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RELOADED EP189 - Author Of Hidden War Joins the DU Podcast: 2 of 2 · Ducks Unlimited Podcast

• 0:03
  VO: Welcome to the Ducks Unlimited podcast, Reloaded, where we bring you the best of our past episodes. Whether you're a seasoned waterfowler or curious about conservation, this series is for you. Over the years, we've had incredible guests and discussions about everything from wetland conservation to the latest waterfowl research and hunting strategies. In Reloaded, we're revisiting those conversations to keep the passion alive and the mission strong. So sit back, relax, and enjoy this reload.
• 0:35
  Chris Jennings: Today, I've got lieutenant John Nores junior back on the show for a you know, just to continue this fantastic conversation about his most recent book, Hidden War, how special operations game wardens are reclaiming America's wild lands from the drug cartels. It's a fascinating story. John, on this last episode where we left off, we were talking about the important role that dogs play in your operation. And, you know, our audience is, you know, just crazy about their dogs and and really likes hearing dogs' stories. So, you know, let's get into a little bit more detail about how how cool and, you know, just how fascinating it is to have these dogs with you in the field on these operations.
• 1:11
  John Nores: Man, dogs are they're our lifeblood, they're our partners, they're family members. And, you know, just like all of our Ducks Unlimited listeners and, you know, conservationists out there, we're dog people, you know. I mean, my yellow lab was a companion patrol dog, but she's my personal lab, and I've had labs my whole life, and for everything from waterfowl hunting to companion to hunting other stuff. And I know our listeners are all dog folks, you know, but the dogs we use for missions, especially these type of very aggressive anti cartel missions, are a dog that doesn't only smell and detect and retrieve, which all of our labs do, and we have a lot of detection certified labs in our canine force in the Department of Fish and Wildlife in California, but these are what we call a dual purpose dog. So they're basically like a military dog, like the Navy SEALs or Special Forces or military forces would use overseas, They trained to bite and apprehend when they need to, to stop a threat, to keep a violent suspect from pulling a deadly force weapon on us or other members of the public, and the dogs work their tail ends off and they put themselves out there in dangerous situations fivefold more than we do, to be honest.
• 2:27
  I mean, these are dogs that just love and support their team unconditionally, and they throw themselves out there and they take, you know, our dogs and some of these cartel groves like I talk about in the book and even beyond what's discussed in the book, they're taking huge risks, because these guys don't want to give up, Chris. These are not guys who see a dog coming and decide, Okay, I don't want to get bit, I'm going to just give up. Some of them will bay, some of them will put their hands up because they've heard stories of their colleagues getting apprehended by these amazing dogs. And canine Phoebe, who's mentioned in the book, there's a lot of highlights to her, you know, how we tragically lost her last year, and the poisons and how they affect some of our dogs, and we're learning that we're losing some of our dogs at early ages, likely, possibly, but most likely due to exposure to these poisons in the grow sites, really healthy Belgian melanogs, which we use, and German Shepherds, that are good bite dog apprehension dogs, but they're also good detection dogs. And the cool thing about Phoebe and the cool thing about our other apprehension dual purpose dogs is they work amazing in teams, way back in the backcountry in really hot conditions, and they're the type of dog that I call it the Goldilocks analogy, you know, they don't bite too hard, they don't bite too soft, but they're just right, Just enough to neutralise a suspect that's going to hurt us, not enough to permanently maim or destroy somebody, but then at the same time, they're social.
• 3:59
  And I'm going to use Phoebe as an example. She was as lovable and playful off duty, and my yellow lab, Apollo, that I retired with, that is 11 years old now, I remember when Apollo was a little pup and Phoebe was, a veteran canine at five or six years old, and them hanging out at the house together before we'd all go on a mission the next day, and they're running around like two lab puppies, man, just having fun, getting belly scratches, and Phoebe was that type of lovebug as a dog that would be great around a family. But when we went to work, and when she got in the woods and saw us putting on battle gear and camos and painting faces and locking and loading weapons and getting radio gear ready in the middle of the night, and we're gonna step off, she was all business. I mean, Brian affectionately called her, Brian Boyd, her amazing handler, and my brother called her the Fur Missile affectionately, because when she was onto a target that was gonna give us deadly force, and he had to send that dog on a suspect for a bite. We call her the fur missile, just kind of like a laser guided JDAM off an F-eighteen, fire and forget.
