Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 446: When an African Cape Buffalo Beats Your Butt

Transcript

Ep. 446: When an African Cape Buffalo Beats Your Butt · The MeatEater Podcast

0:02
Speaker 1: Hey guys, it's Brody Henderson. You probably know me from
0:05
Speaker 1: kicking Stey's butt on Meet Eater's trivia show. When I'm
0:08
Speaker 1: not doing that, I'm part of the Mediatter publishing team
0:11
Speaker 1: and stoke to announce that our new book, Catch a Crayfish,
0:15
Speaker 1: Count the Stars, Fun, Project Skills and Adventures for Outdoor
0:19
Speaker 1: Kids is coming out June thirteenth. It's Media's first book
0:22
Speaker 1: for kids, and it's chuck full of activities and adventures
0:25
Speaker 1: that will help build serious outdoor skills start them young
0:29
Speaker 1: by teaching them how to build a wildlife, viewing blind,
0:31
Speaker 1: giga bull frog, and navigate through the wilderness. They'll also
0:35
Speaker 1: learn how to forage and grow their own food, build
0:38
Speaker 1: emergency shelters, hunt for fossils, gutfish, track animals, and much more.
0:43
Speaker 1: To celebrate the release of the book, Steve will be
0:45
Speaker 1: heading out on a little Book tour from June sixteenth
0:48
Speaker 1: to June twenty fifth, and he'll be signing copies of
0:51
Speaker 1: the books at Shields stores in Billings, Montana, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Omaha, Nebraska,
0:56
Speaker 1: Kansas City, Missouri, Dallas, Texas, Colorado Springs, Colorado, out Johnstown, Colorado,
1:01
Speaker 1: and Sandy Utah. Catch a Crayfish. Count the Stars is
1:04
Speaker 1: a must have book for any parent or caregiver who
1:07
Speaker 1: wants to get their kids off the couch and off
1:09
Speaker 1: their screens over those long summer days. It also includes
1:13
Speaker 1: activities for all different kinds of weather that'll keep them
1:16
Speaker 1: busy throughout the year. Visit the meateater dot com for
1:19
Speaker 1: tickets and we'll see you at Shields.
1:33
Speaker 2: If this is the mea Eater podcast coming at you shirtless.
1:37
Speaker 3: Severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast.
1:42
Speaker 4: You can't predict anything presented by First Light, creating proven
1:48
Speaker 4: versatile hunting apparel from Marino bass layers to technical outerwear.
1:52
Speaker 4: For every hunt, First Light, Go farther, stay longer. All right, Borry,
2:00
Speaker 4: the Tanzanians are here when you guys, That's what I
2:03
Speaker 4: was telling my kids, and you guys came off for dinner.
2:04
Speaker 2: I said, the Tanzanians are coming to night. They didn't
2:06
Speaker 2: know what that meant.
2:07
Speaker 4: And then but you're Australian when you were born in Tanzania,
2:13
Speaker 4: I was really misleading by kids a little.
2:15
Speaker 5: Bit nearer than Morgan.
2:16
Speaker 2: He's a little closer than me.
2:19
Speaker 4: Okay, Morgan, So walk me through how you became to
2:22
Speaker 4: be came to be a Tanzanian.
2:23
Speaker 2: Yeah in Montana. Yeah, yeah, Well it's kind of a
2:27
Speaker 2: long story. And I guess if Roger's the sort of
2:31
Speaker 2: the pedigree, the kind of thoroughbred, I'm like the mongrel,
2:35
Speaker 2: so I, you know, African hunting was something that I
2:39
Speaker 2: grew up with. My grandfather was an African hunter, not
2:42
Speaker 2: a professional, you know, as a client. He'd go over
2:45
Speaker 2: there in the sixties and seventies. He did a number
2:47
Speaker 2: of Safaris and I always I was passionate about hunting
2:50
Speaker 2: and I got that from him. And now the farmhouse
2:54
Speaker 2: where we kind of lived had a lot of his trophies,
2:56
Speaker 2: a lot of his pictures, a lot of stuff, kind
2:58
Speaker 2: of memorabilia from Africa. So it was just kind of
3:01
Speaker 2: always like under my skin, I guess, and I think,
3:05
Speaker 2: like a lot of people, I sort of hit this
3:06
Speaker 2: period in my early twenties where I was like, what
3:08
Speaker 2: am I going to do with my life? You know,
3:09
Speaker 2: odd jobs here and there aren't cutting it, didn't go
3:12
Speaker 2: to college, and I kind of thought about, you know,
3:16
Speaker 2: taking hunting as a profession further. And I went up
3:18
Speaker 2: to this place in Northern Australia, met a guy that
3:22
Speaker 2: was hunting water buffalo up there. There's these free range
3:24
Speaker 2: Asian water buffalo Northern Australia, like thousands of them. They
3:28
Speaker 2: had this colony that they tried to establish up there,
3:31
Speaker 2: and they realized they couldn't use British breeds of cattle,
3:34
Speaker 2: so they brought these water buffalo as like beasts of
3:36
Speaker 2: burden and meat animals, and the colony ended up failing
3:39
Speaker 2: and they just kind of opened the corrals and were
3:41
Speaker 2: like off, you know, get out of here. Came back
3:43
Speaker 2: like I think it was seventy years later and there
3:45
Speaker 2: was like twenty thousand at the things.
3:47
Speaker 4: So I got a few friends that from here that
3:50
Speaker 4: have gone there to do that.
3:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's awesome.
3:53
Speaker 6: Oh yeah, No, I just have have always had a
3:55
Speaker 6: high fascination with.
3:58
Speaker 2: Those moldern water buffalo.
3:59
Speaker 6: Yeah. And maybe it's the like crocodile dundee, which is
4:04
Speaker 6: probably like a horrible reference for you.
4:06
Speaker 2: But it's it's a tough one.
4:08
Speaker 4: They don't put those in Crocodile Dundee.
4:14
Speaker 2: I forgot about that. Yeah, that that ball that was
4:16
Speaker 2: in that movie is super famous. It's like mounted in
4:19
Speaker 2: a bar down there. It's actually it was like a eunuch,
4:21
Speaker 2: like I don't know what the right term is like
4:22
Speaker 2: that that specific animal unit. He'd be a yeah, yeah,
4:28
Speaker 2: I guess, or a bullock. Is that? The other time
4:31
Speaker 2: it was no, no, no, it was castrated and that's why
4:34
Speaker 2: it has those massive horns like oh no.
4:36
Speaker 4: No, no, castrated, No castrated ox is there you go
4:40
Speaker 4: it's an Yeah, it's strated.
4:44
Speaker 2: An adult castrated ball. Yeah, is an ox. Yeah it
4:48
Speaker 2: was an ox. Hence the enormous kind of spread on
4:51
Speaker 2: those on those horns. But yeah, they're a fascinating species
4:55
Speaker 2: in there. They're they're pretty different from African buffalo. But really,
4:59
Speaker 2: I mean it's an incredible area of wilderness where you
5:02
Speaker 2: go hunt them. It's They're impressive for sure. So I
5:05
Speaker 2: went up there. I kind of got got hired for
5:07
Speaker 2: that to really see, and I guess for me it
5:09
Speaker 2: was about seeing if I could be a guide, and
5:13
Speaker 2: I think I did all right despite my sort of
5:16
Speaker 2: youth and inexperience. And then this guy came out to
5:20
Speaker 2: make a movie about all the species of buffalo you
5:22
Speaker 2: can still hunt in the world. How that movie do?
5:25
Speaker 6: Ah?
5:26
Speaker 2: I think it did? Okay, it was It's well, I
5:30
Speaker 2: was called buffalo hunters, but it was It was a
5:32
Speaker 2: German production, and I think the Germans have a different,
5:35
Speaker 2: different vibe around there. There was a lot of like
5:38
Speaker 2: recreates and I'm a terrible actor. Let me just give
5:41
Speaker 2: you that, like it just heads up right now, hold
5:44
Speaker 2: that against you, oh man, And so like, I had
5:46
Speaker 2: a tough one with the recreates. They sort of always
5:48
Speaker 2: have that look where like, if someone films you hunting,
5:51
Speaker 2: it looks like whatever looks normal. Maybe you're a little goofy,
5:54
Speaker 2: but generally you look natural. But then if someone's like,
5:56
Speaker 2: all right, walk back there and do that again, you
5:59
Speaker 2: always look like an idiot.
6:00
Speaker 4: I think, yeah, I'll give people a little heads up
6:03
Speaker 4: for people at home if you're watching hunting shows and
6:05
Speaker 4: you're looking for the recreates. Uh, if someone goes to
6:11
Speaker 4: shoot something and you realize you're getting three or four
6:13
Speaker 4: camera angles on.
6:14
Speaker 2: It, it's not happening, like, oh, there's a camera game in
6:18
Speaker 2: front of him, to the side of him. There was
6:22
Speaker 2: there was a lot of There was a lot of that,
6:24
Speaker 2: but it was cool. But the guy that made the
6:26
Speaker 2: movie was a phenomenal hunter called Ryana yosh and his
6:30
Speaker 2: day job was a professional hunter in Tanzania. So after
6:33
Speaker 2: we got done with the movie, I followed him back
6:35
Speaker 2: to Africa and was this what he taught me? But
6:37
Speaker 2: was this what Roger? Was this one of you guys
6:40
Speaker 2: say he used.
6:41
Speaker 5: With us from time war time with you.
6:43
Speaker 4: Yeah, people are gonna get people are gonna get Well,
6:46
Speaker 4: this will all start making more sense to you people
6:47
Speaker 4: at home.
6:48
Speaker 2: Yeah, it'll we'll we'll fill in the narrative here. But
6:51
Speaker 2: I uh, and so I sort of came to I
6:54
Speaker 2: came to Robin Hurt Safari's a little later on in
6:56
Speaker 2: my career.
6:58
Speaker 5: Uh.
6:59
Speaker 2: Well, I guess I was thirty thirty three, thirty four
7:03
Speaker 2: or something like that. And I've been doing this for
7:05
Speaker 2: thirteen years now.
7:07
Speaker 4: So did they have you just carrying water at first?
7:09
Speaker 2: Whatnot? Did you get to jump right in? You know,
7:12
Speaker 2: it was a lot of following and kind of you know,
7:15
Speaker 2: Rhyana is one of these guys. I mean, I'm kind
7:17
Speaker 2: of interested in your take on this because he was
7:19
Speaker 2: one of the guys that I take. Yeah, well your
7:21
Speaker 2: take on like what a genius hunter, like, if there's
7:24
Speaker 2: like a genius hunter, if there's a level there? I
7:27
Speaker 2: think so too, And like the way, well the way
7:30
Speaker 2: I define it. I think it's the same. I read
7:31
Speaker 2: an article about a math genius one time and he
7:34
Speaker 2: was describing it as like, yeah, he has to work
7:36
Speaker 2: hard and that's the ideal, but really generally like math
7:39
Speaker 2: is just super easy for him and like makes it
7:41
Speaker 2: look easy. And this guy Ryana Yosh to me, was
7:46
Speaker 2: like that kind of hunter where he just he made
7:48
Speaker 2: what everyone else had to really work out just look
7:51
Speaker 2: easy when he was doing it. So I kind of
7:54
Speaker 2: had had the opportunity to learn from him, which was
7:56
Speaker 2: a big deal. And then a couple years later I
7:59
Speaker 2: got my license, kind of went out on my own
8:01
Speaker 2: for a bit. You did work for some other people. Yeah,
8:04
Speaker 2: there was at that time there was a reshuffling of
8:06
Speaker 2: hunting areas in Tanzania and kind of Ryina found himself
8:11
Speaker 2: sort of you know, I guess caught caught out in
8:14
Speaker 2: the in the open, not sure where he was going
8:16
Speaker 2: to go next because his the outfit he was working
8:19
Speaker 2: with kind of lost their area. So that sort of
8:22
Speaker 2: put me in limbo as well. So I ended up
8:26
Speaker 2: kind of doing doing a season in the salou kind
8:30
Speaker 2: of with my own clients. That was really interesting and
8:33
Speaker 2: it kind of happened early in my career, and I
8:35
Speaker 2: learned a lot from that. It was kind of just
8:37
Speaker 2: being on my own, not having anyone to really follow
8:39
Speaker 2: around anymore. I learned a lot by by making mistakes,
8:42
Speaker 2: to be honest, Oh, kind of kind of screwing up.
8:45
Speaker 5: And it's the best way to learn.
8:47
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is. And I'm sure there's some former clients
8:50
Speaker 2: of mine out there who might disagree with that, But yeah,
8:56
Speaker 2: I like to think I came out of it, you know, better,
8:59
Speaker 2: better at what I do. But it was it was tough,
9:02
Speaker 2: It was interesting.
9:03
Speaker 4: So how did how did you guys come to be
9:04
Speaker 4: colleagues in.
9:06
Speaker 2: Well, interestingly enough, Roger's older brother and I were kind
9:11
Speaker 2: of I always I sort of. I mean, the name
9:14
Speaker 2: Robin Hurt. If you're interested in African hunting, and particularly
9:18
Speaker 2: the East African tradition, you're going to know that name
9:20
Speaker 2: because Roger's dad is probably the most famous living African
9:25
Speaker 2: professional hunter now, a guy who's literally had a license
9:28
Speaker 2: for sixty years and came up in the Golden Age.
9:32
Speaker 2: Really the kind of the second Golden Age, I like
9:34
Speaker 2: to call it, kind of the resurgence of African hunting
9:38
Speaker 2: after the second was Teddy Roosevelt, the first gold nage.
9:40
Speaker 2: Roosevelt was the first Golden Age in my view, Well.
9:43
Speaker 4: You could hemingway it was the second Golden Age.
9:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, you could kind of argue that, like the guys
9:48
Speaker 2: that kind of really explored Africa and the kind of
9:51
Speaker 2: black Powder era were sort of I mean what they.
9:54
Speaker 5: Saw even Livingstone.
9:56
Speaker 2: Yeah, those guys exactly that whole vibe, so that those
10:01
Speaker 2: guys really explored a totally untamed continent. But and Roger
10:06
Speaker 2: and I always have this kind of back and forward
10:08
Speaker 2: dialogue about if we could go back in time, like
10:11
Speaker 2: when what era? And I always say that era in
10:13
Speaker 2: Roger's like, oh, you would have died a malaria about it,
10:16
Speaker 2: like you would have died of some tropical disease things
10:18
Speaker 2: into your trip.
10:19
Speaker 5: I think my dad basically started in the prime of
10:22
Speaker 5: African hunting basically where it wasn't dangerous, but it was
10:26
Speaker 5: still well dangerous from a medical point of view. You
10:28
Speaker 5: weren't going to die of yellow fever or you know
10:31
Speaker 5: all the other diseases. But the hunting was just phenomenal.
10:35
Speaker 5: The wilderness was pristine. I mean, it was what you're
10:38
Speaker 5: doing that was sixty years back.
10:41
Speaker 2: So yeah, I'd say the fifties sixties or Hammingway Second
10:47
Speaker 2: Golden Age? Did it anywhere ever? Hunt with your dad's outfit?
10:50
Speaker 5: No, he didn't.
10:52
Speaker 2: He had one guy. He had Philip Percival, who was
10:56
Speaker 2: actually on the Roosevelt safari as a young man wow,
10:59
Speaker 2: and was on Hemingway's guided Hemingway as an old man,
11:03
Speaker 2: which is fascinating. So like guys like Perceval kind of bridged.
11:06
Speaker 2: The two took took some time out to go fight
11:09
Speaker 2: the First World War, you know, maybe some of them
11:12
Speaker 2: some of them were involved in the Second World War two,
11:15
Speaker 2: and then kind of like came back into.
11:16
Speaker 4: The song the same dude. There's there's a dude that
11:19
Speaker 4: guided Teddy Roosevelt on his big yeah, like it has
11:25
Speaker 4: a big crazy museum collection. And then turned around and
11:29
Speaker 4: also with Hemingway, Yep, Philip. If we liked better like
11:34
Speaker 4: tr better man.
11:35
Speaker 2: I think tr probably, I think Ta. Both of them
11:38
Speaker 2: were marcho men right in my I like I guess
11:41
Speaker 2: in my reading of them both they were kind of
11:43
Speaker 2: like sort of tough guys.
11:46
Speaker 5: But to have been part of that Roosevelt's sorry just
11:49
Speaker 5: would have been an experience for lifetime and the people involved,
11:52
Speaker 5: they had like a hundred porters.
11:54
Speaker 6: I mean it was oh yeah, it was not a
11:55
Speaker 6: small imprint.
11:57
Speaker 2: Yeah. No. And the places they went, I mean they
12:00
Speaker 2: went all over East Africa. I mean it's just incredible.
12:02
Speaker 5: He would have had stories for a lifetime off that one.
12:05
Speaker 6: Farry, Oh yeah, a small tangent. Have you ever read
12:09
Speaker 6: West with the Night?
12:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, Beryl maas.
12:12
Speaker 6: Beryl holy Cats. That's a great one.
12:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, a good one. Beryl hard Call. Yeah.
12:17
Speaker 6: And the female right female, Yeah, pilot and spotting big
12:23
Speaker 6: tusked elephants out there. And I just don't hear that
12:27
Speaker 6: book reference very often.
12:29
Speaker 2: We had Roger.
12:35
Speaker 5: I used to work with our company, used to be
12:37
Speaker 5: our sort of main marketing man.
12:40
Speaker 6: That awesome.
12:40
Speaker 5: Beryl Markham's great grandsons.
12:42
Speaker 2: Okay, a lot of it's all connected.
12:45
Speaker 5: And ken or everyone's sort of connected it their day.
12:50
Speaker 4: Krin I were talking about when I was telling her
12:52
Speaker 4: originally about you, after we met, after you guys came
12:56
Speaker 4: for dinner, I'll tell Krin about you, and we got
12:59
Speaker 4: the I use the word convalescing, yes, And we're talking
13:04
Speaker 4: about how no one uses the word convalescing. I said,
13:07
Speaker 4: he's like convalescing. He's convalescing in the US. The snot
13:14
Speaker 4: kicked out of him by Kate Buffalo. Yeah, I guess
13:17
Speaker 4: that's have you been you're convalescing.
13:20
Speaker 5: No, I've not used that exactly.
13:24
Speaker 4: So we got to touch on a couple of things,
13:26
Speaker 4: and then we're gonna come back and I want to
13:28
Speaker 4: we're gonna talk about I want you to tell the
13:30
Speaker 4: story getting by a Kate Buffalo.
13:32
Speaker 5: Yeah, the impact to that who's still alive, he still lies,
13:35
Speaker 5: still out that you didn't go try to find him. Oh,
13:37
Speaker 5: I'm definitely gonna go.
13:41
Speaker 4: Well, we'll get into that story because it's a good
13:43
Speaker 4: story and and you'll you can explain how when you
13:46
Speaker 4: see him, you'll know, Yeah, you'll recognize someone.
13:50
Speaker 5: He's ingrained in my in my head.
13:52
Speaker 2: He's got his head pretty much. Oh you know.
13:59
Speaker 4: So here's here's the thing that happened that we covered.
14:03
Speaker 4: We covered a guy he's something of a repeat offender
14:07
Speaker 4: I believe, who was up in Jackson Hole, down in
14:11
Speaker 4: Jackson Hole, wyhoelming shed hunting prior to shed season and
14:18
Speaker 4: he got busted by a whelming fishing game. He had
14:23
Speaker 4: been going out and uh like pre hunting.
14:27
Speaker 2: Wasn't that right out of out of season?
14:31
Speaker 4: He was pre hunting, making little stash piles and then
14:35
Speaker 4: he'd make a little cash and then when season opened,
14:37
Speaker 4: you just go in and pick up your cash. But
14:39
Speaker 4: he was also in the field hacking chew toys, so
14:44
Speaker 4: he was cutting his He was cutting elk antlers into
14:47
Speaker 4: chew toys out in the field, probably for easier transport,
14:49
Speaker 4: because you imagine, you imagine you take a big ass backpack.
14:53
Speaker 4: I mean, once you whack him up, dude, you'd have
14:56
Speaker 4: well just think.
14:58
Speaker 6: This is like an old guide joke, but it is
15:02
Speaker 6: repeated in many circles. You know, if you want me
15:05
Speaker 6: to make that load easier on here, we just cut
15:07
Speaker 6: those antlers off. You just lop off a couple of
15:10
Speaker 6: these points and I'll pack a lot easier.
15:13
Speaker 4: So this is someone rode in. They're like, hey, I
15:17
Speaker 4: wanted to let you know about what happened with the
15:20
Speaker 4: antlers that were confiscated Woming fishing game went out and
15:26
Speaker 4: just put it, went out and strewed them. Is that
15:29
Speaker 4: a word strewed? I know you can strew something something
15:33
Speaker 4: strewn around.
15:34
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think that's a past He's let's say I'm
15:41
Speaker 7: gonna go out and strew around.
15:43
Speaker 4: You didn't say that. Yeah, yesterday I went out and
15:47
Speaker 4: strewed around some.
15:48
Speaker 7: They littered the mountain broadcasts, so like the mountain, the
15:54
Speaker 7: hillside was strewn with ye.
15:56
Speaker 4: But yeah, I'm just gonna go. Strewed sounds like a soup,
16:03
Speaker 4: a kind of soup you might make. I made some
16:06
Speaker 4: strewed last night.
16:07
Speaker 2: They went out and strewed around all the antlers back
16:12
Speaker 2: out into the woods.
16:13
Speaker 4: They redistributed them in the mountains so that people could
16:17
Speaker 4: have the joy of finding them. But a guy sends
16:20
Speaker 4: a picture in and they were out on opening day
16:22
Speaker 4: picking them up, and they were and he in his
16:26
Speaker 4: little gripping grin of him and all the stuff he
16:28
Speaker 4: picked up that day, he has the chunks. They just
16:33
Speaker 4: flicked the chunks around toys as well, so when opening
16:38
Speaker 4: day came, you could wander around and you could.
16:40
Speaker 2: Find It's like an Easter egg, like an Easter egg
16:44
Speaker 2: hunt with antlers.
16:45
Speaker 4: It's a great idea, but it's like, uh, here's part
16:51
Speaker 4: of the problem. It's the same way that I wouldn't
16:52
Speaker 4: want to shoot a deer with a collar on it,
16:57
Speaker 4: because it would be that it had been touched, it
17:00
Speaker 4: had been soiled by man. So people don't hold that
17:03
Speaker 4: perspective as every time we talk about this, We talk
17:06
Speaker 4: about how that perspective is not extended ducks, because getting
17:09
Speaker 4: a banded duck is sweet, Getting a banded duck is great.
17:14
Speaker 4: Getting a deer with a collar on it is not great.
17:17
Speaker 4: I can't explain why. You just have to trust me.
17:21
Speaker 4: So to go out shed hunting and pick up chew toys,
17:28
Speaker 4: I would feel like there was I would feel that
17:30
Speaker 4: it'd just be not as exciting.
17:33
Speaker 2: To give you one intending to make a chew toy
17:36
Speaker 2: with your shed. Ultimately you'd feel a little bit well,
17:38
Speaker 2: a bit jipped.
17:39
Speaker 4: Yeah, it'd be that it got picked up, it got
17:42
Speaker 4: caught up, it got confiscated, it got put back out.
17:45
Speaker 4: It would just feel like it wasn't like like, for instance,
17:49
Speaker 4: if you are out hunting morels, it's it's sixty percent
17:53
Speaker 4: it's forty percent that morels is good to eat and
17:55
Speaker 4: sixty percent this fun to find morels.
17:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, So if you went.
17:58
Speaker 4: Out and found like morels that were just cut and
18:02
Speaker 4: set out in a little box, different, it'd be like
18:06
Speaker 4: it just be different.
18:07
Speaker 2: Yeah, hallout of victory fish.
18:08
Speaker 5: Yeah, some guys like.
18:10
Speaker 4: I found these, but I put them back out in
18:12
Speaker 4: a box. And then you find them, you wouldn't feel
18:14
Speaker 4: like you found them ll.
18:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I can see that it'd be that you.
18:18
Speaker 2: I don't know, it just be different.
