The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 899: Jim Heffelfinger, The Deer Preacher

Episode Date: July 6, 2026

Steven Rinella talks with with Jim Heffelfinger about: the Rompola mystery; lead poisoning from ammo; CWD impacts on humans and deer; the future of Mule Deer; and did wolves fix Yellowstone? Enjoy Mountain Dew, an American Original. 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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First Light, go farther, stay longer. This is going to embarrass you, Jim, but you know how I'm going to, to introduce this. I can't imagine. I'm going to say, joined today by the smartest man in the woods, by the smartest man in the woods, Jim Heffelfinger. You're lying right off the bat. You're lying. How about this? Join today by the most well-informed man in the woods. Okay. Jim Hefflefinger. Thank you for coming in. It's great to be here. Yeah. If listeners of the show know that rarely does an episode go by when someone doesn't say Hefflefinger was telling me or Hefflefinger, Fetfinger wrote in to explain or Hefflefinger is mad about blank because he like I said,

he's the, he's the smartest, most well-informed man in the woods. And when we're talking about stuff, he likes to tell us where we, where we hit and where we miss. And Jim comes on, you've been on, I don't know how many times. This is maybe your third, fourth time. Fifth time for the regular podcast, yeah. And what we do is we work up a bunch of things that we're going to talk about and we agree that we agree on what we're going to cover. And we're going to cover a bunch of those today.

We're going to talk about, um, we're going to talk about Jim's thoughts and current research on a thing that we've brought up in the past is like if you eat wild game eat is the lead going to get you is the lead going to kill you we're going to talk about this thing that pops up now and then that um if that that the argument that by having more predators on the landscape we would see a decline in chronic wasting disease we're going to talk about that we're going to talk about a thing you might see pop up in the news now and then trophic cascades particularly in the context of when wolves came back to Yellowstone National Park people came up with all these sort of fantastical ideas about the trophic cascades that occurred in the park thanks to wolves we're going to talk about havelina getting their due um we're going to talk about some ungulate stuff but the first thing we're going to talk about is um the rompola buck now first I want to clarify a thing I and I grew up near where I grew up south of Mitch but but my father had my father had met him had known him had handled some of the deer he'd killed in the past he used to measure bucks for like commemorative bucks of Michigan and somehow I had in my head I for years have said Rampala but um that's a that's a lure rappala yeah it's yeah yeah cast and rock cast and rapes

followers. Rompola. We're working on a project. Jordan Sillers, who you might know from Blood Trails, is working on a podcast about, we're doing a series along a way to series that I've been talking about

for a million years on the Rompola buck. And for those of you that just tune in for the first time, I'll try to keep it brief. But officially, officially, the biggest buck ever killed. by the hands of man was killed in Canada

by a guy named Milo Hansen but shortly after that buck was killed a buck that would have beat Milo Hanson's buck to become the all time world record typical white tail was erode by a guy

named Mitch Rompola and then withdrawn from consideration. So we're doing a mystery series on is the buck real or not? Which side are you on, right? And so I've been,

we've been wanting to interview, we've been wanting to interview Heffle finger about this buck because you have, you spend a lot of time on antlers and antler growth and deer and everything. And one of the questions I want to ask you about, and this will be included in the series, but just to kick it around,

is one of the things that people point out is that where this buck got killed in northern lower peninsula of michigan is a place that does not make big bucks they don't have they don't make boon and crockett like god does not make boon and crockett bucks in the grand travers bay area of michigan what do you make of something like that yeah i've i've heard that and i'm not an expert on the whole Mitch from Paula Buck. I remember when it came out. I did around the Midwest. I grew up in Wisconsin. So it was right next door. And remember all the chatter about that. Never paid much attention to it. Came back to it more recently and helped Jordan out with that series. And just from a basic standpoint of can a monster buck like that come out of nowhere?

And I think it can. You know, it's a matter of it's a matter of likelihood, always when when you're thinking about that sort of thing. But I've seen cases in Sonora and the desert southwest where you get a drop condition where all of the antlers are a little stunted that year from nutritional restrictions. And then out of nowhere, there's this giant desert mule deer. And you just wonder, how did he do that?

Antlers are secondary sex characteristics. They only get the extra nutrition after the body gets what it needs. And then it can throw off some extra nutrition to antler growth. And so when they're nutritionally stressed, they don't throw that out and sometimes you'll get a buck that who knows why have found some good nutrition or has some kind of genetics that is able to better deal with kind of the environment and you can get a monster out of nowhere that that's not a reason to discount it when you're talking about this case another thing we're looking into in this series and it was it's an observation

that another whitetail freak had made and and i can't remember the number the number but but this this white tail enthusiast was saying that one problem with the rompola buck it's too perfect and I can't remember the number but let's just say I don't remember let's just say at 190 inches let's say 190 inch white tail he's like once a deer gets that big

go find me an example of a perfectly symmetrical buck that's that big that doesn't have kickers they're there I mean, examples are there. I looked at the, because it was Michigan, I looked at the Michigan State Records. And the number two and the number seven buck in the Michigan State Records is, actually, this was not Michigan State Records. It was a Boone Crocker Records, but only from Michigan. Okay.

So the Boone and Crocket Records from Michigan. Number two in Michigan, number seven in Michigan are in the 180, 190 Boone Crocket range. And one has one inch and five-eight deductions. And the other one has two-inch and change deductions. So you can get these bucks in that. range that are almost perfectly symmetrical. So again, it's not a reason to discount the buck just because it's symmetrical. Yeah.

So what's your gut on the whole thing? I, for a while, thought, he probably just wants his privacy. He doesn't, he doesn't want the fame. But having the world record shot with an arrow, it's, that's a tough thing to overcome that he would tell everybody about it. show people in the back of his truck, talk to some media, and then within a day or two shut up for three decades. There's something strange.

And one thing, I don't know if you want any spoiler alerts, but one thing I talked to Jordan about was the way the bases, the pedicles, they come out at an unusually wide angle. Sure. So you can have wide bucks where the antlers come straight out. You see those in South Texas all the time. But those pedicles really seem to come out like on the side of the head, kind of odd to me.

And one of them actually in the photo, and there's not many photos, one of them actually looks a little like a little different orientation than the other one. And I wondered, allowed to Jordan, whether in past years something could have happened to that skull and cracked it a little and healed it and made those pedicules orient a little more. Now, if he had done something with the skull and cracked it, those antler times wouldn't be straight up. They would be out because he bent it out.

but they're not they're straight up in that buck but if that something happened to that skull in the past that widened those pedicles out cracked it and rehealed which there's cases of that and then subsequent antlers the tines would grow straight up no matter what the orientation let me interrupt will you pull up put on this screen up here shot of the round pole the buck so i've just wondered and this is all speculation because we we don't know there isn't any evidence that it's a legitimate buck and there's no evidence that it's not a legitimate book so we're all speculating it's just all speculation so as long as we're speculating those pedicles if that skull was damaged somehow the pedicles were wider and then subsequent antler development made those tines go straight up it would

account for that i mean it's a theory but it would account for kind of the unusually wide pedicles coming out of that skull and i find it strange that he talked to the media for a day he showed people the buck. It was apparently solid antlers. Other people saw it in the back. Yeah. There's guys. There's, yeah. There's a lot to this. There's a lot to the solidness

of the end. Are you able to do that or no? Go on. So then I wonder, why was he talking to the media and talking to everyone and then got home and skin the buck and shut up for three days? There it is. Now when I look at the

deer's left pedicle right when you're looking at it, but the deer's left side, it looks like that that base is coming out a little lower to me. It could be the angle of the camera. It could be anything. But it comes out kind of in the back of the eye, like the eyes lined up with it, where on the other side, the eyes below the pedicle.

I was looking at that asymmetry in that and wondering if something didn't happen to the skull. There's even kind of a divot in the middle of that skull. I wonder if something didn't happen and then it re-grew normal antlers but would account for that wide width. It's funny that he showed everybody. He talked to the local media and then got home and skinned it and shut up for three decades. Why was that? And then when they went back to measure it, I mean, you're familiar with all the like wild theories. Yep.

Yeah. One of the wild theories being. And I've sat on both sides of this thing and I, and I don't want to do too much. Like we're really, we're doing a lot on this. Okay. But one of the wild theories is people have looked at the ears, the difference between the way the ears lay, the difference between the positioning of the eyes. You can see it all here. We got it pulled up.

Colouration issues, right? And a theory, a theory is that he skinned that head back and put that rack on. He had made that rack and he installed that rack on that buck. Yeah. I don't think he could have fabricated. He doesn't, there's no evidence he has any experience in doing any of that sort of thing. And he's shot a lot of big buck. So it wasn't unusual that he would shoot a big buck.

So I'm leaning more towards that possibly being a legal harvest, but maybe not eligible. And he knew that. And so he would rather just be quiet and, and have it be a mystery. Not eligible because the school plate was cracked? Possibly. That's a theory. But he came home and then, you know, he was somewhat of a taxidermist. And when they came to measure the buck.

he had it almost fully mounted on a shoulder mount. He had the cape on it. He had the, if you look at the pictures of them actually measuring it that day, the skull plate's covered by fur. He left, apparently he left the back open. There's no photo of the back that I've seen. He left the back open so that they could inspect the skull plate. But from the photo that I look at, the whole skull plates covered, they could only, I would guess, see the back of the skull plate. So how would they be able to evaluate if something was funny with that, that middle suture where the bones come together?

that would be covered from what I see in the photos. It would be covered. Yeah. Well, stay tuned, folks. It's going to be good, man.

