The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 446: When an African Cape Buffalo Beats Your Butt

Episode Date: June 5, 2023

Steve Rinella talks with Roger Hurt, Morgan Potter, Ryan Callaghan, Randall Williams, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider. Topics include: The guy who's had a hunting license for over 60 years; recalling the Roosevelt Safari; when you guide Roosevelt and then Hemmingway in Africa; convalescing after a run-in with a cape buffalo; cut-up elk sheds strewn across the land; when the Edmund Fitzgerald photobombs your dad's picture; running into a mob of 500 kangaroos; defining a “concession” in Tanzania; how a great tracker is both born and made; different kinds of poachers; homemade muzzleloaders for which AA batteries serve as slugs; the government official attached to every hunt party; how the Cecile the Lion debacle undermined hunting across Africa; a delicate balance of lion coalitions; the 22-month gestation period for a female elephant; discussing the play-to-play model; defining "safari" as a journey; the double men; what being a true professional hunter entails; pith helmets; 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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over those long summer days. It also includes activities for all different kinds of weather that'll keep them busy throughout the year. Visit TheMeatEater.com for tickets and we'll see you at Shields. this is the meat eater podcast coming at you shirtless severely bug bitten and in my case underwearless meat eater podcast you can't predict anything presented by first light creating proven versatile hunting apparel from merino base layers to technical outerwear for every hunt. First light. Go farther, stay longer. Alright, everybody. The Tanzanians are here.

When you guys, that's what I was telling my kids when you guys came over for dinner. I said, the Tanzanians are coming tonight. They didn't know what that meant. But you're Australian. And you were born not in Tanzania. I was really misleading my kids. A little bit nearer than Morgan. Yeah, he's a little closer than me.

Okay, Morgan, so walk me through how you became to be a Tanzanian. Yes. In Montana. Yeah. Well, it's kind of a long story. And I guess if Roger's the sort of the pedigree, the kind of thoroughbred,

I'm like the, the mongrel. So I, um, you know, African hunting was something that I grew up with. My, uh, my grandfather was an African hunter, not a professional, uh, you know, as a client, he'd go over there, um, in the sixties and seventies, he did a number of safaris. And I always, I was passionate about hunting and I got that from him. And the farmhouse where we kind of lived had a lot of his trophies, a lot of his pictures, a lot of stuff, kind of memorabilia from Africa. So it was just kind of always like under my skin, I guess. And I think like a lot of people, I sort of hit this period in my early twenties where I was like, what am I going to do with my life? You know, odd jobs here and there aren't cutting it. Didn't go to college. And, um, I kind of thought about, you know, taking hunting as a profession further.

And I went up to this place in Northern Australia, met a guy that was, um, hunting water buffalo up there. There's these free range Asian water buffalo in Northern Australia, like thousands of them. They, they had this colony that they tried to establish up there and they realized they couldn't use British breeds of cattle. So they brought these water buffalo as like beasts of burden and meat animals. And the colony ended up failing and they just kind of opened the corrals and were like, off, you know, get out of here. Came back like, I think it was 70 years later and there was like 20,000 of the things. I got a few friends that from here that have gone there to do that. Yeah. It's, it's awesome.

Oh, yeah. No, I just have always had a high fascination with those water buffalo. Yeah, absolutely. And maybe it's the crocodile Dundee, which is probably a horrible reference for you. It's a tough one to swallow. But they don't put those in crocodile Dundee. No, there's that scene where he does the... Yeah, he does the... You remember that? I forgot about that.

Yeah, that bull that was in that movie is super famous. It's like mounted in a bar down there. It's actually, it was like a eunuch. Like, I don't know what the right term is. Like that means like a bullock. That specific animal. A eunuch? He'd be a steer.

Yeah, I guess, or a bullock. Is that the other... It was born with... No, no, no. It was castrated. And that's why it has those massive with. No, no, no. It was castrated. And that's why it has those massive horns. Oh, no, no, no. A castrated.

No. A castrated ox is a castrated. Yeah, an ox. There you go. It's an ox. An adult castrated. Yeah, exactly. Like a castrated, an adult castrated bull.

Yep. Is an ox. Is an ox. Yeah, it was an ox. Hence the enormous kind of spread on those, on those horns. But yeah, they're a fascinating species and they're, um, they're, they're pretty different from African buffalo, but really, I mean, it's an incredible area of wilderness where you go hunt them. It's, they're impressive for sure. Um, so I went up there, I kind of got, got hired for that to really see. And I guess for me, it was about seeing if I could be a guide. Um, and, and I think I did all right, despite my sort of youth and inexperience. Um, and then this guy came out to make a movie about all the species of Buffalo you can still hunt in the world. How'd that movie do?

Uh, I think it did. Okay. It was a call. It's well, it was called Buffalo hunters, but it was, it was a German production, and I think the Germans have a different vibe around there. There was a lot of, like, recreates, and I'm a terrible actor. Let me just give you the, like, just heads up right now. I don't hold that against you. Oh, man. And so, like, I had a tough one with the recreates.

They sort of always have that look where, like, if someone films you hunting it looks like whatever looks normal maybe you're a little goofy but generally you look natural but then if someone's like all right walk back there and do that again you always look like an idiot i think yeah i'll give people a little heads up for people at home if you're watching hunting shows and you're looking for the recreates uh if someone goes to shoot something and you realize you're getting three or four camera angles on it. It's not happening. It's not happening live.

Like, oh, there's a camera guy in front of him. Yeah. Or to the side of him. Seems dangerous. There was a lot of that. That's a recreate. There was a lot of that. But it was cool.

But the guy that made the movie is a phenomenal hunter called Rainer Josch. And his day job was a professional hunter in Tanzania. So after we got done with the movie, I followed him back to Africa. And was this, he told me, but was this what Roger, was this one of you guys?

So he used to work with us from time to time with you. Yeah. People are going to get, people are going to get, well, this will all start making more sense to you people at home. Yeah. It'll,

we'll, we'll fill in the narrative here. Um, but I, uh, and so I sort of came to, uh, I came Robin Hurt Safaris a little later on in my career. How old? Well, I guess I was 33, 34, something like that. And I've been doing this for 13 years now.

Did they have you just carrying water at first and whatnot? Or did you get to jump right in you know it was a lot of following and kind of um you know reiner's one of these guys i mean i'm kind of interested in your take on this because he was one of the guys that i take on it yeah well your take on like what a genius hunter like if there's like a genius hunter if there's a level there are i think so too and like the way well the way i define it i think it's the same i read an article about a math genius one time and he was describing it as like, yeah, he has to work hard and that's the ideal. But really generally like math is just super easy for him and like makes it look easy. And, and this guy, Rainer Josch to me was like that kind of hunter where he just, he made what everyone else had to really work at just look easy when he was doing it. So I kind of had, had the opportunity to learn from him, which was a big deal. Um, and then a couple of years later I got my license, kind of went out on my own for a bit. You did work for some other people. Yeah. There was, at that time there was a reshuffling of

hunting areas in Tanzania and, and kind of Reiner found himself sort of, you know, I guess caught, caught out in the, in the open, not sure where he was going to go next. Cause his, the, the outfit he was working with kind of lost their area. So I, that sort of put me in, in limbo as well. So I ended up kind of doing, um, doing a season in the Saloo kind of with my own clients that was, was really interesting. And it kind of happened early in my career. And I learned a lot from that. It was kind of just being on my own, not having anyone to really follow around anymore. I learned a lot by, by making mistakes, to be honest, kind of, kind of screwing up and.

It's the best way to learn. Yeah, it is. It is. I'm sure there's some former clients of mine out there who might disagree with that notion. Came a long way. Yeah. I like to think I came out of it, you know, better, better at what I do. But it was, it was tough. It was interesting. So how did you guys going to know that name. Because Roger's dad is probably the most famous living African professional hunter now. A guy who's literally had a license for 60 years and came up in the golden age, really. The kind of the second golden age, really the kind of the second golden age, I like to call it kind of the resurgence of, of African hunting after

the second was Teddy Roosevelt. The first golden age Roosevelt was the first golden age in my view. Well, you could argue anyway, it was the second golden age. Yeah. You could kind of argue that like the, the guys that kind of really explored Africa and the kind of black powder era were sort of, I mean, what they saw. Even Livingston.

Yeah, those guys. Dr. Livingston, I presume. Exactly, that whole vibe. So those guys really explored a totally untamed continent. And Roger and I always have this kind of back and forward dialogue about if we could go back in time, like what era. And I always say that era, and Roger's like, oh, you would have died of malaria. Like you would have died of some tropical disease five minutes into your trip.

I think my dad basically started in, in the prime of African hunting, basically where it wasn't dangerous, but it was still dangerous from a medical point of view, you weren't going to die of yellow fever or, you know, all the other diseases. But the hunting was just phenomenal. The wilderness was pristine. I mean, it was, what year was that? That was 60 years back. So yeah, I'd say the, the 50s, 60s or.

Hemingway era. Yeah. Second golden age. Did Hemingway ever hunt with your dad's outfit? No. He did? I didn't think so. He had his one guy.

He had Philip Percival, who was actually on the Roosevelt Safari as a young man. Wow. And was on Hemingway's, guided Hemingway as an old man, which is fascinating. So guys like Percival kind of bridged the two, took some time out to go fight the First World War. Maybe some of them some of them were involved in the second world war too and then kind of like came back into the same dude there's a there's a dude that guided teddy roosevelt on his big yep like his big crazy museum collection like 1910 and then turned around and also hunted with Hemingway? Yep. Philip Percival. I wonder if he liked better.

I bet he liked TR better, man. I think TR probably, I think TR, both of them were macho men, right? In my, I guess in my reading of them both, they were kind of like sort of tough guys. But to have been part of that Roosevelt safari just would have been an experience of a lifetime. I mean, the people involved, they had like a hundred porters. I mean, it was. Oh yeah. It was not a small imprint. Yeah.

No, no, no. And the places they went, I mean, they went all over East Africa. I mean, it's just incredible. He would have had stories for a lifetime off that one safari. Oh yeah. Yeah. A small tangent. Have you ever read a West with the night?

Yeah. Beryl Markham's book. Beryl Markham. Holy cats. That's a great one. Yeah. Love it. Good one? Yeah. Beryl Markham's book. Beryl Markham. Fascinating. Holy cats. That's a great one. Yeah. Love it.

That's a good one. Yeah. Beryl was hardcore. Yeah. And that female, right? Female. Yeah. Yeah.

Pilot and spotting big tusked elephants out there. And I just don't hear that book reference very often. What's it called? West with the Night. No, I don't know that one. It's a great one. So her great grandson used to work with our company. Used to be our sort of main marketing man.

Who was? That's awesome. Beryl Markham's great grandson. Oh, okay. God, man, a lot of, it's all connected. Yeah, in Kenya, everyone's sort of connected. The other day, Corinne and I were talking about, when I was telling her originally about you

after we met after you guys came for dinner I was telling Corinne about you and we got the and I used the word convalescing yes and we're talking about

how no one uses the word convalescing I said he's like convalescing it's a great word he's convalescing in the US after getting the snot kicked out of him by a Cape Buffalo. Yeah, I guess that's one way of putting it.

Have you been telling people you were convalescing? No, I've not used that exact word. You should, Roger. So we got to touch on a couple of things, and then we're going to come back, and we're going to talk about, I want you to tell the story of getting whooped by a Cape Buffalo. Yeah, the impact of that. Who's still alive. He's still alive. He's still out there. You can go going to talk about, I want you to tell the story of getting whooped by a Cape Buffalo. Yeah. The impact of that.

Who's still alive. He's still alive. He's still out there. He's out there. You can go try to find him though. Oh, I'm definitely going to go try to find him. We'll get into that story because it's a good story. And you can explain how when you see him, you'll know.

Yeah. You'll recognize him when you see him. I'll definitely know. He's ingrained in my head. He's got your shorts on his head? Pretty much, yeah. Oh, you know, so here's the thing that happened that we covered. We covered a guy, something of a repeat offender, I believe,

who was up in Jackson Hole, down in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, shed hunting prior to shed season. And he got busted by a Wyoming fishing game. He had been going out and like pre-hunting. Wasn't that right? Yeah, out of season. He was pre-hunting, making little stash piles and then he'd make a little cash and then when season opened you just go in and pick up your cash

but he was also in the field hacking chew toys so he was cutting his he was cutting elk antlers into chew toys out in the field probably for easier transport because you imagine you imagine you take a big ass backpack i mean once you whack them up dude you'd have well just think how many this this is like an old guide joke but it is uh repeated in many circles you know if you want me to make that load easier on you we just cut those antlers off it's like you just lop off a couple of these points and it'll pack a lot easier So Someone wrote in They're like hey I wanted to let you know about what happened

With the antlers that were confiscated Wyoming Fish and Game went out and just put Went out and strewed them Is that a word? Strewed? I know you can strew something Something can be strewn around. Yeah. I think that's a past tense.

They strew. To strew, he strew. Let's say I'm going to go out and strew around. You didn't say that. Nope. Yeah. Yesterday I went out and strewed around some. They littered the mountain.

Broadcast. No. Broadcast is a good one. So like the mountain, the hillside was strewn with Yeah but There's that part of the speech I'm just gonna go Strewed sounds like a soup

Like the kind of soup you might make I made some strewed last night They went out and strewed around All the antlers Back out into the woods They redistributed them in the mountains so that people could have the joy of finding them but a guy sends a picture in and they were out on opening day picking them up and they were and he in his little grip and grin

of him and all the stuff he picked up that day he has the chunks they just flicked the chunks around they chew toys as well yeah so when opening day came you could wander around and you could find it's like they did like an easter egg hunt like an easter egg hunt with antlers it's impressive i don't know what the hell else you do it's a great idea but it's like uh here's part of the problem it's the same way that I wouldn't want to shoot a deer with a collar on it. Cause it would be that it had been touched. It had been soiled by man. So people don't hold that perspective.

As every time we talk about this, we talk about how that perspective is not extend to ducks. Cause getting a banded duck is sweet. Getting a banded duck is great getting a banded duck is great getting a deer with a collar on it is not great i can't explain why you just have to trust me so to go out shed hunting and pick up um chew toys i would feel like there was i would feel that it'd just be not as exciting. Like if you weren't intending to make a chew toy with your shed, ultimately you'd feel a little bit, a little bit gypped. Yeah.

