Speaker 1: Yeah. My name is Clay Nukeleman. This is a production
Speaker 1: of the Bear Grease podcast called The Bear Grease Render,
Speaker 1: where we render down, dive deeper, and looked behind the
Speaker 1: scenes of the actual bear Grease podcast, presented by f
Speaker 1: HF Gear, American made purpose built hunting and fishing gear
Speaker 1: that's designed to be as rugged as the places we explore.
Speaker 1: Dan's instinct for where his mic she goes, it's like
Speaker 1: really off. Then every time we put on microphones, he's like,
Speaker 1: you can tell her he thinks he's about to get
Speaker 1: in trouble. Kinds it doesn't make it doesn't make eye contact.
Speaker 1: And then I look at him and he won't look
Speaker 1: at me. And his mic is like jammed up in
Speaker 1: his nose, and like every time he breathe it sounds
Speaker 1: like a rhinoceros. I'm nervous. I'm looking. I know a
Speaker 1: lot of times when we when we're setting that in
Speaker 1: the World Headquarters, I hear breathing and I'll stop and say,
Speaker 1: is that means they're out here? And I look and
Speaker 1: I'm watching everybody watching. Usually I'm watching his chest go
Speaker 1: up and down, like, oh, well, welcome to the Beargrease Render.
Speaker 1: What this is. Yes, I feel like I need to
Speaker 1: explain what the burgary S frender is because if somebody
Speaker 1: here's like, man, the Beggars podcast is awesome, I need
Speaker 1: to listen to it. And they come to a render,
Speaker 1: they may not know what it is. They may hear
Speaker 1: Dan breathing profusely through the microphone the Bgaras Russian his
Speaker 1: microphone with his my stache. Yeah, the Bargery surrender is
Speaker 1: the the the secondary part of the Burgrease podcast, which Isaac,
Speaker 1: why don't you tell him what the Beargrease podcast is? Uh,
Speaker 1: it's a it's a storytelling podcast. Is the guy that works.
Speaker 1: The Bargaras podcast is a documentary style podcast, Yes, taking
Speaker 1: things forgotten but relevant. Yes. Uh, anthropology, history, stories, biology,
Speaker 1: human history, human psychology. I once heard it described as
Speaker 1: things that you could get excited about. Yes, So that's
Speaker 1: what the Bargaries podcast is every other week, well produced.
Speaker 1: And then the render is when we break down, we
Speaker 1: render down and render a metaphor render. The word render
Speaker 1: is a metaphor for what you due to bear fat
Speaker 1: to make it into bear grease. So you render it down,
Speaker 1: you melt it down, apply heat and so the Bargreasur
Speaker 1: Render is where we talk about the previous week's podcast. Okay,
Speaker 1: with this kind of an eclectic group of people, different
Speaker 1: people every time, usually there's some people that are consistent.
Speaker 1: So welcome to the Beargrease Render. And on this render
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk about the podcast that came out last
Speaker 1: week called Where the Red Fern Grows, Part one, The
Speaker 1: Peculiar Life of Wilson Rawls. So we are right now
Speaker 1: near the town of Augusta, Arkansas. Is that correct? Yep? Augusta,
Speaker 1: Arkansas is in the Delta region of Arkansas. I've spent
Speaker 1: quite a bit of time in the Delta region of
Speaker 1: Arkansas this year duck hunting and then now we have
Speaker 1: come to what has become known as Coon and Squirrel
Speaker 1: Camp with Brent Reeves, hosted by Brent Reeves. Good to
Speaker 1: be here, bad you guys are here. This is actually
Speaker 1: we can think in for this. You're welcome boys, we
Speaker 1: can yep, was it for anything? Four months ago we're
Speaker 1: finishing a render at the World Headquarters. Heed said, man,
Speaker 1: we need to get together and gokuna and that's all
Speaker 1: it took. He lit the fuse and bang, here we are.
Speaker 1: I'm like the spark that that lights y'all's souls on fire. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so and good had a good idea. So we have
Speaker 1: We're here for two nights. We got here yesterday on
Speaker 1: a Friday. We kun hunted last night. We'll talk about
Speaker 1: that where you scure hunt a little bit this morning, um,
Speaker 1: and then and then we're gonna coon hunt tonight. If
Speaker 1: the score hunting a little bit is foreshadowing, it was
Speaker 1: a little bit, it wasn't. It wasn't a lot of Yeah,
Speaker 1: it wasn't a lot of It was a little scure hunting. Hey,
Speaker 1: I want to start off before I introduce everybody. I
Speaker 1: have a story to tell you guys that is relevant
Speaker 1: to the coon hunting series that we're doing because knut
Speaker 1: has been a fairly substantial sector of my outdoor life. Okay,
Speaker 1: And when I was in the ninth grade, my good
Speaker 1: friend Nick Cunningham, he his dad came to us, we're
Speaker 1: fourteen year old boys, and said, I think you boys
Speaker 1: should get coon dogs. And I had never coon hunter before,
Speaker 1: and they took us coon hunting with So Nick's uncle
Speaker 1: had coon dogs or his cousin had coon dogs. We
Speaker 1: went coon hunting with his with his cousin, and I
Speaker 1: remember we were hunting in National Forest and he had
Speaker 1: two blue ticks, Teresa and Trooper, and Teresa was real
Speaker 1: coon dog, and we we road hunted back in the
Speaker 1: in the long drainages of the Washtall Mountains. Washtall Mountains
Speaker 1: run east and west long east east west running ridges,
Speaker 1: so the roads travel either the tops of the mountains
Speaker 1: or the bottoms of the mountains along creeks, and so
Speaker 1: there's long stretches where there's just roads going by creeks.
Speaker 1: And so you road hunted your dogs at night, turned
Speaker 1: the dogs out in front of the truck and just
Speaker 1: drove down the roads and your dogs just hunted like
Speaker 1: quail dogs, you know, out in front of the truck.
Speaker 1: The dogs struck, and I really don't remember the sequence
Speaker 1: of events, but the dogs ended up on a The
Speaker 1: coons typically if they're on the creeks, they go right
Speaker 1: to the top of the mountain and tree, and I
Speaker 1: remember that Teresa and Trooper treat on top of that mountain.
Speaker 1: We walked up there, and at this point I still
Speaker 1: didn't think much about coon hunting, you know, it was
Speaker 1: just going out in the dark with these dogs and
Speaker 1: it was cool, but nothing was that unique about them. Man,
Speaker 1: When I saw those dogs tread and we shot that
Speaker 1: coon out and those dogs ended up at the bottom
Speaker 1: of the mountain after the coon kind of jumped out,
Speaker 1: and it was like the most exciting thing I had
Speaker 1: ever been a part of in my life. And I
Speaker 1: was like, I think I'm gonna I think I'm gonna
Speaker 1: get into this. And then Nick's dad came to us
Speaker 1: and said, hey, y'all need to have some coon dogs.
Speaker 1: You'll need to get some coon dogs. He went to
Speaker 1: the Arkansas Democratic Gazette and the printed version of the Gazette,
Speaker 1: which all there was at that and there was a
Speaker 1: litter of blue tick raish your blue tick coon hounds
Speaker 1: for sale about an hour away from where we lived.
Speaker 1: On New Year's Eve, about I think, we drove in
Speaker 1: the cunning Hams like total like mom mini van kind
Speaker 1: of van hour and a half and bought a pair
Speaker 1: of bought a we were going to buy one dog.
Speaker 1: And when we got there, the dogs were The dogs
Speaker 1: were a hundred dollars apiece, and Jeff Cunham knew how
Speaker 1: to roll. He picked out the dog we wanted. We
Speaker 1: started to walk away. He turned around and he said
Speaker 1: I'll give you fifty dollars for another dog, and the
Speaker 1: guy said deal, and so Jeff paid a hundred fifty
Speaker 1: dollars for a pair of dogs I remember we got.
Speaker 1: When we got back in the truck, Jeff said, I
Speaker 1: could tell that fan needed an extra fifty bucks. It
Speaker 1: was they were like and it was New Year's Eve.
Speaker 1: He said, those kids will have a better Christmas. I'll
Speaker 1: never forget that. He actually said that New Year's come
Speaker 1: after years, say New Year's Christmas Eve? Okay, I just
Speaker 1: I didn't want. I didn't didn't want. Okay, changes everything.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry. Did I say New Year's Eve? Christmas Eve?
Speaker 1: It was Christmas Eve? And we get these dogs. And
Speaker 1: then here's where I'm gonna speed this story up a lot. Okay.
Speaker 1: We named the dogs Macy and Maddie. My dad, Gary Newcomb,
Speaker 1: wanted me to name them after the president during that time.
Speaker 1: We won't mention his name after his wife and daughter,
Speaker 1: but we're not going to mention their names. And I said, Dad,
Speaker 1: that's a bad idea. So we named the dogs Macy
Speaker 1: and Maddie. There were registered blue ticks and um and
Speaker 1: we raised the dogs and they were never very good.
Speaker 1: They just weren't They just weren't great dogs. We didn't
Speaker 1: know what we were doing. We didn't get to hunt
Speaker 1: them very much. And I started getting uh coon Hound
Speaker 1: Bloodlines magazine and I started seeing all these big, awesome
Speaker 1: pictures of stud dogs and coon haum Bloodlines magazine. I
Speaker 1: still have the picture that I ripped out of the
Speaker 1: magazine of East Texas Blue Thunder. Who was in who
Speaker 1: was in uh uh Center Texas, which is a six
Speaker 1: hour drive from where I lived. And I was a
Speaker 1: junior in high school, and I said, Dad, I need
Speaker 1: to go to Center Texas. I'm buying a pup out
Speaker 1: of East Texas Blue Boomer And it was a beautiful picture.
Speaker 1: Like I I had to find it and put it
Speaker 1: on Instagram. Gary Newcomb and I this is dad was
Speaker 1: a good dad. He was like, Okay, I'll drive with
Speaker 1: you down to Texas. We drive to Texas pick up
Speaker 1: a pup. I named him Newcomb's washing Tall Southern Blue
Speaker 1: Thunder's Mouthful. And this caused a major breakup with me
Speaker 1: and Nick. We we worked this out back in the day,
Speaker 1: but I was I didn't handle it right like I
Speaker 1: owe Nick an apology, which I apologized him, but I'll
Speaker 1: do it again publicly. I wanted to get out of
Speaker 1: our pair of dogs. I was like, these dogs aren't
Speaker 1: for me, but we were partners, and so we got
Speaker 1: like mad at each other. He got he kind of
Speaker 1: got upset with me, and I was in the wrong
Speaker 1: for even just like you know, bring it up and
Speaker 1: so you know, like trying to get out, Like why
Speaker 1: didn't I just the dog? Yeah, I failed on the
Speaker 1: dogs basically like a single parent exactly. And that's why
Speaker 1: I want to officially apologize to Nick. Um. And so
Speaker 1: I remember, like I talked it over with them and
Speaker 1: in in anyway, it was kind of like a big deal.
Speaker 1: And uh, anyway, I ended up getting this dog and
Speaker 1: I still feel bad about that. Um, so sorry Nick.
Speaker 1: And uh, East text blue Thunder no, no excuse me,
Speaker 1: Lucole Southern Washington. Blue Under never made much of a dog,
Speaker 1: but he he had an active name. So you ditched,
Speaker 1: You ditched your forma in favor of U the new
Speaker 1: shiny thing, which didn't turn out to be much any exactly.
Speaker 1: Man never saw that coming. Yeah, and uh and then
Speaker 1: East texta blue No, not East texta Thunder. He incessantly
Speaker 1: barked in a dog box, like, I could not get
Speaker 1: him stopped. And we didn't have electronics back then, and
Speaker 1: so anyway, we uh, you know, he just like it
Speaker 1: pretty much. If he wasn't hunting, he was gonna be
Speaker 1: barking the entire time he was in the box. I
Speaker 1: couldn't get him stopped. I mean I could. I tried
Speaker 1: every trick in the book, couldn't get him stopped. And Um,
Speaker 1: Anyway that I said all that to say that Nick
Speaker 1: and I when we hunted together with our dogs, we
Speaker 1: had to kind of infamous coon hunting run ins that
Speaker 1: we talked about this day. The first one as we
Speaker 1: were driving his dad's old truck called the Gray Ghost,
Speaker 1: and we were hunting out in the National Forest and
Speaker 1: we were sophomores, so we would have been like sixteen.
Speaker 1: We drove out, we got nine miles away from our
Speaker 1: camp and the transmission went out on the truck and
Speaker 1: we're there were no cell phones, no nothing, you know,
Speaker 1: just like back in the night you didn't have cell phones.
Speaker 1: She did, no communication. You're just walking out, you know.
Speaker 1: But we found out that the truck would drive and reverse.
Speaker 1: Serious we it would not drive forward, but it would
Speaker 1: drive and reverse. And we drove nine miles back to
Speaker 1: camp in reverse. We took turns because our next hurt
Speaker 1: automatic automatic turn. Okay, I'm I know I'm hugging the
Speaker 1: I'm doing a monologue here, but I just couldn't help it. Um.
