Speaker 1: This is me eat your podcast coming at you shirtless,
Speaker 1: severely bug bitten in my case, underwear listening podcast. You
Speaker 1: can't predict anything presented by first, like creating proven versatile
Speaker 1: hunting apparel from Marino bass layers to technical outerwear for
Speaker 1: every hunt. First like go farther, stay longer. Okay, we're
Speaker 1: gonna step through a gate marked Sahara Desert. So we're
Speaker 1: gonna enter the Sahara Desert in Texas and it's sixty
Speaker 1: acres well that yeah, that pass is about a square mile. No,
Speaker 1: that pasture is part of the six it's probably about acres,
Speaker 1: you got it? And how many scimitar horned orcs are
Speaker 1: in there? Uh? In that group there are twenty two
Speaker 1: adult females. UM, and I want to say, there's eleven
Speaker 1: newborn kids. And there's nothing special about that rooster's playing
Speaker 1: out over there. I'm interested. And to the right is
Speaker 1: a bunch of orcs quest friends. Okay, So to interview, Uh,
Speaker 1: let me hear what you guys all, what your role
Speaker 1: is here and what you guys do. Okay, I'll start out. Uh,
Speaker 1: my name is Stephen Fulton. I'm the manager of the
Speaker 1: Bamburger ranch. UM I've been I've worked here for about
Speaker 1: eighteen and a half years. UM. I've worked with the
Speaker 1: scimitar horned orcs UH for about ten years now. They've
Speaker 1: been under my my purview. So other than that, when
Speaker 1: it comes to ranch management, everything's up for grabs, every
Speaker 1: job his mind. If I'm if I'm available, I'm Lee Burton.
Speaker 1: I'm the acting director and programs Manager for Conservation Centers
Speaker 1: for Species Survival and based in Austin, Texas and Bamburger Ranches.
Speaker 1: One of our first members. And as a great story
Speaker 1: and UM the scimitar horned ORIX and the founding of
Speaker 1: the Source Population Alliance, which is a consortium model that
Speaker 1: helped bring these animals back and ultimately led to their
Speaker 1: reintroduction and in the wild and chat when do you
Speaker 1: say back? It's not back to Texas. No, that gets
Speaker 1: into the whole topic of these animals are part of
Speaker 1: a metapopulation that are spread out in x c QU environments.
Speaker 1: So we have in in that particular program, the Source
Speaker 1: Population Alliance, there's ten different species UH, most all ungulates
Speaker 1: to cattle species, and the idea was to pick species
Speaker 1: that were endangered or even extinct in the wild. Put
Speaker 1: them in ex c two settings over here, repopulate them,
Speaker 1: do genomics testing on them to ensure you don't get
Speaker 1: in breeding, ETCeteras, that they're sustainable, build up their numbers
Speaker 1: within the hope that one day you can do things
Speaker 1: like have happened in chat reintroduced them and we've had
Speaker 1: three of our species have now been either put back
Speaker 1: or supplemented in the wild. Um. Some of the other
Speaker 1: ones it's not ripe yet. And so the ideas the
Speaker 1: settings here on a ranch like Bamburger are ideal conditions
Speaker 1: as close as you can get to matching what they
Speaker 1: have back at home in sub Sahara, the weather in Texas,
Speaker 1: the terrain, etcetera. UM. And additionally that the other big
Speaker 1: benefit of it is these animals were mostly in Steve
Speaker 1: will tell you the whole story of how it started,
Speaker 1: but we're mostly in zoos, and a lot of them
Speaker 1: weren't faring well, not because the zoos are do anything wrong,
Speaker 1: but just because of space constraints, just not having the
Speaker 1: normal social dynamic that you have when you know breeding, etcetera.
Speaker 1: And so putting them back out here has been UM
Speaker 1: an incredible benefit to the species and has helped these
Speaker 1: populations grow where we can do things like that today,
Speaker 1: and you know, look at the future of doing reintroductions.
Speaker 1: The models interesting and you know, I'm sure you heard,
Speaker 1: you know, the story when they started trying to repopulate
Speaker 1: American bison on the Great Plains. One of the places
Speaker 1: they found them was in the Bronx, you know, and
Speaker 1: sent him. So there's sort of like this irony of
Speaker 1: like loading them up in the Bronx and bringing them
Speaker 1: back up west, you know. And this is like on
Speaker 1: a much much larger scale, right it is. There's some
Speaker 1: other famous stories. There's a which is not one of
Speaker 1: our species, but the Mexican wolf. Um. And I'm not
Speaker 1: a geneticist, but um, I think you need three lines
Speaker 1: at least to be able to not have in breeding.
Speaker 1: And so when they were doing that program back in
Speaker 1: the Southwest, they had two lines. And then it was
Speaker 1: a Canadian guy who had just on vacation, was driving
Speaker 1: through Tucson, saw an ad in the paper to pick
Speaker 1: up a wolf pup. Yes, put it up, put it
Speaker 1: into saddle bag, got about an hour north or something,
Speaker 1: thought better of it. I don't know if he's pissing
Speaker 1: all over his bike or whatever. The you know, Hill
Speaker 1: was doing anyway, and so he stopped turned it over
Speaker 1: to like some sort of animal shelter turned out to
Speaker 1: be the third line. So yeah, So Dave Parsons, who
Speaker 1: led that reintroduction effort on l fishing wildife, told me
Speaker 1: that story, and so yeah, that's why they didn't have
Speaker 1: to bring in the northern subspecies in Yellowstone. So yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of strange stories like that. And Warren
Speaker 1: saw I'm Warren Bluntser own and operak Warren blunts Or
Speaker 1: while off consulting services and work uh all over the
Speaker 1: US and then several foreign countries. And part of my
Speaker 1: business is wildlife capture and we specialized in that, but
Speaker 1: basically we worked with anything to do with land, water
Speaker 1: and wilife. But I'm very very deep be involved with
Speaker 1: exotics and humane treatment, um, the stocking of ranches, rebuilding
Speaker 1: of these animals, and and so we have a we
Speaker 1: have a company that does extensive wildlife captures. So I've
Speaker 1: I've been privileged enough to be on a lot of
Speaker 1: these ranches like the Bamburger Ranch and get to see
Speaker 1: firsthand what's really done and and help bring some of
Speaker 1: those animals back and and and help advise on their
Speaker 1: welfare and their their general well being. So Warrant was
Speaker 1: also retired to game Warden Parks and Wildlife. Oh really, Okay,
Speaker 1: So I was a conservation officer as y'all know them,
Speaker 1: and state game Warden for Texas for twenty five years
Speaker 1: and sit on the Texas Parks and Wildlife Whitetail UH
Speaker 1: Advisory Board. And I sit on several disease boards that
Speaker 1: helped formulate and I testify quite a bit to wilife
Speaker 1: disease issues and try to get to try to educate.
Speaker 1: That's the biggest issue that I see in this wildlife
Speaker 1: world now is the the separation between what the general
Speaker 1: public understands about wildlife management and what it really means
Speaker 1: and and how many benefits a person that that took
Speaker 1: a ranch like this and brought it back to the state.
Speaker 1: It's end because they're shrinking fast. It's getting more and
Speaker 1: more of a challenge for generations to hold onto these
Speaker 1: ranches and these these are really special places. Okay, So
Speaker 1: we're gonna jump in this pickup, go through the gate
Speaker 1: marked Sahara Desert, and then we're gonna go find a
Speaker 1: female that just dropped a calf within the last forty
Speaker 1: eight hours and try to convince her to let us
Speaker 1: handle the calf and put the ear tag into it
Speaker 1: so they keep track of it. Whoa, here's serious horns.
Speaker 1: So to see a few of those up about two
Speaker 1: weeks old. Let can see the color of them, howethery
Speaker 1: or not white like the females they're they're more of
Speaker 1: a tan, a baby color, which with this dry grass
Speaker 1: they blend in very well. I'm still to tell the
Speaker 1: males and females on these things. Man, it's like they
Speaker 1: has to the hook of the horn is one of
Speaker 1: the things. This is an all female herd. Oh so
Speaker 1: that makes me so yeah, well hard to find a male.
Speaker 1: The metals of mis do the feeding out of this track? Absolutely? Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're pretty well feeds. So what's the what's the orcs
Speaker 1: that they you know, I've done that. I drew a
Speaker 1: tag to hunt the you know, the off range New
Speaker 1: Mexico or that's gems box, that's but Gemsbock orcs. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's four kinds. And who they are too, Arabians, Yeah, Cementars,
Speaker 1: Gemsbock and what's the other I'll stable out of the
Speaker 1: other three, I mean the other three besides these foreign
Speaker 1: country you know, stable isn't pretty good shape. It's the
Speaker 1: least threatened. Um. I think all the other ones are
Speaker 1: a greater concerned. So the gams boxes hurting non native
Speaker 1: ranch um some you don't see him as much as
Speaker 1: these guys. But yeah they are. I'm not what I'm saying,
Speaker 1: like where they come from? Are they stable? It depends
Speaker 1: on what part of the country you're looking at. Some
Speaker 1: of them, the poaching is horrible on them, and uh,
Speaker 1: you know that those people are starting this, so obviously
Speaker 1: they're gonna eat some of them. But where they're really protected.
Speaker 1: A lot of a lot of the game ranches now
Speaker 1: in in Africa were in their concessions are are game ranches,
Speaker 1: so they can protect them down. They've got some good
Speaker 1: herds over there. The games Boc is in much better
Speaker 1: shape than the Semitar. Yeah. You know, uh, if there's
Speaker 1: some males in here, would you see a lot more
Speaker 1: broken arms on everybody? It seems like some pretty quiz
Speaker 1: a horn length on those? Yeah? Yeah, I mean again,
Speaker 1: these are these are this is my oldest herd of
Speaker 1: females um. So these these animals are nine years old,
Speaker 1: so a lot of them are uh. And then with
Speaker 1: with that freeze two februaries ago, we've we've lost quite
Speaker 1: a few horns on these older females. But in most
Speaker 1: of the most cases, the females don't fight much, so
Speaker 1: they don't really have much use to battle and and
Speaker 1: break off horns. But when you when the male's got
Speaker 1: a broken horn, that's is it more from fighting or
Speaker 1: freezing for us fighting? Okay, so they do do that.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I don't know if that is to miss.
Speaker 1: But the rule of that exception is that we've never
Speaker 1: been tim below zero. It's something this country. So we
Speaker 1: had some of these these true horns two or three
Speaker 1: months later just fall off of our ear damage the
Speaker 1: ears froze off of and so we had a we
Speaker 1: had if we see this female separate, yeah, that's from freezing. No, no,
Speaker 1: she's separate because this is the one we're coming to
Speaker 1: look at. You tell what I'm saying. She got one horn?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I know, but the one horn yet that
Speaker 1: froze off. Do you guys go with bull calf or
Speaker 1: bull kid? Male kid? So there's a calf, yeah, he said.
Speaker 1: She's she's super protective, so she's basically standing over it.
Speaker 1: So this this will be interesting. How long How long
Speaker 1: is that calf born? Uh? I think yesterday afternoon or
Speaker 1: evening so hard. Yeah, and we're not sure if it's
Speaker 1: a male or female calfolic again because she's been super protective.
Speaker 1: Um so I'm gonna get out. I would yeah, I
Speaker 1: would know, I would. I would be korean. I'd be careful,
Speaker 1: keep keep the truck between you and it. Yeah, yeah
Speaker 1: they are okay, So yeah you got you got a bench.
Speaker 1: She's growling at you. Yeah, they're been. It's very vocal.
Speaker 1: Let they get I just so do you want some
Speaker 1: distraction though? Ah? Yeah, this one y'all want. Haven't letting
Speaker 1: me in? Finch'll tink? Wow. Yeah, I'm a good volunteer.
Speaker 1: I would hate for you to get I have gove
Speaker 1: into the front of the truck before with one of
Speaker 1: these narrows narrowly missed me. Um so how do how
Speaker 1: do they get how do they get the hook in you?
Speaker 1: When they're there horns helping, They'll put their hand the
Speaker 1: forehead all the way down there. That's what they do.
Speaker 1: They come in. Also, they also use that horn like
Speaker 1: a club. Oh the dear, so they'll they'll hit you
Speaker 1: with it um, then the hookie with a harn as
Speaker 1: those far as we're made out of elements, how they
Speaker 1: feel a line. If they don't get a good line,
Speaker 1: just the horn itself coming out of we'll lose a
Speaker 1: filament inside the flesh on bad something distracted about that
Speaker 1: thing stuck with them. These are serious business to get
Speaker 1: taken care of, or you can lose your arm, your leg.
Speaker 1: But what we're saying about with lines, so when they
Speaker 1: get a hit on the line or whatever, the predator
Speaker 1: is after him, if they don't kill them a lot
Speaker 1: of times just the horn itself see the film, it's
Speaker 1: hanging off that horn right there. It'll stay inside that wound.
Speaker 1: It'll get infected and they'll die. You ask him like
Speaker 1: like like splintered, like splinter it that cast only about
Speaker 1: two days olmy yesterday. Every year, this one is very protective.
