The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 274: Farewell, Red Wolf

Episode Date: May 24, 2021

Steven Rinella talks with Jacob Broussard, Mike Chamberlain, Brody Henderson, Phil Taylor, Corinne Schneider, and Janis Putelis.Topics discussed: How The Wild Turkey Doc is also a Wolf Doc; the attempted recovery of the red wolf and why there are only 10 left in the wild; in the absence of wolves, coyotes; red hot radio collar action; ravens destroying young livestock and deer; when you pop open a prosecco bottle and a turkey gobbles back; dying from yellow perch; a reminder about the Wisconsin Super Sow; Taiwan's indigenous groups lose court battle over hunting rights and how Jani thinks it's bull; the importance of the treaty concept to Indian Country and the Bureau of Indian Affairs; the 573 distinct federally recognized tribes within the US; Deb Haaland as the first Native American Secretary of the Interior; what #landback is and is not; when facts and figures undermine false beliefs; how hunting on Native American reservations may come with greater freedoms than hunting on state land; 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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Go farther, stay longer. Quick note up top. A bit of sad news if you go way back in our in our library of episodes to episode 120 which was called adaptive hunting and fishing you will find a pretty inspiring interview with a guy named chris clasby um he had had an accident do you remember i i feel like i can't was it diving no it was a vehicle vehicle accident yeah i think 16 or 17 pretty very young pretty young paralyzed from the neck down um but had a enjoyed hunting and fishing you know and even had worked with people to devise and, and, and fine tune. I remember like a, a way to cast a rod.

Yeah. He could cast a spinning rod, reel it in. Oh. Shoot a rifle. Did some hunting. His hunting buddy basically didn't hunt, but just helped.

Like they just teamed up to try to help Chris get on, have experiences. Anyways, uh, Chris Clasby passed away, um, related to his condition,

uh, started to have a difficult time breathing. And, and, um, I think that he always kind of assumed he would not live to be an old man, but, uh,

condolences to Chris Clasby's family and friends. And again, uh, episode one 20 adaptive hunting and fishing. I think we, yeah, we recorded that here. Not here, here, but here. It was in Bozeman. It was actually the last day that I was ever in the old Bozeman ZPZ office. Was that right?

I remember it was cleared out. There's just a table sitting there. Oh, I do remember that now. We were in there. Yeah. But no, it's a good episode. Everybody should go back and listen to that one, and you'll realize that whatever your problems are,

they're not as big as you think they are. Yeah, that's a good point. Moving down here. So I've said in recent episodes, I'm always talking about how the only thing that should be allowed on Instagram is the turkey dock. I've heard you say that. The Instagram should be called the turkey dock,

and that's the only page you can follow. But that said, like, if there's two, yeah, you should be able to follow Nature's Metal. If you really had to follow something else you could choose that well we just found out something uh quite titillating about uh uh the turkey doc mike chamberlain who's been on the show before here in the studio he's been on the show in a sort of more ethereal way right where he we just had his voice because because Corinne conducted the off interview with him and then we played, so we were like playing a recorded

interview. But Dr. Chamberlain came up recently because we were reading the thing that about the what the hell do you even call them? The Red Wolf of the Southeastern

U.S. Whatever parts I'm messing up, Mike Chamberlain what the hell do you even call them? The Red Wolf of the Southeastern US. Whatever parts I'm messing up, Mike Chamberlain will square us the way on. But that there's only like, basically none left. Next to none left. And we were kind of hunting around to try to find someone who understood this world so they could explain the saga of the Red Wolf

of the Eastern, of the deep Southeast over into Texas, Red Wolf. And the first guy we went to was a real wolf expert that we're always talking about, Heffelfinger, James Heffelfinger. Heffelfinger says, I know a lot about a lot of things and I don't like to talk about things I don't know about, and red wolves are one of them.

But he said, just so happens that the turkey doc is not just a turkey doc. He's like the red wolf doc. So we reached out, and Mike Chamberlain is joining us remotely here, and he's going to give us a rundown on what the hell happened to the Red Bull. Like what happened to it? What's happening to it now? And why are there now articles saying there's 10 left? Yeah.

Yeah. That's, that's right. That's right. It's been quite a sorted, uh, a sorted past, if you will. Yeah. So, so Red Wolves, you mentioned this mentioned this Steve, red wolves were historically the, the canid in the Southeast. They were the, they were the top predator, if you will, intermediate in size between gray wolves and, and coyotes. So not as large as a gray wolf and

quite a bit bigger than a coyote for for many many years they were the they were the top dog in the south and then as human beings are apt to do we we extirpated them for most of their range uh part of that was just conflicts with humans part of it was was basically government mandated and and funded eradication programs to to get rid of the wolf for for human desires if you will hey let me let me let me hit you with this about the range though um because i i know that we talk about i'm now in the southeast virginia texas but like the wolves that daniel boone encountered like i remember a guy and daniel boone's hunting party once got bit by a wolf and then got rabies and developed hydrophobia

and died would that have been a red wolf in kentucky yes okay so when when when the frontiersmen were talking about wolves, they're talking about red wolves. Yeah. Basically from latitude, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, South to, to the Gulf coast and then over to Eastern Texas. Yep. Got it.

Okay. Go on. Yeah. So, so we removed the red wolf for most of its range, and then there was a pocket of wolves slash hybrid animals that kind of persisted in southwest Louisiana. And in the 1970s, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service went in and captured as many of those animals as they could. And using what we thought at the time, this is what a red wolf looks like. This is how big they are.

This is what their appearance is. They selected animals out of those captured animals. And they considered them as pure red wolves and they moved them to um captive breeding situations and they started a captive breeding program what had they been hybridizing with what had they been hybridizing with in in Louisiana was it coyotes not domestic dogs but coy Yeah, it was coyotes. And basically what you had, and you guys know this, so you had this, you had this pocket of, of wolves that were left and then you had this swarm of coyotes that, you know, they're numerically

superior. And as they kind of moved into areas where wolves were. They hybridized with wolves because they're numerically superior. And so you had all sorts of wolf-like creatures. You know, you had animals that were hybrids between coyotes and red wolves. Those animals were removed and the quote unquote pure red wolves became founders for what is now the red wolf that we know as a species. Those ended up being 14 that became the founders. Quick question. When the hybridization happens, is it usually female coyote, male red wolf or vice versa? Or would it go both ways? It goes both ways, but it tends to be smaller red wolves. That's what we've seen. The smaller

red wolves tend to be the ones that hybridize with coyotes, which makes sense because they're, without going too far in the weeds, you know, wolves are bigger, so they can use more space. They can eat larger prey more efficiently. So a smaller wolf would be closer in size to a coyote. So they would be more compatible when it comes to pairing together and using a home range together because they're comparable in size, if that makes sense. Do you mean smaller, like as in younger or smaller as in just smaller stature, even at maturity? Smaller as a, you know, morphologically smaller. Gotcha.

They weigh less, they're, they're shorter, shorter ears, shorter legs, you know, et cetera. So morphologically they, they look quote unquote more like a coyote than say a larger wolf would. That's the wolves that we see as being the hybridization issues, which makes sense. But to, but to Yanni's, but I wanted to make sure you, I don't know. I didn't know if you caught Yanni's question, the particulars of it, but he's saying like,

is it generally that, uh, a male red wolf breeds a female coyote or vice versa. It goes both ways. It goes both ways. Okay. So you did catch that. Got you. Yeah. Yeah.

It goes both ways. It just tends to be, it tends to be size driven in particular. As you would expect, I mean, you, and I'd have to go back and look at our data. I think it tended to, it tends to be more prominent with a, with a smaller male wolf and a female coyote, but, but that's kind of getting too far in the weeds, but the bottom line is yes, both males and females will hybridize with coyotes. Gotcha. Yes.

So those 14 founders became what is now the Red Wolf. And for years, the Fish and Wildlife Service, through cooperation with zoos and island propagation sites off the east coast bred red wolves. And the idea was to eventually create a wild population somewhere else other than where they were removed from the wild, which was southwest Louisiana. And that happened in the late 1980s. Those wolves were, I say those captive bred wolves were moved and released on the Albemarle Peninsula, which is Northeast North Carolina. And the reasons for that were many. One, there's a lot of federal and state lands in that area. Two, there are not a lot of human beings in that area. It's an agricultural-type landscape with large private landowners, and there were no coyotes there at the time.

So in 1987, those animals, you know, the first releases occurred. And from there you saw a fairly rapid increase in the, in the red wolf population. Mike, during that time, when they did that, knowing what you run into when you get coyotes, was there anything that could be done or was attempted to be done to keep that knowing that coyotes are spreading everywhere and moving into areas they had never been before, was there anything like a plan to prevent coyotes from getting in there? Not per se keep coyotes from getting there, but once they did get there, there was an immediate recognition

that there needed to be an adaptive management program in place. And what I mean by that is as soon as coyotes started infiltrating the recovery area, if you will, which was a five-county area, as soon as coyotes started getting in there, the Fish and Wildlife Service realized they were going to have to have a plan to mitigate this hybridization potential that we knew existed with this species. And that's really when the more kind of hands-on management of the wolf began. And what that program, this was, this came about in the late 1990s. There was a workshop convened. I actually attended that workshop as a graduate student. I was, I was in awe of the people I was, I was sitting around because they were the,

the gods of, of the Wolf and Coyote world. But anyway, the outcome of that workshop, which was dedicated to trying to figure out what do we do moving forward, knowing that coyotes are there and they'll hybridize with wolves. And the outcome of that was an adaptive management program where the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would go in and capture coyotes that had infiltrated into the recovery area, they, rather than euthanize them, they would sterilize them and release them as sterile placeholders. And the reason for that was simple. If you remove a coyote, then another coyote comes in and replaces he or she very, very quickly. We know that with coyotes in general. But if you release them

