The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 870: Chimp Wars, Cocaine Hippos, and Steve Destroys Animal Rights People

Episode Date: April 30, 2026

Steven Rinella and the MeatEater crew discuss: House cat jerky; Seth's baby; Save Tuckertown!; Lane Legacy Beef; how warped Colorado's animal rights folks are; a Ken Burn's-level Philandering Randimals production on the chimp civil wars; El Chapo's cocaine hippos; proposed federal cuts to conservation for 2027; black bears biting; an American hunter killed by elephants in Africa; and more.  Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. Worldware gear at firstlight.com. Welcome to the news show, everybody. This week we've got cows, not condos, a bit about house cat jerky. Army tanks are using up all the turkey ammo. Randall covers a chimpanzee war.

An American hunter is killed by elephants. Spencer covers a war on cocaine hippos. And more, including for real this time. We cover the ongoing goofiness and cluelessness of Colorado's animal rights movement. But first, Seth Morris is back from his year-long paternity leave. He has a new baby.

I do, yeah. A new baby. He kept me up all night last night. Tell everybody about that baby. It's the only kid in America named Virgil. Yep, Virgil. It's an old-timey name that we're bringing back. Virgil Morris.

It's great. Oh, he didn't get that joke. Okay. No, no. I didn't get right away with it. Spencer sent me the song. Right away. My buddy, my buddy, Andy goes, does he ride the Danville train?

He comes over. We're like, does he ride the Danville train over his head? Then he thought about it and he goes, someone else made that joke. It was Spencer. Virgil Kane is my name. Yep. No, Virgil, he's two months old now. And he's doing good.

So our pediatrician said, he is the fastest growing baby she's ever seen wow how long she's been in the biz I didn't ask her it'd be the first thing I'd ask how big like we're going to how far back did you start last week I'd get that in writing

it seems like she's been around a while but no he's he was gaining he gained like 18 ounces in a week or something like that that's exceptional great he's like 12 pounds at that rate how much will he weigh when he's 80. I don't think that sounds like that's worse. You'd be big.

You've already had him fishing and hunting, haven't you, Seth? Yeah, we took him out on the turkey opener here in Montana, and my wife and I both killed turkeys. He was in the truck with an ear shot. With someone there with him. He wasn't listening to the radio with a pack of smokes, you know. So he doesn't already have a hearing problem from the shit to go next to his little baby. baby head? No.

Oh, okay. But no, yeah. My wife and I took turns going out while one stayed in the, in the rig. It's okay. When he's three, you can just get him, you know, like that story last week. Oh, a guy wrote in, we don't have it in the, we don't have it in the show today. But a guy wrote in, based on that, the story we covered the guy, the three-year-old who, the guy that supposedly had his three-year-old hunting turkeys. And this guy sent in a picture of a three-year-old standing next to his shotgun.

gun. The gun's way taller than the kid. He's like, this kid is not shooting that gun. Oh, my house cat jerky story. So, man,

I just gave the punchline away. Anyhow. So Guy Melitz, the editor, brings me this jerky that he likes a lot. It's made in Kansas or something. It's his favorite jerky.

It's like these square sheets of jerky. It's very unique. I'm on the plane with my little boy going out to hunt turkeys at Doug's. and I give my little boy a piece of the jerky, and he pauses because it's square. Do you know what I mean? He pauses kind of like he's like not getting how you could have square jerky.

Yeah, I can see that. And he's eating it, you know. And I said, he goes, well, our jerky's not like this. I said, there's more than one way to skin a cat. He then goes, this is cat. And keeps eating. that's good oh

here's no one since you're back Seth this occurred to me when we used to want to do our show Seth and I were trying to want to do a show called Deep Drop Boys where we go around the world to the deepest places and put a deep drop rig down

but the thing is most fishermen don't even recognize it as fishing and they all agree that it's the most boring thing in the world so our show never got off the ground Like my wife refuses. My wife refuses to go deep dropping.

At the shack, you have to work a little to round up a deep drop crew. I make sure I'm running a boat that day and I otherwise. No one wants to watch me. Because going deep dropping means watching me deep drop. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It means watching you do nothing. You have to watch me catch nothing. But then I thought we could do the first episode, the straight of hormoos.

So deep drop boys. The straight of horro moves. Yeah, it sounds risky, but let's I know. Because then people would tune in and we get our show off the ground. I mean, people would tune in for them. We're going to deep drop the straight. Is it deep enough?

Wonder how deep it is. Yeah. How deep is the straight? Can you check how deep the straight of her moose is? Like, is it going to be good or not good? The deepest parts are 650 feet. That counts. Yeah, that'll work.

That's fine. Can you send me a pin? Yeah. Oh, our safe Tucker Town. update, Randall? Yes, that's right. Save Tucker Town. If you haven't heard of it, we teamed up with Anex to help raise money for a cause in North Carolina. The Three Rivers Land Trust is spearheading this. And in short, there's a whole bunch of private land that is owned by Alcoa, and it was accessible for outdoor recreation, hunting, fish, and camping, all that stuff for

years and years, and it's going up for sale. So it would likely transfer into hands of other private landowners who wouldn't be as open to public access. And so the Three Rovers Land Trust is leading a campaign to raise money to purchase some of that so that it becomes public land. And we are matching, we meaning meat eater, we're matching every dollar given along with onex between April 14th and May 14th. So we're halfway, we're not quite halfway through that time period, but we're more than halfway to our goal. So we're matching, on X immediate or matching up to $200,000. And right now there's been $103,580 raised. So that's at 52% of the $200,000 goal. And there's still, again, I guess about two weeks before May 4,000.

14th. So keep the money coming. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, we're good. That's a good job. Can I add? Do you want to add more? No, no. I just didn't know if I wanted to make sure it was good. Well, I didn't feel like it was impassioned.

Like an impassioned plea in the end. We're halfway. I mean, like, I want you to bring like some Jerry Lewis. Jared Lewis. Some telephone on it. No, we need some Jeremy Goplin music running in the background. Yeah, maybe next time. Kick in now.

We're on schedule. Let's go. We're still on schedule halfway through. Okay. Oh, we have a live guest here today. Her name is Katie Lane, and she's going to talk to us about the ranching business, cattle ranching business. Tell us now. So you guys are, your family.

operates a ranch in eastern Montana, and you are primarily a cow-calf operation. Yes. Tell people what that is. So cow-calf operation is we raise the cattle and we raise the mother cows and then breed them every summer, have calves in the spring, and then we raise them until the fall. They're about six months old. And then we sell them to a cattle buyer. and they buy them and put them in feed lots all around the country.

And that's where they get fattened up and go into the grocery store. And that's your traditional business. Yes. And you have been, you have embarked on an interesting enterprise. Yeah. Where you have, you are trying to build, not trying, you have built it. You are growing a sort of, I don't want to call it a side business, but like switching the, switching your model around.

This is what I think might be interesting to listeners. So you've been in a traditional great plains, arid grassland beef business. Yeah. And you're trying to switch your model and tell people what the model you're trying to switch to. And within this, like all anybody hears about is like beef prices are crazy right now. So is it even a good time to switch the model? Well, it's tough because I started back shortly after COVID. And that was kind of, I've had people.

asking to buy our beef for years. Okay. I would take coolers home to Minneapolis where I'm from every summer. And I would take a couple coolers home with steaks and ground beef and give it to our family and friends. And they would just hum about it when they were eating it. And they're like, can we buy this from you? Mm-hmm.

I said, we don't really have that type of an operation. We just process one steer a year for our family and our crew. Okay. And they were like, well, if you're ever interested in selling it, we're interested in buying it. So I had those requests for several years. And I'm a nurse by trade. So I help on the ranch, but I would go to the clinic and see patients. And that was my job.

So COVID hits. And there's this huge shift. More people want to know what's in their food. They're cooking from home. They're filling freezers. The grocery store shelves are empty. And there's just this huge shift of people want to know what's in their food. They want to take better care of themselves.

And so I said to my husband, Bill, I said, I think I can sell our beef. There are so many people asking for it. And a lot more people are interested in grass fed. And so I did a little trial run. I actually took two steers. And I called family and friends back in Minnesota. And I said, hey, I'm going to bring out some beef. Are you guys interested?

And I had it all sold before I went out there. Oh, is that right? Yeah. Okay. So we're coming home. And everybody's like, when are you coming back? It's like, I don't know. So I got home and I said, Bill, I think we've got something here.

And so I developed a logo and started building a website to tell our story. And it started out with just a couple cows, a couple beef every couple months. And I decided to just sell at farmer's markets, direct to consumer. So locally, I went to some places in North Dakota, Miles City, Billings, regionally. and all of our beef is USDA inspected. That's where it's processed at a USDA inspected facility so I can sell it. Got it, got it. And Bill said, okay, every time you process a beef, you're going to have hundreds and hundreds of pounds of burger.

