The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 587: Finding a Middle Ground on Predators

Episode Date: August 19, 2024

Steven Rinella talks with Charles Whitman and John Stallone of HOWL, Ryan Callaghan, Maggie Hudlow, Brody Henderson, Randall Williams, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider.  Our new video series, Whitetail EDU with Mark and Tony; tune into our brand new, live-streamed podcast, ME Radio, Live!; Turks and Caicos walks its law back; two different correct pronunciations of “Roosevelt”; bipartisan support for the expansion of nuclear power; Chetiquette on how to deal with a nuisance turkey; a wolf saga in Wyoming and wanting to see ethical predator management; being a tree-hugging hippy redneck; how you can’t bring a harvested mountain lion from another state into California; the problem of ballot box biology; Sarah McLachlan’s hits; manipulative anti-hunter billboard campaigns; conservation vs. convenience; the Land Back Movement; coming from different angles but landing at the same conclusion; the difference between feral and wild horses; management practices and balance; the merits of salvage requirements; and more. Outro song “Wildlife Song” by Ryan Posh Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light.

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 everybody we're joined today by john stallone and charles whitman from howell for wildlife which is an organization you hear more and more about as they have been heavily involved in some of the fights to preserve our hunting rights around the country welcome guys thank you for having us thanks yeah thank you i know that um

i think i my first introduction to you guys was was uh yannis was one of the first people i heard mentioning it and he would um maybe i had heard of you but during trivia a long time ago i think giannis yeah made a donation to how for wildlife and uh and so he brought you guys onto um our radar then um increasingly you you guys have come up in conversations and stuff you're working on around the the colorado hunting ban vote coming up some other issues so i'm looking forward to spend some time with you guys talking about uh some things that have happened some things that might happened in the efforts to preserve everyone's hunting rights so we will get to that shortly thanks for coming uh meteor tv youtube channel now not to be confused

with the youtube channel where you watch our podcast network, which now has its own channel. Tell them, Corinne. All right. So we've got a new podcast network, Meat Eater Podcast Network YouTube channel, which is distinct from the MeatEater TV YouTube channel. And the MeatEater Podcast Network channel on YouTube is going to be the place where you can listen to and, importantly, watch all of the network podcasts. And if you are watching us right now, that means you're already on that channel. But please make sure you give a... Yeah, welcome.

Please make sure you give a subscribe as well so that when these pop up, you'll get those alerts. On the regular channel, on the regular MeatEaterTV YouTube channel, go right now and check out WhitetailEDU. So in this world, you got ED. Not great. Which gets a lot added.

You got EDC, which is your pocket knife. I remember when that didn't exist. It was a pocket knife. Now it's an EDC. And then you got EDU, meaning Whitetail EDU on the Media2YouTube channel. It's with Mark Kenyon and Tony Peterson. It's a short video series running through September to get you in the mindset for the fall hunting season and provide all kinds of tips and tricks for getting after whitetails.

And man, those guys are great too on the whitetail front. I grew up hunting whitetails a man those guys are great too on the way on the whitetail front i grew up hunting whitetails we would just kind of put a tree in the same put a tree stand in the same where you could see a lot of stuff where you could yeah out on the point so you just watched deer that were 500 no you couldn't see that far um tony was telling me and then left before i ever got it really figured out but these guys got it figured out. Their number one request is people will send them on X pins and say, where would you kill a deer?

Where should I set up? Do they reply? Their reply is listen and figure it out for yourself. Yes. The whole teach a man to fish. Dude, after hunting, after Tony and I went down last fall and hunted And figure it out for yourself. Yep. Yes. The whole, uh, teach a man to fish. Yep. Dude, after hunting, after Tony and I went down and last fall and hunt some public land down in Oklahoma and watching that dude, like, uh, kind of put that whole thing together.

Like just basically scouting on the fly and then making determinations. He's taken in all kinds of information you might not be. No, it's like sixth sense stuff, dude. Yeah. It's sixth sense stuff. Like you didn't sit there and be like, oh, I could do this.

No. It probably becomes sixth sense. Yeah. If you're constantly doing something a certain way and like keeping track of certain things, it probably becomes like like a an instinct yeah after time yeah what white tails are doing when they're doing yeah you know like you can take someone and and show them uh but you know you might not notice but look that's a deer trail

right and they'll eventually figure that out but sort of his his like i don't know i think around four o'clock feels like he's gonna come down there and stand right there and eat an acorn. And then he's right? It's incredible, man. He's good on, those dudes are good on whitetails. It's fun to see. We also have a new live streaming podcast called Meat Eater Radio Live. Starts in a few days.

So you want to check that out. It's the Field Report, all from around the country. Live correspondence from around the country telling you what they're up to and what's going on. What's the news in their area? What's the hot bite in their area? What kind of tattoos did they get that they might later regret? Whatever.

Field Reports from around the country. Alaska to Florida, New to hawaii and all points in between you'll be hearing from some of the hardest hitting outdoorsmen out there as they give you live reports on what's going on in their area and in their lives but also co-anchored by a combination of all kind of you cal brody randall Randall, Spencer, Yanni. Yep. So a nice peppering of different personalities from across our network.

And you will be able to watch it live on the podcast. But then you can watch it later too. If you want to watch it live, watch it live. Yep. Turks and Caicos repeals the law that has all the Americans locked up. They walked the law back a little bit that has all the Americans locked up. They walk the law back a little bit that has all the Americans locked up.

If you haven't heard about this, we've covered this and interviewed some of the people and covered it on our website, covered it on podcasts. Turks and Caicos passed this really strict gun law, which had a minimum, was it 12, I think 12 years minimum jail time? For ammo as well.

For gun, yeah, for possession, firearm possession. And the way they wrote it would roll up even if you had a shell and no gun to shoot it from. And they caught, once this law was passed and started being strictly enforced, they caught five American tourists, some or all of them, coming out of the country, leaving Turks and Caicos with a stray round or a stray few rounds of ammo left over from hunting season in their backpack. Jailed all these guys. A congressional delegation went down there. There was a guy from Pennsylvania, so I know Fetterman from Pennsylvania went down there. There was a guy from Oklahoma,

so a congressman from Oklahoma, on and on. Congressmen from all these different states went down there to try to put some heat on Turks and Caicos to give the guys back. Because clearly in this situation, it's like, first, they don't have a firearm to match the ammo. Second, they're leaving. They've already gotten, somehow they got into the country.

They're like doing you a favor by taking ammo out of the country. Yeah, and it'd be like some hunting ammo. They got into the country, stayed the whole time, and now they're leaving and you catch them on the way out the door with a bullet or two in their bag and so this U.S. Congressional delegation goes down there and says

come on, I mean, come on. Right? And I had earlier I had wondered what would be the leverage that the U.S. would apply to Turks and Caicos and one thing that I realized in some reading I did this morning, leverage they could apply is the state department issues a warning like don't go to you know uh warning businesses don't do business in turks and caicos because they're a little overzealous and warn u.s citizens hey be careful going to turks and caicos which can

really when when you have a country whose economy is based on tourism, so apparently that's the pressure they put on. Meanwhile, they've been slowly letting these guys out. They held one guy in jail for 100 days. He got out on time served. Another guy came home because he's got bad health problems. One of the two guys we interviewed is home. Another one's going to find out today or tomorrow.

And meanwhile, they walked back the wording on the they walk back the wording on the legislation still still check your bags dude i'm like i'm always yelling at my little boy because he's super careless with 22 shells put things back in man. I got detained for a little while in Anchorage. I got detained. For four 10 shells. Yeah. I got rolled up in Mexico. Yeah, Mexico. I'd rather get detained in Anchorage than

Mexico. That was scary because you were in a What happened there? So, again, I was coming back across the border and I had shotgun shells underneath the back seat of my truck because I had gotten coyote hunting like, like a week before we went down. Well, it's also just where shotgun shells live.

Exactly. And, um, you know, they were just doing a routine inspection, checking for if I was bringing fruit or whatever. And they found these two shells and they pulled me and my family. The US side or the Mexico side? Mexico side.

Okay. Got it. Yeah. So I was kind of, you know, crapping my pants a little bit. Cause I didn't know I was there with my kids and my wife. Yeah. Luckily I had my whole family, my parents with us. My uncles were with us.

We were like down there for a whole thing. So, um, eventually they just took the shells, threw them out and let us go. But it was a little hairy for a little bit there. I want to, uh, I want to know like, uh, what percentage of government spending goes into stuff like this? When we all bitch about government overspending. It's like, well, we had to send a congressional delegation, uh, because some folks on vacation

had a couple of shells in their pocket. I'd just like to know but i could guarantee they're like thank god for the u.s government they probably worked in a little vacation while they were down there yeah oh you know it's totally you know it's totally hilarious i don't want to say the name but there's a subject um we've been wanting to have we want to do another episode on wild horses wild horse the wild horse wild burrow subject so i was telling karen i was like i really want to find like a guest who's got deep deep history deep personal on the ground history with the issue of wild horses the wild horse and burrow protection act unintended consequences of the wild horse and borough protection act the kind of insanity of shipping

these horses to oklahoma and paying farmers to raise them until they die of old age because there's no other outlet for them all that and i start eyeballing this guy that seems great on the subject and i said to crint once you find this guy and see if that seems great on the subject and i said to corinne once you find this guy and see if he'll come on the show and last night corinne sends me a article and like we'll share articles all the time and i'm reading the article thinking that there's like a hunting and fishing angle to it and it's an article about this guy who's embezzling money from a university by just weird little petty things like he would like expense reports he would take a company car

but then fill out an expense report as though he took his own car. Or he would have his daughters getting married somewhere so he would book a big house for the family to be at the wedding but then he would schedule a meeting

and then white out the details and submit the white out certain details on the invoice and submit the invoice reimbursement he's got a shitload of markers and staples at his house yeah and i keep and i'm reading the article thinking that i'm going to get to a part where he's using a company truck for hunting and fishing like i don't know i'm waiting i'm waiting for the hunting and fishing angle. And I text her. I'm like, I don't see the relevance of what you just sent me. She goes, that's the guy

that you've been telling me to get on the show. So I was like, well, I guess we're back to the drawing board. I think we know some people. We know some people. We'll talk about it later. We've done some actions on wild horses, feral horses and all that.

In Arizona specifically. Yeah, exactly. So if you are a, here's the catch. You can't, you cannot be, uh, God bless you.

This is not like a, this is not, not, this is not meaning any disrespect. Not, you can't be an agency person. You can be a former agency person, but you can't be a current agency person because it's the kind of issue where

if you, if you're an agency person, you're going to be restricted on what you can say and you're going to be reluctant to share your own opinions because of retribution. Former agency person or other professional tenured, a person who's tenured somewhere and can just talk about the issue. And you could be free to say, you know, I'll tell you the crazy part about this, or here's the part that everybody thinks is crazy, but it's not so crazy. And, um, just a realist, someone who really sees all sides of it, understands arguments on both ends. Cal's looking at me like he wants the job. At the same time, I want somebody from the, uh, horse somebody from the uh horse sausage industry the horse

the glue factory come on down from the glue factory yeah no agency people and and you know i guess people from we're open to a glue factory person but he's got you got to be a well-rounded glue factory person uh so there's a call to action. The pronunciation on the Roosevelt family deepens. It does. You ready for this? Guy wrote in. Who's this person's name? Her.

Michelle. Michelle. What's DVM and MS mean? Vet. Oh, a vet wrote in. They're getting paid for this somehow. I actually need to call her about this pigeon situation. It's a little late now.

We have a vet in the family. We have to be the Spencer. Well, that's who we called. But we didn't call her. We called her. We kind of jumped the gun. Yeah. And already burned some, you you know we caught like goodwill

called her a couple times about non-issues and then when we had an issue i was like are we really gonna call her again about these pigeons she might appreciate it i think a little bit i gathered from her tonality was a little bit of like, why did you go get them? Right. Why'd you involve yourself? This all seems very preventable. I do need to talk to this person though. Veterinary microbiology. Snort's got some gut health issues

that we need to figure out. Call her up. But here's what she has to say right now. Perventative. Michelle. She says, Some interesting history surrounding the Roosevelt family and pronunciation of the name.

I have always jumped back and forth and have been intellectually too lazy to figure out what it actually was. So I would sometimes do Ruse and sometimes do Rose. And I was corrected that when speaking of theodore it's roosevelt and he spelled he articulated it very clearly in letters and that's how he likes it to be but here it is here this my husband got on a presidential biography kick and around the time our son was born he was working through edwin edmund morris's three-part biography of theodore roosevelt this became my son's first bedtime story as he loved to read

aloud for him every night and even threw in an attempt at an old-timey accent. Phil, do your old-timey accent from people in movies, from the early movie days. Well, hey there, chap. How you doing? You've got a nice-looking mouth. I'd like to kiss it. And then do the, what's the big idea here?

And so you want to be a star. Hey, what's the big idea here? You want to be a star, don't you? Yeah. Yeah, okay. That's Phil's specialty. Reminds me of last night yeah um where was i oh somewhere in this trilogy was an explanation of the history of the family which was intertwined with the differences in pronunciation there are historically two different groups of roosevelts the hyde park clan and the oyster bay clan

who are each based from two different sons of the hell's that name klaus i think it's klaus martinson martson's and von rosen yeah i think it's martson that sounds like a name you'd have a lot of important. The important part is Von Rosenbelt. But I like that whole name because it makes it's like you know there's a thing I've become interested in is like there's certain names you'll see and you know they're rich.

Yeah, we hit on that the other day. What was that guy's name? I can't remember. Braxton. Braxton. No. Saxton. Saxton, yeah. Dustin? Yeah. It's like they know like rich people. I wonder if it works

if I name my kid a rich name, if I was like I'm going to name him Thurston Vaughn. So he will become rich? Yeah. Will money just flow his way? I think so. Life might be different.