Speaker 1: And so the second thing that happened was one night
Speaker 1: after we played a basketb All game. It was late
Speaker 1: at night, I mean we got done with a basketball game,
Speaker 1: like at ten o'clock and it was late in the
Speaker 1: winters after the first year. So was in January February.
Speaker 1: We jumped in Nick's dad's truck. Nick's dad is great man,
Speaker 1: still is a good guy. And um, he had an
Speaker 1: extended cab, long bed, full size Chevrolet pick up. I mean,
Speaker 1: the thing was like eighteen feet long, two wheel drive.
Speaker 1: We went out in National Forest and went on a
Speaker 1: a section of road that it's pretty remote that goes
Speaker 1: from one community to another community. But it's basically like
Speaker 1: a one lane road for about six or seven miles.
Speaker 1: And we're road hunting the dogs and we we decide,
Speaker 1: you know, the dogs get away from us and we
Speaker 1: don't know where theyre, and we decided we need to
Speaker 1: turn around. Well, we decided we can just turn around
Speaker 1: right here in the road because we couldn't find a
Speaker 1: place to turn around, and so we started doing like
Speaker 1: the fourteen point turn in the This is basically one
Speaker 1: lane road with an eighteen foot truck, and the truck
Speaker 1: just absolutely gets wedged in between the two banks of
Speaker 1: the road. I mean like the bumper is up on
Speaker 1: the bank in the front and a bumper is up
Speaker 1: on the bank in the front, front and back, and
Speaker 1: I mean just like all of a sudden, it's just
Speaker 1: like we're stuck bad. And so this is we were
Speaker 1: still hunting Macy and Maddie at this time. This was
Speaker 1: prey and so we're right in the dead middle of
Speaker 1: this road. So we could walk either way, but we
Speaker 1: feel like the closest way to walk is to walk,
Speaker 1: you know, to the to the east is what it
Speaker 1: would have been. And it's several miles to a little community,
Speaker 1: a rural, little rural community, and we knew that one
Speaker 1: of our English teachers lived in that community. His name
Speaker 1: was Mr McMasters, and so we just take off walking.
Speaker 1: Was the plan, to just walk through town the middle
Speaker 1: of the night, calling for Mr McMasters. It's not a town,
Speaker 1: it's like a community, meaning there's like four houses like
Speaker 1: surrounded by national for us. So you got one that
Speaker 1: we just knew that Mr McMasters lived in that community.
Speaker 1: You're either gonna get Mr McMasters or you're gonna get shot. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so we walk and I don't know how long
Speaker 1: it took us, but you know, several miles through the dark,
Speaker 1: and we get to Mr McMaster's house around one am,
Speaker 1: and he is he was our ninth grade English teacher,
Speaker 1: and he was like just like the nicest man in
Speaker 1: the world. And so, you know, we were nervous to
Speaker 1: knock on the door, and we were you know, I
Speaker 1: remember it was like, who's gonna knock? And I'm like,
Speaker 1: you're gonna knock. And so anyway, we go up the door, knock,
Speaker 1: and we hear wrestling around, and you know, we knocked
Speaker 1: all louder and we hear more wrestling, and we hear
Speaker 1: Mr McMaster's wife say who's there, and we go it's
Speaker 1: Nick and Clay from school. Our truck stuck. We need
Speaker 1: some help, and she just goes okay, and the next
Speaker 1: thing we know, Mr McMasters just like springs out of
Speaker 1: the door like fully dressed. Hey, what do you do.
Speaker 1: It's great to see you and he was, and we're like,
Speaker 1: we've got your truck stuck, and he's like, oh, no problem,
Speaker 1: I got I got my four wheel drive. We'll just
Speaker 1: go in there and get it out. And so Mr
Speaker 1: McMasters drives back in there, gets us unstuck at one
Speaker 1: in the morning, and then we drive home, get home
Speaker 1: at four in the morning. I remember that. And uh, anyway,
Speaker 1: that was the story. Did you find the dogs? We
Speaker 1: got the dogs. They met us on the road on
Speaker 1: the way to McMaster's house, so the dogs were with
Speaker 1: us when we went back. So we had to load
Speaker 1: the dogs up and Mr McMaster's truck to get back.
Speaker 1: Did he get it or did you have to, Like
Speaker 1: you know that book where the red Fern Grows? We
Speaker 1: were doing that. Oh man, he was English teacher, I
Speaker 1: know for sure would have known about where the red
Speaker 1: friend growth. That feels like a missed opportunity. Yeah, can
Speaker 1: you get him on the second part. I wrote a
Speaker 1: poem about coon hunting when I was in the ninth
Speaker 1: grade in his class, and I still remember a phrase
Speaker 1: of it. I'll tell you later. Um, hey, we have
Speaker 1: some we have two sort of guests today. We have
Speaker 1: Michael Roseman with us. So this is part where we're
Speaker 1: gonna introduce guests. Michael roseman Man, good to see you,
Speaker 1: Good to see you, good to be here. Michael's a
Speaker 1: coon hunter, Michael's uh friend of Brent Reeves, and uh
Speaker 1: so we got Daniel Rupe, Josh bill Maker, President, Brent Reeves,
Speaker 1: Isaac neil h. We'll get back to Michael Isaac. Did
Speaker 1: you know Isaac works with meat Eater? Now? Is that
Speaker 1: appropriate way to say that? I don't know, I don't know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a true story. Yeah, Isaac is helping me a
Speaker 1: lot with Bargeras right now. He's uh, he he is,
Speaker 1: He's uh, come alongside and is helping with just every
Speaker 1: part of the Burgers podcast. So that's a big deal.
Speaker 1: I'm the Chief Facilitating Officer yep, CFO, quite a title,
Speaker 1: facilitating whatever. Maybe you can clean this mess up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So Isaac is a Isaac is a photographer, videographer, lets
Speaker 1: the Spring film Missouri and all around good guy. So
Speaker 1: they brought in a fixer, is what they did. They
Speaker 1: were like, Isaac, go in there, fix it, fix it.
Speaker 1: So Michael is a lifelong coon hunter and you have
Speaker 1: a light company called sun spot Lights. That's how I
Speaker 1: know you. Yeah, um, Brent, tell us about sun spot lights,
Speaker 1: because you're going to be better at it than me.
Speaker 1: Sit in the dark man. They really are. Here's how
Speaker 1: I got to introduced to it my buddy Rex, who's
Speaker 1: painfully obviously and absent from the from this, but he's
Speaker 1: on his way up here. He's gonna be here in
Speaker 1: time to help us eat fish here later on. But
Speaker 1: he was wearing he was wearing when we started hunting.
Speaker 1: And you know, Rex and I met. He drove up
Speaker 1: in my yard and pulled up in the yard one
Speaker 1: day as iut there clearing out my dog box. He
Speaker 1: wanted to know what kind of dog I had. You know,
Speaker 1: people didn't live in my part of the country either
Speaker 1: duck hunter. They either got labs or coon dogs, one
Speaker 1: or the other. And turns out, right after I first
Speaker 1: got Whalen and we became he's an old coon hunter,
Speaker 1: and we became friends. And he was wearing a sun
Speaker 1: spot light and he's and h he said, and he
Speaker 1: introduced you to to Michael, my friend lives up at McCray.
Speaker 1: McCray that's just right up the road. He's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: he makes these, he makes these lights. And we started
Speaker 1: hunting together and became friends, and it's a good quality
Speaker 1: of product made right here in the old US of eight. Yeah,
Speaker 1: right in the old backyard. Well, listen, I go up
Speaker 1: and watch Michael work. I said he does. He doesn't
Speaker 1: help that said. My wife likes him for some reason, though,
Speaker 1: so he sits on that side of the room with
Speaker 1: her too. She's been trained to manipulate people always. I'm
Speaker 1: still not entirely convinced Brent isn't undercover. Is a double
Speaker 1: undercover agent. And I thought that there's so many layers.
Speaker 1: Now one day he's gonna flip out of his badge
Speaker 1: and be like Clay all this time. I really wasn't
Speaker 1: your friend. It was after you undercover. I got a question,
Speaker 1: would you describe it more as a light company or
Speaker 1: a hat company? Well, I can sell lights without hats.
Speaker 1: I've only seen the hats. Well, and come off. Can
Speaker 1: you paint a picture for people who haven't seen your lights?
Speaker 1: When you say you gotta light company, could you tell
Speaker 1: us about a coon light? That was what a coon
Speaker 1: light is. So we made the first cap light is
Speaker 1: what you guys are referring to. In two thousand and nine,
Speaker 1: I made it for another guy. It was called the
Speaker 1: smart light UM. Then in two thousand and ten, I
Speaker 1: started sun Spot and it's UM used to we had
Speaker 1: what you wait a minute, described the first thing you
Speaker 1: said that caplight like a soft cap. So no, so
Speaker 1: it's totally totally enclosed system, self contained system with the
Speaker 1: battery and the head of the light on the helmet
Speaker 1: or because used to. When I walked to Mr McMaster's house,
Speaker 1: I was carrying a four pound battery pack on my belt.
Speaker 1: You had a with a wire that went up to
Speaker 1: a hat that had my light. That's how because coon
Speaker 1: unders need massive superpower light. Yes, I started with a
Speaker 1: car battery and a backpack. Really really you needed some
Speaker 1: serious light. We were serious about it. I'm talking to
Speaker 1: twelve vote truck battery and a backpack hooked to a
Speaker 1: giant sun spot spotlight. It was called a sun spot
Speaker 1: was what That's where the name of the company come
Speaker 1: from when I was a little kid. And so okay,
Speaker 1: so that's what you mean by the batteries have much
Speaker 1: improved by the way, well, batteries and led lights. Okay,
Speaker 1: so described the modern sun spot light like because a
Speaker 1: lot of people wouldn't know what a coon light was.
Speaker 1: So it has a battery box on the back, cord
Speaker 1: attached to a head on the front. We make them
Speaker 1: with switches to control different L E D s on
Speaker 1: the head and on the battery box. Either way, it's
Speaker 1: like a hard It looks like a hard plastic bumbcap,
Speaker 1: a bump capump. Well, there's many ways to where basically
Speaker 1: the light is designed to ride on your head. There's
Speaker 1: multiple ways that can ride on your head. It can
Speaker 1: ride on your head and what I'd call a hard
Speaker 1: hat or a bump cap or a coal miner's hat.
Speaker 1: It looks like a coal miner's light. Like great Grandpa
Speaker 1: was a lead miner and he has we have his
Speaker 1: helmet looks exactly like that. Yeah, we still make them
Speaker 1: much better belt also, so we'll take that same battery box,
Speaker 1: put it on a longer cord. You can put it
Speaker 1: on your belt. Some guys get headaches from helmets or
Speaker 1: hats or whatever, and we'll put it on a long
Speaker 1: cord the head and they'll just throw it over their
Speaker 1: shoulder and use it in their hand like a flashlight. Hey,
Speaker 1: listen to this, Okay. I think there's a big market
Speaker 1: for non coon hunters to use the lights that we use.
Speaker 1: As coon hunters because people that are that are interacting
Speaker 1: with wild places. I don't know if y'all know this,
Speaker 1: but typically it's dark about as long as it's daylight
Speaker 1: this part of the world, especially on the solstices. Um
Speaker 1: and uh and this is getting deep. But if you're hunting,
Speaker 1: you have to interact with nighttime. You shoot your white
Speaker 1: tailed deer hunter, you're walking in the stand before daylight.
Speaker 1: You're tracking deer in the dark. If you're like me,
Speaker 1: I wear my light every single day feeding my dogs
Speaker 1: with my mules at night. I mean really every single day.
Speaker 1: I put on my coon light and use it. So
Speaker 1: everybody thinks they know what a good light is. That's
Speaker 1: not a coon hunter, and they don't. Yeah, I can't
Speaker 1: tell you how many times I've run over stumps in
Speaker 1: a boat going into the duckwoods, Like I didn't see
Speaker 1: that coming. So two years ago we started making a
Speaker 1: light for duck hunters. It's called the ben Oak Light.
Speaker 1: You wore it last night, so that light on on
Speaker 1: the headband. I didn't know if you knew that or not.
Speaker 1: I made that one. Also. That's so I own all
Speaker 1: of sun Spot and I have a partner on beIN
Speaker 1: oak also two brand's lights. I want to get into
Speaker 1: the specific specifics of it, but let me let me.
Speaker 1: Let me tell this. I was at a camp I
Speaker 1: won't name any names, Rustin Johnson, but he Rustin Johnson Um.
Speaker 1: Ruston was like, I love rust Um. He was like, man,
Speaker 1: I got a light that is bright. It is bright, Clay,
Speaker 1: You're not gonna believe this light. This light isn't outibly bright.
