Transcript for #1204 - Steven Rinella

You know, uh, it's funny all day later. Tell me now.

Uh, I was going to tell you funny story about your address, but it wouldn't be funny for you.

All right. Yeah. So I have more, I have more credential than that department.

Yeah, no. And it's, it's funny because, you know, you sort of have your, the, the story in your family kind of like where he came from and everything made. And I always knew I was 25 percent, you know, Italian, and I knew that my family came from Sicily. In fact, The renellers that came from Sicily all seem to become kind of established 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 up in the south side of Chicago and he was raised by his grandfather who was Sicilian and come from Sicily. His grandfather delivered produce with a horse and cart in Chicago. So to have lived through that, like to be brought up in a house where a guy like leaves in the morning in a horse and cart to deliver produce and end up be alive like to fight in World War II 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. 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.

Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, I should have probably like always assumed, but I just 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. It captures what's there, but there's could be a lot there that's not captured. Just in the way that chrome zones are inherited and passed down. It's an incomplete picture. There could be influences. There could be, 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.

You know, I hate to write off the bat, get into something that I can't speak about, and you level of expertise. I was just reading a piece. The piece I was reading had to do. It was kind of a dissection of what happened with Elizabeth Warren, which he claimed.

Yeah. Well, that's what I found. I'm ten times more or whatever, but it was a piece about it was a piece in the times explaining how to make sense of not that everyone's doing these tasks, like how to think about it makes sense these tasks. But my understanding of it is that you could have a lot of ancestry that just isn't captured in your genetic code in a way that would be detected through the testing. Meaning there could be ancestors it for what? Because you're inheriting half, you know, you're inheriting chromosomes from each parent. And somehow you could have, it could be an incomplete picture. You could have ancestors that had come from all that, you know, whatever these, these tests break out the world into a hundred 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.

I don't know. I'm going to have to have a dude on. Yeah, I'll listen. You need to have a dude on and understand. And as I say, I feel like I'm off on a bad start here, man.

Really? Less than average.

Yeah. I can't remember. Okay. I can't remember. I just remember it was less than average. And you know, and those things like are refined by how many people Do them, you know, but it was less than average was bummed me out But I'm like as hairy as like a 13-year-old like Norwegian girl, you know, I mean, so it's that surprise shocking then surprise me too much I was wishing to have a little more of that floating around in me.

People discuss, I was having an argument there a day where they see a Neanderthal or Neanderthal. And everyone goes up saying Neanderthal. And it's one of those things you're supposed to switch once you realize how you're supposed to do it. Right. Neanderthal by this can't get comfortable with it. I go back and forth. There's a lot of words that like that were, I know you're supposed to do it by can't get comfortable with it. Because I feel like it makes you sound pretentious.

But we have this idea that we have this idea that Neanderthal's as unsuccessful. right right there these brutish thugs that died out but they had a 600,000 year run yeah in Europe alone 600,000 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

Yeah, it's funny to look at that understanding of those, that understanding of those people, and then to have the side to picture in your mind's eye, and then you can't picture it. Like, when they were hooking up, someone art, you know, like anatomically kind of behaviorally modern humans were

I thought you're gonna say it was a paleontologist or anthropologist.

I hope he's not listening right now.

Oh, he died at that age 79.

Hey, have we were talked about uh? the idea of neanderthals is like having a confrontational hunting style.

Because when when anthropologists look at the skeletal remains of neanderthals, they see this sort of sweet of this pattern of injuries on them. And a research was looking at the types of fractures that they have on their bones and where the fractures occurred and the brakes and like cracks in 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 observing the way in which that sweet of injuries was very familiar to him from rodeo riders, the types of brakes and the location of brakes. And this guy has this idea that they had a very confrontational hunting style that they were like mixing it up with big animals. And the other 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 males would suffer injuries with a greater prevalence than females. But with the neanderthals, it seems like they didn't have the sort of duplicity of roles. So many females, the females have the same prevalence of these types of injuries. And so maybe they didn't have that, they didn't share that division of labor.

I don't believe that they've found they had addilattles. Right. And I don't know if they were hafting materials, but they were doing, they were doing art. Um, 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 these are all things that as, as we kind of like wake up to what these people really like and it paints like a more complicated picture. There's even the steering. I don't know if this held any water or how long it was fashionable for, but you had this really long history of, it was extremely long history of hundreds of thousands years in the end of fall. 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 is though they were being exposed to or seeing our seeing jewelry and mimicking this from these new invaders that we're 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. The number thing doesn't interesting idea that they would, and 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 these adorned people showing up with these amazing tool kits 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

Are you familiar with the writer, John Moelle?

You'd like his stuff. Yeah. He wrote a really beautiful piece about, he wrote a really beautiful piece about Neanderthals not long ago.

I don't have a problem with that.

Yeah, yeah. My limitations as Let's see, I was gonna say my limitations as an anthropologist, and I'm certainly not an anthropologist that I'll just do his interests 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. I'll just read about them. And I don't take it as gospel, but I'll read about it. And I'll be like, that's interesting, and they'll sort of like shape my understanding of it, but then I don't keep track of it. Like, I try to really follow the story of like the peepling 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 track the idea to see where it lands in terms of scholarly consensus. But on other stuff like 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.

You know, it's, it takes time to, it takes time to follow this stuff.

Yeah, left hand corner. Whatever he's got going on, that thing is not making art. You don't think so? No, he's making meat, man. Come on.

Oh, that's how I got it.

You know, that one's not, that one I don't know.

We started collecting images for years ago. You could tell. It's really good. Because I didn't want it to look like, um, Was it boring you talking about the end of us? No, I'm out of stuff saved by them anyway.

We're gonna spend a day talking about things we're not quite sure about. Yeah, exactly.

So, I want to I want to get back to the cook but real quick, but you know what's funny is how many you probably don't know this. But how many people in the wildlife world listen to you show angry? I hear about it because I'm like a conduit.

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 works. Yeah, it's really funny how many people I hear from one up. I could tell on your on I know like when you're on the subject of wildlife, I'm sorry.

That's not what antlers are for.

Yeah, that's two things that definitely make sense. Yeah. Yeah.

in like, in animals.

I got a secret to your last year who had lost his eye completely gone. I mean, like, the design ball had been punctured. And people were asked to me, well, no one, you got him. But I was like, no, it was good. I was facing me. on his line of approach. But he didn't know what you were. His left perception. His left eye was facing me. But yeah, with the cookbook, so we started gathering pictures up for it years ago. Because I wanted to have this really complete idea of how to process everything. So like the book includes everything from how to process a bull frog, you know, to a deer, to a pig, to a mimei. And a problem I run into when I've done books, is I never wind up needing, I never wind up needing like paddum in the end. I always wind up having like very painful cuts. When I did my book, my book American Buffalo, I remember I had to lose a hundred pages, which was hard to do. When we did the complete guide in the hunting butcher and cooking wild game, it came out at 700 pages.

No, in hindsight, it had to happen. It had to happen. That's, in terms of the narrative stuff I've written, that's the narrative nonfiction I've written. That's my favorite thing that I've done. It had to happen. It was painful. When I did those guidebook, the guidebook series came in 700 pages and my publisher was, My publisher was like, you know, he just don't really make 700 page books. And so that's why we want to do the volume one and volume two because I didn't want to get rid of any. But then in doing this this cookbook, the meaty deficient game cookbook is what it's called. And putting this together. I think early on, we started to get a little bit kind of running a little bit wild about what was going to fit, but then caught it earlier. But that was the first thing we did to start 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 photo shoot and you know I'm saying yeah yeah where you can tell that they get the sort of how they got the images And I didn't want to feel like that. I wanted it 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 process 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 it and putting it together was more systematic once we had that underway. But I think it's I think like it's cool looking though, you know. No, it's great. Like the book in the end where it's kind of like half. It could almost pass as a coffee table book.

