On this episode of Sleep and Relax ASMR, we have special guest Donnie Vincent on the show. Donnie is a professional wilderness survivalist, guide, guide and guide. He has been in the wilderness for over 20 years and has been involved in many different kinds of outdoor adventures. In this episode, we talk about how he got started in the outdoors and how he's come to realize how important it is to slow down and appreciate the little things in life. We talk about the importance of slowing down and taking a moment to appreciate the small things in your life and how it can make all the difference in the world. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE on Apple Podcasts and leave us a rating and a review! It helps us to keep bringing you quality, high quality and diverse shows to your ears. Peace & Love, EJ & Rory -Evan & Donny Vigue Music by Ian Dorsch Enjoy & Retweet this episode and spread the word to your friends about this amazing podcast! -Rory & EJ Thank you EJ and Elyssa for making this podcast possible! Love Ghost of a Podcast? -HAPPY THANKSGIVING! EJ is a great podcast and we hope you enjoy it! See you next week! -Elliott and Rory - EJ - Thank you for listening to this podcast. -P.S. ~Rory and Rory - E. & Rory - Love & Rory xx Love & Blessings, E. xOXO -A. & E. -Alyssa - - ~ - R. & R. - P.A. - . -Bobby - B. & B. - A. & C. - M. - B. and R. & S. - S. & A. - J. & JB. - C. & D. -J. - G. & K. -S. & M. Thanks for listening -M. & P. & L. - RYAN - SONGS: -SORRY! -ROBY -JOSH & J.& J. -R. & G. -B. & T. & F. -C. -E. - D. & V.
00:00:34.000Just to meditate and just to sit there in a quiet...
00:00:36.000You know when you're a little kid and you go in a swimming pool or something and you put your ears just under the water and you get that kind of...
00:00:42.000When everything's just peaceful and you can just sit there and you can't hear your mother or you can't hear your girlfriend or whatever and it's just quiet.
00:02:20.000And my mind has been doing this for years where early on when I would go in the Arctic or early on when I'd go into the mountains or something like that, everything was frantic.
00:02:30.000Like, I had to do things really quickly.
00:02:34.000Everything, packing, moving, everything was so frantic.
00:02:37.000And then when I started realizing that if I would just stop and slow down and look at the very tiniest details around me, no matter where I was or who I was with, then I started having a great appreciation of my presence.
00:02:50.000And so I'm sure something like that is just because of the darkness and because of the floating, it's just hyper-extended into that presence of You can trick yourself into thinking that nothing else is going on in your life.
00:03:05.000I think that we take this attitude that we have in the city when you're dealing with traffic and massive amounts of people, and you sort of have that same momentum when you go into the mountains.
00:03:15.000And if you do do that, you're not going to appreciate it the same way.
00:03:28.000And I'd try to, as horrible as this sentence is to say, I'd try to kill as fast as I could so I could get out of there and go to site B and site C. And then I started realizing, I actually had a friend of mine, he's like, man, I think you're...
00:03:42.000I think this is going to catch up with you and the experience is going to start to degrade for you.
00:03:46.000But it was almost like I was trying to accomplish really fast goals.
00:03:50.000And when I started slowing that down and saying, hey, I don't want to go to the Arctic for seven days and try to knock all these things off my list in seven days.
00:03:58.000I want to go to the Arctic for 30 days.
00:04:05.000Now I just want to sit still and be quiet and not chase the Arctic down, but I want it to come to me.
00:04:12.000Well, I think people who don't have any experience in the outdoors and certainly people who don't hunt, Don't understand it.
00:04:20.000And their version of it, they're getting either from movies, where hunters are always portrayed as villains, or they're getting it from these outdoor TV shows, which I don't think do a good job of representing what it actually is.
00:04:32.000Even the really good ones, like Ranella's show, which I think is the best show out there.
00:05:04.000Close-ups on leaves floating down a river, and you get a real sense of it, which is missing.
00:05:11.000You're still getting a blink of multiple weeks in the wilderness, but at least you get a feel like, oh, this is something very different than what's being portrayed.
00:06:22.000And this piece right here was specifically done for Nat Geo because they have the National Geographic Society, which is the magazine, and then they have National Geographic, which is the TV show.
00:07:19.000So they wanted me to do a no bullshit sermon, if you will, download, looking down the barrel of the camera and just said, this isn't going to go public.
00:07:34.000We try to explain it so that we can bring it to our producers and say, this is why he hunts.
00:07:39.000And so I did this, had my little temper tantrum there, and in doing it, realized it made me really question, you know, I'd say, okay, so you want to know why I hunt?
00:07:51.000And then it made me take a step back and say...
00:07:55.000Man, for the love of God, I really don't even know.
00:07:57.000I don't know why I hunt, but I can explain some of the areas.
00:08:22.000I can tell you that I love seeing antlers of all sizes and the hides, and I can tell you I love watching grizzly bears eat blueberries and watching salmon come up a river to spawn.
00:08:31.000I can tell you all of these things, but I don't know if all of those things make me a hunter or if I'm just experiencing all those things because I am a hunter.
00:08:39.000It's just very difficult to articulate.
00:08:42.000It's very difficult to articulate how much you love something, yet you're willing to engage it in such A heavy way, such a violent way that you're willing to step in, kill it, cut it up, get your hands bloody, because really that's what it is.
00:08:58.000We love it so much that we're willing to expose ourselves to the elements, put ourselves in these places, let the arrow or the bullet go.
00:09:08.000Watch an animal die, which is never an interesting thing to watch.
00:09:12.000I say interesting, but it's just not a pleasurable thing to watch.
00:09:15.000But this is how we engage as hunters into these environments.
00:09:18.000And so I was trying to convey that to Nat Geo in a seven-minute piece.
00:09:24.000And Kyle, after he put it together, he's like, I think we should release this.
00:10:04.000I mean, if we are really the stewards of nature, if we're really the top of the food chain, and we most certainly are, and we're conscious, and we have a conscience, we absolutely should be ethical in our treatment of animals and take care of them and be kind to them.
00:10:19.000The problem with PETA is that's not really what they're about.
00:10:23.000They're the animal liberation organization.
00:10:32.000This sounds radical, but it's absolutely true.
00:10:35.000In fact, PETA euthanizes thousands of pets a year.
00:10:39.000They kill pets, and they kill them quickly.
00:10:41.000They don't keep them alive very long, and the idea being is that For the critics, the idea that's been bandied about is they don't want these animals to live and breed and stay pets.
00:11:50.000That freaks me the fuck out, that we can take these alien creatures that are essentially as smart as us, probably, and put them in swimming pools and justify it.
00:12:00.000And that the only time they've ever killed people in recorded history has been in those swimming pools.
00:13:01.000I'd been bear hunting on the coast, and we were in a boat cruising back to the harbor...
00:13:06.000And we found two pods of killer whales, three big bulls, and a bunch of cows that were hunting.
00:13:11.000And we kept, as they would come up, they were chasing salmon, and as they would come up, we would just get closer just to film them, or even just to see them.
00:13:21.000So I don't know if it was just happenstance of where we were, but we came up and we were just kind of waiting for the whole pod to come up.
00:13:29.000And all of a sudden, just 50 feet from the boat, here comes the huge dorsal fin of this bull, comes right at our boat, Bumps into our boat.
00:13:38.000I'm standing in the crow's nest, essentially.
00:13:41.000I'm on the roof of the boat looking at this thing.
00:13:43.000He comes up, bumps into our boat, and he just glides his left side all along the boat.
00:13:49.000So his left pectoral fin is probably under...
00:13:53.000Our gunwale, if you will, or under our hull.
00:13:55.000And so he's just dragging his fin and he rotates on his side, dragging his dorsal fin along our side, exhales, covering our director of photography, William's face in his spray.
00:14:08.000And as he's doing this, he goes, he hugs the bow of our boat and he never, ever breaks eye contact with me.
00:14:15.000He's staring at me out of his left eye, literally rolling his eye over and he just cruises all the way around the boat.
00:14:30.000I didn't want to be the first guy to die.
00:14:32.000And I also didn't want to have some sort of shallow water blackout because the water was so cold.
00:14:37.000So I didn't want to dive in and have all of a sudden...
00:14:39.000I didn't know how my body would react because I hadn't been in the water yet.
00:14:43.000And then also I was like, I'd watched Blackfish or whatever that film is where they killed a bunch of folks in SeaWorld and in BC. And so I was just like, well, what if there's got to be a first?