Because if you name your kid Dave, I mean, who knows? It could go any way. But if I name him Thurston Von Rinell in the Ninth, does money just show up? Likely. He's going to be getting calls, for sure. Klaus Martinsen Von Roosevelt, who arrived in New Amsterdam around 1640. Meaning, that family showed up in Manhattan in 1640. That's a good way to make money, actually.

I think the money followed the name. Theodore Roosevelt was part of the Oyster Bay branch, who pronounced the name Roosevelt. Franklin D Roosevelt was part of the Hyde Park clan who pronounced the name Roosevelt. So technically the pronunciation indicates which branch of the family you are referring to. That's very interesting. That's great.

I had no idea. So that confuses things even more so now when you're talking about the great depression and you're going to talk about franklin delano you need to go like hey what was it again well that's right roosevelt and if you're talking about the trust busters and the early conservation movement and the Theodore, you got to go, what was it again? That's right. Roosevelt elk, though. We now know, right? I think we should say cow's deer are deer that reside in Arizona, New Mexico, whereas coos deer are the ones we hunt in Mexico. Two different plants.

I would beg to argue with that. Are you a cow's or a coos man? I'm a coos man. And everybody that I know says coos. And I live in Arizona, so. When I wanted to know, I checked with Chris Denham, who's written it and said it more than anybody on the planet. And he said, till the day I die.

Yeah, exactly. There's nobody that says cows, dear. Unless you're pretentious. There's one non-pretentious person that says it and it's heffelfinger but he's a stickler he's a stickler we had spelled one of our things online we had spelled um what state did we spell we spelled nevada wrong and jim texted me he says there are two ways to pronounce nevada but one way to spell it. This guy wrote in, a nuclear and RFK Jr. So we recently interviewed RFK Jr.

And talked about nuclear, which I remain. I'm not convinced. I feel that we need to be leaned. I'll just say, without really knowing what I'm talking about, I feel that we need to be leaned. I'll just say, I feel that without really knowing what I'm talking about, I feel that we need to be leaning very heavily that direction. He says, the guy writes in, I am the plant manager of a nuclear plant and need to remain anonymous due to

company policy. I listened to the podcast religiously in this week's discussion on nuclear power was upsetting. RFK made two points on nuclear nuclear that were stated as facts and are both completely false. I'm not looking to force an opinion on anyone, just correct some bad information. RFK stated nuclear is heavily subsidized. Not true. We do not receive the carbon credits wind and solar benefit from

i had no idea that was true if you get into a little game of well who's right but i'm gonna trust i'm gonna give this guy that i'm gonna trust that this guy's correct for this week he goes on i think we should because nuclear is carbon free as well, but that's an opinion. We do get some recovery payment from the government for spent fuel storage, but that is not a subsidy. The money is repayment for all the money we spent on the failed Yucca Mountain government project. Without getting into the weeds too much, just for people, the Yucca mountain project was there there was a plan we have all kinds of nuclear waste stored in places that are not long-term storage and for a while there was a plan to auger a deep deep hole in the area that's regarded then lead seal the stuff into a mountain

which sounds bad until you consider that it's all somewhere already anyway two primary arguments against it one you got to get it there okay so all this stuff would then need to be transported which some people argue would be a huge security and environmental risk to transport it. Other people say, well, you got to do something with it because it's not good where it is. The other issue,

um, is native Americans in, in, in, uh, was Yucca mountain, Nevada or Arizona. Sorry.

I don't know this Nevada, right? I think so. Type it in real quick please there's definitely two in arizona nevada okay that one and i think it was the navajo who were of the opinion don't put that shit here on our land. Understandable. So there's that. Two.

It's point two. RFK was empathetic about the lack of insurance for nuclear plants. Western Shoshone Nation. Okay. There you go. Sorry about that. RFK was emphatic about the lack of insurance for nuclear plants. This is, is again completely false now i gotta clarify to the person writing in he wasn't

he wasn't talking about a lack of insurance for nuclear plants he's talking about the astronomically high cost of insurance for nuclear plants meaning people think that anti-nuclear people are hippies and tie dyes and he said you also have to blame guys and ties on wall street i don't think they wear ties on wall street anymore they unbutton yeah um they unbutton the top button uh he was saying the real the problem there is cost of insurance meaning wall street guys don't want to insure so a little bit of a squabble there on that but again he says this is again completely false nuclear plants are heavily insured by multiple companies one update though um because the the senate just passed a bill to support

advanced nuclear deployment um so it passed um the senate passed a bill to support advanced nuclear deployment. So it passed, the Senate passed a bill to accelerate the deployment of nuclear energy capacity, including by speeding permitting and creating new incentives for advanced nuclear reactor technologies. And this passed 88 to 2. Do you know why Corinne's

in on this? The real reason why? Kel's Week in Review? No, no, no. Oh. She's hedging her bets on her Charles Schwab account. I can also see

what Corinne's doing on her computer. Is she trying to manipulate the stock market? Corinne's scrolling through the NASDAQ during this whole podcast. She's got like graphs

going up and down. All me. All me. I'm just going to really manipulate it. And it's going to Wall Street bets. Joe Biden for signature

to become law. I'm not exactly sure when that's going to be. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy,

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

fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24k topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right, we're always talking about OnX here on the MeatEater podcast. Now you

guys in the Great White North can be part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services

hand-picked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. The guy concludes. He even gives his first name.

I don't even read his damn first name. I'll give a hint. He has the same first name as a very popular country musician. I could go into great detail in each of these points, but in the interest of brevity, I won't. I do sense a sincere curiosity, especially of Steve, anytime Nuclear comes up on the podcast. It would be great to have an expert on to speak in facts

and allow listeners to decide for themselves. I love what you guys are doing. Keep up the good work. If you're sitting at home or driving in your truck wondering why we're talking about this on a show about wildlife and hunting and fishing and whatnot, I'll lay it out for you very, very briefly. As the country moves toward...

As the country moves toward renewables um and i think we're going to retract from renewables because i do not think like i there's no i there's no way biden's going to win in november so we're going to see a we're going to see a retraction on renewables but if we do push ahead on renewables there's this conversation about how much of our public lands do we put over to renewables. And when I look as an energy novice, when I look at the huge movement, I'm struggling for words. When I look at how heavily we're spending on moving toward renewable energy,

I just can't see why we're not moving heavily, aggressively into research and deployment of nuclear energy because the footprint's so small. And hopefully, I mean, I that's reveals my perspective but hopefully and it seems like potentially from certain you know legislation

that there is momentum behind that and i think that there are people driving markets you know all these ai investors who are actually talking to nuclear. So that might become more of a thing. Because of the huge power needs of AI. Exactly. It's either we go back and double down on fossil fuels, we plaster our coastlines with wind farms and convert hundreds of thousands of acres of BLM to solar arrays and wind. I'm not trying to make it like a rock in a hard spot,

but it's a little bit of a rock in a hard spot. And I can't get satisfied around the idea. I know that we had these huge crises. Three Mile Island, Chernobyl. What's the, Japan? Fukushima. Yeah, the tsunami that wiped out the Fukushima power plant. Like, I understand all of that,

but my God, do I feel like we need to be taking that stuff more seriously? Well, how about this BS on batteries? Like the solution is, uh, coming up with bigger batteries. Like that's, I do not believe that for a fricking second. Did you hear Trump lay out his concerns about big batteries? No, but I just changed batteries at my house last night. And I'm like, here's this thing.

And my place is right next to Pacific Steel and Recycling. Huge shout out to that place because it's like the most fun place I go. You can recycle anything. They're your neighbors too. Yeah. And then you get paid for it. It's awesome. And there's a bunch of real interesting folks down there.

Awesome documentary to be made. Could waste a lot of time at Pacific Steel. You know what they don't recycle? Any type of battery. Why not? Because it's trash. They're like, you can't recycle that. Poisons.

But why are they always paying that? Why are they always paying that? Well, there's people who can recycle the lead out of lead core batteries. Oh, they don't want lithiums. Yeah. No alkaline, you know, no double A's, triple A's. Oh, that kind of battery. Okay.

Yeah. When you said batteries, my head immediately went to the fact that you can get money for a car battery, but that's a fraction of all batteries. But like these lithium batteries and stuff like that is like it's just it's trash man you don't want to get them wet either or take them on an airplane brody and i were laughing the other day because i was watching this clip i kept hearing that trump was talking a lot about shark attacks i was like what so i was watching this clip and he's talking about boats like vessels now with these huge battery-powered vessels and he's laying out a scenario where the vessel is sinking and you have a lot of

electricity in the water and you're faced with a do you stay with the boat or risk shark attack by getting away from the boat and he really had shark attacks on his mind he had been a woman had just lost a leg to a shark Maybe In Florida People in the audience were a little confused But he was He was back on sharks the other day too It's funny that he's I'd like him to come on

And talk about sharks You struggled with the word nuclear Oh always my whole life Yeah do you remember the Bush clips No Did you have a hard time with it bush number two yeah there's a great great series of nuclear nuclear nuclear that's right that was a big thing is this guy that wrote in do you know where he's from is he perhaps from michigan on the nuclear part oh we probably can't say that can't say he won't even

say i grew up right next to a fermi nuclear power plant in michigan what's his name luke i was gonna say luke so was i what do you say you gave me the country music in my head he has to be kept quiet well how do you know his name's not waylon how do i know yeah no waylon was my second guess. Sure, yeah. Or George. Could have been George. Or Tanya. Could have been Garth. Garth, Tanya, George? Yeah.

Tanya would be probably not Tanya. Dolly? Dude, that song, Delta Dawn. Oh, dude. Love it. Yeah, she was a teenager. Yeah. Oh, have you ever looked at the YouTube Grand Ole Opry?

Mm-mm. Good stuff. Yeah, it's great. She almost had Grand Ole Opry? Mm-mm. Good stuff. Yeah, it's great. She almost had a big role in Jeremiah Johnson. Did you know that? No. She wound up having a small role in Jeremiah Johnson. Huh.

Oh, she did have one. Yeah. Dude, you could do, I shouldn't throw this out there, because maybe someday I will. You could do a whole documentary on Jeremiah Johnson. Here's a good one for you guys. It's a Chetiket question. Chetiket meaning, Chester's not even here.

It means it's an etiquette question, and we normally defer to Chester, who likes etiquette. But he's not even here. So I guess it's more of an etiquette question. This is a good one. I'm seeking guidance on a recent dilemma I have been troubled with. So it's not so recent anymore, but from the spring. He says,

I live in a mid-Atlantic state. Here's another guy. He doesn't even want to tell a mid-Atlantic state. He doesn't even want to get down. He doesn't even want people to narrow down to what state he's in. I think he feels a little guilty. I live in a mid-Atlantic state with a robust turkey uppercase

T population. This season I hunted the woods behind my house. You always know where it's going when someone hunts the woods behind their house. I had several close encounters at the same time, but never filled my tag. Three days after the season ended, I woke up to the barks and growls of my Labrador retriever, uppercase R. He was right to uppercase the L and wrong to uppercase the R. I looked out my bedroom window to see that the same tom had found itself trapped inside my garden plot,

which is surrounded by an eight-foot fence. I watched as the bird retreated, repeatedly tried to take flight, hit the fence and run around the garden, tearing up my plants. My immediate thought was to grab my 12 gauge and protect my crops. There's not really. This is good.

Hear him out. Hear him out hear him out yeah suddenly every segment of chetaket popped in my head i felt as though i was biased and wanting a turkey in my freezer yeah maybe and that my rationale and protecting my crops may be impaired by the frustration of the prior turkey season i don't rely on my garden for survival, but I do appreciate my homegrown veggies. I called my state's game warden dispatch several times and was told to leave a message and that someone would get back to me. The Department of Natural Resources website states homeowners are strictly prohibited

from trapping and shooting wildlife outside regulated seasons unless the animal has been actively causing property damage or is an obvious threat to public health and safety eventually i was able to get the garden gate open and scare the bird out damaging even more plants i don't understand the eventually. I would like. The hinges were rusted shut. I don't know. He doesn't say. After a closer inspection of the garden, I wish I shot the bird on sight

because he took out my onion patch. That I worked real hard on. It's been three days and the game warden hasn't called. My buddies are giving me a lot of crap for not shooting the bird. My question is, would I have been right to shoot the bird it was actively causing damage if you this is where if you're a

hunter you cannot shoot that bird if you have a hunting license you're not you're not going to end up on the right side of the right hand Right, and we're trying to kill that bird. I have so many questions, though. How'd it get in there in the first place? Well, I've been waiting to share this. I was in the situation he's in. I didn't have a fence around my garden. When I got a fence around my garden, I mean, it wasn't a day, and there was a turkey in there.

Because the dog chased a turkey up on the roof of the house. When the turkey pitched off the roof of the house when the turkey pitched off the roof of the house he landed in that garden and proceeded to run all over freaking out until we were able to get him out of the fence yeah they have trouble with fences i'll point out to this gentleman it never the thought never occurred my in my mind to kill that turkey he was just sorry he didn't get i think that if you i think that you that that because you were trying to kill that turkey and got duped and then if you did kill that turkey now you would always be a, um, what am I trying to put? Suspicion.

Yeah. In the neighborhood. I understand the wanting to protect your garden. I was eyeballing a cottontail this morning that was drifting towards my garden. And Brody's got a domestic cat giving him a lot of grief. I do. Oh, that's gross. It uses his garden as an outhouse, which infuriates Brody.

