The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 320: Rut, The Dating App

Episode Date: March 14, 2022

Steven Rinella talks with Janis Putelis, Kevin Gillespie, Sean Weaver, Maggie Hudlow, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider.Topics discussed: MeatEater's dating app idea called "Rut"; bison as livestock or wild game; when critters know damn well that hunting season is on and go hide; how Steve wants to use Covid masks to make a goose down quilt; mapping CWD across the United States; refunding wolf tags in WI; a scientific study demonstrating the association between eating meat and good health outcomes; Danielle's Copycat Chick-Fil-A Turkey Nuggets; getting a Warner-Bratzler shear force test machine for the office; the whole Putelis clan talking to turkeys; Kevin's wowza food videos and “Holiday Ham” feral hog; Jesse Griffith's Hog Book; celebrating Kevin's James Beard Award nomination; meat mold; Maggie Hudlow's investigation into Florida's Senate Bill 2508; mesopredators and nest depredation; a raven's massive cache of duck eggs; the snake that ate radios; 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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First Light. Go farther, stay longer. Oh, this is the you got the machine on, Phil? It's always on, Steve. Well, you need to go in and delete everything. Yeah, I was like, oh good. Can you imagine the black mail tape that Phil could

produce, dude? Us on geopolitics. Yeah. Now, this is more in line with what we're supposed to talk about is uh man this is a genius idea i don't like i feel like um i hope that me saying this like that we're gonna do this makes it that we have like uh like it's copyrighted now you know saying. Time stamp this, Phil. I just hit the time stamp button. At this date, we have claimed, this came from a listener, but we're cutting him

out of the loop. Guy's name is Dan. We've got to hook Dan up. He gets a free membership. Yeah, go try to find him. For getting the idea. At least 5% off to find him. Yeah. All right, Dan. For getting the idea. At least 5% off the first month.

This is what Dan gets for having the idea. A dating app called Rutt. You don't like it, Maggie? No. What would you call it? Yanni said he knows Dan's a dude based on the fact that he wants to call the dating app the Rutt. 100%. That is correct. What would you call it? Yanni said he knows Dan's a dude based on the fact that he wants to call the dating app The Rut. A hundred percent. That is correct.

What would you call it? I just don't have a whole lot of faith in dating apps, period. So it's not like you'd want to call it like breeding season or something. Jesus Christ. No, that's far superior. Okay, so breeding season. Just cutting the chase here. Probably go with rut.

And it's like a dating app he said okay this is a guy that's burned out on dating apps and he says that he sees that we have an interest in fixing people up um and he says that he's real burned out on dating maps he said farmers.com missed have you guys ever farmers only farmers only much dating app action have you had in your life? It's been limited. To what apps? I guess I haven't tried Farmers Only. Christian Mingle?

Or Christian Mingle. I haven't reached out. I've tried Hinge and Tinder. I pretty much download them, I meet a couple folks and I delete them cause it's it's just I don't think it's a great way of meeting people

I was gonna say I've got a ton of friends that go through that whole like download delete download delete cycle like a couple times a year let me ask you more I want to ask you a series of yes or no questions it'll be easier on you. I'm so glad this is where I'm not going on the podcast. Well, hold on.

Have you done these? Oh, yeah. Oh, okay. I'm going to ask you both a series of yes or no questions. I know you haven't. I haven't. I missed. I tell my wife all the time, if I could go back in time, like normally I'd want to go

to the Pleistocene, but if there was like a limit, I would go back in time. Like, normally I'd want to go to the Pleistocene, but if there was like a limit, I would go back in time. I would go back in time to like a little teeny while ago and do dating apps for one day. Like, what? I think you'd be disappointed. It's just like a game. At what phase of your life would you have been using the dating apps? Like, would this have been Steve prior to everything? It would be a weird time machine because, yeah, it'd be 22 years.

I got married before these became a thing. Right. So I'd have to like, it'd be like a weird time machine because, yeah, it'd be 22 years. I got married before these became a thing. Right. So I'd have to like, it'd be like a weird time machine that made my life go back a certain number of years to when I wasn't married, but then make time. Fast forward to when they exist. Go forward to when there was dating apps. This is a complex machine. This is better than that shit that Michael J. Fox. You're going to put a stitch in the system.

It's better than that DeLorean. Michael J. Fox's DeLorean I don't think had settings like this. And I would online date for one day. I would love to know what Katie's reaction to this is. She knows that.

But I think she missed it. Yeah, of course, because we got married the same day. You guys weren't missing when I swiped proxy? Yeah. So she never did it either.

Yanni's never done it. Phil, you probably missed out. I've been with my wife since 2011, so it's kind of right before all that kind of exploded. Corinne, you hit some dating apps? Yeah. Really? Kevin, you've been married too long.

Yeah, I haven't. I didn't do it. My best friend, though, met his wife. I'm going to ask a series of you guys dating app questions. All three of you, yes or no. Like, just because I want to get down. Have you gone on dates from dating apps? Yes. Yes. Yes.

Have you developed a boyfriend slash girlfriend through a dating app meetup? Yes. Yes. No. Okay. Um. Short series. Yeah. Yes. Really to the point. So here's the deal with Rutt This guy's like

He thinks Farmers Only Is full of posers But Rutt won't be Because you gotta answer To get your profile up You have to do a flash App based session Of meat eater trivia

Yep And score a certain threshold Right To be on Rutt Then When you hook up on RUT, you'll know that you're hooking up with someone who has some idea what they're talking about.

Well, there's one in... So Phil would not be able to use. I would not. I was going to say, there's one in kind of the celebrity sphere called Raya where they have administrators that have to approve you. Like, are you famous enough? Are you good-looking enough? So you could be the administrator for Rutt.

You know. That's a lot of time. I was like, I don't know what you got to do. I would get too jealous, man. I'd be like, oh my god, this app is so good I can't use it. Everyone in Bozeman pretty much

claims to be an avid outdoorsman. Yeah, because that means anything nowadays. That means you go skiing down. It's like you go up to Disneyland up the road there and act like that's the outdoors. This is another knock on Steve. That was so far out there, I didn't even catch him. I'm like, I wonder what he's talking about. Steve and I are in the same boat.

I actually posted something like that on social media the other day and it got taken down. Instagram told me that it was hate speech. And I was like, I can't make fun of my fellow white people and their obsession with skiing. Oh, no, I can't do it. You got a job for making fun of white people?

Yeah. Good. Yeah. What did you say? Good. I was like, I just landed in Bozeman. I was like,

let me tell you about white people. White people fucking love sliding down snowy hills. They can't get enough of that shit. And they were like, hate speech. That's great that they're policing that, man. Yeah. I was like, by the way, that was just a statement of fact, though. Like, just so we're clear, I didn't make, like, that is true what I said.

Because when people bring up that, like, if you're, like, a white male, you're supposed to, like, just take it now, you know? But I'm hearing from people that we always oppress that it's that it sucked yeah so why like if it sucks so bad and you agree that it sucks why should i want to go like you just told me it sucks yeah so i feel like you're setting me up to not want to do it you know yeah so you guys are all real quiet now. I'm just saying that I'll take it. Send any white person hate speech to philtaylor25 on Instagram.

From what I've heard, I have heard that being stereotyped against is not good. Yeah. So, yeah, I don't like go out of my way

to get it. Back to Run. And you guys. I mean, oh yeah, Run the Dating App. One of our favorite individual, not a, yeah, Run the dating app One of our favorite individuals Yeah, I'd say one of our favorite individuals A pilot in Alaska

That I've been recently in contact with That is going to take Jordan Budd and I Caribou hunting In August When I caught up to him, he was on a family ski vacation In Girdwood, Alaska And Steve and I were texting. I said, yeah, we're going to go caribou hunting.

He said, love that guy, man. He's a real great guy. I said, yeah, avid skier too. What was your reply? Bullshit. I said, no, he was on a ski vacation. He's like, well, I thought he was cool. You know, I don't know if I want to get into this right now.

You can't give away the secrets of Rutt just yet. That's how you're going to end up losing. Oh, the other thing is you've got to have a valid hunting license to join. Nice. Doesn't matter what state, though. There's a gatekeeper. Yeah, could you have tiers of that? Like, if you have five states, you really are in this group.

Oh, then you get those, like, superstars or whatever. Yeah, exactly. Pushed into everyone's profile. Up your chances. Real quick, just to return to that. I know that people are probably real sick of hearing about apps, but what's the app for celebrities? Raya.

That's how celebrities find each other is on an app? Some of them, yeah. I think you just need to talk Katie into letting you sign up for it. Have their agents hook them up. Yeah. So you'd go on there and there'd be like, I don't know, name of celebrity, I don't know. I think you need to I think you just need to talk Katie into letting you sign up for it have their agents hook them up yeah so like you'd go on there and there'd be like I don't know

name a celebrity I don't know Steve Rinella you could probably get on Raya I think you could it's a low threshold it's a low threshold it didn't say you had to be

an A-list celebrity you know you could be a C yeah maybe even a D who knows do you guys ever play that bar game

Big Buck Hunter? Oh, yeah. No, but. You know what I'm talking about? I know, yeah. It's like an ongoing dispute with my kids. Oh, anyway, you know, it's like you get enough matches and then it's like, you're a hunter hero. My buddy, Jimmy Doran, used to have a pizza place in Seattle.

And I feel like I've probably told the story how me and jimmy doran met anyhow he had buck hunter in that pizza place and we'd go in there and he'd give my kids rolls of quarters and i was like dude don't let him play that game man they'd just be in there playing that game he's just he used to think it was funny well steve it kind of upset me it kind of goes back to how you say when you're at a wedding you always just kind of scope out the guy that's like i'm gonna find the hunter and i'm gonna talk to him for a while i think rye is sort of that because you know when when you're a celebrity i assume you just get a lot of very like inauthentic conversations and interactions of people just trying to sidle up to you or you know kiss your ass so i think rye is a kind of a way it's like an agreement like i'm sort of famous

you're sort of famous let's get together and do whatever we want. I like it. I like that. Yeah. Moving on. Here's an interesting thing. So we're a little late on this because it's already happened. Colorado Parks and Wildlife.

This is an interesting issue because this comes up in a lot of states and will continue to come up in a lot of states. A fellow named Trevor is with a non-profit advocacy and restoration group called Grasslands Unlimited. They submitted a petition to Colorado Parks and Wildlife seeking the legal reclassification of bison that cross from Utah into Colorado. Here's what that means.

Well, let me read the rest of this thing. Any such animals right now are regarded as livestock and are not protected by Colorado Parks and Wildlife regulations, meaning they get shot almost immediately. Reclassification would protect the animals and allow them not only safety once in colorado but also potentially an opportunity to repopulate their historic range throughout colorado and perhaps even expand fair chase free range bison hunting opportunities he's the president of grasslands grasslands on linwood uh let me unpack this for a minute every animal there, every native land mammal in this country can move from state to state and still be wildlife.

If a Wolverine crosses state lines, it's wildlife elk, moose, wolf, grizzly bear, black bear. It can move across geopolitical boundaries and still would be like everybody would agree it's wildlife somehow i i get into this a bit in my buffalo book somehow

it came to be that not buffalo i think it was because at one time they were so whittled down and the only ones that were left you know we had we had like a hundred of them. Yeah. Were in captivity or, or like closely guarded that people like instantly got used to them all being in one place in a fence. And they've never been welcomed back on the landscape. But there was a time when New Mexico had zero elk, like elk were extirpated from New Mexico. Right. Right. There's elk in New Mexico now. If elk crosses from Arizona to New Mexico, he doesn Right. There's elk in New Mexico now. If the elk crosses from Arizona to New Mexico,

he doesn't cease being an elk. So it's just a weird hiccup in wildlife law. So what this would mean is you could have a wild herd. Well, you know, this happens, it happens all over the place. For a long time, bison leaving Yelso National Park, they would step into Montana and immediately they would

become the property of the livestock, Department of Livestock. So here you have some free roaming ones in Utah, but once they cross into Colorado, Colorado doesn't have the capacity to manage their, not the capacity,

they're not legally able to manage them as wildlife. So they fall into like errant livestock. Um, I think they should do away with all that stuff, man. It's real contentious. Do they become the property of the landowner where they're occupying their land?

If they're like, my guess, it'd be like the same way as if a donkey showed up on your land. That happens all the time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a weird deal. Like you could have, I made this point before, like you could have elk go from Yellowstone National Park into National, all in one day.

