The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 252: A Sideways Thumb on 2020

Episode Date: December 21, 2020

Steven Rinella talks with Whit Fosburgh, Clay Newcomb, Brody Henderson, and Janis Putelis.Topics discussed: tail strippers and Clay's squirrel tail ornaments; tanning squirrel hides; smash burgers; crazy fossilized footprints of hunters and a one-legged person from 20,000 years ago; pondering dropping out of the block management program; mistaking movement and a person for a deer; a local priest suffering hunter harassment; intentionally popping mountain bike tires by stringing a wire; out-of-state interests challenging spring bear season; managing wildlife through the ballot box as maybe not ideal; how Clay's old man went to high school with Bill Clinton and wasn't a partier; the LCWF; the intent to kill Pebble Mine once and for all; assessing where we're at with the ANWR; removing wolves from the endangered species list; explaining the Farm Bill and how gutting it is a big loss for conservation; the American Conservation Enhancement Act; not doing great on keeping CWD under control in 2020; manhaden aka bunker aka pogie; when 6,000-year-old arrows emerge from an ice patch; how to get involved in TRCP; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google Play Store. Know where you stand with OnX. Alright, here we are. Half remote, like half COVID remote and more than half COVID remote. Two-thirds COVID remote. I'll tell you what I mean by that. Giannis

and Brody Henderson are in our studio. How's it feel over there guys back to you it's great wish you were here i am on maybe i'm on my third i might be on my third or fourth quarantine i'm not totally sure yet i'm waiting on seth to get his latest result who like he already had covid now he's maybe got it again um all of his buddies got it so there's a good chance he does yeah his theory seth feels like when he had it he didn't have it but now he has it but i got 20 bucks riding on the fact that he doesn't have it but like he already had it your bet in history hasn't gone so well lately what are you talking about man i just won a thousand bucks on pebble mine probably

i lost 200 on the election made a hundred on a different election related bet and then picked up a thousand that's pretty good i need to forgive the thousand. That's pretty good. I need to forgive the thousand because it's with a family member. And that's the kind of money that like causes tensions. So I'm going to find a way to let her off. But also joined by Clay Newcomb. Thanks, Clay. Who's remote, not quarantined, but remote.

And Whit Fosbert from trcp from the very functional the very functional city of washington dc where no one does anything weird oh no normal as can be what what's the general climate like in dc and not not i don't mean like the weather but is it you know is it just like business as usual or are people scratching their heads or what? Yeah, it's more or less business as usual. I mean, we've gotten used to the unusual now. So there's a bunch of stuff going on and people are just sort of waiting for the latest maelstrom to pass. Yeah, I got you.

We'll talk a lot more about doings and DC doings in a minute. But Clay, I'm surprised you don't know. Clay recently did for us a video, a wonderful video about how to make Christmas ornaments with squirrel tails. Yeah. I think I know where you're going with this. Well, first I'm going with the fact that you're a video making machine man it was uh you know i'm pretty crafty too so kind of home ecchi crafty clay made a video uh you it's out right like i saw that oh yeah oh yeah it's on it's on meteor instagram meteor website facebook it's out there man yeah it's like viral man went viral yeah clay's got virality and by

that i don't mean covid but um i'm surprised you don't know about tail slitters and tail strippers i i you you will soon because i just bought you one of each man, but Hey, you know what? So Steve texted me the other day and I knew he was watching my video and he said, do you not have a tail stripper? And I almost texted you back that you were like one of the internet trolls. Like, you know how many people have asked me that? I troll on text. I'm a text troll. Hey, you know how many people have asked me that i troll on text i'm a text troll

hey you know what man i grew up using green sticks yes i mean that's my tail strippers green sticks two of them two green sticks but with a squirrel tail it was just easy enough to do it with hand you know by hand well i got it what i thought for sure you would say when I asked you if you had a tail slitter and a tail stripper, I thought you would say I do, but I don't want to discourage people from doing this by making them think you needed fancy equipment. And listen, don't say that it's that i'm that it's trolling it's a text trolling is when you do it in a public format as a way to like put people in their place

gotcha i sent you a private text okay to put you in your place and then and then turned around and ordered one for you as a gift. That's pretty high-level thoughtful. He's saving you from future trolling. Yeah. Well, it was what you thought, the foresight that you thought that I had to make this do-it-yourself video.

It would have been cool if I would have thought that but I didn't think that I just didn't have I just didn't have the gear can you guys explain the whole point of uh yeah okay to understand a tail stripper take your middle finger and index finger and put them together okay Okay. Like you're making the peace sign, but then sandwich your fingers together. Now imagine that right at your middle knuckle, you were to drill a hole right where your fingers touch. And then you were to take your fingers and clamp them around the tailbone

so that that little hole you drilled was accommodating the tailbone. Then you grab that device and pull, and it strips the bone right out of the tail. The tail slitting guide is like a long sliver of metal with a groove in it. And you insert that into the tail, fox, coon, squirrel, whatever, and then just run your knife down that groove, and it slits the tail open so you can dry it out. Without having a bony spine inside. I didn't know the tail slitter existed.

I did know about the tail strippers, the tail slitter that is totally new to me yeah i ordered you one aluminum all right uh quick note on that yanni you'll like this um seth and i were uh before he got uh got to thinking he had covet all over again um we were squirrel hunting and we've been we've embarked on a project that you'll probably want to get involved in where we, we had some fox squirrels, the size of house cats. And you guys got a blackface fox squirrel, which is way cool. No, that was a gray. That was a gray. That's a blackface gray, even though it's huge.

I'm sure it's a blackface gray. I mean, it was equal to those fox squirrels. I think it's a blackface gray. I mean, it was equal to those fox squirrels. I think it's a blackface gray. Either way, me, Seth, Matt, we're getting, and we started our collection, we're all getting a complete set of tanned squirrel hides. Eastern gray, Blackface gray. Fox. And then I'm going to go on and on and on until I have the full.

So we're going to start fleshing and stretching those. And we're each going to have a collection. I just got a couple of Montana fox squirrels last week. I saw that. One other thing. What's your plan for displaying those, Steve? Hang them on a string. Like just let them drape? Or are you going to like put them on a wall? No, Steve? Hang them on a string.

Just let them drape? Or are you going to put them on a wall? No, I'll let them hang on a wall. That'll look classy. That'll look great. One other quick thing we did, Clay, that I thought you might find interesting. The day after Thanksgiving, we made a bunch of raccoon barbecue sandwiches. Very good.

How was it? I put my oven on 400 and browned all the legs and whatnot and the back pieces in my oven for a long time. Then I pressure cooked them for 20 minutes. Then we picked it, put barbecue sauce in it, got coleslaw, pickles, and brioche buns. Yeah.

Sounds good. Where'd you get the coon? My brother's buddy had them. So he brought it all over. While we're on cooking, can I share a little something I learned? I think you guys would all like to hear about because you can go home and try it if you haven't tried it yet. Yeah, please. And for the life of me i cannot remember i've texted three separate people saying hey were you

the one that told me that uh your family and your wife really like smash burgers like venison burgers done smash burger style i don't know what you're talking about so it obviously wasn't you either very simple all you do is you just get a, uh, instead of making patties, you make balls, just venison balls, season them if you want or whatever. I did just plain, you know, with whatever my 10% fat in there. Like a big ass meatball. Big ass meat. Well, yeah, but not, not like it's probably just a little bit bigger than a golf ball. Not quite the size of a, um, you know, tennis ball, not quite the size of a tennis ball. Not the same amount of meat you would use

for a regular quarter pound patty like you normally cook your burgers at home, right? Hold on a minute, man. If you're saying there's a big difference between a golf ball and a tennis ball. Yeah, I said somewhere in between. Okay. I can't think of a ball that lands

right in between those two. Freaking racquetball. Handball? Racquetball? Yeah, there you go. Maybe that would work. Okay. So I make a piece of meat like a racquetball.

Super hot skillet or flat top grill. Okay. It's got to be flat. No, can't be a grill. Get it smoking hot. You put, I was doing three at a time. You put those balls and spread them out evenly onto that skillet. You know, I had, I must've been just like a 10 inch skillet,

I guess that I have at home that I was using. And then at first I started with a slotted spatula, but I realized I wasn't going to be able to move fast enough. So I had another, uh, skillet where I could just put it on top of these balls and just squish them until they were, you know, figuratively paper thin. Hot squish balls. You're looking for, yeah, paper thin patties. And so you literally squish them down. They cook like that for less than a minute. You flip them, throw some salt on there, put a piece of cheese on there, let them cook for another 30 seconds and they're done, which is another cool thing about them is

they cook super, super fast. Um, you kind of get like weird edges and you get a little bit more just, uh, browned kind of bits and pieces on your burger than you would, I think doing the normal patty. Um, so it gives you a you a little more caramelization in the mouth, a little bit more crispy edges. But yeah, the kids each just had one, and I did a triple on mine and had cheese in between each layer of meat. And much, much different eating experience than your standard make patty and throw it on your grill cheeseburger.

Well, how does the, how does the burger know? How does the burger know that it was squished on the grill as opposed to on a cutting board or on a plate? I think it's an issue of transport. I didn't try to do it ahead of time. So maybe you could do it ahead of time and just put them skinny.

But you're working with something, hopefully, that's going to be so thin that I imagine that it'd be fragile if you try to make them that thin ahead of time. That makes sense. Yeah. You wouldn't be able to move it around. And the internet's full of, if you just type in Smashburger recipe, there's tons of recipes out there to read. I think that's the way a lot of these burger franchise restaurants do it.

Like the cool ones like In-N-Out Burger, I think, does that. And the one called Smash Burger. I'm not familiar with that one. You guys know how we were talking recently about those crazy footprints that came out of new mexico where it was the an individual walked along a path and then walked back along that same path some thousands of years ago and in the time between when he or she passed through the second time a mammoth and a giant ground sloth had crossed her trail in white sands national park or national monument whatever the hell it is a guy from australia wrote in about these crazy fossilized footprints from australia

it was from these hunters of about 20 000 years ago and there's like a few sets of hunters and a family there's a kid that kind of wanders off and comes back into the group but there's like a few sets of hunters and a family. There's a kid that kind of wanders off and comes back into the group, but there's also the footprints of a one-legged person. They don't see where the individual was using a walking stick. Like it either wasn't, um, it either wasn't captured and the, the,

the like fossilized prints, but it seems as though this person with one leg was able to cruise along hopping on one leg. Wow. We also recently reported on this big flock shooting, this big elk hunting flock shooting occurrence in Montana. So there's a ranch, and the ranch is enrolled in something called block management area. And the way block management areas work is you take revenue from non-resident hunting licenses and use it to fund this program where ranchers and landowners, farmers get paid to allow, get paid a very

modest fee. No one gets rich off this stuff. They get paid a very modest fee. No one gets rich off this stuff. They get paid a modest fee. I think the cap is $15,000 a year. Yeah. It's like they're basically doing a favor to hunters. They're like, it's a gesture. It is a gesture to the public.

