#637 - Remi Warren

[0] Okay, we're live.

[1] Remy Warren.

[2] How are you, fella?

[3] Pretty good, how's it going on?

[4] I watched your show last night.

[5] Oh, did you?

[6] Good.

[7] Yeah, and I watched it again today.

[8] The show is called Apex Predator.

[9] It's on Thursday nights on the Sportsman's channel.

[10] Yep, 8 p .m. And this is a show that last time you came in with Dan Doty, we kind of talked about it off the record, right?

[11] We couldn't talk about it yet.

[12] Yeah, it was kind of like in the wind there.

[13] It was not, we didn't have a network for it yet.

[14] We filmed, like, the pilot episode.

[15] And now it's a, it's a, it's a, real deal now.

[16] Yeah, now it's actually on television.

[17] Yeah, it's a real show.

[18] It's cool when stuff like that happens, right?

[19] Yeah, it is.

[20] You plan it out, you work, and it actually comes together, and you have a real television show.

[21] Yeah, it's pretty exciting, so I've been pretty pumped about it because this is something that I've been thinking about for years, and then, you know, we came in, was it?

[22] It's quite a while ago.

[23] Something like that.

[24] And now it's finally come to fruition, and people can look at what I've been talking about for the last couple of years.

[25] It takes a long time to make something.

[26] fucking happen man it's this hurry up and wait game yeah buddy uh my buddy was in the army and he's like yeah war is just hurry up and wait and I was like that's television war it's hurry up and wait wow that's a jaded individual come on can we just get to killing folks the show is what you're doing on the show is you're essentially emulating a lot of tactics that various predators use and you're were using these tactics to get close and figure out how to hunt animals.

[27] The one I saw last night was the buffalo one.

[28] Oh, sweet.

[29] Where you put a coyote outfit on and we're crawling up to these buffalo.

[30] And it's kind of fascinating that they don't run necessarily from coyotes or wolves that just sort of walk towards them.

[31] The only time the coyotes or the wolves would actually attack them is if they were running, that that's when they would move in on them.

[32] Yeah, exactly.

[33] because the way wolves hunt is they have to get the animals running first.

[34] And tomorrow night's episode we really see that when we look at the way wolves hunt.

[35] But the reason that the wolf has to get the buffalo running is the wolf's essentially outclassed by the bison.

[36] It's so much larger.

[37] So if the bison's say, we're going to stand here and fight, then it can kill the wolf.

[38] And it's the cost -benefit analysis for the wolf to attack that bison while it's standing there isn't great enough.

[39] so the wolves will actually get around the bison and try to instigate them to run because if the bison makes the mistake of running then they can hunt as a pack they can wear it down once they get it moving and then they attack from the back and they're safer and they're more successful so the bison know this so if they run well they're going to be in trouble but when a human hunter comes along using primitive weapons or whatever the human hunter needs that animal to stand still in order to kill it so when the bison sees a human it runs because that's how it stays safe so you know the point of this show is really dissecting the way nature does things and you look at like every animal is so specialized it does something really well and everything falls into a certain niche and as a human looking at nature we look at and go man what can we learn like humans are an amazing species and what i've come to realize is we've adapted a lot of the techniques and tactics that a certain animal specializes in or does really well and use it for ourselves to become this this essential top predator so you know looking at this the plains indians we looked at a george catlin painting where it's a pretty famous painting there's two planes indians yeah let's see we can get that painting jamie it's a really famous painting it's really cool you've got like that yeah there's two plains indians sneaking up on a herd of bison underneath these white wolf skins and i'd seen that You know, I've always thought that was an awesome picture.

[40] How do you spell his name?

[41] George.

[42] Catlin.

[43] C -A -I -T -L -I -N.

[44] And, yeah, so, you know, he paints this picture of what, supposedly what he saw, but you never really know these artists types.

[45] This is from the 1800s, yeah, I mean, this pretty old photo.

[46] So it was kind of a gamble whether or not this guy was a bullshit artist.

[47] Yeah, he was kind of going out west and painting what he saw.

[48] or what he interpreted to see.

[49] And so I've always thought, oh, I wonder if that's really true.

[50] But when you dissect it, obviously those Plains Indians sitting around saw that, oh, and those wolves are there.

[51] Those bison aren't running.

[52] Well, let's throw some of those skins on our back and see what happens.

[53] And it's attacking, like, through the show, we develop, find out that.

[54] No, that's not it.

[55] Top left corner there.

[56] Yep, that one.

[57] Yeah.

[58] Yeah, just pull that sucker up.

[59] Wow, that's crazy That they really did that Yeah They must have Yeah I mean it makes perfect sense If you're sitting there And see the correlation Between the wolves and the bison And You come to this logical conclusion That if we act like a wolf The bison will stay there A lot of bison there were back there too Millions God And that's on that episode Steve You know He's the bison expert Yeah And just how many bison He was telling us me that they used to find the bison by giant clouds from their breath it'd make like huge clouds what that's what steve is telling me wow i mean millions millions of bison well you know there's a guy named dan flores that's a good friend of steves as well and uh he is a real bison expert and he's written a very controversial paper on uh what happened to the bison and what he's saying is that He compares, he's going to be on the podcast soon, as soon as he's done with his book, hopefully by sometime in the summer.

[60] And what his paper is basically saying is that they were, the Plains Indians, once they had figured out how to ride horses and shoot from horses, were already on the way to wiping out the Buffalo.

[61] And the reason why the Buffalo were in such high numbers was because that so many people, so many Native Americans had died from smallpox.

[62] And if you go back before the smallpox epidemic, the people that arrived in North America, like the Dutch, when they had made an accounting of all the different animals, they'd talked about turkeys and deer and elk and bear, no mention whatsoever at Buffalo.

[63] And they were visiting all these same areas that 200 years later had millions of Buffalo.

[64] But during that 200 years, 90 % of the Native Americans had been wiped out by smallpox.

[65] Really?

[66] And during that, and they were apparently, like, probably the number one predator of these bison.

[67] I'm probably doing a really shitty job of explaining this.

[68] That makes sense.

[69] I mean, they would do things like the buffalo jumps, where just drive herds of bison.

[70] Off a cliff.

[71] Off a cliff.

[72] And apparently the wolves would feed, because there would just be dead, I mean, you couldn't take all that meat.

[73] Doesn't mean, if you've got a small village, you're taking what you can use.

[74] There would be dead bison everywhere.

[75] And the wolves would come in and gorge on them I guess there was an account where There was wolves so full on food They were just laying there in excess Just gorgeed And they were just hanging around next to the Native Americans Well, where the buffalo had jumped off the cliffs Yeah, but the Native Americans were down there too With the wolves No, I think I don't know if they would move on You know, set up in a point the meat's gonna go bad And then the wolves would just keep eating And the wolves would just keep eating and eating And eating Fuck Because apparently a wolf can And they can gorge like a hungry like a wolf.

[76] That's really hungry.

[77] Duran Duran was on to something.

[78] Yeah, because they'll eat.

[79] I read something, it was like 25 pounds in a sitting and they can process that meat in two hours.

[80] So they'll just eat.

[81] What?

[82] And eat.

[83] 25 pounds of meat processing.

[84] Imagine if you ate a 25 pound turkey.

[85] Like you went to the supermarket and picked up a 25 pound turkey.

[86] And you ate it yourself.

[87] And there's never been a wolf.

[88] bigger than a human being, right?

[89] The biggest wolf ever is probably like 200 pounds, right?

[90] Ever.

[91] Yeah.

[92] So we're talking about, you know, 150 pound wolf, which is the size of a normal man, can eat 25 fucking pounds and go through it in two hours.

[93] That's insane.

[94] That's crazy.

[95] That's insane.

[96] It's competitive eating at its finest.

[97] Well, their bite power is also freaky.

[98] I didn't know.

[99] Ricky Jervase told me, and I was like, this guy's got to be wrong.

[100] He said that a wolf has a bite that's five times more powerful than a pit bull i'm like how could that be true oh yeah it's true i can't fucking believe it but it's true really yeah i mean they're not that you look at like pit bulls have all these muscles in their heads and they're known for their bite nothing compared to a wolf wolf can go right through an elk shin bone it's crazy fuck yeah that's that's that's what that's what that's one of the inspiration wolves were actually the inspiration for me to even think of this show uh i just i'm I'm pretty fascinated by wolves, but one day I was out hunting elk in kind of in Montana, and I'd been hunting this one bull, and it was the first time I ever saw a wolf in the wild, and it was probably really close, too.

[101] I was like, well, this is awesome, because this is before you really saw a lot of wolves.

[102] And then I actually got a little video of it, and then I go and do my hunt, and then the wolf happened to be chasing these, hunting the same group of elk.

[103] and was it lone wolf yeah it was by itself and I was actually telling I did Steve's podcast with Steve Rinella the other day and I was telling him the similar, this same story and I've seen four times I've seen wolves take down an elk in the wild they've all been by themselves I've never seen a pack attack elk I've only seen lone wolves that has got to be amazing to watch that go down it's cool I mean wow They're so fast.

[104] You see the elk running, and it's almost like the wolf is just, it can like, it could almost run between its legs back.

[105] It's going back and forth.

[106] The elk is bee lining, and that wolf is back and forthing.

[107] Just much faster.

[108] Much faster.

[109] Yeah.

[110] So how do they take it out?

[111] They bite its back legs?

[112] Yep.

[113] Grab hamstring, bite its back leg.

[114] Anywhere it can sink its teeth in, but mostly go for the back end.

[115] Do they try to take it down all in one shot, or do they try to wound it and then eventually get it?

[116] I think it's whatever they can grab, and half the time it ends up wounding it.

[117] When I've seen them be the most successful is they run the elk into deadfall, because the wolf can go under and over the logs, up and down, back and forth, and the elk struggles.

[118] It uses all its energy.

[119] It kind of gets trapped.

[120] Oh, wow.

[121] So the wolves kind of funnel them into areas where they know they'll be more successful.

[122] It seems like it.

[123] Seems like I've always seen them catch them on the downhill, like run them down a canyon in the bottom of a canyon, seems to be where I'm trying to think about it.

[124] Yeah.

[125] It's like in the bottom of a canyon where there's lots of logs and things down.

[126] That's got to be an amazing thing to see happen live because it's so rare to be able to be there.

[127] I mean, you might see a wolf, you might see an elk, but to see a wolf kill an elk, like to be at that moment where it didn't matter if you were there or not, that was going to go down.

[128] I mean, that's nature.

[129] Exactly.

[130] I was blood trailing my friend's wife's, she shot a nice bull with her bow last year, and we're sitting there trying to find this elk.

[131] And here comes this cow elk running with a wolf hot on its tail.

[132] And I was like, sweet, we're going to watch it go down.

[133] And my buddy, like, yells at it.

[134] He didn't know what to.

[135] I mean, it was right in our face.

[136] It was like right there.

[137] And he just kind of yells, and it spooks the wolf off.

[138] And I was like, why did you do that?

[139] He's like, I don't know.

[140] I was like, now he's just going to go hunt more.

[141] I mean, it would have been cool to at least see it, you know.

[142] You would have seen it, right?

[143] Oh, we were 75 yards away.

[144] I mean, it was right there in the open, like in this burn.

[145] It was amazing.

[146] God, they're incredible.

[147] I have so mixed feelings on wolves.

[148] I mean, one part of me thinks they're amazing.

[149] I love them.

[150] They're fascinating.

[151] But another part of me is like this reintroduction of them into the United States is, it just, I just don't think it was really planned out very well.

[152] And their numbers are staggering now.

[153] Oh, yeah.

[154] It's, well, when we talk about the American model of conservation, there's checks and balances and goes with game animals and non -game animals.

[155] So when you reintroduce an animal into an area that it hasn't maybe never been in that area or it's been so long that it's been in there, they have to be managed as well.

[156] Otherwise, the whole ecosystem comes out of balance.

[157] Well, I watched this video about Yellowstone, about wolves in Yellowstone.

[158] It was talking about the impact that wolves have had in Yellowstone and all these other animals that are thriving because of the introduction of the wolves.

[159] And it's kind of interesting, but the reality of those animals is they're predators.

[160] You're not talking about any other kind of animal.

[161] You're talking about a predator.

[162] It's like if you have a large amount of elk in an area or a large amount of deer, I mean, this is a completely different animal than having a large amount of wolves.

[163] And when you're managing these types of animals with emotions rather than objective logic, that's when things get weird because you've got a lot of people, their version of conservation never would include hunting a wolf.

[164] But if you get thousands and thousands of wolves in a state, Like, you have to hunt them Because then they started attacking livestock Like where I was up in BC Where I shot that moose There was the guy that I hunted with His neighbor had a cow Get taken out by wolves In the middle of the winter It's like cold and there was not much for them to eat And they said fuck it let's just do this They took out a cow You imagine like out you're in your house And you're here and you're looking out There's 20 wolves just ripping apart One of your cows like fuck man Yeah, once they figure out what an easy meal is to it, I think it's hard for them to go back to chasing moose and other animals.

[165] Well, they have no limit on the amount of wolves you can shoot up there.

[166] You can shoot as many as you want.

[167] I don't think they could ever hurt the population.