And he could feasibly do this quite easily. Right. Go from Yeltsin National Park onto municipal property and say Gardner. Right. Onto a dude's land in Gardner, onto National Forest, onto a state section, onto a Fish, Wildlife, and Park river access site. And throughout the day that, and then into Wyoming, that'd be hard. Let's just say, uh, that some bitch was an elk all day long. He was a wild elk all day long, but we don't, we like for Buffalo, we don't have it. So if that, so if like all the Buffalo that are, you know, outside of like the Tetons

worked their way across into Idaho or something like that, their livestock in Idaho. I don't know how live, I don't know how Idaho runs it. I'm not sure what they do. Yeah. But I think it has anything at all to do with that. They were not that they're not like pure blooded or whatever. There's a lot of like, there's a lot of like argument.

There's a lot of insincere arguments that get thrown into it. So here for a long time, it was that bison were given a Eurasian livestock disease called brucellosis. Okay. So cattle gave brucellosis to bison um bison have often are often gunned down on even on public land under the auspice under the idea that they're going to spread they're going to transmit brucellosis and so the state has if a state has brucellosis free status they don't have to test for brucellosis in cattle but once there's a brucellosis infection in a state has brucellosis-free status, they don't have to test for brucellosis in cattle.

But once there's a brucellosis infection in a state, in some corner of the state, the whole damn state has to go back to brucellosis testing. That all sounds perfectly reasonable, except there's a wrinkle in it. The elk all have brucellosis, and they move wherever they want. Yeah. And elk intermingle with cattle. It's just like a weird deal. Brucellosis causes heifers to abort a fetus. So like, but elk have it and no one's ever

suggested that they gun down every elk to cross the state lines because it's carrying brucellosis. So there's that. There's like the, they're dangerous to you know they'll now and then kill something they'll kill a horse or whatever they go through fences which is legit they just walk through fences and that pisses people off yeah and they eat grass and that pisses people off like those are the legitimate ones but people are often like acting like it's something else that they're mad about. Gotcha. Um, if I had to,

like, if I had to do the, uh, if I had to crystal ball it, I would crystal ball it that in 20 years, they have, they have greater acceptance. Here's my prediction.

Like if I was, got to do a time capsule, I'd put a note in the time capsule that said, there are more bison and you're hunting them more often. I would put that into a time capsule. Shouldn't, I mean, Colorado's addressing this right now,

but do you see it being addressed on a federal level in the future? They became the national mammal. But no, I don't. I think it's going to be state by state. And there's a lot of, like, it's all really, you know, here in this state, there's a lot of conversation about trying to restore a free-roaming herd in the Charles M. Russell. Right. In the CMR, right? In the refuge.

A lot of people, that really pisses off a lot of people for the reason of the Charles M. Russell. Right. And the CMR. Right. And the Refuge. A lot of people. That really pisses off a lot of people for the reason of the fencing and grass competition. And people are looking like, well, I leased some of that and I run my cattle on it. And now you want to put like, now you're hoping to have like eight, 9,000 bison running around on it. What's that going to mean for my long-term, the long-term viability of my grazing program? And so then you get people who are just like, I don't like that because it just sounds like something different and i'm doing good under the current system but my yeah my time capsule is that you'll be hunting you'll have more opportunities to draw bison tags in the future and it'll be more likely that you live in a state

where the state regards them as wildlife and not livestock i wonder if somewhere like texas where you know even elk are considered exotics. Like, I wonder if you end up with bison there, if they're going to become this non-native and be, you know, hunted under an exotic tag where you can just hunt them year round, no bag limit, all that kind of stuff. I'd like to know how Texas handles it. The elk thing in Texas is crazy to me. Because then you're talking about a native animal. And you're damn sure talking about a native animal and your dams are talking about a native animal with, with bison. But I would be shocked if Texas regards

bison as livestock or regards bison as wildlife. Yeah. Even though some of the biggest, you know, some of the big hide hunters, the, some of the biggest hide hunter slaughters were on the Texas panhandle. I mean, right now, Texas claims them as an

exotic. They do. They do. Because they'll have them on like these big ass hunting ranches. And, you know, they're fair game just like anything else is. You don't have to have a specific tag for them. You just have your general hunting license.

And that's it. You can hunt them. What I find unfortunate about that is it was some players down in the Texas Panhandle that were most instrumental in saving them from extinction. Yeah. Hmm. There's the irony of it.

Yeah. Yeah. Buffalo, this dude, Buffalo Jones. And then like, what's that, that property, like the good night. Yeah. The good night ranch. He was real instrumental in it. So they had kind of have this legacy of, uh, you know, these reformed hide hunters trying to save them.

And it seems like you would honor that legacy with like regarding them as native wildlife. Here's an elk article out of Utah that's interesting. I mean, it kind of like tells people what they already know. That when it's elk season, elk leave public land and go on to private land. Yes. True story. It's like one of those articles where you're like, you don't say.

Yeah. But it does put some numbers around it. In the Journal of Wildlife Management, in Utah, okay, elk reduced, by the middle of right, by the middle of firearm season, elk had reduced their use of public lands by 30% on the private land.

The herd returned to public land almost immediately after the season ended. Like they know. This is based on the patterns of 445 elk with tracking collars in the Wasatch range. Am I saying that right, Yanni? Mm-hmm. The collars would ping every 13 hours. I wonder why 13 hours.

I'd have said it at 12. Maybe that extra hour saves a lot of battery. I would have felt like, I don't know, man, 12. Lucky number 13. Twice a day. Interestingly. Because I would have said it for noon and midnight. Yeah.

I was talking to Garrett Long's dad the other day, and he was out hunting late season cows, which you can only hunt on private land in Montana. I didn't know that. I mean, there's a few units that have public land, late season cow hunts, but these that go like well into February, mostly on private land.

And they were dealing with the exact opposite. He's like, I've hunted this spot during rifle season and those damn elk are always on the public. Now they're always on the private. I have access to the public now. And the elk were like literally three days in a row hanging out like 50 to 100 yards on the, onto the public land and not on the private where they could shoot at them. Dude, they're smart, man. Yeah.

My old man used to talk about like, they used to hunt geese. Back when there weren't like any geese in the 50s. They'd hunt geese in Southern Illinois and they'd hunt on these refuges that you couldn't, uh, there's probably still some this way. You can only shoot till noon. Yeah. Or whatever the hell it was. Still that way.

Yeah. Yeah. He said that, man, he says at noon, you're packing up your stuff and they're pouring in. It was so. Like what they would normally do at a different time of day. It was pouring in as you're picking your stuff up.

When I was down in Arkansas with Clay this january we were hunting public uh big famous public area that closes at noon and at like to a t at 1201 the refuge all up in the air pouring into the public timber like tens of thousands of ducks at 12.01 are like, okay, now it's time to go to the timber because the hunters are gone. Yeah. It's unbelievable. Yeah.

As we talked about that you have banded birds that are like 17, 18 years old. It gives them a couple of years to put it together. Yeah, mm-hmm. Well, you got to think that they do, you know, that was the thing that was interesting to me about these elk the day after season moving back onto it. You almost wonder if that becomes ingrained in them that they do understand the dates to some level. Yeah.

Or is it because they're like aware there's not pressure there today? Like, is it there's no human activity there today or is it because they've learned over time i imagine you can move the season dates by two weeks and they would still wait until the trucks leave yeah yeah i think there's like indicators man that's one of my favorite doug duran stories is when he killed the standard that uh he took his uh skid steer or something in there i don't know what he took and the standard is a giant biggest ever buck killed on the durham farm but he saw i don't know that yeah he saw an area and when he went in there he took his tractor in there

and left his tractor running while he hung his sign you know or while he hung his stand right he's like he just didn't want to do any little like thing where they're like, shit, that's a weird truck. Yeah. I think that's 100% true. Like we see that on my like hunting property in Georgia that they have a completely different reaction to the sound of your truck than they do to even like, you know, you're like side by side, like the sound of the engine.

Like just a completely different reaction. Snuggie's hardly bat an eye at a truck driving by, but if that truck slows down they're gone quick. You see pronghorn like that. They're like, I don't mind cars that are

moving real fast. I just don't like the slow ones. They tend to have something hanging out the window. Joined today by Magli Hudlow.

Very own. You're not up yet. I'm just telling you. I'm just doing introductions. Kevin Gillespie. Phil's here. Corinne.

Sean Weaver. In the flesh. Yep. Hey, do you know how many, I should ask you this question. Canada Goose, you know that Parker company? Mm-hmm. How many geese have to go into one of those jackets? I've been trying to figure that out uh there's a there's a company in california doing hunter sourced down which is real cool

that is cool but because part of what myths me about canada geese is a goose or whatever the park is i guess even anderson cooper has one of these damn things. What are they called? Canada goose. They made this big thing out of how they're not putting real coyote fur on the, like this year they're phasing out all fur. Okay. And I asked a buddy of mine who's a furrier, I said, how many fur ruffs could Canada goose get off one coyote? He said three to five.

But the best I can tell there's 12 damn geese inside the jacket oh it's it's it's probably even more than that it's probably even more than that i spent some time on and i put someone else on the question and she's like man it's really hard to figure out the answer but i think about a dozen so you got a dozen dead things in your coat and a fifth of a dead thing on the outside of your coat. Yeah. And they're getting rid of the dead thing on the outside of the coat. I need to, I'm going to call up that. I feel like the guys at like Catabatic or.

Next time I come on, I'll have that. I'm going to call that company in California. Cause that's an interesting question. They're doing it with, so they've got all those refuges down in the Valley out there and hunters, when they're done with their birds they offer a plucking service so they're they kind of have a cool double dip going on where uh where hunters can bring the birds to them to get plucked they charge them for the pluck but then they also get to keep the feathers and really yeah they make pillows and yeah my old man did a sleeping bag

with his own feathers but he said it was a pain in the ass. Oh, yeah. He had bags and bags and bags of them, and then they had to shampoo them. Yeah, and you have to get rid of the big feathers, right? And then just try to keep the down. Yeah, he didn't suggest it. He had trash bags full of feathers while he was trying to achieve it.

I sure would like my own coat filled with the down I harvested myself. You know what else he did, man? And I don't know what happened to it. He had a – You remember like in the 70s, he'd wear like a business coat made out of leather with like a belt on it and shit? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

He had his own, he saved all of his own deer skins and had his own buckskin business coat. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Dyed black. That seems like it. You look like a serious pimp. I was like, that's a strong look right there. Oh, you look like a mega, yeah. You look like a serious pimp. I was like, that's a strong look right there.

Yeah, you look like a mega pimp wearing this jacket. You got like the belt. Yeah, that's not low key. Oh yeah, you wouldn't be able to run around in it now. It would have a lot more personality than I have.

You don't still have this jacket? I gotta find, I don't know what happened to it. Last time I was home, I was trying to find it. Man, that would be awesome. Guy wrote in with CWD, like, this guy's

interested in brain tanning. You missed a really good segue there. I'm surprised. Oh, yeah. Speaking of that buckskin jacket. Come on. It's good to have you back, Yanni. So, chronic wasting disease, right, concentrates in the nervous systems of animals. Spine, is, uh, so chronic wasting disease, right? Concentrates in the nervous systems of animals,

spine, brain. He's like, man, what about brain tan? And are you, are you worried about, I don't,

I mean, I don't brain tan, but he's saying, should a feller be worried about brain tan with CWD, uh, so prevalent in America's deer herds. Hmm. It's just kind of obvious, though. Right. I mean.

Heffelfinger. I don't think it's obvious. I don't think so, either. If you said to me, let's say you sat me down, you put a gun to my head. Okay. Okay. And you said, listen, Sonny. Everyone's teeth got his little finger stuck up

you said you either eat that cwd infected deer meat or brain tan his hide i would put my latex gloves on and brain tan that hide 10 times over 10 times over. I'm imagining this person with the gun in that buckskin jacket. I'm like, are you sure that's what this is all about? Take it a little serious. I want to understand why you think that way, though. Because you're directly handling

the nervous system. Because I'm not ingesting them. And I got my latex gloves on. And I'm not ingesting them. Okay. And I'll put like a, you know like when you have a little kid and they have a pacifier and it's got that lip guard around it?

I'll put one of those in. Okay. To prevent stuff from getting in around my lips. Looking super pimp. And I'll put... You know there's a bunch of masks laying around these days. Yeah, because I was wondering what I was going to do with all my COVID masks.

Instead, Steve's immediately like, I need to get one of those adult rave pacifiers so that I can brain tan my eyes now. No, I forgot about masks. How short your memory is. I forgot about COVID masks. It is like, what are people going to do with those masks? I think it'd be sweet to make a goose down quilt out of all your COVID masks. Like sew the little things together. Old school Appalachian style.