• 5:01
  You let her go, she's going to get that suspect. Very rarely did she miss suspects, but when K9 Champ came along, and you mentioned K9 Champ, and I won't give away the whole development of Champ, and especially on a crazy mission, but Champ is out there absolutely doing great work. He has taken over for Phoebe since Phoebe had retired and then passed away at the 2017, and now Champ's out there being one of two primary dogs just doing fantastic work and getting a whole lot of apprehensions. A lot of people are giving up where they don't have to get bit, which we like. It's just safer for everybody.
• 5:41
  There's not a bunch of trauma medicine implementation we've got to do. And Chris, in lieu of COVID right now, one of the new topics that's come up in some podcasts and something that you're going to see in the second edition of Hidden War, because it's going to address this with additional chapters, is how has COVID and a worldwide pandemic and exposure issues with people that could have this virus affected how we do this enforcement? And it's had a huge impact. Oh, okay. There were so and the cartels, brother, have seen a target of opportunity to kind of run rampant in America right now on this tainted cannabis production and all their other crimes, because they know we're kind of hamstrung with what type of contact we can have with them.
• 6:26
  For the many months at the start of this summer season back this year, when grows were going off the hook and the pandemic was just ramping up, we couldn't go out and do operations. The federal agencies, Forest Service, BLM, same type of thing, and you can imagine the frustration. And then our dogs, you know, possibly get into a bite scenario where, you know, you could have a suspect that's got COVID from a multitude of other countries he's come from, or even within America, and now you've got an exposure issue for the dog and for any officers handling, these environmental criminals. So that's been an issue, but we've pushed through and we're still doing a lot of work. The team is working hard throughout this pandemic, as are the other federal agencies, and trying to hold back the tide.
• 7:12
  But overall, the dogs are just amazing, and whenever we see one attacked, you mentioned booby traps, you mentioned these guys targeting our dogs, right around 2014, 2015, Phoebe's legacy and other federal and state and local dogs around California that had really followed in Phoebe's footsteps as we had worked with other agencies to kind of develop a programme for the unique canine application of doing this type of work specifically, the dogs are getting really effective, and not just with our agency, but with many others. And the cartels started doing counter canine tactics where they would actually take a bite in the arm and not pull a gun and be a pretty good distance away from our entry team as we're moving in to support the dogs, and knowing that they're not going to get shot necessarily, but if they can get that dog close to them and pull out a fixed blade knife off their waistband right next to their pistol but take that knife out, or that sharpened deer bone, like in a picture I have in, Hidden War, one of those, and just stab that dog right in the jugular or in that front vital area, and they can take one canine out permanently, they've just secured and protected hundreds of millions of dollars of black market illegal trade cannabis money into their organisation by taking that dog out, because our dogs are shutting down operations permanently.
• 8:36
  And not only are they taking one grow out, but they're taking, you know, a certain grower that's a journeyman that could be doing it elsewhere if he wasn't caught. So it's really hitting their criminal enterprise kind of hard on the cannabis front, and that's why they started targeting our dogs. A couple of federal dogs were stabbed and killed, unfortunately. It was heartbreaking. All of us and our dogs worked with those dogs, and you have a picture of a federal dog, little canine ice there, just coming out of surgery, and fortunately, by the good graces, he survived, and he's doing amazing work throughout the country now at the federal level, but I remember watching that dog work with Phoebe side by side when we were working with US Forest Service on collateral operation in Water, California during one of the first couple years I met.
• 9:21
  And I mean, you just sit there and grin ear to ear and just feel it inside how amazing it is to see two dogs that have never worked together running side by side and just making the world good, man. Making everything safe, nobody got hurt that day, nobody got, you know, no gunfights, everybody went home, we caught all the bad guys we needed to, because these two dogs just worked miracles, and we just had to go back them up.
