The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 732: Predator Management, California Style

Episode Date: July 14, 2025

Steven Rinella talks with BHA's Western Policy and Conservation Manager Devin O'Dea, Brody Henderson, Randall Williams, Cory Calkins, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider.   Topics Discussed: Steve gets the short end of the stick with a wafer cone, twice; a hot tip on using hydrogen peroxide to remove blood from fabric; an organic mass; subscribe to The MeatEater Kids Podcast feed to catch our fresh drop of Season 3; a crawfish Oedipus complex drama; mountain lions killing six times more deer because black bears steal their; the highest density concentration of bears in the world; more bear-human conflict; how the Humane Society of the US shockingly has police powers; California's screwy laws against hunting bears and the effort to fight them; 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.

This is an iHeart Podcast. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for elk, First Light has performance apparel

to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at firstlight.com. F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. Okay everybody, joined today by, let me tell something real quick. So just hang tight, Devin. I just, a lot of things going on. I can't tell my main story, which I just told,

but I'm gonna tell my other story. So, you don't have, you have little kids, right? Devon. Two little girls. Devon O'Day. O'Day. O'Day, sorry. Devon O'Day is here from BHA.

We've met, we're like phone friends, but we haven't met in person till now. He's the Western Policy and Conservation, I am doing the intro. He's the Western Policy and Conservation Manager at Backcountry Hunters and Anglers. Devon and I met when I was doing a little article for the LA Times about the black bear management in California, which we're going to speak to today

because it's sort of emblematic and indicative of things that happen all around the country. So even if you're not from California, you should listen in. I was telling my favorite story in the world, which I don't want to tell, just out of respect for the town, but I'll tell this story. Pete Slauson respect for the town, but I'll tell this story So respect for the town Here's a weird deal though man like a weird like listen the way happens to me last night on Was last night Thursday? Yes, okay on Monday We're gonna take our little our two little ones to ice cream, but then we changed our mind.

And man, they had a fit. A fit. You still call them little ones? They're not a fit. There's the older one. They'll always be the younger ones. I don't know how you call them. There's like a older one.

Little ones are like. The younger ones. There's a 10, one. Little ones are like. The younger ones. There's a 10, a 12 and a 15. I know, I've met them. I don't know what the 15 was doing. He's got like a girlfriend now and everything, but the 10 and 12, what was he doing? I don't know what he's doing. The 10 and 12, somehow it was like, we're going to go to ice cream and then we reneged, which just pissed them off. I mean, it's a bit, that's a great way to piss a kid off.

So my wife is going out with her friend to dinner the next night. So she just then says, your dad will take you tomorrow. So now I'm into that. I go down there and they're like, like when you take a little, if you don't have kids, if you take kids to the ice cream, you're gonna argue about like what all cone everybody's gonna have. And I'm going and I make a joke,

like there's like the little shit in cone, like I don't know what they call it, like a baby cone. And I make a joke like, do you have, they didn't know I was joking, but I'm like, what do you have just to mess with my kids? I said, what do you have? That's like a step down from that baby.

They didn't get the joke. So anyhow, we agree that we're all going to get the fucking, the, the, not that word, we're going gonna get the fucking, not that word, we're gonna get the waffle cone. We're gonna get the waffle cone, okay? And like, so, by two little ones, I think it was just them. Yeah, they get the waffle cone, and I'm like, I'll have the same thing. They then tell me, we're out.

Oh, so I now get stuck with the old kind when I was a kid. Yeah. Oh, that wafer. The wafer. kind when I was a kid. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that wafer. The wafer. That wafer thing that's like coffee filter. Two of those just to make a point that you can have whatever you want. Now check this, that's the pre-story.

Last night, we go down to the ice cream place. This time, it's the two little ones. The other one was getting his head shaved at a party. The older one, the two little ones. The other one was getting his head shaved at a party. The older one, the two younger ones. It's me, my wife, my two younger ones, my daughter's two friends, my buddy Matt Cook. We're in line. Rosemary, her two buddies, Matthew, my wife, all get that cone.

The waffle cone. I'm not kidding you. I ordered, she goes, we're out of those. I'm like, you don't say. I said, I was here the other night and that happened. My daughter's like, she thinks you're being mean. So something's going on at that ice cream place that I don't understand.

I need to get to the bottom of it. What I need to do is find someone to come down later and order that cone. See if they're just hiding it from you. There's something fishy at what's that place called? Genuine probably. It's right by the, it's right by the elementary school.

They got a Polaroid with your picture on there that says no cone. Yeah, no waffles. Is that off seven? I love that one. It's not genuine, it's sweet peaks. Genuine is too like you go there it's tons of people that aren't even in the right demographic to be out for ice cream. Yeah. Everybody likes ice cream. No, no, no. Or la, I mean. I'm in the demo because I have children. If you go to genuine, it's people in their late 20s, early 30s lined up for ice cream. I'm like, should you people all be lined up for a drink?

But that goes back to what I mean. Everybody loves ice cream. That's really good. What's the demographic for ice cream? Drinking culture is endangered. It's like, if I go to yoga with my wife and there's a, like a dude there, like 35, whatever there by himself, I'm always like, you, you come on. Come on.

I don't think that. Let's talk straight. There's no ice cream demographic. There's an ice cream demographic. There is not. Dude, there is. And like, who's not in it? If I see Randall down getting ice cream,

I'm gonna think like, I don't wanna say what I'm gonna think. Yeah, but there's also things when you look at me, you'd be like, that guy's squarely in the ice cream demographic. So he's walking around wearing basketball shoes. Yeah. Doesn't really fit in his jeans. I'm not a big government guy, but I don't think, I don't think there should be like

a little card that you get from the government that like says you have business at the ice cream place. And it would be like, like how old are you? You should be eating a pint of shame above your sink. I actually, when I walk into the ice cream place, I like to think that the people behind the counter are thinking, good, finally somebody who knows what they want, they'll look me in the eye.

They're not gonna fight with the people they came in with. They're not on their tippy toes trying to look over the counter. They don't want a taste of everything. Yeah. Actually, I'm the one who wants a taste of everything. Oh yeah. My wife embarrassed me last night.

She sampled two things before she made the order and I was getting embarrassed about it. Oh yeah. I can't stand that. Two samples. I was like, you're good. I'm going to have to ask you to step outside. Was the order one of those two or did she order something different?

No, she settled on the seven. That's the really embarrassing one. Oh yeah, no, I'm the really embarrassing one. I was embarrassed about that. That's when you should have slipped in there and ordered yours. You would have got a cone. Yeah, she walked out with a waffle. Right. But the funny part, this isn't even the main part of the story.

Like, at the elementary school is right there. At the end of the year, they wheel all the junk, all the kids leave, they wheel it outside. I'm not kidding you. Like all the lost and found, when they're done, they're done. Like a bad breakup. So the playground, like if you want, if you need to outfit a kid, the day school ends,

go to the playground. It's all out there. Well, there's some nice clothes in this town too. Real nice clothes. We go down there and my kids are like, we're gonna go to the playground. I'm like, no man, don't go to the playground. But my wife overrode me.

And so we go down to the playground and walk in through the open gate. There's kids all over playing. And all the clothes. And the first thing my wife lays eyes on is our the clothes. And the first thing my wife lays eyes on is our boys clothes. We retrieve three hoodies and I pick up a pair of muck boots. And I know my own work. There was like a pair of muck boots that had an L-shape cut in them.

And I had sewed them and put neoprene patch. I pick up these muck boots and I'm like, that's my work. He doesn't even have a recollection of owning these muck boots. So we walk out of there and then everybody's probably thinking like all the other people are probably thinking we're like shopping off the free rack. I wanted to yell out like, this is actually our stuff. Hands off.

Yeah, like we're not just taking, this is our kid, like this is our stuff in this playground. Yeah. Good. Very eventful evening. Very eventful evening. Devon O'Day is here from Bad Country Hunters and Angers, Western Policy and Conservation Manager to talk about black bears. Can we talk about black bears outside of California for a minute? Yeah of course. Is this your picture of the giant black bear? No that's not me that's my buddy Ned. I'm saying you you you gave us the picture. Oh yeah. Phil pull that picture up. That's a nice black bear. That's got to make REI proud. Yeah. You know because they might wonder if anyone ever does anything legitimate in those packs, and there it is right there.

I wonder how they'd react if you came into the store and asked them if they had tips for washing blood out of their backpacks. You know the hydrogen peroxide tip? Mm-hmm. Did you know that someone was saying that, for you folks that don't know, if you have a bloody pack,

and put hydrogen peroxide in a spray bottle, anything you got blood on, my God does it come out. Not that you don't wanna use the heavy duty peroxide. Blood hates, yeah, don't use like the stuff, use the bleach, the school, which is what percent, 45? Yeah, it's a 40 or something like that, yeah. Dude, we could do a whole show on hydrogen peroxide

I could use this like that time Yeah, my Something or you have a skull you're cleaning I got a I couldn't find my normal pack that put my laptop in so I just Brought my hunting pack on the airplane when I got to the airport. I noticed there's just Blood all over it. Yeah, I thought I was gonna get pulled to the side sure man. I'm gonna use that trick next time you know all over it. Yeah. I thought I was gonna get pulled to the side. Sure, man. I'm gonna use that trick next time. Yeah. I got pulled to the side the other day and before I got pulled over, I had a big tongue, a buffalo's tongue, frozen. And the guy used the term like, we need to look at your pack,

and he used the term organic mass. So the other day in Ketchikan, I had like a chunk of deer meat roast that was left over. And he's like, I need to check your pack. And I said, I think there's an organic mass in there. And he goes, you know that term. I learned it from you people. I don't know that naturally. Yeah. 3%. So if you're gonna bleach a skull, you brush on the gel stuff, which is like heavy duty. It's what people use to- It'll peel your skin. Yeah, it's what people use when they're to bleach hair.

And it also, when you go look on Amazon and you're trying to buy the really heavy duty hydrogen peroxide that'll bleach a skull, you know what they have it listed as is to sanitize greenhouse equipment. Oh, I didn't know that. No, I didn't know that either. It must kill like molds and funguses

and stuff on greenhouse equipment. On your backpack, this is a yanny trick. You put three percent hydrogen peroxide in a spray bottle and Spray it let it sit a minute and turn the hose out on it. I don't know blood hates hydrogen peroxide hates it if you're on blood thinners just drink hydrogen peroxide Save money. Um But here's the catch is someone before you do that someone told me that it I think it can degrade the stitching yeah yeah that's what I was told yeah I think

like a lot of pack companies will tell you just to use water do like a long cold soak yeah because they don't want to be responsible for their stitching falling apart a thing that I'll do when I can, I did it there, in fact I did it the other day in Alaska, is I'll put rocks, I'll just put some big rocks in my backpack and throw it in the river. Or throw it in a fast flowing creek if the blood's still fresh and when you come back a few hours later it's just the cold blood blood the cold water that's what the department is talking about too is figuring out how to get more people to come you know how do we entice these out-of-state hunters because

California in most cases not exactly the the out-of-state dream destination of most people on Their their wish list unless you're trying to get that like 30 year sheep tag Yeah, what's a non resident bear tag cost in California non resident bear tag is a great question. I got pulled out for you I think it's a couple hundred bucks. That's not bad I know, you know, I know what the problem is why they won't go there and they don't know and I don't think you know You know what it is. I want to know what the problem is, why they won't go there. And they don't know. And I don't think you know. You wanna know what it is? I wanna know. The primary vegetation is poison oak.