Speaker 1: How many calves that she produced every year for at
Speaker 1: least last ten years? Just a year and there somewhere
Speaker 1: do a natural breathing or natural except for it's rased.
Speaker 1: I've got I've got a herd bull that I want,
Speaker 1: you know, pass the jeans along and he'll get it.
Speaker 1: He'll get a herd of females, and then the other
Speaker 1: herd of females has a different genetic background, so or
Speaker 1: it'll get a different bull. Maybe you'll you'll, let's put
Speaker 1: that's how you got your university. Make much closely? Maybe
Speaker 1: m window okay, Chris Stee if you want us to
Speaker 1: move off, it's easier just with no, No, it's not
Speaker 1: gonna be easy anyway anyway, or for him, I've been there.
Speaker 1: I just formulated a plan. Drive over it, Drive over it,
Speaker 1: and it's just under the trump there it is. It's
Speaker 1: a little boy. I think, Yeah, I'm good. Feels like it.
Speaker 1: So it feels like future ball, all right. So this
Speaker 1: is just a tag daughter. This is basically the same thing.
Speaker 1: This is the only male when we'll keep this year,
Speaker 1: just because, as I said earlier, the geneticist that's doing
Speaker 1: the work on these animals, I thought this female was
Speaker 1: a particular interest genetically. So a lot of times we'll
Speaker 1: take and we'll take the tag and we'll pull the
Speaker 1: tag out like that to get air behind it, and
Speaker 1: they'll prevent it from getting sometimes since but they're not
Speaker 1: bad about getting infected at all. Yeah, it was a healthy, strong,
Speaker 1: young BULLI you want fasten the room, so you'll were
Speaker 1: you were you guys like my kids are all grown up,
Speaker 1: I'll hand it to you that way. And my nap
Speaker 1: all the all the all the kids, whether it's bull
Speaker 1: kids or a little fellas kids. I sell them as
Speaker 1: he is of course once they're older. So I feel
Speaker 1: it right now like we're snuggling and he's loving this
Speaker 1: is his heart rate like way up because heart right
Speaker 1: up the scary so we can and we also want
Speaker 1: to take turn. You know, you want one of these
Speaker 1: that this there's really only two times a year that
Speaker 1: we have this kind of contact with them, and that's
Speaker 1: this time of year. And it's usually only about six weeks,
Speaker 1: a six week period um where they're where they're burthen
Speaker 1: because I put the put both males in with each
Speaker 1: one of the herds um at the same time of
Speaker 1: the year. So well, how do you know the how
Speaker 1: do you get all the females cycle at the same time.
Speaker 1: They tend to cycle together once you put them in.
Speaker 1: Once you if you if you don't have them reproducing constantly, um,
Speaker 1: they tend to cycle together. So in that six week period,
Speaker 1: they'll all cycle and they'll all get pregnant. That's been
Speaker 1: my experience now in in in a wild population um
Speaker 1: where you got the bulls with them constantly. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: sure the cycle their cycles are are are off set.
Speaker 1: Quite a lot of their past ranges were all they're
Speaker 1: breeding cycles to evolutionary were synchronized with vegetation range, and
Speaker 1: that that was their biological signal that what they were
Speaker 1: gonna do, they're gonna do. And so it's kind of
Speaker 1: the evolution has taken it different. This is a different country,
Speaker 1: but they're still, like you said, they're still evolutionary. They're
Speaker 1: still locked in on it, and it's amazing. That's why
Speaker 1: you see all those animals giving birth on that grass.
Speaker 1: It's a hell of a feat. I mean from four
Speaker 1: years ago there being none in their native range and
Speaker 1: now there's a hunderfitted there and they're having kids. Those
Speaker 1: kids are considered you know, of native stock, so they're
Speaker 1: no longer considered endangered. This baby calf, let's just say
Speaker 1: that he individually is tested or there's a sense of
Speaker 1: what his genetics is. Is it possible that he would
Speaker 1: be a chosen one time and these animals I tagged
Speaker 1: him for that purpose because again that that side, that
Speaker 1: damn was was told to me that of particular interest genetically.
Speaker 1: So my plan is to keep all of her all
Speaker 1: springs is for as long as she reproduces. I wish
Speaker 1: I'd known that, you know, four or five years ago,
Speaker 1: because I've had a lot more of her all free
Speaker 1: representation on the range. The other aspect of having animals
Speaker 1: out in a facility like this and multiple facilities and
Speaker 1: this idea, this meta population, is that we've had to
Speaker 1: rethink the number of individuals that you have to have
Speaker 1: to keep your genetic variability um. And the goal is
Speaker 1: in this program over the next hundred years to maintain
Speaker 1: at least ninety and in the zoo world if you
Speaker 1: keep them only in zoos, just because they don't have
Speaker 1: the space to do that. I mean they there's something
Speaker 1: like a total of a hundred and fifty eight of
Speaker 1: the a zoos, they had roughly about eleven thousand acres,
Speaker 1: and and just within our program it's closer to a
Speaker 1: hundred thousand acres. And so the number of animals you
Speaker 1: can get, you know, they used to think maybe you
Speaker 1: need a few hundred, a couple undred, you know, now
Speaker 1: they know you need well over a thousand, even two
Speaker 1: thousand maybe or more. So that that is another aspect
Speaker 1: of it that you know, having them in places like
Speaker 1: this beyond just individual genes, you don't want to lose
Speaker 1: variability at all, as you can and a lot of
Speaker 1: times zoos running to breeding problems just some species just
Speaker 1: don't want breading a zoo. You know, they they will,
Speaker 1: but they don't like it, and so they missed times
Speaker 1: and times or years and years or decades, and so
Speaker 1: you can get behind quick. So when you have a
Speaker 1: free range situation and and individuals like he's keeping track
Speaker 1: of and and and switching out to keep that variability
Speaker 1: in there. They that's there's where the truth the true
Speaker 1: herds do well, and they're they're much more likely to
Speaker 1: do better when they go back into the wild, being
Speaker 1: in a wild or semi wild setting like this, you know,
Speaker 1: and and having those traits. Yeah, there's gonna be some
Speaker 1: fighting sometimes whatever, but obviously that serves them well, you know,
Speaker 1: when they go back in versus a more docile animal.
Speaker 1: That's you know, several generations removed in a a zoo
Speaker 1: environment and whatever the appo genetics is, however, all that
Speaker 1: works or you know, just um, just train and behavior,
Speaker 1: not being passed on. So these animals are are likely
Speaker 1: to do well and they have so far. All right,
Speaker 1: now that we've visited the the young do you guys
Speaker 1: go by calf? What do you there's a bull cow calf?
Speaker 1: What is it in orcs? Really? Is that universally accepted
Speaker 1: bull cow calf? All right, now that we've visited the
Speaker 1: cow calfe unit of the scimitar horned ORCS, it's like,
Speaker 1: walk me through, um, how that like, walk me through
Speaker 1: how that animal fits into the broader picture of what
Speaker 1: happens with the Conservation Centers for Species Survival, Like like
Speaker 1: where it fits into the hierarchy of activities. Sure, So
Speaker 1: the scimitar horned Orix is one of the ten species
Speaker 1: and what's known as the Source Population Alliance, and that's
Speaker 1: one of the programs under Conservation Centers for Species Survival
Speaker 1: or C two S two for short. And we have
Speaker 1: a number of different programs. Um, that one is focused
Speaker 1: so other species um including cheetah, red wolf, southern black rhino.
Speaker 1: The Source Population Alliance folcus is just on ungulate species
Speaker 1: and it was originally four species, which were the ones
Speaker 1: that we kind of discussed earlier and were the most
Speaker 1: critically endangered or in the case of the scimitar horned Orix,
Speaker 1: was extinct in the wild. It also included the addicts
Speaker 1: and doma gazelle. Uh. And then the four species was
Speaker 1: the sable antelope, which is not that's actually doing fairly well.
Speaker 1: They were the original four and the concept was created
Speaker 1: back in two thousand and five. There was an out
Speaker 1: scientists named David Wilt Smithsonian. He was a reproductive physiologist
Speaker 1: and did some great work including artificial insemination, etcetera. He noticed,
Speaker 1: among others, that these animals, these angular species, were just
Speaker 1: not doing as well in a zoo environment as they hoped.
Speaker 1: So they looked at that. They were concerned because of
Speaker 1: the space constraints, uh, not having normal social dynamics. This
Speaker 1: idea of you needed to have if you wanted to
Speaker 1: keep them alive in these ex C two settings, having
Speaker 1: a meta population explained x C two an n C T.
Speaker 1: Yeah that's from archaeology, but it's yeah, it's one of
Speaker 1: these sort of terms. It sounds fancy, it's pretty simple.
Speaker 1: So n C two is just their native range, their
Speaker 1: native habitat where they live. So again with with these guys,
Speaker 1: the three we just mentioned, the scimitar, addicts and doma
Speaker 1: gazelle that's sub Sahara Africa, okay, and so um that
Speaker 1: would be n C two XC two is in were
Speaker 1: removed out of that it's not their home range, okay.
Speaker 1: And so the idea was we wanted to have you know,
Speaker 1: the zoo world was set up for way back when
Speaker 1: for a lot of reasons. Um, but the conservation aspects
Speaker 1: several decades ago was there was I guess you'd say
Speaker 1: re energized, refocused, and so these species survival plans were
Speaker 1: created to try to maintain these populations and an ex
Speaker 1: C two environment for a lot of reasons. And one
Speaker 1: of the reasons was to have an assurance population if
Speaker 1: something happened to the animals in their n C two
Speaker 1: and the scimitar is a great example of that if
Speaker 1: they go extinct. You don't want to lose the species
Speaker 1: altogether if they get extirpated in that case. So these
Speaker 1: species survival plans were set up and these animals were
Speaker 1: bred for several decades in the zoo world, and they
Speaker 1: did a great job. Again, they had the stud books,
Speaker 1: they knew the lineages, you know, they knew, Hey, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna take this bull and breed it with this female
Speaker 1: over here. But they were space constrained. And also again
Speaker 1: it removed the natural conditions. It just take place and
Speaker 1: how these species interact and compete, right and you know,
Speaker 1: survival to fitnest, all that stuff. So David Wilton noticed this,
Speaker 1: and so he and some other scientists got together and
Speaker 1: some of our facilities and said, hey, let's take some
Speaker 1: of these animals. Let's put them in you know, places
Speaker 1: like in Bamberg already had simitar horned orcs, which is
Speaker 1: a great story in and of itself that predates this.
Speaker 1: But let's put them in these facilities where they have
Speaker 1: you know, big ranges that are not truly they're not
Speaker 1: in C. Two, but there they closely mimic where they
Speaker 1: come from. And and so you know, if we put
Speaker 1: them in there, we think they're gonna do a lot better.
Speaker 1: You know, they're gonna breathe, their numbers are gonna build
Speaker 1: up um and and our motto at C. TOWS two
Speaker 1: is grow optimized return, So you know, grow the herd,
Speaker 1: optimize the genetics, and then hopefully, you know, when possible,
Speaker 1: return them into their native habitats. Do you guys feel
Speaker 1: the last part of that, the return part, uh, the
Speaker 1: strikes me as being immensely important. But you hear people
Speaker 1: offen like you hear people hold the belief that, like, well,
Speaker 1: it can't be like let's let's say we take the
Speaker 1: scimitar horned orcs, which which effectively, if I'm not mistaken,
Speaker 1: like it went extinct in the wild. Yeah, in the
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties was when they think that the last ones
Speaker 1: in the wild gone ceased to be a wild animal,
Speaker 1: Like I feel that you couldn't then say like, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: but we have them in Texas, so that's good enough.
Speaker 1: I completely agree. That seems like a sentiment you hear
Speaker 1: a lot. Well, um, I think maybe you hear that
Speaker 1: among some people they just like to have them as
Speaker 1: I hate to say, ornaments or just property. We clearly
Speaker 1: don't view it that way because we're a conservation organ
Speaker 1: You rolled the return into it exactly. So when when
Speaker 1: this who's the guy you're talking about, the geneticist or
Speaker 1: David Willed, He was reproductive biologists. His interest was in
Speaker 1: things that his interest was in species that were imperiled.
Speaker 1: Absolutely on their name like that that was sort of
Speaker 1: the that was sort of the thing that they had
Speaker 1: to that had to be there for him to want
Speaker 1: to absolutely, and and he was from Smithsonian and they've
Speaker 1: done a lot of great work. They do our genomics
Speaker 1: testing right now. Um and you know they did the
Speaker 1: first AI on a cheetah a couple of years ago.
Speaker 1: And so you guys have what we should have gone
Speaker 1: looked at the cheetahs. Crint We Well they're running around
Speaker 1: out here somewhere Steve can find. Um. Uh, they're a
Speaker 1: variety of facilities. Yeah, yeah, there's and they're spread all over.