And part of the annoyance, this is one way you could think about it. Part of the annoyance of this is offset with a small amount of money it's not life-changing money to enroll in block management um but it's a block management place and on opening day of general firearm season a bunch of guys get on to a herd of elk and start flock shooting i think they kill like 50 these elk citations were written a herd of elk and start flock shooting. I think they kill like 50 of these elk. Citations were written. I'm not sure what the citations were for. But on there, we mused about,

what does the landowner think about all this? Well, a guide that does some work for this landowner, not on this place, but he guides a different property, wrote in and said he watched this spectacle from seven miles away. It was too far to see any individual elk fall, but he said it sounded like the beaches of Normandy when these guys surrounded this herd of elk. He said, if you're asking what the landowner thought of the whole thing what the landowner thought of the whole thing the landowner is

not happy with this event and he is considering dropping out of the block management program which is a real disappointment another thing I read about recently, a hunter in Minnesota just fatally shot. I mean, this happens every year.

Fatally shot another hunter. Mistook him for a deer. Apparently, the guy that got shot wasn't wearing his hunter's orange. This is up by Bemidji. Apparently, the guy that got shot wasn't wearing any Hunter's Orange. This is up by Bemidji. Apparently the guy that got shot wasn't wearing any Hunter's Orange. But, you know, and you might

look at that and be like, oh, that's the problem. But I mean, when someone, when you hear of someone mistaking someone for a deer, it's kind of like not only did you think you were looking at a deer, you thought you were aiming at its rib cage.

It's just so hard to understand why this has to be a story that you read every year, multiple times. Like, are people so greedy and lusty that, that they want a deer that bad? Yes. Yeah. Firing at movement, like mistaking. I don't buy the mistake in it for a deer. They're just seeing movement. It's gotta be.

You know, I've been, I've been surprised at, um, I mean, growing up a bow hunter, like we were taught not to shoot at walking deer. We were taught to really calculate the shot. I mean, you had to, to be a successful bow hunter. And then transitioning later in life to rifle hunting and different things, especially in the big woods, when deer are moving through big woods, I'm surprised at the shots that I see and hear about people taking, which they've almost got to be just, you know, like shooting at something that's moving. And I'm not saying they're not identifying what they're seeing as a deer, but as far as like, are they aiming at the rib cage? I don't know how they could be. You know, a much more common hunting injury, I think it's the most common hunting injury from firearms, is when someone's swinging on a bird with a shotgun.

And you know you're shooting at a bird, but what you don't see in the foreground or in the distance is your hunting partner or another individual and when i hear those stories i'm often like man like i could i hesitate to say this you're like i can just picture how that happens like i could picture how it happens but something like this i just can't it's upsetting because it's so preventable and so much more dangerous than what happened to Dick Cheney years ago. Kind of interesting story to come out of Wisconsin. There's like a article that comes out

about a local priest who's suffering hunter harassment. So this he's called, he's a Norbertine priest, which I don't know what the hell that means. He's forced to file a police report because he keeps getting continued public harassment for bow hunting on the St. Norbert Abbey grounds in De Pere. So this dude joins this order in 2013, and he lives on a 160-acre Abbey property. So where he's sort of stationed is 100... Do they use that term? I don't think priests use that term, but he's stationed in this place, 160 acres.

And he realizes that there are a lot of deer there. So he starts investigating and checks into his city ordinances and regulations and checks with the DNR, checks village stuff. Everybody says, there's no reason you cannot be bow hunting on Abbey grounds. So he starts a bow hunt and he quickly, this dude gets, he stacks up four deer, but people in the town are so pissed. He had to go and, uh, you know, pursue his hunter harassment law protections

to keep hunting on his abbey. I was feeling like going down there and doing communion and whatnot and hanging out with the guy just to get his back. Well, I can see there's a lot of listeners whose wheels are turning right now thinking about ways they can get into some good hunting properties. Oh, yeah. You just got to become a priest. Yeah, that's a line of work I'm going to become a priest. Yeah. That's, that's a line of work.

I'm going to start pursuing man. Um, Brody talk about this, uh, talk about this dude that got in trouble for, uh, this dude that got in trouble for setting them a mountain bike trap. Oh yeah. This happened in Montana. Um, he's in big trouble. Yeah. Like, like, like there's no way he's gonna be in that much trouble

i don't know man dude okay tell everybody about it but i bet you he'll wind up getting like a nothing a slap on the a slap on the wrist i i don't know we'll see um certainly could have hurt some people uh this guy is not a fan of mountain bikers, which, you know, uh, which, you know what?

Yeah, I, I can understand. Like I got to tell the story first. Okay. He, he put a board that he had hammered maybe a dozen nails through quite a few nails to lay across a trail so that when mountain bikers ran over that board they'd pop their tires this was in an area

where mountain biking is completely legal i i'm not even sure how they tracked the guy down and confirmed that that it was him but he confessed to it. Well, a dude out walking his kids stepped on the board. Right, but I'm saying how did they get from point A to point B? Oh, like how did they ever figure out who the hell was doing it? Who it was. But once they caught up to him, he confessed to it, said he wasn't trying to hurt anyone. He just didn't like all those mountain bikers out there.

When I was reading about it, one of the things that struck me was one of the investigators winds up interviewing a guy who had allowed this individual access to the national forest through his private property. And when the investigator prevent presents this guy with a board with all the nails through it, he tells the investigator, yes, I saw the suspect with such a board gotcha who

laid out for me his plan to use it to to reduce mountain bike traffic they describe this guy as a witness but how is he not sort of complicit right like he could have at least said that's not not a good idea yeah like if I went to your house Brody and I'm like see this machete I'm gonna take this machete and I'm gonna go over and hit clay on the head with it right and then I do that and then later you're like you know he did have a machete

and he told me he was gonna hit clay on the head with it like is that being a witness or is that being like something different that's an accomplice I'd say yeah the reason the reason I'd say. Yeah. The reason I hesitated earlier is because there's a spot that I hunt back in Colorado where, you know, I've seen some illegal mountain bike use, some illegal motorcycle use, and

you know, it bugs me. But that's, you know, in a spot they're not supposed to be. So do you normally just like string piano wire across those trails? No, no, but, um, I'm not going to lie. If I hadn't said, I, I, I fantasized about the, the idea of doing the same exact thing this guy did, but of course I never followed through

with it because you can hurt someone, you know. You can, but I'll tell you on those trails, illegal trails like that, because I know, I mean, we might be talking about the same spot, but I would sort of advertently maybe kick a big rock onto that trail or like roll a log onto that trail. I mean, no one's supposed to be mountain biking it. So like, you know, they come across a log.

They should be prepared for that. Right. I got, I got a cousin. He caught a 30. I remember he caught a 63 pound beaver one time, but this same cousin, he tells me this, told me this, this is a long time ago. According to this cousin of mine, he one time was in an emergency room like where the um ambulances pull up and you got like the sliding doors i don't know what the

hell he's doing there but he's there he says that out of this ambulance comes a gurney and on the gurney is a headless corpse. Under its arm is a helmet with the head still in it. This struck his curiosity and he says that what happened was a guy was so pissed about snow machiners, snowmobilers, that he did like Yanni said and strung a wire. I don't know if that's true or not.

We used to float a river where one of the landowners, he had to float through his property. He strung some wires, keep kayakers and rafters from rolling through. So we just carried wire cutters with us uh okay clay tell us about the um tell us about what's going on with this washington bear hunting deal now yeah so there's uh i talked to a lady today that's with the Inland Northwest Wildlife Council named Marie Newmiller. Really nice lady. And she talked about how she was at a spring, the commission meeting, and because the spring seasons were the first seasons of 2021, that they came up and were talked about. And basically she was the only hunter there that gave any positive input

about the spring seasons in Washington. And she said that there were basically, there was a room full of people that were upset about the, that had negative things to say about a spring season. They had all these different reasons, but there was a couple of interesting things that she spoke about. So this was a Zoom meeting and she said that there's a lot of out-of-state special interest groups that are influencing wildlife law in the state of Washington and in other places, which was kind of a new idea that is kind of an influence of COVID because there's a mountain lion group in

California, an anti-predator hunting group in California that was present in this meeting. I made a list here of five takeaways from what she said, Steve. But basically COVID-19 and some of these Zoom meetings are giving access to these groups, to regulation meetings from afar that they never had. The second thing she said- That would never have showed up. That wouldn't have been likely to show up for a local meeting. That's right.

They would have never showed up. Second of all is that in the state of Washington, and I would assume this is the same in other states, any email that comes into the commission is presented and somehow acknowledged by the commission. And so these anti-hunting groups are pretty well put together and they're sending these form emails. So basically one of the people got up and said, hey, we had 540 emails come in against the spring hunt. And it was a form email chain sent out by one of these anti-hunting groups. But you know what that does inside of a crowd when you begin to hear something negative

it's it like empowered some of the people that were actually in the zoom meeting to begin to speak out against it and um basically she was like where are the hunters at where where are the where's the voice of the hunters oh they're all hunting yeah and her point to me was that the commissions hear the squeaky wheel but not the positive stories of hunters and hunting and uh you know we've we have i think the solution to the problem and there's nothing specific that's happening in washington like there's not a regulation that's being proposed that takes away their spring hunt, but it just came up and she sent an email to Meat Eater. And basically as

hunters, we need to build a culture that's more proactive talking with our game commissions, talking about the positive things that we see inside of our hunting seasons because there's definitely squeaky wheels. You know, the cultural shifts that we're experiencing today inside of an era of technology, basically rapid culture shifts can have significant consequences in hunting regulations and are moving much faster than they have in past decades because of technology if i could say it that way like so like you know this idea of some murmur about a spring bear hunt not being a good thing like maybe in past times that would have taken 25 years to infiltrate a deep part of the culture to change regulation. Well, anymore, that is moving much faster.

And so, you know, I just think we just have to be more proactive with the tech communication game as hunters and speak up for stuff. But this points to a thing that I argue about frequently with my very dear friend, Carl Malcolm. And Carl's of the opinion that, you know, we need more voices, right? More voices in the room, more seats at the table, and that game management in this country has so long been so heavily influenced by hunters and anglers. And he points to the fact that we need to be realistic about the fact that more people have input, and that we're not always going to enjoy having oversized input on like game commission rules and things.

