WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The Hillsdale Interview: Mike Arnold

Episode Date: April 4, 2024

Mike Arnold is a scientist/hunter passionate about conservation through hunting. He is Head of the Department of Genetics at the University of Georgia and author of the book, Bringing Back the Lions - International Hunters, Local Tribespeople, and the Miraculous Rescue of a Doomed Ecosystem in MozambiqueHe's on Hillsdale's campus to take part in the speaker series supporting the Nimrod Education Center.

This is Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7 FM. I'm Scott Bertram. We're joined by Mike Arnold. He is head of the Department of Genetics at the University of Georgia, a scientist and hunter passionate about conservation through hunting. You can find him online, Mike Arnold Outdoors.com. He's written a book. We'll talk about it in a bit called Bringing Back the Lions, and he's here on Hillsdale College's campus as part of a speaker series for the Nimrod Education Center. We'll talk about that a little later on in our conversation too. Mike, thanks so much for joining us. Hey, Scott. Thank you so much for having me.

So much interesting information at Mike Arnoldoutdoors.com. I wonder what sparked your passion, your interest in all of this, in hunting and shooting particularly. Well, my dad raised his two sons to hunt and to love firearms and shooting and the shooting sports. I took my first white-tailed deer when I was five, shooting off of my dad's shoulder down in San Saba, Texas. I grew up in Texas. I think that's why Daddy's right ear was deaf, was because he let me shoot off of his shoulder because I wasn't big enough to hold the rifle up. That dough is still my number one trophy in the world. I've had an opportunity to hunt leopards. I've had the opportunity to hunt all over the world, and yet she still sticks in my mind introducing me to the

hunters, their culture, their love for the outdoors and conservation and understanding animals and plants and all sorts of things. And then I went on to train as a scientist. And I was able, I was very fortunate to be able to gather the science and my passion for hunting because I'm a conservation biologist as well. That concept of conservation through hunting for non-hunters can be a tough idea to grasp. How do you translate that for non-hunters, that conservation through hunting works? So it's a really great, great point.

So let me give you a couple of anecdotes. My wife is a non-hunter. She loves shooting, especially handguns, but she doesn't have any desire whatsoever to hunt, to take an animal. And she goes on most of my hunting trips, me. She's my photographer, videographer, but she's a non-hunter. And so I wrote the book that you alluded to in 2022, and Frances read it as I was reading it, sorry, writing it, and she read through it

and edited it for me. She's a great editor. At the end of that, she said, honey, I've always known you've been passionate about hunting. You've talked about conservation, but she said, up until this book and reading the parts and living in Africa, which is where the book is based, she lived there with me over the months that we did the research for the book. She said, I never really understood how hunters dollars translate to conservation of ecosystems, is what I would say, but also uplifting human lives and improving their, uh, They're living and saving lives. She said, I just never understood that.

And so that's the one anecdote. The other anecdote is that I have a friend. We have a couple who are members of PETA. They've traveled around the world with us. They respect that we differ in this regard. I'm not a big proponent of PETA, I have to admit, and they're not a big proponent of hunting. The wife would not go into my office at home because I have trophies on the wall.

But she's never been vindictive about it. She asked to read them the book when it came out. And I said, Kathy, you know, love you to death. You're a very good friend. We've traveled to Portugal. You've lived with us there. We've done all this stuff. But I said, there are going to be a few dead animal photos in this.

Not a lot, actually, because the book has several chapters interviewing non-hunters. But I said it does. And it's based around hunting because it's hunting dollars. She said, I still want to read it. And so when she was done, she came over. And the first words out of her mouth, when they live in our neighborhood, and she came over to visit with me and talk to me about the book. And the first word, she said, you changed my mind.

And she knows how sarcastic I am. And I said, all right, Kathy, let's unpack this a little bit. That's what all my psychiatrists tell me. And let's unpack this a little. little bit. And I said, are you still a member of Pita? She said, of course I am. I said, are you ever going to go hunting? She said, of course I'm not. I said, would you like to go in my trophy room? She said, I sure don't want to do that. And I said, what do you mean? And she said, I don't mean that I want to hunt or that I understand why you want trophies hanging on your walls or anything. She said, I still

don't understand that and probably never will. But I do now understand how hunting contributes to conservation and the uplift of human lives. It was exactly what Francis told me. My wife told me. So that's really how this goes together. The dollars pay for other things. Mike Arnold with us. We'll talk more about bringing back the lines in a moment.

