Steven Rinella

00:00you know you know it's funny all day later tell me now three-two-one what's funny I was going to tell you a funny story about your address but it would be it wouldn't be funny for you we'll talk later about that you and I we share African ancestry yeah yeah I was shocked yeah I'm 1.6% alright yeah see I have more I have more credential in that department you're two percent right yeah I know and it's it's funny because you know you sort of have your the story in your family kind of where he came from everything mates and I always knew I was 25 percent you know Italian and I knew that my family came from Sicily in fact the the the Rinella z' that came from Sicily all seem to become kind of established and in the produce world my dad was brought up in the south side of Chicago I'm 44 years old okay so think about that for a minute my dad was brought in south side of Chicago and he

01:05was raised by his grandfather who was Sicilian and come from Sicily his grandfather delivered produce with a horse and cart whoa in Chicago so to have lived through that like to be brought up in a house where a guy like leaves in the morning and a horse and cart to deliver produce and then to be alive like to fight in World War two to be through the atomic era the advent of the Internet right but I always knew that we had Sicilians when I did the genetic test want some of those at some point in time one of those Sicilians must have shot southward and crossed the Mediterranean and like had a hook up down there or something well that was the history of Sicily in the first place yeah Sicily just being Sicilian in the first place there were so many people that were impregnated by the Moors and by various people of West Africa and North Africa yeah yeah I should have

02:08probably like always assumed but it just I hadn't thought about it another thing I was reading about this stuff and you might know more about it than I do is that when you do those tasks there's missing parts you know it does it like it captures what's there but there could be a lot there that's not captured mmm just in the way that chromosomes are you know inherited and passed down like it's not it's an incomplete picture right right there could be influences there could there could be in your in it doesn't create a full picture of your lineage there could be lineages that are there that aren't represented in your particular makeup how so like what do you mean you know I hate to right off the bat get into something that I can't speak about any level of expertise I was just reading a piece and the piece I was reading had to do it was kind of a dissection of like

03:01what happened with Elizabeth Warren when she claimed we've been going off about that on the podcast and I'm like a hundred times more African than she is Native American yeah well that's what I found I'm ten times more whatever but there's a piece about it was it was a piece in The Times explaining like how to make sense of now that everyone's doing these tests like how to think about it make sense these tests but but my understanding of it is that you could have a lot of ancestry that just isn't captured in your genetic code in the way that would be detected through the testing I mean there could be ancestors it for what because you're inheriting half you know you're handing chromosomes from each parent and somehow you could have it could be an incomplete picture you could have ancestors that had come from mother you know whatever these tests break out the world and do a

03:51hundred or some odd regions or zones that there could be people from those zones who are in your lineage that are not captured in your personal that are not captured in your genetic code that so bizarre you would think it all be in there so that's just an incomplete measuring tool is that what it is or is it just actually not in there I don't know you're gonna have to have a dude on yeah I'll listen you need to have a dude on understands and it's I feel like I'm off on a bad start here around how much Neanderthal did it say yeah less than normal really less than average was the the number like it said it gives you did 23andme right yeah I can't remember okay I came here I just remember it was less than average and you know and those things like I refined about how many people do them you know but it was less than average which bummed me out but I'm like this Harry is

04:40like a 13 year old like Norwegian girl you know I've insults surprise shocking didn't surprise me too much I was wishing to have a little more of that floating around in me it's a bizarre heritage you know the idea that there was a different type of human that bred with Homo sapiens and that there's like little bits and pieces of it floating around in people yeah and people discuss them people discuss let's have an argument there day where they sane and or tall or Neanderthal and everyone grows up saying the and earth all it's one of those things you're supposed to switch once you realize how you're supposed to do it right Neanderthal but I just can't get comfortable with it I go back and forth there's a lot of words that like that word I know you're supposed to do it but I can't get comfortable with it cuz I feel like it makes you sound pretentious it does it's

05:25like rolling your R's and certain Spanish words but we have this idea that the we had this idea that Neanderthals as unsuccessful right right they're these brutish thugs that died out but they had a six hundred thousand year run yeah in Europe alone six hundred thousand years longer run than Homo sapiens have actually existed yeah yeah so whatever I don't know that we're gonna hit like I don't know that we're gonna match up and have that run well we'll probably have a twenty three in me for whatever the is after us things look somebody back then a human like oh one of those crazy war monger you can rapists thieving humans it died out turns out they didn't totally die out overrun with emotions and lies and they someone someone of a superior race infiltrated the humans and banged one of them yeah it's it's it's funny to look at that that understanding of those that

06:25understanding of those people um an end it to have the site to picture in your mind's eye even though you can't picture it like what was looked like when they were hooking up so one all right you know like anatomically and kind of behaviorally modern humans were hooking up with Neanderthals was that with it was how is it perceived by their peers I bet the people that we think of as people back then like you know George the animal Steele is no Georgie animal Steele is a very famous pro wrestler from back in the day and I thought you're gonna say it was a paleontologist or anthropologists or a slur he's arrest pro wrestler very famous guy who could be a caveman like legitimately could be a caveman yeah see if you got a good image of them now this is what I think when I think of people now give me a full-body one there you go oh when I think of people he's hanging

07:23on to some Homo sapiens Homo sapiens from you know 200 thousand years ago I think a George the animal Steele I think there was something like that so the idea of George in neanderthal chick not that far off I think our ideas like that like dan Rather would be out there banging some monkey lady I just don't think I don't think that's the case look at George's body i mean jesus christ he's got the hairiest shoulders i've ever seen in a man he's still alive I do not know I don't believe he is I hope he's not listening right now I don't believe he is he's a legend legend in the world of the Pro Wrestling so it's gonna take more than this to hurt his feelings that guy don't give a yeah he's a legend but uh when I was in a kid in high school oh he's old so far yeah he's uh well those guys they all that's a hard way to make a living man so he died he died at age 79 now he had a good run

08:19yeah that's a good run for for those guys that's a hard way to make a living but we were talked about the the idea of Neanderthals is like having a confrontational hunting style no no like we have because when when when anthropologist look at the the skeletal remains of Neanderthals they see this sort of suite of this pattern of injuries on them and a researcher was looking at the types of fractures that they have on their bones and where the fractures occurred and the brakes and like cracks and their skulls he was looking at all this and wound up working with a doctor who had a lot of exposure to rodeo riders bull riders and the doctor was was observing the way in which that suite of injuries was very familiar to him from rodeo riders the types of breaks and the location of breaks and this guy has this idea that they had a like a very confrontational hunting

09:25style that they were like mixing it up with big animals and another thing they found is that when you're looking at skeletal remains from early people you still see that separation in the sexes right that the male's would suffer injuries at with a greater prevalence than females but with the Neanderthals it seems like they didn't have the sort of like duplicity of roles mmm so many of the females the females have the same prevalence of these types of injuries whoa and so maybe they didn't have that the they didn't share that division of labor where the females as large as the males yeah I don't know the answer to that so we know that they had stone tools right the crude stone tools yeah but we don't know whether or not they had anything that could launch them like they didn't have did they would do we know if they had Spears I don't believe that they've found they had addle addle

10:22right and I don't know if they were hafting materials but they were doing they were doing art and I think there's a little bit of a debate about whether they're doing representational art but they were doing art they were doing they were probably making jewelry and is that these are all things that as as we kind of like wake up to what these people were really like and it paints like a more complicated picture there's even this theory and I don't know if this held me water how long it was fashionable for but you had this really long history of extremely long history of hundreds of thousands years of Neanderthal you know occupation in Europe and then it seemed to be that I remember someone putting forth this idea that it seemed to be that there was this flourishing of advancement that was contemporaneous with the arrival of our own ancestors in Europe as though they were being exposed

11:16to or seeing art and seeing jewelry and mimicking this from these new invaders that were coming in but I don't know where that idea sits right now I don't know if it's been dispelled because of other discoveries remember thing that was an interesting idea that they would it kind of paints this really sad picture right that they would be sort of in the autumn you know of their existence and here's he's adorned people showing up with these amazing toolkits and all these abilities and kind of struggling to start to catch up you know it'd be like the country bumpkin you know going to the big city and yeah well there was also this idea I think up until very recently that Neanderthals were not as violent as humans as homo sapiens but now there was an article that was published just a couple of days ago that new evidence shows that Neanderthals like internee and tall

12:07violence between each other it was just as bad as homo sapiens yeah and find that in evidence of cannibalism oh yeah there was a lot of that right scraping of inside the skulls indicative of tools Oh ad blocker got busted they get this every time with the ad blocker yeah was the saying humans are just as violent as Neanderthals are you familiar with the writer John mu alum know you'd like his stuff yeah he wrote a really beautiful piece about he wrote a really beautiful piece about Neanderthals not long ago okay I it up the what they're saying is that modern humans were just as prone to violence as Neanderthals I don't have a problem I think I'm conflating this with something else that I read about inter inter species violence Neanderthal on Neanderthal violence the other things weird about them is they had bigger brains in us their bigger brains and

13:04they would be like five seven and weight 200 pounds just jacked just a little gorilla thing you know it'd be great to see it there's a really dumb theory that was being bounced around a few years ago it was really hilarious about how we wiped out we assumed Neanderthals because you don't have a soft tissue samples we assume that Neanderthals looked similar in humans but because of the very different shape of their skull this guy had instead of giving them European looking white skin turn them into a gorilla turn them into a giant muscle-bound gorilla that preyed on people and this was like I believe this guy was and actually is actually was a professor and it seemed almost like a goof at first you remember this champion we pulled this up a few times the like killer Neanderthal Theory I think he called it but yeah it was he had drawn this thing black like a

13:57gorilla with like giant muscles all over the place and these big crazy eyes and that painting Neanderthals as a predator of humans and that's why we wiped him out yeah yeah but my limitations as see I wasn't saying my limitations as an anthropologist I'm certainly not an anthropologist at all just a dude who's interested in it but one of my limitations is I'll hear theories floated okay and I don't follow them long enough to see which ones have any traction right I'll just read about them and and I don't I don't take it as gospel but I'll read about it and I'll be like that's interesting and it was sort of like shaped my understanding of it but then I don't keep track of it like I try to really follow the story of like the peopling of the Americas so when it comes to the human history of the Western Hemisphere I sort of follow and like ideas will get floated and I'll

14:52track the idea to see where it lands in terms of scholarly consensus but another stuff like with with Neanderthals I'm always a sucker for a Neanderthal story but I don't track what ideas that float up are just very quickly denounced as being complete rubbish hmm yeah it's a weird one you know it's a it's it takes time to it takes time to follow this stuff go go to that other picture that's what it is them them and and us yeah but look at him as some of his images look at that image that he has on the cover of the book like those the idea there's some way better ones there's some way better images what they drew of full-body ones they had is it in the article this was a link to the special website from a different article just go go to that and then go to images because there was some really bizarre yeah there is upper left-hand corner this is what this guy yeah laughing

15:49whatever he's got going on that thing is not making art you know think so no he's making meat come on yeah yeah it's pretty preposterous but near toasting that fangs like that no did they know but it's out he's he morphing and neanderthal into a gorilla's that was trying to do down here oh that's a ha okay monkey gorilla and the end at all but yeah but the like oh it's got it snarling with its vegetable eatin teeth anyway it's it's uh and then there's the do we even know what those Deneuve Ian's just how do you say that word the one from Russia yeah they don't have any idea what they look like right no I don't like some pinky bones and you know they have that that one's not that one I don't know I mean your cookbook is fantastic it's really good yeah yeah you put a lot of goddamn work into that thing we started collecting images four years ago you could tell it's really good okay I

16:51didn't want it to look like um what was it boring you Tom out in the NFL no I'm out of stuff to say about him anyway no I go on for days that's the problem things were not quite sure about with I watched I might get back to the coke but real quick but you know what's funny is uh how many if I don't know this but how many people in the wildlife world listen to your show and get angry I hear about it because I'm like a conduit I'm like a tell Joe that that's not how it works I'm like a conduit where I'm oftentimes getting frantic text messages as though I would be able to jump in and you know clarify like how a porcupine quill work sir yeah it's really funny how many people I hear from what uh well I can tell you I know like when you're on the subject of wildlife if there's marijuana in the room we got a real issue that's not what antlers are for he should really know Oh

17:57No who knows what antlers are for other than well they're from two things right for they're for fighting and sexual selection right yeah two things that definitely makes sense yeah yeah we've had like a sexual display we got a bull in Utah this this year and when we're butchering it one of the hind quarters had been punctured by an antler yeah and it got infected and when we cut into the hind quarter just this bucket of pus yeah came out I mean it was nasty we thought it was piss at first like someone had actually punctured the bladder and then we realized when we got deep into it that there was this giant ass and he had been asked like literally right in the flank yeah and it was just so nasty you find really high-pressure pus pockets and like in animals yeah all over his body had holes holes in his ribs he had big one in his face he'd been jacked in the face

18:52I got a Sika deer last year who had lost his eye completely gone I mean like his eyeball had been punctured and people are asking me well no one you got him but I was like nah I was good I was facing me on his line of approach anybody didn't know where you were his left perception his left eye was facing me but yet with the cookbook so we started gathering pictures up for it years ago because I wanted to have this like really complete idea of how to process everything so like the book includes everything from how to process a bullfrog you know to a deer to a pig to mahi-mahi and a problem.i running when I've done books is I never wind up needing I never wind up needing like padam in the end I always mind of having like very painful cuts yeah you know when I did my book my book American Buffalo I member I had to lose a hundred pages which was hard to do when we did the complete

19:57guide to hunting butchering cooking wild game it came out at 700 pages do you ever think of going back and putting those 100 pages back in door do you think it made sense to remove no in hindsight it had to happen it had to happen that's it in terms like the narrative stuff I've written that's the you know the the narrative nonfiction I've written that's my favorite thing that I've done and it had to happen it was painful and we did them without did those guide book the guide book series that came in 700 pages and my publisher was my publisher was like you know just don't really make 700 page books and so that's like when I'm doing the volume 1 and volume 2 because I didn't want to get rid of any but then in doing this this cookbook the mediator fish-and-game cookbook is what it's called and putting this together I think early on we started to get a little bit kind of