Me and Janis have like conscious, when we're thinking about hunting in California, the number one thing on our mind is like, but do I really wanna have poison oat for three months? Because we're all very, we are very susceptible. Yeah, I am too. 387 for a black bear tag. Non-resident. I bet you in this picture, if you look carefully, everything you're looking at is poison. You got to be rugged. Like that's the thing that people don't think about. If you're susceptible, you gotta be prepared to be miserable. I'm like, I got, I have the skin of a little baby when it comes to poison oak. Oh, kids podcast is out. Came out on January January 30 which hasn't happened yet January no what am I saying what's the other J month yeah so in the future when you're

listening to this episode 2 is out hmm and importantly it's on its own feed just like last season you can't listen to it in the MeatEater podcast feed. You have to please go and listen and subscribe. Exactly. Pete Slauson How old are your daughters, Devin? Devin Two and five. Pete Slauson Have they ever listened to the MeatEater kids podcast? Just lie and say they have. Devin It's their favorite podcast. Pete Slauson They love it.

Devin Yeah, they beg me to listen to it every week. Devin Phil's masterpiece. Pete S masterpiece. They like the jingles. Don't be being a smart ass. It's a good podcast for kids. You should play it for them. All right. You know, part of their education. I am going to have to get them the crayfish book though. Sure. I'll sign it for you. Yeah. When you called me, talk about Black Bears, whatever, last year or the year before, I was actually at a kiddie pool talk about black bears, whatever, last year, the year before, I was actually, I had a kiddie pool filled with crayfish. You talked about that. A couple hundred of them. I got a good story there too. We had one of them actually escape. And then we found him the next day and my wife, we had eaten all of them, we boiled all the crayfish and- That last crayfish was like-

So then we were like, you know, we had the whole neighborhood over, which is funny too, because this is San Diego and everyone's like, where'd you get the baby lobsters? With claws? Yeah. Mud bugs. They're mud bugs. But we had one escape and then my wife's like, well, you know, we, we got to keep him now. And so he became Stowey, Stowey the Stowe way. Huh.

He lived in a little flower vase for a couple of weeks and I was like, well, this isn't cool. We got to get him in an aquarium at least, you know, we're going to eat them or we're going to give them a aquarium. Sure. And then ended up going out, catching more crayfish with the, we're doing like removals with the forest service, uh, where they have some

endangered species habitat and did a whole another boil, got another one, gave them a little friend. They mated. What? A bunch of little baby crayfish. No. Then my neighbor, we had a shitty little

aquarium. Then my neighbor, we had a shitty little aquarium, then my neighbor gave me this amazing tank. So we had this like mansion. And so still we went from, you know, hot in this little flower vase to an aquarium, to a mansion, he's got a wife, he's got a bunch of kids. Then, you know, this is like the American dream. This is where it goes off the rails though.

Aquaculture. Wow. But you know what? I wonder though, him having witnessed the carnage that he witnessed, I wonder if he still hates you. Oh, I mean, certainly. Well, there was like, you know, if I came in here, I come in here and I kill everybody in here in this room, but I take you and I'm like, now I'm going to set you up with a sweet house and a wife. Are you like, uh, man, this guy's great.

Or are you like, this guy's a monster? Cause he did, you did kidnap him originally. And then if you have children, do you stare at them and know in the back of your mind, something's going to happen someday? I've seen it before. I don't want to let you in on the secret, but he has to live with that, that guilt. That foreknowledge of what awaits. Not too bad you can't interview that crayfish.

He just died. This is the eulogy. Cause this is like the American dream of a crayfish. But you know, things got really sour when he and his mate, they got into a tizzy, she ripped off his arm. What? And then somehow she escaped, which blows my mind. Our babysitter found the female walking across the kitchen floor, put it back in the tank, and this was too much for Stowe, he couldn't handle it.

So he killed her, and then it was just him with the kids. And then one of the kids got revenge on him once the kid got big enough and killed him. Just like five years ago. That's a good movie. That's what I'm saying. That's the story of Oedipus. It really is.

Life and death on the farm. So I wanna do this quick, but if people out there, if you hear someone say like, Oedipus or the Oedipal complex, it's that like, that you want to kill your dad and marry your mom. Oedipus didn't know he was adopted. And someone comes to him, like a soothsayer, says, hey, heads up, you're going to kill your dad and marry your ma. He's like, to hell I am. And takes off and goes to a new town because he thinks his

parents are the wrong people. So he shows up in the new town, promptly kills the guy, marries a lady. He's real my dad. Just, that's just a little bit of background. And then doesn't he take his eyes out? Doesn't he take his own eyes out? Rather than look at what he's done. Yeah. That's a terrible story. I mean, that's a lot of ups and downs in that story.

So where are you at now? You have just the babies. I mean, they're not babies anymore. Now we got the new, you know, there's a power struggle going on. It's kind of like that. How many are in there? There's six.

And we got a bunch of fish too, except I thought the crayfish would eat the fish, but they're just not interested. Years ago, I did something real similar. We gotta get to the show in a minute here, but. We went out, this was a, I went, we went out and chopped a huge hole in the ice in a river where we knew that there was a lot of crayfish in the summer and flipped all the rock, like chopped

the, you could get in with waders and walk around in this hole. And we catch a ton of crayfish that are comatose under the rocks, like out of it, the water so cold. Bring them in, put them in a wash tub. And the minute they warm up, they're all just super energetic, like instantly. They had a crawfish boil. Took one little dinker that was too small and put it in an aquarium with my roommate's little baby. He had this crazy little white, some kind of sinking frog, like a little white

aquarium frog that would live at the bottom of the aquarium. He was worried about it, so he took the crayfish's pinchers away from him and put them in there. He gradually grows back a little mini claw. And one day my roommate peers in there, and here's that son of a bitch laying in the bottom of the aquarium holding that dead frog. Like you caught it. The whole time he was growing that claw back and eyeballing that frog. No, he's like, one of these days, one of these days you know the liquor, I'm going to have my claw back.

If Clay Newcomb's listening, here's a story that has everything that Clay would like. A Kentucky man, Kentucky man arrested for releasing a raccoon into a business months after fleeing police on a mule. Only in Kentucky. I know that Tom Murray, Kentucky. I know that town, Murray, Kentucky. A man from Murray, I've spent a bunch of time there. A man from Murray, Kentucky was arrested last week after police say he released a raccoon

inside a business. This is the same man just months after the same man was arrested for attempting to evade police officers on a mule. Why can't we have him on the show? after the same man was arrested for attempting to evade police officers on a mule. Why can't we have him on the show? Maybe I can, I can maybe think of a few reasons. Radio live. Yeah.

Guy wrote in. They're having a baby and they got it narrowed down to two names, Yannis and Callahan. I mean, this must be a super fan. Well, well, it's not half. He's half. He's like Yannis because of Yannis. Callahan is just coincidence because it's after Dirty Harry. Dirty Harry, Callahan. So it's like, Cal is like, just caught the crossfire.

Jared Suellentrop Mm-hmm. Pete Slauson He says, anyhow, this is the guy writing in, Brad. Anyhow, I was telling the person I helped out at an auction in Coldwater, Michigan that we were between Giannis and Callahan. So, this individual, Brad, is explaining to someone, hey, we're gonna name it Callahan or Yannis. This, he's talking to a gal. The gal then informs him. Back to the letter.

She then informed me that she knew a Yannis and said his name is Yannis Poutelis. She said he was a real estate appraiser in Michigan who she worked with as an attorney. A couple things. If you meant a building inspector, is that same thing? No. No. If you meant the building inspector, Yannis's dad, also named Yannis, is a building inspector in Michigan, but what you're overlooking is that all Latvians are named Janus. They all are named Janus.

So there are some hundreds of Janus Putelluses running around. So it may or may not be Janus' dad. Papi Janus. Or it could be one of his brothers. I think that he's a building inspector. This woman calls him a real... I feel like that's too close together. Rather than just being like too many Yannises running around. Yeah. I mean there still could be too many, but I feel like this checks out.

I'm not going to disagree with you on the point that there are too many Yannis's. Yeah, very confusing. So is Brad hoping we come up with an answer for him here? I would name it Steve. Which dudes named Steve are a dying breed, man. I would say just know that if you name it Yannis, you're also naming the child Janice as well. Yeah, well and Ciri won't know how to spell it. And you're gonna, you're gonna condemn him to a life of explaining how to spell his name to every, uh, like, like restaurant host or hostess, every DMV person. No one believes him. Yep. Anyone. If he goes into a coffee shop and he tells one person, like, they're like, what's the name for your order? He'll be

like, Janice. And then they'll be like, how you spell it? And He'll spell it for him. And then it goes to the next person who yells out when their order is ready. There's no way that's not going to be Janus. I was staying there with Janus one time and we're weighing bags to get on a charter plane. And there's a guy there taking everybody's weight. So he looked, he's saying people's names So he looked, he's saying people's names and he goes, Janice and Yana steps forward and he goes, it's Yana's and stands on the scale. And the guy looks at Yana's and looks at the guy next to him and says Janice 172. He's like, don't bullshit me, buddy. I know what your name is. He's like, don't bullshit me, buddy. I know what your name is. Yeah. I don't know what's named that kid.

Doug Durin, uh, doubling down on something here. I was goofing on Doug when I was with, when I last I was with Doug, he was telling my kids a story. He was, he's trying to convince my kids that you should always back in, like your car. Apparently in the oil field, they call it first move forward. Like Doug always back, no matter how much hassle he has to go through, he always backs in. He always claims, he says that his dad got attacked by his own chainsaw and Doug's telling my kids like, if my

dad hadn't backed in, he wouldn't be alive, even though his dad's died at old age. But he would have died that day had he not backed in. And I'm telling my kids like, listen, Doug wants you to back in. That didn't make the difference between Doug's dad dying or not that day, because he drove down the road. Doug rode in doubling down. I do, here's Doug, I do want to correct you about something with my dad's chainsaw story. He didn't drive himself to the hospital. He was barely able to get to town. So literally every second was important. Had there not been an EMT in downtown CAS at that moment, when he pulled in and fell out of the truck and had the ambulance not been just down the road, he would have died.

Maybe we should reenact it sometime when you are here. I'm not sure what that means. Like, like actually. Um, when he does our meteor sheds shoot, he's going to take you to, he's going to take the viewer to the spot where Doug's dad was attacked by the chainsaw. I had turned Doug onto a book. One of the best I've read in a long time called the land breakers. It's an old book.