Uh, I don't know if he's being pragmatic or if he's being hopeful when he talks about the fact that more people are going to be coming into the conversation, but I don't necessarily look at that as an entirely good thing. And as we deal with management and funding structures, where right now, fishing game agencies are funded largely by hunters and anglers and shooters, meaning people that buy hunting and fishing licenses and all kinds of other things that have excise taxes on them for that purpose, like marine gas and sporting goods and all kinds of things. Funding from that and funding from buying licenses and buying sporting goods, right? So the users are paying. As we look at these other funding structures and we talk about having a backpack tax or a trail tax or some way for other outdoor users to kick in money, then when they kick in money, they're going to probably want to have their opinions be heard.

And I don't think their opinions are always going to go along with ours. Yeah, but the trick to it, you can do that, is just target those dollars to what they're used for. So if there's an excise tax on mountain bikes, it's for fixing up mountain bike trails someplace. That's great. You know, that shouldn't be something that the hunter's dollar should be paying for, which has been partly done in the past. You just segregate the accounts. You know, in terms of fish and wildlife management, hunters ought to have a larger say.

Well, you know, I think it goes back to and you guys help me understand this better even it goes back to how these state game agencies are run like her one of the things we talked about today she told me that four percent of people in washington state are hunters so they're starting out as a minority so the the anti-hunting argument is that hey most of the people in this state aren't for this specifically talking about the spring bear hunt so this is a democratic society so why don't we stop the spring bear hunt and the game agency in washington came back with a great response, as I understood it, which was, we don't manage our game based upon democratic feel. I mean, and I know here in Arkansas, our commission is totally run by these commissioners. I mean, it's not a referendum

state, meaning you can't just get a bunch of people together, sign a petition to get something made into law. So that brings up the question, I mean, are our game management practices up for the democratic process? Yeah, but I mean, so much stuff in society is not, or so much stuff. We have a representative democracy, right? You have an opportunity now and then for your congressman it's every two years your senators every six years your presidents every four years whatever you have an opportunity now and then to weigh in on generally how things are going but when people point out like it's a democratic society it's like okay if we're going to go invade iraq right do we then have a quick

vote to see if we're going to do it or not if If we're going to have a new tax bill, do we have a quick vote to see if we're going to do it or not? Or like, we're going to lower the maximum fine for marijuana possession. Do we put that? Of course not. We get people to do things for us, and we don't subject everything to a temperature check,

a public temperature check, every time we turn around. That's a good point. When people point out that argument, I'm like, I see what you're saying, but we don't do anything like that. One of the things I want to talk to Whit about is, do you have opinions about what happened with Colorado? In this case, where we did go to a public opinion

and have a public opinion poll on a path toward a wolf? Yeah, no, I don't. Listen, I think that the worst thing you can do is to sort of have wildlife management by ballot box. I mean, this is professionals ought to be dealing with this stuff. And that's why you have professionally run, you know, game fishing, game agencies. And, uh, no, I think if we've failed, if we go to this, you know, model of, you know, trying to get the citizens to weigh in on issues like that. Colorado has a history of that too. Yeah. That involves a spring bear hunt, you know, and I think in the mid nineties, the spring bear hunt in Colorado was outlawed by ballot box initiative.

Right. You could even argue that Congress is not the right place to be dealing with things like wolf delisting, which we ended up having to do around the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, certainly. Because the courts kept blocking it, even though biologically it was justified to delist wolves. So Congress had to weigh in and deal with it there. But again, that's not the best place either. Are you guys familiar with the predator hunting conspiracy theory that the anti-hunting community wants to shut down predator hunting so that predators would overtake the landscape and

take down ungulate numbers to such a level that hunting would no longer be necessary because have you heard that yeah no i hear that do you know the do there's one we like to talk about a lot which is even more insidious. It was that the Clintons. I knew you were going to say that. They wanted wolves to come. They wanted wolves reintroduction because the wolves would kill all the game. No one would hunt anymore. And if they couldn't hunt, they wouldn't have any reason to buy a gun.

And that's how you disarm America. It's a long play so i feel like this i i i i don't know that that i know that theory and there's a guy there's a guy that's a very big proponent of um he's right here in our town he's done a lot around wolf reintroductions and he gives a lot of talks about wolf reintroductions, really likes them a lot. And he's very antagonistic toward hunters. And I've mentioned this a couple of times where he referred to hunters as the recreational big game killing industry and views them as being like an adversary for it

but i don't think that he views wolf reintroduction as a way to stick it to hunters i think it's more like he feels that we have an obligation to like restore in a completely intact ecosystem be my guess maybe at night he's like you know like this insidious plot but i i don't know i mean i could not like if anybody could put it together it'd be the clintons though yeah i mean you know hey did you know my dad went to high school with bill clinton oh because you're from arkansas yeah man did they party a lot no he was a few years older than my dad but i well i'm sure clinton did yeah i didn't know if your old man partied with him not not gary newcomb no sir so your your old man can't put

your gary newcomb can't put to rest this inhale or not inhale thing well he probably could but not because he was there got it Got it. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that that they can't join, whew, our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there,

OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking.

That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater 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. Wait, we're a little bit early. No, we're not too terribly early every year most every year for the last few years we've done with wit from theodore roosevelt conservation partnership where full disclosure i am a proud board member uh wit fosberg comes in and does a recap so the year's not quite done but i mean mean, you know, it's winding down. We're getting there. It's winding down.

Last year when we did this, you had about 2019 a general thumbs up. We went through the details, but you had a thumbs up from conservation perspective where where does the thumb sit now let's say it's a middle of the road kind of sideways right now there are some huge accomplishments to 2020 uh there have also been some real disappointments really uh so yeah so i think it's you know a mixed bag as it usually is listen you know i think that overall i think we're happy with where we you know got this year we had some challenging circumstances but once again in at least in congress conservation proved one of those

things that you could actually get done in a very hyper partisan year you know presidential election you know hot congressional elections everything else that's one of the you talking about that and explaining how that happens, that conservation is a thing that can move forward when, when nothing else can move forward. I was kind of thinking about that a little bit recently and looking at that we'd have, you know, Republican led Senate, the Democrat, the White House, they're not going to get anything done.

Maybe they'll decide to focus on some, led Senate, the Democrat, the White House, they're not going to get anything done. Maybe they'll decide to focus on some conservation work to get those easy wins that you were talking about that they often get thirsty for. Yeah, I think so. I mean, everyone has to show they can legislate and get stuff done. And if you look back at this year, I mean, things like the Great American Outdoors Act, which was permanent and full funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund. It was a $10 billion almost trust fund to deal with maintenance backlog on public lands. That came together because a lot of different interests thought it was a good idea at the time.

Some of those were conservationists' interests. Some were political. There was an idea that they wanted to help Cory Gardner in Colorado and Steve Daines' re-election efforts. So Trump proposed doing this. This is something the Democrats have been pushing for years, and they weren't dumb enough to say, oh, because you're proposing it, I'm going to vote against it. It's like, hell yeah, bring it on. And so that allowed us to get it done. Can you explain why like the elder talk people through the lwcf sure and why we had to have a new thing called the great american outdoors act to sort of like

provide backing for a thing we already had which is the lwcf like why does it require a new it wasn't it's just basically you know congress passes things in bulk these days. It doesn't do individual bills very often. So the Great American Outdoors Act had two independent bills underneath it. One was Land and Water Conservation Fund. The other was a maintenance backlog. created in 1965 by Congress when they opened up the outer continental shelf of oil and gas development. The idea was that oil and gas industry pay into a fund to do national resource conservation in perpetuity, $900 million a year. The problem was that in the 55 years that it's been around, only once did Congress actually fully fund it. So, you know, 2019 and a big omnibus bill that we passed, we permanently reauthorized this. You don't have to go back to Congress every year, every five years to get it reauthorized.

In the Great American Outdoors Act, we took that funding and moved it off budget because what Congress had been doing is it saw this juicy pot of funding sitting out there. It had not been protected in 1965 from being raided so congress rated it for all sorts of purposes unrelated to conservation what were they rating it for deficit reduction schools you know who knows i mean it just it was used for other purposes so so they still collected the money from the oil companies. Oil and gas industry paid into it every year, $900 million. And in their mind, they're paying into it because of this thing, this fund. Sure.

But then the money goes and sits in another pile and someone grabs the money off that pile. Oh, yeah. So Congress looks at it and says, well, we could give it the $900 million we're supposed to, or we could give it half of that and use the other half for these pet projects we might have. So finally, what we've been trying to do is get that off budget so it automatically goes out. Things like Pittman-Robertson, Dingell-Johnson, those funds Congress is not allowed to tamper with. The sportsman's excise taxes. Those go to the federal government and then go back out to the states. This would be similar in that the $900 million in full goes to projects like it was intended. Land acquisition, permanent easements, city parks, trails, those types of activities.

That was a huge win. You know what I think people might be interested in when we're talking about money going into piles and someone robbing that money? Earlier, we talked about this. when you buy like earlier i meant we talked about this when you buy your fishing license okay the money from your fishing license goes to support your state game agency which does everything from like regulation you know enforcement of hunting and fishing laws disease research access enhancement uh boat launches like on down the line it goes to all this stuff

If a state states are blocked You can tell me if this is universal Or not states Are blocked from raiding that money Because if They raid that money and don't put It for what it's supposed to go to they're not Eligible for

The federal funds that come From the excise taxes, correct? Yep. So you get slapped on the hand if you try to steal the hunting and fishing money. Correct. It was genius when they

set that up. Because people would have taken that money. Oh, sure. And so now Congress can't rate it and the states can't rate it you know the matching funds the states use basically which is their state license fees so no it's a it's a perfect situation it's worked and that's why it's funded conservation for you know since the 1930s is there like when all this lwcf money comes in um who who is the who is the who's the collection of people that decides where it goes so half of it goes basically half of it goes back out to the states and the states can use it

for anything from you know real conservation migration corridors that type of activity or they can use it for a city baseball diamond, basketball courts, urban recreation. They have flexibility in how that gets used. The other half basically goes to the agency's Department of the Interior, Department of Agriculture, that then goes out for very specific projects. And what we're trying to do is make sure that they really think about projects a little bit differently than they have in the past.

LWCF has been used to fund the big Plum Creek acquisitions on the Blackfoot and things like that, which are multi-million dollar, really complex deals. But it could also be used for things like funding. You buy one section someplace in Montana to open up a landlocked parcel. As you guys know, we've been working with Onyx on those reports on landlocked. And you've got 16.5 million acres around the country that are owned by the public, but the public can't access. So start thinking about it a little bit differently because 3% of the $900 million, $27 million annually, is earmarked for access projects. So start thinking about that little section or half section someplace that opens up a

whole bunch of different land. And the Onyx project really helps identify where those areas are. Yeah, because that's like a force multiplier on your money. Exactly. When you buy like a small chunk, it'll open up a huge chunk. Yeah. And you mentioned even like the block management in Montana, buy a section that opens up more block management potentially. Yeah.