Our goose season in 2022. Let me tell you. So Duren points out that he don't eat deer meat that is CW positive. Okay. Heffelfinger. Crenn brought it to Heffelfinger. Heffelfinger. James Heffelfinger. is cw positive okay heffelfinger uh crin brought it to heffelfinger heffelfinger james heffelfinger do we still have that heffelfinger song he's a conservation ringer

he says he wouldn't do it if it was positive or if it was untested. But if you had the deer and it was tested negative, which you should do anyway. Like if you have testing available to you, I don't care if you decide to eat it. I should say I don't care. Even if you don't care and are going to eat CWD positive meat. And I'll point out, no human has caught anything from deer yet. Yet. People have eaten hundreds of thousands of

pounds of infected deer meat and no one's gotten it yet. So if you like, well, what are the chances I'll be the first and you're eating it, I would still encourage you to get it tested just so they can use it for like getting it tested doesn't mean that you're going to pitch it, just getting it just so they can track it for, like, getting it tested doesn't mean that you're going to pitch it. Just getting it tested just so they can track infection rates. Yeah.

Right. Like, why not? Which is a great segue into the next talking point. CWD mapping info. Oh, did I say that Heffelfinger says if he got it tested and it was negative, he would brain tan with it? Mm-hmm. I mean, that's what I meant by the common sense part, right? Yeah.

So we're harkening back here to episode 307, talking about things that are not sexy to talk about. And someone was mentioning how there should be a CWD, a single database where you can see all CWD stuff. I'm sure there's got to be a million of them. I don't know Matt Dunphy of the Wildlife Management Institute who's been working on the software behind www.cwd-info.org went public

the other week they don't mean like public on Wall Street made available to the public the other week Halflefinger I don't know if you want to play that thing all over again Phil why not made available to the public the other week. Heffelfinger. I don't know if you want to play that thing all over again, Phil. Why not?

He's a conservation ringer. Jim Heffelfinger. He says it's long been the best source of CWD info. These new apps and maps on the website allow you to visualize a lot of great CWD information in a useful way. When there's a new state that finds CWD, it shows up here within 24 hours or so. So it's good to have the site bookmarked. That's interesting. All right, if you live in Wisconsin and you're looking forward to your tax return this year,

how's that? That's like being on a nightly news program or something. There you go, yeah. Wisconsinites looking forward to their tax return. I thought I was sitting next to Jimmy Fallon for a second. You might get an extra $10 if you got a wolfie because those sons of bitches put wolves in the lower 48.

They put them back on the ESA list. It's unbelievable. Outside of the Northern Rockies. Unbelievable that they would have done this, but they did it. You just can't win, man, in the political climate today. Yeah. Everybody screws you in some way or another.

So Wisconsin has a give back everybody's application fee. So if you live in Wisconsin and you applied for a 2021 fall wolf harvest permit or preference point, watch the mail because your 10 bucks

is coming back to you. So lame. And they'll restore all your wolf preference points. So when this gets sorted out and they get... That's sweet. Yeah, that's to hold preference points. Thank you, so generous.

Because when they get it sorted out, you'll still have your preference points. Yeah, what a mess. I hate to be that guy, but I'd love to know how many... I'd love to know this change, like how much money has to be spent in all this to refund everybody their... That's what I was thinking. I was like, how much of the $10 are we spending

to refund the $10? $13. Yeah, exactly. I feel bad for those guys. And because it's the state, they're going gonna literally mail you A $10 check Which then you'll be like oh that was great thanks

And I'm that guy who has to physically Go to the bank and be like I'd like to cash my $10 check Please Who wrote on this document Who put that more titillating headline up there I did Corinne's like spin doctor dude There's an article There's a study this surprises shit out of me

meat consumption is positively associated with life expectancy to which crin's headline is vegetarianism might shorten your lifespan it's like in other words this surprised me because all you ever do is read about how that stuff's killing you. Even though people I know, it's just like it gets a little complicated. People I know who are most like the people I know who are. Like most strong. You know? Yeah.

Like physically strong. You mean? Oh, yeah. Just like people are like do crazy shit. Yeah. Eat burgers and stuff? Yeah. Like physically strong, you mean? Oh yeah. Just like people that are like do crazy shit. Yeah. Eat burgers and stuff. Yeah. But it's always like, they're always telling you how bad it is. A team of scientists from Australia, Italy, Poland, and Switzerland.

So a good mix. Examine the association between meat intake and life expectancy at a population level based on ecological data published by the United Nations agencies. It is estimated that 20-30% of human life expectancy is determined by genetic factors and 70-80% is determined by environmental factors. Over the last 50 years, although the associations between meat eating and illness are circumstantial and controversial to some extent, they have prompted the spread of vegetarianism and veganism based on the assumption that non-meat diets provide more health benefits than diets that include meat. If you do yourself a favor and read son of the morning star okay uh he talks about what happened at the battle of little bighorn and uh compared to the cavalry soldiers the euro-american like

white cavalry soldiers right just in the diet they were on when they came up against these people who lived off bison meat um they were astounded like the the sioux the aglala and onkpapa sioux and the northern cheyenne he describes those people going through the cavalry soldiers like a wolf through sheep i mean there's huge there's a fighting people yeah i mean there's a ton of information out there that you know various aspects of uh you know a balanced quote-unquote diet like grains for example like that they have huge health related issues so it's like all of these arguments there's a counter argument for every single one of them, and some scientist has signed his name

to the bottom of it. Yanni goes to my doctor. He's also my doctor. Pretty soon, everybody in our company is going to go to the same doctor. It's going to be weird. There are a couple other people

in the company who go to the same doctor, too. Tell everybody what she told you, Yanni. About just overall everything. Oh, just that, yeah, that, you know, for 40-year-old, 44-year-old white, do a banner of health. So keep eating what you eat. I saw Yanni eating liver pate and bread, but he laid down a very generous layer of butter.

That's how you got it. Yeah. Below his pate. You got to prime it, you know? You can't just get straight on with liver pate. I was like, easy, honey. And he said, hey, man,

I got it straight from the high-end doctor. Your doctor. My doctor, that I can just do what I'm doing because I'm kicking ass. It goes on to say,

moreover, it has been argued that vegetarianism and veganism form a part of trendy western consumerist lifestyles only accessible to privileged white people vegetarian that has been prevalent in western countries has been subject to prejudice low self what's this all now vegetarianism that has been prevalent in western countries has been subject to prejudice, low self-esteem and low psychological adjustment.

I have no idea. I think we just need to. I got tripped up on that one too. But I do think the next paragraph is worth saying that a lot of the studies that have been done that come out with the results of vegetarians, vegetarian lifestyle and diet is good for you, that there's a lack of population representativeness and a failure to remove the influence of lifestyle

in these studies. Yeah, it's like when you see a statistic. I've never seen a statistic that pet ownership makes you live longer. And it'd be like, well, pet ownership is associated with being stationary and financially well off. So no shit. That's like my clickbaity title. I'm like doing exactly what Metten was against in terms of science journalism.

Yeah, it's a great title. It's like mansions are associated with long life. These guys examined the overall health effects of total meat consumption in 175 countries. They did their work. Yeah, that's pretty exhaustive. And I think that comment about the like- Oh, that gets around the socioeconomic thing. Like if you're eating a lot of meat, you probably have you probably have expendable income and you probably seek health care or you're more likely to have money for health care. Yeah, theoretically. But by that same token, what they're saying is that in sort of Western society, especially if you consider the United States, like like a vegetarian diet can be very cost prohibitive because like the veganism, because right. That's what I mean. Like that. And so I get the whole like low self-esteem,

all that kind of stuff. I think they're just making social commentary on the idea that it comes, it's just another form of elitism that, that people want to try to do it, but then it escapes them because they don't quite have the right, they don't live in the right town. They don't have enough money. They can't shop at the grocery store that the, you know, that it's banging that drum. Like they can't, because then it just drives people to all the other stuff. Like, I can't, I can't just eat regular spinach. I got to buy this spinach instead. Like I just, I think it's a slippery slope. It's kind of a big broad brush stroke to say that. But I also understand that in our current society, advocating for vegetarianism also comes with a pretty like loud, you know, what's the term that they use? Like that you're basically patting yourself on the

back for it too, you know, and condemning everybody else. Yeah. Not to get too far into the weeds, but that's always been one of the things I like to talk about and bring up when, when people are against, you know, everyone using meat as their source of protein. It's like, well, some places that's their only source of protein, right? Like they don't have access to, you know, most of the world, well, most of the world eats goat, right? Like they don't have access to. There's, there's a lot of misconceptions about the idea that we can just convert range land into farmland you know like that's a whole other conversation that everybody thinks like why don't we just plant vegetables there instead of cattle like because you can't plant anything

there it's just a bunch of fucking rocks like the only thing that can be there cattle so when they point out the inefficiencies of livestock yeah it's like it's just it's i don't know it's a wasted argument and i think it's unfortunately now instead of it being an argument that's based purely on you know what's best for the environment or what's best for you health-wise now we've all like treaded into this world of what's best for your ability to sort of um commend yourself for doing the right thing all the time like well and i think it's also important to note that it's like, I don't think this study's saying, you know, like these folks aren't eating,

they're not eating sausage for breakfast, a hamburger for lunch, and a steak for dinner. You know, I think like optimal health is like an omnivore kind of way of eating. It's like eating balanced and eating like intelligently, eating like what you have available, like you said. Some people eat goats said some people eat goat some people eat whatever they have i think a lot of media is like feeding you this idea that like

you're a good person if you're a vegan exactly and if you eat you're a bad person and i think it's important to have studies like this that are like hey you know eating meat is healthy like having a diverse like plate is healthy and i think i think that's kind of like a big takeaway is like eating vegan is not gonna eating vegetarian is not gonna prolong your life any more than than eating meat do you remember that guy we had on the claim that the only thing he ate is meat i wonder if if he's still doing it. Maybe he is. Nose, head to, what is it? Head to tail?

No, nose to tail. That's it. Animal. Yeah, like ate ligaments. He says that he doesn't eat anything but. Was it saladino? And no fried meat? He won't eat fish. He won't eat fish.

I value happiness. I love fried meat. That was his claim. He sat right where you're sitting right now and told and made laid out the claim anyway man i follow him on instagram he was pointing out that uh when they see these things like the consumption of meat being associated with all this and that heart disease and all that he's like well that's not the meat's fault it's like how you go about it yeah are you going to mcdonald's right right getting like the like

triple cheeseburger large fry and a milkshake right so then when someone comes and looks at the fact that like how often you're eating that diet and then they find those things it's not untangling they're not he pointed to a number of studies that it doesn't do a good job of untangling all these other like lifestyle choices and ancillary dietary choices by people who are eating meat with high frequency, meaning like the breakfast sausage, burger, steak, fries, cream, spinach crowd. Yeah. Um, and that if you were just eating like a boiled squirrel, you might not have the same, right? Well, I mean, that's, yeah, exactly. It's like not all meat is created equal. Like nutritionally speaking, like the various species are completely different.

And even then when you get to the difference between just kind of modern practices of raising animals for meat consumption. Nutritionally, they're very different today than they were even 50, 60, 70 years ago because of consumer demand for particular texture, particular flavor, particular tenderness, all these kinds of things. And what goes along with that is an adjusted sort of nutritional value, you know, some positively and some negatively. Speaking of fast food, Max, Sean's tight colleague. Yep. The other day he was eating, he was taking

his wild turkey tenders and making an exact replica of, what's that restaurant you went to that one time for the first time? The famous chicken place? Chick-fil-A. Chick-fil-A. He makes place? Chick-fil-A. Chick-fil-A. He makes an exact Chick-fil-A replica.

They probably brine it in what, like, pickle juice or crack or something. It's a little of both. We've got the recipe on the website. Yeah, he does.

But he had, he had his own bottle. He, like, somehow came into a bottle of Chick-fil-A, like, signature Chick-fil-A sauce. Everything else he's making himself. And then he dumped the Chick-fil-A sauce.

I watched me eat two of them. The son of a bitch never even said something like, hey, you want a bite? Oh, man. I was to meet him, egging. Ate two of them. And the whole time he's eating them, I'm asking him questions about it and stuff.

Finished them, licked his fingers, licked his fingers, and walked back upstairs. We're at the office lunchroom area there. Walked out of the room and gave you the middle finger. I'm not going to lie, that doesn't surprise me. He sumptuously licked his middle finger and walked away. Yeah, but that's because he looked at

your socioeconomic place in the world, and he thought, I don't need to offer this to you he's like i know what that dude's freezer looks like there's 15 species in there hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there. OnX is now in Canada.

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

Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com. onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. We need to, we're going to buy the, what is it actually? Warner Bruntler, what is it? Warner Bratzler. Yeah, Warner Bratzler.

We're going to buy a Warner Bratzler. So if you work at the place that makes the Warner Brat or Shear Force test, this is a wonderful integration marketing opportunity for you. If not, we're going to buy our own. We're going to buy our own Shear Force test, and we'll start right here. We'll just start testing everything. Start with this table. I'm going to start with a marshmallow.