18:19
Speaker 7: Could you conceive of it as like a separate thing,
18:22
Speaker 7: Like there's the sheds that you might find, and then
18:25
Speaker 7: there's oh, I got some free chew toys for my
18:28
Speaker 7: dog that I don't have to buy the pet star
18:30
Speaker 7: And if.
18:30
Speaker 4: You're taking commercially, If you're taking commercially, there's still just that.
18:34
Speaker 4: I'm just like, I don't I I would pick them up.
18:37
Speaker 2: I'm all for it. I think it was a great idea.
18:39
Speaker 4: It was better than putting them in a It was
18:42
Speaker 4: better than putting them in a in a fishing game,
18:47
Speaker 4: auction garage somewhere like whatever, like better than all that
18:52
Speaker 4: just just struck me as peculiar.
18:54
Speaker 2: Oh you know what's uh, let me point this out.
18:56
Speaker 6: So did you guys cover the fine and then the
19:00
Speaker 6: failure to pay the first fine? No, this guy's deep
19:02
Speaker 6: into it. Yeah, I mean he tell me his first round.
19:06
Speaker 6: He's a Bosangelus cap too, that's where his OAP business
19:10
Speaker 6: is based. But so he was ordered to pay a
19:13
Speaker 6: ten thousand dollars fine the first time around and never
19:18
Speaker 6: paid it, so that's why they tacked on. I think
19:22
Speaker 6: ninety days a house arrest plus an additional fifteen K
19:28
Speaker 6: and fines I think is what it came down to.
19:30
Speaker 6: So pretty pretty steep. But yeah, I love the fact
19:35
Speaker 6: they strewn about those antlers out there.
19:38
Speaker 2: He'd have to say, I could pay my fine if
19:41
Speaker 2: I can go get my antlers. Right, what do you
19:44
Speaker 2: guys want the money?
19:48
Speaker 4: Because that's that's where all my assets are tied.
19:51
Speaker 2: Up right now.
19:53
Speaker 6: I'm not exactly liquid.
19:56
Speaker 2: I got the liquidity issue. I'm still wrapping my head
19:59
Speaker 2: around the shed hunting thing, to be honest.
20:02
Speaker 6: Oh yeah, I'm crazy.
20:04
Speaker 2: Just how into it people are.
20:05
Speaker 4: Well, you know why you don't understand it because in Africa,
20:09
Speaker 4: you guys don't have any servants.
20:11
Speaker 2: Nothing sheds, nothing sheds, nothing sheds. It's a good point.
20:15
Speaker 5: It's fun when you find a dead skull. There's a
20:21
Speaker 5: name for that too, is.
20:24
Speaker 2: What skull shirt.
20:25
Speaker 5: Yeah, you find a whole skull.
20:27
Speaker 2: Like an old skull. Way of putting it.
20:30
Speaker 5: I mean occasionally, like when you find a sixty five
20:33
Speaker 5: inch koodoo that's been killed by a lion and it's
20:37
Speaker 5: just such an impressive.
20:38
Speaker 2: Head, And do you keep that kind of stuff.
20:40
Speaker 5: Well, we put them in the camp. We're not allowed
20:41
Speaker 5: to take them home or whatever, but we keep them
20:43
Speaker 5: within the area. You definitely pick it up, so.
20:46
Speaker 2: You just you redistribute him over to your camp. Yeah,
20:50
Speaker 2: I think that should be our next T shirt.
20:52
Speaker 6: Steve is dead head, but you know, obviously a play
20:55
Speaker 6: on the Grateful Dead. You know they're a little dancing bears.
20:59
Speaker 7: On how did we never think of that? I am
21:05
Speaker 7: going to talk to anything's not going to Instagram.
21:08
Speaker 4: The last genius idea we had. We made the stupid
21:11
Speaker 4: mistake of checking and if fame wouldn't had it. But
21:13
Speaker 4: everyone's had everything. Yeah, yeah, you really all your idea
21:17
Speaker 4: has already been taking.
21:18
Speaker 8: I brought up the shed head idea with those bears
21:20
Speaker 8: when Denimanti was on the shed crazy guy, did you did?
21:25
Speaker 8: No one remembers a thing that happens in this realm
21:29
Speaker 8: Izuro servant.
21:34
Speaker 6: Yeah that's yeah.
21:36
Speaker 2: The Sahara there's one, there's not what is it, Bobbery,
21:42
Speaker 2: No Barbary. They have a red stag where North Africa
21:47
Speaker 2: from there. Yeah, I'm gonna say that there was, you know,
21:51
Speaker 2: some kind of land bridge with Europe at some point.
21:55
Speaker 2: I believe that for a second. Let's yeah, let's look
21:58
Speaker 2: into it.
21:58
Speaker 6: Barbary Stag.
22:02
Speaker 4: On a recent episode, I went on, I was real
22:06
Speaker 4: fired up about Gordon Lightfoot's death. Goy sent us this
22:10
Speaker 4: great picture taken in July nineteen sixty one.
22:13
Speaker 6: Native to North Africa.
22:15
Speaker 2: Steve, there we go. I meant the other part.
22:20
Speaker 6: Algeria to Tunisia and Morocco.
22:23
Speaker 4: That's where my that's where my ancestors are from two
22:26
Speaker 4: percent of them.
22:30
Speaker 6: That's where you have that big flag and tattoo and stuff.
22:35
Speaker 4: So I went on a big rip about Gordon Lightfoot
22:38
Speaker 4: and the wreck of the Edvan Fitzgerald. And this dude
22:40
Speaker 4: sent this great picture in taken in July nineteen sixty one.
22:45
Speaker 4: His grandpa was on a car ferry in Duluth, Minnesota,
22:48
Speaker 4: and he's got like his station wagon on a car
22:52
Speaker 4: ferry and in the background, uh, there's the Edmond Fitzgerald
22:58
Speaker 4: floating by. And he later wrote, and this guy carries
23:03
Speaker 4: this the guy that wrote in carries his photo in
23:05
Speaker 4: his wallet. He later wrote, built June eight, nineteen fifty eight,
23:13
Speaker 4: or christened June eight, nineteen fifty eight, sunk November ten,
23:17
Speaker 4: seventy five, brought up Gordon Lightfoot sink of the Edmund
23:24
Speaker 4: Fitzgerald and then has the specks of the ship written
23:29
Speaker 4: on it, just like caught, like the Edmund fitz photo
23:32
Speaker 4: bombed his grandpa's picture show.
23:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, another you know.
23:37
Speaker 4: Also the guys from uh, the guys from Old Town
23:41
Speaker 4: wrote in, and I didn't know this Gordon tune. Gorge's
23:46
Speaker 4: got a tune called the Yellow Canoe. If you're dead,
23:50
Speaker 4: do you have a tune or did.
23:52
Speaker 2: You have a tune? That's another we should have a
23:54
Speaker 2: staff linguist.
23:55
Speaker 5: I don't know.
23:55
Speaker 6: I feel like that's an in perpetuity thing. You have.
23:59
Speaker 7: Gorge got his PhD in English, so we should probably.
24:02
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, r do you know that you're not the
24:03
Speaker 4: only PhD around here?
24:05
Speaker 2: Yeah.
24:05
Speaker 5: I'm thrilled by that.
24:06
Speaker 2: I'm thrilled by that.
24:07
Speaker 4: Do you guys know doctor Randall?
24:09
Speaker 2: Doctor rand not really?
24:16
Speaker 8: So?
24:16
Speaker 2: Uh the hell's that? Talking about God? Lightfoot? The Yellow Canoe?
24:21
Speaker 4: So Gord had a canoe. He wrote a song called
24:24
Speaker 4: the Yellow Canoe must not be that great. I never
24:27
Speaker 4: heard it either way. This yellow Canoe winds up in
24:29
Speaker 4: a museum in Canada, and I had a serial number
24:33
Speaker 4: on it. And Old Town was like, Hey, what's the
24:37
Speaker 4: serial number on Gorde's canoe, because Gorde's canoe was an
24:39
Speaker 4: old town canoe. And they were to pull up like
24:41
Speaker 4: I don't know what the hell date it was made,
24:43
Speaker 4: and they and and uh they used to keep me.
24:46
Speaker 4: They sent a photo. They used to have this like
24:49
Speaker 4: what this is like obviously pre digital, right, they have
24:52
Speaker 4: this giant wall full of cedar boxes and each cedar
24:58
Speaker 4: box is sort of like the purchase registration for every canoe,
25:03
Speaker 4: and it's this huge wall.
25:05
Speaker 2: It's like an English gun maker English could they have
25:08
Speaker 2: the same thing, big huge ledger books with everyone, every order,
25:11
Speaker 2: every yeah.
25:13
Speaker 4: All stored in these cute little boxes. So when they
25:15
Speaker 4: found out Gord's canoe, now where they could go down
25:17
Speaker 4: to these cute little boxes, pull up the.
25:21
Speaker 2: The see the original specs. When interesting that that shipwreck song.
25:26
Speaker 2: I think everyone I know from the Midwest kind of
25:29
Speaker 2: gets a little misty eyed when that one comes on.
25:32
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, it's a big deal for you guys.
25:34
Speaker 4: You got in Australia, you guys in tear up about that.
25:36
Speaker 2: No, I didn't have the same uh the same same
25:40
Speaker 2: pull to it. I mean it's a good song. I
25:42
Speaker 2: think we could appreciate it objectively.
25:44
Speaker 5: But we had everyone in Kenya that.
25:48
Speaker 4: Was here's a here's another not interesting. Say it again,
26:00
Speaker 4: witka Oh No, I didn't catch what you said.
26:03
Speaker 5: Was saying in Africa he was. He was the one
26:04
Speaker 5: that made you miss the eye and whose songs were
26:07
Speaker 5: He was a singer.
26:09
Speaker 2: But what was his did he have like a shipwreck?
26:11
Speaker 5: I dreamed of Africa and things like that was a
26:14
Speaker 5: little Africa.
26:15
Speaker 4: Yeah, but he didn't document shipwrecks night like, he didn't
26:21
Speaker 4: document a tragedy or something.
26:23
Speaker 5: Just he was sort of like he was if you
26:26
Speaker 5: lived in Africa, you know, all the songs had to
26:28
Speaker 5: the meaning and I.
26:29
Speaker 6: Was literally like a wreck on uh like like Victoria.
26:37
Speaker 5: Yeah or something like that exactly.
26:40
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, which I'm sure there have been.
26:43
Speaker 4: You should throw in a chunk say the gentleman's name again, Roger.
26:48
Speaker 2: What language did you work in?
26:49
Speaker 5: English?
26:50
Speaker 2: Throwing a chunk? Phil?
26:51
Speaker 4: Yeah, Well you want a hole more feedback fill.
26:54
Speaker 2: Give it to me.
26:57
Speaker 4: When you put in that chunk of the d fits,
26:59
Speaker 4: I didn't think it sounded the sound call.
27:00
Speaker 2: It didn't sound great to me.
27:01
Speaker 8: That's because I was playing it over my cell phone
27:03
Speaker 8: into a microphone in the room. Because you just told
27:06
Speaker 8: me to play the I didn't have my picture.
27:08
Speaker 2: You're coming back in later on and really getting her
27:10
Speaker 2: in there. I'll do that next time. I apologize.
27:13
Speaker 4: So with this fella, let's get him in nice and clean, Phil.
27:16
Speaker 2: We'll do yeah, done, blow it with this one, you.
27:18
Speaker 6: Know, ma ighty sing.
27:23
Speaker 9: So warm and wild and free you always.
27:35
Speaker 4: We've been covering the kangaroo leather debacle heavily.
27:38
Speaker 2: Oh you'll appreciate this. Oh, I'm sure from Australia, I haven't.
27:41
Speaker 5: I'm not across this one.
27:42
Speaker 4: Well, people in America are getting real riled up about
27:47
Speaker 4: They don't want to no one to be using no
27:48
Speaker 4: kangaroo leather for nothing.
27:49
Speaker 6: You could say they're hopping mad.
27:54
Speaker 2: All fired up.
27:54
Speaker 4: Even a sposh Picee was there.
28:00
Speaker 2: So close Victoria Beckham, Yes, even.
28:03
Speaker 4: She is like the person. Yeah yeah, well you know
28:07
Speaker 4: what else she is. She also is a famous soccer
28:10
Speaker 4: player's better half.
28:13
Speaker 6: My buddy Will used to make super fancy denim jeans
28:19
Speaker 6: and his claim to fame was David Beckham wore his jeans.
28:23
Speaker 2: He should have made them out of kangaroo leather.
28:25
Speaker 5: Yeah.
28:26
Speaker 4: Well, bubbly Doug was pointing out that I think it
28:29
Speaker 4: was Dougie pointing out that Sucker must have had forty
28:33
Speaker 4: fifty pairs of kangaroo leather soccer shoes because of the
28:36
Speaker 4: real common leather for soccer shoes. But I'm gonna tell
28:39
Speaker 4: you something else. Gonna curl your hair, guy says. He
28:43
Speaker 4: writes in and says, I've been listening to the recent
28:46
Speaker 4: podcasts covering discussion about companies moving away from kangaroo leather.
28:53
Speaker 4: I was a firefighter for the City of Houston, the
28:56
Speaker 4: third largest department in the US.
28:59
Speaker 2: All of our bunker gloves.
29:01
Speaker 4: Were kangaroo leather. The gloves were amazing, had great dexterity.
29:07
Speaker 4: Houston Fire Department normally has over four thousand firefighters on
29:12
Speaker 4: their payroll. Everyone had a set of these gloves. No
29:17
Speaker 4: telling how many were on Standbio's replacements. If any kind
29:21
Speaker 4: of damage was done to the gloves, we would have
29:23
Speaker 4: to get them replaced, so you could go through many
29:26
Speaker 4: pairs throughout the year. My guess is that Houston Fire
29:29
Speaker 4: Department uses kangaroo still using them, and goes on to
29:33
Speaker 4: say if people in Australia are sweating their market, hopefully
29:38
Speaker 4: the fire departments will keep them alive.
29:40
Speaker 5: There we go have you been to Australia. Nope, never,
29:43
Speaker 5: because I did my gap year set of after university
29:46
Speaker 5: before I became a professional hunter, and Kangary's and Wallaby's
29:50
Speaker 5: are like rabbits. They are everywhere. I mean, I ended
29:54
Speaker 5: up taking out five with my ute as I came
29:57
Speaker 5: around the corner and the farmer next door was doing
29:59
Speaker 5: a hell and about five hundred round across the road
30:03
Speaker 5: in front of me, and before I could slam on
30:04
Speaker 5: the brakes, I'd already hit five of them.
30:07
Speaker 2: I mean, they have to look like five hundred king.
30:09
Speaker 5: It was insane. There was like this hedge and they
30:11
Speaker 5: all came diving over the hedge and me and my
30:13
Speaker 5: friend literally didn't have any time to react and in
30:17
Speaker 5: the worst I had to keep reversing over to finish
30:19
Speaker 5: the job.
30:22
Speaker 2: Iron or something.
30:23
Speaker 5: No, you know, it was a farm truck and it
30:26
Speaker 5: just didn't have anything in it. It's not like an
30:29
Speaker 5: American truck. It's like a pretty small truck in comparison.
30:36
Speaker 4: Well, No, that we talked about, I don't want to
30:38
Speaker 4: retalk about it. But the fact that they're calling kangaroos
30:43
Speaker 4: no matter what. Yeah, whether someone's whether someone's using it
30:46
Speaker 4: or not. Yeah, yeah, either do they either go and
30:50
Speaker 4: do a ditch or they get used as usable product. Yeah,
30:53
Speaker 4: like you you not buying the leather isn't.
30:56
Speaker 5: Doing any impact.
30:58
Speaker 6: And everybody I talked, he says the pro team, the
31:02
Speaker 6: meat is inexpensive and quite tasty.
31:05
Speaker 2: It's good, it's good. It's a hard sell for people
31:08
Speaker 2: in Australia. It's like very seldom eat in there. They
31:11
Speaker 2: mostly export it. Either it goes into pet meat or
31:14
Speaker 2: it's exported, like you'll occasionally see it in some like
31:18
Speaker 2: some sort of high end restaurant or something. But people
31:21
Speaker 2: in general, yeah, people in general there have a real
31:24
Speaker 2: issue with eating.
31:26
Speaker 4: Like do they think of it like eating a dog
31:29
Speaker 4: in America or eating a rat in America?
31:32
Speaker 5: It's hard to better better than I get it in
31:35
Speaker 5: a restaurant.
31:35
Speaker 2: I think it's not quite a rat level of revulsion
31:38
Speaker 2: or dog level of revulsion. But it's like, well, no,
31:41
Speaker 2: I would just say it's a dog.
31:43
Speaker 4: I would, Okay, from a US sensibility, these are two
31:46
Speaker 4: very different reasons not to eat something.
31:48
Speaker 2: To eat a dog children, right, and a rat is
31:52
Speaker 2: because it's discussing. I think it's neither. I think it's
31:56
Speaker 2: because people just don't think it's going to be good,
32:00
Speaker 2: and they're kind of like, you know, they hop around whatever.
32:03
Speaker 2: I'm not entirely sure because I never had this issue
32:06
Speaker 2: with it, and I don't think I've ever really tried
32:07
Speaker 2: to unpack it with someone. But I know that, like,
32:10
Speaker 2: it's hugely unpopular and not commercially successful the meat at
32:15
Speaker 2: all in Australia itself, Russia. For a while it was
32:20
Speaker 2: relatively popular in Russia. I guess it's relatively popular in Europe.
32:25
Speaker 2: But people have this big issue with it. And of
32:26
Speaker 2: course they're one of these species that's just benefited so
32:29
Speaker 2: much from agriculture and land clearing, so their numbers are
32:33
Speaker 2: just way above what they would have been. You know,
32:36
Speaker 2: back in the day, like pre settlement.
32:38
Speaker 4: We covered a guy, remember that, Remember that heart lunch guy.
32:43
Speaker 4: There was a guy that had a heart launch program
32:44
Speaker 4: and he got fired.
32:46
Speaker 7: I remember that, Yes, yes, his job back in the end,
32:54
Speaker 7: I don't remember.
32:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, they let him go.
32:56
Speaker 4: They found out you've been buying a kangaroo berger for
32:58
Speaker 4: the heart launch program.
33:00
Speaker 2: But I think you might have got his job back, man,
33:02
Speaker 2: I figured that. Or was he buying it and selling
33:04
Speaker 2: it as beef or was he just sort of not
33:07
Speaker 2: coming hamburger, Yeah, burger, like whatever, it's burger, burgers, burger.
33:13
Speaker 2: I mean, they're good to eat, there's no doubt about it.
33:15
Speaker 10: Is there a stigma around it, like like that's a
33:17
Speaker 10: guy who eats kangaroo meat?
33:20
Speaker 2: No, I wouldn't say it's that that extreme. I think
33:25
Speaker 2: people just sort of like you walk into the butcher's shop,
33:27
Speaker 2: the meat counters. There there's beef, there's lamb, there's pork,
33:30
Speaker 2: there's kangaroo. I want to be like, I'm not getting kikta.
33:32
Speaker 7: If it's at restaurants though, is it at like high
33:35
Speaker 7: end restaurants, it will be.
33:36
Speaker 2: See that's also kind of tourist contraction. Oh, I see,
33:40
Speaker 2: And I think people are more there's more of a
33:43
Speaker 2: push towards it from a like sustainability standpoint, in the
33:47
Speaker 2: sense that you know, these things, as you said at
33:49
Speaker 2: the point you made, they're getting culled whether you like
33:52
Speaker 2: it or not. We may as well try and incorporate,
33:54
Speaker 2: incorporate some of this protein into our you know, into
33:57
Speaker 2: our diet because it's good stuff. But I know there
34:00
Speaker 2: was like a burger chain I want to say that
34:03
Speaker 2: was like we're switching to kangaroo burgers and I think
34:05
Speaker 2: it just killed their business. I think it just couldn't
34:07
Speaker 2: get people, just couldn't get behind.
34:09
Speaker 7: Crews just need a rebrand.
34:11
Speaker 2: They need a rebrand. I agree. I think it's gonna
34:15
Speaker 2: be a tough road to hug. Yeah, gets a business
34:20
Speaker 2: with them.
34:20
Speaker 7: Steve, Australian.
34:23
Speaker 4: I only had kangaroo a couple of times. Someone sent
34:25
Speaker 4: me a bunch of kangaroo chops.
34:26
Speaker 2: One time we ate them up. Oh interesting. I wonder
34:28
Speaker 2: if they're from like a farm in Texas or something Australia.
34:32
Speaker 4: Really, I can't remember how I got them. It was
34:35
Speaker 4: a long time ago I got those. And then and
34:38
Speaker 4: then the same person sent me some yak meat yack meat.
34:43
Speaker 5: Wow.
34:43
Speaker 6: I think you do a side by side profile picture
34:46
Speaker 6: of would you eat me? And one side just the
34:49
Speaker 6: kangaroo and the other side of the kangaroo with like
34:51
Speaker 6: a big set of rabbit ears on it. Oh yeah,
34:54
Speaker 6: everybody likes eating rabbit.
34:56
Speaker 5: Also, I have to say, like a wallaby looks a
34:58
Speaker 5: lot more appetizing than a big red kangary.
35:01
Speaker 2: Really.
35:02
Speaker 5: Yeah. They just look a bit juic here and.
35:04
Speaker 2: Just smaller and little. They got a juicy look to it,
35:08
Speaker 2: not as sort of wiry and spring loaded as.
35:12
Speaker 5: The male red kangary is a pretty pretty mean looking
35:14
Speaker 5: They are mean looking.
35:15
Speaker 6: Yeah, they're very stern.
35:17
Speaker 8: I didn't find anything about the cook getting his job
35:20
Speaker 8: back because it got so bad that the superintendent of
35:22
Speaker 8: the school district even resigned.
35:25
Speaker 2: What Yeah, as I said, people are funny about it,
35:28
Speaker 2: like they are.
35:29
Speaker 4: These people wouldn't know kangaroo if it kicked them here,
35:33
Speaker 4: you know what they look like. One last thing, so
35:37
Speaker 4: we uh man, maybe a year ago, maybe a year ago,
35:42
Speaker 4: we had a bunch of a bunch of our colleagues
35:44
Speaker 4: from the first from First Light on and they had
35:47
Speaker 4: been on this show, and we would announced that our waiters,
35:52
Speaker 4: First Light Waiters would be coming out this summer. So
35:56
Speaker 4: there was a long, you know, two year test process.
36:00
Speaker 2: We've had people.
36:01
Speaker 4: Running around hunting ducks and I've been trapping beavers in
36:04
Speaker 4: the waiters. I don't know, ten to fourteen states or something.
36:09
Speaker 4: We've been testing the waiters and just the heads up
36:12
Speaker 4: that they they gotta be perfect. We're we're not ready yet.
36:19
Speaker 4: Two years, ten states, they're not ready yet. So I
36:23
Speaker 4: know a lot of people keep reaching out about getting
36:27
Speaker 4: the new first Light forage waiters. I have a pair
36:31
Speaker 4: they're phenomenal, they're worth the weight, but in terms of
36:34
Speaker 4: getting like the numbers out there for launch, we're not
36:38
Speaker 4: there yet. So stay tuned on waiters.
36:42
Speaker 6: Which I think is exactly what you want to hear
36:44
Speaker 6: from a company.
36:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, because we could be saying they're not ready, but
36:47
Speaker 2: order now and by the way, ready yeah.
36:51
Speaker 6: Yeah. Anybody who's had a rough go with an expensive
36:55
Speaker 6: pair of waiters is just you can't even look at
36:58
Speaker 6: them the same way. So yeah, we're aiming for the
37:05
Speaker 6: top of the heap here, the best of the best,
37:07
Speaker 6: and and we're putting the screws to them. So stay tuned,
37:11
Speaker 6: it'll happen.
37:12
Speaker 4: Stay tuned, all right, Uh, tell about the story about
37:25
Speaker 4: getting beat up by by Kate Buffalo.
37:29
Speaker 5: Well, it can be a long story or a short
37:32
Speaker 5: story the media. The long version. We were in our
37:37
Speaker 5: Leganza Game Reserve concession, which just to put things in perspective,
37:42
Speaker 5: it's over a million and a half acres of pure
37:45
Speaker 5: wilderness no other people bar our little camp and.
