The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 266: Crying Wolf

Episode Date: March 29, 2021

Steven Rinella talks with Jon Mooallem, Gaspar Perricone, Brody Henderson, Ryan Callaghan, Phil Taylor, Corinne Schneider, and Janis Putelis.Topics discussed: Papa Jani's wish to have guests introduced at the beginning of the show; how Ronny B. got Steve in trouble, and a correction about raccoons duking it out with dogs inside barrels; moss balls and zebra mussels; Tonka trucks and tularemia; "Wild Ones," "This Is Chance!" and the great Alaska earthquake of 1964; Richter as a nudist; the sociology of disaster; Cal's look alikes; wolves traveling very far distances; The Great Chill, or The 2020 Die Off; wolves coming to Colorado, like it or not; how many elk will they really kill?; social legislation and wildlife as a vehicle for vendetta; where to watch "Cal In The Field"; 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 everybody, Giannis. There's a note from Giannis. In the notes, Giannis has a note. Can we please introduce all guests at the beginning of the podcast? This has been Giannis for years.

For years. All that man wants yanni i i like to have the suspense i i don't introduce him because i like to create a suspense because i think a lot of people just listen because they're like one of brody's there right okay well i just want you to know that uh that there's another man sort of sitting on my shoulders that's talking to my ear all the time as you're not introducing the guest. And you can probably guess who that is. It's the same man that thinks you should not heat birthing tubs with sous vide devices. Correct. Your devices. Correct.

Your father. Correct. Do you like in movies, do you like if you're watching a movie, do you want to know right when the movie starts what's going to happen? No. I can tell you who would, though, would be my kids. We've recently started to introduce them to uh star wars and so we watched four five six over the last two weeks and they cannot take it if they

they get that feeling of uh anticipation just a little teeny teeny bit they cannot stand it that they know something is about to happen and they don't know what it is when you know after we met uh you know the after we met i don't know if he talks about this though anyways i was watching uh where the red fern grows and then uh old yeller with my kids and before we got into it, I told them, listen, these dogs, you know, the dog dies in the end, right? I just want you to know this up top. So I knew that it'd be upsetting to them. So watching the movie, they're just enthralled. They love those movies.

They get to the end, and I'm thinking, well, now that they're sucked into the plot, they will, you know, stick it out now that they know, like, cause they're so engrossed in the story, but it gets up where you can kind of smell what's going to happen. That the dog's going to die and they just, they want to turn it off and walk out of the room. I thought for sure they would be like, wow, what the hell, let's tough it out. But no, they're like, oh, really? He's going to die now? Okay, click. Done. I don't think they want to deal with the emotional trauma. I'll tell you right now, I'm right there with them.

When my kid senses something coming up on a movie he doesn't want to watch, he plugs his ears and runs out of the room. He doesn't want to hear, he plugs his ears and runs out of the room. He doesn't want to hear it, see it, nothing. He's like, my God, Luke Skywalker's going to keep his arm in my mind. That mangy old yellow dog. Okay, Yanni, introduce everybody then. This one goes out to Yanni's dad. Oh, geez.

All right, who all do we have here? Brody Anderson. How's it going, Papa? 15 years ago in old Colorado. It's maybe 20 years ago now. Dude, it's 20. I got news for you. Hailing from the great state of Pennsylvania, Brody Anderson.

Okay, that was good. All right. And as I'm dealing cards, I'm just going to pretend like John is right here on my right-hand side. So I'm going to continue to deal cards. There's Steven Rinella

at the head of the table. Ryan Callahan. Yellow. Corinne Snyder. Are you more of a Snyder or a Snyder? I think she's a Schneider. I am a Schneider. You like the sh schneider i am a schneider you like the sh all right uh phil

our lovely podcast engineer hello and then the uh esteemed author john muallum who we had on i guess three years ago or so to discuss his book the wild ones yes yeah nailed it that was bad we're gonna discuss oh no let's not tell him what which book we're gonna discuss so you do like a little suspense a little bit it's just yanni's dad wants to know who's there but he doesn't want to know why are we leaving out the mystery guests for now yeah all right just to keep yanni's dad at the edge of his seat. Just to keep him irritated. So there is a little surprise for people coming later on. I just got home last night from Mexico. We went down for spring break.

We go every year. We go to, yeah, I guess I could say every year now because for a lot of years we've done this. We go down to East Cape. So Southern Baja Peninsula and fish and just sit on the beach and stuff it was fun but i almost got i'm almost not here reason i bring this up because you now right you have to show that you haven't had covid to get on a plane and they got this big testing facility set up at the airport in Baja. It's like a big tent. You get results in 30 minutes. The tricky part is, you know, there's like false positives and stuff from the thing.

So it's a little unnerving. If you have a family of five, you feel like you're rolling the damn dice. Yeah. And you've had it. Well, that's the trouble. So I had my paperwork from the health department, the county health department. And I had my paper. It all had an official stamp had it. Well, that's the trouble. So I had my, my paperwork from the health department, the County health department, and I had my paper, the all like had an official stamp on it, official signature on it. And it said like, what day, you know, whatever, what day you had it and this and that. And it says you can resume normal activities. In my case, you can resume normal activities January 15th.

But Delta, who I'm normally a fan of, won't accept it. They said, oh, you need a letter saying that you're cleared for travel. And I'm like, but it says right here I can resume normal activities on January 15th. Nowhere can you find point to me a website that says that spells out that requirement that traveling isn't normal activity i'm not putting this on you brody i'm just meaning like no one could point yeah so it's sunday i can't get hold of it you. You call your doctor's office and it'll be like, you know, if it's an emergency, call whatever. And the flight's going to leave. My whole family now has their tests.

So I go down, I go to the tent. And, you know, it's my fault because I don't speak Spanish. So I'm not blaming anybody. It's like I'm not blaming anyone but myself. But it's very hard to convey my concerns. And I go in to do the rapid test, and the thing is, once you've had it, you can get these residual positives.

So I take the test and be like, I'm either going to be in Mexico for a couple weeks. Beach mom and it's being efficient. Yeah, minus my family or and thankfully it came back negative and i was able to get on the damn plane so you were trying to say like listen i need a test but here's my unique situation and they're like you need a test or you don't need i was like what do you What like, what's your take on this situation? You know, can you like barely swab my nose?

You know, and they, man, they were just, it was very binary. Oh, for sure. But I just think it's hilarious because you could suck out the language part, put you on any place in the planet in that situation. And I guarantee that person's going to be like, bro, I'm not here to think about your situation. I'm here to swab you or not. I want to know, was the family upset or were they just ready to leave you there?

Yeah, I don't know. It wasn't like that. The kids, they get a little anxious about stuff like that. You know, be like, we're never going to see each other again. They were getting a little anxious, especially the oldest one. He was tracking what was going on and what it was not like and what he was hearing. He's not quite old enough to be like, listen, I have a boarding routine, and I just need to get into my routine.

You deal with you. Yanni, you remember how I was telling you about all about this thing in Germany that I didn't really know what I was talking about, but I had heard, I had heard that in Germany you put your dog in a barrel with a raccoon and they duke it out. Are you remembering this? That's right. Okay.

Well, the guy, and I got around equating this to NAVDA, which is the North American Versatile Hunting Dog Association, of which my friend Ronnie is, you know, he's always been very involved there. And the president of NAVDA. Yeah, and I remember, I just want to clear my name. I remember being a little... I remember being a little incredulous, a little

skeptical of your statement. Oh, I'd heard this German thing a bunch. From me. No, not from you. I don't want to get into how i know about it but i know about it and i know it's a here's the listen typically associated with drothars go ahead yeah and it's like i don't know what that is it's one of those dogs it's like a shade of a hair of a difference

between a german short-haired pointer nav Navidad, this is Ryan Callahan. You can come on after me for this statement. I'm going to do my apology, and then you come mess with him. You guys got to back up about why you'd put your dog in a barrel with a raccoon. In a pen. It's called the sharpness test. I like a barrel better. A sharpness test.

I don't want to get into, i didn't make this i don't wake up one day and make up i'm not there's such a thing as putting a dog to fight around i believe it's something people would do to why would they do it though that's why i'm saying to train they call it like that he's got them these that he's blood you got sharpness right sharpness which is like a which is a which is a soft term for having a lot of grr. Yeah. You've got to fight the spirit. You want your coon dog running away from a raccoon.

It's just a way to test that that dog is a high-test fighter. Yep. Okay. I did not wake up with... Ronnie had explained to us that historically, when they hunted farms, game farms in Europe, they wanted their upland bird dogs, if they came upon a vermin, to kill it. Well, he's coming on the show pretty soon.

Kareem, can you remember that Ronnie could talk about this whole thing? Because he's got me all in trouble. Possums, raccoons, skunks, egg-eating things feral cats that's right anyhow he wrote in he's fired up very friendly david trahan tran trahan president president north american versal hunting dog association wants us to know that this sort of thing. He said that I made what sounded like a vague, factually incorrect reference to the sharpness test used in some German testing systems that are unrelated to NAVDA. And he doesn't know where I'm getting this whole barrels with a raccoon thing. Anyway, so he's like, you got that wrong.

And then you got the fact that this has something to do with navda wrong says it's neither condoned by navda nor to the best of my knowledge practiced by any of our members we're concerned that listeners who are unfamiliar with navda our goals and our mission might come away from that discussion thinking that it's done at all or worse worse, thinking that it's common practice, and that would be truly unfortunate. And he goes on to say they have 85 chapters, 10,000 members, U.S. and Canada. And although some aspects of our testing system are based loosely on those used in Germany, NAVD does not evaluate dogs' performance related to hunting mammals of any species.

Rather, we focus exclusively on upland and waterfowl hunting. And they are dedicated to treating all animals, including dogs, and game with respect and dignity. So. Cleared that up. Remember that show, Happy Days? Yes, I do.

Fonzie, he wasn't able to say wrong. He'd be like, I was. I was. Yeah, I mean, I was wrong. Like, I was wrong. Hey, you corrected it. But, you know. It's all good.

I was wrong. I should. Still, you know. It's all good. I was wrong. I should still a little bit. Nothing's going my way today. It's not a barrel, it's a sack. No. I was wrong. Okay, Cal, tell them about the moss balls. Oh boy.

Okay, so apparently if you're an aquarium enthusiast, you buy these moss balls to drop in your aquarium tank. And this is something that's distributed through like all these national pet store chains. And it was found that there are some zebra mussels inside moss balls. Zebra mussels proliferate at a high, high rate. They are bad for native ecosystems as a non-native species. Like transform, like what zebra mussels did in the Great Lakes. If you're worried about wolves in Colorado, you should be worried about zebra mussels in your neck of the woods.

But there are Great Lakes zebra muscles sympathizers. Yeah. So, okay. Here's one scenario. Here's one scenario. Dirty water. With all due respect, Cal. Okay.

Go ahead. There are. Yeah. But the Great Lakes, they're like an experimental aquarium anyway. It's like, it's already all made. Nevermind. Go ahead, Cal. I'm staying on.

I'm done. I'm done. I'm done. I'm going to talk about this rabbit fever deal with this little girl. That's it. Mussels, right? They filter feed. They eat zooplankton and phytoplankton. So in systems where we see maybe just dirty water, that can oftentimes be a shitload of food that all of our fish, including game fish,

when they're at a very young age, they depend on that zooplankton phytoplankton to get large enough to where they can then start being a more fun fish to catch if you're just worried about game species, right? What zebra mussels can do is they proliferate so heavily they can clean a system so much to where that water is crystal clear and you're like oh my god how pretty the lake is must be must be good must be good that's what i was talking but it can be very very scarce on life and um then you can get in all this other stuff that like the sun's rays are penetrating way deeper in the water column than they used to be. And then other things that can proliferate and the oxygen can go way down in the lake and then everything dies. Yeah.

