In this episode of the Meat Eaters podcast, we're joined by Joe Rogan, host of the popular Meat Eater podcast, to talk about his new podcast, Bear Grease, and some of the things you can do with it. Joe talks about the history of bear grease, how it was used as currency on the frontier, and how it can be used to make a lot of useful things, like soap made from bear fat, and some other things you should probably try to make with it, like a dish that's made from the fat of a bear! Plus, Joe gives us some helpful tips on how to make your own bear grease from it, and we talk about what it's like to cook with it and what it does to your skin and hair, and why it's one of the most delicious things you'll ever eat. We hope you enjoy this episode, and if you do, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, and tell a friend about what you think of it! Cheers, Joe and the Meat Eater Podcast! Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. Produced by Ian Dorsch. Please rate and review this episode on iTunes and tag us in the comments section below. Thank you so much for all your support and good vibes! Timestamps: 1: 2:00 - What's good to eat? 3:30 - What do you like about it? 4:15 - How do you think it tastes good? 5:40 - What would you like to eat for dinner? 6: What does it taste like? 7:20 - What are you looking for? 8:00 9:30 - What is your favorite thing to cook? 11: What's your favorite kind of meal? 13:40 14:00 | What is it good for you? 15:50 - How does it smell? 16: Is it good to cook it better? 17: What is good for your skin? 19: What do they like to make me? 21:10 - What kind of food? 22:00 -- what do you want me to make? 27:30 -- what are you working on? 26:40 -- what would you want to make you cook it again?
00:00:17.000It's always interesting to meet someone in person when you've heard them on a podcast.
00:00:20.000I've heard you, I don't know, a hundred times on the Meat Eater podcast, so to see you in person.
00:00:26.000And then to start listening to your podcast, which is Bear Grease, which is...
00:00:33.000A hilarious name for a podcast, and if people don't know, bear grease rendered bear fat is actually a very valuable thing, and it's great to cook with.
00:00:45.000I'll never forget when I found out about bear hunting, about bears being good to eat, was actually from Steve Rinella.
00:01:04.000And so when he's breaking down the bear and taking the fat off, the fat is actually purple because this bear has been eating so many blueberries that it's in its flesh.
00:02:35.000And so there was a time when bear grease, bear lard was super valuable on the frontier before refrigeration because bear fat stayed, didn't go rancid as quickly as pork lard.
00:02:48.000So like on it, you would have pork and bear would be essentially the places where you would get it.
00:03:02.000Just whatever the constituency of bear lard is, it just stays good for that long.
00:03:09.000So, going back to this metaphor of the name of bear grease, in our podcast, we're exploring things, and even in the tagline of the podcast, we say that we're exploring things that are forgotten but relevant.
00:03:27.000And we're searching for insight in unlikely places.
00:03:30.000And so like this bear grease, I brought you some stuff that you can do with bear grease.
00:04:21.000It's a metal hydroxide traditionally obtained by leaching wood ashes or a strong alkali, which is highly soluble in water-producing caustic and basic solutions.
00:05:29.000Sometimes I'm amazed at how, you know, kind of like hygiene conscious us bear hunters are, like making soap and stuff.
00:05:36.000Because the other thing I brought you, Joe, and I know you don't You don't run a beard, but this is some bear grease beard oil that I made.
00:05:44.000And so that is a combination of three things.
00:05:47.000So it's cheating just a little bit, but it's one part bear oil, one part almond oil, one part jojoba oil, and then essential oils.
00:05:58.000And I mean, you can drip it out, put it on your hands.
00:07:19.000There was a time when, so there's an archaic unit of measure of a bear oil.
00:07:24.000They used to take the tanned neck hide of a deer, which would have been a part of the buckskin that wasn't usable, the neck hide, and they would have sewed it together, and they would have used it to have stored bear oil, and they called it an eel.
00:07:41.000So they would make a container out of it, like a wine flask almost.
00:09:20.000I would venture to say that 90%, maybe 80% of black bears that are killed in North America, their hides are tanned.
00:09:30.000They have, usually, especially in the fall, have an incredible amount of fat, which can be rendered down into all these incredible, healthy, usable products.
00:10:11.000And they found that pretty fascinating.
00:10:13.000They personally use bear fat for cooking and things like that, and they cook a lot of bear, and they're interested in a lot of bear recipes, but they say that they make trades with the elders, and they deliver them bear fat.
00:12:08.000We should probably tell people, because all this stuff sounds odd, because when you're talking about hunting in North America, to most people that don't hunt, they think of deer hunting.
00:12:19.000But during the days where people were traveling across the country, settling, and the pioneers, they mostly ate bear, and they were using deer for the skins.
00:12:33.000Which is kind of crazy when you think about it today.
00:14:46.000Why that makes sense that right now that people would begin to be re-interested in hunting bears is that we've got more people on this continent than we've ever had, obviously.
00:15:00.000We've got more overlap of bear country and humans.
00:15:05.000We literally are up against the wall in terms of managing these animals.
00:15:34.000A natural bear density in the Ozarks or Ouachita Mountains would be, let's just say, one bear per square mile.
00:15:40.000And that would be a fairly high population of bears at a landscape level.
00:15:45.000Well, if you have two bears per square mile, that might not seem much to you or me, because we're not bears.
00:15:51.000But long term, that is not sustainable.
00:15:54.000And bears replicate, basically, a healthy population of bears is going to increase by over 10% per year.
00:16:02.000So if you have 100 bears, and the next year you're going to have 110, and then you can do the math.
00:16:09.000One time I did the math, and I want to say within 12 years of population, even including mortality, Natural mortality could double in like 15 years if it was just released.
00:16:26.000You know, when you start doing the math, 10% per year.
