WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The WRFH Interview: Tom Opre

Episode Date: November 7, 2024

Tom Opre is a film director, cinematographer, television producer, and wildlife conservationist. His new documentary is The Last Keeper. He joined WRFH to discuss conservation, the Nimrod Education Center, and his new film.From 11/07/24.

This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Markton Hollander. With me today is award-winning filmmaker and wildlife conservationist Tom Opry. Welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, Mark, thanks. It's great to be here in Hillsdale. It's such a beautiful fall day. For our listeners, today we are basically discussing and talking a little bit about the Nimrod Fellowships. So here on campus at Hillsdale, we have the Nimrod Education Center. which offers one year fellowships to undergraduate students with valid hunting and angling licenses who have interest in an experience with hunting and fishing. These fellows receive generous scholarships, assist with Nimrod Education Center events, and take two Nimrod sponsored academic courses. Selections include basic shotgun conservation, introduction to archery, and introduction to shooting sports with more courses to be added in the future. And some background on the meaning of Nimrod. our Western heritage has long recognized the honor and importance of skillful sportsmen.

The Nimrod Education Center draws its name from the biblical Nimrod named as a mighty hunter before the Lord. Now, it's so great to have you on. You have a film called The Last Keeper. Could you give our audience some background information on so what they might like to know before watching a film like this? Why am I here in your studio talking here in Hillsdale here in Michigan? Yes. You know, Mark, I appreciate the intro. And, you know, you mentioned the Nimrod Society.

Dr. Al Stewart, who is the lead on that, is an old family friend. My father used to be the outdoor editor of the Detroit Free Press for about 20, 25 years and dealt with a lot of wildlife conservation, hunting, fishing, environmental issues, and was a serious proponent of protecting those things. for, you know, Michigan sportsmen and sportswomen. And so I grew up in that world and actually met Al when I was younger. And then we got kind of reacquainted here in the last half dozen years. And it explained to me what they were doing here with the Nimrod Society. And, you know, it's kind of an interesting thing in so much is that I spent most of my life working in the feature film business and commercials and whatnot, Hollywood. And, you know, after a long career of that, I kind of trying to figure out who's going to remember the last TV commercial I've done.

And so what I chose to do because of my long love as a sportsman growing up here in Michigan and not living in Montana for the last 25, 26 years, which I have to say is God's country. Michigan's beautiful, but Montana's a little different. But, you know, I saw this need. There's this huge disconnect in our society, our urban society where people don't know where their food comes from. They don't know about what conservation is. They don't understand that they make decisions every day that have downstream effects that not only affect wildlife, but affect the people that live that are tasked with taking care of our wild places and doing the conservation work that has to be done out there.

And let's face it, we live in a world with over 8 billion humans. I've been very blessed to travel around the world for film projects. I've been all over Africa, South America, all over North America, all over Europe, even been in the stands. and I can see what happens and what we do as humans to the land. And it's not very pretty in many cases. We don't have a lot of wildlife habitat left that isn't been severely impacted in an adverse way. And so the North American conservation model, what I like to say, our modern conservation model is really based on the fact that if you use a resource, you take care of it because you care about it. And that is why we've had such a successful conservation story here in.

both the United States and Canada and other parts of the world where they practice that similar thought process, ranching for wildlife in Southern Africa, you know, lots and lots of wildlife. You talk to IUCN, they'll tell you, you know, the only places in the world where wildlife are holding their own or expanding their range and populations is North America and Southern Africa. Exactly for that reason. Very interesting. Yeah. And so, again, though we live in the society where people out of touch, you know, they wake up in the morning, they flip a switch, they expect the lights to come on. They don't know where electricity comes from. They don't care. The next thing is, the walk. in the bathroom, flush the toilet, out of sight, out of mind, right? Then the next big decision of the day is that a chai latte or a caramel macchiato? Well, unfortunately, folks, that's how most of us live our lives in the Western world, but that's not how two-thirds of the rest of the world lives. And, but, you know, it's really important that we understand that we do have impacts.

