The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 331: Getting Skunked at The Navel

Episode Date: May 9, 2022

Steven Rinella talks with Jimmy Rinella, Doug Duren, Ya Yang, Pat Durkin, and Corinne Schneider. Topics discussed: Youth turkey at Doug's; skunked again; the river otter, two dogs, mink, and other critters drawn to the mysterious magnetism of The Navel; Doug Durkin; Jimmy's experiences with the mouse in Doug's Little Buddy heater, his preference for runnin' and gunnin' turkeys, and his superior detection of gobbling noises; the direct way in which Steve talks to his kids; a very lawyerly and official contract between Jimmy and his dad about Xbox use; how the 12.5-year-old hen found in PA always made the right life decisions; the doe that was missing her two back leg hooves; the most obscenely misleading nature headline; defrauding folks with fake hunting leases; Ya's gun buying spree; poop soup; Doug's strong hands; Doug addresses Uncle Ted's statements about CWD; population level effects of CWD; killing a deer per second; Doug's new program, "Sharing the Land"; the pen pal affair between Doug and Steve; Pat's articles on cash for crappie and shooting pike with a firearm in Vermont; 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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First Light. Go farther, stay longer. All right, everybody, we're here at Doug's Farm. As promised. If you're a very astute listener, and you listen real careful, you heard a long time ago when we had Ya Yang on to talk about Hmong culture.

Did you get the shirt made, Hmong Dudes Are Trouble? It's in progress okay yeah Yang was on top and I thought I was given yeah the gift of all gifts by inviting him I didn't tell Doug and Doug Doug didn't know until he listened to the show that I invited yeah and, Michaela, to come for youth turkey season at Doug's place. Did you feel insulted when I did that? Or not insulted, but out of the loop? No, it was actually pretty funny because I started getting text messages from friends who listened to the podcast sooner than I did.

Saying, so I guess you're going to have some extra turkey hunters next year. And I was, what am I talking about? What are you talking about? And then I get a text from you going, Hey, uh, have you listened to the podcast yet?

No. Well, I kind of invited a guy. I was like, Oh, well, that's nice that you, I was actually flattered that you felt comfortable enough to invite somebody,

especially for that season. And, uh, uh, and it was fine. No, it was, but I wasn't insulted by it at all. You're not annoyed. No, that you felt comfortable enough to invite somebody especially for that season and uh and it was fine no i was but i wasn't insulted by it at all you're not annoyed no you said to me once um i was about of course it was about my farming and because i we were doing something we were filming or something and i was like oh hey by the way i got a couple friends coming and you yeah you invite whoever the hell you want it's your damn farm so it was sort of that extension of that no i was i was happy that you did it it was cool and here we are youth turkey another youth turkey season come and gone skunked skunked well yeah last year on the first day of

youth turkey season we called in like without really trying that hard six long beards six rope draggers two youth hunters tagged out by two o'clock or three o'clock in the afternoon nothing left to do but burn ditch nothing left to do but visit the spring and burn ditch and drive do my favorite activity which is drive around with doug and and have him tell stories of interactions with people. But how many hours did your daughter spend in the turkey blind with Pat Durkin here? I want to say it's about 18 or 19 hours. In two days?

In two days, yeah. It was nine for sure the first day. And it was about the exact same yeah the difference in well they were burning ditch and t-shirts last year and it snowed last night yeah yeah yeah the birds are just not fired up but i have photographic evidence of there being plenty of birds around and you being in the same area where the birds were but just not at the same time yeah this is so i'll lay i'll detail this out um we me and my older boy go out for the daybreak thing. We go out to a blind at a place called the Naval where the other day we logged the first,

like every, I got to back up. If you imagine the earth as a beach ball, Doug's of all the whole planet, the place where you would blow air into that beach ball is located on Doug's farm. Ah. Or, if the earth was in its infancy being formed inside its mother's womb, this is on Doug's farm.

The earth is a baby. On Doug's farm that's like the earth is a baby on Doug's Farm is where the umbilicus attaches that's why it's called the navel I never thought about it like that everything everything passes through the name that is very true everything passes through the navel I'm sitting there with my boy the other day we're like sitting there looking at a field in hardwoods and here comes running by running by is a river otter like through doug's field is a river otter he was drawn by some mysterious magnetism to run through the navel sitting there night, here comes two dogs. Those dogs are still in mystery to me. Just dead nuts right through the navel.

They are a mystery to me where they came from. If you hit a deer with a bow and you track it, it will pass through the navel. It's like you can save yourself a lot of time, just go to the navel and pick up the blood trail there. That's like everything passes through there it's the it's the beginning of the earth it's where when they breathe life into the earth that's where they breathed it didn't you see a mink in that same area yeah i saw a mink at the

navel trying to drag a squirrel out of a hole in the tree i mean that wasn't really the navel but it was within 100 yards of the navel yeah so yeah maybe that's i might a little ways from the navel but not far from the navel just up the hill from it yeah so in the belly area you want to hear some screaming but what was weird it was the mink screaming huh you know they got a very shrill the mink was trying Huh. You know, they got very shrill. The mink was trying to fight his way into a squirrel hole, and there was a squirrel trying to defend its territory, and the mink was freaking out. Huh.

Yeah. Anyhow, so me and my older boy go out to the navel in the morning, and there's a bird roosted behind us. And my little boy was like adamant that we come get him at breakfast. Come get him at breakfast. So we sit there until 7.30, and I'm thinking he's going to be up, and Doug's going to want to go out with my daughter. And I better go get Matthew.

So we leave, and Doug's got a camera at the navel. We leave, and at 9, this long beard shows up at the navel on doug's camera yep so doug gets the camera he gets the photographs what every 12 hours every 12 hours yeah so we go back out and we call before going to the navel we call down into the navel and he returns he gobbles and return million times we work them nothing eventually shuts up moves off so we sneak into the blind at the naval set up pretty soon matthew is very concerned about how he needs to go have lunch with doug's daughter eleanor and one you can tell you just want he thinks that there's people back here playing having fun opening like easter presents i don't know but he just committed that he's got to get back he's got to get back so i'm like oh my god so we leave and then at noon we like 11 11 30 yeah

at noon that long beard standing as a navel me. Me and Jimmy go back out, circle around, and call, and there he is just hammering another thousand times from the navel, working as close as we can, can't budge him, and he eventually just drifts off. Wah, wah. Yeah, it really was. Maddening. And then over here, behind the barn up on that point up there where you guys started out uh or you went up there one other time too and and same thing you left there

and later that day there were turkeys there our ceo dan chumbler meteor ceo he's going to turkey hunt a friend of mine's place this spring and And I said, I'm going to tell you something that you won't do. But if you did it, you will kill a turkey. But no one does it. And everyone knows it's true, but no one can bring themselves to do it.

I said, I will show you two spots where if you lean against a tree and stay there for the three days that you'll be hunting, you will kill a rope dragger yeah but you won't be able to do it because there'll be some bird you gotta go after them and you'll leave and then you won't be there when it comes but there's a lone there's a you'll like this dog a lone oak out in the middle of a field and every day multiple gobblers have to go by that oak i don't know why and there's another place which is like a pass a passageway between two paradises

and every day multiple times long beards walk through there but no one can no one will just sit there i can't do it yeah well because i'm sitting there and yesterday afternoon uh when rosie and i went and matthew went with us and she goes and doug i don't want to just go sit in a blind i want to walk and call and it's like she's got the gene, man. She's nine years old or eight years old, whatever it is. She already knows, sitting for socks. She likes to run and gun. Yeah, she's, yeah. It's eight years old, right?

All right, seated next to, oh, we didn't properly. Pat Durkin's here. Thank you. You know what's always confusing? Before we turned the machine on, you were saying something that caught my attention where Pat Durkin, Doug Dern, there's room for confusion there.

But you said you just found a book, a deer hunting book written by someone named Doug Durkin. Yeah, some guy that follows me on Instagram sent me just a little note saying, are you related to Douglas Durkin? Maybe Doug's related to him. There's so many derivatives of Durkin, and there's Durgen, like the G, and there's, we always thought maybe there's something with Durkin and Durin,

but Durin's German, right? Right. Yeah, so it's not. Oh, you're German. I'm German. I'm half German. Well, when I was saying all that bad stuff about you guys i was gonna knock on your ass but i thought well i thought he doesn't know

i was telling doug i don't know if you read much about the late 30s and 40s people left way before then i have to say i went online found that book some it hasn't come yet but i'm looking forward to reading it. Oh, he's sending you the book? No, I looked it up on Amazon. Oh. Doug Durkin. Doug Durkin. It's like if you and Doug had a baby,

and that baby grew up to write a book about hunting. Yeah. Maybe we should update it, and you and I can... With a forward. Yeah, it should be with a forward by Doug Dern and Pat Durkin. Seated next to Pat Durgan is my son james who's going to join us for a minute here now jimmy i'm gonna listen i told you no smart ass comments you gotta shine because here's the thing that you need to be i've told you this before remember how i don't like you like we don't want you on social media? Yeah.

Because you might screw up and it comes back to haunt you later, right? You've told me that many times. Okay. So keeping in mind that you're now possibly, you're making your first, this is true. This is the first trackable thing you will ever do in your life.

Do you understand what I'm saying? Meaning, something you say now will forever be, someone will always be able to locate this. And this is the first thing you've ever done like that. Except when we were ice fishing. I was on that. Oh, sorry.

Did I tell you all this before that? No. You never said any of that. I'm going to ask you some questions, and I want you to give me very specific answers with no smart assery. Okay. Okay.

Tell people how you have war paint on your face and how you made that war paint. So we have a Mr a mr heater little buddy like heater that we had in our um turkey blind and i got really bored when the action slowed down for a little bit um and just took a stick instead of whittling the tip tip and stuck it in that heater flame until it had embers on it. Then I scraped that off and made my dad

war paint. You reinvented the pencil. Yeah. Except charcoal. Now, what was I going to ask you next? Oh, explain the set of circumstances that happened the first time we started Doug's little buddy heater up.

There was a mouse, a mother mouse had made a nest inside of it. And I remember asking you, is it supposed to be smoking? Well, first the mouse, what happened with the mouse? It ran. Come booking out of there. When I tried to light it. Then it started smoking like, oh, holy hell.