Yeah, that's something that was always there for me growing up. Honeying fits you very complicated and you do them for a bunch of reasons. I think that people in explaining Honeying to audiences or explaining Honeying to people who were uninitiated, uninformed about it, maybe adversarial toward it. You sort of, you wind up grabbing these things that, you want to grab in these things that you think will resonate with them, right? I have a friend Greg Blaskovich who'd even worked on this research piece of taking justifications for hunting and finding test subjects who are skeptical of hunting and explaining various justifications to them. and seeing which ones of those that they find to be most impactful. So he's actually done research around when you take this great like these broad spectrum of reasons people do this. And everyone has many of them, this part of their story, right? And you run them by people. He sees these ones that they really resonate, which ones kind of move the needle and their perception of it. And it's a little bit surprising. There's some surprises in there of ones that you think would be really impactful, but in fact, are not impactful at all. People don't care about it. 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 looking at it from the outside and they're skeptical of it. They have a hard, they don't buy it. I don't think that they're afraid of deer.

Yeah, I'm sure that there are quite a lot of people that live in some of these areas that have a great abundance of deer that feel that way, but when you're in a population. Yeah, when he was looking at it with just general population thing, and it was full stop too. He didn't give a lot of, he didn't go in and give case scenarios and examples, which is a question that you ask and people, it didn't like immediately click with people. Another thing that didn't immediately click with people, but it's extremely important to me, is issues around heritage and legacy. So meaning that my maternal grandfather, my paternal grandfather, we're hunters, my father was a hunter, I was brought up hunting. To a non-hunter, doesn't matter. Your grandparents and parents could have been involved in all kinds of bad shit. I don't think that means you need to continue doing bad shit. One that's very obvious is people understand and respect the idea of food. Like your general population is looking respect the idea of food. Now, to back up what I was getting at about, you mentioned that being a big element of 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 erased by a dad who was just really interested in cooking stuff and sharing with people, you know? And if you're driving down the road and June, and you see a snap and turtle, land eggs on the side of the road that's come up out of a swamp and you need to find some sandy ground and he finds it on the edge of a dirt road and there it is land eggs on the side of the dirt road we were eating that turtle right and everything we ate you know all kinds of fish and we had a lot of things that other people weren't interested and we could go out and bring back our dad bull frogs you would love if we went out and got them frogs we take our bows out at night using flashlights, which unbonounced me was illegal, and remains illegal in the state where I was brought up. Even for frogs? To use artificial light for frogs, yeah. Wow. I had no idea. Dude, 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 in the frog legs, and he would cook them. He would cook and eat anything, and then he would do stuff where we would catch salmon when 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 to be a way to connect. Sam and Boyle. Yeah, Boyle fish. So you take your literally, you're literally cubing up salmon and pearl onions and little baby potatoes.

It's just a fish boil, and then you drain it off, and you have drawn butter, and you drawn all that shit and drawn butter. It's good. Sounds good, but it doesn't sound like a fish boils. People do fish boils, but it's not normal to do a salmon boil.

Yeah, for sure. But it's like when you have the pearl onions and a little baby potatoes and cubed up and you drown all that shit and butter, it's just like a thing people like.

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 is going to be on is going to make their list. But we would do that, you know, and it would be a thing and you'd invite people over to do it. I kind of early at 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 a show about hunting wasn't something that was going to it wasn't something that was going to lean out. But in all fairness, when I was growing up, I did a lot of fur trapping, too. And, trap. Muscat, beaver, main, all kinds of stuff. And I was doing that to sell the fur. And I would use some of the meat. I would use some of the meat for bait. I'd sometimes sell meat to dog sled racers.

Not until after. I think I know I ate the first one when I was in the first one I ever ate when I was in community college. I'd still tell people about the beaver that you cook for us and Wisconsin and how good it is and they look at you sideways and my come telling you man it was like the most delicious pot roast I've ever had was fantastic yeah was really good there's even stories about early on with the when early explorers were in this country they had a difficult time getting fish sometimes and beaver were approved for the lenton 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 were allowed to eat beef or meat because they were a water animal. It was a very popular food item. Do you follow them saying? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I get it. The first one's we ate. I had started reading about. I'd always read near it as 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 was sandwiched in time between the end of the Lewis and Clark expedition and the collapse of the Beaver market in the 1840s. So like, it's like a very like finite period of time is what a mountain man was.

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.

Yeah, and he was in on the business end of it. He wasn't in on the trap and end of it. Right. He was in on the hat, right? But the fur companies. Yeah, the big fur companies. And when we bought, think about like this, how big it was. For us to do the Louisiana purchase. to buy that chunk of land. When Lewis and Clark came out, part of their mandate was to sus out the potential for the trade and beaver hides. You believe buying some night vinyl by oil and gas, right? You know, it can be justified this to oil and gas. They're looking to justify it through trade and beat rides. Now also, there was also language about that they might find out about whether we'll be mammoth or existing out there as well. So there was like some confusion about what was going on.

Jefferson was interested in that stuff because he had been to some areas. He had some familiarity and been to some areas with these large bones and he was puzzled about him. 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.

Historians like people not historian popular historians really love to make a big deal out X is 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 in a 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, just point out to your, that you might think is interesting is that people have this idea of Lewis and Clark going into this unspoiled, uncontacted landscape. I was reading a piece by his story, who's talking about, at the time Lewis and Clark had it 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.

They went out in the early 1800s, so they were 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 coming at Coronado, right, coming up from Mexico into the Great Plains, Cabezadevaca, being shipwrecked around the Gulf Coast and people pushing up into these areas. That was hundreds of years prior. Like the distance that separates, imagine the distance that separated Lewis and Clark from the first Europeans who were doing activities in and around the Great Plains. is like the distance in time that separates us from Louis and Clark.

It was like a long history of people. That's crazy. That's crazy. However, so yeah, but think about it too. Like Louis and Clark were encountering people who had horses, right? Right. And those horses had been traded up. So that's just a side note of this idea of eating beef or so. I got from reading about the mountain man. I got interested in the site because you'd always do like any time you read about mountain man you're always going to find the part where the author talks about how much mountain man liked beaver tale. And the first people that tried eating beaver tales around when I was in I was in community college at the time. And my brothers I remember stuck a beaver tale in the oven for a while and cooked that neighbor poured it 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 beef or tail? Yeah.

We have a, there's a, how to, like, this is like pictures in an explanation of how to prepare, how to actually prepare a beef or tail mountain man style in the meat of your fishing game cookbook. It wasn't bad. It was just bland. It's just fat. It's fat. So after that, we started thinking that when they say the mountain and like, beef or tail, we thought it most meant they like, romp. based like the high in course. So we start when we when I would catch bevers. I'd be careful when skinned them to not get the caster. The bevers have two large glands on the inside of their legs. They're like tucked in there. What looks like if you lay a beaver on its back, tucked kind of on either side of its of its. Like if it's a male like tucked either side of its penis or either side of its cloaca. You'll you'll see a not cloaca but like vent. You'll see these these glands that are the size of. I don't know if you make like a, if you take your index finger in your thumb and make a circle, there's like a gland on each side called a caster gland, there's oil gland in there. They used to use it for perfume. It still has value. Today it's used for a wide variety of things. It smells beautiful. If you're walking on a stream bank and you smell like a strange perfume smell, it's usually beaver caster. Wow. Smells great tastes like shit. Taste like you're eating. like you rub roses or something all over your food. So, start figuring out like to skin them and be very careful not to get the caster on your knife or get the caster on your hands. And then we would just take the meat 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 the next I started eating that but I still then later I realized that It read other accounts of how people were 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 would 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 and pretty soon you can just peel it that skin away and what's hiding under there is the best equivalent or point of comparison that I can think of would be it's like if you had a really like imagine you're gonna grass fed steak right but still has that fatty gristle on it it's just made up of that gristle like what a lot of people trim away from a steak and not eat that's what's inside that beaver tail but people eat these individuals that were doing this were fat star 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 it because they were 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 compliment it with just eating the beaver tail fat. And I'll often tell people about it and I even gave some to like 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's just 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 been in this too, where if you're, you know, especially if you're out hunting and eating, you know, like freeze-dried food or night eating great, and you're just exerting yourself all day all the time, how you're what you want to eat change a lot.

