Transcript for #442 - Steven Rinella

Unless someone think we're talking about policemen, we're talking about suits, scruffle.

Yeah, suits scruffle. I'm glad you're here this week. The, the, the, the a, the a, the a, the a, the a, the a, the a, the a, the a, the a, you know, it's interesting, man. All pigs in North America. So domestic, the kind of you in your bacon, Pharaoh ones, wild ones, it's all one species.

As much as there's differences, they recognize them all as one species. There's some old world, like they're in Africa, there's some other members of the pig family and have a leaner, not have a leaner or a packeries, so like when you hear have a leaner or people talk about pigs in Arizona, they're often talking about a packerie, but yeah, all the pigs. So Charlotte, no, that's the spider. Wilbur from Wilbur to Hogzilla is too scruffy.

You know, it's like, what, you know, but all that they roll all the dogs under. I mean, you think that pigs look, you think that Wilbur or, you know, like a, like a, the classic. Well, they don't really exist the classic pink hairless farm pig. I mean he doesn't look as different from what we call Russian borrower which is a variety. He doesn't look as different as a chihuahua who does from a massive yeah, but they would discuss those as being what canus domestic Can't understand.

But I don't know those boys and you might have read this. Those boys and Russia that were taken silver foxes and just like selecting for behavior and stuff, they could move those things so fast.

Yeah, they were just yeah, I can't remember the details and if I did tell you the details you'd look it up and call me in time where I was wrong. But someone I learned not to get to detail with you. But they could move dogs really fast selecting for color behavioral characteristics. It was amazing just in a few generations, you know, wow. So they're they're very malleable.

I mean, so here's so much contradictory stuff. Like at a point in time, I've always kind of filed this a little bit, and I've written about, I learned a lot about dogs. I probably mentioned this to you before. I wrote a piece about eating dogs and Vietnam, and so I had this kind of little summation in this article about the history of dogs. And it went through the fact checking process outside of mags, which is very rigorous. Like if you say, my mom is my mom, they'll call your mom. I'm like, make sure it's your mom. And I had all these things that I kind of like assumed were just true, you know? And this fact check is like, that's in fact not true. So I had to relearn my understanding of dogs at the time. They were saying, oh, you know, it seems that dogs originated in China. And, you know, like the oldest trace of dogs is there. Since then, I feel like I've read that, you know, they definitely, the first Americans definitely brought, were traveling with dogs, brought them down in the new world. But here there seems to have been some intro aggression from the gray wolf. So they picked up some other characteristics, some other things along the way. Even though the guys that came through the bearing lamb bridge were not packing with them a dog that looked wolf-like. They're a pride-packing with them a dog that was decided to leave domestic dog-like. So they had already gone through some, you know, had already gone through some transmissions. They weren't just traveling with both dogs. They were traveling with the dog that had been under selective pressure for, you know, 15,000 years. I mean, because I remember one time staying old, the domestic dog seems to go back 30,000 years. The domestic dog seems to go back 50,000 years. But people arrived here, you know, it was debated, but some time between maybe 15, 20,000 years ago. And when they showed up, they had a dog that was not a wolf. But then there was intro aggression from wolves. But this seems to be like a really hot topic and people are always digging into this because genetics is changing everything we understand. Things that we used to think were related are not related. Things we think were not related to our in fact related. You know, we talked that I like the whole mule deer thing like that mule deer seemed to be a very new species, you know, since the plysisine. Really? Yeah, there was not of they haven't been around long. It was like a hybridization event between black tail deer and white tail deer created the milder it's like our newest big-game species and it's probably Will be one that doesn't last long, you know, it'll be like and then in the long term you might look at milder and see him as this this blip Really. Yeah, I'm just like them. I mean, they're so susceptible to being out competed. They're very habitat fragmentation's hard on them. And they haven't been here long. I mean, on their hand, white tail deer have been here millions of years. They're like, they thrive. They're super adaptable. They can eat and eat and live anywhere. They're like amazingly capable of surviving on this continent and and meal deer are like this new thing. It's a bone like my favorite animal. I like the song, you know, it sounds like a blast before a billion more years. It's going to burn out.

I like the milder a lot too. And it seems like, I mean, despite a lot of people's best efforts to prevent it from happening, it seems like milder vulnerable.

Yeah, and it's some things they're hard to explain, you know. But white tails, They've always lived in the southeast, in the way it tells senior periodically, expand out, and then for climatic reasons, retract, but they kind of keep that ancestral homeland. I'm talking in a very long term, but ancestral homeland in the southeast. But once I'm away, it tells me it's all across the country. And some climatic conditions are something happened in the population retracted, but it left this remnant population in California on the Pacific coast. And then there was a massive genetic barrier, like if you took a bunch of dogs and separated and put, you know, some dogs and South American, some dogs and North American came back and checked out them in a long time. They're going to have gone in a little different direction. And that became the black tail. And then at a time, the black tail seems to have extended its range eastward. The white tail deer extended its range back westward. And there was a hybridization event where male black tails were breeding with female white tails and producing like this hybrid mule deer. There was a habitat retraction again, and black tails retracted back to the coast, and white tails retracted back the other way, and you had to spawn this thing we call a meal deer.

Like how do they know that there was all this guy Valeria's guy who's like the most interesting biologist he's a guy out of Calgary. And Valeria's guy has kind of like done so much work on a big game. He's kind of like the meal. He's like, people like, or he's the meal deer guy. He's the elk guy, he's the buffalo guy. He came up with a lot of interesting theories, like some stuff we taught about in the past were, Larry's guys came up with this idea that what happens to species when they colonize land had been vacated by glaciers, you know, and there's like certain things that go on. And he got, he was into founder effect, you know, where imagine, like one way we got different as people is imagine to just like four people struck off, you know, across the oceans in a homemade craft and landed there and you had a male and a female and they spawn a new that you know they successfully breeding creating population, but let's say they both just happen to be 67, you know, and 300 pounds, you have like this thing like the founder, in fact, where a small little population can carry traits and characteristics that are maybe not totally, not a complete example of where they came from. And so you have like a radical deviation when they spread out. Wow. So he got into this stuff with animals and like in and why do animals seem to change like when the bikes and arrived in North America. Why did it also have a six foot horn span and then shrank very rapidly. So he got into a lot of these ideas and he also did a lot of genetic work, you know, like mitochondrial DNA so they can track female descent. You should have a month sometime. Yeah, you know, he'd be the coolest guy to have on the world actually Valeria's guys. Yeah. Where's your live? Could I come listen?

I'm just listening at home with most people, right?

Yeah, you could just sit there and drink coffee. Okay, and I'll come to an I'll be like sounds perfect. I was like, no, explain this to me Mr. Guys. Yeah, he's great guys. So he was he got in a lot of stuff with with deer. And I bring all this up because we're looking at your fine specimen here, your fine four by four, and you'll be sitting here.

Yeah, it's the prince maybe got me cute. It's the print Allen bird is the burger principle. It's got a name.

This is a name for that principle. And it would be that if you'd like like to take the extreme like white tails like the biggest like guys dream of going to Alberta. It's not white tails because white tails are huge.

That's an elk. I mean, 400 is huge, but you know, you get deer to push it up. Then you go down the floor to keys. That's a white tail. You know, things are 70, 80 pounds. So there's this principle, the burger, Bergman. It's got a name, my brother. He told me what the name it is. And with some species, he seemed to be a little bit exempt. They say that milder don't do that quite as much. You know, you get some really big milder in other areas. They're not, they're not as tied to, which is like a general principle. And what they speculate it has to do with is heat retention. So you have more, like, you way more than me. I have more surface area per unit of mass than you have. So if you're a really big deer, and if you're in the north, the thing you're trying to do is retain body heat. And the animals like people shed body heat by just exposing prices. Like when deer lay down, they lay down with their legs, talk to them, because you look on the inside of a deer's leg, very thin hair, very thin hair onto the tail, right? And when they're laying down, if it's cold, they're protecting those areas that have thin hair. So a big animal has less surface area. So he's less capable of shedding heat and more capable of retaining heat. A small, watery animal has greater surface area. And he's able to shed heat. So one of the things you look at milder, like milder further south, will have 10 to have bigger ears. Because a very great way to shed heat is through your ears. So I'll have thinner hair on their ears, bigger ears. If you think about a radical version of it, just imagine the woolly mammoth. The woolly mammoth is more closely related to the African elephant than he is to the Macedon. mammoths and massadons and mammoths were not very close related to massadons. They're pretty close related to African elephants. Mammoths live in the north. They have like essentially no ear. They have this a very small ear. You look at African elephants. How does giant freaking ears? Because they can funnel a lot of blood through those ears and shed a lot of heat. It's like you shed a lot of heat through your fingers, you know, and your ears how they get so cold so fast because you're able to, you know, you push a lot of blood into those areas and it's cooling off in the air. So that's one reason, that's like a theory of if it is, I think it might be the Bergman principle. Bergman's rule is where Bergman's rule, where it has one explanation for it. I don't know if you'd ever really know the absolute truth, but the explanation for its heat retention and heat dissipation.

So the stuff that's on the northern extreme of its range, where it's budding up against the thing that puts the throttle on its existence is cold. He will tend to get bigger in mammals, you know, he'll tend to get bigger. But then there's all these other deviations like why do, you know, like how you get these huge reptiles on islands, you know, I mean, and then on islands you tend to have dwarfing like that wrangle island off Siberia, how these little mini-manthes, you know. So there's all these other factors. I don't even know, I don't even know why it's like that with islands, but I know with latitude that you get that. And I've also read, I think I even read from maybe as hilarious guys. was writing about how mildier it seemed to not be quite is that they seemed to defy Bergman's rule a little bit more than some other species do.