Then we cleaned it out and had it. Here's my next question. You're doing good so far. Okay. Do you prefer hunting turkeys from a blind or doing what we call running and gunning i like running and gunning why do you think that is um because i feel like there's more action i feel like if you call one of the blind it's just a lot of sitting and then when you're running and gunning you're up in the

woods listening and moving around and it seems just a little more active and more enjoyable here's my next question for you you feel that you're somehow undergunned having a pump action shotgun and you feel that you need to have an auto loader can you explain that to people um so it's it's not so much with turkeys but when i duck hunt it seems to be that like harrison our neighbor who has a semi-automatic uh shotgun he can um like just shoot get many more shots off and it's more let out seems to be yeah seems to i don't know just kind of outperform me with a pump because if i have a bad adrenaline rush i forget to reload so then i'm thinking from watching you thinking that it's just another shell loaded in and then i can just shoot again okay if you had this is your last question unless you got anything you want to add or dog or pat or yeah i might have a question for you okay if you um had to rate your father's ability to hear gobbles relative to your ability

to hear gobbles what would you say out of what huh out of what no relative to yours oh um decent for your age. Yeah, because Pat, he's got hearing aids. Can you set those to like gobble mode for listening? I try and it doesn't make a big difference. Really? Yeah, I can hear better. I can hear him better,

but still compared to like Yaa yesterday and the day before, he's picking out distant gobblers I never heard. Got it. Yeah. One of my favorite hunting stories, and Jimmy, you can help me tell the story. We were sitting at the Naval last year, late morning,

and what happened? So my dad sat down, and I always do this, beg my dad to call just to see if we'll get a response from anything. And I say what? What do I usually say why I'm not doing it yet? Letting things quiet down. Yeah.

Where we walked in there and might have spooked some things out of the area. So he's letting things mellow. Yeah. And I'm like, dad, call, call. And he's like, okay, fine. And does one. I'm like, there's a gobble. And he's like, no, there's not.

I'm like, there is a gobble. And he calls again and the turkey gobbles again. And then it's a gobbling. He's like, no, there's not. I'm like, there is a gobble. And he calls again, and the turkey gobbles again. And then it's followed by two more. And I keep saying, like, there's a turkey. I can hear it gobbling. And my dad just keeps telling me, no, no, no, no. At this point, he's telling me it's getting closer. Like, what in the world are you talking about?

There's no turkey. He said, there's, like, no turkey. And he calls again, and he's's like was that a gobble i'm like yes that's what i've been telling you for like five minutes and next thing we know there's three turkeys three big turkeys running in and they all fan out and i think the coolest thing i saw with those turkeys is when the front one put its fan out and the other two put their fans out. And the turkey turned around and looked at them and they put their fans back in and just walked behind them. Yep. Jimmy shot that one. Oh, man.

He had a shot and he wouldn't shoot because he was waiting for the boss time. Yeah. And he got the boss time. Can I? Oh, you got a question for him? Jimmy, can you take a couple more questions? Yeah. I'm done with you.

How good is your dad compared to you in picking the direction the call's coming from? Better. He's better? I'm better. You're better. Once I hear it, I know where it is. Yeah, it's when he hears it,

but when it's far off, I seem to be better. That might also be because when it's super far off, I seem to be the only one who can hear it. So it's hard to argue with them, right? Yeah. Jimmy, you told us after dinner last night that if you could hunt one species the rest of your life, it'd be turkey.

Why is that? Because I feel like with turkeys, it's kind of like they're just kind of wild in an unimaginable way where it's like, they're never, you never see a turkey just laying down in the brush. Like you never see one hidden or trying to get like out of being a turkey. Like they're just always on the move. They're always always feeding they're always like at night when there's i just learned this yesterday they incubate their eggs all night

and that's how a lot of turkeys a lot of female turkeys die and it's like because they got to lay on the they got they can't go in their roost tree yeah so it's like it just kind of goes to show how like, they're just, they're so strong in a way where it's like they know what they have a very good mindset on like what needs to happen and when it needs to happen. And what's the right time for breeding and if they're supposed to come and do a call. Like when you're hunting turkeys it's not like you go out there and just see one it's kind of like you have to almost trick the turkey and manipulate them into coming into your call that's right that's a good answer yeah very good i like you haven't said anything that's going to keep you out of getting into college or anything all right well let me ask you a question and see if we can get that to that point so you said that you preferred

running and gunning to sitting in a blind which have you had more success with um equal the equal but i'd say the one that i definitely had more fun with was running and gunning because that was like we saw two snapping turtles breeding and then it was like we just got to see a lot more than yeah sitting in a blind yeah we're walking along we're actually working in on a turkey and i see a turtle it's a big a big snapper and i tell jimmy here i'll show you how to sneak up and grab a turtle and when i jacked that turtle turtle out of there what what was he doing oh there was a male and a female, and they were breeding. Locked and embraced. Yeah.

The cloacal kiss, they call that. They put their cloacas together. I asked him, like, Dad, can we keep it? And he's like, we don't have something to kill it with. And you suggested that we what? Shoot it with my shotgun. And then I said, what will that do to the turkey situation that we got going on right now?

Really mess it up. So what did that have? Wait a minute. That was running and gunning. That was running and gunning. So things are more apt to happen. But you saw a river otter when you were sitting in a blind. We weren't holding it by the tail.

Well, fair enough. So then how many turkeys have you harvested? Not, we weren't holding it by the tail. Well, fair enough. So how many, so then how many turkeys have you, have you harvested? I guess is the word. Two. We were in Texas. Last year was his first year turkey hunting. Yeah.

And he got two last year. And I got one here last year. One here and one at home. And then. And this year he's, he's, this year he's having a horrible year. I'm having a really bad year. When we were in Texas, we like just couldn't get up on turkeys and pretty soon. And this year he's having a horrible year. I'm having a really bad year. When we were in Texas, we just couldn't get up on turkeys. And pretty soon, I look up, my dad points out two.

I told you your sister's up to bat. Sister gets first shot. That's not fair. Completely fair. And she got one. Yeah. Which happened to be a bearded hen um so two turkeys so far and you got one in a blind and one running and gunning yeah okay um but we were in texas my dad pointed out two gobblers and i got out of the car oh you want to talk about running and

gunning listen to this hunting story all right uh this is the craziest hunting story you'll ever hear let's just have jimmy sit here we'll just keep asking tell dog what happens when you try to tear off against your dad yelling at you not to do it um so let me let me let me set scene real quick just because we're driving along going out to hunt and come around the corner and here's a gobbler standing there. Two. So, this vehicle has no doors or anything. It's open top, no doors. It's just like a chopped off suburban. He's out the door. I'm like, no!

But he grabs his gun and hustles off into the bushes. And what did you turn up in the bushes? Um, so, I took aim with my shotgun and had a like great shot of the turkey's head and pull the trigger my safety was on oh no then i turned my safety off and bust a move through the bushes fall and my safety gets turned back on so now i'm this this is what they teach you in gun uh hunter safety i'm hustling after this turkey and i'm like sweating and i get up here and this turkey

is stuck in a bush like it cannot move ran completely paralyzed briar patch and got hung up so i take aim at this turkey and my safety is on once again. This turkey turns, runs back towards me and starts flying and is gone. And this happened twice. This happened twice when my safety, no, like a different, a whole different incident. Both times, both times of me screaming my lungs off to get his ass back to the car. But while he's screaming one of the times I didn't shoot because my dad was

screaming at me huh where I thought he'd be mad I was I know whereas you could have come walking out of there going what are you yelling about holding the turkey up yeah all right you're

good all right thanks Jimmy can I stay here no all right never mind see ya Thanks, Jimmy. Can I stay here? No. All right, never mind. See ya. Thanks, Jimmy. Doug and I were talking earlier, Steve, that we like the way you talk to your kids.

Like I'm annoyed. No, you're direct. Oh, speaking of... I read you a little bit of this, Doug. James, like I hate video games. Don't like them none. But James has been lobbying aggressively to get an Xbox. And his mom kind of like...

I don't really understand. I'd have to check with someone who knows about this stuff. His mom thinks it's all right because you're not meeting strangers online on Xbox. Is this true or not true? I don't know. I don't either.

It's possible. Okay. I think you can, right? Because you could play with people all across the world. Through Xbox. Depending on the game. There must be something. Unless she doesn't know what she's talking about.

She feels like that it's all right. I don't know what she's talking about. She feels like that it's all right. I don't know. Either way, our lawyer who represents our company, I asked him to draft up a contract, a real official looking contract to govern his use. It's so funny. To govern his use. And I sent him my points, my deal points.

And so he sends his contract over like it's long. So I'm in the terms of use section. 3.2.1. James Ronello will secure the prior consent from the Guardians before any and all use of the Xbox, which consent may be withheld for any reason, including but not limited to no reason at all. 3.2.2. James Rinella

will not introduce any new games to the Xbox without securing the prior consent from the Guardians before any use. Which consent may be withheld for any reason, including but not limited to no reason at all. 323.

The use of the Xbox will not supersede or interfere with james ranella's obligations to the family ranella which includes requested chores daily routines school obligations room cleaning outdoor sports activities family gatherings family interactions pet care and maintenance and general good behavior it goes on and on six pages and he's like he wants to see he was asking about getting it reviewing it and having his comments and i told him not only is it non-negotiable but it's an exploding offer meaning he signs or else the whole conversation just ends. Your kid's going to be a lawyer.

That's it. He's going to spend all his time studying documents. One more deal point. There should be no complaining, squabbling, nagging, crying, fighting, hitting, punching, or wrestling with any siblings or any other youth that is related to the use of the Xbox. Violation of this requirement may result in additional adverse consequences to James Rinella beyond the inability to use the Xbox. Oh, man. No, I'm going to frame this son of a bitch and hang it above that thing.

He's not even going to turn it on. He's just like, you know what? Too much trouble. Oh, wow. That's great. Huh? Oh, seeing that kid reminds me. If you haven't bought it, buy it.

Outdoor Kids in an Inside World is available now. New book about getting your family, getting your kids and family outdoors and getting them radically engaged with nature outdoor kids in an inside world my book my latest book get it now oh since we're sitting at the durham farm right now in case you didn't already catch it you all have to go watch season three of cal in the field which is out we're talking about ryan o'cal callahan one of those episodes is filmed right here with old bubbly Doug on the Duren family farm the details of

whitetail hunt here and shows all about Doug's conservation efforts to test and monitor CWD in the area Ocal also Spears fish and hunts rice ducks and other episodes so go check him out educating you all on youtube go to the meat eaters youtube channel subscribe check that out also this also related to doug's farm the first episode of yanni's show yanni the latvian lover putellis his show on the hunt is out now one episode was filmed doing what we're just doing, hunting turkeys on the Durham farm. Yanni also goes for black bears with clay, hunts elk with Jason Phelps and Dirk Durham,

does his first ever self-filmed episode pursuing whitetails in Michigan, and he hunts turkeys with our friend Rue Matt. We're launching a giveaway in association with the new series, so head to TheMeatEater.com to sign up for a chance to win a custom curated gear package handpicked by Yanni himself for your own hunting needs.

