On this episode of the podcast, I sit down with my friend Corey Chockeke to talk about his controversial decision to kill a black rhino in South Africa, and how it changed his life and the world's perception of hunting and conservation in general. Corey's story is a great one, and I hope you enjoy listening to it. If you don't know who he is, then you're in for a treat. Corey is a hunter, conservationist, and all-around badass. He's been on Jim Shockey's show "The Uncharted" and CNN's "The Undiscovered" and is one of the most well-known hunters in the world. He is also the co-founder of Conservation Force, a non-profit organization dedicated to educating the public about hunting and protecting endangered animals. I think you're going to love this episode, and if you do, please share it with a friend who needs to hear it. I know I did. Thanks for listening and supporting this podcast, Corey! Tweet me and let me know what you thought of it! Timestamps: 4:00 - What do you think of this episode? 5:30 - What would you do if you had to kill an endangered animal? 6:15 - How did you feel about it? 7:20 - How would you feel if it was your first time killing an animal in Africa? 8:00 9: How did it change your life? 10:30 11:40 - What was your biggest takeaway from the story? 12: What is your favorite thing about hunting? 13:00 | What are you looking forward to? 15:30 | What was the biggest thing you vegans should be doing? 16:40 | What is the most important thing you can do? 17: How do you want to do to protect the environment? 18:10 | How do I feel about hunting more in the future? 19:20 21:00 // 22:20 | What s your favorite part about hunting & conservationism? 22:40 23:30 // Is it a good thing? 25:00 Do you think it s a good idea? 26:50 | How does it make you feel like it s going to help the world ? 27:00 & 27:10 Can I have a vegan lunch? 30:00 + 32:00 / 33:00 Is it possible to be a murderer?
00:01:03.000So when the controversy broke, CNN covered the story.
00:01:07.000For folks who don't know what we're talking about, Corey, you bid money to be one of the people that got a chance to kill a black rhino.
00:01:19.000For people who are not aware of how conservation and hunting work, What they try to do, especially with endangered species, is they have to sometimes protect endangered species from their own.
00:01:39.000For people who are on the outside looking in, you say, well, this is an endangered animal.
00:01:43.000Why are you killing one of these endangered animals and trying to call this conservation?
00:01:49.000But with rhinos in particular, or a lot of aggressive animals, even giraffes, the older males, the older bulls, the older non-breeding members of these groups sometimes will attack the young males and kill them.
00:02:09.000And it is just a natural part of being a wild animal when the numbers are strong and healthy It's like it happens in bears every day of the week.
00:02:18.000It's just a part of being a bear But when it happens with something that's endangered like a black rhino they're forced into a very peculiar situation where they have to Most likely either kill or put this animal in captivity.
00:02:35.000All right A lot of different situations, depending on the animal, what it's actually doing, right?
00:02:41.000But yes, I mean, some of the things you're talking about could apply.
00:02:45.000And this is where it gets counterintuitive.
00:02:47.000So they have a bid, and the bid gets to, you want it, what is it, $350,000?
00:03:12.000Absolutely, they need more money, and the value of that was greater than that amount of money.
00:03:18.000That was the amount of money that I was able to claw together and make happen.
00:03:25.000The anti-hunting community and the animal rights community came out so strongly against this situation for what I think either misunderstanding or they were trying to keep the contribution down, one or the other, or both.
00:03:40.000And there's people who were much wealthier than I am and had a lot more money who really wanted to spend the money.
00:03:49.000But at the time, I don't think that they...
00:03:53.000Well, they had a better idea of what was to come than I did.
00:03:56.000I guess I was a little bit naive about it.
00:04:14.000Basically chased out by the anti-hunting community's rhetoric and their attacks.
00:04:21.000What what was surprising to you about this whole experience because it had to be a pretty life-changing experience like you're a guy who's you know relatively famous in the hunting world you being on that Jim Chocke show and You decide that you want to be the guy so you you spend all this money What was your goal when you wanted to do this?
00:04:43.000Did you want to bring awareness to this was it something that you felt strongly about from the very beginning?
00:04:47.000Well, I've always felt very strongly about Conservation and hunting, okay, ever since I was young.
00:04:55.000But the way this came about was a friend of mine who runs a company called Conservation Force, or a non-profit, 501c3.
00:05:06.000And he came to me and said, look, people I had that are bidding on this are gone.
00:05:55.000The permanent secretary of the Namibian Ministry of Environment and Tourism, him, and basically one of the rhino experts of the country came over and took place.
00:06:08.000They were there at the auction when it took place.
00:06:10.000So the amount of money that gets raised, this enormous amount, $350,000, in your opinion, Is low.
00:06:18.000It would have probably been much more if there wasn't...
00:06:20.000Yeah, not in the opinion of many, in fact, low.
00:06:23.000And I believe it'll come about again, but probably in a different way.
00:06:28.000And it's going to be at least, I would say, three times higher.
00:06:34.000I don't think they're going to do it again in the fashion they did.
00:06:35.000They're absolutely going to do it again, but they're not going to do it in the fashion they did this time, I don't think.
00:06:39.000Look, I don't speak for them, so I don't know.
00:06:41.000But yes, they will continue to auction off these surplus rhinos.
00:06:45.000And it's not hard to get people to be willing to do this, but in order to get people to spend $350,000 to save the rhino, just to donate to save it without hunting...
00:07:00.000I actually think that's more complicated because in this situation that I was in, the money had to be proved to go to the right places to benefit the rhino.
00:07:11.000The path had to be proven to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife for them to grant the import permit.
00:07:16.000So it went through the process, which was like the most vetted process possible.
00:07:22.000On every level, it was the most vetted conservation hunt probably in history.
