Latest / Natural Resources University / Why predator bounties don't work | Wild Turkey Science #478

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Why predator bounties don't work | Wild Turkey Science #478 · Natural Resources University

• 0:00
  So, Mark Twain wrote,
• 0:01
  Any government could have told her that the best way to increase wolves in America,
• 0:06
  rabbits in Australia, and snakes in India is to pay a bounty on their scalps.
• 0:11
  Then every patriot goes to raising them.
• 0:13
  Welcome to Wild Turkey Science,
• 0:24
  a podcast made possible by Turkeys for Tomorrow.
• 0:28
  I'm Dr. Marcus Lashley, Professor of Wildlife Ecology at the University of Florida.
• 0:33
  And I'm Dr. Will Goolsby, Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Management at Auburn University.
• 0:39
  We're both lifelong hunters and devoted scientists who are passionate about hunting,
• 0:44
  managing, and researching wild turkeys.
• 0:46
  In this podcast, we'll explore turkey research, speak to the experts in the field,
• 0:52
  and address the difficult questions related to wild turkey ecology and management.
• 0:57
  Our goal is to serve as your connection to wild turkey science.
• 1:01
  It does kind of look like you're up to something nefarious.
• 1:13
  Well, I'm on the edge of my seat about this one.
• 1:15
  I hope you brought a ladle.
• 1:17
  A ladle?
• 1:18
  Yeah, because we're gonna stir the pot.
• 1:21
  Well, I was thinking we're gonna lap it up.
• 1:25
  I'm about to lap it up.
• 1:28
  Let me ask you a question, Will.
• 1:29
  I think you are going to lap up some of this info.
• 1:31
  I mean, it's cool stuff.
• 1:32
  Oh, I'm going to like it, I know.
• 1:33
  But why do I feel like it's going to be a hot take?
• 1:38
  To be clear to everybody out there, we are doing a deep dive on a topic that comes up a lot.
• 1:46
  How many times, Will, have you heard or been told?
• 1:53
  How many times have you heard or been told or gotten comments?
• 1:56
  I know we do on our episodes sometimes.
• 1:59
  We hear about it a lot that to solve our turkey woes, we need to have a predator bounty.
• 2:05
  So many times.
• 2:07
  I mean, it's like common knowledge.
• 2:10
  It's like almost every single one of our YouTube episodes has that comment on it somewhere.
• 2:16
  But you have now done a deep dive on that topic.
• 2:22
  I have.
• 2:22
  From what I understand.
• 2:23
  And to be clear to everybody out there, I did not do a deep dive on the topic.
• 2:28
  And I don't know what you found or what you're going to talk about other than that topic.
• 2:32
  Well, it's going to be fun because I'm the one armed with the information today.
• 2:35
  And I can quiz you on this stuff.
• 2:37
  Like you have been with me on a couple of recent episodes.
• 2:40
  Hey, you've done that to me before.
• 2:41
  I know I have.
• 2:42
  So see the jokes on you though, because I don't care if it makes me sound dumb.
• 2:47
  I mean, did you think I do based on our history on this show?
• 2:55
  No, obviously we just let it ride.
• 2:59
  Yeah.
• 3:00
  So you're going to get my genuine response and my genuine not lack of knowledge whenever it emerges.
• 3:06
  Okay.
• 3:07
  Well, you ready to go?
• 3:10
  Yeah, but I do feel like it's going to be kind of a hot take just because of the way
• 3:15
  you had presented yourself when we came to the episode.
• 3:19
  How was that?
• 3:20
  You're just like sitting all over there with your arms crossed.
• 3:25
  Like I'm about to tell y'all something.
• 3:28
  Well, I think.
• 3:29
  I think that, uh, well, maybe I do feel that way.
• 3:34
  Maybe I shouldn't be that.
• 3:35
  Maybe I shouldn't be so eager to ruin, ruin people's thoughts or perceptions of the way
• 3:39
  things work, but I don't know.
• 3:42
  Maybe that's one of the aspects that I enjoy about science and why I enjoy being a scientist
• 3:48
  is because that's part of our job is to figure out if things really work like we think they
• 3:53
  would logically.
• 3:54
  And sometimes it's fun when they don't, to be honest, it's kind of more interesting.
• 3:58
  I mean, it's frustrating, but interesting.
• 4:03
  Well, you know, it's a fundamental aspect of our work and, you know, it's, it's disappointing
• 4:10
  sometimes when scientists don't react to things the way that I'm about to lay out.
• 4:16
  But I commonly go into things with a hypothesis and I have a prediction that I think, okay,
• 4:23
  this is the way this is going to happen.
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  And I collect data and that doesn't work like that.
• 4:30
  And it's like, dang.
• 4:32
  Yeah, well, that's interesting.
• 4:33
  I mean, just like probably happens more often than not.
• 4:37
  Right.
• 4:37
  Yeah.
• 4:39
  All the time.
• 4:39
  But it hooks me in and now I'm like, all right, why didn't it work that way?
• 4:45
  We got to figure out and not, we got to do something different to figure out how to make
• 4:50
  sure that we know it works this way.
• 4:52
  Like, that's not, you know, we don't want that kind of, of approach and, uh, you know,
• 5:00
  this sounds like might be one of those topics where we think it works away and then it doesn't.
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  And then I'm going to be really intrigued by that if that's the case.
• 5:09
  Yeah.
• 5:09
  Okay.
• 5:10
  Okay.
• 5:11
  You ready?
• 5:12
  Well, yeah.
• 5:13
  Do you have a place that you want to start?
• 5:15
  I do.
• 5:15
  Well, let's start there.
• 5:17
  With a glossary term.
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  A glossary term.
• 5:20
  Yeah.
• 5:20
  Have you ever heard of the term of a perverse incentive?
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  Perverse.
• 5:27
  I don't think I've heard that terminology, but I might be able to work out the definition
• 5:31
  based on the terms.
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  A perverse incentive is an incentive structure with undesirable results.
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  Particularly one.
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  It's interesting that you would start there.
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  A particularly one where those effects are unexpected and contrary to the intentions
• 5:46
  of its designers.
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  I think that falls perfectly within what we've just been talking about.
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  Yeah.
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  And it is a pretty apt description of what happens a lot of times with these predator
• 5:57
  bounty programs.
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  And so I'm going to kind of the way that I did this and have it planned out, I'm going
• 6:04
  to start out with a couple of kind of classic examples of how this plays out that may not
• 6:14
  be really directly related to turkeys.
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  And then we'll get into some literature that is more so directly related to the topic.
• 6:22
  I think that's good.
• 6:23
  But to start with, since you started this out with a Webster's Dictionary entry, what
• 6:33
  is a predator bounty program just in general?
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  How would you describe that?
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  In some way of incentivizing, typically monetarily, the harvesting of a particular species of
• 6:47
  animal in a particular area.
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  With the intention of...
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  Reducing the population of that animal.
• 6:54
  Yeah.
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  But for some purpose, right?
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  For some purpose.
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  And it's not always...
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  Like if it was for turkeys, we might remove coyotes to increase hen survival.
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  Yes.