Oh, check this out. I didn't think this was possible. In Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Game Commission just found, you're a reference, Doug? I am.

Did the transition throw you? It's about turkeys. Oh, okay. Here you go. Speaking of turkeys, a 12-and-a-half-year-old wild hen. Man, that seems ancient. I know, because here's the thing, man like this isn't always true but i've checked this with two turkey biologists i heard this i verified it with two turkey biologists

and it's like here's the thing you can safely say and we've said it many times on the show of the eggs that hit the ground now this is just running averages okay average there's all kinds of exceptions but average on average so uh they'll lay about a dozen eggs. Okay. Of the eggs that hit the ground, 75% won't hatch. Of the eggs that hatch 75% won't see their first birthday. Of those that see their first birthday, 75% won't see their second birthday. Just very round numbers.

Yet they get a 12 and a half year old hen. Previously captured and tagged as an adult in 2012. Clearfield County. Yeah, that's crazy. So they've been tracking her for a decade. They just threw aps tracker on her now unbelievable wow like she must just always make the right decision right yeah you know what i mean like go right or go left left yeah that's crazy or it'd be interesting to know more about her life history.

Is she somehow infertile? Huh. And has never ground nested? I don't know. Has she really... She has survived incubating nests 11 times? Good question. Spending the night on the ground?

As Clay Newcomb's relative said, never fall in love with a ground nesting bird. You know? Yeah. Unbelievable. Wow. Another oddball thing, totally different. Have you guys seen this?

This is in Michigan. They're trying to find out what is up with this deer. There's some photographs that emerged where a white-tailed doe was missing both of her rear hooves. Explain what that looks like. It's just insane. It's just white leg, like white, dry white leg bones

emerging out of her from below her knee. So she's walking on her. It's just a joint down there, right? Just a white, a clean, pure white. Just like that leg bone.

Six inches of leg bone. No hooves and she's both of them like done in a hospital like both of them exactly the same and she lived like that and walked around on those bones you know it's kind of like a corn dog it's like corn dog legs

the wood part of the sticks are just sticking out no hoof no nothing just walking on that oh and i saw the picture i was like it it's so there's pictures of her alive and pictures of her dead showed up in a bulletin board called michigan outdoorsman in 2013 it was at that time had been taken several years earlier. No location or other details. Who'd this come from? Heffelfinger? Heffelfinger. Heffelfinger's trying to find out. They don't know the age of the deer or how long it was out and about that way? Heffelfinger reached out to Chad Stewart at the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and he asked their recently retired pathologist

who'd been in that job over 40 years. Never saw or heard of that animal. Never saw or heard of what is up with that deer. He didn't know. Went and searched the archives from 2012 to 2015, so around the time these pictures emerged. No evidence of that deer coming through the lab, of someone being like,

how did this deer live walking around? It'd be like if you had, imagine that someone cut your foot off at the ankle, stripped the muscle and flesh up halfway up your calf, and then got a trail cam picture of you. And they actually have pictures of this thing walking around if doug went to 2013 his camera set out at the navel i bet that deer comes through there doug's like oh here i got a picture of the loss of speed at the navel. Hevel fingers dying to know about this deer.

Yeah. So if you know about the deer, and holy cow, what a bizarre picture. I'm skeptical. That it could have lasted long that way. But it's 2013, and look at that picture of it, the trail cam picture of it. Yeah. God. What do you mean you're skeptical? There's something I'm not getting here. 2013 and look at that picture of it the trail cam picture of it yeah God what do you mean you said you're something I'm not getting a doctorate image some I don't know I have no idea doesn't look like one no no it doesn't I saw it okay

guys the thing about it is like half a finger I mean we got a song about helpful finger he's not dummy oh no that's that's the thing coming from Jim but I'm wondering if Jim's looking into it skeptically himself. With the same skepticism, yeah. Trying to pin it down. You know what I always say. Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect. Yep, I wrote that down.

Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know know sucking high and titty there on x is now in canada the great features that you love in on x are available for your hunts this season the hunt app is a fully functioning gps with hunting maps that include public and crown land hunting zones

aerial imagery 24k topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team.

Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit on X maps dot com slash meet on X maps dot com slash meet welcome to the on X club y'all Corinne found a great we always like to cover

in wildlife news misleading wildlife news headlines this is ridiculous this is the best one so there's a famous bull elk that lives in Rocky Mountain National Park. Okay. Somehow this bull elk has three nicknames. He's nicknamed Kahuna, which is mildly not PC. That being Hawaiian for chief. He's nicknamed Bruno.

And he's nicknamed, this is by the hunters who have seen him, Big Thirds. So yeah, most part people are like, I don't understand Big Thirds. I'm going to name him Kahuna. I'm guessing he had big thirds. He lives and dies in Rocky Mountain National Park.

There's some photographers that have tracked him over the years. They said he seemed to have gotten injured during the rut, came out of the winter looking wasted, very thin, weak. They find his body and it's covered in mountain lion tracks and scavenged. He had already shed one antler, so he's only got one antler left.

Apparently someone hauled off the skull and antler. Some park goer just couldn't resist the temptation. How is this reported? In the tech and science section. Newsweek. Take a guess at the headline. Doug? I can't even begin to. here it is from the tech and science

desk no less of newsweek famous elk beheaded in rocky mountains oh my god the remains will return to the earth famous elk beheaded in rocky mountains there's really nothing it just doesn't end no oh the garbage but what these people do though that i don't get is the letdowns they inspire the letdowns the disappointments because i would see that headline i'm like holy shit i'm gonna read this right that's what happened to me that's what happened to me yeah and then you're like oh that's what happened yeah well you i think ago, I remember you saying one time, and I really made me kind of rethink how I look at non-hunters. I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt. You made a great point one time how, why would this matter to them?

They don't hunt. They have no connection to hunter. So how can you expect them to know all these nuances that we will argue about and we'll fight about? They don't know the main topic and we'll fight about. They don't even know the main topic, and we're arguing the nuances. But then this comes along, you think, all right, though, come on. You're going way beyond even objective fact here

with that kind of headline, that kind of storytelling. Yeah. Not a whole hell of a lot to say about it. No. We'll keep talking about it. Another interesting thing that I've been seeing a lot lately is someone, a photographer who found it before it was beheaded, said that he felt humbled touching its antler. I don't understand that. I have no idea either.

Yep. Would you mind pulling up real quick what it means to be humbled? Well, I mean, I would assume that it's, you know, whether it was that the antler is from such a large animal, that the antlers are large or it takes a lot of energy to grow these. And it changed his feelings about himself. I don't know. Maybe this guy's just got some psychological issues. No, I'm not down.

I'm just curious. What actually happens when you get... I mean, I know, but I don't know. I just want to hear straight from the dictionary. When you're humbled, you're like put in your place. Or at least made to feel like kind of brought down the earth a little bit

yeah lower someone in dignity or importance is a dictionary definition so he touched the antler and felt his dignity lower and his self importance lowered that's a horn hunter right there yeah that's an antler i think if i was trying to solve this mystery i would check that gentleman's garage a person of interest yes no joke in court the the lawyer would be like, is it true that you felt humbled by that antler?

Yeah. Are you sure you weren't awed? Oh, here's a good story for you, Doug. You'll appreciate this. I wish this was better. This always concerns me when you say that, that I'm going to be. Well, I stole that joke. I'm not using it right, but that's a Brian Callen joke.

Oh, yeah. Let's say Callen joke. Oh, yeah. Like, let's say Callen's going to tell you, like, the most, like, let's say Callen's going to tell you a story about, like, the worst sex offender.

He'll say it. He'll be like, dog, you'll appreciate this. And then tell him about something he saw on the news. You'll appreciate this, Doug. So, there's a guy,

so, Corinne likens this to when you, but Corinne, can you explain what an online, you liken it to an online love scam, but I haven't been, I haven't had a love scam. Have you?

I have not, but I've. But you haven't shown up for a a love scam have you i i have not but i've like you haven't shown up for a date that turned out to be no no but it's like you'll hear about these instances of people who meet others online so you don't know if they're a real person or not but there have been you know for years these scams where you know someone who i don't even want to call them desperate it doesn't have to be desperate you're interacting with someone over email who you imagine to be the person who they say they are in these emails uh maybe you think you've seen proof that they exist because they've sent you photos which doesn't't necessarily mean anything. And there's like a sob story. There's a whole sob story

and they entice you into sending money somewhere over Western Union, over whatever it is. So when I read this, that's exactly what I thought about. Someone took that. Most famously, it's like a guy in Nigeria who has all of the king's money. And if you could just send him 300 bucks, he'd be able to bring all the king's money to you. Right?

This is a guy who took this. I always love this because it's so specific. Somehow this guy starts selling hunting leases in Ohio that don't exist. Huh. For big money. For big money. He's selling $5,000 leases. He sells a lease to a guy and the guy goes

over there to start scouting and the landowner comes down being like, what's going on? He goes, well, haven't you heard? We just leased this place. Guy's like, you what? I am interested so then they get yeah they catch the guy they get him showing up to collect his money like the

fishing game gets involved and he's got like wire fraud and all that did you have fish and wildlife service get involved in this I suppose we went across the lines. I think U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service even got involved. Ohio Department of

Natural Resources Division of Wildlife was involved. Yep. Involved in search warrants on social media. They did it in connection with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service because it was wire fraud outside the state. And U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service it's kind of credit to them they took it real serious oh yeah

uh so protecting sustainable hunting of america's wildlife resources is bedrock to our mission in the u.s fish and wildlife service said assistant director edward grace from their office of law enforcement investigating those who prey on individuals attempting to hunt lawfully by defrauding them is our trusted responsibility to the american people here's where it gets uh here's where here's where so he's guilt the so he's guilty. The guy pled guilty. His name's Knox. Pled guilty to wire fraud. He's scheduled to be sentenced. Maximum penalty, which,

yeah, like, you know what? He'll get like a day. The maximum penalty, 20 years. That's, yeah.

Huh? Wow. Can you imagine if the judge actually did that? 20 years. I'm not shitting either. 20 years. Did they,itting either 20 years did they did they talk about how much money he defrauded people of uh man yep at least 59 of the individuals he was he interacted with sent initial payments to this defendant totaling over $34,000.