00:07:28.000And they do these hunts like this here in the United States all the time.
00:07:30.000They auction off special deer tags, special elk tags, special sheep tags.
00:07:35.000This year I was in auction where a mule deer tag went for $385,000.
00:07:40.000So they do these all the time to raise money.
00:09:11.000Everybody who had an agenda to it that was against the whole process of what I was doing, and this goes all the way from the head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife to trying to make it look like CITES and IUCN aren't the world's foremost experts,
00:09:29.000especially IUCN. What are those companies?
00:09:34.000Group that puts together the red list of endangered species.
00:09:38.000Okay, they are the foremost experts on the subject and a guy named Michael Knight heads up that African rhino specialist group and he's the foremost expert in the world on rhinos.
00:09:47.000Okay, so you've got you have the world's Foremost experts in this you had the WWF a guy named Chris Weaver in Namibia Who heads that up?
00:10:25.000And in today's day and age, you look at that, and it's like a handful of people who are emotional about something outweigh public, you know, I mean, the experts of the world opinion.
00:10:36.000Well, it becomes very controversial, first of all, because it went on at the same time as they were broadcasting another species of rhino that was going extinct.
00:10:46.000There was three of them left, one male, two women, and the male wasn't breeding with them, and they were like, this is it.
00:10:53.000You're looking at the last three of these rhinos.
00:10:56.000And it also, part of the reason is it falls into this category that people call trophy hunting.
00:11:03.000And it's very different than going to the supermarket and buying meat from an animal that was killed for meat.
00:11:10.000The idea of trophy hunting bothers a lot of people because they think what you're doing is you're going over there and you're shooting something to prop up your ego.
00:11:16.000You're shooting something because, you know, you want to be the master.
00:11:20.000You want to go over there and blast this thing and take a picture, grip and grin and smile.
00:11:44.000The truth about let's quote-unquote trophy hunting is you're going out there looking for the most mature male of the species that you can find.
00:11:54.000Okay, and you're going through a selective process.
00:11:57.000And I think there is, amongst hunters, there's definitely a movement going, you know, Jim and I used to talk about it all the time.
00:12:05.000We would go out, we're looking for the oldest male of the species we can find.
00:12:09.000Okay, because that's the best one to take out.
00:12:11.000He's already breeded, he's going to go down, he's going to fall over dead on the mountain if it's a ram, and birds are going to pick his eyes out while he's alive.
00:12:19.000Okay, he's going to go through a horrible death.
00:12:21.000And we're going to spare that animal that.
00:12:25.000And so there's a lot that goes into that.
00:12:29.000And I understand people say, okay, that's what it is.
00:12:32.000Joe, like, for instance, I just met you today, and my idea of who you are isn't who Joe Rogan is.
00:12:39.000The only person that knows who Joe Rogan is is Joe.
00:13:12.000And so, yeah, okay, you want to go ahead and lump everybody in there because it's easy for you to disenfranchise them.
00:13:19.000Well, you're defending yourself here, and I would be defensive, too, if I had experienced the kind of barrage of hate that I've seen leveled your way.
00:13:26.000But that's one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on, is give you a chance over, you know, a couple hours to speak your mind.
00:13:32.000And so, what people have a problem with, I think, is people that want to kill things and don't eat them.
00:13:38.000There's some people that have a problem with you eating meat.
00:13:40.000There's some people that have a problem with you eating fish.
00:14:53.000There was so many people that that wasn't going to be a large issue.
00:14:58.000I've seen that before with an elephant hunt on television.
00:15:02.000It was a documentary on the controversy in these hunting camps in South Africa, and they shot this elephant and donated it to these villagers.
00:15:12.000These people came with baskets and stuffed these baskets with elephant meat, and they cut that entire carcass down to bite-sized portions or meal-sized portions in just a matter of a few hours.
00:16:23.000So this is a separate video other than the one that I had watched, which was the title of that was Texas Hunter Bags His Rhino in Controversial Hunt in Namibia.
00:16:45.000Yeah, the idea of meat wastage in Africa isn't that...
00:16:50.000Look, in the United States, it's hard for us to comprehend it because we've got a system of such excess that the poorest among us are the most overweight.
00:17:01.000You go to Africa, a poor person is skin and bones.
00:17:12.000And so, they're not wasting an ounce of that meat.
00:17:15.000Now, this animal had been targeted because it had killed one young bull already, and it was an older, angry male with not a whole lot of time left, right?
00:18:21.000I just laugh all the time when I see people talk about how, you know, like I'm some rich, over, you know, super, talk about my family and the oil business and whatnot.
00:18:32.000I was already, before my brother, my father, their partner had any success in the oil business, man, I was in my 20s.
00:18:39.000I was I'd already charted my path and was going.
00:18:42.000Actually, I wasn't aware of your background.
00:19:31.000And so, anyway, we're all growing up together as a family, and it's a part of our thing.
00:19:38.000And my granddad, I mean, I grew up in poverty when I was real young.
00:19:42.000And what we had to do was go hunting and fishing.
00:19:48.000I don't think I shot my first deer until I was 15 or 16 years old.
00:19:53.000So I did this bird hunting, and then I graduated high school, and I went and got a job working for a guy in Colorado guiding mountain lion hunts.
00:20:02.000And then I, you know, got another, started another business up with floor tile and made money and I was saving my money up to go hunting and I met another guy, a guy named Aaron Nielsen and him and I started up a company together and we started taking people on hunts.
00:20:16.000We'd say, we'd go on these different hunts on ourself.
00:20:18.000We'd go there, find the area, check it out and go on these adventures and then come back and get people together and go on more of them.
00:20:25.000And it's kind of snowball and snowball.