Speaker 1: And I was like, really, it's pretty bright and he
Speaker 1: was like, yeah, man, it's bright. It's bright. And I said,
Speaker 1: I bet you in my truck. It's not as bright
Speaker 1: as my coon light. And he was like yeah, whatever,
Speaker 1: And I was like, let's go outside right now. I
Speaker 1: was in the dark and he turned on his light
Speaker 1: and then I turned on my sun spot light and
Speaker 1: it was a it was a light they had made
Speaker 1: for hog hunting or something, and it was just it.
Speaker 1: It was a bright light, no doubt, but it was
Speaker 1: like night and day. And I was just like, Bros,
Speaker 1: you don't know what you're talking about when you talk
Speaker 1: about lights until you talk. So like, I'd like to
Speaker 1: circle back on that first experienced coon hunting last night,
Speaker 1: it became immediately apparent why you need a bright light.
Speaker 1: But can you describe that to somebody who hasn't been
Speaker 1: What do you mean why we need one? Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I mean just it's just highly specific. You get to
Speaker 1: the tree, you're looking for a tiny object that has
Speaker 1: is it looks like a tree branch's camouflaged like a
Speaker 1: tree branch, and you're just trying to catch the smallest
Speaker 1: glimpse of him whatever. Third up, Yeah, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: you're just like you're you're participating in a hunting practice
Speaker 1: that takes place at night, and you know you might
Speaker 1: as well just be able to just light the world up.
Speaker 1: But what these coon lights have, like Michael makes, is
Speaker 1: they have multiple multiple variables. So like you can turn
Speaker 1: on a walking light, which is like in in the
Speaker 1: click very easy click of a twist of a knob,
Speaker 1: it goes to a walking light, which is a really
Speaker 1: wide soft light that it's made for walking out of
Speaker 1: the woods, and it uses less battery. How long will
Speaker 1: your typical light run with just the walking light running?
Speaker 1: Like how long? So we give burn times and I
Speaker 1: would tell you that I would say fifteen hours on
Speaker 1: the walk light, but that's how long it will be bright.
Speaker 1: It'll start deeming after that it'll probably burn twenty two
Speaker 1: before it goes out. Okay, so twenty two. Think about
Speaker 1: if you left a flashlight on your house for twenty
Speaker 1: two hours, I mean it would burn out. This light
Speaker 1: off a single charge would run twenty two hours. You
Speaker 1: could walk out of the woods if you just left it.
Speaker 1: If you left it on and went to bed and
Speaker 1: you woke up, it would still be bright. Now, the
Speaker 1: the full beam when you turn it onto spotlight, Now
Speaker 1: that you're not using that all the time, so you
Speaker 1: don't need that full power. But what would be the
Speaker 1: burn time on like full high beam, same thing we
Speaker 1: advertise seven if full power, it starts to d M
Speaker 1: after that and it'll go about twelve before it's dead.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's incredible. And so I take my coon
Speaker 1: lights on back country hunts, Like when I go away
Speaker 1: back in the mountains in Montana and I see guys
Speaker 1: carrying the little little little head lamps you know that
Speaker 1: the things see their toes in their tent, And I'm like,
Speaker 1: that's the only thing you got to get out of
Speaker 1: here if we have to get out of here in
Speaker 1: the middle of the night. And they're like yeah, and
Speaker 1: I'm like, you're not as smart as you look and like,
Speaker 1: look at this and I step out of the tent. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think the thing for those of us that are
Speaker 1: not a depth coon hunters with that have the trained
Speaker 1: I to find them in the in the tree. The
Speaker 1: thing I like about is the model that that some
Speaker 1: of you guys had on last night has a laser pointer. Yes.
Speaker 1: We started putting a laser on them a few years
Speaker 1: because I'm like, where is it? Where is it? Where's there?
Speaker 1: Like right here? Click and yeah, put a really neat
Speaker 1: feature on the light. You click a single button and
Speaker 1: it puts a green laser out so you can point
Speaker 1: out stuff from a long distance. But he's right there.
Speaker 1: So now I'm a big fan coon lights. And and
Speaker 1: really I mean for this in the sales pitch for
Speaker 1: sun Spot, I mean, but it's like I just love them,
Speaker 1: use them all the time. It's a great light and
Speaker 1: um yeah yeah, and so it's there there. There are
Speaker 1: a lot of companies to make coon lights, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean there's a lot of and a lot of
Speaker 1: them are good. There's a lot of there's a lot
Speaker 1: of great lights. Yeah, there's a lot of great lights. Well, okay,
Speaker 1: let's talk about her hunt last night before we go
Speaker 1: down any further. We went coon hunt last night and
Speaker 1: we're down in the delta. There's a lot more raccoons
Speaker 1: down here than in the mountains. Yeah, and a lot
Speaker 1: of water, a lot of water. So we we cut loose.
Speaker 1: The sequence of a coon hunt would be you go
Speaker 1: out typically right it dark. We were out a little
Speaker 1: bit later last night because we didn't get here, but
Speaker 1: typically right it dark, and uh, we had We were
Speaker 1: hunting four dogs, two walker dogs and two of my plots.
Speaker 1: So we turned all four dogs loose at the same
Speaker 1: time in an area that we believe there be to
Speaker 1: be raccoons close by, and that that understanding would just
Speaker 1: come from years of hunting. And it's not rocket science.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of coons on the landscape, but coons
Speaker 1: like water. Coons like hardwood timber in the winter because
Speaker 1: a lot of acorns and different things still on the
Speaker 1: ground that they're eating. And so you know, you guys
Speaker 1: just knew, Hey, this block of hardwood timber by the river,
Speaker 1: it's gonna have coons. Well, we actually cut loose there
Speaker 1: last night because it had least a chance for us rounding. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot of water and would you say, the conditions
Speaker 1: were just about perfect for a hunt. Hey, if y'all
Speaker 1: had him in coming in front of the fireplace at
Speaker 1: exactly So Michael brought it up. We did a meat
Speaker 1: Eater film deal last February, like with snow ice Mgeddon
Speaker 1: in Arkansas and we were out there with Michael Lanier,
Speaker 1: were on mules squirrel hunting in the snow, gonna go
Speaker 1: coon hunting that night. And I had turned to Michael.
Speaker 1: We weren't treating any squirrels, and I said, Michael, we're
Speaker 1: kind of at a moment when there was a decision
Speaker 1: of like what we were gonna do, which way we're
Speaker 1: gonna go? And I said, Michael, what would you do
Speaker 1: if we weren't here, if it was just you? And
Speaker 1: he said, I wouldn't be here. And I was like,
Speaker 1: great point, Let's say you were here and you're just
Speaker 1: by yourself now. So, yeah, it's tough conditions thus ice
Speaker 1: on the ground, you know, And and um, yeah it was.
Speaker 1: It was cold. I think it was twenty seven we
Speaker 1: cut loose. It was twenty five before we get done.
Speaker 1: And it was normally Michael to tell you, normally it
Speaker 1: gets below freezing. I couldn't down here. They just don't
Speaker 1: stir much. Now, the thing we got going for us
Speaker 1: was this is probably the peak of the rut and
Speaker 1: of the coon rut. And because of the ice on
Speaker 1: Wednesday and that being Friday, they've been dend up, you know,
Speaker 1: not going anywhere because of how cold it is for
Speaker 1: about three days. So they're going to stay in the
Speaker 1: dance along. They're gonna have to get out a little bit.
Speaker 1: You add that into being the rut, and you know,
Speaker 1: we think we one of the trees we think had
Speaker 1: a you know, pretty good a sound that was in
Speaker 1: season in there, and that kind of was like the
Speaker 1: perfect storm and the terrible and terrible conditions and we
Speaker 1: were able to make some trees last night and look
Speaker 1: at some coons. Can we treat five coons? Last night?
Speaker 1: Saw five coons? Didn't we? Yeah, we actually saw we
Speaker 1: made more trees and salt coons and we did Dan trees.
Speaker 1: Was what I figured we all thought we would do.
Speaker 1: You know, honestly, I figured we'd make dens and slicks.
Speaker 1: We'll make we'll make Dan trees. And I figured we'd
Speaker 1: make the slicks because the walkers. But I feel like
Speaker 1: you need to do a whole series goes, that's a
Speaker 1: low blow. Don't start disambiguating the language of coon hunting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're talking about dens, slicks trees. Clay would probably have
Speaker 1: a better handle on the slick tree. I figured he
Speaker 1: could describe them. Yeah, so a dent tree is a
Speaker 1: hollow tree. So your dog will often tree a dent
Speaker 1: tree and you don't see the coons. You can't kill
Speaker 1: in tree is bad. It's like dog gone. It's got
Speaker 1: a hole in it. It means the coon's up in
Speaker 1: the hole. Now, Billy Coleman, and where the red fern grows,
Speaker 1: And because where the red fern grows is out of graphical,
Speaker 1: we can only assume Woodrow Wilson Rawls, who served three
Speaker 1: terms in prison, would have also cut down a tree. Yep,
Speaker 1: it would have cut down a tree. But we don't
Speaker 1: do that anymore. Some people do. I have friends that will.
Speaker 1: Now I've tried to smoke them out. Yeah, we've smoked
Speaker 1: them out. I have a friend that carries a hatchet
Speaker 1: and he'll cut a hole in a dn tree to
Speaker 1: be able to look in it and see if as Yeah,
Speaker 1: a dent tree isn't marketable timber anyway. I think of
Speaker 1: it more of you know, just like good habitat, you know,
Speaker 1: and now they have another hole to go on. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I'm off for cutting a hole in it. It's I'm
Speaker 1: on private land, just reeled their home. Man. So so
Speaker 1: den trees I gotta yeah, I got a good dent
Speaker 1: tree story, but um, a slick tree. A slick tree. Well,
Speaker 1: first of all, okay, if we're talking about coon hunters,
Speaker 1: we got to talk about how den trees are often
Speaker 1: the the often dogs will tree on den trees and
Speaker 1: we all know that there's probably not a coon in there.
Speaker 1: Often dogs that are no good. It's true, it's true.
Speaker 1: So you go to a dent try and it's kind
Speaker 1: of like did your dog go backwards on this track?
Speaker 1: Because like a coon could come out of the tree,
Speaker 1: out of a den and leave, and then your dogs
Speaker 1: hit the trail wrong. Go to the dent tree, smell
Speaker 1: a bunch of coons, sing and be like tree and
Speaker 1: so it's always really nice. Like last night happened twice
Speaker 1: where we were able to look in a hole and
Speaker 1: see a coon and dentry, which is which is pretty good.
Speaker 1: So that's kind of the dent try thing. So when
Speaker 1: you when you's like oh, it's a dent tree. You're
Speaker 1: kind of like, Okay, how many dent trees your dog
Speaker 1: tree on all the time? Okay, slick trees. And you
Speaker 1: heard me give a sucker punch to these two guys
Speaker 1: a minute ago, and then they sucker punched me back. See,
Speaker 1: there's stuff going on that normal people don't even know
Speaker 1: what's happening. Hunting POLITI yeah, big time, big time. So
Speaker 1: the coon hunting world is very opinionated on the types
Speaker 1: of dogs they like to use. Okay, and by far
Speaker 1: the most popular breed of dog, it's a walker tree
Speaker 1: dog walker coon. I mean, like, Michael, would you say
Speaker 1: eighty percent of the coonhound world dogs are walkers and
Speaker 1: then the other it's like six breeds of tree dogs
Speaker 1: would would be the other. Sure for people that competition hunt,
Speaker 1: probably of those are walker dogs. A big majority of
Speaker 1: the rest are not. For the guys that just simply
Speaker 1: pleasure hunt, um, a big majority of those are blue ticks,
Speaker 1: black and tans, that sort of thing. I've always kind
Speaker 1: of liked that that that term pleasure hunting. It seems
Speaker 1: kind of like old school. Yeah, it's kind of like, uh,
Speaker 1: thatwards just pleasure hunting. It's a good descriptive though, I mean, like,
Speaker 1: why are you coon hunting? Fun? I guess I can
Speaker 1: get pleasure around of pleasure hunting just to pleasure walkers.
Speaker 1: And Brent and Michael have walkers and fine pair of
Speaker 1: walk Both of them are yeah, nice hounds. They're beautiful dogs.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't say whoa, whoa and waterfowl. It's like a lab,
Speaker 1: right labs the default. Yeah, and then you got other breeds.
Speaker 1: I had a chassis and what I would have a
Speaker 1: half breed dog. Yeah, it's like me a little bit different. Yep.
Speaker 1: It's style. Yep, yep, it is style. So a slick
Speaker 1: tree is when you're dog trees and by trees, that
Speaker 1: means he indicates that he believes a coon to be
Speaker 1: in this tree. So that means he would go to
Speaker 1: that tree and bark up, and and you'd go to
Speaker 1: the tree and there's no coon in it, like like clearly,
Speaker 1: like you can see the whole tree. There's not a hole,
Speaker 1: not a nest or anything. There's no leaves that you
Speaker 1: can see the whole tree, and you're confident Hu that
Speaker 1: coons like the size of a nickel or the reasons First,
Speaker 1: what are the reasons for a selectory one. A dog
Speaker 1: just simply gives up. They've tackled a track that they
Speaker 1: can't finish. Uh, there's enough scent here that it interests them.
