The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1204 - Steven Rinella

00:00:00.000 You know what's funny?

00:00:01.000 I'll tell you later.

00:00:02.000 Tell me now.

00:00:04.000 Three, two, one.

00:00:07.000 What's funny?

00:00:09.000 I was going to tell you a funny story about your address, but it wouldn't be funny for you.

00:00:16.000 We'll talk later about that.

00:00:18.000 You and I, we share African ancestry.

00:00:21.000 Yeah?

00:00:22.000 Yeah.

00:00:22.000 I was shocked.

00:00:23.000 Yeah, I'm 1.6%.

00:00:25.000 Oh, really?

00:00:25.000 Yeah.

00:00:25.000 See, I have more credential than you in that department.

00:00:29.000 You're 2%, right?

00:00:30.000 Yeah, I know.

00:00:31.000 And it's funny because you sort of have the story in your family kind of like where you came from.

00:00:38.000 And I always knew I was 25% Italian.

00:00:43.000 And I knew that my family came from Sicily.

00:00:45.000 In fact...

00:00:48.000 The ranellas that came from Sicily all seem to become kind of established in the produce world.

00:00:55.000 My dad was brought up in the south side of Chicago.

00:01:01.000 I'm 44 years old, okay?

00:01:02.000 So think about that for a minute.

00:01:03.000 My dad was brought up in the south side of Chicago, and he was raised by his grandfather, who was Sicilian and had come from Sicily.

00:01:10.000 His grandfather delivered produce with a horse and cart in Chicago.

00:01:17.000 So...

00:01:20.000 To have lived through that, to be brought up in a house where a guy leaves in the morning in a horse and cart to deliver produce, and then to be alive, to fight in World War II, to be through the atomic era, the advent of the internet,

00:01:36.000 right?

00:01:37.000 But I always knew that we had Sicilians when I did the genetic test.

00:01:43.000 At some point in time, one of those Sicilians must have shot southward and crossed the Mediterranean and had a hookup down there or something.

00:01:52.000 Well, that was the history of Sicily in the first place.

00:01:55.000 Just being Sicilian in the first place, there were so many people that were impregnated by the Moors and by various people of West Africa and North Africa.

00:02:07.000 Yeah.

00:02:08.000 I should have probably always assumed, but I hadn't thought about it.

00:02:13.000 Another thing I was reading about this stuff, and you might know more about it than I do, is that when you do those tests, there's missing parts.

00:02:21.000 It captures what's there, but there could be a lot there that's not captured, just in the way that chromosomes are inherited and passed down.

00:02:31.000 It's an incomplete picture.

00:02:32.000 There could be influences.

00:02:37.000 It doesn't create a full picture of your lineage.

00:02:40.000 There could be lineages that are there that aren't represented in your particular makeup.

00:02:47.000 How so?

00:02:48.000 What do you mean?

00:02:50.000 You know, I hate to right off the bat get into something that I can't speak about with any level of expertise.

00:02:56.000 I was just reading a piece, and the piece I was reading had to do, it was kind of a dissection of what happened with Elizabeth Warren when she claimed...

00:03:04.000 We've been going off about that on the podcast, and I'm like 100 times more African than she is Native American.

00:03:10.000 Yeah, well that's what I found.

00:03:11.000 I'm 10 times more or whatever, but...

00:03:15.000 It was a piece in the Times explaining how to make sense of, now that everyone's doing these tests, how to think about and make sense of these tests.

00:03:23.000 But my understanding of it is that you could have a lot of ancestry that just isn't captured in your genetic code in a way that would be detected through the testing.

00:03:38.000 Meaning there could be ancestors because you're inheriting chromosomes from each parent.

00:03:44.000 And somehow you could have, it could be an incomplete picture.

00:03:47.000 You could have ancestors that had come from other, you know, whatever these tests break out the world into a hundred or some odd regions or zones, that there could be people from those zones who are in your lineage that are not captured in your personal, that are not captured in your genetic code.

00:04:03.000 That's so bizarre.

00:04:05.000 You'd think it'd all be in there.

00:04:06.000 Is that just an incomplete measuring tool?

00:04:09.000 Is that what it is?

00:04:10.000 Or is it just actually not in there?

00:04:12.000 I don't know.

00:04:13.000 You're going to have to have a dude on.

00:04:14.000 Yeah, I'll have to have a dude on.

00:04:15.000 I'll listen.

00:04:15.000 You need to have a dude on that understands it.

00:04:17.000 And as I say, I feel like I'm off on a bad start here, man.

00:04:19.000 How much Neanderthal did it say you had?

00:04:22.000 Less than normal.

00:04:23.000 Really?

00:04:23.000 Less than average.

00:04:24.000 What was the number, like it said?

00:04:26.000 You did 23andMe, right?

00:04:28.000 Yeah, I can't remember.

00:04:29.000 Oh, okay.

00:04:29.000 I can't remember.

00:04:30.000 I just remember it was less than average.

00:04:32.000 And those things are refined by how many people.

00:04:35.000 Do them, you know?

00:04:36.000 But it was less than average, which bummed me out.

00:04:39.000 But I'm like as hairy as like a 13-year-old Norwegian girl, you know what I mean?

00:04:43.000 So that didn't surprise me too much.

00:04:47.000 I was wishing to have a little more of that floating around in me.

00:04:50.000 It's a bizarre heritage, you know, the idea that there was a different type of human that bred with Homo sapiens and that there's like little bits and pieces of it floating around in people.

00:05:01.000 Yeah, and people discuss them People discuss, I was having an argument the other day where they say Neanderthal or Neanderthal, and everyone grows up saying Neanderthal, and it's one of those things you're supposed to switch once you realize how you're supposed to do it.

00:05:13.000 Right.

00:05:14.000 Neanderthal, but I just can't get comfortable with it.

00:05:16.000 I go back and forth.

00:05:17.000 There's a lot of words like that where, I know you're supposed to do it, but I can't get comfortable with it.

00:05:22.000 Because I feel like it makes you sound pretentious.

00:05:24.000 It does!

00:05:24.000 It's like rolling your R's in certain Spanish words.

00:05:27.000 But we have this idea that Neanderthals as unsuccessful.

00:05:33.000 Right?

00:05:34.000 Right. 0.98

00:05:34.000 They were these brutish thugs that died out. 0.98

00:05:38.000 But they had a 600,000 year run.

00:05:42.000 Yeah.

00:05:42.000 In Europe alone.

00:05:43.000 600,000 years.

00:05:45.000 Longer run than Homo sapiens have actually existed.

00:05:47.000 Yeah.

00:05:48.000 Yeah.

00:05:48.000 So, I don't know that we're going to match up and have that run.

00:05:55.000 Yeah. 0.98

00:05:56.000 Well, we'll probably have a 23andMe for whatever the fuck is after us. 1.00

00:05:59.000 And they go, look, somebody back then fucked a human. 1.00

00:06:02.000 Like, oh, one of those crazy, warmonger, fucking rapist, thieving humans. 1.00

00:06:09.000 That died out. 1.00

00:06:10.000 Turns out they didn't totally die out.

00:06:12.000 Overrun with emotions and lies.

00:06:14.000 And someone of a superior race infiltrated the humans and banged one of them. 0.90

00:06:19.000 Yeah, it's funny to look at that understanding of those people and then to picture in your mind's eye, even though you can't picture it.

00:06:32.000 When they were hooking up, anatomically and kind of behaviorally modern humans were...

00:06:44.000 Hooking up with Neanderthals, how was it perceived by their peers?

00:06:49.000 I bet the people that we think of as people back then, like, you know who George the Animal Steel is?

00:06:55.000 No.

00:06:56.000 George the Animal Steel is a very famous pro wrestler from back in the day, and...

00:07:01.000 I thought you were going to say it was a paleontologist or anthropologist.

00:07:04.000 It was a wrestler. 0.98

00:07:05.000 He's a wrestler.

00:07:06.000 Pro wrestler.

00:07:07.000 Very famous guy. 1.00

00:07:08.000 Who could be a fucking caveman. 1.00

00:07:11.000 Legitimately could be a caveman. 1.00

00:07:13.000 See if you got a good image of him.

00:07:15.000 Now, this is what I think.

00:07:17.000 When I think of people...

00:07:18.000 Give me a full body one. 0.93

00:07:21.000 There you go.

00:07:21.000 When I think of people that are homo sapiens, homo sapiens from, you know, 200,000 years ago, I think of George the Animal Steel.

00:07:32.000 I think they were something like that. 0.99

00:07:34.000 So the idea of George fucking a Neanderthal chick... 0.99

00:07:37.000 Not that far off. 1.00

00:07:38.000 I think our idea is that Dan Rather would be out there banging some monkey lady. 0.91

00:07:44.000 I just don't think that's the case.

00:07:48.000 Look at George's body. 1.00

00:07:49.000 I mean, Jesus fucking Christ. 1.00

00:07:51.000 He's got the hairiest shoulders I've ever seen in a man. 0.99

00:07:55.000 Is he still alive?

00:07:55.000 I do not know.

00:07:57.000 I don't believe he is.

00:07:58.000 I hope he's not listening right now.

00:07:59.000 I don't believe he is.

00:08:00.000 He's a legend.

00:08:02.000 Legend in the world of the pro wrestling.

00:08:04.000 So it's going to take more than this to hurt his feelings. 0.99

00:08:05.000 That guy don't give a fuck. 1.00

00:08:07.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:08:07.000 He's a legend. 0.99

00:08:08.000 But when I was a kid in high school, oh, he's old as fuck. 1.00

00:08:12.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:08:14.000 Well, those guys, they all...

00:08:15.000 That's a hard way to make a living, man.

00:08:17.000 Oh, he died.

00:08:18.000 He died at age 79. He had a good run.

00:08:19.000 Yeah.

00:08:20.000 That's a good run for those guys. 0.99

00:08:22.000 That's a fucking hard way to make a living. 0.98

00:08:24.000 Have we ever talked about... 0.99

00:08:28.000 The idea of Neanderthals is like having a confrontational hunting style?

00:08:34.000 No, I don't think we have.

00:08:35.000 Because when anthropologists look at the skeletal remains of Neanderthals, they see this sort of suite of, this pattern of injuries on them.

00:08:47.000 And a researcher was looking at the types of fractures that they have on their bones and where the fractures occurred and the breaks and cracks in their skulls.

00:08:58.000 He was looking at all this and wound up working with a doctor who had a lot of exposure to rodeo bull riders.

00:09:09.000 And the doctor was observing the way in which that suite of injuries was very familiar to him from rodeo riders, the types of brakes and the location of brakes.

00:09:20.000 And this guy has this idea that they had a very confrontational hunting style, that they were mixing it up with big animals.

00:09:30.000 And another thing they found is that When you're looking at skeletal remains from early people, you still see that separation in the sexes, right?

00:09:41.000 That the males would suffer injuries with a greater prevalence than females.

00:09:47.000 But with the Neanderthals, it seems like they didn't have the sort of, like, duplicity of roles. 0.84

00:09:53.000 And then the females... 1.00

00:09:56.000 Have the same prevalence of these types of injuries.

00:10:00.000 And so maybe they didn't share that division of labor.

00:10:05.000 Were the females as large as the males? 0.71

00:10:07.000 Yeah, I don't know the answer to that.

00:10:08.000 So we know that they had stone tools, right?

00:10:11.000 The crude stone tools.

00:10:12.000 Yeah.

00:10:13.000 But we don't know whether or not they had anything that could launch them.

00:10:16.000 Do we know if they had spears?

00:10:18.000 I don't believe that they've found they had adalattles.

00:10:22.000 Right.

00:10:22.000 And I don't know if they were hafting materials, but they were doing art And I think there's a little bit of a debate about whether they're doing representational art, but they were doing art.

00:10:34.000 They were probably making jewelry.

00:10:38.000 These are all things that, as we kind of wake up to what these people really like, and it paints a more complicated picture.

00:10:45.000 There's even this theory, and I don't know if this held any water or how long it was fashionable for, but you had this really long history of, this extremely long history of hundreds of thousands of years of Neanderthal You know, occupation in Europe.

00:11:18.000 Or seeing art and seeing jewelry and mimicking this from these new invaders that were coming in.

00:11:25.000 But I don't know where that idea sits right now.

00:11:27.000 I don't know if it's been dispelled because of other discoveries.

00:11:30.000 But I remember thinking that was an interesting idea that they would...

00:11:32.000 And it kind of paints this really sad picture, right?

00:11:34.000 That they would be sort of in the autumn...

00:11:46.000 Yeah.

00:11:59.000 As homo sapiens, but now there was an article that was published just a couple of days ago that new evidence shows that Neanderthals, like, inter-Neanderthal violence between each other was just as bad as homo sapiens.

00:12:11.000 Yeah, and evidence of cannibalism.

00:12:14.000 Oh yeah, there was a lot of that, right?

00:12:15.000 Scraping of inside the skulls, indicative of tools.

00:12:19.000 Oh, ad blocker got busted. 0.99

00:12:23.000 They get us every time with the fucking ad blocker. 0.99

00:12:26.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:12:28.000 Um...

00:12:30.000 What does it say? 0.82

00:12:31.000 Humans are just as violent as Neanderthals. 0.98

00:12:33.000 Are you familiar with the writer John Muallum?

00:12:35.000 No.

00:12:36.000 You'd like his stuff.

00:12:37.000 He wrote a really beautiful piece about Neanderthals not long ago.

00:12:42.000 Okay, I fucked it up.

00:12:44.000 What they're saying is that modern humans were just as prone to violence as Neanderthals. 0.94

00:12:48.000 I don't have a problem with that.

00:12:50.000 I think I'm conflating this with something else that I read about inter-species violence.

00:12:56.000 Neanderthal on Neanderthal violence.

00:12:59.000 The other thing that's weird about them is they had bigger brains than us.

00:13:02.000 They had bigger brains and they would be like 5'7 and weigh 200 pounds.

00:13:07.000 Just jacked. 0.70

00:13:08.000 Just a little gorilla thing. 0.75

00:13:10.000 It'd be great to see it.

00:13:11.000 There was a really dumb theory that was being bounced around A few years ago, it was really hilarious.

00:13:17.000 About how we wiped out, we assumed that Neanderthals, because we don't have any soft tissue samples, we assumed that Neanderthals looked similar to humans.

00:13:26.000 But because of the very different shape of their skull, this guy had, instead of giving them European-looking white skin, turned them into a gorilla. 0.51

00:13:35.000 Turned them into a giant muscle-bound gorilla that preyed on people.

00:13:40.000 And this was like, I believe this guy actually was a professor.

00:13:45.000 And it seemed almost like a goof at first.

00:13:46.000 Do you remember this, Jamie?

00:13:47.000 We pulled this up a few times.

00:13:51.000 Killer Neanderthal theory, I think you called it.

00:13:54.000 He had drawn this thing, black like a gorilla, with giant muscles all over the place and these big crazy eyes, and painting Neanderthals as a predator of humans.

00:14:06.000 And that's why we wiped them out.

00:14:07.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:14:09.000 My limitations as...

00:14:13.000 I was going to say my limitations as an anthropologist, but I'm certainly not an anthropologist at all.

00:14:18.000 I'm just a dude who's interested in it.

00:14:19.000 But one of my limitations is I'll hear theories floated, and I don't follow them long enough to see which ones have any traction.

00:14:29.000 I'll just read about them, and I don't take it as gospel, but I'll read about it, and I'll be like, that's interesting, and it'll sort of shape my understanding of it, but then I don't keep track of it.

00:14:41.000 I try to really follow the story of the peopling of the Americas.

00:14:44.000 So when it comes to the human history of the Western Hemisphere, I sort of follow and ideas will get floated and I'll track the idea to see where it lands in terms of scholarly consensus.

00:14:55.000 But another stuff like with Neanderthals, I'm always a sucker for a Neanderthal story, but I don't track what ideas that float up are just very quickly denounced as being complete rubbish.

00:15:07.000 Yeah, it's a weird one.

00:15:09.000 You know, it takes time to follow this stuff.

00:15:14.000 Go to that other picture.

00:15:15.000 That's what it is.

00:15:15.000 Them and us.

00:15:18.000 Yeah.

00:15:19.000 But look at some of his images.

00:15:20.000 Look at that image that he has on the cover of the book.

00:15:23.000 Like, that was the idea.

00:15:25.000 Yeah.

00:15:25.000 But there's some way better ones.

00:15:26.000 There's some way better images where they drew of full body ones.

00:15:32.000 They had, is it in the article?

00:15:34.000 This was a link to the actual website from a different article.

00:15:38.000 Just go to that and then go to images. 0.96

00:15:41.000 Because there was some really bizarre fucking... 0.97

00:15:45.000 Yeah, there it is. 0.98

00:15:45.000 Upper left-hand corner. 0.98

00:15:47.000 This is what this guy...

00:15:48.000 Yeah, whatever he's got going on, that thing is not making art.

00:15:54.000 You don't think so?

00:15:55.000 No, he's making meat, man.

00:15:59.000 Come on.

00:16:00.000 Yeah, it's pretty preposterous.

00:16:04.000 But Neanderthals didn't have fangs like that either, did they?

00:16:07.000 No.

00:16:08.000 What is that?

00:16:09.000 Is he morphing a Neanderthal into a gorilla?

00:16:11.000 Is that what he's trying to do?

00:16:12.000 That's a monkey down here. 1.00

00:16:12.000 Oh, that's a... 1.00

00:16:13.000 Ah, I got you.

00:16:13.000 Okay, monkey, gorilla, Neanderthal.

00:16:16.000 But yeah, but like how it's got it snarling with its fucking vegetable-eaten teeth. 0.99

00:16:22.000 Anyway. 0.99

00:16:25.000 It's...

00:16:25.000 And then there's the...

00:16:26.000 Do we even know what those DeNovians... 1.00

00:16:29.000 How do you say that word?

00:16:30.000 The one from Russia? 0.65

00:16:31.000 Yeah.

00:16:32.000 They don't have any idea what they look like, right?

00:16:34.000 No, I don't think so. 1.00

00:16:34.000 They have some pinky bones and shit. 1.00

00:16:36.000 Yeah, that one's not... 0.98

00:16:37.000 That one I don't know. 0.97

00:16:38.000 Hey, man, your cookbook is fucking fantastic. 0.98

00:16:41.000 It's really good. 0.99

00:16:43.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:16:44.000 You put a lot of goddamn work into that thing, huh? 0.98

00:16:46.000 We started collecting images for it years ago. 0.99

00:16:48.000 You could tell.

00:16:49.000 It's really good.

00:16:50.000 Because I didn't want it to look like...

00:16:54.000 Was it boring you talking about Neanderthals?

00:16:56.000 No.

00:16:56.000 I'm out of stuff to say about them anyway.

00:16:58.000 No.

00:16:58.000 I could go on for days.

00:16:59.000 That's the problem.

00:17:01.000 We could spend days talking about things we're not quite sure about.

00:17:04.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:17:04.000 Well, I heard.

00:17:05.000 That's what I do for a living.

00:17:10.000 I want to get back to the cookbook real quick.

00:17:12.000 You know what's funny is, you probably don't know this.

00:17:18.000 But how many people in the wildlife world listen to your show?

00:17:22.000 And get angry?

00:17:22.000 I hear about it.

00:17:23.000 Because I'm like a conduit.

00:17:26.000 Tell Joe that that's not how it works.

00:17:28.000 I'm like a conduit where I'm oftentimes getting frantic text messages as though I would be able to jump in and clarify how a porcupine quill works.

00:17:40.000 Yeah.

00:17:44.000 Yeah, it's really funny how many people I hear from.

00:17:47.000 I know when you're on the subject of wildlife.

00:17:51.000 Especially if we're baked.

00:17:52.000 If there's marijuana in the room, we've got a real issue.

00:17:55.000 That's not what antlers are for. 0.85

00:17:56.000 He should really know.

00:17:58.000 Well, who knows what antlers are for?

00:18:00.000 Well, they're from two things, right?

00:18:01.000 They're for fighting and sexual selection, right?

00:18:04.000 Yeah, that's two things that definitely make sense.

00:18:07.000 Battling like a sexual display.

00:18:09.000 We got a bull in Utah this year, and when we were butchering it, one of the hindquarters had been punctured by an antler, and it got infected.

00:18:19.000 And when we cut into the hindquarter, just this bucket of pus... 1.00

00:18:25.000 I mean, it was fucking nasty. 0.99

00:18:27.000 We thought it was piss at first, like someone had actually punctured the bladder, and then we realized when we got deep into it that there was this giant ass. 0.99

00:18:33.000 He had been assed, like literally, right in the flank. 0.99

00:18:37.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:18:37.000 And it was just so fucking nasty. 0.99

00:18:40.000 You find really high-pressure pus pockets. 0.98

00:18:45.000 In animals.

00:18:46.000 Yeah, all over his body.

00:18:47.000 He had holes.

00:18:48.000 Holes in his ribs.

00:18:49.000 He had a big one in his face. 0.61

00:18:51.000 He'd been jacked in the face.

00:18:52.000 I got a Sika deer last year who had lost his eye.

00:18:57.000 Completely gone.

00:18:58.000 I mean, like, his eyeball had been punctured.

00:19:03.000 And people were asking me, well, no wonder you got him.

00:19:05.000 But I was like, no, it was good eye.

00:19:07.000 It was facing me.

00:19:08.000 On his line of approach.

00:19:10.000 Yeah, but he didn't know where you were.

00:19:11.000 His left eye was facing me.

00:19:14.000 But yeah, with the cookbook, so we started gathering pictures up for it years ago.