I do want to ask, so why does shooting, hunting, trophy type sport work, but not perhaps something like photographic tourism? We do the same thing, and instead of taking the animal, take a nice picture, frame it on your wall. What's the difference? Why is one more effective than another? So in the, once again, I'm really not trying to flog this book. Believe it or not. It's okay. We'll do it next. I know. But there's a chapter in there, a buddy of mine, a very good friend now of mine, who's a wildlife veterinarian.

He is originally from Portugal. He lives in Mozambique and is the top wildlife veterinarian. And he helps tranquilize elephants and lions and move them out of areas when they become a problem to keep them alive, keep them from being poached. And Zhao was talking to me, and I asked him, he's a non-hunter. He's never hunted. He has no desire to hunt, but he also is an advocate for this kind of hunting. And I said, Jao, why not change all of the hunting, what we call concessions in Mozambique? They call them katadas in Portuguese. But I said, when I take all the hunting areas and turn them into photographic,

I love photographic, by the way. I'm a photographer. I absolutely adore that. However, I said, you know, why not just take all of the hunting concessions? You're a non-hunter. Take them all and turn them into photographic. He said, Mike, the carbon footprint, the guys of scientists, the carbon footprint from a hunting concession is tiny because you have very few people coming in paying lots of

money and you don't build roads because you don't want to tear up the environment and you protect the animals, the plants, the songbirds, everything else. He said, unfortunately, in photographic safari areas, you put in many roads, you put in hotels, you put in water sources, which means you're pumping the water out of the ground, like in Kruger National Park, for example. And I love Kruger. Don't get me wrong. I'm over there a lot in South Africa. But he said it really is a huge impact on the ecosystems in those areas. He said it really tears up the environment. Now, let me hasten to add with that comment, Scott,

I am not against photographic tourism because if it's a choice between that and building a town or building a mine or stripping it of all of its forest, then please put in a photo tourism area. But compared to hunting, because you have so few people coming in for hunting, orders of magnitudes of less of people into a hunting concession because they're paying so much more than a photo tourist does. It just impacts the environment so much less.

Mike Arnold with us. Mike Arnold Outdoors.com is the website. He's here on Hillsdale's campus as part of our speaker series for the Nimrod Education Center. And you wrote a book. Bringing Back the Lions, International Hunter. local tribes people and the miraculous recovery of a doomed ecosystem in Mozambique. So set the table here. How did Mozambique and this ecosystem end up in the situation it did?

So moving back in time, this whole area south of the Zambezi River, it's called the Marameo Complex. Okay. And there was a whole series and now's back, a whole series of hunting concessions or katatas, running along the southern border of the Zambezi River. It was known in the 1950s and 60s as the place to go hunting. If you wanted to go big game, hunting especially dangerous game, but other planes game as well in Africa. It was the place outfitters and professional hunters took their clients.

And then what you had was, fortunately, for Mozambique, I would say, it had a war of independence from Portugal. That didn't last very long. And then it had a civil war, though, that lasted 15-ish years. And what happened was the guerrilla forces, the rebel forces, I guess, is what we should call them, were in the rural areas. And the government forces were in the urban areas. Okay, they protected themselves in the cities. Okay, so you have the rebels out in the countryside.

Well, they knew where the food was. protein was, where were the animals? And this game rich area held tens of thousands, 45,000 Cape Buffalo when the war started. By the end of the war, the rebels had moved in there and basically set up a meat pad. Well, not basically, they set up a meat processing area, a plant, and they killed everything off in there that they could to feed their troops. And so at the end of the war, you had 1,200. In 1994, you had 1,200 Cape Buffalo from 45,000. You had eight zebra. You had 30 sable antelopes, you know, from thousands. You had 250 water bucks. So you had all of this reduction. After now that it's come back, that

those animals have just blossomed and exploded in numbers. So what happened in the early 90s to help spark this turnaround? So another non-hunter. but also a developer of tourism, a very good friend of mine, Carlos Faria, who is a Mozambique person and an investor. He's from Maputo in Mozambique, and Carlos went to the government and he asked hunting friends who hunted and knew the hunting industry because Carlos didn't because he doesn't hunt or fish. By the way, I asked Carlos for the book, Why do you not hunt or fish? Are you against it? He said, yes, I am. You have to get up too early and work too hard.