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  Or whatever.
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  Yes.
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  Something like that.
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  And as it turns out, I have some information on coyote bounties too.
• 7:10
  Oh.
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  So that'll be directly relevant to that.
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  Cool.
• 7:15
  Okay.
• 7:16
  Okay.
• 7:16
  So have you ever heard of the cobra effect?
• 7:19
  That's where I'm going to start out today.
• 7:21
  The cobra?
• 7:22
  The cobra effect.
• 7:22
  The only cobra I know is Cobra Kai, baby.
• 7:25
  Okay.
• 7:25
  Strike first, strike hard.
• 7:28
  Isn't that what the saying is?
• 7:32
  I was, man, when I was about eight years old, I was swinging nunchucks, you know, like the
• 7:38
  plastic ones trying to be Karate Kid.
• 7:40
  Well, you know, they remade a show centered around the Cobra Kai gym a few years ago.
• 7:45
  Oh yeah.
• 7:45
  Yeah.
• 7:46
  I watched it.
• 7:47
  Okay, good.
• 7:47
  It's weird saying Karate Kid as an adult.
• 7:50
  Oh, I know.
• 7:51
  He's not as intimidating as I remember him being when I was a kid.
• 7:56
  So I am aware of the cobra.
• 7:57
  When I watched Karate Kid as a kid, I thought he was a badass.
• 8:02
  And it's like, now that I've grown up and I watch him, I'm like, I don't know if he
• 8:05
  sells the part that well.
• 8:07
  Yeah.
• 8:08
  All right.
• 8:09
  The cobra effect.
• 8:10
  So backstory here.
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  This was in the-
• 8:14
  I'm sorry, I haven't recovered yet.
• 8:15
  I have heard of the cobra.
• 8:18
  We'll keep working on your recovery over there.
• 8:20
  So the British government, it was occupying India, right.
• 8:24
  And they were concerned about the number of venomous cobras.
• 8:27
  Shit, we're going way back.
• 8:29
  I am.
• 8:29
  So they were concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi.
• 8:32
  So what'd they do?
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  Put a bounty on them.
• 8:37
  They put a bounty on them.
• 8:38
  So initially, the bounty program seemed to be pretty successful.
• 8:43
  People were bringing in huge numbers of snakes all the time, trying to get reward.
• 8:47
  But then what happens?
• 8:49
  Somebody starts breeding snakes and they start trying to game the system.
• 8:59
  Yeah.
• 8:59
  So the program, I don't know if we want to talk about this or not.
• 9:04
  Just tell me if you do or don't.
• 9:05
  But this makes me think of like giving up density.
• 9:09
  You know what I'm saying?
• 9:11
  Like with, with regards to wildlife that, you know, if they're trying to acquire a food
• 9:15
  resource or something like that, there's a certain point past which there's too few of
• 9:20
  that food item within an area for it to be worthwhile for them to search for it.
• 9:24
  And I think, and that, and that is kind of an overarching principle that I think we'll
• 9:28
  touch on several times today is if you're implementing a program that people are
• 9:32
  getting financially rewarded for, that is intended to control or eradicate individuals
• 9:42
  of a certain species, you eventually get to this point of diminishing returns where you're
• 9:46
  putting in a whole lot of effort for very few animals that are captured.
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  And if the money is being paid off of how many animals you capture, you're probably
• 9:55
  either going to one, quit when you get to that density and give up like we were just
• 10:00
  talking about, or two, you're going to move to another area that has more of that animal.
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  And then you take the pressure off of the area where the population has been reduced
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  and it starts to respond positively again.
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  MIKE Yeah.
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  And then we could go a little further than that.
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  Another thing that could happen is it becomes part of the, the culture or livelihood.
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  And then you start to cultivate that for, to, to ensure that the sustainability of that
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  opportunity.
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  And that is, that is exactly what happened in India.
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  People began to breed the cobras for income.
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  And the program eventually got scrapped once, uh, the British government caught on to it.
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  And you know what, and you know what, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
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  You know what happened to, to all these breeding populations that people had curated?
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  They just released them.
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  They released them.
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  And the cobra population ended up higher than it was before the bounty program was implemented.
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  So first important point that I want to make here today is that human psychology
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  plays a huge role in the effectiveness of these programs.
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  And that's just one example.
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  MIKE That's not what would happen with turkeys.
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  MIKE Okay.
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  All right.
• 11:13
  I got another one for you.
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  I got another one for you on our little historical adventure.
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  MIKE Is it another cobra example?
• 11:18
  MIKE No, this one is the Great Hanoi Rat Massacre of 1902 in Vietnam.
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  You ever heard about that one?
• 11:24
  MIKE The Great Rat Massacre?
• 11:25
  MIKE The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre.
• 11:27
  MIKE I don't know what that word is.
• 11:29
  MIKE No one knew that they were going to be hearing about the Great Hanoi Rat Massacre today.
• 11:32
  MIKE What is Hanoi?
• 11:33
  Can you say that, like spell that word?
• 11:34
  MIKE It's in Vietnam.
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  MIKE It's just a place?
• 11:37
  MIKE Yes.
• 11:38
  MIKE Okay.
• 11:38
  MIKE It's a place in Vietnam.
• 11:39
  MIKE I don't know.
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  I'm not, not familiar with that geography.
• 11:43
  MIKE So this was in the early 1900s.
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  Vietnam was under French colonial rule and the government created a bounty that paid
• 11:50
  one cent for each rat killed.
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  And so to prove that they had killed a rat, they brought the tail back to somebody.
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  They killed the rat, they severed the tail, brought it back and they got paid for it.
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  So it wasn't too long that officials started noticing rats that were running around Hanoi
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  that were missing what?
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  MIKE A foot.
• 12:14
  MIKE No, their tail.
• 12:17
  God, you're being difficult today for the sake of difficulty.
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  Yes, they were, they were catching them in live traps, cutting off their tails and releasing
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  them so that they would keep breeding to make more young rats with tails that they could
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  cut off.
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  MIKE Well, where does the massacre come in?
• 12:35
  MIKE Well, they were trying to make it into a rat massacre, but it ended up just being
• 12:39
  a massive tail docking event, I guess.
• 12:42
  MIKE So the, all right, my last little, wait, wait, wait, wait.
• 12:49
  MIKE Oh, okay.
• 12:50
  MIKE I'm not past it yet.
• 12:51
  MIKE All right.
• 12:51
  MIKE So the bounty on rats.
• 12:53
  MIKE Yeah, a penny a rat.
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  MIKE A penny a rat resulted in all the rats getting their tail cut off.
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  So now there's a bunch of rats running around with no tails that are still breeding.
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  MIKE They're still breeding.
• 13:10
  MIKE And now that is amazing.
• 13:13
  MIKE I mean, never, what is the, what is the term about?
• 13:19
  I don't know.
• 13:21
  It's just like never underestimate people's ability to work smarter, not harder, I guess.
• 13:27
  They'll find a work, people will find a workaround for anything.