Yeah, they get to like, yeah, like, those things get huge and other things get small. You know, nothing about weird thing about mildier and this kind of fits here because we're in California. You know, you know, obviously I five. So for Blacktail deer are very, very similar to milder. Columbia Blacktail. So in California, you have Columbia Blacktail. Washington, Oregon, you have Columbia Blacktail. Eventually, you get up to the north of just north on the coast. You get to the BC Alaska board and these start calling them sick of Blacktail. Sick of Blacktails. Man, you look at them. They almost look like a white tail, but they're a Blacktail deer. The Columbia Blacktail resembles much more a milder for record keeping purposes. The divided between the range of the Columbia milder or I'm sorry, the divider between the range of the clumbian black tail and the milder is i5. Really? So if that's some of it jumps the road, he is for record-keeping purposes. He goes from being a Columbia black tail to a milder. So when you look like all the record book Columbia black tails, you know, are shot along the left side of I-5 on a north or direction because they're just like so, you know, they're much bigger than anywhere else. But they got to divide it somewhere so they divide it like that. So in one thing's life, you could jump back and forth. They're not even recognizes as distinct. If you look at the Latin name form, you know, the scientific name form, they're like tax on them is don't recognize the difference but we all do it like you look at I mean like that's not a brick emulator man I can tell by looking but it's just these morphological differences these things you see but they're not really betrayed in them you know in the genetics that's fascinating man that's it's so interesting trying to track the the history of these animals and that somebody actually did that and figured out yeah and it changes all the time yeah that used to like that's one of these like mild man He used to reject so much this stuff because it would change. Well, I'll use to say this, so I'm leaving a bit. Like, well, they were saying the best understanding. And now this is the, you know, it's not static. Subject change. Let it's frustrating for people.

I only know, I know no more than what you said. I've been at a thing all week. Oh, you were at the shot show.

Can I guess that they're using that $350,000 to put up enforcement?

the the the vinyl thing. There are versions of that here and we can talk about I can talk in a much more educated way or much more knowledgeable fashion about versions of that that occur here in the US but after like I've never been to Africa I haven't hunted in Africa. I have ill like ill informed opinions about what goes on in Africa but I recognize when it comes to stuff like this it's. There are so many contradictions that are hard to deal with and it's really difficult for people to look at their heads wrapped around why a guy. You know, I don't know and not knowing the person. I can't say that the person is saying, who's like, oh, I would just as happily give you the money to help save rhinos. But if this one has the go anyways, I suppose I'll come and get it. You know, I don't really know what his motivations are.

Yeah. He's never going to, he's not going to be able to bring it back into the US probably.

Can I tell you about, can I tell you about a parallel, like a parallel thing that goes on in the US? Because I just can't speak to it there. Like I don't even know who is it owned? The Rhino? I mean, is it on a conservation?

Let me tell you about a parallel thing to have in the US. If you're interested. Yes. Okay. In the US we have we abide by the basic notion. This is like generally true in the U.S. that while they belong to people, okay. So if you have, let's take an imaginary elk, and this imaginary elk is on, you also national park. And one day, the elk jumps offense and lands on national forest in Montana. He jumps another fence and he's on state forest in Montana. And he jumps another fence and he's on a big ranch in Montana. Throughout that animal's day, he has always been US. He's always belonged to the people. When he's in Montana, he's belonged to the state of Montana as in charge for his management. So we have this idea, in a rough sense, we have this idea that we maintain here that while life is held in the public trust. An individual can control access to his lands for hunting, but the animal belongs to state. You don't get to make decisions necessarily about the things that are on your property. And that's been something that the Americans and particularly the American hunters have always been proud of. We have this like North American model, wildlife conservation we always talk about, which is this idea of like public trust wildlife. And that we manage it in long-term things because people have a vested interest in having more and more animals around for whatever purpose viewing, hunting, etc. One of the things they do though, and so you take an animal like the big horn sheep. And the big horn sheep at a time was pretty nearly wiped out. I mean, they were hurting. They were never hurting as bad as black rhinos are, but they were hurting really bad. And as we got them restored, we started having limited numbers of tags. You might have a mountain range, and every year they determine that we can kill one sheep out of that range. And people will, and I do this every year, people will apply for a lottery that's conducted by the state. And you put your name in the hat, you pay a fee, They, you know, put all the names there drawing out and be like, Dave draws a tag. And this generates a whole bunch of money and they use it for tranquilizing sheep that you can helicopter them to new areas and restore the species and all the funding comes from this kind of stuff. One thing they realized a great way to make money is if you can get that up, let's say you can kill five out of that mountain range. They might wind up going, we're going to do, you know, we'll do four through the lottery, which is for everyone like the common man's pool. But we're going to take one and auction it off. Every year the one that the big one sheet take the auction to Montana. It goes for $203,400,000 every year. I think I think recently went for 380 or 4. I mean, it's it's always up there. I don't think it's broken a half million, but it goes up because if you go in Montana and you go on six, if you go on the Missouri breaks. all the record book big horns come out of there okay like the biggest big horns the biggest Rocky Mountain big horns come out of the break so guys will pay a ton for the gut what they call the governor's tag in Montana and it raises a ton of money and it does a ton of good but some people feel I see both sizes argument some people feel like that bit of money is not worth the damage you're doing by upsetting this idea of democratically own and ministered wildlife. Like most guys will put in their entire life for a big horn sheet tag and they'll pay the fee every year and they have no chance. I've been putting in for that tag for 14 years. I've accumulated, they started to bonus points system 12 years ago. And the bonus point system means that every year you put in the next year you get up, every year you put in without being successful, you get a point in a square year points. So next year, my name will go in the hat 144 times. If you did it for your first year, your name will go in the hat one time. Even with my name in the hat 144 times, I don't think I'm even up to having a 1% chance of drawing a big hard sheet tag.

Meanwhile, a guy can come in and he makes a bunch of money. One guy that buys lately made a lot of money selling sandwiches. He comes in and he's like, be buying one of those and I'll buy it next year. And people are like, all that money is so useful. And it is. Our people are like, dude, this is not the country we live in because we're still. We're still kind of hurting from the idea of where we came from in Europe, which is like the Robin Hood model. You got to be rich to hunt.

Yeah, he would go out and hunt the king's animals. And he used to, I mean, at the, even at the time when our ancestors were like, first coming over, you know, they could kill you for hunting. They could kill you for hunting. You had to be rich to hunt. So when guys like you think like the story of Daniel Boone man, he came out and he's like, geez, this whole, you know, this relative's came from England. He comes over here's like, man, this whole freaking country. I go home wherever I want. So people really fell in love with that idea of freedom and you know, and that you could kind of roam around and the animals were there free for the taken. And now we're a little bit upsetting this model. But all the people who were on the other side of this say they put the money so helpful. And if wasn't for big chunks of money like that, we wouldn't have recovered the big horn sheep as effectively as we've recovered the big horn sheep. and it's not cheap, you know.

Yeah, so I've been Montana governor's tag. You'll see what it went for last time.

I heard a story where the guys that the guys that buy it, once you spend that kind of money, you want to rule out uncertain. And you know that you can picture the area, right? Yeah. You know all that stuff you flow through. Yeah, we saw a lot of things. When a guy will buy the governor's tag, he'll usually hire Some guys, or he'll hire some guys to go spend a couple months. They'll put together a dossier on the animals that are in the area. Yeah, man. Oh my god. That's ridiculous. They scout when they find one. They stay on it. There's guys just specialized in this business.

Yeah, his sack is kind of tucked up to the left. You can't really appreciate it.

It's a ton of money not the sack. No, no, not the sack. No, but it really makes people mad. Yes, there's a story and I don't even know this true I heard it from enough people that's 10 of thing is true. So these guys are going out and They'll get a guy. They'll get guys out there. They find a tanker. You know, they're going they want to ram a score. This got over 200 inches of horn or more And they find one, they don't let it out of their eyes, right? They stand up, stand up, stand up, and eventually the guy comes out and they go, there he is, that's the one you want. There's a rumor a few years ago, this guy had done this, and he's been all this morning, I heard, I'm just telling you, unsubstantiated stuff, I'm not telling you what year or his name, because I don't want to say that and be wrong about what a high roller buys this thing. pays a figure rumored to be around 30 grand to have some guy find check this out. It comes down to it in the guys like third one from the front third one from the front. They go down on the gully. Getting mixed around and he's shooting the gold on his wrong one. Oh no. Yeah, but our rumor has it that he that this gentleman later bought another one and went out and got him. She bought another one out and got a big fatty.

I, in man, I seat like it tears me up because like everything in life, it's so complicated. I see both sides of it. Like I love our system. I love the idea that wildlife is public trust. And I think that there's no other way to explain the success of the richness of animals and the riches of wilderness habitats. We have in this country when you look at how many people live here, how wealthy we are, like all the technology Like some of their countries that would be sitting where we're at have destroyed their wildlife. But we have a very, in place, like a very intact system. And we've done a fantastic job. And I think that one of the ways we explained the fantastic job, we've done is that we've really held true to this idea that wildlife belongs to us. And when you do damage to it, you're doing damage to this idea of an American treasure, you're damaging other people's interests. So yeah, man, it's complicated. So that's my long way of answering the Rhino thing. I bet you anything. It is extremely complicated and that there's emotion battling logic.

That is mine. It is amazing.

What's the ivory worth? Not worth that.

A rhino has a black rhino's got a no. Oh rhino horns not ivory, but it's valuable. Yeah, but it's not ivory.

I went to I went the other day. I mean just like three days ago I saw the act The current head of the U.S. I went to see the current head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service speak about some issues that will be facing this year. And the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is getting really involved in the rhino trade. When they talk about all the money they're spending, you know, they're spending money on enforcement, just spending money on trying to battle the source. Like you might somehow convince people that they don't want it. You know, all the things you would do. And remember, like, think about the millions and millions of dollars of time of throwing around. I remember being like, Too bad he can't just go find any guy who wants to go get one. You'd give him more money than he's ever going to make hunt them. Yeah, but it doesn't the world doesn't work that way because some other do it would be like I remember thing like you would make every rhino portrait really wealthy Yeah, and they just be like, okay cool.

No, no, but I remember I remember just thinking of those guys could only know the amount because you know they're not like no matter what like that business I don't like most the guys that are actually out there with firearms you can imagine the guy that's out around the ground Contan rhinos being chased by people who have pretty much a license to In some cases kill him like I don't think that guy is a rich man. He's he's making someone wealthy, but there's no way that that guy is rich

But it's just, it's probably, I mean, it's an issue of poverty. Yeah. And not that justifies, but I'm saying, like, I don't even know the guys that are out porch and rhinos, they might not even have any idea who it is that They might have like some vag awareness about the properties, but I don't know if they believe in the properties as well.

It isn't foul. Yeah. It's gotta be just that it's a nice foul. Mm-hmm.

But no, they're killing it to make money and people are buying it to make the record.

We should have, we should make a public service announcement right now. We'll have him drop leaflets over China. It doesn't work.

You know, yeah, it isn't an amazing, like, in that way that that there's stuff not only be like, no, dude, this really does work. I mean, like, to the point where it could cause trouble for you.

You think that they would be, you think that the pharmaceutical industry would, it would not the farm. What's the word? The effort, like the avenue jack?

