The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 801: Extinct Elk, Meat Processing, and the Latest News | MeatEater Radio Live!

Episode Date: December 5, 2025

Hosts Brody Henderson, Janis Putelis, and Randall Williams catch up with Jim Heffelfinger about all things elk subspecies, put on their chaps for a news roundup, chat with butcher Anna Borgman about the meat processing she does at Chaos Farms, and pit two listeners head-to-head in a Hot Tip Off. Watch the live stream on the MeatEater Podcast Network YouTube channel. Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey, everybody. Welcome to Mediaator Radio Live. As always, it's 11 a.m. on Thursday here at Meteeter HQ in Wintry, Bozeman, Montana. It's 8 a.m. in Maui, where it's currently about 75 degrees, which sounds pretty nice. It'd be nice to be out there hunting pigs and access deer and shorts and a t-shirt. But anyway, I'm your host, Brody. I'm joined today by Janus and Randall. Good morning.

I think you know these guys. Today we're going to talk to our favorite local wild game butcher Anna Borgman. And we're all going to chat with our friend Jim Hefflefinger about lumpers, splitters, and extinct elk. And we've got a news round up for you and another round of hot tip-offs from our listeners. so we're going to get right into it and have some fun today. Before we get into the first interview, big game season is over. It's kind of sad.

Oh, I got the mega post big game season blues going right now. Yeah, yeah, it's kind of sad, but I mean, they're still hunting to be done. What do you guys got playing for the next one? Do you guys get the blues too? Oh, yeah. Big blues, big blues right now. I don't really have any plans. at the moment.

No. Trying to figure out what tags I'm going to apply for. Got the calendar for 2020 6. Yeah, so get into

that a little bit later. Looking at season dates and points and all that stuff. Yeah. Mountline season's open. That's right. Yeah, I've already had

a couple days out there. Found some tracks, but they were going into private so we didn't cut loose on them. Yeah, we're getting some snow now, which is good for you too. Oh, yeah. It's nice.

It makes it life easy. Are you, you mentioned Maui and how nice to be there. Are you already sick of the cold? and we're not even barely in December. I get sick of the real cold stuff easy these days. Do you think you're going to turn into a snowbird?

No, but eventually I might turn into like a mid-south bird. Like if I moved, I'd want to be somewhere where there was seasons and it snowed once in a while. So I'm not there yet, like a Missouri. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe I'll buy some land from clay and moving down there. Ooh, Arkansas. Yeah, I, for whatever reason, this cold snap. hit pretty badly well that's because we had like 50 degrees all november and then one day it's

just like 10 degrees and blowing snow and then we were i was taking the taking yani's trailer back to his house and we got two pickup stuck and a trailer stuck at his house yeah geez man get that plow truck out well we did well he did because he needed to pull me out with the plow truck one nice thing about the cold is i think we're going to hopefully get some some early spearing ice and i'm tentatively planning a spear and trip with the boys for pike and hopefully like worked some pheasant hunting into that too tuscani or where no no oh montana baby gotcha got some big pike here yeah um so that'll be fun over christmas break hopefully it stays cold enough and we'll get to get some good ice call me if you go i'd like to go do that are you going to

be around over break yep all right can i go too yeah man Perfect. You got a spear? I don't have a spear, but I just go grab one out of Steve's garage. I was just thinking about, I got a bunch of decoys. Yeah. I'd just like to watch. We should take a whole posse out there, man.

It's fun. Empty a few cans and bottles. Put some tip-ups out. Oh, nice. Yeah, that would be super fun. Yep. All right. Enough talking about our fun.

We got to get into the serious stuff and move on to our first guest. Jim Helfinger, many of you guys have seen or listened to him on the podcast. So hopefully you know them. But do we got Jim up yet, or did he disappear on us? Oh, he's still here, but he's not in yet. Let's bring him in. There he is. Jim, for people aren't familiar with you, just quickly introduce yourself and let us know what you do and then we'll get into the nitty gritty.

Yeah, I've been, I'm a wildlife science coordinator for Arizona Game and Fish Department. I've been with their department for 33 years, and probably most of my focus there has been big game management, Western big game. my chair a western North America mule deer working group and then also involved in Mexican wolf recovery last 15 years. Nice. But you also do some work with elk, which we're going to talk about today. I do a lot. Interesting things. The big reason I wanted to have you on today is because you're doing some pretty cool work with Merriam's elk. And if you're not familiar with Merriam's elk, jump in and correct me wherever I screw up, Jim, but Merriam's elk are an extinct subspecies of elk and Jim's doing some work trying to figure out like were they

different than other elk like do they deserve the subspecies designation all that stuff so we're going to talk about that but before we get to that we got to talk about lumpers and splitters so Jim can you real quick explain like the two basic schools of thought um that biologists kind of fall into when it comes time for someone like yourself to like identify and classify wildlife species and subspecies. Yeah, absolutely. There's a, you know, we've got to classify animals as species. And then when we start classifying animals as subspecies, things get a little sketchy.

And so there's this concept of lumpers and splitters and people fall into one category of the other or somewhere in between. And it basically at the most basic level is the lumpers are focusing on similarities between animals. Like they might look at all elk and just say, you know, they're basically elk. They differ a little bit in the east. in the west, but they're all just elk, so they're all one kind of animal. Other people focus on differences, and they might say, well, this one's a little darker. This one has antlers that tend to crown a little bit more, and these have like smaller antlers. And so those are like the splitters that want to split these animals up into a whole bunch of different

categories. We'll talk about Miriam Duck was named after Seahart Miriam. Miriam actually designated 84 different brown bear and grizzly bear species, not even subspeachia. Yeah, that's what I was going to get at. Like, I tend at myself. to like kind of lean towards the the lumper school of thought um because the splitters can get out of control um i think at one point there is like i'm just throwing a number out there but steve and i are working on a book right now and it comes up there um where there's like over a hundred different subspecies of canada goose at one point which is kind of ridiculous but there's good reasons for splitting, too, when it comes to managing species on, like, a regional or more

local level, like having subspecies can allow for better management of those animals. Sometimes they'll focus on animals. But pure taxonomists, though, we don't split animals just so that there's some conservation focus on that animal. Taxonomy is a pure science of are those animals really different? And then if they're different, then we should probably do some different conservation action. Right, right. Okay, so let's talk elk and have you run through the generally accepted subspecies of elk in North America, both living and extinct. And we've got a map that you're going to explain isn't quite accurate, but hopefully can help people visualize where these different elk subspecies live now or lived before they went extinct. Yeah, sure. I say

that map and I said, this is wrong. Because it's not 100% right, but it's the closest representation of just generally these different subspecies that people have been recognizing over and over again. The eastern elk people hear about east of the Mississippi. Those things disappeared so quick that science didn't really catch up and document many specimens. They weren't studied physically. So we don't know a lot about whether they differ in the east. But the Manitoban elk in the middle of the continent and Rocky Mountain elk, all the genetic work that's been done, they don't. separate out genetically as different subspecies. And I suspect if we had the same kind of data for

Eastern Elk, you'd see Eastern Manitoba and Rocky Mountain really just the same thing. And when you say like this is this map is like original range. Like obviously there's not Manitoba and elk running around in Kansas right now. Yeah, you cut out there for a second. But there's no geographic barriers that would have like isolated those three. individual animals, those subspecies. Yep. So what's that a total of six, six subspecies we've got? Right.

