Speaker 1: This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listeningcast, you can't
Speaker 1: predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you
Speaker 1: by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands,
Speaker 1: or scouting for el, First Light has performance apparel to
Speaker 1: support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at
Speaker 1: first light dot com, f I R S T L
Speaker 1: I T E dot com. I'm not in the plumbing
Speaker 1: or appliance business, so I can share this hot tip
Speaker 1: for the listeners that happen to be in plumbing and appliance,
Speaker 1: in particular the intersection of plumbing and appliance. This came
Speaker 1: to me literally, it came into being a dream. In
Speaker 1: a dream, I was staying in a hotel and I
Speaker 1: was standing in the shower in the hotel and realize
Speaker 1: that there's one of those little espresso machines in there
Speaker 1: in the shower.
Speaker 2: Are you sure it wasn't body wash?
Speaker 1: No? No, I was astounded. In the dream. I was
Speaker 1: blown out.
Speaker 3: You could.
Speaker 1: Like like you're standing there showering and there's like a
Speaker 1: thing in the hotel and it had these little cups.
Speaker 1: It's like and you had a shot of espresso in
Speaker 1: the shower.
Speaker 3: Save yourself.
Speaker 1: A little time. Came to me in a dream.
Speaker 4: All right, some company start hotel.
Speaker 1: Tea listen, man, I know, and I'm just throwing it
Speaker 1: out there because I'm not in a position to capitalize
Speaker 1: on it. I'd have to move into plumbing, appliances, coffee business,
Speaker 1: coffee business, hotel contracting. I mean, come on, man's only
Speaker 1: got man's only got so much time. Joined today by
Speaker 1: doctor Ron Kendall, Professor of Toxicology. Yes at Texas State University.
Speaker 1: This is gonna be our first ever. There's two first.
Speaker 1: What did I say Texas State? I didn't. Is there
Speaker 1: such a thing? Yeah, I'm at Texas Tech. Okay, but
Speaker 1: is there a Texas State? Yeah? There is so many
Speaker 1: huh sorry, sorry about that Texas Tech. Uh, which I'm
Speaker 1: just gonna go out on a lemon say it's better
Speaker 1: than Texas State Texas Tech. And there's there's multiple first here.
Speaker 1: Because this is our first ever episode. I don't know
Speaker 1: how we've missed this in all the billion years we've
Speaker 1: been making the show. This is the first ever episode
Speaker 1: where we focused on the plight of the Bob White quail.
Speaker 1: Not only that, the other first is doctor Kendall has
Speaker 1: And people might hear this and they might not be
Speaker 1: overwhelmed by it, but just hear us out. We're gonna
Speaker 1: explain why the first ever FDA approved vaccine for wild birds. Now,
Speaker 1: this is coming at a time when vaccines are exceedingly
Speaker 1: divisive in American culture. You know, I'd be arguing about
Speaker 1: the COVID vaccine all the time. You still get in
Speaker 1: trouble for talking about this. They's still like ban you
Speaker 1: from YouTube for sand's controversial. So the vaccines has been
Speaker 1: in the news. But here we have a case of
Speaker 1: the first ever FDA approved vaccine for wild birds, and
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about that in the context of
Speaker 1: what in the hell has happened to all of the
Speaker 1: quail everywhere?
Speaker 3: Absolutely, I mean.
Speaker 1: A whole culture in some states, like the entire culture
Speaker 1: of quail hunting is vanished in a lifetime.
Speaker 3: That's true.
Speaker 1: My friends in Texas, my buddy Brad in Texas, they
Speaker 1: have they have a big family property and they have
Speaker 1: the quail. They still have the quail hunting trucks. All
Speaker 1: the art is quail hunting art.
Speaker 5: Did you guys have any around when you were a
Speaker 5: kid in Michigan.
Speaker 1: You had to go a little bit south southern, not
Speaker 1: a little bit.
Speaker 5: My dadad and my like my friends' dads used to
Speaker 5: talk about how they used to quail hunt in Pennsylvania
Speaker 5: and they're just like they were all gone by the
Speaker 5: time I was hunting.
Speaker 1: When I was still in college. So in the nineties
Speaker 1: we would go every winter over Christmas break and hunt
Speaker 1: quail in southern Illinois. They ain't there, right, Yeah, Uh,
Speaker 1: Brad's placed atteria. You go in all the art, it's
Speaker 1: quail hunting art. They like, are not. They don't hunt quail.
Speaker 1: M It ceased to be a thing.
Speaker 4: Where did they used to be?
Speaker 1: Well, we're going to talk about all that in a minute.
Speaker 1: First're gonna talk about cowboy hats. We're gonna getting at
Speaker 1: all that.
Speaker 3: So much.
Speaker 1: Listener feedback on my observation that that I was like,
Speaker 1: I was saying that I had a rather end fact,
Speaker 1: you know, perhaps an end defensible position, Doctor Kenda'll be
Speaker 1: curious to get your opinion on this. Or I was saying,
Speaker 1: if you're not livestock adjacent, you have no business running
Speaker 1: around in a cowboy hat. And I equated it too
Speaker 1: that if I ran around in a police uniform, if
Speaker 1: I dressed up like a cop, people would that would
Speaker 1: be odd, right, people would be like, where's he get
Speaker 1: off dressing up like a cop? I think you're reaching,
Speaker 1: But you can dress up like a cowboy without repercussion?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean you get mad at like like I
Speaker 5: don't know some rock star.
Speaker 2: Well, a police uniform designates a certain amount of like
Speaker 2: authority that they can I.
Speaker 1: Think of a cowboys having more authority than a cop.
Speaker 5: You're viewing it as an occupational like uniform type thing
Speaker 5: versus like a fashion thing.
Speaker 1: I'm just saying, think of the world and think of
Speaker 1: a world in which you could just run around in
Speaker 1: a police uniform. Right, it would be chaos. But why
Speaker 1: is it okay that you can run around on the
Speaker 1: cowboys suit as.
Speaker 3: It doesn't.
Speaker 6: Cowboy uniform and a cowboy hat? I mean, I feel
Speaker 6: like you need one more piece of a tire.
Speaker 3: A duster.
Speaker 5: If you have a cowboy hat and a dust, you know.
Speaker 1: You know, you know. The American Prairie Reserve, the movement
Speaker 1: in that area against the APR, against the American Prairie
Speaker 1: Reserve is like and even the even the head of
Speaker 1: the American Prairieserve acknowledges the genius of Save the Cowboys
Speaker 1: Stop APR right like a marketing however you feel, I
Speaker 1: personally am like like, ah, like you know, willing seller,
Speaker 1: willing buyer. They're buying land that's for sale, and as
Speaker 1: you know, sort of a foundational American principle is that
Speaker 1: when you buy land, you can do what you want
Speaker 1: with it. And so if the APR is buying land
Speaker 1: that's currently for sale and choosing to look at it
Speaker 1: or whatever, it's their business. I don't know. True, it
Speaker 1: doesn't mean you got loved, but I mean it's like
Speaker 1: it's kind of like an American principle, you know, you
Speaker 1: buy if you bought property and said, you know what,
Speaker 1: I decided on my property, I don't want any fences.
Speaker 1: It's like, why is that some insulting to people?
Speaker 4: It gets a little uncomfortable when we think about in Texas,
Speaker 4: remember that one spot in Texas, in that one place
Speaker 4: in Georgia where there were monkey farms.
Speaker 1: Well, you're right, you're right.
Speaker 4: That's when you know then you're like that slippery I know.
Speaker 1: But I'm seeing I'm I'm doing like Devil's advocacy and
Speaker 1: I'm trying to make a much broader point. So scrap
Speaker 1: the APR thing. What was I even talking about.
Speaker 5: That for Save the Cowboy?
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 1: People that are opposed to it say like that it's
Speaker 1: a brilliant bit of marketing. Save the Cowboy, Stop the APR.
Speaker 1: So I view it like my I'm trying to save
Speaker 1: the American cowboy, the integrity of the American cowboy. Meaning
Speaker 1: what if I see a guy, I'm like that there
Speaker 1: is a real cowboy. I'll stay to my kids that
Speaker 1: there as a cowboy. Now, I don't know, I could
Speaker 1: be getting duped.
Speaker 4: Could be.
Speaker 5: So you should have to have like a a carrying
Speaker 5: card to be a real cowboy.
Speaker 1: We just had the people in from the Shoshone and
Speaker 1: a rapa Hole tribes that they have to carry they
Speaker 1: have to carry what they were calling their Indian car. Yeah, sure, dude,
Speaker 1: ranch hands and stolen cowboy valory. This generated some KRIN
Speaker 1: pulled some good feedback from it. Guy says, I was
Speaker 1: just listening to Steve's rant on episode six fourteen about
Speaker 1: a fake ranch hand at the airport and the prevalence
Speaker 1: of people wearing cowboy hats. He goes on, I understand
Speaker 1: that Steve feels like most people he sees he has
Speaker 1: seen wearing a cowboy hat lately, have no business wearing one.
Speaker 1: As a US Marine Corps veteran, I fully understand his
Speaker 1: point of view. There are a lot of dipshits that
Speaker 1: buy surplus military unit I don't know this was the thing.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of dipshits that buy surplus military
Speaker 1: uniforms and pretend to be service memors veterans for the
Speaker 1: attention instead of growing a pair and actually joining the
Speaker 1: armed forces. However, as someone who did serve, I am
Speaker 1: not bothered in the slightest by those here. He uses
Speaker 1: a term I have never encountered.
Speaker 5: It's an interesting, colorful one.
Speaker 1: So that term, which I've never encountered. It combines the
Speaker 1: word knuckle with a euphemism for fornicator. Ninety nine percent
Speaker 1: of them are just this, he goes on. Ninety nine
Speaker 1: percent of them are just attention seeking fools who mean
Speaker 1: no harm, pose no harm, and rarely fool anyone worth fooling.
Speaker 1: The most they will ever achieve is a few moments
Speaker 1: of stolen valor. He's speaking not about the military uniform.
Speaker 1: I think he's speaking about stolen valor, Like is wearing
Speaker 1: a cowboy hat when you're not in the livestock business.
Speaker 1: This is stolen valor, not quite so funny.
Speaker 4: I love this guy, I love it.
Speaker 1: Stolen valor. He goes on. But even though I understand
Speaker 1: Steve's misgivings about wannabe cowboys, his contempt is misplaced. It's
Speaker 1: a hat. People like different types of hats. It's their
Speaker 1: right to express themselves freely, and I will fully defend
Speaker 1: anyone exercising that right, even the right school, even the
Speaker 1: night school, rejects that dress up as service members or cops.
Speaker 5: That's a little harsh on the night school.
Speaker 1: Long story short, everyone could tell the difference between a
Speaker 1: real cop, cowboy, veteran, et cetera, and the wannabes. Additionally,
Speaker 1: it's kind of weird that Steve has so bent out
Speaker 1: of shape over the cultural appropriation of cowboys.
Speaker 3: Let the clowns be clowns.
Speaker 1: Love you, William another guy. This is in reference to
Speaker 1: episode six fourteen quote. I'm quoting him here, Steve was
Speaker 1: complaining about people in cowboy hats. As much as I
Speaker 1: agree with his opinion on this, Steve needs a little
Speaker 1: reminder that these want to be cowboy hipsters are currently
Speaker 1: keeping the beaver pelt market alive. And well, I've acknowledged
Speaker 1: this again and again. Every time I bring it up.
Speaker 1: I acknowledge this. He goes out and say, well, I
Speaker 1: may think these people look like idiots, as long as
Speaker 1: my beaver pelts keep selling, they can play dress up
Speaker 1: all they want. Another one called cowboy hats on Liberals
Speaker 1: dear me eater Krue, Steve again got talking about his
Speaker 1: disdain for folks wearing cowboy hats and other than western
Speaker 1: wear who don't work in a livestock adjacent industry. I
Speaker 1: think his point can fundamentally be distilled into the perspective
Speaker 1: that cowboy hats and boots are you specific, and if
Speaker 1: you don't work in that industry, then the need for
Speaker 1: their use doesn't exist. But I think Steve should consider
Speaker 1: a broader user group. Many people go on trail rides
Speaker 1: or visit dude ranches on vacation, so they may well
Speaker 1: have a legitimate use for cowboy hats and cowboy boots.
Speaker 5: No, you can ride a horse with a baseball hat
Speaker 5: on dude.
Speaker 1: The fact that he would need a cowboy hat to
Speaker 1: go to a dude.
Speaker 2: Ranch that's the dress up he's taught. He's like referring
Speaker 2: to right now.
Speaker 6: He says, legitimate use a wider brim tat keeps the
Speaker 6: sun off.
Speaker 4: Here's the sun off, you know.
Speaker 1: Okay, but let's say you were out golfing all that
Speaker 1: day because the sun is still shining.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it'd be just it's appropriate on a golf.
Speaker 3: Course.
Speaker 1: Why is it that when you're out in the sun
Speaker 1: and there's a horse by you, you suddenly need a
Speaker 1: higher level of neck for tect. I mean, like if
Speaker 1: they were out digging ditches all day. It doesn't have
Speaker 1: anything to do with anything.
