Remy Warren and Dan Doty talk about their new TV show, Apex Predator, and what it's really like to be a buffalo hunter in the wild. Also, the guys talk about the Plains Indians and how they evolved into the modern day buffalo hunter. And of course, there's a little bit of history about the buffalo and their relationship with wolves. Don't miss it! Apex Predator is available on the Sportsman's Channel on Thursday nights at 8pm ET. Check out the show here: Apex Predator: The Journey of a Wild Animal Hunter. If you like the show, don't forget to SUBSCRIBE and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe to the show Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Rate, review and subscribe to our other podcast, The Wild Animal Guys. We post polls, questions and thoughts on both socials and the results/comments are featured on the episodes as well. Send your voice messages to sws@whatiwatchedtonight.co.nz and we'll get them on the show. Thanks again for listening! Timestamps: 1:30 - What's your favorite animal? 2:00 - Which animal do you'd like to see on the next episode of the show? 3:15 - What would you like to have as a guest star on your next episode? 4:40 - What animal you dabbled in the next week? 5:15: What animal would you would you want to see me kill? 6:00: What do you would like to eat next? 7: How do you have a painting? 8:00 9: Which animal is your favorite painting of a painting that you dastardly thing? 11:00 -- what kind of painting you dildos? 13:30 -- what would you d have me paint? 14:00 Is there a painting of an animal I d like to paint of a buffalo? 15:30 16:40 -- what do you think you d like me eat? 17: What s your favorite thing I d have a cow? 18:20 -- who would you have me eat for dinner? 19: What kind of animal I would you eat? -- I d love to see someone else eat a cow or something like that? 21:00 & 13:10 -- how do you like it?
00:01:21.000What you're doing on the show is you're essentially emulating a lot of tactics that various predators use, and you're using these tactics to get close and figure out how to hunt animals.
00:01:35.000The one I saw last night was the buffalo one.
00:02:46.000So if they run, well, they're going to be in trouble.
00:02:49.000But when a human hunter comes along using primitive weapons or whatever, the human hunter needs that animal to stand still in order to kill it.
00:02:57.000So when the bison sees a human, it runs because that's how it stays safe.
00:03:01.000So, you know, the point of this show is really dissecting the way nature does things.
00:03:07.000And you look at, like, every animal is so specialized.
00:03:21.000And what I've come to realize is we've adapted a lot of the techniques and tactics that That a certain animal specializes in or does really well and use it for ourselves to become this essential top predator.
00:03:37.000So, you know, looking at this, the Plains Indians, we looked at a George Catlin painting.
00:04:23.000He was kind of going out west and painting what he saw or what he interpreted to see.
00:04:28.000And so I've always thought, oh, I wonder if that's really true.
00:04:31.000But when you dissect it, obviously those Plains Indians sitting around saw that, oh, when those wolves are there, those bison aren't running.
00:04:40.000Well, let's throw some of those skins on our back and see what happens.
00:04:43.000And through the show, we find out that...
00:04:59.000I mean, it makes perfect sense if you're sitting there and see the correlation between the wolves and the bison, and you come to this illogical conclusion that if we act like a wolf, the bison will stay there.
00:05:12.000What kind of bison there were back then, too?
00:05:36.000Well, you know, there's a guy named Dan Flores that's a good friend of Steve's as well, and he is a real bison expert, and he's written a very controversial paper on what happened to the bison.
00:05:49.000And what he's saying is that he compares...
00:05:53.000He's going to be on the podcast soon, as soon as he's done with his book, hopefully by sometime in the summer.
00:05:59.000And what his paper is basically saying is that the Plains Indians, once they had figured out how to ride horses and shoot from horses, were already on the way to wiping out the buffalo.
00:06:13.000And the reason why the buffalo were in such high numbers was because so many people, so many Native Americans, had died from smallpox.
00:06:22.000And if you go back before the smallpox epidemic, the people that arrived in North America, like the Dutch, when they had made an accounting of all the different animals, they talked about turkeys and deer and elk and bear.
00:06:52.000During that and they were apparently like probably the number one predator of these bison I'm probably doing a really shitty job of explaining this that makes sense I mean they would do things like like the buffalo jumps mm-hmm where just drive Herds of bison off a cliff cliffs and they apparently the wolves would feed in because they're just be dead I mean you couldn't Take all that meat.
00:07:15.000If you've got a small village, you're taking what you can use, there'd be dead bison everywhere.
00:07:21.000And the wolves would come in and gorge on them.
00:07:23.000I guess there was an account where there was wolves so full on food that you're just laying there in excess, just gorged.
00:07:32.000And they were just hanging around next to the Native Americans?
00:07:34.000Well, where the buffalo jumped off the cliffs.
00:07:36.000But the Native Americans were down there, too, with the wolves?
00:08:26.000So we're talking about, you know, a 150-pound wolf, which is the size of a normal man, can eat 25 fucking pounds and go through it in two hours.
00:09:09.000Wolves were actually the inspiration for me to even think of this show.
00:09:13.000I'm pretty fascinated by wolves, but one day I was out hunting elk in Montana, and I'd been hunting this one bull, and it was the first time I ever saw a wolf in the wild.
00:09:29.000I was like, oh, this is awesome, because this was before you really saw a lot of wolves.
00:09:33.000And then I actually got a little video of it, and then I go and do my hunt, and then the wolf happened to be hunting the same group of elk.
00:11:15.000It's like in the bottom of a canyon where there's lots of logs and things down.
00:11:18.000That's got to be an amazing thing to see happen live because it's so rare to be able to be there.
00:11:23.000I mean, you might see a wolf, you might see an elk, but to see a wolf kill an elk, like to be at that moment where it didn't matter if you were there or not, that was going to go down.
00:12:33.000Well, when we talk about the American model of conservation, there's checks and balances and goes with game animals and non-game animals.
00:12:41.000So when you reintroduce an animal into an area that it hasn't maybe never been in that area or it's been so long that it's been in there, they have to be managed as well.
00:12:50.000Otherwise, the whole ecosystem comes out of balance.
00:12:54.000Well, I watched this video about Yellowstone, about wolves in Yellowstone.
00:12:58.000It was talking about the impact that wolves have had in Yellowstone and all these other animals that are thriving because of the introduction of the wolves.
00:13:12.000It's like if you have a large amount of elk in an area or a large amount of deer, I mean, this is a completely different animal than having a large amount of wolves.
00:13:20.000And when you're managing these types of animals with emotions rather than objective logic That's when things get weird because you've got a lot of people their version of conservation never would include hunting a wolf But if you get thousands and thousands of wolves in a state like you you have to hunt them because then they start attacking livestock like where I was up in BC where I Shot that moose there was The guy that I hunted with,
00:13:49.000his neighbor had a cow get taken out by wolves in the middle of the winter.
00:13:53.000It's like cold and there was not much for them to eat and they said, fuck it, let's just do this.
00:14:24.000When you go up there, everybody who lives in a city, you owe it to yourself at some point in your life to go out into actual, real wilderness.
00:14:35.000Because there's all these people that have these opinions on animals that are completely based on Some Narnia-like idea of what nature's like.
00:14:44.000Like, they've never actually been out there, like, in real wilderness, like, days in.
00:14:49.000Packing go days in, where you go, oh, god damn.
00:16:20.000You're just a part of this whole thing where everything is going to go.