00:16:29.000And then you have to do the math with fawns and elk calves and all the different animals they're going to eat and what kind of impact that's going to have.
00:16:56.000I mean, the American frontier was fueled by bear meat and bear fat.
00:16:59.000It sounds so crazy to say, but it really is true.
00:17:01.000And it took me a while to understand that.
00:17:03.000It took me a while of reading historical accounts of these travelers and these people that were making their way, these pioneers, making their way across the country, and what they ate.
00:17:50.000Mountain lions went from—they basically covered the entire North American continent, except in the real far North Arctic.
00:17:59.000But, you know, since that time, habitat fragmentation and mountain lion populations are now—they're thriving in the places where they are in the West, and they're moving back into the East, which we did a podcast on.
00:18:21.000In the eastern United States, full of bear.
00:18:24.000I mean, the eastern deciduous forest, which would essentially be from...
00:18:29.000Western Arkansas, all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, all the way to Maine, all the way to Florida, all the way down to East Texas, like one-third of the United States would be the eastern deciduous forest.
00:18:39.000And how did they, like, was bear hunting a thing in Europe when the early settlers came here?
00:18:46.000I don't think there was a lot of, like, I don't see a lot of connection between our bear hunting culture and European bear hunting culture.
00:18:55.000Do you think we or the pioneers learned it from Native Americans?
00:20:38.000But sous-vide, the thing about it is you could go to work and just leave it, sit out there on the counter, and it'll cook for eight hours for you.
00:21:02.000All I've ever done with bear is either slow cook it like a ham and make sure it's thoroughly cooked, put a meat thermometer in it, or I've made Ranella's bear candy recipe.
00:22:45.000Okay, so when I got to the section on Black Bear, they had a full chapter on Black Bear.
00:22:52.000And they started, they called them taboos.
00:22:54.000But okay, so when a bear is found, and these are like...
00:23:00.000Kind of spiritual rules that they use in bear hunting.
00:23:04.000But if you find a bear, you must speak very cryptically about your plans to go back.
00:23:11.000Because the spirit of the bear is aware and he'll hear you.
00:23:15.000So if I went out hunting and I found a bear sign, but I didn't kill the bear, and I came back to camp, came back to my house that night, and I wanted you to come with me, I would be like, Tomorrow, I would like for you to come with me around the mountain just to see what we can see.
00:23:34.000And you would know exactly what that meant.
00:24:38.000There's a thing about animals, when you are staring at them, I feel like they get some sort of a little frequency, like a little beep-beep-beep, a little message from the distance where they get uncomfortable.
00:24:52.000I read these to Jan Spatelis, and he kind of functionalized every one of these.
00:24:58.000He was like, well, of course you don't want to point.
00:25:01.000He's like, think about the movement that you're making when you're pointing.
00:26:11.000What I mean by winded, for people who don't know what we're talking about, the wind came from behind you and reached the bear, so you're sent, reached the bear from eight football fields away, which is fucking bananas.
00:26:53.000The wind is hitting us directly in the back of the neck, and it's basically creating a wind channel that directed our scent right to that bear, where if it had been open country, I feel like by the time our scent got there, it would have dissipated.
00:28:29.000But this is the way I've heard it described to me that made a lot of sense.
00:28:33.000Like, if you were to walk into your house and there was a dish of lasagna cooking in the oven, and you walked in and you're like, I smell lasagna.
00:28:44.000It's just what would register, lasagna.
00:28:46.000A bear would walk in and he would say...
00:30:42.000They don't, they very rarely keep the skins of bears.
00:30:46.000They don't want a bear skin in their house because they think it holds like authority or power.
00:30:52.000So the bear hide is not used as, which you'd think in the Arctic that this would be like an essential for their clothing and whatnot, but they're killing caribou and other things.
00:31:03.000I think I stumbled across the eye slitting on a video of Make the Prayers to the Raven.
00:31:17.000And as I get down to these last two, I'll tell you kind of my conclusion of why this is intriguing to me and how I think it relates to me as someone who I don't...
00:38:55.000He had the viral video of him walking out.
00:38:58.000So I interviewed Todd, and then I went and was trained by a professional pistol shooter that talked to me about the sequence of drawing a pistol and shooting.
00:39:10.000And then we went to the Montana Fish and Wildlife, and I did a bear simulation, bear charge simulation with a remote-controlled bear that will only go 23 miles per hour.
00:39:26.000Okay, I need to see that remote-controlled bear.
00:39:28.000Yeah, well, Joe, what was wild about it was...
00:39:34.000I mean, to be responsible in grizz country, and to be clear with people, like black bears, I'm not going to say black bears are not dangerous, because black bears do kill people and do attack people.
00:39:48.000It is much less likely that a black bear is going to attack you as a brown or grizzly bear, which in the United States, brown grizzly bears are only pretty much in one general area, which would be in We're good to go.
00:40:30.000Bear spray is highly effective, but there are times when you don't want to shoot a bear with bear spray.
00:40:37.000There are times when it is life-threatening, and a bear is trying to kill you, and you need to take lethal action upon that bear.
00:41:47.000I mean, for sure, a bigger caliber is going to be more effective at stopping a bear.
00:41:52.000But that is usually not the limiting factor in a bear attack scenario.
00:41:57.000Because that big, bigger caliber gun, you may only be able to get one shot off accurately, where with a smaller caliber gun, like say a 9mm, you might be able to get off four accurate shots.
00:42:10.000And so the idea, you know, what we say is that choose the handgun that you shoot the best.
00:43:25.000My firearms expert, Jake, on this video, and I haven't seen the ballistics, and there's so many variables with ballistics and different things, but he said a 9mm actually penetrates better in some situations than a.40 caliber.
