The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 643: Should Yellowstone's Buffalo Roam Free?

Episode Date: December 30, 2024

Steven Rinella talks with Rick Wallen, Ryan Callaghan, Randall Williams, Austin Chleborad, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider.  Topics discussed: General spot burning on public land; drawing a line for Chilly; hunting density outside Yellowstone National Park; how south Australia is banning archery hunting; getting in very big trouble for passing off tilapia as grouper; Buffalo Jones restoring the buffalo population; how humans have forgotten how to live; how the brucellosis argument is bull; eating the afterbirth; how bison will figure out where the gate is; bison migrating far from their winter range in the Lamar Valley; bulls as pioneers and females as trackers; harvesting buffalo; preserving the historic skills of the cowboy by preserving wild buffalo; 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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Before I even introduce today's guest, I'm just going to get something awkward out of the way. Because people might be able to feel the awkwardness in the room between me and chili cut it with a knife. I just had I just had to do an investigation on chili. I Had to subpoena his on X record I had to subpoena. No, you didn't subpoena nothing. I just gave it to you. He could have subpoenaed you. I subpoenaed his on X track. I was talking about a spot where I took Chile and Chile's like, Oh, you know, a little over West of there. I'm wait, yeah.

And get the look and he's like, he thought that he thought that he thinks that if you take them to a spot, what becomes private is the route to get there, not the spot. That's not true at all. That is not what I said. Meaning if there's a point on a map and you're like, well, we came in from the East, Chile be like, okay, so if I come back on my buddies, I'll just make sure to go there from the West. But my investigation found that he was sort of correct. He was sort of in the okay.

And sort of not? Unless he said at this point, I need to turn my tracker off. If I ever show this to Steve, I need to stop it. He paused his tracker for a minute and then went about his day and then clicked it back on. There's... That's all? You just want people to be quiet. If they can feel at home, they might be able to feel the time but I really changed the body language look in the camera make eye contact cuz right now You're you're giving up a very guilty air about you Look the man the eyes I I gave you some intel you did I appreciate that until yeah, but you got it through crooked means That's not no It's subjective. I was in this spot. So the Intel is you were telling Steve about the deer that's in his spot?

He was telling me about some stuff from, no, he was telling me about some stuff that I'd never looked at. Oh. So that's why I'm not mad because now I'm glad that he told me that. Oh, okay. And what I might do is make you a little line. Like don't cross this line? Mm-hmm. Don't cross, don't, you're gonna make me a line on public land? Don't cross.

Which I can't cross? I'm not getting any, I'm not getting any, like, Righteousness Nation, I'm getting nothing from Cal. I'm watching Cal to see if he's got an opinion. He's got nothing. His eyebrows are about as high as they go. I haven't heard enough from Chile to understand what the whole situation is.

I mean, I'll tell you right now, I'm thinking about going into a spot for Thanksgiving that I know some people hunted in Almost a decade ago and they haven't walked in there And I was talking about that with a buddy of mine and he's like, well, let's just not bring that up I was thinking about explaining this the other day. I took my boy and um It's gonna be look I took my boy and his buddy from high school to Seth's spot and we gave my boy's buddy a real talking to about it.

Oh good. Well he respects it. Is this the first you're finding out about this? No he knows. We gave him a real talking to and I almost went into, I was almost gonna tell him like an added detail saying the situation you're in is this might prevent you from discovering something in the future that you would just know about on your own. So when you do that, you're, you're sort of saying, um, well, I would have found out about that anyway, but now I'm, I can't. Yeah. I appreciated when we hunted with Cal's buddy

a couple of weeks ago, I met him maybe five minutes prior to him just looking me in the eyes and saying, I better not catch you in any of these places ever again without you asking me first. I just get it out there anyway. I was given some very frank, I was given some very, very good Intel 11 years ago to the 10 year point, 11 years ago. And I would not dare, um, do that unless I knew that those guys were dead.

All of this on public land? Interesting. Thank you. But it's not like, it's a whole thing. Okay. It's a whole thing. I do feel, I do feel a little guilty, but one, we weren't hunting the same drainage and two, You were looking over into my zone. You get on any top, you can see for miles on any ridge. Some dude at home's like, ah! But and also it's not like I brought more people in there. It's not like I brought anyone in there. No, you brought the guy that I brought in there. Yeah. So it's like twice as bad. Because you both are morally, you both are morally bankrupt. Or it could be half as bad because they're both splitting the sin.

They're like if two of us go it's like we're each being a little bad. Yeah. Okay. So that brings into question whether Onyx should post where all of the extremely high-density hunting locations are to help people out because there are locations all around the National Park where you'd be shocked at how many people show up to the same spot every day You know and hunt sometimes 50 yards from each other. Outside the park. Outside the park. I saw some of that the other day.

And that's been going on for over a hundred years, you know, because as they expanded the park, they just move that, you know, that firing line to the new boundary of the park. So it's funny that you bring that up. Cause a friend of mine was like, Hey, I can't go in there, but he's like, I got a spot. You should go check out. And if someone talks to you, you never heard of me, man. Exactly.

And I looked at it on the map and I was like, that looks like a spot where you go in and you're going to be within a hundred yards of 10 other dudes on the same ridge. Cause I'm like, I'm looking at it on the map. The only place. One of them secret spots. Yeah. The only place to go is right here. And he's like, that's where those guys killed those bulls.

Yeah. Weird. A moment ago, you heard the voice of today's special guest, Rick Wallen, former, former? That's the kind we like. Former Yellowstone National Park Senior Bison Biologist who did the role for 17 years of monitoring. Can we say Buffalo? Yes.

You cool with that? You don't correct people in the park when they say that? Absolutely not, absolutely not. Who performed that role for 17 years. And this is where, I mean, oftentimes on this show, we like to explore where, we like to explore what I tend to call wildlife politics. Very cool.

Meaning where wildlife issues take on almost political tonality. Where wildlife issues become a partisan issue, or wildlife issues become something to fight about. Or you get billboards about wildlife issues. Yeah, wildlife politics. There's like wildlife management, and then wildlife management's very close cousin.

Not even, that's not even the right analogy. It's like... Wildlife management is really driven by politics, and it's been that way for decades. There you go. And conservation, on the other hand, is a little less partisan because you see people very supportive of conservation of wildlife. They like the idea of it. They like the idea of it. They may not like the methods to get there. Yeah. I brought up on that point, I brought up a bunch about, and observations over the years, is there's not a politician in America who would not like to be favorably compared to

Theodore Roosevelt. Absolutely. Absolutely. And they are probably not aware of how controversial the actions that he took were and that if someone took those actions today they would call them a communist and they would threaten them and they would have to have security people outside of their home. Yeah, oh yeah. If Theodore Roosevelt did what he did then today. Yep. And then you know during my time trying to stand up for wild bison and Yellowstone and allowing them to you know move across public land, we talked

about that often. Whether after particular public meetings could we be seen going to the bar for a beer? Because we were a little nervous about you know the heated discussions that go on in those those debates about what you can and can't do to preserve wild bison on public land. Speaking of heated discussions, you're going to have a real problem with chili. Cool. Not only is he in trouble for what this now, but I'm just curious.

I want to set the tone. Okay. Chili. So when you hear that chili and Seth. Thank you. that Chile and Seth, thank you, are and have current and former tag holders for the Gardner hunt. Oh. Do you look at them and think, you sons of bitches,

or do you think like, oh, that's cool? You know, hunting has been a tool for wildlife management for a hundred years. And when we debated about, you know, opening up, you know up bison hunting on the north boundary, we thought that hunting was going to be a really good thing for allowing the animals to go a little bit farther and wider than just the park boundary. And that we'd get a great deal of support by the hunters to come out and, you know, and argue with the landowners, argue with the state game agency to come up with creative ways to

manage the hunt so that they could expand the population boundaries or the distribution of the animals so that there could be hunting like what I heard you guys talk about 10 minutes ago on a larger landscape. And it seems like it's much more like competitive hunting to see who can be the first one to shoot, the first one that steps across the park boundary. And the hunting that I envisioned back in 2009 when we were very supportive of hunting wild bison

never existed, never came about came about understood so we're gonna we're gonna get into that that's the story I want to get into and I don't mean to cut you off we got hit on a couple quick bits of listener feedback but that's the story I'd like to mainly dive into with you is that that that that's a story that that grand be told. That grand bargain did not. That never had panned out as yet. It would have been a great cliffhanger. It's not Chili's fault. Right there.

It's not Chili's fault. A little heavier editing on Phil's part. Like a murder podcast. We had the kids on the, we had a bunch of kids on the show recently and we did a podcast called Our Girls Are Here to Kick Your Ass. And my daughter, Yanni's daughter's, Pottery Pat's daughter, who else we have? That was it for daughters?

Yeah, that was it. And we were laughing about my daughter one time. We were walking through the woods squirrel hunting. I hear her behind me going, t-t-t-t. Because she'd eaten a piece of deer shit thinking it was some kind of chocolate. And this guy wrote in that he had a hell of a time with his kid. He said he had a kid from 12 months to three who wouldn't stop picking up shit to eat.

Elk poop. Like they became like a specialist. I had a dog like that. But he said that nothing bad ever happened to the kid. It said he specifically selected for elk. Nothing bad ever happened. So there you have it. Oh, I keep saying he, Anna Anderson. Oh, I guess she wrote her name down.

