The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 260: The Wet Spot

Episode Date: February 15, 2021

Steven Rinella talks with Doug Duren, Spencer Neuharth, Seth Morris, Phil Taylor, Corinne Schneider, and Janis Putelis.Topics discussed: Picking on Chester's donut purchases; Sonja's coyote pecker bone earrings; was Elvis's colon really full of cheeseburgers?; when you're an early 1800s botanist who gets held up by the New Madrid Earthquake and your assistant steals your samples, then publishes your information; duck hunters murdered on Reelfoot Lake; how Spencer sends boxes of rocks to Doug; would you tell a taxidermist to alter your deer?; how Steve’s dad had a wild pig’s butt mounted; a one-eyed deer and antlers coming out of the chin; Jani’s message to do whatever you want and tell others to F off; ragging on Wisconsin’s deer hunters; even if you’re sick of hearing about CWD, it ain't going away; buy time and pay for science; and more.  Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

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

Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google Play Store. Know where you stand with OnX. All right, everybody. First thing, I was going to start out talking about how disappointed I am at Chester's job of how bad of a job he did at hanging up some things

he was supposed to hang up in the studio here. It's horrible. He doesn't hang them in the studio here. It's horrible. He doesn't hang them up like I do. No. Like, they go together, but they're cockeyed. And then he allowed... Someone did a poor job of framing those two. But what I'm going to talk about instead,

yeah, I mean, it's a piss-poor frame job, but it didn't improve any with the hanging. Good thing you weren't in Mexico with us because someone else followed Chester's grocery list that he wrote up for us. And you wouldn't believe. What wasn't on it? No. Well, more so what was. We had literally stacks, towers of containers of donuts.

There's never been a donut on a meteor shoot ever no i don't like donuts man um what else was there seth that was really out of place oh soda pop multiple cases of sodas i'm like coke yeah i don't like soda i now and then in mexico will sometimes get the thinking I might like a soda water But then I drink half of it And I just feel like going and brushing my teeth Yeah Well when you're down there you get caught up in Cause it's like the special Mexican soda

They use cane sugar Yeah You do get caught up in that Instead what I'm going to talk about Part two It doesn't really matter to you folks You do get caught up in that. Yeah. Instead, what I'm going to talk about, part two. So, like, it doesn't really matter to you, folks. More episodes. We got more episodes up on Netflix starting February 17.

February 17. Four days after I turn a whopping 47. Can you believe it? I can. Been alive that long. It's many years. Yeah, and you're still tearing up the mountains. Yeah, dude.

I'm like an inspiration for old people. Yeah, you're doing good, I think. Five new episodes up on Netflix starting February 17th. And good ones, man. Ain't no throwaway episodes. Good ones, man. Ain't no throwaway episodes. Good ones. Coming up. I'm pointing this out because I like this person's name.

Sanja. If your name is Sanja, what is your name? Sanja? Sonja. Sonja? Yeah, I would pronounce that Sonja. Oh. I'll still do it anyway. I was mostly interested in her name. Oh, you know what?

There's this artist. Check this out. There's this artist. She's not, you, you wouldn't fricking believe here. You want to talk about someone who's good at making art. Well, my favorite, you know, my favorite artist is Seth's girlfriend. So don't, don't be thinking that that's not the case, but this. Seth plugger. What's her Instagram? Cause I don't be thinking that that's not the case. But this. Seth, plug her. What's her Instagram?

Listen, I'm going to talk about another artist, but this is meant. A rising tide, Seth. A rising tide lifts all boats. Yeah. Absolutely. You see what I'm saying? I'm being metaphorical. Yeah, for sure.

Okay. Now, this. okay, plug her. K underscore Ray Johns. Yeah. She's emerging as the greatest wildlife artist of all time. Meanwhile, hot on her heels. There's an artist. On her Instagram is Jamie Wild wild art jamie wild art she

does these like things of dogs that look like it's like you can't even tell i'm not the kind of guy that measures art as being that it looks a lot like a photo but like i don't you know but it's so weird like look at this that shit that's a pencil drawing it's like it's kind of like only when you leave it like unfinished you realize what you're looking at anyways she's offering to make me an art piece and i've been telling her i want an art piece of wolves killing a buffalo but i don't want i want it to be like actually with its guts hanging out like that's like mortally wounded but still on its feet with one of them pulling at its intestines and stuff and i said i don't want to squash your creativity

but that's what i'm picturing when i close my eyes and she's going to try to work it up nice that'd be sweet uh how'd i get on that oh sonia because corinne made those duck feet earrings which my little daughter wore around a little bit. And then our dog. Did you know our dog ate one of those? Like my pair of earrings is now a earring. It's like more in line for like a guy with one earring. Did she swallow the metal too?

We can't figure out. She got it and we can't find the metal. And she, I don't know. I think an x-ray may be in order. No, because she's fine. She'll pass it. Okay. Yeah, she's fine.

I mean, it was like. She's weird stuff. She had a game bag once. Yeah, but the wires all hooked, and well, hopefully she's good. It was weeks. It's been weeks. Were those from your speckle belly feet? No.

No. No. There were, I think there, I couldn't, I separated my, some of the speckled belly feet from the specks. And then there was a thing about not being able to transport that. So I left them there. Oh, I see. I also have frozen geese with the feet on, but I think if I defrost them and make earrings out of that, it's just not the same because it's like all wet and frozen and it's, I don't know if it's going to dry out the same way.

It'll be exactly the same. Yeah? Totally. Okay. There's not that much water in those things anyways. Okay. You're golden. I'll make another pair sonja sonja she makes coyote baculum earrings which are great beautiful

but the weird part the reason i bring it up is um so she makes like coyote pecker bone earrings but she points out that her husband does not she kind of like spells it like trump like it's all uppercase does not like these which is like why you can't even come up with one reason that her husband wouldn't like well does it feel like is he like jealous of the coyote like i don't understand like what is he like does he feel that it's like emblematic of him being emasculated like i don't understand like what's not to like about it. No, I just think that the same people that probably just get a little squeamish when you're just talking about pecker bones might get a little squeamish and uncomfortable

when their wife has a pecker bone hanging off her ear. Yeah, I don't know. I'm always telling people they might need to get a new wife, but this gal might need to get a new husband. When we're coon hunting down in Arkansas, we should bring those pecker bones back for Corinne so she can make something out. Make some big earrings, man.

Yeah. I'll get my ears pierced if I had a set of those. Yeah. Oh, man, that would be epic. I think Steve needs like a single piercing and a dangling pecker bone. Who's that dude that used to do 60 Minutes? Had that earring?

Ed Bradley. Good job, Doug. I forgot about you up there. That's Doug Duren, ladies and gentlemen. I'm just here for information. Clay Newcomb is going to be making a video for TheMeat the media.com and how to make a raccoon baculum so the raccoon makes it he's gonna make a video about how to steal it from the raccoon maybe how to clean it maybe exactly at that point you're just like a drill bit away from having earrings so

check that video out on our website i want to get into Clay's business and just make videos about stuff that's interesting to me. You kind of do. Yeah, but just like quick return, you know, quick turn. Oh, we never talked about this last time, but we teed it up. Because I was talking about how,

remember how like when, who was it? John? No. Oh, like when Elvis died, his colon was supposedly packed full of cheeseburgers? Mm-hmm.

And John Wayne was in that group, too. We covered on this thing quite a few episodes ago. We covered about this 1,000-year-old mummified carcass. It was 1,000 years old from a man. I can't remember where. In the desert southwest. And he had had evidence of having a disorder that caused him to have this enlarged

colon. And how it had 2.5 See, with this guy, it had 2.5 pounds of, what this guy doesn't realize, this guy's pointing out that that's not that bad, 2.5 pounds what this guy had 2.5 pounds of what this guy doesn't realize this guy's pointing out that that's not that bad 2.5 pounds of feces in a colon is not bad but this is a mummified colon right it's like it's just different so it's not with the i don't know what the hell it would have weighed with all the moisture in it either Either way, what was interesting about this individual is they were doing some work on this and they realized that he'd probably died from this disorder he had.

But in the final days or weeks of his life, he had been eating grasshoppers with the legs and head removed, I believe. So like the softer, what's that part of a bug, the abdomen or the thorax off a grasshopper? Like the soft part. I believe that's the abdomen. Yeah.

I think. Thorax is the upper part. I'm developing that problem with Spencer that I used to have with Rick. Oh, you trust them. Like I feel that they'll know something. Yeah. But they don't. There's just a lot on the line here

if I'm wrong. I wanted to say yeah, but I was waiting for a combination. I don't think Spencer will go the lengths of like, to hide that he doesn't know.

Feeding you this bullshit. Yeah. Is that a Rick move? Oh, dude. He just like, yeah, he starts just digging a hole.