00:19:23.000 Because I wanted to have this, like, really complete idea of how to process everything.

00:19:28.000 So, like, the book includes everything from how to process a bullfrog, you know, to a deer, to a pig, to mahi-mahi.

00:19:35.000 And a problem I run into when I've done books is I never wind up needing to, like, pad them in the end.

00:19:43.000 I always wind up having, like, very painful problems.

00:19:47.000 Yeah.

00:19:48.000 You know, when I did my book, my book American Buffalo, I remember I had to lose 100 pages, which was hard to do.

00:19:56.000 When we did the complete guide to hunting, butchering, cooking, wild game, it came out at 700 pages.

00:20:01.000 Do you ever think of going back and putting those 100 pages back in, or do you think it made sense to remove them?

00:20:06.000 No, in hindsight, it had to happen.

00:20:08.000 It had to happen.

00:20:10.000 In terms of the narrative stuff I've written, the narrative nonfiction I've written, that's my favorite thing that I've done.

00:20:19.000 It had to happen.

00:20:20.000 It was painful.

00:20:21.000 When I did the guidebook series, it came in 700 pages, and my publisher was...

00:20:28.000 My publisher was like, you know, you just don't really make 700-page books.

00:20:31.000 And so that's why we wound up doing the Volume 1 and Volume 2 because I didn't want to get rid of any.

00:20:34.000 But then in doing this cookbook, the Meat Eater Fishing Game Cookbook is what it's called, and putting this together, I think early on we started to get a little bit...

00:20:44.000 We're good to go.

00:21:04.000 And I didn't want it to feel like that.

00:21:06.000 I wanted it to sort of feel, like, really representative of, like, so many different places and different experiences that are captured in here.

00:21:14.000 And so we just started filming these process shots of how to walk stuff through, like, everything, you know, how to, like, turn things, how to take an animal and make it into a variety of usable ingredients.

00:21:27.000 And collecting all those...

00:21:30.000 It took a long time, and then actually assembling it and putting it together was more systematic once we had that underway.

00:21:38.000 But I think it's cool looking, though, you know?

00:21:41.000 No, it's great.

00:21:42.000 Like the book in the end, where it's kind of like half, could almost pass as a coffee table book.

00:21:47.000 I agree.

00:21:48.000 Yeah, no, it really could.

00:21:49.000 And I think it's a really valuable resource for people that hunt because it's just, I mean, there's only so many different ways you can cook back straps, right?

00:21:57.000 There's so many different ways you can put ground venison into spaghetti sauce, you know?

00:22:03.000 Yeah.

00:22:05.000 Yeah.

00:22:23.000 That's very rare in the hunting world.

00:22:26.000 You see these hunting shows, they're very one-dimensional.

00:22:29.000 You see someone looking for the animal, and then they finally get it, and yay, everybody's happy.

00:22:33.000 The end.

00:22:34.000 But you spend a great deal of time breaking down animals and cooking a bunch of different things, including marrow and shanks and unusual preparations.

00:22:44.000 I think that's really important.

00:22:46.000 Yeah, that's something that was...

00:22:49.000 Yeah.

00:23:16.000 I have a friend, Greg Blaskovich, who even worked on this research piece of taking justifications for hunting and finding test subjects who are skeptical of hunting and explaining various justifications to them.

00:23:36.000 And seeing which ones of those they find to be most impactful.

00:23:40.000 So he's actually done research around, when you take this great, like this broad spectrum of reasons people do this.

00:23:49.000 And everyone has many of them as part of their story.

00:23:53.000 And you run them by people.

00:23:56.000 He sees these ones that they really resonate and which ones kind of move the needle in their perception of it.

00:24:01.000 And it's a little bit surprising.

00:24:03.000 There's some surprises in there of ones that you think would be really impactful but in fact are not impactful at all.

00:24:08.000 People don't care about.

00:24:09.000 Like what?

00:24:09.000 Well, population control.

00:24:12.000 People don't care.

00:24:14.000 I think that people don't The kind of people you're talking about who are largely unfamiliar with it, but they're looking at it from the outside and they're skeptical of it.

00:24:23.000 They don't buy it.

00:24:25.000 I don't think that they're afraid of deer, generally.

00:24:29.000 But people who live in high population areas, like I did a gig once in Western Massachusetts.

00:24:36.000 Well, yeah, it was in Western Massachusetts and I had a drive.

00:24:40.000 I was coming from New York and I had to drive through the most deer infested place I've ever been to in my life.

00:24:46.000 It was completely insane.

00:24:48.000 Like when you're driving on the highway, you have to go 25-30 miles an hour.

00:24:52.000 Things are just jumping in front of your car every 15-20 seconds. 0.99

00:24:55.000 It was fucking nuts, man. 0.92

00:24:56.000 And I took this side road down to get to wherever the gig was, and I'm just watching these animals jump in front of the car, left and right. 0.99

00:25:07.000 And I'm like, these people that live here, these things are a goddamn nuisance. 0.85

00:25:10.000 If this was your everyday reality, and you asked those people, you said, hey, what do you think about deer population control? 0.97

00:25:17.000 We need to hunt to keep the population down. 0.99

00:25:19.000 They'd be like, fuck yeah, you do. 0.99

00:25:20.000 Yeah, I'm sure that there are quite a lot of people that live in some of these areas that have a great abundance of deer that feel that way. 0.99

00:25:28.000 The general population.

00:25:29.000 Yeah, when he was looking at it with just general population thing, and it was full stop, too.

00:25:33.000 He didn't go in and give...

00:25:37.000 Case scenarios and examples, right?

00:25:39.000 It's just a question that you ask, and people, it didn't immediately click with people.

00:25:44.000 Another thing that didn't immediately click with people, but it's extremely important to me, is issues around heritage and legacy, okay?

00:25:52.000 So meaning that my maternal grandfather, my paternal grandfather were hunters.

00:26:00.000 My father was a hunter.

00:26:01.000 I was brought up hunting.

00:26:02.000 To a non-hunter, Doesn't matter. 1.00

00:26:05.000 Your grandparents and parents could have been involved in all kinds of bad shit. 1.00

00:26:08.000 I don't think that that means you need to continue doing bad shit. 1.00

00:26:12.000 One that's very obvious is people understand and respect the idea of food. 0.98

00:26:20.000 Your general population should look and respect the idea of food.

00:26:23.000 Now, to back up what I was getting at about you mentioned that being a big element of the show, it almost winds up being that I was fortunate or lucky or whatever that early in my career, I started focusing on talking about that aspect of it.

00:26:41.000 But it wasn't something I just made up out of nowhere because it was a huge part of growing up where, for whatever reason, I had to be raised by a dad who was just really interested in cooking stuff and sharing it with people.

00:26:57.000 And if you're driving down the road in June and you see a snapping turtle, We're good to go.

00:27:14.000 And everything.

00:27:15.000 We ate all kinds of fish.

00:27:17.000 And we ate a lot of things that other people weren't interested in.

00:27:19.000 We could go out and bring back our dad bullfrogs.

00:27:22.000 He would love it if we went out and got him frogs.

00:27:24.000 We'd take our bows out at night using flashlights, which unbeknownst to me was illegal and remains illegal in the state where I was brought up.

00:27:31.000 Even for frogs?

00:27:32.000 To use artificial light for frogs, yeah.

00:27:34.000 Wow.

00:27:35.000 Dude, when I found that out later, no idea.

00:27:38.000 Wow.

00:27:39.000 That you weren't supposed to do that.

00:27:41.000 We would do it, and we'd come in and bring them, and it was like a big thing, right, to bring our dad the frog legs, and he would cook them.

00:27:47.000 He would cook and eat anything, and then he would do stuff where we would catch salmon when the salmon were running the rivers in October, and he would have people over, and we would have a salmon boil.

00:27:57.000 So I was raised around that stuff of celebrating wild game, having to be very social, having to be a way to connect.

00:28:04.000 Salmon boil?

00:28:05.000 Yeah, boiled fish.

00:28:07.000 So you take...

00:28:08.000 You're literally cubing up salmon and pearl onions and little baby potatoes.

00:28:15.000 Oh, so you're making like a stew.

00:28:17.000 It's a fish boil.

00:28:18.000 And then you drain it off, and you have drawn butter. 1.00

00:28:20.000 And you drown all that shit in drawn butter. 1.00

00:28:22.000 It's good. 1.00

00:28:23.000 Sounds good.

00:28:24.000 Yeah.

00:28:25.000 But it doesn't sound like the best...

00:28:26.000 People do fish boils, but it's not normal to do a salmon boil.

00:28:30.000 It seems like it's such a flavorful fish, you would lose some of that in the broth.

00:28:34.000 Yeah, for sure. 0.99

00:28:35.000 But it's like when you have the pearl onions and the little baby potatoes and cubed up, and you drown all that shit in butter. 0.99

00:28:41.000 It's just like a thing people like. 0.97

00:28:42.000 So the taste is really good, but it's not necessarily the taste of salmon.

00:28:45.000 It isn't what...

00:28:47.000 If you went to the Pacific Northwest and asked a bunch of great chefs in the Pacific Northwest to list their five favorite salmon preparations, boiling them in a pot of water isn't going to make their list.

00:29:03.000 But we would do that, and it would be a thing, and you'd invite people over to do it.

00:29:11.000 So, early on, with all the things I enjoyed about hunting, the food aspect was big for me and really informed all of the sort of conversations that I've had around it since.

00:29:25.000 And so, in doing a show about hunting, it wasn't something that I was going to lean out.

00:29:30.000 But in all fairness, when I was growing up, I did a lot of fur trapping, too.

00:29:36.000 I trapped muskrat, beaver, mink, all kinds of stuff.

00:29:40.000 I was doing that to sell the furs.

00:29:43.000 I would use some of the meat for bait.

00:29:46.000 I'd sometimes sell meat to dog sled racers.

00:29:48.000 When did you realize that beaver were delicious?

00:29:51.000 Not until after.

00:29:53.000 No, I ate the first one I ever ate when I was in community college.

00:29:58.000 I'd still tell people about the beaver that you cook for us in Wisconsin and how good it is.

00:30:02.000 And they look at you sideways and I'm like, I'm telling you, man, it was like the most delicious pot roast I've ever had.

00:30:07.000 It was fantastic.

00:30:08.000 Yeah.

00:30:08.000 It was really good.

00:30:10.000 There's even stories about early on when early explorers were in this country, they had a difficult time getting fish sometimes.

00:30:18.000 And beaver were approved for the Lenten meal.

00:30:23.000 Because they were aquatic.

00:30:25.000 Wow.

00:30:26.000 So on Fridays, when you're supposed to have your meat-free day, you were allowed to eat beaver meat because they were a water animal.

00:30:33.000 It was a very popular food item.

00:30:35.000 Do you follow what I'm saying?

00:30:36.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:30:37.000 No, I get it.

00:30:38.000 The first ones we ate, I had started reading about...

00:30:41.000 I'd always read narratives, stories about the mountain men.

00:30:46.000 Meaning, when I say mountain men, like a very specific thing, like a...

00:30:49.000 You know, a Rocky Mountain beaver trapper who was sandwiched in time between the end of the Lewis and Clark expedition and the collapse of the beaver market in the 1840s.

00:31:05.000 So a very finite period of time is what a mountain man was.

00:31:08.000 Explain to people how big the beaver market is, because this is going to blow people's minds.

00:31:14.000 Well, America's first, you know, Aster, John Jacob Aster, like, the beaver market made America's first millionaires.

00:31:22.000 His fortunes came from being a beaver trader.

00:31:24.000 The richest men in the country, their money came from beavers. 0.97

00:31:28.000 Yeah, and he was in on the business end of it.

00:31:30.000 He wasn't in on the trapping end of it.

00:31:32.000 Right, he was in on the hats, right?

00:31:33.000 The fur companies, yeah, the big fur companies.

00:31:35.000 And when we bought, think about it like this, how big it was.

00:31:40.000 For us to do the Louisiana Purchase, And to buy that chunk of land.

00:31:47.000 When Lewis and Clark came out, part of their mandate was to suss out the potential for the trade in beaver hides.

00:31:57.000 It'd be like buying something, now you'd want to know about oil and gas, right?

00:32:00.000 You don't know, can we justify this through oil and gas?

00:32:02.000 They're looking to justify it through trading beaver hides.

00:32:05.000 Now also, there was also language about that they might find out about whether woolly mammoths were existing out there as well.

00:32:11.000 So there was like some confusion about what was going on.

00:32:14.000 Wow, they really thought the woolly mammoths were still alive?

00:32:17.000 Jefferson was interested in that stuff because he had been to some areas, he had some familiarity and been to some areas with these large bones and he was puzzled about them.

00:32:26.000 He was wondering if this wasn't some, if it maybe in fact was not an extinct species but was somehow living in the American West still.

00:32:33.000 How hard is it to...

00:32:34.000 People, historians, like people...

00:32:36.000 Not historians.

00:32:37.000 Popular historians really love to make a big deal out of that because it's so weird.

00:32:41.000 But it wasn't like, hey, let's buy the...

00:32:43.000 Let's do the Louisiana purchase transaction because of the possibility of locating mammoths. 1.00

00:32:47.000 I think it was like an idea that was floated around.

00:32:50.000 People see it in a...

00:32:52.000 People such as me see it and perhaps overemphasize what it meant, but it was an idea that was out there.

00:32:57.000 The beaver trade stuff was...

00:33:00.000 Certainly a big factor.

00:33:01.000 Another thing I was reading about recently that you might think is interesting is that people have this idea of Lewis and Clark going into this unspoiled, uncontacted landscape.

00:33:16.000 I was recently reading a piece by a historian who was talking about, at the time Lewis and Clark headed out into the Great Plains, There were Native Americans living on the Great Plains who had been to Europe and met the King of France and returned back to the Great Plains.

00:33:32.000 Whoa! 0.71

00:33:33.000 What year?

00:33:35.000 They went out in the early 1800s.

00:33:38.000 So they were out in 1804. Wow!

00:33:43.000 If you imagine the time from the time in the 1500s when the Spanish We're poking around.

00:33:56.000 Coronado coming up from Mexico into the Great Plains.

00:34:02.000 Cabeza de Vaca being shipwrecked along the Gulf Coast and people pushing up into these areas.

00:34:07.000 That was hundreds of years prior.

00:34:10.000 Imagine the distance that separated Lewis and Clark from the first Europeans who were doing activities in and around the Great Plains.

00:34:21.000 Is like the distance in time that separates us from Lewis and Clark.

00:34:25.000 More so, right?

00:34:26.000 Yeah.

00:34:27.000 It's the distance in time that separates us from the Declaration of Independence.

00:34:30.000 It was like a long history of people messing around.

00:34:33.000 That's crazy.

00:34:33.000 However, so yeah, but think about it too, like, Lewis and Clark were encountering people who had horses, right?

00:34:38.000 Right.

00:34:38.000 And those horses had been, yeah, those horsemen traded up.

00:34:41.000 So that's just like a side note to this idea of eating beavers.

00:34:44.000 So...

00:34:47.000 From reading about the mountain men, I got interested in this.

00:34:50.000 Anytime you're reading about mountain men, you're always going to find the part where the author talks about how much mountain men liked beaver tail.

00:34:59.000 The first people that tried eating beaver tail, it was around when I was in community college at the time.

00:35:05.000 My brothers, I remember, stuck a beaver tail in the oven for a while and cooked it.

00:35:10.000 They reported back to me that whatever it is they're talking about, Isn't that?

00:35:17.000 Like, there must be some other explanation.

00:35:19.000 Didn't we eat beaver tail?

00:35:20.000 Yeah.

00:35:20.000 Yeah, we ate it in Wisconsin.

00:35:22.000 Yeah.

00:35:23.000 There's like pictures and an explanation of how to prepare, how to actually prepare beaver tail mountain man style in the meat-eater fishing game cookbook.

00:35:33.000 It wasn't bad.

00:35:34.000 It was just bland.

00:35:36.000 It's just fat.

00:35:36.000 It's fat.

00:35:37.000 So, after that, we started thinking that when they say the mountain man liked beaver tail, we thought it must have meant they liked rump.

00:35:45.000 Basically like the hindquarters.

00:35:46.000 So we started, when I would catch beavers, I'd be careful when skinning them to not get the caster. 1.00

00:35:53.000 The beavers have two large glands on the inside of their legs.

00:35:56.000 They're like tucked in their, what looks like, if you lay a beaver on its back, tucked kind of on either side of its, like if it's a male, like tucked either side of its penis or either side of its cloaca, you'll see a, not cloaca, but like vent.

00:36:10.000 You'll see these glands that are the size of If you take your index finger and your thumb and make a circle, there's a gland on each side called a castor gland.

00:36:19.000 There's an oil gland in there.

00:36:20.000 They used to use it for perfume.

00:36:22.000 It still has value.

00:36:23.000 Today, it's used for a wide variety of things.

00:36:25.000 It smells beautiful.

00:36:26.000 If you're ever walking on a stream bank and you smell a strange perfume smell, it's usually beaver castor.

00:36:31.000 Wow. 1.00

00:36:32.000 Smells great, tastes like shit. 1.00

00:36:34.000 Tastes like you rubbed roses or something all over your food. 1.00

00:36:39.000 So I started figuring out to skin them and be very careful not to get the castor on your knife or get the castor on your hands.

00:36:46.000 And then we would just take the meat and put it in crockpots with potatoes and onions and stuff.

00:36:51.000 And just cook them down in a crock pot so you could pick them.

00:36:54.000 And it was like roast beef.

00:36:56.000 So then I started eating that, but then later I realized that I read other accounts of how people prepared beaver tail.

00:37:03.000 And if you take the tail, like the scaly-ass tail, and it really should be from a fall beaver.

00:37:08.000 Because the tail will be twice as thick in the fall than it is in the spring.

00:37:11.000 They're emaciated in the spring.

00:37:14.000 Take the tail and just skewer it on a stick and put it next to a fire where the skin starts to bubble and boil.

00:37:21.000 And pretty soon you can just peel all that skin away.

00:37:23.000 And what's hiding under there is the best equivalent or point of comparison that I can think of would be just, it's like if you had a really, like imagine you're eating a grass-fed steak, right, but still has that fatty gristle on it.

00:37:41.000 It's just made up of that gristle.

00:37:44.000 A lot of people would trim away from a steak and not eat.

00:37:47.000 That's what's inside that beaver tail.

00:37:49.000 But these individuals that were doing this were fat-starved, eating such lean meat all the time.

00:37:57.000 I think they loved it because here's like a chunk of fat.

00:38:01.000 And they had ready access to it because they were catching them to make a living.

00:38:05.000 And if you're just eating the meat, there's no fat on the meat.

00:38:07.000 And so they would complement it with just eating the beaver tail fat.

00:38:12.000 And I'll often tell people about it, and I even gave some too.

00:38:16.000 There's like a culinary arts institute, and I gave some chefs that stuff.

00:38:20.000 And everyone that eats it points out that it's not that it tastes so fantastic, but it's just like really interesting to try and eat it.

00:38:27.000 The fat from the tail.

00:38:30.000 You've got to put yourself in a position, you've probably been in this too, especially if you're out hunting and eating freeze-dried food or not eating great, and you're just exerting yourself all day, all the time, what you want to eat changes a lot.

00:38:43.000 Yeah.

00:38:44.000 And the level of appetite you have is off the charts.

00:38:48.000 Yeah.

00:38:48.000 Yeah, and so just to eat a big slab of fat was appealing to people.

00:38:52.000 Yeah, your body starts craving things that it absolutely needs.

00:38:56.000 Yeah, that makes sense. 0.94

00:38:57.000 Makes sense, and particularly when you think about these people that are hiking across the West, traveling massive amounts of distance, probably very physically strenuous, dragging all their shit with them, and they get across some big-ass piece of fat from a tail. 0.94

00:39:13.000 It's probably a huge treat. 0.80

00:39:14.000 Yeah, and then our understanding of people, we used to have this idea of early Native Americans, they're just eating nothing but mammoth meat all the time.

00:39:26.000 As our understanding of people grows, you see how much they were utilizing plant resources and probably had pretty plant-rich diets.

00:39:34.000 But with the equestrian bison hunters on the Great Plains, Those guys weren't cultivating.

00:39:44.000 At that era, especially the era when Lewis and Clark came in, these people were not cultivating crops. 0.98

00:39:49.000 A lot of the people who had been farming along the Mississippi and Missouri Valleys, once they got horses, they just gave up on that shit and just started roaming the landscape eating meat. 0.95

00:39:59.000 The mountain men certainly weren't doing that. 0.99

00:40:01.000 They were just eating like you're eating meat.

00:40:05.000 365 days out of the year.

00:40:07.000 And you see that they really, probably to make up for a lot of nutrient deficiencies, ate shitloads of organs.

00:40:14.000 Putting gall on your food.

00:40:17.000 Gallbladder.

00:40:18.000 Squeezing, taking the gallbladder, squeezing the bile from gallbladder on your food.

00:40:25.000 You did that once.

00:40:27.000 Yeah, it's horrific.

00:40:28.000 It's like putting a 9-volt battery on your tongue.

00:40:30.000 And you think they were doing it just because they were just nutrient starved.

00:40:33.000 Yeah, it seems like they put a high emphasis on eating just like all these, like just organ meats.

00:40:39.000 Blood, organ meats, milk from mammary glands.

00:40:44.000 Really? 0.96

00:40:44.000 Yeah, because you can't just eat that lean ass game meat every day. 0.96

00:40:47.000 Right. 0.93

00:40:47.000 You were talking to a guy from Alaska. 0.93

00:40:49.000 What's that guy's name?