Speaker 1: So we're we're mostly North America and with a heavy
Speaker 1: emphasis and Texas again because climate would have you ranch ran. Yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: and and breeding him and that that was another program
Speaker 1: that was his success. Uh. That was about ten years
Speaker 1: ago again kind of the same story. Cheat is definitely
Speaker 1: smaller gene pool. Correct, that's correct because there were two
Speaker 1: founder events with the cheetah. One was about a hundred
Speaker 1: thousand years ago. They don't know for sure what had happened,
Speaker 1: but you know, population got very small, and then about
Speaker 1: twelve thousand years ago it happened again. Which is why
Speaker 1: you can take in Africa in Africa, which is why
Speaker 1: you can take um, you know, skin from one cheetah
Speaker 1: and grafted on to another one. That's you know, two
Speaker 1: countries over, and it'll take it. They're that closely related. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's crazy when they went through a major bottleneck, yes, twice,
Speaker 1: and so that's why are just insane to think about. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean in geologic terms, that's recent, right exactly. And
Speaker 1: um is there is there an estimate how tight the
Speaker 1: bottleneck was? Uh, in terms of a number of individuals,
Speaker 1: I don't know off top of my head. I've heard
Speaker 1: some I don't know if they know exactly. I mean
Speaker 1: even humans went through that, you know, seventy humans exactly exactly. So, um,
Speaker 1: so cheetahs are already in a bad state. And then
Speaker 1: of course what's happened in the wild, and so this
Speaker 1: idea of you know, breeding them and the North American
Speaker 1: population it was, I want to say it was strug
Speaker 1: glean but not doing as well as they needed it
Speaker 1: to do. So we came up this idea we collectively,
Speaker 1: um scientists and our facilities about hey, let's set up
Speaker 1: these breeding centers, share best practices, you know, do all
Speaker 1: these things. And and cheetah's successfully bred. Their numbers shot
Speaker 1: way up in just five years, population I think nearly
Speaker 1: doubled from the North American population. So that was a success,
Speaker 1: and so we saw this model replicating UM over and
Speaker 1: over and over again. Now every species is different, right,
Speaker 1: but sorry, could you explain what constitutes the North American
Speaker 1: cheetah population? UM? Well, that gets complicated, but historically they
Speaker 1: were in a Z A Zoos um so Association Zoos
Speaker 1: and Aquariums. That's the big organization. UM. It used to
Speaker 1: be almost all zoos that were a credit or part
Speaker 1: of that. There's another organization which is z A A
Speaker 1: which is kind of a splinter group. UM. But in
Speaker 1: any case, all there there's cheetahs who are in that.
Speaker 1: We have stud books on them, and it's UM I
Speaker 1: think it's several hundred. I think it's over five hundred now,
Speaker 1: between those those two groups. But then you have all
Speaker 1: of the illegal wildlife trade and depending on what the
Speaker 1: laws are, you know, for each individual species. So there's
Speaker 1: more cats obviously out there than that. UM. We're actually
Speaker 1: on that. We're trying to assist with an effort to
Speaker 1: what's called integrate these stud books between the various organizations
Speaker 1: and international in the hopes of getting a better model
Speaker 1: to manage these animals right, and and make breeding recommendations.
Speaker 1: We've done some genomics testing already, and to do more
Speaker 1: of it because for for them it's especially important. You know,
Speaker 1: like Steve was saying, he's got this special scimitar, right, Well,
Speaker 1: if you find one or two cheetahs, you know, you
Speaker 1: may not be able to find those genes almost anywhere else,
Speaker 1: and you don't want to lose those. Yeah, that's a question.
Speaker 1: That's what I need to understand before I could really
Speaker 1: go much fur other here is h are you guys
Speaker 1: with the Sika deer in Maryland? Okay? So they got
Speaker 1: now and the Delmarva Peninsula, so the east shore of
Speaker 1: Chesapeake Bay. I mean I think got what ten thousand
Speaker 1: of them now or something. They have an absolutely unknown
Speaker 1: amount of deer because there's no way to there's no
Speaker 1: way to measure them. But what they're able. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: gotta pile them and they're able to go to there.
Speaker 1: You could I have had a guy take me out
Speaker 1: the boat. The islands barely there anymore, but he's able
Speaker 1: to be Like you know, Bob Johnson had six on
Speaker 1: that island and that's it. He got him, and he
Speaker 1: got him from some guy in England, and the guy
Speaker 1: in England got him from some guy there, and no
Speaker 1: six swam to the beach and not the ten thousand
Speaker 1: of them. There's no like and then some other guy
Speaker 1: let some go. Right, it's just like you know where
Speaker 1: they came from. But how many people how many people
Speaker 1: cut loosa cheetah or cut loose's? I mean, how many
Speaker 1: people go to Africa and bring home a scimitar horned
Speaker 1: works the Ohio Zoo were at well or the private
Speaker 1: collection rather that all of a sudden, well close to
Speaker 1: twenty years ago, the the importation of these animals was
Speaker 1: um basically cut off, I think primarily because of disease considerations.
Speaker 1: So how many years ago I think it was close
Speaker 1: to twenty now. Yeah, so it's actually a problem in
Speaker 1: some like for instance, uh, there's about a little bit
Speaker 1: less than forty Southern black rhinos in North America. We
Speaker 1: manage that population conjunction with the International Rhino Foundation, and
Speaker 1: we need some more bloodlines. But importing them is almost
Speaker 1: impossible now because the political situation. But on the ungulate side, um,
Speaker 1: it's it's just as difficult because you can't get them
Speaker 1: in so you kind of have what you have now.
Speaker 1: But yeah, that's that's what I'm trying to get at,
Speaker 1: is do you now know? Let me give you no
Speaker 1: let me give you no. Example. Um, in the late
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds, when people were thinking themselves, holy ship, like
Speaker 1: the American bison is going to go extinct, they would
Speaker 1: write letters to each other and be like he has four,
Speaker 1: he has three, right, and you kind of knew like,
Speaker 1: well he got his that way, he got his that way. Uh,
Speaker 1: how is it is? There is there like in Texas
Speaker 1: an unknown number of times when someone managed to try
Speaker 1: ship uh scimitar horned orcs to Texas or can you
Speaker 1: be like, oh no, there was that event, that event
Speaker 1: and that event that led them to be dispersed around
Speaker 1: the state. Well, population dynamics change some of that in itself. Unbeknowing, dush,
Speaker 1: it's a population dynamics. So these areas were changing. You had,
Speaker 1: you had perilous storms hit, you had equipment failures where
Speaker 1: they escaped like you're talking about on the island. So
Speaker 1: so as as time moved forward with the escapes and
Speaker 1: the evolution of wildlife diseases, a lot of these endeavors
Speaker 1: got more and more complicated. What endeavors. Uh, where you
Speaker 1: had someone had a pin failure, a pasture failure, or
Speaker 1: a ranch failure, fence, water gap, whatever, and they escaped.
Speaker 1: And in that period of time, population was growing. But
Speaker 1: at the same time, evolution of wildlife diseases for changing
Speaker 1: right in front of our our eyes. Now, I gotta
Speaker 1: let me, I gotta re ask my question. Well, I
Speaker 1: think I know I'm not explaining the question. Let me.
Speaker 1: I think I know you may be going with this,
Speaker 1: so I have a really clean way to do it.
Speaker 1: How many times that the human being How many times
Speaker 1: did human beings collect orcs in the Sahara desert and
Speaker 1: dry and fly them, ship, sail them whatever, and caught
Speaker 1: them loose in Texas once? Um, I don't know the
Speaker 1: exact Do you know the answer to that? It was enough? Well,
Speaker 1: here's the thing. It depends on the species, right, So
Speaker 1: if there weren't on the e s A prior to
Speaker 1: this importation, man, if they were on the s A,
Speaker 1: then yeah, you can import kind of whatever back in
Speaker 1: the day in Texas. So I don't think they were tracked. Now,
Speaker 1: the zoos tracked them very closely because they had stud
Speaker 1: books and if they were in a species survival plan
Speaker 1: they know exactly and you know they exchange them and
Speaker 1: you know, bringing reasons all that. But the other species
Speaker 1: that came in prior to you know, this band, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we don't really know. But they weren't thousands and thousands
Speaker 1: of events like this. These were these were very well
Speaker 1: founded connections in a lot of cases and and limited
Speaker 1: numbers of imports. They weren't. They weren't just across the
Speaker 1: country importing them like you, like you one may have think.
Speaker 1: But what happened is is if you if you look
Speaker 1: at the habitat, the terrain and topography via Texas, if
Speaker 1: you spend someone around and you can put them in
Speaker 1: a certain part of Texas, they can't hardly tell if
Speaker 1: they're in Africa Texas. So what happened the synonymous habitat
Speaker 1: the weather belts were very conducive to those animals, making
Speaker 1: it so boom boom boom. The stool went from three
Speaker 1: legs to five legs, to ten legs to twelve legs.
Speaker 1: So it wasn't hundreds of events, it was the responsibility
Speaker 1: are the preclude however you want to look at it
Speaker 1: of a group of ranchers that started this from from
Speaker 1: from a from a limited number of individuals. They sold them,
Speaker 1: they trade them, and then you throw in the escapes
Speaker 1: the other things that perpetuate them. Because we've got in
Speaker 1: some of these counties we've got free range and exotics.
Speaker 1: No one really owns them. But do you know, I'll
Speaker 1: put it to rest, like I understand that the answer
Speaker 1: is not as clean as I'd like it to be.
Speaker 1: But what was the first year that that someone What
Speaker 1: was the first year that someone delivered an or a
Speaker 1: scimitar horned orcs to the United States of America. I
Speaker 1: don't know that. I don't know that. I do know.
Speaker 1: Then in the nineteen thirties, thing was the San Antonio Zoo.
Speaker 1: UM I forget his first name, Mr Friederick. He got
Speaker 1: some surplus animals they they had and put them on
Speaker 1: a couple of ranches around here. And then it wasn't
Speaker 1: too long after that. I'm sure you're familiar with the
Speaker 1: King Ranch, right, They got some exotics down here as well.
Speaker 1: And there were a couple of other famous um exotic
Speaker 1: ranches in Texas. There's one in the hill country called
Speaker 1: the Yo Ranch, and so a lot of these animals
Speaker 1: just came, you know, they were there and so that
Speaker 1: that was around when yes, and then you had maybe
Speaker 1: some surplus animals from zoos or whatever happened way back,
Speaker 1: and you know they were, however, put to pasture any
Speaker 1: certain places. The scimitar is a different story though, because
Speaker 1: there was only a smattering of those animals, and I'll
Speaker 1: let Steve tell the whole story. But zoos, a few
Speaker 1: zoos around the country had them in. Basically almost the
Speaker 1: entire world's population was gathered up. And so uh here
Speaker 1: on the ranch it was in uh n UM that
Speaker 1: don't quote me on that. It might have been eighty
Speaker 1: five UM. But Mr Barenberger was a board member for
Speaker 1: the Santonio Zoo UM and they they had the grand
Speaker 1: meeting to discuss the plight of the scimitar armed rics
Speaker 1: and a couple of the other ungulates that we worked
Speaker 1: with with the Source Population Alliance UM. And he was
Speaker 1: privy to that as a board member UM, and he volunteered,
Speaker 1: basically volunteered UH to offer his ranch up as a
Speaker 1: place where they can bring bring all the known genetics
Speaker 1: to one spot to begin this species survival program UM.
Speaker 1: So at that time or short after that meeting, UM,
Speaker 1: they brought in this as as a member of the
Speaker 1: a z A UH. They brought uh twenty eight animals
Speaker 1: and those twenty animals representing thirty one different bloodlines to
Speaker 1: begin the species of survival program right here on the ranch.
Speaker 1: And it was that that sort of was that like
Speaker 1: the Texas bottleneck of that species. There was there probably
Speaker 1: quite a bit more that weren't included in that initial
Speaker 1: round up. Well, they're likely were other animals that were
Speaker 1: not as a animals, but not many. I mean, that
Speaker 1: was pretty much it. I mean, he he literally saved
Speaker 1: the scimitar, horned or x. But that seems incredibly diverse
Speaker 1: for such a you know, very few animals. But but
Speaker 1: they but they were very successful at breeding and perpetuating.
Speaker 1: Whereas in the zoo environment they were there, We knew
Speaker 1: they were there. We had genetics going on that that
Speaker 1: you could see and touch, but not to the extent
Speaker 1: of what they did when they put them on a
Speaker 1: on an open range, quote ranch, whether high finch or
Speaker 1: low finch, most of them are behind high fench because
Speaker 1: they'll get a wipe from you. But but the the
Speaker 1: perpetuation of them was astounding, how well they did. And
Speaker 1: that's almost exactly right. We were fortunate because there are
Speaker 1: that many bloodlines and they had come from different places.
Speaker 1: There was some risks there because you know, what if
Speaker 1: we had had a disease outbreak or something and you know,
Speaker 1: you got your eggs in one basket. Which is why
Speaker 1: this idea and why we use the term meta population
Speaker 1: is that you've got a population here, over here, over here,
Speaker 1: and together they make up this greater population, which is
Speaker 1: in a reservoir, if you will, an assurance population. Um.