You know, and the other question that comes to mind, I mean, the criminal mind generally is not a real sharp one. How can you say that? Okay. In this case, how did this guy not think he was going to, how did he think he was going to get away with this? Eventually, I guess he, it went on for a while, but how did you think you were not gonna you're all like when he like presented his business his like criminal business plan yeah and here's how i'm gonna get away here's where i'm confused when the people

show up to hunt the leases i mean i guess if you're sending the money to someone then yeah it just seems like it's gonna catch up with you eventually oh check this out they found this sweet knife in what country was it norway in norway way up high in the alpine area in the mountains they found an old caribou like a caribou hunter's knife around with all kinds of other well reindeer there because it's europe with other like reindeer hunting equipment like they'd build these sort of like drive lines and he had a birch burl handle it was metal like they had metal technology a metal knife big long tang inside runs the whole length built around a birch burl handle laying on the rock like some

bitch left it there last week. Yeah, it's awesome. Beautiful. I mean, rusted but like beautiful. I mean, not even that much rust. Just like a little bit. It could have been, you know, your old knife. They say in that area, because it's dry, high country stuff. They got all kinds of arrows

laying around that long. You'd be like look at like oh look an arrow melting out of the ice and stuff look at that knife isn't that crazy yeah and who hasn't done that left the knife behind go where the hell i leave that knife and let's buy a gut pile out in the oh yeah and this article gets into something interesting that um around that time 1500 years ago the vikings began to establish trade networks for caribou hides and in goods and they can and then when they go and look at like genetic stuff they can see that the populations start to bottleneck out huh like they were over hunting once they developed like good networks, they started pouring the coals to them.

Yeah. And they see that they really started to reduce the numbers significantly. Contemporaneous with them establishing markets, which is very similar to the, you know, what happened to the American bison. Yeah. Okay.

Everything clicking along. And the minute someone wants to give you a couple bucks for the hide, talking them down. right yeah uh so what i'll give people an update on uh yeah yangness since oh do you want to tell people where you're going to be next wednesday next wednesday isn't it next wednesday um i'll be i'll be turkey hunting next wednesday yeah no i thought you're gonna be in atlanta eating it oh oh yeah well it, it's actually in two days, Wednesday. Oh, that Wednesday. Yeah. You'll have already eaten at Kevin Gillespie's gun show.

Oh, you're going to be at a gun show. Oh, it's so good. Yeah, I'm actually going home and packing up and then heading out tomorrow at 6 a.m. Oh, awesome. Yeah. So what's going on in hunting land? Have you had, you didn't have any, you guys didn't have any success here.

A dog at the during place wasn't able to produce for you. Yeah, but all that loss, you know, we got Mikhail out there and we heard tons of gobbling and saw a ton of turkeys. And so I think that's totally worth the trip. Was this her first turkey hunt? If you count us walking out a few days ago because the season's already started in Minnesota. So we went out for a run and gun style on Wednesday evening after school. And then, you know, we got ready to come here.

So officially it's her first time out like sitting in a blind for a long time. She must have really liked it to be out that long. Whatever he has to do, you got to twist her arm, man. Y'all's got the same attorney as Steve. No, that part was non-negotiable. She was getting contentious with Pat and I a little bit

because she wanted to stay here with the kids. She's like, can we just go for 30 minutes? Pat and I are like, no, they can't be. You got to be a pretty good turkey hunter to do a 30-minute turkey hunt. Well, that was our explanation. You got to have one of Jimmy's ones that's hung up in the briar. We said, if you shoot one in 30 minutes, we'll be back here within an hour.

It could happen. And then what happened last year's season? Last year's season, did a ton of hunting. I missed an eight-pointer via shotgun. I texted you about it, but you gave me no sympathies so so missed one on opening day and uh of the rifle season and then didn't see one after that and then my brother and i went out um a few times and my buddy went out a few times down in Rochester and we went out one day it was the last day of the archery season and then the next day would have been

the CWD hunt so I was sitting in the tree with my bow and it was getting cold I mean it was like sub 10 degrees or something like that um i was fidgeting with my gloves and you know this tiny spike came by and i didn't i didn't have i didn't have a chance to shoot and so that was that and then the next day was the cdwd hunt and we we didn't see any that came by so so that was it yeah that's like what yanni always says. Always be hunting. Yep, so close, but I feel like we're getting closer. But it's still time well spent. How old are you now?

Me? Yeah. 43. You still got time. Look at Doug. 63, I'm still. Yeah, Doug, you got 20 more years of deer hunting ahead of you, at least. Doug's still kicking. Yeah, well, my only slight regret is

I started late, right? And so, yeah, but looking forward to it. Yeah. That's good. Your seasons are much shorter. The archery season is mid-September all the way to end of december oh okay okay and then you got the rifle mixed in there you know um uh i bought a bunch of more

right firearms since we last met sometimes that's all it takes right yeah well i was telling these guys the you know minnesota split into north and south zone so So we ended up hunting or I ended up hunting with my brother and my buddies just mostly in the south. The couple days after I missed that buck, I was with a regular 12-gauge shotgun with the smooth barrel and you had to have the rifled slug.

Well, two days later I went and bought an actual bolt-action slug gun shotgun itself so I could use it pretty much anywhere in the state yeah and when you get your first deer I think we ought to have a party with yeah let me call y'all first deer party you'll you'll be the first one to know Doug asked him must have been Friday or so how many guns you have now then because he's telling you he's planning his gun buying spree.

I think he said 10. Then Doug asked, well, what are they? And he started going through his list and Doug says, that's only six. What about the other four? And I think he kind of stumped you. Yeah, yeah. I think he got up to eight. Yeah, it was eight, but

it really is 10 if you count the handguns. You know, because I do have two handguns. then i i do have a muzzleloader now you know i haven't shot it yet but right after the muzzleloader season um my brother and i like well i think if we want to keep hunting a lot we we need to get into on this muzzleloader action so yeah him and i went bought two muzzleloaders and you know it, it's got the, you know, the pellets, um, you know, it's, I guess they call it the inline muzzleloader. Yeah.

I learned all about it this year for the first time. We should muzzleload hunt together sometime. I just started doing that. So it's like, we're getting, we're new at it together. Sounds great. I happen to get two with one though.

Do you got a, um, a promising hunt plan put together for this fall? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, you know, got after the turkey season, you know, we're probably going to, you know, I think the one thing I've been learning throughout this process is you got to do a lot more scouting. So we did a ton of scouting before the turkey season. And then as soon as this turkey season ends, you know, it's going to go back into, you know,

archery mode and scouting mode for the for the summer so yeah so yeah it's going to be archery you know rifle and then muzzleloader yeah and then you know whatever the cwd hunts are will be um typically they have two at the end of middle december and this december if when when you get and I'm saying when, when you get a deer, do you imagine you'll do all Hmong preparations or do you think you'll do like Joe Blow American preparations? Well, the Hmong preparations are really just soup, which is another thing is my brother and I said that one day

when we can get this group together, we'll cook up this. If you literally translate it, it's poop soup, right? Go on. I'm trying. Which is basically everything in this big pot. It's what kind of soup? Poop soup. Sounds appetizing.

Well, I mean, I'm translating literally. I'm sure a word means something different. It'd be like everything but the kitchen sink pretty much i mean you clean you clean out the um you know you're talking the stomach you know you're talking the intestines everything about the kitchen sink from the deer yeah from the deer oh yeah oh yeah yep okay start from scratch now because now i'm intrigued yeah yeah i mean it's it's really just i mean there's nothing special to it. It's just, you know, typically we don't throw away anything. Yeah.

Right? And so, and that's the one. Yeah, because you guys' people are more connected to the days of want than our people. Correct, yes. Who have been softened and spoiled by opulence. Yeah, so if, you know, and I grew up in you know in the Twin Cities when we have our you know cultural rituals you typically go and you butcher a pig or a cow to be basically you're offering that up to the

ancestors or to do this ceremony like if you have a newborn you know everybody you invite everybody and they tie strings on their hands. It's, it's actually a Thai ceremony, um, in origin, but, um, you typically butcher a cow or a pig and you invite the whole community or your family. And that's one of the things that they do is they take, they save everything including the skin and they use it all in whatever type of dishes that they're cooking for the day.

This big pot of stew is usually one of the main things because it can feed a lot of people. And it's got stomach in it. It's got everything. Anything you can imagine goes in there except for the heart. Did you listen Doug, I got to. Right. Did you listen, Doug? I got to revisit something.

Did you listen to the episode? When he was on the first one? The Yaw was on? Yes. When he talked about the clan of Hmong that can't eat heart? I vaguely recall it. Well, we're going to do a game of chicken. No, what's it called?

Not chicken. Telephone. Oh. If I get this straight. And by the way, audience, that's episode 277, Driving Squirrels with the Hmong. Which should have been called Hmong Dudes or Trouble. So let me know if I get this straight. There's a legend or a story where there's a...

And it's a curse, actually. It's a curse. There is a... One of these events is occurring, and they put the heart of a what? A cow. They needed the heart of a cow. Just tell the damn story.

I mean, I know the gist of it, but I just want you to retell the story. Okay, so they're cooking this big pot and in that pot is the heart of, depending on who tells the story, it's usually a cow. When it came

time to come take the heart to go and do whatever they needed to do with the heart, they couldn't find it. In the pot. In the pot. Anywhere.

Looked high and low, couldn't find it. So they blamed it. They didn't look in the pot. They looked in the pot, couldn't find it. So they blamed it on this young boy or kid or a young man or a young kid. And long story short short they used his heart oh so they you know ended up killing him used that used his heart for this because you have to because they had to They needed a heart. I'd like to see that contract. So,

so, but you had, there was some details about that boy. Yeah. So, you know, apparently he, that boy,

young man had a, like a mental disability. And so he, he was essentially easy to blame because he couldn't defend himself. So they used his heart and blamed it on him. When everything was said and done and they're cleaning out the pot, they find the cow's heart stuck at the bottom of the pot and it was there all along oh

so then this kind of cover-up ensues right and one of the relatives or i can't remember it was it was a woman uh it was it was a woman because it was a woman who laid the curse on the men. So her curse was that from this day forth, all you men, if you ever eat a heart, you're going to go blind. And that curse affects certain subclans of the Yang. I'm a Yang, so it affects certain subclans of the Yang. So you can't eat a heart? I can't eat a heart. Wow.

I don't think I'd chance it. And you honor that. I do, yeah. That's one of the first things you learn growing up. No heart for you. No heart for me, yeah. So I was sharing this last time was two things you learn growing up is, you know, you can't eat heart as a male member of the family. And you can't marry somebody with the same last name, regardless of subclan.

So. Huh. I think that poop soup's going to be great. Yeah. Yep. I like your attention to detail and the level of detail that you're able to delve into these stories really well. I just find it fascinating. So what do you do by the curse, right? But you kind of hear, you know, when you go to family gatherings, you kind of hear, oh, you know, we got the son-in-law over there who can't eat hearts.