00:16:34.000I get furious that this is a giant business, that they take these things and they buy them from other organizations.
00:16:42.000And I've had real problems with it for a long time.
00:16:47.000And my friend Phil Demers, he was a trainer at Marine Land.
00:16:52.000And he's been on the podcast many, many times.
00:16:54.000And he's involved in these constant lawsuits with Marine Land.
00:16:58.000He was a walrus trainer and he also trained killer whales and, you know, he's given us some real insight into the horrors of what it's like in marine land and even in SeaWorld and what they're doing and how they get these orcas and how they're treated and how bad it is for them to be trapped in these environments and how their dorsal fins go limp because they never have to deal with current,
00:18:18.000I get as many letters from non-hunters and from people that think that they're against hunting or have maybe damning questions than I do from hunters themselves.
00:18:34.000You know, you're a badass or you really inspire me or, you know, I'm really happy that I can have my kids watch your films.
00:18:42.000Like, I don't let them watch hunting TV, but when we sit down and they want to see something, they want to ingest something that has hunting in it, you know, we'll watch your films.
00:19:12.000You know, I mean, I don't know what it is.
00:19:13.000It might be a little bit higher than that, but it's no more than 5%.
00:19:16.000And there's a lot of people that are just on the fence, and they're just sitting there going, well, I eat it, but I don't kill it myself, but I somehow know they're angry that someone's doing it themselves.
00:19:28.000Before I ever thought about hunting, my thoughts about hunters were that they were cruel people that liked to kill animals.
00:19:40.000This is the very shallow thinking that I had, you know, decades ago.
00:19:45.000Then, you know, as I started getting older and really considering what I do with my body and what kind of food I put in, and then the internet was a big one.
00:19:55.000Because the internet came along and I started watching those videos, a lot of them that PETA puts up, of factory farming.
00:20:06.000This is like human beings at their very worst.
00:20:11.000That we've treated these things as the most...
00:20:18.000I mean, not just as a commodity, but we've ignored their feelings and their thoughts and the fact that they have instincts and needs, and that we've stuffed them into these tiny little cages.
00:20:31.000Then you see the cruel, inhumane treatment that some of the people that work there...
00:20:35.000You know, and people that work in farms will tell you, look, this is very rare, and these are isolated instances, and this is terrible.
00:20:41.000That's well and good, but there's also ag-gag laws that prevent people from filming.
00:20:47.000Agricultural gag laws that prevent people from filming on these factory farms because they don't want people to know how horrific those conditions are.
00:20:58.000Maybe it's a small percentage of the farms that do treat their animals like that.
00:21:01.000But it's significant enough that they're worried about the impact on the economy to the point where they're passing laws that keep people from filming and showing people what it's like in these places.
00:21:11.000You can even just show people without any abuse.
00:21:37.000But if you have any wherewithal at all, if you have any being, any soul at all, and maybe this is the wrong Idealization or the wrong picture I'm building in my head.
00:21:51.000But if you make yourself the cow just for a second, if you remove yourself just for a freaking second and just say, like, is this how I would want to be treated?
00:22:16.000But if you can remove yourself from your own ego and from your own comfort and try to visualize at all what these other animals are going through, even animals you're hunting, it's going to make you better and more cognizant of being ethical and treating everything with absolute care,
00:22:35.000Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of contradictions there, though, right, with hunting, because, like, if you really care about the animal, why would you kill it, right?
00:22:52.000I mean public lands in particular, it's absolutely wild.
00:22:56.000But it's also very weird because a lot of the funding for that wildlife comes from people that buy hunting tags and hunting equipment in order to kill those animals.
00:23:07.000So the way those animals are sustained and the way the wildlife are protected and the way that the wardens and game rangers are paid A lot of it is through the hunters who want to go out and kill the animals that live on it.
00:23:21.000So a lot of people are like, okay, this is wild, sort of.
00:24:01.000There are other populations that are trending in relative harmony.
00:24:07.000If they have big, huge scales of land and we're not drilling for oil or whatever, where you can go and remove a few animals in a predator and prey scenario and it works just fine for the herd.
00:24:16.000It works just fine for the population and actually, in a very small way, helps the population by removing certain animals for an age class or a sex class, things like that.
00:24:28.000We're preserving the habitat So that we can go in and engage in the wild, right?
00:24:33.000I mean, I think also a lot of people, they think you buy your gun, you buy your bow, you buy your tag, you go to Utah, you leave with an elk.
00:24:41.000Well, that is how it works for like 15% of the people.
00:24:47.000But there's a whole contingent of 80% or 90% of people that buy their bow, buy their gun, buy their pickup truck, get their hotel room, get their tent, hike 20 miles into the wilderness, Strike out.
00:24:59.000Listen to a lot of quiet, look around, hike out, get back in their truck, drive home, send me an email saying, where is it that you find elk around September 15th in Utah?
00:25:11.000And so there's, and still those people are engaging and still, you know, and there's all different wise, there's, you know, there's fly fishermen and elk hunters and, and there's people that just want to take photos.
00:25:20.000And so everyone has their different engagement, but that's really what it's about.
00:25:23.000And we have, what, we're trending towards 8 billion people on the face of the earth now?
00:25:28.000So, well, large-scale agriculture and farming and animal agriculture as well has created this environment where people can thrive in these cities where they're not growing any food.
00:25:41.000I mean, California, where we're at right now, is one of the weirdest places on the planet Earth.
00:27:07.000All that shit is something someone's put there, and when they're using pesticides, they're killing things, and when they're using those combines, they are grinding up bunnies and fucking rats and mice and killing countless bugs.
00:27:18.000So the idea that you're getting away without killing any sentient life, it's bullshit.
00:27:22.000And even look at, so the corridor of the Mississippi River, right, used to be solid wetlands, and our wetlands is how we recycle water.
00:27:29.000It's how we, that stinky biomass that you smell, that's clean water being made.
00:27:35.000That's detritus material being processed.
00:27:38.000Mississippi River used to be completely lined with these wetlands.
00:27:43.000Farmers have one in, and obviously it's not the farmer's fault.
00:27:47.000This is just as soon as we started agriculture, 13, 14, 15,000 years ago.
00:28:06.000But the second we figured out how to grow corn and rice and stay in one place and raise more than one child, and now we're close to our excrement, literally the stopwatch to something that is going to be a fantastic event.
00:29:31.000So we pump in the nitrogen, we pump in the phosphorus, the rains come.
00:29:34.000Well, explain that too, because a lot of people don't understand that when you use, when you grow vegetables on a plot of land over and over and over again, you deplete the soil of all the minerals.
00:30:02.000You don't have these symbiotic relationships that are working with all these insects and microbes.
00:30:07.000So that create your soil to be a living system.
00:30:12.000We've As we push all that into the plant and we harvest it and we just keep doing that repeatedly, well, there's less and less of this biomass in the soil.
00:30:19.000So we have to then go in and fertilize with nitrogen and phosphorus to give our plants nitrogen fixation, things like this, to grow these plants.
00:30:32.000So we lose some of our top soils, which brings us down to even more other different levels of soils that need even more chemicals brought into them so they can actually grow something.
00:30:41.000But all these soils that are heavily laden with nitrogen and phosphorus pour into the Mississippi River.
00:30:58.000All this algae hits this nitrogen and phosphorus.
00:31:01.000It grows it just like it grows a corn stalk.
00:31:03.000The sunlight hits, it has these huge blooms that needs oxygen to function, so it creates these huge hypoxic zones, right?
00:31:12.000You've heard these things called dead zones.
00:31:13.000Fish can't live in them, and so anyone that hangs their hat on being a vegetarian, and I know there's reasons for being a vegetarian.
00:31:22.000I know there's people that refuse to do it.
00:31:25.000They don't want to kill the animal themselves, and they're not going to buy from a factory farm.
00:31:30.000I probably have more in common With vegetarian people that don't want to kill their own animals and aren't willing to eat factory-grown food than I have with some of my hunters, with other hunters,
00:33:11.000Let me ask myself, because I'm going to have to sit down in a quiet float tank and think about myself.
00:33:17.000I should be asking myself some of these big questions, and as should they.
00:33:20.000I just think there's a lot of information that we should keep asking ourselves.