00:43:48.000So, you know, there's this physics involved between a smaller diameter bullet that has less mass, but, you know, I mean, it's just physics.
00:48:38.000Do you think that the attribution was due to the fact that they had these complete superhuman abilities in terms of, like, their senses, their sense of smell, and...
00:48:47.000You know, again, the full context of the book, you see that they do this kind of stuff with a lot of animals.
00:48:57.000They have, like, everything has a way that it's done.
00:49:02.000And that's really what I kind of appreciated about it, is that they pay attention, and that they had just a scripted way that they did things, which I... That ultimately turned to respect towards that animal,
00:49:57.000And I really love how your podcast is produced, too.
00:50:00.000Whoever's editing it and putting music in it, they're doing a great job because it takes you to a different place with the music and the way everything is, the sound is edited into it.
00:50:36.000It's really interesting and it transports you to think about what it was like for those people that relied on these animals for their food and how Incredibly risky it was.
00:50:46.000Yeah So that episode was called death of a bear hunter.
00:50:50.000Yeah, I think it's episode 4 and We learned a lot on that episode.
00:50:56.000A lot of this has just kind of been an experiment to see how these stories come together.
00:51:01.000And it's been an incredible journey for me.
00:51:04.000I've had the time of my life making these podcasts.
00:51:32.000The guy that was working with me on it, he was like, he was kind of like, okay, like, you know, you sure this is going to keep people's attention?
00:51:40.000And I was like, man, I think it's going to be really good.
00:51:43.000And man, when I listened to it, you know, I... Record all this stuff and do all the interviews.
00:51:52.000But, you know, the guys, Phil Taylor at Meat Eater is the one that puts it together.
00:51:56.000Like, I do basically, you know, 99% of the content editing.
00:52:01.000So, you know, I'm picking out what's in there.
00:52:03.000But Phil turns it into what you heard.
00:52:06.000And man, that episode was the first one where we stitched together like a pretty robust story together.
00:52:13.000Because it was centered around this guy getting killed by a bear out in the Ozark Mountains, you know, 20 miles from where I live.
00:54:10.000And I don't know why I was so impacted by it, but I was.
00:54:14.000And I went home and I told my family, and I would use that story, and I would tell my little boys when I would put them to bed, I would tell them that story.
00:54:22.000My daughter, to this day, wears a bear claw necklace around her neck.
00:54:27.000Like, that story really shaped our family, and for no really good reason.
00:54:31.000Like, there's not some big moral of the story.
00:55:11.000Like, our way to understand the world is through stories.
00:55:17.000Well, without giving away too much of that story, that story has so many dots connected.
00:55:22.000Like, first of all, there's a life or death struggle in that one man is seriously injured, the other man is killed.
00:55:27.000It's also a camaraderie between animals because they're hunting with their hounds and what initiates him to literally go hand to hand with a bowie knife with his bear was that the bear is killing his dogs.
00:55:40.000So he rushes on the bear and tries to stab it to death and gets mauled and killed.
00:55:45.000And his friend jumps in and stabs the bear as well and gets his arm ripped out of socket.
00:55:51.000It's wild shit because it's got so many things connected together.
00:55:55.000And then you've got the dogs that are still remaining alive staying with him.
00:56:05.000And then he uses up all of his powder, shooting shots off into the sky to try to alert the rest of the hunting party as to where he is in the dark while wolves are howling around him.
01:01:43.000It just seems that with the danger involved that they would probably prefer eating deer.
01:01:50.000I mean, we're showing and talking about these extreme scenarios.
01:01:55.000You know, Daniel Boone and Early 1800s, maybe late 1700s, you know, was reported he and Rebecca and his son, one of his sons on the Big Sandy River in Kentucky, killed 155 bears in one winter.
01:02:17.000So it wasn't, like, it's not necessary, it's not always, you know, that's actually the trouble with some of hunting's PR, is that If me and you go hunting, we're going to come back and talk about the most exciting thing that happened, the most dangerous thing that happened.
01:02:45.000We don't talk about all the times that the bear just ran up a tree and we killed the bear, or we just saw a bear feeding and were able to take it.
01:02:56.000I think we're seeing the extremes inside of stuff like this, which is not something we necessarily focus on.
01:03:04.000That's a big issue with perceptions of people who don't hunt, right?
01:03:09.000Non-hunters' perceptions are a lot of times based on grip and grins.
01:03:12.000They're a lot of times based on maybe you're flipping through the channels and you get on the outdoor channel and some guy shoots a big buck and they're hooting and hollering and high-fiving each other.
01:03:23.000They see it, and they don't understand why everyone's so excited and so happy.
01:03:28.000It's because they don't see how difficult it is to get to that position, how much anxiety is involved in shot placement and squeezing the trigger, making sure you don't flinch.
01:03:41.000Any kind of hunting and taking an animal's life is very difficult.
01:03:44.000So when you see that That success celebration.
01:03:48.000People think it's like a celebration of death, of killing.
01:03:52.000But it's a celebration of success and of overcoming anxiety and nervousness and the fear of failure and the moment itself, which is so enormous.
01:04:03.000The moment when you're squeezing a trigger or drawing back a bow on an animal.
01:04:37.000But when I see a grip and grin photo, I see a lifestyle.
01:04:42.000I see somebody that's probably dedicated a big part of their life that's not even connected directly to hunting that has informed their ability to be efficient hunters.
01:04:55.000That's kind of what the stories that I'm telling, and even in the future, some of the stuff I'm planning in the future, what I'm trying to tell the story of is people who live their lives close to the land and the other things that happen.
01:05:10.000So you always hear some flavor of hunting in most of my podcasts.
01:05:16.000Many of them are not about hunting at all.