So those are three in the Continental. And then the Roosevelt and the Tule elk, a lot of different genetic analysis have separated those out. So genetically, they will break out as separate subspecies. And we don't know, because they were isolated. And so in that isolation, they created some genetic differences and they're a little bit different. We don't know how far those differences, how far they were isolated,

go back in time, like if we went back 400, 300 years, they may have been all the same, and it's really human influence isolating those populations. We don't really know that. Bottom line is Roosevelt and Tully will break out genetically. Rocky Mountain Manitobin and what little we know about Eastern really don't break out separately. Go ahead. Jim, could you, this is Randall, when you say that Manitoban elk don't break out genetically compared to like a Rocky Mountain Elk, can you describe some, I assume then the difference that has been identified in the past to make that distinction is just a physical

visual characteristic. Can you describe what that is? Yes. The physical descriptions that people use to describe these different subspecies, they're oftentimes like they shot an elk or they shot two elk, and they said, these look kind of darker, and so they drew a big polygon

on the map, and they said, this is the eastern elk. They gave it a subspecies name, and they said this is a new subspecies. And in most cases, those sub-species are described separately based on a couple little general characteristics. They would not hold up to modern-day kind of scientific thinking at all. What about Roosevelt versus Rocky Mountain? Like, you can look at those, to someone who's looked at a lot of elk, you can look at

like a mature Roosevelt bull and a mature Rocky Mountain bull. and there's like obvious physical differences, right? Yep, absolutely, yeah. Bigger body on the Roosevelt, smaller, heavier antlers on the Roosevelt. Yeah, more tendency to crown out on Roosevelt. You're right, physically you can tell. And so it's interesting then that genetically those break out too.

So it kind of supports that. And Dooley elk being a little smaller, duly elk as a population, were bottlenecked. They got down to a very small number of individuals, and now they've recovered somewhat. So some of those genetic differences might, just be that they had a lot of inbreeding when there was a small population and then grew up. But those physically two look different than Roosevelt and a big Rocky Mountain.

So the two that are considered extinct are the Easterns, which I think were considered gone by like 1880. The last ones might have been Pennsylvania, I read. You'd probably know better than me. And then there's these Merriams elk, which are southwestern elk from Arizona. Were they in any other, like, of the contiguous United States or just Arizona? Arizona and New Mexico. Yeah, and here's where the map is wrong. A textbook came out called Elka North America, actually, and it showed these long two fingers of distribution going into Mexico.

But there's no evidence of that. It's on a publisher paper, and they looked at all the archaeological digs, and they found no evidence of Elk in Mexico. So that's in error. They were really, a Miriams Elk was described as being central and northern Arizona and New Mexico. okay so let's focus on them uh since that's what you're working on um tell us like what you're trying to do and then then we'll get into like if you can like weigh i know your your work isn't

done yet um but are you trying to figure out it like if they're like if they warrant a subspecies designation or like what is the work you're doing with merriams out and and part of that is not just a G-Wiz thing. Part of that is some people will complain and say, well, you know, the Miriams elk we had in the Southwest were very different ecologically. And now you brought elk from Yellowstone in to replace them. And they're different, like more damaging ecologically,

which is there's no evidence of that. And so part of it is this complaint that you've got different elk here. And that remains to be seen. Because if you notice on that map, northern and central Arizona and New Mexico, butts right up against Southern Colorado in southern Utah. And in Arizona, there's a thing we call the Grand Canyon, which is a really big ditch that runs across there.

So there's some separation there. But there's a connection all through Southern Colorado into northern New Mexico. And so there's a question about, were those really different? Because there were only three Miriam Del specimens that were saved for science in museum. So the last couple decades, scientists have been talking about just three specimens of Miriam Del. So let's look at those unknown Miriams Elk specimens. And there was only three when we started. We spent, I spent a week in Smithsonian, spent time in the American Museum twice.

We combed every elk specimen in there. We went to Chicago Museum, went to UC Berkeley, looked at elk specimens. We now have identified 13 Miriam Delks specimens instead of three. We have genetic samples from all 13 of those Miriam Delk specimens. Can I stop you for one second? When were they gone from Arizona? Right. So they're gone in 1906, the last record in Arizona and about the same time in New Mexico.

We brought Yellowstone elk in 1913 through 1928, basically the first onslaught. About the same as what was happening in Pennsylvania with Eastern Elk. They were bringing Yellowstone Elk about the same time in the 19thens. And so we only had a gap from 1906 to 1913 where the old elk died out and the new elk were brought in from. Yellowstone. So there's always been a question, did some of the original Miriams Elk, were they down in the bottom of canyon and they made it through that 10 years or so? Now interbred with the Yellowstone Elk. And maybe Arizona elk are big because they've got genetics from the Miriam Delk. There's a lot of talk about that. Yeah. So that's an interesting

side part of it. So we've got these, we got 13 samples instead of three. Extracted DNA. We send in DNA from not only those 100-year-old Miriam Delk samples, but 100-year-old Colorado samples and 100-year-old Yellowstone National Park samples. So we were comparing apples to apples because genetic could change through time. But we're comparing elk at that time 100 years ago. And we sent in 50 samples and we got usable DNA from 48 of those 50 samples, which is amazing when you're talking about a 100-year-old shed antler that we've got DNA out of. So that was really the first step is what samples are available.

Can we get DNA out of it? And now we're not complete. There's a PhD student, Kenzie, who's doing this for her PhD. and she's only a year into a four-year PhD. So we certainly don't have results, but we've got really promising extraction to DNA. We've got some good quantities of DNA to play with and now analyzing whether there's any differences

between Miriam Belk and another hope. So you're still waiting on results is basically where you're at. It's kind of surprising to me that they, you know, a species that was hunted and just like considered extinct in 1906, like just barely over 100 years ago, that you had that much trouble finding samples. Like, you think there'd be old racks hanging in barns and, like, bones pop it. Like, you'd think there'd be some around, right? Right.

And I get those emails, but if you're doing science and you're analyzing differences between Miriam's elk and other elk, you can't use some antler that someone had in the bottom that people said was Mirren's Elk. So we've got to make that clean break of known Miriams Elk in museums. But it will also be interesting if we find a difference between Miriam's Elk genetically and other Elf, we can use that as a diagnostic tool to test some of those interesting antlers that are laid around. So, yeah, I wanted to pin you down and get a verdict from you, but that's not going to happen, obviously. Well, I've got to pin him down question.

Why is this worthy of your time? Oh, like I said, not only the interesting part, but we need to have some information to inform these criticisms that you've got the wrong elk here. You know, you've got this giant Yellowstone elk and it's destroying the assort and destroying the forest. And then also, it's also of great interest to our stakeholders and people that are interested in this. Do we have any Miriam Duck genes in today's Arizona elk? There's a lot of people forever that have been talking about like constant chatter. And it just on that alone will be pretty fascinating to have an answer. for that are you able to to put out like an opinion yet like were they different do you like

do you personally think you're just like wait he's a science man i know that i always got to ask you got to try and get them to say something yeah yeah that's yeah that's not the way science works so we'll see but but we're the mainstream media here jim we need to pin you down before the results you're in no i don't but i don't mind i don't mind highlighting the fact that we've got elk in Colorado that come right down to the northern New Mexico border. And you had elk all through northern New Mexico. It's hard to envision how just those elk in Arizona and New Mexico were substantially different. Right. I mean, the Grand Canyon over by Arizona could be seen as a barrier. But you've got what seems like continuous habitat. So it's hard to vision how somehow they broke out

to be really different in Arizona. There's like environmental factors involved too. Like why why are Roosevelt elk significantly different than Rocky Mountain elk? I would assume it's partially driven by the environment. They live like very thick, dark forests, so they don't need these huge antlers to display from a long distance. Like, what are the reasons there, do you think? Yeah, certainly when you have different ecological conditions, and that's a great example because you have like rainforests.