I'm excited about it. I'm excited about the project. Adding to theories is all I'm doing. No, that's great. It's great. Keep them coming. And then again,

we've done, we've done people like, we've called out looking for people that have any kind of information. And of course, that offer always stands. Let's jump to the next thing. Oh, man. Is that,

are hunters all going to die from lead poisoning? I don't think they have been lead poisoning. I mean, you don't ever hear in the medical profession about one of the dangers of lead exposure is eating gay meat shot with lead ammunition. The medical profession doesn't seem to know about this, apparently. But all of the bird enthusiasts are all concerned about Hunter's health

and what they're feeding their children. Yeah, let me set this up a little bit. You probably remember when this happened. It was some years ago, scattered around on the internet, the stabi all these photos where they were doing like x-rays of deer carcasses that have been shot by rifles. And you look at these carcasses and you see that those bullet fragments really scatter

and travel around. They do. And so you'd see, you know, let's say it's an x-ray of a deer's rib cage, scapula, and you can see the area where the bullet hit. But then you'd see all these little bright spots.

and they're metallic fragments that were, I guess they could get in the vascular system and move a little bit. They kind of explode outward and move a little bit. And that among other things really got people talking about the impacts of lead consumption. Because as you know, there's all this stuff about child development. And like you hear about like whatever kids eat and lead paint,

um, lead pipes, leaching water into lead. And California is very staunch position on. you know, all the lead warnings. You can't buy anything that doesn't come with some lead warning for California. You buy a lead-headed jig and it's got a warning about how the lead-headed jig is going to kill you. So there's definitely like an alarm, a sense of alarm about consumption of lead.

But it carried over into this idea that there's all this lead contamination out there in game meat. And you even now will see instances where a state might say we're no longer accepting venison donations because of the risk of lead. it's well documented that, well, maybe you'll counter this, but it's well documented that Raptors, the most commonly excited example being California condors,

can get lead poisoning from eating game meat killed by lead bullets. That seems to be scientifically accepted. Yep. And so it jumped to, well, it must be bad for us too,

right? Yep. Yeah. Let me ask you like a series of questions. what's your take on your personal take, the scientific understanding of like raptors? Okay. Do raptors,

is it accepted in your mind, is it accepted that raptors die from lead exposure from eating hunter killed deer carcasses? Yep. At the individual level, lead can be really, really toxic to raptors. They have a different,

and birds in general, they have a different digestive system. And so raptors are very susceptible. can get even a small fragment of lead when they're feeding out an animal that was a carcass left in the field or an animal that was wounded, a coil that was hit with lead shot. Okay. And then it wasn't retrieved. If they get a little bit of lead in them, it can make them sick and it certainly can kill

them. So at an individual level, it's very dangerous. The problem is when you scale this up and say, is this really a conservation issue that should force hunters to switch to a non-lead ammunition? and you look at the data that we have available, there is a population level effect of accidental secondary lead ingestion by raptors from ammunition. But what I encourage people to look at is not just the fact that there's a population level effect,

but what is the magnitude of that effect? Is it a serious issue from the population level? And when you look at research that's been done, there was seven northeastern states. They looked at eagles ingestion. They did some modeling. and they determine that using lead ammunition on the landscape dampened the Bald Eagle population growth rate by 4 to 6%. So Bald Eagle is all over the country are just rocketing up.

They're doing really well. Record numbers, trajectories going up. Their models showed that that trajectory upward would be dampened 4 to 6% if we use lead ammunition in those seven northeastern states. So I encourage people to think, is that a serious conservation concern? that everybody in those seven northeastern states should switch the kind of ammo they use so that bald eagles can increase four to six percent faster than they already are golden eagles it was less than one percent okay effect another research and another completely different project in the west looked and found that golden eagle population growth rate was dampened by 0.8

percent so less than 1 percent go effect on golden eagle population growth rate and so when you look in in europe they did studies on 22 different rapid rate species. If you average the effect on 22 different raptor species in Europe, which had just announced a ban in Europe on lead ammunition. Oh, is that right? Just yesterday I saw that. Oh, like an EU ban? I don't think it's, I don't know. That's what I asked. I actually asked, is this EU or what? And I don't know. I didn't get the answer. But in 22 different raptor species in Europe, the average effect on the population was that it increased, using lead ammunition on landscape for big game hunting increased mortality rates by a half a percent using lead.

So if you if you banned all lead in Europe, the mortality rates would be a half a percent lower for 22 raptor species. So to me, I'm wondering where is this giant conservation concern that everybody would need to change ammo? So that's a long answer to the individual question, but I think it's important is lethal to individuals. It's the number one thing that's inhibiting condor recovery. Condor endangered species, so every mortality counts,

and they're very susceptible lead poisoning. So it's a serious issue within condor range. Arizona has a voluntary program where hunters can voluntarily switch to non-lead ammunition or take their gut piles out of the field completely, so they're not leaving anything for the condors. And that has been adopted by 88 to 91% of the hunters in Arizona. So it's very successful, voluntary program compared to other states like California that just have a top-down draconian

ban on lead ammo. Yeah. Listen. And you're there for heart-wrenching knockouts. The world's biggest stage. And breathtaking triumph. In 2026, FIFA World Cup, the knockout stage. Every match, every moment.

Listen on TSN radio. Join the globe. On the road to the July. 19th final. 2026 FIFA World Cup. Stream it all live on TSN Radio. Available on IHeard Radio. Hunting demands preparation, persistence, and gear that will not quit on you.

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Designed by hunters, four hunters, with a deep commitment to conservation and land access. No shortcuts, no excuses. Just gear you can count on. Head to firstlight.com. That's F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. So, but I hear that, is that, explain to me the idea that,

like lead going through a condors digestive tract is different than lead going through a human beings digestive tract. Yeah. Is it something to do with the pH? They, it's, it's pH with the acidic digestive track. And it's also the, they don't have just a stomach like, like we do. They have other organs that the, the lead pellets and the meat that they eat sit in there a long time to dissolve in that, that acidic environment.

And it's the length of time that that metallic lead, um, sits in there. So I hope we talk about different kinds of lead. That's an important part. Okay. So what is, are you aware of cases? And I feel like I've read these, but I can't remember what happened, where they'd go in and look at people that have been consuming game meat their whole life and then go try to see, like, well, how much this person, how much lead is in this person's system?

Yes. There's been several studies like that. And it started in North Dakota in 2007, a dermatologist who happened to be on the board of directors of a major raptor organization. He went into a food bank in North Dakota, grabbed 93 packages, x-rayed them, and about half of those had lead fragments in there. So he sounded the alarm,

and people have questioned the motives being on the board of directors for a raptor organization. But he sounded the alarm, and so the Department of Health in North Dakota tested blood samples for North Dakota people all over the state. They had 736 samples, I think. And they found that those that said they hunted had twice the lead level as those that didn't.

And that spread like wildfire. Everybody picked that up and that hunters are poisoning themselves. They have twice the lead level. What wasn't reported was that level of hunters, twice the lead level, was about the national average of lead for everybody at that time. It was 1.27 micrograms for deciliter, and the national average was 1.25 at the time. And so it was twice a level of non-hunters,

but it was still below any level that any medical science has shown lead problems in humans. And in fact, the reality was that those that didn't hunt because it's probably sparsely populated North Dakota, the ones that didn't hunt had below average lead levels. Yeah. Because the hunters had about the national average lead levels. There's been that study. I think one of the most important studies on human effects of eating game meat with lead

comes from a first nation up in Ontario where they looked at people during the waterfall season. These communities were eating a lot of. killed with lead shot. So they tested lead levels before the waterfall season. They tested them after the waterfall season. They found that people that hunted ducks had a higher blood lead level at the end of the duck season because they were eating a lot of ducks. And so they were getting lead pretty frequently in their diet. But what they found out in that study was that those that were sitting at the supper table eating the same

meals but didn't go out on the hunt had normal, they did not have an increase in blood lead levels. So it was something about actually being on the hunt that seemed to increase the lead level, not eating the meals because other people are eating the same meals at the same table. What does that mean? The primers in shot shells and then pistol rounds and rifle rounds, the primers, and here's where we're getting into different kinds of lead.

The primers have a different kind of lead that's highly absorbable. It's an organic lead compound in the primers of cartridges. And that lead compound can be absorbed through the skin. It can be absorbed through your lung tissue by breathing it. These organic lead compounds that are used in strengthening plastics, clutch shoes and brake shoes and all kinds of different product, waterproofing products. They use these organic lead compounds because it improves the product in some way.

But that organic lead compound is different than the metallic, like the inorganic metallic lead. And so those compounds can be absorbed through the skin. If you get them in your digestive tract, you eat something with it on there, that goes right into your bloodstream. Metallic lead, like what might be in a quail, a number eight pellet,

or a little fragment of bullet that ends up in your burger, that's metallic lead. That goes through the human digestive system 24 to 48 hours and passes through so quickly, it doesn't have time to dissolve. It's not sitting in there and dissolving. And so that, metallic lead occasionally, hunters don't get lead in their system very often, but very

occasionally lead coming through the system and then leaving the system is not going to elevate blood lead levels like an organic compound, lead compound. And so handling shotgun shells, breathing the gun smoke that has some aerosolized primer residue, picking up your shot shells, I shoot pistols competitively, and I'm concerned about when I pick up all my pistol brass to reload it, I'm careful not to touch my face because I know that that, has primer lead primer residue. But I'll hold lead bullets reloading all day long. That metallic lead's not going to come through my skin,

but that primer residue with organic lead compounds can. So when you have these people talk about lead is obviously a toxin, they're talking about these organic lead compounds that were in leaded paint, organic lead compounds that were in leaded gasoline, all of that stuff that causes these human health issues was a different form of lead. You don't have doctors talking about eating game meat shot with lead. ammunition as being a problem because if you look on the websites for like the CDC, the FDA, the EPA, the American Academy of Pediatricians, you look on their websites, they have page

after page of things that you should be careful of so you don't increase your lead exposure. What kind of ways you can increase your lead exposure? None of those websites say anything about eating game meat shot with lead ammunition. It's just not an issue in the medical profession. With one exception, the CDC had added one sentence a couple of years ago. that said if you're breastfeeding, you may want to limit your eating of game meat shot with lamination. So why is it that the entire medical profession is not warning people about this, but there's a lot of bird groups that are warning people about it?

Because it's the ulterior, it's their ulterior motive, just to try to save bird mortalities. But I think we should talk about bird mortalities and not try to use this red herring as a hammer to try to get laws changed. And I've seen in Maryland, New Jersey, the full court press to ban lead ammunition statewide in some of these states is this human health aspect, which is not really an issue. Yeah, they're thinking about one thing and talking about a different thing. Yeah, yeah, exactly. They know that human health and children and lead poisoning will resonate with people. And they're getting laws passed with misinformation like that. Yeah.