00:33:26.000Because if the population of human beings continues exponentially, which it will, until this major event that everyone thinks is coming, Hunters should almost be the first ones to give up hunting,
00:34:01.000A few years ago, this is a micro instance, but a few years ago, actually a few years ago, I say it's a long time ago, 1991, a huge blizzard hit in Wisconsin on Halloween Day.
00:34:13.000And the Wisconsin Deer Hunters Association Shut down whitetail hunting overnight.
00:34:20.000He said there is no deer hunting this year.
00:34:24.000There's no legal deer hunting this year.
00:34:25.000And then all of these deer hunters were taking their tractors out on these public lands and on their private lands and plowing areas for the deer to walk around and the deer to move around.
00:34:36.000And so there's all sorts of instances about it, but you get what I'm saying.
00:34:40.000I think we have to keep asking ourselves these questions as we move through our time and space.
00:34:46.000And what you said about, you know, what you're essentially saying is that people, and this has always been my problem with people that proselytize or people that are really into proclaiming that they have the moral high ground because they eat only vegetables.
00:35:02.000That high ground is filled with holes.
00:35:04.000You're going to step in one of those holes if you keep talking.
00:35:07.000Because the more angry you get at people that hunt and the more angry you get at people that eat meat, you have to understand that if you're eating vegetables, just by fact that you're buying them from a factory farm, you're buying them from large-scale agriculture, you're absolutely responsible for death.
00:35:23.000And the death of fish, I'm glad you brought that up, because those dead zones in the ocean, that's a gigantic problem.
00:35:29.000It's a gigantic problem, and it's a problem that's caused in large part by large-scale agriculture, as you said.
00:35:36.000I think that one of these problems is going to be solved by factory-created meat.
00:35:42.000The problem is how many other problems are going to be created by that.
00:36:33.000And so billionaires will buy up all this land because they already have all the money to buy the land.
00:36:36.000They'll buy the land, they'll get the farms, and they'll get all the wild places out, and they'll build even more houses because you can eat some beige-colored gruel or laboratory-designed meat, and we can get even more people.
00:36:50.000Well, I don't think they're thinking about it that way.
00:38:11.000And if you want to claim the moral high ground because you're a vegetarian or if you want to claim the moral high ground because you're a hunter I think I think you're missing the big picture that there is all this weirdness to life and that there There is this thing that we do that we consume and that every other animal does as well That's the thing that What always strikes me as being strange is people have a real hard time with people eating predators or people hunting predators.
00:38:41.000Like bear hunting is one of the number one most surefire ways to get people angry at you online.
00:38:50.000And there's a lot of ignorance attached to it, particularly with black bears, which are responsible for literally killing 50% of all the moose calves and all the deer fawns and elk calves.
00:39:01.00050% of them get whacked by black bears.
00:39:03.000They're very successful at calving season.
00:40:00.000A little fat kid threw a cheeseburger out of the window here, and two days ago, a woman with really strong perfume walked on the sidewalk with a poodle.
00:40:07.000So there's so many layers to what they're taking in, and everything has its essentially different strengths because of how long it's been present in that area, that they can almost kind of read a book as they're strolling through their environment.
00:40:22.000How do they know that they can do that?
00:40:23.000I think they're just making summations off of like how powerful their noses are and that they're picking up so much information that they're picking up old information, current information, brand new information.
00:40:34.000And I mean, if you think about that, all of that information coming in their head in an instant, every instant, every time they breathe in.
00:40:42.000So I think scientists are probably making a summation that these bears have to process this information as they're going through because otherwise they'd run scared all day, right?
00:43:00.000So, I mean, it's going up to a chef and be like, oh, yeah, you made me codfish, but you used dill and mayonnaise, and yeah, you're a liar, you know?
00:43:09.000So then that night, we made this big roast, and we seared it on all sides, right, and seasoned it all up, made a nice rub, and put it in this broth with vegetables and everything, and He ate that.
00:43:18.000And of course, he's like, well, I mean, you made a rub and you seared it.
00:43:20.000And I'm like, well, if you suck at cooking, it's not the bear's fault.
00:43:25.000I'm not telling you to eat it raw off his skeleton the moment you're skinning him, but if you take the time to prepare the flesh when you're in the field and then cook it well, it's amazing.
00:44:45.000And he's like, if you kill a bear, he's like, there's tons of bears where I'm dropping you off.
00:44:48.000He's like, tons of grizzlies, tons of black bears, which is uncommon, but...
00:44:52.000He's like, if you kill a black bear, he's like, and you don't want the meat, I'll take it.
00:44:56.000You know, he'd made it very clear before he even dropped us off, and I said, no, we'll keep it, but we'll share with you for sure.
00:45:02.000We'll definitely share some with you, but it's phenomenal.
00:45:04.000Yeah, Rinella was telling me that it's literally the greatest meat on earth.
00:45:09.000Like, when you have a bear that's been eating nothing but blueberries, and he did an episode of Meat Eater once where he shot one, and as he's opening it up, you see purple fat.
00:45:22.000And it made me think about my own diet, quite honestly.
00:45:24.000Because if this thing tastes so good and smells so good because of what it's eating, like, if you're eating, like, fucking cheeseburgers and fries, like, that's gotta be in your fat.
00:46:00.000And yeah, if you have the same perspective or wherewithal that we were talking about a few minutes ago, that's when you sit there and go, wait a minute, you're not just mindlessly skinning this bear.
00:46:09.000You're sitting there going, does my fat look like Skittles?
00:46:12.000Because I pounded a bag of Skittles yesterday.
00:49:06.000But later on, we were talking to the biologist about it when we were having the bear skull and hide and meat sealed.
00:49:13.000And, um, and we told him that he pooped out a calf.
00:49:15.000And he's like, oh, fantastic, because there are grizzly bears and black bears that are really successful fawn and calf killers.
00:49:22.000And then there are others that aren't, right?
00:49:24.000They're kind of individualistic like we are.
00:49:26.000And so he's like, it's really good that you remove this big old boar who was a successful calf killer because he would just fixate on that in the spring.
00:49:33.000And really, It does not take, like a lot of people might think, oh, there's millions of moose.
00:49:38.000And you go up in these areas, like people ask me all the time when we're up in Alaska, they're like, oh, when you get off the airplane, there's got to be just animals everywhere.
00:49:56.000You find them when you go looking for them.
00:49:58.000You find them when you find this little micro niche of habitat.
00:50:02.000But by and large, there's nothing there because there's not a ton of resources there.
00:50:08.000I think people think it's the Serengeti, and it's not.
00:50:12.000So if you have a successful grizzly, And he's preying on moose in a particular valley, he could really do some damage.
00:50:21.000And where I was, and I just hunted mountain lion for the first time in BC this winter, and I was talking to the biologist there because I had great contention about doing it.
00:50:58.000He's like, well, you're always preaching that people should ask themselves big questions and people should kind of dive into, you know, this tornado or this storm and experience things and ask themselves and like actually challenge their thought process.
00:51:10.000So who better to come up and go on a lion hunt?
00:51:13.000And if you have prejudice about it, why don't you come up and do it?
00:51:16.000And so you can see if your prejudice are real or not.
00:51:19.000And so I did it and it was very eye opening.
00:51:33.000I had this fox and a hound scenario built up in my head.
00:51:37.000I felt for the same stereotypes that non-hunters and anti-hunters were falling forward.
00:51:42.000I was like, oh, these houndsmen are kind of redneck.
00:51:45.000You know, they treat their dogs like crap and they're sending their dogs into this lion fight and it's going to get rough and these dogs are going to get beat up and scarred up and then finally you treat this lion and the hunter comes waltzing in with no barrier of entry whatsoever,
00:52:01.000no physical suffering whatsoever, no mental suffering whatsoever comes waltzing in and shoots this thing out of a tree and takes some photos and then skins it out, leaves the flesh and moves on with their life.
00:53:03.000We'd see his tracks in the snow, and there's always a dime-sized spot of blood in his track.
00:53:09.000And it was pretty cool because we went and spoke with some ranchers along this river, and they're like, yeah, he's a sport-killing deer, which I didn't believe, but I just wanted to hear the ranchers' kind of summation on it.
00:53:21.000The ranchers were, I was really surprised, but the ranchers were like, you know, we want you to kill this cat because he's sport killing these deer, but we want Ben to be very measured in how he takes cats because they really love cats in this area, and they just want Ben to be cognizant of the animals he removes,
00:56:31.000And so it was just a really rewarding experience for me.
00:56:34.000And then I got to hang out with the dogs afterwards.