If he doesn't know, he like, he's good at, he's good at making you feel like that he knows. In fact, he doesn't know he like he's good he's good at making you feel like that he knows in fact he might not know uh this guy bad mouth and his 2.5 pound colon was telling us that at the philadelphia mutter museum i don't know what that is i trust that it's real they have on display a colon of a man who was born in the 1800s,

who at the time of death had a colon that was 40 pounds. 40 pound colon. That sounds painful. That killed him. That would be a fourth. No. How much do I weigh? I can't do the math quick enough

that'd be like a lot that'd be a huge colon for me that's terrible you wouldn't believe it if the picture wasn't there like no but it looks like it dried out because there's nothing for scale right they should have put a burger next to it if they had a cheeseburger next to it. Because right now, I feel like I could be looking at a coyote scat. Yeah, or maybe like a one-pound or even two-pound ribeye next to it. Yeah, well, a burger is more kind of like a burger that's like a known size. Yeah, we could put a ribeye by it. Yeah, it's looking like a dried-out night crawler.

I think it looks like a coyote scat. But yeah, oh yeah, like a crawler that got... You know, sometimes they'll get themselves caught up. After a rainstorm, they come out and then it dries up. Oh, no, yeah, but you're right. Like, and you find them on your driveway or whatever. But I'm thinking, too, about how now and then one will get out of the bedding and get up around the lip of the worm container.

Oh, yeah. And then he'll get in a tight spot, get all dried out. Another piece of interesting feedback, a law enforcement officer wrote in. We were talking about stacking charges on people. So we were talking about that in a recent episode, I was discussing how there's, like, for instance, there's a prohibition you know states all have prohibitions on bartering and trading um wildlife meaning it's technically illegal for you to say to your buddy like hey uh i just caught a bunch of walleye

if you want to bring me by a backstrap off your buck, I'll hit you with some walleye fillets. You're technically breaking the law. You're formally bartering. Now, were you to say to your buddy, I love you so much, here's some walleye fillets, and your buddy says, by God, I love you so much, here's a backstrap, everybody's cool. But it's like a formal bartering. And I was talking about how this guy in Wyoming, uh, an attorney in Wyoming,

who's done a lot of work for the fishing game agency and said, the only time we ever hit anybody with that and some other arcane or not arcane, some other little known laws is when we're really stacking a bunch of stuff on someone. Like you got a real bad character and you want to make sure that something sticks on them after plea bargaining and everything you start just adding on all these things that you'd otherwise never go and apply to anybody and this guy writes in that he had this

dude who became a he had this meth head um he said a methamphetamine addict so what we refer to as a meth head who even he even names the guy can we talk about this guy's name I'll tell you what his initials are I just noticed his initials are BS. Not making this up. BS became a AC unit specialist. Became a specialist at stealing AC units. And one night stole out of an apartment building.

Help me out with this. Help me out. Eight. Out of an apartment building, help me out with this. Help me out. Eight. Out of an apartment building, one night, stole eight AC units. They were working the case. But you got to say,

what he was doing with it, to make sense, is that he was pulling the copper. It was just the way that he figured out how to make quick money, was to pull an AC unit, pull the copper from it, and then sell it,

you know, at, I guess some kind of, it's like a salvage yard or recycling center, and then go buy his drugs. Which causes thousands of dollars in damage, and he yields about $50 in copper. Each one yields 50 bucks in copper. Is that much copper in there? That's what the article said.

Talking about not, and I don't want to name these guys I went to high school with. I knew some guys in high school that hot wired a bulldozer went to a construction site hot wired a bulldozer use the bulldoze these guys these dudes could take i thought it was four i think these guys could take like a like a piece of heavy equipment apart and as they they take it apart, they would just throw all the bolts. They could take your truck like apart, throw all the bolts into a five gallon bucket.

I'm not talking about taking pictures of shit, put all the bolts in a five gallon bucket and then turn around and put that thing back together the way they found it. Mechanical geniuses. They hotwired a bulldozer, stole a giant coil of coated copper cable, got a big rip and fire going,

burned all the coating off. Like, at a point, you could just get a job. Do you know what I mean? The amount of work and risk and stuff involved. This guy... How much did they make

off of that, Do you know? Yeah. I don't remember what they made off it. And that was like their end game was to sell this. To sell this copper. The copper is valuable. So they went through all this and then had to burn all the coating off and burned all the coating off in a fire and had like a big black blob. They sound like they're just the kind of guys that didn't like having a boss.

They didn't, man. It sounds like there's a, there's a dude that got, I was telling you about a dude that got caught poaching elk up by my hunting camp in Pennsylvania. He shot that bull. It scored 460. Whoa. That doesn't even make sense that a bull could score 460. Well, it did.

No, I believe you. You showed me the article. He was just doing it to cut the antlers off and sell them. It's like, why don't you just get a job? Yeah. Because you don't have a job shooting elk. When did this happen? But burning copper.

Several years ago. If you put to me, like, hey, man, I got a job for you in which you'll go shoot 460 bulls, or you can go make a fire and burn copper. That's true, but I think he's still sitting in prison for it. Oh, yeah. So this officer starts working this case, and he knows that when he gets this guy for stealing AC units, nothing's going to happen to him. Keep reading this article, Yanni, so you can help me out where I run into trouble.

What he winds up doing. Tell everybody what he winds up doing, Yanni. What the guy's in jail for. Yeah, he researches the EPA Clean Air Act and violations that he could get under it and found out that, that, let's see. This is in Wichita, Kansas. Yeah. He's charging with federal EPA violations.

Now he's housing a really nice federal prison. I'm sorry. I missed the part for what the actual charge was too. It was basically for releasing Freon into the air. I'm looking at the article right now. Yep. Faces. He went to jail for this. Oh, shoot. BS faces.

Three counts of venting a class two substance in violation of federal law. Each count carries a potential sentence of five years. $250,000 in fine. And you get that. It's sort of like when they cracked Al Capone for tax evasion rather than all the people that

he had murdered and all the other things. Yeah. It's like the one thing they could get him on. Yeah. And OJ, OJ ended up going to jail for stealing his own t-shirts. Like for stealing his own memorabilia. Not for killing his wife in a waiter with a knife. I think an interesting detail is that this guy,

this detective is from the Gang and felony assault unit investigations. So how we ended up prosecuting this guy for a violation of the clean air act is, is pretty, uh, that's a guy who's doing overtime, you know, the article said this will have like longterm impact as well, because this is a common method among meth heads to like turn a dime. So they said anytime anybody's doing this now,

they're going to get hit with the EPA act. Oh, so it was a common thing, stealing AC units. That's what it made it sound like. Yeah, that was a whole storyline. If anyone's seen The Wire, anyone? No? On HBO? You sure it's not the copper tubing?

Well, the drug addicts in The wires steal a bunch of copper from construction sites and stuff to get drug money i think it's yeah yeah one of my favorite short story collections of all time is dennis johnson's jesus son and in jesus son yeah its name comes from the velvet underground you know when i'm rushing on my run and i feel just like Jesus' son, heroin. In it, these two guys go into a house that's been repossessed by the bank and spend their whole day busting the walls out to get all the copper wiring out of the house. At some point, one of the guys wonders to the other guy who owns the house, and the guy reveals that it's actually his house and then that night they have they go to the bar and they

talk about how the drinks take so much better after a good day of hard work than like their normal workless routine. What do you think, Doug? How should we lay this out? How itching are you to go? How itching are you to tear it up? Or should we go into this other thing we got to talk about? You can talk about whatever you want, man. I'm just here for the duration.

So whenever you want to come to me, I'll be here. You'll be here waiting. You owe me $150, Doug. Yeah, it's on the way. Doug and I made a bet. Come and get it, man. One or the other. Doug and I made a bet four years ago. Four years ago or some amount of time.

Over four years ago. That Doug felt that that uh trump wouldn't finish his first term and i was like i think he will and doug got all excited around the muller probe got all excited around the ukraine probe got all excited around the attempted coup and then in the end oh at the last minute when he got excited about the the coup i got so excited when he got that excited he um what he i said if you're that excited doug let's throw down more money doug's like i need odds and then i was like i'll give you two to one odds so doug puts another 50 in and then on the last like the day before the inauguration doug he had some other

thing about well you know there's always like i don't know what kind of helicopter mechanics they got down there but and doug's like you know and i said doug i'll give you 10 to 1 if you want to add more money to our bet if you're if you're at the point where you're bad where it's going to be a helicopter issue so now doug owes $150, which I need to use. I need the money because I owe people money for the bet I lost. I made two bets, $100 a piece, that he'd do a second term. So I'm waiting on your money to then turn around and send that money plus $50 more.