Man, it wouldn't be hard to find dudes that just shoot all the time but never eat game meat. be interesting to look at their lead. Yeah. Well, use me for an example. If you look at a bar chart of different studies have been done with people that eat a lot of game meat with lead and the more they, like there was an Inuit community that ate sea ducks shot with lead. It was a different study than the other one.

And they asked people how often they eat sea ducks. So how often they might be exposed to lead shot. And it wasn't until you got to the people who ate seed ducks daily or almost daily. that their lead levels were up to a point where a doctor 10 micrograms per deciliter where a doctor normally says, where are you getting this lead exposure from? If you had to eat sea ducks almost daily for that, my lead levels are higher than that from my pistol shooting, from breathing that smoke that has some of the primer aerosolized in it, from handling shells. Mine was at 18 at one point, and it's been at 12 micrograms per deciliter.

CDC use to use 10 for the safe level. They don't do that anymore. But mine was at 18, 12. and then I started religiously washing my hands after a pistol match and washing my hands really good after I reloaded and handle all that and it came right down to five and six. Oh, you kidding. So that's where my lead exposure was obviously coming from. And throughout all that high blood levels when I was at 18, our family has been using nothing but copper bullets since 2009.

So I had these high blood lead levels. I've been using nothing but copper ammo at that time for 15 years. Yeah. So it's not the lead fragment. And we eat game meat all the time, but it's shot with copper, copper bullets. And then I'm over here reloading, getting my lead exposure. So when they survey hunters versus non-hunters, those hunters are, they're making fishing sinkers. They're reloading, they're shooting.

They're doing a lot of other things that are exposing them to the real dangerous sources of lead. And the game meat eating is probably not registering that at all. There's some very rare exceptions. If you eat game meat every day and you shoot lead and you're, you've got burger. burgers is more of an issue burgers can have around 20 25% of the packages might have one lead fragment in it

according to some studies and whole cuts like steaks and roast it's only two or three percent have even one lead fragment so burger is more of an issue if you're eating burger like daily if you think you might be getting lead fragments more days than not

and there was one guy in New Zealand that was eating meat shot with lead every day and he had super high lead levels. So there's extreme cases of individuals like that that you see. Another strange case is everybody has an appendix unless they've had it taken out. And that's like a blind sack in the digestive system. And if you're a quail hunter and you're eating a lot of birds, dove and quail number eight shot, there's been cases where a couple number eight pellets have dropped into that blind appendix and then been trapped in there.

Wow. They may stay in there for years. And then if it's in there for years, then it's going to start absorbing some of that metallic lead just because of the length of exposure. Gunshot victims have been shown too, especially for some reason if it's near a joint. Maybe it's a lymphatic system or something. A gunshot victim where they leave a lead bullet in can have dangerously high blood lead levels in future years. So if it's metallic lead, passing through your system in a day or two is not an issue. if it's metallic lead that stays in your system a long time, it can be.

Man, when we were kids, we had the stuff to pour our own split shot, you know. We go down to the gun range, sift the berms out, get the shot out, melt it, separate the garbage from the lead, pour the lead into the molds, making sinkers, no respirators or nothing, just doing it right in the garage. And then you spend all day with those sinkers packed in your lip like a cha. I always kind of wanted to get my lead test about never gotten to test it, man. Yeah, I always encourage competitive shooters.

A lot of them aren't aware of it to get it tested because if you're not being careful like I started to, washing my hands, it can be an issue. But the whole issue of eating game meat, when you look at packages, like commercially produced, commercially ground, venison burger has a higher level. People that grind it themselves, they keep all those bloody scraps out of their burger pile.

You know, they're more careful about what they're hurting in the burger pile personally. And so the number of fragments in personally ground venison is a lot lower. Is there right? If you do the math on how many meals of venison a family has, a family of four has, and what percentage of those packages might have one fragment that only one person at the table gets. And you do the math on it, it's like someone might get a fragment once a month. I did the math for Arizona using some data that we had. And maybe once a month you get an occasional fragment that passes through your system.

If you look at the reality and the science that's there, it's not an issue. But politicians are not looking at any of that. They're not interested in that. Someone tells them that hunters are poisoning their kids and they feel like they've got to do something. Yeah, exactly. And you get into trouble with laws that don't make sense. Yeah. Okay.

CWD and Predators. Yeah. this is another example of people in my mind this is another example of people thinking one thing and talking about another okay so you will have I'm gonna color this I'm gonna color this heavily with personal opinion okay and you can walk it back if you if you choose predator advocates of which I sort of count myself as one but like I like I like I like living on a predator environment. I like having the animals, all the native

wildlife present. I get excited when I see mountain lions. I get excited when I see wolves. I get a kick out of seeing coyotes and bobcats. I'm not like an anti-preditor guy. But I also am a predator management advocate. And I trap.

We hunt predators. We use fur products. Okay. So I have a nuanced relationship with predators. But I noticed that people that have a view that know that are absolutist that like predators should not be managed, predators should not be killed, predators shouldn't be hunted. They probably never think for a minute about CWD. Oftentimes because most of them are not educated on wildlife issues.

They don't follow wildlife issues. They're like predator saviors first and foremost. And they divorce their love for predators from any conversation about wildlife management, about issues of biodiversity. they are pro-preditor and that's it. It seems like that group,

that group of people is all of a sudden now interested in chronic wasting disease. Why? Because they're now saying, oh, you know how I always felt that no one should hurt a predator? Well, check this out. This is why. If there was more

predators on the landscape, they'd take care of chronic wasting disease. And we wouldn't have any chronic wasting disease because everybody who's seen Never Cry Wolf knows that they always pick the sick animal and eat it. Therefore, we shouldn't have any predator management, any predator control because I all of a sudden care a ton about CWD.

And I would like these predators to eliminate CWD. Right? Right. So that's exactly what happened. People are laser focused on their favorite toothy animal and they're always hungry for and always promoting any notion of little information that might indicate that these things are renovating whole ecosystems.

They're changing the course of rivers. They're managing CWD for us. They're curbing climate change. They're just generally saving the planet. I mean, if they can latch onto a piece of information that supports that kind of idea, they run with it. And there's a ton of reporters in big cities that have no exposure to wildlife. that don't really understand hunting culture,

don't really understand wildlife management at all. And they're very eager to grab those kinds of stories and say, yeah, predators are great. The predators are just going to manage the ecosystem and the diseases. Oh, it's an urban journalist's wet dream, dude. To see that pop up, you know. And that's what happens. It like spreads like wildfire.

Well, what happened was a number of years ago, quite a few years ago, people doing research found out that mountain lions were killing a disproportionate number of CWD positive mule deer more so disproportionate from healthy meal deer sure yeah and so that which I have zero problem believing like exactly yeah especially in the later stages of CWD animals just are unaware even in the earlier stages there's probably cues that predators pick up on that we don't even notice the animals a little less thrifty a little less able to get away like Like when mountain lines hiding in the bushes and charges a group of mule deer, if you've got the CWD animal might be a little slower in detecting that flash of fur coming out of the brush. And so there's a lot of reasons why they can be disproportionately. Yeah, if he's 10% less observant. Yeah. And it's going to come out.

And so people found that. These urban riders and carnivore cheerleaders grabbed onto this and just they ran with it. And so you heard this everywhere. And that was just the first little bit of information. And then later on. But in that, within that, and I don't have the time to do this, but someone that studies the media, it would have been interesting to go look and say, how interested has this person been in CWD? Yep. Or are they historically interested in CWD or are they just interested today because they just saw this?

Yep. And so that bit of information started spreading like wildfire and everybody started thinking about. hey, and they're just making bold statements about not only like mountain lions are going to control CWD and meal deer, but carnivores are going to control CWD in all the whole, the whole deer family. And so that chugged along. And then people started, people started doing some research on that to look into it a little further because that was a number of years ago. And there was some modeling that was done. And if you build a population model and you say, okay, we're going to keep everything consistent, except we're going to have Mountain Lions kill CWD positive mule deer at a higher rate. Well, guess what happens?

They're going to control CWD. It's just a mathematical certainty if you just build a simple model. There are some people that built a real complex model and took a lot of things into consideration. They ran a whole bunch of different modeling scenarios. Some of the scenarios, they varied whether the predators killed CWD positive animals at a higher rate or at a one-to-one rate with healthy animals. The other things they varied in the model is like as CWD progressed in an individual, individual deer or elk, does as soon as it gets infected with CWD, do predators start praying right away at the beginning of the phase of infection? Or does it ramp up and they

pray a lot more higher predation when the animal gets sicker and sicker? And they could model that into the model. And they did that. They varied that. And they varied the overall level of predation on the animals. And they ran these, they ran thousands and thousands of these scenarios. And it wasn't to see if carnivores were controlling SWD, but it was to look at under what conditions would they possibly control CWD. And the paper, the research paper. Can I, I just want to explain a thing real quick that that's why I make sure people are getting,

when you're talking about this, is, is, um, imagine that, okay, imagine you have a white tail deer and he's, he's, it's a terrible winter and he's starving to death. And he's depleted. But he gets killed by a coyote. But he was probably doomed anyway. What do you call that? Right. Is that winter kill?

Right. Or is that predation? Yeah. Do you follow me? So I get the point you're making is, is as they get, like, as an infected animal gets near death, does it wind up being that almost like, that almost the predation event would almost be a symptom? Right. Like a symptom of the disease being predated. Yep.

There's, they call it proximate and alternate causes of mortality. Some of the more recent research is actually assigning probabilities to the different causes of mortality. Okay. Like that was, and through modeling, that was like 75% mountain lion predation, 25% CWD. They're actually starting to do things like that. But that's true. When you get to the later stages, the animal's probably going to die in the next six months from CWD anyway.

because they only last two years once they get infected. And so an animal takes it out, that's somewhat compensatory between those two mortality sources. But they did a model that varied all these different things. Some of the model outputs, and the research paper will say, predators can control CWD. That would be the results. But then you read the paper itself. And those scenarios where predators did control CWD and kept it at a low level, the deer and elk populations were cut in half.

