Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 209: The Deer Nut
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: All right, suckers, We've been talking all the time about
- 0:02Speaker 1: our our live tour me Cal Yanni, A lot of
- 0:06Speaker 1: special guests, live tour coming up. Everything's sold out. We've
- 0:10Speaker 1: got two dates left. Got a lock at home April fifteen.
- 0:13Speaker 1: In April sixteen, April fifteen, Masa Arts Center, Mace, Arizona.
- 0:16Speaker 1: So it's like your Phoenix Market April sixteen, City National Grove, Anaheim, California.
- 0:22Speaker 1: Again Me the Lavine Eagle O cal Special guests, Me
- 0:27Speaker 1: Eater Live April fifteen, Masa Arts Center, Mace, Arizona, April sixteen,
- 0:33Speaker 1: City National Grove, Anaheim, California. Get your tickets. Let's finish
- 0:37Speaker 1: this thing up. This is me Eat. Your podcast coming
- 0:47Speaker 1: at you shirtless, severely, vot bitten and in my case,
- 0:51Speaker 1: underwear listening Hunt podcast, you can't partake anything presented by
- 0:57Speaker 1: on X. Hunt creators are the most comprehensive digital mapping
- 1:00Speaker 1: system for hunters. Download the Hunt app from the iTunes
- 1:04Speaker 1: or Google play store. Nor where you stand with on X.
- 1:11Speaker 1: I think listeners ought to know that that phild engineer
- 1:13Speaker 1: has uh, he's gotta like he's not good at starting
- 1:17Speaker 1: that timer. You might have to go back behind the curtain.
- 1:22Speaker 1: You might have to go back into the might have
- 1:25Speaker 1: to go back into the back into the resumes. We're
- 1:31Speaker 1: just talking about mountainlins and calsambo. What a mountline does
- 1:34Speaker 1: when it drops down into like a pen full alloments.
- 1:36Speaker 1: If I was a mountainlined, I would be allowed with specialists.
- 1:40Speaker 1: That big neck, hard hard to miss. You could be drunk,
- 1:45Speaker 1: a drunk cap, get drunk, no matter what. You're gonna
- 1:49Speaker 1: get it with the net with the neck like that,
- 1:52Speaker 1: That's what I would be a I would be allowed
- 1:53Speaker 1: with specialist mountainlin. Yeah, they really like to keep their
- 1:56Speaker 1: heads high too. Would I would quickly depopulate the nation.
- 2:01Speaker 1: Would be a lama uh and epidemic of a llama
- 2:06Speaker 1: losses uh. A couple of things, do you I don't
- 2:11Speaker 1: know if you guys. There's a couple of news things
- 2:12Speaker 1: I want to talk about before we before we get
- 2:14Speaker 1: into it. Um that's gotta be. I haven't like dug
- 2:17Speaker 1: into this yet, but Disney's redoing they're doing I don't know,
- 2:20Speaker 1: they're doing a live action Bambi remake. I was told
- 2:26Speaker 1: about this yesterday. I believe man um live action, So
- 2:33Speaker 1: it's gonna be like you know that that's that's stupid
- 2:35Speaker 1: thing they did with the lions talking like people. Yes,
- 2:39Speaker 1: they're lion king. Real showed me the intro to the
- 2:46Speaker 1: lion King deal and then he explained that it is.
- 2:49Speaker 1: They didn't variate or they didn't vary the story at all.
- 2:51Speaker 1: It's the exact same story from the animated the full
- 2:54Speaker 1: animated version. Yeah, but it's just like actual lions being like,
- 2:57Speaker 1: what's up man? Phil called it derbank, So that's gonna
- 3:02Speaker 1: be like a buck anna be like, well, it's tough, man,
- 3:05Speaker 1: because you got these these lions, you know, voiced by humans,
- 3:09Speaker 1: but with absolutely no human facial expressions. Just it's yeah,
- 3:13Speaker 1: but I mean, deer is decidedly less. A deer is
- 3:18Speaker 1: decidedly less, uh sort of facially active, So it's gonna
- 3:25Speaker 1: be even worse than the lions. I hope there's a
- 3:27Speaker 1: part of that movie where, um you ever see the
- 3:29Speaker 1: trail camp footage of deer eating baby birds out of nest.
- 3:32Speaker 1: I hope that's part of the movie. That would be
- 3:36Speaker 1: a good part of the movie. Um, I would kill
- 3:41Speaker 1: to be. I've helped out in in the movie world
- 3:45Speaker 1: on on one script as far as like hunting accuracies
- 3:49Speaker 1: and it's something you did some consulting. Yeah, the Last
- 3:56Speaker 1: of the Mohicans. No, it was The Revenant, all the
- 4:00Speaker 1: Walking Out, yeah, which I was all excited for me
- 4:04Speaker 1: because I was if you didn't with any of old movies,
- 4:06Speaker 1: I was gonna smack you VIP resumes. Uh yeah, but
- 4:12Speaker 1: that was for for my buddy Collin helping him. And
- 4:15Speaker 1: it's just like this dude like a horse dude. No,
- 4:20Speaker 1: he's not a horse dude. It was up in Whitefish. Yeah,
- 4:23Speaker 1: he's a white Fish Guy's not a horse dude. A
- 4:25Speaker 1: little bit like a wrangler. He used to wrangle horses
- 4:27Speaker 1: for movies. No, he just kind of looks like that
- 4:30Speaker 1: type of person though you met him once anyway, Well,
- 4:33Speaker 1: I met a dude one's named that who was a
- 4:35Speaker 1: horse wrangler for movies. Oh no, I lived up in
- 4:39Speaker 1: that neck of the woods. No. I always call this
- 4:41Speaker 1: guy a young McConaughey because just because it was hair
- 4:43Speaker 1: more than anyway. No different guys. Yeah, but the movie
- 4:47Speaker 1: world just they fight so hard against reality. Oh yeah,
- 4:53Speaker 1: Like it's just they'd want no part of it. You know.
- 4:55Speaker 1: Did you see that thing I did that g Q breakdown?
- 4:59Speaker 1: That was fantastic, So like GQ, Like GQ magazine, they
- 5:02Speaker 1: have this thing they do the breakdown, so you can
- 5:04Speaker 1: go watch like a Navy seal breaking down Navy seal
- 5:06Speaker 1: scenes and movies. There's a chef breaking down cooking scenes
- 5:09Speaker 1: and movies. There's no, no, no, no, there's many of them.
- 5:12Speaker 1: Alex Donold the Climber breaks down climbing scenes and movies.
- 5:16Speaker 1: I didn't want to breaking down tracking and hunting scenes
- 5:18Speaker 1: and movies. And leading up to what I was talking
- 5:22Speaker 1: to someone and I was like, man, why don't these
- 5:24Speaker 1: movie people like, why don't they hire a guy to
- 5:28Speaker 1: come in and be like no, no, no no, no, no, no,
- 5:30Speaker 1: you know, you should make it like this. That'll seem
- 5:32Speaker 1: more real. And he said, oh, they do. They just
- 5:36Speaker 1: don't listen to him. They like to have him around
- 5:40Speaker 1: just you know, just to be like, oh, man, I
- 5:42Speaker 1: wouldn't do it like that. You know what, you know,
- 5:44Speaker 1: you don't got a tape here with a machete. And
- 5:50Speaker 1: they're like, in this movie, we do plus like we said, uh,
- 5:53Speaker 1: the general uh way of doing things. That has changed
- 5:57Speaker 1: quite a bit because you look at the reality of
- 6:00Speaker 1: the Robert Redford, Jeremiah Johnson Elk shot like that Elk died,
- 6:06Speaker 1: you pointed out, and they took some heat. They took
- 6:07Speaker 1: some heat for it, and Robert Redford kind of like
- 6:10Speaker 1: justified and explained it. And then in mcgwayn's movie Ranchodi
- 6:14Speaker 1: looks grace film never made um. They you know, they
- 6:19Speaker 1: shoot a steer with a sharp's rifle. Um. And he
- 6:24Speaker 1: expressed to me that he was glad they don't do
- 6:26Speaker 1: it that way anymore. They bought a steer and shot it.
- 6:30Speaker 1: And when you watch the movie, if you're familiar with
- 6:32Speaker 1: any kind of hunting or farming or anything, when you're
- 6:34Speaker 1: watching the movie, there's no confusion. You watched Last and Mohicans,
- 6:39Speaker 1: it's like when they shoot a Deer's like that, dear,
- 6:41Speaker 1: I don't know what happened to that deer. It wasn't shot.
- 6:43Speaker 1: That was just I don't know what it went from
- 6:46Speaker 1: a live deer to a stuffed thing somersault Yeah, yeah,
- 6:50Speaker 1: like stuffed like they threw a stuffed animal through the woods, somersaulting. Yeah.
- 6:56Speaker 1: I imagine how for the amount of folks uh that
- 7:00Speaker 1: are on a film set, how some could it could
- 7:05Speaker 1: probably cast a shadow over production for a day. If
- 7:10Speaker 1: if you're not un familiar with watching the light fade
- 7:14Speaker 1: from something's eyes. Anyone with sensitivities might want to come
- 7:17Speaker 1: to work late today. You know, I don't know. I'm
- 7:19Speaker 1: about ready to quit talking about I don't know, Phil,
- 7:22Speaker 1: Let me ask you. It just has an impartial observer.
- 7:25Speaker 1: Do you think we should um cease covering severed finger
- 7:30Speaker 1: stories or no? Well, what has the feedback been like? More?
- 7:33Speaker 1: It's just we get flooded with severed finger stories and images.
- 7:37Speaker 1: Have you gotten anybody that's saying you're you're making me
- 7:39Speaker 1: gag while I listen to your podcast. They just send
- 7:41Speaker 1: us more and more graphics. I have pictures of severed
- 7:44Speaker 1: fingers that would curl your hair. Okay, well, I think
- 7:47Speaker 1: I said. I sent one of my wife and she
- 7:49Speaker 1: was genuinely mad at me for two days. I would
- 7:52Speaker 1: be too. It was about midnight, I was in a
- 7:54Speaker 1: different time zone and I sent her an image. No,
- 7:57Speaker 1: no explanation. This is an audio medium, though, so I
- 8:00Speaker 1: think you know, I think you're okay. I want to
- 8:02Speaker 1: post them to Instagram, but I feel like i'd get banished.
- 8:07Speaker 1: Oh yeah, for sure. You got sent the grinder one, right.
- 8:15Speaker 1: That's that is haunting, especially if you grind your own meat,
- 8:19Speaker 1: because the hand when it gets eventually cut out of
- 8:23Speaker 1: the grinder is very familiar, very familiar. Tend to knee chunks.
- 8:30Speaker 1: I might start a page, separate page on the dark
- 8:34Speaker 1: web before I get anyways. A couple more finger stories. First,
- 8:38Speaker 1: Jim halfl finger. That's the hell of a name actually,
- 8:41Speaker 1: speaking of severed grandfather severed his finger at the railroad railhouse.
- 8:46Speaker 1: Call them Granda half a finger from most of that's fantastic. Yeah,
- 8:50Speaker 1: it's unusual. Last name you have tell tell people your
- 8:53Speaker 1: job real quick. Swiss German. My lame name is Swiss German.
- 8:55Speaker 1: I'm the wildfe Science coordinator for AS in the game
- 8:57Speaker 1: Fish department. But you got your like, you're in there, man.
- 9:00Speaker 1: You mix it up. You write articles, listen to stuff,
- 9:04Speaker 1: monitor stuff, argue. It's all interesting. Um. I started being
- 9:11Speaker 1: interest in Jim because he sends so many clarifications and corrections.
- 9:15Speaker 1: I don't want to be that guy. No, No, not
- 9:17Speaker 1: at all. No, you do it very respectfully. Like we'll
- 9:19Speaker 1: get a lot of guys that like sending a cracktion
- 9:21Speaker 1: or two and you can just see over the months,
- 9:22Speaker 1: you'll see him just become very agitated. But they're not
- 9:25Speaker 1: getting the level of attention they want and then they
- 9:27Speaker 1: just turned and then they turned like they like hate
- 9:29Speaker 1: you but still listen and you want to be like
- 9:31Speaker 1: you could not listen. Um, it doesn't accrue to him.
- 9:35Speaker 1: But here, okay, this guy is talking about Uh, this
- 9:41Speaker 1: guy is talking about another great story. So this guy's um.
- 9:46Speaker 1: This guy got married and his best man's dad had
- 9:49Speaker 1: retired and started. I don't understand. Is he tired, retired
- 9:52Speaker 1: and move to a golf course and he would kill
- 9:55Speaker 1: time by mowing the lawn. I feel like it must
- 9:58Speaker 1: have been a spare job, not volunteer. Would you move
- 10:02Speaker 1: to a golf course and volunteer to mow the golf course?
- 10:05Speaker 1: Listen to my grandpa would volunteer and mow lawns out
- 10:10Speaker 1: of the golf course that he loved. I did not
- 10:13Speaker 1: understand it. But my buddies who were working out at
- 10:16Speaker 1: that golf course as like caddies. They loved it. They're like, yeah,
- 10:21Speaker 1: I saw your grandpa came by on the more work today.
- 10:26Speaker 1: I've been anti golf my whole life, but I'm huge.
- 10:28Speaker 1: I'm super pro golf now. I don't want to tell
- 10:31Speaker 1: people why. I don't want to tell people about what
- 10:34Speaker 1: what happened with me in the flip flat flasher. But
- 10:36Speaker 1: now we're like major golf supporters. At least it's green space.
- 10:41Speaker 1: I'm not a golfer, but a major golf supporter. I
- 10:45Speaker 1: support the golf industry. My dad always said, friends with
- 10:49Speaker 1: the golf industry. Hit the bone chase. It hit the
- 10:51Speaker 1: bone chase. It look at those simps out there, hit
- 10:54Speaker 1: the bone chase. It. Oh no, listen. I'm a golf supporter,
- 10:56Speaker 1: but I mean, and I love all golfers, and I
- 10:58Speaker 1: support all golf courses, but uh, it's a moronic sport. Um. Anyways,
- 11:04Speaker 1: this guy's ut moll on the golf course. You can
- 11:07Speaker 1: just picture this. So he's he's in a more it's
- 11:09Speaker 1: got a roll bar, and he's coming in and there's
- 11:12Speaker 1: a there's a pole with a guideline a guy cable
- 11:15Speaker 1: coming off of it. So he realizes that the roll
- 11:18Speaker 1: bar in the cable are gonna make contact, so he
- 11:25Speaker 1: he's got it. He breaks as he realizes, and he
- 11:28Speaker 1: reaches up to put some up pressure on the guyline
- 11:32Speaker 1: to clear it from the roll bar, but then his
- 11:35Speaker 1: foot slips off of the brake. Phil, can you put
- 11:42Speaker 1: in a good noise that sounds like this, but it's
- 11:46Speaker 1: like a right I mean, is that the sound of
- 11:49Speaker 1: flesh or the sound of like, what's what's happening here?
- 11:52Speaker 1: With that noise? That's the cable cutting his finger off. Combination.
- 11:58Speaker 1: I think the most disturbing part of all of these
- 12:01Speaker 1: is there's rarely a scenario where I don't see myself
- 12:07Speaker 1: having narrowly avoided that happening to me, or I can't
- 12:12Speaker 1: be like, oh, I can see how I would do that.
- 12:15Speaker 1: There's a great detail, he says that his the tendon.
- 12:22Speaker 1: There's a tendons find their way into these stories. The
- 12:24Speaker 1: tendon is someone sent us a picture of it. It's
- 12:28Speaker 1: like a finger with like sixteen inches attendant. Like the
- 12:30Speaker 1: tendant came off up at the elbow. But the tendon,
- 12:34Speaker 1: he said, is wrapped around the cable. This is he's
- 12:38Speaker 1: a good writer. He says. It's similar if you took
- 12:40Speaker 1: a ribbon and run it along a pair of scissors
- 12:44Speaker 1: to coil it up. That's how he's describing the coil
- 12:48Speaker 1: of the tendon. And this man then getting up there
- 12:51Speaker 1: and unwrapping his h unwrapping his finger from the cable.
- 12:59Speaker 1: Another good figure story. It is the last one for today.
- 13:02Speaker 1: There's two stories. One has nothing to do with fingers.
- 13:05Speaker 1: Guy was saying, his h his old man's welder, and
- 13:07Speaker 1: he had a big weald and glove on and his
- 13:09Speaker 1: super hot chunk of slag got down as well and
- 13:11Speaker 1: glove and lodged against his wedding ring. His wedding ring
- 13:13Speaker 1: got so hot that it burned a scar circle around
- 13:16Speaker 1: his finger. Now he doesn't wear a wedding rings. He's
- 13:17Speaker 1: got a scar circle instead. He's got a scar as
- 13:21Speaker 1: a wedding ring. And a story. Uh yeah, oh two
- 13:27Speaker 1: more things, man, I just said one more, but two more? Yeah? Shoot,
- 13:32Speaker 1: what do you think, Jim? You get bored? No? I
- 13:34Speaker 1: like finger stories. It's not even a finger story. No,
- 13:37Speaker 1: I'm not bored. All right, we're talking there to day
- 13:40Speaker 1: we had an episode. We're talking all dropping stuff down
- 13:42Speaker 1: ice holes, and this guy drops three fifty seven Smith
- 13:48Speaker 1: and Weston down down the ice hole, which is easy
- 13:52Speaker 1: to be like, why absolutely why? Like that is not
- 13:55Speaker 1: a common part of my He said it was stainless,
- 13:59Speaker 1: and so the real bummers. He couldn't get it with
- 14:01Speaker 1: a magnet. He sends in a video of him in
- 14:04Speaker 1: his ice house. He gets his ice house ripping hot
- 14:07Speaker 1: with the heat and he's in his ice house but
- 14:08Speaker 1: his swim trunks. He goes down the whole, can't find it,
- 14:14Speaker 1: comes back up and he looks in like rough shape. Man.
- 14:16Speaker 1: He gets warm back up again, his buddies filming, and
- 14:19Speaker 1: it looks at like a totally rough shape. And he
- 14:21Speaker 1: gets psyched up enough and dives back down here again
- 14:23Speaker 1: and comes out pretty much. His buddy's like reeling back
- 14:26Speaker 1: in with a rope tied around his ankle, and he's
- 14:28Speaker 1: got that pistol. He says they were toting it around
- 14:34Speaker 1: because they kept seeing wolves out on the ice. Oh
- 14:38Speaker 1: my gosh, pretty funny. Uh that's good, all right, Uh,
- 14:45Speaker 1: Jim halflefinger, let's start out with this. So you know,
- 14:48Speaker 1: I guess first off, tell people like what your sort
- 14:50Speaker 1: of scope is your your the scope of your life's
- 14:52Speaker 1: work as a wildlife guy. So I spent twenty two
- 14:55Speaker 1: years as a regional biologist and too sound for his
- 14:57Speaker 1: on the game Fish Department, And in the last four
- 14:59Speaker 1: years I moved to kind of a statewide position called
- 15:01Speaker 1: Wilife Science Coordinator. And the gist of that job is
- 15:04Speaker 1: to have someone kind of free floating that can do
- 15:08Speaker 1: some of the deep dives into science and and make
- 15:10Speaker 1: sure that we've got good science supporting the policies and
- 15:13Speaker 1: the decisions we make as an agency. So that's pretty unusual.
- 15:15Speaker 1: We'll have a state wilife agency too, to be I
- 15:18Speaker 1: think forward thinking enough to have someone like that to
- 15:21Speaker 1: make sure that we're providing a good scientific foundation and
- 15:24Speaker 1: the things we do. And your work, uh, I know
- 15:27Speaker 1: that just from talking about various issues around the country.
- 15:31Speaker 1: Inherently your work spreads beyond Arizona because wildlife issues don't
- 15:37Speaker 1: stop at state lines, right, Yeah. And one of the
- 15:39Speaker 1: biggest reasons I'm involving a lot of westwide stuff is
- 15:41Speaker 1: I'm mom. Also, there's an association of of twenty four
- 15:44Speaker 1: Western state wildlife agency, state and provincial wilife agencies, and
- 15:48Speaker 1: it's called the Western Association Official Wildlife Agencies, and they
- 15:51Speaker 1: get together twice a year and they have some subcommittees
- 15:53Speaker 1: and some working groups, and I've chaired I've been on
- 15:56Speaker 1: the Milder Working Group UH for more than twenty years now,
- 15:59Speaker 1: and I've char it for the last thirteen or fourteen years,
- 16:01Speaker 1: and so as a as a chair that oversees a
- 16:04Speaker 1: meal deer expert from each of those twenty four Western agencies.
- 16:07Speaker 1: We as a group and and me as the chair,
- 16:09Speaker 1: are real involved in all the Western migration stuff. You
- 16:12Speaker 1: had Matt Kaufman here and and Kevin Monty talking about
- 16:16Speaker 1: some of the stuff they're doing. I've been working with
- 16:17Speaker 1: Matt and Kevin UM actually an awful lot on a
- 16:20Speaker 1: lot of these things in the West. But that that
- 16:21Speaker 1: position to the Western Association, sharing that group really puts
- 16:25Speaker 1: me um involved and in the seat to do a
- 16:29Speaker 1: lot of things throughout the West too. Uh. I know
- 16:32Speaker 1: some of the bigger things you get involved in, like
- 16:35Speaker 1: you know, all your big game and your charismatic megafauna. Um.
- 16:39Speaker 1: How low down in the what's the smallest thing involved in? Well,
- 16:43Speaker 1: my twenty two years as a regional biologist, I was
- 16:45Speaker 1: in charge of three species of quail, Google's turkey restoration
- 16:48Speaker 1: um in southeastern Arizona, mountain, lion's big horn, sheep, pronghorn,
- 16:52Speaker 1: all of all of the hunted species is what I
- 16:54Speaker 1: dealt with, from big game to small game. That was
- 16:56Speaker 1: most of my career and it's really the last four
- 16:59Speaker 1: years or so that I've been doing primarily a lot
- 17:01Speaker 1: of big game, a lot of big game Western stuff.
- 17:04Speaker 1: UM various miscellaneous science support for the agency, and then
- 17:07Speaker 1: Mexican wolf recovery, which I've been involved in for the
- 17:09Speaker 1: last ten years, oh for a decade now, we'll get
- 17:12Speaker 1: to that a little bit. I know. That's a yeah,
- 17:16Speaker 1: and it's a constantly changing landscape. It is in minefield.
- 17:20Speaker 1: You might say, al right, first question, some quick hit
- 17:24Speaker 1: or topics for you. Um, and a lot of this
- 17:27Speaker 1: is inspired by feedback you've given us when questions emerge
- 17:30Speaker 1: on other shows. One of the things we've emailed about
- 17:33Speaker 1: was this, and we've we've touched on this, like news
- 17:36Speaker 1: reports about this or confusion about this is uh, there's this.