00:40:51.000 Buck?

00:40:51.000 Buck Bowden.

00:40:52.000 Buck Bowden.

00:40:52.000 Yeah.

00:40:53.000 On your show.

00:40:53.000 And he was talking about, you know, essentially he was subsistence hunting in certain stages.

00:41:00.000 Yeah.

00:41:01.000 And, you know, he ate nothing but moose.

00:41:03.000 Yeah.

00:41:04.000 Like he shot a moose and ate nothing but that moose for months.

00:41:07.000 And picking wolverine meat off the skulls and stuff.

00:41:10.000 Yeah, like, whoa.

00:41:11.000 Yeah. 0.98

00:41:12.000 You know, so fucking modern day human who's alive right now talking about only surviving on the leanest of lean meat. 0.99

00:41:21.000 Yep. 0.99

00:41:22.000 That guy had to be skinny as fuck when that was all over. 0.99

00:41:24.000 Yeah, and I wouldn't mess with that guy. 1.00

00:41:26.000 He's tough as shit, too, you know? 0.99

00:41:28.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:41:28.000 He lived a life that seems like he had parts of his life that seemed like he was 100 years. 1.00

00:41:34.000 Yeah.

00:41:35.000 Could have occurred 100 years earlier.

00:41:37.000 The episode of the podcast is like, you're a good man, Buck.

00:41:40.000 Is that what it's called?

00:41:40.000 You're a cool dude, Buck.

00:41:41.000 You're a cool dude, Buck.

00:41:42.000 Which is what Buddy Mine says to him in the show, you know?

00:41:46.000 He's a cool dude.

00:41:47.000 It's a treat to get a chance to talk to a guy that you think probably never even fucking heard of a podcast and certainly comes from a completely different era.

00:41:56.000 Yeah.

00:41:57.000 Yeah.

00:41:57.000 The reason he had to live off the land is an interesting story where he was just getting into the guiding world, so guiding moose hunters.

00:42:07.000 And they were wanting to find some ways to be able to hunt some very remote areas, and they hit on us the idea that they would just bring horses in.

00:42:13.000 Because if you don't have landing strips and stuff, it's just really hard to operate out of these areas.

00:42:17.000 So they thought, well, if we can get horses in there, we'll have them in there, we'll hunt for the season, then we'll ride the horses out.

00:42:24.000 But getting the horses in there was so difficult and took far longer and the route they wanted to use was impassable.

00:42:31.000 By the time they got the horses in there, they realized that they're never going to get these horses back out of here.

00:42:36.000 And they realized that someone needs to stay over winter to take care of the horses.

00:42:40.000 And he just volunteered to do it.

00:42:43.000 So he started spending...

00:42:44.000 They would go in and hunt in September.

00:42:47.000 And then he would just start hanging out and just stay there to agree to care for the horses and Until spring.

00:42:56.000 So that's how he found himself living out by himself.

00:42:59.000 And they would bring some food in, but it would be never enough.

00:43:01.000 And he would be eating, you know, wolverine, beaver, moose, whatever he could come up with.

00:43:07.000 But he was just open to it and didn't care, you know, and is really comfortable with solitude.

00:43:17.000 When I spend time with him, he's very gracious.

00:43:20.000 But when you spend time with him, you see him Just engage in conversation.

00:43:26.000 You see a sort of weariness kick in.

00:43:31.000 Where you're talking to someone who's very comfortable going months without human interaction.

00:43:38.000 Right, so him talking to people is like, okay, that's enough. 0.97

00:43:41.000 Let me get the fuck out of here. 0.99

00:43:42.000 And all of a sudden you realize, like, when I've stayed at his place, his cabin, he's got a remote cabin still. 0.98

00:43:47.000 When I stayed out there, he kind of, like, will sort of drift off and vanish for good spells of time, you know?

00:43:52.000 Sure.

00:43:53.000 Even when he's, like, entertaining, you know?

00:43:55.000 And he sells bowls, like wooden bowls for a living?

00:43:58.000 Well, it's one of the things that he does.

00:44:01.000 Do you have one of those bowls?

00:44:02.000 I have one in my home, yeah.

00:44:04.000 I need to get one of those bowls. 0.99

00:44:05.000 It's a birch, yeah, it's like a, you know, it's a...

00:44:07.000 Like a salad bowl?

00:44:08.000 Sort of like a growth on the side of a birch tree that you cut off with a chainsaw and hollow out.

00:44:13.000 Yeah, they call them birch, you know, birch bark or burl bowls.

00:44:16.000 Yeah.

00:44:17.000 Yeah.

00:44:17.000 I have a beautiful one.

00:44:19.000 And he sells them.

00:44:20.000 They go into tourist shops.

00:44:21.000 I think it's a shame.

00:44:23.000 That they go into tourist shops?

00:44:24.000 Yeah.

00:44:25.000 I think it should all be direct-to-consumer from him.

00:44:28.000 Why don't you hook it up?

00:44:29.000 Get some of them 0.0 people on the case.

00:44:32.000 Get some of your meat-eater folks.

00:44:34.000 Yeah.

00:44:34.000 He had a great many that he lost in a fire, too.

00:44:37.000 Yeah.

00:44:38.000 That was a sad story.

00:44:39.000 But besides, yeah, so he still guides and...

00:44:42.000 Does that and takes those burls and makes bowls out of them.

00:44:47.000 Just talking to a guy like that and listening to you talk to a guy like that is so fascinating because he lives a life that I can barely comprehend.

00:44:54.000 Just everything about it.

00:44:57.000 Just to think that...

00:44:59.000 Well, what he does is almost impossible to comprehend.

00:45:02.000 Now think about Lewis and Clark making their way across the country and not really knowing what was out there.

00:45:08.000 Yeah.

00:45:09.000 Really not knowing.

00:45:10.000 Like, guessing, having some, you know, people gave some reports.

00:45:14.000 This is what we saw here.

00:45:15.000 This is what we saw there.

00:45:16.000 They didn't even have a good account of all the different animals.

00:45:19.000 No.

00:45:19.000 They had wanderlust.

00:45:21.000 And that's the thing.

00:45:22.000 We were talking about this point the other days.

00:45:23.000 We were talking about Now you'll hear people say, oh, he's a real mountain man.

00:45:28.000 And oftentimes, when people hear that, they imagine this old hermit who's living in his cabin, him being a mountain man.

00:45:37.000 But if you think about what the mountain men were, they were, for the time, the most well-traveled people.

00:45:45.000 And the least xenophobic people.

00:45:48.000 Right.

00:45:49.000 The equivalent today, to be a mountain man today, the equivalent would be, I think you'd have to go to Brazil and ascend the Amazon and follow tributary after tributary.

00:46:05.000 And get into like the borderlands around Venezuela and then go in and despite the language barrier, you'd have to go in and travel amongst and live amongst people who,

00:46:22.000 tribes who had not had a lot of outside contact but had a familiarity.

00:46:30.000 Had a familiarity with outside peoples.

00:46:32.000 And you'd live their foods.

00:46:35.000 You'd eat their foods and live with them and take their ways that they dress themselves and adopt it as your own.

00:46:42.000 The kind of guy that would do that is not the kind of guy we're talking about nowadays when we talk about he's a real mountain man.

00:46:50.000 Right.

00:46:50.000 We're talking about reality show people.

00:46:52.000 That's what people talk about now.

00:46:54.000 But these people were insatiably curious explorers They're the people that do go to really crazy war zones or decide to go backpack up in the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan just to see what happens.

00:47:13.000 Yeah, very different kinds of people.

00:47:15.000 Your episodes that you did, where was that with the most recent series where you're bow fishing with these people?

00:47:26.000 Yeah, in Guyana.

00:47:28.000 Yeah, that's got to be a trip.

00:47:32.000 How long were you down there for?

00:47:34.000 Oh, you know, long weeks.

00:47:36.000 A couple weeks.

00:47:37.000 Yeah.

00:47:37.000 But there's a lot of travel.

00:47:39.000 There's a lot of stuff that needs to happen to get out on the river.

00:47:41.000 When you're around these people and they're all walking around barefoot and they're making cassava, which we talked about the other day that could easily kill you if you do it wrong.

00:47:51.000 The water has all the cyanide in it.

00:47:53.000 You're about as close as you can get to that kind of environment, right?

00:47:59.000 Yeah.

00:48:00.000 In a situation like that, You're with people who are very familiar with Western culture.

00:48:05.000 Very familiar with the modern world.

00:48:07.000 A great awareness of it.

00:48:08.000 But when rubber meets the road of daily existence, they're still really connected to...

00:48:15.000 Life patterns and skill sets that their grandparents used, and still fishing in very similar ways, right?

00:48:26.000 So where you might have had when you were a boy, even if someone now is in their 30s, when they were a boy, they probably used a 12-pound handmade wooden paddle, and maybe now they have a different paddle, or maybe somehow they've come into A plastic paddle,

00:48:43.000 say, and they use that for their boat. 0.68

00:48:46.000 Or they still have a dugout canoe, but they also have an aluminum boat.

00:48:50.000 So there's major differences.

00:48:53.000 But just the general sort of approach and the fact that you're deriving all of your protein from the river and that you hunt and fish 250-300 days a year, In the places where your ancestors have always done it,

00:49:09.000 you're still getting this really beautiful glimpse at how people lived, even though they've had enormous changes in their own lifetime and are very much modern.

00:49:20.000 Very modern, but you can still glimpse it more.

00:49:23.000 I don't think you really get that as much here.

00:49:30.000 Hunting is...

00:49:32.000 Ancestral, right?

00:49:33.000 There's this kind of continuation that goes on.

00:49:35.000 But when Europeans came here, when Europeans came to the New World, they weren't coming in as hunters, right?

00:49:46.000 Even if you go look at Daniel Boone's family.

00:49:48.000 Daniel Boone's family came from England.

00:49:51.000 They didn't come here as hunters.

00:49:53.000 Because the peasantry, you couldn't hunt there. 0.99

00:49:56.000 They came here and learned hunting.

00:49:58.000 So hunting in America, for Euro-Americans, hunting in America is like an invention. 1.00

00:50:04.000 It's a thing that people kind of got, learned, and took from the Indians. 1.00

00:50:09.000 So it doesn't have that deep, deep thread that you'd find with indigenous communities where there's this continuation that's going on.

00:50:21.000 For forever unbroken, but on this continent unbroken for whatever, 15, 16, whatever the fashionable number is, thousands of years, right?

00:50:29.000 And so it's like our understanding is just different because our, like my ancestors came here and like got into it.

00:50:37.000 It wasn't a cultural continuation for them.

00:50:40.000 And you look at like for food and wild game, an interesting thing is my My use and understanding of wild game is...

00:50:52.000 Really influenced by contemporary food, right?

00:50:56.000 Like restaurant food, things that chefs do.

00:50:59.000 How do you take wild game and do these cool, exciting, modern, innovative kinds of things with wild game and cook it?

00:51:06.000 You go talk to even a dude like Buck or particularly people in South America who've hunted for more of a subsistence, literally subsistence purposes, their whole attitude is different about it.

00:51:19.000 People in South America will eat Like the chimane or the mikushi. 0.71

00:51:28.000 It's like they'll eat the same thing every day for lunch.

00:51:32.000 Every day.

00:51:34.000 Boiled fish with a dried pepper on it, and then a grain made from cassava.

00:51:41.000 Boiled as well.

00:51:42.000 I shouldn't say a grain, but like a dish made from cassava.

00:51:44.000 Why are they boiling it?

00:51:45.000 Why don't they just grill it?

00:51:47.000 Well, they sometimes do, but for lunch, it's like you'd take leftover.

00:51:51.000 You'd probably smoke what they would call barbecue fish, where you make a big rack.

00:51:55.000 You have a fire and make a big rack high above it.

00:51:57.000 It kicks off a bunch of smoke.

00:51:58.000 You split fish, salt them, and lay them on that rack and smoke them, dry them out.

00:52:03.000 And then you take that fish and break it apart and pour river water over cassava and then put fish in there with river water and kind of stir it up.

00:52:16.000 Or you just take fish and throw it in a pot and boil it and put that on there.

00:52:19.000 But to eat that same thing every day.

00:52:21.000 And then you come and talk about...

00:52:23.000 There's no recipe.

00:52:25.000 There's no written preparation.

00:52:27.000 And then you come and talk about wild game cooking, as I understand it, where you make a book and it's got a hundred different recipes in it and all these ways to approach stuff.

00:52:35.000 It's very particular to us.

00:52:39.000 Other people aren't really perceiving it that way.

00:52:43.000 They don't use wild game in recipes.

00:52:45.000 There's like, here's how you cook this.

00:52:48.000 And we don't really deviate from cooking it this way.

00:52:51.000 Where it's like fish on a rack over the fire or fish in a pot of water.

00:52:55.000 And very limited diet.

00:52:58.000 Does it weird you out when you're around people like that?

00:53:01.000 Because you have options, right?

00:53:03.000 You can eat any way you like.

00:53:06.000 You can go to a restaurant, you get a burger from fast food, you choose to go hunting.

00:53:10.000 With these people, it's literally how they survive.

00:53:14.000 Yeah, there's no option for them.

00:53:15.000 There's no options, and they've been doing it that way forever.

00:53:18.000 Do you feel like a weird recreational sort of person around them?

00:53:23.000 Does it feel strange?

00:53:26.000 That's a great question, man.

00:53:30.000 No, there's definitely an envious part To live that deliberately.

00:53:41.000 I'm a little bit envious of it.

00:53:43.000 But really, the thing that I feel most is I feel more than separated.

00:53:49.000 I tend to feel more the areas in which I'd be aligned.

00:53:55.000 Where I appreciate the perspective and I appreciate the skill set.

00:54:00.000 But never feeling...

00:54:04.000 Yeah, never feeling like bashful or ashamed or something that this would be something that I would like choose to engage in and this is something they were engaged in.

00:54:13.000 And I think that one of the things that helps make it that way is how much they love to do it.

00:54:18.000 Right?

00:54:19.000 That when you go out, like the infectious excitement of heading out in the morning, the fact that they still feel it.

00:54:27.000 Like they're as giddy as anybody about going out and doing it.

00:54:31.000 Like very excited to go out and do it.

00:54:32.000 It is not like going out to get your like...

00:54:35.000 To check your mailbox.

00:54:38.000 My youngest daughter has become enamored with fishing.

00:54:41.000 And I love it.

00:54:42.000 Because I get to, whenever we go on trips, I take her fishing. 0.98

00:54:46.000 She fucking loves it, man. 0.98

00:54:48.000 And we were in Florida. 0.99

00:54:49.000 And we were going to get to go bass fishing.

00:54:51.000 I set it up.

00:54:52.000 Had a guy who was going to take us out.

00:54:53.000 I woke her up at 5 o'clock in the morning in the hotel.

00:54:56.000 I'm carrying her.

00:54:57.000 She's stiff as a board because she just woke up.

00:54:59.000 She's like...

00:55:00.000 I'm so excited!

00:55:02.000 She was so excited.

00:55:03.000 She wasn't like, Daddy, I'm tired.

00:55:05.000 Can we just go back to bed?

00:55:06.000 No, it was dark out.

00:55:07.000 Five in the morning, she's just going, I'm so excited!

00:55:10.000 Did she wind up having fun?

00:55:11.000 She caught a six-pound bass.

00:55:12.000 Oh, really?

00:55:13.000 Then she's hooked.

00:55:14.000 She caught quite a few bass.

00:55:16.000 It was a great lake in Florida.

00:55:18.000 In Florida, obviously, a lot of great bass fishing there.

00:55:21.000 But we caught a ton of largemouth bass.

00:55:23.000 And she caught a She was a fat boy. 0.91

00:55:24.000 It was like a six pounder. 0.93

00:55:26.000 She was freaking it.

00:55:27.000 It bit her finger.

00:55:28.000 She was showing everybody look it bit my finger. 0.77

00:55:30.000 She was so excited. 0.98

00:55:31.000 She fucking loves fishing but that feeling in the morning when I'm looking at her little face and like we're on the water like it's a genetic thing. 0.98

00:55:39.000 It seems like it's just in the DNA. Yeah. 0.99

00:55:42.000 The fishing is it's not like hey we're gonna go play soccer which she likes too but there's not that kind of excitement.

00:55:49.000 No there's a like Oh, this is going to be so fun!

00:55:52.000 It's triggering something that is deep inside human beings.

00:55:58.000 I see it, and I see it in varying degrees in different people.

00:56:06.000 Some kids seem to come out of the box with more of it.

00:56:09.000 Yeah.

00:56:10.000 I don't mean that as a euphemism.

00:56:12.000 No, my ten...

00:56:14.000 My 10-year-old daughter doesn't... 1.00

00:56:16.000 She's like, yeah, we can go fishing.

00:56:18.000 She's gone fishing and caught stuff.

00:56:19.000 It's okay.

00:56:20.000 It's okay.

00:56:21.000 When we had a daughter, my wife was adamant early on, as soon as she found out that it was going to be a daughter, that you will not exclude our daughter in this world that you're in.

00:56:35.000 I was like, of course not.

00:56:36.000 And I don't, but...

00:56:41.000 Having, in my mind, I don't feel like I've messed this up.

00:56:43.000 I feel like I've put the same emphasis, right?

00:56:46.000 I have three kids, but my older two, the little one's just a little bit too little.

00:56:51.000 You have to really know what's going on.

00:56:53.000 But the older two, I feel like I put the same emphasis on it.

00:56:56.000 And my daughter just isn't demonstrating the same enthusiasm that her older brother does.

00:57:03.000 And you try to suss out the nature-nurture question, because I feel like I'm doing the same inputs.

00:57:09.000 Right.

00:57:10.000 But I'm getting different results.

00:57:12.000 And it leads you to wonder, you know, it's a very small sample size.

00:57:18.000 But when I talk to other parents, like, you know, parents who are parenting right now young kids, I just keep encountering other dads who are having the same experience.

00:57:30.000 And it really leads you to wonder sort of, like, what sort of, like, cultural influences are going on there.

00:57:38.000 Yeah.

00:57:47.000 I don't know.

00:57:49.000 I don't know.

00:57:51.000 I don't know.

00:57:56.000 Yeah, man, I don't know how much culture plays a part.

00:57:59.000 I know.

00:57:59.000 I really think that it's...

00:58:00.000 And it's obviously, in my small sample group, an 8-year-old and a 10-year-old for the youngest kids, the 8-year-old fucking loves it. 0.99

00:58:08.000 They're both girls. 0.97

00:58:09.000 The 10-year-old, she's like, whatever.

00:58:12.000 If I try to wake her up, take her fishing, she'd be like, leave me alone. 0.51

00:58:15.000 I'm going back to sleep.

00:58:16.000 I'm sure there are parents out there who, you know...

00:58:21.000 I haven't met them yet.

00:58:22.000 Maybe they're out there where they have a boy and a girl and the girl's super fired up and the boy's not.

00:58:26.000 I guarantee it.

00:58:28.000 Jamie and I were just talking about this yesterday because I was watching this video of these...

00:58:32.000 I want to try to put this in a respectful way.

00:58:41.000 I'm sure you're aware of this.

00:58:43.000 There's people that are in the hunting world, the outdoor industry, that I think are in it because it's a good avenue to get attention if you're like a hot chick.

00:58:54.000 If you're a hot chick and you wear pink and you go out and shoot things, you take all these grip and grins with deer, you're going to get a lot of likes.

00:59:03.000 Yeah, because it's like, imagine the...

00:59:06.000 The male perspective on it is like, here's the woman who has everything.

00:59:10.000 Exactly.

00:59:11.000 And she likes to hunt.

00:59:12.000 Yeah, she's hot and she likes to hunt. 1.00

00:59:14.000 And there's quite a few of them.

00:59:17.000 And I was telling Jamie, it's a weird world.

00:59:21.000 Because part of me, I don't want to be a sexist.

00:59:24.000 I don't want to look at these girls. 0.68

00:59:25.000 I don't look at a guy who hunts...

00:59:29.000 And who wants to be a part of the outdoor industry and go, oh, this guy is just doing this because he thinks this is his avenue for fame and success.

00:59:36.000 I think, well, here's a guy who really likes to hunt and he realizes there's people like Steve Rinella and John Dudley out there and these famous hunters.

00:59:45.000 Man, I want to be a famous hunter.

00:59:46.000 How do I do it?

00:59:47.000 You know, how do I go? 0.98

00:59:48.000 Well, I'm going to just start taking Instagram pictures and say a lot of the same shit that they say and sort of, you know, put myself into the cultural norm. 0.98

00:59:56.000 I don't think like that with girls. 0.99

00:59:58.000 You're like, you just want to have men like you. 0.59

01:00:01.000 Not all of them.

01:00:02.000 A lot of them, I think, are super legit.

01:00:05.000 But there's unquestionably this added element in that world.

01:00:10.000 Let's be super generous and say it's only 10% of them.

01:00:13.000 But that 10%, I'm like, hmm. 0.74

01:00:17.000 I smell a rat.

01:00:18.000 I'm not unaware of what you're talking about.

01:00:20.000 I'm sure you're not.

01:00:21.000 No, I noticed it.

01:00:22.000 It's weird.

01:00:23.000 Yeah, I even had like a...

01:00:25.000 Yeah, I remember it was...

01:00:27.000 Yeah, it was kind of like a... 0.99

01:00:29.000 Yeah, like a sex pot kind of... 0.99

01:00:32.000 Yes. 0.99

01:00:33.000 Huntress scene, you know?

