In this episode, we talk about DNA testing and what it means to be African-American in America. We also talk about Elizabeth Warren's recent DNA test results, and whether or not it's a good or bad thing that she's more African than Native American, or if it's just not in there in the DNA test at all. And, of course, we answer the question: How much of your DNA is there that's not captured in your genetic code? And what could it mean that you could have ancestors from other parts of the world that aren't represented in your DNA code? We also discuss the possibility that there's a lot more to your DNA than you think, and that it could be missing parts of your genealogy that you don't even realize it's in there. We're in no way affiliated with the Bill Simmons Podcast, the Ringer, or Bill Simmons, but we're pretty sure we know who he is and what he's about to say on the podcast, so if you like him, you should listen to this episode! If you like it, tweet us and tell a friend about it! or tell us what you think about it on Insta: or tag us in a story you'd like us to have him on the next episode of the podcast! Timestamps: 0:00:00 - How much African American do you have in your bloodline? 6:30 - What does it mean to you? 7:00- What is your DNA? 8:15 - What is it like? 9: What are your African American heritage? 11:40 - What do you know about your ancestors? 13:20 - What are you most African American? 15:00 16:30- What does your DNA number? 17:15- How much do you think you have? 18:40- What kind of African American DNA is missing? 19:20- Is it in there? 21:10 - Where did you have it? 22:10- Where did your DNA come from? 26:30 27:00, what is your African ancestry? 28:30, what does it matter? 29:40, is it matter to you have any more? 30:00 + 35:00? 35:10, 36:10 - How did it have a place in my DNA?
00:01:20.000To have lived through that, to be brought up in a house where a guy leaves in the morning in a horse and cart to deliver produce, and then to be alive, to fight in World War II, to be through the atomic era, the advent of the internet,
00:01:37.000But I always knew that we had Sicilians when I did the genetic test.
00:01:43.000At some point in time, one of those Sicilians must have shot southward and crossed the Mediterranean and had a hookup down there or something.
00:01:52.000Well, that was the history of Sicily in the first place.
00:01:55.000Just being Sicilian in the first place, there were so many people that were impregnated by the Moors and by various people of West Africa and North Africa.
00:02:08.000I should have probably always assumed, but I hadn't thought about it.
00:02:13.000Another thing I was reading about this stuff, and you might know more about it than I do, is that when you do those tests, there's missing parts.
00:02:21.000It captures what's there, but there could be a lot there that's not captured, just in the way that chromosomes are inherited and passed down.
00:02:50.000You know, I hate to right off the bat get into something that I can't speak about with any level of expertise.
00:02:56.000I was just reading a piece, and the piece I was reading had to do, it was kind of a dissection of what happened with Elizabeth Warren when she claimed...
00:03:04.000We've been going off about that on the podcast, and I'm like 100 times more African than she is Native American.
00:03:15.000It was a piece in the Times explaining how to make sense of, now that everyone's doing these tests, how to think about and make sense of these tests.
00:03:23.000But my understanding of it is that you could have a lot of ancestry that just isn't captured in your genetic code in a way that would be detected through the testing.
00:03:38.000Meaning there could be ancestors because you're inheriting chromosomes from each parent.
00:03:44.000And somehow you could have, it could be an incomplete picture.
00:03:47.000You could have ancestors that had come from other, you know, whatever these tests break out the world into a hundred or some odd regions or zones, that there could be people from those zones who are in your lineage that are not captured in your personal, that are not captured in your genetic code.
00:04:47.000I was wishing to have a little more of that floating around in me.
00:04:50.000It's a bizarre heritage, you know, the idea that there was a different type of human that bred with Homo sapiens and that there's like little bits and pieces of it floating around in people.
00:05:01.000Yeah, and people discuss them People discuss, I was having an argument the other day where they say Neanderthal or Neanderthal, and everyone grows up saying Neanderthal, and it's one of those things you're supposed to switch once you realize how you're supposed to do it.
00:08:35.000Because when anthropologists look at the skeletal remains of Neanderthals, they see this sort of suite of, this pattern of injuries on them.
00:08:47.000And a researcher was looking at the types of fractures that they have on their bones and where the fractures occurred and the breaks and cracks in their skulls.
00:08:58.000He was looking at all this and wound up working with a doctor who had a lot of exposure to rodeo bull riders.
00:09:09.000And the doctor was observing the way in which that suite of injuries was very familiar to him from rodeo riders, the types of brakes and the location of brakes.
00:09:20.000And this guy has this idea that they had a very confrontational hunting style, that they were mixing it up with big animals.
00:09:30.000And another thing they found is that When you're looking at skeletal remains from early people, you still see that separation in the sexes, right?
00:09:41.000That the males would suffer injuries with a greater prevalence than females.
00:09:47.000But with the Neanderthals, it seems like they didn't have the sort of, like, duplicity of roles.
00:10:22.000And I don't know if they were hafting materials, but they were doing art And I think there's a little bit of a debate about whether they're doing representational art, but they were doing art.
00:10:38.000These are all things that, as we kind of wake up to what these people really like, and it paints a more complicated picture.
00:10:45.000There's even this theory, and I don't know if this held any water or how long it was fashionable for, but you had this really long history of, this extremely long history of hundreds of thousands of years of Neanderthal You know, occupation in Europe.
00:11:18.000Or seeing art and seeing jewelry and mimicking this from these new invaders that were coming in.
00:11:25.000But I don't know where that idea sits right now.
00:11:27.000I don't know if it's been dispelled because of other discoveries.
00:11:30.000But I remember thinking that was an interesting idea that they would...
00:11:32.000And it kind of paints this really sad picture, right?
00:11:34.000That they would be sort of in the autumn...
00:11:59.000As homo sapiens, but now there was an article that was published just a couple of days ago that new evidence shows that Neanderthals, like, inter-Neanderthal violence between each other was just as bad as homo sapiens.
00:13:11.000There was a really dumb theory that was being bounced around A few years ago, it was really hilarious.
00:13:17.000About how we wiped out, we assumed that Neanderthals, because we don't have any soft tissue samples, we assumed that Neanderthals looked similar to humans.
00:13:26.000But because of the very different shape of their skull, this guy had, instead of giving them European-looking white skin, turned them into a gorilla.
00:13:35.000Turned them into a giant muscle-bound gorilla that preyed on people.
00:13:40.000And this was like, I believe this guy actually was a professor.
00:13:45.000And it seemed almost like a goof at first.
00:13:51.000Killer Neanderthal theory, I think you called it.
00:13:54.000He had drawn this thing, black like a gorilla, with giant muscles all over the place and these big crazy eyes, and painting Neanderthals as a predator of humans.
00:14:13.000I was going to say my limitations as an anthropologist, but I'm certainly not an anthropologist at all.
00:14:18.000I'm just a dude who's interested in it.
00:14:19.000But one of my limitations is I'll hear theories floated, and I don't follow them long enough to see which ones have any traction.
00:14:29.000I'll just read about them, and I don't take it as gospel, but I'll read about it, and I'll be like, that's interesting, and it'll sort of shape my understanding of it, but then I don't keep track of it.
00:14:41.000I try to really follow the story of the peopling of the Americas.
00:14:44.000So when it comes to the human history of the Western Hemisphere, I sort of follow and ideas will get floated and I'll track the idea to see where it lands in terms of scholarly consensus.
00:14:55.000But another stuff like with Neanderthals, I'm always a sucker for a Neanderthal story, but I don't track what ideas that float up are just very quickly denounced as being complete rubbish.
00:17:26.000Tell Joe that that's not how it works.
00:17:28.000I'm like a conduit where I'm oftentimes getting frantic text messages as though I would be able to jump in and clarify how a porcupine quill works.
00:18:09.000We got a bull in Utah this year, and when we were butchering it, one of the hindquarters had been punctured by an antler, and it got infected.
00:18:19.000And when we cut into the hindquarter, just this bucket of pus...
00:18:27.000We thought it was piss at first, like someone had actually punctured the bladder, and then we realized when we got deep into it that there was this giant ass.
00:18:33.000He had been assed, like literally, right in the flank.
00:20:21.000When I did the guidebook series, it came in 700 pages, and my publisher was...
00:20:28.000My publisher was like, you know, you just don't really make 700-page books.
00:20:31.000And so that's why we wound up doing the Volume 1 and Volume 2 because I didn't want to get rid of any.
00:20:34.000But then in doing this cookbook, the Meat Eater Fishing Game Cookbook is what it's called, and putting this together, I think early on we started to get a little bit...
00:21:04.000And I didn't want it to feel like that.
00:21:06.000I wanted it to sort of feel, like, really representative of, like, so many different places and different experiences that are captured in here.