[168] Well, it's so dense.

[169] When you go up there, everybody who lives in a city, you owe it to yourself at some point in your life to go out into actual real wilderness.

[170] Because there's all these people that have these opinions on.

[171] animals that are completely based on some narnia -like idea of what nature's like.

[172] Like, they've never actually been out there, like in real wilderness, like days in.

[173] Packing, go days in, where you go, oh, God, damn.

[174] Like, I just, I didn't get it.

[175] I just, I just didn't know.

[176] It's nuts out there.

[177] I think the other assumption is people think that the real wild is what they would see in a national park.

[178] It's the zoo version of what wild is.

[179] When you go out into a place like remote BC or outside of any kind of park like that, it's a completely different world.

[180] And you don't see as many animals.

[181] It's tough life out there.

[182] Not that the boundary of the park makes it more animals, but it's set up.

[183] Those animals are acclimatized to seeing humans.

[184] They don't have their same natural senses.

[185] So if you go out to a place that they aren't acclimatized at seeing humans, it's a tough go.

[186] It's not as easy as people think.

[187] Well, it's not only not easy.

[188] There's a weird silence to it out there.

[189] It's like there's an eerie indifference that you get.

[190] That's one of the things that we went to Prince of Wales.

[191] Steve Ronella took us up there hunting deer.

[192] Yeah.

[193] We struck out, but it's an amazingly remote place.

[194] like you don't see it you know we didn't see a single fucking person other than us the entire time we were there and you just it doesn't give a fuck about you no if you fall and break your leg and die there so what so what you're just a part of it you're just a part of this whole thing where everything is going to go there's bears there there's deer there there's all sorts of you know interesting wildlife but it doesn't give a fuck about you it's it's i don't think people kind of understand that and a real like gonna in a in a where you really rationalized it or really like got it into your brain like this is reality until you actually go into the woods to the real woods not yellowstone not central park yeah the real woods are a different animal it is and that's when you kind of understand if you've even i haven't encountered wolves in the wild i've seen what they've done we talked about in the last podcast i took some photos of this um moose calf that we had come upon that had been kill probably like the night before it was kind of interesting but um i haven't encountered them in real life but the people that i know that have have a completely different opinion than the people that live in cities that think that you'd have to be an asshole to shoot a wolf yeah well if you aren't around it it's so far removed i mean you can't oh you almost can't even make an accurate assumption of what it's like no you also can't make an accurate assumption that you'd have to be a person that hates animals to shoot the wolf that's that's that's that's that's The management aspect of wildlife, especially when it comes to predators, this is lost on a lot of people.

[195] And it's one of the reasons why California doesn't have mountain lion seasons, but like mountain line attacks in California have steadily gone up.

[196] Mountain lion sightings have steadily gone up.

[197] And they're kind of playing with fire because there's a lot of them here now.

[198] They don't get hunted.

[199] You know, that's what I wonder what the future is going to look like in a place in the long future.

[200] Mountain lions, if you look at African cats, they're a very dangerous animal.

[201] But mountain lions are a shire version of the species.

[202] And I think it's because they're in the predatory realm, they weren't always, they weren't at the top.

[203] In California, you look at California, there used to be grizzly bears or some sort of species of brown, you know, coastal grizzly bear.

[204] and then humans hunting and so you had mountain lions that had to be afraid of things now they're in a world where they don't have any predators and nothing's chasing them at what point i mean maybe it's 100 years down the road maybe it's a thousand years down the road at what point do they essentially become a different temperament of cat much similar to the ones in africa where they have to or south america yeah yeah where they don't have predators that's That's a good point.

[205] You got to keep those bitches scared.

[206] This family that we went to their farm to hunt turkeys two weeks ago, and they lost all their sheep, every single one of them in Northern California.

[207] All of them.

[208] Really?

[209] They lost all of them to mountain lions.

[210] They have so many cats up there, they see them, like in the day, just hanging out.

[211] And like, fuck, man. They don't even have an accurate account of how many they have.

[212] It's pretty rare to see them.

[213] If you start seeing a mountain line in the daytime, then there's a lot of mountain lines.

[214] Yeah.

[215] Or you just got super lucky.

[216] Yeah.

[217] I saw one in Montecito, which is like a rich suburb of Santa Barbara.

[218] I was driving down like a residential road, and I saw this thing bounce in front of the road.

[219] And I thought it was a coyote at first.

[220] I saw its tail.

[221] And I went, whoa, that's a fucking mountain line in this, like, suburban neighborhood.

[222] Just looking for a good restaurant to get a steak.

[223] Or a good dog.

[224] A good dog that he catches slipping.

[225] Yeah, I think I've got, I must, my place in Montana, I think I have some kind of strange mountain line breeding program going on because every year at the same time, there's just lion tracks all near the cabin, all over the place.

[226] That started right when I, the year I first came here and talked with you, and it's just been continuing.

[227] And I don't know what it is, but a friend of mine started chasing lions around there, he said you would be surprised how many cats.

[228] living in this area within six or seven within a few a mile or two it's crazy to hone ranch which is about an hour plus from here there's a great hunting spot they have pigs oh yeah rocky mountain elk and they have one trail camera on this pond and they found 16 different mountain lines on this trail camera that's pretty crazy but it's a huge ranch it's the biggest ranch in californ it's 270 ,000 acres and they have just a large supply of wild pigs wild pigs are all over the place it's like their bread and butter for their hunting program yeah yeah when we went there we saw I was like we only last time I went I went like real recently we were bow hunting we saw 50 pigs in a day yeah and we didn't even see a lot the time before that we were seeing hundreds of them just hundreds of pigs all over the place did you end up getting one first time yes second time That's cool.

[229] Bo hunting pork is pretty good.

[230] Yeah, it's delicious.

[231] It's very different.

[232] It's very different than, like, I had wild turkey, you know, surprised at how much it tastes like turkey, you know, especially the breast.

[233] It's good, but it's turkey.

[234] It's turkey.

[235] But you eat wild pork, and you're like, ooh, this is kind of a whole different thing going on.

[236] Depends on the pig you get, because if you buy pork, if you shoot a bore, it tastes a lot different than a sour, or even, like, a pregnant sow maybe.

[237] Right.

[238] But I, in New Zealand, we get quite a few pigs.

[239] And this guy showed me this tactic where when you're skinning it, you get your knife sharp and make your initial cuts.

[240] And then he doles the tip on the concrete.

[241] And so when he's skinning it, because what it is is he'll skin, he can skin closer to the, essentially closer to the skin and keep all the fat on the pork.

[242] Mm -hmm.

[243] Which normally, if you just kind of skin it off, take the height off, all the fat's removed.

[244] But he said that if you leave that fat on, you just, it gets.

[245] It gives it a lot more flavor, a different flavor.

[246] And it's really good.

[247] I did it, and it was pretty exceptional.

[248] What's the difference in the flavor?

[249] Like, could you describe it?

[250] It's more like regular pork, I would say.

[251] Hmm.

[252] Yeah, more of it.

[253] Do you know who Joel Salton is?

[254] No. So kind of a famous farmer.

[255] He's got some really unique ideas about farming, and he was a guest on the podcast as well.

[256] And what he does is he lets his pigs kind of run wild.

[257] He sets up like a large electric fence, and he moves that electric fence all over the place.

[258] So these pigs, the way they eat is they root.

[259] They eat acorns, and they eat like a normal pig wood.

[260] There's plenty of food in the forest, but they keep them intact in a certain area with this portable electric fence.

[261] So they just keep moving the fence.

[262] It's like the pigs will root out this area and forage in this one area, and then they'll kind of move them to another spot, and then they'll let them forage in that area.

[263] and so these pigs have a dark meat like a wild boar yeah it's good it's good it's it isn't like domestic pork but i i almost prefer it we if you try it next time you get one try to leave cook a little bit with the skin on oh that's good really with a skin on we just you just burn the start a big fire and get some water and just shake the hair off yeah and then cook with the skin on i'll bone it out first and you can stuff like stuff the ham with i don't know some kind of stuffing whatever you want really and then put it in the oven roast it in the oven like that you don't eat the skin but i've seen people do that with domestic pigs i've seen them do those those big whole pig roasts oh yeah that looks awesome yeah that looks awesome we tried doing that for a buddy's bachelor party but we didn't get the fire hot enough so we're all here camping by this lake and i i brought this big pig and i'm all excited about it and get it out and now we all have a raw pig so we fired up the grills and then made the best out of the situation but everything's closed everything just smelled like pork after that was it a wild pig or was it was a domestic pig yeah i wish it would have been a wild pig yeah well you have to worry less about trichinosis right with the domestic pigs they're actually lowering the temperature that you could cook a domestic pig now the the recommendation they've got it down to 140 degrees see i i've heard that the trichnosis comes from them eating rodents um so technically they could get i mean there could be mice because they would eat the feed and the mice would get in with the grain and everything and they can still get trichnosis definitely can happen i wouldn't quote me on that but i've definitely heard that a lot well i've watched my chickens i have domestic chickens and i've watched them eat a mouse oh yeah they found a mouse in the chicken house and they fucked that thing up man it was wild just because usually they're just kind of like they just like peck in and they'll you know they get real happy if they find a snail or something like that but they found that mouse and they just stomped that little fucker.

[264] They went to town.

[265] They went to town.

[266] They were fighting over it and they were all tearing it apart.

[267] You see their raptor past.

[268] You know, you see their fucking dinosaurs.

[269] That's right.

[270] Because on apex, I wanted to look at a lot.

[271] I'm just fascinated by birds and the way they move in, especially predatory birds.

[272] A lot of people think of birds as seed -eating, bird bath animals.

[273] Most birds are meat eaters.

[274] Most.

[275] Yeah.

[276] Well, I mean, there's a lot of smaller species that aren't.

[277] But there are a lot of carnivorous birds.

[278] And the way they hunt, like the Great Blue Heron, we did an episode that will be coming up here shortly.

[279] The thing's got a spear attached to its head.

[280] What other animal?

[281] What other animal?

[282] There's videos of Great Blue Heron spearing these gophers.

[283] It's unbelievable.

[284] Oh, I want to see something.

[285] Pull that up, Jamie.

[286] They have a spear on their face, yeah.

[287] Well, how about pelicans?

[288] Pelicans.

[289] They got a scooper.

[290] A net.

[291] They have a built -in net.

[292] yeah man um i rented a house in malibu for a few months and uh when i was getting something fixed in my kitchen and uh the house was like right on the water it was really fucking cool because i would eat breakfast every morning like essentially like you'd look out from the kitchen table and just nothing but water and i'd watch these pelicans diving in and i'd watch these swarms of birds when they'd find you know uh fish feeding oh yeah it's just it's so wild to be around them oh look at The Blue Heron spears a gopher.

[293] So what is he just chilling, waiting for it to pop its head up?

[294] Yeah, I don't know if this is...

[295] Oh!

[296] There's like...

[297] That's it.

[298] You just whacked a gopher.

[299] They'll catch anything.

[300] But he speared it.

[301] That's what's crazy.

[302] They stab it.

[303] Imagine me on a weapon built into your face?

[304] Is this another one?

[305] Yeah, that's pretty good one.

[306] A weapon built into your face.

[307] Catch him.

[308] Spear stuff.

[309] The bigger fish, they'll spear other ones.

[310] They grab.

[311] But these gofers, they definitely go for it.

[312] I saw an eagle for the first time, I guess it was two years ago now, in Alaska.

[313] Went up there salmon fishing.

[314] I'd never seen an eagle in the wild.

[315] I'd seen eagles before, but when you see one in the wild, you start going, oh, this is not what I think it is.

[316] Oh, yeah.

[317] This is like some killer, just some flying killer that literally has knives on its fingers.

[318] As it's floating around, look for something to snatch and just fuck up.

[319] Oh, look at that.

[320] Bam!

[321] Just jacked that gover.

[322] It's like, there's your birds.

[323] Wow.

[324] Catching gophers.

[325] Dinosaurs.

[326] Yeah, they look like it.

[327] They're pretty cool.

[328] Yeah, birds are fascinating, man. Have you ever seen the videos of the Harpy Eagles in South America?

[329] Oh, yeah.

[330] They're cool.

[331] Harpy Eagles killing monkeys and sloths flying off with these sloths.

[332] Apparently they're the biggest eagle, right?

[333] The Harpy Eagle.

[334] believes the biggest one yeah well I'm not sure I believe they are yeah I think so either way they're fucking enormous and so they did this uh nature documentary where these guys were setting up a camera on the harpy eagle's nest and they had a chance here goes one look at this who poor sloth he's what a shit deal like he lives his life in slow motion to get ripped out of a tree by an eagle and put on that geo wild oh god seriously what a shit deal it is to be a sloth.

[335] That's crazy.

[336] Oh, God.

[337] It's amazing that they can fly with an animal that size, too.

[338] Easy, too.

[339] Look how he swoops in.

[340] That's cool.

[341] Biham!

[342] That's cool.

[343] It's really cheating, you know?

[344] Oh, yeah.

[345] I mean, it's like hunting a cow with a pen.

[346] That's pretty cool.

[347] It is really cool, but it's, that's an eagle.

[348] You know, I mean, that's what we think of.

