The Complete Guide to Hunting, Butchering, and Cooking Wild Game by Steve Rinella. In this episode, I sit down with the author of the book and talk about the process of writing, editing, and producing the book. I also talk about some of the other projects Steve has been involved in over the years and how he is able to travel the world hunting and cooking wild game. I hope you enjoy this episode and if you have any questions or suggestions on how to improve the show, please hit me up! I am always open to suggestions for new guests and guests are always open for me to add to the show. If you like the show and want to support it, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and become a patron! I appreciate it greatly. Timestamps: 1:00 - How do you have the time to do this book? 4:30 - What does it take to write, edit, and produce a book like this? 6:00 What do you need to do to be successful in your field guide? 7:30 What are you looking for in a cookbook? 8:15 - How to cook and cook wild game? 9:40 - What kind of food do you like to cook? 10:00 How to prepare wild game for your next hunting trip? 11:00 What is your favorite kind of meat? 12:00 Can you cook and eat wild game in general? 13:00 Do you like a good meal? 15:00 Why do you want to cook it? 16: How do I have the most of your day? 17: What are your favorite type of meal 18: What s your favorite thing to eat? 19:00 Should I cook a wild game guide 20: What do I cook and/or do I like? 21:30 Do you have a hunting guide book 22:40 23:30 What s my favorite thing I would like to do with wild game 24:30 Can I have a good night out? 25:00 My favorite thing? 26: What would you eat for dinner 27:30 Is there something you'd like to eat in a Wild Game Guide 29:00 Is there a game guide I'm looking for? 30:00 Does your favorite cookbook 35:00 Would you like me to cook a meat guide
00:00:50.000You know what I wanted to do is I wanted to do a book about field care and butchering and stuff, but then someone said it should be bigger, it should be like the complete guide.
00:00:57.000We started using the word complete, and what I keep saying now is how I should...
00:01:01.000For a long time, I really regretted including the word complete in the proposal, because as we sat down...
00:01:08.000Initially, I would sit down with Dodie, who you know well, Dan Dodie, and we would just start mapping out We had like a board, you know, and sticky notes.
00:01:20.000And we'd just start mapping out like what would complete look like.
00:01:22.000And then it grew and grew and Doty, you know, he was working on the show and moved on to some other things and still was involved.
00:01:32.000And other guys came in and Giannis, you know, we started working on it and just trying to manage the idea.
00:01:39.000And pretty soon, I mean, a lot of people worked on that book.
00:01:42.000But yeah, I mean, I was in there on the writing process, and it turned into several, it took several years to do them.
00:01:49.000Then when I took it to my publisher, she had me in, it's published by Spiegel and Grau at Random House, and she had me into the office, and we had turned it in, it was going to be 700 and some pages long.
00:02:03.000And she said, like, it's just books aren't, Like, you just don't really, you know, you gotta understand, like, that's a big book.
00:02:11.000Yeah, you don't really do illustrated books that big.
00:02:16.000So we were gonna hack a bunch out, but then we kind of hit on this idea just to publish it in two things, as Volume 1 and Volume 2. But it wasn't just as simple as splitting it down the middle.
00:02:49.000I was down with my family, just vacation in Baja, and I remember sitting there, and we were fishing and stuff, and we had two babies with us, and I'm sitting there trying to, like, work on that book.
00:03:15.000Doty kind of organized a shoot with some other folks.
00:03:18.000We organized a week of just cooking and photographing.
00:03:21.000But the other thing is, a lot of the stuff in there, too, the images you'd kind of look at, the images you'd be like, well, how would you go and get all these images?
00:03:29.000You'd never be able to justify getting those images to make a book.
00:03:34.000Access to so many hours of hunting footage of all the stuff, so we're able to do something called screen grabs.
00:03:40.000So in there's a lot of stuff where we're able to pull images to illustrate all these different procedures and stuff that you would just never go out and get those kind of photographs.
00:03:50.000You would have to kill a ton of animals just on purpose to do that.
00:03:52.000Yeah, it'd be really expensive, but we were able to draw back.
00:03:55.000And the advantage of filming hunts for so many years now is that anything you wanted to explain...
00:04:01.000We'd sit there and be like, oh, you know what?
00:05:12.000The next one, the small game one comes out in December.
00:05:15.000But, yeah, they've been doing well, man, and we've heard great things about them.
00:05:19.000Well, you've expanded so much, you know, and when I first started talking to you, it was right after you got done doing The Wild Within, and then you were starting Meat Eater at the time.
00:05:30.000And now, you know, I really think that the show has hit its stride in a crazy way.
00:05:36.000Like, the first episode that I saw of this season was the one where you went hunting for coos deer, and you didn't even kill anything, and it was one of your best episodes.
00:06:30.000Because, you know, to do a hunting show, I mean, you're working in a really traditional genre that in many ways doesn't invite a lot of innovation.
00:06:39.000Or one might think it doesn't invite a lot of innovation, you know?
00:07:58.000Getting stuff doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be great because there's always a story hiding around down in there.
00:08:06.000And when we're getting ready to go somewhere to film...
00:08:09.000I'm always getting pressure in a friendly way from Giannis or from Doty, who are like, what's the story?
00:08:19.000And I just feel like I understand where they're coming from.
00:08:22.000It's their job to wonder about that stuff.
00:08:24.000But I always feel like you're just going to wind up responding to something that happens.
00:08:29.000What I think is important about your show, I think there's a lot of things important about you and what you represent in this world, but one of the things that I think is important in your show is there's a lot of these shows, these hunting shows, without mocking them or saying anything bad about them,
00:09:16.000And you get in your head, oh, this is what a hunting show is.
00:09:21.000This is what hunting is and I think that's a it's a problem with the stereotype that people have with hunting They connect hunting to sort of a like a low vibration of thinking You know that yeah, you know what I mean?
00:09:43.000Yes I could see in that world you probably would really want to watch other guys.
00:09:48.000I haven't found it helpful to watch hunting shows.
00:09:51.000I generally don't watch hunting shows because I don't want to wind up I don't want to wind up having the stuff that I do be a response to that.
00:12:38.000Well, I think a lot of that might have to do with your experience on your first show, too.
00:12:41.000They were trying to let a fucking moose out of a cage and you shoot it with a musket.
00:12:45.000I mean, they were trying to pressure you into a lot of really stupid fake shit because they were operating under the guidelines of, you know, quote-unquote reality TV. That's how they do it.
00:12:56.000What's important to them is getting the shot, not whether or not the shot actually happened.
00:13:00.000I remember one time being in a meeting early on when we were starting to work on that show, and a guy that I later became friends with, and he still does those kind of reality-type shows that come out of Alaska.
00:13:13.000But we were talking about how much time, you know?
00:13:18.000I was always like, we need more time, we need more time, because of finding animals.
00:13:21.000And early on, the first time we ever met, he's like, well, that's why they have Wranglers.
00:13:58.000Just the viewership wasn't there, the wrong viewership and you know, or like the numbers weren't there and the numbers that were there weren't the right numbers.
00:14:06.000Like not the demographic they were after, right?
00:14:40.000But at the time, now I try to wonder, when I look at that show, and there's some good stuff about it, and there's a lot of bad stuff about it, embarrassing stuff about it.
00:14:51.000When I look at it now and I try to go, why did I so badly want that to continue?
00:15:55.000There's a fun bonding thing that goes with those shows that's different than any other show.
00:16:00.000You film a normal show, say if you do, like, a television show.
00:16:03.000Whether it's on a set or it's on location, you go, you film it, and then you go either to your hotel or you go, you know, back to your house.
00:16:11.000Then you show up back on the set in the morning.
00:16:13.000And there's a bonding involved in that.
00:16:14.000But there's a totally different kind of bonding when you're in, say, like, when you took us to the Missouri Breaks, down the Missouri River, you know, in Montana.
00:16:51.000You want to go back to the fun stuff when you're out there in the woods looking for a buck or trying to find a ram or whatever the fuck you're trying to do.
