Speaker 1: Ye were jack late rabbits, which is illegal, but never
Speaker 1: a dear. There was a code, there were laws you
Speaker 1: would not break. This episode of the Bear Grease podcast
Speaker 1: will be an expose on two men in the outdoor
Speaker 1: industry that you may have heard of. I don't like
Speaker 1: to air people's dirty laundry, but we gained access to
Speaker 1: these hunters and you may know them, maybe even respect them,
Speaker 1: and their stories will shock you. Who I'm talking about
Speaker 1: is me and Steve Rannella. We had a candid conversation
Speaker 1: about the way we were raised, our history with game laws,
Speaker 1: and a few of our regrets. The intent is to
Speaker 1: have some honest dialogue, giving us a data point to
Speaker 1: understand our cultural history as modern hunters that will allow
Speaker 1: us to dictate where we're going. We'll also tell to
Speaker 1: Austin Booth, he's a lawyer, a former marine, and now
Speaker 1: the director of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. I
Speaker 1: want to understand the philosophy of wildlife law enforcement in
Speaker 1: two and the status of poaching. Will also pick up
Speaker 1: two foundational components of the North American model of wildlife
Speaker 1: conservation that we all should know. And if you want
Speaker 1: the dirt on me and Ranella. I'm certain you're not
Speaker 1: gonna want to miss this one. That tipping point where
Speaker 1: you go from consumption to conservation necessitates you looking at
Speaker 1: poaching as a horrible thing that detracts from the resource.
Speaker 1: My name is Clay Nukelem, and this is the Bear
Speaker 1: Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search
Speaker 1: for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the
Speaker 1: story of Americans who lived their lives close to the land.
Speaker 1: Presented by f HF Gear, American made purpose built hunting
Speaker 1: and fishing gear. It's designed to be as rugged as
Speaker 1: the places we explore. I was raised around. Let me
Speaker 1: put to you this way. Any of the hunters and angers,
Speaker 1: any of the outdoors when I was raised around, and
Speaker 1: I was raised around many of them, any of them
Speaker 1: would have like and if an undercover agent had embedded
Speaker 1: with them for a week or two or a month,
Speaker 1: any of them would have racked up a bunch of
Speaker 1: violations that would sound really bad. I didn't grow up
Speaker 1: around anyone that didn't break game laws. I'm not kidding you,
Speaker 1: like anyone that was serious about hunting and fishing that
Speaker 1: didn't break game laws. Because there was the ones you
Speaker 1: paid attend mentioned too, And there's the one that no
Speaker 1: one paid attention to. And in fact, I now know
Speaker 1: there's a lot of them that we had no idea
Speaker 1: that was a law. That was Steve runnella of meat eater.
Speaker 1: He and I are about to give an expose of
Speaker 1: our lives, because if you're new to hunting, it might
Speaker 1: be hard to understand where we as a culture have
Speaker 1: come from. Let me restate that all this talk of
Speaker 1: breaking game laws isn't a celebration, a justification or a stunt,
Speaker 1: but rather a crisp look into reality for the purpose
Speaker 1: of getting it right in the future, in modern times,
Speaker 1: for us to protect this immensely valuable wildlife resource we
Speaker 1: have on this continent. It helps if we're just honest
Speaker 1: with ourselves. This next clip is from the Bear Grease Render,
Speaker 1: and it's my father Gary Nucom talking about his experience
Speaker 1: of stepping into the big game hunting world at the
Speaker 1: age of twenty six in the mid nineteen seventies. And
Speaker 1: so I was introduced to bow hunting and I immediately
Speaker 1: fell in love with it, and I got the watching
Speaker 1: people and I saw nobody. Now take this literal, I'm
Speaker 1: telling you, like I saw it. I knew nobody that
Speaker 1: wouldn't kill an illegal, dear, and I'm like, in a
Speaker 1: state of shock, I'm not gonna do that. I didn't
Speaker 1: have uncles that taught me that. I didn't have a
Speaker 1: dad that taught me that. Now, if you run up
Speaker 1: against Josh and he's a city boy out enjoying hunting,
Speaker 1: you know, two or three times a year, now, he's
Speaker 1: not gonna kill anything illegal. He read the regulations and
Speaker 1: just did what it said. Yeah, but the die hard hunters,
Speaker 1: I'm telling you from my perspective, you gotta keep that
Speaker 1: in mind. My perspective, they all killed illegal stuff. So
Speaker 1: where do you draw the line. I killed one person,
Speaker 1: I killed fifty people. I mean, you're killing stuff. It's illegal,
Speaker 1: And where is it bad. It's bad with one, it's
Speaker 1: bad with ten, it's bad with thirty. The prevalence of
Speaker 1: wanton violation of the law in the past is remarkable,
Speaker 1: But I feel like we've turned a corner of all
Speaker 1: the laws. Wildlife laws are tough to enforce because hunting
Speaker 1: is done in secluded places, often alone, and animals don't
Speaker 1: speak English. They can't tell on us. There are various
Speaker 1: gradients of poaching, and all are bad. There are serial
Speaker 1: poachers that leave the house with the intent to break
Speaker 1: the law. There are those who are typically law about him,
Speaker 1: but they make the odd exception to egregiously break the law.
Speaker 1: There are opportunistic law breakers who violate out of convenience
Speaker 1: or to take advantage of a unique situation. There are
Speaker 1: those who are simply ignorant of the law. And then
Speaker 1: there are people that flat out and make a mistake
Speaker 1: or misjudgment in the field. But if laws are broken,
Speaker 1: the intent or the context really doesn't matter. No one
Speaker 1: has an excuse. I'm still on the search for understanding
Speaker 1: our functional ideologies around game laws. In the last couple
Speaker 1: of episodes, we've talked with game wardens, undercover agents, and
Speaker 1: hunters trying to nail down our collective doctrine, and doctrine
Speaker 1: isn't what we say with our mouths, is what we
Speaker 1: actually do. Most people would tell you that their law abiding,
Speaker 1: but when you really dig in, you might find places
Speaker 1: where they don't always hold to the letter of the law,
Speaker 1: or more commonly, where in the past they didn't. And
Speaker 1: sometimes people just mess up. And the more time you
Speaker 1: spent in the woods, the greater chance that's would happened
Speaker 1: to you. We forget we didn't know, we justify it
Speaker 1: this one time, or we just flat ignore a law
Speaker 1: because we think breaking it won't hurt anyone or the resource.