What are you going to do with all that ground beef? Yeah. And I said, well, so the people that own the butcher facility also own a smokehouse. And they make snack sticks and jerky. Okay. So that's where I started taking some. of the extra trim to make beef sticks made out of grass-fed beef and then some of the extra whole muscle.

So like round steak, stuff that's a little tougher as a steak still makes really good jerky, even sirloin. So we started doing that and that kind of took on a whole other life of its own. It was shelf stable. Now I'm not having to transport frozen meat. And we got into, we're in over 100 retail locations now, town pumpkin. carries our beef sticks, which is great. Yeah.

And yeah. And so how do you picture a pathway? Is there a pathway to be that you would, that you would only do that? Like that you wouldn't even sell to cattle buyers anymore. Yes. That is the ultimate plan. Yeah. And when this took off, the biggest problem is having a facility that can take cattle on a

regular basis to process it. That's USDA. inspected because I'm selling it in grocery stores. Yeah, because you're not pre you're not because a lot of times I'll see like a friend of my dog used to do this business. He would have a very small amount. Yeah. He would pre-sell them all.

Yeah. So so the consumer was basically buying it on the hoof. Yeah. And then it wasn't an inspected facility, but you're selling it like piece by piece after the fact. So you have to have it inspected. Yep. Yep.

So I have a big walk-in freezer out at the ranch that I have all the beef. After I pick it up from the processor, it's all divided. it out by cuts. And then even if somebody wants a quarter beef or a half beef, I sell it that way. Okay. I just go basically pick the cuts that would make up that. So it's not always coming from the same animal, but we butcher in small quantities. So I'm not picking from 100, you know, steers at a time. I'm picking from six, eight. So when you go out on your place, because you guys are running a regular cattle operation, when you go on your place and you're going out to get the stuff that

you yourself are going to sell. How do you, do you, do you select? I have my own grass fed herd. Oh, okay. So you're not, it's not even out of the same pool.

No. You have this whole separate operation. Correct. And then how do you get them? How do you get them from the ranch to the slaughterhouse? I take them in a trailer. You load them up. Yeah, we literally go out into the pasture in the morning.

Load them up. Load them up. Whatever looks finished. Yeah. And I take them in and it's all grass fed. It's all grass fed. We just got AGA certified, which is American Grass Fed Association. Okay.

So that's going to be on our logo now, on our labels. All right, man. Yeah. But now, help me understand this part because, like, when, if bees prices are so high, do you see that more? Like, if you're a cow-calf operation, you're just selling to cattle buyers. Who is winning when beef prices are high? Do the, are the ranchers winning more? Are the feedlots winning more?

Are the restaurants winning more? Is it spread pretty evenly? Well, right now I think the ranchers are winning more. Okay. But we weren't for a long time. You guys will feel that beef price increase. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Our calves are selling for more than they've ever sold. Got it. And all the inputs are like right now fuels probably very expensive. So there's certain inputs to go like inflation inputs that make it. Yeah. Even like the tractors and the equipment that we use on the ranch. That's expensive now. Yeah.

I mean, you're looking at half a million dollar pieces of equipment to go out farm. And to put, like, we put up our own hay. So we've got a swather, a rake, a bailer, all those things, and the fuel to run it out in the field. And sometimes we don't have a lot of hay. So we've always got a storage, back storage. So that partially, like having, trying to run like a family business to try to figure out a way like what you're doing to, I don't know, branch out or diversify. There's probably a lot of incentive to do that. Yeah. I mean, it was probably a lot better when I first started because the market was a lot lower. So I was turning, you know, obviously the cattle are on our property for longer.

When we're selling them as calves, they're only six months old. So now I'm keeping them for another year and a half. But we've got the grass. We've got the land to keep them. And so, you know, it started out as just a little side hustle and it's really grown into something bigger. And Bill said, I would love to eventually shift our whole herd. into what you're doing. Yeah.

Sure, man. Just take control of it all. Yeah. And you, and you hop in your truck. I know this. You hop in your truck. Yeah. You got a trailer.

You got freezers. Yep. And you make deliveries all over the place. Yep. You got restaurants. Yeah. So tell people about that, that aspect of it. Um, so we're in several grocery stores, town and country.

I go all the way up to big sky. I don't cover the whole state. Okay. But I kind of have this, I 90, I 94 corridor that I drive and have several deliveries along the way. We're in a couple of restaurants and billings that have us on the menu, which is wonderful. So they'll say the menu will say where it's from. Yeah, the menu actually says, yeah, Lane Legacy Beef. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. And then I, I ship most of the smoke products because I can. The frozen stuff I just deliver. I don't want to

deal with. We live so remote that to overnight dry ice, I'm just not interested in doing that right now. But you'll pull up to the restaurant and do the delivery. Yep. I go to the, loading dock, show up with my cowboy boots, and sometimes I walk back into a kitchen and it's a bunch of guys and like, what are you doing here? Got your beef delivery.

I'm the one doing it. All right. So tell folks again, because I think this is great. And again, you know, I love ranch land and grassland and a lot better in condos.

So it's good to see people that can, like producers out on the landscape, be able to hold on to like large properties that serve as wildlife habitat. Yeah. And able to make those things work and not need to carve them up and, you know. Well, and it's fun. We just started doing virtual fencing here in the last six months.

So our cows have collars. You're kidding. No. And we can move them with the push of a button on our cell phone. Really? Yeah. We've had, we've had neighbors come out because there's just a few people that have started doing it

in our area and they will come out and we'll do a shift. And they, They're not getting shocked. They just get a vibration on their neck. And so you can literally pick up the virtual boundary and shift it over and the cows start getting a, and they start walking. And then when one goes, then the other ones go and then they all kind of want to go together. Really?

So we're moving cows without, yeah. It's incredible. So you can, you can heavily graze a smaller area and then shift them and give that a break. Yeah. If you have bigger pastures with maybe a couple of stock. tanks, they all want to hang out around that one stock tank and they're just overly grazing that area. So you can create these like corridors. You can divide a square pasture into, you know, four rectangles and let them, they can still get access to water, but they can only,

they have to eat over here or. Yeah, you guys are in some dry country. Yeah. I mean, you got. So water's an issue sometimes. There's like, you could be selling cactuses. We do. Cactus jerky, the next thing. So tell people again how to, how to, like, if you're on the I-90, I-94 corridor, you want to buy some, uh, you want to buy some lane legacy beef from some cattle ranchers in Montana. Tell them how to find you.

Lane legacy beef.com. You can order online. Um, we ship all over the country as far as the smoke products. So you can order online. And then if you can buy our stuff at the grocery store and if you want to buy more than a couple packages of ground beef or a steak, you can order directly from me and I can meet you along my delivery routes. And I come out this way every month. So you're always getting fresh beef. You're not getting stuff that's, you know, six months or a year old. Awesome. Thanks for coming by. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Thanks for educating our, you know, the ones that don't already know, educating our audience about the beef business.

Yeah. Thank you. We'll let you get out of here unless you want to stick around. Okay. Sounds good. Totally up to you. All right. Again, Katie Lane, Lane Legacy Beef. Like, super cool business. It's cool to see you guys making a go up like that. Thank you. We're not doing corrections this week, not formally at least.

Not with the prize giveaway. We'll resume that next week. But we do have one small correction to make it only because it's funny. Yep. And it's from our calendar. And timely. Time. It is.

Our half-up old calendar series, which Steve thought was a dead business, but we might be bringing it back. That's all I'm saying right now. Yeah, we're going to like, shut us. The calendar business is waning. Yes. Like, calendars are going out. The way of the wagon wheel. We've tried.

We've tried. And so every year, I think that the calendar will do bad enough that we won't be asked to do another calendar. But they don't do that bad. No. And we got asked. So next year, we're doing a calendar of wildlife diseases. Yep. Every month will be a photo.

every month will be a disturbing photo of a wildlife disease. This is your plan to get off this case. But you'll learn a lot because it'll be the worst calendar you've ever looked at. This is like the producers. Yeah, yeah. The producers.

It'll be the ugliest, most upsetting worst calendar you've ever seen and then we'll never make another calendar after. We're going to probably use a lot. We're going to get our own pictures for this one on like the last few calendars, but you got a real good picture of a messed up animal.

Yeah, if you had a real puff pocket or something, let us know. Yeah, where do you go? If this doesn't work, where do you go after that? I got ideas. Okay. Rotten fish on beaches. Yeah. Like a calendar of, yeah.

Desiccated things. Yeah. The best rotten fish on a beach photo in all seven continents. Roadkill. Yeah. We could do another outhouse calendar, but just from the inside. The inside inside. Yeah. This typo is funny.

Now, Steve and I are the creative force behind these calendars, so you can't blame us for this typo. I'm not sure if you're aware, but May 5th is Cinco de Mayo. Not on that calendar. On this calendar, Cinco de Mayo is on May the 4th be with you. Anyway. And for you people that don't speak Spanish, if one was to translate Cinco de Mayo, it translates to the 5th of May. It does.