Okay. You get aquatic vegetation in places you've never had it before. Yes. And then it's only suitable for what always lives, which is carp. Anyway. Your aquarium moth balls. Moss balls. Okay? Old moss balls.

I would think. Don't just pitch them out in the yard. I was calling them zebra balls on the podcast. Thought that was cute. Don't pitch them out in the yard or just throw them away. If you have purchased some of these things, I'm sure you're eligible for a refund. Is there a brand name? I didn't see a brand name, but these are apparently ubiquitous amongst national pet store chains and things like that.

So take them, throw them all in the freezer for a good 24 hours or like most people do. You'll just forget about them for several months. And then, then by the next time you come across them, then you're cool to throw them away. Um, or, you know,

you can like soak them in bleach, um, and then throw them away. But the worst thing you can do is like, don't flush them down the drain or throw them out in the storm drain or something like that. One of the Brody was talking about zebra mussel sympathizers. I'll tell you who's not is industry in general,

because like filtration systems and stuff like that. Uh, uh, yeah, they clog them up. Yeah. Yeah. Your,

uh, water power plants, stuff like that yeah like i don't know what the actual number is but it's like a billion dollars a year just managing the things yeah cleaning cleaning them off yeah so like montana you know there's water there's uh watercraft check stations all over the place uh in the months. And one of the things they're looking for are zebra muscles inside, um, the, uh, the bilge area of your watercraft. And then if you look at this stuff online, you'll always see like these, um, kind of stereotypical pictures of zebra muscles being stuck all over old

boat props and the bottoms of boats. Yeah. And then, like, in the Great Lakes, especially, you get, like, on the lock systems, just, yeah, somebody's making good money cleaning off zebra muscles. So if you got moss balls, bleach them. Bleach your balls. Okay, this is for Easter. A little

tularemia story for Easter. A listener wrote in. He says he's got a public service announcement. He's apparently a Tonka truck enthusiast. That's how this starts.

Correct? Yes. He's a Tonka truck enthusiast and wakes up and checks on Craigslist and sees that there's a kid selling a bunch of Tonka trucks. So him being a Tonka enthusiast, um, it was funny. I,

we used to have a lot of Tonka trucks when i was a kid and i imagined my mother's attic being sort of this repository of amazing vintage perfect tonka trucks that must just be up there and i got my kids pretty excited for a trip to grandma's went up there just not what i remembered did she get rid of them or they just weren't as cool as you was like well buy a bunch of tanker trucks i mean there's one that's not a tiger truck and it's got three tires not sure what happened over the last 30 years it's not the attic i imagined it being. He's a Tonka enthusiast. So he goes to the guy, he goes to buy,

he goes to this kid's house to buy the Tonka trucks, makes his purchase. And the kid mentions like, hey, I also raise rabbits. So meat rabbits, the guy raises meat rabbits. So he buys a meat rabbit and the trucks and brings the rabbit and the trucks home.

But the meat rabbit, he gets to a seven-year-old, and the meat rabbit scratches the seven-year-old. Barely drew blood. Everyone goes about their business. Now, imagine this now. So we know where this is going, but picture that he gets a rabbit, rabbit scratches the kid, 20 days goes by. Her lymph nodes swell up.

She gets a high fever. Go to the hospital in Oregon. They keep focusing on, has she been scratched by a cat? Cat scratch fever. First time that I got it. So, keep asking about cats. They give her some antibiotics. Do nothing.

Lymph nodes grow to the size of an egg. They do a surgery on the poor girl. They remove her tonsils. They remove her tonsils. They remove her lymph nodes. They leave a three-inch scar on her neck. A month goes by. The fever returns. The lymph nodes swell again.

They go to UC Davis. Again, you've been scratched by a cat. Again, they say, oh, I forgot to mention this. In Oregon, were you scratched by a cat? No, but she was scratched by a cat. Again, they say, oh, I forgot to mention this. In Oregon, were you scratched by a cat? No, but she was scratched by a rabbit. UC Davis, were you scratched by a cat? No, but she was scratched by a rabbit. All of a sudden they realize this poor girl has had tularemia,

and it was not diagnosed. So they do more surgery, remove two more lymph nodes, a cluster of necrotic dead lymph nodes deep inside her neck, some dead tissue and skin around the area, put her on the right antibiotic, save her life. They nick a nerve that controls her smile, so now her smile's off, it's crooked. She's got a six-inch scar below the three-inch scar.

The guy's father-in-law goes and kills the rabbit. Later, someone from the Center for Disease Control in Sacramento calls to interview the family. They thought she maybe had plague. Doesn't. And then expresses disappointment in the family for having killed the rabbit, and they hung up on the person. Yeah, horrible. Guy says, with Easter coming up soon, I know people will be buying rabbits for their kids, and they should be informed of this disease.

Now, we talk about tularemia extensively in the Wilderness Skills book. Yep. All the different ways you can get it. Yeah. There was a guy, I don't know if we mentioned this, did we mention this in the book? A guy that hit a desiccated rabbit, a dead desiccated rabbit with a lawnmower and contracted

a airborne tularemia in his lungs. Yeah. I think we may have. And there's actually, I think we mentioned that there has been talk of weaponizing tularemia in his lungs? Yeah, I think we may have. And there's actually, I think we mentioned that there has been talk of weaponizing tularemia because you can aerosolize it. Yep. Scary. This guy says, this will give you, he says, this will give you something besides CWD to talk about.

Then he goes on to say, if you have any health issues, he says, you know, call your local trapper before seeking medical advice. I wonder if they wiped out the, uh, the other meat rabbits. Oh, if they went to that kid's place. They probably all had it.

Yeah, I would think so. He probably went back and he was probably selling tonka trucks with a rabbit in the back oh man that's the moral of that story is man watch out for tonka trucks but in your long and illustrious cottontail hunting career how many have you come across that you suspected of having to you know i don't check them but you know what i used to hunt cottontails with a guy they had gotten tularemia from cleaning cottontails. I make a point of looking at the liver.

I've never seen what I thought was a bad one. This guy's name was Ken. He's a hay farmer. And he had gotten tularemia and his old man got tularemia. And he still hunted rabbits. What's the liver supposed to look like if it's sick? Spotted. Okay.

Like yellow or white spots i believe i used to make rabbit tempura with for ken make rice cook a bunch of vegetables make a sweet and sour sauce cut the rabbit little strips make little tempura rabbit strips put it on there dump sweet and sour sauce all over it sounds good he it. Yeah. Something fried with a bunch of sugar on it. Yeah. Most people are going to dig that one. There's also that rabbit hemorrhagic disease that's still going around right now. Oh, horrible.

Which is nasty, but that's just another observation thing. You know, call your local department of natural resources or fish and game and let them. Yeah. There's a lot of good county by county maps where you can see, like, if all of a sudden you've seen all kinds of dead rabbits, it'll show this new hemorrhagic thing cruising around. Yeah.

We should talk about that more extensively sometime. All right, John, we're all on me. Ready? Yeah. Okay. Last time, tell about briefly recap the book we had you on about last time. Last time I was here talking about a book called Wild Ones, which was about endangered species conservation. That's the most boring way to put it.

Yeah. And the more interesting way to put it is it's sort of about how America has treated and thought about its wildlife throughout its history. So, you know, why are we a country that at the beginning of one century, we want to kill all the bears, and at the end of another century, we want to make sure that the bears don't go extinct. So there was a lot of on-the-ground reporting about the kind of Byzantine efforts to save the last, you know, Lange's metal mark butterfly at an industrial site in California and things like that. And then a lot of history about sort of, you know, different eccentric characters throughout American history who've had, you know, very unique ideas and sometimes progressive ideas about our sort of obligations to wildlife. And in that conversation, you hinted at,

because I think you were working on this back then. Yeah, I've been working on this book. You were working on your book that became This Is Chance. Yeah, I've been working on that. That book, This Is Chance, took me about six years of work. So I'd been just amassing historical research for years and years. So it was very much always on my mind and I probably, you know, took any opportunity I could to just start downloading the things I was, I was finding out at that point. Yeah. When you started working on

tell people what this is, this is chances. And then when you tell, like, explain what you were, uh, what you were getting at when you started working on it and how it kind of became different than what you thought. Yeah. Well, this is Chances, a book about the Great Alaska Earthquake in 1964. Sometimes known as the Good Friday Earthquake. It happened on Good Friday evening right as the sun was going down. And the book basically tells the story in pretty intimate detail, just the narrative of these first three days in the city of Anchorage. So this was a time, you know, this is just a few years after Alaska statehood when Anchorage was kind of, you know,

beginning to feel like a real metropolis in Alaska. It sort of saw itself as fulfilling the promise of what Alaska was going to be. And suddenly you have this 9.2 magnitude earthquake that shook the city for four and a half minutes and just causing all kinds of destruction, but also really upending people's sense of their community. That's the part, that's one of the things that blows my mind about the earthquake. One of the biggest earthquakes in U.S. history, right?

Yeah, that's correct. The second most powerful one ever measured and the most powerful one in the U.S. But the fact that... I felt one once that was... It was over before you could tell what you were feeling. But the fact that it lasted longer than a rock song, that you'd almost like settle into it is kind of,

it's hard to imagine. Makes four and a half minutes seem very long, very long. Yeah. Yeah. That was definitely the first thing that grabbed me about it. One of the first, maybe the first thing I found about the earthquake, which I'd never heard of, you know, I grew up on the East coast. It's, you know, happened 15 years before I was born

or 14 years before I was born. It just, it just kind of went over my head that there had been this, this disaster. So one of the first things I found was just this big report, you know, 400 page report of individual people's, you know, recollections of this is what was happening to me during those four and a half minutes. And you see a lot of like mental gymnastics of, you know, first, not like you're saying, not knowing what the hell is happening. And that can go on for a minute, you know, 30 seconds. People think it's the Cold War. People think it's a nuclear attack or whatever it is, Judgment Day. And then there's a kind of bargaining phase. You know, people think it's the Cold War. People think it's a nuclear attack or whatever it is, Judgment Day. And then there's a kind of bargaining phase. You know, they're coming up with different explanations.

And some people, you know, it seemed like they just kind of gave up hope and just lock onto these, these different bizarre images, uh, that as your mind's trying to, to make sense of them, trying to make some kind of story about what's happening to you. John, I have a question. Yeah. Did anybody, any one of those reports ever say that, oh, at minute three, I just settled in? You know, there are definitely, I don't think anyone put it so explicitly, but you definitely, you could, there were definitely accounts where it was like, you know, I tried to hold on to this

and that didn't work. So, and they would go through four or five different things, you know? And, or, you know, at first I was trying to keep my car from jerking into the opposite lane, but then the steering wheel was wrenching my wrist and that seemed dangerous. So then I decided to hunker down here.