So you guys kind of watch out for that. It's kind of like this known thing. The people take it seriously. Yeah, they do. They do take it seriously. It's kind of one of those funny things, but not so funny things. Wherever you go, you kind of... What's this have to do with the Saturday

before Thanksgiving? By but by that I mean when you I guess what I was thinking it was in general when you cook stuff or when you and when you get large gatherings you know you just kind of it's just a known thing that you watch out what you put in all the dishes. So not putting your heart in there. Yeah, yeah. Because you have members that are affected by that. Oh, I think Doug was going to invite me to something.

So that has to do with Thanksgiving. I'm talking about the Saturday before Thanksgiving. Trying to hook something up. I think you're getting an invite. Yeah. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. So the Saturday before Thanksgiving. Doug's not getting to the point. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. Doug's being a little. So the Saturday before Thanksgiving.

Doug's not getting to the point. Right. Saturday before Thanksgiving is opening day of the gun deer season here in Wisconsin. Okay.

Where we can shoot bucks and does and it's a nine day, it's a nine day season. I'd love to have you come and join us. That'd be great, Doug. I mean,

I don't have anything planned. If you did, you just cleared that.. That'd be great, Doug. I mean, I don't have anything planned. If you did, you just cleared that. Yeah. I will say this about that, though. We don't eat any deer before we get it tested for CWD, so you can't, we won't eat, you know, fresh venison from that particular weekend. Sure.

You got to eat the old deer. You got to eat the old deer, so usually there'll be some, there'll be some around, but not the whole poop soup thing. Well, I'll make it if you want some.

Well, maybe we can make it out of something else. Oh, you guys work out the details. Yeah. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land,

hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team.

Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try 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 doug yes well first off i thought uh you have a comment about kids and organized sports yeah i do have several um well but it's just been give me the most interesting yeah well the interesting thing is listening to you and you and katie going back and forth and knowing and loving both of you and knowing and loving your kids. Um, I agree with, I agree with her,

um, about the skiing thing that the kids getting the opportunity to go skiing. I understand why, how it affects things with you. And then you, you were, uh, sounded like there was some rub about organized sports and whatnot.

Um, I don't like commit. I don't want to commit myself to doing all that stuff for a bunch of weekends in a row. Yeah. I'd rather come to like Doug's place. Even if it was, yeah. So, I mean, so I played sports all through school. I went to college, played basketball.

I taught high school. I was a high school coach. Um, my daughter didn't play. She played volleyball for a little while, you know, kind of gave up on it. Wasn't something that I was, that I, I pushed her towards kind of gave her the opportunity if she wanted to do it. And, um, the thing that I, even though she's five 11, even though she's five 11, she had a pretty bad ankle injury. She's just like, ah, I'm going to quit playing sports. And I was like like that's fine um

so all of those that background sports and then i build and manage athletic fields for part of my living um so it seems and i had pretty good experiences as an athlete and and and all of that but i also have a wrecked knee a wrecked ankle um all kinds of sports injuries that um had i do to do my life over i would have gotten more i think i would have liked to have gotten more interested in life lifelong sports which skiing is one of the things that i really like no but i understand is like i'm trying to agree with you and you are not gonna let me it lays waste to people oh yeah i know i p i know people got hurt really bad but lifelong sports is sort of and and that's what i like about your approach is let's do lifelong sports um and uh so even

though i have had all this experience in sports and a lot of positive things. I've also seen the ugly side of like parental involvement with sports. I mean, embarrassing moments with people, with their kids. And because I've been around it and I mean, I had parents confront me when I was a coach about their kid, not playing enough and, you know, and all of that. And so I kind of admire the discussion that you and katie have been having about it and boy i tell you hang around with your kids they aren't suffering from any you know lack of opportunity for various things and um so you know you guys keep working that out

all right let's let's move on to the next thing I got to talk to you about. You have a right to speak about this because when we had Uncle Ted on the show, Ted Nugent, he and I talked about you a fair bit in the context of CWD. And you had... I'm normally not interested in retorts, but you felt that it came down to factual issues.

Yeah, sure. So this would be filed under correction, not a retort. Well, I appreciate that. And yeah, people reach out to me anytime i'm mentioned on the podcast yeah someone called you uh what they say watch out don't mess with nugent fat boy or something i told you how'd that come about oh it's just something i bet you beat that person's ass oh i can you imagine if you got to fight whoever that was when uh when i was on the rogan podcast and i uh referred to nugent as the guitar player um i got messages from a guy who said i'll come to casanova and kick your ass and i said that's why i sit with my back to the wall

can i see bastards like you coming i was i was more confrontational in those days i have since mellowed and um uh wow and then was really interesting after that is Joe is texting me after that podcast and he's texting with Nugent at the same time and I said oh if you're texting with him can you ask him if he felt disrespected by that comment because it was the only thing that I actually had planned to say if I'm going to listen to if I want to learn kick-ass Detroit guitar licks I'll listen to Ted Nugent if I want to learn kick-ass Detroit guitar licks, I'll listen to Ted Nugent. If I want to learn about chronic wasting disease and epidemiology, I'll listen to people like my co-guest here, Brian Richards. And I asked, you know, ask him. He goes, no, he thought it was a great line.

Well, like, okay, well, something that Ted Nugent and I agree on. So, you know, that was pretty cool. And so, yeah, somebody called, somebody called well i mean the fat boy thing i was like yeah i know i could lose a few pounds but um oh i don't know who that is but you would beat his ass i had a pinched nerve in my shoulder and i wanted all day i'm telling my kid like try to dude when doug was like i made doug caress it a little bit you realize he could just crush the bones in his shoulder like he could have driven his thumb out my armpit. I wasn't even pressing hard.

Can I tell you a real quick story about Doug's strengths? We were loading up deer into my truck last fall from his milk shed down here. And for me to haul deer into my truck, I first gagged him on a tailgate and then I crawled into the truck and pulled him all the way in. Doug stood behind the tailgate, picked these deer.

These are adult deer. He picked them up like flower sacks and pissed them in the truck. No kidding. With barely bending over. And my best days are behind me, too. I'm not saying Doug's going to go run down to town and back or something like that. No. But just in terms of moments of power.

You should come over to the side of Jitsu, man. Unless that guy runs, Doug is going to be his ass. Which I think you and I have had a conversation before about that. Like if I locked that guy and Doug in this room right here and shut door and locked it, that dude is not going to be alive. But that's not true. I would sit down and have a reasonable conversation

with him and ask him about his points and then I would make my points and by the time it was all over with, we would be singing Kumbaya. But that didn't work yeah if that didn't work if that didn't work uh so like if you punch doug it doesn't matter hey doug ever done mma no no around here we don't call it you know ufc or they call it farm rass no or an ass kicking contest the first time i went to ufc i'm like watching and i'm going that's an ass kicking contest where i'm from um anyway uh okay so cwd yeah corinne and i were talking about

this earlier and i said you know you need a title a title for the cwd sections because it's really kind of getting you know so i think we should call it eat the burger yeah love it oh that's good yeah yeah yeah so you're not here to tell you're not here to try to say that stranglehold wasn't a work of genius you're here to talk about cwd yeah yeah no i i uh i was stranglehold's a hell of a song and i'm not gonna i'm not gonna uh yeah anyway um the eat the burger part first of all there's a difference between saying yeah i'd eat the burger and being confronted with it i know but i want to carry the burger around but i feel here's here's where you can't you can't take it from here state to state here's where you're your own worst enemy uh i want to get a bunch of cwd burger to bring to present to people who say that they want to eat cwd burger this should be a new show on the media network but pardon my cwd

people the cwd enforcers would these are the people who like you're supposed to do this with your knife and burn your house down after you have the deer in there they would be pissed if i had a little pelican box full of the burger and i moved around with it yeah you couldn't take even though you got deer wanting all over holy hell with cwd you probably need to put it in like radioactive you know kind of see this is the exaggeration that immediately happens but you're right you can't transport it state to state yeah well that's not true you can take meat state to state you it's it's uh and you find out when it's if it's cwd positive it's it's up to you and so i could legally carry the cwd meat around sure you could so and and that's a point that i that i want to make i'm not saying people shouldn't eat uh cwd positive meat i'm saying go ahead and make that decision make it for yourself

but you're you're but that's not even what i wanted to talk about. I know, but hold on a minute. So you're saying that you don't buy it? I buy it. That people would eat CWD positive burgers? I asked Uncle Ted, Deadly Tedly, Motor City Madman, Ted Nugent, if I had a CWD burger made with 10 CWD positive animals ground into a burger, would you eat the burger? He said, I would eat the burger. I believe he would too. Dougie here, Bubbles, is saying he's not buying.

Yeah. I'm saying there's, no, what I'm saying. I think Doug. Can I say one thing? This is not my show, but what you need to do with your test though is put a picture above what the animal came from and you show a picture of like the typical buck to get shot that like i've killed that had tested positive cwd positive looks healthy you show some of the pictures of deer with cwd later in the disease when they're

getting wasted down they're drooling their their heads are rolling around. Put that picture on there and say, would you eat meat off this deer? It's a whole different. You're absolutely right. And in fact, that's where the, you better watch what you say about Nugent fatso or whatever that guy said to me, where that came from. I posted a video after that podcast of a deer that

was brought in by my friend down the road that he pulled into his hunting spot. And here's this emaciated buck who had already dropped his antlers laying there next to their field road, shaking. You've seen the video. And I posted that back up and said, I guess I should have kept some of this and turned it into

hamburger. I understand some people would be interested in eating it. I got a lot of comments about it i was like well that was pretty you know and so you know that's when you became fat boy yeah well and you know again i could stand to lose some weight so i don't i'll take it um yeah that video is something but that's that is absolutely so what pat's saying is that's exactly that's exactly the point and making that choice for yourself is one thing.

Making that choice, unknowingly serving it to other people, and I would even encourage people to think long and hard about it before they would serve it to their kids. Explain why, though. Because of the long trajectory of a disease like a Creutzfeldt-Jakobs variant and the effect that it can have on people. Even Ted admitted that scrapies in sheep is probably the origin of it and it transferred to white-tailed deer, theoretically, that we know mad cow disease transferred from cattle to human beings, it's called a transferable spongiform encephalopathy. Transferable is in the name.

So out of a preponderance of caution and risk reduction, that is why I would do it. And in that long arc of time, I wouldn't feed, I mean, I even sent you guys an email about the venison that we were going to have here, right? I mean, it was a fawn or a deer of the year that had tested, not CWD, not detected. I just felt in being a truthful and conscious person to let you know this is the

case. This is what this means. And we both said, you know, we'll eat what you eat. But I wouldn't want to make that decision for, at least for your kids. So, and that's, I mean, I'm not being hysterical here or anything. I think I just, just being a decent person. So, um, some of the other issues that I have with what, uh, with Ted Nugent said, one of the things that he said, I made notes and I rarely make notes before I come on your podcast. So one of them, he says, you'd have trouble finding 10 deer with CWD. We've had 12 on this farm.