Yeah. Quatro de Mayo. But here we have it on the 4th. I don't know who would have made that mistake. And we just want to get it out there so that no one is confused and goes to their Cinco de Mayo gathering. I don't. And then we get sued. May it's, may the 4th be with you, not Cinco de Mayo.

Cinco de Mayo's on the 5th. There we go. Thank you, Brody. Good job. I'm Luke Wilson. Join me each week for Film Never Lies. Since retiring from the NFL, I've had a lot of my mind, and now I've got my own show. So if you're tired of lazy takes, if you want honest conversations, join us each week.

Film Never Lies available on all TSN platforms in the IHeartRadio app. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls and building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called Prime Cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. but when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for.

I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelpsgamecalls.com.

I think you'll be glad you, you did and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy to use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. So a guy wrote in, no,

he didn't write in, we just found this out because it's publicly available information. We were talking about how, so all the cool kids over the last I don't know, six years, five years, all the cool kids hunt turkeys with something called tungsten super shot.

Extremely expensive and getting now insanely expensive. Now if you shoot a tungsten super shot load, it's about $11 to pull the trigger with tungsten. Tungsten is kind of going off the market, and part of the thing is they use it in munitions.

So we're talking about how the government is buying up all the tungsten. Tungsten for homeout, tungsten for just regular sportsmen is getting insanely expensive to the point where it's probably not even going to be around anymore. And we have heard rumors, murmurings that in the future, in the near future, in a year or two, you won't even be able to buy tungsten shot shells anymore.

So check this out. So an Abrams tank, a guy wrote in with a bunch of information about Abrams tanks. They carry, Abrams tanks carry three kinds of shells. one is a depleted uranium rod called a kinetic penetrator. I was reading up on this, I never understood it. It really is. If you take uranium and use it to make fissile material, like nuclear material, these rods are, when they say depleted uranium, it's like, it's a uranium rod that has already had somehow the radioactivity has been harvested off it in a way that I'll never understand. but it produces a rod.

When you sharpen it, it depleted uranium rod self sharpens on impact. I didn't know this. It doesn't mushroom. Wild. Yeah. So when you make it pointed on impact, it sharpens more. That's how it sheds material. It doesn't have a tendency

to want to mushroom. Also, So you want to poke a hole in something. Like you want to poke a hole in another army tank. It shoots four to five times the speed of sound. And it just really is a sharp. sharp rod, but when it abrades on something at high speed, the flakes come off as white hot metal that ignite gas and ammunition and stuff. They carry those.

One of the things they carry is a can round. Okay. Now, here's where all your tungsten is. If you're a taxpayer, here's where your tungsten ammo is going. I had no idea about this. A can round fired from an Abrams tank contains

1,100 4 aught buck tungsten pellets Picture this Quad-aught Quad-a-buck 1,100 tungsten buckshot balls at 4.5 times

the speed of sound. No. 4.5 times faster than your federal premium TSS load. Boy, you talk about killing turkeys long range. So if you shoot a turkey out of a shotgun, this, this, this four a buck is going 4.5 times faster

than out of your shotgun. Which is like 4,500 feet per second. He says that every time they shoot this tank shell and this is meant to be like for anti-tank crews or masked personnel, every time they touch off one of these tank rounds,

he said there goes 100, 555 shotgun loads worth of TSS. So I'm going to do the math. How much is that? A lot. Yeah. It's

Tunks and jigheads for fishing right now are just outrageous. Yep, because of this guy. I didn't even think about that. Two quarter ounce jigheads on Rapples' website is $19.49. Yeah. For two. all those tungsten beads that fly fishermen use, they're going to go away too.

I didn't even think about the fishing end of it. Yeah. They're killing tungsten users. It's fine. The thing about it, there's lakes out there that are like no lead lakes. Yep. Yeah, but big,

fishermen anymore. Big lead's going to make a comeback, though. I think so. This guy also waited on something. Who in here says a sabbid-ed round? I was going to bring yourself. I'd had no idea that this is wrong. Well, I knew that it's split.

He's very firmly that it's a Sabo. It is not as sabbid a Sabbath. I say Sabbath. French. I say sad, but he argues Sabo. I pulled up Merriam-Webster and they accept both pronunciations. Of course they do. Not this guy.

Not this Army Tank driver guy. I just outed him. He said not to say who he was. He's an Army tank driver. Hopefully there's enough of them around that they won't be able to. I mean, stick it to him. I feel like that that would be the only type of guy that would have this information.

Oh, it's all public. He said it's all publicly. It's all publicly. Oh, I don't say he's a driver. Just says he works with tanks. It could be anything. Okay.

Wider net. Yeah. Okay. Now we got a correction special edition. This is going to take a ton of time. This is like a long, this is a long time correction. Okay.

So we covered on a past, I'll get this whole thing. covered on a past episode, Colorado's fur sale ban that is in the rulemaking process in Colorado. So in that correction, we talked about a woman named Samantha Miller. Okay. So Samantha Miller helped bring you the end of Washington's spring black bear season. Her org helped bring on a malfecent game commission in Washington, which is under investigation. We'll cover that soon.

a derelict game commission in Colorado. They help bring you a failed effort to ban mountain lion hunting in Colorado. And now the proposed ban on the sale of products from all fur-bearing animals in Colorado. Well, she herself has written in some corrections about our coverage of the anti-hunting and trapping efforts of the Center for Biological Diversity. So I'm going to deliver these corrections with commentary. Okay, but first some background. You handled this story, didn't you, Brody? Okay, in March, Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission voted six to four to advance to rulemaking a citizen's petition to prohibit the lawful sale, barter, and trade of fur-bearing animals.

So it would become illegal in Colorado to sell, barter, or trade hides from parts are high, parts, by which we mean unless you're talking about bacculums. oh, all this stuff about RFK Jr. And the raccoon penis Of all the news people that have touched this, how come not one of them has made the guess of what was going on there? Because they don't know. There's all these news stories. RFK Jr.

stopped and took a penis from a dead raccoon. Not one of these news stories. It hasn't occurred to any of them. He was getting the baculum. Yeah. He was getting the baccum to make like a drink stir. Oh. No one says this.

Oh, I thought that was in the news story. Find me a news story that includes that he was after the baculum. Did it say you want her for a drinkster? No, but of course that's what he's doing. Or earrings, you know. Yeah, but he wanted the baculum. Or he's got a moonshine still. Okay.

Yeah. Back, this is good. I need like three hours to go through. Let's get back to Samantha Miller. Sure. Okay. So it would become illegal in Colorado to, sell hides of raccoons, possums, skunks, muskrats, bobcats, and a bunch of other fur bears.

A deeper background here. Colorado's outgoing governor is a guy named Jared Polis. His husband is a self-described animal welfare advocate. So when this guy does his little bio, that's what he puts that down. He puts down how he's a first gentleman and he puts down that he's a first gentleman and he puts down that he's animal welfare advocate. He's chummy. He's chummy with animal rights radicals

like the Cruet Center for Biological Diversity. So like Nancy Reagan, if you think like first gentleman, first lady, you think like Nancy Reagan had just say no to drugs. Barbara Bush, universal literacy, Carter's wife, mental health. Did you know this?

Who is the one that was anti swearing in songs? Al Gore's wife. That's right. But he wasn't present. I don't know that. I know. It's the same thing.

Oh, come on. Tip him. It was close. It was close. This guy's got animal rights. That's his schick. Him, this is my personal theory. I don't know this is for the truth, but him having such close proximity to the governor,

meaning they're married. The governor then appointed, in Colorado, the governor pointed a bunch of animal rights. advocate game commissioners who are sort of hostile to the traditional job of what game commissioners do. And so once they got the game commission stocked up with these people in June of last year, they submitted a petition

to the game commission to amend Colorado's regulations to outlawed trade and fur bearing animals. Part of what makes this whole thing interesting is that Colorado Parks and Wildlife Director Laura Clellan, who was appointed by the governor, She's new. Objected.

Objected to the petition on several grounds. So the agency director says, I don't want this petition. One, the petitioners, Center for Biological Diversity, they couldn't demonstrate any decline in fur-bearing animals. Okay. They couldn't demonstrate a relationship between sales of fur and declining animal numbers. it didn't acknowledge the existing strict regulations on the take of fur bears. It cited misleading research that had nothing to do with Colorado, and it conflicts with state statute. And its exceptions are badly defined and would create unenforceable rules.

This is coming from the governor's own appointed commissioner. But they go through it anyways. So. Director, not commissioner. Sorry, director. So back to the to the corrections that came in from from Samantha Miller. So she runs state level anti-hunting and anti-trapping campaigns. So she's with the Center for Biological Diversity, it's called a campaigner is the job.

And that means you campaign for like anti-hunting and trapping campaigns. She was predator campaigner, wasn't she? Carnivore. Yeah, even though they deal with omnivores and herbivores here. her own bio, one of the things she says, she says in the past, I advocated alongside Mountain Lion Foundation in my role as the executive director of Washington Wildlife First, a former gig. During that time, she says, we achieve significant victories for wildlife in Washington State, such as the prohibition of spring bear hunting.

