Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 584: Are Governor’s Tags Un-American?
Transcript
- 0:08Speaker 1: This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
- 0:13Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listeningcast. You can't
- 0:18Speaker 1: predict any ofthing. The meat Eater Podcast is brought to
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- 0:34Speaker 1: T L I t E dot com. Hey Steve, calling
- 0:41Speaker 1: in from Alaska. I'm here to announce that the latest
- 0:46Speaker 1: volume of me Eaters Campfire Stories is available now. This
- 0:49Speaker 1: volume is called Discoveries, Revelations and Near Misses. So the
- 0:54Speaker 1: volume is a little twist on our normal format, like
- 0:57Speaker 1: it includes all of those uh your death escapes in
- 1:01Speaker 1: the wild that really define our for other two volumes
- 1:04Speaker 1: of Meat Eaters Campfire Stories, but this includes something added
- 1:07Speaker 1: and special, which is a few stories about life changing
- 1:11Speaker 1: discoveries and revelations in the wild. The one you're gonna
- 1:15Speaker 1: hear at the end of this podcast involves a guy
- 1:19Speaker 1: whose friends refer to him as black Cloud Bob because
- 1:24Speaker 1: this guy has a cloud of bad luck that follows him.
- 1:28Speaker 1: And this story you're gonna hear is like a terrible
- 1:32Speaker 1: near death experience that kind of bleeds into another terrible
- 1:37Speaker 1: near death experience to make sort of like a duplex
- 1:42Speaker 1: of near death experiences. It's a horrendous story and it's
- 1:45Speaker 1: at the end of the podcast. You'll listen to that.
- 1:48Speaker 1: If you enjoy, you can go anywhere audio books are
- 1:52Speaker 1: sold and get your latest volume of Meat Eaters Campfire Stories.
- 1:58Speaker 1: I hope you enjoy. All right. We're recording from the
- 2:10Speaker 1: Meat Eater Flagship store in downtown bos Of, Montana, and
- 2:12Speaker 1: I am right below the Buffalo skull that now has
- 2:15Speaker 1: its sign stick finger here. People have been sticking their
- 2:22Speaker 1: finger in that hole mark have you I have not yet.
- 2:25Speaker 2: You're worried it's gonna get all greasy and dirty there, No.
- 2:29Speaker 1: What I would like to do is make like a
- 2:31Speaker 1: I'd like to well, I don't even want to tell
- 2:32Speaker 1: you what I'd like to do. I'd like to build
- 2:35Speaker 1: in a little surprise, but stick your finger in that hole.
- 2:39Speaker 1: People come by, they send pictures of themselves with their
- 2:41Speaker 1: finger in that hole. Uh. That and all kinds of
- 2:45Speaker 1: other oddities and great products down here at the Meat
- 2:47Speaker 1: Eater Flagship Store downtown bows Of Montana where we are
- 2:51Speaker 1: recording right now, come on down and say hi. Also
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- 3:54Speaker 1: we're so late on discussing well, first off, I'm joined
- 3:57Speaker 1: by Brody cal Mark Kenyon and doctor Randall Crinz here,
- 4:01Speaker 1: but she doesn't say much. We're so late on talking
- 4:07Speaker 1: about it because I meant to talk about it, that
- 4:09Speaker 1: we got to talk about it now for a minute.
- 4:11Speaker 1: That we're so late on talking about it. All the flurry,
- 4:16Speaker 1: the flurry of news about the Colorado deer hunters. Two
- 4:22Speaker 1: old timers that two old timers that died of Creussfield
- 4:33Speaker 1: Jacobs yes, and some researcher who it turns out, it
- 4:39Speaker 1: was not really pointed out that these two guys hunted
- 4:47Speaker 1: deer together were consumers of deer in Colorado, and then
- 4:54Speaker 1: happened to developed yak of kreutz Felt and he was saying, hey,
- 4:59Speaker 1: heads up, it's they deer hunted. There was the possibility
- 5:05Speaker 1: that they got this disease from eating deer. I want
- 5:11Speaker 1: to being that was quite irresponsible thing to pump out there.
- 5:16Speaker 1: You got how much you guys know about this. I'm
- 5:18Speaker 1: the only one knows about that about it?
- 5:20Speaker 3: No, no, no, yeah, I think totally tracking. You're just on
- 5:22Speaker 3: a roll. You haven't messed anything up too bad.
- 5:25Speaker 1: Well, now I gotta jump into I gotta jump in
- 5:27Speaker 1: and find some stuff. Well, I'll say that the one
- 5:31Speaker 1: building the thing that happened here was that he made
- 5:35Speaker 1: this little bit of conjecture which then got picked up
- 5:38Speaker 1: as a sound bite across the media outlets.
- 5:41Speaker 3: Which turned into a headline to get a headline.
- 5:43Speaker 4: And blew up into hysteria. And they looked past the
- 5:46Speaker 4: point that this was not stemming from some peer reviewed study,
- 5:49Speaker 4: but this was just a piece of again conjecture. There
- 5:52Speaker 4: was a question, yeah, yeah, it wasn't a study.
- 5:54Speaker 5: And the implication is that they got chrotsfield Jacob from
- 5:59Speaker 5: or Yakub.
- 5:59Speaker 1: From eating deer deer. Yes, from the.
- 6:04Speaker 5: Implication is that CWD is crossing the species barrier.
- 6:08Speaker 1: Yeah. Now, there was a version of this years ago,
- 6:11Speaker 1: equally irresponsible, where they had a guy that had Yakub
- 6:16Speaker 1: kreutz Felt and in his personal history had eaten a
- 6:19Speaker 1: squirrel brain. What was the headline everywhere? Man got it
- 6:24Speaker 1: from eating a squirrel brain, when in fact it was
- 6:27Speaker 1: simply that in his personal history he'd eat a squirrel brain.
- 6:33Speaker 1: Jim Heffelfinger when this came out, this is a long
- 6:35Speaker 1: time ago now, when this came out from Jim Heffelfinger,
- 6:41Speaker 1: he said, in talking about this little flurry of news activity,
- 6:46Speaker 1: he pointed out that he doesn't even want to post
- 6:48Speaker 1: a link because he doesn't want to perpetuate a spread,
- 6:52Speaker 1: the spread of this misinformation or information. He said, this
- 6:55Speaker 1: is not a study, and this is not a scientific paper.
- 6:59Speaker 1: The whole thing is three hundred and forty four words
- 7:02Speaker 1: and is simply a mention about two hunters that died
- 7:06Speaker 1: of CJD and both of them ate deer from the
- 7:09Speaker 1: same deer population. There is no evidence of CWD infecting hunters.
- 7:16Speaker 1: There are clusters of CJD throughout the country, some in
- 7:20Speaker 1: CWD areas and some outside CWD areas. With the spread
- 7:26Speaker 1: of CWD nationwide, it is not very noteworthy, meaning that
- 7:31Speaker 1: now I don't know thirty states thirty some states have CWD.
- 7:37Speaker 1: With the spread of CWD nationwide, it is not very
- 7:40Speaker 1: noteworthy that two CJD victims in the same rural area
- 7:44Speaker 1: may have both eaten venison. He points out, we have
- 7:48Speaker 1: to be vigilant about the possible jump of a pry
- 7:52Speaker 1: on disease from deer to hunter. I couldn't agree more.
- 7:55Speaker 1: This is the thing, much to Doug Durn's annoyance, This
- 7:58Speaker 1: is I don't want to say, the only thing, it's
- 8:00Speaker 1: the primary thing that worries me about CWD is the
- 8:06Speaker 1: possibility that it would jump the species barrier and go
- 8:09Speaker 1: to humans. If I knew, if God came down and said, Steve,
- 8:15Speaker 1: there is no chance CWD can jump to humans, I
- 8:20Speaker 1: would care. This is going to really piss off Doug
- 8:25Speaker 1: eighty five percent less about CWD.
- 8:31Speaker 3: I think that like the human jump is like a
- 8:37Speaker 3: step too far. Really, I think people should be way
- 8:42Speaker 3: more concerned deer hunters should be way more concerned with
- 8:44Speaker 3: CWD jumping to any sort of domestic livestock.
- 8:49Speaker 1: Yeah. That's what blows my mind, is why the USDA
- 8:52Speaker 1: isn't more worried. Yeah, I could weigh. I mean, like,
- 8:57Speaker 1: I don't know if you guys know, I'm no infectious
- 8:59Speaker 1: disease specialists, but I'm worried as a person. How are
- 9:05Speaker 1: they not worried about cattle?
- 9:06Speaker 3: Oh?
- 9:07Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean he look a hell a lot more
- 9:08Speaker 1: like a deer than I do.
- 9:09Speaker 3: The USDA response to domestic livestock with these types of
- 9:15Speaker 3: diseases is is severe and final. It's full eradication. So yeah,
- 9:26Speaker 3: which is what.
- 9:26Speaker 4: Makes it so scary if ever, if ever does jump
- 9:29Speaker 4: to humans, it's going to be the end of our lifestyle,
- 9:34Speaker 4: or that beginning of that end.
- 9:37Speaker 1: Yeah right now.
- 9:38Speaker 3: But it's not going to be as simple as turning
- 9:39Speaker 3: a fan off in a chicken.
- 9:41Speaker 1: House, because the fuel in the fire now drunkard to
- 9:45Speaker 1: boil out, boiled out. Now. Here is from a peer
- 9:49Speaker 1: reviewed paper. This is from a peer reviewed paper in Colorado.
- 9:54Speaker 1: I want to point out to people Colorado. I'm very
- 9:58Speaker 1: reluctant to get into this right now. Because I wanted
- 10:00Speaker 1: this to be mistake. I don't want this to be
- 10:01Speaker 1: taken wrong. I am an individual who is concerned about CWD.
- 10:07Speaker 1: I think that we should be testing robustly. I think
- 10:11Speaker 1: we should be investing a lot of money into researching CWD.
- 10:15Speaker 1: I think we should find out everything we can find
- 10:17Speaker 1: out about CWD, and I think we should be taking
- 10:20Speaker 1: reasonable steps to slow the spread of CWD. ME saying
- 10:25Speaker 1: me jumping on someone for claiming that CWD has jumped
- 10:28Speaker 1: into the human population is not because I'm trying to
- 10:32Speaker 1: think that CWD is gonna go away or I'm trying
- 10:34Speaker 1: to whitewash the risk of CWD. It's because I don't
- 10:37Speaker 1: think that you should go around saying crazy shit to
- 10:40Speaker 1: really upset people based off no evidence, like let's have
- 10:44Speaker 1: good clean material, good clean science around CWD, and not
- 10:51Speaker 1: hysterical hogwash around CWD. A problem is I'm still I'm
- 10:59Speaker 1: still ahead of what I'm going to read you next.
- 11:01Speaker 1: A problem I have found even within the CWD spectrum,
- 11:06Speaker 1: the CWD spectrum being CWD deniers, who once upon a time,
- 11:12Speaker 1: a CWD denier was someone who said there's no such
- 11:14Speaker 1: sing as CWD. The same way early on a COVID
- 11:19Speaker 1: denier was someone who said there's no such thing as COVID.
- 11:22Speaker 1: Eventually a COVID denier became someone who said, sure, there's COVID,
- 11:25Speaker 1: I just don't think it's that alarming, which puts me
- 11:27Speaker 1: in COVID denier, which COVID deniers have caught up to
- 11:31Speaker 1: where I'm at, where it's like, sure it's there, I
- 11:34Speaker 1: just don't think it's enough. I don't think it warrant
- 11:35Speaker 1: shutting people's businesses down. A cwd D denier at a
- 11:40Speaker 1: time said there's no such thing. It's all a lie.
- 11:42Speaker 1: Now they say, oh, yeah, it's real. I'm just not alarmed.
- 11:45Speaker 1: Well it's real. I'm alarmed, but don't go running around
- 11:51Speaker 1: saying crazy shit that's not.
- 11:53Speaker 2: True, especially knowing what's going to happen in the media.
- 11:57Speaker 1: As and they planned that. And there are people the
- 12:00Speaker 1: spectrum I was trying to get into the spectrum, on
- 12:02Speaker 1: the spectrum of CWD believers whatever, you have deniers who
- 12:06Speaker 1: at this current stage are like, yes, it's real, but
- 12:11Speaker 1: it doesn't matter. Two people saying if you so much
- 12:15Speaker 1: as put a piece of deer meat on a stainless
- 12:18Speaker 1: steel table, you could then drop a nuclear bomb on
- 12:23Speaker 1: that steel table, and that steel table is still gonna
- 12:25Speaker 1: give you jakub the kreutz Felt disease. Like there's this spectrum.
- 12:32Speaker 1: The people on the far end, the super alarmists, also
- 12:35Speaker 1: need to chill out. And I've told some of them
- 12:39Speaker 1: face to face, please chill out with the zombie deer disease.
- 12:44Speaker 1: The all that garbage from a peer reviewed paper. Okay,
- 12:55Speaker 1: here's this passage from a peer reviewed paper. And oh,
- 12:58Speaker 1: I also got a back up a lot of background here. People.
- 13:00Speaker 1: I'm sorry. Colorado was where CWD is first identified. Cwd's
- 13:07Speaker 1: first identified in Colorado at a deer and elt breeding facility,
- 13:11Speaker 1: a research facility that's ground zero for CWD in terms
- 13:17Speaker 1: of identification. That they identified it there does not mean
- 13:22Speaker 1: that it emerged there. It was identified there, all right.
- 13:27Speaker 1: The date they identified it in the seventies does not
- 13:29Speaker 1: mean it was born that day. The more you look
- 13:33Speaker 1: for it, the more you find it. As we're seeing,
- 13:35Speaker 1: meaning as more and more states find CWD, it's often
- 13:39Speaker 1: that more and more states are looking for CWD. We
- 13:41Speaker 1: don't know where it came from, we don't know when
- 13:44Speaker 1: it first emerged. It was the first identified in Colorado,
- 13:48Speaker 1: back to this peer review paper. In seven Colorado counties
- 13:52Speaker 1: with high CWD prevalence, seventy five percent of state hunting
- 13:58Speaker 1: licenses are issued locally, which suggests that residents consume most
- 14:05Speaker 1: regionally harvested game. So here, all they're trying to establish
- 14:09Speaker 1: is that if you're looking at CWD prevalence and who's
- 14:13Speaker 1: eating CWD infected meat, let's look locally. Okay, we'll go
- 14:17Speaker 1: to these counties in Colorado with a lot of CWD,
- 14:23Speaker 1: and we're going to look at locals, making the assumption
- 14:26Speaker 1: that locals are eating most of the local deer meat.
- 14:31Speaker 1: Goes on to say, we used Colorado death certificate data
- 14:38Speaker 1: from nineteen seventy nine through two thousand and one to
- 14:43Speaker 1: evaluate rates of death from the human prion disease. Kreutz
- 14:48Speaker 1: felt YAKUB disease. Am I saying that right, I'm gonna
- 14:55Speaker 1: say CJD so I don't have to feel like I'm
- 14:57Speaker 1: messing it up every time. The relative risk of CJD
- 15:04Speaker 1: for c WD endemic county residents was not significantly increased,
- 15:11Speaker 1: and the rate of CJD did not increase over time
- 15:17Speaker 1: in Colorado. Human prion disease resulting from CWD exposure is
- 15:24Speaker 1: rare or non existent. The reason they're saying is rare
- 15:27Speaker 1: non existent is because they haven't found it. Then it
- 15:31Speaker 1: goes down to say, however, there's a lot we don't know.
- 15:35Speaker 1: The other piece of this is even after this news
- 15:37Speaker 1: came out implying a correlation between consumption and in these
- 15:43Speaker 1: two cases, after this news came out, statistically, those two
- 15:47Speaker 1: cases happening to come from that area was not an outlier.
- 15:51Speaker 1: You have about a dozen cases a year that we found.
- 15:54Speaker 1: It was like a giant nothing and like everything, like
- 16:00Speaker 1: the guy that got it from eating squirrel brains. You
- 16:03Speaker 1: wind up being that when a news story like that
- 16:05Speaker 1: comes out, got so worked up, we gotta take my
- 16:08Speaker 1: glasses off. When a news story like that comes out,
- 16:12Speaker 1: the retraction never gets the retraction never gets the traction
- 16:17Speaker 1: you found. This repeated use of the retraction never gets
- 16:20Speaker 1: the traction. I wish I could keep it.
- 16:22Speaker 3: Going that the initial action.
- 16:26Speaker 1: The retraction never gets the traction. That the initial action
- 16:31Speaker 1: that it just doesn't c WD scares the shit out
- 16:40Speaker 1: of me. So don't be doing stuff like that because
- 16:45Speaker 1: I'm already scared. Is it worth talking about the Oklahoma thing?
- 16:50Speaker 2: Then?
- 16:50Speaker 3: Yes, would you like to.
- 16:57Speaker 1: I know Steve wanted to leave that off or not.
- 16:59Speaker 1: Can we get into it in a minute. Yeah, I'm
- 17:01Speaker 1: here to talk about that that I think like that.
- 17:05Speaker 1: God bless them for trying to find a thing. You
- 17:09Speaker 1: listeners have no idea what we're talking about. God bless them.
- 17:11Speaker 3: But come on, We've covered this heavily on the Week
- 17:15Speaker 3: in Review, because again, when I first saw it as
- 17:18Speaker 3: a as a little blurb, I was kind of like.
- 17:20Speaker 1: Ha ha, it can't be little. Did you know maybe we
- 17:27Speaker 1: don't even get into Randall Hoff? Well, damn it. I
- 17:37Speaker 1: want to get into it a couple of things real quick.
- 17:43Speaker 1: I put this in the notes, and everybody got mad.
- 17:44Speaker 1: I wrote in the notes Trump is right about voter fraud.
- 17:47Speaker 1: Hear me out hear me out here.
- 17:50Speaker 3: I didn't hear a single person in this room get mad.
- 17:52Speaker 1: Not mad. We mostly no, not mad.
- 17:56Speaker 3: I just wanted to tell you brief in general.
- 17:59Speaker 1: I check them out there. I'm on date night. I'm
- 18:02Speaker 1: on date night, not on dateline. I'm on date night
- 18:05Speaker 1: with my wife, and I'm trying to listen to what
- 18:10Speaker 1: she's telling me.
- 18:12Speaker 3: But there's something way more interesting.
- 18:16Speaker 1: Something way more interesting going on coming to a restaurant
- 18:19Speaker 1: and there's a big group of people, look like a
- 18:21Speaker 1: qu for funny looking people, look like a corporate function,
- 18:24Speaker 1: And I said, that's weird. What what are these guys
- 18:26Speaker 1: doing in town? Just didn't something didn't fit. Turns out,
- 18:30Speaker 1: I don't want to trivialize they're from World Wildlife Fund.
- 18:34Speaker 1: I don't want to trivialize World Wildlife Fund. But they
- 18:36Speaker 1: of the many things they do, one of the things
- 18:38Speaker 1: they do is they are a thorn in the side
- 18:40Speaker 1: of hunters, so that they do a lot of things
- 18:44Speaker 1: for wildlife, positive things for wildlife. But anytime, they're always
- 18:47Speaker 1: litigating against hunters in cases where I don't think it
- 18:50Speaker 1: has anything to do with preserving bio diversity. It's just
- 18:53Speaker 1: they got a is this my fair, totally overlyfair center
- 18:59Speaker 1: for biological diversity. World Wildlife Fund are always going to
- 19:03Speaker 1: litigate against hunters, and they're always going to sort of
- 19:06Speaker 1: even with stable wildlife populations, they're gonna kind of come
- 19:09Speaker 1: and act like hunting is somehow imperiling stable wildlife populations,
- 19:14Speaker 1: and it'll come out. I picked this up. I hear
- 19:18Speaker 1: a story about Corey Booker.
- 19:21Speaker 3: Here's a senator.
- 19:22Speaker 1: Yeah, and someone's telling the story as a way to
- 19:25Speaker 1: demonstrate how nice Corey Booker is. And I'll point out
- 19:27Speaker 1: Corey Booker's a vegan telling how nice Corey Booker is. Yeah,
- 19:34Speaker 1: by recounting an interaction to Corey Booker is having with
- 19:37Speaker 1: a flight attendant, I'm hearing it, and I'm like, that's
- 19:41Speaker 1: him scamming on a flight attendant. This is just my
- 19:44Speaker 1: like the story I hear, I'm like, that's not nice,
- 19:47Speaker 1: that's scamming. Not to say he scammed on a flight attendant,
- 19:50Speaker 1: but just that caught That's what caught my attention. Okay,
- 19:54Speaker 1: I'm not coming here and saying you did. I'm saying
- 19:56Speaker 1: individuals telling the story. And then the individual tells a
- 19:59Speaker 1: story about fixing to commit voter fraud.
- 20:03Speaker 3: And the whole time, your dear, beautiful, telling sweet wife
- 20:09Speaker 3: is talking and you're going, uh huh.
- 20:10Speaker 1: Well, I'm with my left ear, I'm listening to her
- 20:14Speaker 1: with my right ear. I'm listening to this voter fraud plan.
- 20:17Speaker 1: There's an individual in Chicago, and you're pretty deaf in
- 20:20Speaker 1: that left ear. I'd love to hear Katie's perspective. I
- 20:24Speaker 1: should I cut all this off for legal reasons? How bad.
- 20:27Speaker 1: Is it that I that I overheard something in a restaurant?
