#709 - Steven Rinella

[0] It's a good fucking book, dude.

[1] Did a great job with this thing.

[2] Oh, thanks, man. It was a lot of work, I would imagine.

[3] I don't know how the hell you have the time.

[4] Where do you see Volume 2?

[5] We live?

[6] So tell me, how the fuck do you have the time to do this?

[7] I'm looking at this book, the complete guide to hunting, butchering, and cooking wild game.

[8] Steve Renella is here, ladies and gentlemen.

[9] Ladies and gentlemen, Steve Renella.

[10] I put on my fucking knees here.

[11] Oh, I like that.

[12] I like that, huh?

[13] Sporty.

[14] How do you have the time to do this book?

[15] You know, when I got into doing the book, that was a great opening to the show, by the way.

[16] Thank you very much.

[17] When I started doing that book, I thought it'd take eight months, man. We just got an idea.

[18] You know what I wanted to do as I wanted to do a book about field care and butchering and stuff, but then someone said it should be bigger.

[19] It should be like the complete guide.

[20] We started using the word complete.

[21] And what I keep saying now is how I should, for a long time, I really regretted including the word complete in the proposal.

[22] because as we sat down, initially I would sit down with Doty, you know, well, Dan Doty, and we would just start mapping out.

[23] We had like a board, you know, and sticky notes.

[24] We'd just start mapping out, like, what would complete look like.

[25] And then it grew and grew, and Doty, you know, he was working on the show and moved on to some other things that still was involved.

[26] And other guys came in and Janus, you know, we started working on it.

[27] and just trying to manage the idea.

[28] And pretty soon, I mean, a lot of people worked on that book.

[29] But, yeah, I mean, I was in there on the writing process, and it turned into several, it took several years to do them.

[30] Then when I took it to my publisher, she had me in.

[31] It's published by Spiegel and Growl at Random House, and she had me into the office, and we had turned it in, it was going to be 700 and some pages long.

[32] And she said, like, it's just books aren't, aren't like you just don't really you know you got to understand like that's a big book you don't want to do yeah you don't really do illustrated books that big um so we were going to hack a bunch out but then we kind of hit on this idea just to publish it in two things as volume one and volume two but it wasn't just as simple as splitting it down the middle so uh it took probably I don't know, almost a year maybe to turn it into volume one, big game, volume two, small game.

[33] That's a big effort, man. I know how much you work and how much you travel and how many hunts you go on and I don't just know how the fuck you did this.

[34] I remember being down, we were down and I was down with my family, just vacation in Baja.

[35] I remember sitting there and we were fishing and stuff and we had two babies with us and I'm sitting there trying to like work that book i just worked on it all the time but but the thing is i don't want to like i did a lot of work on it but everybody a lot of the guys you know worked on it a ton too you know like all that recipe stuff um you know doughty like we did a big shoot dody kind of organized a shoot with some other folks and like we organized a week of just cooking and photographing but the other thing is a lot of the stuff in there too the images you'd kind of look at the image you'd be like well how would you go and get all these images you'd never be able to justify getting those images you'd never be able to justify images to make a book, but we had access to so many hours of hunting footage of all the stuff.

[36] So we're able to do something called screen grabs.

[37] So in there is a lot of stuff where we were able to pull images to illustrate all these different procedures and stuff that you would just never go out and get those kind of photographs.

[38] You would have to kill a ton of animals.

[39] Yeah, it would be like really expensive, but we were able to draw back.

[40] And the advantage of filming hunts for so many years now is that anything you wanted to explain, we'd sit there and be like, oh, you know what, it'd be perfect.

[41] And we'd just go in and pull stills out of images and put them right in the books.

[42] It's like, as you look at it, it's kind of, you know, it's beautiful.

[43] Another guy, a lot of the photography, like stuff on the covers by this guy, John Haffner, who's a hunter and photographer.

[44] We became friends with John working it up, and he opened up his vast library of wildlife imagery.

[45] It just gave us kind of like the keys to his whole catalog.

[46] And so we had just to pick of some of the best stuff out.

[47] there but I'm real happy with it man I'm proud of it and and I always tell people like if you get it there's no way you're going to be disappointed in it no it's it's excellent it's so comprehensive and it's I don't know of any other book like it I mean maybe there's one out there that's like it but it's there's so much involved and even if you're not into hunting it's really fascinating the tactics and strategies and why you have to do certain things and and what's involved in the pursuit and tracking, the habitat of these animals and why they live in these certain places.

[48] We put a lot of legal stuff in there.

[49] The next one, that one's out.

[50] The next one, the small game one, comes out in December.

[51] But, yeah, they've been doing well, man, and we've heard great things about them.

[52] Well, you've expanded so much, you know, and when I first started talking to you was right after you got done doing the Wild Within, and then you were starting meat eater at the time.

[53] And now, you know, I really think that the show has hit its stride in a crazy way.

[54] Like this, the first episode that I saw of this season was the one where you went hunting for coos deer, and you didn't even kill anything.

[55] And it was one of your best episodes.

[56] And it was just, because it was so much involved that it just, it's not just a hunting show, you know, like you were talking about your relationship with your father and how you would love to bring your father to this play.

[57] You know, your father's dead.

[58] You were talking about how, you know, you have this tumultuous relationship with him and how you'd want to bring him to this place to see what this is like because it's so beautiful.

[59] And there's no music and you were just out there talking.

[60] And it was like, man, this is some really deep, compelling shit.

[61] Yeah, we had no intention of doing that show that way until later when the editor looked at it and he went doing it.

[62] There's no music.

[63] It's just like the sound of the wind.

[64] It was awesome.

[65] It's my favorite episode.

[66] It's mine, too.

[67] It's my favorite one we've ever done.

[68] and I was nervous at first because to do a hunting show you're working in a really traditional genre that in many ways doesn't invite a lot of innovation or one might think it doesn't invite a lot of innovation you know yeah you could get away with thinking that but anytime we've done something that really goes against the grain of what you picture is going to happen in a hunting show it's like people that like the show have always liked it like we can run shows or no one gets anything, you know?

[69] When we're out, if we're out filming it and no one gets anything, you know, we call them skunkers.

[70] I get real nervous.

[71] You know, I mean, like, I started getting real nervous from a, from a production standpoint.

[72] Right.

[73] But in the end, man, I think that people, that fans of the show are willing to go along with you on that, if you're giving them something else instead.

[74] Yeah.

[75] You know?

[76] Well, you definitely did.

[77] We just filmed, like, we just filmed a dove hunt down in Virginia with my buddy Ronnie Bame, who you met.

[78] You know, the daily bag limit on Doves is 15, right?

[79] So it's me and Ronnie, another guy.

[80] We all limit out.

[81] That's a tremendous amount of shooting, you know.

[82] So then you're kind of...

[83] It's a kill fest.

[84] Yeah, so you're sort of thinking, they're five -ounce birds.

[85] But, and then you're sort of thinking, like, man, this is going to be a great show.

[86] But it doesn't, and I hope that it will be.

[87] But it doesn't necessarily mean that.

[88] You know, it's like having, like, getting stuff doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be great because you kind of, there's always like a, there's always a story hiding around down in there.

[89] And when we're getting ready to go somewhere to film, I'm always getting pressure in a friendly way from Janus or from Doty, you know, who are like, what's the story, you know, like what's the, and I just feel like I understand where they're coming from.

[90] Like, it's their job to wonder about that stuff.

[91] but I always feel like you're just going to wind up responding to something that happens.

[92] What I think is important about your show, I think there's a lot of things important about you and what you represent in this world.

[93] But one of the things that I think is important in your show is if there's a lot of these shows, these hunting shows, without mocking them or saying anything bad about them, but they, they're very simple.

[94] They appeal to simple people.

[95] they have like this simple ideology that goes through them and I think you get caught in that genre and everybody sort of starts thinking well this is what these shows are about these shows are all about like go sit in a tree stand and you know and when you shoot this animal that you named early in the spring and you got trail cam pictures of it I mean a lot of those shows are the same goddamn show every week and it gets you get it in your head oh this is what a hunting show is and this is what hunting is and I think that's a it's a problem with the stereotype that people have with hunting they connect hunting to sort of like a low vibration of thinking you know what I mean I understand what I mean?

[96] I understand what you're saying I don't know if it's you being a comedian and I notice you guys always say comic you being a comic I don't know I'm guessing you watch other guys yes I could see in that world you probably would really want to watch other guys I haven't found it helpful to watch hunting shows I generally don't watch hunting shows because I don't want to wind up I don't want to wind up having the stuff that I do be a response to that.

[97] Right.

[98] You know, I'm always afraid of that of feeling like something would get in your head and even if you didn't intend to that you'd wind up responding to it, you know.

[99] So I haven't watched a whole lot.

[100] And I don't like to hack on, I don't like the hack on.

[101] People often invite me to like, hack on hunting shows.

[102] And I just don't...

[103] There's some things I see a little bit that trouble me, like some of the ways that female hunters are portrayed as like little sex dolls, you know, with the mascara.

[104] And it just doesn't feel like when I think about my daughter growing up and going hunting, I just don't feel that that will...

[105] I don't want that to be how she finds her way into it as sort of like every man's fantasy.

[106] That stuff bugs me a little bit.

[107] But I haven't found that help of the watch, So I don't think of, I don't do like a reaction to what's going on.

[108] I just try to make things that, uh, to show just like the complex relationship I had with hunting before I started doing this.

[109] Filman hunts definitely changed the way I think about hunting.

[110] And in a way, I try to react against that.

[111] I try to recapture like how I used to feel about going hunting when I wasn't having this production thing in my head.

[112] About like making a show, you know, be worried about making a show.

[113] Well, I think that it's the elephant in the room.

[114] I mean, how do you avoid thinking about it while you're out there and you're doing it?

[115] You have to consider it's one of the episodes that you did your podcast recently we were talking about with Casey.

[116] Casey Levere?

[117] Yeah.

[118] Where you were talking about all the different aspects of putting together a show and that you kind of feel like sometimes that filming a show in a way, it kind of, it's almost like prostituting it.

[119] Yeah, it makes me feel a little bit evil.

[120] I feel evil for being involved in, I feel a little bit evil for being involved in TV, partially.

[121] Well, that's also because your wife is into publishing and she wanted you to stay within the world of book publishing.

[122] It's a very respected thing, whereas TV, especially like hunting shows or even reality shows, which is your first thing.

[123] It's filled with bullshit and yahoos.

[124] Yeah.

[125] Yeah.

[126] So, yeah, when I feel a little bit embarrassed, not so much.

[127] I mean, I obviously do it, and I love doing it, and I fight to try to keep being able to do it.

[128] But, like, so in the back of my head, like, I do carry that with me, you know, I do carry it with me that I think of, like, I think of TV as, yeah, it's just as like a, it just something about it feels kind of base, man, you know what I mean?

[129] Well, I think a lot of that might have to do with your experience on your first show, too.

[130] where they were trying to let a fucking moose out of a cage and you shoot it with a musket.

[131] I mean, they were trying to pressure you into a lot of really stupid fake shit because they were operating under the guidelines of, you know, quote -unquote reality TV.

[132] That's how they do it.

[133] What's important to them is getting a shot, not whether or not the shot actually happened.

[134] I remember one time being in a meeting early on when we were starting to work on that show and a guy that I later became friends with, and he still does those kind of reality -type shows that come out of Alaska but he we were talking about how much time you know like I was always like any more time any more time because of finding animals and early on the first time we ever met he's like well that's why they have wranglers you know and that was sort of like where that was where we began with that I liked doing I you know what I liked about it doing while and it was so many years ago now we did eight of them I liked I fell in love with the guys that I traveled with.

[135] Bad.

[136] I mean, like, when we quit doing that show, the show didn't get renewed.

[137] I mean, they knew we were still filming the last episode, and we already knew it was going down hill, right?

[138] Just because the viewership wasn't there, the wrong viewership and, you know, or like the numbers weren't there and the numbers that were there weren't the right numbers, like not the demographic they were after, right?

[139] and you weren't going to fix that but I had fallen in love so bad with the guys that I worked with that it was like getting broken up with by a girl that we weren't going to hang out together anymore and travel together anymore I mean it was bad you know these guys you know which guys everyone man all those guys were on that show yeah mo near you took them over no I know yeah so I don't So I still associate with them.

[140] But at the time, like now I try to wonder, when I look at that show, and there's some good stuff about it, and there's a lot of bad stuff about it, embarrassing stuff about it.

[141] When I look at it now and I try to go like, why did I want that to, why did I so badly want that to continue?

[142] And I did at the time.

[143] You know, I really wanted to keep doing it, not knowing that I would find such happiness doing what I'm doing now, that I'd find such a sense of peace doing what I'm doing now and feel like I'm being constructive and working with good people and doing good work.

[144] At the time I was just devastated that we were going to go and now I'm like, why did I feel that way?

[145] And I think in some ways just because I like running around with those guys.

[146] Well, it's fun.

[147] Man. We had a lot of fun.

[148] And we had enemies that we could like, there was like a gang of us and we felt like we were surrounded by enemies.

[149] Oh, the enemies being the executives?

[150] Just everyone, all these people around.

[151] And we're like, man, if we can go another season, we're going to clean house, right?

[152] And we're going to turn us into this perfect thing.

[153] And it was like, yeah, we're like, I don't know, man. That's the story of every television show.

[154] Dude, we were like warriors, man, you know.

[155] I loved it.

[156] I still love those guys.

[157] There's a fun bonding thing that goes with those shows that's different than any other show.

[158] You film a normal show, say if you do like a television show, whether it's on a set or it's on location, you go you film it and then you go either to your hotel or you go you know back to your house then you show up back on the set in the morning and there's a bonding involved in that but there's a totally different kind of bonding when you're in say like when you took us to the the missouri breaks down the missouri river you know in montana and you're you're you're in the wilderness together you're you know your your only source of entertainment is we're sitting around at a campfire at night shooting the shit laughing yeah and there's this crazy bond that you have with people when you do something like that and when you're doing it over and over and over and over again like you're doing like the regular world of civilization seems so stupid the red lights and the fucking telephone poles you just want to you just want to go back you want to go back to the fun stuff when you're out there in the woods looking for a buck or trying to find a ram or whatever the fuck you're trying to do it's like there's this crazy heightened reality to that life that especially when you have a bunch of men together, and you have the opportunity to just do...

[159] It's almost like playtime.

[160] Like, you have this wild existence, you know, and then it gets taken away.

[161] Yeah.

[162] I'm a Klansman, and I don't mean that with a K. Clansman with a C. And I do feel like, like, after growing up, I had, like, well, I still hang out.

[163] I still consider, I still regard my two brothers, like the main people that I hang out with, you know, even in a time since that's not true.

[164] Like, in his mind, like, you know, days per year, that's not true.

[165] But they're, like, the main thing outside of my immediate, my wife and kids, like, I think my two brothers just are, like, this main thing.

[166] And, but we always had these guys that we hung out with growing up, the same guys.

[167] We still hang out, like, just the summer, we had people out to our shack, our fishing shack, and it's like mostly guys from Michigan that we've known a long time, you know?

[168] And I do kind of feel that hunting and fishing, for me, do form those kind of relationships, you know, and traveling together forms those kind of relationships.

[169] I always think I would have been good in the military maybe because you get to, like, have this little core guys, you know.

[170] And, yeah, traveling with those guys that I work with and traveling, you know.

[171] And now it's just, like, revolving cast of members, like faces change, but it still feels the same.

[172] But, yeah, it's like this little, like a little clan, you know, like a little clique of fellas.

[173] And I like, I do, man. I just like, I like that kind of.

[174] I like hanging out with three or four people out in the woods, you know?

[175] It's fun.

[176] I mean, even me and Callan have only done a few episodes with you, but Callan was pasturing me the other night.

[177] He's like, when are we going again?

[178] When are we going, honey?

[179] I got to get out of here.

[180] He's like, I got to get out of here.

[181] Let's go.

[182] Let's go, honey.

[183] Call Steve.

[184] We were just up this summer, August 15th.

[185] We were on Prince of Wales Island.

[186] I got sunburned.

[187] Sun burnt.

[188] That's hilarious.

[189] Killed bucks.

[190] I mean, it was like you would.

[191] to believe.

[192] I believe it.

[193] That pollution, man, one of the things that I took from that trip.

[194] It was so nice.

[195] I would have done anything to swap the weather because going up there, like, I got like, I got Dan Doty mentioned it just right now, but Doty had said, he's like, I'm never going back to this island, you know, and like we're doing this stupid island after our trip.

[196] And we went up there and he was very like, you know, he had a very tentative feeling about the weather.

[197] We kept watching the forecast and it wound up being nice.

[198] And we went out there It was just like sunshine, deer everywhere.

[199] It was perfect.

[200] You wouldn't believe it, man. It's August.

[201] You got to go in August.

[202] Is that the move?

[203] Janus got a buck like doing after hours, doing a little after hours on.

[204] Really?

[205] After you're filming?

[206] Yeah.

[207] I took something away very important from that show and something that you said.

[208] I think you said it when we were in the tent when we were doing your podcast.

[209] You're talking about the different kinds of fun.

[210] That there's fun that's fun while you're doing it, like a roller coaster.

[211] But it's not fun.

[212] after it's over, but there's other things that are fun way after you're doing it, but while you're doing it, it's miserable.

[213] Yeah, I stole that theory from two guys, a guy named Hardcore Jeffie and a guy named Mark and a guy named Matt Rafferty.

[214] Why is his name Hardcore Jeffey?

[215] He's hardcore.

[216] Yeah, Hardcore Jeffie and Matt Rafferty.

[217] And recently, someone sent me a link where I think that it had, I feel it was like an ad of some sort that alluded to that.

[218] like an advertisement that alluded to that.

[219] But it was like a mountaineering thing, so I don't know, yeah.

[220] But I just don't want to, I don't want to take claim for that theory, but they had this thing like the four levels of, you know, the four or five levels of fun.