Oh, the cat? It might as well be defecating in Brody's mouth. Yes. I tried non-lethal deterrence, like laying sticks over the garden, but it's not working. It might as well defecate in Brody's mouth for all the insult it brings to Brody. We're going to have to up the game on that cat. Your kids get diseased because of that thing.

I know. And a plasmosis in the garden. They're going to get toxo plasmosis. Oh yeah. Not toxo. And then you know what they're going to do? They're going to make risky investments.

This is all true. I'm not making this up. They're going to get toxo. They're going to make risky investments. They're going to drive too fast. They're going to be too hot headed and too prone to be too hot-headed and too prone to fighting. That cat's got to go. Yep.

It's either that or they lose all their money. Yep. Do you find them making risky bets with one another already? I've noticed some weird behavior lately. It's Toxo. Yep. Or they become a weird cat lady. Now that's not going to happen.

Which is also linked to Toxo. That's not going to happen. Well, no. When you become a weird cat lady hoarder, toxo. I'll keep an eye out for that. When you become a guy that drives too fast and tries to evade arrest and makes bad bets and likes going to casinos, toxo. Gotcha. I'm going to have to do some research on this.

You're like, this is getting uncomfortable. This guy's describing me to a T. That's my problem. Moving on. Maggie Hudlow is joining us from Wyoming. Hello. What's covered up by a tarp in the background? I've been dying to know.

Oh, that's our strawberry patch. We've got a little hoop house thing there. We've got another bigger vegetable garden up on the other side of the house. Are you keeping cold out or pests out? Well, the dogs really like to dig around in there, and it's been below freezing the last few nights so a little bit of both okay keeping the cat keeping brody's house cat out of there so give us give us a dispatch oh sorry go ahead we have a slight delay oh you're good yeah sorry about that the uh don't have too much trouble with cats with all the dogs running around this yard

maggie hudlow is a um colleague of ours here meat eater a very prolific writer you can always find her work at the meat eater.com and maggie's going to give us a wyoming dispatch um and lay out some of the the aftermath of the incident where a individual had struck a wolf with a snowmobile and then taped its mouth shut and paraded it around town in a very distasteful incident that had some far-reaching consequences. Go ahead, Maggie. Yeah, thanks, Steve. I mean, when I first heard the news, I had a couple thoughts, and it was like, what a thoughtless dumbass, like what a terrible thing to do.

And also the second thought was that this is going to blow up and get just huge. And it did immediately. So kind of local repercussions that have been not necessarily as publicly newsed. There have been a lot of people, you know, connected to Cody through family, I know, that have been getting death threats. The Green River Bar, where the incident happened, they've been getting, you know, threatened game wardens, people, small businesses in town have been getting just like hundreds of one-star reviews by people they've never met, just angry animal activists, and all that is done, like these strangers kind of infiltrating this really like close-knit small town. It's just made people want to side with Cody more than anything because they know him as a person.

And he's never, you know, threatened to kill them or their family or anything so what's happened is this like massive polarization and you have these animal rights activists that want something to happen and are doing it in the worst way possible and then you have this established culture of hate against predators in Wyoming that is like already existed, but now it's had this international spotlight shown on it. And essentially right now it's like you're either on this side or you're on this side you're either for animal rights or you're for killing wolves and I think we need to have more conversations that meet a little bit more in the middle like we need predator management in this area like ranching is a huge part of this community.

We also are right in the middle of migration corridors for mule deer, for antelope. We have huge elk populations. There's elk feed grounds all around us. I think predator management is important, but I think it's also really important that we look at creating legislation that makes it ethical. Right on. Yeah.

Can you elaborate on that last point a little bit? Yeah. I think that was some of the I think some of the frustration that happened on this issue is someone did something that was so egregious and I'll remind people I think this gets a little bit lost this was hitting a wolf with a snowmobile

this was running down an animal and hitting it with a snowmobile okay yes the individual hunts This is running down an animal and hitting it with a snowmobile. Okay. Yes, the individual hunts, does some hunting, but this is a snowmobile strike and taking this issue being, how could you do that and the criminality of it was illegal possession of wildlife? Which would be the same thing as if you went and caught a baby rabbit and raised it as your own. You would be guilty of the same crime. Illegal possession of wildlife.

So when you talk about legislation, can you comment on that? Am I going in the wrong direction on this and trying to understand what you're saying, Maggie? No, you're good. And I think, so wolves are considered predators, on this and trying to understand what you're saying maggie no no you're good and i think so wolves are you know considered predators so they just don't have any sort of protections beyond that um and that's sort of the the sticky thing about the situation is that everyone wanted to see Cody prosecuted more than just that

small fine. And there is nothing legally set in the state that he technically did that he can be taken to court for or fined for. And that's where the, you know, the state legislation itself needs to change. So Maggie, are you getting at that in Wyoming, wolves are not managed as, well, in most of the state, they're not managed as a game animal. So it's like open season all year long, no bag limits, outside of a small area in northwestern Wyoming. Yeah, they're managed as predators.

In all fairness, I wouldn't call it a small. Well, not. Yeah. I think it's 95% of the state. Okay, sorry. I thought it was more significant. But just like a little background for people listening. When wolves were delisted, different states took different approaches.

In Wyoming, in some respects, the delisting process was delayed by negotiations with Wyoming about what kind of management plan Wyoming wanted to do. And Wyoming like really stuck to its guns and push for a management plan in which they would have a area where wolves would be managed as a game animal. And they would have an area where wolves would be managed as basically the same way that virtually all states manage coyotes. Right. Yeah. It's vermin. Yeah. It's listed as a non-game, whatever, the same way. Vermin.

Yeah. For coyotes, you know, most states have, I think this is true, most states have no closed seasons on coyotes, right? And if there's a coyote molesting your livestock or whatever, you don't even need to tell anybody about it if you were to kill a coyote. So Wyoming was emphatic about arriving at in in that position um and it differs from the management approach taken in idaho and the management approach taken in montana where they established quota systems around the state and regulatory measures around those states so just a difference in in the approach. Yeah, and the concept of running down wolves on a snow machine,

that's something that's been happening here for a long time. In coyotes. Oh, in coyotes for sure. I was called a tree-hugging hippie growing up when I would tell my classmates I thought that was wrong or a bad thing to do. I was like, if you want to shoot them, why don't you just shoot them?

Like, why do you got to run them until they die? I don't think that's right. And because I would say that, I was a tree-hugging hippie. But, you know, I think you can be a sportsman and believe in ethical predator management, and that's what I would like to see. If there's any light in this situation, that it just brings more of that. Yeah, because I think amongst the pro-predator management crowd, even the pro-predator eradication crowd,

you would see a division in getting the job done and playing with an animal. Right. Even if you're going to run it over, just run it over, kill it. If you're pro, as in a professional, you're doing things quickly and efficiently and doing the job i don't think any hunter who like says that they're a hunter wants to see a prolonged death on right we we like pride

ourselves on the fact that one shot one kill or yeah you know inject inject. Now I'll just totally honest, like my hunting mentor, uh, he was in a time where coyote pelts were worth a ton of money. And, um, he used to tell me stories over and over again about, uh, the, um, the success of his coyote season was based on how many snowsuits he had to replace. Because instead of shooting a coyote, he'd get up alongside of them on a snowmobile and whack them on the head with a club. So he didn't have to stitch up a hole. But that's still dispatching.

Even that, yeah. But it's a dead coyote. That's still dispatching it right away. I mean. Yeah. But that dog is latching to Even that, yeah. But it's a dead coyote. That's still dispatching it right away. I mean. Yeah. But that dog is latching into the leg on his snow, snowsuit and then he'd whack it on the head.

Huh. Yeah. That's one of those things that you hear and, and, and, um, you don't immediately think about what'll, uh, and I, I almost hesitate to say this, but what a level of, uh, um, uh, that's a lot of coordination. Athleticism. These are old snowmobiles, too.

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onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Maggie, I want to say real quick to real quick calvin you take over uh i want to tell you that one of the the interesting things about being alive today is it's possible to be a tree hugging hippie and a savage redneck all at the same time it just depends on. I feel that in my core. It depends on who's doing the looking. I think that Einstein got into that with theory of relativity. When you say, well, how fast is it going? Well, it depends on where you're looking at it from.

So yeah, you're a bloodthirsty redneck and a tree-hugging hippie. Welcome to the club. I've never been more clearlyie. Welcome to the club. Never been more clearly defined. Welcome to the club. The conversation with a bunch of ranchers over the years who make some comment about environmentalists, and I'm looking at their place, and I'm like, well, aren't you?

A lot of environment. I'm like, you seem to be doing a lot of things good for the environment here. One of my favorite stories from this podcast is we had a guy on years ago that worked on the Nutria eradication program in Chesapeake Bay. And in order to do the nutria eradication program they had to get all private landowners to participate and they had one big landowner it was just a holdout so they couldn't finish killing all the nutria and he had a real just kind of anti getting along yeah anti he had a anti-government perspective and kind of an anti-environmentalist perspective and eventually they become friends with him and he goes out to this guy's place and he realizes the guy just

loves loves wildlife and in walking around his place he's like look at that look at that look at that tree look at this and he looks at the federal guy. He goes, see what I'm talking about? It's a G damn menagerie. And he realized we're like closer than I thought. You know what I mean? Anyhow, anything else, Maggie, you want to add? I mean, at the moment, no. I'll stick around and chime in when I see fit.

But I just want both sides of situations like this to just think about the best way to make change. And, you know, I feel like my mom talking to myself when I'm in like high school, like, think about your actions, Maggie Rose, think about how your actions impact other people, you know, and I just wish more people were told that maybe they needed to be reminded, like, don't mess with small businesses that have nothing to do with the situation don't give people death threats like what do you think that's going to accomplish so yeah think about your actions you're not dealing with our there's my group of rational people for the most part in that in that uh scenario so guys give me the howl perspective on this because it's uh it's

you know it's a it's it's a thorny one for everyone we got involved um i heard about it we were at mile high expo in in denver um i was at dinner i almost flipped my table over and i'll explain why i was just pissed off that this happened, like right now. Really, this happened in 2024 in the midst of... Mountain lion bans. Mountain lion bans and all this stuff that's going on. This is going to blow up. This is going to look bad.

This is going to... This is really going to boost the anti-hunters in their campaign because it's... He's going to be the poster child. Cody became the poster child for their, what they're trying to push. Yeah. So we created, I guess you can call it an action. It was really a sign on letter to get as many orgs companies, uh, to contend the action. Right. And we got about 70, which was great. i think we were the only ones to really even talk about it like as far as a national org which i was disappointed in you know we should we should come out in opposition to this yeah it's red hot oh man it's red hot and

and we took some heat i i run the social media so i was kind of seeing it you know from from people that i knew and i'm like hey come on we're anti-hunters now i mean because we're condemning this action like that's that's the level it went to um well you know where is this gonna go you're kind of what are you what are you saying we should change legislation or or whatnot no you you shouldn't be able to torture an animal this this guy could have ran it over, ran the wolf over, tied it to a tree for five days, came back five days later and then killed it. It would have been fine. No penalty because he didn't transport the animal.

Oh, right. That would have been legally permissible. Would have been in that area. So in the, in the vermin area that Maggie was talking about. What's it called? Is it predator management zone is it called? Yeah. The predator, the other zone, which is, which is funny is called the trophy zone. Oh, let's keep shooting. Where there are rules, it's called the trophy zone.

So it's Wyoming's just a, you know, it's a different place. So, so we got involved. Um, and then one of the things we do is, you know, we're not, we're not from wyoming we're not a organization that's based in wyoming i reached out to organizations in wyoming say hey who's who's taking care of this is anybody does anybody care is anybody willing to you know get involved and uh and it was jess johnson with wyoming wildlife federation And she's kind of taken the lead on this.

We got her back as far as what she's going to need, podcasts, support from in-state or out-of-state, support from industry partners that we have who can kind of lend the support that she's going to need. And she's working on what's going to work. Is, is there anything in legislation she realizes that's really sticky? Cause this is a,

this is a situation here where it's not normal. You know what I mean? What happened? So how do you really legislate kind of morality? Yeah. Really? And how do you draw legislation around, uh,

totally individual once in a lifetime outlandish set of actions on on a one person's behalf right you know so i don't know if it was yeah yeah there's some things there's stuff that i think it's happened before maybe not with this guy but it happens it has happened before things like this maybe not as egregious as this particular thing but yeah and things happen that shouldn't happen if you're again an ethical yeah hunter okay you know but what but what did it but what did it do we can we can talk about that so the the action was terrible um and what did it, but what did it do? We can, we can talk about that. So the, the action was terrible. Um, and what did it do? So he became the guy who did this. I kind of, I realized he has a family and all that. I don't like really saying his name. I'm just

kind of talking about the incident, but, um, cats aren't trophies. Who is the, the anti-hunting organization in Colorado that's leading the charge to ban trophy hunting mountain lions bobcats um his face is plastered on their website his face is plastered around their social media the guy was also he's hunted lions so they have pictures of him with lions and they're like this is why we need to ban this because we need to protect this yeah we need to protect them from from these evil Hunters and this is, yeah, everybody becomes this guy automatically by association because we're

all hunters because we're all, we all engage in hunting. Now we are this bloodthirsty, hate animals. We don't, you know, we willy nilly go out there and shoot crap. And you know, like that's, that's the picture they want to paint. You know, it's part of what they do. They deal in the eye of public perception all the time it was a nightmare it's a nightmare for

us it's a nightmare for for the people who are in the trenches fighting because man you get a picture of something you know how it works i mean you can't talk your way out of that you know maybe if you have five hours and you really spend it with the person and explain you know these things we're talking about but we don't get that chance. Right. Um, social media on all the, all the anti-hunting, um, uh, you know, websites or whatever. He's the poster boy and you can see publicly how much money they're raising. It's in the billions. We talked a little bit earlier about the biker rally and that thing that happened. Uh, I think that was $132,000 or something. It's just, it's unfortunate that that happened. It's unfortunate that there are some people who aren't

aware of themselves, their actions. Obviously somebody in Daniel, Wyoming, the video got out somehow. I don't know how it got out. I don't know who got ahold of it. But those things, they don't do us any good. And, and, you know, both, both morally, it was wrong. It was wrong. If nobody even knew about it, it was wrong. If, you know, if it wasn't on video, but it was on video and now it's a, now it's a completely different, you know, completely different story. But that kind of stuff is a big struggle. It's a big, big struggle. It doesn't help us at all. So anyway, we don't know what the strategy is going to be.