You know, we support organizations. We support politicians. We make buying decisions every day that can have really, really, you know, bad, unintended impacts. I mentioned you while we were talking before we started the recording about the fact of the intended consequences of policy by devaluing the natural resources, say, for wildlife in Africa. You know, you end up with child brides, you know. And so people don't quite understand how it works. We have a whole film about it called Killing the Shepard, which you can watch on Apple TV,

Amazon, TB. I think it's even on YouTube these days. But, you know, there's, it's really important, though, that 8 billion humans we have, that we have people out there taking care of these resources and this wildlife habitat. Because, you know, really at the end of the day, this is ensuring that we have clean environments, you know, healthy forest. Right. We have, you know, vibrant wildlife populations, which are, you know, indicative of being good stewards of the land.

And at the same time, it's about as simple as things as clean drinking water. You know, I think everybody can identify with those things. And it's really important that the people that are out there living with this wildlife, these rural communities, see a value and a benefit because we have thousands of years of human history where, as a species, we have not been very good neighbors of the rest of the creatures on the planet. And we haven't necessarily done a good job. We've pretty well mucked a lot of things up. And there's thousands and thousands of examples. And it's just this late 1800s, you know, 1888. The Gronachukh, the Gronel, Theodore Roosevelt, and others like them, kind of obviously.

in this modern conservation model. And because of that, that's why you have birds in the bird feeder. That's why you have deer and turkey in your backyard. Heck, that's why you have national forest. It's because of hunters who went hunting. And so that's something, though, that we now find that less and less people identify with. They've got more and more things that are pushing in different directions. Of course, you know, the iPhone, the smartphone, the internet, Facebook, you know, people get distracted.

But now you have the opportunity to manipulate messages. And we see this in our political. We just got out of an election here on Tuesday, right? Big one. Yes. And, you know, we're in a situation now where we have a group of people that is, you know, it's about power and control. And what they're interested in doing is stopping all sustainable use of wildlife,

whether it be hunting or whatever way you're using it. But they only do it not because they want to make the planet better. They do it because they either believe in this romantic idea that nature should be in charge of everything and everything should be all hunky-dory and wonderful. but, you know, Mother Nature isn't in charge of everything. Yeah, they're the final arbitrator, but at the same time, as humans, we've been manipulating this planet for our species survival since the beginning of time, you know. And so it's important that we do continue to take care of those places where wildlife lives, because if we don't, we're going to lose these things, and they are going to go the way to the Dota Bird. And we talk about right now, about climate change.

We talk about biodiversity loss. We talk about all these things that are, you know, kind of mainstream lingo. But, you know, the people that are actually out there doing the hard work in conservation are the ones that are the forefront of these efforts to ensure that we have biodiversity. Right. I mean, that's important. So what do you think, maybe even on a cultural level in, say, the past five to ten years, what, like, is there something that you noticed changed with respect to some of these ideas or, um, other things that you think might have had to impact that we've come so far? Like, is this something that's maybe in the past five to ten years or does it go back further?

No, I think we've been seeing this change. Wholesale change, you know, ever since the great, you know, you and I aren't, weren't alive during the Great Depression in the 1930s. But prior to that, most people had a friend or a family member that had connection to a farm or a ranch. They knew where their food came from. I mean, prior to COVID, there was a survey done with the Chicago Public Schools district in the high schools and 50% of the kids there didn't realize that that hamburger came from

an animal. They thought it just came from a box from the grocery store. And so that disconnect is alarming. And of course, if you are very talented at messaging and manipulating people, you can tell them a story. And of course, that story is about the emotions of, you know, say the loss of an animal or the death of an animal by another human being killing it. Of course, you know, hunters are the harbingers of death, in order to harvest an animal or do you have to kill it? That's the reality. And there's a lot of people out there that are disconnected from that. That's basic our modern Western society has outsourced is killing.

I like to ask people at a film festival, we do these screenings? And of course, somebody will say, well, you know, do we have to kill the animals? And of course, you know, everything in nature's program to overpopulate the carrying capacity of lamb. That's why we hear about these great herds of animals and the passenger pigeons. That's because nobody was, you know, utilizing them. But of course, what you'll end up with is, you know, at the end of the day, either some sort of ecosystem that's in harmony and managed well so that you don't have these huge ups and downs where, you know, populations get out of control, you have lots of human wildlife conflict. And or they get disease or drought hits. And then you have mass starvation or mass death and die off.