00:21:14.000And so we just started filming these process shots of how to walk stuff through, like, everything, you know, how to, like, turn things, how to take an animal and make it into a variety of usable ingredients.
00:21:49.000And I think it's a really valuable resource for people that hunt because it's just, I mean, there's only so many different ways you can cook back straps, right?
00:21:57.000There's so many different ways you can put ground venison into spaghetti sauce, you know?
00:22:34.000But you spend a great deal of time breaking down animals and cooking a bunch of different things, including marrow and shanks and unusual preparations.
00:23:16.000I have a friend, Greg Blaskovich, who even worked on this research piece of taking justifications for hunting and finding test subjects who are skeptical of hunting and explaining various justifications to them.
00:23:36.000And seeing which ones of those they find to be most impactful.
00:23:40.000So he's actually done research around, when you take this great, like this broad spectrum of reasons people do this.
00:23:49.000And everyone has many of them as part of their story.
00:24:14.000I think that people don't The kind of people you're talking about who are largely unfamiliar with it, but they're looking at it from the outside and they're skeptical of it.
00:24:56.000And I took this side road down to get to wherever the gig was, and I'm just watching these animals jump in front of the car, left and right.
00:25:07.000And I'm like, these people that live here, these things are a goddamn nuisance.
00:25:10.000If this was your everyday reality, and you asked those people, you said, hey, what do you think about deer population control?
00:25:17.000We need to hunt to keep the population down.
00:25:20.000Yeah, I'm sure that there are quite a lot of people that live in some of these areas that have a great abundance of deer that feel that way.
00:26:05.000Your grandparents and parents could have been involved in all kinds of bad shit.
00:26:08.000I don't think that that means you need to continue doing bad shit.
00:26:12.000One that's very obvious is people understand and respect the idea of food.
00:26:20.000Your general population should look and respect the idea of food.
00:26:23.000Now, to back up what I was getting at about you mentioned that being a big element of the show, it almost winds up being that I was fortunate or lucky or whatever that early in my career, I started focusing on talking about that aspect of it.
00:26:41.000But it wasn't something I just made up out of nowhere because it was a huge part of growing up where, for whatever reason, I had to be raised by a dad who was just really interested in cooking stuff and sharing it with people.
00:26:57.000And if you're driving down the road in June and you see a snapping turtle, We're good to go.
00:27:17.000And we ate a lot of things that other people weren't interested in.
00:27:19.000We could go out and bring back our dad bullfrogs.
00:27:22.000He would love it if we went out and got him frogs.
00:27:24.000We'd take our bows out at night using flashlights, which unbeknownst to me was illegal and remains illegal in the state where I was brought up.
00:27:41.000We would do it, and we'd come in and bring them, and it was like a big thing, right, to bring our dad the frog legs, and he would cook them.
00:27:47.000He would cook and eat anything, and then he would do stuff where we would catch salmon when the salmon were running the rivers in October, and he would have people over, and we would have a salmon boil.
00:27:57.000So I was raised around that stuff of celebrating wild game, having to be very social, having to be a way to connect.
00:28:47.000If you went to the Pacific Northwest and asked a bunch of great chefs in the Pacific Northwest to list their five favorite salmon preparations, boiling them in a pot of water isn't going to make their list.
00:29:03.000But we would do that, and it would be a thing, and you'd invite people over to do it.
00:29:11.000So, early on, with all the things I enjoyed about hunting, the food aspect was big for me and really informed all of the sort of conversations that I've had around it since.
00:29:25.000And so, in doing a show about hunting, it wasn't something that I was going to lean out.
00:29:30.000But in all fairness, when I was growing up, I did a lot of fur trapping, too.
00:29:36.000I trapped muskrat, beaver, mink, all kinds of stuff.
00:30:38.000The first ones we ate, I had started reading about...
00:30:41.000I'd always read narratives, stories about the mountain men.
00:30:46.000Meaning, when I say mountain men, like a very specific thing, like a...
00:30:49.000You know, a Rocky Mountain beaver trapper who was sandwiched in time between the end of the Lewis and Clark expedition and the collapse of the beaver market in the 1840s.
00:31:05.000So a very finite period of time is what a mountain man was.
00:31:08.000Explain to people how big the beaver market is, because this is going to blow people's minds.
00:31:14.000Well, America's first, you know, Aster, John Jacob Aster, like, the beaver market made America's first millionaires.
00:31:22.000His fortunes came from being a beaver trader.
00:31:24.000The richest men in the country, their money came from beavers.
00:31:28.000Yeah, and he was in on the business end of it.
00:31:30.000He wasn't in on the trapping end of it.
00:31:33.000The fur companies, yeah, the big fur companies.
00:31:35.000And when we bought, think about it like this, how big it was.
00:31:40.000For us to do the Louisiana Purchase, And to buy that chunk of land.
00:31:47.000When Lewis and Clark came out, part of their mandate was to suss out the potential for the trade in beaver hides.
00:31:57.000It'd be like buying something, now you'd want to know about oil and gas, right?
00:32:00.000You don't know, can we justify this through oil and gas?
00:32:02.000They're looking to justify it through trading beaver hides.
00:32:05.000Now also, there was also language about that they might find out about whether woolly mammoths were existing out there as well.
00:32:11.000So there was like some confusion about what was going on.
00:32:14.000Wow, they really thought the woolly mammoths were still alive?
00:32:17.000Jefferson was interested in that stuff because he had been to some areas, he had some familiarity and been to some areas with these large bones and he was puzzled about them.
00:32:26.000He was wondering if this wasn't some, if it maybe in fact was not an extinct species but was somehow living in the American West still.
00:33:01.000Another thing I was reading about recently that you might think is interesting is that people have this idea of Lewis and Clark going into this unspoiled, uncontacted landscape.
00:33:16.000I was recently reading a piece by a historian who was talking about, at the time Lewis and Clark headed out into the Great Plains, There were Native Americans living on the Great Plains who had been to Europe and met the King of France and returned back to the Great Plains.
00:34:47.000From reading about the mountain men, I got interested in this.
00:34:50.000Anytime you're reading about mountain men, you're always going to find the part where the author talks about how much mountain men liked beaver tail.
00:34:59.000The first people that tried eating beaver tail, it was around when I was in community college at the time.
00:35:05.000My brothers, I remember, stuck a beaver tail in the oven for a while and cooked it.
00:35:10.000They reported back to me that whatever it is they're talking about, Isn't that?
00:35:17.000Like, there must be some other explanation.
00:35:23.000There's like pictures and an explanation of how to prepare, how to actually prepare beaver tail mountain man style in the meat-eater fishing game cookbook.
00:35:46.000So we started, when I would catch beavers, I'd be careful when skinning them to not get the caster.
00:35:53.000The beavers have two large glands on the inside of their legs.
00:35:56.000They're like tucked in their, what looks like, if you lay a beaver on its back, tucked kind of on either side of its, like if it's a male, like tucked either side of its penis or either side of its cloaca, you'll see a, not cloaca, but like vent.
00:36:10.000You'll see these glands that are the size of If you take your index finger and your thumb and make a circle, there's a gland on each side called a castor gland.
00:37:14.000Take the tail and just skewer it on a stick and put it next to a fire where the skin starts to bubble and boil.
00:37:21.000And pretty soon you can just peel all that skin away.
00:37:23.000And what's hiding under there is the best equivalent or point of comparison that I can think of would be just, it's like if you had a really, like imagine you're eating a grass-fed steak, right, but still has that fatty gristle on it.
00:38:30.000You've got to put yourself in a position, you've probably been in this too, especially if you're out hunting and eating freeze-dried food or not eating great, and you're just exerting yourself all day, all the time, what you want to eat changes a lot.
00:38:57.000Makes sense, and particularly when you think about these people that are hiking across the West, traveling massive amounts of distance, probably very physically strenuous, dragging all their shit with them, and they get across some big-ass piece of fat from a tail.
00:39:14.000Yeah, and then our understanding of people, we used to have this idea of early Native Americans, they're just eating nothing but mammoth meat all the time.
00:39:26.000As our understanding of people grows, you see how much they were utilizing plant resources and probably had pretty plant-rich diets.
00:39:34.000But with the equestrian bison hunters on the Great Plains, Those guys weren't cultivating.
00:39:44.000At that era, especially the era when Lewis and Clark came in, these people were not cultivating crops.
00:39:49.000A lot of the people who had been farming along the Mississippi and Missouri Valleys, once they got horses, they just gave up on that shit and just started roaming the landscape eating meat.
00:39:59.000The mountain men certainly weren't doing that.
00:40:01.000They were just eating like you're eating meat.
00:41:47.000It's a treat to get a chance to talk to a guy that you think probably never even fucking heard of a podcast and certainly comes from a completely different era.