Holy cow. Is it good? The Land Breakers. It's an old book. Holy cow, is it good. It's about, it's like the first, it's kind of after The Longhunters, but it's like the first farmers to begin moving into the Appalachian valleys, and it's like the story of farmers trickling into this valley in Appalachia and establishing corn patches. They're hunting bears all the time. It's a phenomenal novel. Doug is surprised I liked that book. He's delighted that I liked it and says,

the surprise comes from the amount of personal reflections, human condition, and even romance. Wonderful book. Have you read it? I haven't. I sent to Doug because the knowledge about trees that the author has that he then gives to the authors very knowledgeable purposes for wood. A guy wrote in about something that I don't really understand. Yeah, Randall and I were trying to figure this out earlier. Basically, someone has submitted a formal petition to the EPA.

It's kind of an interesting concept, but you can see where it's going. Someone submitted a formal petition to the EPA, which probably happens every day, but requesting that humans become wildlife. Officially categorized as. Be like, why are humans not officially considered as wildlife?

Because the play here would be for regulatory effects, meaning that you wouldn't be able, there's certain things you can't do that would be damaging to wildlife, and you wouldn't be able to do certain things to human habitats because it would be like, you'd be affecting wildlife. I gather that's the play.

It's a very interesting concept. As if NEPA isn't long enough already, man, that's gonna really, really throw a wrench in the system. Yeah, I see a thousand ways this isn't long enough already man, that's gonna really really throw a wrench in the system Yeah, I see a thousand ways. This isn't gonna go down Because I know they're gonna do lethal control Then overpopulated areas, you know, I mean like there's a lot it's just an interesting concept. Yeah I'm not sure I want to be not not sure I want to back hunting as a management strategy It's more like a bar room conversation than a yeah.

Yeah. I as a parent, especially my kids were younger. I always tried to like over accentuate to them that we were an animal. I mean, I would be like a lot of animals, like bears, like us humans, right? I would always do that to sort of get them in that frame of considering us as animals, but that's not gonna fly. There's a move to how far, who knows this story well? Guy says, I was gonna read what the guy says, because this is a fascinating topic and it bleeds into what we are gonna talk about today. Reinstated a blackberry hunting in Florida. Longtime listener, first time caller.

Was that from Rush Limbaugh's show? Longtime listener, first time caller? I don't know if it's Rush specifically. I thought it was just sort of a convention of talk radio. I remember Limbaugh would have, you would call in and say, dittos. And it meant all that stuff. Cause every caller is like, long time listener, first time caller, love the show.

So then it would become, you just call and go like dittos. And then just get to the point. Florida has been in the process of evaluating and getting public input about reinstatement of a quota black bear hunt. It has been a wildly controversial topic and has been gaining huge traction in the media lately. He's attached the proposal from the Black Bear Commission.

He's going on talking about more and more bear interactions in Florida. Bear interactions and bear sightings in places where they didn't historically have them. Beach visitors, tourists. The other day he took his first bear attack call two weeks ago, made national news. He says, I know the meat eater crew normally handle more Midwest and Northern issues. That is completely untrue. Go all over the place. Dude. That hurts.

I think unintentionally. That hurts my heart. We talk about Florida more than any other state. We do. I'm sure they have ice cream down there. Oh yeah. But people with kids, only like dudes like Randall down there. Lock you up. I had a person in Florida one time telling me like cold stone cold.

She's probably like 23, 24 year old woman tell me stone cold. Like she's telling me a fact. She told me Florida is the free estate. That was the story of how you calibrate that. Like how you measure that. Yeah, man. I, this is like a little, this is a little bit Machiavellian, but like if you want, if you were a bear hunter in Florida and you wanted to take like a Machiavellian approach to pursuing your interests, you would almost hope not for bear attacks. You would hope for more conflict bear conflict. Cause this is what happened in New Jersey. It's a, yeah, that's what I was going to say. It's just like a what happened in New Jersey. It's a yeah, that's what I was gonna say

It's just like a rerun in New Jersey, New Jersey had historically had bear hunting Through poor management bear numbers were greatly reduced They did a pause on bear hunting and some other moves They rebuilt bears to where they had the highest density in the country They rebuilt bears to where they had the highest density in the country, did a bear hunt. The anti-hunters had a shit fit. Their governor was Murphy's first name. Murphy, Phil Murphy.

Phil Murphy campaigns on an anti-bear hunting plank in his platform, gets elected. They shut down the bear hunt in New Jersey. First, like they closed public land. Yeah. State, state on land. And then he just let the bear management plan expire, which essentially just outlawed all bear hunting. One of the things they did in New Jersey to just totally screw hunters too.

You had to do a check, mandatory check. They would publicize, like you would need to pull into a rest area that was known to the public and they like publicly, openly seal everybody's bears so that all the protesters can stand there heckling you, taking pictures of you while you check your bear. Any other state, when you go to check your bear, you go in, talk to someone at the desk, and then you go to a little whatever, garage, back room, you meet with a biologist, they check your bear.

They don't turn it into like a public spectacle of subjecting people to that kind of exposure. Murphy then, all of a sudden, what happens? Bear conflicts, shoot through the roof so much that Murphy comes back and says, it pains me to say it, but I was wrong. We have to have the bear hunt. So if you were like, like I said, the Machiavellian approach to bear hunting in Florida is hoping

for bear conflict. Because that's your clearest path. The same day, in fact, this is kind of weird, the same day in the same place where the girl told me that Florida is the freest state in the nation. That same day in that same place, I met a Florida game commissioner who told me he opposed the bear hunt only because of not wanting to deal with the public blowback that would come his way. He told me that I don't want to say his name because he's kind of telling me in confidentiality, he told me I didn't want to deal with the

Antis. They like swayed his vote. What happened on that hunt? What did they have 48 hours? Well so they. Randall's going to do a little report. They had Florida had a Black Bear season from, uh, like the thirties up until 1994. And then it was closed from 94 to 2015. They reopened a fall hunt in 2015 and, um, they shut it down within two days, uh, because they had, they were, I don't think they actually went over the quota. But they were speeding toward it. They were killing so many that like another day of hunting probably would have taken them well over the quota.

So they killed 300 bears in two days. You're ruining the story. You're not getting it right. I asked you one thing to do here. Well, then you said Randall's going to give a little account of. Yeah, but you're not, your account's not right. My understanding, and you're a professional research. I've got my research right in front of me.

I thought it went like this. That like, they build a buffer in. When, when they close, there's a 48 hour window or 20, no, in Florida, I think it was a 24 hour window. Do you have a PhD or not? I mean, I'm just going by what I, uh, I do. I'm just going by what I read. Yeah.

I don't think you could just close it because you're not going to read like you have to my recollection. My recollection is they were speeding toward the quota. Yes. And so they called it closed, but they can't immediately close it because how are people supposed to get the word? Like, let's say you're like waiting for one to step out. You know, you got a shot, but he's not quite clear. And they go like, Hey, season's over, but you're not looking at your phone. And then the bear steps clear. You're not in violation. Well, they did. That makes sense to me. That's how we run our, our unlimited hunts here. But they shut down central and East panhandle regions after the first day of Saturday, they shut, they shut down central and East panhandle regions after the first day of

Saturday, they shut, they said, but, but what, there was a 24 hour window. They were speeding toward it, but by the end of the 24 hours, they had overshot it and then everybody had a conniption. The antis had a conniption. Oh, I see. I see now. had overshot it and then everybody had a conniption. The antis had a conniption. Oh, I see. I see now in the panhandle, they did go into Sunday and killed triple the quota.

Um, and so they killed the overall quota was three 20 and they shut it down on Sunday night with 295 bears killed. But then by the time it wrapped, what was it? Um, Oh, geez. See, this is the real issue with hastily assembled research here. Actual harvest, uh, 304. And the quota was what?

Paying out? 320. Well, for the overall state, the quota was, was 320, but they, the one, the, the area where they met the quota on the first day, they'd ended up that they went, they tripled the quota. And so I think they just shut the whole thing down before the rest of the state. That's generally speaking, but yeah, they killed 300 bears in two days. 38 of them were sows with cubs. And, uh, they haven't had a hunt since then. Cause it was treated in the, you know, with all due respect, I didn't give Randall much time.

Do you notice like this group of, there's like a fan group about Randall? Yes. I wonder what they're thinking right now. Well, I think this- Their support, they're all those dedicated and loyal Randall's. Randall's.

They are, I'm sure. I think they understand the constraints of what I was asked to do here They're reasonable shout out to the random, but Yeah, I mean Mm-hmm. I've pieced it together. I feel like mm-hmm. I thought you did well. I want to know more stories Ted Nugent bought a Florida Bear-tag Good for him.

2015. We were gonna, we don't have time anymore. We were gonna spend a bunch of time goofing on this thing in California where they got an orphan bear cub and they're trying, they're raising it up and it's a bunch of like furries who are all dressed as black bears.

Like, like that's the problem. To not have it, to that, like that's the problem. That's the way to keep it from not acclimating to people. Yeah, those bears are doomed. Like the bear is going to like get out and be like, oh, I'm just another wild bear. Hey, those, there's some things, but. They're not like the bears I'm used to.

We're not gonna talk about that. It's all different. That would have been funny had we goofed on that for a long time, we're not gonna. All right. The story of the California black bear. It's taking us a long time to get here. Devin usually does. I see you here in Africa listener, long time listener.

Did us, uh, just a couple of quick points on that. Um, we thought about killing that whole part of the show, but we're not gonna. Good. But what I am going to do is I'm looking to in the near future, split the shows and just do interviews and just do, this is something we've considered for a long time, very clean interviews. So you'd be like on as a clean interview and then a different thing, which is just talking about dumb stuff.

So audience, feel free to let us know your thoughts on that. Thinking about doing that. I'm against it. It's part of my professional development. It might be a little too serious. I don't know. Not sure how I feel about it. 1948. Did you, did you supply this timeline? Like you know this stuff inside and out. In 1948, black bears get classified as a game animal in California. Like what does that mean, right? What does that mean for people to hear that they're

classified as a game animal? They're regulated by the Department of Fish and Wildlife. So prior to that, it was like, have at them. Prior to that, we're just killing grizzlies till he extirpated them and people are just you know kind of run around hunting. I mean we had our our commission was established prior to that but I don't think they were formally classified as a game. Got it. So that's kind of the state at which the you know a way to think about that too is that which the, you know, a way to think about that too is that if Sandhill Cranes, like this is a pet, little pet subject of mine that I'm interested in, if my home state

in Michigan were to enact a Sandhill Crane season, which they should, it would require them declaring it, it would require them doing this. It's classified as one thing now, which makes it not like subject to being listed with a season. The first step is to go like, we hereby declare the Sandhill crane to be a game animal and that's like part of the pathway. And that usually triggers like a management plan too. Okay. I know like we'll go on tangents, but, um, you know, recently there's And that's like part of the pathway. And that usually triggers like a management plan too. Okay.