20:45running a little bit wild about what was gonna fit but then caught it earlier but that was the first thing we did it started collecting the pictures because I think a lot of times you look at a book an illustrated book and it kind of smells like a photoshoot you know I'm saying yeah yeah where you can tell that they get they sort of how they got the images and I didn't want to feel like that I wanted to sort of feel like really representative of like so many different places and different experiences that are captured in here and so we just started filming these processed shots of how to walk stuff through like everything you know how to like turn things how to take an animal and make it into a variety of usable ingredients and collecting all those took a long time and then and then actually like assembling and putting putting it together was more systematic

21:36once we had that underway but I think it's I think it like it's cool-looking no you know no it's great like the book in the end where it's kind of like half could almost pass as a coffee table book I agree yeah no really could and I think it's a really valuable resource for people that hunt because it's just I mean there's only so many different ways you can cook backstraps right there's so many different ways you can put ground venison into spaghetti sauce you know yeah you're giving people such a wide variety of things too including your original books as well a wide variety of things - you know - to cook and ways to cook them but it's one of the things I really enjoyed about your show you know and still do but now that it's on Netflix actually I enjoy it even more but that you do a lot of cooking on your show yeah that's that's very rare in the hunting world you know

22:26you see these hunting shows they're very one-dimensional you see someone looking for the animal and then they finally get it and yeah everybody's happy the end but you you spend a great deal of time break it down animals and cooking a bunch of different things including like marrow and shanks and unusual preparations I think that's really important yeah that's that's something that was that was always there for me growing up and hunting fishing very complicated and you do them for a bunch of reasons I think that people in explaining hunting to audiences or explaining to people who are uninitiated uninformed about it may be adversarial toward it you sort of you wind up grabbing these things that you want up grabbing these things that um that you think will resonate with them right I have a friend Greg blask of it she even worked on this research piece of taking

23:22justifications for hunting and finding test subjects who are skeptical of hunting in explaining various justifications to them and seeing which ones of those they find to be most impactful so he's actually done research around when you take this great like these this broad spectrum of reasons people do this you know and everyone has many of them that's part of their story right and and you you run them by people he sees these ones that they they really resonate and which ones kind of moved the needle and their perception of it and it's a little bit surprising there's some there's some surprises in there of ones that you think would be like really impactful but in fact are not impactful at all if people don't care about like what well population control people don't care people I think that people don't the kind of people you're talking about who are largely unfamiliar with it but they're

24:21looking at it from the outside and they're skeptical of it they have a heart they don't buy it I don't think that they're afraid of deer generally but people who live in high population areas like I did a gig once in western Massachusetts well yeah it was in Western Massachusetts and I had a drive I was coming from New York and how to drive through the most deer infested place I've ever been to in my life it is completely insane like when you drive it on the highway you have to go 2530 miles an hour things are just jumping in front of your car every 15 20 seconds it was nuts man and I would would I took this side road down to get to wherever the gig was you know and I'm just watching these animals jump in front of a car like left and right and I'm like these people that live here these things are a goddamn nuisance like if this everyday reality and you asked those people you said hey

25:15what do you think about deer population control we need to hunt to keep the population down they'll be like yeah you do yeah I'm sure yeah I'm sure that there are like quite a lot of people who live in some of these areas that have a great abundance of deer that feel that way but a population yeah when he was looking at it with just general population thing and it was full stop - he didn't get he didn't give a lot of he didn't go in and give case scenarios and examples right it's just a question that you ask and people it didn't like immediately click of people another thing that didn't immediately click with people but it's extremely important to me is issues around heritage and legacy okay so meaning that my maternal grandfather my paternal grandfather you were hunters my father was a hunter I was brought up hunting um to a non hunter doesn't matter your grandparents and parents

26:06could have been involved in all kinds of bad I don't think that that means you need to continue doing bad right um one that's very obvious is people understand people understand and respect the idea of food like your general population to look and respect the idea of food now to back up what I was getting at about you mentioned like that being a big elm on the show it almost winds up being that it was like I was like fortunate or lucky or whatever that early in my career I started focusing on talking about that aspect of it but it wasn't something I just made up out of nowhere because it was a huge part of growing up where for whatever reason I haven't be raised by a dad who was just really interested in cooking stuff and sharing with people you know and if he if you're driving down the road in June and you see a snapping turtle laying eggs on the side of the road it's come up out of a

27:05swamp and you needed to find some sandy ground and he finds it on the edge of a dirt road and there it is laying eggs on the side of the dirt road we were eating that turtle right in everything we ate you know all kinds of fish and we had a lot of things that other people weren't interested in we could go out and bring back our dad bullfrogs you would love if we went out and got him frogs we take our bows out at night using flashlights which unbeknownst to me was illegal and remains illegal in the state where I was brought up even for frog to use artificial light for frogs yeah I had no I do when I found that out later no idea Wow um that you weren't supposed to do that we would do it and we'd come in and bring them and it was like a big thing right to bring our dad the frog legs and you to cook them it he would cook and eat anything and then he would do stuff where we would catch salmon

27:50when the salmon were running the rivers in October and he would have people over and we would have a salmon boil you know so I was raised around that stuff of likes of celebrating wild game having to be very social having it be a way to connect salmon boil yeah boiled fish so you take your little use you're literally cubing up salmon and pearl onions and little baby potatoes I'll show you making like a stew it's a fish boil and then you drain it off and you have drawn butter and you drown all that and drown butter it's good sounds good yeah it doesn't settle do fish boils people do fish boils was not normal to do a salmon boil it seems like it's such a flavorful fish you would lose some of that in the broth yeah for sure but it's like when you it's like when you have the pearl onions and a little baby potatoes and cubed up and you drown all that and butter it's just like

28:41a thing people so the taste is really good but it's not necessarily the taste of Sam it isn't what if you went to great if you went to the Pacific Northwest and asked like a bunch of great chefs in the Pacific Northwest to list their five favorite salmon preparations boiling them in a pot of water isn't it beyond is gonna make their list yeah but he look we would do that you know and it would be a thing and you'd invite people over to do it so I kind of early not like early on with all the things I enjoyed about hunting like the food aspect was big for me and really informed all of the sort of conversations that I've had around it since and so then in doing his show about hunting wasn't something that was gonna it wasn't something that was gonna lean out but in all fairness when I was growing up I did a lot of fur trapping too and trap muskrat beaver make all

29:39kinds of stuff and um it was doing that to sell the to sell the furs and I would use up some of the meat I would use some of the meat for bait I'd sometimes sell meat to dog sled racers when did you realize that beaver were delicious not to laughter I think I know I the first one when I was in the first one I ever ate I was in Community College I still tell people about the beaver that you cooked for us in Wisconsin and how good it is and they look at you sideways and Mike I'm telling you man it was like the most delicious pot roast I've ever had was fantastic yeah it was really good there's even stories about early on with the when early explorers are in this country they had a difficult time getting fish sometimes and beaver were approved for the Lenten meal because they were aquatic Wow so on Fridays when you had to have like when you're supposed to have your meat free day you

30:30were allowed to eat beaver meat because they were a water animal it was a very popular food item you followed I'm saying yeah yeah yeah no I get it the first what the first ones we ate I had started reading about I'd always read narratives stories about the mountain men meaning like when I say mountain like a very specific thing like a you know a rocky mountain beaver trapper who was sandwiched between who's sandwiched in time between the end of the in Clark expedition and the collapse of the beaver market in the 1840s so like so very like finite period of time was what a mountain man was explained to people how big the beaver market is because this is gonna blow people's minds well America's first you know Astor John Jacob Astor like the beaver market made America's first millionaires his fortunes came from being a beaver trader the richest man in the country

31:26their money came from beavers yeah and he was in on the business end of it he wasn't in on the trappin end of it right he was in on the half of the fur companies yeah the big fur companies well it looked like when we bought think about like this how big it was for us to do the Louisiana Purchase and to buy that chunk of land when Lewis and Clark came out part of their mandate was to suss out the potential for the trade and beaver hides it'd be like buying some night bundle bought oil and gas all right you know no it can we justify this through oil and gas they're looking to justify it through trade and beaver hides now also there was also language about that they might find out about whether worldly mammoths were existing out there as well so there's like some confusion about what was going on wow they really thought that wooly mammoths were still of Jefferson was

32:17interested in that stuff because he had he had been to some areas he had some familiarity and been to some areas with these large bones and he was puzzled about and he was wondering if this wasn't some if it may be in fact was not an extinct species but was somehow living in the American West still how hard is it to real historians like people not historian popular historians really love to make a big deal out of X it's so weird but it wasn't like hey let's buy the let's do the Louisiana Purchase transaction because of the possibility of locating mammoths I think it was like an idea that was floated around people see it and they they people such as me see it and perhaps overemphasize what it meant but it was an idea that was out there the beaver trade stuff was certainly a big factor another thing I was reading about recently that just point out to to

33:04your that you might think is interesting is that we people have this idea of Lewis and Clark going into this unspoiled uncontacted landscape I was recent reading to piece by a historian who's talking about at the time Lewis and Clark headed out into the Great Plains there were Native Americans living on the Great Plains who had been to Europe and met the King of France and returned back to the Great Plains Wow what year they went out in the early 1800s so they're out in 1804 wow you got a if you imagine the time from the time in the 1500s when the Spanish right we're poking around and come at Coronado right coming up from Mexico into the Great Plains cabeza de vaca being shipwrecked wrong Gulf Coast and people pushing up into these areas it was hundreds of years prior like the distance that separates imagine the distance that separated Lewis and Clark

34:13from the first Europeans who were doing activities in and around the Great Plains is like the distance and time that separates us from Lewis and Clark more so right yeah it's the distance and time that separates us from the Declaration of Independence it was like a long history of people messing around crazy however so yeah but think about too like losing Clark we're encountering people who had horses right right and those were skin event yeah his horsemen traded up so that just like a side note this idea of eating beaver so I got from reading about the mountain men I got interested in the site because you'd always see like anytime you read about mountain men you're always gonna find the part where the author talks about how much mountain men like beaver tail and the first people that tried eating beaver tails around when I was in I was in Community College at the time and my

35:05brothers I remember stuck a beaver tail in the oven for a while and cooked it and they reported back to me that like whatever it is they're talking about isn't that like there must be some other explanation didn't we eat beaver tail yeah yeah we ate it in Wisconsin yeah we have a read there's there's a hot like pictures in an explanation of how to prepare how to actually prepare beavertail Mountain Man style in the mediator fish-and-game cookbook it wasn't bad it was no bland it's just fat it's bad so after that we started thinking that when they say the mountain men like beavertail we thought it must meant they liked rump based like the hindquarters so we started when we went I would catch beavers I'd be careful when skinned them to not get the castor the beavers have two large glands on the inside of their legs they're like talked in their what looks like if you lay a beef around its

35:59back talk to kind of on either side of its of its like if it's a male like talk to your side of its penis or either side of its cloaca you'll you'll see a knot cloaca but like vent you'll see these these glands that are the size of if you make like if you take your index finger and your thumb and make a circle there's like a gland on each side called a castor gland there's an oil gland in there they just use a perfume this still has value today it's used for a wide variety of things it smells beautiful if you were walking on a stream bank and you smell like a strange perfume smell it's usually beaver castor Wow smells great tastes like tastes like you're eating like you rubbed roses or something all over your food so start figuring out like to to skin them and be very careful not to get the castor on your knife or get the castor on your hands and then we would just take the

36:47meat and put in crock pots with potatoes and onions and stuff and just cook them down in a crock pot so you could pick them and it was like roast beef so when I started eating that but I still then later I realized that they read all their accounts of how people are prepared beaver tail and if you take the tail like the scaly ass tail and it really should be from a fall beaver because the tail be twice as thick in the fall than it is in the spring they're emaciated in the spring take the tail and just skewer it on a stick and put it next to a fire where the skin starts to bubble and boil away appreciating you can just peel its skin away and what's hiding under there is the the best equivalent like the best equivalent or point of comparison that I can think of would be just it's like if you had a really like imagine you're eating a grass-fed steak right but still has that

37:39fatty gristle on it it's just made up of that gristle like weird a lot people would trim away from a steak and not eat that's what's inside that beaver tail but people eat the these individuals that were doing this for fat starved eating such lean meat all the time I think they loved it because here's like a chunk of fat yeah and they had ready access to here catching them to make a living and if you're just eating the meat there's no fat on the meat and so they would complement with just eating the beaver tail fat and I'll often tell people about and I even gave some to there's like a culinary arts Institute and I gave some chefs that stuff and everyone that eats it points out that it's not that it tastes so fantastic but it is like really interesting to try and eat it the fat from the tail and it's like you got to put yourself in position you probably ending this to where if

38:32you're you know especially if you're out hunting and eating you know like freeze-dried food or not eating great and you're just exerting yourself all day all the time how you're what you want to eat changes a lot yeah and you the level of appetite you have is off the charts yeah and so just like to eat like a big slab of fat and be very excited was appealing to p.m. yeah your body starts craving things it absolutely needs yeah that makes sense makes sense in particularly we think about these people that are hiking across the west traveling massive amounts of distance and you know probably very physically strenuous yeah dragging all their with them and they get a cross some big-ass piece of fat from a tail it's probably a huge treat yeah and then our understanding of people like we used to have this idea of like especially of early Native Americans is like they're like just

39:22eating you know nothing but mammoth meat and all the time like as our understanding people grows you see like how much they were utilizing plant resources and probably had like pretty plant rich diets but with the one with the equestrian Bison hunters on the Great Plains those guys were like they weren't cultivating like at that aerial like especially the area when Lewis and Clark came in these people were not cultivating crops a lot of the people who had been farming along the Mississippi Missouri Valley once they got horses they just gave up on that and just started roaming landscape eating meat and the mountain men certainly weren't doing that and they were just eating like you're eating meat 365 days out of the year and you see that they really probably make up for a lot of nutrient deficiencies eat those organs your guy putting the doll putting gall on your food gall

40:17bladder squeezing taking the doll putting squeezing the bile from gall bladder on your food you did that once yeah it's horrific yeah well they put a 9-volt battery on your tongue and you think they were doing just because they were just nutrient starved yeah it seems like there's they they put a high emphasis on eating just like all these like just organ meats borne or milk from milk from mammary glands really yeah cuz you can't just eat that lean ass gamey every day right you were talking to a guy from Alaska what's that guy's name buck load and Buck Bowden yeah on your show and he was talking about you know essentially he was subsistence hunting it in certain stages yeah and you know he ate nothing but moose like he ate shot a moose and ain't nothing but that moose for months and picking Wolverine you need off the skulls and said whoa yeah you know and you you know so modern-day human

