that tree and put dogs on it right away. So they put a lot of pressure on it and get it to grab another tree. When do that typically that cat's running from those dogs and it's going to grab the first tree it can get to it's so it's less likely that it's going to pick a great big tree and climb way to the top how do you prompt it when it's when it finds a tree and it goes into a tree and it's the wrong tree because

it's going to fall presumably right it's going to fall and get hurt if you tranquilize it right how do you how do you willfully prompt it to jump to another tree, to jump to the ground? So we've done it a couple of ways. Sometimes you can just bang on that tree with a stick or a log, and I think that vibration drives them a little bit crazy, and they'll just climb out. If they haven't been treed very much and they are pretty nervous, it's easy to get them to jump. We also carry a paintball gun, and you can rattle the tree above them or actually shoot the cat with the paintballs and they'll come out of the tree that way too.

And try to get them in a better tree. Right. So I want them in, you know, I don't want them over about, you know, 35 feet high. And then we carry climbing equipment because sometimes they go down in the tree. But once, so I deliver the dart and we get this tarp hung out and it's like you would expect it's a big you know I don't know if it's canvas or not but it's that kind of heavy cotton material hey do you have to hit them in any special spot with that dart I always try to hit him in the hamstring you can you can shoot him in the shoulder but there's just more connective tissue and more likelihood of an injury. So I always try to shoot them right in the hamstring or, yeah, the butt.

Got it. And that's a big muscle group. I'm using a one and a half inch long needle, so it's a big needle and you have to get into a pretty deep muscle. So these are just pressurized darts that are reusable. So once the dart hits, you know, typically the dart comes out of the cat in the tree. It's not barbed or anything like that. So the drug's delivered. Dart typically falls out of the tree. We get our tarp up and just watching that cat. About half the time they go down and they're stuck in the tree and we have to climb up, tie a rope around them

and push them out of the tree down into the tarp. How long does it take to put that cat to sleep? That depends. Typically, so the BAM itself is going to take like 10 minutes, which seems like an eternity when you're out there. We have decided, we have started adding a really small dose of ketamine to the BAM. And it's a low-dose ketamine. It's 100 milligrams per milliliter ketamine. So it's like the stuff they use on horses. We put just a whisper of that in there, and that knocks them out way faster.

So those two drugs really work together well. And they'll go down in about two and a half minutes with that. Okay. And then you guys are like firemen catching someone jumping out of a window. much yeah we'll tie the tarp up hold the tarp up in the corners do whatever and catch it when it lands so you had a funny dart story i had one of those just a week ago i was shot a cat and we're we look at the cat the through the scope of our air rifle you know and i could see the plunger wasn't all the way down on the dart, which is a concern because it means there's still half the drugs in the dart. It also

means the cat only got half the delivery. So we're wondering if we're gonna have to dart him again. And he started looking like he was going to come out of the tree. He was getting pretty heavy. His head was hanging. So we've gotten in position with the dart and the cat started moving around and that i wasn't paying attention to the cat i was looking at the tarp and i felt something i thought a stick landed on me and i looked down and that dart had come out of the tree and stuck in my palm like a lawnmower with half the drug still in it and the sleeve was off and it's pressurized i was like oh my, this is going to be embarrassing. But it didn't dose you? It didn't.

I just cleaned it up. Of course, nowadays everybody has hand sanitizer in every pocket. So I pulled it out and smeared some hand sanitizer in there and kept a pretty close eye on it. And I don't think I got any of the drug at all. I didn't feel like I did anyway so you you've got a lot of practice shooting cats with darts though right like how many cats this is a two-part question I'm teeing you up for what's the first part of the question how many cats have you uh darted um I am not sure where I'm at right now so we have oh probably 20 cats so far we're permitted for 35 this year oh and you're in your whole career i figured you would have shot more

than that yeah beyond this study uh no i didn't really shoot very many when i was helping the state um that was typically their their biologists delivering the drugs on that. Oh, I got you. I was just doing the capture part with the dogs. Gotcha. So this project's really most of my cat darting. I've darted sheep and deer and some other things, but for this one, probably 20 cats and probably, oh, I think three or four of those cats

we've had to handle three different times, most of them twice so i don't know how many darts i've delivered 50 or 60 i guess and uh since they're reusable have you identified the lucky dart like what is the dart that comes out of the box you're like you're like that one is gonna that that puts tabby down um we have identified a couple of unlucky darts i don't know. Um, we don't have one that I like better than the others, but we always test them before we load the drugs.

And sometimes those, you know, it's just a syringe, right? And sometimes those plungers, it gets sticky and things like that. So we're always testing them and that has helped, but I had a terrible time. The first cat we treat, I missed twice before I got a dart in it. And the gun was shooting like a foot high. And I, I sighted the gun in on the flat, like a total rookie move. You know, I just took it out in the lawn and sighted it in. And that's a very different trajectory than shooting almost straight up into a tree. So I was shooting over the cat and it was launching these $18 darts full of, you know, $40 worth of drugs out into the stratosphere.