00:56:35.000And then when I went and spoke with a biologist, that was eye-opening as well because the houndsman we were with, he kind of guessed the cat to be like five or six years old, which would be very old.
00:56:56.000And the biologist even told me he had one come in earlier that year that was over 200. It was like 202, 203, which is about as big as they get.
00:57:28.000Sometimes aging deer, aging bears is kind of a tricky prospect.
00:57:32.000You're looking at the molar wear and you're looking at their lateral incisors and their medial incisors and you're looking at wear and everything.
00:57:40.000With the lions, it's very easy to see.
00:57:44.000The age classes have distinct dental changes that happen.
00:58:37.000You drop a deer out of a tree and it's going to have four broken legs.
00:58:40.000These things just land and Yeah, they're freaky animals.
00:58:43.000And so I was going to say, so the sport killing, so the biologist told me with the area where there's a lot of wolves, and so the wolves, the lions are so much more successful at killing than the wolves, that the wolves just become somewhat lazy, and they'll get in these little packs and they'll literally find a big tom and they'll just follow him.
00:59:02.000And so what this cat is doing is scientists have observed him killing deer, and he'll literally kill and cache deer and sheep so that when the wolves find his caches, the wolves will eat, and so then he can go and eat in peace himself.
00:59:17.000Whoa, so he doesn't get fucked with by the wolves.
00:59:53.000And then the biologist also told me, and I was like...
00:59:56.000Man, I had a lot of contention about coming here and hunting lions.
00:59:59.000I don't know how successful they are at repopulating.
01:00:03.000We almost hunted them to extinction at the turn of the century, and they're just starting to expand now back into some of their original territories.
01:01:03.000It's really strange, because they don't have any problem with the predator killing deer, and they have less problem with people killing deer.
01:01:10.000But they have a real problem with people killing predators, and I believe it's the same problem they have with Cecil the Lion and shit like that.
01:01:16.000They think that you're just doing it to be an asshole, and you just want this thing on your wall.
01:01:23.000I do have some contention, and you tell me.
01:01:25.000For instance, the grizzly bear issue being shut down in BC. Grizzly bear hunting.
01:01:32.000Maybe you can explain that for people who don't understand what's going on with that.
01:01:35.000Yeah, so the British Columbia government shut down British Columbia grizzly bear hunting because they equated it, and I guess they're probably correct, with trophy hunting, right?
01:01:46.000Where hunters were killing these animals.
01:01:49.000And just taking the skulls and hides and leaving the flesh behind.
01:01:56.000Have I... I grizzly bear hunted in BC once, but I was actually more on a sheep hunt.
01:02:02.000But yeah, just this notion of like the gentleman that killed Cecil the lion.
01:02:08.000Like if you're really going to kill an animal and just take its hide, then I have a pretty significant issue with that.
01:02:17.000And so I just hope these hunters, the guys that were hunting the grizzly bears, I wonder if this was more of a hunter-instilled issue than people are even bringing light into it.
01:02:30.000Because if people were killing grizzly bears in British Columbia, taking their hides, taking their skulls, and taking all the flesh, I feel like we'd still be grizzly bear hunting in British Columbia.
01:03:11.000You think of some fat, lazy asshole with a rifle that stands on top of a lion.
01:03:17.000There's this image that I found online, and I was looking and I was like, that's why people have a problem with trophy hunting, personified.
01:03:26.000This fat fuck who should never, in a million years without that rifle, have ever...
01:03:53.000So many of those high fence hunts where they let these lions, they have them all caged up in a pen, they throw cows over the dead cows, over the pen, over the wall of the pen, the lions tear them apart, and then they pick one and take that one out into the wilderness area,
01:04:10.000which is all fenced in anyway, and then they let it loose.
01:04:13.000And the lion stays in the area because it has no idea what its boundary is, what its territory is, what other lions are in that area.
01:04:20.000So a lot of times they sit still and they wait for a while before they figure out what their territory is.
01:04:25.000The hunter comes in, shoots it, stands on it, takes a picture.
01:04:30.000If you told me, you said, hey man, I went into Tanzania, I went into the wildest part, and backpacked in, and set up camp, and I was there for 40 days, and I killed an eight planes game,
01:04:46.000and I worked with the locals, and I shared meat with these different tribes, and And man, we found a pride of lions, and there was a giant maned male, and there was another sister pride over here, and we snuck in and we killed him, we hunted him, we killed him,
01:05:02.000we skinned him out, we took his flesh, and we went on an honest hunt, and we engaged the wild here, and we removed an animal.
01:06:31.000It's to preserve these areas because people with greed will kill anything to get a few dollars in the marketplace for market meat and then certainly to sell a hide to maybe even an even more fat hunter that...
01:06:45.000Or a person that calls themselves a hunter that wants a lion on their wall that doesn't even want to engage in the process, right?
01:07:07.000But if you called me and said, hey, we have restored this habitat in this whole river delta, and lo and behold, the giraffes have absolutely taken off, and they're very, very successful, and they're decimating the vegetation here, and they're starting to fight each other with great severity,
01:07:23.000and we're finding dead bulls and stuff.
01:07:25.000We need to remove 10 animals from this herd.
01:07:28.000Will you come down and shoot 10 giraffes with me?
01:09:43.000So we—I was hunting brown bears on Kodiak Island a few years ago, and I didn't kill one.
01:09:50.000But when we got done, there was a guy there, a classically trained chef that lived in town, and he had—him and his buddies had killed a bear.
01:09:58.000And so he invited us over for dinner when we were in town, and he served us brown bear, and it was— Amazing.
01:10:57.000But anyway, and then he pan-seared a bunch of it, and it was like in a roast, if you will, but he did it all in a really hot cast-iron skillet, and it was phenomenal.
01:11:07.000And then I just heard somebody the other day, what was I listening to?
01:11:11.000I was reading something about polar bear hunting, and somebody was remarking that polar bear was really good to eat.
01:11:17.000And so I think there's a lot of misinformation out there about what is edible and what is not edible and what is good and what isn't.
01:11:24.000And probably because of the preparation, because people just have been ignorant about how to prepare and keep the meat.
01:11:30.000Because I have people that think, I have lots of friends that think deer meat's disgusting.
01:11:34.000Soak fish in milk for odor-free cooking.
01:11:47.000Trimethylene oxide is a common chemical in living things.
01:11:50.000It's colorless, odorless, and produced by normal metabolic processes.
01:11:54.000When a fish or shellfish is killed, however, it breaks down into trimethylene, which is the chemical responsible for that fishy smell that we know so well.
01:12:02.000If your cut of fish isn't too far gone, as the flesh is still firm and only a few days thawed at most, a quick soak about 10 to 20 minutes in a bowl of milk will help get rid of that odor.
01:13:51.000And bear hunting all the way around is just awesome.
01:13:53.000Yeah, but again, it's so charged in the public eye in terms of how people perceive it.
01:14:01.000It's one of those animals, and I think it's because of these movies that people grow up with, these movies where these animals are our friends, and they're looking out for us, and they're our buddies.
01:14:13.000We've done ourselves no service by doing that, by creating these films that have poisoned little kids' minds as to what these animals are.
01:14:22.000And what these animals are are opportunists and predators, and they are there to remove the weak and the limping and the babies and anything else he can get his hands on for population control.
01:14:33.000I mean, this is the balance of nature.
01:14:35.000If we still were hunters and gatherers, right, there would not be...
01:14:39.000There was not a single anti-hunter in that group, right?
01:15:30.000If you have enough money, you never have to crack an egg in your entire life.
01:15:33.000And you can eat eggs your entire life.
01:15:35.000So you can back away from who we really are.
01:15:40.000If you have the financial wherewithal or you live in New York City or you live in LA, you can back off of the real muddiness as far as you want.
01:15:48.000But in true reality, this is really who we are.
01:15:51.000It's just that we have infrastructures now that make up for it that make you...
01:16:28.000They were both vegans, a husband and wife couple, and they're both also triathletes.
01:16:35.000And they were doing these races, and they were having a tough time recovering from their races.
01:16:40.000And they actually owned one of the largest vegan food companies in the country.
01:16:45.000And they went to go see a friend who was a medical doctor, a friend of theirs, and he said, hey, look, I think you guys need to get some really high-end animal fats in your systems to help your bodies recover from these races.
01:16:59.000And they started doing that and their symptoms, like their soreness, whether it be back pain, hip, knees, I'm assuming that was all from the races.