01:00:34.000 Oh, yeah. 1.00

01:00:34.000 Super made up, full war paint, fake eyelashes, hot as fuck, skin tight clothes, out there shooting shit, taking pictures. 1.00

01:00:44.000 Yeah, it's weird. 0.99

01:00:45.000 And then you go to their Instagram page, and it's like, there's pictures of that, and then there's a lot of pictures with their butt up in the air where they're doing some strange exercise.

01:00:53.000 Yeah.

01:00:53.000 Getting ready for bowl season.

01:00:54.000 Yeah, accentuating their butt. 0.94

01:00:56.000 Like, that's weird. 0.95

01:00:57.000 I don't do any of those exercises.

01:00:59.000 I would really like to...

01:00:59.000 I know.

01:01:00.000 I would really like my...

01:01:01.000 Because I'm going to continue leaning on my...

01:01:04.000 I'm going to continue leaning on my daughter.

01:01:07.000 Because I would really like her...

01:01:12.000 I'm going to keep leaning on her until I feel like she's at an age where she can legitimately say she doesn't want to go.

01:01:17.000 Right.

01:01:18.000 Because right now, if I asked her every day, hey, you want to go to school?

01:01:20.000 She'd be having a real delinquency problem.

01:01:23.000 So you're really like, you make kids do stuff.

01:01:28.000 I took her duck hunting a couple weekends ago.

01:01:30.000 It was a cold morning.

01:01:31.000 And we get out there, and before it's even legal light, she felt terrible.

01:01:37.000 She's laying there crying about how cold her feet are.

01:01:41.000 If my boy was doing that, I would have a very different attitude about it than when she's crying.

01:01:49.000 Her crying because she's cold made me feel awful.

01:01:55.000 With my boy, I'd be like, shh! 1.00

01:01:58.000 Suck it up. 1.00

01:01:59.000 But with her, I'm like, oh man. 1.00

01:02:01.000 Yeah.

01:02:01.000 She's all cold now.

01:02:03.000 Yeah.

01:02:04.000 And so you really...

01:02:06.000 There really is a difference.

01:02:08.000 Yeah, there's a difference there.

01:02:10.000 And it's not...

01:02:12.000 You know, of the people that buy hunting licenses in this country, 90% of the people that buy hunting, 90% are males.

01:02:19.000 Right.

01:02:19.000 Right?

01:02:20.000 So, one in ten license holders is a woman. 1.00

01:02:23.000 But then there's more women than men in the, you know, slightly more women than men in the country. 1.00

01:02:27.000 And there's a ton of ways of explaining it.

01:02:29.000 We talked about it earlier with Neanderthals, or maybe Neanderthals didn't have these, like, divided roles.

01:02:34.000 But in all the hunter-gatherer cultures, it's very normal.

01:02:39.000 To see a division of labor here and to have like that men were out hunting and women were not.

01:02:45.000 There's a bunch of explanations for that.

01:02:47.000 Like people were tied to being home to care for small children and couldn't afford that risk.

01:02:53.000 Do they vary?

01:02:55.000 Are there some women that go out with the hunting parties? 1.00

01:02:58.000 You know, the minute you say no, someone's going to point out to some variation.

01:03:05.000 In your experience, you've done several of these trips to these remote jungles.

01:03:11.000 Oh, yeah, but that's just such a small thing.

01:03:14.000 I mean, rather than looking at personal experience, just like from kind of exploring the literature and reading about...

01:03:19.000 You know, historic accounts and what people found and what people do.

01:03:23.000 It is very much the norm.

01:03:25.000 It is very much the norm that hunting was, you know, patrilineal descent activity.

01:03:31.000 And all these cultures you go to, like the cult of the hunter is like a male sort of cult.

01:03:37.000 But the factors that made it that way...

01:03:42.000 You have to assume it comes from some kind of practical factor, right?

01:03:46.000 The factors that made it that way aren't there anymore.

01:03:50.000 And like I said, it's a difficult thing to unpack.

01:03:52.000 If it winds up being that if I have two boys and one girl, if it winds up being that...

01:03:57.000 If both boys become avid hunters and fishermen, and somehow my daughter does not, I'll probably view it as some bit of a personal failure, though I'll never know what really was going on.

01:04:11.000 Like I said, it's hard to unload it.

01:04:13.000 I wish I could have 100 children, like 50 girls and 50 boys, and have a bigger sample size.

01:04:19.000 But I do wonder about it.

01:04:21.000 And what's funny, too, is there's no...

01:04:25.000 At our home, our kids eat tons of wild game.

01:04:29.000 At our home, to the point where they don't have any...

01:04:32.000 You could give them anything to eat.

01:04:36.000 They would eat it, and it would not register to them as unusual.

01:04:41.000 They've eaten everything.

01:04:43.000 Right?

01:04:44.000 They've even eaten breakfast sausage made out of fox and beaver meat.

01:04:48.000 Fox?

01:04:48.000 Yeah, they've eaten everything.

01:04:50.000 Wait a minute.

01:04:50.000 Yeah.

01:04:51.000 You eat fox?

01:04:52.000 I have.

01:04:53.000 I made a batch of breakfast sausage because I had an arctic fox one time and I made breakfast sausage out of it.

01:04:58.000 What was that like?

01:04:59.000 I just cut it in with beaver meat and a little bit of deer meat and a little bit of pork fat.

01:05:02.000 My kids ate it and everyone winked.

01:05:04.000 Did you try any of the fox on its own?

01:05:07.000 Nope, didn't try the fox on its own.

01:05:10.000 I've eaten a ton of things, but I didn't eat just a straight old...

01:05:13.000 What possessed you to stuff that fox into that sausage?

01:05:15.000 I heard that they were good, and I had an Arctic fox, and I wanted to get a thing made for my wife from it.

01:05:22.000 So I had a hat, an Arctic fox hat made for her, and I retained the meat, and then we just ate the meat and breakfast sausage.

01:05:29.000 And if I told them, if they were to ask what meat it is, and I would say, oh, it's this, this, and this, it wouldn't...

01:05:37.000 Freak them out.

01:05:38.000 It wouldn't even register as a thing that might seem unusual to some people.

01:05:44.000 Right.

01:05:45.000 So the squirrel, rabbit, all manner of stuff, right?

01:05:48.000 Just anything.

01:05:49.000 And so I know there's no element of...

01:05:52.000 There's no influence like that with them.

01:05:54.000 There's no influence of, oh, that's gross, or, oh, that's weird.

01:05:59.000 The other day we went out and we were hunting street pigeons, and they'll eat...

01:06:05.000 Pigeon meat.

01:06:05.000 Where were you doing this?

01:06:06.000 In Montana.

01:06:07.000 Oh, okay.

01:06:08.000 Yeah.

01:06:09.000 There's like a guy at a grain silo that was like infested with pigeons.

01:06:13.000 Folks don't know that, many people listening to this, that pigeons were actually brought over here as food, and when you get like fancy squab on the menu, that's what a pigeon is.

01:06:24.000 Yeah, a flightless pigeon.

01:06:25.000 Pigeon that hasn't flown yet.

01:06:27.000 That's what a squab is? 0.94

01:06:28.000 Mm-hmm.

01:06:28.000 So it's smaller and younger?

01:06:29.000 Yeah.

01:06:29.000 That's the idea?

01:06:30.000 Yeah, the meat's pinkish on squab.

01:06:33.000 If you want to get squab, we used to go out and catch squabs where... 1.00

01:06:36.000 We had like a little, almost like the equivalent of a little trap line where they would nest in various places around town.

01:06:45.000 And we would just know all the places to go check to get squabs. 1.00

01:06:50.000 And yeah, it's one that hasn't flown yet.

01:06:52.000 But people that commercially produce squab, you can just keep them from flying.

01:06:56.000 But if you want squab from the wild, you need to go out and just go and collect them. 1.00

01:07:01.000 And what's the difference between pigeon and squab in terms of the way it tastes?

01:07:04.000 Pigeon meat is tougher, grayer.

01:07:09.000 It has a more livery quality, and squab is very tender, pinkish.

01:07:16.000 It's not like quail, but it's leaning way more in the direction of quail.

01:07:24.000 Like if a pigeon and a quail had a baby, squab's more like that. 0.85

01:07:31.000 It's...

01:07:34.000 One of the biggest surprises I had, that was one of the biggest surprises that I've ever had in game, if we can count that as wild game, would be what a squab tasted like. 0.99

01:07:45.000 Because I had for a long time eaten street pigeons.

01:07:49.000 Because, you know, street pigeons, you know, they're around.

01:07:52.000 Even up in the Missouri breaks, you get street pigeons that nest up in the cliffs.

01:07:56.000 And, you know, there's many places you can hunt street pigeons and they become an agricultural pest.

01:08:01.000 And they're not regulated.

01:08:03.000 So there's no close season, no bag limit.

01:08:07.000 They're treated like... 0.96

01:08:08.000 They're regulated like rats.

01:08:11.000 If you could talk to wildlife managers and ask them if they could wave a magic wand and make street pigeons go away, most everybody would wave it because they're so costly.

01:08:19.000 They're costly to cities.

01:08:21.000 They're costly to agriculture.

01:08:22.000 So I'd always eaten pigeons.

01:08:24.000 But the minute of discovering what a squab was like, which is well known to people in fine dining, but I had never had it.

01:08:32.000 It was shocking.

01:08:34.000 I think?

01:08:56.000 It's not bad to put it in a marinade and you can grill it.

01:09:05.000 You want to take the little brass and you poke it a whole bunch, like poke it with a fork and tenderize a little bit and also make some avenues of approach for the marinade and grill them over a very hot flame.

01:09:19.000 But what's good is to use it similar to stuff with ptarmigan or whatever, to make pâtés and terrines.

01:09:25.000 Ptarmigan is something that you would cook that way as well?

01:09:27.000 Yeah.

01:09:27.000 I've only seen people do ptarmigan on that, what's that show called?

01:09:32.000 Life Below Zero.

01:09:33.000 Uh-huh. 0.98

01:09:34.000 There's a lady who lives, she's been on the show before, she lives like fucking, what does she live, like 200 miles above the Arctic Circle? 1.00

01:09:41.000 Something crazy like that? 0.98

01:09:44.000 And she hunts ptarmigan up there. 0.93

01:09:46.000 The best ptarmigan I've ever eaten, and this is in our new cookbook, too.

01:09:53.000 I mentioned using ptarmigan for it, but it's just a dish that's great for regular, like any kind of meat, particularly game birds.

01:10:00.000 If you had a hot pot, where you have the...

01:10:12.000 We're good to go.

01:10:30.000 Right.

01:10:43.000 And those, you know, people make a lot of pates with liver, right?

01:10:48.000 So those birds that have that quality, oftentimes they just find their way into pates.

01:10:52.000 So we also have recipes for that.

01:10:55.000 Like how to do pates from using all manner of meat.

01:10:58.000 Do you have any recipes in that book for brown bear?

01:11:01.000 No, but we have bear recipes.

01:11:03.000 Is there a difference?

01:11:05.000 You know, black bears are...

01:11:09.000 Among people who know blackberries are widely accepted as being good to eat.

01:11:16.000 If you go into, if you go to, earlier I mentioned Daniel Boone.

01:11:20.000 So if you go into that, like the frontier era of American history, right, which preceded, just these little lingo terms, the frontier era of American history preceded the mountain man era of American history, like the eastern settlements, right?

01:11:33.000 If you read about Daniel Boone's area, Early 1700s, up into the Revolutionary War, bear meat was the most popular meat on the frontier.

01:11:47.000 Black bears.

01:11:48.000 The most popular as in preferred?

01:11:50.000 Yeah.

01:11:51.000 Preferred over venison.

01:11:52.000 Really?

01:11:53.000 Yeah.

01:11:53.000 People hunted deer to sell deer hides, and they would eat the deer meat.

01:11:56.000 People hunted bears because that's what they liked to eat.

01:11:59.000 It's just more beef-like, you know?

01:12:01.000 Right.

01:12:02.000 When cooked, right?

01:12:04.000 People loved bear meat.

01:12:07.000 Brown bears, grizzly bears just don't enjoy the same reputation.

01:12:13.000 Different diets.

01:12:14.000 The thing you run in with brown... 1.00

01:12:15.000 When we use the term brown...

01:12:18.000 Brown bear is kind of almost like a...

01:12:22.000 It's used amongst hunters a lot, but it's all one species.

01:12:26.000 So whether you've got a grizzly bear in Wyoming or a brown bear on Kodiak, taxonomically it's regarded as a single species.

01:12:34.000 A brown bear is a grizzly...

01:12:39.000 You'll get all kinds of people writing you to say about various points of this, but debating various aspects of this.

01:12:45.000 A brown bear is a grizzly with access to marine resources, where marine resources make up a major component of its diet.

01:12:55.000 And then the question you bring up is then if you go to the North Slope, so if you go to the Arctic Coast and you saw a grizzly there, you'd be like, well, he has access to marine resources.

01:13:04.000 He can eat a beached whale, whatever, but he's a grizzly.

01:13:08.000 So, like, brown bears kind of extend, right, from, you know, northern BC up around and hook around into the Bering Sea, but at some point they're just not brown bears anymore, and they're huge.

01:13:21.000 They tend to be big.

01:13:24.000 And oftentimes, because of the name, they tend to have a darker coloration.

01:13:28.000 They have a horrible reputation as food.

01:13:30.000 You'll always find people who will point it out, right?

01:13:33.000 Or nowadays, because people are so aware, like in the social media world, nowadays you'll have people who will kill a brown bear, and here you are, you've got 400 or 500 pounds of meat, and they'll talk about how they're going to eat it, but like, dude, you're in for a pound a day.

01:13:49.000 Ha! 0.89

01:13:50.000 This year.

01:13:51.000 Really?

01:13:51.000 Yeah.

01:13:52.000 Is that really what happened?

01:13:53.000 For real.

01:13:53.000 Is that really what happened?

01:13:55.000 Yeah, that's true, right?

01:13:56.000 And then there's no salvage requirement on it.

01:13:58.000 Oh.

01:13:59.000 There's no salvage requirement on it.

01:14:00.000 Don't you have to, in Alaska, don't you have to pack it out?

01:14:03.000 It depends.

01:14:04.000 There's some areas that have zero, some areas, you know, typically...

01:14:10.000 Typically, no, but there are areas that do have salvage requirements.

01:14:13.000 Where I have a cabin, there's a salvage requirement on bear meat.

01:14:16.000 In the spring, in areas where bears...

01:14:19.000 That's a black bear area.

01:14:20.000 Yeah, your cabin, there's no brown bears.

01:14:23.000 There, it's island by island.

01:14:25.000 So some islands have brown bears.

01:14:26.000 So you go to the ABC Islands, you go to Admiralty Island, and Admiralty Island is all brown bears.

01:14:33.000 So it winds up being that if the island is good brown bear habitat, it will only have brown bears.

01:14:40.000 Because on the islands, where it's smaller, They kill all the black bears.

01:14:45.000 They're there and black bears aren't there.

01:14:47.000 If the island is not brown bear habitat and can't support brown bears, it'll become a black bear island.

01:14:54.000 Prince of Wales is a black bear island.

01:14:55.000 Admiralty is a brown bear island.

01:14:58.000 It kind of depends on how much...

01:14:59.000 Seems to maybe depend on how much open country or alpine or...

01:15:03.000 If it's densely, densely forested, it's less suitable and becomes a black bear territory.

01:15:11.000 But...

01:15:12.000 Black bears in the spring have a salvage requirement because if you're talking about coastal bears, coastal bears are better to eat in the spring when they're not eating tons of rotten salmon.

01:15:21.000 In the fall, there wouldn't be a salvage requirement because when they're eating dead salmon...

01:15:28.000 Their flesh can become not good.

01:15:30.000 I remember you telling me a story about using a guy's smoker.

01:15:33.000 And you told the guy, man, you need to clean that smoker out.

01:15:36.000 It smells like fish.

01:15:37.000 He's like, I've never cooked a fish in there.

01:15:39.000 It's because you were smoking a bear in it.

01:15:41.000 Yep, and that was an early June black bear who was not getting salmon, but that flavor stores up in their fat.

01:15:49.000 I've watched even wolves eating salmon that were so rotten that they're like lapping it up.

01:15:57.000 Where it just turns into a gray mush.

01:16:00.000 And the bears, and people's idea of a bear is like eating a brand new fresh fish, which they love to do, and they seem to prefer it.

01:16:07.000 Like when there's tons of fresh fish and they're just getting fresh fish, they'll just eat eggs, right?

01:16:11.000 But as the fish run dies down, they just start eating rotten fish.

01:16:17.000 I can't remember how we got talking about the quality of food.

01:16:19.000 Oh.

01:16:20.000 Brown bears.

01:16:21.000 So even like Buck Bowden.

01:16:22.000 Buck Bowden.

01:16:24.000 Like I said, he's picked the head meat off a wolverine skull to eat it.

01:16:28.000 Buck Bowden has said he's struggled his entire life and just hasn't found a way to make brown bears that good.

01:16:36.000 There are exceptions.

01:16:38.000 People run into good tasting ones.

01:16:40.000 I was talking about grizzlies up on the North Slope have a very good reputation.

01:16:44.000 Any black bear in the Rockies, any black bear is good.

01:16:51.000 I've heard stories, like I had a buddy that killed one over a dead cow one time.

01:16:55.000 He killed one that was scavenging a rotten cow, and he had a hard time with the meat.

01:17:00.000 But generally, bears that aren't eating marine resources are phenomenally good.

01:17:09.000 I talked to my friend Eric Weinstein yesterday.

01:17:11.000 He's a mathematician.

01:17:13.000 One of the smartest guys I know.

01:17:14.000 And he has been fascinated by my obsession with hunting.

01:17:19.000 And so he started watching a bunch of hunting things online.

01:17:22.000 And he said he was very put off.

01:17:23.000 I saw people killing bears with spears.

01:17:27.000 And celebrating.

01:17:29.000 And the way they were celebrating about stuff.

01:17:30.000 He's like, he found the whole thing.

01:17:33.000 And I saw his point.

01:17:35.000 And we had this discussion about it where...

01:17:40.000 You know, acknowledging the need to control the population and that this is all, that they're allocated a certain amount of tags by wildlife biologists and this keeps the moose population healthy and the deer population, all these different things.

01:17:54.000 And even that people eat them.

01:17:56.000 All those things made sense to him.

01:17:57.000 But the celebration and all the hooting and hollering and stuff, it's like there was just not enough of a reverence for the dead and it really, really disturbed him.

01:18:07.000 Yeah.

01:18:10.000 It's a great subject and it's hard to...

01:18:12.000 It's hard to approach because you find so many contradictions in weird parts of it.

01:18:20.000 By that I mean this.

01:18:22.000 I was having a conversation the other night with a gentleman over dinner and we were talking about...

01:18:26.000 He was explaining to me what is the role of a rancher and what is the role of a farmer.

01:18:32.000 Here's a person who's bringing animals into life.

01:18:35.000 He's propagating breeding animals with the sole intention...

01:18:40.000 That they will all die, and he will make his living off of their death.

01:18:46.000 But that person remains a sort of cultural icon.

01:18:53.000 They enjoy a celebration.

01:18:56.000 When you're trying to sell a pickup truck, if you can tie it to a rancher, it makes that pickup truck seem more legitimate.

01:19:05.000 That's a celebrated character.

01:19:06.000 People are like, oh, he's an old cowboy.

01:19:08.000 And we like that.

01:19:11.000 I'm definitely not knocking them.

01:19:12.000 Let me get where I'm going with this.

01:19:14.000 But that person is based off of rearing animals in order that they may die, and he profits from their death and remains celebrated.

01:19:29.000 And then you get into the idea of what, when it comes to American wildlife, Where we have a population of wildlife, in many respects, we have it and enjoy the management that we do and the abundance that we do.

01:19:43.000 In many ways, that abundance is supported, bolstered, financed by hunters.

01:19:51.000 But hunters tend to not enjoy that same cultural support because of the death.

01:20:01.000 Well, it's also because of media depictions.

01:20:03.000 Sure.

01:20:04.000 I think that's the big part of it.

01:20:05.000 More even so than the death.

01:20:07.000 If all of our depictions about hunting were tied into this sort of rational discourse and they showed all the images from your show of animals being shot and carefully butchered in the field and then prepared and cooked and enjoyed,

01:20:23.000 I think people would have a way different perception.

01:20:26.000 But we have Elmer Fudd Yeah.

01:20:49.000 Very few kids have stuffed cows that they're pets or that they're toys.

01:20:55.000 They have teddy bears and maybe Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

01:20:58.000 You don't want to shoot Rudolph.

01:20:59.000 No, it seems that it gets much worse and more contentious the less the population.

01:21:07.000 If the American population is looking at something that they recognize as game, they feel different.

01:21:13.000 Things that they don't recognize as game, that they don't readily recognize as game, To see that death is more abhorrent to them, even if it is being treated as game.

01:21:24.000 You don't see social media explosions come up around someone with a turkey.

01:21:30.000 You don't see a lot of social media explosions come up with someone around a whitetail deer.

01:21:35.000 People look at that, they see this animal that they perceive to be very abundant.

01:21:39.000 In the case of whitetails and turkeys, they're correct. 1.00

01:21:41.000 Very abundant.

01:21:42.000 They're familiar with them.

01:21:44.000 They're familiar with the idea of these things being hunted.

01:21:47.000 And it feels different.

01:21:49.000 Now, if there's things where there's a perceived scarcity, and they don't immediately recognize it as a food item, it's hard for them.