And so that may not be an ideal situation for people that like robust deer and elk populations. You know, maybe that's not a great thing to have that situation. They had other modeling scenarios where predators actually eradicated or almost eradicated the CWD in that population. But the deer and elk population, they were gone in 30 years. They were gone. Like no deer and elk. So they controlled CWD because there's no deer and elk left in the model runs. This is in when you run a model.

When you run a model, right. Right. So models are valuable. You know, they say all models are wrong, some are valuable. And they say that because models are valuable because you can look at different relationships of different scenarios. And the first result they got from that modeling was that predators could control CWD into population, but under certain conditions.

But those conditions weren't operating in Yellowstone National Park. And what that was was predators in the model, that showed that if predators preyed on prime age animals primarily and primarily on infected prime age animals, they could control CWD, but predators aren't in Yellowstone. Wolves and mountain lions are praying on young and they're praying on old individuals. They're praying on the wrong classes of animals to actually control CWD. So in their report, in their paper, they will say predators could control CWD. But people will quote that.

People will cite that and say, see, they can. But you read the paper and they say, but they're killing the wrong classes of animals to do it. And so you have to, that's nuance that you have to all take into account. But people don't. They'll grab what nugget they want and they'll cite it. And you have to go to that paper, which most people don't do, and read the entire paper. Like they can eradicate CWD, but that means there's no deer and elk left. So is that valuable?

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Head to firstlight.com. That's F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. Do you feel whatever the models reveal, I mean, do you feel that it's helped, like would you argue, like, let's say you were a man, you were a state agency manager, you're tasked with, or you're like the

SWD czar for an animal, for a state agency. You're the CWD guy. And like a lever you can pull is how many coyotes around the landscape. And you're looking at all the things you have available to you. Would you go and be like, one of the things

I'm going to do is I'm going to turn up that, that, I'm going to turn up the coyote dial. I'm going to turn up the lion dial as part of my management strategy. Yeah. No. Because there isn't any evidence that shows that making those, pulling those levers will improve CWD. I'm interested in population level effects, not whether mountain lions kill,

disproportionately kill positive animals. I'm looking at big picture. Having carnivores on the landscape, does that make a difference from having maybe a also robust, healthy population of the carnivores, but sustainably hunted a small percentage of the population? or compared to having no carnivores. There isn't any evidence yet that shows at a population level that changing the management or limiting the harvest of coyotes and wolves

and mountain lions is going to change the CWD trajectory. Yeah. Where do you sit on CWD these days? It's such a constantly evolving thing. My own opinions, my own fears morph and mature and all the time. Where are you at? Like just in a very general way where you add on, I know. I'm not solidly on one side of the other.

What I think about is, and we've talked about it before, I think 40, 50 years of people in the Rocky Mountain States eating CWD positive venison. And they've done a lot of studies to see if there's an increase in Crucrup-Jacob disease or any other variant that might be related to that in nothing. They've done intensive research, nothing, no evidence that has crossed over into humans at all. But when I talk to my wildlife, my disease expert friends, they say, you know, mad cow disease created a variant that went into humans in England. And so, yes, we have this decades and decades of proof that it doesn't cross into humans, but it would only take once. And so that's why the CDC and most of the disease experts will recommend not eating animals you know are CWD positive. And so I'm not on one side or the other. It gives me great comfort to know that we've tested this and it's not crossing a human barrier.

Yeah, with a lot of testing. I know, I've always known I ate a boatload of it without knowing it. And now I ate it not knowing it, but I found out after the fact. So now I've, now I've 100% know I've eaten infected me. Yeah, but I didn't lose these sleep. And in fact, a buddy mine was there too. I think I told, I don't know if I told you this. I'm at my buddy's house.

I'm with a buddy mine. I take a buddy mind to another buddy's house. This is a doctor lawyer couple. I got a buddy mine. We go there and he, the lawyer of the couple says to his doctor wife, not to me, but to his doctor wife says,

heads up, I haven't gotten the results back on this deer. Like he discloses to her. She doesn't do anything. She just eats. So we're all eating it. Eat a pile of it. While later he calls me.

He's like, man, I got, I just calling you to tell you that I got the results back and it was, you know, it was infected. And so I was like, I'm going to call my buddy now and tell my buddy, but I kind of forgot. Not kind of. I forgot forgot. One day, months go by. And this dude calls me and, no, it's text me. And I don't know why it's even on his mind. but he says, have you knowingly eaten CWD positive meat?

And I said, I forgot to tell you. We both have. Not only that I have. Not only have I. And I expected my phone to ring, no call. So I was like, okay, he's not alarmed. He's not alarmed by it either. Yeah, I think it has, I mean, it's an individual choice, obviously,

but it might have a lot to do with how much venison you have in a freezer. And I go to Texas and I'll kill three or four deer just as a shopping trip to fill. the freezer full of venison. It's a little harder to get a deer in Arizona. And there has been some CWD positive cases near where we harvest those. And we haven't been getting them tested. Maybe that tells you something. I haven't been getting them tested at all. Now, it's different too, I think. One thing that worries me is when you look at Kuru, which is another form of this kind of disease, TSC disease, like scrappy and sheep, CWD and deer, Cruzeil-Yacobs and humans. There's another human form called Kuru that was found in some tribes in Papua New Guinea.

They're eating the brains of their elders as a cultural thing. And they were getting these infectious preons because they were eating brains. They were infecting themselves with this cannibalism action. And so some of the anthropologists then figured that out in a disease expert. They got them to stop doing that. And then Kuru went away. But if you read the scientific papers, there were Kuru cases that were like 30 and 40 years. after the person ate their meal of Kuru.

That worries me a little bit. So it's your choice whether you want to feed your kids. I mean, I'm not too worried about it. But if I had kids around the table, that's a different equation. It's too late for mine, man. They're brought up on deer meat.

Last night, we ate quite a pile of it. Okay, never mind the health, human health. Population level, then we're going to move on. Population level impacts on deer. Yeah, definitely.

You think you're going to be documented all over now. You're not in question, hasn't been in question for a while. Big buck impacts, you think? Yeah, one thing that was interesting is one of the studies in Table Mesa, Colorado, which I should talk about more. But one of the results they said in there, they had about 43% of the deerhead CWD. And they were studying them a couple times through a couple decades.

And after probably 20 years of fairly high prevalence rates, like 25 to 40%. They couldn't, in all of the 64 deer, I think they captured, not one of them was over five years old. They couldn't find a buck over five years old. And I thought they didn't even talk about that much, but that's a symptom of what happens. When an animal doesn't live more than two years after they've been infected

and they're getting infected early, you're not going to have an older age structure. Saskatchewan's got some game management units that are 70% positive for CWB. And when you reach that level and you've got animals dying after two years, you have to affect the population. There's no way you couldn't. Yeah, got it. Got it.

You know, it gave me a lot of hope, if that's the right word. This idea that, yeah, that you're going to have, that animals get infected, they're always going to die within a couple of years. The precinct you won't have old bucks. You're not going to have six-year-old bucks, seven-year-old bucks. But earlier we mentioned the Hansen buck. Yeah, right, and four years old. Yeah.

That was a sketch one. but the only four years old, right? Biggest buck ever killed was four. Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, another thing about the, another study that was done in Colorado, the table mesa study area, done by a number of people in 2005, they went in there and they studied prevalence rates of CWD, what percent had CWD?

They looked at predation rates on the deer population. They looked at causes of mortality, how the deer were dying, and studied it a couple years. And they said throughout this period, CWD was going up and up, and there was a heavy predation on meal deer, mountain lions on meal deer, not only heavy predation, but almost four CWD positive deer

were preyed upon for every one healthy deer by mountain lions. So there was a differential predation on CWD sick animals, a heavy predation overall, and throughout all CWD levels kept going up and up and up. And so they concluded, in 2008, when they published, they concluded even with a heavy predation by mountain lions, there's still, the mountain lines are not able to control CWD.

But then 13 years later, some of those same people came back into the same population, collected the same kind of information, and they found that after 13 more years, now mountain lines were killing four and a half infected deer for every one healthy deer. So still high predation, differential predation on CWD positive animals, and the CWD, the percent that had CWD went from 28% to, from 38% to 42. So CWD still increased with that heavy predation for 13 more years. But their conclusion in that paper was, we think, among other things,

predators might be assisting in controlling CWD. And so people can cite that paper. But the reason they said that. They thought maybe it would have been even worse? That's exactly it. So that was just on the speculation. With lions killing four and a half sick deer to every healthy deer, CWD still increased. But they hold out that well, maybe it would be even worse.

That was their speculation even worse. So I think an alternate conclusion would be even in that condition, they still weren't able to manage CWD. It still went up. Now the people doing that research, some of them are friends of mine. They're good. They're solid research. That was just their conclusion. And, you know, we don't all agree sometimes when we look at the same data.

And I'm not willing to take that speculative step and say, yeah, they were probably controlling CPD because it probably would have been higher. It's too many probabilities for me. Let's move on to another one. Another subject. If you follow wildlife news, wildlife politics, conservation news, you know the trophic cascade thing. Okay, so wolves are returned to, uh, to release sites. You got Yellowstone National Park, Frank Church, 97, 96, somewhere in there. Um, and in a while later, outcomes like that they have transformed riparian ecosystems.

Mm-hmm. And now like the rivers are returned. The beavers are back. There's willows everywhere. You know, it was a, unbeknownst to us, it was a sick land. that is now healthy, all thanks to this handful of wolves that are that are running around. People are doing TED is the perfect right. Ted talk thing.

It's very inspiring. And then over time you see pieces of research coming out that sort of have this, well, maybe it's not that tidy. Maybe that's not quite quite right. The last one of these I read was the authors. the trophic cascade theory relied on some work done by some willows, some people doing research on willows. And even the people that did the research that is cited in the trophic cascade thing, started saying you kind of got our numbers wrong.

I'll correct that a little bit. Please. That's what you're here for. Yep. So first of all, trophic cascades, if people understand that, basically a trophic level is like the grass is one trophic level.