• 9:46
  Chris Jennings: Yeah, no, that's definitely a cool angle of hidden war, man. I really enjoyed that, the dogs were working. And, you know, hearing their stories, just, you know, just having you kind of add in even more additional information is always good. Think, you know, especially with our audience, we're we're majority dog people and understand that, you know, canine dogs do some pretty pretty miraculous things, and and I think that's a really cool aspect of it. You know, you kinda hinted at this a little bit earlier, but, you know, as I'm reading this book, and and it didn't it wasn't necessarily defined right off the bat, but as I'm reading it, I'm thinking I'm like, well, man, you know, what's gonna happen when when they legalize marijuana in California, which obviously they have?
• 10:28
  And and you detail that very extensively throughout, and I thought that was a great kind of follow-up with some of the more active kind of tactical chapters where you really detail, you know, the issue wasn't necessarily getting, you know, these marijuana. Right. You know, the marijuana wasn't the focus. Although it is, you know, kind of a tainted grow, it was really you know, it gave you guys an opportunity on the wildlife side to really take the lead and go in, and you're targeting, you know, literal wildlife violations to shut these things down, you know, environmental protection type violations. So if you can kinda lead into that of how that process went where, you know, it it legalized, but but that that the war didn't change.
• 11:10
  You know, the battle didn't stop.
• 11:12
  John Nores: Yeah. You bet, Chris. That's something that I don't think the public really got. When we when we regulated with Prop 64 in California and we tightened up our medicinal cannabis laws, the big sales pitch to the voters in other states that have regulated are, this will make the black market go away because it's regulated and you can get it easy and, you know, etcetera, etcetera. So there was even some jokes running around that once it got regulated, that MET and all our cannabis enforcement units in California were going to be out of jobs.
• 11:42
  But, you know, that was a wishful thought. It was kind of shortsighted, unfortunately, because just because we regulated in California, there's a lot of minutiae that goes along with that. You know, to be a regulated grower and be doing it legally now, you're going to get inspected by multiple environmental agencies, you're going to pay fees, obviously you're going to pay taxes on a product that previously was made for the black market, so it was a cash product only, there were no taxation on it. You're going to be under basically agency oversight if you're a legitimate grower, either indoor, medicinal, or outdoor. And all of those things keep a certain price standard for the cannabis that's grown in California and other states that have regulated Colorado, where I'm up in my new home state of Montana, and some Eastern states, you know, not too far from where you're at now.
• 12:30
  And unfortunately, exactly the opposite happened. The cartels now realise, and I'll take them as the, you know, kind of the black market kingpin, if you will, because they have the market cornered and I think they impact the public and the environment the most in a negative way, the cartels realise that, hey, wait a minute, now that they've regulated in California, all of these enforcement agencies are going to focus their attention on the legitimate growers that are registered and regulated to make sure they're complying with those regulations. And those cartel groups are right, because a majority of our enforcement now in California are cannabis enforcement teams that are watershed oriented, that are private land specific grows. They're not necessarily targeting the drug trafficking organisation, cartel grows, on wide open expanses of public land, but you have our MET Marijuana Enforcement Team, the tactical unit, that does that, but we're only one team out of 100 game wardens in California handling cannabis now, because they're unregulated. Because of the new black market that is thriving, it hasn't slowed down.
• 13:33
  The black market has actually increased, unfortunately, because people still want to get inexpensive, very potent, high THC percentage content cannabis products and not go through the red tape of spending the money they're going to spend in a dispensary or getting a medical recommendation. Or in many states, because we only have, I think and correct me if I'm wrong, because it keeps changing every election year, especially just now a couple weeks ago but I think we're in about 13 states that regulate to some level, but the rest of the country, there's no legality. It's still a scheduled drug through the DEA at the federal level, so 40 plus million Americans are cannabis consumers, and they want to get potent cannabis some way somehow, and they're going to get it from the black market. And so our cartels on the West Coast, and the same ones affecting states out your way, they're just feeding to that black market desire and regulation as it's structured. And I preface that with regulation as we're regulating now through the procedures, it's not working, and I don't see it ever working in the structure it is now, unfortunately.
