The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 324: The Latvian Eagle's Heavy-Assed Arrow

Episode Date: March 28, 2022

Steven Rinella talks with Janis Putelis, Kevin Gillespie, Brody Henderson, Seth Morris, Chester Floyd, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider.   Topics discussed: hating spouses that make you do a thing with your kids at the expense of doing another thing with your kids that you’d rather do; Dirty Dan jokes; red dot and Jani's video; solar-boosted battery life of 17+ years; Kevin "Giuseppe" Gillespie; The MeatEater Podcast smarter than doctors; South Dakota's pen raised pheasants; a stream access victory in New Mexico; whose mountain lions?; Mingus' resume; a squishy bobcat as Jani’s first taxidermy; pronouncing “nilgai”; the definition of a double entendre; jumping the spring; grumpy middle aged men arguing over math and arrow grain weights; Jani the Believer; MeatEater Podcast Ep. 284: The Archer's Paradox; a poop blasting party; our May 3rd Live Show; cooking nilgai; a thick assed hide; Steve’s funny pronunciation of “bagel”; Kevin's feral hog holiday ham recipe; and more.   Connect with Steve and MeatEater Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop MeatEater MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. Hey, listen, man. We got a neighbor. You're not recording. Sorry, Phil.

What did he say? He's always recording. I got a neighbor. I don't want to say her name. Their family loves sports. They used to play sports. The parents used to play sports. Yeah. So for them to spend every weekend going to sports is a real treat.

Yeah. I'm not telling them not to do that. That's what I'm saying. I'm saying, I don't want to do that. Just because they don't want to go ice fishing. You start off by saying, what does your parents do on the weekend? Yeah. And then if they're like, well, they sit at home and watch sports all weekend.

It's like, all right, you're fine. You can do both. You might think about putting your kids in sports You can do both Who can? Sports and outdoor activities No I can't Well I did No he's saying as a young individual Lots of outdoor activities

And lots of sports I think it's a great podcast topic Here's the main thing I have a certain bag of tricks Outdoor activities and lots of sports. I think it's a great podcast topic. It's incompatible. Here's the main thing. I have a certain bag of tricks. We're really missing out here. I have a certain bag of tricks that I can bring to the table. We need to have a whole conversation. What are you doing?

I was telling Corinne to hit the record button. Oh, turn the recorder back on. I have a certain bag of tricks that I can bring to the table as a parent. That should be valued. Let's say, for instance, let's say, name for me a sports figure. Michael Jordan. Okay. Michael Jordan comes

over to spend the weekend at your house. Okay. It would make sense that if there's a basketball court and he's staying the weekend and he says, I'd love to take the kids out to shoot a few hoops, as they say. Play a game of horse. You would be like, well, that makes a hell of a lot of sense, seeing as how you're Michael Jordan.

Right. Sure. So if you have a person that likes to hunt and fish in the house and you have hunting and fishing to be done around home, wouldn't you extend the same logic? Sure. Okay. You wouldn't be like, hey, everybody,

Michael Jordan's here for the weekend. Let's go ice fishing. Maybe you'd be like, hey, Michael. But he's like, no, no, no, I wanted to shoot some hoops with the kids. No, no, no, no, no, no.

No, no, no, no. Take them ice fishing. Clearly you don't understand it. It'd be stupid. Michael Jordan's actually just a degenerate gambler. no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, for the guy. I did. None of that bad... You didn't come away thinking he was an asshole? No. None of that bad stuff resonated with me. That's funny. None of that bad stuff resonated with me. You're speaking of the last dance?

Yeah. I like all that. I like all that. Playing for keeps. Yeah. Like, I like all that. All... I liked all that stuff.

All of it. Okay, turn around, Phil. That was all free content for everyone. For you six lucky individuals. No, that was free. No, I think we should publish that as a free bonus extra. Yeah. With no lead-in, just launch straight in mid-sentence.

Just free. Don't say we never gave you nothing free. You got that? It'd be great if we could have Carrie here and Katie here to help us with this. Look, I'm just not wasting all my weekends on that kind of shit. And Carrie doesn't like it when I put it that way.

I almost had to go sleep on the couch about this. Don't worry as I did, I kind of fell asleep, but I was laying there thinking about, you know what I'm going to do to really make my point? I'm going to go sleep on the couch about this. The only reason I didn't is I kind of fell asleep, but I was laying there thinking about, you know what I'm going to do to really make my point? I'm going to go sleep on the couch. How'd that work out?

I fell asleep. Did you wake up sore and feeling guilty the next morning? No, no, no. I'm saying I was in bed thinking about storming out and going to the couch. Oh, you never made it.

But I fell asleep. I never got to do... Make your point. Yeah. Have you heard Mitch Hedberg's deal about why he doesn't like camping? No. Because it's too hard to express his anger

when he fights with his girlfriend. Like trying to slam a tent flat? He tries to angrily zip the tent. He's like, fuck you. Zip, zip. We need to have a bigger conversation about. Oh, we should do a whole. Oh, yeah.

Did you know that I was helping coach my girls basketball team the last two months? Yeah, but let me ask you this. Not on the weekends. No. See? On the weekends. I don't care. That's what I've told everybody.

I don't care what they do. What I've been very, on the weekdays, I've been very supportive of all the kids are in swim. They swim two days a week. I'm, and now they're like little river otters.

All of them. Very strong swimmers. They'll swim till they die. They will not play sports when they're 80. They'll still be swimming. There's no way, because they're not going to when they're 80. They'll still be swimming. There's no way. Because they're not going to play t-ball.

He already quit t-ball. Yeah, but he might be playing pickleball at 80. That argument makes no sense at all. Oh, I agree, man. People shouldn't do something unless they're going to do it until they're dead? Exactly. What?

That's exactly what I'm saying. Okay. Develop some lifelong skills. That's exactly what I'm saying. Okay. Develop some lifelong skills. That's exactly what I'm saying. Things to become passionate about. There are lifelong skills that are developed in team sports, too. We can't discount that. Very much so.

They're always telling you that. They're always telling you that. I want you to go find. Okay. I want you to go like, okay, find a way to measure cooperation. Like, however you measure cooperation. Then I want you to go randomly sample randomly select a hundred americans spend a week with them and and give them a cooperation score and then correlate it for me show me the chord the the correlation that like oh the top scorers

all wrestled in high school i bet that's noness, though. If you were to do a toughness test, like mentally toughness, I think that wrestling would be up there. Do you want to have a contest about who's mentally more tough out of you and me? I don't know. How do we set it up?

Staring contest? Yeah, perfect. Bill, turn the machine on. Scientifically legitimate. Bill, record the staring contest for me and Chester. No blinking. We don't have a baseline. We don't have your board.

Yeah. This is a riveting podcast. All right, let's get down to it. I know you guys can't see us staring at each other, but... I just... If the parents like it, I think that you should do it. I'm not like it I think that you should do it I'm not against it I think you should do it I don't what I'm against are wives

or husbands I'm gonna cut it right there what I'm against I'm against wives or husbands forcing their spouse into doing things with their kids that they hate when the big win,

they want to do a different thing with their kids. I could see if he's like, I don't want to do anything. I want to sit here and be a bad parent. Then I'd be like, listen, that's not going to fly. Take them to basketball. But if they're like, truck's loaded, dude. We're going camping. We're going to fish.

We're going to make a fire. We're going to go look up on what's up on top of that hill. No, you can't because you got to go to T-ball. Bullshit, man. Total bullshit. At what point does it shift, though, as your child ages, when the child has a passion for something? What if they just really like baseball?

I don't know yet. Do you then make the sacrifice? I had to do a similar thing the other day. I was telling my kids about the genre of jokes called Dirty Dan. Okay. And I told them the layout of a Dirty Dan joke where they're in class and the teacher's doing the alphabet. And they do a letter and the kid has to raise his hand and then have a word that starts with the letter and then use it in a sentence. And she's like, A.

And right away, Dirty Dan's hand goes up. He's like, I got it. I got it. I got it. Right? But she can't call on him because he's Dirty Dan. And she knows what he's going to say. So she's like, Susie.

And she's like, Apple, my grandmother established an apple orchard. Right? And she's like, B. Dirty apple orchard right and she's like b dirty dan's like oh oh oh right she but she's like i know i can't do that i know what he's gonna say and she's like billy he's a baseball so as i was telling the kids it gets to r no one raises their hand not even dirty danirty Dan, but very slowly, eventually Dirty Dan's hand goes up and she's like, well, there's nothing, there's no R, there's nothing to do with R. And so she finally agrees to call on Dirty Dan. And I said, I can't tell you what Dirty Dan says though. And we agreed that when they get their learner's permit to drive, I will tell them what Dirty Dan says. You'll give them the punchline to this joke?

So now they like to speculate about what Dirty Dan says. I was like, you'll never guess what Dirty Dan says. So when they get their learner's permit, if they choose to participate in weekend sports, I will consider it knowing that they're soon able to drive themselves. And if they make it to a championship, I will probably go the final championship. It's the doing one thing that screws up the thing for the whole family that the whole family enjoys. For sure. Like a hundred percent does like my, my brother-in-law is a, is an ex professional athlete and his kids are like extremely into sports

because David is extremely into sports in my opinion. Um, but their weekends, shit, their weekdays are cannibalized with nonstop sporting events. Like it's, I don't even know how they fucking manage it. It seems like a nightmare to me.

And I like sports care about sports, but not at this level. I just realized I can't tell the punchline. Because Phil, I'll tell the punchline. And just bleep out the parts. Okay. So Dirty Dan slowly raises his hand. And no one else raises their hand.

The teacher's like, there's nothing. He can totally say it. There's nothing he can say. So Dirty Dan goes, rats. Big **** like this. And it's a double joke. It's a double joke because that's not even a sentence. Did you guys see this i'm holding this this is where the show's starting now

this is the meat eater podcast coming at you shirtless severely bug bitten and in my case underwearless you can't predict anything presented by first light creating proven versatile hunting apparel from merino base layers to technical outerwear for every hunt first light farther, stay longer. I'm holding a new red dot that I'm going to put on a shotgun. People are going to think this is a paid advertisement, but it's not.

You'll just have to trust me. Guess what the battery life? It's a Vortex, what's it called? A Spark Solar red dot. Jonas just did a big video on this thing the solar yeah did you explain the battery life yeah do you believe it i do believe it but you have to understand how it works properly before you spout off because it's not just the battery light no i know it works in conjunction yeah it's a it's a red dot. This is a solar panel, I gather. Mm-hmm.

But it's indiscernible from a normal. I mean, it's like a little teeny bigger than a normal red dot. Yep. It stays on. When you turn it on, it stays on for 14 hours. If you move the gun, the light comes back on. Yeah. Or you can just turn it off.

If you were to not move your gun for 14 hours, it would turn off automatically. In 14 hours. So that prevents you from leaving the gun in the safe all. That's right. So yeah, like, well, the other night. Let me try to explain something here. I'm like, the other night we went out.

There's a thing that I have heard works extraordinarily well and I can now attest. You sneak up to a raccoon den tree in the dark and set up a collar and play a coon fight. Which is a crazy noise. It's two raccoons, yeah. So me and Garrett went out to a known coon den tree and sean weaver was saying when you turn that thing on get ready and i thought he meant like you know

kind of get ready we get up to a den tree with a red light and that coon collar on and turn that fight on and holy shit they just came pouring out one a boar i mean he come out like there was no time to even think and he's not only out of the hole out of the tree on the ground coming at us and i realized i hadn't turned the damn red dot on he goes back sees us us, goes back up, gets worked up all over again, and comes back down, at which point I had the red dot on.

You're ready for him now. And that got me being like, and I even said to Garrett, I said, if you're using a red dot, yeah, actually like pay attention to what's going on. It's like the only,

you know, if you like spend your whole life, you're not used to like turning your sight on. But, and I was bitching about it. and so he put this on my desk where as soon as you move it and it then hunting raccoons at night obviously is different because there's no sun but 150 000 hours of runtime holy shit with the battery in the sun you buy that yanni 150? 150,000 hours.

Got to figure out how many days that is. You'd never be able to figure that out. You'd have to. Absolutely. You'd have to divide. Absolutely no way. You'd have to divide. 150,000 by 24. That's tough to do in your head.

No one's going to do that. It's a lot. What's the answer? 750 days. It's somewhere around 700. No your head. No one's going to do that. It's a lot. What's the answer? 750 days. It's somewhere around 700. No, wait. No. 7,500.

What do we got? Somebody? This is amazing. That's too much math for me. It's like, listen. Some things are just best. We can't do it. 6,250 days.

How many years is that? Oh, now you're getting into it. Divide that by 365. Now it's getting ridiculous. No, this is interesting. 17.1 years on one battery. Yeah, it's called the Spark Solar Red Dot. Yeah, I've got that on my turkey gun.

How many moon phases is that, Chester? That's how I measure time. How many leap years, Chester? Yeah, exactly. I want to make sure everybody how many fortnights do you know

everybody understands that that is up to by using like a lot of ambient you know solar power like Arizona in late June

yeah like if you're if you're only hunting coons at night it's probably going to be closer to like 30,000 which is

what the red dots that you and I both use, the Venom. That's what their battery life is. Still very impressive. 30,000. Oh, yeah. Yeah, this is like how EVs range. It's like 450 miles. And you're like, if you're driving very slow,

downhill the whole way. Yeah, I got a really good surface. Yeah, exactly. One more question about this thing uh it's not running is it is it storing solar no oh so it's like actually like running on solar i see so it's just basically not tapping into the battery so thus the battery life is that's what surprised me because if you're putting a Joe Blow Walgreens coin battery in there, I was like, how is that running on solar? Yeah, it's not charging it.

Automatically, which is the cool part, right? It's just always using the solar that's available to it if it can okay now we're really starting to show uh joined by kevin gillespie we were arguing about this the other day do you like a j or a guh it's a guh it's definitely not a j i don't think that's what i was like right like my parents or grandparents decided it and i don't really get to weigh in no because well i've had this conversation hard times with clay i don't think Clay knows what his last name is. What do you think his last name is? His last name's Newcomb. Ah.

He thinks it's Newcomb. I'm like, that's not what your last name says. I think that's called regional dialect, accent. But you go with a guh. I was arguing for guh. And it's, yeah, exactly, guh. Not gill, not, yeah. Well, I had a person doing a juh.