01:22:02.000 Extremely, and this is way outside of my personal area of expertise, like what goes on in Africa, but for people to see animals in Africa that have been hunted and they recognize them only from like Film depictions, cartoon depictions,

01:22:17.000 mobiles over their child's crib, like a hippopotamus.

01:22:22.000 You can't look at that and it's hard to see that as the harvest of game.

01:22:26.000 It becomes something very different.

01:22:29.000 We've watched it happen with bears.

01:22:35.000 Also, a thing that will happen is if you initiate the hunting of something, That wasn't hunted before.

01:22:42.000 That's very difficult for people.

01:22:45.000 So you take a state where, like New Jersey or Florida, where they for a long time, you know, historically they would have a bear season.

01:22:52.000 They would lose the bear season.

01:22:54.000 The bear season would go away because of a resource scarcity.

01:22:57.000 Then later they would recover the resource and want to reinitiate the hunt.

01:23:03.000 People have a very difficult time with that.

01:23:05.000 Being like, if it wasn't hunted before, how can it be hunted now?

01:23:10.000 And that trips people up really bad.

01:23:13.000 People are hard to get on board with it.

01:23:15.000 I don't know if you watch what's going on with grizzly bears around...

01:23:18.000 What has been unfortunately named the greater Yellowstone ecosystem where you sort of have this cultural custody battle around who owns this Indiana-sized hunk of land surrounding Yellowstone.

01:23:27.000 Because of naming, people sort of think of it as Yellowstone when it certainly is not.

01:23:34.000 It's a large area surrounding it.

01:23:36.000 But there, we had a period where we stopped grizzly hunting because the animals were being slaughtered.

01:23:43.000 Over harvested, habitat destruction, and then you go through an enormous amount of work to recover the species.

01:23:49.000 And people are extremely resistant to the idea that you would start hunting now, that you would now start hunting something you weren't hunting a few days ago.

01:23:57.000 Right.

01:23:58.000 But it's also what you were saying earlier that's not recognized as a game species because it's not thought of something you eat.

01:24:04.000 Like mountain lions.

01:24:05.000 Even if mountain lions are a nuisance.

01:24:07.000 There was a woman that had a depredation permit because mountain lions had killed 10 alpacas and a goat in her farm in Malibu.

01:24:17.000 And she decided not to act on the permit because there were so many different people that were threatening her.

01:24:25.000 There were so many wildlife activists that were threatening her and just general people online, death threats, because she was going to hire someone to shoot this mountain lion that had been, I mean, it just went on a thrill kill and got into one of her pens and just went ham.

01:24:41.000 But people, they think of that thing as somehow or another better than her alpacas.

01:24:47.000 Which is very weird.

01:24:48.000 No, people just recently protested the killing of a tiger in India that had killed 13 people.

01:24:54.000 I saw that. 1.00

01:24:54.000 I put that online and people in the comments were like, fuck those people. 1.00

01:24:59.000 Like, okay. 1.00

01:25:00.000 You're out of your mind.

01:25:01.000 What if that was your sister?

01:25:03.000 What if it was your daughter?

01:25:05.000 What if it was your mom?

01:25:06.000 What if it was your brother?

01:25:07.000 Watch your brother getting dragged away by a giant monster.

01:25:11.000 You know, just because it's called a tiger?

01:25:14.000 You're cool with that? 1.00

01:25:15.000 Like, fuck your brother? 1.00

01:25:16.000 Is that what you're saying? 1.00

01:25:18.000 This was an interesting year.

01:25:21.000 I don't mean that...

01:25:22.000 Well, let me finish my thought.

01:25:24.000 I don't want to sound callous when I call it interesting, but Washington State had its first mountain lion...

01:25:32.000 Like where a mountain lion killed a human for the first time in I think it was 94 years.

01:25:35.000 And Oregon as well.

01:25:36.000 And then Oregon had its first in state history.

01:25:37.000 Yeah.

01:25:38.000 And with the one in Washington, it killed a person.

01:25:42.000 They tracked the lion down and killed the lion.

01:25:46.000 And the state fish and game department got, you know, predictably like a bunch of blowback for having killed it.

01:25:52.000 And I was talking to someone who was involved with that.

01:25:54.000 And I was saying, you know, I think that the blowback would have been a lot worse had you not...

01:25:58.000 Done it.

01:25:59.000 Yeah.

01:25:59.000 But you just don't hear from those people.

01:26:02.000 I don't think there would be blowback, honestly. 0.98

01:26:05.000 If they didn't kill the lion, if the lion is just out there roaming around, I think people would just ignore it because the news cycle is so fucking quick. 0.96

01:26:12.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:26:13.000 I think they would lose. 1.00

01:26:14.000 It would get lost and Trump would say something stupid about North Korea or whatever and people would forget. 0.99

01:26:18.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:26:20.000 I continue to...

01:26:24.000 You know, I continue to hunt black bears.

01:26:26.000 I eat black bears.

01:26:27.000 It's like, you know, in the case of mountain lions, you have rapidly expanding mountain lion populations.

01:26:32.000 There's a lot of mountain lions.

01:26:33.000 Mountain lions are recolonizing new territories all the time.

01:26:36.000 They're managed, you know, most states manage them very tightly with mortality quotas, female mortality quotas, open season, closed season, permit draws, right?

01:26:48.000 They're managed as a game animal. 0.96

01:26:51.000 They're hunted and there's some allowable use of the renewable resource.

01:26:59.000 And at the same time that that's going on, we're enjoying expanding populations of mountain lions.

01:27:03.000 I personally...

01:27:06.000 Welcome the return of mountain lions to any suitable habitat where there's enough space for them to live without causing undue friction by them butting up against human interests.

01:27:19.000 And I encourage people who are in areas that are being recolonized by mountain lions to practice some level of tolerance and use best-case practices around to avoid conflict, right?

01:27:33.000 Same thing with bears.

01:27:34.000 I welcome the return of bears.

01:27:36.000 I think there's a lot of areas in this country, not a lot, but there's a handful of areas in this country that could have sustainable populations of grizzly bears, that's suitable habitat that is not being used by grizzly bears and could and should be used by grizzly bears.

01:27:49.000 At the same time, I like to see, when it's appropriate, I like to see state-managed wildlife practices and then allowable harvests of animals.

01:28:00.000 There's a lot of people listening to this that don't even understand that mountain lions are edible.

01:28:05.000 In fact, you say delicious.

01:28:07.000 I like them.

01:28:08.000 I was eating mountain lions long before I ever hunted a mountain lion.

01:28:11.000 I've hunted one mountain lion in my life.

01:28:13.000 And I've eaten a bunch more than that.

01:28:16.000 So I had never had the question about it.

01:28:19.000 You know, I'd never had the question about whether it was good or not.

01:28:21.000 But the vast majority of the people listening to this right now are probably like, what?

01:28:25.000 Yeah.

01:28:25.000 Among houndsmen, like among people who deal lines, it's widely known that it's a very good meat.

01:28:31.000 But I was introduced to it that way.

01:28:33.000 There's a place, when I was living in Missoula, Montana, there's a place 20 miles east there called Rock Creek Lodge, and they're famous for having this big thing called the Testicle Festival in the fall, where, you know, after you castrate Steers, you know, people will fry up the nuts, right? 0.84

01:28:47.000 And so the testicle festival is this big.

01:28:49.000 It's kind of like turned into this big, or had turned into this kind of like biker festival. 0.96

01:28:53.000 But it was this big party, and it was centered around eating deep fried cow balls.

01:28:59.000 And we used to go down there all the time and go drinking.

01:29:01.000 And one time I was at that same place in the spring, and this guy had a pot of what looked like pulled pork, you know, with barbecue sauce.

01:29:11.000 And he had a bunch of buns out, and he was just giving it away. 0.73

01:29:13.000 And I was eating it.

01:29:15.000 And he was telling me how it was mountain lion meat. 0.99

01:29:18.000 And he was saying, you know, he's saying like, balls in the fall and pussy in the spring, you know, just to read mountain lion there. 0.99

01:29:24.000 And that was the first time I had mountain lion. 0.98

01:29:26.000 And then later I had a girlfriend who's from Wyoming.

01:29:28.000 And she one day is standing behind a guy in a, she's standing behind a guy in a hardware store who's buying a mountain lion tag.

01:29:35.000 And she asked him, what are you gonna do with all that meat?

01:29:39.000 And he didn't want it.

01:29:40.000 So she gave him her phone number. 0.99

01:29:42.000 And when he got his line, he gave us the whole damn thing. 0.97

01:29:46.000 And so we ate that whole mountain lion. 0.98

01:29:48.000 Then I came into other mountain lion meat and other ways.

01:29:51.000 And always enjoyed it to the point where I wasn't eating it because I had a moral obligation to eat what I killed.

01:29:58.000 I was going out of my way to get it.

01:30:01.000 Because I'd rather eat someone else's mountain lion than buy pork.

01:30:05.000 It's like pork.

01:30:06.000 It's that similar.

01:30:07.000 It's white meat, man.

01:30:08.000 Wow.

01:30:08.000 You can take the back straps with fat on it.

01:30:11.000 You can leave the fat on it and take that back strap.

01:30:15.000 You've got to cook it good because it's probably going to have trichinosis. 0.92

01:30:18.000 You've got to cook it to 160, just how pork used to be.

01:30:22.000 Cook it, sear it.

01:30:23.000 The fat's good.

01:30:24.000 The meat's good.

01:30:25.000 We cook it down.

01:30:26.000 Make all kinds of preparations with it cooked down.

01:30:29.000 My kids eat a bunch of mountain lion meat.

01:30:34.000 You know, well cooked.

01:30:35.000 Yeah, but that's one of those things that we're not accustomed to.

01:30:40.000 But we're fine with things we are accustomed to.

01:30:43.000 Yeah.

01:30:44.000 If you showed a mountain lion dead on social media and you're like, can't wait to eat this. 0.99

01:30:50.000 People would go fucking crazy. 0.99

01:30:52.000 You saw that recent controversy with that woman who shot a goat. 1.00

01:30:55.000 An invasive species on an island off of Scotland.

01:30:58.000 It's an animal they have to hunt.

01:31:00.000 They literally have to hunt them.

01:31:01.000 If you've never seen what a goat can do to an environment, they just destroy everything.

01:31:06.000 They eat everything they can.

01:31:07.000 They cause erosion.

01:31:09.000 They decimate all the local foliage.

01:31:13.000 But they weren't seeing that.

01:31:14.000 And I think that...

01:31:16.000 The people that were upset about that were really struggling to describe why it upset them.

01:31:21.000 Even a politician had pointed out that the person was wearing camouflage, because traditionally in Scotland you hunt with different clothes.

01:31:27.000 There was no secret that there's hunting going on out there.

01:31:30.000 No secret at all.

01:31:32.000 It was that it's an American... 0.89

01:31:37.000 We're good to go.

01:31:55.000 With his, you know, deerstalker outfit on, but there's something where people are like, why her and why here?

01:32:04.000 Yeah, and also her description of it as a fun hunt.

01:32:08.000 I mean, people had a lot of problems with it, but it's also, I think, because...

01:32:13.000 There wasn't anything else going on.

01:32:15.000 She caught a cycle.

01:32:19.000 She was headed down the river and a tributary opened up and she went right into Controversy Bank.

01:32:25.000 That's what I think happened.

01:32:26.000 And the people that were tweeting about it, I saw Glenn Greenwald tweet about it.

01:32:31.000 I'm like, you're a journalist.

01:32:33.000 You're an actual journalist, a respected journalist.

01:32:35.000 You should really do some research on this because the way you're calling it I don't know.

01:32:41.000 I mean, Glenn Greenwald is, I believe he's some sort of an animal rights activist.

01:32:44.000 I don't know if he's a vegan.

01:32:46.000 I don't know if he's a vegetarian.

01:32:48.000 But I know Ricky Gervais isn't.

01:32:49.000 He's not a vegetarian.

01:32:51.000 He eats meat.

01:32:51.000 No!

01:32:52.000 Really?

01:32:53.000 Yes!

01:32:54.000 That's the weird part, right?

01:32:55.000 Yeah, that's funny, man.

01:32:57.000 I didn't know that.

01:32:59.000 I had a conversation with him on a radio show about it.

01:33:01.000 He eats meat.

01:33:02.000 Yes!

01:33:03.000 We were talking about hunting.

01:33:05.000 And, you know, I brought it up because we were on the radio show together on the Opie and Anthony show.

01:33:09.000 And I said, I shot bears and I eat them.

01:33:12.000 You know, I eat everything I kill and I hunt for food.

01:33:16.000 And I prefer to get meat that way.

01:33:18.000 And we discussed the fact that he eats meat.

01:33:22.000 Huh.

01:33:23.000 That's really surprising me, man.

01:33:24.000 It's a weird one, right? 0.98

01:33:25.000 Because there's a virtue signaling aspect of shitting on hunters where you're always going to get some positive remarks about it. 0.97

01:33:36.000 It's difficult for me. 0.98

01:33:37.000 It's not difficult for me from someone who doesn't eat meat.

01:33:45.000 Right.

01:33:45.000 I don't have a problem with it.

01:33:48.000 I'm like, you know, my brother said it best.

01:33:51.000 I don't know.

01:33:51.000 He said, maybe they have a point.

01:33:54.000 But when it's coming from someone who does eat meat, why is it demonstrating?

01:33:57.000 They're trying to put them, to condemn hunters who are hunting like a regulated resource.

01:34:04.000 Yeah.

01:34:04.000 To condemn them.

01:34:06.000 You're sort of acting like, when you condemn, you're sort of acting like, oh, I care about these issues, and I want to be out here, and I want to be articulating a perspective, and I know what's going on.

01:34:17.000 So you're putting yourself out as a person who has opinions of value, just to let your opinion be known.

01:34:23.000 So if you're going to have that...

01:34:25.000 Where's the self-examination?

01:34:27.000 Exactly.

01:34:28.000 Where you are, if you're eating meat, you're contributing all kinds of animal death.

01:34:34.000 What is your understanding of those lives and those deaths?

01:34:39.000 How is that not part of your reckoning?

01:34:43.000 Let's say I am happy.

01:34:45.000 That I got a bear.

01:34:46.000 That I will eat with my family.

01:34:49.000 Let's say I am happy about it.

01:34:51.000 Is it better for you that you're kind of...

01:34:55.000 Is it better to be sad about it somehow?

01:34:56.000 Is it better to be regretful or just ignore the fact altogether?

01:35:00.000 Or why is it not okay that I'm happy about what I eat?

01:35:03.000 I know the story of it really well.

01:35:06.000 I understand the history of wildlife in this country.

01:35:10.000 I don't want to say better than anybody, but damn sure better than most.

01:35:14.000 I know where we've been.

01:35:16.000 I have a good sense of where we're going in terms of American wildlife, what the challenges are for American wildlife, right?

01:35:22.000 I'm involved in this stuff on a daily basis.

01:35:25.000 I can know all that and I can see my place in it, right?

01:35:29.000 I can see what my actions are and whether my actions are helpful or hurtful for something that I care a great deal about.

01:35:37.000 And if I can know that Well, and get a deer, a bear, whatever, and have it be food, and find that I'm really happy to be involved in that, that somehow is off-putting to people.

01:35:50.000 But it's okay to be that I'm blind to it.

01:35:53.000 I have this nagging sense of guilt about it that I haven't reckoned with.

01:35:57.000 I don't really know about it.

01:36:00.000 And that's an acceptable position for some people to have.

01:36:04.000 It's really hard for me with people that are We're good to go.

01:36:19.000 I've got to find a way to engage with it, though, and I need to get a better understanding of it because the debate isn't going away.

01:36:27.000 I can't keep brushing it off as so ridiculous that it doesn't warrant my time because clearly it does warrant my time to understand that perspective.

01:36:34.000 I just haven't had anybody really give it to me in a good way. 0.92

01:36:37.000 I have people say, oh, but they were raised to be eaten. 0.98

01:36:40.000 That's a foolish perspective. 0.99

01:36:42.000 That, to me, is way worse. 0.99

01:36:45.000 It's a life condemned.

01:36:46.000 Would you Google if Glenn Greenwald is a vegan?

01:36:50.000 I'd probably rather talk to someone like Ricky Gervais about it, because I assume that he's articulate about it.

01:36:56.000 He's articulate.

01:36:56.000 I don't think his position is nuanced.

01:36:59.000 I think there's some willful ignorance that's a part of people that eat meat but condemn hunting.

01:37:05.000 Willful in the fact that, like I said, they know that they're going to get a certain reaction out of people when they tweet about it on social media.

01:37:12.000 One thing, if you're talking about someone who's out there shooting things and not eating it, okay, I get it.

01:37:17.000 I'm with you.

01:37:18.000 If some guy's just shooting an elephant because he wants his tusks, I'm on your side.

01:37:22.000 I get it.

01:37:23.000 But if someone chooses to hunt an animal, fill in the blank, that might be a goat, might be weird to you, that they're eating this thing, but they're shooting this, it's an invasive species, it's actually very delicious, it's very edible,

01:37:39.000 it's prized for its meat by some communities.

01:37:41.000 You don't make any sense. 0.92

01:37:43.000 You're doing this because you know that other people are ignorant about it as well. 0.98

01:37:46.000 And either you're ignorant because you've never bothered to look into it, or you've bothered to look into it and you're ignoring the nuance. 0.98

01:37:52.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:37:53.000 In the case of the goat thing, there's this little added thing.

01:37:55.000 There's an added element that our government, on the federal level, is involved.

01:38:01.000 There's a lot of state wildlife management agencies that are involved in trying to do...

01:38:06.000 Wild goat eradication projects on islands.

01:38:10.000 Yes.

01:38:11.000 This is something that's ongoing all the time in Hawaii and many other places where we're like out helicopter gunning.

01:38:18.000 Yeah.

01:38:19.000 Helicopter gunning for invasive species.

01:38:22.000 Explain to people how those goats got there in the first place because this is also very weird.

01:38:27.000 A variety of ways but a lot of things were a lot of island species.

01:38:32.000 This is just one way it happens where Invasive on islands would be introduced by seafarers, whalers, who would want to establish food resources along transoceanic routes so that you could put something there and come back and get it later. 0.82

01:38:52.000 Early whalers used to come out of the American Northeast, like all those famous whaling villages in New England.

01:39:00.000 They would go down and stop in and gather up tortoises that they could flip over in the hold of a boat and the tortoise would stay alive for months on its back.

01:39:12.000 You'd have a fresh meat resource.

01:39:15.000 As people came to understand scurvy and realizing that fresh meat It gives you enough vitamin C to avoid scurvy that you can get from dried meat because, you know, the way the vitamin C behaves through the cooking and drying process.

01:39:31.000 But, like, fresh meat you can keep from having scurvy.

01:39:33.000 Meat became, like, even more important then.

01:39:35.000 But people would come in and you'd, like, cut some sheep loose, cut some goats loose on an island and know that they're going to breed and build up a big population and that can be, like, a place you stop in and get food.

01:39:46.000 Yeah.

01:39:47.000 And other things get introduced in other ways.

01:39:48.000 And of course, animals move.

01:39:50.000 So if you have one island that has close proximity to another island, they can- Swim across.

01:39:54.000 Yeah, bump over.

01:39:55.000 And then it destroys native vegetation.

01:39:58.000 They trample birds' nests.

01:40:00.000 And so you have many cases where introductions of- Non-natives, particularly non-native grazing animals, non-native predators, will wind up causing a lot of extinctions of endemic species on islands and creates all kinds of problems. 0.97

01:40:15.000 And that's exactly what we're talking about with this goat in that picture.

01:40:18.000 So this is an animal that must be killed.

01:40:21.000 If you want healthy wildlife on that island, the native wildlife and the native fauna, I don't buy that that was the motivation of that person.

01:40:42.000 What I care about is motivations of individuals.

01:40:44.000 I think you're right.

01:40:49.000 We're good to go.

01:41:02.000 To go out and kill lions, they're not comfortable with someone paying who wants to go do it.

01:41:08.000 I don't think they realize that state agencies are killing as many mountain lions in California as they are.

01:41:13.000 I don't think people understand that.

01:41:15.000 I think people do understand if something gets put on the ballot, you know, would you like to reintroduce mountain lion hunting?

01:41:21.000 People would go crazy.

01:41:23.000 Like, why would you do that?

01:41:24.000 Mountain lions are beautiful.

01:41:25.000 They're exciting.

01:41:26.000 I want to see them.

01:41:27.000 But these are people in Santa Monica, you know what I'm saying?

01:41:30.000 They're not people that are living an hour outside of Bakersfield, and they've got 16 mountain lions in their backyard in a year.

01:41:38.000 This is a different kind of world.

01:41:40.000 If they're in the Tachapi Mountains out there, you see mountain lions all the time.

01:41:45.000 They have a lot of mountain lions.

01:41:46.000 It's a real issue.

01:41:47.000 And there's a problem, too, that I view, and this is coming from...

01:41:53.000 There's a problem where I think a lot of people have a very hard time empathizing with people who might be negatively impacted by wildlife as well in the question of the lion issue.

01:42:07.000 Right.

01:42:07.000 Where it's kind of like this idea like, well, you better suck it up.

01:42:10.000 Yeah.

01:42:11.000 So if you're a rancher and you're running cattle in an area where you're losing a lot of cattle to wolves and grizzlies, people will look and be like, you better suck it up, buddy.

01:42:21.000 Right.

01:42:22.000 I can't really picture your problem, but your complaints are not legitimate.

01:42:27.000 If someone were to cut a Grizzly loose in Golden Gate State Park, I don't know.

01:42:35.000 I think that people would come to have a different perspective.