So that was embarrassing, but we've got it dialed in now. I haven't missed a cat in a long time. Yeah. Good for you. Okay. So the cat falls out of the tree, lands on the trampoline, the cotton. Yeah. If the, a lot of times the cat comes out and still has some life in it, we tie it up. We just put a loop around its hind leg and tie it to the tree and let the drugs take full effect. The dogs are tied back 100 or so yards to kind of lower stimulation. We tell people to be quiet and not talk, not stimulate the cat. They are really paying attention. Visual stimulation will really bother them when their anesthesia

is taking effect and it will it will slow down the effects of the drugs so we get a head cover on them as soon as it's kind of safe right and their and their head can still be up they really want to get away from you at that point they're not like trying to fight or anything they just want to walk away so we get a head cover on and that really seems to subdue them and they relax pretty fast once their eyes are covered. So we collar the cat. We're using the regular survey collar that you see on every wildlife project, right? The big GPS collar weighs like whatever, I don't know how many grams, but they're big. And on that, we're affixing the Garmin unit. So we're putting that other Garmin T5 tracking unit. It's basically the same thing you get from a, same thing for a dog, right? We're affixing that to the Vectronix survey caller.

And with that unit, we're able to get two-second data on the cat. And then... What does that mean? Uh, so on the survey caller, I'm getting data every four hours. So I kind of have an idea where that cat lives on a four hour, you know, every four hours I get a point. So over time you get really good data, but only have a month. I'm not trying to determine home range or any of that stuff. I just want to know where that cat's at right now. So with this Garmin, it's the same thing I use on a dog. I have a handheld that shows that cat's location, shows my location, it shows the dog's location. So when I'm in the field,

I have this real-time data on the cat and I know within two seconds where that cat's at and when it's moving and how fast. So you basically, I mean, you know, right where he is at every moment. I know exactly. Yeah. It's, um, so to my knowledge, it's the first time anybody's done this with cats anyway, with that kind of data and that kind of field, um, capability. But Bart, why even attach the, uh, the regular GPS collar? Uh, because battery life is an issue with the Garmin's. We're still working on how long, we don't really know how long a battery will last. In the wintertime, it seems like we're

getting about a month out of one of those batteries. Right now, it's extended out to about six weeks, I think. But I just didn't want to have a cat running around with a dead collar on it and have no way to go recapture the cat. So that normal survey collar has the four hour data and VHF capability. So it lasts, you know, I get two years of battery life out of that unit compared to that other collar where I'm getting two second data and it's just going through the battery fast. When this cat wakes up from getting tranquilized,

I know this isn't the object of your study, but when you tranquilize the mountain lion, you put the collar on it, it's effective immediately, right? You can just start tracking him instantaneously. Yes. How far does he go and how long, how much time goes by before he's back to like acting like a mountain lion? I, with this, with the BAM, the recovery is fast. how much time goes by before he's back to like acting like a mountain lion?

I, with this, with the BAM, the recovery is fast. I think they start acting normal far more quickly than they do with a ketamine capture. I think that that ketamine capture really causes, you know, for lack of a better better term so a hangover for that cat that lasts a day or two with the BAM we see movement pretty quick once they recover because we reverse it remember so we reverse that cat and within about three minutes that cat is on its feet and running away from us and how far will he run before he goes like how far does he haul ass before he like chills out again not far maybe a hundred or two yards i mean that's it doesn't just run for miles just to get out of there nope so they they move away from

us and we get out of there and so before i leave i put that garmin collar to sleep mode so that saves the battery life and when i want to go find that cat again, I use the VHF on the electronics collar. I get close and I use my handheld Garmin unit to just wake that collar up. So it's in wake mode. And then I start generating that two second data. So I'm not logging data all the time. It's only when it's awake. So it's kind of a nice function to save battery on that unit. So how much time will elapse before you go back to look at it? I've been trying to give them at least five days after capture to go have another look at that cat to recapture it. And typically, how far away are they from where you've originally caught them? You know, we've had a couple of cats that live on the same mountain the whole time.

We studied them, and then we've had others that bounce around, you know, 6, 8, 10 miles over the course of that week. So it just really depends on the cat and also the time of year. You know, the cat that lived on one mountain the whole project was in the middle of winter, is up north by Colville, Washington. Deep snow, had a nice piece of winter range for deer, and that cat was just living right above the deer. It had no reason to leave. And then after you tranquilize them and collar them, what's the soonest you've seen them actually kill a big game animal or kill a large animal after that? I'm not sure. I haven't really paid attention to that. I know one cat, we collared her. So we were approaching her to collar and she had just killed a deer the deer was actually hadn't even been dragged to a cache it was laying in an open field basically or meadow

up in the mountain so she had just made a kill we collared her and later that day she was on that deer and drug it into the brush and and ate on it for about a week. Oh, so pretty quick turnaround to going back to normal. Yeah, she started acting normal pretty quick. Wow, yeah, that's amazing. If you did that to a person, dude, they'd be whacked out for the longest time, man. Yeah, they'd be seeing a counselor. Yeah, well, we would be thinking about it too much.