Yep, but the kid was a- The kid was a he. The person that wrote in was his mother. And this kid liked liver, big baby, real healthy, no nutritional deficiencies, weaned on wild game, liked liver and had a taste for elk shit. We should all have that guy at job. Especially after the problems we had with Max earlier today

down here. One of them wants Max's job. Nobody can do anything right around here today. today down here. Yeah. Max's job. This is a here's a really surprised I had this is like I kind of don't understand how this maybe maybe Cal knows more about sort of like the evolution of this but um I know Cal's reported on it, that Australia is, South, okay, South Australia is just flat out banning archery hunting. Private, public, whatever, like banning archery hunting. And someone's asking, the question is, not so much like what do you do about something like this, and I have like, how the wheels of law turn in Australia,

I have zero idea. But he was saying, I had made a comment one time when we were talking about the Proposition 127 in Colorado, and we were talking to some houndsmen who would have been affected, Proposition 127 in Colorado, and we were talking to some houndsmen who would have been affected. Proposition 127, to remind folks for the 8,000th time, was a push to ban bobcat and lion hunting in Colorado. That proposition was defeated.

After it was defeated, we had interviewed a houndsman and we had asked like what would you really have done if it after your whole life spent with this discipline what would you have really done if it became illegal and he said how he commented you know half joking that the law like that is a good way to make an honest man dishonest and this person's bringing up like if something like this happens, what is your take on how, like, how would you react to it? Sort of meaning, would you just bow hunt anyway? Currently, prior to this ban, here's how fine-tuned it was.

Bow hunting was allowed on private property for non-native species, of which they have a great quantity in Australia. Non-native species, of which they have a great quantity in Australia. Non-native species, rabbits, hares, foxes, goats, deer. Red deer. However, this upcoming ban, bow hunting will be illegal." Hmm. It seems so, you know, I remember a move, remember we had that guy, who's that kind of a, he's kind of a controversial figure in the broad, if you can be controversial in the broadhead world, he is Dr. Ed. Oh yeah. Dr. Ed Ashby. Do you remember when there was a country in Africa that did not allow bow hunting? And he was doing a bunch of efficacy. The

area I think he was in was KwaZulu-Natal, if that makes sense. And they were doing these efficacy programs to bring in bow hunting. Right. Well, this is the first example I've heard of, I'm familiar with people bringing in archery seasons, this is the first example I've heard of eliminating bow hunting. Because it's especially funny because so many people would be like, well, that's ethical. Eliminating bow hunting for non-native species on private land like it was already a very narrow opportunity And that's right so like the context does matter I mean I my perspective on this is is it's just clearly another step in eliminating hunting altogether another step in eliminating hunting altogether, but you know, it's like you're like, oh really the

Animal welfare people who always advocate for the elimination of hunting are all the sudden concerned about Ethical hunting. Mm-hmm. That's right. It's like there that's not really what they're concerned about but their argument is like well Is hunting a wildlife management tool? if so let's treat it as an effective efficient wildlife management tool uh and you're in a country where you can hire um you know people who professionally eradicate game at night um using uh all sorts of manners and means but you know rifles with suppressors and taking only headshots and it's like well if you want to eliminate the game or manage the game do it in the most efficient way possible yeah and and or the most humane way possible which is you know I think we've think we've discussed that a good Jillian times, just a asinine word to use

on things like this, in my opinion. So, so that's the argument is there's a, like the argument would coming from the people that want to see it gone and be like, we agree that there's some control that needs to occur with non natives, but we'd like to eliminate any sort of like sporting flavor and do it in a more systematic procedural fashion with trained professionals. Yeah and so like in this guy's example he's like I have small acreage property that I have permission to hunt, but firing a high caliber rifle would be displeasing to the neighbors.

Right. And the, it'd be like, well, use a smaller caliber rifle with subsotic ammunition and shoot them in the, in the ear. Right. Problem solved. Why do you need bow hunting? And the argument would go on and on. Right.

So hunting is also a cultural activity that people have an opportunity to engage in in a manner that would be similar to our ancestors. And so it's kind of both a management tool for game agencies to manage abundance and distribution. But from society's perspective, it's a way to engage in a cultural activity that maybe your family were descendants of the long hunters or you know someone like that. So that you know it's a pride kind of a thing. I think that that perspective, I've never even been to Australia, but we get a lot of emails from Australia and that perspective about hunting seems to be absent from discussions in Australia. It's like you see a lot of things about in

Australia, it's like issues of, a lot of the conversations are like issues of control, controlling non-natives, controlling non-natives, and even like controversial things like if kangaroos are shot. You see, there's, I hesitate to use example because there there's examples like this in the US, but an example like if you're shooting kangaroos for depredation, you can't utilize any resource from the kangaroo. But we have versions of that, meaning if you kill a bear for getting in your garage out of season, that's not your bear, like you don't send it off to the tax dermis, it becomes the property of the state. So we have, you know, we

have versions of that, but that sentiment seems to be more widespread and more kind of leading the discussion in Australia than perhaps here. There's like doesn't seem to be a lot of the hunters we hear from express a lack of any kind of acknowledgement of the culture of hunting and with wildlife managers and feral managers in Australia. But so that we should answer the question like what, because it's kind of an advocacy question, right? It's like, how do you stick up for yourself if you want to maintain bow hunting in the state or region that they're in? One super interesting case is case is the waterfowl, like maintaining a waterfowl season was recently under attack in Australia and there weren't just on paper there were not enough waterfowl hunters to really effectively advocate for themselves right it's like

what we talk about here in America is like, well, we need to maintain healthy hunter populations if we're going to maintain hunting, because if we dip below a certain set of percentage points, like it's just not gonna be valuable enough to listen to hunters in a political sense. And in Australia, they were in a very real sense going to lose their ability to waterfowl hunt. And they were able to, and again hunters, firearm owners

were not a large enough political group on their own to effectively advocate for themselves, but they were able to get support from the the labor unions and trade unions. Because a large percentage of the labor and trade folks were younger, disposable income, liked to go out and do stuff outside. Oh, so they found representation from, from a big enough political group where people were like, oh wait, all the electricians and plumbers and those guys. Yeah. There aren't many, but a lot of them are here. There aren't many, but I'm friends with a lot of them. Yeah.

Hey guys, earlier this year, we launched Meat Eater Kids podcast and we made a deal where if you guys liked it and loved it and listened to it, we were going to make more and you did and we did and we're dropping a bunch new, five new Meat Eater Kids podcast episode starting November 25th. Again, it's a kids show. You listen to it with your kids. It occurs in three acts. There's a little history lesson or a wildlife ecology lesson.

There's a animal call game that you play by listening to animal calls and trying to guess what animals you're hearing based on some clues. And then real live kids come in the studio and play kids trivia and work together to build up a little pot of money to donate to kids focused conservation organizations. So meat eater kids podcast coming back round two. Meat Eater Kids. Find Meat Eater Kids wherever you get your podcasts. I remember that was one of the first times

I had really seen it, or not that, in the state of Washington was one of the first times I've seen the lack of participation get weaponized. And it was around some trapping bands and they were just making a lot of noise about, well look how few people do it. You know, I'd never seen someone like actually use that as the argument to not be able to do it. Meaning no one's really doing it, so why should you be allowed to do it? It feels that important, people would be doing it. And it'd be like, so you'd be more comfortable with it if there's

a lot of people doing it. Here's a story out of Mississippi. This one's interesting because you see this so many times in different ways. I remember they did, it has to do with mislabeling fish in restaurants. And I remember some years ago, quite a few years ago, this piece came out that they went and they went and sampled Red Snapper, some organization sampled Red Snapper, and it was, I'm not exaggerating, I think it was 78% of Red Snapper wasn't Red Snapper, because it's Mangrove Snapper, it's, I don't know, name a bunch of snappers. Uh, Kubera, that's a cool one. Sure. Like, a bunch of snappers uh kubara that's a cool one sure like a bunch of snappers non red snappers

you can't tell them apart i mean like like i'm saying if i made you like a fried up some snapper and i had a a blue line a mangrove a mutton right on down the line, and a red snapper, and I said like, okay, sort them all out by taste. That's a tough task to do. So I think that all these different snappers in the marketplace, at some point someone was just being like, yeah, red snapper, it's all red snapper. Here's an egregious example of mislabeling, and this ain't even close. Mary Mahoney's old French house in Biloxi, Mississippi. Been in business since 1962, and a building that dates to 1737 was passing off to Lapia as Gruber.

Oh, come on. That's like deer shit as deer meat. I've eaten a lot of tilapia. Not a lot, I've eaten enough to know it ain't grouper. Five years of probation in order to pay 11.5 million in fines. They got waft, so that's deserving. Jeez. So what they came after, okay, a criminal fine of what makes sense. So you go like, well, how do you arrive at that number?

A criminal fine of only a hundred, not only, a criminal fine of 150,000 bucks. But what they came after him about is like, I guess like a cost discrepancy thing, a forfeiture, a forfeiture, that's a hard word to say, for did I nail it? Forfeiture. Forfeiture of $1.3 million for fraudulent sales.

So not even fine, but basically saying you have been bilking people out of yeah You know buying this for like 70 cents a pound or the health lab he goes for when buying groupers probably I'm guessing Yeah, so I wonder if on the menu. You know it said like market price. You know how those restaurants do that I'm really curious how this got started if it was a disgruntled employee or a patron with a really refined palate. I don't like anybody in trouble. One time we were in a very remote Alaska town that is not on the road system and we were stuck at an airstrip and there's like a little place you could stay and eat there and like a lot of nights they don't have any customers.