So right there. Part of the aim of the job is the reform wildlife commissions, which means working with what I feel to be like gollable governors to bring anti-hunting and anti-trapping folks into commissions, which is what she worked on over in Washington, where they had the placement of commissioners who then ended the spring bear hunt. What's really fascinating is these same group of commissioners are being investigated for malfeasance and destruction of government property in Washington. We have a show coming up where we'll dig into that investigation and that's saucy.

Also, one of the commissioners that poll has put on had a lot of. gone, did this vote, voted for the fur sales ban in Colorado, but they hadn't yet been approved by the Senate. They didn't get the votes to get approved. So now they resigned because once they were appointed, voted for the fur ban, and then the date came, they were acting, right? And some of that vote still stands. Yeah. But then the date came up for them to get voted on by the state senate and he doesn't have the vote, so he just resigns. Rather than, I feel like that's chicken shit. I feel like you should stick it out like. Yeah. get voted, but he like Harikari, like death before dishonor.

So he's not even on the commission anymore. He wasn't going to get voted in, but he got to vote on this. He did what he was there to do, which is cast that boat. Yeah. So Miller campaigns on behalf of anti-hunting initiatives. Okay. So she worked on the recently failed effort to ban Bobcat Mountain Lion and even links hunting. And links hunting doesn't exist in the lower 48 because they are an endangered.

species act protected animal but who let that little detail get in the way of something that sounds important um so i think that when we get into these corrections is important to keep that in mind because you've already laid out you've laid out when you said like i want to ban bobcat mountain lion hunting you've already laid out like what your end goal is do you know i'm saying like if you took a guy like if mike lee came up with a thing where he said oh i just want to sell some public lands you'd be like yeah but i kind of know you don't like any of them right like i already know what you think. So that's already been like the end goal has already been like quite clear.

Okay. But correction one. She says. Our petition. This is a correction from Miller. Our petition is not the same as the Denver fur ban. And that distinction matters. The Denver measure concerned retail sale of fur products regardless of source. Our petition is far narrower. It addresses the commercial sale of

pelts and parts from Colorado wild fur bears killed in Colorado. Now, I'd have to go re-listen to the whole thing. I don't think in any way you said or I said this is the same as the Denver fur bear bear bear bear. I certainly said something like this was attempted a couple of years ago. Okay, so you're guilty. Correction taken. Sure. Yeah, we didn't get into the details of.

Yeah, but I'm glad she brought it up. I'm glad the correction brought it up because I want to point out. The Denver fur ban was defeated by voters in Denver. In Denver. Not Colorado in general. It was defeated by voters in Denver. So this new effort, this new Colorado-wide fur sale ban is like taking your Trojan horse anti-hunting commissioners and getting them to do what voters didn't even want to do. Okay.

Well, a funny addition here on to get to this. Pushback. One of the things that helped tank the Denver fur sale ban was the fly fishing community. I was reading about this day a day. The fly fishing community was pissed about it because they're like, what about our flies? Right. Keep that in mind because that ties into what I'm going to get in in a minute. So fly fishermen of which Colorado has a great many were like, hold on a minute.

You wouldn't be able to buy certain flies. Beaver, yeah. And so they learned their lesson there as I'll get to in a minute. Okay, here's her second. Here's another correction. She gave a bunch, but I'm doing a bunch of them. She gave, if she gave eight, I'm doing four or something like that. What was her tone?

Was she angry? No. She'd like, I want you to understand this better. Understand it better. Okay. That we were wrong about some things. She says, the petition would not eliminate the economic viability of nuisance wild life control or similar work.

Colorado law already allows continued sale of pelts and parts in certain nuisance and agricultural context. That sale would continue to be allowed and is protected by law. Okay, got it.

Correction taken. We had a guy right in with that same. But this is where this creates huge problems. Okay. As pointed out by the wildlife director, A person working on agricultural depredation stuff doesn't even need a license. So here's what the state director. Here's where their thing is.

How can the state possibly distinguish if a farmer kills raccoons from getting into a grain bin? Or if a kid down the road from that farmer kills a raccoon not getting into a grain bin, how would the state ever distinguish between these two raccoons when they come up for sale? there's no tagging system. So part of the state saying this is so dumb is they're like, we already have a way that things can hit the market. You're trying to make another way that things can hit the market, and then we're supposed to be able to tell.

So that's part of the unenforceable quality to it. Okay? Here's another correction. And I'm going to bring all this together in a minute, but here's another correction. She says, the petition applies to a narrow category of Colorado wild fur bearers under Title 30. It does not apply to all wild animals.

Okay, got it. Understood. Fur bears only. Fur bears only. It applies to furbearing animals that can be legally hunted or trapped. Okay, so raccoons, opossums, skunks, muskrats, beavers, long-tailed weasels, bobcats, coyotes, gray fox, red fox, Martin, Mink, muskrat. Hold all that in mind. I'm going to come back around to this too.

She says, it is not accurate to suggest commercial markets pose no population-level concern when population status and harvest data for several fur-bearer species remain uncertain. I get the point you're making, but your state agency disagrees. Okay. But she routinely attacks state agency workers in an effort to delegitimize them. For instance, her words. this is her she describes the state commission as having extremist views

her words I thought state agencies took care of wildlife that they were managing for wild animals but really they managed for humans' interest in wild animals and the value that they can put on each species

which is usually by selling tags for hunting or fishing licenses going out her words agencies like Colorado Parks and Wildlife are enterprise agencies. They are there to make money, and they make money by selling tags. Let's get to the population thing. Of all those fur bears in Colorado, each of them has a listing from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature called IUCN.

Anyone at home, if you go to look up any animal you can think about Wikipedia. Go on Wikipedia and look up. Name an animal. Stripe Skunk. Type in Stripe Skunk in Wikipedia. You'll see the entry hovering off to the right. You'll see an icon and a IUCN status for that species. They have colors.

It may be colors or a color icon. Vulnerable, near threatened. It's a very nuanced system. Species of least concern. I'm going to get to how nuanced it is. It is a very nuanced system. The IUCN system goes like this. Extinct.

Extinct in the wild. critically endangered, endangered, vulnerable, near threatened, and least concern. Every one of these fur bears in Colorado has an IUCN ranking of least concern. Can I point out something else about all those species? You haven't been able to trap them in Colorado for 30 years? You can still hunt them, but people aren't trapping for fur in Colorado. anymore. Like it just does, it's not a thing. A little bit. A little bit. Because you can cage, trap and private land, you can private land. But foothold,

kind of, like, it's just not a thing. They've already, they've already crippled it. Yeah. Which maybe someday will undo. I'm Luke Wilson. Join me each week for Film Never Lies. Since retiring from the NFL, I've had a lot of my mind and now got my own show. To if you're tired of lazy takes, if you want honest conversations, join us each week. Film Never Lies available on all TSN platforms and the IHeart Radio app. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls in building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use.

I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? that's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt

with Phelps's cut and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelpsgamecalls dot com. I think you'll be glad you did and you'll find out that the Steve Rinella cut is an easy to use cut for

beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. So all of these things, the IUCN offers one, two, three, four, five, six. The IUCN offers seven levels. Each of these fur bears that we're talking about here are all least concerned. But here's what this gets interesting.

Colorado has, if you're interested, if you're the Center for Biological Diversity and you're interested in biological diversity, why are you not focused on the 17 species in Colorado that are, that are listed as federally threatened or in danger. Why are you not spending your time on black-footed ferrets? New Mexico metal jumping mice, humpback chubs, razorback suckers, southwestern willow flycatchers, Pawnee Montane skippers, 17 plant species.

Why not do that? If you were interested in biological diversity, this is going to be distasteful to you, you would be volunteering for ducks unlimited or RMEF and doing habitat work. Trout Unlimited. You would be doing habitat work if you were interested in biodiversity. Ducks Unlimited, Wetlands.

Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, grassland ecosystems. Trout Unlimited, river ecosystems. That's what you would do if you were interested in biodiversity. You wouldn't be messing around like with striped skunk protections. It's because you're not like they're not looking at what matters for biodiversity. They're looking at where they can successfully shut down hunting activity. Here's another one. Correction, another correction.

Fly tying materials were explicitly accounted for in drafting. This is from Miller. She says, the petition was designed narrowly to avoid disrupting ordinary fly tying and retail supply chains. It is aimed at the commercial sale of pelts and parts from Colorado wild fur bearers, not at ending fly tying. Understood. Correction understood.

And I want to take this a step further. Here's the agency director on the fly fishing thing. This is the agency director's words. There are two significant problems with the first exemption in the proposed amendment for, quote, finished hand-tied fishing flies. That's what the petition says. That's okay. The petition says it is okay to have, quote, finished hand-tied fishing flies.