Um, and just for perspective, how many acres? 400 acres. And so we've had 12, and that's over a five-year period of time that have tested positive. And as you fairly represented on that podcast, we were testing deer once they started letting us do that. And now we get every deer tested. And we went from no CWD positive to CWD positive, having CWD positive deer. This past year, we had 24% of the deer killed on the farm, which, by the way, was 40 deer, which was a record number of deer on this farm.

Six out of 10 bucks, antlered bucks tested positive. So our anecdotal evidence follows the data that testing shows. Anyway, and we've had sick looking deer on the farm that we've not been able to shoot, but we've had them on camera in the middle of the summer when they shouldn't be looking sick. Like some of the deer right now look unhealthy. I mean, even some that we've seen as we've been out and about, but it's spring of the year and, you know, winter weakens and spring kills. And so, you know, deer don't do real well sometimes. You can just see them out there just eating like crazy right now because they're building back up their reserves. So there's that.

Another one was the vitality of the herd. And there actually are four studies out there and you can look them up. I put them, I sent them to you, Corinne, and they can be put in the show notes that the Boone and Crockett Club, a fairly reputable organization, did articles summarizing them that showed where populations were affected by

chronic wasting disease in four different areas. So there's that. I mean, it's actually population levels are being affected. But then also what we've seen or what's really been seen south of us is that the age structure of the herd is being affected. So that there are a lot of deer still south of us. But what's happening is the older deer are dying off and the herd is trending younger. And so over time, that is a particular concern to people who like to hunt big giant bucks. Here in Richland County, we're still killing big giant bucks. In Iowa County, they're still killing them, but they're killing fewer of them. Here in Richland, especially

Northern Richland County, with our prevalence level still being pretty low, we're not seeing that, uh, that issue yet. But this past year, um, we killed, uh, my friend Chip killed a five deer was already showing the, the, uh, signs, not physically, but mentally just by the way he was acting, seeing him pre-rut, um, standing in the yard, like not concerned about anything. A five-year-old buck is usually pretty, uh, uh, pretty, um, wary. Um, so there are four studies. We put that, um at cwd ground zero there's a uh still killing you know some big old bucks but 60 uh there are bucks are testing 60 positive i also sent that uh to you um one of the other things that ted said was that CWD peaked in Wisconsin, Southwest Wisconsin, eight years ago. Well, wrong.

Exactly the opposite happened in 2014, which would have been eight years ago, according to my calculations. Exactly the opposite happened. We incorporated the deer trustee report at that period of time where we quit. We took a more passive approach to chronic wasting disease. And we backed off on herd control and population control, or at least the tools like Earn-a-Buck and longer seasons. And what we saw was a almost straight up increase in the number of of cwd positives and the prevalence so it was exactly the opposite of what he said that we you know that cwd in our area in this area of southwest

wisconsin um changed quite a bit um what else that okay do you contest that when they've done control they've never they've never effectively done anything to control? Like when they do the big shootouts and try to kill them all, that it doesn't have any impact on spread? Do I? Do you contest that point? I'm glad that Pat's here because we can talk about this. Wisconsin gave up due to political pressure. We were controlling the disease.

And it's part of what I'm, what I'm saying is that through herd reduction, through opportunity, we were controlling population, not just for disease control, by the way, but for also for habitat and ecosystem benefits. And when we stopped doing that, having extended extended seasons like the first time you came here we were hunting deer in february um uh and we had earn a buck that was effectively controlling population and actually increasing uh at least my bow hunter friends were saying they were seeing a lot more big bucks on their feet during those periods of time that once we abandoned that that the control was working and once we abandoned that that's when the disease has taken off yeah yeah about 2005 they started compromising backing

off on stuff 2007 backed off yet more lost a lot of the funding from the legislature right because so much political pressure the dnr lost a lot of, I can't remember what the percentages were, but it was a big drop off in testing and control. They no longer allowed them to go out and do targeted harvesting where you go into areas where you know you have CWD, pound that area pretty hard. They were showing it pretty consistently that when they targeted an area, their number of percentage of deer shot with CWD would go up compared to what the hunters

were shooting. So when they could target it by 2000. Say that again? Yeah. The targeted harvesting DNR would go on, they call it sharp shooting, but it's basically DNR employees operating at night with spotlights over a bait pile typically. To try to thin the herd in the area where they found the disease. Right. They would target those areas. They're smart people.

They have logistical people that can look at percentages that, what do you call it, the Bayesian principles of statistical analysis. And they could figure out these areas that were probably the highest incident areas and target them. So when they went and shot those areas, they'd shoot markedly more C2D positive than what the hunters in general were shooting during the regular season. So it was effective. What do they attribute that to, I don't understand? Just that they were able to go in and target just one little area. Oh, I'm with you now.

Yeah, rather than hunters are more spread out. So yeah, so their focused efforts were turning up, were killing more diseased animals than just people in general. And while all that was going on, the first 10 years, 8, 10 years of our problem here, they were, you see the numbers on those graphs, it kind of stayed down around 2%, 2%, 2%.

And that's starting around 2011, 2009. 2009, statistically, you could look at it and see it was changing because it is a slow-progressing disease. It's not like it's going to, you know, touch off right from the start. But within 10 years, though, and they started backing off, those numbers started climbing. And that's a classic wildlife disease term or um problem it starts just going up like a big big uphill climb just right up especially among the

older bucks yearling bucks even but but even the does known in areas like this they're seeing 30 percent infection rates you know south of here so it's's getting worse. But these folks who thought that the first 10 years, because things weren't going up, everything's fine, that we're overblowing the concern, was basically because we were controlling it. Right. And as soon as you backed off, the problem started. And what I would add to that is if you go to Illinois,

and especially northern illinois northern illinois which is just south of southern wisconsin um they have had controlled uh uh targeting sharpshooting down there on a continuing basis and they have controlled the disease down there they've controlled their percentages that's what montana's doing in the breakout areas and they're using hunters to do it too but they're they're going after them hard yeah in areas where they see the disease spring up just to try to like drop numbers yeah yeah it's been really interesting um because i've heard from uh the one ranch manager out there and and alarming alarming numbers and to me out there would be even more of a concern because it and i've never hunted in montana but um it seems to me on the on the hierarchy of big game that white-tailed deer

kind of the bottom of the of the hierarchy white-tailed deer mule deer elk moose all which can be affected by cwd but the white-tailed deer uh are in isolated areas mostly in the river bottoms for at least according to the yeah i've been talking yeah well i mean there's yeah in a general way yeah so in the in the inner montane areas they're in the valleys yeah so there's an opportunity there to control them i had a long conversation with this guy about it and uh to be able to control both the number of deer because he has some of the same concerns i do you know damage to the ecosystem damage to uh to plants that are uh and trees and and that they're trying to grow and they're trying to do good things in these river

bottoms um uh so you know those are those were the biggest things i mean there was there a handful and they're trying to do good things in these river bottoms. So, you know, those were the biggest things. I mean, there are a handful of other things. You know, sort of the conspiracy and the conspiracy theories about it and the deflection that I listened to in that discussion that, you know, the subject got changed pretty um uh pretty quickly and i i just want to defend uh biologists and the people in the science i can't think of any good reason that 99.9 percent of biologists in this country would be concerned about uh cwd or would be a part of a conspiracy to to spread this um or but what what is the conspiracy well because i think that like here uh if you look at the the discussion you're referring to

and i'm not trying to take you to task i'm just saying if you look at the discussion referred to ted said cwd is a thing it's a disease right at a time there were people who questioned like that like they questioned it's the reality like that it's not they're like there's no such thing called that right it was a hoax it's not what he said it is a disease um he feels that it's a disease. Control efforts aren't warranted and aren't practical and aren't effective. And nature will sort itself out and I'd eat it if it's infected or not. Now, if there's other people that have, that they feel there's a conspiracy at play and i and i know people who do i don't know them personally but i know it is

what do they feel the conspiracy is the uh well ted said some of this stuff the insurance companies the you know anti-hunters that there's all those are the kinds of reasons to discourage that it discourages people from hunting and that would that could be a part of it the insurance companies would be like yeah it's serious we should kill all the deer no no no they don't need to pay the claim yeah yeah no no because like they're like man imagine the money we'd save not needing to pay all these deer collision yeah cases if we could build up this disease hoax that would inspire wildlife managers to kill all those deer. I could tell you this.

I have spoken to our county biologists here that was asked to come down and receive something. And then the guy who invited me the their regional director said hey could you say a few words and i look out on this group of you know 40 or so biologists and they all are looking at me like oh here comes the cwd guy like these people didn't get into wildlife biology to spend the biggest part of their career on chronic wasting disease. There's no motivation for them to, to do that. There was, um, you know, the idea that it's the bureaucracy doing it while those folks are a part of the bureaucracy. And I just, I just want to

push, um, um, I just want to push back on that. Um, and so I just will always remember that group of biologists looking at me and I said, you know, I guess the last thing you guys want to talk about today is CWD. So I'm not going to talk about it. And so we talked about some of the other, I talked about some of the other thing. I do want to say though, that he and I agree on a few things. And one of them is that the under harvesting of deer can lead to an increase in chronic wasting disease. And that's absolutely the case. He talked about that a little bit. I was like, right on Ted, you got that. Um, and so I agree with that. Um, the fact that he wanted a

hundred tags so that he and his family can shoot those deer, I guess I have a little suggestion for him. That's maybe bringing some other people to shoot some of those deer because quite honestly i did that one year i shot seven deer and thought to myself well i'm only going to use three of these i'm a deer exterminator at this point and i uh as you rightly said in that thing that you know i love and admire these animals i think as much as anybody and i took that opportunity to then start inviting other people in uh to hunt so that they could have that experience and um so they could learn about the conservation of the white tail deer the conservation of this property and and that's one of the things that we've started to do Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew, our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there on X is now in Canada. The great features that you love in on X are available for your hunts. This season,

the hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24 K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right, we're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function.

As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit OnXMaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. you got to take a guess how many people have hunted how many people in 2021 hunted the family farm 40 wow do you believe that that's a lot geez 40 yeah yeah yeah and it's fun i mean part of what hunting you let 40 people hunt your farm yeah and can you only imagine

spirit right here can you only imagine if that if that attitude was uh infectious i will say this about that yeah yeah so of those 44 actually and i'm happy to say this he invited a person for every 10 acres yeah um then opportunity opportunity hunting opportunity is really important but and let me say this i have um i don't bow hunt as as we've talked about before doug the rd tell me bow hunting is for people who don't have enough to do. That's like such a farmer mentality, man. Well, I mean, think about it.