00:16:23.000There's bears there, there's deer there, there's all sorts of, you know, interesting wildlife, but it doesn't give a fuck about you.
00:16:31.000I don't think people kind of understand that in a real, like, in a...
00:16:37.000We really rationalize it or really like got it into your brain like this is reality Until you actually go into the woods to the real woods not Yellowstone not Central Park.
00:16:49.000Yeah The real woods are a different animal it is and that's when you kind of understand if you've even I haven't encountered wolves in the wild I've seen what they've done and We talked about in the last podcast.
00:17:01.000I took some photos of this moose calf that we had come upon that had been killed probably like the night before.
00:17:08.000But I haven't encountered them in real life.
00:17:11.000But the people that I know that have have a completely different opinion than the people that live in cities that think that you'd have to be an asshole to shoot a wolf.
00:19:02.000You've got to keep those bitches scared.
00:19:05.000This family that we went to their farm to hunt turkeys two weeks ago, and they lost all their sheep, every single one of them, in Northern California.
00:19:36.000I saw one in Montecito, which is, like, a rich suburb of Santa Barbara.
00:19:41.000I was driving down, like, a residential road, and I saw this thing bounce in front of the road, and I thought it was a coyote at first, but I saw its tail.
00:19:49.000And I went, whoa, that's a fucking mountain lion in this, like, suburban neighborhood.
00:20:02.000Yeah, I think I've got, I must, my place in Montana, I think I have some kind of strange mountain lion breeding program going on because every year at the same time, there's just lion tracks all near the cabin, all over the place.
00:20:16.000That started right when I, the year I first came here and talked with you, and it's just been continuing.
00:20:22.000And I don't know what it is, but a friend of mine started chasing lions around there.
00:20:26.000He said you would be surprised how many cats are living in this area.
00:20:30.000Within six or seven, within a mile or two.
00:21:40.000But you eat wild pork, and you're like, ooh, this has got a whole different thing going on.
00:21:45.000Depends on the pig you get, because if you buy pork, if you shoot a boar, it tastes a lot different than a sow, or even a pregnant sow, maybe.
00:21:56.000But in New Zealand, we get quite a few pigs.
00:22:00.000And this guy showed me this tactic where when you're skinning it, you get your knife sharp and make your initial cuts, and then he dulls the tip on the concrete.
00:22:08.000And so when he's skinning it, because what it is is he'll skin, he can skin closer to the, essentially closer to the skin and keep all the fat on the pork.
00:23:14.000So the pigs will root out this area and forage in this one area, and then they'll kind of move them to another spot, and then they'll let them forage in that area.
00:23:23.000And so these pigs have a dark meat, like a wild boar.
00:24:02.000We tried doing that for a buddy's bachelor party, but we didn't get the fire hot enough, so we're all out here camping by this lake, and I brought this big pig, and I'm all excited about it.
00:24:12.000Get it out, and now we all have a raw pig.
00:24:16.000So we fired up the grills and made the best out of the situation, but everything's closed.
00:24:22.000Everything just smelled like pork after that.
00:24:25.000Was it a wild pig, or was it a domestic pig?
00:24:31.000Well, you have to worry less about trichinosis, right, with the domestic pigs?
00:24:35.000They're actually lowering the temperature that you could cook a domestic pig now.
00:24:39.000The recommendation, they've got it down to 140 degrees.
00:24:42.000See, I've heard that the trichinosis comes from them eating rodents.
00:24:48.000Hmm, so Technically they could get I mean there could be mice because they would eat the feed and the Mice would get in with the grain and everything and they can still get trichinosis Definitely I wouldn't quote me on that, but I definitely heard that a lot.
00:25:01.000Well, I've watched my chickens I have domestic chickens and I've watched them eat a mouse.
00:25:05.000Oh, yeah They found a mouse in the chicken house and they fucked that thing up man.
00:25:09.000It was wild just because usually they're just kind of You know, they just like peck in and they'll, you know, they get real happy if they find a snail or something like that.
00:25:17.000But they found that mouse and they just stomped that little fucker.
00:27:38.000Just some flying killer that literally has knives on its fingers, and it's just floating around, looking for something to snatch and just fuck up.
00:30:28.000Yeah, apparently that's what we're I was studying their eyesight and they can spot medium-sized prey from up to two miles away two miles Isn't that fun?
00:30:39.000I mean that's the thing that One of the things that just so much fascinates me about animals especially is they have capabilities That it's almost hard with all our technology to even replicate.
00:30:52.000Yeah, if you really think about it There's a lot of weird stuff on this planet.
00:30:57.000Dolphins using sonar and eagles being able to see two miles away.
00:31:02.000There's just a lot of crazy things in nature that has taken us years and years to replicate some kind of machine or contraption where we can even compare to it.
00:31:11.000And in some cases, we haven't even come close, like the smell that a bloodhound can pick up.
00:31:19.000We don't have any idea, like, we don't have any idea how to make a piece of equipment that can smell something in the distance the way a dog can.
00:31:44.000Yeah, they say that the comparison is with skunk spray.
00:31:49.000Because with skunk spray, a person can pick up parts per million in a way that you can't with any other spray, with any other smell, rather.
00:31:57.000Like when you're driving down the street, like there's this area near my house, and as I'm driving on my way home, I smell skunks in this one spot all the time.
00:32:05.000And they're probably blocks away from me.
00:32:53.000One of the things I always tell people is, especially if you haven't been elk hunting, most of the elk that we end up killing, I attribute to smelling them first.
00:33:01.000And people that don't Elk hunt would never pick up on it.
00:33:06.000But I'm hunting with my nose almost as much as I'm using any other tactic.
00:35:41.000Doing this show, what has been the most surprising thing when you're analyzing all these different animals and their hunting tactics?
00:35:48.000I think the most surprising thing is...
00:35:51.000Humans have a natural innate ability, hunting ability, that is very comparable to animals that Have to hunt to survive.
00:36:05.000And I say that, like, one of the things that really brought this to light was one of our last episodes of the season, we look at the river otter.
00:36:13.000Well, it's a mammal that hunts underwater.
00:36:18.000And I'm pretty much from the desert, so people are in the water, but I think of it as something that people have trained their whole lives to do or whatever.
00:38:25.000And obviously there's a big learning curve in it, but we are very similar to these other animals that are born predators.
00:38:33.000It only makes sense that if buffalo have a natural instinct to avoid bipedal hominids, because they've seen that, okay, they get shot, get killed, and they know that wolves come around, okay, don't run, stay put, and we'll fuck these wolves up.
00:38:47.000Like, it almost seems like all this information just gets passed on somehow or another through genetics, and that's how these animals manage to be here.
00:38:55.000Well, it would only make sense that if we've gotten to 2015, the way we got here is by eating everything that we could eat up till now, including every animal that we could figure out how to hunt, and all those skills and all those abilities, especially the idea that your spleen starts releasing extra red blood when you dive underwater to allow you to stay.
00:39:17.000There's only one reason to stay underwater.
00:39:19.000Two, to hide from something or to kill something.
00:39:42.000How long was it the longest you stayed down?
00:39:44.000While moving, so the static breath holds we were doing, four minute breath holds, and when I got up from those, you feel this kind of euphoric sense.
00:40:27.000He did some sort of a sneaky trick where he breathed in pure oxygen and held it and then held his breath for like 17 minutes or something like that.