• 14:36
  Know, being a realist and not looking ten years ahead at what we're going do as a country, regulate or not, and try to break this black market federally, I'm looking at what each state is having to do and what they're up against on a wildlife front. And now that I've retired and I'm speaking to the hidden more content, and was just in your great state of Tennessee last week, speaking at the Tennessee Narcotics Officers Association Conference with hundreds of officers through COVID protocol and COVID testing ahead of time. We had our first face to face that had happened since before COVID, so it was a little surreal. But, man, I gotta tell you, it was great to get in front of 500 officers from five or six Western Eastern states where you're at, centered in the great state of Tennessee, and tell these stories and put up the visuals and talk canines and talk regulation and black market, because those narcotic teams are dealing with the same thing. Those game wardens in your part of the country and the Midwest and other parts of the West, we're all starting to see it popping up in wildlife refuges on little tracks of land, because these cartels know they can get away with it, even a small grow in a small state.
• 15:40
  It doesn't have to be as big and blown up as California. They're going to make something because the black market is thriving as states regulate, and we've to keep fighting it if we want to protect our environment. And more states are reaching out to me and working hand in hand on talking about how we built this Game Warden specific team on the environmental front, and how states with even less resources and less personnel, brother, can fight the fight safely and not go through the growing pains and being ill equipped, undersupported, and get into another gunfight situation where we almost lost a great officer and a great brother of mine. We don't want to see that happen anywhere else in the country. So right now it's about educating and talking about it, that's why Hidden War was written, was to point out to the public a bigger issue than what they normally see when they think of cannabis or anything else, and really point out an issue that's going on embedded within American soil all over the country that we all care about as Americans, regardless of where we sit on cannabis issues.
• 16:40
  We all love our wildlife. We all love public safety, and we can take the politics right out of it and unify the message, especially in conservation groups like Ducks Unlimited and all the other ones I work with, to to put the word out. And you guys, by having me on the show and all the great work you do and all the work I've done with DU up to this point my whole career, thank you so much for helping spread the message and being part of our thin green line to help to help fight this problem.
• 17:11
  VO: Stay tuned to the Ducks Unlimited podcast, sponsored by Purina Pro Plan and Bird Dog Whiskey after these messages.
• 17:27
  Chris Jennings: No matter where you stand politically on the issue, it all comes down to it's still fundamentally a conservation ethic issue, you know, whether it's clean water, you know, poisoning wildlife, not and and you you used a very good example. It's this is not a California issue. I mean, this is Right. It's nationwide. And and and just from my experience, you know, reading Hidden War kinda brought me back, and and I kinda chuckled at the thought of I was probably seven 16, 17 years old, and I grew up in Indiana and running around the bottomlands of the Wabash River.
• 18:01
  And, you know, me and a couple buddies, we were out actually morel mushroom hunting and stumbled into, you know, big blue I can still picture it to this day, you know, big blue tarp. There's a there's a, you know, bunch of propane tanks. There's trash everywhere. And we're like, what is who is camping? And my bud one of my buddies is like, man, these people are not camping.
• 18:21
  This is basically we walked right into a meth lab. And Wow. Fortunately for us, there was no one there. You know, we stumbled into it when either they were gone doing whatever they do. But, you know, you you can stumble into something like that anywhere in America for the things that that we do, and it's unfortunate.
• 18:40
  But, you know, things that we do, we're getting you know, we always stress, especially for Ducks Unlimited from the editorial side, we're talking about, hey. You wanna find a hidden, you know, hidden duck spot. Go further than the next guy. Get you know, take your kayak into this little back creek and try this, and you're trying to get away from the crowds. And what you're doing is you're getting away from the crowds, but people who are doing illegal activity on wild lands are also trying to get away from the crowds.
• 19:03
  And the the opportunity to run into someone like that continually grows, it sounds like, and it's cool that that you're getting the message out. But one thing I wanted to wanted you to kinda do, and that's kinda based off of my personal story of stumbling into a, you know, random Indiana meth lab, is tell people what to do. You know, what if I'm duck hunting Yeah. In Arkansas and I stumble into a grow? You know, what are the steps there?