So I'm still in the hole on this whole thing. Well, so am I. I am looking to make a thousand bucks off pebble mine anyway we'll come back to you doug all right uh k spencer get into this whole thing this is some interesting stuff man this is the kind of story that starts making gravy or you know what it It unmakes gravy. It's kind of been that way. People were trying to have it make gravy. Yep. But then the gravy has, rather than thickened, the gravy has thinned. Yeah. On that point, like, there was—

Can you keep it all in gravy terms? Yeah. On that point, before we started the conversation, there was a quote from a reporter on this story that said, This is like a bad horror movie. It's missing a lot of plot points. Basically implying that there's just not enough information yet from investigators. So what we're going to be talking about is a tragedy that happened on Monday on Real Foot Lake in northwest Tennessee. I got to jump in. Phil, you know Real Foot Lake because we've discussed it on the show a few times. put in the audio of how on real foot lake they have a calling strategy where you go

yeah to call in mallards yep that lake is this lake okay that's there wow so we've covered is it i'm guessing it's really popular then it's a massive for duck hunting so just so phil's up to speed and And Phil, maybe you can put that guy yelling back in again to remind people? Sure. I'll interrupt a hundred more times, but go on. You're right. It's a historic duck hunting lake in the Mississippi Flyway.

And when we're talking about the story, I think it's important to understand a little bit about the lake. I'm going to read the description from the Tennessee State Park website. Real Foot Lake State Park is located in northwest corner of Tennessee and is noted for its fishing, boating, and wildlife viewing. The 15,000 acre lake was created by a series of violent earthquakes in 1811 and 1812 that caused the Mississippi River to flow backwards for a short period of time, creating Real Foot Lake. So essentially- The New Badger earthquake. Yes. This is an enormous water body with the average depth of six foot, and it's just a giant flooded forest with a lot of vegetation on the surface and submerged cypress stumps. What year was the New Madrid earthquake? 1800s.

It was right around the war. 1811, 1812. Yeah, it was right around the war. Did you take the challenge when I asked you to discuss the botanist bradbury i forgot about it almost immediately after we hung up the phone so i did not take your challenge okay there was a dude there was an english botanist that had come to america to do a survey a botany survey of the american west he another thing he was interested in,

you know, I don't know if people know this, honeybees are not native here. And this guy was interested in, check that his name's Bradbury, will you? Was interested in that the honeybees were always like ahead of civilization, that honeybees colonized land ahead of Europeans. But he comes out to do this deal, to do this big, gather up all this vegetation.

And then he wants to publish on, you know, vegetation of the American West. John Bradbury. John Bradbury. He's got like an assistant with him. At some point, he wraps up his project and sends the assistant home with all these trunks full of all of his samples. And he's got

a thing or two he wants to get taken care of and gets waylaid by the New Madrid earthquake when the river flows backwards. Gets delayed by that and over this, changes his route home and tries to go down through louisiana the war of 1812 starts up and the guy's like he doesn't get back to he's like two years

late getting back now if you're like two days late you get all stressed out the guy like gets home two years late jeez. His assistant, meanwhile, steals his shit and publishes the piece. She thought he was dead? I don't know. We should get him on the podcast. Look him up. Get him on the podcast.

We need to get one of those mediums, one of those people that communicates. There you go. Did he contest it? Like, was he able to get it back under his name or no? Yeah, something like that went on. That's why I was asking Spencer to dig in, but he forgot about it. It's weird that you would just tell me that flat out,

that you just chose not to research that. I'm not going to be Rick and try to get in a hole here. New Magic Earthquake. Wilco has a song about it. Or no, what wilco used to be before their wilco uncle tupelo they had a song about that earthquake go on so what i'm going to tell you about uh this murder is just what has been said from the district attorney or what was said on the back to the lodgeodge podcast. Now, the host of the Back to the Lodge podcast is a friend of the witness to the murders. So I would lend some credibility to what he had to say. He's a secondhand person and I would say one of the best sources within the first three days of this happening.

You're going to ask me to clarify a lot of things or add more details. I'm probably not gonna have them well i would just like to um i'm actually gonna lean away from my microphone after i say this i would like you to cover the ways in which people um sought to assign a narrative to this that would support certain criticisms of hunting on this lake. I'm leaning back. Monday morning. And the date, just because this is

now it's like February 15th, but it happened what, January 24th? 25th. Oh, what we'll do, man, later. I leaned back forward. Um. You can just pull your mic back to you. Updates.

We'll put, like, updates or something. Sure. We've been updating this story on our website. So as, like, even more information becomes available, you'll find stuff there. Certainly the story will change by the time this episode drops. This happened Monday morning, January 24th. All that was really known was that a 70-year-old suspect was sought for killing a 26-year-old

and a 25-year-old duck hunter. Early speculation on Facebook and forums was that there was a dispute. There were local reporters even reporting that there was a dispute. Some said it was over a dispute. There were local reporters even reporting that there was a dispute. Some said it was over a blind. This lake is said to have 600 duck hunting blinds, a mix of private and public. Some of them you can earn by like being in a draw system.

Some of them are like staked out for the season. From what I've understood, some people said it was a dispute over a blind. Other people said that it was an argument over sky busting or shooting at swinging birds. The blinds tend to get piled up on this lake in a way that if ducks are decoying to one blind, somebody in another blind could have the opportunity to shoot at those birds before they make it to the hunter that's actually calling them. So that was also in the early speculation. Monday night, that was sort of like the accepted story that this 70-year-old man left his blind, came over to the blind of the 26-year-old and the 25-year-old, and shot him for sky-busting birds or shooting at swinging ducks to his decoys. And this was like it had sort of become a story of the culture of real foot lake.

When you saw this talked about on Facebook, people were like, why am I not surprised? Like, of course, it was real foot lake. I knew right away when I heard this story, there's going to be a real foot lake. There's so many problems there with bullying and intimidation and conflicts between non-residents and residents and guides and DIYers that this is just a product that has been boiling up for decades. So that was like the early story of what had happened. We've since learned that it seems as though that's not the reality of what took place. So what I'll tell you now is like what we've learned, like I said, from the district attorney and the podcast where the host had sort of secondhand information. 25-year-old Zach Grooms, 26-year-old Chance Black, and 58-year-old Jeff Crabtree got to their duck blind

about 6 a.m. on Real Foot Lake. At 9 or 10 a.m., a boat approaches the blind. The person in the boat is the suspect, 70-year-old David Vowell. He asks if he can join the three hunters and they said yes. Vowell then loads his gun and shoots Grooms at point blank range in the chest. What has been said on the podcast is that the other hunters thought that they just witnessed a tragic accident. They rush over to Grooms and as they're like trying to help Grooms, Vowell then shoots Black

in the side, killing him as well. So the 70-year-old has now shot the 26-year-old and the 25-year-old within minutes of arriving at their blind asking him if he can hunt with them. So now we have the 70-year-old left and the 58-year-old Jeff Crabtree left. Crabtree wrestles the gun away from Vowell, strikes him with the butt of the gun, knocks Vowell into the lake, and throws the shotgun into the water. The water at their blind was about waist deep.

Investigators later recovered the gun and said a third shell was in the gun, but it was jammed. So, some have suspected that Vowell was also going to try to shoot Crabtree. Now in Tennessee, or this is probably a federal law, I guess, right? You have to have a plug in your gun. You can only have three shells.

So that was his third shell. Nobody's officially said that Val was going to shoot Crabtree, but that's some early speculation that this third shell was jammed in the recovered shotgun. Well, did he have a, if he had a semi-auto, it just would have cycled on its own. I don't know. No, not a lot of details right now on that

part. He had a pump. Yep. So, Vowell, the shooter, has been knocked into the water. There's two men that are laying there with close range shots from a shotgun. Crabtree loads them into the water. There's two men that are laying there with close range shots from a shotgun. Crabtree loads them into the boat and drives away from the scene. As he's driving away,

he looks back and he sees Vowell getting out of the water and walking towards the bank of the lake. And that's the last time that Vowell is seen. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there,

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

That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the 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. So at this point, you have grooms in black that are dead crab tree is alive and vowel is missing and has been charged with two counts of murder they have not yet found him why was it that why was it that when you know whenever something like this happens, you just get flooded with text messages and links and whatnot. What was all the stuff that he's on the bottom of the lake somewhere? Or that he's probably not alive. What is that coming from?

The weather has been bad in that area. Like I said earlier, Real Foot Lake is largely a submerged or a flooded forest. So there's a lot of stuff below the surface that makes it dangerous for boating. The lake has rised since Monday because of storms. There's been wind and rain. And his boat was found 200 yards away from the scene, but Vowell has not been found. So Vowell left the scene on foot. And because of the rain, the cold temperatures, the rising water,

they suspect that if he's still in the area, that he's not alive. And that is a quote that the DA had. He had said, there's no good way out of there. This from the district attorney. It's a huge wilderness area. We're convinced someone assisted him in leaving the area or he's still in the area. If he's still in the area, he's more than likely not alive. Now, like I said, within the first 24 hours, most folks had assumed that this was an argument that happened over the blind or over swinging ducks or whatever. And the language that the Tennessee Bureau investigation of investigators investigation had used was thatell has not been caught and he is armed and dangerous, which sort of like fueled that this was like an argument that happened.