37:50
Speaker 2: How many acres over a.
37:52
Speaker 5: Million and a half acres.
37:53
Speaker 4: It's looks like, yeah, that's like like what yellstones two million?
37:58
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's about the size of the road Island.
38:00
Speaker 2: Basically, Rhode Island's great state to have in the country.
38:06
Speaker 2: It's always good for making things comparisons. Yeah, you know
38:09
Speaker 2: what I mean. It's a great little tool, Yeah, to
38:12
Speaker 2: have Rhode Island.
38:13
Speaker 5: So anyway, it's a two hour flight in from Arusha,
38:17
Speaker 5: which we're our bases, and it was a big family
38:21
Speaker 5: safari so my brother and another professional hunter were on
38:24
Speaker 5: the trip as well.
38:25
Speaker 4: Now I'm going to drive you crazy because I need
38:27
Speaker 4: to have certain things clarified as we go along. Yeah,
38:29
Speaker 4: that's fine, do you mind right now?
38:33
Speaker 2: Telling? Like, what is a concession?
38:35
Speaker 5: So how it works in Tanzaniera is you lease the
38:39
Speaker 5: areas from the government. Gives you the right the tourism
38:43
Speaker 5: and hunting rights for that area of land. There's no
38:47
Speaker 5: private ownership in Tanzania and Southern Africa is very different
38:50
Speaker 5: and the landowner owns the wildlife and everything. We just
38:54
Speaker 5: leased the right to take people there.
38:56
Speaker 2: So it's undeveloped.
38:59
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's set aside for wildlife and you know, the
39:02
Speaker 5: habitats protected, but there's huge pressures on it. So it
39:07
Speaker 5: involves a huge amount of anti poaching and community sort
39:11
Speaker 5: of liaison work to get them on site.
39:15
Speaker 4: This one million acre chunk. How many residents are in
39:19
Speaker 4: that one million acres.
39:21
Speaker 5: No one just hunting camp. But all around the edge
39:25
Speaker 5: there are villages where they're farming and they have their land.
39:28
Speaker 4: And those those villagers around the edge, they utilize that.
39:33
Speaker 5: They're technically not allowed. They're not allowed to do anything.
39:38
Speaker 5: They shouldn't be cutting trees, farming, grazing their cattle. It's
39:42
Speaker 5: it's just set aside. It's a gamers.
39:45
Speaker 2: Assuming that that does go on.
39:46
Speaker 5: So this is the problem in Africa that you know,
39:50
Speaker 5: people are desperate to survive and the population is growing
39:53
Speaker 5: so rapidly there's not enough space for everyone. So you know,
39:58
Speaker 5: they see this huge piece of land and if they're
40:00
Speaker 5: not benefiting from it in some way, then of course,
40:04
Speaker 5: you know, if they can catch an animal and feed
40:06
Speaker 5: their family, then they're going to try. And so a
40:11
Speaker 5: big part of our job is trying to make the
40:12
Speaker 5: communities benefit from us being there. And yeah, my dad
40:18
Speaker 5: was a sort of instigator in the community benefit scheme
40:21
Speaker 5: where you know, the local villages would benefit from the
40:24
Speaker 5: game that we hunt. And so we've over the last
40:29
Speaker 5: fifteen years, I think we've spent over three million dollars
40:32
Speaker 5: on developing schools, boreholes, health dispensaries, you name it. Whatever
40:38
Speaker 5: the communities needed. And that was all generated through through
40:42
Speaker 5: our community benefits of hunting.
40:44
Speaker 2: Oh okay, so that's concession. Yeah, in their concession.
40:49
Speaker 5: So we're in the in the Laganza Game Reserve, and
40:53
Speaker 5: because it's a big family group, some people are arriving
40:57
Speaker 5: earlier or later. And I'd been hunting with the mother
41:01
Speaker 5: and the daughter was just arriving halfway through the trip.
41:04
Speaker 5: And she's twenty three, her first African hunting experience, and
41:09
Speaker 5: the mother's like, well, why don't you just go out
41:11
Speaker 5: with her on one on one today and let her
41:14
Speaker 5: just you know, enjoy the experience and I'll have a
41:17
Speaker 5: rest day and camp. And so she arrives and we
41:21
Speaker 5: set off early in the morning, and you know, I
41:23
Speaker 5: want to get her a feel of hunting in Africa.
41:27
Speaker 5: So we're not going for anything dangerous. We're going to
41:31
Speaker 5: go out and look for one of the more common
41:32
Speaker 5: planes game animals, like a water buck or a topi.
41:36
Speaker 5: And as it happens, we run across some fresh tracks
41:41
Speaker 5: for buffalo and it's just you know, you can't miss
41:46
Speaker 5: the opportunity, you know, when something's fresh and good. I
41:49
Speaker 5: was like, well, let's give it a little look and
41:51
Speaker 5: we'll see how it all goes. And as it happened,
41:55
Speaker 5: these buffalo took us right up into the mountains, you know,
41:59
Speaker 5: over a platte so down the other side, and we
42:01
Speaker 5: spent like five or six hours tracking them, by which
42:05
Speaker 5: point she's now beginning to suffer from heat stroke, and
42:09
Speaker 5: like we hadn't taken any lunch with us. Luckily, we
42:12
Speaker 5: had a couple of bottles of water and I had
42:15
Speaker 5: some Eminem's which I gave her some chocolates, which was
42:19
Speaker 5: enough to basically walk back to the nearest point we
42:21
Speaker 5: could get the car. So basically, after six hours, we've
42:26
Speaker 5: had no.
42:27
Speaker 4: Luck following a single track following it was a group
42:30
Speaker 4: of four or five bucks.
42:31
Speaker 5: Yeah, And anyway, the wind just kept swirling and working
42:36
Speaker 5: in their favor and it wasn't going to happen, so
42:38
Speaker 5: we don't want to push it anyway. So we head
42:41
Speaker 5: back to the car and we have our picnic lunch
42:44
Speaker 5: and a bit of a break and I'm like, well,
42:46
Speaker 5: why don't we just go along the edge of the
42:48
Speaker 5: lake shore this evening, and you know, if we happened
42:50
Speaker 5: to see a water bark or something. Then then we'll try,
42:54
Speaker 5: you know, tryal luck, but otherwise we'll just amble back
42:57
Speaker 5: to camp because she basically, you know, had enough for
43:00
Speaker 5: them from the day. And we're driving along the lake
43:04
Speaker 5: shore at about five thirty in the evening and suddenly
43:08
Speaker 5: this beautiful old water buck runs across the road in
43:12
Speaker 5: front of us, and I can see straight away as
43:15
Speaker 5: you know, perfect old bull, and I'm like, okay, we
43:20
Speaker 5: need going give this guy a go. So she jumps out,
43:23
Speaker 5: gets her gun. I grab my shooting sticks because in Africa,
43:27
Speaker 5: you know, the grass is often long, so you use
43:29
Speaker 5: shooting sticks. It's like a tripod, so you shoot from
43:32
Speaker 5: a standing position, not lying down. And my track is
43:37
Speaker 5: grabbing my big five hundred, which is a sort of
43:40
Speaker 5: the backup weapon, and the zip keeps jamming on the
43:44
Speaker 5: gun sleeve, and so I turned to don't worry. Don't worry,
43:49
Speaker 5: We're not going far, and we set off and we
43:54
Speaker 5: come around the edge. The way it works is sort
43:55
Speaker 5: of floodplains, So you've got these ant hills where all
43:58
Speaker 5: the foliage basically it's concentrated, so the trees. Because during
44:03
Speaker 5: the wet season, the whole area of floods. The grass plains,
44:08
Speaker 5: but it survives. These things are big, you know, yeah,
44:10
Speaker 5: talking thirty feet across. Yeah, So you've got these really
44:14
Speaker 5: huge open planes and then these these massive ant hills
44:17
Speaker 5: that have trees and palm bushes and lots of foliage
44:21
Speaker 5: on them, and it's you sort of work with them.
44:24
Speaker 5: You know, they're perfect for stalking things. You come around
44:27
Speaker 5: the edge of the cover and so we go round
44:29
Speaker 5: a couple and there's the water buck and I put
44:31
Speaker 5: the sticks up, but the water buck stops with a
44:35
Speaker 5: palm leaf right in front of its vitals, and she's
44:38
Speaker 5: uncomfortable with the shot.
44:40
Speaker 2: Pictures.
44:40
Speaker 5: Yeah, and so the water back carries on and it
44:47
Speaker 5: goes around a few more of these ant hills, and
44:49
Speaker 5: we're stalking along the other side.
44:51
Speaker 4: So you just use these ant hills as yeah, and
44:56
Speaker 4: like using round round hay bales exactly just like that.
45:01
Speaker 5: And next minute, as we're coming around, we've literally only
45:05
Speaker 5: gone probably five hundred meters from the car, and I
45:10
Speaker 5: come around this one bush and this buffalo burst out
45:14
Speaker 5: of the front of the bush towards us. And normally,
45:17
Speaker 5: like when you're hunting them, ninety nine percent of the time,
45:20
Speaker 5: if they sense you, they burst out of the back
45:23
Speaker 5: of the bush and you don't even see them, you
45:25
Speaker 5: just hear the eruption, and this one time. Typically it
45:31
Speaker 5: decides it's coming out the front, and it looks at me,
45:36
Speaker 5: It looks at the young girl that I'm with, and
45:40
Speaker 5: it decides it's homing in on her. Meanwhile, the trackers
45:44
Speaker 5: have just vaporized.
45:45
Speaker 2: They disappear and.
45:46
Speaker 5: Smart insecond, and normally that actually helps you in the
45:50
Speaker 5: case that they'll it'll draw the animal's attention, but in
45:55
Speaker 5: this case, it didn't. It it just fixated on my
45:58
Speaker 5: client and everything sort of slowed down, and I could tell,
46:03
Speaker 5: you know, she was going to get annihilated because she
46:07
Speaker 5: was just standing up right in the open. And she'd
46:11
Speaker 5: later told me she didn't actually know it was a buffalo.
46:13
Speaker 5: She thought it was the water buck that we were hunting,
46:16
Speaker 5: so she was just confused in the moment, and I
46:20
Speaker 5: sort of evaluated everything I saw. It was really old
46:23
Speaker 5: and it didn't have both of it It had broken
46:25
Speaker 5: both its horns off, it was so old, so it
46:27
Speaker 5: just had this big mound of a boss in the middle,
46:30
Speaker 5: but no nasty.
46:32
Speaker 6: Hooks, just a battering ram.
46:34
Speaker 5: Yeah, So in my head in that split second, I
46:37
Speaker 5: kind of thought, well, I can throw my shooting sticks
46:39
Speaker 5: at it and attention. I didn't even slow it down.
46:43
Speaker 5: I just thought it would draw it towards me. And
46:46
Speaker 5: then I thought I could be like a bullfighter and
46:49
Speaker 5: dive out of the way. And at the last second,
46:52
Speaker 5: and I got that bit a bit wrong. I threw
46:57
Speaker 5: my sticks and hid it straight in the face.
47:01
Speaker 4: How close was it when you when you huck your
47:02
Speaker 4: sticks at it?
47:03
Speaker 5: So it burst out of the bush literally about fifteen
47:06
Speaker 5: yards in front of us, And it was about eight
47:09
Speaker 5: yards when I checked myself in the weigh a buffalo
47:13
Speaker 5: about fifteen hundred pounds, you know, maybe seventeen hundred for.
47:16
Speaker 2: A big old How high are they at the shoulder?
47:20
Speaker 5: The shoulder probably five five and a half.
47:25
Speaker 4: Considerably bigger than I mean, well, like a big Yukon
47:28
Speaker 4: moves bigger.
47:30
Speaker 5: Body is bigger, but I mean.
47:34
Speaker 4: Pound yeah, carry, yeah, for sure.
47:38
Speaker 5: It's it's more of a bull terrier shape than dobaman,
47:43
Speaker 5: if you know what I mean. It's solid, yeah.
47:46
Speaker 6: Yeah, and the mask goes all the way to.
47:47
Speaker 5: The hips, yeah, all the way to the ankles.
47:50
Speaker 7: Ye.
47:53
Speaker 5: So yeah, it comes at me and I literally just
47:57
Speaker 5: bend my knees to start the dark I've and I realized,
48:02
Speaker 5: there's no way I'm even going to project.
48:04
Speaker 2: You couldn't get on.
48:05
Speaker 4: You couldn't even get a jump going.
48:06
Speaker 5: No, I didn't even start jumping. And I used to
48:09
Speaker 5: play a lot of rugby, so my instinct was I
48:13
Speaker 5: kind of knew it was going to get me in
48:14
Speaker 5: the ribs, so I.
48:15
Speaker 4: Dipped my When you hooked your sticks at it was
48:17
Speaker 4: it was it still standing.
48:19
Speaker 2: Or was it already it was running? It was almost Yeah,
48:21
Speaker 2: so he was already.
48:23
Speaker 5: He was already, he'd homed in and he was.
48:24
Speaker 4: And how far apart are you and your client?
48:27
Speaker 5: She's about a meter to one side.
48:30
Speaker 4: So he comes out, he's coming hard, and you throw
48:33
Speaker 4: as he's running at you, You fling your stuff at him.
48:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's already got his velocity.
48:38
Speaker 6: And really make a great shot too.
48:41
Speaker 5: It was pretty surprised when I hit it in the face.
48:44
Speaker 2: Imagine what he.
48:48
Speaker 5: Yeah, it worked, and he came straight at me and
48:51
Speaker 5: and I dipped my shoulder, thinking I'll just take the
48:54
Speaker 5: impact on my shoulder, and I didn't realize it was
48:57
Speaker 5: going to be like being hit by a freight train basically,
49:00
Speaker 5: And the impact threw me about twenty yards, no joke,
49:05
Speaker 5: and I took most of it on my shoulder, but
49:10
Speaker 5: then the secondary impact hit my head and I sort
49:13
Speaker 5: of blacked out. So I woke up on the ground
49:15
Speaker 5: and everything was sort of blurry and spinning around, and
49:20
Speaker 5: I was trying to stand up, but I couldn't use
49:22
Speaker 5: my one arm. And at the same time, all I
49:25
Speaker 5: could think about is my client. Okay, so I'm so
49:27
Speaker 5: shouting are Uka trying to locate her? And luckily one
49:32
Speaker 5: of my trackers ran back and grabbed me and sort
49:34
Speaker 5: of helped me stand up, and then I saw her
49:37
Speaker 5: and she was absolutely fine and got told. The rest
49:41
Speaker 5: of the story was basically, after it had flung me
49:44
Speaker 5: twenty yards, it then decided it hadn't had enough and
49:48
Speaker 5: came after me again and was just pounding me on the.
49:50
Speaker 2: Ground while you were blacked out.
49:52
Speaker 5: Yeah and yeah, so my butt was completely black, but I.
49:57
Speaker 2: Don't remember this hook. Were still just doing with the boss.
50:00
Speaker 5: They always use their head for everything. Yeah, and when
50:04
Speaker 5: when it did this, my client, the young girl, basically
50:07
Speaker 5: realized this was a buffalo, not a water buck. And
50:11
Speaker 5: we'd had the discussion earlier that morning what to do
50:14
Speaker 5: if you know, if we came across a buffalo in
50:16
Speaker 5: a bad situation, and I sort of said, you know,
50:18
Speaker 5: either get behind a bush if there's one nearby, or
50:22
Speaker 5: life laud on the ground. And so there was one
50:25
Speaker 5: bush right there, and she ran the sort of five
50:28
Speaker 5: steps to get behind the bush, and it was enough
50:31
Speaker 5: to attract the buffalo's attention off me onto her, and
50:35
Speaker 5: it tried to then get her, smashed the one bush
50:39
Speaker 5: and then ran off, never to be seen again, well
50:42
Speaker 5: almost never to be seen again. Actually ran into our
50:44
Speaker 5: anti poaching team, like who was setting up camp for
50:47
Speaker 5: the night, and so that caused a bit of mayhem
50:50
Speaker 5: there as well as it ran through. Yeah, and then
50:54
Speaker 5: he was out of there, and they the anti poaching
50:56
Speaker 5: team said that they noticed it had a bit of
50:59
Speaker 5: a limp, and I think it had had a run
51:01
Speaker 5: in with a lion or possibly a poacher at some point,
51:04
Speaker 5: and one of its legs wasn't.
51:06
Speaker 6: He didn't claim that, He said, well, I used to
51:08
Speaker 6: play rugby. I gave him a pretty good shot.
51:13
Speaker 5: But it did explain slightly why it behaved the way
51:16
Speaker 5: it did and why it was in a place you
51:17
Speaker 5: normally wouldn't expect to find a buffalo. So caught us
51:22
Speaker 5: off guard.
51:24
Speaker 6: Oh so he was also in terrain, Yeah, he was.
51:27
Speaker 5: He was right in a very open area and normally
51:29
Speaker 5: the buffalo will go to water and then they'll head
51:31
Speaker 5: way off back into the hills and thickets and and
51:34
Speaker 5: sort of disappear in the heat of the day. And
51:37
Speaker 5: he'd stayed very close to the to the water's edge,
51:40
Speaker 5: and I think probably because his leg was giving him problems.
51:44
Speaker 5: And I presume when we came around the corner, he
51:46
Speaker 5: must have thought we were after him, and he knew,
51:50
Speaker 5: you know, he didn't have a chance to run away,
51:52
Speaker 5: so he stood his ground, which, yeah, it wasn't great.
51:56
Speaker 6: So what was the the damage in total?
51:59
Speaker 5: So that's kind of a funny story.
52:02
Speaker 2: So I.
52:04
Speaker 5: Thought I'd dislocated my shoulder, like the track has stripped
52:07
Speaker 5: me naked well down to my underwear, and because you know,
52:11
Speaker 5: you sort of think, you don't know with all that adrenine,
52:13
Speaker 5: I'm not sure what injuries you've sustained. And they realized
52:19
Speaker 5: that basically I looked fine on the surface, apart from
52:22
Speaker 5: I had this rhino horn sticking out of my out
52:24
Speaker 5: of my shoulder and I couldn't really figure it. I
52:28
Speaker 5: could still use my arm a little bit, but it
52:30
Speaker 5: was painful, and.
52:32
Speaker 6: Rhino horn sticking out of your shoulder was what it was.
52:34
Speaker 5: My collarbane, okay, but I thought it was just dislocated,
52:39
Speaker 5: and I thought I might be able to pop it
52:40
Speaker 5: all back into place. So by now, it's about six
52:44
Speaker 5: or fifteen in the evening, and as I was explaining earlier,
52:47
Speaker 5: like it's basically two hours flying back to Arusha, and
52:52
Speaker 5: we were about two hours from the air strip, so
52:57
Speaker 5: the whole process was going to take four hours, and
52:59
Speaker 5: we only had half an hour daylight. And we were
53:02
Speaker 5: all members of this thing called flying Doctors, where if
53:05
Speaker 5: you have an incident a plane or fly in with
53:07
Speaker 5: a doctor and you know, basically rescue you and take
53:10
Speaker 5: you back to hospital. But I kind of knew it
53:12
Speaker 5: was too late to call them, so I thought the
53:14
Speaker 5: best plan just get back to the camp, And so
53:18
Speaker 5: I gave her a couple of beers because I knew
53:20
Speaker 5: the shock was only going to help for a little
53:22
Speaker 5: while and I want to keep her sort of calm,
53:26
Speaker 5: And I decided to drive back to camp as a
53:29
Speaker 5: kind of distraction. And also I thought the more I
53:31
Speaker 5: used my shoulder, the less it would stiffen up. So
53:35
Speaker 5: we drove forty five minutes back to our camp, arrived,
53:39
Speaker 5: you know, just after dark, and everyone else had just
53:42
Speaker 5: arrived as well, and so they straight away sort of. Well,
53:47
Speaker 5: my brother lectured me on why didn't I have my rifle,
53:49
Speaker 5: which supers literally the number one rule is you never
53:53
Speaker 5: leave the car without your rifle. And the one time
53:55
Speaker 5: I broke it, this happened.
53:57
Speaker 2: Do you think you would have gotten the shot off
53:59
Speaker 2: if you'd heard it?
54:00
Speaker 5: Yeah, definitely. I mean I had enough time to hit
54:02
Speaker 5: it in the head with a stick, so I think
54:04
Speaker 5: I could have shot it. But anyway, hindsight, it's a
54:09
Speaker 5: lovely thing. But so anyway, we get back and they
54:13
Speaker 5: feed me some painkillers and I have a shower, and
54:16
Speaker 5: it's not beginning to stiffen up a little bit. So
54:19
Speaker 5: we decided to try on YouTube how to relocate your
54:22
Speaker 5: your shoulder. So I'm now lying on the dining room
54:26
Speaker 5: table lifting my arm above my head.
54:29
Speaker 2: No doubt, watch those ads. Everyone knows.
54:35
Speaker 5: Right, and I'm hoping it's going to just pop back
54:40
Speaker 5: in and nothing happens. So eventually the father's like, well,
54:46
Speaker 5: actually we should call my brother in law, who's an
54:49
Speaker 5: orthopedic surgeon's law.
54:51
Speaker 6: Yeah, he's like, is he on YouTube?
54:55
Speaker 5: Luckily we've got Wi Fi and camp so yeah, we
54:58
Speaker 5: have this sort of satellite Wi Fi. So we we
55:00
Speaker 5: FaceTime him and it's it's like four in the morning
55:03
Speaker 5: in the States, and amazingly he answers and he realizes
55:07
Speaker 5: straight away it must be quite serious, and so like, yeah,
55:10
Speaker 5: there's been a bit of an incident, but we really
55:12
Speaker 5: want you just to diagnose this problem. So I like
55:15
Speaker 5: showing my injury and I said that when I bend
55:17
Speaker 5: down like this, it sticks up like a ride a
55:20
Speaker 5: horn and I thought it was dislocated. And he's like, no, no, no,
55:24
Speaker 5: you've you've separated your ac joint and there's no fixing
55:27
Speaker 5: that you need surgery, and so we give up on
55:31
Speaker 5: the YouTube and least opinion, yeah, and he was like, yeah,
55:40
Speaker 5: there's there's three or four grades and you've you've basically
55:42
Speaker 5: done the worst. So there's no hope. And so I
55:47
Speaker 5: go to sleep and we wake up in the morning
55:50
Speaker 5: and I'm pretty stiff, like because also my Sternham everything's
55:53
Speaker 5: been basically just smashed, and so every time someone makes
55:59
Speaker 5: me laugh like I'm literally dying with pain. And anyway,
56:03
Speaker 5: I wake up and I was planning. I was actually
56:06
Speaker 5: leaving the trip in three days anyway, so we're sort
56:10
Speaker 5: of debating whether to call the flying doctors or if
56:13
Speaker 5: I just waited out. And I was flying back to
56:17
Speaker 5: England from Tanzania, and I actually thought this was easier
56:19
Speaker 5: to just stay in camp and there was no blood
56:22
Speaker 5: in my urine because I was the thing I was
56:24
Speaker 5: more worried about was internal injuries. So, I mean, my
56:28
Speaker 5: wife literally killed me when when she eventually found out
56:31
Speaker 5: about all this. But I made the decision to stay
56:35
Speaker 5: and do the last three days of the trip, and yeah,
56:40
Speaker 5: we actually had a pretty successful time. I managed to
56:43
Speaker 5: hunt seit a tunguer in the crocodile or really with
56:46
Speaker 5: one arm. I sort of figured how to hold onto
56:49
Speaker 5: my shirt so I wouldn't move my arm around because
56:51
Speaker 5: it was basically wasn't too painful as long as I
56:53
Speaker 5: didn't move.
56:53
Speaker 6: So did you switch up rifles at that point so
56:56
Speaker 6: you could operate something with one arm? No, because you
56:59
Speaker 6: just out the lecture.
57:01
Speaker 5: Yeah, well so I could with pain, I could use
57:04
Speaker 5: my rifle. I just couldn't lift it above my head.
57:07
Speaker 5: I mean my my arm basically couldn't lift my arm
57:09
Speaker 5: above my head. So I did try. I actually went
57:12
Speaker 5: looking for the buff.
57:14
Speaker 4: So you already tried to find him.
