#879 - Steven Rinella

[0] No, no, go ahead.

[1] He's about to click the button and we're waiting on him.

[2] I'd hate for you to drop some awesome knowledge.

[3] Hey!

[4] And we're live.

[5] That's it.

[6] Steve Ronella, the only hunting show ever in the history of Meat Eater, or excuse me, of Netflix, of meat eater.

[7] That's an awesome accomplishment, man. You're the first hunting show.

[8] See, I tell everybody that if you want to watch a hunting show, like people watch hunting shows, and they go, all these shit, what the fuck of these guys doing?

[9] They're sitting around.

[10] They go, well, look at that.

[11] Look at the size of this buck, man. This is amazing.

[12] your show is so different from all those other shows.

[13] Like, it belongs on something else.

[14] It belongs on, like, the history channel or the Discovery Channel or something more mainstream.

[15] So I'm glad that Netflix picked it up.

[16] Oh, man, I'm delighted.

[17] They picked up 32 episodes.

[18] I'm glad we got to this plugin part right away.

[19] Right away!

[20] Yeah, because if I turn people off and they tune out, they'll remember this, man. This is great.

[21] I can just walk out the fucking door right now.

[22] How many episodes have you guys done, all told?

[23] You know, I don't know.

[24] Really?

[25] More than 75, way more than 75, I think.

[26] So there's sort of.

[27] I just remember one day we had a little, I remember one day us having a drink to celebrate us having rapped number 50, and that was a long time ago.

[28] So we're way past that now.

[29] Wow.

[30] That's a good question.

[31] It's a lot of weeks.

[32] Upwards of 75.

[33] It's a lot of weeks out in the field.

[34] Yeah.

[35] The 100th, yeah, we'll probably have a little party on the 100th episode.

[36] But no, it's been great, man. I mean, the Netflix thing is really just, I mean, it really.

[37] you know, exposed to a lot of, you know, a lot of people.

[38] And it was cool.

[39] Instead of starting with season one, you know, they put up season five and six on Netflix, which is nice because it makes people real curious about the other ones.

[40] There's one episode that's probably one of my favorite episodes you ever did where you never shot anything.

[41] It's that one episode with you alone deer hunting, you started talking about your dad.

[42] Yeah, Coos.

[43] Yeah, Arizona Cooze deer, yeah.

[44] No music.

[45] A lot of ambient sound, a loud wind.

[46] Who makes those choices, like those editorial choices?

[47] That was, you know, the editor, one of our editors, kind of one of our core editors that's been doing it for a long time, a guy by the name of guy.

[48] He, yeah, he did that.

[49] And at first I was like, huh, what?

[50] Because he wanted, yeah, he wanted to do one, no music, there's no VO in it.

[51] You know, and we're pretty VO -heavy sound, pretty, tend to be a VO.

[52] Yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry.

[53] Like, I do a lot of narrating, you know.

[54] In fact, I was just writing some narration for the hunt you not did recently.

[55] But I do a lot of narrating, and then we just did one where there's no narrating.

[56] And I think a lot of times it comes down to how talkative I'm feeling in the field, you know.

[57] And yeah, for whatever reason, I was suffering a little bit of exhaustion or something.

[58] I just did a lot of rambling.

[59] And then when he started cutting it together, he just wanted to run it like that with no sound at all.

[60] We want to do one now with no music at all, no voiceover, like no, no narration, just all spoken to camera, no other people there.

[61] So everything just like not delivered as dialogue, but just like two camera addressing.

[62] We talk now about doing one that has no words in it, but it's all music.

[63] Maybe.

[64] You looked to me. I was looking for, like, excitement to register on Joe's face.

[65] And I got the opposite.

[66] Yeah, well, that's one of the things that I think.

[67] think is the most ridiculous about a lot of hunting shows is how terrible the music is.

[68] Some of the music choices, just like, what did you guys just go to fucking, what is that I program that you have on your Mac?

[69] What is that?

[70] Garage, garage band, pick up some beats and just shove it in there.

[71] I don't know the name of the system that we use, but it's a, you know, it's a searchable database of music, like a catalog of music.

[72] Yeah.

[73] The documentary we're doing, we're beginning now to work on, we're in the initial stages of, you know, having it scored, which is fun, so it's not something I've ever messed with, you know.

[74] Like, I think we're very rarely in a television show, or do you have a television show scored?

[75] You know, you usually using library music or licensed music, you know?

[76] Yeah.

[77] I was watching Westworld the other night, which is an awesome show if you haven't seen it.

[78] But there was one scene where this music started playing.

[79] I'm like, this is so bad.

[80] I hate this.

[81] I hate when I'm being manipulated by music during a scene.

[82] Like, if the music's telling you to, where you're like, where they come up to it and they're like, man, you're not going to feel like, this isn't making you feel how we wish it made you feel.

[83] Perhaps if we played this, you'll feel this way more.

[84] Yeah, it's weird that we just accept that.

[85] They're like, this is the part where you're supposed to feel you know, kind of like feelings of nostalgia and, you know, and like these remorseful feelings, and we have no idea how to invoke that in audiences, but this musician did a wonderful job some years ago.

[86] Let's play this.

[87] It's always like viola.

[88] lens and shit piano there's something about that that's just I feel so manipulated like I should just give into it right because you're already accepting there's always this acceptance of like you're giving me a program you're showing me something in an hour you there's all these edits we're going back and why can't I just accept that you know there's a musician I like quite a bit named Micah P. Henson and he's out at Abilene Texas and he has a song called The Day Texas Sank to the Bottom of the Sea.

[89] And a friend of mine who's a screenwriter, we always have joked about someday writing a movie so sad that you could play that song at the end and it would not feel manipulative.

[90] Like a movie's so sad it could earn to have the Day Texas sank to the bottom of the sea played in the end of it.

[91] What's his name again?

[92] Micah P. H. Micah?

[93] M -I -C -A?

[94] Yeah.

[95] A -H.

[96] A -H?

[97] Yeah.

[98] Seems like a young fella.

[99] I don't know him.

[100] Seems like a young fella.

[101] Seems like he's got a...

[102] background and drug taken ah one of those guys um but yeah i really yeah he's a good musician man yeah there's something about music in movies that we've just totally we just totally accept it in television shows and music when there's a scene and they want to manipulate you and they want to establish some sort of a feeling that you're supposed to invoke they just shoved in there the radio head album okay computer has a song called exit music for a film because i think They just felt like they were trying to send a message to the licensers.

[103] Yeah, I wonder who was the first.

[104] I guess they did that back in the movies before there was talkies.

[105] You know, it was all when movies were silent.

[106] I mean, that's how they sort of manipulated you.

[107] And then they showed the screen and they had the words on it.

[108] Oh, yeah.

[109] Yeah.

[110] And then like the Peter and the Wolf thing and all that.

[111] And then it just carried over.

[112] But, yeah, when we're working on the show with music, I have a hard time describing visual stuff, you know.

[113] Like, I'll often see something, like a visual treatment for something, you know, or artwork or whatever.

[114] I'm like, I don't know.

[115] I can't see it.

[116] I'll know that I like it, but I can't tell you what I like.

[117] And when we're doing it and I listen to music, when an editor is putting something together and I hear music, I never have suggestions.

[118] I always just have no. it's like it's me it's like it's like it's like yes no yes no and I never can be like make it more you know I don't know yeah I just have to hear it and I'd be like oh that's it's too heavy handed or not I saw one show where they were deer hunting and there was electronica music playing I was like who chose this well they might be trying to create like a weird tension yeah make you upset yeah that way you want the deer to die Because they're forcing you to listen to this music.

[119] There's a great compilation of hawks.

[120] I think they're rough -legged hawks.

[121] Maybe I can't remember what kind.

[122] But just bitch -slapping mallard ducks up in Canada.

[123] And the guy said it to Hell's Bells.

[124] And I always thought that was an obvious choice, but it just has a great effect watching Hawks kill ducks to Hell's Bells.

[125] But other than that, no, I like it to be, I always kind of like it to be, not obvious like you know like let's say you're doing a show in west virginia and someone be like oh yeah kick it off of some banjo music you know i mean it's like i hate that kind of decision making you know right cliche yeah and then and then i don't like it to be like electronica to deer hunting like you kind of want it to be sort of like not obvious but right yeah like who wasn't the decided to outer space sounds the way it does like no one shows images of outer space to banjo music.

[126] It's a good point.

[127] You show images of outer space like do, do, do, do, do.

[128] Or it's got to be like Star Wars Symphony type music.

[129] Dun, dun, done, done, done.

[130] Like, someone decided that outer space feels like a kind of music.

[131] So if I was doing something about outer space, I would want to find something that you'd never guess was outer spacey sounding, but in the end, you're like, yeah, you know what?

[132] That's not out of place for outer space.

[133] Like a harmonica?

[134] Sure.

[135] Sure.

[136] I'll know it when I hear it.

[137] I'll know it when I hear it.

[138] You'd have to like enlist a bunch of the world's best harmonica players that come up with something spacey.

[139] Yeah, to watch outer space stuff.

[140] I think like a diggerie do would work for space.

[141] No, you could do that.

[142] But all the, all the editors used all that music up for when they got to cut to an Australia thing.

[143] That's true, right?

[144] They're like, what's Australia sound like?

[145] Oh, that's right.

[146] The diggerie do.

[147] But yeah, man, Netflix, it's, it's, uh, it's got a lot of emails and people kind of stumbling out on the show.

[148] And it's funny because you make a show about hunting and you want to, like in your head, you're like, people that like to hunt would have found it.

[149] But then you hear from people who hunt their asses off and you're like, hey, I just discovered this show.

[150] And it's, and you realize this, all these people, like all the, the untapped millions that are out there.

[151] Yeah.

[152] Well, there's a lot of people like me before I ever started hunting that are interested in it.

[153] they think it's interesting and I think the gateway drug for them is those Alaska shows those like subsistence hunter shows like the last frontier and the mountain men shows they show these people like wow that looks cool yeah you know and then I think the next step is to switch on over the sportsman's channel or something like that and find something interesting but you can get turned off really easily you could go to the wrong kind of show and it could be boring or you can stumble upon like I would say about uncharted the Jim Shockey show have you seen that show?

[154] I have.

[155] It's a great show.

[156] And to me, it's not really a hunting show.

[157] It's a show about cultures.

[158] Yeah, travel and culture.

[159] Yeah.

[160] It's about a really curious, open -minded guy who loves to go to different cultures, and he goes there, you know, and the premises he goes there to hunt.

[161] But he's traveled to some really, really incredible places and filmed some amazing stuff.

[162] Did you see the one where he went to, I forget what river it was in Africa, where these people have a significant problem with crocodiles, eating people.

[163] Oh, no, I didn't about talking to people about that one.

[164] Everybody in the village was like missing an arm.

[165] They had a hole in their head.

[166] Everybody had been jacked.

[167] And while he was there, a woman got taken.

[168] Yeah.

[169] It was crazy watching these people wail and cry and sob.

[170] It was really, really intense.

[171] You know what, I was in seventh grade.

[172] We had a teacher named Miss Merkel.

[173] I don't know if she's alive anymore, but I remember she lived down.

[174] the Muskegon River.

[175] She was in the peace court and one day this is one of those things that happens on your kid and you realize later it's weird.

[176] One day she brought in a photograph of her I believe it was her fiance at the time of his body after it had been removed from a crocodile's stomach to show us.

[177] Whoa.

[178] Now to set that to set the times I also, when I was in ninth grade, there was a teacher named Mr. Wright, and he wanted me to re -blue a shotgun for him.

[179] You know, the bluing on a shotgun, like the coating on a shotgun?

[180] Re -blue it?

[181] Yeah.

[182] How do you do that?

[183] What is it?

[184] It's a chemical dip.

[185] You strip it, and then it's like a chemical treatment, bluing.

[186] Bluing is kind of falling out of favor, but everything used to be blueed.

[187] Anyways, just set scene like for what you could do back then that you don't do now.

[188] He gave a shotgun to a kid.

[189] Brought shotgun to school.

[190] gave me the shotgun.

[191] I took a home re -blued it.

[192] You know what he paid me back with?

[193] What?

[194] He gave me a 25 -caliber semi -automatic handgun in a sweat sock at school.

[195] I brought it home, and my dad confiscated it from me, and I never saw it again.

[196] Wow.

[197] So the teacher gave you a handgun.

[198] Yeah, this is the old day.

[199] And your dad said, what the fuck is his teacher doing?

[200] Give me that.

[201] Yeah.

[202] The 25 -caliber semi -auto in a sweat sock as payment for ballooned shotgun.

[203] The transaction all happened at Reese Puffer.

[204] Is that in Michigan?

[205] It's my high school, yeah.

[206] So when I say that she had a photo of a guy's body coming out of a crocodile, it's like just the, you know.

[207] That's not that long ago, though.

[208] No, I'm 43.

[209] No, how old am I?

[210] 42.

[211] Times have changed pretty radically.

[212] Oh, yeah.

[213] I remember when they instituted the rule that you couldn't have firearms at school.

[214] And I remember going down and talking to Mr. Beckman.

[215] and being like, hey, you know, and he's like, oh, yeah, of course.

[216] I mean, you know, you guys are hunting everything.

[217] So he allowed you?

[218] So you can stick, like, a gun in your locker?

[219] No, you could have it in your car in the parking lot, though.

[220] Wow.

[221] Now, for our documentary, we interviewed a guy who used to get on his school bus with his shotgun.

[222] Holy shit.

[223] In Martha's Vineyard, of all places.

[224] And he would get on the school bus with a shotgun.

[225] Wow.

[226] So he could hunt ducks after school.

[227] whoa how old is this guy old he's a Vietnam veteran what happened what happened people started shooting people at school but what the fuck happened that if we could answer that I've been talking about this on stage a lot what happened to go in postal what did the post office figure out how did the post office get it together like why did that stop happening yeah going postal was a real issue how many cases like was it it was a huge issue there was a game called postal there was a video game that you could play in the early days of video game called Postal.

[228] This is another thing that you probably couldn't do today.

[229] But there was a video game based on mass shootings where you'd go to a post office and just fuck everybody up.

[230] But was, I don't remember.

[231] I know, of course I remember that, but I don't remember were there actually like more than two?

[232] Yeah, I was going to say it's called Running with Scissors was the company that made it.

[233] Look, look, this is the fucking game.

[234] You would just run around and mass shoot people and chop them up and gun them down.

[235] I mean, it's terrible graphics because it's the early days of gun or of, excuse me, of video games.

[236] No, it looks like my 6 -year -old did the pictures.

[237] But this is the game.

[238] I mean, this is like the original grand theft daughter.

[239] Auto.

[240] Really?

[241] Yeah.

[242] How come he could just go over the roof like that?

[243] Shitty -ass physics.

[244] Yeah, I mean, going postal was a thing that people used to say all the time.

[245] But if you said he went postal to like a 20 -year -old.

[246] Yeah, I know what they were talking about.

[247] I think people use it as being you got real mad.

[248] I think it's a murderous thing.

[249] No, I know, but also, once it became in the lexicon, you know, you could say like, oh, yeah, you know, he went postal about me not, you know, sending him the check.

[250] But you could say going postal because you're 42, but could you say postal if you're 22?

[251] I don't think a 22 -year -old would have any idea what you're talking about.

[252] Something happened.

[253] It ended.

[254] the phenomena.

[255] Yeah.

[256] What did the post office do?

[257] What I'm questioning is, what was it based on?

[258] Two things?

[259] Three?

[260] Monotony.

[261] Inbox, outbox.

[262] Inbox, outbox.

[263] Inbox, outbox.

[264] I mean, how many postal?

[265] How many.

[266] How many examples of people going postals?

[267] Were there at post offices?

[268] Jamie's pulled them up here.

[269] Look at this.

[270] Oh, shit.

[271] In 1986, 1991, 91 again, two events in 93.

[272] And it took a 13 -year hiatus.

[273] Yeah, and then it came back strong in 2006.

[274] Baker City, Oregon, 2006.

[275] So 2006, it seems like that was the last postal event.

[276] It says that was based around these ones in 1986 is where the term started.

[277] So it probably is just a novelty thing.

[278] Like one person did it.

[279] and then a bunch of other people.

[280] Well, I wonder if there's a disproportionate amount of mass shootings in post offices as compared to other warehouse jobs or other...

[281] I mean, because there's been mass shootings at work before.

[282] But for some reason, that distinction got put on post office.

[283] Said 35 people and 11 incidents.

[284] Hmm.

[285] That is high.

[286] It's fairly high.

[287] But when you're dealing with the number of people that come in and out of the post office, irate.

[288] Yeah.

[289] But it's one of those weird things.

[290] It's like, why don't you see that about Jiffyloob?

[291] There's no Jiffyloob mass shootings, you know?

[292] Yeah, I can't answer that.

[293] I bet there's people who've studied it carefully.

[294] I read the book.

[295] I read the book, Columbine.

[296] Oh, yeah?

[297] Yeah.

[298] Did you read that book?

[299] No, I didn't, but I just got a book from one of the kids that survived.

[300] Met him.

[301] He was with Marilyn Manson at this podcast that we did for the election night, the End of the World podcast.

[302] and he gave me a copy of his book.

[303] He survived.

[304] They came up to him right before the shooting.

[305] They said, hey, man, we like you.

[306] Get the fuck out of here.

[307] Really?

[308] Yeah, and he left, and guns started blazing.

[309] And he survived.

[310] Yeah.

[311] That'd be a good guy to have on your show.

[312] I'm going to have him on.

[313] The guy that wrote a Column.

[314] No, no, I mean, yeah, him, but I mean, the guy that wrote a Columbine.

[315] Columbine's a good book, man. I mean, as far as the psychology and background and context of shooters, it's a good book.

[316] It's an intense phenomenon that is attributed to North America more than anywhere.

[317] I mean, you're starting to see a lot more mass shootings all across the world, but a lot of them are religious -related.

[318] But it's a very confusing one to people because there's so many factors involved.

[319] And it's one that gets lumped in with the gun culture.

[320] This is a tweet that I put on my Twitter page while back that I said this country has a mental health problem disguises a gun problem.

[321] Yeah.

[322] And I really, really believe that.

[323] I just, I don't think that you can attribute, there's so many guns in this country and so few mass shootings.

[324] There's so many guns.

[325] I mean, the number of guns exceeds the number of people.

[326] And the amount of mass shootings, in relative, obviously they're all horrific and terrible, but relatively to the amount of people that we have, it's relatively small.