01:17:34.000They ended up actually selling the vegan food company off because people found out that they owned both.
01:17:39.000And I think there was obviously some problems there.
01:17:44.000But they just found really good sourced meat and they do all field harvest.
01:17:50.000And so we did a commercial production for them, a branding piece for them to kind of highlight how they treat their animals and how they kill their animals because they kill them Rather than putting them on a truck and loading them into corrals and doing that whole thing, they literally drive out with the same tractor that they feed them with,
01:18:06.000and they have them on huge pastures so that they're actually reclaiming the ground.
01:18:11.000When they do ranches, they'll go in and test all the soils of these ranches and the grasses, and then they'll retest them after one year, three years, five years, and they're finding even better soils and better grasses as these animals have spent time there because they're doing More fertilizing and the grasses are being reclaimed and then they shoot the animal in the head with a high-powered rifle and so they do just lights out,
01:18:33.000boom, done and then that's how they butcher them.
01:18:36.000So they do it about as ethically and humanely as you can kill an animal.
01:18:40.000As you can kill an animal that's being raised in a pen.
01:18:42.000What was that place in LA? Was it called Harmony Cafe?
01:18:52.000There was a place in LA that was owned by these people.
01:18:56.000It still is, but they were vegans for a long time and they were having health issues as well and they decided to butcher their own animals and start raising their own animals and butchering them.
01:19:06.000And I think they wrote about it on a blog And they were just trying to explain themselves, and vegans went fucking crazy.
01:19:13.000The people that owned the restaurant went crazy, and they got a bunch of death threats, and it became this giant issue with them.
01:19:29.000But their perception of the ethical purity of their deciding to just eat vegetables...
01:19:37.000And the actual health consequences in terms of how many people can get by and what your physical dietary needs are, how many people can get by on just eating a vegan diet, especially if you're not super careful and using algae and all these different things to get B12 and fat-soluble vitamins.
01:20:11.000And some people that are in the vegetarian world, they want us to think that we are basically herbivores and that we can get by and that our desire to consume meat is just because of the sickness that we have and this evil nature that, you know, human beings sometimes are possessed by.
01:20:30.000The whole reason why we became a human being in the first place as opposed to one of the lower primates, a lot of that is attributed to our consumption of meat.
01:20:40.000Hunting, meat, cooking, cooking with fire.
01:20:44.000I would love if I was a billionaire and you said, hey, do you want to continue along with the career that you're on right now?
01:20:53.000I absolutely would, but the thing that I would love the most is to take people with me.
01:20:58.000Yeah, it would be super hard for a vegan to get into that, though.
01:21:02.000I mean, man, they would have to have some sort of desire on their part to see the cycle of life.
01:21:08.000It's not something you could just take some flower child that's only eating sprouts and say, hey, I'm going to go shoot this mule deer through the lungs with a fucking...
01:21:24.000No, they would have to be—they have questions.
01:21:27.000Yeah, I mean, they would have to be on that path themselves.
01:21:30.000It's just—it's an interesting byproduct to me of society.
01:21:35.000What we've done with this really incredible infrastructure that we've created where we can get food to these 20 million people that live in LA and No one be a part of that Preparation in terms of you know getting the animal killing it serving it, you know Butchering it cooking it serving it we cut all that shit out and go right to buying the meat that's already cooked Yeah,
01:21:55.000and we've done it so much and it's so much more prevalent than any of the other steps you know most of the Most of the consumption that most people in this country, like when we're talking about eating meat, I would say maybe even,
01:24:01.000So the percentage of dinners eaten at home that were actually made at home in the U.S., somewhere around 60%.
01:24:08.000So in that 60%, You gotta think there's the mom or the dad that's cooking and then the kids that are eating the food so they're not cooking shit.
01:26:11.000But there's a certain percentage of them, and they claim veganism, and they usually put that name, the word vegan, in their fucking screen name.
01:26:18.000That's how you could spot those assholes.
01:26:22.000They're in a plant-based gang, and that's really what happens.
01:26:26.000What it is, is not necessarily even a problem of diet.
01:26:29.000It's a problem of human nature, is that people love to stand on the moral high ground.
01:26:35.000They love to point down to all the other people, whether it's a religious issue, like you're not eating halal, or you're not eating kosher, or you're eating meat on Good Friday, whatever the fuck it is.
01:26:45.000They just decide that they have this moral high ground that you don't have, so fuck you.
01:26:52.000And it really comes from our own questions of our own existence and this messiness that we're all inherently aware of, that life eats life.
01:30:18.000I know some vegans too, and I actually know some vegetarians that, you know, it was an education for me, but I had some vegetarians hit me up for meat, you know, and I was like, uh...
01:31:23.000Funny or fun to shoot as many animals as they can and they don't they don't have any consideration to you know that this life has been taken so that your life can be Nurtured or you get nutrition from this animal and they're not thinking of it in terms of this cycle of life They're just thinking of in terms of you know just like The worst aspects that you get like in a movie about hunting and for me like Doing it.
01:32:19.000It's just always fed these experiences to me, and that's what really started to mean, that's what really mattered the most to me, was being in these areas, taking a deep breath, being super present, being super aware, and seeing all of these different things that were...
01:32:36.000True soul food while I was hunting a moose or while I was hunting a caribou.
01:32:40.000And then maybe being successful on a moose or a caribou and skinning it out and feeling the weight on my back because I'm getting it back to camp.
01:33:06.000I was doing research for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and I ran a research camp, a genetics camp, from June through September, May through September, whatever.
01:33:19.000I did it five years in a row, and one year, a pack of wolves moved into my research camp.
01:33:29.000I went fly fishing one night, and I was standing on the bank of a river casting, and it was an eerie little river that I was on.
01:33:37.000It was pretty quiet, but it had a good flow, and I was waiting for salmon to come up, and I was fly fishing for grayling.
01:33:42.000And I just kind of had this eerie feeling.
01:33:44.000I was by myself, and I just had this eerie feeling that I was being watched, and And I happened to look behind me and there's a big alder thicket, right?
01:33:51.000These bushes that are probably 10 to 12 feet high, have green leaves on them and these twisted gnarly, almost like a, you know, Boo Radley type tree, like gnarly branches.
01:35:48.000That's how I was reading into it anyway.
01:35:51.000So you think just by the way you were talking to her that she realized that you weren't even interested in being a threat and she was confident that she could get the fuck away from you?
01:36:58.000So the area of the tundra that I was on is greatly impacted by even human foot traffic.
01:37:05.000So you have to be really careful where you step because, you know, your footprint will be there for a long time.
01:37:10.000So we'd walk on these little planks that we made out of 2x4s that would sit up on logs that we put in place.
01:37:16.000And I had a tent where I slept, and I had a genetics tent where I did all my stuff, and then I had a cook tent, things like that.
01:37:23.000But right in front of my tent, I had this little platform where I would get dressed in the morning, because I would literally live for five and a half months in a little two and a half person pup tent.
01:37:31.000So I'd get out in the morning and get dressed on this little piece of wood, and then I'd walk to breakfast or whatever, or to the river.
01:37:37.000In the middle of the night, the alpha male was sitting on my little platform and he howled right outside my tent.
01:38:50.000It was about a researcher, a book by Farley Mowat, of a researcher that went up to the Canadian government.
01:38:57.000They were thinking that wolves were decimating these caribou herds.
01:39:01.000And so they sent this biologist up there to research the wolves to see how many caribou they were killing and basically what the biologist found out was that the wolves weren't killing any caribou.
01:39:37.000And so these wolves, they were just always present.
01:39:40.000Even I would go hiking just to get some exercise, and literally three or four of them would go with me.
01:39:45.000And they'd hang back like 50, 60 yards behind me.
01:39:48.000But I'd hike for like 10 miles and they'd do the whole thing with me and return back to camp with me.
01:39:53.000And then it started to really grow because we have this research gear that's in the river so that we can count, speciate, and sample the salmon as they swim through to go spawn.
01:40:04.000But after the salmon spawn, they all die, right?
01:40:07.000And so they would spawn, die, and they'd come back and they'd wash up on my gear.
01:40:11.000And so I'd have all these, that's why the wolves were there.
01:40:13.000They wanted to eat the dead fish that were coming back down.
01:40:16.000And so as I started to toss fish off on the banks of the river, usually I would just toss them back into the river, but I'd toss them on the banks, the fresher fish.