01:05:19.000But you'll see a small window, but you'll see this life.
01:05:23.000For instance, there's a podcast that's coming out soon.
01:05:27.000And I interview this old guy that really is a legendary hunter.
01:05:31.000I'm not going to tell you where he's from.
01:05:32.000I don't want to forecast what the podcast is about.
01:05:34.000But the whole podcast is about his life.
01:06:26.000But I am very interested in how hunting has actually affected my life, how it impacts the character of my children, how it impacts the sanctity of my marriage.
01:06:41.000I mean, I'm kind of going out there, but I'm being serious.
01:06:45.000I think that what we choose to dedicate our life to has the opportunity to make us better and impact our character and It's just a big story, man.
01:06:54.000It's a big story, and a grip and grin doesn't tell that story.
01:06:57.000But it's so hard, because it's hard to tell me, Clay, don't post a picture of yourself with a dead deer and you smiling.
01:07:05.000And it's like, bro, you want me to accommodate my entire life for you?
01:07:39.000Is that many people don't understand that bears are food and that it's not just food, it's actually a delicious food and from a conservation standpoint it's actually important to control the population.
01:07:51.000But when you see someone posing with an animal, unfortunately it will go to like elephants or giraffes or some unpleasant animal, a lion, where you see someone posing with a lion and then you think about some Canned hunt in Africa where some obese man is standing there with a with a rifle over this majestic animal and it's very distasteful and it infuriates people and rightly so because the image they're getting out of that is some
01:08:21.000cruel Sociopath who's just trying to check off boxes.
01:08:25.000Have you ever seen Louis Theroux's piece that he did on hunting camps in Africa?
01:08:44.000Until they just start talking frankly in front of him.
01:08:47.000And he gets all these people who come over there, and they're talking about how much money they're paying.
01:08:52.000I want to pay this much to get a hippo, and then I want to pay that much.
01:08:56.000And you see these folks, and you see this sort of casual attitude they have about going over there, It's almost like going to Disneyland saying, okay, I'm at Disneyland, I want to ride the Incredibles ride, and then I want to go over here, and I want to do this thing.
01:09:13.000It's the same sort of way of describing it, and missing is all of the stuff that I get out of your podcast.
01:09:22.000All the stuff of the long, deep history of this and the traditions.
01:09:27.000And then, you know, one of the best things about Meat Eater is not just that it's like, like Steve is an incredible narrator and the way he writes those pieces is amazing because it gives you this insight into his mind that is this deeply intelligent,
01:09:43.000very well-read man who also loves hunting, but also the cooking.
01:09:48.000He's always cooking wild game on the show, and you get it.
01:09:51.000You get it when you see them cooking over a campfire and eating this food, and it's fantastic.
01:11:38.000That happened from in 150 years, essentially, from 1750 to the turn of the century, 1900. Basically, it was one of the greatest scale demolitions of wildlife that planet Earth has ever seen.
01:11:59.000Well, you know, I mean, Boone was born in 1734, and he died in 1820, and that was kind of the...
01:12:06.000So let's just say from the late 1700s till the late 1800s, so roughly 150 years.
01:12:14.000And during that time, there was also no refrigeration, so if you did shoot an animal, it was really only good for a certain amount of time.
01:12:51.000And in the late 1800s, Teddy Roosevelt and a group of guys that would later form the Boone and Crockett Club, they foresaw the end of North American big game.
01:13:01.000They said, the big game of North America will be extinct in the next decade, like gone forever, such that they went out to collect specimens to put in a museum in New York so that future Americans would know what a buffalo looked like.
01:14:14.000Well, for Boone and Crockett, it's just the skull, just for measurement.
01:14:19.000The Boone and Crockett guys essentially came up with an ingenious plan that we are going to give cultural value to older age males so that people will be incentivized to take older age males and let the juveniles and females go.
01:14:37.000And basically, over the course of about 50 years, they changed the entire hunting culture of North America.
01:14:44.000They picked us up from a market hunting.
01:15:04.000But essentially, this idea that we're now obsessed with big antlers comes from...
01:15:10.000The idea that we want to save North American wildlife, and in a conservation perspective, the best animal to take out of a herd is an older, mature male, because he has contributed to the gene pool, and it is not a loss to remove him.
01:15:26.000And so, basically, they had this incredible idea that worked, and so that's what hurts me a little bit.
01:15:32.000Like, when you say trophy hunting, I'm like, no!
01:15:34.000I mean, what you are describing, I am against.
01:15:39.000The semantics of it, though, actually, if you deep dive, and that's where you cannot understand these things if you just gloss over the surface, and that's the problem with so many parts of our world, is people look at a clip off YouTube and go, okay, I understand the whole thing.
01:15:56.000That's a part of Louis Theroux's documentary as well, where it explains that a lot of these animals in Africa were on the verge of extinction, and now they're in abundance, but they live in these high-fence hunting ranches.
01:16:08.000And it's sort of a weird, bittersweet victory, because the numbers are huge.
01:16:15.000They're higher than they've ever been before, because there's value associated with them, because people are willing to pay to kill them.
01:16:21.000I realize that's a tough pill for some people to swallow.
01:16:26.000To me, many, many, many animals have not been shot by me and my family because of the influence.
01:16:51.000We're players in this big game that we understand.
01:16:56.000You could take any one of my kids and put them in this chair and they could tell you the exact same thing that I just told you.
01:17:01.000I mean, they understand what we're doing.
01:17:03.000They understand that, yeah, when we pass up a young buck to shoot an old one, we will celebrate the heck out of those horns.
01:17:11.000But we also know that we are celebrating the heck out of that we took an animal out that's the right one to take out, the hardest one to take out.