On the podcast, a friend of Crabtree said, there was no confrontation. There was no fighting over a duck. There was no fighting over a blind. What did take place was heartbreaking. And that is that a gentleman, Vowell, who was going through something very, very difficult and challenging, was not able to process what they were going through. And that resulted in the tragedy on Monday. Now, the district attorney has also been quoted saying, one of the first things we look for is motive. Here, we don't have a motive. We don't see a motive. Mental illness may prompt a shooting or a crime.

Perhaps that's what we have here. Or there may be some motive that we just don't understand. Those were quotes that came out yesterday morning. But then last night, sort of like the information that everyone was waiting for to be confirmed, the DA said in an interview that Vowell, the 70-year-old shooter, has early-onset dementia. I take it they've been probably interviewing family and friends of Vowell. Yes. Yep. And Vowell had no criminal record prior to this.

I had read a quote from a friend somewhere that said something like, he wouldn't go as far to say a cuss word. Not not that that doesn't make somebody capable of murder, but it sort of adds to the this being a mental illness thing and and fueled by the dementia that the D.A. has now confirmed. So the D.A. has provided like a lot of information. One of the reporters working on this story said that he's the most transparent DA that you could possibly ask for and has been really good about communicating with people. But the DA also said that it's his job to not cloud the judgment for a potential future jury. So with that, there's probably some information or details being withheld yet that we don't know. Obviously, law enforcement has more information at this point. Man.

Crazy. Heartbreaking. Yeah. From Spencer's crime desk. Yeah, so this is all the information we have right now. We're going to keep updating themedia.com as things become available. Who knows? By the end of the day, they could have a body.

They could have him in jail. We could know more about his mental state. Now, another important detail in this is a lot of people have asked, why didn't Crabtree shoot Vowell? There were plenty of guns around. He obviously had like that opportunity to do it. And the host of the podcast who had talked to Crabtree again said that the gentleman that survived this didn't even have the heart to shoot the guy in self-defense he even tried to help the third party that is wanted which is vowel he even tried to get him to shore uh which sort of further confirms that there was just some sort of some state of confusion uh by vowel when this happened

you know uh an interesting thing about how it was handled in the media would be that because there was no actual connection to these problems that people talk about at Real Foot Lake, these like overcrowding, competition, all the tension there, they would like, the articles would be like, oh, there's a double homicide at Real Foot Lake. And then it'd have this sort of tone where you're like, oh, and you know, by the way, a lot of disputes on Real Foot Lake about blinds and who historically had a blind. And now that the public land hunters are there and they're hunting just, you know, a little

something to keep in mind. That was how it was presented. Yeah. Making the connection, but the glue isn't there. Yep. Hey, this is Spencer Newharth. And since we recorded this podcast, there have been new developments on the Real Foot Lake double homicide. On January 30th, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation announced that they recovered the body of David Vowell in Reelfoot Lake.

According to the Tennessee River Valley News, Vowell was discovered by a hunting guide in an area locals refer to as Grassy Island, a spot not too far from where the incident took place. Although autopsy results won't be back for a few weeks, Nick Barris of News Channel 5 heard from sources that Vowell died of an apparent drowning. High lake levels from heavy rain caused authorities to temporarily halt the search and District Attorney Tommy Thomas said the water temperature was 39 degrees. This is a developing case that we're going to continue to update you on. Head over to TheMeatEater.com for more on this story.

I got a follow-up for you. How are you to go uh fishing with me on monday and why is it that your wife will not go um and i told you that we would wine her and dine her and you still said she will not go i'm excited to go my wife just is not interested in in hunting and fishing in general. Did you take offense when I said we'd winer and diner? No. Okay.

Nope. Um, and I'm, I'm cool with that. My wife has 0% interest in participating. In ice fishing. Ice fishing. I offered to call her and talk to her about what it's like to be out in the cold and dark at night fishing and how she might enjoy it.

And you didn't even want me to give her a ring. No. Nope. I'm real satisfied. What you don't understand here is it's very cold and dark. I'm real satisfied by her lack of interest in participating

because I would rather it be 0% than like 30% or 40%. Oh, dude. I am not saying, trust me, trust me. I am not saying, trust me, trust me. I am not saying that she ought to be, should pretend to be.

Yep. I just was looking for a little clarification. I have tons of friends where their spouses or boyfriends or girlfriends or fiances have like that 30 or that 40, 50% interest in participating in stuff. But then they get cold, they get tired. They don't want to wake up in time.

And it just like makes the experience worse for everybody. My wife was that way at one point. We've been together for over a decade at this point, though, at 0%, it's been that way for the last five years. And we are both very happy with that arrangement. She likes picking rocks.

I was just about to say that. Yeah. She goes rock hunting. Loves picking rocks. Yep. At, at risk of, risk of fostering a jealous, fractious work environment here, I'll point out that my wife

got a nice set of earrings from Spencer's wife out of rocks he picked. They picked. So did Corinne. And so did Kelsey. Yeah, Kelsey got a pair too. Did Phil get a pair?

No. Doug, you get any earrings over there, buddy? I don't, but I understand and sympathize with Spencer, sympathize is the wrong word, but my wife is not interested in hunting at all either. I mean, she's an artist. She's just like, this is what I do.

That's what you do. And other than the eating of it, you know, it's really not a thing. It can be a little hard sometimes because of the amount of time that I want to spend at it. And she's like, well, you're going to go and do that. I'm going to go and do something else. But I guess we get enough together in this time. But Doug's wife will guard in circles around you. Oh, that's for sure.

Doug didn't get earrings, but I did send him some other rocks the other day. Oh, yeah, man. And garnering all kinds of favor with me, Spencer, and almost to the point where I'm forgiving him for some of his transgressions about Wisconsin. But yeah, and they're proudly displayed. I guess I actually posted a picture about them,

a couple of garnets and some petrified wood. And it's really interesting going to your mailbox. And actually, I guess they came UPS, but you pick up this thing and Trisha's like, what is in here? I said, well, it's a bag of rocks. She didn't believe me until I opened it up, but there it was, a bag of rocks.

You guys are going rock picking on, not, yeah, Doug, not rock picking. Doug's like, did we talk about this before? I think we did. Doug heard rock picking and he got excited because he thought they were going out into fields. Oh, yeah. Picking rocks to make a farmer's life easier. And he's like, well, that's awful nice of them. picking he got excited because he thought they were going out into fields oh yeah picking rocks

to make a farmer's life easier and he's like well that's awful nice of them he's like that's great because doug's like doug you know doesn't enjoy rock picking but no recognizes it as something that needs to happen and there's there's great value in it and actually uh the the flint rock that we have it here in in the driftless area, in particular in our township, my father always referred to as Westford Diamonds. So I'm looking forward to Spencer coming and picking some Westford Diamonds someday. Me too. But rock hounding. You guys are going rock hounding on Monday before we fish.

That's right. And then she's going on home. She's going to go home and I'm going to go ice fishing. And like I said. Are you guys going after bourbon again? Shh. Oh, we can't talk about that?

It's top secret. Sorry. All right, Seth. Hit this deal. This has been sitting in our to-do list for a long ass time. Are you equipped? Because I see your name there.

Yeah. There's this fellow from Louisiana that rode in. He's an archery hunter. He had this, I would say, a hit list buck he had his eye on for quite some time and uh had a bunch of trail cam pictures of it and tried killing it with no success and then one day it showed up on his neighbor's trail camera with its antler flopping to one side. Hmm. Um, and his neighbor showed him the pictures and he, he didn't think that it was the same buck that he was after until a couple of days later,

it showed up on his trail camera. And then he realized, you know, that's the same buck that he's been after and it must have been hit by a car or something. And it broke a chunk of like, didn't break his antler off. It broke the skull, like below the pedicle. So we just had like a flopping antler.

And so the guy like. It actually had like movement. Like when it walked, it flopped. If you look at the pictures though. Yeah, if you look at. I saw the pictures. Yeah, it looks, it's a nice nice buck it's a damn nice buck i'm sure uh yeah i'm i'm sure it would flop when he would walk it looks floppy it's probably painful as hell oh my god can you imagine man having your

skull cracked this happened this very story happened to me and yanni but go on um so he like he he made it like he he really wanted to kill this buck to just basically put it out of its misery um which i i don't know if the thing would live or not man they can survive so much i've seen elk man i've seen elk healed up from broken skulls i killed a wild

hog one time that had broken his lower jaw clean, and it had fused back together. Really? I shouldn't say clean. It was so broken and fused up and whatnot that I don't know why I said broke it clean. It looked like it broke the jaw. Yeah. You know why I thought, like broke the jaw. Yeah.

You know why I think I thought it broke a clean? Because it healed at an angle, like a hockey stick. And I was like, there's no way that would have happened if it had been. Yeah, yeah. Makes sense. Why are you looking incredulous when I say that? No, I'm not. I trust you.