00:41:11.000One of the countdown shows to one of his big fights.
00:41:13.000He would dive underwater and lift up a big rock and then move the rock underwater and drop it and come back up for air and go down and move it again, drop it and come back up for air.
00:41:22.000I've heard through the grapevine that a lot of athletes are doing these breath holds before competitions because they're naturally creating more red blood cells, performance enhancing breath holds.
00:41:37.000That makes sense if you're saying that the spleen releases it when you're underwater, it probably is releasing it because you're holding your breath.
00:41:55.000But there's a lot of athletes that are doing these, initiating these natural responses to enhance their performance.
00:42:04.000Yeah, that's one of the big ones that I've been really getting into over the last few months or a year or so, actually, is cryogenic therapy, where you go into this chamber that's 250 degrees below zero.
00:42:15.000You put a surgical mask on, earmuffs on, gloves, you have underwear on, and you wear socks and, like, rubber crocs so that your foot doesn't touch the bottom, because you will get frostbite.
00:42:27.000Anything you touch, you'll get frostbite.
00:42:29.000And you step in this thing 250 degrees below zero for three minutes.
00:42:58.000And then immediately your blood just rushes back to all your extremities.
00:43:03.000And the anti-inflammatory response is spectacular.
00:43:07.000So people have pretty significant injuries, arthritis, even people that are close borderline and needing hip replacements, they've been able to put it off by doing this cryotherapy and mitigate almost all the pain.
00:43:21.000Because it's funny, the mammalian dive reflex response, when your face hits cold water, it starts to initiate because that's closing those capillaries, and it's probably a very similar process that's going on with that cryo.
00:44:39.000You would think that maybe taking a really cold shower before you perform, you know, before you do anything athletic would benefit you as well.
00:45:24.000Get a little bit deeper and do something different.
00:45:27.000And by something different, I wanted to also do something that looks at hunting and any person watching the show, whether they're a hunter or not, could look at this and go, you know what?
00:46:03.000So if all of a sudden it disappeared, wasn't allowed or whatever, people didn't understand it, then for me I'd feel like I don't know what I would do.
00:46:18.000I mean, you never really know because it's not guaranteed.
00:46:21.000Just like mountain lion hunting isn't allowed in California, it makes no sense ecologically or whatever if people's emotions get involved with management or whatever.
00:46:32.000It just seems like California is such an extreme example of people who don't have experience with wildlife or making those choices or definitely don't have experience with hunting.
00:46:42.000The whole Department of Fish and Game out here isn't Fish and Game.
00:47:29.000I think hunting itself is a learning experience.
00:47:34.000There's so many bad ideas that people have or just bad misconceptions about hunting, and a lot of it comes down to We look at hunting, or people look at hunting, a lot of times they look at the negative aspects of,
00:48:06.000Like, you could keep going on and on forever.
00:48:09.000Like, why would you lie down next to a giraffe, smiling?
00:48:14.000You know, the whole thing is very strange.
00:48:16.000And the real fuck-up about it is that it puts out this image that confuses the real issue at hand, which is this was a large, non-breeding male...
00:48:30.000That they were going to take out anyway.
00:48:32.000They had already deemed through their conservation efforts that they were going to take this giraffe out and that they were going to use it to feed these villagers.
00:48:45.000So her paying money to go and shoot this thing actually helps all these villagers.
00:48:50.000It gives them food, then they take the money, they can apply the money to whatever, making wells or whatever they do with the money that they get.
00:48:57.000From from hunters paying to hunt these animals There's a benefit to it because that animal wasn't gonna be around much longer anyway her stepping in and going but But then when you put it on Facebook and you're smiling and you're It's all so fucking confusing like to everybody else that goes well you're an asshole you just shot a fucking giraffe Who eats giraffes?
00:49:18.000You know like no one's you're not like going over there to feed your family by shooting giraffes And then you find out, well, you actually can eat giraffes, and actually giraffes taste like a lot of different animals they're related to.
00:49:42.000You go to the zoo, you know, I had this bit in my last special about giraffes being like the only animal that I don't feel bad that they're at the zoo.
00:49:50.000Because they wake up and they're like, another day with no lions.
00:49:53.000And they just wander around like having a great old time.
00:49:56.000Like, we're so confident that giraffes are nice that they let babies feed them.
00:50:00.000When my daughter was two, I was holding her up in my arms, and she's got her tiny little baby hand out with a piece of lettuce, and the giraffe comes over, wraps its tongue around the lettuce, and takes it, and she's laughing.
00:50:12.000They're so confident at the zoo in a giraffe's behavior that they'll let babies feed them.
00:51:16.000They can see you coming forever, and they were skitterish.
00:51:20.000They wanted these giraffes to survive, and two of the giraffes had actually gotten killed by power lines, so there's only a few giraffes left.
00:52:05.000If you go on a photo safari in South Africa or whatever, it's...
00:52:09.000Essentially, there's places where, say, they bring in animals, and maybe that animal wasn't indigenous to that region, but they swapped with this game reserve area over here to kind of integrate breeding and keep the populations existing.
00:52:24.000And so you bring in a giraffe to this portion of Africa that maybe...
00:52:29.000Hasn't had giraffes for who knows how long.
00:53:46.000Well, even in the places that aren't hunting, where they just are for photo safaris or what have you, you get, say you bring in, I'll pick a species, Kudu.
00:55:04.000And all that, it's a business on multi-levels too because the landowner now owns the meat, so then he'll either sell the meat or give it to people living there, working there.
00:55:17.000Yeah, if you go over to Africa to hunt, you can't really bring that meat back, can you?
00:55:39.000It's funny, Ebola, one of my friends is a professional hunter in South Africa, and a lot of people didn't want to go to Africa after they heard the Ebola.
00:55:48.000Well, Africa's such a large continent, from where he is to where the Ebola is, is further away than Atlanta, Georgia.
00:56:14.000We did an image on the podcast recently where we pulled up, there's an image of Africa, the continent, and how enormous it is and how many other continents you could stuff inside of Africa.
00:56:27.000And it's so shocking when you realize how big it really is.
00:56:32.000Because on a map, there it is right there.
00:57:12.000He wrote an amazing piece about this woman, these young girls that are getting involved in hunting, and it's become a career for a lot of them.
00:57:22.000They look real pretty, and they go over there, shoot animals, and pose with them, and all the pro hunters get on their side, and all the anti-hunters attack their Facebooks, and death threats, and it's almost like a dance that everyone's doing.
00:57:33.000But what he wrote about it, which I thought was really fascinating, he was like, I think a lot of this is sexism.
00:57:57.000It's because, yeah, it's because it's women and as much as, it's the same people, it's kind of a hypocritical way to look at it too.
00:58:06.000Because they go, oh, a lot of the people that are doing this, maybe it's just me being hypocritical as well, but a lot of the people that do it probably look at them as women and go, you know, if it's a man, it's different because hunting is a man's sport and they see these pretty girls doing it and they're out of place or something.
00:58:22.000Whereas hunters don't even think like that.
00:58:31.000You just think, all these evil thoughts of racism and cruelty and just these monster Aryan women that are shooting animals and posing with big stupid whitened teeth smiles.
00:59:44.000I wonder how many gay hunters there are, too.
00:59:46.000That was something that we had gotten into before.