- 20:30Speaker 1: Are you allowed to do this the right? Well, I
- 20:35Speaker 1: mean right. The individual's talking lives in Chicago. He lives
- 20:40Speaker 1: in Chicago. Now. He did not say who he's planning
- 20:43Speaker 1: on voting for this fall, but he's explaining to everyone
- 20:47Speaker 1: that he knows how Illinois is going to go on
- 20:52Speaker 1: this fall's presidential election. Okay, he owns a cabin in Michigan.
- 21:00Speaker 1: He wants to be able to vote in a battleground
- 21:03Speaker 1: state this November, so he went and got a Michigan
- 21:08Speaker 1: driver's license. When he asked about the legality of what
- 21:12Speaker 1: he's doing, he was told, you're supposed to spend a
- 21:15Speaker 1: majority of your time in the state where you're registered
- 21:19Speaker 1: to vote, but they said they only really care about
- 21:22Speaker 1: that with rich people, and since he works for an NG, oh,
- 21:27Speaker 1: he felt that this did not apply to him. Wow,
- 21:33Speaker 1: just overheard how many how do you do the right caveat?
- 21:38Speaker 1: Overheard in the restaurant? Yeah, I thought the overheard.
- 21:42Speaker 5: I thought the whole crazy disquisition about the CWD Colorado
- 21:47Speaker 5: Hunters scare, but you need evidence.
- 21:51Speaker 1: I thought that was all.
- 21:51Speaker 5: A setup for this anecdote.
- 21:54Speaker 1: No, No, it's just something I overheard. Yeah, Now, I
- 21:58Speaker 1: think if you, if you were to say, believe.
- 22:00Speaker 3: That whole thing because overheard at a restaurant, right, like
- 22:04Speaker 3: we have been the town approached by a police officer
- 22:08Speaker 3: in my younger years, because during our late night dinner,
- 22:14Speaker 3: we thoroughly ran through all the ways we could have
- 22:19Speaker 3: dined and dashed right, eaten and eaten and left without man.
- 22:23Speaker 3: Right as just a fun way to have the time
- 22:27Speaker 3: where you're having dinner.
- 22:27Speaker 1: Right, So you're at dinner, you're discussing ways in which
- 22:31Speaker 1: you could get out of paying for said dinner, right, which.
- 22:33Speaker 3: At that point in our lives was the perfect crime.
- 22:36Speaker 1: Right, that's how you would really stick it to the man.
- 22:44Speaker 3: Probably the first people to ever pull that off at an.
- 22:46Speaker 1: I know why I brought this up because cow was
- 22:49Speaker 1: laying out for me, someone laying out for him away
- 22:52Speaker 1: in which you could get a non a way in
- 22:54Speaker 1: which you could get a resident hunting license that you
- 22:56Speaker 1: weren't allowed to get. Yes, they're sort of saying a
- 22:59Speaker 1: fella could, yeah, and Cal was saying, or a fella
- 23:02Speaker 1: could just buy the non resident hunting license, yes.
- 23:05Speaker 3: Instead of setting purchasing a piece of land getting a
- 23:09Speaker 3: po box setting up an LLC. I'm like, boy, that
- 23:12Speaker 3: sounds like.
- 23:14Speaker 2: Dude, we used to see like very well off second
- 23:18Speaker 2: homeowners in Colorado. Dude like try to bend over backwards
- 23:22Speaker 2: to get a resident fishing license instead of a non resident,
- 23:26Speaker 2: which is like.
- 23:28Speaker 3: Yeah, but you know what they're doing though, they're chasing
- 23:31Speaker 3: the high right.
- 23:33Speaker 2: Of sticking it to the man.
- 23:35Speaker 3: Well, it's not necessarily sticking it to the man, right,
- 23:40Speaker 3: It's like, oh, I'm saving money and that's what really
- 23:45Speaker 3: gets them, get them going. Well, that's your heritage.
- 23:55Speaker 1: We should start, you know, Krin. This is Kris like
- 23:58Speaker 1: this because Kritin doesn't like when we think of ways
- 24:00Speaker 1: in which Krink could get more email. But if you
- 24:04Speaker 1: want to send it in an email saying here's a
- 24:06Speaker 1: wild ass idea in the subject line, and you got
- 24:09Speaker 1: a wild ass idea, go ahead and throw it in
- 24:12Speaker 1: sent to Krin. Here's a guy wrote in a wild
- 24:15Speaker 1: ass idea and talking about live sonar and the controversy
- 24:20Speaker 1: surrounding live sonar. He's saying, well, think about Dingle Johnson,
- 24:27Speaker 1: some old timer who's digging worms out of his garden
- 24:30Speaker 1: and using the same bag of evil claw hooks. He
- 24:33Speaker 1: bought twenty years ago, fishing on a resident license. Yeah,
- 24:40Speaker 1: fishing on a resident lifetime license that he bought. They
- 24:43Speaker 1: bought sixty years ago, digging worms out of his garden.
- 24:47Speaker 1: Bought a bag, bought a bag of three hundred eagle
- 24:50Speaker 1: claw hooks at a sportsman show two decades ago out
- 24:55Speaker 1: of some old ass rowboat that he bought at the
- 24:57Speaker 1: yard sale. Right, what is he doing for Dingle Johnson?
- 25:03Speaker 3: He's taken not give it.
- 25:06Speaker 1: There's your enemy. That guy. He's saying a live sonar
- 25:10Speaker 1: guy is not the enemy because this guy. Think about
- 25:13Speaker 1: the amount of money this guy's pumping into conservation through
- 25:17Speaker 1: excise taxes on fishing equipment. Yeah, yes, I added all
- 25:24Speaker 1: the stuff about the old.
- 25:25Speaker 5: To this guy's credit, he didn't call anyone the enemy.
- 25:30Speaker 1: Yeah, but he was kind of filling out. I was
- 25:32Speaker 1: filling out his argument.
- 25:35Speaker 3: Growing up, Like how long you would have a box
- 25:41Speaker 3: of large caliber ammunition, right, I mean.
- 25:46Speaker 1: Like the box would corrode.
- 25:48Speaker 2: Yes and yellow.
- 25:50Speaker 1: Yeah, the folds on the box would give out and
- 25:54Speaker 1: you'd have to tape them back together before it was gone, right.
- 25:57Speaker 2: And there's all kinds of corrosion on the cart just
- 26:00Speaker 2: themselves exactly.
- 26:02Speaker 1: When my dad died and I was able to raid
- 26:04Speaker 1: his Ammo ben I thought at that time that I
- 26:07Speaker 1: would never buy Ammo again. I was like, well, shit,
- 26:11Speaker 1: here's forty Remington Court. That's like, you know, twenty deer
- 26:18Speaker 1: and then twenty shots to make sure I'm still on. Yeah,
- 26:21Speaker 1: still good. Yeah. It would be.
- 26:25Speaker 4: Really interesting though, to try to run the numbers on
- 26:28Speaker 4: the increased funds that we're getting in from, you know,
- 26:33Speaker 4: increased purchase and and you know, folks becoming more and
- 26:36Speaker 4: more fervent about this pursuit, right, if you were to
- 26:38Speaker 4: compare that to the negative pressure outcomes of it and
- 26:41Speaker 4: try to see, like, how does that.
- 26:43Speaker 3: You know, yeah, is there a balance?
- 26:46Speaker 1: Here's a four thousand dollars purchase with excise taxes at eleven.
- 26:55Speaker 1: That makes you feel bad for yelling at my kid
- 26:56Speaker 1: about buying worms.
- 27:01Speaker 3: Got a whole garden out there.
- 27:03Speaker 1: He could have dug out, Oh, I'm not gonna do one,
- 27:06Speaker 1: because we haven't found out if people like him or not.
- 27:08Speaker 1: Play the drop fill.
- 27:09Speaker 3: I liked the previous one. It just went on too long,
- 27:13Speaker 3: a little too long.
- 27:13Speaker 1: I didn't get to happen.
- 27:14Speaker 4: But I think I bet I kind of liked that
- 27:16Speaker 4: because it's awkwardly long.
- 27:19Speaker 1: That was kind of what made it so great. Play
- 27:22Speaker 1: the drop fill ready for this.
- 27:23Speaker 3: One, but I think this should be an alternating host
- 27:25Speaker 3: deal to Yeah, so you ain't got to okay.
- 27:32Speaker 1: This is a teaser for a future installment. Alaska tracks
- 27:38Speaker 1: life stories from hunters, fishermen, and trappers of Alaska. This
- 27:41Speaker 1: is there's a Randy Zarnky Zarnk. He's a president of
- 27:46Speaker 1: Alaska Trappers Association. He's doing an oral history talking to
- 27:50Speaker 1: old timers. I was gonna share two quick ones for
- 27:53Speaker 1: you from the from my damn glasses back on. I'd
- 28:01Speaker 1: never started making a podcast, but I knew I was
- 28:03Speaker 1: gonna lose my reading vision. Listen to this very quick.
- 28:10Speaker 1: From the time I was about ten years old, I
- 28:12Speaker 1: had to make a living for the whole family, his dad.
- 28:19Speaker 1: His dad got to where he couldn't work anymore during
- 28:22Speaker 1: the Spanish flu pandemic of nineteen eighteen, which hit Alaska hard.
- 28:27Speaker 1: From the time I was about ten years old, I
- 28:28Speaker 1: had to make a living for the whole family. The
- 28:31Speaker 1: Smithsonian had been paying my brother forty five dollars a
- 28:38Speaker 1: piece for black bear skulls and seventy five dollars for grizzlies.
- 28:44Speaker 1: If I could get one bear a month, that was
- 28:47Speaker 1: pretty good money. I'd sell the feet to the Chinese.
- 28:51Speaker 1: You're listening to Krim. Yeah, I've perked right up.
- 28:53Speaker 6: I still have never eaten a barefoot, though I'm looking
- 28:56Speaker 6: forward to the time I can.
- 28:57Speaker 1: And I got seven dollars a piece for the galls,
- 29:01Speaker 1: so if you add it all up, one bear would
- 29:04Speaker 1: bring in quite a bit of money. Jumping ahead, this
- 29:09Speaker 1: is from a different fellow, Duke Short out of Cake, Alaska.
- 29:15Speaker 1: I hunted eagles for bounty. If you tell people that,
- 29:19Speaker 1: now they think you're a really bad person. We got
- 29:24Speaker 1: two bucks apiece for eagles. The biggest day I had
- 29:27Speaker 1: was doing a herring run. The eagles were eating the
- 29:31Speaker 1: herring and I killed thirty three cow. The only reason
- 29:35Speaker 1: I didn't get more was I ran out of bullets,
- 29:39Speaker 1: Ladies and gentlemen us Today's installment of Steve Reid's books.
- 29:43Speaker 1: So you ain't got to.
- 29:44Speaker 4: Now something you didn't do in the first one. But
- 29:45Speaker 4: I wanted to know. It was just do you recommend
- 29:48Speaker 4: the book? Like is this something other folks should even.
- 29:51Speaker 1: Though they don't. It ain't got to read it, but
- 29:53Speaker 1: they could, well, let me put the to you this way. Mark,
- 29:59Speaker 1: guess how I had to read for those tidbits? Not
- 30:02Speaker 1: very far? Page fourteen is all. I didn't even read
- 30:07Speaker 1: all the good stuff.
- 30:08Speaker 5: Steve reads the first fifteen pages of a book.
- 30:11Speaker 1: Well, no, no, I'm going to do a full report.
- 30:13Speaker 1: And Cal just announced that he's gonna do it full
- 30:15Speaker 1: for sure.
- 30:18Speaker 2: Tidbits.
- 30:19Speaker 1: Yeah, I think we might. We should buy a timer,
- 30:21Speaker 1: maybe krinn figure out that the section what what's the
- 30:25Speaker 1: reasonable length for Let's say Cal reads books that you
- 30:29Speaker 1: ain't got to I mean a couple of minutes, No,
- 30:33Speaker 1: a couple of minutes, and I think.
- 30:36Speaker 3: I think it should with a couple of minutes, like
- 30:41Speaker 3: buy it or note, buy it or don't.
- 30:43Speaker 1: Yeah, Like there's gotta be an assessment, but there should.
- 30:46Speaker 3: We should work in bang for your bucks so we
- 30:48Speaker 3: can have a sound.
- 30:50Speaker 5: I think of a solid twenty five minutes.
- 30:54Speaker 1: Past I was taking fifteen. We get a timer, and
- 30:57Speaker 1: when you present a great book, you got fifteen minutes.
- 31:00Speaker 1: I like it? Yeah, new pot. Can we get that
- 31:03Speaker 1: machine back out? Used to like stop to rate how
- 31:07Speaker 1: much you like something?
- 31:08Speaker 6: Yeah, that's that's yeah, we.
- 31:10Speaker 1: Need to so I don't know you tell me mark
- 31:14Speaker 1: fourteen pages and I found that. No, that seems like
- 31:16Speaker 1: a hell of in our And I fell asleep last
- 31:18Speaker 1: night perfect. I mean not because the book was no good.
- 31:21Speaker 1: You know, you get to a point where you're gonna
- 31:22Speaker 1: get a bet. Yeah, I'm shooting eagles three bucks apiece? Random?
- 31:29Speaker 1: Can you talk about the breeding mule here in Mexico?
- 31:38Speaker 1: We keep wanting to get into this. Did you get
- 31:39Speaker 1: boned up or not boned up? I mean I I've.
- 31:43Speaker 5: I familiarized myself with the case a little.
- 31:45Speaker 1: Bit, but then you know about it prior to this. No,
- 31:47Speaker 1: I didn't. I just knock off nikes because the thing's backwards.
- 31:51Speaker 5: No, they're real nikes. These are oh there's limited. These
- 31:55Speaker 5: are the Yannis Antokumpo Immortality threes. Gotta met uh famous
- 32:00Speaker 5: footwear for forty nine ninety nine because I think they're
- 32:02Speaker 5: a few generations old.
- 32:05Speaker 1: But sorry, it's got distracted. This seems so just unlike you.
- 32:12Speaker 5: I mean, you put a pair of shoes in front
- 32:14Speaker 5: of me, a new pair of shoes for forty nine
- 32:16Speaker 5: ninety nine. I'm gonna have hard time walking away.
- 32:18Speaker 1: Okay, someone walked me through the breeding milder in Mexico
- 32:24Speaker 1: because I used to like to say, I think I
- 32:26Speaker 1: mentioned sport. I used to like to say the thing
- 32:27Speaker 1: I love about mulders you can't buy a big one,
- 32:31Speaker 1: which is not true.
- 32:33Speaker 5: Yeah, and this I mean my understanding of the case
- 32:36Speaker 5: was that it's an American citizen and he's he's in
- 32:40Speaker 5: business with two Mexican citizens who own a ranch in Mexico,
- 32:45Speaker 5: and he'd been working with them to improve mule deer genetics.
- 32:50Speaker 5: And uh, he grew the business and then got the
- 32:55Speaker 5: first permit to bring those genetics across the border, and
- 32:59Speaker 5: then in and in the form of semen, in the
- 33:01Speaker 5: form of semens draws. There was a note in here
- 33:06Speaker 5: about how many semens fourteen hundred and sixty semens draws,
- 33:10Speaker 5: and those are coming from more than I've ever seen.
- 33:12Speaker 2: Those are coming from like a captive breeding facility.
- 33:16Speaker 5: Yeah, and two hundred and sixty nine embryos. Mueled your embryos.
- 33:21Speaker 1: Wow.
- 33:23Speaker 5: And essentially the case is that the guy, the guy's
- 33:31Speaker 5: partners in Mexico, he claims, became jealous of how successful
- 33:37Speaker 5: this guy had become as a result of their joint business,
- 33:40Speaker 5: and he says that they they started threatening his life
- 33:44Speaker 5: and tried to take some of this stuff back and
- 33:49Speaker 5: have engaged in defamation against him. And so he's he's
- 33:52Speaker 5: trying to get some of that genetic material back from
- 33:57Speaker 5: them because it's a partnership gone wrong.
- 34:00Speaker 1: Got it. Yeah? Uh, this I don't I don't really
- 34:04Speaker 1: care about all that. I didn't care about them fighting
- 34:09Speaker 1: about whatever. It's just what. Yeah, I don't mean to
- 34:12Speaker 1: be callous, no, but I guess this guy got What
- 34:14Speaker 1: was interesting to me was that this is going on
- 34:16Speaker 1: in the first and.
- 34:17Speaker 5: Well, he got the first ever permit to move as
- 34:21Speaker 5: I understand, he got the first ever permit to move
- 34:23Speaker 5: meal deer DNA genetics embryos across the border in.
- 34:29Speaker 2: Yeah, and what's like, what's happened to that stuffs border?
- 34:35Speaker 5: Yeah, it's in a it's I think it was in
- 34:37Speaker 5: a lab in in uh in Texas or at a
- 34:40Speaker 5: breeding facility in Texas, the facility that does both livestock
- 34:45Speaker 5: and apparently meal deer.
- 34:47Speaker 1: Yeah. That was the part that was surprising me because
- 34:50Speaker 1: I have been noticing on social media accounts of these
- 34:57Speaker 1: some of these ranches in Mexico they're offering these really
- 35:01Speaker 1: high dollar mildeer hunts. The staggering numbers of two hundred
- 35:08Speaker 1: in just one year after the other after the other,
- 35:12Speaker 1: and I'm like, how could this be true? But it's
- 35:15Speaker 1: that they're getting really good. And I'm not saying that
- 35:18Speaker 1: I'm not pointing, I'm not saying that there's something like
- 35:21Speaker 1: nothing criminal. They're getting really good at producing giant mule
- 35:26Speaker 1: deer out in the desert by using tricks of the
- 35:29Speaker 1: trade developed through white tail management, meaning bringing in food,
- 35:35Speaker 1: water development, it's all that, and they're kind of like
- 35:37Speaker 1: creating a they're kind of creating a resource of giant
- 35:41Speaker 1: box that just wasn't there before by employing strategies developed
- 35:45Speaker 1: by you know, the Texas white tail community. So now
- 35:49Speaker 1: they've kind of created like the new mule deer. It's
- 35:53Speaker 1: like Utah and the seventies down there, What.
- 35:55Speaker 2: Is it happening behind fences?
- 35:58Speaker 1: It's got it a lot of it. It's because when
- 36:01Speaker 1: you see one of these social media pages I follow,
- 36:05Speaker 1: when I've seen enough guys standing there with like a
- 36:08Speaker 1: beer in each hand in a golf cart. There you go,
- 36:14Speaker 1: in a two and twenty inch merely laying there and
- 36:17Speaker 1: sixteen other guys standing back behind him, I'm like, there's
- 36:20Speaker 1: something just like, yeah, there's something that does not make sense.
- 36:25Speaker 1: Worked our tails off.
- 36:26Speaker 3: Well, Yet you can take the best areas in the
- 36:33Speaker 3: in the the the North. Yeah really, I mean really
- 36:37Speaker 3: in North America, and to have like a success rate
- 36:40Speaker 3: of like three weeks in a row, six people go
- 36:44Speaker 3: and all six get thirty inch wide bucks, Like it
- 36:49Speaker 3: just doesn't even it just doesn't happen. No, it just
- 36:53Speaker 3: does not happen.
- 36:54Speaker 1: It's it's so weird looking. And part of the problem,
- 36:58Speaker 1: it's a minor problem, but part of the problem with
- 37:00Speaker 1: it is it's gotten to the point with white tails
- 37:04Speaker 1: where when you if you walk into someone's house and
- 37:08Speaker 1: you there's certain white tails you'll see and you'll just
- 37:11Speaker 1: know it's not a wild white tail. Yeah right, you
- 37:15Speaker 1: look and you don't even ask the guy, oh sweet,
- 37:20Speaker 1: where'd you get that? Because you just know, like that's
- 37:22Speaker 1: a high fense white tail. You just know the second
- 37:24Speaker 1: he walk in the door, and it why wasn't being
- 37:26Speaker 1: it like it kind of a little I don't want
- 37:29Speaker 1: to say ruins looking at deer, but it with meal
- 37:32Speaker 1: deer walked in and I've always been like, damn yeah, because.
- 37:35Speaker 2: They were like they were unsullied by that.
- 37:38Speaker 1: It was like holy.
- 37:40Speaker 4: Yeah, so does this hurt a little bit more to
- 37:43Speaker 4: see this with your beloved mule deer and know that
- 37:46Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, I mean.
- 37:48Speaker 3: White tail has been turnished for so long, right.
- 37:51Speaker 1: Yeah, because those big giants are now now knowing that
- 37:56Speaker 1: when you see a big giant now in the back
- 37:58Speaker 1: of your head, you gotta be war you gotta be
- 37:59Speaker 1: warm about that. The other thing you can just you
- 38:01Speaker 1: just know is when some guy comes back from New Zealand,
- 38:04Speaker 1: right and he's got a four hundred inch red stag. Yeah,
- 38:09Speaker 1: you're like, didn't shoot that? No, right? Right? Yeah?
- 38:15Speaker 2: But with with mule deer, you're talking like, I don't
- 38:18Speaker 2: know what the numbers would be in in the United States,
- 38:22Speaker 2: but like it's almost like a handful of two hundred
- 38:27Speaker 2: inches get shot in the whole country every year.
- 38:30Speaker 1: Yeah, right, handful. I don't know what. It's not more
- 38:33Speaker 1: than fifty.
- 38:33Speaker 2: Right, so now when fifty are coming back every year,
- 38:39Speaker 2: it's not.
- 38:39Speaker 1: More than twenty yeh shit, I don't know, I don't know.