Speaker 4: It seems like the cowboy hat is just a superior
Speaker 4: hat I had better at doing its job than a cat.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to give airspace to the opposing viewpoint here,
Speaker 1: but I'll tell you this. I had exposure for a
Speaker 1: number of years to a dude ranch through circumstances I'll
Speaker 1: not get into, but I had some I would have.
Speaker 1: I would be a number of times spent a little
Speaker 1: bit of time at a dude ranch. And oddly the
Speaker 1: people that worked there were the most cowboy dressing up
Speaker 1: people on the planet. But they were all rich, kid,
Speaker 1: they were all rich boarding school kids and their parents
Speaker 1: would go to the Dude Ranch. Okay, rich kids from
Speaker 1: out East. They'd grow up going to the dude Ranch
Speaker 1: and playing cowboy. Then they get older and they get
Speaker 1: a little rebellious, and then they go to work at
Speaker 1: the place for a while as sort of like this
Speaker 1: little act of rebellion, and they would dress up like
Speaker 1: seventies cowboys. So everybody that works there dresses like a
Speaker 1: cowboy from the seventies. Everybody that works there, I don't know,
Speaker 1: like the Marlboro Man, like yeah, yeah, like silk scarf.
Speaker 1: You know, if you go and watch Ranchody Lucks, they
Speaker 1: all dressed like Ranchody Lucks. Yeah, and like yeah like seventies.
Speaker 5: Like Reynolds and what was the trans Am movie?
Speaker 1: Yeah, stuff like like yeah, you know when you uh
Speaker 1: and and there's like it's hard to express it. There's
Speaker 1: a little bit of like at this dude ranch too,
Speaker 1: there's a little bit of like a little sexy mixed
Speaker 1: in right up.
Speaker 4: Hm, that seems right.
Speaker 1: He goes on, did I get into anyways? He says,
Speaker 1: here he's attack. In my viewpoint, there's no different than
Speaker 1: wearing a cowboy, or no more different than dressing like
Speaker 1: a policeman. He says, the name is the same is
Speaker 1: not true for a police outfit. The public generally can't
Speaker 1: go on a ride along and dressed like cops as
Speaker 1: part of their vacation. It's a valid point, and it's
Speaker 1: probably illegal to impersonate a police officer. I think cowboy
Speaker 1: hats and boots are more similar to motorcycle jackets and boots.
Speaker 1: They serve a real purpose when you are riding, but
Speaker 1: it's also okay to wear them when you are not riding.
Speaker 1: Same with hiking boots and pants, or the scholarly apparel
Speaker 1: that Randall might wear, such as a tweed blazer with
Speaker 1: elbow patches. That mean said, I totally agree that spurs
Speaker 1: and the airport are a bit much. He goes on.
Speaker 1: A few years back, I made plans to go trail
Speaker 1: riding for the first time. I wanted a cowboy hat,
Speaker 1: but there aren't any Western wear stores near me in
Speaker 1: New Jersey. Even though John Stetson, this is a little
Speaker 1: thing I didn't know, even though he goes on, even
Speaker 1: though John Stetson is from New Jersey. So I ordered
Speaker 1: a Stetson hat off Amazon. It came in a plastic
Speaker 1: bag as a pancake.
Speaker 3: Oh.
Speaker 1: I processed the return and the new one also came,
Speaker 1: and Amazon told me to just keep the old one.
Speaker 1: I did that five more times and ended up with
Speaker 1: seven Stetsons, all flat. Then COVID hit and I never
Speaker 1: went a trail riding.
Speaker 5: I think maybe he wasn't getting legit stats, and from
Speaker 5: his Amazons.
Speaker 1: He says he's been wearing it gardening instead.
Speaker 2: Did you label this cowboy hats on liberals?
Speaker 1: Or was that?
Speaker 4: Was that fair thing?
Speaker 2: Because I would argue that the tourists wearing cowboy hats
Speaker 2: is mostly from like conservatives from Orange County who move
Speaker 2: up here because they're tired of liberal California and they're like,
Speaker 2: I'm gonna wear my cowboy hat.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like I've had enough of the bullshit exactly, I'm
Speaker 1: going to Montana and getting the cowboy hat.
Speaker 3: Hello, fellow cowboys, how are you? How do you do?
Speaker 1: Last one? Is this the last one? Last one? Airport
Speaker 1: cowboy hats? He begins his note with salutations. I couldn't
Speaker 1: help but think about Steve's disdain for people dressing his
Speaker 1: cowboys in the airport and wonder what the difference is
Speaker 1: between that and anyone wearing a baseball Jersey to a
Speaker 1: baseball game. I'm going to my kids tonight. I'm going
Speaker 1: to the there's a thing for my kids debate for
Speaker 1: debate club debate. Jimmy, Oh, this guy's not invited. Okay,
Speaker 1: so he's wanting to compare it.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 1: It's not like the fan is going there to pinch
Speaker 1: hit or step on the mound because the entire bullpen
Speaker 1: was somehow injured, but rather to support who they're rooting for.
Speaker 1: Chances are people in the stats and and Spurs are
Speaker 1: not cheering on their home team on the range. But
Speaker 1: would it be fair to say that maybe they're such
Speaker 1: big fans of the West lifestyle that they choose to
Speaker 1: portray themselves in that fashion. I don't believe the two
Speaker 1: situations are exact replicas of one another, meaning it's an
Speaker 1: imperfect analogy, but they seem hand in hand. Sports fans
Speaker 1: who waste their time and money dressing like overpaid, whiny
Speaker 1: athletes is a close enough comparison. In my less than
Speaker 1: humble opinion.
Speaker 2: I disagree. Yeah, also athletes taking astray what's going on here?
Speaker 4: I think I think that's the one toward the end
Speaker 4: is a good point.
Speaker 1: It's a great point. It's almost too obvious right here.
Speaker 1: He goes on to say, as for Steve's a version
Speaker 1: for cowboy hats that aren't in a hands, that aren't
Speaker 1: in livestock adjacency. He goes on, he says, I wonder
Speaker 1: how the non hunting public view cameo worn anywhere, but
Speaker 1: the woods no no camo has become not the same.
Speaker 1: I don't think you should wear it if you don't
Speaker 1: like I would question wearing it if you're not in
Speaker 1: an outdoor adjacency lifestyle like snowboarders. That annoys me, and
Speaker 1: I could pick that up as my next thing that
Speaker 1: annoys me. I'm shopping around.
Speaker 3: I gotta show.
Speaker 5: Though it's a small part of this based in the
Speaker 5: fact like that you feel like you just can't pull
Speaker 5: off a cowboy hat yourself.
Speaker 4: We've seen Steven a cowboy hat. I think he looked swell, swell.
Speaker 1: I'll return again to Ronnie Bamb to two things. Ronnie
Speaker 1: Bam told me never wear a hat that says hello
Speaker 1: before you do. And I wear a fur hat but
Speaker 1: I'm a trapper and uh and uh what was this
Speaker 1: other one?
Speaker 5: Personality has more personality?
Speaker 1: Yeah, and likewise, he says, this. He said, never wear
Speaker 1: a hat that has more personality than you do.
Speaker 4: This should be a shirt. It should be a podcast
Speaker 4: inspired meat eater shirts, cowboy hat with that, or like
Speaker 4: you know Raccoon had.
Speaker 1: And a yeah, hey did you did you? Did you
Speaker 1: eliminate the need for Brody to talk about Oh no, Brodie,
Speaker 1: are you ready?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 5: Are we jumping to spearing? Just very quickly, let me
Speaker 5: scroll back up. They're still at the top.
Speaker 1: Well, I thought you, I thought you were researching it.
Speaker 3: I get that.
Speaker 5: We got a letter from someone here in Montana. Just
Speaker 5: wanted to make sure that all interested parties were aware
Speaker 5: that amendment to the Montana Fishing Regulations had just has
Speaker 5: just been proposed that would open the Western Western District.
Speaker 5: Montana's divided into three fishing districts, East, Central, West, open
Speaker 5: the Western district up to spear fishing for northern Pikes.
Speaker 5: Have remembers of the crew are major proponents of spearfishing.
Speaker 5: He's just trying to like he supports this thing, he
Speaker 5: likes the idea. I'm not sure if this thing will
Speaker 5: get approved or not. But the thing is is a
Speaker 5: lot of Western Montana's waters are already open to spearfishing.
Speaker 1: For northern pike.
Speaker 5: Like, where there's pike, it's generally a lot of them.
Speaker 5: You can already go spearfishing, not all, not all, but
Speaker 5: a lot of them because they have pike in a
Speaker 5: lot of places they'd rather not have them. But they're
Speaker 5: not going anywhere. But it's basically like a free for
Speaker 5: all on them where they are. Like you were saying,
Speaker 5: the sea Lestwan, the clearwater. There's a small lake.
Speaker 3: Outside of.
Speaker 5: But yeah, yeah, so there are already places where you
Speaker 5: can do that.
Speaker 1: I don't have a problem with it, Like, I think
Speaker 1: it'd be great. I think it'll probably pass because they're
Speaker 1: trying to slow down the spread of North. I call
Speaker 1: him Northeast. When I was a kid, like my county,
Speaker 1: I lived in twin Town, but it was a Moskegon county,
Speaker 1: but there was a there's a wealthy neighborhood called North Miskegon,
Speaker 1: and everyone that didn't live in Northkegon hated like class
Speaker 1: and we called Northeast. Gotcha, everybody hated them except them.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, there's places where you can shoot pike
Speaker 5: with rifles. What's a big deal with with spearing them?
Speaker 1: Where can you shoot a pike with a rifle?
Speaker 5: I think there's still a seat there. May it may
Speaker 5: have been ended, but there at a time, like in Vermont,
Speaker 5: you could shoot them with rifles some places in the Northlake, Vermont.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that seems like it encourage some hazardous behavior. Man,
Speaker 1: they may have ended it, but they're taking shots at
Speaker 1: a shallow angle over hear the neighbor's house.
Speaker 5: Or something that you shot on a fish or two
Speaker 5: in your life.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, oh yeah.
Speaker 6: A little off topic. But I grew up in Whitefish
Speaker 6: and had a school mate acquaintance kid that was like
Speaker 6: two grades older than me, Die Spearfish in Whitefish Lake.
Speaker 6: He punctured a electric wire under the water.
Speaker 3: Super sad.
Speaker 1: Yeah, shot never the ice spearing, not spearfishing.
Speaker 6: No, he was under the water in the summer, swimming
Speaker 6: around looking for carp I believe, and uh a wire, yeah, electric,
Speaker 6: I believe. It was a two twenty vault to a
Speaker 6: water pump that was probably water in somebody's lawn. Yeah,
Speaker 6: he never came up, and his friend that realized he
Speaker 6: never came up dove in after him and when he
Speaker 6: touched him to release him, he got electrocuted, almost died too,
Speaker 6: but he didn't. I never heard what ended up happening
Speaker 6: if there was a lawsuit or whatever.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I want to jump one thing about this spearfishing thing.
Speaker 5: You know how spearfish and walleye is legal in like lake?
Speaker 5: Is it Lake Michigan.
Speaker 1: Well, it's legal, it's it's it's legal north of thunder
Speaker 1: Bay on the Lake Huron side, and it's no, it's
Speaker 1: legal south of thunder Bay on Lake hereon, and it's
Speaker 1: legal south of Grand Haven on Lake Michigan side.
Speaker 5: And real guys get all bent out of shape about it.
Speaker 1: Well, they don't have any reason to be because what
Speaker 1: they did they made a special license. So they know
Speaker 1: how many spearfishing certificates are being sold, and all spearfishermen
Speaker 1: have to submit a report, and they're going to be
Speaker 1: quite surprised at how few exactly wally dogs are getting
Speaker 1: killed relative to Roden real guys. And I don't think
Speaker 1: it is that contentious, right, It is a non thing.
Speaker 5: It's a non thing that I mean there when I
Speaker 5: was doing my research there at it, and something I
Speaker 5: found was that there'd be.
Speaker 3: Conflict. They made it.
Speaker 1: They went and made it provisional subject to revisiting, and
Speaker 1: it's it's a non issue. It's a non issue. But
Speaker 1: that's even different because they're talking about a native fish
Speaker 1: like you could always spear trash fish. I don't like
Speaker 1: to use that term. It rough fish, non game, non game.
Speaker 1: I take that back, Phil edit me out saying that
Speaker 1: it make it make its like.
Speaker 3: Non game.
Speaker 1: You'd always be a non game. And they're trying to
Speaker 1: open up like like Walleye Northeast, it might just be
Speaker 1: like primarily Walleye and there.
Speaker 5: And Montana is weird too because they have like in
Speaker 5: some places in the state, game fish are game fish,
Speaker 5: certain species of game fish or game fish, and then
Speaker 5: you go somewhere else in the state and that species
Speaker 5: is not managed as a game fish, like yellow perch.
Speaker 5: There's places where there's no limit. Then in Canyon Fairy
Speaker 5: you can only keep.
Speaker 1: Ten, which makes them a game fish. They magic to
Speaker 1: become a game fish. So it gets confusing. All right,
Speaker 1: we'renna talk about well are you ready? Can you explain
Speaker 1: toxicology doctor Kendall? I think of drunk people, Okay, I can.