Yeah. A lot of people do jillespie. That's what he was trying on me. J and a hard I. I shut that shit down hard. And then periodically people in TSA pronounce it Giuseppe, but I'm not really sure what that's going to sound like. Like that points to larger issues, not really my name being the problem. I like that as a nickname though.

Totally, yeah. Me and all of my Italian heritage. Yeah, you just call me Giuseppe brody henderson hello fixing to say something divisive among the dog lovers of the world oh i got something for you we'll do it later something that came to mind the other day phil corinne uh chestester the Divester is here. Midwester. Chester the Midwester. Seth Morrison and our very own beloved Giannis Poutelos,

who's going to fill us in about his whole journey of discovery about heavy-ass arrows. Is that a good way to put it? Oh, we can go down that rabbit hole if you'd like. No, we'll get to it. We're going to get to it hardcore, but we've got to do a few things up top. All right, we've got to speed demon. Speed demon through a lot of stuff

because we've got a lot of stuff to get after. You guys ready? Bring it. Ready as I go. Here's one. The Meat Eater podcast is smarter than doctors. That's right. You heard it right.

A guy was eating some venison with his family, eating it very rare. Whole family gets sick. He gets to thinking about the symptomology, lethargy, very high fever, chills, body aches, headaches. He's like, I feel like I heard about this on Meat Eater podcast. I think I got toxoplasmosis. Cat scratch fever.

Cat scratch fever. Calls the doctor. The doctor's like, you can't get that off deer meat and he's like you want to bet i learned it on the podcast turns out they all had toxoplasmosis no shit he could have died another guy rode in he was in florida of all places on a long run, long boat run, fishing tuna, long wet ride. All of a sudden his buddy inexplicably is acting real weird. And he's like, this reminds me of the story I heard about the caribou hunting guide on Meteor's Close Calls audiobook. And he was able to diagnose the guy. And sure enough, the guy was having, in Florida, where you'd never expect it,

his buddy had gotten his clothes too wet and was in hypothermia so bad he became incoherent. But he recognized it. And he's like, I think I know what's happening to this guy. Huh. So if you just feel like you're sitting around with your thumb in your arse right now, you're actually learning how to save lives. Yeah, if you haven't listened to those close call stories,

you're missing out. South Dakota, this has been going on for a while, but just a quick reminder. We keep talking about, you know, it comes up all the time for prices affecting, you know, meso predator populations and like raccoon and skunk prices being really low. So we're seeing this like dramatic upswing over the last few decades and meso predators and what that means for predation on duck nests and all that South Dakota. This is contentious as all get out.

South Dakota is opening up a bounty program. They've been talking about it. They're doing it. Kids get their own bounty season. Man, this would be great. I would love it if I was there with my kids. Kids get an exclusive head start period starting on March 1st for a month.

Raccoons, striped skunks, badgers, opossums, and red fox, $10 per tail. That's cool. Jimmy would be all over that. Oh, he'd make a killing. Participants must submit the tailbone and entire tail to receive payment. $590 worth of tails per household. I'd like to know why it's that number i don't know regular south dakota residents april 1 to july 1. see how they're timing it for nesting april 1 july 1. obviously very contentious it was i should point out just to be fair to history here it was bounty programs intended to eliminate predators that we have to thank for the fact that we eliminated the mountain lion across 70% of its range.

Sure. They destroyed the grizzly bear across the lower 48, removed black bears for a time Across a massive part of their range Um I don't know Yeah and modern day bounties have Proven to be pretty ineffective way Of dealing with coyotes So they're going out on a limb

Here and as Sean pointed out in a Recent duck report To do this kind of work it has to be done in a very Focused way Like you ask me like does coyote control work for fawn crops, right? And researchers will tell you, yes, if. And it has to do with when you're doing it, how you're doing it. It's done with like, when done with a high level of precision,

like timing wise, spatially wise in a certain way, it can have an impact randomly done. Um, not as much, but it looks like that's happening. If I live in a state where it was happening, if I lived in a state where they were kicking it around, I would be like, let's think about this for another second. But if I was living in a state where it did happen, I would get my kids into

it. Yeah, this particular program is, yeah. I'd be like, let's take advantage of the situation. You can make a little jingle. Okay, Brody, quick. Pen raised pheasants. Why the hubbub um in montana there's been a bill proposed by a politician it's a state representative uh hb 637 which includes some like other stuff that people are pretty fired up about but what we're focused on here is the proposal to spend $1 million to stock pen-raised pheasants around Montana.

From the state prison. That's right. Can I ask a question first off? They already stock pheasants. If they didn't stock pheasants, there wouldn't be pheasants here. They're from China. Well, yeah. Okay.

Yeah. But this would be a program to go and release, I don't know how many pheasants. I'm assuming a million dollars will get you quite a few of them. Half of the money would come from licensed sales and half from Pittman-Robertson funds. Which is how all that stuff generally works. That usually comes as matching funds. Right. So that's like money that's already been earmarked for FWP for wildlife conservation, hunting and fishing improvements, things like that, access.

This proposal is to take a million bucks and start a pen-raised bird release program in Montana. Like not meant to establish a population, but just to put birds on the ground for people to shoot. To put more out there. And it's being done as, it's being done to boost our three efforts. Mm-hmm.

Not sure how, you know, releasing birds translates to recruiting more hunters in a state that has extremely good wild pheasant hunting, extremely good pheasant or extremely good hunting for other upland species. Like there's what, four species of grouse here, Hungarian partridge. So there's, there's all kinds of upland opportunities that already exist. So there, there's some questions about whether this is a good use. Yeah, but that stuff's not easy. Always easy.

And this is easy. Well, it's easy. I'm saying that'd be the argument, right? Sure. But the other argument is you're paying a million dollars to feed coyotes, bobcats, foxes, raptors, because these farm-raised birds have no survival skills. So a lot of people are pretty fired up because they

feel like this is, you know, a waste of money and that perhaps a better way to spend a million dollars and a better way to bring in more hunters would be to spend it on access programs or improving habitat, uh, where, you know, for pheasant hunting that would also benefit a whole bunch of other wildlife. Like maybe investing a million dollars is better than just flushing a million bucks down the drain with some pen raised birds that are going to be dead very quickly. Yeah. I also think, and we've explored this in a lot of facets i also think like considering covid i just don't think that that activities

for to spend agency money or habitat money on things that have the sole purpose of growing hunter numbers seems unnecessary at the moment well i think it's all it's a popular way to get it something done right because it sounds good like if you're if you're a politician angling to get something like this done you throw the r3 thing and it's hard to like argue against yeah but i mean like why not just like put a million bucks into habitat exactly which is gonna just have a long-lasting benefit for all but like buying i could see it like i could definitely see it like buying a million bucks for the birds to sort of like faux hunt them yeah like to kind of like have a pretend hunt it's like it's like a see what i did for hunters

kind of thing you know um but i like i i'd like to clarify like this isn't fish wildlife in parks that like a lot of people like to drag their state game agencies through the mud for doing shit they don't agree with this is not that this is a bill that's being proposed that FWP would then have to follow through on if it passes. And there was a comment period that's closed, and now it's whatever. Yeah. Yeah, so we'll find out, hopefully. Where that went. Yep.

Okay, moving on. A little news from New Mexico. This is good news from New Mexico. And this has been a thing that's gone on for a long time. It has to do with stream access. So as we all know, a lot of states of states whatever imagine you're on a river take a big river where it's true everywhere imagine you're floating down the mississippi river right as you're floating down the mississippi river you are not expecting that someone would run out of their house and come say, Hey, you're on my land. You'd say, Oh no, I'm in the

river. Okay. That's like an extreme version because we all, of course, everyone knows you can float down the Mississippi river without needing to get permission from someone. But in some states as rivers get smaller and smaller and smaller, you get to a point where you cannot float down the river or walk along the river or whatever in the water without securing permission from the landowner. Inevitably, you will have landowners who don't like looking out their window and seeing some scruffy whatever or a bunch of people on a floating trip, drinking beer, whatever, fishing. They don't want to see it. They're like, how can I own the banks, but some dirt bag can float down through my property? And so they will always seek ways to reduce your stream access and to argue that unlike the Mississippi river, where there's like interstate commerce happening, this isn't a commerce river. I don't want people just recreating in front of my house.

I want them out of here. Um, in New Mexico, there had always been an understood stream access rule. Walk in below the high water. Yeah. It'd be like, you stay below the high water mark. You can fish float, whatever. It always been understood, But it hadn't been properly codified into law. Now, we've had Senator Martin Heinrich from New Mexico on this show to talk about this issue. It's sort of in the spirit true, but certain well-heeled landowners have been pushing to narrow those definitions and lock up more streams and rivers as private property for themselves. Just the other day, New Mexico's Supreme Court ruled that the state's... Listen to what I'm going to say carefully. New Mexico Supreme Court ruled that the state's game commission decision allowing landowners to restrict access to water that flows to their property

is unconstitutional. That's a hard sentence to follow. The game commission had come out and said yes if a landowner wants to challenge stream access on their own private stream and make it their own private little deal no one can float through the air or fish they can push for that with the state they can go to the state and ask for that exemption the supreme court came in and just nipped that whole conversation in the bud. They're like, your decision to let people argue that is unconstitutional. So streams where you're hanging out right now, floating, kayaking, canoeing, rafting, w block in the road for people looking to cut you off of that and restrict access to places you've traditionally enjoyed it.

So now, Brody, it's like Montana. Just high water. Oh, but it had been. They were trying to find a path to make it not that way. I see. Yep. They were trying to, like. This should just seal the deal for a while.

Yeah, and the same thing had been true. I don't want to get too like Montana centric, but it's a great, it's a great case point. Years ago, it had been understood in Montana and some people were toying with undoing it. Oh, it comes up every so often. Yeah.

And some people like very deliberate. There's a great story about this because some people, you know, now and then you'll like push something in order to like push it to get to the courts. Uh, when they tested it in Montana, instead of having fishermen, they had, I think it was like, they had a bunch of, uh, girls from a high school go float down a river in tubes through a landowner that kept trying to get people cited for floating down what he argued was a private stream. And everybody would float the stream all the time.

So we're not going to take it to court with fishermen. We're going to take it to court with high school girls. The girls get in their tubes, float through. The guy calls the cops. Cops give him a citation. It goes through and it comes out codified in law. It was codified as everybody understood it to be

true. They just wanted to push it to a point where it was tested in the courts. As Senator Heinrich explained, it's widely understood in New Mexico that we have open stream access, but there are people always dicking around, well, maybe we can try this.

Well, maybe we can try that. When you look at this stuff, it always comes from a wealthy person buys land. They buy a luxury property. They buy some old ranch. And the first thing on their mind is getting rid of the assholes who come floating through. That's right.

It's always that way. Yeah. I've got, I've got a, well, you know, I've got, we've got a buddy who sells large kind of uh large ranches and uh those real estate agents very much against stream access because you know it's a lot easier to sell a ranch if you can say private access to three miles of trout river yeah no it sells a hell of a lot better yeah um back to the montana desk we reported about how Governor Gianforte In Montana recently got in trouble It's kind of a funny story

I'll relay the story even though we covered it already One day someone hands me I find a headline That says Montana's governor kills a Yellowstone wolf And I think to myself Wow That is extremely a Yellowstone wolf. And I think to myself, wow,

that is extremely surprising that our state's governor went into Yellowstone National Park and shot a wolf. Like, you'd think he'd know better. But you read the article, and in fact, he didn't. It was on a ranch.

It was on private property. Why was it a Yellowstone wolf? Because it's safe to assume that in that wolf's life it had been on the park and there are there's a contingent of americans and they're significant that like to think that anything that spends some part of its life in month in yeltsin national park becomes yellowstone X, and therefore we should enjoy this sort of like de facto protection no matter where it goes. Like it carries with it this sort of like this specific blessing and should be preserved forever. So Montana's governor, Greg Gianforte, in the news again, This time, again, he's made what would appear to be a horrible mistake.

Yanni has the headline pulled up. Here's the headline. It's from the Climate and Environment Desk, oddly. Washington Post. Washington Post's Climate and Environment Desk. The headline is, Hounds chased a Yellowstone National Park mountain lion into a tree.

Then Montana Governor Greg Gianforte shot it. Except not. He was hunting on national forest land not in the park. It's like

except not. I don's like, except not. I don't like to say it because it became such a thing. The fake news shit, it's like, I'm sorry. I don't run around fake news, fake news, but you have to have some sympathy for people who run around being fake news, fake news, because it's just not true. It's not true.

It's like, how can you say that yeah listen and i am one that usually will err on the side of uh a liberal news source but you'll believe that i will personally trust it more yeah and and people like this i'm not gonna i'm not gonna call this guy out by his name you can go find out who wrote it but it's just like man like you're eroding my trust in like what i figured should be like good journalism from like you know the the um key journalistic entities of our country and yet here he is just like, like, I want to ask the guy, I wish he would come on the podcast and just be like, why did you write this? What was your goal here?

No. Why did you word it the way you worded it? But yeah, well, that's the beginning. But then the rest of it is like, what's the outcome of your article? Like what?

Like, are you just an anti-hunter or are you just an anti-Greg Gianforte guy? There's also so much that's loaded into that. Hounds chase cat up tree as though that doesn't happen as part of cat hunting or using hounds to hunt. Oh, no. There's this strong insinuation. There's so many elements in there that are soft.

There's this strong insinuation that something naughty was going on. And then it goes on to talk about how rare, then they do a disservice by talking about, they get like park officials to talk about how rare a mountain lion sighting is. There are a lot of things that are IUCN, species of least concern, like globally categorized by a global wildlife organization as a species of least concern that you don't lay eyes on. Because of myriad reasons. How many Martins do you see? Most people will go their entire life

and never lay eyes on a Martin. Why? Because they're out at night and they're secretive. They don't even know they exist. It's an IUCN species of least concern. But the whole, like the condemning part about this article is that

these jokers from the park don't see that many lions tell them what you heard from actual park biologists yanni why might they not be seeing a lot of lions in the park well it wasn't from park biologists it was from uh hound handlers that help park biologists that are helping right now with the probably the study that is, they're talking about in this article, right? They've got collared mountain lions and these hound handlers help them catch, collar, recatch when the collars go down, et cetera, et cetera. So they're a big part of this study.