Speaker 1: But but you know, thank goodness that they did that
Speaker 1: because it's you know, im possible as animal would not
Speaker 1: be around if that were not the case, not be
Speaker 1: around period. Not just in Texas, correct, And I think
Speaker 1: there were some other individuals um maybe in Europe and
Speaker 1: some other places, but uh, this was certainly North America
Speaker 1: and and may have been I don't know, see if
Speaker 1: you know, the largest and only sizeable population in the world.
Speaker 1: I mean, it was certainly a cornerstone of it. So
Speaker 1: it's very important to what you were talking about, the
Speaker 1: return aspect, because you know that very possibly, if not likely,
Speaker 1: would not have occurred with without someone like Mr Bamburger's
Speaker 1: vision to do that. And and some of this was
Speaker 1: not just chance. These these these group of individuals, they
Speaker 1: they knew of the sononymunity of Texas versus Africa, and
Speaker 1: they theorize if they could just get them here, they
Speaker 1: would they would perpetuate because of the synonymous of the
Speaker 1: two countries, the habitat, the temperatures and all that. And
Speaker 1: of course they were right. You know how it seems
Speaker 1: like you hear more and more about these, particularly over
Speaker 1: the last decades, Like the idea of a seed bank
Speaker 1: right where you have where they built that one in Northon,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I think that's right, nor somewhere where
Speaker 1: they have this they built this perfectly, that's right, stable
Speaker 1: underground climate and they just store seeds there right that
Speaker 1: there would be some global catastrophe and then you start
Speaker 1: from scratch, right, plant stuff in the ground. Um that
Speaker 1: with with mammals, I'm guessing that doesn't work to go
Speaker 1: and uh have like a bank of frozen embryos that
Speaker 1: you can't do that they don't like lose, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, like without sort of a continuity of like
Speaker 1: we watched today, Right, we go out and there's a
Speaker 1: mother and she you know you you wanna get her calf,
Speaker 1: put it your tag in it. She doesn't want you
Speaker 1: to do that, right, she presumably picked where she was
Speaker 1: gonna give birth, Like, this is stuff she is exposed to,
Speaker 1: has done it before, learned from it. Um, I imagine
Speaker 1: you thaw that stuff out and do it like you
Speaker 1: probably you have to lose something like a herd, like
Speaker 1: a sort of like her dynamic knowledge base or something
Speaker 1: that's done. So yeah, that's what I mean. Like you
Speaker 1: know what I mean, like how important is it to
Speaker 1: have because like appartially, if you look like I'd never
Speaker 1: give animals and zoos any I don't give me any credit.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm like, Okay, there it is, but it's
Speaker 1: not right. It is, but it's not. It's species specific.
Speaker 1: It is, and it's a different it's it's all a
Speaker 1: different theater versus what there's. There's great merit to zoos,
Speaker 1: but they have their limits and the the the the
Speaker 1: issues with the property having the propensity to look like
Speaker 1: act like ce like function like the open range. There's
Speaker 1: no substitute for him because they do a lot of
Speaker 1: different things out there they don't do in a captive situation.
Speaker 1: Yeah that's what. Yeah, that's the thing. Maybe it's probably
Speaker 1: not easily answered, but well, there's some species like wolves
Speaker 1: where it's far and I'm you know, I'm not wolf biologists,
Speaker 1: but if you turn them loose, they just kind of
Speaker 1: know it to do, right, That's that's not necessarily the case.
Speaker 1: The mother has to teach them how to hunt and
Speaker 1: talk about big cats in a way. Right. So but
Speaker 1: to your point, I mean, that's that's relevant. But yeah,
Speaker 1: we we do do UM. There's an O site capture
Speaker 1: you know, certain species and sperm banking UM. And even
Speaker 1: if the species doesn't go extinct, you want to keep
Speaker 1: some of those genetic traits. Like for example, we have
Speaker 1: some rhinos that you know are have reproductive pathologies or
Speaker 1: you know, old or whatever, but they might have some
Speaker 1: valuable traits. Well we can't breed them, but um as
Speaker 1: AI techniques artificial insemination get developed. Having a sperm bank
Speaker 1: that becomes very useful in the future, right to reintroduce
Speaker 1: those genetics so that animal, the line of that animal
Speaker 1: is not lost. So even if this species doesn't go extinct,
Speaker 1: that's still important. But yeah, obviously there you know, there's
Speaker 1: some other dynamics in there about behavior and training, and
Speaker 1: you know, some of these species you you have to
Speaker 1: maintain animals on the around doing what they do in
Speaker 1: order to make that egg bank seed bank. Let's try
Speaker 1: an actual resource. Well yeah, although even with the newer techniques,
Speaker 1: there's some new organizations that are foreigned about talking about
Speaker 1: trying to bring back the wooly mammoth. It's yeah, so
Speaker 1: are you guys into that or is that annoy you guys? Um,
Speaker 1: let me put it this way, It's not what we do, okay. Um. However,
Speaker 1: there are maybe some advantages of the in terms of
Speaker 1: what you learn and some applications genetically. Yeah, because they're
Speaker 1: not bringing back the woe mammoth. Well, they're they're messing
Speaker 1: with an age and el to eventually accumulate a bunch
Speaker 1: of traits where you can be like, that's probably a
Speaker 1: little bit what it looked like. So but although you
Speaker 1: never know it happened in the future, it is a
Speaker 1: little annoying because but the stuff blinking out right now,
Speaker 1: it's like, we have a thing we don't even you know,
Speaker 1: we have a thing that went extinct, I don't know,
Speaker 1: thirteen twenty thousand years ago for unknown causes. But meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the you know, the mammals on the planet have a
Speaker 1: sort of viable pathway to extinction and we're in and
Speaker 1: now you've got all these like celebrity investors in this
Speaker 1: whole mammoth project, or even we haven't we haven't sequenced
Speaker 1: all of our animals yet in the SPA, so there's
Speaker 1: an a neat immediate need, you know, for that. And
Speaker 1: you know they're still alive and most of them are
Speaker 1: still in the wild, so absolutely. Um. You know, again,
Speaker 1: there are some techniques that I think will be very
Speaker 1: important that they're going to learn from. Yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: the argument like, if it wasn't for NASA, we wouldn't
Speaker 1: have tough lin Yeah, exactly, Like, but but they put
Speaker 1: all that money into pan codings, Yeah, hell of pand coding. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean we we read about stuff every single day. Right,
Speaker 1: It's like, and this got collected a hundred hundred years ago.
Speaker 1: It's been sitting in this categorize shelf, and then all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, somebody's well, we have this new thing.
Speaker 1: Let me take a look at that old copper light.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, there's a rattlesnake in there. Uh. But
Speaker 1: it's like, I'd love to know the hierarchy of needs
Speaker 1: of the preservation of species, right, because you take an
Speaker 1: animal that has this very known uh system of learned behavior,
Speaker 1: like I have to teach my young how to build
Speaker 1: the nest, I have to nurture a bunch of eggs
Speaker 1: to get some to hatch. I have to then teach
Speaker 1: these little baby birds how to fly and and we
Speaker 1: know that doesn't happen. But but also things that are
Speaker 1: just so much like if there's not water here, go
Speaker 1: look over there. Yeah, like that's not carried in the egg, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: but hopefully that that's a smell thing it goes right.
Speaker 1: I mean there's some species that we know, right, like
Speaker 1: the sandhill crane, right is like that thing wants to
Speaker 1: do everything but lift. I just was I said sandhill
Speaker 1: crane instead of whooping crane. Some of those behaviors can
Speaker 1: be taught I think by animal caretakers. You know, uh,
Speaker 1: there's probably a limit there, so um, you know, any
Speaker 1: anytime you alter their their natural learning ability, your influence
Speaker 1: and possibility what they're gonna do in the future is
Speaker 1: far survivability. There's a lot of belief that if they
Speaker 1: if they can't do it on their own, they can't
Speaker 1: do it, and maybe maybe their their history is uh
Speaker 1: is dictated but but the thing that we do know now,
Speaker 1: and I'll go back to the zoos versus the free range.
Speaker 1: Both of those places have have great purpose, but that
Speaker 1: the free range situation like we were in today, even
Speaker 1: though it's an enclosure, it's it's so much closer to
Speaker 1: what they're supposed to be doing, and they know it,
Speaker 1: and they do well, and they respond well from it,
Speaker 1: and that's reflected by like a very tangible result, right,
Speaker 1: which is off for well. And look at the ages
Speaker 1: of those animals where we were at today that that
Speaker 1: have we influenced That obviously we have. But but again,
Speaker 1: when when you have that scenario and they're not in
Speaker 1: cages or pens and cages in the fair term for
Speaker 1: an ungulent like that, they're just gonna do better. But
Speaker 1: but some of this was not by accident. On the scimitars,
Speaker 1: there were people that knew if they could get them
Speaker 1: to Texas, they felt like they were going to propagate
Speaker 1: and do well. And those those few individuals with some
Speaker 1: other carrying individuals were right. And this this is really
Speaker 1: a success story as he as he pointed out early
Speaker 1: because these things were they were gone. Basically, Now the
Speaker 1: next species might not do exactly what this species did
Speaker 1: because they're they're all different biologically and they're different sociologically
Speaker 1: how they roam and how they how they they do.
Speaker 1: So answer, it's always better obviously if you have the
Speaker 1: species and they can learn from their own. But we
Speaker 1: have gotten a lot better. And I teach a couple
Speaker 1: of animal behavior classes at a couple of universities, and
Speaker 1: like in the bird world, they've learned this like a
Speaker 1: navy ecologists I work with training these birds, you know,
Speaker 1: how to look for threats, right, Oh, yeah, it's amazing
Speaker 1: what they've done is that now you know you hear this,
Speaker 1: you know, alarm, this is this it means it's an
Speaker 1: owl or this kind of hawk. Um. And there's a
Speaker 1: famous example. They tried to introduce thick billed parents. I
Speaker 1: think it was in the eighties back into the uh
Speaker 1: southeastern Arizona and um, I think you've been hunting down
Speaker 1: their cou's here, right, And they put him in there
Speaker 1: and they were great. They had done great, except they
Speaker 1: had no idea that hawks were a threat. They all
Speaker 1: got wiped out. That was That's like I'm sort of
Speaker 1: like pulling all these little snippets from things I know
Speaker 1: from native wildlife in the US and trying to like
Speaker 1: interject them here. But when you talk to people who
Speaker 1: are involved in the recovery of the American wild turkey,
Speaker 1: sort of the the aha moment was, you can't put
Speaker 1: pen raised turkeys down up exactly. They're all dead just
Speaker 1: they get annihilated. And you had to put you had
Speaker 1: to put like wild reared. You had to put wild
Speaker 1: reared birds on the ground if they're gonna have any
Speaker 1: chance they had, you know, having any idea about how
Speaker 1: to avoid predators. And another iconic thing about the simitars
Speaker 1: that I find very interesting is sometimes we're our worst
Speaker 1: on enemies. We have carrying individuals, knowledgeable individuals. They bring
Speaker 1: them over here, they do good and lo and behole.
Speaker 1: We get a regulation that almost sent them backwards again. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I wanted to have you tell that story, but let
Speaker 1: me hold that because that's important to hear um. But
Speaker 1: I got one more. I got another question, just like
Speaker 1: particular to the scimitar and horned orcs and how like
Speaker 1: like let's let's say here in the US, you have
Speaker 1: people who are globally aware, right they and globally ecologically aware.
Speaker 1: They understand that this species is imperiled on its native range.
Speaker 1: It's to candidate for extinction. Right. Um, at what point
Speaker 1: do do those individuals or like your organization, at what
Speaker 1: point do you wind up forming some form of contact
Speaker 1: with the government or the the the the proper agency
Speaker 1: in one of these countries where the country is perhaps
Speaker 1: almost a failed state. Right, Like if you were to
Speaker 1: right now recognize that there's a species in Afghanistan, I'm
Speaker 1: sure there are many. Um. Yeah, so you're like, okay,
Speaker 1: the snow leopard ranges in Afghanistan. You know, at what
Speaker 1: point does someone go and and introduce themselves to the
Speaker 1: Taliban to say, we understand you have a problem, we'd
Speaker 1: like to help. Yeah, that's got to be like a
Speaker 1: tricky It's very tricky. And so because you've already got
Speaker 1: so much money into it. Yeah, and so I asked
Speaker 1: this question a while back with the cheetah with some scientists,
Speaker 1: and it gets into politics, It gets into you know,
Speaker 1: these species off and times, particularly animal like a cat
Speaker 1: like that that will you know, in some cases have
Speaker 1: very large territories, make cross boundaries. You've got different laws
Speaker 1: and some of them it's like, well, we're doing reintroductions. No,
Speaker 1: we only want native you know, born animals here. So
Speaker 1: there's all kinds of things. So typically what ends up
Speaker 1: happening is you have to have multiple organizations involved who
Speaker 1: are working together and clearly one or two on the ground.