So yeah, it's amazing. I recommend you actually just sit with a stopwatch for four and a half minutes and see what that feels like because you can go crazy when the earth's not shaking. So yeah, that psychological part of it, the surreality of it, and the disorientation. I still can't really get my head around. You know, when you mentioned growing up not knowing about that earthquake, it still lived. My brother lives in Anchorage, has been there for a very long time now. It's still almost like, I don't want to say it's a daily part of life, it's it's just like it's the earthquake and you know

we used to go hunt ducks in a place that used to be agricultural fields but it fell whatever eight feet and became a marsh and there's still pieces of equipment and stuff sticking out of the water you know it's like people just like people just talk about it as this thing. And there's still all the trees from the areas that slumped into the ocean, trees sticking up. Yeah. Yeah, there were a lot of – you're probably talking about portage. Yeah, a whole little community that just – exactly,

just sunk and got inundated by the saltwater. But, yeah, I think that's what struck me too when I went to Anchorage. There's places that they just couldn't really rebuild in the way they wanted to. So there's an earthquake park, which was basically the luxury neighborhood of Anchorage at the time that just sloughed off this ridge onto the shoreline. And now it's a park you can hike through. They've got little interpretive signs and things. Yeah, it's very much a part of the identity of the city, I think. It's a city that is really proud of its history and it doesn't have as long or as crowded of a history as some

other cities in America. So yeah, it's a real touchstone for people. One of the things I liked about the book is it a little bit uh about i know it's like it's hard we'll get to what the book narrows in on but uh richter like you always hear you know the richter scale and and i remember in early college i had to take geology 101 or something and they explain how that scale is exponential so a nine is 10 times worse than a than an eight um but i guess you thought you thought it was worth putting in your book talk about what uh richter like the guy richter what he was doing and and how this earthquake kind of played into his work and life. Yeah. I love that you asked about that. I mean, I know that as a writer, you know,

you probably read that and knew exactly what was going on, which was, you know, there's not a lot of science in the book, but I started reading about Richter and I was like, I got to get this guy in here somehow. Oh, like, yeah. You're like doing a book. You're sometimes you're like, I don't care how I'm jamming this in. Yeah. I don't care where I put it. That was definitely it. I was like, you know, okay, I'll give him two pages. Okay. Oh, you don't like that, editor?

All right. How about one page? All right. How about half a page? But yeah, but I got him in there. And then you, of course, zeroed right in on it. And that's the first thing we're going to talk about. But yeah, Charles Richter, I didn't know anything about the guy, but he was an odd duck. I sort of had this image

of him as this kind of like someone who's exceptionally good at the science he's doing and kind of exceptionally bad at every other facet of social existence. And he was in a kind of polyamorous relationship for a while and wrote a lot, you know, seemed not so sensitive about it, didn't have the greatest sensitivities about it. He was dappled in nudism, I believe. In any case, he was... Don't we all? Yeah, well, when I, you know... Every time I take a shower.

Yeah. He wrote some really, really bad poetry, which I had the pleasure of reading. Explain the polyamorous relationship. I don't actually know that I can go too much into depth in that at the moment. You're afraid he'll sue you? No, I just don't remember all the details. I do remember that there was a lot of consternation from his wife that he lived with in my memory. He wasn't really good at juggling everything as far as I remember. But yeah, but the thing that I loved was that he

enters the story. This is why I could justify putting him in the book. Oh, yeah. That he enters the story in this very kind of representative moment where he works down in Southern California, running his lab, and he's sitting at home about to... He and his wife have cocktails poured and they're turning on the radio to listen to a broadcast of a concert. And he's got this giant... Dude, I'm sorry, but that just doesn't happen anymore. No, no, it doesn't. I mean, I feel like it's kind of happened last year, a little bit. We're kind of all our grandparents sitting in our chairs side by

side, you know, what's on the live stream tonight, hon. But yeah, that's, that's the kind of, the kind of a mood that they were setting. It was a really mid-century, you know, elegant living room. I've seen pictures of it in kind of this gorgeous Southern California home. And he has been pissing off his wife by installing a bunch of scientific instruments in his living room, right in the middle of the living room, so that he can measure earthquakes and stuff. And she does not like this, although in his telling, she's grown accustomed to it and is fine with it now. But you kind of have to question that and they're settling down with their their concert and all of a sudden the needle starts

starts jumping measuring the Great Alaska earthquake you know about a couple thousand miles away and he he turns to his his his wife and he says oh that's a that's a great earthquake you you know? And she doesn't respond, you know, because he's talking over the concert. But I like that moment, I guess. And the reason why I felt justified to cram it into the book is because I tell that little anecdote just as a kind of end note to a kind of panorama of all of the destruction and chaos that's happening in Alaska and then reverberating out, you know, until it's getting smaller, you know, these actual, the shaking is getting smaller and smaller and people registering is getting smaller and smaller

until finally you come all the way down the coast and you've kind of just got this dweeb in his living room, just kind of, you know, pausing between sips of his cocktail saying, oh, look at that, you know, something's a shaking, you know? Yeah. So that to me seemed to- Somewhere a city is being destroyed. Exactly. It seemed to me to reveal something, you know, kind of profound about suffering, I guess.

Something that happened during the concert. Right. I always remember that concert because- Why did so few people die? Yeah, that's a really good question. Because it seemed like, you know, in reading it, I mean, it plays out, when you're reading it, it plays out, Yanni wouldn't like it because you don't really know what's going to happen.

Yanni's daughters would be irritated. But you're thinking that, I i don't know like thousands of dead people well yeah like the whole luxury neighborhood ends up on the beach that to me is like yeah like literally like someone cleared a table and sent all the houses down off the edge of the table yeah yeah it's um i mean that's the key point for me was that it took days to realize that fewer people had died than anyone imagined. And that, to me, was the real drama of this. The story was like clawing their way back from this complete disorientation to just figure out the most basic information about what just had happened, right? You know, how many of us are dead? That seems like a pretty fundamental thing to get your head around after something like this. But yeah, there's a couple different reasons. I mean, first of all, there were, you know, there was just over 100 deaths. The number's kind of up in the air still. And a lot of these deaths were, the majority of them were actually in native Alaskan villages that just had from tsunamis, resulting tsunamis. You know, entire villages were just kind of erased by those waves. And so you had, you know, sadly, that was where a lion's share of the deaths were. Wow.

In Anchorage itself, the story is a lot more complicated because on the one hand, it's, you know, it was Alaska's, you know, greatest metropolis. It was also not a very densely populated place, right? And there weren't a lot of tall buildings at all. There's a lot of small, single-family wooden structures, which fared not exactly well, but you didn't have complete pancaking all over the place. And then the other reason which I found most fascinating was a lot of people survived because there

was this great burst of energy all around the city right after the shaking stopped to go find people in the wreckage. So, you know, this search and rescue, you know, I mean, to even call it that makes it sound way more organized and methodical than it was at first. It was just this scramble to peel people out. You know, you had people just pass her by outside the JCPenney building, working in teams, bringing in tow trucks and other equipment, cutting torches to get people out of cars

that had been buried in the rubble of the collapsing facade. So whereas in a lot of disasters, a lot of the deaths are people that, you know, they're not killed immediately by the disaster itself, but you know, they're killed by some, you know, they're trapped or something like that. A lot of these people are being peeled out right away and taken to get medical care. So it's a much more complicated story than that. But those are some of the reasons that I really latched on to as being kind of illustrative of what was happening in the city. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

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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. You know, John, I don't know it kind of surprised me to i'm trying to think of how why i'm trying to say it surprised me it surprised me a little bit because in a lot of ways the book seemed to have this it had almost a um libertarian ethos where it would be that all these um like structures we put together you know like like organizational things and officialdom and bureaucracy right so that we're all set when

shit hits the fan but in this case you go you almost make this kind of like you know it almost seems like you're enthusiastic about the fact that that stuff doesn't work and what does work is just people like doing what needs to be done and it kind of seems strange to see you you know this is like pre-pan when you wrote it was pre pandemic you know i wonder if you'd look at it differently now. When you'd see how we've responded to the last year in terms of our reliance on bureaucracy and government and following the guidelines. And this book being like, dude, guidelines don't work, man. At least here and then. I mean, that's something that I've been thinking about a lot, obviously.

And to be honest, it's not as easy to resolve for me as it might seem. It kind of reminds me of... So there's a big portion of the book that's about sort of sociologists who study disasters. And there's a great book by Rebecca Solnit called The Paradise Built in Hell. I don't know if any of you guys have read that. No. But it's explicitly about that. It's just about this field of sociology that's showing what

you're talking about, that it's people band together and do right. And I remember, I know Rebecca, and she had started working on that book. She published a piece sort of about that premise in Harper's, I think. And it came out the week of Hurricane Katrina. And I remember talking with her then, and she's putting forward this thesis. You know, people are good. They band together. And on the TV, you know, you're seeing just, you know, kind of chaos unfold. And I think she had the presence of mind to know that, you know, she's looking at it on a different time scale. And that also a lot of that media stuff is incorrect when it first comes out.

And it took her years to piece together the kind of true reporting to show that her initial instinct was true. I don't know why I'm going on about her, except for just I think she's an amazing writer. My book owes a debt to her book. But in any case, yeah, I think you're right. Absolutely, that what's happening in the book is you have a lot of Cold War bureaucratic structures in Anchorage and elsewhere that are set up to handle disasters. But what they're really set up to handle is like nuclear war, and no one's set up to handle nuclear war, you know? So you have in the place of these kind of official agencies kind of unraveling or being slow to adapt to the situation, you have individual people, including

Jeannie Chance, who's sort of the main character of the book, who are kind of rising up and meeting the problem in front of them. And then not only are they meeting the problem in front of them, but then they're banding together and forming kind of ad hoc organizations to solve even bigger problems. And it just keeps going like that all weekend. And I think that is absolutely true. And that's absolutely characteristic of what tends to happen in disasters. You see that when people have studied the responses, you know, in all kinds of different kinds of natural disasters all around the world. What we saw this year, I think, is, you know, a lot of that, you know, and we can talk about

that too, because I've actually been involved with a group like that where I live. But I think what you're referring to is we things like that. But there's also things happening on a grand scale that only government is going to be able to solve. And because my book's only dealing with those first three days, I'm not talking necessarily about a lot of those things. I'm not talking about rebuilding a city or making sure the water system is safe, things like that. And so I think the thing about, I mean, we kind of got to see it in real time at the beginning of the pandemic or even through the middle of the pandemic where you had people doing as much as they could, you know, staying home, sewing masks, doing 3D printing, face shields, you know, all sorts of things. But when you have a government response that's just not kicking in on a problem of this

scale, those people are only going to get you so far. So I could have told a lot more of the story of how the government, especially the military, being that there was this huge military presence in Alaska, they had a lot to do with making things run smoothly after the quake. But to me, for those three days, the most interesting story to me and the most surprising story was the story of these people who were in many cases surprising themselves

and really managing to get shit done in ways that they wouldn't have been able to predict beforehand. Explain how- Did I slap that away? Did I- No, no, it's good. You did good, man good man defend my thesis

successfully here yeah i think i think that you uh you tackled it well i do not view this as an anti-government manifesto yeah all right good it was good though to see because you know at the beginning of you can only you can only equate a pandemic and an earthquake. Like the comparisons, you kind of run out of comparisons pretty quickly. But, right, early in the pandemic, I did see a lot of folks, including some people who I like. Their initial thing was, I'm going to get ready to start killing my neighbors when they come for my food right like there's there's some folks that that's where they're that's just where they go it's it's sad that that's where they go but that's where they go and other people are like i wonder how i can help my

neighbors you know um and and you really see in the three days that that you describe you see overwhelmingly is what can i do to help my neighbors not um how can i get ready to kill them all when they run out of water uh but talk about how how genie chance enters the thing and like you know the book's called this is chance which is named after which you wouldn't guess from looking at the the cover necessarily but named after a particular person who really emerges as this star player in this drama. Why did you choose not to introduce Jeannie Chance on the cover when her name is so clearly on the cover? I like to torment children who can't stand suspense and need to plug their ears when scary things happen in movies. Yeah, I mean, Genie Chance for me, discovering Genie Chance and discovering the earthquake happened simultaneously.