Okay. The director. This proposed exemption is too narrow as it would exempt finished hand-tied flies but prohibit the sale of the raw materials typically used to tie flies. The resulting ban on fly-tying products could result in significant impacts to the Colorado fishing community, both fly shops and individual consumers. Two, this proposed exemption is unworkable under the current regulatory framework. The current framework does not define fishing flies generally.

Rather, it only defines artificial flies and lures. In order for the ban to be enforceable, its exemptions must be clearly applied, and the commission would need to develop a separate definition for a finished, hand-tied, fishing fly. However, there can be misunderstandings or disagreements as to whether something qualifies as a fly versus a lure. Furthermore, because the exemption language does not include handmade lures, any such lures using fur products would fall outside this exemption and be banned for sale. So, flies are okay. Bucktail jigs are illegal. Yep. And as someone who ran a fly shop for a long time, there was a lot of stuff on that fly tying wall.

We would have to yank off the wall. Yeah. You know. It's so funny. But you're like, well, why would they care about fly fishermen? Because fly fishermen boned them on their Denver fur ban. So now they're so short-sighted. They're like, yeah, a walleye guy with a bucktail jig, screw that guy.

A fly fisherman, cool, if it's hand-tied. So there's this quote I like, it's, um, uh, you can get bump. There's bumper stickers to say this. People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because it's safer to harass rich old ladies than motorcycle gangs. I've changed that quote. I've adapted that quote. People are more violently opposed to fur than flies because it's safer to harass rich old ladies than rich old men. You get it?

You get it? Okay. Here's another. Exemption. Oh, there's more. Oh, this. I'm just getting warmed up. Did you, was this?

This exemption is insane. Was this all done through email or did you talk to her? Me reading and me reading and getting emails. Okay. Now here's another, this is this demonstrates the insanity of you, this stupid petition. Okay. The petition. Okay.

This is the petition's words. Okay. They have an exemption. And it pertains to felted. fur western hats. If, okay, if, if the hat is, quote, I'm quoting, if the hat is, quote, crafted using heritage techniques like wet felting that promote sustainability and cultural craftsmanship, unquote, from the director, the petition does not define the necessary

elements of the exemption. For this exemption to be meaningful, the commission or the division would need to define a felted-fur Western hat, as well as to define accepted, quote, heritage techniques, as well as determining whether such techniques, quote, promote sustainability and cultural craftsmanship. The commission and the division cannot guess what petitioners mean by these terms. nor do they have the historic or artistic expertise to meaningfully determine what qualifies as a, quote, heritage technique that promotes, quote, cultural craftsmanship. It's so dumb.

If you had a hat, if you were selling a hat that was just a beaver fur, and you could have made it with a bone all, okay, you could be a Native American woman making a beaver fur hat with a beaver fur hat with a, the bone all, and it would not be regarded as a heritage technique or cultural craftsmanship, it has to be in the form of a cowboy hat. It's so dumb. You have to take all the hair off and make it a cowboy hat, and then in their mind it becomes okay. I redid my quote again. Remember the quote? Where's the original quote?

People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because it's safer to harass rich old ladies and motorcycle gangs. People are more violently opposed to fur than cowboy hats because it's safer to harass rich old ladies than 30-year-old women from New Jersey buying a big goofy hat for a summertime outdoor wedding and veil. I like it. I made that quote up. I can say Bozeman, too.

Miller. Well, I was trying to keep a Colorado. Yeah, true. Here's another correction from Miller. Wow. Rabbits are small game, not fur, not fur bears. Yes, I did save rabbit. They would not be considered under this petition.

Got it. Brody was wrong. Another correction. This petition does not ban personal use. Hunters and trappers could still keep and use animals they lawfully take for personal purposes. I know. We framed the whole conversation as being about a fur sale ban. We never talked about a use ban.

Now, I was discussing the logic of this all by demonstrating what is considered to be okay in the Center for Biological Diversity's eyes and what's not okay, right? Like things like flies, cool. Spinners, not cool. Felt made from a beaver hat, cool. Or like a hat made from felt made from beaver, cool. A hat made from fur from a beaver, not cool. Okay.

And again, it's tainted by other efforts like the Bobcat and Mountain Lion band they just tried to do. This doesn't occur in a vacuum. Now, here's some other quotes to get an idea how Miller thinks. Okay. Okay. People like to make this point with talking about this fur thing. They love to make this point that like it goes against the North, our own North, they like to take the North American model of wildlife conservation to throw it back in Hunter's faces.

Okay. So she's like, the commercialization of fur bears. She says, it is to make commercialization of fur bears, this petition, is to make commercialization of fur bears, align with other big game species. To me, this is a simple question. this is Miller talking why are we allowing the sale of wildlife in one species in one category of species rather than others

she also says this today I really do urge you to support this petition it's a common sense change it's a low bar for our wildlife it should not be for sale okay when Miller walks into a whole foods and her mind must be

absolutely blown when she sees wild caught Alaska salmon in Whole Foods. Her mind must be blown when she sees Gulf shrimp for sale in Whole Foods. How could that be? How could we be selling wildlife? Because different wildlife has different conservation histories. Game animals became a no-sale item. Fur-bearing animals never went through a collapse that necessitated it. Same thing like, why can you sell wild-caught salmon?

If our wildlife shouldn't be for sale, why is it okay to buy a wild-caught salmon? Because salmon, which is wildlife, is under an entirely different management structure with a different conservation story. It's just different. Fur bears are different. When Roosevelt was considering ways to stop the market slaughter, they weren't concerned about raccoons and possums. Because those things weren't at a critical conservation point. there was never a recovery effort. So it's just they have a, just like how you can buy salmon, you can buy raccoon furs.

Okay. She also says this. She says, I don't believe carnivores need. This is a thing you'll find again and again in this language and careful with language. She says, I don't believe carnivores need to be killed, period. Like, that's just where I'm at. That's a quote. Okay.

And apparently not omnivores either. because she's worked to end bear hunts, okay? But it's an interesting wildlife distinction. And in wildlife management, not often do we manage wildlife by diet. Okay. Like a northern pike is a carnivore. Sure. Well, I mean, a raccoons and omnivore.

A raccoon is an omnivore. A fox is they pro. It's an interesting way to like manage wildlife. You'd be like, I'm gonna do it by diet. Okay. Herbivores, cool. Well, beavers are herbivorous. But that's not cool.

So like stop talking to me about what they eat as a management tool. And a management tool is not, I just feel like carnivores should not be killed. That's not a management strategy. She says this, I think that people that hunt predators for fun. Okay, remember that word need. I'm going to come back to the word need and I'll come back to the word fun. She says, I think that people that hunt predators for fun have a very specific personality type that I would not want to be around by myself.

Right. Oh, she's scared. Also this. Let's just remove, this is a quote, let's just remove the four funzies part, the killing for funzies. Let's maybe take that away while we figure out how to get these animals back where we want them.

She says this. This is commercial killing with lion hunting guides charging an $8,000 fee to guarantee a trophy and trappers selling bobcat pelts to China. Okay. Often describes hunters as remorseless, which is a weird one. She says, this is animal cruelty that's allowed to continue to our wildlife. And I think every Colorado knows that this isn't really hunting. Okay, there's real hunting and this isn't it.

She should tell me what real hunting is. Okay, well, this is this. This is a, quote, trophy exercise for heads and coats and nothing more than that. Here's another word that comes up again. Quote, needless killing of mountain lions and bobcats for their heads and beauty and beautiful fur coats. Okay, she says this. About bear hunters in Washington, a fraction of a percentage of Washingtonians, including Fish and Wildlife Director Kelly Susslewind, have fun killing bears and

spring. She says this. The commission continued to approve spring bear hunting long after the department could show any management need. So if you look at what they say, what they're saying is if there's no need, if there's no management need, don't hunt it. Okay. Well, I have news for you.

There is no need to fish walleye. There is no management need to fish walleye. There is no management need to fish rainbow trout. There is no management need to hunt pheasants. There's no management need to hunt turkeys. Turkeys do not have a demonstrable, like, effect in a negative way. So when you introduce the idea, like, do you need, is there a management need for a hunt? You're left with, like, hogs in Texas.

Sure. Maybe white tails where they're overpopulation. White tails egg. But that's her way of looking at it. Is there a management need? Yeah. So, okay, so you can't do it if it's fun. She wants to end the stuff for fun.

Okay, you shouldn't enjoy hunting. That's out. Not if you want to sell something, that's out. If you like taxidermy, that's out. If there's not a need, that's out. I'm lost on what's left. If it's enjoyable, don't. If you're going to have it stuffed in your house, don't.

right well it's just crazy that she spends all this time setting up these like arguments that are made to sound like reasonable and sophisticated and then she ends with this stuff here's the here's the yeah here's some of the final best stuff apparently there was someone secretly recorded a meeting of the biological diversity people and their followers someone tapped in and recorded the meeting okay and this demonstrates some insanity that goes on with the commission okay So they had these commission meetings about this first sale ban. And they have their own commissioners that they've placed within it. The animal rights community has their own commissioners sitting there. In this recorded meeting, they're telling their supporters about the cohesion they've created with the commissioners. She says this. She's addressing a guy named Mark. Okay.