I know like we'll go on tangents, but you know, recently there's a proposal in California to classify coyotes as a game animal. And so that would trigger a management plan and everyone's like, you know, I don't think that's going anywhere. Hopefully not. But that's part of the process, right? And that's coming from people who don't want that. That's coming from people that don't want them to be a game animal.

They want to be able to curb. Right. Their, their aim is to be like that. Yeah. That it won't be year round, unlimited, whatever. Yeah. Classify them as a game animal allows you to protect them. It's not like, Oh, Oh, here's an open season. It's a game animal allows you to protect them. It's not like, Oh, here's an open season.

It's a game animal. Now. Yeah. It's not dudes that hate coyotes doing that students love coyotes. Correct. In that case. Okay. We're going to jump up.

The we're going to jump up to 1980 where we have a sort of black bear benchmark. This is all deep history. Hit me with like in 1980, what was the status? So Reagan, Reagan comes in, right? 80? Pete Well, he was elected in 80. Pete And then took office in January 81. Pete Okay. Pete So, just for you people to remember this. It's Carter. There's that PhD.

On his way out. Reagan on his Carter on his way out. Reagan on his way in. Carter. What's going on in California? Hint me with what's the status of black bears in California in 1980? So 1980, I think they've got the population around 10 to 15,000 bears. That's the estimate. Started getting a little bit more restrictive as far as management goes. I think they've got the population around 10 to 15,000 bears.

That's the estimate. I'm starting to get a little bit more restrictive as far as management goes. So that's when they took prohibited trapping, no killing cows, no killing of cubs and sows. And then they reduced the bag limit from two to one. And if I can jump in because I didn't know what 10 to 15,000 bears meant I'm looking here that Montana has between 13,000 and 17,000 black bears. Yeah, so it's yeah, so like that's a fairly robust

Population not like it is now and wait Not like it is now and counting bears. I think it's gotten a little more refined. Yeah. I think it used to be like a little bit tougher to count bears back in those days. But I mean, it's a guideline, right? Right, right. It's a general sense.

But of course, if you're saying 10 to 15,000, you're opening yourself up to a wide gap. Right. There's a lot of numbers between those two numbers. Yeah, but still it's in the vicinity of where, like what we think of as Black Bear numbers in Montana where we obviously don't have a shortage. Was Reagan the Gipper or the Kipper? The Gipper. Gipper. As much as he is like celebrated among traditional concert,

like much as he is celebrated among like pre Trump Republicans The old kind of Republicans from a couple years ago He wound up not being the hunters best friend When it came to black bear management, isn't that correct? Like wasn't it on didn't Reagan sign? He was about as mountain lions. I don't know Okay, he signed the ban on Mount I was mountain lions. I don't know about mountain lions. Okay. He signed the ban on dogs from mountain

lions, right? He also signed the ban on a, no, and Carrie in California. Did he? Cause he didn't mean basically. So the black Panthers couldn't. So you had to start wearing your pistol in your pants, not out of your

pants, you had to start hiding it in your pants instead of exposing it out of your pants. But Reagan, Reagan's a big Hollywood guy and he's full of all sorts of contradictions. Okay. Now we're going to, this is going to, we're going to start narrowing in on much more, just for you listeners. We're just laying a little groundwork here. We're just laying some background before we start getting into like how bare management works in our most populous state and how Bayer management might work in a state near you coming soon.

Uh, 1998. So now we're getting closer. I'm a young buck. I'm kind of an older buck. Six years out of high school. Go on. 1998. That, that on, 1998.

That was when the- Clinton. Previous. We'll do this presidentially. That was when the management plan, the previous management plan was established. And so that was the framework that we operated on in California just up until this year when we updated the new management plan. So 1998, they're like, here's how we're going to handle bears and then 20 some years goes by.

And it's how we're managing bears. Correct. And in 98, the population had. Had it increased. Yeah. Had increased. And all this data is just coming from hunter harvest.

So they're using, you know, age, sex ratio and just hunter harvest from premolars. That's it. Uh, I mean, they're not doing like a ton of, they don't have the current integrated population model that we have now that gives you a much more accurate representation of. So they're able to determine, they're able to make a stab back in 1998. They're able to make a stab at how many bears are there based strictly on what

they're seeing hunters bring in. I'm sure there's some scientific stuff, but that is the core of the model, is just hunter harvest data. Okay. And in 98, so again, that population estimate in 1980, we're gonna get into some wild numbers now, but coming up here. In 80, 10 to 15,000 bears estimated.

Jump ahead almost 20 years, the estimate 17 to 23,000 bears estimated. Jump ahead almost 20 years, the estimate 17 to 23,000 bears. Notably the plan indicated an increase in the bear population and documented an expansion of black bears along the central coast in Southern California. So bears moving into new places, right? And that's because historically there were grizzlies and

You know that's a good point grizzlies are extirpated and black bears are now like filling the void and they're like, oh, hey There's nothing killing us down here. Yeah, that's fascinating. Oh, yeah, that's that's funny. How Slow some of that stuff takes place right that you're still seeing adjustments Do you mean like even today you're still you're probably seeing adjustments. Do you know what I mean? Like even today, you're still, you're probably seeing adjustments from extirpations of wolves in the early 2000, or not the early 2000, what am I saying? In the early 20th century,

you're still seeing wildlife adjust, but it takes like a hundred years, right? For things to get used, or how long it takes wildlife to get used to people. It takes generations of mountain lions, generations of bears to get like used to people and figure it out and raise their offspring to be like, no, no, no, no. Like you can do this, but you can't do that. You gotta like, when you get to a road, here's how I like to do it.

Do you know what I mean? And they like gradually learned or like, oh no, no, no, you can like totally go into a neighborhood man and, and trash cans, but not that neighborhood. Like not that neighborhood. Yeah. They like, they figure it out somehow, you know? Okay. 2012, this is one, this is one, this story starts getting kind of juicy and interesting. So hit us with 2012. So up until this point, uh, you could hunt dog, you can have bears with dogs. And that was, you know, we were hitting the quota, um, every once in a while,

right? Like pretty regularly that quote. Can I stop you for a second before this? Like, was there spring and fall? Was there baiting? No, none of that. All that was back, like, was there spring and fall? Was there baiting? No. None of that? All that was back in, like, I think around the 80s. A lot of that stuff got, they went

pretty restricted. That had already been taken away. So we had dogs, but no baiting, no spring season, just one tag. And we're hitting the quota, you know, not every year, but around that, like, 1,700 bears with dogs. Fall hunting with dogs Hitting the quota of how many bears 1700? Okay out of an estimated say they did change that By like a hundred or so so I think it maybe like was 1600 and went up to 1700 But it's been it's hovered around there hasn't changed dramatically over time Okay, and they got this quote and periodically people periodically hunters are like capping it and hitting a closed season

Yep, primarily with the use of hounds Yeah, it was instrumental to people being successful for sure okay, and then 2012 hot what what goes on and how does that happen? Well the legislature, you know that that story of a legislature gets involved. There's an effort to ban hunting with dogs. They're successful. And immediately following that, the harvest rate drops significantly. So we don't hit the quota after that legislative session, after that bill was passed. We do not hit the quota until today.

We still haven't hit the quota. was passed, we do not hit the quota until today. We still haven't hit the quota. And that is really like why everything got so sideways with the petition from the Humane Society and all the efforts to ban bear hunting is because the population model, when you just take it strictly on hunter harvest data, everyone went, oh no, the bear population's collapsing. Look, they're not killing as many bears. Look, they're only killing half as many bears. There must be half as many bears on the landscape. That's the great irony and perversity in this story

that gets to me is like the same people that pushed to end dog hunting for bears, then trumpet the reduction in harvest as a way of showing that bear numbers are collapsing when you know that they know, you know that they know what happened. But it's an argument people will buy if they don't think about it. They don't understand it. You know, if you wanted to see bear, uh, numbers in California, really collapse,

you'd end all bear hunting. Like no one's checking a bear anymore. There's none left. You know, Oh, interesting in the new management plan, they actually have a, an interesting little snippet that says that in some areas where there isn't bear hunting, you know, where bear hunting is not allowed, you get higher rates of like infanticide and like starvation and inter-competition because there's just so many bears that like some of the younger bears aren't making it, their mortality rate increases. I thought that was kind of fascinating. Do you have some of those stats in here about like black bear predation on mule deer and

stuff? Yeah. Yeah, there's some crazy ones. So that new management plan, you know, I think it was, I think they put a couple million dollars like into all the work that went into that. They built out an entirely new integrated population model which utilizes hunter harvest data, but it also, they collared a bunch of bears, they have a bunch of hair snares, they have a bunch of camera traps and data

that's all building out this plan. To give you a much more robust picture of what's going on. Yeah, and regionally specific too. But some of those crazy stats that they include in that, they did a study on mountain lions and kleptoparasitism up in Northwest California. Explain that term. So that's where you have a mountain lion that typically,

let's say, kills a black tail a week up there. And there are so many black bears that black bears are opportunistic. They, you know, smell a dead deer like, oh, breakfast. So they come in, push the mountain lion off the kill.

And of all the, the mountain lions that they had collared and were studying, I think only one of them was willing to defend her kills. All the rest of them were like, it's not worth it, I'm not fighting this bear. So then the mountain lions go out and kill another deer. Yeah, because wasn't it that over 50% of the deer

that mountain lions killed were stolen from them by black bears? They ended up killing six times the normal amount of deer that they would because of kleptoparasitism. Oh man. Yeah. So you, I mean, the whole coming back to spot burning, you know, if you're a deer hunter, yeah, we want a lot more people to kill bears.

And in that region where they did that study, it's the presumed to be from the data is the densest concentration of black bears in the world. No. In the world. Four bears, over four bears per square mile. And a lot of poison oak though. That's an overlooked thing. That's why there's that. You know, kleptoparasitism, you could do a study on that. Like if I'm in my kitchen with my kids and I make a quesadilla, they'd be like, this individual wants to make four times as many quesadillas as he normally would have made. Because of kleptoparasitism.

That's pretty fascinating that they had always met the quota. Then when you banned hound hunting, so from 2012 to 2021, with the ban of hound hunting, the quota never gets met. So then you just, you've taken away people's primary way of getting, or you take away one of the most effective ways to get bears and then you have it that you're just going to have more bears, more bears, more bears, more bears, because they're not even able to hit the number that they've regarded to be a very safe number anyway.