The grass eaters, the herbivores are another trophic level. and then the predators are another trophic level. And the idea is you can take the predators away or you can add predators. And if you add predators, there's less grass eaters and so there's more grass. So it causes this this cascading effect

through these trophic levels. That's what trophic cascade is. And so we brought wolves back in Yellowstone and 95, 96, 97 wolves were released. I think a total of 41, wolves were released. And then just a couple, just about, so 97, in 98 already there is, There was a couple researchers from the Pacific Northwest that were in there measuring the tallest aspens.

In retrospect, there's been a lot of scientific papers showing that their methodology was biased. They weren't trying to be biased, but it just was not randomly distributed sampling. It wasn't very good sampling. But regardless, they measured the tallest aspen in a bunch of these aspen stands. And this is just, they started in 98th. It was a year after the third wave of release of wolves came in. And they published in 2001, and they said in that publication 2001, Aspins are recovering in the riparian areas. And we're probably seeing the beginning of wolves triggering a trophic cascade.

So they didn't have any data on that. They just measured some Pallas Aspins, which wasn't a very good method of measuring Aspins anyway. And they made this comment. And once again, the media picked it up. And it was a wonderful story. from wolves were coming back, brought wolves back to Yellowstone, and now the streamside vegetation, the aspens were recovering and doing great. And that spread like wildfire for a number of years. And then the first paper I saw with Matt Kaufman, remember you had Matt Kaufman on the podcast with Montef.

Matt Kaufman went and did some research in the 2000s. He published in 2010 with some people. And they said, and they did a very good, scientifically robust measuring of acid. been throughout the park in a more robust way than the original. Can I wedge in here that just to make the connection? The idea was that elk ungulates were over like we're overgrazing. And so now that there's more predation on the landscape, more animal predation on the landscape, it was giving it was giving a break to the vegetation regime from elk grazing. therefore it's coming back and recover.

I need to clarify something. I should have started with that. There's two different kinds of trophic cascades that people have talked about in Yellowstone. One is the density-mediated trophy cascade. And that just means there's fewer elk, so there's more vegetation. That's just a real simple kind of relationship.

And so people will say, look, we brought wolves back. There's fewer elk. We had 19,000 elk in Yellowstone two years before the wolves came. They started declining before the wolf. were released actually for two years. We had 19,000 elk two years before the wolves were released.

That was a fun of hunt back in them days, man. And that dropped to a low of 4,000. So 19,000 to 4,000, you're definitely going to have more vegetation growing in Yellowstone. So that's the density mediated. That just means there's fewer elk. So there's more vegetation. But the problem is people want to give wolves all the credit for that. But at the same time, we had a little handful of wolves at that time.

But we have grizzly bear populations. increased to the extent that their predation on elk calves was three times what it was prior to that earlier. It increased three times. Mountain lion population doubled in Yellowstone. Fires burned 36 percent of Yellowstone in 1988. That had huge effect on the ecology of that. We had one of the worst droughts during that time shortly after wolves were released.

We had one of the most severe winters at that time. And then we were hunting cow elk off the park in Montana to help try to manage the Yellowstone population. And we kept cow elk tags too long and too high. And so hunters contributed to that population to climb because all this stuff was happening at once. And the people managing the elk tags didn't really at the time didn't know that all this stuff was going to affect the population. So you're burst in the bubble of everyone that just wants to blame wolves. Right. And so you hear, I mean, wolves are precipitating this trophic cascade.

So that's the first one. I think we can dismiss that. Wolves did not cause that decline of 19,000 to 3,000. All those factors did. So we can't give wolves credit for trophic cascades because of density reductions in elk. So then they very quickly switched to the behaviorally mediated trophic cascade, which means that elk like to hang out along the streams and wolves were hard. hunting along the streams and they were scaring the elk out away from the streams.

And so that streamside vegetation could respond because the elk were scaring them out of there. They call that the landscape of fear. But that first study that kind of talked about that, which was actually part of the 2001 study, first study that talked about that didn't mention the fact other researchers have later that, you know, if you're comparing aspen that grow along the stream and aspen that grow on the drier uplands, the aspen along the stream are going to grow a lot more than the uplands. I wasn't ever mentioned in the original discussion of that. But other people, like Kaufman came by later in 2010,

not only did he measure the aspen in a more randomly and more scientifically robust way throughout the park, but he took the last 10 years of locations of where a wolf killed an elk and took all those spots. And he mapped the landscape of fear. He mapped for the first time, because people talking about the landscape of fear were using other metrics that weren't very direct.

but Kaufman map kill locations and then related that to close to stream, not close stream, other effects, and actually had a map of very risky places for wolves to be and not risky places for wolves for elk to be. Through elk to be, right, because of wolf predation. And there was when they did the analysis of high risk areas and low risk areas for elk to be preyed on by wolves, they found no difference in Aspen regeneration in riskier areas versus areas of. weren't risky. And so he published that paper in 2010. That was the first one I saw that said, hold the boat. The title was Aspins are not recovering in Yellowstone because they weren't.

And at the time, there was a 60% reduction in the Yellowstone elk population. And still there was no evidence of Aspins recovering. And so that really, that was the first one I saw. And I think it is. Yeah, but that wasn't the Trofic Cascade heyday came after that. Yes. And the Trophic Cascade, heyday where everybody, was talking about it, they were all talking about this behaviorally mediated. They're all talking about wolves are redistributing elk away from some of these areas. And then those streamside vegetation's recovering. And then another researcher Thomas Hobbs came in and he focused on willows, not aspen. And he measured willows and where they grew and where the wolves were. And his conclusion

was wolves, Aspen are recovering, but wolves have nothing to do with the will of recovery. The interesting thing is you hear, there's the YouTube video that's got 44 million views now about how wolves are restoring the Yellowstone ecosystem and changing the course of rivers, changing the hydrology. And bringing the beavers back was one of the things. That was peak trophic. Yes. Yeah. But the biologists brought the beavers back, not the wolves. Biologists released beavers in seven drainage in the Galles and National Forest right on the edge of Yellowstone.

About 130 beavers. And those beavers then dammed up the tributaries, changed the. the hydrology made habitat for willows to now return. So beavers probably should get more credit than wolves for trophic cascades and in Yellowstone because of their changes in hydrology. But beaes don't have the big public relations campaign that wolves do. Hunting demands preparation, persistence, and gear that will not quit on you. That is why I wear first light.

This isn't about hype. It's about no compromise gear. Built to perform, built to last. Whether it's their industry leading merino wool, keeping me comfortable through the cold and the hot, or their durable outerwear shrugging off the elements. First Light is built to help you go farther and stay longer. Designed by hunters, four hunters, with a deep commitment to conservation and land access. No shortcuts, no excuses.

Just gear you can count on. Head to firstlight.com. That's F-I-R-S-T-L-L-I. T-E.com. Another funny thing that I made the same point earlier. And this is about public perception. This is a comment about public perception about media and not a comment about wildlife.

But the people that were so happy, it's cynical to point this out, but the people that were suddenly so happy about Willow regeneration, if you studied the media, I would ask you, can you go find me situations in the past where they were expressing their concern about willow regeneration? And can you show me where they were aware of this?

Or beavers. You know, they weren't concerned about beavers not being on the landscape. Yeah. So it's like it drives, they're going through life. They're not aware that there's an Aspen issue. They're not aware that there's a Willow issue. They don't care that there's an Aspen issue. They don't care that there's an Aspen issue.

They don't care that there's a willow issue. They've never heard the word riparian, but suddenly hear that wolves have made it better. Therefore, I now believe that it was a problem. But it was the discovery day for them. Yep. Yeah. And it's interesting that the first two people that published that paper in 2001, they've been on a campaign to convince everyone that wolves have been the drivers or the triggers of a major trophy cascade. They've published a paper almost every year.

in the last 25 years talking about wolves initiating a trophic cascade and they're unrelenting even with all of this mounting body of scientific evidence that shows that that's really not true that that this story is not like that at all and because it doesn't suffice it somehow doesn't suffice just to be like they're cool to have around you're right it's cool to see them they're cool to have around they're like I need something more we have to justify them on a landscape and we don't need to justify large prayers on the landscape. They were part of the native fauna. We recovered almost all of the native other animals and we've got a couple more and

they happen to be carnivores to finish up. Yeah. I think it's like the best word I can think of it. I don't mean to give it like a religious aspect, but the best word I can think of it is I think of it like it's a sin. I think it's immoral or whatever to eliminate, to intentionally eliminate native wildlife I think of as like a sin against God and man. You know what I mean.

It's like I don't think it's right. Yeah. That's what I don't think it's like it's human. It's it's hubris, you know, to be like, oh, there's this thing that's lived here. It's always lived here. But I deciding that it needs to go away. I'm just like, we can't be making that decision. Yeah, David Meach, L. David Meach is is the leading wolf guy really in the world.

He's been researching wolves for more than six decades. researching wolves for more than six decades. And he came and taught, gave a talk at the University of Arizona one time. I picked him up at the airport. We were at breakfast. And he said something to me and he said it later in his talk. He said that the people that think returning, this is like the largest wolf advocate. Well, maybe not a wolf advocate.

Largest wolf scientist in the world. He says, people think that returning wolves to Yellowstone created this situation with brought back the birds and the bees and the butterflies. he said, that's more religion than it is science. But he was quick to add that those people that say that bringing wolves back is going to decimate all of our big game herds in the state, he said, that's more religion than it is science. The truth is really in the middle. They're not going to be destructive and they're not saints.

And he wrote another paper that said that, and you've probably heard this before, but that wolves are neither saints nor sinners except to people who make them so. People want to make them out to be saints and sinners and they're not. Yeah. They, within that, they have an impact. Uh-huh. They have an impact. They sure. And certainly, and locally, they can have an impact, and we can manage that. We should be able to manage that impact. But the two that have been publishing Trophicascade papers almost every year, I think they have 25 papers I read since that 2001.

They just published one last year. And in the abstract, it says, that wolves triggered the strongest trophic cascade in the world. This is just last year. They're still saying this. And that was followed by a rebuttal this year by some Yellowstone researchers, people who are making their living researching the Yellowstone ecosystem as a rebuttal. And the title of the rebuttal was flawed analysis invalidates the idea of a strong trophic cascade in Yellowstone. That's a heavy hit title.