That report that I mentioned, just collecting individual people's accounts of those four and a half minutes, that was something Jeannie did. So Jeannie was a part-time radio reporter, working mother in Anchorage at the time, which was a pretty rare thing on its own. And she was just, you know, completely tenacious person. And she ended up by sort of a quirk of luck, but also like her own persistence winding up in the heart of everything, you know, immediately after the quake, right at the police station where information was starting to come in, the official city response was starting to take shape. And she had this mobile radio unit in her car that she used to report as a kind of roving reporter around Anchorage normally. And so she was able to get on the radio again, once the station was up and running,

and relay a lot of that information. And at first, that was a very simple job. And over the course of these three days, it becomes a much more important job and a much more elaborate job where she just kind of stumbled into being a really integral part of the whole community response. And also like a voice that was guiding a lot of people in town through it. So even, you know, saying like, we need a diesel fuel over here, or we need a doctor in here, you know, that was her giving that information. And then also people who couldn't, were separated from their family members, just, you know, hours of just reciting people's names and saying, you know, your mother's looking for you, you know, give us, we'll come here,

we'll get a message back and relaying those back and forths over the air. But that report that I mentioned, that was all her doing. That was after the quake, she went back and interviewed all these people to just kind of collect an oral history like that. And I had found that report. And in the very beginning, there's a little author's note that says, the author is a part-time radio reporter who was on the air for 59 hours after the quake, and her family recorded a lot of those broadcasts. And, you know, I saw that, and my, you know, journalist spidey sense started tingling, and I just thought, I got to find these tapes, which I did. Ultimately, I found a lot of hours of broadcasts from the radio

station, KENI. And that, that was kind of the backbone of this book. It allowed me to, to really tell it in a minute by minute kind of way. Uh, you, a couple of times I've mentioned how the book focuses in on a few days, but when it, it, it, toward the end, it doesn't because, I i mean it's very much about like the day of the quake and the immediate aftermath but we don't need to go into this in too good a high level of detail because people need to go read it and find out but for her um it never ends you know i mean it's like there's these handful of people that that this becomes sort of the defining thing in their life and then and then shapes and in kind of in unhappy ways

uh yeah that being like this pinnacle moment you never eventually i guess you're kind of stranded on the the pinnacle you know for her yeah i don't know that i'd put it exactly that way i mean i think that she you know when you think about what it would have been like to be like a working mother in 1964 i mean she was dealing with a kind of um sexism that it's it's just almost funny to to see it now like you you feel like it's a satire, the way people would talk to her. And so during the quake, for her to just ascend to this position of where she's just so obviously competent and getting stuff done and being so valuable to the community without

question, I think that really, it kind of freed her to just accept her own, you know, awesomeness, I guess, you know, like it was the sort of like the last thing she needed to feel like, why am I wasting my time, you know, with other people's expectations? So in that way, it was a kind of door that opened for her. And she went on to have this career in the legislature and did a lot of really, you know, important work there. But yeah, there is a moment in the book where when you kind of just fast forward through the rest of her life and you do realize that, you know, it was a very sad, you know, last phase of her life for a variety of reasons. And that was something that I just really tried to keep my eye on as I was going through the whole process of researching

this book was, it's a very weird thing to write about three days that happened 50 plus years ago, because your head's so in the minute by minute drama of that time. And then you look up from that and you say, oh, I wonder what happened to this guy. And nine times out of 10, you hit an obituary, you know, and you realize that these three days were just a sliver of time in these people's lives. And that really shaped the whole feeling of the book for me was to think that there's this kind of intensity that kicks in in these moments. But a lot of the feelings that come up in those times, and a lot of the possibilities that come up in those times are things that kind of haunt you or you carry on for the rest of your life. So you could have someone at the top of their game, like Genie, in this moment.

And then you want it to last. You want it to stay for the rest of your life. And it keeps going higher for a while. But eventually, all our stories end in the same way. And somehow, that just made the whole story of the quake more poignant to me this this idea that your life can be disrupted you know that violently at any minute well you know in the end it's kind of what we all kind of get get the the earth you know stripped out from under us i guess okay uh tell folks you know the title subtitle tell me can i get. Can I get in one more question? Get in there, Yanni.

Go, man. John, did it put you in any sort of like a different space to spend six years in three days? Yeah. Yeah, it really did. I don't even really know how to talk about that. I mean, it was insane. insane like it's just an insane thing to do in retrospect you know like like i remember one night somewhere in the middle like we were having you know having dinner with the family and and we're doing that you know who would you

living or dead who would you like to have to dinner you know it's genie chance you know like it's like it's not only it's not only genie chance it's like it's like you it's not only, it's not only Jeannie Chance. It's like, it's like, you know, the, the, the second in command at the National Guard the luxury of really trying to zoom out and realize that this moment that we're in is just going to be this little narrow speck of a much longer line, it really starts to mess with your head because I just don't think we normally have the tools to integrate all that information. But definitely, I feel I feel like I mean even the other day I was I was just like standing on my on my front lawn looking at this this maple tree and I was thinking like oh yeah it's starting to look a little unhealthy like yeah it may be maybe 20 years from now it'll it'll kill over and and also this used to be a tree farm so I wonder if

this was you know this came up after they cleared all the furs or what you know just suddenly seeing these moments on a much huger timescale, I think, is something that I may never stop doing just kind of instinctually because I spent so much time kind of stuck in the past. I don't know if that makes any sense. It's something I'm still trying to unpack for myself, honestly. Are you doing a new book now uh i wish um no i mean this year has been just completely strange professionally so i've been kind of dabbling on a couple things but um i'm one of those people that kind of just had to pump the brakes a little bit and deal with you know kids and and keeping my my family life

working so um so, just in the, since the new year, I've been, I've been really starting to look for what my next project is going to be, but there were a few months there where I was like, there's a whole part of myself was, uh, was deactivated, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Do you have to restrain yourself from turning to the kids on like all their events, right? And being like, well, if you think about it, it's not that big of a deal. Yeah, yeah, I think I do.

I mean, I have to do that to myself too. But yeah, right after I finished this book, I did a, before it had come out, but after I was done with it, I did a story about the campfire in Northern California in 2019. So I did a big magazine story about that. story of like six hours and was, you know, had videos of multiple angles of different things and was just, you know, just like even more compressed than three days of an earthquake was this six hour, you know, evacuation of this one, this one car. And I definitely started like looking around at, you know, the trees on my property and noticing which ones are going to fall in the driveway and all that stuff. And I made the mistake of kind of like talking about that a little too much with my daughters.

And I think it, you know, I really, it was not good parenting. You know, I sort of loaded them up with a kind of awareness of peril that I don't think was, was recommended.

But yeah, you gotta, you gotta put up some walls sometimes and I'm not necessarily very good at it. I made the mistake one time of explaining to my kids how the sun will burn out you know and i was telling them that the earth's kind of in a midlife crisis like you know it's four billion year old planet and i think the sun's gonna peter out and maybe about that long and they just can't comprehend the time so in their mind it's still like at any moment.

Are they checking for it? Do they look out? I told them, well, you won't know until eight minutes after it happens. But no, they feel like at any moment, it's just going to go bloop. Well, I remember, I'm going to blame you a little bit, Steve, because I remember, I think maybe I heard you on an interview. I think it was an interview. I don't think it was a conversation we were having

where you were talking about your son just loving your truck and knowing that everything that you need to survive is in your truck. Oh, yeah, yeah. And I feel like that's what I was aiming for. I was aiming for that kind of like, we got this kind of vibe. That you'd embolden. I don't think I carried it off. I didn't carry it off the same way you did.

I've got to work on my tone or something. You know what's messing with me on this is, a huge part of me is like, don't be in a city center. Don't be in a place where the infrastructure is so built up when these disasters occur and it's it's really boned me out that the uh you know the superstructure less native villages on the coastline were the ones that had the highest mortality rates that's it was just like not, it was lack of early warnings. It's not the narrative you want to hear?

It's not, it's not, yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, there is a school of thought that if you stop thinking of people as problems during disasters, right? As chaos that needs to be controlled or avoided and you start seeing them as parts of the solution, then that suggests you want to be around as many people as possible,

right? Because mutual aid and all that stuff, it's just, you've got more to work with. And then again, you know, so this is, I live on Bainbridge Island, which is next to Seattle. So it's a, I think it's 27,000 people community, you know, and I've been really blown away by a lot of the things that volunteers in this community have been able to do during the pandemic. So I've been working, volunteering at the vaccination clinic they're running. They just did their 10,000th dose yesterday, which is insane for a community this size. And they're doing, you know, people from all over this part of the state. And I think that maybe there's also a sweet spot where you have a community where, you know, it's small enough that people feel a part of it and feel like the problems are manageable and that they can step up and actually make a difference with that but it's not quite too small where you know

you don't have that kind of critical mass of of human energy to get things done but yeah i agree i mean it wasn't it wasn't that people in those villages weren't weren't taking care of each other they were i mean they were really heroic in terms of you know trying to get everyone you know clamoring up these hillsides keeping kids kids warm overnight, things like that. But they were just up against it. That was more geography, I think, than sociology. They were just up against a giant wave that was coming on their coastline. So I'm just trying to reassure you.

You're doing a good job. You're doing a good job. Okay, good. I'm practicing for my kids. All right, John, hit us with all the detailed information. All right. The book is called This Is Chance, The Shaking of an All-American City and a Voice That Held It Together.

And it just came out in paperback from fine people at Random House Books. And you can buy it with your money. That was a good pitch. Tell everybody where. I mean, you can buy it with your money. That was a good pitch. Tell everybody where. I mean, you can find it anywhere. You can find it. I want to see how you walk this delicate line. Where should people find the book, John?

You can buy it from Eagle Harbor Book Company on Bainbridge Island, Washington. Go on their website and tell them John sent you. That was very diplomatic. And anywhere else books are sold. Yeah. Alright, man. We'll talk to you in six years when you got another one. Thank you.

I appreciate that. Take care, guys. You gotta find something to happen in one day because then maybe it'll take you just two years to do it. Yeah, or like a couple minutes. Maybe I'll do a book about this podcast. I'll just retrace. I'll interview. I'll find out what was your interior monologues going on as we spoke.

All right. Look forward to reading it. Thanks, man. Come back anytime you got something you got to plug, even if it's just a magazine article. Cool. I'll do that. Take care, guys.

Appreciate it. Thank you very much. Good to talk to you all. Bye-bye. Cal, are you hip to the whole deal about how you look like the guy from Ram Jam? Nope. You're not hip to that? No. No one showed you this?

I mean, who's looked into Ram Jam deeper than the song Black Betty, right? Well, that's how we know about it. Right. You haven't seen this? No. Corinne, do you mind? You don't know about this? Holy shit. That guy looks like you mind? You don't know about this? Holy shit. That guy looks like you, but you don't look...

This, like... Is it a black and white photo? Listen, this is... No. That brought up... We actually found Callahan. Callahan is a collaborator and lyricist for the Grateful Dead named Robert

Hunter, who weirdly died at 78 for the Grateful Dead named Robert Hunter who weirdly died at 78 even though you're sitting here right now. If you show up, that is Cal. It's unbelievable. That's you right there, man. Cal, can you fold your hands and rest your head

i have a advice for men this is my advice for men in photographs keep your hands away from your face but for me if you don't mind can you rest your chin on your hand? Is that what he's doing? Yeah, right here. Right here. We need to play like, yeah. Where can we put? No, the other direction. Can you do the other direction for me real quick? And then look at me. Look at me.