Speaker 1: So in Chad where the scimitars were reintroduced, there's Sahara
Speaker 1: Conservation Fund. Really was were the guys on the ground
Speaker 1: who put this together, but they had to have financial backing.
Speaker 1: And the whole program was a success because of the
Speaker 1: Environment Agency of Abu Dhabi, you know, and they helped
Speaker 1: lead this, put the resources in. You know, they kept
Speaker 1: they had their own stock of scimitars, so you have
Speaker 1: to have buying, and then they had to go get
Speaker 1: buy in from the locals, you know, because these are
Speaker 1: on pastoral lands, there's domestic livestock running around, so yeah,
Speaker 1: it is tricky and so you have to have a
Speaker 1: lot of buying and you know, we found this out
Speaker 1: here as you well know, from reintroducing like the wolf
Speaker 1: here and the learnings they got from that. The first ones,
Speaker 1: the red wolf was the first one they did was
Speaker 1: and then the you know, the gray wolf of Mexican
Speaker 1: wolf is that you've got to have buy in from
Speaker 1: the state agencies and then from local landowners, people are
Speaker 1: gonna have to deal with that, and you have to
Speaker 1: have a comprehensive plan to make it all work. And
Speaker 1: if you don't have that, you're gonna run into problems.
Speaker 1: So I think we know a lot more about that
Speaker 1: than we used to. But this is why, even though
Speaker 1: we may have enough numbers of a lot of these species,
Speaker 1: if the conditions aren't right on the ground, then you know,
Speaker 1: there's no point you're reintroducing. At that point, do you
Speaker 1: have can you think of examples of of animals were, uh,
Speaker 1: you're poised to do a reintroduction, but the situation on
Speaker 1: the ground is just not like you're in a holding
Speaker 1: pattern because of the political climate. Um yeah, sure, yeah,
Speaker 1: Well in terms of numbers of animals, yeah, um, there's
Speaker 1: several I mean, you know, the cheetah is one example
Speaker 1: where certainly there's some possibilities there, but again given the
Speaker 1: political situation and different laws, and and again we're not
Speaker 1: the ones my organization is not the one that does
Speaker 1: the reintroduction. To be clear about that, right, you'll just
Speaker 1: show up and no, no, but um, but yeah, there's
Speaker 1: there's several species. Cheetah would be one of them. You know,
Speaker 1: and then the and then the other element that we
Speaker 1: haven't talked about, but it's a major element, is conflict
Speaker 1: with people. Some of these species are not viewed as
Speaker 1: we're saving the species. The classic example of that was
Speaker 1: the reintroduction of the wolf. There were big support to
Speaker 1: do that until the public, the ranchers got into it,
Speaker 1: and it got in conflict, and and it and its
Speaker 1: remained in conflict ever since. And uh, the dynamics of
Speaker 1: the population swelling and growing. We're talking about Montana, Texas
Speaker 1: is going through it all. All these western states are
Speaker 1: going through this. So some of these species there are
Speaker 1: other lines to walk and they may not get that
Speaker 1: chance because of that. Well, it doesn't doesn't even need
Speaker 1: to be a unulate versus a predator. At the Rocky Mountain,
Speaker 1: elk is a big issue with a lot of ranching communities.
Speaker 1: So we're buffalo if you talk to those, Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: not even um competition. That's like recovering your own that's
Speaker 1: what they're recovering your own native wildlife where you have
Speaker 1: the animals. We just don't have the public willpower and
Speaker 1: and the real truth maybe there are just some species
Speaker 1: that aren't going to have the gracious because of because
Speaker 1: of these issues we're talking about right now, and then
Speaker 1: you get in even other issues like you brought in
Speaker 1: the bison. We've looked at that is you have domesticated bison,
Speaker 1: they've got cattle jeans. Well, you don't want those in
Speaker 1: a wild population, you know, for a lot of reasons.
Speaker 1: And so how do you manage that? I don't want
Speaker 1: to straight too far by totally disagreement. I think it
Speaker 1: looks like one. I think that people make that all
Speaker 1: at this point. If it looks like one, let's go
Speaker 1: with it. So then you'd want the William mammoth brought
Speaker 1: back because it looks, well, here looks like I don't.
Speaker 1: But I'm saying you wind up being that. You wind
Speaker 1: up you have like verma So they have genetically pure ones, Yellowstone,
Speaker 1: they got genetically pure ones Vermaho. It's just not that
Speaker 1: many of them. Meanwhile, you got well here's the one
Speaker 1: half a million of them. You got half a million
Speaker 1: of them on the contin but here's the one seven
Speaker 1: thousand or up to snuff the real truth. Maybe you
Speaker 1: can't get them back here again. And and Buffalo is
Speaker 1: a perfect clash of that example of that. You start
Speaker 1: looking at how many of these buffalo have cattle jeans
Speaker 1: and them lots of them do. But can you look
Speaker 1: at him and tail? No, not not every time. And
Speaker 1: if I was anti if I was anti bis and recovery,
Speaker 1: which I'm not, if I was anti bias recovery, I
Speaker 1: would be like, you know what I'm gonna do, like
Speaker 1: like a totally mock a Machiavellian move, and that would
Speaker 1: be like, oh no, no, no, I'm all for it.
Speaker 1: But they have to be genetically pure. That's how I
Speaker 1: would win my fight. Yeah, which I didn't want it
Speaker 1: to have. The one caveat to that is that um,
Speaker 1: in some places they are selecting bison to be more domesticated,
Speaker 1: and so you can imagine and so over a long
Speaker 1: period of time, you know, if that gets into um
Speaker 1: Daylor when I think was his name, He was the U. C.
Speaker 1: Davis professor who was like the foremost bison expert. That
Speaker 1: was his concern. Yeah, that It wasn't that. It was
Speaker 1: like it was like my comment about so I understand
Speaker 1: what you're In fact, that doma gazelle. Actually there's a
Speaker 1: they thought for a while it was a subspecies. There's
Speaker 1: two colors there's one that's a predominantly kind of burnt
Speaker 1: orange looking and there's once pure white, and they thought, well,
Speaker 1: it's you know, different gene or the subs. It's not,
Speaker 1: it's a phenotype. Right. So but had that been the case,
Speaker 1: I da mix those, do you not? You know? And
Speaker 1: so I understand where you're coming from on that um.
Speaker 1: And unfortunately, because the more we learned about genetics and genomics,
Speaker 1: like there used to just be one species of black rhino,
Speaker 1: and then they realize, well, no, there's a Eastern, there's
Speaker 1: a southern. Well, actually there's a southwestern, when now there's
Speaker 1: a western. Several of them have gone extinct, right, So
Speaker 1: where do you draw the line? You know, it's a
Speaker 1: good point. I guess you have to weigh someone's motivations
Speaker 1: and then and then help trust it. Okay, let's I
Speaker 1: know the basic outline of the story. Someone the scimitar
Speaker 1: horned orcs it's going extinct. Someone's like, hey, there's a
Speaker 1: bunch of in Texas, thank god, and then they want
Speaker 1: to say, okay, no one in Texas touch one. And
Speaker 1: people didn't like that and it was counterproductive. How close
Speaker 1: is that's the reality? The story I just told well,
Speaker 1: I I think the word they is is probably begs
Speaker 1: to be defined so well meaning probably people that thought
Speaker 1: they shouldn't be commercialized because of other things in other
Speaker 1: places and other issues that were going on. But but
Speaker 1: those particular group of people weren't looking at the perpetuation
Speaker 1: of that species and what was going on. And the
Speaker 1: minute they came in and they put those regulations on them,
Speaker 1: what was the regulation, Well, it had to do with movement,
Speaker 1: hunting and barter cell exchange and trade. They hadn't it.
Speaker 1: They were on the SA, but there was an exemption.
Speaker 1: Then they removed the exemption. This has been two thousand twelve,
Speaker 1: I think. Okay, And who's the essay? How are they
Speaker 1: on the US listed species because it's global, Because it's global,
Speaker 1: it's not just US species. They don't look at Texas
Speaker 1: and make the law for the world. It's a global
Speaker 1: view of that species. And of course I know governor
Speaker 1: like was is that the i c U N Like
Speaker 1: who's the governing like, who's the governing body that would
Speaker 1: say like they're imperiled there, don't mess with them in Texas. Well. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: I think it was our decision for the E s A.
Speaker 1: But It's like if a species is imperiled, you know,
Speaker 1: wherever its native habitat is, right, then it's it's considered
Speaker 1: under the umbrella of the s A. I mean, it's endangered,
Speaker 1: So any of those protocols can come into play in
Speaker 1: terms of what you can and can't do. So once
Speaker 1: it's endangered, then there's criteria under that endangered title, and
Speaker 1: that criteria may say barter, cell, exchange, hunt, transport, all
Speaker 1: those things can be under there. And what happened is
Speaker 1: that happened to that species of animal. And when it
Speaker 1: did that thing, that that plan that was going on
Speaker 1: right before our eyes came to our crashing halt in Texas.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna speak for Texas because I'm more familiar
Speaker 1: with the plan being people distributing, allowing to breathe. Yes,
Speaker 1: because commercialization was predicating those numbers, and and commercialization was
Speaker 1: the mother. It was pushing the numbers out, and because
Speaker 1: there was a market for animals in the state, and
Speaker 1: a byproduct of that market was creating more of them
Speaker 1: and then you couldn't hunt them. Of course, you know,
Speaker 1: the market was dictating that people wanted to trade them
Speaker 1: and all whatever people's view of that is that's the
Speaker 1: reality of it, right, and so you know the market
Speaker 1: crash and then furthermore, if you had them on your ray.
Speaker 1: I mean this is an exception, and all of our
Speaker 1: facilities are like that. We're conservation, so we don't actually
Speaker 1: hunt them here because we're trying to increase their numbers.
Speaker 1: But then you couldn't even hunt your own, So what
Speaker 1: do you do with them at that point? And here
Speaker 1: they go. They're perpetuating, right, So there you're saying, there's
Speaker 1: some and and listen, it's for every listener out there. Um,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure if the folks in this room like
Speaker 1: it or not. The very first thing that we did
Speaker 1: today was get a ci entire horn oracs and put
Speaker 1: in your tag in it. So if you think about
Speaker 1: it with along the lines of every animal out there
Speaker 1: that have your tags and are run around in past years,
Speaker 1: that's what we're talking about in the commercialization right now. So, um,
Speaker 1: there were individuals out there who had purchased scimitar horned
Speaker 1: orcs during this period where all of a sudden they're on.
Speaker 1: So if we we tag him for a slightly different reason,
Speaker 1: because we track and we do a census count every
Speaker 1: year of you know, how many offspring, how many die, etcetera,
Speaker 1: And so he needs to track them. And for genetics
Speaker 1: reasons as well. You know we oh that's animal number
Speaker 1: twenty eight whatever. So that's the reason primary that we
Speaker 1: do that. So, but there's other folks out there who
Speaker 1: are like, I'm gonna buy some of these, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: have them specifically for the reason that I'm gonna hunt
Speaker 1: them on my ranch. But then when that regulation came down,
Speaker 1: they just became animals that were competing against the other
Speaker 1: animals that had all of a sudden had more value. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they can't do anything with them. They can't hunt him,
Speaker 1: you can't trade him, and so they're just paying to
Speaker 1: feed them. So what did happen to him? Like the
Speaker 1: numbers went down? Solution people shot him out of spite.
Speaker 1: Well you're not supposed to, but you know, I'm sure
Speaker 1: some of that happened. They did. Let's let's let's be frank.
Speaker 1: They the numbers dwintals for whatever reason, because the value
Speaker 1: now was not on the animal. The value is what
Speaker 1: brought the incentive to perpetuate the animal. And we were
Speaker 1: in Texas probably well I know, so we got more
Speaker 1: than anybody, and and and he was selling them to
Speaker 1: a rancher. We were capturing them, we were moving him
Speaker 1: over here. We were moving him for this reason, this reason.
Speaker 1: But everybody had a reason to perpetuate that animal. And
Speaker 1: when those reggs came down, all of a sudden, it
Speaker 1: disant it disincentivized us and ranchers. This is speculation, but
Speaker 1: was the was the first off? What you're are we
Speaker 1: talking about, um? Is it that it was risk the
Speaker 1: exemption was put back in. Okay, so there was. So
Speaker 1: there's a two year window when this this was going on,
Speaker 1: when this this sort of the prohibition on hunting, prohibition
Speaker 1: on moving. Whether it's like an exemption that was lifted
Speaker 1: or not, let's just describe it as like a prohibition
Speaker 1: on these activities, was a two year window that the
Speaker 1: number of animals during that two year window actually go down? Yeah,
Speaker 1: they have, but they so what I'm saying is they
Speaker 1: weren't dying an old age. I mean there's like a
Speaker 1: little bit of spite, right, Well, if I had to venture, guess, like,
Speaker 1: you saw how defensive that mother was. We talked about
Speaker 1: how aggressive the bulls are in fighting. I'm sure they
Speaker 1: can be detrimental on other animals inside your pastory there too,
Speaker 1: or they're just beating themselves to death. Sometimes I can
Speaker 1: speak on on the ranches behalf. But for those two
Speaker 1: years we had no breeding. I kept the males completely
Speaker 1: separate from the females again, because what what were we
Speaker 1: gonna do with them? We had We had our own
Speaker 1: We have our own carrying capacity, which is top on
Speaker 1: a good year of sixty animals. Right now, I got
Speaker 1: forty five animals um with with addition of a bunch
Speaker 1: of young. Um. If this year continues to be as
Speaker 1: dry as it is now, I'm likely gonna have to downstop.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna run the grass. So we could we could.