Speaker 1: They know that their owner wants them to tree, so
Speaker 1: they give up in tree right here, and they're not right. Um.
Speaker 1: Other times there's been if you've deer hunted for the
Speaker 1: people of deer hunt, if you watched a coon in
Speaker 1: the daytime, move around there, up this log down, up
Speaker 1: this tree down. They leave a lot of scent all
Speaker 1: over the woods. And if the dog maybe has a
Speaker 1: little trouble trailing because of one just ability or to
Speaker 1: sink conditions, they may wind up on a tree that
Speaker 1: doesn't have a coon in it. Uh. There are dogs
Speaker 1: that will grab a tree because another dog comes in
Speaker 1: and trails too close to them, and out of pure competition,
Speaker 1: just grab a tree. There's several reasons this slick tree
Speaker 1: and see the whole idea of a dog tree and
Speaker 1: two is it's bred into them to want to bark
Speaker 1: at the base of a tree based upon the scent
Speaker 1: of the game that there that they're running like that.
Speaker 1: A tree dog or a tree hound is a specially
Speaker 1: bred dog like what's so interesting is is that doesn't
Speaker 1: work out in nature. That is a human specific thing
Speaker 1: bred into them. Because if a if a wolf trees
Speaker 1: a squirrel and stays under there for eight hours barking
Speaker 1: at that squirrel like he's gonna die, this is a
Speaker 1: This is a human influenced breeding of these dogs. And
Speaker 1: so the end goal to finish for that dog is
Speaker 1: to tree. And so that's why I like he might
Speaker 1: tree if he gives up, like he's like, okay, I
Speaker 1: gotta finish this track. I'm just gonna tree. Or he
Speaker 1: knows that he gets praise from his owner when he trees,
Speaker 1: and so he'll tree. That's probably the number one problem
Speaker 1: is people not quite understanding what they're doing when they're
Speaker 1: training a pup. They you've seen me last night petting
Speaker 1: heck when he treat uh, Well if you do that
Speaker 1: too much for a dog that doesn't completely understand what's
Speaker 1: going on, Well he thinks, well, I'm gonna go out
Speaker 1: here and tree and get pettied. So here I go,
Speaker 1: come pet me. So yeah, you also got variations of that.
Speaker 1: You know, dogs are like people, you got different personalities,
Speaker 1: and they accept praise and and punishment different ways. You
Speaker 1: know when is a clown. I think I can beat
Speaker 1: him with the two before for doing Not that I've
Speaker 1: ever laid a hand on him, but I could do that.
Speaker 1: In the next minute, he's like, Okay, let's that was fun.
Speaker 1: Let's go do something else. And some dogs you can
Speaker 1: look at and get on to them verbally and they're
Speaker 1: done for the evening and they just cowered down. So
Speaker 1: a lot of it has to do with being able
Speaker 1: to recognize the personality of a dog. Now you can
Speaker 1: talk to ye to look at the dog and say
Speaker 1: that was adequate. Your dogs was adequate. How long have
Speaker 1: I hunted with Whalen? Uh going on? It's over two years? Yeah,
Speaker 1: look a little over two years. He's the most accurate
Speaker 1: dog I've ever seen. Um, I don't think I've ever
Speaker 1: seen These are big words. Sorry, hunters don't do this
Speaker 1: to each other. Michael So is beautiful. It is a
Speaker 1: beautiful moment. He doesn't hardly make a slick tree, and
Speaker 1: I mean I can I can count on one hand
Speaker 1: in two years the amount of slick trees I've seen
Speaker 1: you make, and he hardly ever trees a dent. Try
Speaker 1: that we can't get some kind of looking that dentry
Speaker 1: believe no, I find it. Yeah, stop our phone in
Speaker 1: the bottom took a picture of coon's in there, that
Speaker 1: kind of thing. He's the I've hunted for going on
Speaker 1: thirty five years. He's the most accurate dog I've ever seen.
Speaker 1: How would he compare to Clay's dogs. Clay's dogs tree
Speaker 1: one time last night didn't had a coon, so they're
Speaker 1: d yeah, and they were there on the one that
Speaker 1: got pulled out. They're still a hundred percent. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: have seen Wayland slick tree more than I have Claysed dog.
Speaker 1: So given the conditions last night, you were expecting a
Speaker 1: lot of dens and slick trees. Do you slick? Do
Speaker 1: they slick tree more on a slow night? Did they
Speaker 1: have more false flags or so they would slick tree
Speaker 1: more on a night that the sinning conditions weren't great
Speaker 1: and they were not great last so we were expecting
Speaker 1: more of that, but we ended up having a good
Speaker 1: Would I would expect that out of most dogs, I
Speaker 1: wouldn't expect that out of the two they got hunted
Speaker 1: last night. At the same time, they still do it sometimes,
Speaker 1: and if they were going to do it, last night
Speaker 1: would have been the night to have done it, Michael,
Speaker 1: how much? How much? Give us an overview of the
Speaker 1: the what a coon dog? Okay, a couple of things,
Speaker 1: but the the high end of what coon dogs go for,
Speaker 1: which which will be exorbitant, and we'll make us all
Speaker 1: go what but then all so bring it down to
Speaker 1: how an entry level thing like how could somebody get
Speaker 1: into coon hunting? Give me like a span of the
Speaker 1: economics of coon hounds because it's kind of mind blowing.
Speaker 1: So I have some parallels between them and mules. This
Speaker 1: is all changed in the last five years. So this
Speaker 1: has changed quite a bit in the last five years.
Speaker 1: Up until five years ago, a high end competition coon dog,
Speaker 1: proven winner or someone that knows what they're doing, if
Speaker 1: seen him and have complete confidence that he's gonna win
Speaker 1: thirty thou dollars um, who has that much money? Raise
Speaker 1: your hand in this room. If you do way more
Speaker 1: people than you believe, all eyes, all heads down, just
Speaker 1: raise your hand. In the last four or five years,
Speaker 1: there's been some people come into the game that in
Speaker 1: the competition end of it, that there's been coon dogs
Speaker 1: sold for over a hundred thousand dollars. Now, where are
Speaker 1: these guys making their money back? They are not. Okay,
Speaker 1: they're not. They're not. Would someone spend money? Let me
Speaker 1: let me so with a lot of luck, they can
Speaker 1: make their money back. When was that hunt? The Jarvis
Speaker 1: Unfree's Memorial hunt was three weekends, so four weekends ago.
Speaker 1: Four thousand dollar entry fee. Wow, sixty four dogs in
Speaker 1: the hunt, and you would think, oh man, there's no
Speaker 1: way that's going to fill up. It filled up so
Speaker 1: fast that they had a second sixty four dollar sixty
Speaker 1: four dog hunt on the same night. So they hunted
Speaker 1: a hundred and twenty eight dogs, two separate hunts, four
Speaker 1: thousand entry fee per dog. First place paid a hundred
Speaker 1: thousand dollars. Wow. There and there are there, yes, several
Speaker 1: of them. They're hunting for a truck right now in
Speaker 1: Texas to night's finals. Uh, there's a group of guys
Speaker 1: that have gotten together. They go all over the country
Speaker 1: and they give away trucks for first place. Entry feed
Speaker 1: on those hunters are a thousand dollars. I think, can
Speaker 1: you can you bread a dog and get money out
Speaker 1: of it? Yeah? I'm thinking, like, there's no money in
Speaker 1: study dogs. I mean, you're not gonna make a living
Speaker 1: in a stud dog. Let's put it that way, not
Speaker 1: that you couldn't make money. Okay, So that's that's the
Speaker 1: ultra high end. And I think it could be compared
Speaker 1: to like race horses. Like you look at a horse,
Speaker 1: like how much the horse cost. It's like, well, you
Speaker 1: could spend a million dollars on a horse or ten million,
Speaker 1: but you could also go down there and probably buy
Speaker 1: a pretty good broke horse for you know, well pre COVID,
Speaker 1: post COVID out the roof, you still buy puppies for
Speaker 1: three d bucks or so you can buy a well
Speaker 1: bred coon hound puppy. Yes, yeah, I gave two hundred
Speaker 1: fifty dollars for oil. Yeah, so this is not they're
Speaker 1: not financial significant financial barriers to entry into coon honey.
Speaker 1: I mean you heard Michael say what a good dog
Speaker 1: Brent's dog has become, and you paid two dollars for
Speaker 1: that dog. Yeah. I raised heck on his mother and
Speaker 1: his father. Yeah. So your dog's names Heck Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I bought his I bought his sire, and I
Speaker 1: bought a half sister to him, who I sold back
Speaker 1: to the owner and got his mother in on the deal.
Speaker 1: So I've always raised my own dogs. I've hardly ever
Speaker 1: bought a puppy, having having until now you're doing You're
Speaker 1: in the competition world. Though you're doing some competitions, some
Speaker 1: nothing like I used to. I can't with my business, um,
Speaker 1: so I can't go out here and it's it's a competition,
Speaker 1: so there's people. Well, it gets heated every once in
Speaker 1: a while, so you're Michael only does Yeah, So you're
Speaker 1: in a sport where most of it is judged with
Speaker 1: what you hear is going on. So it's easy to
Speaker 1: have a miscommunication with someone else about what's going on,
Speaker 1: or just a complete disagreement on what's happening. So I
Speaker 1: hear what's going on, and you hear what's going on,
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean that we have the same opinion of
Speaker 1: what's going on. So you're basically doing the same thing
Speaker 1: at a competition hunt. And I can't go out there
Speaker 1: and sell all these guys coon hunting lights and um
Speaker 1: stick up for my dog in a competition and make
Speaker 1: people mad. At the same time, I want to just
Speaker 1: I don't want to get into the details of competition hunting.
Speaker 1: We may do that later at some point, but basically
Speaker 1: on a competition coon hunt, that could some people might
Speaker 1: hear that and be like, wait a minute, we can't
Speaker 1: you know, that might go against like North American male
Speaker 1: of wildlife conservation in some way, Like but a competition
Speaker 1: couon hunt, no, no, raccoons die. You're not even allowed
Speaker 1: to firearm on the ground. So this is not about
Speaker 1: so in in the movie, in the book where the
Speaker 1: red Fern grows, And this is probably the way competition
Speaker 1: coon hunts started is it literally was who can bring
Speaker 1: back the most dead raccoons And that hasn't taken place
Speaker 1: in a long time. These competition hunts. Raccoons don't die.
Speaker 1: It's it's really an artifact of of the meat hunts
Speaker 1: because you're just seeing which dog can tree the most coons,
Speaker 1: the fastest, and the most kind of clinical textbook away
Speaker 1: for a coon dog to operate essentially like you you
Speaker 1: want a dog that I mean, it seems simple. Like
Speaker 1: if you go coon hunting with really good dogs, like
Speaker 1: like Heck and Whalen last night, you're like, what's the
Speaker 1: big deal? Sure? I mean for real, we literally turned
Speaker 1: the dogs loose in the dark and in ten minutes
Speaker 1: we're looking at the coon and we're looking at you know,
Speaker 1: Heck tree and a coon. Well, what you don't know
Speaker 1: is that these are really good dogs. So the other
Speaker 1: option is you go out in the twenty five degree
Speaker 1: weather with ice and all this. You turn loose your
Speaker 1: dog and he bumbles around for forty minutes and go
Speaker 1: there and runs the deer and makes a big loop
Speaker 1: and trees for ten minutes. You start walking towards him
Speaker 1: and he leaves the tree and chases an armadilla. I
Speaker 1: mean you you you feel in the story of what
Speaker 1: goes wrong on a coon hunt and you hunt for
Speaker 1: five hours and don't see a coon. Last night, we're
Speaker 1: hunted for two hours, two and a half, three hours
Speaker 1: and bad conditions, saw five coons, you know, saw some
Speaker 1: pretty good dog work. So that was like, very good.
Speaker 1: Is it safe to assume at a competition they don't
Speaker 1: do it on the honor system? Man, that you don't
Speaker 1: want me to talk about competition coon hunting, So I'm
Speaker 1: not We're not going to get into the system. They're
Speaker 1: called are you serious. You just go out and you're like, yep,
Speaker 1: well listen, okay, I'll talk. See you're doing what I
Speaker 1: told you we couldn't do. Okay, we're not going to
Speaker 1: talk about this Isaac, we're not going to talk about this.