No, no. You got to have. Like this? Yeah. Hold on a minute here. For the audience out there, we are looking at a photo. I'm trying to do them. If you go to Rolling Stones magazine.

I think it's Rolling Stone, correct? Rolling Stone, sorry. Rolling Stone magazine. Rolling Stones. I was reading that Rolling Stones magazine, and I turned up a picture of it. It's Robert Hunter, Grateful Dead collaborator and lyricist dead at 78. We ain't getting richer

because we can't get our picture on the cover of Rolling Stones. It's uncanny. It's unbelievable. Anyhow, what gets me to thinking about wolves. Yanni. Yanni, does this qualify as a book report? Can we play our book report jingle? Yeah, what the hell? It's Yanni's book report.

But first, before my book report, you got to introduce our guest that's joined us now. Oh yeah, it's real important to Yanni to do that all the time. Go ahead, Yanni. No, I asked you to do it. Oh, Brody, you do it. Wow. That just went to hell real quick. No, no.

Because Brody, you're mainly friends with our guest. Yeah. Kel knows him, too. Well, hit it. Our mystery guest is Gaspar Perricone. Joining us from Colorado. Gaspar, introduce yourself. Thanks, guys. Yeah, Gaspar Perricone. Joining us from Colorado. Gaspar, introduce yourself. Thanks, guys.

Yeah, Gaspar Perricone. Appreciate the opportunity to join you guys. I've been in the hunting team and angling space for most of my professional career and happy to join the conversation today. And you're neck deep in wildlife politics. For reasons passing all understanding, yeah. I work for a group called Freestone Strategies, and we're a full-spectrum public affairs firm. And a large portion of my portfolio is involving the greater realm of wildlife politics, yeah. All right.

I think it's important to note also that you formerly served on Colorado's Wildlife Commission. Yeah, I was actually, I started my tenure when it was the former Division of Wildlife. Obviously, Parks and Wildlife merged under the Hickenloop administration, and I continued to serve under the newly formed Colorado Parks and Wildlife for four years after that. So my work continued kind of in that space when I became the legislative director for the Department of Natural Resources under Governor Hickenlooper. So like you indicated, I've been neck deep in this stuff for the better part of a decade here in Colorado. You good, Yanni? You like that? That was wonderful. Okay, now Yanni's going to do his book report.

Yanni's book report. Whose verbiage, Corinne, is escaped about a wolf that escaped the island? The articles. Huh. Go ahead, Yanni. Real curious about that word. Yeah, this is Canadian broadcasting. They use the word escape.

That's interesting. Well, anyways, yeah, there was a radio collared female wolf on Isle Royale. She was brought there from Minnesota. And if everybody remembers, I can't go into too much detail because I'm not going to remember properly, but I believe there was like too many moose on Isle Royale and they brought in some wolves to take care of the wolf problem or the moose problem and so on and so forth. So I'm guessing this is probably part of that.

Yeah. Hey, do you, when you, cause you grew up in Michigan, Yanni, did you grow up saying Isle Royale or we would always call it Isle Royale, Isle Royale. Probably Royale, I guess. But then again, I maybe, I maybe never said it until I was 30 years old and had long been gone from Michigan. Got it. Yeah. You don't want to get too much detail, but a long time ago, that island, which is out in Lake Superior,

but sits between Michigan's Upper Peninsula and Canada, was like a lynx caribou ecosystem. And then because it freezes now and then new stuff shows up and leaves and moose got out there there's like some speculation that i don't think people really know there's some some people think he says it freezes he means the lake freezes yeah sorry which is how wildlife got out to the island and occasionally leaves the island yeah so i had which kind of hard to believe that there's like caribou out there at one point in time. Like not like a long, I mean, in modern times there was caribou. Um, and then everybody, you know, everybody's always dying off and then someone new walks out there. And then most recently became like tons of moose.

Um, they don't want anybody to hunt out there, which, and so they're trying to control. That's actually a whole other story we're going to get into at some point here. And we've talked about a little bit trying to like open up, pressure the park service to allow hunting to bring the moose numbers back down to a more manageable thing. But right now what they're trying to do is truck wolves out there. And you think like the wolf would be the happiest wolf on the planet.

Going back to your escape thing i think it it's it's the notion that it was collared captured brought there so the idea is that like that's where it's supposed to be because it was biologists intentions to remain and then it escaped it had different ideas it had sort of a feeling of of escape because it was put on an island surrounded by hundreds of miles of water. And you would think that there'd be no way that this wolf would ever leave that island. But in 2019 came the polar vortex, which when I read this, it got me thinking, how come the crazy storm that we had like a month ago

that killed probably thousands of birds in arkansas and south and all kinds of crazy animals in texas it never got a big crazy name like the polar vortex yeah that's a good point yeah you guys that didn't that didn't cross no no they should have dubbed it the great Chill. The Great 2020 Die Off. Yeah, something or another. So she leaves Isle Royale, or Royal, depending on what part of Michigan you're from, and travels all around, crosses the U.S.-Canada border a few times.

All in all, travels thousands of kilometers until 2020. At some point, her radio caller dies and uh from what the people that were watching her can tell you that she kept on cruising around and uh last time they had her was near uh thunder bay which is like northwest part of lake superior um so yeah lots of traveling just Just pretty interesting. Yeah, it kind of threw her, it seems like it threw her out of whack because she went back home,

more or less, but then it was like something got, the wires got crossed, man. It just became a wanderer. Right, but there's this next story we'll show you. They like to wander. This next story is about

a two-year-old wolf that was collared in banff and uh he traveled all the way from uh alberta to montana in five days 300 miles yeah pretty amazing it's like you're not even stopping to eat man or like if you're eating you're eating on the go like yeah scavenging i'd imagine i don't imagine he like followed her i don't know maybe you run into a pack of deer and get lucky it'd be cool to see his line of travel like was he just straight lining it for montana or you know well yeah because i mean that whole like kootenai country is not flat right country it's mountainous, heavily timbered, and some big water in there too. 300 miles.

Yeah, the wolf was killed by a hunter legally here in Montana. And that got a lot of people's attention. But what a chief scientist for a nonprofit called Yellowstone to Yukon says, what you should focus on is how cool it is that that wolf was able to do that. And then it shows this amazing like corridor and connectivity for wildlife that it can still happen. And if a wolf can do that, then grizzly bears can connect between uh you know the wilderness of canada and the yellowstone ecosystem as well which is really neat and it's a hard thing to figure out unless you have a dead wolf in this circumstance that's the thing i always think about this is how many animals are actually running around with a collar like when we were caribou

hunting this year i took my boy caribou. We saw hundreds of caribou go by. Okay. Saw one with a collar. And that's an intensely studied herd where they, it's that they have a ton of collars and they have people that in the winter full-time track them.

So you watch hundreds of things and one goes by with a collar in an area where it's like they're doing a collaring study. How many things go unnoticed because no one has a collar on but then every week there's some crazy story about something wearing a collar doing well you know like insane journey so all the all the unsung there's a lot of unsung heroes out there man yeah what's going on we don't know about uh but there's that theory too there's that theory that the collar scrambles the brain.

Exactly. There's this lady in Wyoming. Her dog brought outside of Matizzi, Wyoming. Her dog brought her a recently deceased black-footed ferret. This is like the rediscovery of living black-footed ferrets. That's a while ago. Oh, yeah. This, a while ago. Oh yeah, this, this was a while ago, but it's like that discovery served a huge purpose that just kind of came back to light recently.

Um, and it, it was because of a dead ferret that a dog picked up and brought home. Right. It's like, it's just funny how things work. You got to start with something dead sometimes. Yeah. And they can, and that's like the problem. That's like the real Bigfoot problem. Right?

No dead ones. We got to collar one. Then we'll know. You put a collar on one of those sons of bitches, all of a sudden he's going to wind up, you know, you're going to collar him up wherever, like in Washington where they all live, and he's going to wind up, you know, you're going to collar him up wherever, like in Washington where they all live, and he's going to wind up dead on a road in Connecticut with that

freaking collar around his neck, man. In the back of a van. He'll just be like, I don't know, dude, they put that collar on me, and I just went for it. Yep. Started walking. But wolves move in, and us moving wolves around is why we got Gaspar on. Jeez, that was good, Brody.

See that, Yanni? Oh, Yanni, here's a question for you about your book report. I've always been familiar with the group, the Yellowstone to Yukon. Or is it Yukon to Yellowstone? Yellowstone to Yukon. Which is this, you know, maintaining this travel, trying to imagine that you're maintaining a wildlife travel corridor that would connect the greater Yellowstone ecosystem

with the Canadian wilderness and then the vast boreal forest. But the wolf didn't make it to Yellowstone. And isn't a big problem with the Yellowstone to Yukon corridor, how do you connect sort of the glacier ecosystem, like the connectivity between the glacier flathead ecosystem? Northern continental divide ecosystem. And Yellowstone. Now, if some guy had shot him down by Yellowstone, then I think he'd be like, oh, the corridor works. But he had hundreds of miles. He didn't make it to Yellowstone, then I think he'd be like, oh, the corridor works. It was hundreds of miles.

He didn't make it to Yellowstone. He made it halfway. It's probably at least 300 miles to go, don't you think? Yeah, he still had to cross I-90. Which is proving not as difficult.

Yeah, it's a barrier. A couple of wildlife overpasses on I-90 would do some serious wonders. But, you know, that wolf sniffing distance from running all the way down the Bitter Roots and, you know, not having too much of a gap between crossing I-15 into the GYE. Yeah, you can see it. Yeah. And the wolves made it across Interstate 80 from Wyoming into Colorado. Yeah, they did the impossible already.

Yeah. All right, Brody. Well, grizzly bears have done that too, right? Let's not go there yet. Have run the bitter down. No, no, no. Have gone from southern Wyoming into Colorado. Oh,

by government helicopter. Well, and catapult. Yeah. Oh yeah. Government catapult. That we don't know about, but we do know about the wolves.

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Um, so last year, Gaspar, when did that go through? This year, 2020. Last November. So there was a ballot initiative that passed in Colorado to reintroduce wolves. Not really, though. You already messed up. I don't think that that's true. What's not true about it?

I thought it was like it's not that level of specificity well i can let gaspar you know talk about it but anyway we'll clear that up but at the same time there is a pat now a breeding pack of wolves established in colorado which is caught you know it was too late for that to have any impact on the measure that passed but we've got these two things happening concurrently and we're past the point of like the reintroduction is happening but Gaspar you want to explain to Steve what what happened like yeah like uh okay the initial what was the damn initiative? Proposition 114.

There you go. Look at this now. He's got the number. Yeah, so you're both right here. Following this continuous trend of ballot box biology that we've seen throughout the West, Colorado voters narrowly passed Proposition 114 that requires the state to reintroduce the northern gray wolf into Colorado. So, Brody was totally right. Well, yeah, there's some caveat to this, though, of course. It isn't as simple as to say, we passed the proposition, now we go buy a bunch of wolves and drop them off in the state. This gets a little bit complicated on account of a couple of different timing things that happened.