00:16:58.000It's like there's this crazy heightened reality to that life that especially when you have a bunch of men together and you have the opportunity to just do it's almost like Playtime.
00:17:15.000Like, you have this wild existence, you know?
00:17:56.000We still hang out Like, just this summer, we had people up to our shack, our fishing shack, and it's like mostly guys from Michigan that we've known a long time, you know?
00:18:05.000And I do kind of feel that hunting and fishing, for me, do form those kind of relationships, you know, and traveling together forms those kind of relationships.
00:18:16.000I always feel like I would have been good in the military, maybe, because you get to, like, have this little core of guys, you know?
00:18:22.000And, yeah, traveling with those guys that I worked with and traveling with, you know, and now it's just, like, revolving cast of members, like, faces change, but it still feels the same as, yeah, it's like this little...
00:18:32.000Like a little clan, you know, like a little clique of fellas.
00:22:18.000Yeah, and then there's things that are terrifying while you're experiencing it, but after you survive it, you're like, ha ha, that was crazy.
00:23:19.000I was driving around LA and the sun was shining like it always is.
00:23:24.000It was warm like it always is, but I appreciated it on a level that I had never appreciated it before.
00:23:31.000Because being rain-soaked in that island, huddling up in that tent, and I remember turning on that little headlamp and seeing mist everywhere inside the tent.
00:23:42.000I'm like, I thought in my stupid head that there was going to be a place that you would go to get dry.
00:23:47.000Like, you would go inside the tent, and you would get dry.
00:23:49.000Well, it's raining outside, but that's okay.
00:24:06.000And it gave me an appreciation for LA that I wouldn't have had if I didn't go through that.
00:24:12.000Oh yeah, to go home from something like that and then be in bed all warm with like your wife, oh my god.
00:24:18.000You know, I've talked to you often about Rourke Denver.
00:24:20.000You know, he was a Navy SEAL officer and ran that BUDS program, which is like this whole thing, like he'd basically go there to suffer.
00:24:28.000And he was talking about how You think, like, you go into a SEAL's home, you think it's going to be all Spartan, you know, like he's sleeping on a stack of cardboard or something.
00:24:36.000He goes, those guys have, like, you go in there, it's like the Egyptian cotton, the nicest, most comfortable homes, man, because you wind up...
00:24:46.000After the suffering, you so badly want to go be comfortable that they go out of their way to have a comfortable house.
00:25:11.000I think having these conversations and what you're doing on your show, it's very important because it's giving people a different sense of hunting.
00:25:22.000It's one of the things that I get all the time from tweets and Facebook messages and that people change their perspective because of your show.
00:25:31.000And because of these conversations that you've had on my podcast and because of your podcast, people have changed their perceptions of it.
00:25:38.000Because people who don't experience hunting personally and their ideas of it a lot of times are shaped by the portrayals of hunters in movies, which are almost always negative.
00:26:45.000No, I mean, they learned some good wildlife stuff, but I'm like, I just don't want to, I'm not going to let them, no, I tell them that, I tried to explain to them why I didn't like it, they didn't understand, but now I don't like them watching that show.
00:26:56.000Because I don't like the way, like, they're like, I just can't have a show where, like, the bad guy is, like, some guy that, like, a chef who is always out trying to hunt, like, he's always trying to hunt endangered species.
00:28:36.000When I hear people don't let their kids watch certain shows because of whatever, I don't like them watching stuff that has a negative portrayal of hunters.
00:28:46.000Well, I'm writing this thing right now that I'll put out probably tomorrow about all the people that got mad at me because I put up a picture of that elk last week that got mad at me and then I went to their Twitter pages or their Instagram pages and I saw pictures of their cats.
00:29:03.000And I'm like, what are you feeding your cat?
00:29:23.000It's so easy to fall in the trap talking about stuff that annoys you, but that's one thing is like...
00:29:31.000People that you can have this holier-than-thou attitude, like a lot of catch-and-release fishermen have it, you know?
00:29:36.000They'll go out fishing, they'll let their trout go, and you know those sons of bitches go to a restaurant that night and order fish, and they're like, well, whose fish is that?
00:31:50.000He was saying that the idea is ridiculous that you could kill these animals and that you would say that you're working as a conservationist but you still kill these animals and that you're trying to protect them and make more of them and let them breed and let them repopulate so that you can kill them.
00:32:21.000If you're making this argument against the hunting of these animals, where do you get your protein from?
00:32:26.000Are you getting your protein from all plant sources?
00:32:29.000Because in that case, maybe we can have this conversation about that.
00:32:31.000But if you're not, man, if you're choosing animals that you think are okay and not okay to kill and it's based on which ones are captive, that seems to me more fucked up.
00:32:43.000It's way more cruel, in my opinion, to put an animal in a cage and make that animal earmarked for death, and you just stuff it and keep fattening it up until you kill it.
00:32:55.000And to think that somehow that's a better moral decision than going out and killing something in the wild.
00:33:01.000But then there's the trophy hunting thing, and that's where it gets weird.
00:33:05.000When you say, well, these are animals that people aren't even eating.
00:33:57.000You know, it's generally illegal to fence in wildlife in some way that it can't get away.
00:34:01.000An animal can move across borders freely and its public ownership doesn't change when it moves around.
00:34:10.000This is something I've tried to explain a thousand times, but if you have, let's take some iconic park like Yellowstone National Park.
00:34:17.000If you have an elk in Yellowstone National Park and it jumps a border onto private land and then jumps a border onto federal national forest land, jumps a border onto state land, jumps a border into subdivision, jumps a border into a county park, throughout all of his little journey there, he's always been the property of the state.
00:34:35.000When elk migrate out of Yellowstone National Park, they get hunted.
00:34:41.000Many animals that get hunted in Wyoming and Montana are animals that, as part of the year, spend time in Yellowstone National Park.
00:34:48.000My brother once drew a bighorn sheep tag For the upper Yellowstone Valley.
00:34:55.000And there's this peak near the Gardner entrance to Yellowstone National Park called Electric Peak.
00:35:01.000And a lot of bighorn sheep spend their summer on Electric Peak.
00:35:05.000When he had that tag, this was in 2005, I think, it was quite a while ago.
00:35:08.000When he had that tag, we were just waiting for snow to pile up.
00:35:14.000On Electric Peak, and the sheep would begin migrating.
00:35:17.000And they would migrate down and spend the winter down in some grass, some like rangeland up and down the Yellowstone.
00:35:25.000It was on our third trip to the area when we finally found sheep were migrating down out of the High Country, out of Yellowstone National Park.
00:35:33.000We killed the sheep within a couple miles of Yellowstone National Park.
00:35:35.000So when people were talking about, oh, like how the lion belonged in the park, Was of the park, was lured off the park.
00:35:43.000If you condemn that in and of itself, then you're really talking about something that would have very revolutionary implications here in the U.S. that animals aren't able to freely move or that an animal becomes the possession of whatever land administration it happens to be.
00:36:03.000Right, but there's a big difference between an animal moving freely.
00:36:54.000Well, in Zimbabwe, we don't cry for lions.
00:36:57.000I mean, that was the name of the piece.
00:36:59.000It was all talking about his family members that were terrified, where these people would go outside, and they had a very real fear they were going to be killed by monsters.
00:37:08.000Giant cats that would kill everything, anything.
00:37:22.000And there's these villagers in Mozambique that are just hunted by crocodiles.
00:37:28.000And they showed dozens of people that were missing arms, missing feet, had giant holes in their head where a crocodile had just barely grabbed them.
00:37:39.000And these are the people that survived.
00:38:14.000But I think if you got to the point where you were facing, where you might be looking at a genetic extinction of the crocodile, it would change.
00:38:23.000My thing, my interest in the lion controversy that came out of Africa, my interest in that is provincial, in that I was concerned about and I'm interested in the way that that's going to impact things here.