Speaker 1: We can talk about it's a it's a good I
Speaker 1: can just open it up just a little bit, but really,
Speaker 1: I don't want to get into the rules of it. Basically,
Speaker 1: they're very prescribed rules. There is a judge and competition
Speaker 1: coon hunting, by my assessment, and I think everybody in
Speaker 1: here would agree that would know is as much about
Speaker 1: the handler as it is the dog. I mean, like
Speaker 1: I could I could have the best dog in the
Speaker 1: world and know very little about the rules and not
Speaker 1: be very good and go out and get beat by
Speaker 1: an average dog with a really good handler. So it's
Speaker 1: a game. Does each handler have a judge? You're still
Speaker 1: asking questions. You're just trying to get out judge hunting
Speaker 1: most of the time. Yeah, that's the one said that
Speaker 1: coon hunters aren't vaccinated against lyon. Oh they're not, all right,
Speaker 1: So what you mentioned about the dog bumbling around and
Speaker 1: leaving trees and and chasing armadilla's, there are guys that
Speaker 1: have an absolute ball out there doing that, and that's fine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just not my thing, you know. Yeah, but they're
Speaker 1: they're a big majority of people that just love to
Speaker 1: be out there at night with a dog and haven't
Speaker 1: really matter what the dogs doing. It is a social sport. Um.
Speaker 1: So you know last night we didn't. I heard this
Speaker 1: mentioned on the render about the duck hunting, that it's
Speaker 1: a social thing that you don't have to be quiet.
Speaker 1: You don't. You don't coon hunting either. I mean, these
Speaker 1: guys never shut up last night. At one point I said, now,
Speaker 1: you got to understand, we're trying to hear these dogs
Speaker 1: bark a little bit. Oh, somebody said last night it
Speaker 1: just seems too easy, damn and Joshua trout fishing the
Speaker 1: whole time we were out there. YEA, give it up, boys,
Speaker 1: let's listen to this now. And so yeah, that's a
Speaker 1: great place to like swing the conversation back to why
Speaker 1: I have always of coon hunt and I've done you know,
Speaker 1: I've been in probably less than ten competition coon hunts
Speaker 1: and and enjoyed them in their own right for different reasons.
Speaker 1: Was never very successful at it, and couldn't expect to
Speaker 1: be with only doing it that amount of time. But
Speaker 1: the pleasure hunt a coon dog goes right back to
Speaker 1: what you see in the book where the red fern
Speaker 1: grows and it is there is there's a magical connection
Speaker 1: between a person and a hound that is undescribable. It's
Speaker 1: in our DNA. It literally, I mean you go back
Speaker 1: to our original conversations in the Burgers podcast about dog domestication,
Speaker 1: and I mean like there's deep science, deep human psychology
Speaker 1: and science about our connection with dogs that's just bizarre.
Speaker 1: Like you just kind of wake up as a human
Speaker 1: one day born and you just love dogs. And you're like, well,
Speaker 1: why don't I love chipmunks, Why don't I love ostriches?
Speaker 1: Why don't I have a rhinosters in my house? And
Speaker 1: you're like, don't ever question why you have this incredible
Speaker 1: connect connection to this dog. I'm not crying talking to
Speaker 1: you have this incredible connection to a dog. And it's
Speaker 1: like it's like very deep, very real, very biological, very
Speaker 1: all this stuff. And so to be able to hunt
Speaker 1: with a dog, it's just fun. I mean, it's just
Speaker 1: it just doesn't even make it doesn't even make sense,
Speaker 1: And um, I guess I'm feeling I just thought, I
Speaker 1: guess now makes sense. Y'all were there, y'all are amazing
Speaker 1: coon hunters, We had amazing dogs. I thought I was
Speaker 1: just an amazing coon hunter. I thought, I'm just really
Speaker 1: mean this, see me the way I pointed my sunlight.
Speaker 1: But before Josh Spilman you mentioned you mentioned the connection
Speaker 1: with that dog. Um, So competition coon hunting is about
Speaker 1: pride and recognition and me wanting you to recognize how
Speaker 1: good my dog is. That's what it's when it when
Speaker 1: it comes down to everything, is not the money. It
Speaker 1: is for some people, but normally it's not about the money.
Speaker 1: It's about recognition. So I wouldn't carry anything about competition
Speaker 1: coon hunting and say winning the world championship if no
Speaker 1: one knew about it. So it's about getting my dog
Speaker 1: on the front of the magazine, getting on the website.
Speaker 1: That's when it bulls down to it. It's about recognition
Speaker 1: for your coon dog. And you know, and I don't
Speaker 1: want to throw competition coon hunters under the bus too
Speaker 1: much because I think there's a there's a possibility for
Speaker 1: a pure motivation inside of any kind of competition, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean, and there's some guys that are probably doing
Speaker 1: it for you know, some guys would say it's for
Speaker 1: the dog. You know, it's too it's recognition that you know,
Speaker 1: this dog is a top notch dog. And for him
Speaker 1: to be recognized. But but I get it as too,
Speaker 1: as exactly what you're saying. Well, and the problem with
Speaker 1: competition hunting is the same reason that they go. It's
Speaker 1: about pride. So if I have this much pride in
Speaker 1: this dog and you say, oh, your dog left that treat,
Speaker 1: No he didn't. You know, So Rex been asleep on
Speaker 1: the couch over there. Um I met Rex almost thirty
Speaker 1: years ago. Competition coon hunt. That's how I met Rex.
Speaker 1: Rex introduced me to wait Land over there, and uh,
Speaker 1: I mean that that's how it goes. That's how we
Speaker 1: build relationships, is is through people that we know. And
Speaker 1: I would have never known Rex without competition coon hut Yep.
Speaker 1: It's definitely a passionate group of people that uh that
Speaker 1: love it. Yeah, And that's so people. It's always interesting
Speaker 1: interacting with people kind of on a broader level about
Speaker 1: coon hunting. People are surprised to hear that people even
Speaker 1: coon hunt anymore, like in Arkansas and in different places
Speaker 1: maybe it's a little bit more known that people coon hunt,
Speaker 1: but you get it into more urban areas and sometimes
Speaker 1: people are like, people still coon hunt. And and that's
Speaker 1: why this book where the red Fern Grows in the movie.
Speaker 1: And this whole idea for this podcast is so interesting
Speaker 1: to me that and I said it in the introduction
Speaker 1: to this this podcast, was that this was the one
Speaker 1: time that this super niche thing did a three six,
Speaker 1: three sixty slam dunk on pop culture and made him
Speaker 1: love it. And I the reason I got interested in
Speaker 1: this is I had a friend of mine, um that
Speaker 1: moved to Arkansas from Los Angeles, California pretty much, and
Speaker 1: he he he told me that he read Where the
Speaker 1: Red Fern Grows at his high school or maybe his
Speaker 1: grade school in in California. And I was, I was like, what,
Speaker 1: I thought this book was a regional phenomenon. I thought
Speaker 1: it was just like a small thing, and said, you
Speaker 1: read that in your school in Los Angeles and he
Speaker 1: was like yeah, And he was fascinated, and he had
Speaker 1: all these questions and he wanted to go coon nothing
Speaker 1: with me, and so I took him first month he
Speaker 1: lived in Arkansas, and I mean, this guy had never
Speaker 1: interacted with hunting in any way, and he had all
Speaker 1: kinds of questions about the book. He was like, the
Speaker 1: raccoons really like shiny things. There's a part in the
Speaker 1: book where where Billy catches a coon by putting the
Speaker 1: shiny object in a hole in a log and then
Speaker 1: the coon puts his hand in there, and he's got
Speaker 1: little little traps that that the coon pull his hand out,
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, we talked about that and we well,
Speaker 1: and then it happened again with another guy from California. Well,
Speaker 1: he was on the podcast Andreas I'll Tie You from
Speaker 1: Meat either. He told me, he just said, man, I
Speaker 1: love that book so much, and and that's why made
Speaker 1: me do a little more research and then realized kind
Speaker 1: of what a big deal the movie was in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy four. I mean, that was like a major that
Speaker 1: would essentially be like, I mean, I don't know what
Speaker 1: what's a famous movie today. I don't even know where
Speaker 1: the Red Fern grows iron Man? Iron Man? Where the
Speaker 1: Red Fern Grows was basically the Iron Man of nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy four is This was produced by Walt Disney. This
Speaker 1: was a major motion picture. This was like a big deal,
Speaker 1: went across the country, movie theaters all across the country. Um,
Speaker 1: and I think, honestly, I think there's a pattern inside
Speaker 1: of it. And I alluded to it and said it
Speaker 1: in the podcast. But we are very interested as hunters
Speaker 1: and I am as a hunter, in preservation of a
Speaker 1: lifestyle that is, you know, we believe is beneficial to
Speaker 1: wild places, wildlife and people in families and economy. Like
Speaker 1: there's like, yeah, yeah, you'd have a hard time, like
Speaker 1: given too much of a painting. Hunting really in a
Speaker 1: negative picture and when you look at this broad scale thing.
Speaker 1: But we know that the culture in general in this
Speaker 1: country is leaning towards movement away from some of these things.
Speaker 1: And so what Wilson Rawls did was he encased a
Speaker 1: lifestyle that involved hunting into a very human story that
Speaker 1: was relatable to people. And people all over the country
Speaker 1: related to Billy Coleman on a human level and they
Speaker 1: were like they empathized with him, and inside of that
Speaker 1: empathy for another human, they accepted his lifestyle. And that's
Speaker 1: just do you see what I'm saying. Yeah, well he
Speaker 1: took that, He took a subject that just happened to
Speaker 1: be wanting some dogs and and applied the lesson of
Speaker 1: working wanting something so bad that was pure and work
Speaker 1: can hard. For two years I think in the book,
Speaker 1: just save up enough money to be able to get
Speaker 1: something and succeed at a dream. And you could apply
Speaker 1: that anything learning to ride a bicycle, Daniel, there's still
Speaker 1: hope that, but anything like that, use that handlebar most
Speaker 1: day stabilization, you know, it could it could be whether
Speaker 1: it's since you know, studying in school or learned to
Speaker 1: play the guitar, draw or whatever. Yeah, he he said
Speaker 1: hisself a goal. He worked beyond measure too to succeed.
Speaker 1: And the hardships that he faced along the way. And
Speaker 1: there's so many the story and we're gonna get into
Speaker 1: it more on the second podcast with Sean Tutan, the
Speaker 1: professor at the University of Arkansas. The narrative of that
Speaker 1: movie is really quite complex. It moves in and out
Speaker 1: of conflict and resolution, conflict resolution from when when the
Speaker 1: Pritchard boy dies when he falls on his ax oh
Speaker 1: man spoiler in nineteen seventy four. Yeah, if you hadn't
Speaker 1: seen this movie yet, you better watch it. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: Pritchard boy dies. Um, they go to the coon hunt
Speaker 1: and Grandpa breaks his ankle and then he you know,
Speaker 1: ends up winning the hunt and then the hunt the
Speaker 1: money from the hunt is actually what funds his family
Speaker 1: to leave the country and go to the city, which
Speaker 1: is the most heartbreaking part of the whole thing for me.
Speaker 1: For real, It's like doggun it. I thought his criminal
Speaker 1: record was I heard your heartbreak when you found out
Speaker 1: about that. Tell you what do you mean when he
Speaker 1: found out that Wilson Rawls had a criminal record? Yeah,
Speaker 1: did anybody else? I mean, nobody knew that wasn't so
Speaker 1: what was the time frame? But it was when he
Speaker 1: was when he was young man. He first went to
Speaker 1: person in Oklahoma in nineteen thirty threes. When he went
Speaker 1: to nineteen yeah, nineteen thirty threes, when he served time
Speaker 1: great depression, larceny of domestic foul. He said he was
Speaker 1: stealing a chicken eat. He stole a chicken to eat.
Speaker 1: And you don't know. The second reason could have easily
Speaker 1: just been a parole violation. The third reason was breaking
Speaker 1: and entering. Man. That could have been he got in
Speaker 1: an old building to go to sleep. I mean, you
Speaker 1: don't know what right, we don't know. So he in
Speaker 1: the speech that you put on there, he said his
Speaker 1: mother said he was born in the wrong place at
Speaker 1: the wrong time. Uh, well, I would imagine that all
Speaker 1: three of those times he was probably in the wrong
Speaker 1: place at the wrong time. Yeah, yeah, you know that
Speaker 1: was so interesting to me. And I found it out
Speaker 1: like while I was interviewing Sean Tutan. I mean, that
Speaker 1: was the first I expected him to say, Man, Wilson
Speaker 1: Rawls was born in Oklahoma and was just upstanding man
Speaker 1: and he's buried over by talk and he's like, well
Speaker 1: he served three prison terms. And and then when I
Speaker 1: went to research it, it was very difficult to find
Speaker 1: that information, like to actually get like hard information, which
Speaker 1: made me and I communicated with Professor Tutan and I
Speaker 1: was like, do you know it is? I mean I
Speaker 1: see this, but like, do you have more information? And
Speaker 1: he was like not really, And that's when I was like, okay,
Speaker 1: well we got to confirm this before and what you
Speaker 1: wouldn't know from the podcast, and this is why the
Speaker 1: Burgers render is the rent that this is why this
Speaker 1: is we're rendering it down. I called the Oklahoma Department
Speaker 1: of Corrections. They never called me back. So it's a
Speaker 1: little bit of a dramatic setup. You got the answering machine.