Or target some of the block management, which is also it surprised me when you said like urban projects, like baseball diamonds and such. I knew that a lot, some of that money, I had seen wording inside of that where it said it could go for rifle ranges and firearms related stuff. I mean, how are we guarding against like all of that money going to baseball diamonds?

Well, I mean, first of all, it's largely a state decision where they want to spend it. So engage in the process, work with your game and fish agency, your outdoor parks agency, whatever is in the state, and help influence that decision. The idea was that it makes sense to send some of this money local and let the locals decide how they want to spend it. And we want to make sure that they can think about different ideas like migration corridors. You see a lot of those states in the West are now developing formal migration policies to try to identify and protect big game migration corridors. Use some of the stateside money to help further that cause, as well as doing things like baseball diamonds, or if you do a shooting range or, you know, whatever it might be. Uh, well, let's go on to, uh, you got Pebble Mine. I got a quick follow-up if it's all right.

That's fine. I want to know, uh, thanks Steve. I appreciate it. Um, when you're like, what does it look like if you can give me like an abbreviated version of when like you're in there in the trenches in dc trying to help push something like the great american outdoors act through what does that look like on a day-to-day basis and then two like did are there allies that like right alongside trcp that are maybe not in our you know the hunting and fishing bubble that are also in there and yeah it's a great question.

I'll answer the second part first. So, yeah, we had great allies in the outdoor recreation community, in the historic preservation community. You know, it was big. You know, there were literally, you know, hundreds and hundreds of different groups that were engaged in this. We were all fighting side by side for it. In terms of what it looks like in the trenches, I mean, what we do is really two things. One, we provide good information. You know, we let a member of Congress know, here are the projects that have benefited hunters and anglers in your estate through all the BCF. Here are the other types of projects that are sitting

out there that could get funded if we had full funding. And then what we also do is apply some pressure. And, you know, honestly, they don't want to see me walking in the door. They want to hear from their local rod and gun club in that state. You know, the local chapter of Pheasants Forever or Turkey Federation engage. I mean, local voices matter a lot more than, you know, guys like me that live in here in D.C. and they're paid to do this stuff. So what we try to do is, you know, that's why we have guys in a lot of the Western States around the country as organizers, mobilizing local businesses, local citizens, local rod and gun clubs to engage on these issues to make their voices heard. So it's one part, good information. Another part, you know, just, you know, shoe leather and getting the

people out there that can help influence this. Thank you. You put down Pebble Mine in the win category, and I recognize that. And to bring people that have been following this show, we had a big Pebble episode recently. I shouldn't say recently, but I guess this fall. We had a big Pebble Mine episode, and it was funny because while we were recording that we had a gentleman on Tim Bristol who just coincidentally his last name is Bristol and Pebble Mine is in the headwaters of Bristol Bay and he came on and sort of laid out the whole history of where this idea came from, why it's

a bad idea, why it won't go away and literally while we were speaking with him he was very eager to from why it's a bad idea, why it won't go away. And, and literally while we were speaking with him, he was very eager to get home after the interview. While we were speaking with him, a story was breaking about some, some activists who had masqueraded as foreign investors in Pebble Mine. And the CEO of Pebble Mine, what was his name, Whit? Tom Collier. Tom Collier.

These people masquerade as investors, and they do a call with Tom Collier from Pebble Mine. And Tom Collier really opens up to them in a way that wound up being deeply humiliating to him where he contradicted a lot of Pebble Mine's own messaging. They had all along in the permitting process been looking for, I don't know, like a 10 or 20-year roadmap.

He shares with these supposed investors that this is like a 120-year play, that he's got plans where the state is going to pay for a lot more things than the state had any intention of paying for. And then he really drives a nail in his own coffin by speaking rather disparagingly of a number of politicians that he needs to have a lot of cooperation with to the point where some politicians who haven't been entirely supportive or entirely dismissive but have wanted the process to run, and they've been pretty careful to say that this is a process we're going to allow to play out, and they don't want to weigh in too heavily.

But anyways, he goes and shares that basically these people are in his back pocket, and when the rubber meets the road, they'll do what he says. And there's nothing that's going to be quicker at getting those politicians to not do what you say than to say that. Oh, yeah. Listen, that was, you know, I'm not sure that, you know, the interview, the tapes, you know, had that big bearing on the core's final decision to deny the permit for the mine, but it sure as hell had persuaded Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan to come out very vocally against that mine. Oh, just because it was so insulting to them.

And, uh, you know, it was, and we've been trying to get them both to come out hard against the mine. And again, like you say, they've just sort of taken a very neutral stance of let's wait and see,

let's see what they say. Not wanting to take anybody off, but as soon as he started saying that stuff, holy mackerel, they went off like Roman candles. Yeah. It was, you know,

it was just one of those, uh, you know, if you were gonna, and I'm sure someone will someday make a documentary about this entire process, that would be sort of like, uh,

you know, a huge moment in the film is this call but that set off I don't know if it set off or not it sure seemed to set off a cascade of events like all of a sudden there's people wanting to do investigations Tom Collier is dismissed from his position the Army Corps of Engineers comes in and rejects the proposal.

The funny thing about this mine is it never goes away. When we had this episode, I was pointing out to someone that I went to my first Pebble Mine event. I thought it was the year before my kid was born he's 10 years old and um bristol had pointed out that to really close this thing up there needs to be some land designations in that area that would make it that we don't just need to constantly revisit this horrible idea i don't want to spend too much time because we've covered it so heavy. Basically, it's like this.

When you draw a gold-bearing ore out of the ground, you use an acid to dissolve. Cyanide. Yeah, you use cyanide to dissolve the gold out. This isn't like digging up for gold nuggets. This is like ore that contains gold. You crush that stuff up, put cyanide on it, and that dissolves the gold. Then you're able to collect the dissolved gold. The problem is you have all this waste from

the cyanide, and you have a bunch of heavy metals that are in water. That stuff don't go away. So you got to make a big lake, and you fill this lake up with all this shit, right and they just in their plan they're like oh yeah and the lake will always be there but we'll build a sweet dam to hold it in and people like what do you mean always i mean like 20 years 50 years no it's like for an eternity forever forever the lake of toxic sludge sits there behind the earth and dam and people point out, well, how can the dam be forever? And they're like, oh no, it'll be a sweet dam. Real nice dam. Yeah. In a seismically active area. Yeah. And so it just is very unsettling to people who have to trust that this earth and dam will hold for the rest of human history.

Right. It's just hard to buy it. It's hard. The toxic sludge does last for eternity as far as we know. Right. It's got a better, it's got a greater life expectancy than the dam. That's for sure.

So that's where this mind, like in a nutshell, that's where this mine becomes really problematic. But your original point is exactly right. And that's what Tim and I used to work together at Trout Unlimited. And so the trick now is how do you permanently protect that area? Do you do a land swap with the state and give them some federal lands where they actually may make some money? Do you get the state legislature to designate all those state lands as some sort of salmon reserve, something like that? But there is nothing to stop the next fly-by-night jackass

company coming in there five years from now when they think they have favorable politicians and do the exact same thing again. Do you think that we'll kind of put a wrap on this now? Do you think that it is the appetite, the political appetite, to just squash this once and for all, or do you think it'll be left to linger? No, I think there's an appetite. Thank you, Tom Collier, to kill this once and for all now. And so I think that Lisa Murkowski is already on record

in a variety of publications saying that she wants to find a permanent protection mechanism for Bristol Bay. Oh, that's great. Yeah. Now, one of the things that I was wondering about when, you know, I was pretty happy when Donald Trump Jr., Tucker Carlson, a number of right-wing figures came out

in varying degrees of intensity, but came out in opposition to Pebble Mine. I remember wondering if this would somehow be cover, or could be justified as cover for something else. Which I think, and I don't know if that's a conspiracy theory that exists in my own head or not, but layout where we're at in the year in review around the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. another massive premier pristine ecosystem in Alaska that for my entire life, we've been arguing about, do we leave it be or do we tap its resources?

Yeah. So a little bit of background on this one. And again, you know, we don't do a whole lot with Anwar, which is Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. You mean TRCP? TRCP does it. TRCP, yeah. But there's history here.

So when the Alaska Native Lands, I guess it was Alaska National Interest Lands Act passed in the 1970s, which created most of the national parks, refuges, forests we have in Alaska, it was silent on what to do with the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It basically, there are 1,400 miles of coastal plain by that North Slope, 1,200 miles of which were open for oil and gas development, 200 miles in that Anwar coastal plain were basically to be determined what we do with it later. So when that law passed in the 70s under the Carter administration, it basically didn't have to be Nostradamus to know you're going to have fights over that area for a very long time. That's just what's played out.

And so now here we are a long time later, and we're still dealing with it. So it's always been the goal of politicians in Alaska to open it up because they were convinced that there's the next Prudhoe Bay is sitting under there. I think it's very questionable whether that's true or not. But what happened now is you finally had, you know, during the beginning of this administration, you had a Republican House, Republican Senate, Trump, and they jammed through opening up ANWR to development. And now the Department of the Interior is moving as fast as humanly possible to get the first lease out of there, knowing that the Biden administration,

when they come in, is going to shut that thing down. It's much harder to shut it down if there's already a sole lease someplace. So that's why they're trying to get it leased right now and have somebody buy something out there so that it's much harder on doing the future. I mean, there's people that are opposed to drilling in Anwar. What are the reasons they're opposed to it? Well, I mean, the main thing is I think actually there was a variety of different reasons, but the porcupine caribou herd is the main one. That's their main calving grounds. Obviously, it's a big polar bear area, too, and polar bears aren't doing great right now. But it is, you know, because it was the biological heart of the refuge,

which is why it wasn't set, it opened up for a while in gas development back in the 1970s. And, you know, Steve, you've been up there, you know, so you've seen it. And when those caribou come in, it's, you know, pretty freaking amazing and huge numbers in the, you know, in the spring and early summer. So I think that's the main reason. And it's just that, you know, if you go over to Prudhoe Bay or it is a major industrial city and, you know, I think there's a lot of folks that want to leave that coastal plain over in Anwar, the way it is not looking like that.