[327] And I think the kind of person that can engage in something like that, there's so many factors and you can't blame it on guns it's like blaming forks on people getting fat yeah it doesn't make sense i think you know i think when you look at the tendency to want to like grasp on to somewhat easy solutions for stuff it's something people go to yes because it's like it seems conquerable you know so people go you know people look at like a really complex thing we saw so much this during the run to the presidential election where, you know, to make a point really fast, you look at something that's terrifically complex.

[328] And then it's not just that you want the magic solution, but people kind of go like, well, what could be, what possibly could be done?

[329] And I think people moved in the direction of moving the direction of the Second Amendment.

[330] And there's also this sort of an agreement that people have when discussing it.

[331] Like, yes, guns are a problem.

[332] And that guns are a problem because these things happen.

[333] And then they all start talking about guns.

[334] and then we get lumped into two groups.

[335] You get lumped into people that are pro -second amendment that go, no, no, no, it's not guns.

[336] And then the people that say, well, those crazy people with guns, you know, like Obama, there was one of the famous statements that he said during his administration is how people are so attached to their guns.

[337] And the Second Amendment people got so mad.

[338] The NRA people got so mad.

[339] I mean, like the cling into religion and guns.

[340] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[341] It's, you know, if you just look at the sheer number of people who actually have guns in this country, it is a little crazy.

[342] I mean, the volume is very, very high.

[343] The actual number of firearms.

[344] And the thing that always gets me is they don't, it's not like they stop making them.

[345] I mean, they're making guns every day.

[346] Yeah.

[347] A lot less now since the election.

[348] Really?

[349] Yeah, I had friends.

[350] I had friends that were so convinced that, you know, like most people in the country, whether you like it or not, were convinced that Clinton was going to win, you know, and they had, I got one friend in particular that went out and bought a bunch of stocks for a company, you know, firearm companies, and he said they took a little hit after the election.

[351] Because people relaxed, they didn't worry about stockpiling.

[352] If people weren't worried about stockpiling.

[353] I mean, we were all talking about it.

[354] It was like the stockpiling thing is self -perpetuating where, like, when I was a little kid, you know, in our Christmas stocking, we would get bricks of 22 shells because we used 22.

[355] We'd hunt small, we'd hunt a lot of squirrels and rabbits with 22s.

[356] And it was just like, you always had 22 shells.

[357] You know, you could go anywhere and get 22 shells.

[358] A buddy of mine, one of our camera guys, he grew up on a ranch, and at the ranch store, they had two items, chew.

[359] So tens of chew and 22 shells.

[360] You could get on credit at the ranch store.

[361] The ranch store was like, had a very limited inventory.

[362] But that's like how just pervasive 22 shells.

[363] shells were.

[364] Now, when Obama won, you know, no one's going to use a 22.

[365] Like, 22 is not a go -to caliber for inflicting harm on other human beings.

[366] It's, you know, it's just not a great, it's a very small, small game round.

[367] But the hysteria about guns drove people to gobble up 22 ammo.

[368] So all of a sudden then it was, you couldn't find 22 ammo.

[369] And not being able to find, like, I used to just buy these little boxes of 50, right?

[370] You go like, oh, it's hard to buy it.

[371] And then all of a sudden you got in the need where you wanted to buy all you could get because it was in your head that you couldn't get it.

[372] So then you'd see a thousand of them and I'd be like, well, I'm going to buy it because everyone's buying it.

[373] And I think it was self -perpetuating.

[374] Now I got shitloaded to 22 shots.

[375] But it was like, I had no need for them.

[376] I felt into this thing like there's this thing that I've always had access to and now I won't have access to it.

[377] You know?

[378] And I don't know where it came from.

[379] And I think that now all through the last eight years, There's been this great arming of America because I feel like so many people were worried about having their rights infringed.

[380] There's like at least now in that community of which I'm a part, I suppose.

[381] There's a sigh of relief, you know?

[382] Yeah, there's a great relaxation among sports when they think that Trump is going to come in and, you know, protect the Second Amendment rights.

[383] But a lot of people have to be worried about private land or public land.

[384] Yeah, that's the thing that I'm really watching, and I'm curious about it.

[385] You know, at this point, you know, the talk's over, right?

[386] The rhetoric's over.

[387] So now I'm, you know, whether someone was forward or against it, for or against Trump's victory, I think now, like, the responsible thing to do in my mind, or the realistic responsible thing to do in my mind is because there's so many unknowns just to approach the administration with an open mind.

[388] You know, I'm like, now I'm like, okay, talks over.

[389] Now, like, what's going to happen?

[390] Like, what sorts of things that we're going to see come out of it?

[391] And I don't know if anyone really knows the answers to that.

[392] And, like, in my outward public -facing way, I don't generally talk about politics outside of issues that relate to wildlife, issues that relate to hunters and fishermen, right?

[393] Like, I kind of focused in because politically I'm a mess.

[394] You know, I'm all over the place.

[395] I have no use for and I know you don't either I have no use for like classic definitions of conservatives and liberals that just that shit makes no sense to me like I don't get I don't draw my viewpoints from going and looking and finding out how I'm supposed to feel about it in order to be like a consistent partisan individual last January though for people who aren't even I'm sure there's probably a lot of people that aren't familiar with this can I give a quick rundown on public lands so the federal government government has, you know, holds, owns millions and millions of acres of land in the U .S., primarily in the western U .S. And there's a handful of different landholding agencies.

[396] You know, the Bureau Land Management manages lands.

[397] The U .S. Fish and Wildlife Service manages lands through the refuge system.

[398] So when those boys in Oregon took over the wildlife refuge there, that was, that was actually U .S. Fish and Wildlife Service land.

[399] It wasn't BLM land.

[400] You've got the National Forest Holds Land, National Forest Service, which is under the USDA.

[401] I already said the BLM, right?

[402] Yeah.

[403] And then, of course, you have, you know, states own public land, but the federal land management agencies of which there are several hold deed to millions of acres of land.

[404] And it is owned by the American people, and it's represented through, you might think of it, is represented through a trust, and the trust is administered by the federal government on your behalf.

[405] That's our public lands, where people are.

[406] Recreate.

[407] Another large holder of public lands is the National Park Service.

[408] I didn't mention that one.

[409] In the lower 48, you don't hunt on national park land.

[410] You fish on national park land, and you generally hunt national forest land, bureau land, management land, refuge land.

[411] And there's a push right now to that people feel that we should, that the federal government should be dumping a lot of federal land.

[412] Now, for what reason?

[413] Well, yeah, that's what I'm getting at.

[414] So people get frustrated with dealing with the federal bureaucracy.

[415] And the reason that is, is generally the feds are pretty, I mean, this is a gross generalization, but generally the feds are much slower on exploitation of natural resources, less responsive to demand for exploitation of natural resources, than state.

[416] agencies are.

[417] So federal lands, you know, they're, they, in exercising the will of the American people, federal land agencies are, um, not as easy to deal with when it comes to mining and development and other issues as state agencies are.

[418] So people who are, who want to see a more readily exploitable system in place for, for developers, miners, loggers, others.

[419] We want to see people able to more readily make a buck off the land.

[420] They'd like to see these lands, our federal lands, they'd like to see them going to private hands or like to see them going to state hands.

[421] Because they know that either way it goes, if they go into private hands or state lands, they're going to have a much easier time doing extractive industries and development on those lands.

[422] So that's like under the surface what's going on.

[423] And for instance, like the guy, you know, one of the reasons the guys that took over the refuge the Malmere Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, one of their gripes was they run cattle on public property, right?

[424] So they pay a fee that one of those families is heavily involved in running cattle on federal land, and they pay a fee far below the going rate to run cattle on public land.

[425] So what you'd go pay a rancher if you wanted to run cattle on his land, they pay about 10 % of that, by some estimations, to run it on public land.

[426] And then when federal land managers, don't want to renew those contracts because, again, because people are thinking about other uses for the land or whatever they want to do with it, it causes an intense amount of, like a serious amount of frustration with people.

[427] So there's people that want to dump lands.

[428] Now, I heard Donald Trump speak last January, so almost a year ago, in Las Vegas.

[429] And he was standing 40 yards away from me and was talking about that he has no desire to see them.

[430] He has no desire to see our public lands privatized.

[431] However, one might argue kind of by name only, he's a Republican.

[432] I mean, he definitely hasn't demonstrated any sense of being beholden the party orthodoxy.

[433] I mean, he's like he takes an issue -by -issue stance on things and doesn't really care for how things are done at the party level.

[434] However, his party is very much, you know, You know, it's right in their, it's one of the planks of their platform.

[435] It's right in their agenda to see us dump federal property, to see us offload federal lands.

[436] To see us offload American public lands into state or private holdings.

[437] So I don't know, I hope that he has good, I hope he has luck in resisting that.

[438] If in fact, if in fact he is still standing by that statement that he made.

[439] I don't think most people in America understand how unique this situation is that we have these massive swaths of public land.

[440] no they don't it's one of those things where and even the people that do even the people that know don't really conceptualize like I grew up I grew up about two and a half miles south of the southern terminus of Manistee National Forest in Michigan a significant portion of our outdoor activities took place on that national forest we took it like it fell from like our perception of it was that it fell from the sky.

[441] It was that it just existed, just it had always existed.

[442] We took it for granted, like, how you'd look at the sun and be like, the sun's just there, you know?

[443] So I think even people who are public lands users don't, often don't take the time to be like, how is it that I'm able to be on this land?

[444] Right.

[445] Well, I never considered it at all until I hung out with you.

[446] No. But I'm saying I hung out on public lands and it wasn't for, It wasn't until I was, you know, it took me 25 years to start being like, now, how am it now?

[447] What is this now?

[448] This public lands you speak of.

[449] Yeah, that you hold deed, like that as an American citizen, in most ways, as a global citizen, because our national four, our public lands are open to anyone, American or not, right?

[450] But as an American citizen, you hold deed to hundreds of millions of acres of land.

[451] Now, there are conditions to your use, like just things you can and cannot do.

[452] But you're free to roam, camp.

[453] hunt fish look at the stars whatever you're extraordinarily wealthy um and these things that came about like they came about in various ways probably the most influential person in creating the public land system we have now this is Theodore Roosevelt and he was controversial in his time for creating our for helping to create our public land system he had the same resistance when he was doing it from industry from extractive industry he had the same resistance that we have now to public lands and then we went and chiseled his face on a mountain because everyone now everyone every politician would like to liken himself to Roosevelt right he's like one of those dudes and he can just be like like Teddy Roosevelt and people are like yeah positive feelings positive feelings he's achieved Rushmore but this was a guy who was like a radical you see a little bit of that with Reagan yeah during the Reagan administration during the time where he was actually president.

[454] He was a massively polarizing figure.

[455] People hated him.

[456] I mean, there was so much going on during the Iran contra hearings, where it's like, oh my God, who is this asshole that we let run president?

[457] Yeah, I think around the time by the time he died, he had sort of ascended to political heaven.

[458] Yeah.

[459] Where now you can, like, Kennedy enjoys that position.

[460] I mean, Kennedy barely won the damn election.

[461] Yeah.

[462] It's debated whether he actually won the, you know, people say to all these votes wound up in Lake Michigan.

[463] Well, there's a lot of fucking shenanigans going on with that election with the the mafia.

[464] That was a big part of how he got elected.

[465] So, but later in life, we like to look back and say, now there's a guy, right?

[466] And so Roosevelt creating our national forest system, yeah, he was considered a radical.

[467] Yeah.

[468] It was like this outlandish idea, like, you mean to tell me you're just going to take huge chunks of land that could earn some individuals an extraordinary amount of money right now and just set it aside.

[469] for just Joe Blow future person to enjoy.

[470] And he even made a point where he went on to say at one time that he was doing it for those in the womb of time.

[471] Whoa.

[472] Because at the time people were arguing like, okay, if public land, like, here's the other thing that kind of pertains to this, is wildlife in America is publicly owned.

[473] It's not like most countries is not like that.

[474] Like wildlife in the U .S. is publicly owned.

[475] So if a deer, if you got a deer standing on your neighbor, place, you as not a federal citizen, but you as a citizen of your state, own that deer.

[476] That person can control access to it, but it's not his deer.

[477] He can prevent you from going up to it because you can't go on his land, but he has no more right to that deer than you do, generally speaking.

[478] So when people said to Roosevelt, like, how are you blocking industry out of all these lands and how are you blocking industry from getting at the wildlife so we can sell the wildlife back when we had commercial hunting.

[479] He goes, if it's for the people, give it to us.

[480] And that's when he had his line.

[481] He's like, yeah, but it's for those still in the womb of time.

[482] That's deep.

[483] Yeah.

[484] That's deep.

[485] People didn't like them.

[486] I'm sure.

[487] Someone tried to do that today.

[488] Dude, he had a thing one time where he had a timeline.

[489] He had to draw, there was an end of when he could, he kept just throwing shit into National Forest.

[490] I mean, for every day that guy was in office, I think he saved about something like 50 ,000 square miles of land or something.

[491] Yeah, some absurd amount of land for every day.

[492] I could be wrong with that, but an absurd amount of land for every day he was in office.

[493] And there's a thing he did called the Midnight Forest, where he had a deadline that expired, like, his ability to keep drawing up big chunks of National Forest was set to expire at a certain time on midnight.

[494] And he was up to last minute and midnight with a couple of aides marking up maps, making giant National Forest.

[495] Now we celebrate them all.

[496] Wow.

[497] Right?

[498] When they made Yelso National Park, people were pissed.

[499] I'm sure.

[500] yeah mineral resources in there man people are still pissed today timber in there yeah but I'm saying all these big decisions like these decisions happen that we'd create a public land system in America like the decision happens generally people look and go wow what foresight you know it's kind of this insane idea that you would have a country as prosperous as ours you know with our GMP 350 million citizens right you'd have this like this thing as huge as us that would still have an intact suite of megafauna.

[501] No one else pulls that off.

[502] So we've accomplished a lot, but then now and then people just get pissed because they want to be able to do stuff.

[503] Well, there's like interest that want to make money.

[504] And when they want to make money, and then someone tells them no, they get a little bit pissy, and then the smart ones of them, and I would never detract from their intelligence, the smart ones of them, rather than walking away they go like well how is this law why is the law this way and what can we do about it and right now those folks those folks have an idea that the solution to their problem is that we would you know begin undoing the great work of people like Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot and Aldo Leopold and all these seminal American figures that we would undo their work and go back to a system where these landscapes are privatized.

[505] People who've never been to Yellowstone, and I mean, even if you're not a hunter, you should go once in your life.

[506] Yeah, you can't hunt Yellowstone anyway.

[507] Right.

[508] That's the point.

[509] I have a problem with that.

[510] Do you?

[511] No, I'm joking.

[512] But it's, I mean, just forget about hunting.

[513] Just the fact that we have this immense state park that you could go to.

[514] And I took my kids there this summer, and we hung out with Buffalo.

[515] We were like standing there There was a buffalo There was a hundred yards away We're just looking at these giant Huge prehistoric animals Yeah, it's a great place For introductory wildlife viewing We took a lot of selfies with elk Because the elk Because the wolf population Is increased in Yellowstone The elk have decided look There's one spot to hang out To the fucking visitor center Yeah So you go by the visitor center And there's a Coca -Cola machine There's a vending machine And right next to the vending machine There's a fucking elk just chilling just laying down there i mean they have zero fear of people and it's amazing how they become sort of acclimated yeah habituated yeah they know habituated is the word it's funny like when you look at there's a problem i've identified as much as i i love yelstone in my perspective as a fellow that does what i do for food and and enjoyment um which is to hunt uh i look at it from a grand wildlife thing and I look at it as it serves the purpose of being this fantastic wildlife sanctuary you know and everyone like you know our mutual friend Doug Dern even on his farm right he has established a like a sanctuary area like on his farm a place where you don't go that it's always a spot where deer go and they don't get harassed in that area and it's like a self -imposed sanctuary and so you have Yellowstone provides that but I've identified this sort of thing the idea I've been working on called Yellowstone Syndrome, though, is where people, Americans, some many of them, their only idea about wildlife and wildlife politics and wildlife management comes from the Yellowstone story, that they wind up having a difficult time understanding wildlife and wildlife management and situations that are outside of a national park setting, which is to say they don't have a very good grasp on the inevitable conflicts that are going to arise between wildlife and society.

[516] And that's a large chunk of ground where you just do not have those sorts of conflicts.

[517] Like what kind of conflicts are we talking about?

[518] Oh, like, for instance, a thing that's been very difficult and very vexing for wildlife managers is what happens to what happens to Buffalo when they leave the Yellowstone National Park.

[519] Just, I mean, to back up on the Yellowstone issue, just to get a sort of.

[520] sense for how revolutionary that idea was you know there was the Indian wars weren't even over when they made Yellowstone Yellowstone you know we were still battling American Indians on the Great Plains when Yellowstone went into effect matter of fact Yellowstone was a park when the Nez Perce were chased through by the U .S. Army and they actually killed a couple tourists in Yellowstone right at some of the buildings that are still there wow yeah Yeah.

[521] So when you went to a park and got shot by Indians who were engaged in a war with the U .S. Army.

[522] Wow.

[523] It was like a, it was like they hadn't even, you know, the West hadn't even been, in some ways, the center west had even been settled.

[524] And they were made, you know, and they made the national park.

[525] And then Rollsville went there in a, you know, at the commemoration.

[526] Like it was, you know, went there to, to applaud it.

[527] So I just get a sense of like, you know, I mean, just.

[528] It was just an outlandish idea.

[529] It was so far ahead of its time.

[530] But with, yeah, like the Buffalo situation, for instance, how it's kind of, how it's sort of as, like, colored the broader conversation would be, Yelso is one of the few places where they've, where the animal, buffalo or a bison, you know, their Lenean name is bison, bison, bison.

[531] Some people say it's bison, bison, bison, as opposed to bison, bison, athabacus.

[532] at the bascus but uh buffalo i call them buffalo it's very controversial to calm you're not cool if you call him buffalo really no you're supposed to call him bison who are you hanging out with old -timey folk they use coyote yeah well coyote so let's get to that in a bit yeah we'll call him i'll read in dan flores's book oh you are good yeah i'm almost done with it good we're on a no you know i'm gonna call him bison what the hell so it's what you also is one of the few places where bison have always existed.

[533] Now, at a time, the ones there were fenced and fed, but they've always been there.

[534] And the other thing you have there is you have a genetically pure strain where there's been no cattle intrrogression into those animals.

[535] There's only a handful of herds in the U .S. where there hasn't been some amount of cattle introgression.

[536] You can't see it usually, but it's there oftentimes.

[537] There's some in New Mexico that don't.

[538] There's some of the Dakotas that do not, and the Yellowstone ones do not.

[539] They've never interbred or been interbred with cattle.