Speaker 1: I still haven't called me back, um, but I was
Speaker 1: able to I mean one percent, I believe one confirmed
Speaker 1: through records that we were able to find online I
Speaker 1: actually joined ancestry dot com um and looked up his
Speaker 1: records and like, there's a picture of Wilson Rawls twenty
Speaker 1: years old on a with a handwritten prison like card,
Speaker 1: and that's where it told all this stuff, you know,
Speaker 1: like five ft ten and a quarter hundred forty eight
Speaker 1: pounds smoker vaccination scar on his left arm. Um, and uh,
Speaker 1: it just like told it all. And I mean it
Speaker 1: was like legit, like that was really his record and um.
Speaker 1: And again not that that mattered. It's just interesting that
Speaker 1: he wrote this book that was so deep in character,
Speaker 1: and that an autobiographical book, you kind of get to
Speaker 1: go back in and write the things that that you know,
Speaker 1: you just rewrite your story kind of way maybe you
Speaker 1: thought it should have been or wanted it to be. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was just so interesting, I think. And the professor
Speaker 1: that you interviewed said he was probably trying to teach
Speaker 1: young boys basically how to not be him at what
Speaker 1: he was and do the things that he did to
Speaker 1: get him in prison, you know, whatever it was. It
Speaker 1: kind of made me think because I remember very clearly
Speaker 1: reading that book in school, and then of course I
Speaker 1: remember seeing the movie and when the Pritcher boy dies.
Speaker 1: You know, that's such a that really it's like, wait
Speaker 1: a minute, thought I was watching a Disney movie here,
Speaker 1: you know, and all of a sudden because like, well,
Speaker 1: I thought we were hunting coons and somebody's dead. This
Speaker 1: is crazy, and I guess I thought, my goodness, like
Speaker 1: what if? And there's no way to know. But you know,
Speaker 1: I feel like each one of us looks back on
Speaker 1: our past and there's these things that we wish we
Speaker 1: could undo or take away, like parts of ourselves, so
Speaker 1: we wish would just die, you know. And I wonder
Speaker 1: if as he was writing that story, he was kind
Speaker 1: of coming to grips with a part of who he
Speaker 1: was that it seems like died and came to an end,
Speaker 1: because eventually he was he was married, he had a family.
Speaker 1: He did all this talking to all these kids and
Speaker 1: wrote overcame as kind of being ashamed of being a
Speaker 1: writer and wrote these books. Yeah, yeah, I wonder if
Speaker 1: on that line, the Pritchard's dying like they were. Man,
Speaker 1: he did such a great job of making you hate
Speaker 1: the Pretchers. I'm glad my last name is not Pretcher.
Speaker 1: I knew those kids. I knew that several growing up.
Speaker 1: Do you know that that book? I don't know, So
Speaker 1: it didn't influence everyone like it influenced me. I wouldn't
Speaker 1: be setting right here right now without that book. So
Speaker 1: we well the movie. I've seen the movie as a
Speaker 1: as a kid. Before me and my friend setting, we
Speaker 1: would spend the summers when we got out of school.
Speaker 1: The day we got out of school, we went to
Speaker 1: his grandmother's house and we lived in a tent on
Speaker 1: the pond of the bank or the bank of the
Speaker 1: pond for the entire summer, and we hunted and we fished,
Speaker 1: and that's all we did all summer long. We would
Speaker 1: go to her house once a week, whether we needed
Speaker 1: a bath or not, and take a bath. Well, we
Speaker 1: watched the movie at her house, and we decided we
Speaker 1: won't need to be coon hunters. That's what had zero
Speaker 1: idea of how to do it. Uh, looked in the paper,
Speaker 1: tried to find puppies for sale, didn't have a ride
Speaker 1: to go get anything. I went to work at the
Speaker 1: sawmill that was down the road and saved up our
Speaker 1: money to get dogs for both of us. Before we
Speaker 1: did that, we're setting out on the front porch and
Speaker 1: there is a blue tick coonhound walked across the front
Speaker 1: yard in front of us, no collar on, no nothing,
Speaker 1: Walt Disney there, I don't know, but they were like
Speaker 1: released a blue tick. So so we gathered this thing
Speaker 1: up and we hunted him for a year and never
Speaker 1: seen a coon. But we hunted almost and I was
Speaker 1: in So we hauled this thing around on a rope.
Speaker 1: We had no idea what we were doing. We were
Speaker 1: afraid to cut him loose. We're afraid we'd lose him home. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Frady to go home. We had him on a tin
Speaker 1: foot horse rope and that thing run more armadilla and deer.
Speaker 1: We were scratched from one end to the other. And
Speaker 1: I told my friend, because my best friend growing up,
Speaker 1: still my best friend. I told him, I said, we
Speaker 1: have to turn this thing loose. I am beat up,
Speaker 1: I'm scratched on my face, on my arms. We have
Speaker 1: to turn him loose. And we turned him loose and
Speaker 1: never seen him again. Okay, now they were like there
Speaker 1: was like a three month period. Came back. But in
Speaker 1: that time is when we were carrying. We were a
Speaker 1: lot tougher. Carried the car battery on our back with
Speaker 1: the spotlight and UH had a little to cell rayovact
Speaker 1: flashlights that we walked with and shine the trees with
Speaker 1: that spotlight. He made two trees. He treated a house
Speaker 1: cat and he treated a tree that um after watching
Speaker 1: the movie, we thought, you know, coon's just look, it's
Speaker 1: easy to put the light up there. They don't look.
Speaker 1: We looked at that tree for probably two minutes. He
Speaker 1: was like lion dog. And the way we went, you know,
Speaker 1: that's a good point, man, when we look at a tree.
Speaker 1: I mean sometimes you look at a tree for a
Speaker 1: long time, circlet circlet, circlet, circlet, circlet, and then you're like,
Speaker 1: there it is, yeah, right out in the wide open.
Speaker 1: But that led into a life of coon hunting. That
Speaker 1: led into a life where I build hunting lights and
Speaker 1: that's what I do for a living now. And meeting
Speaker 1: Rex and meeting Brent and sitting here with you guys
Speaker 1: would have never happened. Without that Book's what I'd be
Speaker 1: doing making. I'd probably be a Meganaire right now. Pretty amazing. Actually,
Speaker 1: we talked about this a couple of months ago and
Speaker 1: I hadn't I don't know how I made it through
Speaker 1: school without ever reading this book. And so I I
Speaker 1: was doing the buzz building the deck, and so I
Speaker 1: got the audio book and listened to it, and uh
Speaker 1: it was great, yeah, man, and I loved it. I
Speaker 1: was disappointed in Disney in the movie. It would have
Speaker 1: been so easy to have set a tree in a
Speaker 1: field with a hollow uh fence post instead of whatever
Speaker 1: that was, they had to ghost Cooney and that that
Speaker 1: ruined the movie for me. After every yea, so there
Speaker 1: there was. I may get into it more on the
Speaker 1: on the next podcast, as I interviewed Stuart Peterson, who
Speaker 1: was the childhood actor who's Billy Coleman. It's real hard
Speaker 1: for me not to want to tell you all about him.
Speaker 1: But that's what the next podcast is gonna be about.
Speaker 1: Super interesting guy and super interesting kind of sub story.
Speaker 1: But yeah. So in the book, they the ghost coon
Speaker 1: climbs up a tree and then drops into a hollow
Speaker 1: fence post, and so the dogs tree on the tree,
Speaker 1: and then the guys get there and they go, let's
Speaker 1: slick you know tree again the ghost coon. Well, in
Speaker 1: the movie that they tree by an old building. And
Speaker 1: I mean, and when I saw it, even as a kid,
Speaker 1: I was like, come on, Pritchard boys, the old ghost
Speaker 1: coons in that building. I mean, you know, he was obvious,
Speaker 1: and so he was going from the tree into this
Speaker 1: old building. And then Billy's like, you notice that in
Speaker 1: the movie. I mean, you know, like Hollywood's got speed
Speaker 1: stuff up. You can't do stuff in real time. They
Speaker 1: get to the tree, they shine their light. He ain't
Speaker 1: there ghost two dollars and there, and Billy's like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: shuts you learned it. Here's your two dollars. And I'm like,
Speaker 1: shining that tree ye around this thing. I want to
Speaker 1: send up the bat signal. How many people got into
Speaker 1: gambling from this book? Because you bet that the podcast
Speaker 1: he did that to me. He may only be six
Speaker 1: years old, but I hold that him response, you bet
Speaker 1: your truck, some guy. I'm worried about it. There's a
Speaker 1: hotline for people like you. Oh man. Yeah. So, so
Speaker 1: the book has a couple of different places where the
Speaker 1: story is different. I'll tell you where I got hung
Speaker 1: up on the movie. In the book, and this is
Speaker 1: pretty serious. In the in the movie, excuse me. In
Speaker 1: the book, the big Pritchard boy sees old An and
Speaker 1: old Blue fighting and and Pritchard goes, I'm gonna kill
Speaker 1: that red bone and he grabs Billy's axe and takes
Speaker 1: off running to go kill Billy's dog, and he falls
Speaker 1: on the acts, which is Nope, he reached out and
Speaker 1: grabbed his leg. I watched the movie. You fell right
Speaker 1: into my track. In the book, he didn't do that.
Speaker 1: That's what I'm saying. That's my point. So in the
Speaker 1: book he runs and he trips and falls on the acts,
Speaker 1: which I always thought it was an unlikely accident. I mean,
Speaker 1: I probably set up by like a Southern mother influence.
Speaker 1: Southern mothers are always very fairful, highly unlikely mom. The
Speaker 1: acts you couldn't hardly cut up the and it's sticking
Speaker 1: straight up when I fall down. In the book, Billy
Speaker 1: has nothing to do with the death. In the movie,
Speaker 1: Billy Coleman reaches out and trips him and he falls
Speaker 1: on the acts. Terry manslaughter. Boys. I'm not a lawyer,
Speaker 1: but when I saw that, I was like, oh, dang,
Speaker 1: I haven't seen the movie. Well, and then okay, and
Speaker 1: then they go to the The movie really is well
Speaker 1: done for nine, but they go they go to the
Speaker 1: I mean the next scene coming out of the woods,
Speaker 1: after the pitcher boy dies and you know he's dead.
Speaker 1: And in the movie Billy tripped the boy and he
Speaker 1: falls on the acts. The next scene, the whole Coleman
Speaker 1: family is by a gray side in the rain, just
Speaker 1: pouring rain. I mean, like you just feel sorry for
Speaker 1: and they're just standing there in the pouring rain, and
Speaker 1: you see the Pritchard family who they were set up
Speaker 1: as this like kind of like bad family. And Tuton,
Speaker 1: Professor Tuton did a good job. He said, what's cool
Speaker 1: about literary mechanisms is you don't really know what's happening
Speaker 1: inside of you until someone tells you, and you're like exactly,
Speaker 1: but you feel terrible for the Pritchards, these like bad people,
Speaker 1: you know, quote bad people that had these little boys
Speaker 1: that he just hated. But then when they died and
Speaker 1: he saw his mother and his father and they're standing
Speaker 1: there in the rain by this grave side, you just
Speaker 1: have empathy for them. And then the Coleman family is
Speaker 1: setting back from the grave like they're not right up,
Speaker 1: they're not like crowding the family, but they came to
Speaker 1: pay their respects. And when they're walking back to the
Speaker 1: wagon and the pouring rain, Grandpa says to Billy, Billy,
Speaker 1: this wasn't your fault, this was just an accident, and
Speaker 1: I was like, Billy, it actually was your fault. And
Speaker 1: that's where that's where walking back with my son and
Speaker 1: been like, son is going to be tough with you
Speaker 1: while you're there, I come visit. So the biggest disappointment
Speaker 1: for me from the book to the movie was the
Speaker 1: cutting down of that tree for the first con. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so the movie it was he spent one night, they're
Speaker 1: cutting that tree down, and the book he spent it
Speaker 1: was days. His promise to those dogs to get that coon.
Speaker 1: That was the whole thing of the book was his
Speaker 1: promise to those dogs. And uh, he spent all that
Speaker 1: time cutting that tree down. In the you know, they
Speaker 1: have to make it happen, So they spent one night
Speaker 1: in the movie. But well, and that's part of it
Speaker 1: that I never understood with Wilson raw As is. Um
Speaker 1: it seemed like a poor family like that would have
Speaker 1: had a gun number one and number two, you cut
Speaker 1: down a tree with a coon in it? Is that
Speaker 1: coon not gonna hit the ground and run up another tree, clay?
Speaker 1: Could you just not ruin everything? Well, this is the thing.