- 38:42Speaker 2: It's not a lot. But now they're just like all
- 38:46Speaker 2: coming north from Mexico. It's like you got it.
- 38:49Speaker 3: Ruins really wrong. When the con when I'm more apt
- 38:53Speaker 3: to ask how was the chef right then about your hunt?
- 39:00Speaker 1: Uh yeah, though I have been looking see I gotta
- 39:04Speaker 1: admit though, man, looking at those Mexico nil deer, I
- 39:08Speaker 1: was licking my lips.
- 39:09Speaker 2: Mm hmmm, Oh for sure, because you don't see those
- 39:12Speaker 2: wide ones.
- 39:14Speaker 1: You know, I was licking my lips. I still kind
- 39:18Speaker 1: of am.
- 39:18Speaker 2: I mean.
- 39:19Speaker 3: The other thing to think about rad is like through
- 39:23Speaker 3: all the conversations we've had, right, like that desert environment
- 39:28Speaker 3: for big animals, there's just not a.
- 39:31Speaker 1: Lot of them mm hmm.
- 39:33Speaker 3: But somehow there's a lot of them, right.
- 39:40Speaker 2: Uh.
- 39:41Speaker 1: Okay, I'm just gonna sit back in my chair and
- 39:44Speaker 1: someone's gonna explain everyone but besides me, and then I'm
- 39:50Speaker 1: gonna tell you what I think. It's gonna talk about
- 39:52Speaker 1: the that this idea that you're gonna breed you're gonna
- 39:58Speaker 1: breed c w D resistance into wild deer. I could
- 40:05Speaker 1: take a first step at it, Okay, can I can
- 40:08Speaker 1: I give you my comment now and you can weave
- 40:10Speaker 1: that in or give you my comment later.
- 40:13Speaker 4: I want to see you squirm in your chair for
- 40:15Speaker 4: a while, wanting to say it it happened to wait,
- 40:18Speaker 4: you should.
- 40:18Speaker 1: Just interject naturally, sit back I'm to take my watch,
- 40:21Speaker 1: I'm taking my mouth talker.
- 40:23Speaker 3: Okay, oh, this is the type of juicy stuff people
- 40:29Speaker 3: can see up the new YouTube channel.
- 40:32Speaker 1: Mediator podcast network does off.
- 40:38Speaker 4: So so the cliff notes here is that a peer
- 40:42Speaker 4: review peer review study came out in twenty twenty or
- 40:44Speaker 4: twenty one out of Texas A and M where they
- 40:48Speaker 4: had identified genetic markers that can point to the susceptibility
- 40:53Speaker 4: of a deer to CWD. I basically say, hey, these two,
- 40:58Speaker 4: we'll tell you whether I think it was eighty one
- 40:59Speaker 4: percent rate of accuracy, how susceptible this individual whitetail will
- 41:03Speaker 4: be to contracting chronic wasting disease. So, with that information
- 41:08Speaker 4: until then, the next thought that some folks had was, well,
- 41:13Speaker 4: if we can identify if a deer is susceptible or not,
- 41:16Speaker 4: that means we should be able to selectively breed for
- 41:19Speaker 4: those more resistant traits.
- 41:21Speaker 1: So Oklahoma.
- 41:24Speaker 4: Propose a law recently in which they would develop a
- 41:27Speaker 4: program to do just that. So this proposal came out
- 41:31Speaker 4: that first said, all right, we want to start this
- 41:33Speaker 4: program which will involve number one, establishing a genetic baseline
- 41:37Speaker 4: of what the wild deer population looks like. As far
- 41:40Speaker 4: as this resistance. Number two, they would then start a
- 41:46Speaker 4: captive breeding, selective breeding program in which they would try
- 41:50Speaker 4: to breed for this. And then number three and number
- 41:53Speaker 4: three is the real big, really big concern, is that
- 41:58Speaker 4: starting in twenty twenty six, they may create and open
- 42:03Speaker 4: up the ability for private individuals to purchase these supposedly
- 42:09Speaker 4: CWD resistant deer and release them, and not just on
- 42:13Speaker 4: high fence ranches, but low fence.
- 42:16Speaker 1: So any Tom.
- 42:18Speaker 4: Dick or Harry could hypothetically purchase start buying these captive
- 42:22Speaker 4: red deer and start releasing them into the wild.
- 42:25Speaker 3: But only in Oklahoma.
- 42:26Speaker 1: Only in Oklahoma. But to my knowledge, there's no other
- 42:29Speaker 1: state in which you had to put my thing back
- 42:30Speaker 1: just to say, and those deer will know they got
- 42:32Speaker 1: to stay in Oklahoma, right yeahs. And so this is
- 42:38Speaker 1: like a Pandora's box.
- 42:39Speaker 4: There's all sorts of ways this could go wrong that
- 42:41Speaker 4: we can get into.
- 42:43Speaker 2: They're trying. What they're trying to do, right, is uh
- 42:45Speaker 2: like speed up natural selection if it even exists.
- 42:49Speaker 1: I got it? Could I do my thing now? I
- 42:51Speaker 1: put my thing back? Sure? My talkers back in position
- 42:58Speaker 1: presumably if it's in captive deer there's no reason to
- 43:05Speaker 1: think that this disposition, this resistance, this natural resistance is
- 43:10Speaker 1: also in wild deer. Just believe that it is. Why
- 43:14Speaker 1: would it just be there when you have millions of
- 43:21Speaker 1: wild deer. How in the world do you think that
- 43:26Speaker 1: turning out some small handful of deer with a certain
- 43:30Speaker 1: genetic characteristic that already exists in wild deer is going
- 43:35Speaker 1: to accelerate the natural selection that, if you're right, is
- 43:40Speaker 1: already occurring right now. Like, if you're right that there's
- 43:44Speaker 1: a resistance and that that resistance is going to win
- 43:48Speaker 1: out through natural selection, then it already is you putting
- 43:54Speaker 1: one loose? Yeah, I mean, like, I'm not even I'm
- 43:59Speaker 1: not even against the like, I'm not even going down
- 44:01Speaker 1: the path of being against the idea because let's say
- 44:08Speaker 1: there's a version like this, let's say you had some
- 44:10Speaker 1: way well.
- 44:11Speaker 3: Sorry, the version that this idea is based off of,
- 44:17Speaker 3: right is, uh, the near eradication of scrapie and in chigia.
- 44:23Speaker 3: So that's kind of like what they point to.
- 44:27Speaker 1: But that's all domestic, yes, where you control all breeding.
- 44:31Speaker 4: Well, here's the thing, We've already basically tested this idea
- 44:34Speaker 4: in wild populations of deer and that is through the
- 44:37Speaker 4: act of trying to cull for genetics. Right, So, there's
- 44:40Speaker 4: been all sorts of people in Texas and other parts
- 44:42Speaker 4: of the country where they have, you know, very fervently
- 44:46Speaker 4: studied the idea of whether or not you can influence
- 44:50Speaker 4: genetics within a deer population through culling.
- 44:53Speaker 1: You know, yeah, he's got a wonky right side. Kill him.
- 44:57Speaker 1: For a long time, that was that was yeah, he
- 45:00Speaker 1: looked at me. Funny.
- 45:01Speaker 4: Yeah, So long story short on that, a slew of
- 45:04Speaker 4: studies have come out over recent years that have completely
- 45:06Speaker 4: disproven that as an effective approach at all. You just
- 45:09Speaker 4: can't do it because of the very things you're saying.
- 45:12Speaker 4: In a wild population, it's just impossible to actually influence
- 45:17Speaker 4: it enough with our degree of effect. So if that
- 45:21Speaker 4: can't work in impacting genetics of white tail deer antler quality,
- 45:26Speaker 4: same thing's gonna.
- 45:27Speaker 1: Be the truth the case of this. But I don't
- 45:30Speaker 1: Here's why I don't want to come out and just
- 45:31Speaker 1: say I condemned the whole idea of Pandora's box and
- 45:34Speaker 1: all that, because think about this scenario. Let's say, for
- 45:39Speaker 1: some somehow I don't understand how, but somehow you're able
- 45:41Speaker 1: to sample a deer. You're be able to shoot it
- 45:44Speaker 1: with one of those darts out of a pneumatic gun
- 45:49Speaker 1: that they use to shoot tranquisers. You're able to shoot
- 45:52Speaker 1: a deer and pull a genetic sample from it. A
- 45:54Speaker 1: little plug right hits, the deer falls off, It's got
- 45:56Speaker 1: a little chunk of hair on it, and you're able
- 45:59Speaker 1: to determ and Okay, that deer has a genetic resistance
- 46:05Speaker 1: to CWD. Maybe it's you know, maybe you realize that
- 46:08Speaker 1: that deer is eleven years old in a area that
- 46:12Speaker 1: has high prevalence of CWD. So you're like, Wow, that deer,
- 46:16Speaker 1: for whatever reason, survived. You test it. It doesn't have CWD,
- 46:22Speaker 1: even though you got to test them now dead. Let's
- 46:25Speaker 1: just say scientifically, you know that you can test a
- 46:30Speaker 1: deer alive see that it does not have CWD. Also,
- 46:35Speaker 1: you can make the determination that it carries this gene
- 46:41Speaker 1: that gives it a level of CWD resistance. And then
- 46:46Speaker 1: someone proposed, well, let's catch that deer and let's pull
- 46:51Speaker 1: all of her eggs and go make twenty more and
- 46:57Speaker 1: then turn that group of twenty deer back out on
- 47:01Speaker 1: the same landscape where the dough came from. Are you
- 47:04Speaker 1: do you oppose that much less? So okay, So I'm
- 47:07Speaker 1: saying I'm not all the way thinking that this is
- 47:12Speaker 1: the worst idea in the world, because there's different ways
- 47:15Speaker 1: that it might be approached. I just think it sounds
- 47:17Speaker 1: silly because there's no reason to think that this resistance
- 47:23Speaker 1: is only in captive deer. All captive deer came from
- 47:26Speaker 1: wild deer. They're not from another continent. The captive deer
- 47:30Speaker 1: industry its birth was just catching wild deer from North America.
- 47:36Speaker 1: So whatever you're seeing represented in that genetic pool of
- 47:40Speaker 1: captive deer is going to be represented in the wild.
- 47:46Speaker 1: I would just guess that the same percentage of resistance
- 47:50Speaker 1: is out there in the wild if this whole thing
- 47:53Speaker 1: would work, that it's already working or not, and you
- 47:57Speaker 1: putting a couple more out there ain't gonna make shit
- 47:59Speaker 1: for deerfs.
- 48:00Speaker 2: Gonna cost a lot of money.
- 48:01Speaker 5: I mean, well, and it's gonna make someone a lot
- 48:03Speaker 5: of money. That was the other part of that article
- 48:06Speaker 5: is that captive deer interests are involved in this plan.
- 48:11Speaker 4: In the in the in the legislature, and on the
- 48:14Speaker 4: Fishing Game Commission. There are interests that.
- 48:17Speaker 2: Yeah, it almost seems like an underhanded way of being
- 48:20Speaker 2: able to move.
- 48:21Speaker 1: Deer around exactly.
- 48:22Speaker 4: And that's where you get into some real sticky worries
- 48:25Speaker 4: here is that Number one, you can't like, a CWD
- 48:29Speaker 4: can lie dormant. It can be positive in a deer
- 48:32Speaker 4: for several years before we might ever be able to
- 48:35Speaker 4: identify that. So you can get many false negatives. So
- 48:37Speaker 4: they're gonna let's type of hypothetically say that a deer
- 48:40Speaker 4: tests negative. There are live tests, but they're not terribly accurate.
- 48:45Speaker 4: But you could do a test and say, okay, well
- 48:46Speaker 4: this deer supposedly is resistant, and we tested it before
- 48:49Speaker 4: release and it came back negative. Two years later, that
- 48:53Speaker 4: deer could then end up testing positive and it was
- 48:57Speaker 4: positive at that moment, but now we've already released it
- 48:59Speaker 4: and transported across the state all over the place.
- 49:02Speaker 1: But I have to assume they're only going to cut
- 49:05Speaker 1: these loose in areas of high prevalence anyway. Maybe, So
- 49:09Speaker 1: if someone was going to do it prophylactically, I think
- 49:12Speaker 1: that that would be hugely problematic, right. I think the
- 49:16Speaker 1: propylactics are always.
- 49:19Speaker 5: Oh, my Robberts, my father, my father in law, or
- 49:22Speaker 5: not my father in law prophilactically, number of content toothbrush
- 49:27Speaker 5: is a prophylactic.
- 49:29Speaker 1: To do it prophylactically. No one is going to get
- 49:33Speaker 1: into that. No one is gonna before that.
- 49:38Speaker 3: Well right now, I think a huge thing to keep
- 49:40Speaker 3: in mind is there's no consensus on what resistance is.
- 49:46Speaker 1: Mmmm.
- 49:47Speaker 3: So is the deer that dies a day after the
- 49:53Speaker 3: other group of deer more resistant?
- 49:59Speaker 1: Oh? Like yeah, some people lived a year longer.
- 50:04Speaker 3: Yeah. So that's another huge question mark as to why
- 50:10Speaker 3: people who are conservatively approaching this topic are like, well,
- 50:14Speaker 3: this step is putting the cart way before the horse
- 50:18Speaker 3: because we don't even know what resistance is at this
- 50:22Speaker 3: release program.
- 50:22Speaker 1: But give me, give me the Pandora's box. I'm failing
- 50:25Speaker 1: to see it. I can see it as a waste
- 50:28Speaker 1: of effort because of because like I said, it's like
- 50:33Speaker 1: you're trying to go into a population is that have
- 50:35Speaker 1: tens of thousands of animals and you're trying You're thinking
- 50:37Speaker 1: you're going to influence it with some small number of
- 50:39Speaker 1: released animals. But give me the Pandora's box, because these
- 50:43Speaker 1: aren't GMOs. These are just deer that you've just These
- 50:47Speaker 1: are just white tail deer.
- 50:49Speaker 5: Are Virginia oticle Leonis Virginia virginianus.
- 50:54Speaker 1: They're white tail deer from the continent. They're not genetically modified.
- 50:59Speaker 1: You're not doing gene insertion. They're not robo deer. They
- 51:04Speaker 1: are a deer that you have identified having some disease
- 51:08Speaker 1: potential disease resistance.
- 51:11Speaker 3: I'll give you mind and you.
- 51:12Speaker 1: Let it run out, like give me the negative.
- 51:15Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean the simple one right now is I
- 51:18Speaker 3: know we we covered like the first known w CWD hotspot,
- 51:25Speaker 3: but we have a lot of other known CWD hotspots.
- 51:30Speaker 3: They for the most part, all tend to be at
- 51:34Speaker 3: or very near close proximity to captive servid facilities. Correct,
- 51:40Speaker 3: So haven't we already seen the Pandora's box, Like we
- 51:45Speaker 3: have captive servant facilities. Just so happens like a new
- 51:50Speaker 3: K shows up and five miles away. So now we're
- 51:54Speaker 3: thinking we're gonna throw it back into the court of
- 51:57Speaker 3: the captive service facility. Let's see what you guys come
- 52:00Speaker 3: up with next. I'm sure it's got to be better,
- 52:02Speaker 3: right then current CWD.
- 52:04Speaker 1: And then one of the chances something like that it
- 52:06Speaker 1: happened again. Right, Yes, hey, I got you, And we're
- 52:09Speaker 1: creating a.
- 52:10Speaker 4: This hypothetically would create a private market for individuals to
- 52:14Speaker 4: purchase captively bred deer and release them into the wild,
- 52:17Speaker 4: which we've never done before. And I just can't I
- 52:21Speaker 4: can't imagine the future in which, Okay, if we start,
- 52:25Speaker 4: if captive breeding facilities can start breeding these animals and
- 52:28Speaker 4: marketing them to the general public, right, trying to convince
- 52:31Speaker 4: folks to buy, right, buy these deer and release the
- 52:34Speaker 4: CWD resistant deer. You can't tell me that ten twenty
- 52:37Speaker 4: years down the road, not only will they market them
- 52:38Speaker 4: as CWD resistant, but also this came from one hundred
- 52:41Speaker 4: eighty inch genetics. So you can start releasing your selectively
- 52:45Speaker 4: bred mega antler deer.
- 52:47Speaker 1: All of a sudden.
- 52:48Speaker 4: Now that's not just a high fence thing, but any
- 52:50Speaker 4: guy could go and start releasing these on their Yeah,
- 52:52Speaker 4: that's pandorian.
- 52:53Speaker 5: And it's not the it's not the same as like introduced.
- 52:57Speaker 5: I mean, obviously it's it's the same species. It's a
- 53:00Speaker 5: native species, but it has like this bucket biology kind
- 53:05Speaker 5: of feel to it.
- 53:06Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like.
- 53:09Speaker 5: It's just a very slippery slope moving moving wild animals around.
- 53:12Speaker 1: It's just I like what I think that you you, Yeah,
- 53:15Speaker 1: that that was very pandorian of Hey, now that I
- 53:21Speaker 1: can start buying deer and cutting them loose. H, I
- 53:25Speaker 1: want that CWD thing you're talking about, But like, can
- 53:28Speaker 1: you send a picture of the buck? Yeah? Yeah, exactly
- 53:31Speaker 1: for sure. Well, but you just pointed out that that's
- 53:35Speaker 1: not actually true. What do you mean?
- 53:37Speaker 2: Oh?
- 53:38Speaker 4: Well, right, but that doesn't mean people will try Yeah,
- 53:41Speaker 4: I get it, I get it.
- 53:43Speaker 1: Here's the biggest thing I can see, uh, not the
- 53:45Speaker 1: big I shouldn't say that. Here's the thing I think
- 53:48Speaker 1: that's that's noteworthy about this issue. Here you have the
- 53:53Speaker 1: captive servid industry has been has been villainized for years
- 54:00Speaker 1: around CWD. And imagine how and how uh, when you're
- 54:05Speaker 1: looking at this as a pr problem, that you'd be
- 54:09Speaker 1: able to come back around and turn this whole thing
- 54:12Speaker 1: on its head and emerge as the savior. That's got
- 54:17Speaker 1: to be an intriguing that's exactly what's happening. That's got
- 54:20Speaker 1: to feel good.
- 54:21Speaker 5: Well, I think too. One of the issues with the
- 54:24Speaker 5: law that just passed, at least from what I've seen
- 54:26Speaker 5: pointed out, is that it's not just like looking at
- 54:29Speaker 5: this idea, but it's laying out it's not only putting
- 54:34Speaker 5: the cart before the horse. It's like paving that road.
- 54:37Speaker 5: And there's like a timeline for this to happen, and
- 54:40Speaker 5: and before it's it's like determine whether or not this
- 54:44Speaker 5: is really feasible.
- 54:46Speaker 1: There's like a target a target date.
- 54:49Speaker 4: Yeah, like a year and a half out. And we
- 54:52Speaker 4: didn't we didn't mention at the beginning when I led
- 54:54Speaker 4: this off, I said, this law was proposed. This isn't
- 54:57Speaker 4: just a proposed law. Now, this is a past and
- 54:59Speaker 4: sign in the law.
- 55:00Speaker 1: Yeah, happening. Do you think they could work up with
- 55:03Speaker 1: skunk that don't smell and cut him loose.
- 55:07Speaker 2: He wouldn't be a skunk anymore. Yeah, but yeah they could,
- 55:11Speaker 2: like when they're marketing their their big giant bucks, they
- 55:14Speaker 2: can be like disease free two hundred and fifty incher
- 55:17Speaker 2: you know, selt that way all right?
- 55:22Speaker 3: Sk that just shoots out fabreeze?
- 55:28Speaker 6: Uh?
- 55:31Speaker 1: All right? You want to hear a guy's suggestion to
- 55:34Speaker 1: the Michigan DNR while run the subject deer?
- 55:37Speaker 4: Sure do I've heard a few of my day.
- 55:43Speaker 1: My family owns a farm, and this is not me.
- 55:46Speaker 1: We don't know a farman southern Michigan. This is someone
- 55:49Speaker 1: that wrote in My family owns a farm in southern Michigan.
- 55:53Speaker 1: Every year, we require everyone who hunts with us to
- 55:55Speaker 1: kill does on our property. For at least the last decade,
- 56:00Speaker 1: there have been multiple processors in our area that would
- 56:03Speaker 1: accept cleaned deer as donations free of charge. I would
- 56:08Speaker 1: regularly drop off donations throughout the season. I have always
- 56:13Speaker 1: made it a habit of regularly calling processors. I should
- 56:17Speaker 1: preface this by saying this. The head of Michigan's DNR
- 56:22Speaker 1: was it last year. Last fall the year before, basically
- 56:25Speaker 1: wrote a public letter the Dear Biologist of Michiganists Michigan
- 56:29Speaker 1: saying we need to kill more does and we can't
- 56:33Speaker 1: get people to kill does. We reported on that, and
- 56:38Speaker 1: I got a call from Doug Duran reminding me that
- 56:41Speaker 1: I have often said, when someone tells you there's too
- 56:43Speaker 1: many blank, there's too many deer, there's too many whatever,
- 56:47Speaker 1: there's too many bears, always ask by whose measure? Because
- 56:53Speaker 1: I like to point out I don't know elk hunters.
- 56:56Speaker 1: I never hear an elk hunter telling me there's too
- 56:58Speaker 1: many elk. Right, people go out, they want to see elk.
- 57:03Speaker 1: People go out deer hunt and they want to see deer,
- 57:05Speaker 1: so when they hear there's too many deer, it puzzles them.