01:42:41.000 To put it mildly.

01:42:58.000 You know, they were delisted.

01:42:59.000 They were removed from Endangered Species Act protection temporarily because they had met all recovery goals.

01:43:07.000 So what's the recovered population look like?

01:43:10.000 They mapped out what it would look like, and we've exceeded that for many years now.

01:43:13.000 And they were delisted, but then Wyoming and Idaho moved to have a very limited hunt on them.

01:43:21.000 And then a federal judge blocked the delisting, and they went back into listing.

01:43:25.000 What was the federal judge's motivation?

01:43:29.000 Well, you want to hope that they didn't have one.

01:43:34.000 You want to think that they were just looking at the details of it, but I think there's a suspicion that that person went into that knowing damn sure what they were going to do.

01:43:47.000 But you don't really know.

01:43:50.000 A lot of these arguments, they come down to technicalities.

01:43:54.000 No one's arguing that the population's recovered.

01:43:57.000 Well, there's also the argument that the judge is probably trying to protect his own reputation because the amount of blowback that a judge would receive for allowing a hunt to go through is vastly different than blocking a hunt.

01:44:10.000 Yeah.

01:44:10.000 Blocking a hunt, you're not going to get that much blowback.

01:44:12.000 You'll get a few people that are upset, but it hadn't been an established resource.

01:44:15.000 It's not like you're taking something away from people. 0.97

01:44:17.000 But if he allowed it, boy, the wildlife people would go fucking bananas on this guy. 0.91

01:44:22.000 Yeah, they tend to... 0.98

01:44:23.000 I don't call them environmentalists.

01:44:26.000 People who sue to block the delisting of recovered species, they'll masquerade as...

01:44:35.000 You know, ecologically conscious environmentalists, but they're just people who it's untenable to them.

01:44:41.000 They can't, they're never going to accept the idea that you're going to have human exploitation of this resource, right?

01:44:47.000 They masquerade as they have an environmental motivation, but it's not.

01:44:51.000 It's like it's an animal rights motivation.

01:44:54.000 There's a very – they have a sensitive ear in a certain federal court in Missoula, and so you'll see a lot of these cases around wolves and grizzlies.

01:45:04.000 They'll get that – they'll want it done through that court because they know they're probably going to have a friendly take on it.

01:45:11.000 I think it was a real – watching that happen, and that's been happening recently, I think it was a real travesty because – There's a couple things that happen culturally in areas where you create a lot of tension with people,

01:45:27.000 where there's people that are living amongst these things and they're looking for some level of relief and they want to see it go to state management and they might want to see the state exercise some control over where certain populations of large predators are spreading into.

01:45:44.000 And when it winds up being that their voices are not heard, And they feel that people from far away are really heavily influencing decisions that affect them on a daily basis.

01:45:54.000 It winds up creating a lot of animosity toward the species, too.

01:45:58.000 Think about what happened with the spotted owl, right?

01:46:00.000 The spotted owl, no one perceives the spotted owl as the owl anymore.

01:46:05.000 The spotted owl has become a symbol of federal overreach.

01:46:09.000 And you'll find that wolves, for a while, they become a symbol of And people stop liking the animals much, and it becomes this contentious creature.

01:46:20.000 And I think that we're going to head that way if we keep stepping in on wildlife issues with the mentality that we've been approaching, the wolf and grizzly issue, and the northern Great Lakes.

01:46:36.000 I think you're dealing with local and then you're dealing with national, right?

01:46:40.000 So the local people are going to have an issue with it because they're going to be impacted by it.

01:46:44.000 It's going to be directly impacting their life.

01:46:46.000 Dogs are going to be killed.

01:46:49.000 They're going to...

01:46:50.000 Take domestic cattle and all sorts of different things.

01:46:53.000 You're going to have real issues with the people that like to go elk hunting.

01:46:56.000 The populations have diminished rapidly. 0.99

01:46:59.000 But the rest of the country doesn't give a shit. 0.99

01:47:02.000 People in San Francisco, they don't give a fuck about it. 0.99

01:47:04.000 People in Chicago aren't impacted by it. 0.98

01:47:08.000 Especially if they don't have anyone in their family that hunts or anyone that has a background in hunting and they don't have a background in it themselves.

01:47:15.000 They don't care.

01:47:16.000 No, people really don't.

01:47:17.000 I point it out all the time, but...

01:47:20.000 Um...

01:47:22.000 I care about the availability and abundance of deer, elk, moose, caribou.

01:47:31.000 I care about the resource.

01:47:33.000 There's a lot of people who rely on the resource, use the resource.

01:47:36.000 They're major economic drivers.

01:47:39.000 I'm definitely anything but.

01:47:41.000 I regard myself as a pro-wolf person.

01:47:43.000 I regard myself as a pro-grizzly person.

01:47:45.000 I cherish every interaction I have with those animals.

01:47:49.000 Do you think there's a problem calling them a resource?

01:47:52.000 I don't have a problem with calling them a resource, but people do have a problem with calling them a resource.

01:47:56.000 And yeah, I'm like pro.

01:47:59.000 In suitable habitat, I like to see them present.

01:48:01.000 I also like to see them managed in a way that allows for abundant wild game resources.

01:48:10.000 What's going on?

01:48:11.000 House passed the bill to drop legal protections for gray wolves.

01:48:14.000 That's passed today.

01:48:15.000 Whoa.

01:48:18.000 Interesting.

01:48:20.000 Well, roll down a little bit.

01:48:25.000 Republican-controlled House passed a bill on Friday to drop legal protections for gray wolves across the lower 48 states, reopening a lengthy battle over the predator species.

01:48:33.000 Long despised by farmers and ranchers, wolves were shot, trapped, poisoned out of existence in most of the U.S. in the mid-20th century.

01:48:40.000 By the mid-20th century, since securing protection in the 1970s, wolves have bounced back—well, that's not really exactly what happened—great lakes of Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin as well, and the northern Rockies in Pacific Northwest.

01:48:51.000 That's sort of, but they're not talking about the reintroduction.

01:48:54.000 The reintroduction is the big issue, right?

01:48:56.000 Well— Well, yeah, but the reintroduction was only in one area.

01:49:01.000 The Northern Great Lakes, that was not a reintroduction.

01:49:05.000 A sizable population.

01:49:07.000 Yeah, well, movements of wolves coming down from Canada and coming back.

01:49:10.000 And the Northern Continental Divide ecosystem, not a reintroduction.

01:49:16.000 The places where they have real issues.

01:49:18.000 Well, you had the famous case of the famous reintroduction in Yellowstone National Park.

01:49:22.000 And it's widely viewed now that if you wouldn't have done that, you would have had.

01:49:27.000 Had you not done that reintroduction, you would have had a natural flow anyway.

01:49:31.000 A natural flow from Canada.

01:49:33.000 You would have got it.

01:49:33.000 You would have eventually gotten there anyway.

01:49:37.000 Interesting.

01:49:38.000 But would they have gotten to the exact same levels?

01:49:40.000 No.

01:49:41.000 No.

01:49:41.000 At this particular point right now, I think that would be laughable to act as though they'd be there now.

01:49:47.000 But there's now a realization that without the reintroduction, you would have, through natural movement, have eventually gotten there.

01:49:56.000 Do you think that that supports the idea of the reintroduction?

01:50:02.000 Do you think the reintroduction was well thought out?

01:50:05.000 I'm not going to debate the merits of the reintroduction.

01:50:08.000 Like I said, my perspective on it is...

01:50:10.000 They should be in a place where it supports them.

01:50:13.000 Yeah, my perspective on it is I don't...

01:50:15.000 The idea of extinction and regional extirpation sickens me.

01:50:20.000 I do not believe in...

01:50:24.000 I do not believe that as a people, as a culture, we can justify or afford to remove species of wildlife.

01:50:35.000 From the landscape.

01:50:37.000 Native species of wildlife from the landscape.

01:50:40.000 Like I said, the idea sickens me.

01:50:42.000 I like to, you know, I like to have all native wildlife present on the landscape.

01:50:51.000 So I don't oppose it.

01:50:54.000 What I oppose is a thing that's happened now is getting Where we have populations that we agree, like, what will recovery look like?

01:51:05.000 And at what point, how will we manage all the different viewpoints that are coming in, all the different, like, interests of all these varied stakeholders, and at what point will we get in there and manipulate the situation that we're creating?

01:51:18.000 I just would move that in a different direction, where I think that recovered species...

01:51:24.000 Right?

01:51:25.000 In this case, we're talking about wolves and grizzlies.

01:51:27.000 I think that you should have that if you can do it in a sustainable way that doesn't have long-term deleterious impacts on the population, that they should be managed as a renewable resource.

01:51:37.000 See, this is where people are going to have issues that don't have anything.

01:51:40.000 Just even the term, manage them as a renewable resource. 1.00

01:51:45.000 You mean shoot them and kill them and use their fur? 1.00

01:51:47.000 Right. 1.00

01:51:49.000 Sure.

01:51:49.000 I think that if you put something on the Endangered Species Act, and it goes under federal protection, and then when it reaches recovery, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says, it's recovered, it's time to hand it back to state management.

01:52:04.000 If a state then decides that they're going to do some limited harvest, particularly, let's say, even if they're focusing on areas where there's very high prevalence of human-animal conflict, and the state decides to do that in some minor way, As a way to service the needs of certain segments of their population that want something to happen.

01:52:24.000 I don't think that then an activist judge or environmental groups or animal rights groups should come in and be like, well, never mind.

01:52:34.000 We're going to pretend that they're not recovered now because we want to prevent the state from doing something that we think is unsavory.

01:52:40.000 Well, the thought process behind the people that support blocking the hunt is that if you leave these animals alone, naturally they're going to find balance.

01:52:49.000 And that the wolves will kill the elk until there's not enough elk for them to sustain their populations and the numbers of their offspring will dwindle and they'll get to some sort of a sustainable level.

01:53:00.000 Yeah, but we live in a heavily manipulated kind of man-made environment now.

01:53:09.000 The idea that we would just let things run their course and watch what happens isn't going to happen.

01:53:16.000 A lot of grizzlies every year are still going to get in trouble.

01:53:21.000 They're still going to get killed.

01:53:22.000 You're still going to have tons of grizzly mortality in tough areas.

01:53:28.000 But the grizzlies aren't acting in packs.

01:53:30.000 No, but they kill cattle and they butt up against humans. 0.96

01:53:34.000 It's inevitable that you're going to have some of that.

01:53:36.000 You're not going to let it run.

01:53:38.000 As a person, as a hunter, I also don't have a problem with and actually support as a hunter that we would...

01:53:47.000 While allowing wolves to be present on the landscape, that we would mitigate their impact on big game.

01:53:54.000 I don't mind just coming out and saying that I like to have high populations of big game animals that are available to hunters.

01:54:02.000 And also, at the same time, sharing some of that resource there.

01:54:06.000 Having wolves on the ground doing it.

01:54:09.000 Don't want to see them gone.

01:54:10.000 Not anti-wolf, not anti-Grizzly.

01:54:12.000 It's just one of those, it's because a wolf is so much like a dog, and because there's not a great history of people eating.

01:54:20.000 I remember you telling me about one mountain man where his favorite food was wolf.

01:54:24.000 Viljalmer Stephenson.

01:54:25.000 Yeah.

01:54:25.000 He was an Arctic explorer.

01:54:27.000 What a crazy fucker that guy must have been, huh? 1.00

01:54:29.000 Favorite. 1.00

01:54:30.000 Love wolf meat.

01:54:32.000 You ever tried it?

01:54:32.000 No.

01:54:33.000 No.

01:54:34.000 But you've eaten coyote.

01:54:35.000 You've eaten coyote.

01:54:36.000 So you've eaten a species of wolves.

01:54:37.000 No, I've never killed a wolf, never killed a grizzly bear.

01:54:41.000 Just haven't.

01:54:41.000 Haven't eaten either of them.

01:54:44.000 I ate one coyote.

01:54:45.000 Yeah.

01:54:47.000 I ate it, didn't like it.

01:54:49.000 Haven't messed with one since.

01:54:53.000 Yeah, you said that was similar to Diver Duck too, right?

01:54:55.000 That was Remy.

01:54:56.000 Remy felt that it tasted like bad Diver Duck.

01:54:59.000 I eat Diver Ducks and still eat Diver Ducks.

01:55:01.000 But no, I haven't done that anymore and haven't included any coyote recipes.

01:55:08.000 There's no coyote recipes in the Wild Game Cookbook either.

01:55:10.000 Wolf might be the ultimate one that people are going to have a problem with.

01:55:13.000 That might be where the rubber hits the road.

01:55:16.000 Well, you know, in some places it's become a moot point because Idaho, Wyoming, Montana all have state management of wolves.

01:55:27.000 Yeah.

01:55:28.000 All of the things that were all these horrible things that were going to happen when the states resumed management of wolves didn't materialize.

01:55:34.000 Right.

01:55:35.000 But those places also have a rich history of hunting.

01:55:39.000 Yeah, but it was going to be the end of wolves, right?

01:55:42.000 It hasn't been.

01:55:43.000 In the first few years of the wolf seasons, you actually saw the populations go up.

01:55:49.000 Well, it's so hard to hunt them, right?

01:55:50.000 Well, it winds up being that putting that, with that little bit of hunting pressure on them, really changed...

01:56:01.000 Yeah.

01:56:13.000 It was very effective to bring in limited regulated hunting had the desired effect on how wolves were using the landscape and ways in which they were interacting and avoiding humans.

01:56:25.000 I have no doubt, too.

01:56:26.000 I have no doubt, too.

01:56:28.000 The situation will probably, in the northern Great Lakes, they had state management, lost state management.

01:56:34.000 It bounces back and forth.

01:56:35.000 You're going to eventually, I mean, it kind of depends on how the political winds blow, but you're eventually going to wind up with it there, and you're not going to see wolves vanish from the landscape.

01:56:44.000 You know, you're just not.

01:56:47.000 If grizzly bears wind up doing it, you're still going to see gradually expanding populations of grizzly bears despite the fact that they're using limited harvest to achieve certain management objectives.

01:56:57.000 It's not going to be the end of the world.

01:56:59.000 It's just not.

01:57:00.000 Yeah, I agree with you, and I think the grizzly bear thing, you probably have the same sort of situation where the grizzlies will eventually think of people as a threat, and it'll probably save it for everybody.

01:57:09.000 That's one thing that people hope.

01:57:12.000 And again, a lot of people looking from the outside in aren't very sensitive to it.

01:57:17.000 Yeah.

01:57:17.000 To the idea of the way that this has impacted professional hunting guides, hunters.

01:57:23.000 But these are my people and these are people that I care about and I care about their needs.

01:57:26.000 Yeah.

01:57:26.000 Right?

01:57:27.000 And it is an issue.

01:57:28.000 So time will tell where that winds up.

01:57:32.000 Well, we see it in BC where they've just taken it away.

01:57:35.000 And they've taken it away in a very irrational way because they have a large population of grizzlies in BC. It's very large.

01:57:43.000 And for people that live up there, that hunt them, this is kind of scaring the shit out of them.

01:57:48.000 That all of a sudden you've taken this away.

01:57:50.000 First of all, it was a source of income for a lot of these people that would guide them.

01:57:56.000 But it was also a smart thing to control the population and keep them away from humans.

01:58:03.000 Well, I watch that closely, though I don't feel it being another country, you don't have that sense of being that other country, you don't have that sense that you could influence.

01:58:17.000 It's kind of like watching something happen in a distant way, and you don't feel it as closely, and I don't know all the factors at play as well as I do here.

01:58:26.000 Well, I have some friends that live up there.

01:58:28.000 My friend Mike Hawkridge, who's a guide up there, he's told me horror stories about grizzlies.

01:58:33.000 I'd shoot one trying to get into his cabin from like six feet away.

01:58:37.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:58:38.000 And, you know, they're big fuckers. 1.00

01:58:40.000 They are. 1.00

01:58:41.000 I love them to death.

01:58:42.000 They're great.

01:58:43.000 I mean, it's cool that they're real.

01:58:44.000 I mean, it really is.

01:58:46.000 It's a wild thing that we have this huge monster that lives in the woods.

01:58:52.000 Yeah, having been charged by them, I wouldn't change a thing, man.

01:58:55.000 Yeah, and you were charged by them.

01:58:56.000 I like every encounter and every mix-up, and it's really...

01:59:00.000 It's like deeply complicated stuff, and when talking about these things, it's also...

01:59:07.000 They become...

01:59:08.000 Like everything, they become a proxy.

01:59:12.000 We're engaged in a debate about conflicting views on wildlife, and these animals step in to this debate, and the debate centers around them, and it winds up being bigger than a debate about Grizzlies.

01:59:30.000 Bigger than a debate about bison or buffalo, right?

01:59:34.000 Bigger than a debate about wolves.

01:59:36.000 It's just that these animals step into this ongoing dialogue about what is our relationship with the natural world?

01:59:42.000 What is our relationship with renewable resources?

01:59:45.000 What is our relationship with rural versus urban perspectives on how people should be around wildlife and be impacted by wildlife?

01:59:52.000 And so it's just this through line of us trying to sort out How to be good, responsible stewards of the landscape.

02:00:01.000 And that debate always centers around these things.

02:00:05.000 You could have a huge argument.

02:00:07.000 You could be in a lot of tension with your spouse, right?

02:00:09.000 And it springs up in a debate about how best to load the dishwasher or who is supposed to pick up the kid from school.

02:00:16.000 And it always finds a place to live.

02:00:19.000 And right now, this argument about American wildlife and what is our relationship to it has found its place to live right now around large predators.

02:00:30.000 And in Scotland, it's found its way to live around a feral goat on an island.

02:00:37.000 Wow, that one case.

02:00:39.000 Yeah.

02:00:41.000 All the traveling that you do...

02:00:44.000 And all the hunting trips you go on, has it gotten to a point ever that it seems like a job?

02:00:53.000 Yeah, now that I have kids, it's changed a little bit.

02:00:57.000 I view it a little bit differently.

02:01:00.000 But no, I still really love it, and I'm able to know that I'm missing my family while I'm out.

02:01:09.000 I'm able to know that and feel that pain.

02:01:13.000 And still know that I love what I do.

02:01:17.000 And I love talking about the things that I talk about.

02:01:20.000 And I view it as I'm sure you do.

02:01:24.000 It's like this tremendous privilege that you're able to...

02:01:29.000 Kind of grow up to have, you know, to have this, like, intense interest in a subject and this intense interest in a lifestyle and have the ability to, like, introduce people to all these different ideas, right?

02:01:40.000 So, yeah, I can have those two things simultaneous.

02:01:44.000 The kind of longing to be home more but enjoying being out.

02:01:50.000 I think if the longing to be home more would override that someday, it might change it.

02:01:56.000 But right now, I just have seen so many things that I'm happy to have seen.

02:02:02.000 And to think about a future of not accumulating those experiences at the rapid rate that I've accumulated them kind of bums me out a little bit.

02:02:10.000 Yeah, you've lived a hundred lives.

02:02:12.000 You know, the trip that you were talking about when you were in South America in the jungle and you came across those pictographs.

02:02:20.000 What do you say?

02:02:20.000 How do you call those things?

02:02:22.000 Petroglyphs.

02:02:23.000 Petroglyphs on the rocks that no one had any idea who made.

02:02:26.000 Yeah.

02:02:26.000 No one knew why.

02:02:28.000 They were just there.

02:02:29.000 Yeah.

02:02:29.000 No, it's not like a spot on a map that tourists go to visit.

02:02:32.000 Oh, here's the petroglyphs.

02:02:34.000 No, they're just there.

02:02:35.000 They're just there, and the hunter's like, yeah, there they are.

02:02:38.000 The ancient ones made these.

02:02:40.000 Hey, let's get the fish. 0.99

02:02:42.000 They really don't give a shit, but it's like you're seeing who knows how old that is. 0.99

02:02:47.000 A thousand years old? 0.99

02:02:48.000 Two thousand years old?

02:02:49.000 Could be more.

02:02:49.000 Yeah, impossible to say.

02:02:50.000 But you have to run into stuff like that.

02:02:52.000 Yeah.

02:02:53.000 Yeah, beautiful experiences, man.

02:02:56.000 And then to eat the way I eat and live the way I eat, I feel fortunate all the time.

02:03:06.000 Well, I think you're very important because there's a real lack of well-read, articulate people that support your position that are in the media.

02:03:17.000 I mean, you've got a lot of these shows that are on these...

02:03:22.000 The hunting networks, they appeal to a very narrow bandwidth.

02:03:28.000 And this narrow bandwidth is, you know, it's like your stereotypical idea of what hunting is to a lot of people.

02:03:41.000 So they'll flip through the channels, they'll watch that for a few minutes, you see someone hooting and hollering after they shoot something, and they get this bad taste in their mouth about it.

02:03:51.000 Whereas I tell people all the time, if you really want to get an understanding about what hunting is about, I always recommend your show.

02:04:00.000 Because your narration and your reverence for what you're doing and the animals and just your appreciation for how cool the experience is and how wild it is to, you know, for lack of a better term,

02:04:15.000 just to be out there in nature...

02:04:17.000 And to be in the pursuit of these things and then to take these things, these wild creatures and feed your family and have it become a part of your life and to sustain yourself with it primarily.

02:04:30.000 You're giving a perspective that I don't think is available.

02:04:34.000 That I think is really important.

02:04:38.000 Because it's just...

02:04:39.000 There's so many people that are out there that are hunters.

02:04:43.000 That are smart, well-read people that feel frustrated.