01:40:26.000And then our relationship just kept growing and growing and growing and growing.
01:40:30.000And I ended up spending like three and a half months with them.
01:40:33.000Did you think while you were doing this that this is probably how human beings and wolves developed this relationship?
01:40:39.000100% 100% 100% and actually I feel bad saying this and I hope I don't offend anybody but I was working with two Inuit guys two Eskimo guys and they wanted to shoot all these wolves I kind of lied to him and I just said, man, like, have you ever seen wolves behave like this?
01:41:23.000I just didn't want them to shoot the wolves.
01:41:24.000It's probably a good way to rationalize it.
01:41:27.000I steered them down a path of where their minds may have gone anyway.
01:41:31.000But I spent time with those wolves and I've had, you know, in the idea of management, like when we were in the short that Jamie was just playing Who We Are that we played, you can see some wolves in there.
01:41:44.000And a few years ago I got surrounded by a pack of wolves in the Arctic with the crew.
01:42:49.000And if they weren't stalking him, because I think they would have had their hands full with him, but if they weren't stalking him, then they were just moving in that general direction.
01:44:14.000I think there's some sort of a genetic memory that we have of our relationship with wolves.
01:44:19.000I mean, they've become dogs and they've become our...
01:44:23.000You know, our companions, and they've become a part of our community.
01:44:28.000Yeah, it just wasn't, you know, it wasn't for me.
01:44:31.000And when the pilot picked me up, he asked me if I'd seen any wolves, and I said, yeah, we saw a lot of wolves.
01:44:35.000And he's like, oh, they're now, you know, he's not, I'm not telling you, he's running surveys here, but he's like, yeah, there's a lot of wolves here, there's a lot of predation on moose here, so we're trying to really cut the wolves down here.
01:44:47.000And I saw a lot of wolves, but I also saw a ton of moose.
01:44:50.000And I saw a ton of cows, and I saw lots of calves and lots of big bulls.
01:44:54.000So everything seemed to be functioning in that area.
01:44:57.000And I also saw a ton of redback voles, right?
01:45:01.000They look like mice with little short tails.
01:45:02.000And I know where there's a lot of redback voles, I know that wolves do extremely well eating them.
01:45:07.000And so you see these little tunnels, right, in the tundra and stuff.
01:45:10.000And I think wolves eat a lot smaller of prey than people think on average, right?
01:46:55.000They must have been successful on the calf.
01:46:58.000And the idea is that they're going to chase them and wear them out and that one of the calves is going to be separated and they're going to take it down.
01:47:55.000You could snap your fingers right now, kill every buffalo on the continent of Australia, and you'd be doing nothing but helping that place.
01:48:02.000And so those are the kinds of engagements that I love, right?
01:48:07.000You're not going to see them unless you're there, and you're not going to see them unless you're there for a very long time.
01:48:11.000Yeah, just being in the woods and seeing wildlife in its wild environment is a crazy experience.
01:48:18.000I was telling my friend Colton, he's a guide in Utah, and I was saying, you guys should have a thing for people that have zero desire to hunt.
01:48:27.000And let them, like, take them, put them in full camo, and have them creep through the woods during the rut.
01:48:33.000And watch these elk scream at each other and communicate.
01:48:54.000So they know that they've been in that form.
01:48:57.000And likely elk as well, in that form, for a fucking million, maybe even more years.
01:49:02.000These things, this is what they've done.
01:49:03.000They've done it forever, and to be around them when they don't know you're there.
01:49:07.000We did this film for Under Armour, me and Cam Haynes, and we went elk hunting in Utah, and we were in this...
01:49:16.000This wooded area watching these elk that were in this meadow by a stream, and we sat there waiting for a shot opportunity for like an hour or so, watching them.
01:49:27.000They had no idea we were there, and some of them were 15, 20 yards away.
01:49:30.000And I was like, this is the crazy, just to be around them when they don't know you're there is so amazing.
01:49:53.000Yeah, Donnie, so what we're going to do is we're going to have you and your crew, so there's three in my crew, and then we're going to have a photographer, photographer's assistant, and then we'll have the writer with you.
01:50:04.000So I'm just like, alright, so I'm stalking bull elk, and I've never elk hunted before, so I have no idea what I'm doing other than what I've read about, and so I'm stalking these bulls with six people.
01:50:14.000And they asked me, like, hey, do we have to wear camouflage?
01:50:16.000I said, no, you don't have to wear camouflage.
01:50:17.000And they said, well, what, is there anything we shouldn't wear?
01:50:20.000And I said, just try not to wear anything with really bright, stark colors, and try not to wear any bright yellows, because that's the spectrum that elk see in.
01:50:27.000And the photographer assistant shows up with just, I mean, like, canary yellow pants, skinny jeans.
01:51:56.000Now, the writer, Michael Easter, he really wants to hunt, and he's actually going to go on another hunt with me, I think.
01:52:01.000Next year, I'm going to spend like 40 days in the Yukon Territories, just walking from one end to this concession that a friend of mine has like four and a half million acres, and we're going to try to walk from one half kind of to the other half, if you will, and hunting our way through.
01:52:13.000Just kind of do a journal hunt, film the whole thing beautifully, try to, and tell a story.
01:52:18.000And he wants to go along and write a book about the experience.
01:52:23.000But that's the thing, all these guys, just to see their look, seeing this bull elk right there, and they're watching him, and he put on quite a show.
01:53:11.000He's been on a cavalier's tear over the last few days with all sorts of different hats on.
01:53:17.000I think that what I was saying to these guys is without even having to have a tag, you guys could guide these people and it wouldn't be a dent in the resources.
01:53:36.000Those people are going to go back and tell other people about it.
01:53:38.000It's one thing to go to the zoo, but you go to the zoo, it's the most unnatural environment in the world where animals are looking you right in the eye and they're not freaking out.
01:53:45.000That has nothing to do with what you're talking about.
01:53:56.000When you see one in the wild, and their noses are flaring, and they're smelling the air, and their ears are twitching left and right, and they're scanning for noises, and you realize, like, wow, this thing is out there fucking earning, hustling, you know, eating grass, trying to stay alive,
01:54:11.000and if it gets to, you know, like, that elk that I have out there was nine years old.
01:54:17.000It's a nine-year-old animal that's out there surviving against mountain lions and bears and just figuring out a way to get through and keep surviving.
01:54:27.000Get through those winters, make it to spring, keep going, keep going.
01:54:36.000And if you sit down, you know, I'm sure you were sad when you killed him, but you sit down and I'm sure you were euphoric as hell that your plan finally worked.
01:54:47.000Because you've watched it fail 2,000 times.
01:54:49.000So you sit there with your kind of holy crap moment of this actually happened and he's actually dead now.
01:54:55.000And, you know, you have the sorrow of taking an animal's life, but then you sit there and you have any perspective at all.
01:55:01.000You think about those nine years, just like you just did.
01:55:03.000You think about any minute of those nine years.
01:55:04.000And the same was like sheep, you know, or like...
01:55:07.000Your water buffalo back here, this is horned, right?
01:55:11.000The elk cast their antlers off every year and grow new ones, which is, I think it's fastest growing biological substance known to man, right?
01:55:19.000But these things have horns, so it's made out of fingernails, so you literally can sit there with your buffalo.
01:55:24.000And drag your fingernail or a bighorn sheep or a doll sheep and drag your fingernail through these little crags and you see these splits and cracks and you're like, you know, what was a bad winter and what was a great spring and when did the wolves chase you and when did you almost lose your life in a fight and when,
01:55:43.000I wish, you know, I wish we could kind of hold on to these things and kind of go through a little montage of what this thing lived through, you know, but that's the only thing we can do is insert ourselves into the wilderness for a short amount of time, or as much time as we can afford and convince ourselves that that's where we still live.
01:56:01.000I mean, just the relationship that we have with nature, I think, has taken such a bizarre turn because of cities.
01:56:08.000I think that what we've done also in our relationship with animals by putting them in these little animal prisons that we call zoos and having people go and stare at them in some very unnatural way, we've really distorted nature.
01:57:08.000And my joke was that they're like, another day with no lions, and they're just wandering around having a great old time.
01:57:14.000I mean, they're so confident that, like, when my daughter was two, we brought her to the zoo, and they'll let a two-year-old hold a piece of lettuce up for a giraffe.
01:57:24.000If you saw, the first time I ever saw him, I was with my friend Mike Hawkridge and my friend Ben O'Brien, the first time I ever saw a moose in the wild.