It's just funny. Growing up when people were running, I grew up running a lot of small dairy operations. And the farmers, man, they knew about hunting and understood why you want to go hunting. But just like you at and um the farmers man like they like knew about hunting and understood why you want to go hunting but just like you at that time late 80s early 90s you could not find a farmer that hunted yeah it's weird because i wanted yeah yeah or that the old so the guys that were like

man the old guys at that time now their kids hunting with a vengeance something happened generationally but like the the family patriarchs okay who were coming out of like the real practical era those guys did not well around here which was similar you know small dairy farms and lots of them the saturday before thanksgiving is opening day of gun season lots and lots of gun hunters everybody gun hunted and you've been here for opening day and even in these years it sounds like feels like christmas sounds like a war i think is what you said and um oh yeah you can't count the gunshots on opening morning yeah and uh well pat wrote an article about it,

like a shot a second. Oh yeah. What was that statistic, Pat? Well, back in 2011, 2010, that era, Wisconsin was killing a deer every second during, during, during the gun season. If you were to take all the numbers, you know, most of it happened in the first two days,

especially the first day, first day. When you, I went and I calculated out how many hours were in a typical hunting day, how many seconds then were in all those combined nine days, then just did the multiplication and thought, yeah, we're killing a deer a second. Some years we're killing 1.3 deer per second. Some years we're killing 0.7 deer per second. That's why I read Pat Durkin's articles because it's that kind of information you don't get anywhere else. I don't want want to name names but i was surprised to hear that uh i was

surprised to hear of a regional outdoor authority finds you too divisive pat with statistics like that what's divisive right i mean i love that kind of stuff um pat does not need to accentuate the titles of his articles he's gonna tone them down a little bit so that was one of the changes that i saw over time right and and i remember talking with mark kenyon about this is like he's like yeah there's this farmer that i know lets me hunt his place and he's just like he's like talk to me for a little bit and then i go hunting but it seems like every year that's what it is um because he doesn't i you know in my sense well he doesn't have time it's for people who don't have enough to do um and that's kind of where that all came from when i was a kid that you didn't

going gun hunting was the thing that we got to do in November because we kind of got the farm stuff done. When I was milking cows here as a young man, my deer hunting clothes were my barn clothes with an orange zip-up hoodie over the top of it. Well, red, because I'm so old that we used to wear red, too. And boy, it was the best cover scent there ever ever was smelling like a dairy cow going out there um and but seeing a deer was you know it was unusual or it was unusual is the wrong word but um you know seeing four or five deer on opening day was like wow we did really well and seeing one with an antler i was like holy moly um and so that's changed and but you know growing up deer hunting was we would i mean you know there was a dairy farm there there was a dairy farm up there there's dairy farm over here all of these and they all had kids and they all had to get fed right and so deer drives were you

know part of it too by afternoon of the second day of the gun season the woods were getting shook up i mean if you didn't have a gun you had a pot and a stick to walk through the woods and drive deer out. That's, you know, so, so there was this sort of this group mentality of hunting and, and that certainly has changed. And the other thing is, you know, big giant bucks and the value of, of, um, perceived or real of big giant bucks are a part of it too, man. And I've been down that road, you know, I mean, you know, we were doing all of that kind of stuff and, um, it all came to a head when I just got tired of, um, managing people and like they're, well, that one's, you know, big enough for whatever. And I was telling you the story earlier, the night before opening

day, I'd sit here on my laptop and click through, well, let's let that one go. He could use another year. And my dad would just sit back there and go, shooter. Every buck that had an antler on it, he would say it was a shooter. It didn't matter if it was, well, that one's three inches, shooter. And so in what we're doing, what I'm doing here with inviting people in, and I do want to point this out. There's a lot of different ways that people are able to

access private land and one of them that's become pretty big around here is through leasing it and i leased this farm for uh 12 days to four guys for bow hunting because i don't i don't do it um and they are or when they started five years ago, they were predominantly trophy hunters. We want to come and kill a big giant buck. Now they have all killed a big giant buck here, but they've also all learned about chronic wasting disease. They've all learned about herd control. And they come here and they have days like we're having

or weekends like we're having, where it's this outing for them as a family the it's a family but they all live in different parts of the country so they come here and here's the place where they come and stay and of course i entertain them with my wild stories of of whatever but um and uh and after that literally the day after those guys leave i have friends who were coming in and hunting and and jack who's the head of that group. It's like, I want to get this clear. So we're paying X amount of dollars to come here and, and hunt. And we're happy to do it because they get first crack at them. Right. I mean, they get to choose what days are going to hunt, but we're leaving tomorrow

and other people are coming in. They're not paying anything anything i just want to settle that in my mind i'm like yeah but you know what they are doing this is the question that i will i'll ask anyone who gets the opportunity to hunt here what is your contribution to conservation what are you doing for conservation um and uh in some cases that can get you you know, can get pretty complicated. But one of the fellows that hunts with me here now has volunteered for the Wisconsin Conservation Congress. He's actually now the BHA R3 coordinator for the state of Wisconsin. And so those are the kinds of contributions that he makes and he gets the opportunity to hunt this place. And he also happens to come here and help with whatever i need you know help with um and uh you know people get

invited here it's sort of like uh pat's a season ticket holder the green bay packers but it's sort of like getting green bay packer ticket season tickets there's this really long list people ask every year obviously i can't let everyone who would like to come hunt here hunt here but i do maintain a list and every year a couple people you know get the opportunity to come here and hunt and so i share this place with people based on their willingness to make a contribution to conservation and now we've started this idea called sharing the land, which we're pitching to landowners to have that same mentality of,

well, let's share this place. And because going forward, that's the kind of thing that is going to benefit conservation. It's going to benefit the animals that are a part of it, and it's going to benefit the land that's the kind of thing that is going to benefit conservation it's going to benefit the animals that are a part of it and it's going to benefit the land that it's that's happening on doug can you talk about sharing the land a bit so yeah yeah lay out the details man all right well i'll lay out the details of sharing the land so um i as i, I sort of had this, uh, revelation epiphany, whatever, about how I would, and having, allowing people to hunt here has always been a part of, of our, our tradition, but, um, how you make those decisions is sort of where it came up.

Um, Elder Leopold, um, about the same time he bought the shack and the farm, you know, the famous thing where he wrote Sand County Almanac, started working with a group of farmers down in this area called Riley, where he and his buddies would go out there and make improvements to a property, conservation improvements to a property. And in return, they they made the they did the work of the they brought material in uh improved the habitat and in return they got uh actually exclusive access to that or uh i don't mean exclusive like no one else could hunt it but they they got permission to hunt that property. Seemed like a really good idea.

Eventually died off, one, because Leopold died, but two, a little thing called World War II was in there. And then really in those days, access wasn't really a problem. You literally could knock on doors around here and people would allow access. And so, you know, a few years ago, I started thinking about that more and how the experience as I've had of, well, how do I decide who gets to hunt here? And this thing came to the idea of what's your contribution to conservation? So we've now formed a, there's a website called sharing the land.com and we're, uh, it's in its infancy. Um, COVID kind of got in the way of doing some of the, uh, some of the things, but, um, there's a group of people that hunt this property

and we're using this to prove the concept that we have an agreement in place. We want people to put together a conservation resume. And if you go on sharingtheland.com, you can find a conservation resume builder there where you explain who you are as a, someone who's interested in conservation and hunting. The landowners, in turn, are also filling out a thing called a cooperating land profile.

And in there, they say, here's my place. Here are some of the things I need help with. And here's what I have that I can offer in return. So it sort of takes away that door knocking thing, um, that, or letter sending, because honestly I get letters and I look at them and they get added to the list. Um, but it, it, it's, it's, it's a little more cohesive that way. And right now we're working on getting, on getting a number of landowners in Southwest Wisconsin. It looks like we'll have six by the end of the year. We're working with some folks in Northeast Iowa who are real interested in it.

And hopefully some in South Dakota. And the idea is that we're knocking down those barriers between landowners and access seekers. And in both cases, people are sort of presenting themselves as they are. Is that big chore list you got on that chalkboard in the mudroom there? Is that the chore list for the people? That's yes. That is a part of it.

Yeah. And most of that stuff is pretty straightforward. We need limbs taken off of my pine trees up there. There's some just general cleanup around here. You know, the kids help me. Your kids, you know, they earn their keep. They came out here and helped me with the mushroom locks. But you got like timber stand improvement,

thinning projects. Yep. Timber stand improvement, invasive species control. Man, there's little carpentry projects if you have that kind of skills one of my guys adam um has come out here and done uh masonry work on the on the barn he's a mason by trade he's like well okay i can fix that can tuck point those rocks that you know the old foundation for you and stuff well what a great thing i mean we're about the, about the barn being here another hundred years. And he's like, I can take care of that for you. And that, you know, that, those are the kinds of things. And, you know, you can walk around here. Hell, you can walk around

and make a list of another 10 or 15 things. The other part of it is this, I've been talking to some of the groups that offer conservation training, right? So like the Elder Leopold Foundation, the Wisconsin Woodland Owners Association, UW Extension. And one of the things is they offer these landowner days where landowners go and learn about their land and invasive species control, timber stand improvement and all of that.

And you go to those things and it's just all landowners. And they're like, yeah, well, who do I get to do this work? And so what our plan is to do is to encourage access seekers to also go to those things and learn about conservation practices, to learn about timber stand improvement, to learn about invasive species control, and then be able to offer those very specific things to a landowner in exchange for the opportunity to access their property, not just for hunting, but for foraging and, hell, to go out for a walk or for skiing, for camping, and those sort of things.