You were there. For the pig? Yeah yeah I don't remember so he he made a liar go on Seth so this this guy made it his like personal mission to try and kill this buck put it out of its misery why not try to get it because it's a huge buck? Well, yeah. I'm sure that too. But since it's suffering, he really wanted to get it now. It says fast forward several days. He got his opportunity, made a 50-yard shot, and watched it expire. So he has this nice buck with a floppy antler. He wanted to get it mounted.

So he got it mounted. Um, so he got it mounted and he had, when he had it mounted, he had it put back normal. Like, like, you know, the buck was the whole time that he was getting pictures of it and had all

this history with it. Stupid, stupid, stupid. And he wants our opinion on that because he's getting a lot of flack from he's getting a lot of flack from friends and colleagues and just he says

even random strangers. Just all of a sudden there's a knock at the door. Like dad someone's here I don't know who it is. door yeah apparently people are giving them shit that people are giving shit because he didn't mount the buck how he killed strangers here i got the grocery store somebody's like you the guy i recognize you yeah um so yeah he's catching a lot of flack for mounting this buck how it was before he broke his skull. His argument is that he was putting it back into its state of glory. Yeah. Listen, man, that was a huge mistake. I would put that buck mount out in the road in hopes that someone hits it and knocks it back to how it's supposed to be.

Really? Yes. Or I just hit it real hard with a bat and knock it back to where it. Why is that supposed to be that way again? Because, listen, I've never, well, no, I have. I've gotten some rugs and things. I've never gotten a shoulder mount of something made up. Ever.

No, but okay. How about this? How about you get a buck? No, I've never gotten a shoulder mount. What would it take for you to get a shoulder mount? Well, I would like to get my late father's. He has a fawn, a deer fawn. He had a wild pig's butt that my brother took.

He has a little shitting buck mounted. He's got a bear shoulder mount mounted. He's got a pig shoulder mount mounted. I want all those mounts, but I don't want one. I don't think they look cool. And you would never ever, say you killed a state record white tail. I'd do what I would always do. I'd get the skull cleaned up and put it on my skull shelf.

All right. I just don't like, I don't think they look cool, personally. I don't think, I don't want to like make it be back to how it looked when, well, in this case, he should. I'm not like, like, like, I'm comfortable with its deadness, right? I'm comfortable with its deadness. Do you know the painter, what the hell's her name? Always painting skulls and bones and whatnot. Southwest, Santa Fe.

O'Keefe? Georgia O'Keefe. Georgia O'Keefe. You think she ran around painting deer looking all normal? Uh-uh. Skulls. So, here's the thing. If I was going to get one and I said to the tax nervous, oh, yeah, if you don't mind, can you just make them look a little bigger?

Like, the point is, it's how you got it. If you are going to do it, it's how it was when you got it. That's what you're memorializing. When you get a fish stuffed and they don't even use the fish when you get a fish stuffed, you don't change it to have it be like, you know, like, oh yeah, if you don't mind adding a few pounds on there. I feel like he must've been a lot bigger when she was spawning last spring. So let's make her look fat. Back to her glory.

What would you do in this situation? I would have stuffed that thing so fast with that antler cocked over to the side. No, you wouldn't have stuffed it. You would have just done what you always do and boiled the skull. And you would have, like, you always do and boiled the skull and you would have like one antler would have like a four inch chunk of skull attached to it and it'd be quite everybody would ask you'd have a story to tell a lot yeah i have a different kid dropped i would be like no in fact i have a different way to look at it too but but go ahead, Spencer. So, uh, in, uh, 20, 2018, I shot a buck in late December with my muzzleloader that

dropped in his tracks. He didn't move an inch from where he was standing when I bulleted him. Wait, what month? December. It was like December 23rd. He dropped to the ground. And when I got up to him, one antler had

popped off. But that wasn't how you got him. Well well i don't know if he died before the antler popped off or not there there was a tight window there where i can't assess what exactly happened so would you mount it with the antler back on him yes because that's how it was when i shot at it oh all right that's how it was when I shot at it. Oh, all right. That's how it was when I shot at it. Oh, I saw a Remy one time. He shot an elk, and the elk fell over and the antler fell off because it slid down the mountain and busted its antler off. We were with him for that one.

I do remember. Yeah, and I'd be like, in my mind, you could screw that back on because that's how you got him was with his antlers. Now, what if you shot a deer, in like october okay with your bow and he runs off you made a bad shot in the guts he runs off you know that's that's reasonable you never find him oh until until february you find him but by this time squirrels have chewed up his antlers they're now bleached white he doesn't look like he was when you shot at him are you gonna restore him no but you know what the the you know how i said i

want to get my old man's buck so my old man he this buck was like not a big buck but it was big for at the time because you didn't see like you never saw bucks that had lived past their first year. So what we thought was an enormous buck wasn't. It was just, I can't remember what it was. It was like 120 inch whitetail. He got it stuffed. Here's the dirty secret. It wasn't a dirty secret.

He told everybody about it. So the old man is sitting there in what we call the pine plantation on the Zerlot farm. And the old man sticks a deer right below him. Okay. So there's no exit. The arrows comes in like into his back and no exit wound. Right in the lungs. It runs into the corn.

And he's like dead deer. Okay. In our tracking of the, we could never find a drop of blood. We now looking back on it, think that we basically were like sitting, like sitting on that deer, sitting around that deer, but we just in the corn somehow didn't find it, even though we like circled all around it because the farmer then went

to harvest that corn field and found the deer. My old man, questionable or not, my old man took the head off that deer, went out, got the head off that deer, and got a cape from someone and stuffed the deer. And that deer is in my mom's living room at the minute I'm sitting here talking to you. She puts a Christmas bow around its neck at Christmas. It's sitting there right now. So he did reconstruct the buck. He didn't recover that buck, but we know that we should have. And like, we just missed it in the corn.

It doesn't make sense. We missed it. I later went, I was with my brother. We later went and looked at that buck, the headless buck. And I looked in there, I could see a possum's tail wiggling around in there. And there's a hole in it about four inches across. And I put my hand in there and hauled that possum out by the tail and took a photo of it. In that buck.

And, like, over time, all the details went away, and it became, like, the old man's buck. Was it? You know what I mean? But that, like, it became, like, oh, there's a dad's big buck. It's like eh Kinda Yeah that's a whole other rabbit hole I don't know if we have time to get into

I have a way to look at it So he gets his buck mounted because he wants to remember How it was Before it got messed up Say you have a dog Right And you spend lots of time with this dog But say you have a dog, right? Okay. And you spend lots of time with this dog.

Okay. But for some reason, the last month of its life, it ends up getting sick and then dies. Mm-hmm. Do you want to remember that dog for the life you had with it before it got sick or the last month of its life when it was sick? Hmm. Seth, bring in the heat. I like it. Here or the last month of its life when it was sick. Seth, bring in the heat. I like it.

Here's the deal, man. Doug's just shaking his head on the big screen. So the dog analogy is it doesn't work because this is a wild animal and uh had that deer not had its horn busted that guy may not have gotten it so that i agree with steve on that oh yeah he shot him yeah right i mean if had it had its wits about it he may not have gotten it i mean the only it sounds like the reason he got it is because it didn't have its wits about it yeah you know i shot a one-eyed deer one time, and everybody thought that I got it because it had one eye. But I pointed out that its good eye was in my face in my direction. Yeah.

So my taxidermist, or the guy who does taxidermy around here, is a friend of mine. When people ask him to fix an antler, he won't do it. He's got that level of scruples. Yeah, he said, no, I won't do it. That's not the way you kill the deer. And then, of course, the other thing is when you do get a deer stuffed, the only part of it, I mean, it's hide, but all it is is a skull cap. So the ones, I kind of feel like you do, Steve.

I'll probably never get another one um another shoulder mount because they just don't look like the deer that was killed oh yeah but the standard the standard looks awesome man well yeah but it doesn't look like a deer that was out in the woods running around but it's a great piece of taxidermy it's just an average buck for around here um anyway uh but uh but he was big i mean his face and everything was bigger i mean when they do those measurements and they cut you know stuff off every deer that i've seen stuffed and that i was able to compare it to in life they just don't look they don't look as good they don't look as big to me at least so, here's my take on the dog thing.

What you should have said, Seth, you should have said this. If I was doing what you're doing, I would have done this. I would have said, let's say you're married and you love your spouse. Like,

and you're married 50 years, most beautiful, um, spouse you ever laid eyes. I'm trying to make this so, so it's, everybody can appreciate it. So I'm just saying spouse.

Yep. Most beautiful spouse you ever laid eyes on. Loved her your whole life. Him, her, them. Spouse. Spouse. And then they develop a heinous facial problem that kills them. They very much wanted to have an open casket.

This is what you should say. They very much want to have it. Always had said, when I die, I would like you to have an open casket funeral. Yep. The mortician comes to you and says, Seth, how are we going to roll here? I could fix her right back to her glory.