And so you have animals that tend to get darker in thick forests And animals out in the open plains like a Rocky Mountain elk tend to be more lighter and more cream-like. That happens with a lot of different animals. And also, open plains animals are more visual. So their rump patches sometimes are more vibrant, more white, more contrasting. Antlers are larger because they're more visible animals. Here, a Roosevelt elk sneaking around on the coastal rainforest, there's not a lot of visual cues that people are using. And so their animals can be smaller and darker and the body's darker.

And that's just an adaptation to local condition. Yep. So, I mean, with that in mind, it's hard to imagine Merriam's being that much different from Rocky Mountain Oak. You know, it's right, ecological. Habitat and nutrition is the same. Yeah, and I think you see it in the eastern, well, the elk that occupy the eastern range of elk now, like their antlers, when they're small, they look similar to ours. But like as they get bigger, they get very crowned out and they look very different. Like the bulls in Pennsylvania look very different than our bulls here. Part of that might just be because they're not getting hunted as much.

They live longer. They got easier winters. You know, I don't know. We're getting off on a tangent. But I want to talk to you, Jim, about what Janus brought up, which is all these very successful elk reintroductions that have taken place around the country. Like, when I was a kid, like, seeing an elk in Pennsylvania was, like, a big deal. It was like a very small reintroduced herd, and now they've got a whole bunch of them. Like, you can watch these elk on live cams in Pennsylvania, like during the rut, like, we've got these places where they congregate and you can just,

watch them on your computer um and the same those same reintroductions have happened in a few southeastern states and in the upper midwest and the interesting thing is like these are all like this is former habitat of eastern elk the eastern elk subspecies which you said we don't really know a lot about and how much different they might have been um i guess my question is It's like, like, how, how, like, these subspecies categorizations, like, if you can just plug a rocky mountain out into Pennsylvania or the, you know, the smoke, great smoking mountain national park, like, how valuable are these subspecies distinctions? If you can just, like, put it out from Yellowstone into one of these very different environments. And they just, they thrive. They do just fine.

And, you know, we see that with Turkey, certainly, too, with the turkey subspecies. But just because something in a different subspecies doesn't mean it's, like, not going to do really well in a different environment. But it does have local genetic adaptations and physical adaptations to that environment. So you can't, and then also you think about Rocky Mountain, Manitoba, and Eastern elk were probably the same. So when you're moving those animals, they probably aren't much different than what was there originally, even Miriam Delk, potentially. But if you could take a Roosevelt output in Pennsylvania, and they would probably do okay, but they're, not adapted to that environment. So there might be some underlying genetic things that make it harder for them to thrive. Cool. Well, you got to keep us posted on what you find out. I guess

you've got three more years of work you're looking at on this stuff. Yep, that's right. And there's other people doing a majority of the work. I did a lot of the sampling and involved in the beginning of it. Now the geneticists are sitting at the genetics lab bench doing most of the work. One interesting thing is that Seahart Miriam, who Miriam's elk is named after, he's the one who named Roosevelt elk after Theodore Roosevelt. And there's a letter that's on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. And it's Theodore Roosevelt writing back on the Department of Navy letterhead thanking Seahart Miriam for naming that elk after him. Yeah.

Wow. Yeah, we talked about this a little bit through email. Merriums, how many species? Does that guy have his name attached to? He named 71 species, but not with his own name. He has about 12 species that have his name on it. One interesting factoid, too, is that Vernon Bailey used to work for Seahart Miriam as a mammologist.

Vernon Bailey then married Miriam's sister. And Vernon Bailey is the guy who described Eastern Elk for science. So a lot of the same famous people running in the same circles. as you can see by that picture with Seahart Miriam driving Teddy Roosevelt around. Yeah, for sure. Jim, are you hoping to one day attach your name to a new subspecies?

Heffle finger eye. I was hoping to deer species. Heffle finger eye would be nice. Yeah. We'll keep our eyes out for one of those running around. We'll let you know. All right, Jim, we're going to let you go, have fun at that big Boone and Crockett

conference you're at right now. And we'll talk to you soon. Thanks a lot. Yep, see you. Interesting. stuff i want jim to you know it sounds like there's some some people in arizona who are upset about all these big giant bulls walking around and they want some smaller elk like jim to make those connections for us sure i'd be happy to help them with that problem well unfortunately i think it's

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we're going to pick one winner they're going to pick their friends they're going to pick their family and they're going to come out this is eligible for u.s. customer's own only Canadians. I don't know what to tell you. You're out of luck. It runs from December 9 to December 22. See you in town. Let's move on to a news roundup. I assign these guys a little homework to find some interesting news stuff that you guys should know about. I think we've got Randall first. Randall, what are you going to fill people in on? Yeah, this is not a very fun or exciting news topic, but Let's do it anyway.

I feel like this season, I've probably seen more news stories than in years past about accidental hunter deaths from gunshot wounds. The most recent one I saw was in Pennsylvania, which just opened like last week. Yep. Guy was shot in a deer drive. There's another one in Texas. And then there's two, one's actually very close to home here in Montana, and another one in Idaho,

and those actually involved law enforcement officers on their time off. And those two cases and the one that I saw in Texas, the circumstances were very similar. It was getting in and out of a vehicle and encasing and uncasing firearms. And it's just a good reminder, I guess, to always, you know, keep safety at front of mind. And no one ever thinks they're going to be that person involved in an accident like that and um you know we before the before we started recording here we're all saying we've

been in situations where someone had a loaded gun that they thought was unloaded and yep and um you know that stuff only happens when you when you aren't constantly challenging yourself like did i unload this you know did i see them unload this um and and it's just always got to be front of mind um so yeah i don't know that i've got much else there i the the one thing i will say in pulling these stories together and someone had sent me one of these earlier in the year there are fundraisers for the families of the two law enforcement officers who died one was a law enforcement officer from california who died in a in a hunt in Idaho i think in october um and his name is nathan cass k aas and there's if you go to help a hero dot com

There's a fundraiser for his wife and kids. And then a guy named Michael Floor, who is a, I believe he was a sheriff's deputy with Galton County here in Montana. And there's a go fund me from Michael Floor, F-L-O-H-R. So, you know, this time of year, we all look forward to it. And then when it's gone, we're all sad, you know. And it's kind of fun to tell stories and do all that. but it's a very serious business whenever you have loaded guns around. So just seeing all these in the headlines,

I felt compelled to bring it up. It's interesting. I doubt that there's been more this year on average than in the past, you know, like involving hunters, accidental shooting deaths. And I would also guess that in the same period of time, there were way more accidental shooting deaths among non-hunters that didn't make the news,

but these things tend to hit the headlines for, for whatever reason um but it is just a great reminder just to like always be safe yeah and sometimes you got to get up in people's faces about it because people like to act like it's not a not a big deal and as a guide uh you learn very quickly that like it's a uh there's no it's a no strike policy yeah i mean you just don't put up with any of it and if you have someone in your group that uh continues to do it you need to quit hunting with them right because it's just a matter a time till they make a mistake yeah and it's it's easy to keep all that stuff uh in mind when you're at the range and you're taking your time and and it's you're very methodical and how you

approach it but when you're hunting you know you're cold you're tired there's animals moving quickly you might um wear yourself out to the point that you're no longer thinking straight and you just got always double check and triple check and that's like even with when i'm hunting with my wife I'll ask her like did you unload it and she'll hand it she'll say yes and hand it to me and I'll stick my finger up in the chamber you know just yeah and I think you're just begging for trouble if you're the kind of hunter who's like it's hard not to be but like maybe you're driving from spot to spot or maybe you're even road hunting um we're like oh I got to be ready yeah I'm in the truck but I got to be ready um like having a like not even having one of the pipe