But, and you can read about this in a wonderful article that was written on the Mete website by Jordan Sillers titled study show mountain lions have unexpected predator where they're basically saying that like mountain lion numbers have dropped by half in like the last 10 years in the park because wolves not only do they kill and they don't think they kill them to eat them but they just kill them because they're like competition mountain lion kittens but that because they're displacing the elk out of where they used to be, where they were accessible by mountain lions, being like more in the mountains, in forested areas, pushing them out into more open areas where cats do not like to spend time and don't go. That the cats are having a much harder time finding and then killing their prey. On top of that, the wolves steal the kills that they made.

So they're getting hit like three ways. They're getting at, their food's getting displaced, and their food's getting stolen. Exactly. By the wolves. Which leads me to believe. I want to clarify too, just like as you're pointing out i want to clarify too i don't agree with everything that our governor does i don't think this has anything to do with that it's just a way that stuff gets reported that's maddening to me and it's like

again and again and again but you take this thing with like how mountain lion numbers have gone down as wolves i'm and i'm not saying I support wolves on the landscape. I'm not anti-wolf, but why didn't this person write an article when, when Gianforte killed a wolf, why didn't he write an article about what a nice thing he did for mountain lions? Or all the elk.

You could have made a salacious headline. You could have taken as many liberties and said, Montana's governor, Greg Gianforte saves many Yellowstone National Park mountain lions. And you'd be like, oh, that's interesting. And he'd be like, oh, he killed a wolf. I'll tell you what, though. I'll tell you what, though.

He should consider, like, maybe not shooting collared animals. Because of the attention it draws? Sure. And, like, he could have walked up to that lion and said, it's got a collar on it. Maybe I should just let that one go for science purposes. Like, you know, and then go find another line. Like, I'm just playing devil's advocate.

Yeah. Right. They immediately reported. They immediately called a game warden. Yeah. And I'll point this out too. Here's why you don't really know that. Because do you remember when Florida was doing a mortality study on deer? And they had a bunch of deer running around with collars.

And it was a mortality study. And the state was trying to implore people, don't shoot it because it has a collar. Don't not shoot it because it has a collar. Totally, totally. We're trying to find out what kills stuff. Just try to act normal. I'm just saying, if you're poking around near the borders of Yellowstone National Park, and there's a wolf or a lion with a collar, and you're the governor, eh.

I don't know. I could see it. I could see it. I would, personally. It would just depend on a lot of things. Unless I knew what the collaring project was all about. Yeah. And I don't know.

I don't know what they do. Because a lot of times, there's stuff that's wearing a collar and it's not good anymore. They don't even care. It's like a collar from years ago. They haven't, they haven't re-tranked it to pull the collar or put new batteries in. I don't know enough about it. Sure. I personally, I've said this a thousand times on this podcast, at least three.

I like a banded duck more than the next guy, but I would not shoot a banded big game animal with a collar on it because it would feel like touched. It would feel like it had already been less magical and wild. So if you called in a big six point bull and the Missouri River

breaks and he's standing there broadside with your bow, you wouldn't shoot him and he had a if he had a collar on it big bull big six point okay sure yeah yeah i called in three of them you're're only human. And one had a collar. And the bigger one didn't. My thing is like, I don't know. There's a lot of things that are, like even sheep are introduced.

And they've been touched. Reintroduced. Reintroduced, excuse me. You know, like in that population has been touched in a way. We're influencing everything basically humans i think just like like you said just being normal and doing what you would normally do when you you know when you're hunting not letting that influence too much because that study is very that study that they're putting collars on they want to see how many are killed by hunters we don't know that what you think right well in the case of this florida deer. We don't know that. Well, you'd think, right? Well, in the case of this Florida deer thing,

I don't know why this thing had a collar on it. It might have been a mortality study. If it's a mortality study and it was a big tom, then whoever put that collar on it is probably glad. They probably got their collar back. Now they know. If it was some other study, they might be like, ah, damn it.

It's expensive to get the collars out. We got the collar out. Yeah. But in the case of my sheep hunt, like I had multiple people that were working on these, this herd that were collaring them and had just recently collared them. So the study had just kicked off and they very, very nicely, but implored me not to shoot at one with the collar on it because just because of the hours it had taken to get all that work done, the

money invested in it. And in the end, they're like, look, it's your tag. It's not illegal. Have at it. But it would be great if you shot one without a collar. It's very species dependent to where you're at. Yeah. I feel like this is, in my mind, it's a relevant

story because it's like you have a person. He's in a high-profile position. There's a person that enjoys going hunting, goes out and does something, and nothing happens. He goes out and does something according to law and as set up by the Game Commission, as enforced by the Montana State thing, and it has to be reported upon as though you did something wrong. And the wolf thing, it was reported that he did something wrong, but it was reported like he trapped. If you get a normal trapping license in Montana, it's just an over-the-counter transaction. If you're going to trap wolves, you need to go online and take a free, you watch this free online video.

He hadn't watched the, he hadn't done the online video, the wolf certification online video. There's no fine for it. It's a free video. He hadn't watched the video, was told to go watch the video. You'd have thought, you know, the way it was presented, you thought there'd been like some heinous violation. It was a minor violation. And then if you went now and people were like

shocked at the, at how low the punishment was, but then the wardens were like, no, the punishment is perfectly in keeping with what we do when you don't watch the video. Yeah. You go watch the video.

I thought you couldn't get a tag now, like when you're getting those licenses without doing like, you got to do that video you have to get wolf vet no that hasn't gone into effect yet you'd have to get a wolf validation you get the wolf validation by doing the free online thing the guy had not done the online thing yeah i got it which is against the law and was called out for such in this case and i'm not saying like i'm not serious about it he should not have watched

the video of course he should have watched the video and it's fair to point it out but in this case nothing happened and it's this thing it's like it's like this thing that like it's like a thing coming from the media where in certain circles like if it involves yellowstone and if it involves wildlife it's just this this this idea that seems to be growing and spreading that state management of wildlife is bad and naughty and it should be managed by the National Park Service. I don't even know if people understand that. I mean, I totally agree with Yanni. I don't even know if people understand it to that extent and they've made such a nuanced argument in their mind. I think, sadly, it's not

even that it's misleading and biased. It's like, I would really hope that various media sources can cover information like this in a more educational way. So for example, same story, NBC News, Tim Fitzsimmons, the headline is, Montana Governor Gianforte Hunts Kills National Park Service Tracked Mountain Lion. And then you can go through his article and it just seems to serve up information that is educational to a public. I don't even think that that headline doesn't bother me. Right. There's an ax to grind, but at least it's like, I would give him like a high, a much higher fairness in headlines. Right. It's like, what is information being relayed versus what is a headline whose language is just kind of twists or has a backstory or kind of colors or shades.

It has a purpose. Something in a way, it has a purpose, right. What else pisses me off about it? And I don't mean to go on all night about it. Day, it's just lit like night, like I said. We have a lighting issue. It's all lamp lit in here. I'm getting like thirsty for beer.

I gotta go pick up my kids from school. It's all lamp lit in here. I'm getting like thirsty for beer. I gotta go pick up my kids from school. I'm gonna get dinner. It's not beer. It feels like a Bordeaux night. Come on. So, he also says that it prompting an outcry among environmentalists. Those

aren't environmentalists. What you're talking about are animal rights activists, and I would really appreciate if people not confuse those two things. Those aren't environmentalists. What you're talking about are animal rights activists. And I would really appreciate if people not confuse those two things. They have overlap. They are not the same thing. They are not the same thing. No.

All right. Speed of mountain lions. No, but listen, listen. I think we do. I would like to just point out that out of all the critters in this lovely state that we reside in the hunt in, there are probably none other that are managed more than mountain lions. Oh. Yeah, it's so much so that people don't even bother because they can't understand the regulatory structure.

I mean, every morning that I go out to even just go look for tracks, I'm going to check the quota in the region that I'm going to go in and see where it's at. Some of them are like a total quota where it's like, yeah, 10 total can be killed. That's a high one. It's probably more like, you know, between five and seven at most. But some of them are like, oh, it's seven, but only three can be females. Some of them, it's completely opposite where it's seven, but only four can be males. Yeah.

And like, you really got to know what's going on. They're almost managing them like by the hour or the day, like that closely, you know? Yep. They're keeping such a close eye on them. Yeah. Whereas deer, you go to a damn gas station and buy a deer license. Yeah. Yeah.

Even like bears, you know, over the counter tag here. You know, there's like one small place in Montana where there's a quota. And they should especially not be hacking on. I don't mean to be like all like pro Montana. I guess I don't mind. But here's the thing. They should be hacking on this state because there's a lot of states that still run lions. They still manage lions as vermin.

Texas, I think. Right. They still manage lions like they have have no management plan on lions. They still got a kill-em-all-let-God-sword-em-out attitude. And this state, for decades, has managed them as a tightly managed big game animal. Which is way better for,

if you like mountain lions, and you like, I don't care if you like hunting lions, you like seeing lions, I would applaud a state that runs them like a big game animal, not a state that runs them like coyotes. And a lot of places in the Southwest still treat them with about the same, they treat them with the same attitude they treat coyotes. They don't track it. They don't know what's going on.

Huge seasons. You used to be able to shoot like a female with kits. Here's where it all comes back around. Here's where it all comes back around. I where it all comes back around i'm gonna get to that story because it's a good one you're gonna love my mountain lion story but it all comes back around to if we didn't have hound handlers that were interested in in mountain lions they're probably there maybe wouldn't be any not only in montana but in the park itself because as we heard from jim will Williams, go listen to the podcast.

I love it. It's one of my favorites. Number 149, Path of the Puma. Jim Williams, who worked for Montana State for a long time. One of the world's leading large cat experts. Exactly. Might not be anybody that's messed around with cats of all kinds, more than he has.

He said it in the podcast. If it wasn't for the hound handlers of Montana, there probably wouldn't be cats here. So all you people that get lucky enough to see one in the park or outside of the park or wherever, thank those people that every now and then chase

the hounds, chase one into a tree, and then someone comes and kills it. More times than not, they get chased into a tree, everybody looks at it, takes a picture, and everybody walks away. To paraphrase the guest you're talking about, he's not a lion hunter. No. But to paraphrase what he said, he's like, basically, I tread real light when it comes to hacking on a houndsman

because it was houndsmen that were sounding the alarm a long time ago about the need to manage mountain lions and get out of the business of bounty hunting them, poisoning them, killing them. They were the ones that wanted to, they were the ones saying, man, we got to get a grip on the program and protect lions.

For punishment, for this guy having such a dumb headline, he should... The thing is, he didn't write that headline. Well, whoever did the headline, they should be tasked to write an article for every elk, every one of Yellowstone's elk that gets killed legally in Montana every year. He'd get writer's cramp.

And then he'd spend the rest of his life just writing articles about people shooting legal elk. Yeah. Every day of the season, he'd have to be like, hundreds of Yellowstone elk killed over in Cody, Wyoming. There just needs to be like hundreds of Yellowstone elk killed over in Cody, Wyoming. There just needs to be a little bit more education among those folks writing headlines from the environmental and climate desk. Yeah.

Well, that makes me mad because I'm an environmentalist. I self-identify as an environmentalist. And it just kills me to see this framed in that way. 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.

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you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. All right, speaking of mountain lions, Yanni, now we're digging in on Yanni here. Let me start with a, I want to start with this question. Has, Phil, play the Mingus song. Trampled by Turtles.

Mingus. Mingus. Has Mingus. Give me Mingus' current resume. He's currently been under approximately a dozen, 10 to a dozen, depending if you count all of them. But yeah, roughly a dozen trees with mountain lions in them. Which means you have. Yeah.

That's pretty, that's great. No, when you start to, you know, purposely know purposely pursue it you know more often than just once when you just were making a show about it with your buddy then yeah you start to see it more sir are you beyond the holy shit it's a lie in the tree phase a little bit but not too much not too much yeah oh you still get like a, there's still like a, like by God. Yeah. But I would say that the reason being that I don't quite, you know, I'm not as fascinated by that line as much anymore is because the attention of my dog, my dog's taking my attention because I'm there.

I'm like, oh my God, my dog's there at the bottom of that tree. And look a lion. Yeah. And he's like, no, he's like sees the line. He's barking at the line. He's doing what he's look, a lion. Yeah. And he's like, no, he's like, sees the lion. He's barking at the lion. He's doing what he's supposed to be doing. Yeah. And, uh, but no, I always still take a few, quite a few minutes to sit there in awe when

you get to see one sitting in a tree. It's pretty special. When I saw, uh, one, it was like so snowy, you know, and like for days, you're just looking at green and white timber and snow never-ending expanses and there's the thing like the most alive reddish brownish thing that like has ever existed on a limb and it just is burned in my mind yeah you. And you're talking about, this is from the Idaho hunt. Yeah. Just to be like, holy shit, there's a lion standing in that tree.

Yeah. And I can look at it for as long as I want. No, I mean, and just, we just heard how rare and elusive they are from, you know the prior thing we just talked about and uh the only the only guy i know that's seen a whole bunch of lions and is not a hound hunter doesn't really do that much is jay scott but that's because he sits behind giant binoculars right for like you know how many hours are in a year brody but? Don't ask me, but he spends a lot of them behind the glass. A lot of hours just glassing, glassing, glassing. And that's how I had seen two of the three mount lions. I think I had seen three before I started doing hound hunting and two or three binoculars.

One was one just, you know, jumping across the road in the headlights. No, one came up to you turkey hunting. Oh, I know. But that was after I started, you know, hound hunting. Oh, I know, but that was after I started hound hunting. Oh, I got you. But yeah, you just don't get to see them otherwise. It's a special deal. So your dog now knows that that's what it's, that at the end of this trail is that thing in a tree.

Correct. But is it participating in the catch? Well. Or is it participating in the catch? Well, it's a spectator. Um, my friends and mentors tell me

that he is. I'm still a novice enough where I think sometimes I have a hard time looking at the GPS and actually knowing, but like being with Bart George,

being with, uh, our buddy Jake, like they're always like, oh yeah, Mingus is right there. He might've not been the first dog of the tree, but he was there two seconds later.