- 17:41Speaker 1: It seems to be this emerging idea that people are like, well,
- 17:45Speaker 1: if if hunters go out and they want to like
- 17:48Speaker 1: hunters want to get big bucks, right, hunters want to
- 17:50Speaker 1: shoot big box, they want to shoot big bighorn sheep,
- 17:53Speaker 1: they want to shoot big moves. If you go out
- 17:56Speaker 1: and selectively target big bucks, are you changing the evolutionary
- 18:02Speaker 1: path of the species, Meaning you're putting on you know,
- 18:07Speaker 1: you're putting a selective pressure against big antler dear, This
- 18:13Speaker 1: is an argument against trophy hunting, right, and that by
- 18:16Speaker 1: doing that, you're making them. You're driving them to become smaller, right,
- 18:22Speaker 1: all right, you're buying it, not buying it. No, with
- 18:25Speaker 1: with servants with a deer family there there's no evidence
- 18:27Speaker 1: of that at all. But this all came to light.
- 18:29Speaker 1: It's not even that new. It's just once in a
- 18:30Speaker 1: while a reporter will learn about it and write an
- 18:33Speaker 1: article about it and think they're the first one to
- 18:34Speaker 1: write about it. But it really call That's a good
- 18:37Speaker 1: way of expressing how things like this come up and
- 18:39Speaker 1: they and they stay alive like that. Um, someone thinks that, hey,
- 18:43Speaker 1: I just found out this new thing, but everybody's been
- 18:45Speaker 1: discussing it for seventeen years, which has been about the
- 18:47Speaker 1: case with this. In two thousand three, David Colton came
- 18:50Speaker 1: out at we're talking about severed fingers. You don't feel
- 18:52Speaker 1: that way, you know, we can keep doing that, keep
- 18:56Speaker 1: doing that. These guys think they discovered severed fingers. So
- 19:01Speaker 1: there was a there was a paper in two thousand
- 19:03Speaker 1: three that really lit the world on fire on this
- 19:04Speaker 1: whole topic. He didn't hear two thousand three, two thousand three,
- 19:07Speaker 1: that's all long and that's really the genesis of all
- 19:10Speaker 1: this recent kind of interests in that in that topic.
- 19:13Speaker 1: But they there was a there's a population on the
- 19:15Speaker 1: east side of the Alberta Rockies and it's separated from
- 19:17Speaker 1: the main part of the Rockies Bigne. It's called Ram
- 19:21Speaker 1: Mountain and it's a it's a really small little dot
- 19:23Speaker 1: out away from the rest of the sheep populations. I
- 19:26Speaker 1: gotta stop you. Okay, you mentioned with servants, but now
- 19:29Speaker 1: we're talking about yep cheap. Yeah, right, to help people
- 19:34Speaker 1: get through that, And I just I just mentioned servants
- 19:36Speaker 1: right off the bat to to almost dismissed that because
- 19:39Speaker 1: and we can talk about some of the reasons and
- 19:41Speaker 1: tell me what servants are too, just because it's a
- 19:42Speaker 1: deer family, so it's a moose and alcan deer and
- 19:44Speaker 1: and um anything in the deer family with basically with
- 19:47Speaker 1: antlers with a few exceptions. So so this whole idea
- 19:50Speaker 1: of trophy hunters ruining the gene pool, degrading the gene pool.
- 19:54Speaker 1: Some of the popular media called evolution in reverse that
- 19:57Speaker 1: has really been focused on big horn cheap or why
- 20:00Speaker 1: out cheap and and it all comes from this one isolated,
- 20:04Speaker 1: unique population called Ram Mountain and Alberta. And they did
- 20:07Speaker 1: some research on there and they reported in two thousand
- 20:10Speaker 1: three in Nature that hunters selecting the largest rams were
- 20:14Speaker 1: actually causing a genetic change in the population, so that
- 20:17Speaker 1: there was smaller and smaller rams uh in that population.
- 20:21Speaker 1: And then that same author even came out in two
- 20:23Speaker 1: thousand and eight and said, well, my work in two
- 20:25Speaker 1: thousand three really probably over exaggerated the genetic component of that.
- 20:28Speaker 1: There's really more nutrition um than I originally said in
- 20:32Speaker 1: that paper, but it was too late. The popular media
- 20:35Speaker 1: took that and just ran with it, and you saw it.
- 20:38Speaker 1: You saw it everywhere, and part of it was for
- 20:40Speaker 1: people who don't like hunting and people who don't like
- 20:42Speaker 1: trophy hunting. It was such an irresistible story. Trophy under
- 20:46Speaker 1: something negative about trophy hunters, and some people just love that,
- 20:49Speaker 1: and so trophy hunters are ruining the gene pool, and
- 20:52Speaker 1: all the popular media picked up on that. And then
- 20:54Speaker 1: there's even some scientists who don't like trophy hunting and
- 20:57Speaker 1: don't like hunting, and so they started looking at other
- 20:59Speaker 1: data set and and see if they could produce a
- 21:01Speaker 1: paper that looked something similar, And all the subsequent papers
- 21:05Speaker 1: that came out they would cite the Ram mountain information,
- 21:08Speaker 1: which were later found out to be over exaggerated in
- 21:11Speaker 1: the genetic component, and these and these other scientists would
- 21:14Speaker 1: speculate um sighting Ram Mountain and then speculate that this
- 21:17Speaker 1: may be happening in these other areas, and it may
- 21:19Speaker 1: be happening with all big game, may be happening with
- 21:22Speaker 1: all species worldwide that humans harvest, and so these other
- 21:26Speaker 1: papers were just full of speculation. But every time someone
- 21:29Speaker 1: published a paper to speculate, someone else could cite the
- 21:32Speaker 1: speculative paper and the Ram Mountain paper, and these started
- 21:35Speaker 1: to build this body of speculation. And and now we're
- 21:39Speaker 1: starting to get back and apply some science to that
- 21:42Speaker 1: and find out that it's it's it may happen in
- 21:45Speaker 1: a few cases, but it's certainly not widespread. But it's
- 21:48Speaker 1: too late. The public has has seen the popular message
- 21:51Speaker 1: and aren't reading scientific papers. But the bottom line is
- 21:55Speaker 1: if selection is intensive enough, it can affect the gene
- 21:58Speaker 1: pool in the future. What you need to think about
- 22:01Speaker 1: is in what cases is selection intensive enough to actually
- 22:05Speaker 1: change the gene pool in cheap or or deer or
- 22:09Speaker 1: any other species that we hunt. And the answer is
- 22:11Speaker 1: it's a very rare case. And and the case on
- 22:14Speaker 1: Ram Mountain was unique because it was isolated. The population
- 22:17Speaker 1: swelled and bottlenecked a few times, which can affect the genetics.
- 22:21Speaker 1: And also they had a hunting regime there where it
- 22:24Speaker 1: was an unlimited number of hunters could hunt that little
- 22:26Speaker 1: isolated mountain range the isolated mountain, but they had to
- 22:30Speaker 1: be four fifths curl before they were legal to harvest.
- 22:33Speaker 1: And so that's a situation where the rams that have
- 22:35Speaker 1: faster growing horns, better genetics, faster growing horns are going
- 22:39Speaker 1: to get truncated. They're gonna get taken out of the
- 22:41Speaker 1: field as soon as they hit four fifths. And so
- 22:43Speaker 1: that's the case where the rams that have faster growing
- 22:45Speaker 1: horns are going to be removed at a higher proportion
- 22:47Speaker 1: than rams of slower growing horns. So that was the
- 22:49Speaker 1: basis of this Coldman and so there's it's so theoretically
- 22:53Speaker 1: and in practice there it's not flawed that in certain
- 22:56Speaker 1: situations that can happen. We did some more recent search
- 23:00Speaker 1: with with Kevin Montiese Lab Taylor Lashar is a graduate student,
- 23:03Speaker 1: where we took state big horn sheep records, and state
- 23:07Speaker 1: records were important because we had horn measurements and we
- 23:10Speaker 1: also had ages on those rams, which is something the
- 23:12Speaker 1: Boone Crockett, Pope and Young Rocket books don't have ages.
- 23:14Speaker 1: They just have measurements, and they don't they don't record
- 23:16Speaker 1: the number annually on a horn um not not Buona Crockett. No,
- 23:21Speaker 1: it's measurements, you know. They got their measurement system and
- 23:23Speaker 1: then on the data sheet there they can put um
- 23:26Speaker 1: age on some of the species. But I'm not sure
- 23:28Speaker 1: if they even do it with big horn sheet on there. Yeah,
- 23:31Speaker 1: and the problem too is you have to be like
- 23:33Speaker 1: pretty well trained. Yeah, it's not it's not that easy.
- 23:35Speaker 1: There's some there's some experience that goes into it. But
- 23:37Speaker 1: state agencies do record age and record some measurements, sometimes
- 23:41Speaker 1: full Boone Crockett, sometimes just basis plus the length of
- 23:45Speaker 1: the horn. And so we went to the state records
- 23:47Speaker 1: and got all the state records we could assembled into
- 23:50Speaker 1: a database where we had age and we had the
- 23:53Speaker 1: antler or the horn measurements, and then we were able
- 23:55Speaker 1: to analyze these the sheep records and we were able
- 23:58Speaker 1: to to accommodator neutralized the effective age because obviously the
- 24:03Speaker 1: older the ramble, the bigger the horns. And so you
- 24:05Speaker 1: got it in your analysis, you've you've got to be
- 24:07Speaker 1: able to UM look at that and fair at that
- 24:10Speaker 1: part of the analysis out. And then we're also able
- 24:13Speaker 1: to look at some UM in d v I index,
- 24:16Speaker 1: which is a greenness index of satellite imagery, and we
- 24:19Speaker 1: were able to look at at nutrition and environment and
- 24:22Speaker 1: how that affected horn size in these in these states
- 24:25Speaker 1: and in these populations, and and in the end, we
- 24:27Speaker 1: analyzed UM data from thirty five years from seventy two
- 24:33Speaker 1: different hunt units around North America UM and and in
- 24:37Speaker 1: the end we found that of those seventy two units UM,
- 24:42Speaker 1: seventy eight percent of them were either stable or the
- 24:45Speaker 1: horn size was increasing, so only even showed a decline.
- 24:49Speaker 1: Now we don't even know yet what that decline is,
- 24:51Speaker 1: but in those twenty two that declined, only half of
- 24:54Speaker 1: those had a hunt regime that even even could possibly
- 24:59Speaker 1: exert some kind of stuf the pressure. You know, sometimes
- 25:01Speaker 1: you can just look at a hunt system and and
- 25:04Speaker 1: like a complete permit system that Arizona has, where someone
- 25:07Speaker 1: just takes just one rams monge, so you're not you
- 25:11Speaker 1: don't have that kind of selective pressure like you have
- 25:14Speaker 1: if you have unlimited number of hunters creaming that horn
- 25:16Speaker 1: size at a certain level. And so even in the
- 25:19Speaker 1: twenty two where they weren't stable or increasing in horn length,
- 25:22Speaker 1: they were decreasing UM still about half of those could
- 25:25Speaker 1: even have possibly been due to some selective pressure. And
- 25:29Speaker 1: so the bottom line is, even in sheep, which is
- 25:32Speaker 1: the only species that this has really been um found
- 25:36Speaker 1: in a in a controlled setting, it's very unusual to
- 25:39Speaker 1: have that kind of hunting regime that that would actually
- 25:42Speaker 1: apply that selected pressure to cause kind of genetic changes.
- 25:45Speaker 1: And all this is confounded terribly with with nutrition. More nutrition,
- 25:50Speaker 1: and animal gets the bigger the horns and antlers. The
- 25:52Speaker 1: older the animal gets, the bigger the horns and antlers,
- 25:55Speaker 1: And and there's um all kinds of obstacles, which is
- 25:58Speaker 1: a paper you saw that I wrote, all kinds of
- 26:00Speaker 1: obstacles that get in the way of hunters actually affecting
- 26:03Speaker 1: the gene pool. And when the hunter goes out and shoots,
- 26:06Speaker 1: passes up a spike and shoots an eight point white
- 26:08Speaker 1: tailed buck in Iowa, technically that's selection because they passed
- 26:12Speaker 1: up one buck and they selected a bigger buck. But
- 26:14Speaker 1: you have to look at the intensity of selection. Is
- 26:17Speaker 1: that anywhere near um intensive enough to cause any genetic changes?
- 26:21Speaker 1: And you think about all of the other things that
- 26:23Speaker 1: are removing animals from the population that have nothing to
- 26:26Speaker 1: do with horn or antlers size. You have, for example,
- 26:28Speaker 1: a fawn crop, you lose half of the fonds every
- 26:31Speaker 1: year before their first birthday UH in general, and those
- 26:35Speaker 1: losses of half of that annual cohort have nothing to
- 26:38Speaker 1: do with horn or antlers size. You've got mountain lions,
- 26:41Speaker 1: you've got predators killing adults that have nothing to do
- 26:44Speaker 1: with antler size. And the idea that hunters going out
- 26:48Speaker 1: during daylight hours in the hunt unit they have a
- 26:50Speaker 1: permit for only able to take males. The fact that
- 26:55Speaker 1: the idea that they're affecting that entire gene pool, it's
- 26:59Speaker 1: just ludicrous that you would apply that kind of pressure.
- 27:01Speaker 1: That could happen in some cases and cheap, but it's
- 27:04Speaker 1: pretty rare. Well, there's some so much conflicting data out
- 27:06Speaker 1: there too as to how much we're actually even we
- 27:11Speaker 1: I guess hunters in certain cases are actually even affecting behavior.
- 27:15Speaker 1: Like you see all these white tail papers that come
- 27:17Speaker 1: out and it's like, well the bucks have gone nocturnal.
- 27:20Speaker 1: It's like, well, no, we tracked them and they do
- 27:24Speaker 1: just as much walking around during the day as they
- 27:26Speaker 1: do at night. I mean, honing effects behavior hugely. Oh
- 27:30Speaker 1: of game animals, But like you look at these clubs
- 27:33Speaker 1: situations right where it's like you got five guys hunting,
- 27:39Speaker 1: you know, a thousand acres. They're out there, maybe twenty
- 27:43Speaker 1: five days total between the five guys, and they all
- 27:47Speaker 1: have the same story as Joe Dude going out on
- 27:50Speaker 1: public land. It's like the deer are so educated. Yeah,
- 27:53Speaker 1: but it's generational to the mean they're raised by. I mean,
- 27:55Speaker 1: these are animals that spend a year with their mothers,
- 27:58Speaker 1: spend a year with her mother, who's spent a year
- 28:00Speaker 1: with her mother. There's a learned you know, there's learned response.
- 28:03Speaker 1: I mean you just go look at landscapes where you
- 28:05Speaker 1: always had hunting and then took it away. Oh that
- 28:08Speaker 1: that spot that we hunted or Eric Siegfried from on
- 28:12Speaker 1: acc and I hunted this year. It's this funky access
- 28:16Speaker 1: deal where you kind of have to get up on
- 28:18Speaker 1: this rock room and I swear to God or more
- 28:25Speaker 1: of the mule deer dose just walked below staring at
- 28:29Speaker 1: that rock room like they just were it locked on
- 28:32Speaker 1: it and when you and your body sneak in and
- 28:34Speaker 1: always hunt Yellowstone. I mean you always always act like
- 28:37Speaker 1: you hunted somewhere else. But I mean you guys are
- 28:40Speaker 1: really well in all right, you and your body well
- 28:43Speaker 1: better than anybody else. Um. Do you get frustrated by
- 28:47Speaker 1: the way stuffs covered in the media. It's gotta make
- 28:50Speaker 1: you mad. Not not even a scientist, it does. But
- 28:53Speaker 1: when you know the science, and the public is not
- 28:55Speaker 1: reading scientific papers, when you know the science and you
- 28:57Speaker 1: see something like that just catch fire and run away
- 29:00Speaker 1: in the popular media and it's not true and it's exaggerated,
- 29:03Speaker 1: and everything that you read is just full of errors,
- 29:05Speaker 1: and and that's what everybody, that's what most of the
- 29:08Speaker 1: general public readings. And there's like credible places that run
- 29:10Speaker 1: with it too. Like National Geographic could cover the piss
- 29:13Speaker 1: out of a story like that. They would never cover
- 29:15Speaker 1: the like when it wanted, being that it wasn't accurate,
- 29:18Speaker 1: they would have zero interest in it because they love
- 29:20Speaker 1: anything that can be like a little bit like put
- 29:23Speaker 1: a little taint down hunting. They love it. They go
- 29:27Speaker 1: out of their way to find it. They would never
- 29:28Speaker 1: be like, oh, you know what turns out that that
- 29:29Speaker 1: wasn't actually true. Um, I mean like like the bias
- 29:33Speaker 1: is so within the organization like that, Like the bias
- 29:35Speaker 1: is so severe, and like you look at this thing
- 29:38Speaker 1: that's going on with Donald Trump Jr. Right, he's doing
- 29:41Speaker 1: a fundraiser. He's doing a fundraiser where they're gonna go
- 29:44Speaker 1: hunt ducks and blacktail deer, and the media is covering
- 29:49Speaker 1: it like a trophy animal hunt. That's a hunting ducks
- 29:52Speaker 1: and blacktails. Is a trophy animal hunt? Now, well, it's
- 29:56Speaker 1: like that's how, that's how it's described that you guys
- 30:00Speaker 1: saw the UM so that i u c n UH
- 30:06Speaker 1: is a body that I pay attention to for a
- 30:10Speaker 1: lot of conservation up to date conservation facts and knowledge
- 30:14Speaker 1: and UM A lot of stories came out earlier or
- 30:19Speaker 1: late last year on how the i u c n
- 30:23Speaker 1: has determined that trophy hunting is this terrible thing and
- 30:27Speaker 1: it's killing these animal populations. And you start reading into
- 30:31Speaker 1: it and you not not bush hunting, not bush me hunting.
- 30:34Speaker 1: But the paper is they're like, well, this is a
- 30:39Speaker 1: something that was being researched and it's not even the conclusion.
- 30:45Speaker 1: Somebody just took it and ran this out. This is
- 30:47Speaker 1: not our finding. But nobody covered that story. It was
- 30:50Speaker 1: always here it is. That's a good pushback some letters.
- 30:53Speaker 1: I think I sent you something recently with the conservation
- 30:56Speaker 1: front Lines is a is an email um service you
- 31:00Speaker 1: can subscribe to free and they have some really good
- 31:02Speaker 1: information about some scientists have gotten together and some some
- 31:05Speaker 1: people in Africa have gotten together and representing local African communities,
- 31:08Speaker 1: and the African communities are saying, how dare western um
- 31:13Speaker 1: people take away our livelihood? You know, this is sustainable conservation,
- 31:17Speaker 1: it's funding conservations, funding our villages, and how how dare
- 31:21Speaker 1: someone sitting there white house someplace in the US and
- 31:24Speaker 1: and say this isn't a good thing. Yeah, it's like
- 31:27Speaker 1: the it's like left wing imperialism. Man, the band's going on.
- 31:33Speaker 1: It's like it's like it's like a softer, gentler imperialism.
- 31:37Speaker 1: Do you think the UK bands are kind of a
- 31:41Speaker 1: little long term guilt laden thing is from the days
- 31:46Speaker 1: of British imperialism where it's like, yeah, that's fine all
- 31:51Speaker 1: they're like they're like tacking a little like the old pendulum.
- 31:56Speaker 1: Um Chaine Mahoney asked me to be on the u
- 31:58Speaker 1: c N Sustainable Use and Livelihoods Committee, So that's one
- 32:01Speaker 1: of the committees that he chairs and real active with
- 32:04Speaker 1: and it's all about this. I like the i u
- 32:06Speaker 1: c N ratings. Yeah, um, I tend to. I tend
- 32:11Speaker 1: to um. I tend to eat a lot of things
- 32:13Speaker 1: that are of least concern. Yeah, exactly. I was recently
- 32:17Speaker 1: looking at the mountain lion um um they changed it.
- 32:20Speaker 1: It says that it's decreasing. It says that the populations
- 32:23Speaker 1: are decading. Yeah, I looked at that. I understand for
- 32:25Speaker 1: the mountainline, I don't understand that either. In fact, one
- 32:28Speaker 1: of the main paper they cite for that um is
- 32:30Speaker 1: someone I worked with with Mexican Wolf Recovery. I sent
- 32:34Speaker 1: him an email with a link to that, and since
- 32:35Speaker 1: they were citing their work, I just asked him what
- 32:39Speaker 1: what is that all about? And I haven't heard from
- 32:40Speaker 1: him yet, but they get it. They I feel that
- 32:42Speaker 1: the i u c N does a little bit play
- 32:44Speaker 1: a predictive game. But but even that would not line
- 32:48Speaker 1: predicting a decline when something's on an increase, How do
- 32:51Speaker 1: you predict? Yeah, so that that's just apparently wrong. Yeah,
- 32:55Speaker 1: we should say International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Yeah,
- 32:59Speaker 1: if you go, you know, the Wikipedia gives a lot
- 33:02Speaker 1: of ink to the i U c N. So if
- 33:03Speaker 1: you type in any species, like if you're going the
- 33:06Speaker 1: other day, we're looking at uh, we're looking at um
- 33:10Speaker 1: the long tailed weasel, So the i U c N
- 33:12Speaker 1: long tail weasel. It would have it like population of
- 33:15Speaker 1: least concern, which is the which is like the best
- 33:18Speaker 1: news the species can get. The thing you want is
- 33:21Speaker 1: to be in the least concern and it's it's great
- 33:23Speaker 1: at out over. I don't know how many designations, and
- 33:26Speaker 1: it's six. It's a spectrum there and there's like a
- 33:30Speaker 1: most concern and then a critical concern. There's extinct. I
- 33:34Speaker 1: think we're just yeah, okay, next question we have before
- 33:38Speaker 1: you've done some work with that. We talked about Vale
- 33:40Speaker 1: guys all damn time. He's a good friend of mine,
- 33:42Speaker 1: good friend twenty years. Uh. In fact, I brought Ben
- 33:47Speaker 1: O'Brien val guys bone broth recipe. That's Vale for it.
- 33:53Speaker 1: That's good Val guys. Okay, we talked. We've covered this before.
- 33:58Speaker 1: Val guys had a he took at ab at what
- 34:01Speaker 1: I don't know if I want to redo it. He
- 34:04Speaker 1: took a stab on how the mule deer came to be.