It'd be that it got picked up. It got caught up. It got confiscated. It got put back out. It would just feel like it wasn't like, um, like, like for instance, if you are out hunting morels, it's, it's 60%. It's 40% that morels are good to eat and 60% that's fun to find morels. Yeah. Right.

So if you went out and found some morels that were just cut and set out in a little box. It's a hollow victory. It'd be like, it'd just be different. Yeah. Hollow victory for sure. Yeah. At least you can eat them. Some guys are like, I found these, but I put them back out in a box and then you find them you

wouldn't feel like you found them real yeah i know i can see that it'd be that you i don't know it'd just be different but could you conceive of it as like a separate thing like there's the sheds that you might find and then there's oh i got some free chew toys for my dog that i don't have to buy the pet store and if you store. And if you're picking commercially, there's still just that. I would pick them up. I'm all for it. I think it was a great idea. It was better than putting them in a it was better than putting them in a

in a fishing game. Auction. Garage somewhere. Whatever. Better than all that. Just struck me as peculiar. Oh, you know what? Let me point this out. So did you guys cover the fine and then the failure to pay

the first fine? No. This guy's deep into it. I think we did. His first round, he's a Boz Angeles cat too. That's where his business is based. So he was ordered to pay a ten thousand dollar fine the first time around um and never paid it so that's why they they tacked on i think 90 days a

house arrest plus an additional 15k and in fines i think is what it came down to so pretty pretty pretty steep. But yeah, I love the fact they strewn about those antlers out there. He'd have to say, I can pay my fine if I can go get my antlers. Right. What do you guys want? Do you want the money or not? Because that's where all my assets are tied up right now.

I'm not exactly liquid. I got a liquidity issue. I'm still wrapping my head around the shed hunting thing, to be honest. Oh, yeah. I'm still crazy. Just how into it people are. Well, you know why you don't understand it? Because in Africa, you guys don't have any servants.

Nothing sheds. Nothing sheds. Nothing sheds. Nothing sheds. It's a good point. It's quite fun when you find a dead skull. Oh, dead heads? Those are cool sheds. There's a name for that too, is there?

It's dead head. Well, I like dead head. I mean, it's just whatever. What do you call it? Dead skull? Sure. Yeah, as in just when you find a whole skull. Yeah, like an old skull laying there would be another way of putting it.

I mean, occasionally, like when you find a 65-inch kudu that's been killed by a lion, and it's just such an impressive head. Do you keep that kind of stuff? Well, we put them in the camp. We're not allowed to take them home or whatever, but we keep them within the area. Cool. You definitely pick it up, so it lasts. So you redistribute them over to your camp.

Yeah. I think that should be our next T-shirt, Steve, is Deadhead. But, you know, obviously a play on the Grateful Dead, you know, three little dancing bears. That's a good one. How did we never think of that? Well, I threw that out. Don't look at that on Instagram.

I'm not going to talk to any lawyers, and I'm not going to Instagram search anything. The last genius idea we had, we made the stupid mistake of checking if anyone had it, but everyone's had everything. Yeah. Don't look on the internet. You realize all your ideas have already been taken. I brought up the shed head idea

with those bears when Dead Amante was on, the shed crazy guy. Did you? Did I zone out? No, no, you did. No one remembers a thing that happens in this room anymore.

No, I remember everything that happens. I am amazed that there is zero servant. Yeah. God, that's... Yeah, I don't know where that's coming from. North of the that there is zero cervant. Yeah. Yeah, that's, yeah. North of the Sahara, there's one. No, there's not. What is it?

Barbary stag. Barbary sheep. No, Barbary, they have a red stag. Oh, really? What? Yeah. Where? North Africa.

From there? Yeah. I'm going to say that there was, you know, some kind of land bridge with Europe at some point. Take that up, Callahan. I believe that for a second. Yeah, let's look into it. Barbary Stag.

On a recent episode, I was real fired up about Gordon Lightfoot's death. A guy sent us this great picture taken in July 1961. Native to North Africa, steve there we go i meant the other part algeria to tunisia and morocco yeah that's where my that's where my ancestors are from two percent of them um that's why you have that big flag and tattoo and stuff So I went on a big rip about Gordon Lightfoot and the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald And this dude sent this great picture in Taken in July 1961 His grandpa was on a car ferry

In Duluth, Minnesota And he's got like his station wagon On a car ferry And in the background uh there's the edmund fitzgerald floating by and he later wrote on and this guy carries this the guy that wrote carries this photo in his wallet he later wrote um built june 8 1958 or christened June 8, 1958, sunk November 10, 75, brought up Gordon Lightfoot sink of the Edmund Fitzgerald, and then has

the specs of the ship written on it. Just like caught, like the Edmund Fitz photo bombed his grandpa's picture. Nice. Well, yeah. You know, also the guys from,

the guys from Old Town wrote in and, I didn't know this Gord tune. Gord's got a tune called the Yellow Canoe. If you're dead, do you have a tune or did you have a tune?

That's another, we should have a tune or did you have a tune? We should have a staff linguist. I don't know. I feel like that's an in perpetuity thing. You have. Gordon just got his PhD in English, so we should probably get that. Oh, yeah. Randall, did you know that? You're not the only PhD around here anymore.

Yeah, I'm thrilled by that. I'm thrilled by that. Did you guys know Dr. Randall? Dr. Randall? Big deal. I presume. Not really a big deal at all. Dr. Randall. Dr. Randall. Big deal. I presume. Not really. Dr. Randall, I presume.

So, what the hell was I talking about? Go ahead and light foot. The Yellow Canoe. Oh, so Gord had a canoe. He wrote a song called The Yellow Canoe. Must not be that great. I never heard it. Either way, this yellow canoe winds up in a museum in Canada and had a serial number on it.

And Old Town was like, hey, what's the serial number on Gord's Canoe? Because Gord's Canoe was an Old Town canoe. And they were to pull up like, I don't know what the hell date it was made. And they used to keep, they sent a photo. They used to have this like, obviously pre-digital, right? They have this giant wall full of cedar boxes and each cedar box is sort of like the purchase registration for every canoe and it's this huge wall it's like an english gun maker if you go to an english they have the same thing yeah big huge ledger books with everyone every order every

yeah all stored in these cute little boxes so when they found out gourd's canoe number they The same thing. Yeah. Big, huge ledger books with everyone, every order, every repair. Yeah. All stored in these cute little boxes. So when they found out Gord's canoe number, they could go down to these cute little boxes, pull up the, the. See the original specs. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting.

That, that shipwreck song, I think everyone I know from the Midwest kind of gets a little misty eyed when that one comes on. Oh yeah. It's a big deal for you guys. You got in Australia, you guys didn't tear up about that? No, I didn't have the same,

uh, same, same pull to it. I mean, it's a good song. I think we could appreciate it objectively, but, uh,

we had everyone. We had Roger Whitsker in Kenya. That was, here's a, here's another, uh, not interested. Oh no, no. Sorry.

What was that? Roger Whittaker. Say it again. Roger Whittaker. Oh no. I thought I didn't catch what you said. I'm sorry. I was saying in Africa, he was, he was the one that made you misty eyed.

And yeah. Oh, who was that? Songs were all, he was a singer. But what was his, did he have like a shipwreck? I dreamed of Africa and lots of things like that. It was all about Africa. Okay. Yeah.

That was our one. But he didn't document. Shipwrecks, no. No, he didn't document a tragedy or something. No. No. Just. He was sort of like a, he was a.

If you lived in Africa, you know, all the songs had sort of meaning. I was literally geared up for like a wreck on um uh lake lake victoria yeah the afghan queen or something like that yeah exactly yes yep which i'm sure there have been yeah you should throw in a chunk say the gentleman's name again roger whitaker whitaker yeah what language did he work in english oh throw in a chunk, Phil Yeah, I will You want a little more feedback, Phil? Give it to me When you put in that chunk of the Edmund Fitz I didn't think it sounded

The sound quality didn't sound great to me That's because I was playing it over my cell phone Into a microphone in the room Because you just told me to play some on the fly I didn't have my I pictured you coming back in later on And really getting her in there I'll do that next time

I apologize So with this feller Let's get him really getting her in there. I'll do that next time. I apologize. So with this feller, let's get him in nice and clean, Phil. Will do. Yeah, don't blow it with this one. Yeah, no. And mine is Kenya So warm and wild and free You'll always stay with me

Here in my heart My land is We've been covering the kangaroo leather debacle Heavily Oh you'll appreciate this From Australia I'm not across this one Well people in America are getting real riled up

About They don't want no one to be using no kangaroo leather for nothing You could say they're hopping mad All fired up Even Sposh Pice What the hell dude using no kangaroo leather for nothing. You could say they're hopping mad. All fired up. Even Sposh Pice. What the hell is her name? Posh Spice.

What was her name? So close. Oh, really? Victoria Beckham. Posh Spice, yes. Even she is like, Is that the same person? Yeah. No shit.

Yeah, well, you know what else she is? She also is a famous soccer player's wifey. Better half. My buddy Will used to make super fancy denim jeans, and his claim to fame was David Beckham wore his jeans. He should have made them out of kangaroo leather. Yeah.

Well, Bubbly Doug was pointing out that, I think it was Dougie, pointing out that sucker must have had 40, 50 pairs of kangaroo leather soccer shoes because it's a real common leather for soccer shoes. But I'm going to tell you something now, it's going to curl your hair. Guy says, he writes in and says, I've been listening to the recent podcasts covering discussion about companies moving away from kangaroo leather. I was a firefighter for the city of Houston, the third largest department in the U.S. All of our bunker gloves were kangaroo leather. The gloves were amazing, had great dexterity. Houston Fire Department normally has over 4,000 firefighters on their payroll.

Everyone had a set of these gloves. No telling how many were on standbys replacements. If any kind of damage was done to the gloves, we would have to get them replaced so you could go through many pairs throughout the year. My guess is that Houston Fire Department uses kangaroo, still using them, and goes on to say if people in Australia are sweating their market, hopefully the fire departments will keep them alive. There we go. Have you, have you been to Australia?

Nope, never. Cause I did my, my gap year sort of after university before I became a professional hunter and kangaroos and wallabies are like rabbits. They are everywhere. I mean, I ended up taking out five with my ute as I came around the corner and the farmer next door was doing a cull and about 500 ran across the road in front of me and before I could slam on the brakes, I'd already hit five of them. What does that have to look like? 500 kangaroos. It was insane.

It was like this hedge and they all came diving over the hedge and me and my friend literally didn't have any time to react and in the worst I had to keep reversing over to finish the job. Oh,

really? That doesn't make you feel good. Was it a tire iron or something? No, it was a farm truck and it just didn't have anything in it.

Oh, no. And a ute's not like an American truck. It's like a pretty small truck in comparison. Wow. Well, another thing we talked about, I don't want to re-talk about it, but the fact that they're calling kangaroos no matter what.

Yeah. Whether someone's using it or not. Yeah. They're a pest. They either go into a ditch or they get used as usable product. Yeah. You not buying the leather isn't doing any. It's not stopping.

It's not having any impact. And everybody I talked to says the protein, the meat, is inexpensive and quite tasty. It's good. It's good. It's a hard sell for people in Australia. It's like very seldom eaten there. They mostly export it. Either it goes into pet meat or it's like very seldom eaten there they mostly export it either it goes into pet

meat or it's exported like you'll occasionally see it in um in some like some sort of high-end restaurant or something but people in general yeah people in general there have a real issue with eating like do they think of it like eating a dog in america or eating a rat in America? It's hard to. Better. Better than both. You get it in a restaurant. I think it's not quite rat level of revulsion or dog level of revulsion, but it's like. Well, no, I would say it's dog.

I would. Okay. From a US sensibility, these are two very different reasons not to eat something. Like it's my pet. To eat a dog would be like eating children. Right. And a rat is because it's disgusting. And a rat is gross.

I think it's neither. I think it's because people just don't think it's going to be good. And they're kind of like, oh, you know, they hop around, whatever. I'm not entirely sure because I never had this issue with it. And I don't think I've ever really tried to unpack it with someone. But I know that it's hugely unpopular and not commercially successful, the meat at all, in Australia itself. I think it's like a status thing? They exported to Russia for a while. It was relatively popular in Russia. I guess it's relatively popular in Europe.

But people have this big issue with it. And of course, they're one of these species that's just benefited so much from agriculture and land clearing. So their numbers are just way above what they would have been, you know, back in the day, like pre-settlement. We covered a guy. Remember that hot lunch guy? Which hot lunch guy? There was a guy that had a hot lunch program and he got fired.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. He was buying kangaroo burger. Oh, really? Yeah, at a school. But then he ended up getting his job back in the end. I don't remember. Yeah, they let him go. They found out he'd been buying kangaroo burger for the hot lunch program.

They canned him. I think he might have got his job back, man. I bet Phil could figure that out. Was he buying it and selling it as beef? Or was he just sort of not commenting? I don't know. He was buying it and selling it as hamburgers. Yeah, just burger.

Like, whatever. It's burger. It's burger. I mean, they're good to eat. There's no doubt about it. Is there a stigma around it? Like, that's a guy who eats kangaroo meat? No, I wouldn't say it's that extreme.

I think people just sort of like, you walk into the butcher shop, the meat counter's there, there's beef, there's lamb, there's pork, there's kangaroo. Everyone would be like, eh, I'm not getting kangaroo meat. Gotcha. If it's at restaurants, though, is it at high-end restaurants? Yeah, it will be. See, that's beef, there's lamb, there's pork, there's kangaroo, everyone would be like, I'm not getting kangaroo. If it's at restaurants though, is it at high-end restaurants? It will be. It's kind of a tourist attraction. I think people are more, there's more of a push towards it from a sustainability standpoint in the sense that these things, as you said at the point you made, they're getting cold whether you like it

or not. We may as well try and incorporate some of this protein into our diet because it's good stuff. But I know there was like a burger chain, I want to say, that was like we're switching to kangaroo burgers. And I think it just killed their business. People just couldn't get behind it. People just couldn't get behind it. Roos just need a rebrand. They need a rebrand. I agree.

I think it's going to be a tough road to hoe. We should get into business with them, Steve. Australian. I only had kangaroo a couple of times. Someone sent me a bunch of kangaroo chops one time. We ate them up. Oh, interesting. I wonder if they're from like a farm in Texas or something.