02:04:48.000 Like, God, I wish everybody could see it the way I see it.

02:04:50.000 Yeah, I think it's important to point out that my love of hunting...

02:04:56.000 And of fishing and of living like a hands-on relationship with the natural world and living in close proximity to wildlife.

02:05:04.000 Like, my interest in that and desire to do that...

02:05:10.000 It's predated by a long ways my ability to talk about why I think that those things are important.

02:05:18.000 It was there.

02:05:19.000 It wasn't like I didn't grow up around that and then later started understanding the stuff and thinking about it and decided like, well...

02:05:27.000 The path for me then, considering what I know now, the path for me then to figure out hunting.

02:05:32.000 It was like, hunting was there.

02:05:34.000 I loved it.

02:05:34.000 I love it today.

02:05:36.000 And I just had the luxury through what I do for a living to spend a lot of time thinking about, well, why is that the case?

02:05:44.000 If this feels like harmonious to you and you can kind of like live in this and understand it and see how you fit into some greater...

02:05:52.000 You know, ecological picture, right?

02:05:56.000 If it does feel that way and that seems to be true, how is it that, like, why is that, right?

02:06:00.000 And it was pushing at those edges that I eventually developed a way in which I talk about it.

02:06:05.000 Now, I meet all kinds of people who live that same lifestyle that I lived growing up.

02:06:10.000 And when I talk to them, a thing that they appreciate is just that someone is articulating to them something that they felt to be true and knew to be true but just hadn't had the time or, you know, I didn't have the time or ability to really go out and express it.

02:06:27.000 I would never want to act like I certainly have not invented some way of thinking about it.

02:06:32.000 Aldo Leopold, Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, Throughout history, Jim Harris and Tom McGuane for contemporary writers, there's been a lot of people who have been saying and talking about and experiencing the outdoors in a way.

02:06:47.000 I haven't invented some new thing.

02:06:50.000 I'm working toward articulating and expressing something that has been in existence for a long time.

02:06:57.000 If people see negative stereotypes when they're on YouTube or see negative stereotypes on certain television shows, a lot of that stuff is self-feeding.

02:07:06.000 I think a lot of that stuff gets created because it does have a shock value to it.

02:07:10.000 And I would think that minus the camera, a lot of activities that people might feel are abhorrent might not even be taking place, where there is a hamming it up.

02:07:25.000 For the camera that goes on.

02:07:27.000 That's interesting.

02:07:28.000 Do you think that there's like a sort of a stereotypical pattern that they feel like they have to fall into?

02:07:33.000 So they fall into it when the camera's on, almost like a DJ strip club voice?

02:07:37.000 Yeah, I think that there's some of that, man.

02:07:39.000 You know what I mean?

02:07:39.000 I think there's some of that.

02:07:40.000 And there's also a thing that happens with people who feel under attack.

02:07:46.000 And in many ways, you know...

02:07:50.000 Hunters are under attack in a lot of ways in a lot of places, and I think that there's a way when you feel like you're being attacked, you feel like you're being pigeonholed, stereotyped, a response is to cram it right back down.

02:08:06.000 You're like, I'll show you.

02:08:08.000 And there's definitely that stuff.

02:08:10.000 You fall into this us against them. 1.00

02:08:13.000 Fuck them. 1.00

02:08:16.000 I'll show them how we really are. 1.00

02:08:19.000 And you get into this kind of dialogue thing.

02:08:22.000 It's a lot more painful, I think.

02:08:26.000 Maybe not more painful.

02:08:27.000 It's definitely more hard to be like, okay, let's talk about this for real.

02:08:31.000 If this is really something we need to discuss, let's dig in and discuss it.

02:08:34.000 And I think that a lot of people feel like that hunting feels like something that's natural to them.

02:08:39.000 They like to do it, and they don't feel the need to take the time to explain it.

02:08:43.000 And when pressed to explain it, they maybe kind of lash out.

02:08:50.000 Yeah.

02:08:51.000 And maybe lack the ability to look at it from an outside perspective because it's been a part of their life, their whole life, and they don't want to justify it.

02:09:00.000 Yeah, it's...

02:09:03.000 There's also the weird thing that as much as you can appreciate hunting and think of it as an ethical way to acquire meat, everybody can't do it.

02:09:14.000 We've got too many people.

02:09:16.000 It's untenable.

02:09:19.000 There's no responsibility for you to acknowledge that.

02:09:22.000 But it's something that gets brought up when people talk about how ethical acquisition of meat is really like either hunting or you'd have to raise something yourself and be absolutely aware or get something from a farmer who's You know,

02:09:42.000 completely ethical from birth to death, and you have to be comfortable with that.

02:09:48.000 But the most ethical, in my opinion, is the hunting.

02:09:50.000 But then people always say, yeah, but everybody can't hunt.

02:09:54.000 Okay, but I can.

02:09:55.000 So if I can, what do I do about the fact that everybody can't hunt?

02:09:59.000 Well, everyone could come in.

02:10:02.000 It's a moot point, because it doesn't matter.

02:10:04.000 They're not going to.

02:10:06.000 But no, certainly, everyone could enter into hunting.

02:10:10.000 The hunting game, you know, you could come in and hunt, it would just mean that you had a much larger pool of people after a limited resource, and that limited resource would be allocated in a different way.

02:10:24.000 You could have total participation, and it would just be that every person's slice of the pie would be much smaller.

02:10:32.000 But it's not like...

02:10:34.000 When a state looks at what's a turkey harvest that our state could support, they break the state up into a bunch of different units, they look at population trends, and they determine how many turkeys can we afford to harvest without impacting the turkey population.

02:10:50.000 If everyone in the state wanted a chance, you'd still wind up with the same number.

02:10:55.000 You'd wind up with the same number of turkeys being killed.

02:10:58.000 It would just be that you would have less opportunity.

02:11:00.000 You'd have to wait longer to get your turn.

02:11:03.000 So it's not that everybody can't, but it's not even really a point because everybody will not.

02:11:09.000 When I do the stuff that I do, like in writing a wild game cookbook, I'm doing two things.

02:11:14.000 In writing a wild game cookbook, I'm doing the main thing that I feel is the most important part of my job or the most important part of what I am is I'm having a conversation with people who live this lifestyle.

02:11:24.000 Right?

02:11:24.000 Like, those are people that I relate to.

02:11:30.000 Want to represent the world in a way that enhances their lives, provide education, and share my experiences with an audience of people that I recommend as a tribe that I'm part of, which would be like American hunters and anglers.

02:11:44.000 And I'm presenting them, like doing a cookbook, I'm presenting them best practices, how to live the best version of a wild game lifestyle that they can, and here's a way to think about and approach wild game.

02:11:54.000 But also, the secondary part of what I'm doing is presenting a world to people who might be unfamiliar with it.

02:12:01.000 And yes, do I have the hope that people will, like, say, read this book...

02:12:09.000 And then be like, man, I want to participate in this lifestyle.

02:12:13.000 That could mean as much as them walking down to the local river in their city and flipping over rocks and picking up crayfish.

02:12:18.000 But it is introducing them, bringing them into the natural world, and bringing them into engagement with nature.

02:12:25.000 And I do view and hope that that will happen.

02:12:28.000 Will it happen in some grand scale where we'll have hundreds of millions of hunters in this country?

02:12:32.000 No, that's not going to happen.

02:12:34.000 But I do think that it is important that we do have more people involved.

02:12:40.000 We, in large measure, we fund much of our wildlife work and management from law enforcement, disease research, on and on.

02:12:49.000 We fund that stuff through hunting and fishing licenses and through excise taxes on sporting goods equipment.

02:12:56.000 The more people that are engaged with this activity, I think the better it winds up being for American wildlife.

02:13:02.000 I agree, but the idea is that everyone can't do it, so the idea that you're saying that this is how you ethically acquire meat, this is not a solution for everyone.

02:13:16.000 No, but I don't say that this is the only way.

02:13:20.000 I'm not saying you do.

02:13:20.000 I'm saying this is one of the arguments that people make.

02:13:22.000 If you say that, you know, hey, I hunt for my meat, this is how I ethically acquire meat.

02:13:28.000 Well, everybody can't do that because there's not enough animals.

02:13:31.000 That's true.

02:13:32.000 That's true.

02:13:33.000 Everybody can't do that.

02:13:34.000 If even more people got involved, it's not a solution for the entire population.

02:13:39.000 You can say, well, that's good.

02:13:41.000 The entire population is not going to do it anyway.

02:13:43.000 But it's...

02:13:46.000 That gets into...

02:13:47.000 It's a strange...

02:13:48.000 There's just the giant number of human beings that need to be fed.

02:13:52.000 Yeah. 0.96

02:13:53.000 There's almost no other solution than the solution that we're doing right now, unless they come up with some sort of a lab-created meat or whatever the fuck they're going to come up with next, which they are doing. 0.95

02:14:04.000 Your lips are curling as the... 0.97

02:14:07.000 It was involuntary.

02:14:09.000 I said lab-created meat, and you're like...

02:14:11.000 Yeah, I'm pretty happy with my diet right now.

02:14:16.000 Yeah.

02:14:17.000 But yeah, I watch that kind of stuff, and I'm curious about it, but I don't take it as a personal insult by any stretch, man.

02:14:24.000 If everybody switched to lab-created meat, but I still had the ability to continue eating how I eat and living how I live, I don't view that as being a future problem.

02:14:36.000 Rocky Mountain Elk Federation has reintroduced...

02:14:39.000 Foundation, yeah.

02:14:40.000 What did I say?

02:14:40.000 Federation?

02:14:41.000 Foundation.

02:14:42.000 They've introduced elk to a lot of different places and made sustainable populations that are now hunted.

02:14:48.000 And this is a beautiful thing, and I'd hope that they continue to spread and continue to do that.

02:14:54.000 Do you think it's possible that other game animals could be reintroduced to places where they would develop such a large population that we could sustain maybe even double the amount of hunters that we have now?

02:15:06.000 Is that possible?

02:15:07.000 Well, put it this way.

02:15:10.000 Yes.

02:15:11.000 For starters, yes.

02:15:12.000 You just pulled up an article about wolves.

02:15:15.000 Every article from mainstream news sources that involves wolves, you'll kind of detect the bias of the individual writing it.

02:15:24.000 And they're saying how wolves have only been recovered across 10% of their historic range.

02:15:29.000 Elk!

02:15:31.000 That's about the same for elk.

02:15:33.000 Yeah.

02:15:33.000 Right?

02:15:33.000 Elk are missing from 80 plus percent of their historic range in the lower 48. Right?

02:15:39.000 But we have, you know, at various times we have a quarter million of them living in Colorado or, you know, some states got 100,000, whatever.

02:15:49.000 You got now perhaps 20,000 living in Kentucky.

02:15:52.000 Those were all gone.

02:15:53.000 New Mexico at a point had zero.

02:15:57.000 Michigan, zero.

02:15:58.000 Kentucky, zero.

02:15:59.000 Pennsylvania, zero.

02:16:00.000 Elk, we're gone.

02:16:02.000 From the unregulated slaughter of the market hunting era when people could shoot meat and sell it into urban meat markets, right?

02:16:11.000 They eliminated American wild game before we figured out how to do it.

02:16:14.000 The word I keep using all the time now, which is like regulated harvest, regulated management.

02:16:19.000 So all that stuff was gone.

02:16:21.000 There were states where there was no deer hunting.

02:16:27.000 At the time of European contact, you had turkeys in 39 states.

02:16:29.000 It got whittled down to turkeys in 19 states.

02:16:32.000 You now have turkey hunting seasons in 49 states.

02:16:35.000 We've done a tremendous job of recovering wildlife Particularly a tremendous job to demonstrate what happens to an animal that hunters value and love and are able to use as a renewable resource.

02:16:52.000 Those species tend to really enjoy a lot of protections and they thrive because people are vested in their best interests.

02:16:57.000 So yeah, we've created turkey hunting seasons in 30 states.

02:17:04.000 So, yes, you can do things with wildlife and create resources.

02:17:08.000 The fact that we now...

02:17:09.000 We used to argue about what's going to happen with deer.

02:17:12.000 Are we going to drive deer to extinction in certain states or extirpation in certain states?

02:17:15.000 Now our big argument is what do we do with having so many deer?

02:17:20.000 Here it winds up being that you come up against social tolerances.

02:17:24.000 It's hard to...

02:17:26.000 When we fill in the map on elk, when the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation looks at filling in the map on elk...

02:17:32.000 You've got to sell people on the idea that you're going to recover elk.

02:17:35.000 And there's a lot of resistance to recovering wildlife because a lot of stuff is inconvenient to have around.

02:17:41.000 They do a great job of brokering deals with states and finding places where a state maybe has a patch of habitat they think could support the animals and providing the expertise and financial support and all that stuff to bring in those things.

02:17:53.000 But generally you wind up where, because of settlement, In cities and suburban areas, we wind up with fewer and fewer places where we can go and do it.

02:18:02.000 So to really fill in the map on recovering elk across all that range where they're supposed to be, I don't know that we'll get there.

02:18:09.000 But we've gotten there in a lot of other stuff.

02:18:11.000 And there's like the Wild Sheep Foundation, right?

02:18:13.000 They're trying to do the same thing with bighorn sheep. 0.64

02:18:16.000 There, it's not even social attitudes.

02:18:19.000 There it winds up being disease.

02:18:22.000 From domestic sheep?

02:18:23.000 Yeah.

02:18:24.000 The main problem preventing us from recovering bighorn sheep is disease.

02:18:31.000 Types of pneumonia that come from domestic sheep.

02:18:35.000 Wow.

02:18:35.000 And people, to go in and say to someone who's running sheep on a mountain, domestic sheep on a mountain, and say, hey, no insult to you and no insult to your...

02:18:46.000 Four bears who've been sheep ranchers here for 120 years or whatever, but we would like to try to recover American wildlife and bring bighorns back to this mountain range, and that's going to require you moving these sheep out of the way. 0.51

02:18:56.000 It's an insulting idea to people.

02:18:58.000 So there's a blocker there.

02:19:00.000 And every animal has its own type of problem.

02:19:04.000 Turkeys, it worked.

02:19:06.000 Because people don't get pissed about turkeys.

02:19:09.000 No, they like having them around.

02:19:10.000 Yeah, and look at what's going on with just allowing bison to walk out of Yellowstone National Park.

02:19:17.000 That's been an issue for a quarter century now.

02:19:22.000 People are like, I'm not comfortable with you letting these big-ass things walk out of the park and roam around because of disease.

02:19:30.000 Grazing, right?

02:19:32.000 People don't want to be inconvenienced by wildlife.

02:19:35.000 These are places where, in that area, I'd really like to see.

02:19:39.000 When a bison leaves the park, he stops being a wild animal and becomes livestock.

02:19:46.000 What's going on with that American Savannah thing?

02:19:50.000 What is that program?

02:19:52.000 The APR? Yeah, what are they calling that again?

02:19:54.000 The American Prairie Reserve.

02:19:56.000 Yeah.

02:19:56.000 What is going on with that?

02:19:58.000 Explain what the fuck that is, because this is crazy. 0.97

02:20:02.000 I mean, I know it's just a long story. 0.97

02:20:05.000 Too long?

02:20:06.000 Yeah, we're working with having the...

02:20:09.000 It's too long.

02:20:10.000 We're working with having the founder on our show to have a conversation.

02:20:14.000 American Prairie Reserve.

02:20:15.000 What they're essentially trying to do is reintroduce a bunch of animals into a gigantic chunk of land, and they continue to buy up more of this land.

02:20:24.000 And aren't they running block management on this as well?

02:20:28.000 Yes.

02:20:30.000 There's a lot of suspicions and controversy, and it's an idea that a lot of people are uneasy with, but the problem—not the problem.

02:20:42.000 The thing is, it's like people who are— They have funding and have a thing where when land comes for sale, they buy it.

02:20:50.000 And the goal of buying up the land is to turn it back into wildlife habitat for native wildlife.

02:20:59.000 And the controversy around it stems from the fact that some people...

02:21:05.000 I don't like to see areas that supported traditional economies in rural areas like cattle ranching and to see these areas returning to a wild landscape.

02:21:20.000 It's threatening to people.

02:21:22.000 From the hunter perspective, there's a lot of places that people used to be able to hunt, and the American Prairie Reserve is allowing hunting to go on, and people are coming in and saying, well, they need to assure us that hunting will be allowed here in perpetuity.

02:21:38.000 And because we're suspicious about what's going on.

02:21:41.000 So there's a lot of, like, you hear about it in so many ways, but the core mission is something that most people, when you look at it, the core mission is something that most people are going to look at and be pretty comfortable with.

02:21:52.000 Be like, okay, you're a guy or an organization, you have money, and when a ranch comes up for sale, you buy it on the open market.

02:21:59.000 The seller names his price.

02:22:01.000 You pay the price.

02:22:02.000 It's now your land.

02:22:04.000 If you choose to not run cattle but want to have bison roam around on it, why should I care?

02:22:10.000 Right.

02:22:11.000 Right?

02:22:11.000 But people do care because they look at it as being like a value judgment.

02:22:17.000 They look at it as being like a value judgment about rural economies and about agriculture.

02:22:23.000 Oh.

02:22:24.000 Huh.

02:22:25.000 I didn't think about it that way.

02:22:26.000 And there's a thousand more aspects to this.

02:22:29.000 There's a thousand more aspects to this where, like, It's a rich subject.

02:22:33.000 Dude, I'd love to get into it more about.

02:22:36.000 Next time I come on.

02:22:37.000 Okay.

02:22:38.000 Next time you come on.

02:22:39.000 It would take like an hour to explain the situation.

02:22:41.000 What is their long-term plan?

02:22:43.000 Like, how long is this going on for?

02:22:45.000 It's been going on for quite a while, right?

02:22:46.000 Oh, the long-term play is that over time you would assemble a chunk of the Great Plains that is far bigger than Yellowstone National Park that supports a thriving population of bison, wolves,

02:23:02.000 grizzly bears, You know, in a park-like setting.

02:23:09.000 Wow.

02:23:10.000 But it doesn't come without, you know, it doesn't come without its own bits of controversy.

02:23:18.000 And, yeah, again, it's like, it's a thing that everyone has an opinion about.

02:23:22.000 There was a version, they don't like to talk about, there was a version of this called the Buffalo Commons that happened long ago where a There was a social scientist named, I think it was Frank Popper, by the last name of Popper, and he was looking at demographic patterns on the Great Plains.

02:23:39.000 And he was observing the ways in which the areas on the Great Plains where the population was shrinking.

02:23:48.000 So there's a lot of counties on the Great Plains where through various long-term agricultural trends and other issues where the human population is rapidly shrinking, rapidly declining.

02:24:01.000 And this sociologist brought up this idea that if these trends continue, You're going to have this rare case in which a landscape sort of accidentally rewilded, okay?

02:24:16.000 Where everyone left, which is not a story we're familiar with when we look at what happens to wild lands across the world, right?

02:24:24.000 The general story is like people move in and wildlife moves out.

02:24:26.000 So this idea became like the Buffalo Commons, okay?

02:24:30.000 And it just so happens that that That idea kind of centered around this area around Jordan, Montana, right?

02:24:39.000 Because you have large tracts of federally managed public land up there.

02:24:44.000 You had a lot of ranch land that wasn't that expensive and people could buy it.

02:24:50.000 And that was like the seed of the idea.

02:24:51.000 I think that now there was such an unpopular notion because it had to do with like economic decay, right?

02:24:57.000 And shrinking towns and reduced resources for public education and all the kind of stuff that comes from having an economy that's not thriving.

02:25:04.000 But over time, that Buffalo Commons idea kind of segued into this American Prairie Reserve idea, and it happened to be sort of centered around the same chunk of land.

02:25:15.000 Bill Kittredge, a Western writer who deals with a lot of landscape and environmental issues, was talking about... 0.98

02:25:23.000 In the wake of the Buffalo Commons idea and Popper's work was talking about going to Jordan, Montana and talking about the Buffalo Commons is a great way to get your ass kicked.

02:25:32.000 Because it's this idea like if culturally like the agricultural producers and ranchers were celebrated and they made a civilization out of the wilderness and they brought in animals and created economies and created communities and for someone to now say you know thanks but no thanks bro. 0.98

02:25:51.000 We'd rather go back and eliminate your presence on this landscape.

02:25:56.000 And we don't, in fact, value what you did.

02:25:58.000 And we're going to try as hard as we can to undo what you did.

02:26:02.000 Because we now view it as that your people did the wrong thing.

02:26:06.000 And we're going to correct that wrong.

02:26:08.000 And to some people, it's like this insulting idea.

02:26:14.000 To a lot of other people, they celebrate it.

02:26:16.000 Because they're like, hey, if it's for sale and I buy it, It's mine.

02:26:21.000 I could see it from both perspectives.

02:26:22.000 Sure, man.

02:26:23.000 It's very much like the hunting thing. 1.00

02:26:25.000 If you're a part of it, you have a deep history in it, you understand that your perspective of ranching is from a rancher, whereas people on the outside conveniently can be ignorant about it and go, ah, fuck those ranchers. 0.99

02:26:37.000 I want to see the buffalo. 0.99

02:26:39.000 Yeah.

02:26:39.000 My perspective on wildlife has been it's a thing that you care about, you work to conserve, You want to have it on the landscape, and you also eat a lot of it.

02:26:51.000 And that's a foreign idea for people.

02:26:53.000 Yeah, it is.

02:26:54.000 I'm glad that you can't sell wild game.

02:26:57.000 I'm glad that market hunting is not a thing.