Yeah, there you go. Just to calibrate. I'm going to do a marshmallow. Then we're going to do a hunk of Audad shoulder, and then we'll explore every game meat in between. Yeah, that's a pretty wide gamut, I would say, between the two of those. Dude, I can't. Yeah, all right.

I don't know if you can do the marshmallow. The electric griddle is just going to melt the marshmallow. No, just punch it without cooking it. Oh, okay. I got you. Just for uniformity when they do it. That's the spectrum. Yeah, they put like a digital thermometer in a piece of meat.

Right, yeah. They don't season it or anything. Yeah. And you cook the piece of meat to like whatever you're testing. So you get all the 130 whatever the hell. You just make up your mind what you want it to be. And then, whap! Punch it. We could punch raw too, but I feel like we should punch cooked. No, punch cooked.

Completely different. But the marshmallow, just to be like, for instance, everybody knows what a marshmallow is like, and we'll hit it with the machine and it'll get like a five, or I don't know what the hell it'll get. Probably a one. Yeah, it'll get a one. Okay, there's a one. And what a marshmallow is like, and we'll hit it with the machine, and it'll get a five. I don't know what the hell it'll get. Probably a one. Yeah, it'll get a one. Okay, there's a one.

And then we'll do your hand. We'll do cheap loaf bread. That's even more tender than a marshmallow. Yeah, that'd be good. White bread. It's a zero. A little chunk out of the fatty part of your hand, for instance. But also, within meat, right?

Within meat, the whitetail dough backstrap, most likely everybody will agree that, yes, this is tender. Also, we've got to get it to a uniform thickness. Can you make sure it's got a user's manual on your order? I've got it. Like an owner's manual? I've got it pulled up right here. It comes with an owner's manual?

This is like right in my wheelhouse. They're made in Manhattan, Kansas. Got the guy's contact. I believe everything I hear out of Kansas. All right. All right. So we'll get that taken. You'll hear more about this test because this is going to be a return.

Oh, get some lab coats. Oh, we got to wear the goggles too. Some goggles and some lab coats. Yeah. We'll be set. Yeah, we probably need badges too. That way we look like we're serious. Yeah. You got all that? Yeah. Can we'll be set. Yeah, we probably need badges, too. That way we look, you know, like we're serious. Yeah.

You got all that? Yeah. Can we just at least... Is it a kit? Can we go with some salt and pepper so that we can eat it afterwards? Get some salt and pepper, too. Yeah. We got to be careful.

I got it. Yeah, we got to be careful with the salt and pepper because it'll adjust the tenderness. We'll season. We'll season after. Salt's a desiccant, so... We'll season. We'll test. Okay, there you go.

Test, slice, season. Just dip it in a little hot sauce. You got all that? Yep. Got it. The main thing is the test, though. This is getting serious. Yep.

No, I got the guy's phone number from Manhattan, Kansas right here. We need a really good digital scale because we'll want to have each of these pieces scaled to the same size. And I already have a good caliper. Well, no, you got a caliper, but I have a good caliper. Okay. I got a digital caliper. Okay. We can even do it do it metrics then it'll seem like really serious oh yeah well of course it's science you know like we got a new metric you know yeah yanni will be the only one who actually knows

like x kilometers away i always like like i'm like i'll buy that but you're like i don't know two miles i'm like okay roundabout yeah we're gonna talk kilometers I'm like, okay. Three kilometers. I'm like, damn, some bitch measured it. No, in preparation for my hunt to Latvia, I'm now shooting all my critters in meters. Hey, speaking of meat, can I give

Kevin my meat so we can get this cooler off the table? Let's try that again, but with a different lead-in. I thought it was perfect. You didn't like that? off the table? Let's try that again, but with a different lead-in. I thought it was perfect. You didn't like that? I purposely went there. No, I like it.

Leave that in, Bill. So that's a yes? What's in the cooler? A little something for Kevin. Secret. Can't tell you. It's actually two wild turkey Chick-fil-A sandwiches. There is wild turkey. Maggie Smith asked me to, she reached out on an email,

said Kevin needs a wild turkey breast. And man, I got to say, I hesitated when I saw that email. I know, that's what everybody did. They're like, but that's my favorite. Yeah. So you understand what a big ass that is. I can return it. Just I need like another month.

Like our season isn't open yet. We don't have a spring and fall season. We just have the spring. You don't need to return it. You're lucky that not only am I a good turkey hunter, but my wife is getting to be pretty good too. Oh. And so we've got like, we always get really close to double digits in the freezer.

And there was enough sitting in there where I felt like I could, you know. I want to hear at a different time. I want to hear more about the experiment of whether raising these turkeys has made you a better turkey hunter. Like we talked about last time. Oh, like Guy Zuck? Dude, everybody at my house right now could call a turkey with their voice. You're like speak fluent turkey. Is that right?

I mean. Because those turkeys are gullible. Or because they're getting good. We haven't gotten to that yet because the major pitfall of having birds around the house is that if you let them run around, there's bird, whether it's chickens or turkey, shit everywhere. Oh, yeah, man. And the turkeys are much more.

It's an insidious dropping, too. Yeah. Yeah. Like, you don't know it's there, but then it's on it turkey shit everywhere oh yeah man and the turkeys are much more it's an insidious dropping too yeah yeah like you don't know it's there but then it's on it yeah yeah and you think they're just like oh you just take the hose to it but it doesn't just like disappear at the hose it always leaves like a little mark and you gotta deck brush it you know so they've been kind of locked up but even then when you walk out of our house they're right there looking at you 40 yards away and every time you walk out they're're like, and so what do you do? You go right back at them. And it's like everybody does it without even thinking about it.

My kids walk out the door, the turkeys go, and they're like, you know, I even caught my wife doing it this morning. I'm in the house, like getting ready to get the kids out. She ran out to do something. I can hear it this morning. I'm in the house, like, getting ready to get the kids out, and she ran out to do something. I can hear her out there. That's awesome. So, yes, I think it's, even though we haven't, like, actually played with calls in the turkeys yet,

and, like, trying to call them across the yard or anything, I feel that people are listening to cadence, tempo, pitch, you know, number of notes that they're doing. Right. So it's helping. We had an episode long ago. I think the episode was called The Bronzeback and the Whiffleball Bat. And it was about this guy, Guy Zuck, a buddy of ours.

He grew up with turkeys, and he used to be a competition turkey caller. Natural, what do they call it? Like no call, right? Natural voice. Oh, yeah, just voice calling, yeah. When he was a kid, he had turkeys, and he would hide with that wiffle ball bat wait well wait that came about because the tom the tom became too easy to call in so he would yeah so he would call that tom in and hit it with a bat so the time would become wary so the time would become like less likely to want to come in and so he was he was like making like a high pressure tom

this guy's a good call yeah i bet that's cool dude this dude he i was turkey hunting with him one time man and we get up on this we're in this dense like like just you know oak forest and it's real sandy soil we get up on this high spot in uh middle of the day right and he gets up there and sets to calling just soft you know and um nothing nothing nothing but that dude just knew like he knew that he would get an answer. And he eventually just like squeezed it out of a turkey. He went at it way longer than, if you're just doing like a sound check. Yeah. He's so kind.

He's like, he's like, you know, just give me a minute or whatever. I don't know. Six, seven minutes into it. You can hear some turkey. There's some turkey out there. He's like, not going to do it. I'm not going to answer. Not going to answer.

Not going to answer. Not going to answer. He's like, not gonna do it. I'm not gonna answer. Not gonna answer. Not gonna answer. Not gonna answer. All of a sudden, it's like, but you just couldn't hold it in, man. That's great. I love hunting with that guy.

Hey, do you already have plans for that turkey breast? We do, yeah. We're gonna do, well, so we had, we were gonna do two different dishes with it, but we're gonna see

if we have enough. So one is called a Zagoineschnitzel, like it's a German dish. And then the other is because Maggie, not Maggie Hudlow, Maggie Smith is filming these. Marge. Marge, yeah, Marge. And I wanted to kind of give her a Midwestern tribute.

So we're doing turkey tetrazzini, like the old school mom dish. Yeah. Nice. It's going to be good. Just done a little bit better. I like it. And that'll be on an upcoming episode. So this one isn't for meat eater cooks.

It's just sort of our, you know, we do these like stand and stir videos. Mostly it started with just trying to help people decipher recipes. Like you, you quickly learn that people can read a recipe all day long, but still not quite digest it. And so even just a short video,

five minutes or less, that kind of goes over some of the points that maybe are foggy for people, like changes their success rate. And so what I've learned over the years is that people, if you make them more successful with the recipes that you're providing them, then they kind of, well, they'll come back a lot more. They'll come back and look for other stuff. And so we've kind of exhausted our top 25 recipe list.

So now these are all brand new recipes, and we're just filming them for the sake of filming them. So we're going to make, we're going to show everybody how to make a holiday ham out of feral hog. We're going to do this, either the schnitzel or the tetrazzini. Let's back up to that holiday ham out of feral hog. Yeah.

So like, not like three inches of fat on that son of a bitch, but like a feral hog. Like completely, like almost completely fat free. And you're doing like a wet brine or dry brine? Wet brine. Yep. Yep.

Like a 10 day wet brine. It's what we use in my restaurants like to make them. Um, and they come out awesome, man. They're really good. I do it for every holidays. Yeah. Not like dry ham. No, no, no.

Like, um, you know where I'm from,, there's the, we call it city ham. I don't know why that's the case, but the difference between country ham and city ham. Yeah, sure. So city ham, you know, like honey baked ham, honestly. Like, that's a total riff on that. That's what I'm talking about. You're getting that out of wild pigs? Yeah.

Yeah. It's from some pigs that I killed last week or the week before. So I had my wife ship them out here to me, so they're probably here right now. They probably just got here. I just got an email from a friend of mine who's a little torn up because she had gone. She doesn't really know much about hunting, but she'd gone to Texas with some guys to go shoot pigs. She ditched all those pigs, man. Man, it's bad.

She was kind of bummed because she wanted to keep some, but no one even wanted to help her keep them. It's really bad, actually. We just finished filming the first episode of saber tooth of our new show and pigs is like the species that we hunt in the beginning of it and we talk about that a lot that like there's a lot of i don't know there's a lot of bad information out there about how they're not good to eat which is couldn't be further from the truth it's weird because you have on one hand you have like award-winning restaurants right you know like like our mutual friend jesse griffiths right right he's running a damn restaurant right they're like gets all these

like rave reviews the dude's got like a he got did he went a beard award for a book or something he did i mean he's been nominated for beer for his for his books off wild pigs right but then you got some guy five you you know, five feet away. They're inedible. Yeah. It's like, well, I don't tell that to this damn restaurant. I mean,

I literally, I mean, I was listening to hunters say it to me the other weekend. We were all hunting together. They're like, I, you don't want to eat that. And I'm like,

I eat them all the time. I would rather eat them than white tail deer. I mean, personally, I think they're a hell of a lot more delicious than that. So, um, yeah.

And they make great stuff. We make tons of cool stuff out of it. So, and it's just about understanding. And Jesse's newest book, he does an awesome job of breaking this down.

The Hog Book. Yeah, The Hog Book. Dude, that's a good-ass book. It's so cool. In my opinion, it's the best single-subject cookbook I've seen in the last decade.

Yeah, I don't have, like, the hog experience that you have. I mean, I have, like, you know, here and there a handful of ones that I've dealt with, i haven't dealt with like like you guys deal with like tons of them all the time so i can't say with you know i can't be like a hog expert but i mean i can't imagine there's something out there that even remotely compares to that book

not not at all i mean it's it's seriously unbelievably well done and that dude's developed like indisputable subject matter expertise where you really, you probably can't. I mean, maybe somewhere there's someone that knows more. I don't know, man. I mean, I text Jesse about it. Like I've killed a ton of hogs and know how to know my, I mean, I wrote a book on pork, you know, cookbook on it. But even I text Jesse sometimes with questions about just, you know, I killed one that was really big and I was curious because it did have a ton of fat. If we could scald it and, you know, scrape the hair and actually keep the skin intact.

Yeah. We tried that once. Remember? That's right. Oh, yeah. I can't remember. We did in New Zealand. It worked good.

Oh, I thought we did with that hog we got in Florida. No, no, no. Remember we kept that big, yeah, we scraped it right there on that stone. Oh, yeah. We made our own. Chicharrones. Yeah, we made chicharrones. Here's, yeah.

You know what else we did down there? We made our own sausage casings. Oh, yeah, cool. That ain't easy. No. That's some work. We took all that hog gut out. That was a hell of a night that night.

