The MeatEater Podcast - Ep: 529: BONUS DROP - Steve and Clay Talk Alaska Wolf Trapping

Episode Date: March 7, 2024

Steven Rinella talks with Clay Newcomb about Clay's trip to trap wolves in Alaska and the film MeatEater made out his adventure.  Connect with Steve and MeatEater Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for elk, First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at firstlight.com. F-I-R-S-T-t-l-i-t-e.com all right ladies and gentlemen we're joined by our our friend and colleague and uh i don't know beloved uh ark and ark and say what how do you say that arkansan arkansan clay newcomb who's recently back from a trip where he accompanied a wolf trapper in alaska and made a uh made a video about hanging out with this alaska wolf trapper

and um videos gotten quite a lot of views and generated a lot of conversation and i wanted to check in with clay about and first thing i want to Clay, is tell me what you wanted to name it and what they ended up naming it and why. Well, I wanted to just come out and say what the film was about in the title. And I wanted to call it Trapping Wolves in Alaska or Alaskan Wolf Trapping. Yeah, that makes sense. alaska or alaskan or or alaskan wolf trapping yeah and we were we were advised not to do that because of the potential for youtube to flag something that had the word trapping in the title yeah and so we we ended up calling it alaskan wolf management with clay newcomb yeah and that

kind of opens up a can of worms from the very beginning no it really sets you know yeah i think it sets uh uh it just sets an expectation and delivers a certain dialogue meaning if you made a squirrel hunting video which you like to do which i like to do and then you had to call it squirrel management in mich, it'd feel kind of weird. Right. Raccoon management. It feels a whole lot more like it's this mission-driven experience, as if I felt like by me going up there and trapping a couple of wolves,

four wolves actually, that it was gonna you know change something and and no doubt that it's a statement in today's world if you go wolf trapping but it really i wanted to i wanted to experience it i've known david bennett's for about 10 years yeah that's what i wanted to get into because i don't understand i was a little hurt because i don't know why he didn't come it's why the article wasn't beaver trapping with steve beaver management with steve ranella yeah so what uh what what headed the whole thing off or what started so i met david bennett's about 10 years ago through bear hunting magazine david's an outfitter david's

a professional crabber that's his main livelihood is is crabbing for three months during the summer for dungeon dungeonous crabs yeah oh man his stories and and and and his learning about that was incredible but he's just like the classic Alaskan, man. He's a Dutchess crabber. Whenever those guys come through our area, crabbing gets bad. Go on. Yeah. David is also an outfitter.

So he guides for Alaskan big game. I would say his primary thing is black bear and goats. But then lastly, in the wintertime he traps and he's trapped since he was 10 years old you know david's 57 or so just incredible guy you know and he at times he's made a lot of money trapping back in the day and to this but to this day he still traps just as hard as he's ever trapped just out of principle yeah if he's 67 and he started trapping when he was 10 he was cranking through the big fur boom i mean he was young but he was selling fur during like the the big fur boom with a capital fb. I think it's hard for those guys.

Late 70s, early 80s. My friend Stu Miller said to me, every generation has its own fur boom. And this came early. Man, I think those old guys have a hard time letting go of that. I mean, so much of what we do, I think, is fueled by more than just economics and the buzz that somebody would have gotten back in the day to have made

a legitimate amount of money trapping furs. That association with sustenance for your family, going out and taking furs off the landscape would just almost be hard to erase it feels to me like you know you keep doing it even when prices are cheap but man the beaver the beaver market's back though because of these dang felt hats oh i know yeah uh it is cranked i'm obsessed with i don't want to talk about fur prices but i don't sell fur but i'm obsessed with the fur market i follow the fur market more closely than i follow like the stock market do you have one of those do you have like a graph on your phone that you just can it doesn't flip on and and see like ups and downs like a stock exchange no it doesn't work that way so you reached out to him and i bet there's no way that he wasn't at first thinking to himself, man,