- 34:07Speaker 1: I presented this as some mule dear researchers, and they
- 34:10Speaker 1: were they were not titillated by it. They didn't even
- 34:13Speaker 1: want to take it on. It was like fanciful and
- 34:17Speaker 1: like not understandable. But it was this idea that for
- 34:21Speaker 1: I'm gonna do a short version, hold your thumb out
- 34:25Speaker 1: and as you get bored, start going down. I was
- 34:28Speaker 1: gonna start in the plio scene. So you're doing better,
- 34:31Speaker 1: I'm not going okay, if you know you were here,
- 34:34Speaker 1: what we could do. Let me try to do a
- 34:35Speaker 1: crash course and what I had read he floored to
- 34:38Speaker 1: this idea that three million years ago and the like
- 34:41Speaker 1: what is now the southeastern US, There's always been white
- 34:43Speaker 1: tailed deer Kelson, I'm still up. What you do? Bang
- 34:45Speaker 1: your thumb of the hammer. Your kid asked me that too,
- 34:49Speaker 1: and I gotta tell you the same thing. I don't
- 34:51Speaker 1: know it n fifty right there? Uh what was I saying? Oh? Yeah,
- 34:58Speaker 1: there's always been white tailed deer and was not the
- 35:00Speaker 1: southeastern US. We had this big wet, you know, period
- 35:03Speaker 1: of of of lush growth, and these deer colonized coast
- 35:07Speaker 1: to coast, colonized the mid continent from the east coast
- 35:12Speaker 1: of the US to the west coast. Then there was
- 35:14Speaker 1: a big dry period and the empty in the middle
- 35:16Speaker 1: emptied out, and these deer on the west that were
- 35:20Speaker 1: remained on the west coast gradually evolved into black tails.
- 35:25Speaker 1: Then there was another period where it was moist and
- 35:28Speaker 1: conditions were good, and this population of black tails moved east.
- 35:33Speaker 1: The white tails, which had retreated to the southeastern US,
- 35:36Speaker 1: had moved back west. They met along the Rocky Front,
- 35:39Speaker 1: the Rocky Mountain Front, had sex um and spawned hybridized,
- 35:45Speaker 1: and then there was another great retraction. Blacktails went back
- 35:49Speaker 1: to the coast, white tails went back down to the southeast,
- 35:52Speaker 1: and this lingering population of these hybridized. I think it
- 35:57Speaker 1: was black tailed bucks making love to white tail does um,
- 36:02Speaker 1: that's your mule dere um? Yeah, And they said, uh,
- 36:06Speaker 1: I presented to some mule deer people and and they
- 36:09Speaker 1: had a response kind of like uh, let's move on. Well,
- 36:14Speaker 1: there was some there was some There was a scientific
- 36:17Speaker 1: basis for val coming up with that theory, which has
- 36:19Speaker 1: been superseded by other genetic work that came along time
- 36:23Speaker 1: for you to tell us, like what's up with all
- 36:25Speaker 1: the deals? So that was that was basically I think
- 36:27Speaker 1: it was it was glacier's advancing and receding rather than
- 36:30Speaker 1: wet and dry. I think probably it was changing environment,
- 36:33Speaker 1: changing habitats that were calling again split. But but regardless,
- 36:36Speaker 1: that's basically the story that that Val came up with,
- 36:39Speaker 1: and and he did that for a reason because when
- 36:41Speaker 1: they start first started doing genetic work, they found out
- 36:44Speaker 1: that blacktailed deer have completely different mitochondrial DNA than mule
- 36:49Speaker 1: there yet their subspecies. So there's two kinds of DNA.
- 36:51Speaker 1: There's there's DNA in the nucleus and you get this
- 36:54Speaker 1: nuclear DNA and you get half of that from your mother,
- 36:56Speaker 1: half from your father. There's another kind of DNA floating
- 36:58Speaker 1: around in the sets outside the nucleus called mitochondrial DNA
- 37:02Speaker 1: mighticondra DNA you only get from your mother, so it's
- 37:04Speaker 1: like a clone. It comes from your mother and your
- 37:06Speaker 1: grandmother and her mother. Yeah, that's how they like contract
- 37:09Speaker 1: down sort of the you know, like all of Western
- 37:13Speaker 1: Europe theoretically track all of Western Europe to like a
- 37:16Speaker 1: female to an mitochondrial eve so so the mitochondria, so
- 37:20Speaker 1: you can you want to analyze both types of DNA,
- 37:23Speaker 1: and they yield different answers to different kinds of questions,
- 37:26Speaker 1: But initial mitochondrial DNA analysis showed you think about, really,
- 37:31Speaker 1: the two black tailed deer subspecies are just subspecies of
- 37:34Speaker 1: mule deer. They're all oticoles Hemionus some subspecies, and then
- 37:37Speaker 1: you have white tail, which for a different species Virginianus.
- 37:40Speaker 1: And yet when they looked at the mitochondrial DNA, they
- 37:42Speaker 1: found out that mule deer and white tailed deer have
- 37:45Speaker 1: basically the same mitochondrial DNA, which is bizarre because they're
- 37:48Speaker 1: different species and and both of them, including mule deer,
- 37:52Speaker 1: have different mitochondrial DNA from black tail, so blacktails have
- 37:54Speaker 1: this unique mitochondrial DNA. So Val took that just thinking
- 37:58Speaker 1: about that, Val said, well, could probably occur if female
- 38:03Speaker 1: if if black tailed deer bred with white tailed deer
- 38:06Speaker 1: and in the offspring brought in that wet white tail
- 38:10Speaker 1: deer might have condrial DNA. So if you had female
- 38:13Speaker 1: white tailed deer breeding with black tail males and they
- 38:16Speaker 1: spawned some kind of the hybrid mule deer, then all
- 38:18Speaker 1: those mulder would have the same mitochondrial DNA as the
- 38:21Speaker 1: white tail because because it comes to the female line,
- 38:24Speaker 1: and so it was female white tail, then mulder would
- 38:26Speaker 1: have that same mitochondrial DNA and black tails would be different.
- 38:31Speaker 1: And so that just going on that that was a
- 38:34Speaker 1: basis of that's what inspired that. That's what inspired it.
- 38:37Speaker 1: So it made sense at the time, but later on
- 38:40Speaker 1: more work, especially with nuclear DNA, that you get half
- 38:43Speaker 1: from your mother, half from your father. You look at
- 38:45Speaker 1: muled or nuclear DNA and and it's it's closely aligned
- 38:49Speaker 1: with black tails. Blacktail and mule deer are all closely associated,
- 38:53Speaker 1: and then white tails completely different. So if they really
- 38:55Speaker 1: were hybrids, then the mule deer, when you look at
- 38:57Speaker 1: the nuclear DNA, they would have about half for the
- 39:00Speaker 1: white tailed genome and about half of the blacktail genome.
- 39:03Speaker 1: But they don't. Mule deer and blacktailed deer evolved as
- 39:06Speaker 1: one group and then black tailed deer split off during
- 39:09Speaker 1: one of the advances of the ice ages over in
- 39:11Speaker 1: the Pacific coast. So there, okay, So in this version
- 39:15Speaker 1: of events, mule deer um predated black tails. Yes, yea
- 39:24Speaker 1: in that version, but here sick of white tail looks
- 39:28Speaker 1: or sick of blacktail looks so damn much like a
- 39:30Speaker 1: white tail. I know that that under growth and everything, well,
- 39:34Speaker 1: even like metatarsal glands. There's other things where the black
- 39:37Speaker 1: tailed deer actually looks like a hybrid, which makes it
- 39:40Speaker 1: is confusing as hell, because the black tailed deer looks
- 39:42Speaker 1: almost like it's got some white tail like characteristics. But
- 39:44Speaker 1: when you're at genetics, the blacktail can't be can't be
- 39:48Speaker 1: a hybrid between those two, and so it's got to
- 39:51Speaker 1: be convergent evolution where they they kind of acquire traits
- 39:55Speaker 1: that are similar even though they're not um like dragon
- 39:58Speaker 1: m We talked about this the other day. Dragonfly asanna
- 40:00Speaker 1: hummingbirds both fly. That doesn't mean their cousins yep. So
- 40:03Speaker 1: we did genetic analysis. We did some genetic analysis all
- 40:06Speaker 1: up and down the coast in black tails from California
- 40:09Speaker 1: up to Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and then mid British Columbia.
- 40:12Speaker 1: It starts you start getting into Sitka blacktails up into Alaska,
- 40:15Speaker 1: and we had them all and analyze all of those
- 40:17Speaker 1: and and found the highest concentration of genetic diversity was
- 40:22Speaker 1: the coast of Oregon and Washington in blacktail deer both
- 40:25Speaker 1: subspecies of blacktail deer and and geneticis population geneticis will
- 40:29Speaker 1: tell you that where you have a focal point with
- 40:31Speaker 1: high genetic diversity right there, and then lower genetic diversity
- 40:34Speaker 1: rating out from that. That indicates that was the refugium,
- 40:37Speaker 1: that's the that's ground zero for that species or that animal.
- 40:41Speaker 1: And so likely the blacktail deer were isolated for a
- 40:44Speaker 1: long time during one of the many glacial advances and
- 40:47Speaker 1: receding over on that coast, and then gradually expanded out
- 40:51Speaker 1: from there with the receding of the glaciers. And so
- 40:54Speaker 1: so why does a sitka then look different than the
- 40:56Speaker 1: Colombian And I don't know the answer to why he
- 40:58Speaker 1: doesn't typically have a buy for hated antler like a
- 41:00Speaker 1: forked antler. Well, the mature could, but like they mean
- 41:05Speaker 1: that Washington, they tend to throw a rack a hell
- 41:08Speaker 1: of a lot like a white tail. They look they're small,
- 41:10Speaker 1: they're about the same side like that. The mature ones
- 41:12Speaker 1: will have the G two s. But sitkas have a
- 41:15Speaker 1: double white bib on their throat um. They're kind of
- 41:18Speaker 1: a different tail. They look real different. And that nobody
- 41:21Speaker 1: knows for sure what kind of separation there might have
- 41:24Speaker 1: been in some glacial period between Columbian black tail and
- 41:27Speaker 1: Sitka black tail. The sitka could just be a phenotypic
- 41:31Speaker 1: or a physical adaptation to that marine environment. Swimming and
- 41:34Speaker 1: living on islands in that kind of environment. It could
- 41:37Speaker 1: be adaptation and they're physically changing not so much because
- 41:41Speaker 1: of the separation. Nobody really knows that for sure. Do
- 41:44Speaker 1: you what's the refuge of the white tail? Like, like
- 41:48Speaker 1: how far back in time? Trying to think how to
- 41:51Speaker 1: express this question. If you had a time machine and
- 41:54Speaker 1: it said it like a random it just randomly throw
- 41:57Speaker 1: you back to randomize dates, and you wanted to set
- 42:00Speaker 1: a location on your time machine to maximize the chances
- 42:04Speaker 1: that you would stumble into a white tail, what would
- 42:06Speaker 1: you set Florida, Florida. Yeah, and there's a lot of
- 42:10Speaker 1: white tail fossils in Florida, in fact that they've been
- 42:12Speaker 1: hanging around there a long time. They have been. Yeah,
- 42:14Speaker 1: they've been in the place of seeing there's a there's
- 42:17Speaker 1: just a ton of of places seeing white tail fossils
- 42:20Speaker 1: in Florida. And actually brought you one ship. It's an
- 42:26Speaker 1: epicenter so that you can see that fossilized material and
- 42:28Speaker 1: that's just the just handed me a fossilized the bone
- 42:32Speaker 1: base from the skull so the pedicle, get the pedicle um,
- 42:36Speaker 1: the antler about inch and a half antler about an
- 42:41Speaker 1: inch of skull and it fields like stone and it
- 42:44Speaker 1: is stone. Yea. You know. The word pedicle comes from
- 42:48Speaker 1: George Bobin, famous antler researcher, George and and George and
- 42:51Speaker 1: his his father, Anthony and Anthony. They wrote a book
- 42:54Speaker 1: in nine called Horns Prong, Horns and Antlers and it's
- 42:57Speaker 1: like the Bible for Antler kind of antler science speaking
- 43:00Speaker 1: out um. But Anthony Bubinick Coin didn't coin the phrase pedicle,
- 43:05Speaker 1: but he told us how to pronounce it pedical. He
- 43:07Speaker 1: says it rhymes with medical. But Anthony Bubinick spoke about
- 43:10Speaker 1: six languages and English was like his fifth language. And
- 43:12Speaker 1: so I always think it's kind of funny that we're
- 43:14Speaker 1: all taking our pronunciation of from this guy who nobody
- 43:18Speaker 1: can understand when he spoke English. This is amazing, man.
- 43:21Speaker 1: This is out of Florida. Yeah, Florida. So this deer
- 43:24Speaker 1: was running around he bumped into masodons now and that's dated,
- 43:27Speaker 1: that's dated. Pleist to scene. Yeah. Jim. Also Broad's show
- 43:32Speaker 1: us a replica of a saber tooth tooth smile ad
- 43:38Speaker 1: on fake tal us his canine and smile. Ad On
- 43:42Speaker 1: is uh and this thing is leven inches long? Yeah,
- 43:45Speaker 1: smile and was not because they had a big smile
- 43:47Speaker 1: with those big tooth. The smile addon comes from. I
- 43:50Speaker 1: think it's meetly. I don't have how to pronounce it,
- 43:51Speaker 1: but it's Latin for double edged sword. I'd laugh. They
- 43:55Speaker 1: just jumped out. It's grabbed Phil. It would make a
- 43:58Speaker 1: bike ride to work a little bit eating, like you know,
- 44:01Speaker 1: I just killed him. I'd be like that, can you
- 44:05Speaker 1: believe that? Cow? That's what I would be. Moved real slow,
- 44:09Speaker 1: real slow. So Florida had a lot of white tails,
- 44:13Speaker 1: go ahead, caw. Florida also has the spring site where
- 44:19Speaker 1: they got all the fossils out of, including the giant
- 44:22Speaker 1: tortoise with not familiar with that giant tortoises that once
- 44:28Speaker 1: roamed what is now the United States, But they found
- 44:33Speaker 1: a tortoise shell in this spring in Florida that had
- 44:39Speaker 1: a spear point in it. I need to talk to
- 44:43Speaker 1: our I need to talk to our performer podcast guests.
- 44:46Speaker 1: So then you start digging into the actual paper. It's
- 44:50Speaker 1: like it was laying nearby. He was laying in the
- 44:54Speaker 1: shell as they brought the thing out, and they're like,
- 44:57Speaker 1: so it could be this, but very well would be this,
- 45:00Speaker 1: But then it's clear evidence of ceremonial turtles. This exactly.
- 45:05Speaker 1: It was a religious total. There was a paleontologist in
- 45:08Speaker 1: New Mexico that was knocking one of the arrow points,
- 45:12Speaker 1: knocking one of the little shoulders off and saying that
- 45:14Speaker 1: was indicative of Sandia man and and he wrote papers
- 45:17Speaker 1: and constructed this big because he always knocked the shoulder off.
- 45:20Speaker 1: But he but they found out later he would knocking
- 45:23Speaker 1: the shoulders off and saying it with diagnostic of this.
- 45:26Speaker 1: There's some bad that's some bad stuff. But he wasn't
- 45:28Speaker 1: doing it as a greater social experiment. Can I Can
- 45:32Speaker 1: I tell people what you were musing before we started
- 45:34Speaker 1: recording your observation about archaeology or is that just too hard?
- 45:37Speaker 1: That's fine, that's tell him yourself the truth. Yeah, truth
- 45:41Speaker 1: is hard. A friend of mine always call archaeology a
- 45:43Speaker 1: soft science because they just so much of it is
- 45:46Speaker 1: just made up. They'll find a toebone and then they'll
- 45:48Speaker 1: write a paper about what the home range was and
- 45:50Speaker 1: and what the color of the fur was. And unfortunately
- 45:52Speaker 1: there's just a lot of a lot of garbage. I
- 45:55Speaker 1: was looking into archaeological evidence of elk in Arizona, and
- 45:58Speaker 1: we're doing some Miriam Delk stuff. And and there was
- 46:00Speaker 1: a son who was a paleontologist and archaeologist and his
- 46:03Speaker 1: dad was too at the university, and he had forty
- 46:06Speaker 1: four thousand deer family bones out of this site in Arizona,
- 46:11Speaker 1: and he had like fourteen or so elk. And so
- 46:13Speaker 1: I was really interested in those elk specimens. And I
- 46:16Speaker 1: couldn't get ahold of the sun. But I talked to
- 46:18Speaker 1: the dad, and the dad says, all those were those
- 46:20Speaker 1: are big out icolio. So those are big meal there.
- 46:22Speaker 1: Those weren't elk. He didn't know what he was talking
- 46:23Speaker 1: about talking about his own son in his paper. So
- 46:26Speaker 1: there's a lot of that in there. And you just
- 46:28Speaker 1: got to really be skeptical and be cautious. He can't
- 46:31Speaker 1: read a paper and then just go, um, you know,
- 46:34Speaker 1: repeating it without some skepticism of thinking thinking about it.
- 46:38Speaker 1: When when I was when I was working on my Buffalo,
- 46:40Speaker 1: but um, it came up like I was came up
- 46:44Speaker 1: where I was reading about where there were accounts of
- 46:47Speaker 1: them occurring. And there's a lot of versions of why Buffalo,
- 46:53Speaker 1: New York became Buffalo New York. But you'll often read
- 46:55Speaker 1: in old books that, like, Buffalo New York was Buffalo
- 46:57Speaker 1: New York because someone had encountered Buffalo. I thought it
- 46:59Speaker 1: was the wings. Well, you know there's a I get
- 47:05Speaker 1: I think I get into it in the book hit
- 47:06Speaker 1: or explain or not. A bunch of different theories about
- 47:08Speaker 1: how it got the name, but it would not be
- 47:11Speaker 1: in that that. Sometimes you'll see distribution maps for where
- 47:13Speaker 1: buffalo roamed, bison bison bison roamed, and people have it
- 47:19Speaker 1: going up in New York. The range map. We'll go
- 47:22Speaker 1: up in New York and it comes from people included
- 47:27Speaker 1: because two skulls came out of some campsite, some excavation
- 47:32Speaker 1: of a campsite in New York, just the schools, and
- 47:37Speaker 1: both of them, uh had cultural markings on them, and
- 47:44Speaker 1: later people looked at it and thought were they living
- 47:47Speaker 1: here or did someone get some from someone and bring
- 47:52Speaker 1: them home? The same way copper that comes out of
- 47:55Speaker 1: Michigan's Upper Peninsula can be found anywhere in the Midwest
- 48:00Speaker 1: and trace back like people took stuff they thought stuff
- 48:03Speaker 1: was cool and brought home with them. Arizona parrot feathers
- 48:06Speaker 1: in Arizona and all kinds of things from Central Americas.
- 48:08Speaker 1: There was these big trade routes. And if you look
- 48:11Speaker 1: in the not the Last Elka North America book, I
- 48:15Speaker 1: think it was a one before it, or maybe it
- 48:17Speaker 1: was the last. No, it was the one before the
- 48:18Speaker 1: last one. And they show elk distribution all the way
- 48:21Speaker 1: down to Mexico City. And it's only because Montezuma had
- 48:24Speaker 1: some elk. He had a menagerie, he had a menagerie,
- 48:27Speaker 1: and he had some elk in the menagerie, and and
- 48:30Speaker 1: the people doing the distribution map to include Mexico City,
- 48:32Speaker 1: and in fact the elk really weren't in there. In
- 48:34Speaker 1: in Mexico, Cortez his his like recorders describe the first
- 48:42Speaker 1: the first bison ever witnessed by a European um was
- 48:48Speaker 1: probably in Montezumas menagerie witnessed by cortez expedition. And I
- 48:55Speaker 1: think that somehow and somehow they describe it as having
- 48:59Speaker 1: come from the north. Yeah, probably having come from the north,
- 49:02Speaker 1: and not that it lived there. The mealier was first
- 49:04Speaker 1: described um from the journals of u Laray, and he
- 49:11Speaker 1: first described what amelier looked like in the west, and
- 49:14Speaker 1: it was found out later that there was no such
- 49:16Speaker 1: person as Charles Lay, and that his journals were entirely
- 49:19Speaker 1: fabricated by someone they don't even know who, but entirely
- 49:22Speaker 1: fabricated the journals, taking pieces some of from Lewis and Clark,
- 49:25Speaker 1: some from different journals from explorers, and put it together
- 49:28Speaker 1: and and made up this story about Charles Lay, who
- 49:31Speaker 1: was in the West. He was captured by Sue Indians.
- 49:33Speaker 1: He was held captive for several years, um by the
- 49:36Speaker 1: by the tribe, and during that time he kept a
- 49:38Speaker 1: journal because and it was only because Western literature was
- 49:42Speaker 1: really popular. This is some late eighteen hundreds. I think
- 49:45Speaker 1: Western literature is really popular, and being held captive by
- 49:48Speaker 1: Native American tribes was like a really hot story. So
- 49:52Speaker 1: this guy just fabricated this whole thing. And so you'll
- 49:54Speaker 1: read even some of my early writings we were talking
- 49:56Speaker 1: about Charles Lay described the first meal. Dear, turns out
- 50:00Speaker 1: it's just christated. Everybody keeps repeating it over and over again. Well,
- 50:06Speaker 1: when we're talking ahead of this, um came right at
- 50:09Speaker 1: some point in time, you'd mentioned that you wanted to
- 50:11Speaker 1: discuss Elliott cous But let me tee that off with.
- 50:16Speaker 1: Do you accept ioul, like, who's your kind of one
- 50:18Speaker 1: of my favorite animals by far, definitely probably maybe first
- 50:22Speaker 1: or second favorite thing to go hunting for it maybe
- 50:24Speaker 1: third Turkey's mulder in white tail, I'm sorry, Turkey's mule deer.
- 50:30Speaker 1: Who's dear? In my mind depends what time of year
- 50:32Speaker 1: it is, which one of those is my favorite thing
- 50:34Speaker 1: to hunt. But our cu'se dear, like, do you accept
- 50:38Speaker 1: or what's the thinking? They're like a subspecies of the
- 50:40Speaker 1: white tales. They're just white tails and it happened to
- 50:42Speaker 1: be somewhere else. Yeah, there's no doubt there are subspecies
- 50:45Speaker 1: that that really evolved differently because they were in the
- 50:48Speaker 1: Sierra Madre of Mexico, and so they were really geographically
- 50:51Speaker 1: fairly isolated from the Sierra Madre. That's deer, okay, Yeah,
- 50:55Speaker 1: I mean when you get down, you get about halfway
- 50:57Speaker 1: down the Sierra Madre and they start getting all these
- 50:59Speaker 1: other subspecies names. But nobody's really done science on that
- 51:02Speaker 1: at all. We've got a small white tail throughout the
- 51:05Speaker 1: highlands of Mexico and none of them are probably any different,
- 51:08Speaker 1: probably basically Cole's dear all the way down through the
- 51:11Speaker 1: Sera Money cows dear man. Yeah, didn't you didn't you hear?