sterilized and you leave their hormonal systems in place, they don't know that they're sterile. They continue to maintain space. They maintain their pairs. They continue to try to breed, but they don't produce pups. You leave those sterile coyotes out there until you can go in and insert a wolf, a wolf pair into that territory and you allow the wolf to usurp that space that that coyote was using. And as some people listen to that and they go, that's crazy uh that it had been used previously and when that method started being used by the u.s fish and wildlife service the recovery program continued to to flourish um and what you actually saw was a stair step across the landscape of wolf territories packs that were intact and they were fighting off, if you will, coyote infiltration

because a wolf pack can take care of itself relative to coyotes that are coming in, trying to infiltrate the area. In other words, they fight, kill, expel coyotes from their territories. So at some point, and this was around the mid-2000s, mid to late 2000s, you had 150-ish red wolves across the landscape. You had intact territories, large packs, and they were maintaining themselves through this adaptive management program. That was, you know, a fairly heavy-handed

constant type of approach where, you know, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the recovery program biologists were constantly monitoring animals. As you can imagine, they were constantly trapping. They were constantly trying to determine when a coyote showed up. Was that coyote paired with a wolf? Was a wolf paired with a coyote? If a wolf was lost to gunshot mortality or vehicle collision, well, who did he or she pair with? As you can imagine, this was essentially a year-round activity that these biologists conducted to keep this population intact. And what are those 150 wolves feeding on? Red wolves eat a lot of deer. They eat other things. As you can imagine, a 50, 60-pound canid that's living in a pack in North Carolina, they can eat pretty

much whatever they want. So you see deer, raccoons, anything mammal wise, they would tend to eat, but deer was a primary prey item. And our residents in this area on this peninsula with 150 of them, our residents seeing them frequently, like, like wolves are sort of a part of their life. Yeah. Yeah. As you can imagine, if you go to Northeast North Carolina, you see kind of woodlots, you know, in these Pocosin wetland areas and, and there's a lot of agriculture and wolves being a fairly large animal yeah you you see them all the time you know and they what we've showed with our the

research that we were doing i did a lot of research in that area obviously with students graduate students um is those wolves used agricultural fields a lot. So they hung out in those fields. They raised pups in those fields. They hunted in those fields. So they were readily observable. Did they, uh, did they run into trouble with livestock predation much at all? Not a lot. Um, you know, you, you'd see occasional losses, and the Fish and Wildlife Service, their recovery program biologists at the time, they're now gone. Most of them, there are a few on site. They maintain really close working relationships with the local landowners, and if there were issues with livestock take, they address those issues.

Um, but that landscape is a pretty prey rich landscape. The deer density in that area is quite high. So you, you didn't see a lot of livestock issues and there was broad support from the public for wolves being there. Of course, as you, as you know. Which public though, like the public meaning North Carolina in general or the public meaning the residents of the peninsula. Uh, both, both there, there, there was broad support both locally and, and across the state for the wolf being there. Yeah.

I'm sure you're, uh, I'm sure you're familiar with the phenomenon of, um, when you pull people in a state about who loves wolves, they tend to score lower among the people that live by them than they do the people that are in cities thinking about them. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So obviously, you know, you, you could, it was a lot easier to find somebody in Dare County or Hyde County, North Carolina, that wasn't in favor of wolves than there was in Charlotte, North Carolina, that wasn't experiencing kind of day-to-day life with the wolf. Yeah, absolutely. But in a broad sense, there was a lot of support for the wolf being there. Got it. So we go from such broad support, which is a little surprising to me. I've spent a fair amount of time up in that country, and it's not the country where I would expect the locals to be like, yeah, wolves kicking around and eating our deer.

So what happened? Yeah, so despite the fact that there was broad support, not everybody is pro-wolf. And I will say, you know, in its heyday, the recovery program, part of the reason that the interactions between the wolf and the private landowners was kept on a kind of a positive was the recovery program biologists worked their asses off educating people talking with people trying to help mitigate any concerns or complaints with the wolf those biologists would go on and and obviously they needed access to private lands to trap wolves every year as part of the adaptive management program. So they had a really strong working relationship with those local landowners. And they were able to walk up to the front door and have a forthright, honest conversation about concerns that those landowners expressed. So when there was a wolf that was a problem,

Chris Lukash or one of the other biologists would go knock on the door and have a conversation. And sometimes those conversations were very pointed and very difficult, but that willingness to go have those conversations was one of the reasons that the program continued to flourish. And then all of a sudden, and it wasn't really sudden, but what we started seeing around the mid-2000s was an increase in gunshot mortalities.

As an aside, when the Red Wolf was restored to that part of the world, they were considered as a non-essential population. And therefore, they did not carry the same consequences as it would in other areas. So, what started happening around the mid-2000s is gunshot mortality started skyrocketing. And part of that was mistaking identity. You know, someone thinking they were shooting at a coyote or honestly not caring what they were shooting at. It was a canid of some kind and they shot it. And we started seeing that with this gunshot mortality,

that all of a sudden these breeding pairs were being dissolved because of us, because of humans. And what I mean by that is, you know, you had this pack and all of a sudden you lose the breeding female or the breeding male and chaos ensues. And those packs started being whittled away by gunshot mortalities. Instead of 10, there were six. Instead of six, there were three. And now all of a sudden the pack dissolves. And now you're essentially managing in favor of a coyote and against a wolf because coyotes were numerically superior and still are. Was the, was the gunshot mortality, was that a concerted effort or do you think there was, it was just randomness, but, but an increasing randomness? I think there was probably, and this is me, this is me speaking, um, just kind of a, from

a logical person's perspective, not an academic. I think it was both Steve. Okay. You know, you, you probably had some people that I don't say probably, we know there were people that, that targeted wolves. And we also know from our own field interactions with people that there were some people that legitimately thought they were shooting a coyote and, and were shocked, were stunned that they had killed a red wolf and weren't happy about it. You know, that they were not pleased with themselves that they had done that. Got it.

So it was a combination of both. And honestly, I think part of it centered around the, the kind of the narrative, the rhetoric that you started seeing in the deep South around 2005, 2006, you started seeing a lot of discussion about coyotes and their impacts on game species. And this is my speculation, but it seems a bit coincidental that we started seeing these issues skyrocket about the time a lot of that rhetoric was going around. And people like me were actually part of that because we were publishing a lot of information at the time about the importance of coyotes on deer populations and how they can affect deer populations.

And there was a lot of talk, and there still is a lot of talk, about the coyote being a problem for deer populations, and therefore, if we didn't have the coyote, we would have more hunting and harvest opportunities. And I think the red wolf in some ways got caught up in that. And that's truly, truly unfortunate. But so you started seeing a lot of gunshot mortalities. The population started declining. At the same time, you started seeing issues with private landowners that were politically connected, clamoring for a lack of protection for wolves,

clamoring for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to remove wolves from private lands and put them back on public lands, quote unquote, where they belonged. There was pressure on the Fish and Wildlife Service to issue take permits where wolves could be taken on private lands because they were, quote unquote, a problem. And that was pretty much the beginning of what I consider now to be the end, is the wolf population plummeted. A series of lawsuits resulted. Those lawsuits involved the state of North Carolina,

the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, private groups, and basically the outcome, predictably, was poor for the wolf. And now what you have is you have the Fish and Wildlife Service that has abandoned the recovery program. They have basically said, we're only going to, quote unquote, manage this species in captivity, and we're going to let them do their own thing as wolves on federal lands on the peninsula. And now, as you mentioned at the opener, we have just a handful of red wolves left in the wild. The remainder of them have been assimilated into the coyote population as hybrids. And if you want to go see a red wolf, if you can't get your eyes on that 10 or so that are left out there, you need to go to a zoo. And that in about 15 minutes is what I consider the sad and unfortunate recovery and then loss of wild red wolves wolves is there not another place across its uh historical

range where maybe people and and the state would would welcome a population has that been discussed yes it has guys we we and i say we i've only been tangential in some of these conversations but yeah there's been a lot of discussion about, well, okay, could we go somewhere else with these animals? And, and as an aside, and I didn't, I didn't mention this, but that's a great question. This was attempted a second time. So after the population on the peninsula got, got rolling, the Fish and Wildlife Service also tried this in Great Smoky Mountain National Park. And if you've visited that beautiful part of the world, you know that it's very rugged.

There's a lot of federal land there, but there are not a tremendous number of deer and other prey items in most of the Smokies outside of these open kind of managed early successional areas like Cades Cove and some of those places. So what happened in that instance, the wolves were released in the park and they almost immediately went to private lands and went down to lower elevation areas where there's agricultural properties. And of course, they encountered some problems with people there. Pup survival in that study was very, very low, almost zero. So it didn't take long for the Fish and Wildlife Service to pull that effort and put those animals back in the North Carolina into the Albemarle Peninsula because that effort was a failure. Since then, yes, there have been discussions on, well, okay, well, where do we go from here? Could we go somewhere else? And there are areas that in many ways are for wolves, the problem is twofold. One is us, as humans, and two is the recognition that you

don't have anywhere in the southeast that is absent of coyotes. So this issue that the recovery program ran into, again, the sterilization and release of, of, of sterile placeholders that would need to be conducted wherever we go with this wolf. Um, and, and it was working quite well, you know, as we met, as we discussed, but, but that is something that would have to be in place. Do you think that with new leadership, um, with, with a new administration and new leadership at, uh, U. fish and wildlife service. Do you imagine that there might be a real about face in the next couple of years and that they might reinitiate this? And then I'll hit my second question right now is we know that we don't win.

We know that we can't win every conservation fight. Sure. And there's such a thing as throwing good money after bad. What's your take on that? Yeah. The answer to the first question is, is no, I don't, I don't see a,

uh, an about face, um, unless it's perhaps a half-hearted about face. And maybe that's a, maybe that's a jaded, um, kind of sarcastic answer, but you asked me the question and that's my honest, that's my honest assessment is given, given the past, I don't, I don't see, regardless of a change in administration, I don't see an about face unless it's, again, a half-hearted, not really a genuine about face.