That's like that's as clear as you can possibly make it. And I think you in an email once said, let's talk about this latest, there's some kind of news article that said that the Trophy Cascade stuff doesn't have scientific support. But this has been happening since Kaufman wrote that paper in 2010. I mean, this is 16 years people have been saying things aren't happening like the media is telling you it's happening. And they're using good, solid science. but nobody wants to hear that story. I mean, the original story is so beautiful.

I know it's not true, and it makes me feel warm and fuzzy. And so there's just no getting rid of that. I constantly see on social media how wolves have changed the ecosystem in Yellowstone. And then once in a while, someone publishes a paper that says, you know, a lot of that's not true, that the science just doesn't support that. And I've been seeing that for 15 years, but nobody, people are still telling the original story. There's no getting out in front of that. It's too late.

It's like a freight train that left. As a writer who like as a writer that deals in history and wildlife issues and other things, I will sometimes hear a thing. I'll hear a thing. And I'll get really excited because it's going to be great for the thing I'm writing. Yeah. Okay. And I'm like, that is great.

But then when I look into it and I learn that it's not true, I feel a. disappointed. I do. Yeah. I've been there before too. Like, this is really going to support what I'm right. And then I'm like, damn it. Really? That's a lie? Or that's like, you know, this thing that everyone knows now I know is not true. Yeah. And I'm disappointed. Yeah. Okay. Because I wanted the truth to be other than it was. I will say to wildlife researchers,

which I have many friends that do that, that they're in that line of work. And it'll be talking about something they're doing. And I'll say, what do you hope happens? Yeah, right. And they're like, I can't do that. What do you mean? What do I hope happens? But I'm like, because you're a human being. Yeah.

There's got to be like, let's just be honest. There's got to be some thing. I'm not saying you'd bend the truth, right? You're a person of integrity. But in your head there's got to be, I hope that this something happens that would be like of note. Right? Because you're, you're only human. And so the question I would ask is if you look at the people that started from year

one trophy Cascades, trophy Cascades, would they have had it in them? Would they have had it in them to publish a piece that said, turns out there isn't one? A lot of scientists do that. And that's just a matter of being a good scientist. Because you're right, every single scientist has bias, has things that they would love if the results were this, because that would be, that would be great, especially if it's going to make big news. I mean, that's how people get tenure. And that's how they get promotions in the university setting is the, make a lot of big splashes in the news. And that's what drives a lot of people in academia, unfortunately.

But everybody has a bias, but a good scientist curbs that and packs it away and just lets the results speak for themselves. And in scientific papers, a lot of times you'll see, here's our study area, here's our methods, here's our results. And then when you get to the last discussion section, there's some leeway to discuss what you think the results mean. So the results are the results. But the discussion section, there's a lot of leeway for researchers.

to weave their personal biases in and interpret the results for you, how they see it. That's what you have to be careful of, as these. And that's where people peel quotes out of the discussion section that are just speculation and attribute it to that peer-reviewed scientific paper. But it's not something they've researched. It's not something in the results. It's not something they found. It's something they think, which is not really science.

Let's jump to have, Alinas. This is something that some people might be like, why they why does this matter but it matters exactly it matters to me everyone knows like you have the boon and crockett record books okay um how how was it an oversight how was it you couldn't shoot like you couldn't get a record book havelina yeah i found this out the hard way many years ago i got um a big havelina okay i shot a big havelina and people were pointing out like damn, that's a huge havelina. That's a huge havelina.

And I go and look and I had no idea. I had no idea. I'd never entered anything before. But I go and look, I'm like, what? It's not in here. But then I found like Safari Club had it. And it was like, and it hit the whatever, the minimums for Safari Club. But I was like, how could this noble little, this noble little desert creature not be in the Boone and Crocker record books?

Good question. Arizona's had Arizona record books since 1971. It's had a havelina in there. But I thought the same thing probably 20 years ago. And I was good friends with Buck Buckner, who was the vice president for North American Records for Boone and Crocket at the time. And I asked him, why is Havillena not in there? And he just said, you know, I don't know.

No one's kind of made a run for it. No one's made a proposal for it. And I started a file and I had a file, Havina Buna Crockett early in my career. I'm going to do. This is going to be my project. I'm going to get them in Buna Crockett. and then had a family and got busy and the file folder went farther and farther back into my file. What was in the, okay, what was it?

What were you putting in your folder? Some of the Arizona, like the Arizona records that we've got a big data set of Arizona records like the help inform what the minimum might be. And then and then copies of what the Boone of Crocket needs in order to establish a new category and those sorts things. So I've just starting to have a file and think about that. And then I, and then I just got away from me. I never got back to it. And then Nicole Tapman from New Mexico called me just a couple years ago. And she said, would you write a letter of support from your agency?

That was one thing that was required to get them in the new category. Because she said, I'd like to see if we can get Boone and Crocket to accept Havillina. And she's on the records committee. And I'm on the records committee now, too. And I said, write a letter. I said, I will clear my calendar next week. Let's do this. And so we got two people from Texas, two people from Mexico, Nicole's from New Mexico, and me

from Arizona, and we put together a proposal that talked about how these populations are scientifically managed by these state agencies. They have a long history of records in some states, how popular they were. We've got 58,000 havelina hunters every year in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, harvesting 33,000 havelina. This is a significant big game animal. I mean, some people in Boone Crockett initially said, is that even a big game animal? Yes, it's a big game animal.

It's got hooves. What other hooved big game animal do you mount with its mouth open as big ferocious roar? I mean, they're cool. They're cool animals. And they're really popular in the Southwest. They're really popular for non-residents to come down. So we put together this really robust proposal. You can call them in.

I mean, I could name stuff. I could name reasons all day long. It's a big name animal. They're cool. And they're not invasive like feral hogs. They have two young a year, once a year, not like feral hogs, or they have a litter of 10 twice a year. They'll have a litter of eight and only 10 survive.

That's a joke among the feral hog people. So we went to the proposal. We went to a records book committee meeting and we said, here's, but you know we were talking about biases earlier? I'm biased for havelina. Well, yeah, but did you have because you got a couple hogs that you thought should be in there? No, actually, no.

You didn't have a to have any of that. No, 30 years of hunting havalina and all the skulls I've measured that I cleaned. I don't have any of that make the book. So I don't have that. I got a booker. I need to go dig that sucker out. Yeah, you should. And actually, this year,

entering in the Boon to Crockett is free. There's been a benefactor that will cover all entry fees for all species until the end of December. So if you've got a headline around that you haven't got into the books, this is the year to do it because it's free for you. So you're not in there. No. So you're just doing this out of the goodness of your heart. I just love Havelina.

And I think, especially in Mexico, our Mexican colleagues, have, are really have more at stake of giving the havelina a little more respect. Yeah. As a big game animal, I think that's a big thing. Sometimes they're not given that kind of respect. No, I even hear, man, like people I like, you know, people, people that I count as friends, man. I'll hear people really denigrate them and, like, you know, talk about, oh, you know, whatever, we shot, a couple and left them laying or something.

I hate that kind of stuff, man. Yep. Yep. So we went to the records committee and we said, this was before we did that proposal and we said, we argued our case why haveline ought to be part and some people are like then we got to add alligators and now we got to add but there's reasons why some of these other species aren't ready to make the book and so we said what's the logic there like there's some other animals that aren't in the book that are still harvested that was

what they were thinking like what you were setting up that you were setting up a you were setting up a set of parameters that other things would be that would other things would reach Nope. Just havelina. Just focus on havelina, but some people in Boone Crockett said, well, if we do Havelina, then we're going to get pressured to do all these other animals. It's going to cascade. But it's not. There's not any other animals that are right for inclusion. Be a trophy cascade. Did you get that joke? That is a good one. That is a good one. So we asked the records committee, we're not asking you to decide now, but let us come back with a proposal. We came back with a proposal. They were pretty impressed. The proposal was pretty extensive and covered everything. everything. And they had some board meetings. They talked about it. They agreed to include it, but they didn't have the minimum entry yet. But we have over, we have hundreds of Havillina skulls that have been measured in the state record books and SCI to use as a baseline for what should the minimum be. And so we use those records. Roy Grace from Pope and Young Club did a whole

bunch of legwork on analyzing those data. And then Boone Crockett Club then made the decision what the minimum would be. And the minimum for Boone Crockett, and then Poppe and Young followed suit right after that because there's a close relationship between two clubs. So Pope and Young accepted them, which is great because they're perfect for archery. And so Pope and Young then decided, they approved them, decided on a minimum. Popen Young minimum is 13 and 14, 16. And then Boone to Crocket minimum is 14 to 516.

And it's length and width. It's simply just like bears and lions. It's length and width. No kind of toss. No toss or anything. Nope. They want to make it simple on measures. I already know how to do that measurement.

They have the equipment. What's minimum again? Minimum for Boone to Crocket. Yeah, you'll have to remember that and go back and measure it. Oh, I'm going to measure tonight. So they go home. No. Boone to Crockett is 14 and 516th.

Oh, man. 14 and 516. I wish my wife is more hand. yet that kind of. I mean, if I called her right now and go measure it. Go measure that,

yeah. But it's not going to go over great. But they have to use what's called a boss square that they use, I think, for musk ox or, I think, but it's a square,

it's a steel square because the back of the Havillina skull has a Y. Yeah. So you can't, it's not measured in the bottom of that Y. It's measured absolute total length. So you have to have something square

across the back and square across the front. And the width is just the zygomatic arches here. all right yeah so I'm pretty excited that that that now gets the respect that that's always deserved that's great uh I was gonna ask you about status black tail deer and meledum let me ask you about status of havelinas yeah you don't really hear about this ever no is it just like our havelina is just sort of always there at the same you never hear about that it's a great year it's a bad year ups and downs I

They just sort of like just, they are very stable overall. And part of it is they're so adapted to the arid desert. They're eating a lot of prickly pear, which not like Forbes are coming and going and wet here and dry ears. I see. Brickley pair is always there. They eat a lot of root tubers. So some of those plants are more abundant with rainfall, but they're still there. They're pretty drought resistant, little critters.

Very drought resistant. Just kind of chug along. They do a pretty good job of chugging along and not having these violent swings up and down. Yeah, got it. hunting demands preparation, persistence, and gear that will not quit on you. That is why I wear First Light. This isn't about hype. It's about no compromise gear.