[540] So they're valuable in that way.

[541] And at various times, there's a few thousand of them in the park, and the snows pile up.

[542] And one of the things they like to do when the snow piles up is they like to leave the park.

[543] And they go out at West Yellowstone, which is one of the primary entrance points into the park.

[544] And they'll go out and Gardner at the Gardner entrance in the late winter.

[545] That would be fine probably.

[546] Maybe it'd be kind of fine if it weren't for a couple of issues.

[547] issues.

[548] There's a livestock disease called brucellosis, and it's a Eurasian disease.

[549] So it's a non -native, you know, we don't know if we think of diseases as being native or non -native, but it's a non -native disease called brucellosis.

[550] And brucellosis causes cattle to, it causes heifers.

[551] A heifer is a cow that's, you know, with just one young.

[552] So a heifer is a cow that's having her first, going to have her first calf.

[553] It causes heifers to a Bort, their fetus.

[554] Now, they've gotten bruselosis eradicated from cattle herds, generally.

[555] When a state is getting bruselosis cases, they have to pay for testing, okay?

[556] So it's expensive to get all your cows tested, but if you have brucellosis in your state, then the producers got to pay the testing to get them tested to make sure they're not bruselosis positive.

[557] Well, cattle long ago passed bruselosis to the bison.

[558] when the bison leave the park they carry brucellosis with them and could reintroduce it into cattle herds though that hasn't there's no known case of that happening yet i don't how's it spread they well animals uh the primary way it spread is animals eat their own afterbirth and they'll eat afterbirth of other animals that's an interesting thing why they eat their own you know some folks eat their own i propose that to my wife she was not down with it at all but i've got friends that take their placenta I got some buddies that had their wife's placentas made into pills.

[559] Pills.

[560] Yeah, there's some gal that dries it up and puts it in capsules for you.

[561] I've heard of people cooking it with carrots.

[562] Yeah, I wanted to cook some, man. But the other thing is when my wife, I swore up and down that I was going to drink the breast milk.

[563] You know, I got a buddy that puts breast milk in his coffee and everything, man, you know?

[564] And dude, in the end, I couldn't go near it.

[565] Does he wear a diaper too?

[566] No, but he's like, if he's going to have coffee, you know, when women are breastfeeding and have little bottles in the fridge and everything.

[567] Yeah.

[568] Yeah, he just going there, grab one of those, put in his coffee.

[569] Jesus.

[570] Just drink it.

[571] I tried it just a taste, but I felt like I was stealing from my kid.

[572] I felt like I was being a cannibal.

[573] Ooh.

[574] Which is one thing.

[575] That's where I draw a line.

[576] That's where you draw the line?

[577] Well, you ate a monkey.

[578] Yeah, I know, and I felt horrible.

[579] Did you?

[580] Yeah, I felt real bad.

[581] Well, not so bad that I didn't eat it, but it was, it was like emotionally complicated for me. But so.

[582] We'll get back to that.

[583] Yeah, the bruised deal.

[584] I'm trying to explain Yellowstone syndrome.

[585] So the brucellosis deal is a real issue for some people.

[586] So conceivably Buffalo could leave Yellowstone, give birth, the afterbirth could be there, a cow could eat that after birth and get brucellosis.

[587] And like everything worth talking about, there's so many caveats and complications of this thing, such as elk have brucellosis, but elk come and go as they please.

[588] Right.

[589] So the minute of buffalo or bison when he leaves yellowstone national park if he walks into montana now it's not even fenced right it's like he doesn't know right but when he crosses the line he goes from being a wild animal from being native wildlife okay to being livestock so he goes from being the property of like under the administration of the national park service to the administration of montana's department of livestock Native animal.

[590] Now, how does that work, though?

[591] So if the native animal crosses over onto private property, is he owned by the...

[592] He's the only animal that that happens to.

[593] So coyotes, fox, wolverine, grizzly bears, black bears, big horn sheep, elk, mule deer, white -tailed deer, moose.

[594] They leave their wildlife.

[595] Buffalo leaves.

[596] He becomes errant livestock.

[597] Wow.

[598] Therefore, every year.

[599] There's a perennial story every year where a bunch of Buffalo leave the park and get rounded up by the Department of Livestock and sent to quarantine or usually sent off to slaughter.

[600] Yeah, they just killed a bunch of them.

[601] They killed like 2 ,000 of them.

[602] Yeah, man, they get a lot of them.

[603] You know, that place cranks out a lot of animals, too.

[604] So it's like they're always throwing out these humongous numbers of animals they've gotten.

[605] And every year you wind up having quite a few animals in the park.

[606] So, but it's a thing.

[607] Now, people point out this because elk have bruised.

[608] salosis and elk are calving in proximity to cattle and there and as far as we know like there's not like ironclad cases of cattle of elk transmitting brucellosis to cattle people wonder like well why are bison picked on you know why them and one thing might be sit to say that we got and this is generally true of wildlife in America I think there was a brief period around 1900, when we had, you know, maybe about 75 of them left in the U .S., people got very used to they're sort of like not being buffalo, bison.

[609] And now that it's becoming like a player again, it's like the animal's becoming a player again that we now have, we were down to 75, we got a 500 ,000 in the U .S. now, 94 % of them are privately owned, but we have a population of a half million buffalo in this country.

[610] So, but we got really used to them not being around.

[611] And so it was this thing that was like this additive thing.

[612] Like, I think if there had been a long period when there were no elk, and then all of a sudden someone said, hey, guess what?

[613] We're bringing these big ass ungulates back that eat tons of stuff.

[614] And they're huge.

[615] And they might have a disease.

[616] And we're just going to let tens of thousands of them cut loose across the landscape.

[617] People have been up in arms.

[618] But they were used to elk because elk were always on the ground.

[619] So that's why Buffalo recovery has been so hard because it's kind of like you're trying to sell people on this new thing, even though historically it's hardly new.

[620] They've been around, but there was a period of, you know, a century, not quite a century when it wasn't an issue.

[621] So it's really hard to get livestock interests and private landowners around these areas to unanimously get on board with the idea that we're going to have animals roaming out of the park that are, has been proven to happen, that will get into your corral and kill your horse or you know take out a school bus if it hits them or possibly transmit disease and the big thing that people don't really talk about but which is a huge issue is impact grazing rights impact cattle grazing get back to kill the horse yeah they gore they gore stuff they just go into the horse stable and fuck them out it's happened when they rut in June you know crazy yeah they rut in the summer and the bulls get very they get real fired up and then you know the funny thing there too with the Yellowstone ones you're dealing with animals that are habituated so it's only been like you know it's been a hundred years that you can't you haven't been able to hunt in the park but animals have gotten habituated to humans we like to look at Yellowstone and think you're seeing something kind of natural but you're actually seeing something pretty unnatural because that landscape was hunted for 12 ,000 years the last hundred years notwithstanding so the people had always hunted Yellowstone the unnatural thing is these animals being super comfortable being habituated to humans is unusual, but we go there and be like, this is what animals were like.

[622] I'm like, not if you draw a line back to when humans arrived in the new world.

[623] Well, that was one of the more fascinating things about Dan Flores on your podcast where he was talking about Buffalo and that at one point in time, the Indians or the Native Americans, when they had guns and they had horses, they were on their way to extirpating the buffalo on their own.

[624] Before the market hunters came into place, that's an incredibly controversial idea.

[625] Yeah, that was a controversial idea, and that was put for, again, you know, not, I talked in my book that I wrote, and, you know, I have a book American Buffalo about, you know, the history of the animal, and in my own personal experience is hunting for the animal and finding a skull of one that I found in sort of a journey that led me down.

[626] But in working on that book, I spent quite a time reading the work of Dan Flores, and he was a mentor of mine in graduate school, and he wrote this very interesting piece called Bison Ecology, Bison Diplomacy.

[627] And what he looked at was, he was trying to find, was there a period when Plains tribes, okay, was there a period when Native Americans had actually reached equilibrium with the bison herds?

[628] And he argues that they had not achieved equilibrium, that even if that one of the points, he makes many points in this thing, I don't want to sell his piece short.

[629] It's a very large piece of scholarly work.

[630] But one of the things he talks about is just the introduction of the horse had humongous impacts on the animals on Buffalo for a handful of reasons.

[631] Grazing competition.

[632] So enormous herds of wild horses.

[633] And the horse was distributed.

[634] So you trace, and Flores explains all this as well, like you can trace horses into Native American tribes on the Great Plains and elsewhere.

[635] They go back to the Pueblo revolt.

[636] So, you know, the Spanish conquistadors lost a lot of their animals, and the animals are traded up the eastern face and up the western face of the Rockies, and then were distributed all around.

[637] And so when you get this idea in your head of a planes warrior, right, mounted on horseback hunting for buffalo, that was a very distinct phenomenon that didn't last nearly, it didn't last as long as the U .S. has been a country.

[638] Like, it did not last long.

[639] Between the introduction of the horse and the Indian Wars, they wanted to, like, largely, you know, removing free -roaming, autonomous tribes off the Great Plains.

[640] It just didn't last that long.

[641] Even though it became, like, the iconic image of the Mounted Plains Hunter.

[642] And what he argues is the advent of the horse changed hunting practices so much.

[643] Up until that point, you had tribes that were partially or largely agrarian coming out of the Mississippi River Valley, out of the Missouri River Valley that would grow crops.

[644] And they would during the summer, when the buffalo herds were gathered into tremendous gatherings during the breeding season, they would do trips.

[645] They would do buffalo hunting trips.

[646] Once they had the horse, you had all these cultures turn into nomadic cultures that could have a travoi and a horse and just follow the herds.

[647] and it was a tremendous amount of pressure put on these animals to support that amount, where you had tribes migrating out onto the Great Plains and fighting over those resources.

[648] And I think it was one of his graduate students that later looked at this piece, where when Lewis and Clark did their big westward journey in the early 1800s, the places where they talked about seeing the greatest amounts where they were just blown away about how many buffalo they were seeing, were generally fell upon sort of no man's lands areas between warring tribes.

[649] So the buffers of zone, the buffers of traditional hunting zones, like where the black feet and the Sioux met up, the edge habitat there was where you had a lot of animals that weren't getting exploited by people.

[650] So you started to see these regional extirpations of the animal.

[651] And then firearms was another big blow.

[652] where even outside of white hide hunters just showing up, but just those European technologies of horse gun, you were seeing a steady depletion that would have not, and it seems like the resource would not have lasted.

[653] You'd have had the same outcome.

[654] Well, what was interesting about his paper was that he was saying that the early settlers or the early explorers of the United States in the 15 -1600, they didn't talk about Buffalo.

[655] No. So when the Spanish, the Spanish would go through places, and they would name wildlife.

[656] Now, like, some of the Spanish came through, you know, they go through into Florida, some of the first guys of step foot in Florida.

[657] They talk about everything they see, right down to possums.

[658] Okay?

[659] They're not describing Buffalo.

[660] Though they're describing everything else.

[661] The English going there 200 years later, and they're talking about Buffalo.

[662] So there's sightings in what's now in New Orleans.

[663] Cabezza de Vaca ran into Buffalo around, what's now Houston.

[664] There's sightings of Buffalo and what is now Washington, D .C. Simon Kenton and Daniel Boone figures like that were hunting them around the site of Nashville and Memphis.

[665] They were all the way to the East Coast.

[666] It seems there were only a handful of states that at some point in time didn't have any.

[667] My home state of Michigan doesn't seem like there were any.

[668] For a long time, people thought that there had been Buffalo in New York.

[669] but it turns out the evidence for them in the paleontological and archaeological record is two skulls.

[670] Both the skulls have cultural markings on them.

[671] And it seems that they were the same way that me and Joe here will hunt an animal and bring the head home, that they might have been just things someone had trophies that were traded or whatever because there's no other faunal remains from the animals in New York.

[672] But most places had them.

[673] Now the mound builders, so you have all these Mississippian cultures along the Mississippi River, in Ohio River Valley is called the mound boulders.

[674] They made these giant effigy mounds that people didn't even realize they were there until we had airplanes to get above and see the snakes and like serpents and deer and all these creatures they were building out of earth mounds that were so big that guys would like live around the mound and never recognize it for what it was until they could look at it from above.

[675] You can see these things with satellite imagery.

[676] They never built buffalo mounds.

[677] But once we emptied and this is one our It's kind of a two -pack argument.

[678] Once smallpox and other diseases carried off 90 % of Native Americans.

[679] 90.

[680] That's an estimate.

[681] Jesus.

[682] Many people say that.

[683] I think it's a, I think like the scholarly consensus is that it's in that ballpark.

[684] What are the numbers?

[685] Do they estimate the actual physical numbers?

[686] You know, I've seen it, but I don't know what it is.

[687] I think that there was a number that was floating around for a while, 10 million.

[688] But I remember a lot of people criticized that number.

[689] as being high.

[690] I don't know what the fashionable number is now.

[691] But 90 % approximately wiped out by diseases from the Europeans.

[692] And that this was primarily responsible for this explosion in the population of the Buffalo.

[693] So that's why when the Spanish would go into places.

[694] This is a theory now.

[695] The Spanish would go into places, first contact, like first people's trapes to an area.

[696] They would go into places and they would describe village after village after village after village.

[697] okay and they never talk about buffalo the English while later they'll go down someone guy will go down the Mississippi River he don't see shit for people but there's buffalo crawling everywhere wow so and another issue another thing people talk about is changing agricultural practices that slash and burn agriculture was becoming used and slash and burn agriculture was conducive to spreading it was conducive to buffalo because it created open spaces for them That's another thing people look at is slash and burning agriculture.

[698] But either way, it's proposed that the apex of that species was at the moment we found it.

[699] The fashionable number used to be $60 million.

[700] And that was put forth by a guy named Dodge City, Dodge City, Kansas.

[701] It got its name from a guy named Colonel Dodge.

[702] Colonel Dodge, I could, if you're interested, I could explain how he came up with it.

[703] But Colonel Dodge is the one that floated the idea that there were 60 million in Buffalo.

[704] Now, the fashionable number is, you know, 32, you hear 32 million, you hear 40 million.

[705] And people say that that was an extraordinary amount of those animals and we witnessed it at its apex.

[706] And that other times in the history of the continent and other times of the natural history of our continent, there weren't nearly that many of the animals.

[707] That's such a fascinating concept.

[708] I never had heard it before.

[709] I'd only heard that there was giant numbers of them and that the Europeans came over and Americans wiped them out because we wanted the skulls and the fur.

[710] We wiped out the tail end of them.

[711] So if you get to like the end of the once you get to the end of the Civil War, you know, at that point, there's maybe 15 million.

[712] And that's when it was in 1871 and 1872 that the what you might call the commercial scale harvest of the animals happened and it happened in the south, what was called the southern herd around 1871, 1872 in the area surrounding Dodge City where there was a large population of them and then it took 10 years.

[713] By 1882 you couldn't find one.

[714] Wow.

[715] So the last big slaughter happened around Miles City, Montana and it happened when the railroad, the railroad made it to Miles City, the Northern Pacific made it to Miles City and provided a way to get hides to market and they did the last big kill there and killed about a million of them up there.

[716] And then a year later, Roosevelt came out to Madora, North Dakota, they're thereabouts, hired a guide and scoured the countryside, hunting through the carcasses of rotting animals, trying to find one last one.

[717] Wow.

[718] So they could save them.

[719] No, he wanted to get one.

[720] it was his epiphany he got to think about that guy he kills one and does a war dance around it what kind of dance is that i don't know i've always heard described as a war dance hooting and hollering dancing around like a hunting show wow right so but then whatever kind of effect it had on him he then went and became the most influential conservationist we've ever had in this country so it struck him somehow but as a young man yeah he He was like, man, I missed it.

[721] There's got to be one left.

[722] So he found one.

[723] He got one, killed it.

[724] Wow.

[725] The Montana, North Dakota border there.

[726] And then, you know, went on to do all these kind of amazing things.

[727] But that was the big slaughter.

[728] What's cool about that, the time that worked out, is photography was just coming out.

[729] People were starting to have portable cameras.

[730] And there was a photographer named L .A. Huffman who'd been sent out to Miles City, and he actually took a lot of images of those hide hunters, working the last big hurt, the last big shoot.

[731] And then shortly after that, there was some number of animals left, and they allowed a bunch of planes, Indians to leave one of the reservations, and they went and did a little bit of a mop -up.

[732] But yeah, then shortly thereafter, there was a guy named Hornaday who was kind of writing letters around trying to find out who had one of these things laying around because they'd all fallen into private hands.

[733] You know, those guys like buffalo hunters would kill them, and they'd be like, holy shit.

[734] There's like none left.

[735] And some of these guys actually went out and caught a couple.

[736] There was a guy named Buffalo Jones down in Texas that went out and lassoed a couple calves, raised them on cows milk.

[737] And that's why we even have some now.

[738] Now, it turns out, no one knew this.

[739] But it turns out there were several hundred in Canada that no one knew about.

[740] Really?

[741] They didn't know about until much, much later.

[742] And how'd they get to Mexico?

[743] Oh, they probably always roamed into Mexico.

[744] now the first buffalo that a European ever laid eyes on was in Mexico what's now Mexico City but it was in it was in who is the who is the emperor there you know Jamie what was that dude's name the the Aztec leader in Mexico Tanachalan was it?

[745] Hmm um what years is what year you're talking about?

[746] Oh, in the 1500s.

[747] Cortez found one in Mexico City, but it was in a zoo.

[748] Montezuma.

[749] Try saying that.

[750] The city of Tanachalan.

[751] Oh, okay.

[752] So, Montezuma.

[753] Which is now Mexico City.

[754] He had one in a zoo.

[755] That was the first one described by a European.

[756] Wow.

[757] But he was hundreds of miles away from their native range.

[758] They just had one as, he had all kinds, he had a menagerie.

[759] He had all kinds of animals that he'd collected from throughout the their domains so that was the first one described by a European but he didn't realize at the time that it was from far north of there but they did stray down into the into sonora and they strayed well up all the up you know still today we have them all up by great slave lake you know up they extend well up into Canada so there's a number of them some people call them wood buffalo some people accept the idea that there's subspecies but remember I was talking about bison bison Athabasca and bison, bison, bison, plains bison, wood bison.

[760] There's morphological differences.

[761] They look different.

[762] In the boreal forest, there were hundreds that we didn't know about.

[763] And some of those populations are still in now in Canada.

[764] So we have, you know, like in all things with Americans, we have an American -centric view of everything.

[765] We have an American -centric view of wildlife where we'll say there's only 75 left.

[766] And I feel like our Canadian neighbors are oftentimes being like, you know what?

[767] We didn't quite handle it quite as badly as.