• 13:32
  MIKE I'm just, I was trying to think through the, is there, I guess that could happen with
• 13:38
  raccoons, you know, with ratcheting tails, but it really matters how you measure, you know,
• 13:48
  the, uh, the bounty.
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  MIKE Well, so I can tell you giving more modern examples, the same thing, I don't know about
• 13:57
  leaving them alive, but there's a lot of issues with bounty programs typically require you to
• 14:03
  bring some part of the animal back to prove, to prove that you killed it.
• 14:07
  And I know that people have taken advantage of those programs that were designed for feral pig
• 14:13
  control, where they had to bring back pig tails.
• 14:15
  I know they've done that with beaver tails.
• 14:17
  I have a personal experience with that.
• 14:19
  Um, and then I know.
• 14:21
  MIKE Where you just cut the tail off a beaver and then let it go.
• 14:24
  MIKE Uh-huh.
• 14:25
  MIKE You just cut the tail off.
• 14:26
  MIKE No, no, no.
• 14:26
  They were still, in this, in that instance, people were still killing them, but they were
• 14:29
  killing them outside of the area that they were supposed to be getting paid for the bounty and
• 14:33
  bringing them, bringing the tail back to the other area.
• 14:37
  Um, and then I know of an example where that was done on preparing for this episode
• 14:43
  with actually seals.
• 14:45
  So there's a bounty on seals, um, that I found some information about we might get into today.
• 14:51
  MIKE Interesting.
• 14:52
  All right.
• 14:53
  Well, I'll let you move on.
• 14:54
  MIKE Okay.
• 14:54
  MIKE I just.
• 14:54
  MIKE Well, my last little bit of, my last little historical reference, um, I actually
• 15:00
  pulled from Mark Twain's autobiography, um, and his wife decided to pay their son to control
• 15:06
  flies at their house.
• 15:07
  And of course, you know, what does the son see?
• 15:12
  He's like, man, I'm going to make some money.
• 15:14
  Absolutely.
• 15:15
  And, uh, his, so Mark Twain wrote, any government could have told her that the best way to
• 15:21
  increase wolves in America, rabbits in Australia and snakes in India is to pay a bounty on
• 15:27
  their scalps.
• 15:28
  Then every Patriot goes to raising them.
• 15:30
  And I, I mean, I don't think we would probably, you know, I don't think people would be trying
• 15:36
  to raise animals like that to take advantage of a bounty program today, the way they would
• 15:41
  have historically when people were more in a subsistence state of living.
• 15:45
  But it's, I think the point still stands.
• 15:47
  And anyways, it was interesting to me that Mark Twain had a quote on this.
• 15:52
  So I had to include it.
• 15:53
  That's a really interesting quote.
• 15:57
  And I'm just thinking like, you're going to have some hate messages on YouTube.
• 16:04
  Oh, I know.
• 16:05
  We've got so many people telling us about that.
• 16:08
  But before y'all, before y'all send me that hate message, before y'all send me that hate
• 16:13
  message, think about this.
• 16:14
  Okay.
• 16:15
  They've already said it, man.
• 16:17
  No, no, no, no.
• 16:18
  They said it three minutes ago.
• 16:20
  I might get them on that backspace button right here.
• 16:22
  We'll see.
• 16:23
  We make this same argument about game species.
• 16:29
  When you place a value on an animal, people are incentivized to conserve it.
• 16:36
  And so, but it's the opposite situation.
• 16:41
  So in the bounty system, they're incentivized to conserve it to make money.
• 16:45
  In the hunting situation, like when we recovered wild turkeys, for example, the only reason
• 16:51
  we recovered wild turkeys is because they had value as a game species, right?
• 16:57
  So animals that have value, people find a way to keep those animals around in general.
• 17:03
  Yeah.
• 17:04
  So we make the same argument when it comes to the positive aspects of wildlife conservation.
• 17:09
  I heard this argument the other day.
• 17:15
  I think this is 100% accurate, but I have not vetted it myself.
• 17:20
  But this is what was said, that there have been no game species under protections as
• 17:28
  a game species that have gone extinct.
• 17:30
  Yep.
• 17:31
  It's pretty incredible.
• 17:35
  Yeah.
• 17:36
  Especially when there are many, many, many, many, many, many species that have gone extinct.
• 17:44
  But I think that the point here is that some of those same forces that are in effect on
• 17:50
  this bounty system that perhaps make it less effective than we think it'd be, I do actually
• 17:56
  have an example that we can pull from the literature of one that was somewhat successful
• 18:00
  that we'll get to at the end, because it really is kind of the exception, not the norm.
• 18:04
  I think it, I'm glad we are going to cover that, but I think your point
• 18:13
  is a very interesting one and well-taken.
• 18:15
  When we think about it from the game species, it's a positive viewpoint, and everybody,
• 18:25
  I mean, that's pretty ubiquitously accepted.
• 18:28
  Right?
• 18:31
  As if we put a value on a species, it will get conserved.
• 18:34
  It's one of our main talking points about game management and conservation.
• 18:39
  But when it's a species that we view as negative, like a predator
• 18:43
  or an invasive species or whatever, that logic breaks down.
• 18:50
  Yep.
• 18:55
  It's interesting.
• 18:55
  But the fundamental way that it operates does not.
• 19:01
  Yeah, that's right.
• 19:04
  The next thing that I want to get into is about the pig bounty example.
• 19:09
  I'm pretty familiar with this one.
• 19:12
  This was from a paper that was written by one of my colleagues, Steve Ditchcoff,
• 19:16
  who's also here at Auburn.
• 19:18
  They looked at a pig bounty program that was implemented on Fort Benning in Georgia, which
• 19:25
  for those of you that don't know, that's directly east of me here in Auburn, so right across the
• 19:31
  line in kind of west central Georgia, and I think it's the home for all of the US Army's
• 19:37
  infantry training.
• 19:37
  So they have tons of wildlands across the property.
• 19:42
  They've got a lot of pines and prescribed fire and everything like that.
• 19:45
  And it's known for having a relatively high pig population.
• 19:49
  And so they tried to implement a bounty there.
• 19:53
  And we'll talk about the results of that program.
• 19:54
  But before I go into that, there were a couple of additional little points that I gleaned
• 19:58
  from the introduction of that article that I wanted to share.
• 20:01
  And so we've already talked about, they phrased them in this paper as the bad intentions of
• 20:08
  participants.
• 20:09
  I would phrase it more so as the misaligned objectives of the bounty program versus the
• 20:14
  people participating in the bounty program.
• 20:17
  Their objectives are not congruent with each other, right?
• 20:19
  So we talked about that.
• 20:22
  But then also in the Ditchcoff et al paper, they point out that bounty failure is also
• 20:28
  often attributed to the biology of the species being poorly understood or incorporated into
• 20:33
  the program.
• 20:34
  So that it's not considering the biological attributes of that species and how a control
• 20:40
  effort should be shaped or prescribed in reference to that.
• 20:46
  Does that make sense?
• 20:46
  So they pointed that out.
• 20:54
  And then we'll just get right into the story of the Pig Bounty Program.