- 51:14Speaker 1: Didn't you hear? Yanni? A couple of weeks ago. You
- 51:17Speaker 1: guys know that you were a cow's dear man. This
- 51:19Speaker 1: is the first cow's dear man we've ever had in
- 51:20Speaker 1: this room. I had my fifteen minutes of fame a
- 51:23Speaker 1: couple of weeks ago, and Yanni said, there's like one
- 51:25Speaker 1: guy that says Cole screw him. That's my fifteen minutes.
- 51:30Speaker 1: They mentioned me mentioned, well, here's the deal, Elliot, cows.
- 51:35Speaker 1: That's how you pronounce it. And that's not what I heard.
- 51:37Speaker 1: You heard wrong. I already pronounced it cows. Yeah, that's
- 51:41Speaker 1: you know where that comes from? Chris Denham, Probably Chris Denham.
- 51:46Speaker 1: Chris Denham read um something Richard ockin Fells wrote, and
- 51:49Speaker 1: Richard ockin Fell's rights In his annotated bibliography of Kyle's
- 51:52Speaker 1: White Tail, he writes, it's it rhymes with house. And
- 51:56Speaker 1: I asked, I'm friends with I've known Richard for twenty years.
- 51:59Speaker 1: As Richard, where that come him? He said, well, I
- 52:00Speaker 1: talked to Neil Carmeny and um, and I visit Neil
- 52:04Speaker 1: Carmeny in the nursing home in Tucson every couple of
- 52:06Speaker 1: months I've been I've known for twenty five years. I
- 52:09Speaker 1: asked Neil, where does that come from? The cows and
- 52:11Speaker 1: he says, I know, we knew somebody that um spoke
- 52:14Speaker 1: some French. And he says, that's probably how it's pronounced.
- 52:16Speaker 1: So that's where that's where that cows thing came from.
- 52:18Speaker 1: Completely bogus. There's no question how to pronounce his name.
- 52:21Speaker 1: There's a huge question on how people want to refer
- 52:24Speaker 1: the deer. That's maybe different. Yeah, I think that those
- 52:27Speaker 1: two subjects have their own evolutionary path they do. Okay,
- 52:30Speaker 1: we go on, you calling whatever the hell you want, ladies, gentlemen.
- 52:33Speaker 1: If our guest here says cow was dear, he's referring,
- 52:36Speaker 1: of course, to you, cou's dear. It's really sad. I
- 52:42Speaker 1: nowhere in I would say linguistical or dud logical history,
- 52:49Speaker 1: do I know of a word where we're after learning
- 52:52Speaker 1: how to pronounce it correctly of the public not only
- 52:56Speaker 1: refuses to, but militantly refuses people. They I die, Yeah,
- 53:00Speaker 1: they get you know, he has riled up the most
- 53:04Speaker 1: cows your people. I would call him Cole, I called listen.
- 53:07Speaker 1: I call him cause you for a simple reason. The
- 53:09Speaker 1: people that introduced me to him and that I hung
- 53:11Speaker 1: out with and hunted him with first, that's what they
- 53:13Speaker 1: called him. I actually had Jay Scott's sake Cows on
- 53:16Speaker 1: his podcast one time. When I was on it, I
- 53:18Speaker 1: was like, did you just say what I thought you said?
- 53:20Speaker 1: So there's also like, um, you know, there's a spirited
- 53:23Speaker 1: debate around ska sitka, which confuses people because I think
- 53:28Speaker 1: sick of black tails. Anyhow, Elliot Cows Elliott Cow now
- 53:33Speaker 1: to put the name pronunciation to bed Elliot Cows. When
- 53:37Speaker 1: he wrote the Checklist of Birds in North America, he
- 53:39Speaker 1: added a footnote he was an ornithologist. He was mostly
- 53:42Speaker 1: an ornithologist. He never killed a deer. Someone named the
- 53:44Speaker 1: deer after him, so he wasn't really wasn't a dear guy.
- 53:47Speaker 1: He was really good ecologist. But he wrote the Checklist
- 53:50Speaker 1: of Birds in North America. And he has a footnote
- 53:52Speaker 1: where he explains how to pronounce his name. No he
- 53:55Speaker 1: does it says C and he says c O w
- 53:58Speaker 1: Z house. That's a lie, not a lie in black
- 54:02Speaker 1: and wh okay, here's a twitter. Hell makes a footnote
- 54:05Speaker 1: in their book about how to pronounce their last name.
- 54:06Speaker 1: It was a footnote on a bird species that was
- 54:08Speaker 1: also Cowsy I species. So he was explaining where that
- 54:13Speaker 1: where that name came from, and it was he was
- 54:15Speaker 1: writing the book and he was explaining how his name
- 54:17Speaker 1: was pronounced, but kind of pretentious. Okay, so you're right,
- 54:20Speaker 1: you're right, it's Cole's right from Elliott cows Mouth. You're right,
- 54:25Speaker 1: but we're talking about the deer. Yeah, we're talking about
- 54:30Speaker 1: he's right. But so yeah, so say that there was
- 54:38Speaker 1: someone who was who just had made huge contributions to
- 54:41Speaker 1: outdoor education entertainment, had a podcast, had a TV show,
- 54:46Speaker 1: and did so much for the industry that some dear
- 54:49Speaker 1: biologists wanted to name a subspecies after him. Dear Odiocolius
- 54:54Speaker 1: hemi owners for Nolla. And then so we go in
- 54:56Speaker 1: the Cal's Deer. You and I go on the time
- 54:58Speaker 1: machine and we go a hundred years in the future
- 55:01Speaker 1: and we get out and we talked some deer hunters
- 55:02Speaker 1: and they're talking about, yeah, we're all jack because we
- 55:05Speaker 1: got tags for these rene a dear, you'd be like
- 55:09Speaker 1: rene a dear French. The guy's name was Renella. The
- 55:13Speaker 1: guy's name was Renella, and they trug and say, I'm
- 55:15Speaker 1: gonna call it Renee I tell the day I die.
- 55:18Speaker 1: He'd be like, it's kind of weird that, my dear,
- 55:21Speaker 1: that's kind of weird. That was like named to honor me,
- 55:24Speaker 1: and and the deer was named honor Elliot Cows. So no,
- 55:27Speaker 1: you know what I'd say, I'd be like, no, dude,
- 55:28Speaker 1: I totally understand. W you I don't think so, I
- 55:32Speaker 1: don't think so. As a cous dear man, I understand.
- 55:36Speaker 1: But but there's a twist to that story. So Elliot
- 55:39Speaker 1: Cows and Elliet Cows father Samuel and his grandfather Peter,
- 55:44Speaker 1: they pronounced it cows. He was an ornithologist, not a
- 55:46Speaker 1: dear guy. But did he like muse on or like, like, uh,
- 55:51Speaker 1: did he was he like, oh, there's this little ship
- 55:53Speaker 1: and deer running around or I'm not sure if well
- 55:55Speaker 1: he did. He wrote Quadrupeds of Our Kinds of Deer
- 55:59Speaker 1: and Error Zone. I think he wrote this great written
- 56:02Speaker 1: about it. I like that word kinds. We talked about
- 56:05Speaker 1: sub species and races. And he wrote a paper of
- 56:07Speaker 1: kinds of deer that we do, that whole series kinds
- 56:11Speaker 1: of So he's written about all kinds of you know,
- 56:13Speaker 1: all the mammals and deer too, but not in detail.
- 56:16Speaker 1: He wasn't really a dear person um in detail. But
- 56:19Speaker 1: there's a twist to the cows story. So he Elliott
- 56:22Speaker 1: cows and and at least two generations back um pronounced
- 56:27Speaker 1: at cows. But he says that back in France, I
- 56:30Speaker 1: don't know how many generations that would be we're talking about.
- 56:32Speaker 1: He's a Frenchman from the name is French, and so
- 56:36Speaker 1: his family originally came from northern France moved to southern England.
- 56:39Speaker 1: And he says in that same footnote when when they
- 56:42Speaker 1: moved to southern England, the name was changed, was changed
- 56:46Speaker 1: or bastardized in and they started pronouncing it cows. And
- 56:50Speaker 1: in France it was two syllables kuai's. Dad's what I'm
- 56:54Speaker 1: switching too for the deer kuai's. And so if people
- 56:57Speaker 1: are going to argue that that's their basis for saying coup's,
- 57:00Speaker 1: then I want to hear him saying kuaiz dear. That's
- 57:02Speaker 1: what I'm switching to get around all of them, like
- 57:06Speaker 1: hard hitting Arizona flat brim dudes and be like, wait, yeah,
- 57:09Speaker 1: I'd like to inter rest in these ka I like
- 57:12Speaker 1: how you held out until you found a reasonable out.
- 57:17Speaker 1: I can't something contrary, and I need to find a
- 57:21Speaker 1: way to get out of this. There's some people in
- 57:24Speaker 1: Elliott Cows's family back before him that spelled their name
- 57:29Speaker 1: CEO w e s instead of you in the middle.
- 57:32Speaker 1: They put CEO w e s because they were tired
- 57:35Speaker 1: of people misspronouncing it. Cou's probably. I have a newspaper
- 57:39Speaker 1: article about uh an uncle of mine. No, my father's
- 57:47Speaker 1: uncle hit a accidentally like crash his car into a
- 57:52Speaker 1: policeman's car. An irishman named Philip to me, and Philip
- 57:58Speaker 1: to me went home and got his pistol and back
- 58:00Speaker 1: and shot and killed my dad's uncle. I have a
- 58:02Speaker 1: newspaper article about it. But in that article my family
- 58:04Speaker 1: is r I N E l l I uh huh
- 58:10Speaker 1: so in the article or okay, and that's the only play. Yeah.
- 58:14Speaker 1: My dad said he grew up with his grandma pulling
- 58:16Speaker 1: that she kept the clothes in the box, and she
- 58:18Speaker 1: pulled him down and show everybody the bloody shirt with
- 58:20Speaker 1: a bullet hole in it. But the article about it
- 58:23Speaker 1: describes him as with R I N yellow I. So
- 58:27Speaker 1: he perhaps right, you know, just like people. I'm just
- 58:29Speaker 1: I'm just coming on the way that names morph and
- 58:32Speaker 1: change and yeah, and you're like, how like what like
- 58:34Speaker 1: what pronounced you? What? I mean, how that dude pronounced
- 58:36Speaker 1: his last name? I don't know, did you say ronella
- 58:38Speaker 1: or do you have some the whole other way of
- 58:39Speaker 1: doing it. My my family was originally from deeked in
- 58:42Speaker 1: Switzerland in the seventeen hundreds and two miles from deek
- 58:46Speaker 1: in Switzerland is helful thinking helful thinking Switzerland, and there's
- 58:50Speaker 1: helful fingers back there now and they spell it the
- 58:52Speaker 1: same way, which is kind of unique because names do
- 58:55Speaker 1: change when they switch continents and things, but still spelt
- 58:58Speaker 1: that way. Uh. Lasting on Elliott Cows, do you understand
- 59:03Speaker 1: like I read like he was what was his what
- 59:06Speaker 1: was his thing about levitation that I'd rather he was
- 59:09Speaker 1: into levitation? Levitation? No, I just read that he was.
- 59:14Speaker 1: He's probably on something stupid like his Wikipedia page, but
- 59:17Speaker 1: read that he's like in into levitation. No, you can
- 59:19Speaker 1: get the I bought that publication for likes Um online
- 59:24Speaker 1: on Kindle. I don't know if it's available other places,
- 59:26Speaker 1: probably other other places, but it's a short thing. It's
- 59:29Speaker 1: more of a paper than a book, but they make
- 59:31Speaker 1: it look like it's a book, and it's really entertaining
- 59:34Speaker 1: because he as a scientist. He's talking about, well, okay,
- 59:38Speaker 1: people don't believe in levitation, but basically, I we should
- 59:43Speaker 1: hold out the idea that there's a lot of things
- 59:45Speaker 1: in the natural world we don't understand and we can't explain.
- 59:48Speaker 1: In future research will probably explain it. And he kind
- 59:51Speaker 1: of felt that way about levitation, that we don't know
- 59:53Speaker 1: what it is now he's been totally swindled by people
- 59:56Speaker 1: who are levitating in front of him. But he said,
- 59:58Speaker 1: you know, we don't understand it out, but future, in
- 1:00:01Speaker 1: the future, science might might unravel what that's all about.
- 1:00:04Speaker 1: Because people don't have any problem believing in in centrifugal
- 1:00:08Speaker 1: force or gravity. Like if he took the Earth and
- 1:00:12Speaker 1: you spun it wouldn't people levitate because the centrifugal force.
- 1:00:14Speaker 1: He was talking about these forces as being understood and
- 1:00:17Speaker 1: we just don't understand that one. He said. Everybody in
- 1:00:20Speaker 1: the world, uh, it doesn't believe in levitation, except he
- 1:00:24Speaker 1: says Christians, of course, I mean they have no problem
- 1:00:26Speaker 1: believing that christiscended into Heaven through levitation, So so the
- 1:00:29Speaker 1: Christians believe in levitation, so they're open to the idea.
- 1:00:32Speaker 1: That's right, that was, says his tongue in cheek. But
- 1:00:34Speaker 1: he talks in there about he he ends it kind
- 1:00:37Speaker 1: of odd. He talks about how his wife, which he
- 1:00:40Speaker 1: refers to a Mrs c in there, and and so
- 1:00:43Speaker 1: those probably just gave up on that. So he talks
- 1:00:48Speaker 1: about his wife and a friend and this big oak table,
- 1:00:51Speaker 1: and they put their hands on the table and they
- 1:00:52Speaker 1: tried to move it, and the table started bumping and
- 1:00:54Speaker 1: moving by itself, and you totally convinced that they were
- 1:00:57Speaker 1: doing this, And they pulled away from the table, and
- 1:00:59Speaker 1: the table kept bumping and being agitated with nobody touching it.
- 1:01:04Speaker 1: And then at the end of that kind of bizarre story,
- 1:01:06Speaker 1: maybe he was getting seen out at the end of
- 1:01:08Speaker 1: his career. The end of that story, he says, and
- 1:01:10Speaker 1: therein lies my theory of telekinetic levitation. I'nnced. Now it's
- 1:01:17Speaker 1: an interesting read, it's pretty entertaining, it's pretty short. Uh,
- 1:01:22Speaker 1: this is a this is a question that cannot be
- 1:01:23Speaker 1: answered to my satisfaction. Um, I'm gonna phrase it in
- 1:01:29Speaker 1: an annoying way. Why do dear lose their antlers? Evolutionarily
- 1:01:36Speaker 1: or how does it happen? When it happened? Why do
- 1:01:39Speaker 1: they evolutionarily? Why why should then? Yeah, I say it's
- 1:01:42Speaker 1: annoying because you can't go like, we don't know why
- 1:01:44Speaker 1: you We could speculate about things that may have. Right,
- 1:01:48Speaker 1: there's some good reasons to lose antlers. You break a time,
- 1:01:51Speaker 1: you got a new set next year. That's a great horn.
- 1:01:53Speaker 1: You don't get a new set, No, you don't. But
- 1:01:55Speaker 1: they're not gonna break as much as times though. You
- 1:01:57Speaker 1: know you'll broom the tips off and sinicize, and that
- 1:02:01Speaker 1: would that really drive No, I'm not alone. I don't think,
- 1:02:04Speaker 1: not alone, but you know, you think if you're over
- 1:02:07Speaker 1: wintering and you're trying to make it through winter on
- 1:02:10Speaker 1: harsh winter range and through deep snow, be nice not
- 1:02:12Speaker 1: to have, especially a moose, those big bones on your head.
- 1:02:14Speaker 1: I mean they're being an advantage to to losing those
- 1:02:17Speaker 1: during the wintertime. But you can't beat the hell out
- 1:02:19Speaker 1: of stuff trying to kill you. No, tell you what
- 1:02:21Speaker 1: the answer is probably is let's go nutritional signaling. And
- 1:02:27Speaker 1: you've heard about that work. It gives you and it
- 1:02:30Speaker 1: gives the animal an annual expression of its physical condition
- 1:02:35Speaker 1: and its fitness for females to select the animals they
- 1:02:39Speaker 1: are able to acquire the most resources, grow the biggest
- 1:02:41Speaker 1: antlers because they're they're luxury organs. They grow after the
- 1:02:45Speaker 1: body has been satisfied the nutritions. Yeah, like the difference
- 1:02:49Speaker 1: in driving a car or having a picture of a
- 1:02:52Speaker 1: sweet car you used to have. It sounds like a
- 1:02:55Speaker 1: personal story, okay, But but here you've got an annual
- 1:03:02Speaker 1: expression of of how fit you are, and it's up
- 1:03:06Speaker 1: to the minute and and getting bigger every year. You
- 1:03:09Speaker 1: don't as a yearling, yearling moose, you don't want to
- 1:03:11Speaker 1: grow this gigantic fifty um set of antlers. But here, annually,
- 1:03:15Speaker 1: as your body grows and as you get no more
- 1:03:18Speaker 1: nutrition and maybe become dominant, you can you can express
- 1:03:21Speaker 1: that and say, look, ladies, look at look at I got. Yeah,
- 1:03:24Speaker 1: but horned, here's the problem with that. Horned animals have
- 1:03:27Speaker 1: the same luxury. They just keep growing, right. But there's
- 1:03:31Speaker 1: sometimes where it's like a two year old big horn
- 1:03:34Speaker 1: is gonna wind up having the biggest horns ever. It's
- 1:03:38Speaker 1: like a big ass horned big horn is old. Mm hmm.
- 1:03:41Speaker 1: They you know, servants, the dear Family evolved in Asia,
- 1:03:45Speaker 1: bob is evolved don't know where, probably Europe someplace. And
- 1:03:49Speaker 1: so the the animals get on these different evolutionary tracks
- 1:03:52Speaker 1: and you get you get characteristics that just develop independently
- 1:03:56Speaker 1: and and and now looking at them now, they may
- 1:03:59Speaker 1: not make sense when you compare them, like what you're
- 1:04:02Speaker 1: saying that they just had They just had different um pathways.
- 1:04:06Speaker 1: There's a procolius in in Asia. Some fossils were Looking
- 1:04:10Speaker 1: at a set of fossils, it looks like at least
- 1:04:13Speaker 1: that was the conclusion. Some of them shed their antlers
- 1:04:16Speaker 1: every year and some of them didn't in that form.
- 1:04:19Speaker 1: And so that's thought of as maybe being the root
- 1:04:21Speaker 1: of the servant family, of the deer family. That's right
- 1:04:24Speaker 1: at the point where animals have these things on their
- 1:04:26Speaker 1: heads and then they're dropping off every year or not
- 1:04:29Speaker 1: dropping off every year. We had a really really neat
- 1:04:33Speaker 1: kind of expression of the the you know, the health
- 1:04:38Speaker 1: of the animal being represented in the antlers. Um sam
- 1:04:41Speaker 1: baits producer here at meat Eater. She shout her first
- 1:04:46Speaker 1: mule deer buck and it was a really neat buck
- 1:04:53Speaker 1: and everything about it. From my look at the deer,
- 1:04:56Speaker 1: it was like, boy, this is a mature deer. The
- 1:04:59Speaker 1: antlers aren't that big big, and they're kind of an
- 1:05:01Speaker 1: interesting formation, and uh, you could have laid uh, you know,
- 1:05:08Speaker 1: two year old deer next to this, probably three or
- 1:05:11Speaker 1: four year old deer, and the two year old deer
- 1:05:14Speaker 1: would have bigger antlers um. But then when he started
- 1:05:18Speaker 1: dressing the deer, the deer had been shot the year before.
- 1:05:22Speaker 1: There's also leg injuries. Front leg injuries will produce a
- 1:05:25Speaker 1: non typical point on the same side as the front
- 1:05:27Speaker 1: leg injury. Rear leg injuries. You say that like opposite, No,
- 1:05:32Speaker 1: not always, but oh you know, I knew. I thought
- 1:05:34Speaker 1: it was always opposite. I didn't know his front leg
- 1:05:36Speaker 1: front leg is the same side. It's called a contralateral effect.
- 1:05:39Speaker 1: And and so the rear leg or left rear lego
- 1:05:42Speaker 1: producer um messed up at around the on the right
- 1:05:45Speaker 1: side the next year. So a lot of theories are
- 1:05:47Speaker 1: like some kind of counterbalancing, which doesn't make a lot
- 1:05:49Speaker 1: of sense. Some people some tell you, well, the deer
- 1:05:52Speaker 1: is probably back there licking his injury and he's damaging
- 1:05:55Speaker 1: that opposite side antler. But I think it's more neurological.
- 1:05:58Speaker 1: I think it's the way the right rain um manages
- 1:06:01Speaker 1: the left side of the body and vice versa. I
- 1:06:04Speaker 1: think it's something with that damage to the left side
- 1:06:07Speaker 1: of your leg is neurologically affecting the other side. Um okay,
- 1:06:13Speaker 1: so tell me why they how they lose their antlers?
- 1:06:16Speaker 1: What's going on? One minute're kicking ass, You've got some antlers.
- 1:06:18Speaker 1: You're fighting? Yeah, I mean you can pick up you
- 1:06:22Speaker 1: can pick up the animal by the and then and
- 1:06:25Speaker 1: then the the after the breeding season, to stosterone levels,
- 1:06:29Speaker 1: mostly to stoster and a lot of other hormones. There's
- 1:06:31Speaker 1: this big orchestra of hormones rising and falling throughout the
- 1:06:34Speaker 1: year in a in a deer, but really to stosterone
- 1:06:36Speaker 1: is a driver. And after the breeding season to stosterone
- 1:06:38Speaker 1: levels plummet. And it's that that plummeting of testosterone. There's
- 1:06:42Speaker 1: this this certain layer of bone cells between the temporary
- 1:06:47Speaker 1: antler material and the top of the pedicle. It's called
- 1:06:50Speaker 1: osteo class, and they're real sensitive to hormonal changes and
- 1:06:53Speaker 1: then dropping to stosterone erodes those osteo class and antlers
- 1:06:58Speaker 1: just fall off. They must be strong sons of bitches though. Yeah, right,
- 1:07:03Speaker 1: Like you've seen deer, like you could hit a deer
- 1:07:06Speaker 1: on the antler sometimes break the skull and it busts
- 1:07:09Speaker 1: the skull in half. M Yeah, but then a dropping testosterone,
- 1:07:14Speaker 1: a hormonal shift will cause whatever that glue is off
- 1:07:18Speaker 1: and that doesn't take that long. I mean he's kicking
- 1:07:21Speaker 1: as November, then a couple months later his antler falls off.