[221] These guys out of Anchorage, you know.

[222] And, yeah, it was profound.

[223] But it is profound, and I never thought about it until that trip.

[224] Like, roller coasters aren't fun after you do them at all.

[225] No. Like, I was on a roller coaster last week.

[226] Is that right?

[227] Yeah.

[228] What brought that on?

[229] Last week.

[230] You kid?

[231] Local carnival.

[232] Local, it was a fucking terrifying roller coaster.

[233] I took photos of the base of it and put it on my Instagram, just because it's so fucking ridiculous.

[234] They have this setup.

[235] And when you look at this setup, you're like, why the fuck did I?

[236] Because it's so bad.

[237] It's like pictures of, here, let me show you.

[238] I'll pull it up.

[239] There's these bricks that they have or blocks that they have that's holding us.

[240] up the uh the base of this thing it's like a gambling theme yeah well you can see it on the screen a little bit better but they have the foundation so they have these posts and then a bunch of shims under yeah it's fucking blocks of wood i mean just they're not nailed down i mean it's it's so fucking ridiculous that you get in that thing and it's spinning people around 50 miles and around that's pretty funny they just whatever they could find a couple bricks it's a full -on carny experience.

[241] A cotton board.

[242] But after it's over, and the only thing that's fun is looking at this picture.

[243] But after it's over, you know...

[244] I didn't even notice that at first, man. I went on...

[245] Yeah, so that...

[246] Roller coasters.

[247] Fun in the moment, but not fun later.

[248] Yeah, and there's things that are terrifying while you're experiencing it, but after you survive it, you're like, ha ha, that was crazy.

[249] That was awesome.

[250] That trip was a miserable four or five days, whatever the fuck it was on that island.

[251] But after it was over, Callan and I laughed about that trip all the time.

[252] Yeah.

[253] We just got back from hunting in British Columbia.

[254] And it was just, my feet are still, because my feet were so cold for so long, and my feet are still weird.

[255] Like when I lay in bed at night, they feel numb.

[256] Really?

[257] And it just, I mean, just generally sucked.

[258] Fog, snow, spent whole days sitting under a tarp because you can't see anything in the fog.

[259] I plan on it's seeming fun later But not yet Right now it's not Right now I still think it sucks I think in a couple months I won't think it sucked Didn't I call you when I got back to L .A. They tell you how fucking awesome I felt You did It was a quick turnaround I was driving around L .A. And the sun was shining like it always is It was warm like it always is But I appreciated it on a level that I had had never appreciated it before because being rain -soaked in that island, huddling up in that tent and I remember turning on that little headlamp and seeing mist everywhere inside the tent.

[260] I'm like, I thought in my stupid head that there was going to be a place that you would go to get dry.

[261] Like you would go inside the tent and you would get dry.

[262] Well, it's raining outside, but that's okay.

[263] You get in the tent, you'll be, no, there's no dry.

[264] There was no dry.

[265] The air was wet.

[266] The actual air everywhere around you was filled with more.

[267] moisture.

[268] So everything was wet no matter what.

[269] And so when I got back to L .A., I felt fucking fantastic.

[270] I was like, this is amazing.

[271] And it gave me an appreciation for L .A. that I wouldn't have had if I didn't go through that.

[272] Well, yeah, to go home from something like that and being bed all warm with, like, your wife.

[273] Oh, my God.

[274] You know, I've talked to you often about Roark Denver, you know, he was a Navy SEAL officer and ran that Bud's program, which is like this whole thing, like, he'd basically go there to suffer.

[275] And he was talking about how, you think like you go into his seal's home you think it's going to be all Spartan you know like he's sleeping on a stack of cardboard or something he goes those guys have like you go in there it's like the Egyptian cotton the nicest most comfortable homes man because you wind up after like the suffering you so badly want to go be comfortable that they go because like they go out of the way to have a comfortable house you know like more than normal people's because you want to just soak up comfort when you get the chance yeah it makes sense they don't want to live in a log cabin sleep on a futon yeah so you want to go home and lay on really nice sheets because it might only be two nights man you know you want to get your fill it totally makes sense um I think having these conversations and what you're doing on your show is it's very important because it's giving people a different sense of hunting it's one of the things that I get all the time from tweets and Facebook messages and that people change their perspective because of your show and because of these conversations that you've had on my podcast and because of your podcast, people have changed their perceptions of it because people who don't experience hunting personally and their ideas of it a lot of times are shaped by the portrayals of hunters and movies which are almost always negative.

[276] Yeah.

[277] Especially the animated ones.

[278] Yeah, like Elmer Fudd.

[279] No, yeah.

[280] My kids like to show about animals.

[281] It's like Like there's a bad guys.

[282] It's like these two brothers, they have this cartoon show.

[283] Wildcrats?

[284] Yeah.

[285] So there's like, there's, like, there's, like, some recurring bad guys.

[286] One of them's a chef.

[287] It's like a chef who's out in the woods.

[288] Like, he's always trying to hunt.

[289] Right.

[290] Out in the woods to make food.

[291] And the other one's like maybe like a gay seeming urbanite guy.

[292] Yeah, he's like an evil guy.

[293] Yeah, like a dark hair guy.

[294] Yeah.

[295] Yeah, but real, like, real, you know, just, like, kind of bad, you know.

[296] It's like your one hand telling you, there's two people that are bad, kids.

[297] It's gay guys and chefs who hunt.

[298] Yeah.

[299] But I don't want to let them watch that show.

[300] You won't let them watch it?

[301] No, I mean, they learned some good wildlife stuff, but I'm like, I just don't want to, I'm not going to let it.

[302] No, I tell them that I tried to explain them why I didn't like it.

[303] They didn't understand, but now I don't like them watching that show.

[304] That's hilarious.

[305] Yeah.

[306] Because I don't like the way, like, that they're like, I just can't have a show where the bad guy is like some guy that like a chef who is always out trying to hunt like he's always trying to hunt endangered species but that show like he's like a Cajun chef I don't know if it's Chris or Martin one of them is fat I took my kid to their live show they have a live show in Hollywood it's fucking terrible but for a five year old awesome you know it's like really bad they have costumes on you know they go into their superpowers they have like the animal powers activate and they have these like things that they do and they can assume the attributes of whatever animal they're talking about yeah but in the show on the television show it's cartoons yeah so they can do all this crazy stuff but it starts with them going somewhere yes like the two bros and they're jovial very chatty yeah they go somewhere then and then the show starts yeah yeah in the live show though they don't go anywhere and so in a live show they just put on these outfits and it's so fucking stupid they put on like big rubber feet they pretend to be a fox like it's just ridiculous yeah they have ears and they jump around on a trampoline and they they jump on trampolines to pretend that they have like serval cat powers yeah it's and the trampoline's hidden behind a rock but you can fucking see it if i knew that those guys are big vegetarians i'd be like okay that's cool no they probably aren't but i don't get yeah i never even paid attention to the fact that that one guy is, like, sort of a hunter or a chef, and that's why he's the bad guy.

[307] Yeah.

[308] I never even paid attention.

[309] You're more sensitive to that than I am.

[310] I'm overly sensitive.

[311] When I hear people don't like their kids watch certain shows, like, because of whatever, I'm like the guy, I don't like them watch and stuff that has a negative portrayal of hunters.

[312] That's funny.

[313] Well, I'm writing this thing right now that I'll put out probably tomorrow about all the people that got mad at me because I put up a picture that elk last week, that got mad at me, and then I went to their Twitter pages or their Instagram pages, and I saw pictures of their cats.

[314] Yeah.

[315] And I'm like, what are you feeding your cat?

[316] What is?

[317] You're feeding your cat food?

[318] And where's that cat food coming from?

[319] Someone's killing animals.

[320] Someone's killing chickens?

[321] No, it's probably some guy running high seas drift nets.

[322] That too.

[323] Out in international waters.

[324] Yeah, that too.

[325] Rape in the ocean.

[326] That's one of the things that, you know, it's so easy to fall on the traffic.

[327] talking about stuff that annoys you, but that's one thing is, like, people that you can have this holier than thou attitude, like a lot of catch and release fishermen have it, you know, they'll go out fishing, they'll let their trout go.

[328] And you know those sons of bitches go to a restaurant that night and order fish, and they're like, they don't, like, well, whose fish is that?

[329] Yeah.

[330] Who's, like, whose favorite area did that fish come from?

[331] You know, probably some place that's a lot more imperiled than where you live.

[332] Well, not only that, the reality of catch and release is, what, 10 % of them, die, 20 % of them die?

[333] Sometimes much higher.

[334] But yeah, it's that thing that, like, you just don't want to be, you don't want to look at it, you know.

[335] Yeah, if you got a cat and you're feeding and stuff like that, it's probably, you're probably supporting some, some, uh, you're probably supporting some fisheries practices that you would, that you're glad you don't know about.

[336] Oh, yeah, and not just fish, chicken, lamb, whatever the fuck you're feeding your cat.

[337] You're buying cat food and cat foods animals because cats need protein.

[338] They, they're not omnivores.

[339] You can't, I mean, there's very few arguments to make any sense you can feed your cat a vegan diet.

[340] Apparently, you can get away with it with some dogs.

[341] They can feed some dogs a primarily vegetable -based diet and the dogs are all right.

[342] Yeah.

[343] It's not optimum.

[344] But for cats, they get organ failure, cardiovascular failure.

[345] They go blind.

[346] It's a big issue with cats when you feed them, try to feed them a vegan diet.

[347] They go blind.

[348] Well, I'd also invite those people, your critics, to understand that.

[349] those elk wouldn't be here if it were not for hunter interest.

[350] Yeah, that's an interesting conversation.

[351] They just would not be here.

[352] Did you, I don't know if you've listened to the Radio Lab podcast on that guy?

[353] No, I didn't.

[354] The Lion.

[355] No, I wanted to.

[356] I was gone when that happened.

[357] So many people sent me links to it, but I still haven't listened to it.

[358] It was about the guy that, it was about some of the complexities of the guy that paid, I don't know, $350 ,000, $100 ,000, $100 ,000.

[359] Yeah, and I had that guy on the podcast, and he discussed it, and we talked about it.

[360] But what's interesting is they had on another guy who was in the radio lab show that was a, I forget his position, but he's someone who works to help wildlife.

[361] And he was saying that the idea is ridiculous, that you could kill these animals.

[362] And that you would say that you're working as a conservationist, but you still kill these animals and that you're trying to protect them and make more of them and let them breed and let them repopulate so that you can kill them.

[363] Yeah.

[364] And like that's preposterous.

[365] But the real problem with any of these arguments is you got to know.

[366] I always don't want to know.

[367] Like, what do you, do you eat meat?

[368] Do you wear leather?

[369] Like, if you're making this argument against the hunting of these animals, like, where do you get your protein from?

[370] Are you getting your protein from all plant sources?

[371] Because in that case, maybe we can have this conversation about that.

[372] But if you're not, man, if you're choosing animals that you think are okay and not okay to kill, and it's based on which ones are captive, that seems to me more fucked up.

[373] Yeah.

[374] It's way more cruel, in my opinion, to put an animal in a cage and make that animal earmarked for death, and you just stuff it and keep fattening it up until you kill it.

[375] to think that somehow that's a better moral decision than going out and killing something in the wild.

[376] But then there's the trophy hunting thing, and that's where it gets weird, when you say, well, these are animals and people aren't even eating, you know, like the lion thing, which the guy, that guy was just cleared, apparently, of any wrongdoing.

[377] You know, I never, it was so hard to figure out what exactly was going on there.

[378] I would love to know some of the, some of what was really going on with.

[379] with the with the lion thing because there's so many claims that were being made that just in some way didn't add up like that he had um you heard that they had lured it out of a park right i don't really know what that means now if you because for instance and people act like how bad that was that he had lured it out of a park but in the u .s an animal can move across borders freely you know, it's generally illegal to fence in wildlife in some way that it can't get away.

[380] An animal can move across borders freely, and its public ownership doesn't change when it moves around.

[381] This is something I've tried to explain a thousand times, but if you have, let's take some iconic park like Yelsela National Park, if you have an elk in Yelisle National Park, and it jumps a border onto private land and then jumps a border onto federal national forest land, jumps the border on the state land, jumps the border into subdivision, jumps the border into a county park.

[382] Throughout all of his little journey there, he's always been the property of the state.

[383] When elk migrate out of Yellowstone National Park, they get hunted.

[384] You know, many animals that get hunted in Wyoming and Montana are animals that, as part of the year, spend time in Yelsoe National Park.

[385] My brother once drew a big horn sheep tag for the Upper Yellowstone Valley.

[386] and there's this peak near the Gardner entrance to the Ellesville National Park called Electric Peak, and a lot of Big Horn Sheep spend their summer on Electric Peak.

[387] When he had that tag, this was in 2005, I think it's quite a while ago, when he had that tag, we were just waiting for snow to pile up on Electric Peak, and the sheep would begin migrating, and they would migrate down and spend the winter down in some grass, some like range land up and down the Yellowstone.

[388] So we would go there.

[389] It was on our third trip to the area when we finally found sheep were migrating down out of the high country out of Yelso National Park.

[390] We killed a sheep within a couple miles of Yelso National Park.

[391] So when people were talking about, oh, like how the lion belonged in the park, was of the park, was lured off the park.

[392] If you condemn that in and of itself, then you're really talking about something very revolutionary implications here in the U .S. that animals aren't able to freely move or that an animal becomes the possession of whatever land administration it happens to be on.

[393] But there's a big difference between an animal moving freely but that's what I'm saying.

[394] When they say it lured off, I don't know.

[395] That's what I would say I would love to know.

[396] Like, I don't know the answer to this.

[397] They physically walk into the park.

[398] No. What they did is they drove around the area outside the park with bait and they drag a carcass.

[399] They drag a carcass behind a truck.

[400] That's true.

[401] But not within the park.

[402] No, not within the park.

[403] Standard practice.

[404] Not only that, lions have a huge area that they travel in.

[405] And they killed 28 other lions with tags, with collars, and it was never an issue.

[406] And this idea that this one lion was like this cherished, beloved lion.

[407] That it was only by Westerners who are like outsiders.

[408] So the people that live in Zimbabwe, they're fucking all monsters.

[409] They're all terrifying.

[410] Yeah.

[411] You read that guy that wrote that piece in New York Times.

[412] We didn't know about that line.

[413] Yeah.

[414] It's great.

[415] Well, in Zimbabwe, we don't cry for lions.

[416] Yeah.

[417] I mean, that was the name of the piece.

[418] It was all talking about as family members that were terrified where these people would go outside and they had a very real fear they were going to be killed by monsters, giant cats that will kill everything, anything, kill people all the time.

[419] You know, Jim Shockey has this great show called Uncharted.

[420] Have you watched it?

[421] Yep, I know about that show.

[422] It's great fucking show.

[423] And I was watching last night's show.

[424] He was in Mozambique.

[425] and there's these villagers in Mozambique that are just hunted by crocodiles and they showed dozens of people that were missing arms, missing feet had giant holes in their head where a crocodile had just barely grabbed them and these are the people that survived and they all had stories while they were there a woman was taken into the water while they were in camp one of these women was washing clothes or gathering water and a crocodile came and got her.

[426] And there's nothing you can do.

[427] They try to kill as many as they can.

[428] They bring in hunters to kill as many as they can.

[429] But to these poor people, these people are just horrified.

[430] We don't look at that the way we look at lions because they're cold and reptiles.

[431] But it's just wildlife.

[432] But I think if you got to the point where you were facing, where you might be looking at genetic extinction of the crocodile, It would change.

[433] My thing, my interest in the lion controversy that came out of Africa, my interest in that is provincial in that I was concerned about and I'm interested in the way that that's going to impact things here.

[434] You know, I'm not that interested in, not that I have antipathy toward, but I'm just not that vested in what might happen with African big game home.

[435] hunting, outside of how people's, how the American imagination, or the way the average American perceives hunting in his own country here in the U .S. would be colored by the actions of people in Africa and the circumstances that go on in Africa.

[436] That's my interest in that landscape.

[437] As far as what you're saying about the crocodile thing, I think that one of the reasons is that it's so complicated with the lions is on one hand we're talking about the threat of genetic extinction of a species and I'm sensitive to that here as well because we right now have, we're engaged in our own thing, we're engaged in the wolf debate right now that in some way mirrors the kind of language we're hearing out of Africa where you have an animal, you have a species that's absent from much of its range.

[438] So there used to be wolves, you know, everywhere, but let's just say in the most recent past, you had wolves in New Mexico and Colorado and Arizona.

[439] They're all over the place.

[440] Wolves here, California, and then now they're gone from much of that landscape.

[441] But there are some areas, like the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, area around glacier, in the U .S. that have what I would say is on the verge of too many wolves.

[442] And so people could look at the And they'd be like, well, how can there be too many if they're extinct across 90 -some percent of their range in the lower 48?

[443] You know, I'd be like, well, yeah, it's very complicated.

[444] They're overabundant here and missing from there.

[445] And I see both sides of the debate because a lot of people who might come from my set of my understanding about wildlife, who like to hunt deer, like to hunt elk, like to hunt moose, do want to see the wolves all the way gone.

[446] And what they would point to is the effect that wolves have on livestock, right?

[447] people's way of making a living, there's safety implications or not, but some people say that there are safety implications from wolves being around.

[448] And when I look at that, I'm like, okay, I take all that, but I don't think that that means we don't want wolves.

[449] I think we do want wolves.

[450] Do we want, like, how many do we want?

[451] You know, I don't disagree, I agree that we want them around.

[452] I just agree that there's a limit to how many we want.

[453] Well, there was an agreement.

[454] There was an agreement when they reintroduce him that When the population got to a certain arm, they would open.

[455] It's far past that.

[456] They would open up hunting, and then they reneged on it.

[457] Yeah.