Yeah, and so just like to eat like a big slab of fat. It'd be very excited about it.

Yeah, and then our understanding of people like we have this idea of like especially of early Native Americans is like they're like just eating 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 planes those guys were like they weren't cultivating like at that era like especially the era 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 valleys once they got horses that is gave up on that shit and just started to roam in the landscape eat 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 to make up for a lot of nutrient deficiencies, each should lose organs. You're guy putting gall, putting gall on your food, gall bladder, squeezing, taking the gall, putting squeezing the bile from gall bladder on your food. You did that once. Yeah, it's horrific. Yeah, it's like putting a nine volt battery on your tongue.

Yeah, it seems like they they put a high emphasis on eating just like all these like just organ meats but an organ meat milk from milk from mammary glands Really. Yeah, because you can't just eat that lean ass game me every day. Right.

and picking Wolverine and meat off the skulls and stuff.

Yeah, and I would mess with that guy. He's tough at shit too now. Yeah. He lived the life. He lived the 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.

You're cool dude. Buck cool dude, Buck. Which is what Buddy Mind says to him in the show.

Yeah. The reason he was living up, had to live off the land is an interesting story where he was working for, he was just getting in the guiding world, so guiding moves hunters. And they were wanting to find some ways to be able to hunt some very remote areas, and they hidden us that idea that they would just bring horses in. Because if you don't have landing strips and stuff, it's 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 impossible. By the time they got the horses in there, they realized that they're never going to 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 that'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 it's really comfortable with solitude. When I spent time with him, he's very gracious. But when he spent time with him, you see him just engage in conversation. You see a sort of weirdness kick in where you're talking to someone who's very comfortable going months without human interaction.

Yeah. Let me get the fuck out of this. He realized like when I've stated this place is cabin, he's got, he's got a remote cabin still. When I stayed out there, he kind of like, We'll sort of drift off and vanish for good spells. I mean, I'll sure. Even when he's like entertaining, you know?

What's one of the things that he does? Do you have one of those bowls? I have one in my home, yeah. I need to get one of those bowls. It's a birch, but yeah, it's like a, you know, it's a birch salad bowl. Sort of like a growth on the side of a birch tree that you cut off of the chainsaw and hollow out. Yeah, they call them Birch, you know, Birchmark or Burl Bulls. Yeah. Yeah. I have a beautiful one. And he sells and they go into tourist shops. I think it's a shame.

Yeah. I think he should be, it should be all be direct to consumer. Well, from him.

Yeah. He had a great many of the loss and a fire too. Yeah.

But besides, yeah. So he's still guides. And does that and it makes his, uh, you know, takes those burles and makes bowls out of them.

No. And they had wanted lost. And that's the thing. We were talking about this point their days were talking about. like what people now you'll be able to 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 um and being a mountain man but if you think about the mountain man where 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, um, 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 familiarity with outside peoples and you'd live their foods, you'd 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 when we talk about, he's a real mountain man.

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 are like decided to go backpack up in the Hindu Kush and Afghanistan. You know, just to see what happens. Yeah, very different kinds of people.

all that, you know, long weeks, a couple weeks. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, but there's a lot of travel. There's a lot of stuff that needs to happen to get out on the river.

Yeah. In a situation like that, you with people who are very familiar with like very familiar with the modern world like a great awareness of it but like when the sort of rubber meets the road of daily existence there's still really connected to life patterns and skill sets that were that the grandparents used and still fishing like a very similar ways, right? So where you might have had when you were a boy, even 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 a plastic paddle, say, and they use that for their boat, or 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 driving all of your protein from the river, and that you hunt and fish 250, 300 days a year, In the places where your ancestors lies done it you're still you're still getting this 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 Honey is 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 if you go look like Daniel Boons family, Daniel Boons family came from England. They didn't come here as hunters. because you couldn't like the peasantry you couldn't hunt there. They came here and learned hunting. So hunting in America for your 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 that deep, deep thread that you'd find with indigenous communities, where there's this continuation that's gone on, for forever unbroken but on this continent unbroken for whatever 1516 whatever the fashionable number is thousands of years right and so it's like our understanding is 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 for food and wild game and interesting thing is my my use and understanding of wild game is really influenced by contemporary food, right? 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 wild game and cook it? You'll talk to like a dude, even a dude like Bach or particularly people in South America who have hunted for more of a like a subsistence, literally subsistence purposes, they're whole attitudes different about it. People like people in South America will eat the like the the chamani or the makuchi is like they'll eat the same thing every day for lunch every day. Boyle fish with a dried pepper on it, and then a grain made from cassava.

She's a grain, but like a dish made from cassava.

Why don't they just grill it? Well, they sometimes do, but for lunch, it's like you take leftover, you probably like smoke, but they would call barbecue fish where you make a big rack. You have a fire, make a big rack high above it. It kicks off a bunch of smoke. You split fish salt and the 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 kind of stirred 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 and 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 cook as I understand it where you make a book and it's got a hundred different recipes in it all these ways to approach stuff. It's just like it's it's very particular to us. Like other people aren't really perceiving it that way. They don't use wild game and recipes. They have like a there's like here's how you cook this and we don't really deviate from cooking it this way. where it's like fish on a rack over to fire or fish in the pot of water and very limited diet.

There's no options.

That's a great question, man. There's definitely an envious part to how to live that deliberately. I'm a little bit envious 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 aligned. We're like appreciate the perspective and I appreciate the skill set, but never feeling Yeah, never feeling like a bashful or ashamed or something that this would be something that I would like choose to engage in and this is something that they were engaged in. And I think the 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, is 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.

I see it and I see it in, I see it in varying degrees in different people. Like some kids seem to come out of the box with more of it. Yeah, you know. Yeah, my own.

When we had a daughter, my wife was adamant, you know, early on, since she found out that it was going to be a daughter, like that you will not exclude our daughter in this world that you're in. I was like, of course not, you know, and I don't, but Having in my mind, I don't feel like I've messed this up. I feel like I've put the same emphasis on my, I've three kids, but my older two. The little one just a little bit too little, yeah, I really know what's going on. But the older, I feel like I put the same emphasis on it. And my daughter just isn't demonstrating the same enthusiasm. The her older brother does. And you try to suck 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 leads you to wonder, it's a very small sample size. But when I talk to other parents, parents who are parenting right now, young kids, I just keep encountering other dads who are having the same experience. And it really leads you to wonder what sort of cultural influences are going on there. where it's like the enthusiasm's often times among young girls are not as high as the enthusiasm among boys. It's hard to un-pack. I don't know. It's hard to un-pack everything.

I don't know.

Well, the two I'm talking about are eight and five.

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 in a girl and the girls in the fire up in the boys. Not maybe.

Yeah, because it's like, imagine the, The male perspective on it. Yeah. Is like here's the woman who has everything. Exactly.

I'm not unaware of what you're talking about. I'm sure you're not. No, I know this. Yeah, I even had like a Yeah, I remember it was, yeah, it was kind of like a sex pot kind of. Yeah. Hunter's scene.

I would really like to, you know, I would really like my to, because I'm going to continue leaning on my, uh, under continue leaning on my daughter, uh, because I would really like her. I'm going to keep leaning on her until I feel like she's in the at a age where she can legitimately say she doesn't want to go. Right. Because right now, if I asked her every day, hey, you want to go to school, she'd be having a real delinquency problem. So, you know, you really like, yeah, you make kids do stuff. I took her duck hunting a couple of weekends ago. It was cold morning. And we got 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 because she's cold, like, maybe you feel awful. Right. With my boy, I've been like, shh. It's stuck it up. But her, I'm like, how, man? Yeah. She's all cold now. Yeah. And then it makes it, so you really, there really is a difference. Yeah, there's a difference there. And it's not. You know, of the people by hunting licenses in this country, 90% of people by hunting 90% are males, right? So one in ten licensed holders is a woman. But then there's more women in the men in the, you know, slightly more 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 gather cultures is very normal. to see a division of labor here and to have, like, that men were out hunting and women were 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.