Speaker 3: First of all, Steve, I'm glad to glad to be
Speaker 3: here and listen to this interesting conversation.
Speaker 1: What's your take on it? On the cowboy hat deal,
Speaker 1: like if you were a dictator of the world, Well,
Speaker 1: I think you got something there.
Speaker 3: I come from West Texas and we have true cowboys there,
Speaker 3: and generally speaking, we see true cowboys dressed as cowboys
Speaker 3: with cowboy hats associated with livestock or some agricultural industry.
Speaker 3: I in fact have a cowboy hat because I have
Speaker 3: a ranch with cows. So that's the real nature cards.
Speaker 4: To talk about this, He's.
Speaker 1: Got a cowboy card.
Speaker 3: So I got my cowboy card and I sold and
Speaker 3: bought a lot of cattle. Believe it or not, but
Speaker 3: an environmental toxicologist environmental toxicologist is an individual studying the
Speaker 3: the transport, fate and effects of chemicals and drugs on
Speaker 3: wildlife and human health how it affects reproduction, well being,
Speaker 3: and your health, including cancer. So that's what I do,
Speaker 3: and I've done it all over the world. I've traveled
Speaker 3: the world in my work and have been involved with
Speaker 3: the formation of what we call the Society of Environmental
Speaker 3: Toxicology and Chemistry that just celebrated its forty fifth annual meeting,
Speaker 3: bringing in people from all over the world this year
Speaker 3: to Fort Worth, Texas. And that's my forty fifth meeting.
Speaker 3: A charter member. So I've been involved a long time
Speaker 3: in this field. In fact, even in my high school
Speaker 3: and in my college days working with insect toxicologists that
Speaker 3: were developing chemicals to kill insects that affected cotton. Well,
Speaker 3: the question the bull weavil, and so.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't know one if I saw one.
Speaker 3: Well, I know what they look like and h But anyway,
Speaker 3: I got exposed to this kind of thinking a long
Speaker 3: time ago because at that point I was just a
Speaker 3: teenager working in a lab, and at that time, people
Speaker 3: didn't really think about what those chemicals were doing to
Speaker 3: our environment and to our fish and wildlife resources and
Speaker 3: to our health. Those were the days that kids would
Speaker 3: drive behind a truck spraying DDT to kill mosquitoes and
Speaker 3: they're just riding the fog. So, I mean, we just
Speaker 3: didn't understand that. So what I've been involved with is
Speaker 3: really a very challenging, interesting field, but also a sobering
Speaker 3: feel because on a global basis, we are dramatically impacting
Speaker 3: our planet and it concerns me with the loss of
Speaker 3: biodiversity and the amount of chemicals and chemical transport that
Speaker 3: now we're identifying, even in remote areas of the Arctic
Speaker 3: in the rainforest and so on. But as we were
Speaker 3: talking earlier, you were mentioning what happened to the quail,
Speaker 3: and you know, I was Karinn and I were talking.
Speaker 3: When I came in. She said, where are you from, Texas?
Speaker 3: And I said, no, I actually grew up in Florence,
Speaker 3: South Carolina. It was not far from Myrtle Beach. It's
Speaker 3: called the coastal Plain of South Carolina. And I grew
Speaker 3: up in the country. And I was lucky to have
Speaker 3: a grandfather that mentored me to the outdoors, and he
Speaker 3: gave me a lot of my environmental ethic. And he
Speaker 3: was taking me quaal hunting. I guess I was six
Speaker 3: or seven years old, and would walk around behind him
Speaker 3: as he would quail hunt. I didn't have a gun,
Speaker 3: but I was just so interested. And he had a
Speaker 3: fine bird hunting dog, a Llewellen Setter, and it used
Speaker 3: to be so interesting to me to watch him quaal hunt,
Speaker 3: and he was a very good shot. So by the
Speaker 3: time I got to be twelve years old, my grandfather
Speaker 3: actually would let me use his iron bird dog, and
Speaker 3: I started the quail hunt. And I can remember getting
Speaker 3: my first quail now when I was a kid in
Speaker 3: South Carolina. I actually hunted in a five mile radius
Speaker 3: of my house. I knew, I knew that territory. I
Speaker 3: walked it. I walked it and walked, and I had
Speaker 3: a map, and my map identified quail coves and in
Speaker 3: the fall.
Speaker 1: Help me understand what that means.
Speaker 3: For I'm gonna explain Steve, what a covey is is.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean the map. You're gonna get to that too.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna get to the mall great, because I need
Speaker 1: to see one of these maps.
Speaker 3: Well, that map was like priceless to me because it
Speaker 3: identified where the covees were. Okay, it is where I
Speaker 3: found a covey and a covey of quail in the
Speaker 3: fall of the year back when I was a kid,
Speaker 3: maybe fifteen or twenty quail twenty five quail in a group,
Speaker 3: and they they roost on ground together in a circle.
Speaker 3: Each night they feed together, and they for protection and
Speaker 3: also for thermal regulation. Well, the bird dog, the hunting dog.
Speaker 3: When I have five Llewellen Setters today, but those dogs
Speaker 3: learn how to trail that scent and they point the
Speaker 3: covey okay, maybe fifteen twenty yards away ten yards and
Speaker 3: then you walk in front of the dog, and those
Speaker 3: those when those quail come up as a cuvey. That's
Speaker 3: pretty pretty sporty shooting because most people they get so
Speaker 3: emotional when that big hovey comes up and you got
Speaker 3: twenty buzz bombs taken off, they can't focus. So it's
Speaker 3: a real art form. You gotta pick one out, you
Speaker 3: gotta pick one out, and you gotta stay on him.
Speaker 3: So it's a real art form of wing shooting. Okay.
Speaker 3: In this map, I was a kid, loved the outdoors
Speaker 3: and loved my fishing, and in it was my quail hounting.
Speaker 3: And so I had this map and I had generated
Speaker 3: of all the covey haunts that I could I could.
Speaker 3: I knew where I could go and find three or
Speaker 3: four covees in a two hour period based on that
Speaker 3: particular terrain. So you know, my interest in quail goes
Speaker 3: back to the very beginning. And what's so so concerning
Speaker 3: now is that I could literally walk out my back
Speaker 3: door sometime where I grew up and there'd be a
Speaker 3: covey of quail walking across the backyard.
Speaker 1: Okay, and that when you were when you were a kid,
Speaker 1: I was a kid.
Speaker 3: Now in that five mile radius of where I grew up.
Speaker 3: You might be lucky to find one covey where when
Speaker 3: I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old, there'd be fifty sixty,
Speaker 3: eighty covees. Okay, so the impact has been dramatic. Now
Speaker 3: I'm real four fortunate my quaal hunting buddies from a
Speaker 3: kid from twelve years old, we still hunt together. We
Speaker 3: still bird hunt together. They're both medical doctors in South Carolina,
Speaker 3: and so they they tell me, I mean, basically, wild
Speaker 3: quail hunting as we knew it as kids is gone
Speaker 3: unless you're spending massive amount of money to manage your
Speaker 3: ranch or something. So we've seen this happening across most
Speaker 3: of the wild Bob White quail hunting range.
Speaker 1: You might laying out that range for folks.
Speaker 3: Yes, the wild Bob White.
Speaker 1: Just to clarify my question, pick some point, I don't know,
Speaker 1: like some it could be nineteen fifty, it could be
Speaker 1: fourteen ninety two, I don't know, like like at some point,
Speaker 1: where were they?
Speaker 3: You know, the wild quail wile Bob White is a
Speaker 3: historically valuable game bird, and we often call them the
Speaker 3: canary of the prairie. They're good indicator species of grassland birds.
Speaker 3: In fact, the bob white is among the most declining
Speaker 3: bird in America today.
Speaker 1: It's amazing.
Speaker 3: And so the bob white looking back in time, probably
Speaker 3: had huntable populations and up to twenty five states through
Speaker 3: the southeast out into Texas, up into the Iowa, you know,
Speaker 3: Kansas and so on. So when we look at it now,
Speaker 3: some of the best quail hunting left in America is
Speaker 3: in West Texas and southern Texas. But it's West Texas's
Speaker 3: where I've done a lot of my research. And we
Speaker 3: call it the Alamo of wild quail hunting left in
Speaker 3: North America for bob white quail. And so you know,
Speaker 3: it's really an interesting thing to look at as we're
Speaker 3: losing this biodiversity. Okay, and because the wild quail people
Speaker 3: love them in Texas, and there's so much interest in
Speaker 3: preserving and conserving them, not just hunting them. But they
Speaker 3: are just an important indicator species of our grassland birds.
Speaker 3: So I originally came to Texas, Caran, you were asking me,
Speaker 3: I originally came to Texas in nineteen ninety seven to
Speaker 3: found an institute called the Institute of Environmental and Human Health. Okay,
Speaker 3: and I was also a founding chairman of the Department
Speaker 3: of Environmental Toxicology where we trained doctoral and master students
Speaker 3: and now the field of environmental toxicology. When I was
Speaker 3: a graduate student, we didn't have those degrees, okay, so
Speaker 3: this is an important degree now. And the last twelve
Speaker 3: years after moving out as director and chair, I founded
Speaker 3: the Wildlife Toxicologyaboratory, and that's where we have worked extensively
Speaker 3: with the United States Food and Drug Administration and to
Speaker 3: develop a treatment for a disease in our wild quail.
Speaker 3: Let me back up a little bit as we look
Speaker 3: at agriculture and habitat impacts to our wild quail populations.
Speaker 3: That's very significant and for the listeners, the habitat means
Speaker 3: where quail live, where they occupy to reproduce and survive
Speaker 3: the winter and breathe in the spring and the summer.
Speaker 3: So we've seen increase in predator populations like hawks. Okay,
Speaker 3: we can't shoot a wildhawk anymore, so they're all protected. Well,
Speaker 3: a lot of them feed on quail, including the Cooper's hawk,
Speaker 3: which is the most significant aerial predator to the wild quail.
Speaker 3: And so we've seen changes in agriculture. Of course, heavy
Speaker 3: agricultural chemical use, Okay, that exposes quail and so on.
Speaker 3: So I look at it as a multitude of variables
Speaker 3: that have come together to suppress our wild quail.
Speaker 4: Can I ask you just a timeline question, like, are
Speaker 4: we seeing the decline increase more twenty years ago, fifty
Speaker 4: years ago?
Speaker 3: Absolutely?
Speaker 4: I like, what's you know if we were to graph
Speaker 4: chart that, what are we looking at across a timeline.
Speaker 3: Well, a lot of huntable populations have already been lost,
Speaker 3: say in the Carolinas and Virginia and so on. But
Speaker 3: as we even look at Texas for the last say,
Speaker 3: go back to the seventies to now, you're seeing a
Speaker 3: general decline. Okay, you have bumps of increases followed by crashes,
Speaker 3: all right, And that's that I want to get I'm
Speaker 3: going to get to that in just a minute. So,
Speaker 3: but if you look at the curve over time, the
Speaker 3: curb is generally going down about three or four percent
Speaker 3: a year, all right.
Speaker 1: And that curve pitched off at a round when in the.
Speaker 3: Seventies, approximately late sixties seventies. Okay, Because when I was
Speaker 3: hunting quail in the late sixties and early seventies, it
Speaker 3: was unbelievable. It's okay, and I'm talking about you could
Speaker 3: go out in an afternoon find ten or fifteen covees
Speaker 3: of wild quail, Okay, in an afternoon. It was nothing
Speaker 3: back then. Now people come and may go quail hunting
Speaker 3: just a few years ago, even in Texas, and I'd
Speaker 3: heard maybe they find one covey and hunt a whole weekend,
Speaker 3: all right, So that's not very good quail hunting. And
Speaker 3: when my buddies from South Carolina come to Texas, their
Speaker 3: standard is at least twenty covees a day, okay hunting
Speaker 3: a few hours in the morning and a few hours
Speaker 3: in the afternoon. And generally I could provide that, but
Speaker 3: only in specific areas. And what when we first started
Speaker 3: looking at the whole quail question, it was largely precipitated
Speaker 3: by a major crash of our wild quail back in
Speaker 3: twenty ten in West Texas and on some of the
Speaker 3: finest habitat that you could have a place where quail lived.
Speaker 3: I mean, some of these ranches were superior. There was
Speaker 3: adequate rainfall, the cover looked great. We were seeing lots
Speaker 3: of broods of little baby quail. So everybody said, wow,
Speaker 3: I mean we're going to have an unbelievable year. Everything
Speaker 3: we were good, everything looked good. Well by the time
Speaker 3: we got to October November, nobody could find quail. I
Speaker 3: mean they were gone, and on one of the best
Speaker 3: ranches you could find. It's a picture book quail hunting ranch.
Speaker 3: They didn't hunt for five ye five years. They and
Speaker 3: they had before that had some of the finest quail
Speaker 3: hunting that you could have ever imagined. It took five
Speaker 3: years to recover that population, even in a good zone
Speaker 3: of West Texas. So this generated a large research initiative
Speaker 3: funded by sportsman Steve in Texas Park City's Quail Coalition
Speaker 3: of the Rolling Planes, Quail Research Foundation and so on
Speaker 3: sportsmen and they said, we have got to figure out,
Speaker 3: when we have this kind of habitat and perfect conditions,
Speaker 3: climate and so on, for that particular year in twenty ten,
Speaker 3: what the heck happened to dark quail. They were literally gone.