No, no, no, no, man. They're from Australia. Really? Oh, wow. I can't remember how I got them, but it like a farm in Texas or something. No, no, no, no, no, man. They're from Australia. Really? Yeah. Oh, wow. I can't remember how I got them, but it was a long time ago. I got those and then the same person sent me some yak meat. Oh, Tibetan yak meat.

Wow. I think you do a side-by-side profile picture of would you eat me? And one side's just the kangaroo and the other side's the kangaroo with like a big set of rabbit ears on it. Oh, yeah. Everybody likes eating rabbit. Also, I have to say like a wallaby looks a lot more appetizing than a big red kangaroo. Really? Yeah, they just look a bit juicier.

Just smaller and a little more chunky. They got a juicy look to it. Not as sort of wiry and spring loaded as the... Those male red kangaroos are pretty mean-looking. They are mean-looking. Yeah, they're very stern. I didn't find anything about the cook getting his job back because it got so bad that the superintendent

of the school district even resigned. Oh, man. What? Yeah. As I said, people are funny about it. Boy, they are. These people wouldn't know a kangaroo if it kicked them. And here, no, you know what they look like. Yeah, maybe. One last thing. it like they are these people wouldn't know kangaroo if it kicked them and here no you would

you know what they look like uh one last thing so we uh man it was maybe a year ago maybe a year ago we had a bunch of uh bunch of our colleagues from the first from first light on and they had been on this show and we had announced um that our waiters first light waiters would be coming out this summer. So there's a long, I don't know, two year test process. We've had people running around hunting ducks and I've been trapping beavers in the waiters. I don't know, 10, 14 states or something. We've been testing the waiters.

And just a heads up that they they got to be perfect and we're not we're not ready yet um two years 10 states they're not ready yet so i know a lot of people keep reaching out about getting the new first light forge waiters um i have a pair they're phenomenal they're worth the wait but in terms of getting like the the numbers out there for launch we're not there yet so stay tuned on waiters which i think is exactly what you want to hear from a company yeah because we could be saying they're not ready but order now and by the way they're expensive yeah. Or we could be like, they are ready. Yeah. Yeah. Anybody who's had a rough go with an expensive pair of waders is just, you can't even look at them the same way.

So, yeah. We're aiming for the top of the heap here, the best of the best, and we're putting the screws to them. So, stay tuned. It'll happen. Stay tuned. It'll happen. Stay tuned. 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, 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, 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 3 months to try OnX out if you visit

OnXMaps.com OnXMaps.com OnXMaps.com Welcome to the OnX Club y'all Alright tell everybody the story about getting beat up by to the onX club, y'all. All right. Tell everybody the story about getting beat up

by a Cape Buffalo. Well, it can be a long story or a short story. I want the long one. The medium. Oh. The long version,

we were in our Luganzo game reserve concession, which, just to put things in perspective, it's over a million and a half acres of pure wilderness. No other people bar our little camp.

How many acres? Over a million and a half acres. That's like what Yellowstone's two million. It'd be, yeah. It's about the size of Rhode Island, basically. Rhode Island's a great state to have. Yeah.

In the country. Good for these types of comparisons. It's always good for making things. Comparisons. Yeah, you know what I mean? Yeah. It's a great little tool.

Yeah. To have Rhode Island. So, anyway, it's a two-hour flight in from Arusha, which were our bases. And it was a big family safari. So my brother and another professional hunter

were on the trip as well. I'm going to drive you crazy because I need to have certain things clarified as we go along. Yeah, that's fine. Do you mind right now telling, like, what is a concession? So how it works in Tanzania is you lease the areas from the government, which gives you the right, the tourism and hunting rights for that area of land.

Um, there's no private ownership in Tanzania and Southern Africa is very different in that the landowner owns the wildlife and everything. We, we just leased the right to take people there. Okay. So it's undeveloped. Yeah. It's set aside for wildlife and, you know, the habitat's protected, but there's huge pressures on it. So it involves a huge amount of anti-poaching and community sort of liaison work to get them on side and look after the wildlife. And with this one million acre chunk, how many residents are in that one million acres?

Zero. No one just no residents our hunting camp but all around the edge there are villages where they're farming and they have their land and those those villagers around the edge they utilize that they're technically not allowed in there they're not supposed to hunt in that concern they're not allowed to do anything they shouldn't be cutting trees, farming, grazing their cattle. It's, it's just set aside. It's a game reserve.

So it's protected for wildlife. I'm assuming that that does go on. So this is the problem in Africa that, you know, people are desperate to survive and the population is growing so rapidly. There's not enough space for everyone. So, you know, they see this huge piece of land and if they're not benefiting from it in some way, then of course, you know, if they can catch an animal and feed their family, then they're going to try. And so a big part of our job is trying to make the communities benefit from us being there. And yeah, my dad was a sort of instigator in the community benefit scheme where, you know, the local villages would benefit from the game that we hunt.

And so we've, over the last 15 years, I think we've spent over $3 million on developing schools, boreholes, health dispensaries, you name it, whatever the communities needed. And that was all generated through our community benefits of hunting. Oh, wow. Okay. So that's a concession. Yeah. So you're in that concession. So we're in the, in the Laganza game reserve and, um, because it's a big family group,

some people are arriving earlier or later. And, um, I'd been hunting with the mother and the daughter was just arriving halfway through the trip and she's 23 her first african hunting experience and the mother's like well why don't you just go out with her on a one-on-one today and let her just you know enjoy the experience and i'll have a rest day in camp. And so she arrives and we set off early in the morning and, you know, I want to get her a feel of hunting in Africa. So we're not going for anything dangerous. We're going to go out and look for one of the more common

plains game animals like a waterbuck or a topi. And as it happens, we run across some fresh tracks for buffalo. And it's just, you know, you can't miss the opportunity, you know, when something's fresh and good. I said, well, let's give it a little look and we'll see how it all goes. And as it happened, these buffalo took us right up into the mountains, you know, over a plateau down the other side. And we spent like five or six hours tracking them by which point she's now beginning to suffer from heat stroke and has like we hadn't taken any lunch with us luckily we had a couple of bottles of water and um

i had some m&ms which i gave her some chocolate m&, which was enough to basically walk back to the nearest point we could get the car. So basically after six hours, we've had no luck. Following a single track. Following, it was a group of four or five buffalo. And anyway, the wind just kept swirling and working in their favor, and it wasn't going to happen. So we don't want to push it anyway. So we head back to

the car and we have our picnic lunch and a bit of a break and i'm like well why don't we just go along the edge of the lakeshore this evening and you know if we happen to see a waterbuck or something then then we'll try you know try our luck but otherwise we'll just amble back to camp because she basically you know had enough for them from the day. And we're driving along the lake shore at about five 30 in the evening. And suddenly this beautiful old bull water buck runs across the road in front of us. And I can see straight away as you know, perfect old bull. And so I'm like, okay, we need to go and give this guy a go so she jumps out gets her gun i grab my shooting sticks um because in africa you know the grass is often long so you

use shooting sticks it's like a tripod so you shoot from a standing position not lying down and um my track is grabbing my my big 500, which is sort of the backup weapon. And the zip keeps jamming on the gun sleeve. And so I turned to him and I'm like, don't worry, don't worry. We're not going far. And we set off and we come around the edge. The way it works is sort of flood plain. So you've got these anthills where all the foliage basically is concentrated.

So the trees, because during the wet season, the whole area floods. Oh, but it can survive on the ant hill. It's just these grass plains, but it survives. And these things are big, you know, we're talking 20, 30 feet across. Yeah. So you've got these huge open plains and then these, these massive ant hills that have trees and palm bushes and lots of foliage on them and it's you sort of work with them you know they're perfect for stalking things you come around the edge of the cover and so we go around a couple and there's the waterbuck and i put the sticks up but the um the waterbuck stops with a palm leaf right in front of its vitals and she's uncomfortable with the shot. Like those old Adam and Eve pictures. Yeah.

And so the water back carries on and it goes around a few more of these ant hills and we're stalking along the other side. So you're just using these ant hills as like little concealment. Yeah. Yeah. And like using round, round hay bales. Exactly.

Yeah. Just like that. And next minute as we're coming around, we've literally only gone probably 500 meters from, from the car. And I come around this, this one Bush and this Buffalo bursts out of the front of the Bush towards us.

And normally like when you're hunting them 99% of the time, if they sense you sense you they they burst out of the back of the bush and you don't even see them you just hear the eruption they're going away yeah yeah and this one time typically it decides it's coming out the front and it looks at me it looks at the young girl that i'm with and it decides it's homing in on her. Meanwhile, the trackers have just vaporized. They disappear in seconds. Survival instance.

And normally that actually helps you in the case that it'll draw the animal's attention. But in this case, it didn't. It just fixated on my client and everything sort of slowed down and i could tell you know she was going to get annihilated because she was just standing upright in the open and she'd later told me she didn't actually know it was a buffalo she thought it was the water bug that we were hunting so she was just confused in the moment yeah Yeah. And I sort of evaluated everything I saw. It was really old and it didn't have both. It had broken both its horns off.

It was so old. So it just had this big mound of a boss in the middle, but no nasty hooks. Just a battering ram. Yeah. So in my head in that split second, I kind of thought, well, I can throw my shooting sticks at it and draw its attention. I didn't even slow it down. I just thought it would draw it towards me. I got you. And then I, then I thought I could be like a bullfighter and dive out of the way and at the last second, and I got that bit a bit wrong. It, um, I, I threw my sticks and hit it straight in the face. How close was it when you hooked your sticks at it?

So it burst out of the bush literally about 15 yards in front of us. And it was about eight yards when I chucked my sticks at it. And what did they weigh? A buffalo about 1,500 pounds, maybe 1,700 for a big old bull. How high are they at the shoulder? The shoulder probably, I don't know, sort of five, five and a half foot.

They're considerably bigger than a, I mean, well, like a big Yukon moose. Bigger. Not as tall. Its body is bigger, but not as long.

I mean, like in poundage. Yeah, poundage for sure. Yeah, for sure. It's more of a bull terrier shape than a Doberman, if you know what I mean. It's short and solid. Yeah, for sure. It's more of a bull terrier shape than a doberman, if you know what I mean.

It's short and solid. Yeah, and the mass goes all the way up to the hips, right? Yeah, all the way to the ankles. Yeah, you lose a lot of that. They're just tough. So, yeah, it comes at me, and I literally just bend my knees to start the dive, and I realize there's no way I'm even going to project before it's on me. You couldn't even get a jump going.

No, I didn't even start jumping. And I used to play a lot of rugby. Oh, my God, man. So my instinct was I kind of knew it was going to get me in the ribs. So I dipped my shoulder. When you hooked your sticks at it, was it still standing or was it already coming? No, no, it was running. Oh, I see.

So he was already on his way. He was already, he'd homed in and he was. And how far apart are you and your client? She's about a meter to one side from me. So he comes out, he's coming hard. Yeah. And you throw, as he's running at you, you fling your stuff at him. Yeah.

He's already got his velocity. And really make a great shot too. Yeah. With your sticks, yeah. I was pretty surprised when I hit it in the face. Imagine what he could have done with a rifle. You're like step one of the plan. Anyway, yeah, it, it worked and he came straight at me and, and I dipped my shoulder thinking I'll, I'll just take the impact on my shoulder.

And I didn't realize it was going to be like being hit by a freight train basically. And the, the impact threw me about 20 yards. No joke. And I took most of it on my shoulder, but then the secondary impact hit my head and I sort of blacked out. So I woke up on the ground and everything was sort of blurry and spinning around. And I was trying to stand up but I couldn't use my one arm and at the same time all I could think about was is my client okay so I'm shouting are you okay trying to locate her and luckily one of my trackers ran back and grabbed me and sort of

helped me stand up and then I saw her and she was absolutely fine and got told the rest of the story was basically after it had flung me 20 yards, it then decided it hadn't had enough and came after me again and was just pounding me on the ground. Oh, while you were blacked out. Yeah. And yeah, so my butt was completely black, but I don't remember any of that. And he was doing it with his hoof or still just using his head? No, no, with the boss. They always use their head for everything, yeah. And when it did this, my client, the young girl,

basically realized this was a buffalo, not a water bug. And we'd had the discussion earlier that morning what to do if we came across a buffalo in a bad situation. And I sort of said, you know, either get behind a bush if there's one nearby or lie flat on the ground and um so there was one bush right there and she she ran the sort of five steps to get behind the bush and it was enough to attract the buffalo's attention off me onto her and it tried to then get her smashed the one bush and then ran off never to be seen again well almost never to be seen again

actually ran into our anti-poaching team like it was setting up camp for the night and so that caused a bit of mayhem there as well as it ran through you still pissed off yeah yeah and then he was out of there and they the anti-poaching team said that they noticed it had a bit of a limp and i think it had a run in with a lion or possibly a poacher at some point and one of its legs wasn't quite there. You didn't claim that? You said, well, I used to play rugby. I gave him a pretty good shot. But it did explain slightly why it behaved the way it did and why it was in a place you normally wouldn't expect to find to find a buffalo.

So it caught us off guard. Oh, so he was also in terrain. Yeah, he was, he was right in a very open area. And normally the buffalo will go to water and then they'll head way off back into the hills and thickets and sort of disappear in the heat of the day. And he'd stayed very close to the, to the water's edge. And I think probably because his leg was giving him problems. And I presume when we came around the corner, he must've thought we were after him and he knew, you know, he didn't have a chance to, to run away. So he stood his ground, which yeah, wasn't great.

So what was the, uh, the damage in, in total? So that's kind of a funny story. So I, I, I thought I dislocated my shoulder, like the track has stripped me naked or down to my underwear. And cause you know, you sort of think you don't know with all that adrenaline, you're not sure what injuries you've, you've sustained. And they, they realized that basically I looked fine on the surface, apart from I had this rhino horn sticking out of my shoulder.

And I couldn't really figure it. I could still use my arm a little bit, but it was painful. And that rhino horn sticking out of your shoulder was what? It was my collarbone. Okay. But I thought it was just dislocated, and I thought I might be able to pop it all back into place. So by now it's about 6.15 in the evening.