We don't know if there is going to be legislation or whatnot. Jess is working on that. We trust her to get that ironed out. Maggie, do you talk to Jess at all? Yeah, you do. Okay. Oh, sorry. I was nodding to my mom in the background.

But yeah, I'm actually going to Jess's house this weekend. Perfect. So I was looking forward to talking to her about this. Yeah. So we're having a meeting with her next week. Maybe we'll invite you to that on kind of strategy on this whole thing. So maybe we'll invite you to that too. No, that would be great.

Sounds like you're right. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Do you think like addressing it more and bringing it back up has a potential to backfire and just like keeping it like other than condemning it, right? Which,

what else can you do if you're like, Oh, if you keep raising it up to the top of the discussion is that just helping the other side it's a good question i think it depends on how we how we tackle it what we say what the results are going to be and and honestly if we market it or not i think it's a good thing all All right, I'll give you an example. We condemned this. We said a lot about it.

I made a few videos on it. People reached out to Howell and said, this is the first time I've ever heard hunters talk like this. First time I've heard hunters say, this a this was an action yeah these are these are anti-hunters i i think that's kind of how she was describing herself there was a there's a few people um she was impressed she said i feel like i could sit at the same table with you and at least have a conversation um the more people we reach like that the better certainly kind of like what steve was saying earlier you finally have you find you have a lot

you have a lot more in common with people when you actually yeah sit down and have conversations and learn about their life and that's it's interesting because like it like something that's very obviously immoral and egregious but when someone poaches an elk, you don't get the same, you know what I mean? No, but it's illegal and they get fined. Sure, sure. And they get penalized. But it's like, we don't get the same credit

for condemning that action. You know what I mean? It's just. That's because we're all poachers. You didn't know that? Oh, right, right. Well, the reality is like hunters do have a very long legacy of regulating hunters right right um this would be more of the

same but it's not talked about enough that's the problem and and or is it talked about all the time and it's just white noise it's talked about all the time between hunters. It's not going to the 90%. We are constantly, constantly being like, here's somebody who screwed up. Here's somebody who purposely and intentionally did something very wrong. This is how you got to, you know. And I think you have a positive effect mediator.

For sure. Has a positive effect on the non-hunting public. Now, if you hadn't said those things over the years i don't know where we would be where would we be yeah yeah well look at the first not the first one of the biggest hunting celebrity influencers was uh theodore roosevelt who did i say it right here's a big hunting celebrity influencer named theodore roosevelt who wrote about hunting wrote whole books about hunting celebrated hunting loved hunting promoted hunting um got a lot of people interested in hunting

but what did he do he would say how is it that it's legal to go and kill thousands of shorebirds to the point where you're eliminating them off of entire nesting grounds? Right. Did people go, you're just playing into the hands of the anti hunters. Probably a couple or was he saying no you're you're gonna drive um you know you're driving these things to extinction all hunting is not the same 100 there's a way to go about it there's like a responsible way to go about it that has sustainability in mind and a respect for the resource there's the way to go about it where you're just going to kind of ruin the whole thing yeah conservation yeah that's like that's what it

works on eradication you know conserve yeah you know so it's not i mean leopold another great hunting influencer right celebrated hunting wrote about hunting um got people into it also had a lot to say about some things we do that aren't that great including things that some hunters do that aren't that great sure sure yeah well to that whole point like my whole thing is or our whole thing is really is do you want policy to be put in place by the squeaky wheels of, of anti-hunting or would you rather the decision makers hear from the hunters and have policy be put in place guided by us? Yeah. But that's one of the things that's come out of, um, that's one of the things that over

the years has come out of trapping regulation is you've seen a lot of self-policing over the years um well i shouldn't just point that one out i will quickly i'm gonna move on another one the amount of self-policing you've seen from trappers over the years about best best best practices to avoid conflict with dogs right you've seen a lot of self-pleasing mean they're saying we could wait not do anything and have a total trap ban yep or we could find a way that like how do we look at how do we look at potential areas of conflict and write these rules up in a way that lets us continue to do what we do and eliminate conflict because it's one or the other we either do things where there's zero regulations no setbacks no set

restrictions and then we wait until you can't do anything or we find a way to ease the tension by taking some small steps that we can articulate from an educated perspective about how we could go about our business and not cause trouble. You see it in the fishing industry, right? Self-policing in the fishing industry. And then a famous case would be, uh, with mountain lions.

You talk to anyone involved in the history of, of mountain lion. It's like the first people to come forward on mountain land regulations were mountain land hunters yep and that's how it should be i mean they were smart yeah yeah because you want to keep something around to continue to do it would you rather go hunting once every three years or never again you know know, so you think about it like, you know, from that perspective, everybody always cares about what's seemingly important to them. Sure.

So, you know, think about it. That that's, that's the reality of it. If hunter of anti hunters get what they want, they're going to wave their magic wand and get rid of hunting completely. You know, they're not just going for one thing. They're going for it all eventually yeah if you picture the private conversations i have the private conversations are uh we're gonna do away with it all we're just gonna when this happened i was like i saw a guy like this

yeah but the funny thing is about maybe they just played right into our head the funny thing about the anti-hunting angle is they're not using this to get rid of wolf hunting in Wyoming. Cause they know that will never happen. They're using it. Yeah. In places like Colorado. They have no foothold in Wyoming. Like, yeah.

And that's why Wyoming is kind of. I mean, this thing that happened is probably not going to change how wolves are managed in Wyoming. Not in Wyoming. You know. No, definitely not in Wyoming. You know? No. Definitely not in Wyoming. Could affect everywhere else. And, you know, you talk about the private conversation.

Last year, two years ago, it came back now as a different initiative. It's not really private anymore. So it was IP3, I think. IP3. IP3 in Oregon. That one, they kind of did away with that. Now it's going to be IP28. It's a. Is that the fur ban? with that. Now it's going to be IP28. It's a...

Is that the fur ban? No, it's an everything ban. It's fishing. It's farming. Animal husbandry. You can't even trim your dog's nails. That's how bad it is. That's a publicity play. But there's people signing on.

So there's obviously a group of people that believe that. It's the pinnacle of what they want. If they could get what they want, that's it. Oh, they're like, let's just cut to the, instead of nitpicking, let's just get this over with. That is a great public service announcement though. Like, you know, we're heading into elections and a legislative session here in Montana. So you're starting to see a lot

more uh people hounding you on the street for signatures yeah and their job is to get the signature the last lady who stopped me three times i had to say can i see the language of the bill it's this i'm like that's how the bill's written? No. And then finally I had to say, I am an informed voter. Show me the language of the bill so I can read it. And she's like,

oh, okay. Most people don't want that. Yeah. Cause you're like, cause you're like one in a million. Who wants to read it? Right. So like what,

they're boiling it down. What was the bill? It was on, uh, um, abortion rights. Oh yeah. Yeah. Right.

So it's pro-life. Okay. What's that? You know, it's like, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah. So you can imagine how, uh, like the petitions going around Colorado are phrased, right?

Oh sure. Yeah. Right. Well, we, we don't have to imagine. We know exactly. No one eats mountain lion meat. We're going out there for the head. Mountain lions are going to go extinct.

They're endangered. That's the latest one. What else? Hunters, you know, we're all the guy from Daniel, Wyoming. That's who we are. That's why we're out there doing it. And so we can take a picture and put it on social media. Mm-hmm. That's it the not eating mountain lion thing has been

Really eye-opening to me. I've never a I live in California So the whole mountain lion thing, yeah, you'll never eat one there and even bring I can't even bring it back if I go out of state or, you know, wherever. But really? Yeah. You can't even bring the hide back. Don't you remember the game commissioner? Yeah, but I didn't know. I thought that was just, they thought it was hypocritical on his part.

I didn't know that there was a ban on bringing them back. Yeah. Yeah, you can't even bring it across state lines. Unless I have a museum. If I start a museum, then I can bring whatever I want back. But yeah, I cannot bring a hide back. Even a fully taxidermied piece, you cannot. With documentation.

Legally harvested, fully taxidermied. From another state that allows it, you cannot. Yeah. It's crazy. Shit, man. I don't know how I didn't know that, but I didn't know that. So I wanted to know, because I've heard from so many people, and I knew this, but I wanted to know, you know, kind of publicly on social media, hey, who eats Mountain Lion?

Send me your pictures. Send me the me the recipes send me the cuisine whatever flooded with pictures flooded with the best look you know mountain lion egg roll mount you know mountain lion whatever and uh yes we created a bunch of videos i think crwm just put up one actually that we did on the entire video where it's showing food and kind of talking about what's going on in colorado and then by the way everything you just saw that was all my own line you know so so anyway the cats aren't trophies they are a hundred percent just relying on lies that's what they're telling people when they're gathering signatures you know where they're getting paid what was it seven ten bucks a signature yeah um crazy it's it's a the process of ballot box biology that's really the the issue right um i think it's better understood robbie at blood origins just did a great video on this today but it's better understood if you take a different industry take um i don't know surgeons or or whatnot you

know in the in the medical field should we go to the public and say this is how doctors should perform surgery should we override that you know by public opinion and and when we're out there getting those signatures we can say whatever we want there's no fact checks doesn't matter you can when you're you know collecting signatures you can like i said you can say whatever we want. There's no fact checks. It doesn't matter. You can, when you're, you know, collecting signatures, you can, like I said, you can say, you know, mountain lions aren't eaten. They're going to be extinct. Whatever. You can say whatever you want to get the signatures.

All hunters are like this guy and Cody or excuse me, this guy, Cody. Yeah. Yeah. And Daniel and Daniel. Thank you. Um, and, and now doctors have to follow these procedures for brain surgery. We have wildlife professionals who go to school, they have their doctors, they have their PhDs, they have, you know, whatever, who are managing wildlife and that's their job.

That's their profession. I don't think people really understand that. So when you supersede that with going to the public, making up lies and changing what they're able to do or not able to do, um, that's the real, I mean, to me, that's the real danger there. And not that biologists are perfect, not that our state agencies make the most perfect decisions. Uh, but I think they are the experts that we have to rely on and that we can, you know, kind of hold the, um, we can hold them accountable, right. For the actions that they, uh, that they decide on or that they, um, you know, um, advise to the commissions to make decisions on, um, the real problem here is ballot box biology.

That's what, that's what we got to inform the public on, you know, like what danger, what danger are you bringing to the table when, when, when these things are allowed to come to a vote, right?

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join.

Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land,

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

Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX x club y'all that's always been the anti-hunting establishment's uh goal is to win in the

area of public perception public arena yeah they're not getting what they want they can't they don't get what they want from fishing game agencies they don not getting what they want. They can't win science. They don't get what they want from fishing game agencies. They don't get what they want from game commissions. And so the idea is you take it to the voters and turn something that, you know, you'll take a policy issue that isn't going the way you want through established channels and try to drive it on public opinion. Which, I mean, to be fair, happens in other areas. Of course, of course. It happens in other areas of course it happens in other areas as well but people have pointed out the chaos that would ensue if every piece of policy was

driven by a oh a metric of public opinion about it in that moment 100 so like you know what charles was saying we have professionals and they follow science and they have data that makes informed decisions where the anti-hunters want us to deal with strictly like on emotion and they deal with social sciences. That's the only science that they can manipulate. Like when we first got started, we were dealing with a bill in California

that was trying to get rid of bear hunting. They had did a poll and it said, oh, I don't remember what the numbers were, arbitrary number, like 85% of the public doesn't want us to bear hunt anymore. And the questions they were asking, there's not a single hunter that I know that would not agree with the question that they were

asking. They were asking like, are you opposed to a lopping off a bear's head and leaving it out in the woods? No. Okay. I'm not. I mean, I mean, yes, I am opposed to that. No, I would not like to see that. You know, are, do you, are you okay with, you know, shooting cubs and shooting sows with cubs. No. You know, so like, of course, they're going to come up with 85% because even hunters are going to say, agree with, you know, or go along with what they're trying to see. They just paint a picture that just isn't reality. in a society and Steve's pointed this out many, many times where the, the structure of regulated hunting is a surprise to a huge portion of the voting population, right? They're like,

Oh, Oh, interesting. There's population studies and this is data driven. And then there's a portion of that. And then this is a count. Well, what about roadkill?

Is that a count? Oh, it is. Okay. Well, yeah. Right. And then this is a count. Well, what about roadkill? Is that a count? Oh, it is. Okay. Okay. Well, yeah. Right. It's like, like it or not, there's the burden of education is always going to be on us. Right.

It's like, we're, we're, uh, I don't mind taking the high road, but we're constantly forced into the high road side, side of things. When we were. And that takes a lot more time per person, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When we were in Utah, we were, this was really evident to us because we were riding in Ubers

and stuff like to go to dinner or whatever. And every time we were in Uber, we would engage with the driver and everyone that we talked to didn't know that there was seasons, didn't know that we had to go buy tags. Basically, their idea was that you could go to Walmart, buy a gun, go out in the field and shoot whatever the heck you want. And there's no, there was no perception of like, well, or they would perceive even the ones that knew about tags, that a tag meant a dead animal. They didn't know it was, you know, a 9% chance of you actually killing something, you know, with that, or harvesting an elk or with that tag or whatever.