• 20:58
  So the Army decided when they implemented this, this was back in 2007 and 2008, and
• 21:05
  they instituted a bounty program that paid out $40 for every feral pigtail that was brought
• 21:11
  back.
• 21:11
  So during the study, which again, it was only, it wasn't even two full years.
• 21:18
  It was most of 2007 and a part of 2008, I believe.
• 21:23
  And over the course of that time period, they removed about 1,100 pigs from the site.
• 21:27
  Okay.
• 21:28
  So 1,138 pigs.
• 21:30
  And the total cost of removal of those was $57,000, almost $300.
• 21:38
  Okay.
• 21:41
  So you know what I meant to calculate the cost per pig?
• 21:49
  How many sacks of corn is that?
• 21:50
  Oh, we're getting there too.
• 21:52
  Trust me.
• 21:53
  That's, I'm so glad you brought that up because that's a part of this conversation.
• 21:56
  Oh man.
• 21:57
  Well, that's a cost of about $50 per pig, not horrible.
• 22:02
  Yeah.
• 22:03
  Okay.
• 22:06
  Well, if it worked, it isn't.
• 22:07
  Well, here's the problem.
• 22:10
  You want to guess what the removal rate was?
• 22:14
  The density of removal?
• 22:17
  So 1,100 pigs on Fort Benning?
• 22:22
  Yeah.
• 22:22
  I don't know how big is Fort Benning.
• 22:25
  Well, I mean, then I'd just be giving you the numbers to make the calculation.
• 22:30
  One per 150 acres.
• 22:32
  No, they would have probably had very different results if that was the case.
• 22:37
  The removal rate was less than one pig per square mile and a third, 1.3 square miles.
• 22:46
  And the reason they use that weird number is because that was the average
• 22:50
  home range size of a sounder, was 1.3 square miles.
• 22:55
  And they removed-
• 22:56
  Like 800 acres or something?
• 22:58
  1.3 times 640.
• 23:02
  Or 900, something like that.
• 23:03
  832.
• 23:05
  So less than one pig for every 832 acres.
• 23:09
  I mean, anybody that has ever dealt with pigs knows that that's not going to get it.
• 23:14
  So that removal program, that was the agency removal,
• 23:22
  or that's how many got incentivized to be removed?
• 23:25
  That's how many got incentivized.
• 23:26
  Well, interestingly, they were not able, because they had been documenting,
• 23:32
  you know, everything that gets killed off that base gets recorded.
• 23:35
  And the removal rate pre-bounty program was similar to the removal rate post-bounty program.
• 23:43
  It did not change the removal rate.
• 23:45
  Okay.
• 23:47
  So Fort Benning was removing pigs and then they implemented a bounty program to help,
• 23:52
  and they still kept the same rate of removing pigs.
• 23:56
  Exactly.
• 23:57
  So it doesn't work.
• 23:58
  And here's part of the problem.
• 24:00
  Some reports were that people were buying tails from game processors or killing them elsewhere,
• 24:07
  and then reselling them to the army at a higher price.
• 24:09
  So, you know, you could maybe go to a meat processor-
• 24:13
  Capitalism.
• 24:13
  Capitalism always wins, man.
• 24:16
  I mean, they were going down to, you know, Bob's Deer Processing
• 24:21
  and buying a pig tail for $20 and selling it to the army for $40.
• 24:24
  And then the processor makes a bunch of money off a pig tail.
• 24:31
  Absolutely.
• 24:32
  Absolutely.
• 24:34
  Okay.
• 24:34
  Are you ready for this?
• 24:37
  Yeah.
• 24:37
  Are you still on pigs?
• 24:39
  Yes.
• 24:39
  Okay.
• 24:40
  Well, let's don't leave there because I want to talk about a different aspect of this,
• 24:44
  but go ahead.
• 24:44
  What do you think happened to the pig density?
• 24:49
  It increased.
• 24:51
  I'm just guessing.
• 24:52
  It did actually increase.
• 24:53
  I'm guessing.
• 24:55
  Even worse than not changing, it increased.
• 24:57
  Yeah.
• 24:59
  Do you want to guess why?
• 25:00
  People brought pigs in.
• 25:04
  No.
• 25:04
  It's back to something you said a second ago.
• 25:08
  They cut all the tails off and released them.
• 25:13
  I don't know.
• 25:13
  Quit linking me hanging.
• 25:16
  See, this is why I like being the one armed with the information.
• 25:19
  They dispersed 40 tons of corn and 30 tons of slop throughout the installation over a
• 25:26
  six month period.
• 25:27
  And they think that, I mean, this is a quote from the article, litter size and offspring
• 25:36
  survival increased under the bounty scheme due to the bait used to attract animals to
• 25:41
  hunting and trapping sites.
• 25:43
  The productivity rate we observed was similar to that of adult female pigs in a population
• 25:48
  provided with supplemental feed.
• 25:50
  Sounder size increased 144 to 233 percent and the number of piglets per female increased
• 26:00
  by 191 to 219 percent.
• 26:07
  That didn't work.
• 26:08
  That's something right there.
• 26:12
  And that was from giving them a bunch of corn and slop.
• 26:18
  Yeah.
• 26:19
  Total 70 tons of feed over a six month period.
• 26:28
  That 70 tons.
• 26:30
  How much is that per square mile in that area?
• 26:36
  I can't, I realized I was trying to back construct that.
• 26:40
  Well, that's 140,000 pounds.
• 26:44
  Of corn and slop?
• 26:48
  Yeah, I think it's combined.
• 26:49
  I combined it all.
• 26:53
  Let's see, Fort Benning is 197,000 acres.
• 26:58
  So it was pretty spread out.
• 27:00
  Yeah, it was only like a, what did you say, 120,000?
• 27:06
  140,000 pounds.
• 27:08
  Yeah.
• 27:09
  So less than a pound per acre.
• 27:11
  But you would presume that it was probably concentrated in certain areas of the property.
• 27:15
  It's not going to be evenly distributed across the-
• 27:17
  They didn't walk through there with a spinner.
• 27:21
  Yeah, right.
• 27:22
  Just distributing it equally.
• 27:23
  One thing I will mention too is they noted that a problem was that the hunters generally
• 27:29
  were targeting the large boars and they weren't really killing females and juveniles.
• 27:34
  So all that to say, especially when you consider the before versus after harvest rate, it doesn't
• 27:43
  really seem like the bounty program actually incentivized people to change their behavior
• 27:47
  that much in such a way that it would actually lead to a reduction in the population.
• 27:51
  Mm-hmm.
• 27:52
  And that's not the only example of that that I have.
• 27:54
  I've got another one from another paper.
• 27:57
  Well, another thing that's really interesting, and I did not prepare for this, so I can't
• 28:03
  remember where this is cited, and maybe you will, or maybe they cited it even in this
• 28:10
  paper, but it's interesting to me that from the 1500s all the way up until the early 1980s,
• 28:19
  pigs were in what, five states?
• 28:21
  Oh yeah, mm-hmm.
• 28:23
  And then from 1980 to the early 2000s, they went from five, I think, to 45, I'm pretty
• 28:31
  sure.
• 28:32
  Yeah.