Yeah. You wind up, uh, when you deal with something where you have this like this pebble mine issue and the anwar issue um you do get a little self-conscious i get a little self-conscious about um the tendency my tendency to look at every development project and be like oh no not there this is a line in the sand and then like oh no not there this is a line in the sand and then the next one not there this is a line in the sand you know but i do feel like that man um like i i can't i don't know if there's even maybe it's just perceived it's in my head that there's supposed to be this idea that we're you trade one for the other. You can't do the big gold mine, but we'll make it up

to you with some oil leases. We're talking about places that are the most productive in the case of Bristol Bay, the most productive salmon fishery in the world with ANWR, one of the most pristine Arctic ecosystems on the planet. So I wind up being a little bit unapologetic, even though it's in my head that you're being like a real obstructionist but i just feel in my mind like yeah those those things it's like if we can't have the sort of audacity and vision to protect that kind of stuff like nothing is sacred man yeah i'm totally with you and i think they're just special places out there and there are fewer and fewer of them as you know more and more of our

you know globe gets developed i think anwar you Bay, Boundary Waters is one of those kind of places. We had a big campaign in the Ruby Mountains in Nevada. That's a pretty special place as well. They're now proposing a big titanium mine. It was a titanium, I think so, by the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia, which is another pretty amazing place. So, I mean, there are no places that's not sort of under assault in some fashion. Talk about mining near the Grand Canyon.

That's been talked about for a long time. But you can imagine extraction people, you can imagine at some point they're going to be like, okay, well, then where? I just took possession of, in the mail, a new titanium stovepipe for my Seek outside stove that goes into my teepee tent. I like that I was able to order that thing. So when people say like, okay, so what? Okay, mister, don't touch this and don't touch that. Where should we be doing this? How do you answer it? Look, there are a lot of places that are appropriate to mine.

Go to Nevada and look at a bunch of the big Barrick or Newmont or some of those mining developments out there. It's an incredibly arid country. I mean, basically, water is the main thing that gets you in the way of a good mine. And that's what we're dealing with in Bristol Bay. That's what we're dealing with in Yoke bay that's where you're dealing with the yokey finokey the boundary waters nevada place like that that's not an issue i mean it gets six inches of rainfall a year or whatever so you mean i just think are there places in nevada that are that are not being mined that could be i mean i guess maybe i have no idea i'm not a mineral i'm not a geologist so but i'm just

saying there are appropriate places for a mine and even there are a bunch of mines being developed in Alaska that are fine. It's just that they're not in sort of these amazing areas. And presumably these amazing areas, too, would be super cash cows for these huge energy groups. I mean, so it's not like this is the only place left, but they just, by their projections, by their understanding of the resource, they're like, this would be a major place. It's accepted as an objective reality that pebble would be the largest gold mine in human history.

So, I mean, it makes total sense why they would fight for it. Yeah. But, you know, part of the problem is it's not a, you know, like a solid gold seam like you'd find someplace in other places. It's so spread out over such a large area, you have to churn up so much habitat to produce that gold and copper that it's, you know, that's where you get into the problem. So it's the, you know, the nature it's the nature of the development as well. All right.

I want to keep bumping along on our list. Wolves getting federally delisted. You view this as a win with some caveats. But first, is this real? No. Is Biden going to come in and just undo this? No. The Obama administration proposed it too.

It got blocked by the courts. So you don't think that Biden will be reflexively hostile to this idea? Well, I mean, I have not spoken to anybody about it over there, but I doubt it because they did it in the Obama-Biden administration before. They proposed this, and it got blocked by the courts. And what we're trying to do is take this out of the political sphere and make it much more of the wildlife biologists controlling the decision, not the courts, not Congress, not ballot initiatives someplace. And the only thing I don't

like about the most recent delisting, it's done the day before the election in Minnesota, a swing state. And how do you look at that not think it's political and that just galvanizes the opposition to it and almost works against our interests those of us like to see the wolf delisted yeah you know I actually um well sometime some other time I'll tell you a story about that timing but um not that's not for now but okay give me the caveat so it's a win like so so people understand uh it's gonna go it's gonna go to Give me the caveat. So it's a win. Like, so, so people understand, uh, it's going to go to, it's going to go to the courts. Yeah. U S fish and wildlife service.

We have, uh, trying to think of to what level of detail we want to get in here. Catch me where I mess up on this wit, but wolves were listed under the endangered species act. They were listed like sort of across the lower 48. One fell swoop, right? We just listed like, so we didn't want to hit Alaska. We don't want to get Alaska implicated in this because Alaska has wolves across, I don't know, 99% of historic range or something like that.

Very, you know, thriving wolf populations. But they were listed in the lower 48. Later, when we kind of got a more detailed look at the problem, we realized that thinking about the lower 48 as a whole isn't a great way to try to manage wolves because we know that they're not going to be recovered in downtown Denver. It's not going to be recovered in downtown Denver, right? It's not going to happen.

So we should look at where could they be and where are they and kind of break up the map a little bit and talk about these different population groups. And so one of these population groups is the Northern Great Lakes. And so that's wolf populations in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. There's all kinds of complexities in the law. When you try to go after the fact and impose this logic of these distinct population segments, it creates a lot of ways for people to file lawsuits. The fact that we didn't have that system in place when they were listed and we tried to later come in and overlay this logic has created a lot of trouble. So the Northern Great Lakes wolves have been, you know, the U S fish and wildlife service went and said, it's time to delist them.

It gets blocked in courts. It bounces back and forth. They have hunting and trapping seasons, hunting and trapping seasons go away. Then all of a sudden they were locked back up, put on the endangered species list. And now they're saying that, you know, the outgoing,

well, I shouldn't time it with the outgoing administration, but they're now saying, all right, enough's enough. We're just delisting the whole damn deal again. And it'll almost certainly get all wrapped up in a bunch of lawsuits. Almost certainly.

But it's important to know that the, like the, the, uh, Great Lakes, the Rocky Mountains, you know, they're, they, they've exceeded recovery goals for a long time. Oh yeah. Like there's a reason why they're wanting to delist them. Yeah. But it's just so political and you, you may well see, you know,

similar to what we've had to do in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem with Congress passing a specific delisting legislation for the gray wolf there. My guess is you're probably gonna have to see that again in the great lakes. And these are well-funded anti-hunting groups that have a long-term strategy to keep this inside the courts. Is that true? Yeah, I think that's a fair description. Yeah, and they do it like they kind of, if you look at the details of these lawsuits, they sort of skirt the issue. They'll often, they don't argue how many wolves there are.

They don't argue that. It's like you need to, when you're doing these lawsuits, you're sort of going after these, you're pursuing technicalities. You'd be like, okay, so you have a listing plan. Well, we can prove that you didn't consider something of relevance. And it's motivated by a desire, but you take whatever little things you can get to try to hold it up within the court. issues. Those are the main ones that stick. Now, the irony is, of course, if wolves had been delisted, you wouldn't have to do a ballot initiative in Colorado. They could just go ahead and reintroduce them. Oh, is that right? Oh, yeah. I really should know this as a predator hunter. If wolves have been on the endangered species lists, why can we hunt them in Idaho and in other places? Because the courts did not allow those states to move forward.

And that was all litigated. And so now the issue is the Great Lakes states. Yeah, and also I think Wyoming may still be in litigation about its plan, but that's been on and off because Wyoming didn't have as robust a plan as the other states did. Oh, no. I thought they were insane. But they kind of, in the end, won.

Wyoming wanted to come in. All the states in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem came up with these management plans, right? Right. And Wyoming came up with this management plan where they're basically saying, okay, the area around, in the GYE area, the area around Yellowstone,

they'll be managed as a big game animal. But then they took a huge chunk of the state and said, and here they'll be managed like coyotes, no bag limits, no reporting structure, no close season. And I thought that they were insane to try that approach and that they would never get there. And I was like, man, you're shooting yourself in the foot with that, but they stuck it out, stuck to their guns, pun intended, and got it.

Despite what the Clintons wanted. Got it. Yeah, despite the Clintons, they got what they were after. And so I thought that was a pretty bold play on their part. But in our list here, delisting, you have some caveats. Explain the caveats oh i was just what i was saying is that you know this is not yes or as good as it seems because i think it's going to go straight back into the courts

so yeah well hit hit again i think that yeah that that's the main caveat is that don't go out and buy your license tomorrow yeah okay but what about mexican gray wolf protections yeah i'm again I'm not an expert down there. I'm not even going to venture into it. Okay. Good. Is there any solution to keep it out of the courts? I mean, it just seems like the best arguments that we can come up with.

I mean, is there going to have to be wolves running through the streets of Chicago before a lawsuit is just ridiculous? No, that's why I think that you're going to see probably congressional legislation on something like the Great Lakes population. So it'll be like Montana and Idaho. Yeah, exactly.

When you talk to people who are opposed to delisting wolves, like diehard wolf advocates that aren't interested in a compromise solution, they love to point out that we've only recovered wolves across a fraction of their range. They seldom consider it. Well, yeah, but they're right. And I like to point out to them that we've only recovered elk across 10% of their range, but we manage elk hunting and elk populations in a lot of places very effectively, but we still don't have elk across the entire state of Nebraska, which historically we did. So it is possible to manage a species as a renewable resource, as a game species, while you're still pushing ahead with a broader recovery plan,

because we do it all the damn time. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. 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 Meat Eater 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, gutting the farm bill. You had this as the farm bill is a loss.

Explain to people what the hell that, what the farm bill is. Yeah, so the farm bill is the single largest conservation program in this country. It's $6 dollars annually to incentivize conservation on private lands. The conservation reserve program, you know, wetland areas, grassland areas, you know, just restoring, you know, various types of habitats. But unlike a lot of the environmental stuff we've talked about, like the Endangered Species Act, the farm bill is all voluntary. It's all incentive-based. So the idea is you give a farmer an incentive to enroll the land in a good conservation practice.