- 57:08Speaker 1: They didn't feel like they saw too many deer. They
- 57:12Speaker 1: want to see more deer, but they feel they have
- 57:15Speaker 1: too many deer and they can't get people to kill
- 57:17Speaker 1: does And Chad did it.
- 57:19Speaker 4: He did a good job in that email and that
- 57:21Speaker 4: note articulating the why. I do think he did a
- 57:24Speaker 4: good job of trying to explain to the general hunting
- 57:27Speaker 4: public of Michigan that you addressing that question like, hey,
- 57:30Speaker 4: I understand you want to see a lot of deer,
- 57:31Speaker 4: but here are the possible negative outcomes of this the situation.
- 57:38Speaker 1: He goes on to say, this year, none of our
- 57:40Speaker 1: processors accept the donations at all. It was explained to
- 57:46Speaker 1: me by the processors that the state of Michigan now
- 57:48Speaker 1: requires that each donation must be CWD screened, which takes
- 57:53Speaker 1: two to three weeks. Then a random meat sample from
- 57:57Speaker 1: every donated deer needed to be state evaluated for metal
- 58:02Speaker 1: from bullet fragments. That translates into deer hanging in processors
- 58:09Speaker 1: or being stored in their freezers for weeks. Therefore, because
- 58:14Speaker 1: of that storage problem, they're not willing or able to
- 58:18Speaker 1: participate in the program. He said, I can kill twenty
- 58:23Speaker 1: to twenty five dos a year, but without being able
- 58:28Speaker 1: to donate the meat, it's almost impossible for him to
- 58:31Speaker 1: kill that many does. He also goes on to say,
- 58:35Speaker 1: why are they charging twenty bucks for an antler this
- 58:37Speaker 1: deer tag? You should price them to sell and sell
- 58:42Speaker 1: them at five dollars. He also says Michigan ends their
- 58:47Speaker 1: deer season in January. Why don't they let it run
- 58:52Speaker 1: into the spring. If they really want to get killed those,
- 58:56Speaker 1: I'll say, too bad, you can't donate your deer. Have
- 59:01Speaker 1: you tried this? Have you tried putting up a sign
- 59:06Speaker 1: just like how normal people put up no trespassing signs?
- 59:09Speaker 1: Have you put up tried putting up signs that say
- 59:12Speaker 1: please do you hunt my place? You will get a
- 59:18Speaker 1: lot of does killed? Or say put up signs that say,
- 59:23Speaker 1: if you're interested in harvesting whitetail, does, contact me at blank.
- 59:30Speaker 2: Put an add the local paper, add the local paper.
- 59:32Speaker 1: If you're looking for a place to hunt does with
- 59:35Speaker 1: your kids, please contact me at blank. I think you
- 59:40Speaker 1: will get a lot of does killed.
- 59:42Speaker 3: Even at twenty bucks apiece.
- 59:46Speaker 1: Although I know that Sorry, it's a problem where he's
- 59:50Speaker 1: writing in about it.
- 59:53Speaker 4: I think what we found though, is that you almost
- 59:56Speaker 4: I can't remember who if I spoke to, if this
- 59:57Speaker 4: was Russ Mason with the DNR at one point or
- 59:59Speaker 4: fist Chad, But someone I spoke to basically said, no
- 1:00:04Speaker 4: matter how they liberalize the regulations with dill harvest, no
- 1:00:07Speaker 4: matter how many tags they give out, no lever they
- 1:00:10Speaker 4: can push has been able to significantly increase dill harvest.
- 1:00:13Speaker 6: Me.
- 1:00:13Speaker 1: Okay, let's let's keep it up until early February. Yeah,
- 1:00:16Speaker 1: you know I could kill any more dogs. There's just yeah,
- 1:00:18Speaker 1: people have a certain number they're willing to and but
- 1:00:20Speaker 1: if this guy wants to kill does, and now he
- 1:00:23Speaker 1: can't shoot them because they don't want to accept them
- 1:00:25Speaker 1: at the donation place. I have a feeling in Michigan
- 1:00:31Speaker 1: hunters would be really helpful, good old hunters.
- 1:00:38Speaker 4: I don't think that it's a bad idea though, to
- 1:00:41Speaker 4: consider new ideas, like like having a free done tag
- 1:00:44Speaker 4: with every buck hunters come.
- 1:00:46Speaker 1: If he if he opened up dog durn wants to shoot.
- 1:00:49Speaker 1: Does you know how Doug Duran gets forty does removed
- 1:00:51Speaker 1: off his place.
- 1:00:53Speaker 3: I had a back, got a line out the door.
- 1:00:56Speaker 1: Come shoot the dose please, and what happens people show
- 1:01:00Speaker 1: start shooting those forty a year.
- 1:01:02Speaker 6: I had an exchange with this gentleman because the first
- 1:01:05Speaker 6: thing I did was recommend checking out Doug's.
- 1:01:13Speaker 2: Organization sharing the land.
- 1:01:15Speaker 6: I was gonna say, saving the land, and that's not
- 1:01:17Speaker 6: sharing sharing the land, and he he he's going to
- 1:01:21Speaker 6: look into that. But in the past he shared with
- 1:01:24Speaker 6: me that he has opened up the land to hunters
- 1:01:27Speaker 6: and uh, it's just caused some problems.
- 1:01:30Speaker 1: Well, not with Dougs program that Doug vets all the
- 1:01:34Speaker 1: That's exactly you have to go through the application process
- 1:01:36Speaker 1: to participate that what I.
- 1:01:37Speaker 6: Said, I thought that the bar would maybe be much higher.
- 1:01:40Speaker 1: So one of the funniest conversations I had around this
- 1:01:44Speaker 1: issue is Cal and I. This is Cal's I'm gonna
- 1:01:46Speaker 1: steal Cal's joke. Cal and I were hunting on a
- 1:01:49Speaker 1: place in Hawaii, a coffee plantation Hawaii where they have
- 1:01:53Speaker 1: a lot of problem with pigs rooting everything up. I saw,
- 1:01:56Speaker 1: I'll tell you one way to get rid of these pigs.
- 1:01:59Speaker 1: Put up a sign that says come hunt picks. And
- 1:02:02Speaker 1: he said, do you know what kind of people we
- 1:02:04Speaker 1: would get if we put up a sign like that,
- 1:02:07Speaker 1: Cal said barbecuers.
- 1:02:15Speaker 3: I am so funny.
- 1:02:16Speaker 2: I can see the problem this guys have and becoming
- 1:02:19Speaker 2: more common though with donation programs.
- 1:02:21Speaker 5: Oh yeah, well, and then I mean, I guess the
- 1:02:24Speaker 5: to the point made by the Michigan dn R, if
- 1:02:27Speaker 5: he opens up his place net, there's probably no increased
- 1:02:32Speaker 5: dough harvest in that county.
- 1:02:34Speaker 1: Right.
- 1:02:35Speaker 5: It's like the people that are going to come shoot
- 1:02:36Speaker 5: a dough and his place aren't going to go shoot
- 1:02:38Speaker 5: one somewhere else. I'm just basing.
- 1:02:44Speaker 1: Okay, there's a person I was just talking with at
- 1:02:47Speaker 1: my mom's where I grew up. Okay, this individual his
- 1:02:53Speaker 1: grandfather hunted, His father hunted. He just didn't get into it.
- 1:02:58Speaker 1: Now he has a boy, and it skipped the generation
- 1:03:02Speaker 1: with him, just it was never interested in it. His
- 1:03:04Speaker 1: boy is dying to go deer hunting. But here he's
- 1:03:10Speaker 1: sort of missed this whole thing, of like he doesn't
- 1:03:12Speaker 1: know how the whole thing works. That guy and that
- 1:03:17Speaker 1: kid go shoot a shitload of those doughs. In his mind,
- 1:03:20Speaker 1: he's like, the more I think about it, I would
- 1:03:23Speaker 1: just eat that deer meat.
- 1:03:25Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm just saying the macro I don't know if
- 1:03:28Speaker 5: it would have the sort of macro effect, then.
- 1:03:30Speaker 3: Are you thinking like local huntered local hunters equate to
- 1:03:35Speaker 3: doe harvest versus the further away you get from the
- 1:03:40Speaker 3: hunting spot, people are less interested in traveling to shoot
- 1:03:43Speaker 3: a dough.
- 1:03:43Speaker 5: No, I'm just thinking about the I mean the idea
- 1:03:47Speaker 5: that liberalizing doe harvest or liberalizing hunting seasons doesn't seem
- 1:03:53Speaker 5: to generate more dead does.
- 1:03:55Speaker 2: I think if you give, if you people who will
- 1:03:58Speaker 2: shoot dose more places to shoot dose, more will get
- 1:04:03Speaker 2: if you.
- 1:04:03Speaker 5: Went, if you went, if you went to make I
- 1:04:07Speaker 5: didn't say this is like I'm fully convinced of it.
- 1:04:09Speaker 1: I just threw that out as like a as a Michigander. Yeah,
- 1:04:13Speaker 1: Mark's a Michigander. I'm telling you this. If everyone in
- 1:04:17Speaker 1: Michigan that wanted to shoot a doe this year had
- 1:04:22Speaker 1: a place to shoot a dough, there wouldn't be no
- 1:04:25Speaker 1: does so so just there would Yeah.
- 1:04:30Speaker 4: I gotta I gotta tell you about a pretty cool idea.
- 1:04:32Speaker 4: An interesting example of this problem.
- 1:04:34Speaker 1: Uh.
- 1:04:35Speaker 4: I've been pretty involved with the field to Ford program
- 1:04:37Speaker 4: in Michigan and on the back forty and UH, a
- 1:04:40Speaker 4: couple of the new hunters that have gone through that program. Uh,
- 1:04:44Speaker 4: are are similar to the type of person you're describing,
- 1:04:46Speaker 4: somebody who wants more meat.
- 1:04:48Speaker 1: They're getting into hunting.
- 1:04:49Speaker 4: They're trying to find ways to you know, fill the freezer,
- 1:04:52Speaker 4: and the biggest problem they've had is found finding places
- 1:04:55Speaker 4: to do it. And so at first, you know, they
- 1:04:57Speaker 4: started trying to hunt public land, and then they've tried
- 1:05:00Speaker 4: to get private access and they continue to struggle, like
- 1:05:04Speaker 4: go to a lot of places and there's guys that
- 1:05:06Speaker 4: are already hunting it, or there's people that will let
- 1:05:08Speaker 4: them hunt, but they're really just focused on bucks that
- 1:05:10Speaker 4: they don't want them in there hunting for does when
- 1:05:12Speaker 4: they're guys that there hunting for bucks. But they bumped
- 1:05:14Speaker 4: into a farmer, and this farmer brought the fact that
- 1:05:17Speaker 4: he gets these depredation permits and he has twenty five
- 1:05:20Speaker 4: or fifty dough tags a year and can never get
- 1:05:22Speaker 4: enough people to use them really m hm, And he
- 1:05:25Speaker 4: would love these deer get shot, but can't get anyone
- 1:05:28Speaker 4: to do it.
- 1:05:28Speaker 1: Really.
- 1:05:29Speaker 4: So my two friends said, well, hey, that's all we want.
- 1:05:32Speaker 4: We want to shoot does, and hey we don't mind
- 1:05:35Speaker 4: doing it in the summer. That's great, We'll do it,
- 1:05:37Speaker 4: and so they have started and I'm jumping the gun
- 1:05:41Speaker 4: for them here, but they are going to pilot a
- 1:05:43Speaker 4: program this year in which they try to connect new
- 1:05:45Speaker 4: hunters looking for access, trying to find ways to kill
- 1:05:49Speaker 4: deer with farmers with depredation permits who want does killed.
- 1:05:53Speaker 4: So get a bunch of new hunters who want to
- 1:05:55Speaker 4: have an opportunity to do this out there in the
- 1:05:57Speaker 4: summer when nobody else wants to do it. But they
- 1:05:59Speaker 4: don't care they can't shoot bucks because they don't know
- 1:06:01Speaker 4: about shooting a buck.
- 1:06:01Speaker 1: They just want to shooting dose.
- 1:06:03Speaker 4: So this year they're going to be doing that and uh,
- 1:06:07Speaker 4: we'll see how it goes.
- 1:06:08Speaker 2: Heck, yeah, the summer.
- 1:06:09Speaker 1: How low do they want? Dear? Like I always get,
- 1:06:13Speaker 1: I get a little as soon as people come up
- 1:06:16Speaker 1: with like great deer extermination ideas, I always get like
- 1:06:19Speaker 1: a little nervous. Sure, we've been through this before. Remember
- 1:06:23Speaker 1: I just read a minute ago, I killed thirty three
- 1:06:26Speaker 1: bald eagles in one day.
- 1:06:27Speaker 3: Right, all of a sudden, you're like, boy, there's not
- 1:06:30Speaker 3: a lot of bald eagles.
- 1:06:32Speaker 1: And then they got to a point where they had
- 1:06:34Speaker 1: to put him on the ESA, right.
- 1:06:35Speaker 3: So what Uh, Doug always brings up earn a buck,
- 1:06:40Speaker 3: but it's everybody got pissed. Everybody it was that was
- 1:06:45Speaker 3: it effective though? Yeah, well other than making people pissed.
- 1:06:49Speaker 1: I don't know he he had. I wish Doug was
- 1:06:54Speaker 1: here to explain it. But I'm sure this wasn't so
- 1:06:56Speaker 1: widespread in the gate of the program, but it spawned
- 1:06:59Speaker 1: this whole industry of can I borrow your dough? But
- 1:07:03Speaker 1: what I do not follow your dough?
- 1:07:08Speaker 4: As I understand it, though, the rate of CWD spread
- 1:07:12Speaker 4: during that time period was significantly lower as compared to
- 1:07:16Speaker 4: when they removed that. It's like this kind of trend
- 1:07:19Speaker 4: dramatically increased because they were able to slow down. They
- 1:07:23Speaker 4: were able to increase harvest and slow that spread. And
- 1:07:26Speaker 4: when they removed that tool from the toolbox, it changed things.
- 1:07:29Speaker 4: And it also from the folks that I know in
- 1:07:31Speaker 4: Wisconsin who were interested in having a more natural deer
- 1:07:34Speaker 4: herd and balanced age structure, balanced buck todal ratio, things
- 1:07:38Speaker 4: were a lot better.
- 1:07:39Speaker 1: During that time period. On that book. We should clarify
- 1:07:43Speaker 1: just in case someone's new to wildlife politics and all that.
- 1:07:49Speaker 1: When we're talking about wanting to reduce deer numbers, want
- 1:07:52Speaker 1: of the lower deer numbers. There's historically been a single driver.
- 1:07:58Speaker 1: The single driver's been agricultu damage.
- 1:08:02Speaker 4: Right, yep, Well you're saying white people would want to historically,
- 1:08:05Speaker 4: and insurance company.
- 1:08:07Speaker 1: Just heard it. That's kind of like I used to
- 1:08:10Speaker 1: cite that, and then I've read in places where people
- 1:08:13Speaker 1: have tried to go in and search like sort of
- 1:08:16Speaker 1: the powerful car insurance lobby moving to lower deer numbers.
- 1:08:20Speaker 1: I think it's kind of a thing that's not I
- 1:08:23Speaker 1: could be wrong. Someone could write in if they found otherwise.
- 1:08:25Speaker 1: That's been kind of proven as a thing that's like
- 1:08:27Speaker 1: not true.
- 1:08:28Speaker 2: Yeah, the farm lobby has a lot of.
- 1:08:29Speaker 1: Pool with that. The I always thought that the auto insurres.
- 1:08:33Speaker 1: Someone's like, that's that's like an urban legend. The auto
- 1:08:36Speaker 1: insurers were leaning on state game agencies to lower deer
- 1:08:41Speaker 1: populations to lower claims. If someone can contradict that, I
- 1:08:46Speaker 1: don't really know. I always cited that, and then I
- 1:08:49Speaker 1: can't even remember who told me that. It's kind of horseshit.
- 1:08:51Speaker 1: I don't know.
- 1:08:53Speaker 3: Just on the on the dough harvest side of things,
- 1:08:56Speaker 3: you know, I got to go hang out with Doug
- 1:08:58Speaker 3: for opening weekend and days after. I was shocked at
- 1:09:04Speaker 3: the just general buck activity despite what to my you know,
- 1:09:11Speaker 3: tender Montana ears sounded like an absolute battle going on
- 1:09:17Speaker 3: for three days straight. More shots opening morning that I
- 1:09:21Speaker 3: would hear walking around in Western Hills in a whole season, and.
- 1:09:30Speaker 1: That's the big hunt for you, Oh dude, it's still
- 1:09:32Speaker 1: seeing bucks run around.
- 1:09:33Speaker 3: And still seeing bucks running around. I shot a really cool,
- 1:09:37Speaker 3: bigger buck and went to drag it out to the
- 1:09:46Speaker 3: closest like four wheeler track road and kind of came
- 1:09:49Speaker 3: into this opening where one of Doug's buddies had been
- 1:09:53Speaker 3: shooting all morning. Shooting would be the accurate, accurate description,
- 1:09:57Speaker 3: And there's it looked like a scene from like The
- 1:10:00Speaker 3: Walking Dead. There were dose legs up everywhere you looked
- 1:10:04Speaker 3: in this field, to the degree that I was like,
- 1:10:08Speaker 3: you know what, I'm just gonna fade back into the
- 1:10:11Speaker 3: canopy and wait until it's dark dark before I go
- 1:10:14Speaker 3: walking out into this field.
- 1:10:16Speaker 1: Huh.
- 1:10:18Speaker 3: And but the proximity kind of going back to this
- 1:10:21Speaker 3: guy right and end to a processor is really close.
- 1:10:26Speaker 3: You know, you start stacking up all those does it's
- 1:10:28Speaker 3: a lot of work. But like there's a big part
- 1:10:33Speaker 3: of me that wants to go back, just shoot dose,
- 1:10:35Speaker 3: take them to that processor because the broughtwurst was so good, unbelievable.
- 1:10:40Speaker 1: Cal's Brod's holy shit.
- 1:10:42Speaker 3: It's nuts. And I liked making sausage. But that's a
- 1:10:45Speaker 3: lot of work too.
- 1:10:47Speaker 1: Uh. Back to this thought for a second. Historically, too
- 1:10:53Speaker 1: many deer meant too much agricultural damage. That's still is.
- 1:11:00Speaker 1: I'm just trying to explain that where are people getting
- 1:11:02Speaker 1: the idea of too many deer? Where's it coming from? Now?
- 1:11:04Speaker 1: It's that that remains constant agricultural damage. And there's this
- 1:11:09Speaker 1: other idea laid on that that too many deer two
- 1:11:16Speaker 1: dens of populations of deer facilitates an accelerated disease transmission.
- 1:11:24Speaker 4: And two other things. Oh please, you've got herd health things,
- 1:11:28Speaker 4: and you have habitat health as well. So when you have,
- 1:11:31Speaker 4: like you know in Dug's area, so many deer, here's
- 1:11:34Speaker 4: a really hard time, you know, seeing okra generation. There's
- 1:11:37Speaker 4: many many states across the country where you have these
- 1:11:40Speaker 4: browse lines where it's nothing five feet down, and then
- 1:11:43Speaker 4: you see leaf structure again, So we see all sorts
- 1:11:45Speaker 4: of cascading biodiversity effects by these exorbitantly high white tailed
- 1:11:51Speaker 4: deer populations, which then and this is I think where
- 1:11:53Speaker 4: the standard deer hunter becomes interested. When you have a
- 1:11:57Speaker 4: unnaturally high deer population, your deer hunting experience this might
- 1:12:02Speaker 4: be different than you would imagine, but it's not going
- 1:12:05Speaker 4: to be as great because you're going to see a
- 1:12:06Speaker 4: whole lot of deer, but you're not going to see
- 1:12:09Speaker 4: a lot of natural deer behavior that you would in
- 1:12:11Speaker 4: a more balanced, healthy deer herd. When you have a
- 1:12:14Speaker 4: relatively balanced dough to buck ratio, you are going to
- 1:12:17Speaker 4: see a much more exciting rut. Bucks are actually going
- 1:12:20Speaker 4: to do running things. They're going to be chasing, they're
- 1:12:22Speaker 4: gonna be fighting, they're gonna be doing all that kind
- 1:12:24Speaker 4: of stuff you're going to have. When you have way
- 1:12:28Speaker 4: too many doughs compared to bucks, it's going to stagger
- 1:12:31Speaker 4: and mess up. The breeding and the fawn drop and
- 1:12:33Speaker 4: things like that all get out of whack, and so
- 1:12:35Speaker 4: you have this kind of cascade of different effects when
- 1:12:38Speaker 4: you do not have the natural balance that you achieve
- 1:12:42Speaker 4: when you have some level of you know, it's like
- 1:12:46Speaker 4: thirty dos to one buck is just not natural. We
- 1:12:48Speaker 4: get that in some of these states and these very
- 1:12:50Speaker 4: very very high deer populations. It messes a lot of
- 1:12:53Speaker 4: stuff up that impacts not only the habitat but our
- 1:12:55Speaker 4: experience as hunters too.
- 1:12:56Speaker 1: Okay, so egg disease and Mark Kenyon, Man, we're gonna
- 1:13:04Speaker 1: get all into Governor's Tags. Sh'd save that krin, you
- 1:13:13Speaker 1: think so?
- 1:13:14Speaker 2: I mean saving that one for a while.
