Speaker 1: This is me eater podcast coming in you shirtless, severely
Speaker 1: bugg bitten in my case underwear listening podcast. You can't
Speaker 1: predict anything, Okay, um uh, the machine on is now, Thomas.
Speaker 1: I've been looking at your name. I've been looking at
Speaker 1: your name and don't don't tell me how long? Well
Speaker 1: my entire life. I've been looking at your name of
Speaker 1: magazine you were very personal, precocious, how like? How how
Speaker 1: many it feels like my entire life? How many? How
Speaker 1: many magazine articles have you written? Thousands and now now thousands,
Speaker 1: now hundreds? Maybe you know I've written, um, you know
Speaker 1: the last few years. I've probably written more television shows.
Speaker 1: I'm not a very fast writer. I'm a half fast writer.
Speaker 1: Do you ever hear that quote from I think it
Speaker 1: was our w Apple had that quote that I can
Speaker 1: write faster than anyone who can write better than me,
Speaker 1: and I can write better than anyone who can write faster. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've I've I don't know. I mean I probably am
Speaker 1: good for twenty articles a year, feature articles a year.
Speaker 1: What do you mean writing television shows? I write? I
Speaker 1: write for Right, for Trev Goudy, for um Sasquatch Mountain Man,
Speaker 1: and His Monster Fish show. Right, what I write this
Speaker 1: like enter animal enter, No, it's like it's like, and
Speaker 1: now as the deer comes towards Jim, Oh, you write
Speaker 1: the narration the voice over, so you're coming in after
Speaker 1: the cut's been put together. And I have one of
Speaker 1: those charming little golden mices in my house too, that
Speaker 1: mean the golden moose. Oh like an award. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like you got on yourself over here? Yea? And for
Speaker 1: what for narration? For writing for his Fish and show.
Speaker 1: They decided that they will make they'll make the show
Speaker 1: and then they'll send it to you and you'll be like,
Speaker 1: and they'll be some scratch video and you're going and redo.
Speaker 1: You'll write like, what's gonna be the actual narration? Did
Speaker 1: you either read on it? No? No, no, no, they've
Speaker 1: got they've got they have a professional talent for that. No,
Speaker 1: I I get well scratch vo yeah, well no, not necessarily.
Speaker 1: Now it could be like right here, yeah, that's it.
Speaker 1: You know, it's um um, you know, give us give
Speaker 1: us fifteen seconds here about well whatever, you you know,
Speaker 1: what are you doing it? Okay, let let's let's let's
Speaker 1: aside from the fact that it's easy money, which I
Speaker 1: don't want anybody to know. Um, well, there's gonna be
Speaker 1: two or three now, you know. Well, um, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a different muscle, it's a different it's a different deal,
Speaker 1: you know. Um, some are better than others. I mean,
Speaker 1: some are better too to work on the others not
Speaker 1: not not the shows per se, but just individual episodes.
Speaker 1: You know, you can I I can tell when they're scrambling.
Speaker 1: I'm sure you guys understand what that's like. You know,
Speaker 1: you's got a certain smell to it. Yeah, what is it? Uh? Yeah,
Speaker 1: for Dame talks about smells like stinky feet. So you know,
Speaker 1: so you grew up reading Heavingway because you talk a
Speaker 1: lot about Heavingway in your book. Yeah, yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: and it's and it's Um, I think that was more
Speaker 1: like I had a high school teacher who was like
Speaker 1: just Hemingway guy in the sixties, and I started reading it. Um,
Speaker 1: But I also like had I mean, my influences are
Speaker 1: also personal because you don't write. Here's the thing. You
Speaker 1: don't write like an outdoor writer. What does that mean? Well,
Speaker 1: you write like a writer. Well, okay, there's outdoor writers
Speaker 1: right now. There's some aspects of outdoor writing in your
Speaker 1: writing that a writer would never think to do, right
Speaker 1: courtesies where you'd be like, instead of I lifted Old Bessie,
Speaker 1: you might be like I lifted X caliber Magan model firearm.
Speaker 1: Dawn was a Primrose promises, which is a outdoor writer
Speaker 1: thing to do that a writer wouldn't do unless like
Speaker 1: kar Ck McCarthy would do it. But it wouldn't be
Speaker 1: the same, It just would be different. Well, no, I
Speaker 1: should say, because Karl McCarthy and No Country for Old
Speaker 1: Men doesn't even say like someone had a nine millimeter
Speaker 1: parabellum or whatever. Right, So yeah, so some writer writers
Speaker 1: do clarify calibers and grain bullets and whatnot, but generally
Speaker 1: you don't write like you don't write like an outdoor
Speaker 1: writer because there's people here's here's why I'm putting it.
Speaker 1: There's people that were gonna be writers. I was gonna
Speaker 1: be a writer. Okay, they're gonna be writers Like I
Speaker 1: gotta be a writer. I don't know what exactly gonna
Speaker 1: write about that will come out in time, but this
Speaker 1: is what I'm doing. And then you've got people who were, uh,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna do something in the outdoor industry, not sure
Speaker 1: what it is. It'll emerge over time. And those two
Speaker 1: people have very different world views when they each wind
Speaker 1: up being an outdoor writer and and and I guess
Speaker 1: in my case, I would there was a mesh of
Speaker 1: the two of an intersection um where I was influenced
Speaker 1: as a young child in the hunting, which was unusual
Speaker 1: because I grew up in like l a because you're
Speaker 1: old man didn't hunt. But the guy I learned from
Speaker 1: was his friend and I talked about in the book.
Speaker 1: I mean, why why am I? Why am I writing
Speaker 1: about Africa? You know at this late date, UM would
Speaker 1: be a late date. It is a late date. I
Speaker 1: mean you know that in your life. No, I think,
Speaker 1: I think, I think, I think. I think that the
Speaker 1: whole for the parameters around African writing have changed a lot.
Speaker 1: You know, there was a time when it was, as
Speaker 1: I think, I say somewhere in the book, I mean,
Speaker 1: the greatest adventure money could buy. Okay, let let let's
Speaker 1: pause from it. Pause because you've recently published the book
Speaker 1: August in Africa. So just I just want people to
Speaker 1: be aware, like like so in this book just came
Speaker 1: out or not within a year, so or what Yeah,
Speaker 1: within six months. Yeah, and it's and so uh so.
Speaker 1: But the some of these pieces you wrote long ago,
Speaker 1: they're forty years old. Some of them I started to
Speaker 1: collect it. So you're saying, like after writing has changed
Speaker 1: between when you began, Africa has changed from when I
Speaker 1: began to when you're now putting this out in book.
Speaker 1: African Hunting has changed. Um because of Cecil the Lion. No, No,
Speaker 1: I don't think so. I I think Cecil is the
Speaker 1: least of the worries. Um, I don't, I don't. I
Speaker 1: don't know that there's any way of putting that particular
Speaker 1: genie back in the bottle. That's that's been going on
Speaker 1: since Born Free, you know, you know, back in the
Speaker 1: six it's been going on for a Can we hold up,
Speaker 1: we hold off on this for a second. Um, So
Speaker 1: you're old man and hunt. You were born in l A.
Speaker 1: He had a buddy that hunted was and went to
Speaker 1: Africa in the fifties on on on very little money.
Speaker 1: Was your dad a writer? No, my dad was a
Speaker 1: machinist and actually he and his brother owned a company.
Speaker 1: So who was the first writer you knew? You mean, like,
Speaker 1: what made you aware that there's a thing called writers,
Speaker 1: and that you could be one. You know, it was
Speaker 1: that again. These are these are these are wonderfully probing questions. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't know. I mean, that's a good question.
Speaker 1: I had a certain facility for words, you know, which
Speaker 1: which is as I get older, is is fleeting away.
Speaker 1: But really, thank you? Um oh no, I just I
Speaker 1: know what you're saying, know what you're saying, because I
Speaker 1: feel like it's happened to me and then it comes
Speaker 1: back again. Though, but in some ways it's it's the
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's it's it's like it's like I
Speaker 1: I my fastball is not there anymore, but I'm learning.
Speaker 1: I've got a lot more, uh you know, sliders and
Speaker 1: and and fork balls and stuff I can. My technique
Speaker 1: has gotten better, I think, so I like to think.
Speaker 1: So anyway, those are terms for tricky baseball pitches. Yeah,
Speaker 1: un educated enough in sports like that. When someone says
Speaker 1: like fastball, I'm like, I'm like trap tracking track. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well maybe all our listeners, you know, are huge baseball fans.
Speaker 1: Right well. Anyway, um, so, I mean, if if if
Speaker 1: I'm gonna be a totally autobiographical it was the nuns.
Speaker 1: It was the nuns and grammar school that they singled
Speaker 1: me out and they said you can write, yeah, and
Speaker 1: and that was like and like I think, like anything else,
Speaker 1: it was like this was a wonderful way to get attention.
Speaker 1: You know, Yeah, I'm with you. And it's funny when
Speaker 1: you go when someone when you need to express the
Speaker 1: thing like what caused something? Yeah, because there's all there's
Speaker 1: it's like a game you can play, like you know,
Speaker 1: like like I'll often say like, yeah, I kind of
Speaker 1: wish I hadn't done my first book the way I
Speaker 1: did it. My wife said, well, we wouldn't have met
Speaker 1: because I'm like, okay, but that's like that old story
Speaker 1: where the guy goes back in time to hunt a
Speaker 1: dinosaur and steps on a They find a dinosaur. It's
Speaker 1: about ready to die anyway, and I really careful, rob
Speaker 1: he's shooting a dinosaur. He stepped on a butterfly and
Speaker 1: comes back in the Nazis in World War two and
Speaker 1: and Trump is president. So you do get into like
Speaker 1: what made it become that you became a writer, and
Speaker 1: it's it's a hard thing. I've kind of like I
Speaker 1: look at him like it's kind of because of my
Speaker 1: tenth grade English teacher, Robert Keaton, sure kind of like
Speaker 1: if I had to go, like, oh that right, right,
Speaker 1: And and as far as the Hemmingway thing, I'll get
Speaker 1: put a plug in for my sophomore UM English teacher
Speaker 1: at the you know, with the Jesuits, was Tom McCambridge,
Speaker 1: who's still around him, still talking um. But I knew
Speaker 1: about hunting before I knew about Hemingway, except well, that's
Speaker 1: not really true, because I think this is very weird.
Speaker 1: I mean, and I don't know how these things happen.
Speaker 1: I was seven or eight years old and I was
Speaker 1: riding with my father in his um I think it
Speaker 1: was a Buick Wildcat six one, and we were turning
Speaker 1: down this street called Cherokee and Owny, California, and the
Speaker 1: radio news came on and said, author Ernest Hemingway is dead.
Speaker 1: And this was in the summer of that year, and
Speaker 1: I really had no idea who he was. I was
Speaker 1: seven years old. And then fast forward into high school
Speaker 1: and this other you know, this strange serendipity of you know,
Speaker 1: forces coming together whatever. Um. So yeah, I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: I think that was part of it. I think there
Speaker 1: was that a lure of being What kind of writer
Speaker 1: is this guy? Hemingway, you know, I mean he can
Speaker 1: write about you know, he can he can write about stuff,
Speaker 1: he can do stuff. He knows about stuff. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think there's a great line that that ultimately, you
Speaker 1: know what, writers have to know something, and he knew.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, he knew how to dig worms
Speaker 1: and go and go fishing in the big two hearted river,
Speaker 1: you know, which doesn't exist. They don't think or doesn't
Speaker 1: you're little too hard? Yeah, So I mean it's it's
Speaker 1: I mean he also he he didn't he like fumbled
Speaker 1: with the directions or I'm on purpose to kind of
Speaker 1: like you know, um then you mean like the Nick
Speaker 1: Adams stories. Yeah, I mean he fudged the directions so
Speaker 1: if you if you follow them, you'd never find the place. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean he didn't. He wasn't going to tell you
Speaker 1: where he is particular horn. I grew up in Illinois.
Speaker 1: Now when he shot himself, yeah, catch them idahole, catch
Speaker 1: your mind with a shotgun. I believe was purchased from
Speaker 1: Abercrombie and Fitch. It was a boss ten gage with
Speaker 1: with dual triggers, but didn't wind up being there's the
Speaker 1: thing to have. Not long ago, his family took the
Speaker 1: shotgun down to have a mechanic destroy it. Well, it
Speaker 1: took He took a he took a cutting torch and
Speaker 1: cut the hole. This is in Sylvia, callabe that the
Speaker 1: heavy ways guns, and they and they and they did that.
Speaker 1: He went and buried it and they never found it.
Speaker 1: But he took a couple of pieces, like the trigger, right,
Speaker 1: put in a match a little piece of the sideline. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and put it in in a match. And they were able
Speaker 1: to go back and and piece it all together. Because
Speaker 1: it had always been thought that he had shot himself
Speaker 1: with some different shotgun. It turned out that the pieces
Speaker 1: in that matchbox was from a different shotgun or whatever
Speaker 1: he thought he killed himself with. Now you know you're
Speaker 1: something special when people will later argue about what gun
Speaker 1: it was you killed yourself with. Yeah, but but more
Speaker 1: than a heavyweight, Like I feel like when you write, uh,
Speaker 1: I don't think you you don't write like Hevyway. I
Speaker 1: don't think you like try it right like Hevingway. But
Speaker 1: the stuff he wrote the seventies sounds it reminded me
Speaker 1: a lot of like other guys that are right in
Speaker 1: the seventies even where like early Jim Harrison, early time
Speaker 1: mcgwaen um and it sounds it kind of reminded me
Speaker 1: like the structure of the stuff, well, a disjointed in
Speaker 1: structure that also reminds yea of the other guy that
Speaker 1: shot himself in Big Sarah, California, Richard Broad Again, did
Speaker 1: you read all those guys or was it just something
Speaker 1: in the air. No, I read all those guys, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know that was the the the idea
Speaker 1: that you could actually be a I think one of
Speaker 1: mcgwyn's favorite words of sportsman, you know, and and actually
Speaker 1: right about it, I had no interest in well, I didn't.
Speaker 1: I didn't live in that milieu anyway. I was. I
Speaker 1: was never gonna write about Manhattan, you know. I was
Speaker 1: never gonna write the j McNerney kind of stuff. You know.
Speaker 1: I wasn't gonna write novels anyway, as it turned out,
Speaker 1: Um though I did have I have one Nolla. But anyway,
Speaker 1: they snow Leopard, the snow or Tail and Alan Jones,
Speaker 1: not the snow Leopard, silver tail, snow lips tail, which
Speaker 1: was not t a I t a y. It's it
Speaker 1: was what we finally came with Alan Jones over Bank
Speaker 1: Tell Pressidy here in town and he says, hello, uh
Speaker 1: we uh that's we came up with. So anyway, Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean it was it was. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: stuff was out there and that was that was where
Speaker 1: you looked. You know, it was you know, it was
Speaker 1: that was the way it was. I somehow I had
Speaker 1: this notion that you could actually make it as a
Speaker 1: writer and not have to get sucked into academia or
Speaker 1: someplace else. One of my uh this apricot and uh,
Speaker 1: you know what people say, like speaking of which, or
Speaker 1: like let's say you're talking about frogs, you know, and
Speaker 1: you're like, yeah, frogs are generally a lot of frogs
Speaker 1: are green. And then someone will say speaking of frogs, um,
Speaker 1: and then I'll tell you something about frogs. I found
Speaker 1: myself a lot of times in conversation like wanting to
Speaker 1: raise a point that I can't even say speaking of which,
Speaker 1: but like it's not even related to what we're talking.