Him, to his glory. Or I can leave it the way it is. That's what you should have said. Yep. Not make it some dog thing. And then you would say, then you would say, fix it. Implying that this deer had said that he would want to be mounted, right? The deer had said to his buddies, he said, listen, everyone knows sometimes you don't make it through the rut.

Should I fall? That was good. During general, should I fall during general firearm. Let it be known. I don't want them... When I said this happened to me and Yanni, this is embarrassing for me. We were hunting deer one time,

and I see a buck coming, and it's in the brush. Right. Right. It's in the brush. That detail's never come out before. But go on. Feel free to interrupt him here. Coming through the thick brush that very much obscured my vision.

I see a deer coming that has such huge antlers that there's actually antlers coming out of its chin like so much antler that there's antler below its jaw i believe i said here comes a buck of a lifetime yes but it was in fact a forky that had got hit by a car and one of its antlers had become dislodged yeah i just saw like tines yeah if there's a time by its chin there must be 10 others above his ears imagine how many must be on top of his head hard to see in that brush but i'm telling you oh i don't have much to say about this uh this here talking point and story other than i feel like it's a little trivial and you know we should all be so lucky that we can you know have fun and talk about this but like bradley i think you should do whatever you want to do with that damn buck and all those people just tell them to F off.

Don't worry about the random. Straight from Yanni's desk right there. I wouldn't worry about the random strangers. We'll see you next 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. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Yeah, Spencer primed me up for this. Spencer and I had a little chit-chat the other day. Spencer's sick of CWD. Yeah, I think a lot of people are.

No. Oh, you're not? I heard from Corinne. I heard from Corinne that you wanted us to not beat this one to death. You didn't even need to hear it from Corinne because you were also on the email. What I said is that through data on our website, there's a bit of exhaustion from our readership about CWD. It's hard to get them interested. So I said,

there's probably a little bit of the same sentiment among podcast listeners. That's what the email said. Well, I sure like you're sure not filling Doug's bucket. As they say at my kids elementary school. Enter Doug Duren. Enter double D. uh not filling doug's bucket as they say in my kids elementary school doug duran it's very very important that we do continue to talk about it even if it has been beaten but uh what spencer primed me on that i had no idea what was going on

which is the exciting part maybe you should save this to the end duck but i heard that spencer was basically calling out wisconsin deer hunters and you were none too happy about what he had to say about you guys oh well i'm i'm i was i mean if spencer's got evidence that somehow the wisconsin deer culture is all about trophies and entering them into a record book. Great. But on a previous podcast, he talked about that and was saying, well, Wisconsin calls itself the big buck capital of the world. Do they? Or other people call it that, Field and Stream or whoever calls it that. And, you know, it's because we have more Boone and Crockett, Pope and Young books, bucks registered than any other state.

And he said, oh, it's because people in Wisconsin are braggadocious and they want to be in the record book. And I was like, well, no one, being from Wisconsin. Well, right. And being from Wisconsin and being willing to take a look in the mirror, you know, I thought, well, you know,encer's probably got some real good information on this so i asked him about that and he goes oh i never i've never hunted in wisconsin i only sent us spent an afternoon at a wedding in the state so i'm like but what are you but i didn't talk to the bride's uncle who's a deer hunter he told me so anyway i just was like well i i guess um i don't know how else you decide who

you know where the uh big buck capital is if it's not by the number of bucks and so you know uh like that line and caddy shack how do you measure yourself against other golfers by height um same thing how do you i mean how do, how do you do that? And, and I mean, it's, it's, there's a lot, I mean, I love to have Spencer come out and, and you know, show him around and, and I hope he does that. And then I can kind of show him why the Driftless area is home to so many big giant bucks. I, I concede to you, Doug,oug and i i will now refer to wisconsin as the big buck state but i i felt justified in our conversations because um after that podcast dropped you were instagram messaging me you were emailing me telling me random strangers yes Yes. And Doug wanted that title.

And I felt as though it showed that there is that culture and that mindset there in taking pride in the record book sort of thing in Wisconsin. Okay. That's not what we're here to talk about. Yeah, we leave it at that. A guy wrote in, kind of laying in about, kind of laying in about, what the hell is his name? Just give his first name. I don't remember. Oh. Guy from Southeast Minnesota.

I don't remember his name. Yeah. Practically neighbors with Doug, because Doug's from Southwest Wisconsin. And that's an important point where he is and where we are very similar in topography you know deer herd yeah uh all of that so he he lays in like let me tell y'all about cwd and i knew in reading it i was like i feel like a lot of this stuff he's telling me is not accurate, but I didn't have the time to get into it, but I felt that it was like interesting enough

that I wanted to, I was like, Doug, you'd take a look at the email. You read the email. And then Doug was supposed to explain what he's saying. Cause I feel like this is probably like a commonly held thing. If you somehow don't know what we're talking about, we're talking about the deer and elk, the cervid, the deer family version of like mad cow disease, which is spreading every year

into more and more deer herds across the country. It's got people pretty worked up for two reasons. One, because they could wind up potentially, we don't know yet, being real problematic for deer populations, that they won't live long. You won't grow a huge box anymore because they're all dying. Or that someone would wind up getting sick from deer meat, which has not happened, but it definitely keeps you up at night thinking about about it no one wants to be the first person no evidence that it's happened yet thousands tens of thousands of people have eaten cwd

infected deer meat but it's still like i don't it just makes you nervous so with that doug talk about what this guy taking this is like Joe Blow America out there saying, like, here's why CWD is so full of shit. And what is his sort of take on it? The first thing I want to respond to is I understand the fatigue. Believe me, I'd rather not talk about this either. But I can guarantee you one thing about chronic wasting disease. If you ignore it, it is not going to go away.

It's only going to get worse. And we'll talk about that in a minute. So this guy had a few different comments. One of them was that there's no evidence that humans have contracted CWD from eating meat. Well, that's true. I don't think I've ever said anything else, that there is no evidence at this point that it's spread. So fair enough. But his reasoning was that's why they let you take the meat home, but they don't want you to take the spine and head

home. And the problem with that thought process is that the reason for those transportation movement restrictions are to protect the herd, not to protect people. This is a wildlife agency that's doing this, not a public health agency. The only thing that public health has ever said about it was we recommend, you know, CDC and World Health Organization, we recommend against and recommend you get it tested and you don't eat it if it's positive. The, the carcass movement is all about protecting the herd in, um, the, where you're going to. So that's why they want you to properly dispose of the head and the spine where of course the

prions are concentrated as well. Um, meaning that they know you're going to wind up dumping that, that you're going to wind up taking those bones and it's not going into your freezer. Right. You're going to dump them at the boat launch. So, yeah, exactly. Which used to be a popular place to dump your-

Or in a dumpster if people are doing that kind of stuff, right? His second comment was meat doesn't carry disease. And he said, see above, you know, the thing about, well, they let you take the meat. So, well- What this dude, Doug, see above, you know, the thing about what they let you take the meat. So what does dude Doug, just to what this dude was responding to on this is I was saying like that I'm full of questions about CWD. Like I'm not, I'm not sitting around and act like I know something that I don't know anything that nobody, nobody else knows. Right. I know what I read.

Um, and I read conflicting things and I try to sort it out in my head. But I said, when I meet a guy who's like telling me, hey, it's no big deal. Don't worry about it. I said, I would like to feed, make that guy a burger out of a bunch of CWD infected deer and put some brain and spinal column stuff in there and whatnot. And then if he eats the burger, then I believe that he doesn't think it's a big deal. If he questions eating the burger, then I know that he's like me and he's a little worried about this whole thing. The guy that wrote in that I sent to Doug pointed out, um,

that's why we don't eat the brain and we don't eat the spine because the meat safe, but isn't, doesn't the shit like it's concentrated in the brain and spine, but it's found in the muscle, right? That's exactly right. And so he's off on that. He's wrong on that. And there's a, there's a study that shows that.

And I guess, you know, logically you can think about it too. Another prion disease is mad cow disease, um, BSC and people got that right. There was a, it jumped from cattle to, it jumped from cattle to humans. And that came from eating the meat. So it's in the meat and it's been proven it's in the meat. So I forwarded the study to, to Corinne and she can put that up or, you know, I can answer this guy directly if he wants. But, why don't you? If you want. But there's, you know, there's studies that shows exactly, that show exactly the opposite. And the one that's still happening is the macaque monkeys and everybody's going to go, oh, the one that was disproven. Well, it wasn't disproven, actually.

Two of the monkeys in Canada were fed only meat from CWD, positive white-tailed deer from Wisconsin. That's an ongoing study. It hasn't been published yet. So I would, you know, I'm not a scientist, and I would suggest that, you know, scientists talk about that more. And there have been some conflicting studies. So the point is that—

Hold on a minute. Did the monkeys, like, it was reported that they got reported that the monkeys got CWD from eating deer meat, little chunks of deer steak. But in fact, that's not what happened. Yes, it is. There were five monkeys that got it. Two of them had it injected into their brains. Two of them were fed spinal column, or one of them was injected in the spine and all that.