[349] When we think of a bird, prey that is the quintessential bird of prey doing this apex predator show i've got to get up close and personal with a lot of animals that i just think are pretty badass i'm sure we did one that was a golden eagle episode oh and went to this lady she runs like this rehabilitation center raptor the rockies and she's got all kinds of crazy raptors and there's a golden eagle and a bald eagle in the same enclosure area we got to take the golden eagle out and check it out and that the Golden Eagle is an impressive.

[350] I mean, it's quite a bit bigger than the bald eagle.

[351] It's an enormous bird, right?

[352] They're native to Colorado and the Rocky Mountains.

[353] Yeah, they're probably the most widely distributed eagle in North America.

[354] I mean, all the way through Mexico.

[355] And they are a crazy predator.

[356] Yeah, they've seen some videos of them killing wolves.

[357] Oh, yeah.

[358] The Mongolian guys.

[359] That's bizarre.

[360] They've trained these eagles to hunt wolves for them.

[361] Yeah, it's pretty crazy.

[362] Yeah, it's an enormous.

[363] bird.

[364] And it's really crazy to think that at one point in time they were even larger.

[365] You know, they had much, much larger birds of prey in North America.

[366] Look at the face on that thing.

[367] God damn, those eyeballs.

[368] Yeah, apparently that's what we're, I was studying their eyesight.

[369] And they can spot medium -sized prey from up to two miles away.

[370] Two miles.

[371] Isn't that, I mean, that's the thing that, one of the things that just so much fascinates me about animals especially, is they have capabilities that it's almost hard with all our technology to even replicate.

[372] If you really think about it, there's a lot of weird stuff on this planet.

[373] Dolphins using sonar and eagles being able to see two miles away or there's just a lot of crazy things in nature that has taken us years and years to replicate some kind of machine or contraption where we can even compare to it.

[374] And in some cases we haven't even come close, like the smell that a bloodhound can pick up.

[375] Exactly.

[376] Smelling things that have been there ages ago.

[377] We don't have any idea.

[378] Days.

[379] Like, we don't have any idea how to make a piece of equipment that can smell something in the distance the way a dog can.

[380] When dogs start...

[381] I mean, Kim, I would just love to wonder.

[382] I would love to experience what are they...

[383] What's going on inside their nose when they catch a scent?

[384] Yeah.

[385] Like, what is that?

[386] What are they catching?

[387] Smell where a bird walked.

[388] It's crazy.

[389] Yeah.

[390] They say that.

[391] that the comparison is with skunk spray because with skunk spray a person can pick up parts per million in a way that you can't with any other spray with any other smell rather like when you're driving down the street like there's this area near my house and as I'm driving on my way home I smell skunks in this one spot all the time and they're probably blocks away from me right but I smell them so clearly like I roll down the window like you could smell they're right there and they're there days ago probably yeah It could be, or it could be, they're, well, they're definitely not right there.

[392] They're probably blocks away from me. There's nothing else that I could think of that's that small that you could smell blocks away.

[393] That's crazy.

[394] They say that that's kind of like a dog, but way better.

[395] Like, they know where it is.

[396] Like, they don't just go, fuck, what is that?

[397] They go, it's over there.

[398] It's over there.

[399] Yeah.

[400] A dude.

[401] Like, you can make them smell a dude's socks, and then they'll know he's over there.

[402] And they can chase his ass down.

[403] Just like you could smell a skunk, they could smell a person like that.

[404] It's fucking crazy.

[405] So have you been elk -cunning yet?

[406] Not yet.

[407] One of the things I always tell people is, especially if you haven't been elk -cunning, most of the elk that we end up killing, I attribute to smelling him first.

[408] And people that don't elk -hunt would never pick up on it.

[409] But I'm hunting with my nose almost as much as I'm using any other tactic.

[410] Really?

[411] Oh, yeah.

[412] And I always keep a lighter in my pocket.

[413] And as soon as I pick up the scent, I flip the lighter on and see which way the wind's going.

[414] Because you'll catch it.

[415] Like if the wind blows for a split second or swirls, you'll smell it.

[416] And you can get right in.

[417] And I can distinguish the difference between the smell of an elk and where an elk's been.

[418] You can actually smell an elk's urinated right here, where there's a wallow.

[419] And there's a different smell between that and the smell of an animal.

[420] So I'll tell my clients, I'll say, I smell an elk.

[421] like a physical animal get be ready it's it's within x amount of distance and just through practice you can you can decipher those things what is is there a way you could describe it like what's it's it smell like so i s smells are the hardest thing on the plant to describe an elk smells a lot like a beef cow but there's a different a different note to it and the the smell of on say a bull alive animal it's it's a weird it almost smells hot i don't know how to describe it but you can you can smell the difference it's it's stronger and it it just smells different hot yeah i don't i don't know it's like at the very end of the scent you can you can pick it up does there smell vary based on whether or not they're in the rut yeah it does well the intensity of their smell varies that the a cow a cow elk will smell different when she's like in heat or during the rut same with mule deer you'll smell meal deer as well wow Well, I know when we hunted mule deer, Rinala was telling us, don't touch the tarosal gland.

[422] Because that gland, if you get that on you or if you get it on your, especially if you get it on the meat, it just, just fonks up everything.

[423] Yeah.

[424] What does that smell like?

[425] Smells like musty deer.

[426] Just funk.

[427] Yeah, funking deer.

[428] Just deer funk.

[429] Have you ever got it on the meat before?

[430] No, not that I know.

[431] I did have one mulee that I shot during the rut with my recurved bow.

[432] And it was not as good as other deer.

[433] It was probably one of the worst tasting deer, and so maybe I did somehow.

[434] Hmm.

[435] Because I thought, I was eating it and going, this tastes like they smell.

[436] Really?

[437] Yeah.

[438] Usually they taste great.

[439] Makes sausage.

[440] Usually they smell great.

[441] Or it tastes great.

[442] They taste awesome.

[443] But it could have been that, or it just could have been, I don't know.

[444] Who knows, really?

[445] What is, doing this show, what has been the most?

[446] surprising thing when you're analyzing all these different animals and their hunting tactics?

[447] I think the most surprising thing is humans have a natural innate ability, hunting ability, that is very comparable to animals that have to hunt to survive.

[448] And I say that, like, we, one of the things that really brought this to light was one of our last episodes of the season, we look at the river otter.

[449] River water.

[450] Well, it's a mammal that hunts underwater.

[451] We're mammals.

[452] Can we hunt underwater?

[453] And I'm pretty much from the desert.

[454] So water is people are in the water, but I think of it as something that people have trained their whole lives to do or whatever, you know, be efficient free diving.

[455] So I go to Florida and kind of just try to uncover how humans compare to mammals that hunt underwater.

[456] Turns out we have the same dive.

[457] reflexes in other things as other mammals that hunt underwater and we anybody off the street can initiate these these reflexes thing that our trouble is our mind we have this mental threshold that we have to get over but once we get over that within two hours I was able to hold my breath for over four minutes what yeah crazy what's all the mental you're in really good shape no but this is the guy that I did this free diving course and the guy is like we could take if if if everyone could just block until things out of their mind, pretty much the average person off the street could easily hold their breath for three minutes.

[458] And if you could completely clear your mind, pretty much everyone could hold their breath for four to five minutes.

[459] That's insane.

[460] It's crazy.

[461] So it's just a panic, the freaking out, like, I got to breathe, I got to breathe, they've got to breathe.

[462] Yeah.

[463] But there's this mammalian dive reflex in it.

[464] It restricts your capillary, slows your heart rate automatically.

[465] your spleen releases more red blood cells so your body consumes less oxygen is the exact same thing that happens in whales dolphins otters so we're just born with these these things that other male other predators have and it it kind of really comes out in this TV show and that's one of the things that I really wanted to do this because looking at it and talking about it you say what are you doing and at the onset It sounds completely ridiculous, especially to a guy like me that's made most of my life hunting.

[466] So I go, okay, well, what am I doing here?

[467] I'm trying to dissect nature and see, is hunting really something that's natural for humans to do?

[468] Are we meant to be hunters?

[469] Are we born to be hunters?

[470] And obviously, there's a big learning curve in it.

[471] But we are very similar to these other animals that are born predators.

[472] Well, it only makes sense that if buffalo have a natural instinct to avoid bipedal hunting, Because they've seen that, okay, they get shot, we get killed, and they know that wolves come around, okay, don't run, stay put, and we'll fuck these wolves up.

[473] Like, it almost seems like all this information just gets passed on somehow, another, through genetics, and that's how these animals managed to be here.

[474] Yeah.

[475] Well, it would only make sense that if we've gotten to 2015, the way we got here is by eating everything that we could eat up till now, including every animal that we could figure out how to hunt, and all those skills and all those abilities.

[476] especially the idea that your spleen starts releasing extra red blood when you dive under water to allow you to stay.

[477] There's only one reason to stay underwater.

[478] It's the two, to hide from something or to kill something.

[479] That's it.

[480] Yeah, it's crazy.

[481] Wow.

[482] That's pretty wild.

[483] Yeah.

[484] So what did you do when you did that?

[485] Do you use a spear or something like that?

[486] Yeah, so, yeah, then I went, we went out into the Gulf of Mexico and speared some greater Amberjack and diving down pretty deep.

[487] And it was awesome.

[488] It was so cool.

[489] How long?

[490] It wasn't the long as you stayed down.

[491] While moving.

[492] So the static breath holds, we were doing four -minute breath holds.

[493] And when I got up from those, you feel this kind of euphoric sense.

[494] You're like, wow.

[495] And you get up and people black out at the top because they forget to take a breath.

[496] Because at that point, you get to a certain point where you get up and you're like, you aren't out of, you aren't really out of breath.

[497] It's a mental thing.

[498] It's a horrible feeling.

[499] I'm not going to lie.

[500] but it is a mental thing because you realize your body doesn't it tells you it needs oxygen but it essentially doesn't well it does at some point but there's people that'll hold their breath for 12 minutes 12 minutes well didn't that that dude david blaine right he did something where he took like oxygen in he did something he did some sort of a sneaky trick where he uh he breathed in pure oxygen and held it and then held his breath for like 17 minutes or something like that yeah this is Before he did that stunt, this is the same thing that he went through to prepare for it.

[501] Oh, really?

[502] Yeah.

[503] So he went through free diving.

[504] Yeah, performance.

[505] Yeah, there's a dude name Egan Inouye.

[506] He's brothers with a guy named Ensign Inouye who's a famous M .M .A. fighter.

[507] And Egan actually fought some M .M .A. himself.

[508] But Egan was a world champion free diver.

[509] And I think he would hold his breath for like seven minutes.

[510] Crazy.

[511] Yeah, living in Hawaii.

[512] They would use holding their breath underwater.

[513] It was one of the strength and conditioning programs they would do.

[514] They would move rocks underwater.

[515] B .J. Penn had it on one of the countdown shows to one of his big fights.

[516] He would dive underwater and lift up a big rock and then move the rock underwater and drop it and come back up for air and go down and move it again, drop it and come back up for air.

[517] I've heard through the grapevine that a lot of athletes are doing these breath holds before competitions because they're naturally, they're naturally creating more red blood cells, performance enhancing breath holds.

[518] Wow.

[519] Oh, that makes sense.

[520] That makes sense if you're saying that the spleen releases it when you're underwater, it probably is releasing it because you're holding your breath.

[521] Correct, yeah.

[522] That's going to be the new doping.

[523] Yeah, it is.

[524] You can't hold your breath.

[525] Are you breathing?

[526] Are you breathing?

[527] But there's a lot of athletes that are doing these, initiating these natural responses to enhance their performance.

[528] Yeah, that's one of the big ones that I've been really getting into over the last.

[529] few months or a year or so actually is cryogenic therapy where you go into this chamber that's 250 degrees below zero you put a surgical mask on earmuffs on gloves you have underwear on and you wear socks and like rubber crocks so that your foot doesn't touch the bottom because you will get frostbite anything you touch you'll get frostbite and you step in this thing 250 degrees below zero for three minutes okay and you get out and you feel fucking fantastic when you get out you you you feel like you could jump over the building just wow you just everything just feels so good once you're because your body thinks it's going to die your body pulls all its blood into your internal organs and when you come out they actually do a temperature test the surface of your skin and the surface of my skin is usually somewhere around 30 32 35 degrees it's like it gets really cold and then immediately your blood just rushes back to all your extremities and the anti -inflammatory response is spectacular so people have like pretty significant injuries arthritis like even people that are like close borderline and needing like hip replacements they've been able to put it off by doing this cryotherapy and mitigate almost all the pain that's pretty cool that's because it's funny the the mammalian dive effects response when your face hits cold water it starts to initiate because that's closing those capillaries and it's probably a very similar process that's going on with that cryo that may make sense I used to take cold showers like real hardcore cold showers when I lived in Boston there was this guy named Bob Caffarella that I used to do Taekwondo with and he was like a he was a senior student he was like ahead of me he was a black belt before I was he was like way and he was a fucking madman he used to sleep at the gym trained all day long he'd always see him training but he was also into like forcing himself to do things that he didn't like to do to be uncomfortable and what he'd do is in mid -January he would take cold showers and it was fucking cold.