• 28:32
  Like the range expansion over that, I mean, it's just a fraction of the time that there
• 28:38
  have been pigs in the United States.
• 28:40
  Yeah, I mean, I can remember being a little kid, like late 80s, early 90s, and my dad
• 28:45
  had a good buddy that was big into pig hunting down there in South Alabama, and he would
• 28:50
  have to go way back in the Delta, he'd be crawling back through there trying to find
• 28:55
  pigs when he'd go hunt and have to access it by boat and all that kind of stuff.
• 28:59
  Yeah.
• 28:59
  It's like now people are just tired of killing them.
• 29:01
  Yeah.
• 29:03
  Well, my point is that it became valuable as a thing to hunt.
• 29:12
  We also started incentivizing people through these kinds of programs and stuff.
• 29:16
  And what it did was facilitate moving pigs to new areas and releasing pigs in places
• 29:24
  that they start to cause a problem to incentivize it and all this kind of, I mean, it just,
• 29:30
  like the pigs are, I think are a really good example.
• 29:33
  I'm glad you brought that up because some of the states have banned pig hunting.
• 29:39
  I was going to come to that.
• 29:40
  For that very reason, because just like we talked about earlier, if you incentivize having
• 29:46
  them around, you make, whether that's financially or recreationally, people try to propagate
• 29:52
  them.
• 29:52
  Yeah.
• 29:53
  But exactly what you just said was where I was going to go as a couple of states took
• 30:00
  a radical approach.
• 30:03
  And it seems very counterintuitive.
• 30:05
  Yeah, it seems counterintuitive.
• 30:07
  And that's my point here.
• 30:09
  And the reason that people keep saying this, it is intuitive that this actually would address
• 30:15
  a problem.
• 30:15
  That makes sense, just intuitively.
• 30:19
  Right.
• 30:20
  But it just doesn't work out that way because of the way that it plays out.
• 30:28
  I mean, we've got examples all the way back to whenever that was in India.
• 30:32
  Yeah.
• 30:34
  And did you say you found an example where it worked?
• 30:37
  Yes.
• 30:38
  So at least we've got one.
• 30:39
  Yeah.
• 30:40
  And I'm curious to hear about that because I don't know what it is right off.
• 30:45
  But the best examples with pigs are the couple of instances where the value of it was taken
• 30:54
  away.
• 30:55
  Right.
• 30:55
  So this is an interesting intersection between wildlife biology and human psychology and
• 31:02
  economics.
• 31:03
  And human behavior plays a much larger role in this than wildlife biology does.
• 31:08
  Yeah.
• 31:09
  Which kind of makes it hard to talk about.
• 31:12
  Very interesting.
• 31:13
  Yeah.
• 31:13
  I'm really, really curious to see what the comments on this episode are going to be.
• 31:17
  That's the only reason you had me lead it.
• 31:20
  You wanted it all directed at me.
• 31:21
  No.
• 31:22
  I mean, it's going to be on my YouTube channel.
• 31:24
  All right, you ready to move to coyotes?
• 31:27
  I think so.
• 31:30
  Okay.
• 31:31
  All right.
• 31:32
  So I got a paper from Bartell and Brunson, 2003.
• 31:37
  It was in Utah.
• 31:39
  So Utah reinstated, so I guess they had one previously that they had canceled and they
• 31:46
  reinstated it, a coyote bounty program in 2000.
• 31:49
  And so the goal of this paper is mostly survey work and they wanted to assess the effects
• 31:55
  of the bounty program on coyote take and hunter participation.
• 31:59
  So the first thing that they looked at that I included in my notes here is the number
• 32:06
  of people that had not been killing coyotes previously that started to because of the
• 32:14
  bounty program.
• 32:15
  So of the people that they sent surveys to, what percentage of them would you guess started
• 32:21
  harvesting coyotes because the bounty program was introduced?
• 32:26
  So if you've got a hundred guys that are participating in this bounty program, what
• 32:31
  number do you think just started killing coyotes because of the program?
• 32:34
  Half of them.
• 32:37
  8%.
• 32:38
  8%?
• 32:40
  Yeah.
• 32:41
  Eight out of a hundred.
• 32:42
  So the rest of them were already killing coyotes.
• 32:44
  So over 90% of participants had reported harvesting coyotes within the previous few
• 32:49
  years.
• 32:50
  They also reported that they had been taking coyotes out of the wild.
• 32:55
  They also reported that they had been taking red fox, skunks, bobcats, and badgers in the
• 33:00
  previous year.
• 33:00
  So generally speaking, these were probably people that were already trapping and probably
• 33:06
  for harvesting.
• 33:07
  So in addition to that.
• 33:11
  They're just diversifying their portfolio.
• 33:13
  Yeah, exactly.
• 33:14
  It's a new income stream, right?
• 33:17
  Yeah.
• 33:18
  Which I'm not knocking them for that.
• 33:19
  No.
• 33:19
  I'm just saying that's why it doesn't work.
• 33:21
  Absolutely.
• 33:23
  Also noted participants did not change how they harvested coyotes.
• 33:26
  So 82% of those involved in the program were still just calling and shooting.
• 33:31
  So they didn't change into trapping or running like a long line of a long line trap line
• 33:37
  when the bounty program was implemented.
• 33:39
  And this part is the most telling to me and was also the most interesting to me.
• 33:48
  They reported that because they wanted to look at the motivations of why they participated
• 33:53
  and understand that.
• 33:54
  And one would think, you know, we keep talking about how logical some of this is.
• 34:00
  One would think that they're mostly doing it to be incentivized because of the bounty
• 34:03
  reward, the money.
• 34:04
  But in fact, what they reported is that enjoying the outdoors, big game protection, and ensuring
• 34:14
  hunting rights were the most important motives for their participation.
• 34:18
  The next four motives, which were recreation, testing outdoor skills, livestock protection,
• 34:25
  and participation in conservation were all equal in importance.
• 34:29
  But gaining additional income was identified as the least important factor in participating
• 34:35
  in that program.
• 34:41
  I don't even know how to digest that.
• 34:45
  What I'm taking away from it is that.
• 34:50
  So basically, let me see if I understand that only 8% of the people started into the bounty
• 35:01
  program because there was a bounty program.
• 35:04
  The rest of them just were trapping because they do that.
• 35:07
  Yeah.
• 35:07
  For whatever reason.
• 35:08
  They were trapping or calling and shooting because they already do that.
• 35:11
  So then when you ask them all why they're participating, 92 out of 100 of them are responding
• 35:18
  for why they are participating in trapping because they aren't actually, they weren't
• 35:23
  incentivized to start by the program.
• 35:25
  No.
• 35:27
  So let me back up and we may have speculated too much and gotten off on the wrong track.
• 35:33
  82% of people were harvesting coyotes by calling and shooting.
• 35:39
  So it wasn't like there were many trappers in this.
• 35:41
  Even though people reported taking fox, skunks, bobcats, and badgers.
• 35:47
  I guess they were taking them while they were out there calling and shooting.
• 35:50
  I'm not sure.
• 35:51
  It didn't specify in the article.