Speaker 1: I think we've got to be honest with our worst
Speaker 1: selves if we'll ever live consistently in our best selves.
Speaker 1: I hope these stories will fortify a culture of putting
Speaker 1: the resource first. Breaking the law is an easy thing,
Speaker 1: and here is an example. Once during muzzleloader season, I
Speaker 1: was walking to my deer stand in the pre dawn darkness,
Speaker 1: and I planned to put on my hunter orange vest
Speaker 1: in the tree. You see, I got dressed at the tree,
Speaker 1: trying to do all the sink control stuff on the
Speaker 1: way in, I dropped my orange vest on the ground
Speaker 1: and didn't realize that until I was twenty five ft high.
Speaker 1: The orange was like way back towards the truck. I
Speaker 1: was on private land with no other hunters, and I
Speaker 1: was bow hunting during musloader season. I continued to hunt
Speaker 1: with just my orange hat, which didn't meet the square
Speaker 1: inch orange minimum, and that morning I proceeded to kill
Speaker 1: one of the largest bucks of my life with my bow. Technically,
Speaker 1: I was in violation of the law and my poacher.
Speaker 1: By the law, yes, but by every rational thanking human
Speaker 1: on planet Earth, I don't think so. It would have
Speaker 1: been more dangerous to all out of the tree and
Speaker 1: walk to get the orange at daylight than it would
Speaker 1: have been to stay in the tree and walk out midday.
Speaker 1: Have you ever left your tree stand up longer than
Speaker 1: you were supposed to on public land? Have you ever
Speaker 1: gone fishing for the first time of the spring, only
Speaker 1: to realize you didn't auto renew your fishing license. Have
Speaker 1: you ever dipped your toe across a fence boundary that
Speaker 1: you didn't have written permission to access. Have you ever
Speaker 1: party hunted as a water fowler, which is basically a
Speaker 1: group working to get the collective limit of everyone on
Speaker 1: the hunt. Have you ever wasted meat? My intent and
Speaker 1: asking these questions isn't to soften our ideas about the law,
Speaker 1: but rather to strengthen them, and ultimately I hope this
Speaker 1: conversation makes us be introspective about ourselves. That being said,
Speaker 1: and I'll stand by this statement. I don't have a
Speaker 1: history of intentionally breaking game laws. I've dedicated an incredible
Speaker 1: amount of energy to the point of paranoia to not
Speaker 1: break them even before I was in the outdoor industry.
Speaker 1: I've never had a wild streak, and I grew up
Speaker 1: in a very law abiding family, which I'm proud of.
Speaker 1: But by sheer volume of exposure running around with the
Speaker 1: odd ruffian, being a dumb kid and just being human,
Speaker 1: I've made some mistakes. Here's Steve Ronnella describing the culture
Speaker 1: of how he grew up, like I used to be
Speaker 1: reluctant to talk about some of this stuff because of
Speaker 1: h like a fear of getting in trouble, like elements
Speaker 1: of hypocrisy. Whatever. Sure, we broke laws all the time. Okay,
Speaker 1: I could sit I could sit here and and just
Speaker 1: give you dozens of occurrences. Let me give you a
Speaker 1: cup for instances. In the spring the rivers had come up,
Speaker 1: and sometimes the rivers had come up so high that
Speaker 1: it would flood out the muskrats out of their bank dens.
Speaker 1: It wasn't muskrat season. You were not allowed to shoot
Speaker 1: muskrats in Michigan. You had to trap them. But we
Speaker 1: couldn't resist the temptation. We go out of twenty two
Speaker 1: and go out in the flooded swamp and get my
Speaker 1: scratch and just add him into the furs we sold
Speaker 1: the next year, okay, because who's gonna notice, like some
Speaker 1: twenty two holes and some of them. I remember in
Speaker 1: high school my buddy Eric Kern, he's no longer with us.
Speaker 1: A buddy Eric Kern would dip and smelt. He caught
Speaker 1: a steel head, not allowed to do that with a net,
Speaker 1: stuck it in his waiters and carried around in his
Speaker 1: waiters in the boot of his waiters for the night.
Speaker 1: I'm talking like a ten pound fish. Never in a
Speaker 1: million years, and we had to let that fish go.
Speaker 1: But there's some stuff we would never do. Would no way,
Speaker 1: no how jack light a deer. We were jack late rabbits,
Speaker 1: which is illegal, but never a deer. Wouldn't go over
Speaker 1: a bang limit. But you had to be fourteen to
Speaker 1: hunt with a rifle. I started hunting with a rifle
Speaker 1: when I was thirteen. I shot a dough. My mom
Speaker 1: came out and put her tag on it. I would
Speaker 1: have gone down. I would have gone down and told
Speaker 1: that story in school. It just it wasn't like you're
Speaker 1: being secret e. It was just it was like the
Speaker 1: attitude was how many deer are we allowed as a family?
Speaker 1: Tell us that and then and then just leave the
Speaker 1: rest to us. Right, And that's functionally the way they
Speaker 1: that it was enforced too, am I right? It was like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I don't like we weren't checked by
Speaker 1: people just I could. I could go on and on
Speaker 1: like stuff that I'm the stuff that I'm ashamed about.
Speaker 1: And I'll point out my dad was, Like I mentioned,
Speaker 1: my dad was a veteran. His friends were veterans. These
Speaker 1: are people who fought in World War two. These people
Speaker 1: love their country, right, the most upstanding members of the community. Okay,
Speaker 1: One of the guys down the road of a veteran. Uh,
Speaker 1: he was a car salesman, mentored me all through growing up.
Speaker 1: He fit, He lived with his wife, and his wife died,
Speaker 1: and he fished all the time. Couldn't eat that many fish,
Speaker 1: but he fished. I remember some days he'd fish two
Speaker 1: d seventy days a year because he kept the track
Speaker 1: of it a notepad. How many fish can you eat?