[530] You're talking about 33 degree water you know it was like just barely cold enough to not be frozen in the pipes and he would turn that shit on and he would take a shower in there and it would just breathe in there and I'm like and I remember trying and I did it a few times but it's just like you can't that's the thing that freaks you out is like you got no breath why can't I breathe like it should be being cold makes sense but why can't I breathe?

[531] I guess it's probably the same sort of a response it is yeah wow it would think that maybe taking a really cold shower before you perform you know before you do anything athletic would yeah would benefit you as well i would think so there's a lot of there's a lot of things that nature can teach us that you know our bodies just do by themselves what was what was the motivation to do this show because this is a very different than solo hunter which is how i found out about you which is a really cool show.

[532] It's still around.

[533] If you guys want to catch some episodes, in that show, you would go out by yourself, just bring cameras and really fascinating stuff.

[534] And I'm still doing that show, and I don't really plan on changing anything with that, because I still, my bread and butter is going out hunting.

[535] It's what I love.

[536] But I wanted to get a little bit deeper and do something different.

[537] And by something different, I wanted to also do something that looks at hunting and any person watching the show, whether they're a hunter or not, could look at this and go, you know what, there's something here.

[538] There's something that shows me that humans are meant to be hunters.

[539] And if I can make one person think that and go, okay, well, maybe hunting isn't so bad, then for me, that's a bonus because it's something that I love.

[540] I don't want to see hunting go away because if I did, then that's, That's my passion.

[541] That's what I'm all about.

[542] So if all of a sudden it disappeared wasn't allowed or whatever, people didn't understand it, then for me, I'd feel like I don't know what I would do.

[543] Is that really possible, though?

[544] I don't necessarily know.

[545] It could be.

[546] I mean, you never really know because it's not guaranteed.

[547] There's just like mountain lion hunting isn't allowed in California, it makes no sense ecologically or whatever if people's emotions get involved with management.

[548] or whatever.

[549] It just seems like California is such an extreme example of people who don't have experience with wildlife or making those choices or definitely don't have experience with hunting.

[550] The whole department of fishing game out here isn't fish in game.

[551] It's fishing wildlife.

[552] It's in the few states that has a distinction in the way it labels itself.

[553] But the other reason is I professionally, I've made my living, hunting.

[554] And there's always been this idea.

[555] for me of kind of taking it deeper and in this show I actually learn something every time I do one of these as ridiculous as the premise might be or whatever we're trying to do seems ridiculous to me sometimes at first and then I go through the steps and I really learn something and if I can learn something I've been doing this forever then I feel like other people watching can learn something other hunters other people in general yeah no doubt I think just hunting itself is is a learning experience.

[556] There's so many bad ideas that people have are just bad misconceptions about hunting.

[557] And a lot of it comes down to, we look at hunting or people look at hunting.

[558] A lot of times, they look at the negative aspects of, like, trophy hunting.

[559] Trophy hunting seems kind of gross to people.

[560] Like, the recent one was that lady that was laying down next to a giraffe.

[561] Yeah, I just saw it today.

[562] That's just really, it's just poor taste.

[563] poor management, poor thinking.

[564] Like, you keep going on and on forever.

[565] Like, why would you lie down next to a giraffe smiling?

[566] You know, the whole thing is very strange.

[567] And the real fuck -up about it is that it puts out this image that confuses the real issue at hand, which is this was a large, non -breeding male that they were going to take out anyway.

[568] Like this was, they had already deemed through their conservation efforts that they were going to take this, this giraffe out, and that they were going to use it to feed these villagers.

[569] So her paying money to go and shoot this thing actually helps all these villagers.

[570] It gives them food, then they take the money, they can apply the money to, you know, whatever, making wells or whatever they do with the money that they get from hunters paying to hunt these animals.

[571] There's a benefit to it because that ain't.

[572] animal wasn't going to be around much longer anyway her stepping in and going but but then when you put it on facebook and you're smiling and you're the it's all so fucking confusing like to everybody else it goes well you're an asshole you just shot a fucking giraffe who eats giraffs you know like no one's you're not like going over there to feed your family by shooting giraffes and then you find out well you actually can eat giraffes and actually giraffes taste like a lot of different animals they're related to yeah they're like meat yeah they're deer there's essentially crazy -necked antelopes, right?

[573] Yep.

[574] Isn't that what their family there are?

[575] They're antelope, yeah.

[576] Yeah, I mean, antelopes are delicious.

[577] Yeah.

[578] But giraffes are so nice.

[579] You go to the zoo.

[580] You know, I had this bit in my last special about giraffes being like the only animal that I don't feel bad that they're at the zoo.

[581] Yeah.

[582] Because they wake up and they're like, another day with no lions.

[583] And they just wander around, like having a great old time.

[584] Like, we're so confident that giraffes are nice that they let babies feed them.

[585] Yeah.

[586] Like, when my daughter was two, I was holding her up.

[587] in my arms and she's got her little tiny little baby hand out with a piece of lettuce and the giraffe comes over wraps its tongue around the lettuce and takes it and she's laughing and like they're so confident at the zoo in a giraffe's behavior that they'll let babies feed them which is crazy in the wild though giraffes can be like a bull giraffe can be pretty dangerous animal because probably because of their size but if you I've seen giraffes fighting oh yeah they're necks and wham and they use their neck like a weapon they whip their hair head into each other but they're uh you know ever i think people would assume too like oh giraffs really would be really easy to kill because they're so big i got this uh i was working in south africa and on this place there's a few giraffes there and they would get this disease from ticks and so the guy would hire these professional hunters like myself or whatever to shoot like inoculate the giraffes with these paintballs fill with like we call it douse or drench it kills parasites so it's a paintball gun so you have to get closer than you would with a bow and sneak up on these drafts the drafts were the hardest thing on the place to inoculate really oh yeah because they can see you coming forever and they were skittish because they just because they wanted these giraffes to survive and two of the drafts had actually gotten killed by power lines so there's only a few giraffes.

[588] Power lines.

[589] There's a big windstorm and two giraffes, boom, zapped dead.

[590] Whoa, the lines came down and cooked them.

[591] Holy shit.

[592] How it happened or what just whipping in the wind and killed both of them.

[593] Whoa.

[594] But so the guy was really set on inoculate or dousing these giraffes.

[595] So I went out there and I don't know why I, because a lot I would, there was a lot of other animals in this area that just weren't accustomed to the ticks there because they might have been from another region and they kind of do this on these giant i don't even know what you call them preserves in africa like if you go on a photo safari in south africa or whatever it's essentially there's places where say they bring in animals and maybe that animal wasn't indigenous to that region but they swapped with this game reserve area over here to kind of integrate breeding and and keep the populations existing and so you bring in a giraffe to this portion of Africa that maybe hasn't had giraffes for who knows how long and the ticks there will kill them they get these diseases from the ticks so but there's a lot of other animals like that too so I'd go out at night or whatever and try to shoot these animal antelope with paintballs that would inoculate them yeah kill the ticks and I never saw the giraffes at night I don't know why maybe I just it was kind of weird you'd think you'd find them at night maybe I just driving bass and maybe trees.

[596] Or maybe they're laying down.

[597] Maybe that's why I didn't find them.

[598] I don't know why I couldn't figure that out.

[599] But they were the hardest things to shoot with a paintball gun.

[600] So there it is.

[601] Paintballing drafts is one of the hardest things I've ever had to do.

[602] Those wild game preserves in Africa, boy, that is a goddamn conundrum.

[603] And if there's ever anything that's stirred up the sort of the horrible feelings that anti -hunters have, it's those game preserves where you could just go there and just kill these animals and it's such a catch -22 because these animals a lot of them were bordering on being extinct just a couple of decades ago and now their populations are thriving but the vast majority of them are in these high -fence game operations it's real weird well even in the places that aren't hunting where they just are for photo safaris or what have you you get, say you bring in, I'll pick a species, Kudhu, Kudu, there you go.

[604] So you bring in Kudu to this place where it could be 200 ,000 acres and people are going to come and take pictures of these animals.

[605] Well, if there's no hunting there, even with the lions and other things that they have there, the Kudu population may explode.

[606] They cannot sustain themselves.

[607] They have to manage these areas too.

[608] So a lot of times they do game captures or they may allow some hunting that the people taking photos don't even know about.

[609] But whenever you have these populations, it's just the same as managing animals in the state of Montana just on a smaller scale.

[610] You know, you have a limited amount of food supply.

[611] You have X amount of animals.

[612] These populations are growing at this rate.

[613] The predators are only taking care of this much.

[614] Therefore, excess has to be taken care of.

[615] And some of those excess animals are animals that used to be near extinction.

[616] And now, if you don't manage them, they'll all die off of wherever they're at.

[617] It's so crazy.

[618] Yeah.

[619] It's so crazy also that this is a giant booming economy in Africa now.

[620] Oh, yeah.

[621] And all that, it's a business on multi -levels, too, because the landowner now owns the meat.

[622] So then he'll either sell the meat or give it to people living there, working there.

[623] Yeah, if you go over to Africa, To hunt, you can't really bring that meat back, can you?

[624] No. But you can in New Zealand.

[625] Yep.

[626] New Zealand, you can.

[627] How is that?

[628] New Zealand's clean.

[629] They don't have anything that we don't have.

[630] So you can't bring meat into New Zealand, but you can bring meat out of New Zealand.

[631] Okay, so you don't have to worry about some funky new Ebola type thing.

[632] Yeah, they don't have anything.

[633] Africa's crazy.

[634] Yeah.

[635] It's funny, Ebola, one of my friends is a professional hunter in South Africa.

[636] And a lot of people didn't want to go to Africa after they heard the Ebola.

[637] Well, from Africa's such a large continent, from where he is to where the Ebola is, is further away than Atlanta, Georgia.

[638] Wow.

[639] Not to Americans.

[640] Yeah.

[641] That's goddamn Africa.

[642] It's all the same shit.

[643] You're going over there.

[644] They all got AIDS.

[645] From the monkeys.

[646] Yeah, we don't realize how big it is.

[647] We did an image on the podcast recently where we pulled up.

[648] There's an image of Africa, the continent, and how enormous it is, and how many other continents you could stuff inside of Africa.

[649] And it's so shocking when you realize how big it really is.

[650] Because on a map, there it is right there.

[651] Look, China, United States, India, Eastern Europe, and a bunch of other shit in there, too.

[652] I mean, all of it just stuffed in there, the UK, everything, stuffed in there.

[653] Jam pack.

[654] That's crazy.

[655] That's nuts.

[656] It's a cool picture.

[657] It's a very cool picture.

[658] This is a goddamn huge country or huge continent rather.

[659] That's the other thing is Africa.

[660] People think of it's like United States, Africa.

[661] No, it's the fucking continent, man. Lots of different facets and people and problems and solutions.

[662] And a huge spot of controversy now for hunting.

[663] And this whole trophy hunting thing.

[664] Rinella wrote a great piece about it.

[665] He wrote an amazing piece about this woman, these young, girls that are getting involved in hunting and it's like become a career for a lot of them yeah they look real pretty and they go over there shoot animals and pose with them and all the pro hunters get on their side and all the anti hunters attack their Facebooks and death threats and it's like it's almost like a dance that everyone's doing but what he wrote about it which I thought was really fascinating who's like I think a lot of this is sexism oh for sure for sure right yeah you're dealing with this pretty blonde who goes over there and shoots all these animals if it was a fat old guy from Denmark Nobody would give a fuck.

[666] You wouldn't be storming that guy's Facebook page.

[667] No. People would find a distasteful that he shot a lion like one of the asshole.

[668] But that would be where it ends.

[669] Yeah.

[670] It's because it's women and as much as it's the same people, it's kind of a hypocritical way to look at it too.

[671] Because they go, oh, a lot of the people that are doing this, maybe it's just me being hypocritical as well.

[672] But all the people that do it, probably look at them as women and go, you know, if it's a man, it's different because hunting is a man's sport.

[673] these pretty girls doing it and they they're out of place or something whereas hunters don't even think like that it's like oh woman hunting yeah that's great well you know what it is too i think it's also that they're attractive white women with blonde hair exactly you just think all these evil thoughts of racism and cruelty and just these monster Aryan women that are shooting animals and posing with them big stupid whitened teeth smiles yeah it is a form of sexism i i feel like Now, on the flip side, some of them probably just, I mean, it's the easy, if you wanted to jump in that spotlight, go shoot yourself a lion and wear a cheerleader out.

[674] I'm actually planning on doing that next week.

[675] This show will blow up Apex Predator.

[676] Just going to run my cheerleader outfit, have my pom -poms, and go out and chase the lions.

[677] That's what you need to do.

[678] You need to take over the transgender hunting market.

[679] It's ripe.

[680] It's ripe.

[681] If you became the first, like, openly transnational.

[682] transgender hunting or at least trans transgressor not transgender I don't want to go that deep into it When you start pulling out a scalpel and removing balls, I'm kind of like Oh, let's step away from this issue Fucking with the endocrine system.

[683] There's a lot going on there behind the scenes You know hills and heels just I'm new in all my hillcans from now solo hunters and I just got these Stilettos Stilettos I'm really pumped for this adventure I wonder how many gay hunters are too That was something that we had gotten into before.