• 35:52
  Oh, well, yeah, I see.
• 35:58
  I said trapping, but I meant taking predators.
• 36:01
  Okay.
• 36:02
  I've just kind of condensed that down to the one word, but I meant they're participating
• 36:07
  in predator removal somehow or another.
• 36:09
  Yeah.
• 36:10
  And I think basically the take-home story is these people are doing what, it's the same
• 36:15
  people doing it as we're doing it previously.
• 36:17
  They're doing it the same way that they were doing it previously.
• 36:20
  They're doing it for the same reasons that they always were.
• 36:23
  And probably the only reason they're participating in the bounty program is they were going to
• 36:27
  do it anyway.
• 36:27
  Why not get paid for it?
• 36:28
  Yeah.
• 36:29
  Well, clearly it wasn't incentivized, not even in the top many reasons that they do it.
• 36:35
  Right.
• 36:36
  But you could say.
• 36:37
  They're not ranking the incentive, even in the top many reasons that they're doing it
• 36:41
  to begin with.
• 36:42
  Well, and to play devil's advocate here, maybe the reward wasn't high enough.
• 36:45
  Maybe so.
• 36:47
  You know, that would be a factor, but then the problem.
• 36:50
  But if you go through all the other examples.
• 36:51
  Well, that's the problem is if you incentivize it too much, then you create dishonesty in
• 36:56
  the system.
• 36:57
  Yeah.
• 36:57
  All right.
• 36:58
  Let me get into the biology of this too.
• 37:00
  There was a little bit of that.
• 37:01
  That's a good point.
• 37:02
  If you had gotten it into a, if you had moved it up enough to where it actually was one
• 37:07
  of the top ranking, then it's a financial decision.
• 37:11
  Not that they're not doing it for the sake of the other objectives associated with the
• 37:17
  program.
• 37:17
  And that's when you're going to start having people cheat the system.
• 37:19
  Yeah.
• 37:20
  All right.
• 37:22
  So a little bit, one last little fact before we leave this, the highest rate of county
• 37:28
  level removal, they put a table in there and they had all these counties that the program
• 37:31
  was implemented in and the total removal.
• 37:33
  So they removed 332 coyotes over a nine month period.
• 37:40
  And that was done by 126 individuals.
• 37:45
  So 126 people removed 332 coyotes over a nine month period in Beaver County, Utah, which
• 37:52
  is, I calculated 2,592 square miles.
• 37:56
  So that comes out to a coyote harvest of 0.13 coyotes per square mile.
• 38:01
  Not enough to move the needle.
• 38:10
  No.
• 38:11
  Even if it, let's say a quarter of that's actually somewhere that could be occupied
• 38:18
  by a coyote, it's still not.
• 38:19
  Yeah.
• 38:21
  And my study was not designed to do this, but we did estimate coyote density as part
• 38:31
  of my PhD research.
• 38:32
  And I know that John Kilgo and I shared some numbers back and forth several years ago,
• 38:38
  cause we were kind of trying to come up with a general idea of, you know, like what is
• 38:41
  probably a region wide average that coyotes occur at.
• 38:45
  And I think where we were ending up was somewhere around like four to six coyotes per square
• 38:50
  mile on average.
• 38:51
  And they were removing in this particular study, you know, basically a 10th of a coyote
• 38:56
  per square mile.
• 38:57
  I think we probably have higher densities here than they do, just to be clear.
• 39:05
  Yeah.
• 39:05
  Well, the other thing is the compensatory immigration, compensatory reproduction.
• 39:12
  We haven't even gotten into all that.
• 39:13
  Yeah.
• 39:14
  Yeah.
• 39:16
  Well, I don't feel very good about predator Mounties right now.
• 39:23
  So do you have, are we ready to move on to where, when it worked?
• 39:27
  Yeah, almost, uh, we were almost there.
• 39:30
  I've got one more stop before we get there.
• 39:32
  Cause this one was kind of just an interesting one.
• 39:34
  And I really thought.
• 39:35
  Lay it on me.
• 39:36
  I really thought that it spoke to the human psychology of this whole issue.
• 39:43
  I mean, it like it hit it right on the nose.
• 39:46
  Okay.
• 39:46
  So I'll give you a little bit of background.
• 39:48
  There's not a lot of results in this.
• 39:49
  I kind of want to just get to how people felt about it.
• 39:52
  But, um, this paper was by, uh, Lely et al 2009.
• 39:58
  I'm probably not saying that right.
• 39:59
  Apologies.
• 40:00
  Um, but there, they recorded, or they, um, they did some work on a historical seal bounty
• 40:08
  program that had been implemented in the late 1800s, early 1900s in the states of Maine and
• 40:15
  Massachusetts.
• 40:15
  And during the part of, uh, during the course of that, they estimated that 72 to 135,000
• 40:22
  seals were killed as part of the program.
• 40:24
  And they said that it probably had a substantial impact, particularly around areas that had high
• 40:30
  population, high human population densities.
• 40:34
  Um, and what was really interesting though, like, like I was talking about earlier, getting
• 40:39
  to the human psychology side of this equation, it said they were likely successful at reducing
• 40:44
  conflict between seals and fishermen.
• 40:46
  However, cause that was the main, you know, reason that they wanted to control them.
• 40:51
  However, it is also true that fishermen never ceased complaining about the impact of seals
• 40:56
  on fish, no matter how low the seal population fell.
• 41:00
  Eventually the bounties were repealed because the costs were felt, uh, to outweigh the benefits
• 41:05
  and people still weren't satisfied.
• 41:07
  So even causing the species to basically go extinct.
• 41:14
  Yeah.
• 41:14
  Well, and seals are not even close to being a seal biologist, but the little bit, relative
• 41:23
  to the average person, you're pretty damn close.
• 41:25
  The little bit that I know about them is, it tells me that they have a much lower reproductive
• 41:31
  rate than, you know, coyotes or coons, or a lot of these turkey predators that we're
• 41:36
  dealing with.
• 41:37
  So they're probably a lot easier to control.
• 41:39
  And then, you know, they have this convenient habit of swimming up around fishing boats
• 41:43
  and hanging out around docks and marinas and makes them easy to kill.
• 41:46
  Yeah.
• 41:47
  Those habits.
• 41:50
  Yeah.
• 41:51
  All right.
• 41:52
  So you're ready to get to where it worked or you want to.
• 41:55
  Hold on.
• 41:56
  Okay.
• 41:56
  I've been thinking through this while you're laying all this, this on me.
• 42:01
  I'm dropping the note.
• 42:03
  And I'm, I'm also thinking about how people are going to react to it.
• 42:07
  Cause this one's got the potential to, to circulate we'll say.
• 42:13
  Yeah.
• 42:13
  And if you're listening out there, share it with everybody.
• 42:16
  Let's get it.
• 42:17
  Let's get Will in front of as many people as we can.
• 42:21
  But I did think about the incentivize, like the, like what the incentive is.
• 42:28
  So when you have a general incentive like this, where the whole population doesn't have
• 42:35
  a vested interest in outcome, they just have a vested incentive.
• 42:40
  Yeah.