And there was just all these things that we hunters know about and we take for granted, seasons, draws, and all these other little things that the general public doesn't know. The non-public doesn't, you know, non-hunting public doesn't know.

So if they don't know that, and the only thing that they're being exposed to on a constant basis is what the anti-hunters are feeding, of course, they're going to have this preconceived notion of who the hunter is. Yeah. They're going to think you're Elmer Fudd. You know, they're going to think you're a redneck. Well, Elmer Fudd never got anything. True. This is true i i found often um all throughout my life talking to urban people

um to have them be pleasantly surprised to learn about the regulatory structure pleasantly surprised and then you want to go like oh those cities slicking idiots yeah but put yourself in their shoes yeah let's say you're talking to someone you know you go you're uh someone from where i grew up and you know rural west michigan meet someone from manhattan you must live in a war zone i bet you can't even go outside without getting raped and mugged yeah you know what i mean it's like people just aren't aware of other people's world so it's not to go and look at someone who doesn't hunt doesn't grow up around hunting isn't exposed to hunting that they have a totally different idea about it well yeah right and you know what too uh the people i hang out with a lot of times are idiots

about urban life right of course because okay tell me a thing or two about the subway system you just get robbed like dude there's people been riding subways 50 years never seen a robbery do you know i mean but you don't know you jump to conclusions and you have wild ideas it's like a human it's a it's a human problem rather than anything else and then there are people that um that in the other direction are educated about it and choose to just manipulate reality. Right. Right. And that's like far less excusable than just being ignorant of a world that you don't have any reason to have ever been educated on that world. You know? Yeah. It's like, it always comes down to education. And I think

as a group hunters, we do a pretty good job of getting on our soapbox and talking to each other, but we don't ever talk to the non-hunting public. We're probably not going to change anti-hunters minds, but okay, let's leave that 5% alone. But the, the 90% in between us, they're, they're willing to listen. Everyone that we talked to and like, you know, that's not even last night, we were at a comedy club here and they were we were we got you they're all going to watch they're all going to listen to meat eater they're all excited so yeah we had the whole crowd going um but you know they're willing to listen if you're giving them oh you know i didn't know that about this i didn't know that about that. And, and they, what we're doing by having those conversations

is next time some bill comes up or something comes up now, they'll be like, Oh, you know, I remember so-and-so, or I know so-and-so from work. And, you know, Steve's a good guy. Steve told me this. I'm not, I'm, I don't necessarily believe I'm going to look into this a little bit more before I put my name on it, or I'm not going to vote that way because i know this is bs or whatever yeah so that's always been an objective of mine and imagining that you're having conversations like like through a career and talking about hunting and talking about fishing and natural resources issues i have this picture that i'm that there's two audiences um one audience is people from completely outside of that world looking in um maybe just voyeuristically maybe they're looking in because

they're curious maybe looking in because they're deeply suspicious but whatever they're looking in on this world and there's also a conversation that you're always having with people that are from the world i much prefer the conversations with people that are from the world sure like that's just more engaging to me but i'm aware of this other conversation with people that are looking in and i imagine some of the time that backfires but i think a majority of the time in my experience which is long now the majority of time it creates a bit of understanding and some sympathy meaning if they go to a whole foods and they're presented with the thing that would be stop hunting yeah those who spent time looking in are gonna more be like what cal said well let me see because i like i hang out with some of those guys i know

some of those guys yeah i've eaten deer meat over some of those guys houses um the guys i know that are into that world know a shitload about wildlife and really love wildlife let me take a look right rather than um yeah i'll sign it yeah hunting screw that. Do you know what I mean? I think you generally like a majority of interactions create a sympathy, understanding, empathy. Of course. Or a desire to engage. You know, that's part of what we're working on. I got to say. So imagine I live in San Francisco.

Well, now I'm a few miles outside, but I was there for a while. Imagine you go to San Francisco. Imagine you go to Portland. Imagine you go to Denver, wherever here you drive down the highway and you see billboards that are framed for the general non-hunting public about what hunting is. Not to become a hunter, but to understand what hunting is right to tackle. I don't know the things that they don't know. Conservation, ecological, economical. right to tackle i don't know the things that they don't know conservation ecological economical um the the uh historical the cultural aspects whatever it is play on their emotions about

people who do hunt and their stories and wow women hunt did you know that yeah women hunt black people hunt did you know that you know? Let's change the narrative a little bit. When you turn on the TV, you see the, I don't know if it's on anymore, but Sarah McLachlan. You got the Humane Society commercials, right? Sarah McLachlan threw with those guys? What was her big hit? In the Arms of an Angel. She had a lot.

She was big. In the Arms of an Angel was the one that was used all the time. She had a big, big hit. Probably in the Arms of an angel. She had a lot. In the arms of the angel was the one that was used all the time. She had a big, big hit. Probably in the arms of the angel. I think there's a few big, big hits. Dude, Phil for a minute pulled his mic up to his lip and thought better of it and moved it away.

What was it, Phil? It's in the arms of an angel. That's the big one and that's the one they played on those commercials. For just 99 cents, you can save... I don't think the camera's on Phil. Phil, can you aim the camera at me? It's on you. Okay, Phil did one of these.

And you read my mind exactly, yes. So imagine you're on the TV, and you see commercials about this messaging that would be framed for the general public to understand it. Why do we not have it? This is a billion dollar industry. We spend a lot of money on habitat, a lot of money on a lot of things. A lot of money has come in through Pittman Robertson. What is it now?

20 billion? I don't know. It's a lot. It's a lot. Since 1937. Oh, yeah. All through. Yeah, all through. Close to a billion? I don't know. It's a lot. It's a lot since 1937. Oh, yeah. All through. Yeah, all through.

Close to a billion bucks a couple years ago. It was 1.5 billion. 1.5 billion. Three years ago. Four years ago. Just in one year, yeah. In 2020, I think. Well, yeah.

The COVID personal firearm bump. Yeah. Definitely. Yeah, people always like to point out that it's so fair and so true that you can't talk about Pittman Robertson funding without pointing out this reality. That money, I mean, let's be honest, that money is gun owners. Oh, yeah. It's a lot. A lot.

You can break those gun owners out, but that money is. Well, 25% of gun owners are hunters, though. Sure. But I'm not. Yeah, it's a big constituency. It's a big constituency. Yeah, the original intent. Yeah. Yeah.

It's just at a time, I think at a time when you did that excise, when you formed that excise tax in 1937, it was viewed as like, well, who's going to be paying this? Yeah. Hunters. It has just come to be that as cultural things have changed and time's gone on, was that was um had they at the time if let me put it this way if at the time of the enactment of that act if they had said you need to check a box about what you're going to do with that firearm and if if you put down hunting then it goes to the pitman robertson fund if they had done that that phone would be a would be much much much much smaller today than it is just out of fairness way different yeah so when you're talking about

like promoting what i'm saying yeah this is arbitrary number let's just say 70 million dollars a year that we as an industry spend on a media campaign throughout the united states a super bowl commercial i'm just saying 70 million right yeah but we change three percent five percent on a media campaign throughout the United States, a Superbowl commercial. I'm just saying 70 million dollars a year. Right, yeah. But we changed 3%, 5%, 6%. This is a generation. We're basically doing what the anti-hunters have done over decades.

They have slowly changed the mind. They've, a sea change really. A Bambi effect. I grew up in Michigan too. There was a time in my life where I thought, I didn't know people didn't hunt. Times have changed. Pat Durkin,

speaking of Wisconsin, once said, if you're not a deer hunter, you share a bed with one. Right. Or maybe a house with one. Something like that, yeah. So that's what I'm getting at. It's funny you bring up the billboard thing because

anti-hunters use the billboard campaigns all the time very effectively and very in a very manipulative manipulative way and cal was pointing out one around here where um there's a they're they're equating the delisting of grizzlies would mean hunting and so there's a picture of a sow with cubs, and there's a crosshair on the sow. I can assure you, one thing, the last time they moved to D-List, Montana wasn't issuing any grizzly tags.

I can damn sure tell you that since you can't shoot a sow black bear with cubs, there is no way in the world that they're going to open up and extend any harvest that would happen in the future to sows accompanied by cubs sure well those are the lies there's there's one right now there's an organization that has always put pushed for a public land trapping ban wolverines were recently listed and this is a whole deep conversation but wolverines were recently listed as threatened under the esa there's now a billboard in town from gallatin valley wildlife association i think it's like a mostly anti-hunting group

they have a billboard that says then these are people that always wanted to see a trapping ban. It now says, stop trapping on public land. Save the endangered Wolverine. Yeah. Well, that's part of the problem. It's threatened. You can't trap them anyway. That's part of the problem with like promoting the positives when you're always forced to be in a reactionary position and like fighting these kinds of things.

Like the dude in Wyoming, it was screwed up. Like you're constantly in a position of defending yourself rather than promoting yourself. And if you do promote it, do you do their playbook and just put up totally outrageous lies? No. I don't think we need to. Be like, um, hunters are 100 times more likely than anyone else to be great people. Or you could be like, have you ever been in an accident hitting a deer? Well, shoot them all before they kill you.

No, but the biggest problem is that we live in a world right now that we are dealing with these just memes and little quick hits. And the anti-hunters have such an easy job of swaying public perception. Like it's very easy to post a picture of a guy holding a deer with a bloody background and whatever, and very negative thoughts are going to come to your head. Like if you don't know what hunting is, if you're not exposed to hunting. So we have this like super hard job of like, how do we tell people about conservation, about the money, about the caring of the wildlife,

about the human intrinsic values and the things that the meals and all, like all these good things that come about with hunting. You know, it's probably, it's changed. I know probably everybody's life in this room, right? How do we have those conversations when you only have three seconds to do it? If we had the chance to have a podcast, a three-hour discussion and nuanced discussion with everybody that you encounter,

it'd be a lot easier job, but we don't. So we have to start coming up with ways. And I think it's on us to have to start talking to, we all know people that don't hunt. We all interact with people at work and at the store or whatever that don't hunt. So let's start giving them positive interactions with us. Let's start communicating these things with us. Cause there's what, I don't know, the numbers keep changing somewhere between 14 might be a lot closer to, you know, having a better understanding

with the general public or the non-hunting public, I should say of what hunting is. I don't personally want to see more hunters. I want that. I'd like to see less hunters. I want to see more people accept what hunting is and not just that, but also understand that hunting is an effective management tool that is used by these agencies that people don't even know exist in the first place they don't even know these agencies exist so there's a lot of education to happen there but um what john was saying you know we all talk to one person we all talk to two people or whatever um how do you i mean i see that as having a positive effect on the perception of what hunting is to the general non-hunting public

do you you feel the same way uh i mean your show's on netflix that has to you're not just it's not just hunters watching your show right yeah i find it interesting that the oldest representational art on earth is people cataloging yeah the hunts you don't know what's the first painting ever yeah yeah you don't you don't know what's in their mind um i've always written about what i'm interested in and written about my world and as a writer or a creator of some sort i'm going to talk about a certain set of ideas and as time changes and technology changes i'm going to continue to talk about a set of ideas that i'm interested in and i feel compelled to discuss in whatever way is available for me to talk about them i think that

had uh to go back to and on that in no way would i ever equate myself to him but if you go back to someone like roosevelt or you know i mentioned leopold earlier i think that they would have taken the ideas that they dealt in and they would have talked about them on podcasts i think they would have talked about them on social media they would not have limited it to books they would have not limited it to articles they were vocal about their enthusiasms and vocal about their love and they had a big impact and they would have talked about in any way possible the argument about there's this kind of pervasive argument about uh i had someone actually frame it to me one day about like somehow conservation that that get you know introducing people to the

idea of hunting getting people interested in hunting was bad for conservation let's take a look at that for a second new mexico is going to issue a certain amount of elk tags it's capped okay if you're talking about conservation a bunch of people wanting to apply for elk tags and wanting to go hunting doesn't change the number of people that are out hunting. They're confusing oftentimes conservation with convenience, meaning they're mad that it's not as convenient to get a tag. Don't tangle this up with conservation. The elk harvest is fixed. Let's talk about conservation for a minute as well. You go to Wisconsin,

you go to Michigan, wildlife managers are writing public letters because they cannot get people to harvest enough deer. They're seeing habitat degradation and unprecedented disease transmission

in certain areas because they cannot get the doe harvest up. The people that are hunting now aren't killing does, but not enough. Conservation in that area, if you want to talk about conservation, conservation in that area would be encouraging a type of hunter motivated by venison to go out and get does. That's conservation. Conservation in that case is not saying shh don't tell anybody about hunting another thing is i find it's like here's something

that's incredibly common you'll have people like me that come from a place like i come from michigan i moved out to montana out of an interest in hunting and fishing. When I came to Montana, I moved in on other people's hunting spots. You just did. The only person that has any justification to start bitching about losing their spot to incoming people would be Native Americans. And if you're really, really, really deeply concerned about people that had their hunting

spots overrun, you should be involved in the land back movement and helping Native Americans. If not, buddy, you took someone's spot, right? When you moved out West, you took someone's spot. When you started applying for sheep tags and goat tags and moose tags and drawing those tags you cut in line from someone that was applying before you were applying you just did but people's memories are so short whatever they were motivated by to move out west and start hunting they think that that because it was them, that was so pure. Everybody else since them is just an asshole. Right.

It's like, come on, man. Right. Do you know what I mean? It's like, come on. And there's this other, there's this other funny thing too, about this like industry thing. Like, let's say you work, let's say you work in a, I don't know, just pulling it out of thin air.