And as I was explaining earlier, it's basically two hours flying back to Arusha. And we were about two hours from the airstrip. So the whole process was going to take four hours, and we only had half an hour of daylight. And we're all members of this thing called Flying Doctors, where if you have an incident, a plane will fly in with a doctor and basically rescue you and take you back to hospital. But I kind of knew it was too late to call them. So I thought the best plan, just get back to the camp. And so I gave her a couple of beers because I knew the shock

was only going to help for a little while and i want to keep her sort of calm and i decided to drive back to camp as a kind of distraction and also i thought the more i used my shoulder the less it would stiffen up so we drove 45 minutes back to our camp arrived you know after dark, and everyone else had just arrived as well. And so they straightaway sort of, well, my brother lectured me on why didn't I have my rifle, which is literally the number one rule

is you never leave the car without your rifle. And the one time I broke it, this happened. Do you think you would have gotten a shot off if you'd had it? Yeah, definitely. I mean, I had enough time to hit it in the head with a stick. So I think I could have shot it. Um,

but anyway, hindsight is a lovely thing, but so anyway, we get back and they, they feed me some painkillers and I have a shower and it's now beginning to stiffen up a little bit. So we decided to try and YouTube how to relocate your shoulder. So I'm now lying on the dining room table, lifting my arm above my head.

No doubt. No doubt. Watching those ads. Everyone knows Fat Burn's carbs. Fat Burn's carbs, right? Wrong. Bananas do. And I'm hoping it's going to just pop back in and nothing happens.

So eventually the father's like, well, actually we should call my brother-in-law who's an orthopedic surgeon. Oh, that's a handy brother-in-law. Yeah. He's like, is he on YouTube? No, luckily we've got Wi-Fi in camp. So yeah, we have this sort of satellite Wi-Fi.

So we FaceTime him and it's it's like four in the morning in the states and amazingly he he answers and he realizes straight away it must be quite serious and so like yeah there's been a bit of an incident but we really want you just to diagnose this problem so i like showing my injury and i said look when i bend down like this it sticks up like a rhino horn and i thought it was dislocated and he's like, no, no, no. You've, you've separated your AC joint and there's no fixing that you need surgery. And so we give up on the YouTube and least type that into YouTube.

Right. And he was like, yeah, there's's there's three or four grades and you've you've basically done the worst so there's no hope and so i go to sleep and we wake up in the morning and i'm pretty stiff like because also my sternum everything's been yeah basically just smashed and um so every time someone makes me laugh, like I'm literally dying with pain and anyway, I, I wake up and I was planning, I was actually leaving the trip in three days anyway. So we're sort of debating whether to call the flying doctors or if I just waited out and I was flying back to England from Tanzania and I actually thought it's easier to just stay in camp and there was no blood in my urine because the thing I was more worried about was internal injuries. So I mean my wife literally killed me when she eventually found out about all this.

But I made the decision to stay and do the last three days of the trip. Oh give me a break. And yeah we actually had a pretty successful time. Managed to hunt a sitatunga and a crocodile. Oh, really? With one arm. I sort of figured how to hold onto my shirt so I wouldn't move my arm around because it basically wasn't too painful as long as I didn't move it.

So did you switch up rifles at that point so you could operate something with one arm? No. Because you just got the lecture. Yeah. You can't. Well, so I could with pain, I could use my rifle. I just couldn't lift it above my head. I mean, my arm, basically.

I couldn't lift my arm above my head. So I did try. I actually went looking for the buffer. Oh, you did? So you already tried to find him? Yeah, I did try to find him, but it was, I realized I was actually not being very clever, so we didn't look for it for very long. ever see the life aquatic no i haven't well it's these guys that set out to what do they want to kill tiger shark jaguar shark kills his partner and it's a whole movie

about him trying to find uh this this exact jaguar shark and kill it so it's a comedy but yeah yeah that's like you you're like so the father put a bounty on on the buffalo he basically the father of of the girl that was with me oh really and he was like yeah any any of your other clients coming through after we leave he's like i'll i'll pay the the game fee just you know we need to to exact a little bit of revenge i followed the tracks for a little bit. A month or so later, couldn't get on him. So he was still alive?

Oh, he was out there, yeah. Did he have a bad limp? The trackers said they could see from the tracks that there was something going on with one of his legs, yeah. And they were certain it was him. I mean, they knew that was that buffalo for sure. Huh. So we went for it for a little while,

but it just kind of it wasn't viable did he start getting out of like his uh his his convalescent zone he was within a mile he was within a mile of where he hit roger um and he was sort of doing the same thing he was hanging out by those sort of vegetation islands but he did once when we followed him he had gone kind of into the woodland and headed towards some thickets um and some kind of higher country with swirling wind and yeah we just couldn't get on him so i think uh i think he you know i think he was sort of reverting back he's maybe he was doing a little better yeah maybe it lifted his morale yeah lifted his morale.

You had your surgery in the U S in the UK. Oh, you had your surgery in the UK and then came here to chill out. Yeah. So we always come over in January anyway, and you know, for the hunting conventions and I kind of figured, yeah, it would be a good time to do something different and have a bit of time out from Africa and brought my family over and yeah, I've been living the Montana dream, which has been incredible. And how, when do you got to go back? Uh, in about five days. You'll go back to Tanzania and do your summer hunting season. Yeah. So it's all about to kick off. Yeah. I want, uh, I want you guys to talk about trackers. You talk about trackers a lot.

Um, and what I thought was interesting when you, when was interesting when you guys came for dinner is you discuss trackers like you acquiesce to their judgment. Definitely. Definitely. Definitely. In my view, the trackers sometimes aren't spoken about with the kind of reverence that they deserve. And I would say for me as someone that wasn't born into a professional hunting family or born on the African continent, the greatest privilege of doing what I do and being part of this industry is, is working with those trackers. And the way I see my job is our industry kind of has this sort of trifecta and, and, you know, there's obviously the, the foreign client that makes everything we do possible. You know, that's the, that's the revenue source. And then there's the trackers

and then there's the professional hunter. And I see the role of the professional hunter is kind of the glue that binds those two other halves, the, you know, the tracking team and the foreign client and kind of brings that, that unit together to be a successful hunting, hunting team. Um, but what they do and, and the way that they allow us to be able to hunt, you know, it's so funny because, you know, oftentimes professional hunting, you know, has its roots in kind of the early, you know, the guys we talked about before, you know, the sort of Philip Percival's, the FC Saloos of the world that kind of opened up a lot of this country. And they were obviously from the European hunting tradition. And a lot of that's

carried over. We, you know, we look for old bulls, we hunt males of the species exclusively, you know, which, you know, the sort of trophy hunting aspect, if you want to call it, that comes from that European tradition, but we hunt in an African way. You know, those, the, the, the tradition that European hunters or American hunters in many cases have come from, and I know there's some tracking in the, in the North woods and that sort of stuff is, you know, either sitting in a stand or, or spot and stalk. Yeah. We hunt the African way, which is following animals tracks and, and I can't do it. You know, I've been in this industry for a good long while, um, and, and watched what

they do with just keen interest, but oftentimes just amazement at how they're able to sort out tracks that have mingled with other animals. You know, you're following a single Buffalo and it mingles with a herd for a while, then separates off again. They can sort that out. They can sort out one animal. Yeah. Keep on that one animal.

And it's not just Buffalo. They can do it for almost any species. What allows them? How, why phenomenal. So a great tracker is both born and made in my opinion, they have exceptional eyesight. I mean, just phenomenal ability to see things, um, up close and in the opinion. They have exceptional eyesight. I mean, just phenomenal ability to see things up close and in the distance. Their eyesight is borderline superhuman. And they have a great

tracker, has a feel for what the animals are going to do, and also for the terrain that they inhabit and how the animals will use that terrain. And, and a great tracker, you know, generally speaking, they'll be very familiar with an area that you're hunting in possibly because they grew up in a similar area or on the periphery of the hunting area. They're oftentimes from those communities that Roger was talking about before. Um, or, you know, and Rog can sort of expand on this because his dad was kind of the oftentimes from those communities that Roger was talking about before. Or, you know, and Roger can sort of expand on this because his dad was kind of the master of this. They were a former poacher that basically, you know, Robin Hurt Safaris turned straight

and brought into the fold as a tracker. And those guys, they, you know, they have this intuition about where the animals are going to go, what they're going to do at different times of the day. And you'll get a sense of that. You know, I'm cognizant of some things that are happening. You know, for example, if you're following a buffalo that's coming from water and you see it starts to sort of cast around back and forward, you know, it's looking for a place to lay down and you'll often think, okay, we're potentially getting close here. You know, that buffalo is getting ready to bed. But there's so much more that they can intuit from those tracks and from the, you know, the marks that the animal makes on the ground that are just beyond my understanding.

It's beyond my ability to interpret. It's second nature to them. I mean, the way I. But you were brought up in this world. Yeah. So, I mean, my childhood was spent. Basically basically my dad used to hunt 10 months of the year. But the trackers are better than you still. Yeah.

But the only time I would see him would be to go on safari. So all my holidays were spent on safari. And my favorite part of the day was when the hunters would come back and it was siesta time. And the trackers were like some of my best friends and sort of nannies and we'd go off adventuring in the middle of the day and set traps for guinea fowl and climb barebob trees looking for honey and just learning how to make poison arrows i mean these guys just they they lived off the ground and as as morgan was saying a lot of them were converted poachers.

Talk about that a little bit. You mentioned that to me when we had dinner. Yeah. Well, what people don't realize is there's different forms of poaching in Africa. There's the ivory poachers who are obviously very heavily armed, totally commercial and nasty and zero tolerance. tolerance and of course you call in the game department if you ever see one and then there's commercial meat poachers who often all have a rifle and they're going out just to sell the meat and then you have what i call like the subsistence poacher the opportunistic poacher who's your average farmer who lives nearby and the temptation

to try and get something to feed his family. And some of them even, you know, were traditionally hunter gatherers, you know, by nature and, you know, the rules of the world have made them into a poacher. Um, but so an individual might've grew up. Yeah. So. Hunting these areas. And at some point someone said, that's not how it goes down anymore. Yeah. So, I mean, we used to live, have a hunting area on the edge of a traditional hunter gatherer tribes sort of boundary. And they were always coming in to try and hunt something with their bow and arrow.

And you'd sort of feel sorry for them and drive them around threatened that they were potentially going to go to jail and then my dad would often be like or you could come and work for me and make a living doing what you're doing um and it will be legal and so a lot of the trackers still work for us they've been with us for like 45 years and were ex-poachers at the time and do they do they enjoy it or is it just that that's or is that just the situation they were dealt they love it and the main thing is in in africa like meat is literally a very rare commodity and placed very high on a sort of pedestal. So for these guys, they weren't actually interested in the money, but when they realized how much meat they were going to get,

and in Africa, most people have meat in their diet maybe once in a week. One meal in a whole week will have meat in it. So for them to be able to literally gorge themselves on as much meat as they can dry everything that's left over take some home for their families at the end of the season i mean that that was why they decided to come and work with us really and you know the only way i can explain it is like the tracking going back to the tracking is like it's it's like reading a newspaper for them like they look around at the ground and they can see everything that's happened that morning you see and you know they didn't have any interaction with the outside world so that was their entire focus so it's a lot of it is born and bred into them in its yeah i think there's a lot of it that can't be taught. And yeah, I mean, it's not a dark art, right? They're seeing

something on the ground, but, and oftentimes we can see it too. We just can't interpret it the way they can. Um, and yeah, they're, they're incredible characters to be around and hearing their stories about how they learned how to do what they do is it's fascinating it's such a privilege and it's so different from how how people hunt in north america or europe or anything else it just you know it's it's incredible to see when uh you talk about that they they dry a lot of meat how does that go down do i mean are there because and that's not a small task. No, it's a big operation. Everything, basically, when you hunt something successfully,

they skin off, you know, the skin and the head and any trophies that the client wants. So the trackers do that work? Yeah, they'll do

the easier bits and then it goes back to camp and the skinner will split the lips and the ears and around the eyes, all the sort of more complicated bits um back in camp but they'll do the field preparation as such and then you know a lot of the animals are too big to load into the back of a car so you'll chop it up into sizable chunks and but by the time they're finished everything has been

loaded into the car with the exception of a big pile of grass, basically, and the lungs. I mean, the stomach lining's taken, the intestines, everything has a use and nothing goes to waste. I mean, literally, that's all that's left is a pile of grass. And our camps sort of have like a behind-the-scenes operation that's processing. Obviously, when you're on safari as a client, you're eating a hundred percent game. You know, the kitchen in camp is, is turning out incredible food made from, you know, the animals that you hunt, but then there's this sort of whole parallel operation kind of behind the scenes of processing all that, all that protein, um,

and, and preserving it through drying and smoking to, to be a product that, yeah, our whole team basically can take back to their communities, to their families, um, and, and just sort of sustain themselves throughout the off season. And it's, it's a huge draw, um, that, that pulls people into our industry because yeah, that, that access to protein is just, it's priceless. It's a big deal. Um, and then we support some of those surrounding communities directly with meat as well. We'll either take fresh meat there if we're in kind of close proximity or that, that dried smoked product will go to, to the surrounding communities as well to, you know, to feed people there. Um, and it's a big deal. What is the, what is the, um, sort of like your trackers are from what cultural group?

I don't even know the right lingo. So they come from all sorts of different tribes. I mean, generally what happens is initially you get people from the area. So in Marseille land, most of the trackers are Marseille because they understand the animals that you get there. That's the amazing thing with Tanzania is the variety of species that we hunt. And different parts of the country have completely different animals. So like in Maasai land, you have Lesser Kudu and Geranuk and the gazelles.

And then you go to western Tanzania where you've got the sable and roan antelope and sitatunga. So it's very different. And so you need people that have grown up with those animals. I got it. Yeah. So we've got a whole mix of tribes.

You know, each of our camps basically has people from that area. And then the one area basically on the edge of the Serengeti had probably the most amazing trackers, the Hatsubee people and their sort of offshoots. And they're about the only tribe that really can transfer from one area to another. And they're still amazing. Whereas the Maasai take a Maasai out of Maasai's, he's got no idea how to track another type of animal, but he'll spot a lesser kudu, you know, half a mile up a valley just with his bare eyes and you can hardly even see it with your binoculars. Got it.

