The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 608: A Mountain Lion Tragedy

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

Steven Rinella talks with Wyatt Brooks, Aaron Brooks, Malcolm Brooks, Ryan Callaghan, Chester Floyd, and Corinne Schneider. Topics discussed: Patience and willingness to be out the longest; oison oak monoculture; ticks in the ear and up the nose; depredation permits; the public perception of predators; management deficiencies; when you’re out shed hunting and run into a lion; how it won't back down even though you hit it in the face with your pack;  losing a brother, losing a son; Malcolm’s article in The New York Times Magazine; and more.  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.

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Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for elk, First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at firstlight.com. F-I-R-S-T-t-l-i-t-e.com joined today by members of the brooks clan wyatt aaron and the novelist malcolm brooks and we'll get to this in a bit but um what brought us here together is that aaron's son uh wyatt's brother malcolm your nephew yep talon brooks uh died in a mountain lion attack in california in march and we're going to discuss the the circumstances around that but first we're going to talk a bit about um your guys family who's a big hunting and fishing family and

after that incident um after that accident or attack uh our good friend dave smith from dave smith decoys was telling me of his great affection for your guys family and and i had i didn't initially put it together when i saw the name brooks i didn't initially put it together that you guys were related to the writer malcolm brooks who i've met and who's here today as well. Aaron, you knew Dave through competitive turkey calling? Knew Dave through videoing hunts. Oh, really? I went up and videoed for DSD. Oh, you did?

Mm-hmm. I didn't know that. You're in the wood business. Are you still in the wood business? Firewood? A little bit. I see you got a logging hat too, so I don't know. Were you running a camera, like a camera out for him?

Mm-hmm. Okay. For Dave? Yeah. Well, for Colpin, it was actually through Ron Latshaw from Final Approach. Okay, yeah. Yeah. I got you.

Yes, I've known Brad and Dave for 25 years. Mm-hmm. They come down and turkey hunt with us regularly. In California? Yeah. I got it, I got it. Dave's been there a few years. Brad's been there a bunch of years.

And you got into competitive turkey calling yeah we have any calls around we can get some lessons do you do any natural voice calling no you don't uh i did a podcast with uh dsd and i did a bunch of calling on there you could probably look that up there There you go. I'm looking at your stats. You got into competitive calling in 1992, the year I graduated from high school. The year I was born.

Is that right, Chester? Cute as a button. Good Lord, really? Yeah. I'm not that old. I'm i'm getting old now yeah now you are three-time california state calling champion two-year oregon state champion so you kind of carpet bagged it down in oregon and beat him down there and in montana then he came to Montana and carpet bagged Montana And beat everybody in Montana What was harder? Probably the Oregon one

Those were the best callers? Uh huh Then he finished third at the Keystone Open in Pennsylvania Then you're in the big leagues That was the hard one, those are all the big guys Then you got people that have been hunting turkeys Since the beginning of time All those guys in Pennsylvania Are the guys that go to and win nationals every year.

So I was called against some pretty good guys there. It was fun. Do you still do that kind of stuff? No. I just, probably like early 2000s, I just lost interest and stopped doing it. Did you lose interest in turkey hunting? No, no turkey hunt a lot.

Um, in California primarily. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But California stopped having calling contests too for like, they didn't have one outlaw. They didn't have, yeah. No kidding. That's probably next. California stopped having calling contests too for like. Did they outlaw them?

They didn't have. Yeah. No kidding. That's probably next. That is like when you bring up hunting in California, right? Like the, it's like, how could you ever be a hunter and live there? And it's like, oddly enough, every time I go to California, there's a lot of hunting and fishing to be done. That's typically pretty good.

Yeah. Did your dad get you into hunting and fishing Wyatt oh yeah how old you know 18 you know how did I get started out um just from going out with my dad since I was little what's your specialty man waterfowl probably deer hunting because i don't know i'm super patient and i'm always out there the longest you don't mind just coming right out and saying that and he kills giant bucks black tails or yeah they're mainly yeah yeah very cool so you weren't a big bow hunter aaron no how'd he get in how'd you get him into it or how'd he get into it on his own yeah mostly just from watching youtube stuff like that seeing it on tv uh-huh yeah so you decided to get yourself a bow yeah well my dad's friend gave me his kids

because his kid grew out of it. Okay. Then what happened? I just started shooting it, and then started hunting deer with it, and then I ended up getting my first one, the bow. Do you guys do a lot of tree stand stuff for the blacktails in California, or is it mainly ground blind? Ground blind. Yeah.

You do? Mm-hmm. I've never hunted out of a tree stand do you guys hunt public or private ground private yeah yeah so you had a secondhand bow learn how to shoot it yep learn how to hunt deer your brother it feels easy yeah because he wasn't very patient so he just liked going out and shooting one super fast so tell me about tell me about patience man like what is that when you say it what do you mean i mean i understand what patience means but you mean you're willing to sit all day? Oh, yeah. Yeah.

All day, every morning, every evening. Okay. Yeah. So you just put in the time. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Did you guys grow up reading your uncle's books and stuff?

You ever look at his books? Yeah, I've read part of one. My own kids haven't read my books. I'm not a very big reader. So explain all your guys' relationship. How are you guys tied in with each other? Well, Aaron's my younger brother. And we grew up in the same region where these guys still live, Colorado County.

It's Gold Rush country, Foothills country. Yep. You know, it's, you know, within an hour of Sacramento, but very rural, the southern part of the county where we grew up. So I was deer hunting and bird hunting first before Aaron was legally old enough to. God. And then he, he just, he, he had already been like kind of a maniacal bass fisherman, even as a real little shaver. So he just, you know, segued right into hunting too,

as soon as he was legally able to do it. And he and I hunted together for years down there. Then I moved to Missoula in 95 and I've been there ever since. Did you move there to be a writer? Well yeah I mean I had lived in outside of Kalispell for about a year in 92 I guess and then wound up in Wallowa County Oregon for a little while and then back home again in Cali but yeah I mean i was really just enamored by montana history montana culture you know the outdoor culture i mean it was you know really interested in fly fishing when i was in my teens and knew that the writing culture was what it was in montana um that you know it had these famous writers and i read all those books you know mc McGuane and Harrison and AB Guthrie.

And yeah, I was just kind of steeped in it in general. And that's where I wanted to go and never did leave. My buddies in Missoula used to call Missoula the Paris of West central Montana. Oh yeah. Yeah. You were a maniacal bass fisherman tell me what that means oh just when i was little like from when i was like four till probably around 15 i just didn't really do it as much but

you guys still bass fish yeah yeah hold on hum it back up when you you quit when you were 15 but you started being a maniacal bass fisherman at four yeah three or four it was a little yeah yeah we had a pond behind our house and it had large mouths in it you know that's just all we did was down there throw throw plugs so do you tend to get into stuff and get out of it? No. Like you got into turkey calling and then drifted out of it? Yeah, that was just the competitive calling. I just lost interest in it.