And she says this, Mark, everyone, it's fine. Let them do that. the commissioners know that that is coming. I have run through every single scenario of things that might hit them, including children coming up there and crying and saying this is their favorite thing to do with their dad, or all of those pieces. Everything that will be thrown at them. They know that all of that is coming,

and they are aware to be prepared for any, anything. We will be your consistent and reliable support. So she's explicitly confirming that she has pre-briefed Colorado Park and Wildlife Commissioners on the content of public testimony they will hear. Okay? She's like, they're going to tell you this, they're going to tell you that. She also says, she's telling a person in this little secret community. She's telling them, she's coaching them on what to say in the commission.

meeting. She says, I think you can say support this petition. And these people are obviously commercializing wildlife. And that's the end of your comments. I think that if that's going to be your reason, Michelle, just show up and say, I support the petition and know that I have one of the commissioners prepared to address that. That is very interested in that point you brought up and is planning to talk about it. Okay. So here they are. Right in the script.

Planting a comment and planting a commissioner who's ready to address the comment. She says this. We have been directed from the governor's office. Don't let us be shown up in Denver. This is the next meeting. It will be in Grand Junction. It's like, quote inside a quote, this is the governor talking. It's like, you guys are in Denver.

Don't let them show you up in Denver. So here, directly conveying that they're taking their chart, they're taking their, they're marching on behalf of the governor's office. The governor's, it's planned. Anyways, what's next? What's next is May 6th and 7th in Grand Junction when the vote takes place. Like, you're in Colorado. It's so stupid.

Go raise some hell in Grand Junction. when they have this next vote. The days after Cinco de Mayo. That's right. And May the 4. Uno and Dost days after Cinco de Mayo. That was a real fantastic expose there, Steve. I'm impressed.

Yeah, it's like 60 minutes. Expoise. It's like listening to 60 minutes or something. How long was that? 60 minutes. One of the most egregious things. It's close to 60 minutes. Yeah, pretty close. One of the most egregious things, she said,

I'm just paraphrasing. Maybe you can find the exact quote, Steve. But it was something about like Colorado Parks and Wildlife's goals to make money. And they make money by selling tags and fishing license and stuff. Those agencies are not money-making operations. No. Like they're money-losing operations. In fact, it's like-

Because it's this constant thing of like, there's this constant thing of like you de-legitimize the agency. In people's eyes. It's that the agency is bad. they want to kill everything off. They're just there to make money. You like delegitimize the agency and delegitimize the agency. But the way she framed is though they're like, you know, carrying around money bags from license sales. Yeah, where's it all going?

And usually it's the other way around that like they need to take money from other parts of the state to fund this sort of thing. In Montana, like we have, is it 20% marijuana tax that supports our public lands. So there's an example of we're like, we're going to take money out of this bucket because, you know, our parks and wildlife. and division needs that kind of funding. That's how you know these people aren't true to mission, because if they're true to mission, they'd be working on an alternate funding mechanism. I looked up their mission.

Like what Minnesota has, like what Missouri has. Their mission is to perpetuate the wildlife resources of the state, to provide a quality state park system, and to provide enjoyable and sustainable outdoor recreational opportunities. That's FWP's mission. No, Colorado's. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Colorado, D&R. Say the other thing again? To prepare. the wildlife resources of the state to provide a quality state parks system and to provide enjoyable and sustainable outdoor recreation opportunities. They're not a money-making organization. They're to make jingle.

That's why you always see those game wardens walk around with gold teeth and stuff. Well, they get their tag sale bonuses every fall. When they roll up to you, they get their keys out, big wad of cash falls on the ground. All right. I'm done with that. You're done? I guess that we're next? Yeah.

Is that where we're at? I'm serious, though. And if you're in Colorado, go to Grand Junction on May 6 and 7 make some noise. I think the whole thing's got to go away. It's so funny. Yeah, let's hope so. Let's hope so. Let me find where I'm at.

What am I talking about? And we are going to do a follow-up about this commission. Because the commission. The Washington one is even crazier. Where she worked, too, on. Yeah. They got commissioners under investigation for destroying government property. You ought to find out the other state she's been talking to commissioners.

And there's got to be more. Okay. I'm going to talk about some federal conservation funding. Steve sent an email the other day to me and Corinne, which is like, hey, here's some good news, which is great. But there's also some bad news. The good news is on April 24th, you might have been in D.C. for the TRCP thing when you sent this to us. Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service.

I'm going to talk more about that. It's better known as the NRCS. Announce the availability of $52 million to increase hunting and fishing access through the voluntary public access and habitat incentive program. So that's great. Money going towards public access to private property. Hopefully a lot of farmers and ranchers will enroll in that. program and get more people, you know, access to good hunting grounds.

Let me see. The hip kids call it VPA hip. Yep. They just like to say hip. Yeah. This represents the largest single investment in VPA hip since its creation in 2008. And the first opportunity for new funding since 2019. Really?

Yep. So 70% low 48 states are in private ownership. Sportsmen and women are reliant. on private lands for hunting and outdoor recreation opportunities. And this helps address that by opening up, hopefully opening up a significant number of acres to hunting and fishing. So that's the good news. Unfortunately, that same day, I got some bad news.

In 27, the following cuts, conservation cuts will be made to various agencies in the federal government. 300 million from the U.S. Yeah, these are, these are, there's a lot of haggling left to have. These are proposed cuts. Yes. Yeah. This is like an initial offer. Right.

52 mil. Either way, it's not great news. No, it's not, no, it's not going to end the better. But I'm saying there's a lot of fighting. There's a lot of fighting left to be done here. 300 million from the U.S.GS ecosystem management program. That's the entire budget. all of the BLM's wilderness budget will go to management budget.

It'll be reallocated to land use projects like energy production, primarily energy production. $105 million will be cut from the National Wildlife Refuge System. $40 million from the North American Wetlands Conservation Act, which is 80% of their budget. 11 million from Migratory Bird Management Program. The entire U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's science application budget of $30 million will be cut. All U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service funding for state and tribal grants will be cut. BLM staff will be cut by an additional 27 percent. That's over 2,000 full-time positions.

The USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service, which we just talked about, eliminating that. And eliminating the Forest Service entire Forest and Rangeland Research Division. A lot of fighting. I'm just saying like, keep your eyes open. That's like someone going like, I'll give you a dollar for your car. You know, no one that it ain't. But yeah, I mean, it's bad. And that's only part of the list.

If you want to check out the list in detail of these proposed guts, go to the Wildlife Society's web page, which is wildlife. It'll be bad. It'll be bad. I don't know. It'll be bad. But there's a lot. If it's for 27, you know, let's hopefully get through the next round of elections and then we'll see what happens for 27. I don't know.

Yeah. We might return to just like pure gridlock where nothing happens. Right. Which is good. Yeah. Just good. Just things quiet out. The DOI was already like such a tiny piece of the pie that, you know, they're going to cut it so

much where there's like no pie left for them anymore. Oh, the interior will be. Yeah. When you see these budgets getting cut from whatever it was to nothing, like basically eliminating a department. It's just zeroing out. Yeah. Yeah, you'll often bring in people to eliminate their own program, you know.

I mean, the fact that we just were bragging about how the conservation service is going to create, it's 50 million bucks for more access, but then they want to get rid of the conservation service. It's like, okay. It's going to be a messy process. Interior is less than 1%. It's almost half a percentage of the 26th budget. And they were taking some of those things and eliminating them by 100%.

Yeah. That's all I got. I'm Luke Wilson. Join me each week for Film Never Lies. Since retiring from the NFL, I've had a lot of my mind. And now, I've got my own show. So if you're tired of lazy takes, if you want honest conversations, join us each week.

Film Never Lies available on all TSN platforms and the iHeart radio app. On Blood Trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bag. And there was a full of blood. Oh my God, he doesn't have a hit. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors, where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper, from cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwoods.

Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments, and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere know something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season 2 of Blood Trails

premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, I Heart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. So the chimpanzees are in a war? A little change of pace here. A little change of pace here. And I apologize to people that have been waiting for the segment

because we were going to run it last week, you know, and then other bad stuff happened. So... This is the kind of thing that just gets bumped. Yeah. Watch, I'll hold it right now. Please don't. Put a lot of work into this.

There's a paper published earlier this month in the journal Science that got a lot of popular attention in New York Times, NPR, BBC, picked this up. It's based on 30 years of observation. And it documents an eight-year, what they described as a civil war among the largest community of chimpanzees in the world. It's about 200 individuals. and uh... in that's a big town yeah and so they I mean this is a group of chimpanzees that they sort of there were two

sort of factions within the larger community and they they groomed one another and made it with one another and socialized with one another and then over the course of eight years they split apart they began to occupy different territories and they started raiding one another and killing uh first adults but then infants from the other groups.