[684] We were trying to describe, like, the average hunter.

[685] And I said, well, how many people, like, you know, like a lot of hunters tend to lean right wing, and maybe that's because of gun rights or Second Amendment ideas, or just because it's, like, sort of a traditional, you know, god guns and, you know.

[686] Grills.

[687] Grill and meat.

[688] Not the kind of going to keep, but they tend to, like, like, I would say, the majority, I would say it's probably like more than 60 % or right wing.

[689] Yeah, I would probably say that.

[690] Yeah.

[691] But how many of them are gay?

[692] I don't know.

[693] Do you know any gay hunters?

[694] I do.

[695] You do?

[696] Oh, there you go.

[697] I know a few of them that are actually guides like professional hunters.

[698] Really?

[699] Are they open?

[700] Not.

[701] No. I mean...

[702] They just tell you, hey man, you don't want to share a tent with me because I will fuck you.

[703] That's one of those.

[704] No, I mean, they're...

[705] I don't really know You just know that they're gay Yeah It just doesn't come up Yeah It's not Yeah I think in this day and age It's more about I mean Not that this needs to be discussed in depth But I think Homosexuality It's more about If you really do care Unless you're dealing with Some extremely aggressive individual That's like annoying with his gayness Right Like just won't take no for an answer Which I have seen I have seen I know a comedian like that He's fucking brutal.

[706] He's not so brutal anymore.

[707] He's an older gentleman, I believe he's calmed down.

[708] But back in the day, like, man, 10, 15 years ago, I had a deal with him one night at a drunken bar in Montreal.

[709] I was like, dude, you got to get the fuck away from me. Like, I'm not gay.

[710] You got to stop.

[711] He was brutal, you know?

[712] He was trying to get this other dude to come upstairs.

[713] And then he's like, what about you?

[714] I'm like, come on, man, get out of here.

[715] Like, you're just brutal.

[716] Like, you realize what it's like to be a woman.

[717] I'm not a piece of meat you can stare.

[718] Eyes are up here.

[719] You fucking assholes.

[720] Stop looking at my non -functional breasts.

[721] But then he started to insult you and you're kind of like, well, maybe, what's wrong with me?

[722] And then you latch on.

[723] Yeah, he starts playing mind games.

[724] Now you start wanting him.

[725] No, I just, I think in this day and age, there's going to come a point in time where the person that is homophobic or racist or any other prejudice, that person is going to be like very rare, very rare.

[726] and, like, despised.

[727] Like, right now, there's plenty of people that you could hang out with that would share in your racism or share in your homophobia.

[728] But I think because of the internet, because people are kind of understanding people a little bit better and motivations a little bit better, that's going to be less and less.

[729] Yeah.

[730] I think if more gay hunters were around, I think that would help.

[731] So you gay people out there.

[732] It's a great way to get fabulous furs.

[733] Fabulous furs.

[734] That's a touchy one, though.

[735] Even people that like to eat.

[736] eat meat, they're like, have a hard time with furs, right?

[737] Yeah.

[738] Furs are tricky.

[739] They are.

[740] Falls into like sort of the same ideas of trophy hunting.

[741] Like you're turning an animal into an object.

[742] Even people that eat meat have a problem with furs.

[743] Or furs or leathers, I guess.

[744] But leather's not.

[745] Because you're eating the animal underneath it.

[746] Well, look, I could wear these fucking converse to Whole Foods.

[747] No, single vegan.

[748] Nobody would give me a hard.

[749] These are leather.

[750] Yeah.

[751] You know, nobody would give me a hard time about these.

[752] That'd be fine.

[753] Leather belt.

[754] No one's going to get crazy.

[755] Is that a leather interior in your car?

[756] No one does a fuck.

[757] No one cares.

[758] But if you say that you eat an animal that's not on the average everyday menu, you know, if you're one of those weird dudes that go squirrel hunting, you know, oh, you piece of shit, how could you shoot a squirrel?

[759] With, what is a Ronella's term?

[760] He uses charismatic megafauna, like bears.

[761] Bears are a big one.

[762] People think of yogi and boo -boo and all these different animals.

[763] It's, yeah, we've given, we've given human personalities to, to non -humans.

[764] Yeah.

[765] So we attach to them.

[766] But Bow Winkle never caught down.

[767] Nobody gives a fuck if you shoot a moose.

[768] No. They really don't care.

[769] But rocky.

[770] Because, oh, the squirrel.

[771] Squirrel.

[772] That's right.

[773] Squirrels are cute.

[774] They're fluffy.

[775] They're like the most acceptable rodent ever.

[776] I don't, yeah.

[777] I think they're just kind of big, noisy rats, really.

[778] I don't even I've eaten coyote And I don't eat a squirrel Really?

[779] I've never eaten squirrels I don't know why You've never even tried it?

[780] Not that I wouldn't But in my Where I grew up Squirrels You just didn't eat squirrels Well you got your coyote The same place I got my squirrel from Ronella Did you?

[781] I ate some squirrel Was it?

[782] You know Now I feel like I shouldn't go through My life without eating a squirrel I've eaten I ate a pigeon the other day We had pigeons on our roof And they were just crapping All over So I shot it with the Pelican And I ate it like whatever it's me that's hilarious I felt well yeah I feel like when you when you utilize it then it's okay it kind of it for myself it justifies it yeah okay yeah well yeah yeah it's like now if I trap a rat in the garage I'm not gonna eat that right unless you're really fucking hungry exactly I was in New York City last week and they had pigeon on the menu at a restaurant we ate at they call it squab nope It was pigeon.

[783] It just said pigeon.

[784] See, that's, some animals get weird, there's like a weird stipulation with them where it's not a tasty edible item.

[785] But if you put dove there, hunters love doves, but pigeons are taboo.

[786] Hunters love doves, but if you dove on a menu on a regular restaurant, the average person who's not a hunter would be like, oh, the peaceful bird?

[787] It's the peace bird.

[788] The bird of love?

[789] That's the love bird.

[790] It has the twig in its hand.

[791] the love bird was the swallow.

[792] I don't know.

[793] Oh, that's not the love.

[794] That's the lust bird.

[795] That's the dirty bird.

[796] That's, I forget.

[797] Yeah.

[798] The pigeons were actually brought to North America as a food source.

[799] When you look at pigeons that are in New York and they're flying all over the buildings and shitting all over the place, those pigeons were initially brought over as a food source.

[800] They are non -native animals.

[801] My great grandma raised pigeons for food.

[802] Wow.

[803] And sold them.

[804] That was like, that was their, they're pigeon farmers.

[805] Squab salesmen.

[806] Wow.

[807] Squab salesman.

[808] That's crazy.

[809] Because I'd seen it, you see it in a few Chinese food restaurants, squab salad and other things.

[810] But they have to call it squab.

[811] If you don't call it, if you call it pigeon.

[812] That's why I was amazed at this New York City restaurant.

[813] But they're just, New York City is on some next level culinary type shit.

[814] And, I mean, that's, it's like, that's locally sourced, man. That's a pigeon from, yeah, I can see that.

[815] It's from my jungle.

[816] The jungle of my rooftop apartment.

[817] Yeah, there's a lot of them If you want to serve pigeons in New York That's like you got a sustainable sort of an environment And they're fed well too They eat lots of garbage Probably not good for you They used to say that lobster was like a poor person's food In New York, like way back in the day They used to, when people wanted lobsters They would get them directly from the river They would get them right from the East River And they would pull them out And they would serve them in bars And they were like poor people food Because they're aquacockerages Yeah.

[818] Well, they literally are.

[819] Yeah.

[820] Iraq.

[821] Spiders.

[822] If you have an allergy to shellfish, you also have an allergy to roaches.

[823] We found that out on Fear Factor.

[824] That's pretty crazy.

[825] Yeah.

[826] People that were allergic to shellfish, we gave them roaches, and their throat started seasoned up.

[827] Oh, because they're eating the roaches.

[828] Yeah.

[829] I guess there's no other show where it's like, whoa.

[830] Oh, cockroach over here.

[831] Oh, yeah, they're ingesting these.

[832] Well, I can't believe that no one knew that.

[833] Like, they would ask people, what are your allergies?

[834] And they said, shellfish.

[835] Okay, eat a roach.

[836] Same fucking thing, man. Did anybody go into, like, anaphylactic shock or anything?

[837] This guy got real close.

[838] Where his mouth or as a windpipe was closing down.

[839] Did you, do you, when someone's dying from eating cockroach, do you kind of like shit talk?

[840] I'm still like, you scared?

[841] Come on, man. Suck it up.

[842] It was much later after the show.

[843] Yeah, they had eaten the cockroach.

[844] They'd gone back to the hotel, and that's when the reaction started kicking in.

[845] It wasn't an instantaneous reaction.

[846] So I don't know if maybe they have a less strapped.

[847] wrong reaction from eating the cockroats than they do from eating shellfish or if that's how their reaction normally is I guess there's levels of allergies right yeah some people are like acutely like I my friend Gary he can't even come over my house because I have cats if he opens my door just start he literally can't even breathe the air inside my house but my wife's allergic to cats and she lives with she's fine she just has to wash her hands if they touch her they lick her they get their they have to be clean we have to bathe them but My friend Gary can't even walk in the door.

[848] So I guess it's like there's levels of it.

[849] Let's put that on the cockroach allergy.

[850] Is there game animals that people are allergic to?

[851] Is there any animal?

[852] Have you ever heard of a person being allergic to like venison or something like that?

[853] No, I know.

[854] I'm allergic to antelope in a certain way.

[855] Like when I'm skinning it, the blood, when it dries, it gets hives itchy.

[856] Some people get that.

[857] Only antelope?

[858] Yeah.

[859] Did you ever get it checked?

[860] No. Huh.

[861] I don't know.

[862] But, I mean, cook it, eat it all the time.

[863] I love antelope meat.

[864] So, I don't know.

[865] But I've talked to other people that happens to you.

[866] If you had to say, like, what is your all -time favorite meat?

[867] If somebody restricted you to one meat for the rest of your life?

[868] Oh, it's so tough.

[869] Probably elk.

[870] Yeah.

[871] It's just something about elk.

[872] It's delicious and healthy and it's good.

[873] It's really good.

[874] It's such a majestic animal, too.

[875] I've only seen a few of them in the wild, but every time I see him, I'm just like, whoa, look is that thing.

[876] And it's a fun animal to, I mean, it's a hard animal to hunt.

[877] A lot of people don't realize, but the payoff's amazing because it's pretty large and some of the best meat around.

[878] I really, I keep coming back to elk is the best.

[879] Yeah, it's very, very delicious.

[880] It's an enormous animal.

[881] Like, what's the biggest elk you've ever shot?

[882] Body -wise?

[883] Body -wise.

[884] Oh, this year on me and my brother drew tags on southwest of Fognac Island up in Alaska, and we shot these elk.

[885] Mine, no joke, probably weighed 1 ,400 pounds.

[886] Holy fuck.

[887] Now, this is for people, like most elk are about 400 pounds.

[888] Like Rocky Mountain elk average, you know, younger bull.

[889] I think the, what was it, Wyoming did a study, and it's around there 400 and something pounds as the average elk weight.

[890] This was a very large animal.

[891] And the fishing game department in Alaska sends out a thing saying these elk are about the size of moose.

[892] And yes, this elk was as big or bigger than any moose I've ever packed out, taken apart.

[893] God.

[894] It was a brutal experience, to say the least.

[895] Does it carry it?

[896] Oh, yeah.

[897] We had to pack this thing.

[898] Dude, it was crazy.

[899] My lower back just started throttle.

[900] Me and my brother, we both shot, we both shot bulls.

[901] Mine was quite a bit larger body -wise than my brothers, but eight days of just straight toil, 100 -plus -pound packs.

[902] Eight days of just carrying the animals.

[903] We filmed a documentary -style show on this.

[904] it's not anything yet but we did we recorded all our our trip in a documentary fashion and recorded on his GPS our elevation because we camped on this one lake and we had to climb up this big mountain down the next one and we shot these elk ways away and it was I hate pulling I'm so bad with numbers I always misrepresent him so I'm trying to think here but it was something like 60 man hours of packing between the two of us 30 hours, you know, 30 hours of just straight carrying.

[905] Holy fuck.

[906] It was, it was, I got, and I got really sick on that trip.

[907] And I think it might have been partially due to just being physically done.

[908] Just destroyed.

[909] It was, it was one of the most physical trips I've ever had, but it was probably one of the best trips I've ever had.

[910] And we came back with 600.

[911] pounds of boned out meat and get this uh we we put the meat up in a tree because we had to do caches i mean this is a multiple day ordeal so we're doing these caches and this island has some of the largest brown bears in the world and we got them up in this one spruce tree as high as we could get them probably 14 15 feet up and two of the hind quarters in our cash got eaten by bears by a bear and they say these bears don't close climb trees.

[912] I don't necessarily believe that.

[913] I think that they can get up a tree in some fashion because I don't think it was a 16.

[914] I know it wouldn't have been a 16 foot bear, but somehow this bear got the meat out of this cash.

[915] And so we came back with 600 pounds of meat minus two hindquarters.

[916] Holy shit.