Indeed. You want to talk about a fight between some dogs and a raccoon yeah a lot of things happened that night before the fight with the dog and the hog i want to real quick just give a recap of that yeah you skipped over a lot of things there listen i've talked about this i'm gonna talk i'm gonna tell a real quick recap of this night we're down turkey hunting hunting for osceolas you know which you still got to get right uh and we ran into these guys is the guy that owned we're on a place where there's like a dude that leased the turkey hunting rights on a

place but then the actual guy that owned the place, we run into him and they're pouring up some big stiff drinks heading out. You know, like those, uh, when you go to like a seven 11, big gulp. Yeah. Oh boy.

Big gulp size cocktails. And they're going out in a swamp buggy to go hunt pigs. And this guy's ranch, his cattle ranch, a butts, uh, preserve. Um,

uh, like a, a, a, a a preserve, it was dedicated to a certain species of bird. I can't remember what it was. I think so. But the no hunting on the preserve. Yeah. And where his place has been like historically grazed by cattle is like those hammocks, you know?

So it's like, it's flat grassland with hammocks of like palmetto. And then you go to this fence where it goes from traditional cattle country to preserve. It's like the jungle starts. I mean, if you look one direction, you think you're in one like state or country or whatever,

you look the other direction, you think you're in another country. This border of like Catalan and not. And he's got a fence, but he's got doors cut into the fence. So what he's fixing to go hog hunting, they open those doors for a couple of days. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep. And all the pigs invade his ranch.

Yep. So the first step is to go and close all the doors. Then you turn the dogs loose. Yep. And guess where the pigs. Then you turn the dogs loose. Yep. And guess where the pigs get caught? Yep. Oh, man. At the closed gate.

Right up against the fence. Yeah. Yep, yep, yep. They had a dog get cut real bad by a pig. And I asked him, what does your vet think about you bringing in all these dogs that are cut up by pigs? And he said, it's my favorite quote ever. He said, you got to get a vet who likes to hunt hogs. Yeah.

We lost a dog on this last hunt on this Sabretooth episode. Oh, really? We had one get gored in the neck. Killed by a pig. Yeah.

Went down fighting. Died with his boots on. Yeah. It was pretty gnarly. It was a big, it's the biggest hog I've ever killed on that property.

So, like, right at 400 pounds. Killed a dog. What? Yeah. Was everybody upset dog. What? Yeah. Was everybody upset about the dog? Yeah. I imagine.

Yeah. And it happened so fast. Like I saw him get cut right as I like jumped onto the pig to stab him, but I didn't realize that he'd gotten hit that bad. So then he just bled out. Dude, I don't know what it is. Maybe you can answer this since you've done so much more hog hunting. I just did like, I went, I was in Texas a couple weeks ago and did my first ever like real personal hog hunting.

Not watching Steve do it or watching someone else do it. And every time I'd see him at 100 yards, I'd be like, holy shit, that's a giant. Oh my God. I'm looking at Chris, the camera guy. I'm like, that thing's got to be over 100 for sure. And that's where we're looking at, like the plus or minus range you know and we're like okay sweet let's forget about no guy let's go try to get on this hog and like i get to 70 i'm like yeah still pretty big get to 50 i'm like hmm getting a little bit smaller and then when i'm at like 30 yards i'm like man that 100

pounder turned into like 40 or 50 again like why, why is it? Because it's... About a pig. Why does everybody think every bear is big? Correct. And why do they think every mountain lion is a 200-pound tom?

Yeah. It's the dimensionality of hogs. Like, even little hogs are shaped the same as big hogs for the most part. Short of like...

That's a good point. Like, this one that we killed here. I pulled up the photo so you could see it. Like, you can get a sense of how big it was. But this one had a ton of Russian bo could see it. You can get a sense of how big it was. But this one had a ton of Russian boar in it.

And so, it was... Those are... There's no fooling that. And that was born in the wild. Yeah. That's not one of those hogzillas where they raise it up and one day shoot it and say it's a wild pig. Yeah, exactly. No, but I mean, honestly, on our property, you'll see a lot of ones that are clearly feral domesticated

hogs. Yeah. And it's pretty obvious. That's incredible. They have a completely different shape. That's a different strain altogether. Remember that guy that turned up and he's got some 1100 pound wild hog and it's all over social media. Hogzilla, they called it. Some dude was like, hey, I just sold that guy that hog.

I know the dude who sold him the hog. I was actually, he's one of my buddies and we were hog hunting together and we were talking about that. And he's like, I sold that guy the hog like a week before. Yeah, and in fact, he's like, here's a picture of it in my truck.

Yeah. Yeah, this buddy of mine, he's the only person in Georgia who has a license for like live captive, like feral hogs. And so he just sold that guy. That pig.

Hey, real quick before we move on. Oh no, we haven't mentioned all the things that happened That night Oh okay no Please They caught a pig

That had They castrated They caught a pig And castrated it And turned it back out Uh huh Which made the pig Go from a

Takes his mind off He became a barred hog Yep And it takes his mind Off ass And puts it on grass As was explained to us Then they caught another pig That they had castrated years gone by

and kept that one. To eat. Yeah, to eat. And we gutted the pig and cleaned all of its intestines out and then inverted them and scraped them and made our own sausage casings, which is labor intensive. And made our own chicharrones. When I was talking about Burnham,

do you remember, were you there in New Zealand when we got a big ripper going and threw the whole pig in there and then dunked it in a creek and scraped all of its hide off? Nope. All of its hair off?

But I always talk about that episode and I tell people that it is possible to film a whole meter episode in one day. By 11. Oh no, you guys weren't. Maybe the hunting was done by 11. The hunting was done by 11 almost done by 11 what's up with the what's what's up with you being uh um oh go ahead yanni i just was real quick was gonna uh plug uh jesse griffiths one more time and say if you're in austin definitely try to go to daidue yeah yeah

and then uh if you're interested in the hog book go to thehogbook.com yeah and even if you're if you don't think you're interested in the hog book, go buy it. It's unreal. Like it's so well done. And I mean, this is coming from a professional chef. Like it is.

I just think it's one of the most well-written books. Oh, look right here. I'm on the front page. It says praise for the hog book. Easily one of the best cookbooks that I have seen in years. Chef Kevin Gillespie. Right there. There you go.

He's not lying. I mean, I'm just, I have multiple copies. I give them out as gifts to people. I just bought a case of them from Jesse. Anytime somebody's like, I don't really know what to do with hogs,

I'm like, hang tight. And then just hand them a copy of this book. Phil, are you going down to Texas with us? We've got to go down to Texas pretty soon. I am, yeah.

We've got to get a reservation there. Yeah, I know. I've already told her. Have you told him? Have you gotten us a reservation?. Yeah, I know. I've already told her. Have you told him? Have you gotten us a reservation? I wanted to see if he should join us for a podcast.

Yeah, let's talk to him. So tell me about this whole semi-finalist restaurant tour. Restaurant tour. That's a hard word. Yeah, restaurant tour. Restaurant tour. The James Beard Foundation. So it's like the easiest way I can describe it is that it is the, it's like the Academy Awards for the food and beverage hospitality industry. It's

a really big deal. I've been nominated. I think this is my 10th nomination. I'm like the Susan Lucci of the James Beard Foundation. But you can't steal the deal. No, I can't ever win. I just get nominated a ton. But like, I mean. Like they're messing with you. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't, I'm not like a really good loser. So I have a tendency when I don't win to show my ass pretty much immediately following that. So anyhow, this year I was very much not expecting this, to be honest with you. Because the two most difficult ones to even be nominated for are Restaurant Tour and then another one called Outstanding Chef. Because they're a national award. So it's not regionalized. It's like, you got to cut through a lot of chaff to like make it. Um, and I was just shocked. And I,

interestingly enough, I think that a letter that I wrote to the foundation this year might have been the reason that I made the list. Cause you're like, what gives? I wrote him a letter and just said, you say that you care about these particular things. Like, well, they've, they're very vocal about social justice and social aspects and like restaurants having an obligation to improve, um, you know, in their hiring practices, all these things, you know, but then I don't feel like they reciprocate that with who they hand the awards out to. And so I wrote him a letter and said, you know, my restaurant group is owned like by a minority as well as myself. Like we operate our own charity that, that feeds 500 families a day in Atlanta. We dedicate almost half of our profits every year to that. Like, and yet somehow, some way, like you seemingly overlook that kind of stuff.

And then you give the awards out to people who six months from now end up having a New York Times article written about how they have this horrible culture inside their business. So like, you know, put your money where your mouth is. I know who you're thinking of. Yeah. And so. And also doing a little subterfuge. Yeah. Yeah.

About sourcing. Yeah. Doing a lot of things you're not supposed to be doing. You know what, man? I ate at the place we're talking about. Yeah. Yeah. About sourcing. Yeah. Doing a lot of things you're not supposed to be doing. You know what, man? I ate at the place we're talking about. Yeah. And I was all night saying to my wife, like, I just smell a fish. I smell a fish.

Right. I mean, it's just, it's like, so anyhow, I just was, maybe it was an inappropriate thing to do, but I felt compelled to do this. And so somehow, some way, I think maybe that like, I don't know, maybe that's what got me on the list. Because I certainly was not expecting it by any means. Well, hopefully that, I mean, that's not your end goal, but hopefully that, I mean, I'm glad you got on there. But hopefully that helps in the future to get other people that are actually, you know, meant to be there. Yeah, because I was like, you know, especially that award. Like what makes you an outstanding restaurateur is all about your culture and what you do as a company and how you support your team and all that kind of stuff. It doesn't, this isn't like flash in

the pan. It really should be an award that's given out to people who are making like a substantial difference in their localized food and beverage community, but are also like kind of setting the tone for what you would want people to do in the future. And it's really easy to talk about doing it, but I can tell you it's very hard and expensive to actually do it. And so, you know, hopefully that encourages people to do that in the future. Congratulations, man. Thanks, man. I appreciate it. How many semi-finalists are there? I don't know, maybe 15 or something like that in the country. And then it'll go to five finalists week after next, something like that at two weeks. And then it'll go to five finalists week after next. Something like that.

Two weeks. People should go. There should be a social media campaign. I wish that's the way it worked. Like how you actually. Yeah, would they do that kind of stuff with the Oscars, man? Yeah, for sure. Yeah, that'd be huge.

I mean, I don't think anybody really understands how you, like who is shortening the list. Or even then once the list is shortened because i've been a finalist a number of times in different categories like why this person wins in this and these other folks don't like i have no idea how that works to be honest with you we've been nominated for those sons of bitches and went down to the ceremony and everything and didn't even win yeah the last time like i was like i wouldn't have come if i knew i wasn't gonna win i literally it's not a great story about me but the last time i was was like i wouldn't come if i knew i wasn't gonna win i literally it's not a great story about me but the last time i was there i thought for sure i was gonna win oh really and

when i didn't you're sitting there like going over your notes for your speech and stuff i don't know what i was well i was really fucking i was like antsy as shit and then when they announced somebody else's name this is in such poor taste i literally just stood up and said, fuck this and walked out and then got like blackout drunk off of all the free booze. So, so yeah, that's good.

Kevin Gillespie, like high character story there, you know, very proud moment for my wife and my teammates who were all there with me. Yeah,

I would think that they would then never award you anything. Well, I was pretty sure I was blacklisted for some stuff. Like, yeah,

I mean, I definitely apologize. I was, I was just so wound up like there's so much anxiety leading into it that like i just blew up for some reason man uh speaking of restaurants this doesn't do the restaurant okay i i told i shared a story about my old man talking about how these guys used to hang deer until they were coated in mold This guy writes And I must have said something like I don't know at least that's what my dad said

I wasn't there And he wrote in to say like He wants to substantiate the story Based on something that happened to him When he worked at an abattoir A country abattoir Butcher shop What is that?

A meat processing You want a hell of an album Is abattoir. Butcher shop. Yeah. What is that? A meat processing. An abattoir is a butcher shop. Yeah. You want a hell of an album is Abattoir's Blues. Nick Cave. Hell of an album, especially the second part. So they used to hang cattle 21 to 28 days.

Right. Humidity control, large coolers. He said they would grow mold. He said the building was really old. The cows would start growing a gray mold, similar to hair, over the entire carcass. By day 21, it was thickly covering any area with protein or meat exposed from fat. And by day 28, some cows had grown bad green

mold as long as two inch strands. So two inch strands of mold. He goes on to say this was a, this was a government inspected building in Ontario, all kinds of protocols. When they were working on stuff that had what was deemed the bad mold, the inspector would be there all day to watch them cut the beef. They had to have super hot water tanks that drip almost boiling water into stainless steel tanks. The tanks slowly drain.

Between every cut, they're required to sterilize the knife blade in the tank. When they're working on bad mold, they were required to cut from underneath toward out so as to not drag the mold into the meat. Um, when they're doing the not so bad mold, they trimmed off a considerable layer underneath to give more of a buffer. The meat was very tender, dry aged, never had anybody get sick, never had any complaints. The coolers were eventually upgraded, but mold is really hard to avoid in these old buildings. Because I think a lot of folks in the country eat moldy beef.