And it's been incredibly successful. And just one of the areas, the one we focus on a lot, is the Conservation Reserve Program, which was really created back in the 1980s as essentially a supply management tool. When during the farm crisis to get people, give money to farmers and have them set aside land so that they have money in spite of really terrible markets. So at its height, the Farm Bill, the Conservation Reserve Program, about 37 million acres enrolled in it. And that's good for upland birds, birds it's good for deer it's good for water quality it benefits pretty much everything today you know that program is down to 20.7 million acres give me the number again at its height 20 about 37 million acres down to so we down to the

lowest level today is today is the lowest level we've seen really since the creation of the program. And that is 20.7 million acres. And we're expecting another probably 3 million acres to expire, you know, in 2021. So, and at the same time we're giving, I think,

you know, the last two years we gave $30 billion to farmers because of the trade wars that were going on with China and depressed markets as essentially a bailout not asking to do anything yet at the same time we are just starving the conservation reserve program and we're not offering enough in terms of rental rates we're not offering enough incentives for folks to get into the program and so you're seeing it basically you on the vine. Are farmers wanting to get involved, but they're just not, they just can't make the numbers work with the way they're trying to fund it? Yeah. And there's a lot of interest to sign up for it, but when you're offering low

rental rights and minimal incentives to get in, you're not going to have a whole lot of interest for folks to lock up their land for 10 or 20 or however many years. So what are they doing? I mean, they're growing crops on that land. They're growing crops on that land. Yeah, exactly. So they're tilling it and growing something and getting a bailout from Congress. So what we want to try to do is really try to re-incentivize the farm bill program and have a much more honest effort to get

it implemented and i think the trump administration has been a mixed bag a lot of conservation areas good on things like great american outdoors act good on migration quarters but they have been really bad in terms of conservation on private lands through the farm bill what is it what give me an argument against the farm bill like what like what do they not like about the farm bill it costs a lot of money yeah but we have subsidies that cost a lot of money. Oh yeah, I know. It ties the farmer's hands. It requires more effort to implement, so it's easier to write somebody a check and send it out there. If you have a Department of Agriculture or Office of

Management or Budget that doesn't really care about conservation, it's not going to prioritize this. Plus, you look at a program like the, you know, Conservation Reserve Program, it's in the Farm Service Agency and not in the Natural Resource Conservation Service. NRCS wakes up every day thinking about conservation. Farm Services, FSA does not. So again, it's not a high priority for the agency that administers it, not a high priority for the agency that administers it not a high priority for sunny purdue not a high priority for you know nick mulvaney and omb so you know it's a perfect storm of you know just it's just not getting implemented how has it this is like a horrible generalization but let's say i went out and found a random sampling. I somehow pulled a random sampling of 100

farmers. And I put to them, hey, what do you all think of the farm bill? And what do you all think of the CRP program? What am I going to hear back? Probably the index bag. I think a lot of them really like it because it provides supplemental income for areas that they may not want to farm or maybe recognize that it's great to have pheasants on there too. And then they could do a walk-in program and have some extra money from hunting on their property also. So I think the ones that have done it,

I mean, again, I think that if they were to do another enrollment and offer better incentives, you see widespread interest for you know big signups but if you don't you starve it yeah brody how how do you think how farming has changed it plays a role here like you have a lot more gigantic commercial fence defense farms that like there's not a tree anywhere there's not a fallow field anywhere and you got a lot less small farms that traditionally had brush or fallow fields or shelter belts or whatever like are those big giant commercial farms just less interested in being involved with this absolutely and i think that when you had the you know the old time you know small farmer or even you know the low person who lived on the land and cared about it and took real pride in it,

that's very different than when you basically contracted out for somebody just to maximize profit off it. And I think that's part of what we're seeing. So no, I think that's part of it. But at the same time, technology is with precision agriculture, things like that, you can be a lot smarter about how you farm. You can target areas that, you know, maybe more productive for you to grow soybeans or corn and, you know, protect other areas that are much better use being in a CRP land. So to, to simplify the issue, it's an issue of funding because the conservation repairs. Funding is there.

Funding just is not being used. Okay. But why wouldn't they offer more incentive through making the price super high, like making it so advantageous to put your land in that? That's what we want to have happen, and that's what's happened in the past. But if the farmer, for whatever reason, is not being offered very much money, not being offered the incentive to get into it. And again, Congress has made this money available. It's sitting out there. It's just not being offered by the Department of Agriculture to the farmers. So that's my question. Where's the stop point for that price tag?

Like who decides how much money is going per acre to those farmers? Because if it was financially advantageous, they would do it. Yeah, obviously that varies depending on where you are because one price doesn't fit all. It's different. So there are very local mechanisms to set those prices. But basically, we want to have a program that is robust enough that folks want to get into it. And they're willing to put decent land into it, not a bunch of just marginal habitat that can't grow anything. So, you know, that's been one of my real frustrations is, you know, just the implementation of the Farm Bill, because the

last Farm Bill was really good. I mean, it dedicated a lot of money, $6 billion annually to conservation. You know, it dedicated more money to conservation than it did to basically traditional farm programs. And so we love that. And there's still a lot of really good programs in the Farm Bill, but it just needs to have a much stronger orientation towards implementation and making it work. Okay, what's the ACE Act? So that's the act that was passed this past year,

the American Conservation Enhancement Act. Huge win. It had, I think, six or seven different individual bills underneath it. Again, the idea that Congress passes big bills that have a lot of little components in it. It reauthorized the North American Wetland Conservation Act, reauthorized National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, authorized for the first time National Fish Habitat Partnership Act, which has been around administratively for a while, but had never been codified by Congress, Great Lakes Program, Chesapeake Bay Program, you know, all really good, you know, on the ground conservation programs. Who do we have to thank for that? Was that bipartisan? Yep, very bipartisan. It passed, I can't remember the exact vote counts, but overwhelmingly, not close.

Martin Heinrich, who you know, worked really hard on that, a variety of others. But no, it was very bipartisan. Very few people opposed it. It was, again, a place where they could come together. When you're doing something like that, and it's a bunch of stuff rolled together, is there a lot of infighting about trying to keep crazy stuff out that's just going to wind up, that's going to turn people off?

Yeah, and that's one of the strategies of the folks that are anti-conservation. They'll try to get poison pills added to some things till it kills the whole bill. So that is part of the art and science of managing these bills when they're on the floor or in, the floor or, you know, a committee and the, you know, Congress or in Senate or the House is, you know, just keeping that, you know, silly stuff out of there and keeping the poison pills away.

I mean, you know, right, you know, there was a lot of folks that wanted to see Great Lakes, you know, Wolf delisting on that bill. But it was just, but it was, you know, and we were one of them, but it was one of those things that could potentially derail that bill because of the vehemence of the opposition from some folks. Gotcha. So you're put in a position where you got to keep it clean in order just to get the win. Yeah. Listen, we would love to see a bunch of other stuff in there, but we'll take the good instead of the perfect. Yeah. Yeah you you said anti-conservationists or anti-conservation with it being so bipartisan who is this i mean there are fringe elements uh you know that you know don't like public lands i mean we've talked about them they rail against them all the time

yeah who think that any money that's going to conservation is a waste of money. So it's a different orientation. And you can do a little Google research and figure out who we're talking about. But there's a handful of members who just don't like this stuff and always fight against it. But they wouldn't describe themselves. Oh, no, of course not. How do they describe themselves?

Just unfettered. Frugal. Get the government out of this stuff. Government shouldn't be involved with this. Yeah. Yeah, so they either use the libertarian approach or the deficit hawk approach when it suits their purposes. But they don't say, I hate animals. No.

They may say, I hate public lands. Oh, I don't know, I hate animals. No. They may say, I hate public lands. Oh, I don't know if you do that. But that's getting less and less tenable all the time, though, man. Yes, it is. Thankfully. So, Hibby, we have in the loss column environmental rollbacks. Walk that through a little bit. Let's talk about the Clean Water Act.

Clean Water Act obviously was a product of the early 1970s after we saw the Cuyahoga River catch on fire. It has fundamentally changed water quality in this country to the point where the majority of our water is now fishable, swimmable, maybe not drinkable, but still, it's done an amazing job of cleaning stuff up. Now, the controversy has been, to a large degree, not what comes out of a tailpipe someplace or a sewer pipe from a factory into a river. The issue is much more evolved into, say, open space and what is covered and what is not covered by the Clean Water Act. And there were two rulings by the Supreme Court back in the 2000s, 2004 and 2007, I believe,

that basically said, Congress, you have need to define what is and what is not included in the Clean Water Act. Is a farm pond included? Is the irrigation ditch included? Is an ephemeral stream or isolated wetland included? And so it basically told Congress to do that. Congress never took it up. It was too controversial. So you've had administrations ever since defining it themselves. The Obama administration, we thought, did a very good job with the waters of the United States, which defined what was included in the overall navigable rivers standard. So a strict reading of the Clean Water Act says a navigable river is something you can actually float a boat down. A much more scientific-based reading of the statute

is there are a lot of little streams that impact or wetlands that impact that navigable water directly that need to be included because, you know, that's not the way rivers work. It's just protecting it and not any of the tributaries. So the Obama administration set out a complex rulemaking process that basically laid out what was and what is not included. It eliminated, you know, any sort of coverage for things like farm ponds, irrigation ditches, conventional agricultural practices, things like that. But it did protect headwater streams, wetlands, and even some isolated wetlands when there was a scientific justification. So in comes the Trump administration and proceeds to basically undo

that, eliminates all the protections for headwater streams and isolated wetlands. So essentially decreased by 50 percent. The wetlands that are covered are protected by the Clean Water Act and probably decreased by maybe a quarter. You know, the stream miles are protected. And the rationale there is that, I mean, it basically would come down to job creation and industry, right? Like making.

Sure. I mean, that's not what they have. job creation and industry, right? Like making... Sure. I mean, that's not what they, that was some of the arguments they used in the heavy hand of government. And they always trot out a few horror stories where there was indeed, you know, federal overreach and some poor dude that's just trying to build a farm shed or something, you know, gets blocked by some evil person from the EPA. Yeah. So, you know, I mean, there's, you know, there have been abuses, no question, but it also argues for let's better define what

is and what is not included. And our idea is let's not define it so that half the wetlands in this country are no longer protected. And it's really, they trot the farmers out as the main sort of victims in an overly robust Clean Water Act. Honestly, the way that the Obama rule is written is eliminated. Basically, if you have normal farm practices, farm ponds, irrigation ditches, those are not included in the Clean Water Act. Everyone knows that. But it's a lot easier to trot a farmer out there and say, you're trying to destroy my livelihood than a real estate

developer out there who says, you're going to block my mini mall that I want to put in. Yeah. Got you. Do you feel that they could have had a better way of fixing the problems? Congress needs to deal with this. So what we have a situation now is Congress won't deal with this. You have different administrations that keep genuflecting back and forth. The pendulum is going to go back and forth. And if you're a developer, if you're a landowner, if you're a farmer, you're never going to have any sort of certainty about what is and what is not covered. And listen, I completely agree with that. Uncertainty is a terrible thing. And we've been arguing that Congress, you know, Republicans, Democrats get together and decide what is covered and do it, you know, statutorily so that we don't have an administration just swinging back and forth that we attacked by the courts all the time.

Yeah. The loss column CWD as well continues to spread. No real, no real consensus from the sportsman community. Well, I mean, I think, yeah,

listen, I mean, there are some people that pretend it's not out there they're going to be you know the science deniers but the majority of folks recognize it as a threat i don't think anyone pretends it's not out there all right maybe they just they just say it doesn't matter it doesn't matter it's never going to jump to humans you know whatever you're not going to see population impacts unless you replace like wisconsin we're seeing population impacts. So,

you know, I think that, you know, prudence would dictate that we get on top of this. And, uh, we got $5 million appropriate last year to go out to the States to kick up surveillance and testing peanuts.