- 1:13:16Speaker 3: Yeah, I think if we do it, it's gonna risk
- 1:13:19Speaker 3: we're gonna generate a longer format conversation in the future.
- 1:13:26Speaker 3: So I'd say we just talk about it because we
- 1:13:28Speaker 3: can do it quick.
- 1:13:31Speaker 1: What's that? Okay? Tell me? Uh, let me tee it up.
- 1:13:37Speaker 2: Are we gonna give our own like thumbs up thumbs
- 1:13:41Speaker 2: down on our thoughts?
- 1:13:44Speaker 1: How many times have I told the story about the
- 1:13:46Speaker 1: GMO guy that came on?
- 1:13:48Speaker 2: Four?
- 1:13:49Speaker 1: Four times? Here's the fifth. I'm not gonna do it. It's
- 1:13:58Speaker 1: my favorite quote of all time. Actually, my favorite quote
- 1:14:01Speaker 1: of all time was from Ike Turner. But I'm not
- 1:14:03Speaker 1: going to tell that quote Governor's Tags. All right, sure,
- 1:14:20Speaker 1: picture you have a wildlife resource. Don't really have to
- 1:14:24Speaker 1: do this. Picture. You have a wildlife resource where the
- 1:14:27Speaker 1: demand exceeds the supply wildly exceeds, where the demand wildly
- 1:14:33Speaker 1: exceeds the supply. In this case, we'll talk about bighorn sheep.
- 1:14:39Speaker 1: You have thousands and thousands of people in every western
- 1:14:42Speaker 1: state want to draw a bighorn sheep tag, but there's
- 1:14:46Speaker 1: only one hundred or two hundred or fifty available, or
- 1:14:49Speaker 1: in the case of Texas, one available. How do you
- 1:14:55Speaker 1: allocate those tags? Generally, historically in this country we have
- 1:15:02Speaker 1: given them out in a democratic fashion, which is consistent
- 1:15:06Speaker 1: with our wildlife management values, where we have lotteries. You
- 1:15:10Speaker 1: send in a few bucks, your name, you know, as
- 1:15:13Speaker 1: we say, your name goes into a hat, and there
- 1:15:16Speaker 1: is a lottery drawing and you pull them out. At
- 1:15:22Speaker 1: some point in time, I was hoping to get a
- 1:15:24Speaker 1: governor's tag expert on to talk about the inception of
- 1:15:28Speaker 1: governor's tags. At some point in time, I don't know
- 1:15:30Speaker 1: when someone had the bright idea to say, man, why
- 1:15:36Speaker 1: don't we do that, like give them out to all
- 1:15:39Speaker 1: the little people through lottery. But let's just sell one
- 1:15:45Speaker 1: and see how much it goes for, and then we'll
- 1:15:50Speaker 1: take all that money. Because that's gonna look horrible, but
- 1:15:52Speaker 1: we'll take all that money and use it for sheep habitat.
- 1:15:58Speaker 1: And they said let's just see what happen. Well, it
- 1:16:00Speaker 1: turns out that what happens is this, people are willing
- 1:16:03Speaker 1: to pay one hundred thousand dollars, two hundred thousand dollars,
- 1:16:08Speaker 1: three hundred thousand dollars, four hundred thousand dollars, and now
- 1:16:11Speaker 1: close to five hundred thousand dollars to jump in line
- 1:16:17Speaker 1: a line that you might not ever get to the
- 1:16:19Speaker 1: front of if you're a Joe blow most people will
- 1:16:24Speaker 1: never get They'll never get to the front of the line.
- 1:16:26Speaker 1: And it turns out that getting to the front of
- 1:16:28Speaker 1: the line on a big horn sheep tag is worth
- 1:16:33Speaker 1: regularly hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it's not.
- 1:16:37Speaker 2: And the idea is so successful in raising money that
- 1:16:42Speaker 2: it spread out to a bunch of other species too.
- 1:16:46Speaker 1: Yep. Then they're like, well, shit, let's try that with deer.
- 1:16:50Speaker 1: Let's try it out, try anelo anything where the demand
- 1:16:56Speaker 1: exceeds the supply. With that said, take it away.
- 1:17:04Speaker 2: Well, there's only a finite number of tags, right, I
- 1:17:07Speaker 2: just said that. So when when someone with the money
- 1:17:14Speaker 2: can go in there and win that auction, that tag
- 1:17:17Speaker 2: is coming from a pool of tags.
- 1:17:21Speaker 1: I don't agree with that that I don't think it
- 1:17:24Speaker 1: comes from the pool. I think they made an extra okay,
- 1:17:27Speaker 1: because you just said there's like I have laugh. Well,
- 1:17:33Speaker 1: because think of how they did it. Think of how
- 1:17:34Speaker 1: Arizona did Arizona spawned this whole conversation because I'll point
- 1:17:37Speaker 1: out just a spoiler alert, Arizona's Game Commission voted to
- 1:17:41Speaker 1: get rid of governor tags in Arizona. When you get
- 1:17:44Speaker 1: a governor's tag, your tag, Like if you draw a
- 1:17:48Speaker 1: big horn tag in Arizona, you have a season in
- 1:17:50Speaker 1: a unit when you buy the governor's tag. To sweeten
- 1:17:53Speaker 1: the deal, this is insane. Seeming to sweeten the deal,
- 1:17:58Speaker 1: they said, oh, in your season, Bud, three hundred and
- 1:18:03Speaker 1: sixty five days is your hunting season, and you can
- 1:18:06Speaker 1: hunt any unit that is open to sheep hunting. That
- 1:18:11Speaker 1: tag did not come out of the pool.
- 1:18:14Speaker 2: Even if it didn't, that guy goes let's say you're
- 1:18:18Speaker 2: the one dude who draws the big horn tag and
- 1:18:22Speaker 2: a unit. Yep, the governor's guy goes in there and
- 1:18:25Speaker 2: shoots the.
- 1:18:25Speaker 1: Big ram in there. Oh yeah, and he's got months right,
- 1:18:29Speaker 1: he can do it. When you find out if your
- 1:18:32Speaker 1: season opens like September fifteenth, that's some bitch as all
- 1:18:36Speaker 1: summer to hunt.
- 1:18:38Speaker 3: So I will I will say, like in the state
- 1:18:40Speaker 3: of Idaho, there's a Governor's tag for the the numbers increased,
- 1:18:48Speaker 3: but Hell's Canyon, the Hell's Canyon tag, arguably the best
- 1:18:52Speaker 3: big horn sheep tag in the state of Idaho, is
- 1:18:56Speaker 3: at one. There's one tag. This is I get. I
- 1:19:00Speaker 3: don't know what it's at right now, but at the time,
- 1:19:03Speaker 3: one tag. And they factored in that there's a ninety
- 1:19:11Speaker 3: chance that if the Governor's tag or whoever gets the
- 1:19:16Speaker 3: Governor's tag is gonna hunt that unit, gonna hunt that unit,
- 1:19:19Speaker 3: which is why there's one tag.
- 1:19:22Speaker 1: Oh, because it would have been too because it would
- 1:19:24Speaker 1: have been okay, So there's one extra.
- 1:19:25Speaker 5: Yes, there's it's not necessarily taking a tag out of
- 1:19:28Speaker 5: the pool, but there's gonna be one more dead ram.
- 1:19:31Speaker 1: Yep. Now, I gotta before what we even get into
- 1:19:34Speaker 1: some listener feedback on this, I gotta say I am
- 1:19:37Speaker 1: so torn on the issue that is the It is
- 1:19:39Speaker 1: one of the very few areas of wildlife politics where
- 1:19:42Speaker 1: I do not have an opinion.
- 1:19:45Speaker 3: Bullshit.
- 1:19:48Speaker 1: Yeah, you can think of a lot of stuff that
- 1:19:49Speaker 1: I don't have an opinion.
- 1:19:50Speaker 3: Done this is the one area. One of the area
- 1:19:55Speaker 3: Stephen Ranella tattooed on his gravestone.
- 1:20:01Speaker 2: I can't think anything good or bad to say about it.
- 1:20:03Speaker 1: No, no, I can think of all kinds of good and bad.
- 1:20:04Speaker 1: I think, no, not that I don't know. I didn't
- 1:20:07Speaker 1: mean that. I have conflicting opinions, meaning okay, you're right,
- 1:20:12Speaker 1: cal I'll phrase it differently. If I was emperor of
- 1:20:15Speaker 1: the country and they said, oh, yeah, one last thing,
- 1:20:19Speaker 1: what about governor's tags, I'd be like, I still haven't decided, Okay,
- 1:20:24Speaker 1: I got to think about it longer. Yeah, that's what I.
- 1:20:28Speaker 4: Just when I think about it, I go back to what, Yeah,
- 1:20:32Speaker 4: what's better for the resource in the end, and in
- 1:20:36Speaker 4: then the government a million dollars in habitat respiration the resource.
- 1:20:41Speaker 1: It's better for the resource. What's better for us emotionally.
- 1:20:45Speaker 3: Better for the resource.
- 1:20:46Speaker 1: But it's not.
- 1:20:47Speaker 2: It doesn't American mode.
- 1:20:51Speaker 5: If you have ten governors tags, right, if it's simply
- 1:20:55Speaker 5: about maximizing the slippers of the market value for the
- 1:20:58Speaker 5: economic value of those wildlife resources, you'd auction all the tags.
- 1:21:05Speaker 1: I think there is.
- 1:21:08Speaker 5: I was gonna say that the Arizona the guy the
- 1:21:10Speaker 5: email from the guy in Arizona, I think, pointed out
- 1:21:13Speaker 5: something that's relevant to us here in Montana, and that
- 1:21:15Speaker 5: is that there are other ways of of allocating these
- 1:21:19Speaker 5: special opportunities, in one of which is because he I
- 1:21:23Speaker 5: believe he pointed out that in Arizona they're not doing
- 1:21:26Speaker 5: away with.
- 1:21:27Speaker 1: Well, i'll tell you what he said, unless you'd like
- 1:21:30Speaker 1: to read it.
- 1:21:31Speaker 5: No, no, go ahead.
- 1:21:32Speaker 1: It was so well worded, I think it. Yeah. This
- 1:21:36Speaker 1: this gentleman describes himself as someone who has been intimately
- 1:21:41Speaker 1: involved in the commission appointments and Arizona wildlife policy. He
- 1:21:47Speaker 1: wrote in a bullet pointed email. He goes on to
- 1:21:51Speaker 1: say the rhetoric that Arizona votes to eliminate governor's tags
- 1:21:56Speaker 1: is wrong. Okay, how are that'd be true? Well, he
- 1:22:00Speaker 1: says this, Arizona has quote special big game tags which
- 1:22:05Speaker 1: are administered by the Game and Fish Department along with
- 1:22:08Speaker 1: other tags, rather than the more political administration of governor's
- 1:22:13Speaker 1: tags and other states. Okay, so he's saying they don't
- 1:22:18Speaker 1: actually have a thing. They don't have a pool called
- 1:22:20Speaker 1: governor's tags. They have special big game tags. He's getting
- 1:22:26Speaker 1: a little bit into semantics here, but that's fine. The
- 1:22:30Speaker 1: Arizona Game and Fish Commission did not eliminate special big
- 1:22:34Speaker 1: game tags. They voted to phase out the practice of
- 1:22:39Speaker 1: allocating these tags through an auction process in order to
- 1:22:44Speaker 1: rely more on raffles. So he is making a semantic argument.
- 1:22:49Speaker 1: They don't call them governor's tags, but in defense of
- 1:22:54Speaker 1: our language, they are functional Colloquially, they are colloquially functionally
- 1:22:59Speaker 1: govern tags. Well, it's not the governor.
- 1:23:02Speaker 5: When you think of a governor's tag, that's what it
- 1:23:03Speaker 5: looks like.
- 1:23:04Speaker 1: It's an auction.
- 1:23:04Speaker 4: Now is the will the raffle? Do they believe the
- 1:23:07Speaker 4: raffle will bring in equivalent funds?
- 1:23:10Speaker 2: What did the Montana to be determined?
- 1:23:12Speaker 1: I don't think so, But let me go on, since
- 1:23:18Speaker 1: two thousand and nine. This is the same individual since
- 1:23:21Speaker 1: two thousand and nine. Auction tags. Okay, so what we've
- 1:23:25Speaker 1: been calling governor's tags. Auction tags have accounted for seventy
- 1:23:31Speaker 1: percent of the thirty two point four million dollars raised
- 1:23:34Speaker 1: by special tags, with raffle tags raising thirty percent, or
- 1:23:42Speaker 1: nearly ten million dollars.
- 1:23:45Speaker 2: What my question would be how many tags were auctioned
- 1:23:48Speaker 2: and how many were raffled?
- 1:23:51Speaker 1: I was wondering the same thing. I wish this email
- 1:23:53Speaker 1: got into that, But he gives information where you would
- 1:23:55Speaker 1: go find it, because he sends in a whole slide
- 1:23:59Speaker 1: presentation on the subject. Now he goes on to say,
- 1:24:02Speaker 1: while the sheep and meal deer tags have generated eye
- 1:24:05Speaker 1: popping headlines, the department's data shows that for other species,
- 1:24:11Speaker 1: including turkey, bison, coosier, black bear, mountain lion, have Alina
- 1:24:16Speaker 1: pronghorn raffle tags generate more than auction tags. Okay, so
- 1:24:25Speaker 1: it's species dependent. He has another thing, the notion that
- 1:24:31Speaker 1: Arizona and now I don't think he got this from us,
- 1:24:36Speaker 1: but the notion that Arizona is becoming purple and therefore
- 1:24:43Speaker 1: the Commission's being influenced by anti hunting interests is flat
- 1:24:48Speaker 1: out wrong. Oh I know where this came from. There's
- 1:24:51Speaker 1: a guy that's coming on the podcast, and I'm gonna
- 1:24:55Speaker 1: let him put this in his own phrasing. We have
- 1:24:57Speaker 1: a guest in the future coming on the podcast who
- 1:25:00Speaker 1: felt that the move against governor's tags was a anti
- 1:25:04Speaker 1: hunting thing. Okay, and I might have quoted him on
- 1:25:10Speaker 1: that anti like that. It's anti hunters arguing against governor's tags.
- 1:25:19Speaker 1: How dare they auction off the life of an animal.
- 1:25:22Speaker 1: Oh but this individual who will be coming on the
- 1:25:26Speaker 1: podcast expressed to me, I don't want to say his
- 1:25:28Speaker 1: name because it was a private conversation and I don't
- 1:25:30Speaker 1: want to quote him on it, expressed to me that
- 1:25:33Speaker 1: he felt like it was a loss to the anti hunters. Hmmm, interesting,
- 1:25:38Speaker 1: this guy says that's flat out wrong. The commissioners very
- 1:25:42Speaker 1: very clearly articulated their reasons for taking this step. Retired
- 1:25:49Speaker 1: US Army Lieutenant General Jeff Buchanan said he understood the
- 1:25:56Speaker 1: argument that the ends justify the means, meaning he understands
- 1:26:03Speaker 1: the argument that, hey, it's a lot of money, but
- 1:26:05Speaker 1: it's not democratic. And he says, we cannot compromise our
- 1:26:09Speaker 1: values to make money, meaning it might be ugly to
- 1:26:14Speaker 1: auction off hunting opportunities when you have people that in
- 1:26:17Speaker 1: ways in which it excludes the general population. Sure, but
- 1:26:25Speaker 1: that's true, but it's a compromise of our values. Therefore
- 1:26:28Speaker 1: the money shouldn't matter. He also cited founding principles of
- 1:26:32Speaker 1: this nation and inserting that we should not be setting
- 1:26:35Speaker 1: aside a special privilege for the rich and elite. He
- 1:26:41Speaker 1: spent thirty seven years in the military. That's not what
- 1:26:45Speaker 1: he was there defending. Okay, he was not there to
- 1:26:49Speaker 1: defend special privileges for the rich and elite. He was
- 1:26:52Speaker 1: there to defend all Americans, which influenced his decision that
- 1:26:57Speaker 1: governor tags are on American Former chair James Sorry, I'm
- 1:27:08Speaker 1: gonna mutilate this name. James Goner was cited, among other concerns,
- 1:27:17Speaker 1: the concentration of these tags in just a few hands,
- 1:27:23Speaker 1: meaning check this out. Thirty six governor's tags have fallen
- 1:27:29Speaker 1: into the hands of three individuals. Wow, which is also
- 1:27:38Speaker 1: in the slide. He goes on to say these individuals
- 1:27:44Speaker 1: are not sympathetic to anti hunting advocates. Should I keep
- 1:27:50Speaker 1: going about this guy? This guy's good.
- 1:27:53Speaker 3: Yeah, no, I mean it's all I'll get info.
- 1:27:55Speaker 1: I served as a policy advisor to the previous Arizona
- 1:27:58Speaker 1: governor and was personally involved in the selection of several
- 1:28:01Speaker 1: of these commissioners. I am intimately familiar with the process
- 1:28:04Speaker 1: for the appointment of the others and can state confidently confident. Yeah,
- 1:28:09Speaker 1: I can state confidently. Why am I saying I can
- 1:28:13Speaker 1: say confident, But he's saying he can state with confidence.
- 1:28:20Speaker 1: There you go that the wishes of anti hunters played
- 1:28:23Speaker 1: no role in these appointments. I was similarly, similarly, very
- 1:28:29Speaker 1: closely involved in the banning of trail cameras in the
- 1:28:32Speaker 1: state for taking of wildlife. As we're a number of
- 1:28:37Speaker 1: these commissioners, I can tell you personally that the decision
- 1:28:41Speaker 1: was driven by hunters for the benefit of hunters and
- 1:28:45Speaker 1: our model of wildlife conservation. To see either of these
- 1:28:51Speaker 1: actions as being motivated by anti hunting forces is just
- 1:28:55Speaker 1: flat out wrong. Yeah shuck, I like that guy. Yep,
- 1:29:03Speaker 1: it's good. Email Okay, who wants to do? Email number two?
- 1:29:09Speaker 3: I can read it. I haven't read it before.
- 1:29:12Speaker 1: Who I'm looking forward to? Email number three?
- 1:29:14Speaker 3: This is from Mark, not the guy that's sitting next
- 1:29:16Speaker 3: to me, but he describes himself as a spare time
- 1:29:20Speaker 3: economist and a spare time hunter. The idea that governor's
- 1:29:25Speaker 3: tags or any other market mechanisms to manage scarce wildlife
- 1:29:29Speaker 3: resources counter the democratic allocation pillar of the North American
- 1:29:33Speaker 3: model of wildlife conservation is a misconception held by many
- 1:29:37Speaker 3: conservationists and hunters. When discussing a scarce resource like a
- 1:29:42Speaker 3: big horn, cheap tag, a random draw isn't democratic in
- 1:29:45Speaker 3: the same way electing a president is everyone doesn't vote
- 1:29:49Speaker 3: for who gets the tag. John Stikovich of Cleveland, Ohio
- 1:29:53Speaker 3: isn't the favorite to win because he saved an eleven
- 1:29:57Speaker 3: month old baby from a burning building and deserves that
- 1:30:00Speaker 3: the most parentheses. True stories, random draws are just one
- 1:30:04Speaker 3: imperfect way to allocate resources when demand exceed supply. It
- 1:30:10Speaker 3: just so happens that that it is an indisputably suboptimal
- 1:30:14Speaker 3: way to do so.
- 1:30:16Speaker 1: No, he's contradicting himself. A merit based system is not
- 1:30:21Speaker 1: democratic in this case. That's merit based. Does he ever
- 1:30:26Speaker 1: think we're going to hold an election to see who
- 1:30:28Speaker 1: gets the governor's day.
- 1:30:30Speaker 3: Everybody's essays need to be to do it now. The
- 1:30:34Speaker 3: debate's going to be held halfway through.
- 1:30:37Speaker 5: It's democratic in the sense of everyone's equal before the law,
- 1:30:41Speaker 5: like democratic culture voting one.
- 1:30:45Speaker 1: If the governor was given the tag and the governor
- 1:30:49Speaker 1: could honor a person who deserved it on merit, it
- 1:30:54Speaker 1: would open up big problems with cronyism.
- 1:30:58Speaker 2: Wouldn't raise money either.
- 1:31:01Speaker 1: But get.
- 1:31:04Speaker 3: He's saying the market will decide who's right or wrong.
- 1:31:13Speaker 3: You shouldn't take seriously state game agencies complaining about managing
- 1:31:18Speaker 3: white tailed dough populations while still charging for licenses to
- 1:31:22Speaker 3: hunt them. If they were really felt that there were
- 1:31:25Speaker 3: too many deer on the landscape, they would reimburse hunters
- 1:31:28Speaker 3: for shooting. Does not charge them?
- 1:31:30Speaker 1: All right, I'm done. In general, there was zeno state agency.
- 1:31:39Speaker 3: In general, game agencies unwillingness to manage.
- 1:31:42Speaker 1: That they had to run out of deficit. Not that
- 1:31:44Speaker 1: state agencies can get revenue to fund biologists. How about
- 1:31:48Speaker 1: the state agency with now that we've stripped its funding
- 1:31:51Speaker 1: source anyways, now needs to pay people to hunt? Does yeah?
- 1:32:06Speaker 3: Oh, I am as Steve put it a way ass
- 1:32:10Speaker 3: pro governor's tag person who wants to read that one
- 1:32:17Speaker 3: I can jump the brod well.