And I remember he had a chicken Alfredo. He's like, I have chicken Alfredo. And we all sat down here to eat like that. Ain't chicken. Like I've eaten enough spruce grouse, spruce grouse, but I see you. But I appreciated that. But I appreciated that. How many chickens did they have in that town? We just, right before flying out of Wichita, Kansas, two days ago, Peter Kung and I were

at a Mexican restaurant and they had skirt steak on the menu. I was like, skirt steak? Awesome. And the guy's like, how do you want that cooked? And I was like, well, there's only one way to cook a diaphragm. And he's like, medium rare is how most people get it. And I was like, well, that's, I'm like, what cut is it? And he's like, well, it comes back here off the end of the, I'm like, oh, that's a flank steak. I'm like, okay, sounds good. A little more color on this. They did it for six years.

They sold 58,750 pounds of tilapia imported from Africa, India and South America at what they're calling premium, at premium prices. There's another article I was going to get into but I'm not going to get into it, but the long and short of it is it's out of India, northern India. So from far away, not Indiana for you people that just heard Indiana, India, wildlife. This is a thorny one and you can picture this pissing people off in America. Wildlife researchers in India who are looking at relations with like Asian elephants, um, Asiatic tigers.

Is there any other kind of tiger tigers, uh, have trail cams out, and part of the purpose of the trail cams is to see how there women do a lot of gathering. In this community in India, women spend a lot of time gathering natural resources in the wild. So the camera program is meant to monitor not just predator-prey relations, but to monitor how area women use resources. And the women are very intimidated and don't like it, and have changed a lot of their habits. Like, they traditionally sing while they're gathering resources, because there's a risk of predation from tigers. They traditionally sing, but women reporting that they don't feel comfortable doing that now because they have to be out doing their resource extraction on camera. And it's changed their desire.

I don't like singing on camera either. It's changed their desire to be out. It's impacted how long they like to be in the woods, what they do in the woods, and they're reporting that like the surveillance and they're like, well, it's important for us to understand how people utilize the resources. Um, picture in the U S if they said, we're going to, we want it. We're curious how hundred, what hunters are doing. So we're going to go and put out tons of trail cameras to watch how hunters are going about their business.

Well, I mean, that's already changed a lot of I'm always looking for cameras there's so many stinking cameras around these days. Yeah I sneak around I always catch them and I like go around back. I probably peed in front of trail cameras. Oh yeah I did that a couple of weeks ago. That's part of this article. Trail cameras pointed right at me. That's part of this article. Surveillance. And they put it up online. They caught a woman, they caught one of these women peeing in the woods and it wound up on whatsapp. Oh no. Yeah. And humiliated her. Yeah, we were hunting Phelps and I and Rick Smith and and Max when we were filming in Washington last year.

We all stopped and you know how one guy starts p.m. And everyone I've Time to pee too and look around and yeah trail camera right there got all of us We're on a meteor shoot one time he was Florida and I get a message on Instagram. I see you guys are hunting Because he had a cellular camera and Wreck it yeah recognizes He just said yeah, I don't think you put it online well Maybe did but if I could just add like a blanket regulation there were any sort of regulation there any sort of Remote roadless wilderness designation all of that come hunting season would just get up like a blanket dropped over the top of it with zero cell phone reception for hunting season

Yeah, I saw they're trying to take a bunch of federal money recently you'll appreciate this our guest here to increase cell phone service in national parks. Whatever. I believe on that, Rick. That means we're getting a different kind of visitor to national parks and the kind that wants to build. Exactly, the kind that doesn't really want to go there for the resources. They want to be able to take pictures and send them to someone to say, look where I'm at, I'm at this location and I found this animal things of that nature got it I mean they've been doing foolish things like that for a decade or more

trying to get as close as they could to the elk with the large antler and do the selfie and Then they get budded in the rear from the antler kind of a thing So what what drew you to working at the park? What was your professional path to land at Yellowstone National Park? Oh, you know, that's a very good question. I should have thought about that and knew you might ask that. But I think it was more just fate than anything else.

I grew up in Colorado. I moved to Jackson Hole in the early 1980s to be a trail hand on the trail crew because I moved to Jackson Hole in the early 1980s to be a trail hand on the trail crew, cause I love to be out in the wilderness. And, um, I started to see that my undergraduate degree in biology wasn't quite enough and I needed to find a way to go to graduate school. And I picked U of M and Montana state to look for graduate school projects. And I landed here at MSU studying harlequin

ducks. Oh really? I did. I did. It was a beautiful project. My professor wanted me to study rabbits at the national engineering lab in Idaho. And he said, no, I'm going to do my own project.

I'm going to make this as hard as possible. I want to do something cool in the wilderness. And he helped me raise money and I just fell in love with the National Parks by, you know, as a trail hand. And then decided that ecology was sort of my calling because I loved nature. And I went to graduate school in Fish and Wildlife Management here. My first job was back at Grand Teton as a biologist at Grand Teton. And I did a big circle around the national parks and ended up back in Yellowstone. And I think it was fate as well. I came to do a backpack trip from the south end of Yellowstone

Lake to the Buffalo Valley on Togarty Pass. Big wilderness, the most remote places in the country. And I stumbled into a friend of mine that told me, pretty soon we're going to be hiring a biologist to do bison work around here. You should apply. And so I kept in touch and applied, and by golly, I got the job. So I knew what I was getting into because bison... You knew it would be hot. I knew it would be hot because as a graduate student here in the mid 80s, there was animals starting to leave the park.

They were being harvested by Fish, Wildlife and Parks, auctioned off at the Fish, Wildlife and Parks regional office around here. It was big business, big news all over the place. And so I've been, I followed it in newspapers most of my career and I thought oh you know I want to be somewhere where biology is interesting and boy did I fall into an interesting spot at Yellowstone trying to conserve wild bison. Yeah. can you give a real high, uh, can you give a real high level, uh, snapshot, um, being as fair as possible to all interested parties of

sort of the, the landscape around the wild bison conversations that are happening in the West and how the part fits into that? conversations that are happening in the West and how the part fits into that. So I've heard stories from everybody and I think even on this podcast in the past, once upon a time there was 30 million wild bison, you know, across, you know, America. And there was a military strategy to conquer the

West and the military strategy was to eliminate bison and that would be our way to battle all of the various native cultures that lived all over the West and it was successful and the 30 million wild bison that was 300 years ago became a couple dozen animals at Yellowstone and maybe a hundred or two hundred up in the far north of Canada before someone decided to try and turn it all around. And at Yellowstone it was the army because the army ran Yellowstone at the turn of the last century. So the army hired a bison tender and he just happened to be one of the five ranchers around

the West that went out and gathered a few calves. Was that Buffalo Jones? Buffalo Jones, yep. Out of Texas. And so Buffalo Jones came to Yellowstone and started restoring the population and they got a small group of animals from Texas, I think it was three bulls from Colonel Goodnight and then he had some connections up in the Flathead Valley, got 18 females from the Flathead Valley and they're from the population that's now the National Bison Range in that area of the state. And there was 21 animals brought to Mammoth, sort of a display herd. They reproduced well. There was the couple of dozen animals in the

interior of Yellowstone. And this whole restoration project, you know, got on the board by Congress saying, you know, we got to save wild bison, we can't just let them, you know, go extinct. And conservation of bison was part of the enabling legislation of Yellowstone, conservation of most of the wildlife as well, because it was all being hunted out. And I don't think anyone ever dreamed that they would recover to the level that they have. And in the 1940s, Yellowstone had an abundance of bison. Well, at that point in time, an abundance of bison was a thousand of them. So they were seeing that in order to make this conservation of this animal on a broader scale, they started giving away bison to farmers and ranchers and preserves all over the place.

And the conservation of wild bison kind of went down a different path than elk and deer and sheep because as we took animals from Yellowstone, like we took deer and sheep and pronghorn from Yellowstone, spread them all over the country, but we didn't put them in fences. Yeah, they all got moved as wild animals. As wild animals, free roaming for as far, and let the animals make the decision on,

you know, where they want to migrate to, who lives because they make good decisions, all of that kind of stuff. But for some reason, the country decided that in order to save wild bison, they all had to be within fences. So I think the bottom line is humans forgot how to live with wild bison and forgot how to respect the nature of wild bison on the landscape and it was easy to just put them in fences. So for a hundred years now we've

been saving wild bison from the Great Plains, even as far east as the East Coast. There's preserves in Pennsylvania and Virginia and places like that. But let's narrow in on that question for a second, because this is something, I don't know the answer to this. This is something that baffles me, and it'd be, I think it'd be a great project for a really like a great project for a serious historian. Like, like, I get it in a broad sense, but I'll lay out the question. Be like, we recovered grizzly bears as a wild animal. We recovered bighorn sheep as a wild animal. We recovered elk as a wild animal.

I'll point out there were no elk in New Mexico. That's right. Right. There was a time when there was zero elk in New Mexico. Yep. Right. We recovered elk as a wild animal. Wolves get recovered as a wild animal. I would love like to really know the discussions and decisions were made. How did they arrive at like everything? This like great Noah's Ark of creatures will all be politically wild except you. I don't have an answer for that either. I mean, I think like the, I don't, I couldn't find this in a document, but I think the answer that most people would arrive at is that the ecological niche of the buffalo was filled in by cattle, right? I mean, at the same time that the plains are being emptied of buffalo, cattle are coming in.

And I can't really think, like obviously, domestic sheep and wild sheep share the same niche. I guess, I wonder if it's a question of the power of the lobby, but like that would be my guess is the ranching industry would have not is the ranching industry would have not particularly appreciated releasing giant bovine grazes. The predators. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I think it, but even, but you're, I think that's a gut. Yeah. I think that that's, that's a huge part of it. But even if you look at like isolated isolated inner mountain valleys that aren't even great cattle country, and at the time probably, my guess is there was not a big cattle presence for instance in the Upper Yellowstone Valley, I don't know maybe I'm wrong, early 1900s was there a big cattle presence in the Upper Yellowstone? I think there was. In the Paradise Valley definitely. Nelson's story brought cattle in there like in the 1870s.