[458] So I don't think most people, it's just, I'm, like, sensitive to the thing where, as much as I was baffled by the Cecil the lion thing, I'm also a little bit like, when there was the backlash to the backlash, and people said, like, oh, yeah, but, you know, people live in fear of lions and lions kill people.

[459] I don't know that, like, that doesn't really change anything for me. Like, I don't think that that then means that, oh, you're right.

[460] we should kill all the lions because they kill people.

[461] Oh, I tweeted the wrong link.

[462] Was it a new link?

[463] Yeah.

[464] Oh, it's a different link every time?

[465] What?

[466] The Twitter or the YouTube link is YouTube.

[467] Or dot com slash C slash powerful Jerry slash live.

[468] You must have copy and pasted yesterday's.

[469] All right.

[470] I'll tweet that right now.

[471] Oh, Jesus Christ, Jamie.

[472] What was different about yesterday's?

[473] I don't know if you copied it from the same place it was at yesterday's.

[474] yesterday it changes all right okay i'm sorry keep going steve i lost my train of thought um wolves blah blah blah yeah you want to keep wolves alive oh that that the argument that like oh yeah man it's okay to wipe something out because they hurt people um i don't really buy into that either you don't no i think that striving for, with wildlife issues, I think striving for a happy medium where you can have many different stakeholders at the table talking about it is more constructive.

[475] And so I think as well, with the Cecil, the Lion deal, I just think it really like clouded and confused tons of that shit here in the U .S. and made it harder for people to imagine the role of what I would call management, wildlife management game management you know because it's not like this we no longer live in this eden environment where you can you can act somehow like the hand of man is not at play i mean we've we've cooked that world well isn't the issue that a lot of people have a big part of it is this this term trophy hunting yeah trophy hunting is deemed to be evil and the people have respect for people that hunt if you hunt hunt for your food, I, you know, I can appreciate that.

[476] But what I don't like is this idea of trophy hunting.

[477] I mean, that is a, that's a giant issue with people.

[478] Yeah, it's a, it's a semantics issue in some way I see it as.

[479] And this is something I spend a lot of time thinking about and talking about in recent years.

[480] Is there's what trophy hunting means to someone who's unfamiliar with hunting when they hear the term trophy hunting.

[481] I think what they see in their mind, they see the wanton slaughter of an animal just in order to take a piece of the animal, its head or its hide, and have it as a bragging rights thing.

[482] That it's like this callous slaughter of animals to take part of it and take possession of part of it and use it as an emblem or to prove your manhood.

[483] right like that's what they're seeing it's so pervasive now that that meaning of the word that i think that it might almost be time for people who do engage in trophy hunting to think about a new term if i go out and and i hunt and get something i do retain parts of the animal that would be a trophy the same way you have that skull right there and that skull right there right but it was a portion of of what you retained but you eat the animals yeah so i think the difference between that and a lion is you're not eating a lion and i think that freaks people out this idea of just killing something just for its head to stuff it and put it on the wall when it's not something that you're going to eat i think it freaks people out that the guy didn't eat it.

[484] He should have eaten the damn line.

[485] I think.

[486] You should have eaten it.

[487] He should have eaten it or found someone to want to eat it.

[488] And apparently he shouldn't have been a dentist because people love that that guy was a dentist.

[489] Why?

[490] I don't understand why.

[491] There's no other occupation where he would have became the dentist.

[492] If he was a welder.

[493] The welder that killed the lion?

[494] Yeah.

[495] It would just be that he was the guy with a name.

[496] Well, it's a public practice.

[497] That's a big part of it.

[498] There's a target there.

[499] No, it's like there's a thing about people just don't want there's something people don't like about Dennis or somehow that it said something to people that he was a dentist I don't fully understand it people loved pointing out that that man was a dentist somehow it just made it seem just really egregious well one of those guys it's like one of the big game hunters that he's got a super he's got like the Super Slam and the Grand Slam he's always on that Tom Moranda show he's a famous surgeon No, he's a surgeon.

[500] It's like one of the more famous guys that's involved in the world of bow hunting.

[501] Yeah.

[502] He's killed everything that walks with a bow.

[503] Yeah, they got, it might be that they have, you know, they have the disposable income and a flexible schedule in order to do that sort of hunting.

[504] Maybe.

[505] Brian Callan's dentist is apparently some crazy big ham hunter.

[506] Yeah, all right.

[507] I mean, it's a common thing amongst dentists.

[508] But, yeah, I think if that guy, there's a handful of things that I think could have gone differently.

[509] If they had it eaten that damn line Yeah, but you wouldn't go Kill a line too Yeah Without a doubt, I'd eat that line What do you think it would taste like?

[510] Shit?

[511] No, I don't think it would taste like whatever Even if I had to take the whole I'd take the whole thing and grind it up And make pepperoni sticks out of it Dude, I'd walk around I'd come and do a party and be like Hey man, I brought you 30 pepperoni sticks bro I'd feel like he should have Well, you had a coyote on your show Yeah Yeah.

[512] If he had known, I think that he, if he had known what it was going to wind up, he would have never shot it.

[513] That's what he said.

[514] If he had known it, he said it, I think he said if he had known it had a name, he wouldn't have shot it.

[515] Yeah.

[516] Well, the craziest thing was the brother.

[517] I don't know what that means, though.

[518] I don't know what that means.

[519] Do you know the brother Jericho?

[520] He had a, Cecil had a brother named Jericho.

[521] And they said that Jericho was now going to take care of Cecil's young.

[522] Bullshit, first of all, like, that's not real.

[523] And second of all, they thought Jericho had gotten killed because another life.

[524] lion had gotten killed and they attributed, they thought it was Jericho.

[525] And then they found out great relief.

[526] The lion that was killed was not Jericho.

[527] It was just some no -name, bitch -ass lion that nobody cared about.

[528] But it's the idea of giving a lion a name like your dog.

[529] It's not like some wild animal.

[530] All of a sudden, it's a pet.

[531] It's a pet that's in a park.

[532] And that's how a lot of people that don't go to Africa don't have anything invested in keeping the people.

[533] around there safe or anything they have this idea that it's like the lion king and there's some evil hunter is going to go over there and steal decapitate it like the the language would they use first of all they said he shot it with a crossbow i saw that in like reputable newspapers yeah like he didn't use a crossbow that's not true decapitated in it well yeah that's what you do if you want to take the hide you have to cut the head off the rest of the body it man it's like such that issue is such a black hole but I think that the people I mean it just like has this way and it was kind of one of the ways it was most upsetting to me when it was going on thankfully I was gone for a lot of it but it just had this way of like acting like a black hole or like we envision a black hole being where it just sucks everything around it into this thing where it became like the dominant discussion about hunting and I think that one of the most telling things about it is the people who seem to be most upset by were the people who had the least nuanced understanding of wildlife management, wildlife politics, and wildlife in general.

[534] And just the least understanding of what it means to eat meat in the first place.

[535] I looked at all these people that were protesting in front of his dental practice.

[536] I'm like, you can't tell me you fuckers are vegetarians.

[537] Your big, fat, sloppy faces.

[538] These are not vegans.

[539] These are not healthy people.

[540] I mean, this is not people that are eating a bunch of people.

[541] of salads.

[542] These are people that probably got burgers on the way to putting those fucking signs up.

[543] I had a FBI.

[544] One time I had to have the FBI look into a guy who was messing me a little bit and this agent came over my house and he was like, I can tell you that guy is not a vegan or he's not a vegetarian.

[545] He said the guy, you're talking about how the guy had just ordered a pepperoni pizza.

[546] Which in my mind, I'm like, dude, why you have such a problem with me yeah what the hell you think that is because it's a target you're a target people aren't looking at things rationally I think they're finding green lights like there's a green light I'm frustrated by my life I don't like my job I don't like my social position I don't like my my whole the whole life that I've carved out for myself and I find green lights and I see those green lights and I can just point my anger in that direction Instead of focusing it inwardly, instead of looking at what aspects of my life that I should change, maybe I'd have a more harmonious existence, maybe I'd be happier, maybe I'd be more fulfilled.

[547] Nope.

[548] They just find someone like, this fucking guy, what are you fucking, you're a hunter, you get a little dick, you get your little dick, you're going to fix it with a rifle.

[549] There's like these cliches that they always throw about, and then they'll go eat a pepperoni pizza.

[550] It's like, oh my God, do you know what's involved in making pepperoni?

[551] Do you, if you've ever gone to a slaughterhouse, do you know what existence these animals have before they get snuffed out?

[552] It's a horrific existence.

[553] The existence of a wild animal is infinitely better.

[554] And the distance between or the time between the wild animal, even knowing that you're alive and being dead, is like that.

[555] Yeah, it can be.

[556] Can be.

[557] The difference between that and an animal that lives in captivity and gets turned into sausage or pepperoni or whatever.

[558] the fuck it is.

[559] That's horrific.

[560] And the idea that someone who buys cat food, someone who buys chicken cat food can get mad at someone who goes out and hunts a grouse or hunts a duck, it's madness.

[561] It's just madness.

[562] I wrote this thing about the hierarchy of, uh, of dead animals on social media.

[563] And I showed what you can get away with, what you can't get away with.

[564] I'm like, cut up fish.

[565] Nobody really gives a fuck.

[566] You could show a dead fish and it's a little sketchier, but you could show a steak that you've cooked, very few people get upset.

[567] But you can show an actual animal that's dead, people get really upset.

[568] Why do people get pissed about fur, but they don't get pissed about leather couches?

[569] It's a good point.

[570] Just someone scraped all the fur off.

[571] Exactly.

[572] As soon as you scraped the fur off, people were like, that's awesome, man. I'll buy a pair of shoes, and I'll take that in a jacket as well.

[573] Can I get a belt?

[574] If you leave the hair on it, they just do not like it.

[575] Well, because we're mammals.

[576] It's really disturbing to him to leave the hair on it.

[577] They much prefer you to take that stuff and throw it in the trash and then use it as leather.

[578] But if it doesn't have hair, like a snake -skin belt, that's cool.

[579] Yeah.

[580] Another thing that really bum me out about our dentist friend is that when I'm talking about hunting, one of the things I'd like to try to promote or try to explain is in a term I use a lot.

[581] is trying to form a context with the land where you hunt and establishing a context with the animals you hunt, meaning that you understand your place in the world, and you understand the world that you're walking into.

[582] Have you heard of the writer Aldo Leopold who wrote Sand County Almanac?

[583] Yeah, I've heard of his name.

[584] I'm not familiar with his word.

[585] He was writing in the 40s, and he was kind of the, He's like the grand pappy of hunter conservationists.

[586] I recently had occasion to reread his book because I went to, I gave a talk at the University of Wisconsin.

[587] It was sponsored in part by the Aldo Leopold Foundation.

[588] So I reread Aldo Leopold San County Almanac, and he was a hunter in the 40s.

[589] And relative to the 40s, we live in the good old days.

[590] We have phenomenal, phenomenal hunting and fishing here in this country in the 40s.

[591] And the 30s, it really sucked.

[592] There was, you know, very few hunting seasons for anything.

[593] Most things were just gone.

[594] Habitat destruction was, you know, off the charts.

[595] You couldn't, you could legally hunt turkeys almost nowhere.

[596] Waterfall was just about wiped out.

[597] Deere just about wiped out.

[598] So now, like, if all the Leopold could be alive now, he'd see a lot that would make him very, very happy.

[599] Because we've done such a good job on this continent.

[600] with wildlife management but in this book he pushes this idea he's talking about hunting but he's using the metaphor of a forester okay because he had been trained in forestry and worked in forestry and he talked about how a forester or you might say a hunter um goes out on the land and with each stroke of his axe is writing his signature on the land with each swing of an axe.

[601] And when I say he's talking about hunting, because he's kind of talking about this in the conversation with hunting, meaning when you go out on the land, you are like writing your signature out there, you know, you're building a legacy, you're making decisions and having implications for the landscape, impacting it.

[602] What it seemed to be with that guy, I think one of the things that upset me about that guy, and it might have upset other people about that guy, the shot.

[603] the lion was that he seemed to claim um he he seemed to be claiming in some way that he just had no idea didn't know where he was didn't know what was up with the line didn't know the lion had a collar and be like I just didn't know you know I think that in some ways obviously you're in another country it's hard to follow what's going on you rely on other people's judgment but in some ways I think it was upsetting to people that he was doing like, he wasn't following that thing that Leopold set out about writing your signature on the land because it was sort of like he just had no idea where he was, what he was doing.

[604] And I think that when you hunt, you do have an obligation to understand your role in your place, okay, and understand the context that you're working in.

[605] what are the limits and the needs of the resource you're trying to exploit can the resource withstand exploitation are you generally behaving as a force that's ultimately for or ultimately against wildlife like you have an obligation to answer all these questions you can go in a situation like that and rely on the judgment of someone else but that judgment can get really confused I think when money enters the picture you know but the money things funny too because people were very upset i was joking early about them being him them i was joking about the dentist thing it was just funny that how often it was pointed out his occupation was pointed out but what i'm not joking about is people were very very upset about the amount of money the traded hands which puzzled me because the old narrative from a century ago was that people of european descent go go going to to Africa and take resources and pay for nothing, that we go there and just rob the place of its resources and we take what we want and we leave and we don't pay a dime for it.

[606] That was upsetting and is upsetting to me. Now it's like he's being criticized for paying too much for a resource.

[607] It's like, and he paid, or like the guy that he paid $350 ,000 for a rhino, would it be better to you if he paid $5?

[608] It would seem to me that him having expressed the value of the animal in some way is almost a compliment to the pursuit rather than just going in there and robbing what you want and never paying for anything.

[609] That makes sense, but I think a lot of people have an idea, a real problem with the idea of putting a value on life at all, like saying that it's $350 ,000, you can go kill an endangered animal.

[610] instead of the real issue is they that animal was killing of the we're talking about the rhino yeah the endangered black i'm doing a brian williams i'm conflating the they had a real problem with that rhino they had a real problem with these older non -viable rhinos because they were killing young rhinos they killed this rhino had killed a female and in the the npr piece the excuse me the um radio lab piece they actually found the dead bodies of this female and a male that this rhino had killed like they he took them to these spots the guy who is the professional hunter so you know in africa they have these things called professional hunters where you would think call him a guide in america but they took them to the spot where this the bones were of this female i mean this this rhino really fucked this young female to death like he kept mounting her and fucking her and and and horning her you know hitting her with his horns and wound up killing her and killed a male who had, you know, gotten in the area and wanted to breed with the female, too.

[611] So he had killed two other rhinos.

[612] They had targeted him anyway because he was dangerous to the population because he was killing breeding males.

[613] The money that had come in from that $350 ,000 that guy gave was going to stop poaching, was going to protect the environment that this animal lived in, was going to protect habitat.

[614] So the argument is real, it's real weird because on one hand, it does seem strange that we're talking about value for life that this life would be valuable but in other hand the real value is like you've got to kill this thing anyway because it's a non -breeding male either kill it or you have to capture it and take it somewhere and make it live in a cage but if you kill it this guy's willing to pay you $350 ,000 and he was saying that that was undervalued and that if there wasn't so much bad press they would have probably been over half a million Yeah if they had had a part range go out, or some kind of land manager go out and shoot it, and act like like, you know, just something that had to be done.

[615] You know, there would be no protest.

[616] The guy would have been applauded.

[617] But they would lose all the money.

[618] And all that money that would go to wildlife to preservation of the land and protecting of the habitat.

[619] All that money would be gone.

[620] Protecting against poaching.

[621] It's one of those things in life.

[622] It's not clean.

[623] No, I was reading this morning this article in The New Yorker by Adam Gopnik.

[624] He was writing about he's actually writing a piece about books about the Holocaust but in there he had this line that stuck with me or at least it stuck with me for the last few hours where he said that something to the effect of the only way to simplify history is to make it complex you know it's like anytime any real explanation of something particularly with wildlife you don't get any real aha moments until you get into the deep complexity surrounding the issue.

[625] I think that's how we can sit here and all these whatever number of months after that and I can sit here and still hold in my hand or hold in my hand simultaneously a disdain for this guy and what he stood for.

[626] We can talk about the line.

[627] Like some kind of.

[628] disdain for it.

[629] Like something about it.

[630] It's a visceral reaction about some of the things I know about what went on and what might have been in people's mind.

[631] And at the same time, disdain for the general public for feeling the disdain that they felt.

[632] It's like I just see it as such a big thing that I haven't really made that much sense out of it.

[633] And whenever I get that conflicted about an issue, I start to feel like I'm getting somewhere.

[634] that's fascinating you know why do you feel like you're getting somewhere when you get conflicted because then i realize that i'm probably seeing it from the necessary number of angles well it is one of those things where there are a bunch of different angles to look at it and it is complex because this guy whether or not the zimbabwe government cleared him of any wrongdoing which they did he still tampered with the collar which is illegal he still was a poacher he had been convicted of poaching already.

[635] He had killed a bear 40 miles outside the area that he claimed to kill it, tried to bribe the people that he was with to claim that he killed it in a legal area.

[636] So this guy was already unethical.

[637] So he was a perfect guy to pin all this on.

[638] Yeah.

[639] But you want to say like, okay, yeah, this guy was an asshole doing some asshole stuff.

[640] Right.

[641] But does that mean that we're not going to manage large predators?

[642] but and I want to be like do we have to manage lions I mean is this a critical issue like it is with wolves like you're talking about the wolf population getting out of control and this is from a biological wildlife management standpoint like the guys who are wildlife biologists gave a number that they think a wolf population should reach before it should start being managed that number has been far exceeded and when that number was exceeded that's when all the blowback came back where they were saying, no, no, no, we've changed our mind.

[643] We don't want to open up a hunting season.

[644] And that became a real issue because then the elk population dropped radically.

[645] Then the deer population dropped radically.

[646] And then there was all these positive spins on it.

[647] Like, did you, there was this one guy who, there's another radio love.