The good money, bad? Man, Steve, that's a good question. And as you can imagine, this program costs money. I mean, it costs money to do this. It costs money to pay the people that did this. It cost money to have the framework in place, the logistics in place. These animals were monitored weekly by airplanes, as many wolves and other populations are. So there, yeah, there was a lot of expense associated with this program. And there would be, there will be, if they continue it, if they

expand it, there will be. And that competition for resources is certainly something that, that would be at play. Yeah. And that's some of the, some of the anti-Wolf rhetoric, if you will, that was generated in the late 2000s and early 2000s that resulted in a lot of those, those lawsuits. That was one of the complaints is, you know, look how much money is being spent on this program. And for, for what, this is what the critics were saying. And for what, for, so that we can have a wolf in North Carolina that we constantly have to help, that this was one of their arguments. This is not me saying this. What's that term?

I remember when we had John Mualem on, the author John Mualem, he introduced a term that I hadn't heard before. It was something like conservation reliant. What's that expression? Yeah, yeah, conservation reliant. Is that what it is? Like a conservation reliant species. It's only going to cut it if we're putting time, money effort it's never going to get on autopilot absolutely yeah that's yeah

now the interesting thing and some of the wolf the the pro-wolf people and and i won't label myself as that but i the research was very clear if if you had enough wolves out there, they were capable of managing themselves. In other words, what you saw, if you look at a map of the Albemarle Peninsula, if you look all the way over to the east in Derrick County, and then you move westward towards Raleigh-Durham, on the easternmost part of the peninsula, there were no coyotes. And what coyotes were there, there were very few because the wolves maintained space and they excluded coyotes from the landscape. And as you moved westward, you moved into an area where at the

far edge there was hybridization going on, you'd expect but as soon as you moved far enough east to where you had large intact packs of wolves they took care of their own business if you will they excluded coyotes from those territories and therefore and this is something i think is sadly ironic would you rather have six or eight red wolves consuming deer or 60 to 100 coyotes? And that's what you see. In wolf territories, you only have a small number of wolves that are eating deer or any other prey. But in the absence of those wolves, you replace them with a species that uses a much smaller home range, eats a much greater diversity of prey, including many, many birds. And you replace them in a situation where they're now numerically two, three, four, five times superior to the wolf that was there.

That's something that I would often talk to people about and sometimes it fell on deaf ears, but that is something we saw with the research. The timelines don't add up for this, what I'm going to ask you next. They don't add up in a real literal way because wildlife populations can move so slowly. But would you think it's safe to say that had we not extirpated wolves in the Eastern U S or virtually everywhere, um, at a time in the lower 48, do you like, would you ever look at that and be like, if that hadn't happened, we wouldn't have had the explosion of coyotes or do you think it would have been inevitable? Uh, I think it, it's kind of somewhere in a gray area in between because, you know,

removing wolves from certain parts of our landscape was inevitable, whether we actually tried to extirpate them or not, you know? So if you kind of look at the Eastern United States, um, you know, just because of population, human population, you were going to be in a situation where you would create parts of the landscape that a coyote can use, but a wolf can't. Yeah. If that makes sense. Yeah.

Just the, the, the urban suburban landscape. Yeah. Yeah. Like you're going to have wolves or you have coyotes in Central Park, but you're not going to have wolves in Central Park. You don't see many gray wolves running around in Central Park. Yeah. Yeah. You're going to have wolves or you have coyotes in central park, but you're not going to have wolves in central park. You don't see many gray wolves running around in central park. Yeah. Thankfully.

Um, so yeah, I think there's, there's probably a little in both directions on that, but I think yes, in many broad areas, rural areas, the removal of the wolf,

there's no question it's benefited the coyote. There's no question. The removal of wolves, in particular the red wolf, allowed the coyote to colonize the southeastern United States in a ridiculously fast manner. Had they encountered intact wolf territories, that expansion would not have been nearly as rapid as it has been. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join our northern brothers get irritated well if you're sick of you know sucking high and titty there on x is now in

Canada the great features that you love and on x are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about on X here on the Meat Eater podcast. Now you guys in the great white North can be part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services

handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com. onxmaps.com. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Hey, Mike, why and how is it do you think that this is kind of flown under the radar as this population has gotten whittled down to nothing? You're not seeing it on the national news. Pro-wolf advocacy groups aren't making a big deal out of it.

Like anything, anytime anything happens with gray wolves, like the Wisconsin hunt or Idaho saying they're going to kill 90% of the gray wolf population. It's like, that's not, that is not what they said. Okay.

That is what, that, that is what the, the, the, the, the,. That is what the lame stream media. That's what I'm getting at. It becomes this national story. Pro-wolf advocacy groups jump on it. Like, why haven't we seen that with this? Can you please clarify what they said now that you said that?

I'll let you do it. Damn it, Brody. They had agreed they had agreed in that state many decades ago that wolf recovery looked like 150 wolves they're now sitting on 1500 to say that they're still operating on that recovery objective, which everybody agreed to. Don't yell at me. I'm not disagreeing with you. I know, I know.

I'm not mad at you. I'm mad at Reuters. I'm mad at every clickbait generating, not you, Spencer, but every clickbait generating person on the planet they're loosening some hunting restrictions they've loosened the hunting restrictions all the way along to no effect do you like it's not like all of a sudden idaho is going to loosen a couple more restrictions and all of a sudden they're going to be like BAMO at recovery objective. You're not going to do it.

I understand that. I'm not mad at you, Brody. I'm just saying, why hasn't there been that level of scrutiny put on this situation? I know someone's governor kills a gray wolf and holy smokes. Yeah. That is a really good question, man. And I will tell you. They had a problem in the question yeah the question itself was flawed but as steve has alluded to but i think the root of the question was was a was a good one that that question has been bannered about amongst myself and many others, and I don't have a great answer, guys. It was a very rural area. The state of North Carolina, the state agency, was not particularly vested in this project.

There were conflicts between the agency and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. So you basically had a small group of people, the recovery program, that were working in isolation out in this area. And when these issues started popping up and these things started happening, instead of going to the top of the mountaintop and saying, damn it, people, we've got a problem here and we need help. We need you to help us figure out a way to stop what's happening to this animal being, they're being shot. That didn't happen. And it, it didn't matter if I got up at a conference and, and gave a talk about what was going on, which I did, it didn't matter. Um, if people interviewed me or students or biologists, it, it just didn't, it didn't seem to matter.

There, there wasn't a lot of traction around it. And a lot of us have openly discussed why that, why that was. It's a, it's a travesty. You know, I wish I could be like a traffic cop and direct American sentiment to proper areas. Because we get distracted by things. We had this conversation about caribou herds in the lower 48. In our lifetimes, in my young little lifetime here, we watched and allowed caribou in the lower 48 to blink out and just gave up no one ever gave a shit about that ever ever yeah we're just in hawaii there's a group of people in hawaii who

make it their mission to go around feeding feral house cats at night. And they have a legal team. Just the fact that that exists is ridiculous. So that coincides with like, oh, we'll just kiss the red wolf goodbye. We'll kiss the caribou goodbye. And then poor our attention. Oh, my God. Brody got me all riled up. I know it wasn't your fault, Brody.

I got thick skin skin I'm okay I just read too many of those headlines Mike you were telling me He just reads the headlines You were telling me that you think the red wolf Got kind of caught up in the hatred Of the Coyote

And whether in the minds of folks They were really ever seen as a Distinct species or there was some gray area around that. Yeah. Yeah. And that's something we haven't talked about, but it's a very important point. Thank you, Corinne, for bringing that up. But there has been some taxonomic debate about this critter as well.

And I'm not a taxonomist. And I kind of look at this from the standpoint and I have from the start, as long as this canid is recognized as its own species, then I'm going to study it because at the time I was, I was really the only PI, principal investigator that was studying red wolves in the wild. And, And the graduate student that was working for me, Joey Hinton, was really the forefront of Red Wolf research. There were other, and I'm not trying to step on anybody's toes, there were other researchers that were doing Red Wolf work. But Joey's dissertation research was really the the penultimate work on red wolves and while all of this was going on there were constant taxonomic debates about well is it is the red wolf

really a species or is it just a hybrid and yada yada and you know taxonomist and no offense to taxonomist but you know they get paid to have these debates and yeah and they got hijacked by the they got hijacked by the geneticist man like they got overthrown by the geneticist yeah yeah and there was a lot of back and forth you know well they're the red wolf is not a wolf it's a hybrid well no it's it's actually a species and etc etc i mean we're hybrids when you say we're human we're human neanderthal hybrids at about the you know it's you'd have thrown out bison recovery they tried to throw out bison recovery on the same grounds there's a little

teensy bit of cattle introgression yeah look at look at the school. Yeah, screw it now. When you say hybrids, Mike, like hybrids of what, like a gray wolf and a coyote, like they're basically that, that they're just a, they're a hybrid canid that, that there was no such thing as a, and there are some that argue this there, there's never been any such thing as a red wolf that actually what's running around there is just a coyote gray wolf slash, you know, mutt, if you will.

And, you know, again, that argument, that mindset has been at play and has been out there for decades, really. What's funny about that, too too is it that's how species i mean that's species creation yeah you could you could say the same thing by some understandings you could be like screw mule deer it's just it's a it's a it's a white tail black tail hybrid yeah or some such you know know? Yep. Yep. Yeah. And I get this question a lot in, in the turkey arena is like, well, hey doc, this picture, is this a Rio or a Merriam's or an Eastern or whatever?