00:20:27.000When I met Jim in 2001, Back then, you know, I was just getting into it and I already, you know, knew quite a bit.
00:21:59.000So do you get frustrated when you watch, like, there's some reality, or not reality shows, there's some hunting shows that are on television that, you know, are essentially like cable access shows.
00:22:10.000I mean, they're just really poorly made, bad editing, bad personalities.
00:23:40.000How did you go from that to shooting an elephant?
00:23:44.000Well, if you really like hunting and you go over there and you learn more about it, you know, and you have a passion for it, if that's what you want to do, you just go.
00:23:54.000Right, but what leads you to want to shoot an elephant?
00:24:17.000And be a part of the cycle of life in an intimate way everywhere I could go.
00:24:23.000Like, people don't realize it, I don't think.
00:24:26.000And it's hard, you know, like, and I'll get into it later with you, really interested in To hear your path that brought you to it.
00:24:33.000I'm sure you've talked on it, and we don't have to talk on it because right now it doesn't bother, you know, if you've talked about it, your listeners get bored of it or whatever.
00:24:42.000Because you probably understand, and I don't want to, like, speak for you, but when you're that close to an animal, when you're within bow range of an animal, it's a different experience than you have going to 7-Eleven or whatever you're going to have in a normal life.
00:24:57.000And so, in a way, that would be the way I would translate it.
00:25:00.000I just wanted to go everywhere I possibly could.
00:25:03.000And I read everything I possibly could.
00:25:05.000And I learned everything I possibly could.
00:25:07.000Especially about I had a real passion for Asia.
00:29:16.000You go out and hang out with, you know, with pygmies who are very tough people, for instance, who've been to Cameroon, and they're waking up every morning, a lot of them, you know, their lives are hard, okay?
00:29:27.000It's not a nice existence, and you go out there and exist with them.
00:29:47.000You know, you're shooting that, you eat it.
00:29:49.000But shooting an elephant to people, they have a hard time with it because they're intelligent and they're social creatures and they know each other for, they have insane memories.
00:29:57.000Most of all these animals are intelligent.
00:30:07.000Look, in an innate way to stay alive, they're much more intelligent about their environment than you and I ever would because that's their home and they live in it.
00:30:43.000And what happens is when people are trying to apply human constructs to animals, what right does the antelope have not to be killed by the jaguar?
00:31:49.000And in these places, sometimes they actually have to kill these elephants because they start encroaching in human territory and stomping villages.
00:32:39.000I mean, the least that I've ever heard of anybody shooting a bull elephant for, you know, in recent times, probably like $8,000, $6,000, $8,000 bucks.
00:32:47.000And then the government just keeps a tusk.
00:32:49.000And the government keeps a tusk and does what with them?
00:34:38.000You know, it's a totally different thing.
00:34:40.000And the thing that you have to understand, there's different reasons to hunt different things, okay?
00:34:47.000You know, it's not like hunting is some giant, just broad thing.
00:34:55.000And in the case of elephants, if you want people to have a positive benefit, local people who really determine the survival of any animal is local people.
00:35:07.000You have to put a positive benefit on it for them.
00:35:10.000If it's just living next door to an elephant, you don't want that.
00:35:13.000If it's living next door to a lion, you don't want that.
00:35:16.000And so you're trying to understand that.
00:35:20.000You have to give them a reason to keep it there.
00:35:32.000If you don't know who Louis Thoreau is, he's a documentarian from the UK and he really gets very very thorough on subjects and he spent a lot of time in this South African hunting camp but it got down to the end of it and you know he was Pastoring this guy who ran this camp to the point where the guy said,
00:36:26.000Do you think that part of the problem with people and their perceptions of hunting is just based on this really weird insulated world that we live in where you could just go to the store and buy meat and most people, the vast majority.
00:36:46.000And in addition to that, they think that Timon and Pumbaa, who are Disney characters created by a couple guys and drawn up and given personalities.
00:37:59.000You have to have some sort of financial incentive for the people in the area.
00:38:03.000Financial incentive for people in the area.
00:38:06.000And also prevents poachers by hiring rangers.
00:38:09.000Well, or just like, for instance, in this black rhino situation, there wasn't anybody in there going to rat out where these black rhinos were at.
00:38:15.000You go to South Africa, and I was actually hunting in a place the other day that was in the middle of the rhino war.
00:38:22.000Okay, while I was there, they killed a poacher one of the nights I was there.
00:38:49.000And a white rhino, which was brought back from 30 animals to over 20,000 because of incentivizing people to own them and them being able to sell them on a hunting market, okay, and for whatever other reasons.
00:40:22.000It's not like you and I are getting together and going out there and saying, let's go kill a rhino today.
00:40:27.000Okay, and we're gonna go get our bullets we bought on fair and legal here in the United States or wherever we bought them.
00:40:33.000I think another issue that Lewis Thoreau covered in his documentary and that a lot of people are not aware of is that a lot of the lions, or excuse me, a lot of the animals in Africa that are being hunted on a regular basis were on the verge of extinction just two decades ago.
00:40:58.000It bothers people the idea that the only way these animals are surviving and thriving is if somebody is willing to pay money to go over there and hunt them.
00:41:05.000Because these people who are sitting there looking at it ain't doing a damn thing to save them, Joe.
00:41:09.000They're saving them to death by making uneducated comments and throwing up...
00:41:14.000Typing 75 characters into Twitter or your Facebook page isn't saving a rhino.
00:42:07.000Well, it also doesn't cover the reality of the money that's involved in paying for those tags and going over there and flying over there and paying for these hunting camps to stay open has kept these animals in enormous populations where they were dying off just 20 years ago.
00:42:34.000Look, a lot of the parks are spared because they're surrounded by game management areas and hunting areas.