41:15who's alive right now talking about only surviving on the leanest of lean meat you know I had to be skinny as when it that was all over yeah and I would mess with that guy he's tough as to now yeah he lived life he lived life that seems like he had parts of his life that seemed like he was a hundred years yeah could have occurred a hundred years earlier he the episode of the podcast is like you're a good man buck is that what it's called you're cool dude but cool dude back which is what body-mind says to him in the show he's a cool dude it's it's a treat to get a chance to talk to a guy that you think probably never even heard of a podcast and certainly comes from a completely different era yeah the reason he was living on had to live off the land is an interesting story where he was working for he was just getting in the guiding world Guiding moose hunters and they were

42:07wanting to find some ways to be able to hunt some very remote areas and they hidden us the idea that they would just bring horses in because if you don't have landing strips and stuff is just really hard to operate out of these areas so they thought well if we can get horses in there we'll have them in there we'll hunt for the season then we'll ride the horses out but getting the horses in there was so difficult and took far longer and the route they wanted to use was impassable by the time they got the horses in there they realized that they're never gonna get these horses back out of here and they realized that someone needs to stay over winter to take care of the horses and he just volunteered to do it so he started spending they would go in and hunt in September and then he would just start hanging out and just stay there to agree to care for the horses until spring so

42:56that's how he found himself living out by himself and they would bring some food in but it would be never enough and he would be eating you know Wolverine beaver moose whatever he could come up with but he was just um he was just open to it and didn't care you know and is really comfortable with solitude when I spend time with him he's very gracious but um when he spent tyldum you see him just engage in conversation but you see a sort of weariness kick in where you're talking to someone who's very comfortable going months without human interaction right so him talking to people is like okay that's enough yeah when we get the out I don't say he realized like when I've stayed at his place his cabin he's got he's got a remote cabin still him when I stayed after he's kind of like well sort of drift off and vanish for good spells at I'm no sure even when he's even when

43:54he's like entertaining you know and he sells bowls like wooden bowls for a living well it's one of the things that he does I had one in my home now it's a birch but yeah it's like a you know it's a salad bowl sort of like a growth on the side of a birch tree that he cut off with a chainsaw on hollow out yeah they call him birch you know birch bark or burl bowls yeah you know I have a beautiful one and he sells and they go into terrorist shops I think it's a shame that they go in a tourist shop yeah I think he should be it should be all be direct-to-consumer well from him why don't you hook it up take zero point zero people on the case okay some of your meat meat-eater folks yeah he had a great many the lost in a fire - yeah that was a sad story but besides yeah so he still guides and um does that and and and makes his uh you know takes those barrels and makes bowls

44:46out of them just talking to a guy like that listening to you talk to a guy like that is so fascinating because he lives a life that I can barely comprehend mmm just everything about it from and just to think that well what he does is almost impossible to comprehend now think about Lewis and Clark making their way across the country and not really knowing what was out there yeah really not knowing like guessing having some you know people gave some reports this is what we saw here this is what we saw there they didn't even have a good account of all the different animals no they they had wandered lost and that's the thing we were talking on this point their days were talking about like what people now you'll hear people say like oh he's a real mountain man you know and oftentimes when people hear that they imagine this like old hermit yeah you know who's like living in his cabin and

45:36being a mountain man but if you think about what the mountain men were they were for the time the most well-traveled people right and the least xenophobic people right alive the equivalent today to be a mountain man today the equivalent would be I think you'd have to go to Brazil and ascend the Amazon and follow tributary after tributary and get into like the borderlands around Venezuela and then go in and despite the language barrier you'd have to go in and travel amongst and live amongst people who tribes who had not had a lot of outside contact but had a familiarity had a familiar ready with outside people's and you would live their foods you eat their foods and live with them and take their ways that they dress themselves and adopt it as your own the kind of guy that would do that is not the kind of guy we're talking about nowadays and we talk about he's a real mountain man

46:49right we're talking about reality show people that people talk about now but these people were like insatiably curious explorers they're the people now yeah the people that do like go to really crazy war zones or like decided to go back pack up in the Hindu Kush and Afghanistan you know just to see what happens yeah very different kinds of people your episodes that you did what we're where was that in with the the most recent series where your bow fishing with these people yeah down in Guyana Guyana yeah that's a that's got to be a trip how long were you down there for oh you know long weeks a couple weeks yeah yeah you know I mean there's a lot of travel there's a lot of like stuff needs to happen to get out on the river but when you're around these people and they're all walking around barefoot and they're making cassava which we talked about the other day that

47:48it could easily kill you if you do it wrong you know the water is all the cyanide in it like you're you're about as close as you can get to that kind of environment right yeah what you're yeah in the situation like that you're with people who are very familiar with like very familiar with the modern world like a great awareness of it but like when when the sort of rubber meets the road of daily existence they're still really connected to life patterns and and skill sets that were that that their grandparents used and still fishing like a very similar ways right so where you might have had when you were a boy leaving if someone now is in their 30s when they were a boy they probably used a 12-pound handmade wooden paddle and maybe now they have a different paddle or maybe somehow they've come into you know a plastic paddle say and they use that for their boat or

48:46they have a they still have a dugout canoe but they also have an aluminum boat so there's major differences but just the general sort of approach and the fact that you're deriving all of your protein from the river and that you hunt and fish 250 300 days a year in the places where your ancestors died has done it you're still you're still getting this like really beautiful glimpse at how people lived even though they've had enormous changes in their own lifetime and they're very much modern you know very modern but you can still like glimpse it more you don't I don't think you really get that as much you don't get that as much here you know hunting is ancestral right there's this kind of continuation that goes on but when Europeans came here when Europeans came to the new world they weren't coming in as hunters right even to go look like Daniel Boone's family Daniel Boone's family

49:50came from England they didn't come here as hunters because you couldn't like the the peasantry you couldn't hunt there they came here and learned hunting so hunting in America for euro-americans hunting in America is like an invention it's a thing that people kind of got learned and took from the Indians so it doesn't have a it doesn't have that like that deep deep thread they'd find with indigenous communities where there's this continuation that's going on for forever unbroken but on this continent unbroken for whatever 15 16 whatever the fashionable number is thousands of years right and so it's like our understanding is just different because our like my ancestors came here and like got into it it wasn't it wasn't a cultural continuation for them and then when you look at like food and wild game an interesting thing is my my use and understanding of wild game is really

50:53influenced by like contemporary food right like like restaurant food things that chefs do like how do you take wild game and do these like cool exciting modern innovative kinds of things with with wild game and cook it yo talked it like a dude even the dude like Bach or particularly people in you know people in South America who have who've hunted for more of a like a subsistence literally subsistence purposes their whole attitude is different about it people like people in South America will eat that like the the CH Imani or the makuu she is like they'll eat the same thing every day for lunch every day boiled fish with a dried pepper around it and then a grain made from cassava boiled as well was he a grain but like a dish made from cassava why are they boiling it why don't they just grill it they well they they sometimes do but for lunch it's like you

51:50take leftover it you might you probably like smoked with it but where they were called BBQ fish where you make a big rack you have a fire make a big rack high above it kicks off a bunch of smoke you split fish salt Amman lamb on that rack and smoke them dry them out and then you take that fish and break it apart and pour river water over cassava and then put fish in there with river water and kind of stir it up or you just take fish and throw it in a pot and boil it and put that on there but to eat that same thing every day then you come and talk about there's no recipe right there's no like written preparation right and then you come and talk about like wild game cooking as I understand it where you make a book and it's got a hundred different recipes in in all these ways to approach stuff it's just like it's it's very particular to us like other people aren't really

52:41perceiving it that way like they don't use wild game and recipes they have like oh there's like here's how you cook this and we don't really deviate from cooking this way or it's like fish on a rack over to fire or fish in the pot of water and very limited diet does it weird you out when you're around people like that because you have options right you can you can eat any way you like you can go to a restaurant you get a burger from fast food you know choose to go hunting with these people it's literally how they survive yeah and there's no option there's no options and they've been doing it that way forever like is it do you feel like a weird recreational sort of person around them like is it does it feel strange that's a great question man no there's definitely there's definitely an envious part to how like to live that deliberately like I'm a little bit

53:42envious of it but really the thing that I feel most is I feel more than separated I tend to feel more of the areas in which I'd be like aligned hmm you know right where I like appreciate the perspective and I appreciate the skillset but never feeling um yeah never feeling like like bashful or ashamed or something that this would be something that I would like choose to engage in and this is something they were engaged in and I think that one of the things that helps make it that way is how much they love to do it right that when you go out like the infectious excitement of heading out in the morning the fact that they still feel it like there is giddy as anybody about going out and doing it like very excited to go out and do it it is not like going out to get your like to get you to check your mailbox my my youngest daughter has become enamored with fishing and I love it because I get

54:44to whenever we go on trips I take her fishing loves it man and we were in Florida and we're gonna get to go bass fish and I set it up how the guy was gonna take us out I woke her up five o'clock in the morning in the hotel I'm carrying her she's stiff as a board cuz she just woke up she's like I'm so excited she was so excited she wasn't like daddy I'm tired can we just go back to bed now it was dark out five more and she's just going I'm so excited did you mind of having fun she caught it six pound bass oh really then she's hooked and she's got quite a few bass it was a great lake in in Florida in Florida obviously a lot of great bass fishing there but we caught a ton of largemouth bass and she caught up Fatboy there's like a 6 pounder she's a freaking it hit bit her finger she was showing everybody look at bit my finger she was so excited she loves

55:32fishing but that feeling in the morning when I'm looking at her little face and like we're on the water like it's a genetic thing it seems like it's just in the DNA yeah the fishing is it's not like hey we're gonna go play soccer which she likes to but this is not that kind of excitement no there's a like this is gonna be so fun there's like it's triggering something that is it's deep inside human beings I see it and I see it in I see it in varying degrees in in different people like some kids seem to come out of the box with more of it yeah you know yeah my owning that as a euphemism know it might might Ted my ten-year-old daughter doesn't she's like yeah we can go fishing like she's gone fishing cause it's ok it's ok when I when we had a daughter my wife was adamant you know early on as soon as she found out it was gonna be a daughter like that you will

56:30not exclude our daughter in this world that you're in I was like oh of course not you know and I and I don't but having in my mind I don't feel like I've messed this up I think I've put the same emphasis right on my I have three kids but my older two the little bunch is a little bit too little you have to really know what's going on but the old types like I put the same emphasis on it and my daughter just isn't demonstrating the same enthusiasm that her older brother does and you try to suss out like the nature nurture question because I feel like I'm doing the same inputs right but I'm getting different results and it leaves you to wonder you know it's a very small sample size but when I talk to other parents like you know parents who are parenting right now young kids I just keep encountering other dads who are having the same experience mmm and you it really leaves you to wonder sort

57:34of like what sort of like cultural influences are going there where it's like the enthusiasms oftentimes among young girls are not as high as you enthusiasm among boys it's hard to control I don't know it's hard to unpack everything yeah that's that's my questions like I'll never I don't sage what's hold your kids well the two I'm talking about are eight and five yeah man I don't know how much culture plays a part I know I really think that it's and it's obviously in my small sample group an eight year old and a 10 year old for the youngest kids the the 8 year old loves it they're both girls the 10 year old she's like whatever you know if I try to wake her up take her fish and she'd be like leave me alone you know going back to sleep I'm sure there are parents out there who you know I haven't met him yet maybe they're out there where they have like a boy and a

58:24girl and girls into fired up and the boys not maybe after you I guarantee it's there's Jamie and I were just talking about this yesterday because I was watching this video of these there's I want to try to put this in a respectful way I think they're in I'm sure you're aware of this there's people that are in the hunting world the outdoor industry that I think are in it because it's a good Avenue to get attention if you're like a hot chick yeah if you're a hot chick and you know you wear pink and you go out and shoot things you take all these grip and grins with deer and like this you're gonna get a lot of likes yeah because like imagine the the male perspective on it yeah is like here's the woman who has everything exactly and she likes to hunt yeah she's hot and she likes to hunt and there's quite a few of them and it's I was telling Jamie it's a weird world because

59:21part of me I don't want to be a sexist I don't want to look at these girls into me I don't I don't look at a guy who hunts and who wants to be a part of the outdoor industry and go oh this guy is just doing this because he thinks this is his avenue for fame and success I think well here's a guy who really likes to hunt and he realizes there's people like Steve Rinella and John Dudley out there and these famous hunters man I want to be a famous hunter how do I do it you know how do I go well I'm gonna just start taking Instagram pictures and say a lot of the same that they say and sort of you know put myself into the cultural norm I don't think like that with girls because you're like you just want to have men like you not all of them a lot of them I think you're super legit a lot of them are but there's unquestionably this added element in that world and it with

60:10it let's be super generous and say it's only 10% of them hmm but that 10% I'm like I'm I'm not unaware of what you're talking about I'm sure you know I noticed that yeah it's yeah I even had like a yeah I remember girls yeah it's kind of like a yeah like a like a like like a sex pot kind of yeah huntress scene oh yeah it's super made up full war paint fake eyelashes hot it's skin tight clothes out there shooting taking pictures yeah it's weird and then you go to their Instagram page and it's like there's pictures of that and then there's a lot of pictures with their butt up in the air where they're doing some strange exercise getting ready for both things and yeah accentuating it but like that's weird I don't do those exercises I would really like to I know I would really like my two because I'm gonna continue leaning on my I'm gonna continue leaning on my daughter

61:07because I would really like her I'm gonna keep leaning on her until I feel like she's in the Edit age where she can legitimately say she doesn't want to go right cuz right now if I asked her every day hey you want to go to school she'd be having a real delinquency problem so like you know you really like yeah you make kids do stuff I took her duck huntin a couple weekends ago it was cold morning and we get out there and before it's even legal light she's like felt terrible she's laying there crying about how cold her feet are if my boy was doing that I would have a very different attitude about it right then when she's crying her crying cuz she's cold like made me feel awful right with my boy I've been like Shh suck it up but here I'm like hell man yeah she's all cold now yeah and then it make it so you really there really is a difference yeah there's that

62:09there's there's a difference there and it's not you know the people who buy hunting licenses in this country ninety percent of people buy honey you know ninety percent are males right right so one in ten license holders is a woman but then there's there's more women than men in the you know slightly more men women than men in the country and there's a ton of ways of explaining it we talked about earlier with Neanderthals or maybe Neanderthals didn't have these like divided roles but in all the hunter like and hunter-gatherer cultures is very normal to see a division of labor here and to have like that men were out hunting and women we're not there's a bunch of explanations for that like people were tied to being home to care for small children and you know couldn't afford that risk something to they very there are there some women that go out with the hunting parties you know if it is a