So this is the first time, according to the paper's abstract, group conflict among non-human animals is well known. However, lethal conflict among groups of animals that were once socially affiliated has not previously been observed outside of humans, in whom cultural ideology can drive divisions among individuals within the same group.

These findings indicate that group identities can shift and escalate into lethal hostility in one of our closest living relatives in the absence of color. cultural markers often thought necessary for warfare. Is it, Randall Kinniner, is this like a bad blood thing, or is it like a competition for resources? Well, Phil, would you, we do have a, we do have a resource here from the front lines. Yeah, sure.

Is someone reported, a war reporter? My dearest bubbles, I write to you from beneath a forest canopy that no longer feels like home. The rainy season has come and gone eight times now since I last held your hands. hand, and still this ruinous conflict shows no signs of relenting. What once seemed a temporary rift among brothers now portends, as the primatologists say, in a permanent fission of our community. The western forces of Ngogoe press on with a ferocity that defies comprehension. 28 of our number have now fallen, 28 souls.

The reports from the front are not fit for juvenile eyes. Chimp genitals torn from the chimp genital places. How awful that the opposable thumbs we have been blessed with by our creator are now used for such unspeakable acts. The men now whisper of infants struck down in their innocence. The white tufts of hair on their rumps will never darken as they typically do among our kind in their fifth year of life. At night, when the moon hangs low over the forest of Kibbali, I close my eyes. eyes and I am home. I hear the screeches of our brood and I feel your sagittal crest under my elongated fingers. Our family swinging peacefully amongst the trees in a behavior known as brockiation.

In those moments, I imagine that none of this is real. I am merely living in a nightmare of war and I shall awake with you lying in the dirt beside me. First Sergeant Knuckles, third canopy Regiment Central and GoGo Forces. My goodness. You guys need to watch this on YouTube. That was like that was a little film. We need to send that to Ken Burns. That's Barge.

Who's been on the podcast? I gave Barge a preview and he said we need to send this to Ken Burns. Yeah, I've been thinking about doing that. I'm going to send that to him. I've been thinking about doing that ever since I read this headline and Phil and I made it happen this morning. That's a

wonderful report. Thank you. Yeah. I have to watch it again. I was so blown away by the concept. Yeah. Yeah. I really wanted to do that and Phil made it happens. Thank you to you, Phil. I appreciate it.

It was a great idea. So this story is actually pretty wild. Based on genetic evidence, they believe that chimpanzee communities split apart every 500 years. Really? It's a pretty rare thing. But basically what happened. The community is split apart every five weeks. Yeah.

They, so like in 2015, 2014, some of the older, camps got sick and some of the alpha males, like there was, among the central group, the outgoing and ingoing alpha male, like the alpha male got sick, another guy took his place. But the new guy that took his place had actually been born into the other faction. And then he took over the dominance hierarchy of the central group. Wow. So it all kicked off where a group of them encountered, they encountered each other in the forest. Instead of socializing, the researchers saw that the one group went silent and hid and the other ones looked for them and then chased them. And then over the two years after that, they kept distancing geographically and socially. And then they just started killing each other.

They made, the Western chimps made six lethal attacks into central territory. And then they started killing infants in 2021. They killed 17 infants. And another 14 chimps from the central faction have disappeared. Their bodies are never found. And so essentially, like, the takeaway is that they, they've tried to explain this by their hypothesis is that there were certain key figures that kind of bridged the communities. These older male chimps were kind of intermediaries and they maintained relations.

And when these older males got sick. Like the statesman, the older statesman died. Yeah, exactly. Hotter heads prevailed. Yeah. And so basically what they're saying is like you can have a big conflict spill out from individual interactions. Sure. That's a hell of report.

You know, like American dudes will show up and fighting in Ukraine. I'm going to, I might try to get in on this monkey war. Send Randall. Yeah. What side would I want to be on? Who's winning? Western seems to be the aggressive. I want to be on the wind inside of that because last thing I want is for them chimps to get a hold of me.

And then there's there's another, the other really interesting thing is that in this 1970s, there was an episode called the Gombe War, which Jane Goodall observed. But there are doubts as to whether this is a natural behavior because, quote, these chimps were eating bananas given to them by humans. Got it. So they're wondering if that was like a jealousy resource thing. And the lead author of this paper says, it's like go to a bunch of little kids to give one of of them a banana. Yeah, exactly. He says this is the first time you can definitively say that there is a rift in this chimp community that's basically driven by the chimps themselves. Yeah. When you first told me some months ago that you were a big eight guy.

Yeah. And I didn't think you were. Remember, I called you out on it? Yeah. I think you've proven yourself. Okay. Thank you. What does a frontline conflict look like?

Are they strangling each other? Are they clubbing each other? Oh, you don't know about this? No, I don't. We had the photographer on the podcast that photographs chimps killing each other. Yeah, we were getting into monkeys. Yeah, they put on hunts for other monkeys. They rip them.

They rip them piece by piece. They rip their genitals off. Oh. And did you just listen to the Ken Burns thing? Yeah, like they attack their faces and their genitals and tear their arms off. You don't want to get involved in one of them, chimp boys. No. No.

So that's what I got. That was brilliant. A lot of war out there these days. That's your best report ever. Thank you. Thank you. It's great. Yeah, man, I had a lot of fun with that.

Thank you. Great job. I'll send it to him. Yeah, please do. I'd love to get his thoughts. Not a cease and desist. Do you got a big original video production, Spencer? No video for mine, but Phil does have some imagery.

Hippos are, of course, native to sub-Saharan Africa. There's about 150,000 of them living on the continent. But there are also about 200 hippos that call South America home, and they are a huge headache for wildlife biologists in Colombia. Now, before we get to those problems, let me tell you how they got there. It's 1981. Drug Lord Pablo Escobar visits wildlife breeding facilities in the United States in search of his next exotic pets. His hacienda in northwest Colombia is already housing elephants, giraffes, rhinos, ostriches, zebras, kangaroos, Lions, tigers, panthers, llamas, antelope, dolphins, and more.

There's just one thing missing. He's a real nature lover. Yeah, one thing. It's going to take his personal zoo to the next level. Hippos. If I ever get arrested, I hope I look as self-satisfied as that. He is not worried. He looks like he's on vacation.

He's got a Hawaiian scene on. It looks like a man on spring break. So Pablo is in search of hippos. He goes to America, and that's what. he finds. Pablo winds up bringing home four hippos. Three of them are females. One is a male.

It's unclear what the source of the hippos is, but historians believe they came from a private dealer in either Dallas or California. That's roughly where they've been traced to. If I may, the gate to his zoo here bears an uncanny resemblance to the architecture of Jurassic Park. Even the font. Oh, yeah. The one in the background. And he stole that airplane.

an idea from Uncle Ted. Inspiring stuff. The zebra-striped airplane. Inspiring stuff. Okay, that was 1981. He finds his four hippos. Let's fast forward to 1993. Pablo Escobar has been on the land for 16 months after escaping prison.

Eventually, in December of that year, he's gunned down by Colombian special forces while attempting to flee across a rooftop. Pablo takes bullets to the leg, torso, and head, and is pronounced dead at the scene. It's the day after his 44th. And then those American. DEA agents did grip and grins with them. Yeah, I considered putting that in there. Those pictures are all over the internet.

There's like 14 dudes standing with his mutilated. It's like guys in Arizona when they get out. It's exactly like that. On the roof. One of them gets it. Or he was killed. So in the aftermath of his death, the zoo is closed and wildlife officials start to relocate his animals.

Almost everything finds a new home at a new facility besides four creatures. his hippos. This is because during the rehoming process, official said the hippos were just simply too aggressive, too dangerous, and too difficult to move, so they left them there. Well, at some point in the 1990s, the hippos take it upon themselves to find a new home and they break out of the zoo and escape to the nearby Magdalena River serving as the founding population for South America's cocaine hippos. That's how that happens. It's how it happened. I tried to find more specific details on their escape, like how did they get out of their enclosures, but nothing exists. They just got out on their own at some point in the 1990s. Now, by 2007, those four hippos

turned into 16. By 2014, those 16 turned into 40. By 2019, those 40 turned into 120. And that brings this to today where it's estimated that there is a population of 200. And they all have the same great, great, great, great, great. They all have the same, like, great, great, great. They all came from those four founding, one male, cocaine hippos. Their growth is like Seth's baby at this point. It just cannot be stopped. Biologists speculate at this rate, the hippos will exceed 1,000 in the next decade. Wow. Yeah. So what problems do they create? Well, for starters, 200 hippos. They take up a lot of space and a lot of food. They're displacing native fauna, such as manatees, Otters, Cayman and turtles. The hippos also increased

the nutrient levels in the water, which might sound like a good thing. But this burst of hippo fertilizers actually creating enormous algae blooms, which in turn trigger other die-offs. And then there's just the sheer mass of the hippos is literally changing the waterways there. Their wallows are now filling up with water and creating side channels and ponds that otherwise did not exist. You know there's totally scarring the lands. Real dangerous, have they killed anyone, Colombia that you know? There has been pretty minor conflict so far, it seems. I couldn't could not find that they've had interactions with humans. We'll get to some of that in a second here.