No, I'm saying what is the term for like something that like you look you want he agent horn or or you want to Yeah, that the average jack market for men would You know The decartening market for men would evaporate with now that there are pharmaceuticals that are specifically tailored for that and are clinically proven to work.

Yeah, you've heard a big Mac diplomacy.

I'm 40 years old in a month.

Talking about... Yeah, I just can't, I can't, I just, my head wants to blow up because I just, I see all sides of it.

The part I don't see, the part I do not see, though, for me, is I would never, I don't have that desire. to hunt one of those. But so much of that kind of thing is, and it's hard for you to don't understand. So much that kind of stuff comes from context. You develop over time a deep context with an animal. And for me, that familiarity and the hours you spend, the hours you log watching it, understanding it, reading about it, starting it. For me, develops into something like, produces a great desire to hunt the animal once I get to know it. An animal that I don't know well, I don't have any desire. I don't have that much desire to hunt for it. But when I watch them and watch them and watch them, like big horn sheep. When I moved to Montana, when I was born in Michigan, I moved to Montana. I didn't go out there being like, man, I can not wait to hunt big horn sheep. But after spending years and years and years out, you know, glancing for deer, glancing for elk, glancing for bears, and I'm like big horn and big horn, big horn. And I really got to where I love to watch big horns. I liked everything about big horns. And in time, I was like, man, would someday love to have an opportunity to go hunt a big horn. And it was born from that. So when I say that I have no desire to hunt a rhino, I'll be like, it's just like it would be to mean like like hunting Martians like I just don't have any you know familiarity with it just doesn't like culturally I haven't read about it my whole life I haven't like when I go and look at calendars like hunters love wildlife calendars and it's like all the stuff with like the hunt you know you don't grow up looking at like the rhino page on a wild on a hunting calendar which is I just have no context with it and this gentleman that that bought this thing I don't know I don't know I just don't know anything about him I'd love to talk to him he probably doesn't want to come on your podcast

It is. It's like, it would feel very, if I did shoot the Rhino, I would eat them.

Friends of mine that have hunted in, friends of mine that have hunted in Alaska. Sorry, friends of mine that have hunted in Africa. kind of marvel at the rapidity with which like how how quickly the animals get all off and consume as it is like Not a lot of waste, you know. Then there's some animals that you look at and you think they'd be really good. They're not very popular and other animals that you'd look at and you wouldn't think would be that great and they're really popular as table fair. I don't know what the reputation of Rhino is. But elephant's popular. People like the elephant one.

I have no desire to hunt one, but again, I have no context. And I don't really understand For me to go, like, for me to go hunts on, then I also have know that it's sound, that it's in a safe position. And one nice thing about living in the US, I mean, there's some exceptions to this, but generally in the US, like if you want to be, if you want to be ethical about your hunting practices in the US, you can generally look to the guidance of your state-fishing game agency. I mean, a state-fishing game agency can't get away with, I mean, theoretically can't get away with, practically can't get away with running a species into the ground, you know, it would be big trouble for them. So generally, if you're looking and you realize that there's a, you know, there's a population of big ones, and there's some, and there's a hunting season form right now. It's okay. I mean, it really is okay. If they're finding a decline in that thing, they're going to curb it or cut it out all the way out of the way until it's growing again. And then you can also look at their long-term goal of, you know, where they want animals, how many animals I think they're able to support. So it's easy in the US because this stuff is watch so much. Obviously, again, coming from Guy to the Spenty Time in Africa, I know that in Africa, like money talks in a way that it doesn't necessarily hear when it comes to small issues like wildlife. Like you can buy your way into things that maybe you don't have any real ethical business. doing, you know, and in the US, it's just easier to kind of, there's a lot more information that are fingertips. So for me, when I go hunting, I can really kind of read up and understand a lot about what I'm going after, where it's at, what the management goals are, what risks the animal has, is hunting it, you know, productive and helpful right now, is it potentially detrimental to the species, and you can make your decisions.

Well, there's the state. So you have U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is a federal thing. And so they have a hand in, they have a hand in managing migratory waterfoil. But most things are managed by it. So every state has a, you know, you kind of like just in general terms, you call them fishing game, but it's like in Michigan, it's the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. And Montana, Montana, the Department of Fish and Wildlife and Parks. but just as a euphemism versus fishing game. So, you know, every state, the department of environmental conservation in New York, so every state has a different name, but it's a state department that sets hunting and fishing regulations. And then on these state departments would be big boards, and there'll be the people that set it will be biologists, various figures, different stakeholders, so you'd have like representatives from the hunting community, representatives who are outside of the hunting community, will all come together and come to some level of cohesion and some level of, you know, they'll find a happy middle ground when they set their quarters. And they often, I mean, they meet every year to determine what can be done and not done. And they can control harvest a number of ways by issuing tags, shortening seasons, lengthening seasons. You can, if you want to slow down the harvest, you might move the season away from the rut, you know, if you want to pick up a harvest, kill females. You know, if you want to, if you want to bring a population down because of various factors like agricultural interests, auto-insurers, you know, generally want, like generally want deer numbers lower, agricultural interests, generally want deer numbers lower, landscape people, often want deer numbers lower. So they're kind of factor like their concerns and you got the concerns of people who want hunters want more deer, they want to see more deer around. And you figure all this out and there's all these management tools to try to find a way to tweak things. Another thing is predator control. If you have a population that's really hurting, you go in there and do predator control in that area. And sometimes you can bring, you know, you can bring some animals back from the brink. It's possible to lose isolated populations. Like it's possible to have a mountain range. And you get a, you spend a few hundred thousand dollars a million dollars, whatever, moving some big horns in there. And you find that you're just getting hammered by lions. And you're going to lose all the sheep and lose your home investment. You might go in there and hit those lions a little bit, you know, save them. There's so many tools that they're disposed. But in general, in general, there are exceptions. In general, I think that I'm always amazed at how well the state-fishing game agencies do.

They're good. And you know what? The other thing about them is they don't get a lot of hard funding. There's not many agencies that get so much of their funding from license sales. So fire arms taxes. That's why there's a lot of conservation money out there right now because the gun businesses have been blown up. As people feel that their gun rights are under attack, they've been buying so many fire arms and puts money in the, you know, the pitman Roberts and finding it's called. that goes to conservation stuff. There's exercise taxes on firearms, exercise taxes on ammunition, exercise taxes on sporting goods, all your license fees, every guy who ever hunts ducks or migratory birds has the bioferral waterfall stamp, state waterfall stamp, all this money plows in and creates money for conservation work, research. And so these agencies are enlarged, some more than others are self-sustaining. You know, that's the way the funny thing is I know that you get annoyed by P to as much as I do. is like they're not spending the money on doing this stuff that hunters are like hunters are are bankrolling so much of wildlife research and wildlife conservation and it's not just stuff that benefits the animals were after you know my problem with groups like Pito or the animal liberation organization the people that want to fucking save lobsters and rescue them from restaurants and throw them back into the ocean

Yeah, you get this idea like oh, they've just one day decided to go and and do it and it's a I'm sure you have on one level you have individuals who absolutely like a guy opens up his regulation book He's like oh, I can buy a wolf take this year that individual does not really need here That individual does not really need to understand it's nice if he does but he doesn't need to understand the full picture because that individual is a tool being used by managing agencies. We need to get rid of some wolves. We could bring back the days where we have government agents going out and gun informed or we could open it up and have people actually pay money. to go out and have the opportunity to try to do what we need to do anyways. You know, so the guy that goes out, I can't always speak to every guy that goes out and hunts the wolves. I can't speak to his motivations. I don't know, but they're servicing a greater good and that they're being used as a tool that winds up being an economic driver, which kind of like points to the efficiency of wildlife management is like you could higher the job out which is some cases it does because there are you know we do have government trappers do some wolf control but it's kind of nice that you can want to turn like rather than you're paying someone to go out and do it you can have people pay for the opportunity to go on and do what we know needs to be done. And in these cases, we're going to have to get, we're going to have to lower wolf numbers. No one's arguing, not that no one is. No one's arguing for like a new extrapation of the wolf. That would be in the worst interests of the managing agencies. The last thing Wyoming would want. Now, they get the wolf de-listed. People are soon to stop the, you know, the de-listing. Wyoming gets the wolf de-listed. They go into control. No one in Wyoming in the government would like to see wolves wiped out and put back on the endangered species list. It'd be the worst thing that could possibly happen for them. There's no interest to like extrapate them. You know, no one's arguing for extrapations is bringing them into control because we are puppeteers. You know, I mean, there's a lot of people living here in your bat. You're you're like really balancing a lot of interests, you know, and so again, it's like Like so much in life, you really have to take before jumping into the stuff. The emotions of you really have to take a time to look at the stuff.

And we haven't even gotten into blistics. Well, there's new things to learn. That's for sure. I, you know, before long before I ever even thought about hunting.

Yeah, you know, they were out and about fucking madness just jumping in front of the car left and right you see him on the side of the highway and you see one get plastered by a truck and it opens up you're like that things made of meat

Yeah. People are so backed out to like, it's some of those areas in the Northeast or you know, there's so many deer and they're kind of like, well, maybe we can hire Snipers to go out at night and shoot them or we'll give them, you know, we'll put up the deer on birth control. Yeah. For me, what I got all these dudes being like, I got a great, I know the perfect way. Open up, you know, suburban, urban, bow hunt, people pay to come out and do us like, no, we'd rather pay. I think I remember reading this one, they had come out to, I don't know what was like, by the time they did this deer, this town one, the lower it's deer population was all sent down they had a thousand or more dollars into each deer they got rid of.

Well, it's all to prevent the harrowing experience that might happen to someone. Should they wake up in the morning and realize and see a deer running into their yard and tip over because they had a arrow in it. And his, his up setting is out. It'd be as so much better to go out and just at night quietly, snipe him off.

But there's so fake that they say the onion on them. No, no, no.

Yeah, has anyone ever died like you ever heard? No one ever dies from marijuana.

Oh, I got I've heard that term. I'm you know, because my brother works in his work involves a little bit, not the use of, but the understanding of herbicides and pesticides. I feel like he talks about LD50s on pesticides, yeah.

But think of how upset your body gets when you're snorkeling or something. And you get a couple of gulps. Oh, yeah. Oh, just you start wretched. Yeah. That's a salt water. That's a miserable thing.