Very safe. I mean, that's like, the harvest rates in California are well below what would be considered the threshold for sustainable. They estimated about 15% take would be like a sustainable level for the population. In California, at least recently, we're not over 5% for the entire state, 5% for more than one zone and 3% for the entire state. So, I mean, the harvest rates are incredibly low. And there's some estimates that say you can go

up to 20%. I think Pennsylvania and a couple other states have even higher harvest rates and they have no issues. Cause they got sows with a lot of food and they're dropping three clubs four cubs whatever you see videos of you know in the East you know some bear goes across the road and five cubs come running after it right stuff you just don't see it around here. When those quotas when they'd stopped meeting those quotas did, was there a correlation between an increase in bear conflict and an increase in the number of bears that were getting what they like to say euthanized, but you know, just shot by management officials,

whatever. Yeah. Bear conflict generally from that time period up until today has kind of steadily increased like human-bear conflict and the department actually prior to the release of the management plan they updated their sort of depredation strategy and their human-bear conflict strategy and after that there's been a lot less euthanasia of bears but a lot more conflict as well. So it's just a little bit more difficult for the department to go in there and approve for a bear to get taken. Because of like social pressure or?

Pretty much. Yeah. I mean, it follows what the depredation strategy is for mountain lions, which is, you know, previously there is, you know, procedures, but you could kind of, I think my understanding is that wardens could make, you know, a determination like it's kind of on the fly, like, yes, this is a problem bear. We need to like go in and take care of this. Now there needs to be, you know, a lot that there needs to be a record of documentation of attempts to haze the bear. You need to have a number of steps that go through before

that depredation tag is issued and before the department will consider actually going in. Interesting. I have a question about not hitting that quota. Is that, is the success rate for black bear hunters and cow, obviously like the success rate goes down when they do away with dogs, right? And you're just doing spot and stock. They drop 50%. Oh no, sorry. Not the success rate goes down when they do away with dogs, right? And you're just doing spot and stock. They drop 50%.

Oh, no, sorry, not the success rate. Harvest drop 50%. Yeah. So success, but yeah, I mean, hound hunting is, has, is higher efficacy. So I'm wondering like, in the time that the quota hasn't been met, in the time that the quota has not been met, are success rates among hunters on par with fall bear, non hound seasons and other States? Like, is it a question of they're not enough people buying bear tags?

No. There's a question that success rates are much lower in California compared to a similar season in say Washington. My understanding is that they're like some of the lowest of the states that have bears. Um, and I think part of that is cultural. I think in California people, I mean, there's like something like 25,000 bear tags that get

bought every year. It's a good amount of revenue for the department, but there's only about a thousand to 1300 bears that are actually getting harvested every year. And I think a lot of that is cultural and it's just like, it's. Smoking dope, surfing. Yeah. I mean, that's my problem, but it's people that are going deer hunting and are just buying a bear tag. Opportunistically.

It's opportunistic. And you know, if you don't run into one, all right, whatever. It's like me and my wolf tag. Yeah. I don't know, maybe. Carrier. It's opportunistic. And you know, if, if you don't run into one, all right, whatever. It's like me and my wolf tag. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe. Carrier. Yeah. Hate to get caught without it. You know? Yeah, exactly. And it's not, you know, a super expensive tag. So it's people just kind of buy one and they run into a bear. Great. But that, I think skews some of the data too of like, how much are hunters really trying and how does that success ratio factor in? Yeah, I guess that was sort of, rather than how many people are buying tags,

it's like how many people are actually hunting them. And it sounds like that's where the sort of the hang up is. Yeah, you probably lost a ton of hunters. Once Hounds went away, people are like, I'm not gonna hunt them a different way. Right. In 2021, they put forth what they humane society, right? Yep Do we need to once again explain the humane society there's HS us I

Answered my own question If you're sitting there and you're buying something and there's like a little roundup thing, do you want to round up for the Humane Society? Right? You're thinking, oh it's the local puppies. Like HSUS is an anti-hunting organization. You can have a local humane society shelter, but HSUS is an anti-hunting organization. There's tons of confusion about this, that people have. The difference between the humane society, writ large, like as a big umbrella,

and then like humane society shelters. Don't do anything to ever help HSUS ever. I had a question too, because I was having this debate just two days ago in California. And I'm curious for you guys, if you know the answer to this, if it's outside of California, but in California, the humane society has police powers where they can actually write you a ticket

and it's enforceable as if it were a police officer. And if you like run from them, it's like you're running from the cops. They can write you a ticket. How do you 100% your dog pretty much for having your dog off leash at the beach. No, a hundred percent. I've, I've, I've seen it happen and it blew my mind. And so I did a bunch of research and I was like, is this just California where they have this police power or is it elsewhere? Because it's, it's definitely problematic.

And Corinne be getting a lot of tickets. They got all worked up about the national guard. And meanwhile, they got the HSUS running around writing tickets. Here's a, here's a journal article from 1998 in the what? The Proceedings of the Vertebrate Pest Conference and the title of the paper is Humane Society, Good Guys or Gestapo. Very provocative. That is a great title. I'm jealous of that title. But it does it does sound like yeah yeah, uh, societies or private organizations that have no inherent power, but derive all their powers and authority to enforce

animal laws from the state, as in most states in California, the counties can choose to operate their own animal control services or to hire the society to perform animal control services for the county and they can serve search warrants at the time of this, they can serve search warrants. What? At the time of this, they can serve search warrants, they can carry firearms, um, and may even use reasonable force and deadly force to prevent the perpetration of any act of cruelty upon an animal.

Wow. Deadly force. So I guess they're like, kind of. Put your dog on a leash. Like a county, a county that has to provide animal control services can sort of rent a cop the Pumane Society. You know what we were talking about the other day

with our camera guy, Rick Smith. He was working on this documentary about dogs in Mexico, street dogs. And he's talking about like, he's like psychologically, a street dog in Mexico is a way healthier dog Psychologically hmm they wake up they hang out with our dogs. They're in a pack form Mm-hmm people look at him like oh that dog has an infected eye, and they think the dogs hating life

But he's like they have total autonomy They have dynamics hmm they hang out with dogs. They want to hang out with, they travel where they want. And we're talking about this concept that Americans have, people around the world, but like you take a dog, you remove its reproductive organs. You lock it in the house all day and you act like you're doing the dog a favor. And I think that all those dogs have, what's that syndrome when you get caught? Stockholm? All dogs have, I think dogs are very susceptible to Stockholm syndrome and they empathize with their captors. I think that they're like a highly susceptible species.

And that's why when you come home and your dog's happy, your dog has Stockholm syndrome. He has come to empathize with his captor. You've seen the way dogs in Mexico will try to they, they're, they got chutzpah. It's it's their only natural predator, like a, an urban dog, an urban pack of dogs. I swear there's a pecking order and the biggest one will go after like cars and they'll come in and they'll try to bite the wheel. Cause it's a natural predator. And they're like showing their dominance. It's, it's a wild thing.

I was, uh, I did a study abroad in Santiago. That's a great point, man. And I was on a skateboard. And if you're on a skateboard, you'll get like 20 stray dogs that will just come in. Like they're trying to kill you. And then the second you hop off the board, they're like. Yeah, that's a great point. Well, hey.

Cats, I got signed out of my thing. Oh, I thought you were looking for videos of dogs chasing cars. No, but, no. Phil, can you pull that up? Cats are remarkably less susceptible to Stockholm syndrome. But dogs, for whatever reason, weirdly,

are like highly susceptible to empathizing with their captors. People that restrain them, don't let them do what they wanna do, don't let them hang out with who they want to hang out with, make them eat what they want them to eat when they want them to eat it. No autonomy, no autonomy. Like you get to go to the yard. It's like prison.

You could say that. They even call it the same thing. Let them out in the yard. Let the prisoners out in the yard. I love that this is your new crusade. I hope you chase this. Yeah, but you'd have to like, because you could say the same thing about horses. I don't know about that. Well, sure. Let me think about it for a minute. I want to get back to Tom. The bear protection act. Here's a move where the HSUS correct HSUS comes out says hey I got an idea how about you

can't hunt bears at all anymore in California. SB 252 I was a senator wieners bill. Okay what happens with the bear protection act? It got squashed it I was a Senator Weiner's bill. Okay. What happens with the Bear Protection Act? It got squashed. It was a big uprising from a lot of different organizations and it got pulled back very quickly. Okay. That's 2021. 2022, there's a different approach made. Through the commission. Okay. So explain this now. Uh, the humane society filed a petition, uh, to the fish and game commission, which honestly, you know,

HSUS HSUS, uh, respectfully, like that is the process, right? The legislature had no business taking that on. And so at least they're going through the proper channel now, right? The commission failed in legislature. So like people complain about ballot biology or whatever, but this is, right? The commission, but they failed in the legislature. So. People complain about ballot biology or

whatever, but this is like, Hey, okay, we'll play by the rules. We'll go to the commission and we'll. Yep. So they, they bring forward this petition and the, the whole argument is based off of this population model and the collapse of bears.

So they're saying, according to their science, they're saying there's only 10,000 bears left in California. And this is a, you know, we need a moratorium on bear hunting until we can update the management plan and until we have a better population model so that we can, and they're citing, you know, mega fires and climate change.

This is a, causing a catastrophic drop in the bear population. And they're going back to that, like. Evidence by a decline. Not meeting the quota. And that's going back to that, like. Evidence, but not meeting the decline. And that's what this is. Everything is built around that hunter harvest model, which is when you look, when you break down the science, I mean, it's not, it's not a solid argument at all. It doesn't take an expert to look at that and go, okay, well, this doesn't,

you know, this clearly doesn't really, you know, pass the smell test here. And it being 2022, they just throw in climate change for a zinger. And we'd had some huge fires in California, massive fires. Right. And so, uh, I think that's, that was the topic of the time, right. It's like, you know, what could these giant fires be doing to our bear populations and what are the impacts? And, you know, that's something I think a lot of people are genuinely curious

about, and we actually, uh, used a chapter money and funded a study on pre and post-fire population status of black bears in California in Lassen National Park, just because at this time, you know, we're saying, okay, well, humane society, like if, if you want to talk about this, well, let's put your money where your mouth is. Let's, let's fund some research, right? Let's get to the answer. And so as a part of like BHA and wanting to be an organization that stands for science based management of wildlife, we had this opportunity from one of the old carnivore

biologists in the state, who's a great guy. He came out to like one of our bear camps and talks to people about bear hunting. He mentioned this study and so we put some money towards it and it's ongoing. But you know I think this is like where we want to be as hunters like you know making sure that we have good data and good science. And that's look but I would think just just intuitively I would think that the that the fire outside of mega fires I would think that the fires are basically generating more and more black hair habitat. That's the assumption. I think just successional, successional vegetation. So it might, it's cooked

for a couple of years, but then it goes through a very productive bunch of years with a lot of berry production. Yep. I think that's through the successional process. So you're right that you'd like, if you have, what, what's a big in acreage? What's a big fire in California in acreage? I mean I Mean tens of thousands of hundreds of thousands Yeah So you do when you I mean like you can't deny it if you go into a place you burn 100,000 acres of ground and a catastrophic wildfire that is a

100,000 acres of ground that for a period of time is not going to be used by black bears for the most part but then it'll become a patch of ground that is very well used by black bears for a pretty long period of time but I could see that like I could kind of see the argument but I kind of don't see the argument. And I think there's, it's one of those examples also where like, do you have, can the bears move somewhere else, right? Is there habitat for them to move into or not? Yeah. And I think even following like some of the, especially like low to mid severity fires,

I think bears probably move in like right after the fire too. Maybe the habitat and value isn't as good, but they're not, it's not like it's gone forever is my understanding, right? There's going to be some bears that come right back in. You know, if anyone's listening that knows about this, I'd love to know this answer. Has anyone ever had the opportunity to look at collared black bears, collared mountain lions, and see how they behave with the fire? How, how, how far ahead of the fire are they?