He knows what's up. He's doing the job. And I think that I just, and that's why hopefully in the next week or two, I'm going to do a little bit of hunting just he and I, because we're sort of at this place for me to answer this question. I need to go out there, find the track for myself,

which is a big thing that I haven't yet to even do. It's just like find one, identify it as a line, and then just put Mingus on it. And then just the two of us go and do it and see what happens. In an area that's closed, when there's a unit that's closed because of quota, can you run? Correct. You still can.

You can still run. Oh, yeah. Until April, I think it's 14th or 15th. Got it. Do the people around you, if Mingus was never going to make it, would the

people around you say that? Yeah, but I think that most people experience hounds, hound handlers would tell you that it's not the dog. It's just that you haven't done enough work with a dog. They all have it in them. And the more I've done this, I've heard about like little, uh, wiener dogs that run tracks. I've heard about labs that have been on a whole bunch of mountain lion tracks and in trees, like you need to teach the dog

what you want it to do. They all have these amazing noses. And like you put the time in and it's going to happen. Jay keeps telling me it takes 20 trees to have like a finished dog. When your dog has been to 20 mountain lion trees, like that dog, at that point, you're going to say either he's got it or he doesn't, right? After 20 tracks and trees. So he's got eight more, and then you might be out digging a hole out back.

No, I don't think so. Well, let me ask you this though. Is it fair to say that, like, because you have kids and stuff, you were going to get a dog, right? And you got a pound puppy, and it was a hound. Knowing what you now know, do you wish you'd just gone and bought, like, some, you know, Pedigree?

Like, proven line, like, it's 18 grandfathers, we're all famous lion hounds. No, no. I don't want to say it's cheating, but I've enjoyed the journey with Mingus. And I don't know if I would have been able to appreciate it. What's a real good mountain lion pedigreed puppy go for? Like just raw puppy. I have no idea, but I bet you could easily spend a thousand bucks. Oh, yeah.

These little bird dogs. And plus, man, if you'd have got one of those, you'd have had a thousand bucks. Oh yeah. Say bird dogs, you know, like, and plus man, if you'd have got one of those, you'd have had such high expectations and that's what the dog was for. He'd be out digging. Like you just got lucky. He'd be out digging that hole, man.

Like it's just, you know, it's everything's. Yeah. Like Mingus exceeds expectations every day. Say, not that I think this is going to happen at all, but say for whatever reason

you get the 20 trees and he's just like not doing it, you know? Would I get another hound? Are you going to put him back on the couch with the girls and get another hound? I'll get another one. Possibly. Yeah. And then we're not going to go down to the pound again. No, no, no, no.

Then I would be mining all my best resources. I would go smaller. That's, I mean, we love Mingus in our house, but he's an 80 pound big boy. And you could have, you can have two or three hounds that fit into the same package. Yeah. You know, most dogs, when they want to know what's going on in the counter, they got to kind of walk with their nose up and then kind of like, that dog just looks. He kind of has to just turn his head sideways a little bit.

And that gets him the angle that he needs. Oh, that's what's on the counter. But no, the story I've been meaning to tell you, it's kind of funny is over the holidays. Uh, my sister and her family were visiting with four kids.

Uh, my mom was visiting. So we had quite the full house. And a couple of days, we went up to Disneyland, also known as Bridger Ski Hill up there at the Bridger Canyon. And one day as we're leaving right around, I don't know, 3.30, 4, we started getting texts from my mom. And I'm not even getting them.

They're coming. I'm getting the information from like my sister and my wife. And they're like, yeah, your mom's saying that in the course of the day, she's seen like a fox, a raccoon, and now there's a couple lynx trying to climb the fence to get into where the turkeys and chickens are. I'm like, holy shit. Lynx?

Yeah. It's quite the wildlife thing. Exactly. Someone must have moved my house look at us we're up here being dumbasses just skiing we could have been at home you know seeing all this amazing wildlife so uh you know i i finally get my mom on the phone i'm like okay tell me exactly she's like no i'm for sure they had you know she's describing like rings on the tail of one animal i'm like okay it could have been a coon you know and then uh this other one of those

real warm days uh no no it was cold um but the other animals i said describe the links to me said spots she said no spots so how long was the tail and she's like you know a foot or two i'm like okay sounds like a small lion maybe more than likely so she's like you know a foot or two i'm like okay sounds like a small lion maybe more than likely so she's like well yeah mingus and i were out there and he didn't even run after him like oh man mingus got knocked down a notch so anywho we get home and uh i like i double check again with my mom where everything was i'm like okay, okay, well, I'm going to go look for tracks. So I go out there with Mingus and going towards the chicken coop. And in like seconds, Mingus is off kind of where we cut down that tree,

not the two trees together, but the single. He's off behind the garage there down the hill cutting loose, like baying. I'm like, what the hell? So I don't even make it to look for tracks. I walk over there and yeah, there's like a 20 pound mountain lion up in a tree. Yeah. Turns out it was a pair.

Now, I don't know what happened. 20 pounds? Like little guys. Little guys. But why didn't he want to chase them when he saw them? The thing is, is I wasn't there. So I can't for sure tell you that Mingus saw two small mountain lions and then just stood there. Maybe he didn't because I wasn't for sure tell you that Mingus saw two small mountain lions and then just stood there. Maybe he did.

And because I wasn't there, he didn't like think that that was the thing to do. It just doesn't seem right. Cause that dog usually cuts out of the house, like chasing after something before he's even seen it, you know? But anywho, yeah. And I can't, I don't know. I went to get a light so we could show everybody mountain lion. Cause I mean, you could just stand next to the garage and see this cat in the tree. Huh.

And as I'm gone, either that lion gets down and runs into another tree or there's a – because there ends up being two. Like, in the next couple of days, we see two small, you know, kittens. But Mingus trees another cat, like, 100 yards away on that same hillside. So, in one night, he got two trees. Yeah. Are those counted within the dozen? Yeah.

Yeah. You think they got orphaned? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. And whether it's by – we were trying to see if a female had been killed on the quota like recently. And I obviously called the game warden to see hey like what should i do about this and he pretty much just said man you gotta like don't take any chances like if you feel like you want to put them down put them down and just shoot them we didn't want to do that we were hoping that you know if they got too crazy and

we're trying to mess around well yeah because they hung out for like another 24 to 36 hours. You know, like we saw them, I think, two or three more times. And I was definitely getting to the point where I had a rifle at the ready and I was kind of saying like, eh, if they show up again, like I'm just going to shoot them, you know. And they had no interest in coming out and getting them. No. They're just like, let it play out, like whatever's going on.

Well, they did say, if you want us to come and take care of them we will but that's what taking care of them would look like yeah they'd euthanize them got it uh but uh yeah either mom got killed by a hunter she could have gotten struck by a car sometimes they'll leave i found out they'll leave the kittens for days while they're out hunting then once they make the kill they go get the kittens and then go back to the kill. So we were hoping, yeah, maybe mom will show back up in the next couple of days. But unfortunately for those two kittens, they went up and over the ridge and found themselves under someone else's deck. Those people called the game warden. He came and euthanized them.

Oh, really? Yeah. How'd you hear that? Oh, he called me back just to give me the update. The warden did. Huh. Did they show like any fear of you guys at all? Yeah.

I mean, when you went out there, they'd walk away. Yeah. Were they spotted? No, they weren't spotted. But yeah. yeah were they spotted no they weren't spotted but uh yeah so uh that's kind of a fun little mingus cat story we can talk about hunting cats too uh with jake but it's we didn't really get to do a lot of cat hunting it's not a great hunting story yeah no i'm curious other than other than catching that big old bobcat yeah which was like a big than catching that big old bobcat. Yeah, which was like a big old bobcat.

Big old bobcat. Quick side note, have you seen that little viral video of big old bobcat and the kid saying big old bobcat? No. Like YouTube? Just Google it and it'll come up. It's a kid saying big old bobcat? Yeah, it's going to go viral now bobcat yeah it's gonna go viral now um i think i think it already has but yeah the kid's like i don't even know if he has a bb gun he might just have a stick and he

sort of plays like he's shooting his own house cat and he goes pew pew and he throws the stick aside grabs a bobcat who's ever running the phone is like what you got there he's like no after he does the shooting he's like that's what i'm talking about old son and it's like a four-year-old he throws the stick aside puts the cat up on his shoulder and goes got me oh he's like what you got he's got big old bobcat we're about to play it right here that's what i'm talking about what you got there he's holding the house cat oh man

big old bobcat um yeah so jake and i went hunted, made an episode hunting lions in Montana. And we cut tracks, unfortunately, where the tracks were like it sometimes happens when you're filming on land that we didn't even know we could have hunted. So we didn't try to get the film permit for it. And we also had tracks going into private and we tried to get private access and it just didn't pan out. Uh, so we didn't really get to run any lions on the trip, but, uh, we did get to run this one, uh, Bobcat track. And unfortunately Mingus didn't run that one because, uh, it was very deep snow and Jake figured we needed all the advantage we could get. And bobcats, unlike lions, tend to be a lot more evasive.

And they actually, when they know they're being pursued by dogs, and this is according to houndspeople that I talk to, they actually start to make evasive maneuvers. And I've seen it even with Mangus. The one time we did a bobcat, just he and I, I had a bobcat go into a tree and then leap so far out of that tree into the nearby snow that it took me, you know, five minutes of wandering around to kind of put two and two together because I saw the tracks going into the

tree, but there were no tracks leaving the tree. I could see the whole tree. I'm like, where's the bobcat? And then, you know, five minutes later, I see like a, what looks like a little crater, you know, like 20 some feet away and I walk over there and there's the beginning of the track again. Right. So there's an example of like what they might do. Jake's dogs, two of them run silent on track. Meaning like Mingus, when he's on track every 10 to 30 seconds. Oh my God.

Yeah. Yeah. And. I like that. I like that silent killer dog idea, man. Yeah. Yeah. And. I like that. I like that silent killer dog idea, man. Yeah. Yeah. Well, back in the day before GPS collars, you had to have at least one dog that, that was loud on trail because you had to stay with, there was no way to stay with your dog.

You never. You don't know where they were. You get to use them once. Yeah, exactly. So now you can have that because you can always see where they are via GPS collars. Oh, that's a good point, man. Like in the old days, yeah. You had to be here.

Which I, for whatever reason, I'm a little bit drawn towards that. The silent killers. No, no, no. I'm drawn towards, for some reason, even though I've never done it. You want to go old school. I'm nostalgic for like having to run. And maybe it's just because I like the physical aspect of like running around in the Hills and having to like purposely do physical shit on this hunt,

which would be like, yeah, you got to stay with the dogs. You got to keep them in earshot at all times. But I've mentioned it to both Clay and Jake who've been doing it a long time. And they did it prior to GPS days. Oh, they actually remember those days. And they're like, nah.

Yeah, exactly. Not interested. They like it just fine like this. Yeah, totally. Now, when you go to run a Bobcat, are they picking – they're looking for a big Bobcat. Do they pass up small Bobcat tracks or is there any Bobcat fair game? I think it would depend. But, yeah, I don't think that Jake likes to kill small Bobcats that are the size of a house cat.

Okay. So he looks for a large track. Yeah. bobcats that are like the size of a house cat okay so he he looks for a large track yeah he probably would if he has time i think he'd probably still run the bobcat because i think it's like really good training because if your dog can run a bobcat they can just about run anything um so he'll probably still run it and then just you know walk up to the tree say hi and walk away you know my theory is about about that bobcat dog thing? Because on one hand, you'd be like,

well, how would they ever develop the ability to evade hound dogs? But it has to be something with just the fact that all their interactions with coyotes and wolves. Oh, for sure. They get trailed by canines and have developed ways to elude a canine trailing them. A hundred percent. Yeah.

And it's like a thing you have to know or else you're screwed. And so because the snow was like, I mean, literally, you know, crotch to ways deep on us, the bobcat is specifically made to walk on top of that stuff, right? With giant paws. These dogs are not and so if that bobcat gets a head start he or she can just take their time you know do figure eights climb trees do whatever they want to do and the dogs are going to be post-holing and they're never going to catch up to it or put enough pressure on it to put it up into a tree so he feels if you put

silent dogs in there when the bobcat knows that it's being trailed too late it's the dogs are seeing it and they can immediately put that pressure on it and boom it goes right into a tree like there is no you know there's no real chase on the snow yeah and then you don't like to turn out at night right like you kind of want to get going you can't you're not allowed to uh chase at night or You can't You're not allowed to chase at night Or you can't chase at night At least not in Montana Same thing, it's like legal shooting hours

You can't turn out until half an hour before sunrise Oh, I didn't know that So that's like a, okay I thought there was some practical reason why Is that for lions specifically? Yeah, it could be different for bobcats I'd have to check the regs You can like coon hunt yeah at night yeah but also you can't it's not just the shooting

it's the turning out you have to turn out during legal light yeah oh that explains a lot that'd be a dirty trick yeah and listen man this bobcat was so special. I've heard from a multiple people that have pursued bobcats for, you know, half their lives that have never gotten a bobcat like this. Like Jimmy Miller, who, you know, has a whole pile of bobcat hides in his house, used to trap them a lot in Colorado, which produces a lot of what he calls lynx grade cats. He's like, I've never seen one like that. He's like, that is a very, very, very special cat. You're talking about its pelt.

Yeah. Yeah. The size. And the size. But yeah, to have like a belly that goes like almost up onto its size and the spots go like down the insides of its legs. Good cats. Good cats. I've been looking at the stuff.

Good cats are still getting over, some good cats are still getting over a thousand bucks this year. What are you going to do with that thing? I'm going to make it into a John Hayes taxidermy soft pillow mount. Oh, nice. Oh yeah. That'll be cool.

No, I want, I've never done any taxidermy. This will be my first one ever. And I want something that is very approachable and can be handled. I don't know if anybody's going to actually take a nap on it and use it as a pillow. I might. I'll go over there. When kids come over, I want it to be like, I'm not worried about it getting messed up. If in 10 years it's worn ragged from kids and people handling it, I'll consider it a win

and I'll go make another one, right? I'm a little jealous that, I mean, to be totally honest, I'm a little jealous of that bobcat. What would you do with it if you had it? Wallhanger, tan it. Trapper style. Just put up the hide.