I used to wash when I was I got this job in I was 13 washing dishes at a summer camp. I was washing dishes for campers that were older than I was. And there's a cook there. I was David S. I'll say and one day I just he was drank iced tea and I put much salt in his iced tea to mess with him. So he'd sip and it'd be like salt and he'd spit it out. As retribution, he comes up behind me and kind of puts me in a lock and grabs my forehead and tips my head back and fills my mouth with poured salt. Yeah. Wow, gave me some sorrows. Maybe throw up. That's dangerous. Yeah.

Can't penalty one. Where's that at? West Michigan. Is this still open? Yeah, I'm no idea. I don't know why it wouldn't be.

the ruthlessness of youngsters.

I remember, you know, I work at, I'm on the Massed it outside of mages, you know, they were telling me that the most letter the the most letter generating article they ever ran Was an article that Was deemed to be critical the Boy Scouts because there's been another there had been a number of catastrophes it happened to Boy Scouts that scout camp Like a like a handful things was a lightning strike There's a drowning incident. There's more things in there. It kind of ran historical like is your kid's safe at Boy Scout camp. And it really riled the organization up. I think they were telling me why I'm being the number one letter generating thing at

I dribble a dribble. I got you. I got you. I got you. I got you. I got you. I got you. I got you. I got you. I got you. I got you. I got you. I got you.

Boy Scouts for a while and I think you'd become an Eagle Scout and I joined Cub Scouts as a kid but the problem the way it was is like my dad was always doing such interesting stuff and would take us to do such interesting stuff it'd be like you know whatever Wednesday and there's a Cub Scout meeting and you could go do like nice things you know like if you didn't have a dad It'd be great stuff, you know, but I'm one hand like I could go over and we could do like not tying us up with that or I could go out deer hunting my dad. So like he always like would kind of trump, you know, you could do like the way cool stuff. So I never got involved in it, but it was great for him because he was born like an inner city kid, you know, and didn't like that. He was born an inner city kid and wanted to somehow be out in the woods and for him it was a perfect avenue into it. But then for me it was like, you know, You couldn't do his cool stuff doing that as I could hang out with, you know, my dad and his friends and his kids. So I never got really involved in it.

So you get to think about something like, man, I shouldn't be thinking about that.

But isn't that, I know, because that's kind of like what self-control is. Yeah. Like self-control doesn't speak to that thought, the ideas you entertain, self-control speaks to, or it's like, you get an email. And you're like, I'm gonna write it really mean email back. But it's a fun to imagine what you'd say. I mean email. I'm going to put it up. You write a regular email and that is like supposed to be like adult behavior. Exactly.

You drive down really like, yeah, I would pull his fingernails out. I'd so as eyes open and throw salt on them and make them stare at the sun. I never go there.

What pushed you to get involved in it? I mean, what was your like you wanted to get out?

So it was like a good avenue. Yeah. Proceed as a good avenue to get out.

I can't imagine how Max got home sick when I was a kid. Yeah, I get the opposite of home sick now, you know what I mean? But yeah, I used to get home sick as a kid.

I try not to be, you know, I try not to, but yeah, you do, you get used to a certain moment of me knowing you get home for a while. I'm wife of sometimes point out.

I feel like that's true for me. Yeah, I gotta watch for a sex. I can imagine trying to picture my wife's gonna listen. It's just busy all the time. You know, but I never know what you might get a free minute. Someone might tell her about it.

I just want to say though, I love my wife. I love my wife so much.

You know what, you know, my wife was annoyed with me recently. I discovered this way on Janine's song called Freedom to Stay. And it's like this dude, the narrator wailing. You know, it begins where he's got his backpack and he ties his band down on, you know, and he goes his door and his woman's sleeping and he's gonna go off and roam around, you know, and be a vagrant. And he realizes that everything he wants is here and the refrain is kind of like, um, you gave me the freedom to go my own way, which gave me the freedom to stay.

No, because I keep singing it to her and telling her how it's our song, you know. that she liberated me from my desire to be a wanderer.

I'm going a lot.

You know, my wife always asked, like, where, where were you? Who had gone, who was with you? Did you get anything? And she just likes to ask after I get back. She's like, she's often doesn't ask when I'm going. When I get back, she likes to know those things. My three-year-old wants to know what I could pound. And if we're going to eat it now, you guys want to know that, right? Yeah, I have, I mean, I have like a very nice existence. You know, I could spend a lot of time going to fantastic places and doing cool stuff it's a very unusual life for a hunter that you managed to figure out how to make a living doing that I know because I used to think I would make a living like I thought I'd make a living doing that I was gonna make a I knew I was gonna make I knew I wanted to make a living hunting When I was a kid I wanted to be a professional hunter so I tried to I'd trap for a long time and got you know sold for got really involved like really heavily involved in trapping and you know took lessons in trapping ready to be about trapping I was gonna be a professional trapping The fur prices are so low when I quit trapping those just like wasn't going to happen. And then I hit on this idea that I would write about, um, write about that kind of stuff instead. And so I was like writing was kind of my plan B, but yeah, I thought that I would just live out, you know, like when I was a kid, I had this dream or this fantasy that I would just live out in the woods and never talked to anybody in hunt. You know, and I kind of like made my living like communicating. It was supposed to be the thing. The one thing I wasn't in my plan was I wasn't going to communicate.

Yeah, I enjoy, like I enjoy it. I remember when I was in 10th grade, I just English teacher Mr. Heaton and I had written an essay, I had written like a comparison contrast paper about Melville and Faulkner, so I came in and what, and for the English class, and he said, I'm going to submit your essay to a right and contest, and I forbade him from doing it. I can't even imagine why, but I told him I wasn't going to do that. I don't want to be in the contest. He sent it in anyways in that one second place, and when I got this letter that had to go this award ceremony, it mentioned the cash prize. And I was super excited as well as 250 bucks or something. And we go down there in the gal at one, The event was at this place called The Fronethal Center. I'm a skig and Michigan. The gal at one goes up and gets a check. And then I go up and they give me the source. And I was just like bummed. So I thought I got 250 bucks. And I was like, visibly bummed. And Mr. Heating had come in the ward ceremony with me and he said, he said something. I'll never forget. He's like, You know, there's far more than $250 worth of words in that book. That was kind of my genus that says a writer.

No, he meant like that if you can capture.

No, they just changed what a budget wasn't what it was or I mean, I never had a satisfactory answer to the wide and get 250 bucks. But I went there. wanting my check and come out of this book. I still have that the source, you know. Do you really? Yeah. That's fine. Now I keep it in my box of like special stuff.

Made a bullbow out of a buffalo.

Yeah, you shot it with a musket, too, right? I mean, do you want the show business story about how I did what made you decide to be on TV? Like, what did I would periodically, like as a writer, I would periodically get called by producers and developers, a boss if I had written, or they would kind of summon you, you know, like you might get a phone call, or you get an email, not a phone call, an email through a magazine or whatever it realizes. Some guy at history channel wants you to come down and what they do is they're desk bound individuals and they're obligated to go into these meetings, you know, and have like some ideas. And so when they're putting together their portfolio by ideas, they would like to go contact writers or people who are out doing interesting stuff in the hinterlands, you know, and come in and kind of report about what's exciting at the time. And I'd gone to a number of these meetings over the years about stories I had written, and every time you get the email you're like, oh my God, I'm going to be on TV and it would never work out. But eventually I signed a development agreement after all my first book. Um, scavengers guy to Oak cuisine, which I just got the rights back to. That book sells like there's so few of those books out there. They they sell an Amazon for like 130 bucks. Really? And I just they just like mirror max. They're wine scene company. Just gave me my rights back. Wow. And in a move that would benefit them in no way whatsoever. Just like out of the goodness of their hearts, like gave me the rights to my book back.

Like the only as much as people like to talk about Harvey Y and seeing being like the worst guy on the planet. I don't know that. I know that his company has gave me my books rights back. Didn't even try to get money out of me. Just gave him to me.

Well, I'm people tell like a horror stories, you know.

Yeah, and that guy was to blame and that thing man, but yeah, that guy Like, the cover of it is in like, hold the camera, do his head like that. That's a phenomenal movie.

I watched it after the documentary. I was like, I watched it on my Mac, I got to see this movie. But it only validates the movie. Validates the movie.

Do when I want to see that movie, it felt like something came down from the heavens and that's not my fault. I had never seen a like, I didn't know anything about cool. I was blown away.

It's a great job. I don't know anything about the guy that made that movie. It's a great job when I move it. Yeah.

And meanwhile he's like saying like anti-Semitic stuff and like yeah.

I've heard of multiple people.

Yeah, yeah. I've heard of it. I've heard of multiple people. like how surprised people are what a great guy.

He played a tough guy. He could turn on and turn off electric appliances by punching the wall.

Yeah. He would walk into a bathroom and bang the wall and run out of the bathroom and he would talk to Pinky Tuskadero.

They never, you live a flop and such an immediate way, man.

I can imagine it's like, you're just watching it. It's like a movie like you make it. There's all this excitement. It's something later. It doesn't do well. You're like up there going like, this is not going well. I've never done it back into some magic and how humiliating.

But your comedy suffers. Oh, it goes terribly wrong.

You're treated probably around you. You treat with a certain amount of deferance, too, that you're not going to get us doing stand up. Exactly.

Yeah, like you'll be disrespected.

What stones do? Oh, you know you know this a little bit. I think maybe forgot. I'm going to see you on January 31st. Oh, yeah.

Is that sold out yet? Should we talk about it?

Yeah. I will after I saw you last time when I went to see you in New Jersey. We were driving home my wife was saying we should let my face hurts from laughing at heart. And I wanted to write a thing. I wanted to write a thing like I wanted to write an envisioned writing something called like the only happy comedian because you see like I don't understand comedy at all, but you got to think we you come at it from a position of strength in some way like it like so much stuff is funny because it's like from a place of self-loving like so many comedians do like a self-loving thing and it might be real, but it's like it's kind of like It's just where it spawns from as like self-hatred and I'm so pathetic, you know what I mean? It's like finally you build a whole act. You can build a whole act and like come like you're at a position of strength. I don't know if you ever think of it that way but like you're up there like you seem like when you're up there you seem somehow like in control and and you know like a word you like in control and powerful but still funny it's a weird contradiction because we get from stamp we get to thinking like it's just like yeah my wife don't like me no one likes me I'm awful I can't do anything

That's kind of what I'm saying. You could be like, no, I'm fine. Yeah. Like if I wasn't doing this, I'd be fine. I'd be doing something else.

Oh, yeah, I mean, I got a good Mitch Hedberg. Really?

Like you don't sit around and think like what would be something funny I could say?

What I do is jumps in your head.

And he like I will convert this now into my comedy.