Let's say you worked at the ARS where you draw your money from federal taxpayer dollars that are part of agricultural subsidies. Okay. You know, that money's coming because it's pork barrel protected. You know, that money's coming. You never have to market anything. And it winds up being, it's like so weird to see an industry where people have to are in the, are in the open market economy, creating jobs, revenue right it's just it's like upsetting because you live outside of a world where there's any accountability you know what butters your bread right and if it went to a public vote that bread wouldn't get buttered it just wouldn't so this whole conversation i would rather cal was born in montana i'm opening to hear cal bitch about stuff from montana i'll indulge it all day long but this whole thing like

this whole thing of like a ton of guys like me that moved out here and started finding hunting spots and let me tell you man there was people hunting those spots dude they were you yeah and now you're in that spot so like this conservation question give me a break dude it's convenience it's convenient oh it's 100 it's like you took someone's spot someone's in your spot now and you know what there's a couple things if the person in your spot is a veteran screw you if the person in your spots a person with their kids screw you what what makes it your spot that's not yeah like go ask the black feet about it and see what they think about who's in their spot give me a break man it's just it goes on and on and it's like just well we're our own worst enemy we're our own worst enemy holy shit i think it's

i think it's a jealousy thing really because you you see somebody having success or you see somebody doing something that you want to do so automatically somehow they're they're cheating to get that or they're doing something wrong to get that so if that's oh you know stealing spots or poaching or getting their tags whatever I mean, having different factions fighting with each other is never going to help hunting, man. It's never, never, never, never. And I'm sure there, there's still like getting back to the wolf thing or the bear thing. Like there's hunters out there that. Tons.

Don't like that shit. Yep. You know. There's a real, there's a really interesting statistic that goes along with that. Every time there is an argument where hunters are on both sides of the fence of, of, of an issue, whatever that is,

it almost always, it's like in the 90 percentile aligns what it, what it, when the smoke clears, it ends up aligning with anti-hunting movement. So think about that. If you're fighting your fellow hunter about something like, okay, this is a simple one, trail cam ban in Arizona. Okay. I don't think you can say that that's anti-hunting thing, but there was anti-hunters on the side of that. So that's what helped tip

the scales. I don't, I don't think. I see what you're saying. That's what, I'm not saying that anti-hunters are driving that. I'm saying that if you're this way and this guy's this way. If they're going to be on a side. They're going to go with the side that goes against.

That's, that is, that is true. And it's almost always, it never works out for hunting. Now, could there, could there, you know, could we have found a better solution than just, hey, let's get rid of trail? I mean, this is just an arbitrary example. But could we have found a better solution? Could hunters have gotten together and said, okay, I agree with you.

I don't like this happening, or I don't want guys coming in and checking their trail cameras while I'm sitting on a water hole, because that's what started it. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada and boy my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes and our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join our northern brothers get 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 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 MeatEater podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement.

You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onXMaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Diverse coalitions, right, are what win fights, right?

So when you're like, oh, the anti-hunters jumped in on this, they're able to skew things at the end because they're like, okay, we've heard from this group. Oh, and then here's this other group. And so, yeah, I can see how that would push a thing, but that's comes down to why everybody who does anything that you like to do, you need to figure out, educate yourself on how to be a better advocate for those things and be willing to be involved, right? I mean, we're just at a point in time where if you're not going to weigh in on the decision-making processes, these burdensome regulatory processes where, thank God we live in a place where public comment periods are built into the process. Um, somebody else is going to go in there and do it for you. Right. And, um, you know,

we really do have a broad, diverse coalition amongst hunters, but you have to say, Hey, you know, I'm in the, you know, plumber's labor union this is where i live this is my family this is how much money i spend and we do it hunting right and people need to go through and we need to make sure that we're checking all those boxes when we're saying hey this access issue. And, and I think access to wildlife is a very smart way of framing this Colorado issue, right? It's like, there is no reasonable science that says we shouldn't be allowed to take

advantage of this opportunity. Should you want to take advantage of the opportunity to, to just pursue lions? Um, but somebody is like, Oh, well, there's not a lot of them, not a lot of hunters doing that. So let's just shut off that little bit of access to that opportunity. Right. And so you need, unfortunately, like the way a lot of politicians work is like, well, we've already heard from the

hunters right but if you can go in and say listen yeah i do some hunting but really i'm a fly fisherman this is why this issue that doesn't seem to be connected matters to me or you know dirt bikes atvs all the outdoor pursuits right right? It's like, well, you know, the, the cat hunting thing matters to me because there's no reason to stop this group of people from doing what they're doing. You're just listening to some other group that says it shouldn't exist.

And it doesn't stop there. Yeah. People bitch about riding motorcycles all the time. And one of the consequences of getting rid of that too. Yeah. Like, are we just looking at the issue for the issue and not looking at the, you know, the, the side effects that happened to it?

Right. And like Steve says, people's memories are very short, right? It's like. Oh, yeah. Yeah. we discussed this in the past is uh there are gonna come times on regulatory issues where the general will of hunters is going to align with anti-hunters oh sure i mean you take a look at this um this is the thing i always like to bring up because it was so clean and it was so clean and instant was when the idea of using drones for hunting came in okay um

right when drones were hitting and becoming this thing just widely available inexpensive i think in one year you had 13 states um come out 13 western states come out with drone bans including alaska right had you gone to the anti-hunting world and said, should you be able to use a drone for hunting? What do you think they're going to say? No. Okay.

Well, sort of the, you know, Alaska's game commission. Sure. So I don't think like in some of these cases, it's a little more complicated than to say like when they side with the anti-hunters, because it's just, right. It's, it's like, you're going're gonna wind up i don't even want to use the term strange bedfellows but you're coming at a question from opposite directions but you're landing on that question the exact same way you know like you can't your point yeah it's it's

it's impossible i don't want to call it an unfortunate accident but just sometimes they're your sentiment a hunter sentiment is going to align that way. Well, it's the same thing goes with the Wyoming wolf thing. But it's, do you want them driving the policy or do you want the policy to come from us? Well, in this case, in the drone case, the policy very much came from hunters, you know, um, as we just heard from some people involved in the commission in Arizona on the governor tag issue, like that policy change is coming from people who have untarnished reputations as pro hunters, right? It's just some things, uh, would be that if you're knee-jerk anti-anything having to do with hunting, you're going to align oftentimes with hunting restrictions.

If a state game agency says, do we want to allow nighttime hunting of elk with thermals? Right. Hunters are going to say what? No. No. And what are anti-hunters going to say? No. Of course not.

So. Yeah, we, we just, we dealt with something. Was it last year with the horses? We actually. So I was going to say, yeah. So we have aligned, uh, you know, and I, with the Center for Biological Diversity a couple of times. Oh, really?

And it's on wild. Tell me more. It's on wild horses. No, I mean, this is not uncommon. Yeah. Right. I mean, yeah, go ahead. Well, it's uncommon in our space, but we basically got pictures and documentation from Robin Silver, who I think is the co-founder of CBD, I believe.

He's up there somewhere, yeah. Apache Sickle Reefs National Forest, I think is what it was. They're calling them feral horses because the evidence points to there was a wildfire. It burnt down fences of native tribes. Their horses got out. Now they're living here. So they're not wild horses. They're feral horses.

I agree with that. Yeah. Dude, I feel like you got to provide a little background for people. Well, there was a wild horse untarnished by the hands of man and manipulation. You're doing the background right now? Yeah. Oh, thank you. Yeah. How far back are you going?

Pleistocene. Okay. End of story. Walk us through a quick chronology here because these are confusing, very confusing terms. So that horse died off several theories as to how but they very well could have been hunted and killed by early humans

on this continent 12,000 years went by leap forward in time the Spanish arrive with horses at a couple of different geographic locations but uh those indigenous people to uh north america southern north america start stealing those mainly for food and uh you know horses run away even in modern times horses run away right so um this allowed for like another food option out there on the on the prairie um because they're out there making more horses but but I mean, that's, that's where, like, that's how a feral population begins.

Now we're just like a long road down the way. I think what you're getting at is at this point, all wild horses are feral horses. There's a, but there's a, if you went to, but there was a bifurcation at a point where they looked at these sort of ancestral Spanish horses. They dubbed we Americans, whatever,

dub those wild horses. But if Cal's horse ran away, that's a feral horse. Those have different governing rules, but the world has gotten murky in that among those ancestral wild horses, you got all kinds of runaway feral horses. Right. And so they do it by not what is the animal's history?

Where is the animal standing? Yeah. Geography. Yeah. What was that? 1970 something? They like made boundaries and any horses that were in this, I think it's in the 70s, something like that.

Any horses in this area is a wild horse. Anything outside of that is a feral horse. We have wild horse island here in Montana. Where they're feral. We got a crazy feral horse problem. But yeah, you could take a horse you've owned for 20 years, put it on the right patch of ground and that horse becomes a wild horse.

Sure. Yeah. Well, they go feral very quickly or they go wild. No, I mean, I'm sorry, legally. Well, legally. It legally becomes a wild horse sure yeah well they go feral very quickly or they go wild no i mean i'm sorry legally well legal cars yes yes yes yes you're right you just got to get rid of uh any any markings yeah make sure the brand inspector doesn't isn't around yeah i'm taking something that's why we need to have the right guest i'm taking something that's so complicated and trying to compress it and i'm not a subject matter expert but anyhow go ahead yeah you found yourself on the same side well they were yeah they were legally classified as as as uh feral horses not not wild otherwise i don't think anything could have been done but uh for that issue we were the

squeakiest wheel which whenever this had come up before the well the hunt. Can I, can I enter? Yeah. What was the issue? Like get rid of them? To remove them, to remove them from the Apache. Yeah. Um, like the landscape there was just. Getting decimated. It was just dirt left. No, no water.

It was the water situation was the worst thing. They would like physically see tanks that elk would normally drink at. Horse, you know, whole brood of horses come in and. And there was endangered species. Oh yeah, there was an endangered species. That's what helps. This is where the CBD comes in a lot. They're all about habitat. It's like a frog or something.

Frog, I believe. Yeah. My girlfriend's a horse, grew up as a horse person. She gets really annoyed with me when we're driving through parts of montana and i point to shitty pastures and i'm like oh that's a horse property right it's the truth so in this case in the desert southwest areas of nevada california arizona new mexico um you have a a imposter wild animal out competing true native wildlife for grass and water. A hundred percent. Yeah.

And that's the, that's the, that's the, like the crux of the issue. Yeah. And I talked to him two days ago and this might be the guy I refer to you if you want to talk to him, but he said they've, they've removed 500 horses now and they are going to, there's farms. There's, I don't know what they're called. Some of them, yeah, some of them are getting relocated, but I think some of them are getting lethal. People buy them, people.

No, they can't. I thought there were some that they had, they were, they approved the lethal ticket. Oh, maybe they were not true wild horses then. Well, they're not. Or they were diseased or crippled or. Yeah. They're feral, 100%. These, because of the, whenever that wildfire happened, they were classified as, these're feral 100 these because of the whenever that wildfire happened they were

classified as these are feral these escaped out of the understood out of the indigenous you know out of the reservation so they were able to classify white mount apache in the tribe that's what it was yeah so there's an example of alignment. Um, like the center for biological diversity, one of them removed wildlife, like more hook and bullet wildlife activists wanted them removed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent back to the CBD.

We are fighting them now on this, uh, Catalina Island, you know, about the mule deer extermination deal. Yeah. We've covered that exhaustively, man.

So, uh, but they backed up on it no no no aerial gunning that's not going to happen at least not this year um two days ago three days ago um the commission approved plm tags on catalina island to increase hunting opportunity on the island that's what we asked for um Um, there's, but the humane society is on our side. There's other groups. It's funny. So, yeah. So I was just on Catalina Island and, um, you guys been on the phone together? Yeah, no, it's funny. We did, we did some podcasts together. I'm like, well, this is, this is interesting. I'm here with the humane society. And,

and this lady said, Hey, I'm all all for hunting i'm all for management um we were very surprised about that yeah just not eradication i'm like i'm right there with you that's such a that's a not hs us standpoint no never she still worked for them right did she just say that to get you know she's not on the billboard so there is a difference so hsus is is kind of like the the national brand right and then that's the animal rights oh yeah that this causes huge confusion yeah so hsus and your local humane society are not the same thing very different very different so this was a low but maybe a little this is this is local however the the humane i believe hsus has come out in opposition of this because they're just against killing anything. Right.

They don't, yeah, they don't entangle themselves into things from a habitat perspective. They, and they are focused on like individual, they're focused on welfare of individual animals, you know? Yep. I recently looked at some interesting documentation out of California with HSUS, where HSUS had petitioned the state to end California's bear harvest, or sorry, to petition the state to end California's bear hunt

over concerns that populations were plummeting, which was the opposite of true. And then later, one of them clarified someone, I think it was on a podcast. Someone sent me a transcript. Someone pressed them. If you're arguing to close the bear season based on a population number that

you understand to be true, what is the population number where you would not oppose the bear harvest? And she acknowledged there is no number. So was that was actually we actually have that on video that was actually in a commission meeting um that was commissioner murray pressed um uh wendy kefover she's the humane society hs us representative she asked her that in a commission meeting what's the number you're happy with you know because they they didn't know at the time when they when they had this petition and we had we had this big meeting we had 130 hunters there i believe um the commission was was

incredible gave us the opportunity to talk about um you know what we do with uh with bear fat with bear meat like like really the cal the California commission's given us this incredible opportunity to share our stories and humane society was just going nuts, like disrupting the meetings. You guys can't do this. Don't let them talk about that. And they're like, wait, it's your petition. You made these claims. You made these claims that people don't eat bear, um, that, you know, they do this and that. And's only 13 000 bear in california well we just proved you wrong and one of our scientists at that time we nobody knew this was coming stood up gave a presentation and said hey we're working on a bear management plan um which is now to present they they have one yeah the common period yeah he goes, I think we're looking at 60, 70,000 bear.