You know, if it is, you know, the minute you say no, someone's going to point out to some variation, but in your experience, you've done several of these trips to these remote jungles. Oh, yeah, but that's just 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's very much the norm that hunting was, you know, a patrilineal descent activity. And all these cultures you go to, you like the cult of the hunters, like a male sort of cult. But the factors that made it that way, okay? You have to assume it comes from some kind of practical factor, right? The factors that made it that way aren't there anymore. And I said it's a difficult thing to unpack. If it winds up being that if I have two boys and one girl for 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 though. I'll never know what really was going on. Like I said, it's hard like unloaded. I wish I could have 100 children like 50 girls and 50 boys and have a bigger sample size. But you know, I do wonder about it. And what's funny too is there's no like at our home, you know, our kids just 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 sausage because I had an Arctic fox one time and I made breakfast sausage out of it. What was that like? I just cut it in with beaver meat, a little bit deer meat, and a little bit of pork fat.

Nope, didn't try the fox on its own. I've eaten a ton of things, but I didn't eat just straight old.

I heard that 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 an 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 them 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 them out. It wouldn't even, no, it wouldn't even register as like a thing that might seem unusual to some people. Right. So the squirrel rabbit, all-manor stuff, right? Just anything. And so I know there's no element of, there's no influence like that with them. There's no influence up. Oh, that's gross, right? You, that's weird. You know, they're dead. We were hunting, they're dead. We went out and we were hunting street pigeons, you know? And they'll be pigeon meat. Where are you doing this? In Montana.

Yeah. There's like a guy at a green side of those, like, infestible pigeons.

Pigeon hasn't flown yet.

Let's see idea. Yeah, the meat's pinkish on the meat's pinkish on the squab. If you want to get squab, we used to go out and catch squabs where We had 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 yes, 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.

Pigeon meat is tougher, grayer has a 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 a pigeon and a quail. had a baby, squabs more like that. It's one of the biggest surprises I had, and that was one of the biggest surprises that I've ever had in game, what if we can count that as a wild game, would be what a squab tastes like. Because I had been for a long time eating street pigeons. Because, you know, street pages that, you know, they're around. Even up in the Missouri Brakes, you get streetpages that nest up in the cliffs. And, you know, there's many places you can hunt streetpages and they become a agricultural pest, and they're not regulated. So there's no close 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 ask them if they could wave a magic wand and make street pigeons go away, most everybody would wave it because they're so costly. They're costly to cities, they're costly to agriculture. So I'd always eat in pigeons, but the minute of discovering like discovering like what a squab was like, which is well known to people in the, you know, fine dining, but I had never had it. It was shocking.

No, I would eat some first. Just to test it. Yeah, make pad tays from it.

It's not bad to put it in a marinade and you can grill it. You want to take a little brass 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 you know grill them over a very hot flame. But what's good is to use it like similar to like stuff with thyme again or whatever to make patees and terrains.

Yeah, up there. The best tarm again, I've ever eaten. And this is, we, this is in the, in our new cookbook too. But I mentioned using tarm again for it, but it's just a dish that's great for regular, like any, any kind of meat, particularly game birds is like, you have, you have the hot pot. Mm-hmm. Yeah, where you like, where you have the, you know, you have like the simmering broth and you have all these raw, like raw slice meats you dip in there. Mm-hmm. The best time I've ever had is just like that. It's all the worldly. It's just kind of like, when you slice it thin and cook that way, it just kind of vanishes on your tongue. It's a very, very tender meat. You can almost kind of mash it up. I think you hear a lot of gambers, people describe tarm again, and treat street pigeon. A lot of gambers, people describe as livery, diving ducks being livery, because it's like a texture, thing to it, and then a strength of flavor, and a darkness of color. Um, and those, and you know, and people make a lot of patates live, right? So those birds that have that quality oftentimes, they just, they, they can find their way into patates. So we also have recipes for that. Like how to do patates from using all, all manner of me.

No, but we have bear recipes. Is there a difference? You know, brown, but black bears are, Among people who know blackbirds are widely accepted as being good to eat. If you go into, if you go to, earlier I mentioned Daniel Boone. So if you go into that, like the frontier era of American history, right, which preceded just these little lingo terms, the frontier era of American history preceded the mountain man era of American history, like the eastern settlements, right? If you read about Daniel Boone's area, You know, early 1700s up into, uh, you know, up into the Revolutionary War, bear me was the most popular meat on the frontier. Black bears.

Yeah, preferred. It's over-ventison. Really? Yeah. People hunted deer to sell deer hides and they would eat the deer meat. People hunted bears so that that's what they like to eat. Hmm. Yeah, just like, it's just 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 diets that the thing you run in with brown like when we use it when we use it turn brown like brown bears kind of almost like a like It's used amongst hunters a lot, but it's all one species. So whether you got a grizzly bear in Wyoming or brown bear on Kodiak, it's taxonomically, it's regarded as a single species. People call brown bear. A brown bear is a grizzly, you'll get all kinds of people right now to say about various points to this, but debating various aspects of this. A brown bear is a grizzly with access to marine resources where 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 art at coast and you saw a grizzly there you'd be like well he has access to marine resources he can eat a beached whale whatever but he's a grizzly So like brown bears kind of extend right from, you know, northern BC up around and and hook around into the bearing sea, but at some point there's not brown bears anymore and they're huge. They tend to be big 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 aware, like in the social media world, nowadays, you'll have people with a killer 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, do you're in for a pound a day? That's true, right? And then there's no salvage requirement on it. There's no salvage requirement on it.

Depends there's some areas that have zero some areas you know typically Typically, no, but there are areas that do have salvage requirements. Where I have a cabin, there's a salvage requirement on bear me in the spring, because in areas where bears, so that's a black bear. But yeah, your cabin is, there's no, no, that there's island by island. So some islands go like the ABC islands, like, like, you know, you go to admiral to island, and admiral to 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 Willes is a black bear island. Admiralty's a brown bear island and you know, it kind of depends on how much seems to maybe depend on how much like open 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 and the fall there wouldn't be a salvage requirement because when they're eating dead salmon their flesh can become not good.

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 in their fat. I've watched even wolves eat in salmon that were so rotten that they're like lapping it up. where it just turns into a gray mush. And the bear's, 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, they'll just eat eggs, right? But as the fish run dies down, they just start eating rotten fish. I can't remember how we got talking about quality of food. Oh, where you guys think what? So even like these bones, buckboden. who, you know, I said he's picked the head meat off a Wolverine school to eat it. Buckbone and said he 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 in ones. The, you know, it's talking about like grizzlies up on the north slope of 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 that killed one over a dead cow one time. He killed one of those scavenging a rotten cow and he had a hard time with the meat. But generally bears that aren't eaten marine resources are pretty, like, are phenomenally good.

That's it's a great subject and it's hard to It's hard to approach because there's so you 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 a farmer? Here's a person who's bringing animals into life He's propagating breeding animals with soul 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 a celebration, you know? When you're trying to sell it, sell a pickup truck, right? If you can tie it to a rancher, it makes that pickup truck see more legitimate. That's celebrated character and people like, oh, he's an old cowboy. Yeah. And we like that. It's like, what is, and not to, I'm definitely not knocking them. 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 remain celebrated. And then you get into the idea of what, and when it comes to American wildlife, where we have a population of wildlife, 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 because of the death.