And just so I'm clear, when you're talking about moving away from just jokes. Yes. Like, what does this do? It's this. Maybe like taking like a philosophies or

Well, can you pull them out?

Well, I love that I use that term, that's not it.

Kind. He never threatened you.

One thing, but one thing. the bones, they can't, they may not be there. They didn't find it because they only had two of each. So they died. Well, that could have been the unicorn's bone.

That could have been for a long time. But I'll tell you one thing though, you were kind of getting that. This like, the way the guy came up to you and he said, like, you were offending me. But it was funny. The thing I struggled was like, he talked to really liberal people and you're like, yeah, rush, you know, rush some boss funny sometimes when he's funny. It's that makes them so mad. Every time I'm really concerned of people be like, you know, John's stories, though, you can be pretty funny. Get mad.

They can't imagine. But I remember like when you were doing part of your act or talking about when people get really mad at comedians for saying something, the cops, and you can't imagine like How come no one's mad at Johnny Cash? For shooting a man just to watch him die.

Yeah, no one's always wanting to kill novelists. No, unless you're solving Rushty alone to have a go. People aren't always going to kill novelists.

Yeah, not exactly.

But what's more upsetting than the people who are so volatile and do get so mad about stuff is... The thing that politicians do, which is to fain that response. Yes. Like, you get politicians, you know, you look at their career. They've vastly to wildly between all these positions, but they'd love to get up and act like, to act like the morally outraged guy. Yes. By something that would, you know, like, when you look in his eye, like, you don't care at all about that, but you're like fainting the guy who is that way. And that's more of saying that someone really is mad about someone. Yeah.

I mean, that's a cop. That's that's a complicated idea.

But I wish, is it Patrice O'Neill? Yeah, yeah, yeah. He, yes, I wish he was here. Because it's like, you've been in a situation where someone said something that they wanted to be funny. Yes. Let's say they're made that someone makes a crack about gaze and it flops. A way that it can flop is if they're so transparent that you see when you see into them for a minute and you're like, wow, that really comes. Yes. A place of deep hatred. Yes. Yes.

And it's not funny because in that I got a glimpse into that. You know, yes. If you make a gay joke, I know from, I don't know why, from your demeanor, whatever it is. I know that you're not at home, you know, wishing you'd go out and kill gay people. Right. How do I know that? It allows you to explore like a funny idea. You know, but sometimes someone will say something like, man, this person really has a problem with black people who are in a power of position.

Dude, but how soon is now is a rock solid song. But I know you're more stupid than I laughed at it. Yeah, I was like the Noah guy because I could have come up to you and said, you know what? I like how soon is now that shit about Marcy was funny.

And if you could have made it true, it was a 10% of the wars where the game was responsible for 10% of the wars and it would have set the theory.

Because it was so gay that because you were there, it was assumed you must be gay.

I just had occasion. I'm not going to go into, I had occasion right. It's read the first and last chapter of Al Sharpton's most recent. No, the second or third chapter in the last chapter. I read the second or third chapter, and it kind of changed my opinion about it from it. I was like, that's really like it. He made an interesting point about something and express it really well. And he kind of talked about an evolution he went through on an idea. He explained what would be in politics a flip flop. He did a big flip flop and kind of went walk through how a public figure does a flip flop. And it was good. Then we had the last chat there and I just went back to being like, oh, you are. It was like some reading that book. Oh, no matter what, I was there mine.

Yeah. So never read that book. Yeah. And it guy comes up to me. And this guy looks like a yachtsman. Like, it looks like a guy or an yacht. And he comes up to me. Because he goes, sharpden. I had a meeting with L sharpden one time. He came in. in a showford car. And he was wearing a gold Rolex presidential watch. And the first thing he tells me is how he survives on a $10,000 dollar salary. Then the guy left, walked down the street and I was the end of his story. I was a sharpened story.

I remember the teacher played that for us once. Especially when you hear what happened, I mean, before he was assassinated.

But it's funny because being a performer is really, I mean, like being a performer is what launched and where he is. Sure.

This is because that speech at the convention. Oh, yeah.

I mean, we were coming from, yeah, it's an amazing narrative, you know, but one of the earliest criticisms was it's performances performance. Well, I mean, but all speeches are, I mean, their performances. It's hard not like when you go look, like if you look at like Hitler giving a speech, it's hard not even fan how it would ever be that that he's not as a loon, you know, I mean, look, how would it not be just like transparently loon took, but at the time it was like he would give these amazing performances that would get people stirred up and, you know, it's hard to grasp the context of Hitler because I don't speak German.

Can we back up? Please don't think I was doing the old like Hitler Obama thing.

Yeah, no, maybe never something.

It's been, you know, it's been so device. But I always think like, when I look at things that like things that happened, there's things that happens to candidates. I think it has so much to do with money. We get these figures going into the primaries. You get these figures that have these, they buck the trends and mavericks. When I say mavericks, I'm not referring strictly to McCame, but you get these people that come in and they're going to upset the status quo. You have to play the politics game and you owe so much stuff for money. And then you pay those debts and it's like cropping. And I think a similar thing happens to people often in office. I think that like I can't imagine what it must be to be present. And I say this, talking about George W. Bush and Obama. I can't imagine what was being your president and someone comes in every morning and runs through the list of threats. And you hear it and hear it and it's like threats, threats, threats, threats. the paranoia that must exist. You know, I think it has to be really taxing on people. No doubt. And every decision you make. And it's like, it's like, yeah, it's gonna be, it will be your legacy. And you're like, and you're, it's got to be wrenching to just have to make those decisions all the time. They look, I mean, guys come on to office looking so rough. Yeah, it's probably like. But then no one, you never have a guy do one term. Real popular. He's like, you know what? Fuck this. I'm not doing it. Yeah. There's something like it's so intoxicating to be present.

We got, we got you into this mess. Wouldn't be funny though. Well, since George Washington, they say he could have won again. He only had one term. No, but he was going to, people were like, do three. They wanted him to, they wanted him to keep rolling. And he stepped down and I think he might have been the last guy that wouldn't have been like, I'll take another one. Bloomberg took another one.

And he's like, he wound up in a weird situation out in the desert.

It should be like those shows where people vote from home. Like every issue is always up on this thing and it's like everybody homes constantly voting on every issue. The president, the president should attack not attack you know.

Well, yeah, but we have the system of checks and balances, man. Allegedly. If you look, if you, if you look at the wild vacillations at some countries go through, okay, then as well, I mean, rattle them off all day long. People get frustrated with how slowly things happen in the US. That's the, that's the story. The gridlock, nothing gets done. It's all idiots. If you look at the gradual way, one might argue. that all that gridlock, and all that mayhem, and things being so stagnant, somehow works to our benefit from preventing wild swings. Oh, we're this, though we're that. We get a really serious communist, let me go from that to a real serious anarchist. Then we realize that doesn't work, so we go to some wild ass dictator, I feel that kind of like just kind of these mild angelations. When taken, when you view it from a historic perspective, I think these mild angelations that we go through in politics are to our benefit. I'm like, I'm a little bit pro gridlock. That's interesting. Because just if it was just like so fast, I feel that we'd make, we'd have more stumbles than we have. I think- But I'm like, I'm kind of like, generally like an optimist, you know.

The money things really should look like. Like, this dude, the just got the mayor in New York. I want to go back to my show business story to at some point. And I want to tell my Mitch Hadberg story. But, and I want to talk about Houghton Pig's Mill. How are we in time?

Okay, so, man, last month. Oh, yeah, so the guy at the guy just got elected mayor in New York. I mean, he's not in there at day and he's like, okay, no more. We're not having more horses pulling carriages around in Central Park. Really? Yeah, right off the bat. It's like, are you telling me, you're you're now running the biggest city. The one that like tears drool about, you know, the one that's like, like balancing all these like ethnic groups and tensions and the one thing that's on your mind when you come in, is that horses are pulling carriage as essential part of his mean. How could that possibly, it has to be that some dude wrote that guy check, you know? And he's like, here's a deal. I'm gonna give you this check, but I don't want them damn horses in that park. Because there's no other way to explain it. And it shows kind of this weird ignorance and arrogance where if you talk to anyone who's involved in livestock theft and livestock issues, we don't have a horse theft. We don't have a not enough horse problem. There's too many horses. Like there's no sense to close your horse slaughter plants. There's like People are dumping horses. People farmers will wake up and be like, wow, there's a bunch of horses out in my place. Because there's just no way to get rid of excess horses. You have all these horses that are unwanted, horses that are starving, horses that are being treated properly. And you've got these like gainfully employed horses that are fed, stable, care for, veterinary and treatment. And the guy would be like, the one thing we need is unemployed horses. It has to be about some weird money thing.

I never wanted those comedians. Some comedians doing something. He was doing like a thing where he was like, you're supposed to complete the sentence. It's so hot, you know? And one of them was, it's so hot. Bloomberg had to go over to Jersey to get a big goal for something like that. Yeah. But the many state stuff I hate it. Like I hate to like the all that I tell them people doing not do for your health. I hate it, but you have to like, I could also picture like how frustrating because you'd be like, you know, it's like you'd be like, look at like a guy who smokes time cigarettes. I'm only hearing like, it's not you. Why? Right. And you can't go, you gotta be big enough of a man to walk the way and be like, okay, you know, a riding motorcycle without a helmet. I'm kind of like, why? Then I'd send like, you gotta be like a big enough person in some weird way and be like, okay, you go ahead and push on. And I'm gonna try to not want to control your life.

No, we met, we met well before, but that's, that was, You know, if you do enough TV, like that was what I did was so stupid that you'd want out of one hand. It was so dumb when I did not tell, I'll tell what I did in a minute, but when I did was so stupid that you'd want to then hide how stupid you were and not have it be on TV. But I didn't hear like, but it's compelling TV. Like a guy getting run over by a moose is interesting, you know? So it's your thing of like your ego where, and I'll tell what happened. We were calling, you know Ryan Kelly.

We were calling moose and when you call moose That's excellent but pinch your go like pinch your nostrils That's the cow. Yeah, that's a cow saying I am coming into asterisk and Party calling is a fact like moose calling is a fact of right before the rut for the breeding season because bulls Know what's gonna happen Like the cows are going to want to be bred and I'm going to breed them. But the cows haven't really got rolling yet. So it's just all anticipation. If they were actually all doing it and the cows are really an asterisk in the bulls like with the cow that's an asterisk, he's going to be less likely to come to one calling.