Speaker 1: We couldn't breed because you had no outlet. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: couldn't get rid of them. You have no outlet for
Speaker 1: the ones that weren't essential for your program. And and
Speaker 1: and one thing that we that we haven't mentioned, but
Speaker 1: but I participated in this. When that was lifted. We
Speaker 1: we had people that reached out and said, I want
Speaker 1: to multifacet my operation. Um, I don't want cattle anymore.
Speaker 1: I want something that has multi value to it. So
Speaker 1: we in the lot of cases we had Semitars, we
Speaker 1: had Neil Guy, We had other undulus that were that
Speaker 1: were exotics that were also used to manage grass pastures
Speaker 1: just like cattle, but we had a multi value for them.
Speaker 1: We could breed them, we could sell them, we could
Speaker 1: hunt them, we could manage grass communities with him. So
Speaker 1: now now we've got an incentive on them, and that's
Speaker 1: where we're at today, and that's why the numbers are
Speaker 1: here like they are. But they wouldn't have been had
Speaker 1: they not lifted that and we had not organized and
Speaker 1: fought like we did, we would be down more so
Speaker 1: than we were at half at the time that thing
Speaker 1: would happen. And I just say this, and there's a
Speaker 1: lot talked about the exotics industry and especially in Texas,
Speaker 1: but that way that was handled for conservation purposes, you know,
Speaker 1: was not a good thing. And when it was, when
Speaker 1: it was rescinded, was it rescinded with a man? You
Speaker 1: were right? That was the horrible idea. I can answer that.
Speaker 1: I can. I don't even need to think of that.
Speaker 1: It was it was rescinded because of political cloud and pressure,
Speaker 1: and that's the honest truth, or we'd still be right
Speaker 1: where we were Texas spent thousands and thousands of dollars
Speaker 1: lobbying in Washington. It's funny because just in my circle
Speaker 1: I have heard and people not from the conservation biology world,
Speaker 1: I have heard people still grumbling about that. Well as
Speaker 1: in their mind like just like you know, oh, you
Speaker 1: want to talk about idiocy because everyone and they and
Speaker 1: they opened a book and there in the book says
Speaker 1: there almost are close to being extinct in another country,
Speaker 1: and these people in Texas are shooting them and commercializing them.
Speaker 1: What in the world is going on here? Well, what's
Speaker 1: going on here is we're perpetuating these animals because they
Speaker 1: have a value. No, I can see, like, it's not
Speaker 1: it's not a stretch. I don't mean to run around,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't want to sound like, oh, they're
Speaker 1: so stupid. I mean, you can see how someone would
Speaker 1: draw that conclusion if they weren't really if they weren't
Speaker 1: like acutely aware of like all the dynamics in place
Speaker 1: and the motivations of people involved. If you went and
Speaker 1: wrote like some goofy you know, newspaper headline Texans killing
Speaker 1: endangered species, right, A lot of articles written like that.
Speaker 1: Some of us did interviews on those and they were
Speaker 1: tough interviews. Um, there there's some folks out there who
Speaker 1: at that time and still today would rather these species
Speaker 1: not be here at all, that any of them are hunted. No,
Speaker 1: that's a yeah, I think that's a that's a that's
Speaker 1: a sentiment. Um. I think it's a widely held sentiment
Speaker 1: among people who would that. I would be like the
Speaker 1: radical animal rights agenda would put a very strong emphasis
Speaker 1: emphasis on individual animal experiences and that that would actually
Speaker 1: matter more to them than population level. Because that's just
Speaker 1: I can't have the argument, you know what I mean,
Speaker 1: It's like I would I would be hard for me
Speaker 1: to sit with someone and have the argument. I wouldn't
Speaker 1: even know where to begin. It's um, it all happened
Speaker 1: when people I didn't know what luck nuts where anymore.
Speaker 1: M that's test. It's a good one. I heard someone
Speaker 1: else bring up recently, like how did it go to
Speaker 1: it just all of a sudden, No one knows how
Speaker 1: to change a tiger. Well we're close. I'm usually luck
Speaker 1: Nutch but but but really, um, as time goes on,
Speaker 1: that these challenges, these bicycles will have multiple riders on
Speaker 1: them that we that we have to defend um, to
Speaker 1: perpetuate an animal, to to to make it UH, to
Speaker 1: be beneficial again, to have a value, because they're just
Speaker 1: people that don't know what luck nuts are. And when
Speaker 1: you have that, it's a In my world, I deal
Speaker 1: with it every other day and I have to educate
Speaker 1: as hard as I can. But I also have to
Speaker 1: be a good mediator and understand how people think UM.
Speaker 1: And that's why I'm so sensitive about UM. The merit
Speaker 1: of every good story and every good scenario is to
Speaker 1: preside proceed both sides of the issue you have do
Speaker 1: You can't hold it back, and it's tough sometimes to
Speaker 1: sit in a room and talk to people about why
Speaker 1: this animal's doing good. We got to start with the nest.
Speaker 1: There's also a lot of crossover too because of you know, obviously,
Speaker 1: as you well know, hunting brings in a lot of
Speaker 1: conservation dollars. Right to go to that, but particularly here
Speaker 1: with with the whole land rush UM, and he deals
Speaker 1: with it very closely that you know, if you didn't
Speaker 1: have this, you would have even more fragmentation and development
Speaker 1: and what have you. So you know, we try and
Speaker 1: incur ch people in bamburgers. The best example of it
Speaker 1: of you know, you can have an exotic species, but
Speaker 1: you can manage it sustainably and still you know, create
Speaker 1: great habitat for native wildlife as well. Yeah. Now not
Speaker 1: everybody can do what they've done here because it's fantastic,
Speaker 1: but you know you can still do that, and you
Speaker 1: know Warren is a specialist in that, and so that's
Speaker 1: that's the other message that we're trying to get across.
Speaker 1: What percent of the species that your organization is involved
Speaker 1: with our native North American animals and what present are
Speaker 1: Africa Asia? Um, most of them are Africa Asia, but
Speaker 1: we have a couple of grassland bird species, so uh,
Speaker 1: the loggerhead shrike which you know, Texas sill has quite
Speaker 1: a few of them, but their native grassland prairie habitat
Speaker 1: as you you know well now is shrinking and they've
Speaker 1: largely disappeared, you know, up in all the way up
Speaker 1: into Canada. So um, you know, we support that and
Speaker 1: doing some releases up there or they do genetics testing
Speaker 1: to try to you know, help the viability. A couple
Speaker 1: other grasslands species, um, even like the whooping crane. The
Speaker 1: red wolf um is another one, and then most of
Speaker 1: the rest of them are anxietic. So probably as a percentage.
Speaker 1: I don't know exact number, but you know it's probably
Speaker 1: in native is probably you know or something they're they're
Speaker 1: about to what to what degree if you compare let's
Speaker 1: say you're gonna compare the Sahara. Um, and just I
Speaker 1: know it's hard, but the U s in general. Um,
Speaker 1: if you look at something like like it takes something
Speaker 1: like the Pacific salmon for instance. Um, it's not an
Speaker 1: animal problem. It's a habitat problem. Right. It's like if
Speaker 1: if you took all the dams out of the Columbia Watershed,
Speaker 1: your problems right, um in in in Chad and the
Speaker 1: Sahara with the simitar horned orcs. I gather that it
Speaker 1: was it became like an animal problem. It's multifaceted, if
Speaker 1: I understand you correctly. So it's um, it's a bush
Speaker 1: meat problem. UM. A lot of these areas you know
Speaker 1: historically or you know at least last hundred years, war
Speaker 1: zone problem. It's a human footprint expanding problem. UM, a
Speaker 1: disease problem as well, you know, again having to cohabitate
Speaker 1: with domestic livestock. And then when you get down another
Speaker 1: aspect of what we do is that when we're looking
Speaker 1: at something like this, we enlist the help of UM.
Speaker 1: There's an offshoot of a U see in called cps
Speaker 1: G and UH they do great work like population modeling
Speaker 1: and you know, figuring out you know, you have this
Speaker 1: many animals and you know you're gonna add this MANI
Speaker 1: to it. And here's how often drought happens, here's how
Speaker 1: much poaching. You know, you can kind of pretty well
Speaker 1: predict what's gonna happen. UM, And when you get down
Speaker 1: below a certain number, you know, it becomes unsustainable. So
Speaker 1: you know they're species out there right now. You were
Speaker 1: alluding to it earlier that if it's just left to
Speaker 1: their own over time, they're probably not gonna make it,
Speaker 1: you know. And fragmentation is another huge issue, right you know,
Speaker 1: corridors are cut off, you know, so you don't get
Speaker 1: not only genetics crossing, but just being able to connect
Speaker 1: populations have more room for them to disperse, you know,
Speaker 1: drought over here versus you know, it's better range over here.
Speaker 1: So all those problems factor into it. I thought of
Speaker 1: another more extreme, uh visual way of putting it. Let's
Speaker 1: say you just started flying sea one thirties into Chad
Speaker 1: and offloading thousands of scimitar horned orcs at this moment
Speaker 1: in time, you would find that, like in some number
Speaker 1: of years, you're probably gonna be right back in the
Speaker 1: same situation. A lot of the habits prepped. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: it's localized. It's local age where they can not at
Speaker 1: the they can't make it somewhere else, but they the
Speaker 1: extruding factors on it will only let it make it
Speaker 1: in that particular area or where they have that protection.
Speaker 1: A lot of it's been converted to agriculture. That's another
Speaker 1: crash lands. And how many do they have? So how
Speaker 1: many do they have on the ground now? And it's
Speaker 1: sort of like semi wildish state simitars ch about a
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty And what size like on what is
Speaker 1: it of size of ground comparable to where we're sitting
Speaker 1: right now. No, it's much larger. It's a huge area.
Speaker 1: I don't have the exact number, but it's it is.
Speaker 1: It's a big area. And Steve do you know And
Speaker 1: it's like I thought I heard it was the same
Speaker 1: size as like West Virginia. Yeah, it's like hundreds of
Speaker 1: thousands of millions of acres and they and they need
Speaker 1: to they're actively they need to be actively defending the
Speaker 1: animals from poaching. And I don't know about defending, but
Speaker 1: you know, there's been a lot of education that's going
Speaker 1: on about it, and you know they monitor it closely.
Speaker 1: Of course, you know, they're collared right UM, and the
Speaker 1: animals will disperse a lot. I think the biggest thing,
Speaker 1: or one of the biggest things they've done is just
Speaker 1: education with UM, the herders, the shepherders, you know, and
Speaker 1: I think so far that's going pretty well. Uh but again,
Speaker 1: we're only talking a hundred fifty animals, so it's hard
Speaker 1: to gauge. You know, it's not like there's fifteen thousand now.
Speaker 1: Is that number growing? It is? Yeah, They've they've had
Speaker 1: they've had offspring, and they keep actually uh there, I
Speaker 1: think doing another release right now as we speak. So yeah,
Speaker 1: there's definitely plans to add on too. And I don't
Speaker 1: know if there's a total number UM that they're trying
Speaker 1: to get to UM, but yeah, they definitely want to grow.
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously a hundred fifty of a herd animals
Speaker 1: not you know, sufficient to you know, you need to
Speaker 1: grow that ye that Yeah, it's still ever changing. But
Speaker 1: but the only way probably to get it to where
Speaker 1: they someday will say we have a stable population is help.
Speaker 1: Uh that they won't do it on their own. Probably
Speaker 1: if they, it would be so eons out um that
Speaker 1: that it just you couldn't monitor it. So the the
Speaker 1: influx that that that groups like this can help is
Speaker 1: what's gonna make it. Somedays, say we have a in
Speaker 1: this area, we have a standardized herd, I mean just
Speaker 1: off tope of my head. Again, I'm not a population
Speaker 1: biologist disclaimers, so but you know, I would think you'd
Speaker 1: have to have at least several hundred animals ultimately not
Speaker 1: several thousand. But whatever that number is, unless it's into
Speaker 1: the thousands, you're gonna need to supplement from time to time.