What about Mingus? He's going to be around that thing. Yeah, yeah. But it don't smell right. Dogs don't care. Right. Dogs don't. I found that dogs don't like to chew. Like our dog likes everything, but it doesn't like chewing tan hides.

I think it just smells like chemical and shit to them. Really? Mine's the exact opposite. Like he's obsessed with this Axis deer hide in my house. Like we just basically had to give it to him. Yeah. He just keeps taking it and like dragging it to his spot. That's so weird. Like our dog won't even look at it, man. Yeah. He just keep taking it and like dragging it to his spot. That's so weird.

Like our dog won't even look at it, man. Yeah. He'd rather chew rags out in the garage. Yeah. Like I literally was like, well, I guess I got to go get another access deer hide. Yeah. We've got a coon hide and like a couple coyotes and a fox and he's never touched those. So I'm sure when we first bring it in and that thing looks pretty real, like it's staring

at him, he's probably going to have a little reaction. Okay. Let's get into this Neil guy deal. Okay. Now I hunted Neil guy one time you were there. Yup. Uh, the whole conversation around,

we should, first off, do you want to do like a little Yanni's book report about what Neil guy are? Giannis Patelis, the Latvian. Yanni's book report about what neil guy are we can yeah if you think that would be good real quick real quick introduction nil guy yeah guy are you a nil or a neil fella nil nil okay nil guy uh nil fella? Nil. Nil, okay. Nil guy. It's a antelope species. It's best known for coming from India,

although it's found all over the southern part of the Asian continent. A little bit of fame in that there's more of them in Texas now than there is in India. Probably, depending on sex and maturity, anywhere from 300. I mean, obviously, calves can be little, but adults, probably 300 to 550, maybe 600 on a really big, mature bull. There's stories of a 1,000-pound nil guy,

just like there are 1,000-pound bulls running around Montana, which I don't think happens that often. But, yeah, known to be very good eating. For whatever reason, out of all the exotics in Texas, it sort of like sits on a pedestal above the rest, which I don't really understand. It's the same ranch

that we've been on. Ranchers even say like down here it's like cattle are for selling, nilgai are for eating and stuff like that. It's because even though

they're an antelope, quote unquote, they're actually like a member of the same, they're a bovine species, like cow, like cattle are. So it really has to do

with like the taste preference of especially of Americans who like species like cow like cattle are so it really has to do with like the taste preference of especially of americans who like beef who like cattle flavored animals and so that's why they're so much better but the trophy is very highly sought after too for sure yeah for some reason yeah which is interesting because i you know it's not you wouldn't i wouldn't originally think that would be a huge trophy for folks just because of the fact that yeah it's not like it has big yeah horns on it and right next to it is standing a scimitar uh oryx yeah which looks amazing four foot horns on it yeah all curved and crazy looking there's something like the euro mounts uh freedom mounts uh there's something rather satanic looking about yeah for sure they

definitely have the devil horn thing going on for sure yeah i can't wait like a heavy metal album cover or something man uh we we covered we we covered neil guy real heavy during that crazy ass southern arctic blast a couple winters ago yeah hammered because they were i mean thousands and thousands and thousands froze to death. They just can't cope with below freezing weather. Did you see any impacts from that? No. No. I think that they're high fecundity, and either they bounce back or they just weren't that big of a die off. They also felt that because they have low fence on three sides of that ranch

that any animals that wanted to leave could leave and maybe did and then came back um they've had that happen with other species too when there's been weather events or like smoke or something that they feel like animals just like leave and come back yeah um so when we that was a good little intro yeah when we hunted them there's a lot about uh there's a lot about they can really take a hit um you gotta be very careful to try to drop them once they get in the in the brush you're gonna lose them they don't bleed their hearts in a weird place a lot of that yeah that like you're gonna lose them if you don't do everything exactly right right you go online and that was one of the reasons we went to hunt them on this particular trip was that it's kind of known as the toughest animal in the lower 48 to take down super tough hide soaks up the lead like if you don't kill them out in the open they run into the brush you're never going

to find them he's got like quick clot flowing through his veins totally totally um and so yeah this episode that i went down there to shoot uh i did I did with a fellow by the name of Troy Fowler. You can find him on YouTube and Instagram as the ranch fairy. What does that mean? The rain, right? Yeah. I told him multiple times.

I said, buddy, it's ballsy to like, and that's a nickname that he gave himself to give yourself a nickname that has fairy included in it. You know, um, didn't we have this podcast podcast buddy yeah we're no stranger to double entendres you got to explain that to me uh-oh that's not well people are good thing you didn't call it man eater right oh just double

entendre that's all no explain double entendre oh me saying something like let me try to think of a good double entendre um uh you think it won't feels good at this kind of stuff it has double meaning it has double meaning so often in a sexy way yeah and one one of the meeting one of the meetings meanings is usually a little risque or yeah sexy right so ranch fairy you could be like it's a person that brings magical gifts to ranches or you could be that it's a derogatory term of like a derogatory term for someone of a particular persuasion who's residing at a ranch. Correct. He is neither of those. So it's a triple hot dog. He came up with the ranch fairy kind of like at

home sometimes. Range? It's ranch. Ranch, ranch. See, then I started thinking it was range, which made more sense, but go on. No. His family, I think actually he married into it

and married into a big family that owns, I can actually he married into it, and married into a big family that owns, I can't remember how big the ranch is, but they own a small ranch in Texas. And they're kind of like at your house sometimes where the kids might be like, wow, the house is always clean. I didn't clean it. How does it stay clean?

You're like, well, when you go to bed, you little shit, I stay up and do all I didn't clean it. How does it stay clean? You're like, well, when you go to bed, you little shit, I stay up and do all the dishes and clean it up. Me and your mom run around for 30 minutes putting all your stuff away.

The ranch fairy or the house fairy cleans it all up. So he sort of has assumed the role on that ranch as when everybody else leaves and the good times are over, but the ATV is not running anymore

and the one blind got knocked over by the windstorm. And the pipes froze in the house. He goes around. Yeah. He fixes everything. The unseen person taking care of everything. Oh, I would never guess that.

Mm-hmm. So, yeah, when you come back, everything's fixed. Who did it? The Ranch Fairy. I'm going to start being the Shack Fairy. Or not me. I'm going to find one the shack fairy. Or not me. I'm going to find one. You need to find one?

I was going to say, if you're going to do that, why don't you stop at mine? See if that shack fairy can take care of two shacks. Exactly. Exactly. So he volunteers with the Ashby Foundation, who we had on the podcast a while back, Ed Ashby, and we talked all about his... I get the connection now. Yeah.

About his principles of what makes the best, most efficient killing arrow in broadhead. Which might not be the most fun arrow to shoot on league night. Nope. That's right. Because they're heavy and they have two-bladed broadheads, which sometimes tend to plane in the air more than maybe a smaller broadhead and whatever.

Layout really, just leave the Neil guy thing for a minute. Sure. Lay out the, just do a, not a recap of Ed Ashby, but that episode. But lay out sort of the emerging conflict. Like, everything got light, like, everything got light and fast. And it was celebrated, like, how fast. Sure. And how flat. Yeah, probably in like the early 2000s. I believe it was like graphite actually.

It was before carbon. And I saw it as a hunting guide. It was heavy aluminum arrows, but nobody thought they were heavy aluminum arrows. They were just aluminum arrows. They were arrows. And that's what they were. Yeah.

And it was either that or wood arrows. Well, graphite shows up and uh all of a sudden people started getting very high speeds of arrows i remember being as like a hunting guide we would shoot a lot mid midday when we were not in the woods and all of a sudden guys started showing up with rigs where when they shot you didn't even see the arrow in flight it would just be like and then the arrow would be a peer in the target. You'd be like, holy shit, you know? Well, those also came along with like really light broadheads.

And even though they were super flat shooting and like your pin gaps were super tight and you could, you know, they just don't have a lot of trajectory. We immediately saw it on elk where we were getting poor penetration. And for a long time, we actually figured that we just had bad hunters. We just were like, ah, these guys like aren't practicing enough. They're not hitting them in the right spots.

And we never really thought, we never really put it on the equipment, you know. But like I can vividly remember like I half dozen elk that were shot in the shoulder and you'd get like three, four or five inches of penetration and you see him run off and the arrow would fall out and you wouldn't even bother. I personally, yeah, I, I like shot elk, hit the shoulder one time.

And as it ran off, the arrow was flopping, and it was just like, slightly lodged into the muscle. And there's probably like a hundred things I did wrong, but yeah, I remember that it was like a thing like, damn. Yep. You think it would have. Well, and even I think that you were trying to think, were you shooting

those full metal jackets I got for you on that Blue Mountain hunt that we did in Washington? Yeah, I was. You were. So you had a fairly heavier arrow. I don't know what your broadhead was at the time. Probably didn't have as high of an FOC.

Maybe it's like if I had to build you an arrow now. And again, I don't know what broadhead you had, but like that bull didn't go. The G5 Montech, I think. G5 Montech. That arrow only went probably halfway into that animal, right? In the video, you could see half an arrow kind of hanging out. Anyway, so yeah, we've had this thing where everybody went super fast, super light.

And would brag about speeds. Yes, exactly. And a lot of people liked it for whitetail hunting because they figured it was a way to get around the whitetail ducking or reacting to the sound of the string. Can I tell you a funny story about that? You sure can. I don't want to name names here, but someone was a friend of mine. Not in this room. No, no, no.

Building. He was out with a rancher and the rancher was showing him around his place for deer hunting. And he's like talking about having a famous bow hunter. I recently heard this story too.

And the bow hunter missed the deer and he's like, oh, he jumped the string, he jumped the string, you know. And the rancher very nonchalantly goes, but we watched the tape. He just shot under it um yeah that's a another thing that people are starting to talk about now too is that people for a long time have thought that it's always a sound of the bow going off that the animal's reacting to um but i recently heard a story about a guy that was in Africa and when he'd have animals coming into the waterhole that he didn't want to shoot

opposite the waterhole he was in a blind so he's got a waterhole on one side but he's got windows on both sides of his blind and opposite the waterhole he had a target because he wanted to test this and so he would when an animal would be sitting there at the waterhole 20 yards away drinking, he would draw his bow

and shoot at the target. Zero reaction from these animals. Head down to stay in the water, kept drinking. So there's some people that are starting to think that it's actually the sound of the arrow coming towards that animal that makes them react. And it's not just the pop of the cams and the string.

When people say jump, just so folks listening might not know what we're talking about. When people say jump, just so folks listening might not know what we're talking about, when people say jump the string, it's actually ducking. It's like an animal goes to load up to spring. It's no different than if you're trying to jump up and touch a basketball rim. Yeah, you go down, four up.

Exactly. So he knows something's not right enough to where he's going to get out of town. And the time as he gets ready to spring and you look on it, people know so much of this stuff now because you can film stuff and watch it. I mean, his back, I mean, they drop a half body length. Yeah, you'll also hear people say duck the string. Like they're intentionally like, oh.

Yeah, but you'll watch, like, oh. Yeah. Yeah. But you watch, you'll watch, like, if you watch the slow motion, his spine winds up down where his belly or where his brisket was. Yeah. Sometimes. I'd say it could be a whole body, you know, vertical width at times. So anyways, Ed Ashby, we're going to get into

that real quick. He's, I don't, I don't know. He's not necessarily the guy that came up with heavy arrows, but he did a bunch of work in Africa and his whole, what's interesting is the reason he was doing this stuff is not that he was out there trying to prove that light and,

and, uh, fast arrows were bad. He was trying to get, uh, bow hunting Legalized in the whole continent really there was a few countries that allowed bow hunting Just because they didn't have rules that said you couldn't bow hunt, but most of the countries were like no you can't bow hunt

So he was like well look I'm gonna go out and study and maybe show you guys that it is a lethal way to kill an animal right so that was Like his reasoning behind going and doing what he did. So they, they were saying you can't do it because they felt like it would be dangerous for hunters to come there and do that. Or they thought it wasn't effective.

Or yeah, maybe it wasn't just ethically, you know, fair to the animal. Right. It just wasn't like a good way to bring down an animal. You know, there's still countries now where you can't bow hunt. Right.

Um, so, uh, yeah, cause sometimes I think he gets you know there's still countries now where you can't yeah bow hunt right um so uh yeah because sometimes i think he gets a bad rap for like he's out there just trying to like destroy you know what other people have you know come up these ideas that he came up with he's like no i was just trying to prove that like hey we could do this with a bow and by the way the results show that if you want to get maximum penetration, which he believes is the best way to kill animals, here's the setup that works best for that. Which turns out that it's a heavy, weight forward arrow.

And to get weight forward, you put on a heavy broadhead, and you put sometimes even an insert at the tip of your arrow to more and drive or pull that arrow through the animal. And for these 50 reasons having to do and drive, you know, or pull through, you know, that arrow through the animal. And for these 50 reasons having to do with physics, this is why that is. Totally. And how heavy, just for a quick, like recap, like how heavy is heavy?

Don't do it. And if you do grain, tell people what the hell that means. No one knows what that means. Oh yeah. I don't know if I can remember the definition of where grain came from. I mean, it's like a, it was literally came from

like the weight of seeds way back in England. Yeah. How many grains are in a pound? When it comes to, when you're saying that you shoot a 110 grain broadhead, that grain is a fraction, equates to a fraction of a pound. 7,000 grains in a pound. Okay.

So 7,000 grains in a pound. When you're shooting a 100 grain broadhead, that's what they're talking about. Yeah, let's see. I got a math question for you, Cheddar. That's broad, yeah. You're shooting 100 grain broadhead. What percentage of a pound is that?

Got to drop some zeros. One-seventh. No. No, this, I'm doing a little. Is it? Well, I mean. Yes. Yeah, it is.

It's not like a percentage point. We can take that. 100 grain broadhead would be almost a couple ounces, right? No, this conversion chart is saying that 400 grains is 0.9 ounce. Hold on, just pause all this, Phil. We've never done this, so I've never done the conversion. 437 grains in an ounce of powder. It's no different.