Some folks do argue that the hippos are actually doing more good than harm. Locals have reported that illegal dynamite fishing is at an all-time low because poachers are simply scared to be a lot of hippos. That's right. So there's some good. This story has also been of interest to proponents of the Pleistocene rewilding project, which advocates for reintroducing megafauna to places where they're missing. In this case, the African hippo is taking the place of toxidons, which are a hippo-like creature that

went extinct about 12,000 years ago. We're looking at one of them here. But for the most part, it's agreed upon that having these hippos is not sustainable and something needs to be done. In 2020, they tried castrating the hippos, which was a ton of work and cost about $50,000 per hippo. That was a short-lived effort. Did anyone get injured doing that?

They did one singular hippo, and we're like, we're done. This is not. 50 grand? This is not the answer. 50 grand to castrate one hippo that they then let go. I'll give you a shot. Yeah, be like, the hippo will be like, how about you give me 50 grand? I just promise.

I just promise. In 2021, they explored sterilizing the hippos with the vaccine, but that got litigated to hell and it quickly fell out of favor. In 2023, a trap and transfer program was pitched that would place these hippos in zoos across the world, but so far that hasn't gone anywhere. And then earlier this month, Colombian officials approved a euthanasia program that aims to eliminate 80 hippos from the herd. It remains to be seen if and when that plan will go into action. And then the most recent development comes from 24 hours ago, which is when Indian billionaire Anant Ambani made a formal request to the Colombian government to let him take some of the hippos.

This just happened yesterday. He's offering to foot the $3.5 million bill to have 80 of them relocated. to his wildlife preserve in India. It's considered the world's biggest animal rehabilitation center. It's called Ventara. It's already home to 250 leopards, 900 crocodiles, 200 lions, 160 tigers, and 50 bears. Oh, my. There is no word yet on if Columbia is going to agree to his ambition.

But you got to bring in some serious hard hit and wranglers. I mean, that's why it's going to cost $4 million. Yeah. Yeah, then you got to go to them all the way across the damn. We're like Cody Farian level kind of stuff. This is the buyer. The buyer's the son of the richest man in Asia. Yes.

Yeah. So this has been something. Probably get him on the pod. That's been simmering in Columbia for like a decade. But now it feels like it's boiling because they keep reproducing at such an insane rate. That's a hell report. That's a great breaking news hit too. Thank you.

We saw a hippo skull at the Museum of the Rockies. Yeah. That was the one of the wildest I've seen one of the wildest things I've ever looked at So you know I'm like an expert on Africa Yeah Well here's what I heard When they hunt those hippos

You'll shoot them Like you hang out where they're gonna pop up and they'll shoot them And the hippo sinks You just hang out and wait Till it bloats And it'll surface Is that hours or day? Yeah, hours.

Okay. Like, think about how a deer, like, if you find a deer like an hour later, it's sort of, you know, you hang out for a couple hours and he rises up to the surface with bloated gas. Then you got to pick someone and no one wants this job. It's swimming out there and getting a rope on it. Because crocodiles. Yeah. Not a job anybody wants. It's getting a rope on it.

And then you drag it up to the beach. It's how we've solved dynamite fishing in there. So less of that. That's a hell of report. Good job, Spencer. Dang. My God, man, there should be like an award. I would like to remind everybody about the report that came earlier.

But he's got like the picture. I mean, he didn't make a documentary. Yeah, no, I just. I'll give my prize to Randall. Oh, no, you don't have to do that. Don't have to do that. See, you're prematurely accepting the prize. I appreciate it.

Sure. This report is more like a little brief PSA. If anyone has plans to visit the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, please be bear wearers. The other weekend that there were six separate black bear related incidents in various areas of the park.

Is that amazing? Six separate. Yeah. Well, some of them was with the same bear. But yes, six incidents. And so this park runs across Eastern... Oh, incident.

Yeah. Not like someone got scratched. Well, no. I mean, something got bit. Oh, okay. Yeah. So it... There are a couple of different things. that happened. But yeah, so this, if anyone doesn't know where Great Smoking Mountains National Park is, it spans part of eastern Tennessee into western North Carolina. And as of now, it seems

that most of these areas have reopened, but they were closed for a couple of days and then reopened with no bear activity. But the following incidents were reported. So two bears approached visitors and stole backpacks. And a third bear displayed aggressive behavior and chased off a group of visitors. Then there was an aggressive bear involved in three

incidents at the same location, the same bear. And one instance was that this bear actually bit a visitor who had gone into an area that was restricted and closed. So that is kind of, I think, more action than we've seen recently.

And there are 1,900, approximately 1900 black bears in that park. And this is the time where mama bears are coming out of dens with their cubs. And there are a lot of visitors. I was reading Corinne Gatlinburgs, like right. next to the park, right? They're Gatlinburg, Tennessee. And they, like, they have a bad urban bear. They think the park is, like, helping to create this urban bear problem.

Tennessee is in the top five bear tech states. Yeah. But when you look at it, it's like one of those things where five is not, you're getting down to a very small number. Meaning you look at like Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, you know, you're up in the teens or whatever. And then by the time you get down to. Number five, you're down to like two or three, but it's still number, it's still within top five bear attacks dates.

But it makes sense because, you know, Smoky Mountain National Parks, like, surrounded by millions of people. So it's like, most visited national park. You know, that's going to, all those bears are going to spill over, you know. I tried to find out if any of those bears had been euthanized. And I didn't find information that they had been captured or euthanized, but on the NPS website. it stated that if they're dangerous, they will euthanize black bears. We're going to close out with a story from Gabon.

How do you say it? Gabon. Gabon. Gabon. I think it's Gabon. Gabon. Which Brody says has phenomenal fishing. Yeah.

I want to go. I've wanted to go for decades. I want to go there. I want to go there because it's like, it's like jungle. But they got nice beaches there, too. So a hunter from California was killed there. it's important to point out here the hunter that was killed there

an American you know guy from California was there in a big game hunting dikers yellow-backed dikers okay but he was killed by elephants

the party his hunting party they ran across a group of I don't know five elephants they were trampled and he got gored by a female elephant so it's

you know a tragic thing it happens I remember like last year the year we were in Africa filming. I remember two Americans got killed by Kate Buffalo that year. I guess it's still the same year now, or is it a different year now? It's a different year now. Yeah.

An American killed by an elephant hunting there. But the coverage on it is very predictable. Ricky Jervais, like Big Pita guy. He's glad. Like he says, the best thing is they'll never forget it. But it's like he wasn't even, he wasn't. hunting elephants. He was hunting.

He was hunting dikers, but it's like celebrated. What's also funny is like people this happens every time something happens in Africa is the amount of money that the individual is worth becomes a big part of the story. So it's like he was killed, but a millionaire was killed in Africa. So people are like,

they got it wasn't a guy with less money. You don't see a head. by like blue collar hunter escapes elephant in Africa. No, it's, it's just, it's like weird. They always, that's like always a point. It's always a point. Because you're like, millionaire, US big game hunter, trampled to death by elephants, while hunting in Central Africa.

Especially if it's British coverage. They really like to find out that. Yeah, they're the ones that named Brian Harmon, Brian the butcher. Because he likes to hunt deer. the golf or br- yeah um dude hunting all over the place

but yeah man always gets covered that way the only thing that you can do if the only thing worse if you are a if you if something happens to you in africa and you're a rich white guy the only thing worse than being a rich white guy

would be an attractive young woman that especially infuriates people when it comes that young woman killed that lion. They're like, oh, I was hoping to be a rich white guy. It's an attractive young woman. I'm going to be outraged outrage. Cheerleader.

Yeah, it's like they get more mad. What's this fellow's name? Ernie Dosio. Ernie Dosio. Or docio, I don't know. Big game hunter killed in Africa. Buy an elephant. 75 years old.

his family outliving him and sad. Yeah. Well, I wish we'd end on a happier note. What's something we could do that was like a happier note? We'd play the chip. Seth had a new baby. Yeah, yeah.

Let's say we play the chip video again. With death, there's life, you know? How's Kelsey doing on your first day back? Yeah, let's end happy. Oh, she said he won't go down for a nap and he's pretty restless today. Well, I said to end on a happy. Yeah, I know. He's cute as hell.

He's cute. That's it, ladies gentlemen, Seth's new baby's cute Good looking baby See you've got a new show On blood trails The stories don't end

When the hunt is over They just get darker I've seen something in the road I instantly thought it was a sleeping bed And there was a full of blood Oh my God He doesn't have a hit Blood Trails is a true crime

podcast born in the outdoors Where the terrain is unforgiving The evidence is scarce And the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper, from cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwoods.

Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of a be. on us. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers.

Season 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, IHeart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.