Yeah, I was going to point out, and you already shot down my, you know, shot down part of it, I was going to point out that like, that even in areas where that conflict wouldn't have been, is acute, but you're right, if people were running cattle by that, by the time when we had them all bottled up. You know, I've even mentioned before that like, there was a moment when we knew where they all were, right? That's right. Somewhere between like 1882, between 1882 and 19 whatever, there was a moment when someone could say like, I know where they're all at. I know where everyone is. And in that instant, we

became really comfortable with them as something that we know where they're all at. That's exactly right. And since then, we don't have any that we don't know where they're at. And I think, I mean, I, I, well, look I Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, all of them have elk hunts, right? RMEF has put elk out there and all of those states have a geographical area where if those elk step out of that geographical area, it's an over the counter thing for landowners. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. Because there was an agreement made based on agriculture. That this where the elk are gonna be and we're all okay with that.

Is that true? Mm-hmm. Oh, I didn't know that. I mean, I do agree with you that I have not seen like a history of the debates, like the actual, like I would love to read letters and debates within agencies about how it was that bison became not wild or unwilded, recovered but not... I know there's some congressional record that would be valuable to get a hold of in the late 1800s because that was part of George Catlin's perspective, that we needed to save you know some great national park where we could save, you know, all these wildlife species that would be hunted for subsistence at that point in time. Go ahead and continue your story. I just wanted to ask a little about that because

that's the thing, like, of all the interesting parts of what you're telling us, like that decision that we as a culture, as a society made, yes, it's never been adequately explained to me. And I don't think it ever could be and I think competition for grass is probably a key component of it and that there's been a probably a unrealistic perspective that you could restore 30 million again and still have the same level of you know human Occupancy on the landscape, but there's no reason that you couldn't at least restore a couple of populations like Cal pointed out You know we've done it with elk in a few places where they disappeared many years ago

and in fact there was a hunting club in Utah and early 1940s that got a group bison from Yellowstone and took them to the Henry Mountains of Utah, turned them loose, and they wanted to have a wild population. And I'm sure they felt like, well, you know, this is a remote location. They'll probably just stay here. And I think the first thing they did is, you know, move 50 or 60 miles. Is that right? And I think the first thing they did is, you know, move 50 or 60 miles. That's all right. So they have a new location. But Utah's figured out how to do it, you know, and it's not been easy. You know, there's been a lot of conflict with the local ranchers,

but they've learned how to do it and they have a very sporting bison elk hunt for managing abundance and distribution. And bison really are sort of an indicator of where the most productive habitats are in that area that they occupy. You mean they'll find it. They'll find it. Yeah, they'll definitely find it. So, um, I think that you could do that in a few

other places, but you'll never be able to have, because of the ecology of wild bison, they do compete with habitat, with cattle, with humans, with agriculture. And in order to do our national mammal right, you know, it would be valuable to do just like what you described, designate an area that's legitimate for wild bison to distribute around the Greater Yellowstone area and allow the culture of, you know, tribal hunting and, you know, subsistence hunting by the rest of us, you know, that like to go out and do something that our ancestors did. But I really think that the states of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming felt like they had their eye

on the Yellowstone restoration of wild bison from the very beginning and have always assumed that they would just be kept within the national park, just like we've done at all other national parks where wild bison are but all those other national parks have fences so Windcave Badlands all those places have fences for keeping their buys Teddy Roosevelt has fences around it So at Yellowstone those parks have taken the responsibility of fencing those creatures in. Well, that depends on whose responsibility is.

I don't know whether those are fence out or fence in states. In Montana, it's a fence out and if you don't want the wildlife or you don't want your neighbor's cattle on your property, you're supposed to fence your own property to keep that kind of stuff off of it. So Yellowstone's one of the few national parks that's large enough in the lower 48 states that can allow ecology to play its role on the landscape. And we don't prohibit bighorn sheep from staying in the National Park and we don't prohibit elk or deer or pronghorn or any the other you know native species from leaving the National Park but

we do have laws in Montana that say as soon as they leave the National Park it's agriculture department that manages wild bison on Montana lands. So that was done primarily because of a cattle disease that was brought to the area, a bacteria that affects the reproductive tract of large mammals, brucelosis. And that's kind of been the arguing point as to why bison can't be restored as wildlife like the other animals. And I think that it was I mean, it was somewhat legitimate because

You think it was? Initially, the farmers and ranchers, you know, they want to make a profit. And so if you're in business for yourself and you want to make a profit, you don't want things to come to your ranch that would have caused mortality, you know, to your your profit-making machine. Yeah, if I'm not mistaken, it causes heifers to abort. They'll abort their first calf. Right. Yeah, by and large that's what it is. It's a little more complicated than that, but you know it's not every one of them, but then there's a few that just never recover from the disease.

I see. But by and large, animal gets infected, gets pregnant, aborts pregnancy, gets immune to the disease, any other future pregnancy, they're gonna have their calf. It's gonna be fine. But a farmer's gonna, you know, that's money in the bank for him if he loses... A couple years ago I did a ride-along with Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks and it was during the most successful bison harvest hunting season. Two years ago, yeah. I didn't mind the year before. There was nothing.

There was nothing, right? Yeah. So if you go by the numbers, it was like an unbelievable amount of bison taken out. Buffalo killed comparatively, but it was still an over you know Buffalo remained over objective for like that carrying capacity number that was agreed to yeah the social carrying capacity was a court negotiated number in a court case between 1995 and 2000 there's like a starting line and a finish line on that Gardner zone and at the finish line, so the starting line would be the park boundary. You're paying

attention, Julie? Oh yeah. And the finish line is the end of the negotiated outside of the park the end of the negotiated, um, outside of the park bison range. Right. Right. And the state calls it a tolerance zone. The tolerance zone. Most people call it a conservation area. So, and at the finish line was, and I, this is something I had never heard or seen before, but at the finish line was the state brand inspector.

What? Yeah. line was the state brand inspector. What? Yeah. And his job is to be the guy on the finish line and make sure no, no bison crossed the tolerance zone. Yeah. Which I was just like, I.

Was he having any action? Uh, I think he, he's a pretty hands-on participant down there as far as like, you know, he's, he's rounding up people and making sure that they know where the Buffalo are. But was he getting, was he getting, um, that year, was he getting stuff that was making it through the zone? You know, I didn't get to talk with him. Um, I believe a few animals went beyond that line in the sand, if you will, but

not many, there's so many hunters now. And I would say that the state offers like 44 permits or something like that. I haven't checked lately. But the- Yeah, I think they handed out 40. 40? OK.

Somewhere in that neighborhood. But the tribes- The tribal number is much, much larger. Yeah, the tribal numbers are much, much larger. There's no limit, really. Each tribe issues a tag to anyone that wants one, and some tribes issue four or five tags to various families if they want to gather multiple bison. Yeah, because they can still provide meat for everybody. Absolutely, yeah, for the

whole family. A traditional harvest type method, yeah. Let's hit on this brucilosis thing for a little bit, because there's a lot of questions about this that I have that I've heard others voice. Guys like me who are Buffalo Advocates and who would like to see a much bigger tolerance zone, okay? A bigger tolerance zone and more of them. Okay. A lot of people would like to see that. Now, I will say to people, don't give me the whole brucellosis thing because Elkev brucellosis. You nailed it. So, okay. Did I nail it? Is there something I'm not seeing? Can you speak to this for a minute? I can speak to that. It's a really good question. So, so in 1995, when the governor of Montana sued the federal agencies to not let any bison

leave the national park, because some were infected with brucellosis, the assumptions were, because we didn't have good science on it all, the assumptions were that bison were the primary vector for infecting the system and that elk were infected because buffalo were infecting the elk. And if we could eliminate brucellosis from the buffalo population that lived in Yellowstone, brucellosis would just disappear in the elk.

They were the superspreaders. Exactly. The superspreaders. Exactly, the superspreaders, exactly. That's a good term for it. They were the Gavin Newsom's. Sure, sure. Anyway, you know, that was the assumption of the time. And it was a bad assumption, you know, to begin with. And the Park Service argued with the US

Department of Agriculture about that assumption. Okay. Because in Jackson Hole... Can you give the background on that assumption? Like how was that arrived at? I don't know. I can only suspect and I suspect that it had to do with you know like a capitalistic perspective that you know Buffalo compete with our cattle and we got to get rid of buffalo so we got to find some sort of legal way to show that we have backing to get rid of it. An analogy is that the people that really argue to preserve wilderness use the Wilderness

Act and things like that they and they use the Endangered Species Act you know as a sort of a political tool sure to try and win you know in court kind of a thing and you know brucellosis came to North America when we brought cattle from Europe and Africa and places like that so it's ironic that we colonized the Great Plains with cattle and we brought this disease with many some of those cattle and that disease is something that is a problem for profits and the USDA started in the 1930s to eliminate brucellosis because back then

there are a lot of people that milk their cows and to eliminate brucellosis because back then there were a lot of people that milked their cows and they had brucellosis and they would create infection in humans. So because it was a factor to humans, undulate fever. And so it creates sort of a, you know, by late in the day you feel lethargic and you have a fever it creates I think other Infection within the lymph system of the human being okay to basically drain energy from you So you recover at nighttime you get up in the morning and feel good But by you know sometime during the day you're starting to feel tired again

sometime during the day you're starting to feel tired again. Sounds very familiar. I see Randall. I was thinking the same thing. I was like, I got that problem. There was a lot of humans across the country. I got that problem bad. And the infection actually caused problems to the military all the way back when there was Mediterranean Wars. And it was called Malta fever originally when it was first discovered because an army over in the little tiny, you know, island of Malta, you know,

all the soldiers were getting, you know, infected because they'd been drinking milk from, you know, the cows and stuff around there. Couldn't fight in the afternoons. You can't fight period if you're tired all the time. That's right. That's right. So, so brucellosis is a worldwide issue, especially in developed countries, but pasteurization made it a bit of a non-issue. And as we pasteurized milk over time, you know, we eliminated the bacteria from milk products.