And that's historically what's happened on this planet forever. It's only since these modern ages where we've actually started to, you know, manage the wildlife, you know, based on utilization so that, we can do it through the terms of and the ideals of modern conservation. So, you know, you get into these scenarios and at the end of the day, you've got people out there that, you know, these non-anty hunting groups, you know, Humane Society of United States, Center for Biological Diversity, they all claim to be doing a great thing. But the reality is they don't spend a dime on conservation, the wise use of a natural resource. They spend their billion dollars they collect based on 990 tax returns between all these different groups out there. Literally, they're, you know,

using it to pay for an army of attorneys that are, you know, wearing Armani suits of $500 haircuts. And they're actually working against conservation because it's about power and control. That's all it is. It's about power and control. And unfortunately, at the end of the day, that doesn't do a whole lot for wildlife and doesn't do a whole lot for these rural communities. And so that's why we have to make sure that these rural folks, they see a benefit to taking care of the wildlife, taking care of the wildlife habitat. Because if they don't, obviously we see the results going to be bad. And so we do, know, it's the Shepherds of Wildlife Society, which is our 5-1c3. You know, our mission is to reconnect our Western urbanized society with nature.

And so we know that tools like film and video and, you know, and photography are very powerful and they get consumed at ever-increasing rates on social media and online. And so we produce these mainstream documentary films that literally give a voice to rural communities all over the world that live with wildlife so that you can now not talk about, maybe the historical achievements of conservation say here in North America, you know, we brought back animals, millions of animals back from the brink of extinction.

We've conserved millions of acres. Can we raise billions of dollars? I think the Pittman Robertson Act last year raised about $1.4 billion, mostly from target shooters and self-defense people, but also from hunters and, you know, and sportsmen out there. And so that money,

you know, goes directly into, you know, the state fishing game agencies to help pay for the management of wildlife resources. And it's very, very critically important that we have that type of legislation continue. But at the end of the day, the rural folks, you know, we can talk about all this money, but at the end of the day, it doesn't mean anything because that suburban housewife in Hoboken, New Jersey, she's about the warm and fuzzy. So if we keep talking about these past laurels,

I mean, you all know what the definition of insanity is, right? Continue to do the same thing over and over, expecting different results. Well, that's the hunting industry, the hunting, community for the last four or five decades that I've watched it. And so we looked at this and said, okay, well, really what is, let's just drill down with this. Okay, again, we got these people. They take care of the wildlife. They have to see a benefit. If they don't see a benefit, it's going to go away, right? The resource will go away or it'll get overused and disappear. And so it's important that they see that value. And that value provides these people with their most basic needs, you know, a good paying job, be able to buy food for the family.

And many parts of the world, it's an opportunity to have access to health care or an education. We even talked about Northern Michigan here. You know, it might be how many families have little businesses in northern Michigan or the UP where, you know, their little store outside of Mayo, Michigan generates enough revenue with all the hunters showing up during the hunting season that allows them to survive until Memorial Day Week. And when everybody goes up north to go on, you know, their summer vacations and everything else. Something people don't think about too much. No, no, you don't. You don't put it in the context of there. And so that that human rights story is something that resonates with that suburban housing.

housewife, that 39-year-old gal in Hoboken, New Jersey. And it's really important that we start to tell a different story because, you know, again, we've done a good job of preaching to the choir as a hunting community has. And now it's important that we start talking about what the real impacts are on our planet and that biodiversity loss, that climate crisis, these things that are real issues that are out there that people are talking about. And it's the, you know, it's the people are out there that are in the wild places, people that are out in these rural areas, those are the ones that are going to be at the forefront of ensuring that we have a healthy planet. And the people that are paying out the lion's share for the cost of doing conservation

work are the sportsmen and sportswomen of the world. And so it works. You know, it's a good formula. It works and it's great. But unfortunately, we haven't done a good job of communicating. So that is why our mainstream films are so important to get it out. So our first film came out in 21. That was killing the shepherd. I think you said you watched that on the shepherds of wildlife.org website. And that's the story about a rural African community in Zambia, a very remote place, led by a woman chief, pretty rare for that part of the world. And she wanted to break the bonds of poverty. These are subsistence farmers. Like I said, crops fail. And so when a crop fails, and you got eight or ten mouths to feed, well, you use the wildlife resource. But our ancestors

here in America, we figured out that that wildlife resource was absolutely not infinite. It's a very finite resource. So come the late 1800s, wiser heads prevailed. Guys, you know, we literally have this modern conservation ethos. And so over there in Africa, they don't have that modern conservation ethos because they're trying to survive, just like I ancestors tried to do in this part of the world. So you got a bunch of malice of feet, utilize the wildlife, eventually the wildlife's gone. In some cases, I saw local species of animals that went extinct, gone, completely gone from the landscape. And so... Unbelievable. Yeah. So you have that. Now, if you've got...