Yeah. Those guys are ancestral hunter gatherers. So it's sort of, it's, it's deep, deep in them to be able to sort of go anywhere and hunt anything. But, you know, one could be forgiven for thinking that, well, what is, what is it exactly that the professional hunter does? And it's, it's so funny, you know, I've sat with trackers for hours and hours and hours and just talked about, you know, different things related to hunting and their perception of hunting and how it varies from mine and so on and so forth. And like the one bridge that I've never been, or the one gap I've never been able to bridge is like them seeing an animal as a source of meat and understanding like why we want to go for an old bull. Like when we follow something for eight, 10 hours in the hot sun and through thickets, you're crawling through like these buffalo holes in the thickets and we get we get

up on them they point them out to me we close the distance I put my binos on it and I'm like oh no they're young we got to back out of here like the muttering and like tongue-clicking and like shaking of heads. It looks pretty good to me. I mean they're just like I mean I know they're just like what is wrong with these people you know like what is wrong with these people? You know, like, what is this guy's deal? Can't believe it. Like, we worked so damn hard and he's walking away.

I mean, but yeah, it's just, it's like, it's that, they'll never, they'll never be able to reconcile. They'll never be able to come to terms with that. And so, you know, it's, it's funny. There's always this kind of tension around that, but, um, yeah, a great, a great safari team of, of a professional hunter and trackers that are, that are working together in, in unison is, it's a beautiful thing. When you guys strike off, how many trackers are with you? So, it'll be, you'll have a senior tracking team that'll usually take the lead. If things go long, I mean, it is exhausting work, right? It gets very, very tedious. joins another herd or an animal's gone through an area and another herd's crossed over and it's kind of confusing, they'll sort of fan out and everyone will sort of work together to kind of sort out what's happening. And then sometimes the kind of the reserve guys will step up if the tracking job's getting long, but it'll 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 a high-end 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

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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. What's the impact of, like, how is poaching felt meaning like you could be in america and you're aware of poaching here right but you don't hear about poaching here

nearly as much as you hear about poaching in africa yeah and like anti-poaching squads and the black market around poaching and documentaries about poaching in Africa. Is it, I guess, I guess the, probably the biggest difference is like a poacher in America is more or less a hunter who just hasn't got the right license. Whereas in, in Tanzania, you know, there's commercial poachers who are out there, you know, trying to hunt elephants, uh, you know, for the ivory, not, not even necessarily for meat or for, you know, the, the art of hunting that they're doing it to make a living. Um, and they're part of like, but, but it's like a criminal syndicate. It is. Yeah, it is. Those three tiers that, that Roger mentioned, you know, there's the ivory

poachers that they're heavily armed and they're very aggressive. And really, there's not a lot that we as safari operators can do about them. And I think that's something the Tanzanian government's very cognizant of. And, you know, they've come down a lot harder on that. Tanzania is in an unfortunate position where it has, you know, obviously a lot of coastline and seaports, which opens up smuggling potentials to Asia, basically for ivory that sort of landlocked African countries don't have. So we've seen a lot of pressure on our elephants, um, particularly in the early sort of 2010s that, that was, you know, it was a big problem and it was keenly felt across almost all of the hunting areas in the country that, that, you know, the presence of those, um, commercial ivory poachers heavily armed was, was there.

Um, and, and the government realized it and, you know, needed to essentially use the army and, and their other sort of law enforcement resources to deal with that because it's beyond our scope, commercial meat poaching is another problem. Often those guys will be armed too, but a lot of times it'll be snares and traps, you know, snares and gin trap type things that are set up and they'll go and check. And what kind of trap? Oh, like a gin trap is kind of the term we use for it. I'm trying to destroy.

It's like a leg hold, but giant with a car spring as the, as it like a gin trap is kind of the term we use for it. I'm trying to, it's like a leg hold, but giant with a car spring as the. Oh, like a bear trap. Yeah. It's like a, yeah. What you'd call here a leg hold, you know, with the, um, with like a car spring as the kind of the, the spring component. Um, so it's, it's powerful. It can grab a Buffalo. It can grab whatever.

Oh, really? Oh yeah. Yeah. It can grab a giraffe. And then, you know, there's other sort of nasty methods those guys will employ. One of them is driving around at night on motorcycles with a spotlight and kind of spotlighting stuff like giraffes, for example. And then basically chasing them on the motorbike and like hamstringing them with a machete. You're kidding me.

No, unfortunately not. And that's for the bushmeat trader. That's for the wild game trader. That's for commercial meat trade. So that meat goes into. Consumed where? Consumed in bars, restaurants, villages. I mean, wherever. It's sort of an underground. You can now, I believe in Tanzania, get a permit to sell legally acquired game meat. But in the past, when I first got started in the industry, similar to the US,

you couldn't sell meat derived from the hunting industry. It didn't have commercial value. So yeah, there's sort of this underground trade of meat. And then the third tier, like Roger says, which is the guys that, that sort of ladder category, that ladder category we can deal with, you know, we can do something about that, that sort of, you know, commercial meat poacher. Our anti-poaching teams are equipped to handle that. And then there's the kind of lone guy who, yeah, he's a subsistence farmer. Maybe an elephant came in and wiped out his crop.

His family's hungry, you know, grab the old muzzle loader that he's got stashed under the- Richard, homemade. I mean, a lot of these guns thater that he's got stashed under the... Which are homemade. I mean, a lot of these guns that we confiscate, they've made out of a bit of pipe. Shooting chunks of rebar that have been sawed. Oh, yeah. I've seen AA batteries loaded into them. As the slug.

As the slug. And so those guys, you know, grab the old muzzle loader, grab the old bow and arrow and head out into the game reserve and try and try and get something for the family. And those are the guys when we catch them that, you know, we have a lot of sympathy for. And if we can find a way to incorporate them into our operation, particularly if they're good and you'll know they're good based on when you get them to lead you back to their camp and you see how much meat they've got. And if they're dialed, it's like, Hmm, all right, let's see what we can see what we can do here. Um, I do want to, we have enough law enforcement friends where I do have to say that, uh, in the U S poaching is prolific. Uh, and you have a broad spectrum of people who participate and ranging from like the honest mistake crowd yeah to um the people who fit the psychological profile of like a serial killer and they're they're they're poaching so consistently to like scratch that exact same itch

um and kind of everything in between to like very well organized groups of people um who operate for years and years taking excessive amounts of game um for the trophy on the wall type of yeah that's a good way of putting it yeah like you have some real organized poaching stuff but it's not feeding a commercial market as much as it's feeding ego and social. Yeah. The scale of it. And the commercial stuff that we read about would be, you know, is very like mom and pop,

the random butcher shop that is like, yeah, if you bring me a bunch of white-tailed deer, I'll turn it into sausage. And we don't mean to downplay the, you know, poaching as an issue in North America. I think, as you say, it's just got very, it's rooted in very different, it's driven very differently. I'm sure even the guy that's out commercial elephant poaching in

tanzania if you could offer him a steady job that didn't involve that he'd be he'd be more than happy to quit you know it's not it's not coming from ego it's all it's all from poverty and unfortunately a demand for those you know those products like ivory rhino horn on the you know and the guys lion bones and things like that too. So, and the guys out in the field are making a fraction of the big kingpins that are selling the ivory on. I mean, they'll, they'll make a thousand dollars maybe on, on a pair of ivory horns, ivory tusks. And, um, the next guy will sell them for anything from 20 to 50 000 dollars you know let me uh uh you might already know this but just as a way to compare the two so in the u.s you have

um speaking generally generally the states own wildlife. The states have a state fishing game. The state owns the wildlife, whether the wildlife is on private land, state land, federal land. The state has jurisdiction over the wildlife. The state will have a state agency that employs biologists will make an assessment of population trends models of how many animals are out there they'll ascertain what a harvestable surplus would look like they then take that harvestable surplus and they try to allocate it in a democratic fashion to the population so these aren't real numbers but like we have a thousand deer we can safely kill 200 a year those 200 will now be democratically allocated to the best of our ability to those people who would like to go get one. And then we will govern how, when, why, not why.

We will govern how and when they go get the surplus we've identified. And Corinne, it's important to know that the bulk of these state agency funding comes from participation, license, and tag sales. Very important. Very important detail. Yeah. It's quite circular. Yeah.

Because them selling the 200 deer, them selling access to the 200 deer through buying licenses is how they fund. The research to set the quotas. yeah it's very similar in africa although different countries are very different in that in tanzania for example the the land the wildlife everything is owned by the government um the quotas are set by the government we have a government official who comes out hunting with us to make sure we are sticking to all the regulations. All the time? All the time.

Yeah. All the time. Every hunting party has a game scout, a government employee. Are you serious? Wow. That's like commercial fishing vessels. Yeah.

Here? Yeah. Really? Yeah. At all times. Boy, that changed it up. Can you imagine if every hunting party in the US had a game warden? There he is. Take the imagine if every hunting party in the US. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

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Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. the appropriate term. Yeah. Oh, for sure. And they're there and they're, they're a great help too. You know, when we run into those poachers, we don't have to do a citizen's arrest, you know, or in our case, they carry authority. They're, they're an agent of, of the department of natural resources and tourism, the same way with our anti poaching. Are they generally good hunters too?

Some of them are. Yeah. A lot of them are. Yeah. A lot of them get passionate about it and, you know, enjoy being out in the wilderness like we do. But you also kind of had a look that said some of them may be, uh, bureaucratically placed there and are a little,

they stick out a little bit. Some, some start in the towns and then might get placed out in the field. Yeah. Sure. Against their wishes. Yeah. Um,

same in, you know Same in any big bureaucracy. But in your camp, to make sure that you guys aren't doing, what would be the most common bad thing that would happen? Well, I mean, we don't break any of the rules, really. But there are laws like you're not allowed to hunt from a vehicle. You have to be 25 meters or 50 meters away from a vehicle anytime you can't i can't hunt over water holes yeah for example also there oh that's i guess that's what i was curious about there is interest we're not allowed to hunt at night you know there is

interested in methodology as they are and that you're not killing too much of whatever i would say a combination of both yeah they're they're making sure that essentially the act of government that governs what we do, they're there to make sure that we adhere to that. But as much of that as they do, they're also there to support us in our efforts to combat poaching. Yeah. They're there to be, yeah, they're essentially the law enforcement arm of the Department of Natural Resources and Tourism that they are able to, you know, if we run into a poacher, they're going to make the arrest. They're going to make sure that everything's properly documented and written up and so on and so forth and take that person into custody, you know, which is something that we don't have the authority to do. So it's very much a combined effort. Our anti-poaching teams are half our employees of Robin Hood's Fares and half from the Tanzania Wildlife Department.

And they all go out on patrol together and help each other out. And you guys are operating out of the same camp. Yeah, they'll have their bases. You're like hunting and hunting poachers all kind of at the same time. Yeah, the two go together. Every time we're out in the field, we're on patrol. You know, we have our actual anti-poaching units as well. But when we're in the field, we're naturally doing anti-poaching.

So all of Tanzania, you are not allowed to hunt the waterholes. No one can hunt. You can't hunt over water. Apart from a few animals. Crocodile. That live in water. Sittunga water. But there's,

there's a few very specific animals that. So other than aquatic or semi aquatic species that you just not, I mean like, you know, crocodile is in the water all the time. You know, there's an exception for that, but we can't sit over water and wait for a buffalo to come and drink.

God, that seems so nitpicky for Africa. Being someone who's never been there and has no idea what I'm talking about, I thought it was a little more wild westy. But it makes it a challenge, which to me is half of what hunting's about. And these rules weren't set 20 years ago, 30 years ago. These rules have been around since the early days. I would say probably Roosevelt safari era.

It was probably a little looser, but for sure there would have been a concept of, oh, you know, we don't, we don't shoot stuff over water. You know, we don't shoot big, we don't shoot big tuskers, big elephants over water. We track them from the water hole. And that, that, that ethic would have have been these things are basically ethics that the east african professional hunters association sort of held you know held their members to account with the sort of ethical guidelines that then got sort of enshrined into law yeah and that that we now are absolutely bound to both ethically and legally. Would you say that they're, they're complex or, I mean, like how hard would it be for someone to step in and understand the regulatory regime?

That's why we do like to become a professional hunter, you do a two year apprenticeship and then you have to sit an exam on the law. I mean, cause every species there's, there's different rules like to hunt a male leopard, first of all, it's gotta be male, but it's gotta be over a certain length or, you know, it can be confiscated and same with a lion. Has to be aged in Tanzania. And if it's under seven, there's a fine and it can be confiscated if it's under another age. So, so when people like to point out that Cecil, the lion was 13, he couldn't have been under seven. In Tanzania, you have to hunt a seven-year-old or older.

And I mean, the Cecil thing is something that sort of hits a bone. Have you heard about that before? Funnily enough, we've been laboring. It's been an albatross around our neck for like however many years it's been now and i mean it had a real impact for us it did it i mean okay go on i mean roger can go into it a little more but we've both seen and know of anecdotally and and seen with our own eyes areas that were perhaps not the most productive area from the standpoint of there wasn't a big ticket item from a planes game standpoint,

didn't have a good population of sable or roan antelope, for example. Which is not a huge variety. Not a big variety. You know, it had like buffalo and lions and the lions, because of the population of them there, would be enough of a big ticket item that you could generate if you could sell a couple of lion hunts a year, one, maybe two. Again, abiding by those rules of harvesting those old lions, you would be able to sustain and justify having that area as part of your company's concessions and doing anti-poaching, so on and so forth. We can literally point to areas where, with Cecil, that rug was pulled out from under us. Clients weren't booking those lion hunts. The outfitter can't make money from that area anymore. Gave it back to the government, essentially.

The paper records are there. Before Cecil, there was 160 hunting concessions in Tanzania. And within three or four years of that, the government basically, I mean, the hunting outfitters had returned a lot of these leases because they didn't have the business for them. And it dropped to 120 and those 40 areas the sort of fringe areas they then had no use and i watched it with my own eyes some of our neighboring concessions where everything went wasn't you know it had a negative impact on

everything like there wasn't a tree left because if no one was looking after that area that the local villages would use it for something so first of all the loggers would move in cut all the trees then the illegal grazing would come in and there's no one there to sort of stop it and then after that then the farmers would come in and you know plant their crops and within literally a year to two years this pristine wilderness area was just farmland without a breathing living wild creature so you believe i mean you're saying this that's why i clarify you the the the we call them cecil yeah the cecil lion debacle um everyone had the right like actually led to. Like actually led to land, like actually led to abandonment of hunting lands,

which were then developed. I mean, just in Tanzania, we're talking, that's probably 40 million acres of wilderness that was lost because of the Cecil incident. Really? I have no trouble. It didn't even happen in Tanzania, but it's a fact. What country did it happen in?