• 19:30
  And I'm sure it's different in every state, but kind of a general overview, more or less a PSA.
• 19:35
  John Nores: Yeah. It's critical stuff. And first, wanna before I get into that answer, I'm glad you guys made it out of that that fine safely, because meth labs are no joke, and it's just like a cartel cannabis grow or an outdoor meth lab, man. Nine times out of 10, our hunters that find them run across them and no one's in there. It might be before harvest or before the grows even in or after the season and the fall hunts.
• 19:58
  But to your point, we've had many hunters come in and get shot at. We've had them get run off. We've had some, you know, kind of we had a situation in El Dorado County, California a couple years ago where a father and his daughter on her first deer hunt, you know, bringing the next generation in, hunter safety, did the whole thing, got her deer tag at the first date she could get one, and they're getting shot at because they got too close to a cannabis grow in the national forest, and man, heaven forbid, that happened to any of our listeners when they're out there doing, but it could happen that they could find one, and I'm glad you guys made it out safe. And the first thing you want to do is, you see something out of the ordinary, don't continue to go down that trail, don't rummage through any of the stuff you find. I mean, it's really, really tempting when you find an encampment like that and no one's there, especially if you're a hunter and you're kind of savvy in the outdoors like most of us are, you're going to want to know what you're looking at.
• 20:52
  So you're going to want to peel back the layers of the onion a little bit, maybe see what's under that tarp. Meth labs obviously have very dangerous chemicals that if touched, absorbed through the pores, you could be killed instantly. These fentanyl labs, the tainted cannabis grows, have that carbofuran everywhere. It's in the soil, right? It's on the plants, it's in the water, it could be on an unused container, a backpack sprayer, a fertilizer bag, so you don't want touch anything.
• 21:19
  We can't even touch that stuff without nitrile gloves because it could be absorbed through the pores and could be very deadly. Just as soon as you see it, wherever you're at, we're all in the age of cell phones, right, with cameras, take some good pictures, turn on your GPS locator if it's not already on on your phone, if you don't have a handheld GPS, get an exact coordinate of what you're seeing, whether it's a water line going down a canyon, a stash bag of grow supplies that hasn't made it to the grow yet, or, like you walked into, Chris, a full blown meth lab camp, or what these other hunters and anglers, countless of them run into, seeing marijuana plants, seeing water lines, seeing a kitchen and a camp, maybe a hooch, maybe a lean to, camouflage tents, whatever, get that documented, get it photographed, and don't turn around and run out loud, just back out of there like you're going up against a dangerous predator, like seeing a grizzly bear in the woods. Know, creep out slowly, don't turn your back on the threat, and as soon as you have cell coverage, get word out to 911 and talk to your sheriff's department, your local game warden, your BLM ranger, your Forest Service ranger, whatever particular property you're on for a public land element or private land, if you can get a hold of the owner, you're going to want to make that call right away, because the sooner we have a good coordinate and we have a good visual of where we're at, you know, in the early days we were doing sketches and just diving like when I found that grow with my grad student buddy in 2004, we're just diving off a canyon.
• 22:47
  We don't have maps, we didn't have Google Earth yet. Now we can plug in a Google Earth coordinate from the coordinate you give us and the photo you give us before we even meet you face to face to get a statement, we can get that all from your phone in text and emails, and we can do a workup and know exactly what the topography looks like all around that particular site, and already be thinking about a scout plan that'll take us in there safely, what routes we're going to use, how we're going to ascertain it, and how we're going to eliminate the problem. So that's the safest way to do it, and our best cases and our majority of cases like this, come from hunters and anglers that are stumbling on it. Because, I mean, think about it, we're the guys and the gals that are going off the public trails to get into good waterways, to hunt big game. We're going in through marshland to find a real good little coconut peninsula to jump shoot ducks, or to boat them, or whatever type, or flooded rice, or whatever the case may be.