[648] Oh, the guy that, you taught the guy that, like, the how wolves save the rivers.

[649] Yeah, that guy's fascinating.

[650] Because that guy's, I saw that piece and I thought, well, maybe this guy has making some interesting.

[651] points until I listen to this TED podcast about him recently where he's talking about reintroducing wolves or reintroducing lions and even hippos to England because he thinks that at one point in time and you know they found in London they found like ancient bones of lions and he thinks bringing megafauna to areas of the UK would be beneficial that these areas of the UK you know millions of hectares yeah how do you say it hectares hectares that are not being used and utilized and they can turn into a wildlife park with fucking lions.

[652] And this is all the result of a self -admitted midlife crisis this guy had.

[653] So he got interested in the concept of rewilding.

[654] I'm interested in the concept of rewilding, and I'm interested in the concept of rewilding in that if you can correct mistakes, if you can correct extirpations, or let's say scientific you had the ability to correct extinctions, but you can't, so we'll not talk about that for right now.

[655] If you could correct extirpations, like regional extinctions of animals that were brought on by human causes, then I think we have a moral obligation to remedy those mistakes.

[656] Elk, okay, the American elk only occupies 10 % of its native range.

[657] Elk live in 10 % of the land in the U .S. that they lived in at the time of European contact.

[658] No one talks about elk being endangered or near extinction, even though they're absent from 90 % of their range.

[659] Why is that?

[660] Because there are many areas where they abound.

[661] So we've come able to go like, yes, elk are missing from areas, and there's a number of groups, many state agencies, and most notably the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, work to, where plausible, bring elk back to areas in the east that used to have them that no longer do.

[662] In my lifetime, elk have come back to Michigan, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and on and on, through reintroduction efforts.

[663] Okay, so we're working to repopulate elk.

[664] The biggest piece of resistance you get on repopulating elk is public approval.

[665] People don't want to be inconvenienced by big -ass animals that they're going to hit with their cars, and they don't want to be inconvenienced by animals that eat crops.

[666] So that's the resistance.

[667] The resistance is that we don't have the technology for it.

[668] It's just that we've got to get public approval.

[669] So we're trying to bring them back.

[670] Meanwhile, we have hunting seasons for elk all over the place, right?

[671] I mean, just down the line, you got elk seasons, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, California, Nevada.

[672] while they're gone from other places, you know.

[673] Why is it that we can't extend the same logic to the wolf and say, yeah, the wolf's absent from much of its range.

[674] And most of it, in some of its range, it's thriving.

[675] We're going to manage the areas that are thriving.

[676] And we're going to work toward bringing wolves back to the areas where they're not the same way that hunters, by and large, not even by and large, solely, hunters are responsible for bringing an elk back all over the place.

[677] But I think the way the general public looks at things is very different from the way that you're looking at things.

[678] You're looking at these animals as a renewable resource.

[679] The general public looks at them as magical creatures that live in the forest that we need to bring back because we made them extinct because we're greedy and vicious.

[680] Yeah, we're fundamentally flawed.

[681] And on top of that, we're talking about animals you eat versus elk versus animals you don't eat, wolves.

[682] Why do you want to kill these wolves?

[683] You must be a cruel person who wants to go out and kill something that looks like a dog.

[684] Because to people, wolves are these magical creatures.

[685] You hear, whoa, I hear a wolf.

[686] Wow, that's cool.

[687] And it is cool to hear a wolf.

[688] Yeah, but I like wolves more than those people do.

[689] Do you think so?

[690] Yeah.

[691] Why do you think you like them more?

[692] I just have more familiarity with them.

[693] I go to more places where they might be found.

[694] I, like, spend more time looking through my binoculars trying to find them.

[695] I just am more interested in them.

[696] I like them more.

[697] It means more to me. Not every one of them.

[698] But your average guy that's never even laid eyes on one, I have more of an appreciation for the animal than they do.

[699] I'm sorry, that sounds like a bold, offensive statement, but I just do.

[700] I would back you up on that.

[701] I think you do, but I think...

[702] I like grizzly bears a whole bunch.

[703] A whole bunch.

[704] I've been hunting for grizzly bears a lot.

[705] Never shot a grizzly bear.

[706] I've never found the one I want to get, and I will get one in my life.

[707] Are you going to turn into pepperoni sticks?

[708] No. No, I'm going to eat it straight up when I do get one.

[709] I just got back from spending 12 days looking for grizzly bear.

[710] Why would you decide to eat it straight up and not turn into pepperoni sticks?

[711] Because isn't it going to taste like shit?

[712] No, because I hunt them in the interior.

[713] The areas where I go to look, you know, anytime I've gone out with the intention of getting a grizzly bear, I go to areas where they don't have access to fish.

[714] Purposely.

[715] Yeah.

[716] So that you can get a big one.

[717] Because I want a big one that you can eat.

[718] I want a mature male, preferably one who tomorrow will die of old age, and I want him to not be eating a lot of dead fish.

[719] So that you can eat him.

[720] Yeah.

[721] Yeah, Cam Haynes, I told you the pictures of the two grizzlies that he shot, he's eating them, he's chewing his way through him, and I go, how do they taste?

[722] He's like, they're fucking awful.

[723] He goes, I just eat them.

[724] And I'm like, man, see, I'm not interested in that.

[725] Unless it was for a legitimate wildlife conservation reason and I was going to eat it, I don't think I would be interested in hunting something like that.

[726] I mean, even if it was, it's just, if I'm going to spend my time hunting something, I want to eat it, 100%.

[727] That's the thing that, that's my connection to hunting.

[728] Well, I grew up, I told you about this a handful of times, I feel like, but I'll say it again.

[729] Like, I grew up always hunting since before I can remember.

[730] But for a long time, I got interested in trapping.

[731] And that's what I was going to do for a living because I was going to be a fur trapper.

[732] I caught my first muskrat.

[733] I was 10 years old.

[734] and I trapped until I was 22 so I trapped for 12 years and the latter part of that I was trying to do it where I was going to be a professional trapper all right I eventually quit trapping because fur markets got so low and moved away from home got more serious about college and started just feeding me and friends my brothers by that point in time we were feeding ourselves on wild game buying no protein besides what we hunted for and and at that point was when I really like sort of found my my place in the natural world.

[735] You know, that was like the relationship with animals and the relationship with the natural world and the relationship with hunting that really spoke to me and made me feel very good about my decisions, very good about my lifestyle.

[736] And I've lived that lifestyle now, you know, for 20 -some -odd years.

[737] But I did at a time, yeah, I did trap.

[738] you know and I would trap in order to sell the hides so when I now talk about why I like to hunt and then I don't want to hunt for something I'm not going to eat because that's just that that's what I like to hunt for it I think that some hunters will look at that and they act like you're being divisive you know that you're being that you have this holier than thou attitude you're somehow condemning other practices I'm just talking about what I like my approach what I like to do you know what to me is the what to me is the value of an animal I think in many many cases when it comes to predator management I think there are many cases where you're going to have harvests of predators that are just not going to it's not going to be a food driven harvest you know it's just not we're looking right now like in the same areas that in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem around Glacier National Park, you're looking at coming up on a thing where the same thing that happened with wolves is going to probably have to happen with grizzly bears.

[739] In many of these areas, they're getting way above objective.

[740] It's starting to have negative implications for prey animals.

[741] It's having negative implications for people who use the land.

[742] These bears have, they're just not afraid of anything.

[743] You go up in Alaska where grizzlies get hunted.

[744] you can generally get upwind of the thing, let it get a smell of you.

[745] It's going to take off, oftentimes, typically the case.

[746] In these areas, they're drawn to the smell of humans.

[747] No one can touch them.

[748] They have ESA protection.

[749] You know, we had drawn out decades ago what recovery would look like.

[750] We far surpassed what recovery looks like.

[751] It's going to happen.

[752] It's going to be ugly, but they're going to delist bears.

[753] They're going to delist grizzly bears.

[754] They're going to put grizzly bears.

[755] under state management, it's inevitable.

[756] They're going to put them under state management in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, and people are going to be killing grizzly bears, some limited amount, and there probably is not going to be a meat salvage requirement on those bears.

[757] Am I going to now condemn that hunt?

[758] No way.

[759] No. Well, you wouldn't because you understand it and you know about it and you understand the importance of it, but to the average person, the average person is a very cursory knowledge, like very, very peripheral when it comes to wildlife management.

[760] They don't even consider it.

[761] They think of trophy hunting as just being some evil person wants to kill things, again, to make their dick hard, right?

[762] Isn't that what Jimmy Kimmel said on TV when he started crying?

[763] We started talking about Cecil?

[764] Oh, no, I heard about that.

[765] He cried.

[766] And he did the whole cliche.

[767] We talked about, is that what you need to get your dick hard?

[768] I just kind of like that guy to you, man. A little bit.

[769] Well, I do too.

[770] I like him a lot.

[771] But I just don't think he understands.

[772] I don't think he understands.

[773] I don't think he educates himself about it.

[774] I think he works 16 hours a day on a show, and I think he has very little knowledge about what it takes to manage wildlife.

[775] Now, this is coming from someone who doesn't agree with the lion hunting, that guy.

[776] Like, I don't think the lion populations are low, or high, rather.

[777] I don't think it's anything where you have to manage.

[778] I mean, I don't think that's the issue that they're having in Zimbabwe.

[779] I think this is just a way that they make money.

[780] Yeah.

[781] And you can look at it that way, like it's sustainable, and if it is sustainable, and these people use it to make.

[782] money and they benefit from the resource of people coming over there and hunting them.

[783] I guess you could see a positive benefit of it.

[784] You know, did you ever see the Louis Theroux documentary on those hunting camps, the high fence hunting camps in South Africa?

[785] No. It's pretty good.

[786] I should say it's really good.

[787] You told me about it and I failed to ever watch it.

[788] Now I'm going to redo it.

[789] I'm going to rewrite it down on my notes.

[790] It's excellent.

[791] You gave you a notepad.

[792] I'm going to write it on my notebook.

[793] One of the craziest parts of it was the lions.

[794] they had this fenced -in area, and it's a small area where they have these lions, and they're throwing these cows literally over the fence.

[795] They're in the back of a truck, and they have this high fence, and these lions are staring at them with these fucking ruthless killer eyes.

[796] I mean, they are right there.

[797] There's two sets of fences in case one of them fails.

[798] There's another fence behind it, and they chuck these lions, this cow, this calf.

[799] They throw it over the top, like fucking Jurassic Park.

[800] and they just tear this thing apart, and they're looking at it.

[801] And then meanwhile, some guy goes and acts like he's hunting the lions.

[802] Exactly.

[803] They're going to let one of those loose.

[804] They let them out of the cage, and lions are used to their territory, right?

[805] So when they let them out of the cage, the lions are going to get out of that cage, and they're going to go, where the fuck am I?

[806] I'm just going to sit down here and try to figure out where the hell they are, right?

[807] So they're going to sit down, and then they send this hunter out, and the hunter finds the line, shoots it, poses, does the whole picture with it.

[808] And, you know, that guy, Pigman did that.

[809] They had a whole episode.

[810] and he's going, and you can tell these lions have just been released.

[811] But he doesn't, does he show what he was doing?

[812] Does not.

[813] That's the thing I don't understand about high fence.

[814] This thing I don't understand about guys like to hunt high fence.

[815] Why do they love the trappings of hunting, the appearance of hunting, the methods of hunting, the tools of hunting, the clothes of hunting, the photographs that come from hunting?

[816] why do they like that so much but they just don't like hunting the doing of is that what it is or do they want guaranteed success and do they want to hide the fact that it's in a high fence environment because they're doing it on television and don't things like the outdoor channel don't they have rules they have rules like you can't show high fences you can't show fences on television whether or not you hunt inside of one do you feel like they would show it because I feel like people are off doing non -fair -chaise hunts but masquerading that it was a fair chase hunt.

[817] If you like to do hunts that aren't fair chase, if you like doing it, why do they have such a hard time just saying that's what I like to do?

[818] Well, Ted Mugent does.

[819] I spend an enormous amount of time explaining why I like to do what I do.

[820] You know, why don't, I would love for one of them to explain to me what they like, about it instead of doing it and acting like they did something different.

[821] Well, part of it is the network themselves, right?

[822] The outdoor channel and the sportsman's channel, they don't allow you to show high fences.

[823] That's part of their bylines, right?

[824] I don't know if they say don't show high fences.

[825] They might not want...

[826] This is coming from Ben O 'Brien.

[827] Yeah, so they might...

[828] I can't say if they say don't show it or if they're saying don't do it.

[829] I think they say don't show it.

[830] Don't show it.

[831] Because Ted Nugent is on that program, right?

[832] He's on those networks, right?

[833] He's got a huge show on that network.

[834] He hunts in his fucking yard.

[835] I mean, he's not on a big piece of property.

[836] I think he's less than 300 acres, or maybe 300 acres.

[837] That's not that much.

[838] And in that 300 acres, it's all high fence.

[839] He's got African animals.

[840] He's got all kinds of shit in there, white tails, pigs, all in this one area.

[841] And he hunts high fence almost exclusively.

[842] And when he's hunting on, you know, it says, like, Spirit, Wild Ranch.

[843] Yeah.

[844] That's his yard.

[845] I mean, he's essentially hunting his pets.

[846] If you really want to look at it that way, leaves his house, goes, sits in his favorite tree stand.

[847] Probably got a bunch of them all over his property.

[848] But I don't think, I don't think in and of itself, I don't feel there's anything wrong with that because my brother raises sheep.

[849] Right.

[850] And when he goes out to get the sheep, he goes out with the 22.

[851] He's got irrigated pasture.

[852] He runs lambs.

[853] When he goes out to get a lamb, he gives a lot of the way, eat something for himself, shoots the lamb of the 22.

[854] However, he doesn't dress it up like he's hunting the lambs out on his pasture.

[855] Like it's a wild animal that's going to sneak up on.

[856] No, I mean, he doesn't like put a picture of him in his 22 in a dead lamb on Facebook.

[857] He's like, you know what I mean?

[858] He's a very avid hunter.

[859] He's a very avid hunter.

[860] And never once in his life, I wish he was here because I'd like to ask him this question.

[861] Never once in his life has he confused the act of farming.

[862] organic sheep with the act of hunting wild elk.

[863] It's not confusing to him.

[864] No. But is it confusing when you fished in a stockpun?

[865] Did you have a good hunting year?

[866] He'd be like, so far he got an elk with his bow, a national forest land.

[867] He got an antelope with his bow.

[868] And he would never be like, oh, and I got 10 lambs in my yard.

[869] Yeah.

[870] It's just like, I don't get it.

[871] It's just so weird to me that I feel like we talked about this with Doug Duren, too.

[872] Doug Duren has to go out now and then and kill cattle on his farm.

[873] He doesn't like get like gussied up in camo and get like a bunch of pink accents and like put pink accents all over his gun and go out.

[874] Pink accents?

[875] He's not a girl.

[876] And go out and like shoot the cows on his property.

[877] Right.

[878] He'd be like, no, I went and shot my cow.

[879] Right.

[880] He wouldn't make a TV show where he's like acting like he's like he's.

[881] He's hunting his cows.

[882] But his fence is only, you know, 20 yards, whereas Ted Nugent's fence is 300 acres.

[883] Yeah, I can't really speak to it because I'd have to just go see it.

[884] Right.

[885] No, I haven't seen it.

[886] You know, you only see it on the show.

[887] You see him, he takes around one of those little ATV vehicles, you know, little things, and drives around on his beautiful piece of property.

[888] It's kind of a cool way to acquire your meat.

[889] You know, if you have all these animals, 100 % guaranteed there's animals there.

[890] You know, it's not like there's a big search, you know, you're like, fuck, you know, let's keep hiking, you know.

[891] But it's so weird because if my brother all of a sudden told me the one who raises sheep, and Alex, like, he, I want to explain the sheep thing a little bit better.

[892] This might be interesting to your viewers, your listeners.

[893] He has pack llamas, okay?

[894] He uses llamas.

[895] He, like, hunts bat country for elk, right?

[896] Hunts very remote areas, and elk or bikini hunts by himself.

[897] so he keeps llamas to carry his elk meat so he'll go in the mountains with his bow and he's going there for a long time sometimes and when he kills an elk he can put a whole bull on three llamas and pack the elk out of the mountains he hunts some areas where he's nine miles from a trailhead and he did that because he fucked his back up carrying it out himself carrying elk meat yeah that's when he first got motivated to buy llamas now because he has llamas.

[898] He bought irrigated pasture to keep the llamas on.

[899] It's flood irrigated.

[900] But he's gone a lot.

[901] So to incentivize his buddies to come over and check on his llamas and make sure everything's cool, he lets them run sheep with the llamas.

[902] So they come over to watch to check on their sheep, thereby checking on his llamas.

[903] Now, if he told me one day, if all of a sudden he said, hey, man, let's get all done up, in our camo and i'm going to put a blind out i'm going to put a blind out with the sheep and let's sit in there and shoot arrows at the sheep right i would just think it was weird yeah it's not like it's not like i think there's like moral stuff right you we have things in our lives that are just like moral obligations i feel like you have like a moral obligation to take care of your children i think if you're not taking care of your children i think you're like That's an immoral move.

[904] For my brother to go out and decide that he wanted to shoot his bow at the sheep in his pasture would just strike me as just strange.

[905] Yeah, it is definitely strange.

[906] But is it strange to stock a pond with fish?

[907] No. You have a small pond.

[908] No, in fact, in fact, his neighbor just dug a big fish pond.

[909] Right, but isn't that strange?

[910] It's the hierarchy.

[911] Oh, the hierarchy of animals.

[912] Yeah.

[913] Yeah.

[914] It's just, I can't explain it.

[915] You one time posed something to me that still troubles me now.

[916] We were talking about baiting.

[917] When I was a kid, we baited deer.

[918] I now realized that we would have been a hell of a lot better deer hunting had we not gotten involved in that.