Speaker 1: What what is the stable number? Like, do we have
Speaker 1: an idea what that that herd stability sizes self Sustama
Speaker 1: Because that country is so different, it's it's hard to
Speaker 1: classify it animals per acre um, And I don't I
Speaker 1: don't know the dynamics to that number, but I would
Speaker 1: say that they're they're they're people over there know what
Speaker 1: they're what they need to do to where they could
Speaker 1: finally say we do have a stable herd, they move
Speaker 1: a lot their their micah, they're they're they're the larger
Speaker 1: the herd, the larger the range needs to be their
Speaker 1: nomadic and it's more it's more sparse than you know,
Speaker 1: Steve has this fantastic grass here and it'll rain in
Speaker 1: one area of this of this area where they've got them,
Speaker 1: and they'll move to that area because a lot of
Speaker 1: their all their ecologies is steered around perpetuation, so they
Speaker 1: know to go to that area. Uh, and it's timed
Speaker 1: with all their parturations and all the things they do,
Speaker 1: and so it will take time, um years before they'll
Speaker 1: ever be able to say that's a standardized herd. And
Speaker 1: we're comfortable. I mean, this is ideal for him here
Speaker 1: in terms of what we're trying to do. And you know,
Speaker 1: these guys have done such a great job and you
Speaker 1: know burns and you know not you know, they don't
Speaker 1: graze the rest of it and they're not and had
Speaker 1: a history of overgrazing all those kind of things. So
Speaker 1: it's ideal habitat you know. Yeah, I mean driving through here,
Speaker 1: this country probably never looked like this prior to folks
Speaker 1: putting up fences, right. I mean, you guys don't have
Speaker 1: a natural competition out here because you're you're managing it.
Speaker 1: You're seeing fifty years of intensive management. Yeah, maybe this
Speaker 1: is how it looks like two hundred years ago, as
Speaker 1: long as the bison weren't traveling through. He's being pretty
Speaker 1: humble because I do what he does. He's worked his
Speaker 1: rear end off and and he's got he's got the backing,
Speaker 1: and he's got the knowledge. And that's why you see
Speaker 1: the garden growing like it is, and it's a and
Speaker 1: you know, to the neck and eye. It's hard to
Speaker 1: understand what he sees and what I see on these
Speaker 1: properties because this is years and years of our lives
Speaker 1: to get these grass communities back to where they're at.
Speaker 1: It just doesn't happen. I mean, this land has transformed
Speaker 1: so much. I grew up around here, and it's you know, uh,
Speaker 1: Native Americans kept this burned off to a large degree
Speaker 1: with natural fire. Uh. But you know, I'm sure you've
Speaker 1: been around here. Now. It's changed tremendously. That juniper choked,
Speaker 1: you know, and so he's done restored it. Whatever you
Speaker 1: want to call natural. If you want to call that natural,
Speaker 1: you know, you see, but certainly from a wildlife perspective,
Speaker 1: it's see what'd your bird count go from? Uh? The
Speaker 1: first the first counts done in like nineteen seventy nine,
Speaker 1: seventy one. UM, they found forty eight species. These are
Speaker 1: year round surveys and today we're over two and twenty.
Speaker 1: Really God, that's incredible man. So well, if you had
Speaker 1: to boil that down, that's like is it? It's water,
Speaker 1: water and grass, diversity of habitat. So when Mr mambur
Speaker 1: way more than just more grass. Absolutely. When Mr Member
Speaker 1: first bought this property, it was in nineteen six or nine,
Speaker 1: it was basically a cedar a cedar forest, a cedar break.
Speaker 1: It was very much clad with cedar like you see
Speaker 1: a lot of the hill country today from fire suppress
Speaker 1: and sproach it seed down, overgrazing. Overgrazing led to that
Speaker 1: a lot um. So yeah, in early seventies is said
Speaker 1: about restoring the place, and that basically removing a lot
Speaker 1: of the juniper, not all of it, because this is
Speaker 1: a native tree. UM. Restoring the grasslands also given our
Speaker 1: native deciduous hardwoods a chance to become a hardwood forest again. Um.
Speaker 1: And then with that came back water was one of
Speaker 1: the first things that came back to the ranch that
Speaker 1: wasn't here. Um, we have quite a bit of water here. Um.
Speaker 1: And then with you get that's such a diversitive habitat,
Speaker 1: and especially that edge habitat, you know, that transition between
Speaker 1: forest of grass or water's edge, that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: I mean, I imagine some of that, some of those numbers.
Speaker 1: I mean, it wouldn't account for significant number, but some
Speaker 1: of those are sort of things on a more national scale. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: like like some raptors right, actually got a paragraph in
Speaker 1: your thing, but it could be because of a green
Speaker 1: activities happening hundreds of months, an impressive increase and improved habitat,
Speaker 1: as Steve said, uh brings uh diversity of wildlife. So
Speaker 1: a lot of these ranches now that that have the
Speaker 1: finances and the skills to do all this, they're not
Speaker 1: only benefiting exotics, um dear there, it's it's all species, mammals, reptiles,
Speaker 1: bird life, avian life. All this is is benefiting for
Speaker 1: people batcav Yeah, we're not talking. And that's what happens
Speaker 1: when you get a commitment because we've done it and
Speaker 1: restored it. Uh. Not I'm not talking about here. I've
Speaker 1: done it on other ranches like Steve's done, but we
Speaker 1: see the benefits. And this bird life is a classic
Speaker 1: example of responding to improved habitat that doesn't happen by
Speaker 1: accident because now they have these levels, they can live in,
Speaker 1: edge effect, hardwood for arrest, all the things that they've
Speaker 1: done out here. So yeah, I mean Bamburger is like
Speaker 1: a modern day example. And if you've ever seen Tending
Speaker 1: the wild looking California about Native Americans managed the landscape
Speaker 1: over there, this is an example of that. I mean literally,
Speaker 1: I saw a study recently where, um, I don't know
Speaker 1: how they came to this conclusion, but researcher figured out that, um,
Speaker 1: this part of the world anyway, of the fires were
Speaker 1: set here by Native Americans. Now it only burned the
Speaker 1: landscape because you know, lightning fires would just go right.
Speaker 1: So they had controlled burns and they were managing it
Speaker 1: for wildlife, you know, to bring back you know whatever,
Speaker 1: you know, the Coron's walnuts, yeah, track wildlife whatever. And
Speaker 1: so he's actually kind of gone back, even though this
Speaker 1: is a modern he's gone back to much more the
Speaker 1: way it was in terms of managing the land for wildlife.
Speaker 1: Got it? Uh, I got two more big questions for you.
Speaker 1: Once once pretty concrete, once theoretical. Uh. The the scimitar
Speaker 1: horned orcs. Uh. They came full circle. Okay, they were
Speaker 1: in the Sahara. They were for whatever reason, lost to
Speaker 1: you know, lost to us uh collectors, whatever brought him here.
Speaker 1: They were captain Zoo's they went extinct in the wild.
Speaker 1: They went back. Um, what's the next Like, who who's
Speaker 1: in line to have that happened again? Most immediately? Like
Speaker 1: what like what species is that that you're working on?
Speaker 1: Is like you have the clearest path exists to being
Speaker 1: like they're gonna go back on the ground. Well, the
Speaker 1: two other ones that um of our species that are
Speaker 1: being worked with right now actually in the same preserve
Speaker 1: are the Domina gazelle um and the attics. And there
Speaker 1: were some remnant populations there somewhere between a hundred and
Speaker 1: three hundred animals but scattered about this. This is in
Speaker 1: the same area Chad, yeah, and Niger. They so they
Speaker 1: were they've translocated some. But yeah, they're they're releasing I
Speaker 1: think right now actually some Doma gazelle. They it's already
Speaker 1: happened and it's well, it's again, it's this multi step process,
Speaker 1: right where maybe some of them came here historically and
Speaker 1: then they went over there, announced two or three generations.
Speaker 1: There in the third generation got habituated, you know, and
Speaker 1: then they let him go, right yeah, Like you can't,
Speaker 1: like it's not really practical to track the individual exactly.
Speaker 1: It's it's bloodline or exactly. And that that's why the
Speaker 1: genomics is so important and why we want to keep
Speaker 1: sequencing and testing these these animals, because we want to
Speaker 1: know if we have valuable traits or whatever. Like Steve,
Speaker 1: you know, got his report on his his female scimitar
Speaker 1: that hey, in the future, you know, that bloodline maybe
Speaker 1: not that particular animal, but that bloodline we want going
Speaker 1: over there, right um. And and so that that's kind
Speaker 1: of the future, so that when the conditions are ripe
Speaker 1: to do more of these were ready to do it. Um.
Speaker 1: Remember early on in our conversation we talked about the
Speaker 1: idea that if it's not where, if an animal is
Speaker 1: not where it's from, like it doesn't count. Now, well, well, no,
Speaker 1: I don't mean that, because that's gonna sound wrong, because
Speaker 1: I am a very avid wild turkey hunter. Okay, I
Speaker 1: hunt wild turkeys in the state that turkeys aren't from.
Speaker 1: I mean, they're not that far down. I could drive
Speaker 1: in a day, I could drive in a data where
Speaker 1: they're from, but they're not from there. Okay, So I
Speaker 1: love them like my children. Um so I got you know, well,
Speaker 1: not quiet in some ways more yess, some ways less,
Speaker 1: but so so I get it. It's like, there's not
Speaker 1: like it's not a black and white issue in terms
Speaker 1: of native you know, native animals and non native animals.
Speaker 1: But what's your sort of like, like, what's your take
Speaker 1: if if we looked at that, that you determine that
Speaker 1: for whatever reason we determine the Sahara Okay, since we
Speaker 1: talked about that a bunch. It's just like you get
Speaker 1: to a point where like, it's not gonna happen. It's
Speaker 1: not gonna happen. It's divided up, it's war torn, not
Speaker 1: getting any better. It just is gonna happen. Do you
Speaker 1: then lose interest in the orcs or do you go, like, okay,
Speaker 1: plan B is this part of Texas is Africa and
Speaker 1: there's no and you know that it's not ever going
Speaker 1: to be a reintroduction issue. Well, I guess there's two things.
Speaker 1: That's a loaded question, Um it is. Yeah, I mean one,
Speaker 1: I think you know, there's a difference between like I say,
Speaker 1: this part of Texas or letting them run rampant and
Speaker 1: just keeping the species alive, not let them go extinct.
Speaker 1: For and you could have a still philosophical debate about that.
Speaker 1: A lot of reasons, right, you know, they deserve to live,
Speaker 1: you know, value in them, about what we discover about
Speaker 1: their genes, or you know, it could be use of
Speaker 1: other animals, you know, all kinds of right, yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: But then also you know, in terms of these assurance populations, well,
Speaker 1: what do things look like a hundred fifty years from now?
Speaker 1: I don't know. Yeah, I can see what you're saying.
Speaker 1: It'd be a pretty cocky decision. Yeah, ain't gonna happen. Right,
Speaker 1: So it's kind of like, if we're gonna keep them,
Speaker 1: then we might as well keep them in a setting
Speaker 1: where they can do well, right, and in sufficient numbers,
Speaker 1: with enough diversity. So when there's an opportunity, you know,
Speaker 1: we can We're ready, you know, we can put them
Speaker 1: back up. And I say we, I mean collective, not
Speaker 1: just my organization. Right, So that that's one of the things.
Speaker 1: And you know there's also I think an educational component. Um,
Speaker 1: there's even these guys have done it. We've actually partnered
Speaker 1: I know it sounds bizarre, but uh, with a virtual
Speaker 1: reality organization to kind of create some environments where people
Speaker 1: can see what these animals look like, you know, in
Speaker 1: their native habitats or I hear you. Hey, that was
Speaker 1: my initial reaction. I got kids want to do it.
Speaker 1: You can do that. But from the standpoint of does
Speaker 1: that raise awareness and does that get them interested and
Speaker 1: you know, generate some moment. I mean, as we know,
Speaker 1: we're becoming a more urban world and people moving cities.
Speaker 1: And I'm a big believer that if if you don't
Speaker 1: have your feet on the ground, if you're not out
Speaker 1: doing stuff, then you just don't have the same attachment
Speaker 1: or connection to it. So in lieu of that, do
Speaker 1: these do something like that help And if it does,
Speaker 1: then maybe there are opportunities in the future. So I
Speaker 1: think those are some of the arguments. I know, it's
Speaker 1: not black and white, um, And you know it is
Speaker 1: a little odds. Sometimes you drive around you see something
Speaker 1: looks like Africa, and you know, you see more and
Speaker 1: more of it, but you know we're focused really on
Speaker 1: the conservation aspect, and I think you can make a
Speaker 1: strong case for, regardless of what's happening on the ground,
Speaker 1: that we at least want to keep these remnant populations,
Speaker 1: you know, going for the future, whatever the future is. Someday,
Speaker 1: it just hit me, someday I'm gonna write a dystopian novel.
Speaker 1: It will be that humans are all gone, virtually all gone,
Speaker 1: and it'll be like some small group of people trying
Speaker 1: to put all the animals back where they belong. Well,
Speaker 1: I think Jeff Visa has had that idea. One day
Speaker 1: we'll be living, orbiting the planet and repopulation and I'll
Speaker 1: be like, Okay, before I die, I gotta make sure
Speaker 1: to put these things back and sudden, so I'll we're
Speaker 1: coming around the table, so I'll put my two cents in.