Two of them were fed meat only. And who got the, what monkey got it? Those are the five that got it out of the, all the monkeys in the study. So a monkey did get it from eating the meat? I don't know. I thought that was discredited. Yeah, no.

And it's, I mean, the reason I'm hesitate, I hesitate to talk too much about it is because it's an ongoing study. They, there's nothing that, other than the Montana, was it Montana? I'm sorry, I don't remember who that was, but there was a conflicting, or another study that said, well, we did the same thing and no monkeys got it. So that's not that unusual, at least in my sort of logical way and animal husbandry way of thinking about it. You know, my cattle, animals all together, not everybody gets the same disease. You know, not everybody necessarily gets COVID.

Not, you know, no matter what that is, right? Yeah. So, but now you can look into that and that study is ongoing and that will come up. So that being said, it has not been proven to transfer to humans. My only comment about, like Clay and Seth were both talking about that, and I've been there with Clay. I mean, hell, the last time you deer hunted out here, we didn't, I don't think we tested those. No, no, we did test them. No, that's a lie. We did test them.

Yep. And I waited for my results before I ate my deer because I felt that if we ate the deer and then got the results, my wife would be like, hold on a minute. So you saw that it was appropriate to send it for test, but then if you cared enough to if, if it, if you cared enough to send it for testing, why do we not wait for the test results before we ate it? Like, if it doesn't matter, why did you send it for testing? And I didn't feel like explaining all that. So I just waited. Yeah, no.

And, and I think that, uh, I think that's a good policy. I, I, I respect anyone who is their, their choice. Uh, like Seth said, he would, I'll eat that burger. Um, I will tell you this, I had a very different experience when I hadn't actually dealt with it. And Spencer's had that situation too, like there it is. When I found out that I had a positive deer, it was a very different mindset than talking about it in theory. Clay said that he hadn't had a deer tested yet and they'd been in an area. And of course, same thing. I've been in a CWD area. It was quite a bit solid, but there's a chance that I've already eaten CWD positive. But why would you continue that

when you have the opportunity to have it tested and at least make an informed decision? Part of this guy's point was, I don't want to waste the deer. And my response to that is, you didn't waste it. You took that deer off the landscape and you took that infectious animal who's spreading, casting prions about and spreading it to other deer, you took it off the landscape. So you did a good thing there. And the other part is you save that deer from a miserable death i've been i've seen them now i've seen not well we've had pictures on the farm but i haven't seen a live one that's on its way out on the farm but i have seen them in other places it's a miserable death so you save that animal from that um you know you look at a picture i don't want to go down the road of i mean if

somebody wants to eat it that is their uh their their choice. And I respect that. I would say though, let's not make that choice for other people. So if you're in hunting in a CWD area, get the deer tested. If you decide to eat it, go ahead and eat it yourself, but don't serve that unknowingly to someone else. And I had really questions, um, uh, serving it to, uh, to kids too. So, um, that's that. Um, what else did he have to say? Oh, dog shit doesn't carry the disease. Well, that's false also. And I, uh, sent to, and I wanted to, I mean,

I've got a Mingus, uh, Yanni's dog holds a special place in my heart because he's named for and everything. Yeah. Oh yeah. I've never met the dog. Um, but, uh, yeah heart because he's named for and everything. Oh yeah. I've never met the dog. But yeah, because he's named for Charles Mingus. Anyway, and why would you, I mean, it does happen, right?

There's two studies, one of the coyote and one of, I think it was crows or something. And the point is, is what goes in the front end comes out the back end later. We've all heard that before, right? So if you don't have CWD like around your place, and I've been over to Yanni's place, and you feed that dog CWD positive meat, now it's going out and taking a crap. And unless you're going out and picking it all up. And they never do. I don't know how many times you say it to your kids.

They never get it all yeah well smart guy teaches his dog to go out far enough but um and uh and so now you have it there yes it's in very low concentrations going through the meat and all of that sort of thing but because it is an exponentially growing disease that's exactly the kind of thing where you can have some control of your environment and why wouldn't you? So I applaud Yanni for that. And I felt it was just wrong when it came to that as well. Then he talked about the low prevalence in Minnesota and why are we spending all this time and effort on it and money? And the short answer on that is perhaps the reason you have a slow or low prevalence and a slow spread is because these management policies

have been in place. In fact, I would submit that's exactly why they have a low prevalence because Minnesota's got a pretty damn good CWD response plan. And if you want to see something in comparison, one of the other things I sent Corinne, and I'll post it on my social media later too, is a time lapse of the change in spread and prevalence in Wisconsin over the last 20 years. And there are, I have some markers, it's not necessarily on that, but I'll write it into it, of where we gave up. Wisconsin's program didn't, when they say, well, see, it didn't work in Wisconsin. Yeah, it's because we stopped. And all we're doing is putting carcasses in a dumpster

and we're not really even trying to control population or control disease or anything. We failed. I mean, I would say that if you want to learn about CWD and what not to do, take a look at Wisconsin. Southeast Minnesota has got the opportunity to control it. What I'm fighting for in my area is to have a healthy deer and have a healthy deer management. We're at 20% positive of deer tested in this county now. We have 30,000 deer in the county. You know, about 1,500 got tested of the 6,500 that were killed this past season. And 20% of those were positive. By my place, I'm on the Northern edge of all of this, we're down at like four or five percent. I get one a year, two a year. And I, you know, I don't want to give too

much credence to what we're trying, what I'm doing, but we're killing a whole lot of deer and they keep making them, right? I mean, deer keep making them. And so, I would submit that the control measures that Minnesota has been doing is what's exact, exactly what is controlling, um, the disease they're not. And, and I can see he's got that exponential growth. He did a nice job on the math. Um, and so take a look at that. Um, but it's an exponentially growing disease, both in the animal and on the landscape.

And I know folks are – I'm sorry, folks, that you're tired of hearing about it. But if you don't have it, you don't want it. And if you do have it, you want as little of it as possible. I want that littlest little of it as possible. And so – Spencer Newhart, he kissed my ass, man. I care what he says. Listen, my take on CWD is what I learned from Doug Dern, articulated by Doug Dern, is pay for science.

Buy time, pay for science. Yeah, sorry. I was going to do it the other way around. I was going to pay for science and buy time. Buy time, pay for science. I think that there's this thing in the CWD denier community, it's like, it's wishful. I feel like it's like wishful thinking on their part or they're ahead of themselves to be like, doesn't matter. Look the other direction.

Doesn't matter. Nothing to see here. I'm like, I don't know. Like, I really don't know. But if there's the potential for a problem and if there's a disease that's spreading around, and if you love deer and you love deer hunting and you love eating deer why would you not want as much information as you can get your hands on it would be wonderful if in five years ten years someone's able to say oh look uh weirdly it winds up for all these reasons that seem perfectly plausible, it winds up not having population-level impacts. Like something happens within the herd dynamic, and we don't see catastrophic collapse of deer herds. shaped where unlike similar diseases that afflict sheep and unlike similar diseases that afflict

cattle um we know for a fact now that it can't touch humans i would be like awesome because that's what i wanted to hear all along i'm not like rooting i'm not like cheering on cwd i hope it's bad i hope it kills people it's, that's not what I hope. I just want to find out, man. I don't want to look the other direction, which is what seems to be what the deniers want you to do is not even look. Right? You're bad for looking. Actually, in defense of my friend from Southeast Minnesota, he's like, you know, I'm not a denier. I know it's a problem, but it was sort of relative was his point.

And I think that what I see and feel and hear from people is that the deniers are few and far between now. It's now a question of, well, how bad is it or how bad can it be? And I kind of, my friend Mitch Baker has said a few times that I'd rather we did as much as we could and find out we did more than we had to than find out we didn't do enough and have a disaster on our hands. And again, if you look at that, and I'll just give you some anecdotes. A friend of mine who's got a property about four miles south of ours, they killed a nubbin buck on his place. It tested positive. If he wouldn't have killed that buck, it's never going to be a big giant buck. It would have been dead at two and a half years.

Right? His neighbor had four out of five bucks test positive. I routinely get messages from people who are saying six out of eight. The hot zone south of us, about 25 miles, is over 50% in bucks, over 35% in does and rising. We still have plenty of deer because we, I mean, you guys have been here. We grow deer like crazy. You know, 1.4, 1.5 fawns per doe. We can keep producing. We have 60 deer per square mile.

So we're not going to run out of deer. We're just going to have more and more of them, and we already have that, that are diseased. And I think I sent you another note from one of the members of our CDAC. He killed three deer in his yard this past year that were just standing there and that were emaciated and went through all that. It's a horrific disease. You know, animal rights people should be concerned about it. Using my example of the Nubber Buck getting it, and he's never going to be a big giant buck. If you want big giant bucks, we need to control this disease. If I can keep disease in my area at five to even 10%, at this point, I'll consider that a, a victory.