01:57:32.000We pulled the car over and it was like that scene in Jurassic Park when Jeff Goldblum sticks his head out of the Jeep and he's like, wow.
01:57:39.000Like you see one in the wild, you realize how big they really are.
01:57:43.000And this thing was just walking through this open field in the woods.
01:57:47.000And we were like, holy shit, look at the size of that thing.
01:57:52.000Filmmaker killed by giraffe while working in South Africa.
01:58:38.000That anyone that voted on that ballot has never seen a grizzly bear, or been a grizzly bear territory, or participated at all in understanding how that ecosystem works.
01:58:46.000Well, isn't it a very small percentage of people?
01:58:49.000It was a very small number of people, and they got the information from an email list, right?
01:58:54.000I think it was less than 3,000 people.
01:59:03.000Well, it's also, if you talk to the actual wildlife biologists, and maybe even more importantly, the people that are in the field on a daily basis, there's no problem with the grizzly bear population in British Columbia.
01:59:16.000It's a giant animal that eats a lot of meat, and it's out there taking out a lot of calves right now as we speak, and now that they can't hunt them, they're very likely to have a situation where they're going to have to hire people to shoot problem bears.
01:59:30.000The first eco-tour that goes down where a boat full or a bus full or a hiking group watches a boar kill and eat triplets.
01:59:41.000Kill and eat three football or watermelon-sized cubs and rip them to shreds and eat them while they're bawling and trying to get to their mom and then have him kill their mom.
01:59:50.000Once that goes down, they'll be like, okay, I think we might have a couple too many bears here.
01:59:54.000But that happens every day, even in a great, not every day, but it happens often even in a good population.
02:00:00.000But now that they've shut down any killing whatsoever, these things have no predators other from old boars that become giant bullies on the block.
02:00:08.000Yeah, what are they gonna do about that?
02:00:09.000Because apparently there is some sort of a movement to try to educate people and get them to understand what they've done by making this hunt illegal.
02:00:18.000But What I would like to see is people also be educated on the fact, like what you said, that these animals are actually edible.
02:00:26.000And that maybe part of the problem is the fact that these people are just taking the head and the hide and leaving behind the meat.
02:00:32.000And if you were responsible for not just taking the meat but showing that you're consuming it and then teaching these people how to cook it and how to prepare it and make them realize, like, you should be using this thing In its entirety as a resource.
02:00:48.000And don't just think about it as this fucking rug or this, you know, skull that you're going to have on your wall.
02:01:47.000So people will write and say, see, let me get this straight.
02:01:49.000You kill the deer, you take its life, you take its hide, and you take its antlers, and you just take it home and mount it, and you leave everything else to rot.
02:03:06.000I've seen guys argue over that more than anything.
02:03:08.000I sent elk meat to the writer of Men's Health, who was writing the article, because I ended up killing the elk.
02:03:15.000Two days after he left, he had to go on another story, and I ended up killing Alex.
02:03:18.000So he's like, hey, will you send me a box of meat so I can try it?
02:03:20.000Because I feel like I was really part of this hunt.
02:03:22.000And I did so, and he's just like, yeah.
02:03:25.000I mean, he wrote about it in the article, but it's in the last paragraph or whatever, but he sent me a text message, and he's just like, are you freaking kidding me?
02:03:32.000This is the finest thing I've ever eaten in my life.
02:03:34.000It's prepared correctly, but you have to learn how to do that, too.
02:04:55.000Don't say I want to go bow hunting like I want to go deep sea fishing on a chartered boat where they put the bait on the hook, drop it in, and I just reel in the fish.
02:05:15.000Okay, but I'm crazy and I've been obsessed with this shit for years and I practice every day and you go to my backyard, I've got fucking rubber elk sitting on a hillside and I shoot at them every day before I do anything.
02:05:32.000Then you have to learn something about hunting.
02:05:35.000Now you have to actually get out of your truck and take a bunch of steps into the wilderness and hope you can even just get back to your truck, let alone finding an animal, a legal animal, sneaking into within archery range.
02:05:49.000Killing him quickly, dismembering him, getting him on.
02:05:53.000That's the other thing that freaked me out when I first went hunting.
02:05:56.000I was in shape as far as like jujitsu and martial arts shape, but fucking hiking with a backpack on in altitude and you're going up and down and up and down at seven hours a day.
02:06:39.000Yeah, I mean, it's an awesome way to get started, too.
02:06:42.000You go wild pig hunting, you're doing good for the environment.
02:06:46.000This is an invasive species that devastates ground-nesting birds, all sorts of plant species.
02:06:51.000And if you're dealing with agriculture, like, wow, I mean, then it's really, you're talking about a massive financial burden on farmers, but with a rifle.
02:06:59.000That's the way to do it because it's so much easier if you have a rifle rest and someone can take you to a range.
02:07:05.000The learning curve is so much shorter than with a bow.
02:09:59.000But then you go to their jungle and everything's green except for all the palms that die turn bright orange.
02:10:05.000And they all have really long, sharp fronds that look like a tiger stripe.
02:10:11.000So you see his little blotches of orange and black all...
02:10:16.000disappearing into the green and so but we would see the deer and the deer would know like when we were going into an area to either we had a cat that was radio collared or we're going in to look at a particular piece of habitat the deer were just like on pins and needles like we'd get even remotely close and you could see him we are dealing a lot with islands and you'd see him leaving the island on the other side like they'd be ditched in the swim to the next island Wow very aware they're extremely aware How crazy is it that somehow or another the tiger evolved to develop those stripes that look
02:10:52.000Yeah, see, like this is from, I don't know where this picture was taken, but this reminds me of like in Nepal, in southern Nepal where I was, the Royal Chitwan National Forest.
02:10:59.000They have this grass that grows like 20 feet tall and, I mean, just absolutely disappear.
02:11:03.000But how bizarre is it that this animal somehow or another evolved this camouflage?
02:12:20.000And so, but yeah, so my dad, the gift to me was my grandparents got him a subscription to Outdoor Life Books.
02:12:27.000So he'd get all these books that were penned by these gifted authors.
02:12:33.000One of them was named Jack O'Connor, who's inspired my entire career, but I'd read all these things.
02:12:37.000And so I just thought, I want to spend time outside, so I might as well get a wildlife biology degree and then do research and live outside and things like that.
02:12:44.000And as odd as it was when I was in college, I was still hunting a lot.
02:12:48.000And I had family and friends sit me down and they're like, hey man, you got to like buckle down on your studies.
02:12:53.000And I wasn't disagreeing with them, but they're like, you need to stop hunting.
02:12:57.000Stop hunting so much because I'd literally, I'd go to the Arctic caribou hunting by myself and I'd come home and go to classes and then I'd leave to go to Alaska on a black bear hunt and I'd come home and go to classes and I'd just save as much money as I could, didn't party, didn't drink with any of my buddies, didn't, you know, didn't do anything lavish.
02:13:13.000I just literally kept going on trips and, you know, it's kind of basically what's led to my career today.
02:13:18.000But it was funny that I, you know, these kind of things traveled in parallel, if you will.
02:13:22.000When did you start making films and when you did it did you make them with the intention of trying to relay like what I was explaining at the beginning of the podcast that what you do best is you you as much as possible in an hour you're relaying the whole experience yeah as opposed to what you're gonna get When you see a hunting television show,
02:13:43.000or especially what you're going to get when you see hunting in a movie.
02:15:20.000We filmed them as beautifully as we could.
02:15:22.000We filmed them as completely as we could, right?
02:15:24.000A lot of guys, when they go on these trips, they'll film, okay, you arrived, and now you're hunting, and then you kill an animal, and they're just trying to, like, get a little piece of it.
02:15:32.000Well, we would try and film everything.
02:15:35.000And then when we got done, we started putting together our first film, and we thought, okay, we'll put together a film.
02:15:40.000We'll see what the audience kind of thinks.
02:15:45.000We'll just go from there and see what happens.
02:15:46.000And so I started writing the film, writing the script, all the dialogue that was going to live outside of what was already naturally occurring on camera.
02:15:56.000And I brought it into Kyle's office and I was like, yeah, so read this.
02:16:00.000And he picked up my notebook and he's like, dude, I've never, ever heard you talk like this.
02:16:04.000I've never, it was, I think, probably a little bit macho and a little bit sensational, a little bit like being actual delivered, like delivering a line and trying to convey something on film that wasn't me.