And I'm like, um, well, it looks like an Eastern, but let me ask you, who cares? Like, who really cares? Well, I wanted it for my, you know, for my slam and I'm in whatever state. Well, are you within the range that's considered that subspecies? Well, yeah. Then just, okay, move on, man. I mean, you shot a turkey and it was awesome um good opportunity to bring up your uh slam steve oh yeah you know i can never remember

what slam i have i have something like the the the super great slam royal maybe the royal great slam yeah so so to corinne's point yeah that the taxonomic issues certainly didn't help didn't help what went on with this animal because there was a narrative around well wait a minute there's some scientists saying this is you know it's not supposed to be a species really and that that didn't help for sure yeah okay can we ask you a turkey question absolutely we're gonna ask a lot it's not as depressing as the red wolf for sure someday it might be i don't know i hope not i really do uh i want to ask you a turkey question then i want you to tell people how to find you and everything. But we had a guy write in.

He says in Missouri and now in Idaho where I live, he hears about how a primary turkey predator is crows and ravens. We're going to talk later in this episode, we're going to talk a bit about ravens killing, some crazy stories about ravens killing stuff. And how they'll find the nests. They'll see hatchlings, poults, and kill them. They'll find nests and eat the eggs. And he was saying anytime he kicks up, this hunter's saying,

anytime he kicks up a hen, they'll set to scrounging around on the ground. And this is no easy task, I'll point out. But they'll set to looking around on the ground until they find the female's nest. Then they'll camouflage that nest with sticks and leaves. Do her the favor of camouflaging her nest with sticks and leaves. So that nothing eats them while she's gone. Right. And he says they'll even be working a tom, kick up a hen, stop working the tom in order to locate the nest and camouflage it. And he's wondering if anyone else does this and if you would, as a biologist, if you would discourage or encourage this very, you know, admittedly like very well-intentioned

conservation move? Yeah. Well-intentioned, um, don't do it. That, that would be my recommendation for, for a couple of reasons. I understand the notion of the bird leaves the nest and you feel like it's your fault, you want to hide those eggs and keep these marauding predators from getting the eggs, know a couple of things. One, if you just get the hell out of there, she's coming back most likely. If she's later in incubation after, say, the first 8, 10 days, she's almost guaranteed to come back.

And she's not going to wait that long to do it. It's not like she's going to be gone for half the day. She's coming back quickly. Two, if you walk around that nest and you're looking, searching, you're trampling vegetation, you're leaving your scent in the area, and that's something that predators can cue in on beyond just the scent of the hen or the nest. So I think in many cases,

particularly with predators that are olfactory, that smell, that us approaching the nest is a real problem. And that's one of the reasons that my field crews, we don't go to the nest until it hatches or it fails. Even though we know exactly where it is, we don't go, we have, but we don't typically put cameras at nests. We don't do any of these things that compromise the situation at the nest site because we're concerned with predators queuing in on on our activities and our scent more importantly so that i would i would not encourage people to do that and if that person contacts me and he's really mad i understand but i that would not be

something i would encourage people to do he uh he's definitely not framing it up like by god this is the way to do it and i'll do it for the rest of my life come hell or high i think he's saying like hey i've been doing this is it is it a good idea or not not not a great idea no all right we're gonna move on to some other stuff uh mike but hit us with um you know hit us with your uh how to find you stuff yeah so if you want to see not red wolf stuff but turkey stuff um you can hit me up on any of my social media accounts on instagram and twitter it's just at wild turkey doc it's all one word wild turkey doc and you'll see i post stuff every week about turkey stuff of some kind, research, just general anecdotes. Great graph, but great graphics.

Yeah, yeah. I try to. A lot of stuff like what animals are doing when they're wearing tracking devices and kind of how they move on the landscape, where they stay, how they react to each other, how they react to hunters. It's fascinating. I've got some pretty cool ones coming up for this summer too. Some stuff some students are doing now that's pretty cool. We're doing some drone work, which is really cool, looking at vegetation and stuff. So I've got some pretty sweet things I think people will be interested in. So yeah,

you can find me there on Facebook. You just type in my name and if you can get the same information, uh, you want to get some radio collar action. You need to put a collar on me and my son this weekend for the last couple of days of Turkey season, man, you're going to see a hardcore mortality event. I'm jealous. I've hung it up. I've hung it up for the year. I'm so tired, and my wife is so mad at me. All right, man.

Thanks so much for joining us. Yeah, man. Take care, guys. Thanks, Mike. Thanks. Yep. See you. We're talking about this guy, Ravens killing turkey nests.

Native Alaskan wrote in about Ravens. He works on a remote island outside of Juneau. Sounds like he's in the mining business. They got a mill shop. They got a rock pile. But he said that at their camp where he works, when I say Native Alaskan, I don't mean like knowing someone says like, I'm a native Idahoan. They mean that they were born in Idaho, native Alaskan. Um, you don't say native American

in Alaska. They'll say native Alaskan, uh, says that, uh, they had a, they found a fawn with a broken leg at their mining camp, stumbling around and they were able to grab it and splint its leg and it made it back to his mom but um a small gang of ravens got onto it plucked it to death picked it to death picking its eyes picking at its snout eventually they killed it it, got to its rib cage, and got to its vitals to eat. Then, around their camp, this is where it gets weird. It was a group of, he says, four to five young male ravens. Around their

camp, he's wondering, did this group just learn to do this? Because around their camp, they then started laying waste to fawns. They watched one, they were attacking a fawn and the doe kept coming in trying to defend it and eventually the doe got some injuries on her ears injuries on her eyes gave up they killed that and the best they can tell they killed six to ten fawns around them said something they just left like they once they figured out how to do it they

just left and they got to learn that his co-workers they were worried about what to do and there's a you know migratory bird act you know you can't legally kill him and they were asking him like as an alaskan native maybe he can kill the ravens um he explained that the relationship between his people and the the ravens and their cultural beliefs and uh that was out of the question for him he's wondering has anybody ever heard of this so we got to looking into a little bit man in the livestock world uh it's a real known thing. There's like manuals. What is some of this stuff here? We got manuals about

the cost to livestock of ravens, killing baby lambs. We got a picture of someone made a little pile of lambs that all look like they have like racket, not even like golf ball sized holes bore into them all over the place. Like a horror film.

Yep. Is this just a, this is just a raven thing, not a crow thing? Do we know? Crows as well. Crows as well. And so Heffelfinger brought this up. He brought up how there's that old saying, you know, like the how different herds and stuff are murder of crows.

He doesn't know, but he brought up, it makes you think about the term murder of crows when they'll descend on livestock when they'll descend on livestock operations. A livestock manager in Colorado was saying they had a very hard winter in 2008. Tons of snow.

Food got real scarce. they lost a lot of calves the to ravens getting them around the eyes the tail head which i guess is where the tail joins the body i never heard that term tail head meaty part of the hip she's what talks about golf golf balls oh there it Golf ball-sized holes pecked all the way over, down to the bone. Said it's sickening. Yeah, that was a bad winter. There was a huge mule deer kill that winter.

Was there? Yeah. There's a book, The American Crow and the O'Connor Raven, and it gets into their predatory instincts. And then the Department of Ag has this 2020 paper about ravens, and it talks about just their insane intelligence and that groups them will learn to do things.

It talks about being bad for crop damage, but also preying on livestock, newborn livestock, and then complications where ravens become a hindrance to endangered, threatened, and sensitive species. This Department of Agriculture report gets into where they have impacts on sensitive, threatened, and endangered species. We're part of recovery plans are impacted by them. Desert tortoises, California lease turns, snowy plovers, piping plovers. Plovers? What the hell is that word?

Plover. Plover. Pip the hell is that word? Plover. Plover. Piping plover. The old California condor. Marbled murelets. San Clemente loggerhead shrikes. Greater sage grouse, our good friends, goes on and on. So that guy, it's interesting that that guy had that occurrence around that camp, and it winds up being pretty well corroborated as not unusual.

Yeah, not unusual at all. It documents of ravens and just kind of digging into like local town publications, you'd see that this happens so much with livestock. But I wonder if other listeners have ever come across, you know, like we're looking at this photo of a bunch of young lamb, exactly as Steve had mentioned, with like golf ball size holes like a cookie cutter shark right yeah you know part of their abdomen in their eyes and i just wonder if any hunters or you know folks around the outdoors have ever come across a fawn or some young deer a guy a guy a tree surgeon i used to work with when i was in the tree biz, he watched and he had like a blow-by-blow account. Like I have no doubt that this guy watched it happen.

Not Crows and Ravens. He watched two golden eagles kill a pronghorn. Oh, wow. He said, man, they took their time with it too. And he said they very much knew what they were doing. And it wouldn't run. It just go in circles and hang out.

It's like, how are you going to run? Remember in a fog night, we saw those Golden Eagles dive bombing that elk? Yeah. And they were really harassing it. And there was something about it that was acting weird too. They were very intent on it. Dive bombing its neck, dive down its face. The guy that saw him hit the, kill the pronghorn, he said they'd come down and rake its back.

They'd come down, rake its back, and then crash it into the ground. Like they maintain that level of velocity. Wow. So he goes, it actually like kind of like poof, when it hit the dirt, they'd be going so fast and just rake their talon. And he said, eventually they got a big wound on its back and and uh got down into the backbone and tendons and stuff and that was it holy cow he said it was just running circles so did it well you may not know but did it die of exhaustion or blood loss or they just wore it down and picked it apart he said

they got a wound on it i mean the stress i the stress. I mean, the stress has to be. Yeah. It just got to the point where. Everything is such an enormous factor. Couldn't run anymore. We were just out in Hawaii. I was going to talk about this stuff. Reminded me of something I was going to mention

about the spearfisher, Kimmy Werner, was telling me just about predation things. She was one time in the water with killer whales. Orcas is the PC term for them. They're feeding on herring. And they're just chasing these big balls of herring around underneath her. Bubbling them? She didn't mention that part, but she mentioned this.

She sees a half of a herring coming up, floating up toward the surface, bubbling. And she's like, why the hell is it bubbling? And realized it was like a, like it's swim bladder had just been nicked when it was cut in half. So it was like kind of making a bubble line as it came up. Half of, you know how big a herring is, I mean it's not as long as your hand, right? Half of a herring. All of a sudden, here comes a bull killer whale up sips that little half herring down and goes back down again just for a little crumb like the thousands of pounds of that thing he's like oh missed that one yeah came up and nabbed it which would be like, you going out of your way to go grab a quarter of a Smartie.