Zimbabwe. There's a high roller here in town. He's kind of not, he's operating here and he didn't grow up hunting. And I heard how he's going to Africa to go hunting, but his wife has forbade him. I'm shooting a lion. Yeah. And that's what it did is a lot of people. She doesn't want their holiday home burned down. But it made people, it didn't just affect lion hunting,

it affected hunting in Africa full stop. Your avid hunters would still come, but a lot of the middle ground for a few years were like, well, I'm not sure what the other people I work with will feel about this. We have, Tanzania has 40% of Africa's wild lions. In Tanzania. Within the borders of Tanzania are 40% of Africa's wild lions. So we were hit hardest because that, for a lot of these areas, that was our big ticket item.

You know, that was our draw card. We could offer a really well done lion hunt that we can back up with actual conservation data. I mean, Oxford University did a study that basically showed in an ecosystem in central Tanzania that there's no discernible difference between the populations of lions and leopards. So those sort of top predators and in the photographic hunting areas versus the hunting areas that have a sustainable offtake. We actually funded our own population studies of both lion and leopard in our hunting areas because, again, most of the research was done in the national parks where it was comfortable and easy for the scientists.

So we paid for some researchers from Kingsville, actually, to come out and study the lions for two years and the leopards and make population to check that our quotas were actually within the right regions. So do you have, in your areas, do you have lions that you could hunt but there's no clients that want to buy that lion tag yeah definitely and and the the other thing that the reality of it all is is in the wild very few lions make it over the seven year you know age restriction for hunting because it's not like living in the Serengeti where there's just plentiful wildlife everywhere it's it's a tough life and these younger stronger lions come in

and they push those older males out into these fringe areas they get injured they can't feed themselves they die a pretty nasty death so for one to find a lion over the seven year age is very hard. And then the pressure on a professional hunter that he's got to judge that it's definitely over seven years old by just looking at it. What are you looking at when you look at it? There's a whole range of things from nose coloration, main development, body shape, color of their teeth. They have these glandular patches sort of on their

back legs look how they've developed I mean it's an inexact science trail cameras are a real help because we can

get too close are trackers helpful on that kind of stuff yeah a little bit it comes down to your judgement they're going to say

it's a huge lion no matter what and it might be a three year old they're going to be like oh it's a monster it's like people here with mountain lions yeah big old time yeah yeah totally totally black bear we saw we were coming down the road looking for turkeys last weekend and there's a black bear about the size of my dog a little white patch on his chest

yeah and he's sitting like my dog one leg kind of kicked out on his back like this, literally waiting for cars to get down the road, you know? And I turned to my buddy Kyler after he passed and I was like, knowing the area, I was like, you know, let's swing around, shoo that little guy off the road a little bit. And when we had flipped around, there was another, there's like a truck down the road like piling junk out of the like obviously digging for their rifle i just felt i was like all right we just can't yeah it's one of those things where in an area where there's a thriving lion population, it won't be just one male with a pride.

It'll be often a coalition. And those males will frequently be related. They'll be sort of litter mates. So like cousins, brothers, sometimes a father and sons that will sort of run that pride. They might run multiple prides. So there might be two different groups of females, X number of miles apart. And there's this kind of coalition of males that are sort of split their attention or kind of coordinate to run these prides. What'll happen as those lions age,

you know, they get, they get weaker and weaker and there'll be this, there's this other sort of class of lions that's nomads. And,ads. And those will be basically the young males of those prides that haven't joined the coalition and the coalition won't tolerate them once they get to a certain age. So they'll kick them out. And so they become, you know, sometimes in groups, sometimes alone, kind of basically building themselves up, um, doing a lot of hunting, doing a lot of kind of bonding with their future kind of coalition mates and getting themselves ready to go challenge for one of those prides. And then the other category of nomads is ones that have been basically kicked out as a result of one of those battles for dominance. the when the battle for dominance happens a lot of times it'll result in the death of those older lions or or any number of the lions there was a brutal video from the serengeti the other day of like literally the king of the serengeti being wiped out by three younger males i mean just getting told it's a nasty ending, but the ones that survive go, will then go into that nomad phase again, but he's never coming back to pride dominance.

He's, he's not, he's not building up. He's on the, he's on the downswing. He's done his job. Yeah. He's on the downs. Is that a good one to try to find? That's the only one we're going to find. We can't shoot a pride male ethically because if you upset the balance of that coalition, what'll happen is

it'll just be inherently weaker having lost one of its members which can precipitate that pride takeover from another group of males. And what that'll do is once those males take over if there's any cubs from the previous males, they'll kill them. And that has a physiological effect on the females, brings them back into, into season,

brings it back into Easter. So then those new males can breed them. So it's like the Romans. It's brutal. It's real similar to, to our cats here though. Right. So number one killer of mountain lions is

mountain lions. Yeah, that's a good point. But is that predatory or is. It, it, it can be both, but typically males are killing males, but also the exact same, like males are killing kittens because that female will come back into season. Will come back into cycle, yeah.

Like right away. Yeah. So, yeah. When, when they do, uh, with coastal brown bears, when you do like, what are right away. Yeah. So yeah. When they do with coastal brown bears, when you do like, what are they eating? Yeah. If you were to list like what a mature male coastal brown bears diet is high on the list

is brown bears. Yeah. I told a woman that at a party one time and she was just incredulous. She nearly clawed my eyes out. It's regarded as like a primary food source. Yeah. I mean, I have no trouble.

Cubs are a primary food source. And the old fishermen. Isn't it so funny though? It's like, well, what is your agenda with that? And you're like, well, no, it's just what, that's what it has. It's nature. It's what they do. Yeah.

You guys have largely, maybe I'm getting this wrong, but you guys have been, for different reasons, moved out of the elephant hunting business. Well, we as a company made a choice about 20 years ago that we couldn't ethically hunt elephants in our hunting areas in Tanzania. The poaching got so bad about 15 years ago that, you know, for a mature elephant with big ivory, it takes 50, 60 years to, to get to that level. And are they that old? Yeah. Oh yeah. I knew they were old.

Oh, they're old. Yeah. So to get to the point that we would feel comfortable hunting one again would take another 20, 30 years from now just to build up those populations to an ethical level for us. But there's still ethical government limits, but we just personally decided. You don't sell the hunts. If you want to, well, we'll suggest people go to Botswana or parts of Namibia where they've got too many elephant and they actually physically have to cull on top of the foreign hunting clients. Botswana at one point was having to cull 40,000 or 50,000 elephant every year.

What? Yeah. No way. Yeah. No way. Yeah. I mean, the crop damage that they can do. And again, you know, elephants are extremely migratory by nature. You know, they'll follow grass. They'll follow the rains.

They'll follow ancient ancestral paths to get to different food resources at different times of the year. And, of course, all that now has been like interdicted by highways, development, farmland, and so on. So, you know, if they can't do those migrations, they're increasingly pushed into these smaller and smaller areas and they just eat themselves out of house and home. And also they get in conflict with those surrounding agricultural communities. And, and that's where, you know, the necessity of a cull comes in, but we're, we're not in that place

in Tanzania anymore. And, and what's, you know, what's fundamentally changed for us is we, we, if you believe as we do, and I think as everyone in this room does, whether it's in the North American model or in our model that, you know, an animal there's in any sort of functional sort of population of animals, there's a sustainable offtake that, that can be managed and, you know, can be utilized whether it's lions or white tail deer that, you know, that that's something that that's possible. But when you've got that commercial poaching pressure over and above on top of that, it just does, it's not sustainable anymore.

We can't, you know, look at ourselves in the mirror and say, yeah, you know, there's harvest, there's elephants we could harvest in these areas and it wouldn't be detrimental to the population. So, you know, Robin hurt safaris. We're out of that business. Well, that actually leads me on to another

point. Yeah. Offspring every single year. No, no, no. They're not dropping offspring every single year. No, no, no. They're not dropping. Four to seven year calving interval. 22 month gestation. Elephants will breed well when they're left to their own devices and when they have habitat.

But it's a slow process. It's generational. So if you lose a whole bunch like we did, it takes a long time to get back. But what Morgan was saying a minute ago is something that it touches a bone with me. For some reason, hunting in Africa is labeled as trophy hunting. And okay, trophies do come into it. Like hunters always, there are people who want the bigger animal, but it should really be called sustainable hunting. What we do, that's, that's what our company is all about. It's making sure that our offtake does not affect the population.

And, and it's, my dad always says it's, we're basically no different from a beef cattle farmer. Like the wildlife is our crop and we manage it. We have sustainable offtake, but we don't want to do anything detrimental to that wildlife population because that's how we make our living. And I know, I guess a lot of celebrities and everyone have, have made this stigma about hunting in Africa where it's all these rich americans you know standing over an animal you know and an ego thing where that's that's not what we're about you know we're traditional ethical hunters with very strong practices on age sex everything like that well it's very confusing and i'll tell you like the argument that i hear all the time and I have no answer to because I have no experience.

Right. It's like, well, where does that money go from that elephant hunt? Yeah. Right. And it's like, well. It generally all goes straight back into that area, you know, because the game fee gets paid to the government, which funds their game scouts who are back in the area patrolling. And that's what I was saying with these areas that disappeared after Cecil. It's because there was no longer any funding.

And they put the funding back into the core places that are bringing them money. And that's what I'm confused about, too. Because so you pay like a lease to the state for that concession. Yeah. But then at that point, it sounds as if it then becomes your responsibility to fully manage that concession. In conjunction with the wildlife department. But that wildlife department will not operate there unless there's an active concession. Well, they just have limited funding and they're going to put the

funding at their core resources. So like the Serengeti, for instance, that has millions of tourists coming through paying fees. They have all the funding they need for, for that area. And they're going to protect it because that's bringing in the big bucks. And the more peripheral the areas are, the less funding reaches those places. And that's where in the big bucks. And the more peripheral the areas are, the less funding reaches those places. And that's where hunting comes in.

Without hunting, most of the areas we operate would disappear in a matter of literally years. So your business affords the government to be able to do monitoring in that area. Exactly. 100%. And then they can afford the government to be able to do monitoring in that area. Exactly. A hundred percent. So Tanzania has got, I think it's 40% of their total landmass is set aside for some sort of conservation effort, some sort of wildlife conservation and sort of various tiers of wilderness. So before when you were talking about like no one lives in our Luganzo concession because it's a game reserve.

Well, that's kind of our top tier of protection. Below that, there's other tiers where you'll have areas where there are human inhabitants. There is a village inside the area. There are people grazing through that area seasonally. There are people, you know, people collecting honey, people collecting firewood, doing other activities. But there's still game there and there's still, you know, it's still a hunting concession. There's still management going on. There's still kind of an interaction between those people that are inhabiting or seasonally using the area and the hunting operator and the government, but, but essentially, you know, that's a huge chunk of land that

the Tanzanian government's committed to wildlife conservation. Like, I'm not sure what percentage of North America is set aside for some sort of, you know, wilderness or hunting or whatever. Well, there's a, what is it? Less than 2%. No, but, well, yeah, but no but no the 30 by 30 is that what it is oh yeah but that's a way different definition yeah by 2000 by 2030 having is that right yeah by 2030 having 30 of the u.s and some kind of protective state. Yeah, and it incorporates things

like CRP and... Under some kind of conservation model. Yeah, and the lines here are a lot blurrier between wildlife habitat and agriculture, right? Like, you can go on a ranch that's being fairly intensively

farmed or ranched and there'll be white-tailed deer, there'll be antelope, there'll be elk coming down onto the alfalfa, there'll be predators following those animals. In Tanzania at least, in northern Masai land, it's a little different where people just graze animals, but in most of central, kind of western and southern Tanzania, there's like a hard delineation between agricultural land and land for wildlife.

Got it. And there's very little spillover because a lot of that agriculture is subsistence farming. So there's no ability for those people to accept, oh, well, a percentage of my crop is going to go to the buffaloes and that's just kind of the way it is. That's not a- And anything that steps in there is going to get poached because there's no one as food as food and because it's detrimental to their agriculture this is the biggest thing that you have to understand about africa is that for for wildlife to survive it has to have a value

because it's either going to be eaten or it's destructive to their their crops or it's killing their cattle you know their livestock 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.

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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 x club y'all in the u.s we're on we're like on edge very guarded about the pay-to-play model certain certain forces are not right yeah but like you know um you're kind of like meat and potatoes non-aristocratic

hunters are worried about the pay-to-play model because it violates an understanding of how we manage wildlife when i was talking about that at its ideal wildlife is allocated democratically yeah yeah okay and and pay-to-play, there's a hundred versions of pay to play. Emerging pay to play would be, um, things like governor's tags, auction tags, where you're pulling it out of democratically. It's you're taking animals, bighorn sheep, elk, whatever. And the tag, the opportunity would have been allocated democratically, but it goes to a highest bidder. So that would be an affront to pay to play. Another huge pay to play aspect in the U S is the rapidly, I mean, the increased, still

increasing numbers of acreage that are, um, where hunting rights are leased. Right. Okay. It's a pay to play model and it's, and it's generally regarded by most folks it's it's watching this progression um is disheartening to people they don't it's depressing okay but you guys are telling me when we spoke recently that um this is not new and like the entire african system is built around pay-to-play it's to play. It's always been. Yeah.

It's always been that way. Yeah. Even, you know, going back again to the, the Roosevelt safari, you know, that you couldn't, I mean, the early guys would go to Cape town or something like that and, and buy a bunch of cattle and hire a bunch of guys and load up these wagon trains and head out into the wilderness. But it very quickly became, if someone wanted to come and experience Africa, whether it was someone with the almost limitless means that Roosevelt had at that time, or a British colonial officer, they'd need to engage the services of someone who could navigate that, you know, deal with the, you know, interact with the various tribes they were going to come across, you know, make sure that, you know, they were able to find the appropriate habitats where those species resided. And I think our industry's kind of always been that way. And I sort of get

the discomfort that, that a lot of people have with this notion that you can have a guy living on the edge of a game reserve, but he's not allowed to hunt there. Like, is that really like, if you were, you're a resident of Tanzania, there is no possible way for you to go legally get. We used to have resident hunting. For all intents and purposes, no. But what I would say is that a lot of people probably, I don't know if a lot of people have thought about this, but I've thought about it quite a lot recently, having spent a lot of time in North America. I think the North American model is underpinned by something else other than sort of just the democratization of wildlife. And that is the sort of like presupposition that there's a large number of this

people, people in this country that aren't living hand to mouth. Right. I fundamentally believe that the North American model wouldn't function in a country in this country. If 60% of the population of this country was living on a dollar a day and trying to figure out ways to feed themselves. Well, you know what backs you up on that?