02:26:59.000 However, I would really love it if there was a restaurant where you could go, where you could buy really well-prepared wild game dishes, like a really well-prepared bear.

02:27:12.000 Really well-prepared mountain lion.

02:27:14.000 Well-prepared, you know, fill in the blank with the animal.

02:27:18.000 I just think that would be a fascinating place to eat.

02:27:21.000 You know, and maybe if they could do something like that, it wouldn't be that you could actually sell the meat.

02:27:26.000 I mean, there'd have to be some weird workaround.

02:27:29.000 It'd have to be like...

02:27:32.000 Someone would have to give it to you.

02:27:33.000 You'd have to come to one of my dinner parties.

02:27:34.000 I would have to.

02:27:35.000 Well, that's fine.

02:27:36.000 But I would like it if there was a place where the general public could participate in it.

02:27:42.000 I think they'd get a better understanding. 0.97

02:27:44.000 I put up these posts all the time of elk that I cook, and people are like, God damn, I want to eat some of that. 0.97

02:27:49.000 How do I eat that? 0.98

02:27:50.000 How do you eat that?

02:27:51.000 You've got to go get one of them.

02:27:53.000 I mean, it's the only way you can eat that.

02:27:55.000 Or come to my house.

02:27:57.000 Yeah, you can go and buy the farmed-raised version.

02:28:00.000 But then it's, you know, that's one, yeah.

02:28:03.000 Good luck getting a farm-raised blueberry black bear.

02:28:06.000 Yeah, well, no, not that case, but like, you know, you can buy, but then it's, that's a whole other conversation around the captive cervid industry, but yeah, you can buy elk that are raised in a ranch environment, right?

02:28:17.000 Yeah, I mean, as long as you're getting it from New Zealand, you're not dealing with CWD and a lot of the other issues that they're dealing with in America, right?

02:28:23.000 Well, yeah, but they're not.

02:28:24.000 I mean, those places are tested and herds that have CWD in them are destroyed.

02:28:30.000 Right, yeah.

02:28:33.000 Yeah, but the whole New Zealand thing, that was an interesting thing that you brought up on your podcast recently, how New Zealand, there have been talks about actual eradication.

02:28:43.000 And one of the arguments that hunters always use is, hey, we're controlling the population.

02:28:47.000 This is a good service that we're providing.

02:28:50.000 And then the government comes along and says, well, how about we take care of that?

02:28:53.000 And everybody's like, hey, hey, hey, not so fast.

02:28:56.000 Yeah, it's...

02:28:59.000 That takes place in Australia and New Zealand where they have these thriving, very robust populations of non-native wildlife.

02:29:07.000 The government has always and does now do a lot of culling of these animals.

02:29:14.000 They don't have predators.

02:29:17.000 They're very fecund.

02:29:19.000 They have extremely high reproductive rates.

02:29:21.000 The government is actively engaged around the clock Gunning wildlife from helicopters.

02:29:29.000 Just letting it rot.

02:29:31.000 You shouldn't leave it to rot.

02:29:32.000 You have to, but they do that because they're trying to protect certain ecosystems and keep a lot of native...

02:29:51.000 I think?

02:30:13.000 And then later when people come up and they talk about, well, you know, we're going to get serious about this and we're going to really actively, with the goal of totally eliminating these species, people are justifiably made uneasy about it because it's a thing that they've come to appreciate and rely on and a resource that they want to use.

02:30:34.000 And now they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute!

02:30:37.000 I don't want to kill them all.

02:30:38.000 I do like them being here.

02:30:39.000 And it winds up putting you in this weird, like, it winds up putting you in a weird rhetorical position.

02:30:46.000 But I understand where they're coming from.

02:30:47.000 Because if you could live there and you could agree that we're going to have some small number of them on the landscape and we're going to use those and we're going to hunt those and eat those, I also, if someone said, hey, they're gone now, I would be bummed.

02:31:00.000 I hunt turkeys.

02:31:01.000 I was saying earlier, we had turkeys in 39 states at the time of European contact.

02:31:04.000 We have turkeys in 49 states now.

02:31:06.000 I hunt turkeys in a lot of those 10 states that didn't historically have turkeys and that do now.

02:31:12.000 And I generally have a perspective of trying to preserve native wildlife and trying to control non-natives because I don't want to wind up with sort of a, this like monolithic wildlife pattern where these same super resilient adaptive species such as Canada geese and rats and white-tailed deer take over the entire country. 0.59

02:31:28.000 And pigs.

02:31:28.000 Yeah.

02:31:29.000 Yes, I want the variety, so I'm generally antagonistic toward non-natives. 1.00

02:31:34.000 But if someone came and said, okay, you know what, we're going to actually go in and kill off all the turkeys in those 10 states that historically didn't have turkeys, I would say, really? 0.92

02:31:46.000 Really? 0.92

02:31:48.000 Because I've kind of grown to really like those turkeys and they're not really causing a problem.

02:31:52.000 And I think that some people, you know, if you're a New Zealand hunter, an Australian hunter, I don't think anyone's arguing there should be no control, but I think that they're like, let's find a balance.

02:32:02.000 I think we can find a balance where there's some availability of animals on the landscape since they've been here since the beginning of our, you know, experience on this continent.

02:32:11.000 If there's some availability of animals, let's find like a reasonable compromise here.

02:32:15.000 Well, that was one of the discussions as well about Hawaii, right?

02:32:18.000 Like, on some of the Hawaiian islands, eradicating the pigs. 0.51

02:32:21.000 And then the Hawaiians were saying, well, they've been here as long as us. 0.85

02:32:26.000 Yeah, we've both been here.

02:32:27.000 Our ancestors have been here 1,100 years.

02:32:29.000 They brought the pig with them.

02:32:31.000 How am I a native Hawaiian?

02:32:34.000 And the pig has to go. 0.97

02:32:35.000 And it's like, maybe you people ought to go. 0.94

02:32:37.000 Yeah.

02:32:40.000 Dude, I always like, again man, I always instinctively, when I hear stuff, I instinctively lean in from the perspective of...

02:32:52.000 I instinctively lean in from the perspective of the hunter and angler.

02:32:56.000 And I love all these little debates, and I think that they're all really helpful and interesting.

02:33:04.000 But no, I feel like I can recognize their pain.

02:33:08.000 And I can also look far away and laugh at the absurdity of it.

02:33:11.000 I even had a guy write me from Australia and say, this is a real bummer, because it exposes us To the thing where we got to say like, yeah, you know what?

02:33:21.000 I wasn't really just doing it because I'm trying to help the ecosystem by eliminating non-natives. 1.00

02:33:27.000 I actually like having some of them around and now I just got to come out and say that and that's a bummer.

02:33:33.000 I really do wish there was some sort of a restaurant.

02:33:36.000 I think that would be a great place for people to get a perspective.

02:33:42.000 There's no way to do that, though, huh?

02:33:43.000 No, but I've...

02:33:44.000 No, there's not.

02:33:45.000 Well, I mean, not for all the things that you're talking about, no.

02:33:48.000 And I don't look to...

02:33:50.000 There is talk of...

02:33:53.000 A lot of people are looking to...

02:33:56.000 Are pushing for this idea that in areas that have too many whitetail deer, there's people who are really pushing to reopen up the sale of wild harvested deer.

02:34:08.000 Yeah.

02:34:08.000 As a solution to deer overpopulation.

02:34:11.000 But for me, from my perspective and from the damage that was caused by unregulated wildlife slaughter, I'm very, very uneasy with it.

02:34:23.000 And I do not picture myself ever coming around in support of the idea that we would start marketing wild cervids.

02:34:33.000 No, I agree.

02:34:34.000 And I think just the sheer... 0.99

02:34:38.000 Possibility of fuckery and people shooting them and poaching them and selling them. 0.99

02:34:44.000 And it would increase the commodification of wildlife. 0.99

02:34:48.000 Yeah.

02:34:49.000 And that's something that I'm also just uncomfortable with in general, the commodification of wildlife.

02:34:57.000 And I think about resource availability.

02:35:01.000 For hunters.

02:35:01.000 And I think that a lot of people who enjoy access to certain areas now to go hunting, to hunt for themselves and their family, that the minute you made it be that those deer had a dollar value attached to them, that there would be a lot less opportunity for people who choose to hunt to feed themselves.

02:35:22.000 Because it would all of a sudden be like, why would I let you come in or allow you to come in and use a resource when I'm just going to do my best now to collect it up And sell it.

02:35:32.000 And so, again, for aesthetic reasons, for what it would mean for hunters, for our perception of our relationship with our resources, I'm extremely uncomfortable with it.

02:35:46.000 It's an idea that keeps popping up because we have, in some areas...

02:35:51.000 And I hate to say that, I hate to talk about, oh, there's too many deer, there's too much this, too much that, because by whose measurement?

02:35:56.000 But in some areas we really do, especially when you start getting into issues like Lyme disease prevalence and ticks and starvation and just the possibility of other disease outbreaks and the spread of certain wildlife diseases.

02:36:09.000 There's some areas that by any reasonable measurement we have too many deer.

02:36:13.000 Yeah.

02:36:15.000 Well, look, it's already 1 o'clock.

02:36:17.000 Oh.

02:36:18.000 How crazy is that?

02:36:20.000 Time flies in this room.

02:36:23.000 Your podcast is awesome.

02:36:25.000 It really is.

02:36:25.000 I'm glad I talked to you and you're doing it.

02:36:27.000 Yeah, I owe it all to you.

02:36:29.000 And every chance I get, I point to it.

02:36:30.000 I appreciate it.

02:36:31.000 I really do appreciate that you do it because I think it's my favorite podcast to recommend to people that want, if I want them to get an understanding of hunting without Even watching it, just listening to you talk.

02:36:45.000 Because you have so many guests on where you might not even be talking about hunting.

02:36:49.000 You might be talking about biology.

02:36:51.000 You might be talking about history.

02:36:53.000 It's just a great podcast, and you're a great guy for the job.

02:36:57.000 You play a very important part out there.

02:36:59.000 I really believe that.

02:37:01.000 Thank you.

02:37:01.000 I appreciate it.

02:37:02.000 And I am glad that you talked me into doing it.

02:37:05.000 In terms of all the things I do, TV, writing.

02:37:10.000 It's the thing that I enjoy doing it the most.

02:37:15.000 There's a lot of things I enjoy having done it more, but the thing that I enjoy actually doing it, I just have a smile on my face doing it.

02:37:23.000 Well, you're such a great talker.

02:37:25.000 I mean, remember the first time you did my podcast, even before Meat Eater, when you were just coming off of The Wild Within.

02:37:31.000 What is it?

02:37:31.000 Was that what it's called?

02:37:32.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:37:33.000 And I remember thinking, why doesn't this guy have a fucking podcast? 0.97

02:37:36.000 And this was like, how many years ago? 0.98

02:37:37.000 Seven years ago?

02:37:38.000 Something like that?

02:37:39.000 Do you know the first time I ever heard the word podcast?

02:37:41.000 This is embarrassing.

02:37:42.000 The first time I ever heard the word podcast was Helen Cho telling me that I should go on Joe Rogan's podcast.

02:37:49.000 And I didn't know what it meant.

02:37:51.000 That's how early you were into this ship.

02:37:53.000 You were into this ship before I ever heard the word.

02:37:56.000 Wow, that's crazy.

02:37:58.000 Can I double back around and plug my book again?

02:38:00.000 Yeah, please do.

02:38:01.000 Okay, so it's called The Meat Eater Fishing Game Cookbook, Recipes and Techniques for Every Hunter and Angler.

02:38:07.000 Got a picture of that, Jamie?

02:38:10.000 Bam! 0.98

02:38:11.000 There it is.

02:38:11.000 Can I say one last quick thing about it?

02:38:13.000 It releases right now.

02:38:14.000 It releases this week on November 20, but it's available for pre-order everywhere.

02:38:18.000 And it's broken into a bunch of chapters where it has big game, small furred game like rabbits, hares, squirrels, upland birds, waterfowl, freshwater fish, saltwater fish, shellfish, and crustaceans.

02:38:34.000 Reptiles and amphibians, so all your bullfrog stuff is in there.

02:38:37.000 And you want to talk about a species that's spreading all across the country.

02:38:40.000 Bullfrogs?

02:38:41.000 Yeah.

02:38:41.000 Really?

02:38:42.000 Yeah, I've hunted a lot of bullfrogs in places where they're very unwelcome.

02:38:46.000 What do you hunt them with?

02:38:47.000 I hunt them with a variety of ways, mostly a frog gig.

02:38:50.000 I don't care where you live.

02:38:51.000 Like, there's a lot of people that live in a city like, dude, I'd love to go out and get some wild game, but I can't go get an elk.

02:38:55.000 Like, how do I do that?

02:38:56.000 You could be out gigging frogs at night and no one would even know.

02:39:00.000 Frog gigging, crayfish grabbing.

02:39:02.000 We talk about all this kind of stuff in the book.

02:39:04.000 And it explains everything from how to break down and process and freeze stuff.

02:39:10.000 And then for everything, there are many recipes.

02:39:13.000 And the recipes walk you through how to use the entire thing.

02:39:15.000 So for your whitetail deer, everything from the tongue to the rear shank.

02:39:23.000 How, like, specific recipes on how to do it, and also just general best practices and guidelines around how to handle the ingredients, and then all the stuff around all the substitutions.

02:39:36.000 So there's no such thing as, like, an elk heart recipe, right?

02:39:39.000 It's like how to, like, handle game hearts, whether it's mule deer, whitetail, whatever, like how to approach a heart, and an attitude toward wild game that is not, that's cut-specific, not species-specific.

02:39:53.000 And with fish, too, I'm not comfortable with the idea of, like, this is a walleye recipe, or this is a bluegill recipe, but how to handle, like, varieties of freshwater fish and, like, what kind of recipes you can use that are interchangeable, depending on where you live and what you use,

02:40:09.000 and includes all that.

02:40:11.000 And they're real pretty pictures.

02:40:13.000 Beautiful.

02:40:13.000 You can see Giannis Boutelis, how to do the tail skinning method on a squirrel.

02:40:17.000 And I don't care where you live, you damn sure live near squirrels. 0.97

02:40:21.000 People are very uncomfortable with squirrel eating. 0.95

02:40:23.000 Not me.

02:40:26.000 Oh, and you know, in the end, the guy that got the disease from eating squirrel brains, nothing to do with squirrel brains.

02:40:31.000 Oh, the article I sent you?

02:40:34.000 Yeah.

02:40:34.000 Everybody sent me that article.

02:40:36.000 Yeah.

02:40:37.000 There's no demonstrable correlation.

02:40:40.000 It's like 30 Americans a year wind up with that form of...

02:40:45.000 Krutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

02:40:47.000 30 Americans wind up with it.

02:40:48.000 It just happens to be that this dude sometime in his past...

02:40:51.000 It's a prion or prion disease, right? 0.84

02:40:56.000 Yeah, it's a thing that happens to people, but the correlation between his diet and what happened to him was implied.

02:41:05.000 Implied.

02:41:06.000 Possible?

02:41:08.000 If you go read up on it, it now seems like people are really saying there's no obvious relationship here.

02:41:18.000 No obvious relationship between eating squirrel brains and getting a prion disease.

02:41:22.000 Yeah, there's plenty of people that get the same thing that haven't been eating squirrel brains.

02:41:27.000 Right.

02:41:28.000 So they were just looking at the unusual aspects of his diet and pointing to that, and it's not that scientific.

02:41:34.000 Yeah, and the article got a lot more love when it was that some squirrel hunter died from eating squirrel brains than it did when the later subsequent pieces came out where everybody was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

02:41:44.000 Yeah.

02:41:46.000 Squirrels are cute.

02:41:48.000 Yeah.

02:41:49.000 I ate some squirrel with you.

02:41:51.000 It's another thing you've served me.

02:41:53.000 Very good.

02:41:54.000 There's not a person in the world.

02:41:55.000 You know what we have in the cookbook is we have how to do buffalo wings, hot wings?

02:42:01.000 How to do hot legs.

02:42:02.000 With squirrels?

02:42:03.000 Yeah, we were eating it the other night.

02:42:05.000 Really?

02:42:05.000 Yeah, so it's just like you're making...

02:42:07.000 What are the rules on shooting squirrels?

02:42:09.000 Do they vary state by state?

02:42:11.000 Yeah, so if you're in New York, you have a season, squirrel season in most states.

02:42:18.000 So it's either one or the other way.

02:42:20.000 Either there's a season and a bag limit, or they're treated as a non-game species.

02:42:23.000 So here in California, there's a squirrel season, there's a bag limit, I think it's four a day, four squirrels a day.

02:42:30.000 And when's the season?

02:42:31.000 You know, seasons usually run from sometime in August and September into winter, into January, February.

02:42:38.000 So where I grew up, September 15th.

02:42:41.000 September 8th to January 27th, archery, falconry only.

02:42:47.000 Jesus Christ.

02:42:48.000 Yeah, so archery and falconry.

02:42:49.000 Falconry.

02:42:50.000 So August 4 for archery and falconry.

02:42:53.000 Falconry.

02:42:54.000 Then you've got to go to the tree squirrel zone map, right?

02:42:56.000 Right.

02:42:57.000 But in your state, jackrabbits are open.

02:42:59.000 For instance, your state, jackrabbits are managed as non-game, meaning there's no bag limit and open year-round.

02:43:06.000 Cottontails, snowshoes have different management.

02:43:08.000 In a lot of states, pine squirrels are red squirrels, which aren't commonly hunted, but they're more regarded as things that get into people's houses, but they're not hunted for meat.

02:43:16.000 They'd be listed as a non-game species, but fox squirrels and gray squirrels would be as a game species.

02:43:21.000 So in New York, I think the bag limit when I was living there was six per day.

02:43:26.000 A possession limit of two bag limits.

02:43:28.000 Did you shoot any squirrels in Brooklyn and eat them?

02:43:30.000 No, no.

02:43:31.000 I caught some there.

02:43:33.000 I caught some there and ate them.

02:43:34.000 Did you?

02:43:35.000 But I would hunt out of the city at my buddy's farm and some other places.

02:43:38.000 So where I was born in Michigan, the squirrel season was September 15th, and it ran into the end of January.

02:43:47.000 Five squirrels a day, possession limit of two bag limits.

02:43:50.000 The state I live in now...

02:43:53.000 Treats squirrels as non-game species.

02:43:55.000 So there's no closed season and no bag limit because they're not widely distributed and they're not commonly hunted.

02:44:04.000 Alright.

02:44:05.000 But, yeah, most places they have them, and they're managed, and you go out and buy the small game license for $12 or whatever, get your hunter safety, get yourself a.22 or a shotgun, and you can become a squirrel man.

02:44:19.000 Or a squirrel lady. 1.00

02:44:20.000 Like your buddy Kevin Murphy?

02:44:22.000 He's a squirrel.

02:44:22.000 This is one of my favorite guys on your podcast.

02:44:24.000 He's a squirrel man.

02:44:25.000 This guy blows a horn in the woods before every hunt to alert the animals that he's coming.

02:44:32.000 Yeah.

02:44:34.000 Yeah, he carries a cow horn around and blows it.

02:44:36.000 I think it's a shofar, right? 0.92

02:44:42.000 Is that right?

02:44:45.000 When you blow the shofar in a Jewish synagogue? 1.00

02:44:48.000 Is that what it is?

02:44:49.000 I think it's called a shofar.

02:44:50.000 They blow a ram's horn.

02:44:52.000 It's not a cow horn, but it's a ram horn. 0.88

02:44:55.000 You know in the end of No Country for Old Men?

02:44:59.000 Yeah.

02:45:01.000 Have we talked about this before?

02:45:03.000 I don't know.

02:45:03.000 He talks about his father riding out ahead of him with a horn of fire.

02:45:10.000 In the end, he relates the dream.

02:45:12.000 It's in the book and it's in the movie where the Tommy Lee Jones character is describing a dream in which they're riding through a snowstorm and his father rides ahead with a horn of fire.

02:45:20.000 And I always wondered how many people heard that and had no idea what he was talking about.

02:45:27.000 But what a common practice used to be is you take a horn, buffalo horn, cow horn, and it's hollow because it grows off a protrusion of the skull called the horn core.

02:45:39.000 And you pop the horn off and it's hollow.

02:45:40.000 And what people would do is when you left your campfire in the morning, you would fill that horn with embers and cap it.

02:45:47.000 But there'd be a little pinhole in it just to let a little bit of air in there so it could continue to smolder.

02:45:52.000 And you'd carry that horn all day full of embers.

02:45:55.000 And at night, to start a new fire, you would dump the horn out and rekindle your fire.

02:46:00.000 So when he talks about his father riding out ahead of him with a horn of fire, what that's meant to say is that he knew his father would be waiting out ahead of him with a fire burning.

02:46:11.000 Whoa.

02:46:12.000 Yeah.

02:46:12.000 But Kevin Rivey just blows it to let squirrels know he's coming.

02:46:18.000 Thanks for coming, man.

02:46:19.000 Thank you.

02:46:19.000 Always good to talk to you.

02:46:20.000 We keep saying we've got to organize another hunt.

02:46:23.000 I would love to.

02:46:23.000 We have to do something.

02:46:25.000 Call Brian Callen.

02:46:27.000 I talked to him recently.

02:46:28.000 We'll make it happen.

02:46:29.000 He's one of the funnier guys on Instagram, man.

02:46:31.000 He's one of the funnier guys alive.

02:46:34.000 Bye, everybody!

The Joe Rogan Experience - November 16, 2018

Joe Rogan Experience #1204 - Steven Rinella

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