Her belly started growling she said oh yeah that's right i killed a deer this morning all right i think i can ask a good prompting question um can i what are the like the data points then that you're actually looking for now that you've you've you've probably got the data point of like where you you caught it right and that's your start and then so what what are the data points then like where you caught it right and that's your start and then so what what are the data points then next time you go in that you're capturing so there's really there's three important data points that i'm gathering and that's um more important than the actual point is that the distance is in between them so when a week after we put a collar on a cat, we go, we approach that cat. And when I'm within

about 400 yards, I start the podcast on an 80 decibel, a little Bluetooth speaker. Do you play the intro? Cause it's going to think it's tree has fallen down. I don't play the intro. It's actually, I've only used like two podcasts. I don't, I'm not out there that long. So, um, so you don't pick your favorite parts. No, I'm just got one podcast. It's been playing for the same, for the cats for quite a while. Okay. Okay.

Well, do you mind me asking real quick? Like what, uh, what's going on in the show? It was the, uh, polar expedition show. All those people eating each other and everything. That probably turns a cat on man. Yeah. They don't like that. And then the other one was that gentleman that wrote the book about Davy Crockett.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which, yeah, I listened to that. I mean, I want to read that book now after listening to you at 80 decibels for an hour and a half talk about it. It's like I feel like I have to read it. So I approached the cat from about 400 yards. I'll start that podcast. And I started approaching the cat on a, basically a direct line. And I know exactly where it's at. I've got it on the handheld and I know where I'm at and I don't have dogs with me or anything else. I'm just walking up to the cat with this human voice playing. The important data is.

And he, hold on, back up, back up. And he's like in a predictable place. Are you like, oh, he's in a cliff or he's in, you know what I mean? Or are they just like out in just weird places? If it's in the middle of the day, which we're trying to capture cats or recapture cats in the middle of the day, it's a pretty predictable place. And we're starting to make some connections that way about when cats are on the move compared to when cats are in a bed, how they respond. But there's a little bit of individuality that way too. Some cats are a little more comfortable laying out in a less of a thicket and some cats really hole into some gnarly little thickets or rock overhangs and

things like that. So they like, they like to lay in the thicket? Yeah. There are some cats that lay in a thicket that's like impenetrable thickets. Oh, no kidding. And when they're in one of those, they feel very safe. You can walk right up to them. Gotcha. Okay, so I didn't mean to derail you there.

I was just curious about. No. What's the more open location look like? A penetrable thicket okay so it's never like you just laid out in the sun in the middle of a hundred yard grassy meadow no they we do find them laying in open forest on occasion but if they are it's like at the base of a tree with you know heavy with branches yeah i feel like when we chased those the first day we chased lines with you in northern idaho didn't we find two beds that were in a pretty open yeah for forest yep yeah that was open for us they're up up against you know old growth cedar trees though i mean they had some cover there still cedars so they like some cover they like a thicket

they like a rocky spot yeah we find them in all of those things. Overhung rocks. We've had a couple of cats that we walked right up to that were in overhung rocks. We actually had one Monday that we got within 30 yards of. She was laid up in a rock pile. Okay, so you start playing this thing and walking toward them, and you start playing it at 400 yards. Yeah, 400 yards. I turn the podcast on. I approach them in the most direct line how loud

is it how loud is it for you like you're playing it it's like that's an annoying level for you yeah it's it's annoying it's an outside voice for sure okay okay um it's not a it's not a shout necessarily but it's a loud talk for sure okay Okay. If we were talking, if we were walking in the woods, talking at that level, it would be annoying probably. Got it. So they're hearing it from quite a ways. So as we approach this cat, the important data that I grab is how close do I get to the cat before it gets to its feet and leaves. So I grab, at that point I stop, I get my location, pin that, I get the cat's location, I pin that, and then I just watch that cat and I keep the

speaker playing and I just stand still and I let that cat move away however it chooses. Whatever that flight looks like, however much energy it wants to put into escaping my approach. And the cat moves away and I get, typically that happens within about, oh, 10 minutes. And once that cat stops moving for, you know, I don't have a set amount of time, but once it's hanging out in an area and not really going anywhere, I call that the end of the mobilization and I grab that distance. So the two important measurements really are the distance from me, the stimuli, and the distance of the flight. And then I hop on the radio, I walk up to where that cat was laying around, I hop on the radio and tell Bruce kick the dogs loose. The dogs are now trained to like track me. If I ever get