I don't want you and some camera dudes coming into this thing, which is just going to cause me hassle. Guys are going to know where I trap. Guys are going to know how I trap. I'm going to have animal rights people coming after me. Um, how did you ever get them to say yeah come on out trapping with a camera you know i was very conscious of that when i reached out to him

and i honestly feel like david believes that the the authenticity and legitimacy of what he's doing is able to withstand any criticism that he's taken. And he also just isn't concerned about giving away secrets. I mean, sometimes guys are like that. David is willing to help anybody he can that's wanting to do it. But it's so difficult. I mean, what the film didn't portray and we tried to portray, and you know this because you do stuff like this all the time, Steve, is that you got to have something driving you that's almost

clinically insane to do what he does. I being out on the water the distance of these the distance he's traveling the amount of money that he spends on even just his trap sets um it's a very very few people are going to see that video and move to alaska and be a wolf trapper yeah and he knows that and uh and and i told him that we were gonna handle it in a responsible way and i think he just he just took us for our at our word for that you know so how did you guys pick the season you were gonna go um was he trying to line it up with with peak conditions with when he doesn't have anything else going on, with when he felt that it was biggest chance of getting real prime wolf pelts that weren't rubbed out? Right.

What was he shooting for when you guys went? His year is very regimented down to the week. He can tell you what he's going to be doing any given week of the year and that first week of december he was going to be trapping wolves whether i was with him or not that's what he told me and yeah it's it's peak fur it's but it's also um you know tough travel conditions that time of year no daylight you can oh that was the biggest challenge of the whole trip steve and you would know it as much as anybody is it gets daylight at about 7 30 a.m maybe even closer to eight and it's dark by 4 30 i mean it's like dark dark and so what was wild so dirt myth was my cameraman on this deal yeah you know garrett smith and he we would get back to the boat 4 30 and not be needing to be in the boat till

eight o'clock the next day sitting in that little cabin on the sandpiper, which we became very familiar with. We'd sit around for six hours, and I don't know what we did. Read, eat, talk. Pack a big old dip. Pack a big dip, probably, right? Dirt was running through some dip, buddy. You better believe it. I was like, man, what if we run out? And he was like, Clay, I got so much dip in my bag. He's like, I got enough for all of us. And I'm like, I don't dip. I'm out, but appreciate it.

So what did the days go like? He runs a big, like he's running a big, well, first, I guess, before we say what the days go like, you should explain, this is a Marine-based deal. He's not running off snowmobiles trucks it's it's marine-based it's boats completely two boats water-based completely water-based trapline yeah so if you saw the film you saw that he has a 48 foot crabbing boat with a cab a kitchen you know fully equipped we we put that in a small, narrow inlet to get it out of

big water and waves. And then we took a skiff out to check the traps. And what is amazing to me, what I would have thought if you would have just said, Clay, you're going to have to go trap wolves in Alaska. How are you going to do it? Coastal Alaska. I would have thought you couldn't trap these wolves on the beach just because they wouldn't have any reason to be there but he's literally catching wolves on the beach in the sand a lot of times yeah um you know you only there's salmon they like it's a peculiar kind of wolf that likes salmon dead i've watched them eating rotten salmon off the beach yeah well yeah they're so they're he feels like they're actually attracted to to these points these sandy points

he feels like they just kind of loaf there you know like a mallard duck and the timber in the midday you know just like loafing huh okay but, okay. But what was interesting to me is he said he learned how to catch wolves by watching his Labrador retriever. Okay. He would pull up on the bank and let his dog jump out of the boat, and he would watch what his dog would do. It was a male dog, and he said that dog would pick the most prominent visual thing that it could see, whether it was a stump, whether it was a clump of grass that set out from the rest of the grass,

whether it was a big rock. And he'd go over and he'd mark it, lift his leg and pee on it. And he just started watching that dog and he started setting traps where he saw his dog, Mark, and started catching wolves. And he- It's like little scent post sets. Exactly. That's what he called them.