Speaker 1: But a favorite thing of mine about Tom mcgwain speaking
Speaker 1: of no speaking yeah, speaking of mcgwain, he writes great
Speaker 1: short stories. Still to this favorite Yeah anything yet, Hi, Hi,
Speaker 1: I like Tom mcgwaen, So mcgway so writes, I mean
Speaker 1: he writes phenomenal short stories. There's two short story writers
Speaker 1: I like right now. I like Tom mcgwaen, and I
Speaker 1: like a girl named Curtis sit and Felt. I don't
Speaker 1: know her. Yes, yeah pieces in New York, dude, Yeah
Speaker 1: she is good. So mcgwaen. He's got an essay he
Speaker 1: wrote about hunting, and it's like a seventies style essay.
Speaker 1: Everybody's essays in the seventies all were kind of the same.
Speaker 1: It's just good versions and bad versions of it. Like
Speaker 1: like pasta, right, like spaghetti, meat sauce. You're looking at
Speaker 1: something it's good to something that essays in the seventies
Speaker 1: looked a certain way. His word, the good version, well
Speaker 1: it was. He he's got this piece he wrote where
Speaker 1: in it he's imagining a conversation I talked about this
Speaker 1: all the time. He's imagining a conversation between a hunt
Speaker 1: her in an anti hunter, and the anti hunter is
Speaker 1: taking the hunter to task and like, why do you
Speaker 1: have to kill deer? What did dear do to you?
Speaker 1: And the hunt was like I can't talk about it
Speaker 1: this way, and I know, why do deer have to
Speaker 1: die for you would you die for a deer? And
Speaker 1: he says, if it came to that, yes, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and that is I mean in circles and a spiral
Speaker 1: and a wheel within a wheel. Now it's the like.
Speaker 1: His editor for that piece was Terry McDonald, who coincidentally
Speaker 1: later became my editor at Sports a Field. I know that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the and and then he uh, and you know,
Speaker 1: and then his his I took Terry Terry out on
Speaker 1: an ant well. I went back to New York and
Speaker 1: I was saying, like, you're a doing an outdoor magazine. Xea,
Speaker 1: yeah here he ever hunted anything. He goes, no, does
Speaker 1: that matter? Yeah? I said, yeah it matters. And I said,
Speaker 1: come out to Wyoming and we'll hunt antelope with black
Speaker 1: powder rifles. And he said, okay. So you know, we
Speaker 1: came out and you know, he was out in this
Speaker 1: blind I guess, and this antelope walked by and he
Speaker 1: killed it very you know, serviceably. And then I was
Speaker 1: walking out to them and I got up to him
Speaker 1: and he was like looking at me and he said,
Speaker 1: you know, Tom, I saw you cross in the fields.
Speaker 1: I yeah, And I suddenly had this urge to shoot
Speaker 1: and kill you, and I said, really, Terry, yes, yes
Speaker 1: I did. Anyway, that that evening went on for quite
Speaker 1: a little while, and the next morning he had to
Speaker 1: catch a plane and I had to come in and
Speaker 1: wake him up and ask him what he wanted for breakfast,
Speaker 1: and he said, I'll have the surfer breakfast. And I
Speaker 1: got the surfer breakfast and he goes, he goes, yeah, uh,
Speaker 1: twinky and a pepsi. Anyway, but he actually commissioned that
Speaker 1: piece by mcgwayne mcgwayn piece, yeah, and it was actually
Speaker 1: mcgwain went to him, well, he said, I want you
Speaker 1: to I'm starting he was starting Outside, and so I
Speaker 1: want you to write a piece for Outside, and uh,
Speaker 1: mcgwayne said, I don't suppose you'd want something about hunting.
Speaker 1: And he goes, well, it's not really kind of where
Speaker 1: we're at. But sure, yeah, I've wedged I've wedged the
Speaker 1: number of house hunting stories into Outside over the years.
Speaker 1: There you go, you gotta cram them in there. If
Speaker 1: you try hard enough, you can stick it in there. Now,
Speaker 1: there's the thing you say in your book that really
Speaker 1: surprised me. I want to make sure that you think
Speaker 1: this is correct. The Africa has a lower percentage of
Speaker 1: what one would call wilderness than does the world in general. Supposedly, Uh,
Speaker 1: that are that those are the statistics that I guess
Speaker 1: it kind of makes sense if you think about and
Speaker 1: and it's like if you think about the boots and
Speaker 1: its semantics, the circumpolar boreal like they are the Antarctic.
Speaker 1: You know, there's but the other figure that's more interesting,
Speaker 1: I think is that there is more wilderness in North
Speaker 1: America than there is in Africa. I just well, but
Speaker 1: you have to realize that the African Africans are essentially
Speaker 1: pastoralists and agrarians. So they are, you know they are,
Speaker 1: and there's some there's a billion of them, you know,
Speaker 1: there's a billion Africans, and and they tend to be
Speaker 1: spread out. You know. It's it's if you took off
Speaker 1: here and went up in the mountains someplace, and we're
Speaker 1: walking around, you would be surprised to run into somebody.
Speaker 1: You know you could, but I mean in places if
Speaker 1: you know, there is almost no place in Africa where
Speaker 1: you will not run into somebody. They'll be on foot,
Speaker 1: they may be carrying a spear, they may be driving
Speaker 1: a cow, they may be doing whatever. You know, but
Speaker 1: that tempers the definition of wilderness, you know, So it's
Speaker 1: it's it is more. I mean it is a it
Speaker 1: is a rural society more than a wilderness society. Is
Speaker 1: that a probably probably possibly of um, maybe the landscape
Speaker 1: or the people requiring a larger piece of the landscape
Speaker 1: they have they have to elude Um. I don't know
Speaker 1: if you don't Val guy stuff in BC. But we
Speaker 1: talked about that guy every day. Yeah, I love him.
Speaker 1: He's a great guy. Um Vale's anyway, so Val would like,
Speaker 1: you know, Val is like what I was asking him.
Speaker 1: I said, what will produce more biomass? And he goes, well,
Speaker 1: you gotta remember African is, as he says, thin soils.
Speaker 1: They don't. They didn't have the advantages of glaciers pushing
Speaker 1: all this top soil down like we have here, and
Speaker 1: so we have a much more fertile base as it were,
Speaker 1: that you can you can grow a lot less in
Speaker 1: Africa than you can here. And because of that, the
Speaker 1: people tend to be more spread out, and so they're there.
Speaker 1: It's like how cows are spread out. Yeah, if you
Speaker 1: go look at like like grazing ratios in Florida, cows
Speaker 1: per acre. Yeah, let me look at cows per acre
Speaker 1: in West Texas. It takes a hell of a lot
Speaker 1: more ground. I mean, if you want to if you
Speaker 1: want to raise cattle, you go to Iowa and you
Speaker 1: feed him silage. You know, that's that's the sensible way
Speaker 1: of doing it. Um. You ever see a map of
Speaker 1: where you could raise cattle that'll supplemental feed. No, but
Speaker 1: I'm sure it's fascinating. It's not a big chunk of ground. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: it's I mean it's and it's like, you know, it's
Speaker 1: how much how much corn is raised for cattle? So
Speaker 1: uh yeah, that really threw me for a loop. And
Speaker 1: and and as you like, I've never I've never stepped
Speaker 1: foot on Africa. I've always been kind of interested in
Speaker 1: going there. Um And I've come kind of close sometimes
Speaker 1: to go in there hunting. But I have so many,
Speaker 1: so many things about it. Give me pause, and I'll
Speaker 1: ask you about a lot of those things. But it's
Speaker 1: I'm coming at you in discussing this, um not not
Speaker 1: from an educated perspective. Yeah, I don't know what I'm
Speaker 1: talking about. Oftentimes I have the luxury of talking. That
Speaker 1: doesn't stop a lot of people from feel like what
Speaker 1: what doesn't happen is a lot of people don't lay
Speaker 1: that out right. Well, that's that's that's an admirable position.
Speaker 1: You're talking your you're talking to your book, and this
Speaker 1: might be a good way to kind of lay out
Speaker 1: like when you started going there, how many times you've
Speaker 1: been there? You're talking to your book at a point
Speaker 1: where you say, there's old school African hunting and there's
Speaker 1: new school African hunting. Ryan, what are they? And when
Speaker 1: did and when did uh that that? When did it tip? Well?
Speaker 1: I think I can't deny that there are probably aspects
Speaker 1: of what I kind of think of as old school.
Speaker 1: Let's put it this way. When I first started going
Speaker 1: to Africa forty plus years ago, you when you're in
Speaker 1: the twenties, it was it. Yeah, when I first started
Speaker 1: going there, it was we would go out, we we
Speaker 1: would go to the game department and we would get
Speaker 1: licenses and permits. It wasn't just complete you know, las
Speaker 1: a fair but in the permits were expensive or inexpensive
Speaker 1: all relatively speaking, It depends on where you were, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess they were expensive at the time,
Speaker 1: but I had I It wasn't like buying like elk
Speaker 1: tags as a resident or like buying a deer tag
Speaker 1: as a resident in Florida. Yeah, yeah, well I don't Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it was. Let's put it this way. I
Speaker 1: mean it was. It has certainly become exponentially more expensive
Speaker 1: for what it was, like it's a head of inflation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what it was in those days was probably not considered cheap.
Speaker 1: I had the benefit. I had some money that I
Speaker 1: had gotten, and I had enough money to either, let's say,
Speaker 1: go put a down payment on a house or go
Speaker 1: to Africa. This is the first time you went. You
Speaker 1: didn't go as a writer? No, I wasn't. I wasn't published.
Speaker 1: You know, I got you. So I just went, you know,
Speaker 1: and it was like it was like it was like,
Speaker 1: what are you gonna do when you get back? You know,
Speaker 1: this is my question more than anything else. And I
Speaker 1: didn't have an answer. I mean I didn't. Well, I
Speaker 1: guess I'll come back and try to write about something,
Speaker 1: you know. But I, for some reason, because of my
Speaker 1: experience of a friend of my father's, his influence on me,
Speaker 1: you know, too many books read at two young an age. Um,
Speaker 1: I wanted to go. I wanted to see it. That's
Speaker 1: a quote in your book were Hemingway what what Hemingway
Speaker 1: books that we're Havingway were one of the characters says, hey,
Speaker 1: we should go to Africa and go hunting. Their characters
Speaker 1: never had any desire. He goes, that's just because you
Speaker 1: haven't read a book about it. That's yeah, that's from
Speaker 1: uh the sun also right, but anyway they Yeah, No,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it's the you know what was I
Speaker 1: gonna say? Are the the that I when I went there?
Speaker 1: You you had, you were, you were mobile, you moved,
Speaker 1: you know you if if we will go, we will
Speaker 1: we would go into an area and we would find
Speaker 1: a spot and would go, you know, under the fever
Speaker 1: trees and we would put the tents up and then
Speaker 1: we would hunt them and then and not hunting. These
Speaker 1: aren't fenced areas. Just just no, no, no, no no.
Speaker 1: When you say we, who is we, Well, me and
Speaker 1: I'd have a professional hunter, you know, they would just
Speaker 1: be the two of us, two of you got on
Speaker 1: the track. That's another thing I mentioned in the book.
Speaker 1: I mean, because basically you have you know, there's there's
Speaker 1: it's it's a it's a polite fiction that the professional
Speaker 1: hunter is there for you know, but the guys who
Speaker 1: are really doing the work are the trackers because they
Speaker 1: are so good at what they do. But in those
Speaker 1: so it was still you professional hunter and multiple trackers.
Speaker 1: The professional hunter is like a liaison. He's he's a
Speaker 1: legal requirement, but he's also he's more than that. But
Speaker 1: it's not a legal requirement that he be white. No,
Speaker 1: And I've hunted with black professional hunters you know who've
Speaker 1: been are great guys, I mean like native born well,
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess most of white professional hunters, well
Speaker 1: know you mentioned a lot were born in England and elsewhere.
Speaker 1: Not necessarily no, I mean some of them. You know,
Speaker 1: the first guy hunter with John Fletcher, he was actually
Speaker 1: born in India, um, but he was he was a colonialist,
Speaker 1: I guess, is a you know, without any pejorative attachment
Speaker 1: to that word. Um. But he was with Kurt, Donnie
Speaker 1: and Selby, you know, and that was that was you know,
Speaker 1: this wasn't this is kind of the way it was
Speaker 1: in those days. Is I found a night I knew
Speaker 1: the name Kurran Downey, um, which is what an outfitter. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was like Robert Rourke, you know, and those guys
Speaker 1: hunted with with Kurran Downey. And then Harry Selby is
Speaker 1: the guy who was Rourke's professional hunter and and and
Speaker 1: he he put in with these two guys and they
Speaker 1: became Kurve Downey and Selby Safari's and I actually knew
Speaker 1: the name. I had no other information on them. And
Speaker 1: I a friend of mine had gone to Nairobe and
Speaker 1: he'd come back with the phone book. He'd stolen the
Speaker 1: phone book because he thought it was pretty cool to
Speaker 1: have U, you know, the night robe phone book, And
Speaker 1: so I looked it up. I got their name and
Speaker 1: address out of the thing, and I wrote him a
Speaker 1: letter and I said I want to go home with
Speaker 1: you guys. And this letter came back with all these
Speaker 1: blue lions on the outside of the letter going, we'd
Speaker 1: love to have come pretty cool and um, so that's
Speaker 1: how I got over there. You know, now, of course,
Speaker 1: today you're gonna go to like the conventions, and you're
Speaker 1: gonna go to a booking age and you're gonna you know,
Speaker 1: you're gonna it's all it's all gonna be brokered for you.
Speaker 1: It's all going to be negotiation anyway. That's and that's
Speaker 1: the way it is, And I don't I'm not one
Speaker 1: of those kind of guys who like says, well that's
Speaker 1: you know, that makes it all bad. It's just the
Speaker 1: way it makes it the way it is. But um
Speaker 1: so we note when I first went there and and
Speaker 1: it was and it was that was still this this
Speaker 1: this hold over of the kind of some of the
Speaker 1: worst aspects of colonialism. I'm not gonna deny that. When
Speaker 1: I the way I hunted in Kenya and at that time,
Speaker 1: I mean, this is the way that people have been
Speaker 1: hunting for seventy eight years, you know, and it was
Speaker 1: the way. What was the way? Like what's that that?