lost the dogs are gonna find me in a second. They know what's going on now. So they track me to the site of the cat's bed. And once they get there, they take off and go tree that cat. What are the distances like? The cat's responding at what distance typically? So we are seeing those distances extend over the course of the project for pretty much every cat. The first time we approach a cat, so Monday was an exciting day. Monday was the first cat that I've walked up on and actually looked at before it ran away from me. And it's the first time, it's the first hazing, it's kind of what we're calling this, the first hazing event. The cat had been captured once. It was pretty calm at capture. So last Monday, I went out and

walked up to that cat and I'm watching the gps and it's pretty thick they're not terribly thick uh you can certainly see you know 40 or 50 yards in the forest and i'm watching the gps i'm like man i'm getting pretty close to this cat he ought to be it's like that scene it's like that scene in red dawn when the dude's in the white suits the ruskies in the white suits start tracking that kid down right yeah it's uh it was unnerving i'm looking at my gps unit like is this thing updating right like what's going on here do you get nervous do you get nervous around mountain lions um i had my gun out i had my gun out of its holster oh you did okay yeah i was nervous um i mean what i was close i got within 19 feet of him. Holy smokes. He's just laying there listening to the podcast.

He's like, dude, this is fascinating. Yeah, I can't get enough of this guy. So he was bedded underneath the kind of a leaning log. And I hopped up on top of the log to get a better view and get a little bit of elevation. And when I did, the end of the log moved. And I think that unnerved him and he ran out from underneath that um so that's the first one that i've actually watched run away wow man and then he ran 19 feet sorry to be clear this was the first time you had gone in right

after this cat after yeah so this cat okay this is the first time it's been exposed to this stimuli so it run it ran off it only went 75 feet and stopped and would not move and i'm like really now i'm unnerved at this point so i'm hollering and i'm watching the gps very closely to make sure it's not circling me or coming back to me or something because it knows i'm there it has seen me it's hearing me and now here's me hollering at it over the podcast um and it sat there for a long time. I mean, several minutes at 75 feet. And finally, I'm like, well, I guess we have to turn the dogs loose. It's that's, that's it's flight. That's what it's going to do. It's not going to run from me. Oh yeah. Yeah. I gotcha. So you marked down

his, his, his flight is 75 feet. Yeah. It's pretty close. So it, the dogs treat it within about 400 yards. And, um, at the first, at the first hazing event, we shoot them with a paintball gun. We tie all the dogs back, take them back to the truck, and we shoot that cat with a paintball gun to reinforce that negative stimuli and holler at it, you know, and kind of try to stress it out a little bit, that first capture event. So I'll see what he does. We're going to go after him again again next week and i'll probably take somebody with me this time just because and presumably he'll i think he's gonna i think he's gonna get out of there yeah that has been our experience the first the first time we approach a cat they let us get quite close um i we have not had one flee from outside of 100 yards yet so we're within 100 meters of anything right now the first time and we have complete data i think on eight cats now and pretty much across the board complete meaning that you've done it four or five weeks in a row yes so that's cats that have been collared hazed four or five times and a row? Yes. So that's cats that have been collared, hazed four or five times, and then uncollared and released. And are you seeing it grow every time? Not every time. We do

have a couple of negative data points. We have a couple of cats that let us get a little bit closer, you know, on the third or fourth event. Some of those are easily explained some one of those cats was sitting down by a creek in a thicket probably didn't hear us with that running water right next to it um let us get pretty close another one was up with a uh it was a tom a big tom 175 pound cat that had a female and they were laid up in a rock pile together and he let me get quite close before they mobilized which is to say that which is to say as well that she let you get quite close that was an interesting deal for sure because he left first he was in a little town called ion up north and he was in a woodshed when we darted him actually he was in a woodshed and we couldn't

get him out we shot him with a slingshot to get him to run out of the woodshed and we couldn't get him out we shot him with a slingshot to get him to run out of the woodshed and i couldn't get a dart in him when he was running out and he went into a carport and was hiding under a boat and i tried to get a dart in him there and he squirted out the back of that and went under a deck and we ended up having to dig you know it's deep snow it's chest deep snow we had to dig a tunnel kind of down underneath the deck and he, I got a dart in him there. So that cat had some experience with people and he lived in very close proximity to a little town. And the first time we went after him, he was up in these rocky cliffy, this terrible spot to walk around and hunt and you know in the gps unit you're looking at data from

overhead you know so 15 yards might mean 100 or 200 vertical feet if it's cliffs which is in this case is what it was so that data is difficult to explain um yeah i got within 40 meters of him but he was uphill of me in this overhang with a with a female that you know line of sight would have been 100 meters or something so yeah i got you difficult so he left and i circled around and i got up on top of the cliff and i found his tracks and i was sitting on his tracks and at this point i didn't know there was another cat there so i was sitting on his tracks just kind of watching the garmin unit and filling out my data sheet and grabbing data that I needed and he got out a few hundred yards and I still had the podcast playing and I hear something to my side and I look over and there that female is

walking on his track straight at me and maybe 15 feet from me and slips down through that same little crack in the rocks that that male had just used to escape it kind of seemed like without a care in the world about me and you're making noise because you're still playing the noise oh yeah she's walking towards the noise yeah she walked right up close to me but it was yeah her desire to follow that tom's tracks was pretty strong she pretty much ignored me to do that and we got eyes on him twice before he went in a tree that day he was just pretty bold cat hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes.