And we didn't have time. The video wasn't like how to trap wolves, so we didn't really get into the technical side. But what he uses is wolf urine, a big bottle of wolf urine, and he'll make an artificial scent post. So he'll go to a point that he wants to trap on, and he'll go gather up a couple of logs and some clumps of moss. But he's doing this above the high tide mark or right in where it's getting submerged at high tide no most of it's above the high tide mark even though that is a strategy you know to set it below the tide mark and it's it's like a a drown set you know but most of these he's just catching above the above the grass or near where there'd be grass yeah okay

so he drags out whatever drags out some objects to make some visual appeal i assume yeah and then he and then he puts sin all over it you know he puts his he he had multiple commercial wolf lures, but also this wolf urine. And the biggest thing that I think is different for those guys in Southeast Alaska that are trapping is they don't have to worry about human scent. We were not worried about human scent at all. What is the thinking there? Because everything gets washed out it rains yeah when you're setting a wolf trap you're yeah you're it's gonna rain and it's gonna wash away the scent yeah and so when the guys in the lower 48 that do some trapping that's a big concern is how do you pretty much keep the set scent free?

So, you know, they're wearing gloves. They're really concerned about what you're touching. And up there, he's not at all, which makes it convenient. But his traps, his footholds are dyed and waxed, correct? Yeah. Okay. So go through making this like scent post set so he drags out so an object for some visual appeal and places it out on a point

that's right how big of an and so we showed it we showed a set in the film there was a probably a stump that was 18 inches long or just a piece of log that was 18 inches long and kind of had a big oblong root ball on one side that set up 18 inches tall. And we set it out right out from the grass in the sand where everything would see it and maybe even put another little smaller four or five inch log on it. And then you put that scent post in an area where you can dig easily that's not rocky that's sandy and then we dig down and set just a stand a standard trap set i'm not a expert trapper i've spent a little bit of time trapping i know how to make dirt hole sets and catch foxes and coyotes and all this and i mean you know setting these big traps is just identical to that you know you're you're trying to well he uses a drag for you know

his equipment he's he's using a drag instead of trying to anchor it down now yeah and so you have to dig a deep a pretty deep hole to bury that big drag and it is a big drag and then you know you're setting that trap down into a bed where it doesn't wiggle around and the top of the trap has to be even almost even with the surface of the ground how many inches off the explain how it goes like how many inches off the post because you got a you're trying to get one of the ways to describe it is you got the whole world you know the animal has the whole world the whole damn island whatever to walk around on and you're trying to get it to put its foot on a well in this case you're trying to get it put its foot on a

two-inch circle right so if something walks up if picture that, let's take something that people are more familiar with, like a coyote, okay? A coyote's walking down a dirt lane, walking down a farm trail, whatever, and there's an object that it wants to piss on. Its feet are going to fall in a specific spot. They're not going to be two inches off the thing. They're not going to be 30 inches off the thing. He's not going to dance there he's going to come through raise his leg and leave what are the odds that you've put that trap pan where it's going to put its foot yeah so you're david you're like you you're you're thinking about foot

placement and anatomy when you place it because if not you place it wrong you could have eight wolves run by none of them's gonna put their foot there yeah you know i was kind of surprised at how non-technical david's explanation to me of you know where to put the trap so he's thinking that he's not he's thinking it but he's not saying it probably well i think he's just done it so many times it's just instinctive yeah but i was expecting him to have a tape measure and be like the average big southeast alaskan alaskan wolf has a stride that's you know 14 inches long so if he's sitting here and he's peeing on that log he's going to be 16 inches out and slightly back because he's peeing from the third,

the back third. Yeah, it's technical. Nothing. I mean, he's just – but probably he was 18 inches off of the trap. And I don't think he was targeting a specific foot. I think he's catching a lot of them in the front feet when they come up to sniff the post before they mark it. You know, just an animal just walking up and putting his nose on that on that little scent