having a clip in the rifle whatever it might be like i don't think you can be thinking about like what happens if a buck pops out right next to the road kind of thing or right stuff like that oh it's killing me this fall in wisconsin i was climbing trees a bunch and going up in a saddle i would have to pull my rifle up you know with the string yeah and uh of course i wanted to be unloaded when i was doing that because you're literally pointing it up well i guess you could pull it up button for either way but um yeah you don't want to it to be loaded. But the bad part is that when you're

in that tree and it's, you know, 30 minutes before daylight and it's super quiet and then you got a rack one, you know? Oh, God. It almost made me want to like pull a loaded gun up the tree, but which I never did. But like, I just, I learned to actually, I would

take extra clothes so I could like cover a whole action with a jacket and then slowly just slide one in there and try to make it as quiet as could. Yeah, no shortcuts. Yep. Yonis, what do you got going? Big news

out of Idaho. I think it's big news. You know, a lot of us that live here in Montana and people that live all over this country like to hunt Idaho. You don't really want to go hunt there if you're into like elk and deer because the wolves have eaten most of them. But

if you want to give it a shot, they're going to make it a little bit easier. A lot of us complained in years past. This has all happened in probably the last 10 years because 10 years ago I hunted Idaho and I was literally able to buy a deer

license at the gas station with like five days left in the season and when I bought it the guy offered me a second one. That is no longer the case. The last whatever five to ten years you've had to either go

and stand in line or stand in a digital line like a queue. Stand in line in Idaho. Yeah. in Idaho or get online and stand in a digital queue and they gave you a number

and you know that's kind of the order that you would be you'd get to try to buy a license and it was a mess it was hard I think there was a lot of people gaming the system

took forever and they had more technology errors than we do on this program right it was not it was not cool it's pretty bad the way it worked is you were a set

like if you were going to do this online thing you were assigned a random number for a position in line. Yeah. So like last year I tried it and I think I had five devices open. Right. Like I had my wife's phone, my phone, a couple computers, maybe even like my daughter's iPad or something, right? The lowest number I had was 7,000 something.

Wasn't going to get a tag, or at least not one of the tags. Not the tag you want. I wanted. So now they've listened to the complaints and they're changing it. It's going to be just a strange. up application process. Very short application period, which I was surprised about,

December 5th to the 15th. It's actually opens tomorrow. You have 10 days to do it. You have to buy a hunting license to apply. The hunting license is non-refundable. The way I look at it when I do that is just that, you know, you're chipping in on conservation.

Sure. Because there's a good chance you're not going to get the tag. You're not going to get that. I think it's like 160. Yeah, it's not. nothing. It's in the upper half of the 100s. You know, it's, 185 maybe.

I think there will be people that are like, nah, you know, I'm not that committed, but the people who are committed will pay it. It's something other states do. So, you know, it's something to think about. You're like, you can end up not getting a tag and you're still in for whatever, $150, $20,000. And this is just for general season,

like regular old, what used to be, you know, what you'd call an over-the-counter attack. This is not. for their, what they call their controlled hunts. And so if you're, like, looking to apply for a special unit for a big buck in a special date range, this is not it. This is just for, like, the general season. You still have to pick, like, a unit. Yeah.

Yeah. Unit species, all that stuff. Non-residents have to have to pick a unit. But it's for, like, the general season. I think, I think it's going to be good. Hopefully it'll be less stress. And there's no, correct me if I'm wrong, but there's no. It's a total lottery, right?

Like, there's no, they're not going to have a preference point system or anything like that. It's just going to be a pure lottery. Yeah, Idaho doesn't have points for anything. Right. Which I like. Yeah. I like. I mean, you could, if you're an unlucky person, you could go your entire life and never draw a tag there.

You know, it is what it is. I like this system better than what, like, Colorado's got going. Yeah. And I think, like, the new, you know, more and more things are going to a, draw and like that's a bummer but the way that it was working before it if you could fly to idaho and spend money on a hotel room you know you were going to get it or or if you had an outfit or who would wait in line for you you'd get it so this just makes the the um playing fields it makes it levels the playing field for people and yeah like you said i think it takes a lot

of stress out of it yeah and what else i like about idaho and i'll leave it at this is that they They really, I forget what the numbers were, but they cap their non-resident numbers. And it's not that high. It's like 10 to 15K per species per, you know, deer and elk. And so it's, that way they're going to, they're going to give their residents and the few non-residents that get to hunt there. They're going to give them a quality hunt. And I would much rather have that every couple, three years than go and have a crowded hunt every year. Oh, yeah, for sure.

but don't go hunt there because of the wolves and the bears yeah i mean like i said last time i was there it didn't seem like there were many wolves or or uh many elk or or deer left because of of the wolves and lions eating them all but uh it's up to you yeah give it a try if you're we're feeling adventurous um speaking of wolves speaking of wolves um been a while since we've done a colorado wolf update and there's there's been some some action down there so i thought i'd give you guys a little update. They started their reintroduction, famously started their reintroduction program a couple years ago after a ballot box initiative. It's been going on for a little while now. There's currently about 30 in the state of Colorado, 30 wolves, and those were sourced from Oregon

and Canada, or part of those 30 are offspring of those reintroduced wolves. Over the last couple years, at least a dozen have died from various causes, including being lethally removed for livestock predation. The state's got a goal of reintroducing at least another 20 with an end goal of establishing a population of 200. But the thing is, it's like they're running out of options. They found themselves in a position where they're running out of options to bind places to get wolves. The ones they got from Oregon ended up being livestock killers. The ones they got from British Columbia, I think, have maybe also been, some of them have been involved in some of that livestock predation. But either way, like, Colorado wants more wolves.

It's to be determined whether they're going to get more wolves. Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana, they've always refuse to give wolves to Colorado, largely for political reasons. And recently, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service mandated that Colorado has to source its wolves from the Northern Rockies in the United States, meaning no wolves from Canada, no wolves from Alaska. So now they're getting pinched by the Fish and Wildlife Service. then they turned to Washington recently and Washington declined because they feel like they can't afford to take wolves out of Washington and risk the population they have reducing the population they have there Oregon also declined to provide to provide more wolves to Colorado so like two states that were kind of like politically aligned with Colorado it just bailed and said no we're not given them to you. And those are really Colorado's last best options to get wolves. I don't think they'll be able to get them like Great Lakes Wolves from Wisconsin or Minnesota. So we're kind of,

we're kind of in a holding pattern to see if this reintroduction is going to continue. There are other, they could go to some Native American reservations that might be willing to provide wolves. They tried that at one point. It didn't work out. So it'll be interesting to see if this reintroduction program continues. It's under the, there are people who are very unhappy with the money aspect of this in Colorado. The, the projection was 800,000 per year cost to the state that the voters agreed to. Last year, the program went wildly, it's consistently went over budget. Last year, it went wildly over budget, 3.5 million. Not, and that doesn't include a budget of several hundred thousand dollars to reimburse ranchers for lost livestock which they drained they

completely drained that that fund to reimburse ranchers um and some lawmakers in colorado are calling the situation out of control uh governor polis has been forced to cut the budget and lawmakers are forbidding colorado parks and wildlife from using remaining general fund dollars uh to acquire more wool so like they might be at a point where they're kind of treading water for a while you think Idaho would give them some wolves since they're so overrun with right they don't even have any elk and deer left but no yeah it's funny I was thinking politically yeah it's uh folks don't want to see wolves spread they're like folks in Montana Idaho don't want to be part of like sending

wolves to Colorado but on the other hand getting wolves out of Montana and Idaho yeah but it'd only be 10 or 15 of them so you know they can make that up pretty quick. But yeah, there's your Colorado update. There's still wolves there. We'll see how it works out with them getting towards that goal of 200 wolves. But right now it's not happening. Oh, it's going to be a major smudge, I feel like, on Polis's tenure.