Speaker 3: And our data suggested that we're not talking about losing
Speaker 3: some of them on some of the ranches we were
Speaker 3: looking at, We're talking losing ninety percent, all right. And
Speaker 3: so this began a multi university research initiative to look
Speaker 3: at environmental contaminants, pesticides, viruses, bacteria and so on?
Speaker 1: Was the fire ant in the mix? And if not?
Speaker 1: Can you hit on that? I hear that all the time.
Speaker 3: Well, I know a lot about the fire ant. You're
Speaker 3: going to have got me off track there, but I'll
Speaker 3: address it. Well, No, I decided, like.
Speaker 1: The whole what happened when I have this conversation with
Speaker 1: people who are not as not authorities like you are
Speaker 1: in the mix? Is this like fire ants well kill babies?
Speaker 3: Believe it or not. For my master's degree at Clemson University,
Speaker 3: I studied the fire ants sol Anopsis and victa and
Speaker 3: and I know a lot about them. And uh, and
Speaker 3: we were at that time testing an organic chlorine pesticide
Speaker 3: called my rex that was utilized to be sprayed from
Speaker 3: an airplane and a corn cob grit bait that the
Speaker 3: ants would pick up and take into the mound and
Speaker 3: kill the queen. Okay, but it was an organic chlorine
Speaker 3: like DDT, So we ultimately couldn't use that anymore. And
Speaker 3: that's a whole nother story. Maybe we can do another
Speaker 3: podcast in organal chlorine pesticides.
Speaker 1: I'd love you.
Speaker 3: I'm serious, I'm serious and so, but in my opinion,
Speaker 3: they are part of the mix. But they didn't wipe
Speaker 3: out our quail. Okay, they just didn't.
Speaker 1: And I'll tell you the argument is just so clear
Speaker 1: on it because I might be wrong about this. They uh,
Speaker 1: when the when the egg hatches, they bite the hatchling
Speaker 1: and kill it.
Speaker 3: It's possible. But I can still remember, uh, I guess
Speaker 3: I was about sixteen years old. I was quail honeing
Speaker 3: near my home and this area, this field burned, and
Speaker 3: there were lots of quail in this field, like four
Speaker 3: or five covey all right, and there were fire ant
Speaker 3: mounds all over the place. And I looked at it
Speaker 3: and I said, wow, this is a good bit of
Speaker 3: fire ant mouns here and they're quail here. So the
Speaker 3: fire ant, in my opinion, does not necessarily wipe out
Speaker 3: the quail. They may have some impacts on when the
Speaker 3: hatchlings hatch and so on. It's no, it's not the
Speaker 3: big gun. It's not the silver bullet. And but what
Speaker 3: I'm going to tell you is I think we've identified
Speaker 3: one of the silver bullets that are really hitting our
Speaker 3: wild quail. And so so I talked about this big
Speaker 3: project called Operation idiopathic decline because nobody knew what was
Speaker 3: the cause. It was called idiopathic ido because nobody could
Speaker 3: When when a doctor does an operation ideopathic evaluation, they
Speaker 3: don't know what's wrong with you. And so so with
Speaker 3: the quail, this this terminology was coined with these foundations
Speaker 3: coming together, funding all of this multidisciplinary research, and what
Speaker 3: emerged and what's been a really undervalued area in wildlife
Speaker 3: conservation are diseases, okay, and so this has been one
Speaker 3: of the big unstudied areas that you know, I became
Speaker 3: a parasitologist and I never even thought I would engage that.
Speaker 3: So we so with this old ideal operation idiopath that declined,
Speaker 3: big research program. What emerged in Texas, particularly in Western Texas,
Speaker 3: was the occurrence of parasitic infections. And there were two
Speaker 3: parasites that we identified in our wild quail, and one
Speaker 3: was the eyeworm oxy spy rural pat rowley. The eyeworm
Speaker 3: what is an eye worm. It's a worm that has
Speaker 3: a sophisticated mouth part and it locates in the eye
Speaker 3: of a quail and it feeds on tissues and so
Speaker 3: on in the rear of the eye. Generally and including
Speaker 3: the heart what we call the hardarian glen, which is
Speaker 3: important for immune function and tear production. Nevertheless, this ie
Speaker 3: worm is located in the eye and there quite large.
Speaker 3: The female eyeworm adult will stretch across a penny. Okay,
Speaker 3: and if you extrapolated that ee worm in that little
Speaker 3: quail to your eye, that eyeworm would be the size.
Speaker 1: Of a toothpick.
Speaker 5: How were they picking this worm up?
Speaker 3: Okay, good question. We have completely defined the life cycle
Speaker 3: and published this. Steve, the reader of the listeners here
Speaker 3: can go of my website at Wildlife Toxicology Lab dot
Speaker 3: org and everything I'm talking about we've published the world
Speaker 3: scientific literature. Okay, so we we we have pursued this
Speaker 3: step by step by step, and I'll get to the
Speaker 3: FDA work in a little bit because that was a
Speaker 3: decade of work.
Speaker 1: Take your time.
Speaker 3: But the ie worm is a pretty sophisticated creature. They
Speaker 3: have a very sophisticated mouth where they can attach and feed.
Speaker 3: But they've been around a long time. We're not completely
Speaker 3: sure of their in total total biological history, but they
Speaker 3: are ninety six percent related to the Central African eyeworm
Speaker 3: in the human called loa loa, and that worm in
Speaker 3: a human can damage the eye, can result in blindness,
Speaker 3: actually can penetrate the brain. Okay, So that eeworm in
Speaker 3: a quail is highly related to a pathological infection even
Speaker 3: in the human being. Okay.
Speaker 4: Is the quail eye their cuisine of choice or do
Speaker 4: we see them in other bird species.
Speaker 3: I'll get to that corin lots of good questions here
Speaker 3: the the it's a fascinating life history. But where the
Speaker 3: quail basically will release eyeworm eggs and it's droppings, Okay,
Speaker 3: as it's in a field feeting, and crickets and grasshoppers
Speaker 3: come along and eat the droppings, and they ingest the egg.
Speaker 3: The egg hatches in the cricket gut or the grasshopper
Speaker 3: and it develops into what we call the infective L
Speaker 3: three larvae. Okay, so there's it's a larvae. So the
Speaker 3: quail comes along and grabs that cricket. Believe it or
Speaker 3: not that that larvae can exit the exoskeleton of the
Speaker 3: cricket and migrate up the esophagus into the nasal sinus
Speaker 3: into the eye of the quail.
Speaker 1: Coming out of the quails crop, yes, or gizzard or
Speaker 1: something and the crop in ten minutes, that's all. And
Speaker 1: what we get in the quail eats that cricket. Yep,
Speaker 1: and the cricket's got the larvae in its gut. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's something bitch comes out, shoots up into his
Speaker 1: nasal capaccy or cave, he gets in his eyeball.
Speaker 3: You can't believe it, but it's true. In ten minutes.
Speaker 3: In ten minutes, that's so weird.
Speaker 1: Does even know where to make a break for it.
Speaker 3: It's a lot of things about biology we don't fully understand.
Speaker 3: But the only thing I know is number one. Then
Speaker 3: in faction carried by a given cricket may be more
Speaker 3: than one one infective FLORIVI. So one cricket could be
Speaker 3: ten ten eye worms. Okay, And then once that worm
Speaker 3: gets in the quail. What we've learned now is it
Speaker 3: pretty much is going to be there to the quail dies.
Speaker 3: Their long lived, very long lived, and they actually mate,
Speaker 3: the male and female mate in the eye and they
Speaker 3: they they produce eggs. We have the listeners can go
Speaker 3: to my website and see pictures. But the female eyeworm
Speaker 3: is loaded with eggs. They're egg producing machine and so
Speaker 3: so basically they release the eggs, they're they're swallowed, they're
Speaker 3: going to the elementary track over, it starts all over
Speaker 3: and so and what what is so amazing and we
Speaker 3: were the first ones to discover this is you can
Speaker 3: go from a relatively clean quail population, maybe with ten
Speaker 3: percent infection, to a month or six weeks later you
Speaker 3: have ninety five percent of your birds infected with eyeworms. Okay,
Speaker 3: so it happens very fast. The epidemiology is extremely interesting.
Speaker 5: Is that because they're a bird that travels in tight
Speaker 5: little packs or.
Speaker 3: We think that precipitates it, because you know there when
Speaker 3: they are with covees, do they do? There are exposed
Speaker 3: to each other every day. Now in the spring they
Speaker 3: break up and pair off, okay, and so that's when
Speaker 3: they're reproducing. But we're seeing that the infection with the
Speaker 3: eyeworm can literally emerge into a zonotic event fast. And
Speaker 3: so I as an environmental toxicologist studying this first, I said,
Speaker 3: is it plausible that we could go from a ranch
Speaker 3: to a county of infection in the matter of a
Speaker 3: month or two. Answers, Yes, it can. It travels fast.
Speaker 5: How do the quails end up dying? What kills them.
Speaker 3: Okay, Wow, you guys are are aggressive. You want to know, Well, uh,
Speaker 3: what we're seeing is we we we have we've had
Speaker 3: FDA demonstration ranches where we've been testing the medicated feed
Speaker 3: I invented. Okay, and the testimonials are amazing because one
Speaker 3: man and wife live on their ranch and they used
Speaker 3: to they wear my phone out calling me about quail
Speaker 3: flying into their windows and house and killing themselves. Okay,
Speaker 3: oh okay, because it affects vision. And so uh, once
Speaker 3: we started using the medicated feed on this particular ranch
Speaker 3: right at four years ago, not one quail has flown
Speaker 3: into that house.
Speaker 1: Oh I was driving them blind. Yeah, that's what we
Speaker 1: ye know.
Speaker 3: So yeah, and what you got to understand, Well, Steve,
Speaker 3: I'm a quail hunter, I gather, I'm an outdoorsman, I'm
Speaker 3: a rancher, and I'm a scientist. Okay, so I kind
Speaker 3: of bring it all together. So I'm not just in
Speaker 3: some lab pontificating. I actually understand quail, their biology, their
Speaker 3: behavior and so on. And so I've seen Cooper's hawks
Speaker 3: go after quail when a quail leaves the ground flying,
Speaker 3: they got to be ninety nine percent on the go
Speaker 3: or that Cooper's Hawk's probably gonna catch them. It's unbelievable,
Speaker 3: dynamic a watch.
Speaker 1: That's why he's hauling ass like that. You got him
Speaker 1: and so and so.
Speaker 3: What I'm trying to say is quail have got to
Speaker 3: be Olympians athletes every day. So anything that suppresses their
Speaker 3: energy or affects their keenness of sight and all, it
Speaker 3: puts them at a disadvantage. And we know this now
Speaker 3: because what we're seeing with our medicated feed. We just
Speaker 3: had a major scientific paper come out at the International
Speaker 3: Journal of Parasitology, Parasites and Wildlife. It's on my website
Speaker 3: people can look. But what we've been able to see
Speaker 3: is we've been able to increase our quail survivability with
Speaker 3: the use of the medicated feed up to forty percent annually, okay,
Speaker 3: which most people estimate less than ten percent will make
Speaker 3: it to the next year. God, we're seeing dramatic increase
Speaker 3: in survivability and a three hundred percent increase in the
Speaker 3: quail population compared to untreated sites in the same area.
Speaker 3: So the point is is we know these parasitic infections.
Speaker 3: Now we've got the evidence that they are impairing survivability
Speaker 3: of our wild quail.
Speaker 1: Can you can you touch on that second parasite.
Speaker 3: Yes, the second one that that we discovered and published
Speaker 3: a lot of papers on. Now, it's called the sekl worm,
Speaker 3: and it it lives in the secum of a wild quail.
Speaker 3: The secum is assisting the quail and digesting all the
Speaker 3: seeds it's eating. Okay, The Sicca worm lives and feeds there.
Speaker 3: And we've seen secle worm and what is.
Speaker 1: That thing them? I'm not familiar.
Speaker 3: It's just part of the digestive tract associated with the
Speaker 3: small intestine. Okay, But but again it's just it's it's
Speaker 3: an area that is secreting certain digestive enzymes, particularly for
Speaker 3: fiber digestion. All right, but these sickle worms can build
Speaker 3: up to large quantities in the quail. Now, Corinne, you
Speaker 3: asked what the our worm was. The Sicca worm is
Speaker 3: more than ninety percent related to the round worm or
Speaker 3: the scaret in your dog. It's essentially a scaret. And
Speaker 3: I saw your two dogs earlier today. I bet you
Speaker 3: you worm deworm your dogs regularly at least.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, she means to Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, I tell you these Sicca worms can build up,
Speaker 3: we found seventeen hundred and one quail. Oh and the
Speaker 3: poor quail.
Speaker 4: It looked like from on the outside.
Speaker 3: Well, the poor quail, you know, they have a well
Speaker 3: developed breast muscle because when they come off the ground,
Speaker 3: they explode and they're moving fifty miles an hour in
Speaker 3: just a few seconds. Okay, h a dog pointed this
Speaker 3: bird and the dog caught it. The bird couldn't fly,
Speaker 3: and so they brought it to us, and it had
Speaker 3: seventeen hundred sec worms. So I mean, and this particular
Speaker 3: group was reporting what we call feather piles of kills
Speaker 3: of quail kills on the ground. The predators were really
Speaker 3: hitting them hard. They were very infected with seka worms.