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hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the MeatEater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function.

As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services hand-picked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps. com slash meet on x maps dot com slash meet welcome to the to the on x club y'all i'm surprised that i don't picture you're going to have a continued problem uh funding your work i don't think so a lot of people will be like really interested in this and how to because the thing about cat it's not like rats right it's not like where you have just

thousands and thousands of them and there's nothing you can do like what do you have mountain line problems or mountain lions that you want in areas where they're imperiled and not doing well you're talking about like a small number of animals. So you could actually go through and give them some white glove service, so to speak, and be targeted about it. And it would still make sense, you know? I mean, because there's so few of them. It's not insurmountable to go into an area that has a lot of lion problems and adjust some lion behavior. Right. And I had a biologist from California reach out to me and he's got some interest in replicating the project down near San Francisco on a, one of the big

reserves that they have a lot of what they believe are habituated cougars, cougars that are kind of just laying around in day use areas, um, and sort of don't have a care in the world about people. And I don't tend to make a whole bunch of promises about what we can do but i can like i did promise him like if there's a cat laying in a day use area i promise i can change that cat's behavior to not do that anymore like we can we can adjust that cat's attitude really quickly with dogs and paintballs have you messed with i know that like i i support using the podcast i think it's a great idea it's a great touch but have you um experimented with other stimuli other stimuli like do they hear

free like like a dog for instance do they hear frequencies that humans can't hear? I don't know that. I have considered using the sound of dogs barking rather than a human voice to approach the cat and see how they respond. Not like a hound's bang, but like a border collie yapping around or something that a cat's going to hear fairly regularly. If we get to a point in the project

where we have good enough data and solid enough data with the human voice stimuli, we will switch to another sound, but it will probably be either like the sound of equipment droning on like a four-wheeler or like a dog barking or something that cats are going to hear that would have a management, it'd be a management action, right? Like something that you could tell people, you could tell people like, yeah, once we do this, this cat's probably not going to go close to your barking dogs or whatever. I had a friend that used to design soundscapes in films. And when you're watching a movie, you know, and there's people sort of like driving around and you're hearing the sounds of the city uh he would like design those just just the ambient sound you know in films so yeah like just that you'd make a soundscape

of just human activity you know doors shutting kids whatever people yelling at their kids it'd be like my house yeah and get them used to that noise right and then the obvious thing that you know if you let's say you did this over the course of time in an area um it's a small area this isn't something that i expect to happen across the whole region or something but it would be interesting then to see how cats responded to just a speaker at a house or out in the woods say see how they moved around the landscape to see if they avoided that or just passed through like they always have. And is there a thing you can do to them that they really, really hate? Touch them.

Yeah. If you can get contact with them, that paintball or anything like that just drives them crazy. They hate that. They don't like it. No. You change your shot placement uh when you're doing the negative reinforcement i game for like point of the shoulder or something something that's gonna tip of the nose bruise yeah yeah um when i'm when i'm

shooting a paintball so that's i was kind of experimenting with this permanent paint that foresters use they mark trees with this stuff and it lasts quite a while on a tree. So I bought some of these fancy paint balls with permanent paint in them and I wanted to see how long that would last on a cat. Just so if we had a cat that was causing trouble in an area, a sighting, I didn't have a collar available or whatever. All right, we'll go mark this thing and if it you know without having to drug it and handle it we're not going to put an ear tag in it or anything else if that cat shows up hopefully the people that see it would be able to say yeah as it turns out i had a bunch of blue

paint on its side so i wanted to see how long that paint would last and it turns out it's not that effective it comes off fairly quickly but I was trying to shoot the cat forward in the body where it wouldn't be able to reach back and lick that stuff off so I was shooting him in the front of the shoulder neck and back it's kind of where I was aiming but I don't know if that I mean anybody that's played paintball knows those things they sting they're not gonna break skin on a cougar for sure, but they do sting and making contact with that cat drives them crazy. Have any of the cats that you got right now, how often do you have a cat that has a collar on and then it gets killed somehow or another while like unrelated to your activity? So that big tomcat that I was talking about in the cliff

just a minute ago, he got killed. He took off after that day and walked all the way into Canada about 10 miles north of the border and got himself killed by a legal hunter up there. So I got that collar back. And then another cat was down here close to Spokane. It was a cat that... Were you pissed that the guy shot your collared lion? No, I don't care. It was a whatever. That's the, that's the deal. He's a legal hunter. Was he aware that it had a collar? Oh yeah. No, he knew I had a collar. I think he was a little bit nervous. He was like, he was a little bit reticent to, to call me and you know, on the collar, it has my