Most predominantly, the ruling that came out of Secretary Bernhardt last year, delisting the wolf in the lower 48. That happened also concurrently, of course, while the ballot measure was in place. So there's a real unique convergence of events that is unfolding for the first time and not a lot of precedence on how to navigate this. And we can get into that in detail if you guys would like. But effectively what Proposition 114 required was for the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission to create a plan to reintroduce the wolves. And what they need to consider is the details for restoration, including selection of donor population, the place, manner, and schedule of reintroduction, actions necessary or beneficial for maintaining a self-sustaining population, and details for management, including distribution of state funds to compensate for

livestock losses. So, you know, the commission has some lateral in how they go about developing this management plan. They recently just approved about a month ago, a broad scope outline that put some bookends on the process. And that requires the formation of three things. The first of which is the hiring of a third party facilitator. The second of which is the creation of a working group, which is kind of the social element of all of this. And then a scientific technical group, all of which will advise the commission and the development of that final plan. Hey, Gaspar, before we get too deep into that policy stuff, do you want to talk about kind of the wrenches that were getting thrown into the process just recently in regards to what Governor Polis said, as well as how it was going to be, there was some speculation that

hunters and anglers were going to fund this thing. And like that, these are the reasons why a lot of people were upset. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I share that sense of frustration. The language in the ballot was relatively arbitrary associated with who was responsible from a fiduci Assembly to the division to pay for all of this. Absent any of that action, the plan has to be implemented on the backs of dollars generated through the sale of hunting and fishing licenses. And, you know, that's a frustration to us, not only because I think it flies in the face of this general underlying sentiment of Pittman, Robertson, and Dingell Johnson. It's worth noting, of course, that sportsmen have a long history of being willing to underwrite wildlife and conservation programs so long as those revenues go back to the perpetuation of the sport. That doesn't seem to be the case in this instance. And so, last year during the legislative session,

shortly after the passage of Prop 114, we went to a couple of members in the Colorado General Assembly and had asked them to draft and pass legislation that would have required the General Assembly via taxpayer dollars to come up with the revenue sources for the implementation of Prop 114. Unfortunately, COVID does what COVID does and got in the way of it and destroyed the whole process. So here we are again this year, back at the legislature with a similar bill requesting that no general, or I'm sorry, that no sportsman dollars be made available for the implementation or the restoration of wolves. I want to be clear, though, this is not an effort to effectively re-litigate or overturn

Proposition 114. It is merely a way to identify an alternative revenue source. Let me hit with a couple of questions here, just so I can understand this better. Why did the arrival of wolves walking in on their own four feet into the state, why did that not sort of negate and undo this whole conversation? Like if the goal was to reintroduce wolves, why would you not be just ecstatic

that it happened? I'll say naturally. I mean, it happened on the back of the Yellowstone reintroduction, but that was a long time ago. It's accepted now. You had a natural reintroduction. Why is that not just viewed as a victory and that it puts to end the conversation?

I think from our perspective, it is kind of viewed as a victory and that it puts to end the conversation? I think from our perspective, it is kind of viewed as a victory. You know, that discovery occurred after Proposition 114 was on the ballot. What simultaneously happened, as I mentioned, was Secretary Bernhardt issued a rule delisting the wolves in the lower 48. And so where we stand now is the commission has got this obligation by the people of Colorado to move forward with a plan. Because we are in a scenario where the wolf is not listed, and back to the point that you had raised, Brody, the governor had made a request of the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission to expedite the timeline for the reintroduction effort of Prop 114. The reason and the thinking behind that, I can assume, is that I don't think there's anybody who is of the opinion that the wolf is not likely to find itself back on the list in the near future. And so there's this narrow window of opportunity where you aren't subject to the endangered species laws and rules that govern reintroduction,

like took place in Idaho and Wyoming. And so, you know, hypothetically, there's nothing legally that would preclude them from just going and purchasing wolves and dropping them on the landscape. Fortunately, the commission, I think, saw good wisdom in pursuing what they're calling a preliminary 10-J, which is a section of the ESA, but it effectively would establish a plan that in the occasion the wolves were to get relisted again, it would give the state some flexibility on the management prescriptions, particularly with respect to lethal take. So yeah, there's a question as to what a determination from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would mean because these reintroduced populations traditionally have been non-essential separate populations. But now that we have an established population in the state, there's a question as to what does that mean for a reintroduction effort?

And we're in uncharted territory here. It's relatively unclear what U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service might say about that. So you guys think that the Biden administration is going to turn around and is going to turn around and re-list wolves? They did include it on their rule review coming out of... So every year an incoming administration has the opportunity to take a look at the rules that were issued under a previous administration, and they do have the authority to overturn those. I think what's more likely to happen is that a judicial determination will result in them going back on the list. Oh, man. It's not just as far as like the feds to use the broad term, but like the ESA in regards to reintroduction, right? It's not just the presence of wolves in the state, but it's the health of that population, right? uh, uh, some, some, uh, Dan studies this spring and, and see if we can't howl up a bunch of wolf puppies in the state of why, or in the state of Colorado.

Yeah. I think those are still slightly separate discussions though, right? Because the statutory mandate that came from the voters, uh voters is a question that's disconnected from the evaluation of ESA. There's not necessarily a scenario where a Fish and Wildlife or a Fed decision in this case would have the effect of circumventing the responsibility that the Parks and Wildlife Commission is tasked with right now. So I think they exist independently. And how they come together and ultimately approving a reintroduction effort is the question. And it's not going to be a situation where they just start cutting wolves loose this year, that like Governor Polis suggested, they have to follow the planning and procedure process that was outlined in the initiative? Yeah, the thinking is that this will occur over a three-year timeline. And there's a huge social element to this, as you might

imagine, just given the politics that surround reintroduction efforts, particularly with respect to wolves, of course. But yeah, so the Science and technical committee presumably will dedicate a lot of time to identifying what is suitable habitat, how the interplay between the existing wolf population in the state and technical element will help script the ultimate management plan. And the thinking is that that'll take place over roughly a three-year timeline. The statute or the language in the proposition says that they need to take the steps necessary to introduce wolves by the end of 2023. That doesn't necessarily imply that wolves need to be on the ground at that date, but that the process for the reintroduction needs to be concluded and the effort needs to commence quickly thereafter. You know, I'm going to get to a rumor I heard, it's beyond rumor, but an idea about different strains, what some people call subspecies of wolves but uh

before i say that i'll point out that historically wolves existed in a continuous band um you know there there weren't gaps in populations right so you had these large you know these large gray wolves in the north and then you had what we've come to call the you know much smaller mexican gray wolf in the south and and you had these variations but there weren't hard edges between the populations isn't there some issue in colorado where it seems that the people that are really driving for the reintroduction would have been angling toward having it be Mexican gray wolves in the South, but the ones that showed up on their own are a larger, different Northern animal. Is there some friction there on that?

Because I know the proposition doesn't get into that, but wasn't that the intention that it would be Mexican gray wolves? There's been a lot of discussion around that. It's interesting because all of Colorado is in the historic range of the Northern gray wolf. That is not true for the Mexican wolf. And so I think from a, you know, ESA standard perspective, the recovery of the Northern gray wolves is a more likely scenario in Colorado. But, you know, there has been a lot of conversation about, you know, what it might mean in the occasion that they were to cross pollinate, you know, if Northern gray wolves were to migrate to the southern part of the state, would there be conflict between the Mexican wolf population? And so, you know, there have been even comments from some of the members of the commission seeking to shift this thinking from the Northern Gray wolf to the Mexican wolf.

As it stands currently, I think it's more likely that the pursuit, uh, for reintroduction will likely fall with the, the Northern gray. Okay. And there, there's a, uh, another level of conflict, right?

Because the Mexican wolf is listed and the recovery efforts are like, there, there's a legal conundrum there, right? It's like, well, no, you're legally bound by the ESA to recover this wolf in these areas, like how it's written.

Yeah, and what happens when gene pools start getting mixed? Well, that's what I don't understand. All the hassle they put in over the years, and it doesn't bother me, all the work we put in over the years to identify range, get source population animals, and reestablish the Mexican wolf to then. It's not far from the San Juan Mountains to, you know. No, it seems like you'd probably, you know, I guess some people might point out and be like, they don't really care about those level of details. Right. If it's wolves is wolves. But then you got to stop calling them Mexican wolves.

Right. You need the old high school dance biological chaperones out there whoa you two if you if you had uh here i'll i'll save my chris i like to save my crystal ball question for later go ahead brody oh i i mean i think we've we've hit it pretty good as far as what's going on. I mean. Why did you Colorado people decide to put this up to a vote for everybody? I'm a registered Montana voter, Jack. But yeah, I spent a lot of time there and I was happy to live in a state where I didn't have to compete with wolves to kill an elk, you know.

But then up here, it's like, you know, there's plenty of elk getting killed. I know, I know I'm gonna get crucified for saying that. Here's how I always explain it to people. Alaska has wolves across 90 some, I don't know, 95, 99% of their historic range. They have grizzlies across the entirety of the historic range. Why does everybody want to go hunting in Alaska? I don't know. I always tell people, ah, you wouldn't like it, bro.

You wouldn't like it. You wouldn't like it. There's wolves all over the place. Things with teeth everywhere. Yeah, there's wolves everywhere. So there must not be any animals there. But I do have concerns. You'd hate it.

You'd hate it up there. It's all wolfy. But everybody wants to go there and hunt. So it's like, it is a hard thing for people to explain it. You'd be like, wolves will be the end of hunting in Colorado. Yeah. And for a while. It'll seem like that.

If they come on hard, because it. There's a learning curve. There's a learning curve on the elk. Like when they brought them into the, when they brought them into the greater Yellowstone area. I mean. Yeah. You saw two thirds dropoffs in elk populations. I mean, they do not understand.

Like, hey, look at that dog. And all of a sudden. Yeah. So my concerns in Colorado are they have – there are these large elk herds that right now they can't figure out what the hell is going on. Like the calf recruitment is very poor and these elk herds are, their numbers are going down. And those elk herds are in areas where wolves are going to end up for sure. Oh, it is going to, yeah, it will. It's like one more thing.

It'll knock the piss out of them. But I don't, I think it's, it'll knock the piss out of them, but it won't be the end no no yanni you moved yeah i had to we've we've got uh our our furnace is getting fixed finally we've been out of heat for like two weeks and the dude's coming over so i he's gonna be in the basement where i was at congratulations what else do we need to know gaspar oh sorry i want to point out though about your Yellowstone, you know, northern herd of Yellowstone that dropped by two-thirds.

There was other factors, they think now. There was like a perfect storm of habitat, a super high unhealthy population, and then the wolves coming in that produced that precipitous drop. And then you can't just say because the wolves showed up that that's what did it. There was some coincidence there. Well, there's never one thing, but when you throw one more thing on top of those herds that are hurting in Colorado, I mean, the end result's not going to be good, I wouldn't imagine.

Well, and Giannis, you touch on an interesting point there, right? A lot of the proponents of this have been using this trophic cascade as the baseline for why this makes sense. And, you know, I think by all accounts, some of the trophic cascade argument has been overblown. You know, we've learned since the introduction. Can you explain trophic cascade, please? Yeah, trophic cascade is effectively this idea. And as far as I understand it, it originated out of this concept that predators and the relationship that they have with prey can improve the ecological conditions of a select environment. I was reading the other day a study about some of the early thinking about this, and they were talking about the relationship between spiders who scare grasshoppers improving grass conditions in a unique area.