Speaker 3: So we think the secret worm is about as important
Speaker 3: as the eyeworm. Okay, now we've learned something from our
Speaker 3: brethren in Scotland and the United Kingdom where they hunt
Speaker 3: the red grouse, very important game bird over there, and
Speaker 3: the red grouse was suffering from dramatic population declines on
Speaker 3: given years. And research showed that the red grouse suffered
Speaker 3: from a worm and there seek them as well. Okay,
Speaker 3: was a sick of worm and it caused the birds
Speaker 3: not to be able to fly as fast because they
Speaker 3: reduced energy from aerial predators. And believe it or not,
Speaker 3: it caused the female grouse setting the eggs to emit.
Speaker 3: Emit a smell that the foxes could key in on
Speaker 3: and they were destroying all the nest. So so the
Speaker 3: behavior of the red grouse by the scientific team in
Speaker 3: the UK was studied. And you know, the red grouse
Speaker 3: is eating, you know, a lot of fiber, so they
Speaker 3: have to go get grit every day, all right, that's
Speaker 3: part of their behavior. And so the Scottish scientists identified
Speaker 3: where the grit piles were where the red grouse would go,
Speaker 3: and they said, if we could simulate a grit pile
Speaker 3: and put a drug in, maybe the grouse would eat it.
Speaker 3: Well they did, and they were able to knock out
Speaker 3: these infections, are suppress them and and the grouse. We're
Speaker 3: not experiencing these kind of population crashes anymore. So and
Speaker 3: I know this, know this team, and I've been on
Speaker 3: a program with them both at a quail seminar. But anyway,
Speaker 3: so we we had evidence that the UK and Scotland
Speaker 3: could do this, but the United States Food and Drug
Speaker 3: Administration doesn't register drug treatments for wild animals.
Speaker 1: Okay, so kick you for a couple of hours. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I want to get into this. Okay, I got a
Speaker 1: couple of back up. I got a back up on
Speaker 1: a couple of things I never associated. I never thought
Speaker 1: about high fiber with grit. Does a does a hawk? Okay,
Speaker 1: does a redtail hawk? Does he need grit? Does he
Speaker 1: ever go get grit?
Speaker 3: He's mainly a meat eater. Yeah, to my knowledge, red
Speaker 3: tae hawks do not go get grit. I've never seen one.
Speaker 1: Do they have a gizzard though? They gotta have a gizzard, right?
Speaker 1: Or does the gizzard only function if it has a grit,
Speaker 1: has a grit in it?
Speaker 3: The latter?
Speaker 1: Okay, So the gizzard is a grit contracted part.
Speaker 3: The gizzard is part of species of birds that are
Speaker 3: eating grains seeds. The gizzard is a grinding machine, so
Speaker 3: to speak, and it requires abrasive substrate like rocks grit. Okay,
Speaker 3: So these red grass and Scotland are eating a lot
Speaker 3: of fiber and they have to go to these grit
Speaker 3: piles every day every day.
Speaker 1: You know, my kids the reason I'm asking about this,
Speaker 1: My kids have these pet pigeons. They use a lot
Speaker 1: of grit, and what they do is they get all
Speaker 1: the grit from the shingles on the roof.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I believe it.
Speaker 1: That could be a toxicology problem.
Speaker 3: That could be a toxic cology problem. You got that right, Yeah.
Speaker 5: Before you jump into like how you got the drug
Speaker 5: out there, you were doing all your research on quail
Speaker 5: in West Texas. Did you find that those parasites were
Speaker 5: a problem with quail in other parts of the country also.
Speaker 1: Yeah, South Calina. Yes.
Speaker 3: Well, what this has been very research intensive and as
Speaker 3: far as what I'm telling you now is we had
Speaker 3: absolutely no clue about this back in twenty twelve, okay,
Speaker 3: when we first opened the book and said, where do
Speaker 3: we go with this thing? And so we started looking
Speaker 3: across the border in New Mexico and we actually found
Speaker 3: it in the blue quail, the scale quail, all right,
Speaker 3: So there is some interface there and believe it or not,
Speaker 3: And we've published a paper on this. We've seen it
Speaker 3: in the prairie chicken, all right. So they are the
Speaker 3: same genus and species as in the prairie chicken. And
Speaker 3: we've now I've got a graduate student working on this.
Speaker 3: We now see it in a several species of songbirds
Speaker 3: the eye worm, not the SEQ worm, the eyeworm. So
Speaker 3: this thing could be continental. We've just had samples submitted
Speaker 3: to us from Montana in sharp tailed grouse and the
Speaker 3: gray partridge. You got it here, it's in Montana. And
Speaker 3: I'm telling you an eyeworm is dangerous. They are dangerous
Speaker 3: in the I birth.
Speaker 1: And that could be what that could be those those
Speaker 1: same species of worms, the eye and seek them seem
Speaker 1: yes that those worms could be in bob we quail
Speaker 1: in Kentucky. They could be in bob We quail in
Speaker 1: South Carolina.
Speaker 3: Yes, And then we're this thing. This whole thing is
Speaker 3: expanding now. And we've had so many people reaching out
Speaker 3: to us because wildlife disease investigation and wildlife management is
Speaker 3: just pretty much been ignored, okay, and people just think
Speaker 3: that if you've got great habitat and good rainfall, you'll
Speaker 3: just have quail. Well that's not true. That's kind of true.
Speaker 3: In certain years you will. But I take it back
Speaker 3: to twenty ten. On one of the top ranches for
Speaker 3: quail management in the state of Texas won all the awards,
Speaker 3: he lost all his quail, all right, So that hypothesis
Speaker 3: of we got a good habitat and some rainfall, we're
Speaker 3: gonna have a lot of quail. That doesn't necessarily work
Speaker 3: and so, but what is really awesome is that since
Speaker 3: we introduced the medicated feet on that particular wrench, he
Speaker 3: hasn't seen a crash in years. And that's another thing.
Speaker 3: We've got several of these FDA approved demonstration ranches and
Speaker 3: we've been sustaining huntable quail populations while the neighbors aren't hunting.
Speaker 5: You got to give the neighbors some of that stuff.
Speaker 3: Well, I kind of you can't imagine what I had
Speaker 3: to go through even to get a ranch approved for
Speaker 3: demonstration site.
Speaker 1: Let's let's jump into that talk about the FDA. Is
Speaker 1: there reluctance that they don't do that? Is their reluctance
Speaker 1: that that by approving wildlife drugs there's a Pandora's box
Speaker 1: and unforeseen consequences.
Speaker 3: Well, first of all, I've had a lot of experience
Speaker 3: at EPA, being the past chairman of the Scientific Advisory
Speaker 3: Panel for Implementation of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Redenticide Act.
Speaker 3: I know a lot about EPA regulatory mandates. I did
Speaker 3: not know what I was getting into with the United
Speaker 3: States Food and Drug Administration. They are very tough at
Speaker 3: evaluating registration of drugs. I started in approximately twenty thirteen, fourteen,
Speaker 3: developing preliminary data and communication with the FDA about my
Speaker 3: interest in this whole parasitic disease issue and a treatment.
Speaker 3: And we had developed a dialogue and they said it
Speaker 3: seems to make sense. And historically FDA they just don't
Speaker 3: register drugs for the natural habitat. Okay. So basically what
Speaker 3: we got done, and I will tell you what we
Speaker 3: got done. It's not a vaccine. It's a medicated feed
Speaker 3: drug treatment. That is the first medicated feed treatment FDA's
Speaker 3: ever registered for a wildlife species and the natural habitat
Speaker 3: that will be commercially available. Okay, it's first, and they
Speaker 3: worked with me for many years to get that done.
Speaker 3: The product now is called quail Guard. But backing up
Speaker 3: when we got started, it was in approximately twenty fifteen.
Speaker 3: Ain't got to understand, I'm not a drug company. I'm
Speaker 3: just a professor at a university. And so I submitted
Speaker 3: these all these materials and I had I thought I
Speaker 3: had some pretty good, pretty interesting data that I knew
Speaker 3: about a wild quail I knew about their behavior because
Speaker 3: I have a ranch and I love my quail. And
Speaker 3: so we ultimately figured out we could get them to
Speaker 3: come into an enclosure with some openings and feed out
Speaker 3: of a simulated chicken trough a wild quail covey. We
Speaker 3: will do that. And it took us a long time
Speaker 3: to figure that out.
Speaker 1: And Uh, why do they need to do that rather
Speaker 1: than you just scattering it?
Speaker 3: Because because FDA didn't want just scattered in out at
Speaker 3: that time, they wanted us to target the wild quail.
Speaker 1: Understood, And because this was still in the testing face,
Speaker 1: it was still in the test and everything running around heat.
Speaker 3: And so it was my son, Ronnie Kendall that helped
Speaker 3: me figure this out. With what size enclosures would these
Speaker 3: wild quail come into. We started out Steve with a
Speaker 3: dog kennel eight by eight eight foot by eight foot,
Speaker 3: and we had holes in it and we baited the
Speaker 3: quail in so they would come in the covey wood
Speaker 3: and feed out of a trough and we could offer
Speaker 3: the medicated.
Speaker 1: Feed like a crab trap, like a like a trask
Speaker 1: got a little open and.
Speaker 3: Uh, and Ronnie kept working and we went down to
Speaker 3: six feet by six feet. Then we went to four
Speaker 3: feet by four feet, and now he's got a technology
Speaker 3: called quail Safe and it's a third the size of
Speaker 3: your table here. It's you could put it in the
Speaker 3: back of your truck. And it's amazing how the quail
Speaker 3: will come in and feed and we can target the
Speaker 3: wild quail.
Speaker 4: But are they over medicating themselves if they're eating too
Speaker 4: much feed?
Speaker 3: No, we had to go when y'all are interesting, I
Speaker 3: mean I think I think you find this interesting. I
Speaker 3: love this suff but Coarin. We started out I had
Speaker 3: to figure out could I even treat a bird in
Speaker 3: the while in the natural habitat FDA wanted to know
Speaker 3: that how would we do this? And so I submitted
Speaker 3: all this data and in September of twenty fifteen, I
Speaker 3: was invited to FDA headquarters for formal meetings and uh.
Speaker 1: Can I I got a question about leading up to that.
Speaker 1: At first, do you just find the address online? And like,
Speaker 1: dear FDA, that kind of it started out, I have
Speaker 1: an interesting quail.
Speaker 3: It started out we did a lot of research and
Speaker 3: about who who may be willing to engage us on
Speaker 3: this and.
Speaker 1: Were you were trying to find I was trying to
Speaker 1: yeah and uh.
Speaker 3: And it was the Office of Minor Use and Minor Species.
Speaker 3: And I said that looked to me that they might
Speaker 3: be Yeah. I mean this was like, you know, just
Speaker 3: pull up your boots and go do it. You know,
Speaker 3: I had. I had worked with the EPA extensively, but
Speaker 3: not with FDA. And so I was brought to this meeting.
Speaker 3: And it wasn't a day of meetings, it was a week.
Speaker 1: This is when you finally got their attention.
Speaker 3: I had their attention then, and so my sponsoring office
Speaker 3: told me to be prepared for a twenty minute seminar
Speaker 3: and to show them what we were going to do. Okay,
Speaker 3: So I had all these meetings during this week, and
Speaker 3: on the final day, on Friday morning, I was told
Speaker 3: that we're going to have a meeting starting first thing,
Speaker 3: and you're going to walk into a big room of
Speaker 3: scientists and they're going to talk to you about this.
Speaker 3: And from this meeting, they will even either give you
Speaker 3: a thumbs up that we will go ahead for a
Speaker 3: registration pursuit, or they'll give you a thumbs down. And
Speaker 3: so when they opened those two doors, they were close
Speaker 3: to seventy people in that room. Really, yes, from what
Speaker 3: disciplines environmental science, toxicology, statistics, immunology, they had it. It
Speaker 3: was like a whole room and I'll never forget it.
Speaker 1: They can just attack your stuff from any angle.
Speaker 3: From any angle, and so I mean I had to
Speaker 3: swallow pretty deep. And I sat down at the table
Speaker 3: with my sponsoring office, the director and project officer, who
Speaker 3: was terrific, and they both just leaned over and they
Speaker 3: just said, get up there and just tell them what
Speaker 3: you want to do. And I literally I went to
Speaker 3: the front of the room. They were all very attentive,
Speaker 3: and I gave a twenty minute seminar and I showed
Speaker 3: them the wild quail. I showed them, you know what
Speaker 3: these worms looked like. I showed them the dog kennel
Speaker 3: and the quail. I had videos of the quail coming
Speaker 3: in and I explained how we could develop a feed
Speaker 3: the quail would eat it, and we had early evidence
Speaker 3: that we could kill the parasites. And you know, that
Speaker 3: was a three.
Speaker 1: Hour meeting, not twenty minutes, not twenty minutes.
Speaker 3: When I got through with my presentation, they began to
Speaker 3: ask me questions, very respectful questions and about you know,
Speaker 3: about how to how they would do this and whatever.