Speaker 1: It was the structure, the the organization, you know, the
Speaker 1: fact that you were going into an area and you
Speaker 1: were hunting. You know, we were the But what was
Speaker 1: colonial because it was exploitative of the well it was
Speaker 1: it was a skin color. Was was you know, a
Speaker 1: factor a factor uh in I mean in compensation in hierarchy. No,
Speaker 1: it was just the way it was. But it was
Speaker 1: a factor. And what it was the way that was
Speaker 1: the way the Safari system had been structured and and
Speaker 1: it evolved from you know, like Roosevelt on is you
Speaker 1: had you had a professional hunter with a licensed hunter,
Speaker 1: and then it was you know, he would set up
Speaker 1: the camps and he he had responsibility, and it was,
Speaker 1: you know, what they wanted to make sure. It was
Speaker 1: that when the Mazoongu, the crazy white guy who's going
Speaker 1: over here to hunt, he's not gonna get killed because
Speaker 1: we don't want him to be killed. That's gonna look bad.
Speaker 1: It's not gonna be good for our our tourist industry,
Speaker 1: you know. I mean the second time. The first time
Speaker 1: Hemmingway went to Tanzania in Gnyka in those days, that
Speaker 1: was on his own dime, or at least his wife's
Speaker 1: uncle's dime, you know, and it was a pretty expensive
Speaker 1: deal in those days. You figured out it's not you
Speaker 1: when he went back the second time to Kenya for
Speaker 1: I don't know how long months he was there um
Speaker 1: as the guest of the Kenyan Game Department, because they
Speaker 1: wanted we would love to have some promotion to get
Speaker 1: people here too. You know, we're we're kind of on
Speaker 1: the cusp of the Mau Mau uprisings and we're getting
Speaker 1: some bad press and we want to you know, we
Speaker 1: would love to have you come in here and and
Speaker 1: you know, hang around, and so that's what he was.
Speaker 1: I feel I got that because I feel like I'm
Speaker 1: missing something. Sure, the first time you went, you go
Speaker 1: there and you there, there's a feller, the pH he's
Speaker 1: a white guy, right, and there's some element of he's
Speaker 1: a loonial being that European countries carved up Africa and
Speaker 1: they had colonies and there was a offset power structure
Speaker 1: that favored those white individuals or the indigenous individuals that
Speaker 1: lived there. Yeah, and also hunting with you are trackers.
Speaker 1: The trackers are there as you know, they're they're working
Speaker 1: for They are hired by the professional hunter, and you
Speaker 1: say they do the heavy lifting of the hunting. They're
Speaker 1: the guy who they're the guy. You put them on
Speaker 1: a track and they're gonna they're gonna figure out where
Speaker 1: that track ends up to a degree where you're like,
Speaker 1: holy sh it, this guy is good at tracking. Oh man,
Speaker 1: oh man, like you wouldn't be able to do. You know,
Speaker 1: that's the scary part. If you follow those guys around,
Speaker 1: even for a few weeks, you can begin to like actually,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of deceive yourself into figuring out, oh,
Speaker 1: what it is they're doing. And you get to the
Speaker 1: point where you're start. You can like, look, oh, here's
Speaker 1: a buffalo track. Look how look how it look? How
Speaker 1: the edge is shiny, it's fresh, you know, it's not
Speaker 1: blown over. You know, so it was probably this morning.
Speaker 1: Let's go, let's get on this track and and go.
Speaker 1: And you also mentioned how the coarseness of the vegetation
Speaker 1: in the buffalo ship, yeah, giving you an indication of
Speaker 1: tooth ways, especially elephants. Elephants you can look at you
Speaker 1: can get the you know, the elephant dounge is like
Speaker 1: this basketball laying on the ground, and you can look
Speaker 1: at how coarse the grass stems are in it. That
Speaker 1: will tell you that it's an older bull because his
Speaker 1: teeth are worn down and he's not he's not chewing
Speaker 1: it as much as he could as a younger one.
Speaker 1: So that's that's an indication of something. It doesn't, you know,
Speaker 1: none of that tells you if your elephant hunting. None
Speaker 1: the tell And I've never hunted. I've never taken an
Speaker 1: elephant with who I would have, but I never have
Speaker 1: um and I add the that the the fact is
Speaker 1: that that doesn't tell how big the ivory is. You know,
Speaker 1: the size of the track doesn't tell you anything if
Speaker 1: it's got a big tusk or not. Right, So old
Speaker 1: school new school, new school is now okay, old school
Speaker 1: is explained more about old school. Okay, well old schools. Essentially,
Speaker 1: you were hunting as close to wilderness in Africa as
Speaker 1: you could find, you know, as we're talking about before
Speaker 1: it was it was when by the definition of oldness
Speaker 1: in this country probably wouldn't qualify. You know, there were
Speaker 1: motor vehicles allowed, you could, you know, but you were
Speaker 1: out in the middle of nowhere, you know, and it
Speaker 1: was and you would find you would run across you know,
Speaker 1: massi who were still I mean guys with spears. Guys
Speaker 1: were still these guys were still spearing lions in those days,
Speaker 1: you know. And and it was all essentially it was
Speaker 1: it was government land, open land, wild land. It was.
Speaker 1: It wasn't controlled by anybody just roaming around you were
Speaker 1: you were. Essentially you would, yeah, you would essentially you
Speaker 1: had you had you had arranged for the right to
Speaker 1: hunt it for a certain amount of time and and
Speaker 1: a certain perimeter. You know. They they broke it up
Speaker 1: on what they called hunting blocks, and you would actually
Speaker 1: get blocked sixty and you would hunt blocked sixty which
Speaker 1: might be fifty thousand makers. I don't know. I mean
Speaker 1: it was just go on forever and the pH arrange
Speaker 1: that with the government. Yeah yeah, I mean he was,
Speaker 1: he was, you know, that's what they did. They'd go
Speaker 1: to the game department. Now fast forward thirty years to
Speaker 1: the new school New school and you kind of get
Speaker 1: to the South African model and the South African model.
Speaker 1: The land is owned by the hunter or by a landowner,
Speaker 1: and then the hunter professional hunter will like sort of
Speaker 1: lease that out, you know, and you'll bring in his
Speaker 1: clients quote unquote clients and they will um and unquote Oh,
Speaker 1: I just there's there. You know, you get that, you
Speaker 1: get into that that weird area like as am I
Speaker 1: a hunter? Am I a client? Am I not? You know,
Speaker 1: you go back and forth on that. I don't understand
Speaker 1: what you're saying. Well, you know, it's it's it's how
Speaker 1: much how much handholding are you getting? Well and and
Speaker 1: meaning a client gets more than a hunter. Client is
Speaker 1: the term I think to avoid confusion with professional hunter.
Speaker 1: You know that that that you are the client is
Speaker 1: a hunter. The professional hunter is the licensed guide on
Speaker 1: the hunt. So I think for the term of art
Speaker 1: is client. You are the client of the professional hunter.
Speaker 1: But that would seem like a really literal perfect word client. Yeah,
Speaker 1: given the guy money to take you hunting, you're his client. Yep, yep.
Speaker 1: The same thing in this country when you go, you know,
Speaker 1: that's the word guided. He he does talk about He
Speaker 1: talks about clients. Do you think guys go over there
Speaker 1: and then disliked being called clients because they wanted to
Speaker 1: be called well, you know, I mean, there's there's there's
Speaker 1: you know, everybody wants to be jungle Jim. You know,
Speaker 1: everyone wants to come back where you know, as soon
Speaker 1: as they go, they want to run out and buy
Speaker 1: the Safari jacket and the you know with the bullet
Speaker 1: holes or the pouches in the in the in the shirt,
Speaker 1: so that they aspire to be taken more seriously than
Speaker 1: they are. Yeah. Yeah, well you know, and and and
Speaker 1: there's a great one I got and I think I
Speaker 1: quote Jim Harrison in the book where he talks about that,
Speaker 1: you know that, um, there there's a there's a certain
Speaker 1: amount of African hunting that um is really a polite
Speaker 1: fiction or a little comedy that that that wealthy sportsmen
Speaker 1: play on their less well healed brethren back home. You know,
Speaker 1: it's like they're always getting charged by a lion, attacked
Speaker 1: by a cake buffalo or something. And and well, but anyway,
Speaker 1: the and and and there is a point to this
Speaker 1: that um so now it's like, you know, and God
Speaker 1: bless him. I mean, if you want to go to Africa,
Speaker 1: go to Africa. And if God who any any hunter
Speaker 1: who wants to go to Africa, if he wants to
Speaker 1: go to South Africa and he wants to shoot a
Speaker 1: kudu in a ORICX and a whatever, you know, I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't feel bad about that because the meat is
Speaker 1: going to be used, every scrap of it. But in
Speaker 1: the new school model, what's the main I don't I
Speaker 1: still want to say, in the main difference time I
Speaker 1: think it's I think more than anything else, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's it's scheduled in time, and if you go there,
Speaker 1: they run it like a hunt factory in some instances.
Speaker 1: In some cases that doesn't mean you cannot find places
Speaker 1: in Africa that are not that you know, and I
Speaker 1: the more you, for lack of a better term, mature
Speaker 1: in your African hunting, it's less interesting that kind of
Speaker 1: hunting becomes so sketch out that kind of hunting because
Speaker 1: can I tell what I think my my impression. Let's
Speaker 1: start with my impression based on nothing sure, and you
Speaker 1: tell me where I'm wrong. My impression of going to
Speaker 1: South Africa to hunt is you're hunting on fenced land
Speaker 1: and you go and you have a budget. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: they're like, you can shoot that and that's five thou dollars.
Speaker 1: You can shoot that and that's eight thousand dollars. And
Speaker 1: guys walk drive around on the truck and they're like, oh, no, ship,
Speaker 1: that's what one of those looks like wam and the
Speaker 1: guys like that's six and he's like, well, I can
Speaker 1: only spend twenty, so let's go shoot some more it.
Speaker 1: So I get up to fourteen and I'm then I'm
Speaker 1: aheading on keep the tally going, Um, is that wrong? No?
Speaker 1: Oh well, I mean I mean I mean in the
Speaker 1: in the in the cosmic sense, yeah, it's really wrong.
Speaker 1: But I mean in the sense of of what you're
Speaker 1: gonna what the way things can be can be, and
Speaker 1: I want to make sure I make that clear can
Speaker 1: be that can be the experience. Many people go to
Speaker 1: Africa and come back and describe as their African hunt.
Speaker 1: And that plays out over how many days? How how
Speaker 1: fast do you want to shoot him? They're that abundant.
Speaker 1: Depends depends on what the guy's got, you know, I
Speaker 1: mean he's got you know, he's he may have a
Speaker 1: he may have a run on springbok this week. Well,
Speaker 1: he may have he may he may go I've got
Speaker 1: I've got I've got a thousand acres of productive springbuck habitat,
Speaker 1: and I've got that will support fifties springbok or you know,
Speaker 1: and he puts them in there or they're there. He's
Speaker 1: put them in there before they have bread. They are
Speaker 1: usually self sustaining and breeding on their own, you know.
Speaker 1: But they are cutting animals loose into there for people
Speaker 1: to go get. No, the animals there, you're just going
Speaker 1: inside to get it. So it's not like, uh, it's
Speaker 1: not like the kind of canned hunt or fence hunt
Speaker 1: where they cut the animal loose in the morning. No no,
Speaker 1: no no, and you go shoot it that down. No,
Speaker 1: they don't do that. They don't do that in that
Speaker 1: from now, well, I can't say that it's a big
Speaker 1: place that's there may be places where that happens. I
Speaker 1: don't know that, you know. I mean, I I've hunted
Speaker 1: in all I've hunted behind fences, and it's it was okay,
Speaker 1: But I very quickly learned the difference because you had
Speaker 1: started out in the wild, yea, And so whenever I
Speaker 1: could go back, you know, I haven't gone to I
Speaker 1: haven't hunted in South Africa in twenty years. It's South
Speaker 1: Africa kind of the center of the new school. What
Speaker 1: remains the center of the old school? Well, Tanzania. Tanzania
Speaker 1: is still rolling around in the woods, is yeah, and
Speaker 1: it's fabulously expensive. It's more expensive to roam around in
Speaker 1: the woods dealing with uncertainty is to not roam around.
Speaker 1: So guys know the difference because people paying for that
Speaker 1: experience there. Yeah, that's the whole point. They're not paying
Speaker 1: for the animal, They're paying for the experience when they
Speaker 1: go to someplace like Tanzania, the animal becomes a matter
Speaker 1: of indifference. And it's okay, that's not correct either, But
Speaker 1: I'm just saying, you know, it isn't like, you know,
Speaker 1: the first things too many guys can do is go
Speaker 1: up to an animal and go where does this go?
Speaker 1: In the book? You know, and they expect their their
Speaker 1: professional hunter to tell them that will be in the
Speaker 1: top the top camper cent you know, and they'll go, okay, great,
Speaker 1: And then I am at a loss fro why that exists.
Speaker 1: But but at the same time I can also realize
Speaker 1: that it does support game lands in South Africa but
Speaker 1: otherwise have absolutely no economic value. So it's it's it's
Speaker 1: it's a it's a it's a that's the part of
Speaker 1: it that starts to get really it's it's it's it's
Speaker 1: a bargain with the devil, you know. It's it's Do
Speaker 1: I want to go there and hunt? Probably not, because
Speaker 1: why I just don't have a good feeling afterwards. How
Speaker 1: many times do you hunted in Africa? Thirteen or fourteen
Speaker 1: times over the last forty years? No, mean, there's guys
Speaker 1: who have hunted lots. This guys have gone more, much
Speaker 1: much more. The guy, the guy who wrote here in
Speaker 1: Dutch my book, Craig Bodington, has hunted a hundred times. Now,
Speaker 1: why in your whole book do you never mention someone
Speaker 1: shooting a hippopotamus? If they do? And I've I've actually
Speaker 1: I would. That's kind of one of my dark secrets
Speaker 1: that I would love to do someday. But I don't
Speaker 1: want to shoot him in the water. I want to
Speaker 1: shoot him on the land. The reason I asked that,
Speaker 1: The reason I asked that is I think that growing
Speaker 1: up where growing up in the United States. Well there
Speaker 1: they had a conversation with a friend of mine who
Speaker 1: just gone to New Zealand. And we're talking about wildlife
Speaker 1: management in New Zealand, Okay, where while we're generally the
Speaker 1: wildlife of general interest the hunters is all non native,
Speaker 1: oftentimes delaterious, exotic wildlife. We're talking about like that world.