But turkey hunting, we still just hunt a bunch bunch and you guys got good turkey still right yeah uh malcolm tell people what you tell people what your books man well yeah i mean i guess the the thing i'm most known for as a writer at this point you know is the two novels the first one's called painted horses and they would probably both books would equally qualify probably as literary fiction and historical fiction painted horses is set in the 50s in the sort of like prior mountain bighorn river region and it just explores the archaeology that they used to do in advance of like the hydro projects in the 50s and 60s and that's a very thumbnail There's a lot in there about like, you know Ice Age cave art and you know, there's it's it ranges pretty widely

Second book cloud maker was inspired by these real-life Montana teenagers in the Great Depression who were building and flying their own airplanes powered by model a Ford engines. So yeah. And uh, now as of about two months ago, I guess I'm under contract with Simon and Schuster to do a narrative nonfiction, you know, full length book on like history of early debut, Montana.

Oh really? Yeah. Oh, that's good. Yeah. Have you read, um, I don't even want to say the name of the guy, but, yeah yeah have you read um I don't want to say the name of the guy but uh have you read pennies from hell no this is an article I don't even know if I've heard of it what it was an article in Harper's a long time ago oh was it yeah it was yeah yeah starts with it, the initials are E.D. So is the first name. Right.

Yeah. E.D. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good idea. Yeah. Well, I did, I'm a carpenter by trade and I did a restoration for a friend on a row house on Mercury Street over there, summer before all the COVID stuff started and i just like deep dove into the history there i got really super interested in it and my initial initial impulse for it was to try to make like a dramatic television show out of that like war of the copper kings sort of era

so i wrote i you know when covid hit and i had a lot of downtime i actually did write a tentative pilot episode for that but um you're probably aware of this but the publishing industry has just been so turbulent in the last say six seven years oh they're gonna say the last six seven centuries well yeah but you know worse worse for sort of cultural and political reasons in the last yeah so i i realized that my odds of selling another full-length novel in the same vein that i had written the other two were probably not great but i was like well i have done all this research for this tentative TV show on mute. And what's really, by doing the research, I realized that nothing had really recently been written on the early history of the place in like 50, 60 years.

And I was like, wow, I mean, I should just turn this into a narrative nonfiction proposal and see if I can move that. And it took 18 months to do it but it did happen finally no congratulations man thank you yeah yeah uh tell me about how old was taylor when he died 21 21 yeah he was a musician tell me about your brother man um or tell me about your son whatever makes sense oh yeah he was super into music playing guitar he was really good at it in bass fishing it's like all he did yeah let's go that's a pretty good combo really yeah so he was a bass fisherman yeah big time into it. Letting him go. Making him late for something. Yeah.

Yeah. Anytime he could, that's what he was doing. And what's up with the music? I don't know. He just always liked listening to music. Did he ever record anything? Just like on his phone. Gotcha.

And like, I don't know. Yeah, but he wasn't big into recording. What was he, what kind of music did he play? What did he listen to? Mostly metal

type of stuff. Nice. He was a headbanger. Metallica. Uh oh. Really? All kinds of strange bands that I don't even know.

But he would dip back into some Metallica? Yeah. Mm-hmm. Hmm. He he was like a one of those like intuitively just gifted guitar people where you know it's like if you take like i was you know take guitar lessons when you're a teenager and you think you're like coming along with it and all of a sudden you meet some kid who's never had a lesson in his life and you just completely blow the doors off of you know even professional musicians to a degree one of them to your right

well chest was a guitar virtuoso all right i wouldn't go that far at least that's how he introduces himself yeah that exactly yeah uh did he did he want to be a musician like what was his aspiration his long-term aspiration he's only played music by himself in his room i mean he never played with a band or played with it's just all he just loved playing guitar was he kind of a loner yeah kind of yeah i don't know you get good at bass fishing get good at guitar that makes sense too stay away from the ladies what line of work was he going toward uh he hadn't really figured it out yet yeah but well i mean he always talked about wanting to do bass tournaments and stuff like that. Did you guys have a bass boat rigged with electronics kind of stuff and bass master classic kind of fishing?

No, we just have an old John boat. Gotcha. Yeah. Cool. So he thought maybe he would get into that. Yeah. Did he go to college at all? No.

No. Are you fixing to go to college? No, I'm not going to go. Had you thought about it at a time? Yeah. Well, my plan was to go. Okay. But I just decided no.

When did you decide no? After my senior year, before the next year of school was going to start, during that summer. Yeah. What did you think about doing instead? Well, I was going to go to be a firefighter, and then I ended up going a different route that didn't require college and

so that's what i do i i did wildland firefighting last year for a private company out of georgetown and then my plan is to just get my emt so i could work full-time instead of seasonal. But you still want to be a firefighter? Yeah. Okay. For the most part, yeah. I'm going to introduce you to someone. I'm going to volunteer him as a mentor because he's a Sacramento firefighter. Okay. He'll tell you what's what. I can tell you one thing I know. It was a lot better to get in a long time ago. I'm thinking about something like playing with fire. What about being a welder?

Make a bunch of cash, create stuff, always have a job. I'm not really into it. You want to be a firefighter. If you like to hunt and fish, firefighting is the way to go. Yeah. But a lot of firefighters, because you go in and you work, you know how it goes. You go in and you just live there for days and work around the clock, and then you get a little bit of chunk of time off. Yeah. But a lot of firefighters, cause you go in and you work, you know how it goes. You go and you just live there for days and work around the clock and then you get a little bit of

chunk of time off. Yeah. And it's, it's like a predictable schedule. Yeah. So you like go through hell for four days or whatever it is and you kick it for a couple of days. Yeah.

Yeah. Or you go through hell for like eight days and then you kick it for a lot more days. And sometimes you're like, I want 12 days in a row and then I'll it for a lot more days when sometimes you're like i want 12 days in a row and then i'll see you in three months yeah yeah that's a good hunting and fishing pursuit but a lot of firefighters i know start a second business because they're too ambitious that's not how you want to do it it's not how you want to do it you want to have you want a second business of hunting and fishing did you and your bro spend a lot of time in the woods?

Yeah, a decent amount. Yeah. Like what would you guys go and do? Mostly we would just turkey hunt together. Okay. So he liked that? Yeah. That was his favorite.

Turkey hunting. Yeah. You guys did, obviously did some shed hunting together. Which he wasn't very into that because of all the walking. I was going to ask, did he have patience for turkey hunting? Turkey hunting, you got to have some patience. Yeah, but that was it. Only turkey hunting.

So he didn't like no walking? No waiting? Not really, no. Did he get some deer? Yeah, he got two. Oh, okay. Yeah. And you guys went shed hunting for deer antlers or what?

Yeah. Did you think of it like scouting or you just wanted to find the antlers? When I would shed hunt spots I was going to hunt, I'd kind of scout it out while I was looking, but mostly just to find the antlers. Yeah. Yeah. Can I ask you a question about your area there? Are you susceptible to poison oak? I don't get it very badly.

I don't know how you guys can live in that area. Do you get it bad? Dude, that's all over my hands right now. Yeah, I don't know how you guys can live in that area. Do you get it bad? Dude, that's all over my hands right now. Just because you walked in the room. He's got poison oak on his hand. You get it worse than anyone I've ever seen. Oh, yeah, man. I had to quit hunting California.

I've been in places in California where the primary vegetation is poison oak. It's like the primary people it's not like watch out for poison watch out for vegetation because the primary plant species like you look it's a poison oak monoculture yeah it's all over oh my god please i fell asleep in an orchard in california one time hunting black-tailed Yeah. And I woke up and I simultaneously had a tick going in my nostril and in my ear canal to the point of like just barely being able to grab them.