No, it seems that it gets much worse and more contentious. The less the pop. If the American population is looking at something that they recognize as game, they feel different. Right. Things that they don't recognize as game, that they don't readily recognize as game. to see that death is more abhorrent to them even if it is being treated as game but like right you know 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 tail deer people look at that they see this animal that they perceive to be very abundant in the case of white tails 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 things that where 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 the 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 a hippopotamus. You can't look at that and it's hard to see that as the harvest of game. It becomes something very different. We've watched it happen with bears. 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 where they for a long time you know historically they would have a bear season. They would lose the bear season that the bear season would go away because of a of a resource scarcity. Then later they would recover the resource and want to re initiate 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 are hard to get on board with it. I don't know if 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 Indian-sized hunk of land 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 area surrounding it. But there we had a period where we weren't, you know, we stopped grizzly hunting because the animals are being overharvested habitat destruction 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.

No, people just recently protested the killing of tiger of a tiger and India that had killed 13 people.

This was the interesting year. I don't mean that. Well, let me finish my thought. And I don't want some chaos. I might call it interesting, but Washington State had its first mountain line. about mortality like we're mountaineering killed a human for the first time and it was ninety four years and organism and then organ had its first in state history yeah and um... with the one of Washington killed a person they track the line down and killed the line and the state fishing game department got you know predictably like a bunch of blowback for having killed it now talking to someone who's involved with that and i'll say not 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.

Yeah, 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 Mountlands, you have rapidly expanding Mountland populations. There's a lot of Mountlands. Mountlands 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 as a game animal. 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 lines. I personally welcome the return of mount lines to any suitable habitat where there's enough space for them to live without causing you know undue friction by them budding up against human interests and I encourage people who are in areas that are being caught recolonized by mount lines to you know practice some level of tolerance and use best best use practices or best case practices of around to like a void conflict right same thing with bears like I 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

I like them. I was eating mountain lines long before I ever hunted mountain. I've hunted one mountain line in my life, and I've eaten a 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.

Yeah. Among, among poundsmen, like, among people who deal lines is widely known that it's a very good meat. But I was introduced to it that way. There's a place, but when I was little in Missouri, Montana, there's a place 20 miles east there called Rock Creek Lodge and their 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 festival is big. It's kind of like turning like this big or head turned into this kind of like biker festival. But it was this this big party in those 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, uh, a pot of like, what looked like pulled pork, you know, bought with barbecue sauce and he had a bunch of buns out and he was just giving it away. And I was eating it and he was telling me how it was mountain land meat and he was saying, you know, he's, he's saying like balls in the fall and pussy in the spring, you know, the breed mountain land there. And that was the first time I had mountain land. 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 line tag. And she asked him, what do you do with all that meat? And he didn't want it. So she gave her phone number. And when he got his line, he gave us the whole damn thing. And so we ate that whole mountain line. Then I came into other mountain line meeting 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 line than buy pork. 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 to cook a cook so it'll have, you know, it's probably gonna have trick analysis. So you got to cook at the 1-6, just like all, just how pork used to be. Cook it, sear it, the fats good, the meat's good, we cook it down, make all kinds of preparations with the cook down. My kids, they eat a bunch of wild, they eat a bunch of mountain line meat, you know, well cooked.

They were like the people that were upset about that were really like struggling to describe why it upset them even a politician appointed out that the person was wearing camouflage because traditionally in Scotland you had with different clothes and like there was no secret that there's 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 make up and it's kind of like a beautiful image set up. She had a high powered rifle, which they're already using out there anyways. And it was just a confusing idea and a confusing image for people. Had it been some old Scottish dude. with his, with his, you know, deer stalker outfit on, but there's something where people are like, uh, why her and why here.

Yeah. That's funny, man. I didn't know that. I didn't know if you.

That's what it surprised me.

It's difficult for me. It's not difficult for me, for someone who doesn't, who doesn't eat me. Right, I can, I don't have any, I don't have a problem with it. Like I'm like, you know, I, my brother said a bass, like I don't know. He said, maybe they have a point. But when it's coming, somebody does eat me to it. Why is it damaged? They're trying to put them to, to condemn hunters who are hunting like a, 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 perspective and and I know what's going on but then so you're like putting yourself out of the person who has opinions of value right just just like let your opinion be known yeah so if you're gonna have that Like, where is the self-examination? Exactly. Where you are, if you're eating meat, 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. Is it better for you that your 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 this 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. I'm involved in this stuff on a daily basis. I can know all that and I can see my place in it. 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. That somehow is off-porting 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 an accessible position for some people to have. It's really hard for me with people that are that are contributing to animal death who want to condemn those who are more willing for whatever reason, willing to excite it about taking part in the process themselves. I gotta find a way to, I gotta find a way to engage with it though, and I need to get a better understanding of it, because the debate isn't going away. I can't keep brushing it off as 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 it to me in a good way. I have, you'll say, like, oh, but they were raised to be eaten. That's a foolish perspective.

I'd probably hear talk to someone like Ricky Jervais about it because I assume that he's articulate about it.

Yeah. In the case of the goat thing, there's this whole 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 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.

Um, 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 sea fares, wailers. who would want to establish food resources along trans-Oceanic routes, so that you could put something there and come back and get it later. Early way there's used to come out of the American Northeast, like all those famous wailing villages in New England, you know, they would go down and stop in. And like, you know, stop in and the gullapagos, whatever, and gather up tortoises that they could flip over in the hole of a boat in the tortoise to stay alive for months on its back. You'd have like a fresh meat resource. And as people who 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 that the vitamin C behaves through the cooking and drying process but like fresh meat you can keep from having scurvy meat became even more important than but people would come in you'd like cut some sheep loose cut some goat's loose on an island and know that they're going to 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. So you have one island that has close proximity to another island that can swim across. Yeah, bump over. And then it destroys native vegetation. They trample birds nest. And so you have many cases where introductions of non-natives, particularly non-native grazing animals, non-native predators will wind up causing like a lot of extinctions of endemic species on islands and crates all kinds of problems.

But I think people look, people look and they look and they're 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 line hunting, There's still killing several hundred mountain lions here a year. People are comfortable with like 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.

It's a new issue. And there's a problem too that I view, and this is coming from There's a problem, I think a lot of people have a very hard time empathizing with people who might be negatively impacted by wildlife as well in the question of the lion issue. Right. Where it's kind of like this idea, like, well, you better suck it up. Yeah. So if you're a rancher and you're running cattle in an 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. It's somewhere to cut a, if someone were to cut a grizzly loose and golden gate state part, right? I don't know. 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 in people are they don't really want to hear about all their people's problems if it doesn't if it doesn't drive with their understanding of what problems are. Yeah. And that's where the issue around grizzly bears and in the delisting. So You know, they were de-listed. They were removed from endangered species, act protection temporarily, because they had met all recovery goals. So when we like, what's the recovered population look like? They mapped out what would look like and we've exceeded that for many years now. And they were de-listed, but then Wyoming and Idaho moved to have a very limited hunt on them. And then they were a federal judge blocked the de-listing, and they went back and listing.

Well, you want to hope that they didn't have one. You want to think that they were just looking at the details of it. But I think there's a suspicion that that person went into that no one damn sure what they were going to do. But you don't really know. A lot of these arguments around, they come down to like technicalities. No one's arguing that the populations were covered.

Yeah, they tend to like, and I don't even call them environmentalists like people who sued a block, the delisting of recovered species. They'll they'll mask a raid 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 going to have human exploitation of this resource, right? That they masquerade that there they have an environmental motivation was 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, in Missouri. 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 that they're probably gonna have a friendly take on it. I think it was a real, it was, the watchin' that happened and that's been happening recently. I think it was a real, a real travesty because there's a couple of things that happen like culturally in areas where you'll, You create a lot of tension with people. What are 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. They might want to see the state exercise and control over where certain populations of large predators are spreading into. And when it winds up being that 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 too. where, I think about what happened with the spot of the owl, right? The spot of the owl, no one can see, no one perceives the spot of the owl as the owl anymore. The spot of the owl has become like a symbol of federal overreach, and you'll find that wolves for a while, become like a symbol of dispute, and people stop liking the animals much, and it becomes like this contentious creature, and I think that we're gonna head that way if we keep if we keep stepping in on wildlife issues with the mentality that we've been approaching the wolf from grizzly issue. And the Northern Great Lakes, the Northern Rockies, soon to be in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem now.