Speaker 1: Though they were poor and bullets cost money, they cost
Speaker 1: nothing for that boy to swing that ax right, But
Speaker 1: what I mean do you think people really did that? Yeah? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: But I mean, is the coon not just gonna run
Speaker 1: up another tree, No, not if you have a good
Speaker 1: killed all to catch him on the ground. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: oh yeah easy. So my uncle's grandmother uncle's side, they
Speaker 1: grew up as sharecroppers here in East Arkansas, and you know,
Speaker 1: their dad would give them three or four shales to
Speaker 1: go squirrel hunting, and they better come back three or
Speaker 1: four squirrels. You know, they didn't waste shals. They didn't.
Speaker 1: You know, if you could get him out jump the mount.
Speaker 1: People used to climb trees all the time. That was
Speaker 1: the thing to do, was to climb the tree and
Speaker 1: kick the coon out. They just didn't hardly carry. Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1: So it's so the preservation of ammunition or not having
Speaker 1: a gun pretty pretty realistic. I mean, I knew it
Speaker 1: could happen, but I was just like, man, it seems
Speaker 1: like even a poor family would have a singamore tree
Speaker 1: the size of the one they was. We're just gonna
Speaker 1: call it good and go find them. But he made
Speaker 1: a promise. That was the point of the world, was
Speaker 1: the promise that he made that the dogs and you
Speaker 1: saying that Michael May helps me make more sense of
Speaker 1: why at the end when the dogs die spoiler, he's done.
Speaker 1: Or listen to the podcast. Wait a minute, this is
Speaker 1: the podcast. Didn't you feeling lightheaded some fixer? No, I
Speaker 1: mean that helps me makes sense of why at the
Speaker 1: end and when the dogs pass away, he's done. Like
Speaker 1: it was more than he It was more than I
Speaker 1: love coon hunting dogs. Those dogs well, and so people,
Speaker 1: that is a you know, people, why do you want
Speaker 1: to hunt coons? I don't want to hunt coons. Coons
Speaker 1: is what my dogs hunt. I love my dogs. That's
Speaker 1: what it's about. Mm hmm. Coons has just happened to
Speaker 1: be the game if it was squirrels or possums or whatever.
Speaker 1: That it's about. Dog work is seeing a dog work.
Speaker 1: What I think is interesting too. And I tried to
Speaker 1: say this in the podcast and what you'll hear it
Speaker 1: more through this. But we live in such a modern
Speaker 1: time with all the technology that absolutely surrounds us and
Speaker 1: dominates our lives. And I like cultural artifacts. So cultural
Speaker 1: artifact would be like why that a competition? Why we
Speaker 1: like to tree a coon? It's kind unusual. It's like
Speaker 1: what why, Well, and you go back and there was
Speaker 1: a time when that coon hide was extremely valuable monetary
Speaker 1: value also sustenance value for different families just eating coons
Speaker 1: back in the day, and that built such a strong
Speaker 1: thing inside of rural culture in the South and mid
Speaker 1: South different you know, wherever they coon hunted, that a
Speaker 1: coon dog was highly valued. It was highly valued. And
Speaker 1: so today you go might ask some kid over here
Speaker 1: that is connected to rural culture, be like, it's a
Speaker 1: coon dog, good or bad? Like you know, and they
Speaker 1: would be like, good, very good. Why I don't know,
Speaker 1: it's a coon dog. It's a it's that's good. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm breaking it down like to the simplest terms. That
Speaker 1: is a cultural artifact of a time when a coon
Speaker 1: dog could literally change your life. And then it's also
Speaker 1: interesting to see like the modern version and of that
Speaker 1: and like when when I look at my life and
Speaker 1: survey my life and all the incredible times that I've
Speaker 1: had hunting raccoons with hounds, the people that I've met,
Speaker 1: the things that I've done that have that has made
Speaker 1: me go when I see a coon dog, I'm like,
Speaker 1: that has value, because what else are you gonna do
Speaker 1: on a Friday night. I mean really for the last
Speaker 1: seven years. And I was out of coon hunting for
Speaker 1: a good part of my adult life. So just in
Speaker 1: the last like seven eight years, I got back into
Speaker 1: coon hunting. And literally, I'm like calculating, of the hundreds
Speaker 1: of times that I've taken my kids and other people
Speaker 1: coon hunting, what would we have been doing? I mean, like,
Speaker 1: what would you have been doing on a cold, icy
Speaker 1: Friday night in February. And I mean the truth is
Speaker 1: probably a family would have been sitting around watching the
Speaker 1: television or and it's like, no, we were out engaging
Speaker 1: in an adventure. You're engaging in, you know, riding trucks,
Speaker 1: doing stuff, working together. Like, man, I love yelling at
Speaker 1: kids to go get dogs. If there's a kid around
Speaker 1: me and I've got dogs, I'm like, get that dog
Speaker 1: and put him in the box and then go get
Speaker 1: those dog called. I mean, I just I don't even know.
Speaker 1: I don't even care who the kid is. He may
Speaker 1: be the neighbor, he may not even be going with us,
Speaker 1: and I just have this instinct to be like, get
Speaker 1: that kid's hands on that dog's collar. And what age
Speaker 1: did you read the book? Were you in elementary school? No,
Speaker 1: I can't. I don't think. I'm not even sure. I
Speaker 1: read the book when I was a kid. I think
Speaker 1: we started off watching the movie. That's what we did.
Speaker 1: We read it, and I remember we were I have
Speaker 1: very few memories of school, but I do remember reading
Speaker 1: it in school and then watching the movie in class. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it was the sixth grade when I read it.
Speaker 1: I think most elementary schools do it like fifth grade,
Speaker 1: but I think it was the sixth grade. But I
Speaker 1: remember how it affected me at the time. It was
Speaker 1: it was culturally significant to me because of Conan being
Speaker 1: big where I grew up, you know, and I knew
Speaker 1: people and had coon dogs, and me wanting one so bad.
Speaker 1: I could identify with Billy in there. I think you
Speaker 1: and I talked about it. The other thing, Well, it
Speaker 1: was identified so much with it because I turned eleven
Speaker 1: when we were when I read the story. No, it
Speaker 1: was one of my favorite years. I turned eleven and
Speaker 1: read the book, saw the movie. I think it came
Speaker 1: out on TV about that time, and then I had
Speaker 1: to have a coon dog. I talked to my daddy,
Speaker 1: said you gotta earn it. So it's like I told you,
Speaker 1: I didn't go through the depression. We weren't having to
Speaker 1: hunt to feed our families. We hunted because we enjoyed it.
Speaker 1: We eat a lot of the game that we that
Speaker 1: we hunted. But I identified so much with it that
Speaker 1: he said, you earned the dog, You earned the money,
Speaker 1: you can buy the dog. So I worked there. We
Speaker 1: worked on. I grew up on a farm, so I'm
Speaker 1: making um a wage there for a different task I
Speaker 1: would do, and he provided the majority of the money.
Speaker 1: But I can remember going to school right had to
Speaker 1: be finished that book, and I put a jar on
Speaker 1: my desk and I wrote on Salt Disney here for this, No,
Speaker 1: but I watched this. I put a note in there
Speaker 1: that said, contribute to the Brent wants a Coon Dog fund. Well,
Speaker 1: I got one donation. One girl in my class and
Speaker 1: her name was Amy. She dropped a quarter in there,
Speaker 1: and I told her, I said Amy. When I grew
Speaker 1: up and getting married and I have a daughter, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna name her Amy. My daughter is named Amy, Yes, sir,
Speaker 1: And it was from that are you at all in
Speaker 1: touch with Amy? Five or six years ago? Think it's
Speaker 1: really creepy you name After actually introduced her, I said,
Speaker 1: this is Amy. Was with. I thought you were going
Speaker 1: to say, Amy introduced your daughter to her. This is
Speaker 1: a girl. Remember a coon drop tree on Amy's head?
Speaker 1: Do you remember the sixth grade? And I told you
Speaker 1: that a quarter And she looked at me and smiled
Speaker 1: and said, I absolutely do not. She couldn't recall it.
Speaker 1: I said, I was gonna kill the interest of the story.
Speaker 1: But this is Amy right here. I thought you were
Speaker 1: gonna say. I thought you were gonna be like Amy,
Speaker 1: because you've donated to my fun the first raccoon hide
Speaker 1: that I get, I'm going to donate it to you.
Speaker 1: I mean, I thought it was gonna be something. I
Speaker 1: thought you were gonna say. Five years ago. I bumped
Speaker 1: into her and she said, my name's Mamie. Hey, here's okay,
Speaker 1: here's the biggest question. I mean, did you get a dog?
Speaker 1: I did? I did seventy five dollars. We bought it
Speaker 1: from man Rantom feed store there and Warren where up
Speaker 1: and we hunted him, started training him. Was he a
Speaker 1: good dog? He? I think he had he had potential
Speaker 1: to be something, but he wounded up getting stolen. But
Speaker 1: the biggest adventure I had with him was no, he
Speaker 1: was a walker, a couple of kids ended up with
Speaker 1: the dog for a couple of months, and my dad says,
Speaker 1: we're gonna take him over. We'll take him over to
Speaker 1: a spot I know he's got a bigger symmetry. And
Speaker 1: we took it overs on a farm a friend of ours.
Speaker 1: And we drive up. We drive up, we're pulling up
Speaker 1: and the headlights are shout on that cemetery and man,
Speaker 1: it looks I mean it's like Christmas lights. There's coon's
Speaker 1: all and it's five or six coons in there. Oh man,
Speaker 1: oh yeah. So we get at and we get the
Speaker 1: pup out. We turn him loose, and he's just bumping around.
Speaker 1: He don't know what he's doing. He's running around the
Speaker 1: tree and around us and back and forth. And I
Speaker 1: told my dad, I'm a climbing friend. Shake some of
Speaker 1: them coons that shake a coon. Now, Well, I climbed
Speaker 1: up in the tree. I gotta grabbed the limb up
Speaker 1: up the tree, I go, and I started shaking him out. Man,
Speaker 1: he just raining coons for like three minutes, bam bam,
Speaker 1: bam back and as soon as they hit the ground,
Speaker 1: he's barking right back up the tree. They come. They're
Speaker 1: calling I thought that big old so I thought I'm dead,
Speaker 1: you know, and hunt I came my dad say this,
Speaker 1: hang on, son, just hang on. And but that was
Speaker 1: that was the most adventure we had with him. But
Speaker 1: he hunted good and uh, but he got out of
Speaker 1: being somebody picked him up and never saw him again.
Speaker 1: So several several dogs through the years, blue Tick included,
Speaker 1: and but by far, this one that I have now
Speaker 1: is it's been the best. I bought my first one
Speaker 1: for seventy five working at that sawmill. We was like
Speaker 1: the going price for we. We we got ours for
Speaker 1: after Jeff Cunningham negotiated. That's actually probably pretty accurate because
Speaker 1: I got my dogs in ninety four. Y'all probably got
Speaker 1: your dogs in the seventies early at DOUN like like
Speaker 1: not good coon dog puppies had gone up by about
Speaker 1: because that man wanted a hundred dollars for a pub.
Speaker 1: We negotiated for two for one fifty. They've been depreciating.
Speaker 1: Talk to me, what do you mean, Well, Billy Coleman
Speaker 1: paid fifty bucks for two pounds, you know, nifteen thirty
Speaker 1: would be hundred dollars today, Well you can, you can.
Speaker 1: I'm just saying I feel like they're going downhill. Well
Speaker 1: there's there. It's it's just the tragedy of the commons um.
Speaker 1: Coon dogs have not stayed up with inflation. I wish
Speaker 1: coon I wish mules and coon dogs would would like
Speaker 1: like paste with like carrots, fir or like a bag
Speaker 1: of yeah milk, Yeah, but it does. They don't because
Speaker 1: you put a gallon of milk in front of me,
Speaker 1: especially his chocolate. If you could have a slick train
Speaker 1: walker or a gallon of chocolate milk or a gallon
Speaker 1: of chocolate offer. I don't know if they heard it.
Speaker 1: I said it really loud a couple of times. I
Speaker 1: offered Michael five dollars for his dog last night. He
Speaker 1: didn't take it. And then I offered Brent five dollars
Speaker 1: for his dog and they didn't take it. I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't know, that's that's a lot of money where
Speaker 1: I came from. I believe Brent's response was for what
Speaker 1: part of my dog by a partnership just that they
Speaker 1: don't have. Are you interested in selling a partnership in
Speaker 1: your dog? You can have the part that eats this
Speaker 1: is okay, remember Clay's last partnership with dogs. I'm sorry, man,
Speaker 1: I need to call him. This is like, it's like
Speaker 1: figuring out you served three prison terms. Maybe one day
Speaker 1: you will wow and they'll be like, can you believe
Speaker 1: you never talked about it? He just kind of on
Speaker 1: your Wikipedia page. Well and they but then, but what
Speaker 1: I said was maybe he did talk about it and
Speaker 1: we just didn't know. I mean, I don't claim to
Speaker 1: be a Wilson Rawls, you know, like expert. So maybe
Speaker 1: he did. He just didn't in those channels I gave
Speaker 1: him that. That's not something you jump up and tell
Speaker 1: everybody every conversation that you have in an elementary school.