And it just blew their mind. Humane Society was like, what? You know, did anybody know about this? Because we look like idiots right now. Because they were pushing 12,500. Yeah. And then the new thing is like the sort of best, it's a range of 50 something to 80 something. So people are probably 65,000 bears.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But no, hunters stood up and said, now you imagine 60, 70,000 hungry bears on the edge of your child's playground. Right. Okay. Yeah. Um, that's the only thing you got to resist.

They may. Yeah. A hundred percent. So they find a lot of hunters tiptoeing into this dangerous territory of telling everybody how dangerous wildlife is. And that they're doing you a great service. Yeah. Because wildlife's so dangerous. Yeah.

And that's another real, that's a, that is a dangerous place to get. We never want to vilify the lion or the bear or whatever. They're just going to do what they do, the wolf. But it's. No, we're full support. We love wolves on the landscape. Grizzly bear, they deserve to be there. But they do need to be managed.

And I don't know. We don't really believe in reintroduction or introduction. That's a sticky. It's, well. Cat cats out of the bag yeah sorry you're not gonna put it back i should have how how that's done i'm just saying this like we had a conversation a long time ago about um with we had a conversation on this show with the woman that ran the that that ran the wolf program during the wolf reintroduction in the mid nineties in Yellowstone.

Okay. She looking back, looking back, felt that it was unnecessary. Even now says it was unnecessary at the time because we would have landed in the same place coming down. We would have landed in the same position with natural movement of animals coming in and they were seeing it coming in while the Colorado reintroduction bill was

progressing. Wolves were showing up from Wyoming. Right. So whether or not in, in 20 years, 30 years, whatever the hell it is, I think you're going to be stuck with the same set of commerce.

You're going to be stuck. Whether or not those things that happen, you probably stuck around the same set of conversation you're gonna be stuck whether or not those things that happen you probably stuck around the same set of cons conversations around you are gonna i think this is the reality you are gonna have large predators on the landscape you're gonna have large predators on more of the landscape and there's gonna become a question of um do we do management practices to uh do we take steps for management practices to reduce conflict and to stay with deer and elk herds that we want to see that we hunters want to see and that's going to be like it's going to be somewhere between those two things they're not going to be gone right they're not going to be like, it's going to be somewhere between those two things. They're not going to be gone.

Right. They're not going to be gone. We're not going to go back in time. No, not re-eradicate them or whatever. Yeah. It's not going to happen. It can't happen. There's all kinds of, I mean, we have this

whole legal framework that they can't allow that to happen. But big pop, you know, what the prey population objectives are going to be, I think you're prey population objectives are going to be. I think you're correct. Is like going to be a big conversation. Cause like here in the state of Montana, right. We're like, we love elk, want more elk.

Yeah. A lot of folks in Montana are like, we don't want more elk. Well, right. In Colorado where there there's a new wolf population getting itself established, at some point they're going to have to decide how many elk are we willing to like give to those wolves and how many elk are we saving for hunters, right? debate between different stakeholders you know the same way agricultural interests might argue with hunter interests about how many elk is the right number elk how many deer is the right number of deer we're going to have we're going to have conversations about um how many lines is the right number of lions how many wolves is the right number of wolves how many grizzly bears is the right number of grizzly bears how many black bears is the right number of wolves? How many grizzly bears is the right number of grizzly bears? How many black bears is the right number of black bears?

I don't think that the conversation is never going to return to, should we poison them all? It just, right. I mean, be realistic. But the problem is like these guys are saying there is no number that's big enough for some people.

Yes. You know, and there's no number of elk that's big enough for some people. Right. Right. I And there's no number of elk that's big enough for some people. Right. Right. I don't know many guys. I don't know many elk hunters. The convenience factor.

That bitch about having some. God, I saw too many elk. Too many bulls. Yeah. I don't know those guys. There's a big difference between reintroducing and them coming in on their own.

You know, natural attrition. Yeah. Social friction is a big issue. And I think that's part of the, to be fair to the woman that said we, that she sort of questions the move. She said the social conversation that we would have eventually got there, the social conversation would have been so different. Yeah.

But even ecologically, it's a big difference. It would have been a huge difference psychologically, yeah. So like you drop 100 wolves into an area and all the prey, they've never seen a wolf before in their life. They don't know how to react towards a wolf. It's just like when you go out in the woods, deep, deep back, and you run into an elk that's staring at you because he's never seen a human before. Or in your backyard. Or in your backyard. One or the other, yeah. He's never seen them or they've never heard them.

Right. And they pick the problem wolves. Yeah, that's the other thing. In this case out of Oregon. Yeah, like they. They pick the wolves they wanted to get rid of. And from what I understand, that's like generally what happens. Okay, like a state's like, okay, well, we need to get rid of these problem

childs and let's ship them off to this state. So, you know, you introduce a wolf that's never been on a landscape or hasn't been on a landscape for a hundred years or whatever. Those animals don't know how to, how to deal with it. Also, those wolves don't know, hey, where are my boundaries?

What do I need to stay in? Like, they're just going to keep going wherever they want to go. And like, it just causes more and more problems. Uh, Dan Gates and I were just talking last week about, uh, Colorado specifically on the, on the wolves. We changed topics for a minute.

Um, and, uh, we're just talking about how it is kind of funny where like that celebratory zeal of reintroduction has gone away. Oh yeah. Uh, don't hear much of that anymore, but you are hearing from some of those same sources that were so happy about wolves being reintroduced to the state of like,

oh boy, you know, this is kind of hard. This is kind of, what do you mean? Just because now there's, as these wolves are getting into the predicted types of friction.

There's a lot of buyer's remorse. There's a, yeah, there's like, well, I didn't know it would be that, or I didn't know those wolves would be here. I thought, you know, so it's not like this a hundred percent dedication. It's not kumbaya. Yeah, not, not, not so much.

And it, it is just interesting because third time now, like our memories are short, right? It just approved lethal management for them. Yep. Oh, they did. Yep. To some extent. And there's an official pack now because some

of them had a couple. Oh yeah. I just saw an article came out that they had. Yeah. That goes back to, I think if the vote, what was that? Prop 114 in Colorado. if the vote what was that prop 114 in colorado if the vote was held today i don't think it would pass nope i really don't uh but it goes back to what you're saying people didn't know what they were voting for oh i didn't know

it meant that i didn't know it meant this i didn't it was worded very weird yeah it was it was worded in a way that it was sort of like a mandate that they in i don't know set into motion a recovery plan or yeah you know it was under it was understood but the wording could have been confusing i think the wording is always confusing i mean even people who are trained to be able to read through these things and you read through a crap ton of them like i feel like it's always it's always like a word play there's always always like, it's, it's propaganda. For people don't, you know, like for the lion thing, who's going to go read through this thing and see that there's, you know, this trophy language put in there that could be

transposed onto elk and deer and stuff in the future. Didn't I just see a clip of Cam Haines? He said, I read it and I didn't know how to vote. Like if it was, if it was me voting voting because i don't know what i was supposed to do yeah no just because the way the whole thing was worded 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 sweepstakes and our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join our northern brothers get irritated well if you're sick of you know sucking high and titty there on x is now in canada the great features that you love

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Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. On the broader wolf issue, i'm of the opinion and i think you could you could arrive at this from a religious perspective you could arrive at this from a secular historical view would be that there are animals there are wild animals that live on our landscape okay that have just been there it they're there because god placed them there they're there because these billions of years of earth history and all all these evolutions and ecological upheavals and things are placed in there but there's a there's a static nature to wildlife and you got and you go look and you go like okay at what point in history do i go and declare it being normal okay meaning some people

would argue well the pleistocene that should be normal and we should bring back mammoths and bring back yeah short-faced bears and turn them all loose because that's when humans showed up in the new world and so normal should be that day uh i tend to view normal um normal in my mind just because you have to pick an arbitrary point normal in my mind is the distribution of wildlife at the time of european contact and um i don't i don't believe in removing certain turtles from the landscape i don't believe in removing certain birds from the landscape i don't believe in removing certain invertebrates from the landscape i don't like extinction i don't like extirpation i just don't i don't care what it is i don't like extinction and extirpation um and here's it gets like a little bit complicated because i do think that uh a right like like animals have a

right to be on the landscape there's a reality that we live in and we, all of those species are going to be, need to be managed from a very human perspective of, of what are our needs and what are the balancing thing? Because we're here. And we're the biggest consumers of everything. And we affect more change. We never even have to leave your living room to affect what happens out in the woods.

Yeah. And as we, as we discovered, like, um, in certain areas, like with forest management, not doing anything is not the answer in a lot of, in a lot of areas, not doing anything, letting it

do its own natural thing, um, isn't the answer. Right. Cause we've, we're here. Yeah. We're here. We've stirred things up so much. We've got roads everywhere. We consume all these different, you know,

things that we take out of, you know, wood or fuel and rocks and sand and everything's disrupted by, by man. And there's what, 8 billion of us on the, on the planet now. Yeah. I like grizzly bears. Yeah.

I like seeing them. I've never been sad to see a grizzly bear. I love grizzly bears. I don't think grizzly bears should be listed under the esa right agreed i just it's like both of those things are simultaneously true for me i love them it's time to come off the list you said a lot right there so you went you went back thousands of years for animals um and you brought up God or you brought up Evolution whatever it is that that people believe I think the same idea exists for humans because people say oh they were here first or it's their home well where are we from we're not aliens yeah you know yeah uh

where exactly are we from uh if you believe in the evolutionary process or the creation process what we still land here on earth like imagine someone in africa saying well they were here first yeah define who's they right right um and it's always just an interesting it really throws me off when i when i hear that a lot the whole they were here first thing and you know the basically what but the other thing that you brought up about grizzlies and ESA, and you brought it up earlier with some billboards, um, it wasn't a how sponsored billboard,

but I designed, maybe you've seen it. I think it's at the North end of Yellowstone and the South and Wyoming. There's a, a billboard that says, I think it's like grizzly bear recovery is a conservation success story. So I designed that for whoever put it up and that, um, inspired apparently all these other billboards that I think some of the

trapping organizations or whoever, the ones that you mentioned earlier um that uh they've been putting up because it wasn't the typical billboard that would come from hunters because what i was presented with was hey do you have any ideas on this on billboards i said well what do you got this is funny and it was like a bunch of furs hanging and something like smoke a pack a day i don't know something like that and i'm like, where are you putting this? Very popular bumper sticker for a long time. Right. Yes.

Where exactly are you putting this? Well, you know, the entrance to Yellowstone. I'm like, okay, who's coming in and out? Tourists, probably. People who don't hunt. I can't believe you're thinking this way. So let me work on it. Let's take let's,

let's take the, the, the grizzly bear situation. Let's look at the success stories. It is a success story. Let's make it that let's challenge the public who's coming in. Let's challenge the, the, the anti-hunters with kind of their own rhetoric, um, and give the actual success story here. We have so many things and positive things that we can talk about that we've done in the last hundred years that's the kind of stuff we need the market that's the kind of stuff you know that we need to get out there and apparently uh apparently that billboard really struck a nerve with with the anti-hunting orgs because they're not they're like shoot we need to we need to combat that a little bit.

Cause that's not their usual strategy. Usually it's easy. Usually it's, you know, some organizations got a, you know, trailer going down the, the highway representing their organization. They got a picture of a wolf and a, and a scope reticle over the roof over the wolf. I'm like, is that, so that's your one chance to talk to the general public and that's what they see is just kill them all you're not winning any hearts and minds with that that's what we're putting out yeah you're not winning anything um but it just it made me think of that

when you brought that up you know back to the optics thing and back to to messaging and you know where i think we should be as an as an industry what we should be doing the the question with with grizzlies too that's interesting and how people position it to say that it's hunters that want them off people lose sight of the fact that you know who keeps trying to get them off is the federal agency that has managed them since the 70s yeah the u.s fish and wildlife service yeah are the ones moving to remove them from the list. They're getting, like the management agent, the federal management agency is getting blocked

from doing what they think their job is to do, which is remove them from the list. You leave, you can leave the states out of that for a minute because it's them saying it's time. Imagine that job, you know know you got to do this but i'm not going to give you any tools to do that with you know it's like yeah it's it that that's the thing that gets lost here and it was the same thing with wolves the u.s fish and wildlife service moved to remove wolves from the list they initiate the conversation

yeah i would love to get um somebody on that that we can talk about like accurate numbers of lethal removal because like when i went back and did the idaho uh bear capture with idaho fishing game it was i think it was just prior to july 4 weekend. And at that point, Montana had killed 26 grizzly bears that, that year. Hmm. For, you know,

conflict mitigation basically. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And, you know, and typically Wyoming's, uh, twice what Montana is.

Um, and, you know, Idaho is a handful. So, and that's what I see all the time is like well if you delist hunters are going to kill the bears it's like well somebody's killing them right now yeah right and again california is a great example of that with the with the mountain lions

you know the numbers right and it doesn't it doesn't mean yeah to your point um i asked that question to uh all right if if grizzly bears are delisted, what's that mean? Maybe 20 hunting tags in Montana. Well, the first year it was zero. Okay. The first year it was 24 in Wyoming. Okay. One in Idaho.

I love it because it's like classic Wyoming. Yeah. It's 24 in Wyoming. Idaho was doing a symbolic one just to exercise the right. Which was only open to residents and I got to apply for that tag. Oh, nice. In Montana on the fishing. Didn't drop, Brody.