[917] Insane.

[918] And the hindquarters are boned out or no?

[919] Yeah, boned out.

[920] No bones in them.

[921] Just meat.

[922] Wow.

[923] 100 % meat.

[924] We took a picture where we got the plane.

[925] We had to take two plane trips to get the meat out.

[926] Just stacks of meat.

[927] So how far are you traveling?

[928] Like as the crow flies.

[929] I love saying that.

[930] As the crow flies, five miles.

[931] As the crow flies, but you're going up and down.

[932] So quite a bit more than that.

[933] So from camp, the summit was 2 ,500 feet from our camp vertical up.

[934] So it's 5 ,000 each.

[935] 5 ,000.

[936] And in my brothers, we had to go even over two ranges like that.

[937] So just to get one trip back, it was 10 ,000 vert.

[938] Fuck.

[939] Just, we documented the whole thing because it was just ridiculous.

[940] And so I got sick.

[941] And I don't know if it was from drinking water, but sometimes the gestation period of a lot of things you pick up.

[942] I did drink out of one stream that my brother didn't, and it might have been below an elk wallow.

[943] Anyways, I get sick, and it happens to be this night that we had an insane walkback.

[944] We got back, I think it was one in the morning.

[945] And we could have bivied out, The thought was we set up a base camp, and if you bivvy out, you carry your camp on your back.

[946] But then you still have to get all the meat back, and it was, in our minds, easier to just do extra effort if we had to come out light, and then we would have room to carry meat, so we wouldn't have to carry our gear and other things.

[947] Right.

[948] And with the bears as well, I mean, these bears are everywhere, so we have electric bear fence around our base camp.

[949] Whoa.

[950] And the night we come back, and I just got super sick.

[951] is gale force wins 70 mile an hour wins and i'm and you're just trying not you're trying to hold throwing up the coming out both ends essentially and it's the worst time ever so you probably had jardy or something like that i don't think it was your jaric i just something maybe some kind of food point something but it had to have been bacterial in some way because uh i had one of those z pack three antibiotic things and i just so happened to throw it in i normally do but it was a lucky deal because i took it out of my carry on and threw it in the thing and i've it's been in my kit forever and i've never had to use it and that helped i don't know how i would have done it because i was able to still take that and kind of kill off whatever was going on and then finish packing out or meat so you're talking about 30 plus hours of just packing meat and carrying it yeah and each pack you're You're more than 100 pounds, right, on your back?

[952] Fucking A man. I was, my brother's in really good shape, and he's a bigger guy than me. So carrying the same amount of weight for me and eat, but I'm, this is my little brother.

[953] I can't, he can't carry more weight than me. I hope he doesn't listen to this because I was hurting.

[954] I didn't want him to know it, but I was, oh, I still hurt from it.

[955] He's like a competition to see who breaks first.

[956] Exactly.

[957] Who can deal with the hardship better?

[958] Exactly.

[959] And he's, I mean, if I'm in, if I'm ever in a wilderness hard situation, like, that's the guy I want in my corner.

[960] He's just an awesome dude.

[961] And because of it, it ended up being one of the coolest trips ever.

[962] And while we're hiking, the thing we do, you're just like walking and working hard.

[963] All we do is talk about how few calories.

[964] We memorize the amount of calories in every mountain house.

[965] That was our thing is.

[966] Mountain house, those meals, those freeze -dried meals.

[967] And when you're over -exerting and just eating.

[968] freeze -dried meals, nothing is better than some fresh elk steak over the fire.

[969] I was hanging out with this photographer when we went moose hunting, this guy Sam, and he was talking about this trip that he had went on where they had not brought enough food.

[970] Yeah.

[971] And everyone on the trip had lost like 30 pounds, 20 pounds.

[972] You can lose so much weight.

[973] When I first started guiding, every year I would lose 20 to 30 pounds.

[974] Wow.

[975] It's starving.

[976] You're starving.

[977] It's essentially starvation.

[978] Essentially.

[979] Yeah, you force your body to keep going, and it starts eating off fat and muscle.

[980] And it doesn't take much to do, because you almost come to a point when you're working so hard that you physically can't, you just get sick of eating almost.

[981] They need some better hierarchy.

[982] You just need to bring sticks of butter or something.

[983] Like fat, just actual fat.

[984] Realistically.

[985] Yeah, when people say that I can't lose weight, man, I can't lose weight.

[986] You're not trying.

[987] Yeah.

[988] If you just, just what you need to do.

[989] Get one of those tensing packs, throw a fucking rock in it like Cameron Haynes does and go climb up a mountain.

[990] Oh, yeah.

[991] He puts a hundred and thirty pound rock in his pack.

[992] It's one of the ways he prepares for elk season.

[993] He puts a rock in his pack and he hikes mountains.

[994] I saw, I was on Facebook or something.

[995] He just did the Boston Marathon.

[996] For a guy in his, like, bodybuilder status to run like that is semi -unhuman, really.

[997] That motherfucker works hard.

[998] Oh, yeah.

[999] He does it.

[1000] He lives it.

[1001] He lifts weights every day, seven days a week.

[1002] go how many days you work out every day every day you never take a day out he doesn't take days off he just pushes i mean he's always hurt he's always sore he's always like aching barely can get out of bed has to drink coffee take aspirin hot shower and then starts running huh just crazy just tough just tough yeah there's certain people man they just and a lot of them are hunters like ronella's one of those guys it's just fucking tough just they have this mental toughness the ability to endure discomfort that the average person just doesn't get and I think it's accentuated by this life or death struggle that you you experience on a day -to -day basis when you're hunting yeah you can kind of compartmentalize certain aches and pains and hunger and thirst and cold you can just block that shit out and keep going where the average person sort of wallows in that stuff but you know you have you have to you come into this this you have to do these certain things where you're tasked with something it's probably a lot harder than the average person thinks you can do but you've once you've done it once meant it's a lot of this stuff's mental and that's the apex predator show that I've been doing comes back to a lot of shit's just mental yeah it's so many things a lot is mental with almost everything yeah with almost like you know tattoos here this is a bad example but everybody says like how bad tattoos hurt I fell asleep and I was getting tattooed like it doesn't hurt I mean it hurts a little but it's not hurt it doesn't hurt like someone kicking you in the head doesn't hurt like someone trying to choke your fucking neck off no it doesn't it doesn't hurt like a lot of things hurt like they really hurt that's it's just discomfort and there's a difference between discomfort and real pain yeah and what you can endure like you a lot of times people start focusing on the discomfort and like it accentuates it starts it becomes like their entire focus becomes this pain instead of doing the task like blocking out whatever discomfort that you have dealing with it and get through it and going on sometimes that that alaska trip while we're doing it we're like would you ever do this again no and then when it's over we were so excited we just wanted to do it again and it was because we hurt the whole time like when was the last time you just hurt for weak just punish your and it's and it's like this cool experience where you push yourself to these limits and then you feel awesome afterwards.

[1003] Well, after it's done.

[1004] After it's done.

[1005] In the middle of the toil, you're like, oh, God, this is not fun.

[1006] But you get back to camp that night, we flew in a few beers, crack open a beer after in the middle of nowhere.

[1007] And you go, yep, let's do this again.

[1008] Ronella has a whole way of describing it that he said he learned from one of his buddies, is that there's different kinds of fun.

[1009] There's the kind of fun that's fun while you're doing it, but it's not fun.

[1010] later right and there's a kind of fun that's not fun while you're doing it but afterwards you have amazing fun memories and it's awesome it's weird yeah i i've noticed and and you you know i don't know if you've experienced this yet but for me you know i've hunted a lot and so i almost like to punish myself and some i like it to be hard i like to be a challenge so i will actually create it to be I just did this hunt in New Zealand where I was hunting these fallow deer.

[1011] And at any given time for the first few days, I could have shot a deer.

[1012] Well, a lot of people don't realize as hunters, it's not always the goal to just go shoot something.

[1013] It's part of the experience.

[1014] And so for me, I just kept passing up animals because the experience wasn't right.

[1015] Until the last day when I was supposed to leave early and I end up, oh, I'm just going to be hunting for two hours and I don't bring any water.

[1016] and I ended up hunting all day and going, I don't even know how far, 18 miles maybe, and I didn't bring any food, I didn't bring any water, and I'm hurting, and I ended up shooting a deer at the last light, and now, to me, it was awesome experience.

[1017] It made the trip, it made that memory, the hardship made the memory.

[1018] And something that I, as a hunter, that non -hunters don't really maybe understand is, like, having these antlers around.

[1019] And when the meat's long gone, I can look at that and remember the hardship and the journey and the adventure and these other things about the experience and the meat was a bribe product, but these are the memories that I, like you look at that moose and you think of something completely different than I do.

[1020] You remember how it went down.

[1021] You remember, you know, maybe the struggle or carrying the meat back or whatever.

[1022] So I may have a rack in my house that's sitting up on the manton.

[1023] Why is that one on the mantle on that one?

[1024] Well, that one I had to work real hard for.

[1025] So I look at it, and I think it reminds me constantly of what I went through.

[1026] When you say that the experience wasn't right, what do you mean by that?

[1027] Like, I feel sometimes it just wasn't a challenge.

[1028] I would have been shooting an animal, not the adventure wasn't there, the challenge wasn't there.

[1029] It just wasn't the right time.

[1030] I wanted to keep going until it happened.

[1031] I don't know.

[1032] It's a weird.

[1033] But for me, hunting's about the adventure and everything behind it.

[1034] And so, as well as obviously getting meat, but there comes a point where, you know, okay, if I didn't get a deer this week, well, maybe I'll get one next week.

[1035] I'm not going to starve to death.

[1036] I've got a freezer with meat.

[1037] But I also want to keep that freezer full.

[1038] Right.

[1039] But so it comes to a point for me where it's about other things as well, the experience, the adventure, the meat, all combining into this.

[1040] If it's too easy, I just don't like it.

[1041] That's fascinating.

[1042] I don't know.

[1043] It'll happen.

[1044] For me, it happened.

[1045] I started, when I was younger, I never wanted to stop hunting because I liked the experience of being out there so much.

[1046] So I would do what a lot of people call trophy hunting, and I'm air quoting that, because it means something different to me, where I would look for a bigger deer because I wanted to keep hunting and make it more of a challenge for myself.

[1047] I see what you're saying?

[1048] See what I'm saying?

[1049] So instead of, like, some people, they want a bigger deer so they could say, hey, I'm going to.

[1050] I got a $1 .90 inch and look, it's on my, you know, and they'll measure everything and look at his tines and look how big is.

[1051] For you, it was just, it's a more difficult pursuit.

[1052] Right.

[1053] Just a difficult pursuit where it keeps me in the field longer.

[1054] Because if I shoot that first deer I see, I would be the type of guy that goes out.

[1055] If I've got 10 days to hunt, I want to hunt 10 days.

[1056] I don't want to shoot something on the first day.

[1057] Even if I end up getting something the last hour of the last day that I would have shot the first day, I want to spend those 10 days.

[1058] out hunting.

[1059] That's funny.

[1060] I'm the opposite.

[1061] I'll shoot that fuck in the first minute.

[1062] I would love to set the Kent up to turn around.

[1063] Look what I got.

[1064] Boom.

[1065] Cut it up, start eating it on the spot, but I haven't been hunting as long.

[1066] I think when you've been hunting as long as you have also, you kind of appreciate what you appreciate after the fact.

[1067] Like you, you have a real deep understanding of what it means to you.

[1068] Whereas to me, it's all pretty new.

[1069] I've only been doing it for three, not even three years now.

[1070] So it's like, oh, crazy, we're shooting a turkey now.

[1071] Oh, wow, this is cool.

[1072] Like, yeah, we're going to go shoot this.

[1073] I'm going to eat that.

[1074] It's fun.

[1075] I enjoy it.

[1076] I love, you know, the turkey, I don't know if I'll do that again.

[1077] I might, I mean, it's not that I didn't like it.

[1078] But what I didn't like about the turkey is you work all day and, you know, several days in a row to get a turkey, and you can only, it's like a meal.

[1079] It's like a meal for, like, for my family.

[1080] They couldn't even eat the whole turkey.

[1081] It's like, it's not that.

[1082] big you know that's what in Nevada chucker hunting's big and you might work your chucker what's a it's a it's a partridge it looks they're from the middle east they aren't native but they're released into the mountain and they're always they live in cliffs and there is a really hard animal to hunt and you may go out and only shoot one bird and hike my friend put his little track my run thing on and we're hiking we get back to the truck after chuckering I'm pretty tired it's like 22 miles because you're walking from sun up to sun down and steep and it's like well we got one bird between the three of us but it's just it's where I grew up that was the thing to do but it's not even lunch no but it's more you're out there you're working hard for it so if you get and when you get when you shoot six of them then you really feel like you've accomplished something how much is one like as far as the amount of meat you get out of one like two quail wow Wow.

[1083] So like six ounces, eight ounces, maybe?

[1084] Yeah.

[1085] Maybe?

[1086] Not even.

[1087] Not even?

[1088] Wow.

[1089] Fuck that.

[1090] Yeah.

[1091] I don't have that kind of time.

[1092] But I know.

[1093] But when you, it's just the pursuit of it as well.