No. It didn't. Oh, right. Oh, yeah. We went through that. No, for sure. We went through that for 200 years. Absolutely.

Absolutely. And they wiped the place clean. Wiped the place clean, right? And Africa, and I speak, you know, through the lens of Tanzania specifically, is still on that development trajectory where, you know, there's a growing population. There's all this pressure. There's a huge number of the commons, right? Where it's just like there's all this pressure of consumption on very limited resources. And also, I think if you spoke to the average Tanzanian, like sport hunting isn't a high priority for them. It'd just be about the meat.

It'd be about the meat. It'd be about the meat. And so what we do, what our objective is as a company is to basically extend those benefits to those communities, partner with those communities, and allow those people that live on the edge of the game reserve, okay, they can't grab their bow and arrow, apply for a tag and go in there and shoot a buffalo, but there's meat coming back, you know, there's meat coming back to their communities. There's employment coming back to their communities.

There's things they need like clinics, schools, et cetera, et cetera. So they're benefiting in an indirect sort of one degree removed from our operations, as opposed to just sort of saying, well, hey, this resource is quite literally for everybody in the sense that it's accessible to you. So the wildlife isn't allocated, but some of the funding is allocated. Definitely. And we couldn't do what we do without partnership with those communities, right? Our model was roll in there, run roughshod over them, put up fences, keep them out, have our anti-poaching guys essentially intimidating them to stay out of our area. It wouldn't work because there are more of them than there are us. Always going to be.

So the only way that our model functions is if those communities feel that they're a stakeholder in this model, that they're benefiting. And so that's really, that's our biggest challenge. And that's our primary focus. I mean, America has a great system. I mean, the tag system. We like to talk about it, it's the best in the world. Yeah, it is. I mean, I didn't really fully understand it. Unironically, it is. But there's some preconditions, I think, I didn't really fully understand it. Unironically, it is. But there's some preconditions, I think, that are missing for us.

It's a great point. Randall and I are working on a project. We're working on a project about, it'll be an audio book, like an audio book. I imagine his title would be Dr. Williams on that. We're working on, the first one we're doing is, an audio book. I imagine his title would be Dr. Williams on that. Yeah. It'll be. Uh, we're working on a, the first one we're doing is a history of the, of the deer.

Well, what we call the long hunters. If you're heard of a feller named Daniel Boone. Oh yeah. He made his name for himself as a long hunter, but focused heavily on the deer trade in colonial America. Oh, interesting. Because they were in bad shape for a while.

Oh, and what you're talking about when you talk about like, well, what about when everyone is in poverty? Right. How does the system? research that just uh things that are brought to mind in talking to you about what goes on in tanzania would be these like very early wild temptation attempts not temptations attempts at slowing the slaughter right from pot hunters from professional poachers of which you know boone was essentially a professional poacher um meaning that if you didn't own land in a district you weren't allowed to hunt interest you weren't allowed to hunt somewhere where you didn't live nearby like the european model yeah and like trying to which no one paid attention to but like them trying to go like okay how would

you do something like this and i couldn't believe one of the first prohibitions on deer hunting was in the 1700s oh yeah yeah early they're just going like well what if we had a time a year what if we had a time a year when you can't hunt and basically the response is yeah i hope everybody else pays attention to that. But it was. It was like sort of watching this young country to be going like, well, let's say you did want to save some of it. Like, where do you begin?

You know, with a bunch of ideas that didn't hold. So what defines a long hunter? They went on some long-ass hunting trips. Got it. Got it. Okay, interesting. They would only return if they had enough meat to to bring back wow okay right and that's yeah hide yeah hide hunters they were generally like deer they were deer they were hunting generally they sold a lot of bush meat got it okay they sold a lot of bush meat but they were generally

hunting uh hides primarily whitetail deer hides that would get exported to europe interesting They sold a lot of bush meat, but they were generally hunting, uh, hides, primarily whitetail deer hides that would get exported to Europe. Interesting. And there's also the parallel of like global demand for commodities fueling excessive harvest, right? Like when you're talking about ivory trade, right? Like in the commercial demand for those resources. Oh, millinery trade.

There's like a bottomless demand for, or an endless demand, whatever you want to call it for white tail deer skins. Yeah. To turn into leather for leather products. And it's just like. From people that didn't really care how you got them. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. As long as, like you said, you talked about earlier, like if you can get them to the port, that's good enough for me. Good enough. Yeah.

The fascinating thing with North America to me is like, obviously those animal populations just took a dive. I mean, I've heard about the, in relation to turkeys and white-tailed deer in particular. But obviously the habitat was still there to enable that once they had figured out through whatever political or social means to put this structure to conserve these animals, set seasons, limit harvest. Once that was in place, the animals were able to bounce back because that habitat was intact. Whereas what we face really is like Roger was talking about before that loss of habitat. And I think you said something once along the lines of like, when you see someone building some sort of structure, you, you think in your head, well, that'll never be habitat again. And, and that's what we, that's what we deal with day in, day out.

Once that field of maize gets planted once that tree gets cut once the you know once all that's done once those cattle are in there that'll never be habitat again and even if you wanted to it's it's a 15 to 25 year process to recreate something that's destroyed in six months well and politically you go evict those people which is a nightmare there's one exception to my rule is my friend matt Cook has a farm yeah and there was a house on there and he uh the fire department came in and burned the house down like to do practice yeah and then he scraped up the foundation and they just planted it over the top of the house and every time you go through that area, there is something hanging out. Sitting on the house.

Yeah. It's not really a scalable model. No, one time we go. So one time you go by, there's a groundhog standing there. Last time, two times ago, I went by it. There's a fox squirrel standing there. And I'm not kidding you. We were just doing a fundraiser hunt there And the turkey that my Like my fundraiser guy

That I was guiding Helping The turkey that he killed When I spotted that turkey It was standing on that place Nice So just imagine So there's that place

Yeah hats off to that guy I often kind of have fantasies Like driving the Paradise Valley Like maybe we could just Scrape all this back Oh buddy You're talking Listen I Like Let me choose my words very carefully had someone in 1800 thought that they would just

put a giant trailhead right alongside what would become i-90 and that was the trailhead for that for everything to the south of there yeah they would be they would be applauded today uh but you know that ain't gonna happen um i had some other point i was gonna make about uh what the hell were we talking about before i start talking about my body's place well that habitat when it goes well we've been we've mentioned roosevelt a lot yeah yeah so we've been mentioning his safari yeah sort of you mentioned like the habitat was still there yeah uh his his kind of genius at the time was um it was just focused on basically preservation of preservation of habitat right um it was stop well stop the slaughter yeah yeah like stop unregulated slaughter and then save ground right knowing that just the

the fecundity the biology of the animals if you stop killing every last one of them and you save chunks of ground it would kind of solve itself later later much later you know in the 50s 60s we started to really do a lot more around putting animals back on habitat right um you know moving animals around recovering stuff but initially the conservation play in the u.s was uh stop commercial slaughter and and put some kind of loss prevention in place on on habitat right and then later we started like to fine-tune through you know all these restoration you know um yeah the captive breeding and putting animals back out but early on man it was like it was just those two

things and it's what kind of reminds me a little bit of what we're talking about here is like what we're talking about that you guys see in africa is like try to stop commercial slaughter right and then try to hang on the ground yeah yeah south africa went through a like a reintroduction phase they did well yeah because they privatized they went a different direction to us they They did. market for, you know, people to go over there and hunt or, you know, do photo safaris or whatever it was. Um, and, and yeah, people started breeding game since they could own it, they could breed it. So they, they'd buy a couple of whatever and put them together and breed and then sell the, the excess. And it sort of repopulated. I think it, um, you know, there's downsides to that model a little bit, like you're talking about your, uh, your shed antlers, right. that model a little bit like you're talking about your uh your shed antlers right there's a little something i think in a lot of people where knowing that animal is the the sort of offspring of captive maybe takes a little bit of the little bit of the gloss off it um it's

certainly i wouldn't say i'm necessarily firmly in that camp but like i feel that a little bit you know one of the great things about tanzania is like you're hunting a wilderness. That's kind of always been like that. Um, and, and those animals, the descendants of the ones that Roosevelt hunted, you know, so there's that, um, but, but you can't argue with the success of that model from a, just numbers of animals on the ground standpoint. It's a hugely successful model. Cal's got a question. Oh, sorry. Go ahead.

So I was going to say, going back to the Roosevelt protecting the habitat thing. I think that's our biggest issue in Africa right now is like the population in Africa is already 1.3 billion people. And it's set to basically double in the next 25 years. So the pressure on land is just like, it's never been before. You're not terribly optimistic, are you? No, it's, I mean, everyone's so in the great world is, is anti-hunting and especially African hunting, but, but we're preserving these huge wilderness

areas that have so much pressure. And, and I, I would be totally for it. If there were other forms of land use that could protect it and the photo tourism has their areas, but none of those people want to go to the places we hunt and it needs something to protect those areas and, and at the moment with the answer and until someone comes up with something else, people need to realize how important what we do is. Yeah. There's that huge temptation to like say, we'll just swap the gun for the answer. And until someone comes up with something else, people need to realize how important what we do is. Yeah. There's that huge temptation to like, say, well, just swap the gun for the camera. Right. And then there's no killing. There's no, you know, it's then it's all quote unquote sustainable. Um, the issue with that is Tanzania already has, I think on the mainland, like I think it's 14 or 16 national parks.

And I think three or four of them generate enough revenue from visitors to basically cover all those costs that we talked about. Like having guys patrol the boundaries, having guys work with the local communities to kind of encourage, you know, participation, but not encroachment. And the rest of them, you know, and the government's doing their best, but again, resources are tight. It's a country that's trying to develop, trying to create more opportunities for their people. Resources are tight. So a lot of those areas that are ostensibly, you know, for photographic tourism are just not in good shape. They're not getting the visitors to sort of cover the costs of managing those areas. And I can tell you a photo tourist isn't going to follow tracks of buffalo for eight or ten hours a day in the baking hot sun, pushing through thorn bushes to get a grainy image of the arse end of one heading the opposite direction but hunters will do that all day long and pay for the privilege so we have a different

and while getting bitten by tsetse flies and you know dodging snakes i mean we it's just a different it's a different clientele for a different product but that ecosystem that has the low game density, the sandy soil, and the Tetsy flies is no less valid of an ecosystem and no less important for sustaining certain species than the Serengeti is in my view. Cal's got a question for you. Oh, I mean, that was a beautiful statement. So I was going to let it linger a little bit, but yeah, absolutely. Habitat, man.

It's all habitat. It is. And one of the greatest things about hunting is the fact that, um, a lot of people go to New York state, but they don't go to the parts of New York state that I go to, right, or swap that out for Montana or Maryland or wherever. Uh, it just takes you off of the tourist map. And it's, it's a, ultimately in my mind, a much more real experience, right? Oh, big time. I mean, the thing that I say to people that it's like kind of become a little bit of something

I repeat again and again, but safari, the word safari doesn't mean hunting trip. There's a word for hunting in Swahili. It's kuinda, which I also think kind of rolls off the tongue, to be honest. But that wasn't selected as the word to describe what we do. Safari was. And what safari means is journey. And people forget, like again to Roger's previous point about us sort of getting labeled and tarred with this trophy hunter brush. People just imagine in their mind's eye a bunch of kind of out of shape guys driving around on a truck indiscriminately shooting animals.

But safari is so much more than that. And it's exactly what you say. It's that connection with those wild places. It's the adventure. It's the adventure. It's the drama of it. I mean, you know, hopefully not as dramatic as what Roger, that's the high drama. I like to keep things a little

more mellow. Um, but you know, it's, it's, it's the drama, it's the success, it's the failure, it's the sunrises, the sunsets, it's the, the sounds, the, I mean, you know, on the last safari I was on, we bumped into this giant python, like 13 foot long and as thick as my thigh. And it was just, it was so cool. You know, we just, we talked about that around the campfire. Nothing got killed that day, you know. But it was a trophy day, right? We sat around the campfire. We're just like, I mean, my tracker stepped, nearly stepped on its head and it sort of reared up and it was incredible.

And yeah, we talked about it around the campfire for hours. And it was just like one of those things where you realize like that's safari. It's the escape as well. It's like a lot of our clients say there's nowhere else in the world that they truly just switch off from everything. Apart from being out tracking buffalo. They're in big wild spaces, you know, it's hard to get that elsewhere. I do have to ask you this one thing. It's not nearly as romantic and fun as the things

we've been talking about, but what you have to go through to be a professional hunter as it is a profession. Right. And then what is your response to, uh, people in North America who casually respond to themselves or refer to themselves rather as professional hunters? Is this a subtle dig at Steve Manella? Never in my life. I want you to go to Scott. Never inven ranella i talk a lot it's recorded i want you to find where i've ever said that i think other people have said it about you that's good no i i'm being very facetious

it's it's it's a brotherhood um so i don't i'm not in the business of kind of dunking on other people. Shit-talking. Yeah, shit-talking people that make their living guiding whatever, doing whatever it is that they do that kind of allows them to refer to themselves that way. We had a professional shed antler hunter on the podcast recently. Really? Oh, it turns things into dog treats. That is, I'm going to have to think about that one. So he was a PH.

I'm going to think about that. He was a PSH. I'm going to have to think about that one for a while because I'm still a little bit back. Professional mushroom hunters, for sure. You do enough of anything, you become a professional. No, for sure. And I mean, ours is, our industry's got a little bit more of a sort of formal thing to it, but there are guys that, that'll look at the kind of apprenticeship I I've done, which some of it has been like a little bit self-taught. hunters and going back to your Rogers comment that his brother chewed him out for not carrying his rifle.