57:16
Speaker 5: I did try and find him, but it was I
57:18
Speaker 5: realized I was actually not being very clever, so we
57:20
Speaker 5: didn't look for it for very long.
57:24
Speaker 4: No, I haven't these guys that set out what do
57:28
Speaker 4: they want to kill?
57:29
Speaker 2: Tiger kills And.
57:33
Speaker 4: It's a whole movie about him trying to find this
57:36
Speaker 4: this exact Jaguars shark and kill it.
57:39
Speaker 2: It's a comedy. But yeah, that's like you.
57:41
Speaker 5: Like father Bounty on the buffalo, the father of the
57:47
Speaker 5: girl that was with me, really and he was like, yeah,
57:49
Speaker 5: any any of your other clients coming through after we leave,
57:54
Speaker 5: I'll pay the game fee. Just you know, we need
57:57
Speaker 5: to to exact a little bit of revenge.
58:01
Speaker 2: I followed the tracks for a little bit a month
58:03
Speaker 2: or so later, couldn't couldn't get on him. So he
58:05
Speaker 2: was still alive. Oh he was out there. Yeah, did
58:06
Speaker 2: he have a bad loop?
58:08
Speaker 5: Uh?
58:08
Speaker 2: The trackers said they could see from the tracks that
58:11
Speaker 2: there was something going on with one of his legs. Yeah,
58:13
Speaker 2: and they were certain it was him. I mean they
58:15
Speaker 2: knew that was that buffalo for sure.
58:17
Speaker 8: Huh.
58:18
Speaker 2: So we went we went for it for a little while,
58:19
Speaker 2: but it just kind of it wasn't viable.
58:23
Speaker 6: Getting out of like his his his convalescent zone.
58:27
Speaker 2: He was within he was within a mile of where
58:31
Speaker 2: he hit Roger, and he was sort of doing the
58:34
Speaker 2: same thing. He was hanging out by those sort of
58:36
Speaker 2: vegetation islands. But he did once when we followed him,
58:40
Speaker 2: he had gone kind of into the woodland and headed
58:43
Speaker 2: towards some thickets and some kind of higher country with
58:47
Speaker 2: swirling wind, and yeah, we just couldn't get on him.
58:49
Speaker 2: So I think I think he you know, I think
58:52
Speaker 2: he's sort of reverting back. Maybe he was doing a
58:54
Speaker 2: little better. Yeah, maybe he lifted his mirale. You had
59:02
Speaker 2: your surgery in the US, in the UK, or you
59:05
Speaker 2: had surgery in the UK and then came here to
59:07
Speaker 2: chill out.
59:08
Speaker 5: Yeah, so we always come over in January anyway, and
59:12
Speaker 5: you know, for the hunting conventions, and I kind of
59:16
Speaker 5: figured it would be a good time to do something
59:19
Speaker 5: different and have a bit of time out from Africa
59:22
Speaker 5: and brought my family over and have been living in
59:25
Speaker 5: the Montana Dream which has been incredible.
59:27
Speaker 4: And when do you got to go back? In about
59:29
Speaker 4: five days, you'll go back to Tanzania. Yeah, and do
59:32
Speaker 4: your summer hunting season.
59:33
Speaker 5: Yeah, so it's all about to kick off.
59:36
Speaker 4: I want I want you guys to talk about trackers.
59:39
Speaker 4: You talk about trackers a lot. And what I thought
59:42
Speaker 4: was interesting when you when you when you guys came
59:44
Speaker 4: for dinner, is uh, you discuss trackers, is like you
59:54
Speaker 4: acquiesced to their judgment.
59:56
Speaker 2: Definitely, Definitely in my view, the trackers sometimes aren't spoken
1:00:03
Speaker 2: about with the kind of reverence that they deserve. And
1:00:07
Speaker 2: I would say, for me, as someone that wasn't born
1:00:10
Speaker 2: into a professional hunting family or born on the African continent,
1:00:14
Speaker 2: the greatest privilege of doing what I do and being
1:00:19
Speaker 2: part of this industry is working with those trackers. And
1:00:25
Speaker 2: the way I see my job is our industry kind
1:00:29
Speaker 2: of has this sort of trifector and you know, there's
1:00:33
Speaker 2: obviously the foreign client that makes everything we do possible.
1:00:37
Speaker 2: You know, that's the revenue source, and then there's the trackers,
1:00:42
Speaker 2: and then there's the professional hunter. And I see the
1:00:45
Speaker 2: role of the professional hunter as kind of the glue
1:00:47
Speaker 2: that binds those two other halves, you know, the tracking
1:00:52
Speaker 2: team and the foreign client, and kind of brings that
1:00:55
Speaker 2: unit together to be a successful hunting hunting team. But
1:01:00
Speaker 2: what they do and the way that they allow us
1:01:05
Speaker 2: to be able to hunt. You know, it's so funny
1:01:06
Speaker 2: because you know, oftentimes professional hunting, you know, has its
1:01:12
Speaker 2: roots in kind of the early you know, the guys
1:01:15
Speaker 2: we talked about before, you know, the sort of Philip percivals,
1:01:17
Speaker 2: the FC Salus of the world that kind of opened
1:01:20
Speaker 2: up a lot of this country. And they're obviously from
1:01:22
Speaker 2: the European hunting tradition and a lot of that's carried
1:01:25
Speaker 2: over we you know, we look for old bulls, We
1:01:28
Speaker 2: hunt males of the species exclusively, you know, which you know,
1:01:33
Speaker 2: the sort of trophy hunting aspect if you want to
1:01:35
Speaker 2: call it, that comes from that European tradition. But we
1:01:38
Speaker 2: hunt in an African way, you know, those the tradition
1:01:42
Speaker 2: that European hunters or American hunters in many cases have
1:01:46
Speaker 2: come from. And I know there's some tracking in the
1:01:48
Speaker 2: in the north Woods and that sort of stuff is
1:01:50
Speaker 2: you know, either sitting in a stand or spot in stalk.
1:01:53
Speaker 2: We hunt the African way, which is following animals tracks,
1:01:57
Speaker 2: and I can't do it. You know, I've been in
1:01:59
Speaker 2: this industry for a good long while and watched what
1:02:04
Speaker 2: they do with just keen interest, but oftentimes just amazement
1:02:08
Speaker 2: at how they're able to sort out tracks that have
1:02:13
Speaker 2: mingled with other animals. You know, you're following a single
1:02:15
Speaker 2: buffalo and it mingles with a herd for a while
1:02:17
Speaker 2: then separates off again. They can sort that out. They
1:02:20
Speaker 2: can sort out that one animal. Yeah, keep on that
1:02:23
Speaker 2: one animal. And it's not just buffalo. They can do
1:02:25
Speaker 2: it for almost any species.
1:02:26
Speaker 4: What allows them wow, why phenomenal?
1:02:31
Speaker 2: So a great tracker is both born and made. In
1:02:36
Speaker 2: my opinion, they have exceptional eyesight, I mean just phenomenal
1:02:41
Speaker 2: ability to see things up close and in the distance.
1:02:46
Speaker 2: It's their eyesight is it's borderline superhuman. And they have
1:02:51
Speaker 2: a great tracker has a feel for what the animals
1:02:55
Speaker 2: are going to do and also for the terrain that
1:03:00
Speaker 2: they inhabit and how the animals will use that terrain.
1:03:05
Speaker 2: And a great tracker, you know, generally speaking, they'll be
1:03:09
Speaker 2: very familiar with an area that you're hunting in, possibly
1:03:12
Speaker 2: because they grew up in a similar area or on
1:03:14
Speaker 2: the periphery of the hunting area that oftentimes from those
1:03:18
Speaker 2: communities that Roger was talking about before, or you know,
1:03:23
Speaker 2: and Roger can sort of expand on this because his
1:03:25
Speaker 2: dad was kind of the master of this. They were
1:03:27
Speaker 2: a former poacher that basically you know, Robin Hurt Safaris
1:03:31
Speaker 2: turned straight and brought into the fold as a tracker.
1:03:35
Speaker 2: And those guys, they you know, they have this intuition
1:03:39
Speaker 2: about where the animals are going to go, what they're
1:03:40
Speaker 2: going to do at different times of the day, and
1:03:44
Speaker 2: you'll get a sense of that. You know, I'm cognizant
1:03:48
Speaker 2: of some things that are happening. You know, for example,
1:03:50
Speaker 2: if you're following a buffalo that's coming from water and
1:03:53
Speaker 2: you see it starts to sort of cast around back
1:03:55
Speaker 2: and forward, you know, it's looking for a place to
1:03:58
Speaker 2: lay down, and you'll often think, okay, we're potentially getting
1:04:01
Speaker 2: clos here. You know, that buffalo is getting ready to bed.
1:04:04
Speaker 2: But there is so much more that they can intue
1:04:07
Speaker 2: it from those tracks and from the you know, the
1:04:09
Speaker 2: marks that the animal makes on the ground that are
1:04:12
Speaker 2: just beyond my understanding. It's just my ability to interpret.
1:04:16
Speaker 2: It's second nature to them. I mean the way you were,
1:04:19
Speaker 2: but you were brought up in this world.
1:04:20
Speaker 5: Yeah, so, I mean my childhood was spent basically my
1:04:24
Speaker 5: dad used to hunt ten months of the year.
1:04:26
Speaker 2: But the trackers are better than you still.
1:04:28
Speaker 5: Yeah, but the only time I would see him would
1:04:30
Speaker 5: be to go on safari. So all my holidays were
1:04:33
Speaker 5: spent on safari. And my favorite part of the day
1:04:36
Speaker 5: was when the hunters would come back and it was
1:04:38
Speaker 5: siesta time, and the trackers were like some of my
1:04:42
Speaker 5: best friends and sort of nannies, and we'd go off
1:04:45
Speaker 5: adventuring in the middle of the day and set traps
1:04:48
Speaker 5: for guinea fowl and climb beare bab trees looking for
1:04:52
Speaker 5: honey and just learning how to make poison arrows. I mean,
1:04:56
Speaker 5: these guys just they lived off the ground. And as
1:05:00
Speaker 5: as Morgan was saying, a lot of them were converted
1:05:03
Speaker 5: poaches and something talk about something.
1:05:06
Speaker 2: You mentioned that to me when we heard dinner.
1:05:08
Speaker 5: Yeah, Well, what people didn't realize is there's there's different
1:05:10
Speaker 5: forms of poaching in Africa. There's the ivory poachers, who
1:05:15
Speaker 5: are obviously very heavily armed, totally commercial and nasty and
1:05:20
Speaker 5: you know, zero tolerance and of course you call in
1:05:24
Speaker 5: the game department if you ever see one. And then
1:05:27
Speaker 5: there's commercial meat poachers who often all have a rifle
1:05:31
Speaker 5: and they're going out just to sell the meat, and
1:05:33
Speaker 5: then you have what I call like the subsistence poacher,
1:05:36
Speaker 5: the opportunistic poacher who's your average farmer who lives nearby
1:05:41
Speaker 5: and the temptation to try and get something to feed
1:05:44
Speaker 5: his family. And some of them even you know, we're
1:05:48
Speaker 5: traditionally hunter gatherers, you know, by nature, and you know
1:05:52
Speaker 5: the rules of the world have made them into a poacher.
1:05:56
Speaker 4: But so an individual might have grew up, yeah, hunting
1:06:01
Speaker 4: these areas, and at some point someone said that's not
1:06:03
Speaker 4: how it goes down anymore.
1:06:04
Speaker 5: Yeah. So, I mean, we used to have a hunting
1:06:06
Speaker 5: area on the edge of a traditional hunter gatherer tribe's
1:06:11
Speaker 5: sort of boundary, and they were always coming in to
1:06:15
Speaker 5: try and hunt something with their bow and arrow, and
1:06:18
Speaker 5: you'd sort of feel sorry for them and drive them around,
1:06:21
Speaker 5: threaten that they were potentially going to go to jail.
1:06:25
Speaker 5: And then my dad would often be like, or you
1:06:28
Speaker 5: could come and work for me and make a living
1:06:30
Speaker 5: doing what you're doing and it will be legal. And
1:06:35
Speaker 5: so a lot of the track has still work for us.
1:06:37
Speaker 5: They've been with us for forty five years and were
1:06:40
Speaker 5: ex poaches at the time.
1:06:43
Speaker 4: Do they enjoy it or is it just that desk
1:06:47
Speaker 4: or just the situation they were.
1:06:49
Speaker 5: Dealt, they love it. And the main thing is in Africa,
1:06:52
Speaker 5: like meat is literally a very rare commodity and placed
1:06:58
Speaker 5: very high on a sort of pedestal. So for these guys,
1:07:03
Speaker 5: they weren't actually interested in the money, but when they
1:07:05
Speaker 5: realized how much meat they were going to get, and
1:07:09
Speaker 5: you know, to in Africa, most people have meat in
1:07:11
Speaker 5: their diet maybe once in a week, you know, one
1:07:15
Speaker 5: meal in a whole week will have meat in it.
1:07:17
Speaker 5: So for them to be able to literally gorge themselves
1:07:20
Speaker 5: on as much meat as they can, dry everything that's
1:07:23
Speaker 5: left over, take some home for their families at the
1:07:26
Speaker 5: end of the season, I mean that that was why
1:07:28
Speaker 5: they decided to come and work with us, really, and
1:07:33
Speaker 5: you know, the only way I can explain it is
1:07:34
Speaker 5: like the tracking going back to the tracking is like
1:07:38
Speaker 5: it's it's like reading a newspaper. For them, they look
1:07:40
Speaker 5: around at the ground and they can see everything that's
1:07:43
Speaker 5: happened that morning, you see, and you know, they didn't
1:07:46
Speaker 5: have any interaction with the outside world, so that was
1:07:49
Speaker 5: their entire focus. So it's a lot of it is
1:07:52
Speaker 5: born and bred into them. It's yeah, I think there's
1:07:56
Speaker 5: a lot of it that can't be taught. And yeah,
1:07:59
Speaker 5: I mean it's not a dark art, right, They're seeing
1:08:03
Speaker 5: something on the ground, but and oftentimes we can see
1:08:07
Speaker 5: it too, we just can't interpret it the way they can.
1:08:11
Speaker 5: And yeah, they're incredible characters to be around, and hearing
1:08:16
Speaker 5: their stories about how they learned how to do what
1:08:18
Speaker 5: they do is it's fascinating. It's such a privilege and
1:08:22
Speaker 5: it's so different from how how people hunt in North
1:08:26
Speaker 5: America or Europe or anything else. It just, you know,
1:08:29
Speaker 5: it's it's incredible to see.
1:08:32
Speaker 4: When you talk about that they dry a lot of meat.
1:08:36
Speaker 4: How does that go down?
1:08:37
Speaker 5: Do?
1:08:37
Speaker 2: I mean? Are there? Because that's not a small task.
1:08:41
Speaker 5: It's everything. Basically, when when you hunt something successfully, they
1:08:46
Speaker 5: they skin off you know, the skin and the head
1:08:50
Speaker 5: and any trophies that the client wants.
1:08:53
Speaker 2: And the trackers do that work.
1:08:55
Speaker 5: Yeah, they'll they'll do the easier bits and then it
1:08:57
Speaker 5: goes back to camp and the skinner will split the
1:08:59
Speaker 5: lit in the ears and around the all the sort
1:09:02
Speaker 5: of more complicated bits back in camp. But they'll do
1:09:05
Speaker 5: the field preparation as such, and then you know a
1:09:08
Speaker 5: lot of the animals are too big to load into
1:09:10
Speaker 5: the back of a car, so you'll chop it up
1:09:13
Speaker 5: into sizeable chunks. But by the time they're finished, everything
1:09:18
Speaker 5: has been loaded into the car, with the exception of
1:09:21
Speaker 5: a big pile of grass basically and the lungs, I mean,
1:09:24
Speaker 5: the stomach lining has taken the intestines. Everything has a
1:09:28
Speaker 5: use and nothing goes to waste. I mean literally, that's
1:09:32
Speaker 5: all that's left as a pile of grass.
1:09:34
Speaker 2: And our camps sort of have like a behind the
1:09:37
Speaker 2: scenes operation that's processing. Obviously, you know, when you're on
1:09:41
Speaker 2: Safari as a client, you're eating one hundred percent game.
1:09:45
Speaker 2: You know, the kitchen in camp is turning out incredible
1:09:48
Speaker 2: food made from you know, the animals that you hunt.
1:09:51
Speaker 2: But then there's this sort of whole parallel operation kind
1:09:54
Speaker 2: of behind the scenes of processing all that all that
1:09:57
Speaker 2: protein and preserving it through drying and smoking to be
1:10:04
Speaker 2: a product that our whole team basically can take back
1:10:08
Speaker 2: to their communities, to their families and just sort of
1:10:11
Speaker 2: sustain themselves throughout the off season. And it's a huge
1:10:15
Speaker 2: draw that pulls people into our industry because yeah, that
1:10:19
Speaker 2: access to protein is just priceless. It's a big deal.
1:10:23
Speaker 2: And then we support some of those surrounding communities directly
1:10:26
Speaker 2: with meat as well, will either take fresh meat there
1:10:29
Speaker 2: if we're in kind of close proximity, or that that
1:10:31
Speaker 2: dried smoked product will go to the surrounding communities as well,
1:10:36
Speaker 2: you know, to feed people there. And it's a big deal.
1:10:39
Speaker 2: What is the.
1:10:42
Speaker 4: What is the sort of like your trackers are from
1:10:45
Speaker 4: what cultural group?
1:10:46
Speaker 2: Only know the rate lingo.
1:10:48
Speaker 5: So they come from all sorts of different tribes. I
1:10:51
Speaker 5: mean generally what happens is initially you get people from
1:10:56
Speaker 5: the area. So in mars Island, most of the trackers
1:10:59
Speaker 5: of Marsailles because they understand the animals that you get there.
1:11:03
Speaker 5: That's the amazing thing with Tanzania is the variety of
1:11:05
Speaker 5: species that we hunt. And different parts of the country
1:11:10
Speaker 5: have completely different animals. So like in mass Island you
1:11:14
Speaker 5: have lesser kudu and geranok and the gazelles, and then
1:11:18
Speaker 5: you go to western Tanzania where you've got the sable
1:11:21
Speaker 5: and roan antelope and siatungo. So it's it's very different,
1:11:25
Speaker 5: and so you need people that have grown up with
1:11:28
Speaker 5: those animals. Yeah, so we've got a whole mix of
1:11:31
Speaker 5: tribes for you know, each of our camps basically has
1:11:35
Speaker 5: people from that area, and then the one area basically
1:11:41
Speaker 5: on the edge of the Serengetti had probably the most
1:11:44
Speaker 5: amazing trackers that the Hudsonby people. And they're sort of
1:11:48
Speaker 5: offshoots and they're about the only tribe that really can
1:11:51
Speaker 5: transfer from one area to another and they're still amazing.
1:11:55
Speaker 5: Whereas out of Mars Island and he's he's got no
1:11:59
Speaker 5: idea how to track us another type of animal, but
1:12:03
Speaker 5: he'll spot a lesser coudoo, you know, half a mile
1:12:07
Speaker 5: up a valley just with his bare eyes and you
1:12:09
Speaker 5: can hardly even see it with your binoculars.
1:12:11
Speaker 2: It's yeah, those guys are ancestral hunter gatherers. So it's
1:12:15
Speaker 2: sort of it's it's deep deep in them to be
1:12:18
Speaker 2: able to sort of go anywhere and hunt anything. But
1:12:21
Speaker 2: you know, one could be forgiven for thinking that, well,
1:12:24
Speaker 2: what is what is it exactly that the professional hunter does?
1:12:27
Speaker 2: And it's it's so funny, you know, I've sat with
1:12:30
Speaker 2: trackers for hours and hours and hours and just talked about,
1:12:33
Speaker 2: you know, different things related to hunting and their perception
1:12:36
Speaker 2: of hunting and how it varies from mine and so
1:12:39
Speaker 2: on and so forth, and like the One bridge that
1:12:42
Speaker 2: I've never been able One gap I've never been able
1:12:45
Speaker 2: to bridge is like them seeing an animal as a
1:12:50
Speaker 2: source of meat and understanding like why we want to
1:12:53
Speaker 2: go for an old ball, Like when we follow something
1:12:57
Speaker 2: for eight ten hours in the hot sun and through thickets,
1:13:00
Speaker 2: you're crawling through like these buffalo holes in the thickets
1:13:04
Speaker 2: and we get we get up on them, they point
1:13:06
Speaker 2: them out to me. We close the distance, I put
1:13:08
Speaker 2: my bino's on it, and I'm like, ah no, they're young.
1:13:10
Speaker 2: We got to back out of here. Like the muttering
1:13:13
Speaker 2: and like tongue clicking and like it just looks pretty
1:13:17
Speaker 2: good to like guys, come on. I mean they're just like,
1:13:19
Speaker 2: I mean, I know, they're just like what is wrong
1:13:21
Speaker 2: with these people? You know, like what is this guy's deal?
1:13:23
Speaker 2: Can't believe it? Like we worked so damn hard and
1:13:26
Speaker 2: he's walking away. I mean, but yeah, it's just huh.
1:13:29
Speaker 2: It's like it's that they'll never know, they'll never be
1:13:34
Speaker 2: able to reconcile, they'll never be able to come to
1:13:35
Speaker 2: terms with that, and so you know, it's it's funny.
1:13:38
Speaker 2: There's always this kind of tension around that. But yeah,
1:13:42
Speaker 2: a great a great Safari team of a professional hunter
1:13:46
Speaker 2: and trackers that are that are working together and in
1:13:49
Speaker 2: unison is it's a beautiful.
1:13:50
Speaker 4: Thing when you go straight off. How many trackers are
1:13:52
Speaker 4: with you?
1:13:53
Speaker 2: Two with usually two in reserve, so it'll be you'll
1:13:59
Speaker 2: have a seen your tracking team that'll usually take the
1:14:02
Speaker 2: lead if things go long. I mean it is exhausting work, right,
1:14:07
Speaker 2: It gets very very tedious if things go long, or
1:14:11
Speaker 2: there's sort of a scenario where, for example, like we
1:14:14
Speaker 2: were talking about before an animal joins another herd, or
1:14:18
Speaker 2: an animal's gone through an area and another herd's crossed
1:14:21
Speaker 2: over and it's kind of confusing. They'll sort of fan
1:14:24
Speaker 2: out and everyone will sort of work together to kind
1:14:26
Speaker 2: of sort out what's happening. And then sometimes the kind
1:14:29
Speaker 2: of the reserve guys will step up if the tracking
1:14:32
Speaker 2: job's getting long, but it'll be two with two in reserve.
1:14:45
Speaker 4: What's the impact of like how is poaching felt? Meaning
1:14:51
Speaker 4: like you could be an American and.
1:14:52
Speaker 2: You're aware of poaching here, right, but you don't hear
1:14:56
Speaker 2: about poaching here nearly as much as you hear about
1:14:59
Speaker 2: poaching and how for.
1:15:01
Speaker 4: Yeah, and like anti poaching squads and the black market
1:15:05
Speaker 4: around poaching and documentaries about poaching in Africa, is it?
1:15:10
Speaker 2: I guess.
1:15:10
Speaker 5: I guess probably the biggest difference is like a poacher
1:15:13
Speaker 5: in America is more or less a hunter who just
1:15:18
Speaker 5: hasn't got the right license, whereas in Tanzania, you know,
1:15:24
Speaker 5: there's commercial poaches who are out there, you know, trying
1:15:28
Speaker 5: to hunt elephants, you know, for the ivory, not not
1:15:32
Speaker 5: even necessarily for meat or for you know, the art
1:15:35
Speaker 5: of hunting that they're doing it to make a living and.
1:15:39
Speaker 4: They're part of like but but it's like a criminal syndicate.
1:15:42
Speaker 2: It is. It is those three tiers that that Roger mentioned.
1:15:47
Speaker 2: You know, there's the ivory poaches that they're heavily armed
1:15:50
Speaker 2: and they're they're very aggressive and really there's not a
1:15:53
Speaker 2: lot that we as Safari operators can do about them.