63:00you know the minute you say no someone's gonna point out to some right variation but in your experience you've you've done several these trips to these remote jungles oh yeah but that's just well that's such a small thing I mean you get a rather than looking at personal experience just like from kind of exploring the literature and reading about you know historic accounts and what people found what people do it is very much the norm it is very much the norm that hunting was you know patrilineal descent activity and all these cultures you go to like the cult of the hunter is like a male sort of cult but the factors that made it that way okay that's sort of the you you have to assume that comes from some kind of practical factor right the factors that made it that way aren't there anymore and I said the difficult thing to unpack if it winds up being that if I have two

63:54boys in one girl if it winds up being that both boys become avid hunters and fishermen and somehow my daughter does not I'll probably view it as some bit of a personal failure that I'll never know what really was going on like I said it's hard like unloaded I wish I could have one under children like 50 girls and 50 boys and have a bigger sample size but I you know I do wonder about it and what's funny too is there's no like at our home you know our kids like our kids eat tons of wild game at our home to the point where they don't have any you could give them anything to eat they would eat it and it would not register to them as unusual they've eaten everything right they've even eaten like breakfast sausage made out of Fox and beaver meat they've eaten Fox yeah they've eaten everything wait a minute yeah you eat Fox I have I made a batch of breakfast

64:54sausage because I had an arctic fox one time and I made breakfast sausage out of it what was that like I just caught a DIN with beaver meat and a little bit of deer meat and a little bit of pork fat my kids ate it and every winged lizard you try any of the Fox on its own no didn't try the Fox on its own I mean a ton of things about having it I didn't eat straight old possessed you to stuff that Fox into that sausage I heard they were good and I had an arctic fox and I wanted to get a thing made for my wife from it so I had a hat the arctic fox hat made for and I retained the meat and then we just ate the meat and breakfast sausage and then like if I told him you know if they were to ask like what meat it is and I would say let's you know this this and this it wouldn't freak him out it wouldn't it wouldn't even know it wouldn't even register as like a that might seem

65:43unusual to some people right so the squirrel rabbit all manner stuff right the just anything and so I know there's no element of there's no influence like that with them there's no influence of oh that's gross all right you that's weird you know there we were hunting the other day we went out and we were hunting street pigeons you know and they'll be pigeon meat where were you doing this in Montana oh okay yeah there's like a guy at a green Seidel it was like infested with pigeons folks don't know that many people listening to this that pigeons were actually brought over here is food and when you get like fancy squab on the menu that's what a pigeon is now a flightless pigeon pigeon hasn't flown yet that's what a squab is so smaller and younger you know what's the idea yeah the meets pinkish on the the means pinkish on squad if you wanted but we used to go out and catch

66:34squabs where we had a lot we had like a little almost like the equivalent of a little trap line where they would you know nest in various places around town and we would just know all the places to go check to get squabs and yeah it's one that hasn't flown yet so but you know people that commercially produce squab you can just keep them from flying but if you want squab from the wild you need to go out and you know you just go and collect them and what's the difference between pigeon and squab in terms of the way it tastes pigeon meat is tougher grayer has more liver equality and squab is like very tender pinkish like it's like lean it's not like quail but it's leaning way more in the direction of quail like it's like if a pigeon and a quail had a baby squabs more like that hmm it's it's one of the biggest surprises I had and that was one of the biggest surprises that I've ever had in

67:39in game what if we can combat his wild game would be what a squab tasted like because I had been eating I had for a long time eating street pigeons because no street pigeons would be you know they're around even open the Missouri Breaks you get street pigeons that nest up in the in the cliffs and you know you can you there's many places you can hunt street pigeons and they become a agricultural pest and they're not regulated so there's no closed season no bag limit right they're treated like they have no more they're regulated like rats if you could talk to wildlife managers and asked if they could wave a magic wand and make Street pigeons go away most everybody would waive it because they're so costly they're costly to cities they're costly to agriculture so I'd always eaten pigeons but the the minute of discovering like discovering like what a squab was like which is well

68:29known to people in the you know fine dining but I had never had it it was shocking how good it is that's interesting I've never picked it off the menu but now I'm tempted yeah you should do it but street pigeons I have with that no I would eat some first just to test it yeah make pates from it okay but it's not something that you would go this is one of my favorite things to eat no is there a way to do it where you could really like is there a preparation maybe that you've missed it's not bad to to put it in a marinade and you can grill it mmm you know what you want to take little brats and you poke it a whole bunch like poke it with a fork and tenderize a little bit and also make some like avenues of approach for the marinade and then you know grill them over a very hot flame but what was good is like to use it like similar to like stuff with ptarmigan or whatever they look to make

69:24pates and Trine's ptarmigan is something that you cooked that way as well I've only seen people do ptarmigan on that uh woods that show called life below zero um so lady who lives she's been on the show before she lives like hell what does she live like 200 miles above the Arctic Circle something crazy like that and she hunts ptarmigan yeah up there the best time again I've ever eaten and this is whe this is in in our new cookbook too but though I mentioned using ptarmigan for it but it's just a dish that's great for regular like any any kind of meat particularly game birds like you have it you've got a hot pot mm-hmm yeah were you like we have the you know you have like the simmering broth and you have all these raw like raw sliced meats you dip in there mm-hmm the best timing I've ever had is just like that hmm it's it's otherworldly you know it's just kind of like like kind of

70:20like when you slice it thin and cook it that way I just kind of vanishes on your tongue it's a very very tender meat you can almost kind of mash it up people are like a thing you hear with a lot of gamers people describe ptarmigan treat street pigeon a lot of game birds people describe as livery diving ducks being livery because it's like a texture thing to it and then less strength of flavor and a darkness of color and those and you know people make a lot of pate deliver right so those birds that have that quality often times they just they they can find their way into pates so we also have recipes for that like how to do pates from using all all manner of meat do you have any recipes in that book for brown bear no but we have bear recipes is there a difference you know brown bear black bears are among people who know black bears are widely accepted as being good to eat if

71:15you go into if you go to earlier I mentioned Daniel Boone so if you go into that like the the the the frontier era of American history right which proceeded just these little lingo terms the frontier era of American history preceded the mountain-man era of American history were like the the eastern settlements right if you read it like about Daniel Boone's area you know early 1700s up into you know up into the Revolutionary War bear me was the most popular meat on the frontier black bears the most popular is in preferred yeah preferred over venison really yeah people hunt a deer to sell deer hides and they would eat the deer meat people hunt embarrasses that that's what they like to eat hmm yeah it's there's more beef like you know right and you know when cooked right people love bear meat brown bears grizzly bears just don't enjoy the same reputation different

72:13diets the thing you run in with brown like when we use it we use it turn brown like brown bears kind of almost like a like a it's usable amongst hunters a lot but it is all it's all one species so whether you got a grizzly bear in Wyoming or brown bear on Kodiak it's taxonomically its regarded as as a single species people call brown bear brown bear is a grizzly you'll get all kinds of people writing you to say about various points of this but like debating various aspects of this a brown bear is a grizzly with access to marine resources we're a marine resources make up a major component of its diet and then the question you bring up is then like if you go to the North Slope so if you go to the Arctic coast and you saw a grizzly there you'd be like well he has access to marine resources he could eat a beached whale whatever but he's a grizzly so like brown bears kind of extend right

73:12from you know northern BC up around and hook around into the Bering Sea but at some point they're just not brown bears anymore they're here they tend to be big and and oftentimes because of the name like they tend to have like a darker coloration they have a horrible reputation as food you'll always find people who will point it out right or nowadays because people are so we're like in the social media world nowadays you'll have people to kill a brown bear and here you are you've got four or five hundred pounds of meat and they'll talk about how they're going to eat it but like dude you're in for a pound a day really yeah they're really what happened really that's true right and then there's no Salvage requirement on it there's no Salvage requirement on it don't you have to in Alaska don't you have to pack it out it depends there's some areas that have zero some areas you know typically

74:09typically no but there are areas that do have Salvage requirements where I have a cabin there's a salvage requirement on bear meat in the spring because in areas where bears so that's a black but your yeah your cabin is you know that there it's Island by Island so somehow you go like the ABC islands like like you know you go to Admiralty Island and Admiralty Island is all brown bears so it winds up being that if the island is good brown bear habitat it will only have brown bears because on the islands where it's smaller they just would they kill all the black bears they're there and black bears aren't there if the island is not brown bear habitat and can't support brown bears it'll become a black bear island Prince of Wales is a black bear island Admiralty is a brown bear island and you know kind of depends on how much seams and maybe depend on how much like

75:01open country or Alpine or you know if it's like densely densely forested it's less suitable and becomes a black bear territory but black bears in the spring have a salvage requirement because if you're talking about coastal bears coastal bears are better to eat in the spring when they're not eating tons of rotten salmon in the fall there wouldn't be a salvage requirement because when they're eating dead salmon their flesh can become not good I remember you telling me a story about using the guy's smoker and he told the guy man you need to clean that smoker out smells like fish yeah it's like I've never cooked a fish's yeah that's cuz you you were smoking a bear in it yep and that was a that was an early June and early June black bear who's not getting salmon but it's it stores up that flavor stores on their fat I've watched even wolves eating salmon that were so rotten that they're

75:54like lapping it up where it just turns into a gray mush in the Bears and people's idea of a bear is like eating a brand-new fresh fish which they love to do and they seem to prefer it like when there's tons of fresh fish and they're just getting fresh fish delta c eggs right but as the fish run dies down they just start eating rotten fish i came how we got talking about quality of food Oh were you asking why so even like my bones buck Bowden who like I said he's picked the the head meat off of Wolverine skull to eat it buckboard and said he's struggled his entire life and just hasn't found a way to make brown bears that good there are exceptions people run into good taste and ones the you know it's talking about like Grizzlies up on the North Slope a very good reputation any black bear in the Rockies any black bear is good I mean I've heard stories like I had a body to

76:53kill one over a dead cow one time mmm he killed him it was scavenging a rotten cow and he had a hard time with the meat but generally bears that aren't eating marine resources are pretty are phenomenally good I talked to my friend Eric Weinstein yesterday he's a mathematician one of smartest guys I know and he has been fascinated by my obsession with hunting and so he started watching a bunch of hunting things online and he said he was very put off I saw people killing bears with spears yeah and celebrating and the way they were celebrating my stuff he's like he found the thing the whole thing I you know and I saw his point and we had this discussion about it we're you know acknowledging the need to control the population and that this is all that they're allocated certain amount of tags by wildlife biologists and this keeps the moose population healthy and the deer population know all

77:53these different things and even that people eat them all those things made sense to him but the celebration and the the all the Hootin and Hollerin and stuff is like there was just not enough of a reverence for the dead and it really really disturbed him yeah that's it's a great subject and it's hard to it's hard to approach because they're so you find so many contradictions and in weird parts of it and by that I mean this I was having the conversation and I was a gentleman over dinner and we were talking about he was explaining me like what is the role of a rancher and what is the role of the farmer here's a person who's bringing animals into life he's propagating breeding animals with sole intention that they will all die and he will make his living off of their death but that person remains a sort of cultural icon they enjoy like a celebration you know

78:56when you're trying to sell sell a pickup truck right if you can tie it to a rancher it makes that pickup truck seem more legitimate and just celebrated character if you like oh he's an old cowboy yeah and we like that it's like what is and not that I'm definitely out knocking them like let me get where I'm going with this but what is that like that person is based off of like rearing animals in order that they may die and he profits from their death and remains celebrated and then you get into the idea of what in a when it comes to American wildlife where we have a population of wildlife in many respects we have it and enjoy the management that we do and the abundance that we do in many ways that abundance is supported bolstered financed by hunters but hunters tend to not enjoy that same cultural support hmm because of the death right well it's also

80:02because of media depictions sure I think that's the big part of it more than even so than the death if our if all of our depictions about hunting were tied into this sort of rational discourse and they showed all the images from your show of animals being shot and and carefully butchered in the field and then prepared and cooked and enjoyed I think people would have a way different perception but you know we have Elmer Fudd you have the the evil hunters and the movies that are always you know trying to torture the animals I mean it's it's Disney and anthropomorphic ization of these animals and all these different films and media depictions and books that and then teddy bears all these things are like stained into people's brains of what's good and what's bad you know very few kids have stuffed cows that their pets yeah or that their toys the of teddy bears and maybe Rudolph the red-nosed

80:57reindeer you know want to shoot it off no it seems that it seems that it gets much worse and more contentious the less the popular if the American population is looking at something is they recognize as game they feel different right things that they don't recognize this game that they don't readily recognize this game um to see that death is more abhorrent to them even if it is being treated as game but like Ryan you don't like you don't see social media explosions come up around someone with a turkey right you don't see a lot of social media explosions come up with someone around a white-tailed deer people look at that they see this animal that they perceive to be very abundant in the case of whitetails and turkeys are correct very abundant they're familiar with them they're familiar with the idea of these things being hunted and it feels different now if there's

81:49things that were there's a perceived scarcity okay and they don't immediately recognize it as a food item it's hard for them extremely and this is way outside of my personal area of expertise but like what goes on in Africa but for people to see animals in Africa that have been hunted and they recognize them only from like film depictions cartoon depictions mobiles over their child's crib like like a hippopotamus is very like you can't look at that and it's hard to see that as like the harvest of game it becomes something very different and it's we've watched it happen with bears you know also a thing that will happen is if you initiate the hunting of something that wasn't hunted before that's very difficult for people so you take a state where like New Jersey or Florida were they for a long time you know historically they would have a bear season they would lose the bear see that

82:54the bear seas would go away because of a resource scarcity then later they would recover the resource and want to reinitiate the hunt people have a very difficult time with that being like if it wasn't hunted before how can it be hunted now right and that trips people up really bad where they people have hard to get on board with it I love you watch what's going on with grizzly bears and around what has been unfortunately named the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem where you sort of have this cultural custody battle around who owns this Indiana sized huncle and surrounding Yellowstone where the big because of naming people sort of think of it as as Yellowstone when it certainly is not it's a you know large areas surrounding it but there we had a period where we weren't you know we stopped grizzly on them because the animals are being over harvested habitat