He wants it. You're the first. He's like, there she is. First cow to come to a asterisk. I'm going to go get her. So we're out. Ryan's mimicking the noise of a bull. I'm sorry, mimicking the noise of a cow. And what inspired him to begin doing that is we heard a bowl of bull makes and always like this a bowl will go So that's all you heard it's like a suggest you don't even hear it you feel it. It's a suggestion of a noise It's like you kind of it was like what was that but it just it's very hard to determine where it was not where it's hard to determine how far away and We heard that and then we debated for a long time whether we had heard it or not right now I know I heard a bull I heard a bull Then it actually started to thunder a little bit off in the distance, which made it even more confusing, because it was like, was it thunder? It was at that, you know, noise. So Ryan starts trying to lure the bull to us. This is not British Columbia. He starts trying to lure the bull to us by roaming around, making cow calls. And he goes away from the bull. And I stay put hoping that the bull will come and he's going to want to see her before he gets too close. So by Ryan's thing about 75 yards further away, the bull might hang up in the vicinity where I'm at, you know, while he's trying to get a visual lock on the cow to make sure everything looks safe. And we keep calling him calling. And then I'm starting to think I was going crazy. I never heard the bull in the first place. So we start going in the direction. Eventually we start moving in the direction where we think the bull is. And sure enough, I see some brush clash. And he's in there rubbing his antlers on some brush. and Ryan starts calm and now we're in his zone enough where he's coming to investigate and he's coming in and he kind of comes at me and I do like a really stupid thing when I take what you call a brisket shot and a brisket shot on a deer while pig is devastating you know you're coming in like the sternum and you you know there's this is devastating the animal a small animal But on Moose is just so much, you know, it's like layers of bricks and stuff, or like basically the front of the made up. And he goes down and I go running over there. And sure enough, he gets something starts running. And I'm worried, like the last thing I want to do is chase a moose. But I'm worried that maybe he's not bleeding enough, so I start running after him. And I get up there and he's, I catch up to him when he's laying down again. And I go to shoot him in the neck. And click, like I had messed up my rifle and hadn't chambered around so it clicks and that bull got up and just turned and like came and boom not me over like coming at you like you know head down horns down like a bull you know head down horns and he punched me in the ass of one of his antler times and I thought it punctured me so I ran away in Callahan shoots the moves down And I keep reaching around to feel where he had popped me so hard in the ass and knocked me over. And my hand keeps coming back, bloody. So I'm trying to feel where he put a hole in me. And I'm thinking like he'd like punch the hole through my waders and into my, into my ass tissue. And um, but then I realized that like I got blood all over. And because he had, I'd hit him in the brisket. So when he ran me over, he like smeared a lot of that blood on the back of my clothes. So that was the blood I was feeling. scared to hell and you saw that like wasn't a few days before that I got charged by a grizzly bear yeah this is a harrowing trip and you're talking about people smoking cigarettes and riding motorcycles with no helmets that moose deal was probably the closest you know you like you fancised about bad stuff happening you from big animals you know like you can get mulled by bear whatever and like what really gets you as little teen things like I've been like my hospital stuff has been you know Like serious, this has been GRD, so drinking bad water and lime disease by getting, you know, bit by little teeny bugs that are infected with bacteria. And that's like my real source of trouble. But when I'm laying in bed and I'm not thinking about microbes, I'm thinking about big giant animals coming to get me and on that one. came and knocked me. In the minute, like, it's mixed emotions. It seems like that was a stupid thing I ever did. I can't believe that I'm so dumb. And then concurrent with that is a thought of like, I am so happy that that happened. That was an amazing thing, you know? And now dude, as stupid as it was, now I said, and I'm like, I love that that happened.

It's, it's probably actually what I'm looking at it now. I wouldn't even be disappointed. Had he punched the hole in my butt as long as you live.

I keep telling half the days. My wife is like, we're not gonna get a bad sack to me. Half days. She's like, no, wait, cuz we went on the one. I'll just many know what's that. I've just the dead issue now. Moose. Crushed my who's killed my trash might say I'm a unit Wow, that would be harsh It was fun man. I mean, I love that like you know I was you'll you'll appreciate this because I was reading this book about Human history called loans survivor Not loans survivor. That's the the seal story. Yeah, it's something like loans survivors It's by a geneticist of a British geneticist Tells names. Anyways something like that Souls survivors. I don't know He talks about the sweet of injuries that are common to neanderthal skeletons. I told you about this. So like every time they dig up a neanderthal, skeleton in the mouths of caves and stuff, like one, you find that they've been cut, like they're bone, they've been butchered. So they die and their bodies would presume either bodies or crow mag, then would have had a tendency to go eat them. And they also find all these like fractured bones, like busted bones, fractured skulls, fractured vertebra, little survivors. And you saw what's in this book. And these guys kind of got one and like, why do they have this type of injury? And they eventually some doctor looks at the, you know, like the injuries that are common in nanophiles. And he says, you know what I see that is rodeo riders. And it's like the things that happen to people who are like mixing it up with big critters. And The theory that this guy puts for not not psyched. Not the guy that wrote it. Who put it up again? What was the name again?

Yeah, so Chris, I don't think Chris Dringer floats that he talks about a guy who floats this idea that they had a confrontational hunting style that Neanderthals did. Today we're in there, you know, tearing it up. And Crow Magnins had a little bit more of a state back. You know, we'll stay back and get them at a better time.

You know what else is? They didn't have a lot of sexual dimorphism. The males and females are much more similar.

Female females are in their hunt more.

Probably how to be a child. Yeah, they weren't like just structurally the females are similar. So having that little running with that moose was kind of, I felt like a little bit in a positive way. I felt a little bit like, maybe like, there was like a neanderthal experience. But the neanderthal thing is weird, man, because they find out all these things if you used to think they didn't do. It was like evidence that they, that once they came into contact with Crow Magnum, it was like they started picking up some of the things that they were in do. like this evidence to suggest that like at the that they had been around for you know hundreds thousand years and also do show up that we show up and also they kind of got interested in decoration a little bit got interested in our a little bit it's a theory you know that they had seen they were somehow interacting with us and kind of like stealing our Makes sense stealing our groove a little bit.

Yeah, you'd die. And so they were kind of like came into, somehow it was going on. And there was some intro version. He talks a lot about that in that book that there was, there were He argues and I'll be the argument there is that there was certainly some intro aggression.

Yeah, yeah, I've heard all that so I'm not like I'm not definitely I'm you know when it comes to that kind of stuff I'm not the guy Like you do the same. Like, I'm saying what some people say. Right. You know what I mean? And some people say that. And it's an interesting idea. And all that's of change is so fast.

I mean, when they went out 30, 30, 35, 30, 35. 30, 35.

He explains how he explains what they know so far. Well, yeah, he explains how the people that have an opinion on it came to form their opinion.

They would do it. Even if it was sort of like an act of aggression like you look at conquering forces, you know? Yeah. And one hand, they're coming into Congress because they despise them. But like dudes conquering dudes will often find themselves, you know? Like hisries fool those examples. We're got conquering army that's coming out to get like the worst people on the planet. All they want to do is annihilate them. But they also kind of want to have sex with them.

No, but I don't know if I've seen that guy's ideas, but I've seen the idea that that's the case. And what people point to is that they always find butcher marks, not always, but it's very common to find butcher marks on those bones and also find where they crack the heads open, presumably to get the brain out.

Oh yeah. You know, yeah, but I bet you that Crow Magnet and Neanderthal weren't as different. There might have been as many differences between those two as there would be between us and the Sasco Arch if you haven't run into one.

Oh, that's what do you think they look like? Yeah. That looks like something you'd have in your studio.

I think the picture will become more clear. Eventually. I mean, because I get such sophisticated ways of looking at stuff.

But like, this is, you would get so many women that would do it.

You know what I think about, I'm gonna try to tell real quick, it's not that great of a story, but I had this girlfriend who had this fellowship, she got in San Jose, California, and so I was back in forward between Montana and San Jose all the time. And there's always this marquee above this comedy house.

There's just marquee above the comedy house, and it kept saying, Mitch had bird, you know, march, or Mitch had bird, whatever. And there's always in the bag of my head like, man, I'll get my ticket, gotta get my ticket. And one day it says, like, we'll miss you, Mitch. I'm like, snap of a bitch, I thought it was coming up, you know? And I thought I like, that it meant like he came and performed and went home, you know? And I ran to the window being like, why did you guys have it on your marquee that he's coming to March when he's, when he's already, and she said not many died this morning? Yeah. It's kind of a weird story.

Yeah, man, do it's funny.

Yeah. Have you gone on and listened to the comedian, the storyteller Jerry Clauer that I'm always asking you to listen to?

No, in the context. I don't know why. Oh, I thought that just because, yeah, Mitch Edwards, like you could actually listen to Mitch Edwards with your kid and your grandma.

Yeah. Yeah. He's using them, you know.

I want you to bring it, I want you to bring it around the pigs.

It's good that you're shooting them. I mean, that's a lot of shooting. I mean, it's not a lot of shooting for like guys that are really in the shooting, but it's a lot of shooting. It's good to get, no, I mean, to like, to like get that level of proficiency. I mean, just from repetition, you learn how to do stuff through repetition.

So yeah guys I know like the guys in the middle of the best of hunting then I thought about you go out and you like have to it has to be you know you're gonna. you know. Because if things get hard and things get bad and things aren't going your way, if you've already been going into it like you didn't know what was going to happen, it allows you to more quickly jump into it that it didn't happen. Like if you go into it like it has to happen, it will happen, it has to happen. Then when things are like sucky, you've You're still pursuing that narrative, you know?

I feel like what what we're doing this weekend isn't gonna be, you know? Like hunt and wild pigs, I mean, there's going to be, I think there's going to be a lot of pigs. I mean, this place, Tee-Hon, Tijon, Tahong, T-E-T-E-J-O-N, Tahong Ranch. Yeah. I think has, you know, I gather they have like quite a big population enough to the point where, you know, people go out there and You can go out there and like, you know, do a guided pig hunt and they do this throughout the year. So if they were none there, it wouldn't be that way. Right. And oftentimes, when I've hunted pigs, I've found it. You know, they're just like, there's so much more fun, you know, like a deer will go on a deer will ever use that word in my life.

They have a lot of babies. So like a take up like another animal, native animal around here, be like, you know, blacktailed deer.

Focund if you see you and me. So like, for quantity is, you know, good at making babies.

But, you know, Deer's gonna have one or two a year. Right. That pig's gonna, a female pig's gonna keep kicking off, litters of, you know, six, 10, several times a year.