And, um, the USDA was very strategic and going around the country from 1930 to they started getting states bruce-loses free in the 1960s and 70s. But what they would do is go to the farm, test the farm animals. If an animal had bruce-loses, they'd make the farmer get rid of all their cows and they'd pay them, you know, some price. That's how they tackled it. That's how they tackled it, yeah. And so... You talk about transmission from one animal to the next. Yeah, the bacteria manifests itself in pretty concentrated forms in the amniotic fluid of the reproductive tract. So whenever there's a still birth or

even a natural birth, you know, an animal infected has a full term calf, the calf is born, the amniotic sack is spilled out, all that fluid becomes a transmission vector. And they got a desire to lick it for some reason. Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. Almost all of the, you know, the mammals of that nature that are herding, you know, grouping type animals, you know, they're in groups.

So when they see that first calf born, they all want to go see it and, you know, see what's going on. And as the first 10 or 15 percent of them are born, they're super curious. And then, you know, the fascination wanes and by your time you're halfway through the breeding or calving season, they're not as interested in that because it's not new anymore. But they do, they eat that after birth. Yep. And that's a- A B we like to call it.

Absolutely. That's a survival mechanism for deer and elk and pronghorn because it cleans up the site and predators don't smell the offspring, the newborn fawns and calves. They don't have any odor for a short while, so, you know, mom cleans up the birth site, stashes the calf, there's no smell in the predators. You know, have to more visually identify their prey than to do it through smell. So, so... And there's no reason, just to, like, you know, go back into this point again, there's no reason that, there's no thing about transmission to a cow, like cattle cow,

there's no reason that it getting the amniotic fluid or getting the bacteria from that it getting the amniotic fluid or getting the bacteria from a bison's afterbirth is sort of like more concentrated or more likely to transmit to a cow than if a cow were to interact with the elk's afterbirth. The biology is all the same. Okay. All the same. And so... So if an elk was infected in a cow, lick that after birth, it's just as likely to transmit, it's just as likely to pick up that bacteria as if it came off a bison. Oh yeah, absolutely. It's like a super bacteria in a bison. And there's some small concentrated areas of the Paradise Valley where the elk down there test positive at like almost 50 percent. And then other places in the system, it's lower than that. And then the argument in the 1990s after, you know, the state of Montana became brucellosis free was that

we can't afford to let our cattle ranchers have, you know, any new brucellosis infection because of that, you know, that policy I told you about, if they get caught and one of their cows has brucellosis, the policy was, well, the USDA comes in and makes you get rid of all your cows. And I don't think they give them the fair market value, at least not considering what the future value would have been in those animals as well. Yeah. what the future value would have been in those animals as well. So it's not as profitable for ranchers to just, you know, live on the landscape and learn how to live with with brucellosis in the system. My understanding too on the brucellosis

issue from a rancher's perspective is that when you have free status, there's some testing alleviation. Um, but when you're in a, when you, when you're not operating a Bruce losses free status, you're there's, there's a testing requirement. Yeah. Like your region is designated as a Bruce losses zone or a Bruce losses free zone, depending on where you are. That's, that's what you're saying. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. So the, the debate in Montana was that, you know, a rancher in Galaton County and Park County, you know, probably had a much higher prob, definitely has a much higher probability of that as a threat to his livestock than a rancher from Kalispell. Because there isn't any brucellosis affected herds anywhere near Kalispell. Got it. So when USDA would come in and, you know, find brucellosis in herds anywhere near Kalispell. Got it. So when USDA would come in and, you know,

find brucellosis in the cattle herd, they would shut down sales by the state, you know, statewide. And so that's, that's why it was a problem, you know, um, economically for the state of Montana. Yeah. Some guy out in Weeville, Montana, what? Yeah, exactly. And so he would not be an Alker Buffalo in years.

Exactly. Century maybe. Right. So, um, the, the USDA realized that that was an undue burden on the livestock industry. And in 2010, they kind of changed all of the rules. Most of the rest of the country had become brucellosis free, industry was humming along

brilliantly, and in 2010 USDA drew a line around basically the greater Yellowstone system. In fact, the line coincided exactly with where they thought brucellosis-infected elk occurred throughout the Yellowstone system and said, all right, here's where the threat is. Let's just apply this policy only in this area where ranchers are likely to encounter that issue. And so it greatly relieved ranchers from away from Yellowstone in the three states surrounding this region so it changed

the game completely in 2010 and so the court case between the governor of Montana and the federal agencies in 1995 was that was that governor Roscoe it was governor Roscoe yes and so the the complaint against the feds was that was that governor Roscoe it was governor Roscoe. Yes, and so the the Complaint against the feds was that you know if the state were to lose their brucelosis free status It's going to affect a huge number of businessmen throughout the whole state And so we can't let any bison leave the National Park. Well now that zone You know of acceptance anyway for brucelosis and then new conservation measures put in place, you know, to protect the industry of farmers and ranchers within that zone, you know, changed the name or changed that game to the point where, you know, where elk are still a threat to them, and they won't lose their brucellosis status, but that farmer and rancher has to do

that more intensive testing like you were talking about. And so they have to go in and test about every five or six months, and they have to have three tests in a row where none of the animals in their herd test positive. And then they clear that brucellosis affected herd. So it's a very burdensome. It's very burdensome for rancher to have to go do that.

I believe at least at one point, and I think it's still the case that USDA covers the cost of all that testing. Um, and I'm pretty sure that ranchers round their cows up at least once a year to go through vaccinations and you know, weaning and branding, all kinds of things. So at least one of those three roundups could be done at sort of the routine time of year, when they do that kind of stuff.

But having to do it three times in a row, and if they miss a time, then it becomes four, five, or six until they get to it three times in a row, and if they miss a time, you know, then it becomes four, five, or six until they get to that three times in a row. So you can see that there is some economic impact to the cattle industry within this zone. So in 2017, the National Academy of Sciences came to the region and brought scientists that have been studying brucellosis all around the you know the area and in their careers and they looked at the issue and

the The questions that they were facing was you know is elk really a significant impact? You know and that assumption that I talked about earlier that it would just go away if we got rid of brucelosis and bison, they disproved that. And the way they disproved that was to show that, you know, the elk in areas like Idaho, where there's no bison interaction, and the Green River Valley of Wyoming, there's no buffalo interaction. There's a few places around where elk are infected with brucellosis and they were infecting cattle of the area. And there was enough information on how elk move about the system. I heard you guys talking to Matt

Kaufman not long ago. And Matt did a lot of studies with his students at the University of Wyoming, you know, with putting radio collars on and showing animal movements. And there are radio collars studies that show elk moving out of places like Jackson Hole into Idaho, into Montana, never even migrating through Yellowstone National Park or anywhere where there's buffalo involved, and cattle are getting infected with brucellosis. So it pretty much resolved the debate that elk are a maintenance reservoir of the

disease. And you can't just assume that solving the problem with buffalo will solve it with elk. And's no way we're gonna go around and round up every elk in the greater Yellowstone system. That would be political suicide. That would be absolutely, that is absolutely correct. We just came through an election and no one involved in that election would have proposed that all the elk need to go away. And that's the only way that you could do that like they did it in the livestock industry and they wouldn't have to do it once, they'd have to do it multiple times. I think that the industry is starting to realize that well until there's some sort of technology

for learning how to you know inoculate livestock that is 100% foolproof that their animals won't become infected if they encounter a brucellosis-affected birth site, then we're going to be living with brucellosis in the Greater Yellowstone area. So there's a great deal of debate among the staunch conservationists that, well, now, if elk are allowed to move along around the system like that, why can't bison? Why do we have to have the conservation zone, the Gardner Basin and the West Yellowstone Valley? And why can't it be that same zone that brucellosis infected elk have opportunity to roam around and it'll

take citizen debate you know to try and change the state of Montana's perspective to do something like that because it won't just happen because Montana thinks that that that's the right thing to do. Even though elk destroy a lot of fences they do they can still go over them. Absolutely. Whereas the basin Well, you know, I'll argue with you on that one Cal Because I lived in the Gardiner Basin for a long time and I lived, you know 13 miles from the park boundary and we periodically had 25 30 animals roll through our property of you know, four miles from the park boundary and we periodically had 25, 30 animals

roll through our property of, you know, four or five acres. And if you don't chase them, they'll figure out where the gate is and they'll walk to the gate and if you go out and tell them you don't want them tearing up your new landscaping, they'll walk back over to the gate and leave. And so I think it's a matter of humans learning how to live with wild bison. And it's inconvenient. It's more inconvenient to live with wild bison than it is to live with wild pronghorn, wild deer, and things of that nature. And I think that bison as fence destroyers gets a bad name You're right. You get to run in them and all they see the fence there. They don't even bother they just blow right through it

I was I was like very Shocked that day that I want to you know admittedly one day But there's this line of cows walking back towards the park. Oh, uh-huh. And you know, they'd lost a few members along the way. Yeah. But they were still just just walking. Yep. And eventually the the people who must have harassed them closer to the finish line than the start line came back alongside them and that lead cow started trotting and just picked up steam and, and, uh, she crossed the road, blew through a fence, went right through the ranch yard there,

blew through the next fence. And I mean, and did so in a way that you're like, nothing would have diverted those. Change your mind. That's right. Nothing. That's exactly right. I was amazed. That was due to them learning the landscape and they recognized the

hunters, you know, their level of stress goes up because they lost 25% of their group, you know, 10 miles behind them and they knew where they were going and if the hunters hadn't caught up with them and created that vision that they had just faced two hours ago, you know, they'd have probably just kept walking and just walked and they'd have, they'd have gone to the gate. I'm positive they would have gone to the gate. I was pretty blown away though, cause I was like, Oh, that's a different way for, for animals to act different ways for bicycles.