Do you ever get mortality on collard stuff for getting caught in fires? Like, I'd love to understand that. Like when you watch a giant fire cooking across the mountainside, I always say to my kids, I'm like, like can you imagine how many pine squirrels died in that thing?

They're not getting, you know what I mean? Yeah. You're not getting, you know what I mean? Yeah. You're cooking thousands and thousands and thousands of pine squirrels. But like, what are bears doing? You know, some of them, presumably they got to get burned up by one or like when they move, like how well do they get it? What, how good are they at going the right direction? That'd be fascinating if you could ever have a good sample size of like

what is it's at what point did it start to shift its you know at what point did it demonstrate any kind of awareness? I would love to see some of that if it's out there. A couple years ago you could have gotten it funded as climate change research. But now you won't. You have to think of a different thing. Think of a different buzzword to get your money, to get your research money on. Um, at the same time that they're saying 10,000 bears using the hunter harvest data, the California department.

As they're saying now we think we got 20 to 30,000 this is in 2022 and that's their number they'd stuck with for a while and there'd been some studies that had pushed that up to 35 but generally speaking in the the documents that they'd had out there they said you know we're thinking it's around 20 to 30. Okay. That petition doesn't go anywhere, right? I mean, it, it stuck around for a little while. It was a big, a big deal, right? There, all the anti hunters came out, all the hunters came out. Um, we actually put together a huge, just all the available

literature and science that we could, one of our former board members was a black bear biologist in California. So just like the perfect person to compile all this evidence. And what came of the petition was it was ultimately rejected, but it led to, it lit a fire under the part, under the department to update their black bear management plan, which was something that the hunting and conservation coalition in California, something that BHA participates in prior to all this, had as one of the top priorities is like, we need a new management plan because previously when the management plan gets outdated,

the anti-hunters will come in and say, you don't have good science, we can't hunt it. And so we knew that was like square one, having a defensible position is having good, good signs. Cause they'll use it against you and be like you haven't updated your management plan since 1998. Correct. You have no idea what's going on out there. Right? Yeah exactly. So they start the process of doing the new management plan and it goes up for like public opinion, public comment. What was your general vibe on the proposed management plan or your general take on it?

A general take was, it was ambitious because the, um, director said they were going to do it in a year and everyone went like, oh, you could tell all the, the scientists and the department staff were like, did he say a year? Cause I mean, we don't do anything fast. The sheet plan just wrapped up and that that's been going on for over a decade. Um, you know, these things take a long time and, uh, they, I mean, credit to the department, they got it done in a couple of years, but they got a draft out, um, in about a year and then followed up with the final, um, you know, just this year. And it, you know, generally speaking, there's a lot of information in there,

but there's a lot of good data. Like some of those nuggets that I pulled out about kleptoparasitism. Yeah. They talk about, I read like, I rarely read those whole things. I read that whole damn thing. It was, I thought it was like, I mean, I give huge credit to whoever put it together. Yeah. I mean, it was phenomenal.

There's some really good research that went into that. And just to back up a tiny bit to our commission, like I got to give a lot of credit to them because they. Really pushed back against this whole notion that just because hunters are the minority in the state that we should just ban bear hunting. And so the commission really like came out in favor of black bear hunting in favor of hunters, but with the caveat of like, let's get. Let's get all the data and research that we can to make an informed decision. Yeah, I think it was like what I got from it when I read it was like a number of recognitions.

Like it was a sort of recognition that there's shifting social values in the state. There's a recognition that there are a ton of black bears in more places. It was a recognition that we have historically used bear hunters as a management tool. It recognized bear hunters contribution to bear research. It was very even and then had like just like the whole state history and all their measurement stuff. I thought it was like super informative. One of the cool things in there too to check out is the range map that they updated because you can see some of those areas where black bears have expanded and they updated that map. And it was kind of surprising to me even it goes all the way down to the border

to Mexico and we don't have black bears in San Diego although we did have one that ran And we don't have black bears in San Diego, although we did have one that ran down into like Ramona, I think it was last year. So like, it's not a, not a common freak occurrence, but you can imagine if things stay on the same trajectory, that those bears will probably move down there. If they continue to, to move out.

I mean, we've been, we've had bears pouring into Nevada for years and years now, like their bear population is bolstered by all these bears that are just leaving California because the taxes are too high or whatever. Yeah, yeah. You know, with that black bear management plan they put out, which is like a proposal, right?

I mean, they have a proposal part of it. Well, they had the draft management plan and then they finalized it just this year. Okay, so that I'm not, that I'm less schooled on. But I remember in there they were saying like, there's things that you could do, or people were asking for certain things like Californians are limited to one bear. Yep. And since the quota is not being met and you have more bears, like categorically more bears than you did when they established the quota, and the quota is not being met and you have more bears Like categorically more bears than you did when they established the quota and the quota is not being met They were like we could do X Y & Z

We could give everybody two bear tags, which I don't think is gonna make a huge difference. Probably It's the low it's the lowest hanging fruit. Yeah, and I and I agree I don't necessarily know that's even gonna get us to the quota But it's it's a very logical first step. And that's actually what BH8 is. We filed a petition to the commission right after the management plan was finalized. And we reviewed it as the like easy slam dunk lowest hanging fruit. Everybody could buy two bear tags because then, you know, one is just more

revenue for the department. You know, if some people are like, oh, well, I'm going to go deer hunting and maybe I'll see two bears, you never know. Like, uh, so that for us was just like an easy win, but there's other, other, uh, proposals that the department are going to bring forward that we're aware of, including expanding some

of the bear hunting zones. So like in Northeastern California and the MoDoc Plateau, that has been closed to bear hunting, it's because it's not historically occupied bear habitat, but the bears have moved in there. There's, you know, good genetic diversity. There's, there's good bear hunting up there. So it seems like a logical place to, yeah, let's open that up. There's no reason not to hunt bears there.

Um, you know, they're going to potentially talk about season timing. Uh, it's a pretty wide open season right now, around when deer season starts and it goes like to the end of the year in most zones. So they may look at that as well as if there's any improvements there or additional opportunities. I think those are the big first things that the department's going to try to address this year.

I don't think spring bear baiting dogs. That's not coming from the department. It's hard to bring that stuff back once you what does it take to bring it back? Like I appreciate. I appreciate the efforts. I appreciate your guys efforts on this. I appreciate the efforts to me. Like these are all wins. They're all, they're battles, they're little wins, right? They're battles that you win. The war to me, like to win the war, it would be that we would, we would be able to go in and revert.

We would have success in going in and reverting some of the major management, the historic major management decisions. Like hunters look at winning, oftentimes that defeating, we look at winning as defeating losses, meaning Colorado's like, okay, we're gonna ban bobcat hunting, mountain Lion hunting, hunters come together fight it and the victory is that you didn't lose the band. You maintain the status quo. I would love to see like that somehow we would pull off that trapping came back to Colorado that, right, that hound hunting came back to California, that the mountain lion season came back to California. What does that

take in California? Like is that just not, I mean like give me the realistic, is that just not gonna happen? I mean when you talk about mountain lion it's not gonna happen because of the when that legislation was passed, the way it was passed, it will require a four-fifths vote majority in the legislature to bring Mountain Lion out and back in California. Are you serious? Four-fifths. So I mean, Mountain Lion, as much as we would like to see it, that is not the priority number one. So that's the threshold? Yeah. For bears, it's a different story. OK, hit me with bears.

Bears, we had a bill this year, AB 1038, that almost made it out of committee. It actually, there was a lot of work done by a lot of great organizations to bring that forward. This is like a Houndsman bill, primarily as a sponsor. And it was before the management plan was finalized. And now it's a two year bill.

So in California, the legislative session spans two years. So this is basically just kind of going to get recycled into next year, but doesn't have to necessarily start from square zero. In order to bring hound hunting back, it will require the legislature's approval. And so what this bill tried to do is this bill tried to allow the use of hounds for basically tree and free from like a perspective of human-bear conflict. But it also, the reason why it got so much opposition.

That's great. That's great, but it's not what I'm talking about. Right, but what it did also is that it allowed for the, it delegated the authority as it should be to the commission to determine whether or not there should be a hound hunting season. Got it. So it took it out of the legislature's hands, put it in the commission's hands

where it belongs and that was too much for the anti hunters in the state. But I think that it's not, it's not something that's out of the question. It just, I think these things have to happen in their stages. And now that we have the management plan, let's say we get a second bear tag, we expand the zones, we do everything we can, and we still don't hit the quota, and we can show the negative impacts to other species, mule deer, you know,

Which is big. Charismatic megafauna, like mountain lions. I mean, if you wanna like really make the argument, bears are negatively impacting mountain lions, right? Like we need to manage them to an extent where we can actually be successful. Now you're getting back into that Machiavellian stuff, man. I just feel bad for the mountain lions.

I need to be able to hunt more bears. So I don't know if you've, oh, the one thing that sticks out to me about this new plan, and I don't know if we've touched on it and I missed it, but it's got a new population model, which again is like one of these little steps that leads towards reframing the whole conversation, right? So the current statewide black bear population is what now? According to the best available science.

According to the new IPM, the integrated population model, it's 59,000 with a... God! But it could be up to 80. Let me scroll back up. And 59 is conservative. That's the low end. I wanna remind people where we are.

1980, 10 to 15,000 bears in Cali, best scientific guess, 10 to 15,000 in California. Hit me again now. 59,000 up to 80,000. Well, the most bears in the lower 48. The highest density of bears, black bears in the world in Northwest California. And that's, I mean, there's too many places claiming

to have the highest density of black bears. It's in the management. They take it. They like put their flag in the ground. They're like, anyone else come challenge us, but this is the data that we have. And like getting stuff like that. You know, that'd be a good thing for Atlas

is the different places that compete. The different places compete. New Jersey and California. For the densest well and then portions of southeast Alaska also claim to have the highest density. different places that compete. The different places. New Jersey and California. Dense as well. And then portions of Southeast Alaska also claim to have the highest density. Yeah. This is also per a hundred square kilometers.

So, uh, it's like 156 bears per hundred square kilometers is their metric, which is like just over four bears a square mile. So I don't know if someone else, someone else is like, we got the most bears in this quadrant or whatever, but I think a square miles are pretty good. Yeah.