00:41:57.000The reason he had to live off the land is an interesting story where he was just getting into the guiding world, so guiding moose hunters.
00:42:07.000And they were wanting to find some ways to be able to hunt some very remote areas, and they hit on us the idea that they would just bring horses in.
00:42:13.000Because if you don't have landing strips and stuff, it's just really hard to operate out of these areas.
00:42:17.000So they thought, well, if we can get horses in there, we'll have them in there, we'll hunt for the season, then we'll ride the horses out.
00:42:24.000But getting the horses in there was so difficult and took far longer and the route they wanted to use was impassable.
00:42:31.000By the time they got the horses in there, they realized that they're never going to get these horses back out of here.
00:42:36.000And they realized that someone needs to stay over winter to take care of the horses.
00:44:39.000But besides, yeah, so he still guides and...
00:44:42.000Does that and takes those burls and makes bowls out of them.
00:44:47.000Just talking to a guy like that and listening to you talk to a guy like that is so fascinating because he lives a life that I can barely comprehend.
00:45:49.000The equivalent today, to be a mountain man today, the equivalent would be, I think you'd have to go to Brazil and ascend the Amazon and follow tributary after tributary.
00:46:05.000And get into like the borderlands around Venezuela and then go in and despite the language barrier, you'd have to go in and travel amongst and live amongst people who,
00:46:22.000tribes who had not had a lot of outside contact but had a familiarity.
00:46:30.000Had a familiarity with outside peoples.
00:46:54.000But these people were insatiably curious explorers They're the people that do go to really crazy war zones or decide to go backpack up in the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan just to see what happens.
00:47:39.000There's a lot of stuff that needs to happen to get out on the river.
00:47:41.000When you're around these people and they're all walking around barefoot and they're making cassava, which we talked about the other day that could easily kill you if you do it wrong.
00:48:08.000But when rubber meets the road of daily existence, they're still really connected to...
00:48:15.000Life patterns and skill sets that their grandparents used, and still fishing in very similar ways, right?
00:48:26.000So where you might have had when you were a boy, even if someone now is in their 30s, when they were a boy, they probably used a 12-pound handmade wooden paddle, and maybe now they have a different paddle, or maybe somehow they've come into A plastic paddle,
00:48:43.000say, and they use that for their boat.
00:48:46.000Or they still have a dugout canoe, but they also have an aluminum boat.
00:48:53.000But just the general sort of approach and the fact that you're deriving all of your protein from the river and that you hunt and fish 250-300 days a year, In the places where your ancestors have always done it,
00:49:09.000you're still getting this really beautiful glimpse at how people lived, even though they've had enormous changes in their own lifetime and are very much modern.
00:49:20.000Very modern, but you can still glimpse it more.
00:49:23.000I don't think you really get that as much here.
00:49:58.000So hunting in America, for Euro-Americans, hunting in America is like an invention.
00:50:04.000It's a thing that people kind of got, learned, and took from the Indians.
00:50:09.000So it doesn't have that deep, deep thread that you'd find with indigenous communities where there's this continuation that's going on.
00:50:21.000For forever unbroken, but on this continent unbroken for whatever, 15, 16, whatever the fashionable number is, thousands of years, right?
00:50:29.000And so it's like our understanding is just different because our, like my ancestors came here and like got into it.
00:50:37.000It wasn't a cultural continuation for them.
00:50:40.000And you look at like for food and wild game, an interesting thing is my My use and understanding of wild game is...
00:50:52.000Really influenced by contemporary food, right?
00:50:56.000Like restaurant food, things that chefs do.
00:50:59.000How do you take wild game and do these cool, exciting, modern, innovative kinds of things with wild game and cook it?
00:51:06.000You go talk to even a dude like Buck or particularly people in South America who've hunted for more of a subsistence, literally subsistence purposes, their whole attitude is different about it.
00:51:19.000People in South America will eat Like the chimane or the mikushi.
00:51:28.000It's like they'll eat the same thing every day for lunch.
00:51:58.000You split fish, salt them, and lay them on that rack and smoke them, dry them out.
00:52:03.000And then you take that fish and break it apart and pour river water over cassava and then put fish in there with river water and kind of stir it up.
00:52:16.000Or you just take fish and throw it in a pot and boil it and put that on there.
00:52:27.000And then you come and talk about wild game cooking, as I understand it, where you make a book and it's got a hundred different recipes in it and all these ways to approach stuff.
00:54:04.000Yeah, never feeling like bashful or ashamed or something that this would be something that I would like choose to engage in and this is something they were engaged in.
00:54:13.000And I think that one of the things that helps make it that way is how much they love to do it.
00:55:31.000She fucking loves fishing but that feeling in the morning when I'm looking at her little face and like we're on the water like it's a genetic thing.
00:55:39.000It seems like it's just in the DNA. Yeah.
00:55:42.000The fishing is it's not like hey we're gonna go play soccer which she likes too but there's not that kind of excitement.
00:55:49.000No there's a like Oh, this is going to be so fun!
00:55:52.000It's triggering something that is deep inside human beings.
00:55:58.000I see it, and I see it in varying degrees in different people.
00:56:06.000Some kids seem to come out of the box with more of it.
00:56:21.000When we had a daughter, my wife was adamant early on, as soon as she found out that it was going to be a daughter, that you will not exclude our daughter in this world that you're in.
00:57:12.000And it leads you to wonder, you know, it's a very small sample size.
00:57:18.000But when I talk to other parents, like, you know, parents who are parenting right now young kids, I just keep encountering other dads who are having the same experience.
00:57:30.000And it really leads you to wonder sort of, like, what sort of, like, cultural influences are going on there.
00:58:43.000There's people that are in the hunting world, the outdoor industry, that I think are in it because it's a good avenue to get attention if you're like a hot chick.
00:58:54.000If you're a hot chick and you wear pink and you go out and shoot things, you take all these grip and grins with deer, you're going to get a lot of likes.
00:59:03.000Yeah, because it's like, imagine the...
00:59:06.000The male perspective on it is like, here's the woman who has everything.
00:59:29.000And who wants to be a part of the outdoor industry and go, oh, this guy is just doing this because he thinks this is his avenue for fame and success.
00:59:36.000I think, well, here's a guy who really likes to hunt and he realizes there's people like Steve Rinella and John Dudley out there and these famous hunters.
00:59:48.000Well, I'm going to just start taking Instagram pictures and say a lot of the same shit that they say and sort of, you know, put myself into the cultural norm.
01:00:45.000And then you go to their Instagram page, and it's like, there's pictures of that, and then there's a lot of pictures with their butt up in the air where they're doing some strange exercise.
01:03:25.000It is very much the norm that hunting was, you know, patrilineal descent activity.
01:03:31.000And all these cultures you go to, like the cult of the hunter is like a male sort of cult.
01:03:37.000But the factors that made it that way...
01:03:42.000You have to assume it comes from some kind of practical factor, right?
01:03:46.000The factors that made it that way aren't there anymore.
01:03:50.000And like I said, it's a difficult thing to unpack.
01:03:52.000If it winds up being that if I have two boys and one girl, if it winds up being that...
01:03:57.000If both boys become avid hunters and fishermen, and somehow my daughter does not, I'll probably view it as some bit of a personal failure, though I'll never know what really was going on.
01:06:09.000There's like a guy at a grain silo that was like infested with pigeons.
01:06:13.000Folks don't know that, many people listening to this, that pigeons were actually brought over here as food, and when you get like fancy squab on the menu, that's what a pigeon is.
01:07:34.000One of the biggest surprises I had, that was one of the biggest surprises that I've ever had in game, if we can count that as wild game, would be what a squab tasted like.
01:07:45.000Because I had for a long time eaten street pigeons.
01:07:49.000Because, you know, street pigeons, you know, they're around.
01:07:52.000Even up in the Missouri breaks, you get street pigeons that nest up in the cliffs.
01:07:56.000And, you know, there's many places you can hunt street pigeons and they become an agricultural pest.
01:08:11.000If you could talk to wildlife managers and ask them if they could wave a magic wand and make street pigeons go away, most everybody would wave it because they're so costly.
01:08:56.000It's not bad to put it in a marinade and you can grill it.
01:09:05.000You want to take the little brass and you poke it a whole bunch, like poke it with a fork and tenderize a little bit and also make some avenues of approach for the marinade and grill them over a very hot flame.
01:09:34.000There's a lady who lives, she's been on the show before, she lives like fucking, what does she live, like 200 miles above the Arctic Circle?
01:11:09.000Among people who know blackberries are widely accepted as being good to eat.
01:11:16.000If you go into, if you go to, earlier I mentioned Daniel Boone.