I hate Smarties. What, in like the chalkiness? No, I just, I don't really like that kind of candy. You don't like sugar and chalk mixed together? How do you feel about Necco wafers? Those are heinous. Anyway. I don't know what those are.

Guy wrote in a couple of interesting things that we got from other good pieces of feedback is we were talking about getting accidentally shot. Guy was messing around with a BB gun when he was a kid.

And he had one of those kind where you had to unscrew the barrel cap to load it. And he was unscrewing the barrel cap with his teeth. Got a BB shot into his tongue and carried the BB in his tongue, and dental x-rays, you could keep an eye on that little BB because dental x-rays would turn it up in there.

Another guy wrote in, they were in Kentucky, southeast Kentucky, on a float trip. They get to a gravel bar. This is like the list of things that will make a turkey gobble. Wake up in the morning. They got to camp on the beach. There's a big cliff across from camp. He gets up in the morning, makes some mimosas,

pops open the Prosecco and got a shot gobble off Prosecco bottle, man. That's good stuff. Another thing that came in is interesting to me is I used to fish. When I lived in Seattle, I was a major cause of perch mortality in Lake Washington. I don't mind. I don't like to spot burn, dude, but it's beyond.

It's a huge lake. Anywhere you go at the edge of a weed bed, which is the entire perimeter of the lake, go out to 18 feet of water. And as you catch perch, a cyclone of perch comes up with the perch. Me and my boy caught 70 in an hour. Like usually like doubles. I mean, you're not going to mess it up.

And now that lake was in the Midwest. Old men with Lund skiffs would empty it out. They would park camper trailers along the banks and empty it out. But no one there cares. When I was fishing there, they had health advisories on the perch. And I'd always be having perch fries and people would be like,

they're not supposed to eat those fish. The health advisory was pertained to perch over 10 inches or some such. And it was you're only supposed to eat certain amounts, like so many ounces every so many months of perch over a certain size.

And the health advisor, because they used to have a lot of heavy metals, industrial solvents from all the manufacturing in Seattle. Someone just said, you'll be pleased to know a lot of those health advisories for Lake Washington have been dropped now there's only two fish from lake washington with a health advisory the common carp and the northern pike minnow the health advisory is everyone should not eat but perch corinna's gonna find out is this

because it's getting cleaner and it is right it is we're like limiting pollution doing cleanup measures and then time and flushing and rainwater right all all help dilution is the solution to pollution to pollution oh uh is it that or is it that they realize that you can eat a lot more of that nasty shit than you thought you could? Corinne's going to find out is the water better or is the monitoring or the recommendations different? Stay tuned. Right. Um, I need to know, but it is good to know because now when I, if I was to ever go back there and have a giant perch fry, I wouldn't able to need i wouldn't need to be able to say to people um well you see these aren't these are all nine and three quarters of

an inch long and they don't get they don't kill you until they're 10 like now i just be able to be like in fact no there is no health advisory on yellow perch in lake washington it would have made perch fries more fun that That was some good fishing there. Missouri had its first black bear season. Someone explain this. Yeah, first black bear season in quite some time. Might be like 100 years. I don't know when the last one was.

We don't have that in our notes. But they were dang near extirpated, just like next door over there. Or not next door. I guess Arkansas would be to the south, correct?pated just like next door over there and uh we're not next door i guess arkansas would be to the south correct yeah which is next door yeah that's clay oh speaking arkansas guy sending a new one so this is terrible but we're talking about arkansas and ducks yeah he says what they call a siphoning hose is an Arkansas credit card. As for Clay, too. Go ahead, John.

Sorry. Well, anyways, conservation efforts have brought the bears back in Missouri, and now they have an estimated 800, and they're going to give out 400 black bear permits for October. Damn. Yeah. It's pretty cool. 9% year over year population growth. They're figuring that they're going to have, in the next 10 years, they'll double their population.

I just saw something from, I think it was Iowa fishing game that said they're expecting bears to become more and more prevalent in Iowa. So they're spreading. They're good. They're good. They're good at adapting. Yeah, they figured out.

Remember we had Carl Malcolm on years ago when he talked about the Wisconsin Super Sow and his, he was specifically studying black bears on the edges of range. So his particular thing was, I mean, in different areas, they're moving in different directions, right? But in his area, it was bears in Wisconsin moving to the south. And what was crazy is the health and fecundity of those bears on the edge bigger more cubs badder like they you know because they're in they're moving into new on they have no untaped resources man and presumably you're talking about smart bears because they're coming from population it's not like you're like moving

them into a whole new area it's like he's familiar with the area he's just pioneering new spots where no other bears are in there messing around and that super sow you remember that put off something like four years four years in a row four cubs or something it did it did five it did five cubs that it got to 100 pounds. Took a year off as they do. Did five cubs, got them all to 100 pounds. That's when they quit monitoring them. And then when they left her off, she was pregnant with five.

Wow. Super sow. Super sow. Pretty soon, man, it's going to be like the bald eagle. You know, when we were kids, like anytime someone saw one, if you were traveling somewhere where they lived you'd be like oh I hope we get to see

a bald eagle and now people are just like ah that scavenging son of a gun like we see them everywhere which is what Ben Franklin thought about them he thought they were

just gross scavengers yeah where I grew up in northwestern Pennsylvania there was never bears when I was a kid and they're all over the place now you got the biggest damn bears in the country.

Well, there was always bears, but not like way up in the Northwest part of the state along Lake Erie. And now they're like in the city of Erie. Do we know what percentage of bear tags purchased across states are filled? Yeah, that I was, when I was surprised to see the 400, I would like to know as a

slow open slow can open right there um i'd be curious to know if you were allowed like it i'm i'm assuming you can't bait and you can't run hounds because if you had 800 bears and you'd never hunted the population and it was gloves off on baiting and hounding, you're gonna kill a lot of bears. I wonder if it's that you can't and they're giving out 400 tags because they think they'll kill a hundred bears. Yeah,

you can't. Because they think the efficacy, efficacy. Even that would be a pretty high success rate but i mean if you i'd be curious because i was like man that's like i wonder if you know i bet reuters right now is writing an article um missouri to kill half of all bears yep this is something we don't cover taiwan we need a taiwan desk this is an interesting i this I was shocked to find this out about Taiwan. Yeah, it's interesting. Taiwan has indigenous groups.

So as we'll talk about a little bit later here, in the U.S., we have our predominant Euro-American population that displaced indigenous peoples. In Taiwan, they have indigenous groups. And people are gunning. That was a good pun. People are gunning for their hunting rights. So, Taiwan has 16 indigenous groups that hunt, 2.5% of the population. They can only hunt on certain days, and they have to use homemade rifles. This one, I don't understand that. Yeah, so traditionally they had to use homemade rifles. This one, like, I don't understand that.

Yeah. So traditionally they had to use homemade rifles. Homemade rifles are dangerous. So they're like, well, you know, we want to keep hunting as our tradition dictates. We would like to do it with safer firearms. But there's a big battle going on. The Wildlife Conservation Act is seeking to restrict indigenous hunting rights, saying you can only use

homemade guns. And this is interesting. They would have to file an application and then report how many and what kind of animals they'd hunt. So beforehand,

you got to tell what your plans are. Then afterwards, you got to issue a report about what you got. This is where it gets interesting. In their tradition, hunting animals are the blessing of ancestral spirits. You cannot boast or show off. These people are probably not on Instagram. Yeah. Yeah. They would not like my Instagram page which I use to boast and show off

about stuff I caught so if you boast or show off about your hunting prowess you're punished by God in their legal system so they don't want to issue reports tallying up what they got

that you then send off in the mail it looks like they're not going to reports tallying up what they got that you then send off in the mail. It looks like they're not going to overturn these new rules because they say that environmental protections are as equally important as indigenous rights. This all started with a lengthy legal battle. Guy named, I don't know how he pronounces his name, Tama Tulum, Tama Tulum, I don't know. Tama Tulum, let's say. He's 62 years old. Back in 2013, he killed a couple protected species with a modified rifle. So he was trying to feed his mother, and she had always been raised on wild game, preferred wild game, and he killed a couple of protected species.

Got three and a half years in the old clink. And that's what started this whole brouhaha. I'm rooting for the indigenous hunters. It seems unlikely that they're the ones that are responsible for... That's what it gets into. Yeah. They used to have commercial market hunting.

Up until 1989, they had commercial market hunting up until 1989 they had commercial market hunting they banned commercial market hunting and a lot of the endangered they hunt jack deer they hunt monkeys a lot of that stuff

started to recover and they're saying that subsistence hunting by indigenous peoples is not what's driving extinctions. Yep. Hmm.

Hmm. Hmm. Bullshit, that's what I say. Ha ha ha! Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there,

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All right, so moving on. But keeping what we're going to move away from our Taiwan desk, but we're going to stay on indigenous culture, indigenous hunting rights. We're going to talk to our next guest here, also joining remotely. We're still having like residual. Let me explain this real quick. So COVID forced us to do a lot of remote stuff, which I didn't really like. But then I started to kind of like aspects of it because it allows you, we used to, I used to have a firm, like no remote guest rule. Yeah.

But, and as much as I'd like to have people here, it kind of opened up. Like there's people that we wanted to talk to that simply couldn't talk to because of issues lining up schedules so um one of the long-term pandemic results you know i keep meeting people who say like i for now i will always wear a mask on airplanes now that i'm used to it. Well, I don't know if we talked about this recently, but I've been talking with quite a few people about it. A couple of interesting things is that we've realized that we haven't had a cold or a flu in well over a year that's come through our household.