Speaker 3: I answered the questions. I didn't try to, you know,
Speaker 3: I just I was as straight as I could be.
Speaker 3: And so the sponsoring office took me back after it
Speaker 3: was lunchtime then and the director then she since has retired,
Speaker 3: but she said, she said, that went really well. There
Speaker 3: wasn't one condescending comment, not one in three hours. And
Speaker 3: they could have ripped me apart. There was There were
Speaker 3: so many statisticians on the left wall. I mean it
Speaker 3: was like a dozen ten of them. The statisticians could
Speaker 3: have just gone into that, and the toxicologists, the Human
Speaker 3: Food Safety Division people were there and they were all
Speaker 3: just discussing all the components. I was going to have
Speaker 3: to deal with corinn. I was going to have to
Speaker 3: determine safety. I was going to have to determine environmental issues.
Speaker 3: I was going to have to determine how quickly the
Speaker 3: drug would move itself from the body of the quail
Speaker 3: if a human ate it. Uh So I had to
Speaker 3: I had to, you know, they they were all talking
Speaker 3: and so and so. That was September, and it took
Speaker 3: about till December and I got a letter through my
Speaker 3: sponsor in office and they said, doctor Kendall here's what
Speaker 3: you're going to have to do. And when I read
Speaker 3: that letter, I took a deep breath and says, Wow,
Speaker 3: that's massive amount of work. Massive.
Speaker 5: Maybe I missed this, but were they all interested in
Speaker 5: you qualifying the value of having quail on the ground.
Speaker 3: They didn't. They didn't debate it. They I explained it,
Speaker 3: and they got it. They got it. And and not
Speaker 3: only is a bob white quail the canary of the prairie,
Speaker 3: so to speak, as an indicator species, they're a big
Speaker 3: time economic bird. People come from all over the world
Speaker 3: hunt wild quail and Texas and there's a big real
Speaker 3: estate firm in love Att, Texas, where I'm from, and
Speaker 3: they sell big ranches, you know. And I gave a
Speaker 3: talk at a sportsman's group and one of the owners
Speaker 3: of that company stood up and he said, what he's
Speaker 3: saying is the truth. He's He said, if you got
Speaker 3: a lot of wild quail in your property, I can
Speaker 3: probably sell it faster than if you had on oil.
Speaker 3: Well I'm dead, sare He said it right in front
Speaker 3: of the whole whole crowd. This wild quail, this wild
Speaker 3: quail thing is a big deal.
Speaker 1: What about what about human What did you find out
Speaker 1: about human safety. Like I shoot a quail that's got
Speaker 1: h you know, he's got a mouthful of stuff, and
Speaker 1: I go clean out his gizzard and I eat his gizzard,
Speaker 1: and I eat his breast meat and his thighs. What
Speaker 1: happens to me? Well, in my in my dea worm, you're.
Speaker 3: Good, You're good. We uh. All of this was exploratory,
Speaker 3: and it drew every bit of experience I had. But
Speaker 3: we started investigating the drug from bendzol, and it's it's
Speaker 3: been it's been used on a variety of domestic animals,
Speaker 3: and so excuse me, but we had to come up
Speaker 3: with an effective concentration. And what FDA made me do
Speaker 3: once I had some early testing i'd done with them
Speaker 3: bends zol, and we saw it was pretty safe and
Speaker 3: we knew it would kill those worms, and so we
Speaker 3: had to run at the request of FDA. And you understand,
Speaker 3: everything is so formal with FDA. You have to have
Speaker 3: a good laboratory practice certification for your lab. So I
Speaker 3: had to have what we called the gop officer, so
Speaker 3: they come in and evaluate you and check your data
Speaker 3: and and everything we did was under strict protocols approved
Speaker 3: by FDA. So you just can't imagine a lot of
Speaker 3: our reports would be massive like that, maybe a thousand
Speaker 3: pages of data. They check everything, They don't just skip around,
Speaker 3: They check everything, and so it was quite a process,
Speaker 3: like we had to do safety and we had to
Speaker 3: triple the estimated dose and triple the time frame of
Speaker 3: exposure to look for any pathological issues.
Speaker 1: Or to check the extremes.
Speaker 3: Check the extremes, and there were none. We ran this
Speaker 3: very nice experiment on all of that. Well, it was
Speaker 3: really cool. Steve, one of my students of PhD students,
Speaker 3: was terrific chemist and it's very sophisticated chemistry to look
Speaker 3: not only at the parent drug, but the what we
Speaker 3: call them metabolites, okay, the breakdown drug products. So FDA
Speaker 3: gave us We had to develop techniques to look at
Speaker 3: the liver of the quail and see how the breakdown
Speaker 3: products were clearing the liver and so on. This is
Speaker 3: all published and but oh, it took us forever to
Speaker 3: get the drug validation down and it required a lot
Speaker 3: of collaboration with our School of Pharmacy up at Amarillo, Texas.
Speaker 3: They had the right instrument and we're willing to work
Speaker 3: with us. So we had to GOLP certify that lab
Speaker 3: and uh and but we got you know, we got
Speaker 3: it done. But what we showed is the drug clears
Speaker 3: within hours after the birds were removed. Okay, so FDA
Speaker 3: now has designated you don't even need a day of
Speaker 3: drug clearance. It clears within hours. So it's very very
Speaker 3: safe to the birds and it clears very quickly.
Speaker 1: So you could get you you would get a feeder.
Speaker 1: Let's say you assuming you're not going to broadcast the seed, right,
Speaker 1: you could get a feeder and run a regular old
Speaker 1: feed in it, but you don't need to have treated
Speaker 1: exactly and get the quail where you got. You got
Speaker 1: a bunch of these out and your cobes are using them,
Speaker 1: and then on treatment time you come in and put
Speaker 1: the treated feed in, let it cycle for whatever amount
Speaker 1: of time and then shut the thing down or continue
Speaker 1: back to this regular feed inside there.
Speaker 3: Steve, that's terrific. That's exactly what we do here.
Speaker 1: That brody, so kick an ass.
Speaker 3: You guys are are awesome.
Speaker 1: Then I started drug.
Speaker 3: Up so so uh uh we do uh assist the
Speaker 3: quail with with a four to five feed with without
Speaker 3: the medication.
Speaker 1: And to get them coming to the game.
Speaker 3: But what's cool is my son, Ronnie, we have this
Speaker 3: this technology called quail Safe and but he's developed an
Speaker 3: electronic Bob White quail call of their covey call. Got it, Okay,
Speaker 3: now I could do that for you please. I've heard
Speaker 3: about it. Quail my mouse really dry, I gotta get,
Speaker 3: I gotta get. That's good, though, but that's kind of
Speaker 3: what it sounds like, I'm sure.
Speaker 1: And he puts that out by the feeder.
Speaker 3: It's an electronic call. And believe it or not, when
Speaker 3: these covees hear that, they'll come from hundreds of yards away,
Speaker 3: and you can when you when they know that feed
Speaker 3: is there, they come by and check it once in
Speaker 3: a while. It's amazing. That's their behavioral ecology. That we
Speaker 3: understood the critical component of the cuvey call, and they
Speaker 3: will come from so far to investigate that. And then
Speaker 3: once they find that feed, you know, that's like a
Speaker 3: free lunch. And and this does not domesticate them whatsoever.
Speaker 3: These are wild birds and we can attest to that
Speaker 3: by you know, when we hunt I mean these things.
Speaker 3: I know what a wild quail looks like when we
Speaker 3: hunt them, and so so it's it's really worked beautifully.
Speaker 3: The electronic call gives it so much more uh pull
Speaker 3: of the birds. And like I said, once once the
Speaker 3: covees start using it, then the summer comes, then early
Speaker 3: fall and the hen brings the brood in the little birds, okay,
Speaker 3: and they learn to eat the four to five fee,
Speaker 3: not the medicaid feed yet although it's fine for the
Speaker 3: little birds, it doesn't hurt them. Okay, it's very very safe.
Speaker 3: But once so they learn, then the little birds learn
Speaker 3: that that that's a resource for them, particularly during drought, okay,
Speaker 3: when maybe seed production is very low. And so we
Speaker 3: were looking at all of these dimensions now and so
Speaker 3: what's what's kind of pretty awesome is once you get
Speaker 3: set up to treat, and like one of our ranches
Speaker 3: is two thousand acres and I've got students working out there,
Speaker 3: so we've got some pretty good estimates on the number
Speaker 3: of birds. But once you're set up to treat, with
Speaker 3: the cost of quail guard, you may be approximately able
Speaker 3: to treat for a dollar an acre a year, two
Speaker 3: thousand dollars instead of So.
Speaker 1: What's that come out as? How much for a pound
Speaker 1: of that feed?
Speaker 3: I think it sells for the Quail Guard Organization. I
Speaker 3: think it's fifty dollars for a fifty pound bag, so
Speaker 3: a dollar.
Speaker 5: Okay, you mentioned wild birds, and there's a lot of
Speaker 5: places where people are just going and shooting planted farm
Speaker 5: raise quail. Are those operations that are all interested in
Speaker 5: using this stuff or they're just putting birds out. They're
Speaker 5: they're gonna get shot, they're gonna get eaten by whatever.
Speaker 5: They're not worried about treating those birds.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a lot of my buddy's back in South Carolina
Speaker 3: they call them box birds. You go to a breeder
Speaker 3: and you buy twenty five in a box, and you
Speaker 3: go put the box out under a bush and the
Speaker 3: birds walk out in your home. Now, that's kind of
Speaker 3: what quail honting is to South Carolina now compared to
Speaker 3: us all wild covees. We're talking about wild quail, and
Speaker 3: a pin bird that's released in the wild has a
Speaker 3: very low chance of survival. And you can't imagine. This
Speaker 3: is another real value of our ranch. And when you
Speaker 3: have a ranch and you live with your quail, you
Speaker 3: learn a lot. But that hen is teaching that brood
Speaker 3: so much on alarm calls, and I mean she'll make
Speaker 3: a certain call and they'll all just freeze. And they
Speaker 3: don't learn that in a pen okay. And so survival
Speaker 3: is critical for a quail because literally everything wants to
Speaker 3: eat them, hawks and raccoons or snakes. Raccoons are terrible
Speaker 3: on the nest and so on. So aqail, a quail
Speaker 3: to survive has to be an athlete.
Speaker 1: You know that they found that same thing when they
Speaker 1: were trying to do re establish wild turkey populations for
Speaker 1: a long time. They were taking box birds exactly and
Speaker 1: cutting them loose, and it just never worked. It never
Speaker 1: worked because they didn't have the survival instinct. They didn't
Speaker 1: have that. It wasn't appreciated, like what level of education
Speaker 1: they're getting from the hen And when they finally found success,
Speaker 1: they found success by catching wild birds and moving wild
Speaker 1: birds exactly, and then they had that I always think
Speaker 1: of it as they had the right level of paranoia.
Speaker 3: And another thing too. We just had a second paper
Speaker 3: just come out in the International Journal of Parasitology. It's
Speaker 3: on our our website for Facebook, but we did a
Speaker 3: study on the same ranch. It's a massive French and
Speaker 3: we were able to get three six mile transsects where
Speaker 3: we did a test. And this was the early stages
Speaker 3: of getting ready to test the efficacy of the drug
Speaker 3: treatment for the FDA. So I was getting ready for that.
Speaker 3: But what what was really cool was reported this paper
Speaker 3: is that we had six miles separated by two miles
Speaker 3: and six miles separated by two miles all on the
Speaker 3: same ranch.
Speaker 1: Okay, big place, anybody hunting that place.
Speaker 3: But what was really interesting we we had feeder systems
Speaker 3: out there. We had the birds coming. Now, one of
Speaker 3: the transects we did nothing, and we had radio callers
Speaker 3: on birds, so we knew where they were going. We
Speaker 3: were using telemetry and they weren't flipping across transsects. They
Speaker 3: were located on those transseacts. But we had one transsect
Speaker 3: with nothing. The second transsect we had just the four
Speaker 3: to five feed, all right, it was a good quail feed.
Speaker 3: And then on the third transset we introduced the medication,
Speaker 3: the drug, and so we did two years of treatment.
Speaker 3: In that two years, that drug treatment had a three
Speaker 3: hundred percent increase in wild quail three hundred percent, And
Speaker 3: there was no difference between doing nothing and introducing the
Speaker 3: four to five feed. That was not significantly different. We
Speaker 3: were surprised. But when you introduced that drug.
Speaker 1: I would have thought it'd be good better or bad
Speaker 1: better best?
Speaker 3: Well, you know, the data is the data, but it
Speaker 3: could be on a given year, might might be. Do
Speaker 3: you think helping the birds, particularly in drought years is critical.
Speaker 3: I do, But on the given years we were working
Speaker 3: on this particular ranch, what we saw is it wasn't
Speaker 3: just the feed, it was the drug and that when
Speaker 3: you introduced that drug, we literally had a population explosion.