It was common at every abattoir in that county that didn't have a building built newer than 1990. I mean, part of the process, the dry aging process is such that that mold is critical to it actually working. Like that's how it takes place. So like that mold is critical to it actually working like that's how it takes place so like that that mold on the surface is it's not only is it not dangerous it's actually like preventing it from being dangerous like it's like putting a jacket on it so that the meat that is you know he points out that like it was it's in areas where the protein was exposed from the fat the fat doesn't really grow it in a lot of ways. Like it doesn't have the same effect on the, on the fat component of it. Um, but that white mold is what it would be called. The gray that he's referring to is called white mold for, um, I won't go down the list of

like it's actual scientific names cause it, it'll just confuse people. But that white mold is a very safe, very helpful. It tells you that you're doing this at the right temp because it only grows at a very particular temp. It only grows at a very particular humidity level. And that's inside that range of something that's very safe. Now that green mold on the other hand- That two inch long green mold? That stuff's dicey as shit.

And it's really not, you gotta be really, really careful with it. I'm surprised that they were allowed to cut it out. He doesn't name the place, notice. Yeah. I think that under most circumstances with modern like beef dry aging, that inspector that he's referring to will reclaim that meat and it'll just get thrown away.

Like they won't allow them to actually trim it off. So, because that's the stuff that will make you really sick. You have to be really careful with. And so that technique that he's talking about makes perfect sense. That's really the only path out of that is that you've got to start somewhere underneath the white mold and then kind of get inside the animal and then kind of come back out and take off that whole chunk. And so you get huge amounts of meat loss in that scenario. Now with wild game though, it's completely different because there's really no, no particular benefit

to you dry aging something like a deer because somebody, I'm sure somebody's going to write it and be like, you're wrong, Kevin. I'm not talking about hanging an animal. I'm talking about dry aging an animal like without a lot of extra muscular and intramuscular fat, dry aging's effects are pretty limited. Like the dry aging component breaks down natural enzymes in the meat that are present along the connection points of the protein and the fat. And so if there's not any fat, it doesn't really do the same thing and you will end up with just tremendous loss. And so that's why really hanging a deer less than that 21 days is probably your best bet. Because what you do want is some evaporative, you know, sort of loss of moisture because that will, just the blood itself, blood is very acidic.

And so the blood will break down the muscle protein, make it more tender, and it'll concentrate its flavor because you're losing water. But if it shifts into that dry aging realm, you're probably not doing much to tenderize it that much further. And you're running a really serious risk of just having tremendous loss on that animal when you go to butcher it. Got it. We had some stuff that had been dry age for eight, some, it was an odd ad, wasn't it? 18 months. They were dry aged 18 months, and we got into the shoulder. And if you did that shoulder and cross section, the only thing that was left, the only thing that wasn't rind

was the size of a walnut. Right. Like in diameter. Yeah, I always say it was like the size of a whitetail's tenderloin. Yeah. Like a hot dog almost in the center of the shoulder. Running through the center, and it was all rind. I imagine in another six months, the rind would have become rind.

And you said it tasted like blue cheese. Yeah. 100% it tasted like blue cheese. Because it was interesting. I wouldn't eat it every night, but it was like, wow. That's not what I thought that would taste like. That white mold is the same mold that is growing on cave-aged cheeses. That's why they taste that way. I mean,

it's the exact same stuff. And so, um, you know, everybody has different opinions on how long you should take dry aging, you know, and it really is a matter of personal preference and taste. Um, the science behind it says that there's that the tenderizing effects of it stop at a certain point. And then from that point forward, you're really just aging for flavor sake. Like, do you want it to be much, much stronger tasting? Um, but it is different with game species. It's different with everything. I mean, we're talking about, and when everybody's talking about dry aging and what he's talking about is cattle and it's just a whole different ball game. You know, you can dry it. I mean, we dry age ducks in my restaurants. Um, but it doesn't take very long to dry each duck. So, you know, and that really is just to concentrate that, um, pull some moisture out, concentrate the density of the

flesh, but we're really not tenderizing it. We're not leaving it long enough for that to happen. Have you ever heard of a contraption called a Warner Bruntler shear force test? No, not at all. It's how they measure meat tenderness. Oh, okay. And you take like a, you cut it to a certain thickness and it's this machine that punches three centimeter diameter, I think it's

centimeter diameter, holes through meat and it measures resistance on the meat. I think that all this talk about all this like dry age and this and that and the other thing these days, what I want, it's a long study. What I want someone to do is I want someone to take a chunk of elk meat, and I don't give a shit how long you age it, but take a chunk of elk meat and hit it with a shear force test

and then freeze a bunch of that. Right. And then six months later, hit it with a shear force test, hit it with a shear force test at 12 months, hit it with a shear force test at 18, 24 a sheer force test at 12 months. Hit it with a sheer force test at 18, 24. I can't keep doing 12s. Right. Because I forget how it goes.

36. Yep, there you go. 48, 60, 72. I used to know all the way up to 12 times 12. So. 144. Yeah, then they don't teach you beyond that. Beyond that, I'm like, I don't know Then they don't teach you beyond that. Beyond that.

I'm like, I don't know. That's why you're committed earlier. Earlier when you were like, I would have chosen 12 instead of 13. That's the reason we've just gotten to the root of it. Uh, because I feel like totally anecdotally, but so many other people agree that you get Dan, my brother, Danny, he runs his moose program. He runs his moose program where he starts eating a moose at a year. He's got his moose program in his freezer so that it's offset by a year.

So if he kills a bull in September 21, he'll begin consuming that bull September 22. Interesting. He's offset. Freezer aged. For that reason. He's like, dude, it's like it just gets, it's different.

It's tender then. It's not tender when I put it in there. Yeah, there's, I mean, what's taking place is sort of twofold. So there's, the other form of aging

is wet aging, you know, and that's where you bag something, wrap something, and it's sitting in its own blood. And again, blood is acidic, so it has its own tenderizing effects. But it's in there anyway. That's what I understand. It's in there anyway.

But what happens is that freezing and then defrosting ruptures the cells, like ruptures the cell walls of the protein. And so it does have a natural tenderizing effect. So if you really wanted to get after it, you'd unplug your fridge now and then. You unplug your freezer now and then. You unplug your freezer now and then. I mean, actually, there's a method, and it's I can't believe I'm saying this on Meat Eater, because it's a method for tofu. Like, to change the texture of tofu. And so

you'll marinate it, freeze it, defrost it, freeze it, defrost it, freeze it, defrost it, and then every single... To make it extra mushy? No, it actually does the exact opposite. Oh, it does? It dents, it makes it much more dense, and after the sixth or seventh time, you end up with something that has the texture of a chicken breast or something. Really?

Because you're losing water? It's losing water, and in this case, since it's vegetable-based, the rigid cell walls actually are rupturing completely. They're not as malleable as meat proteins. Remember our buddy Steve Jones wrote in to tell us. Steve Jones from Missouri, I believe. Because we're always talking about how it doesn't make a difference if you thaw some meat, put it back in the freezer. Yeah, killer noms.

Killer noms is his food. But you say, well, it does because of what you just explained where it's breaking down the cell walls. So like if you, let's just say you did that with an elk backstrap four times, do you think that that elk backstrap is going to be better or worse for doing that? It sheds a lot of water. Yeah, it's going to shed a lot of water. And so then you run into a risk of like, you're into that territory of being really worried about

freezer burn or almost freeze drying something because you're, you know, that's the method of effectively freeze drying is that you're using. Will it be drier when you cook it too? It could very well be. You got to be careful with it for sure. I want to back up on the hog thing. Maybe Phil, if Phil's got time,

he can just go insert this back where it belongs. I understand like guys are doing damage control and shooting all kinds of hogs. I totally get they're shooting all kinds of hogs and they don't have the time or whatever yeah like they're doing like a job to like do hog control i'm not saying that they're that you're like bad to not eat them just don't say you can't eat them correct right 100 i don't see like you're shooting shit loads of hogs because there's a hog infestation you're not going to then spend it's like 80 degrees out right you know it's like of

course like i get it right that's totally going to happen but it doesn't mean you can't and if someone wants one i feel like you can't you shouldn't tell them that they that you can't eat it yeah 100 we're not going to eat them because we're shooting vacation oh yeah because we're shooting 200 of them i mean it's just like nobody wants to clean that many of them that's what it comes down to i mean at the end of the day, and don't get me wrong, they vary tremendously from this is clearly a domesticated bloodline that is now feral to this is a truly wild bloodline, drastic difference in flavor, like one of the tricks that I'd always, that I'd learned like earlier in my life is that if you do kill one of these big boars, if you can, if you can like within the first five minutes of having killed it, cut its nuts off, the meat is significantly better tasting. Really? Yeah. So, and I'm like, I don't even know how that's possible. Like it's heart's not beating anymore, but it seems to make a difference. You know, maybe it's a placebo, but I don't think so.

I think it makes a pretty drastic difference in the end flavor of it. So, um, yeah. And when we look, we do on the property that I'm, that I have in Georgia, we're doing both damage control, trying to keep populations in check because they're out of control. I mean, we killed 300 last year and it did nothing. So, um, and so there are days that you just sit, you just go down in the morning and you sit in your stand all day long, pack a lunch. And I mean, I'll literally just sit there and like, you know, watch videos on my phone and then you just shoot every pig that comes out, you know, and you just leave. I mean, you don't get out of your stand. You stay so that more will come and more will come. And because they come to their own dead, like pigs will come to check out the dead pig and

eat it. So it's a pretty good chance that there'll be more. And in that case, yeah, those ones that you killed early in the day are probably not a very good idea for you to be eating. But the idea that you can't eat them is just a complete fallacy. And in reality, like especially certain size ones, not only can you eat them. I mean, I know this because we serve them at the saber tooth dinner last week. And the commentary across the board from everyone who dined there was this just tastes like a much

better pork. Like it tastes like pork. That's just a lot better than what I can normally get. And you're like, yeah, that's it. Exactly. I heard firsthand from a person. I heard firsthand from a person who participated in that dinner. Who did you hear from? I don't want to say. Oh, okay. Loved it.

Awesome. Good. I mean, honestly, I told this sounds like I'm being exaggeratory, but he's a private dude. I think, uh,

I think it's one of the best meals I've cooked in 20 plus years of doing this professionally. I think he'd agree. It was dialed in. Like we, it was good. Very good. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

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onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnXx club y'all uh speaking of uh rotten old hogs and culinary awards we're gonna go on to meat eater investigates now so we did our first ever meat eater investigates a couple episodes ago and katie hill reported on um going on amazon and finding all kinds of endangered species horns for sale. Right now we're going to hear from our very own Maggie Hudlow. And this, you actually went down. You went to Florida. I did.

Yeah, I went to Tallahassee. And what's going on in Tallahassee? Why? What's going on? Yeah, so it was a rally. It was a lot of fishing guides. Not truckers. Not truckers, no.

Fishing guides, folks from the outdoor industry, and it was a rally protesting Senate Bill 2508. And this was kind of some sneaky politics is what was going on, and that's why folks were all fired up. And for folks that don't know, Florida has got some serious water issues. I mean, last year alone, millions of fish washed up on shore from toxic red algae blooms. And everything kind of about Florida's water management issues, it revolves around Okeechobee, Lake Okeechobee. And so it used to, the water used to flow north to south through Okeechobee, down through the Everglades through what they called the sea of

grass. And it acted as this natural filtration system. But they, they turned that into ag land, developed it. Well, and they had that flood that killed thousand people. Yeah. In the twenties, right?

It's, yeah. Or many thousands of people. How many, that was a hell of a flood. I'm going to look that flood that killed a thousand people yeah in the 20s right it's yeah many thousands people how many hell of a flood i'm gonna look that flood up keep going look that up so they you know now the now the water's rerouted and now now they use kind of these dams and these things as as little political ponds to to kind of divert where they want things to go. And so they've been trying to figure out for years now how to deal with Okeechobee because it collects everything that comes down. So it's basically a holding tank, and it has this super phosphorus-rich water. And people still need access to this water.

They need it for ag. They need it to this water. They need it for ag. They need it just for water. And it, oh, apparently almost 2,000 people died in the 1928 flood of Okeechobee. Thank you, Sean. Yeah, 2,500 people in a hurricane. And that inspired, you know, I guess what, like a radical overcorrection or helped justify. Yep. And it was this, it was a huge feat what they did there.