Speaker 1: Sold his fish? He would encourage me to go sell
Speaker 1: my fish to the illegal outfit that he sold his
Speaker 1: fish too in a restaurant. No, it's a fish dealer,
Speaker 1: fish a fish market. And he would even advise me
Speaker 1: on how to negotiate the deals. Do you understand these
Speaker 1: are not people that would have identified as poachers. I
Speaker 1: don't know why. Oh, moving fish around, dumping them into
Speaker 1: all their lakes and stuff like you name it, man like,
Speaker 1: it was just everywhere. But there's certain lines you there was,
Speaker 1: like lines you didn't cross. I remember. I don't want
Speaker 1: to name the guy's names. I'm friendly with his kid.
Speaker 1: The guy shot way more wood ducks than he was
Speaker 1: allowed one time and did a very sloppy job of
Speaker 1: cleaning them and just breasted some wood ducks and dumped
Speaker 1: him out in the woods. And we found them and
Speaker 1: told our old man about these wood ducks that weren't cleaned.
Speaker 1: And my old man went over there and confronted the
Speaker 1: guy that, well, something you you not do, waste the game,
Speaker 1: don't do that. But he would do all my only way.
Speaker 1: I would do all manners, stuff you weren't supposed to do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it was like a spirit of the law leader
Speaker 1: the law. I really appreciate Steve opening up about his past.
Speaker 1: It takes some guts to do that, and his intent
Speaker 1: is just to be honest. He nor I have nothing
Speaker 1: to hide. I have no doubt that people who have
Speaker 1: been involved in hunting and fishing their entire lives, and
Speaker 1: if they've seen a few winters can relate. I know
Speaker 1: I can. And at the end of this podcast, I'm
Speaker 1: going to tell you my darkest secret. It's really not
Speaker 1: a secret. But here's Steve on ethics. It's a relationship
Speaker 1: with the game laws. It's hard to understand. I'll point
Speaker 1: out to people. Now, people we have all these conversations
Speaker 1: about hunting ethics. I'm like, man, here's a here's a
Speaker 1: good way to get of the way. There follow laws.
Speaker 1: We've codified our ethics in this country to large measure,
Speaker 1: they changed their time at any given time. Are ethics
Speaker 1: are mostly codified by law. If you want to be be
Speaker 1: an ethical hunter, that typically means don't break the laws.
Speaker 1: But my God, really loose with the laws growing up,
Speaker 1: and I was two because I was brought up that way,
Speaker 1: I had to later realize out of getting on board
Speaker 1: with the program, okay, getting on board with the game
Speaker 1: management program that we're on in this country, the journey
Speaker 1: we're on with conservation, the journey around with game management,
Speaker 1: like getting on board with that, and also, quite simply
Speaker 1: and frankly, when I was in my twenties out of
Speaker 1: fear of being in trouble. Yeah, then will I'll be
Speaker 1: in trouble. Cleaned up our act. I got the scared
Speaker 1: out of me by game word one time, who I
Speaker 1: knew was on to me about something, and that scared
Speaker 1: me pretty straight. You don't want to tell that story, Well,
Speaker 1: I really don't tell what he asked me. Let me
Speaker 1: tell you what he asked me. You weren't allowed to
Speaker 1: use airs where I lived on land for land animals.
Speaker 1: He asked me if I had been setting snares. I
Speaker 1: told him no. He then went through over a hundred
Speaker 1: traps in the back of my truck looking for one
Speaker 1: that didn't have a tag on it. He didn't like
Speaker 1: check one. He was like, I'm gonna looked at his
Speaker 1: bundle and I'm gonna find a not tag trap and
Speaker 1: I'm gonna give you a citation. And you didn't find
Speaker 1: a not tag trap, to my surprise and his because
Speaker 1: they just fall off sometimes. But I knew that guy
Speaker 1: knew something I've done. Uh, you know that kind of
Speaker 1: scared straight on that stuff. I had a fur buyer
Speaker 1: who would push snares on you catch more game license
Speaker 1: fur buyer. He's like, hey, why don't you take some
Speaker 1: of these bringing stuff in right, just pervasive, And there's
Speaker 1: no way you wouldn't. There's no way you don't like
Speaker 1: knowing where you grew up and how you grew up.
Speaker 1: There's no way you didn't have all those same experiences. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I had an interesting, interesting experience in that
Speaker 1: my dad was Gary Nucom who he he did? He
Speaker 1: He always says he didn't grow up in a hunting family,
Speaker 1: and I don't like it when he says that, because
Speaker 1: he did. My grandfather was a big quail hunter and
Speaker 1: bird dog trainer. What he means to say is he
Speaker 1: didn't grow up in a big game hunting family, which
Speaker 1: he didn't, and so he was kind of a first
Speaker 1: He he learned how to bow hunt on his own
Speaker 1: and did all this stuff, and man, he was pretty
Speaker 1: straight laced and kind of came into the hunting space
Speaker 1: and realized that he was the only guy around that
Speaker 1: was actually trying to obey game laws. And he just
Speaker 1: had just kind of the right mix of following the
Speaker 1: rules and he was he was a banker. He was
Speaker 1: in the community that he felt like he needed to
Speaker 1: be an upstanding citizen in which was good and man,
Speaker 1: we came out of the shoot with a very I mean,
Speaker 1: I wasn't afraid the game warden. I was afraid of
Speaker 1: my dad. So it's kind of a different story. And
Speaker 1: so I never wantingly bro game loss, even though I
Speaker 1: did just because I was a dumb kid. You know,
Speaker 1: a couple of times in coon hunting while we were
Speaker 1: coon hunting, twice deer were killed on coon hunts. M M.
Speaker 1: Steve said, well, here's the full story. I've never in
Speaker 1: my life set out to kill a deer illegally. Ever,
Speaker 1: but one night deep in the winter when I was seventeen,
Speaker 1: we were on a coon hunt. I saw the glowing
Speaker 1: eyes of an erect eared critter that hovered about twenty
Speaker 1: inches off the ground. I immediately whispered to my buddy
Speaker 1: with the twenty two rifle Kyo, shoot that thing. Within seconds,
Speaker 1: a shot was fired and the glowing eyes went out.