- 1:07:25Speaker 1: Yelping and growing new ones in a couple of months
- 1:07:29Speaker 1: prior to November. You could squeeze the tip of those
- 1:07:33Speaker 1: antlers off your hands, get blood on your hands. I've
- 1:07:37Speaker 1: talked to a number of guys have gone up, remember
- 1:07:41Speaker 1: the circumstances going up and grabbed the deer to dragon,
- 1:07:43Speaker 1: had the antler come off in her hand. It was happening.
- 1:07:47Speaker 1: Shed antlers quicker if they're nutritionally depraved or if they
- 1:07:51Speaker 1: get sick or something. I don't really cause that, it messes.
- 1:07:53Speaker 1: It just kind of messes with their hormone system and
- 1:07:56Speaker 1: may lose their the sauceron may go down quicker just
- 1:07:58Speaker 1: because they're kind of sick. What do you think it
- 1:08:02Speaker 1: takes um? You know, people talk about areas of big Bucks,
- 1:08:07Speaker 1: and you know what, when I was like coming up
- 1:08:11Speaker 1: as a young man, everybody was excited about the genetics
- 1:08:15Speaker 1: that place got great genetics, right, And then we talked
- 1:08:20Speaker 1: to some guys. You've done some work with Matt Coffin
- 1:08:22Speaker 1: and and his colleague Kevin. Kevin looks at nutrition, and
- 1:08:29Speaker 1: they've done studies have taken deer from supposedly shitty genetic
- 1:08:32Speaker 1: areas or supposedly stupendous genetic areas, changing changing their diet
- 1:08:38Speaker 1: to match diet of deer from areas that are contradictory
- 1:08:42Speaker 1: to that, meaning like you take a deer from an
- 1:08:45Speaker 1: area that supposed he has shitty genetics and put it
- 1:08:48Speaker 1: on the same diet as a deer from an area
- 1:08:50Speaker 1: that suppose he has great genetics, and lone behold, they
- 1:08:53Speaker 1: went looking exactly the same. And he got into and
- 1:08:57Speaker 1: we discussed like, not only is it that animal is nutrition,
- 1:09:01Speaker 1: but it's the nutrition of its mother when she becomes pregnant, right,
- 1:09:05Speaker 1: and his aunt, Like whether he's going to be a
- 1:09:07Speaker 1: stomp or buck could be decided by the condition of
- 1:09:11Speaker 1: his mother when she becomes pregnant. It could, Yeah, it
- 1:09:13Speaker 1: can be decided condition of his mother right before she
- 1:09:15Speaker 1: becomes pregnant, the condition she's in when she becomes pregnant.
- 1:09:18Speaker 1: Epigenetics that probably epigenetic it's a maternal effect, is what
- 1:09:21Speaker 1: Kevin research and talked about. Probably there's a thing called
- 1:09:24Speaker 1: epigenetics that is kind of a new field or finding someone.
- 1:09:28Speaker 1: Not we but there's some amazing things where an animal
- 1:09:32Speaker 1: has genetics and passes on the genetic code. And we
- 1:09:35Speaker 1: always thought of it, like Gregor Mendel, Mendelian genetics was
- 1:09:39Speaker 1: just like whatever genes you had, that's what got expressed
- 1:09:42Speaker 1: in the young. We're finding out that environmental influences like
- 1:09:46Speaker 1: nutrition can actually switch genes on and off. So so
- 1:09:49Speaker 1: the genetic code doesn't change because it can't change, but
- 1:09:52Speaker 1: which genes get expressed and turned on and off can
- 1:09:55Speaker 1: change depending on if if you've got good nutrition or
- 1:09:58Speaker 1: poor nutrition, And so really amazing things where it looks
- 1:10:03Speaker 1: like it's actually genetic effects, but it's the genes are
- 1:10:07Speaker 1: the same, there's just more different ones are active. It's
- 1:10:09Speaker 1: really amazing, amazing stuff, certainly not my expertise, but cool stuff.
- 1:10:14Speaker 1: And that's probably what's behind this maternal effect where the
- 1:10:16Speaker 1: condition of the female can can actually affect the antlers
- 1:10:20Speaker 1: of her male offspring when they're mature, because it's certain, yeah,
- 1:10:24Speaker 1: it's got enough enough gas for certain things to kick
- 1:10:27Speaker 1: in or it turns on. It's the methylation process. And
- 1:10:30Speaker 1: I only sund that to to sound smart because I
- 1:10:32Speaker 1: don't know anything about the methylation process. But that's the
- 1:10:35Speaker 1: vehicle um in in the DNA transcription that turned genes
- 1:10:40Speaker 1: on and off. And that's what's at the heart of that.
- 1:10:42Speaker 1: If you took what's your theory on this? And why
- 1:10:44Speaker 1: hasn't someone done yet? Get yourself a couple cuz dear
- 1:10:50Speaker 1: bring them up to Iowa. What happens to him? Do
- 1:10:55Speaker 1: they just die because they don't like it? Because it's
- 1:10:57Speaker 1: they get bigger, They would get bigger. Nobody's done it
- 1:11:00Speaker 1: UM that I know of, because c w D don't
- 1:11:03Speaker 1: want to be moving animals around, you can't, you know.
- 1:11:06Speaker 1: We had a we had a conversation with someone at UM,
- 1:11:10Speaker 1: someone who does some work with Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation,
- 1:11:12Speaker 1: was talking about with c w D just like the
- 1:11:14Speaker 1: whole thing of like moving out. It's just done, man, Yeah,
- 1:11:19Speaker 1: but do we need to move much? I mean we're
- 1:11:21Speaker 1: still really now. It's unfinished work man. Yeah, but that's
- 1:11:27Speaker 1: a that's a concern to move the the habituated Elk
- 1:11:35Speaker 1: out of the state. And they had to that that
- 1:11:37Speaker 1: lucky elk that somebody chose to feed is now at
- 1:11:40Speaker 1: the Veterinary Research Station, full full life. So they get bigger,
- 1:11:48Speaker 1: they would get bigger. Yeah, I don't you know there
- 1:11:50Speaker 1: would they stop being the gray ghost. I don't good
- 1:11:54Speaker 1: question what their pellege would do, whether you get like
- 1:11:55Speaker 1: a rusty red coat in the summer, which we normally
- 1:11:58Speaker 1: don't get. But I don't there. They're they've been so separated,
- 1:12:01Speaker 1: and they're good legitimate subspecies. They're smaller. We did some
- 1:12:05Speaker 1: genetic work. Bunda Crockett and Pope and Young paid for
- 1:12:08Speaker 1: some genetic work that I orchestrated with some real geneticist
- 1:12:11Speaker 1: where we found a genetic marker that will identify a
- 1:12:14Speaker 1: cow's white tailed deer from the other white tailed deer.
- 1:12:16Speaker 1: So you could bring me a rack of skull plate
- 1:12:19Speaker 1: and we could test that and tell whether it's Cole's
- 1:12:21Speaker 1: white til or not. And Buona Crowt and Pope and
- 1:12:22Speaker 1: Young are using that to keep their record books clean.
- 1:12:24Speaker 1: Now someone enters the new world record cow's white tail,
- 1:12:28Speaker 1: and it's a skullplate that Grandpa had in the attic
- 1:12:30Speaker 1: and Grandpa sett he shot it south of Tucson back
- 1:12:34Speaker 1: and this has happened, and we do a genetic test
- 1:12:36Speaker 1: and yeah, family stories sometimes get twisted and chains, and
- 1:12:41Speaker 1: so we've done that and we've found some of these
- 1:12:43Speaker 1: animals they're not cow's white tail, and so they're not
- 1:12:45Speaker 1: they can't be included. That's a bomber man. Someone gets
- 1:12:48Speaker 1: confused about the butt grampa shot in Alberta and the
- 1:12:50Speaker 1: bucket shot in Arizona. That's what it is. Uh, we
- 1:12:57Speaker 1: had the thing where we were You wanted to bring
- 1:12:58Speaker 1: up something about Neanderthals. Why, yeah, I didn't. I've sent
- 1:13:02Speaker 1: you a bunch of the Ndfel papers just because you
- 1:13:05Speaker 1: are you interested. I think it's just you and I
- 1:13:07Speaker 1: are in the same boat, were interested spectators and what
- 1:13:10Speaker 1: the scientists are doing. But the reason why, be the
- 1:13:12Speaker 1: reason I'm when Neanderthal man is uh into him is
- 1:13:16Speaker 1: because in my life, they have gone from these crude
- 1:13:25Speaker 1: right and these crude like you know, you know, like
- 1:13:28Speaker 1: beating their lady over there on the rock and dragging
- 1:13:31Speaker 1: her home kind of thing, to being just increasingly complex
- 1:13:36Speaker 1: and sophisticated. And it's oh, they were free divers. They
- 1:13:40Speaker 1: built a raft and I was like, yeah, they were
- 1:13:43Speaker 1: having free divers. They had art. They like to carve things.
- 1:13:48Speaker 1: I was so I was trying to get cal that
- 1:13:49Speaker 1: put a thing in Cal's weekend review where um, I
- 1:13:52Speaker 1: had a whole joke crafted up for Calvity, wouldn't use it.
- 1:13:56Speaker 1: I was waiting for the story. I wasn't even the
- 1:13:58Speaker 1: story to come out where it was review old that
- 1:14:00Speaker 1: Neanderthals had laptops. They don't happen, because every story about
- 1:14:05Speaker 1: in Airthals now is like, oh, they were just great,
- 1:14:08Speaker 1: nice people, nice smart people. Doing start testing this out
- 1:14:14Speaker 1: by every time you see somebody eating oysters, you stare
- 1:14:17Speaker 1: at him and you go, you neander Well, they're two
- 1:14:20Speaker 1: percent of VIRGINO. Well, I'm a little bit Well do
- 1:14:24Speaker 1: you have you done twenty three? No? I did the
- 1:14:26Speaker 1: other one. I'm a little less than less than average
- 1:14:28Speaker 1: on Neanderthal Rogan. I had a good laugh. Joe Rogan,
- 1:14:32Speaker 1: he's like running ahead. He's running heavy. That's not surprising.
- 1:14:38Speaker 1: It's a sanginal crest and the eyebrows. I think it's
- 1:14:42Speaker 1: rather real heavy. He was saying, But you know that
- 1:14:45Speaker 1: that miniature hominid that they found in Flores Island, Yeah, Florences.
- 1:14:54Speaker 1: I think I'm missing a syllable. But three ft tall
- 1:14:57Speaker 1: at maturity. They're running on almost all all Neanderthal and
- 1:15:01Speaker 1: Denisovan jeans or genetics. I mean they come from that
- 1:15:04Speaker 1: Neanderthal stock, not from modern human stock. Yeah. At once
- 1:15:09Speaker 1: upon a time, you could have walked. You could have
- 1:15:11Speaker 1: wandered around Southern Europe Mediterranean area, and just like you
- 1:15:16Speaker 1: can wander around um here and be like, oh, there's
- 1:15:19Speaker 1: a black tail deer. Oh there's mild deer. There's a
- 1:15:21Speaker 1: white tail, there's a couzier. How did these all fit together?
- 1:15:23Speaker 1: You could have roamed the land and run into like
- 1:15:27Speaker 1: different kinds of different folks. Yeah, different kind of folks
- 1:15:32Speaker 1: did some amount of love making multiple time. But paper
- 1:15:37Speaker 1: just came out with the Neanderthal showing that wasn't just
- 1:15:39Speaker 1: one kind of unique population where they interbred and it
- 1:15:42Speaker 1: spread out from there. But it was a real complex
- 1:15:45Speaker 1: over a long period of time, thousands and thousands, probably
- 1:15:48Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands, well at least tens of thousands of years,
- 1:15:51Speaker 1: a whole bunch of different interbreeding events between and that
- 1:15:54Speaker 1: and really messing with people or not into it people.
- 1:16:00Speaker 1: Would you coming from one spot, would you like trying
- 1:16:03Speaker 1: to pick up other species? You're saying could as if
- 1:16:09Speaker 1: it's past tense. I feel like you're trying to call
- 1:16:12Speaker 1: me out here. Probably like back in the day you
- 1:16:15Speaker 1: would have been like, I'm gonna go check out that
- 1:16:17Speaker 1: other camp. What are those anyway? Yeah? I think so,
- 1:16:21Speaker 1: I'm gonna bring a some cookies over there. And we're
- 1:16:25Speaker 1: speaking past tense hypothetically. Back then, people with all the
- 1:16:30Speaker 1: oysters and muscles and doing the free diving a pretty
- 1:16:33Speaker 1: good crew. Kind of small? Was it the was it
- 1:16:36Speaker 1: the unattractive modern humans though, that were more likely to
- 1:16:39Speaker 1: breed with Andrew? I would love to know man, and
- 1:16:41Speaker 1: I'd like know like when they sat around talking or
- 1:16:43Speaker 1: they talking about how you know, like, was it like
- 1:16:47Speaker 1: if you were krol Magnet or you know, and you
- 1:16:53Speaker 1: hooked up with the Neanderthal? Was it like did you
- 1:16:55Speaker 1: try to like keep quiet about it right, We're like wow, know?
- 1:17:00Speaker 1: Or did you brag it up? I would load? No,
- 1:17:06Speaker 1: I got along with the time activities. I'll be engaging
- 1:17:09Speaker 1: in some day. Um. Yeah. Did you have any burning
- 1:17:14Speaker 1: observation about him? No? I just just like them. I
- 1:17:17Speaker 1: like that the h is back in the name, you know,
- 1:17:19Speaker 1: it was Neanderthal. And then for a period of time
- 1:17:21Speaker 1: someone said neander tall because because it's it's the cow's
- 1:17:25Speaker 1: dealing because damn valley in Germany. I don't give what
- 1:17:29Speaker 1: they call their value. But but not all the papers
- 1:17:32Speaker 1: have the H back in though. That was good because
- 1:17:34Speaker 1: it was kind of awkward to say. I never know
- 1:17:36Speaker 1: what to do in those circumstances, man, like how I
- 1:17:39Speaker 1: went to switch. I've switched to pronghorn, trying to switch.
- 1:17:43Speaker 1: I even labeled my meat pronghorn. No, it confuses people. Yeah,
- 1:17:47Speaker 1: you don't believe me, you go look hell yeah, And
- 1:17:51Speaker 1: I've given it to people and they've registered confusion. Really,
- 1:17:54Speaker 1: that's so funny. You don't label your packages prong horn.
- 1:17:57Speaker 1: I do not. They don't antilo capra on my go.
- 1:18:05Speaker 1: You know, there was eighteen eighteen different types of primitive
- 1:18:08Speaker 1: antilo capra pronghorn families in North America eighteen million years ago.
- 1:18:13Speaker 1: For eighteen million years, we had eighteen different types of
- 1:18:16Speaker 1: prong worns. Some had corkscrew horn corps, some had three
- 1:18:19Speaker 1: horn cores on both sides, six total horn cores. A
- 1:18:22Speaker 1: lot of them had two on each side. I wrote
- 1:18:25Speaker 1: a field guide it's called a Bestieri of Ancestral antilocaporates
- 1:18:30Speaker 1: and it's illustration, wrote that, yeah, with another machine man.
- 1:18:35Speaker 1: Well that's interesting stuff. Eighteen different kinds of prong worn
- 1:18:38Speaker 1: and they all went extinct except for the American pronghorn
- 1:18:41Speaker 1: that we have. And so we had illustrations that Randy
- 1:18:43Speaker 1: bab did illustrations of each one of those skulls. And
- 1:18:47Speaker 1: then I wrote a paragraph which was anything we knew
- 1:18:50Speaker 1: about it. And we had a map of where the
- 1:18:52Speaker 1: fossils have been found, so it was like a little
- 1:18:54Speaker 1: field guide. How far are you, Florida. There's different kinds
- 1:18:58Speaker 1: always over there. If you would have named it kinds
- 1:19:01Speaker 1: of a kind of you would have been on the
- 1:19:04Speaker 1: same shelf. You know. Whenever I started getting depressed about
- 1:19:07Speaker 1: all the animals aren't around anymore, I always to help
- 1:19:11Speaker 1: not be depressed, I remind myself that the largest animal
- 1:19:15Speaker 1: to ever exist larger than the biggest of Brontosaurus or
- 1:19:21Speaker 1: argent two soaurus, the biggest animal to ever have ever
- 1:19:25Speaker 1: existed on Earth. Right now, it's still here, right, We're
- 1:19:30Speaker 1: in the good old days. The biggest animal ever is
- 1:19:34Speaker 1: here right now, the good old days of megafono. We've
- 1:19:37Speaker 1: got them now. Yeah, Because you get looking at my
- 1:19:41Speaker 1: kids like dinosaur books and I need to look at that.
- 1:19:44Speaker 1: I'm like man kind of little jealous about that. Oh
- 1:19:46Speaker 1: so jealous. I just to lay eyes and get your
- 1:19:50Speaker 1: brain wrapped around the scale. I want, I want it.
- 1:19:54Speaker 1: We talked a lot about whether they have been a
- 1:19:55Speaker 1: good eating or not. One of my kids thinks they
- 1:19:59Speaker 1: would have been on one of the things. They wouldn't
- 1:20:00Speaker 1: have been very good eating. Yeah, I don't know. Reptile Like, Okay,
- 1:20:04Speaker 1: moving on, this is a little bit I want to
- 1:20:07Speaker 1: talk about, like you really mixed up in the wolf world.
- 1:20:11Speaker 1: I am. Yeah. I would put on the Mexican wolf
- 1:20:14Speaker 1: Recovery team in December and was on it for two years.
- 1:20:18Speaker 1: Resigned in December of UM and with my resignation letter
- 1:20:23Speaker 1: added ah about a fourteen page report sighting all of
- 1:20:26Speaker 1: the scientific process flaws that were that I saw in
- 1:20:31Speaker 1: the writing of what was supposed to be the draft
- 1:20:33Speaker 1: recovery plan at that time. That's what we were put
- 1:20:35Speaker 1: together for a couple of months later, the remainder of
- 1:20:38Speaker 1: the team UM went had and submitted a report had
- 1:20:42Speaker 1: so many flaws. As I pointed out, Fish and Wilad
- 1:20:45Speaker 1: Servis couldn't do anything with it. They couldn't they couldn't
- 1:20:47Speaker 1: make that their their draft plan. Um. They just stakeholders
- 1:20:51Speaker 1: weren't involved. State agencies were just seen as, uh, maybe
- 1:20:55Speaker 1: stakeholders will we'll talk to you later. Um. And it
- 1:20:58Speaker 1: went nowhere. So back away up They're like, what's the problem,
- 1:21:02Speaker 1: Like what happened we used to have? I mean, the
- 1:21:05Speaker 1: wolves were like continue they had them in Alaska. There
- 1:21:08Speaker 1: was no like place without them. They just ran all
- 1:21:10Speaker 1: right down into Mexico. And people mistakenly just think about
- 1:21:13Speaker 1: the Mexican wolf as um just the southern part of
- 1:21:18Speaker 1: a blending of different wolf sizes and wolf subspecies throughout
- 1:21:21Speaker 1: the continent. We used to have a twenty four wolf
- 1:21:24Speaker 1: subspecies in North America and Rohn no Wack boiled that
- 1:21:28Speaker 1: down to five that seemed ecologically different in different areas.
- 1:21:33Speaker 1: Um Arctic, well, there was a um occide and Talus,
- 1:21:36Speaker 1: which is a big Canadian wolf, and in Alaska and
- 1:21:39Speaker 1: then New Bliss, which is mid continent most of the
- 1:21:41Speaker 1: United States, and then Bailey I, which is the Mexican wolf,
- 1:21:45Speaker 1: and then there was the Arctic wolf and I can't
- 1:21:51Speaker 1: remember what the other one one. In the Arctic wolves
- 1:21:52Speaker 1: they run white a fair bit, yea, yea. And so
- 1:21:55Speaker 1: the Canadian down in the Canadian High Arctic, Elsmere Island
- 1:21:59Speaker 1: and that sort of thing. And so so these are
- 1:22:01Speaker 1: kind of groups of wolves that it kind of makes sense.
- 1:22:04Speaker 1: The Mexican wolf is not just the southern tip of
- 1:22:08Speaker 1: a big wolf distribution that blended um freely with New Bliss,
- 1:22:12Speaker 1: the other wolf to the north. The Mexican wolf evolved
- 1:22:15Speaker 1: in the Sierra Madre, like we're talking about white tails.
- 1:22:17Speaker 1: And that's another reason Mexican wolves are physically different. They're
- 1:22:22Speaker 1: genetically different. They're the most genetically different wolf subspecies when
- 1:22:25Speaker 1: they look at genetics. But they weren't just in Mexico,
- 1:22:29Speaker 1: and they were only in Mexico and the Sky Islands
- 1:22:32Speaker 1: in southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico. That was the
- 1:22:35Speaker 1: historical range of the Mexican wolf. Some of those almost
- 1:22:38Speaker 1: overlaps with Cosier and and Got and Got Turkey and
- 1:22:43Speaker 1: so and and evolutionary ecologists will talk about subspecies just
- 1:22:48Speaker 1: have more support when there's a whole bunch of other
- 1:22:51Speaker 1: unrelated animals that have that same distribution. It just makes
- 1:22:54Speaker 1: sense that there are some ecological forces that allowed those
- 1:22:57Speaker 1: animals of different types to to evolve a little bit differently.
- 1:23:01Speaker 1: As a subspecies, and in that same range you have
- 1:23:04Speaker 1: this like very different type of turkey, very different type
- 1:23:08Speaker 1: of deer, very different type of quail. And if you
- 1:23:10Speaker 1: look at ecological zones plants in the plant community, that
- 1:23:14Speaker 1: that whole Um Madri and oak woodland, they call it
- 1:23:17Speaker 1: that the Sierra Madre is is typical of is different
- 1:23:19Speaker 1: than the Muggian rim in northern Arizona northern New Mexico.