[768] you folks did um so yeah it was uh you know it's a long bizarre picture i can't remember what the hell we got what even got us on the subject uh dan flores uh i don't remember either yeah public lands yeah oh yellowstone syndrome yellowstone bruce loses yeah so there's a tremendous background to the buffalo story as we just explored and we're we're if you find follow wildlife politics.

[769] It's a conversation happening in places, Alaska, which is a whole other long story about how it's happening there.

[770] It's happening in Alaska.

[771] It's happening in Montana.

[772] It's happening in Wyoming.

[773] It's happening in the Dakotas, which would be, do we welcome, are we going to welcome this animal back onto the landscape as a free -roaming wild animal, like all of our other?

[774] Earlier, I mentioned how this country we have an intact suite of megafauna.

[775] Like, we haven't lost.

[776] We might have damn few of some things.

[777] We haven't lost any of our large mammals.

[778] It's kind of mind -boggling.

[779] During the colonial period, Western Europe, I think, lost five or six species of large mammals.

[780] The orcs, many things.

[781] We haven't lost any large mammals.

[782] We came pretty close, though, right?

[783] Damn close.

[784] With the Buffalo in particular.

[785] Yeah.

[786] And we've lost.

[787] birds we lost the passenger pigeon and we lost the ivory bill woodpecker and you know we lost many things of many kinds of may not many but we've lost substantial numbers of things we haven't lost any larger mammals extinction is terrifying for us right that's that's one expression that uh extinction man -made extinction yeah that that's terrifying for us to me i think to me it's a um it's a moral sin it just is like you know we we have all these conversations and bioethics and other things playing god i think that extinction like human -caused extinction is uh it's terrifying do you support if there is evidence of human -caused extinction if there is the opportunity to bring something back through scientific methods through like some sort of cloning do you support that or do you think it's gone it's gone it's gone man i'm on the fence about it and in my understanding of the my understanding of the technology is probably too limited for me to really speak to it with any authority, but the most interesting aspect of that is when you get into the Pleistocene extinctions, where you'll notice that I could just just to kind of bring people up to speed on what that means is if you just look globally at where we lost where we lost, where and when we lost pachyderms, so elephants, including the woolly mammoth, you know, Mastodon and on our own continent.

[788] If you look around like where we lost pachyderms, we always lose pachyderms right around the time humans show up you know i would tell you like we lost like we lost them you know humans arrived in the new world it's a hotly debated number 14 15000 years ago and um kind of contemporaneous with the extinction of woolly mammoths we know that to some degree humans were praying on woolly mammoths and praying on maced there's context of hunting equipment in context with woolly mammoth remains.

[789] There's butchering sites.

[790] There's all kinds of stuff.

[791] And they vanished right around then.

[792] Yet we didn't reach an island out in the Bering Sea till 4 ,000 years ago, and there was a woolly mammoth on that island until 4 ,000 years ago.

[793] And then dudes show up, it's gone.

[794] So some people will look, there's a thing called the Blitz Creek hypothesis, which hold that all these large mammals, nine genera of large mammals that went extinct when humans arrived in the new world.

[795] world, that they were somehow human -caused extinctions.

[796] Now, other people argue that it was, you know, other things, climate change issues.

[797] Randall Carlson is a guy who've had on my podcast before, and he argues that it's due to asteroid impacts.

[798] Yeah.

[799] I hung out with a guy who was doing research on that.

[800] There was a lot of evidence.

[801] A lot of evidence.

[802] This guy was looking for nanodiamonds.

[803] Yeah, they found nanodiams.

[804] I think you say it's called tritonite, but it's nuclear glass.

[805] It's the same exact glass that they get on sand when they have nuclear explosions, when they do test sites.

[806] They find that all throughout Europe, and it's all around 12 ,000 years.

[807] And there's also more somewhere around 10 ,000.

[808] So it seems like somewhere between 12 ,000 and then another thousand years or so later, there's another series of impacts.

[809] And it has to do with this asteroid belt that we pass through.

[810] And it was fucking fascinating, but terrifying conversation.

[811] Oh, it is.

[812] I went with a guy that there's a famous paleo -Indian site north of Denver called the Lindenmeyer site, and the Lindenmeyer site was one of the few, not one of the few, the only place that we now know were large gatherings of the Folsom culture, large gatherings of the Folsom culture where you had perhaps hundreds of Folsom hunters in one place at one time.

[813] And the site is marked by a large, like an easily recognizable escarpment.

[814] And it's presumed that it was just a place that you could describe and people could meet up.

[815] But the Lindemeyer site has been studied extensively, and tons of radiocarbon dating has happened at the Lindemeyer site.

[816] And I was with a guy there who was working on that theory, the theory with the asteroid impact and the nanodiamonds, because he was able to go draw samples from strata that had been tested and studied so much, which is an expensive laborious process to get datelines.

[817] And he was there drawing those things out.

[818] And then I had other people who work professionally in this space talking about how sort of ridiculing the idea and saying that it's just like one of these ideas that never dies and never quite lives but never quite dies.

[819] But when you look at it, it's just so hard to believe they hunted them to extinction so quickly.

[820] Well, the massive amounts.

[821] 65 % of all the North American mammals died really quickly.

[822] And it wasn't just big stuff.

[823] That's your thing.

[824] It's like, we used to, because when they used to do digs, right, they used to do like archaeological digs, you know, they would use high pressure hoses and shit.

[825] And they were, they only had an, they were only looking at the big stuff.

[826] But many, many things went extinct.

[827] Did you see that?

[828] Bird species, small species, you know.

[829] Yeah.

[830] It's kind of hard to picture.

[831] It's just so hard to picture what exactly happened.

[832] It's just, I don't know.

[833] Especially people killing them with addalattles.

[834] Yeah.

[835] Those goofy things, which, I mean, how.

[836] How far can you throw in Adelano?

[837] The people kill stuff out.

[838] 40 yards?

[839] I think that's a real reach.

[840] Crazy.

[841] Yeah, you have to be like the Hulk.

[842] But then the thing they say is, you know, we talk about wildlife and Yellowstone being habituated.

[843] That wildlife probably would have been the other extreme.

[844] They probably would have been like the elk and Yellowstone when a wolf showed up.

[845] Was it like, oh, what's that cute dog?

[846] Right.

[847] So, and then they have very low fecundity, you know, pack of, but we're not just talking about it.

[848] That's a problem.

[849] We're not just talking about packingers.

[850] We're talking about like short -faced bears, the American cheetah, giant ground sloths, on and on and on and on.

[851] Did these guys really hunt it all to extinction?

[852] It's hard to imagine, but it's also hard to imagine all that shit going to extinct for any cause.

[853] Well, it's also coincides at the end of the ice age.

[854] So something happened, something radical to create the Great Lakes.

[855] But the end of the Ice Age is just an idea that we've created.

[856] Right.

[857] Like, you know, there were interglacial periods.

[858] Like, if you look at the ice ages or the Pleistocene, right?

[859] There were interglacial periods where the water was much higher than it is now.

[860] There were interglacial periods when the water would have been up over the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.

[861] Really?

[862] And then shit froze again.

[863] It's like, but the idea that the Pleistocene Holocene transition is just like a, it's just a point we divided in our heads.

[864] You know, there was many glaciers.

[865] Right.

[866] Time will only tell if we ever see another glaciation.

[867] again, but I don't know, and that's one of the things, that's one of the things that emboldens people who contradict, one of the things that emboldens people who contradict human cause climate change is that we've been through so many cycles, they'll often point out and say, well, how do we know this isn't just a normal, another warming trend between ice age periods?

[868] And then a lot of people point out and go, because there's no evidence that they ever happen this quickly.

[869] This is like radically fast.

[870] These are things that played out over 10 ,000 years.

[871] These aren't things that played out over human lifetimes.

[872] You know, an interglacial period being a 10 ,000 -year thing.

[873] Interestingly, interglacial periods are really important to understanding all these issues because interglacial periods and glacial periods mark moments when wildlife could have come into the new world, when wildlife such as, you know, buffalo and then later elk and other things, when they would have had the opportunity to come from Asia and cross the Bering Land Bridge and come down onto our continent and when they could have not done that.

[874] So when you look at like when did humans show up, when did these other things show up, like when did the horses disappear, when could they have come down, when could Buffalo have come down, how did elk get here?

[875] You're sort of always looking at, assuming they didn't come down when the entire north was swabbed and 40 feet of snow and ice, presumably they came down when it was an ice -free corridor.

[876] and so you can kind of fine -tune all these comings and goings by looking at moments when there was an ice -free corridor to come down in.

[877] So it's beautifully intertwined, man. It's so complex and there's no way to really lock it down yet.

[878] There's no way to really totally figure it out yet.

[879] But it's so fascinating when they find these animals still.

[880] They just pulled a big giant skull with tusks out of a ranch in Montana, like really recently.

[881] I think I tweeted it.

[882] I think it was, see if you can find it on, My buddy found a jaw with the molars in it, but I went to a museum.

[883] Wow.

[884] Where?

[885] He just found a couple years ago.

[886] He found it in the tongue.

[887] My friend John, his buddy owns a ranch in Montana, and he was talking to some sort.

[888] This might be the same guy.

[889] Do you know where it was?

[890] No, I don't know.

[891] But this was a, I'm talking about a dinosaur.

[892] Oh, never mind.

[893] Okay.

[894] They found a dinosaur on his property.

[895] He said the archaeologist came, what was it, paleontologists came to his property.

[896] Paleontologists.

[897] Paleontologists came to his property.

[898] he said he went for a walk up the hill he stopped he found something on the ground he looked around he made some calculations and he came back to him he goes congratulations you got a dinosaur on your property he goes what they came back they have a fucking t rex on his property no way the guy got a million and a half dollars because they pulled a fucking t rex from his property that's what he got for it the paleontologist found it and literally found it in five minutes said he started walking around the property he found a tooth or some sort of chip a piece of bone he recognized it immediately as being a dinosaur made some phone calls called some people and next thing you know like within weeks they had started excavations no shit found a fucking t -rex on his property because it was on private land you could sell it a million and a half dollars yeah because on public land once something's fossilized you can't touch it yeah that's interesting but do i agree because i don't want to escape your question about undoing human -caused extinctions.

[899] What I was getting at is the animals that I'm most interested in, just from a boy in a very boyish way, are those plicine critters.

[900] And if I knew, you know, if I had the diamond bullet, right, that would tell me that, yes, absolutely, we lost the mammoth.

[901] because of human hunting behaviors at the place of scene Holocene transition I would be like let's bring them sons of bitches back right now wow if you could prove without a shadow of a doubt that human hunters created that problem yeah and I knew the tech not like let's say the technology was just fail safe you want to talk about some controversial you think people are up in arms about some buffalo running around you cut loose some short -faced bears or you know that would be a giant issue yeah you think the wolf reintroduction was shaky Well, the short -faced bear is a scary idea of animal.

[902] That's a huge bear.

[903] Very fast.

[904] Really?

[905] Yeah.

[906] Yeah, they were a fast runner.

[907] And they're bigger than polar bears.

[908] Yeah, and you know there's the American Cheetah.

[909] Yeah.

[910] Well, that's the reason why antelope are so fast, right?

[911] That's a theory.

[912] The antelope are ridiculously fast for any predator.

[913] Their speed doesn't make sense through the context of what's chasing them right now.

[914] Why do people call them speed goats?

[915] They haul ass.

[916] But why goat?

[917] Because they're, I think there's a, there's a, there's a dumbass reason, and there's a taxonomical reason.

[918] And I know dear friends of mine on both sides of that spectrum, where if I put it to my brother, who on occasion calls them goats, he'll talk about how taxonomically they're, you know, they're distinct.

[919] Like, they're the only thing in their, they're the only thing in their family, right?

[920] they don't have any close relatives but there are only they're a horned animal that sheds its horn now antlers shed elk moose deer all the cervids like antlers shed horns don't shed animals carry their horns for their whole life like a crat and a sheath but antelope shed their horn but it turns out that some people like to point out that they're like close to a goat that the goat is close other people say they kind of look like goats I don't know I think it's a derogatory term I don't like it Really?

[921] I don't like derogatory animal terms But why is goat a derogatory term Well goat is what people call The greatest of all time It's the goat Now a mountain goat Is a noble majestic animal Right A barnyard goat I don't think is noble and majestic And I don't think they're equating it To a mountain goat Right the mountain goat Being those beautiful white fluffy goats Well being a wild animal Those are awesome Yeah it's a wild animal And to be like a speed goat You're saying like Oh it's like a goat a lowly barnyard goat that hauls ass I was just in Hawaii I feel that it's derogatory this is a minor issue I'll point out but it does bother me I don't think it's derogatory to call it a goat but I do think that an animal I haven't met anyone I haven't met anyone who does think it's derogatory except me it's just you it's so funny because mountain goat you agree is a noble animal mountain goats are gorgeous I don't want to interrupt you I was in Hawaii and goats are everywhere bizarre driving down the road there's fucking goats everywhere wild goats and they're like they're like a wild wild animal.

[922] Man, you want to talk about wildlife politics.

[923] Hawaii.

[924] Hmm.

[925] If you ever want to get into that.

[926] Yeah, it's crazy.

[927] That's interesting shit, where you have your whole suite of mammals is, your whole suite of mammals is all non -native.

[928] Yeah, all of them.

[929] But here's where it's interesting.

[930] So, Polynesians colonized the Hawaiian Islands, like the first people, the first humans that colonized the Hawaiian Islands, Polynesians, who carried with them, rats, dogs, dogs, pigs, right?

[931] We have native Hawaiians, right?

[932] Like Hawaiians, indigenous Hawaiians people or carry native rights, they regard themselves as native Hawaiians, yet people are always telling them that the wildlife is non -native.

[933] So you've got people that showed up with pigs, and now the nature conservancy will get chunks of land in Hawaii and eradicate the non -natives.

[934] and the native Hawaiians but we're contemporaneous with these animals well how am I native right but you're telling me that the thing I like to hunt is non -native and needs to be gotten rid of it's ridiculous they sure think it is well I don't mean to say they like it's a unanimously held viewpoint but people who hold the viewpoint of that they hunt pigs their father hunt pigs their grandfather hunt pigs their great great great great great grandfather hunted pigs now what's the pressure coming from to eradicate them.

[935] Is it from agriculture?

[936] No, it's from people who are worried about losing yet more.

[937] And we've already lost a dozen, you know, speaking of regional extinctions or extirpations and in some cases extinction extinctions, we've lost dozens of species of Hawaiian flora and fauna to, considering a wide range of ground nesting birds, have been lost to rats and pigs.

[938] So now it's not so much focused on the animals, but flora.

[939] So there are people who are trying to read, who would like to, and I get where they're coming from, who would like to restore large areas of native, you know, plant communities in the Hawaiian Islands.

[940] Because anything, when you go there, all the fruit, you see, the coconuts are not native.

[941] Papaya's mangoes, breadfruit, none of that stuff's native.

[942] Wow.

[943] It's all introduced.

[944] That place is a petri dish, man. They're hunting turkeys, pheasants, chucker.

[945] They're hunting, you know, Axis deer.

[946] They're hunting everything there, but none of that shit's from there.

[947] Yeah.

[948] So there are some people who look and they say, like, we have an, you know, ecological responsibility to try to salvage some part of this.

[949] But meanwhile, yeah, another perspective would be like, we made this place bloom.

[950] This place oozes with life.

[951] And there's people who, you know, they get all, they're able to glean all of their food, sources from the island, from things that their ancestors have established on the island, and it's offensive to them.

[952] Do you know about Darwin visiting the Galapagos Islands, and that's one of the ways that he sort of formulated his theories about evolution and all the various variety of wildlife.

[953] Through visiting the Galapagos Islands, unintentionally, people have had seeds that they brought with them on the bottom of their shoes.

[954] Oh, yeah, I'm sure.

[955] Which is really crazy, and all these animals, and plants, rather, are growing that are non -native.

[956] And this debate pops up as to what to do with them.

[957] And then there's all these turtles that live there.

[958] And this debate props up as to, like, how to protect these turtles.

[959] And they brought in goats to eradicate some of the plants.

[960] Now they got a goat problem.

[961] Yeah, some people brought goats over there, like some sailors brought goats over there as a food source.

[962] He left them on the island, figuring, hey, we'll stop back when we need food.

[963] And now they've got goat problems.

[964] So they're trying to figure out how to eradicate the goats.

[965] And there's a great radio.

[966] You know the Judas, the idea of the Judas goat?

[967] Talk about that.

[968] That's good.

[969] Well, they take one goat, and they sterilize that goat, and so that goat can't breed.

[970] But that goat will find all the other goats and hang out with that goat, and they put a radio collar on the little fucker.

[971] And then he lets them know where the other goats are, and then they gun down those goats and let this one goat live.

[972] And he goes, well, I've got to go find some other goats.

[973] And he goes and finds the other one.

[974] And they're like, up, we found him.

[975] And the point is, the thing is the poor guy I don't even know.

[976] He's like, man, am I lucky?

[977] They show up in his helicopter.

[978] I mean, he'd taken him out like platoon style.

[979] You know, the writer Tom Robbins, is he still alive?

[980] Skinny legs and all, jitterbug perfume.

[981] Yeah, I think he's alive.

[982] You know, he was talking about, in one of his books he talks about Hawaii, how Hawaii had a rat problem.

[983] Then they brought in the mongoose.

[984] And then they had a mongoose problem.

[985] And he makes a joke that we had a crime problem and we brought in cops.

[986] Well, that's sort of what Australia did, right?

[987] I mean, Australia brought in fox to deal with the rabbits.

[988] They brought in rabbits.

[989] The rabbits got out of control.

[990] They brought in fox who deal with the rabbits.

[991] The fox started eating ground nesting birds.

[992] Yeah.

[993] And they brought in cats as well.

[994] They have a huge feral cat problem in Australia to the point where their hunting magazines are really bizarre.

[995] Because people are holding up cats.

[996] I'm like, what?

[997] Like, my friend Adam Green Tree lives in Australia.

[998] And, you know, it's a crazy place because it's similar in a lot of ways of Hawaii is that a lot of the animals they hunt are non -native.

[999] But their hunting magazines are filled with fucking dogs and cats and shit.

[1000] It's just really weird to look at.

[1001] If you left one of those on an airplane so the next passenger to find, well, I was looking at it on an airplane.

[1002] And I got to the part where the guy was holding up the cat, gripping, gritting.

[1003] I just turned the page real quick.

[1004] I was like, oh, fucking Jesus, it's heavy.

[1005] Yeah, the non -native thing is, it amazes me our inability to anticipate, well, I guess it's, I'm going to say something that's, like, weirdly contradictory, our inability to anticipate unintended consequences, which doesn't entirely make sense, but you see that I'm getting that.