If they're, I mean, they're really, they're really something. I mean, they've gotten, they've, through our, you know, through, I'm trying to put together an idea. It's not actually that complicated. Thanks to us, and in spite of us, at the same time, they've managed to get everywhere. Like oftentimes, we just do it. Like we thought it was a good idea for a long time, we go put pigs everywhere. Now, we're like, maybe it wasn't such a good idea to put pigs everywhere. And, you know, there's not a lot we're doing to stop them. That's not the case here. Like in California, they're treating more like a game animal. You know, the number, like, when people travel, more people travel to California, it's a hunt wild pigs than hunting anything else. Really. And they just don't seem to really cause the level of damage in hysteria that they do in some other areas. Like in certain areas in the southeast and the Gulf Coast area. I mean, there's pigs of the point where it's just really hard on agricultural interests and it's like kind of inexplicable. how they seem to be there for so long and exploding to some level. But in California it's just been there's some pigs around and people generally appreciate them. I used to hunt pigs at not used to us. I still do, but I have a friend who's got some, her family has some cattle ranches up around Sacramento. And he's kind of got this a little bit like, yeah, you know, sometimes I get too many. And I need to get rid of some, but then we'll get a dry year and they'll all go away anyway. And I'd like it if you went out and shot some. And if you see one shoot one for me, and they kind of are causing me a little bit of problems. And you can tell has this conflict of relationship about him. But I put it to him one day. I said, Glenn, if you could shake a magic wand in all the wild pigs would be gone. Would you shake it? No. You know, so he even admitted like they're a hassle. He doesn't want a lot of them around. But he would never want to see him all gone. You know, and that feels kind of like the relay. It's a great general. It's a huge generalization. But I feel like that's kind of been the relationship here. There's a lot of hundreds. I get all kinds of emails from guys living California. And they're like, they went out pig hunting six times, everything saw pig, you know, hunting on public ground. And he's guys are wishing there was more of them. And in other parts of the country, you got government agencies paying real money to try to wipe them out because they cost such a problem with native species and agricultural interests. And you know, but here it's just a different vibe in California.

I've seen clips of it. I haven't seen it. I know I know so much about it. I mean, I have a show on that network. Yeah.

Did he kill it? Yeah. I saw that. Yeah. I knew that I had, but I know I didn't know if it came to be that he got it and got it.

Yeah. I heard recently I heard that they're in a situation. Learn to be like paying people by the hour though. kill pigs.

But they're it's like it's weird thing about it. The endangers like not the endanger species. We're thinking about stuff like pigs. And how, you know, just so I don't know if I'm sure your viewers have somewhat up to speed on this, but wild pigs are not from North. Yeah, we don't have wild pigs are not native North America. People brought wild pigs to North America. early on, and the pioneer days are during the contact years. They brought pigs to North America from their native and your age, brought them here as a food source. And they would keep some in pens and other people would have a practice where you'd go in an area and you'd just kind of turn pigs out. They wouldn't scatter too far. They'd fatten themselves on acorns and mast and grubs and various things. And when you want them, when you could take your rifle out and find a couple and shoot them. And it was a way to produce meat where it wasn't, you weren't needing to provide it with all of its feed. It was just a very sturdy animal that could fat in itself on land. And inevitably these pigs would get away. So we've had wild pigs here about as long as we have to have had Europeans here. Another version happened later where people brought them in as a game species. And when they would bring them as a game species, they would bring them in from you know, like Siberia and other areas where you still had the original stock. So the original sous-scrothal was like what we call the Eurasian wild board. They had been bringing in domestic versions that had been bred off the Eurasian wild board. And then people brought directly in the wild board. Now if you look for a parallel with cattle, like the ancestral cattle is an, and we now call the orics, but the orics might extinct. So we lost the wild version, but retained the domestic version. With pigs we had the domestic version that we humans created over long, long tens of thousands of years, co-existing with the wild version. So people brought wild ones. They brought some new Hampshire in the late 1800s, early 1900s. They brought some to California around that time and kind of put them out on the land as a thing to hunt. And in time, we now have populations that are of domestic stock. We have populations that are of of Eurasian stocks. So they look like a real souped up European wildbore. And we have populations that are various hybrids. So they demonstrate different degrees of it. And they've been around a long time. And in some areas, there's way too many. The trouble with some, like, the one troublesome thing that happens to me and again, it's as complicated as shooting rhinos to save rhinos. Is that we've always had We've had over the last 150 years we've been developing this set of ethics. What's an acceptable, what are acceptable practices to use when hunting? And we've made a general determination at certain things aren't acceptable. We don't jack late deer. You can't use spotlights to go out and shoot deer at night. We've built up these rules because we have ideas about what's sporting, what's the elements of fair chase, also what leads to too much harvest. If you make it too easy to go get animals and you're going to have shorter seasons, you're going to have fewer available tags, you know, and so they kind of balance technology to sort of make it that you're going to have whatever success rate. Like a lot of elk hunts, only 10% of the hunters that participate in the elk hunt are successful. 90% are unsuccessful because we have rules in place that make it difficult to do to hunt. There's so many pigs now in some places that we're like discarding a lot of the we're have to deal with that species we're discarding a lot of the notions that we've held dear like you would never go out in a helicopter and shoot deer just would never be legal it would be frowned on by everybody in the hunting community but with pigs it's like an exception because it's a non-native animal that we want to get rid of and so it really is like a it becomes kind of a cloudy issue like we're doing these like big game hunting practices that we worked hard to get rid of in order to save North American wildlife from the pits where we had driven it in the early 1900s. And now all these ethical practices are not really applicable to this animal. So you see some things and see some things happen. And like your initial reactions would be like, oh man, it's just like ugly. You know, it's ugly. But you go like, but it's a really complicated situation. There's a ton of pigs causing a ton of economic damage and it's really putting a herd on people and it's putting a herd on native species too. You know, like we lose like Hawaii lost ground nesting birds. many species about ground-nesting birds because of pigs and rats introduce species eighty eggs yeah pigs are really hard there's like you know rare bird preserves in Florida where the number one problem that have in those preserves is pigs eat all the eggs wow because these are ground-nesting birds and that pigs is vacuuming up so you bring like kind of these like practices that strike someone who grew up in the in the American hunting tradition it's like oh man You know, I've even engaged in some things. Like I've done to pigs. I've done things that wild pigs that I wouldn't do to any other animal. Like what? I mean, like running, you know, running the dogs and killing knives and digging them out of holes and chasing them into little fenced enclosures and killing an air and, you know, it's like, it's their legitimate honest problem.

Yeah, so this is crazy. I've gone down the floor to hunt in turkeys and we have the American there's like multiple subspecies of the American turkeys. So we have It's all one species, but their subspecies are varieties. You have like the eastern wild turkey, and most of the east. The Oceola turkey, which was in the south half of the Florida Peninsula, then you have the Rio Grande turkey, the Miriams turkey, the ghouls turkey in northern Mexico, southern Arizona, and if you're like a turkey geek, You might want to try to eventually get all, have the experience of hunting all turkey subspecies. I have kind of accidentally got four of them. And I realized that I want to go to South Florida and have a chance to hunt osteolus. So I went down to hunt osteolus down on the swamps down there. And we're down there. We run into these guys who hunt pigs with hounds. What they're set up is this guy has a big cat a ranch. And it borders a rare bird preserve. The preserve, you can't even walk around. Most of the preserve is closed to any human visitation at all. You can't take a walk to there. But they have guys like a full-time pig hunter there. He goes around and kills pigs as a way to try to protect these rare birds, beasts, and give them nesting opportunities. The rancher who likes to hunt wild hogs, goes and he usually kind of hunts along his border with the preserve because the pigs will come out of the swamps and the preserve and come up and hunt on his in root around on his land in the cover of night and then retreat back into the preserve where they're relatively safe and hideout. So what he realized is he went through and put this fence in and put trap doors one way doors in his fence so that pigs could leave the preserve and enter his fence. but then they couldn't get back out. It was like a fish trap door. So now, and then if you get to itch in the go, pig hunting, he'll go out at four in the morning and make sure all the doors are shut. Like closes the doors up so the pigs can't get back through the other way. And then he knows there probably somewhere on his ranch. And when he starts chasing one of his hounds, they won't be able to make it back into their safety and the preserve. And when he goes out, if he gets a bore, like an old bore, it's got his nuts intact. he knows it's not going to be a great eating board because they just they run themselves right you know they're not like they don't have a lot of fat they're full of hormones they're not at they're certainly edible but not as good eating so what he'll do is he'll do something that benefits everyone he will castrate that hard and turn it out because now that hard cannot contribute to the population he's not a viable breeding member of the population And if you catch them again, he'll have what's called a barred hog. Barrel. What tells that word? Barrel hog? Barred hog, which is a castrated hog. So like a steer is a castrated, you know, steer is a castrated male cow, castrated bull, and a barred hog is castrated. So we went on one night and caught a big bore with his nuts intact. castrated him and turned him out so he could as this guy put it it will take his mind off ass and put it on the grass. And then we stayed out called another pig and this one had at some point in time. They didn't know if they had it or another guy had done it. This one had been castrated. You wouldn't even know when it was totally healed up. But he had been castrated and those guys like that'll be a good one to eat. So we killed that hog and kept it for food. And we ate that thing from from honest to God. We ate it skin as poor crimes. Took it some tassins out and flush the intestines and stripped them made our own sausage casings. Liver, heart, ate his nose and head cheese, ate his feet, like ate every part of that hard.

I got actually the one thing I got left is one of the good parts. I got one back leg frozen in my face. I got one him and my freezer.

Parallel hog. That's the word. I'm Luke Harold.

Please. I've even written the word. I wrote a thing about this.

Bard Barrel Barrel Hog. B-A-R-R-O-W. Barrel Hog. Hmm. Okay.

Yeah, and he's guys loved hunt and I love deep pigs.