name and phone number and says, whatever, please call it took a little i actually saw it on facebook before i think i actually i think i actually reached out to him first um but i think you're like i'm not mad i just want my collar hey by any chance that collar lion you shot right well it's got you know that1,500 collar plus the Garmin collar plus all the data that's on it, which is, you know, that's three or four days of work worth of data that's stored on that Garmin unit that I really want. So, yeah, I called him and I'm like, hey, look, congratulations. That's a big cat. I can send you some pictures of him if you want, you know, pictures of him in a woodshed and pictures of him in a tree and whatever pictures of him with anesthetized and whatever else so once he knew that i was not mad and i was also a hunter and you know congratulated him on such an awesome cat he was he softened up a little bit and sent

me my collar back and i was 175 pounder yeah it was a really nice cat oh man it's cooler for him too because you can be like i can tell you exactly what that cat's been doing you don't have to oh yeah he'd be like and then he ran over to this tree and then he ran over to this tree that's right yeah he had an ear tag in too i don't know if they i'm sure they pulled that out for the taxidermist but get a little jewelry too wow and and uh remind me again how many cats you got running around right now? Got five on there right now. So I haven't really got into a couple parts of the project that are fairly important. One of them, so once that cat runs, I'm getting screwed on this deal as far as seeing cougars other than happening upon one here and there. I don't understand. What do you mean

by that? I'm not even going to the tree anymore. So Bruce and the other gang walks to the tree and I am now measuring the habitat. So I'm grabbing all this data from the flight of the cat. So once that cat runs away, once that cat runs, I measure the distance, you know, let's say it goes 200 yards or whatever meters. I then lay out a tape and I measure the slope. So did that cat run uphill or downhill? I grab a slope measurement and then I grab the basal area measurement. So it's a forestry measurement that kind of tells you the forest type. It'll give you a rough idea how wooded it is. And then also shrub component and you know if it's a thicket or if it's running through fairly open stuff or down a road or whatever.

So I'm trying to describe then how much energy that cat used to escape. Are you taking note of the wind too? Wind direction? I have a wind noise factor that's just one through five. No, I mean, does he play the wind when he runs? Oh, I haven't paid attention to that. Dude, I'd add that to your stuff, man. Yeah.

Because maybe he always goes into the wind. It would be an interesting thing to start to test some of that as far as circling upwind or downwind of him, too. I should have been a scientist, man. You should have been a scientist. You should come along. Dude, I'd have all kinds of science things i'd figure out yeah that'd be fun to circle give him give him the wind advantage and see if they mobilize more quickly or not yeah so i'm grabbing

all of this habitat data for the escape path and i'll use that um to kind of help describe distance with you know capital D distance then. So rather than just a linear measurement, it will include all of this other stuff. Like if it ran up and over a cliff, that might only be a couple hundred yards, but that's definitely more energy to escape than just jogging down a two-track road. And then I'm also grabbing some data when we get to the tree, kind of measuring the behavior of that cat. And we've kind of had to develop this scale, but I think it'll be useful when we're done. We'll have a lot of it. How that cat's responding in the tree.

Is it snarling? Is it urinating? Is it jump bailing out and finding a different tree? How high is it in the tree? Is it moving around? Whatever. So we measure all that stuff for number of times per five minutes that it's treed. And we're seeing that number change as well. The cats tend to, by the end of the project, tree quite a bit higher and be quite a bit calmer where they're not dancing around in the tree.

They kind of know the routine by about the fourth or fifth time we're capturing them. It's like, they just grab a tree before the dogs are very close to them and they climb way up high and they're just like laid out, relaxed when we get there. That's not going to bode well for them when they're traveling, like that one, when they're traveling into hunted areas, they're going to make them easy pickings. Maybe. I mean, it might also have implications in wolf country, which almost everything in northeast Washington is wolf country now. So I don't know if that will play out or how it would.

Oh, yeah, because you were mentioning that you find that cats that have exposure to wolves, you were wondering if it changes their attitude about whether or not they need to get into a tree or not. Yeah, maybe. I think it's well documented that a single wolf is trouble for a cat, or is in trouble if it encounters a cat. A cat will kill a wolf when it gets the opportunity, as long as there's not a bunch of them. And I think it's not a far stretch to imagine those cats learning that on a single wolf a couple of times in their life

and then all of a sudden this single dog shows up that's half as big as a wolf yapping and they're just like well i'll just kill that because i've done this before so a lion will kill a single wolf yes not vice versa oh one-on-one it's a no contest lions are yeah they're deadly at all five ends huh yeah that wolf doesn't have a chance well that's interesting i wouldn't think i guess i don't know i mean unless it's a sub-adult lion or something else an adult lion versus an adult wolf i'd say lion every single time yeah so what's next man um well hold on i gotta i feel like we you told us about the the negative uh changes in in the couple of the data points right when you went back subsequently but what on average is the change

after the hazing for the third fourth and fifth times you come in there with the podcast going yeah um good question the biggest the biggest change almost always occurs on the second hazing so that cat the second time it happens i think they're still pretty freaked out and it's been two to three hundred percent of both the flight initiation and the flight distance and we've had some that like don't stop running. We've had some cats, once they mobilize, they run like 900 yards a long ways. So they're getting out of there. By the end of the project, these cats, without exception, we haven't had any cat let us get closer over the course of the project. We've just had a couple, when I say a couple of data points, I mean like outliers.