01:17:50.000And it's an issue if you do go back to the whole market hunting thing and people get an understanding of what was happening in North America in the 19th century, they'll get a better appreciation of what was done.
01:18:04.000Because with market hunting, having animals on the verge of extinction and then reintroducing them in places like Kentucky where they now have seasons again, Or places like Pennsylvania.
01:18:17.000There's a lot of parts of this country where some, like elk, they're gone still from most of their range, right?
01:18:24.000Where an animal has cultural value, it will be protected and preserved.
01:18:28.000Where that animal has no cultural value, no incentive for the common man to preserve that animal, he will not be protected.
01:18:36.000I think it's hard for people to swallow the fact that it takes a lot of money to protect these animals as well.
01:18:43.000And one of the best ways to get that money is through the taxes that are taken from hunting tags and ammunition and gear.
01:18:53.000And the Pittman-Robertson Act that has been set up to set aside, was it 10%?
01:18:59.000It varies, yeah, 10 to 11 percent, something like that.
01:19:02.000So through that, they've generated literally billions of dollars in conservation.
01:19:08.000And as far as I know, I don't think there's anything even close in terms of the amount of resources that have been gathered for conservation.
01:19:15.000Hunting has gathered up more money for conservation than anything else.
01:19:21.000I mean, when you see a big bear, when you see a hunter with a bear, with a deer, I mean, really, what you should see through that lens is see protected habitat.
01:19:32.000I mean, because essentially, to have healthy populations of animals, we've got to have habitat.
01:19:37.000And that is the biggest threat to North American wildlife right now, is just fragment...
01:19:42.000Fragmentation of wilderness, urban sprawl, decimation of habitat.
01:19:47.000I mean, you know, the stats are easily accessible of, you know, how much of the planet is becoming concrete every single second.
01:19:55.000And, man, when you lock in these hunting grounds, I think it's awesome that we still, like, wars for the last...
01:20:06.00010,000 years have been fought over hunting grounds.
01:20:10.000And today we still kind of do the same thing.
01:20:13.000I mean, not wars, but like we set aside areas that this is a place to hunt.
01:20:18.000And those areas, public land anyway, are accessible to other people other than hunters.
01:20:24.000But hunters are the ones that are primarily funding most of the public land.
01:20:38.000It's got to be a giant shocker too when you run those numbers by non-hunters or people that are opposed to hunting and that people who are believers in wildlife conservation but they don't really understand the amount of resources that are involved in maintaining that stuff,
01:20:54.000protecting wetlands, Protecting, you know, making sure that public lands don't get bought up.
01:21:02.000Some states, they're trying to sell off public lands and people have to act and it gets heated.
01:21:08.000It gets really crazy because it's a slippery slope.
01:21:11.000We have a really unique situation here too, right?
01:21:14.000Yeah, I mean, North America has a hunting culture that's different than anywhere in the world.
01:21:22.000And what's so cool about it, too, and Joe, you may know this kind of stuff, but, you know, the European model of hunting essentially boiled down to that people with money, wealthy people, elites, kings, aristocrats were the ones that hunted and controlled land and controlled wildlife.
01:22:34.000Roosevelt came over here and said, tell you what...
01:22:36.000We're going to make wildlife accessible to all the people.
01:22:41.000We're going to make public land accessible to everyone.
01:22:44.000And everybody would have been like, wait a minute, you sure this is going to work very good?
01:22:48.000Like, if we want to have more wildlife, don't we need to protect wildlife?
01:22:52.000And they were like, no, we need to incentivize the average guy that he has a right and a place and an ability to go out on land and kill game for his family.
01:23:03.000And then you give incentive to everybody to protect, to value, to conserve, to contribute, and it's worked better than anything on the planet.
01:24:41.000Yeah, but it's that thing where the bear hunters...
01:24:45.000The hunters in films are rarely represented as noble people with a deep appreciation for wildlife and sustainability and the fact that this is going to feed and provide nourishment to their family and to friends.
01:25:08.000It's a one-step story to tell someone that does not know or has any context into the rural world that these hillbillies killing stuff are bad.
01:25:19.000It's a multi-step story to understand it.
01:25:24.000If you want to go from zero to an understanding, you've got to walk through all the things we've just described, and you can't put that on a billboard.
01:25:36.000You can put on a billboard, This is bad.
01:26:15.000And part of the problem is the people who think of hunters as the bad guys Are involved in factory farming in the extent that they buy factory farmed meat.
01:26:27.000So they're involved in this weird imprisonment thing where everything is done in the shadows behind closed doors and through the protection of ag-gag law.
01:26:35.000So these agricultural gag laws won't allow people that work in these factory farm situations to take photographs and videos because it would unfavorably hurt the business.
01:26:46.000So they've made it so that it's illegal to film atrocities.
01:28:30.000There's a lot of people that love to talk about how they're vegan.
01:28:33.000And one of the things about saying that you're vegan, you're letting people know that you're a very moral and ethical person who cares about life and you don't want anything to be harmed.
01:28:46.000So you do no harm and you just eat vegetables.
01:28:49.000And so by saying that, you get a free ride with a lot of people.
01:28:53.000There's very few people that are going to question, okay, do you understand monocrop agriculture?
01:29:16.000There's no question whatsoever, you've displaced a shitload of wildlife.
01:29:21.000If you're using combines to gather up that stuff, you're going to grind up a lot of rodents and rabbits and maybe deer fawns.
01:29:29.000And all the wildlife habitat, pretty much anywhere in the eastern deciduous forest that is row crop agriculture was at one time a climax forest of some type.
01:29:42.000And as weird as that sounds, there's not really a lot of moral high ground to eating vegetables as opposed to eating a large game animal.
01:29:50.000Shane Mahoney is a very well-known conservationist and author and speaker.