00:38:44.000Not that I have antipathy, I'm just not that vested in what might happen with African big game hunting.
00:38:53.000Outside of how people's, how the American imagination, or the way the average American perceives hunting in his own country, here in the U.S., would be colored by the actions of people in Africa and the circumstances that go on in Africa.
00:39:18.000As far as what you're saying about the crocodile thing, I think that one of the reasons that it's so complicated with the lions is on one hand we're talking about the threat of genetic extinction of a species.
00:39:32.000And I'm sensitive to that here as well, because we right now have, we're engaged in our own thing, we're engaged in the wolf debate right now, that in some way mirrors the kind of language we're hearing out of Africa, where you have an animal,
00:39:49.000you have a species that's absent from much of its range, okay?
00:39:53.000So there used to be wolves, Everywhere.
00:39:57.000But let's just say in the most recent past, you had wolves in New Mexico and Colorado and Arizona.
00:40:05.000And then now they're gone from much of that landscape.
00:40:08.000But there are some areas, like the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, area around Glacier, in the U.S. that have what I would say is on the verge of too many wolves.
00:40:20.000And so people could look and they'd be like, well, how can there be too many if they're extinct across 90-some percent of their range in the lower 48?
00:40:27.000You know, I'd be like, well, yeah, it's very complicated.
00:40:30.000They're overabundant here and missing from there.
00:40:32.000And I see both sides of the debate because a lot of people who might come from my understanding about wildlife, Who like to hunt deer, like to hunt elk, like to hunt moose, do want to see the wolves all the way gone.
00:40:45.000And what they would point to is the effect that wolves have on livestock, right?
00:41:26.000I'm sensitive to the thing where, as much as I was baffled by the Cecil the Lion thing, I'm also a little bit like...
00:41:34.000When there was the backlash to the backlash, and people said, like, oh yeah, but, you know, people live in fear of lions, and lions kill people.
00:41:43.000I don't know that, like, that doesn't really change anything for me.
00:41:47.000Like, I don't think that that then means that, oh, you're right, we should kill all the lions because they kill people.
00:42:58.000Striving for, with wildlife issues, I think striving for a happy medium where you can have many different stakeholders at the table talking about it is more constructive.
00:43:08.000And so I think as well, with the Cecil the Lion deal, I just think it really like clouded and confused tons of that shit here in the U.S. and made it harder for people to imagine the role of what I would call management,
00:44:04.000Yeah, it's a semantics issue in some way, I see it as.
00:44:09.000And this is something I spend a lot of time thinking about and talking about in recent years.
00:44:18.000What trophy hunting means to someone who's unfamiliar with hunting, when they hear the term trophy hunting, I think what they see in their mind, they see the wanton slaughter of an animal.
00:44:33.000Just in order to take a piece of the animal, its head or its hide, and have it as a bragging rights thing.
00:44:44.000That it's like this callous slaughter of animals to take part of it and take possession of part of it and use it as an emblem or to prove your manhood.
00:44:58.000It's so pervasive now, that meaning of the word.
00:45:04.000I think that it might almost be time for people who do engage in trophy hunting to think about a new term.
00:45:15.000If I go out and I hunt and get something, I do retain parts of the animal that would be a trophy, the same way you have that skull right there.
00:49:31.000It just had this way of acting like a black hole, or like we envision a black hole being where it just sucks everything around it into this thing, where it became the dominant discussion about hunting.
00:49:44.000And I think that one of the most telling things about it is the people who seemed to be most upset by it were the people who had the least nuanced understanding of wildlife management, wildlife politics, and wildlife in general.
00:50:17.000I mean, this is not people that are eating a bunch of salads.
00:50:20.000These are people that probably got burgers on the way to putting those fucking signs up.
00:50:25.000I had a FBI, one time I had to have the FBI look into a guy who was messing me a little bit, and this agent came over my house, and he was like, I can tell you that guy's not a vegan, or he's not a vegetarian.
00:50:43.000You're talking about how the guy had just ordered a pepperoni pizza.
00:50:46.000Which in my mind, I'm like, dude, why do you have such a problem with me?
00:51:13.000And I see those green lights and I can just point my anger in that direction.
00:51:16.000Instead of focusing inwardly, instead of looking at what aspects of my life that I should change, maybe I'd have a more harmonious existence, maybe I'd be happier, maybe I'd be more fulfilled.
00:52:06.000The difference between that and an animal that lives in captivity and gets turned into sausage or pepperoni or whatever the fuck it is, that's horrific.
00:52:15.000And the idea that someone who buys cat food, someone who buys chicken cat food, can get mad at someone who goes out and hunts a grouse or hunts a duck.
00:52:29.000I wrote this thing about the hierarchy of dead animals on social media, and I showed what you can get away with and what you can't get away with.
00:53:22.000Another thing that really bummed me out about our dentist friend is that when I'm talking about hunting, one of the things I'd like to try to promote or try to explain is,
00:53:41.000in a term I use a lot, is trying to form...
00:55:03.000So now, if all the Leopold could be alive now, he'd see a lot that would make him very, very happy.
00:55:09.000Because we've done such a good job on this continent with wildlife management.
00:55:14.000But in this book, he pushes this idea.
00:55:17.000He's talking about hunting, but he's using the metaphor of a forester.
00:55:22.000Because he had been trained in forestry and worked in forestry.
00:55:25.000And he talked about how a forester, or you might say a hunter, goes out on the land and with each stroke of his axe...
00:55:39.000Is writing his signature on the land with each swing of an axe.
00:55:44.000And when I say he's talking about hunting, because he's kind of talking about this in the conversation with hunting, meaning when you go out on the land, you are writing your signature out there.
00:56:04.000What it seemed to be with that guy, I think one of the things that upset me about that guy and that might have upset other people about that guy that shot the lion, was that he seemed to be claiming in some way that he just had no idea.
00:56:30.000And be like, I just didn't know, you know.
00:56:33.000I think that in some ways, obviously you're in another country, it's hard to follow what's going on, you rely on other people's judgment, but in some ways I think it was upsetting to people that he wasn't doing like, he wasn't following that thing that Leopold set out about writing your signature on the land,
00:56:49.000because it was sort of like he just had no idea where he was, what he was doing.
00:56:53.000And I think that when you hunt, you do have an obligation to understand your role and your place.
00:57:03.000And understand the context that you're working in.
00:57:07.000What are the limits and the needs of the resource you're trying to exploit?
00:57:13.000Can the resource withstand exploitation?
00:57:16.000Are you generally behaving as a force that's ultimately for or ultimately against wildlife?
00:57:23.000Like, you have an obligation to answer all these questions.
00:57:25.000You can go in a situation like that and rely on the judgment of someone else But that judgment can get really confused, I think, when money enters the picture, you know?
00:57:36.000But the money thing's funny, too, because people were very upset.
00:57:40.000I was joking earlier about them being...
00:57:44.000It was just funny how often it was pointed out, his occupation was pointed out.
00:57:47.000But what I'm not joking about is people were very, very upset about the amount of money that traded hands, which puzzled me because the old narrative...
00:58:00.000From a century ago was that people of European descent go into Africa and take resources and pay for nothing.
00:58:11.000That we go there and just rob the place of its resources and we take what we want and we leave and we don't pay a dime for it.
00:58:20.000That was upsetting and is upsetting to me.
00:58:23.000Now it's like he's being criticized for paying too much for a resource.
00:58:30.000It's like, and he paid $350,000 for a rhino.
00:58:34.000Would it be better to you if he paid $5?
00:58:37.000It would seem to me that him having...
00:58:41.000Expressed the value of the animal in some way is almost a compliment to the pursuit Rather than just going in there and robbing what you want never paying for anything that makes sense But I think a lot of people have an idea a real problem with the idea of putting a value on life at all like saying that it's three hundred fifty thousand dollars you can go kill an endangered animal instead of The real issue is that animal was killing...
00:59:22.000And in the NPR piece, the radio lab piece...