[1006] Right, right, right.

[1007] Yeah.

[1008] Yeah.

[1009] Well, there's no forethought to bring in foxes or cats, like, and say, well, they're just going to eat the rabbits that we left behind.

[1010] Yeah.

[1011] You had your fucking mind.

[1012] They're going to eat everything.

[1013] Like, how do you not see that coming?

[1014] Don't you know what a cat does?

[1015] No, it's killed things.

[1016] You can't even throw a ball of a yarn in front of a fucking cat.

[1017] Yeah.

[1018] And it kind of doesn't end.

[1019] Like, we're doing, we're doing it now something.

[1020] We won't know yet.

[1021] In 10 years, we'll be, or 20 years, we'll be goofing on something we're doing right.

[1022] now that we think is a good idea probably right yeah well we'll be like can you believe those dumbasses yeah in 2016 thought X I have some theories about what those things might be but I mean you know we're not done well commercial large scale commercial large scale agriculture in a way is not only just really really recent it's completely unnatural yeah have these giant swaths of land it's filled with corn like monoculture stuff it's very unnatural so people that think about like, oh, I'm eating vegetables, I'm eating natural.

[1023] I'm not a part of this whole factory farm system.

[1024] What the fuck you're not?

[1025] You're part of factory agriculture system.

[1026] If you're eating corn.

[1027] If you're buying corn, you're eating corn in a cop, thinking you're all healthy.

[1028] That shit is coming from a really unnatural place.

[1029] It's coming from this ground that has been filled up with all this nitrogen that's been sucked out of the air through the hobber method.

[1030] They've dumped it into the earth because the earth's been depleted with minerals to the point where no longer supports growth of plants unless you add stuff to it.

[1031] And then you have these large -scale machines that you need to tend to this stuff.

[1032] And there's nothing natural about large -scale agriculture.

[1033] No. We just don't consider it because we consider factory farming when it comes to living animals as being horrific.

[1034] You know, whether it's pigs or cows or chickens, that disturbs almost anybody with a conscience.

[1035] But we don't think twice about the consequences of large -scale agriculture on actually.

[1036] wildlife and the wild ground when you picture that we have I mean much vaster than this but that we have entire counties that support a single species of plant of plant oftentimes a single species of a non -native plant now corn like corn is it's kind of a native you know it's derived from maize it's like kind of a native species so oftentimes it's like entire counties given over to a single non -native plant.

[1037] Well, isn't corn sort of like looking at a domestic dog and saying, well, that domestic dog is a wild animal?

[1038] Yeah, really, I don't even know, like, if you took someone from pre -Columbian times and showed him a corn cob, I don't know that they would, I don't think that they would probably recognize that.

[1039] They wouldn't know what the fuck that was.

[1040] They were dealing with a corn that was more, it was smaller than when you are making a stir fry and get the little baby corn things were they that small small little things yeah wow and they can't even tell like they can't tell how it even came to be some people have a theory that it was bred from a grass it's like they're like the lineage of corn is hard to track wow so was this native americans that did this well they figured out how to splice these plants together and tie yeah there's a book i can't remember the name of the book that gets into it but just trying to like track down sort of the history of corn and how it came to be You know, they oftentimes point to you with domestication of animals and plants.

[1041] Sometimes it was sort of an accidental domestication.

[1042] You know, like you'd go out and gather something, right, and you bring it home, you process it near your home, you're scattering seed, right?

[1043] And eventually you're, like, creating these things.

[1044] But, yeah, corn's difficult to track.

[1045] The lineage of corn is not clear.

[1046] It's just so bizarre what kind of a foothold it has in American culture.

[1047] It's everything, man. It's crazy.

[1048] I recently interviewed for, you know, I was talking about the documentary project.

[1049] we're working on.

[1050] I interviewed an animal.

[1051] He's actually, he's from California.

[1052] He's a animal rights activist, and he teaches animal ethics.

[1053] And he has a brand of veganism that I think would be refreshing.

[1054] You should have this guy.

[1055] I keep telling people you should have on your show.

[1056] But he has a very...

[1057] What's his name?

[1058] His name's Robert Jones.

[1059] He has a very refreshing sort of veganism.

[1060] I'd have this dude over to dinner.

[1061] Really?

[1062] Yeah.

[1063] But he doesn't, he doesn't hold.

[1064] hold out ideas that he's pure because of what we're talking about right like he's he's educated enough about agriculture and educated enough about like the inherent struggle the inherent life and death through all food production that he doesn't think like oh I have all the answers I am the gentle kind one because he's seen cornfields right like he knows like you're turning you're violently churning the land with equipment things are dying when you grow vegetables.

[1065] Like, we're enmeshed in a cycle of life and death that is inescapable.

[1066] His point, I don't want to totally steal the guy's point.

[1067] He'd do a better job to explain himself.

[1068] But his point is that if we agree that we should minimize suffering, right?

[1069] There are steps we can take to minimize suffering.

[1070] Not saying that I've got it answers and I've got it figured out.

[1071] But if we want to minimize the suffering of sentient being, then that's a conversation we should have.

[1072] The best thing that he said, the best thing that he said in explaining the animal rights movement, which I've always been a little bit baffled by, is he gets into this idea of, he uses the term speciesism.

[1073] Yeah, I've heard that one.

[1074] Yeah.

[1075] So, you know, we had, we've dealt with and deal with racism.

[1076] We've dealt with and deal with sexism.

[1077] And we are, he would argue, I think he would say we're on the cusp of tackling our problem of speciesism.

[1078] And he would say, like, if you went to someone, like, you know, if you went to the Mississippi Delta, you know, in the 17, late 1700s, and said to someone like, hey, you know, have you ever thought about the fact that, you know, you kind of like own and abuse these people?

[1079] Have you ever thought about how they're like people, too?

[1080] You know, they're like you and me. He was saying, like, the guy wouldn't be able to cope with what you were saying.

[1081] He'd be like, oh, clearly.

[1082] I mean, come on.

[1083] Any idiot could tell you that that slave is not.

[1084] I mean, come on, right?

[1085] Right.

[1086] He says that's where we're at right now with animals.

[1087] He's like, when I say it to you, you're like, well, clearly we're so.

[1088] Does he aim to stop animal on animal crime?

[1089] You know, I asked him about that.

[1090] and that was one of the things and at the end of our conversation I even said to him I'm like you got a couple things you need to work on because he didn't have a great one for that another one that he didn't have a great one for is he had not that he had a great one not that I was like trying to stump him because he's a very intelligent, well -thought person and very respectful to people he's talking to even people that disagree with him I have nothing but admiration for the guy but we had a conversation that I was not totally satisfied with where he has a deal of reverence it seems and again at the risk putting words his mouth he's he has a reverence for like indigenous hunting cultures right that they had like this sort of respect they had a respect for animals that we don't have and somehow that made it okay for them like they had a spiritual connection and so that made that okay and we don't have that so we're not okay and i asked him about are you able to identify the point in human development and cultural development.

[1091] What is the point when you're supposed to give up the chase?

[1092] Like, at what point do you have a responsibility to stop hunting?

[1093] Because you're saying that it is okay for some people.

[1094] It's absolutely not okay for us now.

[1095] When should we have made the jump?

[1096] Because earlier we were talking about, like, the Spanish.

[1097] There's a situation where the Spanish had gone into, in the American Southwest and we're trying to, as they called it, southwestern tribes and they were building homes for them trying to instruct them in religion trying to create schools for them trying to provide them with the tools of the agrarian lifestyle and they would write letters back to the king complaining about how these people refuse to stop go hunting like you give them a chance and these sons of bitches take off to go hunt and here we are giving them everything they need to be sedentary and they just won't get with the program.

[1098] So there is this struggle where people are like, you're supposed to be like, I think some people expect you, like if you're a human, they think that the end result of humanness is that you like wind up not hunting, that it's sort of like the goal of civilizations is to make you not a hunter.

[1099] And I think he's a little bit guilty of that because he thinks it is okay for some people.

[1100] And where he runs into trouble is he talks about that I ask, him about ethics.

[1101] He says, but the animal doesn't care about your ethics.

[1102] To him, he's dying.

[1103] If he dies and you have a good feeling in your heart, or if he dies and you have a bad feeling in your heart, he's dead.

[1104] It doesn't matter.

[1105] They don't know what trip you're on.

[1106] They suffer the same, regardless of your motivations.

[1107] And which leads me to want to point out, okay, but the indigenous cultures that you say it's okay for them to hunt, their animals are suffering too.

[1108] The animals they killed don't know that they're being killed by indigenous peoples and therefore it makes the suffering more palatable for them they're dying so there are some traps there that that that to me weren't answered in a satisfactory way does any that make a sense yeah absolutely it's a very messy situation if you want to try to confine behavior that way and you want to impart moral judgment on people because what do you do with people with pets what do you do with people that have cats he has he has he has companion animals he has some very good he has good stuff to say about that really Yeah, it's very interesting stuff to say about that.

[1109] What does you have to say with those animals that are mistreated and confined and ground up in the cat food?

[1110] Oh, no, he wouldn't like that.

[1111] And I don't know if he feed, I would imagine, I feel kind of like that.

[1112] You can feed your cats a vegan diet.

[1113] No, I would imagine.

[1114] I got a whole bit in my act about it because I got into it because I found, I got harassed by someone online.

[1115] And I went to their Twitter page and it said, hashtag vegan cat.

[1116] And I went, you got to be fucking kidding me. And then I found this entire community of people that feed their cats vegan food.

[1117] food.

[1118] The problem is the cats go blind.

[1119] Was that right?

[1120] And they die.

[1121] Robert Jones didn't like that.

[1122] He wasn't that interested in that argument.

[1123] And when I was saying to him, like, would you, do you feel that we should separate predatory animals from prey and put them on like a soy diet?

[1124] And he just thought, and I understand why.

[1125] He felt that I was being like ridiculous for the sake of being ridiculous.

[1126] Well, it is.

[1127] But how you're going to feed those cats?

[1128] It's a real question.

[1129] I mean, why you're, you're taking this cat and you're putting this cat above the animals that it eats.

[1130] You're deciding that these chickens and the fish and all the different things that you need to grind up to make cat food, that's okay because you love this cat.

[1131] You have a hierarchy of animal life.

[1132] And we all have a hierarchy of life.

[1133] Vegans, I've seen vegans.

[1134] I've seen it.

[1135] I've seen them kill ants, you know.

[1136] There was a lady I used to live near an ashram.

[1137] The lady that ran the ashram was spraying bug spray.

[1138] What's an ashram?

[1139] It's a Buddhist temple.

[1140] That's okay.

[1141] And she was...

[1142] You used to live in an ashram?

[1143] Next to it.

[1144] Oh, next to it.

[1145] Next to it.

[1146] Sorry.

[1147] and she used to spray bug spray on the ants and I was like what the fuck are you doing on the ants she killed the ants she was killing him and I go what are you doing she's like well we don't like to but they get into our food and like holy shit like you're a vegetarian who's committed to a Buddhist life of do no harm but yet you're there's no way around this you have to poison these fucking ants with death from the sky that comes out of these containers these metal containers these aerosol containers of death.

[1148] Yeah.

[1149] This is bizarre lines that we draw.

[1150] But as long as I am taking the liberty of putting myself in Robert and the animal ethics is Robert Jones's position, I think that he would have some interesting stuff to say about this conversation we're having where we're like, because some harm happens, then let's just say fuck it and we'll open up the gates.

[1151] Well, no, but let's talk about life, is life in a small form more insignificant or less significant than an elk?

[1152] Like, who decides that an ant is less significant than an elk?

[1153] If I shoot one elk, I can eat it for a year.

[1154] That's one life, one life for a year.

[1155] You don't like ants getting on your peanut butter and jelly sandwich, so you spray a whole colony of these fuckers.

[1156] You've killed thousands of life forces.

[1157] And even ruling out the insect thing, I remember a guy that wrote a pretty scathing review I think he might even, it might have been in the, I can't remember if it was in the Wall Street Journal or somewhere this guy wrote a pretty scathing review of my third book and there he's like just the number of animals this guy is killed about me. Right.

[1158] And I remember thinking if you go and get a 12 pack of McNuggets, how many chickens and you sorted out the parts you're probably eating hundreds of chickens.

[1159] Probably.

[1160] Yeah.

[1161] Because it's all scraps.

[1162] It's emulsified scrap.

[1163] Yeah.

[1164] They're not like, okay, we're going to take this chicken here and we're going to produce 30 nuggets.

[1165] Well, my problem is they never turn that force on themselves.

[1166] They never turned that high -powered vision of, you know, the consequences of their actions on themselves.

[1167] If someone's talking about, like, if this guy's a vegan and he's a vegetarian, and he's talking about how many animals you've killed.

[1168] How many animals are you responsible for for your whole wheat pasta?

[1169] But he wasn't even.

[1170] He wasn't even.

[1171] So he was a meat eater.

[1172] Yeah.

[1173] Well, that's preposterous.

[1174] No, I know.

[1175] That's Ricky Jervais.

[1176] It's...

[1177] Ricky Jervase constantly talks about hunters and hunting.

[1178] The guy eats meat.

[1179] Yeah.

[1180] Like, there's so many weird laws.

[1181] And I get it that he doesn't think people should hunt animals just for trophies.

[1182] And I agree, but it's very rarely do these animals get hunted just for trophies.

[1183] Like if you shoot a fucking elephant The village eats the elephant You're feeding hundreds of people With that elephant And I'll point out too And I do all the time Not that I'm pro elephant shooting It's illegal No I like We got to talk about yellow stone syndrome I almost have I'm almost having a personal I'm almost I'm taking a couple year long break From discussing wildlife in Africa Really?

[1184] I should point out Your article that you wrote It was one of my favorite on that subject.

[1185] And it was right around the time that the cease -of -the -line thing was going down.

[1186] Yeah, yeah.

[1187] And it also referenced that Kendall Jones girl who got a lot of hate online because she had, she was a Texas cheerleader and she was really cute.

[1188] And I think, yeah, people hate a good -looking woman hunting in Africa.

[1189] With a big smile on her face and lipstick.

[1190] They do not, like, if some dude, like, did real good in heating and cooling and, like, minds up going to Africa a lot.

[1191] Heating and cool.

[1192] People are like, yeah, that's fucking cool.

[1193] Because hot girls, hot American girls don't go there.

[1194] Well, and it's also like, what are you shooting?

[1195] If you're over there and you're shooting a kudu and you're going to eat it and you know, you feed the villages.

[1196] Everybody goes, well, it is an antelope.

[1197] That's okay.

[1198] This is traditional something that we eat.

[1199] Oh, yeah, I was going to talk about the hierarchy because we spend a lot of time at work when we're out filming meat eater.

[1200] We spend a lot of time talking about the hierarchy because, for instance, we have a camera guy who work with Rick Smith has a long professional history and working with wildlife and filming wildlife.

[1201] and didn't grow up hunting He's coming around He's curious about it But he asked a lot of good questions And we were looking We had killed a moose And The next day it happened We were up in Alaska And we killed a moose And the next day We rolled out of our camp And happened to go near there And there was a Wolverine Dragging off moose parts You talked about this on your podcast Yeah It's a great story Rick was like In that area between September 1 and March 31st, you're allowed to kill.

[1202] You're allowed a Wolverine.

[1203] And my friend Buck Bowden, you know, he has eaten and enjoys Wolverine meat and the hides, as we all know, we're phenomenal.

[1204] I don't think we all know that.

[1205] Well, traditionally.

[1206] Listening to this are like, we all know.

[1207] Traditionally, parkas are trimmed with Wolverine because Wolverine will not freeze up when it's got frost on it.

[1208] By trimmed, do you mean the around the hood?

[1209] Around the hood, yeah.

[1210] When you're exhale and you're, you know, like, Yeah.

[1211] Stuff gets frost.

[1212] Wolverine doesn't frost up.

[1213] Wow.

[1214] Why is that?

[1215] You know, I don't know why.

[1216] It's a hollow hair, but I don't know what it is about it that it resists frost.

[1217] So anyways, we're kicking around.

[1218] I'll tell the end first and say we didn't shoot the Wolverine, but we were just talking about, you know, we legally could have gone and take a crack at it.

[1219] Did you have an opportunity to do so?

[1220] Yeah.

[1221] You would have had to have acted quickly, but yes.

[1222] Or you could have staked it out and just waited for him to come back because he wanted to.

[1223] He's a little thief.

[1224] He's stealing your moose.

[1225] But we already butchered.

[1226] Right.

[1227] He was taking the hooves.

[1228] Oh, okay.

[1229] Guts, right.

[1230] But you're a marrow eater, so he's taking bones.

[1231] He actually stole two of our marrow bones because we then...

[1232] Motherfucker.

[1233] Because he took the four big marrow bones, and he wound up getting over on another night at dark and stole some of our marrow bones out of our cash.

[1234] But we didn't see it happen.

[1235] Anyhow, Rick's pointing out, I don't think you should mess with...

[1236] Like, he's like, that's an animal that I think is off.

[1237] And we're like, why is that?

[1238] well, they roam one of the things he was talking about.

[1239] He was like, man, they cover so much ground, you know.

[1240] They'll have a home range, you know, they'll go 250 miles.

[1241] It's like, yeah, but we just killed a caribou, and caribou would go 1 ,000 miles, hundreds of miles.

[1242] So it's not distance traveled.

[1243] No, it's just, it's just something, you know.

[1244] It's like, it's just something.

[1245] Well, people are that about bears, of course, yeah.

[1246] The way you describe it, charismatic megafauna.

[1247] Yeah, that's not my term.

[1248] It's a great, hats off to whoever did.

[1249] I'm sure you could find out who invented charismatic megaphone.

[1250] I always attributed to you, so I'm going to leave it with you.

[1251] No, I didn't come up with it.

[1252] I heard a linguist one day.

[1253] You could find it.

[1254] I heard a linguist one day talking about he was interested in tracking where things come from.

[1255] That would be an easy case, but you know what he was interested in tracking was waitresses saying, are you still working on that?

[1256] Because there was a time when no one said that.

[1257] And then all of a sudden, everyone said it.

[1258] Uh -huh.

[1259] And he was interested, where did, are you still working on that come from?

[1260] The one mouth that it first came out of.

[1261] So, yeah, about it, you know, charismatic megaphone is great.

[1262] And I think that there's some things are so charismatic, wolves and grizzlies that, like, New Jersey cat ladies know about them.

[1263] Did you see that the billboard that they had up?

[1264] We're all Cecil.

[1265] There was a lion hugging a bear.