Speaker 1: Upon retrieval, it wasn't a coyote at all. It turns
Speaker 1: out it was a bedded doe deer, and it wasn't
Speaker 1: even legal to shoot a cowde at night, but I
Speaker 1: didn't know that. Rather than calling the game warden, which
Speaker 1: would have been the right thing, to do, calling old
Speaker 1: Jimmy Martin. We stuffed the deer in our dog box
Speaker 1: and went home and skinned it. A second time, I
Speaker 1: was hunting with someone older than me on his land,
Speaker 1: and again I think I was seventeen. We saw a
Speaker 1: pair of eyes on the hill and I said, there's
Speaker 1: one of your cows. He said, that's not a cow,
Speaker 1: that's a deer. I said, no, you're wrong, that's one
Speaker 1: of your cows. He proceeded to pull out his twenty
Speaker 1: two pistol, take aim, and dropped the animal from over
Speaker 1: seventy five yards away. We walked up there and he
Speaker 1: was right, it was a deer. He loaded the deer
Speaker 1: in the truck, drove to some dude's house that needed
Speaker 1: some meat, and no questions were ever asked. He dropped
Speaker 1: the deer off. Since that time, I become more adept
Speaker 1: at identifying animals by glowing eyes. I'm ashamed of these
Speaker 1: things and learned a lot from them. Here's Steve Man.
Speaker 1: It's hard to explain. Yeah, yeah, but there were there
Speaker 1: was a code. There were alas you would not break.
Speaker 1: I like, I don't know any of all the violating
Speaker 1: I've talked about. I don't know anyone in my family's
Speaker 1: social circle that ever shot a deer of the spotlight,
Speaker 1: or that ever shot a deer out of season, that
Speaker 1: would have been break. You would not do that. I
Speaker 1: don't know why. I want to introduce you to the
Speaker 1: director of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. He's been
Speaker 1: on the Bear Grease podcast before. His name is Austin Booth.
Speaker 1: He's a former marine, a lawyer, a pilot, and at
Speaker 1: the ripe age of thirty five, he's one of the
Speaker 1: youngest directors in the agency's history, and he's making some
Speaker 1: good waves in our state. Austin is also a lifelong hunter.
Speaker 1: Over the next twenty minutes, I'm gonna ask him about
Speaker 1: the agency's philosophy of law enforcement, the status of poaching
Speaker 1: in the state, and the foundational ideology that regulates wildlife law.
Speaker 1: Here's Austin Booth, So what is the philosophy of law
Speaker 1: enforcement these days? And and how are we how are
Speaker 1: we going after people that are breaking the law. So
Speaker 1: there's a whole lot of people out there that wrongly
Speaker 1: believe that the Arkansas Gamon Fish Commission is just out
Speaker 1: there to write tickets. That's not true. It is written
Speaker 1: into Arkansas law that all the revenue that we generate
Speaker 1: from tickets goes into the county schools in which we
Speaker 1: write that ticket in, so we never see a single
Speaker 1: penny of that money. So there's no quota on apt
Speaker 1: to write a ticket. There's not Would you say that's
Speaker 1: common for state agencies outside of Arkansas? I know of
Speaker 1: a handful of other states. There's probably more, but it's
Speaker 1: intuitive to see that a government agency having a monetary
Speaker 1: incentive to write tickets is probably a bad thing. So
Speaker 1: we don't see any of that money. All right, Well, Austin,
Speaker 1: if y'all aren't there to self funder selves through regulations enforcement,
Speaker 1: how to y'all approach this? We enforce regulations for compliance
Speaker 1: at the Cadet graduation for the Cadeta of Wildlife Officers
Speaker 1: we graduated last year are Colonel Colonel Brad Young, outstanding
Speaker 1: American said, y'all are not here to write granny a
Speaker 1: ticket for being one day expired on her fishing license.
Speaker 1: Make sure she gets a new license. We're not focused
Speaker 1: on minor violations. We want to educate people and we
Speaker 1: want to enforce for compliance. Where we do get aggressive
Speaker 1: is on serious game violations. We issue more than thirty
Speaker 1: five hundred citations per year on average. We issue well
Speaker 1: over five thousand warnings per year on average. So we
Speaker 1: really try to focus the lion's share of our enforcement
Speaker 1: work on major violators because they do materially take away
Speaker 1: from the resource. We had a case this year where
Speaker 1: a gentleman had what he called a deer garden in
Speaker 1: his yard where he had harvested over forty bucks and
Speaker 1: and had the heads out there in the sun cleaning them.
Speaker 1: We had a case this year young man in his
Speaker 1: early twenties who acquired over thirteen hundred points. Now, to
Speaker 1: provide some context for that, you only have to have
Speaker 1: eighteen points to have your hunting license revoked. Uh. And
Speaker 1: so he accumulated an unimaginable amount of violations. And you
Speaker 1: can't tell me that that's not a taking from the
Speaker 1: polit resource. Thirty five hundred citations and five thousand warnings
Speaker 1: a year, those are big numbers. It's interesting to me
Speaker 1: that wardens aren't incentivized right tickets. I think that most
Speaker 1: of us wouldn't have guessed that. It kind of goes
Speaker 1: back to some of our past discussion about a fundamental
Speaker 1: mistrust of power. This helps us view law enforcement differently
Speaker 1: and realize that this misperception is probably coming from our side.
Speaker 1: I want to get Austin's opinion on the threat of
Speaker 1: poaching in the big picture. In the big scheme of
Speaker 1: threats to North American wildlife, are poachers at the top
Speaker 1: of that list. And it's not really apples to apples
Speaker 1: to compare like habitat loss, so it's not entirely apples
Speaker 1: to apples. But I guess I'm trying to understand how
Speaker 1: big a threat it is because I think sometimes we
Speaker 1: can live in a bubble, some of us, especially inside
Speaker 1: the guys that are real enthusiast inside the outdoor space.