00:42:43.000And sometimes they have to take those parks and they have to have either someone come in and minimize or control the population and kill some of the animals because they get too high, or they have to open them up for hunters.
00:42:57.000Yeah, I guess the best way I could put this is this.
00:43:00.000Most everybody would agree that humans are complicit in the plight of a lot of these animals.
00:44:01.000It's 100% hypocritical, but it's also wild that the hypocritical is the most common.
00:44:07.000It's more common to be hypocritical about meat than it is to not, because of this system that we've set up that's very effective, that allows you to go to any store, anywhere you want, and just buy meat instantly.
00:44:17.000How long did it become, how long did it take you to truly understand martial arts and everything about it?
00:46:45.000And if some event came up, it comes right back.
00:46:47.000And as soon as it comes up, it's gone again.
00:46:49.000You know, and for the animal rights people, there'll be somebody who will kill a dolphin or stab a frog or whatever, and they'll move on to that.
00:46:56.000Have you had a debate with anybody in the animal rights movement?
00:47:04.000When you try to explain your point of view, you try to explain that this is an aggressive older male that's not breeding anymore, that it had killed at least one young bull, was a danger to the breeding population of an endangered species?
00:48:02.000I really hate it, but there was a person that you did a show, you talked with on Opie and Anthony a while back, who's one of the leaders of...
00:48:21.000It's not about if the facts are helping the black rhino survive.
00:48:25.000These people would rather there not be an interaction with humans and animals They think the second of freedom of you releasing your pet, okay, some of them, and if it got hit by a car right over there, that minute of freedom is better than a lifetime than being Joe Ragoon's pet.
00:48:48.000I'm sorry, they lump animal welfare in with them.
00:48:51.000They try to make that they're bigger because they get these animal welfare people, and a lot of those animal welfare people hate that.
00:48:57.000They don't want to be lumped in with them.
00:48:59.000You know, because they know that, you know, like Michael J. Fox said, that he didn't look at the life of an ant any more or less valuable than the life of his son.
00:49:21.000Okay, but that's obviously, you're talking about a certain...
00:49:26.000That religious side of it, the ideological side.
00:49:29.000And the problem they have really, especially with me, is that I had a gigantic mountain of facts and scientific material, wildlife biology.
00:49:43.000On my side of the argument, I talked with a guy for a different show.
00:50:29.000He didn't get, like, you know, what drives you or me to go hunting.
00:50:34.000But he told me I had one of the best hard arguments, if not the best, that he'd ever gone up against.
00:50:41.000That this placing value on them is going to keep them around.
00:50:45.000At the end of it, at the very end of the conversation, he was like, Corey, you know, you have a really great sense of honor for this, and I really respect it.
00:50:53.000It's refreshing, and I think you're right.
00:50:56.000And so, but it took 90 minutes of going through, like I said, that ethereal mist of all the BS that's out here about this subject.
00:52:07.000For these people who called up or called me...
00:52:10.000Sent me messages threatening to kill my children, starting to burn my house down, rape my wife, every single thing that you could ever imagine.
00:52:17.000I mean, for those people to say they're going to do that, just in and of itself is ridiculous and hypocritical.
00:53:00.000And I will sit here and talk with any of them.
00:53:02.000Well, I think that's a real problem in social media.
00:53:04.000The real problem is anonymity and the lack of the social consequences.
00:53:08.000If I look at you in the eye and I say something really fucked up to you, and you raise your eyebrows at me like, what the fuck did you say?
00:53:14.000And then I feel that, and you feel it, and I feel it, but when you say something mean on Facebook, It hits that person.
00:53:21.000You say, I hope your fucking whole family dies in a fire.
00:57:14.000Once they get there, and that's the reality of the situation.
00:57:17.000I mean, I had some conversations with people about this when this thing went down, and I said, look, I'm not going over there to shoot any rhinos.
00:57:24.000I have no desire to shoot a rhino, but...
00:57:27.000You've got to pay attention to what you're talking about because you can't just talk shit and say this guy's an asshole and this rhino didn't need to be killed.
00:57:35.000You have to look at it from a balanced perspective, objectively, with no ideology attached to it.
00:57:41.000And when you do that, you realize that there's a lot of people, a lot of conservationists, a lot of biologists who are pro-culling of certain animals in any population to keep that population healthy.
00:57:54.000Again, it seems counterintuitive, but it's important.
01:01:59.000There's different kinds of black rhinos?
01:02:00.000Yeah, there's different subspecies of black rhinos.
01:02:02.000Like, for instance, when you were saying the one that was going extinct, the one that went extinct, there was a western black rhino that went extinct.
01:02:09.000And what is the difference in these rhinos?
01:02:11.000Like, how can they tell the difference?
01:03:04.000So they have these animals, they know that there's a fairly healthy amount of them, and they're trying to maintain and grow the population.
01:03:40.000So, you know, basically, it had, for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife to allow the importation of it, they had to find a non-detriment finding, meaning that the taking of this animal is not detriment to the species, and it had to have a positive finding as well, positive benefit, okay, to the species.
01:04:31.000But what I want to do, and I'm going to talk to them about this once it gets here, is can I loan it to different museums, put it on display at different places to keep the awareness alive about it?
01:04:42.000I never was in this because I was like, oh, I can't wait to have a black rhino.
01:06:14.000For everybody to see, everybody to join in, everybody to take the moral high ground, and very few people to take a nuanced, objective look at it and realize, wow, there's a lot of gray area, like many things in life.
01:06:29.000I'll tell you a real interesting deal.
01:06:30.000When it first happened, some children whose parents were activists, they wrote me a letter about why I was doing this.
01:07:12.000And I said, if there's three black rhinos left, okay, and let's say it's one male or two males and a cow or whatever, and one's killing the other two, can you shoot that black rhino?