01:11:20.000So if you go into that, like the frontier era of American history, right, which preceded, just these little lingo terms, the frontier era of American history preceded the mountain man era of American history, like the eastern settlements, right?
01:11:33.000If you read about Daniel Boone's area, Early 1700s, up into the Revolutionary War, bear meat was the most popular meat on the frontier.
01:12:39.000You'll get all kinds of people writing you to say about various points of this, but debating various aspects of this.
01:12:45.000A brown bear is a grizzly with access to marine resources, where marine resources make up a major component of its diet.
01:12:55.000And then the question you bring up is then if you go to the North Slope, so if you go to the Arctic Coast and you saw a grizzly there, you'd be like, well, he has access to marine resources.
01:13:04.000He can eat a beached whale, whatever, but he's a grizzly.
01:13:08.000So, like, brown bears kind of extend, right, from, you know, northern BC up around and hook around into the Bering Sea, but at some point they're just not brown bears anymore, and they're huge.
01:13:24.000And oftentimes, because of the name, they tend to have a darker coloration.
01:13:28.000They have a horrible reputation as food.
01:13:30.000You'll always find people who will point it out, right?
01:13:33.000Or nowadays, because people are so aware, like in the social media world, nowadays you'll have people who will kill a brown bear, and here you are, you've got 400 or 500 pounds of meat, and they'll talk about how they're going to eat it, but like, dude, you're in for a pound a day.
01:15:12.000Black bears in the spring have a salvage requirement because if you're talking about coastal bears, coastal bears are better to eat in the spring when they're not eating tons of rotten salmon.
01:15:21.000In the fall, there wouldn't be a salvage requirement because when they're eating dead salmon...
01:17:35.000And we had this discussion about it where...
01:17:40.000You know, acknowledging the need to control the population and that this is all, that they're allocated a certain amount of tags by wildlife biologists and this keeps the moose population healthy and the deer population, all these different things.
01:17:57.000But the celebration and all the hooting and hollering and stuff, it's like there was just not enough of a reverence for the dead and it really, really disturbed him.
01:19:14.000But that person is based off of rearing animals in order that they may die, and he profits from their death and remains celebrated.
01:19:29.000And then you get into the idea of what, when it comes to American wildlife, Where we have a population of wildlife, in many respects, we have it and enjoy the management that we do and the abundance that we do.
01:19:43.000In many ways, that abundance is supported, bolstered, financed by hunters.
01:19:51.000But hunters tend to not enjoy that same cultural support because of the death.
01:20:01.000Well, it's also because of media depictions.
01:20:07.000If all of our depictions about hunting were tied into this sort of rational discourse and they showed all the images from your show of animals being shot and carefully butchered in the field and then prepared and cooked and enjoyed,
01:20:23.000I think people would have a way different perception.
01:20:59.000No, it seems that it gets much worse and more contentious the less the population.
01:21:07.000If the American population is looking at something that they recognize as game, they feel different.
01:21:13.000Things that they don't recognize as game, that they don't readily recognize as game, To see that death is more abhorrent to them, even if it is being treated as game.
01:21:24.000You don't see social media explosions come up around someone with a turkey.
01:21:30.000You don't see a lot of social media explosions come up with someone around a whitetail deer.
01:21:35.000People look at that, they see this animal that they perceive to be very abundant.
01:21:39.000In the case of whitetails and turkeys, they're correct.
01:21:49.000Now, if there's things where there's a perceived scarcity, and they don't immediately recognize it as a food item, it's hard for them.
01:22:02.000Extremely, and this is way outside of my personal area of expertise, like what goes on in Africa, but for people to see animals in Africa that have been hunted and they recognize them only from like Film depictions, cartoon depictions,
01:22:17.000mobiles over their child's crib, like a hippopotamus.
01:22:22.000You can't look at that and it's hard to see that as the harvest of game.
01:23:13.000People are hard to get on board with it.
01:23:15.000I don't know if you watch what's going on with grizzly bears around...
01:23:18.000What has been unfortunately named the greater Yellowstone ecosystem where you sort of have this cultural custody battle around who owns this Indiana-sized hunk of land surrounding Yellowstone.
01:23:27.000Because of naming, people sort of think of it as Yellowstone when it certainly is not.
01:23:36.000But there, we had a period where we stopped grizzly hunting because the animals were being slaughtered.
01:23:43.000Over harvested, habitat destruction, and then you go through an enormous amount of work to recover the species.
01:23:49.000And people are extremely resistant to the idea that you would start hunting now, that you would now start hunting something you weren't hunting a few days ago.
01:24:05.000Even if mountain lions are a nuisance.
01:24:07.000There was a woman that had a depredation permit because mountain lions had killed 10 alpacas and a goat in her farm in Malibu.
01:24:17.000And she decided not to act on the permit because there were so many different people that were threatening her.
01:24:25.000There were so many wildlife activists that were threatening her and just general people online, death threats, because she was going to hire someone to shoot this mountain lion that had been, I mean, it just went on a thrill kill and got into one of her pens and just went ham.
01:24:41.000But people, they think of that thing as somehow or another better than her alpacas.
01:25:59.000But you just don't hear from those people.
01:26:02.000I don't think there would be blowback, honestly.
01:26:05.000If they didn't kill the lion, if the lion is just out there roaming around, I think people would just ignore it because the news cycle is so fucking quick.
01:26:33.000Mountain lions are recolonizing new territories all the time.
01:26:36.000They're managed, you know, most states manage them very tightly with mortality quotas, female mortality quotas, open season, closed season, permit draws, right?
01:27:06.000Welcome the return of mountain lions to any suitable habitat where there's enough space for them to live without causing undue friction by them butting up against human interests.
01:27:19.000And I encourage people who are in areas that are being recolonized by mountain lions to practice some level of tolerance and use best-case practices around to avoid conflict, right?
01:27:36.000I think there's a lot of areas in this country, not a lot, but there's a handful of areas in this country that could have sustainable populations of grizzly bears, that's suitable habitat that is not being used by grizzly bears and could and should be used by grizzly bears.
01:27:49.000At the same time, I like to see, when it's appropriate, I like to see state-managed wildlife practices and then allowable harvests of animals.
01:28:00.000There's a lot of people listening to this that don't even understand that mountain lions are edible.
01:28:33.000There's a place, when I was living in Missoula, Montana, there's a place 20 miles east there called Rock Creek Lodge, and they're famous for having this big thing called the Testicle Festival in the fall, where, you know, after you castrate Steers, you know, people will fry up the nuts, right?
01:28:47.000And so the testicle festival is this big.
01:28:49.000It's kind of like turned into this big, or had turned into this kind of like biker festival.
01:28:53.000But it was this big party, and it was centered around eating deep fried cow balls.
01:28:59.000And we used to go down there all the time and go drinking.
01:29:01.000And one time I was at that same place in the spring, and this guy had a pot of what looked like pulled pork, you know, with barbecue sauce.
01:29:11.000And he had a bunch of buns out, and he was just giving it away.
01:31:16.000The people that were upset about that were really struggling to describe why it upset them.
01:31:21.000Even a politician had pointed out that the person was wearing camouflage, because traditionally in Scotland you hunt with different clothes.
01:31:27.000There was no secret that there's hunting going on out there.
01:34:06.000You're sort of acting like, when you condemn, you're sort of acting like, oh, I care about these issues, and I want to be out here, and I want to be articulating a perspective, and I know what's going on.
01:34:17.000So you're putting yourself out as a person who has opinions of value, just to let your opinion be known.
01:35:16.000I have a good sense of where we're going in terms of American wildlife, what the challenges are for American wildlife, right?
01:35:22.000I'm involved in this stuff on a daily basis.
01:35:25.000I can know all that and I can see my place in it, right?
01:35:29.000I can see what my actions are and whether my actions are helpful or hurtful for something that I care a great deal about.
01:35:37.000And if I can know that Well, and get a deer, a bear, whatever, and have it be food, and find that I'm really happy to be involved in that, that somehow is off-putting to people.
01:35:50.000But it's okay to be that I'm blind to it.
01:35:53.000I have this nagging sense of guilt about it that I haven't reckoned with.
01:36:00.000And that's an acceptable position for some people to have.
01:36:04.000It's really hard for me with people that are We're good to go.
01:36:19.000I've got to find a way to engage with it, though, and I need to get a better understanding of it because the debate isn't going away.
01:36:27.000I can't keep brushing it off as so ridiculous that it doesn't warrant my time because clearly it does warrant my time to understand that perspective.
01:36:34.000I just haven't had anybody really give it to me in a good way.
01:36:37.000I have people say, oh, but they were raised to be eaten.
01:36:56.000I don't think his position is nuanced.