Speaker 1: Like I said it before, the cool kids obey the laws,
Speaker 1: Like that's what that's the culture we're building, is that
Speaker 1: we want to obey laws. We want we're all on
Speaker 1: the same team. We want to see more wildlife. I
Speaker 1: don't want to kill thirty turkeys. But because sometimes in
Speaker 1: this space we're sur rounded by the by the good guys,
Speaker 1: in a sense, you don't see what's I don't I
Speaker 1: don't always see what's happening on the outside. And is
Speaker 1: poaching a major threat to wildlife? It is? And to
Speaker 1: bring us back to the last time we were on
Speaker 1: a podcast together. We were talking about ducks and g trs,
Speaker 1: and you said, and in closing one of the podcasts,
Speaker 1: you said that when an animal is treasured by people,
Speaker 1: it thrives. And so if you take that that sentiment,
Speaker 1: the appreciation of wildlife and their role that they play
Speaker 1: in the ecosystem and in people's lives, that appreciation is
Speaker 1: front and center with the loss of habitat, and it's
Speaker 1: front and center with poaching too, because the question, as
Speaker 1: hunters shouldn't be do we appreciate this resource enough to
Speaker 1: hunt it? It's to be do we appreciate do we treasure?
Speaker 1: Do we adore this resource enough to conserve it? And
Speaker 1: that tipping point where you go from consumption to conservation
Speaker 1: necessitates you looking at poaching as a horrible thing that
Speaker 1: detracts from from the resource. So are we losing more ducks,
Speaker 1: more turkey two, loss of habitat, absolutely than we are
Speaker 1: compared to say, poachers. But it's a common foundation of
Speaker 1: lack of appreciation for the resource. Right, how do you
Speaker 1: think we remedy that inside the culture, Because it's clear,
Speaker 1: it's a clear world view to me in a in
Speaker 1: a compelling lifestyle to live a life that is in
Speaker 1: accordance with the game laws. It's easy for me to
Speaker 1: say that too, because I have a pretty privileged life
Speaker 1: when it comes to hunting. But there's also you know,
Speaker 1: I spoke about how there was real skin side of
Speaker 1: me telling the stories that I've told the last couple
Speaker 1: of podcasts, the risk of it glamorizing essentially rebellion against authority.
Speaker 1: So there is some of that. How do we like
Speaker 1: projecting forward twenty five years? Because you go back twenty
Speaker 1: five years from two and it was a pretty different
Speaker 1: world in this state, for sure. You go back another
Speaker 1: twenty five and it was like a different planet. And
Speaker 1: today it's just different than that, I think, and I
Speaker 1: think we've improved, but there's still some of this culture
Speaker 1: that values that. I don't know, what do we do?
Speaker 1: How do we build the culture to continue to progress? Well,
Speaker 1: I think there's lots of complex contributions to that that
Speaker 1: are this isn't a complex conversation, awesome, that are well
Speaker 1: outside what you and I can control. We need more
Speaker 1: stable households that have a deep commitment to not only
Speaker 1: making sure that young boys and girls make good grades,
Speaker 1: but that there are men and women of character. I
Speaker 1: think kids, uh and even adults need to have a
Speaker 1: better understanding of ecology and the importance of conserving not
Speaker 1: just individual species, but also conserving the ecosystem as a whole.
Speaker 1: But I think the number one thing that we can do,
Speaker 1: in addition to exposing more young people to the outdoors
Speaker 1: is doing exactly what you're doing on this podcast. And
Speaker 1: let's talk about the nexus of wild things, wild places,
Speaker 1: and people and how these resources don't just exist to exist,
Speaker 1: but they exist for us to for us to steward
Speaker 1: them and to enjoy them, and the only way to
Speaker 1: do that in perpetuity is to take care of them
Speaker 1: the best we can. I want to get to the
Speaker 1: foundation of why we have game laws. This is the
Speaker 1: language that we should all be familiar with and be
Speaker 1: able to wield in intelligent ways as we continue to
Speaker 1: carve out a stable position in modern society. Remember this
Speaker 1: the public trust doctrine. So, the public trust doctrine is
Speaker 1: one of the foundational pillars of the North American model
Speaker 1: of wildlife conservation, and it is a repudiation of the
Speaker 1: European model, which is essentially that if you owned a
Speaker 1: tract of land that you also owned the wildlife though
Speaker 1: that that rana. So you can go back hundreds of
Speaker 1: years ago, if there was a peasant that lived adjacent
Speaker 1: to royalty or some other aristocrat, and there was some
Speaker 1: way to prove that the peasant killed a deer that
Speaker 1: that came from the rich person's land, then they could
Speaker 1: be convicted for it. So private ownership, private ownership life
Speaker 1: of wildlife. Yes, yeah, The public trust doctrine repudiates that
Speaker 1: and says that there is such a universal interests in
Speaker 1: wildlife and seeing them flourish and the opportunity to enjoy
Speaker 1: wildlife that wildlife are universally owned by the public in
Speaker 1: the present and in the future. Now, that would have
Speaker 1: been radical doctrine that was unique to North America. Is
Speaker 1: that right? From a global perspective, Yes, that's correct. So
Speaker 1: this was something that was was part of what Shane
Speaker 1: Mahoney called American genius inside of the North American Mile
Speaker 1: of wildlife conservation that we It's so counterintuitive too, because
Speaker 1: you would think if you wanted to protect something that
Speaker 1: you would sent it down to centralized control and not
Speaker 1: let everybody else in on it. But we're saying everybody
Speaker 1: owns wildlife, So dear on my property, even though they're
Speaker 1: on my property, are not mine. That's there owned by
Speaker 1: my neighbor and by you and by people in Nebraska.
Speaker 1: That's correct. And the context for the public trust doctrine,
Speaker 1: I think is very important because a lot of it,
Speaker 1: the broad public support for it was born out of
Speaker 1: the early nineteen hundreds when we had exhausted wildlife to
Speaker 1: extra pation throughout the country and so from a conservation
Speaker 1: sportsman perspective, as a country, we were picking up the
Speaker 1: pieces and saying, how do we make this better? How
Speaker 1: do we not only increase wildlife on the landscape but
Speaker 1: also ensure that this doesn't happen to the next generation.