00:59:48.000We were trying to describe, like, the average hunter.
00:59:51.000And I said, well, how many people, like, you know, like, a lot of hunters tend to lean right-wing, and maybe that's because of gun rights or Second Amendment ideas, or just because it's, like, sort of a traditional, you know,
01:00:53.000Yeah, I think in this day and age, it's more about...
01:00:57.000I mean, not that this needs to be discussed in depth, but I think homosexuality, it's more about if you really do care, unless you're dealing with some extremely aggressive individual that's, like, annoying with his gayness...
01:01:10.000Like, just won't take no for an answer, which I have seen.
01:01:56.000Yeah, he started playing mind games, and now you start wanting him.
01:02:01.000I think in this day and age, there's going to come a point in time where the person that is homophobic, or racist, or any other prejudiced, that person is going to be very rare.
01:02:17.000Like right now, there's plenty of people that you could hang out with that would share in your racism or share in your homophobia.
01:02:25.000But I think because of the internet and because people are kind of understanding people a little bit better and motivations a little bit better, that's gonna be less and less.
01:03:19.000But, if you say that you eat an animal that's not on the average, everyday menu, You know, if you're one of those weird dudes that go squirrel hunting, you know, oh, you piece of shit, how could you shoot a squirrel?
01:05:49.000But pigeons were actually brought to North America as a food source.
01:05:52.000When you look at pigeons that are in New York and they're flying all over the buildings and shitting all over the place, those pigeons were initially brought over as a food source.
01:08:05.000So I don't know if maybe they have a less strong reaction from eating the cockroach than they do from eating shellfish, or if that's how their reaction normally is.
01:08:13.000I guess there's levels of allergies, right?
01:09:35.000It's a hard animal to hunt, a lot of people don't realize, but the payoff's amazing because it's pretty large and some of the best meat around.
01:09:44.000I really, I keep coming back to elk as the best.
01:13:38.000We documented the whole thing because it was just ridiculous.
01:13:41.000And so I got sick and I don't know if it was from drinking water, but sometimes the gestation period of a lot of things you pick up.
01:13:48.000I did drink out of one stream that my brother didn't and it might have been below an elk wallow.
01:13:54.000Anyways, I get sick, and it happens to be this night that we had an insane walk back.
01:13:59.000We got back, I think it was one in the morning, and we could have bivvied out, but the thought was, we set up a base camp, and if you bivvy out, you carry your camp on your back.
01:14:09.000But then you still have to get all the meat back, and it was, in our minds, easier to just...
01:14:14.000Do extra effort if we had to come out light, and then we would have room to carry meat so we wouldn't have to carry our gear and other things.
01:16:14.000And while we're hiking, the thing we do, you're just like walking and working hard.
01:16:19.000All we do is talk about how few calories.
01:16:21.000We memorize the amount of calories in every mountain house.
01:16:26.000Mountain house, those meals, those freeze-dried meals.
01:16:29.000And when you're overexerting and just eating freeze-dried meals, nothing is better than some fresh elk steak over the fire.
01:16:36.000I was hanging out with this photographer when we went moose hunting, this guy Sam, and he was talking about this trip that he had went on where they had not brought enough food, and everyone on the trip had lost like 30 pounds, 20 pounds.
01:17:01.000You force your body to keep going, and it starts eating off fat and muscle.
01:17:05.000And it doesn't take much to do, because you almost come to a point when you're working so hard that you physically can't, you just get sick of eating almost.
01:17:16.000They need some better, higher, you just need to bring sticks of butter or something.
01:18:23.000Just, they have this mental toughness, the ability to endure discomfort that the average person just doesn't get, and I think it's accentuated by this life-or-death struggle that you experience on a day-to-day basis when you're hunting.
01:18:37.000Yeah, you can kind of compartmentalize certain aches and pains and hunger and thirst and cold You just block that shit out and keep going or the average person sort of wallows in that stuff But you know you have you have to you come into this this you have to do these certain things where you're tasked with something It's probably a lot harder than The average person thinks you can do,
01:19:00.000but once you've done it once, a lot of this stuff's mental.
01:19:05.000And that's the Apex Predator show that I've been doing comes back to a lot of shit's just mental.
01:19:45.000A lot of times people start focusing on the discomfort, and it accentuates.
01:19:52.000Their entire focus becomes this pain instead of doing the task, like blocking out whatever discomfort that you have, dealing with it, and get through it.
01:21:40.000And so for me, I just kept passing up animals because the experience wasn't right.
01:21:44.000Until the last day, when I was supposed to leave early, and I ended up, oh, I'm just going to be hunting for two hours and I don't bring any water.
01:21:51.000And I ended up hunting all day and going...
01:21:55.000I don't even know how far, 18 miles maybe, and I didn't bring any food, I didn't bring any water, and I'm hurting, and I ended up shooting a deer at last light.
01:22:04.000And now, to me, it was an awesome experience.
01:22:12.000And something that I, as a hunter, that non-hunters don't really maybe understand is having these antlers around.
01:22:20.000And when the meat's long gone, I can look at that and remember the hardship and the journey and the adventure and these other things about the experience.
01:22:28.000And the meat was a byproduct, but these are the memories that I, like you look at that moose and you think of something completely different than I do.
01:24:13.000So instead of, like, some people, they want a bigger deer so they could say, hey, I got a 190 buck and, you know, 190 inch and look, it's on my, you know, and they'll measure everything and look at his tines and look how big his...
01:24:25.000For you, it was just, it's a more difficult pursuit.
01:25:27.000I love, you know, the turkey, I don't know if I'll do that again.
01:25:31.000I might, I mean, it's not that I didn't like it, but what I didn't like about the turkey is you work all day and, you know, several days in a row to get a turkey, and you can only, it's like a meal.
01:25:42.000It's like a meal for, like, my family.
01:25:45.000They couldn't even eat the whole turkey.
01:25:46.000It's like, it's not that big, you know?
01:25:48.000That's what, in Nevada, chucker hunting's big, and you might work your...
01:27:14.000So hunting isn't just about going out and acquiring meat.
01:27:20.000Hunting is also about the challenge of the pursuit of the animal, being the hunter, being the predator out there trying to outsmart or out-hunt animals.
01:27:31.000Defy their natural instincts, figure out how to avoid the wind blowing in their nose, figuring out how to approach them the right way, and to make it even more difficult, going after the bigger ones that are smarter, that have been alive longer, making it a more difficult task,
01:27:47.000and making the appreciation of the accomplishment much better.
01:27:50.000Yeah, and the harder something is, the more skill you need, the more you've honed your abilities.
01:30:11.000Yeah, it seems like those trips are very strange, too, because you were staying in one of those weird cabins that they have set up there for people that can just use them anytime they want.
01:30:23.000They can go up there and hang out in those cabins.
01:31:19.000It's a different world, and it's really hard to explain to people that don't understand it because the animals aren't technically supposed to be there, but we want them there, and they can't get rid of them.
01:31:29.000So there's a completely different system in place there.
01:34:48.000They ate living nestlings right out of the nests.
01:34:50.000And if you're thinking that must be a mistake, that the deer were chewing their way through some vegetation that happened upon a mouthful of bird, think again.
01:34:57.000Up in Canada, a group of ornithologists were studying adult birds.
01:35:03.000In order to examine them closely, researchers used mist nets.
01:35:08.000Usually draped between trees are designed to trap birds or bats gently so that they could be collected, studied, and released.
01:35:15.000When a herd of deer came by, the deer walked up to the struggling birds and ate them alive right out of the nets.
01:36:29.000Yeah, there's all sorts of speculation about that, but when we were in Alberta last year, one of the guys we were with, they had seen a female eat its own baby.
01:37:27.000But that's why I wanted to take and look at it as a learning experience, not necessarily come out with these preconceived ideas of what's going to happen.
01:37:36.000Act as this animal in the wild, learn from it, and then see what its life would be like.
01:37:42.000And one of the things that I've come to the conclusion of is a lot of these animals that we see as being super efficient and easily surviving, it's a hard knock life for them.
01:38:25.000And then we go out as humans and it's a lot, essentially, it's a lot easier for us to hunt and catch things than it is for these natural predators or animals.
01:38:52.000Yeah, it just goes back to that challenge of what makes it hard and why you do it.
01:38:58.000I mean, there's people that only bow hunt.
01:38:59.000There's people that bow hunt and rifle hunt.
01:39:02.000There's people that don't traditional bow hunt.
01:39:06.000And it's all based on the challenge and the experience for them, as well as a lot of ideals as far as Okay, well I'm a bow hunter and if you shoot with a gun, that's too easy for me.
01:39:19.000But for me, I do whatever kind of hunting because I just love hunting.
01:39:23.000Yeah, there's a lot of people that have, there's like a purity involved in like shooting something with a bow because it's much more difficult than shooting something with a rifle.
01:39:30.000See, I'm cool with that, but sometimes for me, I don't like when hunters are against hunters.
01:39:36.000Like, if you're, oh, you aren't a hunter because you shoot it with a rifle, and then, well, the traditional dude's like, you aren't a hunter because you shoot it with a compound bow, and there's a guy out there wearing no shoes going, you guys need to grab him with your hands.
01:39:49.000And there's some other dude who's like, you gotta catch him with your teeth.
01:41:03.000And that's, for me, if I'm hunting with a rifle, then I may try to find something that's bigger or pack into an area that's further or who knows what I do.
01:41:37.000It was a good shot with your bow, but the buffalo was still alive.
01:41:41.000They're so fucking tough and they're so big.
01:41:43.000And, you know, there's a lot of things...
01:41:46.000That I would have done different, but also I couldn't have done different.
01:41:50.000Sometimes you have to do what happens in that moment and make a decision.
01:41:55.000And for me, I didn't want to shoot a buffalo bedded down, bison bedded down, but some things went wrong during the filming of the camera guy was in the wrong place.
01:42:03.000And if that bison got up and started walking off, we wouldn't be able to film it.
01:42:07.000And so I made the decision to shoot it with my bow in that particular instance, and I had to live with that decision.
01:42:15.000Yeah, I shot it where it would have been good, but the bow didn't penetrate hard enough.
01:42:32.000Just, yeah, the next day it was still alive.
01:42:35.000And for me, I mean, there's guys that could maybe watch that episode and go, well, you're bow hunting and you shot it in the end with, if you haven't seen it, I'm giving away a spoiler alert.
01:42:44.000But yeah, I ended up shooting it with a rifle the next day.
01:42:47.000And for me, it wasn't about bow hunting or rifle hunting or being a purist in this form or following through because the natives who did that tactic would have only used primitive weaponry or whatever.
01:42:59.000For me, in that moment, it was about...
01:44:09.000I'm not saying that that was a failure or whatever, but, you know, even in solo hunters or other things, there's a lot of episodes where I don't get anything.
01:44:15.000There's a lot of hunting shows that won't show that, but for me...
01:44:25.000And I think if I just edited things how it's always perfect, then I'm just kind of lying to myself, really.
01:44:33.000I think if there was very few hunting shows out there, maybe that would be acceptable, like, to try to make it, like, the most exciting version of hunting possible.
01:44:42.000But I think it's really important to portray it for what it really is.
01:44:45.000What it really is is a difficult pursuit, even for an expert hunter like yourself.
01:45:19.000Like, you go through the, you felt the emotions of a hunter.
01:45:22.000I don't necessarily feel sad, but I talk about it in the end, I say that the path of a hunter is a humbling path, and it really is.
01:45:29.000Like, in that moment, you watch that, and you go, boom, this bison just is now dead, and you go, whoa.
01:45:35.000Yeah, there's a feeling of loss, right?
01:45:37.000Right, and then there's also the feeling of, I'm thankful for this bison, and now it's providing me with all this meat, and that is what it is to be a hunter.
01:45:45.000You go through a range of emotions, no matter how many times you've done it, that life begets life, and now this bison is no longer an animal, it is a source of meat, and I'm going to use that throughout the year.
01:45:59.000That's the real big difference between someone who's been involved in the taking of the life, whether you're a farmer that kills your own cows or whether you're a hunter that goes out and hunts the meat.
01:46:08.000There's a much deeper understanding of what you're actually eating.
01:46:13.000I don't think it's necessarily healthy that we could just go to a supermarket and buy a steak.
01:46:20.000It just gives you a massive disconnect, and that's where all the self-righteousness from people wearing leather, eating meat, and getting angry at people for hunting, that's where it all comes from.
01:46:31.000There's a disconnect, like a complete total disconnect from what you're doing by eating a hamburger.
01:46:38.000You hired a supermarket hitman to go out there and kill those fucking animals and package it up so you can be completely insulated from the life-or-death struggle, and then you're getting upset at other people.
01:46:50.000The idea of a meat-eating person who wears leather being upset at hunting is one of the great, bizarre hypocrisies of our culture.
01:47:18.000And when it becomes meat, then it becomes something different to me, but it's still an animal.
01:47:23.000I think it's kind of a weird story, but we had a horse that...
01:47:29.000We'd use to pack out things and whatever, and it ended up breaking its leg, and we had to shoot it.
01:47:36.000And so I didn't want to do it because it's like you have this attachment to this animal.
01:47:42.000And then my other guy didn't want to do it either, but one of the guys that hadn't used the horses, we talked to him and said, okay, you need to put this horse down.
01:48:30.000I've had horse tartare, or I've had raw horse, and I've had a horse loin, so they cooked like the back strap, and they cooked it up like a steak.
01:49:12.000One of the weird things is I believe a lot of the horse they buy in Canada comes from the United States, but we can't sell it in the United States.
01:50:39.000Yeah, because, well, it was pretty, yeah.
01:50:42.000And I thought, well, there was other animals out there that were also going to eat it, but it would have been impossible to get the rest out.
01:51:57.000Either trade swimming across or something.
01:51:59.000Have you ever seen that picture of a mountain lion and a mountain goat that apparently got into a scrap and they both fell off the mountain onto a highway and they were both dead?
01:53:56.000Oh, yeah, yeah, that's probably what I've heard.
01:53:58.000So the first episode, I emulated the alligator, learned from the alligator, and my goal was to, well, to learn from the alligator, but I was trying to grab a wild boar barehanded.
01:55:26.000I'm going to study animals in their environments, learn what makes them successful, and challenge myself with nearly impossible hunts, giving me raw skills only obtained from experience.
01:55:39.000I plan to immerse myself in nature and hunt like an animal.
01:56:01.000The thing about it is, when we started doing it, I mean, I hate corny things.
01:56:06.000And every time we'd think of an episode, we'd go, this could either be the corniest, dumbest thing ever, or it could be amazing.
01:56:13.000And the fact that we can take something and be real about it, not have to create drama and other things, and...
01:56:20.000Make it educational, where you can still learn, and do something that nobody else has really tried, and make it not ridiculous, to me, is a win.
01:56:29.000Well, also, doing it on the Sportsman's channel, you could actually do the whole show.
01:56:34.000You could actually do it the way you want to do it.
01:56:37.000They're not going to fuck with you, where if you were doing this on, you know, fill in the blank, and name another cable channel, they would give you a hard time.
01:59:39.000And, or a pig, it could have been a sow, too.
01:59:42.000Makes me now realize that strolling around in the swamp with just my head above water is a freaking dangerous thing, because this thing instantly charged me.
01:59:50.000I mean, there wasn't even a split second.
01:59:52.000It wheeled around and came right at me.
02:00:58.000I mean, nothing that, um, nothing life-threatening, really, I would say.
02:01:05.000I mean, I've had elk, like, wounded elk come pretty close to getting at me, but that was just because somebody messed up, and it wasn't, uh, it was pretty weird.
02:01:16.000They were just trying to figure out a way to get out of there.
02:02:22.000The whole relationship that football has to steroids is...
02:02:27.000It's similar in a way to what the UFC has to steroids, but the UFC is more aggressively pursuing it, I think.
02:02:33.000The NFL... If you look at football players from the 1960s, and you look at football players from 2015, you're like, okay, what the fuck happened?
02:02:50.000Well, there's certainly, like, advancements in strength and conditioning programs, understanding recovery and how to enhance growth and all these different things, but there's also steroids.
02:03:01.000There's just no goddamn doubt about it.
02:04:14.000Well, they're starting to realize now the overall effect of all these car wrecks and it's not pretty and it's interesting because there's this class-action lawsuit against the NFL and there's all these different people that are saying They're gonna start suing and all these different players that played for years and years and years that are now debilitated They're just their brains have come to toast.
02:04:32.000Did you see the real sports piece on it?
02:04:36.000It's really terrifying because They have all sorts of very predictable patterns that these guys follow when they have traumatic brain injury.
02:04:46.000Impulsiveness, violent outbursts, memory loss, and they essentially become a totally different human being.
02:04:53.000And it's all because their brain is...
02:04:55.000And the damage takes really 10 years to fully manifest.
02:05:00.000So if they get a massive concussion, the real damage is like 10 years down the line.
02:05:14.000Guys are starting to talk about it now, about how to mitigate it by not sparring as hard, trying to...
02:05:22.000Spar less and concentrate more on strength conditioning drills or drill skill skill based drills for fighting because in the old days and Some some camps still do it this way.
02:05:32.000They would just go to war three four days a week They would just glove up and beat the fuck out of each other and that's how they got better and that's how they learned and there's there's some There's some benefit to that.
02:05:45.000Much like what we were talking about earlier about the mental aspect of just being tough enough to deal with certain situations and not freaking out and not being overwhelmed by Your thoughts, like, oh my god,
02:06:42.000There's like borders when it comes to joints.
02:06:45.000There's some things you shouldn't fight off because like you have to realize as you get older especially, you realize, okay, the reason why I don't want to tap here is because of my ego.
02:06:54.000But if I do tap, then I don't have to go to the hospital and get surgery on my fucking elbow.
02:07:00.000But if I don't tap, I'm going to get my elbow ripped apart and then they're gonna have to reconstruct it because I've already done this before.
02:07:14.000There's occasional injuries, but there'll be occasional injuries if you do any kind of sport where you're trying really hard to do something.
02:07:34.000For soccer, it's like one of the biggest methods or reasons why people tear their ligaments in their knees.
02:07:40.000They like throw a kick, they're planted, and they kick, and their foot doesn't move, and their body torques, and it's taut!
02:07:48.000Yeah, those guys are, that's one of those things, they're in pretty good shape.
02:07:53.000I mean, because you're running, it's a sport we're running all the time.
02:07:55.000What I started doing was, I got like a soccer, I'm not very good at soccer or whatever, but running up and down hills with a soccer ball, like juggling it, because then you get, you like got to control the ball, so on your descent and things, you're actually working a lot harder.
02:08:35.000That's a big one that I think there's a massive misconception in the public's eye.
02:08:38.000They think of hunters as being these fat guys who drink beer and go out and shoot animals and laugh about it.
02:08:43.000They don't realize, like, there's guys like you, like, you were talking about this the last time you were here, you have this insane VO2 max when they studied you for that Predator show, for your Predator show, I should say.
02:08:54.000They tested your VO2 max, and you're in some elite endurance athlete territory.
02:09:00.000Yeah, and that is crazy because it's essentially...
02:09:05.000I haven't trained for that, but it's just by hunting I am training for that.
02:11:04.000You must develop like really great core stability, too, because it's all about balancing that heavy weight on your back and then walking with it.
02:11:28.000It's a matter of going on and on and on.
02:11:30.000I have friends that don't work out, and one of the most hilarious things ever was taking one of my friends who was a comedian who doesn't work out to the gym and trying to put him through a workout, just a fairly easy workout, and watching him just turn blue and gray and look like he was dying and heaving and coughing and hanging on to the...
02:11:50.000The recovery time he needed in between sets was hilarious.
02:11:53.000It's like, you realize, like, this guy just, here's what, this is what a body looks like when it's never been pushed.
02:13:25.000Because I've taken out and hunted with a few professional athletes.
02:13:29.000These guys are, Human specimens of the highest degree like they Physically and then they try hiking with me and Absolutely, they just don't get it that is like no.
02:13:41.000I trained for this is what I do Right, he'll fit or whatever, right?
02:13:44.000You put me in if I'm gonna go bench press like you bench press and this is not gonna happen But we're gonna have you pack on my back and I'll just hike forever.
02:14:36.000And so they've designed these packs...
02:14:41.000Primarily for guys like you that are going to do what you did in Alaska, where you're going to walk hours and hours and hours with giant slabs of meat on your back.
02:14:50.000And that's special gear for a special task, because it puts the weight on your...
02:14:56.000On your hips and your syncs, I guess, yes, right above your tailbone there.
02:15:01.000Because you don't want the weight, you know, you want it above your hips so you've got full mobility.
02:15:05.000You can move, but kind of distribute the weight through the frame to your hips.
02:15:11.000And, yeah, you can put some serious weight in some of these packs and go.
02:15:15.000I mean, no joke, I've packed out a whole elk myself in one trip before.
02:17:04.000That Kodiak Island, man, was the subject of that television show that was really controversial because it had James Hatfield from Metallica was the narrator.
02:17:37.000It was like there was one scene where these guys were stalking this bear and the guy was about to pull the trigger on his bow and then they cut to commercial and then they come back and then all of a sudden the guy doesn't have a jacket on and his pack's not there.
02:17:59.000And then I talked to this dude who worked on the set, and he was explaining to me how much fuckery was going on, and then it made even more sense.
02:18:06.000That's what I'm talking about, the creating drama, and I hate that.
02:18:11.000I was watching some other Alaska show, and it was supposedly about, like, a wolf is coming to eat our cows, and we're gonna go kill this wolf, and then...