log that we made um i don't think he's tech trying to catch it with the back leg you know so he is not as technical as i thought it would be and what you guys before he came out he went out and made a bunch of sets. Yeah. Correct. So he has some sets out working and then you guys punched in some sets and did some remakes and stuff like that. But how many during your time there and explain the number of days you spent

there and, uh, tell folks how many traps you checked. Okay. Over what? so over what distance we were there for six full days and in that time david was concerned that we might not catch a wolf you know that that's how this trapping goes you you might be there for six days and not catch a wolf you know that that's how this trapping goes you you might be there for six days and not catch a wolf so by him setting the traps you know the day before we got there you know we kind of got an extra day um and he has 55 sets over a 200 to we we've mapped it out on onyx a 200 mile trap line boat by water and but each of those sets might have multiple traps so he had two kind of sets he had peepo sets

and what he called bait sets which were set in tide pools. And basically he would have a chunk of beaver that was elevated above the low tide line, covered in rocks, and then he would have four traps set under the water, just set on the ground, not buried. So even at low tide, they're underwater. At low tide, they're underwater. But at low tide or mid tide, whatever, the meat's out of the water,

but the trap's just buried in a tide pool or submerged in a tide pool. That's correct. And so we had 55 sets, but each of those sets, most sets had – well, if they were bait set, they had four traps. So it would be easy to set they had four traps so it would be easy to say he had a hundred traps out

I would say he had a hundred traps out how many how many out ahead of your rival he had all of them out okay he had all of them out

before we got there and we actually caught four wolves on the trip and you know it's just showbiz stuff like we just couldn't we couldn't fit in the other two um but we caught we caught one jet black wolf which which was cool, and caught another kind of juvenile gray wolf. So we caught four wolves in a week, which I think that's about what he expected. But you can go a week and not even catch a single animal. Yeah.

Now, a lot of states have check laws, 24-hour check laws, 48-hour check laws. Some states have check laws. I should clarify. When I'm talking about a check law, I mean a maximum amount of time you can go without visually inspecting a set. And some states just have a flat out check law, 24 hours, 48 hours. Some states have no mention of a check law. And some states have a slightly more nuanced check laws

where certain sets don't have a check law, meaning you might be able to set under the ice or underwater with kill sets and not have a check law but if you're making sets with footholds dry dry ground sets with footholds then there is a check law meaning that one if something goes wrong at your set and you catch something that you're not supposed to catch you're not leaving it there too long and you're able to release it to being that when you do make a target catch that you're not leaving it in the trap so long that it might be um regarded by some as being inhumane to leave something caught in a trap for an extended period of time so to minimize

stress minimize suffering um you enforce this check limit uh they don't have a check law and he's making some sass he's leaving for quite some time what was his perspective on this that he would leave a a foothold set for a week and could potentially have a catch for a week because there's two things one um there's a consideration of the animal's well-being and two there's a consideration of you might not hold it forever it's going to get out right the longer it has more it's going to get out what was his thinking about this is it just is it a matter of logistically it's just impossible to do it any other way um how did he think about that that's a good question and that was one of the first things i we talked about and he when he's

trapping that's all he does like when when he starts trapping he is a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week trapper. And in his mind, he believes he has an ethical responsibility to check those traps as absolutely as much as he can. But if you were there and saw what we were up against with weather, like there are days when you can't get on the water. So that's primarily the reason in alaska that they don't have the check laws is because you're setting you're setting traps in places that sometimes you just can't physically get to and so and he also i think just believes

his job is to to catch wolves and uh and and he's track he's check he's checking them as absolutely as much as he can you know avoid and wet i mean if he thinks he's not going to be able to get to traps he won't reset them i mean he it's kind of one of these deals where he you know your own conscience is your god you know and it works good for it works good for him i don't think he sees any kind of pushback from that. And that's just the way it is in Alaska. I heard some people talking about that. I don't know any trappers who love the check laws, I can tell you that. Yeah. Well, man, that's definitely something that some people didn't understand that watched the film. And if you were up there and you were in that boat and you met David, you'd get it, you know?