02:16:18.000And he's like, I've never, he's like, why don't you write like how you talk in the office?
02:16:21.000Like when you're ranting and raving and talking about wildlife and talking about your experiences, write like that.
02:16:26.000Like paint a picture for us, you know, and answer some questions maybe that you have of your own.
02:16:33.000So I started writing in that manner, and then we released our first film in 2012, or 13, The Rivers Divide.
02:16:40.000It was a story about a deer that I was hunting for two years in North Dakota, and it just took off.
02:16:50.000A friend of mine named him because a friend of his, who's named Steve, said, the fact that you name deer is idiotic and completely stupid.
02:16:59.000And my friend Jeff said, great, that the next deer we find is going to name Steve.
02:17:04.000It is a weird thing when you watch a lot of these shows and people have a piece of property and they have trail cameras and they have all these different names for these deer.
02:17:13.000That's where it gets real squirrely too.
02:17:26.000If you have two sons, you don't go, yep, so there's my skinny boy, the one that does okay in school, and here's a little fat one that we can't keep peas on the fork with.
02:21:56.000Look, I mean, it's going to be really hard to regulate whether or not a person should or shouldn't be able to use it at any point in time.
02:22:03.000Yeah, and I'm not talking about, like, if somebody that's handicapped or somebody that's truly debilitated wants to access this area, absolutely, by all means.
02:22:25.000I mean, I've heard people that have been hunting, and they, you know, in a quiet area, and then all of a sudden five people come by on horseback in front of them, you know, that they're with an outfitter, and the outfitters, I mean, they took the time to hike 19 miles deep into the backcountry, And,
02:23:08.000Like, I feel like we should have to suffer for these.
02:23:10.000Well, it's also rewarding to do it on foot because you're going deep into this area that's hard to get to.
02:23:18.000And when you do get there, there's nothing there but you.
02:23:21.000If you're the type of person that's willing to hike in 7, 8, 9, 10 miles, the deeper you get, the further you're going to distance yourself from everybody else because most people aren't going to do that.
02:23:54.000You know, and people think that it's this, and I'm not, I mean, you know, in certain areas of the country, it's more difficult, but people think if you killed an animal on public land, like, you're a real hunter, because you had to deal with other hunters.
02:24:05.000No, where I went, there was not another person.
02:24:07.000So, you know, it's like, when you're accessing, when you're going deep, and there's not ATVs, there's not side-by-sides, and you can actually hike into an area, you can get away from these people, right?
02:24:16.000You can get away from what people are willing to access, but...
02:24:19.000People like to celebrate public land because you weren't on a guided hunt.
02:24:34.000The problem I have with that is, first of all, the wildest of the wild is the place where people can't go.
02:24:41.000And the other thing is, if somebody said, hey, I'm going to give you a tag for Nevada for some private land area that is just an unbelievable elk hunt, but it's a private land, but I'm going to give it to you.
02:24:55.000You're not going to go, well, I'm not going to do that because it's private land.
02:24:59.000No, I'd say, can I get it next year, too?
02:25:01.000Yeah, most people are only saying that they wouldn't do it because they can't afford it, and so they want to disparage anybody who can because there's a barrier for entry, and that barrier is financial.
02:25:10.000But those areas where you go, if you can get into these private places, those are the areas where they're really wild because there's no fucking people.
02:26:14.000I mean, the fact that people spend that money.
02:26:15.000And then the other thing is, I mean, I know a guy who did that who hired these people to sit on this one fucking bighorn for months.
02:26:24.000They hired these guys to basically be full-time employees to scout this one gigantic bighorn, track it around, follow it, keep an eye on it, and then finally the season opened and this guy trudged in there and killed it.
02:26:40.000Here's what I would do if I was a billionaire or had the cash.
02:26:44.000I'm telling you right now to your face.
02:26:45.000I would buy that tag often if I had that kind of money.
02:26:49.000But instead of hiring the crew to find me a big ram and waltzing in on opening day and killing it, I'd fire the crew because I have enough money.
02:26:57.000I'd go in there and spend the entire season in there myself, immersing myself in that wilderness.
02:27:02.000And using the fact that I have a pile of cash at home to live in the wilderness for 30 days and maybe kill a big ram, maybe not.
02:27:09.000But these guys want They want the bragging rights.
02:27:21.000I've talked about this a little bit before, but when we were kids, like if you went fishing with your dad or hunting with your dad or whatever, like let's say you went down to a little local lake here in California or whatever, and you guys were going bass fishing.
02:27:33.000You guys go bass fishing and you're catching bass or whatever, and then all of a sudden one magical Sunday morning...
02:27:53.000You finally get the net underneath him.
02:27:55.000You get this big bass in the net and you're, you know, you're hugging, you're high-fiving, you're, oh my god, we've come to this lake 30 times.
02:28:01.000It's the biggest fish we've ever caught.
02:28:03.000That, that, And then you take the pictures and you go home and you tell your mom, you tell your friend, you're like, oh my god, and he came up and he ate the frog and we set the hook.
02:28:13.000And you tell that whole tale and you have that energy that lives around that fantastic experience.
02:28:18.000And these guys are trying to buy that.
02:28:20.000That's a really remarkable experience.
02:28:22.000When you go elk hunting and you stumble into a really big bull or you do your homework and you keep truncating down the information, you keep taking steps into the wilderness down until you find this really massive bull.
02:29:52.000What you're saying mirrors what I hear from guys like Steve Rinella and people that are really accomplished hunters that are very ethical and have the right mindset is that this is supposed to be difficult.
02:30:05.000Yeah, the experience is supposed to be, you're supposed to hike all those miles.
02:30:09.000You're supposed to go up and down those mountains.
02:30:46.000That's a good argument, and that argument gets weird, right?
02:30:49.000But if you're doing it, we say if you're doing it well and good, it doesn't matter, you know, it shouldn't matter.
02:30:56.000Like, if you're an ethical, if you're hunting for the right reasons, you're asking yourself these big questions, it shouldn't matter if you pick up a rifle and you shoot them at 100 yards, or you pick up a recurve and you shoot them at 10 yards.
02:31:07.000Because I know recurve shooters that can only shoot like 15, 18 yards.
02:31:11.000I know recurve shooters that can shoot 50, 60, 70 yards.
02:31:15.000And, you know, so we're all different.
02:31:18.000We all like to, you know, some people really enjoy shooting their rifles.
02:31:21.000Some people really enjoy shooting their bow.
02:31:22.000I don't think we should split hairs there.
02:31:24.000Just realize that the bow hunter maybe had to go to the next level of immersion to get himself next to that animal.
02:31:32.000And, you know, the rifle hunter, you know, there's a slightly less barrier of entry, but it doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with it.
02:31:40.000Well, rifle, I've heard it argue, and I agree with them, that rifle hunting on public land is probably more difficult than bow hunting on private land.
02:31:50.000And certainly more difficult than bow hunting on public land, because bow hunters have, that's the reason I started bow hunting, was have access to public land prior to the rifle season.
02:32:01.000To extend my season, to go in the woods when it's quiet and no one else is around and see animals acting naturally, rather than seeing this orange army and seeing everything running for its life.
02:33:52.000I think, and we should probably wrap this up, we're about three hours in, but I think I would want people, if they're really curious about this, Endeavor I really would want people to start with your films because I appreciate that I think that what you're doing if they have the time to sit down and watch that whole thing what you're doing is you I think you represent the best Just the best slice It's so hard to get that slice in 22 minutes and I think Rinella does an amazing job in doing it in 22 minutes,
02:34:22.000but I think what you've done by turning these into films and by really giving yourself the opportunity to relay your appreciation, the wonder and the awe of nature and your immersion into that world and to do so in such an incredibly creative way and Beautifully visually stunning way that I think you've done an amazing service and I think I think it's a great place for people to start
02:34:52.000to get a look at them and for people that that do hunt I think they will really appreciate if they haven't seen your stuff before I appreciate that man like it's uh we definitely suffer for the work like writing the music the shooting it like We want to represent ourselves with absolute purity,
02:35:10.000but we also realize that there are people that have questions, so we try to write and behave in a manner that, like you've done today several times in a podcast, you say, hey, explain what a concession is.
02:35:21.000People don't know what a concession is.
02:35:22.000Well, if you can write in this certain manner, give them some sort of an education while you're telling them the story and do it poetically, and that's...