Yeah. You know, the way he handled the whole situation where, like, they inserted himself into an issue. Yeah. They had wolves coming. Yeah. It was happening all on its own. and he like they he whatever had to make a big deal out of it and it is just yeah yeah and his wildlife commission played a big role like appoint appointees played a big role in it too

which like makes me think that some part of me thinks that those those wildlife commission people should be voted in not appointed in yeah i agree um okay phil what's the chat doing right now. Sure, really quick. I saw several of you had some questions for Jim during his segment. I emailed him and told him to go back and check those out if he feels obliged and he absolutely does not need to. But I did let him know that those questions are there.

So maybe you'll get a little DM from the conservation ringer himself. Let's see here. First off, Fishing Fanatics, nothing like sitting in the stand listening to Media Radio Live. Thank you. and then Nate, he's in the chat almost every week, got his first ever buck on Sunday. 146 and a half inches 12-pointer. And his first thought was Thursday can't come sooner enough

so I can tell the live chat and the crew. Holy moly, that's a pig. Yeah, all downhill from here. Yeah, that's going to be, that's a high bar. No free ads, but free hot tips. Justin says I just upgraded my on-ex subscription and have been doing a bit of playing around. what are your favorite features that are lesser known if you guys use any lesser known

onyx features um i like like like to plan stocks like figuring out yardage and things like that um i forget like the you can range finder yeah the yeah and other other manufacturers do that as well but you can link your range finder to that's a sweet like if you find a bedded buck that you know you're going to be out of sight of for a while like marking that spot and planning your stock that's a good feature I've been using the

now it's integrated with the Maltry cameras and so it's like an automatic filter just to go if you want to see just pictures from one camera where the Maltry app that takes a few more steps but on on X you can literally just click on the icon and see only the pictures from that camera

which is pretty slick that's real nice that's real nice the one thing that I've been I wanted them to improve for a while and then I think in the past two years they they added it but the snap to feature when you're like putting a route when you're building a route and you can actually snap it on trails right and and roads so I know exactly you know how far it is before I want to bust off the trail and and you know climb a ridge or something like

that because before you're always using just the linear like line which is like which yeah always shorter than what it is yeah exactly and so i yeah i build basically whenever i'm thinking about what i want to do the next day as far as like a hike i'll build it out in onyx and get an idea of mileage and elevation change and all that the 3d thing is good for that too because like you can look at the topo but it doesn't tell you how steep like you're only getting so much information so to be able to look at that slope and be like okay that's going to take some more time than i thought like that's cool Let's see

This is the question from Cord He says How often do your Western schools Go on lockdown For dangerous animals In the area He said that he had a mountain lion

Stroll through a neighborhood And they went into a two-hour shelter in place He says does that seem like an overreaction Have your kids' schools ever gone into some sort of like lockdown Because of a bear or anything like that No, I think they had a bear actually walk through Bozeman High a couple years ago Wasn't there a grizzly that showed up over by the elementary school in Bear Canyon a few years ago?

Yeah, nothing changed. I don't think. There was a, there was like a pair of mountain lines in Missoula that was hanging out at a bus stop. And they closed the bus stop. Probably smart. I remember that because it was right by my buddy's house. But, yeah, other than that.

I don't think it's like, yeah, sure, like we've got more large predators out west, but I don't think it's like it happens. It's not like we got bangle tigers out here. Like I think there's probably schools that have been shut down back east because a coyote ran through the playground. You know what I mean? Yeah, I remember when I was living in Chicago watching like a live news feed of a lion running through a neighborhood

and there was like a helicopter following, you know, it was like the OJ chase. And it ran through, I believe they might have even killed it like on a school playground. But it definitely ran through a school playground. but that was one of my favorite moments from my time there. But also in northern Minnesota, Mountline's probably something they're just not real familiar with,

and they might have just been overreacting a little bit, maybe. But they're probably don't see them too often. We've got Leland, who's been really hot on the trivia questions lately. He's been getting a lot of questions in there. He asked, the strangest animal you guys have Euro-mounted. He's having some squirrels done. If you have had anything strange. I did a turkey skull once, very proud of that.

The little stuff is fun, you know, turkey skulls, and I have a bobcat skull. What else? Steve's got, like, the whole collection of weasels. We got, yeah, we have a rack, we have a rack, one raccoon, we have a beaver skull. Beaver skull is real cool. They got some burly, solid skulls, man. Stuff like that. Yeah, I wanted to, I realized too late that I should have kept the skull from

my sandhill crane this year that would be cool yeah yeah and i realized that while i was taking the legs off and i had little drumsticks that were you know 14 inches long a really quick mogor says phil did you and randall knock up back a beer and hot dog after that last disinformation blunder you're going to have to be more specific mocour no that was uh that was when you told me the wrong thing about our radio live from last week do you remember when he gave me the wrong information about whether or not oh oh yeah then we had a fake argument and i and i had a fake argument and i asked if you wanted to get a beer um you said no but uh you want to get a beer after this yeah we will do that after this i but i don't the argument was not just so you know the argument was not

fake on my end well then good to know i guess geez uh all right Phil we've got a few more but yeah no i just want to let these guys know because it's going to have to be a kind of a quick turnaround on Phil's part which makes like life difficult but um we're doing a hot tip off and we're doing, Phil, we're going to do the listener voting thing, right? I've got, I'm prepped and ready to go. Okay. So be prepared as you're listening to, like,

vote on the hot tips that are coming up a little later. But we can do some more. We can move on, Phil. We'll do another round at the end of the show. Okay. Great call, Phil. Hunting big country isn't for the faint of heart. You got steep ground, long distances, and miles

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Canadians, I don't know what to tell you. You're out of luck. It runs from December 9 to December 22. See you in town. All right. Our next guest is Anna Borgman. She co-owns Chaos Farms, a butchering and meat processing business that serves the community and small farms here in southwestern Montana. She's been on the podcast at least a couple times.

She's been on radio and she's been on the main meteor. She judged an episode of. There you go. So you guys may have seen her before. Trivia, I believe, if I'm not mistaken. She came out to karaoke once. There you go. She's like basically a meat eater employee.

Anyway, she's also butchered and processed a bunch of animals for the crew when we're too busy to do it on our own. She did 10, 50 pound game bags of moose meat for me last year. And I can say she did a very outstanding job. So Anna, welcome to the. show um oh you did you went in there great um she's standing above the meet hopefully you can hear me all right yeah we can hear you um general rifle season just ended a few days ago here in montana but i imagine and by the looks of it i'm right you're still pretty busy yeah i it kind of seems like people uh hit it hard the last weekend so got cold we got a lot of calls yeah yeah exactly yeah

So we got a lot of calls and we were running around like crazy picking up. We picked stuff up for people and we drop it off. Yep. Back at, you know, the office or your house or whatever. So we were running around like crazy. We got quite a few elk in here right now, a little bit packed. Nice. How many deer elk do you think you do in a season?

Oh, geez. It's just the two of us. It's just my boyfriend and I. And we kind of take on our own animals, you know, like I'll say yes to whatever. I have time for it. He says that's what he has time for. Yeah, this isn't a situation where people can just roll up and drop something off to you. Like a lot of meat processors. Right. Like this cooler is, I bought a utility trailer and we just put in, you know, foam insulation and built out a cooler. So it's pretty small. We pack it. But we do, I don't know, fewer than 100 for sure. But I should keep track. But it's a lot of animals.

But more in a season than most people will do in their in their lifetime. Sure, definitely. Absolutely. But that kind of gets to where I'm going with this is you're not one of those like mega meat processors processors that are doing hundreds and hundreds of animals a year, which like allows you to like operate with a much higher level of care and quality, I would say. then I'm not bagging on meat processors and processors in general, but like the more they do, it's possible that the quality level is going to go down if they're cranking out hundreds and hundreds of animals.