No, people really don't. And I point at all all the time, but that I care about the availability 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. They're major economic drivers. I'm definitely, I'm anything but I'm like, I'm regard myself as a pro wolf person. I regard myself as a pro grizzly person. I cherish every interaction I have with those animals.

I don't have a problem with common resource. But people do have a problem with common resource. And yeah, I'm like pro. I like the insutable habitat. I like to see them present. I also like to see that I also like to see them manage in the way that allows for abundant wild game resources.

Whoa. Or yeah, well, this is part of two hours ago. Well, roll down a little bit.

Well, the reintroduction is only in one area. The great lake, the northern Great Lakes, that was not a reintroduction. There was, you know, a sizeable population. Yeah, well, movements of wolves coming down from Canada and coming back in the northern, the northern continental divide, ecosystem, not a reintroduction. Yeah, the famous case of the famous reintroduction. Yeah, also National Park. It is entirely 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 would have had a natural flow anyway.

You would have eventually, you would have eventually have gotten there anyway. Interesting.

At this particular point, right now, I think that'd be like laughable to act as though they'd be there now. But people, there's no realization that you would have, without the reintroduction, you would have through natural movement have eventually gotten, you know.

I don't want to you know I'm not going to debate the merits of the reintroduction like I said my perspective on it is being a place where supports them yeah my perspective on it is I don't the idea of extinction and regional extirpation 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. Like I said, the idea of sickens me. I 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 and what how we manage all 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 that recovered species. Right. In this case, we're talking about walls and grislies. 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, that they should be managed as a renewable resource.

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 protection. And then when it reaches recovery and the U.S. 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 let's say they're 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 want something to happen. I don't think that then some like an activist judge or or environmental groups or animal rights groups should come in and be like, well, never mind, we're going to pretend that they're not recovered now because we want to prevent the state from doing something that we think is unsavory.

Yeah, but we live in a, we live in a heavily manipulated kind of land, kind of man-made environment now. The idea that things are going to, that we would just let things run their course and watch what happens isn't going to happen. You're still going to have a lot of grizzlies every year are still going to get in trouble. They're still going to get killed. You're still going to have mortality. You're going to have tons of grizzly mortality in tough areas.

It's just like it's a level they're going to have some that you're not going to let it run. As a person as a hunter, I also don't have a problem with and 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 there having the 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 words.

Bill John or Stephenson. Yeah. He's the Arctic explorer.

I've never, I've never killed a wolf, never killed a grizzly bear. Hmm, just haven't have eaten either of them. I ate one coyote. Yeah. Didn't, my, ate it didn't like it. Haven't mess with one sense.

That was Rami, Rami felt he'd taste like bad, Diver Duck. Diver Duck's instillity, Diver Duck's. But no, I haven't done that anymore and haven't included any coyote recipes and there's no coyote recipes in the wild game cookbook either.

Well, you know, in some places it's become a moot point because Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, all have state management evolves. Yeah. All of the things that were all these horrible things that were going to happen when the states resume management evolves didn't materialize.

Yeah, but it was it was going to be the end of wolves, right? It hasn't been in the first few years in the first few years of the wolf seasons. You actually had you actually saw the populations go up with 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 look 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 were using landscape and ways in which they were interacting and avoiding humans. And there's no doubt, too. I have no doubt, too. It'll, the situation will probably in the northern Great Lakes. They, they had state management, law state management, like a bounce is back and forth. You're going to, you're going to eventually, let me kind of depends on how the political wings blow. But you're eventually going to wind up with it there, and you're not going to see wolves vanish from the landscape. You know, you just not. If grizzly bears wind up doing it, you're still going to see, you're going to see gradually expanding populations of grizzly bears, despite the fact that they're using limited harvest to achieve certain management objectives, is not going to be in the world. It's just not.

That's one thing that people, that's one thing that people hope, and again, people aren't really, a lot of people looking from the outside in aren't very sensitive to it, to the idea of the way 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, right? And it's an issue. Time will tell where that line's up.

Well, I watch that closely though, I don't feel it being another country, you know, you don't have that sense of being that other country 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 is closely and I don't know all the factors that play as well as I do here.

Yeah, I haven't been charged by them. I wouldn't change the thing, man. Yeah, you were charged by them. I like having, I like every encounter and every mix up. And it's really, it's like deeply complicated stuff. And when top of these things, it's also, they become Like everything, they become a proxy. We're engaged in debate about what is, you know, we're engaged in debate about like conflicting views on wildlife and these animals step into 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, her 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 should be around wildlife and be impacted by wildlife? And so 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. You could have a huge argument, you could be in a lot of tension with your spouse, and it springs up and debate about how best to load the dishwasher, or who is supposed to pick up the kid from school. And it always finds a place to live. And right now, we're like, this argument about American wildlife and what is our relationship to it has found its place to live right now around large predators.

And in Scotland, it's found its way to live around a feral goat on an island.

Yeah, as now that I have kids, I've, it's changed a little bit. I view it 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 you know, and I view it like as I'm sure you do, 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 this intense interest in lifestyle and have the ability to like introduce people to all these different ideas, right? So yeah, I can have those two things simultaneously. It's the kind of longing to be home more, but enjoying being out. I think if the longing to be home more would override that someday it might change it, but right now I'm, you know, I 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 in them. Yeah, kind of bumps me out a little bit.

Yeah. Thousand years old. Yeah, I'll say. But that's a run to stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah, beautiful experiences, man. And then the, you know, to eat the way I eat and live the way I eat. It's, yeah, I feel fortunate all the time.

Yeah, I think it's important to point out that my love of hunting and of fishing 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 have 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, well, 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 ecological picture, right? If it does feel that way and that seems to be true, how is it that, like, why is that, right? And it was pushing at those edges that I eventually developed away 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 talk to them, a thing that they appreciate is just that someone is articulating to them something that they felt to be true and new to be true, but just hadn't had the time or, you know, to 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 been like, I certainly have not invented some way of thinking about it. Like, elbow, leopold, and, you know, theater or roles belt, Gifford Pincho, throughout history, like Jim Harris and Tom Aguaine 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 like, I'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 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 that stuff gets created because it does have a shock value to it. And I would think that that minus the camera A lot of minus 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.

Yeah, I think there's some of that. I think there's some of that. I think there's also a thing that happens with people who feel under attack. 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 feel like you're being attacked, you feel like you're being pigeonholed stereotyped. A response is to cram it right back down. someone else's throat, right? You're like, well, I'll show you, and there's definitely that stuff. You fall into this, I'll stick into them, you know, fuck them. Like, I'm gonna, you know, I'll show them how we really are, right? And you get into this kind of dialogue thing. It's a lot more painful, I think. Maybe not more painful. It's definitely more hard to be like, okay, let's talk about this for real. This is really something we need to discuss. Let's dig in and discuss it. And I think that a lot of people feel like that hunting feels like something that's natural with them. They like to do it. And they don't feel the need to take the time to explain it. And when question and when press to explain it, they maybe kind of lash out.

Well, everyone could come in. It's a move point because 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 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, Use the wind up with the same number. You'd have one up with the same number of turkeys being killed. It would just be that you would have less opportunity. You'd 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 because everybody will not. When I do the stuff that I do, like in writing a wild game cookbook, I'm doing two things. And writing a wild 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 of what I am is I'm like having a conversation with people who live this lifestyle. Those are people that I relate to. want to represent the world in the way that it like enhances their lives, provide education, right, and share my experiences with an audience of people that I recommend is a tribe that I'm part of, which would be like American hunters and anglers. And I'm presenting them, like doing a cookbook, I'm presenting them, like best practices, how to sort of like live the best version of a wild game lifestyle that they can. Here's a way to think about an approach wild game. But also, the secondary part what I'm doing is presenting a world to people who might be unfamiliar with it. 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 introducing them and bringing them into the natural world and bringing them into engagement with nature. And I do view and hope that that will happen. What will happen in some grand scale where we'll have hundreds of millions of hundreds in this country now? 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 exercise taxes on sporting goods equipment. If the more people that are engaged with this activity, I think the better it winds up being for American wildlife.

But I don't say that this is the only way to do it.

I said, yeah, I'm pretty happy with my diet. Right now. Yeah. But yeah, I watch that kind of stuff. And I'm curious about it. But I don't take it as a personal insult by me stretch now. If everybody switched to lab created meat, but I still had the, and I still had the ability to continue eating how I eat and living how I live. It's like I don't view that as being a future problem.

Yes. Okay. For starters, yes. You know that you just pull up an article about wolves. You know I sell like every article from mainstream news sources to get the involves wolves you'll you're kind of detect the bias of the individual 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, all right. Elk are missing from 80 plus percent of their historic range in the lower 48, right? But we have, you know, you know, it's very exciting. I have a quarter million of them living in Colorado, you know, some states got 100,000, 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 slaughter of the market hunting era when people could shoot meat and sell it into urban meat markets, right? They eliminated American wild game before we figured out how to do what at the word I keep using all the time now, which is like regulated harvest, regulated management. So all that stuff was gone. There were states where there was no deer hunting. At the time of European contact, we had turkeys in 39 states. It got wheeled down to turkeys in 19 states. You know, I have turkey hunting seasons in 49 states. We've done a tremendous job of recovering wildlife. particularly a tremendous job of 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 interests. So yeah, we've created turkey hunting seasons in 30 states. So yes, you can recover what you can like do things a wildlife and like create resources. The fact that we now, we used to argue about what's going to happen with deer. We're going to like drive deer to extinction in certain states or extra patients, certain states. Now our big argument is what do we do is have in 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've 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 us 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. They think could support the animals and providing the expertise and financial support and all that stuff like bringing those things. But generally you wind up worried because of settlement cities and suburban areas, we want it with fewer and fewer places where we can go and do it. So to really fill in the map 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 in a lot of other stuff, and there's like the wild sheep foundation, right? They're trying to do the same thing with big horn sheep. There is not even social attitudes. There it winds up being disease. Like they spent some domestic sheep. Yeah, their main, like the main problem preventing us from recovering big horn sheep is disease types of pneumonia that come from domestic sheep. Wow. And people, you know, to go in and say to someone 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 four bears who've been sheep ranchers here for 120 years or whatever, but we would like to try to recover American wildlife and bring big horns back this mountain range and that's going to require you moving the 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 don't get pissed about turk you know

Yeah, and look at what's going on with just allowing, you know, allowing bikes in the walk out of Yellowstone National Park. It's that's been an issue. For a quarter century now. People are 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? There's like people don't want to be inconvenience by wildlife. These are places where I would be like in that area. I'd really like to see like one of one of Bison leaves the park. He stops being a wild animal and becomes livestock.

I mean, I know it's just a long story. Too long. Yeah, we're working with having the it's too long. We're working with having the founder on our show.

There's a lot of suspicions and controversy and it's an idea that a lot of people are uneasy with but the problem is not the problem. they have a they have funding and have a thing where they're when land 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 at why it's 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 in rural areas like cattle ranching And to see these areas returning to a wild landscape is threatening to people. From the hunter perspective, is there a lot of places that people used to be able to hunt. And the American Prairie Reserve is allowing hunting to go on. And people are coming in and saying, well, they need to make sure they need to assure us that hunting will be allowed here in perpetuity. and because we're suspicious about what's going on. So there's a lot 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 is something that most people are going to look at and be pretty comfortable with be like okay your guy or an organization you have money and when a ranch comes up for sale you buy it on the open market seller names is price you pay the price is now your land 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.

And there's a thousand more aspects to this. There's a thousand more aspects to this. There's a thousand more aspects to this. There's a thousand more aspects to this. It's a rich subject that I'd love to get into more about. Next time I come on. Okay. Next time you come on. It would take like an hour to explain the situation.

The long-term play is that over time you would assemble a chunk of the great planes 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 there was a version they don't like to talk about that there was a version this called the Buffalo Commons that happened long ago where a There was a social scientist named 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 areas on the Great Plains were the population was shrinking. So there's a lot of counties on the Great Plains, where through various 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 going to have this rare case in which a landscape sort of accidentally rewilded okay where everyone left which is not a story we're familiar with when you look at what happens so wild lands you know across the world right the general stories like people move in a wildlife moves out so this idea became only the buffalo commons okay and that and it just so happens that that idea that idea kind of centered around this area on Jordan, Montana, right? Because you have large tracks of federally managed public land up there. You had a lot of like ranch land that wasn't that expensive and people could buy it. And that was like the seed of the idea. I think that now it was such an unpopular notion because it had to do with like economic decay, right? And shrinking towns and reduced resources for public education and all the kind of stuff that comes from having 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 Kittridge, a western writer who deals with a lot of landscape and environmental issues was talking about, uh, in the wake of the Buffalo Commons idea and 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 like the agricultural producers and ranchers were celebrated and they 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 eliminate your presence on this landscape. And we don't, in fact, value what you did. And we're going to try as hard as we can to undo what you did. Because we now view it as you did your people did the wrong thing. We're going to correct that wrong. And some people, it's like this insulting idea. A lot of other people, they celebrate it. Because they're like, hey, if it's for sale and I buy it, It's mine.

I want to see the buffalo. Yeah. In my perspective, my perspective on wildlife has been 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.

Well, you can buy it. You can come to my house. Yeah, you can go and buy the farm raise version.

Yeah. Well, no, not that case, but like, you know, you can buy, but then it's that's the whole conversation around the captive server industry, but yeah, you can buy, you can buy elk that are raised in a ranch environment, right?

Well, yeah, but they're not. I mean, they're, you know, those places are tested and one that hurts that have CWD in our destroyed.

That takes place in Australia and New Zealand where they have these thriving, very robust populations of non-native wildlife. And the government has always, and does now do a lot of cooling of these animals. They don't have predators. They have extremely, they're very fond of extremely high reproductive rates. And the government is actively engaged, around the clock. gunning wildlife from helicopters, just like shooting this letting around shoot and leave it throughout because you have to because they're trying to, you know, you have to but they do that because they're trying to, you know, protect certain ecosystems and and keep like a lot of, you know, native plant species from going to extinct and fragile environments and all kinds of reasons. Because there's no death, right? There's no predator control on them, which is huge. And then in a lot of places, just completely inadequate amount of hunting. And the thing that hunters have always been able to say in Australia and New Zealand is they've been able to, in a culture where particularly in Australia, like a culture that seems to be not as friendly toward hunters as they are in America, you're able to say, well, we're participating in wildlife control. And then later when people come up and they talk about, we know we're going to get serious about this and we're going to really actively with the goal of like totally eliminating these species. People are justifiably made uneasy about it because it's a thing that they've come to appreciate and rely on and a resource that they want to use. And now they're like, whoa, wait a minute. I do like being here and it winds up putting you in this weird like you know winds up putting you in a weird rhetorical position, but I understand where they're coming from because if 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 in ethos. I also if someone said hey they're gone now, I would be bombed. Yeah, I own turkeys. I was saying earlier we had turkeys in 39 states at the time of European contact. We have turkeys in 49 states now. I hunt turkeys and 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-native because I don't want to wind up with sort of a just like monolithic wildlife pattern where these same super resilient adaptive species such as Canada, geese and rats and white tail deer take over the entire country and pigs. Yeah, so you like, yes, I want like the variety, so I'm generally like antagonistic toward nonnatives, but if someone came and said, okay, you know what, we're going to actually go in and kill off all the turkeys and those 10 states that historically didn't have turkeys, I would say like, you know, really? Because I've kind of grown really like those turkeys, and they're not really causing a problem. Right. And I think that some people, you know, if you, the New Zealand Hunter and Australian Hunter, I don't think anyone's arguing there should be no control. But I think that they are, like, let's find a balance. I think we can find a balance with some availability animals on the landscape since they've been here since the beginning of our, you know, experience on this continent. If there's some availability of animals, let's find like a reasonable compromise here.