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onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. What was your feeling when all of a sudden, like, there's a wolf, you know? When I ask this, I'm asking from the perspective of there's certain creatures that occupy a lot of mind space. You know, like you think about them a lot, but you don't get to look at them as much as you think about them. And I remember after always catching glimpses of mountain lions, you know, out in the wild, I remember the first time I came up on a treed mountain lion where there it is.

You could actually like really look at it as long as you wanted you know those stunning to be just to have it be like right there dogs below it it's in the tree and in this thing that you just you only get glimpses of also was just there in this larger than life kind of way um When you come around the bend or whatever, and there's one standing there, what were your thoughts about it? Were you like, man, I hope he gets away, or thank God we got one,

or what are the different things you were feeling? I haven't interacted with wolves a whole lot. Being from Arkansas, you know, when you and I were in Alaska two years ago, we saw a pack of, I think, 14 wolves that we watched a couple of evenings. Once in Idaho, I saw one cross the road. I haven't spent a ton of time around wolves. This was definitely the closest I've ever been to one. And it was, if I didn't say it was slightly conflicted, I'd probably be lying. I think it was just a magnificent beast.

I mean, yeah, to be able to walk up to it, look at it. But what I said in the film I meant is that my confliction was completely fabricated by the confusing messaging of planet earth and humans about wolves i mean i was aware of that like if if i was you know i i said that you know to sacralize something really is a man-made feature. It's not in the natural realm. I mean, that wolf, I've killed a lot of deer, a lot of white-tailed deer. And on the ethical spectrum of human existence, me shooting a white-tailed deer is no less different than us dispatching that wolf on the end of a trap. I believe that. But at the same time, this is a very unique animal in a unique place, a unique predator. There are less predators than there are prey animals. I mean, I was just

fascinated by it. I'm always fascinated by predators, probably in just a generic sense like anybody else would have been, just kind of like a little kid. I mean, after we dispatched it, shot it with a.22 mag, I mean, I just walked up to it. The dang thing smelled like a dirty, wet German shepherd. And I looked at his claws and just inspected every part of him, man. And, you know, you got to have respect for them. I mean, just absolute respect for them and their job what they do making a living out on that landscape and um but at the same time and i said this in the film

honestly there was little ecological consequence to us taking those two wolves out of that bay i mean the one thing that david says and he and he has you know 35 years of wolf trapping experience to say to know it is that you can trap you can trap half the pack you can trap three quarters of a pack out of a bay and within two years that pack will be back up to the same numbers like you just can't stomp them down that hard especially on this coastal trapping and what he said to me made a lot of sense uh and the reason i'm saying all this is it it didn't really help the deer that much and it didn't really help the deer that much, and it didn't really hurt the wolves that much. It was just a unique experience where we could extract resource from the land

and kind of nobody loses and everybody wins. That's the way I look at it. Yeah. Undoubtedly, did it save a couple of deer or moose calves in that cove this year? Yep, because those two wolves, they were probably 90-pound males. They're going to eat something, and they would have been eating five to seven pounds of meat

since that day that we took them out. Because going back to our original conversation about what we titled this wolf management, as if I'm trying to make some ecological statement. Man, my biggest statement is just let us manage them as a natural, renewable resource. And like David said, man, you can't overtrap these wolves on the coast because a lot of that big country that you can see in the background. You're only touching the edge. Oh, man.