His brother, Derek was like an early mentor to me getting into the business. And that was one of the first things he ever said to me. He's like, listen, when you get off the truck, it doesn't matter if you're going to take a piss or you're going to go check a water hole real quick. See if there's some tracks there, grab that rifle, put, you know, put around in it. And that's, that's the other thing is always have a loaded rifle. There's no point carrying a rifle around if it doesn't have a bullet in the chamber.

This, this rule applies to the, the, the client as well, by the way, but, but stuff like that, you know, getting the opportunity to sit with those guys, another guy, Danny McCallum, who's one of the greats, you know, getting the opportunity to sit down with Danny and just pick his brain about stuff. Um, you know, getting the opportunity to be on safari with some of these, you know, getting the opportunity to sit down with Danny and just pick his brain about stuff. Um, you know, getting the opportunity to be on safari with some of these, you know, these top hunters was, it was a big deal for me. And then, you know, ultimately going through my exams and all the rest of it. But I think, um, exams accreditation. Yeah. Yeah. There was a formal component to it too. That's against the Bible.

I mean, and I'm not necessarily anchoring it to that. There's a formal component to it for us, but yeah, I mean, I think... And then there's something where somebody adorns you with a break-action rifle, a double rifle of some sort. But they screw you on the sling. Well, not everyone likes the double sling.

You gotta carry it over your shoulder. I was in a camp one time where a guy was eyeballing me. I was guiding. And he said, when are you going to get rid of that bolt trash and get yourself a real rifle? What? Meaning a double rifle. Oh, yeah. There's definitely a very split camp in the professional hunting world on bolt versus double.

Really? We're double men. Yeah, we're both double men. So we're firmly in that camp. You guys carry the little doubles around. I'm a traditionalist. The big doubles. Yeah, we do.

We both do. Yeah. Rogers. But it's a question of, is two shots better than potentially three shots is what it comes down to. Ooh. We can get two shots off faster. A bolt action guy can maybe get the third shot. You can miss twice real fast.

Yeah. One of my, again, one of my mentors, it might've been, it might've been Derek also said to me, you know, when you're shooting that double rifle, if something comes, you know, by all means, when you first see it, fire that first barrel, hold on to that second barrel until you can't miss yeah till the end of the barrel is basically on it basically you're you're touching it's you know it's bright i'm assuming both you guys have had to shoot charge

and stuff yep a few times is it like every year thing every decade it varies i will say this a lot is made of um the the danger element of of what we do and it's there you know roger's situation is a classic example if that had gone differently you know two little boys are growing up without a dad you know the danger is there and we'll we'll put our lives on our on the line for our clients like Roger demonstrated. But I consider with, with some exceptions, right? There's always edge cases, but I generally consider a charge to be the result of a screw up from either the professional hunter or the client. Well, that one guy made a whole video series about getting charged by everything in Africa over and over and over again. Yeah, we don't operate that way.

And I'll just leave it at that. But I think the bottom line for me is a charge is a highly undesirable situation. The buffalo hunt or the lion hunt or the leopard hunt that you will remember and that, make you smile every time you think about it is exactly like the deer hunt, the bear hunt, the elk hunt. And that's the one where you make a great stalk, you get close to your quarry and you make a clean, you know, proper kill, proper shot that results in a clean kill on that animal. And then you're able to enjoy that, that wonderful moment of sitting there with your

animal, whether it's a meat animal or a trophy animal or obviously both in 99.9% of cases and you can really enjoy that. That is what you come to Africa for, not to be attacked by things. The biggest part of our apprenticeship is really teaching you how to not get yourself hurt. It's about teaching you caution and not just going, you know, guns blazing into a situation. Sure, man. Big time.

I tell you, I, uh, you know, I've always kind of wanted to, I've always kind of wanted to go to Africa and we've even looked at it when we were filming a lot of shows. We've even at times kicked it around. But after having you guys for dinner, man, I want to go so bad and hunt Cape Buffalo, man. Let's make it happen. You got to see it. Let's make it happen.

It's, I just want to see you all, man. Yeah. It's just really different. It's really different. I would love to check it out. Yeah.

Yeah. It's, I think there's a reason why it, you know, Africa sort of held this place in people's imaginations for a long time. And obviously there's that danger element and so on and so forth. But again, it goes back to my previous point about all those things that make up safari, like what safari is. That's what sticks with people.

Yeah, you guys really sold me on the Tanzania deal too. Cause like the wilderness aspect, man. Well, we've, in my opinion, Tanzania is, you know, the greatest game field left on earth,

you know, and I get that sort of a controversial thing to say. And I, and I don't mean to sort of start a comparison. You haven't been to my buddy, Matt Cook's place. Yeah, it's true.

I heard about that. With the groundhog and the fox squirrel. The fox squirrel. Yeah. And I don't, and I don't mean to like start a sort of pissing match, but. Well, species, how many species on the. Well, between our different hunting areas, there's about 33 different species of animal that you can legally. Of game animal.

Yeah. But out of one camp, what's the variety probably 20 15 20 yeah 20 in any given yeah but i'm not looking man i'm very i want to be very targeted being i'm not looking to be like oh that's what one of them is but there's no part of you doesn't want to be like well what's that well what's that well no there is but they kind of sold me on yeah they i don't know put words your mouth these guys really like tracking those cape buffalo and they kind of sold me on that as being sort of like the and when you're on that there's just less uh sightseeing opportunity

it consumes but there are you'll you'll bump into stuff that you know it'll be a particularly nice specimen or whatever while you're tracking buffalo or when you're, you know, heading back to camp or whatever, you'll bump into stuff and. There's definitely species. There's a list of species that are what we call real hunts. So you're not just going to see one. Right.

Driving around and have an easy. You know, I grew up guiding in Eastern Montana for antelope, right? Yeah. And people got so distracted by all the other stuff that you could do that it became very challenging to kill an antelope. Right. And people got so distracted by all the other stuff that you could do that it became very challenging to kill an antelope, which at the time was not hard to do, but it was like, well,

I want to chase those birds or chase those rabbits or, you know, and all the distraction things. Yeah. So I know that in order to be successful at something, you really have to focus. You've got to focus. Yeah.

But. And buffalo hunting's like that. If I were to go all the way to Africa, I would also just want to be able to be like, holy shit, there's that thing that I've only seen in a book. Oh my God, look at that. They said you will see lions tracking the buffalo. Quite often they're also tracking the buffalo.

You will see lions, you'll see elephants, you'll see warthogs, all this kind of junk, man. Yeah, you'll see it. You'll just see it around. I mean, when you're driving around in the area, you'll see lions. You'll see elephants. You'll see warthogs. All this kind of junk, man. Yeah, you'll see it. You'll just see it around. I mean, when you're driving around in the area, you'll see it. And man, some of those animals are good to eat. Yeah. But it's also sounds like a track and it sounds like a real grind.

You put some big miles on it. Track them sounds phenomenal. It's a grind. You guys will do some 10 mile sessions. Easily. Yeah. Easily. Most days will be 7 to 10 miles.

And it'll end with that Buffalo snorting at you, can't even see it. And you consistently have the clientele that is willing to show up and walk 7 to 10 miles a day? We tell them. You have to judge the client. And sometimes, you know, I've had a 83 year old on safari and it reaches a stage where you've just got to call it on just

different itinerary, but you always bring the bag of M&Ms, right? Yeah, exactly. I do. I always have M&Ms at the ready. Yeah. I'd be like, I could have bought those at home. Cliff bars. There are nothing.

Some source of energy yeah yeah it's i mean you know every buffalo hunt's different but i think roger and i feel the same way as like as probably you guys do the you're driving down the track and there's one standing off to the side of the road even if it's a real big one it's like like, no, you got to track them. You got to track them. It's got to be proper. It's got to be done right. There's no, um, and there is hardly ever an easy, but no, and that's what's so beautiful

about them is it's, it's always an adventure. And I don't know. I always, people always say, how could you liken it to, to hunting in North America? And I think from what I hear, I think elk hunting is probably the nearest thing, but then add in a huge danger element of adrenaline and excitement on top of it being a huge challenge in a beautiful wilderness. And what's the, what's the tip horn tip, the horn tip size on those things? Well, it varies.

It can vary from as wide as its's head Like the one that hit me To 45 inches Wow For us A trophy's an old one You know A trophy's a gnarly one

The gnarlier the better Like If I If I could only shoot one Buffalo in my life And it was like That one that got roged With the

They call it a scrum cap Oh I'd be I'd be psyched I'd be thrilled I'd be happy to have, with the, I'd be psyched. I'd be thrilled. I'd be happy to have that on my wall. I'd be absolutely thrilled. A little chunk of Rogers, a collarbone.

That's an added bonus. But yeah, that, you know, a trophy is in the, the kind of the eye of the beholder, you know, as long as it's old,

I mean, I've shot some Buffalo that's horns are barely as wide as there is, but I was stoked, stoked. Yeah. Or, or just, he was small. There's just a small Buffalo, just like you get a small elk, like you just small Buffalo, never going to get any bigger. That's just how he was made.

Rigby have started this award. They call it the Duggar boy award, which in my opinion is probably the best hunting award that I've ever heard of. And the criteria of how they, they judge it is not based on the size of the animal. It's, it's all about the age and how hard a hunt it was like four or five factors, but it's nothing to do with the inches. It's just to do with age and how physical or difficult it was to achieve. So what made it so memorable?

Yeah. And it's, yeah, it's amazing. I think it's a great idea. So when you find the one that got you, it should get a high score. I'm hoping. It's his only chance. His dad's a judge. Yeah, my dad's a judge.

So he'll need to recuse himself. So the only way for him to win is getting that one. Yeah. And I think you can do it. You have a to win is getting that one. Yeah. And I think, I think you can do it. You have a pretty solid case with that one. Yeah. I think if I was Africa, um,

I would hire you guys to go around like giving the spiel. Well, to tour America. Well, as it happens. No, I mean, we will talk to anyone who listen about what we do because because we, I would say, aside from the privilege of getting to do what I do and be with those trackers, be with those like-minded people, you know, clients, some phenomenal clients over the years that I would say my mission, if I had to like define it.

And I know like, it's a sort of, it's very American thing to like talk about your mission, but I'm going to get on board with that. And my mission, I would say, is to change people's perception of what our industry is about, because I think we've, we've labored under, we've sort of had this albatross around our neck of like, like edge cases, like people like to focus. I think it's like a human nature thing. People like to focus on like edge cases and use them as an example of why a whole system

is just irreparably like not going to work. Oh, I do that every day. Yeah. I mean, we all do. It's like an easy, it's an easy path to go down. But in- Spider Bowl.

There's a famous help. Spider Bowl. Spider Bowl. And's a famous help. Spider bowl. And you go from there to whatever. Yeah. But for us, you know, I think our industry, we can honestly say that wildlife in Tanzania is better off for it than without it. And that's all it's going to come down to soon with all the pressure that's coming from population growth and everything else. It's going to be just come down to that. Yeah. And it's a, it's a passion like for us, it's, it's really, none of us are in it as a, you don't sign up to be a professional hunter to, to make a lot of money. You do it because

you care about these wilderness areas. I mean, we've, we've got areas that we've taken care of for 45 years and, you know, you, you have a bond with these places that is second to nothing. And a lot of it, you know, you can tell we're both pretty passionate about it, but it's, it's our responsibility to try and educate people on, on some of the realities in Africa, what it's like on the ground that you might not realize living somewhere in the United States, for example. Yeah. You guys do a good job of it. I'm gonna start a GoFundMe. It'd be called Steve goes hunt in Africa.

There we go. I'm going, you know, I wish we were playing trivia. Cause I bet we'd beat you guys bad. Cause you wouldn't know all the American North America thrash us, but then trivia show right now. And a lot of them like, what river in Arkansas would beat you guys so bad? Yeah, we'd get thrashed.

We'd get thrashed. I mean, if there was, yeah, a question of like, name these five antelope species. And I'd be like, oh boy. Yeah, we might have to turn the tables on you guys. So it makes me realize how American our trivia game is. It's very American. We're going to have to broaden our horizons. That makes sense.

But we're going to, you know what? We're going to launch in our trivia, we're launching a trivia board game. Oh, nice. And see, here's the long, let me give you a little insight into the board game world. What you do is you launch a board game. Yeah.

And then every year you have specialized expansion packs so like we can't decide if our first expansion expansion pack would be like the whitetail expansion pack the waterfowl expansion pack we'll consult with you guys down the road and we'll do the safari expansion pack or the whatever that word is you had yeah kuinda yeah the queen and then people that have like a little have some curiosity about african big game could buy that expansion pack and it'd be like they could mix it in and have all these questions like what you're talking about yeah and then we'll come back on and do trivia and it'll be a little beat our asses it'll be a little more even if we draw from that deck yeah another expansion pack we talked about was like um mountain men and frontiersman expansion

pack but i don't know if you come up with enough questions we can throw in some cool stuff about like some of those early africa guys like this guy fc saloo for example just a just a wild man just to have be that no americans yeah but some america i mean again if they've read if they've read about the roosevelt safari they'll know who fc saloo is really yeah they'll know that guy's name and they should everyone should i got one last question uh pith helmets mandatory not a thing anymore definitely not i have had one client get off a klm plane with his socks pulled up his hunting jacket and a pithon that's he was a writer to be fair so he was trying to recreate the oh he wanted to feel it from the beginning to the he's like a method he's like instead of a

method actor he's a method writer that's fantastic i dig it i honestly i dig it i've got a lot of admiration for that guy that that takes balls we should relaunch instead of like a regular uh trucker cap we should have a meat eater branded meat eater some of the zimbabwean professional hunters laugh at me for wearing boots so i think a pith helmet's going to be like a non-starter. I'll look it up later. I'm not quite clear why they wore them. Was it sun protection? It was supposed to be shade and breeze.

Sun protection. I don't think it's going to stop a bullet. No. No. All right. Robin Hurts Safaris. That's the place. Don't call down there

though until I get my situation squared away have a thing on the web just shut the website down yeah just for a few days until I get my situation squared away

we'll hold something for you we'll hold something for you dude I want to go so bad man alright what are you thinking Phil you in is this my official invite well let's see if you can get that

editing pulled together turn it around on the edits all depends on how the next couple weeks go it sounds alright guys thanks so much for coming on man this is great thanks for having us yeah oh

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