Like we caught this cat four times and one of them was a negative distance all yeah so of the you know let's say we have eight cats with full data you know four to five points each you know 95 of those points are positive and two to three hundred percent is a pretty standard increase so that's why you feel so confident if you went if you had a problem line that was hanging out at a day use area that you feel like you could go in there and do this for a month and that would cure his, that habit of his or hers. Yeah, for sure. And I think, you know, the other reason that second might be so significant, that second hazing event might, that increase might be so significant is because at the first hazing event, we shoot them with paintballs. If we did that every time, that distance might just continue to increase

until as soon as that cat heard Steve's voice, it hauled ass. Oh, so you guys don't continue the paintballs? No, we just shoot it the one time. Why is that? I don't know. I kind of feel bad shooting them every time. Like, I don't want – I don't know. I just need to learn whether or not it works.

I don't need to torture a cat. Yeah, yeah. You don't want to make a man hater out of one. Yeah. So again, this, I want this to have management implications where when a cat's hanging around a farm and it gets sighted, they can call somebody with dogs and say, all right, go treat this cat and shoot it with paintballs. And we have a, and have a reasonable expectation of how that cat's going to respond in the future. If you give it a known, if you give it a stimuli that it can associate. Right. And then replicate that, then you have to turn around and replicate that stimuli to get the desired effect out of it.

Well, I don't think you would have to, I mean, I don't think, let's say, whatever, after this project's said and done and we get a call, hey, there's a cat on the edge of a neighborhood. Can you go chase it out of there? I don't think we would have to go approach that cat with a voice recording or anything else. I think we could go capture that cat, bang on the tree, shoot it with paintballs, and it would make the association between our, because we're talking while we're at the tree i mean it's hearing human voices the whole time right yeah it would make that association that way it is interesting though because i mean you said in the beginning that some of these cats were hanging out so close to these you know urban interface kill sites where they're likely hearing a lot of human voices too so you're fighting against this kind of maybe not a positive uh interaction but it's kind of like this background noise of human ranch work farm work

but i can still go down and pick off a alpaca or a dog or something like that so right yeah and you know that's one of the real that's one of the misconceptions I'm having a terrible time with on this project. A lot of people think that I'm going out and trying to chase this cat away from a farm with the expectation that it's not going to come back to the farm or that area. And that's not really it. What I want is that cat to avoid all of these human associations. And I don't know if we'll get there or not, not for all the cats, not for all the time, but I think there is an argument to be made

that the cats being messed with are going to behave better. Is there a version of this you could attempt on grizzlies? Not with my dogs. They do this. Are they just hell on go if you try to run a grizzly with dogs they're just hard on the dogs i've never done it but i have heard stories about people getting on them um and i guess they're long runners they're straight line long runners like a black barrel tend to circle and a grizzly barrel just line out and go and then of course they don't climb they just bay and fight so i, I mean, people certainly do it.

There's like famous hound hunters from back in the day that collected bounties on grizzly bears by using dogs. And I don't think we have good records of how many dogs they went through over the course of that time, but probably a lot. Yeah. I mean, black bears are tough on dogs. I mean, black bear is a tough thing for a dog to handle. Have you lost any dogs lately? No, we've had good luck with dogs. I've still got Whisper.

She's 12. Nosy's nine. Radar died of cancer two years ago. And what's the one that got mauled up pretty good? Nosy. Yeah, she's hanging in there. She was with me this Monday. She treated two cats with me

does she just hate him now though oh she hates him yeah she's she was kind of a hateful little dog before that whole wreck and now she's now she's full of it i got oh sorry go ahead go on with the uh the dogs i got a question for you that'll it's out there though okay yeah we and we had a litter of pups actually you remember bruce's had that big red dog gus we bred him back to tipsy who those were the two cats that were at your tree steve gus and tipsy okay um so we bred those two dogs together yeah they were awesome we have a good litter of pups out of them and they've been on a lot of cats like um those pups are doing most of the work right now i think they've seen well 63 cats so far since january 1st um that we've treated so they're getting a lot of exercise

cal what's your question you had to fire you have a fire out question yeah this this would fall firmly in the uh final thoughts of, I got this new neighbor, California guy. Is this the guy that throws all the good stuff in the dumpster? No. Oh, okay. No. Real nice guy. He's got a place that butts up to the Hearst Castle,

which is now a California state park. And Hearst, William Randolph Hurst, tons of cash through the 20s, 30s, built up this incredible place, had this giant zoo and wildlife menagerie. And there's all these stories going around that when the financial hard times of the 30s caught up to them, one solution that they came across was to release a bunch of animals, the animals that they have trail camera pictures of the descendants of Hearst's jaguar population that have now crossbred with the California mountain lions in the area. No. And they are getting black mountain lions that are noticeably larger than your typical mountain lion.