00:59:28.000They actually found the dead bodies of this female and a male that this rhino had killed.
00:59:35.000Like, he took them to these spots, the guy who was the professional hunter.
00:59:39.000So, you know, in Africa, they have these things called professional hunters, where you would call them a guide in America.
00:59:45.000But they took them to the spot where the bones were of this female.
00:59:50.000I mean, this rhino really fucked this young female to death.
00:59:55.000Like, he kept mounting her and fucking her and horning her, you know, hitting her with his horns and wound up killing her and killed a male who had, you know, gotten in the area and wanted to breed with the female, too.
01:00:09.000They had Targeted him anyway, because he was dangerous to the population, because he was killing breeding males.
01:00:15.000The money that had come in from that $350,000 that that guy gave was going to stop poaching, was going to protect the environment that this animal lived in, was going to protect habitat.
01:00:27.000So the argument is real weird, because on one hand, it does seem strange that we're talking about value for life, like that this life would be valuable.
01:00:37.000But on another hand, The real value is like you've got to kill this thing anyway because it's a non-breeding male.
01:00:44.000Either kill it or you have to capture it and take it somewhere and make it live in a cage.
01:00:49.000But if you kill it, this guy's willing to pay you $350,000.
01:00:52.000And he was saying that that was undervalued and that if there wasn't so much bad press, there would have probably been over half a million.
01:01:00.000If they had had a park ranger go out or some kind of land manager go out and shoot it and act like, you know, just something that had to be done, you know...
01:01:31.000He was actually writing a piece about books about the Holocaust.
01:01:35.000But in there he had this line that stuck with me, or at least it stuck with me for the last few hours, where he said that something to the effect of, the only way to simplify history is to make it complex.
01:01:54.000Any real explanation of something, particularly with wildlife, you don't get any real aha moments until you get into the deep complexities surrounding the issue.
01:02:08.000I think that's how we can sit here and all these whatever number of months after that, and I can sit here and still Hold in my hand, or hold in my hand simultaneously, a disdain for this guy and what he stood for.
01:02:26.000We can talk about the line, like some kind of disdain for it.
01:02:29.000Like something about it, I just like, it's a visceral reaction about some of the things I know about what went on and what might have been in people's mind.
01:02:35.000And at the same time, disdain for the general public.
01:02:41.000For feeling the disdain that they felt.
01:02:44.000It's like, I just see it as such a big thing that I haven't really made that much sense out of it.
01:02:50.000And whenever I get that conflicted about an issue, I start to feel like I'm getting somewhere.
01:02:59.000Why do you feel like you're getting somewhere when you get conflicted?
01:03:02.000Because then I realize that I'm probably seeing it from the necessary number of angles.
01:03:06.000Well, it is one of those things where there are a bunch of different angles to look at.
01:03:10.000And it is complex because this guy, whether or not the Zimbabwe government cleared him of any wrongdoing, which they did, he still tampered with the collar, which is illegal.
01:03:24.000He had been convicted of poaching already.
01:03:26.000He had killed a bear 40 miles outside the area that he claimed to kill it, tried to bribe the people that he was with to claim that he killed it in a legal area.
01:04:50.000I saw that piece and I thought, well, maybe this guy is making some interesting points.
01:04:55.000Until I listened to this TED podcast about him recently, where he's talking about reintroducing lions and even hippos to England.
01:05:07.000Because he thinks that at one point in time, they found in London, they found ancient bones of lions, and he thinks bringing megafauna to areas of the UK would be beneficial.
01:05:20.000There's areas of the UK, millions of hectares.
01:05:25.000Hectares that are not being used, utilized, and they could turn into a wildlife park with fucking lions!
01:05:32.000And this is all the result of a self-admitted midlife crisis this guy had.
01:05:38.000So he got interested in the concept of rewilding.
01:05:41.000I'm interested in the concept of rewilding, and I'm interested in the concept of rewilding in that if you can correct mistakes...
01:05:50.000If you can correct extirpations, or let's say scientifically you had the ability to correct extinctions, but you can't, so we'll not talk about that for right now.
01:06:00.000If you could correct extirpations, like regional extinctions of animals that were brought on by human causes, then I think we have a moral obligation to remedy those mistakes.
01:06:40.000Because there are many areas where they abound.
01:06:46.000So we've come able to go like, yes, elk are missing from areas, and there's a number of groups, many state agencies, and most notably the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, work to, where plausible, bring elk back.
01:07:01.000To areas in the east that used to have them that no longer do.
01:07:04.000In my lifetime, elk have come back to Michigan, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and on and on and on through reintroduction efforts.
01:07:14.000The biggest piece of resistance you get on repopulating elk is public approval.
01:07:20.000People don't want to be inconvenienced by big-ass animals that they're going to hit with their cars, and they don't want to be inconvenienced by animals that eat crops.
01:07:35.000Meanwhile, we have hunting seasons for elk all over the place, right?
01:07:41.000I mean, just down the line, you got elk seasons, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, California, Nevada, while they're gone from other places.
01:07:58.000Why is it that we can't extend the same logic to the wolf and say, yeah, the wolf's absent from much of its range.
01:08:08.000We're going to manage the areas that are thriving, and we're going to work toward bringing wolves back to the areas where they're not the same way that hunters, by and large, not even by and large, solely Hunters are responsible for bringing elk back all over the place.
01:08:24.000But I think the way the general public looks at things is very different from the way that you're looking at things.
01:08:29.000You're looking at these animals as a renewable resource.
01:08:32.000The general public looks at them as magical creatures that live in the forest that we need to bring back because we made them extinct because we're greedy and vicious.
01:08:41.000Yeah, because we're fundamentally flawed.
01:08:42.000And on top of that, we're talking about animals you eat versus elk versus animals you don't eat.
01:09:19.000Not every one of them, but your average guy that's never even laid eyes on one, I have more of an appreciation for the animal than they do.
01:09:25.000I'm sorry that sounds like a bold, offensive statement, but I just do.
01:09:48.000I just got back from spending 12 days looking for grizzly bears.
01:09:50.000Why would you decide to eat it straight up and not turn it into pepperoni sticks?
01:09:54.000Because isn't it going to taste like shit?
01:09:55.000No, because I hunt them in the interior.
01:09:58.000The areas where I go to look, you know, anytime I've gone out with the intention of getting a grizzly bear, I go to areas where they don't have access to fish.
01:10:37.000Unless it was for a legitimate wildlife conservation reason and I was going to eat it, I don't think I would be interested in hunting something like that.
01:11:32.000Got more serious about college and started just feeding me and friends, my brothers.
01:11:37.000By that point in time, we were feeding ourselves on wild game, buying no protein besides what we hunted for.
01:11:45.000And at that point was when I really sort of found my place in the natural world.
01:11:53.000That was like the relationship with animals and the relationship with the natural world and the relationship with hunting that Really spoke to me and made me feel very good about my decisions, very good about my lifestyle.
01:12:06.000And I've lived that lifestyle now, you know, for 20 some odd years.
01:12:12.000But I did at a time, yeah, I did trap, you know, and I would trap in order to sell the hides.
01:12:19.000So when I now talk about Why I like to hunt.
01:12:25.000And that I don't want to hunt for something I'm not going to eat.
01:12:26.000Because that's what I like to hunt for.
01:12:28.000I think that some hunters will look at that and act like you're being divisive.
01:12:52.000When it comes to predator management, I think there are many cases where you're going to have harvests of predators that are just not going to be a food-driven harvest.
01:13:08.000We're looking right now, like, in the same areas, in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem around Glacier National Park, you're looking at coming up on a thing where the same thing that happened with wolves is going to probably have to happen with grizzly bears.
01:13:21.000In many of these areas, they're getting way above objective.
01:13:25.000It's starting to have negative implications for prey animals.
01:13:30.000It's having negative implications for people who use the land.
01:13:33.000These bears have, they're just not afraid of anything.