I mean, that's a joke. So we had 15 million in the house bill that, you know, the Senate cut down to five and, you know, I was pissed, but five is better than zero, which is was before that. Yeah. But it's a joke. Yeah. It's a joke,

but you know, a department of agriculture, you know, drags his feet and getting the money out the door and then only gets you about two and a half million out to the States. And the other is used for indemnity payments for captive farms is used for genetic research and how we might be able to modify white-tailed deer and make them live longer with CWD. And it's for administrative services, which nobody knows what that is, but basically just they paid for themselves. So even of that piddly amount we got through Congress, only half of that actually made it out to the states to expand surveillance and testing. So it's just, you know, there is, you know, basically the Department of Agriculture has done a terrible job in terms of getting on top of this. Now, I give Interior some credit because they've been pretty vocal about this, and we managed to get in the ACE Act that I talked about, you know, establishment by law of an interagency chronic

wasting disease task force. So Department of Agriculture, Department of the Interior, you know, probably some other agencies too, all get together and figure out how we're going to stop the spread of this thing. Is it, my question was going to be what needs to happen with, in your opinion? I mean, do we need, like if we had all the money in the world, what would we do? Yeah. First of all, you, you have to get control of the captive deer industry, which continues to be the biggest spreader of this, even though they won't admit that. But anytime you put live deer on the back of a truck and you drive them around the country swapping genetics, you know, APHIS, the Department of Agriculture, you know, their herd certification program, which is supposed to sort of give you a stamp, good housekeeping seal of approval if you have a, you're applying by certain standards, you're CWD free and you're

a good operator. It's been a joke. I mean, you know, it keeps popping up in these certified low risk herds. And it gives, I think, producers a false sense of security. It gives regulators a false sense of security. So what I would recommend is that there be a moratorium on any sort of interstate movement of live deer, period, until we can get a decent herd certification program out there that we know actually works. I don't trust the Department of Agriculture to do that. You need some sort of third party, the National Academy of Sciences, something like that, to look at it and make some recommendations as to how that can be reformed so that this industry is part of solution, not part of the problem. Now, what's this already in a wild herd, like it is widespread across North America?

Does that not, even though we know it came from this captive wildlife, does that not? Listen, hunters have an issue problem here too. I mean, you know, and I think you're bound to see a lot of the states have put in, you know, these prohibitions of moving carcasses across state lines. And that's a good step. You know, Yanni, you did that video for us last year and show people how they can bone out a deer. It's still on our website. You know, so that you have the tools, you know, to, if you're a hunter, to not be part of that problem. You can have your deer tested, you know, but, you know, especially during the pandemic and the government, you know, sort of, you know, funding crisis that state and local governments have been under, you've seen a real,

you know, decrease in testing and surveillance at the state level. And, you know, every single state agency has got a hiring freeze on, you know, every single state agency has got a hiring freeze on, you know, they've had to redeploy resources to other areas. You know, things like surveillance and testing, you know, have become a lower priority. So you're not hearing about as much right now because there's less testing going on than there has been in the past. So, you know, yeah, we need to do more surveillance and testing. We hunters have a responsibility to be, and if the state agency says, hey, go out to do more surveillance and testing. We hunters have a responsibility to be. And if a state agency says, hey, go out and shoot a bunch of animals in this area and knock the population down, do it.

I mean, they're trying to make sure that you have good hunting for years to come. A state like Illinois, which took it seriously and hunters were part of the solution and went out and they whacked a lot of deer in areas where it came in. They kept it at background levels, Whereas Wisconsin didn't take that approach and it's 50% prevalence in a bunch of the state. Yeah. I can't believe that now, man. Like, uh, Doug Dern, he talks about areas around there where guys on certain farms that he knows about where they're, you know, they're getting their deer tested there that their families are hunting on their farms and they're running some of these guys, 75% of the deer their families are getting are CWD

positive. Wisconsin's ground zero, man. Ground zero. Absolutely. It's like the future is now in that place, man. Yep. And no other state out there wants to be like Wisconsin. So give them the resources that they need to not be that state. All right. Let's end on a win. Tell people what a menhaden. Menhaden? Menhaden? Menhaden. Menhaden. or pokey depending on where you are it's basically the bottom of the food chain uh in the atlantic in

the gulf of mexico everything eats it you know striped bass you know redfish uh eagles whales i mean you name it they eat it because it's a nasty little oily fish what's it look like you know tate uh it looks like it maybe a shad is probably the closest thing i think about yeah but how many inches long? Oh, you know, the big one would be like 14 inches long. So I have 15 inches. Oh, they get that big. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. And they're filter feeders. So they have an environmental function too. So in a place like the Chesapeake Bay, which has chronic water quality problems and is a breeding ground for menhaden, I mean,

more menhaden you have in there, the better water quality you're going to have. Yeah. Same thing with oysters. But anyway, we have, you know, never done good job of managing forage fish, the base of the food chain. We manage them like we've done everything else,

which is how many fish can you kill before you crash a species? Instead of what does the ecosystem need, and based on that, how many fish can you kill? And when I say it's not like everybody out there killing them. There is one industry on the East coast and that's a place called Omega protein that catches these things and giant purse sayings, grinds them up, turns them into basically fish food for aquaculture salmon, you know, in Canada.

Huh? So, yeah. So anyway. So those fish, they're using those fish to feed farm fish. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I thought there was like, I thought there was a pet food component to this.

Yeah, there might be. Yeah. But that's the reason that Cook, you know, Cook Industries bought Omega Protein. Cook is the big aquaculture operation up there and obviously is part of vertical integration. So if you buy, you know, the company that makes your food, you're going to be more profitable. Gotcha. So, so what we finally got to do is, you know, the Atlanta States Marine Fisheries Commission, which regulates basically the, you know, non-federal waters, you know, three miles and in, you know, up and down the East coast for migratory fish, including menhaden, striped bass, bluefish, weak fish. You know, they finally changed the way, you know, they manage it

to move from, you know, single species changed the way they manage it to move from, you know, single species management to ecosystem management. And they adopted that unanimously this summer. And then in the fall, they came together and, you know, basically did the first catch limits based on the new model and reduced the Menhaden harvest by 10%. Now their science showed that it should have been reduced by 18%, but at least 10% is a step in the right direction. So I say that's a win because you've had a, basically a fundamental sea change of how we manage the bottom of the food chain, which helps every predator out there. Will that 10% allow the fish to start to recover, you think? Oh yeah. And we're already seeing that, you know, a reduction a few years ago,

we're already seeing more menhaden out there than we have before. And I've got a guy who works for us in Long Island. And he was saying there at some points this summer, there were schools that ran basically from Montauk all the way down to Fire Island. And for those of you who sort of know your Long Island geography, that's a long way. And you had everything in there feeding on whales, Whales, bluefin tuna, you know, striped bass galore. And so we're already starting to see them come back. But they're saying right now that the current menhaden harvest reduces striped bass populations by about 30%. Striped bass is the number one recreational fish in the country. It's saltwater. And there's going to be some science coming out of the Gulf of Mexico. We have even a bigger industry, menhaden industry, and two players, Daybrook is a South African company, and Cook, which is the Canadian company.

And the research that's going to come out of the University of Florida, it's already out there in draft, is showing that there's about a 50% reduction in redfish and sea trout due to the current Menhaden harvest down there. There's also some indications that- Meaning that these researchers are saying that due to this menhaden harvest, they're seeing in our own lifetimes. Oh, yeah.

If you didn't have that harvest, you'd have 50% more redfish and sea trout than you do now. No kidding. And this industry is growing substantially. They're planning on growing another 50%. And there's anecdotal information out there, too, that tarpon are directly impacted by this harvest, too. Because tarpon will follow the menhaden around. That's a tasty meal for a tarpon. So these guys, these commercial harvesters, like these industrial harvesters, they might be seeing some reductions in their harvest quotas coming up in the Gulf too? Maybe.

But the Gulf is the Wild West out there. It is a bigger industry. You've got two players. There are no catch limits in place. There's a voluntary agreement. You've got two players. There are no catch limits in place. There's a voluntary agreement. There are no hard catch limits in place. Unlike in the Atlantic, where the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission actually has legislative authority to manage it, Gulf States Marine Fisheries Commission doesn't. So there's not even a mechanism right now for them to reduce harvests and mandate it. Another issue is the bogey boats in the Gulf. There are more and more conflicts with recreational anglers

because they will come right in on the beaches and catching them. It doesn't matter if you're in there fishing for them. They will come in there, push you off, and hit that school. And they're also tearing up a lot of the barrier islands we've been working on restoring down there after Katrina. So they're causing environmental damage. They're, you know, direct conflicts with recreational anglers. And there's the direct conflict,

the direct impacts on sport fish throughout the Gulf. This was in the wind column? Well, Atlantic is in the wind column. The Gulf, we haven't even gotten started there i mean that's going to be the next frontier we're going to get engaged we're going to go down there we're going to try to get common sense regulations i mean listen you can still have a big reduction industry down there it is a really fertile you know gulf of mexico and uh you can but you ought to stop the industry where it is now at a minimum. Don't let it grow another 50%.

Push them off the beaches where we have all the conflicts of recreational anglers. So there are things you can do that, honestly, I think in the end would work for everybody, but the status quo is not sustainable long-term. So it's like win part one. Yeah. So like at the end of the first Star Wars, they blow up the thing, but then all of a sudden you got the Empire strikes back yeah something like that yeah coincidentally i just got an email with like a half dozen beautiful pictures of a humpback feeding on menhaden off a cape lookout in north

carolina oh this is a i'm no fish biologist but i was gonna say it sounds to me like the whales are part of the problem here. Oh. Honestly, people care. I mean, the general public at large cares a lot more about the whales than they do about striped bass. So they're part of the solution. It sounds to me like we need less whales. I don't know. I don't know.

We want more menhaden and we want more whales. Oh, okay. I got it backwards. I got it. I understand now. All right. Well, one last thing. We got time for one last thing. we want more whales oh okay i got it backwards i got it i understand now all right well uh one last thing we got time for one last thing yanni can you can you uh all right are you ready to oh i thought you forgot all about my book report no man we gotta hear yanni's book report man he threw mine into the first and i was just like jumbled well because we're trying to um

it's hard to explain i didn't know how long we need for wit we got Yanni's gonna redeem this segment knocking it out of the park I didn't know how long it was gonna take for wit we got through the list I had

wrote a scathing email to Yanni about his not telling me whether or not he was prepared to deliver. And so then for me to not get to it would lead him to think that he could do a bad job and not even get caught. You know, I've actually got two of them stacked up that we've talked about doing prior and haven't gotten to them. So we have some already ready for the next time. Well, it's chef's choice. So you can do whatever book report you want.

Well, no, I'm going to do the one that I worked on today because it's fresh in my head for sure. Yondas Book Report. All right. This story, interestingly, I think, to me, when I pulled up the map that was associated with this story, I immediately saw Latvia. I'm like, yeah.