No, I see it. Yeah. And then it depends on how big the area, like if I think a square mile is a pretty good metric. Yeah, I see it. Yeah. And then it depends on how big the area. Like if I put a bunch of bears on this table, could I say like, that's the densest population of black bears in North America? Yeah. This table.

So it's gotta be like, how much air are you talking about? Yeah. It's a sizable chunk of ground though. Oh yeah, it's huge. I mean, there's a ton of public land that you can hunt in California for black bears. Do you do some fall, do you do some specific fall black bear hunting? I'm, I'm excited, um, to do some, some more fall black bear hunting. I've been living in San Diego for 10 years. Uh, been hunting for 13 years.

Uh, my wife and I got into it. We've been trying to kill our San Diego deer, which might as well be the unicorn of the woods. She was successful. She killed one with her bow. Oh, seriously? That's cool. And we've been hunting together for a long time.

Now we have a couple of kids. It's trickier to get out together and do that. You gotta focus on crayfish. Exactly. Where I can really make bang for my buck. Stoey, rest in peace. Uh, but I've, you know, I've, I've gotten to do a little bit of black bear hunting, um, mostly when I'm like, I traveling for work, like we did, uh, we've been doing this big restoration project up in Northeast California.

And so when I go up there, I always have my deer tag and shot a deer a couple years ago and almost shot a bear, but little out of range, usually bow hunting. Um, but I, my friend who shared that picture, Ned, who does some guiding in the Eastern Sierra, he's been trying to get me to come up with him. So I'm pretty excited to get up and I got like 10 points for deer. So I'm gonna cash in next year.

I'm gonna scout my deer zone and go hopefully kill a bear this fall. I was hanging out with a guy in California this winter and one, this weird saying, man, like he, uh, he manages a ski area. Okay. I'm not gonna tell you what ski area. I don't want all hell fire to come down. I had respect for the town.

I respect for the individual. It's not like my story, my crime and punishment story. So check this out though, it's January. This is January in the mountains, okay? At a ski hill, I pull in to meet him. There is a bear standing under, like you park in a parking lot and you walk up this zigzag old rickety stairs to get in to enter the bar at the ski area

There's a bear standing under the porch standing there and his buddy another bear is standing off to the side of the stairs. I Can't like I'm like forgot his ID or what? It's like yeah You know you read like like people seeing these they can't comprehend? I'm stuck in the moment. I mean, the snow is, you can't walk through the woods. Okay, we're using snow cats to get around. You cannot walk around without snow shoes. I'm like feeling like, home, did I come through a fence? And this is like, I couldn't comprehend what I'm seeing.

He's like, oh no, man. These are like the town bears. He says they don't even hibernate anymore. They live in town. They walk around. He had a couple of years earlier, got one. And he's like, he's like, dude, man, I kept that under wraps. Well, it's, it's funny. He said, there's no way I could have told anybody about that.

It was on his property. He tagged it. Well, so this is, this is the thing with the two tags is they in Montana in the last legislative session, they're trying to pass a bill through the Fish and Wildlife Committee or in the House, whatever, to let hunters buy two lion tags in areas that had really low success rates. And there's this question of like, well, if people aren't killing lions there now, what's them having an extra tag going to do? And the point was made was that a lot of these areas

are places where there's not great access. And so some, or there's like considerations about hunting around city limits, things like that. And a lot of hunters wouldn't be like, are pretty conservative when it comes to like butting up against private property or whatever. And so in the case of like these town bears, if there are some guys that hunt and have

properties where they can hunt, you know, like having that person buy a second tag could, it's not going to tip the scale, but it, it increases harvest in these places where it's tricky to address it. I got me a permission on the spot. For a town bear. I just don't know if I can deal with the heat.

That's what I told them. They got properties. Man, you have no problem. Hmm. I was like, I don't know, dude, that seems like a good way of getting the argument with the old lady near, near one country, the old lady with a cat or a dog on a leash. There's an interesting tidbit too.

I think it's from the management plan, but bears that get accustomed to human food and are like your town bears, they were, they reproduce earlier and more often. And so like you're saying, they stop hibernating. Um, I think it's just like those bears and it's like two whole separate conversations, right?

Like how do you deal with the bears and Tahoe and Mammoth and like the human bear conflicts that are there because some of those places, you know, there's little pockets here and there that you can hunt, but the vast majority of those bears are not necessarily like the huntable population, right? That's just like an education campaign for people to stop being idiots and start locking up their food and you know, that's where that whole like, you know, human-bear conflict conversation comes in. But, you know, hunting will improve human-bear conflict, but it's not the like end-all solution, right? Some of these places like require education, require people being smart. Yeah. Yeah, I don't, you know, I keep talking about that, that approach of, um,

like I need to be clear about what I'm after here. I, I, I see people that are on my, I'm making a mess of this argument, let me back up. I often see people use a rhetorical strategy in these conversations that I'm uncomfortable with. They would say, don't, we can't ban mountain lion hunting in Colorado, because mountain lions are going to kill all of our children if we do that. Like like it's so tempting to do that. Cause it helps you get what you want. Yeah. To scare people into it's so tempting to vilify,

to be like Grizzlies. Like, here's the thing I believe is time. The D list Grizzly bears in the greater Yellowstone and Northern Rocky mountain ecosystems. Those, those, those, uh, deep distinct popular DPS is time. But I can't then go it's time because Grizzlies are going to kill us all. Which is how you get there. Cause then you make it an issue that moms, hikers, whatever, you make it their problem by

intimidating them. And I see people do it and very well intentioned people do it. And I'm always like, man, I can't personally traffic in this argument that I'm so afraid of a bear because we have bears all over our yard and fall. I'm so afraid of a bear in my yard that we have to hunt more bears. They're gonna kill us all. But I wish I could. Earlier I used like being like the Machiavellian approach. It's like anything to win, right? And I just don't like it, you know? I think it's worthwhile to point out, I think it's worthwhile to point out bear-human conflict, but I can't put it that my motivation, that I'm motivated first and foremost by preventing

bear-human conflict. You don't want to get out the pitchforks and torches for the scary monsters. Yeah, I'm motivated by, here's a renewable resource. There are people that want to use and utilize and enjoy this renewable resource and it will not be a detriment to the species. Therefore, since the species is fine, they'll continue to occupy the landscape in California. Let those people who would choose to exercise their historic privilege of utilizing the resource for food, skin, whatever, allow them to continue to do so because it doesn't imperil the integrity of the species.

If you got to get there by talking about bears, eating your dog's food, I'd do it, but rather not. I think an interesting take on that too, is that when you talk about like problem bears, right. And depredations and relocations, and this goes for like large carnivores. In California, we have an interesting perspective, um, for a lot of mountain lions.

And we relocate a lot of these, in these depredation instances, we relocate. Um, and I know particularly for mountain lions in, uh, the Sierra Nevadas and the Eastern Sierra, where we have an endangered, uh, subspecies of bighorn sheep, there are problem cats when, um, the sheep come down low enough, there's like a big snow year, the sheep come down low and they

just get massacred by these mountain lions. And particular mountain lions will kill a bunch of sheep. So they'll take that Take it. There's you know instances where they've taken that cat and moved them 150 miles away comes right back starts killing sheep again Hmm, they do it again 300 miles away comes right back and keeps killing chill and so it's like okay At what point are we spending resources like, you know, if we can you know?

If we don't have to kill it sure sure. If we can, if it can be a huntable, you know, animal, great. But, you know, at what point are we spending resources to basically just put a bandaid on something that's gonna come right back in? So I think that's the question there. It's like, you can't, yeah, you can't be fear mongering that, you know, the bears are gonna kill us all. But also like, we have to be smart about our strategies

and how we're using hunting as a management tool and how we're employing depredation to, you know, like prevent problem bears from coming in and killing like the lady in Downeyville, right? Like, which was, I think, part of that, like catalyst of that story. Yeah, that was like a very emblematic story where here's a person complaining about a bear,

the bear eventually comes in her house and kills her. And it was like, yee, right? Um, I might have seen that bear too, cause I, my friend lives like a mile or two down the road. Was that right? Um, and, and I've seen bears in this place. I've, I've hunted deer up there and, um, you know, I had a couple of looks at bears.

So after that, I was thinking like, I wonder if I saw that bear. Like, man, I wish I got closer. Yeah. Here because grizzlies are ESA animals, they'll go to great ends to move a problem grizzly bear. For the most part, when you tattle-tail on a black bear for doing something bad, I'm always telling people not to tattle-tail on the ones around town. Like if enough people tattletale on a black bear, he's dead. Because think about like this, you got to move it 250 miles to get out of where it's not, you know what I mean, where he's not just going to show back up. So here you have an understaffed agency

with, you know, budget constraints like any wildlife management agency is going to deal with, you got a very healthy population of black bears, a growing population of black bears, a black bear starts killing some chickens. Are you really going to send a guy out? He's going to catch it. You're going to pay him the whatever days it takes to bring that thing 250 miles away, come back. Right. It's just, that is, this is not the time and money is going to use dogs to do it. That, you know, dog teams are like how they'll get a contract houndsman to come in and catch those bears off. I mean, they'll do traps, but yeah, and culvert traps, dogs, whatever. But it's like, they're not gonna, um, you know, they're not gonna spend the time and money on it. It's just, it's burdensome.

And then at any given time, like September comes and I had a guy tell me one time, like in this town, September comes, they were, they were monitoring like 11 or 12 in town. Hmm. The people are calling up complaining about. So, uh, I don't know what that has to do with anything, but it's just interesting about how they view it. Then you got these guys here dressing up like, dressing up like bears. That's just another day at the office. So where do you think is going to wind up happening? I think I can say with somewhat you know confidently that I think this year we'll see a second bear tag. We'll see expanded hunting zones into Northeastern California. Maybe a little tweaks to the seasons but nothing substantial there.

More generous tweaks. I don't know as much here. This is where we start to get into like a little bit more uncertainty. The San Luis Obispo is a lot of people that are calling for bear hunting down there. There was an effort maybe about like 10 years ago to establish a bear hunt there because

it's been historically closed. Um, and the department had said there, there's a thousand bears and we should hunt them. And then there was a big effort, um, and the department had said there, there's a thousand bears and we should hunt them. And then there was a big effort, um, to block that saying, you know, you don't have enough data. You don't have enough research. They did a study in 2014 to 2015 is pretty short.

It's pretty small sample size, but the study indicated they thought there was only like a hundred bears there. And so that was kind of like the proof of the pudding that no, we're not going to do a bear hunt here. There's not enough. Um, and so I think San Luis Obispo still is like a wild card. The genetic diversity down there is not the same as it is in all the other areas, even though it's,

it doesn't warrant any concern or management action. So I think if there were to be maybe another study or some more research that could be done into the population there, I think we could definitely see hunting established there, but I don't know that that's going to happen this year. Spring season. Yeah. What's that going to take? I think that's going to take, I think it's

going to be a walk before you run. So I think we need to like lay this foundation where we're at, show, I mean, hopefully we hit the quota. I don't think we need to like lay this foundation where we're at, um, show, I mean, hopefully we hit the quota. I don't think we will necessarily show that like, there's still more management that needs to happen. Yeah.