01:08:16.000It just seems like if one of them is trying to kill the other one and you're talking about it, it's a pragmatic answer to a complex question.
01:08:32.000If the one kills the other one, and who knows if he dies in the process, because it's not like the one's going to let the other one kill him.
01:09:04.000But it's very complicated when you start putting value on things and trying to figure out which rhinos, which way, which method, which place, which community with all these things.
01:09:20.000To keep these animals alive, and unfortunately for these animals, they cannot afford the morality of the average person and the average person's thought process on this.
01:10:55.000Now, that's on a black illegal market.
01:10:58.000Now, if you put a value of it three times the weight of gold on an illegal market, and you have no value on it in a legal market, what's going to happen?
01:11:07.000People are going to kill it and they're going to sell it illegally.
01:11:09.000Okay, let's talk about, you know, I mean, I don't know how far I'm going with this and if it's even the right direction, but if you just put a blanket no, okay, how well would that work like in something like keeping people from doing drugs?
01:11:24.000How well did it work on alcohol in the 20s?
01:12:03.000But, I mean, you're not walking down the streets of L.A. thinking, this mountain lion's gonna frickin' rip my head off today.
01:12:08.000Okay, if you're in, like, Zambia, and you're rolling down in the evening time in rural Zambia, okay, and you're on a bike, you're thinking lion might be around here.
01:12:20.000Okay, and you know people have been killed by lion.
01:14:50.000Like just a giant, you know, different, like raging wall of emotion.
01:14:56.000You know, like I'm angry, I'm upset, you know, things like that.
01:14:59.000But you realize that what made me feel a lot better was a lot of the people that would just say, you know, karma type threats, you know, wish you'd die, hope you get cancer, whatever.
01:15:09.000I would respond to them when they'd send me those messages.
01:15:12.000Nine out of ten, maybe even more than that, said it was just a knee-jerk reaction and apologized.
01:15:16.000They realized there was a human on the other side of it.
01:15:19.000So you think when they see you on CNN, or they see you on a website, or they see your face, a photograph, they don't necessarily think of you as a person?
01:16:53.000Do you think that there's like a certain social currency to standing up for animals, certain social currency to taking that photo, putting it online and going, how dare you?
01:17:05.000I think people do certain things not just because they believe it, but also they put it out there because they want everyone to know they believe it, because it jazzes them up.
01:17:15.000Honestly, if he was here, I would show him nothing but love.
01:17:19.000I would care about him as a human being.
01:17:21.000And, you know, he called me a murdering scumbag.
01:18:42.000They chop down everything that's in that field.
01:18:45.000And they catch fawns and rabbits and squirrels.
01:18:49.000Anything that gets in front of those wheels just gets churned up and sliced apart.
01:18:55.000So the only way you're going to buy grain is, I mean, you're going to buy it in a store unless you're growing your own grain and picking it by hand.
01:19:03.000You're most likely involved in some sort of animal murder, whether you want to believe it or not.
01:19:09.000It's the reality of being a human being in these complicated times.
01:19:13.000They're trying to disconnect us from...
01:20:10.000You're questioning thoughts and feelings and emotions you have.
01:20:14.000I don't think, by and large, a lot of people that live everyday life...
01:20:19.000Have the opportunity to do that or take the opportunity to do that I don't think a lot of people do I think you're probably right and I think there's also the reality that we're all under the influence of the momentum of culture and when cultures when cultures accepts certain types of behavior and Certain types of behavior are not prevalent like hunting that those types of behavior that aren't prevalent get mocked or minimalized or misunderstood And I think when you deal with the system that we all operate under,
01:20:48.000there's a few people that are really aware of what the system really truly is.
01:20:53.000And those are the people that work in the slaughterhouses.
01:20:54.000Those are the people that breed the cattle.
01:20:56.000Those are the people that work in these insane, confined chicken factories where they just stuff all these fucking animals.
01:21:02.000Where they've made laws where you're not allowed to take photos.
01:21:06.000You can go to jail if you work in one of those plants or if you sneak into one of those plants and take photos of the ridiculously inhumane conditions that these chickens and these pigs.
01:21:16.000Different states have made laws because it's inconvenient for people to know the truth.
01:21:22.000It's, like, no different than the outrage that people had when you couldn't show coffins, when you couldn't show American flag-draped coffins.
01:21:31.000They were putting a ban on them in the media after the Gulf War started, and people were freaking out.
01:21:37.000This is my fucking family dying over there.
01:21:39.000You're telling me you can't take a picture of the coffin that my family's on because you don't want people to know the reality of people dying?
01:21:54.000Devise your own opinion or come up with your own opinions on things.
01:21:57.000But you have to be able to have access to information to have a really informed opinion.
01:22:02.000Well, and there's not been a day and age that I think we've had more access to information, and it seems like people would rather get outraged than informed.
01:22:09.000Well, it takes a long time to get informed about this shit.
01:23:09.000They don't have a personal relationship when they bite into a quarter pounder with the cow in the way that my grandmother, my great-grandmother who ran a dairy, would.
01:23:18.000They look at a quarter pounder the way most people look at a potato.
01:23:48.000And say, is the enjoyment that I get from having this Louis Vuitton purse or eating this hamburger, what is different about that enjoyment than Joe Blow gets from shooting a duck?
01:24:23.000It is a good point that you will get people that are absolutely outraged about hunting or absolutely outraged about the death of any animal, and yet they're driving down the street and there's just murdered animal skins everywhere you look.
01:24:37.000On people's shoes, on people's bodies, in their cars, in their briefcases.
01:24:42.000Their briefcase is covered in animal skins.