Speaker 1: And I was saying to him that growing up in
Speaker 1: the United States and understanding our systems in the the United
Speaker 1: States leaves you completely ill prepared to understand wildlife and
Speaker 1: wildlife management in a place like New Zealand, or or
Speaker 1: or Europe or almost the rest anywhere. Moral there's an
Speaker 1: added layer to it in Africa, where I think that
Speaker 1: we don't know those animals. We only know the fictionalized
Speaker 1: version of the animals in Africa, we don't know We
Speaker 1: don't know hippos. We know hippos as the way they've
Speaker 1: been presented to us, and this elaborate fiction fantasia and
Speaker 1: this elaborate fantasia of animation of like kids, American kids
Speaker 1: learn what a zebra is before they learn what an
Speaker 1: elk is. Yeah, it's like animals. Those animals are somehow
Speaker 1: Some of those animals are so charismatic and so otherworldly
Speaker 1: that it winds up being that your average kid would
Speaker 1: be like giraffe, elephant, zebra, lion, and he would not
Speaker 1: be able to go jaguar, mountain lion, bobcat, elk, psy
Speaker 1: a blacktail, whet. It just it's like we live with
Speaker 1: these animals in a way that that forms an impression
Speaker 1: him as being somehow other than animals. So I think
Speaker 1: that a lot of the complication around Africa would be
Speaker 1: like a lot of people look and I was reading
Speaker 1: your book waiting for a hippo to come into it,
Speaker 1: because when I look at it, dude with a dead hippo,
Speaker 1: I just do not see a game animal. I don't
Speaker 1: know what I see, But I'm like, how in the world,
Speaker 1: why how well you know? I mean, that's dude, get
Speaker 1: that feeling you like animals, seem you hunt animals that
Speaker 1: seem like, yeah, you an you talk about a giraffe,
Speaker 1: you jumped up and it looked like a radio tower
Speaker 1: decided to run away. And I've and i've I've had
Speaker 1: people extol the virtues of what a wonderful thing it
Speaker 1: was when they killed a giraffe. But you don't want
Speaker 1: to do it. I have absolutely no Why don't you
Speaker 1: want to shoot? Why in your book does no one
Speaker 1: really shoot at the animals that all little kids know about? Well,
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's true or not. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, giraffes and stuff. I mean, not giraffes, but zebras.
Speaker 1: Sure like hunted zebras. Yeah, I like zebras, y know.
Speaker 1: I mean they're they're tough when they're smart, and they
Speaker 1: seem and you in your time in Africa, the zebra
Speaker 1: became like a game animal and not like a thing
Speaker 1: from a child's mobile. It's always been a game animal,
Speaker 1: you know. I mean, but your perception of it, yeah, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I you know, you know. And there's the other aspect
Speaker 1: of it is one thing you begin to realize that
Speaker 1: you become something of a surrogate for the Africans. You
Speaker 1: are hunting with the people you are with who are
Speaker 1: the trackers. You become the surrogate hunter for them because
Speaker 1: of the gross and fair unfairness frankly of the game laws.
Speaker 1: You know, um oh, that you're able to hunt and
Speaker 1: they're not. They they can't afford it, they can't they
Speaker 1: can't have firearms, they can't have you know, they got
Speaker 1: a line. You had a line if you talked about
Speaker 1: coaching is a word for people doing what they used
Speaker 1: to do, but now it's illegal for them to do it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: kind of. I mean, it's it's it's you know, one
Speaker 1: day you went from a guy out getting food and
Speaker 1: the next day you're a poacher. Well, it's pretty much it.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, the whole system of the colonial
Speaker 1: park system where they would take all these people to
Speaker 1: run them off of that you read. I mean I
Speaker 1: was talking about about ionades, the you know, and this
Speaker 1: guy created one of the v monumental game reserve in
Speaker 1: human history and what countries that in Tanzania in the Salu.
Speaker 1: But he did it in a thousand square miles of wilderness,
Speaker 1: and he did it in the most bloodthirsty way imaginable.
Speaker 1: He didn't kill anybody, but he made sure that they
Speaker 1: had to leave the past. Yeah, the pastoralists, and he
Speaker 1: had he got them out of there, you know. And
Speaker 1: now that is yeah, you were mentioned that he had
Speaker 1: spent a big part of his career killing problem elephants. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but then once he got on this idea of establishing
Speaker 1: a wilderness salute that when people would move in, they
Speaker 1: would provide no assistance to those people that the lion
Speaker 1: was getting them if an elephant was getting was like
Speaker 1: tough ship, this is wilderness. And and and he wanted
Speaker 1: to create literally a sanctuary for elephants where they were
Speaker 1: safe from poachers. Um, you know that they could basically
Speaker 1: in that square miles. They never had to go outside
Speaker 1: the boundaries of that area and they were protected, you know.
Speaker 1: And it was part of the problem you get into.
Speaker 1: And it's it's always a it's always a tough one.
Speaker 1: Is is we're on the scale, does the value of
Speaker 1: the animal begin to outweigh the value of the human?
Speaker 1: You know there that's a humongous question in this country. Well,
Speaker 1: Norm Strung who used to live here in Bozeman. He
Speaker 1: ustry for field and stream and he would go down
Speaker 1: to Mexico every winner. He would like shut the house down.
Speaker 1: He and his wife still and they jump in the
Speaker 1: bass boat and they go down to like Obragone or
Speaker 1: someplace down and they've lived there all winter fishing. And
Speaker 1: he said, the first day he came back, he got
Speaker 1: to this village and everybody comes out, they go, how
Speaker 1: did you do? It? Goes, oh, man, we must they
Speaker 1: had a hundred and fifty fish, you know, all all
Speaker 1: large mouth bass. They where are they? They go, we
Speaker 1: threw him back, and he goes, you threw him back
Speaker 1: because and then he started looking around and he started
Speaker 1: seeing all these little kids with pelegra and you know,
Speaker 1: swollen bellies and stuff. And he's, you know, this was
Speaker 1: a long time ago down to Mexico, but these villages,
Speaker 1: these villages were poor and they were protein hungry. And
Speaker 1: he said, he said, after that, to hell with it.
Speaker 1: I never threw anything back. I brought it in and
Speaker 1: I gave it away. So I mean, you kind of
Speaker 1: get into that bind when you're there. It's like it's
Speaker 1: like because you mean, like you mean literally human life,
Speaker 1: because we could look at me like we have a
Speaker 1: conflict in this country with with wilderness or wild lands
Speaker 1: where we'll be like, I'm not asking you like this
Speaker 1: wilderness is it gonna mean you die? This is gonna
Speaker 1: mean you might make a little less money otherwise might
Speaker 1: have made. We have a tremendous luxury. Yeah, and and
Speaker 1: and we have just this unsurpassed gift. You know that
Speaker 1: that Africans would look at and they would they wouldn't
Speaker 1: understand you if you try to explain to them, you
Speaker 1: know what, why why why aren't you why didn't you
Speaker 1: kill that lion? Like, well, beautiful animal, I didn't want
Speaker 1: to kill them. When we'll watch it, you know, go
Speaker 1: off into the sunset and they go, that lion just
Speaker 1: killed two of my cows. You know, it chased my
Speaker 1: brother up a tree last week. So you would never
Speaker 1: have a situation because in your book you get the
Speaker 1: sense it's a weird part of the you're out and
Speaker 1: what would be like you're out crazy ship, lions running around, baboons,
Speaker 1: crazy animals, elephants and then like dudes come rolling through
Speaker 1: camp and see if they could get like a chunk
Speaker 1: of meat, and they got a cow with him. So
Speaker 1: did you would you ever encounter would you ever encounter
Speaker 1: people out in the in the wilderness who are like, man,
Speaker 1: it's not right that you're out here shooting our animals. Well, uh,
Speaker 1: I don't know if you ever read or you know
Speaker 1: who Joy Adamson was. Adam she was. She was the
Speaker 1: author who wrote Born Free, and she was a she
Speaker 1: was actually an Austrian, I think. And she was married
Speaker 1: to George Adamson, who was one of the you know,
Speaker 1: the kind of the body sock of of game rangers
Speaker 1: in Kenya. I mean he was he was such an
Speaker 1: early proponent of concert anyway, I mean he was a
Speaker 1: you know, and and she was he was an early
Speaker 1: proponent of not shooting the animals. Well he was, yeah,
Speaker 1: well he was a proponent of like like you know,
Speaker 1: he was. He was there on the ground working this stuff,
Speaker 1: you know. And then the whole story of Born Free
Speaker 1: is they found some lion they found there, Yeah, well
Speaker 1: they found a lion cub and mother was killed or
Speaker 1: something was dead. And then so they raised the lion
Speaker 1: cub and it was called Elsa. And they raised Elsa
Speaker 1: the lion, and there was this, you know, then the
Speaker 1: song Born Free. And eventually she turned the lion back
Speaker 1: loose into the wild and let it go free again,
Speaker 1: and and then it eventually started they where the movie ended.
Speaker 1: They didn't mention the fact that the lion kept kind
Speaker 1: of hanging around, you know, people's camps and houses and
Speaker 1: villages and somebody finally killed. It didn't get yeah, no,
Speaker 1: it never it was. It was habituated, you know, it's
Speaker 1: like it's like like, don't feed the bears. Um. But anyway,
Speaker 1: so I was in with Fletcher and Kenya. We were
Speaker 1: in and Ambassilli Park. We're changing blocks and we stayed
Speaker 1: overnight in the lodge and so we're in the restaurant
Speaker 1: and like and like I look up and I go,
Speaker 1: I see this blonde woman running around, you know, greeting
Speaker 1: and meeting everybody. And I go to fletch Rock, Is
Speaker 1: that think it's joy Adamson? And I said, really, God's sake,
Speaker 1: don't tell her we're hunting even then and even there,
Speaker 1: well even then even there and then you know, and
Speaker 1: then she was eventually murdered by one of her servants
Speaker 1: because she was just not a nice lady. Well, you
Speaker 1: could be pretty mean and still not deserved to get murder.
Speaker 1: I didn't say she deserved it, but I'm just saying
Speaker 1: that that she certainly didn't go out of her way
Speaker 1: to be nice. Do you ever see the movie Bernie Bernie?
Speaker 1: Know what's that? One just explores like how bad. You
Speaker 1: gotta be right before it's okay for someone to kill you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, I'm not. I'm not advocating. No, no, I
Speaker 1: don't think you are. No. No, um, I think I've
Speaker 1: noticed in recent years, and let me interrupt that you do.
Speaker 1: You do a really good job of writing about drafts
Speaker 1: running away, right, the analogies right, construction equipment taking off
Speaker 1: or other things. But the thing I think about I
Speaker 1: want to think about Africa, especially through the lens of
Speaker 1: this way. Like I'm interested in the controversies of hunting, right, sure,
Speaker 1: everybody is, and and uh Africa, like, like the behavior
Speaker 1: of Americans in Africa generates this never ending amount of
Speaker 1: of outrage. Well, the behavior of Americans almost anywhere. You know,
Speaker 1: we we have we have a chief executive who was
Speaker 1: who was saying to the first Lady of France yesterdays, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're in really great shape. Something that's really surprised. Not
Speaker 1: that surprised me, but I was like, it's like not
Speaker 1: reading the room real well, no, it's no no filter
Speaker 1: reading the room. Well, it's it's it's basically the I
Speaker 1: figured it out. It's the billionaire subduction technique. You know, like, hey, baby,
Speaker 1: I gotta I got a billion dollars, he told her.
Speaker 1: He turned to her and says, you're in very good
Speaker 1: physical shape. It turns to the president in France, it
Speaker 1: says beautiful, very good physical shape, at which point she
Speaker 1: steps backwards. Dude, it was like, yeah, I was really
Speaker 1: surprising because um, I would go and meet the president
Speaker 1: of France and I would be thinking, I'll tell you,
Speaker 1: one thing I'm not gonna talk about is his wife.
Speaker 1: How is she over? How is she over? A muddy trap.
Speaker 1: So think I've noticed about Africa is that African outrage. Okay,
Speaker 1: So every day, like if you follow social media, every day,
Speaker 1: there's a thing that everyone's supposed to be outraged over,
Speaker 1: and we feign outrage and share our feigned outrage over
Speaker 1: social media. And one of the things one thing that
Speaker 1: people love to feinn outrage over is someone having shot
Speaker 1: something in Africa that was cute or that was a
Speaker 1: fantastical animal that we that we feel as fantastical because
Speaker 1: the way they're woven into the fabric of our culture.
Speaker 1: African megaphun But it's seemed to me that the thing
Speaker 1: that with Americans, they get more piste, the weirder, it
Speaker 1: seems that the person that shot the thing would have
Speaker 1: been their shooting stuff. So if there's a guy that
Speaker 1: made millions doing like heating and cooling from Florida, Guinniss,
Speaker 1: if he shoots something generally, generally it's different if a
Speaker 1: young gal, if a young gal, a high school gal
Speaker 1: say we're to go and shoot something in Africa, that
Speaker 1: is more offensive to Americans. And if there was a
Speaker 1: guy from the heating and cooling industry, except for seize
Speaker 1: the lion, the dentist guy, Now, if that had been
Speaker 1: a high school cheerleader, that would have been like really bad.
Speaker 1: But it was as bad as could be. Now as
Speaker 1: a guy has been going there forty years, what what's
Speaker 1: your take on all that? Well, like, who's the blame
Speaker 1: for how ridiculous that all seen? Well, the first thing
Speaker 1: is is don't post your pictures on social media as
Speaker 1: as if that's a message if I can give you,
Speaker 1: if I if I am going to be your you know,
Speaker 1: campaign advisor can not do not post the pictures on
Speaker 1: social media. But that's why people do stuff, and and
Speaker 1: that and that and that and that is exactly that's
Speaker 1: why people get out of bed. That's exactly the problem.
Speaker 1: I mean you know, it's it's I remember talking to
Speaker 1: a pH one time and he was telling me about
Speaker 1: this guy had taken this just incredible looking animal. I
Speaker 1: mean it was I think it was a Nile Leshi.
Speaker 1: Yeah right. That was not my mobile as a child, No, no, no,
Speaker 1: but it was a beautiful nile. You know. It's one
Speaker 1: of those kind of things that you could just even
Speaker 1: if you've never seen a Nile Leshwie before, if you
Speaker 1: saw this one, you would go, that is the nile
Speaker 1: Lesti of Nile lest Is it a monkey? No, ok,
Speaker 1: it's a it's an anti loop. It's a picture. Oh
Speaker 1: that's good or Mrs grayslist you're black and white but
Speaker 1: big s shaped forms. Yeah that's bad mofo. Right yeah
Speaker 1: yeah yeah, I'm tracking. Okay, So that's like a game
Speaker 1: animal to me. Yeah, And it's and you know, and
Speaker 1: that's that's the other aspect. But you know, he had
Speaker 1: this guy who would like who like hunt with him,
Speaker 1: and he was showing me his picture. Oh that's great. Look,
Speaker 1: he goes, what do you you know what he did?
Speaker 1: You put in the book? I think, goes, no, he
Speaker 1: doesn't have a he has nothing. And he said, this
Speaker 1: guy has killed so many hunted. I would rather say
Speaker 1: this guy is hunted more trophy book animals in Africa
Speaker 1: than almost anybody I know. Just never put a single
Speaker 1: one in the book because he doesn't want to. He
Speaker 1: doesn't care about the recognition. Yeah, that's not why he's
Speaker 1: doing it. Well, yeah, I mean you're aware of that.
Speaker 1: I'm a Turkey Grand Slam holder, so am I I'm
Speaker 1: a super slam I'm a super Slam holder. So okay.
Speaker 1: So so the guy. So is it annoying that I'm
Speaker 1: asking about the lions? He's a one? What's your take
Speaker 1: on it? You know, because you got you I don't know,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I don't know. I mean, I am guilty.