And I used to think about that and like a PTSD style nightmare for years because I, it was just on the edge of being able to claw them out of my face and it was happening in two vents at the same time. Wow. That's California. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And, boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians

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

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

Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. When you guys are knocking around in your area so so how far when you and your brother got attacked how far were you from your house it was like a 30 minute drive i would say yeah and what was the what was the kind of describe the area to me was it ranch like cattle country no it was more foresty type area but it was a is it an area you'd spend a lot of time in no that was our first time

going to that spot yeah what brought you to that spot um well my dad told me about it and then told you what that they used to find sheds up there okay like turkey hunting and stuff all right so then we just decided to go check it out is this the area you got do you guys see do you guys see a lot of lions in your area like is it common to run into lions? On trail camera, we see them a lot. We see them driving, see them cross the road. Aaron hit one in broad daylight with his pickup one time. Whoa. It was like 10 years ago.

Just jumped out right in front of the truck and just ran it over. I thought it was dead, but it managed to get up and limp off the road, and I don't know what happened to it. Never found it? Mm-mm. Oh. But, yeah, people are, everyone's seeing lions everywhere. It's.

Does that feel like it's increased a lot in your lifetime? Oh, it's increased in the last, like, four or five years. Just, like, snowball increase. Yeah. your lifetime oh it's it's increased in the last like four or five years just like snowball increase yeah like escalation to like a degree that is like pretty clearly indicates that they've just become completely habituated to the human you know population residential zones down there at this point yeah you know what's on a different subject just about wildlife biology in california um the last time they had a the last time california had a black bear management plan they did it in 1989 and they had an estimated population of 20 000 black bears

they just put a new pop they just put a new management plan out for comment the comment period is closed and like if you go down the middle of the range the middle of the estimated range is 65,000. Yep. They looked at something with, they were looking at the relationship between black bears and mountain lions and some research there of the collared mountain lion. So when a mountain lion

and this work was done in Mendocino National Forest. If a mountain lion so when a mountain lion and this this was this work was done in mendocino national forest if a mountain lion kills a deer in mendocino national forest there's a 75 chance that they will lose that deer to um there's a 75 so i'm sorry the mountain lion kills a deer in mendocino national forest there's a 75 chance um that a bear will come to that carcass site there's a 76 chance that the bear will take the deer from the lion which greatly ups right which greatly ups the amount of work the lions are doing to be on the landscape as the bear as the bear numbers come up like it's it's sort of yeah it sort of had this this cascading effect of how lions behave and how

lions utilize the landscape well i mean you're kind of pointing to like one of the bigger um contextual issues that involves this whole thing and that's that california really doesn't have good with weird regard it's like north american model-based comprehensive wildlife management it's just a it's a much less um traditional it you can hardly even call it a model at this point. Like the lions themselves were, you know, by ballot biology, essentially, 35 years ago, they were declared a specially protected species in the state of California.

Was that under Reagan? No. What Reagan did was, it was done for more traditional management reasons they were just trying to they're like a lot of hound guys back in that era in the late 60s and 70s were concerned that maybe they had taken too many lions back during the bounty era and then it was a free-for-all the bounty system ended in like 62 or 63 and it was a literal free-for-all at that point. There was no management objective or plan in place.

Nobody knew how many lions there were. Nobody had really studied them very effectively at that point. You could make cash killing them year-round. You could. Well, yeah. And you could merely pursue and kill them year round. So I think what happened was a lot of guys who liked to run them were realizing that maybe they were tipping too far in the take direction. So Reagan signed a kill moratorium into effect in 1972. But that did not prevent guys from being able to run them. They could still run them, tree them, tree them free.

And the kill moratorium was in effect until 1985 or 86. It was 14 years long. So at that point, they had collected enough data and realized that the population was definitely stable. And the howling guy... Because they hadn't killed them in 14 years. Hadn't killed them in 14 years. Hadn't killed them in 14 years. So at that point, they relisted them as a game species and they were going to manage them comprehensively with everything else.

Well, HSUS and the Mountain Lion Foundation and basically animal welfare, animal protectionist NGOs got completely up in arms about it. And they managed to, by popular ballot measure, have the species declared specially protected. Again, for zero science, there's no scientific basis to this at all. It was strictly, you know, the ability to appeal emotionally to a population. They didn't come in and argue population dynamics. It was more like, we're not here to argue population levels. We're not here to argue sustainability.

We don't want people to legally be able to kill mountain lions. It was not a conversation about how many there are. Strictly an ideological or philosophical um you know impetus for that no no no but divorced from any conversation totally totally harvestable surpluses exactly yeah and that really led to a lot of increase oh yeah and so third i mean there's i'm actually i mean this is another thing that's going on. I just signed a contract with the New York Times Magazine to write about this entire issue and really explore through the lens of what happened to the boys and to our larger family as a result of it. And then really the entire region, I mean, this really impacted that foothills region

hard because so many people had been increasingly nervous about the, you know, the behavioral changes in the lions that are just palpable to everybody. You can, I mean, you just, people see them everywhere. They're jumping into people's backyards and taking dogs. They're breaking into chicken coops. They're totally blase about, you know, just being seen in broad daylight. And it was certainly not that way when we were growing up around there. Right. It's no longer this thing that if you spend enough time outside or driving in like the twilight in certain areas, you get really lucky. You might see one. Exactly. But when we were kids, we knew they were there.

We knew guys who had hound kennels and who ran them. And we would hear lions scream from time to time down in the canyon behind our house. Everybody knew that they were around. But if somebody saw one in broad daylight, it would make the local newspaper because it was just such an anomalous event. Do you remember a few years ago? Can you find, do you mind looking up what year this was? There was one summer a few years ago when Washington had its first documented mountain lion fatality. And then Oregon had its first in 90 years. And it happened the fatality. Yeah. And then, and then Oregon had its first in 90 years and that happened the same summer.

Yeah. And I was talking to a friend of mine who does a lot of work. He, he'd done a lot of depredation work for the state of Oregon. Yep. 2018. He'd done a lot of depredation work for the state of Oregon. And I was talking to him.

I'm like, how much is that? Just freak'm like how much is that just freak like how much is that it's free coincidence and how much of that is something different mm-hmm and to paraphrase them and we had a long conversation about it his take was there's a huge freak element right there's a huge freak element you can't discount like in the same summer. Right. Sure.

But he said also like in my career, I have seen a major change in the management attitude around lions where it used to be one, a lion kind of came up against that human threshold. Yup. There was serious pushback like you know if the lion was too aggressive around livestock was too blase around people yeah we would kill the lion right yeah just too apt to be seen yep yeah and he said and since then it's been pushed and pushed and pushed to not take action, to not take action.