01:24:44.000Every convenience store you stop at has meat sticks and those fucking ground-up things that they turn into burritos.
01:24:51.000And every restaurant, everywhere you look is filled with animals.
01:24:55.000There is no bounds to the hypocrisy of it.
01:24:57.000Okay, now if you're a 100% real, legit, true D vegan, okay, who makes sure that on the level of growing in his backyard, he's not affecting any animal's life other than his house took up a place that an animal could live, okay?
01:25:12.000So, if you're that guy, I kind of, alright, you know, I get you.
01:25:21.000If you're not going to go over to Africa or you're not going to go to Asia, you're not going to go to the third world and either help fund or personally put your butt on the ground and live to save these things and protect these things and care about these things and be intimately involved with their life,
01:26:01.000If somehow or another you get some sort of pleasure out of this hunt, then it's bad.
01:26:05.000What they would like you to do is do it with total somber...
01:26:09.000Thinking and very, you know, I would say lots of, you know, probably the majority of hunters have absolutely, at least in the very minimal, a certain degree of reverence for the animal.
01:26:21.000And like someone like Jim, who, you know, I have never met anybody that had more reverence for an animal.
01:28:39.000You understand a certain aspect of a person.
01:28:43.000When you you see them tested and like especially a mountain hunt when you go hiking on these mountains and you see people pushed you see people that are willing to pussy out you see people that get get too tired too quick to get mentally weak and you you see people who don't and you see you see what You see what their character is about when they're pushed.
01:29:05.000When you're in a dangerous situation, when you're forced to be quiet, you're forced to be patient, you're forced to be disciplined, you find out what someone's made of.
01:29:16.000Because a lot of people are fucked up.
01:29:20.000They can't pay attention and they don't know how to stay focused and be a contributing factor in a successful hunt and that's one of the reasons why I think men in general we have an aversion to people who are Loud but aren't saying anything,
01:29:39.000call too much attention to themselves, have a distorted perception of their own abilities.
01:29:44.000I think a lot of that boils down to that would make a very unsuccessful hunter.
01:29:49.000And I think these things are ingrained in our DNA. I think there's a part of what makes a man a man, or makes a man...
01:29:59.000What makes a man, what people value in human beings, what people value in masculine traits, is ability to hold your own mud, ability to stay calm under pressure, ability to come through when the chips are on the line.
01:30:15.000And I think you learn a lot about someone when you hunt with them.
01:30:19.000You learn a lot about whether or not someone can keep it together when they have the shot lined up, whether they can draw back on a seven-foot black bear and make the right shot.
01:31:24.000And we would talk about this extensively.
01:31:29.000And we'd talk about, you know, situations that we'd be in when people, we'd see people go, you know, that would go bad and compounded human error.
01:32:03.000If you all have packs on, you're all equal and it's about what we're doing.
01:32:08.000And the emotion of that, that happens in the bonding, you know, like for instance, Joe, if you and I were on the side of the mountain in Pakistan or Mongolia, or we'd be with these people and we're sitting here, we have these bonds with them.
01:32:59.000It's like a real it's you're you're you're tied into who we are as human beings that in a sense to where a lot of times people don't Understand what that is until maybe they're in a car accident, right?
01:33:10.000They had like a traumatic event or something Okay, that's in most people probably haven't seen something die, you know And so it's you know in real life, you know outside maybe they hit a dog or a squirrel or something, you know Or especially your actions that cause the death of this animal you become Closer to who you are and what life really is.
01:33:30.000And life, I promise you, becomes more meaningful, I believe, because of this.
01:33:37.000I think you put more value on life when you've been in these situations.
01:33:40.000I personally saw the way that I changed as a human throughout it.
01:33:43.000It definitely broadens the spectrum of what you think are experiences.
01:33:48.000It gives you a completely different kind of experience.
01:33:51.000And in a lot of ways, one of the oddest things that I found about hunting is in a lot of ways it's psychedelic in that way.
01:33:59.000Like there's something about locking eyes with an animal that's in the wild that you're hunting.
01:34:05.000You're not thinking about anything other than that moment and there's this weird bond that you have with this animal.
01:34:11.000And when you take that animal and eat it, there's a strange high that comes from it.
01:34:17.000And it's not a high like you don't know where the fuck you are, you're drugged up.
01:34:20.000There's like an elevated senses sort of a thing.
01:34:23.000There's a connection to life itself that's very unusual and it changes your perception of life outside of that.
01:34:31.000Yeah, I think for each person it's different, but I can tell like when you're talking right now and when you're looking at me as you're talking about it, like you're very in touch with who you are as a person.
01:34:44.000You're very in touch with how these things have affected you as Joe Rogan or whoever you, you know, the person you are.
01:34:52.000I think that's one of the best things about hunting is that when you're out there, if it's your family, if it's your friends, you know, hunting is largely a social thing, okay?
01:35:03.000Now, like, in instances, like, you know, the extreme cases where people who, like, you look throughout history, Kermit Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt, okay, exploring type things, a different type of person.
01:35:14.000Even Jim is a different type of person.
01:35:16.000You know, I'm a totally different type of person, okay, when you're drawn to these things.
01:35:20.000It becomes a real fabric of who you are.
01:35:23.000What you're talking about, just eating the animal and everything, it's a fabric thing of who you are as a person and you're in touch with what you understand that the actions you took resulted in the death of a very real thing.
01:35:36.000And the death of that real thing is sustaining your life at that point.
01:40:35.000They kind of didn't show that much on the show.
01:40:37.000Because the real reason of that was...
01:40:43.000The idea of Uncharted wasn't to do a hunting show in traditional methods that we just went out and hunted stuff.
01:40:48.000The idea of Uncharted was to show the way these wild places work and the people who live in them and live off these animals and their value they put on the animal.