01:13:37.000You know, you go up in Alaska where grizzlies get hunted, you can generally get upwind of the thing, let it get a smell of you, it's going to take off.
01:15:33.000And you can look at it that way, like it's sustainable, and if it is sustainable and these people use it to make money and they benefit from the resource of people coming over there and hunting them, I guess you could see a positive benefit of it.
01:15:45.000You know, Did you ever see the Louis Thoreau documentary on those hunting camps, the high-fence hunting camps in South Africa?
01:16:04.000One of the craziest parts of it was the lions.
01:16:07.000They had this fenced-in area, and it's a small area.
01:16:12.000Where they have these lions, and they're throwing these cows literally over the fence.
01:16:16.000They're in the back of a truck, and they have this high fence, and these lions are staring at them with these fucking ruthless killer eyes.
01:16:46.000And lions are used to their territory, right?
01:16:48.000So when they let them out of the cage, the lions are going to get out of that cage and they're going to go, where the fuck am I? I'm just going to sit down here.
01:16:53.000Try to figure out where the hell they are, right?
01:16:56.000So they're going to sit down, and then they send this hunter out, and the hunter finds the lion, shoots it, poses, does the whole picture with it.
01:17:23.000The trappings of hunting, the appearance of hunting, the methods of hunting, the tools of hunting, the clothes of hunting, the photographs that come from hunting.
01:17:35.000Why do they like that so much, but they just don't like hunting?
01:18:13.000If you like to do hunts that aren't fair chase, if you like doing it, why do they have such a hard time just saying that's what I like to do?
01:18:22.000I spend an enormous amount of time explaining why I like to do what I do.
01:18:32.000I would love for one of them to explain to me what they like about it instead of doing it and acting like they did something different.
01:18:39.000Well, part of it is the network themselves, right?
01:18:42.000The outdoor channel and the sportsman's channel, they don't allow you to show high fences.
01:19:33.000I mean, he's essentially hunting his pets.
01:19:36.000If you really want to look at it that way, leaves his house, sits in his favorite tree stand, probably got a bunch of them all over his property.
01:19:42.000But I don't think in and of itself, I don't feel there's anything wrong with that because my brother raises sheep.
01:21:48.000You see him, he takes around one of those little ATV vehicles, you know, those little things, and drives around on this beautiful piece of property.
01:21:56.000It's kind of a cool way to acquire your meat.
01:21:58.000If you have all these animals, you're 100% guaranteed there's animals there.
01:23:04.000So to incentivize his buddies to come over and check on his llamas and make sure everything's cool, he lets them run sheep with the llamas.
01:23:13.000So they come over to watch to check on their sheep, thereby checking on his llamas.
01:23:19.000Now if he told me one day, if all of a sudden he said, hey man, let's get all done up in our camo, and I'm going to put a blind out with the sheep.
01:23:34.000And let's sit in there and shoot arrows at the sheep.
01:23:42.000It's not like, I think there's like moral stuff, right?
01:23:46.000We have things in our lives that are just like moral obligations.
01:23:50.000I feel like you have like a moral obligation to take care of your children.
01:23:53.000I think if you're not taking care of your children, I think you're like, that's an immoral move.
01:24:00.000For my brother to go out and, like, decide that he wanted to shoot his bow at the sheep in his pasture would just strike me as just strange.
01:25:14.000There was a time when they were harvesting, you'd go down there and you'd pull up under a grain hopper type thing and it'd fill your truck with carrots.
01:25:33.000Like, I have carrots in my garden now, and you pull up the carrots, you expect that you're going to pull up a thing that looks like a carrot from the store?
01:25:42.000Most of them are, like, three-legged carrots.
01:25:44.000So they had it down a little better than I do, and they had better carrots.
01:25:47.000But anyway, we'd get all these rejected carrots.
01:25:49.000We'd have a snow shovel, and we would go out to areas we hunted, and we would put down a canvas tarp, I can picture the tarp right now.
01:25:58.000We'd lay down a canvas tarp and you'd snow shovel carrots out of the back of the truck onto the tarp or into what's known as a Duluth pack, a big canvas leather strap backpack.
01:26:11.000And we would hike, either drag the carrots onto the tarp if possible, or load them in backpacks and hike them back into the intersections of deer trails typically, where two big deer trails would come together, and you'd dump the carrots out.
01:26:26.000And then you do this a week before season, and then you'd hunt.
01:26:29.000You'd sit in your tree stand with your bow.
01:26:31.000You're picking an area that deer frequent anyways.
01:26:35.000You're picking, like I said, usually typically like a confluence of a couple good deer trails, or an area where deer might stage up in the evening before going out into ag fields to feed.
01:26:46.000You know, they kind of will mill around a little bit oftentimes before committing to a field at nighttime.
01:26:54.000The problem is, as soon as you put down the carrots, you'd be creating problems for yourself because they would start to associate The carrots with hunters, like they knew trouble was brewing.
01:27:32.000Now I look at it and I go like, man, I would have learned a hell of a lot more about deer and a lot more about deer hunting early on if I hadn't gotten, if I hadn't been involved in that practice.
01:27:44.000I now look back, I'm like, man, did I miss a lot of chances to get educated about what deer need and how to actually find deer instead of trying to manipulate their movement patterns.
01:28:49.000I'm saying like for- Indigenous or whatever.
01:28:52.000People have, yeah, I'm just saying like if someone was posing that argument to me, I would point out how people that hunt for their food have always gravitated toward technology.
01:29:05.000And if you look at our progression from rocks to hafted rocks to adalattles, To bow equipment.
01:30:48.000I don't like, I've never done a baited bear hunt.
01:30:51.000I have no desire to do a baited bear hunt.
01:30:53.000Does that mean it's super hard to hunt bears where I hunt bears?
01:30:58.000I can't tell you that it's super hard to hunt bears there.
01:31:01.000Because once you learn the rhythms of the land, What they want, why they're coming there, what they're coming to get, it becomes easier and easier the more you understand bears and the more you understand why bears do what they do.
01:31:45.000What's interesting to me is they like muscle beds.
01:31:47.000Like, for whatever reason, I find that interesting.
01:31:49.000When I lived in Michigan, my brothers each drew a black bear tag in Michigan.
01:31:53.000You could live your whole life in Michigan, which has a lot of bears in the North, and never lay eyes on a bear because the landscape's flat and it's thick.
01:32:01.000If you want to hunt a bear there, You're going to either have to use dogs or you're going to have to use bait because that's the way the landscape is.
01:32:10.000So when they drew bear tags, I helped them run baits.
01:33:17.000And there's no donuts, there's no cookies, there's no bullshit, no fucking big blue jugs that are set out for them to paw at and try to get their oats out of.
01:33:25.000Yeah, there's something less cool about that.
01:33:57.000You know, and then there's also people who would say, well, you know, I prefer to hunt with a bow because it's more difficult.
01:34:02.000Like, what you're talking about is more difficult.
01:34:04.000But then there's also people that would say, well, if you hunt with a bow, you have more of a chance of wounding an animal and not killing it.
01:34:51.000The bow's only, like here on this continent, the bow's only been around for, people debate it, but somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000 years.
01:34:57.000So you had 10,000 years of human history or more here where they were hunting with adalattles.
01:35:55.000Yeah, but the problem is that's why guys that hunt with Adaladles will tend to hunt wild pigs or other things like that because most places you can't use them.
01:36:46.000So the feds step in to try to make sure the states aren't taking more than their equal share of their resource.
01:36:51.000Now they'll spell out the diameter or bore of the shotgun you're allowed to use.
01:36:58.000You can't use an 8 gauge And then they'll spell out you can't use anything bigger than a 10, and you can't use anything smaller than whatever, 410 or something less than that, or not allowed to use a 410. So they'll spell out in exquisite detail what you can and can't do for legal method to take.
01:37:16.000So a lot of what I'm saying about if you want to go back, back, back, back in time to have things get more and more and more difficult, it's hypothetical.