[1266] who's trying to stop the bear hunt in New Jersey.

[1267] No. He never saw it.

[1268] I know that that guy, someone, you know, the pedals the bear.

[1269] Yeah, someone's shot pedals.

[1270] How rude.

[1271] Like, whenever something like that happens, man, I remember reading it.

[1272] I read it right when I had, right when it came out, like the fishing game agency there, just a little background.

[1273] There's a bear, there's a kind of a neighborhood bear in New Jersey, and he had had some kind of injury or possibly birth defect where.

[1274] where he wasn't able to, he spent a lot of time walking bipedally.

[1275] Yeah.

[1276] Which is not uncommon, which is probably where the big foot rumors come from.

[1277] He had obvious injuries in his front section.

[1278] So would walk, yeah, definitely not uncommon.

[1279] And probably, you know, it could be a lot of the things we have about homin, you know, like large, mysterious hominids could come from, you know, obviously bears walking around their back feet.

[1280] But, you know, New Jersey had, they have an, I don't want to say, I don't want to you had this mean too many, but they have an exploding population of black bears.

[1281] I'm always reluctant to say something's overpopulated because you always got to ask according to whose definition.

[1282] Is it like the automobile insurance industry?

[1283] Because they'll say everything's overpopulated that you might run over with your car.

[1284] Agricultural interests have a different definition of overpopulated.

[1285] So they have a shitload of bears.

[1286] That's a fair statement.

[1287] They had a hunting season.

[1288] Turns out some guy comes into a check station and he had shot this bear that walks around on his back feet and they'd get them in the name pedals because he'd taken to scavenging bird feeders and stuff around a neighborhood.

[1289] And so I can't remember the magazine, one of those, one of those dip shitty New York online magazines that just basically coals, basically steals shit out of the New York Times and writes its own interpretations of New York Times articles.

[1290] It wasn't gawk or something like that, said that pedals had been assassinated.

[1291] Yes.

[1292] Oh, I read that.

[1293] Like one of those websites that all they do is like hack on traditional media, but then they just write articles comment.

[1294] on traditional media stories.

[1295] But they're not out like generating leads.

[1296] Look at this billboard.

[1297] Ban the bear hunt.

[1298] They're all sees.

[1299] Oh, they're crying.

[1300] They're crying.

[1301] They have cartoon tears, like literal.

[1302] And look how the bear's hugging, or the lion rather, is hugging the bear.

[1303] Poor babies.

[1304] Yeah, that's a nice billboard.

[1305] What about pedals?

[1306] Oh, the people, yeah, the charismatic megafauna thing.

[1307] Because another that we talked about on our podcast recently, we had a biologist on who works for the Calisbelle tribe, you know, an Indian tribe and that historically you were in, you know, Idaho, portions of Washington and portions of Montana, and they're very involved in Caribou, Mountain Caribou recovery in the U .S. So most people do not know that traditionally, you know, that traditionally we had a Caribou population that drifted down from, drifted from Canada, down into northern.

[1308] Washington, northern Idaho, northwest Montana.

[1309] We don't have that now at all?

[1310] Well, there's about a dozen of them.

[1311] Right at this moment that we're talking right now, there are some, a couple miles from the U .S. border inside Canada.

[1312] But there used to be, the last legal one to be killed was back in the 1920s.

[1313] What happened to him was just disturbances the habitat.

[1314] There was always a small, like not a large number.

[1315] of them, and we had a lot of things that mess with their travel corridors, development, road construction, logging activities, and now they rarely ever drift down into the U .S. But there's an active recovery area there.

[1316] So we got about a dozen caribou that are contenders to be in the U .S., and that sometimes will actually cross and come into the U .S. in the Selkirk Mountains.

[1317] No one gives a shit about mountain caribou.

[1318] the amount of like energy the amount of mental energy that goes into people's favorite animals at the expense of other good projects we could be other good wildlife projects we could be working on kind of boggles my mind black bears you have so we have enough black bears that we have black bear hunting seasons and i think 36 states wow rapidly expanding population of black bears and people will expend enormous amounts of energy and resources because it's like, I don't understand it.

[1319] And they're just, and they just, like, are willfully ignorant about other wildlife issues that are much more important because it's like it's not cuddly.

[1320] It doesn't look fuzzy.

[1321] Well, they don't have a stuffed one.

[1322] I don't know what it is.

[1323] Stuffed teddy bears.

[1324] There's a lot of it.

[1325] I mean, but we've gotten accustomed to thinking of these things as our friends.

[1326] It's Yogi Bear.

[1327] Yeah.

[1328] You know, we've done these anthropomorphizations with these cartoons and television shows, and it's ingrained in the consciousness of a lot of people.

[1329] No matter what you do, you can't get it out of there.

[1330] There's some legitimate differences between animals.

[1331] You know, we were talking about that yesterday.

[1332] We were talking about the differences between bears and deer, like how a deer looks at you and a bear looks at you.

[1333] Yeah.

[1334] You know, about when I was talking before the show about whitetail deer is, like, catching one.

[1335] He looked at you in a way nothing has ever looked at you.

[1336] They look at you.

[1337] They're electric.

[1338] Their eyes are like, they're like, no, you're there to kill them.

[1339] And they're like, oh, that's a fucking person.

[1340] I got to get out of here.

[1341] Where a bear looks at you like, hmm, what's going on here?

[1342] Can I eat you?

[1343] Can you eat me?

[1344] You know, there's like a weird sort of relationship that people have with bears.

[1345] Like, they look at you, but they don't look at you with the same sort of intense fear that a game animal looks at you.

[1346] Yeah.

[1347] There's this blurring of the lines there.

[1348] And I think that when we think of animals that we eat, we have, very distinct classifications you tell people you eat bear they go oh god yeah and i did you know when the first hunts that you try to take me on was a black bear hunt and i was like man i don't want to yeah it took some getting used to yeah now i'm like when when we going let's go get some blueberry bears yeah i yeah i have i you know i have the same i have the same problem why do i do create a hierarchy but i also try to like question where the hierarchy has come from comes from and to suss out contradiction, but the only problem to me, where it gets problematic for me is the way that, in which it seems that you can get some Americans so excited about preventing any kind of exploitation of a handful of species, yet they remain completely uninvolved with the issues in politics and recovery efforts of other things that need it really, that need it right now.

[1349] You know, the fact that with wolves and, like, certain populations of grizzly bears, certain populations of wolves have reached recovery objective, yet we still cover them under the Endangered Species Act, because people want to use the Endangered Species Act to save things from any threat of exploitation at all.

[1350] Like, nothing to do with what, nothing to do with what the legislation was meant for.

[1351] It's become the Favored Animal Act.

[1352] And if you want to initiate something called the Favored Animal Act and try to get it passed by Congress, Feel free, but don't steal the ESA and take it away from its intended purpose in order to protect your stuffed animal animals.

[1353] You had a very important point on one of your podcasts where you were talking about population numbers, population objectives, and you were saying that, well, like, if you look at elk, for example, in some places, elk are extremely common, you know, in Colorado, for instance, there's more elk in Colorado than I think any other state.

[1354] Yeah, by I think it was almost like a factor or two.

[1355] There's a lot.

[1356] So if you tell people in Colorado that elk are in danger, they're like, what the fuck are you talking about?

[1357] If you go to Florida, there's no elk.

[1358] Yeah.

[1359] Elk are gone.

[1360] Wolves.

[1361] Same thing, right?

[1362] Elk are gone from 90 % of their historic range in the U .S. Wow.

[1363] 90%.

[1364] Yet no one has a problem with elk hunting seasons.

[1365] Right.

[1366] But we eat them.

[1367] That's the thing.

[1368] Who's eating wolves?

[1369] Well.

[1370] That's the problem.

[1371] And wolf looks like your dog.

[1372] No, I don't think it's, oh, an Arctic.

[1373] Explorers his favorite wild meat.

[1374] What?

[1375] Loved it.

[1376] Oh, he's a psycho.

[1377] Dude, you know what he ate, too?

[1378] Carpaccio.

[1379] He ate, they found a desiccated whale, beached, and it had been, like, in the salt, and its tongue was dried out.

[1380] And he cut the tongue out, and he said how they boiled it repeatedly, repeatedly, to try to get the salt out, and they eventually ate it.

[1381] And then they ran into some Eskimo hunters who said that thing about.

[1382] been laying there for three years.

[1383] Jesus Christ.

[1384] He was hardcore.

[1385] How the fuck did he eat a three -year -old tongue?

[1386] Like you said, he just kept boiling it and re -boiling it.

[1387] Dude, anyone, like, if you want to, too bad he can't have that some bitch on your podcast.

[1388] Wow.

[1389] He made Stevenson, he's got to book my life with the Eskimo.

[1390] So he made first contact with a lot of people in the high Arctic.

[1391] They knew, he was meeting people who knew about whites, but hadn't met me yet.

[1392] And what was funny about this dude is how frustrated he would get with trying to show him his shit, which he thought they'd be blown away by.

[1393] So he'd like get out a gun.

[1394] Or one day he's explained to people that we can do, he's like, my people, you know, we can do surgery.

[1395] What year was this?

[1396] He was making first contact in the early 1900s of like Coronation Gold, Victoria Island, went up in the Canadian high arctic.

[1397] Again, they knew, they knew that there was whites.

[1398] They hadn't met any whites yet.

[1399] And he'd come to him and he'd expect to blow him away, like he showed some guys his firearm, his gun.

[1400] And this dude's like, yeah, yeah, that's cool.

[1401] But I know a guy that can shoot his bow and his arrow will travel to the far side of the mountain and kill a carib with it you can't even see.

[1402] Or he was saying, we can do surgery on people and do an appendectomy.

[1403] And he says, I know a guy that can take your whole spine and skull and brain out and put it back in again he was talking about telescopes and he's like you can see the moon craters and they're like I know a guy that's been to the moon and hunted there so that's one up and shit to the extreme it's like it's the greatest book man how frustrated he gets but one of the cool things he describes is he describes how they would kill you know when they killed a polar bear they would bring the head back and put in their lodge.

[1404] Sort of, like, I don't want to draw, I don't want to push this too far, but much in the same way you might bring a head home and hang it on your wall.

[1405] They would bring it home and put in their lodge.

[1406] And the thinking, as explained to Stephenson, was that I'm bringing him home so that he can observe me and my family and see that we're good, people.

[1407] And when he goes to the afterlife, He will tell other bears If you got to get killed by somebody Not a bad guy to have it happen That guy's okay And I often point out about The animal skulls and hides in my own home That I feel like, you know I don't want to make myself seem too spiritual In some ways I think of that I think of that With the animals I have in my home Just a concept that you run in your mind Yeah, that I run in my mind I think about him Why was I talking about stuff?

[1408] Oh, loved wolf So he ate every damn thing, like muskogs, caribou, walrus.

[1409] He ate everything and talks repeatedly about his preference for wolf meat.

[1410] Preference.

[1411] Above all.

[1412] I'm telling you.

[1413] Read my life with the Eskimo.

[1414] Well, you ate a coyote.

[1415] Yeah.

[1416] What was that like?

[1417] Didn't like it.

[1418] But here's the problem that I've run into.

[1419] Because in Vietnam, I ate a fair bit of domestic dog.

[1420] I, a coyote and I ate monkey.

[1421] Monkey.

[1422] Red howler monkey.

[1423] Those are my big, my big transgressions of me, you know, we all, like I said, I admitted earlier to having my own animal hierarchies.

[1424] And those are the times when I've sort of strayed into uncomfortable ground for myself, canines and hominids.

[1425] Are they a hominid?

[1426] No, not a hominid, primate.

[1427] So, yeah, I get like a, I get where I can't really tell what it tastes like.

[1428] It's difficult to tell what it actually tastes like because you're feeling that there's so many other things going on.

[1429] Emotions, thoughts, contributions.

[1430] And I get like a hot, a hot guilty feeling.

[1431] But when I was in Vietnam, they described dog as a hot food.

[1432] And I kept asking what that meant, because I didn't really understand, but it does.

[1433] It, like, makes me sweaty.

[1434] I thought it was like a guilt thing.

[1435] But people would, they would eat it and serve it around the Tet holiday.

[1436] So the Lunar New Year.

[1437] It was auspicious.

[1438] It's auspicious to eat dog meat.

[1439] in the days leading up to the Lunar New Year.

[1440] And it's a game, it's a food that you have, it's like a risky enterprise.

[1441] In some areas of Vietnam, it's kind of a risky enterprise to eat deer.

[1442] And it'd be like a...

[1443] To eat dog.

[1444] I'm sorry, to eat dog.

[1445] And it's like something people go, like these restaurants open up that are only open that time of year.

[1446] And there's people coming in to like bring in good luck.

[1447] Risky enterprise, how so?

[1448] A guy told me that, one of the guys I interviewed told me that he was unable to get his he's unable to have children and they determined that it was it was on him his wife was fertile he was infertile he ate dog and it changed his fortunes it changed his luck and he got his wife pregnant now he says i will not eat dog again for fear that I would undo what I did it's a powerful food this is a sentiment held more in the north than in the that held more like I spent time in Hanoi and I spent time in Saigon or Hoecham and city is the sentiment that was expressed more like in more of a semi -spiritual way in the north than it was in the south now a translator that I had hired told me I don't eat dog.

[1449] He said, I don't eat dogs, I have a dog.

[1450] I went to his house to see his dog.

[1451] I come in, and the dog is in a small cage.

[1452] Probably, I'm not exaggerating.

[1453] I say it was, I mean, it was probably maybe two feet by three and a half feet.

[1454] And it's a wire mesh cage, and there's like a drip pan below it, basically, to collect the animal's waste.

[1455] Whoa.

[1456] and there's a bowl of rice and the dog just goes ape ship when we come in and it's just like looking at the dog it just was not it just did not seem like a well dog okay I said to him and he lives like a very busy street in Hanoi like you walk out and it's just full Vietnam mayhem you know scooters it's just like insane and I said to him so you just take them out you can just go walk him here and he kind of looks at me like he doesn't understand what I'm talking about.

[1457] And it turns out that that dog hadn't been out of that cage since he brought it home.

[1458] That was his pet dog, which he kept like a parakeet.

[1459] Jesus Christ.

[1460] He said, I wouldn't eat.

[1461] Now, conversely, in the Trang, I went out to a farm.

[1462] Or a guy has a small plot of land.

[1463] They have like a basically there's a cyst in there where you have very poor farmers who don't, own the land, but it's state -owned land, government -owned land, but they have subsistence farms.

[1464] And this guy raised sugar cane.

[1465] He had an air gun.

[1466] He can't have a regular gun, but he had an air gun, and he would hunt various arboreal marsupials and things to eat, and he had some water, river flowing through his place, and he had a small amount of livestock and raised some crops and peppers and various things, and he had a bunch of dogs running around on his place, just pet dogs.

[1467] He was explaining to me that now and then, when the dogs are bred up to a number that's hard to support them, the dog buyer comes, and the dog buyer will give you some cash for your excess dog population, and those are the dogs that go into the markets of Vietnam.

[1468] Other countries actually have places where they're like breeding and rearing dogs for slaughter, but that was the Vietnamese system.

[1469] So it wound up being, like, of many interesting things about this whole thing, is it about it being like, comparing like this guy's pet to this guy's livestock.

[1470] You sort of got into this thing as of which is the more enviable position.

[1471] Which is the more enviable position?

[1472] Livestock.

[1473] I'll take that life over than living in the cage and shitting onto like a great.

[1474] And I went to visit a guy that actually a wholesaler who buys the dogs from farmers.

[1475] out in the countryside, and he comes back and they fatten, they would fatten the dogs on beef stomach, beef trim, basically the stuff that in the U .S. we send to rendering plants.

[1476] Like when they slaughter cattle, most everything, you know, once the meat's gone, everything goes to a rendering plant.

[1477] He would buy basically what U .S. production facilities send to a rendering plant, and that's what he would fatten dog on.

[1478] And you'd go to the markets, and they'd have dog stacked, like just dog parts stacked up in pyramids at the market.

[1479] It was bizarre to see, man. I'll tell you, I went out in different places and with different people and different things.

[1480] I went out for seven nights in a row.

[1481] And I could never get beyond, I could never get beyond my own biases about what's food and what's not food.

[1482] It was just, like, very difficult for me to eat it and fake my way through.

[1483] And it was hard.

[1484] So I do understand.

[1485] When people come to me and they're looking, they're like, hey, man, a bear?

[1486] Like, and I'm a hunter.

[1487] I've hunted great, I've hunted and eaten hundreds and hundreds of pounds of black bear meat.

[1488] When people come in, like, dude, I just, like, I don't want to act like that they're coming, when people come to me and express disapproval, right?

[1489] I don't want to act like I can't understand where they're coming from because I had the same thing I felt there.

[1490] Right.

[1491] I remember making the argument, I never fact checked it, but I feel like there are more people in this world who live in a country where it's socially acceptable to eat dog meat than not.

[1492] I haven't formally fact -checked that, but I remember looking at some basic figures and thinking that that was true.

[1493] Well, it's interesting that we choose to not eat pigs, but pigs are probably as intelligent, if not more so.

[1494] Choose to eat pigs.

[1495] Choose to eat pigs, rather.

[1496] Yeah.

[1497] Probably as intelligent or more than dogs.

[1498] Yeah.

[1499] And dogs are probably more dangerous when they're feral.

[1500] than pigs are.

[1501] Yeah.

[1502] When pigs are feral, they generally avoid people.

[1503] When dogs are feral, they know and always.

[1504] I mean, there was an instance a couple years ago outside of Atlanta where an elderly couple was attacked and someone was killed by wild dogs.

[1505] The Australian dingo traces back to being as a dog who owes its ancestry to human activities.

[1506] Does it really?

[1507] So it used to be a domesticated animal?

[1508] Yeah, it was a very early form.

[1509] Wow.

[1510] check that out make sure I'm right about that what the genetic history of the dingo is what's their wild dog called the dingo yeah yeah yeah I think it's some kind of it's like a it's a dog breed probably find Adam Green Tree holding one up by his ankles with a fucking bow hole arrow hole says it's a wild dog it says wild but but what's its what's its ancestry just just Google dingoes were once domestic dogs dingo domesticated animal I'm looking at the genetic status origin here I just pull it up so you can see it Indian wolf and Arabian wolf where it evolved from hmm man I don't feel like I'm wrong hmm interesting widely held that dingoes have evolved bred from the Indian wolf yeah right there 6 ,000 and 10 ,000 years ago bred from was assumed for all domestic dogs.

[1511] The theory was based on the morphological similarities of the dingo skulls and the skulls of these subspecies of wolves.