So as someone who's working with the goal of like doing this in small batches and putting out a really high quality product, I want to get into first what you'd lay out as like best practices for hunters before they even make the call to you. And then the most common mistakes people make out in the field before they even call you. Yeah, I'd say best practices. I'm kind of the hill that I will buy on right now is take those hooves off. We get a lot of stuff that has hooves on it. And I totally, you know, I get it to an extent that you're trying to get it out of there and it's easier to stick it in a game bag with that hook on.

But if you're packing stuff out, A, it's extra weight and B, if you've just done a good job, you know, skinning it and keeping it clean, you're kind of screwing it up at the end there by adding more hide into the bag, more hair, whatever was on that animal's hook, whatever it was. And then by the time we get it, you know, it's just, it's a little more work for us. And we can't, I mean, you can see these quarters hanging back here. Like, we can't hang it with a hook on. It's so close to the ceiling up there. So, and it's really easy to take off. I just put up a video on my Instagram, I think yesterday of how to take off that. You're talking like basically the shin, like the whole lower leg.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Like you just run your hand up and that first joint that you feel, there's a little bit, little ridge in there. You just get your knife in there. And it should, I mean, you can kind of hit it from underneath and it'll just crack off. Yep. Yep.

And you won't cut the Achilles tent. Anything else that's, that's helpful or people should be doing to, like, make sure they're going to have some, like, high quality meat once it's in the freezer? Keeping stuff as clean as possible, obviously. That helps out our whole, you know, us processing, but it also, it's going to, you're going to get more meat back because we don't have to trim as much off. Yeah. And then I'd say, I know, Yanni and I've talked about this reasoning, right? But just at least getting that windpipe out of there because that thing carries so much bacteria. And it'll hold on to heat, too.

And so if you can pull that out of there, you're going to get neck meat. You're going to, things are just going to stay cleaner. So, yeah, I think we do get. You got any opinions on gutting versus gutless method? No, not really. I mean, if you can get as much meat as possible off with the gutless method, that's fine. I, uh, I, I tend to pick up a lot of roadkill.

We live on a highway. Yeah. Um, you know, I go, I am on it all the time. So I see when stuff gets hit and I'll pick it up. So I end up doing a lot of gutless method processing because those things are usually a little exploded. And I don't see a problem with it. You know, if you can if you can gut it, that's great and get the whole thing out. Obviously, you're going to get a little bit more meat off that. But, um, no, I have no problem with the gutless method at all. Gotcha. Okay. Um, what are like the, the, the, the most common mistakes people are making out there? I think, you know, not, not planning ahead to keep things clean. And I don't, if you want to throw even a trash bag in your, in your pack and just lay it down, it's going to weigh nothing and you're going to have a place to put that meat on when you're pulling off quarters or whatever. You can put it on the hide, but the hides off and dirty.

You know, I run into that problem too. It's, it's hard to keep things super clean. As far as bringing stuff to us, when you're putting stuff into game bags, don't, try to keep things in as big like the biggest chunks possible yeah right because when i open a game bag and there's a bunch of little pieces that fall out there's not a lot i can do i can't trim that and if it's already a little bit dirty um it's going to go in the trash unfortunately yeah if you're if you're on like a big back country hunt miles in um it's tempting to to debone those quarters but if you're taking it to someone like anna it's like not the best thing for her to

work on. So something to consider it. If you can debone it and keep it, you know, big chunks. Yep. Yep. All good. But it's the little, you know,

I'll dump out and it'll be like a little quarter size. Mystery chunks. Not a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Anna, how fast can you do an elk?

Not wrapped, but just, just skinned, broken down into, into, you know, rose steaks and maybe a pile of grind. That's a good question. I mean, I'd say two hours, maybe. Two hours? Probably. Yeah, I don't usually, I mean, I'm either like skinning it and hanging it or it's already quarter thing that I'm going to go cut it.

But, you know, like I used to, I got into this from working at a shop and I worked on the kill floor and I would skin and got 30 sheep in a day, sometimes 20 before lunch. So I can skin and gut pretty fast. Yeah. It's just cutting. and it'll take a little bit longer, but yeah. Are there anything, you probably have a pretty good clientele that knows what they're doing, but are there some things that might cause you to, like, just to refuse working on an animal

or like a set of quarters or whatever? Yeah, I've learned my lesson as far as, like, checking in game bags before I take stuff, especially if it's from people I don't know. last year I got the dirtiest stuff I've ever seen like you would have thought they tied it to the back of their truck and just drug it through the dirt to bring it out but and I didn't realize that until after the fact so I did charge them I'll charge a dirty fee you know if there's not if I don't see it beforehand and then like during archery season we'll have people call and they didn't really have a plan and there's been you know an antelope that's

been in the hot garage for two days and and it's like I'm not going to take that on because the meat's going to be spoiled and it's not worth putting our business at risk to give you something that might make you sick or isn't going to taste very good. So I think having to plan beforehand, whether it's, you know, that you're going to get out and you're going to call a few people, see if they have openings, you know, if they don't, you're if you have a last minute plan, you can at least do it. But don't let it hang to the point that it Rothside drives me. If you were giving advice to someone who's just getting into processing their own an animal like what would you tell them like as far as what they need to know or what equipment

they they absolutely should get themselves um just don't overthink it you know you really can't mess it up you might not get the cut that you want because you accidentally cut through it or whatever but everything can be at least turned into burger or sausage um so don't stress too hard about it um watch some youtube videos there's some really good videos out there uh that will show breakdown and seam butchering is is pretty easy i mean you can you can see you know like inside round sirloin tip you've got you can see it on there yep um and yeah but you don't have to go crazy with it don't stress yourself out um everything's edible as long as it's clean um as far as uh tools to have honestly a sharp knife is about all you need when i'm doing game processing that's

That's all I use. And I don't, Jesse and I were just talking about this. He makes knives and he has the ability to, you know, sharpen stuff with his grinder. We don't, we really don't sharpen our knives.

And for as much as we use them, you'd think that we'd be sharpening them, but we use, I have it here. This is my savior. It's a honing steel. Yeah. And that's all I use.

And like, you know, in the summer, I butcher chickens and I'll do over 300 chickens a day. that's all I'll use and I won't even sharpen it at the end of the day. So I think for people, I think knives become sort of a stressor. I don't know how to sharpen it.

I don't know what, you know, what knife to get. You can get a big cornox or you can spend money on a knife. But as long as you've got it, like I would say honing steel is really all you need to learn how to use it. But I think the key, the key,

Anna, right, is that you're using that honing steel. constantly through the day and you don't let that blade get to the point where you can't bring it back. Or do you feel like you can actually sharpen a blade that's like completely dull? Can you bring it back just with that steel or at that point do you have to grind it a little bit? At that point you need to grind it a little bit because that's steel, what it's doing, there's burs on the edge of that knife and as you're cutting, they're going to fold over. And this honing steel is just lining the burs up again. So it'll start to feel like it's dull.

it's just those burrs are out of line and so you hone it back into a line and it'll be sharp again but if you've got something that is past the point of you know the whole edges rolled over or whatever you're going to have to use a stone or a grinder grinding belt um i got one more uh for you and uh i want to get your opinion um there's like people choose you know lead bullets or copper bullets solid bullets like for various reasons but from from from your perspective as someone who's cutting up meat all the time what would you choose would you choose like a lead bullet or a solid copper bullet as far as like getting getting good meat you know i've i've thought about this a lot and i feel like this the copper versus lead it's so complicated yeah um you know

it'd be an interesting experiment to sort of ask people as they drop stuff off what they used. I mean, I will find stuff sometimes. Like I last year, you know, I pulled a couple copper bullets out of an elk shank. I don't really know what was going on there. But so I will find stuff. I'll find, you know, something in the ribs or in the, if it, if something gets stuck in a shoulder blade or whatever. But it kind of runs the gamut. I mean, I find all kinds of stuff.