01:37:26.000Because the guy that is doing, as far as weapon choice, The most difficult thing you can legally do for general big game hunting in the U.S. for a weapon choice would be that you'd hunt with a longbow.
01:39:11.000I heard a guy say, people have really struggled to define fair chase, and I heard someone recently, I don't think it's a new thing, but I heard it recently, where he was saying that in fair chase, the animal has a better than 50% chance of escape or something to that effect.
01:43:57.000Then for a long time they lumped them together as blue grouse.
01:44:00.000And then in a decade ago or sometime maybe 97 or sometime around there, no no I'm sorry 2007, the ornithological society realized that there is a difference between the different species, the different types of blue grouse and they re-split them or they suggested that they be re-split into sooties and duskies.
01:44:21.000So you have dusky grouse in the interior mountain ranges and sooty grouse from the coastal ranges.
01:44:29.000People call them fool's hens and they call them like dumb birds and all this kind of stuff because they don't, when they think of the things that they're afraid of, They're just not afraid of people.
01:44:39.000They don't have much exposure to people.
01:44:41.000They live in places where most people don't go.
01:44:45.000So when a predator approaches, when a human approaches, what they typically want to do is jump into a tree.
01:44:50.000They want to get off the ground so they can't get nabbed by a bobcat or a fox or a coyote.
01:44:57.000And they get under some limbs in a tree so the avian predators can't smack them.
01:45:03.000And then people walk up and there's this bird sitting in the tree and they shoot the bird and they're like, oh, that bird's stupid.
01:46:48.000From the time you heard one to the time you shot it.
01:46:51.000Time it out so we would just run a continuous loop of film.
01:46:55.000Now, we went out and started looking for the first bird, and about like 10 hours into trying to find the first bird, we realized you were not going to do that.
01:48:21.000And I took that thing out, and I would hear where I could hear a bird, but I couldn't tell where I was hearing it from, but I'd get where I kind of knew I was in the area he was in, and set that decoy out, the hen, and then make the call, like a tending call that they make to their young.
01:48:48.000Yeah, and man, it was just really frustrating.
01:48:51.000And then I wound up Finding, I was so pissed about how this was going and so baffled that I couldn't find these birds, I called my brother who put me in touch with a buddy of his, who put me in touch with a buddy of his,
01:49:07.000who knew a guy, who knew a lady, who was very, very good at finding blue grouse.
01:51:06.000He's getting ready for the season to open up.
01:51:08.000That guy is obviously going to have a greater database of information about mule deer than a guy like you who just got back from Bolivia eating a monkey.
01:51:24.000That was a fascinating episode, too, because you're talking about ancient stuff and ancient methods and the difference between people that are eating or existing primarily just their subsisting hunting.
01:51:36.000I mean, there's no sport involved in what they're doing at all.
01:52:25.000We went down there to go up a river, the Casare River, and travel with the Chimane, which is an autonomous indigenous group in Bolivia.
01:52:39.000A way to approach thinking about it would be to think about the reservation system that we have here in the U.S. where there's a fair bit of autonomy on reservations.
01:52:50.000They might be able to have a casino, other stuff that violates state law because they're sort of a nation within a nation.
01:52:58.000And Bolivia had these huge areas of jungle that are autonomous zones, and we were in the Chamane area.
01:53:09.000We went and traveled up a river, just doing like a basic river trip.
01:53:13.000At the surface level, we were going down there to fish a type of fish called dorado, but the main thing I was interested in was just traveling with and hunting with these guys.
01:53:22.000And they hunt with bows for the most part.
01:53:27.000Firearms are starting to come into their area, but they hunt fish with bows, homemade bows.
01:53:34.000And they hunt Birds with bows, and they do some big game hunting with bows.
01:53:40.000But 90% of their protein comes out of the river in the form of fish, and they poison fish with a plant.
01:53:48.000So we went out, we went into a village, and they were cultivating one of these plants.
01:53:52.000There's a handful of plants down there.
01:53:53.000We use a fish poison here in the U.S. when we're trying to get rid of invasives or whatever, called rotenon.
01:53:59.000Rotenon is a root, is derived from a root of a South American plant.
01:54:06.000They had a tree that bore just like a green waxy leaf, and you'd pound that into a pulp, and they'd go out into a river, and they'd try to find a little channel, like an isolated channel of a river or a pool that doesn't have a lot of current coming into it, and they'll pulp that plant and put it into a woven bag and just go out in the water and stir the Pulped up leaves in there and pretty soon all the fish come up and the fish are suffocating.
01:54:34.000It somehow affects a fish's ability to pull oxygen from the water.
01:54:37.000So the fish come up and they're gasping for air at the surface and then they just shoot the fish with their bows.
01:54:44.000They do some netting for fish but most of it's bow hunting and I fell in with a couple older guys there and we did some hunting and one of these guys had only ever hunted with a bow but a year earlier He'd gone into some town and somehow got a Russian-made 16-gauge single-shot shotgun that was held together with wire.
01:55:12.000I was nervous about being around him when this gun went off.
01:55:16.000And they like to hunt at night because now they have flashlights.
01:55:22.000So they got flashlights and they got a shotgun and they got their bows.
01:55:26.000And they would wait till dusk, and then we would head off into the jungle, and these guys only speak their native language.
01:55:34.000They know a teeny bit of Spanish, but they speak Chimane.
01:55:37.000I would go out with them, and I would have no idea.
01:55:42.000And we would leave at dusk and just go into the jungle and the noise of the jungle at night is just deafening if you've never experienced.
01:55:48.000I mean, it's like, it's to the point where, I mean, have you ever been like out in a windy area for a long time where you start to feel like it's like affecting your sanity or affecting your ability to think clearly, you know?
01:55:58.000Or when you're on like small aircraft, the engine noise, you don't realize how agitated it's making you until you get away from it and all of a sudden it feels like...
01:56:09.000The noise of the jungle is so loud, it's almost like that at night with the bugs and stuff going off.
01:56:16.000And we go out into the jungle, and I knew from going into it that their favorite food, even though they drive 90% of their protein from the river, their favorite food is spider monkey.
01:56:27.000Their second favorite food is howler monkey.
01:56:30.000And before it even gets dark out, we go down this trail for a while through the jungle.
01:56:35.000And they come to a date tree, and dates will fruit periodically throughout the year.
01:56:40.000And, you know, you're getting closer to the equator now, so you don't have seasonality as much, so plants will fruit all the time rather than just in the summertime.
01:56:49.000And they get to this date tree, and this date tree's fruiting.
01:56:53.000And he's looking at these dates on the ground, and he finds some shit that I now realize must have been monkey shit, and they got real interested in what was going on up above us.
01:57:02.000And pretty soon, he sees this howler monkey starts going through the treetops, and he shoots it down out of the tree with that shotgun he had with him.
01:57:14.000And the first thing he does is he takes the tail and cuts the tail off the monkey, the tip of the monkey's tail, and buries it in the ground.
01:57:22.000I couldn't even ask him why he was doing this, but later I learned you do that so that the next monkey you kill, he doesn't get hung up in the tree by his tail.
01:58:24.000I had the same problem being in Vietnam and being served domestic dog where I ate domestic dog seven nights in a row and just was never people go like what did it taste like I was like I can't even tell you there's like something I would get so hot like my body would feel so hot eating that just like it's like just this like wrongness Well,
02:00:00.000They look at that thing and just walk by like it doesn't even exist.
02:00:03.000And later, I was able to ask them through, like, by asking them, by asking someone who speaks some Spanish, he was able to, so it was like a three-way translation.
02:00:12.000I was like, why didn't you guys want the possum?
02:00:15.000And he explained to me that you'd only eat a possum if you were real hungry.
02:00:27.000Everybody comes and they're real excited.
02:00:30.000And the thing I say in the show, we did a whole three-part series about Bolivia and the Chimane, but the thing I say in the show when we're talking about this is think of the...
02:00:40.000There's only two things I know about that...