[1512] However, genetic analysis indicated that a much earlier domestication.

[1513] Huh.

[1514] Oh, so there is a domestication.

[1515] New study suggests dinghles may have originated in South China.

[1516] Okay.

[1517] So, yeah, they were originally domesticated.

[1518] Interesting.

[1519] So they were originally domesticated and then cut loose.

[1520] Yeah, we, I mean, I've told you, I mean, I have my own, I had my own thing about bear, and then I hunted bear and ate bear, and then that thing went away.

[1521] Yeah.

[1522] Yeah, it's just, I mean, that's what it is.

[1523] But it still doesn't seem the same to me as, like, a deer.

[1524] Like, if you gave me a choice, hey, would you rather go hunt Axis deer, which I've never hunted, seems so much more natural to me than go hunt Black Bear.

[1525] Yeah.

[1526] I, you know, I have such a complicated, complicated sets of feelings about.

[1527] black bears and as a hunter strange you have gotten to the thing where maybe before I even say that I'm going to say why it's not quite strange I have found that a lot of big game hunters will do some amount of bear hunting get a couple bears and then drift away from bear hunting they still respect how difficult it is and how much you can learn about bears, but I find that a lot of people who've gotten some bears are always excited to go on a bear hunt if it's someone's first bear hunt.

[1528] Like, they're like, you know, I have no desire.

[1529] If you want to go, I would love to go along.

[1530] Right.

[1531] But it's something to happen.

[1532] But whereas, like, something like elk, the more you get and the more you eat, the more you want to get and the more you want to eat.

[1533] Right.

[1534] But don't you think that's a public pressure thing, though, in a lot of ways about bears?

[1535] because I've described even to my friends about hunting bear and they just put their head back like they're fine with me hunting deer they're fine with me hunting pigs everybody seems to be in support of hunting pigs yeah but you know how my brother put the bear thing is for here's the conundra for him and it's pretty simple a bear has a very beautiful very usable hide okay so you know like deer hides you can you can through a process you can get like a buckskin from it You can get, you know, some deer hides, you can get a pretty good usable leather that, you know, they used to use to make apparel.

[1536] In fact, everybody knows Daniel Boone, right?

[1537] Daniel Boone was, much of his life was spent in the business of trading deer hides.

[1538] Daniel Boone was a commercial hunter.

[1539] He would go out and shoot white -tailed deer in the summer when their hides were thin and sell them, and it was used for industrial workware.

[1540] It was used for work apparel.

[1541] Like basically the 1750s version of Carhart clothes Was made out of deer hide Summer deer hides I'm not familiar with that term carhart What does that mean?

[1542] Like Carhart workwear Carhart jackets, carhart pants Jesus Christ, Joe No, I know Dickies Yeah, same thing Okay, I never heard of Carhart though Yeah, same thing Have you heard of it, Jamie?

[1543] Kind of yeah Like, you know like work pants It got like a little holster for a hammer And shit on the side of them Yeah, okay So they used to make them out of bucks again Yeah like work apparel in his time It was made from Buckskin.

[1544] I bet those things smelled great at the end of the day.

[1545] Oh, dude, my dad had, my dad saved a lot of his deer and had a sport coat made out of his own deer.

[1546] And, dude, I think it was amazing and smelled good.

[1547] Really?

[1548] Oh, dude, it was the nicest jacket.

[1549] I should steal that.

[1550] He's dead.

[1551] I should find, I should go dig around and stuff and find that coat.

[1552] It was dyed black.

[1553] It's a beautiful coat.

[1554] How could he never had one made?

[1555] You've shot a lot of deer.

[1556] That's what I'm good at.

[1557] It's like, yes, you can do stuff with it, but it's not really.

[1558] in today's age of other fabrics is not practical.

[1559] However, a bear hide has timeless beauty and timeless application.

[1560] Have you ever thought about making a jacket at a bear hide?

[1561] Yes.

[1562] Did you ever do it?

[1563] Yeah.

[1564] Well, no, because what I was doing for a long time was saving up my bear hides, and I wanted to cut them into like nine or ten inch squares and have a very large comforter made out of many different bears cut into squares.

[1565] Stitched.

[1566] I haven't given up on that idea.

[1567] But I give a lot of my bear hides away to people who really like them.

[1568] Anyway, when you get a bear, it's like no one in their right mind gets rid of a bear hide.

[1569] Right.

[1570] So you get one, and you get a tan, and then you got a bear hide.

[1571] And once you got a bear hide, and it's like on the floor, and then you got a bear hide over the back of the couch, and you got a bear hide hanging on the wall, you get to a point where you don't need any more bear hides.

[1572] You eat the meat, and you have the hides, but you don't need more bear hides.

[1573] And when you get a bear, there's an expense to getting the hide prepared, but you feel wasteful not using the hide.

[1574] So it's very hard to shoot a bear just for meat.

[1575] Right.

[1576] Because you feel like you're wasting something that people really want.

[1577] And it's beautiful, and people like to use to decorate their homes and use it as a totem of the wild.

[1578] As opposed to a white -tailed deer where very few people do anything with the hides.

[1579] Yeah.

[1580] So now, like, one day, Danny was like the last bear he got, he got up to the bear and found himself just, just kind of, he goes, I just don't, I don't need, you know, like, I look at it and I'm like, I have like a set of obligations to this animal now, and, you know, I'm not excited about it anymore.

[1581] I don't want another bear hide.

[1582] It's an expense, and he just, he never killed another bear.

[1583] Wow.

[1584] He's got some bear hides that he loves, but he just, he just got to where he's got enough other stuff to eat.

[1585] He's a moose snob.

[1586] He kills a moose every year, likes to eat moose meat, feeds his family moose, feeds his family, family salmon primarily.

[1587] Well, if he kills the moose every year, the other problem with that is you're talking about like 600 pounds of meat, right?

[1588] Yeah, he's got a family four.

[1589] He burns through a plus.

[1590] Wow.

[1591] He means all he eats.

[1592] Yeah.

[1593] So, but that's just kind of like where he got, and I knew a lot of people.

[1594] For whatever reason, I used to hunt bears and my other brother.

[1595] And then he don't, he, like, when he's out at his, when he's out at his wife's ranch, he'll see bears running around during bear season.

[1596] He doesn't even think about going on hunting for him.

[1597] And he used to hunt bears.

[1598] It's just like something happens.

[1599] You just quit wanting to hunt bears.

[1600] One of my favorite episodes of yours was on the Prince of Wales Island, where you had a bear in your sight, and you just decided, I don't want to shoot this bear.

[1601] Yeah.

[1602] It's just, like, I really enjoy watching them.

[1603] I enjoy hunting them.

[1604] I enjoy making smoke black bear hams out of them, but it's like, I, uh, would you ever do that with any other animal, though?

[1605] Do what?

[1606] Look at it and say, I don't want to shoot this.

[1607] Like, if you saw a mature, a mature mule deer, 180 -inch mule deer.

[1608] No. No, right?

[1609] Mm -mm.

[1610] Right.

[1611] But I could picture it like with, you know, there's a handful of animals that, you know what it is, you can't, one of the things is this.

[1612] I can't help but watch a bear.

[1613] If I'm out and I glass up a bear, you know, when I say I'm out, glass up, I mean, like, if I'm sitting on a big glass and tip or a glass a knob up somewhere, I have a commanding view of the land.

[1614] Glassing, meaning use your binoculars to look at the landscape.

[1615] The way I generally hunt, I hunt a lot of open country in the American West and Alaska and things where you have good visibility.

[1616] The bulk of the time I spend hunting I spend on a good lookout point, a high point where you can see a good 180 degree view or maybe not always 180, sometimes 360, whatever, a commanding view of the surrounding landscape.

[1617] And we generally hunt by sitting there and observing with binoculars and just watching, watching, watching, to the point where sometimes we'll spend days doing nothing but watching animals through binoculars.

[1618] And when you get good at this, you find animals that people would never in a million years find, that other people would never in a million years locate.

[1619] When I'm doing that, and I find a bear, and I'm observing a bear, I would never leave that bear to go do some other thing when you find a bear like when I find a bear I watch him until he's gone you can't turn away from him because I always feel like at any point he's going to do some amazing thing that would blow your mind like what?

[1620] I don't like crush something's skull I don't know they're just up they like are always doing weird things.

[1621] They eat a vast array of things.

[1622] My friend John Dudley was watching a bear through his binoculars and he saw a bear run up on a moose and smash it on the back and crush it.

[1623] That's what I'm talking about.

[1624] He saw a grizzly smash a moose on the back and break its back.

[1625] Literally hit it so hard that it snapped the moose's back and then he tackled it once it was down and started eating it.

[1626] I haven't seen that, but that's what I'm looking for.

[1627] So you watch him and there's a sort of anticipation with seeing them.

[1628] Right.

[1629] deer they're very interesting and the more you watch them the more you learn about them and the thing that i've always been fascinated by and was talking about with some friends of mine recently was um how interested i become in uh interpersonal relationships among mule deer like the body language they use and how you can locate deer that you can't see just based on body language of deer that you can see that you watch them and you become aware of of things they're aware of and you learn where other things are that are out of your view just by how, just by what it's doing.

[1630] Both male and female?

[1631] Generally, it's dough.

[1632] Sometimes, in a general, the most obvious one is doze that know there's a buck around.

[1633] You took me for...

[1634] In their body language there.

[1635] And then those that are encountering another band of doze have a body language they use.

[1636] And you just get used to this and you sort of have in your database.

[1637] Yeah, and then once you, you see it, you go like, oh, he knows about it.

[1638] There's a deer somewhere that's not in that group, and that deer is aware of the fact that the deer's not in the group, and it's, like, wondering about it.

[1639] And you just see that.

[1640] So I'm interested in that kind of stuff, but I can walk away from deer.

[1641] You know, I could, like, see, there's some deer, and I can just go look in another direction.

[1642] Something about me makes me stare at bears.

[1643] Wow.

[1644] I can't give up on them.

[1645] Like, I just, like, I'm watching, I'm watching them.

[1646] Do you have the same feeling about Wolverines?

[1647] That was the first wolverine I ever seen my whole life.

[1648] That was the thing on my checklist.

[1649] Like, as far as, like, if you, large land mammals, that was the one I was missing.

[1650] So you'd never seen one.

[1651] I mean, yeah, large, like, American land mammals, that was the one missing from my list.

[1652] Do you think you'd feel a feeling of remorse if you shot the one that you, the only one you saw?

[1653] That's why I said I wasn't going to touch that Wolverine.

[1654] Because of that.

[1655] Yeah.

[1656] I even said right then and there.

[1657] I said, I'm not going to shoot the first one of something I saw.

[1658] That's like I feel like, when I was talking really about the black hole of Africa, I always imagine like guys.

[1659] going to Africa, being like, no shit.

[1660] That's what one of those shoot looked like.

[1661] Bam!

[1662] That's what it is.

[1663] Yeah, so I just didn't, I hadn't built up a context about it.

[1664] So then we were like talking about it.

[1665] So if you see another one, yeah, I'd reconsider it.

[1666] But no, I didn't want to shoot the first Wolverine I ever laid eyes.

[1667] And that's why I was trying to get, you know, Janus has seen, you know, he's been out caribou hunting and watched Wolverine scavenging caribou carcasses.

[1668] And so I was like, you know, he's not the first one you saw.

[1669] And we just dilly dallyed and no one.

[1670] And so he could have shot it because it wasn't the first one he saw.

[1671] Yeah, but no rule.

[1672] But no one was feeling any.

[1673] It was just one of those things.

[1674] No one was feeling anything.

[1675] I felt, you know, great to soon.

[1676] I remember watching my, you talk about the way a white -tailed deer looks at you.

[1677] I remember watching the first links I ever saw.

[1678] And I feel that I'm anthropomorphizing a fair bit here.

[1679] But he was the first links that I ever saw.

[1680] And I just had a strong feeling that I was the first person he ever saw.

[1681] a look of um a look of like sheer like uncomprehension for what he was seen wow and he's like he's like is this good is it bad what does this mean and you see him kind of like run through all these calculations in his mind and then just drift off like after a while he's like yeah something about it this thing's got its eyes and him looking at me like his eyes are centered on his face right like a predator maybe yeah and standing straight up and that tells me something you know he's looking at me very intently he's not trying to act like I'm not there and therefore he can't see me you know and you just see him kind of run it through his head and just be like yeah nothing's good nothing good is gonna come out of this and then go off the direction but just based on where I was yeah I mean it's very safe to say he'd never run into a person and I'd never run into a link We just had this moment of, you know, I carry a cultural awareness, so I at least knew about what I was looking at, but he was in this point of just, you know, processing.

[1682] Unlike the White Hill that you encountered, who damn sure knew what that thing carries with it.

[1683] Yeah, we talked about it before the podcast started, but I was hunting with my friend John Dudley, and we were in the tree stand, and we were supposed to get down at 1 .30, and it 125.

[1684] I'm like, what do you want?

[1685] You want to call it?

[1686] I'm going to go eat lunch.

[1687] He's like, yeah.

[1688] So I climbed down first.

[1689] And that, you know, 125, like five fucking minutes before we said it.

[1690] And this big, mature white tail walks through.

[1691] And John signals to me, does the bow winkle thing, put putting his thumbs on his head.

[1692] And he starts pointing.

[1693] And then I realize there's a deer coming down the path.

[1694] And so I kind of hide behind the tree.

[1695] But there was all these branches in front of me. Anyway, you've already heard the story.

[1696] But for the people listening, the deer locked eyes with me and there was this intensity like immediate intensity in his eyes that I'd never experienced an animal looking at me like it was it was very tuned in he knew exactly that I shouldn't be there and I just froze I was wearing camo he's looking at me right in the face like right and his eyes were bulging out of his head turned around and bolted but it's like an electricity to them like they know I have very vivid memories of when I was 12 and had just hit legal hunting age in Michigan and I was sitting on the ground hunting squirrels on a farm owned by a man named Alan Zerlot and leaning against a tree and having a four corn white tail coming through the woods and, you know, a for, like a buck like that, this isn't always true, but generally like a four corn white tail is a year and a half old.

[1697] Well, even at that time, you start hunting squirrels September 15 in Michigan.

[1698] So, I mean, that deer was, you know, he could have been as little as 15, 16 months old.

[1699] He locked on to me, saw me, and knew, looked in my eyes, but didn't know what the hell I was.

[1700] I remember him coming at me and coming at me and getting so scared.

[1701] And I had always known, like, there's a thing, you just like, there's a thing, you just like, You don't yell in the woods.

[1702] Like, you don't make noise in the woods.

[1703] You try to be quiet in the woods.

[1704] I remember grabbing sticks and trying to snap them to make a noise to make that deer spook off, you know.

[1705] But being, like, conflicted between just being scared, shitless and doing the thing you don't do, like, as a hunter is.

[1706] You just learn, like, don't make loud noises in the woods.

[1707] When people make loud noises in the woods, it makes me cringe, man. Well, what's interesting about this mature deer that saw me and freaked out when he saw me is that literally a minute before that.

[1708] Because when I was down, when I was down, that deer came through with two other deer.

[1709] And one of them looked to be like maybe a two -year -old deer, and one of them was a baby.

[1710] One of them was like one -year -old.

[1711] And the one -year -old got within 15 feet of me. Yeah.

[1712] I just pinned up against the tree, and the one -year -old walked right by me, had no idea I was alive.

[1713] The other one that was younger deer walked by me, didn't look my direction at all.

[1714] The old one looked right at me. He's like, fuck this.

[1715] He knew right away.

[1716] He'd seen people before.

[1717] Maybe, I mean, they're in Iowa, and Iowa's really different because Iowa's a great state for bow hunting because they have a very short gun season and it's only shotgun.

[1718] Oh, yeah, yeah.

[1719] You don't get a big rifle harvest.

[1720] Right.

[1721] So a lot of what they're dealing with is bow hunters.

[1722] So, I mean, he might have known that I had a bow.

[1723] I mean, who the fuck knows?

[1724] He might have saw a bow and say, I've seen that fucking thing before.

[1725] Somebody shot me in the ass with one of those a year ago.

[1726] That's one of the things I like about big bucks.

[1727] You know, I think that culturally in this country were kind of, getting where it's almost like this like accepted idea that you're supposed to like hate trophy hunters right but um i eat everything i kill and i will even talk about there's like meat bucks and shooter bucks right and meaning like there's like big huge bucks that are cool and meat bucks that you eat but i always eat my shooter bucks it's not like you like you know like shoot big buck it's elite one it's illegal two i love them you can Pepsi challenge them i can Pepsi challenge a five -year -old deer and a two -year -old deer and you can't well you can because you you're really good of cooking.

[1728] Yeah, but I'm saying it's, yeah.

[1729] If you know how to cut it and trim it and stuff, they're great, right?

[1730] Yeah.

[1731] So, point being, I do like to look for big animals, okay?

[1732] I like to, I like, if I have two deer and I can go after a small one or go after a big one, I like to go after the big one.

[1733] One of the things I like about going after the big one and the challenge of it is that they are harder to get.

[1734] And the reason they're harder to get is because they have learned from mistakes.

[1735] You know, a big buck to a experienced hunter, when he sees a big buck, he sees more than the antlers.

[1736] The antlers wound up kind of becoming like symbolic of something of a very worthy, challenging quarry because he hasn't made any mistakes yet.

[1737] Right.

[1738] You can have big bucks in areas that have very low predation and low hunter pressure, and he could get big and still make some mistakes because he doesn't have as many mistakes that could be.

[1739] made.

[1740] But a really big buck in an area that has a lot of lions, a lot of coyotes, wolves, human hunters, he's big because he doesn't, he hasn't messed up, he hasn't fucked up, doesn't fuck up.

[1741] He remembers stuff, you know.

[1742] We had an occasion to watch, we were hunting in Colorado hunting mule deer this year, and we watched, I glanced up a pretty nice buck, and they went up into an Aspen Grove.

[1743] He was traveling with a bunch of doughs.

[1744] and they all go into an aspen grove.

[1745] Later, Janus was looking above there, and he said there's some coyotes rolling down into that aspen grove where all the deer went.

[1746] It's now the middle of the day, and it's rifle season, and it's been rifle season on and off through a couple of weeks of hunting season.

[1747] The coyotes go into the aspen grove.

[1748] All those deer come pouring out of that aspen grove.

[1749] I at the time commented how it seemed like someone like squeezing a tube of toothpaste the way the deer came shooting out of that aspen grove and ran out across a large sage flat, exposing themselves.

[1750] The one deer out of the group that didn't walk out of that sage, that didn't walk out of that Aspen Grove was the big buck.

[1751] Never budged.