83:44destruction and then you go through an enormous amount of work to recover the species and people are extremely resistant to the idea that you would start hunting now that you would now start hunting something you weren't hunting a few days ago Brian that's like but it's also what you were saying earlier that's not recognized as a game species because I'm thought of something you eat yeah like mountain lions like even if mountain lions are a nuisance like there was a woman that had she had a depredation permit because mountain lions had killed like ten alpacas and goat in her farm in Malibu and she decided not to act on the permit because there was so many different people that were threatening her there was so many wildlife activists that were threatening her and just general people online death threats because she they you know she was gonna hire someone to shoot this

84:34mountain lion that had been I mean it just went a thrill kill and got into one of our pens just went ham you know and but people they think of that thing is somehow another better than out her alpacas which is very weird no people just recently protested the killing of tiger of a tiger in India that had killed 13 people I saw that I put that on line and people in the comments where we're like those people like okay you're out of your mind what if that was your sister one of those you're your daughter who's your mom what if is your brother your brother watch it watching your brother getting dragged away by a giant monster yeah you know and just because it's called the tiger you're cool with that like your brother don't what you saying the this was an interesting year I don't mean that well let me finish my thought no I don't want to sound callous I might

85:26call it interesting but Washington State had its first mountain lion mortality like we're mountain lion killed a human for the first time it was 94 years in Oregon is when organ had its first in state history yeah and with the one in Washington it killed a person they tracked a lion down and killed the lion and the state Fish and Game Department got you know predictably like a bunch of blowback for having killed and I was talking to someone who was involved with that and I was saying I you know i think that the blowback would have been a lot worse had you not done it yeah you know but you just don't you don't hear from those people there is there would be blowback honestly if they didn't kill the lion if the line is just out there roaming around I think people would just ignore it because the news cycles so quick yeah I think they would lose it would get lost and Trump would

86:15say something stupid about North Korea or whatever and people would forget you know I can you know I continue to you know I continue to hunt black bears I eat black bears it's like you know in the case of you have a rapidly expanding mountain lion populations there's a lot of mountain lions mountain lions are recolonizing new territories all the time they're managed you know most states manage them very tightly with mortality quotas female mortality quotas open season close season permit draws right that they're managed is a game animal they're there they're hunted and there's some allowable use of the renewable resource and at the same time that that's going on we're enjoying expanding populations of mountain lions I'll I personally welcome the return of mountain lions to any suitable habitat where there's enough space for them to live without causing you know undue

87:16friction by them butting up against human interests and I encourage people who are in areas that are being caught recolonized by mountain lions to you know practice some level of tolerance and use best best use practices or best case practices around to like avoid conflict right same thing with bears like I welcome the return of bears I think there's a lot of areas in this country a lot but there's a handful of areas in this country that could have sustainable populations of grizzly bears that's like suitable habitat that is not being used by grizzly bears and couldn't should be used by grizzly bears at the same time I like to see when it's appropriate I like to see state-managed wildlife practices and then allowable harvest of animals there's a lot of people listening to this that don't even understand that mountain lions are edible and in fact you say delicious I

88:07like I was eating mountain lions long before I ever 100 mountain I've hunted one mountain lion in my life and I've eaten bunch more than that so I had never had the question about it you know I'd never had the question about whether it was good or not the vast majority of the people listening to this right now are probably like what yeah among among pounds men like monkey who deal lions is widely known that it's very good meat but I was introduced to it that way I was there's a place when I was living in Missoula Montana there's a place 20 miles east there called Rock Creek Lodge and they're famous for having this big thing called the testicle festival in the fall where you know if you castrate steers you know people will fry up the nuts right and so the testicle festivals is big it's kind of like turning like this bigger head turned into this kind of like biker

88:52festival but it was just this big party it was centered around eating deep-fried cow balls and we used to go down there all the time and go drinking and one time I was at that same place in the spring and this guy had a pot of pot of like what looked like pulled pork you know Bart with barbecue sauce and he had a bunch of buns out and he's just giving it away and I was eating it and he was telling me how it was Mountain Lion meat and he was saying you know is he sound like balls in the fall and in the spring you know breed Mountain land there and that's the first time I had mountain lion and then later I had a girlfriend who's from Wyoming and she one day is standing behind a guy in a she's standing behind a guy in a hardware store who's buying a mountain lion tag and she asked him what do you do with all that meat and he didn't want it so she gave him her phone number and

89:41when he got his lion he gave us the whole damn thing and so we ate that whole mountain lion then I came in to other mountain lion meat in other ways and always enjoyed it to the point where I wasn't eating it because I had a moral obligation to eat what I killed I was going out of my way to get it because I'd rather eat someone else's mountain lion than buy pork and it's like pork it's that similar it's white meat man Wow you can take the back straps with fat on it you can leave the fat on it and take that back strap and see you got a cooker cook still have you know it's probably gonna have trichinosis so you got to cook it to 160 just like old just how pork used to be cook it sear it the fats good the meats good we cook it down and make all kinds of preparations with the cook down my kids meat they keep they eat a bunch of wild they would eat a bunch of mountain

90:32lion me you know well cooked yeah but that's one of those things that were not accustomed to but we're we're fine with things we are accustomed to yeah if you showed a mountain lion dead on social media and you like can't wait to eat this people would go crazy yeah but you saw that recent controversy with that woman who shot a goat invasive species on an eye a Scotland it's an animal they have to hunt yeah they literally have to hunt them if they don't if you've never seen what a goat can do to an environment they just destroy everything they eat everything they can they they cause erosion they decimate all the local foliage but they weren't seeing that and I think that they were like the people that were upset about that we're really like struggling to describe why I'd upset him even a politician to pointed out that the person was wearing camouflage because traditionally in

91:25Scotland you hunt with different clothes and I mean there was no secret that there was hunting going on out there right no secret at all it was that it's an American that she's wearing camouflage she's adorned you know like like makeup and was kind of like a like a beautiful image setup she had a high-powered rifle which they're already using out there anyways and it's just a confusing idea in a confusing image for people had it been some old Scottish dude with his with his you know deerstalker outfit on but there's something where people are like why her and why here yeah and it also her description of it as a fun hunt mm-hmm yeah I mean people had a lot of problems with it but it's also I think because it's there wasn't anything else going on she caught a cycle you know she just got you know she was headed down the river and a tributary opened up and she went

92:22right into controversy Bank yeah that's what I think happened and the people that were tweeting about I saw Agron Glenn Greenwald tweet about it and like you're a journalist like you're an actual journalist the respected journalist you should really do some research on this because you the way you're calling it I don't know I mean Glenn Greenwald is I believe he's some sort of an animal rights activist I don't know if he's a vegan I don't know if he's a vegetarian but I know Ricky Gervais isn't he's not a vegetarian he's not no really yes that's the weird part right yeah that's funny man that I didn't know that I don't know with him on a radio show about it he's me yes we were talking about hunting and you know I brought it up because we were on the radio show together on the Opie and Anthony show and I said I shot bears and I eat them you know I eat everything I kill and I hunt for food

93:16and I prefer to get meat that way and we discussed the fact that he eats meat huh yeah it's really surprised it's a weird one right this is a good it's a there's a virtual signaling aspect of on hunters where you're always going to get some positive remount remarks about it it's it's difficult for me it's not difficult for me for from someone who doesn't who doesn't eat meat right I I can I don't have any problem have a problem with it like I'm like you know my brother said a bass player I don't know he said maybe they have a point but when it's come from someone who doesn't meet it why is it demonstrate like they're trying to put them to condemn hunters who are hunting like a regulated resource yeah to condemn them you're sort of acting like when you condemn you sort of acting like oh I care about these issues and I want to be out here and I want to be like articulating a

94:13perspective and and I know what's going on but then so you're like putting yourself out as a person who has opinions of value right just to just like let your opinion be known yeah so if you're gonna have that like where's the self-examination exactly where you are if you're eating meat like you're contributing all kinds of animal death like what is your understanding of what is your understanding of those lives and those deaths how is that not part of your reckoning if I do let's say I am happy that I got a bear that I will eat with my family let's say I am happy about it um is it better for you that you're kind of is it better to be sad about it somehow is it better to be regretful or just ignore the fact altogether or why is it not okay that I'm happy about what I eat I know the story of it really well like I understand the history of wildlife in

95:09this country I don't want to say better than anybody but damn sure better than most I know where we've been I have a good sense of where we're going in terms of American wildlife what the challenges are for American wildlife right I'm involved in this stuff on a daily base I can know all that and I can see my place in it right I can see what my actions are and whether my actions are helpful or hurtful for something that I care a great deal about and if I can know that well and get a deer a bear whatever and have it be food and find that I'm like really happy to be involved in that if that somehow is off-putting to people but it's okay to be that it's I'm blind to it I have this nagging sense of guilt about it that I haven't reckoned with I don't really know about it you know and that's like that that's like an accessible position for some people to have it's really hard

96:05for me with people that are that that are contributing to animal death who want to condemn those who are more willing to or for whatever reason willing to excited about taking part in the process themselves I got to find a way to I got to find a way to to engage with it though and I need to get a better understanding of it because it's the the debate isn't going away I can't keep brushing it off is so ridiculous that it doesn't warrant my time because clearly it does warrant my time to understand that perspective I just haven't had anybody really give to me in a good way I have people say like oh but they were raised to be eaten that's a foolish perspective that's that to me is way way worse it's a life condemned I'd rather talk you'll google of Glenn Greenwald as a vegan I probably talk to someone like Ricky Gervais about it because I assume that he's articulate

96:55about it he's articulate I don't think his position is nuanced I don't I don't I think there's some willful ignorance that's a part of people that eat meat but condemned hunting willful and the fact that like I said they know that they're going to get a certain reaction out of people when they tweet about it on social media one thing if you're talking about someone who's out there shooting things and not eating it okay I get it I'm with you so if some guys are shooting an elephant coz he wants its tusks I'm on your side I get it but if someone chooses to hunt you know and an animal fill-in-the-blank that might be a goat might be weird to you that they're eating this thing but they're shooting this it's an invasive species it's actually very delicious his very edible prized for its meat by some communities you don't make any sense you know doing this because you know that

97:44other people are ignorant about it as well and either you're ignorant because you've never bothered to look into it or you've bothered to look into it you're ignoring the nuance yeah in the case of the goat thing this is all added thing there's an added element that our government on the federal level is involved there's a lot of state wildlife management agencies that are involved in trying to do wild goat eradication projects on islands yes this is something that's ongoing all the time in Hawaii and many other places where we're like out helicopter gunning yeah helicopter gunning for invasive species explain to people how those goats got there in the first place because this is also very weird a variety of ways but a lot of things were a lot of island species this is one way it happens where invasive on islands would be introduced by seafarers whalers who would want to

98:43establish food resources along transoceanic routes so you could put something there and come back and get it later early waited like the Whalers used to come out of the the American Northeast like all those famous whaling villages and in New England you know they would go down and stop in and and like you know stop in and the Galapagos whatever and gather up tortoises that they could flip over in the hold of a boat and the tortoise stay alive for months on its back you'd have like a fresh meat resource and as people came to understand scurvy and realizing that fresh meat gives you enough vitamin C to avoid scurvy that you can get from dried meat because you know the way the vitamin C behaves through the cooking and drying process but like fresh meat you can keep from having scurvy meat became like even more important then but people would come in and like cut some

99:37sheep loose cut some goats loose on an island and know that they're gonna breed and build up a big population and that can be like a place you stop in and get food and other things get introduced in other ways and of course animals move you know so if you have one Island has close proximity to another Island they can swim across yeah bump over and it destroys native vegetation they trample birds nests and so you have in many cases where introductions of non natives particularly not need of grazing animals non-native predators will wind up causing like a lot of extinctions of endemic species on islands and creates all kinds of problems and that's exactly we're talking about with this go in that picture so this is an animal that must be killed if you want healthy wildlife on that Island the native wildlife and the native fauna the flora all this stuff that lives there all the stuff

100:30that's supposed to be there you got to kill the goats otherwise they'll eat everything but I think people look people look and they they they they look in there like I don't buy that that was the motivation of that person what I care about is motivations of individuals I think you're right because when California got rid of mountain lion hunting they're still killing several hundred mountain lions here a year people are comfortable with like the the total lion kill didn't change much people are comfortable with the state agent or someone being paid to go out and kill lines they're not comfortable with someone paying who wants to go do it I don't think they realize I don't think they realized that state agencies are killing as many mountain lions in California as they are I don't think people understand that I think people do understand if something gets put on the

101:18ballot you know would you like to reintroduce mountain lion hunting people would go crazy like why would you do that mountain lions are beautiful they're exciting I want to see them that but these are people in Santa Monica you know I'm saying yeah they're not people that are living you know an hour outside of Bakersfield they've got 16 mountain lions in their backyard in a year that's this is a different kind of world you know if they're in the tachi mountains out there and a seamount lions all the time they have a lot of mount lines yeah and there's an issue and there's a problem too that I view this is coming from there's a problem or I think a lot people have a very hard time empathizing with people who might be negatively impacted by wildlife as well and the question of the lion issue Brian where it's kind of like this idea like well you better suck it up right yeah so

102:11if you're a rancher and you're running cattle in the area where you're losing a lot of cattle the wolves and Grizzlies people will look and be like you better suck it up buddy like I can't really picture your problem but your complaints are not legitimate well they can't it's someone were to cut a if someone were to cut a grizzly loose in Golden Gate State Park right I don't know um I think that people would have would come to have a different perspective on that to put it mildly yeah but it winds up being that you look and people are they don't really want to hear about other people's problems if it doesn't if it doesn't jive with their understanding of what problems are and that's area where the issue around grizzly bears and in the delisting so you know they were delisted they were removed from endangered species act protection temporarily because they had

103:05met all recovery goals so when we like what's the recovered population looked like they mapped out what would look like and we've exceeded that for many years now and they were delisted but then Wyoming and Idaho moved to have a very limited hunt on them and then they were a federal judge block the delisting and they went back enlisting was the federal judges motivation well you want to hope that that they didn't have one you wanted you want to think that they were just looking at you know the details of it but I think there's a suspicion that that person went into that knowing damn sure what they were gonna do you know but but you don't really know I mean a lot of these arguments around they come down to like technicalities right no one's arguing that the populations recovered but there's also the argument that the judge is probably trying to protect his own