- 1:32:19Speaker 2: It may be true that people used to have a
- 1:32:22Speaker 2: we're all in it together attitude, and that years ago
- 1:32:26Speaker 2: one was not able to pay extra to skip lines
- 1:32:29Speaker 2: at Disneyland or bored an airplane faster. This tear system
- 1:32:34Speaker 2: is most certainly not new. An argument could be made
- 1:32:37Speaker 2: that the average American today is is today more aware
- 1:32:41Speaker 2: of the financial tier systems that inherently exists in a
- 1:32:45Speaker 2: capital society than they were thirty, forty or fifty years ago.
- 1:32:49Speaker 2: But the fact that rich people are able to buy
- 1:32:51Speaker 2: things that are either coveted or rare and thus expensive,
- 1:32:54Speaker 2: while poor middle class people are unable to buy such things.
- 1:32:58Speaker 2: Is in no way a surprise to anyone, nor has
- 1:33:01Speaker 2: it ever been a surprise to anyone. The foundation of
- 1:33:04Speaker 2: this argument is what exact is exactly equal opportunity means,
- 1:33:10Speaker 2: and where it exists in our North American model of
- 1:33:13Speaker 2: wildlife conservation. I'm not following that regarding the draw system,
- 1:33:21Speaker 2: which is integral to our conservation model, equal opportunity means
- 1:33:25Speaker 2: that every American has an equal right to apply. It
- 1:33:29Speaker 2: does not mean that every American has an equal ability
- 1:33:32Speaker 2: to apply. Someone who asks the financial means to apply
- 1:33:36Speaker 2: across multiple states of which they are not a resident
- 1:33:38Speaker 2: stands a much greater chance of being successful in a
- 1:33:41Speaker 2: draw by virtue of having entered more draws. In the opposite,
- 1:33:45Speaker 2: someone who does not have the financial means has a
- 1:33:48Speaker 2: significantly lower probability of successfully drawing a tag. There's inherent
- 1:33:54Speaker 2: inequality in this, but it is in financial ability, not
- 1:33:58Speaker 2: opportunity to apply. In the very same vein he's gonna.
- 1:34:02Speaker 1: Get to this, he's gonna get to And since anyone
- 1:34:05Speaker 1: can bid on a governor's.
- 1:34:06Speaker 2: Sag right in the very same vein. Everyone has afforded
- 1:34:10Speaker 2: the equal opportunity to write of bidding on a governor's tag.
- 1:34:13Speaker 2: Yet not everyone is afforded an equal financial ability. The
- 1:34:18Speaker 2: person with a greater financial means will be more successful
- 1:34:21Speaker 2: in terms of attaining a tag. The buck stops here there.
- 1:34:26Speaker 1: I think you know what? Can you read his last sentence?
- 1:34:28Speaker 3: Uh?
- 1:34:29Speaker 2: There's a litany of other pro governor's tag arguments, but
- 1:34:32Speaker 2: I believe this to be the most compelling. Sincerely, Sexton.
- 1:34:36Speaker 1: Now when I hear a name like Saxton, you're immediately suspicious.
- 1:34:41Speaker 1: He's got grease, he's got jingle. Of course, Saxton name
- 1:34:46Speaker 1: Saxons because rich people know how to name their kids
- 1:34:51Speaker 1: to sound rich.
- 1:34:53Speaker 3: Right, you don't get that like this is this is
- 1:35:00Speaker 3: a better argument.
- 1:35:00Speaker 2: It is a better argument, but the whole like where
- 1:35:04Speaker 2: it exists in our North American model, Like, you know,
- 1:35:07Speaker 2: it's not the King's deer, so I'm not sure what
- 1:35:10Speaker 2: he's getting.
- 1:35:10Speaker 3: Well, yeah, I mean this, right, is an argument that
- 1:35:15Speaker 3: you could apply to anything. Right, It's like, well, the
- 1:35:18Speaker 3: systems messed up, Yeah, so why pick on this part
- 1:35:22Speaker 3: of the system, cherry pick this when this is our
- 1:35:25Speaker 3: messed up over here too. If you're really invested in
- 1:35:29Speaker 3: making it equitable and democratic, then you need to tear
- 1:35:33Speaker 3: down this part of the system.
- 1:35:35Speaker 1: I'm gonna sum up email for yep. I was gonna
- 1:35:38Speaker 1: sum it up. Y'all's jealous. People jealous about all kinds
- 1:35:44Speaker 1: of stuff. They don't realize they're jealous. Y'all's jealous of
- 1:35:46Speaker 1: people who can buy governor's tags. That's what this is
- 1:35:48Speaker 1: all about, yep.
- 1:35:51Speaker 5: I mean, I think the one of the things that
- 1:35:55Speaker 5: the argument about, if you can't afford it, you're just
- 1:35:59Speaker 5: why is that we own the wildlife right, and so
- 1:36:04Speaker 5: it's not the same as like going to Disneyland and
- 1:36:06Speaker 5: paying to cut in line. It's a public resource and
- 1:36:10Speaker 5: everybody has a right to say how they think it
- 1:36:13Speaker 5: should be managed.
- 1:36:16Speaker 1: This guy goes on here's email number five. He's like, hey, man,
- 1:36:19Speaker 1: I'm torn. Here's a couple of questions. Why is there
- 1:36:23Speaker 1: only one tag? If one tag is worth six hundred,
- 1:36:26Speaker 1: then why not sell two tags for one point two million? Two?
- 1:36:36Speaker 1: His second question is the amount raised? Truly the thing
- 1:36:38Speaker 1: that allows this to be considered If the tag went
- 1:36:42Speaker 1: for twenty thousand dollars one year rather than six hundred
- 1:36:45Speaker 1: dollars six hundred thousand, would it still be worth violating
- 1:36:51Speaker 1: the North American conservation model or is it the amount
- 1:36:56Speaker 1: of money?
- 1:36:59Speaker 3: Yeah?
- 1:36:59Speaker 1: What what?
- 1:37:00Speaker 3: There's definitely a threshold. Yeah, definitely threshold. All good questions,
- 1:37:06Speaker 3: he believed.
- 1:37:07Speaker 1: Here's another question he's got. I believe asking our governor's
- 1:37:11Speaker 1: tag's good hides behind words the truth. The true question, then,
- 1:37:16Speaker 1: is are our ethical beliefs for sale? In pointing out
- 1:37:22Speaker 1: this threshold. We'll do it for six, we'll do it
- 1:37:25Speaker 1: lest it, not do extremes. We'll do it for two hundred,
- 1:37:28Speaker 1: not gonna do that for ten? Okay, uh yeah, At
- 1:37:34Speaker 1: what point do we go, like, well, for that amount
- 1:37:36Speaker 1: of money? I think there's a movie about this one.
- 1:37:38Speaker 1: Oh yeah, Demi Moore, some guy. Yeah, they're like a
- 1:37:43Speaker 1: loyal couple, but she could get a bunch of grease,
- 1:37:47Speaker 1: which is slang for jingle, which is slang for night
- 1:37:55Speaker 1: with everyone has a price.
- 1:37:56Speaker 3: Leaving Las Vegas. Not leaving Las Vegas was the.
- 1:38:00Speaker 5: You know that one movie that Nick Cage did, Raising Arizona.
- 1:38:05Speaker 2: I think you can just the opposite though. If it
- 1:38:08Speaker 2: was only twenty thousand, people be like, oh that's cool,
- 1:38:12Speaker 2: But it would they wouldn't get so pissed.
- 1:38:13Speaker 1: Because of because of email number four, because y'all's jealous
- 1:38:18Speaker 1: and you're and you're more jealous of a dude with
- 1:38:22Speaker 1: massive grease.
- 1:38:23Speaker 2: Totally, because you're like, I know that seven hundred thousand
- 1:38:26Speaker 2: for that antelope island mule deer tag, Like it's like
- 1:38:31Speaker 2: a drop in the bucket for that guy. He didn't
- 1:38:33Speaker 2: give a shit.
- 1:38:33Speaker 1: What if it went the opposite way though?
- 1:38:35Speaker 4: What if what if I told you that such and
- 1:38:38Speaker 4: such a Saxon guy was going to put in thirty
- 1:38:41Speaker 4: million dollars enough to pay double the entire Saxon bombuler
- 1:38:45Speaker 4: the seven Yeah, what if it was such an astronomical
- 1:38:49Speaker 4: amount that it could change everything that state was able
- 1:38:52Speaker 4: to do? Is there is there a tier where it's
- 1:38:54Speaker 4: like undeniably useful we have right?
- 1:38:56Speaker 1: I mean, if someone said, hey, man, I'm going to
- 1:38:58Speaker 1: give you a billion dollar and you can take that
- 1:39:02Speaker 1: billion dollars and spend it on wildlife habitat. But here's
- 1:39:04Speaker 1: the rub, I'm gonna shoot one of them.
- 1:39:06Speaker 5: She's and that she would have died that winter anyway.
- 1:39:11Speaker 1: Yeah, we're giving musks and my das here.
- 1:39:15Speaker 7: Would you just said no, no, no, no, we should
- 1:39:20Speaker 7: introduce into evidence the Montana Bha experiment this year.
- 1:39:26Speaker 1: Yeah, then we're gonna finish Krinn wrote end.
- 1:39:30Speaker 3: Which is which is raffle the auction, right, And and
- 1:39:35Speaker 3: I think there's a bunch of ways that I find
- 1:39:39Speaker 3: to be like irrefutable that this should If we're gonna
- 1:39:46Speaker 3: do fundraising this way, it should be through raffle, not
- 1:39:49Speaker 3: through auction.
- 1:39:52Speaker 1: And like.
- 1:39:56Speaker 3: The wild cheap situation is the best example that we have, right, Like,
- 1:40:01Speaker 3: there's no data out there that says, you know, a
- 1:40:07Speaker 3: hell of a lot more people would be invested in
- 1:40:12Speaker 3: big horn cheap conservation if they had some way to
- 1:40:18Speaker 3: access bighorn sheep or even the opportunity at big horns.
- 1:40:23Speaker 1: There's no data supporting that.
- 1:40:25Speaker 3: Right, But you're like, Okay, you could have your name
- 1:40:29Speaker 3: in the hat for a big horn sheep tag for
- 1:40:34Speaker 3: five bucks, but that chance doesn't really exist, right. But
- 1:40:40Speaker 3: at the same time, like once a year, we all
- 1:40:42Speaker 3: gather in a room and we pat each other on
- 1:40:46Speaker 3: the backs by being like that dude is getting his
- 1:40:50Speaker 3: third World Slam of sheep. What a conservationist, right, And
- 1:40:58Speaker 3: he'd I mean six hundred and fifty thousand dollars ah
- 1:41:02Speaker 3: what a conservationist. Right, That same conservationist can buy six
- 1:41:10Speaker 3: hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of raffle tickets, right
- 1:41:13Speaker 3: and be like, what a great conservationist. He's just not
- 1:41:17Speaker 3: guaranteed the sheep hunt to go with it.
- 1:41:19Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, here's the thing though, My wife recently bid
- 1:41:24Speaker 1: on a thing where you get to go get donuts
- 1:41:26Speaker 1: with the school resource officer and a fundraiser for the school. Yep,
- 1:41:32Speaker 1: it's like donuts with Tom the cop. Uh. She could
- 1:41:39Speaker 1: have just given that money, not gone to donuts with
- 1:41:41Speaker 1: that cop.
- 1:41:43Speaker 3: But he's super good looking, but he listens to her
- 1:41:50Speaker 3: dropping on the neighboring tables one thousand attention.
- 1:41:56Speaker 1: It was actually, Uh, the intention was that our kids
- 1:41:59Speaker 1: would get to go get donuts with the cops. I
- 1:42:01Speaker 1: don't like this. I don't like this.
- 1:42:04Speaker 3: It seems like.
- 1:42:07Speaker 1: Is to go to donuts with the cops in order
- 1:42:10Speaker 1: to be heard.
- 1:42:13Speaker 3: Okay. So the Montana example that that Randall brought up,
- 1:42:17Speaker 3: Montana BHA gets the statewide mule deer tag this year
- 1:42:24Speaker 3: and and typically the state will give it to different
- 1:42:28Speaker 3: conservation groups as that fundraising mechanism the very typical way
- 1:42:34Speaker 3: of fundraising with the tag, right, the conservation group doesn't
- 1:42:37Speaker 3: get the money from the tag. The conservation group gets
- 1:42:42Speaker 3: to use that tag as kind of like the carrot
- 1:42:45Speaker 3: to bait folks into a fancy banquet where that tag
- 1:42:51Speaker 3: gets auctioned off.
- 1:42:52Speaker 1: Oh that's how that works.
- 1:42:54Speaker 3: Yeah, and then they's like.
- 1:42:56Speaker 4: Raff off a bunch of other things, and then they
- 1:42:57Speaker 4: raffle off a bunch of other things.
- 1:42:59Speaker 1: To make their money.
- 1:43:00Speaker 3: But this it's a decoy, yes, really, yeah, yep, because
- 1:43:05Speaker 3: you know, I don't.
- 1:43:06Speaker 1: Know how I thought it worked, but I didn't know
- 1:43:08Speaker 1: that well.
- 1:43:08Speaker 3: Because arguments like this, right, these states that have those
- 1:43:12Speaker 3: those tags, that money has got to go back to
- 1:43:15Speaker 3: the conservation of that species, for the habitat of that species,
- 1:43:19Speaker 3: for the benefit of bighorn cheap or moose or goats
- 1:43:24Speaker 3: or mule.
- 1:43:24Speaker 1: Yeah right, yeah, everything you're saying makes sense as their thought.
- 1:43:28Speaker 5: I think they get a cut, or they can take
- 1:43:31Speaker 5: a cut.
- 1:43:32Speaker 3: I think, yeah, there's like the but it's outlined in here, right, you're.
- 1:43:37Speaker 1: Right, it doesn't go into their general fund, right, the.
- 1:43:40Speaker 3: Handling fee, so you know, yep, it's twenty bucks a chance,
- 1:43:46Speaker 3: but your card gets danged for twenty two fifty type
- 1:43:49Speaker 3: of thing. So anyway, what was interesting here is like
- 1:43:57Speaker 3: we talked about like you put in six hundred thousand
- 1:43:59Speaker 3: dollars at auction, but you could put six hundred thousand
- 1:44:01Speaker 3: dollars into the raffle if you really wanted to do that.
- 1:44:04Speaker 3: Nobody did that. So historically the highest price the Montanas,
- 1:44:10Speaker 3: the statewide Montana mule deer tag has ever gone for,
- 1:44:14Speaker 3: was forty one thousand dollars. A lot of money for
- 1:44:17Speaker 3: mule deer tag. Nowhere nearer the amount of money that
- 1:44:20Speaker 3: mule deer tags and other states go for it to.
- 1:44:23Speaker 1: We don't have that kind of mild are yeah, because
- 1:44:27Speaker 1: we get to hunt them all through the front.
- 1:44:32Speaker 3: Well, the raffle version raised fifty six swenty dollars, a
- 1:44:39Speaker 3: thirty eight percent increase from the all time high. And
- 1:44:46Speaker 3: what's interesting is the the mean purchase price was forty
- 1:44:52Speaker 3: three dollars, so kind of on average, two chances to
- 1:44:59Speaker 3: name in the hat per participant, yep, right, so you know,
- 1:45:04Speaker 3: very equitable. It was spread really evenly amongst the people
- 1:45:10Speaker 3: who chose to participate.
- 1:45:12Speaker 1: Tank of gas ranging to two tanks of gas, and
- 1:45:15Speaker 1: the guys, the guy.
- 1:45:15Speaker 5: Who actually won, The guy who actually won spent like
- 1:45:19Speaker 5: under one hundred dollars or something. He spent one hundred
- 1:45:22Speaker 5: bucks on tickets.
- 1:45:24Speaker 3: Yeah, he spent one hundred bucks through the winner.
- 1:45:26Speaker 1: I think that that could be the start of the arms, right,
- 1:45:28Speaker 1: I think that in that case, you made more off
- 1:45:31Speaker 1: a mule around raffle in Montana. I don't think that
- 1:45:34Speaker 1: you would that that's that's not going to hold true
- 1:45:36Speaker 1: in big horns.
- 1:45:37Speaker 3: Yeah, but like I would love to see that. So
- 1:45:41Speaker 3: if the marketing mechanism were to change from curating individual
- 1:45:49Speaker 3: donors with super deep pockets, right, like you don't hold
- 1:45:54Speaker 3: a raffle or an auction like that and being like,
- 1:45:58Speaker 3: oh my god, a totally random person off the street
- 1:46:01Speaker 3: walked in here and bought that thing. Can you believe that?
- 1:46:03Speaker 1: Yeah?
- 1:46:03Speaker 3: Is not done right?
- 1:46:05Speaker 1: You know the.
- 1:46:08Speaker 3: Person or the top two people who are going to
- 1:46:12Speaker 3: end up with.
- 1:46:12Speaker 1: They're in communication with the people that are going to
- 1:46:14Speaker 1: buy it.
- 1:46:15Speaker 3: Yes, yep. So if you took that level of effort
- 1:46:23Speaker 3: and did a nationwide.
- 1:46:28Speaker 2: Ideally what's five hundred thousand at fifty bucks an entry.
- 1:46:33Speaker 1: Yeah, that's just a matter of removing some number of zeros.
- 1:46:37Speaker 2: And like, would you get that many people to do it?
- 1:46:40Speaker 2: I bet you would.
- 1:46:41Speaker 3: Well, but and you advertise to these areas that are like,
- 1:46:44Speaker 3: I am so detached from big horn sheep, I don't
- 1:46:47Speaker 3: even participate, right, And I'm just saying, like, anecdotally, in
- 1:46:51Speaker 3: the state of Montana, as we increased the bar price
- 1:46:57Speaker 3: wise for these speed that are very very limited, right,
- 1:47:03Speaker 3: the supply demand that we already talked about. I had
- 1:47:06Speaker 3: people within my personal circle that there was never ever
- 1:47:12Speaker 3: a question, nor would there ever be a question of
- 1:47:15Speaker 3: how serious a hunter they are. But they were just
- 1:47:17Speaker 3: like unpriced out of the game, and they just made
- 1:47:20Speaker 3: that decision early on. I can't float two hundred and
- 1:47:23Speaker 3: fifty bucks out there for a chance. I'm just going
- 1:47:26Speaker 3: to concentrate on other things. So I mean, whether you
- 1:47:29Speaker 3: think that's a significant number or not, that is happening.
- 1:47:33Speaker 3: So I want to know if we said, here's the
- 1:47:37Speaker 3: places that don't participate in the conservation of this species,
- 1:47:42Speaker 3: and we put our efforts into saying like, okay, here's
- 1:47:45Speaker 3: a way, would that then lead to greater participation in
- 1:47:50Speaker 3: the conservation of that species in general?
- 1:47:53Speaker 1: Right?
- 1:47:54Speaker 3: Because well, I had threw five dollars in and then
- 1:47:58Speaker 3: I read some stuff on big horn sheep, and boy,
- 1:48:00Speaker 3: I like that idea. Now I'm just a little more
- 1:48:03Speaker 3: invested than I was.
- 1:48:04Speaker 1: You know that.
- 1:48:05Speaker 4: You know that sheep day we went to at the
- 1:48:07Speaker 4: Hunt Expo where we put in our raffle tickets and
- 1:48:09Speaker 4: sat there. I've never thought about and cared about sheep
- 1:48:11Speaker 4: so much as I did for that hour.
- 1:48:15Speaker 1: I think it's safe to say this on the raffle front,
- 1:48:17Speaker 1: even if you do a big horned sheep, it's not
- 1:48:21Speaker 1: a question of It's definitely not a question of do
- 1:48:25Speaker 1: we want four hundred thousand dollars or zero? Yeah, it's
- 1:48:31Speaker 1: probably some question of do we want four hundred or
- 1:48:37Speaker 1: two fifty or four hundred or two or whatever the
- 1:48:41Speaker 1: hell it is. It's not like you're giving to move
- 1:48:43Speaker 1: to a raffle or you're not giving up the whole thing.
- 1:48:46Speaker 1: You're giving up probably something, but you're not losing the
- 1:48:50Speaker 1: whole thing. Well, I mean, you're gaining a public participation.
- 1:48:54Speaker 5: I believe that Idaho Wild Sheep Foundation for that state
- 1:48:58Speaker 5: wide tag they switch every other year. I believe so
- 1:49:03Speaker 5: they one year they auction it, than the next year
- 1:49:06Speaker 5: they raffle it.
- 1:49:07Speaker 1: Yep. I how you put that Wall Street Main Street?
- 1:49:13Speaker 3: There you go brand, but there's no there's just like
- 1:49:17Speaker 3: I feel like, by I mean, look at look at
- 1:49:23Speaker 3: the state of skiing in the United States right these
- 1:49:28Speaker 3: major veil Oh, there's only.
- 1:49:31Speaker 2: Two ski companies left in the whole country.
- 1:49:34Speaker 3: And they have made a very public decision to raise
- 1:49:37Speaker 3: prices cater to fewer customers year over year, at at
- 1:49:42Speaker 3: a higher price to that customer. And that's just the
- 1:49:45Speaker 3: way skiing is going to be, right, I mean, I
- 1:49:48Speaker 3: think that that is a very good example of where hunting,
- 1:49:53Speaker 3: at least right now for certain species already is. And
- 1:49:56Speaker 3: it went that way a long time ago. Right, It's
- 1:49:58Speaker 3: like I always remind people when I'm in that cheap auction,
- 1:50:04Speaker 3: I'm like, what's fun here is the percentage of people
- 1:50:09Speaker 3: who have ever actually had a sheep tag that are
- 1:50:12Speaker 3: in this room right now? This whole industry is here,
- 1:50:16Speaker 3: but relative like the amount of actual sheep hunters very very.