I have my doubts come on i mean if they're getting trail camera pictures just ask them to produce those let's see it does that exist though jaguar mountain lion hybrids or crossbreeding of any sort? Have you ever heard of that? I've never heard of that. And, I mean, they share range. They share habitat in the southwest. Right, yeah.

I mean, we would probably know if that happened. Yeah, they share habitat, like, across, I think, the entirety of the jaguar's range. Yeah, probably. I mean. No, they do. I know they do now that I think, the entirety of the Jaguars range. Yeah, probably. I mean. No, they do. I know they do now that I think about it. But anyway, I give this guy your cell phone number and stuff. Oh, good.

Yeah. That's great. All right, Bart Georgian. You got any more questions for Bart? No, I'm good, Bart. Thanks for chatting with us. Yeah, man. I hope your money comes through because it's interesting.

But see, I'm trying to figure out what it means in general because I don't know if it means, like does it mean that this will be like a thing that winds up being used against people hunting mountain lions with dogs. Will National Geographic reports on this? Will they be able to twist it into a, you see, people shouldn't be able to hunt mountain lions with dogs?

I got to think this through for a minute. I hope not. I mean, I think it's ultimately, I want it to lead to another tool for wildlife managers that are dealing with potential public safety conflicts and depredation issues you know like that that park or reserve down in California I want them to have a tool to be able to say with some level of certainty like hey look we can save these cats lives in the future if these cats get in trouble if they get in a mix-up with a person they're gonna die like that's that's a certainty in northeast Washington when a cat kills livestock it dies so if we can keep that from

happening and you know let's say it only works 75% of the time. That's still, that's a lot of cats that we can keep out there on the landscape and, you know, available to sport hunters and available for whatever other purpose. That was a good little, I liked that, man. That was a good little twist in the end. That was good. All right, Bart, George, how long is it going to be until you come back on again and tell us what you're up to next? How long are you going to be doing this for and then go on to something else that might be interesting? Well, I'll be working on this probably for another year or so. Still doing some caribou work. If you want to have a talk about caribou, there's still some in the central Selkirk. Some working with

the International Caribou Foundation trying to help out a group up at the Arrow Lakes. Save a herd that's down to about 24 animals. Got some collars out on that herd this year. So we know that there's at least nine cows up there and a couple of calves alive, but the census wasn't complete because of the damn shutdown stuff in Canada also. And then what about personal hunting? You hunting spring bear this year? No, I usually hunt Idaho spring bears and they won't let us come across the border nowadays they cut off all the non-resident tax sales washington our season yeah our season will be

open here in a couple days for turkeys i'll probably go try to pick a couple of them up on my way to work are they letting non-residents come to washington for what turkeys for this extremely late turkey season that you told us about. Yeah, probably. Come to Washington. Hunt turkeys in June. In June. Hunt turkeys in your flip-flops, man.

That's crazy. I don't like hunting turkeys after May 1st. Once the mosquitoes are out and the ticks are out, which I've already found some of those, I kind of shy away from turkey hunting. But I'll probably try to get out. It's the only show in town right now for us. And then last question, you're married, right?

Oh, yeah. Two kids? Two kids now. Okay, so I was getting to where you're at with the kid thing right now. Yeah, my wife and I have two boys, two and a half and seven months, so we're pretty busy. And the older boy has been able to tag along on a few cougar hunts. He was in a backpack with

me the other day when we treat a cat for work um so he knows the routine he'll be what's a two and a half year old say or do when they see a cat in a tree um well the more concerning part was before we saw the cat i was approaching the cat had the podcast playing and he's got a stick back there and he's banging around hitting everything with the stick as we're walking in the backpack um and he knows we're he knows kind of what we're doing he has an idea that we're out looking for a cougar but he doesn't know the routine yet so we're marching along and he starts saying I see a cougar I see a cougar and I'm I'm close to the cat you know I'm within about 60 yards I'm like shit is this collar not working does he actually see a cougar?

And I'm trying to ask him where, and I can't see where he's pointing. But he hadn't. He was just telling stories. So when we get to the tree, he's excited about it. I keep a distance, obviously. I'm not handling cats with him. But when we get to the tree, we'll stay a little ways back and let Bruce do all the heavy lifting at

the tree and then just call the dogs to us when we're done he's excited about it good future scientist yeah maybe all right man thanks again for joining us bart we'll talk to you soon later thanks see you bart later Later. Later. Later. Later. Later. Later. Later. Later. Later. Later. Later.

Later. Later. Later. Later. Later. Later. Later. Later.

Later. Later. Later. Later. Later. Later. Later. Later. Later. Later. OnXH available for your hunts this season. Now, the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land,

hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet.