Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 118: Open to Nuance
Transcript
- 0:08Speaker 1: This is me eat your podcast coming at you shirtless,
- 0:12Speaker 1: severely bug bitten and in my case, underwear listening podcast.
- 0:18Speaker 1: You can't protect anything. First thing I want to talk about,
- 0:25Speaker 1: honest is a thought of us day because I was
- 0:27Speaker 1: on the airplane. There's a dude next to me who
- 0:33Speaker 1: wants a beer, but he only wants to beer. Like
- 0:37Speaker 1: it's provisional on what beer they have. Okay, sounds like me, yeah,
- 0:43Speaker 1: but what is the world coming to. It's like like
- 0:46Speaker 1: people like I want a beer, okay, that you decide
- 0:48Speaker 1: you want to beer, and it's it's like if you
- 0:50Speaker 1: decide you want to beer, it's like you decide you
- 0:52Speaker 1: want to beer absent what beer is available, and then
- 0:56Speaker 1: you would hone in on now that I'm now that
- 0:59Speaker 1: I've just side that I want this beer, which I'm
- 1:01Speaker 1: going to have. I want to know what ones I
- 1:04Speaker 1: can choose from. But this guy was like, I don't
- 1:06Speaker 1: know if I really want a beer. It depends on
- 1:09Speaker 1: what beers I can get. And your dead is like
- 1:15Speaker 1: driving around somewhere and you're like, man, I love to
- 1:17Speaker 1: have a cup of coffee. I'm like, there's a Conico
- 1:19Speaker 1: right there, and you're like, yeah, you know, gass Asian coffee.
- 1:22Speaker 1: Let's look for a Starbucks. Let's go so far. You
- 1:24Speaker 1: can't because he's on an airplane. He can't go look elsewhere.
- 1:28Speaker 1: It would be like knee waking up in the morning
- 1:30Speaker 1: in a remote area with one gas station and me saying,
- 1:34Speaker 1: my god, do I want a cup of coffee? And
- 1:36Speaker 1: you're saying the only coffee you could possibly have is
- 1:40Speaker 1: from Bob's gas station. To me say like, never mind,
- 1:44Speaker 1: I don't want a coffee no way. It's like the world.
- 1:49Speaker 1: It's like something's got to give with this beer situation. Yeah. See,
- 1:52Speaker 1: for me, it really watered down a cup of coffee anymore.
- 1:55Speaker 1: There's certain breakfast joints I don't go to because I
- 1:57Speaker 1: got really watered down coffee. So I would not have
- 2:00Speaker 1: a cup of coffee rather than not have one at all. Yeah,
- 2:05Speaker 1: I don't, Okay, come on, please in your camp. Yeah no.
- 2:11Speaker 1: The other day, in fact, we were, um, we're out
- 2:14Speaker 1: in a small town in Montana. We're out specifically for
- 2:16Speaker 1: bear hunting, and um, I was like, I want a
- 2:19Speaker 1: cup of coffee. The hotel we stayed at, awful Coffee,
- 2:23Speaker 1: went to another place awful Coffee. I went to three
- 2:25Speaker 1: places awful coffee. Didn't drink any of it, about three cups.
- 2:30Speaker 1: I'm not gonna touch it. Yep. And the first thing
- 2:33Speaker 1: I said on the third place, I said, can you
- 2:34Speaker 1: make me a good cup of coffee? He's like yeah,
- 2:36Speaker 1: he goes back there pours a huge, tall cup of
- 2:39Speaker 1: coffee that tastes like cardboard walked out. Can't do it.
- 2:45Speaker 1: I'm in that camp. So if you're in a restaurant
- 2:47Speaker 1: and you're like, man, a beard sound good for dinner
- 2:50Speaker 1: with dinner and then they're like, yeah, you take a
- 2:54Speaker 1: look at the menu. If they're like and if all
- 2:55Speaker 1: they have is I don't know your you know, beard choices.
- 2:58Speaker 1: But let's just say all they have like the big
- 3:00Speaker 1: giant macro bruise and would you say, I'll pass? And
- 3:06Speaker 1: how cocktail glass of wine? I'll pass because they made
- 3:09Speaker 1: too many of those. They made too big of a
- 3:12Speaker 1: container of that beer. No, it's the flavor, bro it's
- 3:19Speaker 1: carl No, nothing, it's it's so ridiculous, man, I don't know.
- 3:25Speaker 1: I guess there's times where, you know, for example, I'm
- 3:29Speaker 1: thinking about working outside on a real hot day the
- 3:35Speaker 1: end of the day, all right, so I'm thinking, you know,
- 3:38Speaker 1: like biling. Hey, al right, you're out throwing bails and
- 3:42Speaker 1: you're sweaty and dirty and you got you got hay
- 3:46Speaker 1: and like every crevice of your body and your clothing
- 3:50Speaker 1: and like, man, a brew at the end of this
- 3:54Speaker 1: day would be like heaven, you know, I could go
- 3:57Speaker 1: for one. Uh, in that circumstance, you pull out like
- 4:02Speaker 1: I'm not going to name brands, but any brand my
- 4:05Speaker 1: least favorite beer, if it's cold and you're like, here
- 4:08Speaker 1: you go, I'm gonna I'm gonna be very grateful for that.
- 4:11Speaker 1: On the flip side, there are times where it's like
- 4:14Speaker 1: I could go for a beer if there's the right beer,
- 4:17Speaker 1: the right beer, and if it's not there, I'm I'm
- 4:21Speaker 1: good without. So I don't have a strong opinion. I
- 4:24Speaker 1: think it's more contextual, and I'd say on the airplane,
- 4:27Speaker 1: you're kind of a captive audience, and depending on what
- 4:30Speaker 1: kind of day you've had, maybe you're in Camp A
- 4:33Speaker 1: or maybe you're in Camp BE. That is why I
- 4:35Speaker 1: was reserving my contribution here. Okay, On a somewhat related note,
- 4:40Speaker 1: I have multiple times, I have multiple times said that
- 4:43Speaker 1: I wanted that a great name for a bar would
- 4:47Speaker 1: be the Wet spot. Turns out that a lot of
- 4:49Speaker 1: guys rolled in, and there are already multiple wet spots
- 4:52Speaker 1: around the country. There's a wet spot bar at mile
- 4:56Speaker 1: marker on the Highway forty nine and North Dakota, and
- 5:02Speaker 1: there's a wet spot Barron, Texas. So I know what
- 5:06Speaker 1: the moral of that story is. You might go check
- 5:08Speaker 1: him out. You might have to go check him out.
- 5:09Speaker 1: And just because you have a good idea and you
- 5:11Speaker 1: think it was yours, oftentimes it's not. Um pete munich
- 5:19Speaker 1: are you are? You? Can you guys talk about your
- 5:23Speaker 1: new thing you're making you guess still be all like
- 5:24Speaker 1: a squirrelly about it? No, we can talk about a
- 5:27Speaker 1: couple of things, talking about tent. Yeah, okay, so now
- 5:30Speaker 1: you can say that because for a long time you've
- 5:31Speaker 1: been like like tippy toey No, not a tent. Oh,
- 5:34Speaker 1: there's there's other things tippy toe about now, but you've tiptoed.
- 5:39Speaker 1: You've like now tippy toe about but you've tiptoed. You're
- 5:42Speaker 1: not tiptoey about how you guys are gonna make a
- 5:44Speaker 1: new tent. Correct tent is available for preorder right now
- 5:48Speaker 1: and there's shipping in a month. There on the way,
- 5:51Speaker 1: so genuine stone glacier tent. Tell me, um, tell me
- 5:55Speaker 1: what's awesome about? When were you last on with us
- 5:57Speaker 1: A long time ago? No, no, not too long a
- 6:00Speaker 1: year ago with Roscoe, because then you guys will be
- 6:02Speaker 1: in tiptoey. You were like, let's just say it might
- 6:05Speaker 1: be a thing to put in a backpack. There's a
- 6:09Speaker 1: lot of things on the drawing table right now that
- 6:11Speaker 1: go in a backpack and out of a backpack. Do
- 6:16Speaker 1: you have to be tiptoey or not? Um about a
- 6:19Speaker 1: couple of things. Yeah, we're not. We're there's a couple
- 6:21Speaker 1: of irons in the fire, some things on the drawing
- 6:24Speaker 1: board that we're not publicly talking about yet. But the
- 6:27Speaker 1: tent is uh is ready to go. What's awesome about
- 6:31Speaker 1: the tent? Strength to weight ratio, super lightweight tent and
- 6:35Speaker 1: super strong um generously sized two man four season tent.
- 6:41Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure everybody in this room spent a lot
- 6:43Speaker 1: of time in a tent and being in a small
- 6:44Speaker 1: one not too much fun. So it's a it's a
- 6:47Speaker 1: generously sized genuine two man tent. Dual vestibules, big vestibules.
- 6:53Speaker 1: Four pounds four rounds is minimum trail weight? Was it
- 6:57Speaker 1: way like all in four pounds? Tell bounces sub five
- 7:01Speaker 1: pound four season tent and uh when it's all scrunched
- 7:05Speaker 1: up like how big? Is it pretty typical looking tent stuff?
- 7:10Speaker 1: Sack mm hmmm. I don't know. It's acting like he's
- 7:13Speaker 1: hold a loaf of bread right now. Yeah, big loaf
- 7:17Speaker 1: of bread. But there's only one and if I was
- 7:20Speaker 1: you guys, i'd give one to me. Yeah you got
- 7:23Speaker 1: you got one comment? Okay? Um, but people can go
- 7:26Speaker 1: on and order it right now. Do you feel that
- 7:30Speaker 1: when you look at you, like, wow, it's different than
- 7:31Speaker 1: most tense Yeah. There's a couple of things I really
- 7:34Speaker 1: like about it. Um, I'm six ft two. Most people
- 7:37Speaker 1: are home with their tall guys too, so I do
- 7:39Speaker 1: genuinely like the size of the tent um. There's a
- 7:42Speaker 1: lot of canopy space. When you sit up in it,
- 7:45Speaker 1: You're not crowded by nylon. There's a bit of space
- 7:48Speaker 1: around your head that helps with condensation and moisture. It's
- 7:52Speaker 1: a light color nylon. I spent a lot of time
- 7:54Speaker 1: in Hilliberg tense. Hilliberg's are notoriously dark green nylon, which
- 8:00Speaker 1: can create a bit of like a dark cave vibe
- 8:03Speaker 1: on day seven of a bit of a terrarium inside
- 8:06Speaker 1: area like a hothouse. Yep. So we have white and
- 8:10Speaker 1: gray nylons which a lot of natural light comes through.
- 8:13Speaker 1: Stuff I didn't think about before I was using this tent,
- 8:16Speaker 1: but it actually makes a really big difference. Um as
- 8:19Speaker 1: far as just can't mark. That's a good point that
- 8:21Speaker 1: I never thought of. Is I thought of, like how
- 8:24Speaker 1: much the dark ones can just like you're going there
- 8:27Speaker 1: in the middle of the day to grab something, You're like,
- 8:29Speaker 1: you know, because like what what happens inside there? But
- 8:32Speaker 1: I never thought about light transmission. Yeah, you spend a
- 8:34Speaker 1: lot of time in a tent on some of these hunts,
- 8:36Speaker 1: and it's important be comfortable in there. So yeah, man,
- 8:41Speaker 1: a length is key for longer people because when you
- 8:44Speaker 1: get in there and you sleep bag is touching the
- 8:46Speaker 1: end of that tent, may you wake up with wet cold,
- 8:48Speaker 1: your feet are wet, and your hat's wet. Right, So
- 8:50Speaker 1: it's got a nice garage on it. What do you
- 8:53Speaker 1: mean vestibule, Yeah, super big vestibules, And I love them
- 8:57Speaker 1: because when your backpack hunting and you have a rifle
- 9:00Speaker 1: backpack boots, vestibules are super important, and having a generously
- 9:05Speaker 1: sized one that all of your stuff can comfortably fit
- 9:08Speaker 1: in is really nice to have and not where you
- 9:12Speaker 1: craming in there and the fabrics laying on it all
- 9:14Speaker 1: correct usual last year on your sheep hunt. Yeah, I've
- 9:18Speaker 1: been using it for about a year now. Yep, put
- 9:22Speaker 1: a lot of miles on it. These ten is pretty pricey.
- 9:25Speaker 1: I'm guessing five, don't. They're cheaper than we were not
- 9:30Speaker 1: allowed to use that word. It's less expensive than Pete
- 9:34Speaker 1: went off the competition. Pete went off the went wild
- 9:37Speaker 1: there And I'm not allowed to use a couple of adjectives.
- 9:40Speaker 1: It's the hue glacier that's one of them. That's a
- 9:42Speaker 1: good one not to use. Um, you were just out
- 9:45Speaker 1: bear hunting with the buddy years can can? I can
- 9:49Speaker 1: I talk? I'm not gonna give away your spot, but
- 9:52Speaker 1: we used to do endless amounts of that. Is it
- 9:54Speaker 1: fair to say? You guys are out hike and closed
- 9:56Speaker 1: logging roads? Correct? And when they unclosed logging roads, we
- 10:01Speaker 1: just walk mild I mean miles of those things. But
- 10:06Speaker 1: it works right because when they stabilize those picture if
- 10:11Speaker 1: you will in your mind's eye, listener a logging road.
- 10:15Speaker 1: It's like a two track through the woods, through the
- 10:16Speaker 1: mountains and where it switched backs up hills. Uh, you
- 10:24Speaker 1: have an erosion issue, can have an erosion issue along
- 10:26Speaker 1: some of these things. And so they grade out, they
- 10:29Speaker 1: grade out the banks, and they go to stabilize the
- 10:32Speaker 1: banks with certain types of vegetation. And one of the
- 10:34Speaker 1: types of vegetation that they stabilize a lot of the
- 10:36Speaker 1: banks with as a grass called smooth brown grass. And
- 10:40Speaker 1: when that comes up in the spring, it's just like
- 10:42Speaker 1: what the doctor ordered for bears. They love it. You
- 10:45Speaker 1: find their ships and it's just as like greasy. It's
- 10:50Speaker 1: like black grease. Picture taking a ball of grass and
- 10:55Speaker 1: then dipping it in the thickest, nastiest black grease. And
- 11:00Speaker 1: those are the droppings you find because when they come
- 11:02Speaker 1: out of hibernation or eating all that grass to sort
- 11:05Speaker 1: of get their digestive system cleared out. Yeah, I'm telling
- 11:09Speaker 1: Carlos like a something he doesn't lovest, right, Yeah, you are,
- 11:13Speaker 1: you are. And they love that smooth brown brass. Yeah.
- 11:16Speaker 1: And we've talked, you know, about the adaptability of their diet,
- 11:19Speaker 1: how they have this kind of menu that shifts over
- 11:21Speaker 1: the course of the year, and that initial boost in
- 11:23Speaker 1: productivity that comes with the spring is something not unique
- 11:26Speaker 1: to American black bears either. Um, the work I did
- 11:29Speaker 1: with Asiatic black bears the same kind of thing. They
- 11:31Speaker 1: get that early flush of really nutrient rich spring forage
- 11:37Speaker 1: in the form of vegge. And for people who don't
- 11:40Speaker 1: spend a lot of time thinking about bears or around bears,
- 11:43Speaker 1: you know, you you kind of picture the classic like
- 11:46Speaker 1: bear on the stream bank eating a fish or something
- 11:48Speaker 1: like that, But you don't envision a bear that's almost
- 11:52Speaker 1: in like col mode, just grazing, just sitting there like
- 11:57Speaker 1: like a college, just taking mouthful after mouthful of that grass.
- 12:00Speaker 1: People have ideas of bears, Like the idea that people
- 12:04Speaker 1: have of bears is like something usually that happens to
- 12:06Speaker 1: the bear now and then like yes, now and then
- 12:10Speaker 1: that bear catches the salmon. Well, that bear does a
- 12:13Speaker 1: lot of it's walking in the woods eating vegetation. Uh
- 12:18Speaker 1: So the bear you got, like I would say, over
- 12:21Speaker 1: the years, we had a walking clothes which were called
- 12:24Speaker 1: walking closers, probably a ratio of I bet we walked
- 12:28Speaker 1: a hundred miles of closers per bear that we got.
- 12:34Speaker 1: Though you would know the spots of the bears used
- 12:38Speaker 1: oftentimes to be like they're coming down because they're coming
- 12:40Speaker 1: out of the snow and they're coming down drainages. So
- 12:43Speaker 1: you'd find concentrations of like they're following drainages down where
- 12:47Speaker 1: those drainages would have to be like a culvert going
- 12:50Speaker 1: over the road, and the would be like a bunch
- 12:51Speaker 1: of stabilized areas, and then you find grass patch and
- 12:53Speaker 1: then you'd find droppings on one of those in the
- 12:56Speaker 1: next year that be like droppings there, And there's like
- 12:58Speaker 1: certain spots they go. How many miles did you guys
- 13:00Speaker 1: walk to find one bear? About half of one? Really? Yeah,
- 13:05Speaker 1: we shot this is right away. Yeah, we got pretty
- 13:07Speaker 1: lucky that night. We hunted. I hunting bears pretty much
- 13:11Speaker 1: every day in bear season, and we we knew where
- 13:14Speaker 1: we were going. We were going to a good spot.
- 13:16Speaker 1: And uh we started our hike down the closed road
- 13:20Speaker 1: and I was telling you earlier that there were morals
- 13:23Speaker 1: growing in the road and that was a good indicator
- 13:25Speaker 1: that no one had been out. Yeah, it's really good spot.
- 13:30Speaker 1: Put it in the show notes. He was picked a
- 13:36Speaker 1: couple of Morrel's walking out throad like nobody's been up here.
- 13:38Speaker 1: That's a good sign. And then the cats started. Oh
- 13:43Speaker 1: so you knew there. It was just blanketed on the
- 13:46Speaker 1: I mean you couldn't. You couldn't walk thirty yards without
- 13:48Speaker 1: finding a pile of bear scat. And so you just
- 13:52Speaker 1: have this feeling like, well, there, there are there here,
- 13:55Speaker 1: They're definitely there's definitely a bear or more within a
- 13:59Speaker 1: short distance of us. And yeah, I just came around
- 14:02Speaker 1: one of the first turns in the road. Yeah, we
- 14:05Speaker 1: made an eventually made like a conscious decision to stop
- 14:09Speaker 1: hunting closers two boring. I just felt like we weren't
- 14:12Speaker 1: like really learning anything, weren't really learning anything, and then
- 14:17Speaker 1: started hunting avalanche slides and other kind of stuff. Yeah,
- 14:20Speaker 1: I would say that's my preferred method as well, to
- 14:23Speaker 1: hunt them in the mountains and avalanche slides and play
- 14:26Speaker 1: the spot in stock game. Did you notice how we'll
- 14:33Speaker 1: move on from that for a minute. You know what
- 14:34Speaker 1: I've never asked you about, Michelle. I just noticed, can
- 14:36Speaker 1: I ask you about what's on your wrist? Like take
- 14:40Speaker 1: a left turns out that means no, not well kind
- 14:43Speaker 1: of symbolically in a way, Um, it's a broken arrow,
- 14:46Speaker 1: it's a brand of a ranch. I was really young
- 14:48Speaker 1: when I did this. It's a brand of a ranch
- 14:51Speaker 1: that kind of signified my transition out of northern California.
- 14:55Speaker 1: I left my life and my career there and was like,
- 14:59Speaker 1: I want to go Berienced Wyoming, So moved to Wyoming.
- 15:02Speaker 1: Side Unseen worked at this ranch, had an amazing Yeah
- 15:05Speaker 1: it's um. That was their original brand from nineteen o two.
- 15:08Speaker 1: It was the second oldest dude ranch in the country,
- 15:11Speaker 1: and it was just kind of a big life shift moment.
- 15:14Speaker 1: And you know, why didn't you brand the brand right? Maybe? Um? Yeah,
- 15:22Speaker 1: no real answer for that one, but yeah, it's it's
- 15:25Speaker 1: a little misperceived and left turn, but kind of symbolic right,
- 15:31Speaker 1: super left, super right wing and the sharp left. Did
- 15:36Speaker 1: you notice how I used the word squirrely earlier? I did? Yeah,
- 15:39Speaker 1: I missus. The guy actually wrote in to clarify a
- 15:42Speaker 1: point about he had a couple of points who wanted
- 15:43Speaker 1: to clarify. Um. Two are just observations that you can
- 15:48Speaker 1: feel free to comment on. One is that he says,
- 15:51Speaker 1: I'm missing an important distinction between squirrely and western. Mean,
- 15:56Speaker 1: when someone says things got pretty western or thing he's
- 16:00Speaker 1: got squirrely. Okay, I was arguing that there's sort of
- 16:04Speaker 1: one and the same. He's saying absolutely not. He says
- 16:06Speaker 1: Western is distinct and that it implies a sense of
- 16:11Speaker 1: physical danger or even violence, and squirrely lacks this. Says,
- 16:16Speaker 1: squirrely simply means movements or actions that are erratic or
- 16:20Speaker 1: without obvious direction. Western is more sinister. For example, the
- 16:26Speaker 1: arrow has shot squirrel, he's using in the sentence, the
- 16:28Speaker 1: arrow has shot squirrelly ever since Johanna has stepped on it.
- 16:33Speaker 1: Versus things at the Dirty Shame Saloon got a little
- 16:37Speaker 1: Western when Cal made a pass at that logger's girlfriend.
- 16:42Speaker 1: She says, as a writer, you should know that there
- 16:44Speaker 1: is a nuance here that you need to be aware of.
- 16:48Speaker 1: I think you hit the nail on the head. I
- 16:50Speaker 1: think the the element of the chance of physical danger
- 16:54Speaker 1: is what makes things western. If I was in a
- 16:56Speaker 1: bar and the next I said, man, things got a
- 16:57Speaker 1: little squirrel in that bar, you wouldn't think that. I'm no,
- 17:00Speaker 1: it doesn't really doesn't work. It doesn't mean that someone
- 17:03Speaker 1: got no fight broke out, No, yeah, just got squirrely.
- 17:08Speaker 1: Another point he has is he thinks, oh you know
- 17:11Speaker 1: what I forgot? This has ben long you know, Ben Long,
- 17:14Speaker 1: you know um. Ben Long also says he thinks that
- 17:21Speaker 1: the use of the phrase grand slam beyond baseball came
- 17:26Speaker 1: from a guy like grand slam and hunting stuff like
- 17:29Speaker 1: the turkey Grand slam, sheep sheep grand slam. Um was
- 17:37Speaker 1: really the only too like really recognized, no, really recognized.
- 17:40Speaker 1: But it's a dear one. Yeah, I want to start
- 17:44Speaker 1: a squirrel grand slam. I want to talk about the
- 17:48Speaker 1: world the words squirrely, just real quick here because your
- 17:52Speaker 1: way back on that. Just go ahead there with me.
- 17:54Speaker 1: But when you're meandering through a nice grow oaks, you
- 17:59Speaker 1: might be like, man, looks looking pretty Yeah, if someone
- 18:04Speaker 1: says that to me, I don't think that things that
- 18:06Speaker 1: someone's gonna come up and sucker punched me in the
- 18:08Speaker 1: side of the face. I think that, uh yeah, just
- 18:11Speaker 1: make it sure we're covering the applications of these could
- 18:15Speaker 1: be down in the area and be like, it looks
- 18:16Speaker 1: very western down here, meaning that it evokes the West,
- 18:22Speaker 1: so grand sol Fritz of the Boone and Crockett Club
- 18:26Speaker 1: used grant that he thinks the earliest used to grand
- 18:28Speaker 1: slam for hunting. Boone and Crocket Club. He used to
- 18:31Speaker 1: describe the fort to described to killing the four varieties
- 18:34Speaker 1: of North American wild sheep recognized by BNC records, but
- 18:40Speaker 1: which are doll sheep, stone sheep, rocky, mountain, bighorn, desert
- 18:43Speaker 1: bighorn um. It's said that he later regretted coining the phrase,
- 18:51Speaker 1: and Ben Long editorializes here and he says, I think
- 18:55Speaker 1: that if he were alive today, he would regret it
- 18:57Speaker 1: even more. I don't know about that, because like as
- 19:01Speaker 1: a proud turkey slam holder, I can never remember what
- 19:04Speaker 1: kind of slam I had, slam holder, why do you
- 19:09Speaker 1: think he would regret he doesn't. I don't know. I
- 19:12Speaker 1: don't know why Ben. I don't know why Ben Long
- 19:15Speaker 1: fields that Grand sol Fritz would regret it today. He
- 19:19Speaker 1: must be referring to why he regretted in the first place,
- 19:21Speaker 1: because I think that he feels that we guess on
- 19:24Speaker 1: my part would be a guess would be that it
- 19:26Speaker 1: would be like it's like the golf if occation of hunting.
- 19:29Speaker 1: Mm hmm. There's a strong argument to be made that
- 19:32Speaker 1: a lot of conservation dollars are raised for wild cheap
- 19:37Speaker 1: conservation because this grand slam exists and it's something obtainable
- 19:42Speaker 1: that these affluent guys can go after Without the Grand Slam,
- 19:48Speaker 1: I don't think there would be as much interest in
- 19:52Speaker 1: collecting all four of these species and subsequently raising all
- 19:56Speaker 1: this money for conservation. Yeah, there's some dinky heart of
- 20:00Speaker 1: my brain that knowing that, um you know, uh, knowing
- 20:06Speaker 1: that were I to go to Guatemala or southern Yucatan
- 20:10Speaker 1: Peninsula and go out in the jungle there and find
- 20:13Speaker 1: an oscillated turkey, knowing that that would make me a
- 20:16Speaker 1: World Slam turkey holder, like that that that idea of
- 20:21Speaker 1: resting my head somewhere I was like and added benefit
- 20:23Speaker 1: would be that I would become a I have no idea.
- 20:27Speaker 1: I'm almost half joking, but I'm not. And I think
- 20:28Speaker 1: that the squirrel Slam is interesting because I don't think
- 20:31Speaker 1: people I think it would help promote the squirrel because
- 20:34Speaker 1: I don't think people realize how many damn squirrels there are.
- 20:37Speaker 1: Who would you include in this squirrel Slam. I'd put
- 20:42Speaker 1: a pine squirrel in there. I'd put a gray squirrel
- 20:44Speaker 1: in there, eastern and western with color phases. Yeah, you
- 20:48Speaker 1: know what, I would put a black face, black face
- 20:50Speaker 1: gray squirrel in their eastern Western gray squirrel black phase fox.
- 20:54Speaker 1: Put the fox squirrel in there. You can't put the
- 20:56Speaker 1: del marv a squirrel, right, Abert. I would put a
- 21:00Speaker 1: it's in there, damn sure. True would be all the
- 21:02Speaker 1: tree squirrels because it's not e s. It's not an
- 21:08Speaker 1: e s, a listed species anymore. But it's far from being.
- 21:11Speaker 1: It's far. It's it's recovered, beyond threatened. But it's it's
- 21:16Speaker 1: not a there's not honible numbers of you know how
- 21:18Speaker 1: you get a mountain goat slam shoot one. It's both
- 21:26Speaker 1: grand superan world. Right. Um, he's got a question though, well,
- 21:32Speaker 1: listening to the show, Oh it's cool. So he's listening
- 21:35Speaker 1: to the show and cooking what he describes as a
- 21:38Speaker 1: freezer fossil. There was some pronged warm meat that had
- 21:42Speaker 1: been a bottom of this freezer for quite some time,
- 21:45Speaker 1: maybe less than a decade, maybe not any tips for
- 21:48Speaker 1: cooking freezer fossils. Is there a point which freezer fossils
- 21:52Speaker 1: should be discarded? There's it's like my input on that.
- 21:59Speaker 1: It's like that's something should really try to avoid having happened.
- 22:02Speaker 1: Your brother would say no, my brother would eat it.
- 22:06Speaker 1: I would eat it. I guess it somehow became unwrapped,
- 22:10Speaker 1: and it became unwrapped, and slowly um just turned to
- 22:13Speaker 1: like that white freezer burn, freezer burn, and it yeah,
- 22:18Speaker 1: just you're kind of like you you're it's sort of
- 22:22Speaker 1: becomes uh, it sort of becomes freeze driving over time.
- 22:25Speaker 1: I've had six year old elk though that you when
- 22:29Speaker 1: we served it, you couldn't tell. It's amazing. That's one
- 22:32Speaker 1: of the reasons I kind of quit putting dates. I
- 22:35Speaker 1: don't usually date it sucks, I was remember anyways, Like
- 22:38Speaker 1: I kind of like know what it is and how
- 22:39Speaker 1: it looked, and you know, just like the idiosyncrasies of
- 22:43Speaker 1: the marker used and the animal. I just kind of
- 22:46Speaker 1: have a sense. The reason like to put dates on
- 22:48Speaker 1: it is not only my wife always seeing the dates,
- 22:51Speaker 1: because if it's two thousand seventeen somethings two thousand fifteen, Like,
- 22:54Speaker 1: why invite the scrutiny. There's no difference. She's not gonna know,
- 22:58Speaker 1: but in never she's gonna look like, right, that seems odd.
- 23:02Speaker 1: So I don't even put dates on that. And I
- 23:04Speaker 1: don't need to hear about it or have anyone noticed
- 23:07Speaker 1: about it because there's no difference anyway. So why like
- 23:10Speaker 1: open it up to discussion. It's like a thing that
- 23:13Speaker 1: happens in marriage. I think if you start doing those
- 23:17Speaker 1: things like like, it just isn't worth my time explaining it,
- 23:22Speaker 1: Like why even why even invite the question? There's nothing
- 23:26Speaker 1: to hide, but why invite the scrutiny. I'm still gonna
- 23:32Speaker 1: keep dating. Yeah, there's lots just like it in my
- 23:35Speaker 1: head to know that last year's meets going out, new
- 23:38Speaker 1: fresh meats coming in, yea. But I still do the
- 23:39Speaker 1: same thing. But I do it. Here's the other things.
- 23:41Speaker 1: I have two freezers, so when it's in my garage freezer,
- 23:45Speaker 1: it's on standby, it's not in the run. If it's
- 23:49Speaker 1: in the kitchen freezer, then everyone that knows everyone knows
- 23:54Speaker 1: that that's what you're supposed to eat. Only I go
- 23:56Speaker 1: down into the main freezer and I constantly move stuff
- 24:00Speaker 1: into the running. So I'm sort of sequencing it anyway.
- 24:04Speaker 1: But the minute I put dates on there, people are
- 24:06Speaker 1: gonna go in there and they're gonna see dates and
- 24:07Speaker 1: shy away from dates that they feel to be outdated.
- 24:12Speaker 1: Good strategy, you follow me um quick news tidbit or
- 24:20Speaker 1: if Carl has anything to say about this, you're talking Wyoming. Mhmm,
- 24:25Speaker 1: chrisly Bears Wyoming. I was guessing that's where you're going
- 24:28Speaker 1: because that's so fresh. Okay, No, what are you talking about?
- 24:31Speaker 1: But we can talk about that. They voted on it,
- 24:33Speaker 1: just they tags you're coming up. They're still doing the
- 24:38Speaker 1: one female quota though, right, I've got the details. I
- 24:41Speaker 1: can pull that up while you ask the other question. No,
- 24:44Speaker 1: this isn't a question. This is just a news thing
- 24:46Speaker 1: that that's interesting. So the Interior Department UM under Secretary
- 24:53Speaker 1: Zinchie kind of making a cool move where they are
- 24:57Speaker 1: opening up more than two forty eight thousand acres two
- 25:03Speaker 1: hunting and fishing that were previously unavailable for hunting and fishing.
- 25:08Speaker 1: So this has taken like thirty units of the National
- 25:13Speaker 1: Wildlife Refuge System acreages in twenty two states are going
- 25:19Speaker 1: to be expanded to allow hunting and fishing access. So
- 25:23Speaker 1: it brings the number of refugees, the number of refuges
- 25:26Speaker 1: open to public hunting to three seventy seven and the
- 25:30Speaker 1: number of refugees available for public fishing to three and twelve,
- 25:37Speaker 1: which is cool, increasing hunting and fishing opportunities in the
- 25:43Speaker 1: refuge system. What's interesting about that, maybe it's just it's
- 25:46Speaker 1: got to be a function of the opportunities available. But
- 25:48Speaker 1: I was expecting the fishing opportunity to be higher than
- 25:50Speaker 1: the hunting opportunity when you started going down that pack.
- 25:52Speaker 1: When I was talking to my brother who's a federal
- 25:54Speaker 1: who works at a federal land management agency, he was
- 25:58Speaker 1: he that was the first thing he It was like,
- 26:00Speaker 1: how could there be that are on the same wave
- 26:03Speaker 1: and I and I thought, well, maybe just has to
- 26:05Speaker 1: do with like availability kind of land. Yeah, especially in
- 26:07Speaker 1: the dry West, you know, there's not a lot of availability.
- 26:10Speaker 1: But again, you think of refuges, right, and maybe this
- 26:13Speaker 1: is just a Midwestern bias. I think waterfowl. I associate
- 26:17Speaker 1: the idea of a refuge being kind of a wet well.
- 26:20Speaker 1: Their symbol is the Canada goose right on for the system,
- 26:25Speaker 1: I thought, or what was the bird on a Michelle?
- 26:28Speaker 1: What's the bird on a The National Wildlife Refuge was
- 26:30Speaker 1: their icon. It's a Canada goose, right Yeah, sure that
- 26:33Speaker 1: was a swan or something. It's one of it too.
- 26:37Speaker 1: It's a long neck. It's a sweet logo. So I
- 26:39Speaker 1: got a flat back last night. Hopefully it's either way
- 26:42Speaker 1: that I think. Hopefully that's a Canada goose. Right, it's Canada. Um.
- 26:47Speaker 1: What's cool about um the proposal? Right now? The status
- 26:51Speaker 1: is folks can actually weigh in on it. Um. Well,
- 26:54Speaker 1: what we actually have an article up on the mediator
- 26:56Speaker 1: dot com period and folks can go to the link
- 26:59Speaker 1: that we're linking out to you, put in the docket
- 27:00Speaker 1: number and voice their public support. Sweet, and I'll just
- 27:05Speaker 1: give you a couple of quick quick stats on this
- 27:08Speaker 1: development in Wyoming. So if we've got it right, Idaho
- 27:11Speaker 1: also plans to have a hunt, but it's for basically
- 27:16Speaker 1: Idaho is having a symbolic thing where they're exercising their
- 27:20Speaker 1: their exercising their management. Yes, in Montana, my understanding is
- 27:24Speaker 1: kind of sitting back and waiting, knowing it's a contentious top. Yeah,
- 27:29Speaker 1: I think that I think that they're reluctant to step
- 27:31Speaker 1: into the reluctant to step into the into the fray,
- 27:35Speaker 1: into the fray. Wyoming, on the other hand, can I
- 27:39Speaker 1: real quick? So uh, I'm trying to think of how
- 27:45Speaker 1: deep I want to go on this. At the time
- 27:48Speaker 1: of European contact that there were you know, you had
- 27:52Speaker 1: grizzly bears ranged from I don't know, like roughly the Meridian,
- 27:59Speaker 1: maybe a little bit west hand from Meridian, so range
- 28:01Speaker 1: from portions of the Great Plains all the way to
- 28:05Speaker 1: the Pacific Coast. UH. They were from through habitat destruction, poisoning, um,
- 28:17Speaker 1: unregulated slaughter, conflicts with sheep grazing, cattle grazing, every bad
- 28:25Speaker 1: thing that could happen to a species. They were eliminated
- 28:28Speaker 1: across the bulk of their range and existed only in
- 28:32Speaker 1: a few wilderness strongholds in Wyoming, Montana. UM. They were
- 28:41Speaker 1: when the Endangered Species Act came into play. When President
- 28:45Speaker 1: Richard Nixon signed in the sign the Endangered Species Act.
- 28:48Speaker 1: In the law UH, the grizzly bears listed in the
- 28:52Speaker 1: lower forty eight the grizzly bears listed at as an
- 28:55Speaker 1: endangered species. UM. Later manager wildlife managers kind of hit
- 29:02Speaker 1: on this idea that we would instead of looking at
- 29:06Speaker 1: the grizzly across the entirety of it of its historic range,
- 29:11Speaker 1: we would identify distinct population segments and sort of manage
- 29:17Speaker 1: bears according to these habitat pieces that could possibly hold bears.
- 29:22Speaker 1: Because bears and humans are grizzly bear, particularly grizzly bears
- 29:26Speaker 1: and humans come into conflict, and so there's a lot
- 29:28Speaker 1: of areas where we're never gonna have them, like Golden Gate. Uh,
- 29:32Speaker 1: Golden Gate Park in San Francisco is grizzly bear country.
- 29:36Speaker 1: It will not We will not be able to recover
- 29:39Speaker 1: grizzlies in Golden Gate Park. We will not be able
- 29:42Speaker 1: to recover grizzlies in downtown San Francisco. So we look
- 29:45Speaker 1: at like where can we recover grizzlies? Where do we
- 29:48Speaker 1: have populations? Now, we create these distinct population segments, and
- 29:51Speaker 1: what we later realize, what later came to be, is
- 29:55Speaker 1: that you could declare certain population segments as recovered and
- 30:01Speaker 1: removed them from Endangered Species Act protection and then shift
- 30:06Speaker 1: your focus on recovering other populations um that that still
- 30:10Speaker 1: need assistance. So if anyone of the follows the news
- 30:13Speaker 1: on grizzly bears, it wasn't too long ago. The Greater
- 30:16Speaker 1: what's called the g y E or Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem,
- 30:19Speaker 1: which is a chunk of land the size of Indiana,
- 30:21Speaker 1: UM that population segment of grizzly bears were delisted because
- 30:26Speaker 1: they had reached recovery objectives. You know, twelve years ago
- 30:33Speaker 1: or more years ago, they released they hit recovery objectives.
- 30:36Speaker 1: So long time ago people look at what would it
- 30:38Speaker 1: looked like to recover bears in this area, and we
- 30:40Speaker 1: came up with ideas of how many, how many females,
- 30:42Speaker 1: total numbers of bears, all kinds of things. We hit
- 30:45Speaker 1: that point. So then the US Fish and Wildlife Service
- 30:48Speaker 1: that was in charge of managing the bears are recommended
- 30:50Speaker 1: that the bears be delisted and handed back to state management.
- 30:54Speaker 1: And so now the states that have the states that
- 30:59Speaker 1: are within the g I, which would be small portions
- 31:03Speaker 1: of uh small portion of Idaho, Chunka, Montana, pretty big Chunka, Wyoming,
- 31:10Speaker 1: now have the legal authority and legal right to manage
- 31:13Speaker 1: the bears as a c fit. And they are going
- 31:16Speaker 1: to are toying with the idea, some more than others,
- 31:22Speaker 1: of allowing a very limited hunting opportunities for these bears,
- 31:27Speaker 1: particularly with with kind of the focus of it being
- 31:31Speaker 1: um focusing efforts on areas where you would be like
- 31:38Speaker 1: reducing conflict between the bears and livestock, but still with
- 31:45Speaker 1: still with the recovery objective of growing bear populations in
- 31:48Speaker 1: other areas so that you do listen the greater also
- 31:52Speaker 1: an ecosystem for instance, doesn't mean anything with to do
- 31:56Speaker 1: with current management practices of bears, and like the Cabinet
- 32:00Speaker 1: Act Northern Cascades, I don't know. So with all that said, Carl,
- 32:05Speaker 1: yeah you cooled all that. I'm cool with all that.
- 32:08Speaker 1: And I think, you know, this is one of those
- 32:11Speaker 1: issues that is going to evoke strong emotions in the
- 32:15Speaker 1: non hunting public. But it really is a glowing success
- 32:21Speaker 1: story when you have that transition of the management of
- 32:24Speaker 1: a listed species result in the removal of said species
- 32:30Speaker 1: from protection under es A, and have that management returned
- 32:35Speaker 1: to the state, and it's being driven by the scientific
- 32:38Speaker 1: information that justifies the decision to delist. Um. Whether you're
- 32:44Speaker 1: somebody who is a okay with having grizzly bears hunted
- 32:47Speaker 1: or not, you have to acknowledge that there's a conservation
- 32:50Speaker 1: success story to be told here. And also, I think
- 32:55Speaker 1: a story that warrants some morning, you know, the fact
- 32:59Speaker 1: that we had historically so much more robust populations in
- 33:04Speaker 1: such a such a massive distribution spatially. You know, I
- 33:09Speaker 1: spent a lot of time in New Mexico's where I
- 33:10Speaker 1: live now. Historically a lot of my favorite places in
- 33:13Speaker 1: New Mexico to hunt and fish were grizzly habitat and
- 33:17Speaker 1: they are not there now. Um. Whether or not they'd
- 33:20Speaker 1: ever return is an interesting thing to debate and philosophies about.
- 33:25Speaker 1: But um per personally, I hope so yeah, I share that.
- 33:29Speaker 1: You know, I've been spent a lot of time in
- 33:31Speaker 1: the HeLa lately. I just had a great nine day
- 33:34Speaker 1: family trip chasing turkeys down in the HeLa. And Um,
- 33:38Speaker 1: I was reading this book Black Range Tales that covers
- 33:42Speaker 1: a lot of history of the Southwest, and it wasn't
- 33:44Speaker 1: that long ago. You're talking like the eighteen sixties eighteen seventies,
- 33:48Speaker 1: and these miners and market hunters who were living in
- 33:51Speaker 1: that country are bumping in. They call them silver tips.
- 33:53Speaker 1: That was the terminology. You know. They had this um
- 33:56Speaker 1: coloration kind of the silver tip guard heres um. And
- 34:00Speaker 1: it was an animal. You know, the conflict was very real,
- 34:04Speaker 1: and it's an animal that understandably you know, it's struck
- 34:08Speaker 1: fear in the heart of these miners. But Um, I
- 34:12Speaker 1: share your perception about something missing from the experience when
- 34:16Speaker 1: you know that animal that historically existed on landscape is
- 34:19Speaker 1: no longer there. Um. But I also acknowledge my attitude
- 34:23Speaker 1: about you know, having my my wife and her friend
- 34:28Speaker 1: um out turkey hunting together in that landscape with grizzlies,
- 34:32Speaker 1: I might feel a little bit differently about it, you know,
- 34:35Speaker 1: understand on their own. I understand those fears, and I
- 34:37Speaker 1: think there's many people who would agree that we should
- 34:41Speaker 1: recover the bears an all suitable habitat. The details most
- 34:48Speaker 1: everyone I hang out with would say like, yeah, man,
- 34:50Speaker 1: I agree we should recover grizzlies and all suitable habitat.
- 34:53Speaker 1: And then the minute where things would start to fall apart,
- 34:56Speaker 1: what I would say is like, okay, let's all define
- 34:57Speaker 1: suitable habitat. So in my back well, you know, but
- 35:01Speaker 1: but even uh. And this was like another surprise move,
- 35:05Speaker 1: a surprise move. Uh. Interior Secretary Zincy came to Seattle
- 35:10Speaker 1: and announced his support for recovering grizzly bears in the
- 35:14Speaker 1: Northern Cascades, which was surprised to me, but not as
- 35:18Speaker 1: surprising if probably was the cattle ranchers up there. I
- 35:21Speaker 1: thought it was like, I'm all for it, man, um,
- 35:23Speaker 1: so I'm I'm all There's like I have like a
- 35:26Speaker 1: dual pronged approach in thinking about grizzlies. I'd like to
- 35:29Speaker 1: see grizzies recovered in suitable habitat, and once the recovery
- 35:33Speaker 1: objectives are met, I like to see them delisted in
- 35:36Speaker 1: the hand of the state management and some people that
- 35:39Speaker 1: can't get all these ideas in their heads at once.
- 35:42Speaker 1: But I'm playing like I'm thinking about it in the
- 35:44Speaker 1: terms of I'm thinking about it in terms of like
- 35:47Speaker 1: the long game of where I think things should settle out.
- 35:50Speaker 1: And to your point, this definition of suitable habitat, I
- 35:53Speaker 1: think there's there's a really relevant nexus here with respect
- 35:56Speaker 1: to the the upcoming hunts both in ho in Wyoming Um.
- 36:02Speaker 1: Thinking about suitable habitat in the context of social acceptance
- 36:06Speaker 1: and having the ability to target hunting pressure in places
- 36:09Speaker 1: that are prone to conflict with the species, I think
- 36:12Speaker 1: is one of those management tools that will pave the
- 36:14Speaker 1: way towards social acceptance and having more places on the
- 36:17Speaker 1: landscape where we can strike that balance between your kind
- 36:21Speaker 1: of approach of this definition of ecological suitable habitat social
- 36:28Speaker 1: suitable habitat. I think hunting has the potential to be
- 36:32Speaker 1: a really critical ingredient in that mix and all of
- 36:36Speaker 1: creating social acceptance because because for people who are living
- 36:40Speaker 1: in these locations and whose lives are impacted by these things.
- 36:43Speaker 1: They're experiencing it very differently than you are from say,
- 36:48Speaker 1: Golden Gate Park totally. And you're talking about the opportunity
- 36:51Speaker 1: to manage any very surgical, precise fashion. Right, It's not
- 36:56Speaker 1: like you're gonna have a whole bunch of tags available
- 36:58Speaker 1: and a bunch of people out on the land escape.
- 37:00Speaker 1: You're gonna be able to issue tags and target hunting
- 37:03Speaker 1: pressure in a way that is very focused in places
- 37:06Speaker 1: that are prone to that kind of conflict. So I
- 37:10Speaker 1: think there's you know, there's a real tension and a
- 37:13Speaker 1: lot of these natural resources management issues um between what
- 37:18Speaker 1: the public would like to see in the places where
- 37:20Speaker 1: they're actually directly interacting with the animal versus what the
- 37:22Speaker 1: public would like to see happen from AFAR and the
- 37:27Speaker 1: ability for local managers to be able to make decisions
- 37:31Speaker 1: that address the concerns of the local constituents who have
- 37:35Speaker 1: to coexist with that species day in and day out.
- 37:40Speaker 1: I think it's one of the critical elements of being
- 37:44Speaker 1: able to talk about a broader recovery beyond where they
- 37:48Speaker 1: currently are and where they currently are. So that being said,
- 37:51Speaker 1: here a couple of details on the Wyoming hunt. Under
- 37:53Speaker 1: the Wyoming proposal, you've got the potential for up to
- 37:58Speaker 1: one female and ten male grizzlies killed this fall inside
- 38:04Speaker 1: the states section of federally designated demographic monitoring area, so
- 38:09Speaker 1: they'd have a cap at at one female, ten males, well,
- 38:13Speaker 1: one female, everything ends, that's right, and and that's similar
- 38:17Speaker 1: to other states where you have UM like in New Mexico,
- 38:20Speaker 1: for example, most of the units have unlimited hunting opportunity
- 38:23Speaker 1: up until the quotas met, and it's the hunter's responsibility
- 38:26Speaker 1: to keep tabs on where we are with respect to
- 38:28Speaker 1: the the total um cap and also the female cap.
- 38:33Speaker 1: So if either of those are reached, boom the season closes.
- 38:37Speaker 1: And then outside of that demographic monitoring area there's the
- 38:40Speaker 1: potential for another twelve grizzlies to be taken, and those
- 38:44Speaker 1: could be male or female. So they're being really careful,
- 38:47Speaker 1: very very conservative hunt inside that designated portion and then
- 38:53Speaker 1: beyond that, which again this would be the area where
- 38:55Speaker 1: the bears are starting to expand out beyond kind of
- 38:59Speaker 1: that core prime habitat, i e. The places where there's
- 39:03Speaker 1: more likelihood for conflict with humans. Those places you've got
- 39:08Speaker 1: more flexibility, so a similar number of bears twelve bears,
- 39:11Speaker 1: but they could be male or female. So that's the
- 39:14Speaker 1: plan in the season is set to start September one,
- 39:17Speaker 1: and you know, again getting back to the different values
- 39:20Speaker 1: that people have around wildlife. UM, I don't see it
- 39:24Speaker 1: as being unreasonable for somebody who lives far far away
- 39:27Speaker 1: from Montana two have some consternation about it hunt like
- 39:32Speaker 1: this happening. No, it's not surprising to me. I think
- 39:35Speaker 1: there's a there's a ton of perspectives on it that
- 39:38Speaker 1: are all not surprising to me. Um. And I think
- 39:41Speaker 1: that if you're like completely removed from it, you might
- 39:44Speaker 1: look and just if you're completely removed from it and
- 39:47Speaker 1: you just know the bear from looking at calendars and
- 39:49Speaker 1: stuff and and and social media pictures and you don't
- 39:54Speaker 1: you don't have like three hours to go take a
- 39:57Speaker 1: look at like the history of this whole thing. Absolutely
- 39:59Speaker 1: you're gonna it can be like what Yeah, And that's
- 40:02Speaker 1: why I think that's why I think the biggest talking
- 40:04Speaker 1: point here if if if people have an opportunity to
- 40:07Speaker 1: communicate one thing to someone who will listen to him
- 40:10Speaker 1: for ten seconds, it's that the reason these hunts are
- 40:14Speaker 1: being opened up is a conservation success story. The species
- 40:17Speaker 1: has rebounded, at least in this small portion of its
- 40:20Speaker 1: historic range to the point that the states are able
- 40:23Speaker 1: to manage it guided by sound population ecology, and they're
- 40:28Speaker 1: going to be able to have a sustainable hunt that
- 40:30Speaker 1: helps address some of these conflict concerns. But there's not
- 40:34Speaker 1: anybody who works for these state agencies who's not passionate
- 40:38Speaker 1: about the recovery of the species. I mean, you're not
- 40:41Speaker 1: gonna find a commissioner for the Wyoming Department of Game
- 40:45Speaker 1: and Fish who doesn't think it's cool that grizzly bears
- 40:51Speaker 1: are delisted and recovered to the point that they can
- 40:53Speaker 1: have a hunt, a sustainable hunt. So I personally have
- 40:57Speaker 1: a lot of admiration for the professionals that work at
- 41:01Speaker 1: these state game and phish agencies. And I know, based
- 41:05Speaker 1: on all the personal friends that I have who work
- 41:07Speaker 1: for these agencies, that they come at this work with
- 41:10Speaker 1: a really strong conservation ethic and passion for the resource. Um.
- 41:15Speaker 1: So I view this, this delisting and opportunity to hunt
- 41:20Speaker 1: as um evidence of a really cool story that I
- 41:25Speaker 1: hope we can replicate us we're on the landscape. Yeah, man,
- 41:27Speaker 1: I've spent a ton of time around grizzlies, love being
- 41:31Speaker 1: around them, have had mix ups with them, have never
- 41:34Speaker 1: killed one. I'm not gonna apply from one of the tags,
- 41:39Speaker 1: but applaud, applaud the work and effort that's gone into this,
- 41:44Speaker 1: and applaud the path they're taken on it, and uh
- 41:47Speaker 1: wishing the best of luck on it. And and I
- 41:51Speaker 1: hope it goes well. I have concerns about how this
- 41:53Speaker 1: might play out, but hopefully my concerns won't be found.
- 41:56Speaker 1: And you pointed out an interesting thing, like and I
- 41:58Speaker 1: think this thing people struggle with. It's like, but they're
- 42:00Speaker 1: not recovered across the entirety of the range. Well, you
- 42:02Speaker 1: know what I'm sorry with neither our elk. Elk are
- 42:04Speaker 1: still absent from their historic range. But no one's running
- 42:08Speaker 1: around saying like, hey man, we don't have uh, you know,
- 42:11Speaker 1: a healthy herd of elk in Iowa. How in the
- 42:16Speaker 1: world are you hunt them in Colorado? It's absurd. Yeah,
- 42:21Speaker 1: elk used to exist across Like if you look at
- 42:23Speaker 1: a map of the US, it was all elk country,
- 42:26Speaker 1: excluding like the Florida, probably the Florida Peninsula, probably parts
- 42:32Speaker 1: of Maine. Elk. We're everywhere. We've recovered some chunks, and
- 42:40Speaker 1: we hunt elk in those chunks, and we're still simultaneously
- 42:45Speaker 1: trying to work to put them back on the ground
- 42:47Speaker 1: in all the places that they belong. And I'll point
- 42:49Speaker 1: out that the people who are doing this are hunters.
- 42:53Speaker 1: New Jersey cat ladies are not doing a ton of
- 42:55Speaker 1: work to put elk back in Iowa. Right. Uh? What
- 43:05Speaker 1: what kind of things you guys make a pete the tent?
- 43:11Speaker 1: You can't. It's all the rest of it's all the
- 43:13Speaker 1: rest of it's all secret. Huh. I suppose it matters
- 43:15Speaker 1: when when the podcast is gonna be posted. Um, give
- 43:22Speaker 1: a little hinty hint some No, we're gonna rush some
- 43:27Speaker 1: technical performance pieces of gear that you put on your
- 43:32Speaker 1: body to touch your skin or not. You know, it
- 43:34Speaker 1: might touch your boots. It might it might touch your boots.
- 43:39Speaker 1: It just might touch your boots. Does it cover your
- 43:42Speaker 1: ankles bigger than a bread box? It's about a loaf
- 43:48Speaker 1: of bread and it has to do with your ankles.
- 43:51Speaker 1: That's uh, that's one of the irons in the fire. Okay,
- 43:54Speaker 1: here's something someone wrote in UM. I like this guy
- 43:58Speaker 1: right off the bat because he said he listened to
- 44:00Speaker 1: seventy episodes of the podcast in a month's insane must
- 44:04Speaker 1: do a lot of driving. Now. He takes great with
- 44:07Speaker 1: a number of people who have come on the podcast,
- 44:09Speaker 1: and I think what he's thinking about is Pat Durkin,
- 44:11Speaker 1: are good? Are our good friend? The lovely Pat Durkin,
- 44:14Speaker 1: who argues that he draws the question like just what okay?
- 44:22Speaker 1: He says how Pat Durkin, who he doesn't name by name,
- 44:25Speaker 1: is always saying that coyotes don't kill many deer. I
- 44:30Speaker 1: think what Pat was saying is that coyotes are probably
- 44:35Speaker 1: not having a very dramatic impact on total dear numbers. Right,
- 44:42Speaker 1: he's saying they don't kill deer, But I think he's saying,
- 44:44Speaker 1: like when you look at dear numbers, so like numbers
- 44:49Speaker 1: of adult deer on the ground, um that kyles don't
- 44:53Speaker 1: seem to be having as dramatic of an impact on
- 44:56Speaker 1: dear numbers as some people like the claim. But this
- 45:00Speaker 1: guy goes on to have some pretty compelling anecdotal evidence
- 45:03Speaker 1: where he says he has but he knows about a
- 45:06Speaker 1: couple of coyote dens. He mounts some trail cams on
- 45:09Speaker 1: these kyote dens, he's got two trail cams posted up
- 45:12Speaker 1: over two different kyote dens, and last year alone, he
- 45:16Speaker 1: caught images of coyotes dragging in thirty nine different fonts.
- 45:24Speaker 1: So he's having a hard time believing. Um, he's having
- 45:29Speaker 1: a hard time reconciling that with the idea that they're
- 45:34Speaker 1: not impacting local populations. I feel like it would be
- 45:39Speaker 1: nice to have Pat here to kind of defend whatever
- 45:42Speaker 1: it is he did or didn't say. And I would
- 45:43Speaker 1: not ordinarily speak for Pat Durkin, but I will speak
- 45:46Speaker 1: for Pat Durkin and saying he certainly did not say
- 45:49Speaker 1: he doesn't think coyotes kills some deer um coyotes. In
- 45:54Speaker 1: like studies out of Pennsylvania, coyotes and domestic dog are
- 46:00Speaker 1: the number one killers fawn mortality. Number one fahon mortality
- 46:06Speaker 1: is kyles and dogs. And the reason you have to
- 46:08Speaker 1: say that is because when you do a knee cropsy,
- 46:11Speaker 1: do you say new crops or knee crops? When you
- 46:14Speaker 1: do a knee crops, he's hard to tell the difference. Yeah,
- 46:17Speaker 1: it's hard to tell it it feels killed by domestic
- 46:19Speaker 1: dog or yeah, and coyotes. I mean, Pat, everybody at
- 46:23Speaker 1: this table would agree. Kyotes certainly do kill a fair
- 46:26Speaker 1: number of fonds and a whole lot of other creators do.
- 46:29Speaker 1: I mean, in the in the Upper Midwest. This guy
- 46:31Speaker 1: was from Minnesota, I have that right. But let me
- 46:35Speaker 1: look here, does he say where he's from? I had
- 46:36Speaker 1: it he was. I had in my head that he
- 46:38Speaker 1: was in. Uh, he's up on the Canadian border. I'm
- 46:41Speaker 1: imagining like boundary on northern Minnesota, ninety miles from the
- 46:45Speaker 1: Canadian border. So yeah, black bears are gonna be killing
- 46:48Speaker 1: a bounch of fonds too in that country. But a
- 46:53Speaker 1: couple of points I would make one is you know there,
- 46:56Speaker 1: this is a species, the white tailed deer is a
- 46:58Speaker 1: species that has eat that adapted to um withstand very
- 47:03Speaker 1: strong predation pressure on fawns that occurs in a very
- 47:08Speaker 1: short period of time. So there's this this idea of
- 47:11Speaker 1: predators swamping. And that's the reason why you know, the
- 47:14Speaker 1: deer hunting up in that neck of the woods probably
- 47:16Speaker 1: in late October early November for a couple of weeks
- 47:20Speaker 1: is really really good because all those does are in
- 47:23Speaker 1: estrous and all being bred at the same time. That
- 47:26Speaker 1: translates into a very narrow window of maybe a couple
- 47:30Speaker 1: of weeks. The same kind of duration of time that
- 47:32Speaker 1: the rut would last would be the amount of time
- 47:35Speaker 1: that all those all those pregnancies would be would be
- 47:38Speaker 1: coming to parturition to birth. And so you have a
- 47:42Speaker 1: landscape that suddenly has a whole lot of food on
- 47:45Speaker 1: it in a for a very short window of time,
- 47:49Speaker 1: and everything is eating those fawns. Coyotes are eating them.
- 47:52Speaker 1: I mean, one interesting question would be, I'm not doubting
- 47:54Speaker 1: this guy's story, but if you've got trail cams providing
- 47:56Speaker 1: pictures of coyotes going to a den with fawns, how
- 48:02Speaker 1: he arrived at the count of the number of fawnds
- 48:04Speaker 1: he's actually seeing versus pieces of fawns being carried around.
- 48:07Speaker 1: You know how you come to like there was thirty
- 48:10Speaker 1: nine fawns through a series of static pictures. I believe
- 48:14Speaker 1: the guy though, that there's a bunch of fawns getting
- 48:15Speaker 1: dragged back. The point is you're talking about an animal
- 48:19Speaker 1: that has evolved to flood the market with lots of
- 48:23Speaker 1: offspring predators swamping. It's the exact same thing that oak
- 48:28Speaker 1: trees do when they massed every few years, right there,
- 48:31Speaker 1: just dumping tons of acorns out all at the same time,
- 48:34Speaker 1: and the predator in this case would be something like
- 48:37Speaker 1: squirrels um and over the or deer um and the
- 48:42Speaker 1: the driver there would be that over the long haul,
- 48:47Speaker 1: those oak trees or that deer herd is able to
- 48:50Speaker 1: support a relatively small base of predators by occasionally flooding
- 48:56Speaker 1: the market with offspring, as opposed to trickling out a
- 49:00Speaker 1: corns or fawns over a longer window. Like like put
- 49:02Speaker 1: in an extreme Like to put in an extreme sort
- 49:05Speaker 1: of scenario is imagine you have a let's say you
- 49:09Speaker 1: have an enclosure, right, just just a picture like the
- 49:12Speaker 1: idea of predators. You have an enclosure, and then this
- 49:14Speaker 1: enclosure you put a black bear, and you put ten
- 49:16Speaker 1: white tailed dos uh and the does all ten of
- 49:22Speaker 1: those doughs all dropped their fonds on the same day,
- 49:25Speaker 1: and they're gonna be vulnerable to predation for forty eight hours.
- 49:29Speaker 1: That black bear is gonna eat one or two in
- 49:33Speaker 1: that forty eight hour window, and the other eight are
- 49:37Speaker 1: gonna be by that point up and running around. Now,
- 49:40Speaker 1: picture that those doughs came in and they spread it
- 49:42Speaker 1: out so that one had a baby every two weeks,
- 49:46Speaker 1: probably all those fonds will be dead exactly, so which
- 49:50Speaker 1: just in this predator swamping is something that takes place
- 49:53Speaker 1: with like bird nesting colonies. Yeah, so having having those
- 49:59Speaker 1: those carnival or is consuming some fonts as part of
- 50:01Speaker 1: the system. Um. You know, another interesting question for the
- 50:06Speaker 1: guy would be how's his deer hunting ben? Has he
- 50:09Speaker 1: been able to fill his tags? As you see in
- 50:11Speaker 1: Dear it sounds like you know a guy who's paying
- 50:13Speaker 1: attention to the local landscape. My guess is he's probably
- 50:16Speaker 1: a on the upper end of the distribution tail in
- 50:20Speaker 1: terms of hunter success. Right, he's curious, he's active in
- 50:25Speaker 1: the outdoors, so he's probably a good hunter. Um. But
- 50:28Speaker 1: here there's another thing too that you gotta get into it.
- 50:30Speaker 1: This is, uh, there's there's the idea of like carrying capacity,
- 50:36Speaker 1: So how many adult deer can the landscape support? And
- 50:42Speaker 1: oftentimes you're gonna wind up with a somewhat. I mean,
- 50:45Speaker 1: there's all kinds of variabilities and things are happening in
- 50:47Speaker 1: mass crops and weather and all this stuff. But you're
- 50:50Speaker 1: gonna have a sort of sense that that that the
- 50:52Speaker 1: area can support x number of deer through the winter,
- 50:56Speaker 1: and if and that number is going to stay relatively fixed,
- 51:03Speaker 1: and you could be losing tons of fawns to coyotes,
- 51:07Speaker 1: but still finding that at the end of their most
- 51:10Speaker 1: vulnerable stretch of time, so that every year in March
- 51:13Speaker 1: or every year in April, you're gonna be you have
- 51:16Speaker 1: that same number of deer have made it through the winter,
- 51:20Speaker 1: and that when you when these fawns are getting killed,
- 51:23Speaker 1: it's just making room for the next one, because they're
- 51:26Speaker 1: gonna find there there the bottleneck that they're gonna pass through,
- 51:29Speaker 1: is they're gonna pass through a bottleneck usually like white
- 51:33Speaker 1: tails and northern climates are passing through a bottleneck in
- 51:36Speaker 1: the late winter, and only a certain number going to
- 51:39Speaker 1: fit through that bottleneck anyway, that's right, And there's usually
- 51:42Speaker 1: disproportionate mortality for those young of the year, right, So
- 51:45Speaker 1: those those are the ones that typically have less likelihood
- 51:49Speaker 1: of passing through that bottleneck. And the ecological term you're
- 51:54Speaker 1: touching on is the idea of compensatory mortality versus additive mortality.
- 52:00Speaker 1: So the idea that um, if a fawn is killed
- 52:05Speaker 1: by a coyote in the summer that would have otherwise
- 52:10Speaker 1: made it through the winter, there's potential for that to
- 52:15Speaker 1: be an additive source of mortality. But if you say
- 52:18Speaker 1: the coyote wasn't there, you had let me back up,
- 52:22Speaker 1: I'll simplify it. You've got ten fawns, okay, and only
- 52:26Speaker 1: five of those fawns are going to make it through
- 52:28Speaker 1: that bottleneck you're talking about late in the winter. So
- 52:32Speaker 1: there's enough resources for five of them to survive. And
- 52:37Speaker 1: you have no coyotes in the system. So you have
- 52:40Speaker 1: five of the ten that die as a result of
- 52:44Speaker 1: hardship in the wintertime. If you have coyotes there that
- 52:49Speaker 1: kill those five during the summertime and the other five
- 52:52Speaker 1: make it through the harsh times of late winter, you
- 52:56Speaker 1: would say that that's that source of mortality. The five
- 53:00Speaker 1: went to the coyotes was compensated for you had higher
- 53:04Speaker 1: survival a hundred percent of the remaining individuals. Those five
- 53:06Speaker 1: individuals made it through winter, as opposed to only fifty
- 53:09Speaker 1: of those individuals making it through winter. So there's all
- 53:13Speaker 1: kinds of things that kill fawns. Um the fact that
- 53:18Speaker 1: they've evolved with these predators, the coyotes and others and
- 53:22Speaker 1: have these reproductive strategies. And you know, another another um
- 53:27Speaker 1: form of defense they have is the fact, as you
- 53:29Speaker 1: touched on, it's not a long window of time that
- 53:32Speaker 1: they're super susceptible to being killed by coyotes. It's a
- 53:36Speaker 1: matter of a couple of days that they're able to
- 53:38Speaker 1: run and be up on their feet. Super success. Super
- 53:40Speaker 1: success was the word super susceptible. Susceptible Like when you're
- 53:44Speaker 1: off hunting morals and you find a fawn just laying there. Yeah,
- 53:47Speaker 1: like that's a pile and stumbled across at at in
- 53:50Speaker 1: a very narrow window of time, and and you know
- 53:53Speaker 1: when that's the case, I mean, everything on the landscape
- 53:55Speaker 1: is fat and happy. The bears are doing really well
- 53:58Speaker 1: for that narrow window of time. But there aren't too
- 54:02Speaker 1: many places that come to my mind where you know,
- 54:05Speaker 1: as a biologist, I'm thinking, man, I'm really concerned about
- 54:09Speaker 1: a lack of abundance and white tail deer. You know,
- 54:12Speaker 1: I know there's places that the numbers are higher and lower,
- 54:15Speaker 1: and everybody likes to see deer when they're out there hunting,
- 54:18Speaker 1: but um recognizing there's going to be some predation on
- 54:22Speaker 1: the landscape, and the fact that this guy gets to
- 54:24Speaker 1: see that on his trail cameras, you know, I'd be
- 54:27Speaker 1: fascinated looking at the pictures and think cool to see
- 54:30Speaker 1: the coyotes doing their thing. Hopefully I'm still seeing some
- 54:33Speaker 1: some deer in the fall. I guess as this guy is.
- 54:36Speaker 1: If he's in a situation where the coyotes are able
- 54:38Speaker 1: to capture that many fawns from that small area, chances
- 54:42Speaker 1: are there's a heck of a lot of deer kicking
- 54:44Speaker 1: out fawns. So it doesn't sound like a situation where
- 54:47Speaker 1: the white tail numbers or something anybody should be really
- 54:50Speaker 1: worried about. It did man, I was going to roll
- 54:58Speaker 1: through it, man, just play a little. But uh, I'm good.
- 55:02Speaker 1: I'm good at a place called Stone Glaciers Old, I
- 55:06Speaker 1: gotta I got a little follow up on this before
- 55:08Speaker 1: we jump back to pestering Pete. Just I'm not getting
- 55:13Speaker 1: the kind of answers out of them that want to
- 55:14Speaker 1: get out of them, But go ahead. Talking about this
- 55:17Speaker 1: brings up this thing that I hear a lot in
- 55:20Speaker 1: our community about. And it seems like hunters are kind
- 55:23Speaker 1: of talking about out of both sides of their mouth
- 55:26Speaker 1: on this one, because at one one Instagram post is
- 55:30Speaker 1: hunters are such a big part of controlling these populations.
- 55:35Speaker 1: So there's not too many deer and not too many elk,
- 55:39Speaker 1: and you know, we're like the ones that are keeping
- 55:42Speaker 1: all this and check and then out of the other
- 55:45Speaker 1: side of their mouth, it's and that's why we gotta
- 55:48Speaker 1: kill all the wolves and coyotes, because if we don't
- 55:51Speaker 1: manage that population, they're gonna kill off all the deer
- 55:54Speaker 1: that we're also managing. And so you don't mean to
- 55:57Speaker 1: tell me that there's some hunters who has some squirrel justification,
- 56:01Speaker 1: squirreling justification. Yeah, just say you like to go out
- 56:04Speaker 1: and hunt a bunch um, And yeah, I like to
- 56:08Speaker 1: hunt a bunch and I hope that there's like maintains,
- 56:10Speaker 1: like good stable, huntable populations of animals out there. That
- 56:14Speaker 1: is funny that you're like, no, man, we gott a
- 56:16Speaker 1: hunt deer because I'll be overpopulated, and we gotta kill
- 56:19Speaker 1: kyles because they're killing deer. Yeah, totally. And the only
- 56:21Speaker 1: reason I bring it up is because like I just think,
- 56:24Speaker 1: like that argument is full of holes. And so if
- 56:26Speaker 1: if you're also of the group that is like saying like,
- 56:29Speaker 1: oh my god, hunting is dying right now, Like it's
- 56:32Speaker 1: not good to be going out there with arguments that
- 56:35Speaker 1: don't really hold up. That's right. I've been following some
- 56:39Speaker 1: Australian hunters and they they got the whole other weird
- 56:43Speaker 1: thing there Elwyes doing. Or they're always saying like, um,
- 56:46Speaker 1: hey man, this is all non native. We need to
- 56:49Speaker 1: kill all these animals because they're non native and we're
- 56:53Speaker 1: doing a great service to the you know, the biota
- 56:56Speaker 1: of Australia by killing all these non native animals. But
- 57:01Speaker 1: then they're like, damn do I love these animals? This
- 57:04Speaker 1: is all we eat all the time, love being on
- 57:08Speaker 1: the wild with these animals. But man, we gotta kill
- 57:10Speaker 1: all these animals. Or they always shoot there like it's
- 57:15Speaker 1: big males, so they're shooting like stags and bucks because
- 57:21Speaker 1: we've got to control the animals. Like, if you want
- 57:23Speaker 1: to control the animals, I don't know if you've taken
- 57:24Speaker 1: while they biology one on one yet shoot the females.
- 57:28Speaker 1: If that's really what this is about, shoot females. It
- 57:32Speaker 1: doesn't do any good for anything in terms of number
- 57:36Speaker 1: control to kill males. And people are smart, man, you've
- 57:40Speaker 1: got to be I think authentic in these conversations. There's
- 57:44Speaker 1: there's nothing wrong, in my opinion with really liking to
- 57:47Speaker 1: hunt and havn't it be motivated by a desire to
- 57:52Speaker 1: be outside getting good food, all that kind of stuff.
- 57:55Speaker 1: But if you're just trying to argue points that are
- 57:59Speaker 1: all all the holes, somebody who has no affiliation with
- 58:02Speaker 1: hunting or the outdoors is going to pretty easily start
- 58:06Speaker 1: picking at this idea of talking on both sides of
- 58:08Speaker 1: your mouth. And I think, you know, it's a really
- 58:10Speaker 1: good observation you made. Be honest with respect to the
- 58:14Speaker 1: predator control versus the key role of hunters. If you
- 58:18Speaker 1: were to pull every hunter in Americans say, hey, man,
- 58:20Speaker 1: if we could snap our fingers right now and have
- 58:23Speaker 1: the full the full cast of of predators back on
- 58:27Speaker 1: the landscape and have these systems function with natural predator
- 58:31Speaker 1: prey dynamics, no need for human beings to be part
- 58:35Speaker 1: of that equation anymore. It's gonna be wolves and bears
- 58:38Speaker 1: and lions and coyotes bobcats doing all that work for us.
- 58:42Speaker 1: We can wipe our hands, We're we're good to go.
- 58:46Speaker 1: How many hunters are gonna be like, oh yeah, all right,
- 58:48Speaker 1: that's cool. I don't think any of them. So I
- 58:50Speaker 1: was only doing it to make sure everything was going
- 58:53Speaker 1: to be the reality, actually hate hunt. I actually hate hunting,
- 58:56Speaker 1: but I was just very worried about too many deer.
- 58:58Speaker 1: So this is there's nothing wrong with saying this is
- 59:02Speaker 1: something you know that we deeply enjoy and we you know,
- 59:07Speaker 1: identify fundamentally in our our personal identities as being hunters
- 59:14Speaker 1: and people who are connected to the land and participatory.
- 59:17Speaker 1: And I would make the argument too that if you
- 59:19Speaker 1: want to talk about the full cast of North American
- 59:22Speaker 1: predators or global predators, that for many, many years Homo
- 59:26Speaker 1: sapiens have been part of that cast of characters, and
- 59:28Speaker 1: celebrating that point um and this desire to maintain a
- 59:32Speaker 1: connection to who we are fundamentally in our species identity,
- 59:37Speaker 1: I think is a much stronger case than saying, well,
- 59:40Speaker 1: we've got this job to do and you know, we
- 59:43Speaker 1: gotta we gotta make sure there aren't too many deer,
- 59:45Speaker 1: and oh yeah, we got gotta make sure there aren't
- 59:47Speaker 1: too many predators. It's like, no, man, celebrate the fact
- 59:51Speaker 1: that we are maintaining a strong personal connection to the land,
- 59:55Speaker 1: a personal connection to our identity. The species that we
- 59:58Speaker 1: evolved as would is one of that, you know, one
- 1:00:01Speaker 1: of the key species in that cast of predators. And
- 1:00:04Speaker 1: be able to, you know, to share authentic stories and
- 1:00:09Speaker 1: authentic information about what we do and not try to
- 1:00:13Speaker 1: not try to paint it with some inauthentic brush, because
- 1:00:17Speaker 1: you have to give credit to the people with whom
- 1:00:20Speaker 1: are communicating about this stuff. They're going to be perceptive,
- 1:00:22Speaker 1: They're going to be able to poke holes. And if
- 1:00:24Speaker 1: you're in a thoughtful conversation, my hope would be people
- 1:00:27Speaker 1: are eager to question and pick and ask. And I
- 1:00:31Speaker 1: think a lot of our our community of hunters, you know,
- 1:00:35Speaker 1: we point to these kind of tired, um, overused justifications
- 1:00:40Speaker 1: that we maybe haven't put as much thought into. And
- 1:00:43Speaker 1: it's absolutely okay to really enjoy hunting and have that
- 1:00:48Speaker 1: be a primary motivation and not feel like you have
- 1:00:50Speaker 1: to talk about it. Is this what we've got this
- 1:00:53Speaker 1: job to do in the ecosystem, because I think, frankly,
- 1:00:55Speaker 1: that's one of the weakest arguments that we have. Yeah,
- 1:00:57Speaker 1: but I think it's helpful to point out, though, to
- 1:01:00Speaker 1: to to focus on your particular love of the natural world,
- 1:01:05Speaker 1: your love of being out of doors, um. Could be
- 1:01:08Speaker 1: your love of hunting for food that you feed to
- 1:01:10Speaker 1: your family, your interactions, um. And it's helpful to point
- 1:01:15Speaker 1: out and say, and in addition to all of that,
- 1:01:18Speaker 1: the system that we've developed in this country makes it
- 1:01:22Speaker 1: that my participation in these activities is normally is like
- 1:01:26Speaker 1: enormously productive in terms of land management and funding for
- 1:01:31Speaker 1: wildlife work. Yes, it's it's it's a it's it's a
- 1:01:36Speaker 1: valuable thing to point out. It's not that I don't
- 1:01:38Speaker 1: think anyone's gonna say like, I'd have a hard time.
- 1:01:40Speaker 1: As someone said, dude, the only reason I hunt is
- 1:01:43Speaker 1: because when I buy a hunting license, that provides the
- 1:01:47Speaker 1: funding for my state Phishing Game Agency to work on
- 1:01:50Speaker 1: disease issues and enforcement of wildlife regulations and land enhancement projects.
- 1:01:55Speaker 1: That's why I'm out, Because if that was the case,
- 1:01:56Speaker 1: you just send the money, You just send them a check. Right.
- 1:01:59Speaker 1: So I guess like, there's what I personally like about this,
- 1:02:04Speaker 1: and you can take pride in the fact that the
- 1:02:06Speaker 1: systems that we've developed over time make it that my
- 1:02:10Speaker 1: participation in the activity is actually productive for the land
- 1:02:15Speaker 1: and the animals. I'm not a problems there's no problem
- 1:02:18Speaker 1: with that at all. What I what I think. What
- 1:02:22Speaker 1: I think shines through though, when you have somebody making
- 1:02:25Speaker 1: a justification like Joannie was talking about where you're saying simultaneously,
- 1:02:29Speaker 1: I need to be able to play a role in
- 1:02:32Speaker 1: helping control the white tailed deer heard for example, and
- 1:02:35Speaker 1: then meanwhile, yeah, we've got these issues with too many coyotes.
- 1:02:39Speaker 1: If we don't manage the coyote numbers, we're not going
- 1:02:41Speaker 1: to have any deer to hunt. Um. That kind of
- 1:02:46Speaker 1: a conversation where holes can be poked. I think that's
- 1:02:49Speaker 1: coming from a place of and and this might frustrate
- 1:02:54Speaker 1: some listeners. I apologize, but thoughtful discourse here. It's a
- 1:02:59Speaker 1: it's a selfish kind of mindset, right, Like I want
- 1:03:02Speaker 1: to have deer on the landscape so that I, as
- 1:03:05Speaker 1: a hunter can get a deer. It's coming from a
- 1:03:09Speaker 1: place of I'm totally comfortable centrism. Okay, yeah, but but okay.
- 1:03:13Speaker 1: But my argument is the problem is saying like, no,
- 1:03:17Speaker 1: I want there to be deer because I like to
- 1:03:18Speaker 1: hunt deer. Yeah, let me finish my my point though,
- 1:03:21Speaker 1: because I I like getting a deer as much as
- 1:03:25Speaker 1: the next guy. But I'm also interested in having that
- 1:03:29Speaker 1: resource available to support other species on the landscape that
- 1:03:34Speaker 1: have evolved there to be part of that system. So
- 1:03:37Speaker 1: for me, I want to have deer on the landscape
- 1:03:41Speaker 1: because I like to get a deer. I mean, if
- 1:03:43Speaker 1: there there has not been a year in a long time.
- 1:03:45Speaker 1: And this is not some braggadocio about my hunting prowess.
- 1:03:48Speaker 1: I'm not the greatest hunter in the world, but I
- 1:03:50Speaker 1: have a steady I appreciate the kind words. I have
- 1:03:53Speaker 1: a steady supply of hard earned game meat in my freezer,
- 1:03:57Speaker 1: like all of us here at the table, do okay,
- 1:04:01Speaker 1: And that's a fundamental element of my identity. If you
- 1:04:05Speaker 1: took that away from me, that would be a major
- 1:04:06Speaker 1: impact to me and my family in terms of our lifestyle,
- 1:04:09Speaker 1: how we eat. Um. So I like having a deer
- 1:04:13Speaker 1: as much as the next guy, but I would submit
- 1:04:16Speaker 1: to you that on an equal level of appreciation in
- 1:04:21Speaker 1: my mind with my own use of that resource, I
- 1:04:25Speaker 1: value the fact that that dear herd exists and is
- 1:04:30Speaker 1: supporting a whole cast of other awesome animals in that
- 1:04:36Speaker 1: trophic web, that food web. So I this is the
- 1:04:40Speaker 1: selfishness that I was touching on. It's not saying I
- 1:04:45Speaker 1: have a problem with somebody saying they really want to
- 1:04:47Speaker 1: get a deer. What I have a problem with is
- 1:04:49Speaker 1: somebody saying, I feel like I have the corner around
- 1:04:54Speaker 1: the market for deer, and these deer are all here
- 1:04:57Speaker 1: for human beings, and I don't have any tolerant. It's
- 1:05:00Speaker 1: for all these other animals in the landscape that are
- 1:05:04Speaker 1: also working hard two transfer those deer into their calories.
- 1:05:10Speaker 1: So I love the idea of sharing my deer hunting
- 1:05:15Speaker 1: spots with the full cast of species that evolved to
- 1:05:19Speaker 1: be part of that system. And if you gave me
- 1:05:22Speaker 1: the choice of hunting in a place where I could
- 1:05:26Speaker 1: easily kill a deer every year in the absence of
- 1:05:32Speaker 1: that sharing, or another word would be that competition versus
- 1:05:36Speaker 1: a place where maybe I'd kill a deer every other year,
- 1:05:40Speaker 1: but there's this robust community of all these other organisms
- 1:05:44Speaker 1: that depend on each other for their existence, I would take.
- 1:05:51Speaker 1: I would take the latter option. And I think the
- 1:05:54Speaker 1: extreme example of you know, the ease of killing something
- 1:06:00Speaker 1: every year and in the total control you could talk
- 1:06:02Speaker 1: about like a high fenced deer kind of operation where
- 1:06:05Speaker 1: there's no predators, very high likelihood of success, and increasingly artificial. Yeah,
- 1:06:12Speaker 1: I'm looking for a situation where you're experiencing the ecosystem
- 1:06:17Speaker 1: and it's full complement of species, and if that comes
- 1:06:20Speaker 1: with potential for a lower degree of success in my hunting,
- 1:06:24Speaker 1: so be it, because I would rather have an intact
- 1:06:26Speaker 1: ecosystem in which I can be an active participant, maybe
- 1:06:30Speaker 1: with a lower success rate, than a situation where there's
- 1:06:34Speaker 1: a whole pile of deer out there and I'm going
- 1:06:36Speaker 1: to get two bucks and four does every year without
- 1:06:40Speaker 1: a whole lot of work because the system has been
- 1:06:44Speaker 1: so manipulated that that opportunity exists. I think that that's
- 1:06:49Speaker 1: the thing we've touched on the past is I think
- 1:06:52Speaker 1: that's why I kind of like caution people against assessing
- 1:06:58Speaker 1: the health of the lands gate by looking at how
- 1:07:01Speaker 1: many deer I have, how many turkeys I have, Because
- 1:07:03Speaker 1: you could go into a property, go into a chunk
- 1:07:06Speaker 1: of ground and scrub it of its bio diversity. In
- 1:07:11Speaker 1: scrubbed of like well, you know, Leopold's cogs and wheels,
- 1:07:14Speaker 1: right of the natural world. Scrub it all out, and
- 1:07:16Speaker 1: you've got like the right ratio of soybeans to multi
- 1:07:19Speaker 1: flora rose, you know, to blow down timber and have
- 1:07:24Speaker 1: a ton of deer and all other you've gotten rid
- 1:07:27Speaker 1: of all other native much of the other native fauna
- 1:07:32Speaker 1: and flora, and you go out like, look it's healthy
- 1:07:34Speaker 1: because there's deer here. It's like you could be looking
- 1:07:36Speaker 1: at a very unhealthy landscape. It's got a shiploaded deer
- 1:07:39Speaker 1: on it, and it has been another way to measure it.
- 1:07:44Speaker 1: So I agree, like, there's there's nothing you're saying that
- 1:07:48Speaker 1: I think even like borders on like a controversial sentiment.
- 1:07:52Speaker 1: I don't know, man, I feel like there's an element
- 1:07:54Speaker 1: of our community of hunters that is um overly focused
- 1:07:58Speaker 1: on simple measures of what success looks like did I
- 1:08:06Speaker 1: get a deer? Did I not get a deer, as
- 1:08:09Speaker 1: opposed to being more considerate of the health of the
- 1:08:14Speaker 1: systems that they are participating in. So, you know, I
- 1:08:21Speaker 1: do believe there's an element of our community that's fairly
- 1:08:27Speaker 1: self centered and selfish and the idea of scrubbing every
- 1:08:30Speaker 1: predator from the landscape so that they could have more dear,
- 1:08:34Speaker 1: which has been something that the hunting community has wrestled
- 1:08:38Speaker 1: with for a hundred plus years. Um, I think that's
- 1:08:42Speaker 1: still alive and well in some quarters. And for me personally,
- 1:08:45Speaker 1: I'm speaking you know, about my own philosophy here, I
- 1:08:49Speaker 1: think it's I think it's flawed, and I think it's
- 1:08:52Speaker 1: detrimental to our ability to have thoughtful conversations with the
- 1:08:56Speaker 1: non hunting public about the activity when it's coming from
- 1:09:00Speaker 1: a really selfish place. If you're saying, and this is
- 1:09:03Speaker 1: getting back to Yanni's observation about um, you know, I'm
- 1:09:07Speaker 1: playing this role as a as a deer manager. I'm
- 1:09:09Speaker 1: playing this role as a predator manager. I think what
- 1:09:12Speaker 1: starts to come through there is just this idea that
- 1:09:14Speaker 1: the deer are here from me, as opposed to I'm
- 1:09:17Speaker 1: a participant in this system that I treasure, that I cherish,
- 1:09:22Speaker 1: and that I know something about. That's a very different conversation.
- 1:09:26Speaker 1: And I think that conversation about being an active participant
- 1:09:29Speaker 1: in a community that you know something about, and by
- 1:09:32Speaker 1: community I mean an ecological community where you're a predator
- 1:09:35Speaker 1: involved in this system that you've come to understand and
- 1:09:38Speaker 1: appreciate and cherish. That kind of conversation I think can resonate,
- 1:09:43Speaker 1: should resonate with a whole lot of people who might
- 1:09:46Speaker 1: never want to hunt. And the days of us, you know,
- 1:09:52Speaker 1: arguing about this stuff from a position of feeling like
- 1:09:55Speaker 1: we've got these really strong rights. You know, we exist
- 1:09:59Speaker 1: in a democrat out of society, and I think we
- 1:10:01Speaker 1: are our ability to continue participating in these activities, maybe
- 1:10:07Speaker 1: not in our generation, but maybe in our grandkids generation.
- 1:10:10Speaker 1: It's going to hinge on whether or not we can
- 1:10:13Speaker 1: communicate authentically and effectively. And that conversation about being an
- 1:10:17Speaker 1: active participant who's immersed in the systems that evolved us
- 1:10:21Speaker 1: as a species, I think that's that's an argument, that's
- 1:10:24Speaker 1: a set of observations that's going to continue to resonate
- 1:10:26Speaker 1: with the non hunting and hunting public in perpetuity. Whereas
- 1:10:30Speaker 1: a conversation about I need to manage the deer so
- 1:10:34Speaker 1: they don't get over abundant, I need to manage the
- 1:10:36Speaker 1: coyotes so they don't need all my dear, that conversation
- 1:10:40Speaker 1: is gonna gonna fall flat on its face. I'm tracking.
- 1:10:46Speaker 1: I'd like to point out too, very quickly that you know, hunting,
- 1:10:50Speaker 1: the animals that we take as hunters are compensatory, right, yes,
- 1:10:57Speaker 1: And in most you know, unless they're really trying to
- 1:11:00Speaker 1: down a population of said, you know, certain animal, where
- 1:11:03Speaker 1: they're also they're like, O could kill a bunch of dollars,
- 1:11:05Speaker 1: kill a bunch of this, right, most most of these
- 1:11:07Speaker 1: systems we manage so that we're sort of like, not
- 1:11:10Speaker 1: like extra doing extra killing. We're like, if you took
- 1:11:13Speaker 1: us out, you roughly have the same population. It's not
- 1:11:18Speaker 1: quite that simplenny. I mean, what drives the establishment of
- 1:11:26Speaker 1: quotas is gonna is going to be a combination of
- 1:11:31Speaker 1: ecological science and social science. The reality is, in any
- 1:11:35Speaker 1: one of these systems, we could be managing it up
- 1:11:38Speaker 1: or down potentially um for more fewer animals. And it's
- 1:11:43Speaker 1: a matter of yeah, making sure it's sustainable, but you
- 1:11:46Speaker 1: could have a sustainable number of animals on the landscape
- 1:11:50Speaker 1: that is higher or lower than what we do. So
- 1:11:53Speaker 1: not all the hunting associated mortality is going to be
- 1:11:56Speaker 1: compensatory or additive. Yeah, this is something that comes up
- 1:11:59Speaker 1: all the time. Um. And we've talked about a bunch
- 1:12:01Speaker 1: of times when people say, like deer overpopulated, it's kind
- 1:12:04Speaker 1: of well by whose measure, right, because it could be
- 1:12:09Speaker 1: that oftentimes from a hunter's perspective, they're hardly overpopulated. Like
- 1:12:13Speaker 1: I don't see it. A matter of fact, I didn't
- 1:12:15Speaker 1: even get one last year. But from a from the
- 1:12:18Speaker 1: automobile insurance industry might think they're way overpopulated. When you
- 1:12:24Speaker 1: look at how many claims they're handling for deer car collisions.
- 1:12:27Speaker 1: Agricultural interests might say they're overpopulated when they're looking at
- 1:12:32Speaker 1: orchard damage or people who are losing whole orchard plantings
- 1:12:38Speaker 1: two deer, and they might argue that it's overabundant. And
- 1:12:41Speaker 1: so I think that they're that the wildlife managers are
- 1:12:44Speaker 1: always needing to manipulate the valve because on one hand,
- 1:12:50Speaker 1: they're they're hearing from hunters, we want more deer on
- 1:12:52Speaker 1: the landscape, we want hire success rates, and other people,
- 1:12:55Speaker 1: you know, automobile insurance, egg and the host of others.
- 1:13:00Speaker 1: In some places, even like the landscaping industry is saying like, man,
- 1:13:03Speaker 1: we've got close at valva and and you're you're making
- 1:13:06Speaker 1: like constant microadjustments. Yeah, and they're rooted in different value sets.
- 1:13:10Speaker 1: And and for me, you know, as somebody who um
- 1:13:14Speaker 1: as a trend ecologist and somebody who values a system
- 1:13:20Speaker 1: in which you have all the all the players present
- 1:13:23Speaker 1: and interacting the way they have evolved to interact. Another
- 1:13:28Speaker 1: criterion by which you could you could measure deer over
- 1:13:31Speaker 1: abundance would be are there so many deer on the landscape?
- 1:13:34Speaker 1: That they're having a negative effect on other species that
- 1:13:39Speaker 1: are part of that ecosystem, and there are plenty of
- 1:13:42Speaker 1: examples where that's been shown to be the case. So
- 1:13:45Speaker 1: like the big drive to lower snow geese numbers has
- 1:13:51Speaker 1: as much to do with protecting their habitat Arctic like
- 1:13:55Speaker 1: Arctic coastal habitat as it does grain fields in Louisy
- 1:14:00Speaker 1: in Texas. And there are places where that's true for
- 1:14:02Speaker 1: white tailed deer as well, where um the idea of
- 1:14:06Speaker 1: trying to bring deer to meet a particular objective, um
- 1:14:11Speaker 1: bring numbers down, is driven by trying to protect other
- 1:14:14Speaker 1: elements of that ecosystem. So I think it's the the Canada.
- 1:14:18Speaker 1: You as a plant up in northern Wisconsin that historically
- 1:14:22Speaker 1: was much more abundant, and it's it's, you know, like
- 1:14:25Speaker 1: candy to the deer in the wintertime, and it's basically
- 1:14:27Speaker 1: been eliminated from much of northern Wisconsin. And the only
- 1:14:30Speaker 1: places you have little pockets of it are on the
- 1:14:32Speaker 1: Apostle Islands, where the the deer densities are either zero
- 1:14:36Speaker 1: or really low. So there are plenty of examples for
- 1:14:41Speaker 1: a variety of species where they're over abundance has resulted
- 1:14:44Speaker 1: in major implications to the ecosystem. So you have these
- 1:14:49Speaker 1: criteria that are social, like the insurance example, or the
- 1:14:53Speaker 1: the farmer trying to grow corn or soybeans, and then
- 1:14:55Speaker 1: you have other other criteria that are driven more around ecology.
- 1:15:02Speaker 1: And which one of those you put more weight on
- 1:15:03Speaker 1: is going to be very subjective, Right, what do you
- 1:15:05Speaker 1: care most about? If you're the farmer, you might think
- 1:15:09Speaker 1: of deer as rats with antlers, um. And if you're
- 1:15:14Speaker 1: a guy who waits all year to have that week
- 1:15:18Speaker 1: of deer season and you want to be able to
- 1:15:22Speaker 1: fill X number of tags, you might have a very
- 1:15:25Speaker 1: different perception of what too many deer looks like. This
- 1:15:32Speaker 1: leads into another question, Pet you cool? What I was
- 1:15:37Speaker 1: gonna ask you men for? Um? I just wanta how
- 1:15:41Speaker 1: bad your Australian accent was. Let's say you work at
- 1:15:48Speaker 1: the place like Stone Glacier. Um, why do companies Why
- 1:15:52Speaker 1: are companies secrety about? Like? What's the argument to be
- 1:15:55Speaker 1: secrety about a product you're gonna make sure? Like? What
- 1:15:58Speaker 1: are they afraid of? Um? I don't. I think there's
- 1:16:02Speaker 1: just a time and a place to kind of to
- 1:16:04Speaker 1: lay out the unveiling of it in the hype. Um
- 1:16:08Speaker 1: that that hype is valuable and market you want to
- 1:16:12Speaker 1: time that correctly, got with the with the delivering of
- 1:16:16Speaker 1: the product. But look, man, when a new Star Wars
- 1:16:18Speaker 1: movies coming out, they release trailers. They released trailers for trailers.
- 1:16:26Speaker 1: The questions because I had one one time I asked
- 1:16:28Speaker 1: this to a guy who works in apparel. Heugh was,
- 1:16:33Speaker 1: explain me, there is when you announce new stuff coming out,
- 1:16:37Speaker 1: people will stop buying the currently available stuff because like, well,
- 1:16:42Speaker 1: I'm just gonna wait for the new stuff. And then
- 1:16:43Speaker 1: you could be in a situation where you're left holding
- 1:16:47Speaker 1: sure because they're like, well I was gonna buy a
- 1:16:50Speaker 1: two thousand and sixteen, but screw it now, I'm just
- 1:16:54Speaker 1: gonna wait for the sweet news you can see like
- 1:16:56Speaker 1: in cars. Right. And also, you realize, man, once we
- 1:16:59Speaker 1: told about this bit a new truck, two eighteen trucks
- 1:17:03Speaker 1: sales every we just put it off because of waiting
- 1:17:05Speaker 1: for the new one. But in the situation like this,
- 1:17:07Speaker 1: where company's launching a product they don't currently make, that
- 1:17:11Speaker 1: argument doesn't hold water. It's very true. Just think about
- 1:17:14Speaker 1: all this. Yeah, I'm taking notes. Um, that's funny because
- 1:17:17Speaker 1: I haven't seen you writ anything. You can give me
- 1:17:19Speaker 1: a pen when I came in. Ah. Yeah, I think
- 1:17:22Speaker 1: it's just the timing of the of the hype. And
- 1:17:26Speaker 1: you know, you don't want people forget about it. You
- 1:17:28Speaker 1: want to tell them about it when they can actually
- 1:17:31Speaker 1: buy it or close to it. Yeah, yeah, and not
- 1:17:35Speaker 1: just get forgotten and blown away in the wind. Can
- 1:17:39Speaker 1: I get one of those blue hoodies? Yeah, we just
- 1:17:41Speaker 1: came out with these yesterday. Can you tell people about it?
- 1:17:43Speaker 1: It's a blue hoodie. It's a blue it's a bright
- 1:17:45Speaker 1: blue hoodie, and it has the American flag on my
- 1:17:49Speaker 1: chest and the Stone Glacier logo as well. I wear
- 1:17:52Speaker 1: this here Stone Glacier shirt because my wife's that it
- 1:17:54Speaker 1: makes me look a little younger. Yeah. It's got a yeah,
- 1:17:59Speaker 1: which apparently is um something she cares about. Our shadow
- 1:18:03Speaker 1: being a shadow lady, the shadow leader issues. That's our
- 1:18:06Speaker 1: jersey for a softball team. Don't look like a little
- 1:18:10Speaker 1: league player in this some badass mountain hunter man. Our
- 1:18:17Speaker 1: softball team name is the Stone Glacier. You crushers. That's good.
- 1:18:21Speaker 1: That's a good name. You like not you would, but
- 1:18:25Speaker 1: you e w okay, Carl, This is a real doozy,
- 1:18:30Speaker 1: the major doozy. All right, and it's long. It's a
- 1:18:35Speaker 1: long angry email. Favorite kind a long angry email. And
- 1:18:42Speaker 1: I love the guy. He owns the entire collection of
- 1:18:47Speaker 1: the Mediator TV show, so he's not a freeloader. Wants
- 1:18:51Speaker 1: to point that out. He is critical here where he says, boys,
- 1:18:56Speaker 1: I know you guys generally don't find fault and biologists
- 1:18:59Speaker 1: and over the agencies and whatnot. But come on, but
- 1:19:07Speaker 1: come on, and you know, I don't know that's that's
- 1:19:10Speaker 1: an entirely fair statement. I feel that I can find
- 1:19:14Speaker 1: plenty of situations where where I have not been happy
- 1:19:18Speaker 1: about something that the government agency has done. For instance, uh,
- 1:19:24Speaker 1: the State of New Jersey closing bear season. That's a
- 1:19:28Speaker 1: government agency making a move that I think is ridiculous
- 1:19:32Speaker 1: and misguided. So we've talked about plenty of times and
- 1:19:34Speaker 1: government agencies are screwed up. But here's his here's where
- 1:19:37Speaker 1: he here's his angry nous, here's his problem. He's from
- 1:19:41Speaker 1: Georgia and he keeps wanting to go up to hunt
- 1:19:43Speaker 1: moose and Maine. And he's saying, how they keep counting
- 1:19:48Speaker 1: moose and Maine. They're like, oh so Maine's thirty five thousand,
- 1:19:52Speaker 1: five square miles huge place. It's got one year, they
- 1:19:56Speaker 1: say maybe they got sixty thousand moose in Maine on
- 1:19:59Speaker 1: the low end. Then there's account that comes out and
- 1:20:02Speaker 1: there's someone that doesn't estimate, maybe we've got seventy five
- 1:20:06Speaker 1: thousand moose in Maine. So he's pointing out, man shiploads
- 1:20:11Speaker 1: a moose in Maine. But then there's some talk about
- 1:20:16Speaker 1: how they're wondering what the increasingly warm weather and Maine
- 1:20:24Speaker 1: kind of what kind of impacts it's having on moose,
- 1:20:27Speaker 1: And there's a lot of worry about increasingly warm summers
- 1:20:31Speaker 1: and what and it's concreasingly warm winters, and they're reducing
- 1:20:35Speaker 1: the number of tags available to hunters even though they
- 1:20:38Speaker 1: still have apparently quite a lot of moose. Like, how
- 1:20:43Speaker 1: in the world he's wondering, could it be that the
- 1:20:46Speaker 1: number of tags they're issuing, how could it be as
- 1:20:49Speaker 1: low as two thousand, one forty moose tags when you've
- 1:20:54Speaker 1: got perhaps seventy five thousand moose. Then the writer does
- 1:20:59Speaker 1: something a bit confusing where he starts pointing out that
- 1:21:03Speaker 1: the Canadian provinces to the north of Maine have many
- 1:21:08Speaker 1: more moose two hundred twelve thousand, Newfoundland maybe has around
- 1:21:12Speaker 1: three thirty thousand. So he's saying, you got all these
- 1:21:16Speaker 1: moose all over the place, why isn't Maine killing more.
- 1:21:20Speaker 1: I want to dispatch with a couple of that's before
- 1:21:22Speaker 1: we turn it over to Carl and a couple thats
- 1:21:23Speaker 1: be one. If you're the moose manager in Maine who
- 1:21:27Speaker 1: cares what they have in Newfoundland or New Brunswick, you
- 1:21:31Speaker 1: wouldn't say I'm gonna kill all the deer in Iowa
- 1:21:34Speaker 1: because Ohio has got a lot of deer, right, So
- 1:21:37Speaker 1: that really isn't like a valid point. And not only that,
- 1:21:40Speaker 1: but if you look, Maine doesn't manage moose by Maine.
- 1:21:45Speaker 1: They manage moose by very like micro chunks of ground,
- 1:21:49Speaker 1: so they have, you know, you have districts and regions,
- 1:21:51Speaker 1: and you're making like micro management decisions, sometimes down to
- 1:21:55Speaker 1: a single valley. So it doesn't like it's germane to
- 1:21:59Speaker 1: be like to talk about how many you're in other places.
- 1:22:01Speaker 1: Let's focus on the core of the question. He's sort
- 1:22:04Speaker 1: of accusing them of saying they're all worried about climate change,
- 1:22:08Speaker 1: so they're saying we can't go kill moose, even though
- 1:22:10Speaker 1: it's a ton of moose and they're not letting us
- 1:22:12Speaker 1: get at as many. No, Carl, can you speak to
- 1:22:17Speaker 1: what's going on? And it's happening in more places than Maine.
- 1:22:21Speaker 1: What's going on with some of the trepidation around what's
- 1:22:27Speaker 1: where moose are at, what role hunting is playing with moose?
- 1:22:32Speaker 1: What might be happening to moose? Right? Can you dig
- 1:22:35Speaker 1: in totally? And before I before I dig into the
- 1:22:38Speaker 1: science side of it, I'm thinking about a strategy for
- 1:22:42Speaker 1: trying to get a moose tag. Right, Because you're thinking
- 1:22:46Speaker 1: about this guy's strategy, I guess Maine would be awesome.
- 1:22:50Speaker 1: But this is getting back to the beginning of the podcast.
- 1:22:53Speaker 1: We're talking about the idea of having a beer. If
- 1:22:57Speaker 1: I said you want to go moose hunting, you're gonna say, well,
- 1:23:01Speaker 1: only if it's in Maine. Well he can drive. He's
- 1:23:05Speaker 1: in Georgia and he can drive main And Pete was
- 1:23:07Speaker 1: just telling Pete telling me, tell these guys, tell yeah,
- 1:23:10Speaker 1: I I also put in for a moose tag in
- 1:23:12Speaker 1: Maine this year. Um for a couple of different reasons. One,
- 1:23:15Speaker 1: I really want to go moose hunting a lot like this, Uh,
- 1:23:19Speaker 1: this guy that wrote in um Phil Phil, Yeah, it
- 1:23:23Speaker 1: sounds like Phil really wants a moose tag. I do too.
- 1:23:26Speaker 1: I have ten bonus points in Montana as a resident
- 1:23:30Speaker 1: in the area I put in for my draw, odds
- 1:23:32Speaker 1: are still sub four percent. It's like three and a
- 1:23:34Speaker 1: half percent chance that I'll draw this tag this year.
- 1:23:38Speaker 1: There are no bonus points in Maine. It's very affordable
- 1:23:42Speaker 1: to put your name in the hat, and I think
- 1:23:44Speaker 1: I have a seven or eight percent chance. So Pete
- 1:23:47Speaker 1: would argue that they're still doing a good job on
- 1:23:49Speaker 1: giving out opportunity in Maine. I was doing a quick
- 1:23:52Speaker 1: math in my head. I'm not real good at math,
- 1:23:53Speaker 1: but uh, a little over two thousand tags to sixty
- 1:23:57Speaker 1: thousand moose that seems like somewhere in the ball park
- 1:24:00Speaker 1: of what a three or four target objective of harvest.
- 1:24:04Speaker 1: That seems pretty normal to me, so I guess it can.
- 1:24:10Speaker 1: It can vary. Those percentages can vary widely depending on
- 1:24:14Speaker 1: the host of factors, but it's definitely not unusual. I
- 1:24:17Speaker 1: think like you would know this. I think with mountain goats,
- 1:24:19Speaker 1: I think like in excessive five percent is dangerous, correct, Yeah,
- 1:24:23Speaker 1: like Washington manages for a one percent harvest objective of
- 1:24:27Speaker 1: mountain goats. Montana manages for four, so different states choose
- 1:24:32Speaker 1: different numbers to shoot for. But if moose or anything
- 1:24:36Speaker 1: like mountain goats sounds like men on par for the
- 1:24:40Speaker 1: course here for Phil, I'm going to criticize the state agency.
- 1:24:44Speaker 1: I think, I think I think that the Washington I
- 1:24:47Speaker 1: think at Washington Fishing Game, I think their perspective on
- 1:24:49Speaker 1: harvest numbers from mountain goasts is ridiculous. And I think,
- 1:24:53Speaker 1: and this is a bowl, I can't back it up,
- 1:24:55Speaker 1: but I feel there's kind of a there is a
- 1:24:59Speaker 1: there's there's a sentiment there seems that at times be
- 1:25:02Speaker 1: a sentiment there um of of not maximizing, of not
- 1:25:09Speaker 1: maximizing opportunity. They're kind of like, I guess we gotta
- 1:25:13Speaker 1: allow him to do some hunting. Yeah, Yeah, I don't
- 1:25:15Speaker 1: think you're alone in that feeling. Because the one percent
- 1:25:19Speaker 1: is you know, or whatever it is like to be
- 1:25:21Speaker 1: on such the low end of the acceptable spectrum. I
- 1:25:24Speaker 1: think there's a great argument, and I've read the argument
- 1:25:27Speaker 1: made that like in excess of five percent can get
- 1:25:29Speaker 1: dangerous on these on mountain goat populations because the low
- 1:25:32Speaker 1: fecundity high risk of natural disaster. You know that they
- 1:25:37Speaker 1: die by accident and avalanches, rock slides, falling. Um. It
- 1:25:42Speaker 1: takes a lot to get a mature nanny who's reproductively successful, right,
- 1:25:47Speaker 1: I understand all that, So I'm not disparaging the idea
- 1:25:50Speaker 1: of applying for a main moose teg. My point is,
- 1:25:54Speaker 1: if he'd even limited himself to the lower forty eight,
- 1:25:57Speaker 1: he could be thrown in. If his idea is like
- 1:26:00Speaker 1: I want to go on a moose hunt, he should
- 1:26:02Speaker 1: be applying. I would say anywhere there's an opportunity, and
- 1:26:06Speaker 1: they can't do that much farther to drive from Georgia.
- 1:26:11Speaker 1: It's not like Maine is in the backyard. It's not
- 1:26:14Speaker 1: like Maine is in the backyard of Georgia. So he
- 1:26:15Speaker 1: could be he could be applying eight or nine states. Yeah,
- 1:26:19Speaker 1: And I'm coming at this from the standpoint of having
- 1:26:22Speaker 1: just hunted moose in Idaho last year as a non resident.
- 1:26:26Speaker 1: As a nonresident and shout out to the state of Idaho.
- 1:26:31Speaker 1: I love the way. I'm sure some people hate it.
- 1:26:33Speaker 1: But forcing you to choose one species and then having
- 1:26:38Speaker 1: a real likelihood of actually drawn a tag with no
- 1:26:41Speaker 1: point system, I think is really cool you want calling
- 1:26:44Speaker 1: in the bull there? I called in several bulls and
- 1:26:47Speaker 1: managed to get one at close range. Yeah, it was
- 1:26:51Speaker 1: an awesome hunt, had a great group of friends there.
- 1:26:54Speaker 1: It was a once in a lifetime experience, literally, because
- 1:26:57Speaker 1: now I'm you know, prohibited from ever a plan for
- 1:27:00Speaker 1: a bull tag and Idaho again. And you ran into
- 1:27:03Speaker 1: our resident enforcement specialist. I did. The guy called when
- 1:27:08Speaker 1: I got an enforcement and I got an enforcement question.
- 1:27:11Speaker 1: Ic Crawford. Wonderful guy. He actually man. He was kind
- 1:27:15Speaker 1: enough to come out and visit camp and register the
- 1:27:18Speaker 1: bull for me. But um, the reason I'm bringing up
- 1:27:21Speaker 1: Idaho is can I kind of enough real quick? Sure? Uh?
- 1:27:24Speaker 1: Did you did you enjoy? Was the moose meat? Pretty good?
- 1:27:27Speaker 1: It's been excellent. I'm still I mean, yeah, you use
- 1:27:30Speaker 1: it past past tense is not appropriate here because I'm
- 1:27:34Speaker 1: gonna be eating that moose. Did you data or when
- 1:27:37Speaker 1: you see moose? You know what that moose was? Yeah? No,
- 1:27:39Speaker 1: I don't have to worry about like which moose was this?
- 1:27:42Speaker 1: And my freezer a fossils? There will there will be
- 1:27:46Speaker 1: no freezer fossils. I agree with Steve's advice on that, um,
- 1:27:50Speaker 1: but I have been very generous too. That's the other
- 1:27:52Speaker 1: nice thing about having a moose is being able to
- 1:27:53Speaker 1: dole out some meat. And this is the smallest of
- 1:27:56Speaker 1: the subspecies to rights shiris bulls, so but still a
- 1:28:01Speaker 1: very large animal. And my buds who came and joined
- 1:28:04Speaker 1: me each left with a cooler full of meat. So
- 1:28:07Speaker 1: I'm digressing here, But the point is for this listener,
- 1:28:11Speaker 1: don't limit yourself just the main first start, you're starting
- 1:28:14Speaker 1: out with some advice. Yeah, don't limit yourself just to
- 1:28:16Speaker 1: Main if you want to go moose hunting and you
- 1:28:18Speaker 1: want to drive there, because you could just go buy
- 1:28:21Speaker 1: over the counter up in Alaska right and make it happen,
- 1:28:23Speaker 1: which is going to be more expensive, more logistically challenging.
- 1:28:27Speaker 1: But if you want to hunt moose in the meat
- 1:28:28Speaker 1: home is very tough, yes, and not tough. So if
- 1:28:33Speaker 1: you want to limit yourself to the lower forty eight,
- 1:28:34Speaker 1: I would point out Maine is not in the backyard
- 1:28:38Speaker 1: of Georgia. For a similar distance of driving, you could
- 1:28:41Speaker 1: be going up and and hunting some of those other
- 1:28:44Speaker 1: um you know, Northern Rockies States, Northwest States, and and
- 1:28:47Speaker 1: if you're lucky enough to draw obviously, the more hats
- 1:28:49Speaker 1: you have, your name in the higher the chances. So
- 1:28:53Speaker 1: all that being said, UM, I like it though, all right,
- 1:28:56Speaker 1: because you start you know what my dad always said,
- 1:28:58Speaker 1: he didn't invent us, don't curse the darkness. Light a candle,
- 1:29:02Speaker 1: Light a candle. Nice like to think the old man
- 1:29:06Speaker 1: came up with that bound. I think he did. I'd
- 1:29:07Speaker 1: like to think that maybe we're lighting a candle here
- 1:29:09Speaker 1: and and just lit fills candle. Well, it feels lucky
- 1:29:13Speaker 1: enough to draw a tag up in Idaho. I'd be
- 1:29:16Speaker 1: happy to chat with him to about the planning there.
- 1:29:20Speaker 1: It was a fantastic experience, all right. So what's going
- 1:29:22Speaker 1: on with moose? Um? I would I would refute something
- 1:29:26Speaker 1: that Steve said where it's not allowed. You made this.
- 1:29:35Speaker 1: Don't worry it's it's nothing to major, But you made
- 1:29:37Speaker 1: this comment that, Um, what's happening in those more northern
- 1:29:42Speaker 1: provinces is not relevant to what's happening in Maine. But
- 1:29:46Speaker 1: in fact it's part of the story because Maine and
- 1:29:52Speaker 1: our other um moose hunning opportunities in the lower forty
- 1:29:55Speaker 1: eight represent the southern of this species range. So when
- 1:30:04Speaker 1: you're in that situation and you're you're talking about hunting
- 1:30:06Speaker 1: opportunity at the very fringes of a species distribution. You're
- 1:30:12Speaker 1: already kind of starting off on a difficult foot because
- 1:30:15Speaker 1: you're talking about hunting an animal that is inherently existing
- 1:30:20Speaker 1: at the limits of its capacity to exist. So moose
- 1:30:26Speaker 1: are an animal. I'm sorry, But what's the part that
- 1:30:28Speaker 1: I said that's bad? You said, what was happening in
- 1:30:31Speaker 1: those in those Canadian provinces. I think you mentioned Newfoundland
- 1:30:34Speaker 1: and New Brunswick. It wasn't relevant. You said, just because
- 1:30:37Speaker 1: they're killing all the deer and state X, I don't
- 1:30:41Speaker 1: need to worry about you know, I'm gonna you said,
- 1:30:44Speaker 1: just because the hunting is great in Iowa, I'm gonna
- 1:30:47Speaker 1: go ahead and kill all the deer here in whatever state.
- 1:30:50Speaker 1: I'm ok. And I'm saying to set the stage for
- 1:30:54Speaker 1: the biology the story here, it's important to recognize that
- 1:30:57Speaker 1: there's a fundamental difference as you oh north for the
- 1:31:01Speaker 1: moose into the core of its range. I don't want
- 1:31:03Speaker 1: to belabor this, but this isn't That was not what
- 1:31:05Speaker 1: I was saying. You Okay, that's true. You said for
- 1:31:09Speaker 1: him to say, hey, Maine has sixty thousand moose, they
- 1:31:12Speaker 1: should give out more tags in Maine because a neighboring
- 1:31:16Speaker 1: Canadian province has three. Okay I was I thought you
- 1:31:22Speaker 1: were saying, in essence, what's happening in those other provinces
- 1:31:26Speaker 1: is irrelevant to what's happening here. No, okay, all ahead,
- 1:31:30Speaker 1: Well then I'll I apologize for misinterpreting. The point is
- 1:31:34Speaker 1: what's happening in those other provinces, thank you, is that
- 1:31:38Speaker 1: they are they represent really kind of the core of
- 1:31:42Speaker 1: the of the distribution. That is a place where, for
- 1:31:45Speaker 1: a variety of reasons, moose are able to thrive in
- 1:31:49Speaker 1: contrast to the southern limits of their range, I e. Maine. Okay,
- 1:31:55Speaker 1: So in Maine, you're talking about an animal that has
- 1:32:00Speaker 1: evolved to withstand very cold weather. Um, there's this idea
- 1:32:07Speaker 1: um an ecology in species evolution of a thermo and
- 1:32:13Speaker 1: you you talked about this actually with some of your
- 1:32:14Speaker 1: buffalo work. But the thermo neutral zone. So if you
- 1:32:19Speaker 1: think about being a human being, you know the range
- 1:32:21Speaker 1: of temperatures where we can hang out and be pretty comfortable.
- 1:32:25Speaker 1: Let's say it the lower limit is maybe fifty degrees
- 1:32:29Speaker 1: and you know, you could ask a human um a
- 1:32:34Speaker 1: biologist who who studies people, physiologist, you could ask what
- 1:32:38Speaker 1: the what the actual numbers are. But let's say it's
- 1:32:41Speaker 1: fifty degrees. Yeah, if you get below that, you start shivering, right,
- 1:32:45Speaker 1: and that shivering comes with an energetic cost. And on
- 1:32:49Speaker 1: the upper limit, when do you start getting uncomfortable? What
- 1:32:52Speaker 1: do you say? You're a better man than I am. Damn,
- 1:32:57Speaker 1: he's durable. So I started, I start breaking a sweat
- 1:33:01Speaker 1: if I'm just hanging out, let's say whatever, you get
- 1:33:05Speaker 1: the idea. So, whether you're trying to keep yourself warm
- 1:33:08Speaker 1: through shivering, or trying to cool yourself off through sweating
- 1:33:12Speaker 1: in our case, or if you can't sweat, panting some
- 1:33:15Speaker 1: sort of um physiological response to either heat or cool yourself,
- 1:33:19Speaker 1: those things come at a cost. So there's this envelope
- 1:33:23Speaker 1: where you can exist without any energetic cost associated with
- 1:33:28Speaker 1: addressing an uncomfortable temperature. Yeah, you know, and you're talking
- 1:33:32Speaker 1: for the Buffalo. I remember you writing that. You know,
- 1:33:35Speaker 1: it's some absurd like you can crank them down. They
- 1:33:37Speaker 1: couldn't find it. So yeah, in my book American, that's
- 1:33:40Speaker 1: about the study they did where they took a like
- 1:33:42Speaker 1: a whole stein or just some running the mill cow.
- 1:33:45Speaker 1: They took a Tibetan yak. I think they had a
- 1:33:49Speaker 1: Scottish highland some variety like Scottish Highland cow in a
- 1:33:55Speaker 1: buffalo and they put them in these shipping containers with
- 1:33:58Speaker 1: monitors on to see and they had like a metabolic
- 1:34:01Speaker 1: increase related to the temperature so basically that it will
- 1:34:07Speaker 1: start to shiver or start to expend energy to keep warm.
- 1:34:11Speaker 1: And they hit it like very quickly with the regular cow.
- 1:34:14Speaker 1: Um how mare what it was twenty degrees or whatever
- 1:34:17Speaker 1: the hell was like like surprisingly like still surprisingly warm,
- 1:34:20Speaker 1: and he hit it with a regular cow. And then
- 1:34:23Speaker 1: I think the Scottish Highland cattle, the Scottish Highland cow
- 1:34:26Speaker 1: tapped out. The Tibetan yak might have tapped out at
- 1:34:30Speaker 1: negative thirty and they couldn't get they could never get
- 1:34:35Speaker 1: the container cold enough to tap it out. They couldn't
- 1:34:37Speaker 1: tap it out of the buffalo. Yeah, And it might
- 1:34:39Speaker 1: have tried, like I don't know, I don't know if
- 1:34:40Speaker 1: they got to negative seventy, but they couldn't find the
- 1:34:43Speaker 1: point when it had a metabolic increase for dated to cold,
- 1:34:47Speaker 1: meaning some bits cold tolerant as are moose, they're very
- 1:34:51Speaker 1: cold tolerant. And can I tell no quick story, Yeah, sure, man,
- 1:34:56Speaker 1: this is your gig baby. So cold tolerant, so cold
- 1:35:00Speaker 1: toller that there was a there was trying to do
- 1:35:03Speaker 1: some account on a buffalo herd in Canada, and they're
- 1:35:07Speaker 1: out in the winter and they were using thermal imaging
- 1:35:11Speaker 1: to find the animals. They could never find them because
- 1:35:13Speaker 1: they're so well insulated. One day a guy noticed, when
- 1:35:16Speaker 1: he's looking at the images, how he sees these little
- 1:35:18Speaker 1: teeny crescent these little teeny black crescent shapes that didn't
- 1:35:24Speaker 1: make sense. And what he later realized was the horn
- 1:35:27Speaker 1: is their belly. That when one's laying on its side
- 1:35:31Speaker 1: and it's belly hair is exposed, you would now and
- 1:35:34Speaker 1: then hit a little bit of its belly, but it's
- 1:35:36Speaker 1: so well insulated that you're not picking up warmth off
- 1:35:40Speaker 1: of his back. It's a great a great story and
- 1:35:45Speaker 1: a great example of how a given animal can be
- 1:35:49Speaker 1: so well adapted to, uh, you know, a very cold envelope.
- 1:35:55Speaker 1: All right. So moose like the buffalo are well adapted
- 1:36:02Speaker 1: to withstands some extremely cold temperatures. But it doesn't take
- 1:36:09Speaker 1: particularly warm temperatures for them to need to start regulating
- 1:36:14Speaker 1: their body heat down, which is one of the reasons
- 1:36:17Speaker 1: that in the summertime, in addition to their being plenty
- 1:36:20Speaker 1: of good forage in aquatic habitats, you see moose in
- 1:36:25Speaker 1: the water like all day. They're there to escape insects,
- 1:36:30Speaker 1: they're there to access really rich food supplies, and they're
- 1:36:34Speaker 1: also there to cool down. So the issue of keeping
- 1:36:37Speaker 1: cool in the summer for a moose is a way
- 1:36:39Speaker 1: bigger deal than the issue of keeping warm in the winter.
- 1:36:42Speaker 1: So in a place like Maine, throughout the southern extent
- 1:36:45Speaker 1: of their range, and as we have climate warming and
- 1:36:52Speaker 1: temperature envelopes shifting north, it gets increasingly difficult for moose
- 1:36:57Speaker 1: to thermal regulate in the summer. At the lower extend
- 1:37:00Speaker 1: of their range. There's a a very real cost to
- 1:37:06Speaker 1: their fitness associated with those warmer temperatures in the summer,
- 1:37:11Speaker 1: a longer summer season. But that's just the beginning of
- 1:37:14Speaker 1: the story, because there are a number of other complex
- 1:37:19Speaker 1: interactions occurring on the landscape associated with relatively mild winters
- 1:37:25Speaker 1: relatively warm summers that planned this as well. And part
- 1:37:30Speaker 1: of the story here is with warmer winters milder winters,
- 1:37:35Speaker 1: um the ticks do much better at over wintering. So
- 1:37:41Speaker 1: there are there are a number of examples of kind
- 1:37:44Speaker 1: of natural biological processes that can really ramp up in
- 1:37:49Speaker 1: the absence of super cold winters, ticks being one another.
- 1:37:54Speaker 1: One is um the example of some of these pine
- 1:37:58Speaker 1: beetle infestation in the West, where it takes a really
- 1:38:02Speaker 1: cold winter to kill off the larvae, and in the
- 1:38:04Speaker 1: absence of a cold winter for a few years, you
- 1:38:06Speaker 1: end up with these huge insect outbreaks, these huge insect epidemics.
- 1:38:11Speaker 1: And another example would be um relatively warm falls and
- 1:38:18Speaker 1: springs and wetter weather resulting in more episodic hemorrhagic disease
- 1:38:25Speaker 1: outbreaks in white tail deer e h D. So changes
- 1:38:30Speaker 1: in weather associated with our climate can have major impacts
- 1:38:34Speaker 1: to wildlife and habitat look in those cases, it just
- 1:38:37Speaker 1: doesn't get cold enough, doesn't Yes, And with the moose
- 1:38:43Speaker 1: population in Maine, part of the story is these these
- 1:38:45Speaker 1: tick loads getting to be so severe than portions of
- 1:38:49Speaker 1: the state. They're clearly having a major impact on the
- 1:38:54Speaker 1: survivorship of moose. So not only is it harder for
- 1:38:59Speaker 1: them to last through warmer summers, but then they're they're
- 1:39:03Speaker 1: added on with this heavy load of ticks. But the
- 1:39:07Speaker 1: story doesn't end there either, as these as these warmer,
- 1:39:11Speaker 1: milder conditions continue to shift north. Another trend is that
- 1:39:16Speaker 1: you have increasing overlap between white tailed deer and moose.
- 1:39:21Speaker 1: The deer dew relatively well. Really cold, gnarly winters are
- 1:39:26Speaker 1: much harder for white tails to withstand than for moose
- 1:39:30Speaker 1: to withstand, and there's limited evidence to suggest that there's
- 1:39:35Speaker 1: direct competition for forage between the two species. Um Some
- 1:39:40Speaker 1: folks think maybe dear are a significant direct competitor with
- 1:39:45Speaker 1: moose for forage. Other folks think maybe not. But one
- 1:39:49Speaker 1: thing that the white tails do bring with them are
- 1:39:51Speaker 1: these meningeal worms, so another parasite story. And the species
- 1:39:57Speaker 1: name of the maningeal worm is peril of strugilous teneous.
- 1:40:02Speaker 1: So given that that's such a mouthful, you can understand
- 1:40:05Speaker 1: why they like to refer to him as ningel worms.
- 1:40:08Speaker 1: And them ninjis are these three layers that wrap around
- 1:40:14Speaker 1: the brain and spinal cord of all mammals. And if
- 1:40:19Speaker 1: you ever have heard of anybody going in to get
- 1:40:21Speaker 1: like a cerebro spinal fluid tap, that fluid exists between
- 1:40:26Speaker 1: a couple of these ma ningel layers, and the whole
- 1:40:29Speaker 1: system exists to provide kind of a a shield, like
- 1:40:33Speaker 1: a layer of protection and cushioning around these really important
- 1:40:36Speaker 1: spinal marriage Spinal meningitis will come from the same word. Yes, yes,
- 1:40:40Speaker 1: So meningitis just means the swelling of the ma ninji's,
- 1:40:44Speaker 1: these three layers. So in white tailed deer, this worm,
- 1:40:49Speaker 1: it has a super fascinating um life cycle. And I'll
- 1:40:56Speaker 1: start with the adults laying eggs in the me ninji's
- 1:40:59Speaker 1: in these these layers that wrap around the brain and
- 1:41:03Speaker 1: the spinal cord. So the adults ladies eggs, the eggs
- 1:41:08Speaker 1: on the deer's nostrils. No, so we'll start with an
- 1:41:11Speaker 1: infected and infected white tailed deer with adults that start,
- 1:41:16Speaker 1: and we'll come back around to it. So we'll talk
- 1:41:18Speaker 1: about the mode of exposure. I'll let you do it,
- 1:41:21Speaker 1: but I don't agree. Okay, where do you want to start.
- 1:41:24Speaker 1: I wouldn't do it that way. I would start with
- 1:41:28Speaker 1: the introduction, all right, But I'm just telling what, dude,
- 1:41:31Speaker 1: I'll go with you. So, imagine a white tailed deer
- 1:41:37Speaker 1: is walking through the woods, dicking around in the woods,
- 1:41:41Speaker 1: cruising along and whirling around. Yeah, it comes upon a
- 1:41:46Speaker 1: a tuft of it's preferred browse pick a pick a species.
- 1:41:51Speaker 1: What do you want to be eaten? Man? See that
- 1:41:55Speaker 1: footage of a deer eating eggs out of a bird nest.
- 1:41:58Speaker 1: Pick something, Pick something, pick something more? Yeah, I can't
- 1:42:03Speaker 1: pick little baby birds? Uh? Comes across it desized to
- 1:42:09Speaker 1: um can pick a mushroom? Sure? Okay, size of Eta
- 1:42:12Speaker 1: Morrell Okay. So this deer comes upon black or white
- 1:42:16Speaker 1: morele Morchella canicus okay, Morchella canicus. And as it lowers
- 1:42:25Speaker 1: its muzzle to nibble upon the head of this morale
- 1:42:28Speaker 1: inadvertently without even knowing it has done, so, it happens
- 1:42:33Speaker 1: to consume a gastropod. Do you want it to be
- 1:42:35Speaker 1: a snail or a slug because it could be either snail? Okay?
- 1:42:40Speaker 1: So this this two year old dough, which this is
- 1:42:43Speaker 1: making a lot of sense because you find those things
- 1:42:45Speaker 1: and Morrel's yes, you do. And it's an interesting part
- 1:42:49Speaker 1: of the story to in terms of the distribution of
- 1:42:50Speaker 1: this disease. And I'll come to that. So this two
- 1:42:53Speaker 1: year old white tail dough nibbles down on this morale
- 1:42:58Speaker 1: mushroom and then is up consuming, inadvertently and unbeknownced to itself,
- 1:43:03Speaker 1: a snail. Okay. That snail is infected, and I will
- 1:43:09Speaker 1: come back around to how the snail got infected. But
- 1:43:13Speaker 1: the deer, Yeah, because we're talking about the cycles, right,
- 1:43:16Speaker 1: So you can jump into that circle anywhere along the way.
- 1:43:19Speaker 1: So the deer ingests the snail. The snail has an
- 1:43:24Speaker 1: advanced larval phase of this worm living inside of itself,
- 1:43:31Speaker 1: inside of it, yes, which it has contracted by eating
- 1:43:36Speaker 1: the mucus on a fecal pellet from a different deer.
- 1:43:41Speaker 1: I'll come back around to that pellet. Why you wanted
- 1:43:43Speaker 1: to start where you wanted to Start's confusing, but I
- 1:43:45Speaker 1: think I'm good. One thing about the listenership of this
- 1:43:51Speaker 1: digital radio program is they're a pretty savvy bunch, so
- 1:43:53Speaker 1: they'll be able to they'll be able to track this.
- 1:43:56Speaker 1: So the dough has consumed omed the snail. Upon doing so,
- 1:44:06Speaker 1: the larval phase of the worm is consumed, ends up
- 1:44:16Speaker 1: in the stomach, matures makes it into the stomach wall.
- 1:44:23Speaker 1: From the stomach wall travels to the central nervous system.
- 1:44:27Speaker 1: The blood stream through the bloodstream makes it too. In
- 1:44:33Speaker 1: white tailed deer, the meningel tissues the layers around the
- 1:44:36Speaker 1: brain and the spinal cord, where it then proceeds to
- 1:44:40Speaker 1: lay eggs. Those eggs hatch into stage one larvae, dislodge
- 1:44:51Speaker 1: travel to the lungs, where they are then coughed up
- 1:44:58Speaker 1: by the deer and ingested into the stomach. Wow, at
- 1:45:04Speaker 1: which point in the stomach they are defecated and end
- 1:45:09Speaker 1: up in the mucus where a snail or slug consumes
- 1:45:14Speaker 1: the mucus that is infected with the larvae. That's another
- 1:45:18Speaker 1: thing you see. No, then snails on snails and slugs
- 1:45:21Speaker 1: on snails on droppings. Yeah, they eat that that mucus
- 1:45:25Speaker 1: which can be infected. So you have this cycle of
- 1:45:29Speaker 1: adult worm two long too digestive track, two feces, mucus
- 1:45:39Speaker 1: two gastropods, snails or slugs consuming it to those snails
- 1:45:44Speaker 1: or slugs than being eaten inadvertently by other servants other ungulates.
- 1:45:52Speaker 1: The interesting thing about this worm, though, is that white
- 1:45:56Speaker 1: tailed deer are uniquely able to carry the carry the
- 1:46:03Speaker 1: infection without having really negative consequences associated. So even even
- 1:46:11Speaker 1: other deer species, of course, which the moose is one,
- 1:46:15Speaker 1: but mule deer, moose, caribou all have the potential for
- 1:46:22Speaker 1: this infestation. This infection, this parasitism two go beyond the
- 1:46:30Speaker 1: maningel layers and actually have the infection end up in
- 1:46:37Speaker 1: their brain tissue. So in white tailed deer the worm
- 1:46:42Speaker 1: is limited to existing in the maningeal tissue. In these
- 1:46:46Speaker 1: other species it can end up in the brain and
- 1:46:50Speaker 1: have a major impact, including causing potentially mortality. Is it
- 1:46:55Speaker 1: is it reasonable to assume here that white tailed deer
- 1:46:58Speaker 1: have been exposed to this for very very long time.
- 1:47:01Speaker 1: And what's interesting and this this gets to the common
- 1:47:05Speaker 1: earlier about you know, seeing a snail or a slug
- 1:47:08Speaker 1: on a pile um. That's something I think you see
- 1:47:12Speaker 1: quite a bit when you're in the east. You know,
- 1:47:14Speaker 1: these relatively moist forests. This is not an issue that
- 1:47:19Speaker 1: we see west of the Great Plains. So this is
- 1:47:23Speaker 1: something that in moose populations in Minnesota and Maine has
- 1:47:28Speaker 1: been a big issue, but not so much west. And
- 1:47:32Speaker 1: it's thought that those grassland biomes that exist between kind
- 1:47:37Speaker 1: of the eastern moose populations in the western moose population
- 1:47:39Speaker 1: serve as a barrier for the spread of this disease.
- 1:47:43Speaker 1: The arid landscapes, right, and those arid landscapes it's poor
- 1:47:46Speaker 1: habitat for gastropods, right, So as white tailed deer expand
- 1:47:52Speaker 1: their range northward, they bring with them this worm that
- 1:47:57Speaker 1: has the potential to have a very different effect on
- 1:48:00Speaker 1: moose than it has on deer. And you could understand
- 1:48:03Speaker 1: moose that are out there foraging, consuming vegetation, and also
- 1:48:07Speaker 1: potentially gastropods, there's plenty of opportunity for dear to infect moose.
- 1:48:15Speaker 1: So again getting back to the idea of climate and
- 1:48:19Speaker 1: how how changes even if it's a matter of like
- 1:48:22Speaker 1: a one year that's particularly warm or dry, and this
- 1:48:26Speaker 1: is why there's so much complexity in the system. If
- 1:48:29Speaker 1: you have a hot and dry year, you know that
- 1:48:31Speaker 1: that might be a worse year for gaster pods. If
- 1:48:34Speaker 1: it's hot and dry, snails and slugs aren't going to
- 1:48:36Speaker 1: be doing as as well. But if you have a
- 1:48:39Speaker 1: relatively long window of non snow time, that's gonna be
- 1:48:47Speaker 1: a longer window of potential infection when those gaster pods
- 1:48:52Speaker 1: can be active. So you have changes in the distribution
- 1:48:56Speaker 1: of white tail deer, you have changes in the web
- 1:49:00Speaker 1: they're in the climate that have the potential to impact
- 1:49:03Speaker 1: the activity and window of exposure opportunity. Through the life
- 1:49:07Speaker 1: history of snails and slugs, you have these thermoregulatory considerations
- 1:49:14Speaker 1: that the species is already existing kind of at the
- 1:49:16Speaker 1: limit of its range, its ability to deal with those conditions,
- 1:49:21Speaker 1: you have the ticks, and so there's no one answer, right.
- 1:49:25Speaker 1: It's a very complex story, but it gets back to
- 1:49:30Speaker 1: the topic of compensatory versus additive mortality. One thing is
- 1:49:36Speaker 1: for sure, and it is that the decline of moose
- 1:49:40Speaker 1: at the lower limit of their range is not happening
- 1:49:43Speaker 1: as a result of hunting. It's happening independent of hunting.
- 1:49:48Speaker 1: But it's very hard for wildlife managers to justify issuing
- 1:49:52Speaker 1: a lot of tags to hunt a population that's in decline.
- 1:49:58Speaker 1: And in another one of the states being affected by
- 1:50:00Speaker 1: these dynamics, the state of Minnesota, which has a very
- 1:50:04Speaker 1: rich history of moose hunting. Um they made the tough
- 1:50:08Speaker 1: call in two thousand thirteen to completely stop their moose hunt,
- 1:50:13Speaker 1: and it's some of these same drivers. My understanding is
- 1:50:16Speaker 1: in in Maine it's much more of the ticks are
- 1:50:19Speaker 1: a way bigger deal. But this story about the ninel
- 1:50:22Speaker 1: worms in the northward expansion of white tailed deer, that's
- 1:50:25Speaker 1: something in in Minnesota that goes back to nineteen twelve
- 1:50:28Speaker 1: was the first year that they were really starting to
- 1:50:30Speaker 1: try to figure out we've got these declines and moose
- 1:50:32Speaker 1: what's going on. A lot of research has been done
- 1:50:35Speaker 1: in Minnesota around these white tail moose interactions. But that's
- 1:50:39Speaker 1: an example where UM in the state of Minnesota, they
- 1:50:44Speaker 1: ran a population viability assessment a few years ago basically
- 1:50:48Speaker 1: looking at recruitment and mortality of the moose population, and
- 1:50:54Speaker 1: their projections for the state of Minnesota that it's were
- 1:50:56Speaker 1: that it is possible within the next fifty years they
- 1:51:00Speaker 1: might not have moose in Minnesota anymore in the absence
- 1:51:03Speaker 1: of any further hunting. So totally appreciate Phil's excitement about
- 1:51:11Speaker 1: hunting moose, and having now punched my card as a
- 1:51:16Speaker 1: bona fide moose hunter, I would strongly encourage him to
- 1:51:20Speaker 1: explore possibilities. But these questions, UM, they might seem really
- 1:51:26Speaker 1: simple on their surface. Why won't the state of minister
- 1:51:29Speaker 1: Why won't the state of Maine issue more moose tags?
- 1:51:31Speaker 1: It's hard for me to draw a moose tag. And
- 1:51:33Speaker 1: then you start getting into the complexities of the system
- 1:51:37Speaker 1: and the specialized evolutionary traits of the moose with this
- 1:51:43Speaker 1: disease ecology layered over it, and a changing climate and
- 1:51:47Speaker 1: distribution in white tails layered over it, and what I
- 1:51:50Speaker 1: take away from that are a couple of things. One,
- 1:51:54Speaker 1: these management decisions are very complex and difficult. Two, there's
- 1:52:00Speaker 1: huge value in having wildlife professionals on the landscape looking
- 1:52:04Speaker 1: into this stuff, trying to figure out what's going on,
- 1:52:06Speaker 1: and then applying that science to management decisions. And one
- 1:52:13Speaker 1: other point I'd share is there are other issues, other
- 1:52:18Speaker 1: interests being considered in the issuance of tags. That moose
- 1:52:22Speaker 1: population is also UM, something that plenty of other recreational
- 1:52:28Speaker 1: users appreciate and want to see on the landscape. And
- 1:52:31Speaker 1: when a state is deciding how many tags to issue,
- 1:52:34Speaker 1: they're taking into consideration providing hunting opportunity. They're also taking
- 1:52:38Speaker 1: into consideration UM, wildlife viewing, and all the other folks
- 1:52:43Speaker 1: that want to be UM involved in the conversation. In
- 1:52:47Speaker 1: some states are more UM, more geared towards providing maximized
- 1:52:57Speaker 1: hunting opportunity. Other states, like what you are saying for
- 1:53:00Speaker 1: the state of Washington, maybe they're trying to balance a
- 1:53:04Speaker 1: variety of public values when they're coming to these wildlife
- 1:53:08Speaker 1: UM management decisions in terms of issuing tag allocations. So
- 1:53:14Speaker 1: if you're sitting there in the chair of the biologist,
- 1:53:17Speaker 1: whose job it is to say, all right, we are
- 1:53:19Speaker 1: going to issue X number of tags this year, and
- 1:53:21Speaker 1: you've got the social considerations, you've got the disease considerations,
- 1:53:26Speaker 1: You've got all this information at your disposal. It's a
- 1:53:29Speaker 1: tough chair to sit in. I think that where someone
- 1:53:34Speaker 1: would wind up becoming frustrated is if you were looking at, well,
- 1:53:39Speaker 1: we don't have a population problem right now, but we're
- 1:53:44Speaker 1: concerned about what climate issues might mean in the future. Therefore,
- 1:53:51Speaker 1: we're gonna throttle back hunting because we have a big
- 1:53:54Speaker 1: question mark about what's going on ahead. I think that
- 1:53:57Speaker 1: people could look at that, you get frustrated, so and
- 1:54:00Speaker 1: they could look at it and get frustrated to and
- 1:54:02Speaker 1: in the social consideration thing, where you might where a
- 1:54:06Speaker 1: state might be like, you know what, We're gonna start
- 1:54:08Speaker 1: paying more attention to people who identify as a wildlife
- 1:54:11Speaker 1: viewer and make sure that they're having more opportunity and
- 1:54:16Speaker 1: shift away from a user group that we used to Yeah,
- 1:54:21Speaker 1: like I used to put emphasis on and I could
- 1:54:23Speaker 1: see getting like really frustrated with that. Yeah, I can't
- 1:54:26Speaker 1: to Another piece of the story that we didn't talk
- 1:54:29Speaker 1: about is some of the ongoing research that they've done,
- 1:54:33Speaker 1: and one of the more recent moose studies that occurred
- 1:54:36Speaker 1: in Maine, they had very high mortality among a number
- 1:54:40Speaker 1: of colored individuals, thirty of seventy, thirty of seventy. And
- 1:54:46Speaker 1: that's a gross simplification of the study. You've got some
- 1:54:50Speaker 1: information in front of you, but I'm just I'm just
- 1:54:52Speaker 1: pulling us some filth. Yeah, so Phil knows about the study.
- 1:54:55Speaker 1: So if you have indicators like that, you know they're
- 1:54:59Speaker 1: investing money and research, They're they're tracking the population. He
- 1:55:03Speaker 1: provided some of the historical data and context in his email. UM,
- 1:55:09Speaker 1: they have information at their disposal that leads them to
- 1:55:11Speaker 1: believe this is a this is a population that is
- 1:55:14Speaker 1: in decline. They're trying to get to the bottom of
- 1:55:17Speaker 1: what the management options are. But it's not it's not
- 1:55:20Speaker 1: like they're just thinking, well down the line, this might
- 1:55:24Speaker 1: be an issue, so we're gonna make a very conservative
- 1:55:27Speaker 1: management call today. They believe there's a need to act today,
- 1:55:33Speaker 1: and they're issuing tags based on the information they have
- 1:55:36Speaker 1: at their disposal. I absolutely agree with you that, UM,
- 1:55:40Speaker 1: it would be a source of frustration if they were
- 1:55:44Speaker 1: taking an overly conservative UM. Management call now thinking there's
- 1:55:49Speaker 1: this long term climate trajectory that they're trying to be
- 1:55:52Speaker 1: responsive to. That's not the case. They've got an issue
- 1:55:56Speaker 1: with declining moose. They've got an issue with high mortality.
- 1:55:59Speaker 1: There were about hunting being a source of additive mortality
- 1:56:02Speaker 1: to that population, very similar to the call in Minnesota
- 1:56:07Speaker 1: to close the hunt. Could they have a few tags
- 1:56:10Speaker 1: being issued in Minnesota? Probably so, But at what point
- 1:56:14Speaker 1: do you make the call that you've got enough concern,
- 1:56:20Speaker 1: sufficient concern about the decline that you need to take action.
- 1:56:24Speaker 1: So I think the throttling back of tags, I certainly
- 1:56:27Speaker 1: would not UM second guests any of my counterparts there
- 1:56:33Speaker 1: in the state who are looking at the day to
- 1:56:34Speaker 1: day in and day out and investing time in those
- 1:56:36Speaker 1: surveys and having all that information, all that science. UM
- 1:56:41Speaker 1: it really puts people on good footing to be able
- 1:56:44Speaker 1: to make well informed decisions. And getting back to something
- 1:56:47Speaker 1: you said earlier about UM the funding and how you know,
- 1:56:50Speaker 1: we should be quick to tell out the fact that
- 1:56:53Speaker 1: hunters and fisher fishermen, in their license dollars are going
- 1:56:56Speaker 1: to do all this good habit at work. We wouldn't
- 1:56:59Speaker 1: have any of these studies occurring in the absence of
- 1:57:03Speaker 1: support from the hunting and fishing community. Either. It's not
- 1:57:06Speaker 1: just money going to support law enforcement and habits at work,
- 1:57:10Speaker 1: it's providing all this scientific information that underpins these management decisions.
- 1:57:15Speaker 1: So when you've got such a complicated life history story
- 1:57:19Speaker 1: as this ninel worm, think about how much research went
- 1:57:23Speaker 1: into picking that apart and understanding what the dynamics are,
- 1:57:26Speaker 1: just so you can have information in your hands to
- 1:57:28Speaker 1: start to talk about what your management options are. Imagine
- 1:57:31Speaker 1: if you're trying to make a management decision about this
- 1:57:33Speaker 1: and you don't understand these nuances about the ecology of
- 1:57:36Speaker 1: what's happening on the landscape. So I come away with
- 1:57:39Speaker 1: just a lot of gratitude and um appreciation for how
- 1:57:46Speaker 1: fundamentally difficult some of these management decisions are. As opposed
- 1:57:50Speaker 1: to a desire to cast stones. I think it's helpful
- 1:57:54Speaker 1: too for someone who starts to think, like, man, I'm
- 1:57:57Speaker 1: starting to detect a TI hunting bias in my state
- 1:58:02Speaker 1: Fish and Game agency. If you if you feel that,
- 1:58:05Speaker 1: I think you should probably go and try to find
- 1:58:07Speaker 1: where it's a theme that you're seeing occurring across a
- 1:58:13Speaker 1: bunch of different wildlife resources. So if you find that
- 1:58:17Speaker 1: deer tags going through the roof, no real change, no dramatic,
- 1:58:22Speaker 1: inexplicable change, and bear tag numbers, that's a great suggestion.
- 1:58:28Speaker 1: Turkey season is still long, water foul season is still long.
- 1:58:31Speaker 1: Fish trees are still right. But there's this one anomaly, Like, man,
- 1:58:35Speaker 1: they're really cutting back on moose. You probably look at
- 1:58:37Speaker 1: that and but like this is probably about moose. I
- 1:58:40Speaker 1: think that's a fair assessment and not seeing some like
- 1:58:42Speaker 1: general thing where they're generally being like, you know what,
- 1:58:44Speaker 1: let's try to get fewer hunters out of the landscape.
- 1:58:46Speaker 1: But anyway we can think of and will manipulate data
- 1:58:49Speaker 1: and use you know, hypothetical scenarios that could occur in
- 1:58:53Speaker 1: the future as a justification to throttle back hunter participation. Um,
- 1:58:59Speaker 1: you gotta get a big picture. And that's in contrast
- 1:59:02Speaker 1: to a statewide bear hunting closure or a statewide lion
- 1:59:06Speaker 1: hunting closure that's not at all rooted in any kind
- 1:59:08Speaker 1: of science. Yeah, well, you know what, Maine, I'm sure
- 1:59:10Speaker 1: you followed this. There was a they try to do
- 1:59:12Speaker 1: a referendum to ban uh baiting and the hounds for bears,
- 1:59:16Speaker 1: which would basically make you know, a lot of hunting
- 1:59:19Speaker 1: mane very difficult and it got soundly defeat defeated by
- 1:59:22Speaker 1: the voting public. So there you even have. You still
- 1:59:25Speaker 1: have a strongly pro hunting, yeah, voting population in Maine,
- 1:59:33Speaker 1: like they trounced that thing, that initiative referendum. So hopefully
- 1:59:38Speaker 1: that story helps a bit. But dude, if this guy
- 1:59:42Speaker 1: listened to seventy podcasts a one month, I'm having to
- 1:59:44Speaker 1: think he's gonna get to this and and and find
- 1:59:46Speaker 1: where we addresses concerns. Hopefill draws his tag, Fee's gonna
- 1:59:53Speaker 1: run into him and put in for I at home. Man,
- 1:59:54Speaker 1: when Pete draws, is gonna have some other guys come
- 1:59:56Speaker 1: in and like blow out his area and be like
- 1:59:58Speaker 1: you na mean? Phil? Is it a quick question? Can
- 2:00:02Speaker 1: those miningel worms transmit to humans? There is not any
- 2:00:06Speaker 1: evidence in the literature I've come upon that um indicates
- 2:00:09Speaker 1: that to be the case. But there is a host
- 2:00:11Speaker 1: of other species I talked about mule, deer, elk, caribou, um,
- 2:00:15Speaker 1: domestic sheep, and goats, And then your bro might be
- 2:00:17Speaker 1: interested to notice, Steve, but llamas and alpacas can also
- 2:00:20Speaker 1: be infected with miningel worm. I didn't want to have
- 2:00:24Speaker 1: to think about quitting any more. Else. Yeah, well you
- 2:00:28Speaker 1: are you eating him raw? I mean I have sounded
- 2:00:33Speaker 1: very trigger gnosis like parasites swimming around in you can
- 2:00:40Speaker 1: I give a couple of points just to just to
- 2:00:42Speaker 1: add a little bit, a couple of points that came
- 2:00:44Speaker 1: from at our net when I put this moose question
- 2:00:46Speaker 1: to him. Yeah, he had a couple of good points.
- 2:00:48Speaker 1: He usually does, so he has He bullet points out
- 2:00:52Speaker 1: a few things to think about here. Um. He points
- 2:00:55Speaker 1: out that residents always have top priority for special trophy animals,
- 2:01:01Speaker 1: and in Maine only ten percent of the tags for
- 2:01:03Speaker 1: each of the four management units. So Maine divides this
- 2:01:06Speaker 1: moves up into four management units. Only ten percent even
- 2:01:11Speaker 1: go to non residents. So he goes on to say
- 2:01:15Speaker 1: that a non residents odds stay proportionately the same as
- 2:01:18Speaker 1: everyone else and vary with how many Georgia and other
- 2:01:22Speaker 1: nonresident guys are applying for any given tag. Um. He
- 2:01:27Speaker 1: says that people in Maine are inherently conditioned to having
- 2:01:31Speaker 1: a very conservative number of hunting tags. Uh, I mean,
- 2:01:36Speaker 1: they'd like to play it safe, and proposed increases in
- 2:01:40Speaker 1: tag allocations are often met with considerable pushback. He says
- 2:01:45Speaker 1: there's a cultural social aspect here that a person from
- 2:01:49Speaker 1: Georgia may not fully appreciate um because apparently a few
- 2:01:54Speaker 1: years ago the department did get more aggressive and issued
- 2:01:57Speaker 1: more tags, more moose tags, and happened to coincide with
- 2:02:01Speaker 1: one of the big tick outbreaks that resulted and higher
- 2:02:05Speaker 1: than expected mortality. It was a double whammy, if you will,
- 2:02:09Speaker 1: and they took a lot of ship from the public.
- 2:02:13Speaker 1: He also says, in the last ten years, they've perfected
- 2:02:17Speaker 1: better survey methods, data and modeling approaches, and they're probably
- 2:02:22Speaker 1: operating now on better population estimates than they were operating
- 2:02:27Speaker 1: on in past years. So they may have had assumptions
- 2:02:32Speaker 1: about how many moves they had that were different than
- 2:02:35Speaker 1: what they're now thinking is true. And if you're shooting
- 2:02:38Speaker 1: for those certain percentages, you're going to see a lowering
- 2:02:41Speaker 1: just because you're operating on better information. He also goes
- 2:02:46Speaker 1: down and say this where tick outbreaks have had the
- 2:02:49Speaker 1: highest impact, the department would like to kill more animals
- 2:02:53Speaker 1: to reduce densities. But as you might guess, the public
- 2:02:58Speaker 1: doesn't get that too well, meaning they're gonna say you
- 2:03:01Speaker 1: want to kill more moose who are already dying from ticks,
- 2:03:06Speaker 1: and they're gonna push back on this good stuff, man,
- 2:03:12Speaker 1: deadly edly. Um uh, I didn't even get to the
- 2:03:18Speaker 1: main thing I wanted to talk about. Man, what was that?
- 2:03:24Speaker 1: We've covered some ground, dude, Oh my god? What it
- 2:03:27Speaker 1: maybe I want to talk about? Was the Okay, ny,
- 2:03:31Speaker 1: how long we've been talking here. We've been going for
- 2:03:33Speaker 1: a while. We could do one more at all if
- 2:03:36Speaker 1: you can do it in ten minutes. This is my
- 2:03:37Speaker 1: concluding thought. We have over the months, got many, many
- 2:03:42Speaker 1: requests for comment about an issue that's going on in
- 2:03:46Speaker 1: Alaska that's been generating a ton of headlines here in
- 2:03:50Speaker 1: the lower forty eight in the national medium. It has
- 2:03:52Speaker 1: to do with something that's happened with certain hunting practices
- 2:03:58Speaker 1: being banned on certain lands in Alaska. UM. To give
- 2:04:05Speaker 1: you a little bit of background, Uh, states manage their
- 2:04:12Speaker 1: own wildlife, and with exceptions of if something is protected
- 2:04:16Speaker 1: under the Endangered Species Act or it has federal oversight
- 2:04:19Speaker 1: because it's migratory and actually moves very fluidly across geopolitical boundaries,
- 2:04:25Speaker 1: right then the federal government was going to provide some
- 2:04:27Speaker 1: management oversight so that one state is inadvertently screwing another
- 2:04:31Speaker 1: state over, meaning you kill all the ducks. Let's just
- 2:04:34Speaker 1: say you were to kill all the ducks in Alaska, Well,
- 2:04:38Speaker 1: a dude in Texas is gonna have, you know, or
- 2:04:40Speaker 1: a dude down in the you know, the valley in California.
- 2:04:45Speaker 1: You've just screwed that guy over. So there's some insulation
- 2:04:48Speaker 1: from one state making a bad move on migratory stuff. NASA,
- 2:04:50Speaker 1: we might have federal oversight, but generally if things aren't
- 2:04:53Speaker 1: you know, another example like marine mammals, there's a Federal
- 2:04:56Speaker 1: Marine Mammal Protection Act, but generally the state manages on
- 2:04:59Speaker 1: wildlife as it sees fit um. In two thousand fifteen,
- 2:05:05Speaker 1: during the Obama administration, there was a ruling that came
- 2:05:10Speaker 1: through the Interior Department at the time that eliminated certain
- 2:05:15Speaker 1: management tools or certain things that the State of Alaska
- 2:05:19Speaker 1: at times allowed, and they limited their ability. They eliminated
- 2:05:22Speaker 1: the state's ability to use certain management tools on federal
- 2:05:28Speaker 1: preserve land in Alaska. This did not affect the remainder
- 2:05:35Speaker 1: of the state. So about thirteen percent of Alaska is
- 2:05:39Speaker 1: federal preserve and they said, on this thirteen percent of Alaska,
- 2:05:44Speaker 1: we're gonna eliminate such things as the ability to um
- 2:05:48Speaker 1: shoot caribou from a boat, so you'd use a boat
- 2:05:52Speaker 1: to go shoot a swimming cariboo. Um, that you would
- 2:05:55Speaker 1: be able to use dogs or bait for hunting bears,
- 2:06:01Speaker 1: that you would have wolf and bear seasons that were
- 2:06:06Speaker 1: opened during spring like denning and calving and pup raising
- 2:06:12Speaker 1: times of year. This was like deeply unpopular with the
- 2:06:18Speaker 1: Alaska Department Fishing Game because it would be similar to
- 2:06:25Speaker 1: let's say you have a city like let's let's say
- 2:06:27Speaker 1: take New York and they have all their traffic laws
- 2:06:29Speaker 1: and their traffic laws work very well. No one can
- 2:06:32Speaker 1: look and say, man, your traffic laws are screwed up.
- 2:06:34Speaker 1: But we're gonna do something. If a road passes by
- 2:06:37Speaker 1: a federal building, We're gonna give you a different set
- 2:06:39Speaker 1: of traffic laws that we would like you to enforce.
- 2:06:42Speaker 1: It's not based on the fact that there's a problem
- 2:06:43Speaker 1: with your traffic laws, just we've decided that we think,
- 2:06:48Speaker 1: um that a few things should be different. That you
- 2:06:51Speaker 1: should drive on the uh left side of the road
- 2:06:57Speaker 1: if you're passing federal property, and we'd like you to
- 2:06:59Speaker 1: go in and have the little discrepancies on your landscape
- 2:07:01Speaker 1: these management discrepancies with how you're handling traffic and the
- 2:07:06Speaker 1: police there might be like, uh, one was the problem.
- 2:07:11Speaker 1: You're not showing us, you're not demonstrating that we've done
- 2:07:13Speaker 1: something wrong. You're making our jobs much more complicated. It's
- 2:07:17Speaker 1: more complicated for the public to understand what's going on.
- 2:07:21Speaker 1: So we just generally don't like the fact that you're
- 2:07:24Speaker 1: inserting yourself here in this way. Um, and it created
- 2:07:29Speaker 1: some real like states rights federal rights issues. So now
- 2:07:33Speaker 1: the State Department, I'm sorry, Now the Interior Department is
- 2:07:37Speaker 1: moving to correct this and they're setting the regulations back
- 2:07:43Speaker 1: to the way they were prior to this earlier law
- 2:07:46Speaker 1: that went into place in making it that the state
- 2:07:50Speaker 1: can manage wildlife as it sees fit on federal preserves
- 2:07:54Speaker 1: as they had always done except for this narrow window
- 2:07:57Speaker 1: of time of three years when they weren't able to
- 2:08:00Speaker 1: do certain practices of the state. As the way it's
- 2:08:05Speaker 1: covered though, and the media is it's like they're changing
- 2:08:10Speaker 1: the laws so that people can now go dig cubs
- 2:08:14Speaker 1: out of the den and kill them. Okay, where does
- 2:08:19Speaker 1: that come from? When someone says that, what are they
- 2:08:21Speaker 1: talking about? What they're talking about is this. There are
- 2:08:23Speaker 1: some areas in Alaska where they have a lot of
- 2:08:27Speaker 1: black bears. Let's say they have tons of black bears,
- 2:08:31Speaker 1: not a lot of harvest upset black bears, and for
- 2:08:34Speaker 1: management's sake, they just say that there's no close season
- 2:08:37Speaker 1: on black bears. A person is allowed to black bears
- 2:08:41Speaker 1: a year, no close season. Someone might look at that
- 2:08:45Speaker 1: and be like, oh, if that's the case, I suppose
- 2:08:49Speaker 1: that means you could go dig a bear out of
- 2:08:52Speaker 1: its den and kill it. But does that mean that
- 2:08:55Speaker 1: anyone actually does this? Already right now, seven percent of
- 2:09:00Speaker 1: Alaska is already open to people pulling cubs out of
- 2:09:03Speaker 1: dens and killing them. I can't think of a single
- 2:09:06Speaker 1: instance where this has happened outside of the Koyakuk and
- 2:09:12Speaker 1: Native Alaskan group, an indigenous group who resides along the
- 2:09:16Speaker 1: Yukon and Koyukon rivers. They traditionally hunt bears in the
- 2:09:20Speaker 1: winter by digging them out of Den's a practice that
- 2:09:23Speaker 1: they have engaged in for thousands of years. That's how
- 2:09:26Speaker 1: they hunt. Now, if you're the kind of person who
- 2:09:28Speaker 1: likes the sort of cultural imperialism that would come in
- 2:09:31Speaker 1: and tell an indigenous group of people who has acted
- 2:09:33Speaker 1: a certain way for many thousands of years and live
- 2:09:35Speaker 1: in harmony with its environment. That they've got it all wrong,
- 2:09:39Speaker 1: that they're not sportsmanlike because they have a traditional use
- 2:09:43Speaker 1: practice of eating bear met in the winter that they
- 2:09:45Speaker 1: pull out of den's, then go ahead and be that
- 2:09:47Speaker 1: kind of guy. But as far as what goes on
- 2:09:50Speaker 1: with regular hunters, like people who are operating under sport
- 2:09:54Speaker 1: hunting licenses, it is not a practice to dig cubs
- 2:09:58Speaker 1: out of their dens and kill them. There's no like need,
- 2:10:01Speaker 1: there's no demand. It would be like saying this, if
- 2:10:05Speaker 1: you live in New York and you open your trash
- 2:10:08Speaker 1: can up and you find a little nest of rat
- 2:10:12Speaker 1: babies in your trash can, Okay, it would theoretically be
- 2:10:17Speaker 1: legal for you to take a dull knitting needle and
- 2:10:22Speaker 1: slowly kill all those rat babies with a dull knitting needle.
- 2:10:27Speaker 1: Theoretically one could go do that. So to say that
- 2:10:30Speaker 1: people in New York are allowed to kill rats that
- 2:10:34Speaker 1: they find in their home or in their garbage cans,
- 2:10:36Speaker 1: you could put it that way, or you could be
- 2:10:38Speaker 1: the kind of guy who says it's not illegal for
- 2:10:40Speaker 1: people in New York to brutally slaughter baby rats with
- 2:10:44Speaker 1: dull knitting needles. Because sure, I'm sure if you're the
- 2:10:48Speaker 1: kind of person who reads that that way. Yeah, another
- 2:10:51Speaker 1: way it would be to put it is that you're
- 2:10:53Speaker 1: allowed to like control rats in your home. So like
- 2:10:57Speaker 1: the constant twisting is the other thing is an article
- 2:10:59Speaker 1: and you see news which like because you're because you're
- 2:11:02Speaker 1: allowed to already bait bears depending on where you are
- 2:11:06Speaker 1: in in a three percent or eighties seven percent of Alaska,
- 2:11:09Speaker 1: it's like, now you can kill bears using donuts and bacon,
- 2:11:13Speaker 1: Like the journalists went to such specificity they've called out
- 2:11:16Speaker 1: like they're like, what would be the most egregious sort
- 2:11:18Speaker 1: of bear bait? I guess it would be donuts and bacon,
- 2:11:20Speaker 1: And I'll use that as a headline to explain my story.
- 2:11:26Speaker 1: Or that they said you can use a spotlight to
- 2:11:28Speaker 1: go kill baby cubs in their den. This isn't something
- 2:11:32Speaker 1: anyone's doing. And in fact, just because the state has
- 2:11:37Speaker 1: the ability to make it legal in this new thirteen
- 2:11:40Speaker 1: percent of their land masks and they've already had the
- 2:11:42Speaker 1: ability to make it legal and eight seven percent of
- 2:11:44Speaker 1: their land masks doesn't mean that it already is you
- 2:11:46Speaker 1: can kill caribou from a boat in a couple a
- 2:11:51Speaker 1: couple extremely remote locations north of the Brooks Range. It's
- 2:11:56Speaker 1: a practice generally done by subsistence in digital. This hunters
- 2:12:00Speaker 1: who traditionally target caribou as they go through as their
- 2:12:04Speaker 1: migration paths take them across some major rivers because other
- 2:12:08Speaker 1: than that, these are inaccessible areas and you cannot get
- 2:12:11Speaker 1: into the areas and transport the meat back. So they
- 2:12:14Speaker 1: hunt along rivers, and there's certain bottleneck points where migrating
- 2:12:17Speaker 1: herds of thousands of cariboo will come and encounter a river.
- 2:12:21Speaker 1: It's the only place these people have an opportunity to
- 2:12:24Speaker 1: intersect these herds of cariboo, and that's where they hunt them,
- 2:12:28Speaker 1: is on the river. There is nowhere. In fact, I've
- 2:12:31Speaker 1: hunted all over Laska, I've never hunted in the unit
- 2:12:35Speaker 1: where you could kill a caribou from a boat in
- 2:12:38Speaker 1: the water. So the fact that the state can allow
- 2:12:42Speaker 1: it doesn't even mean that it can be allowed. Where
- 2:12:45Speaker 1: I hunt black bears in Alaska, the state could say
- 2:12:49Speaker 1: you can go dig them out of a den, but
- 2:12:51Speaker 1: you can't. There's a specific season, in a specific quota.
- 2:12:55Speaker 1: You have to apply for a permit. You would get
- 2:12:58Speaker 1: the permit about once every two years if you apply.
- 2:13:00Speaker 1: When you apply, you have to specify whether you want
- 2:13:03Speaker 1: to hunt the spring or the fall season. They both
- 2:13:05Speaker 1: have pramp date parameters around them. If you wound a
- 2:13:09Speaker 1: bear and don't recover, you notch your tag. It's that
- 2:13:13Speaker 1: specific in the legality of it. Okay, So it's not
- 2:13:19Speaker 1: that now Alaska is going to make it that I
- 2:13:21Speaker 1: could go over there and dig baby bears out of
- 2:13:24Speaker 1: their dens and torture them to death, because you already
- 2:13:26Speaker 1: can't anyway. But when they look at when they're trying
- 2:13:29Speaker 1: to do these management practices of maintaining stable populations of
- 2:13:34Speaker 1: cariboan moves often with an eye tord, providing subsistence cultures
- 2:13:38Speaker 1: access two readily available protein sources, and these are things
- 2:13:43Speaker 1: they can do in certain cases when they decide they
- 2:13:45Speaker 1: might want to. Doesn't mean it's gonna now be like
- 2:13:47Speaker 1: the wholesale slaughter of baby animals everywhere. It's just it's
- 2:13:53Speaker 1: egregious how poorly represented this has been in the media. Yeah,
- 2:13:58Speaker 1: some of the headlines are outrageous. It's almost become like
- 2:14:01Speaker 1: a joke to kill bears with bacon and doughnuts. It's like, yeah,
- 2:14:06Speaker 1: it's probably not gonna be bacon and donuts, it's gonna
- 2:14:09Speaker 1: be dog food. Oh my god, it drives me nuts.
- 2:14:13Speaker 1: I don't even. It's like, I don't, I can't even.
- 2:14:16Speaker 1: I don't even know where to begin when talking about this.
- 2:14:18Speaker 1: I read an article that, uh that there was an
- 2:14:21Speaker 1: animal advocacy group from Florida that traveled up to Anchorage
- 2:14:25Speaker 1: to protest all of this, the bear cup killing, and um,
- 2:14:31Speaker 1: they were met with a group, a college group of
- 2:14:34Speaker 1: kids that were all indigenous Native American kids that changed
- 2:14:39Speaker 1: their mind. I think the group is called Protest one.
- 2:14:43Speaker 1: I'm remembering it correctly, and two advocates are going up
- 2:14:47Speaker 1: to protest for it and uh publicly speak out against
- 2:14:51Speaker 1: it in this like college club explained it to them
- 2:14:57Speaker 1: their traditional use practice correct, and they went to Florida
- 2:15:00Speaker 1: and had a public statement or released that they change
- 2:15:04Speaker 1: their position on it. This NBC News article points out, well,
- 2:15:07Speaker 1: it kind of the right of the NBCY article kind
- 2:15:10Speaker 1: of goes crazy because pretty soon he's like talking about
- 2:15:13Speaker 1: all of a sudden, it has something to do with
- 2:15:14Speaker 1: how Donald Trump's kids have been up to a lask
- 2:15:16Speaker 1: on it. It's like this guy is like grabbing its
- 2:15:18Speaker 1: straws right, like trying to drag anything in and in it.
- 2:15:21Speaker 1: He says, like things that are cruel. Okay, so let's
- 2:15:25Speaker 1: let's talk about that for a minute. If there's if
- 2:15:28Speaker 1: there's a group of people who traditionally hunt cariboo as
- 2:15:31Speaker 1: they're swimming across the river, do you understand anatomy and
- 2:15:33Speaker 1: ballistics and stuff so much that you're saying that that's
- 2:15:36Speaker 1: cruel or are you talking about something else? Because I
- 2:15:41Speaker 1: don't really know. I don't really buy that that shooting
- 2:15:45Speaker 1: a caribou at point blank range out of a boat
- 2:15:49Speaker 1: they're usually shooting in the head when they do this,
- 2:15:51Speaker 1: that that's more cruel then when he's standing on the ground.
- 2:15:55Speaker 1: So you're like, you're trying to like introduce these sort
- 2:15:58Speaker 1: of you're trying to introduce these sort of like subjective
- 2:16:01Speaker 1: words into a discussion where they don't really fit, Like
- 2:16:04Speaker 1: it's not a cruelty issue that you kill a caribou
- 2:16:08Speaker 1: in the water versus on land. I think what you're
- 2:16:11Speaker 1: trying to get at, what this writer is trying to
- 2:16:13Speaker 1: get at as some idea of like sportsmanlike and I'll
- 2:16:17Speaker 1: ask them to like, Okay, Are you really concerned with
- 2:16:20Speaker 1: what sportsmanlike or not is that? Are you honestly concerned
- 2:16:25Speaker 1: with that? Are you honestly concerned with what's cruel or
- 2:16:27Speaker 1: not cruel? Or do you kind of just hate the idea?
- 2:16:32Speaker 1: And I would love to know if the sun bitch
- 2:16:33Speaker 1: eats me, because I guarantee does. But you just kind
- 2:16:36Speaker 1: of like hate the idea of people utilizing like renewable resources,
- 2:16:42Speaker 1: and you're gonna jump on any little point you can
- 2:16:45Speaker 1: find to make it seem bad. I sent that to
- 2:16:51Speaker 1: the buddy of mine sent that article to me, and
- 2:16:53Speaker 1: I've already seen it, but he's like, oh, you mean
- 2:16:55Speaker 1: to tell me that NBC News wasn't open to nuance.
- 2:17:02Speaker 1: It's just, oh my god, it's maddening. Michelle, what are
- 2:17:05Speaker 1: your concluding thoughts? I agree with you, it's maddening. Um.
- 2:17:09Speaker 1: But I've been thinking about how our discussion on identifying
- 2:17:13Speaker 1: and sharing our values and motivations of why we hunt,
- 2:17:17Speaker 1: how that kind of should be introduced and tied into
- 2:17:20Speaker 1: the hunt purity scale. I think those should be some
- 2:17:23Speaker 1: variables that we add and uh, I think by the
- 2:17:25Speaker 1: end of this grand experiment and UH with meat eater, um,
- 2:17:30Speaker 1: we're gonna end up with a really refined tool scale
- 2:17:35Speaker 1: the problem. And I love the hunt purity scale idea
- 2:17:37Speaker 1: introduced my my brother. I think that it's gonna wind
- 2:17:40Speaker 1: up needing to have like a lot of emotional factors.
- 2:17:42Speaker 1: In fact, you know, I have to start capturing state
- 2:17:45Speaker 1: of mind, right, Yeah, Like how do you define success?
- 2:17:49Speaker 1: There's variables within that, Like it's it's really have their
- 2:17:54Speaker 1: own personal scales scales. There's like it reveals a trem
- 2:18:00Speaker 1: in this amount of bias. So in crafting a hunt
- 2:18:04Speaker 1: purity scale that doesn't reveal personal bias or regional specific activities,
- 2:18:12Speaker 1: like it might be like a person in Texas would
- 2:18:16Speaker 1: uh like inherently they wouldn't get a high score on
- 2:18:19Speaker 1: my brother's Hunt Purity scale because he puts he puts
- 2:18:24Speaker 1: the land management on his own hunt purity scale. So
- 2:18:27Speaker 1: he if he kills the elk on public land, he
- 2:18:30Speaker 1: considers it like harder and more rewarding. But if you
- 2:18:33Speaker 1: live in a state that's privately held, his hunt purity
- 2:18:38Speaker 1: skill doesn't do you any good. It's a lot of
- 2:18:41Speaker 1: personal a lot of personal bias, but super interesting to
- 2:18:45Speaker 1: think about how those how those subjective values play into
- 2:18:49Speaker 1: that whole idea. Carl concluding thoughts, well, you had it,
- 2:18:54Speaker 1: you had when you wanted to get into like a
- 2:18:57Speaker 1: real one. I do, I have a concluder, so ye
- 2:18:59Speaker 1: can you? Can you hit your concluders off? Quiet? You
- 2:19:01Speaker 1: still think about those cold beers? Depends what kind of
- 2:19:05Speaker 1: beer it is. Oh no, if I get side tracked
- 2:19:10Speaker 1: right now, it's still still Turkey, still golblers. But John No,
- 2:19:14Speaker 1: I'll just go ahead and in the name of time
- 2:19:18Speaker 1: and efficiency, I'll pass today because we have a lot
- 2:19:21Speaker 1: ahead of us today. So beat beat. Yeah, I don't
- 2:19:24Speaker 1: have any any singers here, you know, nothing can drop
- 2:19:30Speaker 1: that product. Big epiphanies. Yeah, stay tuned, that's coming. Um yeah,
- 2:19:35Speaker 1: thanks for thanks for inviting men, So stay tuned at
- 2:19:38Speaker 1: stone Glacier dot com, lots lots of coming. Is that
- 2:19:41Speaker 1: what it is Stone Glacier dot com. Yes, yeah, hell
- 2:19:44Speaker 1: of a website. Good backpacks, Yeah, like them, they're backpacks
- 2:19:49Speaker 1: the formative website. Lots thanks to Pete Man. Like info videos.
- 2:19:55Speaker 1: You go there, you know exactly what's going on with
- 2:19:57Speaker 1: your pack. They're good, man, I'm telling you man. The
- 2:20:02Speaker 1: packs though, it's like there's a little bit like when
- 2:20:06Speaker 1: you get it packed, you kind of gotta like that
- 2:20:08Speaker 1: does stuff. At first you're like, uh what, But to me,
- 2:20:12Speaker 1: you start like figuring out how it all works. It's
- 2:20:14Speaker 1: like a whole different deal. But some people just want
- 2:20:17Speaker 1: like a bag hooked to a shoulder strap, right, which
- 2:20:20Speaker 1: is the kind of backpass we had when we were kids.
- 2:20:22Speaker 1: Are like canvas sacks with two leather straps on them.
- 2:20:25Speaker 1: But once you get a bag, at first you're like, oh, man,
- 2:20:28Speaker 1: like I got a mess with it. But once you
- 2:20:29Speaker 1: learn to mess with it, it changes everything. Yeah, it's
- 2:20:31Speaker 1: a technical piece of gear, and like any piece of
- 2:20:34Speaker 1: technical piece of gear, there's a learning curve with it,
- 2:20:36Speaker 1: and we certainly encourage people to master that learning curve
- 2:20:40Speaker 1: before you you're standing over a dead elk. Yeah. That
- 2:20:43Speaker 1: it's like an adaptable it's like an adaptable type of
- 2:20:46Speaker 1: backpack that like does a bunch of different things. Yeah,
- 2:20:50Speaker 1: they packed meat. Holler yeah okay, Carl. Literally all right,
- 2:20:55Speaker 1: So yesterday was a long day. I had like a
- 2:20:57Speaker 1: full work day and then flew up from Albuquerque to
- 2:21:00Speaker 1: Bozeman And can I interrupt you from it? Yeah? Yeah,
- 2:21:05Speaker 1: it didn't take long, man, But I'm not gonna say
- 2:21:08Speaker 1: another word appens. But I want to point something out.
- 2:21:10Speaker 1: I'd like you to justify this. I like to think
- 2:21:14Speaker 1: that when someone does a concluder that it's informed by
- 2:21:19Speaker 1: what happened here today. But you're throwing a concluder at
- 2:21:22Speaker 1: us that is like a preconceived concluder. Yeah, it is
- 2:21:28Speaker 1: has your So this is my question. Is your concluder?
- 2:21:32Speaker 1: And I don't care, but do you feel that your
- 2:21:35Speaker 1: concluder has been influenced by today's conversation? Oh? Yeah, Oh really, Okay,
- 2:21:38Speaker 1: go ahead, I'm done. Yeah, because you know, you've had
- 2:21:41Speaker 1: a chance to talk a little bit about um kind
- 2:21:45Speaker 1: of the the psychology, the the spiritual aspects of being
- 2:21:51Speaker 1: involved actively in these systems. We've talked about that a
- 2:21:54Speaker 1: bit today and I did take the conversation there because
- 2:21:56Speaker 1: it's been on my mind. And UM, where I was
- 2:22:00Speaker 1: going with my concluder is that yesterday was a long
- 2:22:03Speaker 1: day and when I finally got into Bozeman last night
- 2:22:06Speaker 1: was putting my head on the pill. I had a
- 2:22:07Speaker 1: hard time falling asleep right off the bat, and I
- 2:22:11Speaker 1: had these these few sort of recent um pieces of
- 2:22:17Speaker 1: information floating around in my head in in an interesting concoction,
- 2:22:21Speaker 1: and I'll try to lay it out so folks can
- 2:22:23Speaker 1: follow me here. But what happened was I got picked
- 2:22:26Speaker 1: up by a by a hired car at the airport
- 2:22:31Speaker 1: and was driving along with this dude, you know, making
- 2:22:33Speaker 1: some small talk apt apot dependent uh ride ride hailing service.
- 2:22:42Speaker 1: And you know, I'm making small talk with the driver,
- 2:22:44Speaker 1: a nice guy, um, talking about our families, and he
- 2:22:48Speaker 1: mentioned he'd been married for thirty six years, right, and
- 2:22:50Speaker 1: I'm coming up on my tenth anniversary this year. I
- 2:22:52Speaker 1: was like, he's still yea. And so when I meet people,
- 2:22:56Speaker 1: you know, I'm a fan of trying to tap into
- 2:22:58Speaker 1: the wisdom of our elders, you know, So if I
- 2:23:01Speaker 1: meet somebody who's been married for thirty six years, I'm
- 2:23:04Speaker 1: always interested to hear some words of wisdom. So I
- 2:23:08Speaker 1: took the conversation there, and he, I think, saw that
- 2:23:13Speaker 1: as an opportunity to proselytize a little bit about his faith.
- 2:23:19Speaker 1: And he's like, as long as you're asking me for advice,
- 2:23:22Speaker 1: I'll tell you what I think is the main piece
- 2:23:23Speaker 1: of advice. Yeah, yeah, which is cool. I mean I'm
- 2:23:26Speaker 1: open minded, and I've got friends from all different religious
- 2:23:29Speaker 1: backgrounds and secular backgrounds, and I'm always interested to hear
- 2:23:32Speaker 1: what folks believe at their cores. And so this guy
- 2:23:37Speaker 1: he summarized his perspectives on his religious faith as being
- 2:23:46Speaker 1: the goal of trying to walk through life as if
- 2:23:51Speaker 1: you're in a crowd without pushing anybody, Like navigating through
- 2:23:57Speaker 1: a crowd without pushing anybody, all right. And I've never
- 2:24:01Speaker 1: heard anybody refer to the refer to their faith in
- 2:24:04Speaker 1: that manner. So I thought that was an interesting sort
- 2:24:07Speaker 1: of piece of wisdom. And I think right now, um,
- 2:24:10Speaker 1: in our in our culture as a country and in
- 2:24:14Speaker 1: our culture as a globe, there's a lot of people
- 2:24:16Speaker 1: pushing each other, um. And so this idea of trying
- 2:24:21Speaker 1: to navigate in a way where you're mindful of other people,
- 2:24:25Speaker 1: still moving, still moving, but mindful, right, I thought that
- 2:24:29Speaker 1: was cool. And then as I was trying to fall
- 2:24:31Speaker 1: asleep less and I was thinking about that, and then
- 2:24:33Speaker 1: I was thinking about a couple of papers, like scientific
- 2:24:36Speaker 1: papers that will include in the show notes so people
- 2:24:39Speaker 1: can dive a little deeper if they're interested in this.
- 2:24:41Speaker 1: And they're both very very recent papers that have been
- 2:24:43Speaker 1: picked up in the popular press. Um. The first paper
- 2:24:48Speaker 1: is titled the Biomass Distribution on Earth, and this group
- 2:24:54Speaker 1: of scientists UM basically tried to assess in terms of
- 2:25:01Speaker 1: carbon weight, if you take all the life on the planet,
- 2:25:05Speaker 1: how is it distributed? And then how has it changed
- 2:25:10Speaker 1: during the time that human beings have been on the planet.
- 2:25:13Speaker 1: And there's some incredible takeaways. And if if folks are
- 2:25:16Speaker 1: even remotely interested, UM, please take a look at the
- 2:25:19Speaker 1: paper itself, because I'm going to do a very huge
- 2:25:22Speaker 1: disservice by just skimming. Give us, give us a zinger,
- 2:25:26Speaker 1: a few stats. Okay, so right now today, and and
- 2:25:32Speaker 1: this is the units here are giga tons, which is
- 2:25:35Speaker 1: like a huge amount of carbon. It's some if you
- 2:25:38Speaker 1: imagine one kilogram and then put twelve zeros after it,
- 2:25:43Speaker 1: that's a gig a ton of carbon. And the reason
- 2:25:46Speaker 1: they chose giga tons of carbon is because it it
- 2:25:48Speaker 1: controls for all the creatures who have like a lot
- 2:25:51Speaker 1: of water in their bodies, so it kind of normalizes
- 2:25:55Speaker 1: among plants and animals. But a couple of takeaways are
- 2:26:00Speaker 1: that humans represent an infinitesimal fraction of the total weight
- 2:26:05Speaker 1: of biomass, but during the course of our existence, we
- 2:26:08Speaker 1: have influenced this distribution of biomass, unlike anything that has
- 2:26:12Speaker 1: ever existed in the history of the planet, right, And
- 2:26:16Speaker 1: we've done that by reducing the amount of wild animals
- 2:26:24Speaker 1: and dramatically increasing the amount of domestic animals to the
- 2:26:27Speaker 1: point that today um livestock represents zero point one gigatons
- 2:26:36Speaker 1: of the biomass compared to wild mammals representing zero point
- 2:26:42Speaker 1: zero zero seven gigatons. And that's for mammals. If you
- 2:26:46Speaker 1: look at birds, domestic birds zero point zero zero five
- 2:26:53Speaker 1: compared to wild birds zero point zero zero two. So
- 2:26:57Speaker 1: there are more and this is in terms of biomass,
- 2:26:59Speaker 1: more bio massive domestic birds more than twice as much
- 2:27:02Speaker 1: biomass of domestic birds as wildbirds. The other day, my
- 2:27:05Speaker 1: kid was asking me if there were more roly polies
- 2:27:08Speaker 1: or people, there are more roly pollies. I said, there's
- 2:27:12Speaker 1: more roly polies in your state than there are people
- 2:27:17Speaker 1: on Earth. But then we got into like adjusting for size,
- 2:27:22Speaker 1: and I was explaining that as far as large mammals go,
- 2:27:25Speaker 1: there are far more people than any large mammal of
- 2:27:30Speaker 1: comparable weight. And if you if you want to go
- 2:27:33Speaker 1: with weight, if you take humans and our live stock
- 2:27:38Speaker 1: and put us together, we outweigh the entire world. Of
- 2:27:45Speaker 1: vertebrates except fish. There are more humans and livestock in
- 2:27:50Speaker 1: terms of biomass than all of their vertebrates if you
- 2:27:54Speaker 1: put fish out of the equation, because there's a there's
- 2:27:56Speaker 1: a lot of weight and fish, and it's in the
- 2:27:59Speaker 1: water covers our planet. Right, So the paper talks about
- 2:28:05Speaker 1: our contributions to species loss and biomass loss during the
- 2:28:09Speaker 1: coortinary mega fontal extinction. We get a back up from it. Yeah,
- 2:28:13Speaker 1: everything with a backbone on land, everything with a backbone,
- 2:28:18Speaker 1: it's not a fit. Does all the whales? Yeah, the
- 2:28:23Speaker 1: blue whale being the largest creature. To check this out,
- 2:28:27Speaker 1: marine mammals, if you want to go to marine mammals,
- 2:28:31Speaker 1: they have declined from point zero two giga tons to
- 2:28:37Speaker 1: point zero zero four giga tons, which is a fivefold
- 2:28:41Speaker 1: loss in marine mammal biomass as a result of human exploitation.
- 2:28:47Speaker 1: So this paper is really fascinating, um and in particular
- 2:28:54Speaker 1: the conversation about the change that this you know, horrified
- 2:29:00Speaker 1: primate that represents just a tiny little fraction of the
- 2:29:06Speaker 1: global biomass has contributed to just shifting the distribution. So
- 2:29:14Speaker 1: today now the vast majority of of biomass is woody
- 2:29:18Speaker 1: vegetation fifty giga tons of um total carbon fifty giga
- 2:29:25Speaker 1: tons of that as plants, but based on land use change,
- 2:29:31Speaker 1: it's estimated in the paper we have lost half the
- 2:29:35Speaker 1: global biomass of plants. So if you consider that the
- 2:29:43Speaker 1: implications associated with our our existence, our growth, and our
- 2:29:47Speaker 1: ability to thrive on the planet, we have had, you know,
- 2:29:51Speaker 1: to put it, very mildly and outsized impact on the
- 2:29:54Speaker 1: ecology of the Earth. So I've been thinking about that paper, okay,
- 2:29:58Speaker 1: and then coupled with the taxi driver, hold on for
- 2:30:01Speaker 1: a minute, I promise I'm going to conclude shortly. Then
- 2:30:06Speaker 1: there's this other paper that will also post about the
- 2:30:09Speaker 1: changing attitudes people have towards natural resources. And this is
- 2:30:14Speaker 1: a paper published by some researchers from Colorado State and
- 2:30:17Speaker 1: Ohio State in biological conservation. The lead authors guy named
- 2:30:21Speaker 1: Michael Manfredo, and they talk about people who either have
- 2:30:28Speaker 1: domination type values towards wildlife and they also refer to
- 2:30:31Speaker 1: these as more traditional values. So the idea that wildlife
- 2:30:35Speaker 1: are here to benefit people. Um, you know, this idea
- 2:30:39Speaker 1: of like the subservience of wildlife to human beings as
- 2:30:43Speaker 1: opposed to mutualist values which are on the rise as
- 2:30:48Speaker 1: we become more detached from the land increasingly urbanized. These
- 2:30:54Speaker 1: mutualist values, which are along the lines of, you know,
- 2:30:59Speaker 1: treating these others BECs in a way where we give
- 2:31:01Speaker 1: them deference. That's on the rise now that we've completely Yeah,
- 2:31:04Speaker 1: the people who are most likely to live in a
- 2:31:06Speaker 1: place where they have completely displaced, well, most likely to
- 2:31:09Speaker 1: be like, you know what, we should treat it all.
- 2:31:11Speaker 1: We should have mutual respect now that we've vanquished it. Yes,
- 2:31:14Speaker 1: so they talk about this paper really focuses on how
- 2:31:17Speaker 1: this this trend towards more mutualistic attitudes about wildlife is
- 2:31:24Speaker 1: is already driving and will continue to drive a lot
- 2:31:27Speaker 1: of conflict around fish and wildlife management decisions. But in
- 2:31:32Speaker 1: the paper they also talk about this idea of being
- 2:31:34Speaker 1: a pluralist, which is someone who feels like fish and
- 2:31:41Speaker 1: wildlife cannon should be used sustainably, but also that fish
- 2:31:47Speaker 1: and wildlife warrant a high degree of reverence and appreciation
- 2:31:50Speaker 1: and we need to figure out how to co exist
- 2:31:51Speaker 1: with them. That's called pluralism. Pluralist. Yeah, so somebody sign
- 2:31:56Speaker 1: me up, dude, totally, I'm right there with you. When
- 2:31:58Speaker 1: they when this paper talks abou ut pluralists. I felt
- 2:32:01Speaker 1: like that's hit in the mark and this is something
- 2:32:04Speaker 1: we could talk a lot more about. But in the
- 2:32:05Speaker 1: interest of my concluding thought, I had this paper about
- 2:32:09Speaker 1: the changing distribution of biomass on the landscape on on
- 2:32:13Speaker 1: the on the planet, the planetary landscape, coupled with this
- 2:32:18Speaker 1: idea of a growing disconnect between our species and the
- 2:32:23Speaker 1: systems in which we evolved, in the systems that still
- 2:32:26Speaker 1: still sustain us, right the flow of energy from the
- 2:32:29Speaker 1: Sun to our bodies, and having all that coupled with
- 2:32:33Speaker 1: this idea that my drivers shared last night of trying
- 2:32:38Speaker 1: to navigate in a crowd without pushing. And I wonder
- 2:32:44Speaker 1: if we as a species are capable of finding a
- 2:32:47Speaker 1: way to operate where we thrive and we can extend
- 2:32:55Speaker 1: this idea of not pushing to all of the non
- 2:33:00Speaker 1: human inhabitants of the planet we occupy. Yeah, it's a
- 2:33:08Speaker 1: good concluder. I don't care if you did have that
- 2:33:11Speaker 1: pretty thought up the warrants it. That's what when I'm
- 2:33:16Speaker 1: when I'm up at night land there trying to fall asleep,
- 2:33:19Speaker 1: that's kind of stuff that's in my mind. And that's
- 2:33:23Speaker 1: the kind of stuff that makes me feel supremely fortunate
- 2:33:29Speaker 1: and privileged and grateful to be in this line of work,
- 2:33:36Speaker 1: to be involved on a day to day basis. Yeah,
- 2:33:39Speaker 1: with these tough kind of questions and conversations, you know,
- 2:33:43Speaker 1: and whether we're talking about h