01:29:58.000He's up in Newfoundland, and I heard him say a statistic one time, and I don't have the actual numbers, but essentially if everyone in the United States decided that they were going to be vegan...
01:30:10.000We would have to turn the entire United States and Canada into, we'd have to clear the land and have it be row crop agriculture and able to fuel a 350 million person vegan operation.
01:30:28.000His point in the numbers there, it's been so long, but his point was there's a massive imprint on this place, even from something that sounds so non-massive about being vegan.
01:30:46.000Yeah, and what are you going to do with all the cows?
01:30:49.000What are you going to do with all the chickens?
01:30:51.000Are you going to give them birth control?
01:31:25.000He also wrote Coyote America, which is amazing.
01:31:30.000He's written quite a few great things, but one of the things that he pointed to, and it's really an interesting theory, that when you go back to the original North American settlers, they did not talk about massive herds of buffalo.
01:31:49.000And he thinks that the Native Americans, with their hunting strategies that they had already had in play, Once they got ahold of the horse, and once they were riding horses, which really didn't happen until the European settlement, it's a crazy sort of convoluted thing,
01:32:05.000because horses originated in North America, but then they went extinct, but they had already traveled to other parts of the world.
01:32:13.000So, like, Asian horses and all the horses the Mongols used originated In North America.
01:34:30.000When you think about how long people have been around, and one of the ways that I always describe it, and you have a similar way of talking about it in that bear hunting episode, is that, or was it the deer episode?
01:34:53.000If you go back three people, you're looking at a completely different place, which is nowhere on earth like that.
01:35:00.000Other than, obviously, the introduction of machines and engines and the industrial age, which changed the whole world.
01:35:12.000Just the sheer fact that this was populated by nomadic tribes who are subsistence hunting, and then all of a sudden, within three generations, it's completely unrecognizable.
01:35:24.000The population of the animals is completely changed.
01:35:27.000Some of them have been extirpated out of their land forever, and then there's just this new group of humans from another continent that overwhelm the place.
01:35:39.000It is interesting, the human perspective of time.
01:35:45.000And what you're referring to is when I was talking to my buddy, my hero, James Lawrence.
01:35:52.000He's 72 or something, and he was heavily influenced by his grandmother, who...
01:35:58.000I want to say we calculated that she would have been born in the 1800s, and she would have had grandparents just like James that would have been primitive humans.
01:36:14.000And we feel like that was so long ago, but, you know, and I'm using James as an example from that one, but I mean, it's in all of us, but like, James is like, he, much of the way that he views the world would be from the direct influence of these people.
01:37:41.000But it's really what it is, is like technological innovation and the invasiveness of this technology and how it's permeated all aspects of life and all aspects of civilization.
01:38:07.000I've heard you talk about this kind of stuff.
01:38:09.000It's a common thought process for people to have in this time.
01:38:14.000The way that we have lived, even just for the last 50 years, is a bizarre human experience that has never, ever, ever, ever, ever been seen before.
01:38:34.000In the 1800s, we would have known each other, because you would have lived in Austin, and I would have lived in Northwest Arkansas, and that would have been an 18-day wagon ride, or longer than that.
01:38:43.000I mean, this is a bizarre human experience that we're having right now, and that's why, like, if we talk about people changing the rules, and we have this bizarre understanding of time, like, we just show up on this planet, and then we feel like we...
01:39:02.000And that's why I'm so concerned with people, specifically with hunting, hunting bears.
01:39:07.000It's like we have this one little sliver of time and we decide that we want to change the rules that have governed us for the last 10,000 years.
01:39:28.000And the disconnection of humans from natural places and just a general understanding of the biology of a human and what we have to eat and how we have to live and the natural landscape...
01:40:35.000And how that like, we're now we seem to be in this time of trying to understand what is our identity.
01:40:42.000And for so long, we had this identity that was deeply connected.
01:40:45.000I mean, you know, you look across the nations of the earth and The American identity is pretty tied into, or has been, has tied into wild places and hunting and frontiersmen.
01:41:00.000Some of our most famous people were Daniel Boone and some of these guys.
01:41:30.000I agree and I think it's a lack of understanding and that lack of understanding is there's a lot of factors.
01:41:37.000This is what we talked about before with the media perceptions or depictions of hunters have been very distorted.
01:41:44.000It's very very rare that you see a noble hunter who really truly respects the animal that they shot and killed and Takes time with the preparation and really values each piece of that meat.
01:41:56.000You don't see that in films and in television shows.
01:42:00.000You see the negative, because they're just trying, they have 90 minutes to get a story out there, right?
01:42:05.000And the stories, you know, they're trying to have good guys and bad guys, and the bad guys wear black, and it's real simple.
01:43:17.000Like, that motherfucker's setting us back so hard, with all the hooting and hollering, and all the stupid way of talking about these animals.
01:43:26.000But with podcasts and with shows like Meat Eater, I think things are changing in a lot of people's perceptions.
01:43:36.000I've had multiple conversations with people where they said, I have never even thought about hunting until I listened to A hunter on your podcast describe what it means to them.
01:43:47.000And then I started watching some videos, then I watched Meat Eater, or then I read a book.
01:43:53.000It's like one of those things where when you're looking at it from the outside, you have a view of it that is not really accurate.
01:44:01.000And the only way to really understand what it is I think we have to lay layers upon layers upon layers of these kind of conversations and Discussions and stories and put them out there very carefully So and and be honest about the good and the bad the disturbing the part of the weird feeling of loss like you shoot an animal There's a there's a feeling man when I when I shoot an animal like an elk and I walk on that up to that animal There's a real feeling of loss.
01:44:29.000There's a feeling of I'm very appreciative that that animal is going to feed me and my family and a lot of my friends for like a year.