And of course, you know, when wolves were introduced into Yellowstone, that scientific theory was quickly overlaid. And a lot of the ecological improvement in the Yellowstone area has been attributable alone to the reintroduction of wolves. There's been a subsequent series of studies that have indicated that, well, yeah, they certainly have contributed to a degree of the improvement. It seems a bit overstated to claim that a sole species is accountable for all of the improvement that we have seen. Ed Arnett, who's the chief scientist for TRCP, was explaining to me that wolves very seldomly change their eating habits or their food preference, specifically with relation to aspen and willows, which a lot

of the trophic cascade argument has been based on, on account of wolves being present. And so, you know, undeniably there could be circumstances where wolves dispersing wildlife populations to other areas and disrupting the concentration that we see in winter grounds might be beneficial to the health. The other piece, too, that the proponents have been talking about is the potential benefit of the introduction of wolves to the CWD problem that we have in Colorado. And again, you know, very likely may be the case. You know, I think it's relatively fair to say that wolves have this innate sense of ability to peel off the weaker prey in a population. As far as I'm aware, and I need to state that I'm not a biologist, but it seems a little bit far-fetched to me as well to think that, you know, the introduction of wolves

in Colorado would result in the stop of the spread or a wholesale turnaround in the CWD conditions that we have. So, you know, could there be some benefit? Sure. I just don't find those to be the baseline scientific explanation for the reintroduction that others have claimed. Oh, the CWD thing is a joke, man. We've talked about that before, too. It's like the animals are infected for sometimes years before they're symptomatic. Right. It's such a joke. And then this thing that they, you know, and I'm not an anti-wolf person, but let's at least talk with a little bit of like, you know, have it be slightly reality tinged when we talk about it this idea that they you know this this farley moat oversimplification that came from the movie um you know the never cry wolf thing that

they like trim disease from the herd hold on they prey on calves and pregnant females a pregnant female is your most valuable animal it's like i don't understand like it's fine to like wolves but why can't we just can't just like them as what they are and not act like there's like i don't understand like what it's fine to like wolves but why can't we just can't just like them as what they are and not act like there's like these magical creatures well the trophic cascade argument is does have a very strong correlation to systems in which uh people have been removed so this that's not a joke right right? It's like, if you can, the trophic cascade argument in, in a vacuum in which human beings don't exist works great. You apply that onto a system that's highly, highly managed for wildlife over, uh, human use interaction, like a national park. Um, you can see it like applied there and see

how, yep, these dots can connect, but it doesn't do us all that much good in working situations where, you know, human beings are active on the landscape. Yeah. It's like that, that quote we talked about before describing Yellowstone as blank, um, square miles of paradise surrounded by reality.

Brody kind of hit on an interesting point where Brody talked about not wanting to compete with wolves. And I think it's funny how much people tiptoe around that. Sure. around that sure i mean like i don't think there's anything wrong with saying that um i don't think there's anything wrong with saying that that i value um having a resource be available to people and at least acknowledge i'm saying like yes i think that i like having elk and like i'm fine having elk and deer on the landscape because people want them and we have like regulated legal hunting for them and so i'm fine having it be that we acknowledge that but people act like it's like it's it's a taboo perspective i like eating elk and i think that there's a lot of people in the wolf reintroduction world that don't mind that are in the back of their head they'll never admit it in the back of their head. They do kind of like to stick it to hunters a little bit.

Sure. Like there's this one guy, like one of the chief marketing officers, like the CMO of the wolf world, even when he calls, he talks about the recreational big game killing industry. Like that's his viewpoint on hunting. And I can think he's like,

he used to hunt, but then he quit. And that's like how he typifies the hunting world. To say, oh, the only people that don't want a bunch of wolves is the recreational big game killing industry. As though it's naughty to go hunting. But I can say this because at one point I did hunt. Oh, that's right. He killed a pheasant or something. I don't know, man.

Tell me what, give me your perspective on like can you talk like as a person or do you got to stay all official gaspar oh no hit me what's your question sell me i'm not liking wolves in colorado unless you don't even care to sell me on that yeah i i think the discussion we're having here really is whether or not a reintroduction is appropriate right look i mean wolves are coming down um They've migrated in. It's not going to be long before we have an established pack in Colorado and they're going to coexist. I think that question is a foregone conclusion at this point. You know, I'm sympathetic to what you said. Look, you know, I'm a big game hunter. I spend a month in the field during archery season chasing elk every year. And it's my passion and it's what I like to do.

And I would be lying if I said anything other than I'm worried about the impact it will have on the big game populations. But I don't think you can evaluate all of this in a vacuum either, right? Brody touched on it. I live in Northwest Colorado and we've got tremendous problems with both our deer and our elk herd up there at the moment. It's accountable to changes in habitat loss. Drought conditions were incredibly severe last year. Our calf recruitment somewhere in like the low 30% at the moment. The expanding outdoor recreation is having devastating impacts on that piece as well. And so to layer one additional component that will add strain to the herd seems to me like we're getting pretty close to the tipping point.

And I come from the vantage point that we need to take a holistic perspective of all of this. Wildlife management doesn't exist in a vacuum. And, you know, my experience has been that the proponents of the wolf reintroduction are interested in exclusively that piece. I don't think they have given honest assessment to the impacts across the board. And, you know, I'm relatively agnostic as to whether or not there's a population of wolves in the state. I would prefer that they come in naturally and that the state maintains management authority. You know, call me a skeptic, but I am skeptical of the reintroduction process. I mean, when you look through the timeline of the listing and delisting decisions that occurred with the introduced populations in Idaho and Wyoming, in some cases, they were

taken off and put back on the list, you know, upwards of six different times. And we have far, far exceeded the recovery objectives in all of those cases. So it's, you know, to think that the plan that we come up with as a state is going to have some long lasting effect and won't be, you know, affected by the long history of litigation efforts that we've seen, I think is a foolish perspective. And so, yeah, I'm skeptical of the reintroduction effort on that account. You know, by way of example, I think there was like 31 wolves that were introduced in total in Idaho. That was like in 95. The state didn't get the ability to hunt them until 2009. Their recovery objective, if I remember correctly, was 10 wolves or 10 populate or 10 packs, sorry, 10 packs or 100

plus wolves. And by 2009, when the state finally got the management prescription and the ability to harvest them via Hunter, there was something like 850 wolves. And so, yeah, to think that once our recovery objective in the state is achieved and the state at that point will assume full management authority and we will be able to keep the population in check from an ecosystem perspective, I don't have much faith in that outcome. No, dude, they'll dick you around so bad, you'll never see the end of it it's like they it's kind of the playbook and you know i would play dirty too if i was trying to get what i wanted around wildlife but they'll it's a playbook that they're like oh no no no it's just gonna go like this then we'll hand it over to the state and it'll be like this number and there won't be these kind of restrictions and then you get it it goes longer. And then they will legally

block you in the courts from ever getting the concessions that were supposed to be made in terms of the reintroduction. Yeah. And you're talking about an initiative that, what was it, Gaspar, like 54 out of 64 counties voted against? Yeah, so it passed in only 12 of the 64 counties statewide. And, you know, remember that the initiative said that introduction could only occur west of the continental divide. So, you know, effectively the western half of the state. And only four of the counties west of the Continental Divide supported it. But look, Boulder County supported it with a margin of 68 to 32, and Boulder County is kind of our liberal hotspot in the state,

whereas Rio Blanco County, a location that's very likely to be picked as a reintroduction location, denied it 88 to 12. The average no vote in counties in the area that would be affected was 62%. This is a trend that we've seen in all of the ballot measures, dating back to the constitutional ban on trapping, as well as the bear hunting restrictions that we saw in the state. And so, yeah, it's very much a urban rural divide. Huh? All right.

So now it's time for the crystal ball question. Do you think that, I don't know why you wouldn't think this, but do you think that whatever three years, whatever they will be opening up crates and cutting loose new wolves. Or do you think that somehow the existing population that's got there on its own would, you know, it would, uh, develop, expand, become healthy and self-sustaining. And they would somehow magically be like, ah, nevermind.

We're just going to stick with what we got. Or do you think that this is happening, man? It's going to go down? I think the latter part of what you said is going to be true under either circumstance. The population that's here is going to continue to breed. I do think that the Parks and Wildlife Commission will develop a plan for reintroduction of wolves. They are pursuing what's called this preliminary 10-J. It's never been done.

Colorado will be the first state that has actively, from a state-initiated perspective, pursued a reintroduction of a wolf population. On the assumption that the wolf goes back on the list in the next three years and i think that's a high likelihood i think there are serious questions that remain as to whether or not u.s fish and wildlife service will ultimately approve a reintroduction plan in light of the existing wolf population in the state man the wolves are almost screwing themselves. The wolves that were going to get dropped off are probably the wolves that were going to get dropped off into the happy hunting grounds. They're like, man, I wish they were.

They're probably pissed about the wolves that walk down there. But the wolves that walk down there are going to be tough. They're forged by fire, man. I see a new disney but you know the gas bar brought up a good point to me which is like it's all over but the crying right they're coming so hunters should they just need to accept it right like you've got to like accept it and kind of be part of the process at this point. Oh, yeah. You're not. Man, the worst thing you can do is the smoke pack a day philosophy. Right.

You know, it's like. Oh, yeah. Oh, sure. I'll tell you what I do. It's just the three S's. You better. Shoot your shovel. Be a part of the conversation.

Yeah. In a meaningful way. Yeah. There'll be a lot of people that'll get like you know there's some people that that it's to say it's the crowd that quit waterfowl hunting when they had to stop using lead right there will be people jokes on you guys there will be people that that uh don't have a lot of gr and will like up and it's all over yeah i'll be like oh i quit hunting by god when the wolves and then there'll be like oh i quit hunting by god when the

wolves and then there'll be people who are just who get after it and figure stuff out and they'll keep doing well but i'm telling you man it'll be yeah a shock to the system right they eat seven pounds of meat a day so just get a calculator out, right? It's just a reality. Hey, is there an initial number that they've got a goal for? Well, no. And this is really where the meat and the potatoes of this plan comes together and why sportsmen need to continuously engage themselves in this process, right? Because there are questions about how many wolves will constitute a recovery objective, where they will be reintroduced. All of these questions are

going to be crafted by the commission over the course of the next three years. And my hope is that we as a sportsman community can engage in this rather than just throwing our suckers in the dirt and being upset about the fact that we lost at the ballot and engage in the process to develop what could be the most thoughtful and well thought out plan. But we broached this discussion last year and the legislation we were trying to craft. And I've heard numbers as high as 250. I think from our perspective, we're looking at a number closer to around 50. The precedence in other states, of course, was 10 packs or 100 wolves. Now, when you over-delay the landscapes of Idaho and Montana versus the western half of Colorado,

I think it lends itself to a lower number somewhere in the realm of 50, right? We got way more habitat here, man. Yeah, exactly. But it doesn't matter because they'll say, here's the thing. It doesn't matter because you'll agree. Let's say you agree on 100. Okay. You agree on 100.

100 is a good number. Everybody can live with 100. And then you'll get to 150, 200. And someone will be like, okay, we're going to delist and go to state management. And then you'll fight lawsuits for 20 years. And then it just doesn't matter. Like that's the word. Yeah. It does not matter. It will never, you'll never get it undone. It'll just be, it'll become like a thing that gets litigated to the point where it'll find its number. I mean, it took forever here and it's so tenuous here. The history has indicated that. And unfortunately, whatever plan we come up with won't supersede federal statutes under ESA,

right? And so our plan will continuously play second fiddle to the ongoing national ESA, right? And so our plan will continuously play second fiddle to the ongoing national ESA discussion around listing and delisting. And it's an unfortunate reality because, as you mentioned, Steve, they're on their way here. We're going to have a population of wolves in Colorado in the next couple of years before any of this is implemented. You know what cracks me up about the whiny-ass wolf protection crowd is that, you know, like you look at Wisconsin, right, where they hit recovery objective, you know, eons ago. They get way over recovery objective, but then they have a hunt, and they set a quota, and they go over the quota, and everybody's all upset.