01:42:29.000You know, you're living in intensely cold environments, and there's not a lot of things to hunt, and that polar bear hunt is very important to them.
01:46:40.000I mean, the reason why I'm asking a lot of these questions, a lot of it is just because I want to cover all the bases and take it from a bunch of different angles, play devil's advocate as much as possible.
01:47:41.000One time we sat down, we'd walked like, I don't know, I mean, we walked over 20 miles after the Rhino, and this day we had walked about 10 at this point.
01:47:51.000And, like, the CNN guy was a big dude, bro.
01:47:54.000Okay, he was a 280, 300-pound man, you know.
01:47:57.000And he hung in there the first day he threw up, and after seven miles, he started barfing everywhere.
01:48:04.000But he really wanted to be involved with it, and he got it.
01:48:38.000But the reason I asked you about the brown bear was because I believe in the United States a brown bear is like similar to the situation with the lion or some of these different animals, you know, whatever you're talking about, you know, certain animals that,
01:51:03.000This show was interesting, that show The Hunt, because it was one of the few shows that I've ever seen on television that, you know, you have a lot of these subsistence living shows, you know, like Alaska, The Last Frontier, or Life Below Zero, but this wasn't about subsistence at all.
01:51:18.000It was about hunting to control the populations and trophy hunting.
01:51:22.000I mean, that's what these people were doing.
01:51:23.000I mean, they did cook up some backstraps on one episode, some people sliced up some...
01:51:28.000I don't get the whole thing about, like you said, they go over there.
01:51:31.000Dude, in these camps, just a trophy hunting, the animals aren't getting wasted.
01:51:36.000You're getting into what's drawing a person out there to benefit it, regardless of why he's there in his mind, whatever it is.
01:51:42.000If the result is good, and the result is benefiting it, you're judging his desires to do something on what's going on in your head.
01:52:27.000Well, and that's what the locals were eating, and he thought, well, if I'm going to eat a part of it, I'm going to eat their favorite part, and it was the lungs.
01:53:46.000If you don't know his show, just, I mean, even if you're not into hunting at all, like you said, that show's not really necessarily about hunting that much.
01:53:55.000A lot of it is an in-depth discovery of the cultures that he's visiting.
01:53:59.000And the emotions that we would go through on the hunt.
01:54:02.000I mean, I've cried on the show twice, man.
01:54:04.000I cried previously on The Professionals when I shot a blue sheep because we had a real ordeal and it was just like a relief and an emotional thing and then I cried talking about my granddad one time.
01:54:52.000He has a different attitude about it, almost like I would say some of the explorers might have had.
01:55:01.000In his mind, I'm not saying that he has any delusions of grandeur that that's what he's doing, but he has a different attitude about it.
01:55:08.000You know, we both wanted to see what's left.
01:55:10.000Like, I mean, when you're going to Papua New Guinea, you're going to the edge.
01:55:13.000When you're going to the rural, I mean, we're dealing with people who are, you know, cannibals and believed in witchcraft and all sorts of stuff, you know.
01:55:21.000What's it like hanging out with cannibals?
01:55:22.000I mean, look, I shouldn't put, I didn't deal with a cannibal, but I deal with people who knew cannibals and understood cannibalism.
01:56:06.000But anyway, so we're over there, and they were talking about this big problem they had over in a certain area of Uganda, on Lake Albert, where...
01:56:17.000They were buying bush meat from the Congolese, just basically almost like from a grocery store.
01:56:37.000Well, Vice did this piece on Liberia, and that was a real issue.
01:56:42.000In Liberia, they were selling human meat on these food carts on the corner, and this guy recognized it as human meat because he'd eaten human meat.
01:57:25.000And it's just, it's a huge disconnect.
01:57:28.000If you were over there and you see them selling 12 year old girls naked in a bazaar and having an auction in Syria where they're just selling them as property for sexual abuse, whatever, sex slave.
01:57:53.000The different mindset that we have, I'm not saying that people want that to continue in any way, shape, or form, but if you saw it, you'd feel differently about it.
01:58:02.000Well, there's definitely different ways of living in this age, in 2015, and there's some ways that people are living every day just to get by that would horrify most people.
01:59:32.000I would say every single person that I met that was like, you know, local people on the hunt, I think they were high on weed from the moment they woke up to when they went to sleep.
02:01:03.000And so I was looking down at 2,000 feet, and then going off, sliding straight down 2,000 feet, then going off a cliff of a few hundred feet, then going down the bottom.
02:04:33.000And do you think that all these experiences going to all these different places have made you appreciate your own existence here in civilization more?
02:04:51.000If you're abused, you know, and you're just taken advantage of by whatever, the government, the local, every situation, your plight in the world.
02:04:59.000I don't think that, you know, people say, well, there's no value of life.
02:06:34.000Another way to look at it, people would say, is that giant system is set up by the military-industrial complex to steal resources in other countries.
02:06:41.000Okay, that's why everybody's coming over here, right?
02:07:09.000When you when you do travel to these places and you you do go over there and you experience their life does it give you this feeling of Like almost like helplessness like you can't you can't do enough to help these people the system that they're involved in the life that they live there Yeah,
02:07:27.000the community and that they're sort of entangled in I can tell you hunts I've gone on with my dad and he brought 20 full giant Cabela's bags just worth of gifts for him Just giving stuff at the very end.
02:08:52.000The reason I felt comfortable with Jason Morris and Ed Lavendera Is I sat down with them and I said, you're going to have to come to this with an open mind.
02:09:03.000You're just going to have to come and throw away whatever you got.
02:09:06.000And when you come on a hunting trip, you're complicit in it.
02:09:10.000I told them, I said, you're going to be there.