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That's f-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E dot com. So with that, let's talk about Black T-L-T-L-Dier and Mieldier. Is there a reason to be, let's start with Mildare, is there any reason to be not pessimistic about the future of meal deer. Yeah, absolutely. I'm not pessimistic at all. Really? Yeah. Tell me more. I feel like it's like always bad news about mealy. I hope you feel better by the time you leave then. It is always bad news. And some of the bad news comes from just a desire to advocate for meel deer, which I'm 100% on board with. There's a lot of stresses affecting meel deer in the West. But

mule deer, I chair a meel deer working group, which is for the last 20 years, I've been the chairman of this group that's sponsored by the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies. It's 24 Western wildlife agencies in Western North America, provinces and states. And we have one mule deer or blacktail deer expert from each of those 24 jurisdictions. And that's the Mielder Working Group Committee. So it's the West leading mule deer experts. And every year we put together for the 11th year now this year, status of mule deer and blacktail deer in North America. And you can't just write one paragraph about how Milder and Blacktail Deer are doing.

they're doing differently all over and for different reasons. And so we take a page or two for each jurisdiction. So you can read about Saskatchewan. You can read about Arizona. You can read about Montana written by the meel deer expert in that state. Okay. And then we do some summary stuff at the beginning of that. And that gives you a snapshot of how deer populations are doing.

And more than half of the meelder populations are stable or increasing right now. Some of the Rocky Mountain states had a bad winter of 20, 23, and then they're recovering from that. Southwestern states, New Mexico, Arizona are suffering from multi-year drought. But we had to decline in the 1990. It had several declines in Mealder through time. And the latest one was in 1990, and that's when the Mealder Working Group was established. You mean holistic declines? Like west-wide declines.

Okay. Yeah. And that's happened a couple times. And when you look at it in retrospect, when it happened in the 90s, we were like, what's happening in mule deer? Something is affecting mule deer everywhere. That's what it seemed like because it seemed to be declining everywhere. When you look back now at the history, it's obvious that when you have really wet years in the desert southwest, that means a lot of rain, a lot of Forbes in the winter, really nutritious and deer do really well. Reproduction rates go up.

But that same wet winter in the Rocky Mountains might be heavy snowboard. pack and a harsh winter in the Rocky Mountain. So the same kind of a wet year can make deer population of the Rocky Mountain States decline and increase in the southwest. That's interesting that that same weather pattern can do something different. There's good one place and bad another place. So you have these different things happening in different regions of their range all the time. And then periodically every couple decades, they synchronize just by chance, really.

They synchronize where you might have a harsh winter and you also have a drought in the South and deer population decline. And so looking back, it looks like just once in a while, all those regional differences synchronized and everybody says, oh, my God, there's a deer decline in the West. And that happened in the 90s. And then populations recovered from that decline. And probably no state or province would say, not many of them would say they have all the meelder they want.

They're all below population objective. But there's no west-wide mielder decline, like you see some people talking about right now, like it's going down. Arizona after the 1990s declined because the drought had 15 years of steady growth. Population growth up. And it's just the last six years or so a drought that has caused that to hook down. What made the Mule Deer Glory Days? Yeah.

Good question. That was a 50s and 60s. Whether you call that that was like the late 60s, late 70s, whatever. Sometime, a long time ago was the Mildare Glory Days. Yeah. Was that that everything aligned and lifted? instead of everything aligned and declined? There was a lot of other things going on at the time.

You know, our deer population, like everything else, 1800s or early 1920s declined just because over-exploitation and no management. Then from the 20s, Westwide deer population generally increased. And during that period, we had now restrictions on harvest, not killing those in some places or limiting the killing of dough, limiting the harvest. We had 1080 predator poison and predator control everywhere. We're dropping poison baits everywhere, reduced the predation pressure.

We had some wet years in there, all that. And then there was a lot of logging going on. So we're removing the overstory. Shrubs are coming up. Forbes are growing. It's great for meal deer. So all of that stuff combined was happening from the 20s or 30s

and then into the 50s and early 60s. So 50s and 60s was like the heyday of meal deer. We had a lot of meal deer. But that was the result of conditions and activities. that we will never repeat. We can't go back and do that. We're not going to do that wholesale logging. We're not going to drop 1080 bates one every square mile across the west.

We're not going to do those things. So looking at mielder populations in the 50s and 60s is not the benchmark to compare today's meal there. That was an unusual bubble because of all those things happening. And then in the 70s we had a muleer decline coming off of that bubble. And we even had, there was a symposium in Utah in 1976 that was a, about mealded decline in the West. And it was a whole symposium concerned

about this decline in the 70s. Then we got rainfall, generally in the 80s, was a pretty lush year and deer populations throughout the West increased in the 80s. And then if you remember late 80s, 1980s when Yellowstone burned, there was barges running aground in the Mississippi River because it was so low.

We had really, really bad drought throughout a lot of the West. That precipitated this late 80s, 1990s decline that initiated the mealder working group at that time. And so we've gone through these swings for different reasons. And we've recovered a lot from that 1990s decline. And now more than half of the jurisdictions are stable or increasing. Some of them are certainly declining.

All of them below objective. But they're not. Below objective. I'd say all of them, I don't know if you'd find many meel deer biologists that say, we don't want any more meal deer. We've got enough. You know, the habitat's full. You know, we're still, we're still need to build.

deer herds almost everywhere, even though I think Colorado, half of the units I read from that biologist are at population objectives. So there's places where they are, but we're not in dire straits. There's no west-wide muleer decline right now. We're chugging along in weather conditions, whether it's drought or harsh winters, is causing these annual fluctuations against a backdrop of long-term habitat change. You know, the West looks a little bit different now than it did in 1950 as far as urban development, urban sprawl, communities, roads, all that stuff. We're not going back to the 1950s, so we should not be saying, well, deer populations are such and such lower than the 1950s. It's not fair. It's not fair to do that. But I'm, as long as we keep working on on preserving

migration corridors, improving habitat on large scales, I think the future of meal deer is bright. We're going to keep chugging along with good meel deer herds if we keep paying attention and doing everything we can. If every area is below objective, what do you think of a, what do you think of someone says, and before I say this, I'll recognize you're arguing for like a nuanced approach where you have 24 different regions and every region has its own story and various factors. But let's say I come to you and say generally should it be that we're not killing female meal deer anymore.

We shouldn't be killing dough meal deer. See, that's on a unit by unit basis. There's some areas like if half of the units in Colorado are at population objective, then that's the case where you need to maintain that population in that population objective range. So I would not I would not outlawed doe hunting throughout the West. In Arizona, when populations got really low, then dough hunts were removed. And you see in units, even within a single state, certain units will have dough harvest and other units won't. And that's the biologist doing what they do and managing those populations based on where they are in relation to objectives and where they need to be.

Got it. So I wouldn't broad brush and say we shouldn't be killing females. It depends on the area. What about black tail deer? Blacktail deer are harder to survey. they're doing pellet counts historically. They do genetics. Yeah, right.

And they'll use dogs. They'll use sniffing dogs to find pellets and they'll record all that. They collect in Alaska, they've done a lot of pellet collecting where they do genetics. And they look at how many individual, minimum number of individual deer they have per square mile based on genetic fingerprints. Got it. So they're hard to monitor. They're very susceptible, especially southeast Alaska. very susceptible to heavy snow winters.

You get those islands, Prince of Whale, all those islands, you get a heavy, heavy snow winter, and you can lose 50, 60% of the black town population. But then in the years after that, they come roaring back. Once the population's down, there's a lot of food for the remaining animals. Those populations bounce right back. So they dip and they grow based on mostly on weather conditions.

But then, again, I said weather conditions in the forefront, and the background is long-term habitat changes. And one of the things in Sitka Blacktail Range is the logging that was done in the past that has now all grown up into second growth, really thick, not very easily marketed for anything commercially. So we've got, it's called STEM exclusion or stand exclusion where the sunlight's not reaching the ground to make Forbes and Shrubs that the deer eat. Sure.

It's just blocking out the light. So you have all the secondary growth that needs to be cut. but other than maybe cutting it and making wood pellets, you know, is a possibility. Someone needs to commercialize something to get in there and open up some of that. But now it doesn't mean that the old growth forest in southeast Alaska need to be logged. The old growth forest is really important for the same reason. Those big old trees, they stop the snowfall. And in heavy snowfall events, the deer have to have that mature old growth forest to go in and move around and feed a little bit

until the snow melts enough that they can go back out into the clear cuts in some of the places with more food. So the old growth forest is really important. And then that stem exclusion is keeping that habitat from having more food than it could have if it was managed better. So that stuff's going on in the background of these annual blacktail fluctuations. You know, those clear cuts, they're so good for 10 years or whatever. in that country.

They're so good for deer for 10 years and then they're so terrible for deer. Yeah, when they grow up. For 30 or 40. Yep. For 40. Yep.

When there's a new one, you're like, oh, it's cool now, but man, then it's just going to suck. Yeah. And even if they leave, if they go in and leave

a lot of slash and horizontal logs, it becomes an issue of deer not being able to move around as well either in some of those clear cuts. Yeah, it's just a total obstacle course. Yeah. So,

chairmanship of the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, Mealdeer Working Group. How long have you been doing that? 28 years. I was one of the original, I'm the only remaining original member that was approved by the Western directors in 1997. Our first meeting was in 98 in Jackson, Wyoming. About eight years later, the chairman retired and passed the torch to me.

So I've been chairman for 20 years. And if you go on to see what we've been up to for 20 years or 28 years, We've got a website, Mealdeerworking Group.com. It's just all one word meal deer working group. And you see a lot of publications on there. And what we put together is like we established seven ecoregions in North America that were related to meal deer management and meal deer ecology. And we produce habitat guidelines for each one of those seven ecoregions. So a practitioner on the ground, a BLM biologist in the southwest deserts can pull out the southwest deserts to habitat guidelines and read about what deer need to think.

thrive in the southwest desert or the coastal rainforest. We've done that. We produced other documents about disease concerns translocating wildlife. We produced a North American meholder conservation plan, which guided conservation in a very general way throughout the West. And with that plan, we wrote an MOU, and we had the chief of the Forest Service, the director of the BLM, and about seven agency heads signed this MOU saying that their documents, their forest management plans, their BLM resource management plans, would, incorporate these things and be consistent with the North American Milder Conservation Plan. So if anybody's any local biologist said, we're not going to do that.