[1752] Because he ran a calculation in his head where he's like, I get it, y 'all's scared of those coyotes?

[1753] I'm afraid of the unknown.

[1754] I would rather stay in here in my little thicket, and he stood up.

[1755] We could see him stand up.

[1756] up in there, that some bitch would not move.

[1757] And that was during the rut.

[1758] So everything in his body is saying, chase those doughs and breed those doughs.

[1759] That's all he's thinking about is breeding doughs.

[1760] A dumb buck would have chased those those doves, if not for fear of the coyote, he would have chased the doze just because for fear that another buck is going to go breed them.

[1761] But he resisted that, right?

[1762] He resisted the fear of the coyotes.

[1763] But he's like, I know that there is trouble when you run out in the open.

[1764] shit shoots at you or whatever he knew and he just sweated it out you know wow so it's like he didn't like and he lived he didn't mess up well a big buck like that is also kind of threatening to a coyote too yeah I'm sure that's part of it yeah I'm sure it's part of it but it's just like he there's a threat and instinctively or whatever because here's the thing that they weren't chased those they were not interested in those deer they weren't chasing them I think they know because they see they lose fawns to them all the time.

[1765] Right.

[1766] I mean, they see stuff die from them.

[1767] But it's like, you know, right now, a couple of coyotes at that time of year isn't going to drag down a healthy fine mule deer.

[1768] They weren't even chasing them.

[1769] But he just, like, he knew, you know.

[1770] And that's one of the things I admire about, like, the old ones.

[1771] If you can go into areas that have heavy hunting pressure and consistently find those deer, it's, you know, it's like, it's the highest challenge.

[1772] Yeah, man. I respect it.

[1773] Yeah.

[1774] I respect it.

[1775] Well, it's a very difficult quarry.

[1776] And when you're eating that animal, I mean, there's a completely different sense of not just accomplishment, but connection to that animal than buying some steak in a store or shooting some button buck.

[1777] Oh, yeah, it's such a, that's the thing is it winds up being like such an obvious conversation that it's, that you sometimes feel like it's, that having that conversation with people who don't get it.

[1778] shooting fish in a barrel right it's like so obvious and so easy that you almost feel like a little bit like like almost unfair to bring it out well you but to say that like yeah well i do because i'm like for the same reason why you're challenged to chase after big bucks yeah it's like like you're telling me that somehow you like if you eat meat that somehow the the the system by which you go about getting meat through farms and stores and shit like that is somehow or aesthetically or ethically or somehow superior to me eating an animal that I've hunted myself from a sustainable population that's well managed and that I've decorated my home with its parts that will be there until I die and then we'll decorate the homes of my children.

[1779] If you're telling me somehow that I'm like depraved for that, I have a hard time engaging in the conversation because I can't, I just don't understand it.

[1780] Well, with other meat eaters, it's a ridiculous conversation.

[1781] It's a very short -sighted conversation, and it's part of the problems that people have so many things going on in their lives.

[1782] If you have a job and you have a family and you have some sort of hobby, you've eliminated 90 % of your time.

[1783] Yeah.

[1784] How much time do you have to actually immerse yourself in wildlife and understand the politics of it, understand what's really going on out there in the world?

[1785] How many people have actually seen an overhead view of the Pacific Northwest and the live?

[1786] look down at all the forest and just done the calculations in their head about these animals and how many of them there are and how much of the Wild West is filled with animals.

[1787] But that doesn't stop people from having opinions on ships.

[1788] Of course it doesn't.

[1789] They're just not educated.

[1790] It's the reason why, and it's the reason why after all these years, I still have no opinion on Obamacare.

[1791] Because I do not understand it.

[1792] So I'll point out, like, I have no opinion.

[1793] Now, I'm trying to have this infectious result on people where people will stop talking about shit they don't fully understand.

[1794] No, people have these knee -jerk opinions.

[1795] They're just, they lock them in.

[1796] Like, this is as a left -wing person, I think this.

[1797] As a right -wing person, I think that.

[1798] I think, as we pointed out, you and I both believe that that's a ridiculous perspective.

[1799] Can I close with a bit of flattery?

[1800] Please.

[1801] It didn't occur to me until I was coming down here today, but I've been railing a lot on the, the, the, the echo chamber that we all live in.

[1802] And I think that if anyone goes and you look at your, you look at your Facebook feed or any number of things, like we surround ourselves with people who tell us what we think, you know.

[1803] And it's kind of become very obvious.

[1804] And I think that this presidential election cycle really brought it out where you had just two vastly different narratives playing out.

[1805] And people on each side of it feeling like so absolutely, that not only were they right, but that everyone felt the way they felt, okay?

[1806] Right.

[1807] And it's just been a big part of the national conversation, like the echo chamber thing.

[1808] What I have found with people that listen to your show who come up to me and be like, oh, I heard you on Joe's show the times I've been on there, is that you haven't, you've somehow managed to defy that where you have the right -wing nut jobs and the left -wing, wing nut jobs all listening to you at the same time in the middle of the rotors but like when someone comes up and says I was listening to Joe Rogan podcast I'm always thinking like what does that make you and it doesn't mean anything it's like I don't know just the fact that you listen to it I don't know that doesn't tell me anything about you other than that you'd like to wrestle with ideas because this is one of the few places where people are talking about shit and you talk about stuff and bring it up where it's like people are willing because of you in the way you handle it they're willing to subject themselves to disparate views for a minute and I don't know what it is the formula if you've even thought about it but it's a nice invention it's just how I look at things I think I don't you know I have my rigid lines that I won't cross you know where I think something is evil or something is ethically wrong but I'm willing to entertain ideas and I'm not I'm not rigid.

[1809] Like if someone comes to me and they tell me that I'm wrong about something, I'll go, really?

[1810] Like, how am I wrong?

[1811] If they tell me I'm wrong, I'm like, oh, wow, I'm fucking wrong.

[1812] I didn't know it was wrong.

[1813] Like, I'm not married to my ideas.

[1814] And I think that's a real problem that people have where they define themselves by their knowledge.

[1815] They think they're smart or they think they're valuable because they have a certain amount of information in their head.

[1816] And I think that's crazy because especially as you start getting into, more things or exploring new subjects and new topics you realize it is impossible to know everything it's not possible so for you to define yourself by the the knowledge that you know or the knowledge you don't know it seems kind of crazy i think you're far better off defining yourself not even defining yourself but far better off approaching the world by searching for the truth you know and not being connected or married to any ideas it's far too often people get into these discussions with and it becomes a game of what you're trying to win, you know, trying to one up the person with information or data and then coming off of that with a victory.

[1817] Yeah, no, I'm with you.

[1818] Yeah, I mean, that's what you're seeing on all these news shows, man. You're seeing one of the things that I did during the election was while the debates were going on and post -debate, I would bounce back and forth and spend an hour on Fox News and an hour on CNN.

[1819] And I was like, what is the world?

[1820] Yeah.

[1821] It's just so baffling because these are just enforced narratives from one side and the other.

[1822] And I think the country suffers because of that.

[1823] People suffer because of that.

[1824] It's a tribal inclination that I think we have to support one side or the other or to adopt these predetermined patterns of behavior, predetermined belief systems.

[1825] Or that it's shameful to switch positions.

[1826] Yeah, that it's a, you're a flip -flopper.

[1827] Like, how the fuck do you not learn?

[1828] I mean, you can't be right all the time and you can have preconceived notions that turn out to be incorrect.

[1829] and you have to be able to recognize those.

[1830] Yeah.

[1831] It's good.

[1832] I enjoy, like, I enjoy talking to you.

[1833] I enjoy talking to you, too.

[1834] Thank you.

[1835] It's always fun, man. We should definitely do this more often.

[1836] But I think, yeah, I mean, I appreciate that perspective that you have, too, that you are willing to say, like, I don't have an opinion on Obamacare because I really don't know enough about it.

[1837] That's really healthy and really important and, for some reason, really rare, especially with.

[1838] with a well -read person like yourself.

[1839] And it makes you sound a little bit like a dumbass.

[1840] It does.

[1841] I sound like a dumbass all the time, but I'm willing to say it, you know?

[1842] You know, oh, I would be remiss if we ended this podcast without discussing The Revenant.

[1843] Because you fucking, you crushed me on that.

[1844] I loved that movie.

[1845] I thought it was badass, and I found out it was all bullshit.

[1846] I only have a couple minutes, so I got to leave.

[1847] But I'll, okay.

[1848] Explain everything that was bullshit about the Revenant.

[1849] First I want to say, my dear friend and colleague Mo Fallon, loves the Revenant.

[1850] I love Mo. He was out of town.

[1851] He was hoping to come by and say hi, but he's in, he's in, where is he?

[1852] He's in the Middle East somewhere.

[1853] Is he doing parts of him?

[1854] No, he's in Oman right now in Jordan.

[1855] So he loves it because of cinematography.

[1856] And that's the end of the conversation for him, but he's a cinematographer.

[1857] Right.

[1858] Now, as a student of American history and someone whose favorite era is the Mountain Man era, which ran a way to find the Mountain Man Arrow, it began kind of like the moment Lewis and Clark made it back to St. Louis Louis after their expedition.

[1859] And a man named John Coulter turned around and went back out west to trap Beaver.

[1860] The Mountain Man Era began, one could argue, that day.

[1861] And it ended when the last rendezvous was held for the free trappers, which was in the 1840s.

[1862] Very short period in time.

[1863] time that's my favorite time period of american history is the mountain man era and it was um the the great excavades and discoveries and adventures of the mountain men played out in the arid west uh in the willow -lined riparian zones of the american great plains and intermontane valleys by taking the most famous story from the mountain man era which was the mauling by bear of how is his name not cold what's his name glass huge glass by taking that story and setting it in the in bc along the edges of the boreal forest in a sop and dripping landscape of conifers was a was just a distortion of everything it'd be like if you were making a movie about the people who came when Washington and Franklin and everyone came together to draw up the American Constitution and you said it like in the jungles of Thailand Okay It's like Instead of Philadelphia It just struck me to the court Other thing Hugh Glass Did not have a child He did not have a son Who he was avenging Hugh Glass got mauled by a bear And they left him in the protection of Jim Bridger A very young Jim Bridger He was a teenager and another guy, and Hugh Glassed through much struggle, crawled his way back to a fort, and he later confronted Bridger and said, just so you know, buddy, next time someone leaves you to watch a guy dying in the woods, don't leave him laying around by himself.

[1864] And that was all he did.

[1865] That's it.

[1866] It's a story of forgiveness.

[1867] Whoa.

[1868] Now, in the movie, he does forgive Bridger, who cowers, but then he has to go after the guy that killed the son he didn't have.

[1869] And it's like if you love the story as it exists, to me it's like the Bible.

[1870] It'd be like if you were going to go film a movie about the Bible but change real big parts of it.

[1871] He added aliens.

[1872] Yeah.

[1873] Or like it was how people felt when it was how, it's probably how people felt when Last Temptation of Christ came out.

[1874] And they had, you know, the Christ figure lusting for, can't remember.

[1875] You know?

[1876] People were like, it was an abomination, right?

[1877] So for me to, like, take parts of a story that demonstrates sort of the American landscape, an American grit, and turn it into a British -Columbian, you know, a Canadian farce.

[1878] It just was insulting to me. Well, how about the fact that he fell off a cliff and landed on a tree?

[1879] A lot of that stuff was upsetting to me. That's all fake.

[1880] None of that happened.

[1881] No, he did a lot of crom.

[1882] I think he ate a rattlesnake.

[1883] He did come across.

[1884] He came across a wolf kill and scavenged some parts from it.

[1885] And most of what he was doing is crawling.

[1886] Could he walk at all?

[1887] You know, I don't know at what point he started to walk.

[1888] He started out crawling.

[1889] It's a great story.

[1890] I would have done a damn movie like that.

[1891] I would have called it the crawling person.

[1892] Sort of like Tom Hankson lost, right?

[1893] When he's on the island, it's a lot of struggle, right?

[1894] It's not like he makes his own.

[1895] teletype machine and start sending messages to the rest of the world and i can see how it went like i've you know i've been around and business enough where i can see that there's there are forces at play where they probably went and they were saying you know what i get all that shit but you better put a love interest in this thing well isn't that in a lot of ways similar to your experiences in hollywood when you were doing your first show yeah you know i mean uh what was it the wild within Wild Within.

[1896] Yeah.

[1897] When I saw your first show, and then I spoke with you about it, and, you know, they were telling me, like, they were trying to, like, let a moose loose, and then you would shoot it.

[1898] They had, like, a captive moose.

[1899] Well, it was just, it was an early conversation I had where I was trying to explain.

[1900] I'm like, you know, hunting's pretty hard.

[1901] Like, a lot of times stuff doesn't show up.

[1902] And a guy who I later became friends with and have a lot of respect for.

[1903] But he was new to hunting and was not new to television, was new to hunting.

[1904] And he was saying, well, that's why they have animal wranglers.

[1905] And that was just one of the, you know, one of the early conversations we had.

[1906] I wound up, like, quite a bit.

[1907] But, yeah, it was, I think that one of the things that gets reality television in trouble, there's a fake anecdote I often tell about two kinds of producers, right?

[1908] Like, there's a producer who would say to you, how would you do that, whatever you're doing?

[1909] And you'd say, well, I'd take this really small little knife, and I'd very carefully make a really delicate little incision right here.

[1910] and they would say great I'm going to film that and then there are ones that would go but could you use a machete and I think that you know and those are two types of you know and luckily in my career I've now I'm able to surround myself with people who like that little small knife well you got very fortunate in that you went to the sportsman's channel which gives you essentially free rate Yeah, they don't mess with us I just have loved working with them in the way that they've just allowed us to make a just allowed us to do our own thing there's a lot of trust there and there's a leap of faith there and I like to think we haven't let them down but you definitely honor that trust and I think that's one of the reasons why your show is the first show of its kind to be on Netflix and I think it's educating a lot of people.

[1911] It's not just a show that's a you know a show preaching to the choir.

[1912] You know, it's not just a show for enthusiasts.

[1913] It's a, it's a show that gives you an insight and a perspective into it.

[1914] I think you're the guy to do it, too, because I think the ethics that you carry, you know, like, here's an important distinction.

[1915] Like, even though it's legal to use walkie -talkies and certain things in some places, you don't want to use them.

[1916] And I had this thought the other day because I was listening to this podcast, and these guys were discussing different lenses for optics, they're comparing spotting scopes, and they started talking about walkie -talkies, and they got it, it became this combination of things that guys love, because guys love, like, gadgets and tech things.

[1917] It became tech talk and gadget talk mixed with hunting.

[1918] And I started thinking, I'm like, well, when does this end?

[1919] Does it end with drones?

[1920] Does it not end with, you know, does it end with, what if we come up with something far superior?

[1921] It's ending with drones.

[1922] Yeah.

[1923] It's ending with drones.

[1924] But it does if knowing absolutely what's, sending a drone up in the ant, it flies over.

[1925] Okay, the herd of elk is, you know, a mile to the left.

[1926] We can't see him from here because there's a ridge over us.

[1927] But we can, we know where the wind is.

[1928] We can hook around this way.

[1929] We can get those animals.

[1930] That is in a, in your eyes, that's cheating.

[1931] Well, categorically, at this point, it's illegal.

[1932] Is it illegal in every state?

[1933] No, but every state where it matters, because of having, like, open country, it is or is becoming, and it's not, you're not going to be, it's just not going to have.

[1934] I mean, so many states are out in front of, I think 13 or 14 states have banned drones now.

[1935] It's great that they got out in front of it because it sort of came out of nowhere, right?

[1936] Two -way communications is something where a lot of, you know, some states, And I'm not talking like liberal softy states, man, Montana, Alaska.

[1937] You can't use too many communications the hunt.

[1938] Because they've decided that that's where you draw the line.

[1939] Yeah, because they might not even discuss an ethics thing, but it's something that goes back to the great conservationist and writer Aldo Leopold where he had said, we spent a lot of energy improving the pump, but not the well.

[1940] So we have a resource.

[1941] You know, we have a resource of wild animals.

[1942] and if you just work on improving ways to pump them out without also working on ways of improving the well and having there be a stable population of them, you're going to drain the damn well.

[1943] So when we're looking at as emerging technologies come out, you have to constantly ask yourself, with increased efficacy, like if we get it where technology means that every hunter is always successful, what will that wind up meaning for wildlife populations?

[1944] It's not going to mean a diminishment of wildlife populations.

[1945] It'll mean a tremendous diminishment of hunter opportunity.

[1946] You have a lot, like a lot of over -the -counter public land elk hunts in the American West are about 10 or 20 % success rates.

[1947] So you give out 100 licenses, you're going to kill about 15 elk.

[1948] This is a generalization, but it's generally true.

[1949] You're giving 100 guys an opportunity.

[1950] If you have success rates at 100 % How many tags are you giving out?

[1951] 15.

[1952] Right?

[1953] Yeah.

[1954] Big difference.

[1955] So it's not, it's like you're talking about ethics, but you're also talking about access and privilege.

[1956] But for you personally, aren't you also talking about the way it makes you feel?

[1957] Yeah.

[1958] Because, well, I think it wakes everybody feel that way.

[1959] Guys that shoot stuff behind high fence, the fence is never in the picture.

[1960] And guys at radio hunt, the goddamn radios are never in the photographs.

[1961] right right you see a guy standing there with 10 people in the photo and you know that nine of them were up on glass and tits with radios radioing the guy in but they sure shit aren't wearing the headsets in the pictures so they kind of get too that they're not proud of it right like I would like one way to look at things for me is I'm like you know is it something that you kind of tuck away when it's all over is it something that's celebrated yeah a guy kill something with a bow that's some bitch and bow is laying on top of the animal always yeah that's true he's like oh yeah the gun maybe maybe not who knows he doesn't really care it doesn't matter yeah he's like you know maybe i might put my gun in there i might not that's not the point a guy who never lays out a walkie -talkie on top of a bowl that's very takes a photograph that's very true i got it's very true that's it all right uh meat eater it's available on netflix 30 how many episodes 32 32 episodes Meat Eater on Instagram, Stephen Ronella on Instagram, and on Twitter.

[1962] Yeah, you can also go to themeatheater .com and buy all kinds of downloads of episodes.

[1963] And next time we go hunting, we should probably bring rifles.

[1964] I love them.

[1965] Bang!

[1966] Let's make something happen.

[1967] Callin has been itching at me. We've got to get together.

[1968] We've got to get together again.

[1969] Thank you, brother.

[1970] I appreciate it.

[1971] Take care.

[1972] Bye, everybody.

[1973] See you tomorrow with John Jones.

[1974] Hallow.

[1975] Great.