01:36:59.000I think there's some willful ignorance that's a part of people that eat meat but condemn hunting.
01:37:05.000Willful in the fact that, like I said, they know that they're going to get a certain reaction out of people when they tweet about it on social media.
01:37:12.000One thing, if you're talking about someone who's out there shooting things and not eating it, okay, I get it.
01:37:23.000But if someone chooses to hunt an animal, fill in the blank, that might be a goat, might be weird to you, that they're eating this thing, but they're shooting this, it's an invasive species, it's actually very delicious, it's very edible,
01:37:39.000it's prized for its meat by some communities.
01:37:43.000You're doing this because you know that other people are ignorant about it as well.
01:37:46.000And either you're ignorant because you've never bothered to look into it, or you've bothered to look into it and you're ignoring the nuance.
01:38:19.000Helicopter gunning for invasive species.
01:38:22.000Explain to people how those goats got there in the first place because this is also very weird.
01:38:27.000A variety of ways but a lot of things were a lot of island species.
01:38:32.000This is just one way it happens where Invasive on islands would be introduced by seafarers, whalers, who would want to establish food resources along transoceanic routes so that you could put something there and come back and get it later.
01:38:52.000Early whalers used to come out of the American Northeast, like all those famous whaling villages in New England.
01:39:00.000They would go down and stop in and gather up tortoises that they could flip over in the hold of a boat and the tortoise would stay alive for months on its back.
01:39:15.000As people came to understand scurvy and realizing that fresh meat It gives you enough vitamin C to avoid scurvy that you can get from dried meat because, you know, the way the vitamin C behaves through the cooking and drying process.
01:39:31.000But, like, fresh meat you can keep from having scurvy.
01:39:33.000Meat became, like, even more important then.
01:39:35.000But people would come in and you'd, like, cut some sheep loose, cut some goats loose on an island and know that they're going to breed and build up a big population and that can be, like, a place you stop in and get food.
01:40:00.000And so you have many cases where introductions of- Non-natives, particularly non-native grazing animals, non-native predators, will wind up causing a lot of extinctions of endemic species on islands and creates all kinds of problems.
01:40:15.000And that's exactly what we're talking about with this goat in that picture.
01:40:18.000So this is an animal that must be killed.
01:40:21.000If you want healthy wildlife on that island, the native wildlife and the native fauna, I don't buy that that was the motivation of that person.
01:40:42.000What I care about is motivations of individuals.
01:41:47.000And there's a problem, too, that I view, and this is coming from...
01:41:53.000There's a problem where I think a lot of people have a very hard time empathizing with people who might be negatively impacted by wildlife as well in the question of the lion issue.
01:42:11.000So if you're a rancher and you're running cattle in an area where you're losing a lot of cattle to wolves and grizzlies, people will look and be like, you better suck it up, buddy.
01:42:59.000They were removed from Endangered Species Act protection temporarily because they had met all recovery goals.
01:43:07.000So what's the recovered population look like?
01:43:10.000They mapped out what it would look like, and we've exceeded that for many years now.
01:43:13.000And they were delisted, but then Wyoming and Idaho moved to have a very limited hunt on them.
01:43:21.000And then a federal judge blocked the delisting, and they went back into listing.
01:43:25.000What was the federal judge's motivation?
01:43:29.000Well, you want to hope that they didn't have one.
01:43:34.000You want to think that they were just looking at the details of it, but I think there's a suspicion that that person went into that knowing damn sure what they were going to do.
01:43:50.000A lot of these arguments, they come down to technicalities.
01:43:54.000No one's arguing that the population's recovered.
01:43:57.000Well, there's also the argument that the judge is probably trying to protect his own reputation because the amount of blowback that a judge would receive for allowing a hunt to go through is vastly different than blocking a hunt.
01:44:26.000People who sue to block the delisting of recovered species, they'll masquerade as...
01:44:35.000You know, ecologically conscious environmentalists, but they're just people who it's untenable to them.
01:44:41.000They can't, they're never going to accept the idea that you're going to have human exploitation of this resource, right?
01:44:47.000They masquerade as they have an environmental motivation, but it's not.
01:44:51.000It's like it's an animal rights motivation.
01:44:54.000There's a very – they have a sensitive ear in a certain federal court in Missoula, and so you'll see a lot of these cases around wolves and grizzlies.
01:45:04.000They'll get that – they'll want it done through that court because they know they're probably going to have a friendly take on it.
01:45:11.000I think it was a real – watching that happen, and that's been happening recently, I think it was a real travesty because – There's a couple things that happen culturally in areas where you create a lot of tension with people,
01:45:27.000where there's people that are living amongst these things and they're looking for some level of relief and they want to see it go to state management and they might want to see the state exercise some control over where certain populations of large predators are spreading into.
01:45:44.000And when it winds up being that their voices are not heard, And they feel that people from far away are really heavily influencing decisions that affect them on a daily basis.
01:45:54.000It winds up creating a lot of animosity toward the species, too.
01:45:58.000Think about what happened with the spotted owl, right?
01:46:00.000The spotted owl, no one perceives the spotted owl as the owl anymore.
01:46:05.000The spotted owl has become a symbol of federal overreach.
01:46:09.000And you'll find that wolves, for a while, they become a symbol of And people stop liking the animals much, and it becomes this contentious creature.
01:46:20.000And I think that we're going to head that way if we keep stepping in on wildlife issues with the mentality that we've been approaching, the wolf and grizzly issue, and the northern Great Lakes.
01:46:36.000I think you're dealing with local and then you're dealing with national, right?
01:46:40.000So the local people are going to have an issue with it because they're going to be impacted by it.
01:46:44.000It's going to be directly impacting their life.
01:46:50.000Take domestic cattle and all sorts of different things.
01:46:53.000You're going to have real issues with the people that like to go elk hunting.
01:46:56.000The populations have diminished rapidly.
01:46:59.000But the rest of the country doesn't give a shit.
01:47:02.000People in San Francisco, they don't give a fuck about it.
01:47:04.000People in Chicago aren't impacted by it.
01:47:08.000Especially if they don't have anyone in their family that hunts or anyone that has a background in hunting and they don't have a background in it themselves.
01:48:25.000Republican-controlled House passed a bill on Friday to drop legal protections for gray wolves across the lower 48 states, reopening a lengthy battle over the predator species.
01:48:33.000Long despised by farmers and ranchers, wolves were shot, trapped, poisoned out of existence in most of the U.S. in the mid-20th century.
01:48:40.000By the mid-20th century, since securing protection in the 1970s, wolves have bounced back—well, that's not really exactly what happened—great lakes of Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin as well, and the northern Rockies in Pacific Northwest.
01:48:51.000That's sort of, but they're not talking about the reintroduction.
01:48:54.000The reintroduction is the big issue, right?
01:48:56.000Well— Well, yeah, but the reintroduction was only in one area.
01:49:01.000The Northern Great Lakes, that was not a reintroduction.
01:50:54.000What I oppose is a thing that's happened now is getting Where we have populations that we agree, like, what will recovery look like?
01:51:05.000And at what point, how will we manage all the different viewpoints that are coming in, all the different, like, interests of all these varied stakeholders, and at what point will we get in there and manipulate the situation that we're creating?
01:51:18.000I just would move that in a different direction, where I think that recovered species...
01:51:25.000In this case, we're talking about wolves and grizzlies.
01:51:27.000I think that you should have that if you can do it in a sustainable way that doesn't have long-term deleterious impacts on the population, that they should be managed as a renewable resource.
01:51:37.000See, this is where people are going to have issues that don't have anything.
01:51:40.000Just even the term, manage them as a renewable resource.
01:51:45.000You mean shoot them and kill them and use their fur?
01:51:49.000I think that if you put something on the Endangered Species Act, and it goes under federal protection, and then when it reaches recovery, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says, it's recovered, it's time to hand it back to state management.
01:52:04.000If a state then decides that they're going to do some limited harvest, particularly, let's say, even if they're focusing on areas where there's very high prevalence of human-animal conflict, and the state decides to do that in some minor way, As a way to service the needs of certain segments of their population that want something to happen.
01:52:24.000I don't think that then an activist judge or environmental groups or animal rights groups should come in and be like, well, never mind.
01:52:34.000We're going to pretend that they're not recovered now because we want to prevent the state from doing something that we think is unsavory.
01:52:40.000Well, the thought process behind the people that support blocking the hunt is that if you leave these animals alone, naturally they're going to find balance.
01:52:49.000And that the wolves will kill the elk until there's not enough elk for them to sustain their populations and the numbers of their offspring will dwindle and they'll get to some sort of a sustainable level.
01:53:00.000Yeah, but we live in a heavily manipulated kind of man-made environment now.
01:53:09.000The idea that we would just let things run their course and watch what happens isn't going to happen.