- 1:23:22Speaker 1: So it all makes sense that and and all of
- 1:23:25Speaker 1: the about twenty different mammalogists and ecologists subscribe abscribe the
- 1:23:29Speaker 1: Mexican wolf historical range like that southern Arizona, southern New
- 1:23:34Speaker 1: Mexico and all of the Sierra Madre. Now, some of
- 1:23:36Speaker 1: the Mexican wolves skull measurements have shown that some of
- 1:23:39Speaker 1: the Mexican wolves would disperse up into the Muggian rim
- 1:23:41Speaker 1: like you would expect to the Muggian rims central Arizona
- 1:23:44Speaker 1: and the Healand National Forest in central New Mexico. So
- 1:23:47Speaker 1: some of the Mexican wolves dispersed up there. Those wolves
- 1:23:50Speaker 1: in northern Arizona northern New Mexico were measurably larger. The
- 1:23:53Speaker 1: skull measurements everything were larger, and they some of those
- 1:23:56Speaker 1: would dispersed down the Muggian rim. If you look at
- 1:23:59Speaker 1: the like Google Earth and you just zoom out, you
- 1:24:02Speaker 1: see the Sierra Madrea, this big green patch where the
- 1:24:05Speaker 1: Mexican wolf was, and then the southern Rockies is another
- 1:24:08Speaker 1: huge green patch. And in between there there's this healand
- 1:24:12Speaker 1: national force Muggian rim with non wolf habitat to the
- 1:24:15Speaker 1: north of it, non wolf habitat to the south of it.
- 1:24:17Speaker 1: So Mexican wolves dispersed up, bigger wolves, neubialists dispersed south,
- 1:24:21Speaker 1: and those wolves from skull measurements, those wolves in the
- 1:24:25Speaker 1: central Arizona, New Mexico are intermediate in size. Actually, the
- 1:24:28Speaker 1: males group better with Mexican wolves down there, and the
- 1:24:31Speaker 1: females group with the northern wolves. Con indication that they
- 1:24:33Speaker 1: were intermediate between those two forms. So we did have
- 1:24:36Speaker 1: some geographic separation which accounts for the genetic differences of
- 1:24:39Speaker 1: physical differences in Mexican wolves. They're not just um some
- 1:24:43Speaker 1: subspecies that's blending in with all the other subspecies. There's
- 1:24:46Speaker 1: some reasons why they're geographically and and all those other
- 1:24:49Speaker 1: reasons why they're different. Uh, give me the pros and
- 1:24:53Speaker 1: cons as much as you're comfortable, Like, what are the
- 1:24:55Speaker 1: pros and cons with trying to bring them back? I
- 1:25:00Speaker 1: think they I mean, Mexican wolves were a native wildlife
- 1:25:02Speaker 1: species um in the Southwest, and I think if if
- 1:25:06Speaker 1: we as hunters are going to thump our chest and
- 1:25:08Speaker 1: talk about out bringing elk back and bringing turkeys back
- 1:25:11Speaker 1: and all these species that we call unendangered, we can't
- 1:25:15Speaker 1: stop at the predators. I mean, I just think it
- 1:25:17Speaker 1: makes sense. We just need to they have a place
- 1:25:19Speaker 1: in the in the Southwest, and and we need to
- 1:25:22Speaker 1: be working to bring them back. Most of the public
- 1:25:24Speaker 1: thinks bowls are pretty cool. They want to see wolves back,
- 1:25:27Speaker 1: and so as hunters do we really want to position
- 1:25:30Speaker 1: ourselves on the other side of the table from them
- 1:25:32Speaker 1: and say, no, we don't want to bring wolves back
- 1:25:34Speaker 1: because um, they eat elk and we want to hunt
- 1:25:37Speaker 1: out might impact our elk counting. So there's some real
- 1:25:40Speaker 1: challenges with bringing wolves back, but that doesn't mean we
- 1:25:43Speaker 1: shouldn't do it. We we need to have programs to
- 1:25:45Speaker 1: work with lifetock industry to to make sure those operators
- 1:25:49Speaker 1: and it's usually only a few operators that are uh
- 1:25:52Speaker 1: impacted heavily, but those that are impact heavily. We should
- 1:25:54Speaker 1: have programs that help them out. We can't just say, well,
- 1:25:57Speaker 1: you're a grazing on public land and we're gonna bring
- 1:25:59Speaker 1: wols back and we don't care about what happens to you.
- 1:26:00Speaker 1: We need to work with them where it's not gonna
- 1:26:02Speaker 1: work at all. And as far as the big game populations,
- 1:26:06Speaker 1: you when where we have wolves, we have some hotspots
- 1:26:10Speaker 1: where wolves have impact elk populations and we need to
- 1:26:13Speaker 1: have management flexibility to do something about that when that happens.
- 1:26:16Speaker 1: Predators have to be managed just like we managed prey.
- 1:26:19Speaker 1: But in a lot of areas, wolves are back on
- 1:26:22Speaker 1: the landscape and they're not heavily impacting elk populations, and
- 1:26:25Speaker 1: so I just think we need to make room for
- 1:26:27Speaker 1: for wolves on the on the landscape. They belong here.
- 1:26:30Speaker 1: You know, you've been involved in state wildlife for your career.
- 1:26:37Speaker 1: There's a lot of tension between it seizes, a lot
- 1:26:39Speaker 1: of not seems. I mean there there is. There's a
- 1:26:41Speaker 1: lot of tension between federal wildlife management decisions and state
- 1:26:44Speaker 1: wildlife management decisions. Um, do you think it's fair to say,
- 1:26:48Speaker 1: just look back at at American history, it's fair to
- 1:26:52Speaker 1: say that if there was no federal oversight of endangered species,
- 1:26:58Speaker 1: and there was no federal wildlife involvement. It would be
- 1:27:02Speaker 1: fair to say that it wouldn't have happened there were
- 1:27:07Speaker 1: We wouldn't have done any real we wouldn't have done
- 1:27:09Speaker 1: any active reintroduction efforts that would have been at to
- 1:27:13Speaker 1: this point in time that would have been spawned by
- 1:27:16Speaker 1: the states. And talking about wolves specifically, yeah, yeah, I
- 1:27:19Speaker 1: think I think it's something that's been, like for better
- 1:27:21Speaker 1: or worse, the state's top now And when I talked
- 1:27:25Speaker 1: poorly about the when I was on the Mexican wolf
- 1:27:27Speaker 1: recovery team and that effort, we reinitiated that in two
- 1:27:32Speaker 1: thousand fifteen and in December, and Fishing Wild Services did
- 1:27:36Speaker 1: it completely different. Fishing Wild Service invited state agency people
- 1:27:40Speaker 1: to the table in a series of workshops to develop
- 1:27:43Speaker 1: um a recovery plan that they would they would then right.
- 1:27:46Speaker 1: And that was a whole different process because we had
- 1:27:49Speaker 1: a neutral facilitator who was in charge of a population
- 1:27:51Speaker 1: viability analysis instead of in past efforts, it's been some
- 1:27:56Speaker 1: some academics that are very advocacy oriented, very protectionists oriented,
- 1:28:01Speaker 1: and they were in charge of writing the recovery plan
- 1:28:03Speaker 1: which didn't work repeatedly. This The recovery team that I
- 1:28:07Speaker 1: was on was the fourth recovery team to try to
- 1:28:10Speaker 1: write a revision of the Mexic wolf recovery Plan. There
- 1:28:12Speaker 1: was one written in eighty two. It wasn't adequate, it
- 1:28:14Speaker 1: didn't have recovery criteria, and everybody agreed it need to
- 1:28:16Speaker 1: be rewritten. They kept failing because you can't get a
- 1:28:20Speaker 1: handful of academics with a real protectionist kind of attitude
- 1:28:23Speaker 1: together and have them right a Mexican wolf recovery plan.
- 1:28:26Speaker 1: Explain to protectionist attitude, not ever wanting a wolf to
- 1:28:31Speaker 1: die at the hands of man, no matter what I mean,
- 1:28:34Speaker 1: Just like we want to craft some recovery criteria that
- 1:28:38Speaker 1: will make it nearly impossible for them to ever be
- 1:28:40Speaker 1: delisted and leave the protection of the federal government, which
- 1:28:43Speaker 1: is not what the Endangered Species Act is. Danger Species
- 1:28:46Speaker 1: Act is is that we're supposed to. It's like an
- 1:28:48Speaker 1: emergency room. Someone just ready to are almost close to dying.
- 1:28:52Speaker 1: You bring in an emergency room and you just get
- 1:28:54Speaker 1: them well enough so that they're not going to die,
- 1:28:56Speaker 1: and then you hand them over to um. You put
- 1:28:59Speaker 1: them in a hospital bed, You put them in the
- 1:29:00Speaker 1: hospital and then you monitor them and then you improve
- 1:29:02Speaker 1: their health. Endangered Species Act is supposed to be like
- 1:29:05Speaker 1: that with species, where we're just ready to lose them,
- 1:29:07Speaker 1: we do everything we can to save them. We get
- 1:29:09Speaker 1: them up to a certain level where we're comfortable that
- 1:29:11Speaker 1: they're not no longer in danger of extinction, and then
- 1:29:14Speaker 1: we pass them off to the state agencies and they
- 1:29:16Speaker 1: manage them like all the other carnivores. They manage. Yeah.
- 1:29:18Speaker 1: I've often joked in in some with some species. It's
- 1:29:20Speaker 1: become the my favorite animal protection Act. It is, it
- 1:29:23Speaker 1: absolutely is, and that's does such a disservice to the
- 1:29:27Speaker 1: two thousand other species that are listed on the Endangered
- 1:29:29Speaker 1: Species Act. We've got species that legitimately are going to
- 1:29:31Speaker 1: blink out and we're gonna lose. And we've got four
- 1:29:34Speaker 1: thousand wolves in the in the western Great Lakes, and
- 1:29:38Speaker 1: we've got people writing scientific papers and filing lawsuits saying
- 1:29:41Speaker 1: they're still in danger of extinction. And we've got fifteen
- 1:29:44Speaker 1: hundred in the Northern Rockies that are delisted, got sixty
- 1:29:47Speaker 1: five thousand in Alaska and Canada, hundred ten thousand wolves worldwide,
- 1:29:52Speaker 1: and and we can't delist the wolves in the four
- 1:29:54Speaker 1: thousand wolves in the Great Lakes region when the recovery
- 1:29:57Speaker 1: criteria was about fifteen hundred wolves, and we four thousand
- 1:30:00Speaker 1: and wolves and we've got four thousand, and people are
- 1:30:05Speaker 1: still suing saying they're still in danger of extinction and
- 1:30:08Speaker 1: we can't do that. We need to we need to
- 1:30:11Speaker 1: work together on the other two thousand species that need
- 1:30:13Speaker 1: our help where they're legitimately going to disappear from the earth. Jim,
- 1:30:17Speaker 1: what do you say to And I'm sure you've heard
- 1:30:19Speaker 1: this argument, because I have many times as well. There's
- 1:30:23Speaker 1: a value in having this animal on the endangered species
- 1:30:29Speaker 1: list because it brings attention to the endangered species. I
- 1:30:34Speaker 1: tell you it's gonna bring that. Is that provision written
- 1:30:37Speaker 1: into the Endangered Species Act? The last time says oh,
- 1:30:41Speaker 1: and but you've heard of this. I'm not that familiar
- 1:30:45Speaker 1: with this argument. But I mean, at some point, doesn't
- 1:30:47Speaker 1: it kind of matter about the access Oh god, yeah,
- 1:30:51Speaker 1: absolutely absolutely. But it's like, well, you know, nobody's gonna
- 1:30:55Speaker 1: care about the whatever snail or butter or fly if
- 1:31:00Speaker 1: we don't have the grizzly bear. Yeah, it's gonna That
- 1:31:06Speaker 1: doesn't even kind of surprise me. But I haven't heard
- 1:31:08Speaker 1: that this, if, if, this is the kind of thing
- 1:31:12Speaker 1: that's gonna gonna ruin the Endangered Species Act is going
- 1:31:15Speaker 1: to destroy the Endangered Species at some of these people
- 1:31:18Speaker 1: pushing and pushing and pushing at these ridiculous notions that
- 1:31:21Speaker 1: we need to still have federal protection on a species
- 1:31:24Speaker 1: like wolf is just gonna fuel the fire and we'll
- 1:31:27Speaker 1: have the Endangered Species Act completely renovated. Oh, it's already happening.
- 1:31:32Speaker 1: People get like some state agencies get so frustrated and
- 1:31:37Speaker 1: certain you know, live style groups whatever, get so frustrated
- 1:31:40Speaker 1: with the conversations around grizzly bears and wolves that when
- 1:31:43Speaker 1: they hear it's like what happened Like it's like kind
- 1:31:45Speaker 1: of like the level of damage that happened to the
- 1:31:47Speaker 1: e s a around the spot at owl. It's like
- 1:31:50Speaker 1: you turn these animals into something where the animal becomes
- 1:31:53Speaker 1: symbolic of a kind of foot dragging, and then the
- 1:31:58Speaker 1: Act becomes that it's just like a thing used to
- 1:32:02Speaker 1: wield power about grizzly bear management, and people just get piste. Yep,
- 1:32:07Speaker 1: that's not gonna end well, not gonna end well. We
- 1:32:09Speaker 1: need to get these species up so they're no longer
- 1:32:12Speaker 1: in danger of extinction, which is what the Act is,
- 1:32:14Speaker 1: and then pass them off to the state agencies and
- 1:32:17Speaker 1: and ed bangs lad the wolf recovery in the Northern Rockies,
- 1:32:19Speaker 1: he's fishing wallead service of quote unquote FED. He told
- 1:32:23Speaker 1: everybody the entire time. He says, our goal is to
- 1:32:25Speaker 1: get these up above the recovery criteria that everybody agreed
- 1:32:28Speaker 1: on and pass it off to the states. They do
- 1:32:30Speaker 1: a great job managing wildlife, and that's what my goal
- 1:32:33Speaker 1: is to recover in the in the Rockies. That that's
- 1:32:36Speaker 1: the thing too that happens that that is troublesome. Is
- 1:32:39Speaker 1: this this thing that it's the feeds. Listen, it's the FEDS.
- 1:32:43Speaker 1: They keep proposing wolves get delisted in the Great Lakes.
- 1:32:48Speaker 1: It's the FEDS that proposed the grizzly bears. But people
- 1:32:51Speaker 1: were like, oh, the Feds. Yeah, the Feds are the
- 1:32:53Speaker 1: ones saying they want to deal it. They're the ones
- 1:32:54Speaker 1: that put them up for delisting, and they get sued
- 1:32:56Speaker 1: and they're not allowed to because the lawsuits. Yeah, it's
- 1:32:57Speaker 1: like a handful of like you know, it's anti money
- 1:33:00Speaker 1: groups that kind of masquerade as environmental groups or that
- 1:33:04Speaker 1: that do both, that serve both functions. What what is
- 1:33:07Speaker 1: the most hurtful when you go to some of these
- 1:33:10Speaker 1: UH fish and wildlife meetings and you have you see
- 1:33:13Speaker 1: this argument being played out before you. Is is they're
- 1:33:18Speaker 1: trying to kill them all and state agencies will just
- 1:33:21Speaker 1: kill them all and they'll be on the endangered species
- 1:33:23Speaker 1: and and it's you know, they don't believe in like, well, listen,
- 1:33:26Speaker 1: we have this mandate that says this is what we
- 1:33:29Speaker 1: are supposed to do, and we just spend a shipload
- 1:33:32Speaker 1: of money and get them off the list. And I
- 1:33:33Speaker 1: just I want to say, how familiar are you with
- 1:33:37Speaker 1: how we got rid of wolves in the first place
- 1:33:39Speaker 1: and that time frame. I'm like, if people were trying
- 1:33:43Speaker 1: to kill wolves now, they would be gone. They would
- 1:33:46Speaker 1: be gone gone because we did it very very well
- 1:33:49Speaker 1: in a time without satellites, without GPS, without two way communication,
- 1:33:55Speaker 1: Like we just use a little bit of poison. Yeah,
- 1:33:57Speaker 1: And what what a lot of pro wolf groups and
- 1:34:00Speaker 1: it sounds funny because I'm pro wolf too, but but
- 1:34:03Speaker 1: a lot a lot of the protections groups won't acknowledge
- 1:34:06Speaker 1: is that the contributions of sportsmen through the decades have
- 1:34:10Speaker 1: brought back the prey base in in huge numbers that
- 1:34:13Speaker 1: allows us to recover wolves, not just a better kind
- 1:34:17Speaker 1: of conservation ethic that the population has, which is true,
- 1:34:21Speaker 1: it's the prey base. We couldn't do it if if
- 1:34:23Speaker 1: we didn't have all of this prey Jim talked a
- 1:34:26Speaker 1: little bit about your article were you the article you
- 1:34:30Speaker 1: wrote where you talk about the public's enthusiasm for like
- 1:34:33Speaker 1: trophic cascades, that trophic cascades also becomes like everybody's favorite word. Yeah,
- 1:34:39Speaker 1: favorite phrase. That's that's another thing like trophy hunting, that
- 1:34:42Speaker 1: that far outpaced the science behind it. So you're always
- 1:34:47Speaker 1: playing trophic cascades. We need to do that and then
- 1:34:49Speaker 1: talk about the you know whatever. He's like all hopped
- 1:34:52Speaker 1: up on the idea that all it takes is a
- 1:34:54Speaker 1: couple of wolves and their their rivers run clear again.
- 1:34:57Speaker 1: And yeah, so tropic cascades just basically a trophic level
- 1:35:01Speaker 1: in in ecology is like the vegetations one trophic level,
- 1:35:04Speaker 1: and then you may have elk representing the second trophic
- 1:35:07Speaker 1: level above that helk eating the vegetation, and then you
- 1:35:10Speaker 1: have a third trophic level, which might be wolves which
- 1:35:13Speaker 1: eat the elk, and so you have these three trophic levels,
- 1:35:16Speaker 1: and the idea of trophic cascades is that if you've
- 1:35:18Speaker 1: got a situation where you've got elk really impacting, overpopulated
- 1:35:22Speaker 1: elk impacting the vegetation, and you've got too many elk,
- 1:35:25Speaker 1: you bring in wolves on that third trophic level. Wolves
- 1:35:28Speaker 1: impact the elk in such a way that that it relaxed,
- 1:35:31Speaker 1: It relaxes the grazing pressure on the vegetation, and you
- 1:35:34Speaker 1: have more vegetation and you have this recovery of vegetation.
- 1:35:37Speaker 1: So the idea is adding wolves to that system cascades
- 1:35:41Speaker 1: this effect through the trophic levels and where you have
- 1:35:44Speaker 1: actually the addition of wolves affecting how much vegetation there is.
- 1:35:47Speaker 1: So that's basically trophic cascades. So in Yellowstone they put
- 1:35:51Speaker 1: wolves in a ninety five. They put fourteen wolves one
- 1:35:53Speaker 1: year and seventeen the next, and that wolf population grew.
- 1:35:56Speaker 1: But that was Can I interrupt you to use a
- 1:35:59Speaker 1: quote from that era? Yeah? Um, it was in your article.
- 1:36:03Speaker 1: Where's that quote around? Someone described Yellowstone as three thousand,
- 1:36:10Speaker 1: four hundred square miles of paradise surrounded by reality. That
- 1:36:14Speaker 1: was that was that he's the leader of the wolf recovery.
- 1:36:20Speaker 1: In the Rocky Mountain. Very pragmatic. Um, awesome guy. And
- 1:36:25Speaker 1: and so everybody's talking about what's happening in Yellowstone and
- 1:36:27Speaker 1: getting all excited about whatever's happening Yellowstone. That's what's gonna
- 1:36:31Speaker 1: happen everywhere when we put wolves everywhere. But Yellowstone is
- 1:36:34Speaker 1: a whole different deal. And and so that's where he said,
- 1:36:36Speaker 1: that's paradise pause surrounded by reality. And that's so true
- 1:36:41Speaker 1: because what happened in Yellowstone, no matter what happened to Yellowstone,
- 1:36:44Speaker 1: it can't be replicated on on a working landscape with
- 1:36:47Speaker 1: people trying to make a living and working on that
- 1:36:49Speaker 1: landscape that's not Yellowstone everywhere. So so the trophic cascades
- 1:36:53Speaker 1: and in Yellowstone released the World of nine already five
- 1:36:56Speaker 1: years later, some scientists went in there and they measured
- 1:36:59Speaker 1: aspen growth in the northern range, and they concluded that
- 1:37:02Speaker 1: aspen growth was responding. And since the wolves really had
- 1:37:07Speaker 1: an impact of the number of elk yet that they
- 1:37:10Speaker 1: surmised or they theorized that wolves were just chasing elk
- 1:37:14Speaker 1: out of areas where wolf were wolves were chasing elk
- 1:37:18Speaker 1: where the elk would camp out and feed in riparian
- 1:37:20Speaker 1: areas in places. So this scaring elk around by the
- 1:37:24Speaker 1: wolves was distributing the grazing pressure and causing uh A
- 1:37:29Speaker 1: response in the aspen. And that that just kind of
- 1:37:33Speaker 1: speculative paper um was just like the trophy hunting thing.
- 1:37:36Speaker 1: It lit a fuse on on the um popular media
- 1:37:40Speaker 1: and everybody started talking about how the wolf was the
- 1:37:43Speaker 1: savior of the environment. All we did was add wolves.
- 1:37:46Speaker 1: And now we have vegetation responding. We have butterflies coming back,
- 1:37:50Speaker 1: we have bees coming back, we have songbirds, we have
- 1:37:52Speaker 1: beavers coming back to Yellowstone, we have vegetation responding. And
- 1:37:56Speaker 1: and created this narrative based on just a little it
- 1:38:00Speaker 1: of measurement of of aspen in some riperion areas, and
- 1:38:03Speaker 1: the popular media went crazy. They captured the imagination. They
- 1:38:07Speaker 1: love that story. Can you imagine now not only do
- 1:38:10Speaker 1: we do we just want to put wolves back on
- 1:38:13Speaker 1: the landscape, but now we have to put wolves on
- 1:38:15Speaker 1: the landscape to renovate all of this degraded ecosystems. And
- 1:38:19Speaker 1: it's all we need is to add wolves. So can
- 1:38:20Speaker 1: you imagine if they had opened up UM hunting and
- 1:38:24Speaker 1: Yellowstone would have done and they saw corresponding growth and
- 1:38:29Speaker 1: aspens in the news cycle of do you think the
- 1:38:31Speaker 1: news would be champion of cascade? Right, anything can can
- 1:38:39Speaker 1: can precipitate a trophic cascade like that, and so so
- 1:38:43Speaker 1: this firestorm of popular media and then a YouTube video
- 1:38:46Speaker 1: just about everybody has seen. It's got forty million views.
- 1:38:50Speaker 1: That's some British producer um with kind of a David
- 1:38:53Speaker 1: Attenborough kind of that's all it takes, man, You put it,
- 1:38:56Speaker 1: you put it, You put an old brit like, you know,
- 1:38:59Speaker 1: because where they kind of like guy rid of nature
- 1:39:01Speaker 1: to one of those guys at the helm of a
- 1:39:03Speaker 1: nature video and people are like, and that's what happened.
- 1:39:06Speaker 1: He starts out the video saying in the deer and
- 1:39:08Speaker 1: they show these elk running, he says, and the deer
- 1:39:10Speaker 1: gets scared out of And so it's full of errors.