Speaker 1: Can I ask in two parts? Part what's your take
Speaker 1: on what happened, not how it was perceived? Was that
Speaker 1: business usual or was that like a funked up thing
Speaker 1: that happened. I have serious reservations about the affair, you know,
Speaker 1: the Macomber affair. This was the cecil affair. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I mean that's part B is gonna be what's your
Speaker 1: take on how it's part it's a park lion that
Speaker 1: they sat on the edge of the park and waited
Speaker 1: for it to walk out. You feel that they knew
Speaker 1: of course they knew of and the and the other
Speaker 1: thing about it was because it's people. People make a
Speaker 1: big deal like this guy spent fifty that's cheap. That
Speaker 1: that's cheap. But that's okay. I mean, that's a part
Speaker 1: that shouldnt met Is it better if it was free
Speaker 1: that lion? That lion should have cost seventy to a
Speaker 1: hundred thousand dollars because that's what the market is, if
Speaker 1: you're gonna go, you know, the the invisible hand of capitalism.
Speaker 1: He got that lion for about half price. And the
Speaker 1: reason he got it for half price was the guy.
Speaker 1: I have to be careful here because I'm not sure,
Speaker 1: you know, if we want we want to don't don't
Speaker 1: want to get into like areas that maybe oh un
Speaker 1: you're saying right now, Well like just saying we don't
Speaker 1: want we don't want to get into the areas where where?
Speaker 1: Because I may suggest that there was some illegal activity involved,
Speaker 1: but I don't. I'm not saying it was that. You
Speaker 1: don't know that that was I don't know that. I appreciate.
Speaker 1: I appreciate, but but what I what I what I
Speaker 1: what I suspect, and this is purely suspicious and has
Speaker 1: absolutely no basis in fact. And as far as I know,
Speaker 1: the guy who killed it's good to his mother and
Speaker 1: everything else, and the mother and the guy he hunted
Speaker 1: with the professional hunter was was also loves his mother.
Speaker 1: And the African guy who's property they shot it on,
Speaker 1: which was which abuts the park he is, he is,
Speaker 1: the salt of the earth. That was private property. So
Speaker 1: that was the dude's land. Yeah, I believe, Well, it's
Speaker 1: it's up now you have me there, because I'm not
Speaker 1: really sure there was there was some question about who
Speaker 1: had who had the permit, and it's kind of it's
Speaker 1: kind of that part you're getting. You're getting to the
Speaker 1: weeds on this one. But the reason I I think,
Speaker 1: in my own opinion and without knowing if this guy
Speaker 1: get anything wrong, is that if that lion was what
Speaker 1: appears to me to be rather cheap, it was because
Speaker 1: they knew where that lion was and they didn't have
Speaker 1: to spend a lot of time hunting it. You know
Speaker 1: that that if they had to go, if you had
Speaker 1: to go to Tanzania tomorrow and hunt a and now
Speaker 1: you gotta remember in Tanzania, you have to your line.
Speaker 1: The lion has to be you have to age the
Speaker 1: line on the on the hoof, as it were. So
Speaker 1: you know, what's six years old or older. You can't
Speaker 1: take anything younger than that and anymore in Tanzania by law,
Speaker 1: you know. And if you actually went to Tanzania looking
Speaker 1: for a lion like that and in the wild and
Speaker 1: everything else like that, you could be there hunting a month.
Speaker 1: You know, you could be there and you could spend
Speaker 1: thousand dollars. So because what because of the rarity of nothing,
Speaker 1: because of the hard hunt. It's a hard hunt. You know.
Speaker 1: It's like it's like shooting a four hundred point boil
Speaker 1: in the mountains if it was about a month, because
Speaker 1: it might take ten years of a month, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it's yeah. And and from what I
Speaker 1: understand of this situation was the they didn' hunt him
Speaker 1: that long and then and then a crossbow. He shot
Speaker 1: it with a crossbow. I got nothing against crossbows, but
Speaker 1: you feel that it might have an annoyance factor. No,
Speaker 1: I don't know, No, I don't I will go that far.
Speaker 1: I think I think it was. It was it was
Speaker 1: part of the you know, the spree of the whole
Speaker 1: thing it was. I'm gonna add my own little twist
Speaker 1: to this by hunting in with a crossbow. Um, but
Speaker 1: I don't know. But I don't know that. I don't
Speaker 1: know any Can I add two things here? Because I
Speaker 1: I think about this almost I think about this bi
Speaker 1: weekly at least. No. Why moving into the perception of it,
Speaker 1: why do Americans get mad when they hear that someone
Speaker 1: paid a lot for something? And it's puzzling to me
Speaker 1: for this reason. If we look at the history of colonialism,
Speaker 1: it generally is can you go into a country and
Speaker 1: you take valuable ship and don't pay anyone for it
Speaker 1: and take it back home. So here's a system where
Speaker 1: a feller, even though as your point out, may have underpaid,
Speaker 1: he goes in and he pays an outrages some for
Speaker 1: a thing that he would like to remove from the land,
Speaker 1: and that is more offensive to Americans than had he
Speaker 1: just gone and stolen it. Well, I would think that
Speaker 1: people would be like, well, at least the son of
Speaker 1: a bitch gave him fifty dollars. But people get pissed
Speaker 1: about the money. They're like, he paid two or fifty
Speaker 1: thou dollars to kill a rhino that it's asshole. Ish
Speaker 1: A real a better guy wouldn't have paid ship maybe,
Speaker 1: I mean, but that's kind of what you're saying. Well, no,
Speaker 1: that's why I like, why is that upsetting? Well? You
Speaker 1: know what, why do we why do we get piste
Speaker 1: off when we see people you know, with with with
Speaker 1: you know, rolls Racism't blink because you're jealous, because you're
Speaker 1: jealous because you I wish i'd been born I wish
Speaker 1: I'd been born rich instead of good looking, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean. I had a friend of mine who always
Speaker 1: complained about the factors of Mississippi, and he had, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of like worked his way up in the the
Speaker 1: upper echelons. But there was a point in his life
Speaker 1: he said, you know, if I had as much money
Speaker 1: as that son of a bitch over there, I'd make
Speaker 1: him look like Ned's first Primmer. Oh, Ned's first Primmer.
Speaker 1: That's that's that's the book he used to read in
Speaker 1: the little little schoolhouse that takes you a bc S.
Speaker 1: And it was a good looking guy or not. No, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: that's not the whole point, if I understand the point,
Speaker 1: If me, his point was that, um, he was jealous
Speaker 1: of all these other guys who had so much money
Speaker 1: they could hut anything they wanted to in the world,
Speaker 1: you know. And his argument was, if I had that
Speaker 1: kind of money, I would make them look like Ned's
Speaker 1: first primmer, which means that he drowned him in that
Speaker 1: he would he would make them look like amateurs from
Speaker 1: the word go. Can I ask my second question, Yes,
Speaker 1: this didn't occur to me till the other day. Yesterday
Speaker 1: a guy outdoor photographer named John Haffner, who shoots a
Speaker 1: lot of wildlife photography, showed me a picture of a lion,
Speaker 1: a male lion, and he's got a big ass main.
Speaker 1: John says that line is actually a Collard lion. Where's
Speaker 1: the radio collar? You can't see the damn collar. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's got a thick ass main. So with the cecil.
Speaker 1: And this is the last thing I then say about season.
Speaker 1: Unless you got more you want to add a big
Speaker 1: part of the story. People were piste. Oh yeah, they
Speaker 1: paid for it. And people were also pissed that it
Speaker 1: had a collar. But I don't know that that would
Speaker 1: have been known. Do you think that that would have
Speaker 1: been known or not known? Well, yeah, they had to
Speaker 1: cut it off. Because right now and my circumcised or
Speaker 1: not circumcised, I don't know. Well they I mean, I
Speaker 1: mean it was like it was like I was listening
Speaker 1: to the radio coming up here and they're talking about
Speaker 1: some guy in Kentucky. He was on the run because
Speaker 1: he cut off his ankle bracelet, you know yesterday. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they cut it off after. But is it I mean,
Speaker 1: I mean, if if they knew before they shot it,
Speaker 1: not that that would have mattered. That lion was it
Speaker 1: was cecil for God's people told. I also read a
Speaker 1: lot about this that like that name didn't quite have
Speaker 1: the kid in death. No, no, I understand, No, that's
Speaker 1: that's correct. But there's there's a lot, in my mind,
Speaker 1: at least, there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that that
Speaker 1: this lion, his fate had been sealed before that the
Speaker 1: hunter ever got to Africa, like a guy's like, you
Speaker 1: know what, a fella could probably lure that island. This
Speaker 1: this there was a phone call to somebody at some
Speaker 1: point and said, I've got this lion over here. I'm
Speaker 1: pretty sure if we you know, we put a dead
Speaker 1: eland or something. And this is not what I'm saying happened.
Speaker 1: But I'm just saying that we can we can get this,
Speaker 1: we can pull this line out of the park. You know,
Speaker 1: that's gonna be the same thing when you know, if
Speaker 1: we get to where we're we can hunt grizzlies down
Speaker 1: south of here. Wherever we hunt again, there's there's gonna be,
Speaker 1: there's gonna be where do you draw the line? Do you?
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know. I don't know. I mean,
Speaker 1: I would drop that's a part boundary. Maybe maybe that's
Speaker 1: probably where it's gonna be drawn. But I mean, but
Speaker 1: but you know, what difference does it make if you
Speaker 1: keep pushing it out and you're there's gonna be a
Speaker 1: line somewhere, you know, and I don't. I don't know
Speaker 1: what you know? I that leaves me, you know, I
Speaker 1: probably I don't think I'm gonna be shooting a grizzly,
Speaker 1: So that's fine. I don't. I don't intend to put
Speaker 1: in for a tack. No, I don't either, you know,
Speaker 1: but I don't. I can see where it would be
Speaker 1: really interesting for some people, and it could be done,
Speaker 1: and it can be done right, you know, But eventually
Speaker 1: it's gonna come down the line. You know, there's a
Speaker 1: line here, a line here, where do you you know?
Speaker 1: So I don't know, I don't know. Yeah, when that
Speaker 1: was playing out, this this is the honestly the last question.
Speaker 1: When that was playing out, let me preface it by this.
Speaker 1: A friend of mine did many tours in Iraq and
Speaker 1: Afghanistan in the navy. Okay, now he comes home, gets
Speaker 1: out of the military, and every time something is in
Speaker 1: the news about Iraq Afghanistan, I would go to him
Speaker 1: be like, hey, what do you what's your take on?
Speaker 1: And he said, Now at this point, I read the
Speaker 1: newspaper like anybody else. I don't have like my time
Speaker 1: there doesn't give me the feeling of having like insight,
Speaker 1: It doesn't give me the feeling of like that I'm
Speaker 1: following that story more carefully. Okay, So, if you're a
Speaker 1: guy who's written hundreds of pages about hunting in Africa,
Speaker 1: when a story like that happens and everyone fires up
Speaker 1: the outrage machine, do you see it as just a
Speaker 1: guy like huh or do you see it as this
Speaker 1: is my realm, my world, my professional space. I must
Speaker 1: interject and give clarity to all the people who are
Speaker 1: who are out looking now or is it just like
Speaker 1: I don't know the guy shot a line I don't know.
Speaker 1: I don't have, UM, I don't know that I feel
Speaker 1: that I can offer an opinion in that sense. You know, UM,
Speaker 1: I know how I feel about these things. I mean,
Speaker 1: I hate to say it, but I mean, but hunting is.
Speaker 1: You know, what's the line about? Um? Again? To quote himingly,
Speaker 1: I guess it is, it's what we have instead of God?
Speaker 1: You know, UM, And I you know, for me, there's
Speaker 1: there's something Hunting is in a way, at least one
Speaker 1: of my religions. If i'm if, I I want to
Speaker 1: consider myself polytheistic, you know. And the older I get,
Speaker 1: the more I get I get into it, the the
Speaker 1: less I hate seeing piss in the cathedral. That's how
Speaker 1: I feel. That's a good way. You just said that,
Speaker 1: you know. I mean, don't don't go piss in the
Speaker 1: baptismal fountain, you know, UM, all right, But I don't
Speaker 1: know how you teach that. I don't know how you
Speaker 1: instruct that. I don't know that how you I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't know. And I don't want to be one
Speaker 1: of these these these these crabs who just you know, oh,
Speaker 1: you horrible human being? What you know? You know, if
Speaker 1: you can sleep at night, that's fine. And and you know,
Speaker 1: and if you're if if if if if, if there
Speaker 1: are scientifically based, well enforced laws that make sense, then
Speaker 1: go for it. You know, I don't know that. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure where ethics there are ethics. And that's
Speaker 1: and then and we we do as suite, we do
Speaker 1: as hunters, we do bring our we we do have
Speaker 1: an ethical structure that we believe in. You know, just
Speaker 1: because something is legal doesn't mean it's right, you know,
Speaker 1: or moral or ethical. Um. But the elder Leopold, yeah,
Speaker 1: everyd like's the part of the quote where he says, like,
Speaker 1: ethics is what you do when no one's watching. But
Speaker 1: he goes on say even when it's legal. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: and and that's but but that is, you know, when
Speaker 1: it's what as a society, we can only enforce the law.
Speaker 1: Now we can we can try to we can try
Speaker 1: to shape ethics, but that is more of a a
Speaker 1: cultural definition we're putting on things. That's well, Ethics and
Speaker 1: law walk through life hand in hand in many ways, maybe,
Speaker 1: you know. I mean, I I think I think there's
Speaker 1: there's you know, it's yeah, but I don't know, I
Speaker 1: don't I don't know who's who's the handmaiden and who
Speaker 1: is the not you know, I don't understand. I might
Speaker 1: you know who I think. I think that ethics is
Speaker 1: the mother holding the hand the child's hand of law. Yeah,
Speaker 1: except except except except except the law in this case
Speaker 1: is now he's like he's like seven ft three in
Speaker 1: ways four hundred pounds and has a big mallet. You know,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean we we we can talk about
Speaker 1: what the law is capable of doing to people's lives
Speaker 1: if you you know, um which ethics are not you know, ethics,
Speaker 1: I mean you can you can, you can. I mean ethics,
Speaker 1: ethics shouldn't be able to take away your liberty or
Speaker 1: your freedom. Laws can take away your liberty and your freedom.
Speaker 1: You know, ethics can shame you. Law can execute you.