- 1:50:22Speaker 1: Few, yep. But see that guy back there, he got
- 1:50:25Speaker 1: six yeah.
- 1:50:28Speaker 3: Yeah, And we're like and you know, and it's this
- 1:50:31Speaker 3: thing that we're expected to celebrate, and like, are we
- 1:50:37Speaker 3: just so far down the road that we can't go
- 1:50:39Speaker 3: back and be like, man, we got to try something else,
- 1:50:42Speaker 3: because it turns out relatively very few people actually give
- 1:50:46Speaker 3: a shit about sheep because they just will never get one.
- 1:50:51Speaker 3: And we talk about so I have a lifetime license
- 1:50:54Speaker 3: in Idaho, which gives me the privilege of having my
- 1:50:57Speaker 3: name in the sheep draw as a resident, which is
- 1:51:03Speaker 3: I believe. Still, if you're applying as a resident in
- 1:51:07Speaker 3: the state of Idaho for bighorn sheep, that is the
- 1:51:11Speaker 3: best odds of drawing bighorn sheep in the US. Still,
- 1:51:14Speaker 3: I think, depending on your unit. Every year I talk
- 1:51:20Speaker 3: about how stupid I am. I should be applying for
- 1:51:24Speaker 3: badass mule deer tags in Idaho every year because mathematically
- 1:51:27Speaker 3: I will not draw that tag. But I know people
- 1:51:31Speaker 3: who have right and they're at this point like huge
- 1:51:37Speaker 3: chip on my shoulder. I'd much rather draw or a
- 1:51:40Speaker 3: bighorn sheep tag than buy one, because it's like that's
- 1:51:45Speaker 3: where the hunt is.
- 1:51:47Speaker 1: It's more fun.
- 1:51:48Speaker 3: Oh, it's more fun. Yeah, for sure. So I don't know.
- 1:51:51Speaker 1: I think.
- 1:51:54Speaker 3: This is a legitimate issue with the hunting system in America,
- 1:51:59Speaker 3: Like we've already made the decision to just reserve elite
- 1:52:04Speaker 3: opportunities for folks with elite bank accounts, and I don't
- 1:52:10Speaker 3: believe that's right. In any way, shape or form, and
- 1:52:13Speaker 3: we're not exploring ways to change that system. And I
- 1:52:19Speaker 3: think it's going to be at the detriment of hunting
- 1:52:23Speaker 3: because it's like, well, why would I give a shit
- 1:52:25Speaker 3: about that. It's like I'm not I lost that game
- 1:52:28Speaker 3: a long time ago. Ladies, Joan Ryan Kell and Amen
- 1:52:32Speaker 3: Cal thank you for joining.
- 1:52:36Speaker 1: We'll find you out to the uh the hell's it called?
- 1:52:41Speaker 1: Mediator podcast network, YouTube, good Night uncompahgre or the other
- 1:52:51Speaker 1: Robert W service by Bob Servis. This next story came
- 1:53:03Speaker 1: to us through Keith and Spot, the manager of the
- 1:53:07Speaker 1: First Light store in Haley, Idaho. Keith received a call
- 1:53:13Speaker 1: from a customer one day who phoned in to tell
- 1:53:16Speaker 1: him about an experience he'd had while wearing a piece
- 1:53:20Speaker 1: of First Light gear, the Uncompagreate Puffy. While I'd argue
- 1:53:26Speaker 1: that the jacket is certainly not the star of the story,
- 1:53:29Speaker 1: this gentleman had gotten into a very sticky situation in
- 1:53:33Speaker 1: the mountains of northwest Montana. He felt that his survival
- 1:53:38Speaker 1: was due in part to the quality of the jacket
- 1:53:42Speaker 1: he was wearing. As you'll hear, there are a few
- 1:53:45Speaker 1: other pieces of gear that would have served him well,
- 1:53:48Speaker 1: and he readily admits that he should have been carrying them.
- 1:53:52Speaker 1: To be honest, though, what caught my eye about this
- 1:53:55Speaker 1: story wasn't the coat, which is a damn good puffy,
- 1:53:59Speaker 1: but rather the narrator's name, Robert W. Service. As everyone knows,
- 1:54:07Speaker 1: or at least they better know, Robert Service is the
- 1:54:11Speaker 1: name of the greatest poet of all time, if he
- 1:54:14Speaker 1: asks me, better than Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman
- 1:54:18Speaker 1: all put together, known as the Bard of the Yukon,
- 1:54:22Speaker 1: Service was born in eighteen seventy four and is the
- 1:54:26Speaker 1: author of the greatest poem ever written, The Cremation of
- 1:54:31Speaker 1: Sam McGee. It's the story of a pair of gold
- 1:54:35Speaker 1: miners during the Yukon gold Rush, one of whom Sam McGee,
- 1:54:40Speaker 1: is from Tennessee. He hates the cold of the North,
- 1:54:44Speaker 1: hates it severely, and it's not until his death that
- 1:54:48Speaker 1: he finally gets so much needed relief. The poem begins,
- 1:54:53Speaker 1: there are strange things done in the midnight sun by
- 1:54:56Speaker 1: the men who moil for gold. The Arctic trail have
- 1:55:00Speaker 1: their secret tales that would make your blood run cold.
- 1:55:04Speaker 1: The northern lights have seen queer sights, but the queerest
- 1:55:08Speaker 1: they ever did see was that night on the marge
- 1:55:11Speaker 1: of Lake Lebarge I cremated Sam McGee. You'll have to
- 1:55:17Speaker 1: read it to see how it ends, and then you
- 1:55:19Speaker 1: might want to follow up by reading the second greatest
- 1:55:22Speaker 1: poem of all time, also written by Service, called the
- 1:55:27Speaker 1: Shooting of Dan McGrew. Now what binds these two Robert W. Services,
- 1:55:34Speaker 1: one a dead Scottish Canadian poet and the other living
- 1:55:38Speaker 1: commercial fishermen from Oregon. Isn't just their name or the
- 1:55:42Speaker 1: fact that they are actually related. They are bound also
- 1:55:47Speaker 1: by experiences with extreme cold. Only one of them, however,
- 1:55:53Speaker 1: lived through two experiences so harrowing that they would earn
- 1:55:58Speaker 1: him the nickname black Cloud Bob.
- 1:56:06Speaker 8: My name's Bob Service. I'm from the Pacific Northwest. I
- 1:56:10Speaker 8: live in a small coastal town in Oregon. The story
- 1:56:13Speaker 8: I'm going to tell you took place on November fifteenth,
- 1:56:16Speaker 8: twenty twenty three, in Sanders County, Montana. I've lived here
- 1:56:23Speaker 8: in Astoi, Oregon, my whole entire life to make a
- 1:56:26Speaker 8: living a commercial fish and also a member of an
- 1:56:30Speaker 8: operating engineer's trade. It's a pretty economically depressed place, so
- 1:56:35Speaker 8: growing up in a small coastal community. Even though my
- 1:56:38Speaker 8: parents weren't really hardcore, we spent a lot of time
- 1:56:42Speaker 8: outside and we ate a lot of the fish, crab, deer, elk.
- 1:56:47Speaker 8: It just became a way of life. We lived off
- 1:56:49Speaker 8: the land here and it just kind of morphed into
- 1:56:51Speaker 8: my adulthood and it became what I'm all about. I
- 1:56:56Speaker 8: started hunting when I was twelve. I've had horrible luck
- 1:56:59Speaker 8: at it, but it's part of who I am and
- 1:57:02Speaker 8: I love it. People approached me and you're like, man,
- 1:57:05Speaker 8: if you didn't have bad luck, you wouldn't have any luck.
- 1:57:08Speaker 8: I've been labeled black cloud, bob or I've also been
- 1:57:11Speaker 8: told I'm lucky. I don't know what it is to
- 1:57:14Speaker 8: be honest with you, but I mean I was on
- 1:57:17Speaker 8: a crab boat one time that was sinking and we
- 1:57:19Speaker 8: got rescued off that. I've been hit by an Amtrak train.
- 1:57:22Speaker 8: I've had some pretty impressive things happen to me. So
- 1:57:26Speaker 8: I'm still here and there must be some kind of
- 1:57:28Speaker 8: a reason for the story that I'm about to tell you,
- 1:57:31Speaker 8: which took place in November of twenty twenty three. I
- 1:57:35Speaker 8: need to go back to twenty ten. I had been
- 1:57:39Speaker 8: in a relationship for four or five years. I met
- 1:57:41Speaker 8: this gal and she was like twenty and I was
- 1:57:43Speaker 8: thirty three, and she came over to my house and
- 1:57:46Speaker 8: she never left. She had mentioned that, you know, she
- 1:57:51Speaker 8: had an interest in wanting to go deer hunting, and
- 1:57:53Speaker 8: I'm like, well, let's fulfill your interest.
- 1:57:55Speaker 3: Let's go.
- 1:57:56Speaker 8: So I bought her a deer tag. I took her
- 1:57:58Speaker 8: out to a gun. I let her handle a rifle.
- 1:58:02Speaker 8: Everything in my mind that you would do to fulfill
- 1:58:06Speaker 8: somebody that hadn't spent much time around guns. You showed
- 1:58:09Speaker 8: them how it works, let him handle the firearm, you
- 1:58:12Speaker 8: let him shoot. So I did all these things, and
- 1:58:15Speaker 8: I take my ex girlfriend hunting about five hours south
- 1:58:19Speaker 8: of where I live, so it was a camping hunting
- 1:58:22Speaker 8: destination trip. Took her out hunting and I found a
- 1:58:26Speaker 8: buck and I said, hey, would you like to shoot
- 1:58:27Speaker 8: this buck? She said yes. And when I first spotted
- 1:58:30Speaker 8: this thing, it was probably like almost a thousand yards away,
- 1:58:33Speaker 8: so we closed the distance to about three hundred yards.
- 1:58:35Speaker 8: I set her up and I'm like, well, here's the deer,
- 1:58:38Speaker 8: find it in the scope, and when you're ready, shoot it.
- 1:58:42Speaker 8: The funny thing about this story is I don't normally
- 1:58:45Speaker 8: bring a dog with me hunting, but I had this
- 1:58:47Speaker 8: little spring or Spaniel. She was about a thirty five
- 1:58:49Speaker 8: pound dog, and she went with me everywhere. She was
- 1:58:51Speaker 8: in the back seat right when all this stuff happened,
- 1:58:54Speaker 8: she started barking and freaking out. Looking back, I still
- 1:58:58Speaker 8: think that that dog was trying to tell me that
- 1:59:00Speaker 8: she just had maybe like a premonition that something was
- 1:59:04Speaker 8: gonna go wrong that day. And I scolded her for it,
- 1:59:07Speaker 8: and I feel horrible about that because I think that
- 1:59:10Speaker 8: dog just had maybe had a hunch. She shoots this deer,
- 1:59:15Speaker 8: the deer falls down. I rig her up and I
- 1:59:20Speaker 8: put the firearm on her back on a sling. I
- 1:59:22Speaker 8: empty it. I put a pack frame on bags on
- 1:59:26Speaker 8: my back, and I'm going to bone this deer out.
- 1:59:28Speaker 8: We're going to hike down to it. And I'm side hill.
- 1:59:30Speaker 8: I'm trying to find it, and we make our way
- 1:59:32Speaker 8: over to the animal. The deer was about twenty five
- 1:59:34Speaker 8: feet to my immediate right. The animal is mortally wounded,
- 1:59:39Speaker 8: but it's still alive. She was up on the hill
- 1:59:42Speaker 8: from the steep bank and I'm directly across from this animal,
- 1:59:46Speaker 8: and I said, why don't you go ahead and chamber
- 1:59:49Speaker 8: around up and dispatch this deer. So she started to
- 1:59:53Speaker 8: cycle around with this rifle. It was my rifle, and
- 1:59:57Speaker 8: it had a detachable magazine. The spring had a little
- 2:00:00Speaker 8: bit of slack, so when you put a round into
- 2:00:04Speaker 8: the magazine and you went to chamber it, to get
- 2:00:06Speaker 8: that bullet to feed into the chamber, sometimes you kind
- 2:00:10Speaker 8: of had to put your hand on the bottom of
- 2:00:11Speaker 8: the clip to raise that spring up. In that action,
- 2:00:16Speaker 8: she was trying to fight it. It was foreign to
- 2:00:18Speaker 8: her and she didn't know her way around it. Unknowingly,
- 2:00:21Speaker 8: that muzzle was coming towards my direction to my right,
- 2:00:25Speaker 8: and about the time I'm like, oh, that muzzle's way
- 2:00:30Speaker 8: in the danger zone and my safe. The gun went
- 2:00:33Speaker 8: off and I felt the bullet go through my thigh,
- 2:00:39Speaker 8: and immediately I remember saying to her, Oh my god,
- 2:00:43Speaker 8: you just shot me in the leg. And it wasn't
- 2:00:46Speaker 8: like the movies where you fly or fall. I just
- 2:00:49Speaker 8: I stood there and I'm like, oh my god. I'm like, oh,
- 2:00:52Speaker 8: I got to get out of here, and I took
- 2:00:53Speaker 8: a step and down I went. Just by the pain
- 2:00:57Speaker 8: and the shock and everything that I was going into,
- 2:00:59Speaker 8: I pretty much figured that was time I was going
- 2:01:02Speaker 8: to say goodbye right there. She called nine one one,
- 2:01:05Speaker 8: and for about an hour and a half or two hours,
- 2:01:08Speaker 8: she had first responders, firefighters EMTs searching this mountain for us.
- 2:01:15Speaker 8: I had told secondhand, you know, the dispatcher that we're
- 2:01:19Speaker 8: on this road. We're at the three and a half
- 2:01:22Speaker 8: mile marker. It was a one ton dodged diesel crew
- 2:01:25Speaker 8: cab truck. And it's super crazy because the dispatcher at
- 2:01:29Speaker 8: the time had enough common sense to reach out to
- 2:01:34Speaker 8: a local there, and this man was like eighty years
- 2:01:37Speaker 8: old at the time. She called him up and she said, hey,
- 2:01:40Speaker 8: I think there's a hunter behind your house. He's been shot,
- 2:01:43Speaker 8: he's wounded. And this old timer got in his pickup
- 2:01:47Speaker 8: just based off the description and drove up there and
- 2:01:49Speaker 8: found me. I'm sitting there, I'm laying on my back,
- 2:01:53Speaker 8: and I'm things are starting to get slowed down, and
- 2:01:57Speaker 8: I'm actually playing like highlight reels of my life. I
- 2:02:00Speaker 8: had all this real, super vivid memories of things that
- 2:02:05Speaker 8: happened forty years ago that were as vivid as something
- 2:02:07Speaker 8: that happened ten minutes ago. That's when I knew I
- 2:02:10Speaker 8: was probably getting ready to say goodbye. But shortly after
- 2:02:15Speaker 8: that old man found me. He had a bunch of
- 2:02:18Speaker 8: EMTs right directly behind him, and they packed me down
- 2:02:21Speaker 8: to a landing and I was life flighted to Eugene, Oregon.
- 2:02:29Speaker 8: I woke up two weeks later and my dad was
- 2:02:32Speaker 8: there and he's like, do you know what day it is?
- 2:02:34Speaker 8: And I'm like no, and he's like, you've been asleep
- 2:02:36Speaker 8: for ten days. I spent almost fifty consecutive days in
- 2:02:41Speaker 8: the hospital and almost a year of recovery before I
- 2:02:46Speaker 8: was able to walk. But that hunting accident, what I
- 2:02:50Speaker 8: had to go through has been over the last fourteen
- 2:02:54Speaker 8: years as a result of that event, quite an experience.
- 2:02:59Speaker 8: What I bow and what I went through trying to
- 2:03:03Speaker 8: rehabilitate myself and get myself back to work. Like I said,
- 2:03:06Speaker 8: I work as a commercial fisherman and being a guy
- 2:03:09Speaker 8: in a trade, I worked on a lot of heavy
- 2:03:10Speaker 8: duty construction that required pile driving, dredging, dock wharf construction,
- 2:03:15Speaker 8: that kind of stuff that having some debilitating injury creates
- 2:03:19Speaker 8: a little bit of resentment. We stayed together for five
- 2:03:24Speaker 8: or six years, but I just couldn't get over the
- 2:03:26Speaker 8: fact that she shot me, even though it was an accident.
- 2:03:30Speaker 8: I tried to put myself in her shoes, think about
- 2:03:32Speaker 8: what she was going through and the trauma that she
- 2:03:34Speaker 8: went through shooting me. But I just couldn't. I just
- 2:03:38Speaker 8: couldn't get over it. I had times where I'd get
- 2:03:42Speaker 8: these staff infections and it would make me just horribly sick.
- 2:03:46Speaker 8: I got osteo melitis, which is a bone infection. I
- 2:03:49Speaker 8: had to have my metatarsal bone cut off, and the
- 2:03:53Speaker 8: second toe I think they called the second gist all.
- 2:03:55Speaker 8: They had to clip that one off because I wore
- 2:03:57Speaker 8: the end of it off. I learned a lot about
- 2:03:59Speaker 8: it infect and how sick it can make you. I
- 2:04:03Speaker 8: was sitting there stressing, and I was watching the money
- 2:04:05Speaker 8: leave my bank account. I'd go for a couple months
- 2:04:08Speaker 8: where I'd be able to work, and then I was
- 2:04:09Speaker 8: plagued with an infection. I wouldn't be able to work
- 2:04:12Speaker 8: for months, even though it was debilitating. Once I was upright,
- 2:04:16Speaker 8: there was no slowing me down. I pedaled in ten
- 2:04:20Speaker 8: miles to kill a bull elk on a logging road
- 2:04:23Speaker 8: on a bicycle the next year, so I definitely got
- 2:04:28Speaker 8: right back on the bike and ripped the training wheels off,
- 2:04:31Speaker 8: and I tried to be as headstrong as I could be.
- 2:04:34Speaker 8: I actually think it made me work harder than most
- 2:04:37Speaker 8: people because I had this weight of this debilitating leg
- 2:04:41Speaker 8: or this slowed down leg. November of twenty twenty three,
- 2:04:54Speaker 8: I had just spent several months fishing every day on
- 2:04:58Speaker 8: a commercial fishing boat out of Astoria, so I was
- 2:05:02Speaker 8: really looking forward to the fall. And the year prior
- 2:05:05Speaker 8: I didn't really get much hunting time in, so after
- 2:05:09Speaker 8: going for a couple of years, I wanted to set
- 2:05:12Speaker 8: myself up where I had some time. Our Oregon elk season,
- 2:05:15Speaker 8: which takes place in Middle Oregon, is a big part
- 2:05:19Speaker 8: of my life. Elk season is traditional to us as
- 2:05:23Speaker 8: Christmas Morning is for some people. There's a lot of
- 2:05:26Speaker 8: families involved, and we rely heavily on eating elk meat.
- 2:05:31Speaker 8: I wanted to go hunting in Montana before our elk
- 2:05:34Speaker 8: season started, and I had this idea in my head
- 2:05:38Speaker 8: that I wanted to go and try and hunt for
- 2:05:40Speaker 8: mule deer. Oregon has horrible mule deer hunting, and I
- 2:05:44Speaker 8: wanted to shoot a nice mature mule deer bug. And
- 2:05:48Speaker 8: I cut some corners, and that's probably another reason why
- 2:05:52Speaker 8: I got in the trouble. I got into. It was
- 2:05:55Speaker 8: a Sunday, and I had told my wife, I'm like, dear,
- 2:05:59Speaker 8: I'm gonna go hunting. Wanted to utilize some hunting tags
- 2:06:02Speaker 8: in Montana. The person that I was supposed to go
- 2:06:05Speaker 8: with didn't draw. She's a busy woman, hard working gal,
- 2:06:09Speaker 8: and she's like, well, I can't go, I can't leave.
- 2:06:12Speaker 8: And I'm like, I'll just go over for a couple
- 2:06:15Speaker 8: days and I'll come back. So that's what I did.
- 2:06:18Speaker 8: I threw my stuff in my pickup. I was just
- 2:06:20Speaker 8: gonna kind of cruise around and go hunting. It wasn't
- 2:06:24Speaker 8: my first time hunting in Montana. I've probably been there
- 2:06:27Speaker 8: five or six times prior. I went to the area
- 2:06:31Speaker 8: that I knew first, and I spent half a morning
- 2:06:34Speaker 8: there kind of cruising around and decided that I wanted
- 2:06:37Speaker 8: to actually go out and just hunt and explore, spend
- 2:06:40Speaker 8: a couple of days messing around in country that I
- 2:06:43Speaker 8: hadn't really been to before. I went south, about two
- 2:06:48Speaker 8: and a half hours from where i'd normally go hunting,
- 2:06:51Speaker 8: and I drove up this ridge and I had got
- 2:06:54Speaker 8: up to this point where I was overlooking this reservoir
- 2:06:56Speaker 8: and mountains. It was beautiful vast, big country, and I'm like, oh,
- 2:07:01Speaker 8: put a rifle on my shoulder and my little daypack
- 2:07:04Speaker 8: on and I'll just go for a little drawn up
- 2:07:06Speaker 8: this ridge. It's awful weather, raining, sideways, nasty. I'm going
- 2:07:11Speaker 8: up this ridge. And I guess it was probably around
- 2:07:14Speaker 8: one or two in the afternoon over there in that
- 2:07:19Speaker 8: time of the year. I think it gets dark around
- 2:07:22Speaker 8: four thirty or a quarter after four. It was starting
- 2:07:25Speaker 8: to be that time where the lights were starting to
- 2:07:27Speaker 8: go out, and I'm like, well, I better turn around
- 2:07:30Speaker 8: and make my way back down to the pickup and
- 2:07:33Speaker 8: have some dinner and call my wife and figure out
- 2:07:35Speaker 8: where I'm at to stay tonight. As I did that,
- 2:07:38Speaker 8: I was coming back down the hill and everything just
- 2:07:41Speaker 8: went black. I don't know what happened. I know I fell.