- 1:39:13Speaker 1: But it's got forty million views. And you talk to
- 1:39:15Speaker 1: anyone on the street. Thousand people sent me that video.
- 1:39:17Speaker 1: Oh I bet, I bet, and anybody on the street
- 1:39:20Speaker 1: will when you ask him about Yellowstone and wolves say
- 1:39:22Speaker 1: oh that In the title of the the video was
- 1:39:25Speaker 1: when wolves changed rivers, and it was about them having
- 1:39:28Speaker 1: such a strong ecological effect in the Yellowstone ecosystem that
- 1:39:32Speaker 1: river courses were changing and vegetation was coming back. The
- 1:39:35Speaker 1: problem with that whole story is that it's not just wolves.
- 1:39:40Speaker 1: They released the wolves in shortly after that, they had
- 1:39:44Speaker 1: a hundred year drought, the worst drought in a hundred years.
- 1:39:47Speaker 1: They had a couple of years in that next decade
- 1:39:49Speaker 1: with with heavy snows at that time that that knocked
- 1:39:52Speaker 1: elk recruitment back. Grizzly bear populations increased so much that
- 1:39:56Speaker 1: they documented three times the elk the calf elk predation
- 1:40:00Speaker 1: by grizzly bears than than before we had wolves. There
- 1:40:03Speaker 1: was hydrological changes in Yellowstone. We had the fires in
- 1:40:08Speaker 1: huge changes. Their moose populations were dropping, Cougar population for
- 1:40:11Speaker 1: coming up all the beaver reintroductions right see you here
- 1:40:15Speaker 1: very nearby, Yes, in the Galton. Yeah, so you hear that.
- 1:40:19Speaker 1: The bee they made that whole upper Madison and Gallant
- 1:40:23Speaker 1: and beaver recovery areas. So the wolves didn't bring the
- 1:40:27Speaker 1: beavers back biologistic and crates um and released them and
- 1:40:30Speaker 1: the beaver's coming coming upstream and damning is part of
- 1:40:33Speaker 1: the hydrological changes um in that in that ecosystem, that
- 1:40:37Speaker 1: that was really caused by the beavers. But the beavers
- 1:40:39Speaker 1: don't have a paparazzi following them and and champion everything
- 1:40:42Speaker 1: that they do, and so the beavers didn't get any
- 1:40:43Speaker 1: credit for that's right. That's so funny though, because you're like, well, yeah,
- 1:40:51Speaker 1: just add wolves, just add wolves and read what we're
- 1:40:53Speaker 1: talking about, whether it's a beaver or a wolf, is
- 1:40:56Speaker 1: heavy heavy handed management. And also we were killing cow
- 1:41:01Speaker 1: elk off of the park in the wintertime and hunts
- 1:41:04Speaker 1: as a way to try to trim the herds. That's
- 1:41:06Speaker 1: what we do. We killed females and those uh cow
- 1:41:09Speaker 1: tags were probably held a little longer than we thought
- 1:41:11Speaker 1: as the elk population was going down. So there's a
- 1:41:13Speaker 1: storm of things that caused the elk population to go
- 1:41:17Speaker 1: from nineteen thousand down to less than four thousand, and
- 1:41:20Speaker 1: some people wanted to pin all that on the wolf,
- 1:41:22Speaker 1: and the wolf did all that, and it's just such
- 1:41:24Speaker 1: a simplistic thing that happened. But but a lot of
- 1:41:28Speaker 1: research has come on now. Matt Kaufman, who you had
- 1:41:30Speaker 1: on the show, published a paper in two where he
- 1:41:33Speaker 1: did a more robust, more widespread, more scientific analysis of
- 1:41:38Speaker 1: of aspen in that same area in the Northern Range
- 1:41:40Speaker 1: and and showed that Aspen wasn't recovering actually even despite
- 1:41:45Speaker 1: a sixty in decline in the elk population, So at
- 1:41:48Speaker 1: that point it wasn't just a behavioral thing. We've got
- 1:41:50Speaker 1: six decline in the elk and it's still can't document
- 1:41:54Speaker 1: an aspen recovery. And so it's a really complicated thing
- 1:41:57Speaker 1: with a whole bunch of factors feeding into it. And
- 1:42:01Speaker 1: to sit back and say wolves changed Yellowstone and renovated
- 1:42:05Speaker 1: the whole ecosystem is is a fallacy. But but what
- 1:42:08Speaker 1: do you want? What everybody knows. But when someone wants
- 1:42:10Speaker 1: to come in, and they want to come in and
- 1:42:12Speaker 1: be like, let's have a normal, reasonable conversation about this,
- 1:42:16Speaker 1: you get accused of being like anti wolf. You have
- 1:42:20Speaker 1: a quote one of your things, you wrote, I came here.
- 1:42:22Speaker 1: It was you were someone else who said, we don't
- 1:42:24Speaker 1: have to make the wolf out to be a hero
- 1:42:26Speaker 1: to justify recovery. That why can't we just talk about
- 1:42:30Speaker 1: it in a way that's I'm asking you, Why can't
- 1:42:35Speaker 1: it just be talked about in a matter of fact way,
- 1:42:38Speaker 1: like is this the right thing to do? How do
- 1:42:40Speaker 1: we do it correctly? But not have it be that
- 1:42:42Speaker 1: we need to like spend these wild yachts. It's too polarized.
- 1:42:46Speaker 1: We've got everybody at the poles and nobody in the
- 1:42:47Speaker 1: middle when it comes to wolves, and and I think
- 1:42:49Speaker 1: that evolved because of of wolf recovery in the Northern
- 1:42:52Speaker 1: Rockies and wolves are getting and they crossed two thousand two.
- 1:42:56Speaker 1: I think they they exceeded recovery criteria and weren't the
- 1:43:00Speaker 1: listed by Congress unfortunately until they were five times the
- 1:43:03Speaker 1: original recovery criteria. And do you have these these these
- 1:43:07Speaker 1: groups suing to keep wolves protected on an Endangered Species
- 1:43:10Speaker 1: Act even as that population grows and grows and grows.
- 1:43:13Speaker 1: I think that creates so much pull to one pole
- 1:43:17Speaker 1: that you had an equal and opposite reaction the opposite way,
- 1:43:21Speaker 1: with people pulling equally hard and equally unrealistic things that
- 1:43:25Speaker 1: they were saying on the other side. And and it
- 1:43:28Speaker 1: just got so violent. Everybody is still in their corners
- 1:43:31Speaker 1: instead of meeting in the middle and just talking NEUTRALI
- 1:43:34Speaker 1: about it. The opposite of your trophic cascade person, the
- 1:43:39Speaker 1: equally ridiculous opposite, is your person who is just in
- 1:43:44Speaker 1: love with the idea of surplus killing. Yeah, they love it,
- 1:43:49Speaker 1: they love it, right, it's like the other extreme extreme.
- 1:43:53Speaker 1: It's the it's the MSNBC, Fox News split is trophic, cascade,
- 1:43:59Speaker 1: surplus killing. What is the middle like? If you, I
- 1:44:04Speaker 1: know it's not your business, but what is the middle
- 1:44:06Speaker 1: ground like layout for me? Like not only it has
- 1:44:08Speaker 1: it doesn't need to be your opinion, articulate an opinion
- 1:44:12Speaker 1: that based on all of your exposure to people a
- 1:44:15Speaker 1: different opinions about wolves. Imagine if you will, the most
- 1:44:19Speaker 1: sort of like moderate, kind of level headed, consensus minded
- 1:44:26Speaker 1: sentence about collection of sentences about wolves. There's there's not
- 1:44:31Speaker 1: many people there, but I feel like I'm close and
- 1:44:33Speaker 1: I feel like I'm close to that because the wolves
- 1:44:35Speaker 1: to me are not on a pedestal as some religious
- 1:44:38Speaker 1: deity that's going to save the world. And I certainly
- 1:44:41Speaker 1: don't hate wolves. Wolves are just the largest member of
- 1:44:43Speaker 1: the carnivore family, and and agencies manage foxes, we manage coyotes.
- 1:44:47Speaker 1: We couldn't manage wolves the same way. They're just another
- 1:44:50Speaker 1: native um species. And if we just look at them
- 1:44:53Speaker 1: that way and say, let's bring it back onto the landscape,
- 1:44:56Speaker 1: and when they're causing some unacceptable losses to livestock or
- 1:44:59Speaker 1: an accept the losses to native other native species like
- 1:45:02Speaker 1: el ker deer, then were going to manage them. We
- 1:45:04Speaker 1: bring that population down in that focal area, solve that problem,
- 1:45:08Speaker 1: and in other areas where they're not causing any problems
- 1:45:11Speaker 1: and they're just restored to the landscape for good. Um.
- 1:45:14Speaker 1: I don't know why more people can't look at it
- 1:45:17Speaker 1: that way, but but they don't. It's very appealing and
- 1:45:20Speaker 1: I know, I mean, they're just they're just big dogs.
- 1:45:23Speaker 1: They're just another canaid out there. I don't know why
- 1:45:25Speaker 1: they have to be so special. If you imagine looking
- 1:45:28Speaker 1: into a crystal ball, UM, take the Northern Great Lakes.
- 1:45:35Speaker 1: Will we get um? Will they be delisted to stay? Eventually? Yes?
- 1:45:39Speaker 1: I think pretty soon. I mean I don't I don't
- 1:45:42Speaker 1: know how you can justify leaving him on the list.
- 1:45:43Speaker 1: I do think maybe this year they'll be delisted. Does it?
- 1:45:47Speaker 1: Does it? Um? I know you don't do politics, but
- 1:45:50Speaker 1: I don't know. If you need to answer this, you
- 1:45:52Speaker 1: probably can't answer this. Does will that happen independent whatever
- 1:45:59Speaker 1: happens with the next administration, Like does that have its
- 1:46:02Speaker 1: own life course? Or does there need to be some
- 1:46:04Speaker 1: like very top down pressure on that There isn't a
- 1:46:08Speaker 1: lot of top down um pressure because I think there's
- 1:46:12Speaker 1: safeguards against you know, like directives like that. There's there's
- 1:46:16Speaker 1: influence there. There's no way you can take politics out
- 1:46:18Speaker 1: of endangered species management, and certainly not wolf management. So
- 1:46:21Speaker 1: there's always gonna be some political pressures and political um considerations.
- 1:46:27Speaker 1: That's just part of wildlife management. It's not it's not
- 1:46:29Speaker 1: pure science, for sure. It's it's an application of science
- 1:46:32Speaker 1: and social science to manage wildlife. So I think in
- 1:46:37Speaker 1: the future they'll be delisted. They certainly will be what
- 1:46:40Speaker 1: what we can't do, And I've heard people say this
- 1:46:42Speaker 1: is okay. I agree with delisting the Northern Rockies. I
- 1:46:44Speaker 1: agree with the listing the Great Lakes, but we we
- 1:46:48Speaker 1: need wolves in more places, and so we need to
- 1:46:50Speaker 1: keep them listed in all of the other places until
- 1:46:53Speaker 1: they recovered. That's not what the s A does. If
- 1:46:56Speaker 1: they're not in danger of extinction anymore in too big
- 1:46:59Speaker 1: popular nations, then we don't. We don't just move those
- 1:47:02Speaker 1: polygons around the country until we get wolves everywhere we
- 1:47:05Speaker 1: want wolves. Yeah, I know, I a little bit disagree
- 1:47:07Speaker 1: with you because those ideas weren't around at the time
- 1:47:12Speaker 1: they were delisted. But it makes it um It makes
- 1:47:16Speaker 1: it better and easier to work being there. If you
- 1:47:20Speaker 1: look at grizzly bears, it makes sense to me that
- 1:47:22Speaker 1: we would just we would gradually, as it's acceptable, d
- 1:47:28Speaker 1: list some some idea of population groups rather than saying that,
- 1:47:34Speaker 1: you know, rather than like undoing the whole protection across
- 1:47:37Speaker 1: the entirety of the lower forty eight, we would be like, Okay,
- 1:47:39Speaker 1: this region is cool. That region is cool, but that
- 1:47:42Speaker 1: region is cool. That region is not cool. What you're
- 1:47:44Speaker 1: talking about is those are subpopulations that were all part
- 1:47:47Speaker 1: of the recovery, and so one subpopulation is doing really good,
- 1:47:51Speaker 1: then definitely we want to take that one off off
- 1:47:53Speaker 1: the table. We want to delist that, and we do
- 1:47:55Speaker 1: want to keep those other ones because they're right from
- 1:47:58Speaker 1: the start part of the whole recovery plant. Whereas in
- 1:48:02Speaker 1: in gray Wolves, the whole recovery plan was three populations
- 1:48:06Speaker 1: of a hundred, and then it was increased of three
- 1:48:07Speaker 1: populations of a hundred fifty in the northern Great Lakes
- 1:48:10Speaker 1: area there and and we reached that and exceeded that
- 1:48:13Speaker 1: by five times, and then the western Great Lakes it
- 1:48:16Speaker 1: was um like four hundred. In Minnesota where they're just threatened.
- 1:48:20Speaker 1: And then it was a hundred more in Wisconsin and
- 1:48:23Speaker 1: the up and they exceeded that a long time ago.
- 1:48:27Speaker 1: And so those are too independent recovery processes and they've
- 1:48:32Speaker 1: both been satisfied. There was a grizzly bear example. That
- 1:48:36Speaker 1: one that they're delisting is just part of the overall
- 1:48:40Speaker 1: recovery plan. Um, I'm gonna do another crystal ball one
- 1:48:45Speaker 1: for you. What let's say pick a comfortable number twenty years,
- 1:48:49Speaker 1: twenty five years. What are some states that um might
- 1:48:55Speaker 1: have population of wolves that don't. Now if you just
- 1:48:58Speaker 1: kind of look at the trick question, no, no, the
- 1:49:03Speaker 1: biological aspects and the political aspects. If you'd asked this
- 1:49:07Speaker 1: question twenty years ago, there's been some real surprises. Yeah,
- 1:49:10Speaker 1: right right. Some of the Washington you'd have been like
- 1:49:12Speaker 1: California people like bullshit, right, But here we are so um,
- 1:49:19Speaker 1: you know, is Nebraska right, Like, is Nebraska gonna be
- 1:49:23Speaker 1: like wow? Who the thought? Now Nebraska has a wolf pack?
- 1:49:27Speaker 1: And you'd have to say Utah in Colorado because we've
- 1:49:29Speaker 1: got wolves going into those naturally going into those areas
- 1:49:32Speaker 1: as it is, and I think and Mexican wolf recovery
- 1:49:35Speaker 1: we've since two thousand nine, the Mexican wolf population has
- 1:49:38Speaker 1: been increased in average at twelve percent per year, so
- 1:49:41Speaker 1: that the mixing wolf population is going up and up
- 1:49:44Speaker 1: and increasing towards a recovery goal. And yet I still
- 1:49:48Speaker 1: get emails that say the Mexican wolf is spiraling towards extinction.
- 1:49:52Speaker 1: Press the click the button here to donate to help
- 1:49:54Speaker 1: us save the wolves against the evil state and federal agencies.
- 1:49:58Speaker 1: And I think maybe they have my ground pinned sideways
- 1:50:01Speaker 1: in their office or something and they think it's going wrong.
- 1:50:04Speaker 1: I think they hung it up wrong because the graph
- 1:50:06Speaker 1: is going up and up. So I I do feel
- 1:50:09Speaker 1: that Mexican wolves are gonna be I don't know when
- 1:50:11Speaker 1: recovery will happen, because we're still in the early stages recovery,
- 1:50:14Speaker 1: but that situation is gonna look a lot better. We're
- 1:50:16Speaker 1: gonna have more wolves in in Mexico, and we've got
- 1:50:19Speaker 1: two recovery areas in the US and Mexico because it
- 1:50:21Speaker 1: has been a true binational um process. And then we're
- 1:50:25Speaker 1: gonna have some of the rocky mountain states really gonna
- 1:50:27Speaker 1: expand into those rocky mountain states. And and really I
- 1:50:30Speaker 1: think a lot of this angst and polarity is going
- 1:50:34Speaker 1: to relax once people have wolves around and realize they're
- 1:50:38Speaker 1: not that bad and if we have management ability to
- 1:50:41Speaker 1: take care of problems where they where they happen. I
- 1:50:43Speaker 1: think in cases where wolves have been here a while,
- 1:50:46Speaker 1: like for example, Alaska and Canada, they're not that big
- 1:50:49Speaker 1: a deal because they've had them for a while, and
- 1:50:51Speaker 1: I think all this stuff will will settle down twenty
- 1:50:54Speaker 1: years or so. That's a really funny thing about friends
- 1:50:57Speaker 1: of mine that just really don't like wolves. I got
- 1:51:00Speaker 1: friends as hate wolves and um because what they what
- 1:51:04Speaker 1: they what their belief of what they'll do to the
- 1:51:07Speaker 1: game populations. But the Sun's bitches all want to hunt
- 1:51:09Speaker 1: in Alaska, right, I'm like, yeah, you would like it.
- 1:51:13Speaker 1: Another thing I mentioned David Meach. David Meach has been
- 1:51:16Speaker 1: working on wolves for sixty years, which sounds those are,
- 1:51:20Speaker 1: but he has. He's been working Elsmere Island every year
- 1:51:23Speaker 1: on Archtally Worlds for sixty years, and and he he's
- 1:51:26Speaker 1: very pragmatic about wolves. You would think some of the
- 1:51:28Speaker 1: devoted your entire their entire life to wolves and wolf biology,
- 1:51:33Speaker 1: but he's very pragmatic. He's the one that says um.
- 1:51:36Speaker 1: Wolves are neither st nor sinners, except by those who
- 1:51:40Speaker 1: try to make themselves so they're not. They're just they're
- 1:51:42Speaker 1: just um canaans there. And the public perception I find
- 1:51:47Speaker 1: is so skewed as to what a healthy population is.
- 1:51:51Speaker 1: And people like to have this very unrealistic idea of
- 1:51:58Speaker 1: how animals spread out on a landscape. So if there's
- 1:52:03Speaker 1: a healthy population, it means I see them where I go.
- 1:52:07Speaker 1: And like, we're looking at this big picture of Hell's
- 1:52:10Speaker 1: Canyon that is chock full elk, but there's no elk
- 1:52:13Speaker 1: in the picture, and people are like, something is wrong.
- 1:52:17Speaker 1: And I've been at these public meetings. I had so
- 1:52:20Speaker 1: many really cool wolf encounters in the UH Catcham area
- 1:52:25Speaker 1: Catching Ranger District, and UH go to public meetings and
- 1:52:29Speaker 1: it's like doom and gloom and the wolf population is
- 1:52:32Speaker 1: going down and the hunters are killing them all and
- 1:52:35Speaker 1: the damn Cattle Owners Association is killing them all. Shut up,
- 1:52:40Speaker 1: And it's because people aren't seeing wolves when they're I mean,
- 1:52:44Speaker 1: some of these people were obviously not walking on trails,
- 1:52:46Speaker 1: but they said they were right. Um, but they're not
- 1:52:49Speaker 1: seeing them when they're walking their dogs, and they're not
- 1:52:51Speaker 1: seeing when they're driving their cars and he's seeing long
- 1:52:53Speaker 1: tail weasels. Either, that's not that's not charismatic enough, Paul Jazz,
- 1:53:00Speaker 1: I think they're very charismatic. I was with a lot
- 1:53:02Speaker 1: of non game biologists last night, and uh, they're big
- 1:53:05Speaker 1: fans of the weasel family. Are we gonna be arguing
- 1:53:10Speaker 1: about jaguars and ten years No, I don't think so
- 1:53:14Speaker 1: argue about jaguars. Do you want to restore jaguars? I
- 1:53:18Speaker 1: was involved in one workshop recently um talking about jaguars
- 1:53:22Speaker 1: and jaguars don't want to restore them. I just want
- 1:53:24Speaker 1: them to wander back in and be cool. Well I do,
- 1:53:27Speaker 1: I think everybody. Most everybody does. They don't know that
- 1:53:29Speaker 1: I'm arguing yet that we put them in crates and
- 1:53:31Speaker 1: turn them out. But the one workshop I was at
- 1:53:34Speaker 1: where there's uh three advocacy groups that got together and
- 1:53:38Speaker 1: wrote a big manuscript advocating translocating from Mexico into the
- 1:53:42Speaker 1: muggy on Rim and the Healing Esgtional. This is pondrosa
- 1:53:46Speaker 1: pine um forest and was never um, never habitat where
- 1:53:51Speaker 1: they stayed. The southwest Arizona, New Mexico has always been
- 1:53:54Speaker 1: places where transient animals came up. We haven't documented a
- 1:53:58Speaker 1: female with young jaguar in the US in Arizona and
- 1:54:03Speaker 1: New Mexico anyway for a hundred and twenty years. There
- 1:54:06Speaker 1: hasn't been a female since since nineteen sixty three, and
- 1:54:09Speaker 1: then a bunch of been a bunch of been killed
- 1:54:10Speaker 1: in photographs since then. No females. Yeah, well, what about
- 1:54:13Speaker 1: if you went back into you know, like man right, Yeah,
- 1:54:17Speaker 1: we don't know that. And and there were there were jaguars,
- 1:54:20Speaker 1: and there were some females in some reproduction. But but
- 1:54:22Speaker 1: this was a marginary. If you look at the Native
- 1:54:24Speaker 1: American tribes, they have like no jaguar motif, not part
- 1:54:28Speaker 1: of any of their stories. That tells you. That tells
- 1:54:30Speaker 1: you something about how common it was in the Southwest
- 1:54:34Speaker 1: and interesting and so we we definitely want to um
- 1:54:38Speaker 1: make sure they can come back up and go back
- 1:54:40Speaker 1: to Mexico they want. There was. Alan Rabinowitz is probably
- 1:54:43Speaker 1: the most famous jaguar person. He started Panthera, which is
- 1:54:47Speaker 1: a wild cat group worldwide. He's established jaguar conservation areas
- 1:54:52Speaker 1: and refuges in South American Central America. Devoted his whole
- 1:54:55Speaker 1: life to jaguars and and when he talked about well
- 1:54:59Speaker 1: the fish Wallet's Ofervice was being pressured by some environmental
- 1:55:02Speaker 1: groups to designate critical habitat in Arizona, New Mexico. And
- 1:55:06Speaker 1: when he heard that, he wrote not fed in in
- 1:55:08Speaker 1: New York Times and said, this is ridiculous, is a
- 1:55:11Speaker 1: ridiculous waste of money. That we've got a hundred seventy
- 1:55:14Speaker 1: hundred seventy three thousand jaguars estimated from Sonora down to
- 1:55:19Speaker 1: southern South America, and and some groups are saying this
- 1:55:23Speaker 1: little dry arid land on the northern end of their
- 1:55:26Speaker 1: distribution where they really just kind of moved in and
- 1:55:29Speaker 1: moved out. Historically that is should be designated critical habitat
- 1:55:33Speaker 1: and critical habitat as part of the ESA Endangered Species Act,
- 1:55:36Speaker 1: and and habits had to be designated as critical habitat
- 1:55:39Speaker 1: has to be critical to the conservation of the species.