02:00:45.000That get the kind of enthusiasm from a culinary perspective in the U.S. to get the kind of enthusiasm these guys had from monkeys.
02:00:53.000It'd be someone who has homegrown tomatoes and morel mushrooms are the only things I know about that people have that level of love for.
02:01:02.000They were more excited about eating that red holler monkey than you've ever been about eating anything you ever ate, I promise you.
02:02:33.000I hunted with another indigenous group in Guyana, and I remember this guy had a shirt with Muhammad Ali on it, and I was trying to ask him about it.
02:02:50.000Not that they have a responsibility to know about Muhammad Ali and pizza, but just saying, for them to hear from us, be like, dude, it is very rare.
02:04:15.000Hanging out with people who like that, you have all these weird hang-ups, or at least I do, like all this colonial-type guilt or something where you don't want to...
02:05:00.000Like, for instance, there's these guys down there, there's these Bolivians who are from the urban area down there, like, of mixed European indigenous ancestry, and they're very...
02:05:10.000Like, in Bolivia, the ruling class, the urban people, are very different than the indigenous people, okay?
02:05:21.000I don't want to say categorically, but there's a view of the indigenous people that would have seemed more like the 1870s here in the U.S. in some circles, the way they view the backwardness of the indigenous people and trying to bring out missionaries to, you know, help them find religion and get them to settle down and stop being nomadic.
02:05:39.000And, you know, there's all this kind of stuff that we were having that conversation 150 years ago here.
02:05:46.000There's these guys that are doing these trips, who we orchestrated our trip through, who are trying to get these guys hip to the idea of not eating one of their favorite fish, which is the Dorado, because rich white guys will pay a lot of money to come down and catch Dorado.
02:06:03.000That was kind of our in to go down here, was to go up to this area where they catch Dorado.
02:06:08.000So they're trying to sell these dudes on not messing with Dorado.
02:06:17.000Because, like, that's their favorite fish, man.
02:06:19.000You're trying to tell them that, like, now we want to tell them to not eat their favorite fish because guys like me might want to come down and catch the thing.
02:06:26.000And it's not even going to have a negative implication, a ramification.
02:06:29.000Anyways, you're not going to, like, over-harvest them with bows and arrows, you know?
02:08:22.000So it's just about, and they had really long arrows, too, which is very strange.
02:08:25.000Yeah, those super long arrows, and they would carry three kinds of tips.
02:08:28.000They'd carry a big game tip, a bird tip, and a fish tip, so every guy's got three arrows with his bow.
02:08:32.000But they loved that bow, but I wound up being, I just really wanted to be able to hang out with them and have them not, like, stop.
02:08:39.000Like, when I would walk up into them, they'd be standing around eating some fish around their fire, and I would walk up and they'd all quit eating.
02:08:46.000And I eventually got where we were comfortable together.
02:08:48.000Like, they would kind of show me stuff, and they kind of, you know, I don't want to say they liked me, but they sort of accepted me, and I eventually got explained to them through actions and otherwise that I was very interested in their food.
02:08:59.000I was very interested in how they hunted.
02:09:02.000I would go out into the jungle at night with them.
02:09:05.000You know, I got stung by a bullet ant, and, you know, that's excruciating, and they watched me kind of, like, suffer through that and come out of that.
02:09:48.000But it took a long time to get in with them and have them start showing you their world a little bit.
02:09:55.000Because you realize that they're used to being viewed...
02:10:01.000They had enough exposure to the outside world to realize that the outside world usually carried a certain amount of disapproval for their food and dress and other things.
02:10:23.000How did they accept you into their fold?
02:10:29.000These guys are trying to develop a recreational fishery in this area, but they're going into places no one goes into.
02:10:38.000And they're trying to establish, they were in the process of trying to establish a thing where they would have paying clients come down, and the paying clients would go on these river trips up to fish in these areas.
02:10:52.000The only way you can do it, because it's Chimane land, the only way you can do it is by going through the Chimane.
02:10:56.000And the only people you're going to hire to get the boats up the rivers and paddle the boats and run the boats and run the engines and get them stuck out of the rapids and all the...
02:11:05.000Difficult traveling that involves you to hire Chimane guys to do it.
02:11:09.000So we hired the guys that hired the Chimane with the sole goal of I was just interested in traveling with the Chimane.
02:11:49.000I remember I shot a big game bird, a big turkey-like game bird out of a tree with my bow from about 40 yards, and they were blown away, man.
02:12:01.000Hunting and about looking at the landscape and about indigenous food paths in those weeks that I've been fortunate to do that kind of trip, then I would learn in years of hunting with American hunters.
02:12:50.000The level of understanding you get about What's going on around you is just different than what we're able to achieve today.
02:12:58.000Especially someone like me, I travel around a lot and experience a lot of different things, but what I lack, what I miss out on from the way I do things is I miss out on that level of detailed local understanding that I had as a kid.
02:13:09.000For instance, for the lake where I grew up.
02:13:11.000The lake I grew up on, I knew it well, better than anybody, or as good as anybody.
02:13:17.000So to go out with guys like that and just watch how they interact and what noises make sense to them, You know, it's really informative, and it just helps you kind of understand humanity better.
02:13:27.000I remember going out in the jungle with them one night, and Meryl was talking about how loud it is.
02:13:31.000You can't even believe how loud it is.
02:13:33.000And all these noises, you're like, what is all this stuff?
02:13:55.000No, but they were real interested in that noise.
02:13:57.000Like, something made that noise, and they're like, of all the sticks snapping and things dropping and birds going off and insects, you know, getting bit by bullet ants, they hear what sounds like a stick way the hell off, and it just means something to them.
02:14:11.000Was the bullet ant as bad as everybody says it is?
02:15:21.000And the camera guy, Phil Baraboo, was bit on his hand at the same time.
02:15:26.000And he kept pointing to Phil's hand, but then running his finger, the Chimane guys, pointing to Phil's hand and running his finger up his arm, like, to his heart.
02:16:27.000Well, I thought it lasted for like 24 hours.
02:16:30.000For me, now they do a thing where they take some kind of mitt and fill it full of them, and you put the mitt on, it's like an initiation, and you get bit a lot, and then it's a whole other world.
02:16:42.000But for me, I think it was, I could be wrong.
02:17:25.000What I later learned, what they were saying, was make sure you don't have any in your sleeves, and make sure you don't have any, because they'll come up and get you on the chest, which might be bad, or they'll get you on the balls, which is bad.
02:18:53.000It was so itchy, like I had to do everything I could to keep from clawing my arm apart, where I would go under the shower and I'd turn the shower up really hot to the point where it would be painful with any other part of my body and just shove that arm underneath the super hot water like I was scratching it with the insanely hot water.
02:20:22.000Oh, so what we would do is when you get a lionfish, we'd take the lionfish and leave it on the spear and then open the cooler up.
02:20:29.000And stick the spear and the lionfish into the cooler and shut the lid and pull so that your spear would come out and the lionfish would fall into the cooler.
02:20:38.000Now lionfish, just for your listeners, it's a non-native that has been introduced.
02:20:45.000Into the Caribbean is wreaking much havoc from Florida southward, and they're doing a lot to try to get rid of them.
02:20:53.000Because they're so viciously territorial.
02:20:55.000And out there in the Bahamas, you have these small little coral heads, and a couple lionfish would move in there, and they would just move out all their fish.
02:21:02.000So there's no regulations on lionfish.
02:21:04.000You're allowed to kill as many as you want.
02:21:05.000They encourage you to kill as many as you want.
02:21:06.000So will the people let them loose from aquariums or something?
02:21:09.000Yeah, I think somehow they escaped through the aquarium trade of some sort.
02:21:22.000But anyhow, then later we'd take poultry shears and just get big rubber gloves, once the fish is dead, and take poultry shears and cut all the thorns off it.
02:21:50.000Now, I ran out of breath and left my spear stuck in a lionfish down on the bottom.