It's 14. It's 17. It's 14%. So the meat eater math podcast is really blowing the fucking doors off this. No, that's making the show. All right, so just to be clear here, grain, like when we talk about measuring a broadhead, if you go, for you people at home that don't mess with broadheads,

you go down and buy broadheads, or you start, go ask some of your friends, be like, hey, what grain broadhead do you shoot? A lot of people are going to be like, 100. They're going to be like, 110. This is changing now. This is going to change. In the future, it'll be much higher numbers But for the last bunch of years

It might not be But yeah the common weights were probably Chester can help out here He's owned a company that sold them But he does toy bows No But when you say the most common We're like 85, 100, and 125

We're like the three common broadhead weights 85 no hundreds for for a trad bow no okay no no no i'm i'm i'm speaking on what i know and what people use back in the day before all this technology so on like compound bows and i love compound bows but uh anyways they were like typically you'd be shooting 125 to like 200 grain broadheads like even back in the day all those older but that's for trad bows like um but yeah what here's why i'm upset if you went down to Walmart right now and they had one broadhead on the shelf

it's going to be a 100 grain broadhead and 125 there's a lot of 125s it'll be those two for sure that's all I'm saying I'm just trying to establish what the hell a grain is what that means what that means is you're like what is that unit

of measurement that is a what is that unit of measurement? That is a very arcane unit of measurement that has to do with like grain, like cereal grains, I believe. And it is one seven thousandth of a pound is a grain. meaning you'd have to buy 70 100-grain broadheads and put them in a pile if you wanted to balance it on a scale with a pound of elk burger. That's correct. Good job, Steve. Okay.

So, yeah, the most common have been 100s and 125s for probably compound shooters. But now you're seeing a lot of people starting to shoot heavier setups. The reason it's a little contentious, controversial, whatever you want to say. Is it? Yeah. Okay. Is that as it gets heavier, you get more trajectory out of your arrow.

It becomes slower. And so, you know, it falls out of the sky faster. It's not as flat shooting. And, you know, people for the last 20 years have been very accustomed to shooting fast things that shoot flat. And so it's hard to go the other direction, right? Even if there's a bunch of stuff telling you that it's going to work better.

It's fair to say this kind of mimics like the same thing you'll see in rifle shooting arguments, right? Like super fast, flat shooting little light bullets versus great big heavy ones that shoot like a rainbow. Rick Hutton put it to me the other day. He thinks that it,

um, he likes to read articles about this like a rainbow. Rick Hutton put it to me the other day. He thinks that it, um, he likes to read articles about this stuff a lot. Uh, he's like all that like super fast bullet stuff is all kind of like pre range finder that you'd have a gun that you could be like point of aim, 400 yards. Yeah. And scopes that you can dial into.

And it's like, well, with, he's like not with a range finder doesn't matter anymore. Yep. You can just that you can dial into. And it's like, well, with, he's like, not with a range finder, it doesn't matter anymore. Yep. You can just, you can shoot a heavy bullet and you just know what it's going to do.

Yeah. Like the whole thing about like, I can aim at it no matter what. He's like, okay. Yeah. But it's looking how far away it is. And I know exactly what's going to happen. And, and I don't need like the super light,

flat bullet. Yeah. You can shoot a big, heavy bullet because you know where it's going to go anyways. Which I'm flat bullet. You shoot a big heavy bullet because you know where it's going to go anyways. Which I'm all about, like shooting a big heavy for caliber bullet is better. But the idea that you can't kill a nil guy with an arrow that isn't 650 grains in total weight

isn't true. I know for a fact it isn't true because I've killed one with a smaller arrow. Well, sure, but you can kill an elk with a 243 too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I could kill a fact it isn't true because I've killed one with a smaller Well sure, but you can kill an elk with a.243 too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I could kill a brody with my bare hands.

Right. Now we're talking. Gotta catch him first. All right. I'll make a range of those things. Gotta wait for the next episode of Trivia

for that to happen. But I don't know where the baseline as far as like anything below this like when you with rifle calibers it's almost easier

to know like okay, we're now in the range of unethical maybe like when you don't know what i was doing this whole setup which led into this whole thing i was trying to say that in my one experience with nil guy um and i was with we were with a guy um that guides neil guy hunts right he was very i don't want to say fixated his thing was they just get away. They get away if everything doesn't happen perfectly. And he wanted big rifles, heavy bullets, close shots, careful shot placement, drop it, don't let it get in the brush.

They just vanish. Yeah. That was all. The same thing you'd see in Africa, right? 100%. Well, it's no, I mean, you're not going to meet an elk guide that wants something different than that, you know?

What Troy often talks about is, I forgot about Troy. Can your setup handle what he calls like plan B? When the animal reacts to the string. When, because the human element is introduced and no matter how good this technology gets, the asshole shooting the bow is still the same, right?

And maybe he's not gotten smarter and not gotten better. And you shoot too far forward or you shoot too far back, right? What happens then? Does your super light set up that? Sure, like with a perfect shot everything always dies yeah like right there they just run off and die no big deal but when it's not perfect what happens right and that's the same case for why people say use enough gun is because stuff happens and if you don't hit them right exactly right that bigger caliber is probably gonna you know be on your

side at that point my neighbor in alaska he saw his hunt deer, the small caliber rifle. I'm like, well, why do you do that? He goes, because I hit him in the brain. You know, I shoot, and I was like, well, if you don't hit it in the brain, I just do. It was his. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. A good way to think about like that arrow bullet thing is like for people that may not know any of this stuff is just like think about me taking a brick and chucking it as hard as i can at yanni's head got it or grabbing a baseball and chucking it as hard as i can at yanni's head like what's going to do more damage you know and it's going to be's head, like what's going to do more damage, you know, and it's going to be that brick, even though it's going to be going quite a bit slower. Sorry, Yanni.

No, that's okay. Someone's got to take a hit. Listen, it's experimentation. Yeah. It's Yanni. So you're a believer in that system. Well, yeah. And I was a believer.

I've been reading Ashby's stuff off and on because he wrote a lot of stuff in traditional bow hunter, which I used to be a traditional bow hunter. And so I've been a believer of heavy arrows and those kinds of broadheads for a long time. I've known of them. Even before I met Troy or we did the podcast with Ed, I was shooting like a 535 grain setup, you know, but I didn't have that, the high FOC and real quickly, FOC stands for forward of center. And it's basically like, where are you going to, if you're just going to balance like on your finger, your arrow, if everything's equal, it'll balance exactly in the middle. But the more weight you put up front, the shorter, you know, the distance from your finger to the front of the arrow is going to become, right? To get it balanced.

So the more weight you can get up front helps in penetration. And there's always this like dubious physics involved in these discussions where if it's heavier in the back, it pushes the arrow in. Or, you know, I mean, like people say stuff that contradicts itself. Sure. Or pulls it through or pushes it in. And that's why I'm so stoked. Everybody's got like an argument, right pushes and that's why i'm so stoked an argument right and that's why i like listen yeah there's we're gonna learn a lot we don't

know everything at this point there's a lot to be learned out there i'm happy that the ashley depp foundation and people like troy are taking their own uh free time and at least trying to do some research and and trying to figure it out know, because otherwise we're just working off of what, you know, the latest hunting host tells you what's great and what you saw on TV or, you know, listen, man, let me tell you something. Those guys, they know you can rely on, um, right. Cause all of us in this, I mean, I don't know how many animals you've killed with a bull, but for me, it's been, it's less than 10. Um, you know, so I'm working off limited personal experience. I've seen maybe another 30 or 40, you know, because of, of guiding archery

hunters over the years. Um, but anyways, I'm just happy that they're at least trying to figure it out. So anyways, I shot my little guy. Yeah. With a 650 grain arrow with this, uh this 200 grain single bevel head. And I think if you want to know more about some of this, you know, technical arrow jargon that we're going over here, go and listen to that podcast. So if you want to check out what Yanni's talking about, it was episode 284 and it was called The Archer's Paradox. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes.

And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew! Our northern brothers get You're 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 On x out if you visit on x maps.com slash meet on x maps.com slash meet welcome to the to the on x club y'all so do we cover off on y and the arrows enough for you? Yeah. Because I'd like to talk a little bit about the hunting the nil guy themselves. That's what we're going to do now. Because, you know, when we went down there, your hunt lasted a total of two hours, maybe. And it could have been a lot shorter. Could have been shorter.

Yeah. Getting within a couple hundred yards of them is not an issue, though they are generally aware of your presence. But with a rifle, them being aware of your presence doesn't matter that much. Right. I mean, it doesn't matter at all. Well, do you remember exactly when we were there? Was it December, January? It was December. It was December. Right before Christmas. do you remember exactly like when we were there was it december january it was december right

before christmas there was like some some there there was some grab ass going on so it's definitely like pre-rut cold mornings some grab ass uh getting within some distance of them was not hard and they would a little bit throw caution to the wind right and when they saw a movement they would want to come kind of see what it was, but keeping their distance. Yeah. I shot one from a hundred yards.

Yeah. We went, uh, just after Valentine's day, middle of February, which is known as usually their peak rut. Um, Jesse Griffiths told me the locals down there call them Valentin because they run around Valentine's day. Oh, that's cute yeah um so i

think i learned that and forgot it but i like that little detail we uh we were hoping for the rut zero rut activity uh the first four days and extra like i was cut to the chase i've never hunted a more skittish animal. Like, unbelievable. We were getting busted at sometimes 200, 300 yards. And, like, they would eyeball us. And, like, it didn't take long until they were walking away. Is it because you thought it'd be gravy?

Certainly a little bit of that. But, I mean, that only, look, there's enough game. There's no way they're more skittish than a pressured whitetail. There's enough game on this ranch that you get a lot of opportunities. Yeah. Right? So it didn't take long

for like, think, walking into it, thinking it's going to be gravy for that idea to get blown out of my brain and go, okay,

you better rethink of how you're going to get this done. And your idea was you were going to spot and stalk, like sneak in on them. For sure. Yeah. Because that's what, like in doing research for the hunt, it was spot and stalk them, sit over

water, sit a fence crossing, because I didn't know this, but they don't jump fences. Yeah. They go under them and bust a lot of fences. Yeah. Trample. Or they'll go through gates that are open. And then some people have had luck Actually sitting over dung piles

That's all I've ever done Is sit dung piles With your bow They have a lot of fidelity to their little shitting spots Yeah if you can find a big one It's always been sort of accidental I didn't set out on a nil guy hunt We were doing something else and weren't having great luck

We came up on like a big fecal pile. So you know that's a big bull. And then we just changed the plan. Set a ground blind. Weighted it out. How long did you wait? Same day. Both times. But that ranch, it seems like the shit piles every 10 feet. Exactly. And there are.

I would lace some feed with a laxative. You know what I'm saying? No, I don't. I don't know what that would do for you. I think that might do the opposite. It increases visits to the pile. Or they don't make it to the pile.

For the dung pile, too, they don't just poop anywhere. You walk around, and you're literally looking at little poop piles. Nicely, you know, it's crazy. Mamas do it. And you know, what's funny is,

uh, swamp rabbits. But here's my observation about, about, about the dung piles is that Chester, I did, when I started paying closer attention, we did find no guy just dung or scat spread out like

you would an elk. In like a feeding zone, it was just like, oh, there's been Nilgai in here and there's not piles. So piles themselves. So they will go. They vary in size, you know, from, you know, a big platter, food platter to, platter, to a car hood. But what I realized, and again, it might be because there's so many of them on this ranch, is that the difference between one that's like a steamer, as we started calling them, and one that's not, where you're like, oh man, someone's been here recently, is one animal's feces that happened in the prior 12 hours. So you can't really say, oh, this is the hot one right now, because if the bull decides

to use the next dung pile 12 hours later, all of a sudden that became the hot one. You know what I mean? So I never saw one where like, oh my gosh, it looks like five nil guy have taken a shit here in the last 12 hours. It was always just like one had refreshed, had freshened it up and it just was like, eh. just like one had refreshed, you know, had freshened it up and it just like, eh, um, if they're as skittish as a pressured

whitetail, no way, probably not. Okay. But I can tell you that again, I'll cut to the chase. I had a lot of these again, there's a lot of game on this,

on, on this ranch. We had great stalking, uh, spot, still hunting conditions. again, I'll cut to the chase. I had a lot of these. Again, there's a lot of game on this ranch. We had great stalking spot, still hunting conditions, not spot and stalk, just moving through the brush slowly, trying to see them before they see you.

High winds, 15 to 20 miles an hour, making the brush move, very steady winds, so you know you got the wind in your favor. Soft ground in some places. Yeah, very. And like flat ground, which can be a little bit tricky because I'm used to hunting the mountains where you always have a horizon to work with. And like when you see something, you can kind of duck behind a horizon and make a move and get in close. When you're hunting a ranch that is almost completely flat as a pancake, you don't have the luxury of horizons. And so you either have to use the vegetation as sort of a, um, instead of a, um,

horizontal horizon, more of like a vertical horizon and kind of come around corners and keep peeking around the corners like that. But multiple times at sub a hundred yards, 50 to a hundred yards. When I went, when, when, and Chris Gill was filming with me and both of us had decided like, okay, we have to be taking half steps, like no more full steps. And once we get like sub 75, we're going hands and knees to get in close. Cause we're just like going to take them, take ourselves out of that. Like just general view of these animals, but both on my hands and knees and standing there multiple times in that like 50 to 75 range

where I'm like, everything's perfect. The wind's perfect. They don't know I'm here. Their heads are down. They're feeding. There's not a bunch of animals. That's another problem. You get a bunch of animals.

There's just more eyes. You're always battling. And when you think nobody's looking, somebody's looking, they catch it. Right. Yeah. But multiple times, like one or twosies that i'm coming in on and i'm like this is it it's gonna happen just half step half step don't get ahead of yourself don't let your weight get over your toes and just sitting there and i had a cow

just pick her head up look through a tree look at me and, it didn't last a second, and she booked. And I just feel like a whitetail, an elk, in those situations, if you are not moving, and again, Chris Gill could have been doing something behind me that I don't know. Camera guys, man. I know, but listen,

that dude is so skinny. Yeah, and Gil knows what he's doing, man. Gil is one of the, yeah, if you get after him. And he's so skinny that if he's behind me. His instinct is to not behave. If he's behind me, it's kind of like a blind, right? If he's behind me.