01:53:16.000A lot of grizzlies every year are still going to get in trouble.
01:55:28.000All of the things that were all these horrible things that were going to happen when the states resumed management of wolves didn't materialize.
01:56:13.000It was very effective to bring in limited regulated hunting had the desired effect on how wolves were using the landscape and ways in which they were interacting and avoiding humans.
01:56:35.000You're going to eventually, I mean, it kind of depends on how the political winds blow, but you're eventually going to wind up with it there, and you're not going to see wolves vanish from the landscape.
01:56:47.000If grizzly bears wind up doing it, you're still going to see gradually expanding populations of grizzly bears despite the fact that they're using limited harvest to achieve certain management objectives.
01:56:57.000It's not going to be the end of the world.
01:57:00.000Yeah, I agree with you, and I think the grizzly bear thing, you probably have the same sort of situation where the grizzlies will eventually think of people as a threat, and it'll probably save it for everybody.
01:57:28.000So time will tell where that winds up.
01:57:32.000Well, we see it in BC where they've just taken it away.
01:57:35.000And they've taken it away in a very irrational way because they have a large population of grizzlies in BC. It's very large.
01:57:43.000And for people that live up there, that hunt them, this is kind of scaring the shit out of them.
01:57:48.000That all of a sudden you've taken this away.
01:57:50.000First of all, it was a source of income for a lot of these people that would guide them.
01:57:56.000But it was also a smart thing to control the population and keep them away from humans.
01:58:03.000Well, I watch that closely, though I don't feel it being another country, you don't have that sense of being that other country, you don't have that sense that you could influence.
01:58:17.000It's kind of like watching something happen in a distant way, and you don't feel it as closely, and I don't know all the factors at play as well as I do here.
01:58:26.000Well, I have some friends that live up there.
01:58:28.000My friend Mike Hawkridge, who's a guide up there, he's told me horror stories about grizzlies.
01:58:33.000I'd shoot one trying to get into his cabin from like six feet away.
01:59:12.000We're engaged in a debate about conflicting views on wildlife, and these animals step in to this debate, and the debate centers around them, and it winds up being bigger than a debate about Grizzlies.
01:59:30.000Bigger than a debate about bison or buffalo, right?
02:00:19.000And right now, this argument about American wildlife and what is our relationship to it has found its place to live right now around large predators.
02:00:30.000And in Scotland, it's found its way to live around a feral goat on an island.
02:01:24.000It's like this tremendous privilege that you're able to...
02:01:29.000Kind of grow up to have, you know, to have this, like, intense interest in a subject and this intense interest in a lifestyle and have the ability to, like, introduce people to all these different ideas, right?
02:01:40.000So, yeah, I can have those two things simultaneous.
02:01:44.000The kind of longing to be home more but enjoying being out.
02:01:50.000I think if the longing to be home more would override that someday, it might change it.
02:01:56.000But right now, I just have seen so many things that I'm happy to have seen.
02:02:02.000And to think about a future of not accumulating those experiences at the rapid rate that I've accumulated them kind of bums me out a little bit.
02:02:56.000And then to eat the way I eat and live the way I eat, I feel fortunate all the time.
02:03:06.000Well, I think you're very important because there's a real lack of well-read, articulate people that support your position that are in the media.
02:03:17.000I mean, you've got a lot of these shows that are on these...
02:03:22.000The hunting networks, they appeal to a very narrow bandwidth.
02:03:28.000And this narrow bandwidth is, you know, it's like your stereotypical idea of what hunting is to a lot of people.
02:03:41.000So they'll flip through the channels, they'll watch that for a few minutes, you see someone hooting and hollering after they shoot something, and they get this bad taste in their mouth about it.
02:03:51.000Whereas I tell people all the time, if you really want to get an understanding about what hunting is about, I always recommend your show.
02:04:00.000Because your narration and your reverence for what you're doing and the animals and just your appreciation for how cool the experience is and how wild it is to, you know, for lack of a better term,
02:04:17.000And to be in the pursuit of these things and then to take these things, these wild creatures and feed your family and have it become a part of your life and to sustain yourself with it primarily.
02:04:30.000You're giving a perspective that I don't think is available.
02:05:56.000If it does feel that way and that seems to be true, how is it that, like, why is that, right?
02:06:00.000And it was pushing at those edges that I eventually developed a way in which I talk about it.
02:06:05.000Now, I meet all kinds of people who live that same lifestyle that I lived growing up.
02:06:10.000And when I talk to them, a thing that they appreciate is just that someone is articulating to them something that they felt to be true and knew to be true but just hadn't had the time or, you know, I didn't have the time or ability to really go out and express it.
02:06:27.000I would never want to act like I certainly have not invented some way of thinking about it.
02:06:32.000Aldo Leopold, Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, Throughout history, Jim Harris and Tom McGuane for contemporary writers, there's been a lot of people who have been saying and talking about and experiencing the outdoors in a way.
02:06:50.000I'm working toward articulating and expressing something that has been in existence for a long time.
02:06:57.000If people see negative stereotypes when they're on YouTube or see negative stereotypes on certain television shows, a lot of that stuff is self-feeding.
02:07:06.000I think a lot of that stuff gets created because it does have a shock value to it.
02:07:10.000And I would think that minus the camera, a lot of activities that people might feel are abhorrent might not even be taking place, where there is a hamming it up.
02:07:50.000Hunters are under attack in a lot of ways in a lot of places, and I think that there's a way when you feel like you're being attacked, you feel like you're being pigeonholed, stereotyped, a response is to cram it right back down.
02:08:51.000And maybe lack the ability to look at it from an outside perspective because it's been a part of their life, their whole life, and they don't want to justify it.
02:09:03.000There's also the weird thing that as much as you can appreciate hunting and think of it as an ethical way to acquire meat, everybody can't do it.
02:09:19.000There's no responsibility for you to acknowledge that.
02:09:22.000But it's something that gets brought up when people talk about how ethical acquisition of meat is really like either hunting or you'd have to raise something yourself and be absolutely aware or get something from a farmer who's You know,
02:09:42.000completely ethical from birth to death, and you have to be comfortable with that.
02:09:48.000But the most ethical, in my opinion, is the hunting.
02:09:50.000But then people always say, yeah, but everybody can't hunt.
02:10:06.000But no, certainly, everyone could enter into hunting.
02:10:10.000The hunting game, you know, you could come in and hunt, it would just mean that you had a much larger pool of people after a limited resource, and that limited resource would be allocated in a different way.
02:10:24.000You could have total participation, and it would just be that every person's slice of the pie would be much smaller.
02:10:34.000When a state looks at what's a turkey harvest that our state could support, they break the state up into a bunch of different units, they look at population trends, and they determine how many turkeys can we afford to harvest without impacting the turkey population.
02:10:50.000If everyone in the state wanted a chance, you'd still wind up with the same number.
02:10:55.000You'd wind up with the same number of turkeys being killed.
02:10:58.000It would just be that you would have less opportunity.
02:11:00.000You'd have to wait longer to get your turn.
02:11:03.000So it's not that everybody can't, but it's not even really a point because everybody will not.
02:11:09.000When I do the stuff that I do, like in writing a wild game cookbook, I'm doing two things.
02:11:14.000In writing a wild game cookbook, I'm doing the main thing that I feel is the most important part of my job or the most important part of what I am is I'm having a conversation with people who live this lifestyle.
02:11:24.000Like, those are people that I relate to.
02:11:30.000Want to represent the world in a way that enhances their lives, provide education, and share my experiences with an audience of people that I recommend as a tribe that I'm part of, which would be like American hunters and anglers.
02:11:44.000And I'm presenting them, like doing a cookbook, I'm presenting them best practices, how to live the best version of a wild game lifestyle that they can, and here's a way to think about and approach wild game.
02:11:54.000But also, the secondary part of what I'm doing is presenting a world to people who might be unfamiliar with it.
02:12:01.000And yes, do I have the hope that people will, like, say, read this book...
02:12:09.000And then be like, man, I want to participate in this lifestyle.
02:12:13.000That could mean as much as them walking down to the local river in their city and flipping over rocks and picking up crayfish.
02:12:18.000But it is introducing them, bringing them into the natural world, and bringing them into engagement with nature.
02:12:25.000And I do view and hope that that will happen.
02:12:28.000Will it happen in some grand scale where we'll have hundreds of millions of hunters in this country?
02:12:34.000But I do think that it is important that we do have more people involved.
02:12:40.000We, in large measure, we fund much of our wildlife work and management from law enforcement, disease research, on and on.
02:12:49.000We fund that stuff through hunting and fishing licenses and through excise taxes on sporting goods equipment.