So he felt as much as it's crazy that in the same summer we'd see that, it aligns with what I'm seeing, which is a great reluctance on the part of the state agencies for fear of public pushback. Right. of the state agencies yeah for fear of public pushback right um often coming from people who aren't dealing with them for fear of published pushback of being too aggressive around depredation issues too aggressive around hazing lions too aggressive around taking any kind of control measure yeah so he like wasn't shocked right did it happen yeah well when you break down even like the state in california is ground zero for you know exactly what you're talking about because the the degree of like public sentiment that can be steered you know both by you know just sort of hyperbolic sensationalistic

you know media reportings i mean they'll report that there are an estimated 4 500 lions in the state of california and people hear that raw number and they automatically are like holy mackerel they must be on the verge of extinction which is not the case I mean the state of Montana has between five and seven thousand right and the state of Montana estimates that that is within 25% of the pre-european contact number so I mean you've got this apex predator, they just are not that territorial, and there are not that many of them saturating, as a rule,

a really large land space. But, I mean, in California, because you have, you know, again, animal welfare and animal protectionist NGOs who are ideologically committed to a certain outcome. And they've got very deep pockets. They're very well funded. And they're very able to manipulate the media sensationalistic dimension of things to achieve ends through non-scientific means and non-official means. I mean, you put something on a ballot, you get enough, you know, people who are on the ground situation is for, for others who

live in more rural areas and actually have to deal with the, the, the fallout of restricting traditional management policies. Mm-hmm I, I hear that, you know, like people say like uneducated or uninformed, but also just different. Yeah. Just different. Sure. A different set of like a Different, different, different values. A different worldview. Yeah, for different. Sure. A different set of like a different,

different, different values, different worldview. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Now to get, you know, come a little bit full circle here talking about, you know, what your buddy was observing, he was doing depredation work in Oregon. I'm in contact with, you know, a bunch of people, federal trappers and whatnot in California who are fighting a totally uphill battle on that front. But if you look at, in 2020, the Department of Fish and Wildlife in California decided, again, partially in reaction to public outcry over one of the celebrity lions, you know, the well-known lions around, you know, Santa Monica Mountains or whatever that was collared and, you know, wound up being taken

on a depredation basis because of the hue and cry, um, from that, the, the state department of fish and wildlife decided to implement this universal three strikes depredation policy where the actual depredation language in one ballot measure 117, which is what put this pan open this Pandora's box in the first place 35 years ago, it does have reasonable depredation provisions in it, where it basically says that if a livestock producer, pet owner, whatever, can demonstrate that there was a single instance of depredation by a lion, the state is supposed to issue a lethal, it's shell issue language depredation by a lion, the state is supposed to issue a lethal, it's shell issue language, depredation permit to be able to, you know, get a, you know, contract with a trapper or whatever

to go ahead and lethally pursue that animal. Well, they changed that again because of, I think, just cosmetic reasons, like wanting to appear to a certain set of the California voting population. They changed that in 2020 to a universal three strikes policy in which now a single landowner has to demonstrate that multiple incidents of depredation have occurred from the same lion before they will issue a lethal depredation permit so it's like the thing with the felons like three straight like three felon you know now i don't know when that was fashionable i remember that being coming a thing in michigan yeah i was growing up yeah they had okay like your third felony you're out right yeah like it's a baseball game up until then yeah yeah just try to calm down yeah

yeah so when you've committed three felonies that's enough yeah yeah let me just like close this point with this because this is really critical between 1995 and 2019 there were a dozen lion attacks on humans in the state of California with no, with no, with one fatality in 2004, I believe a mountain biker in Southern California, Orange County, right? I think so. Yeah. Um, between 2020 and now, after they changed that depredation permit policy there have been nine attacks on humans with tail and representing the the single fatality out of that group but I mean if

you think about that you have a 25 year period in which they're doing you know the the more traditional prescription for depredation permits and you get a dozen attacks literally the same year that that depredation policy changed that put into motion a four-year nine attack tally on humans yeah so i mean is it anecdotal yeah to a degree but is it like difficult to sort of argue with them you know math i mean i don't think it is especially when again i mean the just the number of daylight sightings and livestock and pet depredations has just skyrocketed during the same period yeah it's uh in california mount lions kill mount lions vehicles kill mount lions and uh secondary rodenticide poisoning kills mount lions and

that's about it except for the explain that well a lot of landscaping golf courses in California. And so they use a lot of rodenticide. And then the foxes, coyotes eat the squirrels that have died from rodenticide. And then the mountain lions knock those guys out. Is that a thing that has to happen from long-term exposure or is that a one can that be a one and done deal it can be a one and done deal but it's not going to be like the single factor from all the all the stuff i've read i'm not an expert here right but it is it's a compounding condition because a rodenticide is uh an anticoagulant yeah um and so like also

it's like how much is that cat getting from eating something that's eating something yeah right so there's another thing at play i think when it comes to california and in public perception of predators um and it's it's for for expecting the public to have the kind of mental elasticity right to understand that different places have different situations yeah and to and to back out on that and use another example to illustrate what i'm saying on a broader scale it would be that that elk okay yeah elk have only been recovered right or let's say elk only exist on 14 of their native range in the lower 48 right okay wisconsin indiana kentucky tennessee like that was elk country oh yeah everywhere was elk country it was buffalo country from the hundred yeah from the yeah there were uh western minnesota

okay yeah so you had the like you had eastern forests with elk like in dan Daniel Boone's day, they hunted elk. Yep. They're not there now. But you're able to have conversations about there being too many elk in Colorado coming from an agricultural perspective. Sure. And no one says, well, how could that be true? They haven't been recovered in Tennessee. Right. But you're able to say, well, because it's a different place and there's a different thing going on.

Right. And what's happening in one place isn't happening in another place. So I think that when they had all that excitement for years with the guy that got the picture of the lion by the Hollywood sign. Right, right, right. And it was this lion that was you know isolated and boxed in by highways and there was this big like outpouring of empathy for this cat living in this unexpected landscape by himself socially isolated socially isolated so full of

risk right you hear that and hear that and hear that and it creates in your head a image of something that is desperately imperiled right and then that's in your head and then it becomes hard to understand that you can go a few hundred miles away into a different range of hills a different mountain range and have a completely different situation on the ground. Sure. And along with that, I mean, the, you know, the more urban and suburban population down there, they're assuming that the entire state, it probably unconsciously, but there's a, there's a presumption that the entire state looks like their swimming pool and, you know, yard fence, six houses to an acre southern california track development but it doesn't i mean the the rural foothills where we're from are

still i mean there's so much of that is literally undevelopable just because of the you know geographic nature of the terrain and then the brush situation in california just like we talked about the poison oak you can hide a lot of animals in that stuff oh absolutely just are not going to get seen yeah yeah yeah i recently did the drive from uh sacramento to over by fort bragg yeah the russian river area dude unbelievable i mean just the country in there oh yeah and the shit that you would not want to i mean not not want to but it would be like hard stuff to go through oh totally i mean even if you go down you know go down like highway one by like um big sir or go i mean the whole

state is yes there are huge dense population zones but it is a massive state with a lot of very wild land in it still. Yeah, for sure. How comfortable are you talking about the day you and your brother were attacked? I think I'd be fine talking about it. Can you tell me what, kind of how the morning went, whatever, like what you guys, what your plan was, what you guys did? Yeah, so. How it came to be that you decided to go out with your brother, like? Well, we were just sitting at home bored. And so I asked him if he wanted to go.