a daughter or two who's 12 or 13, it's perfectly acceptable to sell her as a second or third wife for 30 bags of corn, which is enough to feed your family for a year. That is what happens if you devalue the wildlife, that natural, renewable resource of Africa or anywhere in the world. Now, so that's just one example of, you know, kind of the law of unintended consequences. And it's real. You know, when you watch that film, there's a pretty good section on there about what's going on. It's really impactful. Yeah. It definitely is. So, but yeah, so that's, that's.

the first film. Now the next film is just now coming out. We started this spring, touring about 25 cities around the United Kingdom. It's called The Last Keeper. In short, it's a film about the rural people, the highlands, the keepers that run the sporting estates, which has been going on for many, many hundreds of years. These guys are managing the land for wildlife so that the people that own these estates can utilize the wildlife, whether be stalking deer, like hunting White Till here in Michigan, or shooting the red grouse, the native of red grouse it there. So they try to get those populations enhanced to a point where they have a fair number

that they can have an off takeout without affecting the overall population and keep them in there. And so there's this program they've been doing for, you know, the centuries of low intensity burning of the Heather Morland. You know, these are quarter half acre parcels of land, nothing huge, you know, burned on 20-year rotations in most places. So you take out the ranker, the older Heather. you get this new growth. Of course, we know the new growth, a lot of animals like that, especially the red grouse.

And also a lot of the IUCN red listed waiters like curlew, lapwing, oyster catchers who do all their mating and rearing of their chicks in these grouse moors. And so you have that going on. And then, of course, the stalking of the red deer. This is long tradition of being able to stalk the red deer. And so, you know, it's a pretty fascinating story. But unfortunately, because there's such a disconnect in Scotland where the vast majority of the population losing a population belt between Glasgow and Edinburgh. You know, so it's literally a belt of people there that 80, 85% of the population lives there.

And most of these people never get up into the highlands. But they have the votes. And you've got this movement called rewilding where you, I almost call them urban elite rewilders that have the year. It's such a beautiful area up there. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, everybody's watched, you know, I watched Highlander or watched outlander and the movies

or the TV show. Yeah, I mean, that is the wild wilderness of Scotland. I've come to understand that those beautiful craggy granite outcroppings with the purple flower covered hills of heather. That is the wild, evolved natural

wilderness of Scotland because, you know, I mean, Scotland started out 10,000 years ago covered under glacial ice. And then over the course of that time period, three to seven thousand years ago, trees literally evolved off the landscape. because they get so much rain, they get acidification of the soil. You end up with an iron hard pan on those upper moorland.

And trees can't penetrate that. The roots can't penetrate that iron hard pan. And so you end up with that beautiful scene we've all seen in the movies and on television. But now this concept, there's two threats to this. The big threat is the rewilding issue where people are romanticizing the tree. They've got this concept that they would like to see Scotland in the highlands go back to what they envisioned it prior to, there was a philosopher,

or there was a, not it was a philosopher, but it was a writer, Roman chronicler, that wrote about these great Caledonian forests that supposedly the Romans saw when they came up there, you know, 1,500,000 years ago when they invaded Great Britain. And unfortunately, this chronicler didn't write about the great Caledonian forest until about 200 years after the last Roman was there. And of course, they didn't have the internet back then.