- 2:07:46Speaker 8: All I remember is my legs being above my head
- 2:07:50Speaker 8: and then everything went black. I wake up and it's dark,
- 2:07:59Speaker 8: and I kind of panicked because it's pitch black, and
- 2:08:04Speaker 8: I don't know how long I'd been out, and my
- 2:08:08Speaker 8: leg is really really messed up, I mean messed up, bad,
- 2:08:12Speaker 8: hurt and bad, and I could tell my ankle was
- 2:08:15Speaker 8: all cocked over, and I thought I would expedite things,
- 2:08:21Speaker 8: and I would go down this ridge and get down
- 2:08:25Speaker 8: to the road that I had driven my truck up
- 2:08:27Speaker 8: to where I was well. When I bailed off the ridge,
- 2:08:32Speaker 8: I kept on taking it down, thinking I was going
- 2:08:34Speaker 8: to cut this road, and I never cut it. I
- 2:08:37Speaker 8: was wearing a Boa type ratcheting hunting boot. This particular
- 2:08:41Speaker 8: hunting boot had a sole on it that was super
- 2:08:44Speaker 8: hard and slick. I'd walk over the blowdown limbs and
- 2:08:47Speaker 8: it was like walking on a sheet of ice. Everything
- 2:08:50Speaker 8: was just slick and slimy and wet and saturated. And
- 2:08:53Speaker 8: if it wasn't rain and sideways, it was snowing. I
- 2:08:56Speaker 8: would just be walking along and all of a sudden,
- 2:08:57Speaker 8: I'd be right on my back smack. And I don't
- 2:09:00Speaker 8: know how many times I fell because of that. With
- 2:09:04Speaker 8: my experience in twenty ten, you'd think I'd be pretty
- 2:09:08Speaker 8: set up as far as having some kind of GPS
- 2:09:11Speaker 8: or some kind of transponder type apparatus. My phone battery
- 2:09:16Speaker 8: was dead. I couldn't access any maps, ONYX maps or anything,
- 2:09:20Speaker 8: and I just completely put myself into a situation where
- 2:09:25Speaker 8: I got bit. I had taken compass readings, and I
- 2:09:29Speaker 8: knew before I had left where I needed to go
- 2:09:32Speaker 8: to get back to my pickup. However, I just couldn't
- 2:09:35Speaker 8: achieve that it was very humbling to be a mile
- 2:09:39Speaker 8: or two away from your vehicle and have a broken
- 2:09:41Speaker 8: leg that you can barely stand on, and some injuries
- 2:09:46Speaker 8: that you knew that you might not walk away from.
- 2:09:50Speaker 8: I kept taking this ridge down, and I got down
- 2:09:53Speaker 8: in this creek bottom and I'm like, well, I can
- 2:09:55Speaker 8: take a crick to somewhere. The very first night I
- 2:10:00Speaker 8: went through this country where it was hands and knees
- 2:10:03Speaker 8: crawling through and over, and I remember getting to this point.
- 2:10:08Speaker 8: The whole night had been up trying to get out,
- 2:10:12Speaker 8: and I was so freaking exhausted. I remember reaching in
- 2:10:16Speaker 8: my pocket, I pulled out my keys, and I hit
- 2:10:19Speaker 8: my teeth off to see if I was close to
- 2:10:21Speaker 8: my truck. I remember hearing my horn and I'm like,
- 2:10:25Speaker 8: I'm okay, I can just fall asleep. I was so exhausted.
- 2:10:28Speaker 8: I just fell asleep on this hillside. And I wake
- 2:10:33Speaker 8: up to this mule deer dough blowing and hissing at
- 2:10:37Speaker 8: me and stomping at me, and it's sunny. I'm looking
- 2:10:42Speaker 8: at her, and this deer is just completely agitated that
- 2:10:45Speaker 8: I'm around. She's hissing, and then finally I kind of
- 2:10:49Speaker 8: shoot her away. And I had this little rim rock
- 2:10:52Speaker 8: thing that I was laying next to on this hillside
- 2:10:54Speaker 8: and the sun was beaten on me, and I was
- 2:10:55Speaker 8: warming up, drying out and kind of trying to wake up,
- 2:10:58Speaker 8: and I could hear that dough, that mule deer dough
- 2:11:02Speaker 8: up there, still blowing, and I could hear hooves hitting
- 2:11:05Speaker 8: the ground, and the next thing I know, she kicked
- 2:11:10Speaker 8: up this boulder directly above me. In this rock that
- 2:11:13Speaker 8: was the size of a basketball or a cantalope comes
- 2:11:16Speaker 8: hurling down over this hillside, and I felt the wind
- 2:11:19Speaker 8: of that rock go by my head, and I'm thinking
- 2:11:22Speaker 8: to myself, I'm like, geez, the deer even trying to
- 2:11:25Speaker 8: get me well her tracks, I kind of noticed that
- 2:11:30Speaker 8: was kind of the direction I needed to go.
- 2:11:32Speaker 2: Well.
- 2:11:32Speaker 8: I ended up running into this deer a couple more times.
- 2:11:37Speaker 8: It was really strange because when I caught up to her,
- 2:11:40Speaker 8: she had a nice, mature mule deer with her, like
- 2:11:43Speaker 8: a four point that was just a beautiful buck. At
- 2:11:46Speaker 8: that point, hunting was the last thing on my agenda.
- 2:11:51Speaker 8: There could have been a world record deer there, and
- 2:11:53Speaker 8: I wouldn't have shot it. I needed to get out
- 2:11:55Speaker 8: of there. I didn't even know if my gun was
- 2:11:58Speaker 8: operable because it had fallen twenty feet and taken a
- 2:12:03Speaker 8: pretty hard hit and a whole muzzle was fouled, so
- 2:12:06Speaker 8: I couldn't even shoot the gun safely. And I end
- 2:12:10Speaker 8: up running into these deer, and now there's four. There's
- 2:12:17Speaker 8: a mule deer dough, a mule deer buck, and a
- 2:12:20Speaker 8: white tail buck and a white tail dough and they're
- 2:12:22Speaker 8: all hanging out together, and I'm like, man, that is
- 2:12:26Speaker 8: really weird. That is really bizarre. Well, they ended up
- 2:12:28Speaker 8: taking off, and I ended up making my way down
- 2:12:32Speaker 8: to this road and I'm like, oh, this must be
- 2:12:36Speaker 8: the road where I drove up with my truck. And
- 2:12:39Speaker 8: so I'm down there all night, piecing around looking for
- 2:12:43Speaker 8: my tracks on this road and I literally am just
- 2:12:47Speaker 8: going over the same country over and over again. And
- 2:12:49Speaker 8: I look up this road and I see three kids.
- 2:12:53Speaker 8: And I look over to my right and there's a gate,
- 2:12:57Speaker 8: a farmer gate type thing, and behind is this massive
- 2:13:01Speaker 8: white tail buck. I still can't believe how big it was.
- 2:13:05Speaker 8: But I saw these what I thought were three kids
- 2:13:07Speaker 8: trying to yell at them and get their attention, and
- 2:13:09Speaker 8: they're not yelling back at me. Well the whole time,
- 2:13:13Speaker 8: what I'm thinking are kids is a hallucination. I'm hallucinating.
- 2:13:21Speaker 8: I spent four whole nights out in the woods with
- 2:13:25Speaker 8: no food, and the only water I was drinking was
- 2:13:28Speaker 8: drinking from you know, springs in the ground. I was weak,
- 2:13:31Speaker 8: I was tired, I was hurt, havn't eaten, haven't drank,
- 2:13:35Speaker 8: and I was so freaking exhausted. I'd be walking along
- 2:13:38Speaker 8: and I would just pass out and fall down on
- 2:13:40Speaker 8: the ground. I was in trouble. All I could think
- 2:13:47Speaker 8: about in my head was God, I missed the check
- 2:13:50Speaker 8: in last night. But what is my wife thinking? What
- 2:13:53Speaker 8: is my poor wife going through right now?
- 2:13:55Speaker 2: You know?
- 2:13:56Speaker 8: And I'm just trying to beat my way back. Every
- 2:13:59Speaker 8: step I took was like taking five back. Nothing was
- 2:14:02Speaker 8: working out. I was just terrified and worried about my daughter.
- 2:14:06Speaker 8: I knew my wife would be okay, but I just
- 2:14:09Speaker 8: couldn't stomach my daughter not having a dad. So it
- 2:14:15Speaker 8: was it was a hell the time. I mean, just
- 2:14:20Speaker 8: the fear and being hurt and the helplessness. I don't
- 2:14:26Speaker 8: have any idea how much country I traversed when your
- 2:14:31Speaker 8: legs broke, trying to use your gun as a crutch,
- 2:14:34Speaker 8: and just trying to transit through that country with all
- 2:14:38Speaker 8: the elevation and it being covered in snow and slick
- 2:14:41Speaker 8: and overblowdown trees. You can only get around so much.
- 2:14:45Speaker 8: But I just never would stop. I just kept on
- 2:14:48Speaker 8: trying to beat my way ahead and through and trying
- 2:14:51Speaker 8: to get out of this situation. This ridge that I
- 2:14:56Speaker 8: was on, it was open on the east facing slope,
- 2:15:02Speaker 8: and then on the west facing slope it was timbered
- 2:15:05Speaker 8: terrain and country. I got into these bluffs and I
- 2:15:10Speaker 8: could see a trail below me, and it was so
- 2:15:15Speaker 8: steep and it was so sketchy. It was like being
- 2:15:19Speaker 8: placed on a rock wall where you're looking down where
- 2:15:23Speaker 8: you have twelve or fourteen feet where you're going to
- 2:15:26Speaker 8: hit bottom. The very last night, it would have been
- 2:15:34Speaker 8: like the fourth night I was out there. I'm laying
- 2:15:38Speaker 8: under this fir tree on the side of this mountain
- 2:15:40Speaker 8: and I found myself over into these bluffs and I'm
- 2:15:43Speaker 8: kind of covered up, and I'm soaking wet, I'm cold,
- 2:15:46Speaker 8: and I've got one of the first light puffy coats
- 2:15:49Speaker 8: on the down coats, and I couldn't believe how tough
- 2:15:54Speaker 8: that was, because I thought I would absolutely shred it.
- 2:15:57Speaker 8: I tore it in one spot. But the amount of
- 2:16:00Speaker 8: brutality that I put on that coat was incredible. There
- 2:16:05Speaker 8: was one night where it rained almost two inches. I
- 2:16:08Speaker 8: encountered snow, rain, sleet, just about everything you can encounter.
- 2:16:13Speaker 8: But it kept me warm and kept me dry. But
- 2:16:17Speaker 8: I was wearing like danhim jeans. At my bottom half
- 2:16:19Speaker 8: was soaked and it was just a miserable time to
- 2:16:23Speaker 8: never really warm up or dry out. But I had
- 2:16:26Speaker 8: a space blanket, and if I would say to have
- 2:16:30Speaker 8: anything in a hunting pack, have a space blanket, because
- 2:16:34Speaker 8: if you can insulate yourself even after getting wet, it'll
- 2:16:37Speaker 8: be all right. People ask me if you build a fire,
- 2:16:41Speaker 8: and I'm like, how do you build a fire in
- 2:16:44Speaker 8: country and ground that's completely saturated. You're so critical that
- 2:16:50Speaker 8: you're now thinking about yourself like your cell phone. It's
- 2:16:53Speaker 8: like I only have thirty six percent life left. I
- 2:16:58Speaker 8: need to protect that thirty six percent. That's kind of
- 2:17:02Speaker 8: how I viewed my leg and my body in that situation.
- 2:17:05Speaker 8: So I was warm enough with the space blanket, and
- 2:17:09Speaker 8: I didn't see where I was going to benefit from
- 2:17:11Speaker 8: having a fire that I couldn't even hardly start to
- 2:17:14Speaker 8: begin with. Everything was just wet, saturated. It was more
- 2:17:19Speaker 8: important to keep the energy. And that last night, I'm
- 2:17:23Speaker 8: curled up in a ball under that tree and I
- 2:17:25Speaker 8: hear a siren middle of the night. I have no
- 2:17:28Speaker 8: idea what time it is. I hear this just siren,
- 2:17:33Speaker 8: and I'm looking down this ridge and I see what
- 2:17:38Speaker 8: I think is somebody who shining the spotlight. But they're
- 2:17:41Speaker 8: probably over a mile away, and I'm like, well, that's
- 2:17:44Speaker 8: where my pickup is, but I can't get there. I
- 2:17:46Speaker 8: was blowing on a whistle trying to get their attention.
- 2:17:49Speaker 8: I had a headlamp on. This guy that found me
- 2:17:53Speaker 8: later on told me he saw my sos strobe. So
- 2:17:56Speaker 8: they had me located and they knew where I was
- 2:17:58Speaker 8: at because they were at my pickup, and because I
- 2:18:02Speaker 8: was in such a rough spot, they were going to
- 2:18:04Speaker 8: go up there and extract me with a helicopter. The
- 2:18:07Speaker 8: weather had changed and it was just pea soup fog
- 2:18:10Speaker 8: and they couldn't fly. They figured that I obviously was injured,
- 2:18:15Speaker 8: and that's why I was hung up where I was
- 2:18:16Speaker 8: hung up, but they didn't know how they were going
- 2:18:18Speaker 8: to get me out of there, and I don't think
- 2:18:20Speaker 8: they were expecting what I did. I'm up on this
- 2:18:25Speaker 8: cliff and I'm looking at the shale, and it's probably
- 2:18:28Speaker 8: a quarter mile down to this trail head, and I'm
- 2:18:30Speaker 8: thinking I can't climb thirty feet up a vertical rock
- 2:18:35Speaker 8: face to get over these bluffs, so I guess at
- 2:18:39Speaker 8: this point my only option is to slide down this mountain.
- 2:18:45Speaker 8: I just got on my butt and I slid.
- 2:18:47Speaker 3: Down the hill.
- 2:18:48Speaker 8: There wasn't really much left in my jeans, but at
- 2:18:51Speaker 8: that point I didn't care. I just took it slow
- 2:18:54Speaker 8: and rode her all the way to the bottom of
- 2:18:56Speaker 8: the trail, and I got down to this trail head
- 2:18:59Speaker 8: and pretty much drugged myself out. I didn't know where
- 2:19:04Speaker 8: the trail was going to pop out at, but I
- 2:19:06Speaker 8: ended up encountering this kiosk where this fire had occurred
- 2:19:12Speaker 8: in four or five wild land firefighters had lost their
- 2:19:16Speaker 8: life at this particular spot, and I'm like, well, I
- 2:19:20Speaker 8: must be getting close to some kind of parking lot
- 2:19:22Speaker 8: or something. I went maybe one hundred or two hundred
- 2:19:25Speaker 8: yards further, and I heard people talking and that's when Mason,
- 2:19:30Speaker 8: who was head of the search and rescue where I
- 2:19:33Speaker 8: was at, He's like, we've been looking for you for
- 2:19:36Speaker 8: a couple of days. They actually had an ambulance there,
- 2:19:41Speaker 8: and I got up and crawled me back to the
- 2:19:43Speaker 8: ambulance and they started evaluating me, and they're like, you're
- 2:19:46Speaker 8: going to the hospital. Your bitals are pretty dangerous, my
- 2:19:49Speaker 8: kidney functions that things were getting ready to shut down.
- 2:19:51Speaker 8: So I was one more day and I probably wouldn't
- 2:19:54Speaker 8: be here anymore telling you his story, but it was
- 2:19:58Speaker 8: kind of comical. He just couldn't over the fact that
- 2:20:01Speaker 8: I just went there by myself. He was certain that
- 2:20:05Speaker 8: somebody had dropped me some info or a coordinance or
- 2:20:09Speaker 8: a pan or something, and I'm like, nope, I just
- 2:20:12Speaker 8: came here on my own. One of the things that
- 2:20:15Speaker 8: is just everlasting in my head is when my wife
- 2:20:19Speaker 8: got to the hospital. Obviously it was a little bit
- 2:20:22Speaker 8: of an emotional thing. So heard my father in law,
- 2:20:25Speaker 8: are there living in a small town when you know everybody.
- 2:20:30Speaker 8: When we got married was a big event. We had
- 2:20:32Speaker 8: a lot of people there and stuff, and she said
- 2:20:34Speaker 8: something to me that will always stick. She goes, I
- 2:20:38Speaker 8: didn't know if it would be morbid to have your
- 2:20:42Speaker 8: funeral the same place we got married. I didn't know.
- 2:20:49Speaker 3: What to say.
- 2:20:51Speaker 8: Pretty emotional. My whole ankle was cocked ninety degrees off
- 2:20:57Speaker 8: my right leg. It was completely dislocated from where it
- 2:21:03Speaker 8: was supposed to be. I also had frostbite, hypothermia, and
- 2:21:09Speaker 8: all the emotion being in a hospital, the hospital visits,
- 2:21:14Speaker 8: even getting home and transitioning to home. My leg was
- 2:21:18Speaker 8: already damaged before from the bullet going through my thigh,
- 2:21:22Speaker 8: but when I got out of the woods in Montana,
- 2:21:25Speaker 8: I had just worn my right leg down to a
- 2:21:28Speaker 8: there was just nothing left. I mean, I was down
- 2:21:31Speaker 8: to bones, just trying to beat my way out of there,
- 2:21:36Speaker 8: and I just did irreplaceable damage to it and finished
- 2:21:39Speaker 8: it off. I had this horrible infection in my leg,
- 2:21:43Speaker 8: and I went to multiple doctor visits, vascular physicians and whatnot,
- 2:21:49Speaker 8: and they did all this stuff, and they're like, we
- 2:21:51Speaker 8: can preserve your leg, that it'll be a fused joint.
- 2:21:55Speaker 8: You'll have a very noticeable limp the rest of your life.
- 2:21:59Speaker 3: That just did.
- 2:22:00Speaker 8: I didn't really fit into my schedule when they told
- 2:22:04Speaker 8: me that I was going to be close to fourteen
- 2:22:06Speaker 8: months with non weight bearing and pins. I just elected
- 2:22:10Speaker 8: to have my leg amputated. So I had a below
- 2:22:13Speaker 8: the knee amputation done on February fourteenth, and I'm going
- 2:22:19Speaker 8: to be receiving a prosthetic on the seventeenth of April.
- 2:22:23Speaker 8: Losing this leg is actually a good thing. It's a
- 2:22:26Speaker 8: positive thing. Because my leg was so damaged from my
- 2:22:30Speaker 8: hunting accident, my leg would swell up and sometimes it
- 2:22:34Speaker 8: would be near impossible to get a shoe on or
- 2:22:37Speaker 8: a boot on or anything because my ankle was so swollen.
- 2:22:42Speaker 8: I don't have to deal with that anymore, so I'm
- 2:22:44Speaker 8: actually just grateful to not live in chronic pain anymore.
- 2:22:49Speaker 8: I can go down to the beach and dig a
- 2:22:51Speaker 8: limited razor clams, or drive out to the creek and
- 2:22:56Speaker 8: drift a little salmon egg through a hole hitch steel head.
- 2:22:59Speaker 8: I mean, I did that the other day on crutches.
- 2:23:01Speaker 8: It's just it's part of who I am. But it's
- 2:23:05Speaker 8: still a big wild place, and we just don't want
- 2:23:09Speaker 8: to lose touch of how quick things can go bad.
- 2:23:13Speaker 8: And that's why I wanted to tell this story. What
- 2:23:17Speaker 8: happened to me shouldn't have happened. I should have had
- 2:23:20Speaker 8: everything on me that I needed. That's what I can't
- 2:23:23Speaker 8: stress enough is if you leave the road, you better
- 2:23:26Speaker 8: be prepared to leave the road. What happened to me
- 2:23:30Speaker 8: is just due to my personality and my ignorance and
- 2:23:35Speaker 8: trying to be in a hurry and cutting corners and
- 2:23:38Speaker 8: just trying to fit too much into one small bag,
- 2:23:42Speaker 8: got me hurt and could have got me killed, and
- 2:23:47Speaker 8: has now put a real big skew in my life
- 2:23:51Speaker 8: at this age. Last night, it was my daughter's birth
- 2:24:00Speaker 8: and we're singing her Happy Birthday, and I'm looking in
- 2:24:03Speaker 8: that little girl's eyes and i just glad to be here.
- 2:24:08Speaker 8: You know, you just don't know when you're gonna meet
- 2:24:13Speaker 8: your maker, So maybe just kind of give everything a
- 2:24:19Speaker 8: second thought. Go Is that a good idea? You can
- 2:24:23Speaker 8: go out there and have a good time, but make
- 2:24:26Speaker 8: sure you have your keys crossed and your eyes dotted.