Speaker 1: So there was a big appeal at that time. There
Speaker 1: was like it made a ton of sense that that's
Speaker 1: what we needed to do. Are you saying that now
Speaker 1: there's voices that are saying that is not as relevant. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It has some challenges. Uh, It's met some resistance in
Speaker 1: other states, fortunately not Arkansas, but people are often tempted
Speaker 1: to think more about wildlife as an agricultural resource. There
Speaker 1: are some states where all animals and high fence farms,
Speaker 1: including native wildlife, are completely under private management and ownership.
Speaker 1: This is a new idea. Basically, high fences and privately
Speaker 1: owned native wildlife can threaten the public trust doctrine on
Speaker 1: which we've had so much success. Here's Austin on the
Speaker 1: impact of poaching on the system and a personal story.
Speaker 1: So when you think about the public trust doctrine and
Speaker 1: the success of the North American model of wildlife conservation
Speaker 1: writing on the back of this idea of public trust
Speaker 1: giving incentive for the common man to want wildlife to
Speaker 1: thrive on a macro scale, that's really what's happened. But
Speaker 1: someone that would infringe on those game laws would essentially
Speaker 1: be violating the public trust doctrine or stealing from it.
Speaker 1: And just saying I can take as much wildlife as
Speaker 1: I want, I can take more than I want. They're
Speaker 1: violating not just the wildlife but everyone else. And so
Speaker 1: I mean, that's the whole story of poaching. That's hurting
Speaker 1: the whole system. And when someone violates a game law
Speaker 1: in the form of poaching, essentially what they're saying is
Speaker 1: that they believe they have a higher claim to that,
Speaker 1: to that critter than than anyone else does. If we
Speaker 1: had that on at broad scale, our wildlife as we
Speaker 1: know it would wither and die. Just to illustrate that,
Speaker 1: I'll tell you a personal story. Uh Hantaalis in Arkansas.
Speaker 1: Uh and put some work into it in the off
Speaker 1: season last year. And it was a thing for my
Speaker 1: eight year old daughter and I to go out there
Speaker 1: and work. And then when deer season got closer, you know,
Speaker 1: morning time before school or church, she would crawl up
Speaker 1: in my lap and I've been drinking a cup of
Speaker 1: coffee and she wanted to look at trail camp pictures.
Speaker 1: So we had a good number of bucks out there,
Speaker 1: a lot of them were young. We're super excited getting
Speaker 1: ready for a season, and uh, then the rut comes around.
Speaker 1: There's no deer and I I just kind of chalked
Speaker 1: it up to you know, mother nature, the rut being off,
Speaker 1: it being warm. And then uh, the farmer that was
Speaker 1: there cut his beans. Uh he was late getting him
Speaker 1: in that he was like getting him out. And when
Speaker 1: he cut his beans, we found eleven dead bucks. There
Speaker 1: were no tire tracks leading up to him. All the
Speaker 1: horns are still on them. And so somebody's shooting these
Speaker 1: deer just to shoot him and my coach to the highway. Yes,
Speaker 1: very close to highway and my eight year old daughter
Speaker 1: asked me where did all the deer go? Dad? I said, well,
Speaker 1: somebody killed him? What did you kill him? No, honey,
Speaker 1: who killed him? I don't know? Well why don't you know?
Speaker 1: Well they did this thing called poaching. And I explained
Speaker 1: to her what poaching was, and she said, are they
Speaker 1: going to get caught? And I said, I hope so,
Speaker 1: but probably not. And she kind of thought about it
Speaker 1: for a little bit and she thought, well, if they're
Speaker 1: not going to get caught, can we or anybody else
Speaker 1: do the same thing? And to me, that's one sad
Speaker 1: to not only shows the amount of investment that people
Speaker 1: put into wildlife, and when somebody poaches, they're taking not
Speaker 1: necessarily the wildlife from them, but that investment from them.
Speaker 1: And then thirdly, just the secondary effects of poaching on
Speaker 1: on how people, even my eight year old daughter, views
Speaker 1: institutions and how they should behave if they don't think
Speaker 1: that they're going to get caught. In my opinion, this
Speaker 1: is the most egregious form of poaching, killing for killing sake.
Speaker 1: It's not hunters that do this. These people would fit
Speaker 1: into another category and don't deserve the label hunter. I
Speaker 1: want to ask Austin about the other types of poaching
Speaker 1: that are going on today. Food scarcity is a real
Speaker 1: thing in Arkansas. But the poachers that we catch, the
Speaker 1: narrative of I'm poaching because I have to that is
Speaker 1: non existent. The people that the Arkansas Game of Fish
Speaker 1: apprehends for poaching, they oftentimes have night vision technology, thermal scopes,
Speaker 1: infra red spotlights, and there is a high level of
Speaker 1: investment and work in time that often goes into their
Speaker 1: hardened decision to violate the law. A hardened decision to
Speaker 1: violate the law, that's the place you don't want to
Speaker 1: find yourself. Austin is now going to explain the open
Speaker 1: fields doctrine, which governs wildlife law enforcement. This is another
Speaker 1: thing that would be good to keep in your repertoire.
Speaker 1: I bet y'all didn't know that I could speak French.
Speaker 1: So the open fields doctrine is the notion that if
Speaker 1: you have a wildlife officer out there trying to enforce
Speaker 1: game law US, then they can freely cross from public
Speaker 1: land on private land. This is not just something that
Speaker 1: the Arkansas Game Fish came up with. This actually comes
Speaker 1: from the United States Sprent Court. It was a case
Speaker 1: in nineteen Hester versus the United States that said, uh,
Speaker 1: special protection a quartered by the Fourth Amendment in their persons,
Speaker 1: Houses and Effects, which is in the Constitution, does not
Speaker 1: extend to open fields. And the reasoning they're being from
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court which open fields describe that terminology to me,
Speaker 1: I don't understand that that's where I was going with it,
Speaker 1: is that the Fourth Amendment protections generally revolve around thinks
Speaker 1: that you have an expectation of privacy, and that comes
Speaker 1: from the Cat's case. The reasoning behind open fields is
Speaker 1: if you have a broad expanse of land, your expectation
Speaker 1: of privacy does not go to every single corner of
Speaker 1: the land that that it's insulated around your dwelling and
Speaker 1: what the court calls curtilage like tense trailers, cars that
Speaker 1: you have that kind of stuff. Uh. And so Arkansas
Speaker 1: and nearly every other state. If a game warden is
Speaker 1: is trying to get after a poacher and they believe
Speaker 1: that there's a poacher on private land, then under the
Speaker 1: open field doctrine, they can go apprehend that poacher without
Speaker 1: a search warrant. They couldn't search the house without a warrant.