So he doesn't have any philosophical problems with it. But anyway, so he went to his buddies and said, where should I get a hunting concession? And they said, are you insane? I mean, there's no animals now anywhere in Mozambique. They'd really been pillaged during the Civil War. And he said, no, if you think before the Civil War. And they said, you got out of bike, go to the government and get Catata 11. And this is this one hunting concession.

It's about 500,000 acres that the book is based around. And he said, okay. And he went there even before they had signed the peace agreement in Rome. And he said his friends just laughed at him and made fun of him and castigated him and said, you're an idiot. You know, the rebels are still there. So that's how it got started. And then he brought a person in named Mark Aldane, who is really the, honestly, the main visionary now.

But they together went together and then invested in this area that was very depoporative game animals at that time. No game. They had very few permits. Very, you know, and it started out very small. The animals have come back strong and lifted up the area and the people of Mozambique. What do the villagers think about this? I don't live there. I imagine that animals of the size in these numbers.

can pose some safety hazards perhaps. What do they think about the change that has occurred over these past 30 years or so? So initially, they were incredulous and doubtful of these folks coming in and saying, hey, we're going to hunt in this area. You need to not poach the animals, et cetera. First of all, they were starving to death. In Mozambique, there's something called Quashicor. If you see on TV ads, little ones running around and they have a swollen belly,

that's quash corn is protein deficiency. There's about 50% frequency of that still in Mozambique overall. So their children would have been starving. Once they get to that stage, they have cognitive issues for the rest of their lives. They can't resist diseases, all sorts of stuff. It's a horrible situation. So the first thing that Mark and Carlos and their professional hunters,

etc. had to do was to prove to them that we are going to give you all of the meat off of these animals except for a tiny little bit that we're going to keep for our clients. So the people were incredulous and so how they built up trust was give them the meat, start employing them, especially in anti-poaching, so give them a livelihood where they don't have to make money from doing bush meat in the local markets, once again feeding back into that anti-poaching. And then also building up infrastructure over the years. So they now have a school. They now have a clinic.

They now have 10 pounds of meat, red meat, every week going to every family. Quashicor is zero. So there is no malnutrition in Katata 11 now. Malarial deaths, which are some of the highest in the world or in Mozambique in general, there are pretty much no malarial deaths anymore in Katata. 11 because of the clinic and the medicines that are provided. And the school educates their kids. And some of those children are like what our parents were like.

My parents, anyway, I'm a baby boomer. I was one of the first of our kids to go to university. My wife was the first in her family to go to university. They're dreaming and being able to see that happen with their children now. What has happened in Katata 11? The best description I think I've heard is from Ivan Carlin. Carter, a famous conservation biologist over there who's invested in this area. Ivan said what we've done is created a middle class, saying a villager.

They don't need to be hunter gatherers anymore. They don't need to be poachers anymore. And they have the benefits. Now, their middle class doesn't look like our middle class, but they still have what I would say and what Ivan was saying, what a middle class is, this person, is when they have expendable income. They don't have to spend every penny on staying alive. Mike Arnold is with us.

Mike Arnold Outdoors.com. You can find more about the book there, bringing back the lions, international hunters, local tribes people, and the miraculous recovery of a doomed ecosystem in Mozambique closer to home in Michigan. I saw something the other day. A number of deer hunters in Michigan, about 20 years ago, 800,000 or so. And more recently, perhaps 550,000. Rough estimates, but certainly a decline. What's happening out there? Why do you think those numbers are declining? I think we can lay a lot of that at the feet of people like me. And what I mean by that is that though both of my children love going out to the range and shooting, I didn't transfer the legacy of hunting to them that well.

Will I take them to Africa sometime? I think so. And they will go. and they're great shots and they'll have a wonderful time. But I think that's really what happened is that in a lot of our cases, we didn't invest in our youth well enough. We're doing a better job now, which is interesting, mainly because we're a little bit fearful of what's going on like you just described. I think also there is a climate within our, it's not the same worldwide. I was in Sweden, I was in England, I've been, you know, in Mexico, I've been in lots of places in Africa.