Yeah, we both been here. Our ancestors have been here 1100 years. They brought the pig with them. How am I a native Hawaiian in the pig has the go? Right. And there's like, maybe you people ought to go. I always like again, man, I always instinctively when I hear stuff I instinctively lean in on I instinctively lean in from the perspective of you know instinctively lean in from the perspective of the the hunter-nangler you know and like and and and I love all these little debates and I think that they're all really helpful and interesting but um not I feel like I can recognize their pain and I can also look far away and and laugh at the absurdity of it like I even had a guy right me from Australian say this is a real bomber 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 someone around and now I just got to come out and say that and that's a bummer.

There's no way to do that though. 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, there is talk of a lot of people looking to our pushing for this idea that in areas that have too many white tail deer. There's people who are really pushing to reopen up the sale of wild harvested deer. as a solution to deer overpopulation, but for me, from my perspective and from the damage that was caused by unregulated wildlife slaughter, I'm very, very uneasy with it, and I do not picture myself ever coming around and support the idea that we would start marketing, that we would start marketing wild servants.

And it's just, it would increase the commodification of wildlife. Yeah. And that's something that, and that's something that also just uncomfortable with in general the commodification of wildlife. And I think about resource availability. for hunters and I think that a lot of people who enjoy access to certain areas now to go hunting to like hunt for themselves and their family that the minute you made it be that those deer had a dollar value attached to them that there would be a lot less opportunity for people who choose to hunt to feed themselves because it would all of a sudden be like why would I let you come in or allow you to come in and use a resource when I'm just going to 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'm extremely uncomfortable with it. Though I see keep, it's an idea that keeps popping up because we have in some areas. Um, and I hate to say that I hate topple. I always do me deer. There's too much this too much that because like by who's measurement, but in some areas we really do, especially when you start getting into, uh, to issues like Lyme disease prevalence and ticks and, and starvation and just the possibility of other disease outbreaks and the spread of certain wildlife diseases. There's some areas that like, by any reasonable measurement, we have to meet deer.

Thank you. I appreciate it. And I am glad you talk me to doing it. It's been, in terms of all the things I do, The TV writing is the thing that I enjoy doing it the most. There's a lot of things I enjoy having done it more, but the thing that I enjoy actually doing it, I'm just having a smile on my face doing it.

Do you know the first time I ever heard the word podcast? This is 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 this ship. You were into this ship before I ever heard the word. Wow. That's crazy. I kind of kind of dull back around and plug my book again. Yeah, please do. Okay. So it's called the meat eater fishing game cookbook recipes and techniques for every hunter and angler. Got a picture of that, Jamie. BAM. There it is. I say one last quick thing about it releases right now releases this week on November 20 but it's available for preorder everywhere and it's broken into a bunch of chapters where it has big game, small-ford game like rabbits, hairs, squirrels, upland birds, waterfoil, freshwater fish, saltwater fish, shellfish and crustaceans. Reptiles and amphibians all your bullfrog stuff is in there and you want to 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 are very unwelcome. What are you hunting with? I'm a variety of ways most of you frog gig. I don't care where you live like there's a lot of people live in a city like dude. I'd love to go out and get some wild game. I can't go get an elk. How do I do that? You could be out gig in frogs at night, no one would even know. frog gig and crayfish grab and we talk about all this kind of stuff in the book. So it explains everything from how to 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 tail deer everything from the tongue to the rear shank. how like specific recipes on how to do it, and also just general best practices and guidelines around how to handle the ingredients, and then all the stuff around all the substitutions. So there's no such thing as an elk heart recipe, right? It's like how to like handle game hearts, whether it's milder or white tail, whatever, like how to approach a heart, and an attitude toward wild game that is not that's cut specific, not species specific. and it was fish too. I'm not comfortable with that. You have like, those are the wall-eye recipe. This is a blue-goal recipe, but how to handle varieties of fresh water fish and what kind of recipes you can use that are interchangeable depending on where you live and what you use and all includes all that. And then real pretty pictures. Beautiful. You can see Janice but tell us how to do the tail-skining method on squirrel. And don't care where you live, you damn share live near squirrels.

Not me. Oh and you know in the end the guy that got the disease means squirrel brains. Yeah nothing to do with squirrel brains.

Yeah. What did he have? Everybody sent me that article. Yeah. There's no demonstrable correlation. It's like 30, 30 Americans a year. You know, wind up with that form of. Crumbs fell. Yeah. Yeah. 30 Americans wind up with it. It just has to be that this dude sometime in his past.

And it's the thing that happens to people, but it was 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 people are really saying, there's no obvious relationship here.

Yeah. There's plenty of people that get the same thing that haven't been eating squirrel brains.

Yeah. And the article got a lot more love when it was that some squirrel hunter died from eating squirrel brains than it did when the later subsequent pieces came out wherever it was like, whoa. Yeah. We don't really like, you know, squirrels are cute.

Very good. There's not a person in the world. You know, we have in the book in the cookbook as we have on how to do buffalo buffalo wings hot wings. How to do hot legs with squirrels. Yeah. We're eating it there tonight. Really. Yeah. So it's just like you're making rules on shooting squirrels.

Yeah. So if you're in New York, you know, you have a season, um, you know, squirrel season in most state. So it's either, it's either one of the other way. Either there's a season in a bag limit or the treated as a non-game species. So here in California, um, there's a squirrel season. There's a bag limit. I think it's four a day, four squirrels a day and one season. You know, a season's usually run from some time in August in September into winter into January, February. So where I grew up September 15th.

Yes, so archery and falconry. So August 4th for archery and falconry falconry. Falcon. Then you got to go to the tree squirrel zone map. Right. But in your state, jackrabbits are open. For instance, your state, jackrabbits are manages non-game. I mean, there's no bag limit and open you around, like cotton tails, no shoes that have different management. In a lot of states, pine squirrels are 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'd be listed as a non-game species, but fox squirrels and gray squirrels be as a 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 and eat them? No, no. When you live in there, I caught some there and ate them. But I would hunt out of the city at my buddy's farm in smaller places. So where I was born in Michigan, the squirrel season was September 15th and it ran into January five squirrels a day possession limit of two bag limits. The state I live in now Treats squirrels is non-game species so there's no closed season and no baglement because there's not really There's not of they're not widely distributed and they're not commonly hunted All right, but Yeah, most places they have them and they're managed and you go out and buy a small game license for 12 bucks or whatever get your hunter safety Get yourself a 22 or a shotgun and you can become a squirrel man

Yeah. Yeah, he blows. Yeah, he carries a cow horn around. I think the I think on it's in a show far, right? Is that right for? And when you blow the show far and like a Jewish in a synagogue, is that what it is? Thanks call to show fire like you blow the rams they blow rams horn. It's not it's not a cow. Oh, yeah, it's not a cow harm. It's a ran horn. You know in the end of um You know in the end of no country for old men. Yeah Have we talked about this before? He talks about his father Riding out ahead of him with a horn of fire And then when he relates the dream, it's in the book and it's in the movie. The Tommy 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 now he's 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 it a little bit of air in there so it could continue to smolder and you'd carry that horn all day full of embers And at night, to 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 them 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 Murphy just blows it, let squirrels know he's coming.

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.