We said, well, your director says that you're going to do things that are consistent with what Mielder need and Blacktail Deer need. We're revamping that now. But we've got a guidance document on if you're monitoring Milder populations, here's some of the metrics you should monitor and here's some advantages and disadvantages of monitoring them different ways. kind of for for biologists. We did something on movements and migration barriers to a movement.

And that website has all of these documents as a PDF. And a lot of the Mielder working group members then contributed to our latest Milder book, that big one that you have, the black one that you have. There's 82 chapters and each, 82 co-authors, 23 chapters, and each chapter is written by the national expert for that particular topic with the team of writers. It's all the latest mule deer and blacktail deer information. And the mielder working group had us and a lot of our friends that are working on meal deer work on that book. Yeah, if you want to be the guy in your circle that knows the most about mule deer or black tails, you should get that book and memorize it.

It's got to beat everybody. It's comprehensive for sure. So this is a funny one. You recently went to New Zealand to speak about servid conservation. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. But there, I mean, I feel like they spent more energy trying to get rid of wildlife. They absolutely do.

They spend more energy trying to get rid of wild, not wildlife, but more energy trying to get rid of hooved animals. Yep. There's no one talks in New Zealand about, like, conservation of hooved animals. I know it's like gloves off as it should be. Yeah, like the helicopter gun them, you know what I mean? It's like they did. They're not, they're not trying to make robust populations for hunters to be able to go out and do. This meeting was it happens every four years somewhere around the world.

So it's been in China, been in Peru, in the Czech Republic. I helped organize the one in 2018 in Estes Park, Colorado. We had it in the U.S. And this year, it was in Croatia four years ago in New Zealand this time. And I got to go to the Colorado one because I helped organize it. And it was in a neighboring state. My department is not going to send me to China and to Peru. And so I didn't think I was going to be able to go to the New Zealand one.

And they asked me, it's called the International Deer Biology Congress, and they asked me to be a keynote speaker with the expenses paid. So I was able to finally get to an international version of that. And I went there and I talked about how we manage deer and elk, all servids in North America amid the mosaic of BLM land, forest land, private land, national park service land. And you have biologists for all those different agencies. And around that, and then you have funding,

all these different funding sources for companies, conservation. And among this mess that we have in North America, we somehow have this beautiful well-functioning system that works really, really well. So that was my keynote address in New Zealand at that talk. But it was interesting because that conference, sponsored by the New Zealanders, that conference, the title, the theme of that conference was, your deer here. And it was about New Zealand didn't have any deer. It was all of our deer that were in. New Zealand. It was just that our deer, your deer here.

And so there was talks about trying to ratty. They're poisoning brush-tailed possums. They're poisoning white tails in some areas with poisons to try to control them. Yeah, it's like when you go there, you don't need a hunting license on

public land. They're poisoning white tails. They're poisoning, which makes me feel kind of strange, but they're talking about endangered plants and trying to save what what native ecosystem they had. They had three, those reports between one and three mammals that were native to New Zealand. And they were bats.

Yeah. And there was one bat that was there. And there was another, I think the other ones were fossils of bat species. So they had no mammals, basically, no predators at all. And they had nine different species of Moa, these nine foot, the largest one with nine-foot, flightless birds running around the island. Polynesians got there, I think, 800 years ago. and it only took them about 100 years to wipe out all of the moas on the island.

And the only thing big, you imagine you're on an island and you've got nine-foot chickens running around. I mean, they used them. They ate it. They had to have been egg harvest too, man. Yeah, oh, I bet. Yeah, because that's like tough to do. So there was eight or nine different species of cervids that were brought to New Zealand from different places in the world. And they still have most of them.

I was surprised here at the meeting. They brought moose 100. years ago. Teddy Roosevelt was involved in some of the tram locations. They brought moose and I was surprised to hear some people talking about maybe there being a couple moose still there. I've heard that. There's rumors of that. It seems kind of like

their bigfoot. Their version of Bigfoot is what it seems like. There's never any proof, but there's there's reports. Well, like it's got to be and I hunted there, you know, in the sense I got from the guys in that community is the same

when I get when I'm hanging out with Hawaiian. is they've built the whole culture and lifestyle around big game hunting. Yeah, right. And so a lot of the people, it's funny because you get this idea here that, you know, you get this idea here that, that,

you know, like, like whatever, that the tree huggers want to save the deer, you know, or something, but it seems like the tree huggers want them, the tree huggers want the deer dead,

dude. We have a, we have a representative on the milder working group from Hawaii. And that's because, in 1961, they brought some Colombian blacktail from Oregon and put them on Kauai, the island of Kauai. And they're still there and they're hunted. And the locals that like the deer hunt like them. So they're not eradicating them.

But like the, we had a meeting in Hawaii once. And I asked the Hawaiian representative for the meal deer working group, I said, do you finally get to go to a meeting? Because we're here in Hawaii. And he said, no, I've gotten an endangered plant meeting I got to be at. He said, honestly, we're not looking to conserve. increase our deer. He said like, like there's 50 different species in their diet and almost all of them are endangered

plant species. So we don't want more. We don't want more. It's an interesting different perspective. One of the conversations that sticks to me most wasn't New Zealand, but it was in Hawaii, but it was around the same issue is I was talking to a native Hawaiian. Okay. Like an ancestral Hawaiian or like an ethnic, I don't know what you call it, like a Hawaiian.

Not a guy that lives in Hawaii, but a, but a native Hawaiian. And, you know, historically the idea is that when the Polynesians, when the Polynesians arrived in Hawaii sometime around 1100 years ago, they brought, they brought this menagerie of things with them, including pigs, right? The pigs have been there a long time. And he was sharing with me, he goes, how can I be native? I'm native. But the pigs that my people brought in the got to go in the same canoe. They got to go, but I'm native. Wow.

And his take was he didn't want, his take was he didn't need outsiders, you know, he didn't need howlies coming and telling him what animals belonged on the island. That's such an important part of their culture. It's not just like an animal, whether it needs to be there or not. It's part of the culture. It's part of them. It was just so offensive to him. Yeah. Yeah.

This conversation that like, oh, no, no, your native, mad respect. but your pigs, now, yeah, got to go. Get them out of here. Yep. Did you hunt in New Zealand?

It's my last question for you. Yeah, I have a friend Pete Caldwell. I met a few years prior to that. And he said, he knew about the New Zealand deer meeting. He said, if you get to that meeting, he said,

let's go out and do something fun. And so the meeting was over and my son, Levi and I, and Pete took us out along with another guy, PA, Ellen, from Sweden,

big Swedish guy. We went out and we did a little Blitzkrieg about two days of hunting, staying out there, staying in one of the old hunting shacks that was more than 100 years old, probably. And we shot red deer, we shot tar, we shot brush-tailed possum, shot. I got a European hare, European rabbit, which excites Jack Rabbit Gym, be able to get some European hairs. almost got a feral house cat, but I couldn't get my sights fast enough. David, Pete was with me and he's like, he's like, come here, come here, come here, get in position, get in position.

And I'm like, what, what, what is it? What's over there? It's a cat. Hurry up. He was like really excited about getting a cat. I'm imagining why those gone. It slunk away. It slunk away.

That would have been interesting grip and grin. Oh, sunshine of wallaby. Wallabies are hated. I mean, they're cute. Yeah, yeah. They're cute. My wife says, you're not shooting wallaby. And I didn't.

Levi didn't hesitate. Yeah, but they're on the extermination list too. Oh, yeah, big time. Big time. The browse line, when we were up in those mountains, the browse line was just tremendous, like everything gone from three and a half feet down, just like dirt, everything eaten with tars up there and the wallabies. Pete didn't even want us shooting at a wallaby because he was afraid we'd miss.

He wanted to make sure that that thing hit the ground. Oh, really? It was in a new area that it was a really nice area, and there's starting to, pioneer into that area. And so like every pioneer needs to go. He was adamant about it. You're kidding me. Yeah. What I had fun there, man, hunting there. But the reason I couldn't get into it for like I couldn't get into like to consider going back or anything is that the non-native aspect of it. Yeah. That it's not. It's not like a heritage thing. Yeah. It's like a giant game farm. They came in on a boat. There's not like a human hunting heritage there. It was just it was it was hunting. without hunting without cultural history, hunting without wildlife history. And it just

like, I had fun, but there was just something gone. And another thing that really struck me is the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, I don't want to hack like, like, like, you know, I mean, uh, this isn't meant to disparage dudes in New Zealand. Just an observation from a guy far away that doesn't matter. But I just, there's certain things that were, missing that I didn't know meant so much to me. Yeah.

And sheep raising is such a huge part of New Zealand culture of sheep raising. So you can imagine how interested they are bringing a compliment of predators over to control. Yeah. It's not going to happen. Whenever I'm in Hawaii, I always think like some parts of Hawaii, the dry side like Kona, you know, I'm always like, dude, if you turn a rattlesnake out here, he'd love it. Not that I would do that. But, you know, you think about like there's certain predators who would just love New Zealand. Yep.

But it's not going to happen. well Jim Hefflefinger thanks for joining man I enjoyed it always enjoy coming back appreciate all your work on behalf of um American wildlife and then also just the effort you take as a as a as a scientist the effort you take to come and talk to just Joe blow outdoor people Joe blow hunters and anglers and try to help them ask the right questions understand what they're reading um I think that see through the noise and follow wildlife and be like a concerned, be a concerned resource user. Yeah, I've written a lot of magazine articles and I've, I enjoy and I think I've honed

the skill of taking complex scientific stuff and just explaining it so that anybody can understand it. And I think that's valuable. So I'm driven by the desire to provide reliable, unbiased information and let people just learn from that. No, well, until next time. Thank you. Yeah, thanks. Hunting demands preparation, persistence, and gear that will not quit on you. That is why I wear First Light. This isn't about hype. It's about no compromise gear.

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