That's why I thought you'd be good at this because it's like a little bit close to home. Yeah, totally. No, if Riga, Latvia, so you know where, because everybody knows where Riga, Latvia is. Oh, yeah, for sure. If that was the center of the clock, this story takes place about 500 miles northwest. No, sorry, 745 miles Northwest, 10 o'clock from the center, from the center of the clock.

Um, in my opinion, there's a high likelihood that I probably share blood with some of the same hunters that left these artifacts that I'm going to talk about in this story. Ooh, I like this. Um, yeah, I might as well be doing a biography of my family here.

I wrote that today. Um, yeah's like I'm your new Eastern Northern European correspondent here for Meat Eater. So you got to keep coming up with stories that I can do reports on from the zone of the world. All right. It's a Nat Geo article titled 6,000 years of arrows emerge from melting Norwegian ice patch. Love it. Yeah. Interesting enough. Um, the first artifact that was found here was a 3,300 year old shoe that was found in 2006. That's kind of what tipped everybody off to like ice patch archeology, right? Like wasn't a thing, I guess up until then. Right. And somebody finds a shoe sticking out of like ice patch archaeology right like wasn't a thing i guess up until then right somebody finds a shoe sticking out of this ice patch and they start paying attention they also

start paying attention to ice patches all across the world because stuff that's been buried under this ice is now like because it's all melting at a pretty alarming rate everybody always says alarming rate yeah i don't know if it's alarming or not i mean if you look back at history there's been a lot of melts and freeze and thoughts what is alarming i'll point out is that it might not be good for us to live on this planet if if it continues down this path right people always say oh poor mother earth i i don't i don't i don't pity her at all i think she could shrug her shoulders, get rid of us, and she'll keep on spinning around the sun for quite some time. It just might not work out so good for us.

Hey, can you clarify that these aren't glaciers? Yes. Oh, they're not glaciers. I was just going to point out that an ice patch is different from a glacier, which is basically a slow-moving river of frozen ice. That's a glacier. That's a glacier. An, that's a glacier. An ice patch is just a deposit of water,

which then freezes and forms, and it can grow bigger and smaller, depending on what average temperatures are doing. Huh, I didn't know that. That's good. But it doesn't move. Yeah. Sounds like normal ice to me.

What was the shoe that came out of it? What move yeah sounds like normal ice to me what uh what was the shoe that came out of it what was the shoe made out of oh man there weren't any details about that shoe um but a couple interesting things that they i mean obviously we're interested in it more because of like these uh i think there was a total of 60 some arrows that popped out of here. Right. And they figured that at time they could look at it because from radiocarbon dating, so they could like date each arrow and they can say, Oh, this,

these 10 arrows were here from 2000 years ago. And then these 15 were from 6,000 years ago and they can radiocarbon date the antlers and bones and other things that they found at this ice patch and sort of figure out how, you know, when the hunters were there you know how much they were um dealing with the or what were they doing with the animals because they found times where there was a whole bunch of bones uh and arrows right indicating that sort of like they're there hunting and they're there and they're killing stuff right but then there's other times there's a whole bunch of bones but no arrows and I don't know this seems kind of a stretch

and I don't know if it's the researchers is doing this assuming it was all pass-throughs man but they're saying that well just at that time it was just Wolverines killing all these reindeer and stashing them huh which they do it seems like there had to be a lot of wolverines right around there doing this.

In the same spot. Yeah, same spot, which I want to get to about this spot and ask you guys a question here in a second. But there's other times where the inverse was there, right? Like a lot of arrows, but no bones. And they just figured that at that time, the humans were taking,

like literally using more of the animal or using all of it and taking it off the mountain where this, cause this ice patch is at high elevation, right? So instead of maybe just taking some meat, they're actually taking bones, antlers and fur for whatever reason they were going to use it for, you know,

making things, trading, whatever it might be. Gotcha. But he also makes the assumption that because they found like a point that was made out of iron, there was a point that was made out of a sharpened muscle shell from a river like 50 miles away. And then there was a stone point there.

So the guy says, well, even though their technology changed, they still kept their same hunting techniques. And I'm like, eh. And he's just saying technique as in because it's all in the same spot, right? And I don't think that that's necessarily like a technique. They were like hunting a zone that had animals, right? Yeah. But like, they're just returning to the same spot.

It's like, I don't look at it as the same technique. Wasn't he talking about that they were using archery equipment, though? I mean, was that what he was referring to? Like they could have used something different. Maybe. Did I say tech? Yeah. He said their hunting technique stayed the same,

even as the weapons they used evolved from stone and river shell arrowheads to iron points. Yeah, I think that's him saying they just showed back up in the same spot year after year over hundreds of years but here's my question to you guys yeah well listen hold tight a minute yeah if you were shooting uh old delta points you go up and hunt a spot and you're shooting old Delta points. Then all of a sudden like razorbacks come out and you start shooting razorbacks up in that same spot. Then a while later, mechanicals come out and you start shooting mechanicals up in that spot. And then like single bevels come out and you start shooting those up in that spot.

Uh, I think that you could safely say that this dude's techniques stayed the same, but his shit kept changing around. His tools just changed? Okay. I don't know. Alright, I'll take it. Now,

why do you think it's an ice patch on top of a mountain, right? Yeah. In Norway, like central Norway. Food plot. I'm going to cut you off at the gap. He had a food plot there.

Well, but that is the question. Why there? Why there? What drew the animals there? Do you know the answer? Yes. Is it a saddle? A saddle. No. No. If there's ice there, there was water there. There you know the answer? Yes. Is it a saddle? A saddle.

No. No. If there's ice there, there was water there. There was a water hole when the climate was much drier. Maybe. Any other guesses?

Corn pile. It's not a pass. I'll give you a tip. Yeah. They were always hunting there in the summer. Calving area? Maybe, but that's not what this article said,

not what the research said. Oh, they're avoiding bugs? Yes. Oh, get away from all the mosquitoes, man. High spot, high windy spot. Hmm. Isn't that something? That's a pretty big speculation.

We don't really get to apply that ambush technique. That's speculative, man. Oh, come on. They do that now. We know that. In the summertime, you can go anywhere in the high Arctic, and that's where you find them. We talk about mimicking caribou to avoid mosquitoes in the book. Oh, I thought you meant that's what the dudes were doing.

No, no, no. I totally agree, man, because when you go out in the mountains, the caribou in August are always laying up in a snow pile on top of a mountain. Okay. That's a tip in the survival book. They literally are laying in snow patches on the north side of peaks. I totally buy that. This is a good book report. I was going to give a bad grade when he kind of messed up that

techniques part but now i don't know i think you should read the story and decide for yourself because i think he was kind of leading me the wrong way um so that's kind of the interesting stuff about the the hunting what uh the researchers sort of like their big takeaway and that the takeaway from this article is that they're hoping that an ice patch would be like this perfect time machine, right? Where if something was like the last, the thing that was the oldest, everybody thought would be buried the deepest or be at the center most part of this ice patch, right? Sure, yeah. And then things that later in time would come in there would be sorted to the outer ends. But after this discovery and then being able to radiocarbon date 60 plus arrows, there's finding out that's completely not the case.

And they're just guessing that underneath the surface, because of melting and movement, that it could be like the water melted a little bit and then a little river or little stream carried an arrow to the outer edge of an ice patch. Shit's getting all jumbled up. Yeah. And it's also getting torn up and mangled. And then if it's, let's say something like a light arrow shaft all of a sudden appeared on

the surface, the wind could very easily blow it to the edge, right? Or blow it right off of an ice patch. Yeah. The full metal jackets are on the bottom. Yeah, they were expecting like a layer cake of aero technology. Exactly. Well, just like an archaeologist digging in the dirt, right?

You're going to expect the oldest stuff to be towards the bottom. How big is this ice patch? 60 acres, I believe wow i have a great way to visualize that because i grew up on a 60 acre lake so it's just about the size just for you people at home listening it's about the size of the lake where i grew up i bet they'll find a bunch of your stuff there one day, Steve. You ought to drop a signed copy of the Wilderness Skills and Survival book down there in like a Ziploc bag. I tell you what, man, there is a lot of my stuff laying on the bottom of that lake, man. I'll close with this.

To them, it is melting at an alarming rate. Not so much because I don't think they're worried about the uh you know the planet melting or and blowing up or whatever but because they know that they only have today's technology and today's techniques to figure out what they're seeing and what to do with it and it's all coming at them very rapidly and they're just hoping that they can do the best they can you know in the moment yeah i want put, I want to throw a little archeological, uh, archeology, anthropology tidbit in here. Um, our, our understandings and technologies change all the time. And there's this thing in modern day archeology where they'll find some big camp, right?

And let's say this camp is, you know, an acre in size. They'll be like, you know, you're tempted to go in and dig the whole thing up, right? See what all's in there. But they're like, they know that just in 10 years time, 20 years time, our questions are going to be different. Our methods are going to be different. So they'll take a little chunk and do a little chunk now, knowing that they're leaving tons for future generations to go in and do what they need to do with it the the folsom site which

i talk about all the time when they first dug the folsom site which is an ice age kill site where some hunters uh killed some ice age bison when they went in there first they just wanted to find big bones and big projectile points and they dug the whole damn thing later when people started realizing that you could look at pollen counts to figure out what the climate was like and that there was all these other food items to search for and that you could, you know, pursue all these different avenues of discovery. They had to go to those people's debris pile. So they had to go dig through all the garbage that the first archaeologists left behind to try to see what they could discover.

And it was like, imagine if those guys had just taken a little chunk and took a look. And then a hundred years later, other dudes that had a way different idea about how to go about it, taken a little chunk and took a look and then a hundred years later other dudes that had a way different idea about how to go about it had their little chunk to share um so what these boys are saying is that uh that's not gonna work it's all it's all happening right now yep it's coming coming right to the surface. Thank you, Yanni. You're welcome.

That's a great little report. Uh, and thank you, Whit, for coming on. Tell people how to find TRCP. TRCP.org. Come on.

Love to have you involved. Yeah. Um, you can go in if you want to help TRCP. Tell them the TRCP slogan, the war cry. Guaranteeing all Americans quality places to hunt and fish. If you want to get, uh, on that train, you can make a donation to support TRCP and there's other ways you can get involved. Um, so yeah, trcp.org. Find them, see what they're

all about. You can find policy papers and kind of figure out where they stand on everything. Nothing happens in secret. Oh no. No, very transparent. You can find it all out. You don't need to wonder what they really think about things because

it's just laid out there for you. It is public information. So thanks, Witt. Thanks, Brody, Giannis, Clay. Take care, guys. Thanks, guys. Thanks, Witt. 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

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