104:01reputation because the amount of blowback that a judge would receive for allowing a hunt to go through is vastly different than blocking a hunt yeah blocking a hunt you're not gonna get that much blowback you get a few people that are upset but it hadn't been an established resource not only you're taking something away from people but if he allow poor the wildlife people go bananas on this guy yeah they tend to like and I don't even call him in but like I don't call them environmentalists like people who sued a block the delisting of recovered species there they'll masquerade as you know ecologically conscious environmentalists but they're just people who it's it's untenable to them you know they can't that they're never going to accept the idea that that you're gonna have human exploitation of this resource right that they masquerade is there they have an

104:49environmental motivation but it's not it's like it's an animal rights motivation there's a very there's a they have a sensitive ear in a certain federal court you know a Missoula and so you'll see a lot of these cases around wolves and Grizzlies they'll get that they'll want it done through that court they know they're probably have a friendly take on it I think it was a real it was the watching that happen and that's been having reason I think it was a real a real travesty because there's a couple things that happen like culturally in areas where you'll you create a lot of tension with people where there's people that are living amongst these things and they're looking for some level of some level of relief and they want to see it go to state management and they might want to see the state exercise some control over where certain populations of large

105:42predators are spreading into and when it winds up being that they're like their voices are not heard you know and they feel that people from far away are really heavily influencing decisions that affect them on a daily basis it winds up creating like a lot of animosity toward the species to where means I think about what happened with the spotted owl right the spotted owl no one can see no one perceives the spotted owl as owl anymore the spotted owl has become like a symbol of federal overreach and you'll find that like you know wolves for a while they become like a symbol of a dispute and people stop like liking the animals much and it becomes like this like contentious creature and I think that we're gonna head that way if we keep if if we keep stepping in on wildlife issues with the mentality that we've been approaching the wolf and grizzly issue in the northern Great Lakes

106:32the Northern Rockies soon to be in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem now I think you're dealing with local and then you're dealing with national right so the local people gonna have an issue with it because they're going to be impacted by it it's gonna be directly impacting their life dogs are going to be killed while you know what they're gonna take domestic cattle and all sorts of different things you're gonna have real issues with the people that like to go elk hunting the populations have diminished rapidly but the rest of the country doesn't give a no people in San Francisco they don't give a about it people in Chicago aren't impacted by it if especially if they don't have anyone in their family that hunts or anyone that has a background in hunting and they don't have a background in it themselves they don't care now people really don't and it's III pointed out

107:18all the time but um that I care about the availability and bunt and abundance of deer elk moose caribou right like I care about the resource there's a lot of people who rely on the resource use the resource their major economic drivers I'm definitely I'm anything but I'm like I regard myself as a pro wolf person I regard myself as a pro grizzly person I cherish every interaction I have with those animals do you think I'd love to be around I'm a resource I don't have a problem with callin respected people but people do have a problem with calling a resource and um and and yeah I'm like pro I'd like to ensue Tabo habitat I like to see them present I also like to see that that I also like to see them managed in the way that allows for abundant wild game resources what's going on House passed the bill to drop legal protections for gray wolves as passed today whoa well roll down a little bit

108:24republican-controlled House passed a bill on Friday to drop legal protections for gray wolves across the lower 48 states reopening a lengthy battle over the predator species long despised by farmers and ranchers wolves were shot trap poisoned out of existence in most of the US in the mid 20th century by the mid 20th centuries since securing protection in the 1970s wolves have bounced back while it's not really exactly what happened Great Lakes of Michigan Minnesota and Wisconsin as well in the Northern Rockies in Pacific Northwest that's sort of but they're not talking about the reintroduction the reintroduction is the big issue right well and that's what people have great issue with well yeah but the reintroduction is only in one area the the great lake the northern Great Lakes that was not a reintroduction there was you know one sizable population well movements of

109:07wolves coming down from Canada and coming back in the northern cotton the core northern Continental Divide ecosystem not a reintroduction you had a place famous yeah well yet the famous case of the famous reintroduction Yellowstone National Park so it wasn't widely viewed now it's widely viewed now that if you wouldn't have done that you would have had had you not done that reintroduction you too had a natural flow anyway a natural flow from Canada you've gotten you devote you would have eventually you would have eventually gotten there anyway interesting but would they have gotten to the exact same levels no no at this particular point right now and I think that'd be like laughable the ACK result they would be there now but but but people there's no realization that you would have that without the reintroduction you would have through natural movement have eventually gotten

109:55you know do you think that that's that the that supports the idea of the reintroduction you think the reintroduction was well thought out I don't want it you know I'm not gonna debate the merits the reintroduction like I said my perspective on it it should be in a place where it supports them yeah my perspective on it is I don't the idea of extinction and regional extra patient sickens me I do not believe in I do not believe that like as of people as a culture we can justify or afford to remove species of wildlife from the landscape native species of wildlife from the landscape it's like I said the idea sickens me I'd like to you know I like to have all native wildlife present on the landscape so I don't oppose it what I oppose is a thing that's happened now is getting where we have populations that we agree like what will recovery look like and at what point when what how will we manage

111:07all the different viewpoints that are coming in all the different like interests of all these varied stakeholders and at what point where we get in there and manipulate the situation that we're creating I just would move that in a different direction where I think that when that recovered species right in this case we're timing out wolves and Grizzlies I think that you should have that if you can do it in a sustainable way that doesn't have long-term deleterious impacts on the population so they should be managed as a renewable resource see this is where people are gonna have issues the Germans won't have a just even the term you manage them as a renewable resource you mean shoot them and kill them and use their fur sure I think that I think that recovered species that I think that if you put something on the endangered species act and it goes under federal

111:54protection and then when it reaches recovery and the US Fish and Wildlife Service says it's recovered it's time to hand it back to state management if a state then decides that they're going to do some limited harvest particularly bit let's say there even if they're focusing on areas where there's like very high prevalence of human animal conflict and the state decides to do that in some like minor way as a way to service the needs of certain segments of their population that wants something to happen I don't think that then some at like an activist judge or or environmental groups or animal rights groups should come in be like well nevermind we're gonna pretend that they're not recovered now because we want to prevent the state from doing something that we think is unsavory well the thought process behind the people that support blocking the hunt is that if you leave these animals alone

112:46naturally they're gonna find balance and that the wolves will kill the elk and till there's not enough elk for them to sustain their populations and the numbers of their offspring will dwindle and they'll get to some sort of a sustainable level yeah but we already we live in a lot of in a heavily manipulated kind of land a kind of man-made environment now the idea that things are gonna we would just let things run their course and watch what happens isn't gonna happen you're still gonna have a lot of Grizzlies every year are still gonna get in trouble they're still gonna get killed you're still gonna have mortality you know you're gonna have tons of grizzly mortality in tough areas but their Chili's aren't acting in packs that's not but they kill they kill cattle and they come up they brought up against humans it's just like it's inevitably gonna have some day you're

113:36not gonna let it run as a person as a hunter I also don't have a problem with an actually support as a hunter that we would you know while allowing wolves to be present on the landscape that we would mitigate their impact on big game I don't mind saying I don't mind just coming out and saying that I like to have high populations of big-game animals that are available to hunters and also at the same time sharing some of that resource they're having wolves on the ground doing it don't want to see them gone not anti wolf not anti grizzly it's just one of those were it's it's because a wolf is so much like a dog and because there's not a great history of people eating I remember you tell me about one mountain man where his favorite food was wolf filled amor Steffensen yeah who's the arctic explorer what a crazy that guy must yeah uh-huh Laurie loved wolf meat

114:31you ever tried it no no no levian coyote you've eaten Caio so you've eaten a species I've never I've never killed a wolf never killed a grizzly bear mmm just haven't haven't eaten either oh I ate one coyote yeah didn't eat it didn't like it haven't messed with one since yeah you said that was similar to diver duck - right that was Remy Remy felt it tastes like bad diver dark ie diver ducks and still eat diver ducks but no I haven't no I haven't haven't done that anymore and then haven't included any coyote recipes and there's no coyote recipes in the wild game cookbook either wolf might be the ultimate one that people are gonna have a problem with it's a very that might be where the the rubber hits the road well you know in some places become a moot point because Idaho Wyoming Montana all have state management of wolves yeah all of the things that were all these

115:29horrible things that were gonna happen when the states resumed management of wolves didn't materialize right but those places also have a rich history of hunting yeah but it was it was gonna be the end of wolves right it hasn't been in the first few years in the first few years the Wolves seasons he actually had you actually saw the populations go up well it's so hard to hunt them right well they it winds up being that putting that with that little bit of hunting pressure on them really changed they're really changed their movements and changed the way they perceive human threats and they adjust to it pretty quickly but it hasn't led to you know I think a lot of people looking in those cases where it was pretty effective you know it was very effective to bring in to bring in limited regulated hunting had the desired effect on how wolves are using the landscape and ways in which

116:22they were interacting and in avoiding humans and then I have no doubt - I have no doubt - like it'll the situational probably in the northern Great Lakes they had state management law state management like it bounces back and forth you're gonna you're gonna eventually I mean kind of depends on how the political winds blow but you're eventually gonna wind up with it there and you're not gonna see wolves vanish from the landscape you know you just not if grizzly bears wind up doing it you're still gonna see you're gonna see gradually expanding populations of grizzly bears to fight despite the fact that they're using limited harvest to achieve certain management objectives it's not going to be the end of the world it's just not yeah I agree with you and I think the grizzly bear thing you probably have the same sort of situation where the Grizzlies will eventually think of people as a threat

117:07and it'll probably safer for everybody that's one thing that people that's one thing that people hoping again people aren't really a lot of people looking from the outside in aren't very sensitive to it you know to the idea of the way that which that's an you know that this is impacted professional hunting guides hunters but these are my people these are people that I care about and I care about their needs yeah right and it's an is an issue so time will tell where that where that winds up well we see it in BC where they've just taken it away and they take it as if taken it in a very rational way because they have a large population of Grizzlies and PC it's very large and for people that live up there that that hunt them this is kind of scaring the out of them mm-hmm that all of a sudden you've taken this away first of all it was a source of income for a lot of these people that

117:55would guide them but it was also a smart thing to control the population and keep them away from humans well I that I watched that closely though I don't feel it being another country you know you don't have that sense of being that other country you don't have that sense of the of that you could influence you know so it's like it's kind of watching something happen in a distant way and you don't feel it's close to you and I don't know all the factors that play as well as I do here well I have some friends live up there my friend Mike Hawk Ridge who's a guide up there and he's told me horror stories about Grizzlies I'd shoot one trying to get into his cabin from like 6 feet away yeah and you know they're big they are I love them to death they're great I mean it's cool they're real I mean really is it's a wild thing that they're that we have this huge monster

118:50that lives in the woods yeah haven't been charged by them I wouldn't change a thing man yeah you were charged by them and I like having I like every encounter and every mix-up and its really it's like deeply complicated stuff and and when top of these things it's also they become like everything they become a proxy we're engaged in a debate about what is you know we're engaged in debate about like conflicting views on wildlife and these animals step in to this debate and the debate centers around them and it winds up being bigger than a debate about Grizzlies bigger than a debate about bison or Buffalo right bigger than a debate about wolves it's just that these animals step into this ongoing dialogue about what is our relationship with the natural world what is our relationship with renewable resources what is our relationship with rural versus urban perspectives on how people

119:49should be around wildlife be impacted by wildlife and so it's just it's just this through line of us trying to sort out how to be like good responsible stewards of the landscape and that debate always centers around these things like you could have a huge argument like you be like and a lot of tension with your spouse right and it springs up in a debate about how best to load the dishwasher or who is supposed to pick up the kid from school right there's always like it always finds a place to live and right now we're like the this argument about American wildlife and what is our relationship to it has found its place live right now around large predators yeah and in Scotland has found its way to live around a feral goat on an island well in that one case yeah all the traveling that you do and all the hunting trips you go on this has it gotten to a point

120:49ever that it seems like a job yeah as now that I have kids I it's changed a little bit of you a little bit differently but no I still I still really love it and I'm able to know that I'm able to know that I'm missing my family while I'm out I'm able to know that and feel that pain and still know that I love what I do and I love talking about the things that I talk about and and you know and I view it like as a as I'm sure you do like it's like this tremendous privilege that you're able to kind of grow up to have you know to have this like intense interest in a subject and it's intense interests and a lifestyle and then have the ability to like introduce people to all these different ideas right so yeah I can have those two things simultaneous the kind of longing to be home more but enjoying being out I think if it would if the longing to be home more would override

121:54that someday it might change it but right now I'm you know I've just have seen so many things that I'm happy to have seen and to think about a future of not accumulating those experiences at the rapid rate that I've accumulated them yeah kind of bums me out a little bit yeah you've lived a hundred lives you know that the trip that you were talking about when you were in South America and the jungle and he came across those pictographs what do you say how do you call those things petroglyph petroglyphs petroglyphs on the rocks that no one had any idea who made yeah no one know why they were just there you know no it's not like a spot on a map that tourists go to visit oh here's the petroglyphs no they just they're there just there and the hunters like yeah there they are the ancient ones made these hey let's get the fish no they really don't give a but it's like you're seeing who

122:46knows how old that is thousand years old yeah but that's run into stuff like that you know yeah beautiful experiences man and then the you know to eat the way I eat and live the way I eat it's it's yeah I feel fortunate all the time well I think you're very important because there's a there's a real lack of well-read articulate people that support your position that are in the media I mean you got a lot of these shows that are on these the hunting networks that they appeal to a very narrow bandwidth and this narrow bandwidth is you know just it's it's like your stereotypical idea of what hunting is to a lot of people so they'll flip through the channels they'll watch that for a few minutes you see someone hooting and hollering after they shoot something and they get this bad taste in their mouth about it whereas I tell people all the time if you really want to get an

123:56understanding about what hunting is about I always recommend your show because your your narration and your reverence for what you're doing and the animals and just your your appreciation for how cool the experience is and how wild it is Ted don't you know for lack of a better term to just to be out there in nature and to be in the pursuit of these things and then to take these things these wild creatures and feed your family and have it become a part of your life and to sustain yourself with it primarily it's a it's you you're giving a perspective that I don't think is available that I think is is really important because it's just there's so many people out that are out there that are hunters that are smart well-read people that feel frustrated it's like god I wish everybody could see it the way I see it yeah I think it's a porn to point out that my love of hunting and