And I really think, like my understanding. and my feeling on this is just it depends on the caliber you're using it depends on how far you think you're going to be shooting and sort of your confidence in even recovering an animal right because in my mind it's like the whole the lead thing is like if you're not sure that that animal is going to go down um then that's really where you hit some issues and like you know we do mobile slaughter when we're not doing game processing we're doing mobile slaughter and we use lead but uh And we're using 38 special or I'm trying to think what else we have right now. I think we're just using 38 special right now.

But that's lead, but we also just can pull it out of the skull at the back of the neck. We know where that's going. Can you look at a front quarter on an elk or a deer that was shot in the shoulder and be like, oh, I know what that was? Like, do you see more damage from one or the other? or I don't think I noticed so much as far as copper or lead I notice caliber oh really like yeah like well you know I there's a

I picked up a deer from a kid the other day and he's like oh I shot all the way through it I shot it with the 243 and then another kid that had shot with 300 wind mag and blew up both shoulders and I don't I don't know if they were copper lead I didn't ask them yeah it's like man you can tell yeah for sure to Calibur, I'd say. But, yeah, I don't know. You mentioning that makes me want to ask next season and sort of like take a survey. Yeah, yeah.

You guys got anything for her? You look like you're falling asleep over there. Geez. No, I was just thinking about how I didn't, I meant to defrost some stakes this morning from the elk you dropped off yesterday. And I realized I failed to do that. So I'm going to have to run home and get the sous vide fired up probably. that's okay that works that was fun cutting your elk because we have a um we've got this old

band saw um that makes game processing pretty fun because i can do you know like blade in shoulder roast i can do awesome but go really easily yeah um cut short ribs if someone brings out ribs um yeah yeah anna did or cutting for people like to cook yeah anna did sit in the bison that my wife shot last year and and we got ribs and we got uh tomah hawk steaks and we got osabucco bones and then we got just like long cut marrow bones out of the whole thing yep um speaking to that kind of stuff and uh um ribs and and osabucco and stuff but what what uh what do you most often see like that that gets tossed or or left on the carcass that hunters should be keeping what like obviously they're you know want and waste laws where they have to

keep certain stuff but what do you see getting left behind what and it could even be like organs. I'm a big fan of the tougher cuts. So like neck meat. I like doing the sort of low and slow cooking. Neck roast are awesome. I also understand if people don't want to be cooking with the spinal cord in there and you're worried about CLEAD and stuff.

But if you bone out that neck, that's really nice stew meat. I also on elk, because I do this on beef all the time, you can pull the cheeks out. And cheek meat is one of my favorite. It is so good. And elk have at least big enough cheeks and make it worth it. Deer might be a little like silver dollar size. But yeah, you just throw those in a Dutch oven and cook them for a few hours.

I'm going to have to try that for sure. They're so good. Yeah. And you know, tongues, people pull out tongues a lot, hearts. I like seeing that. And then livers if they're good. I'm a big liver fan. I know plenty of people aren't, which is fair.

But yeah, I don't know. I think the more you play with it, the more you hunt, the more you've got, you know, options of what to cook. And it's really fun to get creative with it because it does, you can get a little boring after a while, you know, just cooking backs are up and burger. All right. You guys got anything else or we want to move on?

We're good. Thanks, Anna. Thank you, Anna. All right. Get to work. Yeah. Thanks for having me. It's like you got a lot.

I will. I've got a lot to do. Thanks again. Yeah. Thanks, guys. See it. All right. Hot tip off time.

Oh, geez. Are you ready? No, we need to play the jingle. Um, I, I, this, I'm tired of this jingle, guys. Okay, Phil's tired of it. But we're going to play it anyway. Yay! Oh, T-T-I-P-R, let's all do a hot tip-off.

I'm kind of tired of it, too, Phil. It's not that, man. Let's all do a hot tip-off. No, it's so good. There's just some, there's some segments we do a lot because they're good segments like Hot Tip-off, and we hear that jingle all the time. And it doesn't help that it's one of the more poppy, I'd say, annoying, grading jingles. I think you're right, Phil.

We got to bring back tattoos, I regret. Brody is thoroughly annoyed right now. I love all of Phil's songs except for that one. I hate it. Got to kill the segment then. Sorry, guys. Hot tip off where two listeners go head to head with competing pieces of advice. And after we hear each tip,

we'll chat about who we think should win, but the audience is going to decide who does win. If you got a hot tip yourself, take a one minute-ish video and email it to radio at themedeater.com, and you might get your hot tip into the show and win something. We do have a prize today, too. Oh, yeah, I was going to ask,

is there something that they're winning? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, my goodness, gracious. A backpack. What's this thing called again, Yonis? Oh, I know you're going to ask me that. It's the transfer light. Yeah.

We got like, it's like Santa's toy bag, man. We got stuff in there. We got a signed copy of the meat eater calendar there, which you guys should go buy if you don't have one because we kick back some money to BHA. It's a great, like, stocking stuffer. Buy some for your friends. Family. Yeah, exactly. It's not expensive.

Anybody who loves trucks? Or the F word. They'll get a kick out of it. Exactly. And also in there was a rattle bag. This is a, that's the Feltz. Smashing Clash. I like that.

So there you go. Got some stuff for whitetail hunters. Man, that's a hell of a hall. I think you could use this bag for other stuff. I mean, I, like, you could throw, I'd use it for bird hunting. I'd put it in my boat and shove some stuff in there. It's not just for whitetails.

so there we go there's our prize let's see here who do we got let's see the hot tips we got it and Dak yeah Caden Bonner and Dak cash so make sure you're throwing your vote in and we'll figure out who the winner is

Philly you ready to roll them let's do it Caden Bonner this is good I'm already my name is Kaden and I am from Nebraska this last weekend we were out

for Nebraska rifle season and heard a bunch of coyotes. And so we were trying to figure out how to call them in and make a predator call. So pulled out a little Debbie out of my backpack, which most hunters should have, and came up with how to make a predator call. Like that, and then just pulled tight. improvising yeah like that definitely would work and that is how you make a predator call out of a little baby wrapper

there we go there's deck cash hey meteor crew got a hot tip for you mostly for small game hunters especially squirrels If you don't like packing your squirrels out in a game bag or a vest, what you gotta do? Cut you a little green limb about like this. Sharpen one end. Grab the squirrel by the back leg, rip those two side toes off. Sometimes harder than others.

You can use your knives if you want to. Once you rip those toes, stick to stick in between tendons and the bones. You got a squirrel carrier. It's like a fishing stringer. And if you don't, if you get tired of carry it, you can stick it in your belt loop. That is the whole system. I love it. Yep. Nice early man tool there. Like so.

That part I like a lot. hands free If you want to make a squirrel come out and look at you you can flick the tail Thanks guys That cash from Arkansas Clay Newcomb's area

Randall Who you like it? I like I mean Caden won me over at first Because of his commitment to Little Debbie snack products I think that was an oatmeal cream pie

One of the finest That Little Debbie offers I used to house those things The OCP yeah yeah we get him colm says um but man i'm i'm just dac charmed me with his accent

with his innovative uh squirrel handling techniques and just the versatility of that whole tip yonnes i'll have to agree i mean it's very uh what do you call it when you just like come up with something on the spot uh improvising yeah uh dad yeah cad cat how do you say his name Cadden?