And you might find this an interesting detail because you, you know, you guys know the farm up there on the big ridge where you killed that giant turkey that time with, with dirt myth down there in the bottom, all five of our positives have come in a kind of a line right there in that little bit of acreage. You're saying because dirt myth had been down there. Well, it could have been. But there happens to be a big population of deer, you know, that, that kind of stay up on near there and that's sort of on the fringe of it. So, you know, the scientists that I've talked to about it have said, well,

you know, don't read too much into that, but anecdotally, it's, it's really, uh, uh, a little unsettling and kind of interesting, you know, but that said, um, we had, you know, it was a little weird deer hunting this year because of COVID. Um, and, uh, but my brother and his nephew came hunting for the first time in a couple of years, which was great. We just did things a little bit differently in terms of gathering in the house and, you know, and all of those sort of things. And, you know, we killed, like I said, 63, 60, maybe 6,600 deer in the county. We're back up like 23% this year. Even with that positivity rate, deer hunting in Wisconsin has a good future.

We just need to do more. We need to continue to do more about this. And I'm inviting, as we're sitting here, I'm inviting Spencer to come out and learn all about it. We got a letter one time complaining about Doug. It was some dude in Doug's area complaining about Doug bringing down all the property values by talking about CWD too much. The powerful Cazenovia real estate lobby. Right, and I've been acquiring land ever since. Doug buys it up, man, yeah.

All right, thanks a lot for the report, man. Yeah. All right. Thanks. Thanks a lot for the report, Doug. You owe me 150 bucks. It's in the mail? It's in the mail. I mean, truly is in the mail. It truly is.

And then you sent cash. Is that correct? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I did send cash. So, oh, you have somebody out there rooting around in your mailbox. I know. That's what I'm a little bit afraid of, man. Yeah, I'm just going to be like, yeah, I got to cash. So, oh, you have somebody out there rooting around in your mailbox. I know, that's what I'm a little bit afraid of, man. Yeah, I'm just going to be like,

yeah, I got to run. Your wife. And I'll be there in the next day or so. Yeah, I'll just tell Katie that Doug Dern sent me a letter for some reason to Steve's house. You see it? Address to him. Don't open it.

Thank you, Doug. Love you. You're welcome. It's interesting to me how we treat uh we talk about cwd and treat it as i think as a society and look at it very similar to how we look at climate change and you have that same sort of like denier group people that are like don't even look yeah don't even look you know shut up and but and i'm in the same way you described is kind of where i've settled on climate change.

I don't know. But like, I'd rather do too much and find out we did too much than, you know, 80 years down the line go, oh. Yeah. Remember all that not looking? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Biologist talks about changing animal patterns, which, you know, you can demonstrate with great clarity and precision. It's like bad that they brought it up. They get criticized for bringing it up. Yeah.

Favorite, like a favorite talking point amongst CWD deniers is like Wisconsin's management of it and how they didn't get rid of it. Um, or maybe not even slow it down, but there was a CWD expert, um, that told me years ago, he's like, Wisconsin is not a good example because the CWD horse left the barn many years ago. Not only is that horse out of the barn, but that horse already died. It's like, it was just too late to, to get in and make a huge difference. But other states, New York, Illinois, Missouri, they have a chance to make that difference, where Wisconsin didn't.

To the CW, to the deniers' credibility, to their credit, here it's been around all those years, right? And Doug still has big huge giant bucks running around in this place i couldn't believe a picture of a buck he sent me from the wet spot yeah well you know just an average deer around here you know in the big buck capital of

the world put a little buck man juice down there and see what turns up that's right no and and that's important i appreciate appreciate that, actually. Deer hunting is really good around here. I mean, there's a reason people come to Richland County. He's trying to drive those, now that he's got all that land. You see him trying to drive the values? He's trying to restore property values now.

I've acquired all that land, now I'm building it back up. As a matter of fact. But, and the way to, I mean, just keep doing it, keep enjoying it. And, you know, this is an interesting point. It's very different than what you guys deal with out there. But 85% of our county is considered deer habitat. And that's about 50 square miles, 85%. So, but 95% of that is privately owned. So

if we're going to do anything, really, we need to either incentivize or force private landowners to do something about it. I'm kind of working on the incentivize end of it, you know, and, and yeah, I try to share my place with as many people as I can. Um, and you're right. And we still have big giant bucks, you know, there's, there's some beautiful deer around. Um, interestingly also, most of the deer that we've had positive, the oldest one was a three-year-old doe. The other ones have been year and a half and two year, two and a half year old bucks and a year and a half old doe. So, you know, our older bucks, I mean, you remember Yanni, the last time you were here with, with all the, the, all your buddies, all the

Latvians from, from Toma, all those deer, man, that truck full of deer, including that one big giant buck, that one eyed buck at that, another Yannis shot. And none of those deer tested positive. And, you know, there's those deer around, but that's by controlling the disease, we can continue to have that kind of hunting.

That's the other end of it. So, I mean, I'm trying to do all this stuff. You know, Steve, you and I've talked about oak management and I'm trying to manage oaks. I want deer around, but I don't want too many. And it's, you know, these things are the same, the same, the reasoning is exactly the same. You know, we're trying to balance everything

in an ecosystem. Yeah. So. You know, if I could have an inanimate object on the podcast, I would have the wet spot on the podcast. It's a magic place. I'd be like, why are you always wet?

Why are you a mud puddle? And why do big deer always go look at you? And I have filled that thing up. I have actually filled that up with clay and run it over and packed it down because I don't want a bunch of water. Yeah. He's like a leopard don't change his spots. That's what he'd say if I asked him why.

Doug, what you might try now is instead of fighting, you know, the wet spot, maybe just make your road go around the wet spot. Yeah, why don't you just move your road over 10 feet and then you'd have a pond and a road. Now you're going to force me to go up there and take a picture because that's exactly what I've done. What's the 15% of your county that's not deer habitat? Is it like concrete and water or what? Yeah, the highways and Richland Center, our county seat. We have 30,000 deer in this county by the estimates. And the population, the human population is about 17,000.

Man, that's great. Yanni, we didn't get, Yanni's our new dog expert. We didn't get to your... You'll retain. You'll refresh. We're going to talk a little bit. We'll tease it. We're going to talk a little bit about blood trailing.

Yeah, we got some interesting stats. Well, it's like a growing thing. I mean, it's been around for a long time time but it just gets more and more prevalent it's like every group of hunters my prediction is in in some number of years every group of hunters someone in that group is gonna want to have a recovery dog well yeah i was just thinking how when i first heard about it nobody that i didn't even know anybody that had maybe even like used a recovery dog to find a wounded deer. It was just like, you know, this thing that you kind of heard about. But now I would almost bet that someone in this room has used a recovery dog to find a deer.

Anybody, Spencer? I've been, I've seen one not recover one. Yeah, we attempted in Michigan. Save. But yeah, I know people now, they're like, oh, yeah. Well, Yanni's got all kinds of stats we're going to get at, but I got to scoot. I got to scoot.

All right, everybody, thanks a lot. Appreciate it. Seth, it was a good job. Good seeing you, Doug. Phil, you know what I want to get, man? I want to get – do you think it'd be too distracting when someone... When Seth's talking about

what he was talking about, remember how I said I wanted one of those dials that they use when they're testing things on people? Yeah, like how their interest dial. Yeah. If we had...

If Seth was talking about something, if we had one that was like a low... But then as he talks, if I get more interest, I turn it up. And then pretty soon it's like, do you think that would detract from the listening experience? Unfortunately, yes. Yeah. It could be that the better job he does, you turn it down. Oh.

So like rewards. Oh, yeah. So when he starts out, when he starts out, it's like, but as he starts out when he starts out it's like but as he starts kicking ass it quiets we'll test it out he starts getting pumped up kick ass exactly

he did a good job on that I especially like the part when he tried to turn it into a dog thing Doug was right to call it out that was good I'm sorry I didn't hear that Seth what did you say about Doug? he tried to turn it into a dog thing. Uh-huh. Doug was right to call him out. Appreciate that. Yeah. That was good. Okay.

I'm sorry. I didn't hear that, Seth. What did you say about Doug? Just good looking dude. All bubbly. That was Phil talking about Doug. Bubbly Doug. I agree. Oh, okay.

Great looking guy. Just like when somebody says Doug is right, I usually ask them to repeat. He's like, what, what, what? What's that? All right. Ladies and gentlemen, Doug Duren. Thanks, Doug.

Thanks, Doug. Thanks, Doug. Thank you. Far away in a far away diseased land. Love you. Hey, have me on for something that isn't CWD sometime. Yeah, I might do that, Doug. Anytime, Doug. We're going to have Doug on to talk about how to properly get your cheese curds squeaky again

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