1:15:58
Speaker 2: That and and I think that something the Tanzanian government's
1:16:01
Speaker 2: very cognizant of, and you know they've they've come down
1:16:04
Speaker 2: a lot harder on that. Tanzani is in an unfortunate
1:16:07
Speaker 2: position where it has you know, obviously a lot of
1:16:09
Speaker 2: coastline and seaports, which opens up smuggling potentials to Asia
1:16:15
Speaker 2: basically for ivory that sort of landlocked African countries don't have,
1:16:19
Speaker 2: so we've seen a lot of pressure on our elephants,
1:16:23
Speaker 2: particularly in the early sort of twenty tens. That was
1:16:27
Speaker 2: you know, it was a big problem and it was
1:16:29
Speaker 2: keenly felt across almost all of the hunting areas in
1:16:33
Speaker 2: the country that you know, the presence of those commercial
1:16:38
Speaker 2: ivory poaches heavily armed was there, and the government realized
1:16:43
Speaker 2: it and you know, needed to essentially use the army
1:16:46
Speaker 2: and there are other sort of law enforcement resources to
1:16:49
Speaker 2: deal with that because it's beyond our scope. Commercial meat
1:16:53
Speaker 2: poaching is another problem. Often those guys will be armed too,
1:16:57
Speaker 2: but a lot of times it'll be snares and traps,
1:17:00
Speaker 2: snares and gin trap type things that are set up
1:17:02
Speaker 2: and they'll go and check them and can kind of
1:17:04
Speaker 2: trap like a gin trap is kind of the term
1:17:07
Speaker 2: we use for it. I'm trying to It's like a
1:17:09
Speaker 2: leg hold, but giant with a car spring as the
1:17:13
Speaker 2: like a bear trap. Yeah, it's like a yeah, what
1:17:15
Speaker 2: what you'd call here a leg hold, you know, with
1:17:17
Speaker 2: the with like a car spring as the kind of
1:17:20
Speaker 2: the spring component. So it's it's powerful. It can grab
1:17:24
Speaker 2: a buffalo, it can grab whatever. Oh yeah, yeah, it
1:17:27
Speaker 2: can grab a giraffe. And then you know there's other
1:17:30
Speaker 2: sort of nasty methods those guys will employ. One of
1:17:32
Speaker 2: them is driving around at night on motorcycles with a
1:17:35
Speaker 2: spotlight and and kind of spotlighting stuff like like giraffes,
1:17:39
Speaker 2: for example, and then basically chasing them on the motorbike
1:17:43
Speaker 2: and like hamstringing them with a machete. Kidding no, unfortunately.
1:17:48
Speaker 2: And that's for the bush meat trade, that's the wild
1:17:50
Speaker 2: that's commercial meat trade, so that meat goes consumed where
1:17:54
Speaker 2: consumed in a lot of the local restaurants, villages, I
1:17:58
Speaker 2: mean wherever. It's sort of an underground it's a it's
1:18:00
Speaker 2: you know, you can now, I believe in Tanzania get
1:18:03
Speaker 2: a permit to sell legally acquired game meat. But in
1:18:07
Speaker 2: the past, when I first got started in the industry,
1:18:10
Speaker 2: similar to the US, you couldn't sell meat you know,
1:18:14
Speaker 2: derived from the hunting industry. It didn't have commercial value.
1:18:18
Speaker 2: So you know, yeah, there's sort of this underground trade
1:18:21
Speaker 2: of meat. And then the third tier, like Roger says,
1:18:24
Speaker 2: which is the guys that you know, that sort of
1:18:26
Speaker 2: ladder category. Are that that ladder category we can deal with,
1:18:30
Speaker 2: you know, we can do something about that that sort
1:18:33
Speaker 2: of you know, commercial meat poacher. Our anti poaching teams
1:18:36
Speaker 2: are equipped to handle that. And then there's the kind
1:18:39
Speaker 2: of lone guy who, yeah, he's a subsistence farmer, maybe
1:18:42
Speaker 2: an elephant came in and wiped out his crop, his
1:18:44
Speaker 2: family's hungry, you know, grabbed the old muzzle loader that
1:18:47
Speaker 2: he's got stashed under the bridge.
1:18:49
Speaker 5: Homemade. I mean a lot of these guns that we're
1:18:51
Speaker 5: confiscated they've.
1:18:53
Speaker 2: Made out of a bit of pipe shooting, chunks of
1:18:55
Speaker 2: rebar that have been swed, yeah, or I've seen I've
1:18:59
Speaker 2: seen double A back loaded into them as the slug.
1:19:04
Speaker 2: And so those guys, you know, grab the old muzzle loader,
1:19:08
Speaker 2: grab the old bow and arrow and head out into
1:19:09
Speaker 2: the game reserve and try and try and get something
1:19:12
Speaker 2: for the family. And those are the guys when we
1:19:14
Speaker 2: catch them, that you know, we have a lot of
1:19:16
Speaker 2: sympathy for and if we can find a way to
1:19:18
Speaker 2: incorporate them into our operation, particularly if they're good, and
1:19:22
Speaker 2: you'll know they're good based on when you get them
1:19:25
Speaker 2: to lead you back to their camp and you see
1:19:26
Speaker 2: how much meat they've got, and if they're dialed, it's like,
1:19:33
Speaker 2: all right, let's see what we can see what we
1:19:35
Speaker 2: can do here.
1:19:37
Speaker 6: I do want it. We have enough law enforcement friends
1:19:40
Speaker 6: where I do have to say that in the US,
1:19:44
Speaker 6: poaching is prolific and you have a broad spectrum of
1:19:49
Speaker 6: people who participate, and ranging from like the honest mistake
1:19:53
Speaker 6: crowd to the people who fit the psychological profile of
1:19:58
Speaker 6: like a serial killer and they're they're they're poaching so
1:20:02
Speaker 6: consistently to like scratch that exact same itch, and kind
1:20:07
Speaker 6: of everything in between two like very well organized groups
1:20:11
Speaker 6: of people who operate for years and years taking excessive
1:20:15
Speaker 6: amounts of game for the trophy on the.
1:20:20
Speaker 2: Wall type of Yeah, it's a good way of putting it.
1:20:24
Speaker 4: Like, you have some real organized poaching stuff, but it's
1:20:27
Speaker 4: not feeding a commercial market as much as it's feeding
1:20:31
Speaker 4: and that ego and social.
1:20:34
Speaker 6: Scale and the commercial stuff that we read about would be,
1:20:41
Speaker 6: you know, is very like mom and pop the random
1:20:45
Speaker 6: butcher shop that is like, yeah, if you bring me
1:20:48
Speaker 6: a bunch of white tailed deer, I'll turn it into.
1:20:54
Speaker 2: And we don't mean to downplay the you know, poaching
1:20:58
Speaker 2: as a as an issue in North America. I think,
1:21:00
Speaker 2: as you say, it's just got very it's rooted in
1:21:03
Speaker 2: very different. It's driven very differently. I'm sure even the
1:21:08
Speaker 2: guy that's out commercial elephant poaching in Tanzania, if you
1:21:12
Speaker 2: could offer him a steady job that didn't involve that,
1:21:15
Speaker 2: he'd be more than happy to quit. You know, it's
1:21:18
Speaker 2: not it's not coming from ego.
1:21:20
Speaker 5: It's all.
1:21:21
Speaker 2: It's all from poverty and unfortunately a demand for those
1:21:25
Speaker 2: you know, those products like an ivory rhino horn on
1:21:27
Speaker 2: the you know, and the guy lion bones and things
1:21:30
Speaker 2: like that too.
1:21:31
Speaker 5: And the guys out in the field are making a
1:21:33
Speaker 5: fraction of the big kingpins that are selling the ivory
1:21:37
Speaker 5: on I mean, they'll they'll make a thousand dollars maybe
1:21:40
Speaker 5: on a pair of ivory horns ivory tusks, and the
1:21:45
Speaker 5: next guy will sell them for anything from twenty to
1:21:49
Speaker 5: fifty thousand dollars.
1:21:50
Speaker 4: You know, let me uh, you might already know this,
1:21:55
Speaker 4: but just as a way to compare the two.
1:21:59
Speaker 2: So in the you have.
1:22:03
Speaker 4: Speaking generally generally, the state's own wildlife. Okay, the states
1:22:10
Speaker 4: have a state fishing game aide. The state owns a wildlife,
1:22:13
Speaker 4: whether the wildlife is on private land, state land, federal land.
1:22:17
Speaker 4: The state has jurisdiction over the wildlife. The state will
1:22:20
Speaker 4: have a state agency that employs biologists and law enforcement individuals.
1:22:25
Speaker 4: That state agency, those biologists will make an assessment of
1:22:29
Speaker 4: population trends, models of how many animals are out there.
1:22:37
Speaker 4: They'll ascertain what a harvestable surplus would look like. They
1:22:43
Speaker 4: then take that harvestable surplus and they try to allocate
1:22:48
Speaker 4: it in a democratic fashion.
1:22:51
Speaker 2: To the population.
1:22:53
Speaker 4: So these aren't real numbers, but like we have a
1:22:55
Speaker 4: thousand deer, we can safely kill two hundred a year.
1:23:00
Speaker 4: Those two hundred will now be democratically allocated to the
1:23:04
Speaker 4: best of our ability, to those people who would like
1:23:07
Speaker 4: to go get one, and then we will govern how, when,
1:23:13
Speaker 4: why not why? We will govern how and when they
1:23:16
Speaker 4: go get the surplus we've identified.
1:23:20
Speaker 6: And Korean It's important to note that the bulk of
1:23:24
Speaker 6: these state agency funding comes from participation, license and tag sales.
1:23:32
Speaker 2: Very very important detail.
1:23:34
Speaker 4: It's quite circular because then them selling them selling the
1:23:38
Speaker 4: two hundred deer, them selling access to the two hundred
1:23:43
Speaker 4: deer through buying licenses is how they fund.
1:23:48
Speaker 5: The research to set the quasis. Yeah, it's it's very
1:23:51
Speaker 5: similar in Africa that it is. Different countries are very
1:23:54
Speaker 5: different in it In Tanzania, for example, the land, the wildlife,
1:23:59
Speaker 5: everything is owned by the government. The quotas are set
1:24:04
Speaker 5: by the government. We have a government official who comes
1:24:07
Speaker 5: out hunting with us to make sure we are sticking
1:24:09
Speaker 5: to all the regulations.
1:24:12
Speaker 2: Whereas all the time, all the time.
1:24:14
Speaker 5: Every every hunting party has a game scout government employee.
1:24:18
Speaker 4: Are you serious, commercial fishing vessels.
1:24:21
Speaker 2: Yeah here, yeah, yeah, really yeah, at all times and change.
1:24:25
Speaker 2: Do you imagine if every hunting party in the US. Yeah,
1:24:31
Speaker 2: there is really it's always present.
1:24:38
Speaker 5: Regulated, yeah, and you know they're they're there to make
1:24:42
Speaker 5: sure we abide by all the regulations.
1:24:44
Speaker 10: What a huge commitment from the agency or whatever the
1:24:47
Speaker 10: appropriate term.
1:24:48
Speaker 2: Well, for sure, and they're there and they're they're a
1:24:50
Speaker 2: great help to you know, when we run into those poachers,
1:24:54
Speaker 2: we don't have to do a citizen's arrest, you know,
1:24:57
Speaker 2: or they can are authority. They're they're an agent of
1:25:02
Speaker 2: the Department of Natural Resources and Tourism.
1:25:05
Speaker 5: It's the same way with our anti poaching.
1:25:07
Speaker 4: Are they generally good hunters?
1:25:08
Speaker 2: Do some of them are? Yeah?
1:25:09
Speaker 5: A lot of them get passionate about it and you know,
1:25:12
Speaker 5: enjoy being out in the wilderness light.
1:25:14
Speaker 6: But you also kind of had a look that said,
1:25:16
Speaker 6: some of them may be bureaucratically placed there, and are
1:25:20
Speaker 6: they stick out a little bit?
1:25:22
Speaker 5: Some some start in the towns and then might get
1:25:25
Speaker 5: placed out in the field against their wishes. Same and
1:25:30
Speaker 5: you know, in any.
1:25:31
Speaker 4: But in your camp. To make sure that you guys
1:25:33
Speaker 4: aren't doing like what would be the most common bad
1:25:37
Speaker 4: thing that would happen.
1:25:39
Speaker 5: Well, I mean we don't. We don't break any of
1:25:42
Speaker 5: these really, but there are laws like you're not allowed
1:25:45
Speaker 5: to hunt from a vehicle. You have to be twenty
1:25:48
Speaker 5: five meters or fifty meters away from a vehicle anytime.
1:25:51
Speaker 5: You can't.
1:25:51
Speaker 2: I can't add over water holes, yeah, for example.
1:25:54
Speaker 4: Also that's I guess that's what I was curious about there.
1:25:56
Speaker 5: Is we're not allowed to hunt at night.
1:25:58
Speaker 4: You know, there is interested in methodology as they are,
1:26:01
Speaker 4: and that you're not killing too much of whatever.
1:26:03
Speaker 2: I would say a combination of both. Yeah, they're they're
1:26:05
Speaker 2: making sure that essentially the act of government that you know,
1:26:11
Speaker 2: that governs what we do. They're there to make sure
1:26:14
Speaker 2: that we adhere to that. But as much of that
1:26:17
Speaker 2: as they do, they're also there to support us in
1:26:21
Speaker 2: our efforts, you know, to combat poaching. Yeah, they're there
1:26:25
Speaker 2: to be. Yeah, they're essentially the law enforcement arm of
1:26:30
Speaker 2: the Department of Natural Resources and Tourism that they are
1:26:33
Speaker 2: able to you know, if we run into a poacher,
1:26:35
Speaker 2: they're going to make the arrest. They're going to make
1:26:37
Speaker 2: sure that everything's properly documented and written up and so
1:26:41
Speaker 2: on and so forth, and take that person into custody,
1:26:44
Speaker 2: you know, which is something that we don't have the
1:26:46
Speaker 2: authority to do.
1:26:47
Speaker 5: So it's very much a combined effort. Our antipaching teams
1:26:50
Speaker 5: are half our employees of Robin Hurtsparaz and half from
1:26:54
Speaker 5: the townsan Near Wildlife Department, and they all go out
1:26:57
Speaker 5: on patrol together and help each other.
1:27:00
Speaker 2: And you guys are operating out of the same camp.
1:27:02
Speaker 5: Yeah, they they'll they'll have the hunting.
1:27:04
Speaker 4: And hunting poachers all kind of at the same time.
1:27:07
Speaker 5: Yeah, the two go together every time we're out in
1:27:10
Speaker 5: the field where we're on patrol. You know, we have
1:27:12
Speaker 5: our actual anti poaching units as well, but but when
1:27:15
Speaker 5: we're in the field, we're naturally doing anti poaching.
1:27:20
Speaker 6: So all of Tanzania, you are not allowed to hunt
1:27:25
Speaker 6: the water horse.
1:27:26
Speaker 2: No one can apart.
1:27:29
Speaker 5: From a few animals crocodile, wait a tunga water. But
1:27:33
Speaker 5: there's there's a few very specific animals that so other
1:27:37
Speaker 5: than aquatic semi aquatic species that you're just not I mean, like,
1:27:41
Speaker 5: you know, crocodiles in the water all the time.
1:27:44
Speaker 2: You know, there's an exception for that. But we can't
1:27:46
Speaker 2: sit over water and wait for a buffalo to come
1:27:48
Speaker 2: and drink.
1:27:49
Speaker 4: It seems so nitpicky for Africa someone has never been
1:27:52
Speaker 4: there and has no idea what I'm talking about.
1:27:54
Speaker 5: It was a little more, but it makes it a challenge,
1:27:58
Speaker 5: which to me, half of what hunting about.
1:28:00
Speaker 2: And these rules weren't weren't set twenty years ago, thirty
1:28:05
Speaker 2: years ago. These rules have been around, you know, since
1:28:08
Speaker 2: the early days. I would say probably Roosevelt Safari era.
1:28:14
Speaker 2: It was probably a little looser, but for sure there
1:28:16
Speaker 2: would have been a concept of, oh, you know, we
1:28:18
Speaker 2: don't shoot stuff over water. You know, we don't shoot
1:28:21
Speaker 2: big we don't shoot big tuskers, big elephants over water.
1:28:24
Speaker 2: We track them from the water hole, and that that
1:28:26
Speaker 2: ethic would have been. These things are basically ethics that
1:28:30
Speaker 2: the East African Professional Hunters Association sort of held, you know,
1:28:36
Speaker 2: held their members to account with these sort of ethical
1:28:39
Speaker 2: guidelines that then got sort of enshrined into law and
1:28:43
Speaker 2: that we now are absolutely bound to both ethically and legally.
1:28:48
Speaker 10: Would you say that they're complex or I mean, like
1:28:52
Speaker 10: how hard would it be for someone to step in
1:28:54
Speaker 10: and understand the regulatory regime.
1:28:57
Speaker 5: That's why we do like to become a professional hunter,
1:29:01
Speaker 5: you do a two year apprenticeship and then you have
1:29:03
Speaker 5: to sit an exam on the law. I mean, because
1:29:06
Speaker 5: every species there's there's different rules. Like to hunter a
1:29:10
Speaker 5: male leopard, first of all, it's got to be male,
1:29:12
Speaker 5: but it's got to be over a certain length or
1:29:16
Speaker 5: you know, it can be confiscated. And same with a
1:29:19
Speaker 5: lion has to be aged in Tanzanier and if it's
1:29:23
Speaker 5: under seven there's a fine and it can be confiscated
1:29:25
Speaker 5: if it's under another age.
1:29:27
Speaker 4: So so when people like to point out that Cecil
1:29:29
Speaker 4: the lion was thirteen, he couldn't have been under seven
1:29:33
Speaker 4: in Tanzaniera.
1:29:35
Speaker 5: You have to hunt a seven year old, a seven
1:29:38
Speaker 5: year old or older. And I mean the cecil thing
1:29:41
Speaker 5: is is something that sort of hits a bone.
1:29:47
Speaker 2: Finally enough, we've been laboring. It's been an albatross around
1:29:50
Speaker 2: our neck for like, however many years it's been now
1:29:53
Speaker 2: and I mean it had a real impact for us.
1:29:56
Speaker 2: It Okay, go on, I mean Roger can go into
1:30:01
Speaker 2: it a little more. But we've both seen and know
1:30:04
Speaker 2: of anecdotally and seen with our own eyes areas that
1:30:09
Speaker 2: were perhaps not the most productive area from the standpoint
1:30:14
Speaker 2: of there wasn't a big ticket item from a planes
1:30:18
Speaker 2: game standpoint, didn't have a good population of sable or
1:30:21
Speaker 2: ronandelope for not a big variety, you know, it had
1:30:24
Speaker 2: like buffalo and lions, and the lions because of the
1:30:29
Speaker 2: population of them, there would be enough of a big
1:30:33
Speaker 2: ticket item that you could generate if you could sell
1:30:36
Speaker 2: a couple of lion hunts a year, one maybe two,
1:30:38
Speaker 2: you know, again abiding by those rules of harvesting those
1:30:41
Speaker 2: old lions, you would be able to sustain and justify it,
1:30:45
Speaker 2: you know, having that area as part of your company's
1:30:49
Speaker 2: concessions and doing anti poaching so on and so forth.
1:30:53
Speaker 2: We can literally point to areas where with cecil that
1:30:57
Speaker 2: rug was pulled out from under us. Clients weren't booking
1:31:00
Speaker 2: those lion hunts. The outfitter can't make money from that
1:31:04
Speaker 2: area anymore, gave it back to the government. Essentially, I
1:31:07
Speaker 2: mean we left the.
1:31:08
Speaker 5: Paper records are there. There was before cecil, there was
1:31:11
Speaker 5: one hundred and sixty hunting concessions in Tanzania, and within
1:31:18
Speaker 5: three or four years of that, the government basically I
1:31:21
Speaker 5: mean that the hunting outfitters had returned a lot of
1:31:25
Speaker 5: these least because they didn't have the business for them,
1:31:28
Speaker 5: and it dropped to one hundred and twenty and those
1:31:31
Speaker 5: forty areas, the sort of fringe areas, they then had
1:31:36
Speaker 5: no use. And I watched it with my own eyes
1:31:38
Speaker 5: some of our neighboring concessions where everything went wasn't It
1:31:44
Speaker 5: had a negative impact on everything, Like there wasn't a
1:31:47
Speaker 5: tree left, because if no one was looking after that area,
1:31:51
Speaker 5: the local villagers would use it for something. So first
1:31:54
Speaker 5: of all, the loggers would move in cut all the trees.
1:31:57
Speaker 5: Then the illegal grazing would come in and there's no
1:32:00
Speaker 5: there to sort of stop it. And then after that
1:32:03
Speaker 5: then the farmers would come in and you know, plant
1:32:06
Speaker 5: their crops, and within literally a year to two years,
1:32:10
Speaker 5: this pristine wilderness area was just farmland without breathing, living
1:32:15
Speaker 5: wild creature.
1:32:16
Speaker 4: So you believe I mean you're saying this, That's why
1:32:18
Speaker 4: I clarify you the we call him Cecil.
1:32:22
Speaker 11: Yeah, the Cecil Lion debarcle everyone had the right actually
1:32:30
Speaker 11: led to land, actually led to abandonment of hunting lands
1:32:35
Speaker 11: which were then developed.
1:32:36
Speaker 5: I mean we're talking that's probably forty million acres of
1:32:40
Speaker 5: wilderness that was lost because of the Cecil incident.
1:32:44
Speaker 2: Really, I have no trouble.
1:32:45
Speaker 5: It didn't even happen in Tanzania, but it's it's a.
1:32:49
Speaker 2: Fact happening Zimbabwe.
1:32:51
Speaker 4: There's a there's a high roller here in town. He's
1:32:53
Speaker 4: kind of not he's operating here and he didn't grow
1:32:57
Speaker 4: up unting. And I heard how he's going to Africa
1:33:00
Speaker 4: go hunting, but his wife has forbade him shooting a lane.
1:33:04
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, and that's that's what it did is a
1:33:07
Speaker 5: lot of people.
1:33:08
Speaker 2: She doesn't want their holiday home burned down. But it
1:33:12
Speaker 2: made people.
1:33:13
Speaker 5: It didn't just affect lion hunting. It affected hunting in
1:33:16
Speaker 5: Africa full stop. Your avid hunters would still come, but
1:33:20
Speaker 5: a lot of the middle ground for a few years. Well,
1:33:25
Speaker 5: I work with will feel about this.
1:33:27
Speaker 2: We have Tanzania has forty percent of Africa's wild lions
1:33:32
Speaker 2: in Tanzania within the borders of forty percent of Africa's
1:33:36
Speaker 2: wild lions. So we were hit hardest because that for
1:33:41
Speaker 2: a lot of these areas, that was our big ticket item,
1:33:43
Speaker 2: you know, that was our draw card. We could offer
1:33:46
Speaker 2: a really well done lion hunt that we could back
1:33:51
Speaker 2: up with with actual conservation data. I mean, Oxford University
1:33:55
Speaker 2: did a study that basically showed in an ecosystem in
1:34:00
Speaker 2: central Tanzania that there's no discernible difference between the populations
1:34:04
Speaker 2: of lions and leopards, So those sort of top predators
1:34:07
Speaker 2: and in the photographic hunting areas versus the hunting areas
1:34:11
Speaker 2: that have a sustainable off take.
1:34:13
Speaker 5: You we actually funded our own population studies of both
1:34:17
Speaker 5: lion and leopard in our hunting areas because again most
1:34:21
Speaker 5: of the research was done in the national parks where
1:34:24
Speaker 5: it was comfortable and easy for the scientists. So we
1:34:27
Speaker 5: paid for some researchers from Kingsville actually to come come
1:34:33
Speaker 5: out and study the lines for two years and the
1:34:36
Speaker 5: leopard and make population to check that our quotas were
1:34:40
Speaker 5: actually within the right regions.
1:34:42
Speaker 4: So do you have line do you have.
1:34:46
Speaker 2: In your areas? Do you have.
1:34:48
Speaker 4: Lion lions that you could hunt? But there's no clients
1:34:52
Speaker 4: that want to buy that lion to egg.
1:34:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely.