[919] But that was just how, when I was a kid, we'd go to this town, Grant, Michigan.

[920] They raised a lot of carrots in Grant Michigan, and you could buy, they'd size the carrots and sort the carrots, and you could fill the back of a pickup truck.

[921] It seems outlandish now.

[922] I'm 40 years old, and this was when I was 12.

[923] You could fill, they would fill your truck with carrots for $5.

[924] Wow.

[925] I mean, the bed of a pickup.

[926] That's amazing.

[927] Yeah.

[928] The bed of a pickup would be full of carrots for five bucks.

[929] How the fuck did carrot farmers make any money?

[930] I never understood it.

[931] There was a time when they were harvesting, you'd go down there, and they would just, you'd pull up under a grain hopper type thing, and it'd fill your truck with carrots.

[932] All of a sudden, I want a carrot.

[933] We'd sit in the back, dude.

[934] We'd sit in the back eating carrots, man. You'd find carrots, like, all that looked like, you could find, carrots that look like humans you can find carrots the genitalia i mean just carrots are crazy like i have carrots in my garden now and you pull up the carrots your eyes you expect that you're going to pull up a thing that looks like a carrot from the store right one in ten yeah one in ten most of them are like three -legged carrots so they had it down a little better than i do and they had better carrots but yeah we'd get all these rejected carrots we'd have a snow shovel and we would go out to areas we hunted and we would put down a canvas tarp I can picture the tarp right now.

[935] We'd lay down a canvas tarp and you'd snow shovel carrots out of the back of the truck onto the tarp or into what's known as a Duluth pack, a big canvas leather strap backpack.

[936] And we would hike, either drag the carrots on the tarp if possible, or load them in backpacks and hike them back into the intersections of deer trails typically, where two big deer trails would come together and you dump the carrots out.

[937] And then you do this a week before season and then you'd hunt you'd sit in your tree stand with your boat you're picking an area the deer frequent anyways you're picking like a like i said usually typically like a confluence of a couple good deer trails or a area where deer might stage up in the evening before going out into ag fields to feed you know they kind of will mill around a little bit oftentimes before committing to a field at nighttime you'd set them up in these areas um the problem is as soon as you put down the carrots.

[938] You'd be creating problems for yourself because they would start to associate the carrots with hunters.

[939] Like they knew trouble was brewing.

[940] Your smells around you got deer, you know, dough can be I mean, they can get really old, but let's just be realistic.

[941] And you got all kinds of deer doughs around that are five, six, seven years old.

[942] You accumulate a lot of knowledge in that time.

[943] So you put the carrots down, you're kind of screwing yourself.

[944] But you would get shots at young deer that would come in to hit the carrots.

[945] So I grew up hunting bait.

[946] Now I look at it and I go like, man, I would have learned a hell of a lot more about deer and a lot more about deer hunting early on if I hadn't gotten, if I hadn't been involved in that practice.

[947] I now look back, I'm like, man, that I miss a lot of chances to get educated about what deer need and how to actually find deer.

[948] Instead of trying to manipulate their movement patterns, you know so now i don't hunt like i don't hunt bait anymore i'm not even kind of interested in hunting bait and i was explaining this to you this is a long -ass story i was explaining this to you because you were like well why is it okay to use bait when you're fishing yeah i don't know it is a weird why is it i just i wish i could explain it i don't know it's more sporting in my mind to use and i hate that word no i don't hate that word no i don't hate that It's more sporting in my mind to catch a fish with bait than it is to catch them in a sane, a beach same.

[949] Don't you hate that argument, though, that people say, you're a real man. Why don't you go fucking fight that animal one -on -one?

[950] Why don't you with a sniper rifle?

[951] Yeah.

[952] You're sitting around with a rifle shooting it?

[953] That's silly.

[954] Why don't you go hit it with a rock?

[955] Why don't you use your bare hands?

[956] Crazy horse had a rifle.

[957] Did he?

[958] Well, he's an Indian.

[959] I'm saying, like, for, indigenous or whatever.

[960] People have, yeah, I'm just saying like if someone was posing that argument to me, I would point out how people that hunt for their food have always gravitated toward technology.

[961] And if you look at our progression from rocks to hafted rocks, to addle -addles, to bow equipment, to flint locks, to percussion cap, to paper cartridge, to write.

[962] on down the line, I'm not doing anything that revolutionary by using what an effective means.

[963] It's kind of a new idea.

[964] It's a new idea.

[965] Yeah, but it's not interesting to me. I'm talking about interest.

[966] I like knowing about animals.

[967] I'm not interested in.

[968] Let's take the area where I have to hunt bears.

[969] I hunt bears in a coastal area.

[970] And it's at a northern latitude.

[971] There's a lot of snow.

[972] there but because of maritime influences you know it's warm enough down around the water where the snow's melted off in the water so when i go to hunt bears in the spring 90 % of the landmass is covered in snow and is of little use to a bear okay when they come out of hibernation they're going down to the waterfront because on the waterfront they're going to find beach rye and some other grasses they like to eat they're going to find blue mossy and they like to eat crabs under rocks and logs.

[973] So I know about muscle beds and grass flats where bears are going to go to all the time.

[974] I can tell you when we go out at night, I can tell you, I'll be like, we'll see more than one, probably less than five.

[975] And I'll tell you, and I know some muscle beds where some are going to show up.

[976] I like that.

[977] I don't like, I've never done a baited bear hunt.

[978] I have no desire to do a baited bear hunt.

[979] Does that mean it's super hard to hunt bears where I hunt bears?

[980] I can't tell you that it's super hard to hunt bears there.

[981] Because once you learn the rhythms of the land, what they want, why they're coming there, what they're coming to get, it becomes easier and easier the more you understand bears and the more you understand why bears do what they do.

[982] But I like having that knowledge.

[983] But I can't say it's like super hard.

[984] It's not super hard.

[985] Once you know it, it's pretty easy.

[986] So when I say I don't want to go hunt bears over bait personally, I'm not saying, oh, because it's so easy.

[987] I'm just not of interest to me. It's like it's not interesting to me personally as a hunter that bears will come to donuts if you put them out in the woods.

[988] That's not an interesting phenomenon.

[989] What's interesting to me is they like muscle beds.

[990] Like for whatever reason I find that interesting.

[991] When I lived in Michigan, my brothers, each drew a black bear.

[992] of Michigan.

[993] You could live your whole life in Michigan, which has a lot of bears in the north and never lay eyes on a bear because of the landscape's flat and it's thick.

[994] If you want to hunt a bear there, you're going to either have to use dogs, or you're going to have to use bait because that's the way the landscape is.

[995] So when they drew bear tags, I helped them run baits.

[996] I helped them collect bait.

[997] We shot carp and all kinds of stuff and froze bait and trapped beavers and baited bears for them.

[998] It was the only way to do it.

[999] I had a blast doing it.

[1000] But right now and No, it's not interesting to me. Well, in Alberta, they have two places that they hunt bears.

[1001] They hunt bears over bait in the spring.

[1002] And then in the fall, they go to these open fields where they find blueberries.

[1003] And the open fields is rifle hunting most of the time.

[1004] And then in the bates, they most of the time use archery.

[1005] Yeah.

[1006] Because you can bring them in close and figure out what size they are, not kill sals of cubs.

[1007] I understand it, man. No, but I understand what you're saying, too, it makes total sense because what you're doing is you're going to places where they would be, no matter what, without human influence whatsoever.

[1008] They would be there for those muscles.

[1009] They'd be there for those grasses.

[1010] And so you are, you're experiencing the actual natural progression of them waking up from their hibernation and heading down to feed.

[1011] You're just going where you know there will be.

[1012] Yeah.

[1013] And it's not, there's no donuts.

[1014] There's no cookies.

[1015] There's no bullshit.

[1016] no fucking big blue jugs that are set out for them to paw it and try to get their oats out of.

[1017] Yeah, there's something less cool about that.

[1018] Like elk hunting, when elk hunting in Colorado or over here in Tahone Ranch, when you're out there, those animals would be there whether you exist or not.

[1019] Yeah, they're out doing elk type stuff.

[1020] They're out breeding and eating, and you're just trying to find them, locate them, and then put a stalk on one and get one.

[1021] that's a pure way of doing it for sure but then there's people that would argue you know like the argument of well you're using a rifle how hard could it be you know and then there's other also people would say well you know I prefer to hunt with a bow because it's more difficult like what you're talking about it's more difficult but then there's also people that were say well if you hunt with a bow you have more of a chance of wounding an animal and not killing it yeah and you should use a rifle I mean you're not going to make everybody happy no no the difficult argument is it gets really circular and hard to pin down because if you say you know I don't I hunt with a compound bow because it's more it's harder than hunting with a rifle then you have to go okay well then by extension hunt with a recurve and if you're going to do that you should hunt with a long bow and then if you're going to do that you should hunt with an addalattle which is certainly more difficult than a long what the fuck's an addleattle like a throwing board with the dart Oh, Jesus.

[1022] Yeah, predated the bow.

[1023] The bow's only, like here on this continent, you know, the bow's only been around for people debate it, but somewhere between 4 and 6 ,000 years.

[1024] So you had 10 ,000 years of human history or more here where they were hunting with Adelattles.

[1025] I bet they were skinny as fuck.

[1026] Yeah, guys hunting woolly mammoths.

[1027] They weren't hunting woolly mammals with boes.

[1028] Wow.

[1029] They're hunting with Adelattles.

[1030] So that's that thing where you put the spear on it and, you know, it's got like a cup and then you throw it like that.

[1031] You put a couple fingers in there or some kind of.

[1032] on a holding board and you fling a spear.

[1033] It makes your arm.

[1034] Yeah.

[1035] Jamie, on the ball.

[1036] It's just, it makes, it's an extension of your arm.

[1037] It makes your arm essentially longer.

[1038] You know when you go to people to a dog park and they're hucking tennis balls of that little.

[1039] Yeah.

[1040] Same thing.

[1041] It's like an addalattle principle.

[1042] Oh, right.

[1043] So, yeah, there was, for, you know, 10 ,000 years, people hunted here with Adelattles.

[1044] How accurate are those things, though?

[1045] I've seen guys get good, man. Really?

[1046] Yeah, I've seen guys get good.

[1047] How much distance can get?

[1048] 15, 20 yards?

[1049] Top.

[1050] tops.

[1051] Yeah, I'm sure some guy like, oh, I do -da -da, but yeah, guys that kill stuff with Adel Adel's, kill stuff at Adelis.

[1052] So is that a thing that's going on right now?

[1053] Like, people are doing that?

[1054] Yeah, but the problem is there's, that's why guys that hunt with Adaladles will tend to hunt wild pigs or other things like that because most places you can't use them.

[1055] Oh, okay, so you can do it with wild pigs because they're considered a nuisance animal.

[1056] In some areas, you can use all their means to kill them, but in most states, they don't, all states have somewhere they spell out legal method of take it is we looked into this once I think that in Alaska I think for the most part like yeah you could hunt caribou with an addle -addle I could be wrong don't know and go out and do it because of that but I remember looking at the way it's worded and I think you could hunt caribou with an addal -a -lattle but states spell out legal method of take in exquisite detail for instance hunting waterfowl which is waterfowls federally regulated and state regulation because they're migratory they move across state lines so the fed step in to try to make sure the states aren't taking more than their equal share of their resource now they'll spell out the diameter or bore of the shotgun you're allowed to use you can't use an eight gauge you know and so and then they'll spell out you can't use you can't use anything bigger than a 10 and you can't use anything smaller than whatever you know 410 or something less than that or not allowed to use a 410 so they'll spell out in a exquisite detail what you can and can't do for legal methods.

[1057] to take.

[1058] So a lot of what I'm saying about if you want to go back, back, back, back in time to have things get more and more and more difficult, it's hypothetical because the guy that is doing, as far as weapon choice, the most difficult thing you can legally do for general big game hunting in the U .S. for a weapon choice would be that you'd hunt with a longbow.

[1059] Because you're still legal.

[1060] It's still a legal method to take for most archery seasons to hunt with a longboat.

[1061] So if you want to cripple yourself or handicap, I don't want to say cripple.

[1062] If you want to handicap yourself equipment -wise, the guy who uses a long bow is going way back.

[1063] Now, I recently looked at an ad where a guy is getting out of a helicopter in space age dress with a long bow.

[1064] So we all, it's a hunting clothes ad, okay?

[1065] So we all find our little ways of mental masturbation.

[1066] And this isn't just something that happened.

[1067] This is like an image that they thought is cooler than hell.

[1068] They're like, it's so cool, it'll be the front of the catalog is climbing out of a helicopter with a longbow.

[1069] So we occupy the, and in the U .S., for the most part, like in Alaska, for instance, you can't hunt with a helicopter.

[1070] You can't use the helicopter to supply a hunting camp.

[1071] You can't scout for animals from a helicopter.

[1072] We decided it's just not fair to use health.

[1073] helicopters because you can land them anywhere you want and you can't hunt for the most part you can't hunt and fly on the same day just not fair but here's like a long bow and a chopper so we all come up with our ways of of finding comfort yeah you know our ways of finding that right mix of challenge not challenge i heard a guy say people have really struggled to define fair chase and i heard someone recently.

[1074] I don't think it's a new thing, but I heard it recently, where he was saying that in fair chase, the animal has a better than 50 % chance of escape or something to that effect.

[1075] My brother's a statistician.

[1076] He's an ecologist, but he does a, he specializes in, like, statistical modeling.

[1077] And I asked him what he thought of a statement like that, and he couldn't even find the language to begin telling me how stupid that was.

[1078] that it has a 50 % chance to escape like under what requirements right or like like he like it made his head like smoke come out of his ears when he heard that but what the guy's trying to get at is this idea that you have an an un that there's an unknown element right there's an not guaranteed success there's not guarantee when my brother goes out to shoot his sheep it's 100 % yeah that it's time to shoot the sheep right now Now, this is the same guy that recently spent 21 days hunting elk with his bow on national forest land before he finally got a bull.

[1079] And he's a very good elk hunter.

[1080] He uses a recurve, though.

[1081] No, no, hunts with a compound bow.

[1082] Which brother?

[1083] Matt.

[1084] So does Danny use a recurve?

[1085] Or did Matt...

[1086] He shoots a recurve, but he generally holds with a rifle.

[1087] Did Matt decide at one point in time he was going to use only a recurve?

[1088] No, I don't think...

[1089] the one that would Danny is more and more interested in hunting with his recurve he does hunt with his recurper but he all I mean he just he drew the same copper river buffalo tag that I drew in 2004 and two days ago he got a buffalo up there and he shot it he got it with his right so did he go by himself for 21 days my brother man yeah yeah wow and it was a couple different trips added up 21 days so it was just trying to locate the right bull or trying to locate any bull just hunting man a bull yeah but he hunts in a very he hunts in the area where it's about is the herd when we started hunting that area this is in Yellowstone it's kind of funny now looking back at the return to this whole wolf thing it's like you know the greater Yellowstone ecosystem okay the GYE let's say that the area surrounding Yellowstone in Wyoming and Montana we started hunting that area in 97 now it seems like this like you know it's prophetic the right word now it's like this watershed moment because it's right when wolves right it's right around the reintroduction of the wolf there's now less than half as many elk in that area as there were the time we started hunting it but he's way more than twice is good at hunting them now so how he's grown and developed as an elk hunter he has a higher success right now hunting half as many elk as we used to hunt that's fascinating so he's bound to that with knowledge yeah because he just learned it he's one of the great he's one of the best hunters that I know and it's not because of any particular thing, it's just a tenacity thing he's tenacious Well, speaking of tenacity you, that's one of your qualities as well and one of the things that I found fucking unbelievably ridiculous about your show was when you made a decoy of a grouse Yeah And you tried to figure out whether or not You had someone make a read I mean a grouse for people that don't know It's a very small bird A blue grouse though bluegrass is a big small bird well big like what is it half found is it even no no i mean a dove's almost a half pound no how much the way a few pounds oh it does weigh a few pounds okay so a football size how big is it yeah the body but i mean but yeah that's a decent size it's big you know what it'd be if you plucked one out it'd be like a not fat cornish game hen okay so a very small chicken like you have you seen my chickens i got some really some of them we've got we've got a couple really tiny chickens.

[1090] Yeah, but they're like a sinewy.

[1091] Blue Grouse is a sinewy bird.

[1092] Okay, you know what?

[1093] They're not as heavy as a pheasant, let's say.

[1094] Okay.

[1095] They're not as heavy as a cock pheasant.

[1096] But meanwhile, you spent fucking days trying to figure out how to more effectively hunt this one little thing.

[1097] Yeah.

[1098] I became obsessed with, like I used that word with such hesitation, man. Obsessed?

[1099] Yeah.

[1100] But no, it's a good word.

[1101] because we used to fully concentrate upon yeah so there's this bird called the blue grouse now blue grouse people used to know blue grouse is dusky grouse and sooty grouse and it's the it's then for a long time they lumped them together as blue grouse and then in a decade ago or sometime maybe 97 or sometime around there no no I'm sorry 2007 the ornithological society realize that there is a difference between the different species, the different types of blue grouse, and they re -split them, or they suggested that they'd be resplit into sodies and duskies.

[1102] So you have dusky grouse in the interior mountain ranges and city grouse from the coastal ranges.

[1103] And there's a normal bird.

[1104] People call them fools, hens, and they call them, like, dumb birds and all this kind of stuff because they don't, when they think of the things that they're afraid of, they're just not afraid of people.

[1105] They don't have much exposure to people.

[1106] They live in places where most people don't go.

[1107] So when a predator approaches, when a human approach, what they typically want to do is just jump into a tree.

[1108] They want to get off the ground so they can't get nabbed by a bobcat or a fox or a coyote.

[1109] And they get under some limbs in a tree so that the avian predators can't smack them.

[1110] And then people walk up and there's this bird sitting in the tree and they shoot the bird.