02:18:53.000There was one episode of the Alaska, the last frontier that I watched where they were fishing and it was like this really badly acted thing where they're like, there's a bear.
02:19:04.000I hear a Bear, like, stop freaking out.
02:19:41.000That's one thing that's really cool about your show, and Rinella operates the same way as does Jim Shockey, that Uncharted show that he has.
02:19:51.000It's more like a cultural exploration show than it even is a hunting show.
02:19:58.000I mean, he goes to these places and eventually shoots an animal, but he's in the weirdest spots on Earth, man.
02:20:05.000Really dangerous, war-torn areas, and he's bow-hunting a fucking goat or something.
02:20:11.000And that's where it comes into the adventure aspect of it as well, because there's so many aspects to hunting.
02:20:16.000The benefit is the meat, but while you're getting your meat, you get these rich experiences that you can't get any other way.
02:20:22.000Well, you get a deeper understanding of life itself in the sense of actual biological life on Earth.
02:20:30.000You get a deeper understanding of not just experiencing it from a video or reading an article about it, but from actually being there in the environment where these things live.
02:20:40.000The other thing is you get to be a part of nature, not just a watcher of nature, not just a bystander.
02:20:47.000Like even doing the Apex Predator show, I'm looking at the way an animal lives and then trying to see how humans compare and then go do it.
02:20:54.000And the doing it part is completely different than the watching it part.
02:20:58.000I can watch the great blue heron do something and there's the heron episode.
02:21:03.000Obviously, there's some things that are ridiculous about it.
02:21:06.000Like I decide to go into a river wearing stilts.
02:21:09.000I go, this seems like you're trying to make entertaining television.
02:21:13.000And at first I thought, is this going to be one of those things where it's like the filleted salmon type show?
02:21:20.000So I look at the way the Great Blue Heron hunts and I'm bird watching for...
02:21:25.000The majority of the first part, like watching the way these animals do something.
02:21:29.000And by watching them, I thought I understood it.
02:21:31.000And then I went and did it in a similar fashion where I'm now putting myself in the experience of dealing with things like water refraction, deep water, clarity, trying to sneak in and be on this elevated platform.
02:21:45.000And the experience of doing it, I learned something about that bird that I would have never learned otherwise.
02:21:51.000And it was like this light on moment where I thought, okay, even in the midst of these semi-ridiculous things, I'm learning something that I can't learn by observing.
02:22:07.000And light refraction, from what I understand it with bow hunting, you have to shoot in the water like maybe six inches below where you think the fish is?
02:22:17.000Yeah, so it varies on water clarity, angle of the sun, depth of the fish, and at some point I realized the fish were so deep that the spear wouldn't even really reach them with enough force for penetration.
02:24:24.000They can take a concept that seems out there.
02:24:27.000It's just one of those shows, you have to watch it to understand it.
02:24:30.000I mean, I could talk about it, but if you really want to see if you like it or not, you have to watch it.
02:24:34.000I think guys like you are really important in the world of hunting because what you represent is what doesn't fit when these guys have this stereotypical idea of what a hunter is.
02:24:46.000The stereotypical idea of what a hunter is to a person who doesn't know any hunters.
02:24:50.000They want to think of them as these loudmouthed, drunken dummies who don't really care.
02:25:11.000I mean, the assholes that laugh and mock these animals as they're shooting them, and people who are drunks are going out there, and irresponsible use of firearms and weapons.
02:25:36.000If you're an anti-hunter because of those people, if they were all like that, I would be like that too.
02:25:42.000But that's not what hunting has been...
02:25:46.000As it's been explained to me, and as I've experienced from guys like Ryan Callahan, from guys like you, from...
02:25:53.000All the people out there that I've run into that are real hunters have been very respectful, very fascinated by it, intrigued, constantly curious as to the nature of these animals, and super respectful of the lives of these animals that they take.
02:26:10.000You know, I think too, because for a long time people, I think there's a lot of hunters that have very similar views to myself.
02:26:18.000And for a long time they just haven't had necessarily the ability or the pulpit to show that there's other people out there like that.
02:26:27.000Because when I first started, I've always wanted to get into hunting television, and when I first started trying to break into it, And I got a criticism because there was this model.
02:27:12.000And that right there told me, like, if this is that industry and this is that, I don't want to be a part of this.
02:27:18.000But then my thought was, you know, there's probably other people out there like me that if they had the chance to do it how, just be myself and do it, then they would recognize that and maybe change the whole way things are going.
02:27:32.000I mean, it'd be awesome to be a part of the people that change the way people see hunters because I think there is the ability to make that change because there is a lot of us out there that respect nature, respect the animals, see it as a way of life and not just as some crazy bubba guy out there hooting and hollering and fist pumping and doing his thing and not respecting what we have.
02:27:56.000The lack of appreciation for the life that you've just taken and also the lack of understanding of the complexities of the whole situation is also one of the disturbing things about the whole quote-unquote Bubba thing.
02:28:43.000It's not always a solid moment, but it's an excitement in this very deep moment where you did take the life of an animal, and you need to respect that.
02:28:53.000And for me, I always have, and I've expected the entire journey to get to that point.
02:28:57.000And so for me to smile behind an animal, to me, means it's not disrespectful.
02:30:07.000Until I listen to these guys in these podcasts I always had this really negative really stereotypical view of what a hunter is and now I kind of understand it and I've gotten that like guys on my message board There's guys on my message board that have evolved over the time They've been there where they were there years ago and they had this idea like all hunters are assholes and then as time went on They've kind of been exposed to all these different people and all these different conversations.
02:30:32.000They realize oh We're just involved in this weird culture that has This compartmentalization of various aspects of life.
02:30:43.000And the big one is where you get your food from.
02:30:46.000So there's people that are criticizing people that do it themselves.
02:30:49.000There's no better way for an animal to die than by a hunter.
02:30:56.000If you shoot a deer or an elk and that animal is dead within seconds, that is the most peaceful way it's ever going to die.
02:31:06.000The most pure way you're ever going to acquire meat, it's so much less struggle and less suffering than being a domesticated animal that's raised to be slaughtered.
02:31:17.000It's so much better than being killed by a predator out in the wild that's going to slowly eat you asshole first.
02:31:33.000One is that populations need to be controlled, and they are controlled through the natural way with predators, but when we live in those environments, you have to pick a team.
02:31:42.000If you're gonna say, team people, well then you're gonna have to control the predators as well.
02:31:47.000And you have to control the game animals because, look, try living in upstate New York where you can't even drive down the road without slamming into a suicidal deer.
02:31:54.000I mean, they have some places where they have to control the populations of deer So badly that they have, like in Pennsylvania, they don't even have a season.
02:32:02.000There's parts of Pennsylvania where you could just go and just shoot deer all the time.
02:32:18.000People are getting Lyme disease because of it.
02:32:21.000There's a lot more to what hunting is and to what...
02:32:27.000What it represents to the people that are involved in it than the Bubba image.
02:32:32.000Yeah, and there's always the thing that always makes me laugh is the people that say, oh, we'll just release more predators to control, like if you're all about animal population control, like make it before humans, like before human, or what did they say?
02:32:56.000Before we got here, before people came across the land bridge, humans and animals have been, especially on any con, have been coexisting for a very long time.