• 23:44
  So we find more of this than anybody, because we're in the areas where they really like to hide in plain sight. So I'm sure your listeners have found some of these before, it's just a matter of connecting all the dots, and I hate to think of anyone getting hurt, I'm really glad you asked that question, because that's one way you could help us eliminate the problem and keep all of us avid waterfowlers and conservationists out there thriving.
• 24:07
  Chris Jennings: Absolutely, and I'm to kind of just move just a little bit of direction away from Hidden War here, if I can keep you for just a couple more minutes, and I want to ask you, and I feel like I'd be remiss if I didn't ask because, you know, our audience especially always enjoys good conservation officer game warden stories. And and I wanted to know, you know, it's all your time, you know, working in California. You know, is there one waterfowl hunting related either, you know, stop or apprehension or search or whatever that really sticks out to you as something that, you know, you kinda opened your eyes like, oh my gosh. What was this person thinking? If you can if if you have one, that's cool.
• 24:45
  If not, I understand. But, you know, what is one waterfowl related situation that you found yourself in through all your years as a as a game hoarder?
• 24:54
  John Nores: Oh, man. I'll tell you, waterfowl cases are the most rewarding because they're some of the toughest to make. You know? You look at the conditions when we're in prime waterfowl season and the hunting's going on, it's wet, it's cold, it's windy, you know, and you're trying to keep equipment dry, and you're trying to make observations. And I'm not talking about the guy making the honest mistake, I'm talking about a legitimate operation that know their poaching.
• 25:17
  And I've had a bunch of them, you know, during the first half of my career, but I remember being in Riverside County my first three years, and my partner wardens in Riverside County, we were all fairly new, but we were all avid waterfowl hunters, and we just loved it. And what people didn't realize about Riverside County is we had all this open public land and private clubs near the Lake Paris area, the San Jacinto River, that same area that I would, you know, catch gangbangers spotlighting on the San Jacinto River in dry parts of the year, that was flooded and great for migrating, you know, Canada geese and other species of geese and every species of waterfowl you can imagine. And I remember a couple of cases that were kind of related is I was getting an inordinate amount of jump shooters hiding out on the San Jacinto River and putting out bait. You know, they were salting the edges of the river, they were using skyscraping loads like buckshot and leadshot, which is a double whammy in the world of waterfowl because non toxic shots have been around for so many years. And I'd find the occasional over limit, well, actually quite often I'd get that, I'd get out of area hunters just being greedy, and they were more in the poacher category than ethical conservationists, and made a bunch of those cases, and those were just really fun ones to make because we'd sit there and observe through spotting scopes at really long range and just nasty weather, you know, counts and where things were dropping and where guys were not recovering birds to, you know, stay within the possession limit from their particular hunting spot and not recover those birds if a game warden ever tried to contact them, you know, but there were three or four, maybe many more birds out there that had sailed and just dropped, you know, one check over on the other side of the river that put them way over the limit.
• 27:06
  But one real deliberate case that I remember was working on a private property piece, kind of a mini waterfowl club, if you will, down there in the Riverside County area, and it was a group of owners that were pretty geared toward having successful hunts all the time for their friends, for their clients, for any business partners they had, and they had pretty much salted several ponds with bait, I mean massive amounts of bait, and had been going on for a long, long time, many years before we were really turned on to it. And I remember it took the better part of a whole waterfowl season to really make the case, because they were really careful in putting out bait, which in and of itself is a violation, but we were moving toward trying to really catch some suspects, and they weren't hunting it that often. It was very infrequent. So when we did finally put this whole thing together and kind of rope in all the players, it had a couple of months of operations, pretty much the whole waterfowl season down there in the early nineties, and we made a really big baiting case that was just pulling so many birds inordinately in this one spot, which that's why we don't allow baiting, right, just the biodiversity of spreading that flyaway out.