- 1:55:43Speaker 1: And the Fishing Wildad Service did population viability analyses where
- 1:55:46Speaker 1: they included Arizona, New Mexico, and then they excluded them.
- 1:55:49Speaker 1: And and as you would expect with a hundred and
- 1:55:51Speaker 1: seventy three thousand jaguars elsewhere, that didn't change the probability
- 1:55:54Speaker 1: of extinction um at all. And in Mexico itself has
- 1:55:58Speaker 1: four thousand, eight hundred jaguars estimate, didn't that increased in
- 1:56:01Speaker 1: the last decade. And so there's Arizona patriot man, I
- 1:56:06Speaker 1: want American jaguars. Well, the groups that are asking for
- 1:56:10Speaker 1: translocation up into Ariza into Central Arizona, New Mexico. At
- 1:56:14Speaker 1: that meeting were some people that were involved in the
- 1:56:16Speaker 1: conservation of jaguars in central Mexico where they are, and
- 1:56:20Speaker 1: those people said, you're at you want to transplicate how
- 1:56:23Speaker 1: many that's more than we estimate are in this northernmost
- 1:56:27Speaker 1: population of jaguars. You can't you can't be taking our jaguars.
- 1:56:30Speaker 1: I mean, we're trying to conserve that there so so,
- 1:56:33Speaker 1: and then that got a lot of people looking at
- 1:56:35Speaker 1: the carpet and scratching their heads like, oh, we didn't
- 1:56:38Speaker 1: think of that. We're just gonna go get some jaguars
- 1:56:39Speaker 1: and bring them up here. I didn't, you know, I
- 1:56:41Speaker 1: never knew It's something I should research more or read
- 1:56:45Speaker 1: up on. Mores like how oft and how many? Right?
- 1:56:52Speaker 1: Like how many were? Really? I'd like to know. I'll
- 1:56:54Speaker 1: send you a book, like what is the sort of
- 1:56:55Speaker 1: you know I've seen it? I read a book um
- 1:56:58Speaker 1: not too long ago, and it was it was just
- 1:57:01Speaker 1: an exhaustive catalog of everything that could have possibly have
- 1:57:06Speaker 1: been a reference of grizzly bears in the Southwest. So
- 1:57:09Speaker 1: it's Mexico. It got up into Collar, yet it covered
- 1:57:13Speaker 1: basically Colorado South. It was sort of like it was
- 1:57:16Speaker 1: just a thing efter thing like from back the Spanish
- 1:57:20Speaker 1: you know, early you know, Frontier day ranchers archaeological record,
- 1:57:26Speaker 1: like everything that pointed to where were they? What was
- 1:57:30Speaker 1: it like? I'd like to see that on jaguars if
- 1:57:33Speaker 1: it was if it was in fact that this is
- 1:57:36Speaker 1: always fringe and theyate straight up and this is just
- 1:57:39Speaker 1: like the natural edge of their habitat, and just like
- 1:57:42Speaker 1: you might you know, you know, Mountain Lion might kind
- 1:57:45Speaker 1: of like flirt with the Alaska border now and then,
- 1:57:47Speaker 1: but you'd hardly call Alaska like Mountain Lion country. But
- 1:57:50Speaker 1: now and then one might turn up and they do.
- 1:57:53Speaker 1: If that was the case, then I guess my ask
- 1:57:56Speaker 1: would be that we take the necessary steps to let
- 1:57:59Speaker 1: that contin new happening. Definitely, Yeah, I agree with just
- 1:58:03Speaker 1: not jaguars and crates up into the Ponderous Pine. That
- 1:58:05Speaker 1: seems really weird that that, but from from a from
- 1:58:08Speaker 1: a like from a armchair expert, not not even that
- 1:58:12Speaker 1: an armchair curious person. That strikes me as being a
- 1:58:16Speaker 1: little bit much. That Ellen Robin wits I mentioned when
- 1:58:18Speaker 1: when Fishing Wild Service was trying to designate which they
- 1:58:20Speaker 1: did designate critical habitat in Arizona, New Mexico for the jaguar,
- 1:58:24Speaker 1: like the third third attempt, Ellen rabin Witz did his
- 1:58:27Speaker 1: New York Times uh article or op ed saying that
- 1:58:31Speaker 1: was the most ridiculous thing in the world that you're
- 1:58:33Speaker 1: wasting money talking about critical habitat and and all the
- 1:58:37Speaker 1: effects of critical habitat and Arizona. So here's a guy
- 1:58:39Speaker 1: that devoted his whole life and he's like at bangs
- 1:58:41Speaker 1: with wolves. He's just pragmatic. He said, that's not critical
- 1:58:45Speaker 1: to the conservation of the species. But there's no doubt
- 1:58:47Speaker 1: everybody wants to make sure that um, they're able to
- 1:58:50Speaker 1: still come up and use that habit that come back.
- 1:58:52Speaker 1: Because I've been in in mountain ranges where I know
- 1:58:55Speaker 1: there's a jaguar in that mountain Rangil Mountain Island, and
- 1:58:57Speaker 1: it's pretty cool just to know that my son and
- 1:58:59Speaker 1: I want time carried to have Elena that he shot
- 1:59:02Speaker 1: off a tall mountain in the Coyote Mountains and in
- 1:59:06Speaker 1: the dark through the thick brush, and we had a
- 1:59:08Speaker 1: bloody have Alina on our shoulders. And I knew that
- 1:59:11Speaker 1: the jaguar, the jaguar that we knew about, was in
- 1:59:13Speaker 1: that part of the mountain range at that time. So
- 1:59:16Speaker 1: that has a little element of interest when when you're
- 1:59:18Speaker 1: out there awes lots. The same way when right when
- 1:59:21Speaker 1: we left Sonora this year, you know, the article came
- 1:59:24Speaker 1: out on the camera traps catching down there group. Yeah,
- 1:59:29Speaker 1: well they got them in that you know that King
- 1:59:31Speaker 1: Ranch area down there in South Texas. Yeah there, Well,
- 1:59:35Speaker 1: and it's what's funny there is they're spending all this
- 1:59:38Speaker 1: uh a version of things, is it? What's funny there
- 1:59:42Speaker 1: is there like doing a lot of awes lot recovery work.
- 1:59:45Speaker 1: And then it turns out that's sort of the strongest um.
- 1:59:49Speaker 1: You know, the strongest populations are coming off these large
- 1:59:53Speaker 1: cattle ranches. Yeah, there's two populations. Ones on a National
- 1:59:55Speaker 1: Wilife Refuge and another one is on the Uturi Ranch,
- 1:59:58Speaker 1: and I think the neighboring ranches and that's that's private
- 2:00:01Speaker 1: lands and you've got that the old mandatory who I
- 2:00:03Speaker 1: think passed away recently. I've permitted, have you just committed
- 2:00:07Speaker 1: to us a lot conservation? And very much Yeah, it's
- 2:00:11Speaker 1: very much private lands. You've you've got to be managing
- 2:00:14Speaker 1: on private lands. It's Mike Twis and and there's a
- 2:00:16Speaker 1: graduate student that, um did I know from Arizona that's
- 2:00:19Speaker 1: down there working on osla's right now. But I knowing
- 2:00:22Speaker 1: Mike Twois who's run that program since I did my
- 2:00:24Speaker 1: master's agreed down there. But obviously that that species has
- 2:00:28Speaker 1: a little bit northerly range than than the jaguars. It's
- 2:00:31Speaker 1: kind of well, it's kind of the same in Arizona.
- 2:00:33Speaker 1: It's kind of the same. There's historical records that come
- 2:00:35Speaker 1: up through central Arizona or so, but not not a
- 2:00:39Speaker 1: breeding population in Arizona like there is in Texas. South
- 2:00:42Speaker 1: Texas are breeding if sixty some Austles that they know
- 2:00:45Speaker 1: I'm out there there, But Arizona it's the same thing.
- 2:00:47Speaker 1: It's one here and one there. And we have so
- 2:00:49Speaker 1: many cameras in in those mountain ranges now that we're
- 2:00:52Speaker 1: capturing what's sneaking around in there. I checked, are there
- 2:00:55Speaker 1: any in Arizona right now, Oh jaguars, uh yes, right
- 2:01:01Speaker 1: now as well as of September, and I know there
- 2:01:04Speaker 1: was one around then. It turned up. It's high turned
- 2:01:07Speaker 1: up on social media, got shot shot in Mexico. Back
- 2:01:10Speaker 1: to Mexico and got shot. Yeah, there's there's a different
- 2:01:12Speaker 1: one that. When I was down by Douglas in September,
- 2:01:15Speaker 1: someone told me about one that was down there. I
- 2:01:17Speaker 1: don't know if I can say where. I probably won't
- 2:01:19Speaker 1: say where, but in the US and it got picked
- 2:01:21Speaker 1: up by a trail camera. Houndsmen founded No, a lot
- 2:01:24Speaker 1: of trail cams I had. I had checking out a
- 2:01:26Speaker 1: lion that a hunter killed, because all the mountain lions
- 2:01:29Speaker 1: get checked out at the game at Fish office, and
- 2:01:31Speaker 1: he was he got it out of the Santa Ritos
- 2:01:33Speaker 1: and he said they had a bunch of cameras in
- 2:01:34Speaker 1: the Santa Rita mountains. This was several years ago. And
- 2:01:37Speaker 1: I said, oh, you got a bunch of cameras, said
- 2:01:39Speaker 1: you ever get one of them spotted cats. He goes
- 2:01:41Speaker 1: yeah all the time, that's cool, and like wow, I
- 2:01:44Speaker 1: mean hunters have trail cams out and they're getting jaguars
- 2:01:47Speaker 1: on their trail camp. We've talked about this. There's a
- 2:01:49Speaker 1: book called Candid Creatures, and it's like trail cam images
- 2:01:53Speaker 1: and there's a jaguar standing in the snow. The only
- 2:01:58Speaker 1: images like the only image I think maybe like the
- 2:02:00Speaker 1: only image in existence or something of the jaguars. There's
- 2:02:04Speaker 1: you're talking about the historical record of jaguars. We have
- 2:02:06Speaker 1: that list that the Game Fish Department maintained of jaguar
- 2:02:09Speaker 1: records going all the way back, but a lot of those,
- 2:02:13Speaker 1: even in more recent times are like like some of
- 2:02:15Speaker 1: the jaguar records that some of these groups for using
- 2:02:18Speaker 1: for their modeling was some high school teachers saw black
- 2:02:20Speaker 1: jaguar across the road, and black jaguars the color phase.
- 2:02:24Speaker 1: It's a jungle phase. It's an Amazon thing. You never
- 2:02:27Speaker 1: have black jaguars in Mexico and to the north. Never.
- 2:02:30Speaker 1: So someone says they see a black jaguar, we know
- 2:02:32Speaker 1: right away, well it wasn't a jaguar. I'm not sure
- 2:02:34Speaker 1: what it was. Yeah, it's hard to start. I mean
- 2:02:36Speaker 1: there's a there's a thing of like measuring the validity
- 2:02:38Speaker 1: right right, and so we've got like three classes class one,
- 2:02:41Speaker 1: Class two, Class three. I forgot what the criteria are,
- 2:02:44Speaker 1: but it's to rank them for for veracity, for um,
- 2:02:48Speaker 1: how reliable they are. But some of those, some of
- 2:02:51Speaker 1: those are are just sightings, and some groups will want
- 2:02:54Speaker 1: to include those as reliable and not. So you have
- 2:02:56Speaker 1: to be careful. And that's why a table like that's
- 2:02:59Speaker 1: a important. But there's a book called Borderland Jaguars. You
- 2:03:01Speaker 1: have not seen that one, Okay, I'll send it to you.
- 2:03:04Speaker 1: Carlos Lopos Gonzales and and Dave Brown and and in
- 2:03:07Speaker 1: there they have probably not as complete as our list,
- 2:03:11Speaker 1: but they have an account of the historical records of jaguars.
- 2:03:14Speaker 1: I'd like to see it. I need to get my
- 2:03:15Speaker 1: opinion straight. I know I like them, all right, everybody's
- 2:03:20Speaker 1: I'd like to get pounced and scratched, kind of scratched
- 2:03:22Speaker 1: by one, kind of just to leave a scar. You
- 2:03:25Speaker 1: have to. It's cool to know that there's jaguars out
- 2:03:28Speaker 1: there right across the packs. Man. One nice scratch, rub
- 2:03:34Speaker 1: some dirt in there to get it infected through. Yeah,
- 2:03:39Speaker 1: got your final thoughts questions? Yeah, I dude, I got
- 2:03:41Speaker 1: I got a question for you. I was talking with
- 2:03:43Speaker 1: a buddy of mine, uh this morning on my drive
- 2:03:47Speaker 1: back over here, and and he's I was checking in
- 2:03:50Speaker 1: with him because he's well for a service dude, and
- 2:03:53Speaker 1: he's getting getting grant money and he's getting a lot
- 2:03:56Speaker 1: of in kine cash for habitat work on his place,
- 2:03:59Speaker 1: and this is kind of his retirement job, as he
- 2:04:03Speaker 1: calls it, learning to be a farmer, and he's uh
- 2:04:07Speaker 1: planting a bunch of plant species and and setting his
- 2:04:11Speaker 1: place up for muleteer winning habitat and upland game Big
- 2:04:18Speaker 1: loves loves the pheasants and quail. And he is kind
- 2:04:24Speaker 1: of running me through his list of what he's got
- 2:04:27Speaker 1: coming up and some of his successes and failures. And uh,
- 2:04:32Speaker 1: I said, well, yeah, a lot of work right now,
- 2:04:35Speaker 1: but hopefully you'll figure out how to strike a balance.
- 2:04:38Speaker 1: He's like, yeah, I don't think so. He's like, to
- 2:04:45Speaker 1: be honest with you, I'm not sure any of the
- 2:04:46Speaker 1: ship is supposed to be here. And I mean, he
- 2:04:50Speaker 1: is working with ecologists and he's got a litany of
- 2:04:54Speaker 1: really good contacts from his past life. But that did
- 2:04:59Speaker 1: just make me think of this question, like do you
- 2:05:01Speaker 1: find yourself ever get kind of bogged down in the
- 2:05:06Speaker 1: management of things, Like we've been manipulating landscapes and species
- 2:05:12Speaker 1: for so long do you ever kind of get to
- 2:05:16Speaker 1: these points where you're like, sure, I guess screw it,
- 2:05:20Speaker 1: because it's not we're so far away from what it
- 2:05:22Speaker 1: was or what we think it was. I don't think so.
- 2:05:26Speaker 1: I mean, I don't. I don't think I get get
- 2:05:28Speaker 1: that discouraged. There's there's things like in the wolf Recovery
- 2:05:31Speaker 1: world where I just wish it wasn't a constant stream
- 2:05:34Speaker 1: of litigation and litigation and litigation. Wish we could just
- 2:05:37Speaker 1: get on with the business of conserving um carnivores and
- 2:05:41Speaker 1: managing them as um as species. But but uh, I don't.
- 2:05:45Speaker 1: I think I'm optimistic. I think there's just a lot
- 2:05:48Speaker 1: of really good work going on right now throughout the West,
- 2:05:51Speaker 1: habitat wise and and movement wise and everything that's great.
- 2:05:59Speaker 1: Phil Someoney's addressed the elephant in the room that like,
- 2:06:02Speaker 1: basically Janice has nothing to do with the show anymore.
- 2:06:05Speaker 1: He's moved on to bigger he's he's out of honest
- 2:06:08Speaker 1: once to get us out on assignments content I was
- 2:06:11Speaker 1: assuming I was coming, and he's all busy with we
- 2:06:15Speaker 1: got a lot of we've got a lot of irons
- 2:06:16Speaker 1: in the fire and and he's tending to a couple.
- 2:06:19Speaker 1: Got well, yeah, he's out ice fishing. But you don't
- 2:06:23Speaker 1: have any you don't have your thing with That makes
- 2:06:25Speaker 1: the honest sounds anymore, do you? I was thinking about
- 2:06:27Speaker 1: bringing it to uh to Nashville next week, so you
- 2:06:30Speaker 1: know he won't be there either. No, you got he's
- 2:06:36Speaker 1: changing his damn thing. He's not even like a co host. Know,
- 2:06:41Speaker 1: he's abandoned, he's moved on. He's he's left the nest.
- 2:06:44Speaker 1: He's just busy. Yeah. Yeah, if you weren't cracking the whip,
- 2:06:51Speaker 1: it's not true outdoors, Yeah, too much skin. He's missing
- 2:06:55Speaker 1: some good skiing though, isn't he? I just said him
- 2:06:59Speaker 1: to know what about out that it's puke in the
- 2:07:01Speaker 1: nar man he's in final Like, I went to high
- 2:07:04Speaker 1: school about forty minutes south of there, in college about
- 2:07:06Speaker 1: an hour northwest of there, so familiar with that country.
- 2:07:09Speaker 1: The only uh, all everything skiers say is annoying, But uh,
- 2:07:14Speaker 1: I just hear one good one the other day is
- 2:07:15Speaker 1: someone's talking about the powder and he said, um, that
- 2:07:19Speaker 1: nar isn't gonna shred itself. I love it. I love it.
- 2:07:26Speaker 1: Blower all right, Jeff Helen fingering what what's your favorite
- 2:07:29Speaker 1: of all the pamphlets and books you read? I think
- 2:07:31Speaker 1: you you say that your masterpieces the jack Book, Hunts
- 2:07:35Speaker 1: and Recipes. Yep. And that's even available as a pdf
- 2:07:38Speaker 1: on my website deer nut dot com. Um, just the
- 2:07:42Speaker 1: doughy r nut dot com. Um. I've got a whole
- 2:07:46Speaker 1: bunch of PDFs that are magazine articles that I've written
- 2:07:48Speaker 1: and you can. I've got Deer of the Southwest. I
- 2:07:50Speaker 1: brought you a copy which is Cow's white Tail and
- 2:07:53Speaker 1: Desert Meal Deer in the Southwest Northern Mexico. Um. That's
- 2:07:57Speaker 1: available on the website and um my Instagram Jim Deer
- 2:08:02Speaker 1: and and deer has an E after the end, like
- 2:08:04Speaker 1: John Deere. Fact, it's a little John Deer logo that
- 2:08:06Speaker 1: photoshop to look like a meal there. Do you want
- 2:08:08Speaker 1: wanna come down and do a jack rabbit hunt with you, man? Yeah, definitely, definitely.
- 2:08:13Speaker 1: I'd like to you guarantee me that we'll get tons
- 2:08:15Speaker 1: of them right without trying very hard? Well, no, you
- 2:08:18Speaker 1: you drive around if you want tons, you drive around
- 2:08:20Speaker 1: and shoot him out of the window. And we don't
- 2:08:21Speaker 1: do that. We walk, I mean walk the land, so
- 2:08:24Speaker 1: we don't walk back with tons, but it's a fun hunt.
- 2:08:28Speaker 1: You get bit up by Mike's quite a bit with those.
- 2:08:30Speaker 1: No they're not no mighty, No, they've got they've got
- 2:08:32Speaker 1: a couple of internal parasites like the the butt fly larva,
- 2:08:37Speaker 1: a big thumb size cute. When they get under the skin,
- 2:08:41Speaker 1: it doesn't affect the meat. But we in our junior
- 2:08:44Speaker 1: jack camp that I developed for kids ten years ago,
- 2:08:46Speaker 1: we bring kids together and we we show them how
- 2:08:47Speaker 1: to jack rabbit hunt, show them how to um clean
- 2:08:50Speaker 1: and cook the jack rabbits. We find some of those big,
- 2:08:53Speaker 1: ugly but fly larva under the skin and and we
- 2:08:56Speaker 1: turned a liability into a positive. When we we still
- 2:09:00Speaker 1: did we brought a little scale, no, we started weighing
- 2:09:02Speaker 1: them and we gave out an award for the largest
- 2:09:04Speaker 1: buttfly large that s the kids are going, Do I
- 2:09:07Speaker 1: have one? Do I have one? Does mine have one?
- 2:09:08Speaker 1: Can you start on? So when you grab them, see
- 2:09:10Speaker 1: I thought, because you guys are down where it doesn't
- 2:09:12Speaker 1: get cold and winter enough, when you grab him your arms,
- 2:09:15Speaker 1: don't just get them by min now. And we hunt
- 2:09:17Speaker 1: them there open ye around but we hunt them October
- 2:09:19Speaker 1: to March, just a season so we can keep the meat,
- 2:09:23Speaker 1: and there is less ectoparasites on them, yep, as opposed
- 2:09:28Speaker 1: to the endo inside were outside like like the like
- 2:09:31Speaker 1: the insects on the outside. But it's not not bad
- 2:09:33Speaker 1: at all. I mean, you just don't when you grab them,
- 2:09:35Speaker 1: they're nice and clean, and you skin them and you've
- 2:09:38Speaker 1: got some really nice clean meat that cooks up like beeft. Wow,
- 2:09:41Speaker 1: how much did you learn, Phil? Like on one to ten,
- 2:09:45Speaker 1: we're paying attention. It was a solid eight. You guys,
- 2:09:49Speaker 1: You guys ran the gamut. He was so many things
- 2:09:51Speaker 1: were talked about. Yeah, yeah, you're soaking it up. Soaking
- 2:09:54Speaker 1: it up. Mostly I was fantasizing about my Neanderthal mingling
- 2:09:59Speaker 1: in this hypothet nicole situation. I feel had to go back.
- 2:10:01Speaker 1: He went back behind that curtain for a while. That's right.
- 2:10:06Speaker 1: It's imagining like a Romeo and Juliet's situation forbidden love.
- 2:10:10Speaker 1: Phil search history is that sounds like a movie. I
- 2:10:16Speaker 1: know tonight, I'm gonna want it tomorrow. I try to
- 2:10:18Speaker 1: tap into Phil's incognito search that you don't want to,
- 2:10:26Speaker 1: all right, Jim Halflefinger outdoorsman biologists, man in the man
- 2:10:33Speaker 1: in the arena, A man in the arena when it
- 2:10:37Speaker 1: comes to wildlife and wildlife management and UM and a
- 2:10:42Speaker 1: great advocate for hunters and wildlife. Thank you for joining us.
- 2:10:46Speaker 1: Thanks it would great be here. Comp