[1111] They're like, oh, that bird's stupid.

[1112] when in fact the bird's not the bird has his way of surviving his typical threats and it is having adjusted to human predation because there's just so little of it on them we used to hunt bears black bears in the spring on avalanche slides when the mountains are all snowy you get avalanche slides that are swept clean of snow and those areas are the first to green up because the snow slid off and it doesn't need to melt off and so when bears come out of hibernation they'll come and find those avalanche shoots and feed on them.

[1113] And we used to sit just at the base of an avalanche slide all day waiting for bears to come out.

[1114] And doing this now and then in the spring you'd hear this noise that would go who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, and I can never forget the hell it was.

[1115] Because I was brought up in Michigan where there aren't these grouse don't live.

[1116] Eventually realized that it's a blue grouse.

[1117] And that's their mating call in the spring, is that who, it's haunting.

[1118] What's haunting about is you can't tell what direction it really came.

[1119] from.

[1120] A couple years ago, I was out on Revella Island or Revelaegado Island in southeast Alaska, and we were messing around there one day.

[1121] We got up on this big high ridge, and I could hear five or six of these things going off.

[1122] And I just thought, man, we'd come back here and pound them.

[1123] Because Alaska is the only place you can hunt these birds in the spring.

[1124] They called the spring hooter season.

[1125] I thought it'd just be madder going up there and hearing it and walking down and getting it.

[1126] So we even talked about doing an episode.

[1127] It was 22 minutes long with no cuts.

[1128] It would just play straight time.

[1129] From the time you heard one to the time you shot it, time it out so we would just run a continuous loop of film.

[1130] Now, we went out and started looking for the first bird in about like 10 hours into trying to find the first bird.

[1131] We realized you were not going to do that.

[1132] Can't find them.

[1133] But you can.

[1134] I learned how eventually.

[1135] very difficult to find them because it's just a ventriloquist sound.

[1136] It's just like you can't locate the sound.

[1137] I had a guy as a game call company where I knew some guys called Down and Dirty Game Calls, and I sent them a bunch of sound recordings that are on the Cornell University website.

[1138] They have this, like, a little Macaulay Library of Bird sounds.

[1139] I sent them some of the sounds that the females make, and the females making noise.

[1140] it sounds like it's almost like and they made me a call that sounds like that and I played the other, the male sound, the woo -woo sound to musician friends and people and I've been like, what in the world would make that sound and people talked about this Australian instrument that might, the diggerie do?

[1141] Yeah, they said that might, you could maybe use that.

[1142] We tried beer bottles, all kinds of stuff.

[1143] Like blowing over the top?

[1144] Yeah, could never make a satisfactory sound but I got to where I was making a female sound.

[1145] And then this guy I know in Utah named Shad Brunson got me a female blue grouse.

[1146] And I had to go to a taxidermist named Colton in Montana, and he stuffed that blue grouse for me, just a real rudimentary stuff job.

[1147] And I took that thing out, and I would hear where I could hear a bird.

[1148] But I couldn't tell where I was hearing it from, but I'd get where I kind of knew I was in the area he was in.

[1149] and set that decoy out, the hen, and then make the call, like attending call that they make to their young.

[1150] And nothing.

[1151] Nothing.

[1152] They didn't give a shit.

[1153] Couldn't call them in.

[1154] Yeah, and man, it was just really frustrating.

[1155] And then I wound up finding, I was so pissed about how this was going and so, like, baffled that I couldn't find these birds.

[1156] I called my brother who put me in touch with a buddy of his, who put me in touch with a buddy of his, who knew a guy, who knew a lady, who was very, very good at finding blue grouse.

[1157] And she's out of Juneau, Alaska.

[1158] And I went hunting with her, and we were standing under a grouse in a tree by 9 .30 in the morning the first day, after spending four days and found a bird.

[1159] one bird yeah she and I we were together three days I think we found 15 of them she just knew how to find them when she hears that noise she's hearing something that I don't hear wow well that's the tenacity I'm talking about yeah she's got it bad barb is a tenacious tenacious hunter you know my older brother who I keep talking about he's got this term he's talks about people having gur gur gur like yeah and like he's got a lot of gur when it comes to hunting.

[1160] I got a lot of gur.

[1161] That's my only thing.

[1162] I'm not actually, like, I'm not a bad hunter.

[1163] I'm definitely not a good hunter.

[1164] But what I have going for me is...

[1165] You're a very good hunter.

[1166] What I have going for me is I'd like to stick with it.

[1167] Yeah.

[1168] Well, how could you possibly say you're not a good hunter?

[1169] Because sometimes I go out with guys who are just so good.

[1170] Just good.

[1171] But are they good at a specific type of hunting?

[1172] Yeah, they get really good at specific things.

[1173] You're a broad spectrum guy.

[1174] Yeah, no, I'm a good generalist.

[1175] I'm a good generalist.

[1176] But then I'll go out with guys who just know their stuff, man, you know?

[1177] And it's a little bit, it's almost a little bit shocking when I'm with someone who really knows what they're doing.

[1178] And it just, yeah.

[1179] Well, doesn't that make sense to him?

[1180] If you're going out with a guy who only hunts mule deer in Utah.

[1181] And this guy just patterns mule deer every year.

[1182] He knows all the trails.

[1183] He spends time in the spring.

[1184] like searching for them he spots them it keeps an eye on them he's watching them he's getting ready for the season to open up i mean that guy is obviously going to have a greater database of information about mule deer than a guy like you just got back from bolivia eating a monkey and then you you know you arrive and uh you did eat a monkey yeah that's i want to talk to you about that too that was that was a crazy fucking episode um that's a fascinating episode too because you're talking about like ancient stuff and ancient methods and and the different between people that are eating or existing primarily just they're so assisting hunting i mean they're not there's no sport involved in what they're doing at all they're just trying to survive yeah man they they loved uh well this was i wanted to point out real quick uh one guy that i one guy that i hunt with it's just like good and you know i'm the remi oh yeah yeah remi warrens very like like i would you know i don't use this word very often to describe of hunters.

[1185] He was what I would call a talented hunter, like has talent.

[1186] Like, it's just, he gets it, you know.

[1187] Um, so we were down in Bolivia.

[1188] Have I not, we not, I haven't been on your podcast talking about this?

[1189] I don't believe so.

[1190] I don't think you've been on the podcast since you got back from Bolivia.

[1191] Have you?

[1192] I don't think, I may, I don't think so.

[1193] So we down in bolivia we went down there to go up a river the cassaree river with these and travel with the chimane which is an autonomous indigenous group in bolivia um you might a way to approach thinking about it or to think about the reservation system that we have here in the u .s where there's you know a fair bit of autonomy on reservations like they might be able to have a casino you know other stuff that violates state law because they're a, you know, like a sort of a nation within a nation.

[1194] And Bolivia had these huge areas of jungle that are autonomous zones, and we were in, like, the Chmone area.

[1195] So they're self -governing.

[1196] We went and traveled up a river, just doing like a basic river trip.

[1197] At the surface level, we were going down there to fish, a type of fish called drado.

[1198] But the main thing I was interested in was just traveling with and hunting with these guys.

[1199] and they hunt with bows for the most part.

[1200] Firearms are starting to come into their area, but they hunt fish with bows, homemade bows, and they hunt birds with bows, and they do some big game hunting with bows.

[1201] But 90 % of their protein comes out of the river in the form of fish, and they poison fish with a plant.

[1202] So we went out, we went into a village, and they were cultivating one of these, plants there's a handful of plants down there it does like we use a fish poison here in the u .s when we're trying to get rid of invasives or whatever called rotan rotan's a root is derived from a root of a south american plant and uh these guys had leaf they had a tree that bore just like a green waxy leaf and you'd pound that into a pulp and you'd go out and they go out and do a river and they've tried to find a little channel like an isolated channel of a river or a pool that doesn't have a lot of current coming into it, and they'll pulp that plant and put it into a woven bag and just go out in the water and stir the pulped up leaves in there, and pretty soon all the fish come up and the fish are suffocating.

[1203] It somehow affects the fish's ability to pull oxygen from the water.

[1204] So the fish come up, and they're gasping for air at the surface, and then they just shoot the fish with their bows.

[1205] They do some netting for fish, but most of it's bohun, and I fell in with a couple older guys there and we did some hunting and one of these guys had only ever hunted with a bow but a year earlier he'd gone into some town and somehow got a Russian -made 16 -gauge single shot shotgun that was it was held together with wire I was nervous about being around him when this gun went off and they like to hunt at night because now they have flashlights so they got flashlights and they got a shotgun and they got their bows and we would they would wait till dusk and then we would head off into the jungle and these guys only uh they speak their native language they know teeny bit of Spanish but they speak chimane I would go out with them and I would have no idea what they're talking about and we would leave at dusk and just go into the jungle and the noise of the jungle at night's just deafening if you never experienced I mean it's It's like, it's to the point where, I mean, have you ever been, like, out in a windy area for a long time where you start to feel like it's, like, affecting your sanity or affecting your ability to think clearly, you know, or when you're on, like, small aircraft, the engine noise, you don't realize how agitated it's making you until you get away from it, and all of a sudden it feels like relaxing in some way.

[1206] The noise of the jungle is so loud, it's almost like that at night with the bugs and stuff going off.

[1207] And we go out into the jungle, and I knew from going into it that their favorite food, even though they drive 90 % of their protein from the river, their favorite food is spider monkey.

[1208] Their second favorite food's howler monkey.

[1209] And before it even gets dark out, we go down on this trail for a while through the jungle, and they come to a date tree, and dates will fruit periodically throughout the year.

[1210] And, you know, you're getting closer to the equator there, so there's not like, you don't have the seasonality.

[1211] as much so plants will fruit all the time rather than just in the summertime and they get this date tree and his date tree's fruiting and he's looking at these dates on the ground and he finds some shit that I now realize it's most been monkey shit and they got real interesting in what was going on up above us and pretty soon he sees this holler monkey starts going through the tree tops and he shoots it down out of the tree with that shotgun he had with him and first thing he does he takes the tail and cuts the tail off the monkey the tip of the monkey's tail and buries it in the ground i couldn't even ask him why he was doing this but later i learned it's you do that so the next monkey you kill he doesn't get hung up in the tree by his tail then just like a belief you know then he cut some bark off a tree and makes a little harness so he can carry the monkey over his cross his chest so he's just got the monkey monkey slung on them like a baby carrier and uh we just head off in the jungle and hunt for several hours at night and then the next day where we got back and they uh gutted the monkey out and kept all the intestines and everything out of that monkey and eventually they burned the hair off it and trust it like how you'd trust a turkey and smoked it over a fire and i did not want to eat a monkey like it did not want to eat a primate you know but at that point I'd been out with them and you know I was going to eat it but it was very difficult for me to enjoy psychologically I had the same problem being in Vietnam and being served domestic dog where I ate I ate domestic dog seven nights in a row and just was never people go there what did it taste like I was like I can't even tell you it was like something I would get so hot like my body would feel so hot eating that just like it's like just this like wrongness well it's like because of nerves yeah man I could tell what it tastes like psychological heat yeah very hard to eat the monkey if I could say what it tastes like eating that monkey it tastes like if you took steel cable and put liquid smoke on it they loved it why do they what will they have a specific preference they like howler over spider or spider over howler which one is it like spiders then red hollers now why a couple nights later we're coming back from fishing one night.

[1212] And we had a giant catfish with us and a handful other fish with us.

[1213] And we're coming back through the jungle and it's just getting, starting to come on to darkness.

[1214] And they see another kind of monkey.

[1215] I can't remember like a Coochee or Ciche or something.

[1216] That's not what they call it in their language.

[1217] But another kind of monkey, and I'm like, surely they're going to go after this monkey.

[1218] No interest in that monkey.

[1219] Not a good one.

[1220] the same night they got the Red Howler Monkey we go down the trail and it's just getting dark and I see a possum same marsupial same possum we have here and I'm like surely these guys are going to want that if they'll eat a damn monkey they're going to want a possum people in the U .S. eat possums they look at that thing and just walk by like it doesn't even exist and later I was able to ask them by asking someone who speaks some Spanish he was able to so it was like a three -way translation I was like, why didn't you guys want the possum?

[1221] And he explained to me that you'd only eat a possum if you were real hungry.

[1222] But meanwhile, they're after monkey.

[1223] And when they get a monkey, it's a party.

[1224] A party?

[1225] Yeah.

[1226] Everybody comes and they're real excited.

[1227] And the thing I say in the show, we did a whole three -part series about Bolivia and the Chimane.

[1228] But the thing I say in the show, when we're talking about this, is think of the, there's only two things.

[1229] things I know about that get the kind of enthusiasm from a culinary perspective in the U .S. to get the kind of enthusiasm that you guys had from monkeys.

[1230] It would be someone who has homegrown tomatoes and morel mushrooms are the only things I know about that people have that level of love for.

[1231] They were more excited about eating that red holler monkey than you've ever been about eating anything you ever ate, I promise you.

[1232] And they eat them on a regular basis.

[1233] No. They hadn't got, they had, they rarely go up to this area.

[1234] And that's one of the reasons they like to go up to this area is because you can get monkeys.

[1235] They hadn't had a monkey for eight months, I think.

[1236] I remember, I think it was eight months they had at those last time they had gone into an area where they would find the monkeys.

[1237] So did you specifically ask them to go to this area where the monkeys were?

[1238] No, we're just going to an area that's like the happy hunting grounds.

[1239] Wow.

[1240] A lot of it.

[1241] They were very excited to go.

[1242] and it was several days up river.

[1243] It's like apocalypse now.

[1244] They're very excited to go up to this area to the area they'd like to go to to hunting fish.

[1245] So this monkey thing tastes like steel cable.

[1246] Like it was just unbelievably chilly.

[1247] You know, I've ever had a smoked turkey drumstick?

[1248] Yes.

[1249] Okay, imagine the lowest part on that smoky turkey drumstick where you're getting close to the joint.

[1250] Just pulling it off.

[1251] Yeah, that's what that monkey's like.

[1252] But I'll tell you something that's like, well, they had a baby monkey at one point.

[1253] Okay, a very young, baby monkey at one point and they just cooked it in a walk and I wasn't even offered any of that they just saved that for themselves a couple of the guys had it I remember one of them had a like a head in a bowl loving it and what's funny about it too dude was funny about it is I remember being in I remember I don't know why I'm thinking this now I did it I hunted with another like indigenous group in Guyana and I remember this guy had a shirt with Muhammad Ali on it and I was trying to ask him about he had no idea and none of them had a shirt from a pizza place he had no idea what pizza was not that they have a responsibility to know about Muhammad Ali and pizza but just saying like for them to hear that for them to hear from us be like dude it is very rare to eat a monkey you know it was just to them it was just baffling it was like they weren't like yeah I know some people don't like it you know like if you go down and someone gets you squirrel brains they're like yeah man it's kind of fucked up we eat squirrel brains like no it was just in their mind it was like their fathers grandfathers great grandfathers great grandfathers like howler monkey how would you not be excited about this like no idea of it being like globally fringe it's just so strange that you don't have their language available so it's you can't have like a real conversation about it like what is it about this that you enjoy more.

[1254] Because you guys shot a deer, too.

[1255] Yep.

[1256] But they wanted the monkey more than the deer.

[1257] They liked the deer more than the monkey, and that deer was phenomenal.

[1258] They want the deer more than the monkey.

[1259] No, no, no. They liked the monkey more than the deer.

[1260] Deer was very good.

[1261] They were very glad about the deer, but they liked the monkey more than the deer.

[1262] What do they think about your bow?

[1263] Because you brought a modern hoit compound bow.

[1264] Yeah.

[1265] I had...

[1266] Did you feel like you wanted to leave it with them?

[1267] You know...

[1268] But if you did, they wouldn't be able to get arrows for it anyway.

[1269] Yeah, there's that.

[1270] And, like, you have all these weird, uh, hanging out people, like, with people who like that, you have all these weird hangups, or at least I do, like, all this, like, colonial type guilt or something where you don't want to, I'll put it to this way.

[1271] I was bummed that that guy had that shotgun.

[1272] Really?

[1273] He's glad as hell, right?

[1274] It's the greatest thing never happened to him.

[1275] He's got a damn shotgun, right?

[1276] He couldn't be happier.

[1277] but I was like, man, you know, I just wish you didn't have that shotgun, and you started to hunt with your boat.

[1278] So it's like me, you're exercising some kind of weird, I don't want to call it, like, racism, it's not racism, it's something, it's just like some kind of, like, the new colonialism.

[1279] There's a Puritan aspect of it, a pure, pure, like, for instance, there's these guys down there, there's these Bolivians who are from the urban area down there, like of Europe, like, of mixed European indigenous ancestry.

[1280] and they're very like in bolivia the ruling class the urban people are very different than the indigenous people okay there is they have it i don't want to say categorically but there's a view of the indigenous people that would have seemed more like the 1870s here in the u .s in some circles the way they view the backwardness of the indigenous people and trying to bring out missionaries to you know help them find religion and get them to settle down and stop being nomadic and you know There's all this kind of stuff that we were having that conversation 150 years ago here.

[1281] There's these guys that are doing these trips, who we orchestrated our trip through, who are trying to introduce these guys to, they're trying to get these guys hip to the idea of not eating one of their favorite fish, which is the Dorado, because rich white guys will pay a lot of money to come down and catch Dorado.

[1282] That was kind of our end to go down here was to go up to this area where they catch Dorado.

[1283] So they're trying to sell these dudes.