124:56fishing and of living like a hands-on relationship with the natural world living in close proximity to wildlife like my interest in that and desire to do that predated by a long ways my ability to talk about why I think that those things are important it was there it wasn't like I didn't grow up around that and then later started understanding the stuff and thinking about it and decided like well the path for me then considering what I know now the path me then would do to figure out hunting it was like hunting was there I loved it I love it today and I just had the luxury through what I do for a living to spend a lot of time thinking about what why is that the case if this feels like harmonious to you and you can kind of like live in this and understand and see how you fit into some greater you know ecological picture right if it does feel that way and that seems to be true how

125:58is it that like why is that right and it was pushing at those edges that I've eventually developed a way in which I talk about it now I meet all kinds of people who live that same lifestyle that I lived growing up and when I talked to him a thing that they appreciate is just that that someone is articulating to them something that they felt to be true and knew to be true but just hadn't had the time or you know didn't have the time or ability to really go out and express it so I just I would never want to act like like I've invent like I sir have not invented some way of thinking about it like Aldo Leopold and you know Theodore Roosevelt gifford pinchot throughout history like Jim Harris and Tom McGuane for contemporary writers there's been a lot of people been saying and talking about and experiencing the outdoors in a way like I haven't like invented some new thing I'm just sorry

126:49I'm trying to I'm working toward like articulate and expressing something that has been in existence for a long time if people see negative stereotypes when they're on YouTube or see negative stereotypes on certain television shows a lot of that stuff is self feeding you know I think a lot of stuff gets created because it does have a shock value to it and I would think that that - the camera a lot of - the camera a lot of like activities that people might feel are abhorrent might not even be taking place where there is a hamming it up for the camera that goes on that's interesting do you think that there's like a sort of a stereotypical pattern that they feel like they have to fall into so they fall into it when the cameras on almost like a DJ strip club voice yeah I think there's I think that there's some of them you know I mean there's some of that I think there's kind there's also

127:41lay people a thing that happens with people who feel under attack um and and in many ways you know hunters are under attack in a lot of ways in a lot of places and I think that there's a way when you're you feel like you're being attacked you feel like you're being pigeon-holed stereotyped or response is to cram it right back down someone else's throat right right you're like I'll show you and and there's definitely that stuff for like you fall into this us-against-them mm-hmm you know down like I'm gonna you know I'll show them how we really are right and you get into this like kind of dialog thing it's a lot more paint it's like more painful I think not maybe not more painful it's definitely more hard to be like okay let's let's talk about this for real this is really something we need to discuss let's like dig in and discuss it and I think that a lot of people feel like that

128:37hunting feels like something that's natural to them they like to do it and they don't feel the need to take the time to explain it and when when pressed to explain it they maybe kind of lash out you know yeah it maybe lack the ability to look at it from an outside perspective because it's been a part of their life their whole life and they they don't want to justify it yeah it's I thought there's also the weird thing that as much as you can appreciate hunting and think of it as an ethical way to acquire meat everybody can't do it we've got too many people it's untenable and that that's that's how I mean there's no responsibility for you to acknowledge that but it's it's something that it gets brought up when people talk about the the how ethical acquisition of meat is really like either hunting or you'd have to raise something yourself and be absolutely

129:37aware or get something from a farmer who's you know completely ethical from from birth to death and and you have to be comfortable with that but the most ethical in my opinion is a hunting but then people always say yeah but everybody can hunt ok but I can you know if I can what do I do about the fact that everybody can hunt well everyone could come in it's moot points it's just it doesn't matter I guess they're not going to but no certainly everyone could enter into the hunting game you know you could come in and hunt it would just mean that you had a much larger pool of people after a limited resource and that limited resource would be allocated in a different way yeah you could have total participation and it would just be that every person's slice of the pie would be much smaller but it's not like you know when we look at when a state met like looks at like what's a what what what's

130:39a turkey harvest that our state could support they break the state up into a bunch of different units they look at population trends and they determine like how many turkey can we afford to harvest without impacting the turkey population right if everyone in the state wanted a chance you still wind up with the same number you didn't wind up with the same number of turkeys killed it would just be that you would have less opportunity you have to wait longer to get your turn so it's not that everybody can't I don't think that but it's not even really point cuz everybody will not when I do the stuff that I do like in in writing a wild game cookbook I'm doing two things and writing a ball game took but I'm doing the main thing that I feel is the most important part of my job or the most important part what I am is I'm like having a conversation with people who live this

131:23lifestyle right like those are people that I relate to I want to represent the world in a way that like enhances their lives provide education right and share my experiences with an audience people that I recommend is a tribe that I'm part of which be like American hunters and anglers and I'm presenting them like and doing a cookbook I'm presenting them like best practices how to sort of like live the best version level of a wild game lifestyle that they can here's a way to think about an approach wild game but but also the secondary part where I'm doing is presenting a world to people who might be unfamiliar with it right and yes do I have the hope that people will like say read this book and then be like man I want to participate in this lifestyle that could mean as much as them walking down to the local river in their City and flipping over rocks and picking up crayfish but it is

132:19introducing them bringing them into the natural world and bringing them into engagement with nature and I do view and hope that that will happen will it happen in some grand scale or will have hundreds of millions of hunters in this country no that's not going to happen but I do think that it is important that we do have more people involved we in large measure we fund much of our wildlife work and management from law enforcement disease research on and on we fund that stuff through hunting and fishing licenses and through excise taxes on sporting-goods equipment if the more people that are engaged with this activity I think the the better it winds up being for American wildlife I agree but the idea is that everyone can't do it so the idea that your that this is how you epically acquire meat this is not a it's not a solution for everyone no but everything I don't I

133:18don't I don't say that this is the only what I'm saying you dog I'm saying this is one of the arguments that people make if you say that you know hey I hunt for my meat this is how I acquire me you know well everybody can't do that because there's not enough animals okay that's true that's true everybody can't do that if more even more people got involved it's not it's not a solution for the entire population you can say well that's good the entire population is not gonna do it anyway but it's that gets into it just it's a stranger there's just the giant number of human beings that need to be fed yeah there's almost no other solution than the solution that we're doing right now unless they come up with some sort of a I mean they're lab-created meat or whatever the they're gonna come up with next which they are do your lips are curling as the involuntary I said

134:10I'm pretty happy with I'm pretty happy with my diet right now yeah and I'm uh but I yeah I watch that kind of stuff and I'm curious about it but I don't I don't take it as a personal insult but I stretch now if everybody switched the lab-created meat but I still had the and I still had the ability to continue eating how I living how I live yes like I don't view that as being a future problem Rocky Mountain Elk Federation has reintroduced foundation you know what I say Federation the foundation they've they've introduced elk to a lot of different places and made sustainable populations that are now haunted and this is this is a beautiful thing and I'd hope that they continue to spread and continue to do that do you think it's possible that other game animals could be reintroduced to places where they would develop such a large population that we could sustain maybe

135:03even double the amount of hunters that we have now is that possible well put it this way um yes okay four stars yes you know that you just pull up an article about wolves united's tell like like every article from mainstream news sources to get that involves wolves you'll you'll kind of detect the bias of the end you're writing it and they're saying how wolves have only been recovered across 10% of their historic range elk that's about the same for elk Yeah right elk are missing from 80 plus percent of their historic range in the lower 48 right but we have you know you know various times might have a quarter million of them living in Colorado or you know some states got a hundred thousand whatever yet now perhaps 20,000 living in Kentucky those were all gone New Mexico at a point had zero right Michigan zero Kentucky zero Pennsylvania zero elk were gone from the unregulated

136:04slaughter of the market hunting era when people could shoot meat and sell it into urban like meat markets right they eliminated American wild game before we figured out how to do without the word I keep using all the time now which is like regulated harvest regulated management so all that stuff was gone later like there were states where there was no states where there was no deer hunting at the time of European contact you had turkeys in 39 states it got whittled down to turkeys in nineteen states you know have turkey hunting seasons in 49 states we've done a tremendous job of recovering wildlife particular tremendous job because to demonstrate like what happens to an animal that hunters value and love and are able to use as a renewable resource as those species tend to really enjoy a lot of protections and they thrive because people are vested in their best

136:57interest so yeah we've created turkey hunting seasons in 30 states so yes you can recover what you can like do things of wildlife and like create resources the fact that we now we used to argue about what's gonna happen with deer are we gonna like drive deer to extinction in certain states or extra patient certain states now our big argument is what do we do is having so many deer here it winds up being you come up against social tolerances it's hard to like you know when we fill in the map on elk when the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation looks and filling in the map on elk you got to sell people on the idea that you're going to recover elk and there's a lot of resistance to recovering wildlife because a lot of stuffs inconvenient to have around they do a great job of brokering deals with States and finding places where you know a state maybe has a patch of habitat

137:47they think could support the animals and providing the expertise and financial support and all that stuff like bring in those things but generally you wind up where because of settlement cities and suburban areas we wind up with fewer and fewer places where we can go and do it so to really fill in the map on on recovering elk across all that range where they're supposed to be I don't know that we'll get there but we've gotten there and a lot of other stuff and there's like you know you like the wild sheep foundation right there try and do the same thing with bighorn sheep there it's not even social attitudes there winds up being diseased like they spent from domestic sheep yeah they're their main like the main problem preventing us from recovering bighorn sheep is disease type types of pneumonia they come from domestic sheep Wow and people you know to go in and say to

138:38someone who's running sheep on a mountain domestic sheep on a mountain and say hey no insult to you and no insult to the you know your forebears who've been sheep ranchers here for 120 years or whatever but we would like to try to recover American wildlife and bring Bighorns back to this mountain range and that's gonna require you moving these sheep out of the way it's an insulting idea to people so there's a blocker there and every animal has its own type of problem turkeys it worked because people don't get pissed about hurt you know no they like having them around yeah and look at what's going on with just allowing you know allowing bison to walk out of Yellowstone National Park it's that's been an issue for a quarter century now people like I'm not comfortable with you letting these big ass things walk out of the park and roam around because of disease grazing right

139:31there's a people don't wanna be inconvenience by wildlife these are places where I would be like in that area I would really like to see like one of when a bison leaves the park he stops being a wild animal and becomes livestock what's going on with that american savannah thing what is that that that program the APR yeah what are they calling that again the American prairie reserve yeah what is going on with that explain what the that is crazy I mean I know it's just a long story too long yeah we're gonna have what we're working with having the it's too long we're working with having the founder on our show yeah in Prairie Reserve they're essentially trying to do is reintroduce a bunch of animals into a gigantic chunk of land and they continue to buy up more of this land and aren't they running block management on this as well yes and there's a lot of that there's a lot of

140:31yeah there's a lot of suspicions and controversy and it's like it's a it's an idea that a lot of people are uneasy with but the problem is not the problem the thing is it's like people who are you know they have a they have funding and and have a thing where they're when blame comes for sale they buy it and the goal of buying up the land is to turn it back into you know turn it back into wildlife habitat for native wildlife and why it's contrary it's the controversy around it stems from the fact that some people don't like to see areas that were that supported like traditional economies and rural areas like cattle ranching and and to see these that to see these areas returning to a wild landscape is threatening to people from the hunter perspective is they're allowing there's a lot of places that people used to be able to hunt and the American prairie reserve is allowing

141:29hunting to go on and people are coming in saying well they need to make sure they need to assure us that hunting will be allowed here in perpetuity hmm and because we're suspicious about what's going on so there's a lot of like you hear about it in so many ways but the core mission is something that most people when you look at the core mission something that most people are gonna look at and be pretty comfortable with be like okay you're a guy or an organization you have money and when a ranch comes up for sale you buy it on the open market the seller names is price you pay the price is now your and if you choose to not run cattle but want to have bison roam around on it why should I care right right but people do care because they look at it as being like a value judgment they look at it as being like a value judgment about rural economies and about agriculture Oh huh I

142:25didn't think about that way there's a thousand more aspects to this the thousand where ax does theirs where like it's a rich subject dude I would love to get into it more about I'd uh next time I come on okay next time it would take like an hour to explain the situation how what is their long-term plan like how long is this going on for it's been going on for quite a while right oh the the long-term play is that over time you would assemble APA chunk of the Great Plains that is far bigger than Yellowstone National Park that supports a thriving population of bison wolves grizzly bears you know in a in a park-like setting but it doesn't come without you know it doesn't come without its own bits of controversy and yeah again it's like it's the thing that everyone has opinion about there was a version they don't like to talk about there was a version that's called the

143:26buffalo Commons that happened long ago where a there was a social scientist named I think it was Frank popper by the last name of popper and he was looking at demographic patterns on the Great Plains and he was observing the ways in which the the great areas on the Great Plains where the population was shrinking okay so there's a lot of counties on the Great Plains where through various like long-term agricultural trends and other issues where the human population is rapidly shrinking rapidly declining and this sociologist brought up this idea that if these trends continue you're gonna have this rare case in which a landscape sort of accidentally rewilding okay hmm where everyone left which is not a story we're familiar with when we look at what happens so wildlands you know across the world right the general story is like people move in and wildlife moves out so this idea that

144:27became known like the Buffalo Commons okay and that was and it just so happens that that idea that this that that idea kind of centered around this area on Jordan Montana right because you have large tracts of federally managed public land up there you had a lot of a grants land that wasn't that expensive and people could buy it and that was like the seed of the idea I think that now that was such an unpopular notion because it had to do with like economic decay right and shrinking towns and reduced resources for public education all the kind of stuff that comes from having an economy that's not thriving um but over time that like Buffalo Commons idea kind of segue into this American prairie reserve idea and it happened to be sort of centered around the same chunk of land um bill Kittredge a Western writer who deals a lot of landscape and environmental issues was

145:21talking about in the wake of the buffalo Commons idea in poppers work was talking about going to Jordan Montana and talking about the buffalo Commons is a great way to get your ass kicked because it's this idea like if if culturally we like the agricultural producers and ranchers were celebrated and they've made a civilization out of the wilderness and they brought in animals and created economies and created communities and for someone to now say you know thanks but no thanks bro we'd rather go back and and eliminate your presence on this landscape and we don't in fact value what you did and we're gonna try as hard as we can to undo what you did because we now view it as that you did though your people did the wrong thing we're gonna crack that wrong and some like it's an it's some people it's like this insulting idea although to a lot of other people they