I'm like, hold on, when did you people start caring about quotas you never cared about the recovery objective number that like became like a completely like you never cared about surpassing that but all of a sudden they go over a hunt quota everybody acts like they're married to these numbers so you don't care about the numbers yeah like what just unfolded was it wisconsin where they greatly went over yeah but i'm like they went way over my like hold on but you guys have we've been over uh the the quota that you liked for 20 years right and you're not like so don't act like all of a sudden like you really care about all the numbers being right you don't give a shit about the only care about certain numbers oh it's it's indefensible to you because you also have to be like, you know, you guys really screwed up because all the other times wildlife science, wildlife management deals in perfect scenarios.

Like there are no mistakes when it's done right. You know, when you're dealing with wild animals and social science at the same time. It kills me. Which is why all these discussions need to take place within the state game and fish agencies, right? We've seen an onslaught of legislation all throughout the Rocky Mountain West this year trying to address specific pieces, not just well outside of the scope of wolf reintroduction, but trying to manage hunting and angling as a sport, wildlife populations in general through legislation. And I just do not find it to be a proper venue for wildlife management discussions.

Those discussions need to be led by wildlife professionals founded on the best available science at the time. Sure, a social element needs to be incorporated in it, and I don't mean to undermine or discredit the importance of that, but it's been my experience that the legislature has not always yielded the best wildlife management strategies or policies. Oh, it's the same thing. The state of Montana is just like, makes you want to throw up right now it's like very clear that wildlife is a vehicle for vendetta not like you're telling me you can look me in the eye and say that this legislation is for animals somehow or is this for who you're talking to like right it's a people

thing not an animal thing. And look, there are some scenarios where it's been beneficial too, right? Particularly on funding, we've seen it be advantageous in Pennsylvania and some of the Eastern states on Sunday hunting and blue laws. And so I don't mean to demonize it across the board because there have been occasions where it's been beneficial. No, I like it when it's good for me and i don't like it but those are like those are social that's like social legislation it's not like wildlife management yeah right right that's a good point uh this is a tangent to this but i was looking at you know lawsuits to undo the burnhards deal listing i'm gonna wind up missing that guy in that guy in more than a handful of ways.

But lawsuits looking to undo the delisting now that we've hit recovery objectives. And how you always see humane society pop up. It's funny because they do the nice stuff for dogs. People never realize that it's one of the most powerful anti-hunting, anti-trappingfficking groups out there like far and away the other day i was at murdoch's you know like murdoch's ranch supply you know you're like doing the thing and they ask you if you want to donate something at murdoch's they ask if you want to donate to humane society oh man we were driving which is like a weird like you're talking to like a ranch community whether they want to donate to the leading animal rights order like the leading animal rights organization in the country.

I think like someone, they kind of like slip by someone. I thought about bringing it up with the cashier. We were driving south of town and there's one of those anti-trapping billboards out that way. And my kids are like, what, what is that? I'm like, you know, some people don't like it. Yeah, they masquerade as dog helpers. Yeah. But man.

Hey, Steve, I did bring it up at Murdoch's with the cashier. You did? No, it is interesting because she said, yeah, it's like a very hot topic because everybody in there is like, what? This doesn't make any sense. And it's like the local Humane Society, which is like a different

thing than the HSUS. Is that right? Yeah. Like, they're not connected. They should rename themselves. I think that there is, no, I think that there is a connection, man. Well, no, because I don't think that the owners of Murdoch's and all the employees there would allow that.

Corinne, you need to get your little producer cap on. Figure it out. Corinne will sniff it out. All right, Gaspar. Hey, you were born in the U.S. I was? Yeah. I'm asking, were you?

Yeah, yeah. Gaspar Perricone. I just feel like, you know, I don't know. Like you're from Spain. It's a Sicilian namesake. Is it Sicilian? Yeah, yeah.

That's my people. I know, I know. We're good people. Were your folks from Sicily? Or you guys been in the US.S. for a long time? Yeah, third generation American. Nice little throwback name, man, Gaspar. You're the only Gaspar I know.

Well. Easy to remember. That's that of my grandfather. I am as well. Oh, okay. Thanks for coming on and explaining this wolf deal, man. You'll have to come back a whole bunch and keep us up to speed on it. Be happy to. Thanks for the time, guys. Wolf deal, man. You'll have to come back a whole bunch and keep us up to speed on it. Be happy to.

Thanks for the time, guys. Thanks, guys. Bye-bye. I'm not totally happy. I mean, you did a great job. I just, like, I just, oh, man. Stuff kind of. You got some lingering questions?

No, no questions. Just something about it. I don't like it. I don't like it. I wish they wouldn't have done it. I wish they wouldn't have done it like this. Running around asking everybody what their opinion about it i don't like it i don't like it i wish they would have done it i wish they would have done it like this run around asking everybody what their opinion about it is you know it's interesting that uh you guys can pull off culling all those geese out of the parks in denver and feeding them to the uh food shelters uh-huh uh without putting that up for a public vote. Yeah, there's a bit of duplicity in some of the regs on the books.

I'd be denying if I said otherwise. Yeah, the voting on this stuff, I know this will never happen. I mean, just to be ridiculous, to demonstrate ridiculousness. Will it be like someday they'll be like, we're going to have a vote and we're going to ask everyone in the state. Should the pheasant limit be two or three that's the way it's going man i mean yeah well and you know we have allocation questions uh before the legislature here right now there's a bill out there trying to limit the non-resident tags available and uh you know again we we periodically as a wildlife commission have gone back and taken

a look at season structures and license allocation distribution between residents and non-residents. And, you know, those take a couple of years. They're among the more contentious conversations that occur in the state. And, you know, here we have kind of just a blanket one size fits all approach, um, that would, uh, set in statute, uh, that distribution requirement. And it's drawn, uh, confrontation on, on every side of the discussion, right. Which I think just underscores that the venue is not suitable for those types of conversations. That, uh, we got one for, uh uh extending wolf season here in montana right and it's like you talk to a public a vote well no this was uh some legislation okay and uh it's just just funny right because they're like uh these folks who introduce this legislation, they don't understand how bad hunters are at killing wolves.

And it's like, yeah, we can make wolf hunting season year round. The people who kill wolves are trappers, but they only want to do it when the fur is good. It's like, you know, the biological basis is not there, it's the social basis that is the point. Right.

Well, and like when they opened up Idaho's wolf harvest for the first time, you know, I think they gave out something like, your listeners may tell me I'm way off on this number, but, you know, it was several thousand tags, right? And they ended up killing like 130 or 140 of them. Which was like the best hunting season I think Idaho had. Right. Right. Like it went, she dropped off the table after that. Once the wolves were like, oh, getting shot at now, time to move off the road. But with just under a thousand wolves on the landscape, you would expect that hunter harvest percentage to be a bit higher than that. Yeah, it's a testament to the difficulty of the hunter-harvest approach in management. All right, man. Thanks a lot.

Thank you. I'm back looking at this picture of Cal now. My God. All right, take it easy, buddy. I appreciate it. To wrap up, Cal, plug your deal. So I guess the day after this podcast will be the Louisiana episode of Cal in the field

Cal's week and reviewed my podcast but something you can see visually on our meat-eater YouTube channel so the first episode was trapping live trapping grizzly bears with Idaho Fish and Game. If you want to see some amazing grizzly bear footage, that is good. It is good. A big grizzly in a trap and they work it up and process it and eventually let it go. Yeah, it's like the.

It's incredible. Good example of like the internal frustrations of being out on something like that. There's just like an overwhelming amount of cool stuff happening and an endless amount of things we could talk about. And it's like, but here's like the most concise version that we could get out to you. That was episode number one, which is tearing it up on YouTube. Already there. It's been sitting there. And episode two is Idaho fisheries, where we're talking about getting rewarded for catching rainbow trout, which is a goofy deal.

Like bounty hunting rainbows. Bounty hunting rainbows. Yep. Yep. On the South Fork of the Snake. So, uh, another fun one. And then Louisiana, uh, we do all sorts, we fish for this really cool species called Atlantic

Triple Tail, which is a giant perch and super tasty fish. And you learn about the citizen science going on with a fish that people have been catching in the Gulf of Mexico forever, but only got on regulations on Gulf fisheries regulations within like the last five years. That really surprised me because it's such a

highly esteemed eating fish. Yes. And such a prized sport fish by people who like to catch it it surprised me there's just one of those fish like oh yeah they're always there yeah never mind those things i think it's because there there's no like specific uh commercial that's what i was gonna ask like they only show up as bycatch right by? Bycatch, some folks target them, but you really got to target them with hook and line. Yeah. So, you know, it's like, is it worth people's time to go after them in a market sense?

Yeah. And I think it's just kind of an interesting thing that even now, it's like there's so much life in the ocean that we're still getting around to like properly identifying, doing some research. I mean, I talked to the one person who's really researched triple tail. This guy, Jim Franks, he's awesome. There's two fish in this world that I want to catch that I've never caught. And triple tail is one of them. The other one I can't, I never, it's like a weird mental problem. I can't remember, but I always have to ask Yanni.

Yanni, what's the other fish I want to catch real bad? Oh, there's three fish I want to catch real bad. You're going to have to give me just a little bit of a hint or something. It looks like a little shark, but it's not. Cobia. Yeah. They're good to eat. Oh, man.

A triple tail and a cobia and then a she-fish. Oh, yeah. I'm a she-fish wannabe, too. Yeah. Um, and then we, yeah, go all over Louisiana, hunt hogs, hunt gallinule, which is a marsh hen. And just look at the effects of saltwater intrusion and, and erosion in Louisiana. And, uh, yeah, super wild, fun trip to Louisiana. So.

When you're shooting at the pig, it looks kind of like you're raiding a, um, you're raiding a target. Small island. Like you're raiding a target out of a, like pretty tight work with a shotgun and thick brush. Oh man.

Yeah. Um, you know, the idea is to go in without any judgment and uh experience things the way people experience them in their places yeah and yeah i felt a little i'm not down on felt a little odd being like so loaded shotgun bow the of the boat, boats under, under power, which is legal in Louisiana. We're going to storm in there. Yep. And you're just going to plow me into a bunch

of bushes. And that's how we're hunting hogs. But. Yeah. It looks like, it's like that. It's like apocalypse now when the tiger comes. Yeah. Like just kind of like firing into some grass.

I mean, you can see what you were doing. I'm not trying to make it like it was unsafe, but it's just, uh, it's, it's a, it's a good clip. Um, but yeah, uh, you know, trying to take a look at some different conservation issues, see how folks, you know, are, uh, exploring their spaces as they change over time and different parts of the world and, and it's been a super fun and,

and always very interesting. So. Good work. Everybody check it out now. Uh, how, I feel like if you wanted to find it, like how people actually find stuff,

you'd go Cal in the field. Into your YouTube search engine would be real easy. Cal in the field. Yep. Start with, say a smart thing to do would be real easy. Cal in the field. Yep. Start with. I'd say a smart thing to do would be go to YouTube, search meat eater, meat eater, and hit that subscribe button. Ooh, Phil, that's good, man.

Yeah. Dang. That's smart. Ladies and gentlemen, Phil. Thanks. Thank you. All right, everybody. Thanks for tuning in.

We got, man, a lot of titillating things we didn't talk about, but we'll talk about them later, including, yeah, I'm going to do it like how they do it in real shows, man. tuning in. We got a lot of titillating things we didn't talk about, but we'll talk about them later. Including Yeah, I'm going to do it like how they do it in real shows, man. Like when you do a teaser. Next week on. I don't know if it'll be next week, but including same-sex relationships

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