And so we both decided just to go try a new spot. So we drove up there, and there was a gated Forest Service road, so I just pulled off the side, and we just decided to walk that road. Had you seen other folks around? There was one other car pretty close to us because there was like a walking trail that they

were stopped at. And then, but we pulled up past them. Okay. Were you doing the classic Hunter's mental gymnastics of like, is that somebody looking for sheds that's parked at the hiking trail? Or is that some old lady walking her poodle i don't know i i don't care i know what cal's saying because i have the problem i could be

out doing the most esoteric thing on the planet um like i could be let's say i wanted to find a railroad spike for some reason and i see a car parked i'm like that son of a bitch is looking for railroad spikes i made it like i like every car is doing what i'm trying to do in my head beat me to it yeah competition sorry go ahead yeah sons of bitches are looking for morels yeah oh anxiety oh no just walking their dog. Yeah. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness. Do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes and our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join our Northern brothers. You're irritated.

Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there on x is now in canada the great features that you love in on x are available for your hunts this season the hunt app is a fully functioning gps with hunting maps that include public and crown land hunting zones aerial imagery 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 hand-picked by the on x hunt team some of our favorites are first light schnee's vortex federal and more as a special offer you can get a free three months to try on x out X out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet.

onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. So you guys get parked and you start walking it up the Forest Service Road. Yeah, and we get like

150 yards away from my car and I'm looking up to the left because the right side of the road is just steep. So I wasn't looking down there. So as I'm looking to my left, I see something like out of the corner of my eye

come up from the steep side up onto the road. At first I just thought it was a dog. That was the first thing that came to mind. And then that's when I turned and looked and realized. And then so I told my brother to look. But it came up like 10 yards away from us. And you feel like you're 150 yards from the car from where you

parked further from the gate yeah we were walking for like five minutes like yeah what time of day like 1 1 30 just midday but the heat of the day i would say it like that so yeah so i look tell my brother to look he looks and then so we both just start putting our arms up and yelling at it but it doesn't care at all it just looks calm and it's just walking towards us slowly and so we're backpedaling down the road which the line was above us because it was the road was heading down and so it's just walking towards us and the only thing I could think of is to throw my backpack at it because I had a backpack on so I sling that off throw it at it and it hits the left side of its face

but it kind of like it didn't even really flinch like it just closed that left eye and then the backpack hit it in the left side of the face and then just skimmed across its body but it didn't care it just kept walking at us and then were you guys still yelling or able to stay calm or at that point it was i guess like the adrenaline was kicking in. This is so bizarre. So bizarre. Middle of the day, 150 yards from the truck. I've called in two cats in the last two turkey hunting seasons. In like places where I really had to walk in.

Yeah. And both of those cats were more than happy to get the hell out of there when i stood up and looked at them once i made look made eye contact those cats were gone yeah so hitting it in the face with anything yeah is just insane and it didn't care and then so yeah my brother's like i'm on the left side of the road he's on the right but he's a little bit behind me and it's like me and the line are just locked eyes with each other and so it's just walking towards me but I didn't want to run so we're just we start to speed up backpedaling and there's a there was a stick in the road laying sideways. And so I'm backpedaling, and I start to speed up,

and then I step on that, and my foot slips out from under me. So I fall down, but at that point, the lion's already like, I don't know, six or seven yards in front of me. So I fall, and then I just remembered the line comes around my left side and then that's when it bites me so I kind of put my arms up and then after bites I grab it and I flip it over and I get on top of it and I like have my arms on its neck pushing it down i imagine it doesn't like that no so then it starts clawing at me was it is it big the lion yeah uh it seemed big to me

but it was what like 90 pounds yeah i mean i think it was what, like 90 pounds? Yeah. I mean, I think it was, it was like a, a juvenile male basically, probably approximate little, a little over like half the size that they can actually get to. Yeah. So, yeah. So I flip it over, I get on top of it and then that's when it starts clawing me so I kind of release my grip a little bit so it manages to spin out from under me and then but it all happened so fast to where my brother couldn't really even do anything to help me so he was still standing behind me to my right so when the lion got up and spun around like my brother was right there so then the lion ran at him jumped up on his back legs took him down but it just went

straight for his neck so there wasn't much he could do and then so I get up and like as that's happening I remember like I just stand there in the road and I touch my face and look because it felt like a dream like didn't it was weird so I kind of had to I I like told myself like, this is actually happening. And so I have to like, I feel like snap back into it. And then that's when I went for my brother. So I just grabbed the lion and kind of tug a few times, but that's all I really did. But I couldn't get it to let go and at that point I was feeling kind of weak because I had been losing a lot of blood and then so after I tried tugging can't get it to get off of him trying to think of what to do.

And all I can think of is my car, because I know that they're scared of vehicles. So at that point, well, the reason I did that is because the whole time my brother had his arms, I could never see his face, because the line was in between me and my brother's face, but I could see his arms, like I could see, I could never see his face because the line was in between me and my brother's face. But I could see his arms doing something up here. But as time went on, and they ended up like almost off the side of the hill. But I could see that by that point,

his arms were just, like, limp now. Not holding it anymore. Yeah, not holding it anymore, and he wasn't moving, so I pretty much, I just knew there was, like, nothing else I could really do. So that's when I thought of the car, so... I reach for my phone to call 911, and my phone's not in my pocket, so I'm looking around for my phone to call 9-1-1 and my phone's not in my pocket so I'm

looking around for my phone and I find it in the middle of the road so I grab it and then I head back to my car I'm jogging to my car and I pulled my shirt off to hold on my face stop the blood and then as I'm trying to dial 9-1-1 like the blood kept dripping on my phone so it wasn't typing so eventually I got that off and got it to work so I as I'm running to my car I'm on the phone with 9-1-1 and then make it to my car and then I have to drive around the locked gate so I'm driving through like small trees and rocks and then I get onto the road make my way down there but by the time I drove down there they were both gone so I flip around and I'm looking out the left side out the window I'm looking down the hill but sorry so

your brother and the cat are no longer on the road yeah and but you have a good idea where it all happened your backpacks laying there or something backpack was in the middle of the road yeah and i knew right where it had happened but so yeah so I so I'm looking out the window down the hill but I still don't see anything so then I just asked what I should do to the dispatcher and so I just went I drove to the the backside of the gate and I just parked there and waited for someone to show up. Did they have any sense of what you were talking about when he called? I mean, did they have any like, did it seem like an informed, probably not like an informed opinion about this? Well, what do you mean?

I probably had never dealt like the dispatch. Oh yeah. Just no idea what yeah no idea how to deal with something like this yeah no idea so it was probably just okay stay calm somebody's gonna be there that type of stuff yeah like wasn't really helping much by telling me what to do but did you have to direct then when they came did you take someone to the area um no i didn't take them but it was like a star volunteer car was the first car that showed up and they had a dog and a pistol and so they just came up to me and i told them

right where to go i said like you'd see the backpack in the road and then so they just came up to me, and I told them right where to go. I said, like, you'd see the backpack in the road, and then, so they went down there, and then I was just waiting still. Then they shot the lion? No. No, that was later. That was later on, yeah. I don't even know if that person saw it,

because it had drag tailing quite a ways down that hill yeah the the star volunteers are like a community watch type you know volunteer outfit they're they're really not like LA oh or right yeah that's horrifying Yeah. That's horrifying, man. I know. It sucked. Yeah, I don't know how much this is within the protocol of this, but last night Wyatt talked to the first responding paramedic for the first time,

or two nights ago, I guess. But he sent Wyatt pictures from the field of what, why it's of his injuries out there. Um, and which, I mean, I looked at him last night. I mean, do you feel comfortable showing those to these guys? Just so, because I mean, it really is highly illustrative of exactly how like crazy this whole thing was of your, of your injuries. Of me. Yeah. Do you remember, cause you have some, some was of your injuries. Of me, yeah. Do you remember because you have some scars on your face

I assume that's from the cat. Was that when he first whacked you like right when you fell or was that from clawing when you got on top of the cat or do you remember at all? I remember it was just the first it only bit me once and that's

what the scars are from. Oh, so that's teeth. Yeah. Wow. That's wild. Yeah. Went like through my nose. Well, before we go on, man, it's horrifying.