So, I mean, that brings up a good question that you guys discussed earlier about sort of the ethics of hunting. I want to ask a different question. Okay go. Can you walk me through that time period, I think of the mid-90s but maybe it was earlier, that time period when the park hit a certain population of the animals where they needed to expand range. Do I understand this one? No, you got that right. If you look back over time, we brought all those animals I talked about. In 1902 was the first year they came to Mammoth. 1907 they filled up their capacity of the pen around Mammoth and they moved them out to the Lamar Valley

and they didn't put any fences up. They just let them roam. Well, they kind of stayed around there for a while and the early park rangers and the old buffalo tenders used to get out on horseback and they'd chase them up into the hills, hoping that they could introduce the introduced herd to the native herd because the native herd summered on the high plateau south of Lamar Valley up along the east boundary and the native herd would migrate to Pelican Valley down by Yellowstone Lake in the winter. And so at the early teens into maybe 1920 was sort of this, you know,

meeting of the two herds and from there, the park service thought that they really needed to, you know, ranch bison. It was the prevailing thought of how you restore wildlife populations. So they took plows to the Lamar Valley. If you go out, you can find old irrigation ditch lines. The Lamar Valley truly was a big ranch back in the 1920s. But they were raising grass.

They were raising grass. They were pushing it up with the beaver slides and stacking it all up. And then they would bring it into, you know, the area that the bison could get to it, and they were helping the bison. You know, they might have even still been killing wolves and stuff, you know, in the early part of that century. Well, that was great for long-term survival. And then the brucellosis issue came along. There was a bunch of up and down of population abundance because we tried to eliminate brucellosis.

But in 1960s, 1966, the park said, we're not going to do any of this ranching business anymore. We're going to follow this sort of, let ecological processes play out. You know, people call it natural regulation. People call it all kinds of things, but, um, ecology became sort of the, the leading edge of policy for the national park service. And the bison knew what to do.

You know, it was all about survival of the fittest. They knew where to go to find those old hay fields. And there are records that in the 1940s, there were some big winters, like maybe a couple years ago. And some pretty good-sized groups went to Gardner Basin. A group of 40-some animals in 1943 migrated almost to immigrant. No kidding.

No kidding. And they let them. Well, I think there was some sympathy because of how difficult the winter was. Got it. I had no idea they were leaving the park at that, back that long ago. Yep. And so about that time is when you started seeing in the historic record observations of at least the sort of older males, leaving the winter range up in the Lamar Valley. And around Gardiner, you could find a few nearly every year at that point. What's the farthest you know of a park? Buffalo ever making it out of the park. Let's see I'm guessing that's about it. The winter of 96 97 was another really big winter if anyone was around here

Oh, that was that's when this killer. That's when the issue just blew up Totally blew because it was Department of Livestock guys on snow machines just dumping hundreds of them. Yep, that's when the Buffalo Field Campaign... That's right, they started up without that time. And animals were on, in little nooks and crannies, again, as far south or east, no, north, no, it's north, isn't it, as an immigrant. Just for people to know how far, how many miles north I used to live in, so I should know this. So immigrants to the Lamar Valley is 80 miles probably. So, and bison migrate differently. It's sort of a combination of nomadism and migration because

when you see them in the fall, they're a little bit more nomadic early in the fall because they kind of, they reach out and walk to where they think they might go three or four months from now and then they walk back. Like a scout mission. Exactly. So, Bison will leave like the Hayden Valley and they'll go over the top of the Mary Mountain and down into the Old Faithful area and they might mill around Old Faithful for three or four months and then the next time they want to move they'll move down to Madison Junction and there they have two avenues, they either go west or go north, you know, from that and some of those migrations are a little over a hundred miles. So animals that you could find near the mud pots of Hayden Valley

could end up in the Gardner Hunt just outside the park. And that's a little over a hundred miles if you follow the route that they take. And we've seen animals move from the Hayden Valley out west, they end up out at west Yellowstone, they would get harassed, you know, and pushed back to the park. And they knew they needed to go somewhere because they're looking for that green up. And the low elevat- Matt talked about, you know, several podcasts. What's his term? The green wave. The green wave, yeah. They're going down to surf. And when they can't get to it going west at West Yellowstone, all of that pressure to

push them back into the park, I think, generated more exploratory behavior and they pushed north and Gardiner Basin is like the first place to green up, unless you're at one of the hot springs all around. But it's that low elevation area, you know, it has the least amount of snowpack. It's got the earliest amount of, or earliest temperature of 32 degrees and warmer. You know, you get the green up and once they find the green up, They'll just camp on it and follow the green up back through the elevational gradient until they get to some of the bigger grasslands in the park and Then they'll kind of let the green up go on higher and they'll camp and make lawns Is it snowpack that pushes those bison? Yes

it's a combination of abundance and snowpack. And in the, um, in the 1990s and the early 2000s, there was a thought that it was, um, abundance of about 2000 animals that would really, you know, create that social, um, that social competition for bites of grass underneath the snow and that some would leave and some would keep working the snowpack. And I think because of all of the pressure in the last 20 or 30 years of pushing it back into the park, what we've really done is we've made them search farther and wider, and now there's more that are the, you know, diggers that dig the pits to find the grass under the snow.

And there's an ecology behind that in that the larger animals move those big heads and make little craters for feeding in, and the younger animals with the smaller heads wait till they abandon the craters and they go over and they eat the residual. And so groups of animals have learned how to carry young animals through the winter

by digging all those feeding craters and tromping down all those ski trails, or trails for walking around like we make ski trails they make Buffalo trails they'll pack it down and you can take your skis off and jump in those trails and walk just like they do and them so so there's two or three different strategies now for wild bison to survive you know there's the stay in the park and avoid the hunt and there's the migrate to lower

elevation hunt looking for the early spring green up and you know not wanting to plow through the snow but then you run the risk of the harvest you know once you leave the National Park. If you had to take a wild-ass guess on a bad winter if no one messed with them, do you think animals would leave the park and then not even come back? No. You think they'd go back? I think they'd go back.

I think you'd see, I mean, there's always the exception, right? Sure. So you might see a few. But the way animals expand their range, and I didn't finish that story earlier is that The the bulls are the pioneers and the bulls wander farther Because you know, they're bigger animals, you know They can't compete with the big crowds of bison that hang out in the big groups So bulls are going to go out and look for small

little pockets of high productivity and just camp on that pocket. You know, they might live in a one acre patch in the forest of trees, but if it's a, you know, a marsh, you know, and super productive, you know, they'll do fine feeding themselves for a long period of time if they don't have to compete with anybody else. Got it. And so bulls are the much more expected pioneers on how bison would expand their range. And the females are the trackers, you know, they follow footprints, they follow, you know, buffalo patties, the whole works, follow the trails that are left behind. And in the 1980s, when the population in the

Hayden Valley area grew to, I think it was a little over 2000 at that point, just in that part of the park, you know, the Firehole Geyser Basin wasn't big enough for them in the winter time. And so they started pioneering down to the West boundary and we started seeing these rare bull occurrences in West Yellowstone and horse butte and places like that.

And then there was some, there was a couple of big snow years in that decade too. And so it was those big snow years that create deeper snowpack. And in later years, during those years of deep snowpack, as you start to get longer days, a little bit more warmth, you get a little melting of that snow, nighttime it gets cold, bison can't do their thing. Their heads don't dig ice. They only move like fluffy snow out of the way. In fact, you can see herds of buffalo

walking on top of the snow in February and March sometimes with significant melt and refreezing. And that's when they simply bail and they walk long distances and they follow those trails that the bulls laid down and they go, okay, the bulls know where they're going. Let's go find those guys. And maybe there's something better at lower elevations.

So in the mid 1980s, Montana instituted Buffalo hunts, you know, and a few animals were harvested by hunters. And it was, you know, it was a good thing for hunters. There was something new to go out and try and harvest. But in the winter following the big fires of 1988, two things happened. The fires burned up a lot of that summer forage production. So the animals would dig down through the snow and find black. And it wasn't what they expected.

And so there was pretty good size migrations, both to West Yellowstone and to Gardner. And the hunters couldn't keep up with the harvest. the game wardens were down there the Department of Livestock guys were down there Enforcing, you know, we don't want any bison out of the park. Yeah, and I think that I think that year It was like eight hundred animals were killed by hunters Game wardens DOL agents and and the park service rangers even pitched in and helped out. How many, what was the total population? If they killed 800, how many were there?

That's a good question. I have to think in 1988, I think it was 2500 or something like that. Oh, so not a huge number. It wasn't huge. Because now it'll get to three or four, right? Right. or something like that. Oh, so not a huge number. It wasn't huge. Because now it'll get to three or four, right? Right, and that's where I was telling you that we thought that 2000 was the sort of number that they'd get to that would sort of drive social capacity of the system to dig the feeding craters and migrate to the boundary.