And I've talked to a couple of doctors, and they said that you can look at national flu numbers and there was no peak last winter it just stayed as flat as a pancake all through the winter and you're like there's two thoughts one is like oh great we should just all wear masks all the time and nobody's gonna get sick and you know great but at the same time we do need to get sick to build immunity stuff so yeah there's there's that and there's also like if someone said to me you can kind of go where you want to go and do what you want to do but you might get a cold now and then or you can hide in your house with a mask on and never get a cold i'd probably be like yeah i'll take the cold definitely um but either way like

some people i know like very reasonable rational people are like now that i'm used to it i'll always fly with the freaking mask because every time I go somewhere in the winter, I get sick. Another long-term COVID impact will be that we will always allow, to a limited degree, remote people to come in and tell us about stuff. It's a long-term like COVID impact. So today, tell us about some stuff. Jacob, I know he just told me how to say it jacob broussard jacob broussard that's right okay uh comes from his family it's from the mississippi band of chakta indians and he's a law student arizona state university um doing his law degree, along with a certificate in federal Indian law, and a

concerned and passionate hunter. Jacob, I know I filled it in, but go ahead and hit any missing points there. A little bit about where you're at in your young career, and then we're going to get into some definitions and stuff like that that are helpful to know. Yeah, I appreciate the introduction, Steve. Well, like you said, I'm in law school now, but prior to coming to law school, I graduated from University of Southern California, and I worked for a year in Washington, D.C. for the National Congress of American Indians, which is the largest, most representative

Indian advocacy organization on the Hill and in the nation. And we did a lot of work advocating for Indian country, addressing issues that are pertinent to Indian country, including things like land use, hunting and fishing rights on tribal lands, as well as elsewhere. And I've also done some work in Los Angeles alongside the Human Relations Commission, working on, again, some issues that are pertinent to Indian country in sort of a city context. So sort of spanning the board from whether it be urban or rural land and everything in between, I've been very fortunate to have some experience learning from nationwide leaders, both in Indian country and some of our elected representatives and how we're touching

on issues as they pertain to Indian country. Right on top here, I have a question for you. Is it equally acceptable? Is it synonymous to say Native American or to say Indian? Like in your mind, is it, either is cool. Yeah, that's a great question. And you know, it's, it's funny because it ties into, you know, some of the things we'll talk about later. And, um, the, the issue comes up a lot, right? You know, folks, some folks take offense to the term Indian. Some folks are completely fine with it. I would say in terms of navigating people's impressions around the terms, Native American is the term that I think is most widely accepted in referencing individuals. However, the Constitution of the United States and the laws that we have set out as it pertains to the Native community references Native Americans as Indians, and that's a political designation. And so it's actually a really fascinating conversation around what is most comfortable for folks from different backgrounds to use in terms

of the terminology. But you'll hear me today use the term Indian and use the term Indian country. And the reason I use those terms is because we have actually codified in law those terms referencing tribal nations as Indians and referencing anything that pertains to those communities as Indian country. And Indian country can mean actual reservation lands. It can mean lands that are owned by tribes, or it can mean lands that are neither of those things, but there is perhaps a tribal community living on those lands. And so Indian country is sort of the blanket term we use both in terms of legislating law, the judiciary uses that term in writing judicial opinions.

And so whenever we're talking about Native communities, those terms come up a lot. And I'd say you're completely fine to use the term Indian country when referencing the land. And in referring to the communities, I think tribal nations or tribal communities is probably the best terminology to be using just to help create that designation of exactly who it is we're talking about in the language that our nation's leaders are using themselves. Yeah, we were, I mentioned this prior, but we were on Nunavak island in the bering sea one time and it's the um it's the the the coast the people on the mainland are the upic is this is this right the upic and then on the on

on nunavak they they are chupac yeah that's right and they would say chupac eskimo now i know like in my later life i'm always corrected from people people who say it's a derogatory term. It's a pejorative. It means eat of raw fish. It was given to them. And you'll hear people clarify Inuit. And you can't say the word Eskimo. You shouldn't say the word Eskimo.

And I asked some Chupacs who call themselves Chupac Eskimo, and I said, what is your preferred term? And he goes, well, if i'm not an eskimo i don't know what the hell i am and was adamant in that case to that was his like that's what he preferred to be called so what do you that's what his people were known as and so i felt to put you in this weird situation a little bit where certain people in the lower 48 are reading your use of that word in a way that isn't aligned with how he traditionally spoke of and viewed himself and so you kind of either like right you either right by the local or you're right by this maybe ill-informed idea from the outside about what people are supposed to call themselves and i think one of the things that happens with a lot of folks is they get like,

we're open to complexity in some areas, but people get pissed when it seems like it's complicated to figure out what names people like. And they're like, to hell with it. I'll just say whatever I want because those people can't get their story straight or some such thing. And so I found it's a little more effective just to kind of hopefully just be able to ask and not be offensive and not be offensive in asking. Right. Right.

And ultimately, you can't go wrong there. You know, if someone asked me for, you know, your single piece of advice, I'd say just ask. Because like you said, I mean, there are, I know tribal citizens who refer to themselves exclusively as Indians. I know other tribal citizens who take offense to that and refer to themselves exclusively as Native American. And then also, you know, depending on where you are in the world, different tribal communities in different countries might refer to themselves as Native, as aboriginal, and a slew of other terms. And I think the safest thing you can do is ask.

But coming from my angle and those of us who work in and around and with the law, we use that term Indian and Indian country specifically because that's the term used in the law, not necessarily because it's the term we prefer. Yeah. Now, our interest, as you know, around the term sovereign nation will often come around with that reservations will often have their own wildlife management systems, right? So you can go down and, you know, you go to, there's some states where it might be illegal to hunt black bears with hounds, but then on a reservation, it is legal to hunt black bears with hounds, or they have completely different season structures and you have to

get a separate license. Like there's reservations here in montana you um you need to go buy a tribal hunting license okay because well here the term be like because it's a sovereign nation um you don't need to like you don't you can talk you don't need to like talk about it in through the lens of just wildlife management but but explain what we mean when we say sovereign nation. Yeah, it's a great question. And I think it's a topic that not a lot of people really fully understand because it's so complex and in a lot of ways, it's almost foreign to us and doesn't come up a lot in basic educational courses as we're coming up. We learn a lot, I think, in elementary school and high school about this idea of federalism. And what that

means is this conversation and this discourse between the United States federal government as a whole, and then the 50 states and their relationship between them. And states are actually their own separate sovereign entity. And that's why when you go into a given state, maybe you're traveling and you go to Montana, for example, you might not be from Montana, but you're still expected to abide by Montana's laws. And that's because Montana is their own sovereign entity. And tribes are really the same way. And the way that comes about is because during the era of colonization, the United States often entered into treaties with tribes. And when you look at when it is that the United States signs a treaty or enters into a treaty

with another nation, it's just that. They only sign a treaty with another nation. And so in signing a treaty, we recognize a given group as a sovereign community. And so if the United States wants to enter into a treaty with a community that's in South America or that's in Africa, they are inherently in doing so most often recognizing that group or they've already recognized that group as its own sovereign nation. And so the treaty concept is really important in Indian country because it's a constitutionally recognized contract between two sovereign nations. And so when we understand that, we see that the United States is actually this really unique land where we're a body of three sovereigns. We have the United States federal government, we have the states, and then we have

tribes. And these treaties between the United States and tribes are all protected underneath the constitution. And they exist as the judiciary has told us, the supreme law of the land. And so it's really critical to tribal communities who want to be able to exercise some regulatory authority, like you were mentioning, being able to control some of the wildlife management on their lands, to have these treaties or other agreements that establish them as federally recognized tribes. So this concept of federal recognition is really important because when the United States elects to federally recognize a tribe, whether that was done decades ago or whether it's done today, and it still is happening today, more and more tribes are becoming federally recognized, it sort of entitles the tribe to have all of these powers that they've

traditionally exercised to control certain elements of the land that they occupy and that is designated for them and held in trust for them by the federal government. And there's a shockingly large number, I think, for a lot of people of these federally recognized tribes. You know, I know just talking with some colleagues and folks who aren't necessarily thoroughly involved in the conversation around Indian country, maybe they learned whatever the public schooling system taught them coming up through elementary school and such. And when they ask me about, you know, is Native American, is the idea of Indian communities,

is it all pretty uniform? Is it homogenous? And a lot of folks are shocked to find out just how many tribes there are that are distinct sovereign nations. And today in the United States, there's actually 573 distinct federally recognized tribes. If you were to put that to me, if you were to put that to me, and one were to put that to me, and one of the options was like way less than 100, I would have said way less than 100. Right. And I think, you know, I would argue that probably the majority of Americans would. You know, not a lot of us are growing up near communities that have a tribal nation nearby. And even for those that are, again, there's usually only exposure to

a few tribes. And it's difficult to conceptualize that within the United States, we have, like I said earlier, we have 50 distinct sovereigns in all of the states. And then within that, there's 573 additional independent sovereign nations that all exist under the purview of the United States federal government. And these tribes all have their own laws. They can set up their own regulations. They can decide what is the process for being deemed a citizen of that nation, and then what rights you're entitled to as a citizen of that nation. And a lot of people are also shocked to see the extent of what it means to be sovereign. The fun fact I kind of share with a lot of people is that tribes, if they want to, and none to my knowledge do, but they could print

their own money. They could form their own military if they wanted to, and they can trade with other nations. And a lot of tribes today, just as a very meaningful exercise of what it means to be sovereign even in a way that goes beyond just their borders and their land we uh we cover you know over the years we cover a fair bit about the whoever's running the department of interior because that department oversees the vast majority of our public lands right um we talked a lot about the you know when zinke came in with trump and sort of a lot of uh high expectations around zinke as an avowed hunter and angler and then his tenure there did not go real well um his replacement was bernhardt who

there was a lot of hand wringing early on with bernhardt because he was coming from the extraction industries but wound up doing you know there was some areas where we definitely had disagreement but wound up in my in my view um was a pretty good Secretary of Interior and did a lot of good work in some important places. Was disappointing in other areas, but a lot of good stuff. And won the respect of the conservation community because he was forthright. If he was going to go against you on something, he would save you a lot of time. I just know this is like the reputation.