Nope. The fishing game agency, Montana's fishing game agency under Martha Williams at the time decided to sit it out. Didn't want to deal with the BS, probably. They just wanted to see, I mean, well, they wound up doing the smart thing. They had a management plan. I don't want to put it that way. Not the smart thing.

But, I mean, these other states are conducting tag draws. Right. They went through a, you know, they spent some money on that process. They were rolling. And so I don't want to, you know, they spent some money on that process. Oh, they're like, they were rolling. And so I don't want to, you know, I'm not, I wasn't involved in all the conversations, but I could picture, I could picture both ways. I could picture an eagerness to exercise the right.

I could also picture saying, I'm going to, I have a feeling about where this might go in the courts and I'm not not gonna go start printing tags and whatnot because i don't know the whole system to return people's money i don't know that this is going through right yeah yeah but that brings up a good wyoming point too right because of you know wyoming's like yep we're gonna hunt grizzly bears, uh, the 20 tags. Um, and again, I, in Idaho at the time, and I was already working with Idaho fishing game to a degree to figure out how to change, um, the requirements for bear harvest in, in Idaho, um, because grizzly is such a political football. We're staring at Wyoming where it's like, you don't legally have to take anything

other than the, the trophy parts. We're like, well, if this isn't going to blow up in our face, then nothing will. Right. And it's like that it's a, another example of hunters probably following in line with some Like that, it's a, another example of hunters probably following in line with some anti-hunters. It's just like, oh, I bet if you made them take

the meat, they wouldn't want to do it. Right. That's one of the, Maggie's still there. That's one of the things, Maggie, um, that I know American Bear Foundation and, why uh wyoming wildlife federation is is wanting to get pushed through in wyoming is it's one of the few states that doesn't have wanton waste laws idaho never it's it's you don't have to take it in idaho now still not on on black bear on bear right yep um which was according when I was digging in the weeds on that, it was burdensome to the state to have to, you can just dispose of the carcass in the landfill for problem bears.

Or the state would also have to adhere to the same regulations. Mm-hmm. Was the way it was explained to me. What? Yeah, as a hunter harvest harvest how can that be true i mean well it got signed into law if you have a regulation if a state has wanton waste laws on ducks and they got wanton waste laws on elk and they got wanton waste laws on deer and doves i it would just by a matter of logic extend it. They would have mountain waste laws

on black bears. Right. Right. Let me share it. Let me share it with you. I want to share with you a quick quote. John Mack, the historian John Mack Farragher,

who John Mack Farragher, a historian who was raised and partly educated in John MacFerrigan, a historian who was raised and partly educated in California in describing the frontier of colonial America. You want to know what he said?

He said, European settlers and Native Americans alike considered bear meat the prime game meat. Venison was inferior eating so i i i don't know why if a state is going to go through the trouble of spilling out wanton waste laws they wouldn't extend it to yeah why is that the exception yeah unless it's a bear because yeah some squeamish people think it's icky. Maybe the trichinosis thing.

Well, then they should have it. I'm not condoning it. You must cook it to 165. Yuck. Like your chicken and like your pork and like your bacon, you got to cook it. Exactly. And bear is delicious. I was going to say, I think that's my favorite game to eat is, is black bear.

I absolutely love it. And I don't know if it's because if it's a, it could be a combination. Are you coming from a California perspective? I am coming from a California perspective. You don't got to convince us, but like I, I went on a bear hunt in Idaho

where there was a group of hunters and it was hound hunting and I was the only one that took that bear meat home so it's like yeah but Buck Bowden just told you yeah it's an exception for one of his clients to take his moose meat right it's like a convenience thing it's like I don't want to be bothered with it, which is. Yeah. That doesn't make any sense. I had a friend that went on a bear hunt in Canada and they were so flabbergasted

that he wanted to bring his bear home from the bear hunt. They tried to convince him that he couldn't. They did that to me in Quebec. Yeah.

He had to be like, what do you mean I can't? Oh, you just can't because of this, that, and the other thing. So he started making

some calls around and he's like, listen, I can and I'm gonna. Yeah. Had to fight with him about it. I left two bears in Quebec. I mean, this is like 20 years ago now. And that guy's like, no, you can't take them. Yeah. He's like, they're, they're riddled with worms.

Oh no. They were giving them like a, like a regulation thing. The border. Well, he did all of his own homework. I was going to fly it back because i flew there i mean i didn't drive i was living in arizona quebec's you know but yeah they wouldn't let me take it back and then i found out afterwards when i got back that it was bs that i had you know i could have just brought it to a meat processor maybe got it frozen and shipped or whatever yeah

i actually didn't even get my height. Never got them? Yeah. It was weird. If people want to debate the merits of salvage requirements, debate the merits of salvage requirements, but if you're going to apply salvage requirements to game animals, I mean, it just seems like it can just apply. I know what side I would argue on,

but if you want to debate, like can the government tell you to remove certain stuff from the woods? Alaska uses salvage requirements in a way that almost like guides activities. They have areas where they're like, you have to bring the moose ribs out on the rack. I think they even had an area where you needed to remove the liver. They got areas where certain permits, if you kill a a moose you got to cut its antler in half muskox you got to destroy its trophy value if you're going to hunt the area so they're and this is not a softy state i'll point out no they're guiding they're directly saying here's

who we want these are the people we're looking for if you're going to hunt moose in this area you're going to be the kind of guy that's going to bring people we're looking for. If you're going to hunt moose in this area, you're going to be the kind of guy that's going to bring the ribs out on the bone. Or you're going to be the kind of guy that's willing to cut that antler in half and then bring it out. Because it's, you know, because they want to see you pack out an extra couple hundred pounds. They're sort of playing their, I mean, I'll put it gently. I mean, they're playing favorites with certain user groups.

Yeah. Uh-huh. Can you glue those antlers back together? No, for sure you can. But like the state of, state of Montana, two years ago, they changed the regulations to where you don't have to keep your duck legs. Yep. And I'm like, I'm the type of person where I'm like, if you don't know how to cook a duck leg and eat it, you shouldn't be hunting ducks. Sure.

Pretend you're game regulation. Guys, tell us how, tell us how people can find out about how and read the, um, what you guys get involved in. Howforwildlife.org. Social media.

We basically do everything on Instagram. Um, it's just the, the path we chose. That's how underscore org. And you can sign up for free alerts. So when we do have actions, you get those emails. Those emails are very detailed. We work with a lot of state partners.

We call them conservation partners. But basically to get on the right track with everything. It's not us in-house saying we should do this. We should write it up this way. We're very, very reliant on who we consider the experts. So when you get that information, it's probably going to be the best info you find on that issue. On, you know, here it is broken down. And then here's how you get involved.

And you guys covered, you got, what is your, explain to people what your sort of jurisdiction is around the country? Like what States do you follow the issues in? Every, everything. It depends on how much time we're very small. It depends on how much time we have the, um, how much time we have to act on the issue. Sometimes it'll come up and we got to do something in five days. It's really for how— It's whether or not we can affect change on it too. Yeah.

And our system is kind of complex, so it takes some time to build that. But we meet with our group, with Everett Headley, he's a part of HAL, and Mike Costello, who's a part of HAL. And then it's John and myself, and we have a few writers besides that. That's it. So we're heavily reliant on those partners. We decide, is this a good thing for us to get involved in? Will it be effective? Does the bill have legs? There's that

too, cuz I don't wanna waste people's time. There's thousands of bills. Yeah. Um, so you mean things that are just gestures. Yeah. Yeah. There's so many of those. Yeah. We just had one the other day. You actually told me yesterday that it was, it was on my, take a look at this because we had one of our partners reached out. He's like, hey, can you look into us? A lot of people reach out like from all over the world really actually, hey, can you look into us? A lot of people reach out like from all over the world, really actually, Hey, can you help us with this? Can you help us with that? So trying to kind of boil that down and see what's really important, balance it with our

time and you know, what can be impactful. That's, that's definitely a challenge. But again, we really, we really rely on our, on our partners. And you guys will often send, you guys will often send your audience outside of Howell to where they need, where like you'll alert them and send them to other partners who are positioned to take on that. Yeah. Privy example. Probably the largest example is, is CRWM Coloradans responsible wildlife management you've had you've had dan on here you you know what's going on there um we recognize that they are spearheading that

issue in colorado they are set up to campaign against it they are set up to fight it legally everything you know they're they are a4. So in recognizing that we have made that a national issue. Dan, I talked to Dan in October or September. They didn't have Instagram. I don't think he'd ever been on a podcast before. He was going to need a lot of help where we came in was, all right, we're going to tell everybody about you and make this a national, make this a national issue. And through all the people John knows and the few people I know and whatnot, we reached out to. I think he's been on 75 podcasts now. I mean, I think it was through, through Giannis is what eventually brought him here. But yeah, we are willing to promote other

organizations to, to, we, we certainly tell people who want to donate to us because they don't know any better. They're like, oh, we should donate to you for this Colorado thing. Or I'm like, no, we can't, we can't do anything there, but who you should donate to. We should talk about that. Why? Because there's a misconception out there. And I think, I think that that number actually gets misconstrued a lot.

Like, oh, I don't want to, you know, donate to so-and-so because they can use 80% of their, of the money towards salaries and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the actual number is only 20% of your expenditure as a 501c3 could be used towards lobbying. And so everything else has to be either educational or administrative or working on projects and so on and so forth so people take that number they misconstrue it so

we recognized in that situation that charles was just giving you that okay if a hundred thousand dollars came to us then we can only spend twenty thousand dollars doing it it's money that not well spent right where we yes we could have did a lot of educational things to make it work but it's the person that's going to be the most effective we want to win yeah that's what we want we want to win yeah there are rules basically is there's there's rules to 501c3s but but overall i think you know as a organization, the 501c3s, the C4s, the national brands, the state, the national organizations, the state organizations, they tend to, it's competitive. It's a little bit competitive. And if one of those orgs kind of takes on an issue, it's hard to get the other orgs to support these guys over here who are leading that charge

when, but you know, for the results that we want, we should all jump on board. We should all jump on board. Right. Cause we want to win this thing. Right. I don't, I don't care who's, who's, who's leading the fight or, or whatever. We don't need the recognition for it. Like, okay, who cares if it's this org or that org that was leading the fight? As long as everybody aligns with the same messaging and the same purpose, let's get there. Let's make a difference. We'd like to actually, you know, people ask us what our mission is or whatnot. I actually want to go out of business, which would be, you know,

30 years from now, we have enough public support to make the anti-hunting argument irrelevant. And I, I really do think that can be done through the right, through the right channels. We touched on it earlier, but, um, that can be done, but that's our goal to actually go out of business. Yeah. So, uh, cause I, I would much rather go hunting and spend time doing the things I like to do instead of, uh, instead of this

full-time job, which has been basically the last three years since we kind of started working on it. Or when you go hunting now, what you think about are the issues, not the fun stuff. It's yeah. I was talking to him the other day. I mean, that's my, my best hunting buddy right there. We hunted all over the country together. Yeah.

Now when we get together, we talk about how stuff. We, and we hunt. Instead of talking about, oh, did you see that elk over there? Yeah. And you know, how should we approach the, you know.

And we hunt once a year now since we've started. That's about it. Oh yeah, I know. That's about it. Yeah. Yeah. So it takes a lot of time. But anyway.

Together once a year. We still hunt a lot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Together. Yeah. I gotta, I gotta give you guys a plug, right? Um, Steve, you've heard of meat eater experiences. Mm-hmm.

Oh yeah. Right. So, uh, Cypress Cove, Louisiana, we're going to be, uh, down there hosting, fishing, uh, doing a bunch of super fun stuff, a bunch of us and, uh, Howl for Wildlife is going to be, uh, donating, uh, to a spot for two people to Cypress Cove with the Meat Eater crew. Oh, sweet. All you gotta do is go over to, uh, howlforwildlife.org and, uh, get a membership. Yep.

Right. And then you'll be entered to win. Yep. The trip for two to Cypress Cove with everybody here at Meat Eater. Now, if you want to skip that line or the random draw, you can go to themeateater.com forward slash experiences. Read all about it. And use the code HOWL-500-DONATION.

And when you buy your spot to Cypress Cove, 500 bucks goes back to howlforwildlife.org. Oh, what do they put in? HOWL-500-DONATION. Got it. Thank you, Cal. And thank you guys. Oh, thank you.

Thank you. Appreciate you coming on the show. And we'll wait a couple of months and the whole landscape will change. You can come back on and talk about it again yep you'll be like we won all right guys thanks for coming on man thank you As they looked out from Pompeii's pillar Such abundance and beauty they saw But when they looked a century later That valley was empty and the animals were gone Now they looked

at one another They said What'll we do now Well our livelihood is ending But I'll be damned if that's the last one

that I saw I said our wildlife must be maintained for our lifestyle to still

remain For our lifestyle to still remain Conservation is calling me Yeah, this wildlife is worth living. No more harvest for the market. Owned by the people, all the wild things in time. Held in trust by all the agencies. To be managed but not confined by state lines and later aldo sensed the problem after the war was fought and was won folks thought food came from the grocery, no He comes from chopping and the salmon need to run I say

Our wildlife must be maintained For our lifestyle to still remain Conservation To still remain Conservation is calling me Yeah, this wildlife is worth living. Wildlife is a citizen-owned, renewable resource held in trust by an agency that assesses and allocates the resource in a democratic fashion with an eye toward people utilizing it but not damaging it in the long term. Wildlife must be maintained For our lifestyles to still remain

Conservation is calling me Yeah, this wildlife is worth living Conservation is calling me This wildlife is worth living