But anyways, I'm telling you, multiple times, like, lifted up their heads for no reason. I didn't pop a stick to be like, oh, I screwed up. I popped a stick. Just, like, standing there. They look up. I'm like full face mask at this point. I was stalking like the first six hours of the first day with no face masks out the window. I'm like, okay, everybody's in full camo now. We're covered up gloves, even though it's hot. Were you wearing like phantom jackets? No, no. Had I brought one, I probably would have tried it, but I didn't bring one.

But yeah, man. Just getting busted for seemingly no reason and a lot of shaking my head and a lot of frustration. And Brad, who we know from down there, is like, that's the way you do it. Just spot and start. Still hunt them. Get on your feet

and find them and get close to them. I finally said, to hell with it. I found a spot, a whole bunch of dung piles, some fresh ones. We had, every time we were in this zone, we were getting into Nilgai and there was an open gate and a fence that goes, you know, miles in either direction, but here's an open gate and it looks like pretty good crossings. So we do the whole ground blind thing, brush it in like crazy, and we gave it a full dark to dark sip. The one nil guy that came by, came by on the other side of the fence and just passed the gate.

I don't know if she would have come through if I had not been there. But you were trying to get a bull. I would have shot any nil guy. Oh, okay. When she came by, as soon as she kind of trying to get a bull i would have shot any nail guy oh okay um when she came by as soon as she appeared like there was kind of like a brushy fence row you know you could kind of see through it not see through it and as soon as she popped into view she swung that head and was like what is that thing over there and she was probably i don't know 35 40 yards like she just pinned us. Pinned the blind. Not us.

In my opinion, looking at it, I'll show you pictures. We had a good hide. The orcs that came by didn't pin us. The whitetails that came by didn't pin us. The whitetails looked, but they would keep feeding. She looked, eyeballed us, and just kept right on walking and was like, I'm not

bothering with that. We saw a few bulls, but they were just out of range. they were, they were just moving a direction that wasn't going to bring them through that gap. So could I have put in three days in that blind and it would have happened? Maybe. I don't know. I didn't have the luxury of that because it was my second to last day. So even though it didn't work that day, the next morning I'm like, okay, morning movement. I'll give it 90 minutes. See what happens. We sit it.

No nil guy come through. Decide to get on our feet again. I'm like, okay, at least we're going to get some action and hopefully we'll run into some pigs. I'd like to shoot another pig. We can talk about that too. I had a blast hunting pigs with my bow. Felt like a kid.

It was great. But immediately leaving the blind, like 10 minutes into it. And felt like a kid. It was great. But immediately leaving the blind, like 10 minutes into it. And again, great wind. Like I bust a cow, pop out of the water hole. And as soon as I hit the water hole and I'm like, not even like,

I'm not like standing on the edge of the water. I'm looking at the water from 10 yards back in the brush. And I look over across the water and there's three nil guy bulls looking at me. I'm like, son of a bitch. And they skitter off. I'm like, well, we'll just keep hunting.

You know, go a little farther. We get to the next water hole. We think we hear a pig. And so I'm like, okay, just totally going to pig mode. I thought I heard one grunt. And Chris is like, yeah, I heard it too. I'm like, let's find this pig. We're looking around, looking around.

And we're like maybe, again, five to ten yards from the edge of a waterhole. Well, from over my left shoulder, come in the open into this waterhole, two Nilgai bulls walk into the water and start drinking. The closest one's at like 50 yards. I'm like, buddy, it's on. Somehow they had not gotten my wind when they came in from behind me. Now they're upwind of me. I'm like, this is it.

I got to make 10 yards. They're out in the open. There's no brush in the way. I can make that shot, no problem. And Chris is like, hands and knees. I'm like, we're on it, buddy. Because we were actually looking for this pig. So we're already down.

So we start going, creeping, creeping. But you had limited yourself to a 30-yard shot. 35 is what I wanted to shoot. So you're still going to be five over. In perfect conditions, I would have shot 40. Okay. But, yeah, I just don't like – the more bowhunting I've been doing lately, I don't want to get into those positions where, like, I take a shot

and it's not the outcome that I want. And it just seems like, you know, there's just too, even if I make the perfect shot, there's so many other variables, you know, I want to make sure it does the trick.

So yeah, 40 for sure. Nothing past that. So we start creeping and just seemingly out of the blue, the lead bull like picks his head up and is splashing out of the water and leaves going away from us son of a bitch and the other one doesn't spook but follows him too you know and i i think now it was this third bull that i'm about to tell you about that comes in that got him to move because i think he was a little bit ruddy ornery

maybe more dominant and that's what got him out of there. So this wasn't our fault. This other bull comes in and he actually crosses a gap for me at 40. I come to full draw and I don't know if it's a nil guy thing or if he was ruddy or what, but I got into the meh, meh, meh, meh, and I'm yelling at him and he's not stopping.

He just marches right on through my window and follows the path of the other two bulls. So I just keep hunting. So I go across the opening, follow them into the brush, and pop out into where it just kind of opens up a little bit. And you can see 50 yards this way, that way. And I see a single cow just kind of moving, and she disappears behind some brush. I'm like, okay, I'm in the mix.

And again, I'm shooting any nil guy at this point. So I kind of make a move towards her and I can see like a pretty long opening to my left. It's maybe 10 yards wide and almost can see a hundred yards. And right as we get there, three bulls pop into there. One is like kind of stuff that we saw when we were down there, all of us together. He's jumping around, prancing, tail up in the air, like just poop, like broadcasting out of his rear end. Really? Yeah, which it kind of makes sense, right?

If they're doing the dung pile as like a scent marker, it's like their scrape, that he's going to do that too in that situation. So just blasting it out. Yeah. Like an airsoft gun. The other two, and Chris caught this on camera, full on head bashing, and one just pushes the other two we and chris caught this on camera full-on head bashing and one just pushes

the other one like through trees like brush getting knocked over to the point where i'm like hey do i want to get mixed up in this right now right like because because the other thing that armando the guy told us about was like and it kind of worked on your hunt we're like sometimes they'll think you are another nil guy oh yeah sort come and inspect you. And so now I'm like, you know, whatever, 60, 70 yards, I'm thinking, well, are they going to like, think I'm a nil guy and instead of just inspecting me, just do what he just did to his buddy. Yeah. I don't have that inch thick hide across my chest, you know? And, uh, anyways, like, I'm like, okay, we have a rutting nil guy. This is good. And so I kind of just stay with the group group eventually get to where i can see like three or four cows in the brush and i see a bull

walking there with them a little bit out of range still maybe 50 60 and he i'd already seen him a couple times like follow them the cows was squirted out you know they get a little annoyed by whatever he was doing they'd squirt out they squirtirt out again. I see right where they go. He comes out after him. As soon as he puts his head behind this kind of bigger, massive vegetation, I sprint up like 15 yards, come to full draw. When he comes out from behind the brush, he stops just head and neck, I can see. He must have just seen something enough because when he doesn't follow the cows now,

he kind of turns away from me and starts just going away and but he's quartering but pretty hard and at first i'm like i can't take the shot and again i'm trying to stop him but i'm thinking i don't know if i can take the shot because he's quarter like just walking i don't want to take a walking shot but because he's so quartering away so hard he's not actually like i'm not having to move my bow to follow him like my pins are almost just like resting on him because he's kind of going straight away. And so, I shoot at, like, 26 yards. And he was walking.

And we replay the shot. I don't see him fall over. We replay the shot. The shot looks like it's a little bit far back. Like, it definitely enters, like, in the guts. And... But strong quarter. Yes. Very strong.

Well, turns out again, I'm going to cut out some of the details. He went 70 yards and fell over. And I was, after watching the footage, I was going to back out, hook up with Troy, give it a couple hours and come in and try to look. But Chris is like, ah, let's just do one quick little loop. I'm like, all right.

You know, twist my arm. Uh, but no blood and we couldn't find the arrow. No blood. No blood. Couldn't find the arrow. And, uh, I'd already spent. So at this point you got that like pit in your stomach. Oh, totally.

I'm like not stoked on the situation. And as a, you know, as a hunting host, the first thing in your head is like, you start to like write the lines that you're going to have to say to the camera about how you screwed the pooch and shit happens and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,

blah, You know? So we recover it not long after. And, um, I was very excited. I mean, and surprised.

I don't know if I would've been more surprised if there was a leprechaun standing there looking at me, you know, but like to see that dude down on the ground. Now, when he, again, animals make it 70 yards in like not even a full second. You know, so fast. Missing half their heart. They can go 70 yards. So where he died, I don't know.

Had he gone another 70 yards, it would have been a very easy blood trail because he had, you know, blood coming out of his mouth and his nose. It would not have come out of either of the, or the one wound where the broadhead went in because it went in, like I said, basically in the paunch and went all, like probably went through the diaphragm, split the lungs in half, cut either the aortal or the pulmonary artery. I had it in a text. I can't remember now, but basically the one that connects the lungs to the heart. And then broke a rib on the way out, went through the shoulder meat. Really? And the arrow, you could just feel the tip of the arrow through that inch thick hide right here. There's your selling point for that heavy arrow. So a little bit for sure. Like we measured it with a tape measure. We had the luxury, as you know, on that ranch, you can get a truck pretty close. We had to drag him maybe a hundred yards by hand, got him into a truck,

took him back whole guts in and everything so that we could really do full necropsy on what happened, you know, when that arrow hit him. And we figured we got somewhere between like 36 and 40 inches of penetration with that arrow, um, which is pretty good. Yeah. That's great. Um, like I said, I think had it not been that inch thick hide on his chest, the broadhead would have been poking out. If not, it had gone all the way through, but it stopped it. But yeah, so it worked well and it was cool because we got to dissect it. Troy used to be a respiratory therapist,

so he has very intimate knowledge about the respiratory system and how all that stuff works. So it was cool hanging out with a guy that not only can just go oh yeah those are lungs and that's the heart which we all can point to and do that but how it all comes together and the different parts of the lungs and why there's you know three lobes of the lung here and you know and all that stuff and how come it's better to hit the lungs up front here etc etc um so et cetera. So yeah, that was the nil guy hunt. Was it hard to drag that thing? I could not drag it by myself.

I can tell you that. Like not even move it for a picture. And it took three of us. It was pretty easy then. Have you guys tried eating on it yet? We did. I ate a lot. It is not.

Well, again, it's just one piece, just a loin, but I felt like yours was pretty tough. Yeah. Interesting. I've been, I mean, I've, I guess I've hunted no guy four times total. Like only once was it a dedicated no guy hunt, but I've never had tough meat and I've served them in my restaurants. But it, you know, from Broken Arrow Ranch these are still animals that are I mean they're in high fence but it's they're still shot yeah it's a few hundred thousand acres of high fence and they're still

shot and I've never we've never ever ever once served tough meat and we're not we don't serve the loin we serve the legs and it's still super tender when we get our Warner Brun what's that when we get our Warner Brunseler Shear Force test in... We're going to bring some of that, too.

Oh, yeah. You can bring some of yours in. I don't have any left of mine, I don't think. No. I'd like to bring in a chunk of... I mean, I turned most of yours into burgers. I'd like to bring a chunk of my Oryx. I got some Oryx waiting for dinner tonight from New Mexico Oryx.

But I would like to bring a hunk of that and throw it on the old tester. My question for you is... We should have Chester run it so he can go back to being Chester the tester. Do you want to be like the official administrator, Chester? I'd love to. That'd be great. Because then it'd be like a great rhyme. Chester the tester.

Then we only had to buy one lab coat. Just one lab coat for Chester. I felt like the lab coat thing was sort of a selling point for me. So. Like, are you doing like a medium rare type preparation Super rare. with the legs? You are.

Yeah, so we'll serve it as tartar a lot. We'll serve it. We do. Yeah. And does that work that you can but is there something like it's like free range, gun harvested, or do they trap them?

No gun harvested. But you're getting it out of Texas into Georgia. Mm-hmm. So you can do that. Well, I don't know if you could do it everywhere. I know that these guys at Broken Arrow Ranch can do it. They have that set up. But they're also, so this is helicopter hunting that they're doing as well.

And it's going through USDA inspection? Correct. There's a USDA processor on site. Like, they process USDA. But, I mean, we call, everything is harvested to order. So, like, we call them in and say, look, we're looking for, you know, this is what we need. And then we have to kind of wait it out for them to go harvest them. With Nilgai, it's never an issue because the populations, as you said, are so huge.

And honestly, they already, they were telling me that they're running into issues, some sort of pressure from political pressure with Nilgai because of this, this like bovine fever tick. Yeah, they're doing that and they're like trying to inoculate them with these sprayers. Yeah. And so it's like, what they explained to me is that, you they're trying to inoculate them with these sprayers set out and stuff like that. What they explained to me is that this has been a serious issue. Back in the early 1900s. It's a livestock problem, right? Yeah, exactly.

It's not that it doesn't in any way actually affect the Nilgai, the Nilgai or the carrier. It massively affects cattle. What's the thing? Someone looked that up somewhere. It's a tick. It's called a fever tick. They call it a cattle fever tick. Okay.

Yeah, I know that that's causing heat between ranchers and Nilgai. Exactly. And I mean, the issue is that in the early 1900s, Texas lost like 90% of its cattle population to this tick. And that's why there's that quarantine zone in between the Texas and Mexico border where they literally, you know, you have cowboys patrolling it every single day, pushing cattle back onto Mexico or keeping US cattle away from that zone but the nil guy they don't respond to bait you know so you can't bait them into um with cattle in whitetail they literally walk them through a

like through a tick bath and that's how they deal with it yeah we don't do that we covered on the podcast a couple years ago i remember we covered it at a live show where, oh, speaking of which, we're doing a live show in Billings. A couple months. May 3rd. Can I talk about that for a second?

Well, yeah. What's that place? We're doing a live show in Billings on May 3rd. As part of the show, during the whole show, Seth's going to be fleshing in his flip-flops.

See, there you go. That's your double entendre. There's going to be fleshing In his flip flops See there you go that's your double entendre There's going to be a dramatic spotlight Like the most dramatic theater lighting You've ever seen Illuminating Seth's work area And he'll be fleshing and stretching for the whole show So you have to show socks

You have to show socks You can just watch Seth for 90 minutes I'd pay to do that I believe you buy a ticket You're going to get a copy of the new book with your tickets. Yeah, tickets are bundled. So that's like publication week of outdoor kids in an indoor. Yeah.