It's not worldwide, but in the U.S., there is this sense of unease about, oh, you know, is it ethically okay to hunt? Is it ethically okay even to have a firearm? And I think that there's that as well. We've talked about conservation through hunting. what happens if there are no hunters or that number continues to decline? If we help conservation through hunting, if there are no hunters, what happens? Well, in North America or in the United States, our model is based on what's called the Pittman-Robertson Act. That's what the Nimrod Center is also a trumpeting is pointing out that since the 1930s,

when the firearms manufacturers and the ammunition manufacturers went to Congress. It's the only time this has happened where a manufacturing group went to Congress and said, please tax us. And they put an excise tax on everything that we buy as hunters. I'm going to, and hunting licenses and everything else, that's what funds conservation at the state level, which is where you want it, and the local level. across the U.S. So I'm going to show a informational thing tonight when I'm talking at the Nimrod lecture

that says there was $1.1 billion back in 18. It's swelled, especially during COVID. And that money goes straight to the federal government, and then they don't touch it. They actually divvy it up between the states. That is a huge portion as well as hunting licenses bought at the state. state level in Michigan, that's what funds conservation. And that is, that is the reality. If we have no hunting, we will have no conservation. Mike Arnold's here as part of our speaker series for the Nimrod Education Center. Why do that? What is Nimrod doing that you feel the need to be here to

support and to speak about? Well, Nimrod, the Nimrod Center is unbelievably productive already. after now this is a very young group right it's three years old they are giving fellowships to students who are interestingly i assumed well all of these students i'm a biologist all of these students are going to be biology majors i couldn't be further from the truth they're mostly business majors i don't like business majors no i play with you by my wife's the cbA so um they are studying this model They're going on field trips. They're understanding what conservation through hunting is doing for how it works. And the amazing thing, Al Stewart, their director and Al Taylor, the benefactor who's helping, you know, helped get this started, the president of it, they have this vision to communicate not mainly to people like me who are passionate hunters.

but rather to the non-hunting public, which is most of the United States, right? And they want to communicate to them this model and why it works, taking a few animals out of a population, relatively speaking, whether you're here or Africa or Mexico or wherever else, a few of the older males, and some of the females to keep the wildlife biology in balance, doing that helps the populations as well as conserving songbirds and plants and insects and amphibians.

It's not conservation of game animals per se it is, but it's not mainly that when we look at the ecosystems. Their entire ecosystems. And that works for the bacteria and the viruses in the soil and everything else. As a biologist, I geek out on you. But, I mean, that's what the Nimrod Center is dedicated to doing, and it is absolutely unique. It is absolutely unique, especially in the United States. There is not another program like this. So Hillsdale should be incredibly proud, and I think they are of it.

You can find more at Hillsdale's website or just search for Nimrod Education Center. Maybe you'll never reach your friend and neighbor, though she loved your book. but those people who are movable on this topic. What do you think Nimrod is doing, Nimrod Education Center, and perhaps through your work with the book and elsewhere, to maybe open their minds or encourage them to get involved?

See, I think you've really put your finger on it. So, once again, as a scientist, as an educator, as a professor, I think of our population as a bell-shaped curve. and it may be skewed one way or the other a little bit, but I think it's a bell-shaped curve. And what I mean by the population is a bell-shaped curve is in their belief systems and feelings about hunting, okay, and shooting. And so what I mean by that is I'm, let's just assume I'm on the right, okay,

that bell-shaped curve. I'm a passionate hunter. You're not going to convince me, probably unlikely to convince me that hunting is bad. you're not necessarily going to convince my friend who's in PETA that hunting is absolutely good, okay? But I'm really talking to people across this country, I get the sense and what they communicate to me is, I don't know. Would you talk to me about hunting and why you're in support of that and that sort of thing? So I believe that the Nimrod Center, and yes, my work and others work, I think we can move that bell-shaped curve and shove it towards those who will vote. Maybe never hunt still, but we'll vote and say hunting is actually beneficial.

So that's the goal definitely of the Nimrod Center. It's definitely my goal. Mike Arnold. You can find him online. Mike Arnold outdoors.com. head of the Department of Genetics at the University of Georgia. You could also find his book out there, bringing back the Lions, International Hunters, Local Tribes people, and the miraculous recovery of a doomed ecosystem in Mozambique here on Hillsdale's campus, part of our speaker series for

the Nimrod Education Center. Mike, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, Scott. More of our interviews and conversations at our website. Go to Radiofreehillsdale.com. Click on student shows and features. And I'm Scott Bertram on Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7 FM.