Speaker 1: They couldn't search a mobile home next to the house.
Speaker 1: They couldn't search a car next to the house unless
Speaker 1: they witness the crime happen and the individual rain that's
Speaker 1: completely different. But for for warrant purposes, if they have
Speaker 1: evidence or reason to believe that there's poaching going on
Speaker 1: on private lands again out you know, outside the home
Speaker 1: or or the curtilage of a dwelling place, then they
Speaker 1: can go hop offense and try to apprehend that poacher
Speaker 1: without a search one. That's right, And the reason that's
Speaker 1: important is because the deer can cross defense too. If
Speaker 1: our natural resources, especially wildlife, can traverse private property and
Speaker 1: public property freely, then it's important for wildlife officers to
Speaker 1: be able to do the same to enforce the game laws.
Speaker 1: That's even more important going forward because if you look
Speaker 1: at the landscape, we're suffering from loss of habitat right
Speaker 1: and so as public land and private land become increasingly intermingled,
Speaker 1: it's a big deal to Americans that that game laws
Speaker 1: be enforced equally, that public land hunters are not more
Speaker 1: susceptible to game laws than say, private land hunters are,
Speaker 1: simply because of where they choose to hunt, and is
Speaker 1: that in jeopardy. Uh, not in Arkansas, but just in
Speaker 1: that it's been undermined and other just actions. How has
Speaker 1: that happen? They believe that the rights of rights of
Speaker 1: privacy in private property are more compelling than equal protection
Speaker 1: of the laws for private land hunters and public lean hunters.
Speaker 1: That's a tricky one, isn't it, Because we like, we
Speaker 1: all respect the rights of private land owners and we
Speaker 1: want that right. But in the macro picture of protecting wildlife,
Speaker 1: that's a that's a right that you know, we kind
Speaker 1: of choose to give away in a sense that we
Speaker 1: didn't choose it, but but we're okay with it. I mean,
Speaker 1: I want a game warden to be able to go
Speaker 1: on this guy's land and enforced game laws and in
Speaker 1: the same way you can do it on my land.
Speaker 1: I hope this conversation is giving us some more robust
Speaker 1: understanding of wildlife law enforcement, and I hope it's making
Speaker 1: us evaluate our own relationship with the law. This next
Speaker 1: story is extremely personal and meaningful to me. At the time.
Speaker 1: It shaped my life and it continues to do so.
Speaker 1: Here's me telling old Steve Ronnella about it. How humiliating
Speaker 1: I was bow hunting public land and had been walking
Speaker 1: for miles and miles and miles with a bow in hand, scouting,
Speaker 1: and I see a squirrel and I mean, I'm I'm
Speaker 1: not joking when I say this is maybe. I maybe
Speaker 1: shot a squirrel with a bow two other times in
Speaker 1: my life, and I mean, you know, kept the squirrel
Speaker 1: because it is not something I make a practice of.
Speaker 1: But just on that day, at the right time, the
Speaker 1: squirrel set there for long enough, and I said, man,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna shoot that squirrel. And I shoot that squirrel
Speaker 1: just at long shot, like I didn't think i'd hit him,
Speaker 1: you know, thirty yards and just nail him and the
Speaker 1: air goes through his hips and I go up and
Speaker 1: I actually set there looking at that squirrel, just thinking,
Speaker 1: doc Hunt, Why did I do this? And this ended
Speaker 1: up being a pretty formative moment in my young adult
Speaker 1: life for real, because I made a conscious decision that
Speaker 1: was like, man, the meats run, you know, broad head
Speaker 1: through the hams of this squirrel, and I just decided
Speaker 1: that I wasn't gonna take it, which I mean, only
Speaker 1: I know if this is true when I say it,
Speaker 1: but it's like highly out of character for me to
Speaker 1: or do something like that. And I walk out and
Speaker 1: on a I'm on a lonely stretch of public land. No,
Speaker 1: I mean, you still see cars out here, very much
Speaker 1: much less a game warden. And I'm walking to the
Speaker 1: road and I can see the road and I see
Speaker 1: a car coming. Now the car can't see me, and
Speaker 1: it's a dead end road, Steve so that this truck
Speaker 1: is going towards the dead end. My trucks at the
Speaker 1: end of the dead end. And I see that it's
Speaker 1: a game boarding truck. And when I saw that truck,
Speaker 1: I knew that I was gonna be held accountable for
Speaker 1: what I did. And and to be honest with you,
Speaker 1: I knew that God was gonna hold me to account
Speaker 1: of it because I could have just sat there. I
Speaker 1: could have just like hidden the woods until he turned around,
Speaker 1: because it is there's only one way for him to
Speaker 1: come out. And I knew that if I did that
Speaker 1: that I would be in big trouble with somebody that
Speaker 1: I was more worried about. And I walked right out
Speaker 1: to the road, and I didn't know how it was
Speaker 1: gonna come up, Like I wasn't gonna bring it up
Speaker 1: that I had shot a squirrel and left it in
Speaker 1: the woods. But I walked and start walking down the road,
Speaker 1: and sure enough, the the guy is coming back and
Speaker 1: he sees me. I could have stepped off the road
Speaker 1: and he'd have passed right by me, and there was nothing.
Speaker 1: I didn't have anything on me that would have given away.
Speaker 1: And there's no really no noticeable blood on the arrow.
Speaker 1: And he gets out and he's like, hey, what youre doing?
Speaker 1: And we talked and he's real nice guy. Since this time,
Speaker 1: me and this guy become friends, communicate with him. Every
Speaker 1: couple of years, I'll call him and man, that sucker
Speaker 1: spotted a speck of blood on my shoe about as
Speaker 1: big as a tic tac, you know. I mean, just
Speaker 1: a tiny speck of blood on my shoe that I
Speaker 1: hadn't even seen. And he was all funning games, and
Speaker 1: then he was like, what's that And I looked down
Speaker 1: I see that blood and he just turned stone cold,
Speaker 1: and I said, I shot a squirrel and I left
Speaker 1: in the woods. I just straight up just told him
Speaker 1: what had happened. And he said, why did you do that?