Speaker 1: But that's the funny thing because I find that when
Speaker 1: hunters get in trouble. Yeah, when hunters getting trouble, they
Speaker 1: like to and read. Especially in the last couple of years,
Speaker 1: hunters get in trouble and they like to go. Uh,
Speaker 1: they like to go. But it was legal, and they're
Speaker 1: kind of like people are thinking about one thing and
Speaker 1: they're talking about another thing because they don't do like,
Speaker 1: let's like, hey, I have a wife and kids, Okay,
Speaker 1: so let's say it. He merged that, uh, at night,
Speaker 1: I would sneak out and just go have sex with
Speaker 1: women in bars that I met in bars. Later, someone's like, dude,
Speaker 1: did you hear can you believe his wife at home
Speaker 1: taking care of those kids? And he's out like is
Speaker 1: there room for me to go? But it's legal? Yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah it is. No one no one doubted the no
Speaker 1: one cares that it was legal, and and and and
Speaker 1: no one's like, oh yeah, my bad. Cool. But that's
Speaker 1: but that again, I mean, there there isn't There isn't
Speaker 1: any way of that I know of, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: of persuading a sociopath that or a narcissist, because what
Speaker 1: you're talking about his narcissism and and and and you know,
Speaker 1: social sociopathology. It's not criminal, but it sure makes life
Speaker 1: hell for everybody around you know what I mean? You know,
Speaker 1: I mean it's like it's like it's like, you know,
Speaker 1: if if if a guy's cheating on his wife, he's
Speaker 1: making it hell for her. He's not breaking the law. Though.
Speaker 1: That's where community comes in, and so and social and culture.
Speaker 1: So it's and it's but it's you know, but even
Speaker 1: you would think that it would be something internalized in
Speaker 1: the human being that he would it would come to
Speaker 1: him at some point in going. You know, I am
Speaker 1: a dog. I am a two dick dog who should
Speaker 1: be shot. Well for taking it back to the example
Speaker 1: of like of hunting, I see like that can be
Speaker 1: like hyper like local and like it's across the country.
Speaker 1: Imagine like there's different social norms in like Alabama than
Speaker 1: there are in Idaho. Right, So I think it comes
Speaker 1: back to ethics and your community almost holding you accountable.
Speaker 1: And I'm a big proponent of that. And I love
Speaker 1: thinking about the ethics of hunting because it's so interchange.
Speaker 1: Um it's it's I mean, I mean, what are what
Speaker 1: are the ethics of hunting raccoons with hounds in California
Speaker 1: versus the ethics of hunting raccoons with hounds and Tennessee?
Speaker 1: You know, all right? Uh, you know, I I blew
Speaker 1: this because earlier I used this, I mentioned this quote,
Speaker 1: Uh that you quote. I can't remember who's the true No, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the Hemingway quote where someone's like where he says, you know,
Speaker 1: we should go hunting Africa, and he's like, I got
Speaker 1: no desires. It's just because you haven't read a book
Speaker 1: about it. Reading the book, I've decided I'm real interested
Speaker 1: in Uh. I've adopted your favorite animal as my favorite
Speaker 1: animal to hunt. Can you talk about the wet like
Speaker 1: Kate buffalo? How it is that that in your mind
Speaker 1: is like that in your mind is like the animal?
Speaker 1: And earlier you were gonna I think you started to
Speaker 1: say something and got distracted. You canna say that when
Speaker 1: you hunt, you're a surrogate right for the people you're with.
Speaker 1: And I thought that at that point you were going
Speaker 1: to point out that you you get excitement from what
Speaker 1: excites them. Well, yeah, that's in fact, Well okay, that's
Speaker 1: so talk about. I mean, I mean you can you
Speaker 1: can get a sense where you know certain animals, you know,
Speaker 1: if if if you take it i Paula, if you
Speaker 1: hunt it in Paula, and then and you make a
Speaker 1: you know, reputable, you know, good shot, it's clean kill,
Speaker 1: and they have meat for camp. You know they're gonna
Speaker 1: come up and they're gonna go congratulations. The difference between
Speaker 1: that and if you have to if you bring down
Speaker 1: a buffalo with one shot the the the effusiveness of
Speaker 1: their response is going to be for one thing, They're
Speaker 1: not gonna have to follow a wounded buffalo into the bush,
Speaker 1: you know, which they do not want to do, which
Speaker 1: nobody is right mind wants to do. There are some
Speaker 1: people in their wrong minds who do. But so, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: there is that. I mean, you know they I can
Speaker 1: look at an ant well, I Africans never get bored
Speaker 1: hunting a buffalo. They never get blase about hunting a
Speaker 1: buffalo because of the risk, because of lots of reasons,
Speaker 1: you know, they have. They have this sort of ultimate
Speaker 1: respect for a buffalo. You know. They there's again it
Speaker 1: it it becomes very difficult to you know, what is it.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure. You know. It's like it's like it's
Speaker 1: like it's like pornography. I know it when I see it.
Speaker 1: You know, it's it's who wasn't that said that Justice
Speaker 1: Potter Stewart um They that there is something about, you know,
Speaker 1: when you're hunting a buffalo, that this is an animal
Speaker 1: and I I it's you know, you have them, you
Speaker 1: have the advantage what they weigh about fifty hundred pounds
Speaker 1: six pounds, you know, and they can run pretty good clip.
Speaker 1: The other part of it is is I've gotten older,
Speaker 1: and you know, I think more in terms of the
Speaker 1: fact that there's so much meat. That's how people get
Speaker 1: excited about him too. That's that's part of it, you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's there, there is, there is the reward
Speaker 1: of hunting buffalo well is in and of itself hunting
Speaker 1: buffalo well that that you know, you didn't mess it up.
Speaker 1: You didn't you didn't cause a scene, you didn't there
Speaker 1: was there was no you didn't cause a traffic accident
Speaker 1: in the middle of wherever you were, you know. And
Speaker 1: then when meaning wooning one and meaning wounding and then
Speaker 1: nothing and everything goes to and it's and it just
Speaker 1: worse comes to worse and it just gets worse. But
Speaker 1: you experienced that, yeah, sure, you know, and never had
Speaker 1: anything where it was I was ever really threatened, but I,
Speaker 1: you know, spend a lot of time trailing a wounded
Speaker 1: animal that I really didn't feel very good about having caused.
Speaker 1: You know. One of the things you say you like
Speaker 1: so much about it is that you have to follow
Speaker 1: him into the thick ship. Yeah, And it's like a
Speaker 1: very it's you're not choosing to have it be close.
Speaker 1: It just has the wind up being closed. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean you you you you basically you want to be
Speaker 1: as close as you can get. You know, what's what's
Speaker 1: the what's the there's the old there's the old saying,
Speaker 1: the old adage. And you get absolutely as close as
Speaker 1: you can and get a hundred yards closer. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: and you know, and you you could be you know
Speaker 1: when you want you don't want to be. That's an
Speaker 1: adage for hunting, Kate buffalo, Yeah, any dangerous game. I
Speaker 1: remember it was its point there where you had someone
Speaker 1: at two d yards You're like, uh yeah, it's not
Speaker 1: that's that's that's shooting and nut hunting if you know
Speaker 1: what I mean. I mean you can you can kill
Speaker 1: a buffalo two hundred yards. You cat buffo three hundred yards,
Speaker 1: you know, and and and why but what what makes
Speaker 1: it then hunting at well, I mean it's like it's
Speaker 1: like yeah, yeah, well it's like anything else. You're you're
Speaker 1: giving him you know, you're not you're not throwing away
Speaker 1: your advantage, but you're giving him more play for his senses.
Speaker 1: You're getting him more of a chance of of of
Speaker 1: of what do They English call it twigging to you,
Speaker 1: you know, discovering that you're they're smelling you, so you're
Speaker 1: not trailed them into the brush because that's how you
Speaker 1: gotta find them. You're doing it because it's an act
Speaker 1: of respect to the animal. No, you're you're you're going in.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's where they are, that's where they that's
Speaker 1: that's their turf, you know, that's their beach, their wave,
Speaker 1: that's where they live. You know. The you can find
Speaker 1: herds out in the middle of a big open planes um,
Speaker 1: passing through, passing through, but you know you'll at some
Speaker 1: point you'll end up having to go into the into
Speaker 1: the trees and look for him. And that's unnerving, you
Speaker 1: know it. It starts out that way and then I mean,
Speaker 1: this sounds then you use that up, you use that up,
Speaker 1: and then it becomes like, I want to do this again,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean, I you know, I mean when
Speaker 1: I first started on Buffalo, they scared the crap out
Speaker 1: of me, you know, because we couldn't see them. They
Speaker 1: were just in this you know, You're just crawling in
Speaker 1: after him, and then they would all of a sudden
Speaker 1: you'd hear this, like just this massive explosion of animals,
Speaker 1: and you'd hear the you know, you hear there they
Speaker 1: got those big bosses on their horns at big horn
Speaker 1: cap and you hear them smacking into the trees and
Speaker 1: coming through there, you know, and which which way are
Speaker 1: they going? You know? Are they coming at me? Are
Speaker 1: they going away? And uh? But just they're they're they're,
Speaker 1: they're just they're they're just going. Yeah, they've dropped their
Speaker 1: heads and they're going. But I mean, just out of
Speaker 1: the blue. They're feeding one. They've they've they've caught your
Speaker 1: wind or they've heard they've heard you snap a twig,
Speaker 1: and you know you've got and you've got like twenty
Speaker 1: or thirty of them all together. So you've got twenty
Speaker 1: or thirty sets of eyes, and twenty or thirty sets
Speaker 1: of years, and twenty or thirty sets of noses. So
Speaker 1: it's like, you know, you ever watched you every nose
Speaker 1: like a white tail and and uh and and turkeys
Speaker 1: are always together. And I figured that out was because
Speaker 1: turkeys can't smell, and white tail can't see as well
Speaker 1: as turkeys can't, but they know how to trigger off
Speaker 1: with each other. Anyway, leave that there, because you talked
Speaker 1: about that bird all the time it lifts up. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: the tick bird. You see that tick bird. You know
Speaker 1: that there's some and you also thought about that. You
Speaker 1: could creep in there and get thirty yards away and
Speaker 1: there's a pound animal on its feet looking at you,
Speaker 1: and you might not catch it. Yeah, yeah, you might
Speaker 1: not detect it. The guy I was telling you about,
Speaker 1: the old guy who taught me how to who I
Speaker 1: got my inherited my love of Africa from I guess,
Speaker 1: but I mean the first elephant he ever took was
Speaker 1: in French Equatorial Africa ninety six or something, and he
Speaker 1: and the tracker because the professional hunter gotten sick, got malaria,
Speaker 1: so he went with the tracker, just team the tracker
Speaker 1: and they're hunting elephants. And he said he'd never seen
Speaker 1: an elephant in the wild at all. And they were
Speaker 1: crawling in through the forest, I mean crawling hands and knees,
Speaker 1: and and the tracker like you know, grabbed him and
Speaker 1: he said there, you know there, And he's looking and
Speaker 1: looking and looking. He can't see anything, and he's looking
Speaker 1: back and forth and the guys keep keeps pointing, and
Speaker 1: suddenly he sees thirty feet in front of him four legs,
Speaker 1: you know, and they look like they look like big
Speaker 1: tree trunks. And he then he keeps looking up and
Speaker 1: up and up, and there's this there's his head, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of like just in there, you know, pulling stuff
Speaker 1: off the branches. And he said that was his first
Speaker 1: elephant he'd ever seen anywhere in the wild. But that's
Speaker 1: kind of what happens with buffalo. You can't find him
Speaker 1: like any untrained game. I yeah, well, I mean that's
Speaker 1: and that's the thing about you know, that's you know,
Speaker 1: that's like I say that you know, these trackers are
Speaker 1: you know, like there and you're going like where you know,
Speaker 1: when they go there, and and they just you know,
Speaker 1: they just know where it is they And that's that's inborn.
Speaker 1: That's innate. I don't know, it's it's it's it's a
Speaker 1: wonderful mystery. How do you how do you? I want
Speaker 1: to see how you cope with something or how you
Speaker 1: perceive something when you when you hunt. There a lot uh,
Speaker 1: this could be true for anyone who does like a
Speaker 1: lot of guided honey, Okay, where like like I look
Speaker 1: at hunting as being a thing where you sort of
Speaker 1: um quite like it's just it's just never ending thing
Speaker 1: of like the act with like acquiring skills, okay, developing
Speaker 1: a skill set, and no one knows the end of it. Right,
Speaker 1: There's no there's no cap there's no arrival moment. Right.
Speaker 1: In fact, the more you climb, the more you become
Speaker 1: aware of the lack of a ceiling. There's no ceiling.
Speaker 1: I think early on you could feel that it was there,
Speaker 1: but it's not there. And I find that if you're
Speaker 1: not brought up doing it um, it creates a separate
Speaker 1: it creates a cap to like it's hard to come
Speaker 1: in late and climb very high. Yeah, but in Africa,
Speaker 1: I feel that that open that that that unachievable ceiling
Speaker 1: probably doesn't really seem to be there because you have
Speaker 1: so much infrastructure around you that's invested in you getting it,
Speaker 1: and it would almost be that you would one would
Speaker 1: feel if if you were a hunter, you would feel like,
Speaker 1: I'm not bringing anything to this. In fact, I'm slowing
Speaker 1: this whole thing down like you are. You are the impediment.
Speaker 1: They would get this done faster and more efficiently were
Speaker 1: it not for my presence. Hand them the gun, let them.
Speaker 1: So how do you cope with that? Well, you know
Speaker 1: it's it's it's an imperfect world. Um, you know. I
Speaker 1: mean if if in a different time, at a different age,
Speaker 1: you were born in Africa. You know, a lot of
Speaker 1: these professional hunters were born growing up in the bush,
Speaker 1: you know, and they hunted for their families and for themselves,
Speaker 1: so they learned it that way. I guess, I guess
Speaker 1: I could look at it in that regard and say, well,
Speaker 1: I'm not bringing everything to the game. I am, But
Speaker 1: does that mean I don't want to do something that
Speaker 1: I have come to love? So I don't know. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's it's the you know, I mean, you know, the
Speaker 1: satisfaction of like hutting something on your own and you know,
Speaker 1: I go in there, you've got you. I know both statisfacts.
Speaker 1: I know that statisfaction, and I know the satisfaction of
Speaker 1: making a friend who does something really well and then
Speaker 1: your friend takes you out and lets you be along
Speaker 1: with him and the thrill of that's, you know, if
Speaker 1: you can get to that stage with Africans, And that
Speaker 1: to me is I don't know a better way of
Speaker 1: doing that. I've I've never found a better way. Maybe
Speaker 1: there is one that I don't know about at least
Speaker 1: that I've experienced. I mean, when you get to the
Speaker 1: point where when you know, when you have done something
Speaker 1: that a bunch of African hunters trackers look at you
Speaker 1: and go, you know, give your thumbs up, it's you know,
Speaker 1: it's golden because you know when it's Jameson. I don't
Speaker 1: want you to think that I'm saying that I don't know. No,
Speaker 1: I don't go. I do go into those situations. No,
Speaker 1: but I'm just I'm just saying. I'm just saying it's
Speaker 1: and you know the difference when it's genuine when it's
Speaker 1: perfunctory or performed performer. You know, I'm the tractor, I'm
Speaker 1: supposed to tell this guy, you know, good job, wanna
Speaker 1: But when when they sincerely do it and honestly do it,
Speaker 1: you know you've earned that from them. That's like, you know,
Speaker 1: it's a great sensation, it's a great feeling. And I
Speaker 1: think I think that's I think some people would think
Speaker 1: that needing that that that not I don't want to
Speaker 1: say needing. I think that some people would think that
Speaker 1: basking in that approval it's childish, but I do not
Speaker 1: because I do like that. Well, there are ways there
Speaker 1: are always like there are always there like calibrate one's
Speaker 1: performance and and to have and to do things and
Speaker 1: be in a atmosphere of other people and to get
Speaker 1: to a point where other people are like, job well done.