But then they realized that they have this water and they don't really know what to do with it because when it goes to the east and west, it's just this super nutrient rich water that's flowing into these very fragile aquatic ecosystems. And they can't handle that. So that's what causes these blue-green algal blooms. And that's in freshwater. And the red algal blooms. And basically, it just kind of eats up all of the oxygen in the water. It kind of suffocates. And kills fish like a mofo.

It really does. Like the pictures you think like, I mean, it's the beach carpeted. Yeah. And dead fish and huge, not just small feeder fish. Didn't like a manatee even wash up once or something like that? Multiple manatees.

Like it's, it's a massive killer. So they've been working on addressing this. They've got the, um, the Lake Okeechobee systems operation manual is So they've been working on addressing this. They've got the Lake Okeechobee Systems Operation Manual is something they've been working on. And that's with the South Florida Water Management District. The Army Corps of Engineers have been working on this. Kind of the best solution they've come up with currently is this EAA reservoir that they're trying to build. So this has been like years in the making and captains for clean waters this non-profit built by um fishing captains that are being affected by this they've all been working

together to come up with a plan to deal with the water and then on february 4th sb 2508 comes through which is a budget sorry a budget conforming bill um State or federal? State. Okay. So this bill has so much stuff crammed into it. I mean, they have like planning on changing who owns a certain park. It's, you know. Sounds about right. They're cramming all this stuff to just push it through. It's kind of fast tracking and getting all of these changes made where previous changes with Okeechobee have been like six years in the making, and this is like

three to four weeks with one period for public input. And all these guides came up for the one period of public input, and they're like, hey, we're concerned. We don't really like what you're doing with this bill. It's tying up all this money we have for Everglades restoration. It's basically putting us back to a 1940 standpoint of where we're at with Okeechobee management. And, you know, they were trying to raise their voices. And the senators basically told them they were misled. They shouldn't be there. There was like no reason to be concerned. So that's why the rally happened. Because that was their one point to raise their voices.

And many of them drove hours through the night. And they had two minutes to talk. And they cut them off at 30 seconds or whatever. And were like, no, you don't need to be here. Don't worry about this. So they organized the rally kind of behind the scenes and and decided to uh pull skiffs and boats into the front door of the capital so oh really it was great it was it was quite the ordeal and it was really cool it was really cool to see all these individuals

coming together and like you know if you're gonna have backdoor politics we're gonna park our damn boats on your front lawn. Were there arrests made? No, no, it wasn't. It wasn't like that. It wasn't that big of a deal. It was pretty well behaved. It was funny.

When I wrote about this, we were all like, everyone was wearing a hat. People had suit jackets on and stuff, but everybody had a hat on. So we were in the Capitol building. You know, everyone that you can tell spends a lot of time in there is clicking around in their high-heeled shoes, and they got their suits on and stuff. And all of us, you know, I was so excited to be warm. I'm wearing, like, Chacos. Everyone's got their fishing shirts on. We all got hats.

And we're piling into these elevators that, yeah, they're the stupidest elevators. And they said, yeah, I'm glad our state spent, like, they're the stupidest elevators. They really, and they said, they're like, yeah, I'm glad our state spent like $15 million on this damn elevator system. Some lady kind of like shimmied in to this whole group of us in our hats. She was on the phone.

She's like, yeah, it's just really busy at the Capitol today. I'm like 10 minutes late. I'll be there soon. Got out and she's like, yeah, she should have said, all these damn hats at the Capitol are making me late, you know? uh what came out of the whole thing so the night before the rally

they put an amendment on the bill and that amendment took some of the bad language out which was it was a huge it was a huge movement they um they clearly they heard the call that um that captains for clean water had kind of put out there and they made some changes but it man sitting in that senate building it really just made me realize how important conservation through legislation is because if if they hadn't raised their voices no one would have and that bill would have just slipped through without any changes made and there's still there still needs to be some changes made to that bill it's going on to be debated between the house and the senate anytime between tomorrow and friday it's not it's not totally solidified yet but currently there's still um the the entire

everglade restoration budget is basically booby trapped and it's dependent on the passing of this bill like if if this bill isn't passed they don't get that money and it's like 300 million dollars but and then the bill the language in the bill that is still troublesome to people is that codifies into state law, a prioritization of industrial ag water supply South of the lake over all other users. Yep. Meaning over fishermen.

And that's that big sugar getting that money. And that's kind of who's been lobbying. And they're saying if you don't sign it, then you don't get any funding. Yep. And as, you know, I've been, I want to get, I want to get Governor DeSantis on the show to talk about the Everglades, but he's fixing to sign this bill.

So this bill, it honestly goes against what DeSantis stands for. Yeah, because that's what he's like. He's taken like some political heat to be, I mean, he describes himself as a Roosevelt conservationist and has taken some heat about his stance on the Everglades. So I wanted to have him on to talk about it. But I'm curious, where is he at on this? So he's, and that's the whole tricky thing,

is that he's kind of tied. He's got his hands tied because they put all that Everglades restoration money. Because it's a budget bill, it's tied up in this. That if this bill doesn't get passed, the Everglades restoration fund doesn't get that like $300 million. I'd love to have the guy on the show. It still has to go be debated between the House and the Senate this week. And it's because it's such a controversial and complicated topic. It's likely that it's going to go to the Speaker of the House and the President of the Senate. But that's to be decided.

And that's also kind of a tricky situation because the president of the Senate is backing this bill. So it's just being down there and seeing how orchestrated the whole Senate is, is really. I mean, they were debating things like what the state dessert should be. That was apparently a big point of concern. Did they land on key lime pie? That is what it was. Apparently someone wanted strawberry shortcake. Jerks. Seriously.

That's treason. Ruining a good thing. Goodness. Idiots. No, dude, I'd way vote for, I'd filibuster for strawberry shortcake. They grow strawberries in, I mean, granted, Plant City, big strawberry growing region, so they grow a lot of them, but, I mean, the key lime kind of grows in a single place. See, this is why it's a debate.

No one wants to talk about water management. No one wants to deal with the serious issues, like which is the state dessert. We want to talk about dessert. So tell me where they can go send people to your article. Yeah, the article is up on meateater.com. It's, I mean, do you want me to read the title off? Yeah, it's a title, man. Yeah, it's 100 Plus Florida Fishing Guides Rally at the Capitol to Protest Bad Everglades Legislation.

And there's a link at the bottom you can find, or you can just go to Captains for Clean Water if you want to harass some senators. There was one guy spoke up, and he was like, God, I got all these emails, and they all seem to be coming from the same place, and I don't know what you guys are all so upset about. This is a great bill.

So it's like, you know, we got to keep harassing them. They're going to pull stuff like this and try to sneak things that that really deserve contemplation and public input like man just keep harassing your senators every chance you get especially on water because it seems like water is the thing that always goes bad it It's always the, you know, everywhere is a fight over water, it seems. Absolutely. It's a hot commodity these days, and always has been. All right, Sean, here's the duck report. What's that, huh?

You got anything else to say? I say it's duck season, and I say fire! Sean's assignment. Yep. Was it an assignment? Well, it was an expansion of what we were talking about last time. So last time we had talked about

age demographics and sex ratios. Yep. And part of the sex ratios is that hens are getting whacked on nests and that there's just less hens than there is drakes. And they have a lower, you know, we had talked about how long they live. Well, hens have a shorter lifespan. Comes back to that's a predator story. So wanted to talk a little bit about predators.

Got it. Because we got into the skewed ratios. Yeah. Yep. Got it. Because we got into the skewed ratios. than hens why that is is um well as delta waterfowl talks about and has researched it's that there are just more predators now and that since the 1980s we've seen this kind of uh a growth of predator populations and a increase in the divergence of the sex ratio. Because low fur prices, bro. Low fur prices.

Yep. And, like, I want to start off with saying that this is not... You should start a really popular parker company. And to help ducks, put, like, fur trim on the collar. There we go. Can you imagine the impact? We can maybe do that as part of our like first light line. There we go.

Totally. Hunter sourced. Into this idea. Yeah. So I want to like preface this with this isn't just wipe out all predators. Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah. But we've had this, we've had this, or we've had over time a change of the landscape of what the predator population looks like. You know, before, before agriculture and before settlement, we had wolves and bears and no egg.

And as you know, we did two things, really. We came through, we wiped out bears and wolves, and then we brought agriculture and grain everywhere. And that's allowed the mesopredators, the midsize predators like raccoons and skunks, possums. Grinners. Yep. Grinners. We've, we've, we've came through and disproportionately enabled those populations, really. And up until the 1980s, we at least had trapping to kind of keep those numbers down. And since then, less and less trappers and a even more like prominent growth of those populations to actually talk about like how much we've influenced those

populations north dakota up until the 1950s didn't even recognize or like uh there was no written record of raccoons being a north dakhmm. And then now they're dispersed all across the prairie. When Delta waterfowl, or, you know, in those old trapping records, they were a 0% catch. There was no trappers catching raccoons on the North Dakota prairie. Now Delta waterfowl, depending on the year, they're either their number one catch or they're their second most catch on the North Dakota prairie. Um, so you've, that like really puts a button on how these predators are spreading into areas that they weren't traditionally. Uh, Delta waterfowl trappers, 80% of what they catch are skunks and raccoons.

And those are kind of public enemy number one, so to speak, on duck eggs. It's interesting to see if you ever looked at maps of the spread of raccoons and opossums. Really? I haven't seen actual map, but yeah, I can imagine.

The opossum used to be like a southeastern U.S. animal. And raccoons are just a riparian animal. You know what else has spread that you wouldn't expect is the javelina. Really? Yeah. Javelinas have been expanding northward in historic times. Is it agriculture?

I don't know what the javelina thing's linked to. I think the opossums and raccoons is like climate ag elimination of big predators yeah yeah there's there's definitely no big predators to keep them in check you know somewhat coyotes can a little bit but but they even like even like I mean we did so much damage to greyhound owls and other things that would kill them you know? Yeah.

Yeah. And to actually put into perspective how many of those animals are on the landscape, a six mile by six mile block for a Delta trapper, they're catching 300 of these mesopredators a year, which just. Yeah. For a township. Yeah. Which. That. Which. That's incredible. It's hard to comprehend how there's a egg in an area that ever hatches.

Where are they doing their, like, how are they determining where to do their work? Yeah. So that's a really interesting thing. Delta waterfowl is, they are focusing their trapping. So they've got contract trappers and that's part of their mission. Sorry, just because I think it'd be helpful for me, so probably for everybody. Can you just tell me what is Delta Waterfowl? Yeah, so Delta Waterfowl is one of the two major

duck conservation organizations, right? Ducks Unlimited being the one everyone historically has recognized. Ducks Unlimited and Delta are both very important. Yeah. You hear more and more and more about Delta Waterfowl all the time. They do more and more work. Yeah, for sure.

And I remember like, it seems like, you know, DU you just grow up with, right? Yeah. I remember being like, what? Delta Waterfowl? It's like, I don't go a week now without hearing about something Delta Waterfowl does. Yeah.

And, and part of that is that they just have, they have the same end goal right but they have a different mission path to get there ducks unlimited is more habitat focused yeah and they preserve shit loads of wetlands yes and ducks unlimited like is absolutely fundamentally important to you know keeping a lot of wetlands intact for a hundred years two hundred years yeah it's like take they they like raise money take money buy wetlands intact for a hundred years, 200 years. Yeah. It's like take, they, they like raise money, take money, buy wetlands, preserve it. Usually turn it over. It usually all becomes public hunting ground.

Yep. Yeah. Yep. Phenomenal group. Oh, for sure. Delta waterfowl, their mission is, okay, we have some wetlands out there and some grasslands out there that we've gone and preserved, but they're not producing ducks. And the reason they're not producing ducks is, you know, one of the reasons is predation. And so Delta waterfowl is a really cool, um, method to the madness on how they pick where they,

uh, where they trap. So they have to have, they're looking for high volume areas, meaning there's a lot of ducks, but low grassland percentage. So their ideal place to go trap is a place that has 60 to a hundred nesting pairs of ducks using the area using a square mile. But then that area is less than 10% grass. And you find a lot of that, you know, across South Dakota, North Dakota, right? Where you have a CRP patch next to a wetland that's not productive ground and it's surrounded on all sides by agriculture. Well, those ducks really will key in on that like low lying nonproductive ground to a farmer and you end up with high densities of breeding pairs there, but they're surrounded on all sides

by, you know, corn or wheat or whatever. And so you end up with this area of the ducks are on an island of grassland, so to speak. And they end up with a bunch of predators coming in and raiding those nests. Um, to kind of put into perspective how bad that predation is on those nests, Delta Waterfowl did a four-year study in Manitoba that over four years, those areas that were not trapped had a 2% nest success. And nest success is not like, oh, the whole nest hatched. One egg counts as nest success. Oh, really?