• 42:40
  I don't know if that's the right way to say that, but everyone gets equal incentive,
• 42:47
  but they don't all get equal, uh, investment in the outcome.
• 42:53
  That's very different than having a landowner that wants more turkeys who has a vested interest
• 43:04
  in making sure that, you know, the predator population has been suppressed so that they
• 43:09
  get more turkeys, the different kind of incentive.
• 43:12
  And that one, I would say is much more likely to work.
• 43:16
  Well, it's an entirely different scale too.
• 43:19
  Yeah, I know.
• 43:21
  But I'm just saying when everyone has a vested interest in the outcome,
• 43:27
  then the incentive is now the vested interest in the outcome rather than a financial incentive.
• 43:36
  Right.
• 43:37
  Right.
• 43:38
  So anyway, I don't know where you're going with that other one,
• 43:42
  but I was thinking through that, like, it's not that, I mean, we're, we're actively
• 43:47
  both involved in research to try to understand how predator removal can impact turkeys.
• 43:54
  Right.
• 43:54
  That's very different than just having a blanket incentive for everybody to kill predators.
• 44:02
  Yeah, we're not speaking at all to the efficacy of predator control right now.
• 44:06
  We are speaking to the efficacy of bounty programs to achieve predator control.
• 44:12
  That's right.
• 44:13
  Is this a good way to go about it or not?
• 44:14
  Right. And we're not talking about whether or not predator removal is a feasible strategy.
• 44:20
  We've done that elsewhere and we can link those episodes.
• 44:23
  Oh yeah.
• 44:23
  Also, in terms of an incentive structure, one that tries to have a local buy-in to an outcome
• 44:34
  is much more likely to work than one that has a incentive to try to achieve that outcome without
• 44:40
  a vested interest in the outcome being achieved.
• 44:43
  Yeah. Aren't we already there with turkeys? I mean, don't we, don't you think that
• 44:48
  turkey hunters have a shared incentive to reduce predator populations to benefit turkeys?
• 44:54
  I do on their property, but I don't think so.
• 44:57
  You don't think they're concerned about it at a larger scale?
• 44:59
  No.
• 45:01
  Yeah.
• 45:03
  Yeah. So people aren't going out and trapping, obviously, property that's not theirs,
• 45:08
  even if they could legally to control populations there.
• 45:11
  And they're not worried about it. In fact,
• 45:13
  there's probably people that would be de-incentivized for that.
• 45:17
  Yeah.
• 45:17
  They don't want their neighbors to have their turkeys.
• 45:20
  Nobody thinks like that, do they, Marcus?
• 45:23
  I hope not, but I'm just saying.
• 45:25
  All right.
• 45:26
  We have seen some lines of thought that are very similar to that.
• 45:30
  So let's get to where it worked.
• 45:33
  All right. Yeah. Let me hear it.
• 45:36
  In the context of the situation where it worked is very different
• 45:40
  from those other programs where it didn't work.
• 45:42
  And it's probably not very applicable to the situation with turkeys,
• 45:48
  but I thought it would be dishonest of me not to present a scenario where it did work, right?
• 45:52
  Yeah.
• 45:53
  Is this the only one you could find?
• 45:55
  This is the only one I could find. Yes.
• 45:56
  Well, I think that's important. We've done that throughout the whole
• 46:03
  theme of the show, and I think that has hopefully built some trust with people that
• 46:08
  we're trying to be balanced and cover what is available to cover.
• 46:14
  And I don't care whether they work or not, but you just lined up a whole bunch of compelling
• 46:20
  instances where they very clearly did not work.
• 46:24
  Yeah.
• 46:25
  And you even started it with Webster's Dictionary to
• 46:28
  give it a name of why it doesn't work before we even started.
• 46:33
  You know what? I'm going to buy a Webster's Dictionary right now.
• 46:40
  I don't know whether to take that as a compliment or an insult.
• 46:42
  I thought it was a, of, I mean, now hindsight's 2020, right?
• 46:49
  Now looking back on it, I see what you did there and I think it was perfect.
• 46:55
  Well, I appreciate it. I needed your validation today.
• 46:58
  All right, let's get into Gosling and Baker. And this is really informative,
• 47:02
  not only because it's an example of a successful program,
• 47:05
  but it also gives us a lot of clues as to what we, the way we might want to go about this if we did
• 47:12
  want to implement a program that would potentially be effective at the desired objective.
• 47:17
  All right, so this paper is Gosling and Baker. It was published in 1989 and it focused on
• 47:24
  two species that were introduced into Britain during the 1920s and they were muskrats and
• 47:29
  nutria rats, which I'd never heard them called. Apparently they call it over there, they call
• 47:36
  them coipus, nutria, they call them coipus. Good name.
• 47:41
  Did you know that? No.
• 47:43
  I had to look it up. I had to look up the scientific name and that's why we use
• 47:47
  scientific names. So all of you students out there that are listening and that complain,
• 47:52
  particularly if- I don't speak Latin.
• 47:54
  Particularly those in my Habitat class that are mad about learning Latin for the lab exam next
• 48:01
  week, this is why we do it. None of them are listening right now, Will.
• 48:05
  I have at least one student in my current Habitat class that listens, I know. So shout out.
• 48:09
  You better be studying. Yeah, you better be studying right now.
• 48:13
  All right, so muskrats and nutria rats in Britain. So two species that were introduced,
• 48:19
  happened in the 1920s. When it happened, apparently the folks in that area were familiar
• 48:27
  with muskrats potentially being a damaging invasive species. So they started an eradication
• 48:34
  campaign really soon after that species was first introduced in 1932 and they made use of overseas
• 48:43
  expertise as well as a control strategy that was designed by pest control specialists that
• 48:50
  had experience working with the species. So they ended up being successful in that regard and they
• 48:57
  were paying trappers as part of this program, but they were also specifying where they trapped
• 49:04
  and their level of trapping effort. And they were continuing to maintain this relatively high
• 49:10
  consistent level of trapping effort by paying those trappers in this scenario. And that's what
• 49:17
  led, they believe, to the success of the program. You combine that approach with the fact that they
• 49:25
  included the experts. And then on top of that, it was shortly after the species was introduced while
• 49:31
  its population was still becoming established. So they weren't completely naturalized within
• 49:35
  that area yet. Yeah. And you definitely have, you're more effective when you're in that part
• 49:43
  of their establishment. Exactly. Because perfect case in point, the Nutria program wasn't as
• 49:49
  successful because they weren't as familiar with the species and they didn't start eradication
• 49:53
  efforts as quickly after introduction. Well, what I was thinking about, it sounds like to me,
• 50:03
  instead of the incentive being on a per animal basis, they were incentivizing by paying a person
• 50:12
  to focus on an area. Yes. And it didn't depend on how many they caught. Here's the details. So I'll
• 50:19
  go ahead and lay that out for you. I'm sorry, I should have went ahead and done that. So the way
• 50:23
  they went about it is they used detailed population simulations to plan the number of trappers that
• 50:29
  they needed. They planned out the time that they estimated they'd need for eradication and the
• 50:34
  likely cost of the campaign. And then they used an incentive bonus scheme to overcome the problem
• 50:41
  that trappers would work themselves out of a job. Trapper deployment was planned using capture to
• 50:48
  trapping effort ratios and progress was monitored by biologists. So it was a very hands-on program.