1:34:55
Speaker 5: And the other thing that the reality of it all
1:34:59
Speaker 5: is is in the wild, very few lions make it
1:35:02
Speaker 5: over the seven year you know, age restriction for hunting
1:35:07
Speaker 5: because it's not like living in the Serengetti where there's
1:35:10
Speaker 5: just plentiful wildlife everywhere. It's a tough life. And these younger,
1:35:16
Speaker 5: stronger lions come in and they push those older males
1:35:20
Speaker 5: out into these fringe areas. They get injured, they can't
1:35:23
Speaker 5: feed themselves, they die a pretty nasty death. So for
1:35:26
Speaker 5: one to find a lion over the seven year ages
1:35:30
Speaker 5: is very hard. And then the pressure on a professional
1:35:32
Speaker 5: hunter that he's got a judge that it's definitely over
1:35:36
Speaker 5: seven years old by just looking at it.
1:35:39
Speaker 2: What are you looking at when you look at it.
1:35:41
Speaker 5: There's a whole range of things from.
1:35:43
Speaker 2: Those coloration, main development, color of their shape, color of
1:35:48
Speaker 2: their teeth, they have these glandular patches sort of on
1:35:51
Speaker 2: their back, how they've developed. I mean, it's it's an
1:35:55
Speaker 2: inexact science. Trail cameras are a real help because we
1:35:59
Speaker 2: can get helpful on that kind of stuff. Yeah, a
1:36:02
Speaker 2: little bit.
1:36:03
Speaker 5: It comes down to you a judgment.
1:36:04
Speaker 2: They're gonna say it's a huge lion no matter what,
1:36:07
Speaker 2: and it might be a three year old. They're gonna
1:36:09
Speaker 2: be liket some on stut and it's like people here
1:36:11
Speaker 2: with mountain lions. Yeah, big old tomta Yeah yeah, totally
1:36:17
Speaker 2: black bear.
1:36:18
Speaker 6: So we were coming down the road looking for turkeys
1:36:21
Speaker 6: last weekend and there's a black bear about the size
1:36:25
Speaker 6: of my dog, a little white patch on his chest. Yeah,
1:36:27
Speaker 6: and he's sitting like my dog, one leg kind of
1:36:30
Speaker 6: kicked out on his back like this wait, literally waiting
1:36:32
Speaker 6: for cars to get down the road, you know. And
1:36:37
Speaker 6: I turned my buddy Kyler after he passed, and I
1:36:39
Speaker 6: was like, knowing the area, I was like, you know,
1:36:43
Speaker 6: let's swing around, show that little little guy off the
1:36:46
Speaker 6: road a little bit. And when we had flipped around,
1:36:50
Speaker 6: there was another There's like a truck down the road
1:36:52
Speaker 6: like piling junk out of the like obviously digging for
1:36:55
Speaker 6: their rifle. I just felt, I was like, we really care.
1:37:02
Speaker 2: Yeah. It's one of those things where in an area
1:37:06
Speaker 2: where there's a thriving lion population, it won't be just
1:37:09
Speaker 2: one male with a pride. It'll be often a coalition,
1:37:14
Speaker 2: and those males will frequently be related. They'll be sort
1:37:17
Speaker 2: of littermates, so like cousins, brothers, sometimes a father and
1:37:22
Speaker 2: sons that will sort of, you know, sort of run
1:37:25
Speaker 2: that pride. They might run multiple prides, so there might
1:37:28
Speaker 2: be two different groups of females x number of miles apart,
1:37:31
Speaker 2: and there's this kind of coalition of males that have
1:37:34
Speaker 2: sort of split their attention or kind of you know,
1:37:36
Speaker 2: coordinate to run these prides. What will happen as those
1:37:41
Speaker 2: lions age, you know, they get they get weaker and weaker,
1:37:45
Speaker 2: and there'll be this there's this other sort of class
1:37:47
Speaker 2: of lions that's nomads, and those will be basically the
1:37:52
Speaker 2: young males of those prides that the coalition that haven't
1:37:55
Speaker 2: joined the coalition, and the coalition won't tolerate them once
1:37:58
Speaker 2: they get to a certain age, they'll kick him out
1:38:01
Speaker 2: and so they become, you know, the young nomads. They're
1:38:04
Speaker 2: out in the wilderness, you know, sometimes in groups, sometimes alone,
1:38:08
Speaker 2: kind of basically building themselves up, doing a lot of hunting,
1:38:12
Speaker 2: doing a lot of kind of bonding with their future
1:38:15
Speaker 2: kind of coalition mates, and getting themselves ready to go
1:38:18
Speaker 2: challenge for one of those prides. And then the other
1:38:21
Speaker 2: category of nomads is ones that have been basically kicked
1:38:25
Speaker 2: out as a result of one of those battles for dominance.
1:38:28
Speaker 2: And when the battle for dominance happens a lot of
1:38:30
Speaker 2: times that will result in the death of those older
1:38:33
Speaker 2: lions or any number of the lions.
1:38:36
Speaker 5: There was a brutal video from the Serengetti the other
1:38:39
Speaker 5: day of like literally the king of the Serengetti being
1:38:43
Speaker 5: wiped out by three younger males.
1:38:44
Speaker 2: I mean just getting told.
1:38:46
Speaker 5: It's a nasty ending.
1:38:48
Speaker 2: But the ones that survive go will then go into
1:38:51
Speaker 2: that nomad phase again. But he's never coming back to
1:38:55
Speaker 2: Pride dominance.
1:38:57
Speaker 4: He's he's not building up.
1:38:58
Speaker 2: He's on the downswing.
1:39:00
Speaker 5: He's done his job.
1:39:01
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's on the downd. That's the only one we're
1:39:05
Speaker 2: going to find. We can't shoot. We can't shoot a
1:39:08
Speaker 2: Pride male ethically because if you upset the balance of
1:39:13
Speaker 2: that coalition, what will happen is it'll it'll just be
1:39:18
Speaker 2: inherently weaker having lost one of its members, which can
1:39:21
Speaker 2: precipitate that Pride takeover from another group of males. And
1:39:26
Speaker 2: what that'll do is once those males take over, if
1:39:29
Speaker 2: there's any cubs from the previous males, they'll kill them.
1:39:33
Speaker 2: And that has a physiological effect on the females, brings
1:39:36
Speaker 2: them back into into season, brings it back into estros,
1:39:39
Speaker 2: so then those new males can breed them. So it's
1:39:43
Speaker 2: like the romans.
1:39:45
Speaker 6: Real similar to ours here though, right so number one
1:39:50
Speaker 6: killer of mountain lions as mountain lions, but is that
1:39:53
Speaker 6: predatory or it can be bought, but typically males or
1:39:58
Speaker 6: killing males, but also the exact same like males are
1:40:01
Speaker 6: killing kittens because that female will come back into that then,
1:40:06
Speaker 6: like right.
1:40:07
Speaker 4: Away, yeah, when they do, uh with coastal brown bears,
1:40:12
Speaker 4: when you do, like what are they eating? If you
1:40:16
Speaker 4: were to list like what a mature male coastal brown
1:40:20
Speaker 4: bears diet is high on the list is brown bears.
1:40:24
Speaker 2: I told a woman that at a potty one time,
1:40:26
Speaker 2: and she was just incredulous. She nearly clowed my eyes.
1:40:30
Speaker 2: It's regarded as like a primary food source. Yeah, I mean,
1:40:33
Speaker 2: I have no trouble a primary.
1:40:35
Speaker 5: Food source fishermen.
1:40:38
Speaker 6: Isn't it so funny though? It's like, well, what is
1:40:40
Speaker 6: your agenda with that? And you're like, well, no, it's
1:40:42
Speaker 6: just what that's what happens.
1:40:46
Speaker 4: They got you guys have largely Maybe I'm getting this wrong.
1:40:51
Speaker 4: But you guys have been for different reasons moved out
1:40:57
Speaker 4: of the elephant hunting business.
1:41:00
Speaker 5: Well, we as a company made a choice about twenty
1:41:05
Speaker 5: years ago that we couldn't ethically hunt elephants in our
1:41:10
Speaker 5: hunting areas in Tanzania. The poaching got so bad about
1:41:13
Speaker 5: fifteen years ago that you know, for a mature elephant
1:41:17
Speaker 5: with big ivory, it takes fifty sixty years to get
1:41:22
Speaker 5: to that level, and I.
1:41:24
Speaker 12: Think they're all so really to get to the point
1:41:30
Speaker 12: that we would feel comfortable hunting one again would take
1:41:34
Speaker 12: another twenty thirty years from now just to build up
1:41:37
Speaker 12: those populations to an ethical level for us.
1:41:41
Speaker 5: But there's still ethical you know, government limits. But we
1:41:45
Speaker 5: just personally decided if you want to, well, we'll suggest
1:41:50
Speaker 5: people go to Botswana or parts of Namibia where they've
1:41:54
Speaker 5: got too many elephants and they actually physically have to
1:41:58
Speaker 5: cull on top of the you know, the foreign hunting clients.
1:42:03
Speaker 5: You know, Botswan or one point was have into cul
1:42:05
Speaker 5: forty or fifty thousand elephant every year.
1:42:08
Speaker 2: What yeah, yeah, no way, yeah, I mean the crop
1:42:12
Speaker 2: damage that they can do and the and again, you know,
1:42:14
Speaker 2: elephants are extremely migratory by nature. You know, they'll follow grass,
1:42:19
Speaker 2: they'll follow the rains, they'll follow ancient ancestral paths to
1:42:25
Speaker 2: get to different food resources at different times of the year.
1:42:28
Speaker 2: And of course all that now has been like interdicted
1:42:32
Speaker 2: by highways and development, farmland and so on. So you know,
1:42:37
Speaker 2: if they can't do those migrations, they're increasingly pushed into
1:42:41
Speaker 2: these smaller and smaller areas and they just eat themselves
1:42:44
Speaker 2: out of house and home. And also they get in
1:42:47
Speaker 2: conflict with those surrounding agricultural communities and that's where you know,
1:42:52
Speaker 2: the necessity of a coal comes in. But where we're
1:42:54
Speaker 2: not in that place in Tanzania anymore. And what's you know,
1:42:58
Speaker 2: what's fundamentally changed for us is we know we if
1:43:02
Speaker 2: you believe as we do, and I think as everyone
1:43:04
Speaker 2: in this room does, whether it's in the North American
1:43:07
Speaker 2: model or in our model, that you know, an animal,
1:43:10
Speaker 2: there's in any sort of functional sort of population of animals,
1:43:14
Speaker 2: there's a sustainable off take that that can be managed
1:43:18
Speaker 2: and you know, can be utilized, whether it's lions or
1:43:21
Speaker 2: whitetailed deer that you know that that's something that that's possible.
1:43:26
Speaker 2: But when you've got that commercial poaching pressure over and
1:43:30
Speaker 2: above on top of that, it just does it's not
1:43:32
Speaker 2: sustainable anymore. We can't, you know, look at ourselves in
1:43:35
Speaker 2: the mirror and say, yeah, you know, there's harve there's elephants.
1:43:38
Speaker 2: We could harvest in these areas and it wouldn't be
1:43:40
Speaker 2: detrimental to the population. So, you know, Robin Hurt Safaris
1:43:43
Speaker 2: were out of that business.
1:43:44
Speaker 6: Well, actually dropping offspring every single year.
1:43:49
Speaker 2: No, they're not dropping four to seven year carving interval,
1:43:54
Speaker 2: twenty two month gestation. Elephants breed well when they're left
1:44:01
Speaker 2: to their own devices and when they have habitat, but
1:44:03
Speaker 2: it's a slow process. It's generational. So if you lose
1:44:07
Speaker 2: a whole bunch like we did, it takes a long
1:44:10
Speaker 2: time to get to recover.
1:44:11
Speaker 5: But what Morgan was saying a minute ago is something
1:44:14
Speaker 5: that it touches a bone with me. For some reason,
1:44:17
Speaker 5: hunting in Africa is labeled as trophy hunting, and okay,
1:44:23
Speaker 5: trophies do come into it, like hunters always. There are
1:44:26
Speaker 5: people who want the bigger animal, but it should really
1:44:30
Speaker 5: be called sustainable hunting. What we do, that's what our
1:44:33
Speaker 5: company is all about. It's making sure that our off
1:44:36
Speaker 5: take does not affect the population. And it's my dad
1:44:40
Speaker 5: always says, it's we're basically no different from a beef
1:44:43
Speaker 5: cattle farmer. Like the wildlife is our crop and we
1:44:47
Speaker 5: manage it. We have sustainable offtake, but we don't want
1:44:51
Speaker 5: to do anything detrimental to that wildlife population because that's
1:44:56
Speaker 5: how we make our living. And I know, I guess
1:45:00
Speaker 5: a lot of celebrities and everyone have made this stigma
1:45:04
Speaker 5: about hunting in Africa where it's all these rich Americans,
1:45:09
Speaker 5: you know, standing over an animal, you know, and an
1:45:12
Speaker 5: ego thing, where that's that's not what we're about, you know,
1:45:15
Speaker 5: with traditional ethical hunters with very strong practices on age, sex,
1:45:23
Speaker 5: everything like that.
1:45:24
Speaker 6: Well, it's very confusing. And I'll tell you, like the
1:45:28
Speaker 6: argument that I hear all the time, and I have
1:45:30
Speaker 6: no answer too because I have no experience. Right, It's like, well,
1:45:35
Speaker 6: where does that money go from that elephant hunt?
1:45:38
Speaker 2: Yeah?
1:45:39
Speaker 6: Right, And it's like, well.
1:45:40
Speaker 5: It generally all goes straight back into that area, you know,
1:45:43
Speaker 5: because the game fee goes gets paid to the government,
1:45:47
Speaker 5: which funds their game scouts who are back in the
1:45:51
Speaker 5: area patrolling. And that's what I was saying with these
1:45:54
Speaker 5: with these areas that disappeared after Cecil. It was because
1:45:58
Speaker 5: there was there was no longer any funding, and they
1:46:00
Speaker 5: put the funding back into the core places that are
1:46:03
Speaker 5: bringing them money.
1:46:04
Speaker 6: And that's what I'm confused about too, because so you
1:46:07
Speaker 6: pay like a lease to the state for that concession,
1:46:11
Speaker 6: but then at that point it sounds as if it
1:46:14
Speaker 6: then becomes your responsibility to fully manage that concession.
1:46:19
Speaker 5: In conjunction with the wildlife department.
1:46:22
Speaker 6: But that Wildlife department will not operate there unless there's
1:46:26
Speaker 6: an active concession.
1:46:27
Speaker 5: Well, they just have limited funding and they're going to
1:46:31
Speaker 5: put the funding at their core resources. So like the
1:46:36
Speaker 5: Serengetti for instance, that has millions of tourists coming through
1:46:39
Speaker 5: paying fees. They have all the funding they need for
1:46:42
Speaker 5: that area and they're going to protect it because that's
1:46:45
Speaker 5: bringing in the big bucks. And the more peripheral the
1:46:49
Speaker 5: areas are, the less funding reaches those places, and that's
1:46:52
Speaker 5: where hunting comes in. Without hunting, most of the areas
1:46:55
Speaker 5: we operate would disappear in a matter of literally.
1:47:00
Speaker 4: So your your business affords your business or the government
1:47:06
Speaker 4: to be able to do monitoring in that area one
1:47:09
Speaker 4: hundred percent.
1:47:10
Speaker 2: So Tanzania has got I think it's forty percent of
1:47:14
Speaker 2: their total land mass is set aside for some sort
1:47:17
Speaker 2: of conservation effort, some sort of wildlife conservation, and sort
1:47:21
Speaker 2: of various tiers of wilderness. So before when you were
1:47:25
Speaker 2: talking about like no one lives in our in our
1:47:27
Speaker 2: Leganzo concession because it's a game reserve, well that's kind
1:47:30
Speaker 2: of our top tier of protection. Below that, there's other
1:47:34
Speaker 2: tiers where you'll have areas where there are you know,
1:47:38
Speaker 2: human inhabitants. There is a village inside the area, there
1:47:41
Speaker 2: are people grazing through that area seasonally, there are people,
1:47:45
Speaker 2: you know, honey, people collecting honey, people collecting fire, were
1:47:49
Speaker 2: doing other activities. But there's still game there, and there's
1:47:53
Speaker 2: still you know, it's still a hunting concession. There's still
1:47:55
Speaker 2: management going on. There's still kind of an interaction between
1:47:59
Speaker 2: the those people that are inhabiting or seasonally using the
1:48:03
Speaker 2: area and the hunting operator and the government. But essentially,
1:48:08
Speaker 2: you know, that's a huge chunk of land that the
1:48:12
Speaker 2: Tanzanian government's committed to wildlife conservation. Like I'm not sure
1:48:16
Speaker 2: what percentage of North America has set aside for some
1:48:21
Speaker 2: sort of you know, wilderness or hunting, whether there's.
1:48:23
Speaker 6: A what is it less than two percent?
1:48:27
Speaker 2: No, well, yeah, but no the thirty by thirty is
1:48:32
Speaker 2: that what it is?
1:48:33
Speaker 6: Oh?
1:48:34
Speaker 4: Yeah, but that's a way different definition. Yeah, right, by
1:48:38
Speaker 4: two thousand, by two thousand.
1:48:39
Speaker 2: And thirty having is that right?
1:48:41
Speaker 4: Yeah, by two thousand and thirty, having thirty percent of
1:48:45
Speaker 4: the US and some kind of it's a.
1:48:49
Speaker 10: It incorporates things like CRP and yeah.
1:48:53
Speaker 4: Well under some kind of conservation model.
1:48:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, And the lines here are a lot blurry between
1:49:00
Speaker 2: wildlife habitat and agriculture. Right, Like, you can go on
1:49:04
Speaker 2: a ranch that's being fairly intensively, you know, farmed or ranched,
1:49:09
Speaker 2: and there'll be white taileda, there'll be analope, they'll be
1:49:11
Speaker 2: coming down onto the alfalfa. They'll be predators, you know,
1:49:15
Speaker 2: following those animals. In Tanzania, at least in northern mess Island,
1:49:19
Speaker 2: it's a little different where people just graze animals, But
1:49:22
Speaker 2: in most of central, kind of western and southern Tanzania,
1:49:25
Speaker 2: there's like a hard delineation between agricultural land and land
1:49:31
Speaker 2: for wildlife, and there's very little spillover because a lot
1:49:37
Speaker 2: of that agriculture is subsistence farming, so there's no ability
1:49:42
Speaker 2: for those people to accept Oh, well, a percentage of
1:49:44
Speaker 2: my crop is going to go to the buffaloes. And
1:49:46
Speaker 2: that's just kind of the way it is. That's that's not.
1:49:49
Speaker 5: A and anything that steps in there is going to
1:49:51
Speaker 5: get posts going to.
1:49:55
Speaker 2: And because it's detrimental to their agriculture.
1:49:58
Speaker 5: This is the biggest thing that you have to understand
1:50:00
Speaker 5: about Africa is that for wildlife to survive, it has
1:50:04
Speaker 5: to have a value because it's either going to be
1:50:07
Speaker 5: eaten or it's destructive to that that crops, or it's
1:50:11
Speaker 5: killing that cattle. You know, their lifestyle.
1:50:24
Speaker 4: In the US, we're on we're like on edge, very
1:50:28
Speaker 4: guarded about the pay to play model. Certain certain forces
1:50:33
Speaker 4: are not right, but like you know, you're kind of
1:50:40
Speaker 4: like meat and potatoes. Non aristocratic hunters are worried about
1:50:44
Speaker 4: the pay to play model because it violates an understanding
1:50:46
Speaker 4: of how we manage wildlife. When I was talking about
1:50:48
Speaker 4: that that at its ideal, wildlife is allocated democratically.
1:50:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, okay.
1:50:54
Speaker 4: And and pay to play comes into there's one hundred
1:50:58
Speaker 4: versions of pay to play emerging pay to play.
1:51:00
Speaker 2: It would be.
1:51:02
Speaker 4: Things like governor's tags, auction tags, where you're pulling it
1:51:06
Speaker 4: out of democratically. It's you're taking animals, bighorn sheep, elk, whatever,
1:51:11
Speaker 4: and the tag the opportunity would have been allocated democratically,
1:51:15
Speaker 4: but it goes to the highest bidder. So that would
1:51:17
Speaker 4: be an affront to pay to play. Another huge pay
1:51:19
Speaker 4: to play aspect in the US is the rapidly i mean,
1:51:23
Speaker 4: the increased, still increasing numbers of acreage that are where
1:51:30
Speaker 4: hunting rights are leased. Right, Okay, it's a pay to
1:51:32
Speaker 4: play model, and it's and it's generally regarded by most folks.
1:51:38
Speaker 4: It's it's watching this progression is disheartening to people. They
1:51:44
Speaker 4: don't it's depressing. But you guys are telling me when
1:51:49
Speaker 4: we spoke recently, then this is not new. And like
1:51:54
Speaker 4: the entire African system is built around pay to play,
1:51:57
Speaker 4: it's always been.
1:51:59
Speaker 2: It's always been that way, even you know, going back
1:52:01
Speaker 2: again to the Roosevelt Safari, you know that you couldn't
1:52:06
Speaker 2: I mean, the early guys would go to Cape Town
1:52:10
Speaker 2: or something like that and buy a bunch of cattle
1:52:12
Speaker 2: and hire a bunch of guys and load up these
1:52:14
Speaker 2: wagon trains and head out, you know, into the wilderness.
1:52:18
Speaker 2: But but it very quickly became if if someone wanted
1:52:21
Speaker 2: to come and experience Africa. Whether it was someone with
1:52:25
Speaker 2: the almost limitless means that that Roosevelt had at that time,
1:52:30
Speaker 2: or you know, a British colonial officer, they would, you know,
1:52:35
Speaker 2: they'd need to engage the services of someone who could
1:52:38
Speaker 2: navigate that you know, deal with the very interact with
1:52:41
Speaker 2: the various tribes they were going to come across, you know,
1:52:44
Speaker 2: make sure that you know they were able to find
1:52:47
Speaker 2: the appropriate habitats where those species resided. And I think
1:52:51
Speaker 2: our industry's kind of always been that way. And I
1:52:54
Speaker 2: sort of get the discomfort that that a lot of
1:52:56
Speaker 2: people have with this notion that you can have a
1:52:59
Speaker 2: guy living on the edge of a game reserve but
1:53:01
Speaker 2: he's not allowed to hunt there.
1:53:03
Speaker 4: Like is that really Like if you you're a resident
1:53:05
Speaker 4: of Tanzania, you can resident there is no possible way
1:53:09
Speaker 4: for you to go legally get.
1:53:11
Speaker 5: We used to have resident hunting for all intents and
1:53:14
Speaker 5: purposes and no.
1:53:15
Speaker 2: But what I would say is that a lot of people,
1:53:18
Speaker 2: probably I don't know if a lot of people have
1:53:21
Speaker 2: thought about this, but I've thought about it quite a
1:53:23
Speaker 2: lot recently, having spent a lot of time in North America.
1:53:26
Speaker 2: Is I think the North American model is underpinned by
1:53:30
Speaker 2: something else other than sort of just the democratization of wildlife,
1:53:35
Speaker 2: and that is the sort of like presupposition that there's
1:53:38
Speaker 2: a large number of this people in this country that
1:53:41
Speaker 2: aren't living hand to mouth. Okay, r I fundamentally believe
1:53:45
Speaker 2: that the North American model wouldn't function in this country
1:53:51
Speaker 2: if sixty percent of the population of this country was
1:53:55
Speaker 2: living on a dollar a day and trying to figure
1:53:58
Speaker 2: out ways to feed them.
1:53:59
Speaker 4: Well, you know what actually up on that?
1:54:01
Speaker 3: No it didn't right, No, no, no, we weren't through that,
1:54:09
Speaker 3: absolutely absolutely, and they wipe the place clean, wipe the
1:54:11
Speaker 3: place clean, right and and and Africa and I speak,
1:54:15
Speaker 3: you know through the lens of Tanzania specifically, is still
1:54:19
Speaker 3: on that development trajectory where you know, there's a growing population,
1:54:23
Speaker 3: there's all this pressure, there's a huge.