Yeah, I made head cheese with the first the first wild pig I ever killed in California. I went out to hunt wild pigs and I had never laid eyes on a wild pig and I don't want to shoot the first wild pig I saw so I went out one day without my rifle to see some wild pigs and the next day I went out and got one I want to make and head cheese with it where it's not it doesn't make a cheese but it's like gelatinous so a lot of the cuts like when you put your name a lot of the cuts that are chewier you know that don't really make great steak they're not that way because they have a lot of connective tissue you know and fatty deposits, whatever they have stuff that turns into collagen when you cook it. Like it turns into like a gelatin when you cook it. So a head's full of that stuff. And the bones have it. And so you simmer that head for a long, long time. And then you can pick off all the meat. And a lot of the gristle and connective tissue and stuff turns into like a gelatin-like substance. You can make real gelatin that way. And now we just have a packet report of powder on mix of the water and makes gelatin. But old-style gelatin and natural gelatin would be just derived from as an animal by product. So you take all the meat that you pluck off the same way, you know, like hog jowl if you ever had that. You take the tongue out and chop the tongue up. And there's all this other at room at when it's warm, it's liquid, but it sets up as gelatin. And it's just all bound together with natural gelatin that you've derived by slow cooking that pigs had. So it's like little bits of pig meat, bound up in an aspect or bound up in gelatin. And then of course you season it and flavor with all kinds of good stuff to eat. And then when you when it sets up when it's chilled, you can pour it out like a, it looks almost like a fruit cake. You know, it pours out into mold and then you slice it and it's, it's not cheese. It looked great. It looked great because my body that makes it, this guy Matt Weingaard and the chef I hang out with. He puts all this amazing stuff in there and he puts, you know, you can put like colorful things and like you can citrusy flavors and it's beautiful.

No, we have a trip, it's like it's amazing how much liberty, like how much liberty we have. Like how much the network lets us get away with.

Yeah, but there's another, there's another channel that shows, shows, they won't let the people have bloody hands.

My understanding is not a show, there's a, I've heard that that, yeah, there's another hunting network. I've heard that it's protocol on other hunting networks. You're now supposed to have bloody hands. Like you won't see him go to animals.

because they think that they make people turned off by hunting. It's like, how you think people will get turned off by hunting by seeing people eat what they hunt is beyond me. But sports with channels really cool because they let us do stuff. I mean, and it works. The advantage of people are like, you know what, I get it, man. You know, it's like you're showing like a thing that most people are hiding from, but it's a reality that meat goes through a metamorphosis, you know, to get there and it sometimes goes. So yeah, we get to show all that and I love it. But I don't think of it as just like gratuitous. No. It's like, it's instructional, really. Yes.

Do that meat was like unbelievable, man. We had that marrow cracked the marrow bones open. It looked like that. It looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like it looked like Because I want it to be that when something is good, I feel like I want to be able to believe me, and that was good. It was just a phenomenal move, man.

Elk's widely regarded as, like, if you went and surveyed people who've tasted a wide variety of meats, Elk is the one that people would be like, it's the best one. What we're going, T-Hon, has Elk on it, totally Elk. Yeah, you know, you got like Roosevelt Elk, Rocky Mountain, these different subspecies, Elk, there's a very rare one in California, not rare, but yeah, rare and a very small range. that it was almost wiped out and it's back now because you have like big chunks of property like that where they can find, you know, find some refuge and people are working to maintain and provide habitat for them. So it's kind of cool spot. You go there and see a elk that most people haven't seen. I hope I hope we run into one because it's like the two of the two of the elk, you know.

I'm not joking. It was one of the best pieces. I mean, I mean, and to eat meat in the field, You know, we age me because it tenderizes, you know, and we're eating meat like fresh meat often tastes like iron. We'll eat some fresh meat. rich kidless like a onion kind of thing to it. It just doesn't quite taste like aged meat.

But when we were Wisconsin man, we were you were cooking those steaks. It was phenomenal though. Yeah. So something that's it's pretty tough. Like my brother, my brother, my brother lives in Alaska. He kills Moose every year. Like the guy like kills Moose East Moose all year. He's a moose snob. Like he won't hunt a lot of stuff. He's like he likes to hunt moose and doll sheet because moose is good. But he puts a moose in his freezer because just because of for he doesn't have a hanging, you know, he doesn't have a locker where he can dry age his meat. He'll kill a mousse and tip because of weather and bugs and other issues. He comes home and right away processes his mousse and puts in his freezer and he won't usually touch that thing for six months. because it will slowly age and like meet will tenderize in your freezer over time. So when he calculates his year out, he knows he's going to kill a moose in September. He doesn't plan on having the one he killed before, be gone in September. He plans on having the one he killed before, be gone. No, it's staggered. So the one that he kills, he lets it slowly age in his freezer and it will tenderize in your freezer over time and then he starts in on the new one. So when he kills and moves, he's still eating the moves from the year before.

Because it was an exceptional animal. So that's unusual. Those animals, like most animals, especially males and bulls, like most animals, not most. Animals benefit, like ungulates. benefit from aging. No one age, you know, age wild pigs, you know, you don't age black bears. A lot of critters you do age, deer, elk, moves, it all benefits. Those animals all benefit from aging. There's natural, you know, there's natural enzymes or whatever that the process is well understood. I don't understand totally what was just, it's well understood that you hang it and there's like a natural decay. You know, I'll put ducks. Like if I kill a duck, I'll gut the duck. If I have like a wife or if I have a girlfriend or whoever doesn't want it or when I had, I'm gonna try to say. Forget it. I'll gut the duck and put in the fridge. Now I might need to put it in a paper bag because some of them might not want to see the duck every time they open the fridge. But I'll roll it up in a paper bag so I'm gonna still breathe and I'll put it in my fridge and I'll leave it in there a long time. I might leave it in there 10 days. And that meat gets to where you could scrape it away with your thumb. You know, the inside that gutting is where you've got to the bird and might start to even smell a little off. But the meat is getting just perfect. You know, it creates the flavor and answers. It gets more tender. It's just like aging, you know.

I don't know. just what it was eating just good. I've had part I mean we had it we had a great piece off a reading like kind of like the most tender part of the rear leg. But it was just a great animal. That there's so much variability like when you that's one thing about being a wild game chef. I don't know I don't know I don't wild game cook. I think chef sounds a little more formal, but I'm a wild game cook and one thing about being a wild game cook is more challenging. the mean a regular cook is you're dealing with so much variability like you get some great chef and he can do some amazing thing because he's got a per veer you know and when he buys a pig it's like the pig eight this for 72 days and then we hit eight this for 14 days and then we killed it on this day and she'll do that this temperature for these many days and you know and every time he buys a pig the pig comes in his kitchen or his restaurant and he knows he just know what is going to be like you know animals you don't know what kind of that there's age issues and what kind of trip they've been on just all kinds of variability. So you learn how to control that and sort of bring the ingredients in the line because some animals are good and some animals aren't. I shot a meal during one time that was just imp, it was just disgusting to eat. And then you get another meal during it's like, that is so good. That one was delicious. So I'm saying man, and then some, you know, it's like, you don't know what they've been up to or there's just a lot of mystery with it. But that moose was a phenomenal moose. I've also had my body, he was my buddy. We had a fallen out. He's home in this guy. He killed the moose. He brought the meat over. I thought he'd killed the Loch Nessie monster. was like, I'd never seen anything like it.

He had a cow tag. See, one thing about shooting males on antlerd game is you can get an idea of age. The antlers betray the age. There's a growth pattern they go through. Like if you see a forky deer, a spike on deer, it's like that's a one and a half. Your deer is going to be great eating. When you shoot an antler list, the clues are much more subtle. What a guy looked at the two though. So he had a Kyle Moose tag. He went on got a Kyle Moose. He later had someone look at the teeth and they estimated that thing to be 20 years old.

And it's like, you couldn't really chew it. It tastes like a sea monster. Do you know what I mean? Because it's really hard to tell. There's like guys that really know their business. Like, you know, Doug Dernan was Wisconsin. Doug Dernan can look at a Dota how old it is. Yeah. He's looking so me damn dear. He's looking at somebody deer that live on his place that he just knows like what their groove is, you know?

No. Candidate geese, crows, white tail deer, love, people.

That guy's one of the best. And I love just like a big, like a big, I don't say this about many people. I don't throw this around lately, but I was like, he's a big hard-ed guy. Do you know what I mean? And then it's not something I really think of when I'm describing other individuals.

I told you about this, I think, or he did. When he was a kid, if you caught saw a deer track, you ran home and told your parents. Wow. They're in the freaking deer realm.

But I mean, he'll, yeah, I mean, it's just, that's like a real deer-y spot. But they do have that, that's the perfect word. They have a symbiotic relationship. Wait till deer have really, are one of the winners. Mm-hmm. When it comes to development issues. And then our, like our good friend, the milder, which is a more, to me, like, it's a more romantic kind of thing, milder. And some people would be like, oh, yeah, but we have milder in my yard all the time. And I know, but generally they have, they don't do as well. They don't do as well with, with fragmentation. They don't do as well. The kind of the stress, you know, they have some things they like to eat and they're kind of wedged, those things they like to eat and why tells you like, Well, yeah, Mo, that don't all eat corn, you know? They're just like, they're always gonna find something. And that place is just like a deer culture down there.

Yeah, you got way, way, way more white-tailed deer than you had the time of your European contact. Way more, right? Yeah. That's nuts. But still, if every dude in America went out and shot a deer, we'd be running like a 200 million deer deficit. Really? No, yeah. Wow. So when people say to me like, so you think everyone should go out and shoot their own meat, I'm like, well, we really couldn't. We'd run on the critters. It's like it's going to always be like a fringe activity.

Oh, no, I'm not worried about that. I don't stay up. And what I might want to my like goals, not a goal, but a thing I'd like to see happen is We could definitely have more hunters. I think we need more just to have political cloud to defend our lifestyle. But I also would like to see that people who have no interest in hunting come to wreck it like through understanding kind of the mechanics of wildlife. Start to recognize it as that hunting is legitimate. useful practice and not the opposite.

No, I think anyone who looks at wildlife politics in a way that's like a mercy and you have to come to understand it. You go ask someone who runs a wildlife agency, like a state wildlife agency or a federal wildlife agency, and ask them what their job would be like without having hunting as a tool. And, you know, it would make them shutter. Because you just, you know, it's so much, it's going to be very difficult to maintain the kind of the portfolio of different species we have at the levels we have. You'd have to be open to having really wild fluctuations, having cycles of disease, and things that aren't as pretty, and also why? Why deny ourselves access to a renewable resource? The generates so much revenue. You know, it generates economic activity. It's self-sustaining. It helps pay for itself.

I always tell people I wouldn't because I heart like I'll talk about the food element of it. I wouldn't hunt if it wasn't for the food. I wouldn't hunt if it wasn't for the fun. Yeah.

No, no, you shouldn't say that. No. Just picture that you're saying it without counting. What would you say?

I don't even pay attention. I know the rule, but I don't care about it. I ain't concerned with it.

I would watch that show anybody wasn't in it.

And in my inbox right now is the first cut of the an initial pass on the Wisconsin. Really.