If you need a reference point. Inside world. Yeah, we went back and forth on it so damn many times. Outdoor kids in an inside world. That's publication week, May 3rd, live show on Billings. And we're bundling tickets with a book. And we're going to talk a lot about that type of stuff.

We're going to gripe about our kids and our wives. That's going to flash. I wish we could think where you had a little wood stove set next to you and you could be burning raccoon fat in it. I don't know if that's doable. Yanni, we should do a meat eater cooks with your no guy. I mean, they produce a lot of meat, so you should have doable. At the fire department. Yeah. Yanni, we should do a meat eater cooks with your Nilgai.

I mean, they produce a lot of meat, so you should have plenty. That's a good idea. I got a bunch. So when you're selling it, what do you sell it as? Generally, we used to write Nilgai, but then people couldn't pronounce it. So people don't order things they can't say. They feel like they don't want to feel stupid. That's why I was going to pass up the gnocchi. We just put South Texas antelope

and then we sell it that way. Oh, really? Come on. Do you not do a little parenthesis? At Gun Show, we go to the table and tell you. We say Nilgai, but on the written menu, it says South Texas antelope. We'll go, hey guys,

this is the antelope it's actually the animal's something called a Nilgai which means blue bull roughly translated from Hindu da da da da da we give them the explanation

so yeah I'm with you sell it that way and it sells they fucking love it they lose their mind are you afraid about giving up your source

because no not at all in fact I would actually because you got a toe in no I would I would bang the drum for those guys because

you like them that much yeah we get Black Buck from them we get Nilgai Not at all. And in fact, I would actually. Because you got a toe in? No, I would bang the drum for those guys. Really? You like them that much? Yeah, we get black buck from them. We get nil guy. We get, what else do we get from them? Hogs from them? We don't actually get hogs from them, but we could certainly be getting hogs from them. We get fallow deer on occasion, on a rare occasion from them.

There's just, you know, kind of a luck of the draw thing. They'll call me and say, saw a fallow deer today. Like, that kind of thing. Like, I'll take it. Yeah, exactly. Do you buy a new guy by the pound? Yeah. It's expensive.

Give me a rough ballpark. I mean, this is the part that I'm probably like throwing them under the bus here. Just give me a rough ballpark. It could be in the 30s and 40s a pound. Okay. You know? That's for the meat, rough ballpark. It could be in the 30s and 40s a pound. Okay. You know? So.

That's for the meat, not live weight. Correct. Yeah. And I mean, we mistakenly one time bought a whole Neil guy. That was not a good decision. Turns out that's really hard to, you know, when you got a restaurant, you're like, all right, well now the rest of the walk-in is just for storing this. Like on those. Get the rest of the food out.

Bone in. Yeah, exactly. We ordered two sides of neil guy and they were like you don't want that and i'm like yes i do we process everything in house and they're like all right idiot so they sent it um it's also cost a fortune it was the most expensive thing to ship in the universe so um now we get now we get sometimes bone in meat but we actually we've just worked with them for so long forever a decade now that they've gotten where they will kind of custom send stuff to me you know if i tell them this is what i want if i walk if i was in atlanta and i walked into gun show uh is it on the menu right now actually it

might be on the menu right now i have to look and see we you know gun show rewrites the menu every day yeah i just don't know if you always got a thing going. No, we generally have some form of a game product at all times. But I think right now we are selling Feral Hog because we just filmed Sabretooth there, and so we're still doing that. That's what, you know, when I always talk about game and restaurants, I need to expand the list of things I think that are worth recommending to people. And, you know, rather than buying, all like a lot of stuff out of Texas like I always think like bison is a great thing to buy because it supports the animal not vice versa right um I think no guy should be like I definitely don't like the penned elk operations I don't like the penned whitetail operations yeah right agreed but there's so many like those ferals out of Texas yeah I think especially the exotics

out of Texas I think you really should. I think more chefs should be using them. Nilgai especially. Honestly, like Nilgai populations are getting super high. There are a lot of people in power who want massive culling to take place. If there was an economy behind that meat going to actually be used as opposed to just being shot and left, that would be a lot better situation. I mean, they're going to have to reduce the population one way or the other, and I'd rather people be selling them in restaurants personally.

Do you, when you guys grind it, do you ever grind it? No, we never do. Okay. If you were grinding it, you'd put some fat in it, right? Oh yeah. Yeah. It's just non-existent for the most part. So any preparation we do is always paired against a ton of fat. So that's why tartar works really great because you're talking raw meat that's folded in with egg yolks and things like that. So it rich, it adds that richness back to it. It's actually, that's one of the best preparations for super lean meat because it balances out that fact. Oh, so did you save the height on that thing? I did not. I, I did did and i wish i would have handled mine better because

later i wanted to have it laminated to that you know how brad has that one that's like got that rubber stuff on the underside and it lays out like real flat and beautiful i hadn't noticed it you haven't seen that oh dude it's amazing amazing and what's yours just kind of wrinkly yeah i just didn't i i should i wish out if I could do it all over again, I would have gone in and skinned it very carefully and sent it to like a, like a, a delicate tannery and had it laminated to that. Cause the thing about those is they laminated to this rubber stuff and that's some bitch lays so flat.

You could run a vacuum over it. Hmm. That'd be cool. Like flat. I just foundbitch lays so flat, you could run a vacuum over it. Hmm. That'd be cool. Like flat. I just found it dulls your knives, like your processing knives like crazy. Cause that skin is just so gnarly. Oh yeah.

It's crazy skin. Chews through them. Yeah. You get on his flank. He's got like a wild pig shield. Yeah. And that crazy hair. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's like cutting. Also, it's like you decided to cut a wire brush up with your knife. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You should talk about that cut a wire brush up with your knife. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you should talk about that patch of hide that's super thick that you post a picture of.

I thought I already did. Not tonight, then. Basically, you know why you said tonight? It's because this room feels like the evening. Well, me and Yanni were here together. I was going to start dipping some strawberries and chocolate and stuff. Our track lighting's out. We got some mood lamps going.

Oh, yeah, dude. But, yeah, basically from... I was like, Yanni. The lavender candle really sets it off. From the tips of their shoulders wrapping around their chest, the hide goes from... It's still a dang thick and tough hide behind that,

going towards the rear of the animal, but that chest, it literally turns into darn near an inch thick. It's not like, it almost looks like it's a layer of fat, but it's not. I mean, it's an inch thick hide.

And best we can figure, well, there's probably two reasons. One, when you're fighting. Look at them sharp ass horns. When you're fighting with your buddies and yeah, the bull I killed, same thing with two reasons. One, when you're fighting. They get them sharp ass horns. When you're fighting with your buddies. And yeah, the bull I killed, same thing with the bull you killed. It had three holes in it where you could take your pointer finger and just, and jam it to the second knuckle in there.

And then you'd feel the end of it, right? So they're constantly getting these wounds. But I also think, somebody pointed out on Instagram that like, yeah, they also, where they are originally from, Bengal tigers chase them around, you know, and jump on their neck. So that could be a reason. That's their major predator. That might be why they don't, that might be why their radar, like their long range radar is calibrated. The wrist calibration is different than the wrist calibration on their short range radar.

They also have not great sense of smell. I've always been told like that. Don't really worry about the wind when you're hunting nil guy. Like they don't smell that great, but it's just their other awareness. We were told that too. And I had instances where I think I felt the wind on my neck, didn't get winded.

And then I had instances too, where I'm like the only way we just got buses because we got winded. So I was reading something a while back after the last nil guy hunt that I was on about the fact that in India you know we call them an antelope, they consider them cattle and so they're sacred just like any other cow

oh they roll them in with the cow yeah they don't eat them for that reason, that all of their pressure in their native environment was actually from colonialism like from you know English folks hunting them they don't hunt them, they you know english folks hunting them they don't hunt them they don't do anything with them they just let them do their thing

interesting all right yanni so when when can people go watch the hunt man may of 2023 no yeah why is that that's the schedule that i'm on. Really? Yeah, I mean, I'm working to push that up a little bit, but yeah, man, this production house is a busy production house, and I'm filming a year out. Huh. If Yanni dies, we won't even really feel it for a while.

You know? Yeah, as long as you can... Don't worry, folks, plenty of stuff coming. That's a very half-glass-full way of approaching it. folks plenty of stuff coming that's a very half glass full way of approaching plenty of stuff in the pipeline as long as you can come in

and uh you know do my VO for me then yeah we'll be good we got plenty of time to find a stand in may like

wow yeah yeah over a year over a year like we don't even plan I don't plan anything like that yeah I mean we're we're uh editing and and putting out

season three of uh my show which will be out this may and then uh but this was already filming for season four i can tell you 2023 the last week of july i'll be at my fish shack that's about it that's about it and i'll be watching yanni's thing in May. Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah, my, I think my last thought on that, which was cool to hang out, hang out with Troy,

being that he knew the insides of the animal, he puts a lot of emphasis on that. Like we all should know that. And it makes total sense, right? Like we all kind of know, like, you know where to shoot the animal,

right? But right now, boiler room. Yeah, exactly. That's like the level of detail right right and all we heard about was how their vitals were like way up front and it's blocked by the big shoulder well you know what when we did this like side view necropsy and literally just like left everything as it was and took the shoulder off flip the ridge cage open.

So you could see it all, but it turns out, no, it really wasn't tucked up more than an elk or, or, or yeah, kind of where you think it would be. I think that's,

I think that's a misnomer due to this whole antelope thing, because something like a scimitar oryx, that's very much the case that, I mean, it's, it's vitals are that little orange stripe on the front of it is where they all live. And if you shoot behind that, so you're shooting in front on the front of it is where they all live.

And if you shoot behind that, so you're shooting in front of the front shoulder. Like, if you get behind that, it's just going to pass through and it's going to just, I mean, it'll probably die eventually, but it's just going to trot on away. But yeah, just the importance, I think, that, you know, we should all take the time. Like, I think now, I'm going to, like, necropsy, like, unless I'm just out of time and it's super dark, but like, it's so educational to take the time. And as you're butchering, you know, really look and see what happened inside there. What, what your bullet did, what your arrow did and try to figure it out. You know? And I just think the next time you take a shot, you're gonna be that much more confident about like, okay, I'm not just aiming for the lungs. I'm aiming for this specific thing. Did you settle on necropsy after consideration of necropsy?

I've heard it both ways. I thought that long ago we were corrected to say necropsy. I don't know. I think both are right. Yeah. It's like coos and cows. Yeah. I still think that you say bagel kind of messed up.

Bagel? I didn't say bagel. I don't know. You say it once. Bagel. Bag kind of messed up. Bagel? I don't know. You say it once. Bagel. Bagel. Bagel. Bagel.

You want a bagel? Bagel your bagel. I can't do it. Is he saying it weird? I'm not hearing it. Bagel. He's corrected that. I think he usually, yeah, bagel.

He's a bagel guy. I know, but then, yeah, I'm trying to get it right. No, I would be like, let me think. In that case, you just got to write it down and be like. I'm trying to enter a bagel guy. I know, but then I'm trying to get it right. No, I would be like... In that case, you just got to write it down and be like... I'm trying to enter a very natural space. I would say, do you want the bagel? Do you want the bagel? Bag and bag. Bag.

It's definitely bag. Bag. Not vague. Bag. Bag. Bag. Say it once, Corinne. Vague.

Vague. Vague. I need to get one of those jobs where you pronounce stuff on the internet. You just recorded an audio book, so you should be... I'll pronounce it on the internet and I'll say it all a lot of ways. Yeah, give them three for everyone. None of these are correct, by the way. I'll start out big and like, I don't know.

You can say... These are all fine. They're all acceptable. You should do an app like Siri where people can just like down, you just record everything. It's like, hey Steve. People can ask you questions. Hey Steve. How do you say bagel?

Necropsy. Necropsy. Before we wrap up here, I just want to mention that new Yanni's book report jingle you heard up top. Oh, that was just sent in by some guy. Yeah, his name is Barry Rigby. So thanks for writing that and sending that in, Barry. Is he a musician?

He is. Yeah. Yeah, Yanni pointed that out to me. That was good. Yeah. Oh, next time we record, remind me to tell you the story about the fleas over at my house. Dude, my skin is still crawling. I had to get in the shower.

Steve's getting himself in trouble. A lot of trouble. Well, there's no reason we can't talk about that. I just want to run out of time. Talk about it later. Okay. It's a funny story. Kevin, thanks, man.

Good seeing you. Bye, guys. I'll be back in a couple weeks. We'll pick up where we left off. The fleas. With the fleas. Well, yeah, because I had a bite of your, you know, not to go from gross to great, but yeah, we should have done it the other way around.

Wild hog holiday ham. Yeah. Like wet ass, sugary ass. Holy cow. How is that good? So, by the way. Those things don't taste good. Did Garrett.

Those things are inedible. Yeah. Did Garrett tell you that he has an extra one at his house? He probably didn't tell you, did he? No. I knew he was going to hold out on you guys. There's a whole other ham at his house that will be ready to be smoked. I live right next door to him.

Hold his feet over the fire. On the 12th, he's got to pull that thing out of the brine and cook it. That was, I'm not joking you. I hope Jesse Griffiths isn't listening. That might be the best thing I ever ate. That might be the best thing I ever ate. That might be the best thing I ever ate that came off a wild pig. Did you hear that, Jesse? Hold on.

Let me put you on speaker. No, seriously. I've got four of those hams in the freezer right now. So if you could send me that recipe, I would like to make it. We filmed that recipe yesterday. I know, but I can't wait six months to see it on YouTube. I feel like you could probably get access to some of that footage, but I'll send you the recipe.

It's actually, if anybody preliminarily wants that recipe, if you have my second cookbook, Pure Pork Awesomeness, it's in there. It's just not set for feral hogs, but you don't need to adjust it. You use the exact same recipe. It's in there. Go get it. Is there the exact same recipe. It's in there. Go get it. Is there still some in the fridge?

I saw Sean Weaver was sacking it up. What? We ate it and he sacked it up. I thought he was loading it in a sack, taking it with him to sell. See there? I saw him loading it into

a double ziploc kind of a messy double ziploc situation he put it in a handkerchief and tied around a stick and then like his hobo bindle yeah he's like i was planning to leave this afternoon but it turns out you're right now see you bye all right man bye guys thanks everybody OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now, the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

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