01:45:23.000But if you're a person who eats meat, and you don't know where your meat comes from, and you're casting aspersions at hunters, You're doing it wrong.
01:45:36.000I'm not even blaming you for your perceptions, because your perceptions, again, a lot of them are shaped by popular culture.
01:45:43.000And popular culture over the last, you know, whatever it is, 100 years, has not done a good job of accurately portraying what's the best aspects of it.
01:48:31.000So I was thinking before Steve took me that I'm going to have one of two options.
01:48:36.000Either I'm going to become a vegetarian or I'm going to become a hunter because I don't want to participate in this world where these animals are stockpiled into a warehouse and they're shitting into holes in the ground.
01:49:07.000Yeah, that was the first animal I shot.
01:49:08.000I'd forgotten that that was your first hunt ever.
01:49:11.000Not only was it the first animal I shot, I'd only shot a rifle against paper like two days before that, like four or five times.
01:49:18.000We set up targets out there and he was basically just telling me, just don't flinch, just squeeze the trigger slowly and let it go off by surprise.
01:49:27.000And I just sort of, he was good at explaining it.
01:49:29.000I got it in my head, but I mean, I wasn't even sure of how, where to look at the scope.
01:51:44.000Yeah, it's cool what the company's doing, too, what MeatEater's doing, and now how MeatEater is connected to all these other really legit companies, too, like First Light, where First Light is now part of MeatEater, and they make this amazing hunting clothing and amazing hunting gear.
01:52:31.000That's the first thing Steve told me when he called me is he said, I mean like within like 10 seconds of saying, hey, what do you think about coming to work for me here?
01:54:35.000It's a good movie, but it's fictitious.
01:54:40.000Tom Cruise is quite a bit more handsome than Barry Seals.
01:54:43.000But the story behind it is that this guy was running drugs for rogue members of government agencies, whether it's the CIA or whoever, and he was flying into these countries,
01:54:58.000buying cocaine, and then dropping it off in Mena, Arkansas.
01:55:02.000And there's a long story that goes with it where there's two children were murdered two kids that saw the drop and then There was a lie that was told that they were high and that they fell asleep on train tracks and then the family wound up paying for autopsies and the autopsies concluded that they were murdered and stabbed and then you know and then yeah,
01:55:24.000so so We moved to Meena in 1984 when I was five years old.
01:55:59.000But it was over by the time we got there.
01:56:01.000But Dad has lots of stories, just over the years, of people that worked at the airport, which I know, I mean, I could list names of people that I know today that worked at that airport.
01:56:11.000And there were stories of big jets coming in with no lights on in the middle of the night.
01:56:51.000Extensive joint investigation by the FBI, Arkansas State Police and IRS revealed that Barry Seal used the Mena airport for smuggling activity from the late 1980 until March of 1984. I was there, man!
01:57:12.000According to an internal FBI document released last week, SEAL, a pilot, moved much of his smuggling operation from Baton Rouge to Rich Mountain Aviation at the Mina Intermountain Airport, according to the May 1986 FBI memo.
01:58:01.000Let's just say it was this square right here.
01:58:03.000There would be a line drawn across from the northwest corner, northeast corner to the southwest corner.
01:58:11.000The southeastern triangle of Arkansas would be Mississippi River Delta country, like swamp country, producing some of the most – an incredible amount of rice, soybeans, and wheat, like farm country.
01:58:27.000From – you go to the northwestern corner of Arkansas – And it is mountains.
02:01:38.000I've added value to it by being there, you know?
02:01:41.000And I've heard it said by kind of an Arkansas philosopher who was describing the Ozark Mountains, okay?
02:01:48.000And he said, the Rocky Mountains are grand and majestic.
02:01:53.000But the Ozark Mountains are intimate, and if you see a knob, there's probably a pretty good chance that you could walk to the top of it within a half a day.
02:02:04.000And that was kind of his—he was like—so, you know, there are much bigger, more majestic views, but— There's beauty to be found everywhere.
02:02:41.000State of, you know, 50,000 square miles.
02:02:44.000So it's just a million people more than the greater Austin area.
02:02:48.000So, like, Austin's a million, and then outside of Austin, apparently, is another million, you know, that are, like, closely connected, which is, compared to where I'm from, California, this ain't shit.
02:07:23.000Farmland as a human population in the United States has grown from under 3 million to over 300 million, providing millions of raccoons with garden vegetables, fruits, nuts, grain, household garbage on which to feed.
02:07:36.000In the 1800s, many areas of the United States supported approximately one raccoon per square kilometer, about three raccoons per square mile.
02:07:45.000In 2002, a study of raccoons in Indiana found 222 raccoons per square kilometer.
02:08:17.000I have video footage of it, but it's night vision, and it's a cat that seems like it's about in the neighborhood of knee-high, maybe slightly below knee-high.
02:10:47.000I mean, it's hard when you see the guy walk by, I don't necessarily think we should put my neighbor on video, but when you see the guy walk by, you get a sense Okay, I just saw his tail.
02:12:13.000So whatever that thing is, I think it's a Jaguar undie because they were native to Texas and the last time they photographed one here was in the 1980s.
02:12:41.000But there's been people reporting pictures of them or reporting meetings of them and citing them, but there's no real photographic or video evidence.
02:13:01.000I'll show you, well, I'll get those guys to get the further video, I hope they saved that as well, of my neighbor walking by.
02:13:10.000Or, I could stand in that spot, and you can get a sense of what it looked like.
02:13:16.000But I'm telling you, the thing is probably...
02:13:18.000What I would be interested in would be...
02:13:22.000And it's not a high-quality video, so it's hard, but, like, the gait of that animal, like, and I'm, this is why it's so wonderful about these kind of things.