02:12:56.000The more people that are engaged with this activity, I think the better it winds up being for American wildlife.
02:13:02.000I agree, but the idea is that everyone can't do it, so the idea that you're saying that this is how you ethically acquire meat, this is not a solution for everyone.
02:13:16.000No, but I don't say that this is the only way.
02:13:53.000There's almost no other solution than the solution that we're doing right now, unless they come up with some sort of a lab-created meat or whatever the fuck they're going to come up with next, which they are doing.
02:14:17.000But yeah, I watch that kind of stuff, and I'm curious about it, but I don't take it as a personal insult by any stretch, man.
02:14:24.000If everybody switched to lab-created meat, but I still had the ability to continue eating how I eat and living how I live, I don't view that as being a future problem.
02:14:36.000Rocky Mountain Elk Federation has reintroduced...
02:14:42.000They've introduced elk to a lot of different places and made sustainable populations that are now hunted.
02:14:48.000And this is a beautiful thing, and I'd hope that they continue to spread and continue to do that.
02:14:54.000Do you think it's possible that other game animals could be reintroduced to places where they would develop such a large population that we could sustain maybe even double the amount of hunters that we have now?
02:15:33.000Elk are missing from 80 plus percent of their historic range in the lower 48. Right?
02:15:39.000But we have, you know, at various times we have a quarter million of them living in Colorado or, you know, some states got 100,000, whatever.
02:15:49.000You got now perhaps 20,000 living in Kentucky.
02:16:21.000There were states where there was no deer hunting.
02:16:27.000At the time of European contact, you had turkeys in 39 states.
02:16:29.000It got whittled down to turkeys in 19 states.
02:16:32.000You now have turkey hunting seasons in 49 states.
02:16:35.000We've done a tremendous job of recovering wildlife Particularly a tremendous job to demonstrate what happens to an animal that hunters value and love and are able to use as a renewable resource.
02:16:52.000Those species tend to really enjoy a lot of protections and they thrive because people are vested in their best interests.
02:16:57.000So yeah, we've created turkey hunting seasons in 30 states.
02:17:04.000So, yes, you can do things with wildlife and create resources.
02:17:26.000When we fill in the map on elk, when the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation looks at filling in the map on elk...
02:17:32.000You've got to sell people on the idea that you're going to recover elk.
02:17:35.000And there's a lot of resistance to recovering wildlife because a lot of stuff is inconvenient to have around.
02:17:41.000They do a great job of brokering deals with states and finding places where a state maybe has a patch of habitat they think could support the animals and providing the expertise and financial support and all that stuff to bring in those things.
02:17:53.000But generally you wind up where, because of settlement, In cities and suburban areas, we wind up with fewer and fewer places where we can go and do it.
02:18:02.000So to really fill in the map on recovering elk across all that range where they're supposed to be, I don't know that we'll get there.
02:18:09.000But we've gotten there in a lot of other stuff.
02:18:11.000And there's like the Wild Sheep Foundation, right?
02:18:13.000They're trying to do the same thing with bighorn sheep.
02:18:16.000There, it's not even social attitudes.
02:18:35.000And people, to go in and say to someone who's running sheep on a mountain, domestic sheep on a mountain, and say, hey, no insult to you and no insult to your...
02:18:46.000Four bears who've been sheep ranchers here for 120 years or whatever, but we would like to try to recover American wildlife and bring bighorns back to this mountain range, and that's going to require you moving these sheep out of the way.
02:20:15.000What they're essentially trying to do is reintroduce a bunch of animals into a gigantic chunk of land, and they continue to buy up more of this land.
02:20:24.000And aren't they running block management on this as well?
02:20:30.000There's a lot of suspicions and controversy, and it's an idea that a lot of people are uneasy with, but the problem—not the problem.
02:20:42.000The thing is, it's like people who are— They have funding and have a thing where when land comes for sale, they buy it.
02:20:50.000And the goal of buying up the land is to turn it back into wildlife habitat for native wildlife.
02:20:59.000And the controversy around it stems from the fact that some people...
02:21:05.000I don't like to see areas that supported traditional economies in rural areas like cattle ranching and to see these areas returning to a wild landscape.
02:21:22.000From the hunter perspective, there's a lot of places that people used to be able to hunt, and the American Prairie Reserve is allowing hunting to go on, and people are coming in and saying, well, they need to assure us that hunting will be allowed here in perpetuity.
02:21:38.000And because we're suspicious about what's going on.
02:21:41.000So there's a lot of, like, you hear about it in so many ways, but the core mission is something that most people, when you look at it, the core mission is something that most people are going to look at and be pretty comfortable with.
02:21:52.000Be like, okay, you're a guy or an organization, you have money, and when a ranch comes up for sale, you buy it on the open market.
02:22:45.000It's been going on for quite a while, right?
02:22:46.000Oh, the long-term play is that over time you would assemble a chunk of the Great Plains that is far bigger than Yellowstone National Park that supports a thriving population of bison, wolves,
02:23:02.000grizzly bears, You know, in a park-like setting.
02:23:10.000But it doesn't come without, you know, it doesn't come without its own bits of controversy.
02:23:18.000And, yeah, again, it's like, it's a thing that everyone has an opinion about.
02:23:22.000There was a version, they don't like to talk about, there was a version of this called the Buffalo Commons that happened long ago where a There was a social scientist named, I think it was Frank Popper, by the last name of Popper, and he was looking at demographic patterns on the Great Plains.
02:23:39.000And he was observing the ways in which the areas on the Great Plains where the population was shrinking.
02:23:48.000So there's a lot of counties on the Great Plains where through various long-term agricultural trends and other issues where the human population is rapidly shrinking, rapidly declining.
02:24:01.000And this sociologist brought up this idea that if these trends continue, You're going to have this rare case in which a landscape sort of accidentally rewilded, okay?
02:24:16.000Where everyone left, which is not a story we're familiar with when we look at what happens to wild lands across the world, right?
02:24:24.000The general story is like people move in and wildlife moves out.
02:24:26.000So this idea became like the Buffalo Commons, okay?
02:24:30.000And it just so happens that that That idea kind of centered around this area around Jordan, Montana, right?
02:24:39.000Because you have large tracts of federally managed public land up there.
02:24:44.000You had a lot of ranch land that wasn't that expensive and people could buy it.
02:24:50.000And that was like the seed of the idea.
02:24:51.000I think that now there was such an unpopular notion because it had to do with like economic decay, right?
02:24:57.000And shrinking towns and reduced resources for public education and all the kind of stuff that comes from having an economy that's not thriving.
02:25:04.000But over time, that Buffalo Commons idea kind of segued into this American Prairie Reserve idea, and it happened to be sort of centered around the same chunk of land.
02:25:15.000Bill Kittredge, a Western writer who deals with a lot of landscape and environmental issues, was talking about...
02:25:23.000In the wake of the Buffalo Commons idea and Popper's work was talking about going to Jordan, Montana and talking about the Buffalo Commons is a great way to get your ass kicked.
02:25:32.000Because it's this idea like if culturally like the agricultural producers and ranchers were celebrated and they made a civilization out of the wilderness and they brought in animals and created economies and created communities and for someone to now say you know thanks but no thanks bro.
02:25:51.000We'd rather go back and eliminate your presence on this landscape.
02:25:56.000And we don't, in fact, value what you did.
02:25:58.000And we're going to try as hard as we can to undo what you did.
02:26:02.000Because we now view it as that your people did the wrong thing.
02:26:06.000And we're going to correct that wrong.
02:26:08.000And to some people, it's like this insulting idea.
02:26:14.000To a lot of other people, they celebrate it.
02:26:16.000Because they're like, hey, if it's for sale and I buy it, It's mine.
02:26:21.000I could see it from both perspectives.
02:26:23.000It's very much like the hunting thing.
02:26:25.000If you're a part of it, you have a deep history in it, you understand that your perspective of ranching is from a rancher, whereas people on the outside conveniently can be ignorant about it and go, ah, fuck those ranchers.
02:26:39.000My perspective on wildlife has been it's a thing that you care about, you work to conserve, You want to have it on the landscape, and you also eat a lot of it.
02:26:54.000I'm glad that you can't sell wild game.
02:26:57.000I'm glad that market hunting is not a thing.
02:26:59.000However, I would really love it if there was a restaurant where you could go, where you could buy really well-prepared wild game dishes, like a really well-prepared bear.
02:27:57.000Yeah, you can go and buy the farmed-raised version.
02:28:00.000But then it's, you know, that's one, yeah.
02:28:03.000Good luck getting a farm-raised blueberry black bear.
02:28:06.000Yeah, well, no, not that case, but like, you know, you can buy, but then it's, that's a whole other conversation around the captive cervid industry, but yeah, you can buy elk that are raised in a ranch environment, right?