You're not laying a finger on the wolf population. Now, but it makes some sense. There's some pragmatism in it for these guys that are sick of black-tailed deer hunting and moose hunting because they're only hunting the coasts. Like when they go in there to deer hunt, they're only hunting the coasts like when they go in there to deer hunt they're just hunting the edges and so if they can thin wolf populations out along the edges it helps on a very micro scale they they truly believe that yeah the the conversation around wolf hunting wolf trapping any kind of predator stuff. It gets, it gets really confused because a lot of people start throwing away their own realities and then putting in these things they half know or suspect to be true or things they've picked up from social media or media in general. For a while, everybody fell in love with this idea that went up not being true but this the trophic cascade right

this this ted talk level idea um that by you know wolves being on the landscape they uh caused the riparian areas to to bloom and paradise returned to the greater Yellowstone ecosystem and the landscape of fear, which drove the elk, you know, which were inflated numbers of elk and it pushed them into the mountains. And so the willows came back and Eden returned. And that idea was proven to not be true in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem.

But the, the refuting that idea didn't get nearly the press as advancing that idea did another thing that you know that everyone on the planet feels like or like you know everyone in montana seems to be a born grizzly expert you know half of alaska seems to be born a wolf expert and they all know this idea of disrupting herd dynamic or disrupting pack dynamics they don't know it from living they just know it from having heard about it and so it becomes this idea they put forth on the other side of it people that like to hunt lions or people that trap wolves or hunt wolves will lay in a lot of

things like oh if i don't do this they'll be coming to get your pets or if i don't do this there will be no big game left which begs the obvious question if there's no big game left how would there be predators anyways because they rely on big game being there so i don't believe that they would be able to completely eliminate their food source because that would lead to their own destruction um then you'll have people in the rockies who are just so upset about wolves being on the landscape because of course that means there's no game but then they like to go hunt in alaska where wolves occupy about 100 of their historic range and so if you hate wolves so much and wolves mean there's no game why would you go to alaska they must not

have any game because they have wolves so everyone winds up being on all sides of it you hear so many people being just intellectually dishonest because they're like i someone's saying i hate to see a predator get killed because um i view them as being special but i don't want to say that. So I'm going to try to throw you some bogus ecological stuff that I don't really understand. Conversely, someone would say, I believe that if there's a renewable resource, a renewable sustainable resource on the landscape, and that we can extract some harvestable surplus off that renewable resource without damaging the resource, I and that we can extract some harvestable surplus off that renewable

resource without damaging the resource i believe that we should have the right to do that but instead i'm going to frame it around ideas of the safety of my neighbor's pets or i'm going to frame it around ideas of um saving big game from extirpation. It invites all this intellectual dishonesty. I'm ardently unapologetically pro-trapping and pro-hunting of sustainable resources because they're on the landscape. we protect the habitat we'll have surpluses of animals and we can harvest animals responsibly and not have a long-term negative

impact yeah that's a long way of setting up the question is why do you feel people always need to dress this up to dress this dialogue up and things where they wind up role playing with what their actual motivations are? Yeah. Man, you say that so well. You probably say that better than anybody I've ever heard say, with kind of an intellectual dishonesty. And I tried to, I hope this film portrayed that. I don't know if I was fully effective at that or not. Because I didn't go interview a biologist.

Like, some people criticized the film and said, well, it was just this backyard biology by David Bennett's, you know, just saying, well, there's more deer when we trap out wolves. And so, you know, I did not go interview biologists. We didn't get into the deep technical research of wolves in that area. And I did that on purpose. I wanted to present it like what you said, that we ought to just be able to go and extract a resource and not be hurt by it. And honestly, golly, if anybody knows wolves up there, it's David, and he can tell you. They're not hurting the wolf population. What was your original question, Steve? I got sidetracked on my thought there.