Well now, because of 40 years of this aggressive management on the boundary, I think that number is now more like you know 3,000 or so on sort of average to slightly above average years. Two years ago was not even close to that. It was like the the storm of the last three or four decades, I think. And so I would bet that 80% of the population leaves when you have one of those storms of, you know, of the half century or greater. So that's where society has to decide, well, what is the right number to try and manage for?

Because, you know, it's easy to think that you could do it when you have below average, average, maybe even slightly above average years where a bunch of animals are leaving, you use hunters to manage distribution. If things got really bad, you'd put some traps in place and catch some animals, much like the park does at Stevens Creek there in the Gardner Basin. The state has a trap they can set up over by West Yellowstone, and they used to use it a lot when there was more migration that way. So for the last 20 years or 30 years, I think we've tried so many different things

that I think we've learned to live with wild bison. And I think that we have the technology, we have the communication skills to get hunters in the right places to harvest animals, and it seems like there's interest by more and more tribes to want to go and harvest bison from the Yellowstone population because they're the remnants of the last wild herds that never were gone from this particular lattice gate. And so their cultural significance is way above the cultural significance of other herds of bison all across the country. So if a tribal member of the, you know, you name it, different tribe that Buffalo are a part of their culture, you know, were to go harvest an animal, going to Yellowstone and doing it is at the top of their list. Going to Fort Peck to do it like you did

once upon a time isn't as high on their list as going to Yellowstone to harvest an animal. So there's a great deal of national significance to preserve this population because of its sole remaining wild herd that never evaporated from the system in the history, the history of life. Is it plausible that there's like a, does the tolerance zone have to include major valleys? You know, you're asking me. I think the tolerance zone. No, I'm saying from the animals perspective, is it all pointless if it doesn't include the upper Madison, if it doesn't include the upper Yellowstone, it doesn't include the upper Yellowstone?

Is it pointless? I think you're right. You know, so to say like, okay, anything that's designated a wilderness area is now a tolerant zone. They're not going to go there anyway. In the summer they might. But they won't stay there. They can survive. They'll need to go somewhere else.

And I mean, yeah, a few of them, the hardy bulls, the tough guys of the population, they'll figure out how to find a windblown ridge and make it through the winter. But to open up more of the, to open up more of the landscape, you have to open up the big valleys. You're going to have to open up like Tom Miner Basin, you know, in the upper part of Paradise Valley, or even, you know, even down to immigrant or something like that. You need some grassland kind of areas that have lower elevation, have something. You're also just whistling Dixie because you're giving them ground.

That doesn't matter to them. Yeah. They're going to go somewhere where there's six inches of snow. They're not going to migrate to somewhere where there's three feet of snow. I'm kind of like, let's go to the high country. Yeah. Unless you got hot springs. And that's why the central interior part of

Yellowstone saved so many animals is the Firehole Geyser Basin has a bunch of hot springs. Even Hayden Valley has a couple of really cool geyser basins that create a melting phenomena that can, they can find sedges that are green, they're green year-round and that's good stuff for them. And so you'd need places like in Wyoming you'd want to preserve or identify, I'm trying to think of the name of it, it's called Sun

Sun something just outside the northeast corner of the of the park there's a couple high elevation grasslands that might work you know and I'll bet historically pre-historically bison out of Wyoming would venture all the way up to the high country from that east side and would utilize some of that area as well. You know about the skull I found? No. I found a skull over 9,000 feet in the Madison's. See that bet that's a my brother's a bull huh? Yeah it was a bull. I had a radiocarbon dated. Oh cool and it probably was going up there in the summertime because it followed the green wave the whole way to where the Green Wave went way up there.

And there's some lush, productive, you know, places to graze in that high country area. And there's some places like that in the park where there's some archaeological sites of single animal kills, you know, up around Yellowstone Lake. And I think there's one on the Buffalo Plateau, too. I don't remember the archaeological record very well. I used to rely on my colleagues at the park to tell me all those stories of all those cool places that yeah there's evidence that bison have been in the system for basically the time they migrated to around here from the Siberia. So I think there's room for wild bison on public

lands outside the National Park. I think society's going to have to make a few concessions, learn how to live with wild bison. I think that it's going to be harder for fish while even parks to manage to be harder for fish while even parks to manage wild bison than it is for them to manage pronghorn and deer. So they're going to have to have a source of funding to maybe hire a couple problem solver types. Fence crews. The fence crews. Or, you know, my thought is you made a great point earlier when you said, we restored grizzly bears and we've restored wolves on the landscape, but we haven't restored wild bison. And the way Fish, Wildlife and Parks manages grizzly bears and wolves is they have conflict resolution teams.

And there's folks out of Livingston and Bozeman that work in this area, all in Region 1 and 2. They have a couple different teams over there. A model like that for bison could help fish, wildlife, and parks deal with conflict resolutions where conflicts occur, and not just trying to draw what they call a tolerance zone, develop like a true conservation area that they manage bison within. And the staunch conservationists that want 30 million are going to have to recognize that that's an impossible dream. That is impossible. That's a waste of time talking about that. A few hundred would be something that the state of Montana could pride themselves in

and say, yeah, there's not very many places in the world where wild bison can roam on public lands and be managed by a state game agency where hunters could experience the same experience that their forefathers four or five generations ago got to experience by going out and harvesting wild bison. And I think that, if you've driven around Montana very much, you'll see these signs that say, save the cowboy, eliminate the American prairie or something like that. Stop, no, save the cowboy, stop American Prairie Reserve. That's it, that's it. Which even the guy that runs the American Prairie Reserve has acknowledged that it's

just a genius campaign. It's, well, it's actually... He's like, ah, that's good. It's somewhat foolish by my perspective because the skills that define the cowboy, that the romantic cowboy of the historic past is being able to ride and herd and rope and you know deal with wild cattle, you know they could preserve those skills by preserving wild bison. So that in reality there should be sort of a counter campaign to say, well you can preserve the cowboy by preserving wild bison and then you have preserved the

skills that you know are the more high-end cowboys than the cowboys that ride four-wheelers to manage their cattle herds. Corinne, can you find what episode number? We had a guest, Sean Garrity, who runs American Prairie Reserve. Oh yes, he's the CEO. He was on the podcast. Also, if you can find the Matt Kaufman stuff about migrations. I was on a flight yesterday coming in. Episode 148 titled The American Prairie Reserve. That's one with Sean Garrity. Number 148, what was the other one? Matt Kaufman.

We had Kaufman and Kevin Monteith. We recorded it down in Lander. Landscape of Fear. Yeah, Landscape of Fear. So American Prairie Reserve, Landscape of Fear gets into a lot of these same issues, but Cal, I'm sorry. Oh, it was just, my flight yesterday was full of cowboys.

Full of cowboys. You're talking about hats. Oh man. Little kids with hats, people in track suits with hats. All converging on the cowboy capital of the world, Big Sky, Montana. We're not running out of cowboys and boas. My goodness.

Stolen Ballard. Stolen Ballard. That's right. That's right. I had some thought about the, oh, what I was gonna say about the, and the America Prairie Reserve is not without its own controversies. And as I recommend that people listen to the episode, there's so much going on there, it's a whole other conversation, but at one hand it's, you know, it's an organization that buys land on the open market. Yep. And what they choose to do with land

they buy on the open market is try to restore the Great Plains, try to restore bison. Okay. So there's like, there's that end of it. There's another end of it, um, of people looking at a real threat of reduced area to hunt on because a fear that the APR's ultimate objective is to create a national park which would you know eliminate a lot of hunting opportunities it's a really rich subject but Gerrity had an interesting point is um you know they're talking about having like three or four thousand buffalo and and he was talking about the friction between the APR and the cattle industry in

Montana. And he was putting it in numbers. He said, there are 2 million cows in Montana. Wow. I'm talking about 3,000 buffalo. Yeah. You know, there's a couple of... It's like it's just, this has gotten really lopsided. Absolutely, absolutely. There's a couple of things that I really like about APR that have some applicability to the greater Yellowstone area. And one of them is that they've, they've developed a sort of a subsidiary connection

to a cattle raising paradigm where they're they're generating money to pay ranchers to be more tolerant of wildlife on their lands and potentially pay them more for the cost of each pound of beef that they raise so that you know the conscious American citizen that really wants to preserve wildlife and doesn't buy guns and doesn't buy ammunition and doesn't contribute to conservation dollars anywhere else could contribute to conservation dollars by buying beef from those farmers and ranchers that are wildlife friendly. And if there was someone willing to develop a franchise around here, I bet there's enough committed conservationists that

would do the same thing and buy products from a company that's paying farmers and ranchers to live in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem and learn to build bigger fences, you know, build a way that during the infection period of brucellosis they move all their cattle to the high fence area and then preserve, you know, a place for wild animals to move across, you know, 25 or 30 percent of their property that the cattle don't go to during that sort of critical time period for infection spread.