[1094] So you get into, and then the more you fail, the harder you want to try to succeed.

[1095] So the next time you go out, you want to go further and hunt harder and try to get, shoot better.

[1096] I don't know.

[1097] That's interesting.

[1098] So it becomes, so hunting.

[1099] isn't just about going out and acquiring meat.

[1100] Hunting is also about the challenge of the pursuit of the animal, being the hunter, being the predator out there trying to outsmart or out hunt, defy their natural instincts, figure out how to avoid the wind blowing in their nose, figuring out how to approach them the right way, and to make it even more difficult going after the bigger ones that are smarter that have been alive longer making it a more difficult task and making the appreciation of the accomplishment much better.

[1101] Yeah, and the harder something is, the more skill you need, the more you've honed your abilities in the end.

[1102] And I've always said, the harder you work for something, the better it tastes.

[1103] If you ask me what the best tasting thing is, elk, it's because you work hard for elk.

[1104] Now, Himalayan tar in New Zealand, I think they're delicious.

[1105] It's a goat that lives in the mountains, but you work your ass off for it, and when you sit down to eat it, you appreciate it.

[1106] It's just a different feeling What does it taste like?

[1107] Because goat A lot of people don't like.

[1108] It doesn't taste like goat.

[1109] It tastes like venison.

[1110] Really?

[1111] It's kind of got marbled fat in the meat, which is different mountain goats have that as well.

[1112] They have a wild coat.

[1113] Yeah.

[1114] To pull up an image of a Himalayan tar.

[1115] I call on it, they're gorilla grizzly bear lions.

[1116] T -A -H -R, I think?

[1117] T -A -H -R, yes.

[1118] Or T -H -A -R either way.

[1119] That's a wild -looking animal.

[1120] Yeah, they're cool.

[1121] Yeah, they look like a werewolf or Chubaka or something like that.

[1122] Like their back looks like a gris or a gorilla because they've got these silver stripes down the back.

[1123] And then they've got a lion's mane on the front.

[1124] Yeah, look at that thing.

[1125] What the fuck?

[1126] What a wild -looking animal.

[1127] I think they're probably one of my favorite.

[1128] That is so strange.

[1129] And that's a very difficult hunt, right?

[1130] Can be.

[1131] Depends how you want to do it.

[1132] Now it's like, for me, I want to walk up from the bottom, but you could take a helicopter to the top.

[1133] Did people do that?

[1134] Oh, yeah.

[1135] In New Zealand?

[1136] Yeah.

[1137] Really?

[1138] Yeah.

[1139] Look at that fucking face.

[1140] That looks like a back.

[1141] or something crazy wild looking half -lying and they have a red meat that's just like venison yeah wow now some people they fly up on a helicopter they shoot these things then they what fly back down now like what are the elevations you're climbing when you're dealing with these things 4 ,000 5 ,000 feet maybe wow depends where you're at 3 to 5 5 3 to 6 and it's all weird rocky, slippery terrain, very precarious.

[1142] I watched one of your episodes of Solo Hunter when you went after these things.

[1143] Oh, yeah.

[1144] Was it one, did I get one?

[1145] Or did I fail?

[1146] There's one you didn't get one.

[1147] Oh, with a bow.

[1148] Yeah.

[1149] Yeah.

[1150] Yeah, you go, I mean, just the adventure and getting up there is half the fun in the first place.

[1151] What the fuck is that pounding?

[1152] Is that next door?

[1153] What am they doing?

[1154] There's a demo.

[1155] Demo.

[1156] Demo.

[1157] You're building a robot.

[1158] Yeah, it seems like those those trips are very strange too because you were staying in one of those weird cabins that they have set up there for people that can just they can just use them anytime they want and go up there and hang out in those cabins.

[1159] Public huts.

[1160] Yeah, that's pretty cool.

[1161] Is there that many people that go hunting up there that they have those things?

[1162] Or they're for mountaineering?

[1163] A lot of it's...

[1164] Most of the ones I stay in are for ice climbing because I like hunting around the glaciers.

[1165] Oh.

[1166] So they're all ice climber huts.

[1167] Like where you base out of before you go...

[1168] Really?

[1169] Ice climbing.

[1170] Well, that's a really popular pursuit around there?

[1171] No. But there's so much so do they have huts?

[1172] Yeah, because, well, yeah, because it's tough terrain, and if that's your sport, these groups, like, build these huts.

[1173] There's historical significance to some of them, too.

[1174] They're put in for coaling expeditions back when animals are running rampant there because they're all non -natives.

[1175] It's completely, talking about, I like to talk about New Zealand because it's a place that I've come to love for a lot of reasons.

[1176] But when you talk about conservation there, it's completely different than we think of it here.

[1177] It's almost a different world, and it's really hard to explain to people that don't understand it because the animals aren't technically supposed to be there, but we want them there, and they can't get rid of them.

[1178] So there's a completely different system in place there.

[1179] They don't have any tags.

[1180] You don't have to have a license.

[1181] You just go hunt.

[1182] Not yet.

[1183] Well, you have to have this thing you get online for free.

[1184] but things might change, who knows.

[1185] But as it is right now, yeah, it's just open.

[1186] Is there some movement to try to change it and regulate it?

[1187] I think it looks like there might be.

[1188] Yeah.

[1189] Not necessarily just, not that they want less animal shot, because a lot of people there would want them all gone if they could.

[1190] I mean, they poison animals.

[1191] The government shoots them out of helicopters.

[1192] What?

[1193] Yeah, they have to.

[1194] Because there's so many of them.

[1195] No predators.

[1196] And no one, no knuckleheads want to bring wolves over there or anything, do they?

[1197] Back in, back during, I think it was World War II, they'd proposed to bring mountain lions.

[1198] Well, it's the, it's the woman who swallowed the fly problem, like swallow fly, so I'm going to swallow a frog.

[1199] Yeah.

[1200] And what they found out is, so they bring in rabbits, and then they bring in ferrets to kill the rabbits and weasels.

[1201] And then they find out that the rabbits and the ferrets are into killing these endangered flightless birds because they're a lot easier to kill than a rabbit.

[1202] And so the non -natives eat the native plants and kill off the native wildlife.

[1203] Did you find that, did you read that study they did recently on deer and deer eating birds?

[1204] No. And that it's incredibly common for deer to eat birds and that not only will deer eat birds, like they'll find nesting birds and they'll eat them.

[1205] They'll find ground nesting birds to eat chicks.

[1206] But they also found they did, they had these birds that were caught in a net.

[1207] and much to their surprise mature deer were walking up to these birds that were caught in the net and just eating them alive and that birds apparently are on the on the menu for deer for deer yeah that's interesting no one knew this is really really recent discovery yeah I wonder if was there more bucks or doze or do they even know I don't know Jamie see if you pull up that article because all you got it already deer have been eating birds for years they do need a lot of protein next Especially the females need it when they're pregnant, and then the males need it when they're growing their antlers.

[1208] But they pick out higher protein grass and other things.

[1209] It makes sense that if they eat a bird, then they get a little bit more protein in their diet.

[1210] They're eating the heads and legs of live seabird chicks as a way to get minerals.

[1211] They need to grow their antlers.

[1212] Scientists believe that surprising addition to the red deer's diet stems from mineral deficiencies in the vegetation they eat.

[1213] Wow.

[1214] There's a bunch of different versions of this that they've, uh, there's more than one study that they've sort of, uh, this is from 2003.

[1215] This is not the one.

[1216] There's one from much more recent.

[1217] That's pretty crazy.

[1218] Yeah.

[1219] Field cameras.

[1220] Yeah.

[1221] Yeah.

[1222] This is the most recent one.

[1223] This is the North American one.

[1224] It's crazy in North Dakota.

[1225] They set up nests cams over, uh, nests of songbirds expected to see some, a lot of the nestlings and eggs getting eaten by ground squirrels, foxes, and badgers.

[1226] Squirrels hit 13 nests.

[1227] The other meat eaters made a poor showing.

[1228] Foxes and weasels only took one nest each.

[1229] You know what fearsome animal out did either of those two sleek, resourceful predators, white -tailed deer.

[1230] They ate living nestlings right out of the nests.

[1231] And if you're thinking it must be a mistake that the deer were chewing their way through some vegetation happened upon a mouthful bird.

[1232] Think again up in Canada, a group of orthonologists.

[1233] Ornithologists.

[1234] We're studying adult birds in order to examine them closely, researchers used mist nets.

[1235] These nets usually draped between trees or designed to trap birds or bats gently so that they could be collected, studied, and released.

[1236] When a herd of deer came by, the deer walked up to the struggling birds and ate them alive right out of the nets.

[1237] Crazy.

[1238] That's cool.

[1239] It is wild, man. It is wild.

[1240] Huh.

[1241] A cow.

[1242] They found a cow eating a recently hatched chick.

[1243] Wow.

[1244] No, herbivores eat meat when they're not getting enough nutrients in their diet.

[1245] That's interesting.

[1246] That is.

[1247] Yeah.

[1248] It is really fascinating.

[1249] I wonder, it's amazing.

[1250] I wonder what other animals do things that we don't even know about.

[1251] It just happen upon it accidentally.

[1252] I'm sure there's a lot.

[1253] Yeah.

[1254] I'm sure.

[1255] You know, I mean, it's one of the things they've found over the last, I don't know how many years, is how many bears eat baby bears?

[1256] and that it's not just a matter of, like, trying to keep their bloodline or trying to discourage up -and -coming males.

[1257] They just eat babies.

[1258] Like, that's just their thing.

[1259] Like, when they get out of the hive or the den, when they're done hibernating, they, like, immediately seek out cubs.

[1260] That's, like, one of their favorite things to eat.

[1261] I've heard that.

[1262] I've also heard that they do that for breeding reasons as well because then the female will cycle again.

[1263] Right.

[1264] Yeah.

[1265] Yeah, there's all sorts of speculation about that, but when we were in Alberta last year, one of the guys we were with, they had seen a female eat its own baby.

[1266] Wow.

[1267] It's really fucked.

[1268] The male had killed it, and then the female finished it off.

[1269] That's pretty weird.

[1270] The male came in and tried to attack the female, attacked her cub, killed her cub, started eating her cub.

[1271] She chased him off, and then she finished it.

[1272] Hmm.

[1273] Yeah.

[1274] That's my snack.

[1275] That's harsh.

[1276] That's fucking...

[1277] harsh man mom why are you eating me it's you're not a me anymore dead it's a harsh fucking world the world of nature that's doing the the apex breader show one of the things that really kind of was surprised because we you know start out doing a tv thing and you have these ideas of what should happen and that never freaking happens ever things always go wrong or or something But that's why I wanted to take and look at it as a learning experience, not necessarily come out with these preconceived ideas of what's going to happen.

[1278] I just want to act as this animal in the wild, learn from it, and then see what its life would be like.

[1279] And one of the things that I've come to the conclusion of is a lot of these animals that we see as being super efficient and they've easily surviving.

[1280] It's a hard -knock life for them.

[1281] It's not as easy.

[1282] A lot of animals scrounge and are hunting all day, every day, into the night just to get enough food to sustain themselves.

[1283] And then there's other animals that it is easier, but for the most part, I've learned that these animals that hunt daily, it's not as easy as you might think.

[1284] You always see the highlight reel of the lion catching the gazelle, but it's pretty hard even for the lion to catch the gazelle.

[1285] it's a it's a pretty interesting thought and then we go out as humans and it's a lot essentially it's a lot easier for us to hunt and catch things than it is for these these natural predators or animals well i can imagine we have guns yeah exactly well that's the archery thing too right that's one of the reasons why people enjoy archery it's because it is a much more difficult challenge you have to figure out how to get between you know 20 and 50 yards proximity yeah and And, yeah, the challenge, it just goes back to that challenge of what makes it hard and why you do it.

[1286] I mean, there's people that only bow hunt.

[1287] There's people that bow hunt and rifle hunt.

[1288] There's people that don't traditional bow hunt.

[1289] And it's all based on the challenge and the experience for them as well as a lot of ideals as far as, okay, well, I'm a bow hunter.

[1290] And if you shoot with a gun, that's too easy for me. But for me, I do whatever kind of hunting because I just love hunting.

[1291] Yeah, there's a lot of people that have, there's like a purity involved in, like, shooting something with a bow because it's much more difficult than shooting something with a rifle.

[1292] See, and I'm cool with that, but sometimes for me, there's hunter, I don't like when hunters are against hunter.

[1293] Like, if you're, oh, you aren't a hunter because you shoot it with a rifle.

[1294] And then, well, the traditional dudes, like, you aren't a hunter because you shoot it with a compound bow.

[1295] Right.

[1296] And there's a guy out there wearing no shoes going, you guys need to grab them with your hand.

[1297] And there's some other dude's like, you've got to catch him with your teeth.

[1298] Can't we all just get along?

[1299] Yeah, it's already a much aligned community.

[1300] Yeah, I ran into Jim Shockey at this thing.

[1301] And he's always been a hero mine.

[1302] I was talking to him about, because he came on your podcast, and I listened to that.

[1303] And I thought that was an awesome podcast.

[1304] The guy is so well -spoken.

[1305] Yeah, I love that, dude.