Mm-hmm. And so- One duck is a successful nest. Yeah. Yeah. So only 2%, even. Had a duck. Like a duck is wild.

And then the areas that were trapped were 24% success. Really? Wow. Yeah. So it, like it helps. It matters. And they did a similar study in North Dakota. North Dakota doesn't quite have the same predator problem like that area of Manitoba does, but 12% non-trap nest success, but 34% success on trap. So if you can key in on those areas that they're keen on, like it really can impact duck, you

know, duck production for sure. And, you know, it's not just that these predators kill ducks. I mean, there's everything likes to eat duck and duck eggs, but the, another population of animals that has exploded. That's really interesting is the like corvids and ravens. Really?

Crows. Yeah. So. There's more of those around. Not just more. A 600% increase in 30 years. No. Yeah.

And they say the great. Attributed to what? When I asked that question, it seemed more like it was conjecture, expert conjecture, but also like more access to roadkill, grain fields, like all, you know, I mean, think of the amount of stuff that we just kill that lays everywhere. But you're saying, here's the weird part about it is boom of like 78 to 82 or 84, whatever, when like every meso predator on the planet would encounter a steel trap every night between November 1st and December 31st, those days. Yep. And you're like, there's like an event, right? There's an event that had a sort of concrete end to it. If you get into magpies, you're not coming out of that. And you could be like, there's more stuff to scavenge, perhaps.

But then you'd be like, well, since what? Well, since we lost our large scavengers. So you lose bears, whatever. You lose lions and stuff. Or raptors, whatever. But I don't get what could have happened in 30 years. I have a book in my library of hunting books.

That makes it sound like a little more than it is. I have a shelf with some old-ass hunting books. I have a book like, How to Hunt Crows. Hardcover. Well, yeah, people were waging war on corvids for a while there. I wonder if that was the event just busting down the magpie and the crow and the raven populations.

So I wonder if it's just like seeing the rebound from that. Yeah, and you can't. Canada, you're still, I think, allowed to, at least in parts of Canada, that they kind of still wage war on ra Ravens, but not, you know, not the U S and, uh, Dr. Nikolai was talking about how the great basin over in Nevada, like that whole basin marsh area. Um, it's like, they don't even have a number for the increase of Corvid populations there. It's way more than 600%. And my kids and I like to set out our uh predator caller put it on crow fight just put it out in the yard you can't do it too much you can

only do it like yeah they figure it out pretty quick um and we turned it on yesterday and didn't get any crows but holy shit the magpies really they came to the crow fight? Oh my God. Fired up on crow fight. Yeah, they were riled up. Well, you know, we protect all those populations, right? They don't have anything. Wiping them out. What percent increase?

600% increase in 30 years. That's incredible. Yeah. I had Joel Bryce from Delta. He was like, when those ravens really get on duck eggs, they are hell on them. And he sent a picture that is unbelievable. It's got to be 100 eggs that a raven had cached on top of a bunch of old railroad ties. That's what that is? Yep, that's a bunch of broken.

I'm looking at the picture. I didn't know what I was looking at. That's a raven's cache of eggs he ate. Yep. And just sits on those railroad ties, goes and picks duck eggs. Really? You know, everything. He carries them back there.

It's crazy. Yep. It's pretty impressive, really, when you think about how many eggs they can eat. And, you know, there's everything else, too, that eats them, snakes and whatever else. Pretty much everything wants to eat ducks and ducks' eggs. Yeah, we're looking at a picture here. There's a mink on a nest, a raccoon on a nest,

and a really cute picture of a coyote. Just sniffing around. Like, fixing to eat all the eggs. Yeah. out just sniffing around like so innocent fixing to eat all the eggs yeah and there's they have so much more to this whole uh to all the research they've done and what they're doing to try to i guess bring people like into the fold on understanding how we can make, how we can make more use of the land we have. Right. We want more CRP, but we would also like to be more productive with the CRP we have.

And you've seen it. And I tell people this all the time, like get an electronic call with a coon fight sound on it and february march when you're not sure what else you should be out doing like that's about as much but you got to set it on a coon tree yeah or or you know a culvert or a brush pile like this railroad tie pile here oh that's a perfect spot for yeah hit people with that stat on snakes, man. Yeah, so Dr. Nikolai, same guy from Delta Waterfowl, he was working on the Mississippi River in 1994, Pool 8. They were putting radios on ducklings that right as they hatch, they'd slip a radio under their skin and then put them back with mama. And they had

caught and killed a snake that when they cut it open, eight radios. So it had wiped out a whole nest of ducklings. My kid was telling me the other day, he was in school, he's in sixth grade. They had a substitute teacher. He says a really old man. And the old man said, I'm just going to tell stories. I'm not going to teach. This is like when they couldn't get any teachers in because of COVID. And my kid told me the story. The old man told him that he told a story that when he was a kid, he went out into the hen house and there was a snake in there.

And it had big bulges in its body. So he took his machete and cut the snake in half and squeezed the eggs back out of it and put them back in the nest and they all hatched successfully. Okay, that's a way better education than anything they could have taught. My kid's like, loves this guy. I want him to tell me stories yeah no that's so you know long story short like i think the whole the whole predator thing is it'd be nice for people to kill some more that's for sure yeah you know what i could just picture the i, I agree. I can picture the counter argument. Well, why are you prioritizing lots of ducks over lots of raccoons?

It's not that you're just prioritizing lots of ducks over lots of raccoons. It's that we ourselves had the unnatural impact. Yeah. Like these are not what mesopredator populations should look like. These are out of whack and they're not, it's not because all of a sudden the raccoon became so much more of a productive animal. It's because we had a, you know, false influence, the Anthropocene, so to speak, on these populations. Uh, can I plug inside kids in an outdoor or outdoor kids in an inside world?

Which releases in May. You can pre-order it now on a little ship. Well, not only that, Phil. Phil can back me up on this. I just spent three days sitting right here and did the whole audio book. Yeah. He had a whole bag of lozenges and. Oh, throat coat tea.

Throat coat tea. Lozenges. Yeah, how do you keep. How do you keep your. That's the trick. The first day was hard. And I went home feeling not good and then I,

then I, then like the same way you build up muscles, like you build up six pack, I built up like a throat six pack. I don't know. I'm not sure.

I built up, I built up, I built up a six pack in my throat and by the end of the thing I could have kept going. Either way, in it,

I like explore with, with how to like, with kids around nature. I'm not saying that I like, I like explore with, with, with how did like with kids around nature. I'm not saying that I like, I have a lot of experience now. I'm not saying I'm like right or wrong on everything, but I have, I've had like three kids and the oldest one's 11. So I've been at it a while. I've been around a lot of kids.

I talk about like the perils with kids of like looking down at nature. That's gross. Right. Ziggy. Ew. And the perils of like looking up at it too much that they're sort of like that they shouldn't touch nature right that we're gross like we're the bad ones and going near it is like it's best to look at it out the window on the yellowstone right like don't go into it you spoil it when you're into it. And I talk about just this concept

of like humans are in this game. There is no now pretending that we're not in this thing. Like we have created conservation dependent species. Yeah, for sure. Like we've created

a situation where a lot of the things that we enjoy and want to have around, they're not around in spite of us. Like they're around because of us at this point. Because of something we did. Yeah. But it'd be painful to see ducks get to a point where they're conservation dependent. Right. Where if you just walked away and let the whole thing take care of itself

considering what we've done that i don't know do they blink out i mean they don't they wouldn't blink out but it might not it wouldn't look anywhere nearly as good as it does if you're involved yeah for sure and you see you see that separation even by flyway in north america right where you have the atlantic flyway, like really, you know, kind of struggling with bird populations and other areas doing better and other species doing better. And you realize just how much we're affecting that

and influencing that. Like snow geese in the mid-continent population are doing so well. Why are they doing so well? Well, it's very much so human influence like it is very much us providing these calorie rich grains all along their flyway and yeah you can't like you just can't deny that like we have a major influence on their population their food their predation like the whole the whole bit that we might

influence ducks, like as much as any other, at least as much as the white tail deer. Like, are these guys that are doing these things? Are they, they're obviously not shy about talking about it. Are they afraid of catching shit with the animal rights people? Um, not from my understanding. Like, I mean, they obviously are more interested in ducks than they are in pr yeah but and i also think that they like they can make that sound argument like this is not this is not natural either too do you think that you could talk to these fellers would they ever let someone come along with them oh yeah yeah they Yeah. They want, they want us to join up and,

uh, they have a specific way they like to trap for nest success. Oh really? In like, in comparison to fur trapping. So you could probably learn a thing or two, go run around in North Dakota, do a little trapping.

Put that in your note, Corinne. Okay. See that? That's called producing right there. Put that in your note, Corinne. Okay. See that? That's called producing right there. I'd like to know what one of them trappers makes annually, you know, in case this gig doesn't work out. Just right here.

Backup plan. Yeah, I feel like, because there I'd be like, you know what? I'm really making a difference. Yeah. Every day. Yeah. In case that- Not just Hollywood and around.

That Werner blade thing doesn't pan out. It ends up being too big an investment. Oh, no. Get trapped. Bankrupt's meat eater. Yeah. Listen, dude. Yeah, between that and the...

Between the sheer force test and the punt gun. The punt gun is a problem, but we're getting it worked out. Sean, that was a good dark report. What happens next? I don't know. I got to think on that one. I'm not sure what I'm working on next. We did sex.

I think... We did sex. I think on the next one, I want to go talk to the boys at Osborne Labs, and they're the ones doing a lot of that GPS backpack work. And we had mentioned last time about what is the odometer on these ducks look like? Well, they're the guys with that information. So I think that'd be pretty cool they're uh then what's after that i don't know you know what i'd like to hear i got a story for you for the duck report okay he's already in the typing position i got you you ready yep um what led up to the lead ban and what were the results? Ooh, that's a good one.

Very good. Yeah. I like that. I like that one. I want to hear that one. That's a good one. People that I was, uh,

people I came, I started duck hunting, like became a legal duck hunter in the aftermath of that. There were people who quit hunting. They probably weren't like diehard anyway. There were people who were like out of protest, quit hunting ducks. Oh yeah.

Mm hmm. When the lead band came. Yep. It's very, you can go dig through the forums from like 10, 15 years ago when, you know, when internet forums were a big deal and there's those guys that can't help themselves or like, I haven't hunted ducks since 1980, whatever. Uh, but they're there on a waterfowl forum. Yeah. I'd be like

you must have really really liked Duck Hunt yeah tomorrow if they were like okay you can't use steel you gotta use bismuth I'd be like

alright I'm quitting I have a request it was one of Clay's episodes I can't remember what he was talking about

oh the green timber reservoir stuff yeah but it was something about migration because he was talking about. Oh, the green timber reservoir stuff? Yeah, but it was something about migration, because he was talking to an ornithologist that was explaining about how some of the ducks, and I'll never forget this, I was telling Corinne, because I heard it, I was telling Corinne

we should just have an ornithologist on this show, but about how he thinks that some of these ducks that are flying down the center of our continent, heading south, that in one ear they can hear the pacific and then in the left ear they can hear the atlantic and then on and then on their horizon the stars that they're looking at are not moving because of the way that the world spins amongst the stars the stars above them move but the ones on the horizon that

they're looking to don't move and just like all that was like, he feels that they are literally sensing oceans on either side of them. And they know which one it is. And that's how they get from point A to point B. I don't know about that, but I like the idea. I like the idea for duck report. How do they know where they're at? There's some really good stuff on that. I've already done some of the liquid on that.

You got four duck reports right there. You got the odometer. Osborne Lab stuff. You got what led up to the lead ban and what happened after. You got Yanni's thing about how they can feel the oceans. We're set for a few months here.

Duck special powers. How often do we do a Sean's duck report? We're doing them once a month right now. Oh, jeez. There's like 30 years done. Oh, man. I have the best idea for a little musical bit. For Sean's Duck Report? Duck tales.

Ooh. Oh, yeah. Now I'm feeling it. Yeah, yeah. All right, everybody. Go, I don't know. Go pre-order Outdoor Kids and Inside World. If you have kids or you know someone who's fixing to,

or already does, get all your questions answered. How old should my kid be before I give him a gun? What happens if a kid sees a deer die when he's real little? All those questions. Why do they always make mess camping? And if you don't have kids, download Rutt. Yeah, or download Rutt, and then pretty soon you'll have kids download rut yeah or download rut

and then pretty soon you'll have kids and you'll need the book we get them coming we get them going at least it's called vertical integration alright everybody thanks for joining don't bother talking to the guys with their hot soft eyes you know they're already

taken on don't even speak to all those sequins of Detroit Well, they kiss, they spit white noise Well, they kiss, they spit white noise Well, they kiss, they spit white noise Well, they kiss, they spit white noise What a Christmas for wise boys