146:16celebrate it because they're like hey if it's for sale and I buy it it's mine I could see it from both perspectives sure man it's it's it's very much like the hunting thing if you're a part of it you have a deep history in it you understand that you know your perspective of ranching is from a rancher whereas people in the outside conveniently can be ignorant about it and go those ranchers I want to see the Buffalo yeah in my perspective on wildlife has been that's a thing that you it's a thing that you care about you work to conserve you want to have it on the landscape and you also eat a lot of it that's a four-night yeah it is I'm glad that you can't sell wild game I'm glad that mark and hunting is not a thing however I would really love it if there was a restaurant where you could go where you could buy like really well-prepared wild game dishes like a really well-prepared

147:11bear really well all paired mountain lion well prepared you know fill in the blank with the animal I just think that would be a fascinating place to eat you know and maybe maybe if they could do something like that it wouldn't be that you could actually sell them meat I mean there have to be some weird work around you know it'd have to be like would someone have to get to come to one of my dinner parties I would happen well that's fine but I mean but I would like it if there was a place where the general public could participate in it I think they'd get a better understanding you know a guy I put up these posts all the time of elk that I cook and people like goddamn I want to eat some of that I eat that how do you eat that you gotta go get one of them you know I mean it's the only way you can eat that yeah well you can buy come to my house yeah you can go and buy the farm-raised version

147:59but then yeah that's one yeah good luck getting a farm raised blueberry black bear yeah well no not that case but like ya know you can buy but then it's that's a whole er conversation on the captive surrett industry but yeah you can buy you can buy elk that are raised in a in a ranch environment right yeah I mean as long as you're getting it from New Zealand you're not dealing with CWD and a lot of the other issues that they're dealing with in America right well yeah but they're not I mean they're you know those places are tested and and one herds that have CWD in them are destroyed right yeah yeah yeah but the well the whole New Zealand thing that was an interesting thing you brought up on your podcast recently how New Zealand there's been talks about actual eradication and one of the arguments that hunters always use is hey we're controlling the population this is a

148:48good service that we're providing yeah and then the government comes along and says well how about we take care of that and everybody say hey hey well not so fast yeah it's uh that that takes place in Australia and New Zealand where they have these like like thriving very robust populations of non native wildlife and you know the government has all does has always and does now do a lot of culling of these animals they don't have predators right they have like extremely like they're very fecund extremely high reproductive rates and they the government has actively engaged you know around-the-clock Gunung wildlife from helicopters just like just letting it run shoot and leave it to rot because you have to you because they're trying to let you know you have to you but they do that because they're trying to you know protect certain ecosystems and and keep like a lot of you know

149:42native plant species from going to extinct and fragile environments and all kinds of reasons because there's no death right there's no there's no predator there's no predator control on which is huge and then in a lot of places is completely inadequate amount of hunting and the thing that hundreds of our has been able to say in Australia New Zealand is they've been in a little - with an in a culture where like and particularly in Australia like a culture that seems to be not as friendly toward hunters as they are in America your ever say well you know we're participating in wildlife control and then later when people come up and they talk about well you know what we're gonna get serious about this and we're gonna really actively with the goal of like totally eliminating these species people are justifiably made uneasy about it because it's it's the thing that they've come to

150:31appreciate and rely on and a resource that they want to use and now they're like whoa wait a minute Oh kill them all I do like them being here and it was a putting this weird like no one's that putting you in a in a weird rhetorical position but I understand where they're coming from because if um if you could live there and you could agree that we're gonna have some small number of them on the landscape and we're gonna use those and we're gonna hunt those and eat those I also if someone said hey they're gone now I would be bummed yeah I hunt turkeys at UPS an earlier we had turkeys in 39 states at the time of European contact we have turkeys in 49 states now I hunt turkeys in a lot of those 10 states that didn't historically have turkeys and that do now and I generally have a perspective of trying to preserve native wildlife and trying to control non-natives because I don't want to wind

151:18up with sort of a just like monolithic wildlife pattern or these same super resilient adaptive species such as Canada geese and rats and white-tailed deer take over the entire country and pigs yeah so you like like yes I want like the variety so I'm generally like antagonistic toward non-natives but if someone came and said okay you know what we're gonna actually go in and kill off all the turkeys in those ten states that historically didn't have turkeys I would say like cow you know really because I've kind of grown to really like those turkeys and they're not really causing a problem right and I think that some people you know if you New Zeeland hunter and Australian hunter I don't think anyone's arguing there should be no control but I think that there's like let's find a balance I think we can find a balance where there's some availability animals on the landscape

152:06since they've been here since the beginning of our you know experience on this continent if there's some availability of animals that's fine like a reasonable compromise here well that was one of the discussions as well about Hawaii right like and some of the Hawaiian Islands eradicating the pigs and then the Hawaiians were saying well they've been here as long as us yeah we've both been here that our ancestors that have been here 1,100 years they brought the pig with them how am i a Native Hawaiian and the pig has to go right there's like maybe you people ought to go I always like again man I always instinctively um when I hear stuff I instinctively lean in on I instinctively lean in from the perspective of you know I instinctively lean in from the perspective of the hunter and angler you know and like and and and I love all these little debates and I think that they're all really

153:02helpful and interesting but um no I feel like I can recognize their pain and that can also look far away and laugh at the absurdity of it like I even had a guy write me from Australia and say this is a real bummer because it exposes us to the thing where we got to say like yeah you know what I wasn't really just doing it because I'm trying to help the ecosystem by eliminating non-natives I actually like having some around and now I just got to come out and say that and that's a bummer we really do wish there was some sort of a restaurant I think that would be a great place for people to get a perspective there's no way to do that though huh no but I know there's not well I mean not for all the things that you're talking about no and I don't and I don't look to that there is talk of a lot of people are looking to are pushing for this idea that in areas that have

153:59too many whitetail deer there's people who are really pushing to reopen up the sale of wild harvested deer as a solution to deer overpopulation but I'm but for me from the perspective from from my perspective and from the damage that was caused by unregulated wildlife slaughter I just I'm very very uneasy with it and I do not picture myself ever coming around and supported the idea that we would start marketing that we would start marketing wild servants no I agree and I think that just the sheer possibility of and people shooting them and poaching them and selling them and it's just yeah and and just it's it would increase the commodification of wildlife yeah and and that's something that and that's something that um also just uncomfortable with in general is the commodification wildlife and I think about resource availability for hunters and I think that a lot of people who

155:03enjoy access to certain areas now to go hunting to like pump for themselves and their family um that the minute you made it be that those deer had a dollar value attached to them there would be a lot less opportunity for people who choose to hunt to feed themselves because it was all assembiy like why would I let you come in or allow you to come in and use a resource when I'm just gonna do my best now to collect it up and sell it yeah and so again for aesthetic reasons for what it would mean for hunters for our perception of our you know relationship with our resources I I'm extremely uncomfortable with it though I see keep I it's an idea that keeps popping up because we have in some areas and I usually I hate to say that I'd hate table well there's too many deer there's too much this too much that because like by whose measurement but in some areas we really do especially you

155:59start getting into issues like Lyme disease prevalence and ticks and and yeah and starvation and then just the possibility of other disease outbreaks and the spread of certain wildlife diseases there's some areas it's like a by any reasonable measurement we have too many deer yeah well look it's already 1:00 o'clock know how crazy is that time flies in this room your your podcast is awesome it really is I'm glad to talk to you too doing it yeah and every chance I get I point to it I appreciate it I really do appreciate that you do it because I think it's it's my favorite podcast to recommend to people that want if I want them to get an understanding of hunting without you know even watching it just listening to you talk because here's you have so many guests on where you know you might not even be talking about hunting you might be talking about biology might be

156:51talking about history you know it's it's just a great podcast and you're a great guy for the job you play a very important part out there I really really believe that thank you I appreciate and now and I'm glad you talked me into doing it it's been in terms of all the things I do the TV writing it's the thing that I enjoy doing it the most there's a lot of things I enjoy having done it more right but the thing that I enjoy actually doing it I'm decided like a smile on my face doing it well you're such a great talker I mean remember the first time you did my podcast even before meat-eater when you were just coming off with a wild within what is it was that what it's called yeah and I I remember thinking why does this guy have a podcast and this was like how many years ago seven years ago something like that you know the first time I ever heard the word podcast this

157:41is embarrassing the first time I ever heard the word podcast was Helen Cho telling me that I should go on Joe Rogan's podcast and I didn't know what it meant that's how early you were into the show we're into this before I ever heard the word Wow that's crazy um I wanna kind of double background and plug my book yeah please do okay so it's called the meter fishing game cookbook recipes and techniques for every hunter and angler got a picture that Jami BAM there it is I say one last quick thing about it it releases right now releases this week on November 20 but it's available for pre-order everywhere and it's um broken into a bunch of chapters where it has big game small fir'd game like rabbits hares squirrels upland birds waterfowl a freshwater fish saltwater fish shellfish and crustaceans reptiles and amphibians all your bullfrog stuff is in there and you want

158:37to talk about a species it's spreading all across the country bullfrogs yeah really yeah I've hunted a lot of bullfrogs in places where they're very unwelcome what do you hunt them with a variety of ways mostly frog gig I don't care where you live like there's a lot of people who live in a city like dude I'd love to go out and get some wild game I can't get it elk right how do I do that you could be out gigging frogs at night no one would even know frog gigging crayfish crab and we talked about all this kind of stuff in the book so all it and it explains everything from how to like break down and process and freeze stuff and then for everything there are many recipes and the recipes walk you through how to use the entire thing so you from for your white-tailed deer everything from the tongue to the rear shank how like specific recipes on how to do it and also just general best

159:30practices and guidelines around how to handle the ingredients and then all the stuff around all the substitutions so there's no such thing as a can elkhart recipe right it's like how to like handle game hearts whether it's mule deer whitetail whatever like how to approach a heart and it's in an attitude toward wild game that is not that's cut specific not species specific and with fish to like I don't I'm not carnivals daddy like though this is a walleye recipe here this is a bluegill recipe but how to handle like varieties of freshwater fish and like what kind of what kind of recipes you can use that are interchangeable depending on where you live and what you use and all and includes all that and then real pretty pictures beautiful you can see Yanis boo tell us how to do the tail skinning method on squirrel and I don't care where you live you damn sure live near

160:19squirrels people are very uncomfortable squirrel eating not me on you know in the end the guy that got the disease means squirrel brains yeah nothing to do with squirrel brains oh the article I don't yeah yeah what what did he everybody sent me that article yeah there's no demonstrable correlations like 30 P you know wind up with that form of crud spelled young 30 Americans wind up with it it just happens me that this dude sometime in his past its in some sort it's a prion or prion yeah beyond its estate yes thing that happens of people but but it was the the correlation between his diet and what happened to him was implied implied put possible if you go read up on it it now seems like like people are really saying like there's no there's no obvious relationship here no obvious relationship between eating squirrel brains and getting a prion disease yeah

161:22there's plenty of people that get the same thing that haven't been eating squirrel brains right so just they were just looking at the unusual aspects of his diet and you're pointing to that it's not that scientific yeah and the the article got a lot more love when it was that some squirrel hunter died from eating squirrel brains right than it did when the later subsequent pieces came out wherever he's like whoa yeah we don't really like you know squirrels are cute yeah um I ate some squirrel with you just thing you've served me now very good there's not a person in the world you know what we have in the book in the cookbook is we have on how to do buffalo buffalo wings hot wings how to do hot legs with squirrels yeah we're eating at the are night really yeah so it's just like you're making rules on shooting squirrels they vary state by state yeah so if you're in New

162:13York you know you have a season you know squirrel season in most states so it's either it's either one of the other way either there's a season and a bag limit or they're treated as a non-game species so here in California there's a squirrel season there's a bag of them I think it's for a day for for squirrels a day when's the season you know what seasons usually run from sometime in August in September into winter into January February so where I grew up September fifties September 8th to January 27th archery falconry only cheese's kraso archery and falconry so August 4 for archery and Falcon II falconry Falcon then you got to go to the tree squirrels own map right but in your state jack rabbits are open for instance your say Jack Rabbit sir manages non-gaming there's no bag limit and open year-round snows like cottontails snowshoes have different management in a lot of states

163:09pine squirrels or red squirrels which aren't commonly hunted but they're more regarded as like things that get into people's houses but they're not hunted for meat they be listed as the non-game species but fox girls and grey squirrels because game species so in New York I think the bag limit when I was living there was six per day a possession limit of two bag limits did you shoot any squirrels in Brooklyn need them no no one there I caught some there and ate them but I would hunt out of the city at my buddy's farm and some other places so where I was born in Michigan the squirrel season was September 15th and it ran into the end of January 5 squirrels a day possession limit of two bag limits the state I live in now trees squirrels as non-game species so there's no closed season no bag limit because there's not really a there's not a they're not widely distributed and

164:02they're not commonly hunted all right but yeah most places they have them and they're managed and you go out and buy two small game license for 12 bucks or whatever and get your hunter safety get your 422 or a shotgun and you can become a squirrel man or a squirrel lady like your buddy Kevin Murphy this is one of my favorite guys on your podcast he's a squirrel man this guy blows a horn in the woods before every hunt to alert the animals that he's coming yeah blow yeah he carries a cow horn around they call I think that I think um it's in a shofar right is that right for you know when you blow the shofar and like a Jewish in a synagogue is that what it is Thanks called a shofar like you blow the ram's they blow a ram's horn it's not it's not a cow yeah it's not a cow horn but Saran horn you know the end of um you know in the end of no country for old men yeah have we talked with us

165:02before no he talks about his father riding out ahead of him with a horn of fire in the end when he relates the dream it's in the book and it's in the movie murder the time you Lee Jones character is describing a dream in which they're riding through a snowstorm and his father rides ahead with a horn of fire and I was wondering how many people heard that and had no idea what he was talking about but what a common practice used to be is you take a horn buffalo horn cow horn and it's hollow because it grows off a protrusion of the skull called the horn core and you pop the horn off in its hollow and what people would do is when you left your campfire in the morning you would fill that horn with embers and cap it but there'd be a little pin hole in it just to let a little bit of air in there so it could continue to smolder and you carry that horn all day full of embers and at night

165:55to start a new fire you would dump the horn out and rekindle your fire so when he talks about his father riding out ahead of him with a horn of fire what that's meant to say is that he knew his father would be waiting out of head of him with a fire burning whoa yeah but Kevin bravery just blows it less squirrels know he's coming thanks for coming man always good to talk to you we keep saying we got to organize another hunt yeah I hope so you have to do something call Bryan Callen I talked to him recently we'll make it happen he's one of the funnier guys on Instagram man he's one of the funnier guys alive bye everybody