Speaker 1: It'll be sharp. I think the limiting factors besides population
Speaker 1: dynamics will probably be evolving wildlife diseesus. Oh go on,
Speaker 1: I knew you were gonna ask me that, and I
Speaker 1: and that's my summary. We gotta do another show, now,
Speaker 1: are you gonna get it out of it? Well? No,
Speaker 1: give me give a little more there. Well, so I
Speaker 1: I think it's like a like a like a conservation challenge.
Speaker 1: I think that absolutely. But but zoo gnosis. If you
Speaker 1: look at what we don't know about wildlife reservoirs and
Speaker 1: human interaction with diseases, we're on the pioneering edge where
Speaker 1: all these lay. And I think as time goes by,
Speaker 1: we're going to find more and more reservoirs that might
Speaker 1: mutate and affect humans are vi subversa, and so I
Speaker 1: believe that that as time goes by, the science will
Speaker 1: develop that there might be a species you can't do
Speaker 1: anything with because of evolving wildlife diseases that may affect populations.
Speaker 1: And guess what if it affects a human, who's going
Speaker 1: to be first? I mean, this gets into strange territory.
Speaker 1: But what if there's a few species that are resistant?
Speaker 1: It doesn't? Yeah, it does exactly what was it? What
Speaker 1: was the question? Well, I mean back to your the questions.
Speaker 1: I what if you find, you know, some traits and
Speaker 1: a few of these species are closely related one or
Speaker 1: two that are beneficial and disease resistant. You know, could
Speaker 1: that keeping those alive? Could that be useful? I mean
Speaker 1: that gets into strange territory and it can. It can.
Speaker 1: But where the bridge starts getting weak is where is
Speaker 1: where they're the possibility exists to jump from wildlife reservoirs
Speaker 1: to humans, and typically that's from a mutation. And so
Speaker 1: if you really look at a lot of things that
Speaker 1: are happening with humans now, with the illnesses and things,
Speaker 1: and look back at wildlife reservoirs, you don't have to
Speaker 1: be a rocket side just to figure out what's happening.
Speaker 1: It's coming. Yeah, I think that that's that's entering sort
Speaker 1: of the public consciousness more as we have this like
Speaker 1: pretty spirited debate about you know, bats while the markets,
Speaker 1: and then these new strains of of COVID that seemed
Speaker 1: to and then you know, like this six of the
Speaker 1: white tails of the white tailed the year taking out
Speaker 1: to think Indiana um I had been exposed to COVID
Speaker 1: back we just we just just have this right, like
Speaker 1: the COVID nineteen into the deer herd, that deer herd
Speaker 1: spit it back out into the human population, and it's
Speaker 1: very very close to COVID nineteen, but it's not quite
Speaker 1: the same, right. I mean that, and I don't care
Speaker 1: what you think of COVID, but that's something to pay
Speaker 1: attention to. And when you sail across the sea. And
Speaker 1: I'm not being a pessimist because I'm a biologist just
Speaker 1: what I do for a living. But when you sail
Speaker 1: across the seed to take a reservoir out to bring
Speaker 1: it somewhere else to do something else with, there's always
Speaker 1: a chance. But but I but I think we're on
Speaker 1: the very infancy of of where this is gonna go.
Speaker 1: And also, just I want to add on the thing
Speaker 1: you're saying, because you talk like there's organizations like the
Speaker 1: Rocky Mountain Olk Foundation. Okay, there their business for for
Speaker 1: well that you know, I hate to oversimplify it. Their
Speaker 1: business have been twofold. It was habitat right and then restoration.
Speaker 1: It hurts with c w D right now moving herds around.
Speaker 1: That's not happening, man. I mean, like the appetite for
Speaker 1: that stuff is it's just not happening. And it's like
Speaker 1: it's because of this understanding of disease transmission that we
Speaker 1: weren't talking about. He's ground zero for that. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: so so I mean we could We'll be here at
Speaker 1: two o'clock in the morning. But but but I think
Speaker 1: my message is it's not as easy as the wishes
Speaker 1: and the money to save an animal. Now there's more,
Speaker 1: there's more to look and see to the fish bowl,
Speaker 1: and I'll end mine. I'll pass it to Steve. Now. Well,
Speaker 1: now as you said that, I would say, short of disease,
Speaker 1: uh here here at the Bamburg Ranch, our philosophy is um,
Speaker 1: it's our responsibility as long as we can afford to
Speaker 1: do it. As long as that species is not detriment
Speaker 1: to our native species and our landscape, our land, we
Speaker 1: should do it. So that's something that's something you look
Speaker 1: at that you're like trumping, this is native wildlife, but right,
Speaker 1: novels things can be harmonious. How do you guys get funded?
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm assuming your funding doesn't come from the
Speaker 1: residents of Chad No, so our membership institutions UH fundus
Speaker 1: and primarily and then UM of course, and they're they're
Speaker 1: great and they really are good at supporting our work. UM.
Speaker 1: And then we get some small fees from other program
Speaker 1: members as well. And then of course you know individual donors,
Speaker 1: UM benefactors, so UM, you know, we it's obviously been
Speaker 1: tough the last couple of years. You know, the pandemic
Speaker 1: and would have you so fundraising? Yeah, you know, and
Speaker 1: and it's we need to do a lot more things
Speaker 1: like genomics testing, um, and so you know funding helps
Speaker 1: for that. So if anybody wants to go to our
Speaker 1: website Conservation Centers dot org, we have a donated it's
Speaker 1: certainly appreciated. The one good thing is that, uh genomics
Speaker 1: testing has come way down in price. It's only gonna
Speaker 1: get cheaper. So um. But you know, conservation work is
Speaker 1: Warren was saying earlier and uh testing to Steve Donne
Speaker 1: has done all the work he's done, is that it's
Speaker 1: not cheap. You know, it takes a lot of effort,
Speaker 1: as a lot of science involved. It's not just turning
Speaker 1: the animals loose, you know, transport, you know, breeding the
Speaker 1: whole nine yards. UM. So you know we're we need
Speaker 1: support just like every other conservation organization out there. Do
Speaker 1: you guys accept volunteers. I feel like you might get
Speaker 1: some volunteer requests. Um, we get some. Um, it's more
Speaker 1: for things we need in office because we're science based. UM.
Speaker 1: You know, we really leverage it's our facilities and are
Speaker 1: our ranches like Steve you know, they really do the work.
Speaker 1: You know, I feel like people are gonna be like
Speaker 1: a come out and raffle that works. Yeah, and that's
Speaker 1: that's also why for this model to work, this consortium model.
Speaker 1: I just mentioned one other thing that there's over five
Speaker 1: hundred species survival plans um in in the the A C. A.
Speaker 1: The zoo world. It's estimated in the next few years
Speaker 1: for variety of reasons um both financial practicality, that half
Speaker 1: of those may go away. And so this model is
Speaker 1: consortium is going to be very important to picking those
Speaker 1: species up and and they'd go away for what reason?
Speaker 1: Funding issues, funding viability, you know, just hey, this isn't
Speaker 1: you know, I don't want to say it's not working,
Speaker 1: but you know it may not be sustainable. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: habitat all kinds of things, right, and so so so
Speaker 1: there's like a plan. It's more than just a piece
Speaker 1: of paper. Yeah, I mean, it's it's en developed and
Speaker 1: this is all happening right now you know as we speak.
Speaker 1: So we're looking at how can we leverage this existing
Speaker 1: model which has been very successful and you know, we
Speaker 1: have a great end to end result case right here
Speaker 1: and do that with other species. But as these species
Speaker 1: become available so to speak. Um, you know, we we
Speaker 1: need uh support to you know, help get people involved.
Speaker 1: And and that ties back into the earlier discussion, which is,
Speaker 1: you know, from a market standpoint, uh, bamburger is a
Speaker 1: little different. But you know, these other facilities, the private
Speaker 1: ones and even some of the public ones, they have
Speaker 1: to make a living, so to speak. You know, so, um,
Speaker 1: you know, they have to be able to move these animals,
Speaker 1: you know, and make it work for them. And if
Speaker 1: they can't there, you know, it's not that they wouldn't
Speaker 1: have an interest in helping conservation, but it just won't
Speaker 1: work for them. I'm with you. What is the liability?
Speaker 1: He said liability earlier, Like when it's like, oh, I
Speaker 1: want to have some entire horned or X on my place.
Speaker 1: I'll give you a really good example. Please do. Because
Speaker 1: the only people that will enture my companies lords of London.
Speaker 1: Oh oh my gosh, my my, My farms are from
Speaker 1: here to that canyon over there that I have to
Speaker 1: fell out. But um, like, well we go up in helicopters.
Speaker 1: So here's a good example of liability. You take what
Speaker 1: he's willing to do today because his his whole approach
Speaker 1: is about education. And helping. Look at what they do
Speaker 1: out here to educate the public. We got in a
Speaker 1: pickup truck. We had a lady that was sitting on
Speaker 1: the tailgate. We had a calf on the ground with
Speaker 1: a mother that's not bluffing. We had a driver of
Speaker 1: a pickup truck. So all those things come into play
Speaker 1: about liability. It was like two minutes into our trip,
Speaker 1: that's right, and so so the liability to include people
Speaker 1: in what we've done. It is absolute um almost impossible
Speaker 1: at times for a guy like me to include the
Speaker 1: public and what I do because of the dangerous He's
Speaker 1: very organized, very but don't think he doesn't have uh risk.
Speaker 1: Sitting in that pickup truck's a risk and so uh
Speaker 1: if you if you turn a cemitar out just he's
Speaker 1: going to be on his own. What if somebody walked
Speaker 1: up on that calf? So this is all about this,
Speaker 1: this just this just doesn't happen by accident. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of responsibility and a lot of things you have
Speaker 1: to do. You can see a liability because there's like
Speaker 1: a there's an actual like ownership path. I mean, if
Speaker 1: you get God, it's just the lands dear it belongs
Speaker 1: to the state, but be like no, yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: already happened. There's also the whole animal care ass man.
Speaker 1: We have all kinds of experts that we draw from,
Speaker 1: you know, veterinarian disease experts. I mean, these people are specialists.
Speaker 1: They've been doing this for you know, decades, right and
Speaker 1: you know someone like Steve that's been doing this for
Speaker 1: a long time. So it's not just anybody can show up, um,
Speaker 1: you know and do this. And so we always have
Speaker 1: a vatting process that we go through. We have an
Speaker 1: ethics document when they want to join a program, and
Speaker 1: you know, we we do a whole check on them
Speaker 1: to make sure they know what they're getting into, their
Speaker 1: capable they have experience, you know, and and every there's
Speaker 1: a lot that goes into it. Not just anybody can
Speaker 1: get in the black Rhino game exactly, that's exactly right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: for a number of reasons. Yeah, so uh help so
Speaker 1: people can come visit this. So tell people how to
Speaker 1: come visit this place. Oh the Bamburger Ranch. Uh we're
Speaker 1: not open to the public. Uh, it's all by reservation. Uh.
Speaker 1: But yeah, look on our website Bamburger Ranch dot org. Um,
Speaker 1: we do we do a multitude of things. We uh,
Speaker 1: we see a lot of kids, about kids a year. Now,
Speaker 1: it doesn't sound like a lot, but um, you've met
Speaker 1: it sounds like a lot of time. Have zero That
Speaker 1: sounds five hundred times more than how many you've met.
Speaker 1: You met a quarter of the staff. Uh, we we've
Speaker 1: when we got really four people here that deal with
Speaker 1: the people ranching or the eco tourism asspect. So yeah,
Speaker 1: they can visit the website and come out for a tour.
Speaker 1: We do also all for a whole series of workshops
Speaker 1: and landowner workshops, uh, to just give people new landowners
Speaker 1: in the area and the idea of how to manage.
Speaker 1: That's great. That's cool man. So someone if someone bought
Speaker 1: some property in the vicinity, they might come out to
Speaker 1: be like, what's possible. You could come here and see
Speaker 1: what's possible. We show you how to get on a
Speaker 1: smaller scale what we have here. That's awesome, that's nice.
Speaker 1: He has some really interesting demonstrations like what happens when
Speaker 1: you chopped the juniper and looking at the water retention
Speaker 1: of grasses versus you know, cedar, and how that helps
Speaker 1: your water table, etcetera. It's it's really good stuff and
Speaker 1: then your inner child you might be missing out. We
Speaker 1: do have dinosaur footprints on the police. We have places
Speaker 1: where we collect fossils. Oh man, you've got to wrangle
Speaker 1: in work. So that's what I got to call it
Speaker 1: wrangled one. I called it special. And then how do
Speaker 1: people go find Like, if they want to get the
Speaker 1: broader picture of the organization, what's the best place to go? Look? Yeah,
Speaker 1: just Conservation Centers dot org. It's plural. And then go
Speaker 1: on there you can see our programs and find out
Speaker 1: just a wealth of information and our member institutions who
Speaker 1: we work with, etcetera. How to make a donation, Yeah,
Speaker 1: right there on the home page. All right, Well, thank
Speaker 1: you guys, appreciate it, Thank you. Pleasure. It's privileged to
Speaker 1: be here with you. Prof. Arter