• 50:57
  Mm-hmm. Yeah. I was just trying to think of how could you possibly implement that at scale
• 51:06
  for turkeys? That's the problem. How do you do it at scale? How does he scale that up?
• 51:11
  Well, even- It's conceivable maybe to do it in a small area.
• 51:15
  Well, even a group, let's say a group of landowners hires a trapper.
• 51:22
  Like now you're focusing on an area, they're getting paid
• 51:27
  to trap that area, not necessarily based on the number of individuals they remove.
• 51:34
  I'm just trying to think of what is, you know, that might be a more realistic thing to accomplish.
• 51:40
  A group of landowners get together and they want to focus a bunch of effort on their area.
• 51:47
  I'm just thinking how could we take what we learned in that study and design that?
• 51:54
  Right.
• 51:54
  And maybe it already is designed that way where you pay a trapper to catch as many as possible
• 52:02
  during a window of time in an area. Mm-hmm. I mean, is that what you do
• 52:07
  when you pay somebody to come trap your land? Yeah. Maybe it's already structured like that.
• 52:12
  So in that type of incentive program already works fine.
• 52:16
  Yeah.
• 52:16
  That's interesting. I don't see how we could do it at a larger scale.
• 52:26
  Yeah.
• 52:27
  But I'm sure somebody has ideas and they're going to leave them in our comments.
• 52:33
  Okay.
• 52:33
  So once we get through all the hate, maybe we'll have some good ideas down there.
• 52:38
  Hey, and you added a new word to your, a new term to your vocabulary today, perverse incentive.
• 52:44
  I'm going to highlight it in my Webster's dictionary.
• 52:49
  That's highlighted in my notes.
• 52:51
  Well, I feel like, how did I start out the episode now? I already forgot where you're...
• 53:05
  I asked you if you had your ladle.
• 53:07
  Oh, it was a hot take. I do feel like it was a hot take.
• 53:10
  Was it a hot take?
• 53:11
  It was a hot take. Essentially what I heard is the way that they have been implemented
• 53:18
  for a long time, that a predator bounties largely just don't work.
• 53:25
  Yeah. And if this does end up being a widely circulated episode,
• 53:31
  and you were listening to us for the first time, know that our goal in covering information like
• 53:39
  this is not to prevent someone from doing something, but to help them allocate their
• 53:46
  effort towards the most productive activities possible. And from what we've gone through,
• 53:52
  it doesn't seem like predator bounties are a good way for us to spend our time, money, and efforts
• 54:00
  to try to restore or increase turkey populations. And so the benefit that that gives us is now we
• 54:07
  know we can focus on something else that will be.
• 54:09
  Right. Well, let's just walk through that real quick. And I agree with you 100%. That's what
• 54:20
  we're trying to accomplish here. But I know that, for example, the state agency catches a lot of
• 54:27
  pressure and you can just name one, it doesn't matter. They get pressure to have a bounty program,
• 54:33
  but that would require them to use part of their funding to pay for it.
• 54:43
  And it's very unlikely from what we just talked about to be an effective strategy since we've
• 54:50
  repeatedly tried it in all kinds of systems and situations and it basically just didn't work,
• 54:56
  except for in the one that would cost a lot more time and effort and money where you'd have to have
• 55:02
  really close tracking of it. And I don't know how you could do that even at the state level.
• 55:06
  Well, that's the problem is like in the muskrat nutria example, I mean, those were newly
• 55:12
  established populations that were very, very geographically limited in their distribution.
• 55:17
  Yeah. Maybe in a county you could do that, but it'd be very hard to do that at a larger scale.
• 55:23
  But my point is, that's not to say that there isn't a place for predator removal.
• 55:30
  Right.
• 55:30
  Like I said earlier, you and I are both actively in research to try to understand how effective
• 55:36
  that can be. But it would, based on what we've just talked about, it would be a waste of resources
• 55:45
  to do a bounty program to achieve that. But those same resources could be diverted to something more
• 55:53
  effective like training people how to trap, for example. Or what we're more fond of is teaching
• 56:03
  them to manage their land, the habitat. Or from the state's perspective, let's hire more
• 56:09
  technical assistance biologists that can go out and consult with private landowners to help them
• 56:13
  improve the wildlife habitat quality on their land.
• 56:16
  Right. That's what I'm, my whole point is, you know, there's plenty of scrutiny about how we
• 56:24
  allocate funding. And, you know, there's a lot of pressure in some situations, I see it and I hear
• 56:33
  about it all the time, I assume there's a lot of pressure to allocate resources to something like
• 56:39
  a bounty program. And it would probably be better served to allocate those resources and other
• 56:44
  things that are more likely to move the needle. We only have so much time and money, let's make
• 56:49
  sure that we're putting it where it's going to most effectively help us accomplish our objective
• 56:52
  of increasing turkey populations. Yes.
• 56:55
  Was that a mic? I think so.
• 57:03
  It's a really small one. I like to use the...
• 57:06
  It's like a little violin. I use the finesse mics.
• 57:09
  I don't know. A finesse mic?
• 57:13
  I don't know. I'm just making it up.
• 57:15
  A finesse mic. I'm going to include that in my vernacular.
• 57:21
  Yeah, that's a real thing, right?
• 57:22
  I'm just learning that.
• 57:26
  No, I'm just making it up.
• 57:27
  A finesse mic. Well, that was a really good one.
• 57:32
  I enjoyed it.
• 57:33
  Hope you all enjoyed it out there. We're trying to, you know, keep up with timely topics. And
• 57:40
  we thought this would be one that folks want to hear about because...
• 57:45
  It was based on listener feedback because we get so much feedback about bounties.
• 57:49
  Yeah. It's brought up all the time. And I've, you know, we kind of de facto end up in this
• 57:56
  in lots of ways when we're working together, you kind of end up being the predator guy,
• 58:03
  which I guess stems from the fact that you've done work, like you've researched a lot of stuff
• 58:09
  related to it. But yeah, I was really interested in the topic and to see where you went with it.
• 58:17
  Yeah. Was it as interesting as you had hoped? Did it live up to your expectations?
• 58:23
  You know, I feel like it was a little bit of a finesse mic drop instead of a,
• 58:30
  you know, like a big Yeti mic drop.
• 58:34
  You wanted a boom mic drop.
• 58:38
  All right. No, it was. I think that was really good. And it did not turn out exactly how I
• 58:44
  thought, but that's probably a good thing. Yes. All right. That was fun. Thanks everybody for
• 58:50
  listening. Keep the feedback coming and we'll keep exploring these kinds of topics.
• 58:55
  Wild Turkey Science is part of the Natural Resources University Podcast Network and is
• 59:03
  made possible by Turkeys for Tomorrow, a grassroots organization dedicated to the
• 59:07
  wild turkey. To learn more about TFT, check out turkeysfortomorrow.org.