You weren't Googling anything. So it was all word of mouth. And then a few things are written here and there. But, you know, if you go back to 1747, 1746, you had the Jacobite rebellion, you know, wars between different families to have control over Great Britain, you know, to be the king. And you had the battle clawedon where the Jacobites got pretty well decimated by the British and their Scottish allies. Quite a few Scots fought for the British. And it was a massacre. And then the King of England, when he took control over Scotland, you know,

banned the use of Gaelic, which is the native Scottish tongue. Yeah. And which is a Celtish language. And then also at the same time said, you know, hey, we're going to go from a communal grazing plan for the land. You know, you could go shoot a deer for the pot and share it with a community. Nobody cared to more of that. aristocracy, you know, more of the going back to what you had happened after the, you know, 1066 when

William the Conquer came in, the Normans, they kind of ushered in this concept of, you know, the king's, you know, land. And so a lot of people wonder, well, you know, the king's forest. And, you know, I don't know if anybody here understands. Does anybody know what the, where the, the word forest, what it means historically? I'm not sure myself. I'm an English major here. I should probably know these things, but I'm not. Most people think it has something to do about trees, right? Well, actually it has nothing to do with trees. All it means is the king's forest means it's just the king's hunting grounds.

And in many cases, there's no trees at all. In Scotland, there were no trees because in 1750, the king went ahead and chartered a military expedition by a guy named Roy. And they went and surveyed all of the landmass of Scotland and made a map of where they found trees. And at that time, only 4% of the landmass of the land. Massa, Scotland had trees on it. And ironically enough, most of them were trees

have been planted around estate houses and castles. 4%. 4%. Now, this is prior to the Industrial Revolution, guys. There's no steam trains. There's no roads. There's no highways. There's no lock and stuff.

This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm here with Tom Opry. When it comes to your interest in other programs like Nimrod, other things happening around the US. Could you talk a little bit about ways beyond social media and just like what's, like, I know you talked a lot. Like with your films, obviously, you have a lot of direct impact, but it's hard maybe for some people to actually understand

like the purpose of shooting here at Nimra. I'm a beneficiary myself of being able to take shooting classes and stuff like this. So apart from what you're doing, what else do you think we can do to really help Americans understand this issue? Well, I mean, when it comes to conservation and wild game, one of the biggest disconnects I think we have in our society is the fact here in America, most people can't eat wild game. Now, if you go abroad, like in Scotland, you'll see it in this film, The Last Keeper. We actually interviewed the owner of a game processing facility that processes about 60,000 red deer. a year. And you can buy venison steaks, venison burgers, venison meatballs, pre-packaged,

ready to go in downtown London and Costco. Now, because of our market hunting passed, every single state has a law against selling wild game. I'm not saying that we need to change that, but I'm just saying there is, there are. Who put that in place? The law is there? Yeah. That's a byproduct of market hunting, you know, that that was the late 1800s, early 1900s. You know, we were building railroads. So there was. farmers, I mean ranchers out there, ranchers out there working to shoot every single black bear because they could get paid a bunch of money. The guy named Hulk Collier was a black hunter out of Mississippi.

Actually, you guys heard of the teddy bear story? Well, that originated because Hulk Collier took President Theodore Roosevelt on a black bear hunt because he always wanted to shoot one. And he told the president to sit over here on this log and he was going to run him back with his dogs, his hounds. And when he got and ran the bear back, the president wasn't there. he and his buddy decided they were bored so they went back to the lodge. And so he tied the bear up to the tree, went and got the president, wrote him out there on horseback. He said, there's your bear. Shoot it.

And the president was so mollified by the whole thing. She wasn't sporting enough to shoot it tied to a tree. So, of course, back then, you know, hunting was well regarded. And of course, the news media was all over the place falling around in his entourage. And there was all these articles that came out about it. And at the end of the story was a toy maker decided to make a bear. and they called it the teddy bear. So that's the story.

So we actually are working on a project about that coming up here over the next couple years. So, but yeah. A new meaning to teddy bear. Yeah, well, it's the original meeting to it. Not the new meeting. It's the meeting. So, yeah, again, consumption of wild game.

Unless you know a hunter, you're not going to get a chance to eat wild game here in America. We've got to figure out something here because you go to the Scandinavian countries. If you do a survey about hunting, hunting has a 95, 95, 90s. percent approval rate. You can buy the national justice reindeer, caribou. You can buy in the grocery store. You can go on a moose hunt and you can decide to put your moose into the food chain in Scotland and over the entire United Kingdom. I've got several buddies that have venison businesses. But in mine's a chef named Mike Robinson down and Siren Sester outside of London about an hour.