1:54:25
Speaker 2: Number of people that are living on a really really
1:54:29
Speaker 2: hand to mouth existence, and you know, democratizing wildlife in
1:54:35
Speaker 2: with those under those circumstances would lead to I think
1:54:39
Speaker 2: like it's like the tragedy of the commons right where
1:54:42
Speaker 2: it's just like there's all this pressure of consumption on
1:54:46
Speaker 2: very limited resources. And also I would think if you
1:54:49
Speaker 2: I think if you spoke to the average Tanzania and
1:54:51
Speaker 2: like sport hunting isn't a high priority for them, just
1:54:54
Speaker 2: about the meat. It'd be about the meat. And so
1:54:56
Speaker 2: what what we do, what our objective is is a
1:54:59
Speaker 2: come is to basically extend those benefits to those communities,
1:55:06
Speaker 2: partner with those communities and allow those people that live
1:55:09
Speaker 2: on the edge of the gamers of Okay, they can't
1:55:11
Speaker 2: grab their bow and arrow draw, you know, apply for
1:55:13
Speaker 2: a tag and go in there and shoot a buffalo,
1:55:16
Speaker 2: but you know that there's meat coming back to their communities,
1:55:19
Speaker 2: there's employment coming back to their communities, there's things they
1:55:22
Speaker 2: need like clinic schools, et cetera, et cetera. So they're
1:55:26
Speaker 2: benefiting in an indirect sort of one degree removed from
1:55:31
Speaker 2: our operations as opposed to just sort of saying, well, hey,
1:55:35
Speaker 2: this resource is quite literally for everybody in the sense
1:55:39
Speaker 2: that it's accessible to you.
1:55:41
Speaker 4: So the wildlife isn't allocated, but some of the funding is.
1:55:45
Speaker 2: Some of the funding is allocated, definitely, And we couldn't
1:55:48
Speaker 2: do what we do without partnership with those communities. Right,
1:55:52
Speaker 2: Like if our model was role in their run rough
1:55:55
Speaker 2: shot over them, put up fences, keep them out, you know,
1:55:58
Speaker 2: have our anti poaching guy is you know, essentially you know,
1:56:02
Speaker 2: intimidating them to stay out of our area. It wouldn't
1:56:05
Speaker 2: work because they have more of them than there are
1:56:06
Speaker 2: us always going to be. So the only way that
1:56:10
Speaker 2: our model functions is if those communities feel that they're
1:56:15
Speaker 2: a stakeholder in this this model, that they're benefiting. And
1:56:22
Speaker 2: so that's really that's our biggest challenge and that's our
1:56:26
Speaker 2: that's our primary focus.
1:56:27
Speaker 5: I mean, America has a great system. I mean the
1:56:30
Speaker 5: tag system.
1:56:31
Speaker 2: It's the best in the world.
1:56:33
Speaker 5: I mean, I didn't ever understand.
1:56:37
Speaker 2: Un ironically it is, but there's some preconditions. I think
1:56:41
Speaker 2: that it's a great point. Randall and I are working
1:56:44
Speaker 2: on a project.
1:56:46
Speaker 4: We're working on a project about it'll be a it
1:56:50
Speaker 4: will be an audiobook, like an audio like a yeah,
1:56:53
Speaker 4: an audiobook.
1:56:53
Speaker 6: I imagine his title would be doctor Williams On that.
1:57:00
Speaker 2: We're working on. The first one we're doing is.
1:57:03
Speaker 4: A history of the of the deer, well what we call.
1:57:09
Speaker 2: The long hunters. If you've heard of a fella named
1:57:11
Speaker 2: Daniel Boone, oh yeah, he made his name for himself
1:57:14
Speaker 2: as a long hunter, but focused heavily on the deer
1:57:18
Speaker 2: trade in colonial America, interesting because they were in bad
1:57:22
Speaker 2: shape for a while.
1:57:23
Speaker 4: Oh and what you're talking about when you talk about
1:57:25
Speaker 4: like what about when everyone is in poverty? Right, how
1:57:29
Speaker 4: does the system? So there's so many things that in
1:57:33
Speaker 4: Randall's research that just the things that are brought to
1:57:38
Speaker 4: mind and talking to you about what goes on in
1:57:41
Speaker 4: Tanzania would be these like very early wild temptation attempts,
1:57:47
Speaker 4: not temptations, attempts at slowing the slaughter right from pot hunters,
1:57:54
Speaker 4: from professional poachers, of which you know Boone was essentially
1:57:57
Speaker 4: a professional poacher, meaning that if you didn't own land
1:58:03
Speaker 4: in a district, you weren't allowed to hunt interest, you
1:58:06
Speaker 4: weren't allowed to hunt somewhere where you didn't live nearby,
1:58:09
Speaker 4: like the European model.
1:58:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, and like.
1:58:10
Speaker 4: Trying to which no one paid attention to that, but
1:58:15
Speaker 4: like them trying to go like okay, how would you
1:58:17
Speaker 4: do something like this? And I couldn't believe on one
1:58:20
Speaker 4: of the first prohibitions on deer hunting was in the
1:58:22
Speaker 4: seventeen hundreds. Wh Yeah, there's going like what if we
1:58:25
Speaker 4: had a time a year? What if we had a
1:58:28
Speaker 4: time a year? And you can't hunt. And basically the response.
1:58:31
Speaker 2: Is yeah, I hope everybody else.
1:58:37
Speaker 4: But it was it was like like like sort of
1:58:40
Speaker 4: watching this young country to be going like, well, let's
1:58:45
Speaker 4: say you did want to save some of it, Like
1:58:49
Speaker 4: where do you begin, you know, with a bunch of ideas.
1:58:51
Speaker 2: It didn't hold. So what defines a long hunter? They
1:58:55
Speaker 2: went on some long ass hunter? Got it? Got it okay?
1:58:59
Speaker 6: They would only turn if they had enough meat to
1:59:02
Speaker 6: bring back.
1:59:03
Speaker 4: Wow, okay, And that's hide hunters. They were generally like deer.
1:59:07
Speaker 4: They were deer. They were hunting. Generally, they sold a
1:59:11
Speaker 4: lot of bush meat. Got it okay, They sold a
1:59:13
Speaker 4: lot of bush meat.
1:59:14
Speaker 2: But they were.
1:59:14
Speaker 4: Generally hunting hides, primarily white tail deer hides that would
1:59:20
Speaker 4: get exported to europe interests.
1:59:22
Speaker 10: And there's also the parallel of like global demand for
1:59:26
Speaker 10: commodities feeling excessive harvest, right like when you're talking about
1:59:32
Speaker 10: ivory trade, right like, in the commercial demand for those resources,
1:59:37
Speaker 10: there's like a bottomless demand for or an endless demand
1:59:41
Speaker 10: whatever you want to call it, for white tail deer
1:59:45
Speaker 10: skins to turn into leather for leather products.
1:59:48
Speaker 2: And it's just like from people that didn't really care
1:59:51
Speaker 2: how you got them, right, Yeah, as long as like
1:59:55
Speaker 2: you said you talked about earlier, like if you can
1:59:57
Speaker 2: get them to the port, that's good enough for me.
1:59:59
Speaker 5: Goo.
2:00:00
Speaker 2: The fascinating thing with North America to me is like
2:00:05
Speaker 2: the obviously those animal populations just just took a dive.
2:00:09
Speaker 2: I mean, I've heard about the in relation to turkeys
2:00:11
Speaker 2: and whitetailed deer in particular. But obviously the habitat was
2:00:16
Speaker 2: still there to enable that. Once once they had figured
2:00:20
Speaker 2: out through whatever like political or social means to put
2:00:23
Speaker 2: this structure to conserve these animals, set seasons, you limit harvest.
2:00:29
Speaker 2: Once that was in place, the animals were able to
2:00:31
Speaker 2: bounce back because that habitat was intact. Whereas what we
2:00:37
Speaker 2: face really is like Roger was talking about before that
2:00:42
Speaker 2: loss of habitat, and I think you said something once
2:00:44
Speaker 2: along the lines of like when you see someone building
2:00:47
Speaker 2: some sort of structure, you think in your head, well,
2:00:50
Speaker 2: that'll never be habitat again. And that's what that's what
2:00:54
Speaker 2: we deal with day and day out. Once that field
2:00:56
Speaker 2: of maize gets planted, once that tree gets once the
2:01:01
Speaker 2: you know, once all that's done, once those cattle are
2:01:03
Speaker 2: in there, that'll never be habitat again any of you.
2:01:06
Speaker 5: Want to. It's it's a fifteen to five year process
2:01:10
Speaker 5: to recreate something that's destroyed in six months.
2:01:13
Speaker 2: Well, and politically you go evict those people, which is
2:01:16
Speaker 2: a nightmare.
2:01:16
Speaker 4: There's one exception to my rule is my friend Matt
2:01:19
Speaker 4: Cook has a farm and there was a house on
2:01:21
Speaker 4: air and he the fire department came in and burned
2:01:24
Speaker 4: the house down like to do practice, and then he
2:01:27
Speaker 4: scraped up the foundation and they just planted over the.
2:01:31
Speaker 2: Top of the house.
2:01:33
Speaker 4: And every time you go through that area there is
2:01:36
Speaker 4: something hanging out sitting on the house.
2:01:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, I do. It's not really it's not really a
2:01:43
Speaker 2: scalable model. No.
2:01:45
Speaker 4: One time we go so one time you go buy
2:01:47
Speaker 4: it as a groundhog stand in their last time two
2:01:50
Speaker 4: times ago I went by it, there's a fox squirrel.
2:01:52
Speaker 2: Stand in there. And I'm not kidding you.
2:01:54
Speaker 4: We were just doing a fundraiser hunt there and the
2:01:56
Speaker 4: turkey that my like my fundraiser guy that I was
2:01:59
Speaker 4: guy helping the turkey that he killed. When I spotted
2:02:04
Speaker 4: that turkey, it was standing on.
2:02:06
Speaker 2: That place nice. So just that place to that guy.
2:02:10
Speaker 2: I often kind of have fantasies like driving the Paradise Valley,
2:02:13
Speaker 2: like maybe you could just scrape all this back.
2:02:19
Speaker 4: Like, let me choose my words very carefully. Had someone
2:02:24
Speaker 4: in eighteen hundred thought that they would just put a
2:02:28
Speaker 4: giant trailhead right alongside what would become High ninety and
2:02:34
Speaker 4: that was the trailhead for that for everything to the
2:02:38
Speaker 4: south of there, they would be they would be applauded today.
2:02:44
Speaker 2: You know that ain't gonna happen.
2:02:46
Speaker 4: I had some other point I was gonna make about
2:02:51
Speaker 4: what the hell are we talking about before I start
2:02:52
Speaker 4: talking about my buddy's place. Well, that habitat when it
2:02:54
Speaker 4: goes well, we've been we've mentioned Roosevelt a lot. Yeah,
2:02:59
Speaker 4: so we've been mentioning his safari sort of. You mentioned
2:03:03
Speaker 4: like the habitat was still there.
2:03:04
Speaker 2: Yeah.
2:03:06
Speaker 4: His his kind of genius at the time was it
2:03:12
Speaker 4: was just focused on basically preservation of preservation of habitat,
2:03:18
Speaker 4: right it was stopped, well, stop the slaughter, yeah, like
2:03:23
Speaker 4: stop unregulated slaughter and then save ground. Right, knowing that
2:03:30
Speaker 4: just the fecundity the biology of the animals, if you
2:03:34
Speaker 4: stop killing every last one of them and you save
2:03:37
Speaker 4: chunks of ground, it would kind of yah. Later later,
2:03:42
Speaker 4: much later, you know, in the fifties sixties, we started
2:03:46
Speaker 4: to really do a lot more around putting animals back
2:03:49
Speaker 4: on habitat right, you know, moving animals around, recovering stuff.
2:03:53
Speaker 4: But initially the conservation play in the US was, uh,
2:03:57
Speaker 4: stop commercial slaughter and put some kind of loss prevention
2:04:02
Speaker 4: in place on on habitat right. And then later we
2:04:06
Speaker 4: started like to fine tune through you know, all these
2:04:10
Speaker 4: restoration you know, not captive breeding and putting animals back up.
2:04:15
Speaker 4: But early on, man, it was like it was just
2:04:18
Speaker 4: those two things. And it's what kind of reminds me
2:04:20
Speaker 4: a little bit of what we're talking about here, is
2:04:23
Speaker 4: like what we're talking about that you guys see in
2:04:24
Speaker 4: Africa is like try to stop commercial slaughter, right, and
2:04:27
Speaker 4: then try to hang underground.
2:04:28
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah. South Africa went through a like a reintroduction phase. Well, yeah,
2:04:34
Speaker 2: because they privatized. They went a different direction to us.
2:04:37
Speaker 2: They privatized the kind of resource and so I think
2:04:40
Speaker 2: they went from something like four million head of game
2:04:44
Speaker 2: in the entire country to like twenty million in a
2:04:48
Speaker 2: couple of decades because essentially, you know, they became a
2:04:53
Speaker 2: market for you know, people to go over there and
2:04:55
Speaker 2: hunt or you know, do photo safaris or whatever it was.
2:04:59
Speaker 2: And and yeah, people started breeding game. Since they could
2:05:02
Speaker 2: own it, they could breed it. So they'd buy a
2:05:06
Speaker 2: couple or whatever and put them together and breed and
2:05:08
Speaker 2: then sell the excess and it sort of repopulated. I
2:05:11
Speaker 2: think it. You know, there's downsides to that model, a
2:05:14
Speaker 2: little bit, like you're talking about your shd antlers, right,
2:05:17
Speaker 2: there's a little something I think in a lot of
2:05:19
Speaker 2: people where knowing that animal is the sort of offspring
2:05:24
Speaker 2: of captive maybe takes a little bit of the little
2:05:28
Speaker 2: bit of the glass off it. It's certainly I wouldn't
2:05:33
Speaker 2: say I'm necessarily firmly in that camp, but like I
2:05:35
Speaker 2: feel that a little bit. You know. One of the
2:05:38
Speaker 2: great things about Tanzania is like you're hunting a wilderness
2:05:41
Speaker 2: that's kind of always been like that, and those animals
2:05:45
Speaker 2: are the descendants are the ones that Roosevelt hunted, you know.
2:05:49
Speaker 2: So there's that, But you can't argue with the success
2:05:53
Speaker 2: of that model from a just numbers of animals on
2:05:56
Speaker 2: the ground standpoint. It's a hugely successful.
2:05:59
Speaker 4: Model's got a question, Oh sorry, go ahead.
2:06:01
Speaker 5: So I was going to say, going back to the
2:06:02
Speaker 5: Roosevelt protecting the habitat thing. I think that's our biggest
2:06:07
Speaker 5: issue in Africa right now is like the population in
2:06:10
Speaker 5: Africa is already one point three billion people and it's
2:06:14
Speaker 5: set to basically double in the next twenty five years.
2:06:18
Speaker 5: So the pressure on land is just like it's never
2:06:21
Speaker 5: been before.
2:06:21
Speaker 2: You're not terily optimistic, are you.
2:06:23
Speaker 5: No, it's I mean everyone's so in the great world
2:06:27
Speaker 5: is anti hunting, especially African hunting. But we're preserving these
2:06:32
Speaker 5: huge wilderness areas that have so much pressure. And I
2:06:36
Speaker 5: would be totally forwadive. There were other forms of land
2:06:39
Speaker 5: use that could protect it, and the photo tourism has
2:06:43
Speaker 5: their areas, but none of those people want to go
2:06:46
Speaker 5: to the places we hunt. It needs something to protect
2:06:50
Speaker 5: those areas, and at the moment, we're the answer. And
2:06:53
Speaker 5: until someone comes up with something else, people need to
2:06:56
Speaker 5: realize how important what we do is.
2:06:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's that huge temptation to like say, well, just
2:07:01
Speaker 2: swap the gun for the camera, right, and then there's
2:07:05
Speaker 2: no killing, there's no you know, it's then it's all
2:07:09
Speaker 2: quote unquote sustainable. The issue with that is Tanzania already
2:07:15
Speaker 2: has I think on the mainland, like I think it's
2:07:18
Speaker 2: fourteen or sixteen national parks, and I think three or
2:07:23
Speaker 2: four of them generate enough revenue from visitors to basically
2:07:27
Speaker 2: cover all those costs that we talked about, like having
2:07:30
Speaker 2: guys patrol the boundaries, having guys work with the local
2:07:33
Speaker 2: communities to kind of encourage you know, participation but not encroachment,
2:07:41
Speaker 2: and the rest of them, you know, and the government's
2:07:45
Speaker 2: doing their best, but again, resources are tight. It's a
2:07:48
Speaker 2: country that's trying to develop, trying to create more opportunities
2:07:51
Speaker 2: for their people. Resources are tight. So a lot of
2:07:53
Speaker 2: those areas that are ostensibly you know, for photographic tourism
2:07:57
Speaker 2: are just not in good shape. They're not adding the
2:08:01
Speaker 2: visitors to sort of cover the costs of managing those areas.
2:08:05
Speaker 2: And I can tell you a photo tourist isn't going
2:08:08
Speaker 2: to follow tracks of Buffalo for eight or ten hours
2:08:11
Speaker 2: a day and the baking hot sun pushing through thorn
2:08:14
Speaker 2: bushes to get a grainy image of the ars end
2:08:16
Speaker 2: of one direction. But hunters will do that all day
2:08:20
Speaker 2: long and pay for the privilege. So we have a
2:08:23
Speaker 2: different and while getting bitten by tetsiflies and you know,
2:08:27
Speaker 2: dodging snakes, I mean, we it's just a different it's
2:08:31
Speaker 2: a different client hell for a different product. But that
2:08:35
Speaker 2: ecosystem that has the low game density, the sandy soil
2:08:39
Speaker 2: and the Tetsi flies is no less valid of an
2:08:43
Speaker 2: ecosystem and no less important for sustaining certain species than
2:08:47
Speaker 2: the Serengeti is in my view. Kel's got a question
2:08:50
Speaker 2: for you.
2:08:51
Speaker 6: Oh I that was a beautiful statement. Linger a little bit.
2:08:56
Speaker 2: Yeah.
2:08:56
Speaker 6: Absolutely, habitat, man, it's all habitat it is. And one
2:09:00
Speaker 6: of the greatest things about hunting is the fact that
2:09:03
Speaker 6: a lot of people go to New York State, but
2:09:07
Speaker 6: they don't go to the parts of New York State
2:09:08
Speaker 6: that I go to, right, or swap that out for
2:09:12
Speaker 6: Montana or Maryland or wherever. It just takes you off
2:09:17
Speaker 6: of the tourist map, and it's it's a ultimately, in
2:09:22
Speaker 6: my mind, a much more real experience, right.
2:09:24
Speaker 2: Oh big time. I mean the thing that I say
2:09:26
Speaker 2: to people that it's like kind of become a little
2:09:29
Speaker 2: bit of something I repeat again and again. But safari,
2:09:33
Speaker 2: the word safari doesn't mean hunting trip. There's a word
2:09:37
Speaker 2: for hunting in Swahili. It's quinda, which I also think
2:09:39
Speaker 2: kind of rolls off the tongue to be honest, but
2:09:42
Speaker 2: that wasn't selected as the word to describe what we do.
2:09:45
Speaker 2: Safari was and what Safari means is journey, and people forget,
2:09:51
Speaker 2: like again to Roger's previous point about you know us
2:09:54
Speaker 2: sort of getting labeled and todd with this trophy hunter brush.
2:09:57
Speaker 2: People you know, just imagine in their mind's eye a
2:10:02
Speaker 2: bunch of kind of out of shape guys driving around
2:10:05
Speaker 2: on a truck indiscriminately shooting animals. But Safari is so
2:10:09
Speaker 2: much more than that, and it's exactly what you say.
2:10:11
Speaker 2: It's that connection with those wild places. It's the it's
2:10:15
Speaker 2: the adventure, It's it's the drama of it. I mean,
2:10:18
Speaker 2: you know, hopefully not as dramatic as what Roger that's
2:10:23
Speaker 2: the high drama. I like to keep things a little
2:10:25
Speaker 2: more mellow, but you know, it's it's it's the drama.
2:10:29
Speaker 2: It's the success, it's the failure. It's the sunrises, the sunsets,
2:10:32
Speaker 2: it's the sounds, the I mean, you know, on the
2:10:36
Speaker 2: last Safari I was on, we bumped into this giant python,
2:10:41
Speaker 2: like thirteen foot long and as thick as my thigh,
2:10:44
Speaker 2: and it was just it was so cool, you know,
2:10:46
Speaker 2: we we just we talked about that around the campfire
2:10:49
Speaker 2: and nothing got killed that day, you know, but we
2:10:53
Speaker 2: sat around the campfire, we're just like, I mean, my
2:10:56
Speaker 2: trackers stepped nearly stepped on its head and it's sort
2:10:58
Speaker 2: of reared up, and it was it was incredible, And yeah,
2:11:02
Speaker 2: we talked about it around the cap fire for hours
2:11:04
Speaker 2: and it was just like one of those things where
2:11:06
Speaker 2: you realize, like, that's Safari.
2:11:08
Speaker 5: It's the escape as well. It's like a lot of
2:11:11
Speaker 5: our clients say there's there's nowhere else in the world
2:11:13
Speaker 5: that they truly just switch off from everything apart from
2:11:17
Speaker 5: being out tracking buffalo.
2:11:20
Speaker 6: In big wild spaces. That's it's hard to get that elsewhere.
2:11:25
Speaker 6: I do have to ask you this one thing. It's
2:11:29
Speaker 6: not nearly as romantic and fun of as of the
2:11:32
Speaker 6: things we've been talking about, but what you have to
2:11:36
Speaker 6: go through to be a professional hunter as it is
2:11:40
Speaker 6: a profession, right, And then what is your response to
2:11:46
Speaker 6: people in North America who casually respond to themselves or
2:11:49
Speaker 6: refer to themselves rather as professional hunters.
2:11:54
Speaker 2: It's a subtle dig at Steve Vanilla, this guy I
2:12:02
Speaker 2: talk a lot.
2:12:02
Speaker 4: It is recorded. I want you to find where I've
2:12:04
Speaker 4: ever said.
2:12:05
Speaker 2: That, No, I think other people have said it about you.
2:12:10
Speaker 2: I'm being very facetious. It's it's it's a brotherhood. So
2:12:15
Speaker 2: I'm not in the business of of kind of dunking
2:12:19
Speaker 2: on other people talking, yeah, ship talking people that make
2:12:22
Speaker 2: their living, you know, guiding, you know whatever, doing whatever
2:12:28
Speaker 2: it is that they do that kind of allows them
2:12:30
Speaker 2: to refer to themselves that way.
2:12:32
Speaker 4: I had a professional shan Antler hunter around the podcast recently.
2:12:36
Speaker 2: Really, that is that I'm gonna have to think about it.
2:12:41
Speaker 2: I'm going to think it was as I'm gonna have
2:12:44
Speaker 2: to think about that one for a while because I'm
2:12:46
Speaker 2: still I'm still a little bit professional mushroom hunter.
2:12:49
Speaker 5: I guess, yeah, you do enough of anything, you become
2:12:52
Speaker 5: a professional for sure.
2:12:55
Speaker 2: And I mean ours is our our industry has got
2:12:57
Speaker 2: a little bit more of a sort of formal thing
2:13:00
Speaker 2: to it. But there are guys that will look at
2:13:03
Speaker 2: the kind of apprenticeship I've done, which some of it
2:13:06
Speaker 2: has been like a little bit self taught. Others have
2:13:08
Speaker 2: been really just following around you know these again incredible hunters.
2:13:13
Speaker 2: And going back to you know, Roger's comment that his
2:13:16
Speaker 2: brother chewed him out for not carrying his rifle. His
2:13:19
Speaker 2: brother Derek was like an early mentor to me getting
2:13:23
Speaker 2: into the business, and that was one of the first
2:13:24
Speaker 2: things he ever said to me. He's like, listen, when
2:13:26
Speaker 2: you get off the truck, doesn't matter if you're going
2:13:28
Speaker 2: to take a piss or. You're going to go check
2:13:30
Speaker 2: a water hole real quick, see if there's some tracks there.
2:13:33
Speaker 2: Grab that rifle, put you know, put around in it.