Speaker 1: And and I just I mean, I told the story.
Speaker 1: I just told you, and he thought I was lying. Uh,
Speaker 1: he thought I'd killed something bigger and it was hiding
Speaker 1: it or something, and he said, well, put your bow
Speaker 1: in the truck. We're gonna go find that squirrel. And
Speaker 1: I just went, man, I don't know if I can
Speaker 1: find that squirrel. That that that country down there is
Speaker 1: thick pine plantations, I mean like thickets, and it was
Speaker 1: way back. I've been walking for hours, and so I
Speaker 1: started saying, man, I don't know if I can find it,
Speaker 1: and he thinks I'm lying, and I'm just tell him
Speaker 1: the truth. I was so naive that actually said, well,
Speaker 1: you stay here and I'll go get the squirrel. You
Speaker 1: don't have to come with me. I'll bring it back
Speaker 1: to you. And he was like, no, sir. You know,
Speaker 1: he thought I was gonna and I didn't. I was like,
Speaker 1: why would you want to follow me? This is gonna
Speaker 1: be torture. And then I realized, you know, later that
Speaker 1: he thought I was gonna go hide something, you know,
Speaker 1: which was dumb for me. I wasn't a very good criminal.
Speaker 1: And anyway, luckily I was able to go back to
Speaker 1: the squirrel and found it just like he said. And
Speaker 1: he goes back to the truck and we have a
Speaker 1: long talk and while I skinned that squirrel on his
Speaker 1: tail gate. I didn't know the tail method or anything
Speaker 1: back then. I was just like pecking on it with
Speaker 1: a puggy knife. You know. It was at this point
Speaker 1: that the game warden issued me a citation for wanting waste.
Speaker 1: I was devastated, and I deserved it. But if there's
Speaker 1: one thing I believe, it's this. Everything happens for a purpose,
Speaker 1: and if you look yourself to that purpose, as painful
Speaker 1: as it can be, sometimes ten years later you'll be
Speaker 1: glad that you did. At that time, I had I
Speaker 1: had just started diving into doing some stuff in outdoor media,
Speaker 1: and Man I told him that. I said, man, I
Speaker 1: write articles about hunting. And I was just I wasn't
Speaker 1: trying to defend myself. The ticket was already written, but
Speaker 1: I was just like this, you busted me as something
Speaker 1: that is not typical for me, and uh, and he
Speaker 1: said you need to write about it. He immediately said,
Speaker 1: just come out with it, Clay. I mean, we became
Speaker 1: buddies in that moment. And I talked to him for
Speaker 1: probably forty five minutes after that, and he said that
Speaker 1: what you should do is just come out with it.
Speaker 1: And so I went home and wrote an article that
Speaker 1: was published in a regional magazine. The article was centered
Speaker 1: around what I learned through the event. It revolved around
Speaker 1: a very unique section of the Book of Proverb about
Speaker 1: hunting and diligence. So there's a verse and proverbs in
Speaker 1: the Bible. It's uh, it's probably probably twelve seven says
Speaker 1: lazy people don't even cook the game that they catch,
Speaker 1: but the diligent make use of everything they find. And man,
Speaker 1: what really it was a major turning point when I
Speaker 1: realized that I had lost some diligence. And since that time,
Speaker 1: I've been diligent with everything that I've done to the
Speaker 1: best of my ability, inside of following game laws and
Speaker 1: doing everything right. And uh, yeah, I was ashamed of
Speaker 1: that for years. Well, I mean that's still in ashamed
Speaker 1: of it, but it was, you know, I'm I'm sparing
Speaker 1: my own kids what I went through. I'm just from
Speaker 1: the get go being that we just follow the rules.
Speaker 1: You might make a stake right, you might misunderstand something
Speaker 1: to make mistake, for get something I don't know, but
Speaker 1: we follow the rules. We talked about what they are celebrated. Um,
Speaker 1: that's like a new generation. Yeah, I don't like to
Speaker 1: tell I don't like to tell. Oh, I don't like
Speaker 1: to tell the stories of growing up in a way
Speaker 1: that that's made to like celebrate it. You know, I'm
Speaker 1: just that happened. Nothing good comes from that. It's arrogant.
Speaker 1: It's arrogant. You know. I'm glad there was a I'm
Speaker 1: glad there was a sort of governor on it, meaning
Speaker 1: that that there was a there was a real limit
Speaker 1: to what people would do. But it's, uh, it's just
Speaker 1: baffling and like a little embarrassing. The degree to which
Speaker 1: just like this, like you know better m in two
Speaker 1: is wildlife and wild places continue to be jeopardized by
Speaker 1: shifting cultural value systems and the encroachment of civilization. Are widespread.
Speaker 1: Adherence to getting with the program AM, as Steve said,
Speaker 1: will be key to the continued success of the North
Speaker 1: American model of wildlife conservation. We gotta turn in poachers,
Speaker 1: we gotta watch our own selves, we gotta love the
Speaker 1: resource enough to sacrifice for it. Listening to the stories
Speaker 1: of my dad and hearing about Steve's upbringing, I truly
Speaker 1: think that we've come a long way in the last
Speaker 1: thirty years. It's my hope that the stuff I've done
Speaker 1: in media has carried with it a strong values, integrity
Speaker 1: and character based message, but I never wanted to paint
Speaker 1: the picture that I'm in Ivory Tower. A good dose
Speaker 1: of transparency is healthy, and I hope it tightens us
Speaker 1: down into positions of respect for the law, and one
Speaker 1: of my most valued practices is becoming deeply introspective and
Speaker 1: learning from mistakes. I can't thank you folks enough for
Speaker 1: listening to Bear Grease. Be sure to check out the
Speaker 1: Bear Grease merchandise on the meat eater dot com um,
Speaker 1: and please share our podcast with a friend and leave
Speaker 1: us a review on iTunes. Oh oh, that wasn't as
Speaker 1: good as russ arts right off, Bros. Right on