02:09:12.000Look, Ed, if the rhino gets somebody and knocks both the dudes down with guns, you may have to grab it to save somebody's life and kill the thing.
02:10:15.000Boy, it was an eye-opening experience to all those guys.
02:10:21.000I honestly felt like One of them really was, he wasn't on, I mean, he was kind of real ambivalent, but he wasn't like some guy who thought it was the best thing in the world, for sure.
02:10:34.000And was really pretty open-minded about it.
02:10:36.000He just wanted to go over there and report what was going down, true journalist stuff, okay?
02:10:40.000They were really pretty hardcore journalistic about it.
02:10:44.000But I think there, when we delivered the meat, I think he kind of got teary-eyed.
02:10:48.000I mean, he kind of got, at that point, he kind of got it.
02:13:11.000I said, hey Hinty, I think you should go back there and let's just split it up again.
02:13:15.000You know, put him a hundred yards behind us, okay?
02:13:18.000And we'll keep one cameraman with me and you and the trackers and then Ed can stay a little bit further behind and another guy who was there with us.
02:13:25.000He goes back there, talks to him, comes back up to me.
02:13:28.000And this is after we walked another 20 minutes or so.
02:15:26.000You should see him in Ferguson This guy's going to the crazy fucking spot.
02:15:32.000Yeah, so anyway, it's CNN's mad at Ed Yeah, so anyways, like, he comes flying underneath me, the animal's charging him, and when it, you know, they don't have good eyesight, okay?
02:15:42.000So when he came low, I think that it was so thick that the rhino lost him, like, you know, lost where he went, and it kind of just veered a little bit to the left, and when he comes underneath me, I just see it coming and turning, like, just turning, veering, and it's like less than 18 yards,
02:16:00.000you know, it's right there, 45 feet, and I boom, boom.
02:17:19.000And so he knew it by, there was ear notch from where it had, you know, when they originally dropped that animal off there, so they could recognize it.
02:17:28.000And so, and there's other animals, you know, the rhinos there.
02:18:43.000He got to experience some backlash himself during a deal in Ferguson where the Drudge Report reported that he showed where this guy's place was at.
02:18:54.000So he dealt with a bunch, which I don't know if that was true or not.
02:20:53.000I don't say that about a lot of people, but that guy was involved in some really shady shit in England with the tabloids, where the tabloids had hacked into victims' cell phones.
02:21:03.000Do you know that whole story behind it?
02:21:05.000A family of a woman who turned up missing, they got hope because they found that she had checked her voicemail on her cell phone.
02:21:25.000You know, and that's a lot of what he did was tabloid sensationalism shit, where even if he had an opinion on something, you know, there's a lot of what they do that, like we were talking about before, they're trying to get social brownie points.
02:21:48.000I mean, look, Ted Nugent is a funny character to have on when you're discussing that, but at the end of the day, he's very fucking informed when it comes to that stuff.
02:22:01.000He didn't understand, like, a lot of those shooting deaths are cops shooting people in the act of crimes like murder and domestic violence and robbery and...
02:22:10.000Every time I talk to like a big, I talk to him, talk to Aaron Burnett on there, talk to, they may have come at me a little bit.
02:22:17.000And the problem is, if you don't have the facts on your side, and especially in this situation, if you don't have the facts on your side, and you're left with, I'm going to cuss this guy out and threaten his kids, you've already lost, bro.
02:22:28.000And so they're just left with outraging, okay, but that ain't helping anything.
02:22:31.000I hope, agree with you or disagree with you, if people are listening to this, that they get at the end of the day that this is a very complex situation that is not black and white.
02:22:47.000And when you're looking at something like hunting, you're looking at something that has existed literally since the beginning of human beings.
02:22:56.000It's been a part of what created civilization in the first place.
02:23:04.000And that's been somehow or another co-opted by factory farming and fast food and restaurant chains, and that has become our reality.
02:23:16.000And our existence is entirely unnatural and disconnected because of it.
02:23:21.000Our relationship with the very food we eat is delusional.
02:23:26.000What you're doing by being a part of conservation, whether or not it makes sense to people, or whether or not they agree with it or disagree with it, once they look at the actual facts behind it, they'll see that this is not...
02:23:43.000Not only are you not doing an evil thing, you're not doing a thing that even can be logically criticized from the standpoint of conservation.
02:23:51.000You might feel uncomfortable that someone's gonna go over there and shoot a rhino.
02:23:55.000You might feel uncomfortable about it, but That's your right.
02:23:59.000When you start looking at the facts behind it, though, it's very difficult to argue against the idea of hunting as conservation, whether you want to do it or not.
02:24:25.000And I think that it's cool that you're open-minded enough to get something that, hey, maybe you don't want to do.
02:24:29.000Because I think that's kind of the issue is like, look, I don't want to do a lot of things, but I don't judge people who do.
02:24:35.000And I definitely don't judge people who actually have a stake in the game when it comes to keeping something around or keeping something good around, you know?
02:24:44.000The uncomfortable reality of attaching monetary value to life, whether it's the Plains games, animals that were on the verge of extinction just a few decades ago in Africa that are thriving now because they're valuable, or whether it's because of white-tailed deer, which there's more white-tailed deer in America now than there were when Columbus came.
02:25:02.000Yeah, I mean, we could talk for another three hours about conservation success stories.
02:26:20.000And so, I mean, I honestly think that I don't know.
02:26:30.000The average person, especially when it comes to a lot of these wild animals, really needs to look within their self and think, is their emotion going to help it?
02:26:37.000And do I hate this guy enough that he gets cancer and dies just because he does something I don't agree upon?
02:26:43.000And then go over to Namibia and take a picture of black rhinos that this situation helped stay alive.