Oh, it wasn't so much a question as an observation about people's need to, on both sides of this issue, people's need to be a little bit dishonest or, or, or be a little bit like assume rhetoric that they don't maybe feel. And, and I'm, and I'm pointing to both sides. It's like, I've, I've laid,

I've laid, like I've really laid out my personal perspective on it, which I said is, is unwavering. Right. But when I hear someone, if someone gets a mountain lion and then they, and then they get called out on

it and they want to put position that they were doing it out of the best interest of unknown strangers pets um i don't know i don't think that they were out there because of their neighbors pets yeah yeah likewise the thing i've observed in the past um people like to hunt prairie dogs or ground squirrels and they'll be like well i do it for the rancher i'll be like if you wanted to help that rancher if you went to that rancher's house and you said man i'm here to help what is the number one most effective thing I can do to help you as a rancher? I don't think it's going to be prairie dogs. I think it's going to be fixing fence.

Look at what he does when he wakes up in the morning. He didn't go grab his 223. He's like, by God, I got to get up early tomorrow for prairie dogs. No, it's like, I got to get up. I got to feed cows, check cows, fix fence, do chores. And that's like the thing most top of mind. So I just, I get a little, I just ended up getting a little tired of, I ended up getting a little tired of the bs but but on management though it's

they eat seven pounds of meat a day right um something's dying if they're living sure and it's been proven time again that that predator management if done in a way that's precise spatially and precise temporally, it's effective. As you're pointing out, you were involved in a kind of non-event, right? No doubt during the following weeks, some fewer number of deer and moose died because they're going to make a kill, you know, a killer to a week, whatever it is up there.

No doubt some fewer prey animals died no doubt those wolves will be replaced by other wolves who fill in the vacancy in the habitat and you participated in you participated in an ecological non-event right Right. Yeah. You know, I think, go ahead, go ahead. No, no, that's all. I said something that probably confused some people at the end, because I think really what, on one side of the story, we're talking about making something sacred. And our society, since the reintroduction into Yellowstone, we have sacralized wolves as this animal that is above other animals. In some ways, that's a positive thing. That's a celebration of this great beast, which humans love to do that. Every culture that's ever lived has sacralized some animal.

And I said in my closing statements on this film, I said, I think as a society, we can sacralize the wolf, but we also need to responsibly be able to trap them and hunt them. I think we can have our cake and eat it too. And I think that's what hunters can do. It's hard for someone to understand. It's like, well, shoot, if you think a wolf's sacred, you don't need to be out trapping them. And, man, I think we can do it all. I mean, I like to see a wolf and have a sense of awe

and have a sense of, wow, this is a special moment. This is a special beast. Like, I think that. Like, I don't walk up to it and think this is a special beast. Like, I think that. Like, I don't walk up to it and think this is a non, just another day in my life just going to dispatch this wolf. I don't know. I think we can kind of have our cake and eat it too. I really do.

Oh, well, that's, at this point, that's proven. It's empirically true. Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Alaska have wolves on the ground. And they have hunting and trapping seasons for wolves. And they're going to continue to have wolves on the ground. I do some coyote hunting. I do some coyote trapping. In fact, I'm sitting by a little stringer of coyote pelts hanging on the wall of our studio.

I get excited and happy when I see a coyote track. I like running into them. I set out trail cameras specifically to catch images of coyotes. I also like to get some. Those two things are not incompatible. Yeah. And having recovered populations of wolves on the ground and then having some extraction of the resource, these are not incompatible ideas. We do it all of the time. Yeah. resource these are not incompatible ideas we do it all of the time yeah

let me can i ask you a question how do you do you think us talking about and showing this is beneficial for our cause man I would say I would say yes and I'll position it I'll explain the two perspectives on this stuff one perspective is that hunters

and trappers ought to try to hide in plain sight. The idea being that if you carry on your activities and you just hide and keep it secret, the broader world will not realize you're there and they will never mess with you. Also this kind of notion that if you don't, if you're off of, so if hunters and trappers stay off social media,

the broader world won't know you're there and they won't come mess with you. But I invite that perspective i would invite them to look at a timeline and look at the timeline of the loss of hunting and trapping rights and pace that over a timeline of the introduction of social media there's no correlation. Colorado lost, like, look at places losing spring bear hunts, places losing lion hunting, places losing trapping. That's pre-social media. It's pre-internet for the most part.