[1284] on not messing with Dorado I was bummed out about that like I hated seeing that because like that's their favorite fish man you're trying to tell them that now we want to tell them to not eat their favorite fish because guys like me might want to come down and catch the thing and it's not even going to have a negative implication ramification anyways you're not going to like over harvest them with bows and arrows you know right but it's just like this weird thing so yeah I didn't like that the guy had the shotgun even though he was glad about the shotgun I had my bow and when I brought my bow down that my main goal and have them a bow you're not going to bring a firearm down there like they can't have firearms not supposed to have firearms so I wasn't going to bring a firearm I would never be able to get it in there anyways it'd probably been very bad to bring it um but I could bring a bow no problem my main goal in bringing the bow was that I would have like some uh that I would establish some credibility with them and it did when I we got up and I was shooting their bows and doing some fishing with their equipment and stuff When I got out my bow, they were like, yeah, very, very surprised by a compound bow.

[1285] Well, they see how fast the arrow shoots, right?

[1286] They couldn't believe it.

[1287] A lot of them wouldn't, they didn't want to shoot it.

[1288] Some of them wanted to shoot it.

[1289] A lot of them were, like, just deeply, not impressed me, but it's impressed by the technology.

[1290] Did you let them shoot it?

[1291] Yeah, I let a couple of them shoot it.

[1292] Did they use a wrist release?

[1293] Oh, yeah, but it was just like they'd, you know, it's hard to keep them from dry firing.

[1294] I mean, it's just like, because you can't tell.

[1295] Like, I can't explain to him.

[1296] So you're trying to demonstrate things.

[1297] Someone was going to get hurt shooting the bow.

[1298] Right.

[1299] You know, these weren't like, and it was funny is these guys had beat my ass all over town.

[1300] A lot of them couldn't come close to pulling the bow back.

[1301] That's bizarre.

[1302] How heavy is the bow?

[1303] 70.

[1304] They couldn't pull it back.

[1305] No, because you develop a muscle for pulling those bows back.

[1306] And these guys beat my ass.

[1307] They couldn't believe how hard that bow was to pull back.

[1308] And I just want to be like, it's just, I just can pull it because I pull bows, you know.

[1309] Hmm.

[1310] It's hard.

[1311] Yeah.

[1312] It's like they had a, I'm sure if they would have spent a day at it, they would have gotten the pull down.

[1313] It's just different.

[1314] They're like going about how they pull their long bows.

[1315] Right, right.

[1316] It's just a different kind of thing, you know.

[1317] Yeah, their bows didn't seem very strong.

[1318] No, not at all.

[1319] Not at all.

[1320] So it's just about, and they had really long arrows, too, which is very strange.

[1321] Yeah, they were super long arrows, and they would carry three kinds of tips.

[1322] They carry a big game tip, a bird tip, and a fish tip.

[1323] So every guy's got three arrows with his bow.

[1324] But they love that bow, but I wound up being, I just really wanted to be able to hang out of them and have them not, like, stop.

[1325] Like, when I would walk up into them, where they'd be standing around eating some fish around their fire, and I would walk up and they'd all quit eating.

[1326] And I eventually got where we were comfortable together.

[1327] Like, they would kind of show me stuff, and they kind of, you know, I don't want to say they liked me, but they sort of accepted me, and I eventually got it explained to them through actions and otherwise, that I was very interested in their food.

[1328] I was very interested in how they hunted.

[1329] I would go out into the jungle at night with them.

[1330] You know, I got stung by a bullet ant.

[1331] and you know and that's excruciating and they watched me kind of like suffer through that and come out of that and eventually we became friendly you know and I had the bow just so because I wanted to go out and hunt with them and because I had the bow they were impressed by the bow and it was just better it just worked better me having a bow so they took you in yeah once they saw that they were like yeah they felt that um you pulled your weight yeah they wound up kind of like like you know and the guys that we were traveling with those down there with Janis was there and Dan was there and a guy named Phil was down there camera operator named Phil was down there and we all wound up being like cool with these guys you know like we got along well but it took a long it took a long time to get kind of in with them to have them start sort of showing you their world a little bit because you realize that they're used to being viewed they had enough exposure to outside to the outside of world to realize that The outside world usually carried a certain amount of disapproval for their food and dress and other things.

[1332] I gathered.

[1333] That was my impression.

[1334] But after a while, they were like, oh, this guy's cool.

[1335] We would just hang out.

[1336] Did you guys have to pay them?

[1337] Like, how did they accept you into their fold?

[1338] We paid the guys that are trying, these guys are trying to develop a recreational fishery in this area.

[1339] But they're going into places no one goes into.

[1340] And they're trying to establish, they were in the process of trying to establish a thing where they would have paying clients come down, and the paying clients would go on these river trips up to fish in these areas.

[1341] The only way you can do it because it's Chimane land.

[1342] The only way you can do it is by going through the Chimane.

[1343] And the only people you're going to hire to get the boats up the rivers and paddle the boats and run the boats and run the engines and get them stuck out of the rapids and all the, difficult traveling that involves you to hire Chimani guys to do it.

[1344] So we hired the guys that hired the Chmone with the sole goal of I was just interested in traveling with the Chmone.

[1345] How did you get this in your head?

[1346] Like, is this something you researched in advance?

[1347] I mean, how do you make a decision to go to one particular indigenous tribes?

[1348] Because I did a similar thing.

[1349] I did a similar thing for TV down in Guyana, and was just blown away by it.

[1350] Just traveling with guys.

[1351] and the guys in Ghana, they were still actively hunting with bows.

[1352] In some ways, they were more modernized people, but they were still avid bow fishermen, hunted with bows.

[1353] I took my bow down there and hunted.

[1354] I remember I shot a big game bird, a big turkey -like game bird out of a tree with my bow from about 40 yards, and they were blown away, man. It was just, it's like fun.

[1355] I learned more about hunting and about looking at the landscape and about indigenous food paths in those weeks that I've been fortunate to do that kind of trip than I would learn in years of hunting with American hunters.

[1356] Because you've got to understand, these guys don't know, let's say you're with someone who's 35 years old, 40 years old.

[1357] He's hunted probably five, six days a week for his entire life within a 100 mile radius of his home the level of understanding that you get but it's raw jungle you know it's like undeveloped jungle the level of understanding you get about what's going on around you is just different than what we're able to achieve today especially something like me who I travel around a lot and experience a lot of different things but what I lack what I miss out on from the way I do things is I miss out on that level of detailed local understanding that I had as a kid.

[1358] For instance, for the lake where I grew up, the lake I grew up on, I knew it well, right, better than anybody, or as good as anybody.

[1359] They have that about the jungle.

[1360] So to go out with guys like that, just watch how they interact and what noises make sense to them, you know, it's just, it's really informative, and it just helps you kind of understand humanity better.

[1361] I remember going out in the jungle with them one night, and it's Marrow talking about how loud it is.

[1362] You can't even believe how loud it is.

[1363] And all these noises, you're like, what is all this stuff?

[1364] It must be whatever And then one time I hear a noise that sounds like this Off in the jungle Everything they just stopped It was like oh so that noise Of the thousands of noises Going on this Is very interesting to them You know And what was it?

[1365] I have no idea They didn't go after it They just know But they're real interested in that noise Like something made that noise And they're like of all the sticks snapping And things dropping And birds going off And insects and getting bit by bullet ants they hear what sounds like a stick way the hell off and it just means something to him was the bullet ant as bad as everybody says it is dude yeah you ever see that schmidt pain index yes the schmidt pain index he scores all insect bites and the bull ants the only one that gets a four plus rating like a five -star hotel it's the highest rated there's he has found and he's a he studies you know insect toxins and insect stings He's found nothing else that's as painful.

[1366] So what does it feel like?

[1367] It feels at first like you got zapped by a wasper hornet.

[1368] And maybe 10 minutes into it, a minute into it, it becomes something very different than that.

[1369] 10 minutes into it, you feel like something's really wrong.

[1370] Like arthritic pain.

[1371] Throbbing, throbbing pain that goes way away from the source.

[1372] And we couldn't speak, and we're out in the jungle at night.

[1373] And first they'd go and find a vine and pulp up some of the vine and put the vine where I got hit.

[1374] I don't know what the vine was.

[1375] I couldn't tell that it had any difference.

[1376] It didn't mean anything different.

[1377] But that was bit on my ankle.

[1378] And the camera guy, Phil Barry Boo, was bit on his hand at the same time.

[1379] And he kept pointing to Phil's hand, but then running his finger, the Chimani guy's pointing to Phil's hand and running his finger up his arm like to his heart keeps doing that to Phil and he keeps taking to me and pointing his finger to his ankle and then running his finger up the inside of his leg to his groin and I thought that means that the poison or toxiners somehow is going to travel up and get you I couldn't tell what he was talking about and all I knew was was bad to get bit by a bullet ant pretty soon was so bad I couldn't even we weren't even able to walk I wasn't able to walk I just had to lay there and just like writhe For how long?

[1380] Well, I'll tell you this, an hour and 45 minutes later, I couldn't remember what the hell of ankle it was.

[1381] Really?

[1382] No mark.

[1383] No mark, and you couldn't figure out which ankle it was.

[1384] I was walking under two hours later.

[1385] I remember thinking, like, I never realized that I couldn't think of what ankle it had been on.

[1386] Do you think that's because of the medication that they used?

[1387] Because of the plant?

[1388] Because I've read that from a lot of other people.

[1389] Really?

[1390] Yeah.

[1391] Well, I thought it lasted for like 24 hours.

[1392] For me, now they do a thing where they take.

[1393] take like a some kind of mitt and fill it full of them yeah and you put the mid on it's like a initiation and you get bit a lot and then it's a whole i guess it's a whole other world but for me i think it was i could be wrong no i don't think i am man i think that it was the the peak was 30 40 minutes into it um and then it and then it just taper tapered tapered and gone now if i got hit by one now knowing what i know what i know now, I don't want to say that I would enjoy it, but I would be more interested.

[1394] I would be interested in what was going on and watching the progression.

[1395] But I was so scared because I didn't know what it meant.

[1396] I didn't know if it was like getting hit by a rattlesnake where you need to go and figure shit out or what.

[1397] And they weren't able to tell me what was happening.

[1398] And they're doing that weird.

[1399] Yeah.

[1400] What I later learned what they were saying was make sure they don't have any in your sleeves and make sure you don't have any because they'll come up and get you on the chest, which might be bad, or they'll get you on the balls, which is bad.

[1401] Oh, yeah, I would imagine.

[1402] So he's saying, like, not that it's traveling up to your, not that it's traveling up to your groin, but that an aunt, don't let an aunt get up your pants and get you.

[1403] The Schmidt.

[1404] Oh, there's the Schmidt pain index.

[1405] 300 M -I -Ns?

[1406] 300 minutes.

[1407] 300 minutes, okay.

[1408] Wow.

[1409] Boy, he's really souped that index up recently.

[1410] I got, I got stung by a wasp recently in Colorado, and it was the most fucking painful sting I've ever felt in my life.

[1411] And I don't know what happened.

[1412] I was walking, and all of a sudden I go, ah!

[1413] Like, it was like unusual.

[1414] It didn't make any sense.

[1415] I was like, what the fuck just bit me?

[1416] Like, I've been stung by bees before.

[1417] Yeah.

[1418] I think I've been stung by hornets.

[1419] I think it was a wasp.

[1420] It was a wasp or hornet.

[1421] I didn't even see what the bug was, because I was going, through this heavy bush and my fucking arms swole up like Popeye it was so weird like it was hard like the bottom of my forearm turned Ronnie Bam got hit by something like that down in Virginia the next day it turned into a big hard knob like he had a like a softball stuck under his skin yeah and it lasted for like five or six days and it was it was so itchy like I had to do everything I could to keep from clawing my arm apart where I would go under the shower and I turn the shower up really hot to the point where it would be painful with any other part of my body and just shove that arm underneath the super hot water, like I was scratching it with the insanely hot water.

[1422] Yeah.

[1423] It was burning my arm.

[1424] But nothing like a bullet ant.

[1425] I got hit by a lionfish.

[1426] Oh, I've seen those things.

[1427] Yeah, and that, again, scared the shit out because I didn't really know what all it meant.

[1428] We were spearfish, and I got hit by a lionfish.

[1429] And the thing you do is you heat water up to boiling.

[1430] and let it cool.

[1431] And the minute you can even kind of stand to put your hand in there, you dip your hand in there, and it takes the pain away.

[1432] Wow.

[1433] That was another thing.

[1434] It was just like my hand swelled up like not really usable, like an old Mickey Mouse hand.

[1435] For how long?

[1436] A couple hours again.

[1437] We were out.

[1438] I had gone down.

[1439] We were spear fishing in the Bahamas.

[1440] and I had gone down and shot a lionfish because they're good to eat.

[1441] I mean, we were doing them like Cevice.

[1442] They're very good.

[1443] Really?

[1444] White flesh, yeah.

[1445] You've got to be real careful with them.

[1446] I'd gone down and shot a lionfish.

[1447] Careful how so?

[1448] What's that?

[1449] Careful how so?

[1450] You have to avoid the stangers.

[1451] Oh, so what we would do is when you get a lionfish, we'd take the lionfish and leave it on the spear and then open a cooler up and stick the spear and the lionfish.

[1452] fish into the cooler and shut the lid and pull so that your spear would come out and the lionfish would fall on the cooler now lionfish just a for your listeners it's a it's a non -native that has been introduced into the Caribbean and is wreaking much havoc from florida southward and they're you know they're doing a lot to try to get rid of them you see why because they're so viciously territorial and out there into bahamas you have these small little coral heads and a couple of lionfish would move in there and they would just move out all their fish.

[1453] So there's no regulations on lionfish.

[1454] You're allowed to kill them as you want.

[1455] They encourage you to kill them as you want.

[1456] So will the people let them lose from aquariums or something?

[1457] Yeah, I think somehow they escaped through the aquarium trade.

[1458] Fucking Florida and aquariums, man. I can't, I don't want to say for sure.

[1459] Maybe your internet whiz over here.

[1460] Jane will tell you the answer to that.

[1461] But how they got in their first place.

[1462] But anyhow, then later would take poultry shears and just get big rubber gloves.

[1463] Once the fish is dead and take poultry shears and cut all the, thorns off it then flay it so the thorns were the toxin stored not in the glands they got injected in you with the with the with the thorns or the spines you know right and these spines is the the toxin in the spine itself or is there a gland underneath it no it's on it huh that's my understanding huh now i'd gone i ran out of breath and left my spear stuck in a lionfish down the bottom came up got a breath went down and as I'm trying to get my lionfish out of this area he was in without pulling him off the spearhead, I noticed a grouper in a hole.

[1464] So I went up and I got a lionfish on my spear and I'm waving to my brother to come over because I can't take the lionfish off my spear and I'm waving him to come over about the grouper.

[1465] And he comes over and he's got a snapper on the end of his spear.

[1466] So I take the snapper off his spear and I'm holding the damn snapper in my right hand and I have a lionfish on my spear and my left hand and I'm going underwater trying to point to the hole that has the grouper in it and somehow swung that lionfish into my hand and it got all weird and puffy and I crawled up into the boat and was just kind of like writhing in the bottom of the boat and I started getting really scared because my hand started to feel hot and all bloated and eventually waved my brother and our buddy Eric over and we went in, we were 45 minutes from the shore and went in, and by then I was really scared.

[1467] My buddy Ronnie Bain was there, and he's like saying I should put it under cold water, and I went and typed in the internet.

[1468] It's like, do not put it in cold water.

[1469] Dude, yeah, it was something, man. You have, here it goes, speculated the root of the problem was only six lionfish accidentally released from an aquarium during the Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

[1470] Wow.

[1471] That's crazy.

[1472] Genetic research supports his finger pointing, but it's likely many more have been intentionally released by retired aquarium enthusiasts.

[1473] Retired aquarium enthusiasts.

[1474] That's a funny way of looking at it.

[1475] But Florida has a gigantic issue with invasions.

[1476] Yeah, man. It comes from aquariums.

[1477] It's amazing.

[1478] Whether it's pythons or, you know, they found Nile Crocs in the upgrades now.

[1479] Yeah.

[1480] They've, uh, reading a whole article how they have just a kill on site for Nile Crocs.

[1481] They're just terrified.

[1482] These fucking giant crocs are going to grow to be the...

[1483] these 28 -foot -long killers like they have in Mozambique or wherever the fuck it is.

[1484] Florida's the future of wilderness.

[1485] How so?

[1486] Because as we move species around with reckless abandon, intentionally, unintentionally.

[1487] And we eliminate biodiversity in some areas.

[1488] is through habitat destruction.

[1489] And if current trends continue and the earth continues to get hotter and we lose a lot of the climatic diversity, different climates that we have, different places, if that continues.

[1490] I think that you will have, we'll continue to see like the great mixing, you know, and we'll just wind up with a situation where there are certain, every animal is going to get a shot at every bond.

[1491] and you're just going to have it be that certain ones that can thrive are going to thrive and you're not going to have the levels of endemism that we have now.

[1492] And I think that, yeah, in the future, you know, just look at what the wild pig has managed to do here in the U .S. You know, it's the dominant large animal on some landscapes.

[1493] It's a non -native.

[1494] In my lifetime in the Great Lakes, the round gobees.

[1495] zebra muscles.

[1496] If you go now and drop a baited hook down in places that I grew up fishing, the first thing you would pull up was a gobi.

[1497] They were not there.

[1498] It's just certain things are winners and certain things are losers.

[1499] Not all the winners are going to be non -natives because white -tailed deer do well around people.

[1500] Crows seem to do well around people.

[1501] Canada geese do very well around people.

[1502] It's just going to be that it's just going to be more and more and more aquarium -like.

[1503] It's, isn't it weird how people have this desire to manipulate and manage all the other wildlife?

[1504] I mean, it is strange when you think about the evidence that points to the contrary.

[1505] The evidence that points to, I mean, there are, like you said, more white -tailed deer in the United States now than when Columbus landed.

[1506] So they've done a great job in bringing back healthy populations to certain animals.

[1507] But then you're seeing like the shit they've done in Florida where the pythons are fucking eating alligators.

[1508] I mean, you've seen that image of the...

[1509] It's a famous image.

[1510] That is a crazy image of 20 -foot -long python that ate a fucking alligator.