It is brutal, and I am so sorry you and the family had to go through this. Thank you. Yeah, it's all I can think about. It's very, very hard. But if you guys want to see the pictures, I'll take a look. Okay. Yeah, I guess that's the other thing

that it kind of demonstrates how brilliant the plastic surgeon who worked on him was. And there's one more picture you can scroll so did you roughly how long before any sort of emergency

services show up there was some deputies who showed up within like 15 minutes I'd say and then the medic came shortly after like 20 minutes it took them to get there but but I imagine even with the deputies there it was probably just up to you to keep holding your shirt to your face yeah they didn't really help I'm sure they didn't want much to do with it

yeah yeah but as soon as the medic got there, though, then they started helping. Was your brother pronounced dead on the scene? No, we didn't find out till that night in the hospital. It was pretty late when we found out, right? But earlier, the deputies and the sheriff had figured it out right way before we knew oh but so yeah but there was nothing they could do to try to help him when he was no he was dead when they found him yeah if you had to guess from the time you saw that mountain lion till the time, you know, you had to go back to the truck, like, was that like within a few minutes? Yeah.

Like just. Like a couple minutes. Yeah. It was really fast. Gotcha. Yeah. Man, this is going to be like a dumb question because, I mean, this will, you already know this. This is good.

This will be the defining experience of your life. But you're already aware this this is good this will be the defining experience of your life but you're already aware of this right yeah it never goes away it'll impact you in all manner of ways for as long as you're on earth right yeah um so just like looking at a small detail that do you do you like do you feel this will transform your kind of like your relationship with with nature do you still feel drawn to go out to go hunting do you still feel drawn to be around animals or did it sort of kill that in you no i actually went turkey hunting like just a couple weeks after it had happened and got one so i still feel the same about hunting and all that stuff so yeah it didn't really have an effect on going out what are what are the things like from a daily perspective what are the things you kind of remember most or will miss most about your brother

just hanging out because we always shared a room together so now it's just kind of empty i guess you guys shared a room at the time yeah we yeah we've shared a room like our whole life do you feel a different when you're out turkey hunting do you feel a different fear in the woods yeah I'm definitely a lot more scared being out there. But when I'm with people, I'm fine. But, yeah. Aaron, has this changed your desire to be out, your relationship with being out? A little bit.

I didn't turkey hunt at all last spring season which is super weird yeah usually we hunt every single day of the entire season but i didn't hunt at all i went with wyatt just a handful of times just to go with him to try to get him one but just feels totally different just constantly looking over my shoulder and it's kind of scary yeah yeah do you feel that you'll find your way back into it in time yeah it's just this happened right before jerky season opened. So it's like, it was pretty raw. Yeah. I didn't have any motivation to go hunting. Of course not.

Yeah. Yeah. So man, I'm sorry to have you guys, man. Thanks. Yeah. Yeah.

I can't even picture, uh, having that happen to a brother. Do you have other siblings? I have a half-sister, but I just call her my sister. Is she cool? Yeah. Oh, that's good.

Great, you passed the test. Good job. Good job. It's one of those things that, you know, it's like, oh, that'll never, that kind of stuff would never happen to us, right? Yeah. You know, we're out in the field all the time and, you know, I've had experiences that are definitely scary. but um like for instance my buddy i'm not going to mention his name but a couple years ago had a mountain lion while he was elk hunting um called it in and it was about 10 yards from him staring at him for a few minutes he threw sticks at it um yelled at it shot an arrow over its back and it just continued to stay there.

So eventually he did have to shoot it, but you know, he, he was like lucky in that situation. You know, you, you just never know. Um, yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, he's like, he's out there with the intent to kill something much bigger than he is already. And he had a traditional bow that I built him, you know, so that cat decided he wanted to. So you knew the bow was capable is what you were saying.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's, but I mean, it's just, it's just crazy. It's unbelievable. Well, this situation, broad daylight, there's two of you, there's one cat. Like it just, it does not make any conventional sense from all my time in the woods it's just historically just kind of unprecedented

absolutely for sure hitting it with something yeah and it just didn't care yeah it's just how weird when you run it through in your head when when you like, like how much does it feel to you? Like what happened to you was just such a freak occurrence. Do you know what I mean? Like it was, it was just something that could never happen again. Should have never happened. And how much of you does it feel like it was a,

like a, like an inevitability or the result of broader things going on in your area? Yeah, I just never even thought that would ever happen really. You didn't walk around prior to this

with a sort of awareness of, fear of, worry about mountain lions in your area no i mean yeah i always had the fear of them because i knew they were there but i also always had a gun on me but in that situation i didn't. Was that road that was 150 miles or sorry 150 yards away was that a busy trafficked road? No.

No. It was just an old forest service road. It was behind a locked gate. Sorry the main stem Steve's referring to I think. How much traffic's on the road that

connected to the forest service road that you guys hiked. It's still not real. Still not very much. No, but very little. Yeah. We'll kind of, oh, sorry. I was going to say, I think where the attack

happened is within like less than a mile from some residential housing yeah yeah so it's not super like off the beaten path or in in the boondocks boondocks there's a little development yeah there's houses back there right on the edge of private where it meets forest service okay so but it's the same line that you said the lady with the girls on the bikes yeah i mean i i went down to california within four or five days after this happened just to help these guys out and while i was down there it was you know plasterville california is our hometown they used to call it hangtown it was like you know ground zero for the gold rush I'm sitting in this little cafe and talking to the waitress and it's somehow I mean it became apparent to her that you know we were the family that this

happened to and she told us you know my parents live less than a mile from where that happened to the boys. And she said, I can't even tell you the number of times I've sent my eight and ten year old girls down that road on their bicycles by themselves just to go for a bike ride. Is that right? Yeah. She said, now I can't do that anymore. Well. I mean, the county trapper, in conjunction with the county sheriff's department, wound up killing two more full-grown toms within the city limits within two to three weeks after the attack on the boys. And both of them were within 100 yards of an elementary school in broad daylight on a paved hiking trail or just off of a paved hiking trail. We're just off of a paved hiking trail.

And, you know, the level of awareness was so high in the entire area at that point. I mean, they went back and forth with the state. You know, what do we do? What do we do? And the lions had both treed and sort of different circumstances on taking each one. But ultimately, they euthanized them. You know, the county sheriff just ultimately made the call and said, I have to regard these things as a public safety issue.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking.