[1306] You can talk about anything, and you're just like, oh, wow, that makes sense to me now.

[1307] But, yeah, I was kind of talking to him about a few things, and it's, in fewer words, you're just like, don't fuck it up, you know, like, don't be against hunters.

[1308] And I thought, yeah, I mean, that makes sense.

[1309] Because, really, it's all hunting.

[1310] We've all got the same desire to go out and harvest our meat and hunt and be out in the wild.

[1311] What's it matter if you're doing it with a bow or on public land or private land or with a spear or with a gun?

[1312] I mean, it's all, the end results the same as the dead animal.

[1313] Well, he tried to make it more difficult for himself to make the challenge.

[1314] So his challenge is he uses muzzleloaders all the time.

[1315] Yeah.

[1316] Even in regular rifle season, he uses a muzzleloader because he only gets one shot.

[1317] Exactly.

[1318] And that's for me, it may, if I'm hunting with a rifle, then I may try to find something that's bigger or pack into an area that's further or who knows what I do.

[1319] Just to make it more of a challenge.

[1320] And then there's sometimes where obviously the only intent.

[1321] is I'm looking for meat and I need that meat now.

[1322] But for the most part, yeah, either way, you're still out there hunting.

[1323] What brings me back to your Buffalo show?

[1324] Because the Buffalo show was a particularly trying one for you because you snuck up on this Buffalo.

[1325] You got it.

[1326] It was a good shot with your bow, but the Buffalo was still alive.

[1327] They're so fucking tough.

[1328] They're so big.

[1329] And, you know, there's a lot of things that I would have done different, but also I couldn't have done different in them.

[1330] Sometimes you have to do what happens in that moment and make a decision.

[1331] And for me, I didn't want to shoot a buffalo bedded down, bison bedded down, but some things went wrong during the filming of the camera guy was in the wrong place.

[1332] And if that bison got up and started walking off, we wouldn't be able to film it.

[1333] And so I made the decision to shoot it with my bow in that particular instance, and I had to live with that decision.

[1334] And, yeah, I shot it where it would have been good.

[1335] good but it just the bow didn't penetrate hard enough and it was nothing i mean the equipment was all right everything was right it was just one of those deals where a quarter inch left or right and maybe would have made a difference it hit the shoulder and just yeah the next day it was still live and and for me i mean there's guys that could maybe watch that episode and go well you're bow hunting and you shot it in the end with if you haven't seen it i'm giving away a spoiler alert but yeah and i ended up shooting it with a rifle the next day.

[1336] And for me, it wasn't about bow hunting or rifle hunting or being a purest in this form or following through because the natives who did that tactic would have only used primitive weaponry or whatever.

[1337] For me, in that moment, is about putting that bison down.

[1338] And, you know, it's as hunters, we don't want to see an animal suffer as that or the other thing.

[1339] So it didn't really matter what I shot it with in the end.

[1340] I just wanted to do my job to make things right.

[1341] That had to be a hard feeling, too, to know that this animal's wounded and you have to go to sleep.

[1342] I couldn't, I didn't even sleep that night.

[1343] And it was raining.

[1344] I think we got back to the tents at 1 .30 in the morning later.

[1345] It'd been just dumping rain.

[1346] We lost the blood trail.

[1347] And I also didn't want to keep pushing it because at some point you think, okay, well, it's not smart to track it.

[1348] The only reason we're tracking it at night was because the rain was coming.

[1349] And then it just, there was good blood.

[1350] and then we lost the blood trail and decided to come back the next day and luckily things turned out but when I came away from that trip there's a lot of things that I was like you know but I when I do a television show I like to make things I don't necessarily need to show people that I'm pounded my chest and be the greatest I'll show my failures as well and not saying that that was a failure or whatever but you know even in solo hunters or other things there's a lot of episodes where I don't get anything.

[1351] There's a lot of hunting shows that won't show that.

[1352] But for me, it's real.

[1353] It's hunting, and I've missed things with my bow.

[1354] I've missed things with my rifle.

[1355] I've messed up, but, you know, I keep doing it.

[1356] And I think, you know, if I just edited things how I'm always, it's always perfect, then I'm just kind of lying to myself, really.

[1357] I think if there was very few hunting shows out there, maybe that would be acceptable, like to try to make it, like, the most exciting version of hunting possible.

[1358] But I think it's really important to portray it for what it really is.

[1359] Yeah.

[1360] What it really is is a difficult pursuit.

[1361] Even for an expert hunter like yourself, it doesn't always work.

[1362] No, things go wrong.

[1363] And, you know, and then it also adds to the gravity of the situation.

[1364] You know, we come upon a bison and shoot it with a rifle, and the bison drops.

[1365] And that episode in particular, I had quite a few people that weren't hunters at all, but it started watching the series.

[1366] And they said, that it was like there was no warning.

[1367] the bison just died and they were like I felt sad and I said yeah that's the point like you go through the you felt the emotions of a hunter I don't necessarily feel sad but I talk about in the end I say that the path of a hunter is a humbling path and it really is like in that moment you watch that and you go boom this bison just is now dead and you go whoa yeah there's a feeling of loss right right and then there's also the feeling of I'm thankful for this bison and now it's providing me with all this meat.

[1368] And that is what it is to be a hunter.

[1369] You go through a range of emotions, no matter how many times you've done it, that life begets life.

[1370] And now this bison is no longer an animal.

[1371] There's a source of meat.

[1372] And I'm going to use that throughout the year.

[1373] That's the real big difference between someone who's been involved in the taking of the life, whether you're a farmer that kills your own cows, or whether you're a hunter that goes out and hunts the meat.

[1374] There's a much deeper understanding of what you're actually eating.

[1375] I don't think it's necessarily healthy that we could just go to a supermarket and buy a steak.

[1376] I think it's weird.

[1377] It just gives you a massive disconnect, and that's where all the self -righteousness from people wearing leather, eating meat, and getting angry at people for hunting.

[1378] That's where it all comes from.

[1379] It's like it's a sickness.

[1380] It's like there's a disconnect, like a complete total disconnect from what you're doing by eating a hamburger.

[1381] You hired a supermarket hitman to go out there and kill those fucking animals and package it up so you can be completely insulated from the life or death struggle, and then you're getting upset at other people.

[1382] Like the idea of a meat -eating person who wears leather being upset at hunting is one of the great bizarre hypocrisies of our culture.

[1383] Yeah, it doesn't really make sense.

[1384] And I can't, for me, I've seen, you know, I have a respect for my food in a different way that someone, an animal is now food is not an animal but for me meat is always an animal it's always food i respect it in that way and when it becomes meat then it it becomes something different to me but it's still an animal i think it's kind of a weird story but we had a horse that uh we'd use to pack out things and whatever in it ended up breaking its leg and uh we had to shoot it okay and so I didn't want to do it because it's like you have this attachment to this animal and then my other guy didn't want to do it either but one of the guys that hadn't used the horses we talked to him and okay like you need to put this horse down he shot the horse and I still felt like okay this is like now we have a ditto and so I don't know why but I cut the back stakes out and ate the horse this is like people are going to be like that is disgust that is sick but for me it was like okay well now it serves a utility a purpose it's now food it's no longer wasted yeah otherwise you'd be wasting it something's going to eat it either bacteria is going to eat it or predators or rodents or scavengers someone's going to eat it yeah why shouldn't you and i've had horse before i had it in montreal it's a place called joe beef they i've had horse tartar where i've had raw horse and i've had a horse uh loins where they they they cooked like the backstrap and they cooked uh they they cooked it up like a steak it was delicious yeah it's really lean they're you know in the end it's meat and now it's but i mean obviously you like like he ate his pet what oh sicko but for me it was more out of a respect thing like okay now it's the circle of life some people were not going to understand that no it's weird but that's okay there's you can't help everybody understand things that make sense to me it's to me it's make sense because it's good meat, it's healthy for you.

[1385] It's very common to eat in Europe.

[1386] It's one of the weird things is I believe a lot of the horse they buy in Canada comes from the United States, but we can't sell it in the United States.

[1387] Yeah.

[1388] I had it in Iceland, and those horses are, that was the only other time I'd had it.

[1389] I couldn't remember part of the reason.

[1390] It was like, you can't actually get a horse here.

[1391] I might as well.

[1392] Try it.

[1393] Yeah.

[1394] Yeah, we served horse rectum on Fear Factor once And it was, yeah, people were so angry, I believe it was boiled, it was very chewy and disgusting, but people were so angry.

[1395] That it was a horse Yeah, well, it's a horse to a lot of folks, it's like if we started serving dog tongue, people would be like, you assholes, you're serving dog tongue, that's our pet.

[1396] You know, so for a lot of people, their horse is even more intimately involved in their life than a dog because they ride it.

[1397] Yeah.

[1398] Oh, and like that horse worked it carried it was like it carried elk for me it was on the hunt which is kind of a weird I mean maybe it was but it's weird yeah it's a weird philosophy I mean it's an animal that you associate with it's weird but I think it's I think what you do is the right thing I was like I didn't really know but I felt weird about it and then I was like but then when we cooked it up and it became it's like okay yeah it's I don't know I'm glad I did it I don't know if I'd do it again but I thought in that moment it felt right how much of the meat did you take off the horse a backstrap that's it yeah because well it was pretty yeah and i thought well there was other animals out there that we're also going to eat it but it would have been it would have been impossible to get the rest out when you were you were in a bear area were the bears there yeah the bears ate it within it was gone really yeah yeah i went back how long i went back like three days later it was pretty much toast wow yeah what kind of bears Bears are great.

[1399] Eagles, they eat a lot.

[1400] There's probably, when I got there, I don't know, there was a lot of eagles on it.

[1401] That's crazy.

[1402] Eagles eat a lot.

[1403] I'm sure.

[1404] I don't know how, yeah, there's maybe a combination of animals, coyotes, eagles, bears, all kinds of things.

[1405] It's amazing how quick nature can eat something like that, a horse.

[1406] You know, what was a horse?

[1407] Thousand pounds or something, probably even more.

[1408] Big -ass animal gets devoured in a few days.

[1409] A few days.

[1410] It's gone.

[1411] Yeah, that's why people talk about, like, finding dead animals in the woods.

[1412] Like, you rarely, you find bones here and there.

[1413] Yeah, you don't find whole animals.

[1414] Very rarely.

[1415] Try finding a dead mountain lion.

[1416] Good luck.

[1417] You could live your whole life.

[1418] Never see a dead mountain lion.

[1419] I've only found one.

[1420] Really?

[1421] A dead one?

[1422] Yep.

[1423] Where was it?

[1424] In a river.

[1425] Ooh, it drowned?

[1426] Yep.

[1427] I think high water.

[1428] You get either trades swimming across or something.

[1429] Have you ever seen that picture of a mountain lion and a mountain goat that apparently got into a scrap and they both fell off the mountain onto a highway and they were both dead was it a sheep or a goat maybe it was a big horn sheep now that I'm thinking about I think you're right I didn't see a picture or something like that there's a whole series of pictures is there pictures of them actually fighting like no they're dead they're both dead there they are bam they're both dead on the road it's a crazy picture I think that thing to the left is one of the horns yeah well what happened because the When they fall along the ways, air pressure blows through and pops the horn off.

[1430] Really?

[1431] Look at the top.

[1432] Go up a little bit.

[1433] Look at that horn, like, where it came off.

[1434] This weird, bloody stump where the horn popped off.

[1435] I wonder if it fell off a cliff or got hit by a snowboard?

[1436] Well, go down, too.

[1437] No, it died off the cliff.

[1438] Look, he's got a mouthful of fur.

[1439] He died with a mouthful of fur, that fucking monster.

[1440] Wow.

[1441] Look at it.

[1442] He's got it in his mouth as he's dead.

[1443] It's crazy.

[1444] Oh, what a weird, broken legs and shit.

[1445] Look at the fall.

[1446] Fah.

[1447] That's crazy.

[1448] Imagine stumbling upon that.

[1449] Yeah.

[1450] That is a cool thing to see.

[1451] Is that in Canada?

[1452] I don't know.

[1453] I don't know.

[1454] Yeah.

[1455] I don't know, but it's a classic.

[1456] Glacier National Park.

[1457] Where's that at?

[1458] That's in Montana.

[1459] Wow, that's amazing.

[1460] That's so cool.

[1461] Stumbling upon things like that Just seeing the Well, you especially Having seen wolves Actually take out an elk Oh yeah It's pretty cool So what different animals do you emulate I know this week is wolf Yeah so this week we So the first episode we did the alligator It's trying to grab a pig Barrett Did you watch?

[1462] I didn't have seen that one Yeah yeah that's that's probably one of my favorite So the first episode We I emulated the alligator Learned from the alligator And my goal was to Well, it's to learn from the alligator But I was trying to grab a wild boar barehanded And you got to watch that episode It's pretty cool That sounds like the most ridiculous idea ever Yeah What about the tusks?

[1463] You worry about it Reaching back and biting you?

[1464] I wasn't, so I was about four feet away from one Did you act?

[1465] Can you spoiler alert?

[1466] Can you tell me?

[1467] No, no, no, because that's going to drive people to the site ApexPredator .tv ApexPredator

[1468].TV