• 28:19
  And the other thing was that was actually my first baiting case I made. It was waterfowl oriented. And when I moved up back to Silicon Valley in my traditional days before getting in the special operations nature of the cannabis cartel stuff, we were getting into deer baiting cases and turkey baiting cases and putting a whole lot of really, I call it arduous, setup and surveillance and watching people for weeks and weeks, sometimes months at a time, to make a case that just doesn't normally get made. And it became, I think, the most exciting case to make because it targeted individuals that were deliberate poachers, they were taking way too many animals, and most importantly, like with our deer herds, they were sucking in these massive bucks and bringing in those good genetics from areas way out of a particular perimeter for black tailed deer, and just, you know, reckon the genetic component of purity for many areas well outside of this one section where this baiting operation would go on. But it all started with my waterfowl days.
• 29:19
  I had never even experienced a baiting case, had learned about it in the academy, you know, mentors like Mike Carrion, who was later our chief, and taught us waterfowl ID and waterfowl investigations portions in the academy. I was putting that to use right out of the academy in my early days, and they were some of the most challenging cases. So, you know, talk about jumping out of the pan into the fire, but it was great, because never imagine, Chris, that we'd have such a waterfowl component down in Southern California, just a stone's throw East of Hollywood and Disneyland, but it's full of good wildlife, especially waterfowl, and that's where it started, and it was that baiting case that kind of set the tone of how we were going to work the career and what I was going to focus on.
• 30:03
  Chris Jennings: Awesome, man, that's cool, and I'm glad you got to share that story, along with everything else about hitting war and about, you know, this is an issue, like we said, it's nationwide, and it's something that hunters, you know, even duck hunters need to be starting to pay attention to, And and really look into some of these issues that, you know, even with some maybe with your local law enforcement, maybe ask a couple questions and make sure that, you know, everything is on the up and up. And and if you have any issues, certainly reach out to them. John, this has been fantastic. I appreciate you joining me, and, you know, I I really do really do appreciate you doing it, and I hope that our audience will look look for hidden war by lieutenant John Norris junior, retired from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. John, thanks a lot.
• 30:45
  John Nores: Yeah, Chris. Thanks so much for having me. And one thing I will point out for your listeners, I speak to this all over the country, and if anyone has a question, if anyone has a game warden question, so many people are asking me from all over the country how to be a game warden, what the hiring process was like. I speak to this issue. I speak to conservation to even, you know, non law enforcement groups if anyone has a need for that, and I'm always open to any questions either through my website, which is just johnnorris.com, johnnores.com.
• 31:15
  That'll link you to my email, which is trailblazer413yahoo dot com, to email me with any questions. You can find me on Instagram. Like all of us now, we've got to be on social media to get this message out. So actually, my Instagram account gets more up to date than even my website does, and Instagram's just John Norris on Instagram, j o h n n o r e s, one word. And certainly, if anybody Hidden War is available through Amazon, both the hardcover that you've got, Chris, the Audible version, and the Kindle version.
• 31:47
  And the Audible version is pretty cool because I was able to read for it with a studio producer not too far from you in Georgia last year, and he scored it musically, put in a bunch of effects with the canines, so the Audible, for people that are are listening as opposed to having time to read books right now in this crazy pandemic, is an option. But I'm certainly there for questions to input, and anyone that wants to talk about the issue or or hear more about it, reach out anytime, and just thanks for all you all of you guys are doing to be part of the Thin Green Line and protect our wildlife in America.
• 32:17
  Chris Jennings: I'd like to thank our guest, lieutenant John Nores jr, for coming on the DU podcast and talking about a really critical war on wildlife and the environment highlighted in his new book, Hidden War. Recommend everyone go out there and give it a read. It's a great one. I'd like to thank our producer, Clay Baird, for putting the podcast together and getting it out to you, and I'd like to thank you, the listener, for joining us and also supporting Wetlands Conservation.
• 32:40
  VO: Thank you for listening to the DU podcast sponsored by Purina Pro Plan, the official performance dog food of Ducks Unlimited. Purina Pro Plan, always advancing. Also proudly sponsored by Bird Dog Whiskey and Cocktails. Whether you're winding down with your best friend or celebrating with your favorite crew, Bird Dog brings award winning flavor to every moment. Enjoy responsibly.
• 33:03
  Be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to the show and visit ducks.org/dupodcast. Opinions expressed by guests do not necessarily reflect those of Ducks Unlimited. Until next time, stay tuned to the Ducks.