Um, and then we start looking at, you know, what's next, right? Is it spring season? Is it dogs? Um, you know, is it dogs before spring season so that you can have a better opportunity to, you know, you know, sex the bear and when you got it up in a tree and make sure it doesn't have any cubs, like those are the types of arguments, um, that I think the key is to have a better opportunity to, you know, you know, sex the bear when you got it up in a tree

and make sure it doesn't have any cubs. Like, those are the types of arguments that I think the community is a little bit more split, but that we need to have as we move forward. But it, you know, in order to like not provoke that substantial backlash and another bill in the legislature, I think we got to take these wins, like, and just chip away. But we are on the, you know, we're moving forward, right?

We're not on the defensive anymore, which is is promising right? It's like it's a really it's a great time To have our department and our Commission Using the science we have new like updated robust science to advocate for like better management and better hunting opportunity And so I'm I'm really optimistic in California Where we're gonna go. Hopefully we just keep chipping away. Let's do a quick roundtable better hunting opportunity. And so I'm really optimistic in California. Where we're gonna go, hopefully we just keep chipping away. Let's do a quick round table. If you could have, if you're the king of...

California? You're like Reagan. You're Reagan. You're the king of California. And you could, someone said, okay, you can have back spring bear hunting or you can have back hound hunting in the fall. I'd do hounds. Brody's on hounds.

With that number of bears, yeah, hounds. Corinne? I feel like I'm not qualified to speak. Are we talking about this as a management tool or just what I wanna do? What you wanna do. Oh. Not what you wanna do.

Oh. Just for the betterment of hunters. Oh, someone said, okay, I can't do both, I can do one. I mean, I'd restore hound hunting because that's, that was the traditional use up till the 80s, right? How bad is poison oak in the spring? Plus like I got questions. Oh, it's terrible. That's when I got the worst turkey hunting.

You just get the dogs go through the poison oak and you stand on the outside. Yeah, hound hunting. I'm not going in there. It seems like in a lot of California, a spring season would be a lot different than like a spring season in Montana, just based on like climate weather, right? Like when the bears are all popping out in May, like, I don't know that that's like, No, this is a mountainy. I know in places, yeah, but there's like a lot of country where it might not be. Yeah, it might not be as they might not be as concentrated Yeah, yeah, it'll vary I think by geography for sure. Yeah, even without the poison oak question

I would say I would say as well hounds Just to have that just to have that win for houndsmen. Mm-hmm who get beat up on all the time Yeah, I agree. Anything else you want to tell us about? Just the three million acres of public lands for sale. Yeah, but that's, that's the show. It's off topic. It's not off topic. It's also out of time because it's the release schedule. We can't just put these up when we want. Yeah No, I know Soldiers cut that out By the time you say that it'll be something different tomorrow. Yeah, exactly. Um

If it wasn't that's what we'd be talking about Bullfrogs Yeah, when you guys gonna come come kill some bullfrogs with me? How many you getting? We're getting like, our good nights are like 30, 20 to 30. What? Yeah, big one, big bullfrogs. Can you 22 them or how are you getting them? We're shooting them with pole spears mostly, like wine slings, spear fishing stuff. Are you allowed to 22 them? Nope. Do they, uh. We couldn't do that where I grew up either. Do they treat them like an invasive species there? Like you're just allowed to get as many as you want?

Yep. Yeah. No, no season invasive species. And I'm doing it with the forest service because they've got a population of, uh, endangered Arroyo toads that the bullfrogs are just hammering. And so we go in, shoot the bullfrogs, eat them. It's my wife's favorite food. And yeah, it's a good time.

Oh, I could also tell you guys about the- What kind of ground are you on? Where are you doing this at? It's like, you know, riparian, little creeks and things that, you know, kind of spread out into the sort of marshiness. Are you hearing them in there? J'rum.

Yeah, if it's- Jugga rum. If it's like, you know, a, what was it? May. It depends on when it gets warm enough, but then when they're breeding and you hear them doing the like. Are you lighting them up or hitting them in the daytime?

Oh, we're lighting them up. Yeah, we're going at night. This, I mean, as a, we're, my friend, who's the biologist, I mean, we both have, he's got three kids that are little. I got two, right? We don't have time. And so kids go to bed.

We're like, wives don't care that kids are asleep. You know, we don't have to work. I'll have to take a day off and we just go out there for hours shooting frogs. You know, in Michigan, it's one of the dumbest, the dumbest game laws in Michigan that I'll never understand is, you cannot hunt bullfrogs with artificial light in Michigan. And this is a place where exactly zero people hunt bullfrogs since I left. Like how that even came to be on anyone's mind I'll never understand. You cannot use the artificial light to spear a bullfrog. Like, I'll never, like how that even was like

on the radar of somebody. Fair chase. Yeah, which means there's no bullfrog culture. Yeah. It's like getting rid of hounds. That's no bullfrog culture. That's sad. You pole spear them.

Yep. Have you just tried getting a big gig with like a 12 foot handle on it? We've, I mean, I don't have one, but I've taken, I have a long pole spear him. Have you just tried getting a big gig with like a 12 foot handle on it? We've, I mean, I don't have one, but I've taken, I have a long pole spear. I've got like a nine foot pole spear. And I'm putting some, I put some weird things on the end of it that I've been able to find.

So it's basically a gig, right? But then you've got the sling. So you can get, you can get some range on it, right? Shoot that thing out in the middle of a little pond. And then big old fatties. Big fatties. Like show me the legs up with your hands, how far the legs in the middle of a little pond. Yeah And then big old fatties big fat like show me the legs up with your hands How far the legs from the tip of his toes to his hips to his pelvis? Oh, I mean, they're like that fat around No Yeah, bullfrog. Yeah, they're like chicken legs. I mean they're from the

Really? Just some good legs California's Peak month out there? It, we just kind of, we're just kind of coming out of it probably. Um. What's poison ivy situation like in there? Oh, it's chilled out.

Southern California is not so bad. Um, poison ivy, poison oak's really more like. I'll just stay in the water. Yeah. There's, there's no. That would be fun, man. 20 to 30 at night. And you're, and it's good for conservation, right?

Like, um, Can I be square with you though? No. Do you really think, does, does like, there are so, when you look at wildlife management, invasive species management, um, with the exception of with the exception of nutrients in Chesapeake Bay and maybe some other examples are there really any case studies in which something was mechanically removed we're never getting rid of these bullfrogs we're not living straight with I live it under any false but yes like you like lion like lionfish

is like you're gonna get them all huh yeah but it's like people that are shooting lion, like lionfish is like, you're going to get them all. Yeah. But in this area, like we are hammering them to the extent that they're not there. It's allowing more Arroyo toads to reproduce. So from a conservation perspective, like it's, it's having an impact while if we were to stop doing this in five years, it'd be a bazillion more bullfucks. Right. Like, so it's, yeah, you're, it. So it's like any kind of control.

Yeah. It's like it's targeted helpful control, but it winds up being that that toad will remain basically conservation dependent on some amount of mechanical removing. Likely, yeah. But I mean, I'll travel for a good bullfrog hunt no matter what.

Cause those are good numbers for big fatties. Yeah. And, and you get the spearfishing combo. You know, shoot some, shoot some frogs at night and some fish during the day. Really? Oh yeah. You want to go spearfishing. What would we go for calicoes and like, like sheep's head or what?

If it's the summertime, like right now, depending on what you wanted, like definitely could find some calicoes. You might find a halibut. If we went out into the kelp bed, good chance you find a yellowtail or a white sea bass. But if you want like a- I don't believe in white sea bass. I don't think they're- I don't believe that's- If you want to surefire guarantee, like I will put you on a fish, it's the corvina. Oh, really? A hundred percent because they are, they're in five feet of water less. I mean, they're right there feeding on sand crabs on the shore.

And so I've taken people that have never spear fished before in their lives and just dragged them out and they, you have to be somewhat comfortable in the water. Cause every once in a while wave will just toss you on the sand. Yeah. Cause you're in there at like this much water

trying to get in and shoot these things, but uh, you can shoot a lot. It's a lot of fun. I got a lucky there. I got a, not San Diego, but I got a lucky, a yellow tail. Oh, nice. Doing a bunch of other stuff. And that luck didn't do yet, which is the only yellow tail I've ever gotten.

I got one on my kayak and then had a hammerhead, uh, come in and try to get it. Oh, really? Yeah. That's cool. I was a three miles out. And did you save the fish? Oh, hell yeah. Yeah. I didn't.

That wasn't, I, after I got in, it was like an hour, um, paddle back in or, you know, I had one of those pedal kayaks for my neighbor let me borrow. And, uh, this thing circled us and bumped my boat for an hour. We got into shore. We have GoPro videos. He just wanted that fish. Oh yeah. Just smelled the blood.

The blood from the gaff was, um, just coming in the water and I was holding the tail like this in between my legs as I was pedaling and I got to shore well right before I got to shore went through the surf break and I was like the 10-foot hammerhead behind me sorry dudes and then I got into shore and I tried to like open my hand because I had so much adrenaline I had to like pry my fingers off this fish because he was just like it's not gonna get it. That frog hunt sounds fun. Big fatties.

Big fatties. Broom. Round here, all you hear is bing. You know what that is? Bing. Someone shooting and missing? No, that's people thinking they hear a bullfrog, but it's a green frog.

Oh, yeah. Bing. Something right out back here. Yeah, you want that b frog. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You want that? Oh yeah. It makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. That's my dad said about the smell of German cigarettes, man.

The hair on the back of his neck stand up. Thanks for coming on the show, man. Yeah. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. I hope you get like, uh, let's get, uh, let's get some, uh, bear hunting in California back on the thing. Come on down.

Yeah. Cause you know, you guys got a, people like to hack on California, but if you guys get some big wins like that, people start being like, I love that place. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's, that's a sportsman's paradise for, if you know like, I love that place. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's, it's a sportsman's paradise for, if you know, the right species to go after, um, or if you draw that tag that, you know, you save up your points, right? Well, this is the final thought on it.

And it's something I bring up a lot. Like everywhere you go in the country, everywhere you go, there's two people next door to each other. everywhere you go, there's two people next door to each other. There's the guy that like, there's too many people now fishing game did this. The wolves did that. The, the, the, the, the, the, the, and they sit in their house and bitch and neck always like somewhere right around his house is the dude who's like,

dude, you can't even scratch the surface. There's so much to do. Do you know what I mean? They're neighbors. Everywhere you go in the country, you will find those two people in very close proximity to each other. I always try to be with the dude who's like, you can't scratch the surface. No. So keep getting after it. Yeah. Just looking in the wrong place,

man. Yeah. You sound like you can't scratch the surface kind of guy. Yeah. Love it. As long as I can do it after my kids go to bed. Oh man. Thank you. This is an iHeart podcast.