02:28:17.000Yeah, I mean, as long as you're getting it from New Zealand, you're not dealing with CWD and a lot of the other issues that they're dealing with in America, right?
02:28:33.000Yeah, but the whole New Zealand thing, that was an interesting thing that you brought up on your podcast recently, how New Zealand, there have been talks about actual eradication.
02:28:43.000And one of the arguments that hunters always use is, hey, we're controlling the population.
02:28:47.000This is a good service that we're providing.
02:28:50.000And then the government comes along and says, well, how about we take care of that?
02:28:53.000And everybody's like, hey, hey, hey, not so fast.
02:30:13.000And then later when people come up and they talk about, well, you know, we're going to get serious about this and we're going to really actively, with the goal of totally eliminating these species, people are justifiably made uneasy about it because it's a thing that they've come to appreciate and rely on and a resource that they want to use.
02:30:34.000And now they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute!
02:30:39.000And it winds up putting you in this weird, like, it winds up putting you in a weird rhetorical position.
02:30:46.000But I understand where they're coming from.
02:30:47.000Because if you could live there and you could agree that we're going to have some small number of them on the landscape and we're going to use those and we're going to hunt those and eat those, I also, if someone said, hey, they're gone now, I would be bummed.
02:31:06.000I hunt turkeys in a lot of those 10 states that didn't historically have turkeys and that do now.
02:31:12.000And I generally have a perspective of trying to preserve native wildlife and trying to control non-natives because I don't want to wind up with sort of a, this like monolithic wildlife pattern where these same super resilient adaptive species such as Canada geese and rats and white-tailed deer take over the entire country.
02:31:29.000Yes, I want the variety, so I'm generally antagonistic toward non-natives.
02:31:34.000But if someone came and said, okay, you know what, we're going to actually go in and kill off all the turkeys in those 10 states that historically didn't have turkeys, I would say, really?
02:31:48.000Because I've kind of grown to really like those turkeys and they're not really causing a problem.
02:31:52.000And I think that some people, you know, if you're a New Zealand hunter, an Australian hunter, I don't think anyone's arguing there should be no control, but I think that they're like, let's find a balance.
02:32:02.000I think we can find a balance where there's some availability of animals on the landscape since they've been here since the beginning of our, you know, experience on this continent.
02:32:11.000If there's some availability of animals, let's find like a reasonable compromise here.
02:32:15.000Well, that was one of the discussions as well about Hawaii, right?
02:32:18.000Like, on some of the Hawaiian islands, eradicating the pigs.
02:32:21.000And then the Hawaiians were saying, well, they've been here as long as us.
02:32:40.000Dude, I always like, again man, I always instinctively, when I hear stuff, I instinctively lean in from the perspective of...
02:32:52.000I instinctively lean in from the perspective of the hunter and angler.
02:32:56.000And I love all these little debates, and I think that they're all really helpful and interesting.
02:33:04.000But no, I feel like I can recognize their pain.
02:33:08.000And I can also look far away and laugh at the absurdity of it.
02:33:11.000I even had a guy write me from Australia and say, this is a real bummer, because it exposes us To the thing where we got to say like, yeah, you know what?
02:33:21.000I wasn't really just doing it because I'm trying to help the ecosystem by eliminating non-natives.
02:33:27.000I actually like having some of them around and now I just got to come out and say that and that's a bummer.
02:33:33.000I really do wish there was some sort of a restaurant.
02:33:36.000I think that would be a great place for people to get a perspective.
02:33:42.000There's no way to do that, though, huh?
02:33:56.000Are pushing for this idea that in areas that have too many whitetail deer, there's people who are really pushing to reopen up the sale of wild harvested deer.
02:35:01.000And I think that a lot of people who enjoy access to certain areas now to go hunting, to hunt for themselves and their family, that the minute you made it be that those deer had a dollar value attached to them, that there would be a lot less opportunity for people who choose to hunt to feed themselves.
02:35:22.000Because it would all of a sudden be like, why would I let you come in or allow you to come in and use a resource when I'm just going to do my best now to collect it up And sell it.
02:35:32.000And so, again, for aesthetic reasons, for what it would mean for hunters, for our perception of our relationship with our resources, I'm extremely uncomfortable with it.
02:35:46.000It's an idea that keeps popping up because we have, in some areas...
02:35:51.000And I hate to say that, I hate to talk about, oh, there's too many deer, there's too much this, too much that, because by whose measurement?
02:35:56.000But in some areas we really do, especially when you start getting into issues like Lyme disease prevalence and ticks and starvation and just the possibility of other disease outbreaks and the spread of certain wildlife diseases.
02:36:09.000There's some areas that by any reasonable measurement we have too many deer.
02:36:31.000I really do appreciate that you do it because I think it's my favorite podcast to recommend to people that want, if I want them to get an understanding of hunting without Even watching it, just listening to you talk.
02:36:45.000Because you have so many guests on where you might not even be talking about hunting.
02:37:02.000And I am glad that you talked me into doing it.
02:37:05.000In terms of all the things I do, TV, writing.
02:37:10.000It's the thing that I enjoy doing it the most.
02:37:15.000There's a lot of things I enjoy having done it more, but the thing that I enjoy actually doing it, I just have a smile on my face doing it.
02:38:14.000It releases this week on November 20, but it's available for pre-order everywhere.
02:38:18.000And it's broken into a bunch of chapters where it has big game, small furred game like rabbits, hares, squirrels, upland birds, waterfowl, freshwater fish, saltwater fish, shellfish, and crustaceans.
02:38:34.000Reptiles and amphibians, so all your bullfrog stuff is in there.
02:38:37.000And you want to talk about a species that's spreading all across the country.
02:39:02.000We talk about all this kind of stuff in the book.
02:39:04.000And it explains everything from how to break down and process and freeze stuff.
02:39:10.000And then for everything, there are many recipes.
02:39:13.000And the recipes walk you through how to use the entire thing.
02:39:15.000So for your whitetail deer, everything from the tongue to the rear shank.
02:39:23.000How, like, specific recipes on how to do it, and also just general best practices and guidelines around how to handle the ingredients, and then all the stuff around all the substitutions.
02:39:36.000So there's no such thing as, like, an elk heart recipe, right?
02:39:39.000It's like how to, like, handle game hearts, whether it's mule deer, whitetail, whatever, like how to approach a heart, and an attitude toward wild game that is not, that's cut-specific, not species-specific.
02:39:53.000And with fish, too, I'm not comfortable with the idea of, like, this is a walleye recipe, or this is a bluegill recipe, but how to handle, like, varieties of freshwater fish and, like, what kind of recipes you can use that are interchangeable, depending on where you live and what you use,
02:41:28.000So they were just looking at the unusual aspects of his diet and pointing to that, and it's not that scientific.
02:41:34.000Yeah, and the article got a lot more love when it was that some squirrel hunter died from eating squirrel brains than it did when the later subsequent pieces came out where everybody was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
02:42:57.000But in your state, jackrabbits are open.
02:42:59.000For instance, your state, jackrabbits are managed as non-game, meaning there's no bag limit and open year-round.
02:43:06.000Cottontails, snowshoes have different management.
02:43:08.000In a lot of states, pine squirrels are red squirrels, which aren't commonly hunted, but they're more regarded as things that get into people's houses, but they're not hunted for meat.
02:43:16.000They'd be listed as a non-game species, but fox squirrels and gray squirrels would be as a game species.
02:43:21.000So in New York, I think the bag limit when I was living there was six per day.
02:44:05.000But, yeah, most places they have them, and they're managed, and you go out and buy the small game license for $12 or whatever, get your hunter safety, get yourself a.22 or a shotgun, and you can become a squirrel man.
02:45:12.000It's in the book and it's in the movie where the Tommy Lee Jones character is describing a dream in which they're riding through a snowstorm and his father rides ahead with a horn of fire.
02:45:20.000And I always wondered how many people heard that and had no idea what he was talking about.
02:45:27.000But what a common practice used to be is you take a horn, buffalo horn, cow horn, and it's hollow because it grows off a protrusion of the skull called the horn core.
02:45:39.000And you pop the horn off and it's hollow.
02:45:40.000And what people would do is when you left your campfire in the morning, you would fill that horn with embers and cap it.
02:45:47.000But there'd be a little pinhole in it just to let a little bit of air in there so it could continue to smolder.
02:45:52.000And you'd carry that horn all day full of embers.
02:45:55.000And at night, to start a new fire, you would dump the horn out and rekindle your fire.
02:46:00.000So when he talks about his father riding out ahead of him with a horn of fire, what that's meant to say is that he knew his father would be waiting out ahead of him with a fire burning.