[1511] I mean, there's a crazy system going on down there where these non -indigenous animals are just crushing all these other animals and surviving and thriving in an environment that's pretty compatible for them.

[1512] You know, as far as, you know, tropical, hot climate, moist, plenty of things to eat, plenty of life out there for them to snuff out.

[1513] In some areas they're finding, a friend of mine, Robert Abernathy, who's a biologist and conservationist, big hunter, he was working with some guys that are going down there, and there's a whole class of mid -sized animal that's just missing from those python areas now.

[1514] Basically, like, possum raccoon -sized critters are just gone.

[1515] you know you will see it like that's why this to bring this full circle back to some things we're talking about a lot of the conservation groups that I get involved in things like you know National Wild Turkey Federation Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation they pick you know they're powered by hunters and powered by hunter money in the in the effort to preserve habitat for certain species but like native animals that wind up by helping those you know you're helping all other creatures because you can't fix elk like if you fix elk habitat you're fixing everyone's habitat you know it's like a keystone thing like if you help elk by salvaging riparian areas you're helping all critters across the board you know you're enhancing wildlife and a big risk that you have if you look at native wildlife and you cherish native wildlife and I do one of the big risks we have coming down the line is just the non -native stuff you know I mean as far as even just vegetation we have a lot of areas that we're seeing those high quality plants being displaced by you know plants that make native wildlife sick that they can't live on it's a big big problem and in some ways you want to look at Florida and it's almost like the wildlife situation in Florida has almost kind of become a joke where it's so outlandish that it's like this like Jurassic Park environment but at the same time it's also you look at you like God you know it's like this wild place and it's and you know it's the new wilderness in some ways but in some ways it's just like it's really sad what that's going to mean for the endemics.

[1516] Well Florida sort of attracts that even with human beings though.

[1517] I mean those are non -native human beings that went down there and took over too It's all people that escape from the mob from New York And weird people from Cuba That came up and rafts And read the books of like Carl Heiason, man And then the cocaine thing That's also a non -native plant It's, you know, its main byproduct Introduced to that area That changed the entire ecosystem Financially.

[1518] You know, there's more banks Per capita in Miami than they're on the rest of the country And the reason being is because that's where they fucking laundered money.

[1519] I mean, it's really clear.

[1520] I grew up with just a tremendous affinity for Florida because in Michigan, that's, in my area, Michigan.

[1521] Like, when you went on vacation, you went to Florida.

[1522] Sure.

[1523] It's just like you didn't go.

[1524] It was just where you went.

[1525] It's a great place to vacation.

[1526] And now, like, in other parts of the country, people are like, you went where?

[1527] I'm like, yeah, man, Florida.

[1528] Why?

[1529] I'm like, because it's Florida, man. It's amazing.

[1530] You know, it's a great fishing.

[1531] But a lot of people, but yeah, it's just like we associated so strongly with Florida and the fishing in Florida that I do.

[1532] I have a soft spot.

[1533] And I was down there, and I was talking to this kid who likes to hunt down there not long ago, and he was telling me, this is the hunting and fishing capital of the world.

[1534] Florida.

[1535] Yeah.

[1536] Well, they have a lot of game down there.

[1537] Yeah, they do.

[1538] He was a wild pig hunter.

[1539] A lot of wild pigs, right?

[1540] Yeah.

[1541] Isn't that where you shot the wild pig with the Brian Gumble in that episode?

[1542] Yeah.

[1543] Florida is a nutty spot, and, you know, they're saying that it's not even going to be there.

[1544] If the water rises, the way it's rising right now, they're thinking Miami won't even exist in 30 or 40 years.

[1545] that because it's all like very porous.

[1546] Porous limestone, yeah.

[1547] That the water's just, it's not going to be like New Orleans where they could dam it up.

[1548] It's like, it's just going to come right through the ground.

[1549] And that's going to be a wrap.

[1550] It's going to be more, there's a thing I like to fish called flats.

[1551] It's going to be a lot more flats.

[1552] You've got to be flats near the Miami Hotel.

[1553] Yeah, knee deep water, man. How strange are to be if you're like a lot of redfish whole place?

[1554] Taking a fucking boat ride for fish around the Miami Hotel.

[1555] What time is your flight?

[1556] I got to get, I got it.

[1557] to get going right now well i got i think he was saying i'd be stupid to leave after 3 30 okay well it's 313 don't be stupid we'll get you get you out of here in a few minutes um what else i want to ask you about oh the one of the things about bolivia that i found fascinating was that the people seemed to have adapted physically to that environment like you were saying that you were traveling with those people and they didn't sweat yeah like you're sweating like crazy it's pouring out of your pores We would go out at night and, well, first off, these guys chew coca leaves, which we all got into big time.

[1558] I could ever tell what it's actually doing.

[1559] It's what they make cocaine from.

[1560] They take the coca leaf and they put a lime on it.

[1561] There's a lie or line?

[1562] No, bacon soda.

[1563] That's what they put on it.

[1564] That's what they used, that bettlene.

[1565] No, they take a leaf and you pack your cheek.

[1566] They call it a bowl, a ball.

[1567] I mean, to the point where your cheek looks seriously.

[1568] puffed out and inflamed with full of leaves and then you put bacon soda in there because it somehow activates the alkaloids and it's supposed to give you a boost and keep you going at night so I'd be out there and I'd have a couple water bottles and I'd just be slamming water and just pouring sweating I'm not like a sweaty dude but I'd be sweating so bad out in the jungle drinking all this water and these guys each got a bag they wear these little shoulder it looks almost like a woman's purse but it's like a handmade bag they carry and it would have a kitchen night in it, like a paring knife, which would be their hunting knife, or they just have that in their back pocket.

[1569] They don't wear shoes.

[1570] They have that bag.

[1571] They don't wear shoes?

[1572] Yeah, you know what?

[1573] One of the guys put shoes on, we were going out, and he couldn't get used to him because he never wore shoes, but he wanted to try them out.

[1574] They go out barefoot.

[1575] So, and they got this leaf, their coca leaves, they got a bag of bacon soda, and then they had this, like, one of these water bottles.

[1576] And I thought that they were somehow able to get through all night two of them with one water bottle of water and I was impressed by that but later someone told me it's a distilled spirit so it's not even water no it's like vodka but not so the drinking vodka they hydrate yeah chewing cocoa leaves drinking it's not vodka but it's like a it's like a rice it's like a some kind of thing like you take rice wine and somehow distill it I don't understand how they did it wow the guys I was worth remember what it was and it was real strong and like a moonshine almost yeah and they would be out there with a mouth packed full of coca leaves sticking bacon soda in there drinking that stuff out of a water bottle and they wouldn't drink water all night wow I was dying yeah they're accustomed to it but here's the thing like when you want to get into that if you took those boys because they've never experienced they've never experienced a temperature below 40 degrees Fahrenheit you know in their life right so if you took those boys and i was like hey man we're going to go hunt in the arctic for caribou and there's going to be snow on the ground you know um they would go home and talk about how we are some kind of superman heroes sleeping out in the snow you know right it would blow their mind what if you took them to nunovac it'd blow their mind took them to that you just get really, like, you get set in your, remember how everybody always likes to make that big deal about how in the, like, in the Inuit language, they have, like, 24 words for snow, right?

[1577] I just don't think that we have a difficult time describing.

[1578] People who like the ski have many ways of describing snow.

[1579] It's kind of a, it's like a little bit, it's almost dishonest.

[1580] We have like, yeah, we have, like, light powder, heavy powder, slushy snow, you know, on and on and on.

[1581] Like, we have ways of describing snow.

[1582] And it's easy to sort of mythologize people, or you go down, you get the feeling that there's like these super, I do, these superhuman beings.

[1583] But then, you know, I look at it's just like they're just used to a landscape that's baffling to me. You know, like, look, there's four of us out.

[1584] Two of us got hit by bullet ants.

[1585] Who got hit by bullet ants?

[1586] Me and the other white guy.

[1587] Right?

[1588] Those guys need to get hit by bullet ants.

[1589] And they're barefoot.

[1590] Yeah.

[1591] Why did they not get hit by a bullet ant?

[1592] Because they walk through, they just know the risks.

[1593] The same way, if I took them and we were walking around somewhere in some urban environment, they might not know when it's a good time to cross the street and walk off the other side of the other one.

[1594] You know, I'd be like, what, are you dumb?

[1595] Like, no, he just doesn't know.

[1596] I don't know.

[1597] Like, I wasn't tuned into the threat of bullet ants.

[1598] They would notice snakes that I didn't, you know, they would see a snake and they would notice that I didn't notice.

[1599] They would always, when they got to a log, they would inspect the log very carefully.

[1600] If it had a bullet ant on it, they would kill it very delicately with the tip of a bow.

[1601] But they just had a way that they'd like to press and kill the bullet ant in this very, like, dainty fashion.

[1602] Why is that?

[1603] I don't know.

[1604] I could never figure it out, man. They just had like a little way that they would crush bullet ants.

[1605] It was interesting.

[1606] Would bullet ants go in these large groups?

[1607] Maybe they didn't want to disturb it because of pheromones.

[1608] Would get other bullet ants excited?

[1609] You know what I'm saying?

[1610] Like, if you got a bunch of hornets around and you start flailing wild.

[1611] I don't know.

[1612] I just noticed that they would do it.

[1613] They just walked through in a new, their area.

[1614] And, yeah, I was tempted to be like, man, these are like gods.

[1615] They're so aware.

[1616] But then I feel like had I been brought up there hanging out, I might have not got hit by a bullet.

[1617] I might have not got hit by a bulletin.

[1618] Well, they'd probably all been hit, right?

[1619] I asked him, and they couldn't.

[1620] I later was able to ask him, and one guy I was saying he had probably been hit maybe.

[1621] I remember I thought he'd said somehow around nine times, and another guy was saying he had no way of even recollection.

[1622] how many times you've been hit by a bullet dam.

[1623] It's just crazy that they walk around barefoot.

[1624] Yeah.

[1625] They do things barefoot that are...

[1626] What did their feet look like?

[1627] Not like yours.

[1628] Just flattened out.

[1629] Flattened out.

[1630] You get real flattened out.

[1631] Your toe, your thumb toe, let's say.

[1632] Starts to move away.

[1633] Like a monkey?

[1634] Mm -hmm.

[1635] Starts to move away from your other toes.

[1636] I never seen anything quite as much as I was in the Philippines and the highlands.

[1637] and the guys there, they're in the mountains, like in serious mountains, barefoot, you know, growing up hunting their whole lives in the mountains, barefoot on just bad rock and everything all the time.

[1638] And their feet, you wouldn't have been able to put that foot in the shoe, no way now.

[1639] Wow.

[1640] Their toes are so spread.

[1641] You can find pictures of that stuff online, just kind of like a famous sort of thing that happens to those guys in the central highlands and Luzon Island.

[1642] Their feet are just incredible.

[1643] But I think it's just like your feet, your toes are held, you know, inside your shoes.

[1644] Your toes are held in the way that they just, if you're walking on a rock and in a mountainous landscapes all the time, your feet just fan out.

[1645] Wow.

[1646] You know?

[1647] Like hands.

[1648] Yeah, man. Like creepy.

[1649] Creepy.

[1650] I don't want to say creepy in a bad way, but it's kind of creepy to you.

[1651] Yeah.

[1652] And when I was there, I spent more time looking at people's feet than I did their faces.

[1653] Just to try to figure it out.

[1654] Yeah, and some of these old guys had these tattoos that recounted when they used to headhunt for the Japanese after World War II.

[1655] Whoa.

[1656] These guys were, you know, they were pretty hardcore fellas.

[1657] Because after, you know, when they took the Philippines, some of the Japanese went up and just hit out, you know, and they would make a big sport out of finding them because the Americans wanted them, you know, and they'd get these tattoos that are exploits.

[1658] We met old people, and they were introduced to us as such, but who'd been head.

[1659] hunters, you know, and they would have their tail narrated on their thing, and they would go out in the jungle and they had these souped up air rifles, and they'd go out in the jungle and have air rifles, and then they'd have these, you ever hear, electro -shocking for fish?

[1660] Yeah.

[1661] They would have homemade electro -shocking kits, would have a car battery in a back, like I saw this guy that had a big, huge detergent bottle that he turned into a backpack, and in that detergent bottle, he had a stack of batteries, and he had a negative and a positive wand, and he would stand out on rocks in the river.

[1662] We were floating down a river with these guys.

[1663] He'd stand out on a rock and the river and put those ones under rocks and under logs, electro -shocking fish and shrimp, freshwater shrimp.

[1664] And how was he grounded?

[1665] He was just standing on a rock and stick him in there.

[1666] Same way when you're electro -fishing for anything doing a survey.

[1667] And he would shock him up, then run down the river with a net and net up all the stuff that he shocked.

[1668] He'd get a log burning and roll the log over and lay the shrimp and crabs out on the log until they turn red and eat them.

[1669] Wow.

[1670] My brother was shocking fish one time and got done shock and fish for a fish survey was walking back from having shocked fish.

[1671] And he had the fish in a gunny sack, and a bolt of lightning came out of the sky, hit the ground next to him, and a shot of that electricity shot up into the sack of fish and shocked him.

[1672] I'd like to end on that Because Some kind of cosmic retribution Yeah, I would imagine Holy shit Well, Remy got hit by Lightning You know that story, right?

[1673] Remmy's got some good stories He's got some real good stories He's got a story about That they were burned and brush one time Someone burned a big brush pile And it was dry conditions And they burned a big brush pile And all kinds of rodents started running out of the brush pile on fire, starting little fires all over the place as they ran away.

[1674] Oh, no. It's a horrific story.

[1675] Oh, my God.

[1676] I want to end on that.

[1677] Let's end on that.

[1678] Well, listen, this book is fucking excellent.

[1679] The complete guy.

[1680] Can you turn off the fade music?

[1681] Yes.

[1682] I forgot this thing I got to talk about.

[1683] We got seven more minutes.

[1684] Yeah, this is important because if you have Verizon files, Oh, yes.

[1685] All your listeners.

[1686] Verizon Fios is in some kind of, there's some kind of piss and match.

[1687] I don't really understand it.

[1688] But they've pulled for now, they've pulled Outdoor Channel and Sportsman Channel off their lineup.

[1689] And they're suggesting that you go and watch, they're like suggesting alternative content.

[1690] They're pointing people to like, like reality is shows that deal in hunting in some way.

[1691] it'd be like if you told people that you know the ufc's banned so watch teenage mutant ninja turtles no go watch WWF right okay it'd be like that's like so if you have if you use Verizon in any way shape or form do me a favor and a lot of and just do people a favor and make sure to go and complain about that and what is this because what it's a contract It's a contract dispute of some sort.

[1692] So the way it was explained to me was that there's some sort of an agenda to push out outdoor programming.

[1693] You don't believe that's the case.

[1694] I don't know if that's true or not.

[1695] You think it's just a contract issue?

[1696] The reason I do wonder if there's something I'd like that is it could be that, you know, it definitely came about.

[1697] It seems that have definitely come about at the time of the Seasle -L -Ly and deal.

[1698] For sure.

[1699] And they also said, oh, it's lower viewership, but they carry networks that are lower viewership, Al Jazeera, they carry a lot of networks that are lower.

[1700] I think with the right, I think with some pressure, it'll get just pressure from viewers who I explain it.

[1701] They want the show, what the show is mean.

[1702] I think that if someone, if they are making some kind of stand and it is like, oh, we don't approve a hunting, I would say look at my show and ask yourself, is my show a negative or a positive for wildlife and conservation?

[1703] I think the answer is pretty clear.

[1704] I would like to see them really change their mind about that.

[1705] And how do people get in touch?

[1706] There's a website, right?

[1707] There is a website.

[1708] Also, just go and let, if you use any kind of Verizon product, man, your phone, I use Verizon for my phone, and I've definitely let them know.

[1709] Yeah, I do as well.

[1710] I hope people can get in there and demand access back.

[1711] Yeah, I'm trying to find the website because I think it was explained to me. Did someone send it to me?

[1712] Information.

[1713] Yeah, here it is.

[1714] Here it is right here.

[1715] Okay.

[1716] Uh, you can also.

[1717] Here it is.

[1718] I'm sorry.

[1719] Keep, it's keep my outdoor TV .com.

[1720] So go to keep my outdoor TV .com.

[1721] One word TV, T, the letter T, letter V, keep my outdoor TV .com.

[1722] And a link, there's a link to call and write their representatives in Washington.

[1723] And there it is right there.

[1724] So that is, that's the issue.

[1725] And this is a way to.

[1726] to voice your disproval this issue.

[1727] There's handsome Steve Rinella right there.

[1728] Oh, yeah, man. Now, you can always get my show, you know, that meeater.

[1729] VHX .com.

[1730] But it's important, man. It's like the network sportsman channel has been so good to work with over the years because they never, ever mess with us about content.

[1731] We do the kind of show we want.

[1732] We put out the kind of message we want.

[1733] it's like it's just the it's just so nice and they just allow you to do authentic stuff that you think is best it's just they've been great great to work with and I hate to see him crippled in any way whatever the reason is we'll put the word out I'll put this out on Twitter and Facebook tonight and hopefully we can make some sort of an impact in the meantime you got to check out the media eater podcast because it's fucking excellent I've been binge listening this week it's no Joe Rogan experience how dare you it's excellent it's very good and if you're interested in hunting it's very good and if you're not interested in hunting you might get interested in hunting from listening to it but it's excellent um and then the book the book is the complete guide to hunting butchering and cooking wild game it's available as of august right it's available right volume one big game is out now volume two you can pre -order all right that's it and uh when are we going hunting again man we got to figure one out let's do it let's figure it out you got to figure out you got to figure out i want to do pandas bad panda bears No, I'm joking.

[1734] Fucking Jesus Christ.

[1735] All right, we'll end on that.

[1736] See you later, folks.