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

federal, and more as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try on X out. If you visit on X maps.com slash meet on X maps.com slash meet. Welcome to the, to the on Xx club y'all has there been any like was that cat territorial was it famished you know was it hungry um any sort of theories done on that yeah i mean people have kind of like thrown but again because

of the just extraordinary and anomaly of this i mean there's really no standard of comparison for this particular incident the cat was healthy it did not have rabies they established that why it initially had to go through like preliminary rabies um you know medications um but they determined ultimately that it did not have rabies um i they i believe they said its stomach was empty but other people have you know who understand lion behavior wildlife biologists and whatnot have have also said, well, it wasn't really acting predatory per se, more like territorial, you know, or maybe because it was a juvenile cat, it really didn't know what it was doing.

It was just a young, aggressive male. And he knows he's not wanted in all these other places right because of adult males yeah well they had had uh predation on sheep and goats and right in that same you know general area within the the prior couple of weeks so there's also speculation of this was the same cat doing that although they are seeing so many lions and they're seeing lions that are you know even like as many as four at one time which is also really bizarre and anomalous usually i mean you if you see two it's usually a mom and a kitten or if you see three it's a mom and twins but to see four together is also sort of unprecedented a little bit.

And a lot of this stuff is documented on like phones and ring cameras and, you know, trail cameras. And no, I couldn't remember the name of the college. So I had to look it up, but Pepperdine, um,

they're in the Santa Monica mountains. Yeah. Yeah. Was that last year or two years ago they were shutting down the campus because of mountain lion activity? Yeah. And this is a fancy pants school. Oh, big time.

Yeah, that's like West Coast Ivy League level. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess that's the other thing I should kind of note here. I mean, this happened in the foothills, and, you know, that Gold Rush foothills region is a real hot spot. But honestly, it's all over the state that this stuff is happening.

Like, just increased lion presence and drastically increased depredation problems with livestock or pets. And then, you know, since 2020, a real increase in attacks on humans almost all of them have been kids under the age of like eight and the reason none of them were fatal is because you know it was typically like on the periphery of a like a park setting or something where there were a bunch of adults around who could you know present enough of a you know enough of a... Just a presence. Yeah, just a presence. And the cats ultimately didn't kill any of these kids. So that's another reason why this one is so strange.

Most of the attacks are on juveniles, not on a pair of adult-sized males. Would it take a... It would take an act of God for California to reinstate lion hunting? So what the state can do, and whether it'll be willing to or not, is, I mean, the first thing that they could do immediately, just by internal policy, is return to the original provision for issuing lethal depredation permits. They can do that. There might also, especially after that study that Bart George did in Washington, the hound hazing study, to determine the effectiveness. I know he's publishing on that soon. I know, and I've been in communication with him. hazing study to determine the effectiveness i know he's publishing on that soon i know and

i've been in communication with him um also been in communication with the the guy who used to be the lead predator biologist for california for seven years he now works for wyoming his name is justin dellinger and he's like legit wildlife biologist phd, North America, you know, totally like very much an adherent to the North American model in terms of his own, you know, personal philosophy for how you go about doing this stuff. But he also grew up in Western North Carolina and a hound hunting family. And so he was hired by the state in 2012 or so, I believe. And for what he did for seven years was go all around the state, almost every county in California,

tree lions and collar. I'm trying to put a data set together. So he told me on the phone that he has since been sort of pressured. He was pressured to leave his position because his management philosophy was so at odds with what the present administration's, you know, department is really, you know, wanting to, the direction that they

would like to go or are going. So at any rate, I talked to Dellinger and, um, he told me that he tried to design a very similar study to what Bart George did in Washington, you know, just to mathematically, quantitatively, you know, scientifically demonstrate the effectiveness of kind of preliminary hound hazing on behavioral conditioning for lions to keep them away from, just make them more evasive, evasive as they used to be when, you know, there was consistent hound pressure put on them. So, I mean, these guys who they used to be when, you know, there was consistent hound pressure put on them. So, I mean, these guys who run hounds and understand, you know, the psychology, if you will, of, of, of that, you know, apex predator, they, they already know that like, this is what works.

It's not necessarily, you know, listing them as a game animal and killing a sustainable number every year. What really works is when we get to like pursuit train our dogs on these things and tree and free them. So at any rate, um, Justin Dellinger put together, he told me a very similar study and was about to get it green lighted and funded and the mountain lion foundation, which is, you know, primary NGO down there that's responsible for a lot of the ballot measure and whatnot in the first place. They caught wind of it and they were able to put enough pressure on the State Department of Fish and Wildlife to have them pull the plug on his study. So, well, I mean, a big roundabout way of saying there are like myriad complexities to this in terms of like, how do we get some meaningful management protocols back in place in that region i want to

explain to folks real quick when we're talking about work bark george was doing with cattle spell tribe yes north of spokane so he was working on this project where they have lions that are on this sort of uh suburban rural. And they have collars on them so they can tell where the lion is at any given time. And they'll go and play audio of human voices. Much of it was your voice, I believe. Yeah, they used it for a long time.

I don't know if he still does. They use the Meteor podcast. They play the podcast out loud. And then they run the line with dogs um and give it a bad experience getting treated right and trying to see if you to what degree what degree the being chased and i don't know if they paintballed them or something like that or whatever they would do to them if you could get if you could monitor an individual lion's behavior right and see if it getting bad experiences when exposed to human voices

would make it yeah less wanting to be around human voices and then watch how it would behave in the presence of human voices yeah once they had their public they're publishing their research about is it possible basically they're trying they were trying to set out to validate or refute the assumption that negative experiences will condition lions to stay away from yards and people. Right. And they repeated the same process multiple times with this established set of lions that they had collared. And what they basically were able to do was track at what point, at what range the lion would decide it just wanted to get out of Dodge and not encounter people. And like initially, like in the, like say the first encounter, these guys were able to get within, I mean, feet, literally.

Remember him saying get 15 feet. Totally, totally. And they're just, you know, and they're both, you can tell they're both just like, I'm not going any farther, but that thing's right in there. So then they tree that lion, they then call in the houndsman, he trees the lion. Well, they go out again, a couple of weeks later, pinpoint the same lion through the, you you know telemetry and do the exact same exercise again they approach the lion while and this time the lion is much less inclined to let it get 20 feet from it so they do this exercise a few different times and by the end of it the lions are like 100 yards away they hear a human voice and they're just like we're out the back door so yeah it, it's really, I mean, that particular episode that Giannis did is really fascinating

and I've sent it to a lot of people just to try to, you know, get people to understand what the missing link in the management chain is here. Well, what, uh, what kind of service did you have for your brother have you guys had a service for him well yeah like a celebration of a life it was big yeah a lot of people from the town a ton you know play some Metallica a lot of music that Taylor liked yeah is that right yep man I appreciate you coming out and talking to us yeah is there anything you want to add what mmm I don think so no aaron anything you want to add i can't think of anything

nothing we didn't get to that feels important malcolm what do you think well i mean i guess there there are two uh sort of two prongs to this, really. I mean, there's the personal family part of it. But then it's also because we've been involved in outdoor stuff, you know, our entire lives and have had to sort of observe the management deficiencies that have led to, you know, an array of things in California. It's not just strictly limited to lions. I mean, there's a lot of problems with bears down there. They have problems with beer, with, uh, with beavers. They, you know, they completely outlawed trapping again. You know, I don't know if that was a popular ballot measure or if that was an actual like