02:13:33.000And I don't know you well enough to, like, I don't know if you really want my opinion or if you don't.
02:13:40.000I always definitely want your opinion.
02:13:43.000Because this is the beauty of these animals out in wild places where there's, like, controversy over what it is.
02:15:41.000And there are documented melanistic jaguars and leopards.
02:15:46.000But science has never documented a melanistic mountain lion.
02:15:51.000And so the whole idea of a black mountain lion in Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, anywhere, is just straight up, it's not true.
02:16:04.000Well, isn't it also that people see things in the dark and they can't get a good view of what it looks like?
02:17:13.000And when they say that the last sightings were in the 1980s, man, that, to me, like that thing, that's exactly what it fucking looked like.
02:19:34.000So whatever that thing is, I mean, obviously we have grainy footage, but we do have, we'll show you off air, my neighbor, and you'll get a chance to see.
02:19:44.000Because when you see that, that's when I went, oh, huh, that's a big fucking cat.
02:19:49.000And they're like, yeah, this is not a small animal.
02:19:51.000This is somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 or 50 pounds, maybe bigger.
02:19:59.000If you really wanted to test out your theory, this is what you would do.
02:20:02.000And the biologist told me they'd do this with mountain lion sightings, is take a cutout, like a piece of poster board, and draw a big cat on it, like a big-sized house cat.
02:26:30.000Well, man, if you want a spiel, like if you want a little spiel, and I could talk for hours about it, but what's the difference between a mule and a horse, and why would you pick a mule over a horse?
02:27:16.000Yeah, like, and so a mule has all these incredible properties that made it super valuable.
02:27:22.000And that's part of the reason in the Ozarks, like, the Ozarks and the Southern Highlands of the United States are known as, in many ways, it could be argued, but as like the mule epicenter of the world.
02:27:36.000Like, a lot of mule trainers, a lot of mule work, and it came from Many, many things, but mules handled the heat better than a horse.
02:27:47.000Mules have more stamina than a horse when worked, and so that's why you hear people talking about plowing with mules.
02:27:53.000I mean, you can plow with a horse, too, but a mule would have more stamina.
02:27:57.000A mule's feet don't have to be worked on because a donkey is essentially not that much different than a wild animal.
02:28:05.000Donkeys would have come from somewhere in the Mediterranean.
02:28:11.000There would have been wild burrows and different things.
02:28:14.000A donkey is pretty close to what it was.
02:28:16.000A horse has been highly, highly influenced by human selection over thousands of years.
02:28:24.000And so you get this animal that has been very much so built for our purposes.
02:28:30.000In general, if a horse is not shooed, it will go lame and not be able to work much.
02:28:37.000So that's why there's this whole farrier industry, which is where people put shoes on horses.
02:28:47.000Because if they're acclimated in a certain way, they can become—they don't have to have shoes in the wild, obviously, but they're not doing work either.
02:28:59.000They're not having a bunch of people on them.
02:29:08.000So if you start shooing an animal, just like us wearing shoes, if we walked around from the time we were born barefoot, the biggest point and the main thing I'm talking about is that a mule has extremely sturdy, hard feet, and so you don't have to shoo a mule.
02:29:23.000Some people do, but typically you don't have to.
02:29:35.000And that may not seem like that big of a deal, but if you're an equine owner, if your mule gets in your barn and has access to 50 pounds of grain...
02:29:45.000It means that if your animal has access to grain and it eats, eats, eats, eats, eats, It's an intestinal condition where basically the animal eats too much of the super rich food and just dies.
02:30:10.000But the main reason that a mule would be the chosen animal for mountain riding is they're known to be safer than a horse.
02:30:19.000What makes a horse a wonderful thing is that they're very trainable, easy to train, such that They say that you could train a horse to run off a cliff, okay?
02:30:33.000You could make, because when you're on that animal, you're in charge of it, and you could give it the cues to make it do something that would endanger its life.
02:30:42.000And in most circumstances, that's a great thing, because, I mean, like, you're in charge, and this animal's doing what you want it to do.
02:32:08.000The thing that works against the mule, I should be like the mule marketing guy for the planet because we need some better PR. Because what happens is people get a mule, don't understand how a mule works because he thinks way different than a horse.
02:32:30.000I had a—yeah, well, I'll tell you something somebody else said.
02:32:32.000A mule never forgets, and you can mess up a mule very quickly.
02:32:37.000And so what happens is I get a mule and start to train it, start having some problems with him, and problems could be— I mean, just a variety of different ways.
02:32:47.000And then I sell that mule because I can't do anything with it.
02:32:52.000And the next guy gets it and he starts adding problems because he's getting a mule with a problem.
02:32:57.000And then basically a mule has five different owners and every one of them has put their own problem on that mule.
02:33:02.000And that mule basically becomes like a wild beast.
02:33:05.000And so people know like stubborn as a mule, man, you don't.
02:33:08.000I mean, you'll hear a lot of legit cowboys and guys say, man, you don't want anything to do with a mule.
02:33:13.000What I learned that I had to do was get mules from the time they were young.
02:33:19.000I didn't want a mule that had been messed with by anybody else.
02:33:24.000I want to know every interaction that that animal has had with a human.
02:33:29.000I've had a lot of luck with that in training these mules.
02:35:50.000There's trainers all over the country, and there's great Western mule trainers, but there are a lot of trainers in the East that train mules year-round, and then they take them to these big mule sales in the Western United States and sell them for big money.
02:36:03.000So this is a secret I will let you in on.
02:36:05.000You could come to Arkansas and buy a mule for $1,000 that you'd pay probably $4,000 to $5,000 just for hauling them and selling them somewhere in Idaho.