02:21:59.000Came up, got a breath, went down, and as I'm trying to get my lionfish out of this area he was in without pulling them off the spearhead, I noticed a grouper in a hole.
02:22:08.000So I went up and I got a lionfish on my spear, and I'm waving to my brother.
02:22:14.000To come over because I can't take the lionfish off my spear.
02:22:17.000I'm waving him to come over about the grouper.
02:22:19.000And he comes over and he's got a snapper on the end of his spear.
02:22:22.000So I take the snapper off his spear and I'm holding the damn snapper in my right hand and I have a lionfish on my spear in my left hand and I'm going underwater trying to point to the hole that has the grouper in it and somehow swung that lionfish into my hand.
02:22:40.000And it got all weird and puffy and I crawled up into the boat and was just kind of like writhing in the bottom of the boat.
02:22:47.000And I started getting really scared because my hands started to feel hot and all bloated.
02:22:53.000Eventually waved my brother and our buddy Eric over and we went in.
02:22:58.000We were 45 minutes from the shore and went in and by then I was really scared.
02:23:01.000My buddy Ronnie Bain was there and he's like saying I should put it under cold water and I went and typed in the internet and it's like do not put it in cold water.
02:23:28.000Genetic research supports this finger-pointing, but it's likely many more have been intentionally released by retired aquarium enthusiasts.
02:23:48.000I was reading a whole article how they have just a kill on site for Nile crocs.
02:23:54.000They're just terrified these fucking giant crocs are going to grow to be these 28-foot-long killers like they have in Mozambique or wherever the fuck it is.
02:24:07.000Because as we move species around with reckless abandon, intentionally, unintentionally, and we eliminate biodiversity in some areas through habitat destruction,
02:24:30.000And if current trends continue and the Earth continues to get hotter and we lose a lot of the climatic diversity, different climates that we have, different places, if that continues, I think that you will have,
02:24:46.000we'll continue to see like the great mixing, you know, and we'll just wind up with a situation where there are certain Every animal is going to get a shot at every biome, and you're just going to have it be that certain ones that can thrive are going to thrive,
02:25:04.000and you're not going to have the levels of indemnism that we have now.
02:25:08.000And I think that, yeah, in the future, you know, just look at what the wild pig has managed to do here in the U.S. You know?
02:25:17.000It's the dominant large animal on some landscapes.
02:26:30.000That is a crazy image, a 20-foot-long python that ate a fucking alligator.
02:26:35.000I mean, there's a crazy system going on down there where these non-indigenous animals are just crushing all these other animals and surviving and thriving in an environment that's pretty compatible for them.
02:26:49.000You know, as far as, you know, tropical, hot climate, moist, plenty of things to eat, plenty of life out there for them to snuff out.
02:26:58.000In some areas they're finding, a friend of mine, Robert Abernathy, who's a biologist and conservationist, big hunter, he...
02:27:07.000He was working with some guys that are going down there, and there's a whole class of mid-sized animal that's just missing from those python areas now.
02:27:28.000To bring this full circle back to some things we were talking about, a lot of the conservation groups that I get involved in...
02:27:36.000Things like, you know, National Wild Turkey Federation, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.
02:27:43.000They pick, you know, they're powered by hunters and powered by hunter money in the effort to preserve habitat for certain species, but like native animals.
02:27:58.000That wind up, by helping those, you know, you're helping all other creatures.
02:28:19.000And a big risk that you have, if you look at native wildlife and you cherish native wildlife, and I do, one of the big risks we have coming down the line is just the non-native stuff.
02:28:29.000I mean, as far as even just vegetation, we have a lot of areas that we're seeing those high-quality plants being displaced by You know, plants that make native wildlife sick that they can't live on.
02:28:47.000And in some ways, you want to look at Florida and it's almost like the wildlife situation in Florida has almost kind of become a joke where it's so outlandish.
02:28:56.000It's like this Jurassic Park environment.
02:28:59.000But at the same time, you look at it and you're like, God, you know, it's like this wild place and it's...
02:29:04.000And, you know, it's the new wilderness in some ways, but in some ways it's just like it's really sad what that's going to mean for the endemics.
02:29:11.000Well, Florida sort of attracts that even with human beings, though.
02:29:15.000I mean, those are non-native human beings that went down there and took over, too.
02:29:20.000It's all people that escaped from the mob from New York and weird people from Cuba that came up and rapsed.
02:29:27.000Yeah, you've got to read the books of, like, Carl Hiaasen, man.
02:30:10.000But yeah, it's just like we associated so strongly.
02:30:15.000With Florida and the fishing in Florida that I do.
02:30:18.000I have a soft spot and I was down there and I was talking to this kid who likes to hunt down there not long ago and he was telling me this is the hunting and fishing capital of the world.
02:32:40.000They wear these little shoulder things.
02:32:42.000It looks almost like a woman's purse, but it's like a handmade bag they carry.
02:32:46.000And it would have a kitchen knife in it, like a paring knife, which would be their hunting knife, or they just have that in their back pocket.
02:33:50.000Yeah, and they would be out there with a mouth packed full of coca leaves, sticking bacon soda in there, drinking that stuff out of a water bottle, and they wouldn't drink water all night.
02:34:02.000But here's the thing, when you want to get into that, if you took those boys, because they've never experienced a temperature below 40 degrees Fahrenheit.
02:34:18.000So, if you took those boys and I was like, hey man, we're going to go hunt in the Arctic for caribou and there's going to be snow on the ground, you know, they would go home and talk about how we are some kind of Superman heroes.
02:35:19.000And it's easy to sort of mythologize...
02:35:25.000People, or you go down, you get the feeling that there's like these super, I do, these super human beings, but then, you know, I look at it, it's just like, they're just used to a landscape that's baffling to me.
02:35:48.000Why did they not get hit by a bullet ant?
02:35:49.000Because they walk through, they just know the risks.
02:35:53.000The same way if I took them and we were walking around somewhere in some urban environment, they might not know when it's a good time to cross the street and walk off the other side of the other one.
02:37:47.000The guys there, they're in the mountains, like in serious mountains, barefoot, you know, growing up hunting their whole lives in the mountains, barefoot, on just bad rock and everything all the time.
02:37:57.000And their feet, you wouldn't have been able to put that foot in the shoe, no way now.
02:38:03.000You can find pictures of that stuff online, which is kind of like a famous sort of thing that happens to those guys in the Central Highlands and Luzon Island.
02:38:56.000Because after, you know, when they took the Philippines, some of the Japanese went up And just hit out, you know, and they would make a big sport out of finding them.
02:40:05.000He would just stand on a rock and stick them in there, the same way when you're electrofishing for anything doing a survey.
02:40:10.000And he would shock them up, then run down the river with a net and net up all the stuff that he shocked, and he'd get a log burning and roll the log over and lay the shrimp and crabs on the log until they turn red and eat them.
02:40:20.000My brother was shocking fish one time.
02:40:23.000And got done shocking fish for a fish survey, was walking back from having shocked fish, and he had the fish in a gunny sack, and a bolt of lightning came out of the sky, hit the ground next to him, and a shot of that electricity shot up into the sack of fish and shocked him.
02:42:20.000It'd be like, that's like, so, if you have Verizon, if you use Verizon in any way, shape, or form, Do me a favor and just do people a favor and make sure to go and complain about that.
02:42:50.000The reason I do wonder if there's something like that is it could be that it definitely came about It seems to have definitely come about at the time of the Cecil the Lion deal.
02:43:08.000They carry a lot of networks that are lower.
02:43:11.000I think with some pressure, it'll get...
02:43:14.000Just pressure from viewers who want to explain that they want the show, what the shows mean.
02:43:20.000I think that if someone, if they are making some kind of stand and it is like, oh, we don't approve of hunting, I would say look at my show and ask yourself, is my show a negative or a positive for wildlife and conservation?
02:43:42.000Also, just go and let, if you use any kind of Verizon product, man, your phone, I use Verizon for my phone, and I've definitely let them know.