Speaker 1: You know. Yeah, No, I mean it's it's when you're
Speaker 1: when you're when you move one tenth as quietly as
Speaker 1: an African and stay up with them, you know, going
Speaker 1: through the bush, that that comes back to you. You You
Speaker 1: get there's a there's a feedback loop in that where
Speaker 1: you you get that energy and your feed on it.
Speaker 1: Did you feel like over the years that did you
Speaker 1: feel like you learned a lot? Yeah? Or just it
Speaker 1: was it like mostly having experiences or was it learning too?
Speaker 1: It's always learning. I mean I always have learned. I've
Speaker 1: tried to learn no matter where I was. You know,
Speaker 1: I want to I want to talk to the people.
Speaker 1: I want to know what they're doing. I want to
Speaker 1: know you know whatever. I don't know where I if
Speaker 1: it's I don't think it's in the book. By was
Speaker 1: just writing something the other day about you know, going
Speaker 1: to places, going to how you go? Why would I
Speaker 1: hunt in Africa instead of going on a photos so far?
Speaker 1: Okay um and there's nothing wrong with going on the
Speaker 1: photos sopharsis. But but I suddenly realized that the people
Speaker 1: I am dealing with in a in a you know,
Speaker 1: a photo lodge situation, these are people who are in
Speaker 1: the service industry. Now, you could argue that trackers are
Speaker 1: not in the service and are are also in the
Speaker 1: service industry. That's not a very good argument. But I'm
Speaker 1: just saying, but I'm just saying, you know that there
Speaker 1: is that it's a different relationship from where I am.
Speaker 1: You know, when a guy's hovering around me one and off,
Speaker 1: if I can he can you know, if he can,
Speaker 1: if he can pour me some more wine and get
Speaker 1: a bigger tip. Yeah, And and whereas if I'm dealing
Speaker 1: with a tracker, you know where where he'll he'll stop
Speaker 1: and he'll point to the track of will and we'll
Speaker 1: we'll try to we'll try to figure it out. You know,
Speaker 1: what are we you know, what are we looking for here?
Speaker 1: You know? And and it's all there's a bad there's
Speaker 1: it's it, there's there is there is a language barrier
Speaker 1: that just disappears. Yeah, that doesn't you know, And he
Speaker 1: doesn't speak English, I don't speak Swanna or or or
Speaker 1: or cuckoo you or something else. But we communicate, we
Speaker 1: understand each other, and that's like just yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: just I don't know, I'm certain to get you know.
Speaker 1: It's it's it's hard not to get nostalgic about it.
Speaker 1: What about that nostalgy because I guess that like even
Speaker 1: the name I feel like the name of your book,
Speaker 1: like having the Autumn's right, there's a kind there's a
Speaker 1: a does a well do you feel like like is
Speaker 1: it done? You? Like if I like I could, I
Speaker 1: could rattle loss and stuff. No, I mean, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's like it's I'm going back in January. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: go to Burkina Fossa. And and the reason I'm going
Speaker 1: to Burkina Fossil is there's a there's a relatively small
Speaker 1: area like two hundred fifty hectars or something that's really
Speaker 1: wild country. There's elephants and lions there walking around, there's
Speaker 1: no fences, and there's a different buffalo, there's the savannah buffalo.
Speaker 1: So I'm I want to go back. I want to
Speaker 1: hunt two animals. That's it. I want to hunt the
Speaker 1: savannah buffalo in the western room and the western rhone
Speaker 1: is like, I mean, it's it's you know, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's kind of like it's like a really mean white tail.
Speaker 1: It's a really it's a disgruntled white tail because they're
Speaker 1: very smart and they love to and they're just beautiful animals,
Speaker 1: wonderful eating. I I don't know. Again, I'm gonna people
Speaker 1: don't really pay much attention to it. I mean, but
Speaker 1: the game meets great. Does anything in the Africa have antlers? Ah?
Speaker 1: You know, you know, actually the giraffes are pedicels, which
Speaker 1: are not they're kind of proto h antlers. And there
Speaker 1: are red deer in nor southern Africa. You know, the
Speaker 1: Barbary red deer is native native. You don't surprise me.
Speaker 1: You talk about hunting SEUs scraf yep, you talk about
Speaker 1: hunting wild pigs in Africa. I didn't know in the
Speaker 1: in the in northern Africa they have straight up wild hog.
Speaker 1: Yeah it sounds like a shipload up. Yeah blocks in Tunisia. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's there, and they're they're all over the place. But
Speaker 1: I point out to people about like autumns in Africa,
Speaker 1: like August and Africa. Oh, I said, Autumn's earlier August Arica. Uh,
Speaker 1: but you go a lot of other months. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: that's it's it's not it's it's it's a it's a
Speaker 1: it's a figurative time, you know. It's it's when I
Speaker 1: first in fact, the first time went that guys went there,
Speaker 1: the first time I was it was a member. But
Speaker 1: there is a there's a you know, there's an August
Speaker 1: feel to it. You know, it's it's especially growing up
Speaker 1: in like southern California, you know, you get that kind
Speaker 1: of late August weather in the climate, and that's kind
Speaker 1: of what you're running into in in Africa when you're
Speaker 1: there sometimes, you know, it can feel like that, and uh,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's more a metaphorical time than it is
Speaker 1: an actual calendar date. Yea conjures a bit of romance
Speaker 1: and nostalgia. Like well, there's a quote on the cover
Speaker 1: by from Robert Rourke, which is you know that that
Speaker 1: that's when they burn the they burn the grass and
Speaker 1: July and the good hunt, the decent hunting starts in August,
Speaker 1: which in the one little part of Africa he hunted.
Speaker 1: You know, that's something about Hanyway to I mean, Hennyway
Speaker 1: didn't really never he never got to East Africa, Worke
Speaker 1: never got out of East Africa pretty much never got
Speaker 1: out of now. So how much have like, okay, take
Speaker 1: it for granted, that is it's a gradual decline like that,
Speaker 1: there's a gradual decline of wild places in the world.
Speaker 1: That's just like a way to explain world history, Okay,
Speaker 1: the peopling of the world. So taken outside of just
Speaker 1: that general gradual thing that happens, how much are how
Speaker 1: much are the good old days here or not here?
Speaker 1: Because I oftentimes find myself when I'm talking about hunting
Speaker 1: in America, I try to remind people that, um, depending
Speaker 1: on how like how your how wide your net is
Speaker 1: that there's a pretty good argument to be made that
Speaker 1: we're in the good old days right now. Well, sure, yeah,
Speaker 1: and you and you have a different you know again,
Speaker 1: we we have we have the luxury or the or
Speaker 1: the benefit of you know, the greatest conservation system wild
Speaker 1: conservation system in the world. You know, if you look
Speaker 1: at if you look at other places you're talking about
Speaker 1: New Zealand and Europe and and you know South Africa,
Speaker 1: we're we're you know, this is this is this is
Speaker 1: animal husbandry that's going on in those places South African
Speaker 1: New Zealand. Well, I mean, yeah, it's animal husbandry on
Speaker 1: a you know, on a on a with wild animals,
Speaker 1: whereas we actually still have you know, truly wild populations.
Speaker 1: And yeah, I mean you know, there's there's more game
Speaker 1: here than then there was and that and that's a
Speaker 1: loaded word as well, game, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: That's people probably give you a hard time about that word. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't care about Okay, tell me what you really
Speaker 1: think anyway. Um, but they I don't know what you
Speaker 1: can say about Africa except that it does continue to decline.
Speaker 1: And that's I don't know what the solution is. You
Speaker 1: don't feel that it's a factor of hunting, No, it's
Speaker 1: a factor of it's a it's a it's it's factors inconvenient,
Speaker 1: like wildlife is inconvenient, inconvenient and and and taste good.
Speaker 1: And let's put it this way, that that that you could,
Speaker 1: you could, you could ban all hunting in Africa tonight,
Speaker 1: absolutely ban at all legal license hunting, and the populations
Speaker 1: would probably decline even faster just because it would de
Speaker 1: incentivize There'd be nothing, there'ld be no reason to keep
Speaker 1: anything around and and it's hard to because no one's
Speaker 1: making money off its existence. And it's and it's it's
Speaker 1: you're asking you're asking Africans to support wildlife when they
Speaker 1: can't in many cases support themselves. Yeah. We we think,
Speaker 1: we think you should let these las run through your whatever,
Speaker 1: and they're gonna go why you know, it's like it's like,
Speaker 1: I mean, if you woke up in the morning and
Speaker 1: there was and there was and there was a bison
Speaker 1: smashing your super route of shreds, you know, you would
Speaker 1: probably go, oh shooting, yeah, and then somebody, no, you
Speaker 1: can't do that, don't do that, you can't do that, Okay.
Speaker 1: You'd be like, then someone's gonna have to give you
Speaker 1: a lot of money. Yeah, wells, but nobody's gonna give
Speaker 1: you any money in Africa. You know, if you if
Speaker 1: you come back and you know someone's destroyed you know,
Speaker 1: the elephants have destroyed your crops trying to get them. Actually,
Speaker 1: I think one of the big things that's it's making
Speaker 1: a difference. I mean, the mass Shire are are using
Speaker 1: they can use cell phones and then call each other
Speaker 1: and they you know, then go elephants are in there
Speaker 1: in the in the maze tonight, you know, and they'll
Speaker 1: run in there and try to chase them out. But
Speaker 1: that's maybe that's an advantage. But of course the cell
Speaker 1: phone also helps the poachers. So you know, why is
Speaker 1: it now? Why does it cost two dollars to kill
Speaker 1: a rhino? Why does it cost two hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: dollars to get a governor's permit for a you know,
Speaker 1: small fur for a sheep small pool? Yeah, you know
Speaker 1: that there's there is And what are the ones that
Speaker 1: do get killed? The ones that do get like, what
Speaker 1: are the situations where there what are the situations where
Speaker 1: like how many how many rhinos are hunted every year?
Speaker 1: Are they? Are they identified? Well, there's there's there's you know, okay,
Speaker 1: there's two kinds. There's white rhino in the black rhino.
Speaker 1: Now the white rhino is actually the more popular it
Speaker 1: is now. It didn't used to be, but it's now
Speaker 1: the more populous species did not used to be. Oh no, no,
Speaker 1: they were almost gone, you know, the and there's a
Speaker 1: long history of that. But if you you can go
Speaker 1: back to um the South Africans back in the these
Speaker 1: are sixties, they wanted to kill them all off because
Speaker 1: they wanted more land for grazing and cattle. And there
Speaker 1: was like there was one little herd of white rhino
Speaker 1: on this park, three animals maybe, and they were getting
Speaker 1: all in bread and it was just total disaster. And
Speaker 1: then a guy named Ian Player, who was the golfer
Speaker 1: Gary Player's brother, came in and just started capturing these
Speaker 1: things and spreading them out, you know, spreading into different areas.
Speaker 1: And in that amount of time they went from like
Speaker 1: three hundreds, I don't know, twenty five thousand or something
Speaker 1: in South Africa. So what's well black rhino or the
Speaker 1: opposite they were like when they were when the white
Speaker 1: rhino was down to like like three d there was
Speaker 1: probably a hundred thousand black rhino. Unfortunately, black rhino have horns,
Speaker 1: and the horn is is mistakenly thought of as an
Speaker 1: afrodisiac or of of medicinal as it is a popular
Speaker 1: ingredient Asian medicine because and here's this animal, the big
Speaker 1: fallast growing out of his forehead. Well it's mad, it's
Speaker 1: madd at hair, but it's also the same. The other
Speaker 1: part of it is also is many Chics wanted the
Speaker 1: horn for there you know, they're they're decorative dagger handles
Speaker 1: because you know, it's just beautiful material when it's worked,
Speaker 1: and they would so that. So, so here's the thing.
Speaker 1: If you want to shoot a black rhino, to poach
Speaker 1: it almost that is that? What like? Is it the
Speaker 1: mechanical removal of black rhinos killing them for their horns,
Speaker 1: not habitat loss? Well, it's it's there's probably so few.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of habitat there's there's there's a lot
Speaker 1: of parks they could have rhinos on it, but they
Speaker 1: get they get killed pretty fast, and and it's it's
Speaker 1: a continuing it's a running it's a running firefight. You see,
Speaker 1: someone went to a French zoo and shot of rhino.
Speaker 1: But but h yeah, well people, people people in Africa
Speaker 1: had who had mounted rhino heads in there have come
Speaker 1: home and the house have been broken into and some
Speaker 1: horns chopped off, the horn off of Because from a
Speaker 1: pragmatic stand from a you know, pragmatic standpoint, Okay, so
Speaker 1: I want to get a permit to hunt a black rhino. Now,
Speaker 1: the US Fish and Wildlife Service says, if you can
Speaker 1: prove to me that you can prove to us that
Speaker 1: by hunting this rhino you're actually which is an endangered species.
Speaker 1: If you can prove to us that by hunting this
Speaker 1: you're actually going to improve the species the you know,
Speaker 1: improve the survival for the species by by pumping a
Speaker 1: lot of money into conservation, then have at it. So
Speaker 1: the way that so the government's and like Namibia in
Speaker 1: places like that that have viable populations of black rhino.
Speaker 1: And also part of the problem is is they want
Speaker 1: to get rid of the old bulls because they are
Speaker 1: a drug on the market. As they say, they they
Speaker 1: don't breed probably you know they've done breeding. They just
Speaker 1: they take over territory and they want to move them out.
Speaker 1: That that if you kill one, you're gonna actually end
Speaker 1: up with net more rhinos because you're pulling this one
Speaker 1: out of the out of the herd. So a guy
Speaker 1: comes over to Namibia, he pays the Nimbian government two
Speaker 1: hundred fifty dollars three fifty thousand dollars. That money then
Speaker 1: ostensibly is earmarked for various conservation projects related to the
Speaker 1: black rhino. He then can import, which is important to him.
Speaker 1: He can import that rhino head into the United States.
Speaker 1: Now the alternative, the alternative is a poacher comes out
Speaker 1: in the middle of the night, jack lights, it shoots,
Speaker 1: it sells the horn for twenty dollars. It was, you know,
Speaker 1: and these things are going up and down. The big
Speaker 1: deal right now is like if you can believe that
Speaker 1: China is actually gonna stop the trade. And they said
Speaker 1: they finally got around to saying, yeah, we're no more ivory,
Speaker 1: no more, We're done. And if they do that, it's
Speaker 1: gonna dry everything up and there's gonna be no incentive
Speaker 1: to start poaching these things things. So it might help. Well,
Speaker 1: it can't hurt, you know, Wow, Johnny Dude, I like, yeah, like, uh,
Speaker 1: your book really made me think about a ton of
Speaker 1: ship I hadn't thought about before. We could I could
Speaker 1: I read a small piece out of it? Please? Okay?