2:13:36
Speaker 2: And and that's that's the other thing. You always have
2:13:39
Speaker 2: a loaded rifle. There's no point carrying your rifle around
2:13:41
Speaker 2: of it doesn't have a bullet in the Yeah, this
2:13:44
Speaker 2: this rule applies to the client as well, by the way,
2:13:46
Speaker 2: But but stuff like that, you know, getting the opportunity
2:13:49
Speaker 2: to sit with those guys, another guy, Danny McCallum, who's
2:13:52
Speaker 2: one of the greats. You know, getting the opportunity to
2:13:54
Speaker 2: sit down with Danny and just pick his brain about stuff,
2:13:58
Speaker 2: you know, getting the opportunity to be on safari with
2:14:00
Speaker 2: some of these you know, these top hunters. Was it
2:14:02
Speaker 2: was a big deal for me. And then you know,
2:14:05
Speaker 2: ultimately going through my exams and all the rest of it.
2:14:08
Speaker 2: But I think.
2:14:10
Speaker 6: Exams accreditation, Yeah.
2:14:12
Speaker 2: There was a formal component to it that's against the Bible.
2:14:19
Speaker 2: I mean, and I'm not necessarily anchoring it to that
2:14:22
Speaker 2: there's a formal component to it for us, but yeah,
2:14:25
Speaker 2: I mean, I think.
2:14:27
Speaker 6: And then there's something where somebody adorns you with a
2:14:31
Speaker 6: break action rifle, a double rifle of some sort, but.
2:14:36
Speaker 4: You got to you got to carry it over your shoulder.
2:14:38
Speaker 6: I was in the camp one time when a guy
2:14:40
Speaker 6: was eyeballing me. I was guiding, and he said, uh,
2:14:46
Speaker 6: when are you going to get rid of that bolt
2:14:48
Speaker 6: trash and get yourself a real rifle, meaning a double rifle.
2:14:56
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's definitely a very split camp in the professional
2:14:59
Speaker 5: hunting world on bolt versus.
2:15:02
Speaker 2: We're double men firmly in that you guys do the
2:15:05
Speaker 2: little bit tradition, the big doubles. Yeah we do. We
2:15:09
Speaker 2: both do, Yeah, Rogers.
2:15:10
Speaker 5: But it's a question of is two shots better than
2:15:14
Speaker 5: potentially three shots? Is what it comes down to. We
2:15:18
Speaker 5: can get two shots so faster a bolt action guy
2:15:20
Speaker 5: can maybe get the third.
2:15:22
Speaker 6: You can miss twice real fast.
2:15:23
Speaker 2: Yeah. One of my again, one of my mental might
2:15:26
Speaker 2: have been. It might have been. Derek also said to me,
2:15:29
Speaker 2: you know, when you're shooting that double rifle, if something
2:15:32
Speaker 2: comes you know, by all means, when you first see it,
2:15:36
Speaker 2: fire that first barrel, but hold on to that second
2:15:39
Speaker 2: barrel until you can't miss till till the end of
2:15:41
Speaker 2: there you're touching.
2:15:44
Speaker 4: It's you know, I'm assuming both of you guys have
2:15:47
Speaker 4: had to shoot charge and.
2:15:47
Speaker 5: Stuff yep a few times.
2:15:51
Speaker 2: Like every year, thing, every decade, it varies. I will
2:15:56
Speaker 2: say this, A lot is made of the danger element
2:16:02
Speaker 2: of what we do. And it's there, you know Roger's
2:16:05
Speaker 2: situation as a classic example that had to gone differently.
2:16:09
Speaker 2: You know, two little boys are growing up without a dad.
2:16:13
Speaker 2: You know the dangers there, and we'll we'll put our
2:16:16
Speaker 2: lives on on the line for our clients, like Roger demonstrated.
2:16:20
Speaker 2: But I consider with with some exceptions, right, there's always
2:16:26
Speaker 2: edge cases, but I generally consider a charge to be
2:16:29
Speaker 2: the result of a screw up from either the professional
2:16:32
Speaker 2: hunter or the client.
2:16:33
Speaker 6: Well, that one game made a whole video series about
2:16:35
Speaker 6: getting charged by everything in Africa over and over and
2:16:38
Speaker 6: over again.
2:16:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, we we don't, we don't operate that way, and
2:16:42
Speaker 2: I'll just leave it at that. But but I think
2:16:45
Speaker 2: the bottom line for me is a charge is a
2:16:47
Speaker 2: highly undesirable situation. The buffalo hunt or the lion hunt
2:16:52
Speaker 2: or the leopard hunt that you will remember and that
2:16:55
Speaker 2: will make you smile every time you think about it.
2:16:59
Speaker 2: Is exactly like the deer hunt, the bear hunt, the
2:17:01
Speaker 2: elk hunt. And that's the one where you make a
2:17:03
Speaker 2: great stalk, you get close to your quarry and you
2:17:06
Speaker 2: make a clean, you know, proper kill, proper shot that
2:17:10
Speaker 2: results in a clean kill on that animal, and then
2:17:13
Speaker 2: you're able to enjoy that that wonderful moment of sitting
2:17:16
Speaker 2: there with your animal, whether it's a meat animal or
2:17:19
Speaker 2: or a trophy animal or you know, obviously both in
2:17:23
Speaker 2: ninety nine point nine percent of cases, and you and
2:17:26
Speaker 2: you can just, you know, you can really enjoy that.
2:17:28
Speaker 2: That is what you come to Africa for, not to
2:17:30
Speaker 2: be attacked by things.
2:17:31
Speaker 5: And the biggest part of the biggest part of our
2:17:34
Speaker 5: apprenticeship is really teaching you how to not get yourself.
2:17:39
Speaker 5: It's about teaching your caution and not just going, you know,
2:17:43
Speaker 5: guns blazing into a situation.
2:17:44
Speaker 4: Sure, I mean, I tell you, I you know, I've
2:17:48
Speaker 4: always kind of wanted to I've always kind of wanted
2:17:51
Speaker 4: to go to Africa, and we've even looked at it
2:17:53
Speaker 4: when we were filming a lot of shows we've even
2:17:55
Speaker 4: at times kicked it around.
2:17:58
Speaker 2: But after having you guys doing, man, I want to
2:18:00
Speaker 2: go so bad and hunt keep buffalo, make it happen.
2:18:04
Speaker 2: Let's make it happen. It's I just want nothing like it.
2:18:08
Speaker 2: It's just really different. It's really different to love to
2:18:12
Speaker 2: check it out. Yeah, it's I think there's a reason why,
2:18:17
Speaker 2: you know, Africas sort of held this place in people's
2:18:20
Speaker 2: imaginations for a long time. And you know, obviously you
2:18:24
Speaker 2: know there's that danger element and so on and so forth.
2:18:26
Speaker 2: But again it goes back to my previous point about
2:18:29
Speaker 2: all those things that make up Safari, like what Safari is,
2:18:33
Speaker 2: that's what sticks with people. You guys really sold me
2:18:35
Speaker 2: on the Tanzania deal too, because like the wilderness aspect, man, well, interest,
2:18:40
Speaker 2: in my opinion, Tanzania is, you know, the greatest game
2:18:43
Speaker 2: field left on Earth, you know. And I get that's
2:18:46
Speaker 2: sort of a controversial thing to say. And I don't
2:18:49
Speaker 2: mean to sort of start a comparison my body Matt
2:18:52
Speaker 2: Cook's place. Yeah, yeah, I don't, and I don't mean
2:18:59
Speaker 2: to like start up sort of pissing match, but well.
2:19:01
Speaker 6: Species, how many species on the the.
2:19:06
Speaker 5: Oh, well between between all different hunting areas. There's a
2:19:09
Speaker 5: there's about thirty three different species of animals you can
2:19:14
Speaker 5: game animal.
2:19:14
Speaker 6: Yeah, out of one camp, how what's the variety of.
2:19:19
Speaker 2: Probably twenty in any given Yeah.
2:19:22
Speaker 4: But I'm not looking, man, I'm very I want to
2:19:25
Speaker 4: be very targeted being I'm not looking to be like, oh,
2:19:27
Speaker 4: that's what one of them is.
2:19:28
Speaker 6: But there's no.
2:19:31
Speaker 2: Want to be like, well, what's that? What's that?
2:19:34
Speaker 4: Well there is, but they kind of sold me on Yeah,
2:19:37
Speaker 4: they I don't know to put words your mouth, these
2:19:39
Speaker 4: guys really like tracking those Kate buffalo and they kind
2:19:42
Speaker 4: of sold me on that as being sort of like the.
2:19:44
Speaker 6: And when you're on that, there's just less uh sight
2:19:48
Speaker 6: seeing opportunity.
2:19:49
Speaker 2: It consumes. But there you'll you'll bump into stuff that
2:19:53
Speaker 2: you know, it'll be a particularly nice specimen or whatever.
2:19:55
Speaker 2: While you're tracking buffalo or when you're heading back to
2:19:59
Speaker 2: camp or whatever, you'll pins of stuff. And there's definitely species.
2:20:02
Speaker 5: There's a list of species that are what we call
2:20:05
Speaker 5: real hunts. So you're not just going to see one
2:20:09
Speaker 5: driving around.
2:20:10
Speaker 6: You know, I grew up guiding in eastern Montana for antelope,
2:20:14
Speaker 6: and people got so distracted by all the other stuff
2:20:17
Speaker 6: that you could do that, it became very challenging to
2:20:20
Speaker 6: kill an antelope, which at the time was not hard
2:20:23
Speaker 6: to do, but it was like, well, I want to
2:20:26
Speaker 6: chase those birds or chase those rabbits or you know,
2:20:29
Speaker 6: and all the distraction things. So I know that in
2:20:32
Speaker 6: order to be successful, it's something you really have to.
2:20:36
Speaker 6: If I were to go all the way to Africa,
2:20:38
Speaker 6: I would also just want to be able to be like,
2:20:41
Speaker 6: holy shit, there's that thing that I've only seen in
2:20:43
Speaker 6: the book. Oh my god, look at that.
2:20:46
Speaker 4: They said you will see lions and tracking the track
2:20:49
Speaker 4: in the Buffalo.
2:20:50
Speaker 5: Quite often there, we'll say tracking the belt, you will.
2:20:53
Speaker 4: See lions, you'll see elephants, you'll see war hogs, all
2:20:58
Speaker 4: this kind of junk.
2:20:58
Speaker 3: Man.
2:20:58
Speaker 2: Yeah, you'll see it. You'll just see it around. I mean,
2:21:00
Speaker 2: when you're driving around in the area, you'll see it.
2:21:02
Speaker 2: And man, some of those animals are good to eat. Yeah,
2:21:06
Speaker 2: but it's a really it also sounds like a track,
2:21:08
Speaker 2: and it sounds like a real grind. You put some
2:21:09
Speaker 2: big miles.
2:21:10
Speaker 6: On it, the track sounds phenomenal, Like you guys do.
2:21:13
Speaker 2: Some ten miles.
2:21:14
Speaker 4: You guys do some ten mile sessions easily.
2:21:16
Speaker 5: Yeah, easily, and it will be seven to ten miles.
2:21:20
Speaker 2: And that ulfalo, you know, snorting at you, I can't
2:21:24
Speaker 2: even see it.
2:21:25
Speaker 6: You consistently have the clientele that is willing to show
2:21:29
Speaker 6: up and walk seven to ten miles a day.
2:21:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, we tell them.
2:21:33
Speaker 5: I mean you have to judge the client and sometimes,
2:21:36
Speaker 5: you know, I've had a eighty three year old on
2:21:39
Speaker 5: safari and it reaches a stage where you've just got
2:21:42
Speaker 5: to cool it.
2:21:43
Speaker 2: Just different, itinerary.
2:21:44
Speaker 10: But yeah, you always bring the bag of em and
2:21:46
Speaker 10: M's right, yeah exactly.
2:21:47
Speaker 5: I always have.
2:21:50
Speaker 2: Already. Yeah, I could have bought those at home.
2:21:55
Speaker 5: The cliff bars, there are.
2:21:57
Speaker 2: Some source of energy. Yeah, yeah, it's I mean, you know,
2:22:01
Speaker 2: every buffalo hunt's different. But I think Roger and I
2:22:05
Speaker 2: feel the same way as like as probably you guys do.
2:22:08
Speaker 2: The you're driving down the track and there's one standing
2:22:11
Speaker 2: off to the side of the road, even if it's
2:22:13
Speaker 2: a real big one, it's like, you got to track them.
2:22:18
Speaker 2: You've got to track them. It's got to be proper,
2:22:20
Speaker 2: it's got to be done right. There's no and there
2:22:23
Speaker 2: is hardly ever an easy buffon.
2:22:25
Speaker 5: And that's what's so beautiful about them is it's it's
2:22:27
Speaker 5: always an adventure, and I don't know. I always people say,
2:22:31
Speaker 5: how could you liken it to hunting in North America?
2:22:36
Speaker 5: And I think from what I hear, I think elk
2:22:39
Speaker 5: hunting is probably the nearest thing. But they're not in
2:22:42
Speaker 5: a huge danger element of adrenaline and excitement on top
2:22:46
Speaker 5: of it being a huge challenge in a beautiful wilderness.
2:22:50
Speaker 2: And what's what's tipped horn tip? The horn tip size
2:22:52
Speaker 2: on those things, well, it varies.
2:22:55
Speaker 5: It can vary from as wide as its head like
2:22:58
Speaker 5: the one that hit me to forty five inches.
2:23:02
Speaker 10: Wow.
2:23:02
Speaker 2: For us, the trophy is an old one. Your trophies
2:23:06
Speaker 2: a nali one, the gnaria the better. Like if I
2:23:10
Speaker 2: if I could only shoot one buffalo in my life
2:23:12
Speaker 2: and it was like that one that got rodged with,
2:23:17
Speaker 2: I'd be psyched. I'd be happy to have that on
2:23:20
Speaker 2: my wall. I'd be absolutely thrilled.
2:23:22
Speaker 6: Little chunk of Rogers collar bone.
2:23:24
Speaker 2: Stuff, that's an added bonus. But yeah, that you know,
2:23:29
Speaker 2: a trophy is in the kind of the eye of
2:23:32
Speaker 2: the beholder, you know, as long as it's old. I mean,
2:23:37
Speaker 2: I've shot some buffalo that's horns are barely as white
2:23:39
Speaker 2: as there is. But I was yeah, or or just
2:23:43
Speaker 2: he was small. He's just a small buffalo, just like
2:23:46
Speaker 2: you get a small elk, Like you're just a small buffalo,
2:23:48
Speaker 2: never going to get any bigger. That's just how it
2:23:50
Speaker 2: was how he was made.
2:23:51
Speaker 5: Rick By started this award they called the Dugger Boy Award,
2:23:55
Speaker 5: which in my opinion is probably the best hunting award
2:23:59
Speaker 5: that I've ever heard of. And the criteria of how
2:24:03
Speaker 5: they judge it is not based on the size of
2:24:06
Speaker 5: the animal. It's it's all about the age and how
2:24:10
Speaker 5: hard a hunt. It was like four or five factors,
2:24:13
Speaker 5: but it's nothing to do with the the inches. It
2:24:16
Speaker 5: is just to do with age and how physical or
2:24:18
Speaker 5: difficult it was to achieve. So what made it so memorable?
2:24:23
Speaker 5: And it's Yeah, it's amazing. I think it's a great idea.
2:24:27
Speaker 2: Guy should get a high score. I'm hoping it's his
2:24:30
Speaker 2: only chance. His dad's a judge, so the only way
2:24:35
Speaker 2: for him to win is getting that one. I think
2:24:39
Speaker 2: I think you can go with.
2:24:41
Speaker 5: Case with that one.
2:24:42
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think if I was Africa, how would hire
2:24:47
Speaker 2: you guys to go around?
2:24:48
Speaker 5: Like?
2:24:48
Speaker 2: Given the spiel? Well, Americans, I mean, we will talk
2:24:56
Speaker 2: to anyone who listen about what we do because we
2:24:59
Speaker 2: I would say, a from the privilege of getting to
2:25:03
Speaker 2: do what I do and be with those trackers, be
2:25:06
Speaker 2: with those like minded people, your clients, some phenomenal clients
2:25:10
Speaker 2: over the years that I would say my mission if
2:25:13
Speaker 2: I had to like define it, and I know, like
2:25:16
Speaker 2: it's a sort of it's very American thing to like
2:25:19
Speaker 2: talk about your mission, but I'm going I'm gonna get
2:25:20
Speaker 2: on board with that. And my mission, I would say,
2:25:23
Speaker 2: is to change people's perception of what our industry is about,
2:25:28
Speaker 2: because I think we've we've labored under we've sort of
2:25:31
Speaker 2: had this albatross around our neck of like like edge cases,
2:25:36
Speaker 2: like people like to focus I think it's like a
2:25:38
Speaker 2: human nature thing. People like to focus on like edge
2:25:41
Speaker 2: cases and use them as an example of why a
2:25:44
Speaker 2: whole system is just irreparably like not gonna work. I
2:25:49
Speaker 2: do that every day, Yeah, I mean we all do.
2:25:51
Speaker 2: It's like it's like an easy it's an easy path
2:25:53
Speaker 2: to go down, but inspier Ball a famous el go
2:26:00
Speaker 2: from there to whatever. Yeah, But for us, you know,
2:26:03
Speaker 2: I think our industry, we can honestly say that wildlife
2:26:09
Speaker 2: in Tanzania is better off for it than without it,
2:26:13
Speaker 2: and that's all that's going to come down to soon
2:26:16
Speaker 2: with all you know, all the pressure that's coming from
2:26:18
Speaker 2: population growth and everything else, it's going to be just
2:26:21
Speaker 2: come down to that.
2:26:23
Speaker 5: Yeah, And it's a passion like for us, it's it's
2:26:26
Speaker 5: really none of us are in it as. You don't
2:26:29
Speaker 5: sign up to be a professional hunter to make a
2:26:32
Speaker 5: lot of money. You do it because you care about
2:26:35
Speaker 5: these wilderness areas. I mean, we've got areas that we've
2:26:38
Speaker 5: taken care of for forty five years and you know,
2:26:42
Speaker 5: you have a bond with these places that is second
2:26:46
Speaker 5: to nothing, and a lot of it. You know, you
2:26:49
Speaker 5: can tell we're both pretty passionate about it. But it's
2:26:51
Speaker 5: it's our responsibility to try and educate people on some
2:26:54
Speaker 5: of the realities in Africa, what it's like on the
2:26:58
Speaker 5: ground that you might not realize living somewhere in the
2:27:01
Speaker 5: United States, for example.
2:27:02
Speaker 2: You guys do a good job of it.
2:27:04
Speaker 4: I'm gonna start to go fund me be called Steve
2:27:06
Speaker 4: Goes Hunt in Africa. Then, you know, I wish we
2:27:09
Speaker 4: were playing trivia because I bet we beat you guys bad,
2:27:11
Speaker 4: because you wouldn't know all the.
2:27:12
Speaker 2: Americas North America thrash US if a.
2:27:16
Speaker 4: Trivia show right now and a lot of them like
2:27:18
Speaker 4: what river.
2:27:22
Speaker 2: You guys, so we get we get.
2:27:27
Speaker 6: I mean if there was a question of like name
2:27:29
Speaker 6: these five antelope species and I'd be like, oh boy.
2:27:33
Speaker 2: We might have to go.
2:27:35
Speaker 4: It makes me realize how American our trivia game is
2:27:38
Speaker 4: very American bad.
2:27:41
Speaker 2: That makes sense.
2:27:42
Speaker 4: But we're gonna you know what, we're launching our trivia,
2:27:45
Speaker 4: our trivia, We're launching a trivia board game.
2:27:47
Speaker 2: Nice and see.
2:27:49
Speaker 4: Here's the long Let me give you a little insight
2:27:51
Speaker 4: into the into board the board game world. What you
2:27:54
Speaker 4: do is you launch board game and then you and
2:27:57
Speaker 4: then every year you have actual expansion pack. So like
2:28:03
Speaker 4: we can't decide if our first expansion expansion pack would
2:28:06
Speaker 4: be like the White Tail expansion pack, the Waterfoul expansion pack.
2:28:11
Speaker 4: We'll consult with you guys down the road and we'll
2:28:14
Speaker 4: do the Safari Expansion pack or whatever that word is
2:28:16
Speaker 4: you had, yeah, Kuinda, And then people that have like
2:28:21
Speaker 4: a little have some curiosity about African big game could
2:28:26
Speaker 4: buy that expansion pack and it'd be like they could
2:28:29
Speaker 4: mix it in and they have all these questions like
2:28:30
Speaker 4: what you're talking about.
2:28:31
Speaker 2: And then we'll come back on and do trivia and
2:28:33
Speaker 2: it'll be will be a little more even.
2:28:37
Speaker 4: If we drop from that deck. Another expansion pack we
2:28:40
Speaker 4: talked about was like mountain Men and Frontiersman expansion pack.
2:28:45
Speaker 4: But I don't know, if you come up with enough questions.
2:28:47
Speaker 2: We can throw in some cool stuff about like some
2:28:50
Speaker 2: of those early Africa guys like this guy F. C.
2:28:52
Speaker 2: Salou for example, just to just a wild man, just
2:28:55
Speaker 2: to have that no Americans give. Yeah, but some American
2:28:58
Speaker 2: I mean again, if they've read, if they've read about
2:29:01
Speaker 2: the Roosevelt Safari, they'll know who F. C. Salu is.
2:29:04
Speaker 2: Really Yeah, they'll know that guy's name, and they should.
2:29:07
Speaker 2: Everyone should.
2:29:08
Speaker 4: I got one last question, pith helmets mandatory.
2:29:14
Speaker 2: Anymore? Definitely not.
2:29:18
Speaker 5: I have had one client get off a carelem plane
2:29:22
Speaker 5: with his socks pulled up, his hunting jacket and that
2:29:27
Speaker 5: he was a writer, to be fair, so he was
2:29:29
Speaker 5: trying to recreate this feel he wanted to feel it
2:29:32
Speaker 5: from the beginning.
2:29:33
Speaker 2: To hes a method writer. I dig it, I honestly
2:29:39
Speaker 2: I did. I've got a lot of admiration for that
2:29:41
Speaker 2: guy that that takes balls.
2:29:44
Speaker 7: Launch instead of like a regular trucker cap We should
2:29:48
Speaker 7: have a.
2:29:51
Speaker 2: Some of the Zimbarbiean professional hunters laugh at me for
2:29:54
Speaker 2: wearing boots. So I think a pith helmet is going
2:29:57
Speaker 2: to be like a non starter. Well, I'll look it
2:30:02
Speaker 2: up later.
2:30:02
Speaker 4: Still, I'm not quite clear of why they wore them.
2:30:05
Speaker 4: Was that sun protection?
2:30:06
Speaker 5: Shade?
2:30:08
Speaker 2: Sun protection? I don't think it's gonna stop a bullet?
2:30:11
Speaker 4: No, No, all right, Robin Hurt Safaris, that's the place.
2:30:18
Speaker 4: Don't call down there until I get my situation squared away.
2:30:23
Speaker 2: Have a thing on the web to just shut the
2:30:25
Speaker 2: website down. Yeah, just a few days until I get
2:30:27
Speaker 2: my situations will and we will hold something for you.
2:30:30
Speaker 2: We'll hold something for you, dude, I want to go
2:30:32
Speaker 2: so bad. Man. All right, what are you thinking? Phil?
2:30:35
Speaker 5: You in?
2:30:36
Speaker 2: Is this my official invite? Well, let's even get that
2:30:39
Speaker 2: editing pulled together. Turn it around on the Edits all
2:30:44
Speaker 2: depends on how the next couple of weeks go. It sounds. Yeah,
2:30:47
Speaker 2: all right, guys, thanks so much for coming on. Man,
2:30:49
Speaker 2: this is great, Thanks.
2:30:50
Speaker 5: Thanks for having us.
2:30:50
Speaker 9: Yeah, go on.
2:31:02
Speaker 4: On the seal Brey, shine like silver in the sun.
2:31:13
Speaker 9: Ride, Ride, Ride on along, sweetheart. We're done.
2:31:22
Speaker 2: Beat this damn horse to death. Taking a new one.
2:31:28
Speaker 2: Ride away. We're done beat this damn
2:31:34
Speaker 4: Horse today, so take your new one and ride on.