And we helped them harvest a whole bunch of fallow deer. You got to shoot them specific ways. There's a whole way you treat the animal and all that stuff in order to get it ready for the table. But I think that disconnect we have here, especially here in the United States and Canada, is that we just, people aren't used to eating wild game. And they kind of think, ooh, you know, because it's not high in fat, so it's a different way to cook it. You go to Africa, bushmeat, which can be anything, could be a primate, it could be a lion, it could be an apollo, it could be whatever, you know, Cape Buffalo. It's just dried meat.

It's considered a right by people all over Africa, city people especially. Wow. It's a $2 billion, $2 billion black market industry in Africa. And it's part of the reason why a lot of wildlife populations get decimated because there is no there is no checks and balances. So that's the worst part of the spectrum. We're kind of on the worst side on the other side because, you know, unless you're in Texas where they do have some mobile trailers doing processing of exotic game.

and selling it to restaurants all over Texas. So if you go to Texas and you're eating wild game, it's most probably it is wild game. You eat wild game in Detroit or Ann Arbor or Hillsdale. If there's a restaurant selling, say, wild boar or quail, it's all farm raised. Or if it's venison, it's usually from New Zealand. It's red deer.

It's all farm raised. No, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, but I'm thinking that part of that disconnect we have in our urbanized society is that people can't access it. Now, Arby's, everybody's heard of Arby's, you know, the burger, you know, the, the beef joint. You know, at the end of the day,

I've been fascinated with that company because every November, they have a wild game burger that they offer for a very short period of time. It could be red deer from New Zealand. It could be ducks, you know, that they've raised somewhere, you know, and bought, you know, millions of them.

But it goes, it typically runs out in a matter of days because there's such a strong interest from it. And these aren't hunters that are buying these burgers. These are city folk that are buying these burgers. And it's going to. And so, you know, Mark, I like to say there's a reason why a campfire mesmerizes every human being in the world. I mean, heck, you drive around suburban Detroit, you go out in the suburbs and behind everybody's house, they got a campfire circle, right? You know, you might have a, you know, 50 foot, you know, backyard. Yeah. But they have a campfire

circle. Well, that reason absolutely has nothing to do. And I mean, absolutely nothing to do with roasting marshmallows. Think about it. So yeah, what can we do? Let's figure out some way to eat more wild game. Let's figure out how to make wild game. Because we have huge populations of deer. I mean, how many car deer collisions do we have here in different parts of the eastern United States? We do have a surplus of stuff.

Wild turkey. It's incredible conservation story. I was a buddy of mine, Matt Light, you played for New England and Connecticut, living in Connecticut, working in their playing there for the Patriots. And we went out hunting out there a couple years ago. And we get in his truck and he's like, hey, you got to listen to the. this song, this guy's got a rap song. And because there's so many turkeys and they're living in suburbia. They're living in people's backyards and their gardens and their subdivisions,

whatnot to the point where they've become a nuisance. Completely opposite from near extinction to now a nuisance. And this rap song was, I got a turkey in my yard. I got a turkey in my yard. I got a GD turkey in my yard. Come and kill it. I mean, it's just crazy, right? Yeah.

But that's an opportunity maybe that those animals could be used in some sort of system. Maybe we incentivize hunters by giving an opportunity. to win a raffle to go on a hunt in Montana for an elk or something. Maybe we're not exchanging money. But we need to figure out some ways to have our government and the powers that be, try to create opportunities. Like we have entire national forests that are managed for berry and mushroom production. Why aren't we managing our national forest for game production?

That would make a huge difference. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. We're so glad to have you. And I look forward to seeing your film. Yeah. Well, folks want to go to shepherds of wildlife. or find us on Facebook, Twitter, or whatever it's called now,

Instagram, all that stuff. You can find me, Tom Opre, OPR, Shepherds of Wildlife.org. I'd love to have all your support. Please share and comment and get on our accounts on social media, and we really appreciate the opportunity to be here at Hillsdale here with the Nimrod Society and such a great program teaching people about the outdoors and what conservation is all about. This is Radio Free Hillsdale 1017 FM.

I'm Markton Hollander with me today. is award-winning filmmaker and wildlife conservationist Tom Opry. Thank you.