If he's going to go against you on something, he'd save you a lot of time by saying he's going to go against you and there's nothing that's going to happen. If there's room to move, he'd tell you there's room to move, let's talk. And so he was regarded as like a good person to deal with. You might not win everything, but with the conservation community, cordial

relationship, forthcoming, well-informed, a respected adversary where need be. What's your take on Biden's appointee, Deb Haaland, who will point out first Native American to take on Secretary of Interior? And so I'd like you to explain kind of like why that matters because I talked about public lands management, but there's a hell of a lot more that the Secretary of Interior does beyond that

that have implications for the fact that Hayland is native. Right. And it's a great point that you bring up that just, you know, the vast scope of what it is the Department of the Interior actually handles, right? And so, you know, I'd say looking back at that idea we just talked about, which is tribal sovereignty, what sort of is the next step, right? Okay, a tribe today, let's say they get recognized today, and they go through the process, which is a quite extensive one to receive that federal recognition. And now the tribe is in this position where they have hopefully some land set aside for them.

They have their community. Maybe it's a community of both Native and non-Native individuals, tribal citizens, non-tribal citizens all on the same land. And the question comes up, okay, how are they now coordinating Interior. And under the Department of the Interior exists the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Bureau of Indian Education, and several other sub-agencies that are handling and addressing issues pertinent to Indian country. And so when Deb Haaland was selected and appointed as Secretary of the Interior and subsequently confirmed. It felt like, I would say, the general consensus in Indian country was just this huge success because it means a lot of things. First of all, to have representation at one of the highest levels of government is just a huge win for any community, because it does a lot for younger generations who are looking up and seeing people that are maybe from their community or look like them, understand some of the things they've gone through in their life, to see that

leadership up there. But beyond that, it can be very meaningful to have someone who understands the needs of tribal communities having a hand in directing these sub-agencies like the Bureau of Indian Affairs in how they serve those communities. And so it was a really, you know, big win. But even beyond just who she is as a Native individual, you know, she comes from a military family. She grew up in a public schooling system. She's a parent. And she's, you know, been known to express some of her memories, both with her family growing up and her family now spending a lot of time on public lands. And her family themselves and she herself are all hunters. And so, it's something that for me as a

Native individual, but also a concerned hunter and angler who wants to see someone who's a responsible individual heading the helm of what is the agency responsible for my access to public lands. It's encouraging to me to see an individual who has some of those similar passions that I do. And coming from New Mexico, before she became the secretary, just as a congressperson, having that constituency of hunter and anglers, it confirms for me that something that's on her mind,

surely, is the rights of outdoorsmen and all individuals to access their public resource, which we all share in ownership of. You know, one of the things that comes out of the Halen nomination, and I'm, I don't want to say I'm guilty of it because that makes it seem like a negative is,

uh, um, from my perspective, okay. Someone who's benefited quite a bit from the public lands policy and availability that, that I've enjoyed in my life. In my perspective, I had a kind of a, uh-oh, meaning that recognizing that this could be something great for other people, but humans are selfish.

And right away, I'm like, uh-oh, is this going to mean a radical reappraisal of priorities okay like we've come to we've come to like i've come to notice um where the secretary of interior the actions they take that have implications for the areas where i go and the things I go and do. And I didn't know this till the other day that the, that the secretary of interior oversees the Bureau of Indian affairs and the Bureau of Indian education. So whatever they're doing there, like I wasn't paying attention to it. I didn't know about it. So I had a narrow scope of where they focus their time. When I knew that someone was going to be coming in with perhaps like very different priorities i had a uh-oh and still have a bit of an uh-oh of um well what about the stuff that they

do that that i think of when i think of the job is that are they gonna be paying attention there you know um so for for people that are having that little bit of like ee the hell's this gonna mean like what's your uh you know what's your what's your guidance or or feedback there yeah it's a it's a great question and i've heard those same concerns and you know both from people that are tribal citizens and even folks who are non-tribal citizens, you know, regardless of the walk of life that you find yourself in, you want to make sure that the person who's, you know, directing the Department of the Interior who's responsible for so much is going to be, you know, catering to your needs and accurately and responsibly representing all people of the

United States. That said, I think it's important to note what it is that the Interior as a whole, and specifically the Secretary of the Interior, now Deb Haaland, can actually do in that role. Because I think a lot of times, depending on what media an individual consumes, you can hear some pretty big ideas of they're going to make these tremendous changes of just an enormous scale that are going to impact your daily life, and it's going to happen right now, and you ought to be very concerned about it. And, you know, I think we can sort of quiet that alarm a little bit when we actually look into what these individuals are entitled to do under the Constitution. And so the Secretary of the Interior, you know, you go on Department of the Interior's website, you do a little bit of research, you'll see that their role is described as having this

administrative responsibility for coordinating federal policy. And what all that means is federal policy gets handed down by our lawmakers, in other words, Congress. And then when Congress passes that law, it doesn't just magically start working. You need people who are actually putting it into play. And obviously, you know, we refer to that as the executive branch and the Department of the Interior falls under that. That's why the president gets to nominate the Secretary of the Interior. And Secretary Holland's role is actually to carry out what Congress's intentions are. Her role does not extend beyond actually putting laws into place. The executive branch does not make the law. And I think a lot of folks get concerned that the secretary might make new laws or change laws, but legally, she has no power to do that. The secretary of the interior's power only extends to

implementation of laws and guiding regulatory agencies in their interpretation of that law. And, you know, I sort of use an example sometimes to describe this as this idea of you have a restaurant chain, right? And, you know, maybe I get hired as the manager of a given restaurant, and I decide I'm going to put in some certain policies at my restaurant to make things a little more efficient, to work better, maybe make sure folks get their food faster, can have access to better services, et cetera. But you're damn sure you're not going to get rid of the golden arches. That's right. You're not going to get rid of those golden arches. You're not going to get rid of the Big Mac because no matter what McDonald's you go to, you don't have a choice. You can own that franchise, you can manage it, but you don't get to make that decision.

The people at the top who are passing the laws, making the policies, they make that decision. You can, you know, you have a little bit of freedom in how you want to carry it out. And, you know, for sure, we need to be concerned in active citizens and keeping an eye on how the interior is actually carrying these laws out. But I think we can all rest assured that there's not going to be sudden significant change to our access to lands or to how individuals can use land, whether lands are going to get taken away. All of that, when you look to the source of power of the interior, you'll see that they have the power to regulate, they have the power to navigate those laws, but they're not making any new laws themselves. Hit me with your take on land back, the land back movement. Now, when I hear it, I always um, at any given year, I would like to see an increase in the number of acres open to the American public. Okay.

So an increase in, in particular through a lens of hunting and fishing, like an increase in areas where we can go to hunt and fish without, you know, not needing to pay trespass fees leases whatever but just increase i hear land back and i'm like that must mean a decrease um and like everything i said earlier i laid my biases out earlier right uh yeah i i have the a human tendency to view things through what it might mean for me um so i'm like you you know, a little leery about laying back. This idea that we would take, presumably it's taking public lands, because we're not going to give Manhattan back to the tribes. I could see an argument for that, but I have a feeling we're not talking about that. We're probably talking about federal lands um and

that's where it's not coming from it's not coming from urban areas it's not coming from suburban areas it'll be coming from open federal lands or maybe i'm way off i don't know hit me with your uh you can tell me i'm right and i should be scared like that won't we're still friends um be very very afraid just joking yeah hit me with uh hit me with what, we're still friends. You should be very, very afraid, Steve. Just joking. Yeah. Hit me with, hit me with what, if we're, you know, presumably if we're going to hear, if people are going to hear more about this, what are they going to be hearing more about? You know, and you can, you can, you can bias it as much or as little as you'd like.

Sure. Well, you know, I, I would say just to answer that question, what folks are going to hear, I, you know, I'm going to have to be candid and say folks are, especially as this movement continues to gain traction, folks are going to hear all manner of things. And that's going to come from, you know, folks who are talking about this movement, writing about it, all have their own perspectives that they're bringing to the table. And again, I would just caution that little bit of uh hesitancy from just believing what you hear right away because there are going to be folks who are talking about what they want to happen

um it might leave out the realities of what actually can happen so just kind of like what we were talking about with what the interior can do as As you might imagine, it would likely be a severe overreach of the Department of the Interior's power to unilaterally decide that we're going to take a huge swath of maybe, say, national parkland and just redesignate it as tribal land and give it away to a tribe. Oh, I have no problem with that. Yeah. If they do parks no problem with that. Yeah. If they do parks, zero gripes for me. I actually support it.

And so, you know, I think oftentimes what I like to say is, you know, let's talk about what the land back movement is not. And what it is not is just the federal government coming in, taking a look at a big swath of land and saying, you know what? Let's go ahead and give this away. I'm feeling charitable today. Let's go ahead and find a given tribe who maybe had rights to this land at one point and just give it away. What it is requires a little bit of a look back in history. And I was telling you earlier about how tribes receive federal recognition and how tribes sign treaties. Well, oftentimes the reason for these treaties was that during the colonial era and during Western expansion, the United States came upon a tribe that was occupying lands that they had

historically occupied for generations. And the United States government maybe said, we really need this land because our people are spreading further and further west, and there's a lot of conflict, and we got to find a way to peaceably settle this conflict. And so what the government would do is sit down at a table with tribes and sign a treaty. And generally what would happen is that the tribes would agree to cede that land to the federal government in exchange for another piece of land somewhere else. And that's where we get this idea of reservations. The federal government said, if you give us this land you have now, we're going to reserve for you a piece of land in perpetuity that will be yours and yours alone, and you get to control the sovereign nations.