Speaker 1: So do most places if you go South Carolina we
Speaker 1: talked about Texas, whatever, do most places have enough birds
Speaker 1: left that that bringing in the medicated feed, bringing in
Speaker 1: the medicine is gonna be enough, because it seems to
Speaker 1: me that that they would need to be paired with
Speaker 1: some translocation of birds because like like like how you
Speaker 1: can go put all the medicid feed in the world out,
Speaker 1: but if there's no birds to find it, there's no
Speaker 1: birds to find it or good habitat.
Speaker 3: Well that's those are those are great points. And there
Speaker 3: are attempts now to reintroduce quail into East Texas. You know,
Speaker 3: Texas used to have quail all over of the state
Speaker 3: and they they have kept retreating west and you pretty much.
Speaker 3: You got to get to Abilene before you start getting
Speaker 3: into quail again. Uh, it's amazing. So they're trying to
Speaker 3: reintroduce quail into East Texas and I don't know where
Speaker 3: all of this is going, Steve, except my data tells
Speaker 3: me with heart information that we've been able to sustain
Speaker 3: sustainable huntable populations on our demonstration FDA approved demonstration ranches
Speaker 3: while the neighbors weren't hunting. And that's a fact. We're
Speaker 3: writing that paper up right now.
Speaker 1: But the neighbors weren't hunting.
Speaker 3: That they didn't have the quail, and so I think
Speaker 3: those are those are real acid tests, you know, and
Speaker 3: because what our whole goal has been is is sustainable
Speaker 3: huntable populations. Because as I explained on my website that
Speaker 3: you know, it was a sportsman that funded all of this.
Speaker 3: It wasn't a federal grant. It was a sportsman and
Speaker 3: they cared about the pay exactly.
Speaker 1: Then people wind up criticizing sportsmen to be like, oh,
Speaker 1: you just want to save them, see can hunt them.
Speaker 1: And you're like, you know what, that's partially true, well
Speaker 1: not all the way true, but it's partially true.
Speaker 3: Well, quail hunting is kind of a religion in Texas.
Speaker 3: And the Park City's Quail Coalition has a banquet every
Speaker 3: March and they they'll have a thousand people there for
Speaker 3: raising money for quail and they can raise maybe a
Speaker 3: couple of million dollars that night. There's so much interest
Speaker 3: in this, and I want to put things in perspective
Speaker 3: to how important quail hunting is in Texas. I gave
Speaker 3: a talk five six years ago with a Scottish scientist
Speaker 3: that had done a lot of work on the red
Speaker 3: grouse in Scotland. Now, in hunting the red grouse in Scotland,
Speaker 3: they're hunting on the moors and the you know, the
Speaker 3: grouse are driven and you have you have a stand,
Speaker 3: and you got a guy loading the gun for you hand.
Speaker 3: You're shooting so much, you have a you have a loader,
Speaker 3: the hands of the gun, and you may stay in
Speaker 3: a castle or something. So I'm serious. I've never done this.
Speaker 3: I want to do it before I die, but I've
Speaker 3: heard it's pretty pretty elite, you know. And I was
Speaker 3: talking to this scientist that had done a lot of
Speaker 3: work with the red grouse and a graduate student and
Speaker 3: I were having lunch with him, and I said, you know,
Speaker 3: I just always thought that was amazing and I said,
Speaker 3: it's got to be the pinnacle of wing shooting while
Speaker 3: bird wing shooting in the world. He said, oh no, no,
Speaker 3: he said, it's your West Texas quail hunting that we
Speaker 3: over in Scotland. Look at you know, you're out with
Speaker 3: a jeep and got fine bird dogs and pointing these
Speaker 3: wild bible white.
Speaker 1: Quail and staying in a regular house.
Speaker 3: Staying in a regular house. And you know, that just
Speaker 3: staggered me because I said, you know, you're telling the truth.
Speaker 3: And uh my, my good friend Rick Snipes. Uh he
Speaker 3: has a ranch in West Texas and and Snipes Ranch
Speaker 3: and we did a lot of the early work on
Speaker 3: on on his ranch. But he calls it the patcheant
Speaker 3: Tree of the hunt. And it's a lot to it.
Speaker 3: Getting the dogs ready, loading the jeep with the bird dogs,
Speaker 3: and you.
Speaker 5: Got your cowboy hat on.
Speaker 3: He didn't wear a cowboy hat, but he's got a
Speaker 3: seat sitting out in front of the jeep, you know,
Speaker 3: off the ground. And I mean it's cool looking and
Speaker 3: and uh so it's it's a lot a lot going
Speaker 3: on there. It's very colorful and dogs were pointing and
Speaker 3: and Coveys are getting up. So it's quite a spectacle,
Speaker 3: to be honest. And we were recently on Sportsman's Classic
Speaker 3: TV with mister Dorsey, you know, he came in quail
Speaker 3: hunting with us and we did a great story and
Speaker 3: we had Rick leading the hunt sitting in front of
Speaker 3: the jeep. So, but it's a lot of pageantry to it.
Speaker 3: So I look back to my uh my, this this
Speaker 3: scientist and talking about that and they it just really
Speaker 3: hit me hard, like it's right here in my backyard
Speaker 3: that what they are looking at is probably some of
Speaker 3: the best in the world. It's the pinnacle and Steve,
Speaker 3: you may want to come quail hunt with us.
Speaker 1: I'm getting excited about it now.
Speaker 3: Oh man.
Speaker 1: The main thing I'm the main thing I'm turning into
Speaker 1: the back of my head is how my buddy, how
Speaker 1: my buddy Brad can get on this program? Now? Uh
Speaker 1: I know you you you put it out using the feeder.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Will that be the like if a if a if
Speaker 1: a landowner, a rancher concern party wants to buy wants
Speaker 1: to try this on their place, is it is it
Speaker 1: prescribed like you have to do it such and such
Speaker 1: way or else You're in violation of the law, or
Speaker 1: do you anticipate there'll be people buying a sack of
Speaker 1: the stuff and just putting it in the seed spreader
Speaker 1: and driving down the road and see what happens.
Speaker 3: Good point. The FDA label said is recommended to use
Speaker 3: strategic feeders. Recommended Okay, okay, because someone buys it, so
Speaker 3: I can see other uses. But again looking at it,
Speaker 3: they the FDA label, They did not make it totally restrictive. No, yeah,
Speaker 3: they just recommended it. And because I can just see
Speaker 3: a lot of value maybe maybe in a pellet form
Speaker 3: in the future, the quail accept the pellet form. The
Speaker 3: the feed is uh is a crumble now and it's
Speaker 3: highly palatable when we shift when we go to the
Speaker 3: medicated feed, the quail have they accept it immediately. We've
Speaker 3: we've determined all of this with video evidence.
Speaker 1: So how do you get how does someone like someone
Speaker 1: wants to apply this and try it. Where do they go?
Speaker 1: How do they begin? I mean do they They're not
Speaker 1: buying it all on Amazon? I don't imagine.
Speaker 3: No. My son has an organization called quail Safe and
Speaker 3: this uh, it's got it's got all this information on it.
Speaker 3: Quailsafe dot com We've been working with Bryant Mills in
Speaker 3: a Ledo, Texas. They've been terrific. They they are, they
Speaker 3: manufacture the feed, they is. They do a beautiful job.
Speaker 3: The feed is incredibly nutritious. We have the science on that.
Speaker 1: And anybody can buy it.
Speaker 3: Anybody can buy it. That's what That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 3: If this is why this made us history. This is
Speaker 3: the first medicative feed article to be registered for a
Speaker 3: wildlife species and the natural habitat to be commercially available.
Speaker 3: So this made history, and and what I'm proud of.
Speaker 3: Like I said Corinn earlier, we weren't a drug company. Okay,
Speaker 3: this was eight years of working with FDA and then
Speaker 3: another couple of years of preliminary data. So we did
Speaker 3: it with graduate students, and graduate students don't stay but
Speaker 3: a few years, so we had to go through multiple
Speaker 3: graduate students and I had some amazing students that well,
Speaker 3: you can look at my website and see how many
Speaker 3: publications we've got. One of my past graduates students through
Speaker 3: her doctoral work, got twenty peer reviewed scientific publications from
Speaker 3: her doctoral work.
Speaker 1: That's a lot off this project.
Speaker 5: Yeah, have you had any interest from like State game
Speaker 5: agencies using this stuff, yes, because one of the challenges
Speaker 5: with it is it's like it's a very targeted solution
Speaker 5: for a like widespread problem, like like like you said,
Speaker 5: like you fix the quail problem on one ranch and
Speaker 5: the neighbors didn't have any quail.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a good, good point. This is an evolving process.
Speaker 3: It was evolving at FDA. It's evolving in terms of
Speaker 3: engagement with management agencies and so on. Traditionally, state management
Speaker 3: agencies are habitat habitat, habitat habitat. And as I told
Speaker 3: you early.
Speaker 1: Which I usually applaud.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I mean, I'm all into habitat, but
Speaker 3: habitat's not all of it. And so when I lost
Speaker 3: quail and my good friends lost their quail on superior
Speaker 3: quail habitat, that the years I told you, I started saying,
Speaker 3: uh uh, it's more than habitat. And I, as a scientist, said,
Speaker 3: there's something driving this, and there's something driving these crashes.
Speaker 3: And what's cool, like I said, when we've been treating
Speaker 3: these properties, we haven't seen the crashes. We've been having
Speaker 3: sustained huntable populations.
Speaker 1: Well, but for how long has it been available for.
Speaker 3: It was registered May twenty third, twenty twenty four. That's
Speaker 3: just now.
Speaker 1: And so you just don't there, there's not you're not
Speaker 1: yet in a position where you've got one hundred land
Speaker 1: managers who have gone out and you haven't yet got
Speaker 1: a hundred land managers to go out, take the equipment,
Speaker 1: apply it on their property. You give it time to work.
Speaker 1: You just you just don't know where this is going
Speaker 1: to head right now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and what we found out it takes about three years. Okay,
Speaker 3: into your second year, you and get in the right conditions.
Speaker 3: You can see a real pop and numbers, and we
Speaker 3: report that in this paper that's just come out next.
Speaker 1: I got I can see the time because yeah, you
Speaker 1: got to do it. You got to acclimate them. You
Speaker 1: got to get the coffees coming, you got to acclimate
Speaker 1: them to the feed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, so it takes You just can't go
Speaker 3: throw the feed out there and say, oh man, I'm
Speaker 3: gonna have a bunch of quail this fall. It doesn't
Speaker 3: work that way. It just doesn't work that way. It's
Speaker 3: a process. And you got you know, and uh, Ronnie,
Speaker 3: my son, Ronnie, he has a website that explains all
Speaker 3: of this and he's got beautiful videos and whatever. It's
Speaker 3: called quailsafe dot com. And and there is a strata
Speaker 3: and and you need you need to know how to
Speaker 3: place these uh, these instruments, uh to deliver the feed,
Speaker 3: how to how to manage them. It's almost I mean,
Speaker 3: once you put them out and get the quail coming,
Speaker 3: it's pretty much this, you're done.
Speaker 1: What you deworm a quail? How long is he dewormed?
Speaker 3: For got a student working on that. They will be
Speaker 3: reinfected the next year probably. What we've learned though, Steve
Speaker 3: is on our demonstration ranches and we have another scientific
Speaker 3: paper on this. We are suppressing the cycle.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's my next.
Speaker 3: In other words, the percentage of insects carrying the infective
Speaker 3: larvae is significantly reduced going into a multi year Medicaid
Speaker 3: feed treatment.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you said they'll be reinfected next year. But like
Speaker 5: a one year old quail is ancient.
Speaker 3: Right, Well, that's what a lot of people think, but
Speaker 3: it's not necessarily the truth. And we have data to
Speaker 3: prove this now. On one of my outstanding PhD students
Speaker 3: that just finished this spring, he had a four year
Speaker 3: project on a ranch and really intensively monitored them, and
Speaker 3: what he found compared to an untreated area and the
Speaker 3: same county close was he was seeing a forty percent
Speaker 3: survivability to the next year versus a ten percent. Okay,
Speaker 3: so and so and no wonder when he would do
Speaker 3: his fall covey counts, it was phenomenal. Now what does
Speaker 3: that mean. Well, the teams go out and write at
Speaker 3: first light, they'll listen for these covey calls, and at
Speaker 3: a given point you hear the covees express themselves with
Speaker 3: a location call at sunrise, and you count those calls. Well,
Speaker 3: if you hear five, that's pretty good. Good. If you
Speaker 3: hear eight, that's terrific. If you hear ten plus, like
Speaker 3: you're here, you're standing here and you're hearing that call,
Speaker 3: that's outstanding. He was hearing fifteen eighteen. You got me
Speaker 3: significant numbers. So we are excited about that because we
Speaker 3: are enhancing quails survivability and sustainability.
Speaker 5: Is that a key to like maintaining numbers, is to
Speaker 5: have birds carry over to their section.
Speaker 3: Exactly, the most valuable quail on your property is that
Speaker 3: hen that is able to carry over to the next
Speaker 3: year and be ready to breed or to nest in
Speaker 3: March April. And she's she could actually give you fifty birds.
Speaker 3: Could she can nest three times in a summer? You
Speaker 3: see what I mean? So you want to carry that
Speaker 3: hen over if you can? And so, uh so this
Speaker 3: is what we're seeing, that we're seeing the evidence of this.