legislative, you know, endeavor or what, but just having observed what happens when you stray from, um, you know, these established management protocols that were invented by geniuses 125 years ago and are responsible for restoring the pronghorn antelope and, and bringing back, you know, Canada geese, maybe a little too much, you know, preserving the last of the American bison. I mean, and when you see that whole, that whole successful model just jettisoned and the immediate like after effects of it culminating in something like what happened to the boys, we all just got really committed to the idea of attempting to, you know, stop the domino effect from going, you know, further. Like now we're, you know, Colorado is now staring down, you know, a very similar ballot initiative. And this happened to happen in advance of that. And we're just hoping that, you know, like appearances like this or the writing that I'm about to do about it will,

you know, reach multiple audiences and lay out a logical case for why it simply does not make sense to seed wildlife management to public sentiment. And, you know, hope that we don't have to, that California, Oregon, public sentiment and you know hope that we don't have to that the california oregon and washington remain the only ones that we have to actually backtrack on and undo so that nobody else going forward has to get even deeper into the muck of you know worst case scenario land i find that on some of these bills and some of these ballot initiatives and other you know congressional activities there's a real lack of crystal ball oh yeah um if you go back to the wild horse and burrow protection act right yep no one at that time could have ever imagined no it's true right it was like there's sort of this

fading population of wild horses and burros right and they're not even wild they're fear sure yeah yeah either way yeah um and they're like we should do something to permanently right protect them yeah having no idea that in decades to come you'd be creating a conservation and yeah and humane animal treatment yeah disaster totally right exactly yeah it's the law of unintended consequences so doing these doing these really radical, impossible to reverse policy changes, which sort of like codifies a certain management strategy in perpetuity, strips agencies and citizens of any ability to have adaptive management. When something's in the hands of game commissions and state

agencies they're able to take this really nuanced not only year to year but oftentimes throughout the year mm-hmm constantly evolving changing needs yeah Jimmy like oh yeah lion populations get kind of alarmingly low well there's steps we can take to bring them up right we're getting a lot of conflict there's steps we can take to mitigate conflict and they're able to go in and surgically yep administer something like meaning a a lack of animals in los angeles right does not mean a lack of animals north of sacramento so let's do what's necessary there and we'll do what's necessary here and we'll be fluid.

Right. And all of a sudden you make it that it's a one size fits all sledgehammer approach to management. And me saying this isn't going to change the perspective of anyone who would like to see these, these, these, these like writ large edicts about wildlife management. Right. They know what they're playing wildlife management right they know what they're playing right they know what they're playing they they like they're not interested in management they're not interested in the concerns of rural peoples they're not interested in the concerns of

agricultural people right right like it doesn't cost them anything to have no management man god i mean in a way they're not even interested in the concerns of other animal protectionists, you know, organizations, if they're more of a conservationist bent rather than like an outright, you know, animal rights bent. And the easy way to demonstrate that in California is the Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep population is crashing down in its southern range and the the biologists who work with that population down there are like legit biologists and they're like lion depredate depredation on these wild sheep is the number one contributor to the crash that's happening and that's an endangered

species listed animal yeah so well when uh the when i was down in the santa monica mountains probably five years ago i got a run around with a state uh mountain lion biologist and and attempt to live trap mountain lions down there super fun super cool this guy's very invested in mountain lions um and in really that specific population sure some of the stuff that we mentioned but the uh statewide ban on foothold traps in california right we were packing around giant cage traps live animal cage traps for something the size of a mountain lion so this guy could do research to benefit mount lions they didn't put a research component into that band they didn't they didn't we talked a lot about

that really yeah and so there is a research component in 117 relative to hound pursuit which is one thing that i really hope and that's what this guy was like, he's never hunted Mount lions, but because he gets to work with houndsmen to trap Mount lions, um, particularly like the nuisance ones. So they'll go in, dart them, collar them, relocate them sometimes, stuff like that. He was like, yeah, I don't care if he kills Mount lions. You know, these guys seem great. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And then that is something that we should ask. Like, Wyatt, what are your thoughts on mountain lions? Do you feel like you'd add them to the hunt list if you had the chance? Do you think they should all go away? Where'd you end up? I don't think they should all go away but i think you should be able to hunt them or at least do something to bring the population down i guess but i don't think they should fully go away that's how i think about it that's a mature

that seems pretty level-headed you know for in your situation that's a mature perspective i'd say yeah but if you bring up colorado like we talked about right like guy gets uh swatted while he's sitting in his hot tub guy gets attacked on his front porch kid gets attacked in the backyard lots and lots of dogs all within the last four years right and still right now there's a citizens initiative to ban lion hunting completely yep right so it's like this type of stuff this like horrible tragedy that you and your family have had to go through like it doesn't move the needle apparently right well i think it could but it's going to do that with the sort of like middle of the road fence sitters who maybe are not um don't have particularly strong feelings about it one way or another but could be pretty easily swayed by

an emotional appeal to them um and the animal, you know, animal rights NGOs are really adept at producing what I would refer to as straight up propaganda to appeal to, you know, and otherwise generally just not particularly well-informed voting, you know, public. And that's where I think we have an opportunity here. And what I'm attempting to do by again, writing about it for something like the New York times magazine, because that's going to reach a readership that otherwise really wouldn't get a well laid out, you know, clarification on what the actual stakes are. If you go down this road may not be layered in the mailbox with bugle and DU. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, I mean, let's not kid ourselves. I mean, to, to a, to a degree, I mean, this is, you know, sort of preaching to

the converted, right. And I'm glad we have the opportunity to do that because you probably knew as many people in Missoula back in the day that I did who, you know, they go there and they, you know, enroll in the environmental studies program or whatever. And before you know it, they're interested in ungulate hunting, but they still just can't wrap their heads around, you know, predator hunting, well, you know, lion hunting, bear hunting. And I remember having this argument with people in the late nineties, you know, after having watched, um, what happened around Northern California, even in that era with the increased lion presence, once they prohibited hound pursuit from hounds, houndsmenman so this has been a long time

coming it's been a very long road it just happened to strangely land in this family you know how long is the article you're working on gonna be i pitched it as five to seven thousand words and they came back at four thousand words but i have a feeling that that might wind up being kind of elastic once i get into it because there are so many different layers of complexity to this well that's a lot of complexity yeah that's a good chunk that's a good chunk of writing and people uh people will find it the new york times magazine right yeah it in the New York Times Magazine. Right. Yeah, it's the magazine that's put it. It's somewhat independent, as I understand it, from the actual print newspaper.

But, you know, it's on a par with Harper's or the Atlantic or the New Yorker or whatever. It's kind of that type of high-toned think piece, sort of. Yeah, yeah. So, Well, the Brooks family. Thank you, man.

Appreciate you coming on to talk about this. Um, thanks for having us. A tragedy. And, and I think an important issue for people who are interested in, in wildlife and natural resources in America. Um,

and how those questions and policies we make have ways of coming around and impacting people's lives and and thinking through decisions we make in a way that gives us the ability to stay fluid and adaptive so i appreciate you coming on man yeah thanks thank you wyatt yeah thank you appreciate it buddy thank you. Appreciate it, buddy. Thank you, Steve. Yeah, I really appreciate what you're doing and appreciate the opportunity. And I knew that this would be a terrific way for Wyatt to tell a story to a community that cares about him. Oh, definitely. Thank you, man. Yep. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

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