02:33:07.000And humans have been a prime hunter of these animals as a predator in the natural food chain.
02:33:13.000The animals that we didn't hunt no longer exist.
02:33:16.000I haven't seen a T-Rex in a long time.
02:33:29.000Well, one of the main arguments with how human beings' brains developed to such a large size is because of hunting, because of the sophisticated methods that we need to employ to make sure that we kept eating food.
02:33:38.000And one of the things that, like looking at Apex Spreader, it really kind of looks at humans and animals and how we've adapted and learned from nature.
02:33:48.000If we were out there and, okay, well, yeah, our brains, it all comes back to we have...
02:33:55.000Every animal out there can possibly beat us in a certain way.
02:34:25.000Yeah, so the coyote one was looking at that Catelyn painting, but using the coyote skin in that fashion.
02:34:30.000So the coyote, the wolf, the golden eagle, the great blue heron, the river otter, and the American alligator.
02:34:38.000And if you, when you're done with all this, what are your next ideas?
02:34:43.000We've got, I want to do, so even, it's called Apex Predator, but sometimes titles of shows may be misleading because I also want to look at every aspect of nature, not just predators, because I think there's a lot of other animals that can teach us things.
02:34:57.000So we're considering humans as an apex predator.
02:35:00.000How did we get to this point by learning from nature as well as humans?
02:35:41.000I'd really like to look at the way mountain lions, they're so quiet when they walk.
02:35:45.000And some of these, you look at some of these episodes, you just see it as a 30-minute episode.
02:35:50.000And some of these episodes, I've trained for months to prepare to do this episode, the wolf episode.
02:35:55.000I mean, I was training, running, doing a lot of things to prepare myself to be able to attempt to run an elk down.
02:36:01.000And one of these episodes that we had slated an idea of, I was training for, was this mountain lion episode where I'd compare how mountain lions, like, the amount of noise they make when they walk is very little.
02:36:12.000I've had them just walk past me and never heard a thing.
02:36:15.000So I thought, let's measure, kind of measure how loud a mountain lion is when it's walking, and then us with our boots on, and then us with our bare feet.
02:37:29.000Like, this is his idea that, you know...
02:37:31.000To really truly survive, you know, you're gonna have to go without shoes because occasionally you find yourself with no shoes and then you'd be fucked because your feet are soft, so he doesn't want to be in that situation, so his feet are always hard.
02:37:45.000Before I did, I did like a lot of research.
02:37:48.000There's some crazies out there that are all about this like no shoe thing and there's dudes that talk about drawing like a fake sandal on your foot because you can't go into places, you know, like no shoes, no shirt, no service.
02:37:58.000So they've got all these, like, tricks of making, like, a rope, a paracord fake sandal so people don't really notice that you're barefoot.
02:38:04.000And then how to, like, get into it and start by going on varying terrain.
02:38:09.000And I actually had to spend, while I was trying to toughen my feet, I had to spend some time in L.A. So I was, like, cruising down downtown L.A. near Skid Row, barefoot, and I thought, this is a good way to pick up a disease.
02:39:54.000One of the problems is they don't seem to get together and talk that often.
02:39:57.000And I've seen Rinella have conversations with people that were kind of anti-hunters and...
02:40:01.000I guess, you know, actually in my day-to-day, I do have a lot of conversations with people that aren't hunters, but they're also people that are close to me.
02:40:30.000I think when you really sit down and think about it, if you're talking to somebody like myself or people that are like-minded to me, there's a lot of things that we can pull from that if you just actually had a real conversation and take out all the bullshit of the,
02:40:46.000I don't even know, on both sides, I call it the hunting propaganda and the non-hunter propaganda, the things that you're told and you think or whatever.
02:40:54.000You just actually have a real conversation about it.
02:41:05.000There's something, it sounds like, oh no it's not, you're taking a life.
02:41:08.000I get all the arguments, I understand the arguments, but I'm telling you, there's something, there's something even psychedelic about going into their world And hunting them, dipping your toe into the wild, the true wild.
02:41:23.000There's something like boundary dissolving about that.
02:41:27.000It changes the way I looked at the whole world.
02:41:33.000Like the first time I went deer hunting...
02:41:35.000One of the crazy things about it was looking at this deer, locking eyes with this thing in the wild and understanding the roles that we have.
02:41:44.000His role is trying to get the fuck away from me.
02:41:47.000And then taking its life and killing it and eating it.
02:41:49.000And I was like, this is a spiritual experience.
02:41:52.000A deeply spiritual experience in a weird way that I didn't anticipate.
02:41:57.000I anticipated it being Maybe somber and that I would have to get over the sadness of it all and then I might not even want to do it again Maybe I'll just become a vegetarian.
02:42:08.000Those were like real considerations that I had but after the event I felt like there's a there's something that most folks are missing about this experience and I think it's because it's been very poorly represented in our culture by media by these the the stereotypical Bubba type by all these different Different pieces of information that have sort of filtered down to the average urban civilization inhabitant.
02:42:38.000We don't have a connection to it, so we're basing our opinions on it just based on stereotypes, on these immediate depictions of what a hunter is.
02:42:53.000False ideas but then when you if you actually got to talk to someone but it's also one of those things you talk about it we talk about we're sitting here talking about it but until you go through that experience you necessarily don't know what it feels like what it means what it means to you my mom's stepdad who called grandpa he is loves fishing big out like loves nature hiking other things Went hunting,
02:43:21.000shot a bird, felt really sad, never went hunting.
02:43:44.000Yeah, and it just depends on maybe your experience.
02:43:48.000But also, I think it depends on your reason for going out there.
02:43:52.000If you have never hunted before, and you say to yourself, I would like to go hunting because I'd like to eat less meat that I don't know where it came from.
02:45:09.000Because I get a lot of people on social media or whatever that have listened to, like, found me through your podcasts or whatever, and a lot of them have now jumped into hunting, and there's still a lot of them that are trying to figure out how to do it.
02:45:22.000And I would say the main question I get asked is how I get into it, or how would someone get into it?
02:45:28.000Really, I mean, the first thing, you've got to take the hunter's safety and do the legal requirements.
02:45:31.000Because once you have that, then your barriers to entry or...
02:45:53.000Wild Sheep Foundation or Elk Foundation, and you go out on these projects and do something for wildlife, like build a water guzzler, reseed an area that's burnt, do all these things, or conservation efforts that are done by hunters, and you meet other people.
02:46:09.000Because hunters, if you meet them in the flesh, are probably really willing to help you out if you're like, I really want to get into this.
02:46:16.000And you've got to find the right type of guy, too, or woman or whatever to get you into it.
02:46:21.000But the easiest way is to have somebody show you, like a mentor.
02:46:23.000This place where I hunted moose, I should tell people about this guy because he's awesome.
02:46:28.000Bigcountryoutfitters.ca in northern BC. Mike Hawkridge is a guy who is the main guide.
02:46:37.000He's got other guides there as well that work with him.
02:46:39.000But he does that with people that have never hunted before.
02:46:42.000He'll take you through the whole deal.
02:46:45.000He's explaining to you how to shoot, explaining to you how to breathe when you're pulling the trigger, shot placement, aiming, the whole deal.
02:46:58.000He'll take you through the whole thing.
02:47:00.000Stalking, hunting, butchering, the whole deal.
02:47:07.000About as real a guy as you can get to.