Caden. Caden, uh, improvised. Great. Yeah. And you made it happen. I wish you would have told us if they actually called something in with it. Yeah. I mean, both of these guys improvised great.

Yeah, they're good hot tips, but, you know, and the thing is, is if I were out, uh, deer hunting and I heard some coyotes, I would think, uh, damn, I don't have a predator call. I wouldn't think, what can I do to make a predator call? Definitely. It's close. Like, I like that mindset. I like the idea of just building something on the spot. too like you don't always got to go you know buy something you can just make it right there

it's cool uh you know so i'm leaning towards dac but it doesn't matter what we think it matters what the audience thinks phil i'd say one of the one of our uh listeners was in a runaway lead and the poll is tightening quickly really so your votes matter get in there yeah i'll give it another 30 seconds or so you got any other comments we can hit while we're your tallying votes sure let's see here cliff is wondering serious question are we going to see randle clause this year just wait tbd tbd but got to watch and you just the thing is you got to believe he doesn't come unless you believe it's like the polar express i feel like you and brett are kind of battling for santa claus rights around here brett's a southerner he can't win yeah but he's got the

Well, that's, both of you guys are going to be on that live tour. Yeah. Have you guys had, like, you know, a rock paper, scissors, Rochambeau, who's going to be taking? Brent's doing it. I tried to, I tried to insert myself, but I didn't want to be like, I'd like to be Santa. I didn't want to put myself on that. I just said, I'll, you know, if you need someone to wear a Santa cuts him the whole time, I'll do that. Maybe he could be father Christmas and you'd be like his apprentice.

Yeah, or we could be different regional variations on Santa. like I would be Chris Kringle or some sort of Germanic Right, sure We have a lot of shows to do He might get tired and need a break Yeah, he is older He might tire out

Yeah, stay tuned for Randall Claus All right, who want Phil? Well, man, it's hard for me to I'm going to give them another 30 seconds Because it's so close Let's do one more comment Yeah, we should see 334 votes in there, guys Okay, if you guys could sacrifice Steve

To the Hunting Gods in return for any tag species or location, what would it be? This is from Evan. Oh, I'd probably go on some super expensive stone sheep hunt and some crazy mountains. Doll sheep, stone sheep. Yeah, I think if, I mean, I'd love a mountain goat hunt, but given that we're sacrificing Steve for this,

I feel like you sort of owe it to Steve to go for the big high dollar hunt. Yeah. Yeah, maybe you go do a Cape Buffalo. Do a Marco Polo hunt. Man, I'd take a, I know it's Steve, but I'd take it just a big horn hunt right here in Montana. Oh, yeah. That question. You do pretty cool.

This is wild. It is flipping back and forth every, every two or three seconds. I can't call it yet, Brody. If we can't declare a winner, then we're just going to have to give a ball with the prize. That over 200 people who are watching this right now have not voted. Can we set a timer? Should I set a timer? Yeah, let's set a timer.

60 more seconds. We have to, we have to end it at some point. All right. One more comment. come back and declare a winner. Yeah, my teeth are about to float. All right, hold on. Yonis has to pee.

Setting the timer here. Oh, I see. We should bring a pee bottle into the studio. I thought that was like a comment about it being malnourished. Do we have any muzzleloader, uh, people with muzzleloader experience at the table here? Maybe. It depends if it's, is asking what muzzleloader powder bullet combo have you found to be most accurate?

If he's talking about inline muzzle loaders, which I have much. much more experienced with um like you can't go wrong like with a tc muzzle loader in line um blackhorn it's just like the regular black horn black powder it might even be synthetic black powder um and i use uh i think it's federal's copper bullets and i've done real well with that combination And it probably depends a lot on the state that you're in and what their requirements are. Right. They've got different rules for sure. But like I don't, a lot of muscle, the inline muscle loaders these days are set up for magnum loads of 150 grains.

I have found that I've gotten way better accuracy results by not going with, like you can choose what load you use. You don't have to use 150 grains of powder. And I've always done way better with about a hundred and a hundred and a lot. hundred grains accuracy wise and I shot a shyris cow moose with that set up and it went right through both of her shoulders. So there you go. Okay. I let it run and the person who started off in the lead also ended up winning our winner with 53% of the vote at the end of the poll. That's not even close in a presidential election, Phil. No, but it was 50-50 going back and forth for a while. So this guy's fan stepped up

And that person is Dak with the squirrel holder Squirrel Man, Dak. Congratulations. He doesn't need that squirrel holder anymore. You're going to shove them all in this bag. That's right. Congrats, Dak. There you go.

Beautiful work, everybody. You did it. We'll have our producer, Jake, reach out to you. Yep. Who's actually in the room today from Missoula. He's in Bozeman. I don't, do I have his camera on?

I do have his camera on. Say hi, Jake. There he is. Oh, hi. All right. Thanks everyone for tuning in. Before we go, we've got some great new gifty stuff in the store. We've got some new Nome logo wear. We've got some of our spices up there now, spice mixes. That Bayou boil, I can tell you, is very good. I've used it a couple times on some fish, and it's great. Live tour, guys, what do you got to say about that? Getting excited. Getting real excited. Some of those venues are getting close to selling out, so people need to buy their tickets.

Yeah, last I saw that it's like 80% sold out, which is compared to prior years, like, leading up. One of the venues is already sold out. Fayetteville, yeah, Clay. Clay's crew came out in force. Clay's family, yep. Clay's extended Ken. His mountain family? Yeah.

They came down from the hills. They're very supportive. Yeah, it's always fun to go. do these things, you know? It's a marathon, but we'll have a good time. You guys... I'll do one more question. Moses from Mowgore.

He was setting us up for this. Question for Randall and Yanni. Sorry, Brody, but he's asking how nervous do you guys get before a tour? It's good to hear from Mowgore, even if it's at the very end of the broadcast today. I don't know. I feel like Mowgar's starting to have a little too much influence on this show. Nope. Nope. That's heresy. He's been nothing but supportive and kind.

I'll say this, Mowgore. Last year, I was very, very nervous before the first show. and then it was like a drug and I couldn't get enough of it just the life of a showman sure those weren't the beers you had before the show could have been a few of those but just going out there have fun

uh and I'm a warrior I get stressed out about things I get anxious but uh God it's like a drug just being on the stage with the hot spotlight on you the microphone in your hand and they're just eating from the they're just eating from your palm oh nothing better working on some great

I need to workshop it at a couple stand-up nights this week, but we should be good to go. Nice. I need to work on my material, too. I've got, I feel like I've got a decent amount of stories, but yeah, I haven't actually recited it yet. But, yeah, we've been doing it so long now, Morgora, that it's just, you just realize that, I don't know, people in the audience are more, they're more nervous than you are, right? Um, yonest, what are we got going on with roasts? Oh, yeah, new episode dropped. Maybe already on meter YouTube channel it's Best Burger episode

Brody Anderson faces off with Nate Mason from FHF Gear Oh, big guy Good guy Great guy It was live as of an hour ago Okay so it's up So go watch it and tell us what you think

In the comments And if you have any ideas for Meteor roast Drop in the comments too Love to hear ideas On how to make that show better Thanks for watching All right signing off

We'll see you guys next week Thanks a lot beers. Oh, no, wait. I forgot to play. I almost ended the stream without playing the outro. So cool if the outro had played right as soon as I said that. I tried. If a Lenovo gaming computer is on your holiday list, don't shop around. Just go directly to the source, Lenovo.com. It's your last chance to score exclusive deals on the gaming PCs you want, like the Lenovo Legion Tower 5 Gen 10 gaming desktop and Lenovo lock gaming laptop. So avoid all that shopping chaos and price comparing and just go directly to the source, Lenovo.com, where PCs are up to 35% off. That's Lenovo.com.

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