Speaker 3: And the way I look at this, you know, you
Speaker 3: don't really get it until your buddies, that we your
Speaker 3: teenager hunting partiers, say there are any quail left in
Speaker 3: our old haunts in South Carolin, They're gone. And I said,
Speaker 3: I said to myself, man, that that's the real deal.
Speaker 3: And it's happened across most of the wild Bob white
Speaker 3: quail range now and so can it happen in Texas?
Speaker 3: You better believe it can happen. And so what we're doing,
Speaker 3: and the way I look at it is, you know,
Speaker 3: any I'm in this for conservation, and uh, I don't
Speaker 3: shoot any quail anymore. They my buddies, and uh so
Speaker 3: so but I love my quail, honey, and uh and
Speaker 3: I love my bird dogs, and uh it's such a
Speaker 3: beautiful thing to watch a fine dog cover the landscape
Speaker 3: and work a covey of quail and just the finesse
Speaker 3: of it and how intelligent they are. So there's a
Speaker 3: film some of your viewers might want to look at.
Speaker 3: It's called Vbob White dot com. That's Vbob White dot com.
Speaker 3: And it tells my son produced it with a team
Speaker 3: from Nashville, and it's won some awards. But it tells
Speaker 3: that story of the the issue of the quail and
Speaker 3: how important they are as an indicator of your ranch
Speaker 3: health and of your conservation ethic. And so we take
Speaker 3: this pretty serious and the family has all dedicated itself
Speaker 3: to this work over many many years. So you know,
Speaker 3: my wife Colleen has been counting quail with me for years,
Speaker 3: and I just wanted to share something with you too.
Speaker 3: We drive around on the ranch and when we get
Speaker 3: up a covey of quail. When Ronnie was a little boy,
Speaker 3: he grew up out on that ranch, and I get
Speaker 3: excited over every covey I see, you know, I count
Speaker 3: them and want to see if they're young birds or
Speaker 3: older birds. But every covey I saw, I always get excited,
Speaker 3: and I'll never forget. One day, he looked to me,
Speaker 3: he's in the jeep, and he said, Dad, why do
Speaker 3: you get excited over every covey of quail you see.
Speaker 3: He said, we got quail all over the place. I said,
Speaker 3: because we may not have them one day, and we
Speaker 3: lost them in South Carolina, and we can lose them here.
Speaker 3: And so now when he drives around, he gets excited
Speaker 3: over every covey he sees because he values it. Now
Speaker 3: he understands that, you know, so many people don't have them,
Speaker 3: even in West Texas.
Speaker 4: I got a question about quail nos on public lands
Speaker 4: because I I see this so far as a like
Speaker 4: a private lands solution, and I know this maybe kind
Speaker 4: of piggybacks off what you were asking. If there's game
Speaker 4: agencies interested in this.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's no way they're not going to be
Speaker 1: If it's if it winds up being effective, there's no
Speaker 1: way they're not going to be interested in that.
Speaker 4: But then if you've got if on public lands, you
Speaker 4: have these feeders, and then with the issue of toxicology,
Speaker 4: you know, are there studies underway of what quail guard
Speaker 4: on the land has on other species?
Speaker 1: Who knows not not that you know well.
Speaker 3: And good question, Karin.
Speaker 4: I appreciate, honestly Ryan Callahan's question.
Speaker 3: What we've seen in ten years of field work and
Speaker 3: massive amount of observation, video data and so on. We
Speaker 3: are not seeing non targeted were we are not seeing
Speaker 3: non target species effects. Okay, and what we know as well,
Speaker 3: if you utilize quail safe technology on a property, you're
Speaker 3: targeting the quail pretty much. And so so again we
Speaker 3: do uh, when we were doing all these tests, like
Speaker 3: our efficacy studies for FDA whatever, we would do circular
Speaker 3: investigations around any treatment area to see any.
Speaker 4: Evidence like soil health type stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So so again it's you know, and the rate
Speaker 3: at what we're using it's pretty low. And uh, so
Speaker 3: I I feel really good about it. And uh, I'm
Speaker 3: sure going to use it. And so I look at
Speaker 3: it and to me is I want to help the
Speaker 3: wild Bob white, I don't want to lose and uh
Speaker 3: and so and I'm looking at this. We're starting to
Speaker 3: look at songbirds too, and I think we may be
Speaker 3: needing to investigate songbirds because we've already got the evidence
Speaker 3: it's in songbirds.
Speaker 4: Are there are there groups of individuals or other I
Speaker 4: don't know? Are there are there people who are against
Speaker 4: the idea of administered, not not administering, but offering drugs
Speaker 4: to wild animals as as the thing that you know
Speaker 4: you can you can bring this out further.
Speaker 1: To organized is there organized opposition effort?
Speaker 4: I haven't not run into that, you know, like would
Speaker 4: we end up, would we end up you know, having uh,
Speaker 4: you know drug come is make all kinds of things
Speaker 4: to you know, hoof fraud eahd you know, would.
Speaker 1: We the minute they find something for hoof fright, I
Speaker 1: can guarantee you that someone's gonna be going through this
Speaker 1: process on it.
Speaker 3: I'd say for the for the most part, I haven't
Speaker 3: seen major opposition. I've seen mainly amazement and fascination that
Speaker 3: we can help a species like this. And the way
Speaker 3: I see it, we are experiencing a lot of climatic variation.
Speaker 3: That's I mean, we had one hundred and sixteen degree
Speaker 3: temperatures last summer in West Texas. We're not the Mohave Desert,
Speaker 3: so we're seeing a lot more plus hundred degree days
Speaker 3: one hundred and twelve hundred and fourteen. And you look
Speaker 3: at all all these variables and you think about the
Speaker 3: stress organisms or having to deal with and in a
Speaker 3: climate that may be may be changing. I'm not going
Speaker 3: to debate that right now, but I'm going to say,
Speaker 3: when it's one hundred and sixteen degrees out there and
Speaker 3: you're a quail nesting on the ground, that ground is
Speaker 3: probably two hundred degrees. So anything we can do to
Speaker 3: help that quail survive those extremes, that's what I'm looking at.
Speaker 3: And at the same time, this past winter it's five
Speaker 3: degrees with snow on the ground. We can go to
Speaker 3: those extremes and by the way, Steve, that's where quail
Speaker 3: safe becomes critical. Those quail will bore down through the snow.
Speaker 3: Have we got the videos They want to get in
Speaker 3: there and eat, and because they can't get to the
Speaker 3: feed on the ground with snow. So if you go
Speaker 3: to that website, you'll see you'll see the quail. They
Speaker 3: get them a little tunnel to go in and feed,
Speaker 3: and anything we can do I'm looking at it as
Speaker 3: a conservationist and anything we can do to help sustain
Speaker 3: those populations.
Speaker 4: I think it's just an interesting question when we think about,
Speaker 4: you know, making drugs available for for animals, as you know,
Speaker 4: beyond the habitat question, right, isn't this I don't isn't
Speaker 4: there something out there for wild sheep? And so this
Speaker 4: is the second that drug for.
Speaker 1: Not something that you cannot something that you can go
Speaker 1: a private person can go by.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's it was. It was for sheep, but that
Speaker 3: was an agency that wasn't publicly available. No, that's why
Speaker 3: this was so unique. And they used the trough that
Speaker 3: the sheep came and bighorn sheep came and ate out of,
Speaker 3: and they offered them a drug for lung lungworm. But
Speaker 3: that was agency driven. So what I'm saying, and I was,
Speaker 3: I was very proud that FDA they worked with me
Speaker 3: on this because this was the first time that a
Speaker 3: wildlife species was It was a drug register for a
Speaker 3: wildlife species and their native habitat that was going to
Speaker 3: be made commercially available, not an agency. So that's what
Speaker 3: made it the journey so complicated and and to be honest,
Speaker 3: FDA was very difficult. They held us to the same
Speaker 3: standards as the drug companies and they don't work with
Speaker 3: universities very much. Because I met with a drug company
Speaker 3: with their vice president of research and they said to
Speaker 3: do something like this for a new registration for a
Speaker 3: new species, they budget ten years. Okay, so universities turn
Speaker 3: over so much in ten years. The students come and
Speaker 3: go you know what I mean. Whereas a drug company,
Speaker 3: they got a whole lot of people that can work
Speaker 3: on this. FDA wasn't really used to working with professors,
Speaker 3: but they did work with me. I had an assigned
Speaker 3: project officer that stayed with me the whole way through,
Speaker 3: and she was wonderful and so and then I had
Speaker 3: to deal with all these different entities within the agency,
Speaker 3: with all the components I've been talking about. So this
Speaker 3: thing's been really rigorously evaluated, and they made it real
Speaker 3: clear we're not We're gonna hold you to the same
Speaker 3: standards we hold drug companies. You can have to do
Speaker 3: everything we told you to do, and that's it. So
Speaker 3: I was kind of proud that we did it in
Speaker 3: eight years instead of ten, but my sponsors thought it
Speaker 3: was forever, and oh many it was rough, Steve, but
Speaker 3: they all thought she could just be able to get
Speaker 3: done next year. You know, I was explaining, listen, like
Speaker 3: on some of these prides or massive amount of data, okay,
Speaker 3: and and the FDA, when I turned a project, then
Speaker 3: they would get six months to look at it. Six
Speaker 3: months and then if they had any questions and you
Speaker 3: had to redo anything, and you had to resubmit it,
Speaker 3: they'd get six more months. So I mean it would
Speaker 3: drive me crazy. I tell you, you noticed my my hair
Speaker 3: wasn't this gray in twenty twelve, and I'm telling you
Speaker 3: it was. It was. It was the toughest thing I've
Speaker 3: ever done. But I you know, I had great students,
Speaker 3: a great team. I want to acknowledge my assistant Tammy Hendrix,
Speaker 3: who was terrific, been with me for twenty five years,
Speaker 3: and she stood right by me through the whole. She's
Speaker 3: not she's she's still younger. But some days I'd walk
Speaker 3: into her office just shaking my head. She said, don't worry.
Speaker 3: We're going to get through it one day. So we
Speaker 3: actually had a party in Fort Worth associated with that
Speaker 3: scientific meeting I mentioned earlier in the in the in
Speaker 3: the podcast drug Party Society of It of Environmental Toxicology
Speaker 3: and Chemistry. So I had some of my past students,
Speaker 3: current students and and Tammy and uh, we just really
Speaker 3: had a great time finally getting through that. But I've
Speaker 3: just had wonderful people and one wonderful students, and very
Speaker 3: thankful about that, and thankful the family's help. And like
Speaker 3: I said, my son, I'd never when we started off
Speaker 3: with quail safe when I I had to find some
Speaker 3: way I could show the FDA we could get those
Speaker 3: quail to come into to some some kind of system
Speaker 3: where we could we could target them. And uh and so,
Speaker 3: like I said, uh, uh you'll you'll find the website
Speaker 3: quailsafe dot com is fascinating. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I want to congratulate on the whole thing. But before
Speaker 1: we wrap though, tell people, like, what's what's the best
Speaker 1: single place they can go to to see what's going
Speaker 1: on and figure out if it's right for their property
Speaker 1: and is to go to quailsafe dot com.
Speaker 3: Guy will go to quailsafe dot com until you.
Speaker 1: Get you can buy all you can buy all the
Speaker 1: stuff you need there. Yeah, yeah, excellent, man, I appreciate
Speaker 1: Uh again, Doctor Ron Kendall, Professor of Toxicality, Texas Tech University,
Speaker 1: go to quailsafe dot com to check out the work. Also,
Speaker 1: can you name the two foundations you've been working with?
Speaker 3: Yeah, the two foundations, Uh, Park City's Quail Coalition they
Speaker 3: have a nice website and uh and the Roading Planes
Speaker 3: Quail Research Foundation.
Speaker 6: Something for I'm not gonna eat any more chocolate covered grasshoppers.
Speaker 7: That's I remember the nights when I was seventeen.
Speaker 8: Men them dogs feed down by the crib e Marlborough
Speaker 8: light in the little gyming. They'll ball on the track
Speaker 8: and they chop win.
Speaker 1: The trees.
Speaker 8: Activase souther Ridge where we cut out. I sit on
Speaker 8: tailgate and eat for a sound leavine clyde at.
Speaker 1: Their nose to the ground.
Speaker 8: Well, the last of our time we were hunters. Now
Speaker 8: up from shows, now in fields, down through the haller
Speaker 8: back up through the hills. Lord, saving my soul, and
Speaker 8: leave me see what these old hounds have put up
Speaker 8: this tree. Well, now hunters towns ain't but a few
Speaker 8: left round. They've cut all timber, and the old timers
Speaker 8: died out the one shining Friday in the leaves on ground.
Speaker 8: We're the last of.
Speaker 3: All time we were hunters.
Speaker 8: Now he had a job for all of the bag
Speaker 8: and a shirt pocket lid. I remember saying that. And
Speaker 8: old man want said one of them when you can,
Speaker 8: and keep him good fed, sun lost lost in run
Speaker 8: over his dead. Well, Now hunters towns ain't but a
Speaker 8: few who left the round the godden mu stimber and
Speaker 8: the old timers died of the one shining Friday.
Speaker 3: And the leaves on the ground.
Speaker 8: Were the last of our kind.
Speaker 1: We were on hers nash