So there's plenty of opportunity out there to lease property or to do, you know, a pay for play. But, and I know how that works. And even some of like the voluntary public access programs and that sort of thing. Well, you know how that works. The landowner gets paid by the government to open their land up for access. Some of them have some habitat improvement to it, but the people who are accessing aren't doing that. They're probably paying money to, or they're being paid to do habitat improvement. So then they have to get somebody

to do that work and they're hiring somebody. So, you know, with the pay-per-play thing, we know what the landowner's getting out of it, and we know what the access seeker is getting out of it. But my question is, what's the land getting out of that? So let's tie all those things together. So the people who get invited here are one thing. The people who get to continue to come back here, there's a relationship developed, right? There's a trust that develops and um uh and this is a way of doing you know of helping people develop that in a very specific way

without as much uh as much unknown about it um you know how yeah i was going to come hunt this year yeah do you think that we could have him go up in the bunk area and try to find all my kids socks yeah well put that on the list let me put that on the show because the cool thing about having find steve's kids shit and mail to steve the great thing about having a list like that is when you take get to take a line and put it through a list like that is when you take get to take a line and put it through it you know that's one of the things about lists is just like you know crossing stuff off of the list because there's nothing worse than having a list that

nothing ever gets marked off on and so what's really cool is this past year i invited um several you know a bunch of new people um to come in and uh and hunt and and folks i know i i got i mean i literally have a list of over 150 people who have asked for permission to hunt here um and as i said they come up oh yeah man i mean i know i keep track of it it's i i just guess yeah if you're writing them down it doesn't surprise me yeah yeah i mean i just i just feel that um thing and you know why i mean people reach out to me i try to answer people who reach out to me and it's because i reached out to a guy once 12 13 years ago and he he wrote me back so that's you know sort of carries forward but i've been

wait do you know that's how me and doug became buddies uh email right he wrote me a letter yeah yeah yeah you shared that yeah and he reached back out and i didn't get many of them back then i thought it was because it was a you know so heartfelt and touching uh i'm joking it was swarms the mail that was a good one but uh yeah and he you know we had this exchange and then my favorite email I ever got from Steve is when I, I said, uh, well, this has been really great. Cause we were like pen pals there for several months, you know, or email pals. And, um, I would answer quickly and it would take him a while to get back to me. But, um, and then I said, well, this has been great. Um, if you ever want a

deer hunt in Southwest Wisconsin, I'd welcome you at the farm. And the response was really? Question mark, when? Question mark. And we figured it out. I picked you up at the airport on New Year's Day in 2010. Yeah. So, I mean, really boring, you know,

get some credit for this whole thing too. Sort of born from that year before i'd invited pat out because he and i had been arguing so our you know ours is based on this uh my admiration for your writing and in the case of pat i actually really had always admired his articles too but then he got something wrong and that's when i decided to write to him and i corrected him and i and i said you know I never thought about it like that. And then we ended up getting together. So to me, it's interesting.

I'm always interested in people who are interesting. And Yaa is certainly one of those people. When I listened to your podcast and growing up in the period of time that I did and knowing what happened in Southeast Asia and with your did and, and knowing what, what happened in Southeast Asia and with your people and then what you went through to get here and, and, you know, just your sort of cheeriness and, and, uh, telling your story. And it was just, it was wonderful. And I was like, I want to meet that guy. And Steve goes, I think I could arrange that. Thank you, Doug.

Yeah, it was fantastic. So that, that you know you can go on um sharing the land.com and take a look at what we're doing and understand that 2022 is our year of of you know continuing to build um landowners i would say that are the harder group to reach although it's been really gratifying we were hoping to you know have like you know one in 10 persons who reached out to us be a landowner and it's been more like 20 to 30 percent oh no kidding yeah yeah and what's been really cool is like uh a consulting forester that works for me uh when he got the email about inviting him out here because he happens to be a private landowner to come to our kickoff party he called me and he said hey our uh chapter of wisconsin woodland owners associations had a couple of bad years of getting together because of covid um and we haven't really had

an event could i invite more people from our chapter and i'm like yes i just need to know if they're coming and then the other part of it is he said i have all kinds of clients a number of clients i should say not all kinds a number of clients who don't hunt but who need these kinds of things done on uh on their property so if you're someone who's looking for access on a property um you know bone up on your conservation skills you know learn what invasive species are and how to control them and learn about things like timber stand improvement and um you know if you learn some carpentry and around here you can learn how to build gates that open and close on their

to my satisfaction to steve's satisfaction um and uh you know just there's just a ton of things to do and and there's a lot of information out there for it but we want to become a a central uh place for that doug you're great american well that's nice of you to say i mean that well i i i i know you do. I know it's sincere. Oh, he's blushing. Dog blush? Dog blush. He's a great American. Well. Great Casanovian? Doing what I can with what I've got. Not Casanova.

Casanova. Casanova. That sounds so exotic, doesn't it? So people that want, I think probably, I don't know, at this point, you probably don't need a bunch more dudes calling you who want to do the work. You need landowners. Yeah. If you got property, what's too small? I think that's really up to them.

You got a 40. Yeah, a 40 or an 80 or something like that you got a 40 and you wanna you're not interested you don't need the you're not looking for like the couple thousand bucks or whatever you got stuff you want done to the land you look out there and you're like son of a bitch look at all those weeds yeah or man it'd be sweet if someone could go and thin that out or i've always wanted to plan a whatever the the list landowners it's so interesting to me because i've done land management consulting and contracting for so long and i've i've worked with a lot of land new landowners and after about their first year the first that it seems like the most common thing they say is man owning a piece of property is a lot of work and like well would you like to get

a little help with that here's how you do that and there's plenty of that going there's a lot of that going on out there i mean i can but this gives a template for people who haven't like spent their whole life immersed in it that's exactly right that's exactly right um and and you can get like if you're open to having your place hunted you'd like to have some projects some conservation projects done on your place or whatever and that's the kind of human interaction relationship you that is more appealing to you you can find ways to get paired up with people, vetted individuals, who've laid out their credentials, and you can have a sort of negotiated,

they'll work on the land with your goals in mind in exchange to do a little hunting. Yeah. Yeah. And access it in any way. And whatever you agree with. And every landowner can decide how much or how little of that, that they're,

they're willing to, to do, but it's important for landowners to also be thoughtful and fair about it. You know? So thanks for letting me talk about that, but it's been my theme you know sharing the land.com at this point it is a.com you know not.org right sharing the land.com shoot doug a note get on his get on his list yeah yeah some dude is on that list is just like,

son of a bitch, I just got knocked off by Yai Yang. I'm telling you, there's no unionization of this. It's just not the next guy moves up. It's completely at my whim. I will say that. Sorry. Thanks a lot. Thank you,rick durgan thank you glad you got good articles

coming up for meat eater always good tell me the next titillate me with the next thing um let's see the next one i i just turned in one last week on um on you can sell panfish in vermont so you can sell panfish fillets. You can sell panfish fillets? Yeah, you can sell panfish fillets. It's on themeateater.com right now. How'd that come into play? Were there folks who wanted to make a living off that? Is this like the first fish that you can sell? It's the only state in the country that we know of.

I think there might be one little spot in Tennessee where during the spring they can sell crappies, crappie fillets. But Vermont, it's basically they go to bait shops, bring in the fish they don't want, and drop off the fish. And that's been going on forever, basically. Oh, it's not something that recently happened.

In the article, I got to go check it out. But what's a pound of wild-caught bluegill flays? Oh, God. These days, I did that. Free-range bluegills. I showed that in the article. Depends how big the pond is. I showed in the article that the one fish, if you can do it,

if you can catch it and sell it in Vermont, the fish that do it is crappie that one is way more expensive than gets a lot more money than uh than like um salmon does basically you know last year what was funny as hell is uh speaking of crappies and turkeys and doug made me think of this the kids tagged out so quick on youth season yeah remember we go up to the pond up there oh yeah yeah and we caught a couple crappies and austin i hook into like i don't even know what dragging the boat around huge fish and i'm just a tussling and fighting the kids are all excited you know what comes up snagged a big snapper by the tail. Oh, is that right? Wow. I mean, I'm like, I don't know what it could be. That's the last thing on my mind.

I was like, that someone like threw some, you know, 80-pound flathead into Doug's pond unbeknownst to him. Like, it just didn't make any sense what this thing was. Between river otters and mink and now the big snapper. Dude, it was so funny, man. Okay, so tell me, so the other one? Yeah, the other article, Steve, I just got done writing about.

In Vermont, from March 25th through May 25th, you're allowed to shoot northern pike and quite a few other fish, they call them cull fish, with a firearm. So guys will sit out in these flooded spawning areas and it goes back into their history, the Revolutionary War period, basically.

And it's not many people doing it, but they can sit up in trees. Some just wait around and you can shoot them with any gun you want. Muzzle loader, handgun,.22 caliber caliber 4 460 rigby if you want to or whether be i mean dude my kid this would be like the thing that he found most interesting in all the planet yeah what's funny that would satisfy like everything he's interested in but what's making big splashes shooting guns at the water.

I got into the whole thing about what it takes because they don't shoot the fish. They don't aim to shoot in the head or in the vitals. They shoot off the side underneath to concuss it. So the concussion.

So I got into the whole thing about why vibration through water is so deadly. So I got a little bit of that in the article too. Good, man. That story starts to make some great. That's interesting. Mention your kid, though.

What's fascinating about it, they've been thinking now that they've tried a number of times to kill the season off out in Vermont, the fishing game department. The fish hunting season. Yeah, they don't like it. They just would like it to be done with because it's just, they think it sends the wrong message. You know, you're shooting in the water and you teach everyone, don't shoot in the water.

Well, here you're shooting in the water. I would think the message it would send is that you can shoot fish in the water. Like, I feel that that's the message. Sends the wrong message. The message being that you can shoot fish in the water. What I found, I think I may have led the article with this whole point was that for decades, or for many decades, they kept thinking,

this is going to die out. Back when they first wrote about it, when I first found articles about it from the 1970s, early 80s, they're read about when i first found articles about from the 1970s early 80s they're talking about the current generation when they age out this will go with them they think it's a dying activity well here we are 50 years later and now i'm the old guys my people my age the old guys doing it but what they're finding is that there's the young kids all they need to do is find out about it yeah i'm no kidding once you find out about any kid in america with a gun and said oh if you feel like

it and you want to wander around out there with the light at night and you see a fish go ahead and shoot it yeah yeah and the kid so it's not gonna go so it's basically a few kids doing it and then then they then they kind of go away for a long time then late in life becomes a thing like well my grandfather could do this his grandfather could do it we're going to keep doing it and it becomes a rights issue and this one guy i talked to interviewed for the article pointed out that so you know in recent decades we've had a big big movement in our country i have a constitutional right to hunt and fish in Wisconsin, a constitutional right to hunt whatever state it might be.

He says, Vermont put that in their constitution in like 1790, whenever it was, they formed the state constitution in Vermont. It was a right to hunt and fish. It was part of their constitution. So anytime you mess with that now, you're messing with their history. And it gets real contentious when they try to

get rid of anything. Good for them. Great story. That's great. All right, check out Durkin's articles, TheMeatEater.com. Check out Yao Yang. He'll be appearing at Gun Show

and Doug's Farm. Yeah. Thanks, everybody. Yeah. thanks everybody yeah OnX Hunt but hear this on X hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips. You Canadians, the great features that you love and on X are available for your hunts this season. Now the hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include

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