Colorado lost trapping back in the late 80s, early 90s. Yeah. Pre-internet. You can't look and say that the ability to discuss hunting and trapping is somehow correlated to a loss of rights so but that's this idea that you should go hide and if you go hide no one will ever notice you're there but you know what you'll get noticed you'll get noticed because you have animal rights people that are going to find out about it you know how i know that because they find out about it and they found out about it way before the internet and they're going to come after you hey before you say your second thing to me we have to be the people that tell our story yes that that's that that's my body that's the bottom line if somebody's going to talk and

talk about trapping wolves in alaska i want it to be one of us that's doing it. Not necessarily me, but I want the narrative to be not a spun narrative, but the narrative the way we see it. When I first got into the national bear scene about 10 years ago, I was confronted by some of the bearhound guys that were like, hey, we should, you're making a mistake by talking about this. And basically I was like, I think you're wrong. I think we have to be the ones that tell the story. And I think in a world of social media, it's all the more impetus for us to be the storytellers. Because if we just went silent, radio silent, media silent,

like some people are saying we should do these days, we don't have this governing body that can tell all hunters to never post something on the internet, or somebody's going to do it. And so the worst of us are going to be the storytellers of why something's going to happen. So in a world that now communicates through social media, I mean, I feel like it's all the more important for us to stand up and tell our story in a reasonable way. Yeah, I think it's kind of an absurd request. I mean, I'm a writer and a creator,

and I'm going to talk about the things I care about. The oldest representational art in the world is people drawing pictures of their hunts um that's not good i've never heard that said before that's good the the idea that that somehow hunting and trapping should be removed from any sort of artistic expression or any sort of expository expression to tell people how you view things, what you think about them, because it somehow sits outside of what's polite to discuss. It's absurd. Yeah. I'm going to talk about the things that I love. I'm going to advance my perspective on things. I'm going to defend the things that matter to me.

How, and like, how do I imagine defending the things that matter to me? Do I do it by obfuscating them or do I do it by elucidating them by bringing them to light? There's nothing I'm going to take that I'm going to love and I'm going to like obfuscate it out of my love for it. Right. gonna like obfuscate it out of my love for it right i'm gonna illuminate it out of my love for it and you know by us not talking about this stuff it might work for a generation but the very nature of it i mean today the world

communicates with social media bicyclistists, guitarists, sports athletes. This is the medium of the world to communicate with our generation. And so if we were exempt from that, it would work for one generation, but the second generation, it would fail. It's not a long-term strategy. We have to be relevant. The way for hunters to be less relevant to planet Earth would be for us to be less relevant in the communication of the times. Yeah, I mean, well, like I said,

you've already seen it happen. I mean, there was a dramatic erosion of the rights of outdoorsmen in the 80s and 90s. It's not an internet phenomena. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Clay, I'm glad you joined us for a talk about wolf trapping in Alaska. Wolf management.

Wolf management in Alaska. Wolf management. What's next what's next how is it beavers no doubt it's beaver trapping with steve beaver trap man okay here's what we do me and you we do martin long lining in the mountains man well we could do that on mules, or we beaver trap and follow the fur all the way to making a sweet cowboy hat for both of us. A pair of sweet cowboy hats. No, I'm going a floppy brim Daniel Boone hat, man. Yeah. His was beautiful.

Well, he wore a beaver felt. Sure he did. That's what I'm saying. I mean, I just mean like a beaver felt. Yeah. All right. Well, thanks for coming on. Go ahead. Yeah, man. Thanks's what I'm saying. I mean, I just mean like a beaver felt. Yeah. All right. Well, thanks for coming on. Go ahead.

Yeah, man. Thanks, Steve. Appreciate it. I appreciate you coming on, Clay. Thanks a lot, man. hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada you might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt

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