And the other thing about American Prairie is by turning it into some sort of national park, they could generate the kind of rules and regulations. You see, national parks are enabled by Congress and each are unique in their you know commitment to what they do for the landscape where they're at and like Grand Teton National Park when they established that National Park and there's a handful of them around the system they preserved hunting in a proportion of the National Park and American Prairie could do the same thing. I don't think they will. You don't think they will? No. Interesting. No. I think

they have a somewhat of a begrudging relationship with it. That's a personal opinion. Okay. I think they have a begrudging relationship. All right. I, my, we kind of touched a little bit on like the societal tolerance of the hunting and being up there and kind of watching the the Gardener scene when it was really going off, right? Right. There's buffalo crap all over the high school football field. You know, I was just like, well, why not allow a certain amount of tribal hunting within the park boundary, expand the hunt that way

to a very specific group of people that have the longest relationship with it. They're already highly regulated. Each tribe, each hunting group has their own game warden with them. Yeah. I was talking about this with my kid the other day. And I was saying to him, and I'm not sure on the,

I'm not sure on all the treaty regulations, but I don't know that a lot of the people that signed under the Stevens treaty, that those tribes wouldn't even be able to make the claim that they could hunt the park if they wanted to. It came too late for the treaty or just history? I'm saying that people that were under that treaty, there's language in that treaty that I think there's an argument that tribes could make in their argument that that I have every right to hunt the park. Oh yeah yeah yeah and but and then

there's a handful that would not under the same language right? Right. Because they weren't historically in that specific area. Yeah I think that the thing that prohibits them from going into the National Park is that their treaties have a language and I don't remember it specifically but it has something to do with claimed versus open and unclaimed. Which there's nothing now that's open and unclaimed. And unclaimed, yeah. Which there's nothing now that's open and unclaimed. So there's like, what does that exactly mean? And we've determined that it's federally managed land, not state land, not Montana state land specifically. And somehow not the park.

And somehow not the park. But it's the national forest. I think they've determined that the national Forest fits that category. I know and I would argue based on no evidence that so does the park. Well it's claimed by Congress as a pleasure and ground for humans. You know if you look at the enabling legislation of national parks. And it was designated what year 77 or something like that? No 1872. Was it 72? Yeah. So yeah I you know I think you know you don't like that idea. I don't like that idea. Because the the issue really is if we did it in the boundary lands area there are some concessions that I think you could figure out how to do it.

But what my argument is, if you do it in the National Park without qualifying it, then what's to say it's not justified in Lamar Valley or in Hayden Valley, and I think that hunting disrupts sort of this natural ecology of the system that it could create chaos, you know, and if you went there to hunt, then they might just scatter to the wind. I'm only bringing that subject up, and it's like to me, it's like a legal question. And I'm not advocating one way or the other. I'm just saying it's an interesting legal question that at some point in time in the future, a tribe wouldn't say, um, we're going to go exercise what we understand to be our treaty rights, right?

We're going to go exercise them. And if you'd like to arrest us, this is where we'll be on Monday. Yeah. The Crow nation probably has the, you know, most opportunity to be successful. Then they would be in the situation of like, are we really going to go arrest a bunch of Crow for hunting? Right. Well, they've been known to push other, you know, tribal treaty rights kinds of issues. So I think it'd be a heck of an educational program within the park.

I'd go down there just to watch. If you like, when people used to be a heck of an educational program within the park. I'd go down there just to watch. Yeah. If you like, when people used to go to watch the civil war battles, like watch on the sidelines, I'd go down there to watch. Well, the Gardner, the Gardner basin was an extension. So it's not actually part of the original national park. And I want to say, um, the original national park boundary was, gosh, really close to the, where the is, Gardner. And at some point in time, there was this program to pay farmers market value for their

land because they weren't very productive. And I don't remember, I think it was in the 1920s or 1930s or something like that. Again, I'm not advocating for that. What I am advocating is for this, because we're running out of time. I don't know how to do it. I think we need to find, I don't know how to do it. I think we need to find a way to have a Buffalo on our federally managed public lands. I don't think it should cost the ranchers money. I agree. I agree.

Like I don't think it should cost them money. I don't think it should cost them business. I think that we should find a way to do it. I agree. And it's like, I just cannot accept that there's not a way to sort this out. I think there is. And the money will follow. And I think that sportsmen like I think there is, um, the money will follow. And I think that sportsman, like, I think that sportsman need to the same way

sportsman demanded re bringing back big orange sheep the same way sportsmen demanded and funded bringing back elk. And in some cases, black bears, I mean, all around the country, absolutely sportsmen demanded it paid for it, worked for it. I just don't see why hunters are not saying, let's take a look at this and let's make it be that it doesn't need to cripple the livestock industry. I mean, there has to be a way, but I don't know what it is. I think we need some creative minds from all industries and perspectives to get together and give them a directive that you have to find a solution.

You can't argue your heartfelt perspective. I agree completely. And I don't think it needs to go all the way to interstate 90, even if that designated brucellosis zone does. Because then the level of difficulty is dramatically greater. And maybe the park, maybe the Yellowstone area is not the place to do it. That's a possibility.

Maybe the place to do it is somewhere in the break. I don't know, I don't know. I think American Prairie- I need to finish my word. Maybe it's somewhere to do it in the breaks. But the American Prairie Reserve thing doesn't scratch my itch. That's a private enterprise. It is a private enterprise right now. But yeah, as far as long-term vision for something different. Landscapes, right? It's like if we're talking about federally managed lands, then we're talking about either voluntary or

some sort of large incentive program to buy out grazing leases that are active. And then the other thing is like landscape fragmentation. Like there's just so many obstacles around the federally managed lands that we have here in Western Montana, which would guarantee if you talk to all the people that were coming off the plane yesterday It's like the Wild West like there's it's wide open out here, right? And it's just not right. So if we're gonna do it, we got to do it fast Alaska now has

five Alaska now has I think five herds. Oh Yeah, they got the copper herd. They got the Copper Herd, the Farewell Burn Herd, the Delta Junction Herd, the Yukon Flats Herd. And at least one or two of them are the actual Northern Buffalo. One. One? Okay. Is hunting allowed? Oh yeah. Yeah. You can't hunt the wood buffalo one that they just got going, but the intention is to, the intention is that you will be able to, and that's how they got local buy-in with native Alaskans. But all their herds, their source herd was, their source herd was National Bison Range in Montana. Okay. And they turned them, they brought a bunch to Delta

Junction and let them trickle out here and there. And now they have these four, I think it's four, they have four managed hunts and then they have a wood buffalo population. And whether or not wood buffalo are actually different is this whole conversation for geneticists to argue about. But they have this other herd they're establishing there that has the potential to be, that has the potential to be three, four thousand animals. Oh wow. And again, why is that possible? It's possible like, you know, there's, I don't want to insult anyone that has livestock in Alaska. There's effectively not a livestock industry in much of Alaska. They run them as managed hunts. People are very enthusiastic, like every,

you know, at draw time everybody fills out their thing to win a chance to hunt. I've done it. My brother Danny just through his social circle has gone like six or seven times on bison hunts, not just him holding the tag, but bodies of his holding the tag. It's just a part of, it was brought in as like they're here, they're not necessarily from here. They don't have, they they don't have an adversary they don't have a human adversary that's right and they have a lot of public buy-in because the hunts are cool has anyone at this table got harvested a bison other than you because I know Randall's wife Sydney has a we're gonna go up to the APR in January and very cool. My wife's got a management tag for that herd And then Seth you've had it. I drew Gardner and West Yellowstone, but you haven't harvested

You know what it takes and then Chili's got this didn't have the snow We'll see if Chili has what it takes. Do you have Gardner or West Yellowstone? I have Gardner. Yeah You've got Gardner right now this winter this winter. All right, let's talk. All right. Yeah Gardner right now this winter this winter all right let's talk all right yeah I've already met one guy don't show don't show me your seat get in here from the other direction no I've been really quiet because I'm like I there's so much I want to know just like because you're very familiar with the area I'm not but I also I've met a guy in Bozeman That's like yeah, I got the same tag and I don't want to put it on podcast. So yeah, yeah

She's a veteran too. So give them good Veterans here, so we're gonna get along famously perfect Branch US Army. I'm an artilleryman. So okay. You guys can have that little army I'm an artilleryman. So, okay. You guys can have that little army. The connection. Oh, Marine Corps. I raised Marines. Seth and I talk about cowardice a lot. Our shared connection.

Yeah. You know, there's the brother. Oh, you didn't commit to defend your country either. Yeah. We call you guys war daughters in the industry. Yeah. Well, harvesting a wild bison or harvesting any kind of bison gives you the opportunity to teach the next generation a lot of lessons.

A lot of lessons. So I mean I took my son out to the Green Ranch out on the Madison to harvest a buffalo 20 years ago. We had a grand time. Took us a long time. Yeah that's why I'm super excited about the sign because like I grew up in South Dakota and a lot of Buffalo history there, too. Yep and My dad never did it but he always talked about like Buffalo hunts and old timers that he knew Going on them. And so I think this is probably the closest thing I'd ever get to doing something like that, you know

and so that's why I'm kind of... And I don't discredit places like the Custer State Park because, you know, it's sort of canned, but again, it provides the... It's a large enough landscape that it provides the opportunity to experience what our ancestors could have experienced. When Sydney drew her tag, I texted Dan Flores and I just told him, you know, we're gonna be buffalo hunting in January and his response was like,

that's fantastic Randall, I can't think of a more, a single more historical act that you could do on the Great Plains Like a really funny way, but I mean it's hard to argue with it. Yep. Yeah Rick wall and thanks for joining man. Appreciate it all your insights. I admire all you guys keep up the good work It's very educational. Thank you. Thank you. Hey guys, earlier this year we launched Meat Eater Kids podcast and we made a deal where if you guys liked it and loved it and listened to it, we were going to make more and you did and we did and we're dropping a bunch new, five new Meat Eater Kids podcast episode starting November 25th. Again, it's a kids show. You listen to it with your kids. It occurs in three acts.

There's a little history lesson or a wildlife ecology lesson. There's a animal call game that you play by listening to animal calls and trying to guess what animals you're hearing based on some clues. And then real live kids come in the studio and play kids trivia and work together to build up a little pot of money to donate to kids focused conservation organizations. So Meat Eater Kids podcast coming back round two. Meat Eater Kids. Find Meat Eater Kids wherever you get your podcasts.