Now, obviously, there were a lot of times that those treaty agreements and people sitting at those tables weren't having the same understanding of the treaty terms, and oftentimes tribes were taken advantage of. But the treaties nonetheless were signed. A lot of tribes were given these reservations. And now today, we see some tribes that are occupying those reservations ever since. But on occasion, there were times where the federal government subsequently came and said, look, we know we promised you this reservation, but actually we're going to need that land back. And the federal government then, through Congress, would pass a law that would

disestablish the reservation and take it away, breaking those treaty promises. And that has now subsequently led to this land back movement. And I would just say, you know, this is sort of a very simplistic explanation. It's certainly more complex. But there are tribes today and people today who believe that when this land was set aside and promised in perpetuity, and then subsequently taken away, that those tribes should have a right to come to the federal government and ask to have that land back. And so again, it doesn't mean just giving land away for no reason. The people who are actually on the ground floor of this land back movement are folks who are saying, you promised us this land and you gave it to us, and then you took it away,

or maybe you promised it and never gave it to us at all. And so now we're just asking the federal government to do no more than just fulfill the promises they made in these treaties, which again, as I mentioned earlier, are considered by the United States as the supreme law of the land. And so in that way, it just makes sense for some people. And it has proven to be a very divisive subject. And I think, you know, in my opinion, what the land back movement can mean in a productive way is having tribes who are responsibly handling their lands, going to the federal government, showing the treaty agreements and saying, we want to exercise control over this land once again in a regulatory fashion to carry through on what was promised to us. But it doesn't mean, even if that tribe gets that land back, that suddenly it's gone forever. You may have seen driving along the road.

I know you travel a lot and you hunt a lot. You're talking about up in Alaska. You've been on different tribal lands. You know, if you're driving from California to Arizona, coming out to Phoenix where I am now, you'll see a sign on the 10 that says, now entering the Colorado River Indian Tribes Reservation. And you're just driving through it. And I promise you, when you're driving through that land, you're not going to see a bunch

of walls put up. And oftentimes, I think folks who have been on tribal lands, they probably haven't seen a huge wall surrounding the borders of the reservation. And that's because most tribes, just like states, allow people to freely come on and off. And even if land goes back to a tribe, that land is held in trust for the tribe by the federal government. And now the tribe has rights to actually carry out and meaningfully apply their own regulatory regime for things like wildlife management, for things like hunting and fishing. It's no different than if you drove to another state to do some hunting and angling. You're just now doing it on a tribe, on tribe's land. Maybe it means going to a

different website to get your permit. But ultimately, I think there's a lot of concern that this means you're going to lose access forever. And I'd say my response to that would be, A, this isn't a quick process. It's no unilateral decision where someone can come in and take the land away. It would be a long and meaningful conversation. And two, should that land be transferred to the tribe, chances are you'll still have a meaningful way to access that land and still engage in recreation on it just under the regulation of the tribe as opposed to the state. Can you hit real quick on, we can stick to the lower 48 on this because it gets infinitely complicated in Canada. It gets infinitely complicated in Alaska. But extra privileges that tribal hunters get, which you seem to hear a lot about.

Yeah. Um, and I noticed in, in, when, when you and Corinne were talking earlier, um, you had a number that tribal hunters, uh, of the total take of deer and elk tribal hunters account for 2%. I was giving Corinne a great example of sort of the, how a tribe and a state can work together. And a great example of that is the state of Washington. And oftentimes you get this notion that tribal members have all these extra privileges. And because of those extra privileges, they're significantly harming the wildlife or the wildlife take overall in that given area. And in the state of Washington, where you have a very high number of tribes for the size of the state itself and a large number of tribal citizens who are going hunting, they're actually only taking, as you mentioned, 2% of the harvestable deer and elk. I believe the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife

released some statistics. And in 2012, they said that non-Indian hunters took approximately 29,000 deer, whereas treaty tribal hunters harvested about 495. And in that same period, non-Indian hunters took about 7,200 elk and treaty tribal hunters harvested about 365. And Washington, again, is a state where you're hearing a lot of that jargon around, they get these extra rights. Maybe they can access lands I can't access. They're going to wipe out the population. But when you look at the numbers, it just isn't the case. And in fact, the state of Washington has said that most of the elk herds there are, A, very healthy, and B, the biggest threat to the health of those elk herds is the loss of habitat in the state.

And when we look at where that occurs, it's occurring not on tribal lands, but on state lands and is oftentimes a product of state development and infrastructure on traditional habitat of those animals and of those herds. And the tribes themselves are often the ones who are advocating the most heavily for new programs and new infrastructure that actually helps protect these animals. So, you know, we're talking about these concerns, right? A lot of non-Indian hunters have around extra privileges that maybe some tribal citizens exercise, and whether or not they are extra privileges, just this general concern that, you know, tribal nations and tribal hunters might be harvesting more animals than anyone else. Or, and we just addressed that, but there's still that concern of, well, what if I want to hunt in an area that is run by a tribe and falls under their sovereign jurisdiction and regulatory authority for hunting and fishing,

and I'm concerned that I'm not going to have the means or I'm not going to have the opportunity to do that because I'm not a tribal citizen. And this comes up a lot in different states that have larger, you know, tribal populations. And being here in Arizona, where a third of the landmass is actually sovereign tribal land, it's a huge concern for hunters here. But I can tell you that Arizona actually has one of the most fascinating examples of tribes doing excellent management of wildlife resources. And here, if let's say you want to go on a black bear hunt, the state of Arizona, like many states, and it's its own topic in itself, has prohibited hunters from hunting with hounds at certain times of the year. And they've prohibited individuals from hunting bears via baiting at all times of the year. And so you go up to perhaps northern Arizona or central Arizona where there's larger

bear populations, and maybe you've been hunting with hounds in the spring, for example, every year for decades, and now the law has passed and you can't do that. You can only do it in the fall. What some hunters are now realizing is that they can actually go onto tribal lands, and a great example of this is the Fort Apache Reservation here in Arizona, where they allow hunting with hounds year-round. And just a few weeks ago, I was actually out on a hunt and I was right along the border of the Fort Apache Reservation. And sure enough, first thing in the morning, I hear some hounds going crazy. And I hear them going down from this ravine a couple miles away. And I look over in that direction, I realize it's

on reservation land. And maybe that party that's thinking, hey, that's not very fair. I'm going to call it in. I just realized, oh, that's awesome. A hunter decided that's something he wanted to do, he or she wanted to do, and they got in contact with the tribe, found a tribal guide, and they now get to continue in that practice if they're a hound hunter, being able to do that year round, specifically because they're utilizing the resource of having a tribal hunting regime really next door. And it's the same thing with baiting. If you want to bait bears, however you may feel about that, you're entitled to go do that on certain tribal lands here in Arizona. Again, the White Mountain Apache Nation will allow you to come onto the land. And just

like you would if you're an out-of-state resident, you would come to Arizona by an out-of-state permit over the counter. You just go onto the reservation by your non-member permit, and you can then go and carry on a baiting hunt or a hound hunt. And the same thing applies in tribes throughout the nation. And not only that, but you know, it again brings up that issue of, well, if the tribe is allowing it, isn't that just killing the numbers of animals for the rest of us? And on this hunt I went on, I spoke to a game warden who used to be a guide, and he actually told me, he said, you know, we call the bears around here res bears because the best ones that, you know, the top bears that people hunt around here, we track some

of their movements and we see they're coming over from the reservation oftentimes or elk, it's the same thing. And when you look at top ranked, you know, however you may feel about ranking of animals, top ranked hunts and animals that are harvested in the U.S., every single year, several of the top bears harvested are all coming out of the Fort Apache Reservation. And so you're looking at the success rates on the reservation versus off the reservation, and the success rates just continue year after year

to be incredibly high. You can do research and find statistics on herd health on the reservation, and it's some of the best in the nation. And so oftentimes we're seeing now that the tribe's way of managing the land and managing the wildlife resource is often superior to that of the state. And folks who want to do some of the best hunting in the country can go to a tribe purchase a permit just like they would anywhere else uh grab themselves a guide if that's what they want to do and have just an incredible hunt in some of at least here some of arizona's most beautiful country all right man uh this is great i got like three million questions that we're gonna have to have

you on more and then submit and then honestly some then honestly, some areas where I'd be like, yeah, but what about? But what about? I got a bunch of but what abouts? But we're going to let you go for now under the agreement that you're going to have to come on now and then to debate with us and explain stuff to us and, and, and give your take on stuff. But I don't know if you want people to, do you want, I mean, if you, if I say to you like, Hey, tell people how to find you, you will get great emails and you'll get emails from some real assholes. So it's up to you, man. Do you want to tell people how to find you? Absolutely. Yeah. I, I, I believe that, you know, it's up for everyone to decide the extent to which they want to help educate the community, but it's something I'm passionate about.

I'm always happy to entertain questions. You can find me on social media. I'm happy to give you some contact information. Yeah, do it. guy that came on in good faith uh in the spirit of of education cooperation to explain some stuff so as much as you might be sitting there with your hackles up about everything's going to be different we invited him and he did a great job and he's now going to tell you how to get ahold of them, but keep in mind, it's a conversation. Go ahead. Yeah. So you can look me up on, on social media. I'm on most platforms at Jacob Broussard. I'm sure if you're listening to the podcast, you'll probably see my name, I imagine in the

podcast description. And if you feel like sending me an email uh you can go ahead and reach out to me as well um i'm happy to give that over to the meat eater team and and uh if they want to facilitate any contact like that you can feel free to reach out to me yeah that's a good idea is um uh cory caulkins who uh runs our email inbox he'll he'll get everything where it needs to go all right thanks man this is this is great uh i like it i learned a lot talking to you i still got a couple but what about but we'll cover that later address any what abouts anytime i appreciate you having me on all right Thanks so much, man. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

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

without cell phone service as a special offer you can get a free three months to try out on x if you visit on x maps.com meet