Speaker 1: It's also the kind of thing that if if you
Speaker 1: are a public figure that everybody loves and you wrote
Speaker 1: this great story that's really compelling, that people don't want
Speaker 1: to dwell on. They want to kind of forget well,
Speaker 1: and it probably just wasn't relevant. You don't think so
Speaker 1: those kids saying it happens so long ago that he
Speaker 1: came into the elementary schools and stole those kids chickens, Well,
Speaker 1: I think about it. If he went to prison for
Speaker 1: if he went to prison for stealing a chicken, he
Speaker 1: wasn't the only one. It might have been something that
Speaker 1: was fairly common. You know, my grandpa spent a little
Speaker 1: time in prison. I just have a feeling that if
Speaker 1: you serve three prison terms for that kind of stuff,
Speaker 1: there's some shady stuff going on in other places. Well,
Speaker 1: but remember him talking about even in the clips that
Speaker 1: I used, which I used like four minutes of an
Speaker 1: hour long speech, that would have been like his polished
Speaker 1: version of his life. And he said, in all those
Speaker 1: years I spent rambling around from city to city, and
Speaker 1: I was like, yeah, you're stealing stuff, chicken. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm not making it up. I mean, I'm I'm just
Speaker 1: the messenger. But I hope it came through and and
Speaker 1: I believe it did. I mean, I respect him because
Speaker 1: of the the path that he eventually led his life
Speaker 1: do so. I mean, to me, it's like a thing
Speaker 1: to be celebrated. And I think probably during that time
Speaker 1: it wasn't. I think today, because of the nature of
Speaker 1: technology and the communication, you couldn't hide something like that.
Speaker 1: He came to the chicken and he stole it, and
Speaker 1: he made the right there. Well, and the point being
Speaker 1: about like this tip day and ages, you couldn't hide
Speaker 1: something like that, so you'd have to confront it, and
Speaker 1: you'd say, Man, I used to live a rough life
Speaker 1: and then, but I celebrated today. So it's celebrated today
Speaker 1: that you overcame that back then that people didn't want
Speaker 1: to know about it. Let's not talk about you being
Speaker 1: a thief. That's okay. We just won't bring that up
Speaker 1: because of their sorted past. Bump bump bum. You know,
Speaker 1: and Brent have a sorted past. That's all we can't
Speaker 1: talk about. I thought this was a safe place, guys.
Speaker 1: Do we just kind of gloss over the part where
Speaker 1: he mentions that he was working for the nuclear Yeah Commission,
Speaker 1: He was a construction worker for the nuclear Commission. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you talk to me. I'm just assuming that there'd be
Speaker 1: a background check on a project like really nuclear fel
Speaker 1: I feel like they were doing some background checking as
Speaker 1: soon as they started messing with nuclear stuff for a
Speaker 1: guy out there. They don't or we wouldn't be here, okay,
Speaker 1: mm hmm. Man Woodrow Wilson didn't he have the coolest
Speaker 1: voice in the world, though, I recognized that off of
Speaker 1: the movie, like they didn't like. I think in the
Speaker 1: credits of the movie it says that he narrated it.
Speaker 1: I didn't realize that he didn't do it, and you
Speaker 1: immediately pick up like that's Wilson rawls and um, yeah,
Speaker 1: but I mean he lived through a difficult time that
Speaker 1: we didn't. We'd have lived through. And you will not
Speaker 1: die of hunger when there are chickens running around that
Speaker 1: you could take. So I was surprised. I would like
Speaker 1: a little more detail on that, Like how do you
Speaker 1: go to prison for stealing chickens? Someone had connections, he
Speaker 1: stole a chicken from someone that knew someone probably Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I mean it's chickens plural. It could be twould like
Speaker 1: today to go to prison for stealing chickens, like in
Speaker 1: a one time incident, you'd have to like steal like
Speaker 1: a chicken truck and like you think it was a
Speaker 1: sting operation. They had an animatronic chicken. I've seen what
Speaker 1: those game wardens do with deer. Yeah, I have like
Speaker 1: a chicken out in the yard bouncing up and down. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I got you, sucker, and you pull in grab it
Speaker 1: and then the sirens come on. I hate to bring
Speaker 1: us up. This is a big segue, but we had
Speaker 1: a massive chicken crisis at our house this weekend. New
Speaker 1: from Farm Oh it was major and involved my dogs. Uh.
Speaker 1: We had this big snow and ice and you know,
Speaker 1: really extreme temperatures and we have Misty has chickens. She
Speaker 1: loves her chickens like way more than a human should
Speaker 1: love a chicken, and um, it's it's hard for us
Speaker 1: because of how much she loves those chickens and us die.
Speaker 1: If you had a romantic setting on your sun spot headland,
Speaker 1: I would shine it away from the chicken, not like
Speaker 1: the though well yeah no she didn't. She was afraid
Speaker 1: of him. But no. So so we had real extreme
Speaker 1: temperatures and usually we end up shutting the coop a
Speaker 1: little bit after dark because if you shut it, you
Speaker 1: can't shut it try because the chickens don't go in there.
Speaker 1: You gotta shut it, like right it dark, or like
Speaker 1: maybe right before you go to bed. You're like, hey,
Speaker 1: go out there and shut the chicken coop, And so
Speaker 1: like at ten o'clock at night, she was like, hey,
Speaker 1: do you mind shutting the chicken coop? And I was
Speaker 1: like okay, And so I walk out there and we
Speaker 1: I think we had like fifteen chickens and they were
Speaker 1: like five in there, and they were like feathers just
Speaker 1: a trail of feathers, and I just go, dot, got it.
Speaker 1: I'll walk back in and I go, hey, something something
Speaker 1: got your chickens, and she just was like, oh no.
Speaker 1: And uh so I take Tim over there, Tim the
Speaker 1: squirrel dog, and he is so tuned into you know
Speaker 1: what I want from him. I don't know what it is.
Speaker 1: I think maybe it's a coon or a fox, That's
Speaker 1: what I think it is. And I get over there
Speaker 1: and I see him put his nose on the ground
Speaker 1: and start smelling, and I start sicking him on it,
Speaker 1: you know, just like get him, get him, get him,
Speaker 1: get it, getting him excited, And sure enough he takes
Speaker 1: off trailing and goes out kind of buy our garden
Speaker 1: around and he gets on a track and it's barking
Speaker 1: on the track and I think, dad gum, he's gonna
Speaker 1: trail whatever that is up. So I go get Fern,
Speaker 1: and which is my plothound, which is supposedly a a
Speaker 1: dog that won't run off game, which is not true. Uh.
Speaker 1: And I take Fern over there and I turned her
Speaker 1: out right at that chicken coop and she doesn't strike,
Speaker 1: she doesn't bark, and I pretty much know it's not
Speaker 1: a coon at this point, because if it's a coon,
Speaker 1: she would just struck out of there. And she just
Speaker 1: kind of ambles around. But I acor on it, like
Speaker 1: I'm like, come on, get get get get get it.
Speaker 1: And she hears tim and sure enough she starts trailing
Speaker 1: and barking, and off they go. And I had my
Speaker 1: phone with me and I text everybody, and you know,
Speaker 1: I kind of just want to miss you to feel good.
Speaker 1: And so I'm like, we're on the track, babe, you know,
Speaker 1: Like I'm like, we're after him, him and Fern. We'll
Speaker 1: find those twelves. And they they run across the road
Speaker 1: and up on a ridge and make a loop and
Speaker 1: circle back around and come over right by my neighbor's house.
Speaker 1: And I text my neighbor. I have good neighbors. Text
Speaker 1: my neighbor and I say, hey, I just turned loose
Speaker 1: my dogs on something that kills our chickens and they're
Speaker 1: over by your house. He text me back and he says,
Speaker 1: I'll get my A R. Fifteen out. I'll be on
Speaker 1: the porch. I love the guy literally said that, and
Speaker 1: uh and and so the dogs run past his house
Speaker 1: and they're trailing, and finally the track just kind of
Speaker 1: peters out and they're going to play. So I can't
Speaker 1: get to and thereby road, and so I call him back.
Speaker 1: Well the next night. My neighbor also has some traill
Speaker 1: cameras set up like that, send pictures to his phone.
Speaker 1: And uh, it was a black panther, A black panther,
Speaker 1: good one. That was a good one. That's why you're here.
Speaker 1: And and he had a picture of a kyo. Yeah
Speaker 1: it was. I'm pretty sure the chickens are dead. There's
Speaker 1: a tin of chickens in his mouth. Or fox wouldn't
Speaker 1: killed tin chickens. That would have come back ten nights
Speaker 1: and killed one a night, yeah, yea. Or a mink
Speaker 1: would get in there and kill them all and leave him.
Speaker 1: And but so the moral are the stories your dogs trashy? Yes? Absolutely,
Speaker 1: And that's where Stan died. That's why where the red
Speaker 1: friend grows. A real coon dog wouldn't have struck a
Speaker 1: mountain lion because he was trashy. I'm all about having
Speaker 1: a multipurpose dog at different times. I would love it
Speaker 1: if my dog well. And and and they have got
Speaker 1: after bobcats a couple of times that I've known about,
Speaker 1: which is legal to run in our stay. I'd love
Speaker 1: it if they had trashy multipurpose. What does he run
Speaker 1: whatever he wants? I mean, it's it's obvious what it happens.
Speaker 1: He swaps on the very first coon tracks he crosses,
Speaker 1: but he will run something off. I mean, did you
Speaker 1: mark that down? Do you realize it's been recorded? Michael
Speaker 1: I freely admitted it before the first time he said it.
Speaker 1: I was like, I'm white, like I didn't hear that.
Speaker 1: Next time, I'm gonna be be ready for and recorded.
Speaker 1: But it's not he said it. Oh man, So chickens,
Speaker 1: Wilson rawls, coon dogs, trashy coon dogs. We've really covered
Speaker 1: it here. This is this has been really insightful. Um,
Speaker 1: speaking of black panthers meat either now we have our
Speaker 1: our believer black panther hat out. Yeah, I'm gonna get one.
Speaker 1: I like that. Hey, and I'm not trying to hype
Speaker 1: the market, but I'll just tell you if you're gonna
Speaker 1: get when, you better get one because they already sold
Speaker 1: out of Burgery's hats real. Yeah. Yeah. So we ordered
Speaker 1: a big number of them the first time, and we
Speaker 1: sold out in like a week and they were like, Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: let's order twice as many. They ordered twice as many
Speaker 1: of that number, Like we were really, we're not doing
Speaker 1: this on purpose, Like I'm I'm like, how many do
Speaker 1: you think your mom to choose? Bottom? The other day?
Speaker 1: And she was wearing one front words and back. So
Speaker 1: she's she's bought a lot of them, but it's not support.
Speaker 1: She's scalping them look up. Yeah. Yeah. And so anyway,
Speaker 1: they sold out of the double amount, you know, a
Speaker 1: couple of weeks ago when I started posting about those,
Speaker 1: those happened like two weeks. So doesn't have someone that
Speaker 1: projects sales. It's it was just a gamble. We didn't
Speaker 1: know how much they were gonna sell. But this time
Speaker 1: they're reordered and they won't be back in for like
Speaker 1: another I think like two months. And then and they
Speaker 1: bought some of this time that I mean, I don't
Speaker 1: have to give them away. They're gonna flood the market.
Speaker 1: Price is gonna drop nopet in two days. You better
Speaker 1: buy him quick. Embarrassed to admit it. But the first
Speaker 1: time they ordered ten, this time they ordered twenty. Hey,
Speaker 1: you's be surprised at the text messages I get. I
Speaker 1: got a message from a guy the other day. That
Speaker 1: is a friend of mine, and um, he held up
Speaker 1: his phone on an airplane and took a picture and
Speaker 1: there was a guy like a couple of seats up
Speaker 1: wearing a Burger's hat backwards. And I said, did you
Speaker 1: talk to the guy? And he was like no, I
Speaker 1: couldn't you know. By the time he got out, it
Speaker 1: was kind of over and um, trying to think of
Speaker 1: a people all the time are sending me pictures of bargers,
Speaker 1: people you know, but no, So now it's it's great.
Speaker 1: I really appreciated by buying the hats and wearing them
Speaker 1: and supporting what we're doing. But you better get those
Speaker 1: believer hats quick. That's all I gotta say. Can anybody
Speaker 1: else here? Rick snoring but me? So we have a
Speaker 1: coon hunter over here. I hadn't mean dead asleep. Oh man, Hey,
Speaker 1: this has been fantastic, Thanks guys. Closing thoughts, Dan, anybody, Michael,
Speaker 1: Josh looking forward to tonight? Tonight? Yeah, we're going if
Speaker 1: it's raining or not. I don't want to hear it.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm such a good hunter. We're gonna see
Speaker 1: so many coons. Yeah, we set you up for real disappointment.
Speaker 1: You've got to deliver tonight. Deliver the mail, all right, guys,
Speaker 1: next time. See like