Speaker 1: It's interesting to me is that not a single topic
Speaker 1: of the last hour and a half has been without controversy. No,
Speaker 1: but that was my approach to the book. I didn't
Speaker 1: approach the book. I didn't approach the bo just wanting
Speaker 1: to hear cool hunting stories. I approached the book because
Speaker 1: I'm like a guy, uh who is like just interest, like, okay,
Speaker 1: a lot of like I have an inner struggle, like
Speaker 1: do I want to go. Is it a thing that
Speaker 1: in my life needs to happen as a person who's
Speaker 1: pursuing hunting as a discipline and as a mechanism for exploration,
Speaker 1: Like is that or is that not? I came out
Speaker 1: of that book thinking that that I would like to
Speaker 1: go to a wilderness type area and travel with people
Speaker 1: who were who grew up in that environment, and travel
Speaker 1: with him and crawl through that thick ass brush looking
Speaker 1: for kate buffalo? Are are there? You know? The other possible?
Speaker 1: I mean, if you really want to get um there
Speaker 1: you there's the um Democratic Republic of the Congo, and
Speaker 1: there you hunt the forest dwarf. And don't be mistaken
Speaker 1: by the fact I called dwarf forest buffalo, because they're
Speaker 1: actually more dangerous than the cape buffalo because of the
Speaker 1: habitat they live in. And that is where you actually
Speaker 1: that is I haven't done it, but that is way wicked.
Speaker 1: I mean that is you are hunting a lot of
Speaker 1: the times, you're hunting with pigmies and and you know,
Speaker 1: and and you can imagine what that must be like,
Speaker 1: the trip that must be going into these Yeah, we've
Speaker 1: talked with our body about doing that. Yeah, yeah, man,
Speaker 1: I don't mean, do you do you feel you know,
Speaker 1: it's like the customer satisfaction surveys. Do you feel that
Speaker 1: in our conversation, um, that I've focused on ship that
Speaker 1: you wish I hadn't focused on No? No, I mean
Speaker 1: I I appreciate you know, like one to ten. How
Speaker 1: likely would you be to recommend this to friend? To
Speaker 1: recommend this to a friend? Well, I don't want to.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know you haven't. You haven't put this
Speaker 1: on the area, So I depends how how politic I
Speaker 1: want to be. Uh, The point being that, yeah, this
Speaker 1: has been This has been a refreshing, refreshingly intelligent conversation
Speaker 1: for me. Because you know, you're not an African hand
Speaker 1: let's put it that way. What does that mean, Well,
Speaker 1: you don't have any you don't have any African you
Speaker 1: don't you don't have any on the ground experience in Africa.
Speaker 1: That's a fair assumption. But you're a hunter, and you
Speaker 1: can understand the motivations of why people would go some
Speaker 1: crazy ass places like Africa and why once they went
Speaker 1: there they kept going back when they really had no
Speaker 1: business financially or economically, or you know, trying to put
Speaker 1: a kid through college and a wife, you know, to
Speaker 1: keep her fed at least once a week. You know
Speaker 1: she's already going like, you're not going back, all right?
Speaker 1: And I'd go like, um, no I might, God no no,
Speaker 1: so um yeah, I mean, I mean I give it
Speaker 1: a solid night and a half. How is that? Okay?
Speaker 1: I wasn't even worried about it? So you just said
Speaker 1: that No, Uh, I was insane. He always he always
Speaker 1: struck me as a troublemaker. Well, we're not gonna sit
Speaker 1: down and swap old hunting stories about Africas. I haven't
Speaker 1: gone there. Yeah no, no, But I just say that
Speaker 1: that's sort of there is. There is there is no
Speaker 1: way in this day and age that you cannot talk
Speaker 1: about Africa without creating controversy. And I think even with
Speaker 1: two completely like minded people to hardcore African hunters, they'd
Speaker 1: probably find some controversies. And it's it just seems like
Speaker 1: it's inherent almost. I mean, there's there's, there's, there's there's
Speaker 1: let's put it. Hunting in Africa gives you the potential
Speaker 1: of being the worst person you ever were in your
Speaker 1: entire life, or maybe not the best person, but a
Speaker 1: pretty damn good person. Um. You know, there's there's there's that,
Speaker 1: there's that choice, there is that you know, there is
Speaker 1: that option available. Yeah, you talk about some time you
Speaker 1: spent on a trip with a person who embarrassed you
Speaker 1: a great deal. Yeah, yeah, he was. He was their
Speaker 1: views on the culture, their views on racial issues. He was,
Speaker 1: he was. He was a piece of work. I mean
Speaker 1: it was really that's a good story because you really
Speaker 1: go to have such a visceral hatred for that guy,
Speaker 1: you know, and it's and it was it was it
Speaker 1: was like it was because he it was mutual. But
Speaker 1: but but it came to a point where you like
Speaker 1: came to a point where the author Tom here Is said,
Speaker 1: why did you come to Africa except to shoot? Except
Speaker 1: to shoot stuff? Except to shoot stuff? You know? And
Speaker 1: it's like, when I was twenty, I could understand that
Speaker 1: because you know, you're twenty, you want to you have
Speaker 1: that you know, you know you want to you want
Speaker 1: to you want to hunt everything. But now, I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm happy to go back and like I mean,
Speaker 1: I I think I envy somebody like Craig Boddington because
Speaker 1: he's like over in like barrier hunting, these like antelope there,
Speaker 1: the size of this water glass. You know, it's like
Speaker 1: and it was, and it's you know, the whole the
Speaker 1: whole fact that he is dealing with native trackers and
Speaker 1: they're calling them in and it's you know, it's impenetrable
Speaker 1: jungle in this and this whole adventure, I guess, I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's maybe it sounds cliche, but how
Speaker 1: many adventures are there left. I'm sure there there's plenty
Speaker 1: of them, but I but I mean, also, it kind
Speaker 1: of seems to be that more and more people are
Speaker 1: kind of like adventure is becoming more and more kind
Speaker 1: of a stunt, you know what I mean, And that
Speaker 1: that when I went to I came at the very
Speaker 1: very very very end of when going to Africa was
Speaker 1: an adventure because it was Africa and and you didn't
Speaker 1: have to be It wasn't a stunt to find adventure
Speaker 1: in Africa. You it was there, you know, just by
Speaker 1: the fact of being there. And it's interesting you mentioned
Speaker 1: the that story about that guy, that hunter. We took
Speaker 1: a mutual disliking to um so this meaning that you
Speaker 1: and me took a mutual this left no he and
Speaker 1: I took a mutual dislike to each other. You got
Speaker 1: any final thoughts, Yes, got a lot of final questions. Sure,
Speaker 1: we don't have to probably a time for it, but um,
Speaker 1: pick one, pick one, pick your best one, take your
Speaker 1: best shot. Attention must be paid. I'm not it's all
Speaker 1: the classic. I just want to be like, I just
Speaker 1: want to start talking calibersing bullet weights. That's that's yeah,
Speaker 1: because that's like like, I mean, I like the bigger
Speaker 1: ideas for you. But Tom and I five Nitro Express
Speaker 1: for seventies four seventies offully nice. Tom and I could
Speaker 1: probably sit around now after That's what you wanted. You
Speaker 1: guys left Yanni's podcast in which yeah, I'm meant to
Speaker 1: ask what his favorite caliber over forty years and now
Speaker 1: that changed. You should have told me earlier three seventy five.
Speaker 1: You can't go wrong. You can't go wrong in Africa
Speaker 1: with a three seventy five. I'll tell you the name,
Speaker 1: I'll tell you, just let you know that I'm adapt
Speaker 1: the Queens of the Planes Rifles. Is that something like that? Queen?
Speaker 1: You have the planes, right, the queen? Yeah? Three? Al right,
Speaker 1: So Yann is bummed out that we didn't, not at all.
Speaker 1: I'm just saying that, like you know, Um, as we're
Speaker 1: discussing all these controversial ideas, I'm thinking, Okay, when you're
Speaker 1: getting ready to wonder if he handladed most of his
Speaker 1: ready to go getting ready to a matter of fact,
Speaker 1: I did. But that's besides when you're getting ready to go,
Speaker 1: text Tom and ask him what Yeah, and and and
Speaker 1: the solids by the way, Yeah, So I know these
Speaker 1: landscapes are like when I think of fence tons. All
Speaker 1: I know of is our recent discussion with um you know,
Speaker 1: talking about CWD, right, um And I know the landscape
Speaker 1: is on such a greater scale over in Africa, But
Speaker 1: in these fenced areas, is there any problem with disease transmission? Well,
Speaker 1: that's a good question, um. And and it's you know
Speaker 1: that the there's I think in the afterward to the book,
Speaker 1: I kind of look into the fact of that. You know,
Speaker 1: you have this this you have one school of thought
Speaker 1: that says, by getting value out of the wildlife, we're
Speaker 1: actually helping to preserve it by these ranches down there.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, they're also doing these bizarre
Speaker 1: breeding programs so they can come up with gold golden
Speaker 1: willed beast or or or you know, or black impoos
Speaker 1: and which they have now found out that they're all sterile,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean it's it's it's like it's so
Speaker 1: it's like it's it's like a management paradox. Really, like
Speaker 1: dozens of species of big game isn't enough. Yeah, well
Speaker 1: that's exactly it. I mean, they want to they want
Speaker 1: to be able to you know, oh, well you don't
Speaker 1: have one of these, you know, they want to be
Speaker 1: able to to buttonhold a guy at a at a
Speaker 1: hunting convention that you don't have one of these in
Speaker 1: your wall. Yeah. No, no, it's it's it's crazy. It's crazy.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's just and then you know, there's a
Speaker 1: whole argument about that. But as I point out that
Speaker 1: that that essay, you know, it's the same thing that
Speaker 1: happened in Spain when Spain went you know, we went
Speaker 1: crazy with all this money. Everybody wanted to to have
Speaker 1: Andalusian horses. Then they all went broke and then the
Speaker 1: horses they just left to starve. You know, they had
Speaker 1: no money to to run the hostantias anymore, and they
Speaker 1: just took off and lift. So right right now they're saying, well,
Speaker 1: look at all the money we can make out of
Speaker 1: these animals, we can it's a bubble. It's a bubble,
Speaker 1: and it's gonna and then what happens I don't know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and disease maybe one of those factors or animals there,
Speaker 1: like in this book you refer to and I don't
Speaker 1: know over the wholer thing, but risk of wild like
Speaker 1: well the same thing with Bruce Lowis. And and they
Speaker 1: don't want like shooting animals prevent disease transmission to livestock. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they they've actually, I mean that's what they've again found out,
Speaker 1: is that they're you were talking about the map of
Speaker 1: how much non supplemental feeding of cattle and how much
Speaker 1: land there is. Well it's even worse than South Africa.
Speaker 1: I mean there's most of the land is really pretty
Speaker 1: poor agricultural land. So there is that argument that at
Speaker 1: least the wildlife is adapted to the land and we
Speaker 1: can make some money off of that, and then we
Speaker 1: can we don't have I don't know what else should
Speaker 1: do with the land over there, but you know, you
Speaker 1: can you know it it just becomes you're chasing your
Speaker 1: own to your dog chasing its tail. I don't know,
Speaker 1: I mean, I I you know it these public I mean,
Speaker 1: you know the fact that these guys are going to
Speaker 1: auctions and spending two million dollars for a buffalo to
Speaker 1: to put into their breeding stock because I think the
Speaker 1: genes are gonna be there's no guarantee the genes are
Speaker 1: gonna do anything. Yeah, you have a real concluding thoughts
Speaker 1: every hunting small games over there for years. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Franklin Franklin grouse. Um, that's like kind of like that's
Speaker 1: like the quintessential small game. Right, everybody goes like almost
Speaker 1: everybody's like hunting Franklin, right, or sand grouse, sand grouser,
Speaker 1: sand grouser. Tough. Band grounds are tough there, I mean
Speaker 1: they are. They just the Usually they usually wait until
Speaker 1: like about ten minutes after sunset to come to the
Speaker 1: water hole, you know, and they're just streaking in there.
Speaker 1: And that's you know, they're just harder hell to kill.
Speaker 1: Throwing another one, Yohnie. That's why as you get all
Speaker 1: this out of asistance, they feel like you weren't waste
Speaker 1: your time here. Oh I don't handle you're shooting handloads.
Speaker 1: He likes three squirrels. Yeah, I wounded squirrels, but not
Speaker 1: in Africa. He likes to about squirrels. I like I
Speaker 1: like it. I like it when you put the they
Speaker 1: put the they put the stick up in the tree
Speaker 1: and they twisted, twisting, twisting, the twisting the squail out
Speaker 1: of the tree. Yeah, a wounded one. Yeah, all those
Speaker 1: are the worst coum You're good. No, No, I can
Speaker 1: come up with plenty. So you never were in a
Speaker 1: dangerous position with a kate buffalo? How about any other animal?
Speaker 1: Did you ever? We ever? Were you ever actually thinking? Yeah,
Speaker 1: wild boar? While yeah, it was that was the the
Speaker 1: only I think out and out charge I ever saw
Speaker 1: it. It It kind of very it off for me and
Speaker 1: went towards this other guy was actually a wild boar,
Speaker 1: which is the least you know all that crazy ship
Speaker 1: that's a wild boar. Yeah, well that you never know.
Speaker 1: That's the one that you know. You never hear the
Speaker 1: bullet that kills you right well, you know, Capstick said,
Speaker 1: what was it? A dangerous thing he ever encountered? Was
Speaker 1: the woman on the malaria drugs? Right? Pet my friend Pete?
Speaker 1: Is that the name of the story. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: I can't. Pete was a friend of one and and
Speaker 1: and and God love him. He was a wonderful rock
Speaker 1: on tour. Yeah, you talk about malarious pills too. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but there's a well, oh no, that's a hilarium I
Speaker 1: think is the It's a great psychedelic drug to take
Speaker 1: when you're sleeping because you get these like just full
Speaker 1: blown dreams. Dude, I just screak. I could see take
Speaker 1: I could see when I'm on that, I could see
Speaker 1: waking up and like realizing that you're sucking on the
Speaker 1: end of a pistol. It's that it's that bad for
Speaker 1: my brain. You've had you've had larium problems, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Like yeah, well, I'm like, I'll take the malaria. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, I have to choose between that drug and
Speaker 1: that disease. I'll take the disease, you know. And yeah,
Speaker 1: I know it's it's it's it's bad stuff for some people,
Speaker 1: really bad stuff for some people. But yeah, all right, man,
Speaker 1: all right, August and Africa, thank you so much. I'm
Speaker 1: I'm guessing people can buy this book on Amazon. The
Speaker 1: other book, Mother my novella, is The snow Leopards Tail
Speaker 1: that's also available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, all all
Speaker 1: your finer uh you know, online outlets. Yeah, if you're
Speaker 1: curious you hate African hunting, if you love it, if
Speaker 1: you might want to go, it'll it'll inform your perspectives
Speaker 1: in a non manipulative way. Um, thanks for joining us MAN.
Speaker 1: I appreciate it. Thank you so much. I appreciate the
Speaker 1: opportunity